Chapter 652 | I’d Do It Again Tomorrow

Chapter 652: 652 | I’d Do It Again Tomorrow

"Did she break her wrist, Ortega?"

"She broke my nose." Camille pointed at the faint purple line across the bridge of her nose that I hadn’t noticed under her makeup. "She’s got a speed Aspect, she’s tiny, and she’s the angriest person I’ve met since I looked in a mirror, so I’m going back Thursday to teach her to aim."

Zara laughed out loud from two seats down, and Camille’s mouth twitched at one corner before she flattened it.

Felicity went when Steele’s eyes moved to her, and she straightened up in her chair and smoothed her skirt, her braid swinging forward over her shoulder.

"I’m at the Arts District Youth Mentorship program, and I have nineteen kids between six and nine." Her voice warmed up as she spoke, and the Smoke and Mirrors field leaked out just enough that the whole row leaned an inch toward her. "Yesterday a little boy named Theo, a different Theo, told me his Aspect was making his drawings move, and nobody believed him. I made his dragon fly across the ceiling with a little illusion so the other kids would think it was his, and he cried for ten minutes because he’d never had anybody believe him before."

"Hardy, that’s against your placement rules."

"I know, Ms. Steele, and I’d do it again tomorrow." Felicity smiled, bright and stubborn, and under the desk her fingers found my wrist again. "His real Aspect turned out to be a sketch animation thing, and the clinic confirmed it after school, so now the whole class wants him to draw them a pet."

Steele looked at her for a long time, and something soft crossed her face for half a second before she wiped it off and took a sip of coffee.

Rina went after that, her voice small at first and getting steadier as she went.

"I’m at dispatch with Mr. Morrow’s partner, Lydia, and I take calls on the non-emergency line." She wrapped both hands tighter around the mug. "A man called yesterday because his wife had an Aspect flare-up, and she was crying so hard she couldn’t breathe, and he didn’t know what to do. I stayed on the phone with them for forty minutes and talked her through breathing until the medic got there."

"Did you use your Aspect over the phone, Soleil?"

"No, I just talked." Rina’s tail curled tight around her leg, and then loosened. "Lydia said I have a voice that makes people slow down, and I told her that was the nicest thing anybody’s said about me that wasn’t about wool."

Percy wrote something down and underlined it twice, and I suspected that the something was not data.

Petra answered from the top row without being called, her pen still in her hand and her voice like glass.

"I’m placed with the Commission liaison office on the Strand, which handles public records requests for licensed Heroes." She turned a page in her planner, the edge crisp under her thumb, and her voice carried that specific quality of someone who had spent three days memorizing exactly what Section Four was. "Yesterday I processed eleven requests from journalists asking for Badge 138’s incident history, and I denied all eleven of them, because a provisional student has no public incident history under IHL code Section Four."

Every head in the room swiveled toward me.

I felt it happen in stages. Camille first, because Camille missed nothing. Then Theo, because Theo followed Camille’s attention with the loyalty of someone who respected precision. Then the rest of the class, one row at a time, until nineteen faces were locked on me and the twentieth was staring at Petra like she’d just announced she’d been guarding a vault instead of filing paperwork.

"Lang, are you telling me you spent your placement guarding Belmont’s file?"

"I’m telling you I spent my placement doing my job correctly, Ms. Steele." Petra’s ears went pink at the tips, the color bright against her black hair, but her voice stayed perfectly level and perfectly composed, like she’d practiced this answer in a mirror three times before class. "It’s not my fault that the job happened to involve a very popular file."

Maribelle made a noise into her hand that sounded like a dying accordion, high and strangled, and Nyx kicked her under the desk hard enough that Maribelle’s chair scraped forward half an inch on the floor.

Then Steele turned to me, and the whole room got very quiet.

Not the quiet of people who were waiting for an answer. The quiet of people who already knew the answer and were waiting to see if I’d give them the version that matched.

Twenty people had already heard about the raccoon. Maybe more. The Strand wasn’t that far from campus, and the provisional network ran fast when something good hit the wire.

"Belmont, your supervisor sent me another report this morning, and it’s nine words long, so I’d like to hear the rest of it from you."

I kept my face blank and my hands loose on the desk, because if I gave the room anything to work with they’d take it and run it through the rumor mill until it came out sounding like I’d saved a building or fought a Villain or done something that mattered more than standing in a doorway and not touching anything. ℯ

"What were the nine words, Ms. Steele?"

She looked down at the tablet in her hand, the screen lit bright against her palm, and read it out in a flat voice that managed to sound both unimpressed and quietly delighted at the same time. "Kid did good with the boy, needs better shoes."

Caden wheezed behind me.

"So tell me about the boy," Steele said.

I sat back in the chair, and the second heartbeat pressed once under my sternum, slow and warm, the same as it had in the Eastside office when Carmen cried into the phone.

"Yesterday morning we got a call on Moss Street, a five-year-old named Mateo who manifested bone spurs out of his shoulders and cut up his mom’s arm by accident." I kept my voice level, because if I let it go anywhere else the whole room would hear it. "Dralun sat on the floor with him for eleven minutes and breathed until the kid stopped crying, and he didn’t call a nullifier or a single Strand agency."

"And what did you do while he did that, Belmont?"

"I stood in the doorway and didn’t touch anything, because he told me not to." Somebody laughed, and I let it pass. "Afterward the mom asked me if her son could still go to kindergarten in January with horns, and I didn’t know, so I promised I’d find out."

"And did you find out?"

"Our office receptionist knew about Section Eleven of the education provisions, because she got kicked out of first grade for making her teacher cry." I heard Felicity choke on a laugh next to me and kept going. "The school district has to build an Aspect plan for him and pay for it, and nobody ever told the families on the Eastside that the clause existed. I called his mom back and told her, and she cried for a while, and then the kid got on the phone and asked if I had horns."

"What did you tell him, Belmont?"

"I told him I didn’t, but the dragon did, and his were much cooler."