My Scumbag System Chapter 700: A Job For Everyone

I crossed the room and croudown in front of his chair so he’d have to look at me instead of the datapad. Kid smelled like energy drinks and paranoia. Glasses sliding down his nose. Hands twitching against the case.

"Nine thousand people live in those six blocks," I said. "Wednesday morning, seven a.m., there are sixty kids in that daycare and about four hundred adults in the retail strip and three apartment towers full of people brushing their teeth. If that Gate opens with them there, some of them die. Not a lot. Maybe forty. Maybe sixty."

Jacob’s throat worked.

"I can’t evacuate nine thousand people," I said. "Neither can Natalia. Neither can Braxton, and if we call the VHC, they’ll show up ninety minutes after detection with a containment order and a press statement, and the people who built that Gate will have their data before anyone gets a name."

"So what do you want," Jacob whispered.

"I want you to close six city blocks by Tuesday night."

He blinked. Once. Twice.

"Municipal utility database," I said. "Meridian Heights runs on the old Valorian Gas Authority grid, pre-Rupture infrastructure, patched forty times and audited never. I want a pressure anomaly. I want it flagged, escalated, and routed to an emergency shutoff order with a mandatory six-block evacuation radius that starts Tuesday at eighteen hundred and doesn’t lift until Thursday."

"You want me to falsify municipal safety records."

"I want you to save four hundred lives with a spreadsheet."

Jacob stared at me. Behind his glasses his pupils had gone huge, and I watched something in him wake up that had been asleep since the day somebody told him data wasn’t a real power.

"The VGA grid," he said slowly, "runs on legacy SCADA architecture. Nineteen-year-old firmware. They never migrated it because migration meant admitting the old grid existed after the Rupture, and admitting it existed meant somebody had to pay for it." His hands moved. The datapad came alive. "There are seven monitoring nodes in Sector 12. Node four hasn’t reported clean since March. If I inject a differential pressure reading from node four and mirror it in node five, the anomaly triangulates to block four and the automated escalation protocol classifies it as Category Two, which requires physical inspection within twelve hours and precautionary evacuation of—"

"Six blocks," Natalia said.

"Six blocks," Jacob breathed. "Six blocks and a daycare closure notice, and the closure notice generates automatically, it goes out through the municipal alert network, it doesn’t even need a human signature because Category Two bypasses—" He stopped. Looked up. "Nobody’s ever asked me to do anything like this."

"Nobody’s ever needed you like this."

He was crying a little. He didn’t notice. He was already typing.

"Give me until Tuesday at fourteen hundred," he said, and his stutter was gone, incinerated by pure enthusiasm. "I’ll need a clean uplink and about nine hours and I’d really appreciate it if nobody talked to me during any of it."

Skylar spoke from the fireplace without opening her eyes. "You just weaponized a nerd."

"I redirected a nerd."

"You weaponized a nerd and he’s going to thank you for it."

"Thank you," Jacob said, to the datapad.

Skylar tipped her head back and laughed at the ceiling.

Raphael took it worse than I expected, which is to say exactly as badly as I expected.

He caught me in the hallway after, all shoulders and gold sparks bleeding off his knuckles, and put a hand on the wall next to my head, which was cute.

"You’re benching me," he said.

"I’m assigning you to a B-Rank Gate with monsters in it."

"You’re putting me on the paperwork job while you go do the thing that matters."

"They both matter."

"Don’t." His amber eyes were bloodshot. He’d been up early too. "Somebody put a Gate under a daycare and you’re sending me to punch bugs in a cave fifteen miles away."

I looked at him for a second. Kid had a twelve-year-old sister and a grandmother and a body full of stored kinetic energy he didn’t know how to spend, and every single thing he did came out of the same wound.

"Sector 12 needs three barriers, a smoke screen, a scout, and one guy who can put things down without leveling the block," I said. "You cannot do that. That’s not an insult, it’s a spec sheet. You’re a demolition charge with a heartbeat."

His jaw flexed.

"The B-Rank has a Hollow-tier boss and four hundred spawn," I said. "If it goes wrong out there, Isabelle needs someone who can hold a corridor alone for ninety seconds while she repositions. There are two people in this house who can do that, and I’m going to be standing in an intersection in Meridian Heights."

Raphael’s hand came off the wall. Slowly.

"You’re saying I’m the wall."

"I’m saying you’re the reason six people come home from Sector 7."

He was quiet a long moment. Then he shoved my shoulder hard enough to bruise, which from him was a hug.

"Get the name," he said. "Whoever did it. Get the name and don’t kill them before I see it."

"Wouldn’t dream of it."

I told Cel on Monday afternoon, in the west stairwell where the cameras had died in 2019 and nobody had budgeted a replacement.

She listened. She didn’t interrupt. She stood there in her Academy uniform with her silver-white hair pinned up and her hands folded and she let me get all the way to the end before she spoke, which is a thing almost nobody does.

"You’re not bringing me," she said.

"No."

"Because of Seraphina."

"Because of Seraphina."

Cel nodded. Once. Her chin did something at the end of it that she caught and killed before it finished.

"She has my location tracked through my bracelet," she said. "She has my communications flagged. She has two people assigned to me who I have identified and three I have not." Her voice stayed level and it stayed level in the specific way that costs something. "If I stood in that intersection on Wednesday morning, she would know before the Gate opened, and there would be a Sanctions team on that block by seven fifteen, and none of you would survive being that inconvenient."

"Yeah."

"I know that. I have known that since I transferred." Her periwinkle eyes came up. "I still wanted you to ask."

That landed somewhere under my ribs and sat there.

"If I asked, you’d have said yes," I said. "And then you’d have gone home and sat in your room and hated yourself for wanting it."

"Yes."

"So I’m not asking."

"I understand the tactical reasoning."

"I’m not giving you tactical reasoning." I stepped down onto her step, which put us at the same height and much too close, and she didn’t move back. "I’m telling you that on Wednesday morning I need one person in this school who is not compromised, not in a Gate, and not in a hospital. Somebody who can walk into her sister’s office and ask the right question with a straight face if everything goes to hell."

Cel’s breath caught. Not romantically. Something better than that.

"You’re giving me a job."

"I’m giving you the job. Everyone else gets to hit things. You get the one that actually decides whether we survive the aftermath."

Noah’s voice came from the landing above, flat as a closing door. "She’ll do it."