The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 525

Chapter 525: 525 | Tender [GT BONUS]

Silas opened his mouth.

He could see the girl holding the boy. Her blue eyes had left the boy’s chest and found Silas’s face across the distance, and she was not screaming anymore. She was quiet and her jaw was set and her arms were tight around a person she was not going to let go of, and the look on her face was the look of someone who had done the math and found the answer unacceptable and was going to refuse the math rather than accept the answer.

Silas’s mother had looked at him once.

He did not remember the context. Nine years old, the house, before the fire, before the algebra tutor crashed and everything burned and his mother went in after his siblings and did not come back. A morning, maybe. Some unremarkable Tuesday. A hallway in the house that no longer existed. His mother’s hand on the top of his head and her face turned down toward him with an expression that the nine-year-old Silas had not possessed the vocabulary to name and the twenty-two-year-old Silas still did not possess the vocabulary to name, though he had spent nine years with the Architect’s vocabulary and the Architect’s categories and the Architect’s relentless insistence that everything could be classified if you applied the correct framework and gave it the appropriate label and filed it in the appropriate drawer where it would cease to be a problem that required emotional processing.

Some things do not have a framework. Some things refuse the drawer.

The girl’s arms tightened around the boy. The boy moved. One hand came up slowly, shaking through the air between them, and touched the side of her face. The touch was gentle despite the fact that the hand was shaking and the fingers were bloody and the boy should not have been conscious, let alone tender. She closed her eyes. The motion was brief. When she opened them again they were still on Silas and the expression in them had not changed at all.

"Nexo," Silas said.

His voice had come apart at the edges. He could hear it. The specific quality of fraying that Gerard monitored through the tapping and the medication and the careful calibration of Silas’s daily routine, the quality that meant the gauge was redlining and the next thing that happened would be either medication or fire, and there was no medication here. The Architect was not here. The routine was not here. There was just Silas and the girl and the thing he had been told to summon and the choice he had not realized he was going to make until his mouth opened and the words came out wrong.

"Stand down."

The gold light from the mezzanine flickered once. The girl behind the pillar with the rivets shifted her weight but did not fire. The blonde one, the illusion artist, the one who had been reading his face from thirty feet, let out a breath that Silas heard across the broken plaza because the room had gone that quiet.

Nexo’s raised hand lowered.

The creature turned its head toward Silas with the same slow wrongness it applied to everything, the six horns tracing arcs through the emergency light, and something in its posture changed in a way that Silas could not name and did not want to because naming it would require acknowledging that Nexo had been waiting for permission and the permission had arrived and the permission was the wrong one.

The black bands dimmed. The pulsing slowed. The longer arm came up and folded across the creature’s chest, and Nexo stood very still with the patient indifference of a machine that had been powered down but not disassembled.

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