The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 448

Chapter 448: 448 | The Color of a Dead Signal

The words came out with the casual conviction of a child announcing a preference for chocolate over vanilla. Not rage. Not burning hatred refined through years of training into a weapon.

Just want, bright and uncomplicated, the kind of want that emerged from a place in Silas’s brain that did not bother with justification because justification was a thing adults required and Silas had stopped being an adult about Radiant approximately six years ago.

Gerard picked up the glass of water and held it at precisely the angle that would catch the monitor light without creating a glare, a gesture so practiced it had become involuntary. "I know, Young Master."

"Today."

"Not today."

"Tomorrow."

"Nor tomorrow."

"Then when?" Silas twisted in the armchair until his legs dangled over one arm and his head hung off the other, a position that no adult would adopt and that Silas found optimal for expressing displeasure at the pace of institutional violence. His black hair fell away from his face and revealed the scarring around his eye sockets, the thin lines of burn damage that traced the perimeter where fire had come close enough to take his sight and then decided against it for reasons nobody had explained to his satisfaction. "I could do it. You know I could."

"I know you believe you could."

"I could." The leg bouncing intensified. The foot-tapping shifted from concrete contact to a staccato rhythm against the armchair’s leather. "I could walk in there and I could burn through every wall between me and that building and I could stand in front of him and I could make him stop smiling."

Gerard set the glass down on the tray and regarded Silas with the expression of a man who had heard this speech or variations of it approximately four hundred times in the past two years and had developed a response protocol that balanced therapeutic intervention with operational security.

"Young Master. Your medication."

"I don’t want the medication."

"The medication is not a request."

"Everything’s a request. That’s what he said. Everything’s a choice and a request and a—"

"The Architect’s philosophical framework does not extend to pharmacological compliance. Take the pills, please."

Silas looked at the pills. Blue. White. Yellow. A sequence he could identify by color alone because he had been taking them in this exact order since he was thirteen, when the Architect had synthesized the first batch and explained that the pills would help Silas focus, which was true, and that the pills would help Silas feel stable, which was mostly true, and that the pills were entirely for Silas’s benefit, which Silas had stopped believing around age sixteen but continued accepting because the alternative involved his brain becoming a place he did not want to inhabit without chemical assistance.

He took the pills. Swallowed them with water. Handed the glass back to Gerard with the cooperation of someone who recognized that this particular battle was not worth the energy expenditure and had already moved on to the next complaint.

"I’m bored."

"You were bored this morning as well."

"Still bored."

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