The path curved past the faculty garden, and I took the long way without announcing that I was taking the long way, because the north lot is a nine-minute walk if you go through the garden gate and a five-minute walk if you cut the corner past Building D, and Diane had said twelve, and I have never once in either of my lives chosen the shorter route when the longer one had something in it I wanted.
"Okay," I said. "Honest answer. You asked for one per meeting. This meeting technically ended, so consider this a bonus, and consider it the version I actually don’t say out loud."
"I’m listening."
"I want to be a Hero."
She stopped walking.
I kept going for two steps before I realized she had stopped, which is the kind of thing that happens when you say something true out loud and your body tries to leave the scene of the crime.
"You said number one," she said. "Twenty minutes ago. You gave me the grey walls and the wobbly table and the parking spaces and you told me you wanted the top because nobody argues with the guy at the top, and you meant it, and it was the best answer anybody has given me in four cycles." She was watching me now with her head very slightly tilted, and the silver clip caught the light. "Those are not the same statement."
"No. They’re not." The eucalyptus by the garden gate was doing that thing where it drops the sharp medicinal smell all over everything when the wind moves, and I stood in it and thought about how much easier this would be if I could just be a bastard about it. "The number one thing is the armor. It’s real, I want it, I’d take it tomorrow if somebody handed it to me and I would not have a single note about the process. But it’s the thing I say because it sounds like ambition, and ambition is respectable, and ambition is a thing an agency can put in a deck."
"And the other one."
"The other one’s embarrassing." I looked at her because this was going to sound like the kind of answer that people give when they’re auditioning for the hero brand and do not understand that the hero brand is not real.
"I want to be the guy who shows up. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Somebody’s kid is in a building and the building is coming down and there’s four minutes on the clock, and I want to be the one who’s already inside. Not because it looks good. Because I keep thinking about the fact that my parents were in that position, and the person who showed up got there ninety seconds too late, and there is a version of that day where somebody with better legs and a worse file is standing in the right place and I grow up with a mother who teaches me how to fall."
I said it like a statement of fact. Like I had run the numbers and these were the numbers that came out. It didn’t sound like a statement of fact. It sounded like something I had been carrying around in my chest for years, which was technically true except the years belonged to someone else and I was just holding the bag.
Nothing moved for a second except the trees. The eucalyptus kept dropping that sharp medicinal edge into the air and the wind kept moving it around and Odette did not say anything, and the nothing she said was very specific.
"You’re eighteen," she said.
"Yeah."
"You said that like you were forty."
"I’ve had a long semester."
That was the closest I have ever come to telling anybody in this world the actual truth, and I said it with a shrug, and she filed it somewhere behind the same sharp grey eyes that had been taking inventory of me since the moment I cleared the door.
The fact that she filed it instead of laughing at it or telling me to try again with a version that sounded less like I was reading off a script meant she was going to take it out again later and look at it properly, and I could not do anything about that.
The transmigrant problem in a single interaction. Say too much and people hear something true. Say too little and they fill in the gaps with their own version, and their version is always wrong in the specific way that makes the next conversation harder.
We started walking again. She adjusted her pace down half a step to match mine, which she had not done on the stairs, and it registered as the kind of small recalibration people make when the framing of a conversation has shifted and they are accounting for it without saying so.
"May I return the favor," she said.
"Please."
"I believe you. And it changes nothing about my position, and I want you to understand why, because you are going to hear a version of this from a compliance officer in about eighteen months and by then it will be delivered by somebody who does not like you." She let the folio drop from under her arm to her hand. "The industry does not care what you want. It cares where you came from. Provenance, Lukas. Not because we’re snobs, although we are. Because provenance predicts behavior. If I know an Aspect is inherited, I know the failure mode. If I know it manifested under trauma, I know the failure mode. If I know it came out of a research contract, I know exactly which lawyer to call and how much it will cost. A power with no known origin is a power with no known failure mode, and the only thing this business is genuinely afraid of is a variable nobody has priced."
"So the source matters more than what I do with it."
"That is not what I said."
"It’s exactly what you said, you just said it in contract language, which is a coward’s dialect." I let that sit for half a beat, and then I gave her the grin, and it landed the way it was supposed to, which is to say she looked annoyed and did not look away. "So let’s have the actual argument. Because I’ve been carrying this one around for a while and you’re the first person who’s qualified to lose it."
"By all means."
"Nobody knows where Radiant’s power came from."
She did not react. She was too good for that. But her thumb moved once on the edge of the folio, and I have a hundred Intelligence and a passive that runs micro-expressions whether I ask it to or not, and I saw it.
"Interesting," I said.
"Continue."