Chapter 2 — Glass Cage Tricks
Translucent liked bathrooms. Tiles made him feel clean about dirty things.
He leaned his invisible shoulder against the stall door like they were old friends. "You plant something in Vought for your little cop-buddy, Hughie?"
Hughie's tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. The mirror fogged itself into a ghost of a face where none should be. "I…I don't know what you're talking about."
"Sure." The lock clicked. The door swung in without being touched. "Let's not do the lying part. It bores me."
Hughie stumbled back into the stall, hip cracking against the toilet paper holder. "I work at a store."
"You work for my time," Translucent said, and something unseen tapped Hughie's cheek, gentle as a cat. "And right now? You're wasting it."
The light over the mirror buzzed. Then it sighed and went dim the way a room does when a storm walks in.
Cian was already in the building, folded into the seams where electricity forgets itself. The club across town, the conference room, the city—all of it sat on the same web. He plucked a single strand and the bathroom's cheap fluorescent took the hint. Not a blackout. A blink. He didn't need theatrics; he needed angles.
Don't save him, he told himself. Shape the fall.
Translucent moved, air scuffing against skin harder than diamonds. Hughie flinched and swung at nothing, hit everything, and bruised his own knuckles. The stall shuddered.
Cian nudged the sprinkler manifold in the ceiling a quarter of a turn. Pressure shifted. Somewhere, a valve considered ethics.
"Hey!" Hughie blurted, desperation cracking him open to creativity. He grabbed the soap dispenser and hurled it across the stall. It hit tile, exploded into a white tide, and slicked the floor.
Invisible feet slid. Translucent laughed. "Cute."
"Cute is fine," a voice said from the doorway, full of gravel and bad choices.
Butcher came in like a blunt instrument, a heavy flashlight in one hand and something that hummed in the other. He didn't hesitate. He swung at the space the soap's spray pattern suggested, caught a shoulder, and heard the kind of grunt men make when their pride stubs a toe.
"Told you we'd be quick," Butcher said to Hughie, and jammed the humming thing into the air.
The taser kissed nothing and everything. Electricity arced. The stall lit white. Translucent screamed as a courtesy to physics.
It wasn't enough. The current crawled over a shell that wanted to be a gemstone and found no purchase. Butcher saw it in the way the man didn't fall, just got pissed.
Cian blew the sprinkler.
Water came down in sheets. It hammered the invisible suit, traced a man from crown to heel. Translucent had mass now, at least a suggestion of it—outlines and drops clinging to a body that couldn't be seen but couldn't pretend it wasn't there. Butcher grinned like a shark who'd been given chalk.
"That's better."
Hughie, bless him, didn't freeze. He grabbed a fire extinguisher, yanked the pin, and blasted foam. It clung everywhere the water had. Now the invisible was a chalk-ghost, a man-shaped smudge.
"Boys," Butcher said, and swung the flashlight again. This time it hit face. Translucent reeled. The taser sang a second verse. The shock crawled into newly made seams—foam, water, tiny capillaries of possibility—and hurt.
"Come on," Translucent snarled, voice warping into ugly. He lunged. Butcher took it on the forearm and let himself get thrown through a stall door because sometimes you make space by losing. Hughie half-tripped, half-slid out of the way and brained Translucent with the extinguisher's steel bottom for the sheer indignity of being alive.
The invisible man actually went down.
"Bag, mate," Butcher grunted, rolling to his feet.
"What bag?!" Hughie squeaked.
"Boot." Butcher jerked his head toward the corridor. "Car. Now."
Hughie ran like he obeyed verbs. Butcher kicked the bathroom door open, dragged the slumping weight of a diamond-skinned pervert by the foam outline, and cursed creatively at physics.
The hallway outside blinked with a security camera that had decided to enjoy a micro-nap. Cian tipped it into a little longer daydream. In the parking lot, he leaned on traffic lights two blocks over until they turned red in unison and stayed that way just long enough to clear a path.
Hughie fumbled the trunk of Butcher's car open and found a heavy black duffel labeled like a punchline: DOG SHOW – EQUIPMENT. Inside: industrial zip ties, a roll of foil, a coil of cable, a battery pack, a tarp.
