Prologue
Project Helix Σ
The first time the lights went out in the nursery, the baby laughed.
It wasn't a room so much as a polished vault—triple-sealed doors, glass thick as a riot shield, fluorescent hum that made your molars ache. Two nurses in slate-blue scrubs leaned over a bassinet that wasn't quite a bassinet—more like a portable Faraday cage with a heartbeat monitor. The tag on the side read HELIX-03. Above it, a camera blinked red.
Grace Mallory watched from the observation deck with arms folded, jaw tight. She hated being here. Hated the gleam on the stainless steel and the moral vacancy of men who wore it like aftershave.
Stan Edgar stood beside her, immaculate as ever. "You brought the papers?" he asked, as if they were discussing office supplies.
"I brought my reputation," Mallory said. "Don't make me regret it."
Below, the baby flexed tiny fingers. The air thrummed. The fluorescent tube above the crib stuttered, then shattered—not out, but in—glass collapsing as if sucked by a vacuum. Sparks skittered across the bassinet like silver ants, fizzing away before they could bite. The child's eyes—impossibly blue, a laboratory sky—followed the sparks as though he had called them.
"Is that… normal?" a nurse said, which was the wrong question in a Vought lab.
Edgar's mouth hit the faintest curve. "Our normal."
Mallory didn't look at him. She watched the baby laugh at the broken light.
"His name?" she asked.
"Cian," Edgar said. "A gift. Consider it… good faith."
"Gifts don't come with blackmail attached."
"Everything comes with terms, Ms. Mallory. Even faith."
Beneath them, a tech slid a graphene sleeve around the child's forearm and injected a clear fluid into the port beneath. V-Omega, the modern masterpiece. Smuggled inside it, a molecule's worth of antique poison: V-1A, that dusty nightmare they scraped out of Soldier Boy like marrow. The dart hit the blood and the room went still in that special Vought way—where the world holds its breath while something irreversible happens.
The cameras flickered. A hairline crack traveled through the observation glass like it was searching for a pulse. Mallory made a fist. Edgar didn't move.
Electricity gathered in the air, a pressure front. The baby smiled wider, and the overhead monitors stuttered into a field of snow. For a second—less than a second, small enough to hide between blinks—Mallory thought she saw something in the room that wasn't the room: a corridor of blue-white thread running off into forever, and the child floating in it like a leaf.
Then the lights came back, the nurse exhaled a prayer she didn't believe in, and a faint scent of ozone hung over the metal crib.
Edgar clasped his hands. "Welcome to the world, Cian."
Mallory, who did not make a habit of praying, muttered one anyway.
---
If you grow up in a cage, you learn to decorate the bars.
Cian learned his first alphabet from warning labels. NO STEP, MAG-LOCK, CAUTION: LIVE CIRCUIT. He traced the letters with fingers that sometimes sparked just to tickle himself. The researchers loved that one. "He associates stimulus with humor," they wrote, as if they'd discovered joy. He learned language the way lightning learns the shortest path to ground—by making every wrong choice first and laughing at the smoke.
Grace Mallory visited twice a month. Not enough to save a child. Enough to keep a monster from being born in the dark.
She taught him card tricks because nobody looks twice at the hands of a child doing something useless, and useless things keep you human. She smuggled him stale jokes from field ops. Two Supes walk into a bar… He never got tired of them. She never got tired of pretending this would end any other way than the way it always ends—with Vought turning a life into a deliverable.
When he turned five, he ran faster than the camera shutter. One frame: a boy. Next frame: a blur and a thunderclap that rattled the instruments. No one had warned the sensors that the new variable wasn't speed; it was time—how he could put two seconds between the lab and himself like setting down a coffee cup.
"Not just electric," a tech whispered, awe souring into greed. "He's touching something… extra-dimensional."
"We don't do religion here," the chief scientist said, and named it Helix Σ Residual Field because if you label a miracle in Greek, it behaves.
The tests multiplied. Treadmills, catheters, electrodes. What is it with men who poke things that can burn you? Cian handled it the way small gods do—he played along until he was bored, then he broke something minor. A light. A camera. A security tech's pride.
By seven, he knew the facility's power map by smell. He could tell when a generator lied about being at forty percent. He learned to inhale electricity like soup and exhale it as a crackling laugh. When he wanted a day off, he ran slow and sweaty so they'd write fatigue and let him nap. "Lazy," a trainer wrote on a clipboard with the dissatisfaction of a man who never met a brilliant child. Cian liked the word. Wore it like a hoodie.
