The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 619: 619 | I’d Rather Not Know What It Said

Petra’s hand went up from the front row, and Crane nodded at her. Petra didn’t turn around, but her ears went pink under her geometric black waves.

“The injury becomes the story,” Petra said. “If the Hero explains it, the explanation becomes a second story, and if the Hero stays silent, the silence becomes a third. The correct move is to bury it under a better story before the first photograph finishes uploading.”

“Correct, Miss Lang, and brutally so.” Crane turned her masked face back to me and smiled like a cat that had found the cream. “Mister Belmont, what is your better story?”

I thought about it for about two seconds, and then I said the truth, because the truth was funnier.

“My better story is forty-seven families in the Eastside who got their stuff back last night, and a raccoon report that’s now compliant with IHL narrative standards.”

Crane’s smile went wider behind the mask.

“That’s a terrible headline and a very good story. Somebody should give you an agent.”

“His guardian is my agent,” I said. “She’d kill you.”

“Oh, darling, she’d try.” She turned to the smart board and wrote BURY in wide, looping letters. “Page forty. We’re discussing crisis redirection, and Mister Belmont is my case study for the rest of the semester whether he likes it or not.”

I didn’t like it. Felicity leaned over from the seat to my right and whispered that I looked hot when a woman bullied me in public, and I told her that my body had stopped processing compliments at hour twenty-five. She laughed into her sleeve, and her knee settled against mine under the desk and stayed there for the full ninety minutes.

The interface kept me company.

〘Hours Awake: 29.〙

〘Recommended Action: Sleep.〙

〘Secondary Observation: Isabelle Crane has referenced the host by name eleven times in forty minutes. This is statistically notable.〙

I stopped reading notifications around the fifty-minute mark, because my eyes had started to slide off the text. At some point Crane put up a slide of a Hero whose costume had torn during a rescue, and I realized I had been staring at it for a full minute without seeing it. Felicity pinched my thigh under the desk, hard, and I jerked upright hard enough to rattle my tablet.

“Stay with me, bestie,” she breathed. “You’re drooling on your own jacket now, and I refuse to let the goth girl have that record alone.”

Combat Theory with Dravid was at three, in the horseshoe room on the third floor of Building D, and it was the class I had been dreading since Monday. Cole Dravid had spent eleven days in medical with a flail chest and a concussion. He came back with surgical staples holding his left side together, and he had decided the best recovery plan was teaching thirty-eight teenagers about spatial denial on a loaner cane four centimeters too short.

He was already on the raised platform when I came in. His blue-black hair was gathered at the back of his neck, and his charcoal jacket hung a little loose on the left side where the bandages sat. He leaned his weight on the cane at an angle that made my own ribs ache in sympathy. His cool grey eyes swept the room once and caught on my collar for exactly one beat before they moved on.

He didn’t comment on it. I found that worse than Crane.

“Ninety seconds,” Dravid said, and the whole horseshoe went quiet. “You have ninety seconds to explain how you would deny a spatial displacement user access to a room, using only the materials currently visible to you. Mister Revell, go.”

Cain Revell started talking about blocking sightlines with his wing, and I sat in the middle of the horseshoe and fought my own eyelids. Sloane had taken the seat across the curve from me, and through the bond I could feel her watching me the entire time. The heat of it settled into my chest, and it was the only thing keeping me upright. My brain wanted to shut down entirely, and every time it tried, the bond pulled me back like a hand on the back of my shirt.

“Mister Belmont,” Dravid said at the forty-minute mark, without looking up from his tablet. “You’ve been awake for approximately thirty hours. Your pupils are asymmetric by a millimeter, and you have not blinked in forty seconds. Explain spatial denial to me before you fall off your chair.”

I stood up, because sitting down would have made me die right there in the horseshoe.

“You don’t deny the space, sir. You deny the reason anyone would want to be in it. If the displacement user needs a hostage, you move the hostage first, and then the room stops being worth reaching.”

Dravid looked up, and his grey eyes held mine across the platform.

“Adequate,” he said. “Sit down, and do it carefully.”

I sat down very carefully. Dravid went back to his tablet and made one short note, and I decided that I would rather not know what it said.

At the end of class he called my name before I could reach the door. The rest of the room filed past me, and Sloane hovered at the threshold until Dravid gave her a single flat look. She scowled and stepped out into the hall, and the bond stayed pressed against my back like a palm.

Dravid lowered himself onto the edge of the platform with a slow wince that he tried to hide and couldn’t. The loaner cane rested across his knees, and he tapped it once against the floor.

“Your supervisor sent Steele a report of nineteen words,” he said, “and Steele forwarded it to me. You returned forty-seven people before dawn, and you didn’t break anything.”

“Dralun is an efficient writer, sir.” I caught the word too late and decided nobody was grading my vocabulary at three forty in the afternoon.

“He’s a Rank C with a coffee can for insurance, and he managed to keep you from breaking anything for eleven hours. I’ve failed to do that for three weeks.” He paused, and his mouth moved in a way that might have been a smile on a man who had never practiced one. “Go to bed, Belmont, and that is an instruction from your instructor. If I see you before homeroom tomorrow, I’ll assign you twenty pages on raccoons.”

“You’d get the best raccoon report of your career.”

“Get out of my classroom.”