It was so impressively
Emilia
to have dipped a toe back into their lives just that morning, only to find herself the centre of drama hours later—drama that was spreading through the continent with every passing second. Barely half a day had passed, and already, Miles had received no less than a hundred queries about his wayward daughter, and that wasn’t even including her friends, most of whom had now been included in some sort of group chat organizing a months-long torment of her now-ex-boyfriend.
Honestly, how was it that his daughter had such terrible taste in men? Well, most of the men hadn’t been
that
bad—Daniel had turned out to be a piece of work, although one of the clones had removed his memories of exactly how terrible the man had been at some point leaving behind only the feeling that he really didn’t need to know the exact details of the violence the man had inflicted on his daughter—but for the most part, his daughter simply had a habit of falling love with men who weren’t quite ready to love her back.
Miles really hoped his daughter hadn’t been in love with this Elijah Richmond. The video of her ripping through his dorm room wall certainly didn’t seem to imply she had been; rather, in combination with what the triplets were messaging him as they interrogated the young man and his roommates, it seemed as though it had been nothing more than a college romance, doomed to fail from the start—not that Elijah Richmond had apparently seen it that way. No, instead, he had gotten it in his head that he could change his daughter to suit his and his family’s needs. Oddly, he also seemed to have no idea who she was, and while Miles loved his daughter, he really couldn’t see a reason why the boy would try to change her when he didn’t know the power she held.
“Are the triplets going to get in trouble?” Miles asked, peeking an eye open to glance at Kyler Hyrat, the clone who had been sent over to inform him of the situation after Samina had Elijah Richmond and all his roommates—plus Victor LinKai’s parents—taken into custody. They could have messaged him, and once, before sparking, they would have. As it was, there was no good reason for a clone not to come in person, especially given the… delicacy of the situation.
“Unlikely. There were threats issued by the group, if not in words, then in body language. What has been found within their minds has also confirmed the LinKai’s were unlikely to leave without Bethany Haelstrum, regardless of her opinion on the matter. Most of the students were aware they would use force to take her, if necessary.”
Kyler continued staring out the window, towards the stone wall that separated the Starrberg Estate from the Laprises’. Below, several more clones wandered the grounds because, as previously stated, Emilia’s return had caused chaos.
Perhaps if it weren’t for that video, circulating so quickly through the Piketown message boards and then onwards, this wouldn’t have become such an issue. While none of the people who knew who Emilia was—that she was his daughter, the long missing general of Division 30 and the Triangle, or any of the other important and forever secret aspects of her person—it hadn’t taken long for the video and speculation of who she was to make its way back to various government officials both domestic and abroad.
Mostly, all the queries being made of her were friendly enough—no one who knew what his child was capable of were stupid enough to antagonize her—but unrelenting.
They knew she was responsible for ending the war; they wanted answers as to how. Where previously those of them who had been contacted—himself, Olivier, and the Black Knot as a whole receiving the most requests for her contact information—had been able to brush the requests aside; that wasn’t going to work with her image making the rounds the continent over. Their contacting him was simply a courtesy, giving him time to organize official meetings before they showed up at Astrapan regardless of whether they were invited or not.
Before all this, anyone asked about Emilia’s location had been able to brush the question aside, claiming they didn’t know, something that was, to a large extent, the truth. Miles doubted Olivier had known where Emilia was—he’d always been so insistent on not violating her privacy, only asking if she was still safe the rare times they met up to discuss some case or the impressive portfolio Olivier had amassed while managing Emilia’s finances over the last few decades. As for The Black Knot, Miles was aware they were keeping an eye on her, Grenner still lingering in the background of Piketown and keeping a gentle eye on her—he had been the first one to notify them something was wrong, shortly before the echo attack at the purist building—as he had for five decades, and he assumed his daughter still managed some of the skills and functions she had designer for The Black Knot, but really, he wasn’t sure.
Miles had, much to the chagrin of his wife, in those first years of Emilia’s silence, refused to know where his daughter was. It wasn’t that he’d been concerned that he couldn’t lie for her—he hadn’t been the top diplomat in Baalphoria for so many decades without becoming an expert in bending and hiding the truth; rather, it had the knowledge that, one day, someone who was willing to do anything to get that information may come along.
