Lilac was crouched near the bookshelf, restacking the scattered volumes. She looked up when Riot entered, her expression cycling through amusement, exasperation, and something that might have been sympathy.
“Pendejo,“ she said fondly. “You owe me a new pillow. And probably some drywall.”
“Add it to my tab.”
“Your tab is getting long enough to wallpaper the bathroom.” But she straightened and moved to lean against the wall, giving him a look that saidgood luck, you’re going to need it.
Granny Lu had wheeled herself to the center of the room, positioning herself like a general taking the field. She stubbed out her cigarillo in a small ceramic dish that definitely wasn’t an ashtray and fixed Riot with a stare that could have cut glass.
“Sit.”
Riot sat. The armchair put his back to the bedroom door, which made his skin crawl, but arguing about furniture placement seemed like a losing battle.
“Now then.” Granny Lu folded her hands in her lap like she had all the time in the world and none of the patience. “You want to explain to me why there’s an Elysian in my territory?”
The way she saidElysiancould have stripped paint off the walls.
“He’s not—”
“I didn’t ask what he’s not.” Her voice cracked like a whip. “I asked why he’shere. In my community. In my people’s space. An Elysian missionary, sent out to recruit lost souls into the most secretive, most locked-down corporation in all of ISNA.” She leaned forward. “A corporation that people go into and don’t come back from. Or they come back wrong, smiling and grateful and absolutely goddamn convinced they’re happy.”
“Cass isn’t—”
“I’ve buried people who came back from Elysian, boy.” The words landed like stones. “Sweet people. Kind people. People who smiled real pretty and said all the right things and had absolutely nothin’ left behind their eyes. You think I don’t know what that corporation does? You think I haven’t seen what’s left after they’re done helpin’ someone?”
Silence stretched through the room. Even Dante had lost his smirk.
“Start from the beginnin’,” Granny Lu said. “And I mean the beginnin’. How a Berserker I let live in my Collective ended up tangled with Elysian’s property.”
So Riot told it.
The Neutral Zone. The alley. Two strangers bleeding, patching each other up because the alternative was bleeding alone. He kept his voice flat where he could, clinical where he could manage it, because the alternative was feeling all of it again and he didn’t have the bandwidth for that.
“I tried to stay away after that first night,” he said. “Figured I’d done my good deed, helped the lost missionary, moved on with my life.” He smiled without humor. “That lasted about twelve hours.”
“His scent,” Lilac said quietly. “It’s... unusual.”
“Unusual is one word for it.” Riot’s jaw tightened. “The suppressants stopped working. Both of ours. Turns out he’d been on industrial-grade heat suppressants since he was sixteen. Elysian told him they werewellness supplements.”
“That’s impressive, even for corporate fuckery,” Dante said, and for once there was no mockery in his voice.
“There’s more.” Riot made himself continue. “His spiritual guide has been torturing him and he thinks it’s all just a part of his spiritual journey.” The words tasted like acid. “And there’s something called Project Chrysalis. Elysian’s compatibilityalgorithm matched him and his best friend to get married, and when their orientations didn’t cooperate with the spreadsheet, Elysian decided tofixthat.”
“Neural rewriting,” Dante said. His expression had gone cold in a way Riot recognized—the look of someone cataloguing horrors for later analysis. “Sexual reorientation through targeted conditioning. I’ve seen references in Gensyn intelligence files, but I didn’t know Elysian had actually implemented it.”
“Cass went through it once. It didn’t work on him—he’s their first failure.”
“Now that’s interesting,” Dante leaned forward, the corners of his lips upturned.
The way he said it made Riot’s hackles rise. “Meaning?”
“Meaning Elysian’s programming is sophisticated. It works on intelligent subjects, creative subjects, stubborn subjects. It’s designed to work on everyone. So either their programming has a flaw they haven’t identified yet, or there’s something about your missionary—”
“He’s not broken, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“I’m not implying anything.” Dante grinned. “I’m observing that Elysian’s mind-control program failed on someone who seems like they were dropped on their head more than once.”
“You wanna repeat that, motherfucker?” Riot felt his hands curl into fists.
