He'd said he was going to tidy up. There was nothing to tidy.
Jude pulled the curtains closed, laid a mattress flat against the far wall, and pressed the wallpaper into place along the adjacent surface. That was the whole operation. Forty seconds, maybe less. Then he stepped through and left the bare room exactly as bare as it looked.
"There's really nothing better than a safe house that comes with its own villa."
Behind him, the nanobots completed their pass. A thin, imperceptible layer sealed every edge of the wallpaper flush against the wall, indistinguishable from any other interior surface. To anyone who opened the apartment door, it was a standard empty studio: one mattress, bare walls, uninteresting. A space that did not invite closer examination and would not receive it.
Inside was a different matter.
Jude expanded the monitor panel, took a piece of fruit from the Cornucopia, and settled in. The Cornucopia's produce had a quality that ordinary food lacked. Something in the texture, the residual effect, the way it resolved fatigue that had been accumulating since his last access to it. He'd been running on field rations longer than he'd realized. He started humming quietly, without intention. The way someone hums when something forgotten reminds them it's good.
If I processed Cornucopia yield into cat food at some point, the buff values would probably be meaningfully higher.
A note about Yomogi, filed for later.
On the monitor: a private room in a bar, the angle low and slightly off-center, the way a nanobot positioned near a wall joint would see it. A man sat at the table. Middle-aged, his face carrying a few days of deliberate stubble. The kind of look that was either menacing by nature or had simply stopped fighting the direction it was heading. He had a glass in front of him and a lit cigarette, and he flipped through the bar menu with the patience of someone who had zero interest in it.
Billy Butcher. Waiting for someone.
Jude had placed the nanobot the previous night. Standard practice at this point.
The surveillance method had generated intelligence advantages since the Battle of Jokes and Riddles. In Gotham, it had provided information no conventional reconnaissance could have produced. In Central City, with Satsuki added to the operation, the capability had reached a different tier entirely. She could cross-reference intercepts, access networked systems in real time, and run analysis while Jude was still processing the first frame of footage.
Against Reverse-Flash, who had held every physical advantage in the room, Jude had operated close enough to pull threads that mattered. Reverse-Flash had died believing he'd rewritten the future with his own hands, entirely unaware a second author had worked alongside him the whole time.
The current mission required Jude to join The Boys. Butcher did not want him.
Fine. Then I'll read the file first and join later. We'd be sharing the information eventually anyway. I'm just reading ahead.
He checked the timestamp. Butcher hadn't moved with any purpose in the past ten minutes. A few pages of the menu turned; the cigarette worked steadily. He was definitely waiting for someone.
The adjacent room's door swung open.
A man came out with the relaxed, slightly loose bearing of someone who'd eaten well and drunk more than intended. The smell of cheap liquor preceded him. He passed through the bar area without pausing.
Jude's attention fixed on him immediately.
Walk. Eyes. Hands.
The walk was the police walk. Not the swagger, not the uniform, but the specific low-level situational awareness people who spent years in high-alert environments absorbed into their muscle memory and never fully unlearned. The calluses on his hands were exactly where they'd be on someone who'd spent a decade carrying a sidearm regularly. The absence of a sidearm now hadn't rewritten the habit. He'd worked with enough officers since Joe West to recognize the pattern in seconds.
After the man cleared the doorway and moved out of frame, Butcher stood. He didn't look at his drink. He crossed directly to the room the man had vacated, moving with the deliberateness of someone who knew exactly what he was going in for and how long he had to do it.
He pulled the chair out from under the table.
A stack of documents lay flat on the seat, tucked beneath the table's apron, invisible from any angle that didn't involve moving the furniture. Someone had placed them there carefully, in advance.
Butcher took the documents back to his table and spread them flat. Jude leaned slightly closer to the monitor.
Police department papers. Dispatch records.
What does Butcher want with those?
He watched Butcher's fingers move across the pages. Not reading in sequence, but scanning. Looking for a specific entry, running through dates and locations.
