The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 389

Chapter 389: 389 | A Conditional Commitment [GT BONUS]

That landed harder than it should have.

Percy had spent a whole night building me a fortress out of regulatory language, and he’d done it because I told him once that knowing where the exits were made him smart instead of strange. He’d never asked me what he was defending. He was asking now, in the most Percy way available, by presenting me with a missing document and waiting to see what I put in the blank.

"I’ll find out," I said.

"Will you tell me."

"I’ll tell you what I can."

He absorbed that. Then he nodded once, opened the notebook again, and wrote something short.

"That’s a conditional commitment," he said. "I’ll take it. It’s better than my model predicted."

We walked the rest of the way to Prometheus 1-B in a silence that wasn’t uncomfortable, and at the door he said, without preamble, "Rina asked about you today."

"Did she."

"She asked whether you were still planning to help her test her full Aspect range. She said the word full twice." He said it flatly, the same tone he used for exit counts. "I told her I’d confirm your availability. That was three hours ago and I’ve been trying to figure out whether relaying the message qualifies as facilitating something I have complicated feelings about."

"Percy."

"I’m working on it," he said, and went inside.

The common room had the low ambient chaos of a Wednesday night. Caden was on the modular couch with his legs across Marco’s lap, both of them watching some agency highlight compilation on the wall screen and disagreeing loudly about whether a Rank B in Phoenix had actually meant to do the thing she’d done. Finn occupied the far end in his usual boneless sprawl, working invisible filaments through the air above his own face. Rina sat in her corner chair with the sheep mug, and when I came through the door her tail moved once against the cushion before she caught it and made it stop, which was a tell I’d noticed on move-in day and never mentioned to anybody.

"There he is," Caden announced. "The People’s Representative. Marco owes you an apology."

"For what."

"He said you’d cave to Lang in the first meeting and come out of there agreeing to write the whole coordination brief yourself."

"I did agree to write the coordination brief myself."

Caden sat up so fast he dumped Marco’s chips. "Lukas."

"She structured it well. It’s a good brief. I’m writing it."

"That’s caving!"

"That’s owning the document," I said, and kept walking toward the stairs, and heard Caden explaining to the room at increasing volume that owning the document was a real thing and he’d known that, obviously, he’d simply been testing whether the rest of us knew it.

"Yeah," I said, under my breath, on the stairs. "I got it."

Room 205 was exactly where I’d left it. Walnut desk three inches left of where I’d have put it, sage chair angled to catch light that had already gone, the framed photograph of Marcus and Reina in their costumes against a sunset I’d looked at four times in two months and never once managed to feel anything appropriate about.

I sat on the bed with my shoes still on and pulled up the interface, and I didn’t open the quest log or the gauge display or any of the parts it wanted me looking at.

I opened my own registration summary. The one it kept mirrored off the IHL public docket, which was the closest thing to an honest document about me that existed in the world.

BELMONT, LUKAS. Channeler, Class I. Phantom Touch. Rare. Force Manipulation variant, primary telekinetic expression. Effective range approximately fifteen feet. Weight threshold approximately fifteen to twenty pounds. Flagged: Progressive Manifestation Syndrome, Category Seven.

Every line of it was a lie with a receipt behind it, and three separate agencies were currently reading it, and one of those agencies belonged to the mother of a girl who sat in the top row of my homeroom with her planner open and her jaw tight and something behind her eyes that I had already decided not to think about.

My phone buzzed on the desk.

Unknown number. Local area code.

Mr. Belmont. My name is Odette Reyes. I handle candidate assessment for the Lang Agency. I’d like fifteen minutes of your time this week at your convenience, on or off campus, entirely informal.

Lang Agency... Petra?