Chapter 43
Chapter forty-three
Reflecting Pools
Cass
“I’m okay,” Cass said, but his tongue felt thick. “Riot, I’m okay. We need to—”
Riot took in a deep breath, and without a word, moved to Cass and lifted him off the ground, one arm under his knees, one behind his back, pulling him against his chest. Cass’s shoulder protested and the movement opened two of the circles on his ribs.
“You don’t touch him again,” Riot growled, looking down at Cass when he said it, but the words were for Brother Matthias. “You don’t touch him. You don’t look at him. You don’t say his name.”
He carried Cass to the bathroom, kicked the door shut behind them with his heel, and set him down gently on the lid of the toilet seat.
His hands stayed on Cass’s waist for a moment, as though he were making sure he was steady, or maybe just not ready to let go—and then he stepped back and looked at him.
Cass watched him look. Riot’s eyes moved over every bandage, like if he could name and count every wound he could hold himself responsible for the precise total. His face was very still, which Cass knew meant underneath it, things were not still at all.
“There was a needle on the ground. Did he—” Riot stopped, cleared his throat, then started again. “What did it feel like?”
“Warm.” Cass pressed his hand flat against his own sternum, trying to feel where the warmth ended and he began, but the edges were harder to find than they should be.
“It’s making everything warm. My hands feel—” He looked at his hands.
They looked like his hands, but they felt like they belonged to someone else.
“Heavy. We need to leave, right now. Someone will have heard—”
“I know.” Riot turned toward the door. “I’m going to get your robes—”
Cass felt it before Riot’s hand reached the handle—the wire between them pulled suddenly taut, vibrating at a frequency that wasn’t sound. Gold and hot and dark. It wanted, and the wanting wasn’t for anything that could be taken back.
“Riot.”
“Just robes.”
“Riot, don’t.”
Riot’s hand was on the door handle. He still hadn’t turned around.
Cass tried to find the wire on purpose, reaching for the strange connection the way he’d reach for something in the dark. Please. Please turn around. Please stay.
He didn’t know if it worked. He didn’t know how any of it worked. He only knew that a breath later, Riot’s knuckles had gone white on the door handle and he did not open it.
“Please don’t leave,” Cass said softly.
Riot slammed a fist into the sink. The sound was enormous in the small bathroom: porcelain cracking, the basin splitting, a pipe bursting somewhere inside the wall.
Cold water erupted from whatever broke, spraying across the tile, hitting the mirror, soaking everything as more of the sink fell to the floor and shattered.
Cass flinched. The whole body kind where his shoulders came up, his head ducked, and his hand came up in a reflex that said loud noise, someone angry, anger is dangerous.
Water hit his face and he was flinching from something the man he loved did, and the anger was still in his chest where Cass discovered it earlier, sitting right next to his fear the way all his emotions sat: side by side, refusing to be separated, all insisting on being true at the same time.
Riot turned, eyes blazing, but not with the flatness this time.
Cass was learning which gold meant what. There was the gold that was hunger, and the gold that was protection, and the gold that was the flat kind that didn’t know who Cass was anymore.
And there was this gold. A new one. The one that looked like light spilling in from behind a door that didn’t quite fit its frame.
“Brennan,” Cass said it the way he’d said it to the mask at the roadblock, because Riot was the modifications and the mask and the claws, but Brennan was the person who came back. He knew that then, somehow. He knew it more now. “Brennan. I’m scared.”
Riot’s face fell.
“I’m scared,” Cass said, his lower lip quivering, “and there’s something in me from the needle and I don’t know what it is. It’s making it hard to—I need you to stay. I need—” He made himself slow down. He needed to get this right while he still could. “I need you. The part that’s still in there.”
He looked at Riot, blinking away his tears so he could see him clearly.
“I’m not scared of your eyes like this…I need you to know that.
That part—it’s a you that’s having a hard time, but it’s still you.
The part that scares me is when there’s no one in it.
When it’s just—” He tried to find the word, but the creeping warmth was making his words move through honey.
“When it’s flat. I can’t—” His voice cracked.
He let it. “I can’t do whatever comes next if the part I love isn’t here. ”
Riot didn’t move. The water kept spraying. The broken pipe hissed.
Then his shoulders dropped.
Riot crossed the bathroom and pulled Cass against his chest, careful of the sling and his bandages, and just held him.
