The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 523

Chapter 523: 523 | The Anomaly in the Catalog [GT BONUS]

Silas Darius Malfoy had been inside the dome for forty-three minutes.

The plan had called for twenty-two.

He stood on the plaza floor in a lake of his own making, black fire pooled across the tile in rivers that did not reflect the emergency lighting because they consumed it instead, and his left leg bounced in the four-beat pattern that Gerard had spent nine years learning to read. The tapping was fast. Too fast. The wrong rhythm, and Silas could feel the wrongness of it without being able to correct it, like a song he had memorized playing back at the wrong speed.

Forty-three minutes. The primary target had not come. Twelve operators sent into the flood zone and the collapse field had been dropped by children, actual children, students who had not yet sat a licensing examination, who owned provisional badges and brand new suits and apparently enough raw violence to fold grown men into concrete like origami sculptures someone had decided were finished. Somebody had found the interlock on sublevel two. The interlock that should have been invisible behind a maintenance panel for another six weeks minimum, invisible in the way that the Architect’s installations were always invisible until they stopped being invisible for reasons the Architect always accounted for and apparently had not accounted for this time.

The Network was awake. The countdown was running.

Gerard’s voice would come through the collar speaker in ninety seconds and Silas would have to answer it and the answer would be extraction because the schedule had slipped past recovery and the Architect did not tolerate slippage in the way that structural engineers did not tolerate weight-bearing columns that decided to stop bearing weight.

Silas had catalogued all of this in the first three seconds after the interlock fell. He processed it the way he processed most tactical collapses, which was to say clinically, without emotional investment, with the part of his brain that Gerard had spent six years training to treat operational failure as data rather than judgment.

He had not catalogued the boy.

The boy in the charcoal and amber hero suit lay on the plaza tile with the girl’s arms around him, and the girl’s right forearm was scorched from something that was not Silas’s fire. Something else had burned her, something that left her skin raw and blistered in patterns Silas recognized as electrical contact damage, and she held him anyway. She held him the way you hold something that is about to come apart if you let go, the way you hold glass that has already cracked but has not yet understood it is broken.

Her pink hair was stuck to her face with sweat and chemical residue and her blue eyes were open and looking at nothing except the boy’s chest, watching it rise and fall, counting breaths the way Silas counted darts. The way someone counts a thing they need to continue counting because the alternative to counting is acknowledging that the count might stop.

Six inches.

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