Chapter 625 | The First Thing a Hero Does [GT BONUS]

Chapter 625: 625 | The First Thing a Hero Does [GT BONUS]

Mateo sniffled and reached one shaking finger toward the horn, and Dralun leaned in so he could touch the broken tip.

Without looking back at me, Dralun let his tail curl up over his shoulder. The tip slid into the left pocket of his vest, pulled out a laminated card, and held it back toward the doorway.

"Belmont, call the manifestation line," he said. "Tell them it’s District Seven and a first surfacing, and get the kid on the clinic list."

The card read Verano Community Manifestation Support in faded blue letters, with a phone number and a line of small print about zero-cost registration for low-income zones. I took it off his tail and stepped back into the hallway beside Julio, who looked at me as though I’d appeared out of a cereal box.

The hold music played a smooth jazz version of a song I was pretty sure had been about murder. After four minutes a woman named Denise picked up, sounding like she’d been on shift since the Accord was ratified. I gave her the address and the age and the bone spur description, and she typed for a long time without comment.

"No agency affiliation on the responding Hero?" she asked.

"He’s a solo agency out of a laundromat, if that helps."

"Oh, you’re with Dralun." Her voice warmed ten degrees. "I’ll put Mateo on the Eighth Street clinic list for Thursday at four, and his registration will go through as unintentional surfacing. There’s no fee, and his parents don’t need to bring anything except him."

I wrote the case number on my palm in pen because I didn’t trust a single pocket in this jacket to hold something that mattered.

Julio had lowered his phone at some point. The call on the other end was still going, a tinny voice saying something about forty minutes and available units, and he didn’t seem to hear it anymore. He was staring at the door lying flat on the carpet, at the splintered frame, at the bone spur still embedded in the wood.

"She’s bleeding because of him," he said. His voice had gone flat. "In Creston they would take him away for that. In here they would take him away faster."

I looked at him. At the way his shoulders had pulled in. At the hand holding the phone that was still connected to a dispatcher he’d stopped listening to.

"Nobody’s taking him anywhere, Julio."

I had spent the last four weeks lying to half the federal government about my own Aspect registration, which meant I knew the Accord’s manifestation provisions better than my own birthday at this point. Better than most licensed Heroes knew them. I’d memorized them in self-defense.

"Under the Accord, an injury caused by a minor’s first surfacing counts as a medical event," I said. "There are no criminal charges. Nothing goes on a record. The clinic handles everything from registration forward, and the parents don’t pay a cent if it’s filed under District Seven income brackets."

Julio turned to look at me. His eyes were wet.

"You are sure?"

"I sat through ninety minutes of Hero Law yesterday with a woman who’d end my entire career for misquoting a statute," I said. "I’m sure."

His face crumpled. He pressed his free hand over his eyes and stood there in the hallway, breathing hard, and I looked away because I didn’t know what else to do.

Carmen came to the doorway with the red towel still wrapped tight around her arm. She was small and fierce-looking, with her hair falling out of a clip and dried cereal milk on her knees.

She looked past me at her son, who had started asking Dralun whether the horns hurt when it rained, and then she looked back at me.

"He starts kindergarten in January," she said. "Can he still go to school with those?"

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out, because I had no idea.

"I don’t know yet," I told her. "Give me your number, and I’ll find out and call you myself."

She recited it, and I wrote it on my wrist under the case number, the pen skipping over my pulse. The interface stayed silent, and for once it didn’t have a joke ready.

Paramedics arrived at minute twenty-six and wrapped Carmen’s arm without asking a single question about the door. The licensed response from across the river pulled up at minute thirty-one, a Rank B in a shiny blue suit who climbed the stairs, took one look at the dragon on the floor, and asked if they needed him. Dralun grunted twice. The Rank B nodded and went back down to his car.

We walked back to Lin’s through the noon traffic without talking. Ophelia met us at the top of the stairs with her parasol open indoors and Mr. Stitches tucked under her arm.

"Mateo’s abuela already called my grandma," she said. "She says the dragon can have free tamales until Easter, and the gold boy gets one if he stops looking so skinny."

"That’s generous of her," I said.

"It’s conditional, and you fail the condition." She climbed back onto her desk and crossed her legs, and the garter clasp caught the window light. "Minus two for making me carry a phone message like a secretary."

Dralun sat down at his desk and pulled a yellow incident form out of the drawer. He uncapped his marker and wrote without stopping, his claws dwarfing the pen, and I counted seven sentences before he signed the bottom. None of them came anywhere close to two hundred words, and not one of them mentioned that he had sat on a floor for eleven minutes while bone split a five-year-old open in front of him.

I leaned against the filing cabinet next to the scanner.

"Why didn’t you get a nullifier from the Strand on the phone?" I asked. "One look from a Suppress user and those spurs would have gone back under his skin in a second."

Dralun capped his marker and set it down on the form.

"Because he’s five and scared," he said, "and the first thing a Hero does to him shouldn’t be taking his power away."