Chapter 9 — The Kitchen Burns
Morning fit the city like a bruise.
Butcher slapped the Pelican on the table and stabbed a finger at a satellite print. "Cardinal Blend Solutions," he said. "Union County, Jersey. On paper they make toddler vitamins and whey shakes for CrossFit priests. In the ledger, it's where our blue goes from sacrament to supply chain."
Mother's Milk traced the truck lanes with a pen that had opinions. "Three bays, one rail spur, private substation, two guard shacks, third-party cleaners twice a week. OSHA posters on every wall and a panic room in the floor boss's office. Cute."
Frenchie tossed a stress ball in the air and caught it like he was juggling a grenade. "We do not set a fire," he said brightly. "We invite one. Paper fire. Recalls. Inspections. Shutdowns with clipboards."
Butcher's grin did a sharp thing. "After we break something they can't explain."
"Break everything they can explain," Cian said from the window, where the light liked him too much. "Let the computers testify. No casualties. No heroics. We make their own sensors scream 'contamination' until the USDA shows up with a choir."
Kimiko sat cross-legged on the cot, braid over shoulder, watching them like a cat watches a chessboard. Hughie hovered near the coffee with two cups and an optimism he hadn't killed off yet.
"But first," Cian told him, "coffee. In public."
Hughie faltered. "You sure?"
"You promised a future," Cian said. "Best keep an appointment with one."
He flicked him a folded napkin with a time and a place four blocks from cameras that like faces. Hughie tucked it away like a passport.
"Butcher," MM said, "we split. Hughie's on aftercare. We're on kitchen. Frenchie, get me a recall cascade—QC fails that propagate upstream. Cian?"
Cian smiled without warmth. "I'll teach their substation to get introspective."
---
Bean & Bible was a coffee shop that believed in fair wages and cinnamon. Robin sat near the window with sunlight in her hair and a hand around a mug like you hold a life raft. Hughie stopped at the door, forgot to breathe, then remembered, then went in.
They did not rush it. He put his palms flat on the table like he was donating them, sat, and gave her a smile he hadn't rehearsed. She exhaled and the room got easier to live in.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi," he said. "Public."
"Public," she agreed, glancing at the glass, then back to him. The first five minutes were just not lying. It was the best conversation he'd had all year.
Across the street, a delivery truck double-parked. A meter maid made a note. A pigeon tried to invent jazz. On a rooftop two buildings down, a rumor leaned on a parapet and bent the city's attention half an inch: traffic lights synced, a bored cop decided his sandwich was more interesting than faces, a retail camera discovered an urgent need to reboot.
Hughie reached across the table. Robin met him halfway. Hands: treaty, not truce.
"After this," she said, fierce and quiet, "you take me somewhere people don't know our names."
"Deal," he said, and meant it with both lungs.
Cian let the grid breathe, smiled at nothing, and sprinted for Jersey.
---
Cardinal Blend looked like a responsible lie: tinted glass, green roof, a break area with a corn-hole set that had never seen joy. Trucks nose-in, nose-out. The kind of security that says, We pass audits.
Cian arrived in the seam between seconds and put two fingers on the site's private substation. He hummed a line the wires remembered from childhood—simple, clean, the human key of C—and the whole plant relaxed into average. Cameras blinked longer than they should. Badge readers discovered a cough. The PLC racks that ran the lines—Allen-Bradley mastiffs with good jobs—developed a talent for overreporting.
"White-list the cleanup crew," he told the current. "And the guy who stocks the vending machines. They've seen enough."
Mother's Milk and Frenchie rolled up in a box truck that said Holt Calibration—ISO 17025 with a logo that could pass a background check. Butcher came in a minute later in a Cardinal vendor polo he'd stolen from a dryer and a smile he'd borrowed from a funeral.
"Compliance audit," MM told Guard Shack #1. Paperwork slid. A laminated letterhead shrugged. The guard swiped, frowned at the reader's cough, swiped again. Cian patted the reader. It decided life had meaning and beeped green.
Inside: stainless and plastic, the industrial hum of mix, fill, seal. Powder hoppers like friendly silos. Sight glasses. Lines numbered like commandments. And there—Bay 3, the one that didn't exist on the OSHA map—walls a little too clean, a scent a little too antiseptic, a cold loop snaking into a blending head that wore a cheap disguise.
Frenchie whistled low. "Ah. The altar."
"Don't say altar," MM muttered, snapping photos with a pen that loved litigation.
Butcher pointed at an operator in a smock reading a fantasy novel behind a stack of cartons. "You. Pal. I need a QC pull for the 1100 lot."
