41. Seekers Wait Outside
Chapter forty-one
Seekers Wait Outside
Riot
The door closed and Riot stood on the other side of it in the warmth of the evening air, surrounded by the scent of a well tended herb garden and he couldn’t breathe.
They spent time together. They cleaned the bathroom, showered, washed their clothes, and ate the modest snacks in the house and just laid on the bed together.
Cass tried to put braids in Riot’s hair, but apparently it was “too clean” and the braids wouldn’t hold.
Riot let Cass talk about the things he wanted to plant when they got back to the Collective and how he wondered if Granny Lu would still hate him.
Riot savored every moment and almost managed to convince himself that staying in that bed, staring at Cass napping, meant time had stopped. It hadn’t.
Matthias arrived at the house after night fell with a leather case and a warm smile, looked Riot dead in the eye, and said, “The seeker should wait outside.”
Cass looked at Riot, just once, with a look that said I know and I’m sorry and trust me and please go all compressed into a single second of eye contact. Then he turned away and opened the door to the bedroom and Matthias followed him in and the door closed.
And now Riot stood in the herb garden with the rosemary Honey hated and he couldn’t fucking breathe.
He paced. The front path—eight steps to the gate, eight steps back.
The sandals were wrong for pacing. Too loose.
Slapping against his heels on every turn.
He kicked them off and walked barefoot on the cold flagstones, because the cold was something to feel that wasn’t the other thing he was feeling.
He heard Cass make a sound. Small. Controlled. The sound of his body registering pain put a pressure on Riot’s right hip. Not from outside—from inside.
That’s not mine. That’s—
But it was in his body, so it was his.
It was about then he stopped pacing. He could break down the door. It looked like everything in Springfield Gardens had been pre-fabricated and shipped in, probably from SVI territory, and SVI wasn’t really known for its excellent structural integrity. It would be easy.
But the look Cass gave him…
He walked through the little patch of grass in front of the house, closer to a cracked window that he knew would carry the sounds from inside better, and his legs decided in that moment it was a good time to not work.
He just sat there in the grass, next to a cilantro plant that had begun to flower, and tried to focus on the smell of that instead of the scent of blood seeping from the window.
The crying came the same way, with his tear ducts just deciding to do that.
His chest heaved and the sound that came out of him was—Christ—it was the sound of a child.
Not a man. Not a Berserker. A child. The kind of crying that Brennan Loudon did when they’d strapped him to a table and injected something into his spine without anesthetic and he understood the thing they promised him was not the thing they were doing.
He couldn’t remember crying like that since.
He didn’t cry when he woke up, months into the Endeavor program, to find that his roommate had used the screws on the toilet lid to kill himself.
Not when more of them killed themselves after the incident with a Beta researcher who got too close.
Not when Gensyn declared them deceased. He didn’t cry in even the worst episodes, the ones where he came back to himself covered in someone else’s blood and couldn’t remember whose.
He was a weapon and weapons didn’t cry because weapons didn’t have the wiring for it.
But the wiring was back. Being around Cass somehow reconnected that ability in Riot and now that reconnection looked like a six-foot-eight Berserker sitting in an herb garden in Springfield Gardens, sobbing into his hands while someone carved circles into the man he loved.
Pathetic. You’re pathetic. At least a weapon can protect something. You can’t even do that. You’re sitting in the GRASS while he—
The burning in Riot’s chest shifted. A new circle. Lower. Along the ribs.
I’m feeling it. I’m feeling what Matthias is doing to him. I don’t know how and I don’t know why and it doesn’t MATTER because I can feel it and I’m sitting in the GRASS—
He cried hard enough that he had to muffle it against his own knees. The Berserker instincts screamed inside his skull, but the screaming had nowhere to go, because Cass said trust me and trust was the only thing keeping Riot’s hands out of Matthias’s throat.
Time passed. He didn’t know how much. The meditation bell rang.
The evening light shifted. The crying burned itself out the way a fire burned itself out, not resolved, just exhausted of fuel.
He sat in the grass with his face wet and his eyes swollen and hated himself so thoroughly he could pass a Gensyn corporate compliance survey.
Then he heard movement.
Not from inside the house. From the back. A rustle. A hushed voice.
