Arc X.1 | Chapter 26: Interlude | Project Piketown Infiltration 26

The house was quiet as the boy—who was really a man but

hated

that word with a fiery passion—crept through it. There were no creeks to be heard, even beneath the function he had running, tugging the world into quiet severity. It didn’t matter—the boy could tell when there was sound, regardless of the tugs his Censor exerted upon his Awareness, an always burning thing that left him a constantly raw wound.

Too much sound.

Too much texture.

Too much taste.

Too much

everything.

Simeon had once said that his own Awareness of the world was nothing compared to the boy’s, but who really knew. The boy was aware that they were different—every Dyad was. Simeon, was a low-dev, and regardless of his Excess Connection and Control, so much of his genetics were

made

to feel the world in such clarity. The boy’s own D-Level was high—high enough that he faced the occasional additional health issues, but more, it was annoying, as his mind and body were not meant to feel so much.

The boy was aware of the every ounce of the world that passed through his core, his mind, his Censor, his Expansion Levels stretched wide and Perfect around his Excess Awareness and Connection Levels while every other Category was mediocre at best. Sometimes, his Balance Levels collapsed, leaving him a raw, screaming thing, but when compared to Furki’za’s own constant collapses, the boy knew he had it okay. Things weren’t great, but they weren’t so terrible he needed to rely on the majenstra to face the world, those monsters of power constantly tucking Furki’za’s mind a little deeper—constantly making them forget they had been obsessing over this or that because if they didn’t forget, they would collapse into a ball of pain and misery.

It was a complicated thing, the boy thought, to give someone such support. He thought Furki’za had consented to the majenstra’s manipulations, but really, who could ever be sure with them.

Below, someone moved, the soft echo of a conversation the boy couldn’t hear sweeping through the aether, and the boy stilled, let his Censor pull in the details of the words exchanged—Kyler, returning from

cleaning up the Shadow’s messes

.

Another clone laughed—was it so bad that they really needed multiple clones around? Apparently, it was, multiple clones shifting about outside as well—at least, the boy hoped they were clones.

Silently, he activated the security function his sister had designed for him, back when they were young, ‘ariah a threat over them. Aside from the months before ‘ariah had been killed, the boy had rarely used the function that interfaced with his Dyadism often, outside of the war. There had been the occasional time when enemies of his sister had seemed liable to strike and she had insisted he keep the function that pressed all his Awareness into a database for the clones’ use active. It wasn’t that keeping it activated

hurt

or anything—not more than his abilities always

hurt

, anyways. Instead, it was simply draining—Atticus’ Load Levels weren’t meant for this much strain, and while he

could

keep it active indefinitely, he didn’t exactly enjoy doing so, the drain leaving his mind too foggy for much of anything else.

Perhaps, now that she was back—distant as that

back

was—Emilia might be able to make the function a little better? A little smoother? Helix had offered once, but it was his sister’s function, and no one could touch his sister’s things.

In the back of his mind, a map of the clones’ locations and which clone was on duty slotted into Atticus’ mind—and at the least, all of the people he felt roaming about matched up with a clone. The Black Knot had their own function for keeping track of their people, each instance interfacing with every other instance until it was nigh impossible to replace a clone or agent with a different person. Still, Atticus felt safer with his own function running over their own—a silent companion to the power of the clones, as much a gift to them from his sister as his own function was.

“You okay, Attie?”

Kyler signed when Atticus peered down at the two clones, his Censor informing him that the other one was Chanori Hyrat, a younger clone who had been born just before the war began. Apparently, the rest of his pod was dead—killed in an attack that he himself had barely survived when he was in his late teens —and he had struggled to find a place in any other pod.

Regardless of what so many people thought, clones could be traumatized by the death of those they knew and the war itself just as much as anyone else. Atticus could see the trauma in the clone’s eyes—could see it in the rapid blinks, in the way he shifted whenever another clone sparked onto the estate.

“Yes,”

Atticus replied.

“If you cannot handle to Shadow of Jinkai, tell father to assign someone else. We all know how easily they can burn out clones.”