For a long time, that sort of situation hadn’t been much of a risk; most people who knew for certain who his daughter was weren’t the sort who would risk the fallout of forcing such information out of him. Not many people wanted that sort of diplomatic incident, not when the world was finally calm… mostly. There were bigger things to worry about than how she had ended the war, even if practically everyone wanted to know.
Then, the tides had begun to change. It had only been a matter of time, of course, before organized crime started to rise from the ashes of the war, so many of their organizations collapsing under the promise that those who joined the war effort would have their records expunged. Some organizations had sustained themselves, and in the shadow of the war, many of those given amnesty had returned to their former lives.
Not all, but many.
Having raised children scarred by their upbringing, Miles knew exactly how difficult it was to fully escape the trauma of one’s life. He and his wife had removed their children from that home and done everything they could to try and change the course of their lives. For the most part, they had succeeded. It wasn’t perfect, as Emilia’s long list of crimes big and small, secret and over-exaggerated, proved.
There was just something about growing up poor and abused and hated by your caregivers that left the adults those children became struggling to live a normal life. So when statistics about the soldiers who returned to crime came out, he was never surprised to find many of them had been abused as children, had grown up on the streets, had never been given the skills to function and prosper in the real world. It was part of why he had pushed for the Alliance to retain a larger standing army, in an attempt to keep those people in a stable and supportive environment.
The brass had refused.
Division 30 was still technically active duty, each of the members receiving a generous monthly paydrop few of them actually needed. A small standing army remained, largely composed of high-ranking soldiers, including a number of Division 30 members, all skewed towards Baalphorian members. If Free Coloniers wanted to remain in the military, they usually returned home, falling into the confusing world of being trained as an Alliance soldier and yet expected to behave as a solider for their own military. Most of them didn’t last long, not when the Alliance had let so much training slide in order to get soldiers from all walks of life into combat as quickly as possible.
Few of the people now making up the majority of the continent’s military forces needed the money or support of the military. Yet, it had been those who needed it who were dropped adrift first. Without an anchor, often without even a home, they had floundered. A number of the soldiers who had come out of the Dread Coliseum had settled in Zironia and were getting on fine enough, but so many more had been dumped back into a life of struggle—had been dumped back into Free Colonies who remembered their crimes from decades earlier, when many had been little more than children, and they refused to forget even if their records were technically expunged.
Back to crime they had gone, but as different, more dangerous people. Miles had known the day would come when someone would leak the bits of information the clones had tried so hard to contain.
There was a way around the counterskills that blocked sparking.
Members of Division 30 could always spark, no matter who or what tried to stop them.
There are unreleased skills out there that break the laws of the world.
The hacker who worked alongside Halen Mhrina can design virtually anything.
For a long time, Bristol Centarka had taken on the position of
person everyone assumed but could never confirm was Halen Mhrina’s collaborator.
The non-dev researcher had made a name for himself decades earlier, and he had collaborated on many of the skills that came out of Division 30 later in the war, including sparking. Holed up in The Ridge Rind as he was, there was virtually no one who could get to him, so it had been easy enough for him to publish paper after paper on sparking and the theories behind some of Division 30’s more famous skills, redacting as necessary, redirecting more than was perhaps ethical.
Bristol had used himself as bait, never speaking formally on his connection to Division 30 but certainly leading people to assume he had been a member, but it could only last so long. All it took was a single person letting a little bit of information slip, and the house of implications he had made would collapse.
Miles had wondered in these last few weeks if Helix or Tempest would regret their decision to join the crew on that reality show, given how much damage their combined comments on their lives, friends, and friends could cause—had caused. He didn’t blame them—they were only speaking about aspects of their lives, after all, and as much as there was an implicit understanding that those who knew non-public Division 30 members wouldn’t speak freely about them, it wasn’t a rule anyone would ever enforce.
Tempest was free to talk about her life—about her sister, Lux, who had died a hero in the latter years of the war. Both had grown up in The Penns and had let his daughter’s skills slide through their minds as they joked and played, cheered and jeered.
Who were any of them to demand she not speak of the sister who had been ripped away from her, or the friends Lux had died protecting?
