The first matter was closed.
Clark didn't move.
The bartender found reasons to busy himself at the far end of the bar. The television above the liquor shelves played a late local news segment that nobody was watching. Jude waited. Clark was still organizing his thoughts, deciding whether to put the next piece on the table.
"There's a second thing," Clark said. "Bigger than the first."
He spoke with the deliberate care of a man who had been choosing his words for a while. "Have you been following Vought's public push? The defense proposal."
"Putting their supes into the military?"
"You already know."
"Vought's major public moves don't stay quiet for long. I also know Madelyn threw a company dinner last night."
"At that dinner," Clark kept his voice measured, "Congressman Calhoun shut her down. He chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee. He said—and I'm told the quote was very clear—that no one was going to hand Vought's heroes access to the national defense infrastructure."
"That isn't surprising." Jude turned his glass. "The seats at that table were assigned long before Madelyn walked in."
"The proposal is moving to a floor vote anyway."
Jude raised an eyebrow. "Vought is that confident. What did Madelyn do?"
"She compromised the congressman." Clark's tone stayed flat. "An attractive waitress working the banquet bar struck up a conversation with Calhoun. After dinner, they went for coffee." A slight pause. "After coffee, they went upstairs to his hotel room."
"Where they presumably reviewed the room service menu in great detail." Jude picked up his drink. "And then? Vought has photographs? That feels thin. A congressman with Calhoun's tenure has survived scandals before. A private affair won't move him."
"It wasn't exactly an affair." Clark held his gaze. "The waitress wasn't a waitress. She was a shapeshifter."
Silence.
"A shapeshifter," Jude said evenly. "Who naturally become a man in his mid-thirties. Beer belly included."
"In the hotel room, he put a blindfold on the congressman, and took several photographs of the two of them together. Without their clothes on."
"Sometimes," Jude said, "I think this world is stranger than Gotham."
He set his glass down carefully. He didn't speak for a moment.
"Excuse me." He flagged the bartender. "Two iced orange juices. Thank you."
When the glasses arrived, he drank half of the first one before looking back at Clark.
"Go on."
"The rest is standard for these operations. Madelyn arranged a private meeting with Calhoun. He understood his position immediately: if those photographs reached his constituents in Oklahoma, his career is over. Oklahoma voters hold very firm, public positions on that subject."
The most squalid political maneuver since the invention of politics, Jude thought, executed entirely with a camera phone and a shapeshifter with no personal dignity.
He finished the second orange juice and set the glass aside.
"So the bill clears the subcommittee and goes to a Senate floor vote." He looked at the bar, then back to Clark. "It doesn't change our position. Once Vought collapses, any legislation tied to its expansion dies with it. All that motion amounts to nothing."
Clark watched him. "Where are you going next?"
"Pennsylvania. There's a facility—Sage Grove Center. Classified as a mental health treatment center. Almost no online footprint. On paper, it's an independent subsidiary of Global Health Services." Jude paused. "Global Health Services is a Vought subsidiary."
Clark's expression shifted, just a fraction. "Three layers of separation. That was hidden on purpose."
"Which is why I need to go in person instead of working it from the outside." Jude looked toward the back of the bar.
"Is there something actually going on in that hospital?" Clark asked
"I don't know yet. That's what I'm going to find out." He looked back at Clark. "I'll be back in a day or two. If I'm later than that, don't worry about it unless I flash you four signals from my phone. If that happens, something has actually gone wrong. You can find me at this address."
He held up his phone for three seconds. An address, nothing else. Then he put it away.
Clark nodded once.
"One more thing," Jude kept his voice low. "We have been meeting in person too often. I didn't expect to need this many face-to-face contacts. Vought might not have noticed yet, but assuming they never will is dangerous."
"Do you want to change how we talk?"
"We don't need to meet at all, as long as we can talk." He pulled out the phone again and displayed a second address for three seconds. "This is my place. I left a microphone there. Going forward: when you call my phone, speak normally. Your voice comes through the line to me, and my voice goes to the mic so you can hear me from that location. The spot is far enough away from Vought that Homelander can't hear you. We get the exchange done, and nobody sees us at the same bar twice in a week."
Clark considered it. "Your instinct for covert infrastructure is something."
"It varies by situation." Jude stood and dropped a few folded bills on the bar. "This only works because your hearing is a bit more precise than average." He kept his face perfectly neutral. "Mine, specifically. If it were only as good as that, the whole system falls apart."