The clone groaned—Atticus might not be able to hear the sound, but the way Kyler groaned with his whole body made it easy to know he was doing so.

“Heard that, did you?”

he asked, signing something about how annoying the Shadow of Jinkai was and asking if Emilia had ever mentioned anything about being able to

dump bodies into the aether

.

His sister had, but Atticus wasn’t about to tell Kyler that—wasn’t about to tell

anyone

that.

It was one of those secrets that Atticus wasn’t meant to share—wasn’t meant to let

anyone

, not even his sister, know he knew.

“No,”

he replied before slipping away, down the dark hallways of their home’s second floor.

Pictures were splattered over the walls—memorializations of their childhood and those of a thousand more souls of their family, spreading down the Starrberg and Nemora family lines, printed out by Xavier when he was in his first years of compulsory schooling and had needed to do a project on his family. His adoptive siblings had already been doing their shared family, and without the ability to do research about his own, long-dead family, Xavier had asked Emilia if he could do hers.

“Why not?”

she had laughed, adding that—for obvious reasons—Xavier could do their adoptive family, but wouldn’t be able to do their biological ones, given they knew nothing of the people who had given them up.

“Only up the tree,”

she had added before rushing off, intent to keep multiple fatalities from striking their families because few of the children in their sprawling family of children with fraying and knotted and tangled relations were known for being sensible.

A small explosion had followed, along with a respectable amount of swearing on Emilia and Taelor’s parts, the triplets back for a rare break in their work with The Black Knot, his sister loving every moment of it—until they left and she fell apart yet again, of course.

“Indie?”

he called through his Censor, standing quietly outside his sister’s door. Could he knock? Yes, but Atticus hated even making noise, each knock an echo over the world that reverberated back through him. The aethernet was there as well, filling the world to the brink, but

that

he was better at ignoring, Coral having once suggested that it was due to how consistent it was.

The aethernet was always there, at least while in Baalphoria. It never wavered, it never died. Sound shifted from the silence of the night—the silence of chirping bugs and birds and pattering rain—into the cacophony of the day—the scream of people and movement and their lives playing out in noise and noise and always more noise.

Barely a breath had passed before his sister was there, pushing the door to the side and asking if he was alright—he was, he assured her, letting Indigo usher him inside. His sister’s long nightgown brushed the floor as she moved, scratching over his senses. Once, when they were young, each of them figuring out what they liked about clothing and culture and hobbies, Indigo had offered to wear something shorter—something that wouldn’t aggravate his mind. It was a nice offer, but Atticus had never wanted to be a drain on his siblings, who were always so good about working around his sensory issues—Simeon’s as well; later Coral’s and Furki’za’s and every other Dyad who had fallen into their lives.

So, the long nightgowns stayed, regardless of how, even six decades later, Atticus still hated that

swoosh, swoosh, scrape

over the floorboards. The nightgowns were soft, at least—had Indigo ever tried to wear something that grated on his touch-based sensory issues, he actually would have demanded she burn whatever she was wearing.

“Were you asleep,”

he asked, eyes skimming over the room, taking in the thrown-back covers, the sketchbooks scattered over his sister’s desk. If Emilia tossed her bedding into an approximation of a

properly made bed

or tugged everything into submission with a skill, Indigo slipped into midday naps so often that her bed was a constant bundle of a million blankets—

her nest

, he’d heard her call it, as though she were a bird.

With how thin his sister was, tall with long limbs, frail with her ribs and the notches of her spine a constantly countable thing, she did sometimes seem a bird, even if Emilia had always been on the one meant to fly.

“Yeah,”

his sister yawned, swooshing her way over to her bed to activate the machine that sat next to it—a set of three, gifted to each of them decades ago by Halen, one for each of their bedrooms.

The machine spit out skill after skills, tugging Indigo’s bed into a configuration that wouldn’t drive Atticus to madness when he slipped in beside her. There would be no flips in the fabric, no wrinkles, no unevenness. Instead, it would all be perfectly smooth, unlike the insanity that his sister often lived within.

