Chapter 44
Chapter forty-four
Pray the Bad Weather Away
Riot
Riot survived years in the Static Zone, four corporate assassination attempts, a full berserker modification that the brochure described as “temporary discomfort,” and more fire fights than he could count.
He fought the best of the best from Gensyn and SVI with nothing but body armor and his gloves with his brothers.
He survived Lilac beating him with boots.
He had, at no point during any of these experiences, been unable to stop crying.
There was a first time for everything.
The gold made it worse. Everything through the gold was already turned up past eleven—colors louder, edges sharper, the world rendered in the kind of aggressive high-definition that made even moonlight feel like an interrogation.
Add tears and the whole thing smeared like a windshield in rain.
The lanterns became streaks. The white buildings bled at their edges.
The path ahead was a silver blur that he had to keep blinking clear every few seconds, which was not ideal when he was the muscle in a hostage situation pretending not to be a weapon of a man having a quiet emotional collapse behind the group.
He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Again.
The thing was—and this was the part that wouldn’t stop feeding the leak—the thing that had broken whatever valve had been keeping this contained wasn’t Cass’s questions. It wasn’t even Matthias’s answers. The thing that broke him was that Cass cleaned the blood off Matthias’s face.
The drug lowered every filter the princess had and what came out wasn’t rage or accusation or even understanding. It was kindness. Careful, practiced, automatic kindness aimed at the man who had spent a decade isolating him from everyone who might have noticed what was happening.
I just think it’s a lot of volunteering. For one person.
That thought tried to go somewhere…Riot watched the synapses try to fire, the understanding almost surfacing—and Cass had let it go.
It was as if, somewhere underneath the chemicals and the pain and the bullshit corporate brainwashing, Cass made a choice.
It was as if he understood, on some bone-deep level he couldn’t articulate, that if he followed that thought to where it was going, the world he would walk back into would be different.
Smaller. Meaner. Missing a father figure.
So Cass let it go, and Riot loved him for the mercy of it and hated everything that made the mercy necessary, and both of those things were true at the same time. The tears were apparently his body’s solution to a paradox it couldn’t resolve.
Cass leaned into him, more with every step.
His hand was still on Cass’s lower back and the ratio had shifted—ten minutes ago Cass had been walking and Riot had just been supporting him.
Now Riot was walking and Cass was a warm, swaying weight pressed against his side, feet still moving, his brain sending the signals, but the signals seemed like they were on a delay.
“I think I was a fish,” Cass said.
“I know, princess.” Riot wiped his eyes against his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” Cass whispered. “I think I need to sit down.”
Cass didn’t move. His body was standing, but his eyes were wrong, open, aimed roughly at Riot’s chest, tracking nothing. The recognition that had been fading was gone, leaving a body that was still running on the last set of instructions it received: stand, stay close, don’t fall.
“Cass. Can you hear me?”
Cass blinked. Slow. The blink of someone waking up in a room they don’t recognize. “Mm.”
“Princess. Look at me.”
Cass’s eyes drifted up, found his face, and stayed there, but in the way a boat stays at anchor—not by choice, just by the mechanics of having nowhere else to go.
“Hi,” Cass said, sweet and soft.
Oh, god.
This was worse than collapsing. This was worse than going limp. Cass was in there, somewhere, reduced to a pilot light, the barest flicker, and his body was still performing the version of himself that cooperated.
“Cassiopeia needs to be monitored while on that medication,” Matthias said from behind them. “The compound requires careful observation during the dissociative phase due to the risk of respiratory depression—”
“Observation by who?” Sage asked, dry as sand. “You?”
“I’m simply saying that as the only person here with medical knowledge of the compound—”
“You drugged him,” Sage said. “You don’t get to manage the side effects.”
“I was administering a therapeutic—”
“Stop talking.” That was Honey, not looking up from the keypad. Her voice flat and focused and carrying an edge that surprised even Riot. “Just stop.”
Matthias stopped.
Riot guided Cass to the greenhouse wall and he sat when directed—compliant, boneless, his limbs limp as he folded to the ground the way someone in deep sleep would.
He leaned against the glass, his head tilted up.
His lips moved, but his words were soft enough that Riot had to crouch down and lean in to hear him. “...you smell like the good thing...”
“What?”
