Clark had been reading Homelander for most of the morning. He did not use his x-ray vision or his hearing. He relied on years of practice watching human beings navigate rooms they believed belonged to them. When Homelander finally arrived, the shifts in his expression required no special equipment to decipher. Arrogance, jealousy, anxiety, and condescension all operated simultaneously, completely lacking the social filters most adults eventually learned to apply.
The delayed entrance was deliberate. He needed to be last, to enter a room rather than be present when others arrived. Clark had catalogued this same pattern at the armored truck two days ago. A rapid arrival meant to establish ownership, followed by a subtle recalibration when Clark failed to behave as expected. It was a juvenile hostility communicated through small performances. It was an indirect resistance, entirely unaware of how loudly it broadcast itself.
He's never had to share a stage before, Clark thought. Not once, in whatever life produced him.
Jealousy was not a mystery. Clark had known competitive people and understood the architecture of resentment. What failed to align was the proportion. Homelander's response far exceeded the provocation. Two days of proximity, one shared press conference, and zero direct conflict. A typical adult, even a highly competitive one, did not run this hot over so little.
That pointed to a foundational flaw. It was not a behavioral habit that self-awareness could correct. It was structural, presenting a sound exterior while failing at a depth the surface concealed.
Clark was still running this assessment when Homelander settled into his chair and took control of the room.
"Now that everyone's here, let's get to it." Homelander scanned the table. "Translucent. You start."
Translucent pulled a folder and slid it toward the center of the table. He moved fast, eager to present. "Three weeks to release," he said. "And I've already got bootleg merchandise moving on Fifth Avenue. We're looking at over a billion dollars in copyright losses for Vought annually, and we each get four percent. They are literally stealing money out of our pockets."
"Four percent," someone repeated flatly.
"He's also got lawyers billing more per hour than the rest of us see in per diems," another voice added, slow and pointed. "High earners apparently get a different table. Some of us are still waiting to find out where that table is."
Clark looked down at his hands.
Jude had outlined the reality of Vought before Clark ever set foot in the building. It was not a hero organization, but a brand management firm that utilized superhumans as a more effective product category than television. Clark had listened, and he had believed him. Yet he had still arrived this morning harboring some residual expectation that the room would match its public facade. He thought the agenda might hold a mission briefing or an after-action review. Something resembling the purpose these people nominally served.
Instead, they disputed royalties. Envy denominated in percentages. They were arguing over the allocation of money they had already decided they deserved.
I don't want to be in this room anymore, Clark thought. It was the sharpest realization he had formed all morning.
He had braced himself for the fraud. He had not anticipated the complete abandonment of the pretense. Homelander at least maintained the costume of leadership. He sighed, deployed magnanimous patience, and offered polished displays of forbearance. The others discarded the costume entirely. The concept of heroism was not merely absent; it had been assessed, deemed commercially unnecessary, and quietly buried around the first licensing deal.
In this world, Clark thought, it had not merely died. It had been declared a liability.
"Alright, alright." Homelander raised a hand. The room quieted instantly. The occupants had all calculated the power differential and arrived at the identical sum. Homelander let the silence stretch, ensuring everyone understood who had manufactured it, then smiled. It was the polished expression Clark had logged during press conferences and public appearances. "We're a team. We don't argue over percentages." His gaze shifted to Annie, then to Clark. "And we have two new members today."
He pivoted the meeting.
"Let's talk recent saves. Who wants to—" He looked past The Deep, whose hand had already risen. The Deep still operated on an outdated assumption of how this room functioned. Homelander looked directly at Black Noir instead. "Noir. You go first."
Black Noir said nothing.
He occupied his chair with a heavy, absolute stillness. It was not the temporary pause of a man waiting to speak, but a permanent, natural state. His hands rested flat on the table. The mask communicated nothing and offered nothing. He sat among them with the permanence of a fixed object.
The Deep lowered his hand. His expression shifted, conducting a slow, careful reorganization. He converted his embarrassment into a practiced, neutral mask. He picked a blank section of the table and stared at it.
Coward, Annie thought.
