“I can get out and push,” Cass offered.
“You’re barefoot.”
“I’ve walked through mud before.”
“This isn’t mud. This is mud that’s made life choices. Stay in the car.”
Cass stayed, but he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, peering through the windshield at the path ahead. “Go left. The ground looks harder near those rocks.”
He was right. The ground near the rocks was harder, or at least less actively hostile, and the car found traction long enough to lurch forward another fifty yards.
“How’d you know that?” Riot asked.
“The grass is different. Shorter. Harder ground grows shorter grass.” He pointed. “And there—see the way the water pooled? It’s going around that area, not through it. Means the soil is denser.”
Riot stared at him. “Where did you learn that?”
Cass shrugged. “I walked a lot. During the mission. In the Neutral Zone, and the areas around it. You learn where to step if you don’t want to fall down.”
“Could’ve fooled me. That was actually useful terrain analysis.”
Cass’s cheeks pinked slightly. “It’s not analysis. It’s just looking.”
“Lookingisanalysis. It’s the most important kind.” Riot followed Cass’s directions—left around the standing water, right where the grass thinned over harder ground. It worked. The car stopped trying to dig its own grave and actually moved forward with something approaching purpose.
“Go right again,” Cass said. “That dark patch is a sinkhole.”
“How do you—”
“It looks hungry.”
Riot went right.
The afternoon wore on. They rejoined something resembling a road, lost it again, and found a different one. Sage’s updates came at irregular intervals—clear for two milesandstay left at the fork, right goes into SVI border territoryand, once, simplydon’t look at the overpass. Riot didn’t look. Cass did, because he didn’t know yet that some things in the Static Zone were better left unexamined. Whatever he saw made him go quiet for twenty minutes, and Riot didn’t ask.
They talked.
Not about Elysian or Endeavor or the mission. Not about heats or designations or the ruins of a civilization neither of them had been alive to mourn. Just—talked. The way people talked whenthey had nowhere to be except together and nothing to do except survive the next mile.
Cass asked questions. He always asked questions. But these were different from the desperate inquiries of his heat, or the focused information-gathering he’d done for Granny Lu. These were the questions of someone with time, and curiosity, and maybe a person he wanted to know.
“Were you happy? Before?”
The question came with no preamble, no context. Just Cass looking at him from the passenger seat, bare feet on the dashboard, wilting flowers in his hair, asking the simplest and most devastating question in the English language.
“Before Endeavor?”
“Before everything. When you were—” He hesitated. “Brennan.”
The name still felt strange from someone else’s mouth. But from Cass’s it felt less like a wound and more like a door being held open. Not demanding he walk through it. Just showing him it was there.
“I don’t know,” Riot said honestly. “I remember being curious about things. I remember liking my work, or thinking I did. But I can’t tell anymore if those memories are real or if I’ve edited them to make the loss hurt less.” He paused. “Probably both. Memory’s like that.”
“I remember being happy with Honey. Playing dress-up. Exploring Springfield Gardens after curfew. Sneaking food from the commissary.” He gave a small, sad smile. “But maybe those memories are edited too. Maybe I made them happier because everything after got worse.”
The pirate radio station flickered back to life between hills, catching them mid-conversation with a song Riot didn’t recognize—something raw and aching about losing someone todistance and time. Cass turned toward it, and for a moment both of them just listened.
Then Cass asked: “Do you think Honey will still know me?”
