The pressure wave reached the gate a half-second before Stormfront did.
The displaced air rolled through the security checkpoint and swept down the staff corridor, hitting the guards first, then the orderlies, then the nurses clustered near the admissions desk. Everyone stumbled back half a step. A clipboard clattered against the floor.
They recovered in silence. As they straightened up, bowing their heads and murmuring greetings, their faces showed no surprise. Instead, they wore the rigid, practiced expressions of people who had adapted to a routine they hadn't chosen and knew better than to discuss.
Stormfront strode through the lobby without looking at any of them.
A man in an orderly's uniform separated from the group and stepped forward. It wasn't a welcoming committee; it was a shift report. He wasn't old, but his hair was going white faster than age could explain, the kind of premature graying that hinted his body had made a structural decision to shut down. When he spoke, his voice was flat and hoarse.
From four rows back, Jude studied the man's eyes. It was more than just exhaustion. It was the specific, hollow stare of someone who had dismantled his own inner life piece by piece until there was nothing left to take apart.
"The subjects?" Stormfront asked, not bothering with a greeting.
"Stable. All of them."
"This formulation is almost ready." She kept walking. "Once the next injection group confirms stable results, we can wind down R&D. Come with me."
Injection group, Jude noted, standing behind the line of orderlies. Not patients. Not residents. Subjects. Injectors.
He fell into step with the stream of staff as they followed Stormfront and the orderly.
He had found the caregiver's uniform hanging on a spare peg in the changing room. Since it was just sitting there, borrowing it felt more like an act of reasonable appropriation than theft. He could have moved through the building in his own clothes. At the Master tier, his stealth skill had evolved far past simply staying out of sight; it carried an edge now, something that made people's attention slide off him before it could register. But the uniform made things simpler. He stayed in the middle of the pack, kept his hands visible, and matched the slow, institutional shuffle of the group. As long as he played the part, every mind in the building would invent a reason to ignore him.
The reality of the facility sharpened as Jude moved deeper inside.
The first cell they stopped at looked empty.
Stormfront and the orderly pulled the door back and stood in the doorway. Angled three steps down the hall, Jude had a clear sightline into the room. He took it in instantly: a thin mattress on the floor. A steel toilet bolted to a steel sink. Walls layered in the grime of years without proper airflow. Six square meters, maybe.
No other furniture. No window. And no patient.
Third heartbeat, Jude tracked it immediately. Breathing—shallow, controlled, from low to the ground. The breathing of someone who had spent a lot of time learning how to take up less space than they were born with.
"Owen," the orderly said, his voice completely dead. "Come out."
A heavy silence followed. Then, in the narrow gap between the mattress and the baseboard—a space far too small to hold a person—something moved. It took a second look to recognize it as a human being.
The man who stood up on the floor was no bigger than a thumb.
He didn't speak. His entire body shook with the fine, relentless trembling of someone trapped in the presence of a threat they couldn't predict or satisfy. He wasn't cold. He was just terrified, and the fear had become his body's resting state.
Stormfront looked down at him. She sounded like she was reading a file entry aloud. "Your ability shrinks you, and you cannot restore yourself to normal size. Correct?"
Owen said nothing.
"Useless." She turned and walked away.
The orderly followed, pulling the door shut and locking it.
Prison cells, Jude thought as the group moved down the hall. Not hospital rooms. They aren't locking up the mentally ill. They are locking up people with powers.
The cell block stretched on. As Stormfront and the orderly continued their tour, Jude saw more.
One supe blinked out of a corner and reappeared across his room, over and over. He wasn't trying to escape; he was just cycling through the motion the way a person presses a bruise to see if it still hurts. In the next cell, a man stood with his palms open, producing rings of compressed force that expanded and slammed into the walls in a steady, rhythmic loop he couldn't seem to stop.
The next room made Jude pause for a half-step before keeping pace.
Four people were inside, all in identical agony, all generating the exact same effect. The stainless steel food trays on the floor were dissolving into sludge. The walls around the floor drains were heavily corroded, mapping months of damage. Their stomach acid, it seemed, wasn't just for digestion. The smell in the hallway confirmed the theory aggressively.
