The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 573

Chapter 573: 573 | We Have A Great Deal to Discuss

"Good." The doors opened onto the administrative floor, and the smell hit me before the light did. Fresh paint layered over something sharper, printer toner and industrial cleaning solution and underneath all of it the specific chill of a building that had recently held something it wasn’t built to hold.

The hallway stretched ahead in polished stone and recessed lighting, everything gleaming and institutional and slightly wrong in the way places got when they’d been scrubbed too fast after something nobody wanted to talk about.

Diane’s heels struck the floor in a rhythm I’d heard for nine years, that steady click that meant business was happening and she was the one conducting it. I fell into step beside her without thinking about it, muscle memory from a thousand agency events and client meetings and quiet conversations in hallways just like this one. Sloane trailed behind with the coiled quiet of someone deciding not to detonate, her presence a pressure at my back that I didn’t need to turn around to feel.

Percy was already outside the conference room when we arrived.

He stood with his notebook against his chest, blue hair combed flat against his skull in a way that suggested significant product and significant effort, collar pins aligned to the millimeter.

His posture had that particular quality of someone who’d gotten there early specifically to have time to stand correctly before anyone else showed up. He looked at me the way he’d looked at me across the plaza after the breach, not with rivalry, not with suspicion, just recognition. One person who knew too much clocking another.

His Analyze was probably running right now, cataloging my vital signs and my stress markers and whatever other data his brain processed faster than he could articulate. I wondered what the readout said. I wondered if he’d tell me if I asked.

Theo stood beside him, broad and calm, radiating the kind of steadiness that made rooms easier simply by virtue of his presence. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.

His shoulders were relaxed in a way that suggested he’d already decided this was going to be fine and was now just waiting for reality to catch up with his assessment. The warmth coming off him was almost physical, the specific quality of someone who’d decided to be the most uncomplicated thing in any given space.

Felicity leaned against the wall in her uniform, blonde hair pulled back in a braid that kept it out of her face, and when she caught my eye she smiled. Small and real. None of the performance she wore for everyone else, none of the dialect or the calculated warmth or the Smoke and Mirrors running at its usual ambient level. Just Felicity, looking at me like she was genuinely glad I was vertical.

"Bestie," she said quietly, pitching it low enough that only I could hear. "You look like death took the day off and left you in charge."

"I feel great, actually."

"You’re lying." Her blue eyes did the read, the one that stripped past whatever I put up, whatever performance I was running, and settled on whatever she found underneath. I’d stopped trying to figure out how much of that was Mirage and how much was just her. The distinction had started to feel academic. "But you’re good at it. You’ll be fine in there."

"You sound sure."

"I watched you talk a reporter into building your brand for you while smelling like chemical fire and blood," she said, and something in her voice suggested she’d been thinking about that moment more than once since it happened. "One director from Geneva isn’t going to break the streak. You’ve got this whole..."

She made a vague gesture with one hand, indicating my general existence. "Thing. Where you make impossible situations work for you. It’s lowkey terrifying and I mean that as a compliment."

I didn’t have a good response to that. I settled for not having one.

Camille came around the corner with the walk of someone spoiling for a fight she couldn’t have, two-tone hair loose and falling past her shoulders, hands empty and not glowing with Rivet constructs, which for her was genuine restraint. She stopped when she saw me, and something complicated moved across her face.

I watched her catalog the details. The gauze that wasn’t there anymore, stripped away by Boundless Stamina doing its work overnight. The color that had come back to my skin. The way I stood without favoring the ribs that had been screaming at me less than forty-eight hours ago.

"You’re upright," she said.

"Try not to sound so disappointed."

"I’m not disappointed. I’m annoyed." Her voice had that particular edge it got when she was being honest about something she’d rather not be honest about. "You almost died being stupid and now everyone thinks you’re some kind of gold-lightning hero and I have to sit in a room and pretend I don’t have opinions about that."

"You have opinions about everything."

Through no bond at all I felt exactly what she was thinking. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

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