Simeon, being the stubborn, perfection of a man that he was, had barely changed since they were children. Once her childhood friend found something he liked, he stuck with it. Even now, sixty years later, his hair was still pin straight, split directly down the middle, barely brushing his shoulders, although it was a little more disarrayed than usual, the result of several hours spent smithing, she assumed.

  “Busy?” she asked, naturally falling into signing for her friend who, while not deaf, was so sensitive to the world around him that he often muted it out with his Censor.

  Not always, but even when he wasn’t muting, none of his friends spoke to him. Simeon didn’t like to be spoken to, as she’d discovered during their first class together, her little mind recognizing the signs of distress in him the same way she had her brother, when their first caretakers had tried to force him to speak.

  Back then, in their pre-Censor, pre-D-Level testing lives, so many people had tried to make Simeon speak. Emilia still had her suspicions that at least some of the adults at their school had disagreed with this decision, but the Dryden’s had insisted: their daughter would speak, she would not sign, and she would not be referred to by the he that even at such a young age Simeon had known he preferred.

  Enter one Emilia and her siblings, not yet separated by their D-Levels and academic interests. They had signed, and it didn’t matter how much the Dryden’s wanted them not to—how many meetings they had with school administrators—their little sibling group, which quickly grew to include a dozen other students, would not be forced to stop signing—would not be forced to exclude one of their friends because the Dryden’s didn’t want to accept that their child was different.

  Of course, there had still been some attempts to keep Simeon from their little group. It had failed spectacularly—as much as the Dryden’s were scary, the combined might of her own parents and Rafe’s were even more terrifying. They’d been more successful keeping Simeon from them after school ended, but once they’d started a rumour that the Dryden’s were keeping Simeon home to abuse him…

  Well, they’d relented and let him out, very begrudgingly, after the community had begun to distance themselves from the family.

  Emilia wondered, knowing now that the Dryden's were still out there, complaining about how Simeon should have sucked it up, if they regretted not taking him out of school back then. They would have had to move him to a different school district, would have lost their influence to some extent, but if they had, perhaps they would have been more successful at breaking her friend—at erasing the person he was today, quite literally.

  Most likely, without the support of his friends, Simeon would have killed himself. Even by the time they graduated, their little friend group solid and loving and looking forward to their gap decade, Emilia had known it was just a matter of time: if Simeon didn’t get away from his terrible parents, he would kill himself. Maybe not right away, but eventually.

  Hence, she’d stolen him. As she’d been in the middle of her legal case, she’d technically installed him in Olivier’s apartment… for exactly three days. Then, Olivier had organized an apartment for him a few buildings away. Close enough for Emilia to visit him, far enough away that he would gain some autonomy. Even four decades later, Emilia wasn’t convinced her lawyer hadn’t kicked Simeon out solely because they couldn’t fuck anywhere in the apartment while he was living with them.

  Becoming friends with Simeon—forcing him into their friend group despite how broken he had been back then, despite the pushback from so many adults in their life—had been one of the best things she had ever done. The children who existed in this house, the happiness that permeated the air, wouldn’t exist if she hadn’t skipped over to his desk and smiled down at him, signing words he wouldn’t be able to understand for months yet had immediately connected with.

  Simeon’s eyes tilted, his soft version of a smile that anyone who didn’t know him wouldn’t even realize was a smile. “I was. I’m done now.”

  He motioned to a willbrand settled onto the desk beside him. It looked… familiar. Familiar in a long ago sort of way that she couldn’t place, her Censor spinning through ancient memories of willbrands—of pre-war willbrands, which had been common in the Penns, but almost nowhere else until the war began.

  “Grayson found Stella,” Simeon continued just as her Censor caught up, pinpointed that it was similar to a willbrand Stella had had before she disappeared.

  Unlike many of the willbrands everyone even vaguely related to their friend group had used since she’d learned to smith in her teens, Stella’s hadn’t been made by either Emilia herself or the person she learned willbrandsmithing from. Mostly, Stella was just… an annoying little bitch. Always tattling on them, blackmailing them into letting her hang out with them.

  Samina’s sister was nearly six years younger than them, and while that didn’t make a difference to her now—clearly, given Hyr was less than half her age—as children, and especially as teenagers, having the annoying girl chase them had been aggravating. Hence, Emilia had refused to waste time making her a willbrand, and while Master Shaw might have agreed to make one, had anyone bothered to ask, Stella had been too proud to ask. Hence, she’d ended up with a strange willbrand from stars knew where that Emilia had told her would be unlikely to last more than a decade—ironically, this was longer than the mass-produced willbrands used by most heroes lasted these days.

  The fact that the willbrand on Simeon’s tabled contained all new material and was simply inspired by the original design didn’t surprise her. The fact that someone—let alone Grayson—had found her, after the bitch had gone and fucked off the moment she’d finished compulsory schooling over thirty years ago and hadn’t been heard from since…

  Now that was surprising.

  “Seriously? I was just with Sammie, and she didn’t say anything about it,” Emilia noted, wondering if her friend had really decided not to tell her that her dumbass, younger sister had been found after all these years.

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  “I haven’t told anyone.”

  “No? Why not?”

  Simeon stared into the distance for a long moment, his green eyes blank and unseeing. When they finally shifted back to her, staring at her clothing and definitely taking in the fact that they clearly weren’t hers, he signed, “Several reasons. I thought I should give Grayson a chance to get in her pants, before her siblings kill him.”

  Emilia snorted. “Grayson fell for Stella? Fuck. I always knew he would have bad taste, but seriously. What an idiot. He must realize she’ll never like him—I mean, he heard us complain about her often enough to know she hates black knots.”

