A-Train shifted his weight. He would have set himself on fire before admitting Clark had rattled him. He wasn't a rookie who had wandered onto a track with no idea what his body could do. He knew Clark wasn't bluffing. X-ray vision worked as well as an MRI, and came with a worse bedside manner.
A-Train could list names himself if he had to. More than twenty, easy. Guys he had shaken hands with at Vought mixers, guys who had loaned him gear before a meet. All of them dead now. Their hearts had quit somewhere between the locker room and the podium. Cardiac failure was just the most popular exit. Nobody needed more than one way to die. They just kept collecting symptoms until one worked.
He had heard some version of this speech before, from people who actually cared about him. His brother put it plainest. The man who had hauled him out of bed at five every morning of his childhood, who still built his training plan down to the mile, liked to say a man builds his own name, he doesn't inject it. Popclaw said it her own way. She used that two-in-the-morning voice when she expected him to listen. She told him he was already the fastest thing on two legs in the hero business. He didn't need to keep pumping himself full of something that scared her.
They meant it. That was the worst part. None of it ever stuck.
Maybe it's the speed talking, A-Train thought. Maybe it's the money, or the fans, or knowing Vought would have somebody else wearing my number inside a news cycle if I placed second twice in a row. Or maybe Compound V just gets its hooks into a man whether he wants it to or not.
Chemically speaking, Compound V had no habit-forming properties. Vought's paperwork swore to it. But nine-figure contracts, rooms that went quiet when he walked in, and more women than he had hours in the day for got their hooks in just fine. Wealth, fame, the high of being worshipped. That was the narcotic. Compound V was just the fastest way there. He had broken his own rules so many times he stopped pretending any given one was the last.
None of that made it past his throat. A-Train scowled. "I've got my own ideas about my own business. Stay out of it."
Clark didn't react. He had watched this happen before. Some men only started counting the cost once the bill came due. Maybe a failing heart is the only lesson that sticks.
"I probably can't talk you out of injecting today," Clark said. "But I want this race run fair."
"Meaning what."
"Meaning I'm going to stop you from dosing. You're going to run this the same as Shockwave does. Pull that vial and try to get it in your vein in a tenth of a second. I'll have it out of your hand in a hundredth."
A-Train clenched his jaw. He checked his watch. Half an hour to the starting gun.
"You flew in two hours early just to lecture me? You could have timed your entrance like those two are about to. Show up right before the gun, let the cameras catch it. Everybody would have been in a better mood."
A sonic boom split the air overhead. A shape in red, white, and blue dropped out of the sky and landed in the middle of the staging area. The crowd screamed. Phones went up. Three floors above, the announcer's voice cracked over the speakers. Homelander. Edgar had sent him down to lend his brand to A-Train's race, and Homelander had decided to enjoy the assignment. He worked the rope line. He flashed his trademark smile, angling every handshake so a camera could catch his good side. He found the best lighting in the room and stayed in it.
Maeve walked in a step behind him in her armor. She wore a tight, practiced smile. She gave the crowd ten seconds, then peeled off and walked toward Clark.
"Why is A-Train looking at you like you keyed his car?" she asked. "You two not getting along?"
Clark offered a tight smile. Across the staging area, Homelander's gaze kept drifting toward them. His eyes narrowed slightly.
"Homelander doesn't seem too thrilled with you right now, either. Something happen between you two?"
They both let out a dry, humorless laugh.
"Doing the right thing is never cheap," Maeve said. "I expect Homelander is going to make me pay for it for a while yet."
"A-Train probably hates me too, by now." Clark looked at the track, wide and empty under the stadium lights. "I didn't see another way. That stuff is going to kill him if he keeps this up."
"I don't even know what it is," Maeve said. "Something blue. Hormonal, maybe. Some kind of stimulant. Peculiar stuff."
Across the room, Homelander kept smiling at the cameras. His eyes were entirely detached from the expression. He was thinking about a report from two nights ago. A small facility holding Asian test subjects had gone dark without warning. Whoever hit it had not left a face on a single camera. The guards had not seen anyone enter or exit. Eight vials of Compound V were gone. The subject was missing too, the aggressive one that had killed three handlers in a single week before they finally got her stable. Vought's leadership was furious. They called their Filipino partners a bad joke. The Shining Light had lost an entire facility without producing a single frame of security footage.
Nobody had a lead. They could not even determine if the intruder had come for the subject and taken the product along the way, or come for the product and grabbed the subject as an afterthought. Homelander had reviewed the short list of names outside Vought who knew anything about the distribution chain. He put A-Train on watching Popclaw. He had circled New York himself from high altitude over the last two days. He had found nothing.
"Did he dose before the race?" Maeve asked. She kept her voice casual. "I wouldn't put it past him."
"I haven't told anyone this," Clark said. He lowered his voice. "Keep it between us. I just need him to stop injecting. His heart won't hold up much longer if he doesn't."
"So what? It's his call. A man has the right to run himself into the ground if that's what he wants."
"His call doesn't stay his. It costs other people too, and it will cost him more than he thinks." Clark kept his gaze on the track. "By the time he understands that, it will be too late to walk it back. I have watched this happen before. I would like it to stop happening."
He thought of Lois. He remembered the sound she made in that dark multiverse, a raw grief with nowhere left to go. A heavy tightness seized his chest.