Chapter 16: THE COMPOUND V KID
The crowd on Garrison Avenue was wrong.
I'd spent four days running street-level patrols through the Bronx—nothing dramatic, just the same pattern I'd established in Washington Heights. Fix what's broken. Help who needs helping. Let the phones record and the system feed. But this crowd wasn't watching someone fix a hydrant.
This crowd was silent. And backing away.
I pushed through the edge of the gathering and saw what they were running from.
A teenager crouched behind a dumpster, maybe sixteen, his skin flickering with unstable light. Energy discharge—blue-white, erratic, the kind of thing that happened when Compound V met an adolescent nervous system without the stabilization protocols Vought used on their sanctioned subjects.
His hands were leaving scorch marks on the asphalt where they touched.
Three NYPD officers had their weapons drawn thirty yards back. One of them was shouting into a radio. None of them were approaching.
"Oh, no."
I knew these symptoms. Not from anything a stunt coordinator should know—from watching season two of the show, from the subplot about black-market V hitting the streets, from the bodies that piled up when teenagers tried to become heroes and got chemistry experiments instead.
The power expression was tied to emotional state. The kid was terrified, which meant the energy was building instead of dissipating. If nobody calmed him down, he'd burn out in an hour—or explode and take half the block with him.
The cops couldn't help. They'd shoot him the moment he moved wrong, and bullets would just make it worse.
"This is insane," I thought. "You're baseline human. You can't—"
But I was already moving.
"Hey."
I stopped ten feet from the dumpster. Hands visible. Voice steady. The kid's eyes found me through the energy haze—wild, wet with tears, the pupils dilated wrong.
"My name's Harley. What's yours?"
"Stay back!" The energy flared. A section of the dumpster started to glow cherry-red where his shoulder touched it. "I'll—I'll burn you—"
"Maybe." I sat down. Cross-legged, on the asphalt, making myself as small and non-threatening as a six-foot man with a cast on his wrist could manage. "But I'm going to stay anyway. What's your name?"
A pause. The energy flickered—still dangerous, but the rhythm had changed.
"Tyler."
"Tyler. Okay." I kept my voice conversational. Like we were just two people talking on a street corner, no phones recording, no cops with weapons drawn, no crowd of terrified onlookers. "Tyler, I know this is scary. I know you didn't ask for this."
"I just wanted—" His voice cracked. Sixteen years old, crying behind a dumpster, burning holes in reality because someone sold him a chemical lie. "I just wanted to be strong. Like them. Like The Seven."
"Like the monsters," I didn't say. "Like the people who've never saved anyone they couldn't monetize."
"I know," I said instead. "I know. But you're stronger than you think. Right now, this thing inside you is reacting to how scared you are. The more scared, the bigger it gets. Can you focus on something else? Not the power—something else. Your mom. Your friends. What's your favorite movie?"
"What?"
"Favorite movie. First thing that comes to mind."
"I—" He blinked. The energy stuttered. "Spider-Man. The first one. With Tobey Maguire."
"Good choice. Classic. You remember the part where he's on the bridge? He's trying to save Mary Jane and the kids at the same time, and he can't let go of either one?"
"Yeah."
"You're doing that right now. You're holding onto fear and you're holding onto the power and you can't let go of either one. But you don't have to be Spider-Man, Tyler. You can let go. The power's not yours—it's just chemistry. It'll pass if you let it."
Twenty minutes.
I sat on the asphalt for twenty minutes while Tyler's hands melted holes in the ground. The energy discharge slowed—gradually, agonizingly—as he focused on something other than terror. I asked about his school. His friends. His mom. Anything to keep him talking, keep him grounded, keep him human instead of chemical.
The cops stayed back. The crowd stayed silent. Eleven phones recorded every second.
I didn't think about the phones. I didn't think about the system or the belief seeds or the crystallization threshold. I thought about a scared kid who'd wanted to be a hero and got a nightmare instead.
Eventually, Tyler's skin stopped flickering. The energy discharge faded to a faint glow, then nothing. He slumped against the dumpster—exhausted, wrung out, but alive.
I stood up. My ribs ached from sitting too long, and the cast on my wrist had gotten hot from the ambient heat.
"You're going to be okay," I told him. "The V will work its way out of your system in a few hours. Drink water. Eat something. You're going to feel like hell, but you're going to be okay."
"How—" Tyler looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes. "How did you know what was happening to me?"
I didn't answer.
His mother arrived before I had to—running from somewhere up the block, pushing through the crowd, pulling her son into her arms with the desperate strength of someone who'd thought she'd lost him.
I walked away before anyone could thank me.
[BELIEF EVENT: HIGH-INTENSITY WITNESSED ACT]
[OBSERVERS: 47 DIRECT | 11 RECORDING DEVICES]
[NEW BELIEF SEED DETECTED: "UNDERSTANDS V-USERS" — 2,147 BELIEVERS]
[NEW BELIEF SEED DETECTED: "EMPATHY" — 728 BELIEVERS]
The system notification appeared as I reached the edge of the crowd. I processed it without breaking stride.
"Empathy." Not a power—a character trait. The system tracked it anyway, probably because it fed Presence and generated high-quality admiration-belief.
"Understands V-users." That one was more dangerous. It implied inside knowledge—the kind of knowledge a stunt coordinator shouldn't have.
If anyone asked how I'd known what to do, I'd need an answer. "I've been researching Compound V since the scandal broke, like everyone." It was thin, but it might hold.
The alternative was the truth, and the truth was impossible.
[BP: 2,089 | LS: 287]
["SUPER DURABILITY" SEED: 7,234 BELIEVERS]
The numbers climbed on the subway ride home. Clips were already spreading—the twenty minutes of me sitting with Tyler, not moving, not flinching, while his hands burned through solid metal.
"He understands Supes" was the new narrative. I could feel it forming in the belief patterns, a story people wanted to tell because it explained something that didn't make sense otherwise.
"How did he know?" Tyler had asked.
The internet would fill in its own answers.
And in forty-eight hours, Nadia Kazan would publish an article asking the exact same question.
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