The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 422

Chapter 422: 422 | A Lottery with a Body Count

"Mine is that it doesn’t matter, and it has never mattered, and I have spent nineteen years watching provenance get used as a polite word for lineage while actual capability got filed under variance." Something moved through her voice that had not been in the conference room. "I came up in Verano with a Common-tier utility Aspect and a mother who cleaned offices in the Corridor, and I sat in a falls module at seventeen with legacy kids who had private coaches, and the only person in that building who treated me like a person with a ceiling was a mid-tier mobility Hero from nowhere with a name nobody outside her agency knew. So no. I don’t think the source is the point. I think the source is what people reach for when they want permission to stop paying attention."

"And the correct one."

"The correct one is that it stops mattering the second you’re strong enough to make it stop mattering, and until then it is the only thing anyone will ever discuss, and the gap between those two states is where careers go to die." She started through the gate. "Radiant closed that gap in four minutes with twenty-seven people. That is the only method anybody has ever found. It is not a strategy, Lukas, it is a lottery with a body count, and the reason I am attaching my agency’s name to your file two weeks before I have any evidence is that I would rather be early and wrong than watch another one of you go into that lottery alone."

The garden was empty. Somebody’s sprinkler had been running and the path was dark in patches and the jasmine along the east wall was going hard in the heat, and I walked next to her through it and did not say anything for about fifteen seconds, because what I wanted to say was that I did not deserve any of that, and that is not a sentence you hand to a woman who has already decided to spend her credibility on you.

"You’re going to be disappointed in me at some point," I said instead.

"Almost certainly."

"I mean specifically. Not generally."

"I understood you specifically." She stepped over a wet patch without breaking stride. "Here’s what I’ll say about that, and then we’re done and you can go be tired at Cole Dravid. I have read your file, I have read your mother’s file, and I have now spent one hour with you, and I have concluded four things. You are lying about something structural. You are not lying about wanting this. You are significantly more dangerous than the paperwork implies, and you are eighteen and carrying it by yourself, and that last one is the only one that actually worries me."

"Diane’s carrying some of it."

"Diane is carrying it the way a person carries something they intend to keep." She said it without heat, which made it worse. "That is not the same as help. Ask her sometime what the rest of the answer was. Nine years ago. She’ll tell you the truth if you ask her when she’s tired."

The north lot came up through the trees, sixteen cars and a shuttle bay and heat coming off the asphalt in that visible way, and hers was the black one at the end with the plates that meant a leasing company in Sacramento.

She stopped at the driver’s door and did not open it.

"Two weeks," she said.

"Two weeks."

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