Chapter 592 | The District Where His Story Started

Chapter 592: 592 | The District Where His Story Started

I hadn’t chosen to remember that. It came up on its own, the way the eleven memories always did, unbidden and secondhand and belonging to a kid whose face I wore and whose grief I couldn’t access no matter how hard I pressed on it. Eastside. An S-class incident. Six heroes. The Cataclysm. A funeral I remembered the clothes from but not the feeling.

They’d sent me back.

I looked up.

The room had gone through the same wave in reverse. People reading their sheets, absorbing them, and then the quick involuntary scan around the room to see how everyone else had landed. And then, one by one, the scan finding me, because word travels fast when you’ve all been reading the same district crime statistics for a Hero Law assignment, and everyone knew what the Eastside was, and everyone knew, because it had been in every profile and every news segment for three weeks, where the son of Vanguard and Reina Belmont had lost his parents.

The silence when they processed it was brief. It was also total.

Sloane’s sheet was already forgotten in her lap. The bond came at me hot and fast and furious, her attention locked on my face, and I felt her read the word off my expression before I said it, felt the exact moment her fury found a target and it was not me, it was the room and the assignment and the entire institution that had printed EASTSIDE on a page and handed it to me in a plastic chair like it was any other district.

Three rows back, Petra had her sheet held in both hands and she was not reading it anymore. She was looking at me, and her face did the thing it did when her composure cracked and she didn’t have time to reset it before someone saw. Recognition first. Then concern, quick and involuntary, the kind she’d deny under oath. Then the calculation underneath both, the part of her that had signed her family’s name onto my file and was already running the political math on what it meant that the institution had placed me in a district where my legacy and my liability lived in the same eleven minutes of highway. Her emerald eyes held mine for a beat longer than was safe, and then she looked down at her own sheet and did not tell me what it said.

Theo leaned over from the seat behind me, his enormous frame folding down so his voice stayed low. "You okay, man?"

"Yeah," I said.

I nodded, which was easier than explaining that I didn’t know yet, because I genuinely didn’t. I had eleven memories and none of them told me how the kid whose body I was wearing was supposed to feel about being sent back to the place that made him an orphan. I had a district with a body count and a Rank C supervisor named Marcus Webb and eight weeks and a start date on a Monday that was suddenly the only thing in the building I could think about.

Across the room, sheets were still being read into the quiet. I heard the districts land like coordinates being called out on a map I hadn’t asked to be part of.

Sloane’s said Creston Hills Community Outreach. Of course it did. They’d put her in the district where she lived, where her mother’s agency ran half the sponsorship deals, where the worst thing that would happen to her on a Tuesday afternoon was a rich family with an entitled kid who needed his Aspect Core scanned before his eighth birthday. Safe. Managed. Home turf.

Percy’s said Financial District Safety Education. The most paperwork-dense placement in the city, which was correct, which Steele had done on purpose, because Percy would build a spreadsheet of the Financial District’s evacuation infrastructure and hand it to a Rank C supervisor who would frame it and never understand what they’d been given.

Felicity’s said Arts District Youth Mentorship, and I watched her read it and watched her face light up in the genuine way it did when she stopped performing, because the Arts District meant kids, and Felicity had a list she kept in her head about who was good with children, and being good with children was the whole thing for her, and she’d just been handed eight weeks of exactly that.

Camille’s said Waterfront Athletic Initiative, which she read once, pocketed, and did not react to at all, because Camille had decided a long time ago that her body was hers and the Waterfront was just a place she’d be exceptional in front of new people.

And mine said Eastside, and the whole room knew it, and I sat there in a plastic chair with a piece of paper that weighed more than it should and did the transmigrant thing where I filed the feeling I couldn’t reach into a drawer with all the others and turned the analytical part of my brain on the part I could actually work with. Because this was a setup. It had the exact shape of a setup. Steele’s pause. Ashby’s fingerprints, probably, because this had institutional-decision energy and Steele didn’t file people into districts on her own. Somebody had looked at the boy with the dead hero parents and the anomalous file and the four million posts, and they’d sent him to the district where his story started, and they’d done it on purpose, and the purpose was the part I couldn’t see yet.

Steele let the silence run until it had finished doing whatever she’d wanted it to do to us. Then she moved back to the front of the room and clasped her hands, the burned one over the whole one, and addressed all twenty of us at once.

"Provisional contracts are not training exercises." Her voice was flat and complete, every word given the space it needed. "They are supervised field placements in active districts. You will respond to real calls. You will work with real communities. You will represent Halloran Academy in public contexts where nobody has agreed in advance to be gentle with you."

She let that land.

"You are on observational status. That means no unauthorized Aspect deployment, no field engagement, no heroics. If an incident occurs while you are in your placement, your job is to go where your supervisor tells you to go and stay there. Your performance will be evaluated by your supervising Hero, and that evaluation will factor into your winter assessments, which factor into whether an agency scout looks at your name in December and sees an asset or a risk. Questions."

Caden’s hand went up before she finished the word.

"What if we get assigned somewhere that’s, like, statistically likely to kill us?"

He said it with the goofball register fully deployed, feet nearly on the chair in front of him, grin already forming. But I’d learned to read the gap under Caden’s performance, and the gap was pointed at me, because Caden Holt had done the same math the rest of the room had done and had decided to ask the question I couldn’t ask on my own behalf.

Steele looked at him. Then she looked, for exactly as long as she’d paused when she said my name, at me.

"Then you demonstrate competence under pressure," she said, "or you request a transfer and explain to me why you’re not ready for field work three weeks after the field came to you."

Her pink eyes held mine on the last word, and there was the thing I couldn’t name again, and I understood it a fraction better this time. It was not pity and it was not a warning. It was closer to a debt she hadn’t decided how to pay, aimed at the kid who’d pulled her out from under a monster’s palm at four percent stamina.

"Next question," Steele said.

Nobody had one.