Yet, Tempest’s words had been poked and prodded, Helix’s stories and mentions of friendships with certain people added in, despite his soon-to-be-shattered non-public status. A thousand rumours came together, reaching into the Free Colonies, where so many people had once heard tales of his chaotic child and her long silver hair—silver hair that was perfectly visible in the video of her precise assault on the dorm room wall. It was the sort of surgical precision that all but guaranteed the user was a low-dev, even after all those years of war forcing more
normal
people into war machines.
If someone knew what they were looking at, it was clear his daughter was powerful. If someone had heard all the rumours that had circled Division 30 for decades, it didn’t take much to pick at the ones that might very well be true and follow them to the source—follow them to him.
“Are you going to tell her?” Kyler asked.
Miles huffed, pushing himself out of his chair with a groan. He wasn’t quite at death’s door yet, but he was certainly pushing the age where his peers retired. There was no one to take over his job, however. No one had the connections he did, nor the pull. Once, Wilfred had been there, shadowing him and preparing to take the job the moment he deemed her ready. She had been ready three decades ago. Then, she had died in one of the first attacks, and the war had been too important to bother wasting time training someone new. Then…
Then, Miles didn’t know. They were all mourning, he supposed—restructuring their lives and world, and somewhere along the way, he’d forgotten he needed a successor.
“That a number of criminals are now targeting the people she loves, hoping to snatch them up and force her to
have a discussion
with them?” Miles replied, coming to stand beside Kyler.
That was the real reason he and his pod were there, another Hyrat pod within the Laprise estate while more circled the neighbourhood, checking in on known members of Division 30 as they moved and made sure nothing was amiss.
Nothing was amiss, but the clones were made to work and move and protect the people they were assigned to. The fact that the clones also loved his daughter with the sort of intimidating, obsessive drive only black knots were capable of? Yeah, there were going to be clones tailing all of them for a while.
“Do you think it would do any good?”
“No.” There was no hesitation in Kyler’s response, nor in his added, “But she would want to know.”
Yes, Miles supposed she would, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t informed her of other issues in the past, usually through Rafe, whom he knew she still communicated with and always responded to.
“If something happens, and she wasn’t aware there was a risk…”
“I know,” Miles sighed, pulling up the message thread with his daughter. He stared at it and their hopeful parting words for a long moment before closing it and instead messaging Sorvell.
Every Division 30 member had been notified of the situation with the criminal organizations, as had the people they were associated with. Most of the public members and their families now had their own small army of clones following them around, although a few had chosen to utilize their own Free Colony’s security forces. Sorvell’s siege on Piketown had made the situation somewhat easier simply because so many members were in the same location, an entire army of clones moving into one of the floors of the building they had purchased. Easier to protect, but also easier to target. If anything, the risk had probably led more of them to show up, just to keep each other safe—not that most of them were taking it that seriously.
Miles supposed that after facing monsters that at times were unstoppable by anything less than a support sacrificing their life, most of them couldn’t be bothered to worry too much about regular humans targeting them.
Still, they should all be prepared, including Emilia. Plus, while they had put off warning the Zentari’s about the situation so far, it wasn’t fair to leave them in the dark, and Darrian would certainly tell his daughter.
So, no, Miles didn’t
have
to tell Emilia himself, but Darrian didn’t deserve to be forced into the position of informing her either, nor was it fair to leave Emilia’s new friends in the dark, another army of clones slipping into other faces to fall into lives beside those who weren’t currently with her on the airship and didn’t deserve the stress of finding out they may be targeted by criminals and foreign governments alike for their friends with his daughter.
While Miles didn’t have to tell his daughter the unfortunate consequences of her actions, someone did.
One thing most people didn’t realize about his daughter? At least some of her petty streak had come from him, and Sorvell? Sorvell might have had revenge for his daughter in mind when he organized this mission to make Elijah Richmond suffer, but as much as it made protecting them all less work, all the obnoxiously powerful Free Coloniers flooding into Piketown—many without even letting border agents know, shitty little children of diplomats that so many of them were—was a massive pain in
his
ass.
So, let Sorvell deal with telling Emilia that the video she had spread, probably without thinking through the far-reaching consequences, had accidentally put all of them at risk. Sorvell spoke enough languages from his years living and working in the Free Colonies; surely he could find a polite way to tell her she had messed up?
Arc X.1 | Chapter 310: Interlude | Project Piketown Infiltration 2
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