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Arc F1.9 | Chapter 33: Cool Hairstyles (are not what I should be thinking about right now)

So, bone puller.So, Janie freaking out in the corner.

Somehow, the latter seemed worse—seriously, even on the rare occasions the bone pulled had risked looking away from Rafe while they were fighting, the woman had looked either towards where Leerin was messing with the computer or towards Janie’s curled-in form in the corner. If even their enemy—their enemy—was judging the girl, that was a sign that she was behaving in an embarrassing manner.

Halen was trying not to judge her; he couldn’t seem to stop himself for the simple fact that his family had always worn their Grey Sander heritage with pride. The harsh reality of that pride was that it, along with their success in business, made their family targets for purists. Usually, purists did little more than fund either news agencies intent to spread lies or competing businesses. They artificially lowered or raised prices, attempting to take a business owed by out of business. Every so often, something more horrific happened.

Even just a few years ago, another family who owed a chain of high-end restaurants, frequented by the elite of Baalphoria, had their home invaded. The ancient patriarch and one of his great-granddaughters, who was only a teenager, had been killed. According to the purists who perpetrated the attack, just the reality that a third-generation immigrant family from Dion was running a place with so much contact with the influential was bad for their nation.

The rest of the family survived due to a combination of their relatives’ sacrifices and because they knew how to be quiet—how to pull themselves into corners and panic rooms and under beds and make their presence as soft as possible.

So many descendants of immigrants had to learn these things, within the cold reality of Baalphoria’s purism. It reminded him a bit of what Miles had said, about young clones and Emilia needing to learn how to deal with terrorist attacks on embassies: yes, it was horrible to need to teach children that such things might happen to them; it was better to know and be prepared, rather than be overwhelmed when it actually happened.

Janie was overwhelmed, and Halen both felt bad for her and impossibly annoyed—everyone in their age group had sat through lessons on what to do if they were panicking, after all. There was a difference between learning and practicing a skill, of course. The way she was behaving, it were as though Janie was entirely gone to the world and that have been impossible because they all at functions in their Censors to at least attempt to force them to refocus on the world.

None of those functions were triggering. The most important of those functions was one that was connected to all of their minds, letting each member of their class know if someone was panicking if the function was effective or not. As long as the person was awake, it should trigger and an alert would go out.

Janie’s wasn’t triggering, and while it was possible something had gone wrong with it, Halen wasn’t convinced she hadn’t removed it from her Censor. That was the only explanation—

Well, there was another possibility, dark as horrible as it was: Janie was faking her panic.

Given her vitals, however…

Halen tried to imagine a world where Janie would be capable of causing her vitals to go so haywire through force of will alone, and according to everything he knew about her, she shouldn’t have been able to. So many members of their class were wonderful at skewing their emotions and vitals, thanks to their training with Coral and some documents from The Black Knot. In theory, Janie knew how to skew her emotions and vitals, but she had never been more than mediocre at messing with her emotions, while her ability to augment and suppress her vitals had always been atrocious.

That was, of course, unless she had been faking it. Considering Leerin’s comment about how she was reevaluating the authenticity of her friendship with Janie…

It was a horrific thing to consider, that this girl might have not only been faking her friendship with everyone, but also pretending her abilities were less impressive than they were. It was horrific and confusing—why the fuck would someone even bother doing that? Halen had heard the story about how Bryce Runsh had been expelled from Emilia’s friend group after they found out that her parents were trying to use her to get close to them and their families. It was no secret that the group was inclusive exclusive all that once.

At any time, Janie could have done to force her to kick her out of the group. At the same time, if she’d actually wanted to be close with everyone, being competent would have made it easier. Had she been worried that being competent would have solidified her into the group? That doing something to force her removal would have put her and her family into the same position that the Runsh family was now in, being pariahs to so much of the community?

It seemed insane to consider, but had Janie been hoping that, eventually, being supposedly incapable would force her friends to leave her behind? That slowly in class would lead the school to put her into another class, thereby leaving neither her nor her friend group responsible for her

Leerin asked, their minds still connected as they stared down the bone puller, no one quite sure how to actually start a conversation with the woman. Granted, only a few seconds had passed since Halen had asked Rafe to cease fighting her—truly, the stress was making his mind run faster than normal and it was already an often spinning thing.

An echo of agreement reached through their connection, and it was strange to experience Leerin this way—as someone competent and understanding and speaking without a whine in her voice.

Truly, Leerin acting reasonable might have been the weirdest thing he’d experienced all day, and that said a lot.

a voice called—Simeon’s voice, pulled through a function to give him sound when he generally preferred to sign or write his words into existence.

Apparently, the rest of them had waited too long to say anything to the bone puller, and the other boy was now taking over. That was fine; for as much as Simeon was sometimes the most terrifying of people, giving all the energy of someone who would slit a throat without blinking, he was also one of the least threatening looking people Halen had ever met.

Over the last fourteen years, Simeon had bulked out a bit, gaining some definition in his arms and abs. It was likely that without gender-affirming surgery and hormone replacement therapy—even Emilia hadn’t been stupid enough to try getting her friend anything other than pills to stop his period, knowing that if she got caught, it would be bad for everyone involved—Simeon would continue to look a little soft, a little feminine. There was nothing wrong with that—Halen would actually say that, in many ways, the clones leaned feminine and they were… something. Halen didn’t know they were, but he could certainly see the appeal.

The few times Darrian had sent him images of Baylor, his pretty features adorable for one reason for another, he long lashes downcast and spreading shadows over his cheeks, his plump lips pulled between his teeth—

Well, Halen could understand Darrian was experiencing surges of arousal when Baylor looked like that. Of course, he himself didn’t feel arousal, exactly.