They left together and parted ways at the door. Clark headed back toward Vought. Jude walked down the street and found Satsuki exactly where he had left her.
Fifty thousand asset points had unlocked sports car mode. Satsuki's current form was a Chevrolet—mid-range, chosen specifically because it looked like background traffic rather than a destination. She ran on an energy block, meaning her actual performance abilities had nothing to do with her exterior. That was nobody's business as long as nobody measured it.
Jude unrolled the wallpaper in the back and crawled into the concealed space. Satsuki generated a three-dimensional human projection in the driver's seat—indistinguishable from a real person from the outside—and merged smoothly into traffic.
An hour later, Jude woke up. He had long since stopped being surprised by the accelerated rest skill. He was fully rested. And bored. The boredom was the trade-off; he accepted it.
"How far out are we?"
"About three hours to the facility's general area," Satsuki replied calmly. "It's unavoidable. Traffic enforcement on the highway means I need to maintain plausible speeds through monitored stretches. I can alter checkpoint records later, but I can't change what officers see with their own eyes right now."
"Current speed is fine. Any faster and you turn into a completely different kind of vehicle."
"I am aware."
He made a quick meal in the small space, ate it without ceremony, and turned his attention to Yomogi.
She was training.
More accurately: she was dying. Frequently, and with great commitment.
The arena interface showed her current opponent in the lower left corner of the screen—a compact enemy from a tier that looked manageable on paper. The Mosswine moved toward Yomogi's avatar at a gentle, almost considerate pace.
It bumped her.
Her health bar vanished before the animation even finished.
The respawn timer started counting down.
"Again," Yomogi said. Her voice had dropped past standard outrage into a quiet, philosophical despair. "One nudge. An Izuchi has actual claws and a mane, and it couldn't kill me in one hit. This pig bumped me. It was barely moving."
"You need more practice."
"You should have told me before I chose this opponent."
"I told you to read the enemy profile before you selected it. The information was in the menu."
"It said Mosswine." A heavy pause, weighed down by the specific betrayal of trusting a noun. "It is a pig."
"To be fair," Jude said, "the mushroom part is usually what kills you."
Yomogi did not appreciate the observation. She selected the next round and braced herself.
The Mosswine bumped her again.
"Is there a strategy for this?"
"I am confident there is."
"Tell me the strategy."
"I don't know what it is yet." A beat. "But I'm sure it exists."
The respawn timer started again. From the front of the car, Satsuki offered no comment, which was its own kind of commentary.
Sometime after Yomogi's hundredth death—Jude had stopped counting—Satsuki coasted to a stop on a back road in Pennsylvania. Sage Grove Center appeared through the tree line.
Jude picked up the exhausted cat and settled her on top of his head. She draped herself over him with the heavy resignation of someone who had just finished a terrible shift and was choosing not to fight it. He stepped out of the car.
"You are a terrible person," Yomogi announced from above, rallying for one last complaint. "Why didn't you tell me one nudge from that pig would kill me instantly? Even a full punch from An Izuchi kill me. The Izuchi punched me. With its paw. Nothing. Then this pig breathes in my direction and I'm dead."
"You chose the opponent." Jude looked toward the facility
"You'll figure it out," Jude said absently, turning his full attention to Sage Grove Center.
The facility called itself a mental health treatment center.
The barbed wire around the perimeter was the first red flag. The mounted surveillance cameras covering every angle—overlapped to eliminate blind spots—were the second. The security personnel patrolling the grounds were unhurried but deliberate, and far too numerous for an outpatient clinic. Jude counted three camera clusters on the first fifty meters of the fence line alone.
Vought has been funding this place at a steady loss for years, Jude noted, watching through the chain-link. The balance sheet never mattered. Whatever this facility does, it isn't recovery.
He was halfway through mapping the second camera cluster when the weather shifted.
The change came from directly above the facility. The air pressure dropped rapidly, and the clouds dragged toward a focal point with the unnatural speed that only happens when someone controls them. Lightning struck inside the perimeter. Thunder cracked half a second later, hitting the chest before the sound fully registered.
A woman dropped through the static haze hovering over the main entrance. She landed with the specific carelessness of someone who never had to worry about the ground. She touched down at an angle, her attention already focused on the complex, without once glancing at the fence line.
Stormfront.
She isn't checking the exterior, Jude observed. Either she trusts the perimeter completely, or she's been here so long she stopped caring what's outside.
He counted four slow seconds after she cleared the entrance.
Then he vaulted the barbed wire and moved toward the hospital.