The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 416

Chapter 416: 416 | The Entire Test, Petra

Odette turned the page.

"Ms. Lang’s proposal is structurally sound and commercially naive," she said. "I’m going to fix both halves of that sentence, and then Diane is going to try to kill the version I produce, and we’ll meet somewhere in the middle where nobody is happy. That’s the meeting. I’d like everyone to understand the shape of it before we spend forty minutes discovering it."

"Sugar, I love a woman who narrates the ambush."

"You taught me to."

"I taught you to hold the folio flat so nobody reads your margins. The ambush is yours." Diane leaned back and crossed one ankle over the other, and if you did not know her you would have thought she had relaxed. "Go on then."

Odette produced a single sheet from the back of the folio and slid it across the table, and she slid it to me. Not to Diane. Not to Petra. She put it in front of the eighteen-year-old with the collar he had ruined an hour ago, and I watched Diane’s jaw do something very small.

The heading read LETTER OF DEVELOPMENTAL INTEREST, NON-EXCLUSIVE, and the body was four paragraphs long.

"I drafted that Wednesday night," Odette said. "Before Ms. Lang made her speech. I want that on the record, because in six months she’s going to tell her mother she negotiated this outcome, and I’d like at least one person at this table to know the truth."

Petra’s chin came up about a centimeter.

"Then you were already prepared to attach the name," she said.

"I was already prepared to attach the name if the boy could speak in complete sentences under pressure. He can. That was the entire test, Petra. The registration was never the point." Odette put her glasses back on. "The registration is the excuse the industry uses to have a look at somebody. I came here to find out whether there was a person behind the interview clip or a well-managed asset, and Diane has enough clients that the second option was more likely."

"You could have just asked."

"I did ask. He told me he doesn’t know when he stopped being Unmarked and that he trains like it’s going to be taken away." Odette’s mouth moved a fraction, and it was not a smile so much as a place where a smile had once been. "That is an answer nobody coaches. Diane coaches sincerity. She does not coach fear, and she certainly does not coach a candidate to admit to it in front of an agency."

Which was accurate, and I was in the process of enjoying being accurately described when I realized what she had actually said.

She had not believed a single thing my file told her, and she had come anyway, and she had drafted the paper before she arrived.

I have been in a lot of rooms in two lifetimes and I have never once been the least prepared person in one. The novelty was not enjoyable. It was clarifying, which is worse.

I read the letter.

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