The first recording alone was enough to make a man's fists clench. Jude checked the timestamp. Eleven minutes since Madelyn sent Clark and the other two out. By any reasonable measure, they should already be on that plane.
"Is it over yet?"
He started the second recording. It was logged three minutes earlier, right around the time Jude had been smuggling the Wallpaper Room onto a commercial flight, moving stealthily through the airport.
"We're still in international waters." Clark's voice.
"Good, we've got the speed for it," Maeve answered. "No idea when those F-16s are actually showing up, though. Let's just get this done."
Homelander's voice cut in next, his tone flat. "It's nothing. Three guys. The Deep could've handled this one."
Wind howled beneath their words. They were still outside the cabin.
"Who's going in first?" Maeve asked.
"You," Homelander said. "You're the one who actually needs solid ground under your feet."
The audio muffled, drifting further off, before snapping back into focus. Beneath the wind, Jude picked up sounds from a sealed space. Shouting. Crying. The shouting came from a man speaking a Middle Eastern language Jude didn't recognize.
The crying was English. A woman and a small child. It cut off abruptly, silenced by a threat nearby.
"How's a nanobot picking up sound this clean from that far out?"
Satsuki answered through his earpiece. "It relocated from Clark's back to the sole of his shoe. Once it's flush against the fuselage wall, I filter and amplify the audio on my end. That's what you're hearing."
A hiss of decompressing air followed. It sounded exactly like a soda can cracking open. It was the cabin door.
A scream trailed off into the distance a fraction of a second later. One of the three hijackers had been standing right at the door. The pressure differential yanked him straight into the open sky.
Chaos broke over the audio. Passengers screamed as the sudden gust of wind tore through the cabin. Babies wailed, people shrieked and cursed, bodies shifting against seatbelts as they grabbed for handholds. The fuselage shuddered.
Maeve caught the door frame. She vaulted inside, unaffected by the wind, and snatched up the second hijacker from where the pressure change had knocked him flat. She hoisted him off the floor by the throat with one hand.
She squeezed, cutting the blood flow to his brain. He went limp in seconds.
Behind her, Homelander ducked through the doorway. His eyes flared red as he locked onto the third hijacker.
"Don't. Heat vision. Not in here."
Clark's hand shot up. He intercepted Homelander's line of sight before the beams could fire. With his other hand, he tossed the first hijacker onto the cabin floor. The man he had caught mid-fall outside lay unconscious on the carpet.
"Scared out of his mind. Saves us the trouble." Clark ignored Homelander's glare. He turned toward the third hijacker, who still held a knife. Clark vanished.
He reappeared behind the man in the same instant. He delivered a precisely controlled strike to the base of the skull. The hijacker dropped to the floor.
Homelander's expression soured. Three hijackers down. He hadn't gotten to touch a single one. He turned to shut the cabin door.
"I'll take these three back to the Tower myself. You two—"
Clark's head snapped toward the front of the plane. He went quiet.
"Alright, folks, it's over, you're safe now!" Homelander pivoted smoothly into full performance mode. Within seconds, the recovering passengers were in tears. They cheered. Hands reached out from the aisles to touch him. Maeve and Clark received their share of the gratitude.
Clark didn't look at them. He walked straight toward the cockpit door, his gaze cutting clean through the reinforced panel.
Inside, the instrument lights blinked in erratic patterns. The captain slumped in his seat. A deep gash tore across his throat, blood pulsing from a severed artery, soaking the side of his white uniform. His vitals were dropping. Under a minute left.
The co-pilot sat frozen with both hands raised. A pistol pressed to his temple, held by someone out of sight.
"Four hijackers. Madelyn's intel was wrong."
Maeve and Homelander caught up as Clark froze at the door. Homelander swept the panel with his own vision and came up blank. The material was too dense to see through.
He didn't need to see it to know what was happening. His performance smile vanished.
"Someone in there?" Maeve asked.
"One's armed," Clark said.
"So what's the play?"
"No time for one. Just move."
Clark held a piece of candy in his palm. Forty-some seconds left on the captain's clock. Still enough time to save him.
"I open the door, Homelander drops the shooter instantly, no—"
"Do we really need to walk through the whole plan first?"
Homelander's jaw set tight. He had been listening to Clark call the shots since they left the Tower. He didn't wait for the rest of the sentence.
He ripped the door open and fired.
Red light flashed. The gunman went down in two pieces. The co-pilot fell sideways, a strip of his scalp burned off to the white bone. He passed out a half-second later.
Aim was a little off. But he's not dead. Close enough.
Maeve wasn't looking at the co-pilot. Her eyes were fixed on the instrument panel. Homelander's heat vision had left a long scorch mark, burning straight through the flight controls.
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