Chapter 47
Chapter forty-seven
Prairie Null Lights
Cass
His arms were fighting something warm and solid that held him still, and the fear was everywhere—in his chest, his legs, and his hands—and he didn’t know what he was afraid of, but his body knew and his body was fighting.
“Cass. Hey. Princess. You’re okay.” Riot’s voice cut through the fear not by being loud, but by being the right voice.
Cass’s arms stopped pushing. His eyes opened to too much light and not enough sense, and for a few seconds, everything was just shapes with the feeling of being held.
He was in Riot’s lap, which was a lot of lap, curled sideways across the Berserker with his legs bent and his bad arm cradled between their bodies.
“Did I hit you?” Cass asked. His mouth tasted terrible, like he’d been sleeping with it open for a long time, and his head felt like someone had filled it with wet sand.
“Not really.” Riot brushed Cass’s hair back from his forehead.
“‘Not really’ doesn’t mean no—”
“You hit the window. And my chin, a little. And the window again.” Riot grinned. “You’ve got a decent left hook for an Omega.”
“I hit you in the chin?“ Cass tried to jolt up, but Riot’s hand pressed gently on his chest. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—are you hurt? Let me see—”
“Cass.” Riot pressed a little harder. “I’m a Berserker. Your fist is the size of a tangerine. I promise you I’m fine.”
“But I—”
“You’re forgiven. For the devastating tangerine assault. I may never recover.”
Cass’s eyes kept adjusting. The soft edges of the world sharpened and the light outside the windows was the orange-pink of evening.
Sage was driving, her hands on the wheel, and she didn’t turn her head, but Cass saw her hands tighten on the wheel when she heard him talking.
Honey sat in the passenger seat, half-turned around, looking at him over the headrest in a way that made him want to cry, but he wasn’t sure why.
She had the kind of sadness he sometimes saw in the mirror—the kind that had moved in and wasn’t going to leave just because someone asked it to.
“We’re all in the same car?” Cass asked, because the question was simpler than asking about the look on Honey’s face.
“Riot was being an idiot,” Sage said.
“I wasn’t being an idiot—”
“You left an unlocked vehicle in the Static Zone for two days.”
“I didn’t think I needed to put the Free-Ohm sign on it so close to Elysian territory. Maybe a little please don’t take my car note on the windshield with a picture of a sad face.”
“You lived in the Static Zone for a decade, Riot. You should know better.”
The bickering was nice. Cass didn’t have a better word for it. Two people arguing about something that didn’t matter, back and forth, when the arguing was a kind of talking and the talking was a kind of being alive.
“Cass.” Honey’s voice cut through the bickering gently, but everything moved. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” he said. “My head feels like it’s full of... like when you put too much water in oatmeal and it gets that mushy texture where it’s not solid, but it’s not liquid, and it’s not really anything? My head feels like that.”
Honey’s face twitched into the ghost of where a smile would go.
“How long have we been driving?” Cass asked, because the light was wrong—it had been night when they were at the greenhouse, and that was a lot of hours he didn’t have.
“All night,” Riot said. “And all day. It’s about seven.”
Nearly twenty hours. He’d been gone for twenty hours, and he didn’t remember any of them. He’d been in Riot’s lap the whole time, apparently, fighting windows and chins. “Was I asleep the whole time?”
“Mostly.” Riot helped him sit up, but Cass immediately resettled against him, resting his heavy head on Riot’s shoulder. “You talked in your sleep for a while. Then you snored. The fighting started about an hour ago.”
Cass wanted to ask what he’d said in his sleep, but the look on Honey’s face told him he didn’t want to know.
What if he’d said something unkind? Or something about doing sex with Riot?
His cheeks burned at the thought. Whatever the drug had pulled out of him was sitting in this car now, in the space between all of them, and Cass wasn’t ready to find out what.
He shifted, and everything hurt—his ribs, his chest, the circles under the bandages, his thigh where the needle had gone in. The robes from Springfield Gardens were stiff with dried blood and smelled like ointment and a life he wasn’t going back to.
That thought was harder than the pain. He was never going to walk the teaching paths in the morning when the dew was still on the stone. He would never sit in the meditation hall and breathe with the voices…
He was never going to see Brother Matthias again.
That thought was more complicated than the others.
