35. White Robes
Chapter thirty-five
White Robes
Riot
The bathing room had been designed to absorb sound the way a mouth absorbs a scream.
Two stalls, open at the top, separated by a waist-high partition that provided the illusion of privacy without any of the substance.
Water that came from recessed fixtures in the wall—no showerheads to adjust, no temperature controls to fiddle with, just a steady cascade at exactly the right warmth, because Elysian had opinions about what the right warmth was and those opinions were not negotiable.
Soap that smelled like nothing, or like the expensive ghost of something floral, engineered to cleanse without leaving a scent signature.
Everything calibrated. Everything intentional.
Brother Matthias did not leave.
He positioned himself near the entrance—not watching, exactly. Not not watching, either.
Riot stripped with his back to the room in the stall, which made him feel like a bear trying to undress in a telephone booth, stepped under the water and let it hit his shoulders and he did not think about the fact that Cass was three feet away, separated by a marble partition, naked and wet and being supervised by a man who…
He thought about ceiling panels instead.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five marble tiles in the ceiling. Grout lines at regular intervals. No surveillance visible but that means nothing—Elysian Dynamics probably hides their cameras the way other corporations hide their bodies. Six. Seven…
“Brother Cassiopeia, your hair.” Matthias’s voice carried easily in the marble acoustics, warm and solicitous and landing on Riot’s skin like something with legs. “It’s quite tangled from your journey. Would you like me to wash it for you? I know how difficult it can be with your shoulder—”
Riot’s hand found the marble partition and squeezed so hard he was surprised he didn’t crack it.
“Thank you, Brother Matthias, but I’ve learned to manage on my own. During my mission, I had to... I became more capable.”
There was a beat of silence, like the slight hitch in a room’s energy as a man accustomed to total access encountered a boundary where none had existed before.
“Of course,” Matthias said. “Independence is a sign of spiritual growth. I’m proud of you.”
I’m proud of you. The words were a key turning in a lock—Riot could hear Cass respond to them physically, a small shift in his breathing that meant the praise landed where it was designed to land. Somewhere deep and hungry and conditioned to need exactly this.
Riot closed his eyes and counted tiles he could no longer see as he washed blood out of his hair with soap that smelled like someone’s idea of purity and thought about how many bones were in the human hand and how they would feel separating under his fingers.
Faster. Wash. Get dressed. Don’t leave him alone with—
But Cass was already finishing. Riot heard the water stop on the other side of the partition, heard the careful sounds of someone drying off one-handed, the small frustrated noise that meant the sling was wet and needed adjusting.
“I’ll have Sister Maeve bring robes to the dressing chambers,” Matthias said.
Riot turned and saw him helping Cass in a bathrobe, carefully smoothing the material down on his chest to cover his scars.
“Cassiopeia, you know the way. I’ll escort our seeker since we need to find something that fits his. ..proportions.”
They were separated at the corridor junction.
Cass went left, toward the dressing chambers, a quick look over his good shoulder that carried something Riot couldn’t parse.
Reassurance? Apology? A check to make sure Riot was still there.
Then he was gone, and Riot was there, dripping wet and holding a towel around his waist, alone with Brother Matthias for the first time
The storage room where they found clothes was small, lined with shelves of folded white fabric, and lit by the same soft, directionless glow that seemed to emanate from Elysian’s walls like the building itself was trying to be reassuring.
Matthias moved through the shelves, pulling garments and holding them up against Riot’s frame like a dog handler sizing a collar.
“We don’t often receive seekers of your build,” Matthias said, discarding a tunic that would have fit comfortably on someone a foot shorter.
“Our community tends toward more... moderate physical expression.” He found a linen tunic in cream—not white, which apparently mattered—and held it against Riot’s chest. “This should work. The pants may need to be let out, but for now...”
Simple clothes. A tunic that pulled slightly across the shoulders but fit well enough.
Loose linen pants. Leather sandals that Matthias produced from a lower shelf and that fit, improbably, as though someone had measured Riot’s feet while he was unconscious.
