28. The Static Zone
Chapter twenty-eight
The Static Zone
Riot
The romance of the open road lasted approximately four minutes.
That was how long it took for them to reach the first crater—a hole in the asphalt the size of a swimming pool, its edges softened by two seasons of rain and the tentative optimism of weeds.
Riot jerked the wheel left, the car bounced off the road and onto a dirt track that might have been a farm path in another life, and the suspension made a sound like a man receiving very bad news about his retirement fund.
“Hold on,” Riot said, which was unnecessary because Cass was already gripping the door handle with both hands, his bare feet braced against the dashboard.
They should have found him shoes after forgetting his sandals in the Neutral Zone.
That was going to be a problem. But Lilac’s emergency wardrobe hadn’t extended to footwear, and Sage hadn’t thought to pack any, and by the time Riot noticed Cass padding barefoot across the gravel toward the car it was three in the morning and they’d been running from a conversation neither of them had finished. Shoes had not been the priority.
The walkie on the center console crackled. “Bridge out at county road twelve.” Sage’s voice was flat and precise, the verbal equivalent of a filed report. “Go south through the soybean field. Rejoin at the grain elevator. Don’t hit the combine.”
“What combine?” Riot asked, but Sage had already clicked off.
They found the combine. It was rusted into the middle of the soybean field like a monument to mechanical determination, its harvesting arm extended in a gesture that looked uncomfortably like it was trying to flag them down. Cass stared at it as they drove past.
“What is that?”
“Farm equipment. For harvesting crops.”
“It’s enormous.” Cass twisted in his seat to watch it recede in the side mirror. “Who left it here?”
“Whoever used to farm this field.”
“Where did they go?”
Riot didn’t answer. He was navigating around a cluster of pre-Adjustment cars that fused together in a tangle of rust and vine near what used to be an intersection.
Three sedans and a minivan, their paint long gone, windows dark with grime.
One still had a bumper sticker, barely legible: MY KID IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT—
The rest had been eaten by weather.
“There are so many cars everywhere,” Cass said.
He’d been staring out the window since they’d left the Collective, watching the landscape with the wide-eyed focus of someone seeing the world for the first time.
Which, in a sense, he was. Elysian was a sealed campus.
The Neutral Zone was chaotic, but structured, populated, purposeful.
The Static Zone was none of those things. “Where were they all going?”
“Anywhere they wanted, mostly.”
Cass looked at him. “Without authorization?”
“There was no authorization. People just got in their cars and drove.”
“Drove where?”
“Wherever. Work, the store, visiting family three states away. There weren’t checkpoints.
No territory permits.” Riot wrestled the steering wheel through a rut that tried to eat the front tire.
“Just roads that went places and people who used them. Did you not notice this on your way to the Neutral Zone?”
“I wasn’t allowed to look out of the window.” Cass was quiet for a long time. He did that, went silent when something was too big to process immediately. Riot learned to let the silence do its work.
The walkie crackled again. “Gensyn convoy on parallel road, bearing northwest. Kill your engine behind the grain elevator and wait. I’ll signal clear.”
Riot pulled behind the elevator—a massive concrete cylinder with ILLINOIS CO-OP still visible in faded letters—and cut the engine.
Through the gaps in the structure, he could see the convoy: twelve vehicles moving in formation, likely a corporate military escort flanking a line of unmarked transports. Cass had gone very still.
“They can’t see us,” Riot said.
“I know.” But Cass’s eyes tracked the convoy with an intensity that had nothing to do with fear.
He was watching the way someone watches a thing they’ve only heard about in stories.
“Those are Gensyn. The ones who...” He trailed off, his brow furrowing.
“You said they made the designations. In the car, on the way to the Collective.”
Riot looked at him. “You remember that?”
“Pieces. You were talking about a vaccine. And something called Syn-V-7. And I was—” His face colored slightly. “I was in your lap. And everything hurt. I don’t think I understood most of what you said.”
The convoy passed. Sage’s walkie: “Clear. Move.”
Riot started the engine and pulled back onto what generously qualified as a road. The silence in the car had changed—from comfortable to expectant. Cass was thinking. Riot could practically hear the gears turning, slow and steady, building something with the fragments he had.
“Will you tell me again?” Cass asked. “About the vaccine. About what Gensyn did. I want to understand it when my body isn’t—” He gestured vaguely at himself. “When I can actually hear you.”
So Riot told him.
He kept it simple, not because Cass needed simple, but because the truth was simple.
About how the world fell apart during The Unraveling and families tore each other apart because suddenly pheromones got involved.
Corporations rose from the wreckage, each with their own idea of how to manage the mess Gensyn made, and still Gensyn came out on top.
He told it while driving through the evidence of the corporate wars.
Past a highway overpass that ended in mid-air, its other half collapsed into the ravine below.
Past a stretch of road where the trees on both sides were scorched black for a quarter mile and a billboard advertising a restaurant that hadn’t existed in seventy years, its smiling family a relic of a species that no longer quite existed either.
Cass listened without interrupting. His hands were folded in his lap, his fingers laced tightly together.
When Riot finished, the silence lasted almost a full minute.
“The Elders teach that designations are divine,” Cass said slowly. “That they’ve always been part of us. Part of the natural order that Elysian helps us understand.” He was looking out the window at the burnt trees. “They never mentioned a vaccine.”
“No. They wouldn’t have.”
“The meditation sessions. The harmony teachings. All of it is built on the idea that we’re supposed to be this way.
