“Well,” Stave said, his voice flat as ever despite the gold bleeding into his eyes, “this is a shitshow.”
“Get out.” Lilac had positioned herself in the center of the room like a referee at a bar fight where every participant outweighed her by a hundred pounds and could bench-press a truck. She did not appear to care. “All of you. Out of my house. Now.”
“We came to check on you,” Prepper said, but his gaze kept drifting toward the hallway. He caught himself, shook his head hard, and deliberately looked at the ceiling instead. One hand had drifted to the burn scars that twisted down the left side of his face. “Heard there was some excitement at the gates. Wanted to make sure everyone was—fuck, that’s a hell of a scent.”
“The scent is handled,” Lilac snapped. “What’snothandled is three Berserkers in my living room responding to it. Leave.”
Stave hadn’t moved from the doorway. His expression was the same flat mask it always was—the one that made people uncomfortable because they couldn’t tell if he was bored or calculating how quickly he could kill everyone in the room. Probably both, knowing Stave. His left hand rested against his right wrist, fingers tracing the thick scar tissue there. The bite marks had healed badly, which happened when they declined medical attention on the grounds that they deserved the scars. They’d all made that particular decision at least once.
“Your suppressants,” Stave said to Riot, ignoring Lilac entirely. “When did they stop working?”
This. This was what Riot didn’t want to deal with. Not now. Not while every nerve in his body was oriented toward a bedroom like a compass needle that had been magnetically reprogrammed to point at one specific Omega.
“This morning. Double dose.”
“And before this morning?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re clearly not, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” Stave’s head tilted slightly—the only tell that something was processing behind those flat eyes. “Same batch as ours?”
The question landed like a stone in Riot’s gut. He knew why Stave was asking. If Riot’s suppressants were failing, it could mean the batch was bad. It could mean their mods had outpaced the chemistry.
It could mean they were all fucked.
And Riot couldn’t make himself care or make the math feel urgent when every synapse was already dedicated to tracking the muffled sounds from Lilac’s bedroom. Catastrophic pharmaceutical failure affecting surviving Endeavor subjects?Sure. Important. File it under “problems for a version of Riot who isn’t slowly losing his mind.”
“Yeah,” he said reluctantly. “Same batch.”
Stave and Prepper exchanged a look.
“Well, that’s not great,” Prepper said. He’d given up on the ceiling and was staring at Riot, his scarred face twisted into a grimace. “You look like shit, brother. When’s the last time you ate something?”
Had he eaten? Riot genuinely couldn’t remember. There’d been... something, at some point. Maybe. Before the hotel. Before everything narrowed down to Cass. Nutritional self-care had, apparently, been one of the first casualties of whatever was happening to him. Along with rational decision-making, self-preservation instincts, and any claim to professional competence.
“That’s not the point,” Stave said. “The point is we need to know if this is a supply problem or anusproblem.”
Mod decay.
The words hung unspoken in the air between them.
They’d all talked about it, late at night when the suppressants were wearing thin and the modifications felt like they were crawling under their skin. The enhancements hadn’t been designed for longevity—they’d been designed for corporate utility, and when that utility ended, Gensyn hadn’t exactly left an instruction manual, or a “Sorry We Ruined Your Biology” support group.
They had always known they were living on borrowed time. The question was always how much.
But Riot couldn’t make himself care about that right now. Not with Cass immediate and real andright there, separated from him by thirty feet of hallway and his own rapidly deteriorating self-control.
“I’m not falling apart,” Riot said through clenched teeth.
“You’re standing in Lilac’s living room with your eyes glowing and your hands bleeding,” Stave observed. “That’s at least partially apart.”
“Fuck off.”
“Compelling counterargument.”
Prepper moved further into the room, positioning himself against the far wall—as far from the hallway as he could get while still being present. Giving Riot space. It was such a familiar gesture, such athemgesture, that something in Riot’s mind loosened a fraction.
They’d learned this dance over years of living in each other’s pockets. How to exist around each other when their instincts were riding them hard. How to give space without abandoning. How to be family when every instinct was screaming that everyone in the room was either a threat or competition.