"Satsuki," Jude said. "Pull the NYPD electronic dispatch records for the night of A-Train's incident. Everything logged in Queens. Any bank security alerts, robbery calls, anything that would justify a high-speed pursuit in that direction."
Satsuki had the results before Butcher moved through three more pages.
"Search complete. No bank security alerts triggered on that date. No robbery calls dispatched to Queens, no charges filed. No related entries logged the following day."
"Of course not." Jude leaned back. "Even in New York, bank robbers don't punch in on a random Tuesday. Scouting takes time, planning takes time, and if anything worth chasing in Queens had gone active that night, there'd be a paper trail leading somewhere."
He watched Butcher flip to another page.
"Which simplifies the question considerably. What was A-Train actually doing?"
"Butcher has real operational instincts," Jude said, half to himself, half to Satsuki. "His interpersonal skills have the warmth of a structural fire, but he thinks carefully. He didn't buy the press conference, and he's right not to. If Vought's PR department was going to sell a chase narrative, they'd anchor it to something that existed. A documented incident, something the public record could at least partially support. They've done it before."
"Confirmed," Satsuki said. "Comparative analysis of Seven-related public statements against incident documentation over the preceding decade returns several hundred discrepancies of similar structure. Full audit of Vought's broader hero roster not yet complete. Additional detail available on request."
"No need." Jude closed the feed. "If Butcher is following A-Train's trail, we follow A-Train's trail. And we have the advantage of knowing which direction he's going to look before he gets there."
He'd been tracking Butcher since the previous night and now possessed the coordinates of at least one underground safe house. Signal shielding was a reasonable countermeasure against most surveillance methods. It did nothing against nanobots, which simply ran to the surface to transmit.
Jude went to the kitchen and turned on the burner.
"Enough reconnaissance for one afternoon. Eat first."
By the time the pan warmed, Clark stood on a private driveway in front of a building that had brought him to a full stop mid-sentence.
"You're welcome to stay here," Ashley said, smiling the way someone does when presenting a property that requires no selling. "Or you can rent or buy outside. That's entirely your prerogative. Vought just asks that you cover those costs yourself, taxes included." She gestured at the structure behind her. "There's no obligation either way."
Clark looked at the building.
Three stories. Three hundred square meters of floor space, roughly, based on the footprint and the roofline. Private grounds, well-maintained. The kind of exterior that required regular attention from someone whose full-time job was providing it.
"You arranged something like this for everyone?"
"Not exactly." Ashley's expression shifted fractionally. "This was originally built as a shared recreational facility for The Seven. Communal rather than individual. But as you may have gathered at yesterday's meeting, the members of The Seven have established their own arrangements outside the company. They stopped using this space some time ago." She paused. "Starlight uses the dormitory that Lamplighter vacated. She either goes home or stays there after hours. This villa has been sitting empty. Given that you've come to New York from across the country with no existing accommodation here, it seemed the most practical assignment."
"Vought has a great deal of money," Clark said.
This was not a new conclusion. He'd walked through Wayne Manor in the Dark Multiverse and observed the operational footprint of the Justice League's base facilities. But those had existed within a context that made them logical. Clear purposes generating necessary infrastructure, means in proportion to function.
The Fortress of Solitude was his other reference point. Large, certainly, and vast in the ways that mattered. But its construction followed an alien logic. Its materials and dimensions were calibrated for uses that bore only nominal resemblance to what the word home meant to most people on Earth.
It was not a fair comparison.
This was simply a house. An extremely large, extremely well-kept house in New York City, offered without charge by a corporation that packaged superhumans as commercial products.
Clark looked at it more carefully. His attention snagged on a detail he couldn't quite resolve yet.
"Hmm." He tilted his head slightly. "This building..."
Something was wrong. He wasn't certain what it was yet. But the instinct was clean and immediate. The kind derived from a lifetime of noticing things that didn't add up.
He looked again.