“Brother Matthias said I was missing the point.”
“Brother Matthias missed a lot of points.” The words came out harder than he intended. He felt Cass glance at him, probably confused…he wanted to say something so fucking bad.
He deliberately loosened his grip on the steering wheel and filed the anger back where it lived—in the cold place behind his ribs, where it waited, patient and vast, for the day he stood in the same room as Brother Matthias.
“Sorry,” he said. “I just—he hurt you. And hearing his name makes me want to break things. Which isn’t helpful when I’m driving.”
Cass was quiet for a moment. Then, gently: “You could break things later. When we’re not in the car.”
A startled laugh escaped before Riot could catch it. “Yeah. I’ll schedule it in.”
“I’m serious. Sage probably knows where to find things that are already broken. You could break those. That way nobody gets hurt and you still get to—” He made a smashing gesture with his hands. “Do the thing.”
“The thing.”
“The angry thing. With your hands. You do it sometimes when you’re upset—you make fists and your knuckles go white and you look like you want to hit something but you won’t let yourself.” Cass looked at him with the devastating directness of someone who saw emotional patterns the way other people saw traffic signals. “You hold it all in. For me. Because you don’t want to scare me.”
Riot’s chest did something complicated.
“That doesn’t mean it goes away, though,” Cass continued. “You just carry it. And carrying heavy things for a long time makes you tired.” He paused. “I’m not very strong. But I could help you carry it, maybe. If you showed me how.”
This fucking kid…with his bare feet and his devastating honesty and his complete inability to let me suffer alone…
“I’ll think about it,” Riot said, because his throat was too tight for anything more.
“Okay.” Cass settled back in his seat, apparently satisfied. He propped his muddy feet back on the dashboard and turned his attention to the landscape.
Chapter twenty-nine
Unregulated Air
Riot
Thepirateradiostationappeared somewhere around mile sixty.
They’d been scanning through static and corporate frequencies—Gensyn’s station played something that sounded like a lullaby by a committee and approved by three separate departments, each of which having removed anything that might provoke unauthorized emotional responses. SVI’s station was just a man yelling about forge temperatures and bootstrapphilosophies, punctuated by what appeared to be gunfire sound effects, though with SVI Riot could never be sure they were effects.
Then, between the dead zones, a crackle of something alive.
Guitar. Raw, imperfect, played by someone who meant it. A voice that cracked on the high notes and didn’t apologize for it. The signal faded in and out like it was breathing, carried on a frequency that no corporation bothered to claim because it was broadcasting from a generator in someone’s basement in the Static Zone.
Cass went still.
In Elysian territory, Riot knew, there was music—probably harmonic frequency sessions, guided resonance exercises, sounds designed to regulate emotional states and promote collective consciousness or some bullshit. Cass had probably heard music in the Neutral Zone too—market performers, electronic beats bleeding from someone’s speakers. Background noise. Incidental.
This was neither of those things. This was someone playing guitar in a room by themselves because they had to, because the sound wanted out, and because holding it in would have been worse than the vulnerability of releasing it.
The song was old. Pre-Adjustment, it had to be—the lyrics referenced things that didn’t exist anymore. Dancing without rules and loving someone who didn’t come with a corporate designation suffix. Simple things. Lost things.
Cass listened to the entire song without moving.
When it ended, the DJ—if you could call them that—came on with a voice like gravel and whiskey. “That was ‘Harvest Moon’ by Neil Young. Goes out to anyone still listening. You’re not alone out here. Next up, we got some Fleetwood Mac for the overnight crowd.”
“They sound like they mean it,” Cass said. His voice was quiet. Almost reverent. “The person singing. They sound like they’re saying something real.”
“Yeah,” Riot said. “That’s kind of the point of music.”
“At home, the harmonic sessions were always... correct. Everyone in the right frequency. Everyone aligned.” He frowned slightly, reaching for the thought. “But it never sounded like it wanted to be sung. It sounded like it was being performed because someone decided it should be. This sounds like—like the person couldn’tnotsing it. Like it was inside them and they had to let it out.”
