The question hung in the car like smoke.
“Then we figure it out,” Riot said. “But we don’t leave her there.”
“But if she’shappy—”
“Cass.” He waited until Cass looked at him. “If someone drugs you into loving the person they picked out for you—if they rewrite your brain until you can’t remember wanting anything else—is that happiness? Or is it just... not being able to feel the cage anymore?”
“I don’t know,” Cass whispered. “I really don’t know.”
“Neither do I.” Riot’s hands were tight on the wheel. “But I know that real happiness doesn’t need a corporation to maintain it. And I know that you love her. And I know that love doesn’t need an algorithm.”
Cass was quiet for a long time.
“Riot?”
“Yeah?”
“I think she’d like you. Honey. I think she’d think you were—” He searched for the word. “Unexpected.”
“Is that good?”
“The best things usually are.”
The pirate station played another song. Riot drove. And somewhere in the back of his mind, the Brennan part that remembered studying human attachment patterns noted, with something like wonder, that Cass had just offered him the highest compliment in his vocabulary: a place in the family he was trying to save.
It started around hour three.
Riot might have missed it if he hadn’t spent the last several days memorizing the language of Cass’s body. If he hadn’t learned to read the small translations—the shift in posture, the slight change in breathing—that telegraphed what Cass’s words worked so hard to hide.
It was subtle. A degree of sweetness, maybe two, where there had been a comfortable baseline. Like someone had turned up the dial on caramel and cinnamon from “pleasant” to “distracting” and was inching toward “devastating.”
Cass kept talking. He was asking about the water tower they’d passed—how tall it was, who had built it, whether people just had water whenever they wanted before the corporations—and his voice was steady. Normal. Fine.
But he was sweating. Not heat-of-the-day sweating, which would have made sense given the car’s ventilation system had opinions about working. This was a fine sheen across his forehead and the hollow of his throat that appeared despite the fact that he kept angling the air vent at his face.
And he was shifting. Little adjustments in the passenger seat that he probably thought were invisible—pressing his thighs together, then catching himself, then pressing them together again. Adjusting the waistband of the too-big pants. Crossing and uncrossing his legs.
“—and the water just came out of the tower whenever they needed it? Without someone deciding how much they deserved?”
“Yeah,” Riot said. “It was called municipal infrastructure. Local government managed it.”
“What’s local government?”
“People who lived in a place decided together how to run it. Elected leaders from their own community.”
“Like Granny Lu, but they chose her?”
“Basically.”
“That seems nice.” Cass adjusted the air vent again. Away from his face this time. Then back. Then away. “I’m a little warm. Is it warm in here?”
“It’s about sixty-five degrees.”
“Maybe it’s the jacket.” He didn’t take the jacket off.
Ten minutes later, Cass stopped mid-sentence—he’d been talking about a bird he’d seen, a wild bird, not the decorative ones in Springfield Gardens’ controlled aviary—and went rigid. His eyes went wide. His hand slammed down on the edge of the seat and gripped.
The scent hit Riot like a wall.
