Hemorrhage 4.8
Butcher ducked around another corner and kept moving, threading deeper into the building at a careful pace. By now he had passed more than a dozen guards without being noticed. They would go slack as he drew near — practically dozing on their feet — and then, some time after he moved on, he would hear them behind him coming back around, muttering to each other in confused voices about what had just happened. The important thing was that none of them had raised an alarm yet.
Aside from the guards, the only people he encountered were doctors in white coats with their faces hidden behind surgical masks — not a problem for a former special operations man. If he couldn't slip past medical staff after the better part of two decades in service, Butcher figured he'd deserve to spit in his own face.
Since this section of the building housed functioning laboratories, the security setup beyond the cameras was minimal. Occasionally he could peer through a doorway as he passed, but nothing inside looked useful or interesting: blood storage units, supply rooms full of medical equipment, server racks humming in the dark. There might have been something worth having in any of those rooms, but Butcher wasn't here to browse. He had a destination.
It didn't take him long to figure out the right direction. He followed the flow of doctors and moved toward wherever the guard concentration was heaviest. Vought, like any other corporation, was known for its laziness and its habit of cutting corners on expenses — they would simply put the most people around the most important thing. The only wrinkle was that Vought had a second line of defense beyond ordinary security guards. A superhuman one.
They had all learned enough from working against supers to know that somewhere in this facility, Vought would have supers posted — people who could hear Butcher's footsteps from a mile away. To avoid another catastrophic mess, they had struck first, before the enemy even knew they were here.
According to the plan, the moment Butcher stepped inside, Mark was supposed to start quietly switching off every super standing watch in the building. Billy had no idea how many there were, but judging by the figures he saw slumped against the walls and barely breathing, there were a fair few. Six or seven of them, nodding off where they stood. That number of supers on guard duty spoke clearly to what kind of secrets were stored inside.
Of course, they'd only have cover for so long. By tomorrow, Vought would be tearing everything apart trying to find whoever had been inside their people's heads. But given that more than a hundred guests had attended the gala tonight — including a substantial number of supers — they weren't going to find much. And pointing the finger at the kid would be difficult when everyone had watched him performing in front of the crowd all evening.
Butcher made a mental note that he could never again trust an alibi of that kind.
*Bloody supers.*
Easing his head around the next corner, Billy saw a large room with wide double doors, blazing with bright light from within. Judging by the sounds that had been coming from this direction not long ago, whatever was kept here mattered. The guards nearby were essentially asleep — couldn't have spotted a thing past their own noses. He had finally reached his destination.
He moved to the door as quietly as he could manage and peered around the edge with one eye.
A spotlessly clean medical room. Banks of equipment he didn't recognize, a dozen people in white coats frozen motionless where they stood, and beds — children's beds, arranged throughout the room. The strangest thing was that not a single child made a sound.
"Well I'll be god-bloody-damned…"
He said what he thought about Vought and their experiments, then walked inside. He moved past the doctors — standing locked in place, eyes shut — and took in the room more carefully, studying what they had been doing here.
In some of the corners stood empty sealed cages. He stopped at one and found himself looking at a white mouse, staring back at him with an oddly questioning expression. There was something unnatural in its gaze — something that suggested it understood exactly what was happening around it. He moved on without wasting time.
For reasons Butcher couldn't immediately fathom, Vought was housing both animals and children in the same room. Mostly hamsters and other small rodents, but each one carried some vague quality that felt deeply wrong. What disturbed him most were the bloodied, torn bodies in certain cages — and the other animals sitting calmly beside the remains.
Along the walls ran rows of small beds, occupied by children of different ages, sexes, and races. Medical devices he couldn't name were positioned beside them, presumably recording temperature and other vitals. What caught his eye most were the IV stands next to each bed — each carrying a bag of strange blue liquid.
He looked more closely at the children themselves. Ordinary kids, as far as he could see — no visible mutations, no sign of any powers manifesting. He kept moving, working his way to the far end of the room, until he reached a large metal table surrounded by several frozen figures.
