36. Harmonic Design #2
Riot’s vision went gold at the edges. Every muscle in his body locked simultaneously, every fiber of him dedicated to the singular purpose of not reaching across Cass’s shaking body and breaking every bone in Matthias’s hands.
Ceiling panels. Count them. One. Two. Three.
“Perhaps,” Matthias said, his voice soft with concern, his hands still in Cass’s hair, “a session in one of the healing rooms would help settle your energy? We could—”
“No.” Cass gasped, clutching the basket against his chest like a shield. “No healing rooms. I just need to rest. Please. I just—I need to lie down.”
“Of course. Rest is the foundation of recovery.” Matthias’s hands released Cass’s hair slowly, the strands slipping through his fingers one by one.
He stood, and for one second—one fraction of a second, a window so brief that Riot would have missed it if he hadn’t been watching with the cold, predatory focus of a beast that had identified its kill and was simply waiting for conditions to change—Matthias’s nostrils flared.
Slightly. A subtle widening, the involuntary response of someone processing olfactory information.
He can smell it. Through the processed air, he caught whatever Cass’s body is doing now that it wasn’t before he left.
Then it was gone. The mask settled back into place so smoothly it might never have slipped. Matthias extended a hand to help Cass stand—a hand that Cass took, because Cass trusted him, because Cass had always trusted him and the alternative was a door he couldn’t open.
Riot stood. His legs worked. His face was calm. His hands were open at his sides and they were not shaking and they were not curled into fists and they were not wrapped around anyone’s throat.
Riot followed them, stepping over the scattered oranges and figs without looking down. He kept his hands open and his eyes on the back of Cass’s head, where the braids were mussed from Matthias’s grip. One small crystal bead had come loose and was hanging by a thread.
I am not going to make it.
The thought was clear and calm and absolutely certain.
I am not going to make it through the plan.
I am not going to find Honey first. I am not going to wait for the right moment.
I am going to kill this man, and it’s going to happen sooner than it should, and it’s going to ruin everything, and I’m going to do it anyway because there is a limit to what I can watch and I have reached it.
The corridor opened outside to a residential path with crushed white stone bordered by low hedges, winding between small houses painted in soft colors.
Each one was identical in footprint but differentiated by a palette that someone had clearly spent too much time selecting: sage green, pale yellow, dusty rose.
The kind of variety that felt curated rather than chosen, like being allowed to pick their own flavor of the same medicine.
“Brother Cassiopeia, you should rest,” Matthias said as they walked, his hand at the small of Cass’s back. “Your body has been through significant trauma, and forcing spiritual productivity before you’ve recovered would be counterproductive.”
“Yes, Brother Matthias.”
“Sister Honey should be occupied for the evening—she’s been assigned to lead the welcoming ceremony for the female seeker you brought in.
” He said it casually, the way someone might mention a coworker’s schedule, but Riot caught the architecture of it: Honey was accounted for.
Located. Under observation. Not available for an unmonitored reunion with the person who’d crossed the Static Zone to find her.
“She’s been using your assigned home in your absence,” Matthias continued. “Even on days she wouldn’t typically be there. I think your departure was harder on her than she admitted.”
“That’s—I’m glad she had somewhere comfortable,” Cass said with a sniffle.
“She’ll be delighted to see you in the morning. Both of you have been through so much.”
The path curved, and the houses thinned from clusters to pairs to singles, each with a small plot of garden space and a front step just wide enough for two people to sit.
The one Matthias stopped in front of was robin’s-egg blue—a color so gentle it barely registered as color at all, more like the idea of blue.
The herb garden flanking the front step was dense and well-tended, even in Cass’s absence—rosemary, basil, lavender, thyme, all within some approved botanical list but arranged with a care that spoke of someone who loved the growing more than the rules.
Honey’s been tending them. Keeping the house alive while she waited for him to come home.
“Now,” Matthias said, turning to Riot. “We haven’t assigned housing for you yet. Seeker accommodations are typically in a dormitory, but given your condition and the recommendation to keep you with your spiritual advisor during the initial period—”
“He can stay with me.” Cass said it too quickly, like he’d been waiting for the opening and was afraid it would close. “I don’t mind sleeping on the couch. The bed will fit his frame better than the dormitory cots, and it makes sense to keep the spiritual advisory relationship consistent.”
Matthias considered this. The evaluation took less than two seconds but contained, Riot suspected, more calculation than most people managed in an hour.
“That seems wise,” he said. “Continuity of spiritual guidance will aid the transition.”
He reached into his robe and produced a small brass key, which he handed to Cass with a gesture that managed to be both generous and proprietary—I’m giving you access to your own home. Cass took it. His fingers closed around it.
“I’ve been granted permission to give you both a twenty-four-hour reprieve before formal intake begins,” Matthias continued.
“Given the severity of your injuries, the council agreed that forcing protocol before you’ve recovered would be counterproductive.
Rest tonight. Eat. Let the gardens do their work on your spirit.
” He smiled. “We’ll begin properly after that. ”
The smile was warm. The offer was generous. Everything about the moment felt like grace.
Then Matthias leaned close to Cass and his lips moved. The words were too quiet for Riot to catch—just the sibilant edges of consonants, the shape of a sentence without its content.
Fear hit Riot’s body like a car. It was marrow-deep, an animal kind of fear that lived beneath thought and reason and every coping mechanism he had.
It flooded his chest, his stomach, his legs.
His hands went cold and his vision sharpened to a point with Cass’s face at its center, and what he saw there confirmed what his body already knew.
The color left Cass’s skin as if the blood itself had decided to retreat from his surface, to hide somewhere deeper and safer.
His eyes went wide for one uncontrolled second, the hazel bright with something raw, before the mask came down.
The Elysian mask. The one that smiled when smiling was required and held its shape through anything.
“I understand,” Cass said. His voice was perfectly, impossibly steady, and Riot knew what that particular steadiness cost because he’d heard it in his own voice every time he’d reported for Endeavor procedures knowing what was coming and choosing to walk through the door anyway. “Thank you, Brother Matthias.”
Matthias straightened. “Rest well, both of you.”
Riot watched him go and Cass hadn’t moved.
He was standing in front of the robin-blue house with the brass key in his hand and an expression that was trying very hard to be fine and was failing in ways that only someone who knew him—who knew him, who had held him on bathroom floors and kissed his forehead while he shook—would recognize.
“Cass.”
“It’s nothing.”
The lie was so thin Riot could see light through it. But pressing now, here, in the open where any robed figure on an evening walk could overhear—that wasn’t the move. The move was getting inside. Getting behind a door that locked and getting Cass somewhere he could stop performing.
“Okay…are you going to show me the house?”
Cass looked at the key in his hand, then at the door, then, briefly, at Riot, and nodded.
He opened the door the same way he had opened that hotel room door, stepping to the side, one hand on the frame, the other gesturing inward with a grace that was either courtesy or conditioning or both.
The same motion, the same angle of his body, the same implicit offering: this is what I have, and you’re welcome to it.
Except the hotel room had been a borrowed box with institutional furniture and someone else’s stains on the ceiling. This was Cass’s home. His and Honey’s—the space an algorithm had assigned them, the place where they were supposed to become the partnership Elysian had designed them to be.
Riot looked at Cass standing in the doorway of his own home with the color still gone from his face and Matthias’s whispered words sitting behind his eyes like something with teeth, and he stepped through.