42. The Session
Chapter forty-two
The Session
Cass
It was almost over. Cass could tell because Brother Matthias had put the tool away and moved on to the bandaging, which was always the last part before the breathing.
The bandages went on his ribs and across his chest and over the places on his inner thighs where the newest circles were reopened, and Brother Matthias’s hands were gentle the way they always were during this part.
The gauze stuck to the ointment, which stuck to the wounds, which stuck to Cass, and the whole thing felt like being put back together by someone who had taken him apart on purpose.
He knelt on the mat in his underwear and tried to breathe the way he’d been taught. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The pain is negative energy leaving the body. The pain is space being made for divine light. If it hurts, that means it’s working.
He used to believe that. Not even that long ago—weeks, maybe.
Tonight the breathing hurt and the divine light wasn’t coming, and the room smelled like blood mixed with the dark smell underneath Brother Matthias’s robes that he’d noticed at breakfast and couldn’t stop noticing now.
He didn’t have a name for it. It was heavy and warm and made his head pulse behind his left eye.
“You’re doing beautifully,” Brother Matthias said. “I can feel the energy shifting already.”
Cass wiped his eyes. He was crying more than usual, which was saying something, because he always cried during sessions—the cutting hurt, and Brother Matthias said the tears were just the body letting go of what it didn’t need.
But tonight the crying started before the tool came out and it wasn’t really about the circles.
There was a sadness in his chest that wasn’t his.
It was a rock behind his ribs that throbbed with a heartbeat that wasn’t his heartbeat and tasted like strawberries sitting in salt water.
Riot was crying, and Cass felt it coming through the invisible thing between them.
He pressed his hands to each of his eyes and tried not to think about it.
He had to be the things he wasn’t for this all to work—strong and brave.
“The tears are heavy tonight,” Brother Matthias said.
“Yes, Brother Matthias.”
“Can you tell me what you’re feeling?”
“Sadness,” Cass said, which was true, but not the whole truth. “I’m sorry. Could I—can I seek comfort?”
“Of course, dear heart. Come here.”
He leaned forward and pressed his face into Brother Matthias’s robes.
They were soft, smelling like the laundry building and underneath that, the person who he looked up to.
The person who read him stories about the eagle who found transcendence and did the eagle’s voice, serious and deep, and then squeaky when the eagle was scared.
The person who came to his room when he couldn’t sleep and said you’re special, Cassiopeia when nobody else had a dad and Cass did, sort of.
Even now the robes still smelled like safety and Cass cried into them quietly, because the walls were thin, Riot was outside, and if Riot heard him crying, Riot might come through the wall.
Brother Matthias’s hand settled on his hair, his fingers moving along the braids, brushing back the strands that had come loose while Cass shook during the session.
The way he’d always done it. Cass’s breathing slowed.
His shoulders dropped. He let himself be held and comforted, because he was tired and this was the one part of the sessions that always felt okay.
“There,” Brother Matthias said. “Let it out.”
The finishing meditation was the last part. Facing each other on the mat, knees almost touching, Brother Matthias’s arms around him, breathing together until the negative energy was gone, and Cass could put his robes back on and go to bed.
“I was worried about you,” Brother Matthias said softly. “When you disappeared from the Neutral Zone…I thought I’d lost you, Cassiopeia.”
“I’m sorry.” The word came out before anything else, the way it always did.
“I—one of the people I was trying to recruit, a vendor, she didn’t want to listen, and she was connected with the professional bad people…
they told me to leave. I was walking back for a very long time and there were wild Berserkers on the road and—” He built the lie as he said it, each piece fitting the next.
Lying was easier the more he did it, but he didn’t like it.
“Riot and Sage were traveling through. They wanted to find transcendence.”
“And you brought them here. Two seekers—a Berserker and a Null. Do you understand how remarkable that is?”
Cass’s chest ached below the circles. Part of it was the guilt of lying to the person who taught him that lying was disharmonious, but also the real part underneath—the part that was sixteen somewhere inside him and always loved when Brother Matthias said I’m proud of you.
“I just don’t want—” His voice broke. “I don’t want to do Chrysalis again. Whatever didn’t work the first time…I don’t want Honey to have to go through it. So if the seekers are enough to—”
“Cassiopeia.” Brother Matthias’s arms tightened. “I need to tell you something. The Elders have been talking about your situation.”
Cass stopped breathing.
“With Honey. Your compatibility assessment was unusual from the start, and we think—” Brother Matthias’s hand settled on his lower back and rubbed gentle circles into his skin, which was a relief since Cass felt the residual edges of a heat cramp trying to build.
“We think the difficulty may not have been your failure, Cassiopeia. The pairing itself may have been incorrect.”
Not my failure.
Eight years. He’d been carrying this for eight years—the weight of being the person whose body wouldn’t cooperate, whose heart wouldn’t follow the algorithm, who was the first and only person to ever fail Chrysalis, because something inside him was broken so badly that not even the Elders could fix it…
and Brother Matthias was saying it wasn’t him.
“It wasn’t because of me?” His voice was very small.
“The algorithm made an error. The compatibility model matches members with members, peers with peers. But it doesn’t account for all possible pairings.” The hand on his back stopped moving. “It doesn’t account for pairing regular members with Elders.”
The hope that had been rising—enormous, bright, the biggest feeling he’d had in years within the walls of Springfield Gardens—dropped. All at once. Everything went cold, his arms and his legs and his fingers, like someone opened a window inside him and the warmth was pouring out.
He means himself. The thought was so simple and concrete that even Cass couldn’t misunderstand it.
Brother Matthias wants to be paired with me the way Honey is paired with me.
