The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 430

Chapter 430: 430 | Hale Gets Outvoted

Something moved behind her eyes, small, quickly filed.

"Thank you." She turned to her tablet. "Item one."

The door opened again.

Look. I felt her before I saw her. That’s the deal with the bond. Fifty meters and the whole architecture goes two-way, and Sloane Fitzgerald had crossed into range somewhere around the third floor landing, so I’d had about eleven seconds of warning that came through my chest instead of my ears.

The warning said: she’s already got the shape of it.

Not the specifics. The shape. Like someone running their hand over a wall in the dark and finding the outline of a door they hadn’t been told about.

Sloane came through the doorway in the Halloran uniform with her blazer over her arm and her pink hair pulled up into the high ponytail she wore for anything with stakes, and the black choker sat at her throat where it had sat since she was fourteen, and she looked at me for exactly as long as it takes to open a file.

"Sorry I’m late," she said, and dropped into the chair directly across from me.

"You’re not late," Quinn said. "You’re at three thirty-one."

"Then I’m late."

"You are within acceptable tolerance."

"Adler." Sloane’s mouth did something almost fond. "Nobody talks like that."

"I do."

"I know. It’s why I like you." Sloane pulled the brief toward her without looking away from me, flipped it open at the first page, and started reading upside down for four seconds before she rotated it. "Okay. Whose eleven pages."

"Mine," Petra said.

"Course they are."

The air in the room changed pressure.

Two months ago I’d have told you Sloane’s temper announced itself. Explosions, volume, sparks off the knuckles, a girl who fought forward and loud and never once considered the tactical value of silence. What I’d learned since is that Sloane’s actual dangerous register is quiet and pleasant, and that when she gets pleasant, someone should probably start filing insurance paperwork.

"It’s good," Sloane said, turning to page two. "This is really good, actually."

"Thank you."

"Like, weirdly thorough. Actually impressive for something you did in one sitting." Sloane’s eyes tracked across the page with the specific quality of someone reading material she hadn’t expected to respect. "Extraction routing. Sensor thresholds. Comms discipline mapped to environmental degradation timers. You even did the thing where you flag which of your people can’t be deployed in the flooded levels, which nobody ever does because most people write briefs like everybody’s Aspect works in water or they just don’t care."

Petra’s expression remained neutral. Her ears, which I now understood were the whole tell, went faintly pink.

"It’s the obvious consideration," Petra said, her tone perfectly level.

"It’s not, though. It’s the correct one, but it’s not obvious. Most people skip it." Sloane looked up, and her eyes carried a quality I’d seen exactly twice before, both times right before something expensive got said. "When did you write this."

"Last night."

I flipped to Appendix C. She’d built a grid. Four environments across the top, twenty names down the side, and every cell filled in with a rating that had a footnote justifying it.

I found my own name and stopped.

BELMONT, L. Fire: high. Structural: high. Flood: unrated, insufficient data. Hazmat: unrated, insufficient data.

She’d written insufficient data next to me twice and left it there. In a document with her family’s name attached to my file.

That was the most intimate thing anyone had put on paper about me in nine years, and she’d done it in a footnote.

"Adler." Sloane’s voice had shifted, and now it was working. "What’s your read."

Quinn was already three columns deep. "The methodology is sound. Weighted randomization preserves the unpredictability objective while eliminating the catastrophic-draw scenario. There’s precedent. Regional intensives have used compatibility-weighted assignment since twenty-nineteen." She looked up. "Faculty will still say no."

"Why."

"Because it came from students, and because Vincent Hale believes the point of the exercise is to be unfair." Quinn’s mouth flattened by about a millimeter, which for her was a full editorial. "He will phrase it as building resilience."

"He’d be wrong," Sloane said.

"He’d be our instructor."

"He’d still be wrong." Sloane tapped the grid. "But Dravid won’t be. Dravid’s the one who ran the whole information asymmetry unit. He’ll take this in about four seconds because it’s the same argument he’s been making all month. If we bring it up jointly, with both reps from both cohorts signing, Steele backs it, Dravid backs it, and Hale gets outvoted by people who read the paperwork."