Chapter 8 — The Clock With Teeth
Vought's boardroom smelled like glass and contempt.
Stan Edgar watched the NICU memo tree sprout branches on the wall: SUBPOENAS SERVED, MESSAGING TRACK: "BAD CONTRACTOR", INFLUENCER OUTREACH – MATERNAL HEALTH. Ashley Barrett nodded so hard her headset looked seasick.
"Babies," Homelander said, smiling like a bruise. "America loves those."
"Public health," Edgar corrected, mild as a razor in tea. "We'll donate to six hospitals, fire an executive with an unfortunate smile, and highlight our 'Wellness' initiative. We let them win the headline. We keep the market."
Ashley chirped, "I've got three 'tragically contrite' VPs on deck—"
"Not Vought," Edgar said. "A contractor. Patients First Logistics." He clicked a remote. A still of the rooftop rumor flickered: man-shaped smear, a soft halo of lightning around edges that refused to be owned. "And if you see this, you do nothing."
Homelander's grin twitched. "Why would I do nothing."
"Because he's bait," Edgar said pleasantly. "Let Neuman swing her cudgel. We'll get what we need after she's tired."
In the corner, Black Noir stood perfectly, silently still, a punctuation mark that made every sentence shorter.
Edgar slid him a folder: ANNEX WITNESS – NURSE (ID REDACTED). "Observe. Contain if necessary. No blood on white floors."
Noir's head tilted a millimeter. Agreement. Or hunger. With him, it was the same.
---
Grace Mallory's safehouse was a two-bedroom with a widowed refrigerator and a couch that kept secrets. The nurse sat on the edge of her chair, hands flat on her knees, courage parked like a car in a tow-away zone.
"You'll testify to process," Grace said, dry as November. "Not the babies. Procurement. Logs. Dosing card. Keep it boring."
"Boring is safe," the nurse said. She didn't believe it. She wanted to.
Cian leaned by the breaker panel, listening to the building's nerves. He laid two fingers on the metal and drew a quiet circle around the apartment—an EM lullaby that told curious devices to be tired and police radios to love someone else for an hour.
He glanced at the nurse. "You threw the straps away."
She swallowed. "I… did."
"Good," he said. It was the kindest word he knew how to make sound small.
Grace handed over a burner and a speech printed in twelve-point font. "Read it. Then forget it. On the day, say what happened in the order it happened. If someone asks you how you felt, you say 'concerned as a professional.'"
"Can I be angry as a person?" the nurse asked, surprising herself.
"After," Grace said. "After's my favorite religion."
Cian's phone buzzed once in a frequency only he used for storms-with-feet. He tasted nickels in the air—elevator power draw hiccup, stairwell camera waking by accident, the kind of silence that means someone trained it.
"Company," he said, already moving.
---
The hall lights dimmed like a prayer that wasn't sure who to address. Two men in maintenance blues took a landing and didn't look at each other—good tradecraft tells you to be alone together. Third shadow behind them: softer, wronger, a silence with edges.
Cian slid into the seam between seconds and loosened time just enough to breathe in it. He stepped past the first blue, palmed the magazine loose in his pistol, set it on the fire extinguisher ledge like a magic trick you only notice when you go to shoot your way out. He brushed the second blue's shoulder with a kiss of static—nap, friend—and leaned him against the wall before gravity got ideas.
Noir didn't nap.
He was there when time stood up again, a black note in a bad song. He moved like punctuation—clean, inevitable. A blade flicked. Cian's cheek stung; the cut was precise enough to feel like a signature.
"Working," Cian said. "Want to leave a card?"
Noir tilted his head. The hallway sighed. The elevator dinged and decided it loved floor four too much to open.
They traded tests, not blows. Noir's knife tasted air where Cian's throat had been; Cian's palm found Noir's chest plate and wrote a static sigil there that made radios stumble and optics haze. Noir planted a boot and moved him six inches without touching. Precise. Respectful. Irritating.
"I don't kill nurses," Cian said.
Noir's answer was a dart whispering past Cian's ear to pin the peephole camera shut. Fine. Petty king.
Cian stepped between frames and came back holding the stairwell's fiber coil, looped it twice, and let it accidentally fall where Noir's ankle would be next. Noir didn't trip. He flowed over it, then used it—a flick of his wrist—and Cian had to catch the loop or kiss the floor. He caught it. They both heard themselves not laugh.
"Another night," Cian offered.
Noir's head angled: we both have jobs.
Cian exhaled a pennyweight of charge into the ceiling light. It popped, small, loud. The two maintenance blues made the mistake of reacting. Noir ghosted backward, relentlessness poured into retreat, and was simply not there.
Downstairs, a car door shut without sound. A lilac ghost drifted and was gone.
Cian wiped the blood from his cheek with the back of his hand and went back inside, already humming the building back to average.
