“And Cass,” Riot said.
“He was different. From the beginning. The other children responded to the standard developmental programs—the guided meditations, the group exercises. Cassiopeia couldn’t process them, he took everything too literally. The metaphors didn’t land the way they were supposed to. He’d sit in group meditation and ask why the light wasn’t actually warm if it was supposed to be warm.” He paused, and there was something tender in his voice as he said it. Riot was glad he couldn’t see Matthias’s face, because he was certain he would have put his fist through it and it would not have taken much effort. “He needed someone who would explain things differently. Slowly. Personally. I volunteered because nobody else had the patience.”
“And it started as just that?” Riot pressed. “Not something else?”
“Of course that’s how it started…I was just filling a gap I knew I would live with. He was a child who would never have a father and I was a young man who would never have a son.” Matthias’s voice was quiet. Not the contemplative quiet—the human quiet. “I didn’t mean for it to become something else.”
“But it did.”
“I love him,” Matthias said.
Riot looked at the back of him for a long time. The gold light on the white robes. The blood. The scent of tears. This was a man who had taken a lonely child and filled his need for acceptance, then used the shape of that need as a doorway into something unforgivable, and now he was walking through the darkness with them and telling Riot it was love.
Break him. I want to break him into small pieces. One joint at a time.
“Honey,” Riot said. “Can you hold Cass? He’s light.”
“Get your shit together,” Sage snapped. She turned around and thrust the small blade in Riot’s direction. “Now is not the fucking time.”
“I’m together,” Riot said through his teeth, still staring at the back of Matthias’s head, wondering how much force it would take to yank on Matthias’s pony tail and rip his scalp from his skull. “I just need Honey to hold Cass while I—”
“No.” Sage stepped between him and Matthias. “Not now. Not here.”
“I wasn’t going to—”
“You were.”
Riot’s jaw locked. The gold was bright and the Berserker was offering its services with the casual persistence of a telemarketer and Sage was right. She was right and he hated that she was right and the questions he’d asked had gotten answers that were sitting in his chest like shrapnel.
“Fine,” he said.
The tunnel ended the way tunnels did, with the air getting less stale, the draft getting stronger, and the ceiling rising just enough that Riot could stop hunching over the passed out man in his arms like a gargoyle with a spinal condition. It widened into a concrete antechamber with utility pipes along the walls, a junction box, and a heavy, steel door set into the concrete withthe kind of industrial permanence that saidthis was built by people who expected to use it for a long time.At shoulder height sat a small biometric black panel.
“Fingerprint,” Honey said. “Only Elders can open doors that lead outside the campus perimeter.”
Everyone looked at Matthias.
The bite wound on his face had stopped bleeding through the bandage, but the skin around it was more swollen than before. He looked smaller than he had in the house. Smaller than he had in the tunnel. The further they got from Springfield Gardens, the more the authority bled out of him, like a battery losing charge.
“Open the door,” Riot said.
Matthias looked at the biometric panel. At Riot. At Cass, asleep in Riot’s arms. The calculation was still happening behind his eyes—diminished, running on fumes, but not gone. “If I open this door, the system logs it,” he said. “My biometric signature will be time-stamped. They’ll know which exit we used.”
“They already know we’re in the tunnels,” Honey said. “Open the door.”
Matthias sighed as he pressed his thumb to the panel. The lock disengaged with a heavy clunk, and cool air flooded the antechamber—real air, night air, carrying the smell of grass and dirt and distance.
Sage pushed the door open to starlight and a narrow maintenance road, gravel, running along the outside of the campus wall. The trees beyond it were real trees, not the manicured meditation gardens, nor the carefully maintained ones they saw on the way in from the northern entrance, but wild growth. The wall of Springfield Gardens rose behind them, white and smooth.
Cass stirred and his eyes fluttered open and the look in them was the glazed, loose look of someone surfacing briefly before going back under. His hand found Riot’s tunic again and held on.
“Where?” he asked.
“Outside,” Riot said. “We’re out.”
“Oh.” Cass blinked. “Honey is safe?”
“I’m here, Cass. I’m safe,” Honey said gently. Her voice remained calm, but her eyes were huge, darting around like she expected something to pop out from one of the trees and grab her. Or maybe she was still processing the chaos of the night’s events. Cass just nodded and closed his eyes.
