The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 504: 504 | The Compulsion Has an Address

Thatch’s head tilted a fraction. When he spoke, it came clipped and bored, the delivery of somebody reciting a briefing he had heard eleven times.

"Twenty-two minutes of vertical containment. Forty unlicensed candidates as static value. Two faculty as attrition. Primary target arrives inside the window, engages, and expends himself in an enclosed volume with no evacuation lanes." His fingers kept time. "That was the shape. He did not arrive. We are adjusting."

Steele’s stomach dropped a full inch, and she kept her grin exactly where it was.

He had said expends himself. Not dies. Not falls. Expends.

Somebody had told this kid that Arthur Vance had a fuel gauge.

"Adjusting," she said. "That’s cute. You know what adjusting means when you say it out loud in front of two Rank A retirees? It means the plan broke and nobody gave you a second one."

"The plan did not break." A pause in the tapping, half a beat, then it resumed faster. "The schedule slipped."

"Sure it did."

"He responds to everything." Thatch’s voice picked up an edge that had not been there ten seconds ago, thin and personal. "That is not commitment. That is a compulsion, and compulsions are addresses. He goes where the noise is. Today the noise was on the waterfront, so he went to the waterfront, and forty children sat in a sealed dome, and he does not know they are here. That is what he is. That is all he has ever been."

Steele filed every syllable of it and pushed harder.

"So we’ve established the pitch." She spread her hands. "Whose pitch. Because that wasn’t yours. You didn’t build that. Somebody built it and handed it down to you and you’ve been carrying it around like a lunchbox."

The tapping stopped.

Dravid shifted his weight beside her, which from Cole Dravid was practically shouting.

"You do not know what you are talking about," Thatch said.

"I know exactly what I’m talking about, because I’ve met about nine of you." She took two steps forward and let Ring Presence roll out ahead of her, and she watched his pupils tighten inside the field. "Big scary asset, weird handler, coat with the little silver threads somebody else picked out. Somebody found you when you were young and broken and told you the fire wasn’t your fault, and then spent every year since making sure you never got a single afternoon to think about whether that was true."

Something moved at the corner of Thatch’s mouth.

"He has been very patient with me," he said.

There it was. He. Not the Twilight Society. Not the Collective. A man.

"Patient," Steele repeated. "That’s the word you went with."

"Nine years." The tapping came back, and it came back wrong, uneven, his whole leg going now. "Nine years of him telling me when. Nine years of not yet, and dosage, and the target is not isolated, and I want you to understand that this is not a punishment, Silas, this is a design."

He heard himself say it. She watched him hear it. His jaw closed like a trap.

And black fire came out from between his teeth.

Not orange. Not yellow. Black, and it did not throw light, it took light, and the scarring around both eyes lit from underneath like coals coming back.

"That’s a nice name," Steele said. "Silas."

"Do not."

"You want to know what I think, Silas?" She let the grin go feral. "I think you’ve never once picked a target. I think you have thrown darts at a poster of that man for years because somebody built you a room where the poster was the only thing you were allowed to hate. And I think if I put you on your back right now, the only thing that would come out of your mouth is his name."

The temperature in the plaza climbed nine degrees in three seconds. Water at the edge of the flood field began to steam.

"Steele." Dravid’s voice, flat, close. "You are enjoying this."

"I’m working."

"You are doing both."

The butler’s masked head turned, sudden and smooth, toward nothing at all.

He held there for two seconds. Then he made a small sound of regret, entirely genuine, entirely awful.

"Ah." The gloved hands unfolded. "Forgive me. Someone clever has found the interlock on sublevel two. Support-track, I think, or one of yours, which would be more embarrassing for us." He inclined his head at Steele with real courtesy. "Ms. Steele. A privilege. Your file undersells the acceleration considerably."

"Don’t you walk away from me."

"I am afraid I must."

The air behind him came apart into grey static, colorless and soundless and hungry, and he stepped back into it and stopped existing.

Steele did not wait for the portal to close.

She was already turning her hips, already dropping into the load, and she felt Dravid’s Suppress reach out past her toward Thatch, the pressure of it going by her shoulder like a cold front.

Full commitment. Running start. She had moved a reinforced transit vehicle forty meters with this once, on a Tuesday, in front of a news helicopter.

Thatch watched her come. He did not raise his hands. He did not brace. He turned his head slightly toward the enormous white thing beside him, and he said it the way you’d ask someone to close a window.

"Nexo. Shut them up for me."

Twelve feet of wrong moved.

Steele’s brain did not process it as motion. It processed it as a change in the arrangement of the room. One instant the thing was standing, and then the whole plaza tilted and the sound arrived after the impact, which was information she did not want, because sound arriving late meant she had already been hit.

She went through a concrete stair riser at an angle that would have killed her at twenty-two, and her charge came apart on the way, and the noise of it rolled up through every level of the dome like a mountain clearing its throat.

Dust came down in sheets. Something high in the ceiling grid shifted and kept shifting.

Steele hit the plaza floor on her side, skidded eleven feet, and got her elbow underneath herself. Her ribs made an argument. Her left ear was ringing in a pitch she recognized from a warehouse in Long Beach.

Her earpiece clicked.

Then it filled, all at once, forty voices piling over each other, and she did not have a second to be grateful for it.

Somewhere across the plaza Cole Dravid was getting up, which she registered as the single best piece of news of her entire morning.

The white thing was walking now. It had started, and nothing about its stride suggested it had a plan to stop.

Steele got her knees under her, dragged in a breath that tasted like blood and pulverized concrete, and keyed the channel with a hand that would not quite hold still.

"All students, all students, get off the plaza level. Get off the plaza level right now!"

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