Emilia pressed herself to the ground, pushing Conrad’s much larger form further into the dirt. Although they were still a ways off, ahead of them, one of the Clarity groups was discussing the situation, and personally, she wasn’t into fighting with them. Not yet, anyways.

Instead, she was concentrating on listening to them because of all the abilities to suddenly get under control, it wasn’t her aethervoice. No, currently she was relying on Conrad sending his shivery energy through her to suppress that. It was better than the sharp shocks that Astra and V had been inflicting on her, at least, even if the man’s energy had an awkwardly sensual undertone.

When she had pointed this out, he had seemed equally uncomfortable.

No, the ability she’d somehow managed to activate was an extension of her original, ability to hear locals gift. Now, even dozens of metres from the group, as long as Conrad was quiet, she could hear the group with perfect clarity.

And what they were saying? Yeah, it wasn’t good.

⸂Apparently they’ve suffered a split, and a bunch of their members straight up fucked off on their own. Seems the brainwashing of the heartcores wasn’t as thorough as they thought.⸃ She focused, watching the aether shift with their words and letting her ability translate those shifts for her.

It was a strange ability, closer to signing or reading than hearing. That was okay, she thought. What was even more okay? She could now read private conversations. Where previously she could only tell a private conversation was occurring, now, everything was an open book. Fortunately, it was also a book she could close, at least briefly—the process similar to zoning out in the midst of a conversation: the words were still there, her brain just wasn’t fully absorbing them.

⸂Seems it's mostly affecting the people who came into the organization later in life? Like… they had already visited the heartcores a few times before becoming members of Clarity?⸃

⸂That lines up with what we discussed,⸃ Conrad agreed.

They’d had to travel quite a while to get to the place he and the children had agreed to meet up—big shocker, they weren’t there—and then the Ingogia estate, to try and track them down. One of the big things they’d discussed in that time—other than how stupid he was to let the kids go off on their own—had been the toxicity of the heartcores.

⸂I’m glad I only entered two,⸃ the other visitor had said, frowning deeply.

Something had bothered him, but he had been unwilling to tell her what it was, so Emilia had been forced to let it drop. Let the man keep his secrets, although considering he was generally a pretty open book—when something was actually relevant to their current situation, anyways—she was rather worried about what could be concerning enough to make him hide it from her.

Part of what they had discussed was the way each group seemed to be affected differently by the heartcores. Clarity members seemed to lose their personalities in their altered state, becoming mindless drones when their heartcore corrupted personality was active. Risen Guards’ altered personalities, on the other hand, were zealots, willing to hunt down and kill Enclave members and visitors without pause, although they seemed to draw a line at hurting civilians.

A few quick messages to Boundary and Villy confirmed this, and they told her that the Enclave members who sought out the gifts of too many heartcores became cruel, viewing anyone who got in their way as necessary collateral damage.

Interestingly, while Clarity and Risen Guard members shifted in and out of their corrupted personalities, Enclave members seemed to slowly morph into theirs until it was all that existed. Well, that would probably explain why a few of the Enclave members she’d met—Sk’lar, Cade’s crazy babysitter, that rando Boundary had killed in the city, and pretty much every member of the Ingogia family—screamed psycho to her. Permanent psychos. Great.

In other words, with rare exceptions—like Carne—heartcores consistently affected members of each group in a specific way. Now, that was biting Clarity in the butt. A substantial amount of their members might have been born into Clarity, but not all of them: some of them had spent years training to be Enclave members and occasionally Risen Guards—it was even possibly several had been spies and touched heartcores as members of all three groups at different times.

As she and Conrad had discussed all this, Emilia had finally opened Honey’s messages back up, curious as to how the training had affected her as a spy.

The short version: it hadn’t.

The long version: Honey had never been able to seek a gift from a heartcore as an Enclave member, due to how undercover she was. Her heartcore corruption was 100% Risen Guard, which simultaneously put her into a better and worse position than spies who had gone through both.

[Honey: Basically, if my personality switches, I’ll be all anti-visitor, anti-Enclave.]

[Honey: Obviously not good for family reunions.]

[Honey: But the alternative is getting the worst of both worlds.]

[Honey: The spies I know of who’ve done both?]

[Honey: Anger issues.]

