35. White Robes #2
“There were attempts to fix us. They wanted wild Berserker abilities they could turn off. They never figured out the off switch.” Riot continued, because he’d committed to the telling and stopping now would look like concealment.
“They kept modifying us. Some subjects died—some from the procedures, some from each other. Two killed each other fighting over who got to—” He stopped.
Recalibrated. “Eventually there were four of us left. The decision was made that we were too unstable to be useful, too expensive to maintain, and too visible to eliminate cleanly. They altered our records to show us as deceased, removed what they could, and turned us loose.”
The silence afterward was thick and deliberate, the silence of someone processing information and deciding how to deploy it.
“The suffering you’ve endured,” Matthias said finally with that rich, cultivated warmth. “It’s extraordinary. The violence, the loss of control, the shame. These are all manifestations of profound spiritual damage, but they’re not irreversible. None of it is irreversible.”
He means that. Or he believes he means it. Or he believes I need to believe he means it. The layers go down so far I can’t find the bottom.
“Everything you’ve described—the rage, the episodes, the loss of self—these are spiritual defects that can be corrected.
With guidance and time and with the right mentor.
” Matthias rose from the bench, smoothing his robes with hands that had never been scarred by anything.
“You’ve already taken the most important step.
You found Cassiopeia, and Cassiopeia brought you here.
That’s not coincidence. That’s convergence. ”
He placed his hand on Riot’s shoulder like someone accustomed to putting hands on people and having it received as a gift. Riot held himself still and definitely did not think about the specific mechanics of how to remove a hand from a wrist.
“Thank you for protecting him. He is very dear to me. And for that, you have my gratitude and my commitment to your healing.” Matthias gave Riot’s shoulder a small, paternal squeeze before he released it. “Now, let us go find your spiritual advisor.”
They found Cass in a small anteroom off the main corridor, standing in a column of late afternoon light.
He wore all white robes, nothing like the greens and browns he wore in the Neutral Zone.
They were close-fitting through the torso and flowed around him in endless layers that made his movements look like liquid.
He wore no golden trim or adornments on the robes denoting rank.
Just white, pure and unbroken, like the uniform of someone who belonged so completely to this place that decoration was unnecessary.
His left arm was still in its sling, the white fabric of the robes accommodating it in a way that looked as though the outfit had been altered on the fly to account for the injury. Someone had taken the time.
But it was his hair that stopped Riot in the doorway.
Four thin braids framed his face in fine, intricate plaits that started at his hairline and hung to his jaw, each one weighted with tiny clay beads and chips of crystal that caught the light and scattered it.
The rest of his hair was pulled back from his face and gathered at the nape—away from his eyes, away from his cheekbones, revealing the full architecture of a face that always seemed partially obstructed.
He was beautiful. He was so beautiful it registered as a physical event in Riot’s body, lurching his heart sideways, making his breath catch in a way he couldn’t disguise as his feet stopped moving.
And he was diminished.
Riot couldn’t have explained it if someone asked.
The proportions were the same. The hazel eyes, the honey-blond hair, the graceful build, all of it was identical to the person who kissed a snarling mouth and whispered Brennan, please come back.
But something essential had been subtracted.
The robes did seem to pull his shoulders in, or maybe they curved his spine into a gentler arc, and made him smaller in a way that had nothing to do with height and everything to do with permission.
It was as if the fabric itself was a set of instructions of how much space he was allowed to occupy.
Outside of this place—in a borrowed tank top and bare feet, covered in blood and glass, or crying on bathroom floors and running through hallways and biting down on Riot’s throat—Cass had been more.
Not confident, not always, not by any measure that would show up on a survey.
He’d been uncertain and frightened and overwhelmed and desperately out of his depth, but even at his lowest, even sobbing on Lilac’s porch convinced he ruined everything with his ‘negative energy’, there had been something inside him that stood upright.
Some core of stubbornness or instinct or sheer refusal to be less than he was.
The robes crushed it.
Riot stood in the doorway and looked at the most beautiful, most diminished version of Cass he had ever seen, and he felt two things at once with equal and devastating force: I want to look at your face forever and I want to burn every white robe in this building.
Cass looked up.
Their eyes met, and the feeling passed between them in the space below language, in the place where the bite mark on his neck hummed warm and the inexplicable pressure in his chest became, for one moment, as legible as text on a page.
Cass’s lips parted slightly and his brow creased—not in confusion, exactly, but more like someone hearing a sound they couldn’t identify but recognized anyway. His eyes searched Riot’s face, and whatever he found there made his chin lift a fraction of an inch.
Then Brother Matthias stepped forward, and the moment broke.