Chapter 1 — Cold Start
Hughie Campbell didn't look like a man about to lose the center of his life. He looked like a guy arguing about lunch.
"Bánh mì," he said, pleased with himself.
Robin made a face. "You only like it because you learned to pronounce it without panicking."
"That's growth."
"That's food snobbery with extra cilantro."
They stood at the corner where Ninth throws its elbows into West 23rd, the crosswalk counting down at a lazy red that never seems to reach zero. Heat shimmered above the taxi roofs. Somewhere a bus sighed. It was the kind of New York minute you could store in a snow globe if you knew that minutes could break.
Half a mile away, something fast and frightened tore open the air.
Cian felt it before the wind did, a tremor that crawled along power lines and through the fillings of the city. He'd been leaning against the glass of a diner, watching a cracked TV loop a talk show, listening to coins rattle in a tip jar like skittish fish. The vibration slid under his skin and drew a line across his attention with a lightning-made fingernail.
V-boost, he thought, and straightened. A-Train's heartbeat skittered up from downtown like a bad diagnosis.
He left cash by the coffee cup, self-tax for stolen electricity, and stepped into the afternoon. Even before he lifted himself into the faster layer of the world, the city seemed to slow out of respect; or maybe he just stopped pretending to be a normal pace.
The horizon bent. Sound stretched. He crossed the street without the street knowing he'd been there.
Cian didn't love heroics. They were loud, indiscreet, and guaranteed to make liars out of everyone. But there are choices that don't ask permission. The shove of the speedster's slipstream rushed toward the intersection, a knife at child height. A pair of figures filled the center of the frame—hands joined, faces turned toward each other with the ease of people still choosing each other on purpose.
He stepped into the syrup of time and pressed his palm flat against the air.
A bubble bloomed. Not visible—understood. Pressure re-sorted itself around Robin's ribs and lifted her a fraction, an inch stolen from the future. Hughie's fingers slid from hers with a soft pop of lost friction. Robin's eyes widened at the sudden weightlessness, at the black glove at her shoulder humming like a distant transformer. There wasn't enough time to be afraid. There was only the information of survival.
The shockwave needed somewhere to go. The city had donated a cherry slush, a cluster of safety glass in a trash bag, and a thin film of brick dust along the curb. Cian borrowed them, spun them into a red veil, and shoved it into the path A-Train had already decided to experience. From the outside it would look like gore. From the inside it felt like a magician showing you the empty hat right before the dove.
A-Train hit the moment that convinced him he'd killed someone, and kept running because speed doesn't give you time to reconsider.
Cian didn't watch him go. He had someone human in his hands.
They were in shade three boroughs away before the scream on Ninth grew teeth.
Robin twisted, all instinct and refusal. Cian let her move until she hit the wall of what physics and grief would allow, then steadied her with a thumb's worth of electricity that prickled like static and said you are here.
"Hughie," she said, mouth trying and failing to shape the O in his name. "He—he—"
"I know," Cian said. He did, because he'd stood in that shape before—where your body is ready to run toward the thing that isn't there anymore. "He saw what he needed to see to survive the next hour."
"You want me to let him think I'm dead." Her voice came out flat. Somewhere in it, metal buckled.
"I want him alive long enough to be who he is," Cian said. "Vought will pave him if they spot the hole in their story. If you move, their cameras notice. If they notice, they come. If they come—"
"—we get crushed." She swallowed, spit anger like a seed. "Who the hell are you?"
"Someone who gets paid in naps," he said. "And sometimes gratitude, which I hate."
"Is this a joke?"
"It's a city," Cian said gently. "The joke is structural."
She stared at him like she wanted to break something that wouldn't break. "He's not… he's not strong like that."
"He is," Cian said. "He waited for the walk sign even when no cars were coming. That's a kind of spine."
A beat. The alley hummed with noon and a distant air conditioner. Cian thumbed his phone, screen a blur in his hand. BIRD IN HAND. The reply snapped back: NEST OPEN.
"We take seven steps," Cian said, holding out his hand. "And then you vanish for a bit. You'll want to run. Don't. Walk. Running is for celebrations."
"You're insane," she said, but she let him take her fingers.
"Frequently."
They stepped, and the alley unstitched, and the room that replaced it had curtains that remembered sun and a couch chosen by someone who had been tired for twenty years. Grace Mallory opened the door like she'd been standing behind it for a lifetime. She saw Robin's face first—the alive of it—and for a second, the hard architecture of her expression softened into something that would have embarrassed a lesser person.
"We'll keep you," she said, the verb choosing itself. "We'll keep you gone."
"I have to tell—" Robin started.
"I know," Grace said. "And we will. But not today."
