Riot took his eyes off the road long enough to look at Cass. The golden hair, tangled and half-braided with wilting cornflowers. The too-big jacket swallowing his shoulders. The bare feet on the dashboard, muddy toes curled against the vinyl. His face soft with something Riot didn’t have a name for—wonder, maybe, or recognition. The look of someone hearing a language they didn’t know they’d been missing.
The next song started. Something slower, gentler. A woman’s voice this time, singing about dreams and thunder and the way love sounds when it’s keeping you alive.
Cass leaned toward the speakers. Not consciously—his body just drifted, drawn by the sound the way a plant drifts toward light. When the signal wavered, his hand shot out and hovered over the dial, as though he could hold the frequency steady through sheer want.
“Can we keep it on this?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Riot said. “We can keep it on this.”
He found himself steering partly by road conditions and partly by radio reception after that. When the signal strengthened on a slight ridge, he lingered. When it faded behind a hill, he angled toward higher ground. It was stupid—adding time to a trip that was already taking three times longer than it should—but Cass was listening to music for the first time in his life, really listening, and Riot was discovering that he’d build roads through mountains if it meant keeping that look on Cass’s face.
You’re navigating a rescue mission through hostile territory by radio signal because a pretty Omega likes oldies. This is insane.
Then again, you volunteered for experimental surgery because someone in a lab coat told you it would help.
Cass napped after the second hour.
He’d been fighting it—Riot could see the effort, the way his eyes kept drifting shut and snapping back open, the guilty little jerks of someone who thought sleeping was a failure of some kind. But exhaustion won. His head tipped sideways against the window, his breath fogging the glass in slow, even pulses, and his body finally let go of the tension it had been holding since he woke up fighting.
The pirate station faded to a whisper. Riot let it go, driving in relative silence through the remains of Illinois.
The Static Zone had its own kind of beauty, for the kind of people who found beauty in honest ruin. Riot wasn’t sure he was, but he was at least the sort who could appreciate the lack of pretense. No corporate aesthetics here—no chrome perfection, no brutalist industry, no new-age serenity. Just what happened when humans left and nature showed up with plans of its own.
There was a shopping mall with a birch tree growing through the roof. A church with GOD LEFT—NO FORWARDING ADDRESS spray-painted in faded red across the facade. A school with its front doors hanging open, and through the gap, a hallway where the floor tiles had buckled and something greenwas growing between them with the quiet determination of life that had nowhere else to be.
The road wound between these ruins like a thread through wreckage. Dirt paths that had been farm roads. Game trails widened by the occasional passage of vehicles brave or desperate enough to travel them. Twice, Riot had to stop and reverse because a tree had fallen across the path. Once, he navigated around the burned-out hull of what had been a Gensyn personnel carrier, its insignia still visible through the rust. Bullet holes pocked its flanks in a pattern that looked like organized resistance, not random violence.
Someone had spray-painted FREE-OHM on the side.
Good for them, Riot thought, which was as close to political activism as he was likely to get while driving through a field to avoid a sinkhole.
The walkie crackled. “Berserker sign ahead.” Sage’s voice was clipped. “Claw marks on the overpass supports. Recent—within the week. Stay quiet, stay moving.”
Riot’s hands tightened on the wheel. Wild Berserkers—the ones without access to suppressants, without communities, without anything anchoring them to their sanity. Sometimes Riot felt bad for them. They weren’t like that because of some corporate fuckery, their bodies just didn’t work right and society gave up on them. He drove faster, keeping the engine low, his eyes scanning the overpasses for movement. The scratches were there when they passed under, deep gouges in the concrete, the marks they left as warnings to anyone dumb enough to travel through their areas.
Cass slept through all of it. His face was peaceful in a way it rarely was when he was conscious—no furrowed brow, no carefully constructed composure. Just a young man exhausted beyond his body’s ability to stay worried.
Riot breathed in deep, savoring the caramel and cinnamon, warm and steady. No spike. No heat-edge. Just Cass.
His own body disagreed. The hum was still there—in his bones, his jaw, his hands. Not rut. Not exactly. Something adjacent to rut that didn’t have a name, a low-frequency awareness that had been running since the Neutral Zone alley and hadn’t turned off regardless of how many times he’d—
He shut that line of thinking down. Not while driving. Not after the night Cass had.
But he was sweating, just a bit across his forehead…
Twenty minutes later, the walkie crackled again: “Road’s blocked ahead. Looks like they cratered it deliberately during the border skirmishes. I’m scouting an alternate. Give me ten.”
Riot stopped the car on a slight rise that overlooked what had been a town. Small. He had stayed in places like this with Stave and Prepper in the early years, digging through the remains of the past, trying not to kill each other as they learned how to control themselves without chemical assistance. He always liked the small towns.
Cass stirred.
“Where are we?” He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand, blinking at the landscape.
“Somewhere in the Static Zone. About seventy miles from where we started.”
“Seventy miles?” Cass sat up straighter. “We’ve been driving for hours.”
“Roads are bad. When there are roads.”
