32. Spiritual Language
Chapter thirty-two
Spiritual Language
Riot
Something was different about the morning.
Riot couldn’t place it at first. He woke to stone walls and oak beams and the gray half-light of dawn filtering through the cellar’s narrow ground-level window, and the unfamiliarity of the setting was the only wrong thing.
Then Cass shifted against him, his face pressed into his chest, one leg thrown over Riot’s hip— and the details of the previous night flooded back with the subtlety of a car crash.
He’d expected the flood to bring panic. Guilt. The crushing weight of what did I do?
It didn’t come.
That was the different thing.
He lay very still, cataloguing. The Berserker instinct was quiet, but not the chemical quiet of suppressants—that familiar fog that sat between him and his own impulses like a pane of dirty glass.
This was something else. The Berserker was there, fully present, alert, but it wasn’t sending up the endless loop of take him, keep him, mine, finish what you started that had been the background hum of every waking moment since the alley in the Neutral Zone.
It was... settled. Like a dog that had been circling for hours and finally found the right spot and laid down.
That’s new. That’s very new and I don’t like it.
Except that wasn’t true either. He did like it. That was the problem. He liked it the way he liked breathing after holding his breath—automatic, necessary, and deeply suspicious because nothing that felt this good had ever not been a trap.
The wound on his neck throbbed.
He reached up carefully, trying not to wake Cass, and touched it. The bite was hot under his fingers, and when he pressed it, his whole body responded—a pulse of warmth that started at the bite and radiated outward through his chest, his spine, his hands.
He pressed it again. The warmth spread and settled into his bones.
Stop touching it.
He touched it again.
Cass made a sound in his sleep. Not distress—something small and content, the kind of noise that implied good dreams. His face nuzzled deeper into Riot’s chest, and Riot felt something happen that he had no framework for: a mirrored contentment, like a pressure in his chest that mapped exactly onto the relaxation of Cass’s body, as though Cass’s comfort was leaking through some channel that hadn’t existed twelve hours ago.
That’s also very new. That’s also something I should probably be concerned about.
He catalogued it alongside the settled impulses and the wound that felt like home and filed the entire collection under Things That Are Wrong With Me: Chapter Whatever, I’ve Lost Count.
The cellar smelled like them. Both of them, together, in a way that Riot’s nose recognized as different from what either of them smelled like alone.
His own baseline and cordite was still there, but threaded through it—woven into it, like someone had taken two separate fabrics and stitched them into one—was something warm and golden and unmistakably Cass.
As if the bite had pushed Cass’s scent into his own bloodstream and his body was pumping it out through his skin.
I smell like both of us.
He didn’t know what that meant. He didn’t have a reference point, a name, a section in any guide he’d ever read. What he had, right now, in this cellar, was a sleeping man pressed against his chest and the unfamiliar experience of peace.
He decided, for once, to not ruin it by thinking too hard.
Cass stirred. Shifted. Made another of those small sounds that Riot was rapidly collecting alongside the different sounds—the distress ones, the pleasure ones, the I’m-trying-to-hide-something ones.
This was a new category: the I’m comfortable and waking up slowly and the world hasn’t ruined this yet sound.
Then Cass smiled. Before his eyes opened. His mouth curved against Riot’s chest and he smiled, and the warmth that spread through Riot’s body had nothing to do with the bite wound and everything to do with the fact that this was the first time he’d seen Cass begin to wake without a furrowed brow.
“Hi,” Cass murmured.
“Hi.”
Cass opened his eyes and blinked at the stone walls, the dawn light, down at the sleeping bag they’d destroyed. He glanced down at himself and Riot, both of them still naked and turned pink.
“That happened,” he said.
“That happened.”
“All of it.”
“All of it.”
Cass pressed his face into Riot’s chest and made a sound that was partially a laugh and partially mortification. “I’m just going to be a person who is here in this cellar and not think about—”
“‘Oh heavens oh fuck oh heavens’.”
Cass’s fist connected with his chest with zero force behind it. “You’re terrible.”
“We established this.”
Cass tried to sit up and his whole body stiffened, wincing with a sharp inhale through his teeth, his weight settling wrong and his face tightening in a way that told Riot exactly how sore he was. He moved carefully to one side, then the other.
“Ow,” Cass said.
“Yeah.”
“Ow.”
