29. Unregulated Air #2
“I’m fine. I feel normal. Well—” He amended this with the precision of someone who didn’t know how to lie. “I feel like I have a body that’s been through a lot and is very tired. But the other thing—the heats—that’s done.”
Riot nodded and didn’t say what he was thinking, which was that Cass’s definition of “fine” had a margin of error roughly the size of the Static Zone, and that the faint sheen on his forehead could have been sleep-sweat or could have been something else, and that the way he was sitting with his thighs pressed together might have been about comfort or might have been about containment.
But Cass was trying so hard to be fine, to be a person in a car on a road trip instead of a crisis in motion, and Riot wanted to give him that.
“Good,” Riot said. “Because we’ve still got a long way to go and I don’t know if the car can survive many more creek crossings.”
Cass smiled. It was small and tired but it was real. “The car will be fine. You’re very good with your hands.”
Riot bit his tongue. It was the way he said it—utterly sincere, no subtext, no innuendo, just a straightforward observation about Riot’s ability to handle the steering wheel and navigate rough terrain. A compliment on his driving. That was all.
But the worst parts of his brain, which had spent the last several hours being mostly quiet, heard good with your hands and immediately provided a detailed sensory catalog of everywhere those hands had been on Cass’s body, every sound they’d drawn out of him, every—
Stop. Stop it. He’s talking about driving.
“Thanks,” Riot managed. His voice came out roughly an octave lower than intended. He gripped the steering wheel like it had personally offended him and stared at the empty town with a fixed intensity that suggested he’d found something fascinating in the architecture of a collapsed gas station.
“Did I say something wrong?” Cass asked, because of course he noticed. He always noticed.
“Nope. All good. Just—admiring the scenery.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“Exactly. Very admirable nothing.” Riot swallowed.
Swallowed again. His jaw ached. His mouth was doing that thing—the watering thing, the involuntary salivation that had started during Cass’s heat and never fully stopped.
It made no sense. He wasn’t hungry. He wasn’t in active rut.
His body was just producing saliva like it had somewhere important to put it, and the fact that his eyes kept drifting to the juncture of Cass’s neck and shoulder was a coincidence that he was going to aggressively not think about.
This is not how suppressants work. This is not how ruts work. This is not how any of this is supposed to work.
The walkie saved him. “Found an alternate. Follow the tree line east for about a mile, there’s a cattle path. It’s not great.”
“Define ‘not great.’”
“I said it’s not great. What part needs defining?”
Riot started the car. Cass was watching him with that particular expression—the one that meant he’d filed something away for later examination. The observation that Riot went weird when Cass mentioned his hands. The tonal shift. The sudden interest in ruined gas stations.
The cattle path was not great.
It was, in fact, terrible. It was terrible in the specific, curated way that suggested some divine being looked at this particular stretch of land and thought, What if mud had aspirations?
The car slid sideways through ruts that seemed to have been designed by a committee. Riot wrestled the wheel, the engine whined, and something underneath the chassis made a sound that probably had a technical name but which Riot chose to interpret as please, for the love of God, stop.
“I can get out and push,” Cass offered.
“You’re barefoot.”
“I’ve walked through mud before.”
“This isn’t mud. This is mud that’s made life choices. Stay in the car.”
Cass stayed, but he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, peering through the windshield at the path ahead. “Go left. The ground looks harder near those rocks.”
He was right. The ground near the rocks was harder, or at least less actively hostile, and the car found traction long enough to lurch forward another fifty yards.
“How’d you know that?” Riot asked.
“The grass is different. Shorter. Harder ground grows shorter grass.” He pointed. “And there—see the way the water pooled? It’s going around that area, not through it. Means the soil is denser.”
Riot stared at him. “Where did you learn that?”
Cass shrugged. “I walked a lot. During the mission. In the Neutral Zone, and the areas around it. You learn where to step if you don’t want to fall down.”
“Could’ve fooled me. That was actually useful terrain analysis.”
Cass’s cheeks pinked slightly. “It’s not analysis. It’s just looking.”
“Looking is analysis. It’s the most important kind.” Riot followed Cass’s directions—left around the standing water, right where the grass thinned over harder ground. It worked. The car stopped trying to dig its own grave and actually moved forward with something approaching purpose.