“...the cordite and the other one... the strawberry one... even the cordite smells good now because it comes with you...”
Riot’s throat closed as he stroked Cass’s cheek; his skin was too hot. “Stay with me.”
“...m’here...”
“I know. I know you’re here.”
“Don’t be sad, Brennan,” Cass said those words clearly, as though Riot’s old name was stored in a different room than the rest of his language.
“I’m not sad,” Riot said, but his voice cracked and his eyes leaked and the comedy of the lie was not lost on him.
“Okay.” Cass smiled. Then the smile went somewhere else and Cass was looking through him.
“Got it,” Honey said. “Let’s go.”
The keypad beeped. Bright. The light turned green.
The greenhouse was warm, dark and smelled like soil and growing things and for a half second Riot understood why Cass loved it.
Then Honey was pulling up a hatch in the floor between two planting beds, and the smell from below was concrete, standing water, and old air, and the understanding passed.
Cass kept reaching for plants as they passed, with Riot needing to pull him closer so he wouldn’t wander off.
“I’ve never been down here,” Honey said, staring into the dark opening. “We’ve had the weather alarms go off, but we were always just told to join for a mass prayer and nothing ever—”
Riot looked at Matthias.
Matthias looked back. The pastoral mask was holding, patchy and cracked at the edges where the bite wound kept pulling beneath the bandage, but holding.
He looked like he knew what Riot was going to say, because Matthias was probably used to being the smartest person in most rooms and he’d already calculated that his value alive and cooperative was greater than his value silent.
“The main trunk runs east,” Matthias said. “Two hundred meters. There’s a junction. Take the right passage. It exits at the service road outside the walls.”
“If you’re lying…” Riot began.
“I’m not lying, and if you choose to leave now, I will remain silent on the matters that have happened this night. But Cassiopeia needs open air and medical attention and neither is available underground. It’s in my interest to—”
“Get him down the ladder,” Riot said to Sage.
Sage moved Matthias to the hatch. He went down awkwardly—hands tied in front of him, his balance wrong, She controlled his descent with a grip on his arm that wasn’t gentle and wasn’t trying to be. Honey followed.
Riot turned to Cass, who stood beside a planting bed, patting the dirt around what was undoubtedly a weed, swaying slightly. “Hey princess, we’re going down.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want a piggy back ride down?”
“No,” Cass hummed, his eyes landing on Riot with another gentle smile. “I can do it.”
Riot helped him to the ladder. Cass’s hands found the rungs and his feet found the steps. His body knew how to climb down a ladder even if the person inside the body was somewhere in the warm dark. Riot followed, one arm hovering behind him, ready to grab Cass by the robes if he needed to.
They reached the bottom.
The tunnel was somehow exactly what Riot expected and worse.
The ceiling was too low and forced him to stoop, the concrete walls sweated condensation, and there was an inch of standing water on the ground that smelled like mineral deposits and neglect.
The emergency lighting was nothing but bare bulbs, spaced too far apart, casting pools of yellow that left long stretches of dark between them.
“Can you walk?” Riot asked Cass.
“I can walk.” Cass took a step. His foot splashed. He took another step. The walking was wrong—too loose, the joints not quite locking, his balance corrections coming a half-beat late. “My legs feel weird.”
“Weird how?”
“Like jelly. The fruit kind. Wobbly.”
“Okay. I’m going to carry—”
“I can walk.” Even with his mind in another territory, Cass’s stubborn need to be seen as independent was load-bearing, like the last structural element standing. “I’m not—I can do it. Left foot. Right foot.”
“That is how you walk, generally.”
“Then I can do it.”
The spacing was practical between them as they moved: Matthias navigating, Sage controlling him, Honey in the middle where she could hear his directions and relay if needed, Riot and Cass bringing up the rear.
It was the familiar formation Riot knew of people who didn’t trust each other, moving through a space none of them wanted to be in.
“Right at the junction,” Matthias said.
Riot wanted to break his jaw. The desire was so clean and specific it was almost beautiful.
Just the angle of his fist and the angle of that jaw and the satisfying arithmetic of impact.
The Berserker impulses offered this thought the way a waiter offered a dessert menu: casually, as if it didn’t matter either way, but with the confident expectation of acceptance.
Not now. Later.