25. Prairie Null Wake Up Call
Chapter twenty-five
Prairie Null Wake Up Call
Riot
The scent of gun oil dragged him out of sleep like a hook through the jaw.
Riot’s eyes snapped open. His arm swept across Cass, shielding the warm body beside him from whatever threat had set off every alarm in his nervous system.
Granny Lu sat at the foot of the bed in her electric wheelchair, watching them with the patient stillness of a woman who’d been waiting long enough to get comfortable.
She had a lit cigarillo clamped between her teeth—the cheap kind that smelled like burning tires and poor life choices—and her rifle lay across her lap like she’d forgotten it was there. Which she hadn’t.
Beside her, Sage stood with her own rifle held in that easy way that said she could put a round through his eye socket before he made it halfway across the room.
Her moss-green hair was pulled back tight, her expression blank.
Unlike most of the residents of the collective, she never looked friendly with how she carried her weapons.
“Mornin’, sugar.” Granny Lu’s voice was honeyed poison, the kind of sweet that made his teeth ache. “Y’all sleep well? Sounded like you were having quite the time in here.”
“Tallulah.” He used her full name like a shield. “You always greet guests with a rifle, or am I special?”
“Oh, honey, you’re real special.” She took a long drag on her cigarillo, the cherry flaring.
“Special enough that when my people tell me the Berserker’s been makin’ an Omega howl like a cat in heat for two days straight, I figure I better come see what’s left of Lilac’s house.
” She exhaled smoke toward the ceiling. “And whether I need to bury anybody.”
“Nobody needs burying.”
“Not yet.” Her smile was the kind grandmothers gave their grandkids right before telling them exactly how disappointed they were in their life choices. “Get your ass out of bed and into the living room. We’re gonna have a little chat about what the hell you’ve dragged into my community.”
Beside him, Cass stirred.
“Riot?” Cass’s voice was hoarse as his hand found Riot’s wrist. “What’s happening? Are they angry?”
“Nobody’s angry,” Riot said, which was probably a lie. “Granny Lu just wants to talk. I’ll be in the next room.”
“Don’t go far.” Cass’s fingers tightened briefly before releasing. “It feels wrong when you’re not here.”
He pressed a kiss to Cass’s temple—he let them see, he didn’t give a shit—and rolled out of bed. Granny Lu watched him stand with the expression of someone examining a particularly disappointing cut of meat. “Well. At least you’ve got the equipment to back up all that noise.”
“Jesus Christ, Tallulah.”
“Don’t blaspheme in this house, boy.” But there was a glint of amusement in her eyes as she wheeled toward the door. “Get dressed. I don’t need your equipment distracting from the conversation.”
Sage hadn’t moved, her rifle still trained in his general direction. Her face gave away nothing, but Riot caught the slight flare of her nostrils. She was a Null, couldn’t smell pheromones, but the general scent of sex and sweat was probably pungent enough to register.
He found some pants and a shirt in his pack that hadn’t been soaked in sweat or slick and pulled them on.
By the time he was dressed, Cass had curled around his pillow, already drifting back toward sleep.
He glanced back one more time, just needing to see Cass’s face, and followed Granny Lu into the living room.
The living room looked like someone had tried to demolish it with enthusiasm but limited follow-through.
Books were scattered across the floor in a trail that mapped their chase.
A decorative pillow had exploded at some point, stuffing drifting across the hardwood like sad confetti.
There was a fist-sized dent in the wall near the bathroom door that Riot didn’t specifically remember making but probably had.
Dante sat on the couch with his ankle crossed over his knee and his arm stretched along the back, the picture of casual arrogance.
Seven months out from under Gensyn’s thumb and he still held himself like a man who expected the world to arrange itself around his convenience.
Orion was tucked against his side, but there was tension in the line of his shoulders, the particular stiffness of an Omega fighting biological feedback.
Lilac was crouched near the bookshelf, restacking the scattered volumes. She looked up when Riot entered, her expression cycling through amusement, exasperation, and something that might have been sympathy.
“Pendejo,“ she said fondly. “You owe me a new pillow. And probably some drywall.”
“Add it to my tab.”
“Your tab is getting long enough to wallpaper the bathroom.” But she straightened and moved to lean against the wall, giving him a look that said good luck, you’re going to need it.
