The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 539

Chapter 539: 539 | The Inconvenience of Your Death [CASTLE BONUS]

The soup machine down the hall was apparently a Halloran Medical institution, because forty minutes after Juno left, half of Class 1-B knew I was awake and the other half was actively lying about not being on their way.

I know how the news traveled. Percy Mendoza runs a communication network with the efficiency of a small government intelligence agency, and I would bet real money that the moment Juno logged a status change in my chart, Percy’s notebook registered a data point and a text went out with a timestamp and an ETA. The kid loves me. He would never admit it in words. He shows it in spreadsheets.

The first knock wasn’t a knock. It was Camille Ortega deciding the door was a suggestion and shouldering through it with the specific momentum of someone who has spent the last twenty-nine hours managing an emotion she doesn’t have a filing category for.

"You absolute—" She stopped four feet from the bed. Her eyes did the thing her Precision Read does, cataloging every crack in the situation, and I watched her clock the gauze, the brace, the monitor, the color of my skin, and arrive at whatever conclusion her aspect handed her before she’d consciously formed it. Her two-tone hair was down for once, blonde-to-brown falling loose around a face that had not slept. She wore compression leggings and a fitted grey top that she had clearly not changed out of since the plaza, and the fabric pulled tight across her chest with each breath she was taking too fast. "You threw yourself in front of a directional annihilation beam."

"Technically it was black fire, not a beam. Different mechanic entirely." 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

"I don’t care about the mechanic." She crossed the last four feet. Her hand came up like she was going to check my pulse the way Sloane had, then stopped, then hovered, then landed flat on my sternum with the specific pressure of someone confirming a heartbeat she’d spent a day and a half unsure about. "Your stamina was at four percent. I watched the feed. I watched you stand up anyway."

"I’ve been told I have a low tolerance for spectating."

"That’s not a personality. That’s a death wish with good marketing."

Behind Camille, the door opened again, and this one did knock, three precise raps that I recognized before the wood finished vibrating, because there is exactly one person in my life who knocks like she’s filing a scheduling request.

Petra Lang entered the way she enters everything, which is to say she made the room feel like it had been waiting for her. She’d traded the silk pajamas for a cream sweater with the sleeves pushed up and a dark skirt, and her geometric black waves were arranged with a precision that told me she’d stopped to fix her hair before coming, which told me more than anything she was about to say. Her emerald eyes swept the room, found me, and did something complicated that she immediately suppressed.

"You," Petra said, "signed a federal document with my name on it four days ago."

"I remember. Good times."

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