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."

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