The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 506

Chapter 506: 506 | The Appetizer

Arthur opened his mouth.

Ashby’s hand came down flat on the desk, and it was not loud, and it stopped him anyway.

"You do not get to explain the plant to me. I have read the incident log. You do not get to explain the fire, or the sedan, or the little girl, because I already know, and because you know that I know, and you are using them as a shield." Amber eyes, warm in the color, nothing warm behind them. "You have used them all morning. You went from Meridian to Coleridge to Maxwell because the second one meant you did not have to think about the first one, and the third meant you did not have to think about the second, and forty children in a sealed dome are the thing you have been outrunning since six o’clock."

The room went very still.

Arthur sat in an office chair with a cup of tea in front of him and the whole left side of his ribcage full of glass, and for a second he was not in the office at all.

He was nineteen. He was on a rooftop in Sacramento with his chest out and his chin up, saying something about legacy, and a woman half his size and twice his everything came off the parapet and kicked him in the back of the knee.

Vesper never hit hard. That was the horror of it. She did not need to. She would let him build the whole speech, let him get to the part where he sounded like a poster, and then her heel would arrive somewhere structural and he would go down on the gravel with his ears ringing and she would stand over him and say, in that voice like a screen door, that she had not asked what he wanted to be remembered for.

Sixteen months of that. Shin, knee, floating rib, the spot at the base of the spine that made his legs stop being legs. She had been dying the entire time and she had never once been slower.

Something walked all the way down Arthur’s back and out through his heels.

He shivered.

Ashby watched him do it and said nothing, which was worse than anything he could have said.

"You look like her," Arthur said.

"I have been told."

"You don’t kick."

"I have not needed to." Ashby picked his cup back up. "Drink the tea, Arthur."

He drank the tea.

Down on the track the kid finished a lap. Somewhere in the building a door closed. Arthur turned the cup around on the blotter and found that his hands had stopped shaking, and he did not know whether that was the blend or the sitting down.

"I’m going to go apologize to them," he said.

"Not this morning."

"I can be on the floor in ninety seconds."

"You can be on the floor in nine," Ashby said, "and you would arrive smelling of a chemical fire, with blood on your teeth, in front of forty eighteen-year-olds who have been taught by three separate instructors that the gap between a Hero’s file and a Hero’s body is the most important thing in the profession. Nadia Solaris would have you in the medical wing before you finished your first sentence. Cole Dravid would look at you for four seconds and know everything. He may already know. I have not asked him, because I do not want the answer written down in his handwriting."

Arthur pushed the chair back and stood up.

"I should really get going," he said.

He reached for it the way he had reached for it forty thousand times, the pull from the base of the sternum, the flood, and it came. It always came. That was the thing nobody understood about Aegis, that the power was never the problem, the power was a river and he was a cracked pipe.

Bone lengthened. His shoulders went out and the hoodie split along the seam at the shoulder blade. Golden light climbed his jaw and put the horn-shaped sweep back in his hair, and he came up and up until the ceiling stopped being generous, and for one second he was Radiant standing in the principal’s office with his fists on his hips, and it was glorious, and it was a lie.

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