"QA does pulls on the hour," the guy said without looking. "And only QA."
"Today is special," Butcher said, wielding a clipboard like a crucifix. "Vendor variance."
The operator shrugged the way men shrug when a paycheck is a leash. He slid a tray of twelve vials across. Label: Cardi-Kids Omega Chew—DRIZZLE PACK. Batch code in a font that lied politely.
Frenchie laid a spectro puck on the tray. The line kept running. Numbers climbed on a tablet like ivy. "Base oil, citrus terps, stabilizer… and a tiny blue hymn with a new name." He tapped the code. "They don't call it V. They call it β-Complex. So French."
MM patched the puck's feed into a private cloud that was a long hallway ending in Mallory's eyebrows and Neuman's cudgel. "Go loud or let it breathe?" he asked.
"Breathe in five," Cian said from the mezzanine, fingers on a PLC cabinet. "First we make the house scream on its own."
He sang to the logic: de-tune, don't break. Temperature probe +0.6°C drift; vibration sensor threshold –3%; microbial detector hypersensitive. Not false positives—conservative instruments. The line began to fail safe like a choir learning the word contamination.
Lights on the bay lid went from steady green to thoughtful amber.
"Oops," Frenchie said, with delight. "Your baby coughed."
"Time for the cascade," MM said. He keyed an internal recall notice into the plant's system, stamped with a DUNS that matched their fake vendor, and pinned it to Bay 3 and every upstream lot. The ERP dutifully propagated HOLD—QA REVIEW back through three weeks of shipping manifests. In a server room at Patients First, a scheduler had a small, dignified panic.
Two supervisors jogged over: Blue Clipboard and New Beard. Blue Clipboard's eyes saw liability first; New Beard's saw overtime. "What's wrong with my line?" Blue Clipboard asked like the line owed him money.
"Nothing," Butcher said. "Everything. Depends who's asking." He pointed at the amber lights and the puck's unhappy bar graph. "You're reporting contamination. We love machines that talk."
"That's not how this runs," New Beard said. "That's not how it's ever run."
Frenchie gestured at the screen, helpless, apologetic. "Today she is anxious."
The loudspeaker bonged. "QA to Bay Three."
"Let them come," MM said softly, and sent the recall up the pipe to USDA FSIS with just enough data to look like a self-report. Paper before flames.
In the mezzanine shadow, Cian tasted nickel again—the metal twinge of attention. Not Homelander; he is sunlight with teeth. This was silence with edges.
"Company inbound," he murmured. "Private. Not the feds."
Butcher's smile went feral. "I'll fetch biscuits."
"Don't," Cian said. "The kitchen will catch fire by itself. We just nudge the grease."
He walked the mezzanine rail and laid a thumb to a relay. The private uplink that whispers to Vought coughed, yawned, and rebooted into a nice long nap. The plant's safety email queue did not. It ran to every regulator with a pulse.
Down on the floor, QA arrived with the huffy dignity of a priest told Mass would be outside. She swabbed. She frowned at her swab. Her meter beeped incredulous. "We need to shut the blender," she said, voice doing the math where recall meets career.
Blue Clipboard went pale. "That's a full stop."
"Paper likes full stops," MM said, kind as a confession.
Sirens—not cop, not fire—site security—wailed once and cut. A side door banged. Four men in matte gray hustled through like punctuation. No logos. Vought private by the posture.
"Here's our soup tasters," Butcher murmured.
Cian slid two seconds off the clock and went down the stairs like a breeze with manners. The gray team's point man raised a hand. "Everyone away from Bay Three."
"Why?" Frenchie asked brightly. "Is it special?"
The point man didn't answer. He couched to the panel and reached for the manual override.
Cian put a fingertip on the panel's backplane and let out a pennyweight of living lightning—not enough to fry, just enough to make a breaker remember it loved caution. The manual key jammed mid-turn. The amber light held. The logic believed in itself.
"Fault," the point man swore.
"Design," Frenchie corrected.
A shape paused in the shadow of the door. Black Noir wore the plant like a skin. No white floors here. No rules at all.
Cian met his non-eyes over the bay. He lifted one finger: not with workers. Noir's head tilted the smallest degree: agreement / amusement / later.
Butcher saw the glance and grunted. "You two going to keep flirting or finish the job?"
"We're finishing," Cian said, and smiled at Noir like a man who knows where the exits are.
He palmed the master HMI—touchscreen god of the line—and fed it a script the machine could believe. FAULT TREE unrolled like a psalm: thermal variance → micro risk → batch hold → upstream HOLD ALL. The plant's brain did what good brains do in fear: it stopped and asked for help. Somewhere in a federal office, a duty officer's inbox dinged thrice and stayed dinged.
