Sounds came first: the low murmur of voices. Then sensation: something soft beneath him. Scentless air moved across his skin, processed and purified until it was biologically useless.
Then pain, arriving fashionably late but making up for it with enthusiasm.
Where is Cass?
He opened his eyes to a white ceiling and soft, indirect lighting.He was lying on something between a bed and an examination table: padded and adjustable, clinical in function, but draped in white linen to maintain an aesthetic. His blood-crusted shirt was gone. His stitches were exposed, and a thin man in robes with blue trim was applying a bandage over the stitches that smelled like honey and lavender.
“Ah,” the man said, noticing Riot’s eyes were open. “You’re awake. I’m Brother Cyrus, your attending harmonist. Please don’t try to sit up—your body has been through considerable physical trauma, and we want to ensure your energy channels are properly stabilized before—”
“Where is he?” Riot grabbed his wrist. “Cass—Brother Cassiopeia. Where?”
Brother Cyrus’s serene expression flickered with something almost human—surprise, maybe, at the intensity. He recovered quickly. “Brother Cassiopeia is just on the other side of the partition.” He gestured to a white curtain that divided the infirmary space. “He will be attended to as well. You arrived together, and Brother Cassiopeia insisted you be kept close.”
Through the curtain, he heard it, muffled but recognizable: Cass’s voice, warm and familiar, speaking to someone in that measured Elysian cadence.
He’s okay. He sounds okay.
Riot let himself breathe. The stitches protested, but he breathed anyway.
Brother Cyrus, meanwhile, returned his attention to Riot’s torso with the kind of focus normally reserved for a sponsored-Christmas morning. “These scars,” he murmured, tracing the surgical incisions along Riot’s neck. “These are... may I ask about your history?”
“Gensyn.” Riot put the right amount of ash in his voice—shame, exhaustion, the hollowed-out weariness of a man who had been unmade by a corporation and was looking for someone to put him back together. It wasn’t entirely acting. “I was a field operative. They modified me.”
Brother Cyrus’s breath caught audibly. His eyes went bright with an excitement he was trying very hard to frame as compassion. “Do you remember exactly what kind of modifications? Are they attached to the nervous system like Gensyn biotrackers? I have so many questions.” He grabbed a tablet and began taking notes.Of coursehe was taking notes.
“Some, yes. Some are embedded in my bones and glands, I think there’s a couple in my skull that couldn’t be removed,” Riot said flatly. After all this time, he didn’t remember everything he still had floating around in his body. He just knew, vaguely, how to control it.
“And you survived that? You maintained enough of your essential self to seek transcendence.” Brother Cyrus was practically vibrating. “Cases like yours are exceptionally rare. The documentation of your healing journey could provide invaluable insights for helping others who’ve suffered similar corporate spiritual destruction.”
He wants to study me.I’m not a patient. I’m a paper he’s going to present at the next Elysian conference…if Elysians do conferences. They probably call them something else.
“I just want to be whole again,” Riot said, trying to aim for an emotional reason for being there other than “kidnap one person, murder another.” Brother Cyrus’s expression softened.
“And you shall be,” Brother Cyrus promised. “Though the path will require—”
There was sound behind the curtain, not quite a commotion—he doubted anything in this place was a commotion—but a shift. Footsteps, unhurried and precise. The soft murmur of the attending staff going deferential and quiet, the way voices did around someone who outranked them by enough that silence was a form of tribute.
Riot went still.
“Brother Cassiopeia.” Riot knew that voice. He committed it to memory while standing behind the hotel, smelling blood and Alpha pheromones and arousal. “My dear heart, I’ve been worried sick about you.”
“Brother Matthias.” Cass’s voice cracked open and Riot felt it. It was relief and fear and confusion. “You’re here. I didn’t know if you’d be—”
“Shh. Shh, shh, shh. I’m here.” The soft pad of footsteps moved closer. “Oh, Brother Cassiopeia, look at you. Who did such violence to you?”
Riot made himself lie still and held his face into the thing it needed to be: a seeker, grateful and exhausted, resting quietlybehind a curtain. Not a man whose hands were trying to become fists under a blanket.
“Sit for me, dear one. Here—that’s it. Let me see.”
There was more movement. A pained intake of air from Cass.
“The attending staff—they mean well, but they don’t know you the way I do.” There was a pause. Fabric rustling, maybe, or a hand settling somewhere. “I know your body, Brother Cassiopeia. I know where it holds its tension, where the negative energy collects. You don’t need to be brave with me.”
Riot’s molars ground together so hard his jaw ached. He stared at the ceiling and counted the panels.
Brother Cyrus, still at Riot’s side, glanced toward the curtain with the expression of a man watching his favorite show. “Brother Matthias is one of our best spiritual guides and an excellent healer for ailments of the body and spirit,” he murmured, as though offering context for a nature documentary. “He’s guided Brother Cassiopeia for many years. The bond between mentor and ward is one of our most sacred relationships.”
Sacred.Yes. That’s one word for it.