Robin's shoulders tightened, then dropped. Something inside her understood the math of this cruelty.
Cian stepped back when gratitude swelled the room. He could take a bullet better than he could take thanks. Grace's gaze flicked to him, a quick, efficient affection disguised as professional acknowledgement.
"Leave by the kitchen," she said. "They'll be scraping the intersection for stories."
"I'm a smear on a reel," Cian said. "They won't like the taste."
He ghosted through the house like a rumor and let the back door push him into light.
---
On Ninth, the red veil already owned the narrative. People made the sound crowds make when there are no instructions. Hughie had knelt without meaning to and couldn't figure out how to stand up. His hands were held out in front of him as if waiting for something to return to them. His mouth tried to say Robin's name but came out with a vowel and a piece of sidewalk.
A cop shouted for space. A woman clapped a hand to her mouth and said ohmygod in one breath like a prayer with no periods. The world rearranged itself into teams: those who wanted to help and those who needed to record themselves wanting to help.
Cian watched from a roofline and willed the city to be kinder than it knows how to be.
He also counted cameras. Four city cams, two car dash cams, three cell phones in obvious positions, one in a window. He tilted his head and nudged an EMP the way you tilt a fan in July—just enough to make the air bearable. The footage stayed, but the moments around it developed a harmless cough. A continuity editor would cry later for reasons he'd never understand.
He wasn't here to erase. He was here to smudge.
A siren pealed. Hughie startled like a hunted thing. The cop moved him to the sidewalk, words like statement and stay put and I'm sorry falling in careful patterns that didn't fit in Hughie's ears. In the storefront glass across the street, a clean reflection cut across chaos: a man in a brown coat standing very still, watching the scene like a chessboard he didn't mind breaking in half.
Cian's mouth twitched. Hello, Billy.
He could drop down and trip the encounter by ten minutes, but chaos deserved its own timing. Also—above him—the air shifted with that particular pressure front he'd been trained to respect: the sensation of being weighed by eyes that weren't built for weighing. Cian looked up.
There was sky and there wasn't, in that way that happens when a god with branding tilts his head. No cape in view. No silhouette. Just the sense of focus, like a magnifying glass between sun and ant. The ant in this case being everyone.
Cian rolled his shoulders and tucked himself into shadow, aura dimming to something that would rather be mistaken for heat haze. He could allow Homelander to stare at the street all afternoon so long as the man never noticed that thunder sometimes comes from the pavement.
He waited until the stare passed. It did, a fraction at a time, like a storm deciding it didn't like this neighborhood.
He went back to watching the boy who was about to be recruited.
Hughie's fingers trembled so hard he couldn't hold the cup of water someone had pressed on him. He set it on the curb and immediately forgot it existed. The world had narrowed to the precise shape of where Robin's hand had been and the enormous space that now lived there. He wasn't thinking about revenge. He wasn't thinking about plans. He was thinking this is badly designed and please and no and the small mean part of him that always apologized to everything begged the air for forgiveness for something he hadn't done.
A shadow cut the doorway of the electronics shop across the street. The man in the brown coat had moved. He leaned on the jamb like a question mark with a budget.
Cian felt the city take a breath that changed its mind halfway through.
He thought briefly about dropping a word into Hughie's ear—Not a cop—then didn't. The point of chaos, the good kind, is that it grows its own spine.
His phone buzzed. NEST CLOSED. ROBIN STABLE. He let himself smile toward nothing and exhaled a charge he hadn't realized he was holding. It ran along the roof's tar seam, made a soda can twitch, and disappeared into the gutter like it had somewhere better to be.
Down on the sidewalk, Hughie finally looked up.
The man across the street raised a hand in a little salute that somehow managed to be both sympathetic and predatory. He stepped inside the shop and out of frame. Hughie frowned, as if pulled by a thread.
Time resumed its usual bad habits.
Cian stayed where he was and counted three, because three is the number you give heroes and idiots to make their own choices.
He reached the end of the count, and the kid stood up.
Hughie followed the man in the brown coat because a small, furious part of him wanted someone to tell him what to do.
"You Hughie Campbell?" the man asked without offering a hand. Cockney vowels like gravel. Eyes that smiled and didn't.
"Yes," Hughie said, then immediately wished he'd said maybe.
"Name's Butcher. Billy Butcher." He glanced toward the crosswalk. "That was a bit mental out there."
Hughie's mouth was a dry cupboard. "My girlfriend—"
"Yeah," Butcher said, as if he'd watched a weather report. "Listen. You wanna make the wanker who did it pay, or you wanna sit around waiting for a fruit basket from Vought?"
Hughie had never thought of himself as a man with enemies. He nodded anyway.