Riot’s heart pounded against Cass’s ear—fast, hard, the heartbeat of someone who had just walked himself back from a place he might not have returned from.
Cass pressed his face into the wet fabric of Riot’s tunic to muffle another sob that snuck out of his mouth.
“I’m here,” Riot said into Cass’s hair. “I’m here. I’m not going out there without you.”
“Promise me.”
Riot made a sound, not quite a laugh, not quite a sob—it was both of those and neither. “I promise.”
There were three even, measured, knocks at the door, like the person knocking knew the two people on the other side of the door were in the middle of something and didn’t care because there was a timeline.
“It’s me.” Sage cracked open the door, her arm appearing just enough to drop Cass’s robes and underclothes. “You have about four minutes before someone comes to see why the plumbing is screaming. Get dressed. We’re moving.”
She shut the door a little too hard.
“Your eyes are still gold,” Cass said after a moment, tracing the hollow beneath Riot’s eye with his finger.
“I know.”
“They might not go green before we have to run.”
“I know.”
“I don’t care what color they are,” Cass said. “I need you to know that. I don’t care if they’re gold the whole way out. I just don’t want them flat and blank, okay? The blank is the part that leaves.”
“The blank is the part that leaves,” Riot repeated softly, like it was the first time anyone had made that distinction. He pressed his forehead against Cass’s, his eyes closed. “Okay. Okay. Let’s get you dressed. Let’s go.”
Cass tried to stand, but his legs only half cooperated. Riot’s arms were there before Cass’s knees hit the tile, pulling him upright. “I’m fine,” he insisted.
“You’re not fine.”
“The room is just…moving. A little.”
“I know.”
“I can walk.”
“I know you can.” Riot didn’t let go.
The drug was doing something to his skin. Everything felt close and soft, like the air had thickened into a thing he could lean against and his head was wrapped in a foam that wanted him to be calm, still and quiet. He didn’t want to be calm, he wanted to keep the anger.
You can have it later, he told himself. You can be angry later. Right now you have to walk.
That was okay. He knew how to bleed and walk at the same time. He’d been doing it for years.
The room was different than he’d left it.
Brother Matthias was sitting on the ground, his hands behind his back, tied with strips of fabric that Cass recognized as the sash from his spare robes.
Sage stood behind him and Honey crouched on the ground, the blade still in her hand, her robes disheveled.
and her face set in an expression Cass had never seen on her before.
Sage’s eyes moved over Cass, at the poorly tied robes and the way he was leaning against Riot’s side, the way his eyes were probably doing something strange because the room kept going slightly soft at the edges.
“I can walk,” Cass said preemptively. “Everything’s warm and a little slow but I can walk. I’m not—I’m not going to be a problem.”
“You’re not a problem,” Honey said, her voice sharp, like the idea of Cass being a problem was the most offensive thing anyone said all night. She looked to Sage. “We need to get to the inclement weather shelters. They’re tunnels under a greenhouse that we use for when tornado weather pops up.”
“How far?”
“Seventeen minutes if we walk normally. Fourteen if we move fast. The greenhouse is east of the meditation hall, past the reflection pools, through the herb garden, along the teaching path.” She paused.
“Night meditation is in progress. Everyone is in the main hall until the third bell. That gives us—”
A bell rang.
“That’s the first bell,” Honey said. “Twenty minutes to the second. Fifteen more to the third. After the third bell, people start moving.”
“So roughly thirty-five minutes to get across campus,” Sage said as she pulled Brother Matthias to his feet.
He stumbled—his balance was off with his hands tied, and the wound on his cheek where Cass bit him was still bleeding, running down his jaw, dripping onto his white robes.
He looked smaller than Cass remembered. Not just without the calm expression—without everything.
Without the height and the warmth and the certainty.
He was now just a man with blood on his face and his hands tied behind his back.
Cass walked over to him.”Cass,” Riot said behind him, but Cass was already there.
He pulled his sleeve over his hand and pressed the fabric against Brother Matthias’s cheek, dabbing at the blood.
Gently. Because dried blood pulled and cracked and itched, and Cass knew how that felt better than almost anyone.
“I’m sorry I bit you,” Cass said softly, and he meant it. His teeth had gone deep enough that the wound would scar. “Did you read the other children stories? At bedtime?”
Brother Matthias blinked. “What?”