The walkie clicked off.
Riot reached behind the seat and pulled his pack into his lap as he kept his knee on the steering wheel. The weight of it settled against his thighs like an old argument.
“Cass,” he said. “Please…don’t be frightened when you see this.”
He unzipped the bag.
Chapter thirty-three
Earthly Aggression
Cass
Themansittingnextto him was not the man who had woken up next to him this morning.
A dull metal mask covered Riot’s face, scratched and dented from use that Cass didn’t want to think about. Behind a fine mesh over the eye slits, Riot’s eyes were visible but muted, the gold already beginning to overtake the green and filtered into something dimmer. Something that might pass for normal.
Clawed gloves covered his hand, the fingers ending in curved talons, each one about three inches long and sharpened to a point that caught the afternoon light. He looked like the illustrations on the classroom wall at Springfield Gardens. The beast that walked on two legs; earthly aggression given form. Cass had grown up being taught to fear exactly this—the Alpha at its most violent, the thing that transcendence was supposed to lift them beyond.
But it was still Riot. Under the mask, under the metal. The same hands that had braided flowers into his hair. The same voice that had saidI love you too.
Cass’s stomach was tight and cold and he did not like any of this.
“Stay in the car,” Riot said. His voice through the mask was flat and metallic, stripped of the warmth Cass had learned to listen for. “Windows up. Doors locked.”
“What if—”
“If this goes wrong, get low and stay low until Sage handles it.”
Riot got out, the walkie tucked into his back pocket. The sedan rocked with the absence of his weight. Cass watched through the windshield as metal and menace walked toward the blockade with a steady, unhurried stride that saidI am not afraid of you, and you should think carefully about whether you are afraid of me.
Three vehicles blocked the road ahead—trucks arranged between the concrete shoulders of two overpasses, creating a funnel with no room to pass. Welded armor plating, scratch markings, and a general atmosphere of functional menace. They looked like the kind of vehicles people built when they had to make do with what they could salvage from leftovers.
Five men stood around the trucks. Maybe six—Cass thought he saw movement inside one of the cabs but couldn’t be sure. All big. All Alpha, from the way they held themselves—that specificlooseness in the shoulders that meant confident rather than relaxed, with rifles slung casually, knives at belts, and a baseball bat wrapped in wire leaning against a truck bumper like it was resting between shifts.
A man detached from the group and walked out to meet Riot halfway. He was big—not Riot’s height, but wider, thicker, the kind of build that came from years of physical labor and violence in roughly equal proportion. Scarred. A grizzled beard that might have been brown once and was now the color of used dishwater. His eyes were sharp and assessing, tracking the mask, the claws, the height.
What he didn’t do—and Cass noticed this with something like confusion—was attack.
He held up one hand. Palm out. Universal:I want to talk.
Cass could hear them through the cracked rear window. Barely. The wind was carrying their voices toward him in fragments.
“—serious hardware. Syndicate?”
“—matter?”
“—pays good money for escaped—”
“Not running. Passing through.”
A pause. Then the man—Cole, he said his name was Cole—nodded. Quoted a toll. Riot produced money. Cole counted it. Nodded again. Radios crackled. Directions were given—road clear through to “ED freak territory,” Jennings on the other side, they’d radio ahead.
It was civil. It was routine. It was, Cass realized with a confusion that felt almost like relief, nothing like what the Elders had taught him about Berserkers. Cole was running a toll operation the way a merchant ran a shop. Business.
Cass’s shoulders loosened. Just a fraction. Just enough.
The car window exploded.