The gray team's radios hissed nonsense. Noir's didn't. He heard the shape of what Cian had done and took one small step backward, which is the closest he gets to respect.
Blue Clipboard swallowed. "If we log a full quarantine, corporate—"
"—will blame you," Butcher said sweetly. "Or you can let the law blame the system and live to buy your kid a bike."
QA looked at her meter again, at the line, at the men in gray who weren't here to keep her job. She turned and marched to the E-stop. "Quarantine," she said. She slammed it.
Bay Three died like a saint.
Up above, the private substation made a sound like relief. Cian eased his hand off the panel and let the plant own its virtue.
"Paper," MM said. He hit send on a bundle to Mallory and Neuman: QC graphs, batch logs, β-Complex alias, photos, operator statements ready to be sworn. Neuman's reply was a single dot. He liked her punctuation too.
The gray team fell back to contain instead of undo. Noir ghosted with them, last out, a final pause at the door to look up again. Cian drew a tiny static fish in the HMI's corner and flicked it away. Noir didn't move. Then he was gone, as if the plant had exhaled him.
"Exit nice and slow," MM said. "Let the clipboards do their ritual."
Butcher tapped the E-stop twice with knuckles like a benediction. "Blessed be the recall."
Frenchie blew a kiss at the blender. "Sleep, princess."
They walked out with the bored efficiency of men who had earned their coffee. On the way past Guard Shack #1, the reader coughed one last time and then found its faith. The guard waved, distracted by a printer screaming URGENT—REGULATORY HOLD.
In the truck, Butcher finally let his grin off the chain. "Kitchen's cold," he said.
"Better," MM answered, buckling in. "Kitchen's inspected."
Cian's phone buzzed. NEUMAN: Press at 2 p.m. "Voluntary recall," my favorite oxymoron. You're a menace.
CIAN: Paper bites harder when it smiles.
He looked back at the plant. Workers were already texting each other did you hear. A forklift beeped in reverse with the patient dignity of heavy things. Overhead, cloud cover thickened like a curtain that knows its cue.
On the city side of the river, a blue-and-white blur traced a lazy line at altitude. Homelander, smiling at his reflection in a high-rise, oblivious to kitchens and paper.
"Stay myth," Cian told the sky, and pointed the truck toward Manhattan.
Behind them, Bay Three's amber went red and the USDA auto-reply sang SITE VISIT SCHEDULED like a lullaby for criminals.
The recall hit the wires like a hymn sung through clenched teeth.
"Voluntary recall," the press release purred—Ashley Barrett's favorite oxymoron in a font that begged for absolution. Cardinal Blend would "pause production out of an abundance of caution." Patients First Logistics would "cooperate fully." WellSpring Data Partners didn't exist for comment unless you were a hedge fund or a priest.
At 2 p.m., Victoria Neuman faced microphones like they were a committee of sinners.
"Public health first," she said, sleeves rolled, voice made of sandpaper and sunlight. "We appreciate Cardinal Blend's voluntary decision. We're also issuing subpoenas for internal QA emails, contractor directives, and any communications referencing β-Complex." She didn't smile. She measured the room. "If you sell a baby's breath back to Wall Street and call it wellness, we call it fraud."
A reporter tried to drag her into capeland. "Congresswoman, isn't this really about—"
"It's about procurement," she cut in, gentle as a hammer. "Next question."
Behind the cameras, Cian leaned on a pillar and kept the building's cell repeaters bored. Neuman didn't need his tricks now; still, he tuned the room's hum like a stagehand loves a show. Her staff watched him without seeing him. He liked it that way.
His phone buzzed. MALLORY: USDA scheduled. OSHA sniffing. Good work. Don't get cute.
CIAN: I'm constitutionally incapable of not getting cute. Adjusting expectations.
---
Vought's thirteenth floor ran triage with craft services.
Ashley herded influencers on a Zoom grid—#MomLife, #Wellness, #FaithFamilyFitness—feeding them lines that sounded like apologies written by a kale smoothie. "Let's center grace, ladies. Remember, moms hate drama and love recalls when companies listen."
Stan Edgar moved like a man who'd already outlived this news cycle twice. "We drop Patients First," he said softly to a VP whose tie had started to believe in unemployment. "We restructure and invest in maternal health research. Announce a grant at a children's hospital. Get Homelander there with a teddy bear."
Ashley lit up. "Teddy. Bear. Brilliant."
"Not a real one," he said.
