The greenhouse. Dirt. Growing things.
He hoped the rosemary would be okay without him again.
The warmth took him and Cass went somewhere else.
Chapter forty-four
Pray the Bad Weather Away
Riot
Riotsurvivedyearsinthe Static Zone, four corporate assassination attempts, a full berserker modification that the brochure described as “temporary discomfort,” and more fire fights than he could count. He fought the best of the best from Gensyn and SVI with nothing but body armor and his gloves with his brothers. He survived Lilac beating him with boots. He had, at no point during any of these experiences, been unable to stop crying.
There was a first time for everything.
The gold made it worse. Everything through the gold was already turned up past eleven—colors louder, edges sharper, the world rendered in the kind of aggressive high-definition that made even moonlight feel like an interrogation. Add tears and the whole thing smeared like a windshield in rain. The lanterns became streaks. The white buildings bled at their edges. The path ahead was a silver blur that he had to keep blinking clear every few seconds, which was not ideal when he was the muscle in a hostage situation pretending not to be a weapon of a man having a quiet emotional collapse behind the group.
He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Again.
The thing was—and this was the part that wouldn’t stop feeding the leak—the thing that had broken whatever valve had been keeping this contained wasn’t Cass’s questions. It wasn’t even Matthias’s answers. The thing that broke him was that Cass cleaned the blood off Matthias’s face.
The drug lowered every filter the princess had and what came out wasn’t rage or accusation or even understanding. It was kindness. Careful, practiced, automatic kindness aimed at the man who had spent a decade isolating him from everyone who might have noticed what was happening.
I just think it’s a lot of volunteering. For one person.
That thought tried to go somewhere…Riot watched the synapses try to fire, the understanding almost surfacing—and Cass had let it go. It was as if, somewhere underneath the chemicals and the pain and the bullshit corporate brainwashing, Cass made a choice. It was as if he understood, on some bone-deep level he couldn’t articulate, that if he followed that thought to where it was going, the world he would walk back into would be different. Smaller. Meaner. Missing a father figure.
So Cass let it go, and Riot loved him for the mercy of it and hated everything that made the mercy necessary, and bothof those things were true at the same time. The tears were apparently his body’s solution to a paradox it couldn’t resolve.
Cass leaned into him, more with every step. His hand was still on Cass’s lower back and the ratio had shifted—ten minutes ago Cass had been walking and Riot had just been supporting him. Now Riot was walking and Cass was a warm, swaying weight pressed against his side, feet still moving, his brain sending the signals, but the signals seemed like they were on a delay.
“I think I was a fish,” Cass said.
“I know, princess.” Riot wiped his eyes against his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” Cass whispered. “I think I need to sit down.”
Cass didn’t move. His body was standing, but his eyes were wrong, open, aimed roughly at Riot’s chest, tracking nothing. The recognition that had been fading was gone, leaving a body that was still running on the last set of instructions it received: stand, stay close, don’t fall.
“Cass. Can you hear me?”
Cass blinked. Slow. The blink of someone waking up in a room they don’t recognize. “Mm.”
“Princess. Look at me.”
Cass’s eyes drifted up, found his face, and stayed there, but in the way a boat stays at anchor—not by choice, just by the mechanics of having nowhere else to go.
“Hi,” Cass said, sweet and soft.
Oh, god.
This was worse than collapsing. This was worse than going limp. Cass wasin there, somewhere, reduced to a pilot light, the barest flicker, and his body was still performing the version of himself that cooperated.
“Cassiopeia needs to be monitored while on that medication,” Matthias said from behind them. “The compound requires careful observation during the dissociative phase due to the risk of respiratory depression—”
“Observation by who?” Sage asked, dry as sand. “You?”
“I’m simply saying that as the only person here with medical knowledge of the compound—”
