The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 354

Chapter 354: 354 | Vertigo is a Kind of Victory [PS BONUS]

Wednesday morning came with the specific dread of a decision I couldn’t control anymore.

I’d done the work. Twelve conversations, one endorsement I’d earned through refusal, another I’d bought with snack promises and a genuine commitment to Rina’s conditioning problem. All that was left was watching nineteen people decide whether they trusted me enough to speak for them when it counted.

I hated this part. The waiting. The powerlessness of it.

Steele stood at the front of Room 214 with a marker in one hand and her coffee in the other, which told me the votes had already been counted somewhere I couldn’t see. She wasn’t tallying live. She was performing the reveal, which meant she’d decided the reveal mattered more than the count.

Classic Steele. Every moment a lesson wrapped in theater wrapped in more theater.

The class filed in slower than usual. Nobody joked. Even Caden kept his feet off the back of my chair, which was becoming a reliable barometer for how seriously the room took a thing.

Percy sat beside me with his notebook closed. Closed. His pen wasn’t moving. His brain had apparently decided that documenting this moment would violate some internal principle about not analyzing his own defeat in real time.

"You okay?" I asked him.

"My model gave you a sixty-two percent probability of winning the male seat." He stared at the whiteboard where Steele hadn’t written anything yet. "Which means there’s a thirty-eight percent chance my model was wrong, and I don’t handle being wrong well."

"You’ll be fine."

"That’s statistically unsupported reassurance."

"Yeah, well. It’s all I’ve got."

Felicity claimed the seat to my right and leaned close enough that her shoulder pressed against mine. Vanilla and something warmer underneath. She’d done her hair differently today, half of it pulled up, the rest falling loose around a face that had spent the past week telling me exactly what she thought I stood for.

"Nervous?" she whispered.

"No."

"Liar. Your jaw’s doing the thing."

"I don’t have a thing."

"You absolutely have a thing." She bumped my arm. "It’s cute. Don’t ruin it by getting self-conscious."

Steele set her coffee on the podium. The room went quiet in the way rooms only go quiet when twenty teenagers with dangerous powers all decide to hold their breath at once.

"So." She uncapped the marker. "You people made this harder than it needed to be. Fourteen nominations. Fourteen. For a position most of you barely understand and half of you will regret wanting by October."

She turned to the whiteboard and started writing. Names first, down the left side in her sharp military print.

PARK. BELMONT. MENDOZA. HOLT. on the male side.

ORTEGA. LANG. CALLOWAY. WHITFIELD. on the female.

Then the tally marks.

She built the male count first, and I watched the marks accumulate next to each name with the specific attention of someone whose stomach had relocated to his throat.

Theo got the first mark. Then another. He sat two rows down with his usual easy warmth, and I could see him doing the math the same way I was, watching his count climb.

BELMONT: 7. PARK: 5. MENDOZA: 4. HOLT: 3.

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