Same ability. Multiple subjects. Same Compound V batch.
Jude filed the observation away and kept walking.
When they opened the next door, the prisoner didn't wait.
He charged the doorway before it was fully open. His hands were already slick with blood—not from whatever had just happened, but from what he had clearly been doing for hours. The skin across his knuckles was torn down to the white bone. The walls of his cell told the story: dozens of shallow, compressed dents covered every reachable surface, the work of a man who had been hitting the concrete for as long as he could stand. He didn't recognize Stormfront or the orderly. He didn't even notice the lightning gathering around Stormfront's shoulders as he lunged.
She brought it down hard. A bright, blinding curtain of high-voltage electricity hit him square in the chest, driving him into the concrete. The smell of ozone and burnt fabric flooded the corridor. He hit the ground still fighting, thrashing against whatever invisible enemy he saw, until his body finally gave out and he lay convulsing on the floor.
Before Jude could even count to five, the torn flesh across the man's knuckles began to knit back together.
It didn't heal slowly. The skin stitched itself shut with violent speed, as if the body had long ago decided that rapid healing was its only priority, sacrificing everything else to maintain it.
Stormfront looked down at him from the doorway.
"Cases like this one," she said, sounding like she was complaining about a paperwork error, "would have gone straight to the gas chamber back in the day."
She turned to the man beside her. "Lamplighter. Put him down. Keep the temperature controlled—don't burn through him."
The man—Lamplighter—nodded. He reached into his coat and pulled out a silver lighter.
What came out of it was not a normal flame.
A wide, focused sheet of fire erupted from the spark. It moved with calibrated precision, sweeping over the prisoner's body in a practiced, deliberate motion. It was hot enough to force compliance, but controlled enough to stop exactly where it was supposed to. Lamplighter held the flame on him for three seconds, then snapped the lighter shut. He stepped back and waited until the prisoner stopped moving.
Without a word, he pulled the door shut and followed Stormfront to the next cell.
Jude stayed where he was for a second. He rolled a fruit drop between his fingers, pressing his ear lightly toward the door. He tracked the prisoner's heartbeat through the heavy concrete. The erratic pounding slowed in uneven steps, eventually settling into a steady, ragged rhythm.
Tenacious, Jude noted.
He put the candy away.
The prisoner hadn't surprised him. The man with the lighter had.
Jude stood in the empty corridor, letting the pieces fall into place.
Lamplighter.
He was one of the original members of The Seven. Not a replacement, not a diversity hire—a founding member of the lineup that Vought International had built its empire on. He had retired. The official PR story had been incredibly vague, which usually meant it was a lie. Starlight had only recently taken his seat, meaning the gap between his departure and her arrival had been spent right here. Wearing a borrowed orderly's uniform. His hair turning white. Running cell inspections for a third-tier supe who treated him like a dog.
A man who should have been a global icon was playing prison guard.
And Butcher. Butcher reacted to that name with a dark, unspoken fury and refused to explain why.
Jude filed the questions away and caught back up with the group.
Stormfront and Lamplighter moved methodically down the hall. Jude let the flow of orderlies carry him a few more steps, then quietly slipped out of the current and turned the other way.
The security room was fully staffed and entirely boring. The monitors looped through exterior angles and interior hallways. None of the screens showed anything useful to someone who already knew what was inside. Jude spent forty seconds watching from the doorway before moving on.
The medical room was at the end of the east wing, and it was far too large.
It was heavily disproportionate for a facility of this size, which was a clue in itself. Heavy filing cabinets lined two full walls. Glass-fronted medicine cabinets stretched across the third, stocked with the rigid precision of a place managing careful, ongoing inventory. The room was clearly built for something far beyond general patient care.
Jude walked over to the filing cabinets and started pulling drawers.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Writing takes time, coffee, and a lot of love.If you'd like to support my work, join me at [email protected]/GoldenGaruda
You'll get early access to over 50 chapters, selection on new series, and the satisfaction of knowing your support directly fuels more stories.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~