[Can’t Opt Out]

Emilia and Pria exploded into the clinic, breathing in the cool air before realizing it was full up, packed with other students—and a few teachers and other staff—waiting to be seen. Not a chair in sight. Fuck.

Pria moaned beside her, and Emilia dragged her forward, towards the nurse working the counter. She smiled, trying not to look like a drowned rat, her hair sticking to her skin. She pushed it out of her face, wondering if she dared sneak away to the bathroom to do something—anything—to it. Maybe they had an elastic she could steal? Unlikely. She knew the data lab’s paper rooms had elastics meant to do… something with the paper, but those weren’t quite the same as ones meant for hair. She was also pretty damn sure the clinic did not use paper, something about privacy. Fuck.

“She needs to see someone about an aftereffect,” she told the nurse, who looked up at her from under a tired-looking crop of brown hair.

The nurse sighed, looking like he also wanted to die. “Is it an emergency?” he asked, voice so exhausted that Emilia was surprised he was even managing to work. Weren’t there laws about how long medical staff could work?

“No,” she said.

Technically, you could lie, get taken into the back for an assessment quicker. Elijah and some of his friends had done that once, back during their first year, when she’d been intent to beat him in every competition she could. She, Beth and Sil had signed up for a team obstacle event, so had Elijah, Blaze, and their asshole friend. Elijah had been an ass, too. She’d pissed him off more. There had been an… altercation, on the course. Things had gotten out of hand, they'd all pushed too hard and ended up in the clinic. They’d felt like shit, sure. Not enough hydration, not enough calories for what they’d done. Plenty of scraps and a few mild electrocutions and aether burns. One concussion—that had actually been serious—but everyone save Sil had most certainly not been emergencies.

Emilia, Beth and Sil had left the clinic hours before Elijah and his friends had managed to. The clinic had basically held them hostage.

“You said it was an emergency,” the nurse had said, smiling ominously at Elijah with dead eyes, while Beth and Emilia lost their shit as they were bandaged up. “We cannot allow you to leave until we run all the tests.” Somehow, the woman’s smile had turned more threatening as she began swiping through a long list of procedures on a screen for everyone to see. Enema, prostate exam, colonic imaging along with many more, less embarrassing but potentially more painful procedures. Not only would their list take forever, but it was going to involve a lot of unpleasantness.

Served them right.

“Her hearing is off,” Emilia told the nurse as his eyes glazed over, and he began logging information into the system.

“Enough that she can’t talk?” he asked, giving Pria an assessing glance. Pria started a bit—the nurse having probably knocked at her Censor for information while she had been…

Emilia followed her friend’s gaze to an adorable little 40-something year old, likely only a year or two into her studies. She could even be 40, exactly, a little baby freshman. This would be the first year since the war, after all, where new students had been able to properly enjoy their gap decade. The war had delayed so much, aged people far beyond the normal 40 that most started university at. The people in their own freshman year had ranged from Beth’s 32—much too young, but she had had her reasons—to a little over 70, which meant at 60, Emilia hadn’t quite been the oldest of their cohort, but had been far beyond the 40 she had assumed she would enter university at.

“No, but she’ll probably scream at you, and you’ll have to scream back. I think her Censor hearing is messed up, too,” she added. She’d tried to talk to Pria through their Censors, thinking maybe it was just her ears that were messed up. She had yelled in there as well, which wasn’t exactly encouraging.

The nurse’s nose scrunched, and his eyes turned back to Emilia as he asked her a few more questions. How long? What did you take? Did you take it as well? No aftereffects for you?

“Do you know how long it will be?” Emilia asked, trying to resist looking to the crowd behind her.

The man sighed, long and drawn out. He opened his mouth to speak when another voice cut him off.

“I can take you back now, if you like.”

Emilia looked up to see one of their classmates—one of the few older than her—leaning against the door that led back to the treatment rooms.

“We aren’t supposed to skip people up,” the nurse grumbled, although he seemed to lack much conviction. Emilia doubted campus nurses were paid enough to care about people being prioritized because they knew someone on duty.

“Everyone does,” her classmate, Payton something-or-other, said, stepping forward to smile down at the nurse. Unlike the nurse, Payton didn’t appear to be tired, but then, he never did. They’d been on a few so-called class bonding trips together over the last eight years, and she’d never seen him yawn—not even during that horrible camping trip. “Besides, unlike almost everyone waiting, these two were actually nice to you.”

“They could have been about to yell,” the nurse noted, seemingly out of habit more than an actual desire to fight about it, “when I told them it would be a couple of hours.”

Emilia was extremely grateful, at that moment, for Pria’s lack of hearing. Had her roommate been able to hear that, she may well have yelled—at her, not the staff—then stomped out. Why the clinic didn’t put a system into place where you could leave and come back if your ailment was mild enough, she didn’t know. Sitting among these sweaty, grumpy patients would have been miserable. She probably would have left too, used some of that money Olivier had forced upon her to bubble down to a clinic in the city.

