The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 449: 449 | Piece by Piece

This was the only stimulus in the documented universe that produced this result. The Architect’s voice reached whatever part of Silas’s brain controlled the ADHD-driven motor output and applied a pressure that the medication could only approximate. Silas did not become calm. Silas became still, which was a different condition entirely, the way a loaded weapon was still until someone made a decision about the trigger.

"I heard you," the silhouette said. "Through the microphone in the ceiling. You threw nineteen darts and hit the poster fourteen times."

"Seventeen."

"Fourteen. Gerard was being generous. Three of your throws hit the wall within the poster’s border but did not contact the printed surface, which by standard target methodology constitutes a miss regardless of proximity."

Silas’s jaw worked sideways. The scars around his eyes glowed faintly.

"Your temper, Silas."

"I’m fine."

"You are not fine. You are bored, understimulated, and fixated on a target that is currently surrounded by institutional security, public surveillance infrastructure, and approximately fourteen hundred first-year students whose presence guarantees that any operation conducted within a twelve-block radius of Halloran Academy would generate civilian casualties at a scale that no operational objective could justify."

Silas’s fingers found the armrest and began drumming. The rhythm was new. Faster than the previous pattern. The black flame behind his sternum pulsed once, and a thin line of dark smoke rose from between his lips before Gerard quietly placed the glass of water back in his hand.

"I could be careful."

"You cannot be careful, Silas. That is not a criticism. It is a design specification. I built you for situations where careful is no longer available, and the investment I have made in your development is not something I intend to risk on a Tuesday afternoon because you are restless." The silhouette shifted in its chair. "Have you taken your Thursday medication?"

"Gerard made me."

"Gerard is an excellent resource. Listen to Gerard."

"Gerard won’t let me do anything."

"Gerard won’t let you do anything yet. The distinction matters. You understand the distinction."

Silas understood the distinction. He had understood it since the Architect first explained it, in a room that smelled like antiseptic and synthesized pharmaceutical compounds, when Silas was thirteen and the burns on his hands were still healing and the world had been reduced to two categories: the Architect, who provided structure, and everything else, which did not. The distinction was between patience and absence. Patience meant the thing you wanted was coming. Absence meant it was gone. The Architect had promised patience. The Architect had never promised absence. And in nine years, the Architect had not broken a promise once.

"When?" Silas said.

"Soon."

"You always say soon."

"And each time I say it, the distance between soon and now decreases. This is the nature of the word."

"I want a date."

"You want many things. You want to burn down a building that a man you hate sleeps in. You want to feel something break when you hit it. You want to stop taking pills that make the fire quieter because the fire being loud feels more honest than the fire being managed." The silhouette leaned forward, and for one frame of the monitor’s refresh rate, something caught light in the darkness of the Architect’s room. Not a face. Something closer to the outline of a face, the suggestion that features existed in the correct configuration but had been deliberately withheld from the camera’s capture. "What you do not want is to fail. And failure is what happens when the most powerful weapon I have ever constructed deploys itself before the target is isolated from its support infrastructure."

Silas pulled his legs up into the armchair and wrapped his arms around his knees. The position made him look smaller than twenty-two. It made him look like the boy who had stood outside his childhood home while the fire department arrived eleven minutes too late and the Hero system declared the incident contained and nobody had asked Silas whether the fire had started because of him or in spite of him or both at the same time.

"Fine," Silas said.

"Fine?"

"Fine. I’ll wait."

"You’ll wait because waiting is the correct tactical decision, or you’ll wait because arguing with me about it requires energy you’d rather spend throwing projectiles at paper?"

"Both."

The silhouette made a sound that might have been amusement in a different person. In the Architect, it sounded like the adjustment of a thermostat.

"Good. Then listen carefully, because I will say this once and Gerard will not be writing it down."

Gerard, who had been standing silently near the doorway with his hands clasped, inclined his head by approximately two degrees.

"Soon," the Architect said, "we will make our first move. Not against the man in the poster. Not yet. Against the architecture that holds him in place. The institution. The ranking. The public’s certainty that when the alarm sounds, the man in the red and blue will arrive and everything will be acceptable again." A pause. The monitor’s blue light pulsed once, casting new shadows across Silas’s scarred face. "We are going to take that certainty apart, Silas. Piece by piece. And when we have finished, when the man in the poster stands in a world that no longer believes he can save it, then you will have your moment."

Silas’s foot started tapping again. The rhythm was different now. Slower.

"And the fire?"

"The fire will be the last thing he sees. As it should be."

The monitor went dark. The silhouette vanished. The ambient blue returned.

Silas reached for the cup of darts on the side table. Three remained. He threw them in rapid succession without standing from his curled position in the armchair, his arm whipping forward from an angle that should not have produced accuracy. The first dart hit Radiant’s left eye. The second hit the right. The third punched through the poster’s golden emblem and embedded itself deep enough into the concrete that Gerard would need pliers to retrieve it.

"Twenty," Silas said.

Gerard removed the tray from the side table and walked toward the door. At the threshold, he paused and looked back at the boy in the armchair who was already reaching for his phone, scrolling through news feeds with the frantic speed of someone whose brain demanded constant input the way a furnace demanded fuel.

"Shall I bring dinner at the usual time, Young Master?"

"Bring it whenever. I don’t care."

"Seven thirty, then."

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