“Go right again,” Cass said. “That dark patch is a sinkhole.”
“How do you—”
“It looks hungry.”
Riot went right.
The afternoon wore on. They rejoined something resembling a road, lost it again, and found a different one.
Sage’s updates came at irregular intervals—clear for two miles and stay left at the fork, right goes into SVI border territory and, once, simply don’t look at the overpass.
Riot didn’t look. Cass did, because he didn’t know yet that some things in the Static Zone were better left unexamined.
Whatever he saw made him go quiet for twenty minutes, and Riot didn’t ask.
They talked.
Not about Elysian or Endeavor or the mission. Not about heats or designations or the ruins of a civilization neither of them had been alive to mourn. Just—talked. The way people talked when they had nowhere to be except together and nothing to do except survive the next mile.
Cass asked questions. He always asked questions. But these were different from the desperate inquiries of his heat, or the focused information-gathering he’d done for Granny Lu. These were the questions of someone with time, and curiosity, and maybe a person he wanted to know.
“Were you happy? Before?”
The question came with no preamble, no context. Just Cass looking at him from the passenger seat, bare feet on the dashboard, wilting flowers in his hair, asking the simplest and most devastating question in the English language.
“Before Endeavor?”
“Before everything. When you were—” He hesitated. “Brennan.”
The name still felt strange from someone else’s mouth. But from Cass’s it felt less like a wound and more like a door being held open. Not demanding he walk through it. Just showing him it was there.
“I don’t know,” Riot said honestly. “I remember being curious about things. I remember liking my work, or thinking I did. But I can’t tell anymore if those memories are real or if I’ve edited them to make the loss hurt less.” He paused. “Probably both. Memory’s like that.”
“I remember being happy with Honey. Playing dress-up. Exploring Springfield Gardens after curfew. Sneaking food from the commissary.” He gave a small, sad smile. “But maybe those memories are edited too. Maybe I made them happier because everything after got worse.”
The pirate radio station flickered back to life between hills, catching them mid-conversation with a song Riot didn’t recognize—something raw and aching about losing someone to distance and time. Cass turned toward it, and for a moment both of them just listened.
Then Cass asked: “Do you think Honey will still know me?”
The question hung in the car like smoke.
“Then we figure it out,” Riot said. “But we don’t leave her there.”
“But if she’s happy—”
“Cass.” He waited until Cass looked at him. “If someone drugs you into loving the person they picked out for you—if they rewrite your brain until you can’t remember wanting anything else—is that happiness? Or is it just... not being able to feel the cage anymore?”
“I don’t know,” Cass whispered. “I really don’t know.”
“Neither do I.” Riot’s hands were tight on the wheel. “But I know that real happiness doesn’t need a corporation to maintain it. And I know that you love her. And I know that love doesn’t need an algorithm.”
Cass was quiet for a long time.
“Riot?”
“Yeah?”
“I think she’d like you. Honey. I think she’d think you were—” He searched for the word. “Unexpected.”
“Is that good?”
“The best things usually are.”
The pirate station played another song. Riot drove.
And somewhere in the back of his mind, the Brennan part that remembered studying human attachment patterns noted, with something like wonder, that Cass had just offered him the highest compliment in his vocabulary: a place in the family he was trying to save.
It started around hour three.
Riot might have missed it if he hadn’t spent the last several days memorizing the language of Cass’s body. If he hadn’t learned to read the small translations—the shift in posture, the slight change in breathing—that telegraphed what Cass’s words worked so hard to hide.
It was subtle. A degree of sweetness, maybe two, where there had been a comfortable baseline. Like someone had turned up the dial on caramel and cinnamon from “pleasant” to “distracting” and was inching toward “devastating.”
Cass kept talking. He was asking about the water tower they’d passed—how tall it was, who had built it, whether people just had water whenever they wanted before the corporations—and his voice was steady. Normal. Fine.
But he was sweating. Not heat-of-the-day sweating, which would have made sense given the car’s ventilation system had opinions about working. This was a fine sheen across his forehead and the hollow of his throat that appeared despite the fact that he kept angling the air vent at his face.
