29. Unregulated Air
Chapter twenty-nine
Unregulated Air
Riot
The pirate radio station appeared somewhere around mile sixty.
They’d been scanning through static and corporate frequencies—Gensyn’s station played something that sounded like a lullaby by a committee and approved by three separate departments, each of which having removed anything that might provoke unauthorized emotional responses.
SVI’s station was just a man yelling about forge temperatures and bootstrap philosophies, punctuated by what appeared to be gunfire sound effects, though with SVI Riot could never be sure they were effects.
Then, between the dead zones, a crackle of something alive.
Guitar. Raw, imperfect, played by someone who meant it.
A voice that cracked on the high notes and didn’t apologize for it.
The signal faded in and out like it was breathing, carried on a frequency that no corporation bothered to claim because it was broadcasting from a generator in someone’s basement in the Static Zone.
Cass went still.
In Elysian territory, Riot knew, there was music—probably harmonic frequency sessions, guided resonance exercises, sounds designed to regulate emotional states and promote collective consciousness or some bullshit.
Cass had probably heard music in the Neutral Zone too—market performers, electronic beats bleeding from someone’s speakers. Background noise. Incidental.
This was neither of those things. This was someone playing guitar in a room by themselves because they had to, because the sound wanted out, and because holding it in would have been worse than the vulnerability of releasing it.
The song was old. Pre-Adjustment, it had to be—the lyrics referenced things that didn’t exist anymore. Dancing without rules and loving someone who didn’t come with a corporate designation suffix. Simple things. Lost things.
Cass listened to the entire song without moving.
When it ended, the DJ—if you could call them that—came on with a voice like gravel and whiskey. “That was ‘Harvest Moon’ by Neil Young. Goes out to anyone still listening. You’re not alone out here. Next up, we got some Fleetwood Mac for the overnight crowd.”
“They sound like they mean it,” Cass said. His voice was quiet. Almost reverent. “The person singing. They sound like they’re saying something real.”
“Yeah,” Riot said. “That’s kind of the point of music.”
“At home, the harmonic sessions were always... correct. Everyone in the right frequency. Everyone aligned.” He frowned slightly, reaching for the thought.
“But it never sounded like it wanted to be sung. It sounded like it was being performed because someone decided it should be. This sounds like—like the person couldn’t not sing it.
Like it was inside them and they had to let it out. ”
Riot took his eyes off the road long enough to look at Cass.
The golden hair, tangled and half-braided with wilting cornflowers.
The too-big jacket swallowing his shoulders.
The bare feet on the dashboard, muddy toes curled against the vinyl.
His face soft with something Riot didn’t have a name for—wonder, maybe, or recognition.
The look of someone hearing a language they didn’t know they’d been missing.
The next song started. Something slower, gentler. A woman’s voice this time, singing about dreams and thunder and the way love sounds when it’s keeping you alive.
Cass leaned toward the speakers. Not consciously—his body just drifted, drawn by the sound the way a plant drifts toward light. When the signal wavered, his hand shot out and hovered over the dial, as though he could hold the frequency steady through sheer want.
“Can we keep it on this?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Riot said. “We can keep it on this.”
He found himself steering partly by road conditions and partly by radio reception after that.
When the signal strengthened on a slight ridge, he lingered.
When it faded behind a hill, he angled toward higher ground.
It was stupid—adding time to a trip that was already taking three times longer than it should—but Cass was listening to music for the first time in his life, really listening, and Riot was discovering that he’d build roads through mountains if it meant keeping that look on Cass’s face.
You’re navigating a rescue mission through hostile territory by radio signal because a pretty Omega likes oldies. This is insane.
Then again, you volunteered for experimental surgery because someone in a lab coat told you it would help.
Cass napped after the second hour.
He’d been fighting it—Riot could see the effort, the way his eyes kept drifting shut and snapping back open, the guilty little jerks of someone who thought sleeping was a failure of some kind.
But exhaustion won. His head tipped sideways against the window, his breath fogging the glass in slow, even pulses, and his body finally let go of the tension it had been holding since he woke up fighting.
