Chapter 6 — Nursery of Gods
The mural on the warehouse wall said FEED THE FUTURE—smiling cartoon apples, a rainbow with a nonprofit tax ID under it. The loading dock said NO PARKING in a font that meant unless you know the handshake. The manifests inside said Nutraceuticals, Pediatric Supplements, Sterile Water.
The cooler Popclaw gave up said hope, in blue.
Cian watched from a rooftop as forklifts ferried cardboard holiness into a truck whose VIN had belonged to three different charities and one summer camp. He palmed the hood as it left, wrote a note in static the engine would read as a hiccup if he needed it to stop later, and texted a dot to Butcher.
NURSERY PIPE A —> ST. BRIGID AUX PAV.
He added a second line to Mallory: NO SHOOTING NEAR INCUBATORS. I MEAN IT.
"Go to church," he told the truck, and ran ahead to arrange the pews.
---
St. Brigid Pediatric Auxiliary tried very hard not to be a hospital. The lobby had a jungle mural, a fish tank, and a woman at the desk who could talk a panicked parent down with a smile. Only the smell betrayed it—antiseptic, sugar, fatigue.
Cian slid through the revolving door like heat. He breathed the building.
— Two legitimate floors of PT and post-op.
— A third, unlisted, that thought it was a closet and hummed like secrets.
— An elevator that skipped if you pressed B and 3 together like a cheat code.
— A camera grid run by an IT vendor whose logo was really just Vought in a cheaper suit.
— A NICU circuit on its own isolated power—good—and a second shadow line snaked off it into elsewhere—bad.
He touched the main panel and began to cook the building to a precise recipe: a surgical EMP simmer. Not a blast. A seasoning. NICU and life-support circuits—white-listed, wrapped in a bubble of untouchable. The badge readers and private uplinks—left just an inch stupid. The cameras—polite little yawns in sequence, never all at once.
He lifted a hand from the metal with a static thread still strung between his fingers. "No babies," he told the electricity. It agreed.
---
"Rule six," Butcher said in the van, adjusting a lab coat he'd bought from a man with a flexible relationship to certification. "Don't point at babies."
"Rule seven," Mother's Milk added, flipping a clipboard to an empty page, "if a nurse asks what you're doing, the answer is compliance check said confidently."
"Rule eight," Frenchie chimed, tugging on scrubs that made him look like an extra in a soap, "if a doctor asks, the answer is biomed calibration said bored."
Hughie stared at his badge. The name read Cal Adler because Cian liked jokes and printers listened to him. "Rule nine?"
"Don't be a tourist," MM said. "Eyes where they belong."
They walked in as a team that looked like a team. Butcher carried a Pelican case. MM carried the clipboard and a pen that was really a lockpick. Frenchie had a rolling toolbox. Hughie held the compliance meter that was three-quarters shell and one- quarter sin.
The receptionist did her job. "Can I help you?"
"Joint audit," MM said, smile soft as a chaplain. "CMS plus vendor. Should be in your system." He slid a laminated letter with enough jargon to tranquilize a regulator across the counter.
She glanced. Saw the letterhead she'd never seen but felt like she should have. Saw badges that scanned green because Cian whispered into the RFID reader like a friend. "Elevators are right there," she said. "Thank you for keeping us honest."
"Every day," MM said.
They rode up. The elevator mirrors said you don't belong here and then, grudgingly, fine.
At 3, the doors opened on PT: stretch bands, hopeful posters, a little kid tottering between parallel bars while a therapist clapped. Hughie's ribcage did that tight thing it does when hope and anger share a seat.
Butcher hit B with his thumb as he held 3 with his forefinger. The car thought about it, looked around shiftily, and remembered a floor it had been told to forget. The doors shut again.
The basement hall was clean and undecorated, the way places are when they were designed by people who don't expect visitors. A single camera blinked. It yawned.
"Left," Butcher said without looking. He had an animal sense for where rot collects. They passed a door marked STORAGE and another marked DO NOT ENTER in a font that begged to be ignored.
MM stroked a key ring against a latch and the latch decided it was underpaid. The door to SUPPLY—SUBLEVEL whined but obeyed. Inside: stainless steel counters, the hum of refrigeration, a computer terminal whose keyboard had been cleaned enough times to forget where the fingerprints went. Fridges in a row, A-Train's blue cooler bags stacked under a cheerful sign about cold chain integrity.
Frenchie's eyebrows went up. He stroked the nearest fridge like a cheap piano. "Shall we play a song?"
Butcher popped a cooler. Vials in foam, codes in place of names. Hughie's stomach did a slow, angry somersault.
"Video first," MM murmured. "Then touch."
Hughie set the compliance meter on the counter. It didn't beep; it purred, camera lens hidden in the face, feeding an encrypted stream to a mailbox labeled MALLORY and another labeled NEUMAN—AFTER. He found the log clipboard and slid it under the lens: dates, quantities, a squiggle of a signature that would become a tripwire later.
