The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 388

Chapter 388: 388 | The Data Gap That Shouldn’t Exist [GT BONUS]

We sat there in the last of the gold light with two open notebooks and one abandoned tablet on the floor, and neither of us picked anything back up.

I stayed another forty minutes and we got nothing done.

The problem with Sloane’s room was that it had exactly one comfortable surface and that surface was a bed, so any attempt to be studious eventually turned into her lying across my legs complaining about her core while I read Dravid’s assignment prompt for the fourth time without absorbing a word of it. She’d stopped pretending to write. Her foot bounced against the wall in a rhythm I’d stopped noticing three weeks ago and started finding unreasonably endearing about eight days after that, which was a development I intended to take to my grave.

Around seven she said, into my thigh, "Petra’s going to be insufferable Friday."

"Petra’s insufferable on a Tuesday. Friday’s just going to be documented."

"If she says one thing about you being unqualified in front of Quinn Adler, I’m detonating the table."

"Please don’t detonate the table."

"I’ll detonate a small portion of the table."

"You have never once detonated a small portion of anything."

She kicked me. It landed on the outside of my knee with enough force to remind me she was operating at mid-A rank output while lying down and pretending to be tired.

I left at seven twenty because she had a five thirty conditioning slot and because staying meant one of two things happened, and one of them she’d already told me she wasn’t up for. She walked me to the door in a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off and kissed me against the frame with her hand flat on my chest, holding me there, keeping the pressure just long enough that I understood it wasn’t goodbye so much as a bookmark.

"Friday," she said. "Collar."

The campus at dusk had a different personality. All the noise of the day compressed into pockets, a group of second years arguing about something near the fountain, someone’s music leaking out of a third floor window, the sprinklers running along the athletic strip in that steady sweep that made the whole place smell like cut grass and wet concrete. I took the long route back. Not for the exercise. Demigod had already repaired whatever Steele’s core circuit had done to me that morning, which was becoming its own problem, since a body that stopped hurting stopped keeping receipts, and receipts were the only thing that had ever kept me honest about how hard I was actually working.

I got about two hundred meters before the interface finally decided to speak.

〘 Notification. Institutional interest event detected. Three agency-level registration inquiries logged against Host profile within seven-day window. 〙

"Cool. Thanks. Very timely."

〘 One inquiry originated from an entity with direct familial proximity to an active heroine. Lang, Petra. Gauge: 9%. Status: Curious. 〙

〘 I want to note, for the record, that I flagged Lang, Petra as a viable progression vector on move-in day. You called her a spoiled princess and let her believe you worked in logistics. 〙

"I did do that."

〘 You did. 〙

〘 I am not judging you. I am informing you. 〙

The walkway lights buzzed above us.

"How many inquiries have been filed against my registration," I said.

"Three." Percy’s pen stopped. "So the trigger has already fired. Or it should have. Which is the part I’ve been sitting on, because I checked the public docket twice and there’s no verification request logged under your name."

"Meaning what."

"Meaning either the regional office is slow, which happens, their average processing lag is eleven days." He closed the notebook. "Or somebody already handled it."

I stopped walking.

Diane had said she’d be on campus at eleven on Friday. Diane had said she was having lunch with a woman on the Halloran liaison desk who owed her three favors and had never once been asked to pay one. Diane had known about all three pulls, by name, by hour, before I did. Diane had told me nine years ago that she’d taken me in because Reina would have done the same, which was true and had never been the whole answer, and I had never once asked her what the rest of the answer was.

"Lukas." Percy’s voice had gone careful. "I’m not accusing you of anything."

"I know."

"I’m telling you a form should exist and doesn’t. That’s a data gap. Data gaps have causes." He looked at me the way he looked at a floor plan with a room missing. "I’d like to know the cause. Not because I want to report it. Because I put my name on thirty-six pages of interpretive argument for you and if the argument is decorative I’d like to know that before someone else finds out."