Which, Riot reflected, they probably had.
No pockets. No belt. Nothing that could conceal a weapon or hold supplies. Even the sandals are backless and I can’t run in these without losing them. This is soft containment.
“There,” Matthias said. “Not our traditional robes, but it suits you. The simplicity is appropriate for a seeker in the early stages of transcendence.”
Riot stood still and let himself be looked at. The performance of submission cost him: he could feel it in his jaw, in the tendons of his neck, in the deliberate unclenching of hands that wanted to become fists.
“I want to ask you something.” Matthias settled onto a bench with the posture of a man accustomed to having conversations that went exactly the way he wanted them to. “About the state in which you found Cassiopeia.”
Here it is.
Riot leaned against the opposite wall. He wanted the height advantage, forcing Matthias to look up.
It was a small thing, petty even. But the physics of intimidation were one of the few languages Riot still spoke fluently, and he would take every inch this man conceded without knowing he’d conceded it.
“What do you want to know?”
“You said wild Berserkers had him at a roadblock. That you intervened.” Matthias’s fingers laced together in his lap. ”When you found him…how much had they…?”
The question sat in the air between them.
Riot turned it over, examined its architecture, and found exactly what he’d expected: nothing clinical or protective.
This was not a mentor trying to assess a student’s trauma for treatment purposes.
This was either a man trying to determine who else touched his property, or a man collecting details the way some people collected photographs.
Both options made Riot want to take the bench Matthias was sitting on and introduce it to his skull.
“My concern was threat elimination,” Riot said. His voice came out flat, professional—the cadence of a field report, stripped of everything human. “Multiple hostiles, one civilian in danger. I wasn’t cataloguing his condition. I was putting down the men who had him.”
“Of course.” Matthias nodded. “But afterward, did he say anything about what they’d done? Was he—”
“He was scared.” Riot cut him off, and the sharpness of it was deliberate—a bluntness that Matthias could read as damaged social skills rather than controlled fury. “Hurt. Disoriented. I didn’t press for details. Didn’t seem like the kind thing to do.”
“No,” Matthias agreed softly. “No, it wouldn’t have been.” He was watching Riot with an expression of gentle approval that made Riot’s skin want to leave his body. “You showed remarkable restraint. Compassion, even. For someone carrying so much violence inside them.”
You don’t know what violence looks like. But you will.
“I’ve had practice controlling it.”
Matthias tilted his head in a small, precise motion that managed to communicate both curiosity and authority. “Riot,” he said, testing the word like a sommelier with a new vintage. “That’s an unusual name. Is it your birth name, or—”
“Code name.” Riot crossed his arms. “I was a corporate experiment, along with a bunch of other idiots who volunteered. Those of us who survived only use our code names now.”
“And why were you given this particular name?”
The question was asked lightly, like asking someone about a nickname at a dinner party.
Riot recognized the technique: give the subject space to share, let the warmth of the conversation do the work of extraction.
Gensyn used the same method in their interrogation manuals, just without the weird soap and marble floors.
He considered lying, but Matthias was watching him with something behind the warmth that Riot couldn’t quite place. Not suspicion, exactly. Recognition, maybe. The faintest edge of a man trying to remember where he’d seen a face before.
The uncertainty decided it. If Matthias suspected Riot was hiding things, he’d dig. It was better to offer a truth that was ugly enough to satisfy the appetite for disclosure and disturbing enough to reinforce the seeker narrative.
“I earned it,” Riot said. “Early in the program. When the first round of modifications started going wrong and the subjects started realizing what had been done to them, I was the one who snapped first. I started tearing apart the containment wing. Others followed.”
“You started a riot,” Matthias said.
“We started with a cohort of around twenty. By the time they sedated us, we were fifteen.” Riot’s voice was very steady, but his insides felt like they were wobbling.
He didn’t like talking about the early days, not even with his fellow survivors.
“Two more killed themselves within the week when they realized the modifications were permanent and the program was going to continue regardless.”
Matthias listened with his whole body, leaning forward slightly.