[Can't Opt Out]

Arc F1.7 | Chapter 28: Let My Body Unravel

The little girl was crying—screaming really—thrashing in his arms and Olivier tried to soothe her, tried to figure out what she was saying. His Censor burned as they moved, his heart lingering back with Porsq, but at the very least, the people chasing them hadn’t seemed to notice the boy he’d left behind.He’d done that: prioritized these children over another child and he knew his reasoning for doing so was good, sound. That didn’t mean it wasn’t terrible—didn’t mean that if he never saw Porsq again he wouldn’t spend the rest of his life hating himself. Until that little boy was safe in his arms, Olivier wouldn’t be able to let it go, he knew. Porsq needed to be safe—had to be safe—not just for his own peace of mind, but because the preteen deserved to live, to be free, to exist out under the wide-open sky—assuming he wanted to go there, anyways.

Xavier, crying into his shoulder as the little girl continued screaming words—and those had to be words, even if his Censor didn’t know how to translate them—clearly wanted to leave this place, this city, this land where he had been born and no longer seemed to have anyone. Olivier wanted to find him a home—give him new parents who would never seek to replace his birth parents, but who would love him all the same.

The slither of a thought—an image of a future that existed solely within his mind—threatened at the edges of him awareness. Olivier shut it down. They needed to get out of here, and until then…

Until then, hope was nothing but a weight over him—a sword, just as threatening as the stalactites, looming high above them. Hope was great, but it was also what crushed a soul beneath its cruel denial.

Swerving down an alleyway, the little girl screamed louder—and that was odd, wasn’t it? For her screams to grow when all they did was turn a corner? Behind them, the people who were chasing them—two people, from what he could tell—grew closer, closer. Outrunning them was unlikely, and Olivier had no idea how he’d do in a fight. Of course, he would try to defend himself and the children—the children more than himself—but he didn’t think himself likely to succeed.

Could he drop the children and tell them to try and run? He could try. Xavier’s knees and palms were mangled from his fall, but the boy could try to get away—could knock on the door of one of the businesses littered throughout the area and hope someone let him in, and there was that word again:

they let him in.

they didn’t turn him away.

they didn’t all die trying to help him.

As for the little girl? Olivier doubted she would follow any instructions. He could tell her to run, and she’d be frozen. He would tell her to stay put, and she’d bolt. It wasn’t her fault, her tiny mind overwhelmed by everything that was happening. Olivier was a grown man and even he was struggling to obey what his mind said was the best thing to do, as pathetic as that was.

was, unfortunately, nothing more than believe in that stupid word—believe that might get them through this.

Behind him, the women—and he could tell now that they were closer that they were both women—rounded the corner and what did he have? A minutes—maybe two—until they caught up? Was he better off stopping—turning and facing them down—rather than running himself to complete exhaustion and being caught anyways? Keep running and hope that, somehow, someone else—some ally for Emilia’s—suddenly happened across them?

Olivier didn’t know—he didn’t know and he didn’t to know. Out of all the things that he had ever considered might happen on one of these class trips, nothing like this had ever been on his list of possibilities. There was a reason they didn’t go anywhere with too unstable of a government, and the reality that they might find themselves in the middle of a conflict was one of them. Lüshan was always a little more on the authoritarian side, but there had been no proper murmurings of anything like this; of course there hadn’t been, with at least some of the Drinarna complicit in all this.

The Black Knot had known might be coming, but it wasn’t big enough to warn anyone, and if Olivier ever met Malcolm Laprise in person, he might be inclined to punch the man. Maybe. Possibly.

Those words, sent in a private relay between the two of them hours—so many hours—earlier rattled through Olivier’s head because he thought the man telling the truth. Malcolm Laprise, had he realized they were going to be there, with or without Emilia, would have sent a vague message suggesting they don’t. Had he received it… Olivier wasn’t sure he would have gotten out of the class trip, or gotten around rescheduling it, but he would have.

he had asked at the time, slightly baffled by the reality that the organization didn’t have access to all records of people leaving and entering Baalphoria.

Olivier had a feeling he wasn’t supposed to know this—and given most of his conversations with Malcolm Laprise had taken place within those strange, locked relays, Olivier supposed that, to some extent, he know any of it—but Malcolm Laprise had revealed that while The Black Knot had records of who was leaving and entering the nation through all manner of transportation, it often didn’t match up with tickets or mode of transport directly.

The system for managing international travel, it seemed, wasn’t the most sophisticated, likely because few people ever travelled into or out of Baalphoria. As a result, of the three airships that had landed in Baalphoria the day they left—the one they were on, one going over the Grey Sands before landing in Zironia, and another that followed its regular path through Dion before heading back and starting again—The Black Knot had known their group was on one of them in the most benign of ways. What did that mean? It meant that their system knew the names of everyone travelling out of Baalphoria, but as no one had triggered any alerts that they weren’t allowed to travel, it went no further than that. The names of those Baalphorians who had gotten on those ships were also combined with the names of everyone else who had exited the nation that day, via land-border crossings to the south and west, the slideline to Seer'ik'tine, and the occasional boat heading south—not to mention people on the various bubble lines that transported goods to and from other nations.

