The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 507

Chapter 507: 507 | A River in a Cracked Pipe

Arthur sighed. The breath cost him something on the left side, but he let it out anyway.

"Not really," he said. "Some of them are interesting. There’s a boy in 1-B, Hiro. Fights like he already knows the camera’s on him, which sounds like a flaw and might not be. Another one in the same class, Percy. Blue hair, notebook, reads a room faster than the room knows it’s being read. There’s a girl in 1-A named Sloane who commits to everything the way you’d commit to a decision you’d already lost sleep over. And Gia, also 1-A, who solves problems before anyone else notices there’s a problem."

Ashby waited.

"None of them?" he asked.

"None of them are ready to have a river shoved into a cracked pipe."

The tea steamed between them. Arthur turned the cup a quarter turn on the blotter and watched the surface settle.

"I am interested in one of them," he said.

Ashby’s expression did not change, which meant he had been waiting for exactly this and had chosen not to reach for it.

"The Belmont boy."

Arthur did not answer right away. Down on the track the kid finished another lap and slowed to a walk with his hands on his hips, and somewhere below them a door opened and closed and opened again. The building had its own life at this hour, indifferent to the two men deciding things on the top floor.

"I don’t like saying his name," Arthur said finally. "Which is stupid. It’s a name. But every time I put it in my mouth it feels like I’m putting energy into the world I don’t want circulating yet." He looked at the ruined shoulder of the hoodie instead of at Ashby. "So we’ll say the boy. Reina’s boy."

"Marcus’s as well."

"Marcus’s as well." A muscle worked in Arthur’s jaw. "I watched the entrance footage. I watched it four times, which is more than I watch anything, and I don’t watch things four times because I have four hours in a day, I have significantly fewer. He pulled a girl out of a zero-pointer engagement zone when the smart play was to walk. He set up two other kids for kills he could have taken himself. He fought a Legendary-class Conjurer’s barrier and it came apart, which it should not have, because his file says fifteen feet and twenty pounds and a late manifestation that showed up two months ago out of a clear sky."

Ashby said nothing.

"That’s the part I keep circling," Arthur said. "Someone awakening that late, that clean, out of nowhere. Nine years of negative diagnostics and then a Rare-tier Channeler at seventeen. That doesn’t happen. It happens, statistically, in a fraction of a fraction of the population, and even then it doesn’t come out looking like he came out looking. You don’t think there’s something under it?"

"I think," Ashby said, "that you have already decided there is something under it, and you have come to my office to be talked out of it, and I am not going to do that."

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