Butcher and Hughie got Translucent into the trunk by treating him like an expensive rug that owed them money. Butcher slammed the lid. "Drive," he said.
"Where?"
"Away."
They peeled out. Cian kept a half-second between their bumper and consequences, nudging lights, letting a taxi hesitate, making a delivery truck decide it loved its lane too much to move. It was such small cheating it didn't register to the universe as crime.
Three blocks up, air pressed in—high-altitude attention. Cian felt the familiar scale of it: Homelander's gaze like sunlight you didn't ask for. He tasted metal on his tongue.
"Don't you dare," he told the sky.
Homelander's head pivoted a degree you could measure in sighs. He hung in place far above like a thought no one wanted to have. Vought scanners would be pinging; Translucent's body ran on enough proprietary tech to alert a janitor when he sneezed. Cian slid into the small spaces between those pings and padded them with noise—even, friendly, absolutely average noise. He tamped down the trunk's electromagnetic whine until it read like a hair dryer on a bad circuit.
In the car, Hughie clutched the dash. "Is he… dead?"
A thud from the trunk answered with unpleasant optimism.
"Working on it," Butcher said. "Seatbelt."
"You're not FBI."
"Still on that? We're past labels, sunshine."
Hughie swallowed, looked out the window, and saw his reflection looking older by a day that wouldn't fit in a calendar square. "Where are we taking him?"
"Somewhere we can have a chat without his mates listening," Butcher said. He took a turn too fast and made it look like competence.
Cian ran the rooftops beside them, a blur no one would admit seeing. He checked the city's heartbeat every block: police scanners, Vought's private channels, a rise in pitch when The Seven's dispatchers started to care. He sent a soft EMP burp down a side street to make a signal repeater yawn for thirty seconds. It yawned. The world got simpler for exactly as long as he needed.
Homelander drifted with the car like a lazy comet. Cian didn't freeze time. That was for worse situations than this—worse in a way that left you cold afterward. He did something smaller: he bent reflection. Hot air above asphalt becomes a lens if you ask nicely. He asked and the car's outline wobbled as heat washed over it in generous mirage. To sensors looking for clean lines, it became suggestion instead of signature.
The car ducked into the mouth of an underpass. Homelander paused above, gaze going long-distance, annoyed by the way concrete and rebar lie to vision. "Can't see through zinc," he'd told Maeve years ago like a fun fact you keep in your pocket. This wasn't zinc. It was old city. It worked like superstition anyway: a place gods don't care to stare at.
They slipped out the other side with the kind of luck you manufacture and call fate later.
"Where is 'somewhere'?" Hughie asked, voice smaller.
"A friend's," Butcher said. "Temporarily empty. Temporarily ours."
Cian knew the place; not Frenchie's—yet—but a substation storehouse Butcher had a key to that wasn't a key. Steel racks, humming transformers, noise enough to make delicate trackers lie. Cian smiled despite himself. Butcher's instincts weren't good; they were mean, which sometimes worked better.
The car rolled into a service lane and up to a loading bay with a padlock that opened because Butcher didn't believe in locks. Hughie helped drag the invisible weight inside, breath a wheeze, hands shaking.
The room smelled like warm metal and dust. Butcher kicked the bay door shut and hit a breaker. The hum grew teeth.
"Welcome to the chat room," he told their guest. He pulled the tarp off the duffel's last surprise: a cage. Not elegant—welded mesh, thick cable, rubberized mat—but clever enough. He threw the door wide. "In you go."
Translucent said something that rhymed with no and no again. Butcher and Hughie said please with their feet and got him inside. The door clanged. Butcher clipped the cable to the cage's frame and the other end to the battery pack. He didn't turn it on yet. He wanted the promise of it to do work.
Hughie leaned against a pillar and slid to the floor, hands open, breathing like he'd learned how three minutes ago. "What now?"
"Now," Butcher said, peering at a panel of switches like a gourmand at a menu, "we ask a few questions. He lies. We make it difficult to lie. He tries to call home. We make the phone ring busy."