But I want Riot paired with me because that feels right…
Cass’s mind kept trying to put the idea somewhere and there was nowhere for it to go, like trying to fit a fork in a drawer that was only shaped for spoons.
“Someone who has guided you since childhood,” Brother Matthias said, gentle and certain. “Someone who knows your soul better than anyone.”
Cass thought about Riot.
Not on purpose—his mind just reached for the thing it needed and the thing it needed was Riot.
Even though they hadn’t known each other as long, everything about Riot felt right.
Riot knew his soul. Riot didn’t talk down to him.
Riot had never hurt him on purpose and he always apologized when he did it accidentally.
He thought about Riot’s gentle hands the last time he was like this, bleeding and in his undergarments, running through the hotel…
and then felt the all-too-familiar sensation of slick soaking through his undergarments.
“Cassiopeia.” Brother Matthias went still. His voice was different, still warm, but heavier, and Cass recognized the sound because it was the same kind of sound Riot’s voice made when his eyes would start to glow. “Did you experience your heat while you were away?”
“It—it might have—”
“Of course. That’s why the energy pathways are so damaged. Don’t worry. I know how to fix this,” Brother Matthias said. His hands resumed rubbing those gentle circles on his lower back, but they began to move, lower than before. The way Riot’s hands would move over his skin.
No. That’s….
“What are you doing?” Cass squeaked out. “That’s not—you don’t usually—”
He tried to pull back, but Brother Matthias’s arms held him tighter. “It’s all right. This is part of the release. The energy has settled deep—”
“No.” The word came from the same place that drove glass into a stranger’s arm at the roadblock, a strange animal part that felt like he was in danger despite knowing this should be a safe place. “No, this isn’t—stop, please let go of me.”
“Cassiopeia, the healing—”
“Please let go of me.”
The arms didn’t move. The voice stayed gentle: “I understand this is frightening. The contamination doesn’t want to be released. The resistance is the negative energy.”
He’d heard those words every session. Every time it hurt and he wanted it to stop and it didn’t, because the words made the hurt make sense. The pain is negative energy leaving. The fear is contamination. The hands on his body are helping. The man holding him loved him.
But Riot stopped. In the bathroom at Lilac’s house, when everything was too much—Cass said stop and Riot stopped, even when his eyes were gold and his body was stronger and the things inside him made it hard to stop. He stopped.
Brother Matthias wasn’t stopping.
The anger arrived without warning, bright and hot in his chest, and it was his.
Cass had never felt it before, not like this.
Not when he was being teased growing up, not when people were cruel and mean in the Neutral Zone, not when Granny Lu called him trash like he wasn’t standing right there.
He was fine with being known as slow, as being too dumb to be a proper Elysian, and needing things explained twice. Those things didn’t make him angry.
But Brother Matthias was doing something he shouldn’t be doing, and Cass asked him to stop, and he wasn’t stopping and it was making him really fucking angry.
“Stop!”
“Shhh, it’s okay, Cassiopeia, you can trust me,” Brother Matthias murmured, crushing Cass to his chest as his hands slipped below the waistband of his underwear.
This isn’t right.
Cass surged up and he bit down with everything he had, right on his cheek. Brother Matthias cried out, releasing Cass as he jerked backwards, a hand clamped over his face, blood running through his fingers.
“Don’t touch me!” Cass snapped, reaching for his robes as tears rolled down his cheeks. “Those parts of me are not for you!”
The warmth left Brother Matthias’s eyes like a switch being flipped, leaving a gaze that was cold and flat. “The contamination is deeper than I thought. We’ll need more intensive intervention—”
He reached for the leather case Cass always avoided looking at, because the tool came from it, and he’d never looked inside because he hated looking at the things that hurt him.
Cass was struggling to pull his robes on with the sling, his hands shaking, when he felt a sharp pain in his thigh.
He glanced down, taking a moment to stare at the spot where a needle was sticking out of him, and Brother Matthias’s thumb was pushing down on the plunger.
Warmth was already spreading up his leg into his hip.
Cass yanked it out as Brother Matthias stood, his hand still on his face, just looking down at him.
“What did you give me?” Cass felt the warmth spreading, moving up into his torso, replacing that cold feeling he had just had. His body knew this feeling from somewhere and the door in the back of his head was shaking.
“I’m not trying to hurt you—”
There was a terrible sound from the front of the house, like wood cracking, and then the bedroom door smashed open so hard the wall cracked.
Riot stood in the doorway, his eyes engulfed in gold light, worse than when he was standing in the road surrounded by pieces of people.
He was barefoot, his tunic torn, with his hands at his sides, open, like the hands of someone who hadn’t decided what to do yet and the deciding was about to happen fast.
This is bad. This is very bad.
“Don’t look at him,” Cass said quickly, his face feeling impossibly warm as a sob worked its way up his throat. “Look at me.”
Riot’s eyes snapped to him.
“I’m mad at him and I bit him,” Cass sobbed, still struggling with the robe. He gave up and threw it back to the ground. “I’m mad, Riot. I’m so fucking mad.”
Riot’s eyes dimmed a little and he took a step forward, opening his mouth, but before any words came out, Honey’s voice came from the hall, “Give me that.”
She came through the door, shoving Riot out of the way like she hadn’t stood in this room at the beginning of the day terrified of him, and she froze as her eyes moved over Cass’s body.
“Honey, don’t—” he began. He didn’t want her to see.
She crossed the room faster than Cass had ever seen her move and she kneed Brother Matthias in the groin, caught his shoulders as he hunched over, and threw him to the ground.
Before he could get up, she planted her foot on his chest, leaning forward on her knee as she pressed the blade from her hair against the soft skin beside his eye.
“Don’t move,” she snapped, sounding nothing like the woman who arranged fruit by size. “Don’t. Move.”