"Not just hospitals," Frenchie said, crouched at a lower shelf to pull a pediatric formula box. He slit the tape with a practiced thumbnail. Inside—foam cradle, blue glass. "They tuck V into the food basket. Très catholique."
Butcher's jaw worked. "Smile for the camera, darling," he told the fridge. "Say public health."
A muffled cry floated down the corridor. Hughie looked up.
"Storage doesn't cry," he said.
"Here it does," MM answered, already moving.
The corridor ended in a door with a frosted window and a logo that said Clinical Research—Annex in small, nonthreatening font. Butcher put his shoulder to it. It opened like it knew better than to argue.
Inside, the temperature dropped into clinical. Incubators, three in a row, lights soft as a chapel. Monitors mimed numbers. A nurse sat in a rolling chair with a blanket over her lap and two different timecards in her bag—hospital and contractor. She startled, hand going to the panic button clipped to her pocket.
It didn't work. Cian had given it a headache.
"We're biomed," MM said, voice set to father of the bride. "Compliance sweep."
"On a Sunday?" she asked, because some people still believed in Sundays.
"Especially," he said.
She looked at the incubators and then at them. Her jaw worked the way people's jaws do when the truth is bigger than their job. "The babies are… fine," she said. "They are always… fine."
Butcher stepped to the first incubator. A little human slept in a plastic spaceship, chest moving like a small wave. A band around his ankle read L-17. Another strapped across his belly was not a hospital device. Butcher's mouth turned to a thin line. "What's this?"
"Telemetry," the nurse said, too fast. "Cardio."
Frenchie nodded at the second, at the third. "Telemetry for what? Eyes? Bones? Je ne sais pas."
Hughie couldn't stop staring. The monitor showed an icon of a tiny eye pulsing amber every so often, like a notification. He glanced at the lens in his meter, made sure it saw. His hands shook and he told them not to.
"Who else has access?" MM asked, clipboard ready to turn names into leverage. "Names. Vendor codes. Routes."
She looked at him for a long second. Something behind her eyes put on a coat and left. "There's a cold room," she said, chin tipping toward a door at the back. "Locked. They don't let me in."
Butcher had the lock open in a breath. His hands knew this metal like prayer. Inside—stainless, more vials, doses sized for infants. A shocked sound slipped out of Hughie before he could strangle it.
Frenchie leaned in, breath steaming a little in the cold. Labels: BRG-PEDI-β. An instruction card with cartoonish drawings: MIX WITH FEED—0.3 ML / KG. He laughed, high and fragile. "They wrote a recipe."
"Camera's eating," MM said behind them, the meter still purring like a cat that had learned Latin.
Butcher closed the door with care he did not extend to human necks. "We're taking the lot."
"Careful," Cian whispered from the ductwork, and gave the NICU's bubble a little polish.
A distant ding—elevator. Voices. Not parents. Shoes that didn't squeak: Vought private. The building's private uplink twitched awake, sniffing.
Cian laid two fingers on the panel above the door and fed the wire a hummed lullaby. The uplink yawned and dreamed of being unplugged.
In the annex, the baby in L-17's incubator stirred. His tiny mouth pursed. The amber icon on the monitor brightened like a thought.
"Hey, little man," Hughie whispered without meaning to. He put his finger against the incubator's plexi. The baby's hand unfurled, curious, and hovered near the glass as if about to high-five God.
The second incubator's monitor chimed—a gentle chime you'd use to tell a person they'd won a raffle. E-22's eyes opened. The pupils glowed gold for the length of a blink.
"Ah," Frenchie said softly. "We are in the chapter with the laser."
"Let's not get to the verse," MM muttered, scanning the room, calculating where a ricochet would write grief.
Boots in the hallway. A key card beep. Another door hissed. Butcher's grin went feral without humor.
"Bag what we can," he said. "Then we scar them."
Scar meant leave proof everywhere, meant make it public health, not vigilante, meant own the story before Vought can bury it. Hughie moved, suddenly competent with tasks that didn't bleed. Frenchie scooped labels and an instruction card into a pocket with the expertise of a man who had liberated recipes from dangerous people before. MM set the compliance meter on the rolling tray and angled it so the door—and whoever walked through it—would be in frame.
Cian tasted altitude—the antiseptic pressure of Homelander becoming interested in the island again. He pulled a little thunderhead over the river and let it talk about rain so god would have something else to hear. He smoothed the lighting grid so a laser, if it happened, would chew a wall and not a child.
The lock on the annex door jiggled. A voice on the other side, bored and trained: "Contractor access only."
Butcher's eyes brightened. "Good news," he said, and pulled the door open before the man could knock again.
Two private security in charcoal suits framed by cheap paint. Behind them, a third in a lab coat that wore executive like cologne. He blinked at Butcher's coat. "Who authorized—"
Butcher hit him with the clipboard so politely it almost counted as customer service.
The first suit went for his holster. MM put a palm against the man's wrist and applied a physics lesson. Frenchie said bonjour to the second suit's kneecap with the rolling tray. Hughie flinched but didn't flee. The nurse made her decision and sat very still like a person surviving her job.
From the duct, Cian shifted one switch: the hallway camera, which had just remembered how alarmed it was, discovered an urgent need to reboot. The building's uplink tried to wail again; he padded it with a blanket of average until panic sounded like a dial tone.
In the incubator, E-22 pursed his mouth, tiny brow furrowed at a universe not to his liking. The gold in his pupils brightened. The air warmed a degree.
"Hey," Hughie whispered. "Hey, hey. Not us."
The baby decided not to be reasonable. Somewhere inside him, something hummed a newborn yes.
Butcher smelled a moment the way street dogs smell weather. He glanced at MM, at the babies, at the cheap drywall.
"Right," he said. "New plan."
Outside, an elevator dinged again. Above, the sky pressed like a thumb on a bruise. In the duct, Cian rolled his shoulders and prepared to turn lightning into lullabies and walls into blessings.
The baby's eyes lit.
The baby's eyes lit.
Not a laser yet—more like a glow from the inside of a thought. E-22 squinted at the world's poor manners and the gold in his pupils brightened.
"New plan," Butcher said, already moving. "Make it boring."
"Oui," Frenchie whispered, groping blind in a cabinet and producing three foil emergency blankets. He draped one over the wall facing the incubators, another across a stainless cart, a third over the plexi hood like a canopy. "We give the light a nap."
Cian slid two fingers along the dimmer track in the ceiling. The annex lights exhaled into soft, color temperature dropping to something that didn't ask anyone to perform. He pressed his palm to the incubator's plexi, let a pennyweight of charge seep into the plastic—an anti-hum only a brand-new nervous system would notice. The glow in E-22's eyes flickered, confused, then settled like a firefly reconsidering the night.
"Hey, little man," Hughie murmured. "We're on your side."
The nurse—in another life, a woman who collected tiny shoes nobody ever wore—looked at the telemetry straps around the babies' middles like they were snakes. "Those aren't ours," she said. It came out like a confession. "They're… contractor."
"Then they're trash," Butcher said. "Cut 'em."
She hesitated exactly one heartbeat, then slipped scissors from her pocket like she'd been waiting to do this all week. Snip. Snip. Snip. The straps fell away. The monitors tried to be dramatic about it; Cian patted their signals into sensible.
Footsteps hit the hall. Voices—irritable, underpaid, Vought-adjacent. MM angled the compliance meter to face the door and scribbled a date/time on his clipboard like a lawyer writing the eulogy for a lie.
The door swung in. Two suits, one doctor-ish executive trying on authority. "This area is restricted."
Butcher smiled like a wolf with good dental. "Compliance check. You failed. Good news is, we're very hands-on."
The executive looked past him to the incubators, to the cut straps, to the nurse who had decided to be part of this. His mouth opened with a policy and closed without one. "Call upstairs," he told the suits.
MM stepped in so soft it was almost polite. "No phones," he said, and shook his head once. The suit's hand hovered over his pocket, considered its options, changed its mind.
Frenchie used the rolling tray on the other suit's shin the way an orchestra uses a triangle—one clean note to underscore a point. "Allez. Be helpful. Do nothing."
Hughie kept his voice low. "There's a cold room in back with vials sized for infants."
"We've got the film," MM said without looking. "We ruin their day with paperwork."
Butcher moved like a man at work. He yanked a sheaf of red OUT OF SERVICE tags from the Pelican, slung them on fridge handles like jewelry, and slapped a NOTICE OF INVESTIGATION (CMS letterhead, convincing enough to make an administrator cry) smack in the middle of the counter. "Smile for the audit," he said to the room, and the meter purred like a cat who'd found Latin.
The executive pointed at the paper, outraged. "This isn't—"
"—happening?" Butcher offered, helpful. "Oh, it very much is, darling."
Cian drifted to the main panel and hummed a low lullaby into the building's private uplink. It sighed and found itself rebooting. Upstairs, an IT guy said that's odd in the professional tone of men who don't get paid enough to be heroic.
Homelander's pressure brushed the city again—altitude, antiseptic, PR-sanitized. Cian teased the thunderhead he'd parked over the river into grumbling just louder than a scanner ping. The god hovered two boroughs away, attention snagged by a chopper that needed a smile. Good. Go perform. We'll do plumbing.
"Bag and tag," MM said. Frenchie slid labels, instructions, and a dosing card into an envelope with the relish of a thief who steals recipes. Hughie filmed the log clipboard in a long, loving pan that would make a regulator blush.