[Honey: And it’s all permanent, and it all happens, like… way faster than usual for normal Enclave members?]

[Honey: Usually it takes them eight or nine visits for their personality to shift to the point where they can’t be reasoned with, but from what I’ve heard, pretty much the first time someone gets gifts from both Risen Guard and Enclave heartcores, they become really hard to deal with.]

[Honey: All that’s left is a very angry person with very firm beliefs on what’s right and what’s wrong.]

[Honey: That’s not even the worst that can happen, though.]

[Honey: From what I’ve heard, most of the time the Risen Guard heartcores just speed up a spy’s transition into full-blown Enclave psychosis, but I’ve heard that sometimes the spies… become worse? Like… like a bit of the Risen Guard’s alternate personality makes it inside them?]

[Honey: I don’t know much about that. It’s pretty secret, and I think families kill spies who end up like that pretty quickly, since they’re basically just walking time bombs.]

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Emilia had sent off a few questions about Honey’s messages, mostly about her references to beliefs and Enclave psychosis. What she’d gotten back was an explanation that heartcores hardened the beliefs of Enclave members, turning already existing beliefs about the world and its people into something unreasonable—something that couldn’t be argued with.

Dislike turned to hatred, love to obsession. Enclave members who believed their family should be the ones to win a heartcore became willing to destroy anyone in their path, including other Enclave members. A want to save the world at any cost became a willingness to kill, torture or sacrifice even regular civilians.

That would definitely explain some of the strange ways the Enclave families interacted.

An image of Harmony, hating practically everyone, flashed through Emilia’s head. Maybe that was why the girl had ended up hating her, for seemingly no reason. She’d almost seemed to hate everyone at the end there, which sucked. As much as the girl had never been nice to her, she’d been able to befriend Rin, presumably before either of them began changing their personalities.

Rin. The thought of the girl had sent a spike of hurt through Emilia’s heart. Before they met, Rin had had a future with the Risen Guard. She had had something she believed in. Then Key had inadvertently filled her head with half-facts. Yes, the Risen Guard was still corrupt, but it wasn’t nearly as corrupt as Key’s knowledge had led them to believe, and now… and now what? She had no idea what had happened to any of the Stringers. Stars above, they could still be trapped inside the Library Labyrinth, for all she knew!

Before she could think too much about it, Emilia had asked Honey if there was any way she could find out what had happened to them. As much as the Enclave spy seemed rather disconnected from the Enclave, due to how anonymous her fake family was, she must have some way to get a hold of someone and ask after the Stringers… her friends.

Honey had, somewhat reluctantly, agreed.

[Honey: I heard some whispers, about how they lost you.]

[Honey: I don’t know many details, but I think the whole family is being monitored, in case they mess up again.]

Emilia had replied with a redacted version of what she knew about the family, about how they had allegedly already been on thin ice, and messing up in the Library Labyrinth probably hadn’t done anything for their reputation—especially if someone managed to figure out that Rin was actually a Risen Guard trainee. Plus, they’d killed Taoran, and she’d stolen V… then she’d been involved in the situation in Livery—something that had surely gotten back to the Enclave through spies, after they were rescued by the Risen Guard. Yeah… there was a chance that anyone associated with allowing her to gain power in this world might currently be in some deep shit.

That made her feel worse, and she had made Honey promise to let her know if she learned anything about what was happening with the Stringer family.

Honey had agreed, although she had clearly not been happy about it. When pushed, she had admitted that as much as Emilia wasn’t reading any of her other messages—the ones that Emilia received endlessly, about every aspect of the girl’s life—she had still liked telling someone her thoughts. If Emilia actually needed to get a few of her messages, it meant she couldn’t just keep messaging her.

Thinking back, Emilia had realized all that the times Honey had sent important messages they had been followed by long silences, presumably so if Emilia actually opened the messages, she’d see the important ones.

That was… kind, if also unnecessary. She might have put off reading Honey’s messages, but it was more due to the headache they caused than anything else—she’d always loved gossip and drama, and the young woman’s messages were filled with those things. Not relevant to her, but fascinating nonetheless. When she informed Honey that she had actually read all her messages, the young woman had been so happy, Emilia’s heart had ached for her.

