Chapter 43 #2
“When I was little. You came to my room and read me stories. Before sleep. Every night.” The memory was warm. One of the warm ones that lived in his heart alongside the ones that hurt. “I liked the one about the eagle who found transcendence. You did the voice.”
“Your spiritual sensitivity required more personal—”
“Because Honey said she had the recordings. The meditation ones. She didn’t have a person.”
“That’s true,” Honey said from behind them. Her voice sounded wrong, but Cass’s head also felt like it was being filled with water from his ears, so he let the thought go. “I had the recordings. All the communal children did.”
“I liked those stories.” Cass moved to a spot of blood near his ear. “And when I was twelve and the trans-send-dance lectures were too hard for me, you volunteered to tutor me in your quarters. Three times a week.”
“Your comprehension required individual—”
“You told me not to tell the other children. You said they might feel bad that they didn’t get a tutor.”
“You never told me that either,” Honey said, and her voice sounded sad this time.
“He said not to,” Cass said simply. “So I didn’t.”
The room was quiet except for the muffled sound of the bathroom pipe still spraying behind the closed door.
“And the spiritual guide thing. When I was sixteen. Elders don’t usually guide regular members. Honey’s guide was Sister Amara.”
“Your case was exceptional—”
“I liked being exceptional. I liked that someone thought I was special enough to come to my room and read me stories...” Cass paused as a thought tried to form.
It was a big one, with edges, pressing against the inside of his skull.
He let it go. It was too big. The drug smoothed it down and carried it away, and Cass let it go because the shape was something he couldn’t hold right now and keep walking at the same time.
“I just think it’s a lot of volunteering,” he said, dabbing at the blood one more time. “For one person.”
Riot’s arms wrapped around him from behind and gently pulled him back, and Cass went because his legs moved for him. Cass leaned against him, closing his eyes for just a second. He felt kind of like he was floating in a warm bath.
“We need to move,” Sage said. Her voice was thick. “Now.”
The night was beautiful.
Cass kept thinking that as they walked through Springfield Gardens in the moonlight, and the thinking bothered him, because it seemed like the wrong time to think about beauty.
But the light from the focusing lanterns was blurry and bright, making the stone paths look like silver rivers running between the white buildings.
It was beautiful. It was a lie. It was a beautiful lie he loved and he was leaving it forever and his skin felt very hot.
Brother Matthias walked between Sage and Honey. Sage had his right arm. Honey had the blade against his lower back, hidden under the drape of her robes. If anyone looked from a distance, it would look like five people walking together, perhaps heading to the infirmary. Normal.
Riot walked behind them with his hand on Cass’s lower back, supporting him.
Cass was fine, he knew that, but the ground kept feeling further away than it should be, and the walking required more attention than walking usually required, and he was leaning into Riot’s hand more than he wanted to admit.
“How do you feel?” Riot asked gently.
“Warm. Floaty. Like I’m watching myself walk from a little bit above.” He tried to explain it better because Riot’s face was doing the worried thing. “My body is doing what I tell it to do. But my thoughts are—they keep going soft. Like I’m thinking through cotton.”
“Is it getting worse?”
“Yes.”
Riot’s hand pressed firmer against his back.
They passed the reflection pools Cass had spent hours sitting beside as a child, watching the fish, practicing his breathing. He’d thought the fish were happy. Brother Matthias once helped him pick names for all the fish.
The fish are in a bowl. They just don’t know it’s a bowl because they’ve never seen the ocean.
The thought arrived clearly, fully formed, and then the drug wrapped around it and it went soft.
“I think I used to be a fish,” Cass said.
“I know, princess.” Riot looked at him with a sad smile.
“Not—I mean—the pool. The fish in the pool don’t know they’re in a bowl. Because they’ve never—” The words kept rearranging themselves. “I’m not making sense.”
“You’re making sense,” Riot said. “Keep walking.”
They rounded the corner past the meditation hall.
Cass could hear the voices inside, dozens of them, breathing in unison, the guided meditation humming through the walls like a living thing.
He’d been one of those voices. For twenty-four years, he’d sat in that room and breathed with those people and believed he was part of something larger than himself.
He blinked too long.
The herb garden smelled like thyme and sage. Real sage, the plant, not the person walking in front of him holding a man’s arm. Cass’s brain wanted to laugh at that—Sage in the sage garden—but the laugh came out as a small huff of air that made Riot look at him again.