The nurse's courage kept growing legs. "They come Tuesdays and Fridays," she said, voice steady now. "4 p.m. delivery, 4:20 pick-up. The courier signs R. Cole. I have never seen his face. Shoes: white. Expensive. He smells like… lilac." She shook her head at herself for remembering lilac. "Who smells like that?"
"Executives who cheat," Frenchie said solemnly.
"Bless you," she said without smiling.
Doors banged further down the hall. Someone used a keycard like a hammer. Cian padded the readers with a tick of static. The locks developed a thoughtful cough, decided they were tired, considered a career in meditation.
Butcher passed the nurse a burner. "When you clock in next, text us the roster. Take a picture of the delivery log. If anyone asks, you're a nurse. Nurses don't see invisible things. That's management's hobby."
She swallowed. "If I lose my job, I lose my insurance."
"We'll sort it," MM said, and it wasn't a promise, it was an invoice they'd pay.
The executive tried again. "This is illegal."
"So's doping babies," Butcher said cheerfully. "We're merely catching up."
The baby in L-17 hiccuped. Hughie put his palm back on the plexi. The tiny fist opened and closed like a heartbeat trying to understand a hand. For a split second Hughie looked like a man who might forgive a universe that had no right asking.
"All aboard," Butcher said, sunniness gone flat. "We leave the scar and we leave."
Scar meant truth they couldn't scrub. MM taped the red tags in redundant places. Frenchie printed (don't ask how) a Work Order: EQUIPMENT SEIZED—Pending Federal Review and stuck it to the cold room door with surgical tape. Hughie set the compliance meter on the upper shelf of a cabinet facing out, humming away on battery, streaming to boxes labeled MALLORY and NEUMAN—AFTER and a third dead-drop Cian had named PUBLIC—KILL SWITCH.
Cian gave the NICU bubble one last polish, then tugged a fire door in the stairwell into believing in fault. An alarm upstairs chirped. Not a full fire—just enough to pull admin toward clipboards and away from the annex. The building shifted weight like a herd spooked by wind.
The suits decided today wasn't their martyrdom. They stepped back, hands up, faces rehearsing a story where they were the adults. "This will be litigated," one said, the way some people say amen.
"Lovely," Butcher said. "Can't wait to meet your lawyer."
They exfilled the way they'd come—elevator trick (3 + B), then through PT where a kid laughed at a sticker and called it bravery. The receptionist smiled at them reflexively because that's what you do in a hospital and because she hadn't yet been told to stop.
Outside, the air felt usable again. The van yawned open. Frenchie stowed the envelopes. MM strapped the Pelican like it held weather. Hughie stood on the curb, hands on the door frame, lungs figuring themselves out.
Cian lingered one floor up, watching through glass as E-22 yawned, hiccuped, and went back to the project of being alive. The nurse took the cut telemetry straps and threw them away with a finality that made the trash bin look holy.
His phone buzzed. NEUMAN: Got your receipts. Bring me something I can crucify in committee.
He replied: You'll have a nursery and a recipe. Bring a microphone.
Another buzz. MALLORY: If you ever touch NICU power wrong I'll put you in a shoe box.
CIAN: I white-list babies and God. In that order.
He glanced up. The pressure-blue of Homelander slid past toward Midtown like a shark bored with this reef. Good.
Butcher slapped the van twice. "Nursery's a factory," he said, voice made of rust. "We just turned on the lights."
Hughie swallowed. "We're going to expose it, right? Not just… smash it."
"Both," MM said, climbing in. "Expose first. Smash if they rebuild."
Frenchie buckled without looking, eyes a little wet in a way he'd stab you for noticing. "We save the recipes," he muttered. "Then we burn the kitchen."
They rolled. Cian ran the perimeter—lights that loved them, cops distracted by a fender-bender that didn't exist until he suggested it, a camera on the corner that discovered a sudden need to recalibrate. Small sins in service of a larger mercy.
He paused on the hospital roof and stared down through concrete at three plastic spaceships and a nurse in a bad chair. He traced a tiny sigil of lightning under the window ledge no one would ever find, a private joke he only told buildings that kept their promises.
"Hold the line," he told the circuitry.
It hummed back, we will.
The van turned the corner, taking the day with it. Upstairs, a printer in Clinical Research—Annex blinked awake all on its own and spat three pages into the tray—OUT OF SERVICE. FEDERAL REVIEW. DO NOT TOUCH—because MM had set the job on a five-minute delay and faith tastes better with paperwork.
Cian let time stand up around him and shook out his hands. The Speed Force wanted him to keep sprinting until everything blurred into solvable. He told it later and believed himself for once.
Below, a baby squeaked, furious at nothing. Above, the storm kept its manners. Between them, a rumor jogged after a van and a plan.
—End of Chapter 6.