Grace raised one eyebrow that did the work of a paragraph. "Problem?"
"Spell-check," Cian said. "Fixed a dangling modifier."
The nurse stared at his cheek. "You're bleeding."
"Occupational foible," he said. "Read your lines."
---
Hughie's phone buzzed: GRACE: Room B. Fifteen minutes. No phones.
He walked into the safehouse room like a man expecting a ghost and found a woman alive. Robin sat on the bed with a blanket she didn't owe anyone, hair up, eyes that were still the same before.
"Hey," she said.
Hughie forgot how to stand. "Hi."
They didn't touch at first because the past was a third person in the room. Then she closed the gap, arms around his ribs, forehead against his shoulder, breath like he'd remembered it without knowing.
"I wanted—" she started.
"I know," he said.
"Are you okay?" she asked, then flinched at her own question.
"No," he said, and smiled because honesty felt like a thing that might save him. "But I'm… moving."
She laughed a little, broke into tears that weren't a memo. He held her, not careful, exactly careful. Grace gave them fourteen minutes and forty seconds before her knock turned the world back on.
"After the hearing," Robin said, fierce in the way only tired people earn. "We get coffee. In public."
"In public," Hughie said, like a man making a treaty with gravity.
---
Victoria Neuman's legal pad wore grooves. She circled a line twice and underlined once: "They strapped fitness trackers on newborns and mailed the data to a hedge fund." She tried it aloud, finding the tempo that makes outrage useful.
Her chief counsel stuck a head in. "Press wants a name."
"They get a process," Neuman said. "Names come with perjury."
A messenger set a manila envelope on her desk and left before doors remembered to creak. No return address. Inside: Community Pantry West – addendum. A single sheet: six donors, three shell companies, one Prime vendor. At the bottom, in tiny block print: STORM—PLUMBING.
She smiled without warmth. "Good," she told the paper. "Bleed for me."
She texted: Storm—Plumbing: You okay?
CIAN: Paper's sharper. I'll be fine.
She didn't text what she was really thinking: If you die, I lose my coauthor. Instead, she capped her pen and went to teach a staffer how to subpoena with malice.
---
On a rooftop that didn't know it was his, Cian lay along a parapet and watched Midtown light itself like a lie. The cut on his cheek sang to his pulse. He let the city's current purr through his bones until his hands stopped wanting to shake.
Homelander drifted a borough away, haloed by stadium lights and adoration. Noir was nowhere; that was his favorite place to be.
"Stay myth," Cian told the sky. "Tomorrow we write minutes."
He checked the time. The hearing clock ticked in his chest. Three days had become two and a half, had become now. Mercy would have to be a craft. Paper would bite. And the storm? The storm would keep its manners until it didn't.
Night put on its courtroom shoes.
Cian spent it teaching a very boring building how to confess.
Not Vought HQ—too loud. Not a hospital—too sacred. A glassy mid-rise in Chelsea with a logo that said WellSpring Data Partners in a font that wanted to be wholesome. Fourth floor, lights forever dimmed to strategic. A conference room full of succulents and lies.
He walked the stairwell in the seam between seconds, slipped past a badge reader he'd made introspective, and palmed a wall panel that led to the real office—the data room. Racks purred. A whiteboard diagrammed a workflow: Telemetry → Broker → "Wellness Insights" → Strategic Partners. No one had written Hedge Fund in dry-erase. You never do.
He ghosted a wafer-thin tap onto the trunk line—no theft, just a mirror. The feed bloomed on his phone: timestamps, anonymized baby IDs, pulse curves, oxygen saturation, eye-response spikes. A second stream nested under it—match keys that tied "anonymous" to shipping tags from Patients First Logistics.
He didn't need names. He needed shape.
He screen-capped the pipeline, hashed it, dropped it into a dead drop titled NEUMAN—EXHIBIT D. He set a timered script: if the feed spiked or vanished during tomorrow's hearing, his mirror would publish to three public health listservs and one cranky journalist who still loved PDFs.
He signed the rack with a thumbprint of static—storm's version of a Post-it—and left the building the way rumors leave: with no one able to swear he'd been there.
---
Morning sharpened its teeth.
C-SPAN did its best to look exciting with a lower third that read PROCUREMENT OVERSIGHT—PEDIATRIC PROGRAMS. The hearing room in the Rayburn building hummed with policy perfume: staffs in navy, donors in beige, cameras quietly feral. Committee members arranged their faces into Concerned, Skeptical, or Brand-New Dad.
Victoria Neuman had the chair. She did not wear white; she wore work—charcoal blazer, sleeves rolled once, hair like she could outrun a vote and still make her kid's pickup. She tapped her gavel exactly once. "We'll come to order."
