Chapter 444 | Hero’s Edge and Other Catastrophic Miscalculations [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 444: 444 | Hero’s Edge and Other Catastrophic Miscalculations [CASTLE BONUS]

The Uber pulled into a parking lot that answered every question I hadn’t asked and generated fourteen new ones, each worse than the last.

The building squatted in the far corner of a strip mall whose other tenants included a nail salon advertising gel manicures in four languages, a tax preparation office that looked like it had been closed since 2019, and a store that appeared to sell exclusively phone cases for models of phones that no longer existed.

The structure itself was two stories of aggressively windowless black paint topped with a neon sign that read HERO’S EDGE in electric purple script. Below that, in smaller pink letters pulsing with the kind of enthusiasm that suggested the sign installer had been paid per watt: VERANO’S PREMIERE HERO-THEMED ENTERTAINMENT VENUE.

Between the two lines of text, a silhouette of a woman in a cape struck a pose that had nothing to do with actual heroism and everything to do with a completely different genre of physical performance. The cape was the only piece of her costume that looked regulation.

The parking lot contained six cars. Three of them had expired tags visible from here.

It was nine fourteen in the morning on a Saturday in a strip mall parking lot in front of what was unambiguously a strip club with a hero gimmick.

Nobody spoke. The silence stretched through four full seconds, which represented the longest uninterrupted quiet Caden Holt had produced in recorded history.

I reached forward and smacked him on the back of the head.

"Ow!" Caden’s hand flew to the impact site as he whipped around in the passenger seat, his hazel eyes carrying the wounded confusion of a golden retriever who had just been told that the park was actually a veterinary appointment. "What was that for?"

"You brought us to a strip club, Caden." I gestured through the windshield at the neon sign, the silhouetted cape woman, and the parking lot that contained fewer vehicles than a graveyard on a Wednesday. "At nine in the morning. On a Saturday."

"It’s a hero-themed entertainment venue."

"It’s a strip club with capes."

"Those are different things!"

"How are those different things?"

"Branding!" Caden pointed at the sign with the earnest conviction of someone presenting evidence at trial. "It says entertainment venue right there on the building. Entertainment venues are open all the time. Like bowling alleys. Like arcades. Like Dave and Buster’s where you can win tickets for doing activities. I thought these places ran twenty-four seven!"

He paused. The Uber’s interior processed this statement through six separate cognitive filters.

"I’ve never been to a strip club," Caden added, which was somehow worse than if he had stopped talking.

The driver, who had maintained professional silence for the entire twenty-minute ride and appeared to have cultivated selective deafness as a core survival trait, shifted into park. He stared at his steering wheel with the thousand-yard expression of a man who had transported worse passengers but could not remember when or where or what they had done to earn that distinction.

"You’ve never been to a strip club," I repeated.

"I’m eighteen! When would I have gone to a strip club? Where would I have obtained a fake ID? Halloran doesn’t exactly distribute those with the meal plan during orientation week!"

"Mate." Finn had opened both eyes for the first time since we merged onto the freeway. His brown gaze traveled from the neon sign to Caden’s face to the parking lot’s six vehicles with the slow, methodical assessment of someone building a file he would reference for the next three years. "Strip clubs open at like eleven. Some of them noon. The morning shift at a strip club is the sad shift. It’s the last slice of pizza that’s been sitting on the counter since Tuesday. Nobody goes to a strip club at nine in the morning except people having the worst Saturday of their entire month."

"Or the best Saturday," Marco offered.

"Nobody having a good Saturday ends up here, man."

"How do you know when strip clubs open?"

"I contain multitudes."

"That’s my line."

"It was Felicity’s line first."

Percy had his notebook open. His pen had not moved. His blue hair caught the parking lot sunlight and his brown eyes held the fixed, unblinking attention of someone whose Analyze ability was attempting to process a data set that existed outside all known parameters. Percy’s mouth opened, closed, and opened again.

"The Yelp reviews," Percy said. "The four point three star average across two hundred and seventeen assessments."

"Yeah?"

"I built my safety assessment around the premise of a hero-themed experience center with interactive exhibits and potentially a gift shop. The fire code compliance rating was excellent. I personally verified the building’s certificate of occupancy. I confirmed the HVAC system meets all current California commercial ventilation standards for public assembly spaces. I documented the ADA-compliant accessibility features. I cross-referenced the business license with the municipal records database."

Percy’s pen moved across paper now. The motion was precise and controlled. The notebook page was filling with what looked like a post-mortem analysis of his own research methodology. "I did not verify the specific nature of the entertainment services being offered on site."

"Percy peer-reviewed a strip club," Marco said, and the sound that emerged from his throat was so pure and so completely uncontaminated by cynicism that it should have been extracted, bottled under sterile laboratory conditions, and distributed as a dietary supplement for people who had given up on finding genuine joy in institutional settings.

Eden sat in the far back seat with his mouth hanging open and his dark brown eyes reflecting the neon sign’s purple glow. His lighter was frozen mid-click in his right hand. Eden Wilkinson had processed the situation, and the processing had produced a result that his operating system was not equipped to handle, because Eden’s worldview sorted information into two categories: manly and not manly. A hero-themed strip club at nine in the morning on a Saturday occupied a dimensional space between those categories that his brain had never been asked to navigate.

"Is this," Eden began. Paused. Restarted. "Is this manly?"