"Legendary plus. That’s not a tier, that’s an apology. That’s the IHL admitting the scale broke and refusing to build a new one. Fifteen years at ninety-eight percent approval, combat ceiling classified, output undocumented, and the man teaches Hero Basics on Wednesday afternoons and checks his phone three times during a capture the flag exercise." I spread my hands. "Nobody has ever run provenance on him. Nobody would dare. He’s the most trusted human being in this country and his file is a rumor with a costume on it, and the reason nobody asks is that he ran into a burning building twenty-seven times in four minutes with a camera on him, and after the twenty-seventh time the question stopped being a question."
"You think he bought that with results."
"I think he bought it with the only currency that’s ever worked." The garden gate was coming up on the left, wrought iron, the code Percy got off a groundskeeper through a window. "Look. The source is a story about the past. What you do with it is a story about right now. And every single institution on earth prefers the past, because the past holds still and lets you photograph it, and right now keeps moving and makes everybody look stupid. So you get compliance frameworks built entirely around where a thing came from, and then a hospital falls down and the only question anybody in that hospital cares about is whether the person coming through the wall is fast enough."
"And when the person coming through the wall turns out to have gotten fast in a way the framework can’t audit."
"Then the framework is wrong about what it should have been measuring."
"No," Odette said. "Then the framework was measuring the correct thing and got beaten by a boy who was better at hiding than it was at looking, and the people it exists to protect find out about the difference in a very expensive way."
That one went in clean, under the ribs, no wind-up.
"Say the rest," I said.
"You want the rest."
"You’ve been building to it since you put your glasses back on."
She stopped at the gate. Put a hand flat on the iron without pushing, and turned around so the light came off the concrete and hit her from below, and I got a good look at her for the first time since she walked into that conference room like she had built it personally.
Late thirties, and the kind of late thirties that costs money and discipline in equal measure. The kind that photographs well enough that agencies keep her face attached to major campaigns even when the Hero is the one who’s supposed to be selling the product. The charcoal suit was cut close enough through the waist that it had clearly been fitted to her twice, and the jacket had been unbuttoned at some point in the last hour when the air conditioning failed, and the white shirt underneath had gone slightly soft with the day’s heat where it followed the line of her in ways that her posture made absolutely no concession to. Professional cut, professional material, professional tailoring, and underneath all of it the specific shape of someone who has spent enough time in field conditions that she knows how to move in a way that suggests competence before it suggests anything else.
Plum lipstick still holding at two twenty in the afternoon on a woman who had been talking for an hour, which meant it was either very expensive or very stubborn, and knowing her, both. Silver clip holding her hair back in a blunt cut that looked deliberate rather than convenient. A small bump on the bridge of her nose from a break somebody set correctly, the kind of break that comes from proximity to incidents rather than training accidents. No jewelry except the clip and a watch with a scratched face she had clearly refused to replace despite the fact that she could afford ten replacements without checking her account balance.
She looked like the last competent adult in a burning building who had personally checked the structural integrity before deciding whether evacuation was actually necessary, and I had absolutely no business noticing the shirt or the way it had loosened just slightly at the collar where she had pulled at it earlier without realizing she was doing it.
〘 Odette Reyes: 11% → 14% 〙
〘 Status: Assessing. Note: subject has stopped reviewing her exit timeline. 〙
"Here’s the rest," she said. "I don’t think you can hide it. I think you think you can, and I think Diane has convinced herself she can manage it, and I think that woman has managed worse and it has made her arrogant about the specific thing she is currently worst at." A car went past on the service road and she waited it out. "Your registration says fifteen feet and twenty pounds. I have footage of you putting an amber construct through a Legendary crystalline barrier from further than that. Four faculty members have written it down independently. Petra Lang put her name next to yours to close an inquiry that will regenerate the first time a licensed Hero files an incident report with your name in it, and it will regenerate with interest, and when it does you will not be an eighteen-year-old with a sympathetic story. You will be a provisional licensee with a documented pattern."
"I know."
"I don’t think you do. I think you know it as a problem." She let go of the gate. "I want you to know it as a date. Because it has one, and it’s before you graduate, and every single week you spend performing at sixty percent is a week you’re spending building the case against yourself instead of building the answer."
"Dravid said something like that."
"Cole says everything four months before I do and he says it worse." She almost smiled. "So. Your question. Source or use. Do you want mine or do you want the correct one."
"Both. I’m greedy."