“Still here,” Cass said.
“Stay with me.”
“I’m trying. It keeps —” His hands were tingling. Not numb—the opposite. Too alive. His fingertips were buzzing and his palms were hot and the robe fabric against his skin felt like a hundred tiny mouths breathing on him. He could feel every thread.
Then he blinked again and they were on the teaching path, halfway to the greenhouse, when a night safety guide stepped out of the shadows. They did that sometimes when Cass tried to get out of night meditation.
“Brother Matthias? Is everything all right? Your face is bandaged.”
“Brother Rath.” Brother Matthias’s voice came out almost normal. Almost. Cass could hear a slight thinness that could have been anything, really. “Yes, everything is fine. We’re taking this seeker to the infirmary. He had an episode during evening counseling.”
Brother Rath looked at Riot, then at Cass, his hand drifting up to fiddle with the gold pin at his collar. “Berserker episode?”
“A small one,” Honey said, stepping forward. Her voice was the voice of the welcoming advisor she’d been for three years. “I was assisting with his spiritual assessment when it happened. Brother Matthias thinks the infirmary should evaluate before morning.”
Brother Rath’s eyes moved to Cass.
Cass leaned against Riot, and he tried to stand straighter. Tried to make his face look normal. His face didn’t want to cooperate.
“Is Brother Cassiopeia all right?” Brother Rath asked. “He looks—”
“Exhausted,” Brother Matthias said, and his voice had that quality that made Cass’s stomach ache.
It was a voice that said I shouldn’t have to explain this to you and it always hurt.
“The seeker’s episode was distressing, and you know how sensitive Brother Cassiopeia is.
He’s been sitting with our extraordinary new seeker for hours to help calm his earthly aggression.
The seeker needs evaluation, and Brother Cassiopeia needs rest, and we’d like to get both of those things done before the third bell, I’m sure you understand. ”
Brother Rath straightened and nodded. “Of course.”
Cass blinked again and then they were further along the teaching path.
The ground was further away than before and the walking was becoming a thing he had to think about—left foot, right foot, don’t lean, don’t fall, keep moving.
Riot’s hand was still on his back, but the hand was doing more work now, and Cass was doing less, and the balance between those two things was shifting in a direction that scared him.
“I’m okay,” he said. He wasn’t sure if he’d said it out loud or just thought it.
“I know,” Riot said. So he must have said it.
The greenhouse appeared at the end of the teaching path like a glass ship in the moonlight.
Large. Curved roof. The panels catching the light and throwing it back in soft fragments.
Inside, Cass could see the shapes of plants that had grown in the absence of care.
No one had used that greenhouse in years, but it seemed the plants in it had thought about the neglect and chosen life anyway.
He was never going to smell this greenhouse again.
The thought hurt. The drug tried to take the hurt away and Cass held onto it.
He wanted to keep this one. He wanted to remember that leaving hurt, because that place had been real and he had good times here.
Not everything had been bad. He had his best friend.
His little blue house. His mission to the Neutral Zone…
even if it started because of a failure that left a weird door in his mind, that was how he met Riot.
Not everything was bad.
Honey moved to the side door. A keypad. Green numbers glowing in the dark. Her fingers were fast—she knew the code the way she knew her own name, without thinking, the numbers living in her hands.
She punched in the sequence.
The light turned red.
Honey stared at it. Punched the code again. Red.
“The code changed,” she said.
“When?” Sage asked.
“I don’t know. It was correct two weeks ago.”
“Can you—”
“I need a minute.” Honey’s fingers were hovering over the keypad. “The rotation follows the lunar calendar. Current cycle, minus the day offset, plus the master sequence—”
Cass’s vision went soft, like someone had put gauze over the world.
He could still see the greenhouse and the keypad and the moonlight on the glass, but it was all very far away.
And very quiet. And very warm. He was leaving, his mind was pulling back from the surface of things, sinking into the warm, soft place the drug had been building.
Like falling asleep, except he was standing up.
“I’m sorry,” he said from very far away. “I think I need to sit down.”
Riot’s words were becoming shapes now, not sounds. Pretty shapes. Warm shapes.
Honey’s fingers on the keypad. Moving. Fast. The green numbers reflected in the glass.
The greenhouse. Dirt. Growing things.
He hoped the rosemary would be okay without him again.
The warmth took him and Cass went somewhere else.