Atticus could still remember the day Halen had shown up with them, soon after he and Emilia had become

something

that was neither permanent nor temporary, neither calm nor chaotic. It had been something all their own, broken and tragic until its last dying breath—a breath Atticus suspected would never come, the last time he had seen his sister marred over with a moment of watching her crumble beside her own machine, sitting unused in her childhood bedroom, and sob.

Emilia didn’t remember loving Halen, but she knew—it was impossible for her to not know, even if she didn’t remember. It was even more impossible in this house, flaked over with so many of Halen’s touches: pictures of him, spread over their walls as he became a member of their family; the machines that eased Atticus’ ability to slip into either of his siblings’ bed on any night when nightmares of their first home surged through his brain; little gifts that cluttered Emilia’s room, each set atop the note that had accompanied them—the

I wish I could be there with you, but this will have to do for the moment.

It broke his heart, whenever he set foot in his sister’s room, seeing all these little signs of a love she couldn’t remember more than the brutal heartbreak of. Atticus remembered, of course—he was one of the few people who remembered fully, that boy whom his sister had hated and then loved and then been broken apart by. Halen, who had never been anything but nice to him and Indigo, no matter whether he hated or loved or adored Emilia. Halen, who had been his friend—one of the few friends Atticus had ever had.

“Regardless of what happened… know that I would never want you to stop being friends with Halen, okay?”

he could remember his sister saying in the wake of their

breakup

during the war—a breakup he had never been able to get the full story of.

“You shouldn’t want to be my friend anymore—not after what I said about her. You should hate me, just like she does,”

he could remember Halen saying, so much painful self-hatred echoing out of the other boy that all Atticus had been able to do was pull his friend closer and let him sob into his skin, muttering soft

sorrys

into the universe itself and how could Atticus have ever hated Halen when he was so filled with remorse for whatever it was he’d said? When his sister herself had admitted that she didn’t think Halen had meant whatever he’d said.

“Then why hold it against him?”

Indigo had asked, stroking Emilia’s hair while she sniffled into her lap, Atticus setting out cookies Levi, always so observant of the world and the people he cared for, had procured for them.

Shaking her head and burying her face further into Indigo’s lap, their sister had signed,

“Because I can’t get the sound of him saying it out of my head.”

This wasn’t a problem Atticus would ever have, but he could appreciate the reality of it—the reality that his sweet sister couldn’t remove the memory of Halen saying something terrible from her mind. It couldn’t be plucked out, couldn’t be burned to ash or offered up to the universe.

“I should have forgiven him immediately,”

Emilia had once said, several weeks before Alliance Ridge burned—several weeks before she had Halen had figured it out and then he had been dead and she had broken so entirely that everyone had been worried she would kill herself.

Halen, for as much as he had hurt Emilia, had always been her forever person—the one she was meant to go back to, eventually, once that memory faded. Atticus had no idea if that had happened, by those last days before he died, but something had shifted, and Halen was supposed to be coming back to them.

“What’s up?”

Indigo asked, letting the machine tug the covers back for them to slide into the bed before it would gently tug them back up, giving them each a hug of comfort from a man who was meant to be their brother-in-law, one day.

Atticus turned into his sister’s warmth, forwarding him the video that one of his classmates had forwarded him.

“This is you sis, right? Fuck if she isn’t as terrifying now as she was back in comp schooling!”

the message had read, Atticus scrambling to open the video despite thinking there was no way it would be a video of Emilia. It would be another silverstrain, not Emilia—never Emilia—but there she was, ripping a hole in that dorm room and swishing out of that room with all the confidence she had possessed in their youth, before that piece of shit Daniel had gotten hold of her.

Once, Atticus had known that, as soon as Emilia forgot whatever Halen had said—once it faded into the blurry abyss of her swirling mind—she would return to him. Once, Atticus had hoped that, as soon whatever terrible thing his sister had faced in the last days of the war—in the first days of peace—faded into the abyss of the past, she would return to them.

Maybe that time wasn’t yet there, but for the first time in years, as Indigo laughed and signed about how

of course

this would be the way they’d see their sister for the first time in a decade, Atticus let himself hope that soon, they would find Emilia here—in this house, in their bed, in her childhood bedroom, mourning the man she would always love with love enough to last ten thousand years.