Cian ghosted along the wall and set something down where no one could see it: a puck the size of a cookie, inert until he breathed a charge into it. It would sit there doing nothing until Translucent's implants tried to sing. Then it would hum a little lullaby that told Vought every signal in this room was exactly as boring as a toaster.
From the ceiling, a camera blinked that didn't belong to any public utility. Cian sighed, rolled his neck, and gave it a polite three-second seizure. By the time it remembered its job, it would have nothing interesting to report.
He considered saying hello to Butcher, just to see the man try to hit the air. He didn't. Rumors don't introduce themselves.
Butcher flipped a switch. The cage shivered. Translucent howled and then laughed because bravado is a kind of shielding too. "You idiots don't know what you've done," he said, voice warping through foam and fear. "You think they won't come for you?"
"They always come," Butcher said, pleasant. "That's what makes it fun."
Hughie stared at the outline in the cage and realized the world was not only worse than he'd been told—it was more complicated. He looked like a man whose life had just been repossessed.
Cian stood in the hum and let the current soak up his nerves. He did nothing hero-shaped. He just kept the room small in the eyes of big machines.
Above them, high in a sky that pretended it was empty, a dot slowed and then moved on. Homelander had decided—for now—that there was nothing to see.
Cian exhaled. He allowed himself, privately, the smallest victory lap: a grin and a step between seconds just to feel the air change, then back.
He checked his phone. ROBIN ATE. ASKED FOR HUGHIE. He typed, SOON. PROMISE. He hated making promises. He hated needing them.
Butcher clapped his hands together. "Right, translucent tits. Let's talk about V."
The lights hummed like an audience. The cage hummed like a threat. Hughie swallowed hard enough to count as a choice.
Cian faded toward the loading bay door, a rumor exiting through the draft.
Translucent paced the cage like a shark made of blank space. Foam and sprinkler water traced him in a blurred outline that made your eyes complain. He'd stopped joking. Jokes are for men with leverage.
Butcher stood with his hands on his hips, reading the hum of the battery pack like a wine label. "Let's try a vintage," he said, and clicked the voltage up a notch.
The cage sang. Translucent swore. Hughie flinched like the sound had teeth.
"You don't know what you're doing," Translucent hissed. "The Seven will tear the roof off whatever rat hole this is."
"Promises, promises." Butcher's smile was friendly in the way a trap is friendly to a rabbit. "Where's the V moving? Who signs the manifests? Say a name that isn't a PR flack."
Translucent laughed without humor. "You think anyone tells me anything?"
"See, I reckon you know exactly enough to make you dangerous to leave breathing," Butcher said, and bumped the dial until the mesh glowed a nervous orange.
Hughie stared at his shoes. He had the expression of a man watching a bridge he's standing on shake. "He… he can't die, right? He's… diamond. Or whatever."
"Diamond burns," Butcher said. "Everything burns if you pay attention."
From the rafters, a shadow that wasn't one listened to the transformer hum and kept the room small in the eyes of machines. Cian leaned against a steel cross-beam where the air tasted like copper and dust, feeding the little black puck he'd planted just enough charge to keep Vought's sniffers sleepy. Overhead, the sky pressed in once, curious and blue. He tasted the metal tang of Homelander's attention, then the slow recede as the god got bored and found another altitude.
Stay myth, big man, Cian thought. Leave the plumbing to us.
The loading-bay door thudded twice. Butcher killed the juice, crossed, and slid it up three inches—enough to eyeball the world and decide to let it in.
"Bonsoir, ma puce," Frenchie said, crawling under the door with the annoyance of a cat at rain. He wore a jacket that looked stolen and a grin that had been arrested once. He took in the room—mesh, battery, foam man—and let out a low whistle. "You've redecorated."
"Temporary," Butcher said. "We need a permanent."
"No such thing," Frenchie said, but his eyes were already on the cage, greedy like a craftsman meeting a rare problem. "Ah, monsieur voyeur. The diamond turtle."
"Turtle?" Hughie said, the word landing like a dropped plate.
Frenchie shook the canister of extinguisher foam near the bars; the outline on the other side flinched. "Every shell has a soft place, mon frère. A seam. A… cave." His eyebrows climbed. "You follow me?"
