Chapter 601 | The Gold Kid Goes Home

Chapter 601: 601 | The Gold Kid Goes Home

"He’s never met me."

"That’s what makes it impressive."

Somewhere behind me, a car door thumped shut with the heavy sound of real money. I turned around to find a black Escalade idling at the curb with Creston Hills Outreach in discreet silver lettering across the rear window. A tall grey-haired man in a charcoal suit stood beside the passenger door, and I knew in my bones his name was Bartholomew. Sloane sat in the back seat with the window down, her polo still wrinkled and her ears still pink, staring at the laminated card in Felicity’s hand.

The bond told me the rest before her face did. She was not laughing.

"Bart, how many seats does this car have?"

Bartholomew consulted nothing. "Seven, Miss Fitzgerald."

"We could drop him off," Sloane said, directing it at me through the window. "Creston Hills is on the way to the Eastside if you squint."

"Creston Hills is the opposite direction from the Eastside," Percy called from his sedan. "It adds twenty-two minutes and crosses two district boundaries, which would void your outreach insurance."

Sloane looked at him with homicide in her eyes. Percy returned to his notebook with the serenity of a man who had delivered information and absolved himself of its consequences.

"I’m taking the bus, it’s fine." I plucked the schedule back from Felicity. "Dralun wants a test, so I’ll pass his test."

"It’s a bus schedule, Lukas, not a test."

"Everything’s a test around here, and you know that better than I do."

Felicity went quiet for a second. She looked at the schedule, then at me, and her hand slid down my forearm until her fingers wrapped around my wrist. Her voice dropped out of its bright register into the lower one she used when the cameras were off.

"He sent the son of Vanguard and Reina Belmont to the Eastside on a city bus," she said. "Someone there wants you to see it from the window first."

I didn’t have a joke for that. The one I reached for came out empty, and I stood in the loop holding a laminated card while the girl who made illusions for a living saw straight through mine. Her thumb pressed once against the inside of my wrist, right on the pulse, and then she let go and flounced back toward her mural van like nothing had happened.

"Text me pictures of the gritty bus," she called over her shoulder. "I want to see it for the aesthetic."

The Escalade pulled away with Sloane still twisted around in her seat, watching me through the back window until the eucalyptus swallowed her. Camille’s jeep followed, and she didn’t look back at all, which from Camille was louder than waving. Percy’s sedan left precisely on schedule. Within two minutes the loop was empty except for me, the clerk, and a WARDEN pillar that had started glowing at me with what I chose to interpret as pity.

"Good luck, Mr. Belmont," the pillar said. "I am glad you survived."

"You say that to everybody, buddy."

"I do," it agreed. "It remains true in your case."

The walk down to the Creston Hills stop took nine minutes through a neighborhood of hedges and German cars. The bus shelter sat at the bottom of the ridge road, a bench and a plexiglass roof and a digital sign that promised Route 14 in four minutes and then changed its mind to seven. Two licensed Heroes from the new security rotation stood at the checkpoint across the street, a woman in blue and silver with folded wings and a man with rock skin who kept glancing at me and then at his phone. I watched the rock guy pull up a video, look at my face, and pull up the video again.

[NOTIFICATION: Host recognized by 2 licensed personnel. Recognition sentiment: confused. The interface notes that the Host is waiting for a bus in a hero academy jacket. The interface finds this narratively inefficient.]

"Nobody asked you," I muttered.

Route 14 arrived eleven minutes late, which in Verano Metro terms counted as early. The doors folded open with a pneumatic hiss, and the driver, a heavyset woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, looked at my crest and then at my face.

"You’re the gold kid," she said.

"I’m a guy who needs Route 31 at Central."

"Sure you are, honey." She waved me past the fare reader without charging me. "Sit up front where I can see you."

I sat up front. The bus smelled of floor cleaner and somebody’s leftover burrito, and the seat had a crack in the vinyl that pinched my thigh every time we hit a bump. Out the window, Creston Hills slid past in manicured tiers, and then the highway opened, and the city spread out gold and glass toward the water. Somewhere to the south, past the Strand and the billboards with Grande Dame’s violet eyes, the skyline got shorter and darker and stopped showing up in brochures.

I pulled out my phone and texted Sloane a picture of the burrito wrapper wedged under the seat in front of me.

The reply landed in three seconds. I hate this so much. Are you okay?

I’m on the bus, and the driver thinks I’m going to throw up.

Are you going to throw up?

I looked out the window as the bus merged onto the interchange. The skyline tilted, and past it, low and grey, I could see the Eastside for the first time with my own eyes, a sprawl of flat roofs and old water towers and one tall shell of a building near the river that still had scaffolding on it nine years later. My chest did something the Demigod trait couldn’t fix. The second heartbeat under my sternum woke up and pressed outward, slow and patient, like it had recognized the view before I did.

I typed no, and then I deleted it, and then I didn’t type anything at all.

The driver glanced at me in her mirror, her reading glasses swinging on their chain. "First time out there, gold kid?"

"First time I remember," I said, and the bus kept rolling toward the river.