The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 506: 506 | The Appetizer

Arthur opened his mouth.

Ashby’s hand came down flat on the desk, and it was not loud, and it stopped him anyway.

"You do not get to explain the plant to me. I have read the incident log. You do not get to explain the fire, or the sedan, or the little girl, because I already know, and because you know that I know, and you are using them as a shield." Amber eyes, warm in the color, nothing warm behind them. "You have used them all morning. You went from Meridian to Coleridge to Maxwell because the second one meant you did not have to think about the first one, and the third meant you did not have to think about the second, and forty children in a sealed dome are the thing you have been outrunning since six o’clock."

The room went very still.

Arthur sat in an office chair with a cup of tea in front of him and the whole left side of his ribcage full of glass, and for a second he was not in the office at all.

He was nineteen. He was on a rooftop in Sacramento with his chest out and his chin up, saying something about legacy, and a woman half his size and twice his everything came off the parapet and kicked him in the back of the knee.

Vesper never hit hard. That was the horror of it. She did not need to. She would let him build the whole speech, let him get to the part where he sounded like a poster, and then her heel would arrive somewhere structural and he would go down on the gravel with his ears ringing and she would stand over him and say, in that voice like a screen door, that she had not asked what he wanted to be remembered for.

Sixteen months of that. Shin, knee, floating rib, the spot at the base of the spine that made his legs stop being legs. She had been dying the entire time and she had never once been slower.

Something walked all the way down Arthur’s back and out through his heels.

He shivered.

Ashby watched him do it and said nothing, which was worse than anything he could have said.

"You look like her," Arthur said.

"I have been told."

"You don’t kick."

"I have not needed to." Ashby picked his cup back up. "Drink the tea, Arthur."

He drank the tea.

Down on the track the kid finished a lap. Somewhere in the building a door closed. Arthur turned the cup around on the blotter and found that his hands had stopped shaking, and he did not know whether that was the blend or the sitting down.

"I’m going to go apologize to them," he said.

"Not this morning."

"I can be on the floor in ninety seconds."

"You can be on the floor in nine," Ashby said, "and you would arrive smelling of a chemical fire, with blood on your teeth, in front of forty eighteen-year-olds who have been taught by three separate instructors that the gap between a Hero’s file and a Hero’s body is the most important thing in the profession. Nadia Solaris would have you in the medical wing before you finished your first sentence. Cole Dravid would look at you for four seconds and know everything. He may already know. I have not asked him, because I do not want the answer written down in his handwriting."

Arthur pushed the chair back and stood up.

"I should really get going," he said.

He reached for it the way he had reached for it forty thousand times, the pull from the base of the sternum, the flood, and it came. It always came. That was the thing nobody understood about Aegis, that the power was never the problem, the power was a river and he was a cracked pipe.

Bone lengthened. His shoulders went out and the hoodie split along the seam at the shoulder blade. Golden light climbed his jaw and put the horn-shaped sweep back in his hair, and he came up and up until the ceiling stopped being generous, and for one second he was Radiant standing in the principal’s office with his fists on his hips, and it was glorious, and it was a lie.

Then the smoke started.

It came out of the left side of him. Not from the fabric. From the scar, from under it, thin grey ropes of it curling up past his collarbone and going flat against the ceiling, and it smelled like an electrical panel giving up.

Ashby raised his cup and sipped.

"That looks unhealthy," he said.

Arthur tried to say something declarative. What came out was a cough, and then the cough got a hold of him and put both hands in and shook, and the golden light guttered like a candle in a hallway, and he came down.

Seven foot two collapsed. He got a hand on the desk and the desk took it. He hacked into the handkerchief until his eyes watered, and when he pulled it away there was more red in it than there had been in the corridor, wet and bright and rude about it.

He looked at the ruined shoulder of the hoodie. He looked at the smoke still hanging under the ceiling in a flat sheet.

"Fuck," he said.

"Sit down."

He sat down.

Ashby came around the desk, took the handkerchief out of his hand without asking, folded it once, and put it in his own pocket. Then he set a fresh cup in front of Arthur, which meant he had made two and had been holding the second one back for exactly this.

"Nine minutes," Arthur said, when he had breath. "This morning it was eleven. Last week I had four hours. In March I had five."

"I am aware of the curve."

"I don’t think you are."

"I have been aware of the curve for two years." Ashby leaned back against the window frame and folded his arms. "Which brings me to the reason you are in this office instead of on that floor, and I would like you to understand that the lecture was not the point. The lecture was pleasant. I enjoyed it. But it was an appetizer."

Arthur wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist.

"The class," he said.

"The class is fine. Imara Steele has run that facility eleven times and she does not require a symbol standing in the middle of her floor to make eighteen-year-olds afraid of consequences. Cole Dravid will teach them more in four hours than you would have taught them in one, and he will do it without smiling, and two of them will be better Heroes in five years because of it." Ashby’s mouth moved very slightly. "You will apologize Thursday morning at the debrief. You will do it in front of all forty of them, without the voice, and you will not tell them about the sedan or the fire, because if you do it becomes a defense and they will let you have it, and they should not let you have it."

Arthur sighed. It came out of him long and low and took something with it.

"Sure," he said.

"Good."

Ashby stayed at the window a moment longer.

"Now," he said. "The real thing."

Arthur put both hands around the cup.

"Have you found anyone to give it to yet?"

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