"Good lad." Butcher flashed a wallet for half a second: a badge, an authority, a suggestion. "FBI. Off the books. Little stroll?"
He didn't wait for consent. Hughie went because not going required a spine he'd misplaced on Ninth.
---
Cian watched them emerge into sunlight from the roofline. Butcher moved like a man who liked to break furniture to make a point. He had that old-war smell Cian recognized—grief lacquered over with purpose. The kid walked like someone who'd been shoved and was trying to understand the floor.
Cian let them be. He skimmed the grid instead, brushing cameras lightly with his awareness. He didn't erase—he never erased. He simply introduced a polite cough to any lens that stared too hard at a lanky boy and a man in a coat heading for a nondescript sedan.
A bright shape flickered in the corner of his eye—altitude, blond, a blue that sells flags. Homelander hung somewhere over the island pretending he wasn't looking for proof of something. Cian dimmed even further, a low hum crouched behind an HVAC unit, and the god drifted on, bored, or pretending to be.
"Keep smiling," Cian told the empty sky. "It's your best power."
---
Butcher's car smelled like dog and cheap air freshener. Hughie held the seatbelt like he might need to bite it.
"You're not FBI," Hughie said, because his mouth had survived the day with some scrap of bravery.
Butcher smiled without teeth. "Was once. Let's call it… freelance now."
"Why me?"
"Because you were there," Butcher said cheerfully. "Because you saw what you weren't meant to. Because you're mad enough to say yes and scared enough to listen."
"I don't— I can't—"
Butcher took a blind corner like a dare. "You can. And you will. First, a little education."
He took Hughie to a club with a line of velvet rope and a neon sign that pretended irony. They didn't go through the front. They went through a service door that didn't bother to ask questions if you had the right kind of face. Butcher had three.
"You ever heard the term superhero?" Butcher asked as they walked a corridor that smelled like HVAC and secrecy. "Cute word. We prefer celebrity felon with a cape."
They emerged into a room where the music was a migraine and morality had taken the night off. Hughie saw things he wouldn't have believed when his day started; things that weren't illegal because neither law nor physics had anticipated them. He flinched, then stared, then flinched again.
Butcher watched him watch. "There's your education," he said in Hughie's ear. "They're not gods. They're arseholes with agents."
"Why are we here?" Hughie asked, eyes carefully anywhere else.
"Because there's a bloke what can't keep his nose out of places it ain't invited," Butcher said, tipping his head toward a VIP corridor. "Translucent. Invisible perv. Likes to hang about in bogs and ladies' changing rooms. You saw an accident; I see a pattern."
"You want me to… what, fight him?"
Butcher laughed, the kind you don't enjoy hearing. "Christ, no. I want you to plant a little bug for me. We get a read on Vought, we see the rot inside the walls. You up for a bit of civil disobedience?"
Hughie looked at his hands as if they might answer. "I'm a retail clerk."
"Today," Butcher said. "Tomorrow you're useful."
---
On a rooftop two blocks away, Cian leaned on a billboard support and listened to the building breathe. The club's feeds ran through a Vought-owned backbone that tasted like antiseptic. He introduced a hairline stutter—sixteen milliseconds here, thirty-two there—just enough to blur edges if anyone decided to reconstruct Butcher's evening. A kindness for the future.
His phone buzzed once: NEST QUIET. ROBIN SLEPT. He closed his eyes. Let it be true, he asked no one. When he opened them, the city still required work.
---
The settlement meeting was in a conference room that didn't have a soul but had very nice glass. The Vought lawyer had a smile made of anesthesia. He slid a paper across to Hughie and a check that looked like a number you give to an inconvenience.
"We're deeply sorry for your loss," the lawyer said in a tone that was not sorry and would be repeated verbatim in twenty minutes to someone else. "This NDA protects your privacy in this difficult time. You'll find our offer—generous."
Hughie held the pen like a confession. He saw a flash of Robin's laugh and his own face reflected in the conference table like a question he couldn't answer. He put the pen down.
"I need time," he said.
"Of course," the lawyer said, as if he were offering sunlight. "It's an open window."
On the street, Butcher grinned like a wolf that had just watched a sheep insult a shepherd. "That's the spirit. Now, when you go back—because you will—we tuck a little present under their desk."
"I didn't say I was going back."
"You didn't have to," Butcher said. "You're a polite boy. Polite boys tidy up, even when it's someone else's mess."
Hughie hated how right that felt. "And if I don't?"
"Then you go home and learn to love the story they wrote for you," Butcher said, soft. "Some people can. If you can't, we'll be here."