Hughie followed him, then wished he hadn't. "Oh God."
Translucent rapped the mesh. "He lays a finger on me—"
Frenchie smiled blandly. "Non, non. Never a finger."
Butcher clapped once like a man calling a meeting to order. "Work your charm. I'll make tea."
"Make battery," Frenchie said, already kneeling to study the cable path. "Your earth is sloppy."
Butcher rolled his eyes and fetched a spool. Hughie stood very still and tried not to imagine anything with the word seam in it.
Cian slid down the beam in a lazy fall, landing soundless in a slice of shadow near the breaker box. He didn't help. He could have. He could have handed them a hundred ways to hurt a man who thought hurting made him immortal. But rumors don't hand you solutions. Rumors make you clever.
"You're not going to kill me," Translucent said, pitching his voice toward the softest heart in the room. He looked at Hughie even though Hughie couldn't see eyes to be caught by. "You're not that guy."
Hughie blinked. "I… I work in retail."
"Exactly." Translucent softened his tone to a warm poison. "You're a good person who got pulled into a bad thing by a psycho with a coat. Open the cage. Let me walk. We forget this happened."
Butcher called from the breaker, "We absolutely do not forget this happened."
"Shut up," Translucent snapped, then gentled again for Hughie. "Look at you. You're shaking. You don't want this on you. You don't want to be… complicit."
Hughie's knuckles went white around the fire extinguisher handle he was still clutching like a teddy bear. "I don't want any of this."
"Then let me go," Translucent said. "You're not a murderer."
Frenchie held up a hand without looking away from the cage's base. "Petit lapin, do not listen to philosophy from a man who hides in toilets." He glanced at Butcher. "We need plastic explosive. Small. Surgical."
"C-4?" Butcher said, already rummaging in the dog-show duffel.
"Oui. With a friend." Frenchie tapped the cage wire. "A detonator that talks to us, not to Vought."
Cian exhaled through his nose, amused despite the scene's ugliness. He crossed to the breaker box and flicked a single toggle off then on. The lights blinked in a rhythm only Frenchie would notice—a little syncopation, a reminder he was not alone in the wiring.
Frenchie's head tilted. He smiled, nearly imperceptible. "Bon. The room approves."
Translucent laughed, a raw edge in it now. "You idiots can't hurt me."
"Non," Frenchie said. "We cannot hurt your shell. We hurt the meat inside le shell." He wiggled his fingers like a magician promising a dove. "Internal pressure is a language. Boom is a dialect."
Hughie swallowed. "You're going to—where would you even—how—"
Frenchie patted a small, innocuous cylinder the size of a lipstick and didn't answer. Butcher didn't either. Some mercies are in the not-saying.
It did not happen on the page. It happened between beats while Butcher explained to Hughie, gently and with the economy of a butcher, how detonators worked. It happened while Frenchie kept up a cheerful patter about material sciences so Hughie had something else to listen to. It happened while Translucent swore and then promised and then tried to crawl into the part of Hughie that apologizes to inanimate objects.
When it was done, Frenchie stepped back with a grave little nod, like a tailor smoothing a suit. "Voilà."
Hughie looked like he might faint. Butcher pressed something into his hand. It looked like a garage-door opener. It was not.
"Deadman switch," Butcher said. "Don't touch it by accident, don't drop it, and absolutely do press it if our friend gets frisky."
"Why me?" Hughie whispered.
"Because you're the only one he'll try to talk into letting him out," Butcher said, level. "You'll be standing closest to the mistake."
Translucent chuckled. "This is insane. You won't do it. You don't have it in you."
Hughie stared at the little black rectangle and saw a life where he never had to hold a thing like it. He did not live in that life anymore.
Cian watched the edges of the room: the breaker, the lattice of wire, the small puffs of heat in the walls where cheap insulation lied. He leaned into the Speed Force just enough to taste tomorrow. It tasted like metal and the sour sugar of adrenaline. He wanted to flinch on Hughie's behalf. He did not.