The switch happened on a Tuesday, because terrible things love Tuesdays. Mallory came in with eyes that were dusted in rage.
"Pack a bag," she said.
"I don't have a bag."
"Then take your hands."
She didn't point a gun at anyone, which was scarier. Papers were signed in rooms he never saw. Protocols folded like paper airplanes. Vought called it a joint transfer of asset custody. Grace called it theft with better stationery.
The CIA wing that took him in was called GreyWatch. Not a team, not a program—more like an ulcer in the budget with a clearance level. They taught him how to be a weapon and then, as an afterthought, how to be a person in between missions.
Hand-to-hand, then hands you didn't see. Czech at breakfast, Arabic at lunch, Mandarin by dinner—Cian learned them the way storms learn coastlines: by crashing into them until the edges changed. One instructor tried to break him with drills. Cian broke the clock instead. "We operate inside time," the man barked. "Sir," Cian said, "I operate wherever the hell is funny."
They gave him a name because anonymity is hard to file. Tempest. He hated it until he didn't. It looked good on envelopes they never opened.
Seduction, espionage, countersurveillance; walk into a room and you know who's dangerous by where the outlets are. He discovered that if he listened hard, he could hear circuits—banks of servers thrumming like wasps, a phone pulsing like a sleeping heart. He took apart locks by asking them nicely at the speed of electricity. He took apart people more gently.
He met Kimiko once in a corridor lined with doors that didn't open from inside. She wasn't Kimiko then, not to him. Just a girl with eyes that drank sound. He pressed his palm to glass between them and arced a tiny ribbon of light that danced like a fish. Her mouth did something like a smile. The file called her asset, which is a mispronunciation of survivor.
"Don't get attached," his handler said.
"I get attached to naps," Cian said. "People are harder but I'm trying."
---
The night Lamplighter found Grace Mallory, the world was cruel and bored.
It was a house, not a fortress. Lived-in, with shoes by the door and grandkid art on the fridge: blue suns, green cats, family drawn as five stick figures holding hands. Mallory's guard detail rotated like gears. On paper, no one knew who she was. In practice, the world is paper-thin when men like Vought start pushing.
Mallory didn't call. She didn't have to. The rumor of the op moved like a cold front: Lamplighter, fed a location by a very particular kind of coward, walking toward Grace with fire in his hands and absolution in his head.
Cian was already moving before the text hit his phone. Sneakers on hardwood, the hum of streetlights parting as he passed, every window he crossed turning into a mirror of a boy who didn't want the blood that came with being right on time.
He arrived on the inhaled second between door creak and match strike.
Lamplighter stood in the hallway, staff in hand, flame wearing his shoulders like a cape. He looked older than his press kit, younger than his atrocities. For a blink Lamplighter thought he saw a mirror—another handsome weapon in a black suit—until the edges of the mirror blurred with speed and the lightning stitched a bright seam in the dark.
In the living room, two children slept through their first apocalypse. Cian stepped so the sofa was behind him because lightning ain't subtle but it is considerate. "Turn around and leave," he said, voice casual like a store clerk's. "Your PR can survive the hit. Your skin cannot."
Lamplighter smiled in that brittle way Supes learn from media training. "Kid, do you know who I am?"
"I know you're about to make me work," Cian said, and scratched his ear like this was a chore.
Fire boiled out of Lamplighter's staff—yellow-white, hungry. The kind of chemistry that sues for wrongful death after it's done. Cian inhaled. The flames hit the bubble of air around him and hesitated, confused, then vanished like a mouth gone dry. Heat soaked into him, down to the marrow. He felt the sugar rush of stolen calories, the gentle pop of broken molecules repurposed. Thunder lifted the hair on his arms.
"Neat trick," Lamplighter croaked, eyes huge.
Cian tilted his head. "You brought a candle to a storm."
He moved between seconds. The room crystallized into stillness: smoke frozen, sparks hanging like stars, a droplet falling from a houseplant caught midair. He stepped around the flame's memory and placed his palm on Lamplighter's chest.
"Don't," he told himself, because he tried to be a better thing than the thing built out of him.
The staff twitched. The freeze wavered. The kid in the hallway took a breath behind him; a small, innocent, mustard-stained breath. The world snapped loose.
Cian smiled like gravity was a suggestion and pushed.
Lightning didn't so much strike as confide in Lamplighter the error of his ways. It didn't leave a hole. It left a history—everything Lamplighter had burned, returning as a single, perfect message delivered at the speed of yes. The staff detonated into glittering slag, the hall light burst into petals of hot glass, and Lamplighter dropped without time to be surprised.