“Thanks,” Emilia said as Payton led them into the treatment rooms. Around them, a few doctors were moving between rooms, dealing with the more serious injuries. The majority of staff buzzing about were support staff and nurses, like Payton himself. She didn’t know the older man very well, but she was pretty sure she’d heard that he’d been a medic during the war. She supposed that was true, if he was working here as a nurse. Why he’d decided to pursue data-recovery and not continue in the medical field—especially since he was still managing to work in it…

“No problem,” Payton replied, giving her that soft, half-smile that always made her skin crawl a bit. She’d seen that smile—she’d grown up with that smile. That smile might trick most people, make them think you were just a normal person, but she knew better. It was probably why, the few times he’d tried to get closer to one of her friends, she’d conveniently found a reason to take them elsewhere. It wasn’t that she didn’t think he could be kind, that he could be a good friend—one of her closest childhood friends was just like him, after all—but she didn’t need someone with a black knot in her life right now. Especially not if it was a traumatic one. It could be natural—that would explain how he was still managing to work in medicine, when most war medics retreated from the memories they had experienced during the war—but she wasn’t willing to risk it.

She’d risked it before, and that had almost landed her in jail for life.

Payton motioned for Pria to take a seat at an assessor, the machine whirling to life and circling her a few times, looking for whatever was the cause of her hearing issues. “You sure you aren’t having any similar aftereffects?” he asked, glaring at the screen in front of him as information Emilia couldn’t see flashed over it.

“Yeah, why?”

“Nothing different, either? Nothing wrong at all?”

She shook her head when he looked up at her, gaze hard in a way that suited him much more than the lazy smile did. “Nope, nothing.” She thought back to the error her Censor had given her—the “something is wrong, but I don’t know what it is” error—but no. She’d been getting more and more errors recently. That had existed long before last night’s drugs.

“Sure you take the same thing? She didn’t take anything extra?”

Emilia opened her mouth to say no, but snapped it back closed. “We… weren’t together the whole night,” she finally said. “We took something with a hearing enhancer mixed in, so I kinda assumed this”—she motioned haphazardly to Pria, who was seemingly trying to ignore this whole situation—“was from that.”

Payton shook his head, glaring back down at the screen, then to Pria. “You take anything extra last night?” he yelled at her, the earlier nurse’s notes apparently having been thorough enough to mention that Pria would probably have to be screamed at.

Her roommate bolted, attention recentring on the moment. She shook her head, then stopped, frowned. “I did a shot. Bartender said it was something special? Figured it was just something rare? Foreign or something, not something… extra.”

Emilia’s gaze hardened. Irresponsible, if the bartender was giving people random drugs disguised as alcohol.

“You're going to need knot therapy,” Payton yelled.

Pria’s entire body tensed, her eyes growing so wide it would have been comical if not for the situation. The next moment, Emilia was right there with her, hands wrapped around her friend’s, half to support her, half to keep her from bolting. It would be a massive pain to have to send campus security to drag her back.

Payton shifted, moving so Pria and Emilia could see the screen of his tablet. “I mean it,” he added, tone leaving no room for complaints when Pria started to object. “This is serious. Knot therapy, or you could die.” Apparently, their classmate had been keeping notes on them, to know of Pria’s hatred for knot therapy.

“Fuck~” Pria moaned, not even bothering to look at her DNA.

Emilia looked, though, at the way it twisted and curved in a highlighted area. Compromised hearing because some drug had knotted her. Rude and rare. Dangerous, too. Knots from knotters weren’t meant to be permanent. They were temporary things, meant to be removed within a few days—sometimes even just a few hours. If you didn’t, they could decay and spread. Payton wasn’t exaggerating when he told Pria this could kill her, if she didn’t deal with it now.

“I didn’t know there were any knotters in the city at the moment.”

“Neither did I,” Payton said, sliding back into his seat and crossing his legs. They were long—thin and delicate and pale under his scrubs. She’d seen Sil lust after them, seen Payton try to get closer to their group through Sil and his love of legs. Wouldn’t have worked, even if she hadn’t intervened. Fucking Sil almost always meant you’d never be allowed into their group, although perhaps that sub-30 would change that record.

“Then how—”

“Because they used them during the war—the soldiers, I mean.”

She blinked at him. She hadn’t known that.

He smiled like he knew she hadn’t known—knew that hardly anyone knew, probably. “On the field, where they couldn’t get into clinics. That’s where they became common. Take a drug, get more courage. Take another, undo the knot—become yourself again.” He shrugged like it was nothing special. “It looks a little different from a normal knot, like it's meant to be temporary? To unknot easier? It’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t seen a thousand of them. Honestly, even I wouldn’t assume it was a knotter if I wasn’t in the same class as you two.”

He shot Pria that brilliant, fake as fuck smile, explaining what Emilia had already guessed. “I’ve heard you say more than once that you refuse to do knot therapy. This”—he motioned again to the screen that Pria was categorically refusing to look at—“is definitely an artificial knot. Could be traumatic in a child, not an adult.”

