“You drugged him,” Sage said. “You don’t get to manage the side effects.”
“I was administering a therapeutic—”
“Stop talking.” That was Honey, not looking up from the keypad. Her voice flat and focused and carrying an edge that surprised even Riot. “Just stop.”
Matthias stopped.
Riot guided Cass to the greenhouse wall and he sat when directed—compliant, boneless, his limbs limp as he folded to the ground the way someone in deep sleep would. He leaned against the glass, his head tilted up. His lips moved, but his words were soft enough that Riot had to crouch down and lean in to hear him. “...you smell like the good thing...”
“What?”
“...the cordite and the other one... the strawberry one... even the cordite smells good now because it comes with you...”
Riot’s throat closed as he stroked Cass’s cheek; his skin was too hot. “Stay with me.”
“...m’here...”
“I know. I know you’re here.”
“Don’t be sad, Brennan,” Cass said those words clearly, as though Riot’s old name was stored in a different room than the rest of his language.
“I’m not sad,” Riot said, but his voice cracked and his eyes leaked and the comedy of the lie was not lost on him.
“Okay.” Cass smiled. Then the smile went somewhere else and Cass was looking through him.
“Got it,” Honey said. “Let’s go.”
The keypad beeped. Bright. The light turned green.
The greenhouse was warm, dark and smelled like soil and growing things and for a half second Riot understood why Cass loved it. Then Honey was pulling up a hatch in the floor between two planting beds, and the smell from below was concrete, standing water, and old air, and the understanding passed. Cass kept reaching for plants as they passed, with Riot needing to pull him closer so he wouldn’t wander off.
“I’ve never been down here,” Honey said, staring into the dark opening. “We’ve had the weather alarms go off, but we were always just told to join for a mass prayer and nothing ever—”
Riot looked at Matthias.
Matthias looked back. The pastoral mask was holding, patchy and cracked at the edges where the bite wound kept pulling beneath the bandage, but holding. He looked like he knew what Riot was going to say, because Matthias was probably used to being the smartest person in most rooms and he’d already calculated that his value alive and cooperative was greater than his value silent.
“The main trunk runs east,” Matthias said. “Two hundred meters. There’s a junction. Take the right passage. It exits at the service road outside the walls.”
“If you’re lying…” Riot began.
“I’m not lying, and if you choose to leave now, I will remain silent on the matters that have happened this night. But Cassiopeia needs open air and medical attention and neither is available underground. It’s in my interest to—”
“Get him down the ladder,” Riot said to Sage.
Sage moved Matthias to the hatch. He went down awkwardly—hands tied in front of him, his balance wrong, She controlledhis descent with a grip on his arm that wasn’t gentle and wasn’t trying to be. Honey followed.
Riot turned to Cass, who stood beside a planting bed, patting the dirt around what was undoubtedly a weed, swaying slightly. “Hey princess, we’re going down.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want a piggy back ride down?”
“No,” Cass hummed, his eyes landing on Riot with another gentle smile. “I can do it.”
Riot helped him to the ladder. Cass’s hands found the rungs and his feet found the steps. His body knew how to climb down a ladder even if the person inside the body was somewhere in the warm dark. Riot followed, one arm hovering behind him, ready to grab Cass by the robes if he needed to.
They reached the bottom.