The pirate station faded to a whisper. Riot let it go, driving in relative silence through the remains of Illinois.
The Static Zone had its own kind of beauty, for the kind of people who found beauty in honest ruin.
Riot wasn’t sure he was, but he was at least the sort who could appreciate the lack of pretense.
No corporate aesthetics here—no chrome perfection, no brutalist industry, no new-age serenity.
Just what happened when humans left and nature showed up with plans of its own.
There was a shopping mall with a birch tree growing through the roof.
A church with GOD LEFT—NO FORWARDING ADDRESS spray-painted in faded red across the facade.
A school with its front doors hanging open, and through the gap, a hallway where the floor tiles had buckled and something green was growing between them with the quiet determination of life that had nowhere else to be.
The road wound between these ruins like a thread through wreckage.
Dirt paths that had been farm roads. Game trails widened by the occasional passage of vehicles brave or desperate enough to travel them.
Twice, Riot had to stop and reverse because a tree had fallen across the path.
Once, he navigated around the burned-out hull of what had been a Gensyn personnel carrier, its insignia still visible through the rust. Bullet holes pocked its flanks in a pattern that looked like organized resistance, not random violence.
Someone had spray-painted FREE-OHM on the side.
Good for them, Riot thought, which was as close to political activism as he was likely to get while driving through a field to avoid a sinkhole.
The walkie crackled. “Berserker sign ahead.” Sage’s voice was clipped. “Claw marks on the overpass supports. Recent—within the week. Stay quiet, stay moving.”
Riot’s hands tightened on the wheel. Wild Berserkers—the ones without access to suppressants, without communities, without anything anchoring them to their sanity.
Sometimes Riot felt bad for them. They weren’t like that because of some corporate fuckery, their bodies just didn’t work right and society gave up on them.
He drove faster, keeping the engine low, his eyes scanning the overpasses for movement.
The scratches were there when they passed under, deep gouges in the concrete, the marks they left as warnings to anyone dumb enough to travel through their areas.
Cass slept through all of it. His face was peaceful in a way it rarely was when he was conscious—no furrowed brow, no carefully constructed composure. Just a young man exhausted beyond his body’s ability to stay worried.
Riot breathed in deep, savoring the caramel and cinnamon, warm and steady. No spike. No heat-edge. Just Cass.
His own body disagreed. The hum was still there—in his bones, his jaw, his hands. Not rut. Not exactly. Something adjacent to rut that didn’t have a name, a low-frequency awareness that had been running since the Neutral Zone alley and hadn’t turned off regardless of how many times he’d—
He shut that line of thinking down. Not while driving. Not after the night Cass had.
But he was sweating, just a bit across his forehead…
Twenty minutes later, the walkie crackled again: “Road’s blocked ahead. Looks like they cratered it deliberately during the border skirmishes. I’m scouting an alternate. Give me ten.”
Riot stopped the car on a slight rise that overlooked what had been a town.
Small. He had stayed in places like this with Stave and Prepper in the early years, digging through the remains of the past, trying not to kill each other as they learned how to control themselves without chemical assistance. He always liked the small towns.
Cass stirred.
“Where are we?” He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand, blinking at the landscape.
“Somewhere in the Static Zone. About seventy miles from where we started.”
“Seventy miles?” Cass sat up straighter. “We’ve been driving for hours.”
“Roads are bad. When there are roads.”
Cass looked out the window at the dead town as the afternoon light fell through empty window frames, casting shadows that looked almost like the ghosts of furniture. “Did people live here?”
“Yeah.”
“Like the ones in the cars?”
“Yeah.”
He was quiet, processing. Riot could see him doing it—fitting this town into the framework he’d been building since the Gensyn convoy.
A world where people lived in houses instead of corporate dormitories.
Where they drove wherever they wanted. Where designations didn’t exist and nobody needed algorithms to tell them who to love.
“I’m fine,” Cass said suddenly.
Riot looked at him. “I didn’t ask.”
“I know. But you keep checking.” A small, self-conscious smile crept onto his face. “You look at me when you think I’m not noticing. You’ve done it about twelve times since I woke up.”
So much for subtle. “Force of habit.”