Silence.
The kids kept sleeping because some miracles are small on purpose.
Mallory appeared in the doorway, bare feet, a pistol she didn't need. She saw the black scorch that had used to be a man and did not flinch. Then she saw the children intact and did. The relief was a wound opening. She looked up, found Cian with his hand still smoking, and for a second the handler mask slipped, and she was just a grandmother.
"Thank you," she said, which he wasn't ready to hear.
He shrugged like it was a prank. "He was loud. They were tired."
Mallory holstered the gun. Her eyes found the camera in the corner; the one Cian had fried when he walked in because the future needed the mercy of forgetting. "I can't put you in a report."
"You never do."
"I can't put you anywhere."
He winked. "Baby steps. Or, you know, baby sprints."
She wanted to scold him for joking. She wanted to check the pulse of a man who didn't deserve one. She wanted to sit on the floor and cry into her palms. Instead she crossed the room, touched the kids' hair, and straightened a lopsided blanket with the tenderness of a person who knew what she had almost lost.
"Get out the back," she said. "They'll have a contingency."
"I'll take the front."
"Cian."
"Grace."
Something like a smile fought its way to her mouth. "You're not a leash," she said. "You're a hurricane we aim."
"That's marketing," he said, but he liked that she'd said we.
He was gone by the time the first siren scratched the night. The neighbors would swear they saw lightning without clouds, heard thunder from inside the house. They'd be half right.
---
They called it what bureaucrats always call the unspeakable: a containment incident, category red. Two hours later, a file declared Lamplighter: KIA (Operational Accident), and a second file declared Tempest: KIA (Training Mishap), and then someone stapled them together and buried them under a mountain of clearance.
By morning, Stan Edgar had a copy. He didn't ask how. He never asked who unless it mattered more than why.
He called Mallory with a voice that could stage an IPO.
"You took something of ours," he said.
"You gave me a child," Mallory said, "so I gave him a life."
"You gave him an enemy."
"He was born with one."
Edgar let that sit like a coin on a table. "His existence remains mutually beneficial," he said at last. "You don't want your golden boy flying off the leash, and I don't want my city turned into airport soup."
"You going to tell Homelander?" Mallory asked.
"Tell him what?" Edgar said softly. "That his father's other experiment survived? That an unsanctioned lightning god finds him funny?"
"Funny," Mallory repeated, tasting the word like it had bones. "We do this my way. He stays off your books, off your cameras, off your Christmas cards. If Homelander even thinks about going rogue, I make a phone call."
"And I," Edgar said, "will make sure he believes the rumor. A storm on the horizon. A reason to keep smiling for the cameras."
She could hear the smile in his voice and wanted to break it. "You give him a glimpse," she said. "Just a taste. A shadow on the wall."
"Of course," Edgar said. "We all behave better in thunderstorms."
The Thunder Clause was born in that breath—unwritten, unacknowledged, unavoidable. Vought would pretend not to know. The CIA would pretend not to approve. Homelander would pretend not to be afraid.
And Cian, who hated leashes and loved jokes, would pretend he wasn't listening when men with titles built a fence around his life.
---
He spent the next years as a rumor with sneakers. He was a ghost in traffic cameras, a blur reflected in skyscraper glass, a glitch on Vought servers that techs blamed on coffee. He borrowed electricity from streetlights and paid it back with interest. He learned the city the way thieves do: by knowing which locks would rather be doors.
When he slept, the Speed Force hummed in his bones like a lullaby from a universe that didn't believe in bedtime. When he woke, he sometimes heard a sound like applause from very far away; maybe it was just the subways, or maybe the future clapping because he had not yet broken it.
Grace called. Sometimes he answered. More often he didn't. He liked her too much and himself too little to be reliable.
On a humid afternoon with the sky piled high over Midtown, his phone buzzed once with a GreyWatch tag he hadn't seen in months: EYES ON A-TRAIN — POSSIBLE V-ABUSE.
Cian put two fingers against a lightning-shaped scar on his ribs where Lamplighter's last breath had tried to make a home and grinned without humor.
"Let's see who's fastest when speed is the wrong metric," he told the air, and walked into the day so slow he left burn marks where seconds dragged.
