The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 401

Chapter 401: 401 | The Gap [GT BONUS]

"You ran the four-mile hill circuit in seventy-three-degree heat on Tuesday without sweating through your shirt until mile three. You do not run cold. You are a furnace with legs and an attitude problem." Caden’s hazel eyes had sharpened underneath the goofy delivery, the way they always did when he spotted a discrepancy worth cataloging. "Who scratched you."

"Nobody scratched me."

"Your collar is buttoned. Your collar is never buttoned. The collar being buttoned means the collar is hiding something, and the something is on your neck, and the things that end up on necks in college buildings are either hickeys or scratches, and you don’t strike me as the type who lets someone give him a hickey on a Thursday morning before Aspect Theory."

"Your deductive reasoning needs calibration."

"My deductive reasoning is impeccable. Marco, tell him my deductive reasoning is impeccable."

Marco leaned forward from behind Caden’s shoulder with a chip between his fingers and an expression of clinical disinterest. "His deductive reasoning is adequate. The chip situation is critical. I’m running low." He crunched the chip and pointed the remaining fragment at my throat. "The collar’s weird though. Just gonna throw that out there."

"Thrown. Rejected. Moving on."

"Suit yourself." Marco settled back and the chip bag resumed its constant rustling.

Caden remained unconvinced in a way that communicated itself through his continued proximity and the brightness of his gaze, but the bottom door of Room 218 opened and Cole Dravid materialized on the platform without having visibly entered through any door, and every conversation in the amphitheater died like someone had pulled the plug on a speaker system.

Dravid stood with his hands behind his back and his grey eyes already sweeping the horseshoe, cataloging who was present and who was not and what the distribution pattern said about the cohort’s internal social dynamics. His blue-black hair caught the overhead lights, and the Halloran faculty pin on his left lapel sat exactly where it always sat, and his expression communicated the specific flatness of someone who had completed his assessment before anyone else realized he’d started.

"Good morning," Dravid said, in the tone of someone who considers goodness a statistical improbability and mornings a design flaw.

The class responded with the subdued murmur of thirty-eight teenagers who had learned over three weeks that Dravid’s greeting was not an invitation to greet back but rather a calibration point that determined how the next ninety minutes would proceed.

Dravid’s gaze moved across the horseshoe row by row, pausing on specific students for durations that I suspected corresponded to private assessment files he maintained in a locked drawer in his office. When the grey eyes reached me, they stopped. Not for long. One full second of sustained eye contact during which nothing about Dravid’s expression changed and everything about his attention intensified.

His gaze dropped to my collar.

It came back up.

He moved on.

The whole thing lasted under two seconds and I felt it like a punch to the sternum, because Cole Dravid had just noticed that my collar was buttoned and had filed the deviation against his baseline profile of my appearance and had decided to say nothing about it, which was infinitely more dangerous than saying something, because saying nothing meant the observation had been stored for a context where it would become useful.

"Today," Dravid said, and the word carried enough gravitational pull that thirty-eight spines straightened in their seats, "we will discuss the concept of information asymmetry in tactical engagement."

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