Cass looked out the window at the dead town as the afternoon light fell through empty window frames, casting shadows that looked almost like the ghosts of furniture. “Did people live here?”
“Yeah.”
“Like the ones in the cars?”
“Yeah.”
He was quiet, processing. Riot could see him doing it—fitting this town into the framework he’d been building since the Gensyn convoy. A world where people lived in houses instead of corporate dormitories. Where they drove wherever they wanted. Where designations didn’t exist and nobody needed algorithms to tell them who to love.
“I’m fine,” Cass said suddenly.
Riot looked at him. “I didn’t ask.”
“I know. But you keep checking.” A small, self-conscious smile crept onto his face. “You look at me when you think I’m not noticing. You’ve done it about twelve times since I woke up.”
So much for subtle.“Force of habit.”
“I’m fine. I feel normal. Well—” He amended this with the precision of someone who didn’t know how to lie. “I feel like I have a body that’s been through a lot and is very tired. But the other thing—the heats—that’s done.”
Riot nodded and didn’t say what he was thinking, which was that Cass’s definition of “fine” had a margin of error roughly the size of the Static Zone, and that the faint sheen on his forehead could have been sleep-sweat or could have been something else, and that the way he was sitting with his thighs pressed together might have been about comfort or might have been about containment.
But Cass was trying so hard to be fine, to be a person in a car on a road trip instead of a crisis in motion, and Riot wanted to give him that.
“Good,” Riot said. “Because we’ve still got a long way to go and I don’t know if the car can survive many more creek crossings.”
Cass smiled. It was small and tired but it was real. “The car will be fine. You’re very good with your hands.”
Riot bit his tongue. It was the way he said it—utterly sincere, no subtext, no innuendo, just a straightforward observationabout Riot’s ability to handle the steering wheel and navigate rough terrain. A compliment on his driving. That was all.
But the worst parts of his brain, which had spent the last several hours being mostly quiet, heardgood with your handsand immediately provided a detailed sensory catalog of everywhere those hands had been on Cass’s body, every sound they’d drawn out of him, every—
Stop. Stop it. He’s talking about driving.
“Thanks,” Riot managed. His voice came out roughly an octave lower than intended. He gripped the steering wheel like it had personally offended him and stared at the empty town with a fixed intensity that suggested he’d found something fascinating in the architecture of a collapsed gas station.
“Did I say something wrong?” Cass asked, because of course he noticed. He always noticed.
“Nope. All good. Just—admiring the scenery.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“Exactly. Very admirable nothing.” Riot swallowed. Swallowed again. His jaw ached. His mouth was doing that thing—the watering thing, the involuntary salivation that had started during Cass’s heat and never fully stopped. It made no sense. He wasn’t hungry. He wasn’t in active rut. His body was just producing saliva like it had somewhere important to put it, and the fact that his eyes kept drifting to the juncture of Cass’s neck and shoulder was a coincidence that he was going to aggressively not think about.
This is not how suppressants work. This is not how ruts work. This is not how any of this is supposed to work.
The walkie saved him. “Found an alternate. Follow the tree line east for about a mile, there’s a cattle path. It’s not great.”
“Define ‘not great.’”
“I said it’s not great. What part needs defining?”
Riot started the car. Cass was watching him with that particular expression—the one that meant he’d filed something away for later examination. The observation that Riot went weird when Cass mentioned his hands. The tonal shift. The sudden interest in ruined gas stations.
The cattle path was not great.
It was, in fact, terrible. It was terrible in the specific, curated way that suggested some divine being looked at this particular stretch of land and thought,What if mud had aspirations?
The car slid sideways through ruts that seemed to have been designed by a committee. Riot wrestled the wheel, the engine whined, and something underneath the chassis made a sound that probably had a technical name but which Riot chose to interpret asplease, for the love of God, stop.
