The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 574

Chapter 574: 574 | The Arithmetic of the Lie

I walked in.

The conference room had been reset since the breach, cleaner than the hallway, glass and pale wood arranged around a table long enough to seat twelve and currently holding seven. Diane took the chair to Park’s left before I did, sliding into it with the ownership of someone who’d decided the geometry of the room before she arrived. I sat beside her. Sloane went to the far end with Theo and Percy, her energy pulling tight through the bond, a rubber band held at maximum tension by someone who very much wanted to let it snap.

Felicity slid into the seat between me and Sloane, exactly where Diane had placed her in the elevator recitation. Camille sat across from Felicity. Petra took the seat at Park’s right, mirroring me, which put the two class representatives on either side of the woman who’d flown in from Geneva to figure out whether Halloran had accidentally admitted a war crime.

Park set the folio on the table. She did not open it.

"Thank you for accommodating this on short notice," she said, though nobody had accommodated anything and the notice had not been short. "I understand you’ve all been through a significant trauma. I’ll try to be respectful of that."

She would not try to be respectful of that. She’d try to find the seam in the story and pull until it came apart. Respect was the wrapper she put on the knife.

Diane smiled the smile she used on clients who thought they were the smartest person in the room. "We appreciate that, Director. These are children. Some of them watched their instructors get hospitalized. Two of them are still processing survivor’s guilt that a licensed therapist flagged as clinically significant."

The therapist part was invented. I knew it was invented because Diane had invented it in the car, dropping it into the seating recitation like a landmine she wanted Park to step around. It worked. Park’s pen didn’t move, but something in the set of her shoulders shifted, recalculating how hard she could push before the optics turned against her.

"Of course." Park’s eyes went to Percy. "You’re Mr. Mendoza. You ran the headcount."

Percy’s pen was already open on the notebook in front of him. "Yes. At eleven forty-one I initiated a roll call through the recovered communication channel. All forty candidates confirmed present by eleven fifty-three. I logged response times and physical status for each. I have the full record if it would assist your investigation."

He would give her the full record. He’d give her a hundred and nineteen permutations of the full record if she asked. Percy didn’t lie. Percy processed. The trick was that the truth Percy processed had gaps in it exactly where my truth started, because Percy had never actually seen what I did, only its effects, and its effects fit inside the story we were selling if you didn’t look too hard at the arithmetic.

"That would be helpful," Park said, and made a note. "Ms. Fitzgerald."

Sloane’s chin lifted. Through the bond I felt the effort it took her to keep her voice level, to be the girl who’d witnessed something instead of the girl who’d nearly lost everything. "Director."

"You were in the plaza at the conclusion of the event."

"I was."

"You saw Mr. Belmont take direct exposure to the hostile Aspect described as black fire."

The bond spiked, hot and fast, and I pressed my knee against Felicity’s under the table because I needed an anchor and Sloane was too far away. Sloane’s jaw worked once. She held. "Yes. He put himself between me and it. I saw him do it."

"And what did you observe about his physical state at that moment?"

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify