“I meant what I said at the ceremony, you know,” he said. When I looked up, he had a rueful smile—the smile you give to a friend or a colleague, not to a little kid. “Heroism is a bad habit. Once you’ve done it, other people start to expect it. If the city’s in danger again, everybody will remember that you saved them last time, and they’ll forget all the nasty exhausting bits where you nearly died and had to sleep for a week and your headache didn’t go away for three days.”
