The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 507: 507 | A River in a Cracked Pipe

Arthur sighed. The breath cost him something on the left side, but he let it out anyway.

"Not really," he said. "Some of them are interesting. There’s a boy in 1-B, Hiro. Fights like he already knows the camera’s on him, which sounds like a flaw and might not be. Another one in the same class, Percy. Blue hair, notebook, reads a room faster than the room knows it’s being read. There’s a girl in 1-A named Sloane who commits to everything the way you’d commit to a decision you’d already lost sleep over. And Gia, also 1-A, who solves problems before anyone else notices there’s a problem."

Ashby waited.

"None of them?" he asked.

"None of them are ready to have a river shoved into a cracked pipe."

The tea steamed between them. Arthur turned the cup a quarter turn on the blotter and watched the surface settle.

"I am interested in one of them," he said.

Ashby’s expression did not change, which meant he had been waiting for exactly this and had chosen not to reach for it.

"The Belmont boy."

Arthur did not answer right away. Down on the track the kid finished another lap and slowed to a walk with his hands on his hips, and somewhere below them a door opened and closed and opened again. The building had its own life at this hour, indifferent to the two men deciding things on the top floor.

"I don’t like saying his name," Arthur said finally. "Which is stupid. It’s a name. But every time I put it in my mouth it feels like I’m putting energy into the world I don’t want circulating yet." He looked at the ruined shoulder of the hoodie instead of at Ashby. "So we’ll say the boy. Reina’s boy."

"Marcus’s as well."

"Marcus’s as well." A muscle worked in Arthur’s jaw. "I watched the entrance footage. I watched it four times, which is more than I watch anything, and I don’t watch things four times because I have four hours in a day, I have significantly fewer. He pulled a girl out of a zero-pointer engagement zone when the smart play was to walk. He set up two other kids for kills he could have taken himself. He fought a Legendary-class Conjurer’s barrier and it came apart, which it should not have, because his file says fifteen feet and twenty pounds and a late manifestation that showed up two months ago out of a clear sky."

Ashby said nothing.

"That’s the part I keep circling," Arthur said. "Someone awakening that late, that clean, out of nowhere. Nine years of negative diagnostics and then a Rare-tier Channeler at seventeen. That doesn’t happen. It happens, statistically, in a fraction of a fraction of the population, and even then it doesn’t come out looking like he came out looking. You don’t think there’s something under it?"

"I think," Ashby said, "that you have already decided there is something under it, and you have come to my office to be talked out of it, and I am not going to do that."

Arthur huffed a laugh that turned into a cough and cost him. He caught it in his sleeve this time, kept the handkerchief in his pocket where it belonged.

"He’s the child of two Heroes," he said, once the fit passed. "Reina and Marcus. Mid-tier, respected, killed in the Eastside nine years ago buying time. And then Diane Fitzgerald took him in that same day, and Diane Fitzgerald has spent two decades manufacturing the public image of every Hero worth photographing in California, and her daughter is trying to be one, which means that boy grew up in a house where the profession was the wallpaper." Arthur shook his head slowly. "If you wanted to build a Hero from the ground up, you couldn’t design a better greenhouse. The name that opens doors. The guardian who knows how every one of those doors is hinged. The girl next door who trains at five-thirty in the morning and drags people along with her whether they want it or not."

"You are describing reasons to like him."

"I’m describing reasons to be suspicious of how easy the story is." Arthur set the cup down. "Everything about that kid fits together too well, Caelum. The tragedy, the timing, the manifestation, the environment. It reads the way a costume reads. Somebody put thought into the silhouette."

Ashby moved away from the window. He crossed to the shelf where the wooden training staff leaned against the plaster, and he ran one finger along the new crack in the lower third without looking at it, the way a man touches a scar he has stopped explaining.

"You are the only person alive," he said, "who inherited a power he did not manifest, and you are sitting in my office telling me a boy whose power arrived strangely cannot be trusted on the strength of the strangeness alone."

Arthur went quiet.

"That’s not fair," he said.

"It is exactly fair. That is why it landed." Ashby turned around. "I am not telling you the boy is clean. I am telling you that the shape of your suspicion is the shape of your own history, and that a man who cannot separate the two makes bad choices about who he tests and who he protects. You looked at his file and saw a costume with too much thought in the silhouette. You should have looked at the entrance footage a fifth time and asked yourself why a boy with every reason to take the easy score walked into a zero-pointer’s kill radius for a girl he’d known for four minutes."

"Because it looks good on camera."

"Because it does not." Ashby’s voice did not rise. It never had to. "The cameras were not the point of the practical. Isabelle Crane designed that exam. She measures what students do when they think the scoring rewards the opposite. He lost points saving that girl. He knew it. He did it anyway. That is not silhouette, Arthur. You cannot fake that with a guardian and a greenhouse."

The smoke under the ceiling had begun to thin. Arthur watched the last of it flatten and go, and he thought about a boy he had never met, and about a woman half his size who had never once been slower.

"Reina would have decked me," he said, "for talking about her kid like a threat assessment."

"Reina would have decked you for a great many things. She showed considerable restraint while she was alive." Ashby set the staff back against the plaster. "You feel a responsibility to that boy. You have felt it for nine years and you have expressed it exactly once, through a scholarship you instructed your agency never to publicize."

Arthur’s head came up.

"You knew about that."

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