Hyr was braiding her hair when she woke, their fingers softly tugging through the part of her hair that was accessible to them as she had dozed against Conrad. According to her Censor, she hadn’t been asleep long—only about thirty minutes—but that was long enough for her strange group of friends to come to some sort of détente, a transcript of everything they had discussed while she was out flowing through her vision as she yawned and snuggled deeper into Conrad.

  Unfortunately, the brief moment of peace the transcript and the mild friendliness between the group was broken when she got to what had been the main subject of their conversations: her bad taste in men. Rude.

  “Can you deny you have terrible taste in men?” Pria asked when Emilia complained that this wasn’t a nice very thing for them to talk about.

  “V seemed nice enough,” Hyr offered—not for the first time, apparently. There was something strange in their tone, though. Emilia couldn’t exactly put her finger on what it was, however, her Censor coming back with something about how it could have just been a cultural thing, which… yeah, maybe.

  Still, she couldn’t resist trying to push back a little, her energy following the line of the Hyr’s energy, still twinning gently through her. If they could read and manipulate her emotions through their connected cores, then surely she could also—

  Conrad cackled when Hyr’s energy parted so abruptly that she was left spiralling into him. “Careful, Emilia. The little syn could trap you inside them, and even I’d be hard-pressed to get you out.”

  “What?” she asked blearily, her world suddenly overcome with… something. With Hyr? With what Hyr was experiencing at this moment? It was overwhelming—beautiful and breathtaking, a note of amusement coating it like glimmering sunshine, and then, just as suddenly as it had happened, she was back inside her own body, Hyr’s energy gently soothing her own. Honestly, it felt like the syn’s energy was telling her be careful what you wish for, lest it burn you.

  That might have been fair.

  Another loud knock sounded at the door, Emilia abruptly realizing that was what had woken her.

  “Is someone going to get that?” she asked, glancing around.

  “I don’t think you want me trying to open it,” Conrad said, slumping further down as she straightened, his arms reaching above his head as he moaned and stretched. His shirt rode up as he moved, revealing a gently defined stomach and a distinct lack of hair.

  “Why not?” Pria asked. Neither she nor Beth made any move to answer the door, while Sil was immersed in the Virtuosi System again, wrongly assuming his friends were sensible enough to answer the door. Somehow, the man never learned.

  “He keeps… fucking things up,” Emilia muttered, glaring at the door and peaking through the dorm’s security to see who it was. Most normal homes had security cameras that were directly available to residents, but for whatever reason, Astrapan had decided against that trend, and the only option for seeing who was banging on your door was either hacking or one of several finicky—and often highly controlled—skills for looking through walls. “Oh!” she squeaked, activating the door and letting their new arrival in.

  Sil’s door slid open, and from Emilia’s place on the floor, she couldn’t actually see her childhood friend enter, only hear the gentle roll of their wheelchair over the ground. Next to her Hyr’s attention snapped in their direction, even before they came into view, likely having pegged them as having a black knot just as fast as they had whoever had swiped up Victor—Emilia also took the chance to hack the school’s cameras as a whole, peaking back at what had happened. Even the camera had barely caught The Black Knot agent grabbing Victor. No wonder neither Pria nor Beth—nor any of Victor’s roommates, from the looks of panic on their faces as Hyr led her friends away—had computed what had happened.

  A perfect spark-microspark-spark—the agent snapping in and through the aethernet so fast they were barely more than a blur. Most people didn’t even realize that’s what they were doing, not when all but the most proficient sparkers were left queasy by a single spark.

  “Don’t get up on my account~” Samina cooed as she rounded the corner, sharp smile pulling at her gently brown lips.

  She was wearing contacts, as had been common since an accident had damaged them and left a streak of pale white scars over her brown cheeks during their years of compulsory schooling, these ones giving her eyes a strange, iridescent colour—a colour similar to the chair under her. As always, her lower body was uncovered, revealing the results of an injury during the war where she’d been all but bisected. The bitch had proceeded to burn the stumps of her thighs closed and returned to fighting. Needless to say, she was lucky she hadn’t died.

  “I didn’t expect you,” Emilia signed, more through habit and renewed enjoyment of signing than anything.

  Her childhood friend smiled sharper, her hands falling through a short story about how she was due for a vacation anyways. “So is Andie,” she added, laughing as she told Emilia—because it was clear from the faces of everyone else that they didn’t even understand the BSL inspired portions of her family’s personal sign language and their Censors didn’t know what to do with the strange language—that while he probably would have come, they had all figured that for something like this someone less recognizable was probably in order.

  The fact that one of the most vicious members of The Black Knot—one who was a double amputee and had refused proper prosthetics in favour of a wheelchair, no less—was considered largely unrecognizable was something that never failed to amuse Emilia. The entire Baxter branch of The Black Knot was like that, though: existing more in the shadows than almost anyone else in the organization, not that they didn’t have to heavily rely on the Hyrat clones abilities to retain their anonymity.