Granny Lu had wheeled herself to the center of the room, positioning herself like a general taking the field. She stubbed out her cigarillo in a small ceramic dish that definitely wasn’t an ashtray and fixed Riot with a stare that could have cut glass.
“Sit.”
Riot sat. The armchair put his back to the bedroom door, which made his skin crawl, but arguing about furniture placement seemed like a losing battle.
“Now then.” Granny Lu folded her hands in her lap like she had all the time in the world and none of the patience. “You want to explain to me why there’s an Elysian in my territory?”
The way she said Elysian could have stripped paint off the walls.
“He’s not—”
“I didn’t ask what he’s not.” Her voice cracked like a whip.
“I asked why he’s here. In my community.
In my people’s space. An Elysian missionary, sent out to recruit lost souls into the most secretive, most locked-down corporation in all of ISNA.
” She leaned forward. “A corporation that people go into and don’t come back from.
Or they come back wrong, smiling and grateful and absolutely goddamn convinced they’re happy. ”
“Cass isn’t—”
“I’ve buried people who came back from Elysian, boy.
” The words landed like stones. “Sweet people. Kind people. People who smiled real pretty and said all the right things and had absolutely nothin’ left behind their eyes.
You think I don’t know what that corporation does?
You think I haven’t seen what’s left after they’re done helpin’ someone? ”
Silence stretched through the room. Even Dante had lost his smirk.
“Start from the beginnin’,” Granny Lu said. “And I mean the beginnin’. How a Berserker I let live in my Collective ended up tangled with Elysian’s property.”
So Riot told it.
The Neutral Zone. The alley. Two strangers bleeding, patching each other up because the alternative was bleeding alone. He kept his voice flat where he could, clinical where he could manage it, because the alternative was feeling all of it again and he didn’t have the bandwidth for that.
“I tried to stay away after that first night,” he said. “Figured I’d done my good deed, helped the lost missionary, moved on with my life.” He smiled without humor. “That lasted about twelve hours.”
“His scent,” Lilac said quietly. “It’s... unusual.”
“Unusual is one word for it.” Riot’s jaw tightened. “The suppressants stopped working. Both of ours. Turns out he’d been on industrial-grade heat suppressants since he was sixteen. Elysian told him they were wellness supplements.”
“That’s impressive, even for corporate fuckery,” Dante said, and for once there was no mockery in his voice.
“There’s more.” Riot made himself continue.
“His spiritual guide has been torturing him and he thinks it’s all just a part of his spiritual journey.
” The words tasted like acid. “And there’s something called Project Chrysalis.
Elysian’s compatibility algorithm matched him and his best friend to get married, and when their orientations didn’t cooperate with the spreadsheet, Elysian decided to fix that. ”
“Neural rewriting,” Dante said. His expression had gone cold in a way Riot recognized—the look of someone cataloguing horrors for later analysis.
“Sexual reorientation through targeted conditioning. I’ve seen references in Gensyn intelligence files, but I didn’t know Elysian had actually implemented it. ”
“Cass went through it once. It didn’t work on him—he’s their first failure.”
“Now that’s interesting,” Dante leaned forward, the corners of his lips upturned.
The way he said it made Riot’s hackles rise. “Meaning?”
“Meaning Elysian’s programming is sophisticated. It works on intelligent subjects, creative subjects, stubborn subjects. It’s designed to work on everyone. So either their programming has a flaw they haven’t identified yet, or there’s something about your missionary—”
“He’s not broken, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“I’m not implying anything.” Dante grinned. “I’m observing that Elysian’s mind-control program failed on someone who seems like they were dropped on their head more than once.”
“You wanna repeat that, motherfucker?” Riot felt his hands curl into fists.
“Enough dick measuring!” Orion snapped as he slammed his elbow into Dante’s stomach.
“Fuuuuck,“ Dante wheezed.
“Boys.” Granny Lu’s voice cut through the tension. “Save the pissing contest for later. I’m not done with my questions.”
Riot forced himself to unclench his fists.
“You said your suppressants failed,” Granny Lu continued, her eyes sharp on Riot’s face. “Both of you, at the same time. That’s not coincidence.”
“No,” Riot admitted. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not coincidence.”
“Lilac.” Granny Lu didn’t look away from Riot. “What did the gangly, creepy one find when he tested the batches?”
“Clean,” Lilac said from her position against the wall. “Stave said the batches came back normal. Whatever’s happening, it’s not contamination.”