Lamplighter. Stormfront.
Jude stood at the end of the east corridor, weighing the names against everything he had just seen.
If a breakthrough was going to come from inside Sage Grove Center, it would come through one of those two. Stormfront ran the operation and reported directly to Vought. Lamplighter kept the records. Together, they held all the cards—the files, the access, the institutional memory of what had been done to every subject. Any communication with Vought above the facility level went through Stormfront. Any documentation of what happened here was written in Lamplighter's hand.
The investigation had reached its ceiling. To actually do something with this information—to expose what Vought was doing in this building—he would need institutional partners. He needed people inside the government or law enforcement who handled these kinds of cases, who had the authority to act and the leverage to make it stick. Whether Butcher had those kinds of connections was still an open question.
But that conversation is for when I'm back.
Yomogi shifted under his collar. She had been quiet since he answered her question a few minutes ago. She felt heavy against his shoulder, carrying the weight of a cat who had learned something she wished she hadn't.
"Can't we at least help some of them get out?"
"No," Jude said, keeping his voice low and even. "The supes locked up here—most of them were unstable before they arrived, and long-term imprisonment in these conditions has pushed the rest of them over the edge. Their aggression is high, and their capacity to communicate is gone. If we opened those cells, Vought wouldn't be the only one suffering the consequences."
"What about the ones who were normal? The ones who weren't mentally ill when they got here?"
"A normal person who asked to leave would be removed from the facility. There would be a brief process, and then an accidental death certificate." Jude looked down at the tile floor. "Based on the cells we passed today, there are no normal people left alive in this building."
Yomogi went perfectly still.
She retreated fully beneath his collar and didn't come back out. The small, warm weight pressed firmly against his shoulder.
The next batch of test subjects arrives right after this one, Jude thought, turning back toward the main corridor. This is what happens here, and it will keep happening until someone stops it. Finding media contacts and the right government officials is the first priority now. If there are other facilities like this, they need to be found and shut down.
He filed the thought away and started walking.
Stormfront and Lamplighter were moving between cells in the main corridor when Jude approached.
He fell into step with a group of orderlies moving the same direction, sliding into the middle of the pack and letting the current carry him forward. As he passed the two supes, he dipped his head just as the other orderlies did—a small, automatic reflex that meant nothing.
Neither of them glanced at him.
The stealth effect holds even against supes, he noted as he moved toward the exit, provided their enhancements are physical rather than cognitive, and they haven't had formal training in attention discipline. Physically enhanced baselines still relied on human instincts. And human instincts only looked for what moved wrong, what sounded wrong, or what felt out of place. A Master-tier stealth skill didn't make the body invisible. It simply erased all the signals that told the brain to look.
He walked out the front gate of Sage Grove Center in a borrowed orderly's uniform, stepped into the Pennsylvania afternoon, and didn't look back.
Satsuki was five kilometers away, hidden inside an abandoned parking garage where no one had parked in years and no one was planning to.
The plan outside the gates was straightforward.
Lamplighter had the records. Stormfront had operational oversight. Either of them would keep more information at home than they could safely leave at the facility. Tailing one or both of them back to their residence would yield an address, and potentially, documents. It was the logical next step.
Jude found a vantage point with clear sightlines to the facility entrance and the sky. He waited.
Five hours later, the sky cracked open.
A column of charged air rapidly condensed above the Sage Grove campus. Stormfront launched upward through the center of it, rocketing into the overcast sky at a severe angle, heading somewhere fast. Within seconds, she was a dark speck against the gray. A moment later, she was gone.
Jude tracked her heading until she vanished entirely.
Pennsylvania to wherever she actually lives, Jude concluded. A supe who can fly doesn't pick her house based on the morning commute. She could live on the opposite coast and still make it to work on time. I should have considered that before spending five hours sitting in a parking garage. He stared at the empty sky. I'm not catching her on the ground. Or anywhere else.
He waited five more hours.
Lamplighter never came out.
Staff rotations cycled through the front gate. The final shift change ended, and the night crew settled in. The building's interior lights dimmed, shifting into an overnight pattern running on a skeleton crew.
Lamplighter was sleeping in the staff dormitory.
It made sense, looking back at it. A man placed here by Vought—placed in the sense of being filed away and locked in a drawer—would live on-site. Going home wasn't part of his arrangement.
Jude put the wallpaper away.
"No Compound V at the facility," Jude told the empty parking structure as he walked toward Satsuki. "Stormfront handles the transport herself, in quantities she can carry in her pockets, and only when experiments are scheduled. There's no fixed supply to hit here." He got into the car. "At least the notebook and the files exist, and I have photos of all of it."
