“Anywhere they wanted, mostly.”
Cass looked at him. “Without authorization?”
“There was no authorization. People just got in their cars and drove.”
“Drove where?”
“Wherever. Work, the store, visiting family three states away. There weren’t checkpoints. No territory permits.” Riot wrestled the steering wheel through a rut that tried to eat the front tire. “Just roads that went places and people who used them. Did you not notice this on your way to the Neutral Zone?”
“I wasn’t allowed to look out of the window.” Cass was quiet for a long time. He did that, went silent when something was too big to process immediately. Riot learned to let the silence do its work.
The walkie crackled again. “Gensyn convoy on parallel road, bearing northwest. Kill your engine behind the grain elevator and wait. I’ll signal clear.”
Riot pulled behind the elevator—a massive concrete cylinder with ILLINOIS CO-OP still visible in faded letters—and cut the engine. Through the gaps in the structure, he could see the convoy: twelve vehicles moving in formation, likely a corporate military escort flanking a line of unmarked transports. Cass had gone very still.
“They can’t see us,” Riot said.
“I know.” But Cass’s eyes tracked the convoy with an intensity that had nothing to do with fear. He was watching the way someone watches a thing they’ve only heard about in stories. “Those are Gensyn. The ones who...” He trailed off, his brow furrowing. “You said they made the designations. In the car, on the way to the Collective.”
Riot looked at him. “You remember that?”
“Pieces. You were talking about a vaccine. And something called Syn-V-7. And I was—” His face colored slightly. “I was in your lap. And everything hurt. I don’t think I understood most of what you said.”
The convoy passed. Sage’s walkie: “Clear. Move.”
Riot started the engine and pulled back onto what generously qualified as a road. The silence in the car had changed—from comfortable to expectant. Cass was thinking. Riot could practically hear the gears turning, slow and steady, building something with the fragments he had.
“Will you tell me again?” Cass asked. “About the vaccine. About what Gensyn did. I want to understand it when my body isn’t—” He gestured vaguely at himself. “When I can actually hear you.”
So Riot told him.
He kept it simple, not because Cass needed simple, but because the truth was simple. About how the world fell apart during The Unraveling and families tore each other apart because suddenly pheromones got involved. Corporations rose from the wreckage, each with their own idea of how to manage the mess Gensyn made, and still Gensyn came out on top.
He told it while driving through the evidence of the corporate wars. Past a highway overpass that ended in mid-air, its other half collapsed into the ravine below. Past a stretch of road where the trees on both sides were scorched black for a quarter mileand a billboard advertising a restaurant that hadn’t existed in seventy years, its smiling family a relic of a species that no longer quite existed either.
Cass listened without interrupting. His hands were folded in his lap, his fingers laced tightly together.
When Riot finished, the silence lasted almost a full minute.
“The Elders teach that designations are divine,” Cass said slowly. “That they’ve always been part of us. Part of the natural order that Elysian helps us understand.” He was looking out the window at the burnt trees. “They never mentioned a vaccine.”
“No. They wouldn’t have.”
“The meditation sessions. The harmony teachings. All of it is built on the idea that we’resupposedto be this way. That Alphas and Omegas and Betas are how people were always meant to be.” His voice was careful. Deliberate. He was building something in his head, fitting pieces together, and Riot could see the structure taking shape. “But if Gensyn made the designations, then the Elders are teaching us that something someone invented is sacred.”
“Yeah.”
“These people.” He gestured at the rusted cars, the dead highway, all of it. “The ones in the cars. They weren’t Alphas or Betas or Omegas.”
“No. They were just people.”
“Just people,” Cass repeated. He tasted the words like they were foreign, which they were. “And they drove wherever they wanted. And they didn’t need algorithms to tell them who to love.”
“No.”
“And someone decided that wasn’t good enough.”
It wasn’t a question. Riot didn’t answer it like one.
