The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 515: 515 | Fuck It

A FEW MINUTES EARLIER

"I don’t like rain," I said, hauling Rina’s arm over my shoulder because her legs had stopped agreeing to hold her up somewhere around the fourth wave of masked guys. "It’s wet, it’s cold, and it gets into everything. Your boots. Your cloak. Your hair." I looked down at the ruined amber accent lines on my jacket, the ones Diane had picked out specifically so I’d photograph well, now hanging in shredded threads and soaked through. "My jacket’s ruined now. This was a gift. Do you understand the emotional weight of that."

Rina, who had watched me take a force wall through a pharmacy and get up, who had watched me break four arms on a screaming woman, who had every reason to think I was insane, patted my chest with a wet pink glove.

"It’s okay," she whispered. Her horns dripped. Her tail hung limp and heavy behind her, waterlogged into a sad rope. "You did really good."

That was the thing about Rina. She meant it. She’d spent the whole fight convinced her Aspect made her a monster and she still had the reserves to console me about outerwear.

Suki, standing on Ren’s floating stone platform with her notebook held over her head to keep it dry, nodded once. Solemn. Like the jacket mattered. Which, honestly, in that specific moment, I appreciated more than I can say.

"See, Suki gets it." I adjusted Rina’s weight. "You two are the only ones who respect the aesthetic tragedy here."

Koda, wringing water out of her undercut ten feet away with the enthusiasm of someone who’d punched a man’s sternum concave and enjoyed it, snorted. "Your fashion sense is not the biggest problem right now, Belmont."

"Everything is a problem right now. I’m choosing to focus on the one I can fix by buying a new jacket."

The comm at my collar crackled. It had been dead the whole fight, jammed to static, and then it wasn’t, and Percy’s voice came through it clean and steady and running numbers like the world wasn’t ending.

"Belmont, if you can hear me, I have you at sublevel two, flood sector, and I am now counting you as accounted for. That is twenty-three. I need a status on Soleil, Tanaka, Ashida, Reyes, and Brynn."

I grinned into the rain. "Percy Mendoza. You beautiful bastard."

A tiny sound came from under my arm. I glanced down. Rina had gone pink across the cheekbones at the sound of Percy’s voice through the speaker, a soft flush that had nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with the blue-haired kid who timed the acoustics of her laugh. She caught me looking and buried her face against my shoulder, which did not un-pink her ears.

Noted. Filed. Absolutely delighted about it and saving it for later.

"All present," I said into the comm. "All ambulatory except Soleil, who’s running on empty. Nobody bleeding out. Nobody dead."

"Copy. Twenty-seven now." A pause I recognized, the one where his brain got ahead of his mouth. "Lukas. The evacuation model changed. I need you at the main entrance, upper landing, as fast as you can move without dropping anyone."

"Changed how."

"Faster than I can explain over comms."

Which meant bad. Percy didn’t do drama. If he was skipping the explanation, the explanation was the kind you didn’t want to hear while your hands were full of an exhausted sheep girl.

I killed the channel and looked at my little waterlogged rescue party. Ren, dripping and unbothered, holding a section of collapsed street stable with two fingers like it was a party trick. Koda, cracking her knuckles, still hungry. Suki, notebook, judgment. Rina, warm against my side, breathing slow.

"Alright," I said. "Change of plans. We’re going up. Main entrance, get out of here, let the adults with licenses handle whatever’s making Percy skip his favorite part of a conversation." I nodded at Ren. "Bridge us out of the wet."

Ren didn’t answer. He just moved his hand, and the flood behind us buckled as a spine of stone rose out of the water and ran the length of the corridor toward the ramp, dry and level and wide enough for four. Show-off. I loved it.

We ran the edge of it. Koda first because she’d fight anything that got in the way and enjoy it, then Suki and Ren flanking Rina, me at the back with a hand on Rina’s shoulder to keep her upright when her feet stumbled. The stone carried us up out of the black water and the driving fake rain and into a stairwell that stopped weeping the second we crossed the threshold, and the temperature climbed, and the rain became a memory soaking through my socks.

The stairs were bigger than they had any right to be. Two hundred feet of them, curving up along the inside of the dome, and the higher we climbed the more the sound changed. Below us had been rain and explosions and my own smart mouth. Up here it was worse. Up here it was quiet in the wrong places and screaming in the right ones.

We hit the upper landing and I saw the shape of it all at once.

There was a thing.

Twelve feet of it, maybe more. White the way nothing alive is white, the color of a page that’s never had ink on it, wrapped in black bands that curled and doubled and made my eyes want to slide off it. Six horns at angles that hurt to track. One arm longer than the other, fingers dragging near the floor. Joints that bent the wrong way. It didn’t pace. It didn’t flex. It just stood there in a lake of black fire that didn’t give off light, and the fire poured off a kid maybe a few years older than me who was laughing and crying at the same time.

And I remembered.

The granite-skinned guy in the flood, right before I broke his neck, running his mouth about the real objective. Security stretched thin. A weapon. Months of planning while everyone was busy drowning children. I’d taken it as villain trash talk, the kind of thing they say to make you feel small before you put them through a wall.

That was the weapon. That was the thing they’d built the whole morning around, the trap they’d sprung and then couldn’t spring because Radiant never showed, so they’d let the leash out anyway.

Cole Dravid crossed the plaza at a dead run toward it.

I saw the whole thing happen and I couldn’t do anything about it because I was still forty feet up the stairs with my hand on Rina’s shoulder. Dravid closed on the kid with the black fire, and the fire died, snuffed out clean, Suppress doing exactly what Suppress did. And then the boy screamed with no sound and the white thing turned its head with a wrongness that made Rina flinch against me, and Dravid had to break eye contact to save some kid who’d wandered into the corridor staring at a phone, and the second he looked away the fire came back and the white thing’s long arm came around in a flat horizontal sweep and caught him across the chest.

The sound was meat. That’s the only way to say it. A flat meaty thud that carried up the whole stairwell, and Cole Dravid left the ground and rotated twice and came down thirty feet away and did not get up.

Steele started screaming his name.

I was already moving. I don’t remember deciding. The gold came up my arms before my brain caught up to my legs, and I was gone, and I want to be clear that in that exact second I stopped caring about the file.

Fuck it.

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