The notebook read like a lab log.
Dates marked the top corners. Subject IDs ran down the left margin. Procedural notes filled the right-hand columns in the same jagged handwriting Jude had found in the first entry, the second, and the third.
He was reading Lamplighter's private record of everything happening inside Sage Grove Center.
The most recent entry was brief: October 23. Five new subjects admitted today. An unusually large intake for a single day. Stormfront is pleased.
The previous entry was detailed, and significantly worse.
The last batch included sixteen subjects. Three had died within hours of injection. The remaining thirteen—seven men, six women, ranging from their twenties to their fifties—had each developed an ability within six hours of receiving Compound V.
Of those thirteen, five experienced severe mental deterioration. Three were entirely unresponsive. The subjects who hadn't been mentally ill before admission appeared to have come through relatively intact.
Relatively was doing a lot of work in that sentence.
The next entry belonged to Stormfront. Her handwriting was different—sharp, efficient, the script of someone who resented having to write anything down.
She was dissatisfied, she wrote. Not with the amount of Compound V being used—a single dose per subject was a minor expense—but with the results. The problem was unpredictability. She wanted control over the intensity of the powers generated, not just a pass/fail rate on whether they developed at all. Producing useless supes was unacceptable. Having to clean up after weak, impractical superhumans was a drain on resources Vought could not—
The sentence broke off. The next three words were violently crossed out. The pen had torn through the paper, destroying the original phrasing entirely.
The line resumed below, still in Stormfront's handwriting: —that Vought could not afford to sustain indefinitely, given the demands of the grand vision.
After Stormfront's note, Lamplighter had resumed his logging. At the end of the section, neat columns listed names, ages, powers manifested, and current health status.
Of the thirteen subjects who survived the last injection, only three were still alive. Based on behavioral notes, one of them was the man who had charged the cell door earlier today, healed instantly, and been electrocuted to the floor.
Tenacious, Jude thought again. The data suggests it isn't courage.
He closed the notebook.
And Lamplighter, he noted silently, kept this in an unlocked filing cabinet in a room with two guards stationed outside and a camera down the hall. He turned the notebook over in his hands. This document would end careers in at least nine countries. And Lamplighter just left it here.
He put the notebook back exactly where he found it and moved to check the corridor.
He cracked the door open. The two guards were still at their post. The overhead camera hadn't moved. He closed the door. Stormfront would need more time to finish her inspection. He had time.
The door, however, had other plans.
It caught slightly on the frame, shutting with a sharp, flat click that echoed down the hallway.
Both guards turned.
From their perspective, the corridor was empty.
They traded a look. The guard on the left was already doubting himself—no radio chatter, no movement on the camera. Did you hear something? Probably nothing. It was the kind of silent exchange where people talk themselves out of what they definitely just heard.
"I'll take a look," the guard on the right said, pushing the door open.
He was thorough. He checked behind the door, the far corners, the narrow gap behind the medicine cabinets, and the floor under the examining table.
"Anything?" his partner called from the hallway.
"No," a voice answered from the medicine cabinets.
"Clear," the searching guard added, stepping back into the hall.
The door clicked shut.
Inside the room, Jude didn't move. He was the one who had said no. He hadn't expected it to work so flawlessly.
Concealment hides the body, he thought. That is just the foundation of the skill. True stealth means you exist in a space without registering. Not just visually, but across every sense the human mind uses to detect presence. Voice, shadow, peripheral motion, the instinctual feeling that the air in a room has shifted. At the Master tier, he controlled all of it.
He considered this. Being invisible is something you can do with a bedsheet. Being undetectable is something else entirely.
He walked over to the medicine cabinets.
They were meticulously organized. Labels faced outward, quantities were logged, and restock dates were clearly marked. Whoever managed inventory took it seriously.
He checked every shelf. No Compound V. Nothing matched the bright blue solution in Popclaw's safe. The cabinets held standard psychiatric and medical supplies, nothing more. No glass vials. No blue liquid.
He closed the last cabinet, letting the information settle.
No Compound V, but the notebook had already told him something far more important than where the drugs were kept.
He leaned back against the cabinet and turned the realization over in his head.
