The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 501: 501 | Every Name Has a Price

The fake staffer had a limp.

Camille noticed it because she noticed everything, and because a limp was the kind of detail nobody thought to add. Felicity had put a hitch in the left knee, a favoring, a tiny drag at the end of each step, and it did more work than the badge or the sweat or the coolant story ever could. Nobody faked a limp. A limp meant the person had already been somewhere bad and gotten out of it.

That was good. That was genuinely good, and Camille hated it a little, the way she hated anything she couldn’t do herself.

"Hinge line’s plated," she said under her breath. "Six inches of steel over the pins. But whoever welded it ran the bead too hot on the bottom two, and it cooled uneven. There’s a hairline through the second seam. I put four rivets in the same spot, that door comes off the frame sideways."

Sloane didn’t look at her. "Loud?"

"Very."

"Then hold it."

Camille held it. She kept her palms low and her weight on the ball of her right foot, angled so the frame stayed inside her firing cone and the corridor behind them stayed inside her hearing. Water pushed cold around her ankles and her boots had given up an hour ago and there was a rivulet of somebody’s blood drying tight across her knuckles that she was pretty sure wasn’t hers.

Felicity’s little projection reached the door and knocked. Three raps, uneven, the last one weaker, and then a voice came out of thin air in a register Camille had never heard Felicity use. Higher. Younger. Wrecked around the edges.

"Hello? There’s water coming through the vent line on sublevel two, I need someone with a maintenance override, please, is anybody in there?"

Nothing happened for eleven seconds. Camille counted them.

Then the panel beside the door flickered green, and the bolts drew back with a heavy clack, and the pressure door swung inward six inches.

Sloane went through it like something fired.

Camille was moving before the door finished traveling, shoulder to the frame, palms up, both hands loaded and glowing orange in the gap. Inside: a substation room maybe thirty feet across, cable trays across the ceiling, banks of breakers along the left wall with half their housings pulled off and cables spliced into a black case the size of a suitcase that absolutely did not belong to Halloran. Emergency lights ran red along the floor line. The air tasted like hot copper and burnt insulation.

One person. Not armored. Not masked.

Sloane had him against the breaker bank with a fistful of his collar and her free hand flat on his chest, and the room was already too warm.

"Shutters," Sloane said. "Now."

"I can’t, I can’t, they’re on a hard interlock, if you kill me it stays down, it stays down forever, please listen to me."

Camille’s stomach dropped out through the floor.

She knew that voice. She knew it the way you know the voice of somebody who’s been in the background of your life for six weeks without you ever thinking about it. He had taped her hands the second week of term when she’d split a knuckle and refused to go to medical. He’d restrung the heavy bag in the auxiliary gym at five-forty in the morning because she’d told him the old chain had a stretch in it and he’d actually gone and checked instead of nodding at her.

"Wes," Camille said.

He looked at her. Thirties, sandy hair going thin at the front, a Halloran facilities polo soaked through under the arms, hands shaking so hard the zip ties on the case rattled where he’d braced against it. Wes Prentiss. Building four, equipment desk, Tuesdays and Thursdays.

His face did something awful when he recognized her.

"Ortega," he said. "Oh, God. Ortega."

Sloane’s head snapped around. "You know him?"

"He works here." Camille’s voice came out flat and strange to her own ears. "He works here."

Felicity came through the door behind her, and the gold light died off her palm, and Camille heard her stop breathing for a second.

Camille lowered her hands. She did not want to lower her hands. Everything in her chest was screaming to keep them up, and she lowered them anyway, because there was a thing happening in her head that she needed both eyes for.

She looked at the case. Really looked.

Her passive came up on its own, the way it always did, whether she asked or not. It found the black housing and started stripping it down for her, layer by layer, the way it stripped a wall or a stance or a room. Two coax runs feeding into a broadband emitter. A separate line spliced into the shutter control bus. Fiber optic tap on the fire suppression relay. Somebody had married three systems together in a way that meant killing one killed all of them, and the whole assembly was bolted to the breaker frame with a plate that had been drilled on site.

Six weeks. That drill work was old. That plate had been sitting behind an access panel in this room for weeks before today.

"You installed this before this morning," Camille said.

Wes made a noise.

"Answer her," Sloane said.

"Four weeks ago." He got it out on the second try. "They gave me the plate and the mounting spec. I ran the taps during the scheduled reconfiguration, when there were forty contractors in here and nobody logs anything. All I did was mount hardware. I didn’t know what it was for. I swear to God, I didn’t know what it was for."

Camille found that she was very calm. That was interesting. Under the calm there was something with teeth in it, and the calm was the only thing keeping it in the room.

"You gave them the roster too," she said.

His eyes went to hers and stayed there and that was the whole answer.

"He did," she said. "The guy that came at Belmont in the flood zone, he knew Belmont’s file. He knew his file, Fitzgerald. Names, ratings, registration status. That’s not public. That’s the internal packet." Her hands came back up before she made the decision to lift them. "Who else, Wes. Whose names did you sell."

"All of them." He said it into the floor. "All forty."

The room got very quiet, except for the emitter, which had a whine in it at the top of Camille’s hearing that made her back teeth hurt.

"My daughter’s four," Wes said. "She’s got Aspect Core instability, the early kind, they flagged it at three. Halloran’s insurance covers me and my spouse and that’s it, that’s the whole policy, and the treatment protocol is eleven thousand a month, and I make sixty-two before tax." He laughed, and there was nothing in it. "You know what they offered me? Not money. They offered me a name. A specialist in Zurich who takes private referrals. That’s it. That’s what I sold you kids for. A phone number."

Camille wanted him to be a monster. She had wanted that so badly for the last thirty seconds that her jaw ached from it, and instead he was a middle-aged man in a polo shirt who had restrung her heavy bag at five in the morning without complaining about it.

Felicity spoke first, and her voice had gone soft in a way that was worse than shouting.

"You could have told somebody."

"Who." He didn’t look up. "Who do I tell. The board that wrote the policy?"

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