Homelander drifted past the doorway, smile in place, gaze elsewhere. "Babies are adorable," he said to no one, to everyone. "America loves adorable." He paused. "Where's our mystery storm today?"
"Let the Congresswoman do her job," Edgar said. "We'll do ours."
Homelander's grin lost a millimeter. He left a breeze that smelled like hero and funeral home.
Black Noir stood in the corner like punctuation that shortens every sentence. Edgar slid him a single page—CARDINAL: HOLD. OBSERVE WEATHER. NO ENGAGE ON FLOOR. Noir folded the paper without looking and went wherever shadows go.
---
Cardinal Blend tried to pretend competence as ritual.
QA locked the bay. Blue Clipboard found a union rep. New Beard called his wife. The operator with the fantasy novel asked if he should clock out; his supervisor told him to stay on the clock and not touch anything with hands.
Mother's Milk pressed a card into QA's palm without any ceremony. "OSHA whistleblower line. If anyone breathes weird at you, make a call."
She tucked it in her badge sleeve like a relic. "You the good guys?"
"On alternating Thursdays," MM said, and meant it kindly.
Frenchie slid a twenty into the vending machine, bought nothing, and left the cash jammed in the lip for whoever needed sugar after a layoff talk. He patted the machine like a loyal dog. "For your sacrifices," he whispered.
Butcher lingered long enough to enjoy the sight of URGENT—REGULATORY HOLD printing until the tray hiccuped. Then he caught sight of a matte-gray van nosing around the building like a question. He rolled his neck. "We've been seen."
From the mezzanine shadow, Cian brushed the substation with two fingers and watched the private uplink stay asleep. "They can see. They can't fix."
A figure passed across the bay's window—black, still, precise. Noir didn't enter. He watched. He learned the shape of a plant behaving like a citizen.
"Not here," Cian mouthed across thirty yards and a philosophy.
Noir tilted his head. Agreement. / Later.
---
Hughie kept his appointment with the future.
Bean & Bible became a quiet conspiracy against the past. Robin laughed like someone oiling a hinge; the sound shocked him with how familiar it was. They split a cinnamon roll the size of regret and strategized like adults. Boundaries, no surprises, no keeping each other safe with lies.
He reached to silence his buzzing phone and found it already quiet. Somewhere within two buildings, a rumor had told an LTE tower to take a deep breath.
"What?" Robin asked, amused.
"Nothing," he said. "I just… get to finish the sentence."
"Finish it, then," she said.
"I missed you," he said without choking on it. "And I'm trying to be somebody worth missing."
She took his hand, treaty renewed.
Outside, a meter maid decided against a ticket for a truck that didn't deserve one. The pigeon finally found a groove.
---
The workshop took a breath around the team that afternoon.
Kimiko sat on the floor with a piece of chalk and drew small storms—the jagged line she'd scratched on the table turned into a field of lightning sigils in neat rows. She looked up when Frenchie brought her boots. Not new; good. Worn soft at the ankle. Laces like promise.
He knelt to set them in front of her. She tilted her head, amused that he'd audition for shoemaker today. She slid them on, stamped once, approved. Her fingers moved: home / safe.
He signed the first right and the second wrong. She took his hands, put them in the air, and fixed him without mercy or laughter. He grinned like a man proud to be corrected.
Mother's Milk ran the day's haul through a scanner mat and a script that loved judges. Butcher chewed on a grin and a cheap pen. "We're past pranks," he said. "We're onto arson with clipboards."
Cian dropped from the rafters without a sound because rumors like their bit. He set a folder on the table: WellSpring—Mirror Feed. "If they kill the stream during Friday's hearing," he said, "it publishes to three epidemiology lists and one journalist who collects PDFs like pets."
"Name?" Butcher asked.
"Raccoon Sam," Cian said. "He bites. We like him."
Butcher chuckled despite himself. "Good lad."
Hughie and Robin arrived on foot like civilians and sat on the steps. They didn't hide. They didn't explain. Butcher lifted a brow, considered a joke, then reconsidered being human for once. "Tea's on," he said, as if that solved anything and maybe it did.
Grace Mallory texted a photo of a white board: FRIDAY 0900 — DATA / MONEY / NO CAPES. Underlined thrice. GRACE: Neuman wants bodies in seats. Not yours, Butcher.
BUTCHER: Spoilsport.
GRACE: Bring the raccoon if he wears a tie.
---
Night fell early and wrong, the way it does when a city knows it's about to be asked for more than it owes.
Cian caught Noir on a subway platform that had never learned joy. A poster for Community Pantry West—Families First peeled under a grit of boot prints. The violin case finally opened—inside, not strings, but a folded bow that wasn't a bow at all: compact rifle, black like a thought you don't share.
