She sat down next to Honey, close enough that the fabric of their robes touched at the shoulder.
“They wanted to dye it,” Sage said unprompted as she picked up an apple slice from Honey’s tray and looked at it like it had personally offended her.
“So you shaved your head?” Honey asked.
“I shaved my head.”
“Rather than dye it?”
“Rather than letthemdye it.” Sage’s jaw tightened. “There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“I chose this. They don’t get to choose things about my body.”
Neither of them was looking at each other, which Cass was starting to realize meant they were both thinking hard about not looking at each other.
“You didn’t come find me,” Sage said. “After the ceremony. You were supposed to stay for questions.”
“I needed time.”
“You’ve had three years.”
Honey’s cheeks darkened. Her mouth opened and closed. Sage was still looking at the apple, but her other hand was on the table—flat, open, and six inches from Honey’s hand.
Cass looked at Riot. Riot looked at Cass. Under the table, Riot’s thumb moved slowly across his knuckles, and the corner of his mouth twitched in a way that made Cass want to kiss him. It took him a full minute in the awkward silence to figure out what was making Riot smile.
They know each other.
He had so many questions building on his tongue that he couldn’t pick which one to start with, and he may have just started asking and never stopped if the air in the commissary hadn’t changed.
He felt it before he heard it: a quality, a pressure, the particular way a room adjusted itself around an important person. Conversations didn’t stop, they just... redirected.
“Good morning.” Brother Matthias’s voice arrived with its usual warmth and made Cass feel small like it always did. That voice read Cass bedtime stories when he was younger— not official bedtime stories, not the ones the communal caretakers read, but special ones, just for Cass, becauseyou’re like a son to me, Cassiopeia, and sons deserve special things.
Nobody else in Springfield Gardens had a dad and Cass had never even met his birthgiver. Children were raised communally, shared among the caretakers, belonging to everyone and no one. But Cass had Brother Matthias. Brother Matthias who remembered his favorite foods and knew when he was sad and came to his room on difficult nights when other children were mean to him because he wanted to draw flowers instead of do math. Even at his lowest, Cass felt like the luckiest person in Springfield Gardens because everyone else belonged to the community, but Cass had Honey and Brother Matthias.
The feeling that rose in his chest when Brother Matthias sat down beside their table was so tangled he couldn’t find the edges of it. Warmth and dread and love and the thing that lived behind the door, all twisted together like roots grown too close to separate.
“Brother Cassiopeia. Seeker Riot.” Matthias’s eyes moved across the table. “Sister Honey. And our newest arrival. I see you’ve taken an... unconventional approach to the grooming guidance.”
“The color wasn’t approved,” Sage said. Her voice was very flat.
“We could have found a more moderate—”
“It’s done.”
Brother Matthias smiled as he settled into a chair beside their table. “Of course. The path takes many forms.”
Brother Matthias was asking about their night, if they rested, but Cass couldn’t make himself hear the words. His eyes were warm and his voice was the voice it always was and his hand rested on Cass’s shoulder the way it always did, but Cass couldn’t stop noticing a smell. Maybe he had been too tired or nervous or covered in blood the day before, but today he smelled familiar in a very un-Brotherly way.
It was that nameless smell that poured off Riot when his eyes went gold and made Cass’s stomach do flips.
Why does he smell like that?
“There seems to be some tension between our welcoming advisor and our newest convert,” Brother Matthias said lightly, glancing between Sage and Honey. “Is the orientation presenting challenges?”
“No challenges,” Honey said, and even Cass heard her say it too fast.