New York sweated. The sky stacked heavy over Midtown and the crosswalk signals blinked like they were thinking about it. Hughie Campbell held his girlfriend's hand the way you hold a lifeline you don't know is one—loose, easy, future-shaped. Robin teased him about music, about lunch, about nothing; her voice skipped across the afternoon like a flat stone. Half a block away, a blue smear of a man ran a red light at Mach 1 and called it justice.
Cian already felt the hum before anyone heard the wind. A-Train's vibration carried through asphalt, up lamp posts, into the loose change in Cian's pocket. The speedster's heartbeat was wrong—jittering, boosted, the color of panic in a cardiogram. V-abuse, the text had said. He didn't need the memo.
He stepped out of a diner where the cook over-salted everything and the waitress had the eyes of a saint who refused canonization. He left cash on the table, a courtesies habit he'd picked up from someone he missed but would not name. The bell on the door tinkled. He put two fingers on the city's pulse and slid.
Time dilated. The people's faces stretched into the slow clarity of statues. Pigeons hung in the air like bad ideas. A bus exhaled a sigh that took a week to leave its grill. Cian walked into the syrup of it, breath easy, sneakers whispering on sidewalk. The world glittered with micro-choices—atoms deciding one more dance step before they called it a day.
A-Train arrived in the space between blinks: head down, pupils pinned, mouth flared open to drink speed. The current would carry him through two pedestrians and a future. One of them turned to say something about lunch.
Cian moved his hand, and the air obeyed him like a friend.
A pearly bubble unfolded, not visible so much as understood. It caught Robin around the ribs and lifted her off the collision vector by exactly the thickness of a breath. Her eyes widened, but terror never got the invitation; the second wasn't long enough. He palmed the kinetic force—raw, stupid, enormous—and bent it sideways into harmless work.
The shockwave needed somewhere to go. Cian gave it a target: safety glass, brick dust, the cherry slush spilled by a kid who'd dropped his drink a second earlier. He atomized the detritus into a red-tinted bloom that looked like tragedy to human senses. A-Train punched through the fake with a howl of displaced air and felt the brittle snap of impact he expected. He saw the color he feared. He kept running because that's what cowards and bullets do.
From the outside, it was exactly the story Vought required: blur, bang, red mist, a boy staggered backward with horror on his face.
Inside the bubble, Robin faced the storm's eye. She didn't scream. She watched lightning crawl spider-small over the black glove cupped against her shoulder and blinked like the universe had tapped her on the head and said, Move, sweetheart. Cian tucked her against him and stepped out of the moment.
They were in an alley a borough away before the sound finished leaving the block.
Robin tried to run back on instinct, shoulders tense to fight physics for the right to grieve. Cian held her with careful hands.
"You're safe," he said. It wasn't an order. It was a diagnosis.
"Who—" Her voice fractured, found itself. "Hughie. He—he thinks—"
"He has to," Cian said, softer than he wanted to be. "For a bit."
She stared. The alley made a cathedral of trash and summer heat. A rat auditioned for a different story across the way. "You want me to let him think I'm dead?"
"I want him to stay alive," Cian said. "Vought will roll a truck over his life if they think there's a hole in the narrative. If you move, they move. If they move, they crush. Let him hate a ghost for a minute. He'll hate better things soon."
"Who are you?" she asked.
"Someone who ruins tidy stories," he said, and that was almost honest. "We'll get you to people who can hide you so deep the city forgets to dream you. Then we'll fix the part where the world lies to good men."
"You don't know he's good," she said, anger beginning where fear used to be.
Cian smiled with half his mouth. "I know he waits when the light says walk. That's rarer than it should be."
He texted Mallory without looking, thumbs a blur that didn't leave fingerprints: BIRD IN HAND. NEED NEST. The reply arrived on the inhale. NEST READY. He took Robin's trembling hand and laced it with electricity gentle as static. "You'll hear a door," he said. "You'll want to run through it. Don't. Walk. You only run when it's a game."
"You're a lunatic," Robin said.
"Occupational hazard."
He stepped, and the alley became a safehouse on a quiet street that had never made the news. Curtains, plants too healthy to be real, a couch designed by someone who believed in mercy. Grace Mallory opened the door before he knocked. She saw Robin, saw the not-dead of her, and the hard lines of her face reorganized, just for a breath, into love for a stranger on principle.
"We'll explain later," Mallory said. "For now, you're gone."
Robin looked past her, wanting the impossible. "I have to—"
"I know," Grace said, and the kindness in it was a wound. "We'll make it count."
Cian left before the gratitude could weaponize him.
