The word baby gave it away.
Homelander mentioned Stillwell and her child as a grievance—an ordinary person holding power he resented—and for a fraction of a second, his expression changed. Maeve had spent enough years near him to read that look exactly.
It wasn't contempt. It was something older and more pathetic.
He's jealous of an infant.
She kept her face blank as they walked. A man in his thirties, jealous of a baby because it had Stillwell's attention and he didn't. She filed the observation away in the part of her mind reserved for things she could never say aloud. Whatever he wanted from Madelyn—and the list was long—a part of it was maternal. It was the most disturbing thing she had ever registered about him.
Homelander, she thought. You really are something.
They crossed the police line two blocks out. NYPD cruisers had sealed three sides of the building. Sporadic gunfire still echoed from the upper floors—the frantic, uneven bursts of someone panicking rather than fighting. Three officers were receiving field treatment near a patrol car. One had been shot in the forearm, another in the side. Both were awake, letting their partners work on them.
Maeve looked at them.
She knew what the job required. She had done it for years. But seeing ordinary people do the same—taking the same bullets, running toward the same gunfire, with far more to lose than she ever did—hit her in a way she couldn't name.
They didn't have healing factors. They didn't have reinforced skin. They just put on the vest and the badge and walked toward the shooting because it was their job.
She touched her right hand, realizing she had balled it into a fist.
Clark said something like that earlier. About human beings being braver than supes, because the cost of failure was so different.
Homelander glanced at her. "Are you spacing out? What's wrong with you today?"
"Nothing. I was just—" She let it drop.
At the barrier, a captain stepped forward to meet them, his relief obvious. "Homelander, Queen Maeve. Gunman on the thirty-first floor. Single shooter. He's been firing into the street, but we don't have eyes on the layout."
Homelander put a hand on the captain's shoulder, flashing the practiced, warm smile he had used hundreds of times. "Captain, your officers are the heroes here. We'll take it from here."
The captain's expression shifted exactly as Vought's training manuals predicted: a mix of genuine gratitude and the awe of a man meeting someone he'd watched on television his entire life.
Maeve stood beside him, hearing the line and thinking: I have said that line so many times. Not once did I mean it. And today, looking at those three officers, I think I might be the problem.
"Thirty-first floor," Homelander confirmed. "Give us a moment."
He looked at Maeve, looked at the building, and launched himself straight through the glass facade. The windows exploded outward in a controlled cascade, and he was gone before the air closed behind him.
The captain turned to Maeve.
She looked at the building's main entrance.
"Which way to the elevator?" she asked.
Thirty seconds later, on the thirty-first floor.
Homelander leaned against the wall next to the elevator doors, arms crossed. He had that bored expression he wore when he'd scanned a room with x-ray vision and found the situation unworthy of his attention.
He waited, Maeve thought as she stepped out. For him, that's about the same as holding a door open. She kept the thought to herself.
"One person," he said. "End of the east corridor, third room on the left. Sitting on the floor behind a filing cabinet, breathing fast, sweating. He seems to be reconsidering his life choices."
"Glad someone is."
"Edgar wants us at A-Train's track meet."
Maeve adjusted to the topic shift. "The race?"
"Coming up in a few days." He started walking, unhurried. "Edgar wants us both there to show support. Give him a crowd to perform for."
"He's thirty-two," Maeve said.
"That's my point. A pro athlete's window is narrow, even with Compound V, and he's well into the back half of it." Homelander's voice stayed quiet, ignoring the distant gunfire downstairs. "Shockwave is twenty-four. His speed is rawer, less refined, but he's twenty-four. You know what twenty-four looks like at the peak of that ability?"
"Better than thirty-two."
"Significantly."
He stopped in front of a heavy door reinforced with an iron crossbar, staring at it with mild annoyance.
"A-Train's numbers have been falling for two seasons. If Shockwave beats him, the crowd we gave him turns into an audience for his public collapse. I'm not sure what Edgar is thinking."
"He's been in the group long enough," Maeve said. "That should count for something."
"It counts for enough that we still show up. But if he loses—and he might—our presence doesn't help him. He gets the spotlight and the criticism, and we're standing there with our names on it." He paused. "I can fly faster than A-Train anyway. His value to the team is comparative to ordinary humans, not us. He's always been third-tier."
"I thought you cared intensely about the team's reputation."
"I do. I care about it the way a captain cares about a ship. Everything under my authority reflects on me. If someone provokes the Eight, they provoke me. Edgar included." He said it easily, devoid of heat. "But Edgar isn't wrong to want us there. He pays the salaries. That's the only reason we're showing up."
A muscle near Homelander's jaw twitched twice.
"This," he said after a moment, "is why I like you."
The smile that followed was the one Maeve found most unsettling—it was almost genuine.
"You tell me the truth. No one else around here actually does."
"No one else?" she asked.
The crossbar door flew off its hinges like a piece of paper in a breeze.
"I don't want to discuss Superman right now," Homelander said, walking through the frame.
The man behind the filing cabinet on the far side of the room was, to his credit, not stupid.
He looked up as the door vanished, took in Homelander and Queen Maeve standing in the threshold, and dropped his rifle.
"Hands," Maeve said.
He put them up.
She crossed the room in three steps and put him on the floor with two clean strikes—efficient, calibrated, enough to end it without leaving anything permanent. He stayed down, which was the smart decision.
Logically, it was over. It should have been.
Homelander moved.
His arm extended toward the man on the floor—the specific, measured motion Maeve had seen enough times to know exactly what followed. His hand wouldn't stop when it reached the target.
In the past, she had let it happen. Every time, in rooms like this, with men like this, she had stood there and told herself that intervening would only make it worse, that it would cost more than it saved.
If my involvement can make your lives a little freer.
Clark's voice, from an hour ago.
"Wait."
She grabbed his arm.
Homelander stopped. He turned to look at her, the expression of someone interrupted in the middle of something they considered self-evident. His other hand found her wrist—not to shake her off, but to show her exactly what he could do to her bones.
He squeezed.
Every bone in her right hand flared with pain.
His eyes took on the faint red glow they always acquired before a decision became irreversible.
"What," he said quietly, "if I wanted to?"
Maeve held his gaze.
"Have you checked how many new supporters Superman gained from his last three public actions?" Her voice remained steady. "Vought ran the numbers. The PR team is still processing it."
The red light held for a moment.
Then it died.
He released her wrist. He turned without another word and walked toward the elevator.
Maeve stood in the wreckage of the door frame, breathing through the last thirty seconds.
The man on the floor hadn't moved. She glanced at him.
"Don't move yet," she said.
She walked to the window and looked down at the street. The officers near the barricade were still being treated. One was talking to a partner, head back against the car, arm out for a bandage, clearly telling a story. He was laughing a little.
She touched her right hand.
Every bone ached.
Those officers, she thought. Getting shot at by someone they don't know, for people they'll never meet, on a salary the city has been trying to cut for years.
I grabbed his arm.
She cradled her hand and looked at the city below.
I'm not bad either.
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