It was difficult to explain, but he could appreciate beauty—he could appreciate it when it was directly related to Emilia. Imagining her squeezed between the triplets as they had their way with her? Beautiful. Picturing Olivier leaning her over and fucking her ass—thank you Olivier’s Censor for that little slip of information about the man’s preferences? Perfect. Even imagining watching Rafe with Emilia—possibly with Codeth as an embarrassed and aroused observer as well—Halen could enjoy what he saw and feel for it.

There was arousal for Emilia—there was arousal for Emilia—but for the others…

Halen didn’t know. In the end, he had only ever felt attraction and affection of a romantic sort for Emilia. It wasn’t even like he was straight, and therefore, could appreciate the physical attractiveness of men on a logical level while not actually finding that attraction arousing; instead, he had tried to find other girls attractive. It hadn’t worked.

There was nothing, and sometimes, Halen thought himself broken… and completely fucked because if Emilia decided she didn’t want him, he was going to be alone forever—alone, or with someone he liked well enough but couldn’t get it up for.

Honestly, if he hadn’t been able to get it up for Emilia, Halen might have thought himself entirely broken, but nope, for the silly, adorable, completely psychotic silverstrain he could get it. It was actually something of a problem.

the bone puller replied, a little more of her guard dropping as she blinked at Simeon. Once. Twice. Then, her eyes rose, a cute little scrunch appearing between her eyebrows as she took in the physical manifestation of Simeon’s words within a text box.

The bone puller was a strange thing, and honestly… Halen was now mostly wondering if other bone pullers looked similar, something within the flavour of the woman’s appearance almost seeming to scream to the world that she held this specific irregular deviation within her—it wasn’t like it was uncommon for irregular deviations to have some sort of physical indicator, or anything.

She reminded him a lot of Emilia’s sister, Indigo, actually. All of the Starrberg children were on the smaller side. Emilia was shorter than average, while Atticus…

Well, with Atticus, it was sometimes a bit hard to tell. The boy was quiet and tended to curl in on himself. The boy was also something of a shut in, mostly being homeschooled due to how overwhelming the world was—seriously, Atticus’ overwhelm due to his Dyadism might not be as bad as he’d heard one of the Yu sibling’s was, but Simeon’s was in comparison. Simeon’s was so incomparable that, even with their class often insisted that comparisons weren’t a useful thing when it came to overwhelm and trauma and the way people experienced the world, even Simeon refused to compare his own experiences to that of Atticus, while Emilia insisted that the Yu sibling’s overwhelm was by far the worst she had seen—not the worst she’d read about, but close.

Regardless, Atticus had always been nice when the two of them came across one another, usually when Halen had been exchanging books with Emilia, although he’d occasionally run into the other boy out and about—getting snacks, mostly, or sitting in a quiet place. Always, the boy seemed smaller than he actually was, his body a stretch of height and long limbs when he stood. It didn’t last long, the boy’s body inevitably curling back in on itself within moments of standing. Instead, it seemed like Atticus wanted to be smaller, despite how yawning his abilities were, Halen always able to tell when the boy was nearby because his presence was impossible to ignore.

In no world could Atticus be small, but what was a to be smaller if not something small itself?

Indigo, on the other hand, was tall and lean—all bones pressing against nearly translucent skin when she wasn’t wearing the clothing that generally covered the majority of her body. It was a bit unclear to him how much was genetics, how much abuse, how much the fact that the girl rarely seemed to eat anything. During his first few months in the Penns, he’d heard a rumour that Indigo had needed to have part of her intestines removed for whatever reason, resulting in her struggling to keep weight on or even get proper nutrition. There was even a rumour that she had to receive a lot of her calories in liquid and IV form, but who knew—no one had ever told anyone who spread such rumours off, so it could very well be true. At the same time, perhaps the truth was colder than the rumour and letting it live kept people from searching for the truth.

Maybe, if he and Emilia became , he’d find out the truth.

All of that was beside the point that the bone puller seemed so much like Indigo. Her bones pressed against her skin, a strangely dark tone for Lüshan, from what he knew—not impossible, but Lüshanians tended to lean into deeper browns, as opposed to this woman’s pure blackness. The bone puller actually had darker skin than even he did, due to his own golden undertones.

This woman was all darkness, even the thin skin around her protruding collarbones and wrists barely showing the echoes of paleness that was so common around those sections of skin for people with their skin tone. Pale, blue-grey eyes popped across her face, shockingly large and taking up more of her face than was typical. Tight braids ran through her hair, holding sections tight to her scalp and leaving skin as dark as her hair visible between the rows, before the rest cascaded down around her in braids that twirled into curls. It was quite cool, actually, and definitely not the sort of hairstyle typically seen in Baalphoria—similar things were found in the Grey Sands but definitely not in mainland Baalphoria.

Halen had at least one distant cousin who would love to do her hair up like that, her natural hair graced with far tighter curls that Halen’s own hair was—a good thing, he’d heard, as the various diaspora with tighter curls patterns often struggled to find good hair stylists or products in Baalphoria, instead relying on imports for the latter and immigrants who still might not know how to deal with their hair for the former.

Considering how many people would be leaving this place with them, their own hair leaning into such , Halen thought it likely he’d be spending a lot of time talking to hairstylists from throughout the continent, figuring out how to make skills to help them with their hair needs.

the bone puller asked. Of course he had been awkwardly staring at her—

Halen started, thankful his black skin would eat the heat racing over his cheeks.

Seriously, could he sound any more like an idiot, even Rafe looking away from the bone puller to give him a look?

Seriously.