Clark noted the exchange. He was constructing a working map of the room's internal structure. He tracked who deferred to whom, who served primarily as a target for public diminishment, and what the actual hierarchy was beneath Vought's printed organizational chart. The map was clarifying. This group were not a functional team. They were a managed roster of assets. The entire organizational structure existed solely to reinforce one person's sense of position.
Homelander's heroic leadership was a studied simulation, polished to pass at a distance but hollow underneath. Clark saw it clearly. What made it worse was that the others did not even bother performing. Homelander was counterfeit, and the rest had stopped pretending entirely.
This world, Clark thought, and let the thought drift away.
Noon. Jude checked out of the hotel.
The logistics simplified considerably without Clark. When Clark slept there, securing a place meant hunting for two adjacent vacancies on the same floor and paying in cash without raising questions. That process had consumed three days. Now he just needed a regular studio. One room, leased in a decent neighborhood without complicated follow-up inquiries. He would start the hunt after lunch. He would find a cheap bed somewhere and move himself.
The wallpapered room was where he actually lived. He had invested time into that space after his last return, making it functional and reasonably comfortable. The apartment was just infrastructure. Its primary purpose was to exist at the right address.
He crossed the lobby with his bag. The television above the reception desk caught his attention.
A-Train stood at a podium. The morning's press conference cycled on the screen. The venue backdrop featured Vought's standard co-branding, every element curated to project sincerity.
"Trust us. Trust Vought."
Jude kept walking. He read the rest of the speech from its shape alone. It was the grammar of an incident undergoing reclassification. No serious injury equated to no serious consequence. No consequence meant no serious examination required. The language did not lie directly. It simply shifted facts between categories. By the time a viewer registered the shift, the conversation had already progressed past the point of objection.
He stopped briefly, watching the faces at the reception desk.
Both receptionists stared at the screen. Not with cynicism. Not with the skepticism of people who had established a baseline. They displayed the uncomplicated warmth of people watching someone they believed in.
Fifteen years of that, Jude thought. He started moving again. Fifteen years of continuous programming, initiated before these people had fully formed their frameworks for evaluating the world. Vought had not just built celebrities. It had built a conceptual infrastructure. A set of neural connections reinforced so consistently that contradictory data had nowhere to attach. The word hero had been welded to faces, and those faces had been welded to justice, fairness, and honesty. The weld was old, strong, and invisible from the exterior.
That's why the Butcher becomes a hero in this universe, he thought. Someone had to be the load-bearing counter-structure. Systems like Vought did not collapse from the inside. They required someone striking from a completely different direction.
He walked out into the noon light and did not look back at the screen.
The earpiece chimed.
"Hey, Superman," he said. "How'd the meeting go?"
The answering voice belonged to Annie.
"They took him to run tests after," she said. "I'm looping you in. He's walking me through it now."
"I'm here," Clark confirmed. His audio fed in from a different angle. "Vought's protocol. They wanted precise calibration data on my X-ray vision and hearing. Sensitivity parameters."
"They put everyone through ability screening during hero selection," Annie said. Her voice carried the slight edge of someone spotting a discrepancy. "You've never had a physical with them before? Not once?"
"I wasn't in the pipeline," Clark said. "I wasn't involved with the organized hero process before joining the team."
"Okay, but your power profile overlaps almost entirely with Homelander's. You'd think the first things they'd want to map would be the combat data. Flight ceiling, strength threshold, thermal range."
"Intelligence gathering and combat capability are both operational priorities," Clark said. "Vought may have its own reasoning for sequencing the surveillance parameters first."
Jude listened without speaking.
"Compare yourself to him, then," Annie said. "X-ray first."
"His penetration is stronger," Clark said. His tone remained perfectly flat. "Lead is my limit. Standard lead shielding is enough to block my vision. His threshold is higher. It takes the combination of lead and zinc together to stop his."
"And hearing?"
"Also him. He can isolate sound at block distance. Individual conversations, through floors. My reception through solid barriers drops off significantly. Walls attenuate it."
Jude was quiet for a moment.
He let the data settle into his mind, holding it in suspension until its use became apparent. He filed it under Clark's weaker state after saving the other Clark.