The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 499: 499 | Rabbit Logic

Felicity had spent eighteen years learning how to make a room like her, and she had never once looked at anything that made her want to stop existing until right now.

Her hands wouldn’t hold still on the gantry rail. She curled them tight around the steel and the steel didn’t help, because the steel was cold and her palms were wet and neither of those things had anything to do with the rain.

Down there, twelve feet of white wrongness stood beside a man in a blank mask, and Felicity’s entire body told her the same lie over and over. If she stayed still, it wouldn’t see her. If she stopped breathing, it wouldn’t know.

That was rabbit logic. She knew that. She’d read about it in a psych elective she’d taken because the professor was hot.

"I can’t look at it," she said. "Like, I physically can’t. My eyes keep sliding off. What is that."

"Don’t know." Camille’s voice came out flat, which was so far outside her normal register that Felicity’s head turned before she decided to turn it. Camille Ortega talked at volume about everything. Camille Ortega had opinions about hemlines and stamina management and whether the chicken in the cafeteria was farm-raised. Camille Ortega did not go quiet.

She was quiet now. Her palms had stopped glowing. Both hands hung open at her sides like she’d forgotten she owned them.

"Okay, that’s worse," Felicity said. "You being scared is worse than the monster. I need you to be annoying immediately."

"Shut up."

"There she is."

Sloane hadn’t moved at all. Her jaw was locked and her shoulders were up around her ears and there were two scorch marks on the walkway beside her boots where her Aspect had gone off without asking permission. Felicity had watched that girl walk into a hallway on move-in day and rearrange the social order of an entire dormitory in ninety seconds. Now Sloane’s fingers were trembling and she was pretending they weren’t and Felicity respected that more than she wanted to.

Then the plaza floor split open.

Not gently. A slab the size of a bus rose out of nothing and slammed sideways across the open ground, and the shockwave came up the gantry hard enough to knock Felicity’s hip into the rail. Dust rolled up in a wall. Something underneath it shrieked, metal on stone.

Cole Dravid walked out of the dust.

He had his cane in one hand and he wasn’t hurrying. He came across that plaza like a man crossing a lobby to complain about the coffee, and every step he took, the grey lit up around him. Portals opened at his flanks. Bodies dropped out of them. None of them got a chance to land properly, because Imara Steele came in from above and turned the entire eastern approach into a crater.

Felicity heard the impact before she saw it. The gold of Steele’s jacket flashed once through the dust and then the ground under six masked figures simply stopped being ground.

"Oh my god," Felicity said.

Steele came up out of the crater still moving. Her hand closed on a man’s collar and she threw him forty feet into a support column, and then she was already turning, already accelerating into the next one, and the kinetic charge she was carrying made the air warp in front of her like heat off asphalt.

Dravid never sped up once. That was the part Felicity couldn’t stop watching. Two men came at him together with their Aspects lit and he looked at them and their Aspects went out. Both of them. He didn’t even lift the cane for the first one. He stepped inside the swing, put his palm flat against the man’s chest, and the guy folded to the concrete like his skeleton had resigned.

"That’s Suppress," Camille breathed. "That’s actual Suppress. He’s got a fifteen-meter field. I read the ranking sheet. He shut down eleven Legendary-tiers in one incident in Osaka."

"He teaches our Tuesday lecture," Felicity said. "He gave me a seventy-eight on a paper. I had opinions."

"You still have opinions."

"I have so many opinions, bestie, but not right now."

The thing with the horns hadn’t moved.

That was the detail Felicity kept snagging on. Steele had just relocated the eastern third of the plaza. Dravid had put four grown professionals on the floor in under twenty seconds. And that white shape stood beside the masked man in his little butler coat and did absolutely nothing, because nothing happening down there was worth its attention.

Felicity made herself think it through, because thinking through it was the only thing that stopped her legs from folding.

Steele was an active Rank A with a case resolution rate somewhere in the nineties. Dravid had a Legendary-classification nullification Aspect and an operational history that Percy had once described to her in fourteen minutes of unbroken speech. Those two were the reason Halloran had the highest field survival rate on the planet, and they were both down there, on purpose, standing between that thing and everybody else in this building.

Which meant the plaza wasn’t hers.

"They’ve got it," she said out loud. "Right? Look at them. They’ve literally got it."

"They’re holding it," Sloane said. Her voice came out scraped raw. "That’s not the same as having it."

"Okay, but holding it is the whole assignment. Holding it is the entire job." Felicity peeled her hands off the rail and shook them out. "We are eighteen. We are unlicensed. If we go down there we are not help, we are additional bodies for Steele to worry about while she’s mid-swing. And she will worry, because she’s Steele, and she’ll get hit because of us."

Camille turned her head. "That’s actually the smartest thing anyone’s said since the lights went out."

"I’m smart constantly. Nobody notices because I’m also hot."

"Obviously."

Sloane exhaled through her teeth. She didn’t take her eyes off the plaza, but her hands came down off the rail and closed into fists, and Felicity watched something come back online behind those blue eyes.

"Substation," Sloane said. "West service level. If the shutters drop, the Network comes in, and then that thing is somebody else’s problem. Somebody with a license and a body count."

"Now that’s giving leadership."

"Do not do that."

"Too late, it’s already given."

They went.

The gantry fed into a maintenance stair that ran down inside the wall of the dome, and the stair was narrow and dark and smelled like scorched wiring. Felicity went second, with Camille on point because Camille could put eleven rivets through a doorway before anybody inside it finished turning around, and Sloane took rear because Sloane wanted to be where the next thing came from.

Two levels down, Felicity’s illusion caught something.

She’d been running a soft projection ahead of them the whole descent, a version of the three of them jogging about twenty feet up the corridor, sloppy and loud and obviously panicking. Her ghost-Felicity was crying a little. Her ghost-Camille kept looking over her shoulder.

Somebody shot her ghost-Camille in the back.

"Contact," Felicity whispered. "Two. Left alcove, twenty-two feet, one’s got a projectile Aspect and one’s got something in his hands I don’t like."

Camille’s eyebrows went up. "You can tell that from an illusion?"

"I can tell that because he aimed at the fake and it fell over. Real people don’t fall over from that. My fakes fall over exactly how I tell them to."

"That’s disgusting. I love it."

Sloane pushed past Felicity’s shoulder in the dark, and Felicity got a full second of pink hair and the smell of scorched cotton and something citrus underneath.

"Hardy," Sloane said. "Make them look up."

"Copy that."

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