---
Cian perched on a ledge across from Vought Tower like a gargoyle with better hair. The tower glowed: too much money pretending to be ethics. People flowed in and out in curated currents. He took a breath and wove a net—thin as spider silk and twice as clever—over a slice of the lobby's sensor suite. Not a blackout. Never a blackout. Blackouts create questions. He made it… sleepy. The cameras would nap if someone did something unremarkable in a bathroom for twelve seconds.
Twelve seconds is all a brave retail clerk needs to ruin a giant's morning.
He whispered it to the circuitry like a bedtime story: you're a little tired; you'll blink longer than usual; nothing important happens while you sleep.
Then he waited for the boy who was about to become a plot point.
---
Hughie returned to Vought with his best shirt ironed and his hands shaking. The receptionist had a smile like a theme park. The elevator was too bright and had music that begged you to be less than you were. The conference room's glass watched him arrive.
The lawyer's apology was the same sentence in a different mouth. The NDA sat there like a wager he wasn't meant to win.
His phone buzzed. A text from a number he didn't recognize: Breathe. Bathroom. Now. He started, looked around, felt stupid, and excused himself because everyone is allowed to be human for ninety seconds.
He found the bathroom by accident even though he'd already memorized the floor map while pretending not to. It was all chrome and echo. He closed himself into a stall and sat because standing felt like auditioning for a different life. He pulled the bug from his pocket—a ridiculous little thing that looked like a coat button and felt like the weight of a decision.
"Okay," he told the tile. "Okay."
He stuck it under the lip of the sink counter with hands that wanted to drop it. He held his breath without knowing why.
Above him, the cameras blinked. One, two… twelve seconds of a nap they did not know they were taking.
Hughie stood, flushed for verisimilitude because some part of him believed in theater, and washed his hands meticulously because guilt is tidy. He looked at himself in the mirror and saw a man pretending to be the sort of man who does things. He didn't hate it.
He walked back into the conference room and stunned himself by signing.
The pen's plastic bit into his finger. The check slid across like a reward for cowardice. He put both in his pocket and tried to swallow the sense that he had swallowed himself.
Outside the building, Butcher was waiting against a lamppost, grin already in place. "Atta boy," he said. "Baby's first felony."
"I signed their NDA," Hughie said, sick.
Butcher shrugged. "And? You gonna sue yourself?"
"I feel awful."
"Good," Butcher said. "Means you're not them."
---
Somewhere between the lobby and the street, a whisper of movement brushed Hughie's skin in a way that wasn't air. It felt like a static shock and a pat on the back from someone you hadn't met. He turned, saw no one, and told himself to stop inventing conspiracies.
On the roof across the avenue, Cian exhaled. The bug was in. The cameras had yawned and forgotten. He allowed himself the smallest nod to no one in particular.
"Walk away, kid," he said, but the wind took it.
He heard the first ping almost before the Vought network did—a little curious chirp as Translucent's personal sensor suite flagged a new radio frequency in his home. The data moved like a grassfire down a hill. Cian could stop it. He didn't.
The story needed its hunter.
He stood, stretched, and let himself feel the smallest ache of what he'd done earlier on Ninth. Robin alive. Hughie alive. A lie installed between them like a temporary wall you promise to remove when the paint dries.
He told himself again that restraint is a power and not a failure.
---
Night fell like a decision. The city rearranged its faces.
The door chime at the electronics store made the same polite noise it always made. Hughie looked up from a stack of boxed speakers and said, "Hey, we close at nine," because retail scripts are how you pretend the world is normal.
No one answered. The door closed. The chime forgot to say goodbye.
He shrugged, went back to straightening a display that didn't need straightening, and then decided his bladder was a problem he could solve. He left the counter, flipped the "Back in 5" sign that never actually meant five, and went to the tiny bathroom in the back that smelled like lemon cleaner and defeat.
He washed his hands because life is ridiculous and then saw it: nothing. Which is to say, an absence where presence should be. Steam on the mirror curling in a shape that suggested a shoulder where no body stood. A glimmer of pressure on air where a face might hover if you believed in ghosts with opinions.
Hughie's breath stuttered. "Hello?" he said, because his brain was in the habit.
The door behind him clicked shut even though he hadn't touched it. The lock turned with the neat arrogance of a man who has never asked permission in his life.
Something he couldn't see leaned very gently against the bathroom stall and smiled.
"Evening," Translucent said, voice rich with the comfort of a stalker in his natural habitat. "We need to have a chat about wires."
Hughie's spine turned to a ladder with a rung missing.
Across town, Cian's head came up like a dog hearing its name in a crowd. The network shivered with a motion that meant contact. He put two fingers to the city's pulse and slipped.
"Okay," he said to the night, and the thunder in his chest grinned with him. "Let's go ruin a tidy story."
—End of Chapter 1.