And he was shifting. Little adjustments in the passenger seat that he probably thought were invisible—pressing his thighs together, then catching himself, then pressing them together again. Adjusting the waistband of the too-big pants. Crossing and uncrossing his legs.
“—and the water just came out of the tower whenever they needed it? Without someone deciding how much they deserved?”
“Yeah,” Riot said. “It was called municipal infrastructure. Local government managed it.”
“What’s local government?”
“People who lived in a place decided together how to run it. Elected leaders from their own community.”
“Like Granny Lu, but they chose her?”
“Basically.”
“That seems nice.” Cass adjusted the air vent again. Away from his face this time. Then back. Then away. “I’m a little warm. Is it warm in here?”
“It’s about sixty-five degrees.”
“Maybe it’s the jacket.” He didn’t take the jacket off.
Ten minutes later, Cass stopped mid-sentence—he’d been talking about a bird he’d seen, a wild bird, not the decorative ones in Springfield Gardens’ controlled aviary—and went rigid. His eyes went wide. His hand slammed down on the edge of the seat and gripped.
The scent hit Riot like a wall.
Sweet. Hot. Unmistakable. The sharp spike of slick production cutting through the baseline caramel like a blade through silk.
Fuck.
Cass recovered in about two seconds, which was genuinely impressive. He smoothed his expression into something approximating normal, unclenched his hand from the seat, and shifted his weight with studied casualness.
“I think my butt fell asleep,” he said. “From sitting. I should probably move around at some point.”
Riot, whose mouth had flooded with saliva so fast he had to swallow twice before he could speak: “Sure. We can stop and stretch whenever you want.”
“I’m fine, though. It’s just the sitting.”
“Of course.”
More silence. The car bounced over potholes. The pirate station had faded to static miles ago.
Cass was gripping his own thighs under the jacket, fingers pressing into muscle.
Riot could see the tension in his forearms. Could smell the heat building under his skin—not the full roar of before, not the crisis that had driven them both to floors and stairwells and Lilac’s destroyed living room.
But the beginning of it. The ember before the fire.
The heat didn’t break. It napped. Like Cass. And now it’s waking up, and we’re in the middle of the Static Zone with one Null scout and a car that leaks in creek crossings and I have absolutely no plan for this.
Something is wrong with us, Riot thought, for what felt like the hundredth time.
Something started that night in the alley and we don’t know what it is and the only people who seemed to understand were back at the Collective doing their best impression of a Greek chorus—ominous, unhelpful, and deeply committed to dramatic timing.
The walkie crackled. “Found a campsite. Abandoned farmstead, two miles ahead. Defensible. Water source nearby. We should stop for the night.”
“Copy,” Riot said. “Two miles.”
He looked at Cass. Cass was staring straight ahead, arms wrapped around his middle, jaw set. The sweat was visible now—a line of it tracing down his temple, his breathing shallow and careful, each inhale measured, like he was trying to take up as little space as possible.
“You don’t have to hide from me,” Riot said quietly.
Cass’s composure cracked, just a fraction, with a tightening around his eyes, a hitch in the careful breathing. “I’m fine.”
“I know you are.”
“I just need to move around. It’s the sitting—”
“Cass.”
Cass closed his eyes. His throat moved as he swallowed. When he opened them again, they were bright with frustration or shame or both.
“It’s not fair,” he said. His voice was small. “I wanted today. I wanted to just be a person in a car. I wanted to ask you questions and listen to music and learn about water towers and be normal. I wanted one day where my body wasn’t this. I just wanted one day.”
“You had it,” Riot said. “You had a whole day. The music and the questions and the mud on your feet and all of it. That happened. That was real.” He nodded at Cass’s clenched hands, his careful breathing, his body fighting its own biology. “This doesn’t cancel that out.”
Cass looked at him with those devastating wide eyes. “You promise?”
“Promise.”
Cass’s hand crept across the center console and found his.
Then he started humming a song from the pirate station, off-key, barely audible, and he seemed to hold onto the melody like a lifeline while his body burned and the road stretched out ahead of them, dark and broken and full of things that used to be.