On the block where the world thought a girl had died, Hughie Campbell's knees found the sidewalk. He shook like something optional had been removed from him. People screamed at frequencies that break glass. The red mist drifted away in little question marks.
Cian watched from the roofline as the story set like concrete. He felt the wrongness in his teeth—how truth and necessity share a closet. He could see the route it would force Hughie down: the electronics store, the charismatic stranger with the smile like a regret and a plan, the employment offer that wasn't. He didn't want to shepherd a single step. The fun of chaos is that it surprises even you.
He let the city breathe him back in and he moved on.
Stan Edgar did his part the way kings do dentistry: without fanfare, with an array of very clean tools. Homelander met him in a private screening room where Vought pretended art still mattered.
A clip played: a parking garage camera trying to do math it hadn't learned. A figure crossed the frame in a streak that wasn't light, wasn't weather, wasn't supposed to exist. The image froze on a smear that hinted at a human face and then, less than a frame later, nothing.
"Who's that?" Homelander asked, voice butter over a knife.
"A rumor," Edgar said. "Government boogeyman. Something to keep our people conscientious."
Homelander's smile curdled at the edges. "There are no boogeymen."
"Of course not," Edgar said. "But isn't it reassuring? That someone out there loves accountability."
Homelander watched the still like it had done something to him personally. It had. Half-remembered whispers about his father's other experiments knocked on doors in his head he didn't like opening. "If he's real," he said, "I'll handle it."
"I imagine you would," Edgar said, and switched off the screen like a benediction.
In the dark, Homelander kept smiling because that's what cameras need.
---
Victoria Neuman read the same clip three hours later on a device that definitely did not exist. She zoomed in until pixels were philosophy. "Cute," she said to an empty office. "Hello, lightning."
She drafted a speech about responsible supe oversight and deleted the part where she used the word deterrent. She wondered how to meet a rumor without introducing herself first. She wondered why she felt like flirting.
---
Annie January arrived in the city with a suitcase, a heart that believed in things you could name, and a suit tucked into a garment bag that carried the weight of a church. She smiled into bathroom mirrors to practice not looking scared. She had wished on stars because that's what small-town girls do when they don't know the star is a studio light.
Cian saw her on a platform poster and stopped because sincerity still surprises him. He pressed two fingers against the glass over her face like he was taking her pulse. "Please stay real," he said to a picture. "It's rarer than speed."
---
Night put on its sequins. Cian ran the city in long, lazy arcs, eating the static in neon signs that whistled their exhaustion, skirting the edges of conversations that would matter later. He ghosted through GreyWatch, lifted a burner, left a joke on a whiteboard to make some analyst's morning crueler and brighter: IF YOUR CONTINGENCY NEEDS A CONTINGENCY, YOU DON'T HAVE A PLAN; YOU HAVE A PRAYER. He stole a nap on the roof of a church because stained glass looks like sleeping lightning in the right moon.
Grace called. He let it ring three times because he enjoys pretending to be difficult, then answered because he wasn't.
"You could've told the boy," she said without hello.
"I could have told the world lots of things," he said. "I choose carefully."
"Careful isn't a word I associate with you."
"Then I'm evolving."
A quiet. "Thank you," she said again, which he was still not ready to hear.
"Don't make a habit," he said, and they both smiled into a call where no one could see.
"Edgar showed him a shadow."
"Homelander?"
"Mm."
"Good," Cian said. "He looks pretty when he's almost afraid."
"Don't get cocky."
"Grace," he said, fond, "that ship left before I could walk."
She exhaled. "We've entered the part of the story where accidents become accelerants."
"Then let's burn clean," he said, and hung up before she could argue metaphors.
---
Morning put coffee into people and bad ideas into meetings. The city woke, none the wiser, the way forests do after lightning has kissed one tree but not the next. Hughie Campbell stared at a stain on pavement that wasn't what he thought it was and made a choice about who he was going to be when the world asked impolite questions. Somewhere else, a recruiter in a cheap suit practiced a speech about answers. Annie carried her garment bag like a childhood she could still access if she pressed the right button. Victoria penciled a smile over a bomb. Homelander smiled at mirrors until they agreed with him.
And Cian—lazy, genius, chaos incarnate—stood on a rooftop over Fulton Street, hair snagging in the wind, eyes bright with the hum of a universe that refuses to slow down, and watched a city walk toward its first episode.
He stretched, checked his pulse against the city's, and grinned like a man with a secret and a habit.
"Alright," he told the morning. "Let's see what breaks beautifully."
—End of Prologue—