That Alphas and Omegas and Betas are how people were always meant to be.
” His voice was careful. Deliberate. He was building something in his head, fitting pieces together, and Riot could see the structure taking shape.
“But if Gensyn made the designations, then the Elders are teaching us that something someone invented is sacred.”
“Yeah.”
“These people.” He gestured at the rusted cars, the dead highway, all of it. “The ones in the cars. They weren’t Alphas or Betas or Omegas.”
“No. They were just people.”
“Just people,” Cass repeated. He tasted the words like they were foreign, which they were. “And they drove wherever they wanted. And they didn’t need algorithms to tell them who to love.”
“No.”
“And someone decided that wasn’t good enough.”
It wasn’t a question. Riot didn’t answer it like one.
The road, such as it was, wound through what had been farmland—miles of flat terrain gone wild with prairie grass and volunteer trees. In the distance, the skeleton of a water tower rose against the sky like a metal flower on a very long stem.
“Riot?” Cass’s voice was quieter now. Smaller. “If designations are manufactured... then what am I?”
“You’re Cass.”
“But my body—the heat, the way I—” He stopped, taking in a breath before he started again. “Everything my body does. The way it responds. Someone decided that would happen before I was born.” His fingers were white-knuckled in his lap. “And they didn’t ask.”
“No. They didn’t ask.”
“Oh…”
Riot wanted to pull the car over and gather Cass into his arms and hold him until the shaking in his voice stopped.
But they were in the open, in the Static Zone, with potential threats on every horizon, and stopping meant vulnerability.
So he did the only thing he could—reached across the center console and took Cass’s hand.
Cass’s fingers curled around his immediately.
“The designations are real,” Riot said. “Whatever made them, they’re part of you now. Part of all of us. The heats, the scents, the way your body works—that’s yours. Nobody gets to tell you it’s sacred or profane or anything else. It’s just yours.”
“Like the circlet,” Cass said.
Riot blinked. “What?”
“The circlet you gave me. It was made by someone. In a shop, or a workshop, with tools and metal. It’s manufactured. But it’s still mine. It’s still beautiful.” He squeezed Riot’s hand. “Maybe that’s the same thing. Maybe something can be made and still be real.”
Riot’s throat constricted in a way that had nothing to do with rut or heat or any biological imperative that a corporation had engineered into his blood. It was simpler than that. More human than that.
Something can be made and still be real.
He squeezed back and didn’t trust himself to speak.
They lost the first hour to a collapsed bridge.
Sage’s map showed a crossing over what had been a creek and was now a modest river, swollen with spring rain and ambition.
The bridge was three concrete slabs and a prayer, two of the slabs having departed for destinations unknown at some point in the last decade.
The remaining slab tilted at an angle like it was considering following them.
“I could probably make that,” Riot said, squinting at the gap.
Sage’s walkie: “No.”
“I said probably.”
“And I said no. Go north half a mile, there’s a shallow crossing near the old rail line. You’ll get wet. You won’t die.”
“Your faith in me is deeply touching, Sage.”
“My faith in your car’s suspension is nonexistent. Move.”
The shallow crossing was, in fact, shallow—about eighteen inches of muddy water flowing over a bed of gravel and broken concrete.
The car lurched through it with the enthusiasm of a dog being given a bath, and Cass lifted his bare feet off the floorboard as brown water seeped in through the door seals.
“Is the car supposed to do that?” Cass asked, watching a small rivulet stream across the floor mat.
“Absolutely not.”
“Oh. Should I be worried?”
“Only if you value dry feet, which—actually, we need to find you shoes.”
Cass wiggled his toes, which were now muddy. He didn’t seem particularly bothered. “I go barefoot during grounding exercises. I always just liked how the grass felt.”
Riot’s mouth twitched. “Practical.”
“Brother Matthias said I was missing the point.”
“Brother Matthias missed a lot of points.” The words came out harder than he intended. He felt Cass glance at him, probably confused…he wanted to say something so fucking bad.
He deliberately loosened his grip on the steering wheel and filed the anger back where it lived—in the cold place behind his ribs, where it waited, patient and vast, for the day he stood in the same room as Brother Matthias.
“Sorry,” he said. “I just—he hurt you. And hearing his name makes me want to break things. Which isn’t helpful when I’m driving.”
Cass was quiet for a moment. Then, gently: “You could break things later. When we’re not in the car.”
A startled laugh escaped before Riot could catch it. “Yeah. I’ll schedule it in.”
“I’m serious. Sage probably knows where to find things that are already broken. You could break those. That way nobody gets hurt and you still get to—” He made a smashing gesture with his hands. “Do the thing.”
“The thing.”
“The angry thing. With your hands. You do it sometimes when you’re upset—you make fists and your knuckles go white and you look like you want to hit something but you won’t let yourself.
” Cass looked at him with the devastating directness of someone who saw emotional patterns the way other people saw traffic signals.
“You hold it all in. For me. Because you don’t want to scare me. ”
Riot’s chest did something complicated.
“That doesn’t mean it goes away, though,” Cass continued. “You just carry it. And carrying heavy things for a long time makes you tired.” He paused. “I’m not very strong. But I could help you carry it, maybe. If you showed me how.”
This fucking kid…with his bare feet and his devastating honesty and his complete inability to let me suffer alone…
“I’ll think about it,” Riot said, because his throat was too tight for anything more.
“Okay.” Cass settled back in his seat, apparently satisfied. He propped his muddy feet back on the dashboard and turned his attention to the landscape.