"Damn it." M.M.'s grip tightened on the wheel. "Why now? We're driving right toward them. If he'd been half an hour later—"
"We would have been there first," Jude said, checking his phone. "I was gone for two days. Based on what we know, A-Train is daily-dependent—he runs on Compound V like fuel. Two days without a resupply means today is the day. This timing isn't an accident."
"Still."
"I know."
He paused.
"Wait."
Jude studied the screen. "There's a complication. We don't need to rush."
He tilted the phone so M.M. could see it at the red light. The camera feed from Popclaw's building showed the delivery bag open on the table—the zipper pulled back, revealing about ten sky-blue vials. Some were set out, others still nested inside. It was a clear, recognizable supply. But it wasn't being prepared for transit.
A-Train and Popclaw were occupied.
"Oh," M.M. said.
The team channel had been picking up ambient sound from Jude's phone. Frenchie's voice cut in, sharp with interest. "Why does your audio suddenly sound so—tell me what's on that screen, Jude."
"A-Train isn't delivering yet." Jude turned the phone face-down, cutting the audio. "He and Popclaw have some personal business to handle first. We have time."
"How much time?" Butcher asked over the channel.
"Enough. Drive normally, M.M."
"I didn't hear any sound from your channel earlier," Butcher continued, his voice tight. "Why'd you cut the feed? Embarrassed?"
"The feed adds nothing to the mission," Jude said. "Is there a counterargument?"
"Besides satisfying your curiosity, you mean? No. But that's a reason."
"Tell me something." Jude looked at the road. "Between the four of us—has anyone not seen something like this before, in some context? Or are we all first-year students here?"
The responses were quick.
M.M.: "Married. Two kids."
Frenchie: "Free spirit. Multiple occasions. I know what I am."
Butcher said nothing.
The silence lasted three seconds. It wasn't long, but it had a heavy shape. Frenchie started to add something, then glanced at Butcher's face and stopped.
Butcher's expression wasn't complex. He looked gloomy, angry, and sad. Frenchie hadn't seen this specific look often. It was the face of a man reminded of something that cost him dearly.
M.M. picked up on it a second later. His voice shifted, smoothing things over with practiced efficiency. "Hey—in this crowd, I'd bet you're the most sheltered one of us. I'm looking at your face and I'm saying greenhorn."
"Don't worry about me." Jude's voice was easy. Neutral.
Inside the car, he was thinking.
He traced back everything he had learned about Billy Butcher over the past few weeks. He looked at the shape of the man's rage.
Frenchie had Sherry. He checked on his family. M.M. had a wife and daughters he spoke of.
Butcher, approaching forty, had never mentioned a name. No wife, no ex, no partner, no child. Not even a pet. Every conversation Jude had with him painted a picture of a man with no connective tissue to the world—no one waiting, no one who would notice, no obligations outside the mission. He had the clean, unencumbered fury of a man who had made himself into a weapon.
Except.
The reaction when his name was mentioned. The flash that surfaced and was shut down immediately—Jude had seen it the first time they met. Sadness, self-reproach, and the concentrated fury behind both. That wasn't the profile of a man who had never been attached to anything.
He didn't always live like this.
And the rage—the kind that wanted to burn down Vought and every supe in it—that rage had a source. Jude had been filing it as ideological or professional.
But.
Hatred alone cannot turn a person into a butcher. Only love can transform a person into a beast.
M.M. pulled the car to a stop on a side street two blocks from the third restaurant, and Jude climbed out.
Butcher sat at a table near the window, his bowl empty, his face arranged into a neutral mask. He looked like himself again. The expression from the channel might never have happened.
Jude walked in, sat down, and breathed in.
Sesame paste, cooking oil, the mineral note of the neighborhood's water filtered through a kitchen that had been operating for at least twelve years. The proportions were right. The layering was right.
This one.
"This is the taste." He stood up. "We have it."
Butcher's neutral expression sharpened. Frenchie, coming through the door behind Jude, was already calculating.
"Those two finished yet?"
Jude checked his phone. "Not quite. Let's get in the car."
Sitting four-deep in a restaurant would have been a mistake. Butcher looked like a man who settled disputes physically and preferred it that way. M.M. had the build of a structural column that had decided to develop opinions. Frenchie radiated an air of impending customs violations. Jude was the only one who might pass as a normal patron, and only if nobody looked too long.
They filed into the Chevrolet and shut the tinted windows.
Butcher surveyed the interior. "Whose car is this?"
"Vought gave me a hundred thousand dollars," Jude said. "Part went to Frenchie as commission. The rest I put into operational expenses. This was one of them."
Butcher processed this for a moment. Then he laughed—a genuine, if brief, sound. The idea of using Vought's money to run an investigation into Vought had a specific appeal to him that nothing else Jude had said had matched.
Then his face went flat.
"I also paid thirty thousand dollars into this operation," he said, sounding like a man doing arithmetic he despised.
"You did."
"And you're using some of that too."
"The good news," Jude said, "is that none of it gets used against you."
Butcher looked at him, then out the window.
"How much do you have left?"
"Not much. Enough."
Jude's phone was on. The feed from Popclaw's building showed A-Train picking up his bag, the remaining Compound V tubes secured inside. He was saying something to Popclaw—brief, a few words, not a conversation. Popclaw was reaching for the tubes she had set aside: her portion, counted, going into her own bag, going into the safe. She handled them carefully. She knew what they were worth.
A-Train disappeared from the camera.
"The day he nearly ran into Robin," Jude said, watching the screen, "A-Train was also carrying a bag exactly like that one."
No one said anything for a second.
"He wasn't responding to a bank robbery," M.M. said.
"He was on a delivery run. Coming from here, or going to here—we're about to find out which." Jude put the phone away. "He didn't take the Compound V before he left this time. He's learned something since Robin. Which means he's running clean until delivery, and then he'll dose afterward. We calculate from the moment he left Popclaw's building to the noodle shop on the corner—seven kilometers."
"At his speed—" Frenchie started.
"Near-sonic. Run the math. Straight-line distance, seven kilometers, call it twenty-one seconds. Add maybe five for pedestrian avoidance, sudden direction changes. Twenty-six seconds maximum." Jude looked around the car. "Hands on your weapons."
Butcher's hand was already moving. M.M. and Frenchie followed.
"Are you serious? Twenty-six seconds from seven—"
"Ten. Nine. Eight."
The countdown arrived without warning and with complete conviction. All three of them stared at him for exactly one second before the training kicked in and the guns were at their hips.
"Seven. Six. Five—"
"You're sure about this calculation," M.M. said.
"Four. Three—"
A sound moved through the crowd outside the tinted windows. Not loud—a displacement, the kind of pressure shift that arrives when something has passed through the air at a speed the air wasn't expecting. Bystanders on the sidewalk turned their heads at nothing, reacting to an absence rather than a presence.
"Two. One."
In the next moment, A-Train walked through the noodle shop door.
Empty-handed.
"He delivered it here," Frenchie said, his voice quiet. "He actually delivered the compound to this restaurant."
The small bag was gone. Whatever had been in it was now behind the counter of a noodle shop seven kilometers from Popclaw's apartment, and for the first time since the scent of sesame paste in an apartment that had no sesame paste, the supply chain had a location.
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