Chapter 44 #2
They took the right passage. The ceiling got lower.
Riot stooped further, his spine complaining, the top of his head brushing concrete.
The water was deeper here—past his ankles, cold enough to feel even through the general numbness of sustained crisis.
The bulbs were fewer and the darkness between them was longer.
Behind them—far behind, echoing and distorted— there was a sound. The tunnel carried something from its other end that could have been anything and Riot’s mods chose to interpret it as everything.
“Move faster,” he said.
“What—”
“Faster.”
Honey moved faster. Sage pushed Matthias forward. Cass—
Cass moved faster in the way a marionette moved faster when the strings were pulled harder. His legs tried, but he stumbled and Riot caught him by the arm.
“I can walk.”
“I know you can.”
“My legs are just—” Cass started.
“I know.”
“Don’t carry me.”
“I’m not carrying you. You’re walking. I’m just holding your arm,” Riot assured him.
“That’s different?”
“Completely different. Nothing alike. You’re doing all the work.”
“Okay.” Cass nodded a few more times than necessary, then paused. “...my legs really do feel like jelly.”
“I believe you.”
“The fruit kind. Like when Honey makes it and it’s set, but not all the way and it wobbles when you touch the—”
He went down.
Not a stumble this time. A full stop. His legs simply opted out of the enterprise, folding under him like furniture that had quietly decided to become something other than furniture. Riot caught him before he fully hit the dirty water and held him.
“Oh,” Cass said, blinking at the ceiling.
“I’m going to carry you now.” Riot placed an arm under Cass’s knees.
“...okay.”
Riot picked him up. The weight of him was nothing; even without the Berserker modifications, carrying Cass should have been nothing.
Three hundred pounds of wet concrete would also have been nothing.
But the man in his arms felt heavier than physics accounted for, because Riot was carrying everything Cass had ever survived and none of it weighed what it should.
Behind them, there was the sound again. Closer.
Voices, maybe. The acoustic distortion of the tunnel turned it into something unrecognizable—it could have been two people, or ten.
It could have been the safety guides that Brother Rath definitely radioed after watching a gold-eyed Berserker “escort” a drugged Omega past the meditation hall under the supervision of an Elder who looked like he’d been mauled.
Because of course Rath wasn’t fooled. Nobody who looked at that tableau and had a functioning brain stem would have been fooled. Subtle, this operation is not.
“Left here,” Matthias said.
They went left and the tunnel narrowed enough that both of Riot’s shoulders brushed the walls and he hunched further. He curled around Cass, making himself smaller—which was not a thing his body was designed to do and his spine was going to have opinions about later.
Dead end.
The tunnel terminated in a concrete wall. Pipes. A junction box. No door. No hatch. Nothing.
“You said left,” Riot growled, feeling that familiar twitch in his muscles to do something about his growing rage.
“I—the layout may have changed since—”
“The layout may have—” Riot glared at him. The gold reflected off the wet walls and Matthias’s face went white in its light. “You’re navigating from memory?”
“The maintenance infrastructure isn’t something I use regularly—”
“We trusted you to lead us out and you’re guessing?”
“I’m not guessing, I’m reconstructing based on architectural records I reviewed—”
“Honey.” Riot’s voice was controlled the way a leash was controlled—holding something back, purpose-built. “Is there another way?”
Honey was staring at the dead end, her hand on her hip. “The junction. Fifty meters back. There was a branch we passed—I saw a smaller passage. It might loop to the east trunk.”
There were still sounds behind them, even closer and unmistakably voices now. Echoing, multiplied by the concrete, and impossible to count.
“Then we go back.” Riot nodded.
They went back. The fifty meters felt like five hundred.
The water splashing with each step, the tunnel amplifying the sound, announcing their position to anyone listening.
Riot’s gold was doing the thing where it tracked everything—the tunnel behind, the tunnel ahead, the man in front of him, the princess in his arms, the voices getting closer, the math of how fast sound traveled through concrete versus how fast people traveled through water.
The secondary passage was there. Smaller. Darker. No bulbs.
“This way,” Honey said, and went in first, which was either brave or desperate, and at this point the distinction was academic.
The darkness would have been complete if not for the glow of Riot’s eyes, and he did his best to keep them focused ahead of them and not constantly scanning so they would know where they were going.
What kind of military tech did Elysian Dynamics run on their campuses?