All of the grief and the rage routed into the targeting system as his body shifted from collapsed man crying in the grass to threat response in under a second. He sprang to his feet and moved around the side of the house before the thought finished forming.
The back of the house had a small patio with more plants in planters, a stone bench, and a trellis with something flowering. And underneath that trellis, half-hidden by the flowering vine—
Sage and Honey.
He stopped.
Sage’s back was against the trellis, and her cream seeker robes were not where they should have been.
The collar was pulled open, the fabric pushed off one shoulder, and Honey’s hand was inside, the shape of her fingers visible through the thin cloth, moving against skin.
Honey matched the disheveled look of her own robes with all the careful composure of the morning completely dismantled.
Her other hand was at the back of Sage’s neck.
And Sage was smiling.
Riot had never seen Sage smile. Not once.
Not even when Granny Lu was going off on Prepper and said he was so stupid, he couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel.
Her face was built for flat assessment, controlled anger, and the occasional expression that meant she was rethinking her decision not to shoot someone.
The smile was…unsettling. Not because it was wrong. Because it was right. It was a real smile. Warm. Soft. It transformed her face into something Riot didn’t recognize and didn’t know how to feel about, because it was beautiful and wrong and happening at the worst possible time.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Both of them froze.
Honey’s hand came out of Sage’s robes. Sage’s smile vanished, replaced by the flat expression Riot knew, the default setting, just with a little extra color in her cheeks. The space between them was approximately zero inches and neither of them was moving to increase it.
“I convinced her,” Sage said as if she hadn’t just been caught with someone’s hand under her clothes. “She’s coming.”
“Is that what I interrupted?”
“I’ll come with you,” Honey said, straightening her robes and clearly missing Riot’s implication. “I’ll leave with you. Sage explained—about the Collective. About Granny Lu. About what we’d be going to.” She paused. “It might be worth it.”
Might be worth it. Might be worth it. Riot would have laughed if he could remember how, because five minutes ago he’d been sobbing in the grass..
“That’s great,” Riot said. His voice was low. Quiet. The kind of quiet that Sage knew well enough to take a step back from, but Honey didn’t. “That’s really great. I’m happy for both of you. While you’ve been out here doing this, Cass is inside being tortured.”
Not negative energy release. Not session. Not any of the words Springfield Gardens made up to keep the thing it was doing from looking like the thing it was.
Tortured.
Honey’s face fell the way a shelf falls when the bracket gives out. Everything that was sitting on it—the composure, the decision, the tentative joy— crashed to the floor at once.
“He’s having a release session,” Honey said. “He has them all the time, they’re—”
“A man is in your house right now carving circles into Cass’s skin, and he’s been doing it since Cass was sixteen.”
“That’s—” Honey’s voice was barely there. “That’s not—he can’t have—I would have seen—”
Honey’s hand went to her own mouth.
Through the wall, he could hear Cass’s voice.
Not a pain-sound. Words. Muffled through dry wall and wood but audible in the evening quiet, audible because the evening was still and the meditation bell had rung, and everyone in Springfield Gardens was where they were supposed to be except for the three people standing in a garden while something happened inside.
“Please let me go.”
The fear hit Riot’s body like a truck.
Not his fear. This was sharp and electric, flooding through his nervous system from a source ten feet away and three inches deep. His stomach lurched. His vision snapped to gold—full and angry whether he wanted it or not.
“I’m going in,” Riot said.
“We’re not supposed to—” Honey started.
“I don’t care what he said. Something’s wrong.
” He was already moving. His feet were bare and the grass was cold and the gold was pouring through his vision, turning the evening into a high-contrast targeting display.
“You can come with me or you can stay here. I’m not waiting for that man to finish what he’s doing because I don’t think what he’s doing is what Cass signed up for. ”
“His eyes,“ Honey gasped.
Riot didn’t stop walking.
“That’s normal,” Sage said. “Don’t worry about it and try not to be in front of him when he snaps.”
Riot put his hand on the door and looked back to see that Sage had a blade—Honey’s blade, pressed into her hand somewhere between the trellis and here. Honey looked terrified.
“On my count,” Riot said.
He didn’t count.
He put his shoulder to the door.