First panel: boring on purpose. CMS compliance, a pediatric ethicist, a hospital purchasing officer who loved acronyms. Neuman let the clock chew them for background. The room relaxed. That was the trap.
Second panel: Patients First Logistics, LLC—VP of Operations with a jawline that had apologized in focus groups. St. Brigid Auxiliary—a lawyer who believed in expensive. WellSpring Data Partners—"Head of Wellness Insights," smile like a TED Talk. Nurse (Name Redacted)—process witness, nerves taped into professionalism.
Up in the corner rafters where the camera trusses sulk, Cian lay along a girder and listened to the building's bloodstream. He'd already taught the mics to prefer the broadcast feed if someone killed the house. He'd padded the private cell repeater with a yawn. He'd white-listed babies and God on the adjacent NICU circuit for the third time because superstition never hurt.
Butcher, Mother's Milk, Frenchie, Hughie took seats in the back row, all hats and indifference, the kind of audience the Sergeant-at-Arms watches without knowing why.
Ashley Barrett hovered in a side aisle pretending to be staff. Stan Edgar didn't come; he sent a lawyer who looked like the absence of a laugh.
Neuman started soft. "Mr. Cole—"
The VPL's mouth jerked. "Pardon?"
"Your internal routing uses the alias R. Cole." Neuman's brows were polite. "Is that you?"
The VP tried the thing where men answer a different question. "Patients First moves pediatric nutraceuticals—vitamins, mineral blends—for partner facilities, yes."
"Thank you." Neuman's smile clipped. "Do those partner facilities include St. Brigid Auxiliary and PhysioPlus?"
"I couldn't say."
"You could," she said, "because you signed the manifests." She lifted a packet. "Exhibit A."
The screen behind her lit with the routing table Cian had lifted from the East River node—R. COLE, Route C, pantry, clinic, auxiliary. A rinse of murmurs: staff counsel whispering well well across rows.
Neuman didn't chase the murmur. "Ms. Kwan, do your telemetry devices—what you call Wellness belts—transmit neonatal data in real time?"
WellSpring smiled. "Congresswoman, we help hospitals improve outcomes with anonymized insights—"
"Thank you. Do they transmit in real time?"
"Yes," she said, because sometimes you say the true thing by accident.
"To whom?"
"WellSpring," Kwan said. "And contracted analytics partners."
"Those include Ganymede Capital?" Neuman offered a document. "Exhibit B."
Kwan's smile hesitated. "We provide wellness—"
"Yes or no, Ms. Kwan."
A breath. "Yes."
"And you monetize that data," Neuman said. "As a product."
Kwan chose a different verb. "We create value."
"Uh-huh." Neuman pivoted to the nurse. "Ms. —, you're a process witness. Do these belts belong to the hospital?"
"No." The nurse's voice held steady: the tone health care uses to tell you bad news without breaking. "They arrived with the nutraceuticals. They're not in our inventory system. When I saw them on infants, I cut them off."
"You cut them off," Neuman repeated, letting the room try the verb on.
"Yes," the nurse said, looking at no one and exactly everyone. "I threw them away."
Butcher's mouth turned into a blade of a smile. Hughie forgot to breathe, then remembered, then breathed for two people.
Neuman nodded once. "Thank you for your service." She slid a sheet across the dais, kept her voice clear. "Put simply—they strapped fitness trackers on newborns and mailed the data to a hedge fund. That's Exhibit D." She let it hang, the line landing like a dropped piano.
The room reacted: a spasm of outrage, the good kind, the kind that gets appropriations subcommittees to find verbs.
Patients First's VP tried to resurrect the scapegoat memo. "We're a contractor—if there were mistakes—"
"Great," Neuman said brightly. "Who told you to make them?"
On the riser, the feed hiccuped. Ashley hissed into a headset: cut to recess. Someone in the control truck reached for the MUTE.
The house dipped. The broadcast did not. Cian stroked the board with a whisper of charge; the STREAMING light glowed like sunrise. He rolled his shoulder, felt the building purr. Not today.
Stan Edgar's surrogate stood. "We'd like to note for the record—"
"You will," Neuman said. "Under oath."
The clock ate a few more minutes—questions that looked small and were not, answers that looked big and were hollow. Neuman let the teeth bite at exactly the edge of contempt-of-Congress. Then she gaveled lunch.
"Recess for one hour," she said. "Do not destroy documents." She smiled like a prosecutorial angel. "The shredders in this building are very loud."
Laughter. Not much. Enough.
---
Hallways turn to hunting grounds at recess.
The nurse walked with Grace and a staff counsel, head down, badge visible, courage sweating through her blouse. The cameras blinked away to chase sandwiches. That's when the air forgot to breathe.
Black Noir stepped out of a janitor closet like punctuation.
He didn't draw. He didn't need to. The message was the draw.