  “Why are there so many new people?” Pria whined, slumping lower onto the couch. While she was whining, it was clear she was uncomfortable, her emphatic connection to the aether probably going nuts with how many strange—not to mention highly dangerous—people were in the room. As much as her roommate trusted her not to bring anyone dangerous to them into their group, Samina’s arrival was definitely pushing everyone’s limits.

  “I’d like to know that as well,” Sil asked, having pulled himself out of his hacking. His dark eyes glared at Samina and Emilia definitely had a feeling that while her childhood friend wasn’t known to most people, Sil somehow did know—or at least suspect—who she was.

  “This is my childhood friend, Samina—Sammie.”

  “Samina,” the woman clarified, eyes shifting between each of the people in the room, sizing them up as any information The Black Knot had on them slid through her. “Only our childhood friends get to use the -ie, isn’t that right, Emmie?”

  Her classmates looked at her, having definitely never heard someone refer to her as Emmie. Beth raised an eyebrow in silent question.

  “It’s a whole thing,” she tried to explain, cursing the fact that she’d been sent someone who knew her so well for this. Did they need some sort of official permission to effectively invade Ship’o Stars seeking out a terrorist? Yeah, Emilia had come to the realization at some point that they did. It would have been better to be sent someone less… insane, though—especially since she’d already worried about Samina and Conrad meeting. They didn’t need two homicidally crazy people on their little team!

  “There was a group of us whose names could all be ie-ed. Emmie, Sammie, Andie, and so on. Almost all of us got ie-ed—except a friend who is really attached to his name, and one of my cousins. His name was just… so not ie-able.” Samina mock shuddered while Emilia cringed—only one of them not being ie-able had been a whole big thing.

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  “And why is Samina here?” Sil asked, jaw tensing as he realized that someone needed to keep the conversation on track, and it wasn’t going to be anyone else in the room. Good—Emilia was quite done with being so in control of the situation, even if she’d completely fallen apart in the last moments of the raid. Let someone else bear the burden for a bit, even if she still needed to step up and explain what was happening.

  “So…” she said, noting the way Hyr’s hand squeezed around hers in silent support, their energy caressing hers. “We’re going on vacation... tonight.”

  “Is that why you were in that raid?” Sil asked while Pria perked up, any niggling worry she had over all the strangers falling away in excitement at the prospect of skipping school and avoiding the remainder of the pink tide’s heat.

  “Yes,” she agreed, trying to be brave. It wasn’t like she had to tell her friends everything about herself, just enough for them to trust her. Mostly, it was just really unfortunate that news of the echo at the purist building had already spread, more than a few SecOps having—rightly, if illegally—leaked footage of the horrors that had existed within the building. If that hadn’t happened, she might have been able to get away with not revealing that she’d taken one out with Payton, or that she was acquainted with Olivier.

  Unfortunately, that probably wouldn’t be possible, especially not with Sil glaring increasingly suspicious daggers at her. Yeah… he wasn’t going to be going along with this plan unless he had as many details as she could give him.

  “So…” she started again, ignoring the way Sil’s jaw flexed and Conrad’s shoulders shook. “Someone has been distributing knotters in Piketown.”

  There was silence for a blink before Beth was turning on Pria, horrified. “That’s what you were talking about, with the clinic and the girl—about how you needed to tell her to go get her knots checked.”

  Pria shifted, looking uncomfortable as she muttered a yes and confirmed that her knots had been fixed by Payton after they’d been fucked up by a knotter.

  “He’s coming with us, too, by the way,” Emilia said as Beth snuggled into Pria’s side, their hands lacing together.

  “Just because he helped Pria?” Sil asked, his tone already betraying that he knew that wasn’t the only reason.

  “So…” Emilia continued, mostly just so she could see Sil continue to grind his teeth, a snort escaping Conrad this time. Hyr’s energy seemed to poke both hers and the wisps of Conrad’s within her in a silent message to behave. “We went back to The Grint last night, to find the bartender who spiked Pria. With Mazi’s help, I figured out that he was just a pawn of someone else. We also figured he probably meant to drug me, not Pria… and that girl as well.” Emilia shot her roommate a look, one that said, “Regardless of how stressful this is, you really need to tell that girl to go get checked out.”

  “You?” Sil asked, because apparently he was taking overseeing the flow of conversation and information really seriously.

  That was fair. If it had been her decision, Emilia probably would have left it there and just said she figured out through mysterious means that the dude was a purist and had meant to be going on the next tour of Ship’o Stars to meet with his mysterious benefactor. Pria wouldn’t have asked more. Beth would have just been silently annoyed she wasn’t being more forthcoming. Conrad and Samina already knew the whole truth. Hyr… was probably just going with the flow, and didn’t actually need answers to anything. That, or they’d already gotten answers from the aether.

  She really should ask about that, sooner rather than later. Not now, though. The other people in the room—other than Conrad—didn’t need to know about the true extent of a synat’s abilities or her increasing belief in them.