Emilia looked at it, trying to see what her classmate saw. There were other knots through the strand on the screen, outside the part he was focusing on. Everyone had knots. Inherited ones, ones from the way they lived—the things they’d eaten and seen and experienced. She hadn’t known there was a visual difference between natural, traumatic and additive ones. It was part of why people kept records of their sequences over time. It was standard to take snapshots every time you had knot therapy. Normal to run a check against those records if something traumatic happened to you. To be able to see the minute differences without even comparing it to a recent sequence…

“Can other people do that? Tell what kind of knot it is just by looking?” she asked as Payton coxed a pouting Pria out of the chair and began leading them towards the clinic’s knot therapy rooms.

Payton hummed in thought as they passed door after door, the frames lit up red to indicate they were currently occupied. “Probably not a lot? I was always good at observing finicky things like that.”

Not exactly bragging, not exactly not.

“Here we go,” he said, the door to an unoccupied room sliding open for them as they approached. He held out an arm, motioning for them to enter first, and Emilia practically pushed Pria into the room.

“It will be fine,” she yelled at her roommate, who did not look convinced, not that Emilia could blame her.

There had been a lot of misuse of knot therapy among the ex-100s, before the government had gotten a handle on the technology. People had been desperate to raise their social standing, to get better jobs, make better lives for their children. When the government had realized how badly the overuse of knot therapy was affecting people, they had regulated it, but it had already been too late. The damage was done. Infertility skyrocketed, children were born with higher D-Levels than normally expected, genetic spasms became more common, and more than a few people had been driven insane by their decaying genes. It hadn’t been good, and even thousands of years on, families still told stories of the horrors that had befallen their ancestors—about the genetic implications that still affected them today.

It didn’t help that almost no one else had been affected. The ex-300s couldn’t afford it, while the sub-100s and sub-30s had been happy where they were. The knot therapy they had done—still did today—was minor. Sub-50s, no matter what era they existed in, were too snobby to mess with their genes; reaching sub-30 status was only meaningful if it was done naturally, according to them.

As a result, most of the world had forgotten the tragic beginnings of knot therapy. Those kinks had long since been ironed out—Emilia’s own extensive knotting was testament to that—but the ex-100s remembered. The ex-100s wouldn’t forget.

“Pria,” Emilia yelled, trying to throw as much compassion as she could into her voice, then shaking her head. Instead, she knocked gently on Pria’s Censor.

Her roommate’s eyes stayed glued to the white, plastic covered bed in front of her, but she let Emilia in.

Emilia’s vision filled with black panic and her heart clenched. She knew this much fear—she had done everything in her power to hide from it. So had Pria. She didn’t knot herself, even when doing so could make her life a little easier, a little smoother. Here she was, though, despite her best efforts, staring down what might well be her biggest fear, and all because some asshole had dosed her drink.

When Emilia got a hold of him…

“I’m here,” Emilia said, forcing her mind—the illusionary, digital version of herself—to push through the panic and fear to find her friend. She still had to yell, but within this space, it felt softer, more personal and private, without Payton or clinic cameras watching them. “I’m here,” she repeated as she knelt down beside her. “I’m not going anywhere. I know you’re afraid, but it will be okay.”

Pria looked up at her, her burnt-brown eyes wide and watery. She shook her head, the image of her an outdated version, from when she’d had pink and purple braids. When had that even been? When had she last updated this place, this image of how her mind perceived herself?

Emilia’s own version was relatively new, she liked to keep it new. It was a nice contrast to the version she’d used for almost three decades, between when she’d formed it, just after Olivier had won her case, until a few years before the war ended. She shuddered, thinking of the thing that had represented her those last few years, before she’d run away, leaving it and the person she was during the war behind to rot.

“It will be okay,” she repeated, grabbing hold of her friend’s hands in this world and the digital one, pulling her forward, forward. They turned, and she helped Pria sit, encouraged her to turn and lay back. “I can’t stay with you, but I’ll be right over there. It won’t hurt. It’ll only take a minute or two. Then we can go downtown, find the ass who did this to you if you want. Or we can go get the best fucking meal of our lives.” She smiled, the smile she reserved for moments like this, where she needed to be convincing and truthful and a little manipulative.

Pria swallowed, nodded and fidgeted. Pulled her arms away from her sides, sweat slick skin sticking to itself. Her legs were probably sticking to the table too, which seemed like an awful design flaw that really should have been fixed long ago. Emilia had been in some pretty old clinics. They all had that same, horrible plastic covering on everything, so she assumed it had to do with cleaning or longevity or how cheap it was.

She stepped back, eyes staying with Pria, relying on her Censor to see the world behind her for her.

“Ready?” Payton asked when Emilia was safely out of range of the machine. Technically, it was only supposed to affect the person on the bed, but if an accident happened it would be bad—like, you’re dead now, bad.

“No!” Pria yelled, eyes flickering like she wanted to clamp them shut but didn’t dare risk losing sight of Emilia, and the machine hummed to life.