The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 514: 514 | The Wrong Profession

Steele’s head came up anyway, and this time Petra let her, because there was nothing to be gained by fighting a woman who was going to lose the fight to her own body inside of a minute.

Down on the plaza floor, forty feet below and a hundred feet out, the gold moved.

It moved wrong. It moved like a decision had been made about the distance between two points and then the space in between had simply been declined. One instant Belmont was at the base of the stairs and the next he was standing over Cole Dravid with lightning wrapped around his whole body in a coat of crawling light, and Nexo’s arm came around in a horizontal sweep that would have taken his head off his spine and Belmont was not there for it.

He was eight feet left. He had Cole under the arms. The creature’s swing passed through empty air and shattered a section of the plaza railing and Belmont was already moving back toward the stairs with a hundred and eighty pounds of unconscious faculty member hauled against his chest.

Black fire chased him up the stairwell and did not catch him.

Steele watched the whole thing in the space of two breaths and her entire understanding of the boy in her third row reorganized itself around what she had just seen.

Fifteen feet. Twenty pounds. Rare-tier Force Manipulation with a primary telekinetic expression. She had the file memorized. She had written notes in the margins of that file for three weeks about the gap between the paper and the person, and she had been generous in those notes, she had assumed a factor of two, maybe three.

It was not three.

Belmont hit the landing at a speed that should have shattered both his knees and did not slow down until he was on top of them. He went to the concrete with Cole in his arms and got him down flat with a care that did not match the violence of everything preceding it, one hand behind the older man’s skull the entire way, easing him onto the floor like he was handling something that would break.

"Mendoza." His voice came out shredded. "He was hit in the ribs. Left side, one impact, no follow-up. He was talking after it happened but he was not tracking."

"Concussive with possible flail segment." Percy was already at Cole’s side with his fingers on the man’s throat. "Steele, ma’am, was he oriented after the impact."

"He was upset about his cane," Steele said.

"That is a bad sign or it is entirely normal for him and I genuinely cannot tell." Percy’s hands moved down Cole’s flank and Cole made a low sound that meant nothing good. "Lang. I need a rigid board, not a stretcher. Longer than the first one. I do not want any lateral flex through the thoracic spine."

"Give me eleven seconds."

Steele lay on the concrete with green mesh growing up her arm and watched two eighteen-year-olds run a triage line with more discipline than half the agencies she had contracted with, and she wanted to say something about it and did not have the air.

Belmont stood up.

His shoulder was wrong. His ribs were wrong. He had blood on his teeth and one eye was starting to swell shut and the golden threads were crawling back up his forearms in a slow build that she could feel from six feet away as a prickle across her exposed skin.

Petra saw it before Steele did.

"No." She stood too, and the gauze she had been growing stopped mid-sheet. "Absolutely not. Sit down."

"There’s still people in the flood sector."

"There are twenty-two people accounted for and the rest are on the channel." Petra stepped directly into his path and put both hands flat on his chest, which was the first time Steele had ever seen the girl voluntarily touch another human being. "You do not get to do this. You went down there once and you came back with a separated shoulder and a hemorrhage in your left eye. You are not going down there twice."

"Lang."

"The Network response window is four minutes. Valentine reached the access road, Percy confirmed the flare. Four minutes." Her voice cracked on the number and she kept going through it. "You survive four minutes on this landing and licensed professionals handle the rest. That is the correct play. That is the only play. I have signed my family’s name to your registration and I refuse to explain to my mother that you died being stupid on a Wednesday."

"He is going to burn the corridor." Belmont said it quietly. "Not the plaza. The corridor. He was already walking for it before I pulled Steele out. There are three people in that corridor mouth right now doing exactly what you two are doing and he is going to reach them in ninety seconds."

Percy looked up from Cole’s ribs.

"He is correct," Percy said. "Kennedy, Wilkinson, and Calloway are holding the north corridor entrance. I did not include that in the model because I assumed both instructors would be operational by then."

"Then they fall back." Petra had not taken her hands off Belmont’s chest. "They fall back and they hold a different door."

"There is no different door." Belmont looked past her, down at the plaza where the black fire was spreading in slow rivers. "That’s the door."

"You cannot beat him."

"Yeah. I know."

"Then what is the point."

Steele saw him find the answer. She had spent twenty years watching people find answers under pressure, in agency briefing rooms and on rooftops and in the specific silence after a call went bad, and she knew the shape of the moment when someone stopped searching and just picked the thing they were going to carry.

"Professor Dravid said something this morning." Belmont’s voice steadied out. "Before we came in. He told the whole class that some of us were going to get reassigned out of Combat Operations based on the next four hours, and that being nervous was correct, and that he had no interest in lying to us."

He put a hand on Petra’s wrist and moved it off his chest. He did it gently. She let him, which meant something.

"If being outmatched stops you, then you picked the wrong profession."

Belmont stepped past her and went down the stairs. The gold came up his arms and across his shoulders and into his hair, and by the time he hit the fourth step he was lit up like a struck match, and by the sixth step the air in the stairwell had gone dry and sharp and Steele’s molars ached from the charge in it.

Then he was gone and the sound of him arriving somewhere far away rolled back up the stairwell as a single crack.

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