  For the moment, she needed to finish her explanation, lest Sil strangle her. Emilia was half tempted to continue explaining herself with “So…” again, but she figured it would only take so long before Sil snapped. Normally, that would have been fine, but she didn’t trust either Conrad or Samina not to kill him outright if he got too aggressive. Her friend would never seriously hurt her, but even though he’d been chill so far, Emilia could feel Conrad’s energy—could feel the way it perpetually seemed a second away from snapping out at anything that threatened him or the things he cared about, namely her. Conrad probably wouldn’t kill Sil—the Free Colonier clearly knew Emilia loved all her friends, and it would hurt her to see them hurt, plus, he hadn’t seriously harmed Elijah—but until she was a little more confident…

  Yeah, probably better to not tempt fate.

  Samina, on the other hand, was just a loose cannon. Again, she probably wouldn’t kill Sil, but she’d definitely let loose some of the more terrifying Black Knot skills if she thought it necessary.

  “As you saw with my Censor,” she said instead, meeting Sil’s eyes, “I’m a pretty good hacker. I hacked into the guy’s mind, trying to figure out where he was getting the knotters from and how far whatever he was doing had gotten.”

  “I thought hacking into someone’s Censor was illegal,” Pria noted, her frown of unhappiness at being subjected to talk about the knotter turning into one of concern. Her eyes flickered as her Censor confirmed what could happen to anyone caught hacking another person’s Censor without permission. “You could get in trouble with The Black Knot… for me. You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Even if I did get in trouble, finding out who hurt you would be worth it,” Emilia told her solemnly. Images of Pria panicking in the clinic as Payton tried to tell her as delicately as he could what had been done to her flashed through her. Memories of holding her friend’s gaze as the knotting machine whirred to life, intent to fix Pria while she cried, turned her stomach.

  “But—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Emilia assured her. It would come up eventually that Samina was from The Black Knot, but she didn’t actually want her childhood friend admitting just how much illegal shit Emilia could do without getting in trouble, which the woman seemed primed to do. “It’s fine. I’m fine, and the guy is dead. The Club Cartel have probably gotten rid of his body by now, so there’s no evidence of what I did.” Except the moth she’d sent Rafe… and this entire conversation… and the fact that she’d straight up told The Black Knot exactly what she’d done, she supposed.

  “Anyways, the guy’s mind had a virus inside it, and while I was able to decipher a bunch of his memories eventually, the main thing I got was the location of a building where he’d met someone. Their face had been burned from his memory.”

  Most of the assembled group frowned, unsure what that meant, Sil telling them that it was the sort of trail a hacker followed. “There are skills to erase or lock up memories, but the public ones have to be activated when the memory made. Altering a memory after the fact is the territory of The Black Knot. No one’s really sure if the clones use skills or hacking to do so—maybe some combination—but they’re clearly using a backdoor that even the best hackers can’t find. The most anyone outside the clones can do is alter small parts of a memory—like a face—or completely destroy the mind, and usually through a virus. The security protocols inside Censors can fry the minds of anyone stupid enough to try altering a memory themself.”

  “This virus both erased and destroyed,” Emilia said, offering a copy of the contained version of the moth virus to Sil—from the little bit she’d seen of him poking at her hack, he was a good hacker, and seriously, the thing was fascinating. Her Censor had worked on it while she was inside the raid, and then again while she was using Sil’s rig, and gotten basically nowhere on it. He accepted it as she explained that she’d run into Payton on her way out of the bar, intent to head to the building she’d seen in the bartender’s memories. “He wanted to get to the bottom of the knotters as well, having seen them used before, during the war…” She shook herself, muttering that he was a good guy, and they should be nicer to him, especially after he’d helped her so much the night before.

  “So you went to this building and…?” Beth asked when too much time had passed, Emilia stuck reflecting on her years-long refusal to be Payton’s friend.

  “We went to the building and split up, each going up a different side of the building—so many stairs, and the two sides didn’t even connect to each other!” Emilia ranted, still bitter about all the steps she’d had to climb, not just in that building but the raid as well. Her legs ached. Her stomach turned over at the very idea of ever seeing stairs again. “Anyways, the bartender had already shown some purist leanings, so it really shouldn’t have been that surprising when the building turned out to be a purist stronghold.”

  “Purist…” Sil's started, trailing off because he had clearly seen the news.

  For a long moment, he just stared at her, shocked, while Beth and Pria looked more confused. Then, Beth’s Censor caught her up, her eyes snapping wide as she very rudely asked Emilia if she had destroyed the building so badly it had accidentally been labelled an echo attack.

  “What? No! There was an echo attack while we were in the building! Actually, there were two echoes, but that’s beside the point!” Honestly, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the fact that her friend so easily assumed she’d caused enough destruction for someone to think an echo attack had occurred when it hadn’t.

  How rude! And after she had just proven herself capable of ripping a hole in a wall without damaging the integrity of the building! Were those two incidents separated by a long unknotting session? Maybe, but still! Her friends didn’t know that!

  “Shit! You got attacked by an echo? And you’re okay?” Beth asked over Pria asking if she’d met Oliver de la Rue—it wasn't a secret that he’d shown up and officially taken out the echos—echo, according to the news, the fact that there had been two having been lost somewhere along the lines.

  “Oh, she’s totally met Olivier~” Samina teased, which definitely didn’t help the situation or endear her to Sil, who subsequently lost control of the conversation as Pria scrambled over to her, demanding answers.