How hard it must be, to exist in the world with so many secrets. Everyone needed someone–it was part of why she’d held on to Rafe so hard, even after disappearing into her secrets. And here in this world? Harmony had found Rin, as ill-advised as that may have been, and even if she hadn’t, she also had her brother and family. Honey had already told her that she didn’t like her fake family and rarely saw her real one. It was sad, but there wasn’t anything Emilia could do for the Enclave spy long term. In the meantime, however, she told Honey to not worry about messaging her too much, and after nearly thirty minutes of her, Honey and Conrad struggling, they figured out how to connect Honey and Conrad’s messaging system. Emilia had gotten a nose bleed, giving him system access several hours earlier.

Conrad, rather unsurprisingly, had taken well to the system. Somehow it was less annoying with him, something telling her that he was a lot like her, and generally took quickly to new things. Holding that against him felt a bit like forgiving some of her more terrible classmates, when they had glared at her for conquering one task or another too quickly. Given she wasn’t about to forgive their stupid jealousy, she wasn’t going to hold Conrad’s own skill against him.

He had asked, as she mused this over, whether the other visitors she’d been—playfully—annoyed with hadn’t felt like they were quick learners. Emilia had slotted away the fact that he didn’t deny he picked up skills easily, and explained that she didn’t think they were. Neither V nor Astra felt like they had expected to pick skills up so easily—it had just sort of happened for them. In their case… well, V had told her he had dealt with similar communication forms in raids before, and while Astra had never outright said so, Emilia kinda figured she thought less in words and more in images. For them, it felt like the raid system was natural, and it was frustrating because normally, she was good at being a natural at everything.

Not so much in this case.

⸂You know you’re being insane, right?⸃ the other visitor had asked, and yes—yes she did realize she was being insane and jealous over the silliest of things.

⸂It’s frustrating, is all,⸃ she had mumbled, glaring at the magic circle in the corner of the Risen Guard system and willing it to do something for her—anything.

According to the instructions Villy had given her, it should have made it a bit easier for her to use magic, allowing her to skip some of the background imagination, much like Censors allowed their owners to skip some of the computation of a skill. She couldn’t make it work. Conrad could, of course, and he’d even tried talking her through some of. It hadn’t helped, and everything was horrible.

At the very least, she’d been able to make the man laugh as they went, telling him stories about their time apart, as well as before they had met each other. It was a though agreeing to meet up in the real world had settled something between them, some tension disappearing, mostly from Conrad. He wouldn’t say why, although Emilia could guess it had something to do with the oddly familial way they’d been interacting with each other through most of their meetings.

Leaving friends behind was hard enough, but family, whether blood or adopted or chosen? There was something sad to that, and she kinda figured Conrad had been holding himself back a bit—trying not to get too attached to her, in case they left this raid and never met again. If she reminded him of his brother as much as he claimed she did, it was easy to imagine his brain had automatically classified her as someone he could love and care for with as much ease as he did this brother. The sensible thing to do was refuse to allow himself to love her.

Now, that sensibility had vanished. Emilia felt oddly loved and cared for, and for once, she wasn’t the big sister. Sure, Malcolm had been like a big brother to her at times, but there were things that had happened between them that definitely didn’t belong in a brother-sister relationship.

And to everyone else? More often than not, she’d been forced into being a big sister figure to most of her friends. Sometimes she was just friend or potential—or previous—hookup, but big sister was way more common. And the people she knew who could fit into an older sibling role? There had been a few people who felt like that during the war—Ri and Naomi in particular came to mind—but they were gone, one dead and the other disappeared into his locked down Free Colony.

With Conrad, even after so little time together… yeah, there was something strange and natural and familial in the way they acted and teased each other, in the way having his energy inside her felt awkwardly wrong in a way she doubted it would with almost anyone else.

Their relationship was weird. Not bad, but she was also pretty sure that once they met in person, she was going to have a hard time getting rid of him, if she suddenly felt like she had to. Hopefully, it wouldn’t end up like that. The more she got to know the man, the more she liked him, the more she found they had in common, despite his overall oddness.

Plus, other than his one brother, the guy’s family clearly sucked. If she could help him get away from them, she was okay with that.

Yeah… that probably wasn’t the best mentality to be starting their weird relationship in.