The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 609: 609 | Front Doors Are For People With Nothing to Hide

I stood up, walked around the back of the bus shelter where nobody on Delancey could see, and went up the side of the laundromat next door by hand. I didn’t use gold or constructs, or any of the twenty-seven thousand points sitting unspent in my interface. I had a hundred Agility and a hundred Strength and the Demigod multiplier running under both, and a drainpipe that had been bolted into the brick by someone who cared about his work. I reached the roof in about four seconds.

The rooftops of the Eastside ran together in a flat broken plain of tar paper, water tanks, and satellite dishes pointed at nothing. The smoke from Delancey drifted across all of it at knee height. Three roofs east, the black shape was moving away from me.

It wasn’t running. It was sliding. It crouched low and pushed off with one foot, and then it glided across the tar paper on its own momentum, fast and silent, arms out for balance, until it reached the edge and hopped the gap to the next roof. It landed on its hip and slid again, and it spun once for no reason I could see except that it looked good.

I ran after it.

My feet hit the tar paper hard, and I cleared the first gap without slowing down. Running at full output felt clean after twenty minutes of bus bench. The cold air burned in my lungs and the smoke stung my eyes, and the distance closed fast. The shape looked back over its shoulder at the sound of me. I caught a flash of reflected light from its face, round and doubled, like a pair of cheap aviator goggles.

It made a noise. It could have been a laugh or a yelp, and the pitch landed somewhere between the two.

Then it pushed off harder, and the slide turned into something that should have been illegal on a surface made of asphalt and gravel. It shot across the next roof at the speed of a hockey puck. It jumped a six-foot gap without breaking stride and caught the rail of a fire escape on the far building, then swung around it and let go, sliding up the incline of a slanted skylight like water running uphill.

I cleared the gap and hit the fire escape and went up after it.

The skylight belonged to an old textile building, and the top of it met a water tower on stilts. The shape stopped under the tower’s shadow and turned to face me, breathing hard. It planted one hand on its hip and leaned against a rusted stilt like it had been waiting there all night.

It was a girl, and now I could see all of her.

She was maybe my age, five-five at most, wrapped in a black neoprene bodysuit that had clearly started life as a diving suit before someone got creative with scissors. The neckline plunged low enough to be a structural concern. She’d cinched a faux-leather corset belt at her waist, and the belt carried a row of pouches and a grappling gun with electrical tape around the grip. Her boots rose past the knee, and the left one was held shut down the side with a line of safety pins that caught the city light. Her hair was a sleek black bob cut sharp on one side and long on the other, and she blew it out of her face before she said a single word.

Where the suit had been cut away at her hips, her skin changed. Smooth scales ran down the outside of her thighs, emerald bleeding into black, and they shifted color in the orange glow from Delancey, green and then gold and then green again.

The goggles covered most of her face. Behind the lenses, I could see her eyes, a vivid acid green with pupils split in narrow vertical slits.

She smiled, and two long fangs pressed into her lower lip.

“Well, well,” she said, and her voice dropped into a low breathy purr that stretched every vowel out like taffy. “If it isn’t the golden boy from the television. Did you follow me all this way just to say hello, darling?”

“I followed you because you climbed a pawn shop carrying a bag.”

“Everybody carries a bag.”

“Most people carry theirs out the front door.”

She tilted her head. The fangs caught the light when her smile got wider. “Front doors are for people with nothing to hide, and I have plenty to hide.” She let the purr drag a little longer on that last word. “Aren’t you supposed to be standing on a bench somewhere?”

That landed. I kept my face blank and filed away the fact that she’d been watching me before I’d been watching her.

“What’s in the bag?”

“Secrets,” she said. “Shiny ones.”

I stepped closer. She didn’t back up. She slid instead, and her body drifted sideways around the base of the tower without her feet leaving the tar paper. I reached for her wrist, fast enough that most people would never have seen my hand move. My fingers closed on her forearm.

Her arm poured out of my grip like I’d tried to hold a fistful of oil.

There was no resistance at all. Her skin passed along my palm without friction, and she was two feet to my left before my fingers finished closing on nothing. I looked at my hand. It wasn’t wet. It felt perfectly dry, which bothered me more than it should have.

“You can’t catch a shadow, darling,” she purred, and she spun once on one heel just to prove the floor didn’t matter to her. “I’m already three steps ahead of you and I’m—”

Her heel caught the edge of the skylight frame.

The rest of her kept going. Her frictionless boot shot out from under her and her arms pinwheeled, and the purr vanished and something much higher came out of her mouth.

“Whoa! Whoa! The roof is slanted, why is it slanted, catch me, catch me!”