The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 500: 500 | One Way Or Another

Felicity put a version of herself on the ceiling. Not a good version. A wrong one, the kind that made a person’s stomach turn over before their brain caught up, upside down and grinning with her hair hanging the wrong direction, giggling into the dark.

Both men looked up.

Camille’s volley came in low and horizontal, four rivets in under a second, and she didn’t go for center mass. She went for the ankle, the knee, the wrist, the elbow, and every single one landed exactly where a joint needed to be to keep a body upright. The projectile guy went down screaming. The second one turned toward the sound of Camille’s shot, which put his back to the corridor, which put him directly in front of Sloane.

Sloane didn’t detonate him. She grabbed the front of his vest, dragged him off his feet, and put him headfirst into the wall panel with a bang that made Felicity’s teeth click.

"Nice," Camille said.

"He had a compressed-gas canister on his hip. Aspect’s probably combustion." Sloane crouched and stripped the canister off with her thumb. "You blow that in a corridor this narrow, the pressure wave breaks all three of our ribcages."

Felicity blinked. "You caught that mid-move?"

"I catch everything mid-move. That’s the job."

She said it like it was nothing. Felicity filed it, and not for a group chat, and not for leverage, just for herself, because she had spent three weeks around this girl assuming Sloane Fitzgerald was mostly volume and had just watched her save all three of their lives in about half a heartbeat.

They kept moving.

The service level was flooded to the ankle, water pushing in from the eastern zone through a vent grate that had given out. Felicity’s boots filled up and she gave up caring. Her suit was soaked through anyway. The white had gone translucent across her ribs, and her hair had come out of its ponytail somewhere around the second flight of stairs and was plastered to her neck in strands, and if Lukas had been here he would have made an absolute meal out of the whole situation and she would have let him.

Which was the thing she wanted to say. It had been sitting in her mouth for twenty minutes.

"Fitzgerald."

"What."

"Can I say something insane while we’re wading through sewage."

"It’s flood runoff."

"Same energy." Felicity caught up so they were shoulder to shoulder in the dark, and she made herself say it plain, without the sparkle on top. "I don’t want to fight you."

Sloane’s head turned. "We’re not fighting."

"We’re so fighting. Not with fists. You’ve been fighting me since the morning I sat down next to him at breakfast, and I’ve been letting you, because I get it. I would too." Felicity kept her eyes forward. It was easier. "I’m not trying to take him. I know that’s what it looks like. I know exactly what it looks like, because I’ve watched what it looks like from the outside my whole life and I picked out the shorts on purpose. But I’m not trying to take him."

Camille, ten feet ahead, said, "Oh, we’re doing this now?"

"Not you."

"I’m right here."

"You’re on point, focus."

Sloane didn’t say anything for six or seven steps. The water pushed around their shins and something creaked overhead and Felicity felt her own pulse in her throat.

"Then what are you trying to do," Sloane said.

"Keep him. And keep you." Felicity swallowed. "You were first. You’re going to be first when we’re forty. He talks about you like you invented weather. And I’m not built for a version of this where somebody loses, because I have spent my entire life in big houses with nobody in them, and I’m not doing the thing where I win a boy and lose the only two girls in this building who don’t perform at me."

That got out messier than she wanted. She hated when the real one came out messy.

Sloane made a sound. It wasn’t a laugh. It was something closer to a person getting hit somewhere old.

"You’re not supposed to say it like that," Sloane said.

"Like what?"

"Honest. You’re supposed to be fake so I can hate you comfortably." Her voice cracked on the end of it and she covered it with volume, which Felicity had learned meant she’d landed. "God. You’re as bad as he is. Both of you just walk up and say the true thing and then stand there."

"He does do that."

"He does it constantly. It’s a nightmare."

"Bestie, it’s a nightmare."

Camille called back from the dark, "For the record, I hate both of you, and if either one of you tells him I said that I’ll put a rivet through your hamstring."

"Which of us?"

"Whichever one’s slower."

Sloane snorted. It came out of her before she could stop it, that ugly startled honk of a laugh, and Felicity felt something in her chest come loose that had been wound up since Saturday night.

"Okay," Sloane said. She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "Okay. Rules."

"I love rules."

"Shut up. Rules." Sloane held up a finger. "You tell me first. Anything happens with him, I hear it from you or from him before I hear it from Kennedy in a hallway. That’s it. That’s the whole rule."

"Done." Felicity said it fast, because it was easy, because she’d already decided that three days ago. "Same back. I’m not asking for a schedule and I’m not asking for a ranking. I know where I sit. I just want in the room."

"You’re deeply weird."

"I’m the best friend you’ll ever have and it’s going to ruin your life."

"I believe that." Sloane shoved her shoulder, hard enough to stagger her sideways into the wall. "Move."

The service level dead-ended at a pressure door with a red panel beside it, and the panel was dark.

Camille got there first and put her hand flat against the steel. "It’s live. I can feel it through the door. Something in there’s drawing power."

"Substation’s on the other side," Sloane said.

"There’s a problem." Camille’s eyes had gone to that middle distance she got when her passive was working, and Felicity had seen enough of it to know that whatever Camille was looking at wasn’t the door. "Frame’s reinforced. Not factory. Somebody welded plate over the hinge line from the inside, recently, like within the hour. That’s not a lockdown protocol. That’s a person who doesn’t want company."

"Can you crack it?"

"I can crack anything." Camille’s jaw worked. "It’ll be loud."

Felicity stepped up between them and put her palm on the door beside Camille’s, and she made herself think, actually think, past the cold in her stomach and the twelve-foot shape she could still see when she blinked.

"Don’t crack it," she said.

Both of them looked at her.

"If it’s one person overriding the shutters and jamming comms, that’s a technician, not a fighter. Fighters are upstairs dying for Dravid’s amusement." Felicity turned her hand over. Gold light gathered above her palm, soft at the edges, and shaped itself into a small figure in a support-track jumpsuit. "Technicians open doors for staff. Especially panicked staff. Especially panicked staff with a name badge."

Camille stared at the little projection. "You can do a badge?"

"I can do the lanyard, the crease in the jumpsuit, the sweat on her hairline, and a completely convincing story about a coolant leak on sublevel two." Felicity smiled, and it wasn’t her nice one. "I’m very good at this. It’s my whole thing."

Sloane looked at the door. Then at Felicity. Then she cracked her knuckles, and amber sparked once between her fingers and went out.

"She talks," Sloane said. "Ortega covers the frame. I go through the second it opens."

"And then?"

"And then somebody’s going to tell me how to raise those shutters." Sloane’s voice dropped into something Felicity had never heard from her, something that had nothing to do with volume at all. "One way or another."

Felicity set her illusion walking toward the door.

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