When Clark spoke, Annie lost her grip on the tears she had been fighting since she sat down. Queen Maeve had given her the speech during her first week—no crying in front of the Seven, no visible weakness, ever. Annie had tried to take it seriously. She understood the warning and had practiced keeping her composure.
But she had been imagining those exact words for years. Hearing them from the person she most wanted to hear them from dissolved Maeve's advice on contact.
Crying isn't weakness, the rational part of her mind noted. It just isn't.
"I thought joining The Eight would be the beginning," she said, dragging the heel of her hand across her eyes. "Help more people. Stop more bad guys. Grow into the hero I was supposed to become." The tears kept spilling. "Like in the movies. You go through hard things, and then one day the veterans who thought you were too young and too naive look at you differently."
She looked up at Clark. His face mirrored what she remembered hoping to see when she was a child watching superhero films—unhurried, warm, completely unguarded.
In front of someone who actually looks like that, she thought, crying makes sense.
"I used to imagine the moment one of them would tell me I was amazing and actually mean it." Her mouth pulled into a shaky, unresolved line between a smile and a sob. "I thought that would be the happiest day."
Clark held out a tissue.
Annie took it and kept talking, her words spilling out at the same frantic pace as her tears.
"That image didn't survive my first day. I understood what Vought was on day one. I understood what the heroes I had admired actually were." She rattled off the list without pausing to search for the words. "I get assigned to team up with people I despise because people love hero team-ups, and it increases media engagement by twenty-three percent. I run down the mission list Vought provides because Vought doesn't need you to think, it needs you to execute. And I can't give two men who tried to rape a woman the response that situation warranted, all because of public pressure."
She lowered the tissue.
"If I can't do one straightforward good deed, then what am I doing here?"
Clark let the silence sit between them.
"What do you want to do about it?"
She looked at him.
"I mean it," he said. "Nobody is meant to carry this much weight for other people's lives and be unhappy doing it. That isn't what any of this is supposed to be. You are from Des Moines. If you went home, you would have a life."
He held her gaze.
"Do you still want to be a hero?"
"There will be a lot more situations like last night."
"I know."
"Then why stay?"
Annie looked down at her hands, then at the wall behind Clark, and finally back to him.
"Because Vought is the largest superhero company in the world. If The Eight looks like this—" she waved a hand at the walls around them, at the architecture they were both trapped inside, "—then you don't have to imagine how the community heroes below us operate. You already know."
She wiped the last streaks of makeup from under her eyes. Without it, she looked younger, the bare skin a stark contrast to the face she usually wore. She had been doing auditions and appearances since before high school; the heavy styling had become a reflex rather than a choice.
"If I don't do something real here, then the only people protecting this world are whatever two hundred Vought heroes are currently on the clock, plus the Eight." Her shoulders dropped, the tension leaving her frame. "I don't want to back down. I want to be a real hero."
Clark looked at her.
Then he laughed. It wasn't polite or managed; the sound broke out of him involuntarily.
"Amazing." He paused, shaking his head slightly. "It is truly remarkable."
He had walked this path for over a decade. His praise carried the weight of experience. He knew the exact toll this life demanded—the grievances, the sacrifices, the misunderstandings that never got corrected, the brutal setbacks that offered no lessons. He knew exactly what he was encouraging her to step into.
Jude had once mentioned an offhand quote from a writer in his universe, a man named Romain Rolland: There is only one true heroism in the world: to see the world as it is and still love it.
People who shattered at their first failure were never heroes. They were just people in costumes waiting to break.
He offered her the simplest encouragement he had.
Annie nodded once, straightening her spine against the back of the chair.
Ashley walked into the lobby.
"Hey, Starlight." Her voice was entirely transactional. "Ms. Stillwell wants a word. Come with me."
Annie and Clark exchanged a glance.
The resolve in her eyes wavered slightly. The conviction was still there, but the sudden summons from upper management pulled at her nerves. It was the sharp jolt of being called to the principal's office right after declaring you weren't afraid of the principal.
She stood, smoothed the front of her jacket, and followed Ashley.
Meanwhile,
"How long will this take to replicate?"
Down in Frenchie's workroom, the weapons were gone, replaced by glassware. He held a beaker and a stirring rod, staring at the photograph on Jude's phone. His brow creased as he assessed the request.
"Alright. Listen to me." He set the beaker down on the metal table. "I have formulated a lot of things. Some of them distinctly illegal. But a pure, clear solution in that exact shade—" he tapped the screen, "—that takes precision. Even if I could match the compound today, sourcing that specific glass tube will take a day or two on its own."
"That should work." Jude checked the photograph again. "There are two doses left in the safe. A-Train probably doesn't use it daily, and even if he does, that gives us two days of coverage."
He looked at the others.
"We won't replace both vials. Doing that gets noticed immediately. The plan is to make the switch after A-Train uses the first one naturally. On his next pickup, we swap the remaining vial for the fake."
"That assumes the timing cooperates," Butcher said. "What if he goes to the stash and pulls the fake one first?"
"He won't." Jude placed the phone face down. "The vials are stored in a consistent arrangement, similar to the way oral medications are packaged in a sequence. People use consumables in that arrangement by starting at one end and working toward the other. They don't pull at random."
Butcher caught the logic immediately.
"So if he starts from the left, the fake goes on the right."
"Exactly." Jude nodded. "But this is only a contingency plan. The primary approach is to trace A-Train's supply chain and find the main storage source. If there is a larger supply somewhere down the line, taking a single sample from it carries zero detection risk."
Frenchie let out a short, harsh laugh.
"Follow A-Train." He picked up the beaker again, swirling the empty glass. "Do you know why Vought uses A-Train for sensitive transport? Because he operates at near-sonic speed. His movement is the security. You cannot tail a man moving that fast."
"I didn't say we would tail him." Jude kept his voice entirely level. "When I was inside the apartment, I smelled more than just the Compound V."
He let the silence stretch for a moment.
"There were several other interesting scents on it."