“You can’t be serious,” Emilia breathed out, feeling her vague plans for getting the triplets to temporarily quit and enjoy their gap decade as much as they could slither away. As much as she wanted to say someone else should do this assignment—wanted to march off campus and catch the first bubble to wherever Loren was at the moment and demand someone else be assigned—she knew it wouldn’t do any good.
There wasn’t anyone better than the triplets to do this—not now, probably not until Cyan graduated, and that wouldn’t be for another decade, and who knew how things would change in those years. Already, Cyan was proving to be a rebel, continuously fighting against the expectations put on him, although it was also quite clear that the elder Hyrat clones weren’t really sure what to do with the young clone’s defiance.
While virtually every clone went into the so-called family business, it wasn’t actually required. More, it was that living a normal life was impossible, and unless the clone in question wanted to live the rest of their life wearing a different face—and as previously noted, there seemed to be some sort of urge in their very genetics to not change their appearance for anything other than work—there wasn’t really anywhere they could go where they wouldn’t be recognized by at least law enforcement.
Even in Dion, back when Emilia had been a teenager, dragging the triplets with her to visit friends at the Summer Palace, virtually everyone had recognized them, despite their age. While there were probably a few Free Colonies out there where they could go unidentified by the average person, finding those places would be difficult, as would living there as a Baalphorian ex-pat.
Still, it was the expectation that the clones would transition into working for The Black Knot as they aged. If Cyan chose to go against that—if he and Alaric really were more than just friends as a few of them suspected—no one was really sure what would happen. It wasn’t like clones trying to leave the life set out for them was common. Yet, there was something to be said for the possibility that a single person breaking tradition could send the whole fucking system spiralling.
While Emilia knew the clones played an important role in the way Baalphoria functioned—The Black Knot as a whole, really, despite the public’s disdain of them—she also couldn’t say she wouldn’t be happy for the clones to feel like they had more choices.
[
Note to Self:
Contact Cyan and make sure he knows he can always come to me for help.
]
So… yeah. Cyan would be the best option for the ridiculous mission Emilia was continuing to read over, Baylor’s foot stalled between her legs because even he was taking this serious. Cyan would be a viable option, if he followed a completely typical path and the situation laid out in the file didn’t explode before then.
It would probably explode before then. Fuck.
“We are serious,” Taelor continued when she finally refocused on him, his green eyes sharp and determined. “We are hoping you’ll help us.”
“So we don’t die,” Baylor added, a smile still tugging against his sun kissed features. Freckles spread over his cheeks, the result of having friends who loved the sun, and tattoos etched into each of the triplets skin every time one of them appeared with more freckles.
The triplets always had to be identical, right down to natural signs of life, and in their youth, there had been some argument over whether the trios’ friendship with her, her siblings, and their cousins—and later the rest of their friend group—had been a good idea.
The more friends—the more play—the more risk of injury, of errors appearing over their skin and minds and bones.
In the end, the older clones—the older anyone got, the grumpier they got, especially when the younger generation was offered things they themselves had never been—who had argued the triplets be forcibly removed from their friend group had been overridden. The triplets had been allowed to remain their friends—and by extension, they had set a precedent for close, obsessive friendships outside The Black Knot that numerous younger clones now benefitted from.
While all members of The Black Knot’s leading families were encouraged to find friendships outside of their familial lines, it wasn’t exactly common for them to become as close as so many have become with Emilia and her friends. It caused problems, at times, but it was a sliver of normalcy she knew none of them would give up.
Still, that didn’t mean the triplets had escaped the permanent requirement to keep their bodies identical.
Every injury had to be mended up with perfect precision; if a scar remained, it had to be forced onto the other two. Broken bones—of which there had been plenty during their chaotic childhood—had to heal to be undetectable, else complicated tech used to mare otherwise perfect bones of the remaining triplets, leaving evidence of injuries they had never experienced. Always undistinguishable to everyone but the clones themselves—and something even them—and her.
The triplets weren’t the only clones who underwent these sorts of procedures, of course. Every year, five to ten clones were born, depending on the specific needs of the organization. How many clones had died that year. The current political climate. Large assignments that intelligence told them were coming, even if they were decades out.
The oldest of the clones had been born shortly before the height of the last war between the Free Colonies and Baalphoria—the one in which her teacher, Dion’s Blood Rain General, had become so revered and feared—and as a result, there were far more clones over the age of two hundred and fifty than there had been in nearly a millennium. It didn’t even matter that so many had died during the war and the lead up to it; there were still so many older clones that The Black Knot was, quite frankly, overrun with old men, stuck in their ways.
According to documents she and the Laprise boys had once read in their family’s library—the one they definitely weren’t supposed to be hanging out in—at the height of the tension, when everyone had been sure war would be coming any day, at least one clone had been born every week for over ten years.
