48. Gensyn’s Reject Pile
Chapter forty-eight
Gensyn’s Reject Pile
Riot
“You stupid son of a bitch!” Prepper snapped, his voice cracking in a way that didn’t match a man who could bend a car door off its hinges. “Days without a check-in. Again. I thought you were dead. I thought they killed you in that compound and I was going to have to come in there and—”
“I’m fine.”
Prepper punched him in the face.
It was a good punch. Not a full-strength Berserker punch, but more of an I was scared and I’m angry about being scared and nobody taught me a better system punch.
Riot’s head rocked sideways and he came back grinning, blood on his lip, and he tried to get up, but Prepper pinned him to the ground with all the emotional regulation of a drunken child written on his face.
Riot liked this. There was no theological framework for what was happening, just a fist and a feeling and the absolute inability to express one without the other.
God, he loved these idiots.
“I deserved that,” Riot said.
“You deserve worse.” Prepper hit him again in the same spot. “That’s for making me think about feelings. You know I hate that.”
Stave was kneeling on Riot’s arms, silent, his face doing nothing, which was Stave’s version of an emotional reunion and was, in its own way, more articulate than Prepper’s punches. Stave didn’t need to say you’re alive. He was confirming it with his hands, the way a medic confirmed a pulse.
“Your Omega is seeping through his bandages,” Stave said.
“Thank you, Stave. That’s very helpful.”
“It’s going to need attention.”
“I’m aware.”
Stave’s eyes flashed gold, and he shook his head, taking in a gulp of the night air through his mouth and saying nothing else.
For Stave, this was the equivalent of a forty-five-minute therapy session about how a man who’d trained as a surgeon shouldn’t have to fight Berserker triggers every time someone scraped a knee in his vicinity.
Something moved at the edge of Riot’s vision, coming from the Jeep on legs that had no business being operational. Cass’s hand closed on Prepper’s wrist, and Prepper went still with the pure bewilderment of a Rottweiler being accosted by a hamster.
“Please stop. Please don’t hit him.” Cass looked at the ground as he said it, chewing on his lower lip.
Christ.
Riot lay on the ground with blood on his lip and dirt on his back and looked up at this ridiculous, impossible, brave, stupid person and thought: I killed a man for you less than twenty-four hours ago and I would do it again right now, but you just stopped a three-hundred-pound Berserker with the word “please”, and I have absolutely no idea which one of us is more dangerous.
“Princess,” Riot’s voice came out wrong, too soft in the presence of the others. He tried again. “It’s okay. This is how he says hello.”
“By hitting you?”
“It’s a whole thing. Cass, really, sit down before you fall down,” Riot urged.
Cass didn’t sit down. He kept his hand on Prepper’s arm and finally looked at the man with the absolute, earnest, unblinking certainty of a person who would stand there until the sun burned out if that’s what it took. “Please don’t hit him again, Mr. Prepper.”
Prepper looked at Cass. Looked at Riot. Looked at Cass again.
“Hm,” Stave grunted. Which was Stave for impressive.
“Okay,” Prepper said gently, the rough edges filed down. “No more hitting.”
Honey pulled Cass back as Stave hauled Riot to his feet. For a moment, they all stood there recalibrating, because Riot had come home different, and the difference involved a barefoot, glassy-eyed Omega.
A gunshot split the evening and Cass tried to duck, but Riot pulled him against his chest and rolled his eyes. Honey yelped and held her hands up, turning towards the direction it came from.
“SAGE.” Granny Lu came up faster than her chair should have allowed (which meant Lilac had been tinkering with it again) wearing an expression that said she’d been rehearsing this dressing-down for hours and was about to deliver the director’s cut.
Cass pulled away from Riot, fiddling with one of his braids as he stepped forward and said, in a voice that had no business being that steady: “I’m not Elysian anymore.
I’m done. I brought my best friend like I said I would, and we all came back, and nobody needs to be in trouble because it was my idea. ”
Riot just stared. This was the same person who wanted to cuddle with a Berserker, apologized for bumping into furniture and flinched at swear words. Now he was standing in front of a woman with a rifle, protecting the people behind him from a threat that wasn’t even a threat.
“—I know I needed help, because I’m not strong and brave like your grandkids—”
Riot blinked.
Oh no, I never told him.
Cass thought Granny Lu was Riot’s actual biological grandmother. Which meant he thought Sage was Riot’s—
“Boy,“ Granny Lu said, and the word shut everything else down.
Her eyes moved. Past Cass. Past Riot. To Sage.
“Come here.”
Every part of Sage that Riot had ever seen —the steadiness, the confidence, the flat gaze—drained out of her like someone had pulled a plug.
What walked toward the wheelchair was smaller.
Younger. A person who’d been bold enough to defy a direct order, but was discovering that bravery and consequences were two different currencies.
Sage stopped in front of the wheelchair. “Ma’am.”
Granny Lu reached up and touched the bare scalp where green hair used to be. Her thumb moved across the smooth skin like she was reading something written there only she could parse.
“You didn’t leave bald,” Granny Lu said.
“No, ma’am.”
“What happened to your hair?”
“They wanted to dye it. I wasn’t giving them my hair.”
Granny Lu’s hand stayed on Sage’s head, her mouth a thin line.
Then she smacked Sage on the back of the head.
“Three DAYS.” Granny Lu’s voice cracked open and underneath the authority was a woman who had been terrified. “Three days, Sage. Not a radio check. Not a signal. Not a goddamn word. I thought I raised you better than that. My kin ought to have more sense than a lick of—”
“Wait,” Riot said. “Kin?”
Sage didn’t look at him. “It wasn’t relevant.”
“You’re her actual—her biological —”
“Riot.”
Riot had known Sage for months; they went on patrols together, talked shit together, and he had been stitched up by her more than once after doing something incredibly stupid.
He trusted her with his life and with Cass’s life, which was more.
Somehow she’d neglected to mention that the woman who ran the Collective—who controlled their resources, their safety, their everything—was her grandmother.
He filed this under things I will be loudly annoyed about at the earliest opportunity and moved on, because Granny Lu was rolling toward Honey.
“This is what you spent three years carrying on about?“ Granny Lu said to Sage. “All that moping and staring at the horizon like some lovesick poet—for this?”
“Granny…” Sage pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed.
“At least she’s tall,” Granny Lu concluded as Honey stared at the rifle in her lap, wide-eyed, like she was waiting for it to go off.
Riot bit the inside of his cheek to keep himself from laughing, but the laughter he held died as Granny Lu turned toward him.
Cass moved closer to Riot, still standing in front of him like there was something he could do to protect Riot from her.
The pattern was becoming clear: anything that approaches Riot, Cass gets between them.
Berserker, woman with a gun, angry grandmother, none of it apparently mattered. The math of it was absurd.
Granny Lu looked up at Cass, her brow furrowed, then she smirked.
She grabbed her rifle by the barrel and nudged him with the wooden butt of the gun, shifting in her chair to peer around the side of Cass, her eyes locking on Riot’s torn tunic and the edges of the bite mark.
“What were you two doing when you bit the big one?” Granny Lu asked.
Cass went scarlet and Riot could feel it in his own ears and face, like he was the one blushing. Granny Lu knew something about the bite, which meant she understood something about what was happening between them.
“Tallulah,” he said in a low voice, his fist curling at his side. Granny Lu narrowed her eyes and held his gaze.
“Sage.” She settled her rifle back across her lap. “Go fetch Dante and Orion. Community center. My office. Now.”