It had too many things in it now, and the drug residue in his head was making it impossible to sort any of them into piles that made sense, so he just let it sit there.
He didn’t try to open it or understand it; he just let it be what it was, which was something he’d have to come back to later when he could think properly.
“Can you help me take these off?” Cass asked Riot as he stared down at his robes, still all white except for the blood and dirt, dried onto the fabric in patterns that looked like maps of places that didn’t exist.
Riot looked at him with wide eyes, like he was checking to make sure Cass meant what he thought he meant. “You sure?”
“I don’t want to wear them anymore.” It was that simple. They belonged to a place he wasn’t going back to and a person he wasn’t anymore, and taking them off felt like the most obvious thing in the world, even if he could feel Honey’s eyes on him as he unknotted his sash.
Riot helped him work the fabric over the sling and ease it past the wounds on his chest, awkward and graceless, elbows bumping the window, Cass’s head swimming from the movement.
Underneath, he still wore the undershirt and linen pants he’d had on under the robes.
His bandages showed at the collar of the undershirt and through the thin fabric.
He folded the robe with clumsy hands because he was supposed to fold things when he was done with them. Even if it was a thing he was never going to pick up again.
“Okay,” he said to himself.
The car moved through the Static Zone and Cass stared out the window at the flatness. The first time he’d seen this landscape, it scared him—all the abandoned towns and empty fields and unused roads. It had felt like a place that nobody cared about, a place that had been left behind.
It didn’t look like that now. There was life out there—growing and existing as it wanted, despite everything.
Plants coming up through concrete. Birds in trees that nobody planted.
A whole world that kept going without anyone telling it how to go.
It was beautiful, actually, in a way that the meditation gardens had never been.
The meditation gardens were beautiful because someone decided they should be. This was beautiful because it just was.
Cass’s throat tightened as they crested a hill and the Collective came into view.
The lights were on. Warm yellow lights in windows that meant people were home, and Cass’s stomach rose and fell with the hill because the lights meant he was home too.
He didn’t know if Granny Lu would let him stay.
He didn’t know where Honey would go or what would happen next or how any of this worked.
But the lights were on, Riot’s arm was around him, the folded robe was on the seat beside him, and the world hadn’t ended.
“We’re close,” Sage said, and something in her voice cracked—small, almost invisible.
Riot’s arm tightened around him and Cass felt a tangle of relief and guilt and love all mixed together with something darker underneath that he couldn’t identify, something Riot was holding very still and very deep, like a stone in his pocket he kept touching.
“It’s going to be okay,” Cass said. To Riot. To Honey. To himself.
“Subtle,” Riot said as Sage pulled the Jeep off the main road and parked behind a utility shed.
“Shut up.”
“You could have put up a banner. Streamers, maybe.”
“She’s going to find out in ten minutes regardless,” Sage said. “I just want ten minutes.”
The quiet lasted about forty seconds.
Two figures came around the shed fast, and Cass recognized them—the other Berserkers, from Lilac’s house when he had been confused and everything was too much.
The one with the burn scars, built like stacked boulders, and the tall, lean one whose face looked like it had never been at risk of smile lines.
“Shit,” Riot said, but he was almost smiling. He squeezed Cass’s shoulder and said, low and fast: “Prepper’s the one with the scars. Stave’s the tall one. Prepper’s going to be loud. Stave’s going to be quiet. Neither of them is going to hurt you.”
Then the back door opened and Prepper grabbed Riot by the front of his tunic and hauled him out of the car.
Cass lunged forward to go after him, but Honey’s hand closed on his good arm and pulled him back.
He tumbled sideways across the backseat and through the open door he could see the three Berserkers going down in the dirt—not in a greeting, but something rougher and more fundamental, a tangle of limbs and weight and sounds that weren’t words, but meant things anyway.
“Riot—” Cass pulled against Honey’s grip. His legs were shaky and his head was swimming, but Riot was on the ground and two very large men were on top of him and—
“He’s fine,” Sage said from the front seat. She hadn’t moved. “This is what they do.”
“But they’re hurting him—”
“They’re saying hello. It’s a whole system. Just wait.”
Cass waited. His heart was beating too fast, his good hand was gripping the door frame, ready to move the second it stopped looking like hello.