"What?" A-Train said.
He had heard the question perfectly well. The word hung there, buying him a fraction of a second to recalibrate, to trace the trajectory of what had just been fired at him.
Clark turned from the blank television screen. The press conference venue was several blocks away. A-Train had made it back to Vought Tower in under two minutes. He had stayed exactly as long as the cameras required, and not a second more.
"Do you remember the name of the girl you almost hit?"
The repetition stripped away any pretense of a misunderstanding. A-Train tightened his jaw. Clark knew the speedster despised the press conference. Vought's carefully composed PR stunt had used A-Train's apology as the launchpad for Superman's public integration into the team. A-Train had been framed as the liability who required a braking system, and the sting of that framing still radiated off him.
"Her name?" A-Train dropped his pitch. "What's her name got to do with me? The press conference is done. The incident is closed. That's what 'resolved' means."
"So you don't know it," Clark said.
"I didn't say that."
"Her name is Robin," Clark said. His tone remained perfectly level. "She's twenty-four. She's a college student. She has a boyfriend. Her parents are in their early fifties. She works hard and visits her family often, and she brings them things when she comes." He paused, letting the silence expand. "She isn't a background character. She's not a pedestrian generated to create an obstacle in a chase scene. She's a person who was almost killed, and she has a name."
Maeve glanced at Clark. Her eyebrows lifted slightly, then settled into a look of quiet, inevitable recognition.
A-Train ground his teeth.
He knew Clark was right. That was the problem. The capacity for guilt still existed somewhere inside him, but Vought had taught him how to route around it. The endorsements were real. The cheering was real. He could turn on any screen and see a version of himself that was flawless, necessary, and vital. When the entire apparatus of Vought International insisted he was a hero, it was nearly impossible to see himself as anything else.
Clark had just forced him to look.
"She's not dead." A-Train raised his chin. "She's fine. She didn't get so much as a scratch. Which means there's no harm, which means there's nothing to judge. What gives you the right to stand there and look at me like I'm in a courtroom?"
He pointed a finger at Clark's chest. "I didn't do anything wrong."
Clark did not raise his voice.
"If you keep believing that," he said, "you will make a catastrophic mistake eventually. You cannot help people with their pain if you won't take the time to understand it." He held A-Train's gaze without blinking. "And when you can't do that, when you've stopped being able to feel what you're responsible for, everyone around you will know it before you do."
The room went dead silent. Nobody offered a counterargument.
The door opened.
An empty suit and a pair of glasses walked through the doorway, moving at the height and gait of an average man.
"Big crowd today," Translucent said. His cheerful voice echoed from somewhere inside the floating collar. "Looks like the new guy knows how to make an entrance."
Nobody responded. A-Train kept his eyes locked on Clark. Maeve glared at the empty suit. Her posture went rigid, carrying the exact, sharp hostility of someone who had recently delivered a physical beating and was ready to do it again.
Translucent paused. A low, uneasy sound echoed from where his stomach would be. He pulled out a chair and sat down without another word.
A-Train stared at Clark for another long second. His eyes narrowed as he weighed his options. Another one like Homelander, he thought. The realization soured his expression. He dropped into his seat, the chair legs scraping harshly against the floor.
The Deep walked in next. He scanned the room, forcing his shoulders to drop as he strolled toward the table.
"Homelander not here yet? He's usually—"
Nobody answered. A-Train and Translucent stared ahead, consumed by their own frustrations. Clark and Maeve knew exactly what had happened in the Hall of Heroes the previous afternoon. Neither of them made any move to help The Deep pretend otherwise.
The Deep found his chair. His right hand twitched, reaching involuntarily to cup his opposite wrist. The fracture had been set, but seeing Clark brought the phantom impact rushing back to the surface. He lowered himself into his seat carefully and fixed his eyes on the tabletop.
He was a bully who feared the strong. The Deep had run the numbers after yesterday's encounter in the hall. He had concluded that Superman and Homelander operated on the exact same tier of violence, and that realization had entirely erased his interest in causing problems.
The door opened again. A man dressed entirely in black stepped inside. He offered no words and made no eye contact. He walked straight to a chair at the round table and sat down, remaining perfectly motionless.
Clark looked at him. Black Noir. He was silent and permanently masked. Clark's instincts tugged at him, urging his vision to peel back the layers of the man's physiology to see what was underneath. But the mask was a boundary. Looking through it required a deliberate choice, and Clark decided he was not going to cross that line without a reason.
He turned his head away.
Annie came in last.
"Thought maybe the pressure got to be too much," The Deep said. He offered a quick, testing smirk, probing to see if a new day had reset the hierarchy.
"I'm fine," Annie said.
She walked to the chair next to Clark and sat down. It was a deliberate choice, not just an empty seat. Her shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch.
She looked across the table at The Deep.
The faint, ambient shimmer building in her irises was not an outright threat; it was a simple reminder. The Deep swallowed, shifted his focus, and found a spot on the far wall to stare at.
They waited.
Seven people sat around the table. The chair at the head remained empty.
"Meeting was supposed to start five minutes ago," Maeve said. "He's never late."
The door opened.
"Sorry. Terrorist incident in New Jersey. Required immediate attention."
Homelander strode into the room, his cape sweeping behind him. He moved toward his chair at a slow, measured pace, letting the silence stretch as everyone watched him. He sat down, draped his arms over the armrests, and looked over his team.
"Clark. Annie." Homelander flashed a bright, perfectly symmetrical smile that did not reach the muscles around his eyes. "Welcome to the Eight."
Clark met his gaze.
Listening to the steady, unbothered rhythm of Homelander's heartbeat, Clark knew with absolute certainty that there had been no terrorist attack in New Jersey.
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