Riot’s jaw locked. “I was too rough with you.”
Cass paused mid-wince and looked at him.
“In the morning light,” Riot said. He sat up, running a hand through his hair. Not looking at Cass. “In the morning light, some of the things I—said. Did. Are you—?”
Cass was quiet for a moment as his fingers found the bite mark on his own shoulder—Riot’s bite, the one that had preceded everything else.
He touched it. Then reached across and touched the wound on Riot.
His touch was gentle, careful, and when his fingertips grazed the raw edges, Riot felt that pulse again—warmth, spreading, and with it a flicker of something that didn’t belong to him.
Tenderness. Curiosity. The emotional equivalent of Cass tilting his head.
“I’m okay,” Cass said with a small smile.
Riot’s mouth twitched. “We should get moving.”
Sage was waiting at the top of the cellar steps.
She’d been up for at least an hour, from the look of it—her pack was loaded, the jeep’s engine was idling, and she had the blank expression of someone who had formed opinions she was keeping to herself.
Her rifle was slung across her back, her hair scraped into a knot, and she was holding two tin cups of something that steamed in the morning air.
“Coffee,” she said, handing them over. “Before you ask—no, it’s terrible. Instant crystals.”
Riot took a sip. She was right. It tasted like someone had described coffee to a person who’d never had it and they’d done their best.
“Thank you,” Cass said, wrapping both hands around his cup like it was precious.
Sage looked at Riot’s neck. “Rough night?”
“Define rough.”
“The kind where you both look like you lost a fight with each other and are somehow happy about it.”
Cass blushed so hard Riot felt it—a sudden flare of warmth across his own cheekbones that had nothing to do with the expired coffee. He touched his face. That was... that was Cass’s embarrassment, registering in his body.
What the actual fuck.
“We should talk about the route,” Sage said, apparently deciding she’d pushed enough. “Springfield Gardens is maybe four, five hours if the roads hold. They won’t hold, so call it six to eight.”
“Any choke points?” Riot asked, because choke points were a safer topic than the fact that he was apparently experiencing someone else’s emotional states through his face.
“Three. Two bridge crossings and a stretch through Berserker territory south of the old Route 36.” Sage’s voice went flatter. “That last stretch is the problem. Wild packs have been expanding their territory all spring. Lilac’s intel was three months old.”
“We’ll deal with it,” Riot said.
The road south was worse than yesterday.
Yesterday had been craters and abandoned vehicles and the occasional overgrown intersection that required creative navigation.
Today was active decay—a stretch of highway where the asphalt had buckled into a series of ridges and troughs, the result of fifty years of freeze-thaw cycles without a maintenance crew.
Riot navigated by memory and instinct, taking the dirt shoulders when the road surface became impossible.
The walkie crackled. “Southern bridge is intact. Barely. One lane. I’m crossing first to test weight.”
“Copy.”
They watched Sage’s jeep inch across a concrete bridge that looked like it was being held together by optimism and moss. The jeep made it. Riot followed and the sedan handled the crossing with slightly less dignity.
“Can I hold your jacket?” Cass asked.
Riot’s flannel was balled up between the seats. Cass pulled it into his lap before Riot answered, pressing his face into the collar and breathing deep. When he came up, some of the tension in his shoulders had eased.
“It helps,” Cass said, not apologizing for it. “Your scent.”
“I know.”
They drove in silence for a while. Riot’s hands were tight on the wheel.
The landscape was getting less familiar—he’d taken this route twice before, years ago, but the Static Zone rearranged itself constantly.
Roads washed out, overpasses collapsed, new obstacles materialized.
Every mile south was a mile closer to Elysian territory and a mile further from the Collective and every instinct he had—Berserker and otherwise—was displeased.
He was taking Cass back to the place that had tortured him. Back to the man behind the door. And the plan, such as it was, required Riot to walk through the front gates and smile about it.
This is insane. This entire thing is insane. We are going to walk into a corporate cult that owns an entire city and pretend I want to be there and hope nobody notices the Berserker sweating through his spiritual vocabulary.
“You’re gripping the wheel hard,” Cass observed.
Riot loosened his hands. Marginally.
“Riot.” Cass shifted to face him, tucking one leg underneath him. “We should talk about how to act when we get there. You need to know some things about how people talk inside.”
“Okay.”