Noir did not aim. He assembled with the slow, precise intimacy of a watchmaker. He glanced once at the ceiling camera; it blinked. And blinked. And blinked. Cian had given it a permanent case of the honest yawn.
"I know what you are," Cian said conversationally into the hum between trains. "A punctuation mark."
Noir's head angled. He lifted the rifle, sighted along the platform—not at Cian, at a rat—and put a quiet hole through a shadow. The rat died as if it had merely decided to stop.
"Demonstration noted," Cian said, bored on purpose. He lifted a palm and sketched a static fish in the glass of the ad box. It fluttered once, smirked (as much as fish smirk), and vanished. "Mine's funnier."
Noir's shoulders did the thing tightrope walkers do when wind changes. A train rushed in like a decision made too late. In the second where wind became push, Noir went away. Not in the car. Not up the stairs. Just away.
"Later then," Cian told the tunnel. The tunnel kept its secrets.
---
At WellSpring, a junior engineer clicked pause on a stream labeled Wellness Pilot—Neonatal because her boss told her to "hold until this Hill thing calms down." The mirror Cian had planted cleared its throat, tagged an MD5 sum, and addressed three listservs in soothing technicalese. Twenty public health nerds read the pipe schematic, the match keys, the anonymization lie, and sharpened their citations.
At Patients First, a scheduler tried to quietly unwind Route C and found that every box he touched sent a copy of his panic to a federal inbox labeled Chain of Custody—Automated. He tried to call R. Cole. Voicemail. He tried to call Vought Legal. Voicemail that sounded like a man smiling.
At Cardinal Blend, QA's meter beeped again, stubborn as conscience. A USDA inspector in a windbreaker that believed in both God and paperwork asked for "the person who touched the override," and four men in matte gray discovered their badges didn't open anything right now.
---
Neuman's staff ran lines. "Fraud is a government contracting issue." "We don't regulate superheroes; we regulate invoices." "Babies are not a brand segment." She circled β-Complex three times and practiced looking bored in the face of bribes.
She texted. Storm—Plumbing: You keep showing up right before the storm breaks. Coincidence?
CIAN: I like to get my hair wet first.
NEUMAN: You cut yourself?
CIAN: Spell-check. Fixed it.
NEUMAN: Try not to bleed on my exhibits.
CIAN: No promises.
She smiled into her paperwork like a sinner choosing a pew.
---
Hughie walked Robin home without drama. They didn't kiss like teenagers; they kissed like a gentleman's agreement. "Tomorrow," she said. "After the hearing."
"After," he said. He watched her go inside and didn't try to memorize her door code, which is how you know he's learning.
When he turned back toward the street, Cian stood at the curb like a rumor on smoke break. "Good?" Cian asked.
"Good," Hughie said, and then, because it mattered, "Thank you."
Cian shrugged. "I nudged some air. You did the rest."
"Feels like more."
"It always does," Cian said quietly. "Don't get addicted to heroes. It's a boring drug."
Hughie huffed a laugh he hadn't planned. "Says the guy who controls lightning."
"I prefer plumbing," Cian said, and vanished between streetlights.
---
Back at the loft, Butcher poured cheap whiskey into three clean-ish glasses and raised his to no one in particular. "To the kitchen," he said.
"May it burn slow," MM finished.
Frenchie tipped his glass toward Kimiko. She touched hers to his and then, because she was in the mood to be uncharacteristic, clinked Hughie's too as he came in grinning like a rescued dog.
Cian took the unclaimed glass, sniffed it, let the burn sit on his tongue, and handed it to the storm in his bones. He checked the sky through the windowpane, saw Homelander draw a heart over a hospital, and rolled his eyes so the room didn't have to.
His phone buzzed. UNKNOWN (Lilac): You broke my route.
He typed: You broke your city.
UNKNOWN: We will fix.
CIAN: We will watch.
He put the phone away and traced a tiny lightning sigil under the workbench, a private joke and a promise. Buildings that keep their promises get his graffiti. People who do… maybe.
Grace's text arrived last: BRING YOUR SUIT MONDAY. CLOTHES, NOT CAPE.
Cian smirked. I'm allergic to cameras.
GRACE: Wear long sleeves. It's cold.
He looked at his hands and the cut on his cheek that had stopped making music. The clock ticked in his ribs. Friday at nine would arrive like a bailiff. The kitchen was burning, yes—but slowly, legally, beautifully, with paper feeding the flames.
"Stay myth," he told the night through the cracked window.
The storm kept its manners.
For now.