But he held on tighter. And he felt Riot hold on back.
Chapter twenty-seven
Unauthorized Access
Cass
Therewasadoorin his mind that he didn’t open.
It had been there for months, a heavy thing, made of dark wood or maybe metal, with a weight behind it that pressed against the frame. Sometimes he could feel it there, at the edges of his thoughts, when Brother Matthias talked about Chrysalis or when he tried to remember exactly what had happened during those hazy weeks when he’d been so hungry and tired and wrong.
The door stayed shut. It was easier that way. When he’d tried to push on it before, curious and confused, wanting to understand why his memories had holes in them, it hurt. Not body-hurt. Head-hurt. The kind of pain that made his vision swim and his stomach turn and his thoughts scatter like startled birds.
So he left it alone. Everyone had doors they didn’t open. That was normal. That was fine.
But tonight, in the warm dark of Lilac’s guest room with Riot’s arm heavy across his waist and the silver circlet on the dresser catching moonlight as he fell asleep, something was different.
The door was cracked open.
Not much. Just a sliver. Barely enough to notice. But Cass could feel it—a whisper of cold air against his dreaming mind, a pressure that hadn’t been there before.
He should turn away. He knew he should turn away.
Instead, he drifted closer.
The sounds came first. Muffled, distant, like hearing voices from underwater. A low murmur that might have been words. A rhythm that might have been breathing. Cass strained to hear, pulled by something he couldn’t name, something that felt like fingers hooked into his chest and tugging.
“—have to be thorough, Brother Cassiopeia.”
Brother Matthias’s voice. Calm. Measured. The way it always sounded during all the times he’d held the punch tool and explained that pain was just impurity leaving.
But there was something underneath the calm. Something thick and heavy, like honey gone rotten.
Cass’s dream-self reached the door. His hand pressed flat against the wood without him deciding to move it. The surface was warm. It shouldn’t have been warm.
“Good. That’s—yes.”
A sound leaked through the crack. Low. Guttural. Not his voice.
And then—
Phantom pressure. Somewhere in his body that didn’t exist in this dream, in a place he couldn’t locate or name. Like an echo of sensation bleeding through the walls between sleeping and waking, between now and then.
Cass’s stomach lurched. He tried to pull his hand away from the door but it wouldn’t move, wouldn’t obey, and the crack was widening on its own now, inch by terrible inch—
“I feel sick.” He heard his own voice, distant and distorted. “Please. I feel so sick.”
“That means it’s…it’s working.”
The crack was wide enough to see through now. Cass didn’t want to look. Every instinct screamed at him to turn away, to run, to slam the door shut before—
He looked.
White room. White sheets. A thin healer’s cot that seemed too narrow, too exposed.
And himself.
Where are the healers? I don’t remember this.
