Chapter 45
Chapter forty-five
Under the Garden Wall
Riot
Riot had questions.
He’d been carrying them the way he’d been carrying Cass—in his arms, against his chest, the weight of them pressing into his bones with every step.
They’d been forming since the living room.
Since Cass had cleaned the wound on Matthias’s face, asking about bedtime stories and accepting every answer.
The questions were ugly. The answers would be uglier. And the man who had the answers was shuffling along the tunnel a few feet ahead of him.
“Was this always the plan?” Riot asked, keeping his tone conversational as they continued into the dark. “Even when he was small? The stories, the tutoring, the sessions…was that always building toward what you did?”
Matthias’s chin lifted and he glanced back, his pace slowing. He had the fucking gaul to look offended. “Everything I’ve done for Cassiopeia has been in service of his spiritual development. His sensitivity required—”
The blade went into Matthias’s arm.
It was precise and controlled, the thin blade sliding into the meat of his upper arm the way a needle went into fabric.
An inch. Maybe two. Sage’s face looked carved from stone as she wiped off the blood on the back of his robes.
Honey yelped, taking a step back before nodding to herself, as though she were convincing herself this was normal and fine.
Matthias screamed like someone who had spent decades administering pain and had no framework for receiving it.
“Answer him,” Sage said. Her voice was thick, not as flat as it usually was.
She was cracking. Something about being here, maybe it was Honey, or maybe Cass’s rambling as the drugs swept him under, had broken the stoic mask she wore.
“Answer him honestly or I’ll find somewhere less convenient to put this. ”
Matthias looked at the wound on his arm with an expression of pure bewilderment, as if his body had betrayed him by being capable of bleeding.
“Was this always the plan?” Riot asked again.
Matthias’s breathing was ragged. His composure was trying to reassemble—Riot could see it happening, his shoulders trying to stiffen, his neck rolling, but he hunched anyway.
“I joined Elysian young,” Matthias said. The words came out uneven. “From SVI territory. I was sixteen. I learned the practices quickly, faster than anyone in my intake. They made me a spiritual guide before I was twenty.”
He swallowed audibly.
“Guides aren’t permitted partners. No sacred bonds.
It’s the commitment—your guidance has to be undivided.
When I became an Elder, the rules were..
. less clear. It was a gray area that nobody had a written policy for because no one had asked.
” He dropped his shoulders. “I knew I would never have a family. That was the trade. But I could mentor. I could guide. I could have that much.”
“And Cass,” Riot said.
“He was different. From the beginning. The other children responded to the standard developmental programs—the guided meditations, the group exercises. Cassiopeia couldn’t process them, he took everything too literally.
The metaphors didn’t land the way they were supposed to.
He’d sit in group meditation and ask why the light wasn’t actually warm if it was supposed to be warm.
” He paused, and there was something tender in his voice as he said it.
Riot was glad he couldn’t see Matthias’s face, because he was certain he would have put his fist through it and it would not have taken much effort.
“He needed someone who would explain things differently. Slowly. Personally. I volunteered because nobody else had the patience.”
“And it started as just that?” Riot pressed. “Not something else?”
“Of course that’s how it started…I was just filling a gap I knew I would live with.
He was a child who would never have a father and I was a young man who would never have a son.
” Matthias’s voice was quiet. Not the contemplative quiet—the human quiet.
“I didn’t mean for it to become something else. ”
“But it did.”
“I love him,” Matthias said.
Riot looked at the back of him for a long time.
The gold light on the white robes. The blood.
The scent of tears. This was a man who had taken a lonely child and filled his need for acceptance, then used the shape of that need as a doorway into something unforgivable, and now he was walking through the darkness with them and telling Riot it was love.
Break him. I want to break him into small pieces. One joint at a time.
“Honey,” Riot said. “Can you hold Cass? He’s light.”
“Get your shit together,” Sage snapped. She turned around and thrust the small blade in Riot’s direction. “Now is not the fucking time.”
“I’m together,” Riot said through his teeth, still staring at the back of Matthias’s head, wondering how much force it would take to yank on Matthias’s pony tail and rip his scalp from his skull. “I just need Honey to hold Cass while I—”
“No.” Sage stepped between him and Matthias. “Not now. Not here.”
“I wasn’t going to—”
“You were.”
Riot’s jaw locked. The gold was bright and the Berserker was offering its services with the casual persistence of a telemarketer and Sage was right. She was right and he hated that she was right and the questions he’d asked had gotten answers that were sitting in his chest like shrapnel.
“Fine,” he said.
The tunnel ended the way tunnels did, with the air getting less stale, the draft getting stronger, and the ceiling rising just enough that Riot could stop hunching over the passed out man in his arms like a gargoyle with a spinal condition.
It widened into a concrete antechamber with utility pipes along the walls, a junction box, and a heavy, steel door set into the concrete with the kind of industrial permanence that said this was built by people who expected to use it for a long time.
At shoulder height sat a small biometric black panel.
“Fingerprint,” Honey said. “Only Elders can open doors that lead outside the campus perimeter.”
Everyone looked at Matthias.
The bite wound on his face had stopped bleeding through the bandage, but the skin around it was more swollen than before.
He looked smaller than he had in the house.
Smaller than he had in the tunnel. The further they got from Springfield Gardens, the more the authority bled out of him, like a battery losing charge.
“Open the door,” Riot said.
Matthias looked at the biometric panel. At Riot.
At Cass, asleep in Riot’s arms. The calculation was still happening behind his eyes—diminished, running on fumes, but not gone.
“If I open this door, the system logs it,” he said.
“My biometric signature will be time-stamped. They’ll know which exit we used. ”
“They already know we’re in the tunnels,” Honey said. “Open the door.”
