The Bureau of Superhero Affairs' Washington D.C. office occupied the fourth floor of a federal building that had been federalized in 2019 from a nonprofit shell — hastily, with the specific quality of an institution that had been given resources and authority before it had been given time to build proper infrastructure, and which ran on the productive chaos that resulted.
Travis had known this from the file. The experience of standing in the lobby while the security contractor — a former Vought security personnel, two years out, Travis had confirmed from the industry network — ran his credentials through a system that processed them at federal-contractor speed, which was slower than it should have been and slightly more thorough than he'd planned for.
The forged identity held. He watched the contractor's face during the processing and read nothing that looked like elevated concern, which was either the identity doing its job or the contractor doing his job, both of which produced the same outcome.
He was issued a temporary badge with a green stripe. INTELLIGENCE LIAISON — PROVISIONAL. He was escorted to the fourth floor.
---
The first hour was operational paradise.
The Bureau was new enough that its information security culture had not yet caught up with its mandate. Unsecured workstations. Documents left on printers. A shared network drive with folder permissions that had been set optimistically rather than precisely. Travis walked through his orientation while the Atrocity Archives catalogued thirty-seven distinct intelligence products from peripheral vision alone — Vought subsidiary financial flows, Congressional briefing summaries, draft testimony, internal correspondence about the Compound V evidence chain.
The Archives filed each one with the specific efficiency of a system that had been hungry for institutional intelligence and was now being fed.
[INTELLIGENCE HARVEST — BUREAU INFILTRATION: +60 MP]
[CI: 37%]
He was given a desk — fourth floor, east side, a window that faced a parking structure. The desk had been cleared of its previous occupant's materials with the specific incompleteness of a desk cleared in a hurry: a Post-it note with a phone extension, a sticky residue where a coffee mug had lived, a drawer that still held a cable with no visible device to attach it to.
He sat down, opened the laptop, and began building his first intelligence product for the Bureau.
The product would be delivered within the week. He'd already identified the right piece: the Vought subsidiary routing data from the Samaritan's Embrace files, specifically the financial flows that connected three shell companies to a congressional liaison network that the Bureau would find actionable. It was enough to be immediately valuable. It was not enough to reveal the full scope of what Travis had.
The instrument, again. Appetizers.
---
Victoria Neuman came to his desk at 3:47 PM.
Travis had been aware of her in his peripheral awareness for forty minutes — the Bureau had an open floor plan and the Corruption Radar had been running since he'd cleared security, mapping the moral landscape of the fourth floor with its usual palette. The staff read in the moderate range — committed people in proximity to power, the specific moral topography of a government office where everyone believed they were working for the right side and most of them were, with the particular compromises that believing you're working for the right side produced. Amber and pale-yellow, the occasional deep orange at the policy leads.
Neuman read crimson shot through with gold.
The gold was the anomaly. Crimson was standard for someone doing what she was doing at her level — the compromises required, the Edgar relationship, the concealed identity, the specific category of person who had decided that the ends justified their particular means. The gold was something underneath it: conviction, genuine, the specific signal of a person whose stated mission and actual mission had enough overlap that the belief was real.
Travis had not expected the belief to be real.
She pulled a chair from the adjacent empty desk and sat. She didn't ask permission — she owned the floor, and sitting in a visitor chair at someone else's desk was a dominance calibration, a way of saying I'm choosing the consultative position and we both know I'm choosing it.
She said: "Your resume is interesting."
Travis said: "Thank you."
"Vought consultant. Delaware LLC. Experience in logistics and intelligence analysis with no formal intelligence community background." She had a yellow legal pad with his file printed on it. She looked at the file, not at Travis, while she talked — the reading-body of someone who had prepared for this conversation and was managing her tells. "You have Vought insider access but you applied to a bureau whose primary function is investigating Vought. Most people in your position pick a lane."
"I picked the winning lane," Travis said.
She looked up from the file.
[APPRAISAL EYE — SUBJECT: VICTORIA NEUMAN]
[CLASSIFICATION: SUPE — CONCEALED. ABILITY: HEAD DETONATION (PROXIMITY-RANGE, DIRECTIONAL, VOLUNTARILY TRIGGERED). ACTIVE CONCEALMENT: EXCELLENT. TELLS: MICRO-EXPRESSION SUPPRESSION TRAINED, ABOVE AVERAGE.]
[PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE: POLITICAL OPERATOR — LONG-GAME THINKER. STAN EDGAR'S WEAPON (PLACED, NOT VOLUNTARY). CONVICTION: GENUINE BENEATH STRATEGIC LAYER. PRIMARY DRIVER: CONTROL OVER OWN TRAJECTORY. SECONDARY: AUTHENTIC BELIEF IN ANTI-VOUGHT MISSION (PARTIAL — CONFLICTS WITH EDGAR RELATIONSHIP).]
[THREAT LEVEL: EXTREME. SPECIFIC VECTOR: SKULL DETONATION WITHOUT PREPARATION. PROXIMITY REQUIREMENT: WITHIN 30 FEET. RANGE REDUCTION WITH FOCUS: APPROXIMATELY 10 FEET FOR PRECISION TARGETING.]
[CONTAGION VIABILITY: 45% (ACTIVE MENTAL DEFENSES, TRAINED EMOTIONAL MANAGEMENT). NOTE: STANDARD APPROACH VECTORS INSUFFICIENT. HIGH-VALUE TARGET.]
Travis was sitting approximately four feet from Victoria Neuman, who could detonate his skull with a thought, and the specific quality of the risk arrived in his chest as something that wasn't quite fear. Closer to alertness — the biological state of being in proximity to something that could kill you and knowing it, the specific difference between theoretical danger and present-moment danger.
She said: "Why do you want to fight Vought?"
The question had the quality of a question that had been the real question all along, with the resume conversation as the approach path.
Travis said: "I've seen what they do to people who trust them."
The answer was true. It was also true in ways that were not the ways she would interpret it — it was true of Gary, whose trust Travis had converted into authorization documentation on four forms; true of Derek, whose trust Travis had converted into a HR report; true of Stillwell, whose trust of her own security systems Travis had used to extract forty-seven gigabytes of institutional secrets. He had seen exactly what happened to people who trusted their structures. He had been many of those structures.
Neuman looked at him for a moment with the specific look of someone reading for accuracy rather than content.
"That's either very personal or very calculated," she said.
"Both," Travis said.
The corner of her mouth moved slightly. Not a smile — the precursor to one, suppressed, which was the most honest version.
She looked back at the file. "Intelligence product delivery timeline?"
"One week."
"What product?"
"Vought shell company financial routing — Bureau-actionable, congressional liaison connections. Three companies, eighteen months of flows."
She wrote something on the legal pad. "How did you get Vought's shell company routing?"
"The same way I got everything else," Travis said. "I was useful to the right people before I was useful to you."
She looked up again.
The Corruption Radar read a brief spike of gold in her signature — the conviction frequency, responding to the framing. He'd threaded the answer through the one thing in her architecture that was genuine, the real belief underneath the political operator surface: someone who paid a price to learn these things and chose this side with the knowledge in hand. That story was credible to her because it was the story she told about herself.
"One week," she said. She stood and returned the chair to the adjacent desk. "My assistant will send you the secure channel."
She walked back to her office — a glass-walled room at the north end of the floor, the specific placement of an executive space that was visible to the whole room. She sat down. She did not look back.
Travis looked at his desk. At the provisional badge with the green stripe. At the cable in the drawer with no visible device.
He pulled out the Bureau notepad — standard issue, logo in the corner — and drew a triangle. Three vertices: VOUGHT (Ashley, Stillwell files, subsidiary network), THE BOYS (dead-drop, Frenchie, Butcher), BUREAU (Neuman, congressional intelligence, anti-Vought campaign). He put a dot in the center of the triangle. He drew a line from the dot to each vertex.
He looked at it.
Then he turned the pad over so the drawing faced the desk.
Outside the window, the parking structure was a parking structure — four stories of concrete in the specific gray of federal-adjacent infrastructure, pigeons on the second level, a maintenance truck visible on the ground floor. Travis watched it for a moment, the specific pleasure of a person sitting in a room where everyone thought they knew what he was and none of them did, the specific warmth of standing inside all three walls at once.
The Hollow said: "The most connected man in The Boys universe."
"Don't oversell it," Travis said.
"You're not connected to Homelander."
"Nobody is."
"Yet," the Hollow said.
Across the floor, Neuman's assistant knocked on the glass office door. Neuman looked up from her desk and said something. The assistant laughed. Bureau noise, ordinary afternoon, the ambient sound of an institution doing its work.
Travis opened his laptop and started building the intelligence product that would arrive in one week and establish him as indispensable to the most dangerous woman in American politics.
The Bureau gossip mill, as it happened, had already started: the new analyst had gotten a personal interview from the Congresswoman herself, which was the kind of thing that got mentioned in the break room during the 4 PM coffee rush, which was happening now, audible from his desk in the specific frequency of a workplace noticing something it found interesting.
He kept typing.
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