Butcher immediately clocked a steel case sitting on the table's surface, containing a row of about ten blue vials of the same liquid. After everything Vasily had told them, he understood exactly what he was looking at.
"Bingo, you absolute bastards…" he murmured quietly, and began carefully going through the workspace for anything that could serve as evidence. There were papers spread across the table — names, by the look of it. Children's names, parents' names, home addresses. He photographed several pages, then turned his attention to physical samples.
He didn't hesitate. Butcher carefully lifted several vials from the case and tucked them quickly inside his vest, in a way that would leave no trace of their absence to anyone who wasn't counting precisely. He took one more look around, found nothing standing in his way, and moved quickly toward the exit. His head was still working fine, and he had the route back mapped clearly.
A feeling was burning somewhere in his chest. It felt like this quiet, methodical approach was stopping him from expressing what he actually felt — what he actually wanted to do in a room like this one.
But Becky would have liked this a hell of a lot more than some of his previous work.
For now, that was enough for William.
***
The performance had gone off without any significant incidents — if you didn't count the continuous, unbroken use of my ability throughout the entire evening. Splitting my attention across two simultaneous demands was genuinely strange, but years of practice had made me comfortable with difficulty. All those tedious lectures I'd been forced to concentrate through had actually built something useful — my ability to divide focus was well above average.
Though Butcher specifically had been a nightmare to work with. He would creep forward at a glacial pace, then suddenly bolt. And since I had to track everyone in his immediate vicinity and knock them down on the fly — putting all of them under at the same time, even briefly, was beyond what I could manage. So whenever he moved too far ahead, I had to bring the guards back up to speed quickly before looping around to whoever came next.
The hardest part was executing the "slowdown" fast enough. It was a new technique I had been developing — an attempt to knock people out in a way that was less conspicuous and left no damage to the brain. The idea had come from one of my professors, but I had refined the application myself.
Human cognition depends directly on the volume of blood reaching the brain. The more developed the mind, the more intricate the capillary network. In one of our university sessions, we had examined the autopsy results of two men the same age but from completely different professions. The difference between a mathematics professor and a manual laborer was visible even without any instruments.
My ability, therefore, simply reduced the volume of blood flowing in. The body entered a state somewhere between sleep and a mild coma. They shouldn't have retained any memory of what happened, either — just a vague fog in their heads afterward, a faint headache, and a sense of disorientation they wouldn't be able to explain. A near-perfect, non-violent solution.
Applying it to supers, on the other hand, had presented its own interesting puzzle. I had prepared specifically for this event — carefully, methodically training the technique over tea at Ezekiel's church. He had introduced me to about fifteen heroes on his staff a few days before the gala, and while we sat discussing the charity evening's logistics, I had found time to quietly run some experiments.
I hadn't incapacitated anyone or done anything that would stand out, so I was fairly certain no one had noticed my research. I had simply studied the biology of supers with a range of different abilities — observing how superhuman cells could simply ignore the rules of physics and biology, doing things that genuinely strained comprehension.
Working with them had been difficult at first, but I adapted, learning to calibrate to the particular architecture each ability demanded. My own power wasn't entirely without its own violations of natural law, after all.
The moment Butcher made it back, something inside me unclenched, and the bulk of the tension drained away. I could finally stop grinding every last reserve into the performance for the assembled crowd of wealthy donors. Either way, more than half the event was already behind us, and now it was time —
"And now, ladies and gentlemen, I believe it is time to demonstrate that every good deed deserves its reward." Victoria stepped in and took the microphone from me, then turned and placed her hand lightly on my shoulder. "Our esteemed friend here," she continued, "will illustrate that personally. Those who have made the most generous contributions to the fund tonight will have the unique opportunity to be the first to experience the gift of a true healer."
I held my smile perfectly in place and barely suppressed the urge to exhale deeply.
*Nothing a little rest can't fix. Someday.*
***
I turned the vial of blue liquid slowly in my fingers and tried to sort through my thoughts.
I wouldn't claim to be a genius of chemistry or biology — anatomy was my domain. But I knew some things.
