The Deep needed time to make up his mind. Seeing him stuck, Jude let him go. There were dolphins to save, and as it turned out, people too.
The phone on the table buzzed. Jude opened his laptop instead and checked the inbox. Sure enough. New mail.
Frenchie, mid-bite on a piece of fried chicken, appeared at his shoulder before he clicked it open. M.M. and Butcher crowded in right behind him. Kimiko drifted over.
"That's gotta be idiot Ezekiel, right? What'd he send back?"
Sometime in the small hours, the crew had watched Jude send the email exactly as planned. He attached several photos of Ezekiel's arrangement at the Secret Nest, alongside a caption Butcher had pitched and Frenchie had written.
The text was unhinged. A breathless first-person account from the bar, detailing an entire night of Ludo with Ezekiel, his masterful strategy, his rare natural gift, and the impressive things his stretching abilities allowed for. Translated into any language, an email like that would get flagged and yanked off any platform with a moderation team. The only place it would survive intact was a rules-free forum in the internet's basement.
"I wrote erotica for a living for years." Jude shook his head, scrolling back through the draft. "But looking at what you two came up with, some things are just a gift. I couldn't have written this if I had my whole life to work on it. Is this even something a human brain is capable of? Are you two actually straight?"
Butcher snorted. Frenchie went stiff and said nothing. His eyes flicked toward Sherry and Kimiko behind him.
Jude's grin froze.
Before he could ask out loud, Butcher reached over and pulled the email open himself.
"Ha. Bastard actually took the bait."
He scanned it, translating on the fly, grinning wider with every line. "Useless threat first. Bunch of panicked rambling. Then he wants to know who we are. More rambling. Then he tries to buy us off. Classic, every time." He kept scrolling, then slowed. "And then... huh. Now there's something actually useful."
He stared at the last paragraph, a crease forming between his eyebrows.
"What?" A gruff, burly voice came from Kimiko's phone. Jude had told her to pick any voice pack she wanted for the translator. She landed on this one, for reasons nobody had ever gotten out of her.
"He's confessing." M.M. read it over Butcher's shoulder. "Vought's been shipping large batches of Compound V to Samaritan's Embrace, who pass it off as charity donations and inject it into newborns at hospitals across New York."
Sherry took a slow drag off her cigarette. "That blatant?"
"How would they even have parental consent for that?" she asked. "We should've thought of this ages ago. Gone straight to the parents of the supes already out there working, asked them what they remember. We might've cracked this open a lot sooner."
"They wouldn't talk to us, and we wouldn't get anything real out of them anyway." Jude kept his eyes on the screen. "Here's the part that matters. The NICU at Mercer Hospital. That's where the next shipment's headed. It was supposed to go out tomorrow. Now it's been pushed back three days."
"Every batch, same routine. Straight to a hospital, and the whole dose gets used the same night. Nothing left over, not one drop. Vought's not cutting corners on keeping this buried."
Neonatal intensive care unit.
Frenchie repeated the phrase in his head. The muscles in his jaw tightened. "Is that how they get the parents to say yes? These are the sick ones. The dying ones."
"Compound V can turn an ordinary person into something else entirely." Jude let out a breath. "Rewrites a person's genes, triggers the mutation into actual powers. I don't know the mechanism, but from what I can tell, it also fixes a long list of congenital conditions on the way there. It's alien medicine wearing a lab coat."
"A baby born with a deformity, a genetic disorder, dying from complications nobody can fix. Inject them with Compound V, and they come out the other side healthy. Powered, too, more often than not. It doesn't just rewrite genes. It heals."
"Which means for parents who've already been told there's nothing left to try, Vought's little miracle drug is the only hope anyone's offered them."
Nobody in the room spoke.
Butcher parted his lips. Jude waved him off before the words came out.
"Don't get the wrong idea. Compound V might be a good drug. Vought is not a good company. Both things are true, and we're still finishing what we started."
"Somebody brings Vought down, whatever this stuff can do, somebody else picks it back up and keeps doing it right. I have no patience left for turning heroism into a product line. Vought's heroes stopped being heroes a long time ago, if they ever were."
"Slight change of plan. Three days from now, we go to that hospital, get photos, get evidence. If we can land a witness willing to talk, even better. If not, that's fine too. As for the injections themselves, we're not stopping them. Not yet."
"Which gives us three days to deal with Kimiko's brother first."
Kimiko went rigid at the name. She pushed up from the table, already moving toward Jude.
He caught her arm, easing her back down onto the bench. "I asked around. Your brother got the Compound V injection too."
Her body stilled.
"It's a miracle he survived it at all. Getting dosed as a grown man in his twenties instead of as an infant." Jude kept his voice level. "He came out the other side with powers of his own. And he's still with Shining Light."
Kimiko didn't move.
"You understand what that means, don't you."
Neither of them spoke. They just looked at each other.
"What's going on?" M.M. asked, glancing between the two of them.
"Even the weakest supes out there, The Deep, and his whole 'I talk to fish' routine, don't lose fights," Jude said. "A dozen guys with rifles couldn't touch his reaction time. Best case for them, they land a scratch."
"Which means," Butcher said, "that Kimiko brother been staying with those terrorists on his own two feet. Nobody's been holding him there."