Every subject brought to Sage Grove was an ordinary person. They weren't psychiatric patients. They weren't criminals. They weren't volunteers. They were regular people, brought here and converted into test subjects for an adult-targeted version of Compound V. And based on the mortality columns, it was highly experimental.
The adult formula killed people. Often. It produced unstable results. Its success rate was abysmal.
The stable formula—the one that actually worked—was designed for children. Infants.
He stared at the ceiling.
Every superhero operating in the United States was dosed as a child. Likely as a baby. Their parents might not have even known. The powers emerged in childhood or early adolescence, leading everyone to believe the abilities were genetic, natural, like being double-jointed or colorblind.
Vought called it a blessing from God. They put it in their marketing materials with a straight face.
It isn't genetic. It isn't natural. It is a pharmaceutical program given to babies, and every supe walking around is proof that it works. Sage Grove was where Vought tried to replicate the effect on adults. But the infant program had hard limits. You couldn't shoot a grown man in his thirties with the same formula and get Annie January.
You got the berserker in cell fourteen.
"Innate superpowers," Jude said quietly to the empty room. "Right."
He was looking at the remaining filing drawers when heavy footsteps echoed in the hallway.
It wasn't Stormfront. Her walk was sharp and distinctive. These steps were slower, carrying weight.
Jude crossed the room in three strides and pressed his palm flat against the wall. The wallpaper folded inward, revealing a door where none existed a second before. He stepped inside the pocket room and pulled the wall shut.
Through the barrier, he listened. The clinic door opened. A brief exchange with the guards—Did anyone go in today? Anyone at all? Two firm nos. Then, footsteps crossing the tile floor.
Lamplighter.
He walked straight to the filing cabinet. Jude tracked the sounds: a drawer opening, hands searching, finding the exact file. A pause—the rustle of paper, confirming the contents were still there.
Then, Lamplighter muttered in his hoarse, ruined voice: "How could I leave something this important without a proper cover? Next time—better label. Something that blends in."
The drawer slid shut. The footsteps retreated. The clinic door opened and closed.
Jude waited a few seconds before pushing the wallpaper door open and stepping back into the room.
Hiding it won't help, he thought, looking at the cabinet. I am about to tear this building apart. Wherever you put it, it will be here when I'm done.
He pulled out his phone and started taking photos.
The next thirty minutes belonged to Sage Grove Center.
He moved through every accessible room manually. Electronic shortcuts were useless—several of the inmates had powers that scrambled devices, making network access impossible and a stable signal a liability. Doing it by hand was the only option.
He found exactly what the notebook had outlined. The pattern repeated across dozens of files. Different names, different ages, different powers. Some useful to Vought, some completely worthless, and some that died before they could be categorized. The mortality rate across the documents matched Lamplighter's log perfectly. He photographed everything.
He found no Compound V.
He searched thoroughly before accepting the reality. Stormfront brought the doses herself on the days the experiments required them. She carried exactly what she needed for the session. The logistics were flawless: no permanent stockpile, no storage locker, zero footprint inside the facility. Whatever the adult program needed, she carried in her pocket.
They don't need much, Jude noted. One shot per subject. Sixteen subjects a batch. The volume is so low a single courier can handle it. There is no supply chain to hit here.
He stood at the end of the east corridor, weighing what he had found against what it was actually worth.
He had proof of a Vought-funded program injecting regular adults with an experimental drug. Proof that it generated powers, killed subjects, and imprisoned the survivors in concrete boxes for observation. He had the corporate paper trail connecting Sage Grove to Global Health Services, and Global Health Services to Vought International. He had Lamplighter's handwritten logs and Stormfront's margin notes.
What he didn't have was a way to make any of it matter.
Going public—giving the files to a journalist, an advocacy group, or a congressional committee—would cause damage. But Vought had spent decades handling exactly this kind of crisis. The violent metas could be quietly executed. The paper records could be shredded in an hour. The three corporate layers would take years to pierce in court. By the time any real pressure arrived, the hospital would be scrubbed clean, and Vought's PR machine would spin whatever was left.
Minor damage, Jude concluded. Not crippling. Not without the rest of the picture.
He turned back toward the main corridor.
"Retreat for now," he said to himself. "Figure out how to use this later."
He went to find Satsuki.