The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 391

Chapter 391: 391 | The Part You People Never Learn [GT BONUS]

"Wolfgang," she said, and then closed her mouth like she’d bitten herself.

"Wolfgang." I let that sit. "You vented to Wolfgang. Wolfgang told your father, because that’s what happens when a rich girl’s voice does the thing yours is doing right now, and your father owns a hero-tech company with eleven government contracts and an entire legal department that exists to make problems go away. So Heinrich Lang told Margot Lang that some unmarked scholarship boy at Halloran was upsetting his daughter, and Margot Lang did what any decent parent with a federal database login does, which is find out who the hell he is."

Petra’s breathing had changed. Shallow at the top, held slightly, the way people breathe when they’ve realized the room got smaller and can’t decide whether to be angry about it.

"They’re my family," she said. "Family looks out for each other. I understand that’s a foreign concept to you, given the circumstances, but-"

She stopped.

She stopped because she heard it while it was still in the air, and I watched her whole face go through something complicated and unfamiliar, which was guilt, and which she had absolutely no idea how to wear.

"Given the circumstances," I repeated.

"That was beneath me."

"It was accurate." I closed the last of the distance, and now she had to actually look up, and the shutter she’d built cracked in a second place. "My parents are dead. That’s not a wound, it’s a fact in a file, and it’s the same file your mother is currently reading. Do you know what’s in there? Three negative diagnostic scans between ages seven and fourteen. A gap of two years where the ward of Diane Fitzgerald stopped requesting scans, because he’d stopped believing anything was going to show up. And then a manifestation at seventeen and an entrance exam ranking of third out of fourteen hundred."

"I’m aware of your ranking. You’ve made certain everyone is."

"Then you’re aware of how it looks when someone puts those two pages next to each other and gets curious out loud."

She lifted her chin higher, which was the only direction left. "If your registration is legitimate, an inquiry costs you nothing."

"Sure." I laughed, and it came out wrong, and I let it. "That’s the part you people never learn, and I mean that with the exact amount of affection it sounds like. Nobody’s going to catch me on a scan, Petra. Put me in the chair. Bring the good equipment, bring your father’s proprietary equipment, bring an analyst who’s been reading Core signatures since before either of us manifested. I’ll pass. Every time. That’s not confidence, that’s arithmetic."

"Then I fail to see the crisis."

"The crisis is that it never gets to the chair." I watched her, and I made sure she watched me. "It gets to a forum. Somebody in your mother’s office has a friend who has a login, and that friend posts four lines with no names attached, and by Sunday there’s a thread with two hundred replies asking whether the Belmont kid’s late manifestation is real or whether Fitzgerald Media bought a Channeler classification for a boy who tested Unmarked three separate times. Nobody has to prove it. That’s the beautiful part. They just have to say it enough that when I walk into a room in four years, the first thing everyone in that room already knows about me is that there’s a question."

Petra’s arms came uncrossed. Her hands went to her sides and stayed there, fingers slightly open, which was what her body did instead of admitting anything.

"You told me you were a delivery boy," she said.

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