The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

The bus smelled like floor cleaner and somebody’s forgotten chicken sandwich. I read the Sunday dinner notification four times before I accepted that the System had, in fact, generated a quest about eating food with a girl’s grandmother.

I’d braced for a fight, or at least the usual nudge toward something I’d have to lie about later. I got dinner.

?The Host appears to be stalling.?

“The Host is processing,” I muttered at the empty seat across the aisle.

?The Host has processed for eleven seconds. The invitation was extended seventy-eight hours ago. The response window closes at seventy-nine.?

So I had one hour to accept an invitation Ophelia Lin had lobbed at my head like a grenade on Tuesday evening, before the water main.

She’d been sitting on her desk at the time, parasol closed for once, stabbing at her phone with both thumbs. She said it sideways, without looking up, fast and flat, like she was reading a script she already hated.

Sunday. Grandma does a thing. You’re my emergency plus-one because my cousin from Alhambra is coming and she asks about my love life like it’s a deposition. You don’t have to talk. Just sit there and be tall.

Then she’d threatened to dock points if I looked surprised about it and gone back to her phone before I could say anything.

I never answered. I hadn’t been too busy, and I hadn’t forgotten.

It was the special kind of cowardice that kicks in when somebody hands you a piece of their actual life and your first instinct is to check whether you’re allowed to hold it. You reread the message six times trying to figure out if it’s real or if she’s setting up a bit where the punchline is you taking it seriously. Then three days go by and you still haven’t typed anything, because every draft sounds too casual or too formal, and you delete all of them.

I pulled up the thread and typed.

Lukas: what time sunday?

Her reply came in nine seconds.

Nine.

Which meant she was awake at one in the morning with her phone in her hand, waiting. It also meant something else I decided not to look at too hard, because looking at it would mean admitting I’d made somebody wait seventy-eight hours for an answer that only had one right version.

Ophelia: oh NOW you answer

Ophelia: three days. do you know what three days of silence does to a person’s cute points

Ophelia: minus two hundred. i’m not telling you the total. it would hurt you

I grinned at the window. Outside, the Eastside slid by in orange pools, boarded storefronts giving way to the half-renovated block where somebody with money had tried to open a coffee place in 2019 and lost.

Lukas: that’s a steep penalty for scheduling.

Ophelia: it’s a penalty for EMOTIONAL CRUELTY. mr stitches thought you were ghosting us.

Lukas: mr. stitches has button eyes.

Ophelia: he has FEELINGS for eyes

A pause. The typing dots came and went three separate times before she settled on something.

Ophelia: five o’clock. wear something that isn’t a hoodie or i’m telling grandma you dress like a crime.

Ophelia: and if my cousin asks, we work together and that’s IT. don’t be weird. don’t do the thing where you say something nice and look at me.

Lukas: i say nice things and look at people. that’s called talking.

Ophelia: it’s called ILLEGAL. five o’clock. bring the lattes you owe me from thursday and friday. i’m counting both.

I pocketed the phone before she could invent a third latte.

?SIDE QUEST ACCEPTED: SUNDAY DINNER?

?This unit notes that the Host typed and deleted the phrase “I’d like that” before sending a joke instead. This pattern has been logged forty-three times since September.?

“Nobody asked for the statistics.”

?This unit provides statistics without being asked. That is the arrangement.?

I let it have that one.

Verano Central rose out of the dark at ten to two, all sodium lighting and the particular loneliness of a transit hub nobody needs at that hour. A man slept across three plastic seats with a jacket over his face. A woman in scrubs stood under the departures board, her whole body leaned into a vending machine like it owed her money.

I had eleven minutes until Route 14, so I switched on Residue Sight and regretted it immediately.

The station lit up like somebody had gone over every surface with a paint roller. Decades of contact sat stacked on top of each other, most of it faded to grey wisps, some still bright enough to read. The handrail down to the platform wore so many overlapping signatures that I couldn’t see the metal anymore, forty different colors ground into each other until the whole rail glowed the muddy brown you get when a kid mixes every paint in the set.

The vending machine the nurse was leaning on had a deep teal thumbprint on the coin slot, fresh enough that it still had edges.

I switched it off.

Everybody in the world leaves a mark on everything they touch, and most of those marks are a woman at two in the morning resting her forehead on a vending machine because it’s the only thing in the building holding still.

I didn’t need to see that. I’d seen it anyway. That’s the problem with new abilities. They show up without a volume knob, and the System never mentions the part where you find out what you can’t unsee.

Route 14 pulled in six minutes late with a driver I didn’t recognize, a guy maybe three years older than me with earbuds in and the thousand-yard stare of hour nine on a twelve-hour shift. He scanned my card without a word. I sat near the front out of habit and watched the city tilt upward as the bus climbed toward the ridge.

My phone lit up.

Sloane: where are you

Lukas: climbing the hill. fifteen minutes.

Sloane: you said twenty minutes an hour ago

Lukas: the bus schedule is a public service.

Sloane: THE BUS SCHEDULE IS A WAR CRIME

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