Matthias sighed as he pressed his thumb to the panel. The lock disengaged with a heavy clunk, and cool air flooded the antechamber—real air, night air, carrying the smell of grass and dirt and distance.
Sage pushed the door open to starlight and a narrow maintenance road, gravel, running along the outside of the campus wall.
The trees beyond it were real trees, not the manicured meditation gardens, nor the carefully maintained ones they saw on the way in from the northern entrance, but wild growth.
The wall of Springfield Gardens rose behind them, white and smooth.
Cass stirred and his eyes fluttered open and the look in them was the glazed, loose look of someone surfacing briefly before going back under. His hand found Riot’s tunic again and held on.
“Where?” he asked.
“Outside,” Riot said. “We’re out.”
“Oh.” Cass blinked. “Honey is safe?”
“I’m here, Cass. I’m safe,” Honey said gently. Her voice remained calm, but her eyes were huge, darting around like she expected something to pop out from one of the trees and grab her. Or maybe she was still processing the chaos of the night’s events. Cass just nodded and closed his eyes.
“The vehicles are five miles north,” Sage said. “Through the tree line, past the service road. Maybe ninety minutes on foot if we move fast.”
“Aren’t there wild Berserkers to worry about?” Honey asked.
“They’re handled,” Sage said simply.
Matthias walked with one arm still bleeding, seeping through the fabric of his robes, and when he spoke, his voice found some of the old steadiness. “Cassiopeia needs to be taken back. He needs to be monitored. The compound I administered—”
“The people coming after us in the tunnels,” Riot snapped, “are they going to keep coming?”
“They won’t stop looking for a missing Elder.”
“They’re not going to find an Elder.”
“Riot,” Cass squeaked, his voice small and muzzy. His eyes were open again—the half-mast look, swimming, but there was a window in them, a glimpse of lucidity breaking through the drug like sunlight through a crack.
“Hey, princess.” Riot adjusted his hold. “How are you feeling?”
“Floaty.” Cass blinked. His eyes found Riot’s face and stayed. “I want to go back to the Collective with you.”
“That’s where we’re going.”
“I know.” Cass’s eyebrows furrowed, then shot up, like he was trying to use the muscles in the top half of his face to keep his eyes from closing again. “Don’t hurt him.”
Riot went still.
“Please.” Cass shifted and pressed his face into Riot’s neck, scenting him. “I know…I know you want to. I can feel it through the—through the thing. The wire.”
“Cass—”
“Please, Brennan.” Cass’s lips moved against his neck as he kept scenting him, his nose running along one of the scars on Riot’s neck where Gensyn doctors tried to remove some of his modifications. “For me.”
No. No. I said later. It is later. He needs to die. He DESERVES to die. Of all the people I’ve ever killed, he deserves it the most. He doesn’t get to have another chance. He needs—
For me, Cass said.
Ten years of not being anyone’s for me. Ten years of being a rogue asset, a Berserker, an inconvenient survival problem that had outrun its corporate origin.
And this beautiful, kind person—this absolutely demolished, barely-conscious, drugged-out-of-his-mind man Riot loved with every piece of himself—was spending the thirty seconds of coherence the drug allowed to press his face into Riot’s neck and ask.
Not don’t. Not please stop. Not I’m scared of what you’ll do.
For me.
Like it was something Riot could give him. Like there was a version of Riot who had things left to give.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, princess. We’ll tie him up and let the guards find him.”
They used the sash from Matthias’s robes and the trunk of a birch tree twenty meters off the road. Sage did the tying, because if Riot did it, he would have intentionally dislocated both of the man’s arms in the process. She used the sash from her own robes and knotted a gag around his mouth.
Cass watched, bleary eyed in Riot’s arms, his gaze darting from Matthias on the ground to the wall of Springfield Gardens visible above the tree line. “I’m never going to see the fish again.”
“No,” Riot said, because lying about it would have been worse.
“I know it’s for the best.” He blinked away his tears. His voice was still thin and dreamy. “I love you. I love you so much…and I want to plant tomatoes.”
Riot’s chest did something complicated. “I love you too. And we’ll plant tomatoes.”
“Cherry ones. The small ones.”
“The small ones. Yeah.”
Cass’s eyes drifted to Matthias one more time, tied to the tree, and something crossed his face—grief, anger, love, and the ruins of all three.
Then the drug pulled him back under and his eyes went soft and his head settled against Riot’s shoulder again.
They started walking, letting the muffled protests of a man who didn’t deserve to live and the beautiful prison wall of Springfield Gardens fade with every step.
They were only two hundred meters away, maybe a little more, when Matthias’s voice cut through the night air. “Cassiopeia! Cassiopeia, you need to come back—it’s not safe—your soul is at risk of permanent harm—Cassiopeia, please —”
Cass stirred in Riot’s arms.
“Don’t listen,” Riot whispered, pressing another kiss to Cass’s forehead, as though he could soothe him back to sleep.
“Down,” he said, thick and slow, the word costing him. “I want—I can walk.”
Riot looked at Cass. His eyes were barely open, but Matthias was still yelling. He needed to do something about it. He gently set Cass down, waiting for Honey and Sage to brace him before he took a step back.
“I’m going to go fix the gag,” Riot said.
Sage looked at him.
“Just the gag,” he said. “That’s all. We need the time. If the safety guides hear him yelling—”
“Riot.” Sage glared at him for a moment, then turned to face the road. “We’re going to keep going. Just catch up when you’re done.”
He didn’t wait for her to possibly change her mind. He turned and walked back along the road, his strides long and quick, and behind him he heard Honey murmuring to Cass. They could handle him for a little bit.