The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 500

Chapter 500: 500 | One Way Or Another

Felicity put a version of herself on the ceiling. Not a good version. A wrong one, the kind that made a person’s stomach turn over before their brain caught up, upside down and grinning with her hair hanging the wrong direction, giggling into the dark.

Both men looked up.

Camille’s volley came in low and horizontal, four rivets in under a second, and she didn’t go for center mass. She went for the ankle, the knee, the wrist, the elbow, and every single one landed exactly where a joint needed to be to keep a body upright. The projectile guy went down screaming. The second one turned toward the sound of Camille’s shot, which put his back to the corridor, which put him directly in front of Sloane.

Sloane didn’t detonate him. She grabbed the front of his vest, dragged him off his feet, and put him headfirst into the wall panel with a bang that made Felicity’s teeth click.

"Nice," Camille said.

"He had a compressed-gas canister on his hip. Aspect’s probably combustion." Sloane crouched and stripped the canister off with her thumb. "You blow that in a corridor this narrow, the pressure wave breaks all three of our ribcages."

Felicity blinked. "You caught that mid-move?"

"I catch everything mid-move. That’s the job."

She said it like it was nothing. Felicity filed it, and not for a group chat, and not for leverage, just for herself, because she had spent three weeks around this girl assuming Sloane Fitzgerald was mostly volume and had just watched her save all three of their lives in about half a heartbeat.

They kept moving.

The service level was flooded to the ankle, water pushing in from the eastern zone through a vent grate that had given out. Felicity’s boots filled up and she gave up caring. Her suit was soaked through anyway. The white had gone translucent across her ribs, and her hair had come out of its ponytail somewhere around the second flight of stairs and was plastered to her neck in strands, and if Lukas had been here he would have made an absolute meal out of the whole situation and she would have let him.

Which was the thing she wanted to say. It had been sitting in her mouth for twenty minutes.

"Fitzgerald."

"What."

"Can I say something insane while we’re wading through sewage."

"It’s flood runoff."

"Same energy." Felicity caught up so they were shoulder to shoulder in the dark, and she made herself say it plain, without the sparkle on top. "I don’t want to fight you."

Sloane’s head turned. "We’re not fighting."

"We’re so fighting. Not with fists. You’ve been fighting me since the morning I sat down next to him at breakfast, and I’ve been letting you, because I get it. I would too." Felicity kept her eyes forward. It was easier. "I’m not trying to take him. I know that’s what it looks like. I know exactly what it looks like, because I’ve watched what it looks like from the outside my whole life and I picked out the shorts on purpose. But I’m not trying to take him."

Camille, ten feet ahead, said, "Oh, we’re doing this now?"

"Not you."

"I’m right here."

"You’re on point, focus."

Sloane didn’t say anything for six or seven steps. The water pushed around their shins and something creaked overhead and Felicity felt her own pulse in her throat.

"Then what are you trying to do," Sloane said.

"Keep him. And keep you." Felicity swallowed. "You were first. You’re going to be first when we’re forty. He talks about you like you invented weather. And I’m not built for a version of this where somebody loses, because I have spent my entire life in big houses with nobody in them, and I’m not doing the thing where I win a boy and lose the only two girls in this building who don’t perform at me."

That got out messier than she wanted. She hated when the real one came out messy.

Sloane made a sound. It wasn’t a laugh. It was something closer to a person getting hit somewhere old.

"You’re not supposed to say it like that," Sloane said.

"Like what?"

"Honest. You’re supposed to be fake so I can hate you comfortably." Her voice cracked on the end of it and she covered it with volume, which Felicity had learned meant she’d landed. "God. You’re as bad as he is. Both of you just walk up and say the true thing and then stand there."

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