It was the slideline to Seer’ik’tine that was the most commonly used, he imagined—all those people going to The Bridge and taking a short trip to what was often considered by Baalphorians to be the only Free Colony—and when taken into consideration with the outdated nature of the system… Well, Olivier was further questioning The Black Knot’s full awareness of who was entering and leaving the nation based on Emilia’s note, in which it had been implied that no one back in Baalphoria had any idea her friends had come to Lüshan until they’d been explicitly told.

Olivier had a few theories on that—the most likely was that whatever system was used for monitoring the western, Seer'ik'tine-Dion border, it wasn’t hooked into the Baalphorian system. In other words—assuming Halen hadn’t outright hacked the system to hide their travels—the names of all of Emilia’s friends had been dumped into the pool of people who left Baalphoria today, and considering who Emilia was, he didn’t doubt she and her friends visited Seer’ik’tine relatively often. Perhaps they even went into Dion from time to time, given she had implied she had friends there as well. Her friends had crossed the border, and again, their names ended up in whatever system Seer’ik’tine had. Maybe it was normal for them. Maybe not. Either way, they likely had all their paperwork and nothing was flagged anywhere along the way, no records sent back to Baalphoria to let them know their citizens were no longer in Seer’ik’tine.

Then, considering the strained relationship between Lüshan and Dion—whose aetherstream the group must have used to get there, although Olivier had no idea how they’d managed to get down it so fast—they’d also likely entered Lüshan illegally. Emilia’s note had also mentioned and Olivier had concerns.

He had concerns about many things, and how Emilia’s friends had managed to get around Baalphoria’s apparently terrible logs about who was and wasn’t currently within their borders wasn’t the one he should be focusing on right now. The thing was, he needed to focus on—something to distract him from the situation and the slam of his feet over the ground, the cool air of the city biting into his too hot skin.

When was the last time he had been this exhausted?

When was the last time he had felt his body a thing ready to unravel?

In his arms, each straining and burning, Xavier continued to cry. His fingers were little knives into Olivier’s skin—they were broken and torn, he abruptly realized. The guards in the holding cells hadn’t even bothered to give the child a nail file? But then, the little girl’s were smooth where they pulled at him, her squirming becoming untenable—and why did she want to get out of his arms so badly?

As though a chime, the sound of the girl’s cries split through him—

—it wasn’t a word he’d ever heard before, but two women? That telling sound of

Once, in a language class—an odd offering for a law school, but Professor Lee had been insistent that she wanted to be allowed to teach the occasional class on any subject she desired—his professor had explained that some words transcend borders and cultures.

Sometimes, it was thought to be an ancient word, borrowed between a thousand different languages until each had their own version. Often, the similarities between these words were difficult to see unless the person were an expert in each of the languages—unless they could see the shift of tongues over time, certain sounds shifting until, obviously, was the same as because of sound changing, culture being brought in, connection being made.

Olivier was no linguist, but he understood the basics—knew that there were more connections between languages than many of their nations wanted to admit.

Another way languages could share the same word was random chance, or one of those other shared words inspiring the same thing. The ancient base words for both and were the same in Norvellian and Low Falronian, and while their words for were barely similar anymore, their words for Censors were similar enough due to both using and within them. They weren’t a shared word, nor one that had accidentally crossed a border, but they were inspired by two words that, millennia ago, had slipped between their lands, then been morphed to become something belonging to each nation alone.

he could remember Professor Lee saying, a million crying babies flashing over the screen in the lecture hall. Different skin tones. Different styles of bassinets and cribs and blankets. No similar toy to be seen amongst half of them.

His professor had stopped on one particular clip and pointed out that the things that were in the crib with the baby shouldn’t be in there—they were unsafe. Choking hazards. Things the child could tangle themself into. On another clip, she pointed out the mattress was too soft—the baby was old enough to roll and smush their face into the mattress.

Later, when Gabrielle had given birth to her twins, he had been sure to make sure nothing could ever happen to his niece and nephew—and yes, he realized they were technically his cousins as well, but their cousin group was so close that they’d long ago decided to treat the children born between them as their nieces and nephews—while they slept… or swam… or ate.

He was a nervous person, okay? Of course he was going to worry for the children he loved!

Regardless, he had remembered that lecture mostly for the trauma of hearing all about unsafe sleeping habits for babies, and it hadn’t been until Gabrielle had been trying to teach the twins to say that he remembered the rest: babies cry, and more often than not, it comes out somewhere between an and a sound.

another student had asked, and while their professor had told them it wasn’t completely ubiquitous and the sound was also one of the first babies were able to make, regardless of the similarity to their first cries of distress, it was a common enough thing.

Professor Lee had finished, icy eyes glaring over her students as though more than a few of them would ever leave Baalphoria or risk themselves trying to return their child to their parent.

It was ironic, in some ways, that in this case, Olivier was the inadvertent kidnapper, running away from the little girl’s parents while she called for them and kicked, trying to get out of his arms so she could get back to them.