“I wasn’t being an idiot—”
“You left an unlocked vehicle in the Static Zone for two days.”
“I didn’t think I needed to put the Free-Ohm sign on it so close to Elysian territory. Maybe a littleplease don’t take my carnote on the windshield with a picture of a sad face.”
“You lived in the Static Zone for a decade, Riot. You should know better.”
The bickering was nice. Cass didn’t have a better word for it. Two people arguing about something that didn’t matter, back and forth, when the arguing was a kind of talking and the talking was a kind of being alive.
“Cass.” Honey’s voice cut through the bickering gently, but everything moved. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” he said. “My head feels like it’s full of... like when you put too much water in oatmeal and it gets that mushy texture where it’s not solid, but it’s not liquid, and it’s not really anything? My head feels like that.”
Honey’s face twitched into the ghost of where a smile would go.
“How long have we been driving?” Cass asked, because the light was wrong—it had been night when they were at the greenhouse, and that was a lot of hours he didn’t have.
“All night,” Riot said. “And all day. It’s about seven.”
Nearly twenty hours. He’d been gone for twenty hours, and he didn’t remember any of them. He’d been in Riot’s lap the whole time, apparently, fighting windows and chins. “Was I asleep the whole time?”
“Mostly.” Riot helped him sit up, but Cass immediately resettled against him, resting his heavy head on Riot’s shoulder. “You talked in your sleep for a while. Then you snored. The fighting started about an hour ago.”
Cass wanted to ask what he’d said in his sleep, but the look on Honey’s face told him he didn’t want to know. What if he’d said something unkind? Or something about doing sex with Riot?His cheeks burned at the thought. Whatever the drug had pulled out of him was sitting in this car now, in the space between all of them, and Cass wasn’t ready to find out what.
He shifted, and everything hurt—his ribs, his chest, the circles under the bandages, his thigh where the needle had gone in. The robes from Springfield Gardens were stiff with dried blood and smelled like ointment and a life he wasn’t going back to.
That thought was harder than the pain. He was never going to walk the teaching paths in the morning when the dew was still on the stone. He would never sit in the meditation hall and breathe with the voices…
He was never going to see Brother Matthias again.
That thought was more complicated than the others. It had too many things in it now, and the drug residue in his head was making it impossible to sort any of them into piles that made sense, so he just let it sit there. He didn’t try to open it or understand it; he just let it be what it was, which was something he’d have to come back to later when he could think properly.
“Can you help me take these off?” Cass asked Riot as he stared down at his robes, still all white except for the blood and dirt, dried onto the fabric in patterns that looked like maps of places that didn’t exist.
Riot looked at him with wide eyes, like he was checking to make sure Cass meant what he thought he meant. “You sure?”
“I don’t want to wear them anymore.” It was that simple. They belonged to a place he wasn’t going back to and a person he wasn’t anymore, and taking them off felt like the most obvious thing in the world, even if he could feel Honey’s eyes on him as he unknotted his sash.
Riot helped him work the fabric over the sling and ease it past the wounds on his chest, awkward and graceless, elbows bumping the window, Cass’s head swimming from the movement. Underneath, he still wore the undershirt and linenpants he’d had on under the robes. His bandages showed at the collar of the undershirt and through the thin fabric.
He folded the robe with clumsy hands because he was supposed to fold things when he was done with them. Even if it was a thing he was never going to pick up again.
“Okay,” he said to himself.
The car moved through the Static Zone and Cass stared out the window at the flatness. The first time he’d seen this landscape, it scared him—all the abandoned towns and empty fields and unused roads. It had felt like a place that nobody cared about, a place that had been left behind.
It didn’t look like that now. There was life out there—growing and existing as it wanted, despite everything. Plants coming up through concrete. Birds in trees that nobody planted. A whole world that kept going without anyone telling it how to go. It was beautiful, actually, in a way that the meditation gardens had never been. The meditation gardens were beautiful because someone decided they should be. This was beautiful because it just was.
Cass’s throat tightened as they crested a hill and the Collective came into view.
The lights were on. Warm yellow lights in windows that meant people were home, and Cass’s stomach rose and fell with the hill because the lights meant he was home too. He didn’t know if Granny Lu would let him stay. He didn’t know where Honey would go or what would happen next or how any of this worked. But the lights were on, Riot’s arm was around him, the folded robe was on the seat beside him, and the world hadn’t ended.
“We’re close,” Sage said, and something in her voice cracked—small, almost invisible.
Riot’s arm tightened around him and Cass felt a tangle of relief and guilt and love all mixed together with something darker underneath that he couldn’t identify, something Riot washolding very still and very deep, like a stone in his pocket he kept touching.
“It’s going to be okay,” Cass said. To Riot. To Honey. To himself.