The disguised communication pins were already impressive.
Did they carry guns? Stun weapons? Riot had no idea.
He really should have asked Dante for more details… .
“...you smell really good,” Cass said into his neck.
Riot adjusted his grip and kept moving. “Thank you.”
“Even the cordite part. It smells good because it comes with you.” A pause. Splash, splash from Riot’s feet. “I feel sick.”
“Sick how?”
“Spinny. Mmm, last time I was this nauseous, you made sure I didn’t throw up on the fruit outside the healing rooms,” Cass said. “I used to like those rooms…I don’t like them anymore.”
Riot’s arms tightened around Cass as he felt a strange sensation wash over him, like a radio signal through static under his skin, but it was just a sensation. The ghost of nausea that wasn’t his. The ghost of a smell, like a room that had been cleaned with too many chemicals.
“Everything’s too white in there,” Cass murmured. “And it smells like being sick. The smell gets in your robes and you can’t wash it out and then you smell like it for days and every time you smell it your—”
He stopped. Drifted. Came back.
“—lower back hurts.”
Riot felt it.
Pressure, low on his spine. Not pain exactly, more like the ghost of a hand pressing down on his lower back, but it wasn’t his lower back, and it wasn’t his memory and the rattling—
There was no rattling in his head like last time.
It felt like something terrible was creaking open.
I am going to kill him.
The thought was clean, and it did not belong to the Berserker.
The Berserker part of him wanted something messier that involved a prolonged duration and the wet sounds of things breaking.
This was Riot’s thought. Brennan’s thought.
I am going to kill him. I am going to do it with my bare hands and it will not take long.
Matthias was fifteen feet ahead, shuffling through the water. Close enough.
The weight in Riot’s arms shifted as Cass’s hand found the fabric of Riot’s tunic and held on. “I don’t like my hair in a ponytail anymore,” he mumbled. “It makes my head hurt. It pulls. I used to like it, but now when someone puts it up I feel—”
He didn’t finish, letting the sentence dissolve, but Riot felt it—a new ghost of a hand tying his hair back as the creaking became louder, making his eardrums rumble.
“Hey.” Riot’s voice came out rough. “Princess.”
“Mm.”
“Tell me what you want to plant. When we get back to the Collective.”
“...what?”
“I’m going to find a place just for you to plant things. What do you want to plant first?” Riot asked, pressing a kiss to Cass’s forehead.
The silence lasted long enough that Riot thought he’d fallen asleep, but then Cass whispered, “...tomatoes...”
Riot smiled, not bothering to wipe his eyes as his vision blurred again. “Yeah? What kind?”
“...the little ones. Cherry tomatoes. They grow fast and they’re sweet…you can eat them right off the vine...”
“What else?”
“...and lavender because it smells nice and the bees like it and I like bees...” He was getting quieter, the words spacing out. “...and sunflowers… they all face the same direction… looks like…watching something...”
“What are they watching?” Riot asked.
Silence.
“...everything...”
And then Cass’s breathing changed. His grip on Riot’s tunic went slack and the weight of Cass settled in his arms. He was finally asleep.
Not the drug’s blank compliance—real sleep, the body’s last defense, pulling him under where the drugs and bad memories couldn’t reach. Riot just held him and walked.
The tears were back. Or maybe they never stopped.
They came and came and his body did what it needed to do, and the two things happened simultaneously.
He could cry and carry. He could love someone so much it was rearranging his internal organs and also be a weapon moving through a tunnel with extremely good situational awareness.
People were complicated. Berserkers more so.
The voices behind them had faded. The secondary passage had taken them off the main route, away from whoever was following. The air was different—less stale, the faintest draft against his face that meant an opening somewhere ahead.
“I feel a draft,” Honey said from the dark.
“I feel it too.”
“There’s something ahead. A junction. I think—”
She stopped. The tunnel terminated in another junction—three passages branching off into black. No signage. No markers. No helpful THIS WAY TO FREEDOM painted on the walls by a thoughtful maintenance worker.
“Matthias,” Riot said.
Matthias was silent.
“The east service road,” Riot said. “Which passage.”
“I don’t—”
“You have three seconds to know.”
“Center,” Matthias said. “The center passage trends upward. Upward means exit.”
“Then you go first,” Riot said, knowing exactly what he looked like with just his eyes glowing in the dark. “And if it’s another dead end, you don’t get to go back.”