  Unlike the majority of her family, Stella didn’t have a black knot, the result of experiencing a genetic spasm in utero. While genetic spasms were better known for leading to irregular deviations and non-devs, they could do more subtle things as well. In Stella’s case, all it had done—as far as any testing had ever shown—was remove her black knot, which was normally a dominant trait. Growing up surrounded by near-sociopaths, being the odd one out… Well, as much as Emilia didn’t like her—and had certainly never spent a moment of her time actively looking for her, only ever letting her eyes wander over corpses during the war searching for features she recognized—she could understand how growing up like that could be difficult, and in the end, it was her dislike of most of her family—her perpetual exclusion from it despite people like herself and Simeon having managed to find friendship with her black knot family members—that had led her to run off.

  Her friend hesitated before signing that he did not believe Grayson knew who she was.

  “What. How?”

  “I doubt she is going under her real name.” Simeon shrugged before forwarding her the information he had received from both Grayson and James, who Grayson had apparently taken Stella to after a run in with several lavender codes in… where was Platria again? A map told her it was a tiny Free Colony near Norvel. Very tiny, very run down and corrupt, but with no record of lavender codes being used by law enforcement or organized crime in the area.

  What in the world had that girl gotten herself into? Emilia didn’t really care for her safety—honestly, she was a little surprised Stella had even survived the war, given their general assumption had been she’d disappeared into the Free Colonies and their records of the dead had often been on the sketchier side—but if she’d gotten Grayson and James involved in something dangerous…

  “You didn’t tell him?” Emilia asked, wondering how weird it would be for her first message to one of their unit’s most powerful supports to be something about not sticking his dick in that terrible girl because, for one, she was a terrible person, and for another, her siblings were seriously going to kill him if he did. Actually, they might kill him simply for contemplating it—not to mention not telling them he’d found her, regardless of whether he knew who she was or not.

  Stars! The fact that he apparently hadn’t retained what their missing sister looked like—and a quick glance through the information Simeon had sent her confirmed Stella still looked like the prissy bitch she’d always been, if a bit older and dirtier—might be enough for them to kill him.

  According to the information… James had recognized her, and his still-updating information about the situation seemed to be more the reason why neither James nor Simeon were letting the Baxter twins know about their wayward sister’s location—currently she was effectively being held hostage by the men at the Randall estate in Byshire. Essentially: Stella seemed to be in a lot of trouble—although getting information out of her was proving to be difficult—and while more people might help, James didn’t think the Baxter twins would.

  That was… fair. Neither Samina nor Levi were known for being the most level-headed, and while they might help, if they went up against a lavender code…

  Yeah, they were more likely to get everyone killed than help. They were good firepower, but not so good with plans, which would likely be needed if they were tangling with an organization powerful enough to command multiple lavender codes.

  “Well… that’s all… complicated,” Emilia said, for lack of anything else to say.

  Simeon stared in her general direction, his head tilting as he agreed, before asking if she’d like to be added to the group chat between himself and James about everything that was going on.

  Emilia groaned, knowing she should say yes, but really didn’t want to—seriously, she really wanted nothing to do with that woman, and she was already going to have to decide between giving Samina the barest of details about her sister being found alive or lying to her. Luckily, the choice was taken out of her hands when Hyr spoke.

  “You… should not.”

  It was the first time either of the Free Coloniers had spoken, content to let her sign in silence, despite neither of them understanding their personal sign language… at least, as far as she knew.

  “Ooh~ a syn’s seeing,” Conrad said, nodding and telling Emilia that she had better follow his advice, lest the universe rain its wrath down upon her.

  [You are keeping odd company.]

  The words popped up into the world above Simeon’s head, finally including everyone in the conversation, not that he ever needed to. While she might have designed the skill Simeon used to communicate through non-signing, non-direct Censor messaging means, everyone knew he preferred signing. If he didn’t want to speak this way, she would translate for him—all of his friends would.

  Conrad smiled and raised his hands, asking in awkward, stilted BSL whether he was really that odd.

  “Yes,” Simeon agreed, adding that he preferred odd people to normal ones.

  “You don’t sign?” Emilia asked Hyr, who shook their head.

  “There is a variant in Nur’tha, but it is not used by many.” Their eyes slid to her hands, to Conrad’s—which were currently messing up a story to Simeon of how they’d met in a raid and hit it off, her friend gently correcting the Free Colonier. “Could I learn?”

  Emilia smiled at the syn. “Definitely. It takes a while to get it right. There are translation functions you can add to your Censor, but that’s not really the same, and you’d only be able to understand, not sign yourself…. and we never included the variant my friends and I use into it.” Winking, she added that she knew someone who’d worked on the translation function, and they’d helpfully programmed it to never record or even attempt translating their personal sign language. As far she knew, no one had ever managed to remove that glitch, although a few people had tried.

  “During the war, usually we ran new unit members through a custom version of the default language learning program inside the Virtuosi System.” She jutted a thumb at Conrad as she leaned in towards Hyr. “The guy who programmed the base version, meant to teach Free Coloniers Baalphorian, was an ass. It eventually replaced it, but you can always tell who learned on his version because they all have the same odd, forced accent, no matter where they came from.”

  “Yeah…” Conrad sighed, his signs coming out even worse as he attempted to sign and speak at the same time. “I hate my Baalphorian accent. It’s so boring. My voice in my first language is much nicer.”

  “Yeah? I’d like to hear that,” Emilia tried, subtle and—

  “Nope,” her friend laughed. “No way you’re learning where I’m from like that.”

  Sighing, Emilia turned back to Simeon, who was watching them from his peripheral vision. “So, if you’re not busy, do you have time to help me make this one a willbrand, and update ours?” she asked, motioning to Hyr, and then herself, Conrad and Pria’s swiped willbrand.

  “For you, Emmie, I always have time.”