For instance: the first super appeared in the 1940s. Fifteen years after the creation of penicillin. The gap between what was sitting in my hand and the greatest pharmaceutical breakthrough of the century was roughly the distance between a nuclear weapon and a matchstick. The scale was almost impossible to absorb.
Vought had been founded by Friedrich Vought, a former German scientist who fled to the United States in 1944. According to the company's official statements, he was a committed opponent of racism, of the ideals of the Third Reich, of the Hitler regime itself — so committed, in fact, that he had supposedly waged an underground resistance against it nearly to the war's end, operating as an Allied spy embedded in enemy territory, sabotaging countless Nazi scientific projects from within.
Except now a different thought had taken root in my head. The picture wasn't that clean.
Which brought me to a single, unavoidable question.
*How did Friedrich manage to create something capable of turning an ordinary human being into a demigod?*
It didn't necessarily have to be Friedrich himself — but the fact that the first super in America appeared at roughly the same time as his migration was not nothing. Someone else could have been responsible for the formula, but that changed very little about the core problem.
The technology to achieve something like this simply didn't exist in that era. Not even the full weight of twenty-first century human science can adequately explain how a person ends up firing lasers from their eyes. That, in fact, was the main reason I hadn't already guessed that supers were artificially engineered. It creates more questions than it answers.
Even if Friedrich had unlimited access to test subjects, backed by the funding of an entire nation over multiple years — it still shouldn't have been possible. The kind of thinking this required started to drift toward the Thule Society. Toward the more esoteric strands of Nazi research…
"So are you just going to keep fondling that thing, or are you going to take a beer and drink like an actual man? Or are you going to stay a little su—"
Butcher offered his characteristic commentary on what I was doing.
"Just sit down and drink," Marvin said, keeping an easy tone.
"Oui, mon frère, there's no need to ruin the atmosphere." Frenchie chimed in. "It is time to celebrate our success!"
I stopped examining the vial and looked up at my allies, taking in the sight of them celebrating the first genuine victory in the fight against Vought. We now had firsthand witnesses to the company's experiments, along with physical proof that they had been injecting American children with an unidentified compound for decades.
The plan was straightforward from here: conduct a chemical analysis of the blood of both infants and adult supers, cross-reference the results with samples of the formula and with ordinary human baselines. After that, the best lawyers in the country would take over, and they would tear the corporation apart piece by piece. Given the recent incidents — the mass casualties caused by supers who had completely lost control — Vought was unlikely to survive this, even with their bottomless resources.
Senators love money. But they love power more. As long as there existed superhuman beings answerable to no one, no one slept soundly. That was about to change.
I huffed out a quiet laugh, slipped the vial into my pocket, and said nothing. We'd brought back enough samples that negotiating to keep one for my own research hadn't been a problem. Everyone — even our "Butcher" — was in elevated spirits, so no one paid any particular attention to what I was doing.
I walked to the table, picked up a bottle, raised it, and said:
"To victory."
The sound of bottles meeting rang out, and we settled into talking — about what had happened, and about what came next. I smiled and held up my end of the conversation, speaking about the future, since there was no telling when any of us would be in the same room again. With the dragon slain, there was little keeping us together.
Marvin was done with the underground work entirely. He planned to take a job as a coach at a school for troubled teenagers, and to give his wife and daughter everything he had. There wasn't a person in that room who couldn't understand him.
Frenchie talked about a job at a restaurant belonging to some acquaintances of his in New York. With no obligation to work off any sentence, he was a free man now and had no interest in anything criminal ever again.
Butcher would go on working for Mallory and carrying out her surveillance assignments on supers. If I was being honest, I suspected that suited him just fine.
As for me — I intended to finish university, develop my abilities, and continue building my career as a healer and a scientist. Everything beyond that, I would figure out as I went. There was no shortage of possibilities, but first I needed to see what happened to Vought. A great deal of my life had been entangled with that company, but I was no longer dependent on them. I could survive on my own terms now. The television appearance in front of a hundred million people, and the connections I'd made with the people who held the real levers of the world — those had become a solid foundation for whatever came next.
For now, I could breathe.
The battle was over.
At least for the time being.
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