Even in times of peace, a handful of clones were born every year, raised in one or two pods, so they would know each other like the backs of their hands. While eventually most clones would go on missions outside of their pods, they worked primarily in those pods for their first years of service and sometimes long beyond that. When they did begin to branch out, usually based on interests and abilities—some of the clones were so bad at acting it was actually rather funny, and they were deemed completely unsuited for undercover work—it was expected that they be identical, even if they had changed their appearance, just in case.
Just in case
what? Emilia didn’t even know. All she knew what that, before the clones working a specific job went in to have their appearance altered through a mixture of skills and surgery and aether-enhanced tattoos so powerful they physically changed the owner’s body, their true bodies were altered to be as identical as possible. Part of her assumed that perhaps the alterations would turn out slightly different, if the original bodies were different, but the exact details of how the clones altered their appearance was so top secret that even she wasn’t allowed to know—no one outside the clones was, not even other members of The Black Knot.
As someone who loved to learn and had been granted access to basically every other Black Knot secret, this greatly annoyed Emilia, and she had been caught a handful of times during her youth trying to break into classified files, attempting to learn the truth.
Truly, she really was lucky the Hyrat clones loved her so much. No one else would have tolerated her antics so much.
Emilia was still contemplating all this as she hurried off to class, having left the triplets to a very nervous barista at an on-campus café she frequented. Given the looks the staff and patrons had been giving her, it was possible that after leaving a handful of clones in their midst, she may not be welcomed back again.
While she didn’t like it, she knew the triplets were right when they said that the communication function used by The Black Knot as a whole wasn’t suited for this mission. Honestly, it should have been updated long ago, but Baalphoria had been peaceful for decades and there probably hadn’t been a need.
The most recent
serious
incident that The Black Knot had taken part in had been about three decades earlier, when a cult in the Grey Sands had caused some problems. While a lot of details about that were so classified they’d been removed from even The Black Knot’s records—something else that seriously irked Emilia, but even she wouldn’t dare trying to hack into the regular government’s files… for a second time—she did know a number of clones had been sent in to infiltrate the cult.
The fact that it was an isolated cult had made the clones going in… odd, in Emilia’s opinion. It wasn’t like they could switch agents when barely anyone could go in and out of the base to begin with. The communication system The Black Knot used still reflected that. It was meant for general use by a single agent, rather than use by the clones, with their natural flow of pod members in and out of the job. In general use, while there often was a demand to make use of information quickly, usually, it wasn’t life and death, and there wasn’t quite as much to memorize.
Information came; information went. Agents and handlers used the information, Censors keeping track of everything and prompting agents with relevant details when necessary. For a single agent, doing their job and potentially staying undercover for months or years—decades, in a few somewhat horrific cases—the information they learned, the stories and relationships they built around themselves, were just a part of their performance. They were the actor, and they knew the reason they had chosen to do this or that without explicitly laying it out.
This wasn’t the case with the clones, who were meant to switch places flawlessly.
This was also the reason for growing up in pods, the members of each pod meant to understand the minds of their pod members well enough that they wouldn’t need as much debriefing on the situations each had made for themselves while in control of an assignment. Even for the triplets, that wasn’t always easy, each of their personalities never perfectly within grasp of the others—and to be clear, out of all the pods Emilia had met, both those raised together and those who had worked together for decades, the triplets transitioned between each of their respective personalities and ones they formed on the fly with the most ease and grace.
It still wasn’t enough, each assignment the clones took a risk to their safety and lives due to the simple fact that even they messed up—even they forgot facts, let bits of information slip that were accidentally omitted from messages to the others.
Messages,
because that’s what The Black Knot’s communication system was: a simply messaging system. Yes, it was slightly more sophisticated than the average messaging function, letting Censors do the brunt of the work to siphon through memories and the most relevant information for the assignment’s other clones to memorize. More information was packed away into their Censors, left to be pulled out by the clones’ Censors as needed, in case they forgot something, in case something deemed unimportant were needed.
Censors, for as much as they were powerful, weren’t so powerful that they could catalogue everything to such an extreme that they could pull out a small detail in the milliseconds needed for it to be used in conversation.
Clones died because they didn’t know something. Clones died because their Censor took too long to give them the information they needed, sometimes even a forgotten name of someone’s beloved sibling enough to blow their cover.
Those facts alone were enough for Emilia to agree that the organizations, both the Hyrat’s division and The Black Knot as a whole, needed new communications functions. This, though? This terrible, disaster of a mission that the triplets had been assigned?
Yeah, this mission was so dangerous that, if the triplets went into the mission without something else supporting them, the chances of them coming out alive were low.
No way was Emilia sending her friends into this sort of disaster without at least trying to help. While she would have preferred to just tie them all up and refuse to let them go on the mission, she also knew that wasn’t an option—there was too much at stake with this.
Fuck.
Arc 8 | Chapter 276: This Definitely Won’t Cut It
Comments