Grace moved first, body between witness and myth, handbag angled like it held a sin-eater. The staff counsel froze the way civilians do when the world shows them its real weather.
Cian was already a rumor in the cinderblock. He had seeded the corridor with two static sigils and a trick light; now he spent them. The fluorescents flickered in a pulse Noir's optics didn't love. The badge reader next to the stairwell decided to alarm without opening—noise matters. A Capitol Police officer at the far end looked up because that's their job.
Noir canted his head. He had been told no blood on white floors. He had also been told contain if necessary. He took a small step and found the floor hostile—Cian had licked the tile with a coin of charge so rubber squeaked like guilt.
Kimiko arrived like a comma—silently, unexpectedly, correct. Hoodie up, eyes bright with a private joke, she slid in from a service door Cian had coincidentally left unlatched.
For one heartbeat the hallway held a tableau: Witness, Handler, Counsel, Myth, Storm, Knife.
Noir's hand twitched toward his belt. Kimiko tilted her head and showed him all her teeth. Cian shook his head once: not here.
Noir's blade stayed sheathed. He lifted two fingers—a flicker of salute or threat or to be continued—and flowed backward into a fire door that had never opened for anyone else. It whispered shut behind him with no sound at all.
Grace didn't exhale. "Move."
They moved. The staff counsel learned to walk and breathe simultaneously, a skill that will serve him. Kimiko fell in behind, a shadow that would rip a throat if the sky asked wrong. Cian stayed in the wall long enough to pat the cameras back to sleep and make the badge readers feel ashamed of themselves.
Outside, the sun acted innocent.
"Thank you," the nurse said to no one, to everyone.
Grace handed her a bottle of water and a stare that could fix a spine. "After," she said. "Then coffee."
Kimiko signed at Cian without looking: storm / good. He returned home and almost got it right.
---
Back in the room, paper took its gloves off.
Neuman didn't grandstand. She stacked: Exhibit E (cold-room inventory sheets sized for infants), Exhibit F (telemetry contract with Ganymede Capital blacked just enough to anger counsel), Exhibit G (Community Pantry false-bottom tote photos). Each time, the VPL winced like a man learning what kidneys do.
WellSpring tried "innovation." Neuman translated to "rent-seeking." The St. Brigid lawyer tried "isolated incident." Neuman translated to "standard operating procedure." Patients First tried "contractor error." Neuman translated to "fraud."
On the dais clock, the red lights ate seconds like candy. The chair's gavel raised for closing, then paused. "One last question," Neuman said, and turned her eyes to the camera. "If you sell a baby's breath back to Wall Street and call it wellness, what do you call the check you cash?" She let the silence do half the work. "We call it evidence."
Gavel. "We are adjourned until Friday at 9 a.m."
Ashley's phone erupted like a firecracker nightmare. Edgar's surrogate didn't break a sweat; he'd been hired not to. Homelander, somewhere over Queens, smiled at a plane.
Butcher stood in the aisle, vibrating at a frequency that breaks furniture. MM clapped once, low, like a man at church who knows the hymn's next verse. Frenchie grinned at Kimiko; she didn't grin back, but her eyes were lighter. Hughie found Robin in the back row—cap low, brave in public. They didn't touch. They didn't need to. After, they had said. After had started.
Up on the truss, Cian checked the mirror feed from WellSpring. It still flowed—anonymized, matched, monetized. He thumbed a line to Neuman: EXHIBIT D LIVE. She replied with a single period. He liked her punctuation.
He also checked the hallway cameras where Noir had been and left a static fish in the corner of one frame—a private emoji for a man who didn't text. Noir would see it. Noir would understand. Not the nurse. Not today.
Cian slid down the service ladder and into the city before anyone could decide to thank him. The cut on his cheek had stopped singing. The storm in his bones hummed contentment and hunger in equal parts.
Stan Edgar poured himself a thin coffee two miles uptown and drafted a memo titled PARTNER RESTRUCTURE. Vought's stock tipped, considered conscience, and chose gravity.
Neuman walked to her office with a stack of paper that could bruise. "Paper first," she told her chief. "Then policy."
Grace texted a single emoji—the knife you only use to cut cake—to no one Cian could prove existed.
Butcher looked at the Pelican case on the workshop table like a man who had sawn through one bar of a cage and found six more. "Right," he said. "Now we smash the kitchen."
"After we print the recipes," MM said.
"After dessert," Frenchie added, and handed Kimiko a chocolate square that did not deserve to taste that important.
Hughie stared out the window at a city that had learned a new word for shame. His phone buzzed. Robin: Coffee? In public.
He typed: Yes. Then: After one thing.
Cian stood on a roof at the golden-hour edge and told the wind a secret: "We put teeth in the clock. Now let it bite."
The storm kept its manners. For now.