The collar was a cold, constant pressure against my carotid artery, a vampire feeding on my potential. For three days, I played my part perfectly. I attended therapy, nodded blankly at Dr. Renshaw's psychobabble, and submitted to Mallory's "stability assessments" that were thinly veiled power-stress tests. I was the model prisoner.
But inside, I was a storm contained in glass. The muffled echoes had not gone quiet; they had adapted, learning to communicate in the narrow bandwidth the inhibitor allowed. Their voices were now a low, constant strategic hum in the base of my skull.
The dampening field has a rhythm, Graviton noted, his perception tuned to the fundamental forces. *It pulses at 0.7-second intervals to conserve power. A micro-fracture in the field appears at the peak of each pulse. It is 0.0003 seconds wide. Insufficient for escape. But a needle can pass through a crack a thread cannot.*
A needle of thought, the Hypnotist purred. Not power. Influence. We cannot command the air to move, but we can suggest to a mind that it is thirsty.
This was our breakthrough. The collar suppressed metaphysical energy—telekinesis, electrokinesis, transformation. But the hypnosis was different. It was a function of pure will, a psychic virus that required only the most minuscule energy output to latch onto a host mind and replicate itself using the host's own brainpower.
My "homework" was a field test. A Vought security guard, a man named Evans, was assigned to discreetly follow me whenever I left my apartment. He was my shadow, his mind a simple, orderly structure of protocol and mild suspicion.
I was walking through the Vought employee park, a sad little patch of artificial greenery, with Evans trailing fifty feet behind. I focused, not on breaking the collar, but on threading a single, silken thought through that 0.0003-second fracture.
I didn't push. I didn't command. I simply suggested.
Your left shoe is untied.
A moment later, I heard Evans stop. I glanced back. He was looking down at his perfectly tied boot, a confused expression on his face. He shook his head and kept walking.
The coffee you drank an hour ago was sour. Your stomach is unsettled.
Within minutes, he was shifting his weight uncomfortably, a hand drifting to his abdomen.
It worked. On a small, almost pathetic scale, it worked. I couldn't control him, but I could plant seeds of suggestion. It was a start. A tiny, hidden key.
My burner phone, hidden in a shielded compartment in my apartment, had one new message from Maeve, decrypted through a code we'd established based on baseball statistics.
Brandt a ghost. Wiped clean. But ghosts leave stains. Digging deeper. Found a name: Jonah Vogelbaum. Architect. Retired. In protective custody. Location unknown. Tread carefully. H's paranoia is spiking.
Vogelbaum. The name hit me with the force of a physical blow. I'd seen it in Noir's fragmented memories—a kind-faced man with sad eyes, standing behind a young Homelander, a data tablet in his hand. The architect.
Finding him was the next step. But "protective custody" meant either a CIA black site or, more likely, a Vought "retirement community"—a gilded prison for those who knew too much. Accessing that data with the collar on was impossible. I needed a different approach. I needed someone on the outside.
Butcher was the obvious, dangerous choice. But contacting him was a nuclear option. Homelander's digital surveillance was omnipresent. Any signal I sent was a flare in the night.
Unless...
An idea, cold and ruthless, formed. It wasn't enough to send a message. I had to send a message through Homelander. I had to use his own paranoia as my carrier pigeon.
During my next "stress test" in a reinforced training room, I was meant to demonstrate my controlled, limited abilities. I focused my dampened telekinesis, lifting a series of weighted plates under the watchful eyes of Mallory and a remote camera I knew Homelander monitored.
As I lifted the final plate, I let a flicker of frustration through—not enough to trigger the collar, but enough to be perceptible to a hyper-aware observer. I let my eyes dart toward the camera for a fraction of a second, and I mout two silent words, shaping them with exaggerated care.
"Jonah Vogelbaum."
I let the plate drop with a loud clang, breaking the charade of control. I slumped, panting, playing the part of the exhausted, broken asset.
The next morning, the atmosphere in the tower was different. A new, sharper tension filled the air. Homelander was gone. Mallory informed me, her face a careful mask, that he was "conducting off-site threat assessment."
He had taken the bait. My whispered name had sent him hunting. He would tear the world apart looking for Vogelbaum, believing the architect was a threat to him. And in his violent, chaotic wake, he would create distractions, blind spots. Ripples in the pond that someone like Billy Butcher could swim through unseen.
It was a dangerous, desperate gamble. I was pitting one monster against another to create an opening. People would likely get caught in the crossfire.
But as the collar bit into my neck, a grim certainty settled over me. In a war against a god, you couldn't worry about the collateral damage. You had to become a strategist of chaos.
The first crack in the cage had been found. Now, it was time to start hammering.