"The return trip will take about three hours," Satsuki said. "I will have to maintain the same traffic enforcement speeds as the outbound trip."
"That's fine."
He leaned his head back and stared at the roof of the car.
The adult formula was experimental and highly lethal. The real question—the one he still couldn't answer—was entirely different: Where does Vought administer the stable formula? The one designed for infants. Someone gave it to every registered hero currently operating in the country, and someone sourced the children to receive it. What were the logistics of a neonatal Compound V program? Did the parents know? Did they consent, were they lied to, or did something else happen entirely?
He didn't have a single thread to pull. He set the problem aside—thinking without clues was a waste of time—and checked the clock.
It had been a little over twenty hours since he left New York. The round trip would fit comfortably inside two days.
I hope Frenchie finished those glass vials, he thought.
Jude pushed open the door to the workshop and found Butcher holding a test tube up to the harsh overhead light, squinting at it like a man who refused to be impressed by anything. Frenchie stood across the workbench, holding the posture of a craftsman waiting for a verdict he already knew he had won.
The liquid inside was a brilliant sky-blue. The glass caught the light perfectly.
Frenchie reached across the table and flicked the tube with his fingernail. A sharp, clear ring echoed off the glass.
"Look at the color," Frenchie said. "Look at the clarity. And—" he picked up a second tube from the rack, "—since supes biology makes poisoning them mostly pointless, I added heavy hallucinogens and stimulants to the mix. If A-Train grabs the wrong vial, you will have a very confused, very wired supe on your hands for about four to six hours."
"That's a lot of flowery language," Butcher said. "You put food coloring in water and got poetic about it."
"You know absolutely nothing about chemistry."
"I know what water looks like when you dye it."
"It is formulated to match the exact spectral properties of—"
"Water."
Frenchie collected himself, clearly fighting the urge to throw something.
Jude set his bag down and exhaled slowly.
"Frenchie, this is excellent work. The color match is near perfect."
"Breaking Bad," Frenchie said, lifting his chin slightly. "You are welcome, by the way."
"Did you secure the glass vials? The dimensions have to match the original packaging perfectly—same diameter, same seal."
"OEM supplier. I found them yesterday. The shipment arrives tomorrow."
"As long as they hold up."
"They will hold up." Frenchie placed the tube back in the rack with extreme care. "And you? What did Pennsylvania give us?"
Jude walked over to the table and sat down.
"I found Lamplighter."
The room stopped moving.
Butcher stared at him, perfectly still. Frenchie, who had been reaching for a tool on the bench, froze with his hand hovering in the air. Both men looked like they had just heard a name they never expected to hear in this room, or perhaps ever again.
Frenchie too, Jude noted. Not just Butcher.
Frenchie moved first. He stepped around the workbench, and when he finally spoke, his voice was different. The casual hoarseness he had carried all day was gone, replaced by something tight and long-buried.
"Where is he?"
"Working as an orderly in a mental hospital. Doing Vought's dirty work. Running inspection rounds for Stormfront." Jude watched his face. "He's been there a long time. His hair is turning white. He looks like a man who has been running on fumes for years."
A heavy silence filled the room.
"We are all on the same team now," Jude said, breaking the quiet. "That means we share what we know. I told you what I found. Now, I need to know what both of you know about Lamplighter and that facility. Whatever happened that you haven't told me yet—this is the time to say it."
Butcher stayed quiet for a long moment. It was a different kind of silence than his usual calculating pauses. He turned an empty glass over on the table.
"Since this involves Lamplighter," Butcher said slowly, "I need to bring someone else in before we have this conversation."
"Who?"
"An old friend. He has his own history with Lamplighter. He has... more of a conscience than I do." Butcher paused. "More of a conscience than anyone I know, which is exactly why I haven't asked him for a favor in a long time."
"Any person on the street has more of a conscience than you," Jude said.
"Shut up."
Half an hour later, they sat in a small meeting room inside a juvenile detention center in New York City.
The man sitting across the table from Butcher was built like a heavyweight boxer—he filled the plastic chair without trying, making the institutional table look too small for the conversation. He was middle-aged, Black, and currently staring at Butcher with the exhausted patience of a man who had heard Butcher's pitches before and found the track record lacking.
"You're telling me this crew is reliable." His voice was a low, steady rumble. "You're telling me what happened with Mallory won't happen again."
"You have my word."
"Your word." The man chewed on the phrase, clearly unimpressed. "Is Frenchie involved?"
"Frenchie?" Butcher wore a mask of complete, innocent sincerity. "What are you talking about? It's just me and a couple of new guys. You're the only person I trust for something like this."
The man stared at him.
He hadn't said yes. But he hadn't stood up to leave, either.
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