Above them, a helicopter stuttered across the city. Not Vought. News. Cian fed the substation's transformer a thimble of power and let it hum one tone lower; the interference made aerial scanners see a smear where a building should be. The reporter would decide the neighborhood was boring and move on.
Frenchie wiped his hands on a rag and peered through the mesh with theatrical sympathy. "Mon ami, if you have any last words, keep them. The first will be messy."
Translucent bared teeth Hughie could not see. "I'm walking out of here. I'm going to your house. I'm going to tell your girlfriend what you did. I'm going to watch you try to explain that you aren't a monster."
Hughie's breath shook. "Don't talk about her."
"Why? Because she's dead?" Translucent's voice was velvet now, cruel with patience. "Because you let it happen?"
The room tilted. Hughie's thumb twitched on the switch, then froze.
"Easy," Butcher said, calm as the inside of a coffin. "He wants your head. Keep your head."
Frenchie's phone buzzed. He checked it, mouth flattening. "We are not alone in the neighborhood."
"Vought?" Butcher asked.
"Comme toujours," Frenchie said. "But also… a bird of prey." He jerked his chin ceiling-ward. "Our friend with the flag."
Butcher's eyes lifted, narrow. "Of course he is."
Cian felt it too: a weight on the air that isn't air. Homelander's patrol line drifted closer, a bored god sniffing gutters. If he got curious, the next ten minutes became a kind of problem you don't get to solve twice.
Cian cracked a knuckle and made a decision that tasted like chewing foil. He ran.
Not out—around. He slipped into the seconds between seconds and sprinted the block's perimeter, palming every transformer case, slapping a kiss of charge into each relay until the neighborhood's whole electrical mood deepened by a hair. To human eyes, nothing changed. To instruments, the block became a low, even drone of normalcy so soothing it bored curiosity to sleep.
By the time he slid back into the substation, Frenchie was packing the kit, Butcher was watching Hughie watch the switch, and Translucent was finding new ways to say you won't.
"Break," Butcher said. "Everybody breathe something that isn't panic."
It did not last.
Translucent went still in the cage in the way men do when they are about to do something stupid. "Bathroom," he said evenly. "I need to piss."
"No you don't," Butcher said.
"Then I need to explode," Translucent said, nasal with contempt. "Your choice."
Frenchie shrugged. "We can mop."
Butcher jutted his chin. "Let him use the bucket. You blink, he blinks. Open the door and I break your fingers."
Frenchie slid a dented paint bucket through a gap and kept his eyes flat. Hughie held the deadman like a baby bird and tried to remember how to exist.
Translucent did… something with his weight. Hughie couldn't see it. He felt it. The mesh shivered. The battery's tone just barely changed—half a note shy of comfortable. Frenchie's head whipped around. "Butcher."
"I heard it," Butcher said, already moving to the panel.
Translucent hit the corner where the cable joined the mesh and bucked. The joint sparked. He'd found a seam.
Of course you did, Cian thought, admiring the awful competence of a survivor. He moved, too—fast enough to make the dust wake up—and slapped a palm to the cable housing a breath before the connection would've popped. He fed it a lick of living lightning, steady and invisible, holding the current at the exact sweetness where metal doesn't remember it's tired.
Frenchie slapped a hand on the frame. "Stay," he told a man like he would a dog.
Translucent didn't. He twisted, wedged, and for a terrible second his outline was halfway through the gap—one shoulder, then the suggestion of a head.
Hughie took a step forward without meaning to. "Don't—"
Translucent's voice found him like a hand on the back of the neck. "Open the door, Hughie. You're a good person."
The deadman switch weighed a thousand pounds. Hughie's thumb hovered. His brain made a list of all the ways he could walk away if he didn't press. It also made a very short list of the ways he could live with himself if he didn't press. The second list was empty.
Butcher saw the moment and didn't steal it. "Your call, son."
Cian stood very still. He could freeze three seconds. He could slow the room and pry Translucent backward like a cork. He could make this choice go away. He did not.
He watched a boy become a kind of man.
Translucent shoved. The mesh whined. The battery whined back. The world narrowed to one stupid little rectangle and the tendon in Hughie's wrist.
Hughie pressed.
—To be continued in Chapter 3.