Carl Lucas ended up in general population because he trusted the wrong man.
He had no living parents, no outside money, and absolutely no gang backing to offer him protection. In an island penitentiary practically run by the inmates, being a lone wolf made you a target. The guards were either severely underpaid, aggressively corrupt, or both. Brawls, shankings, and riots were just the background noise of the cell block.
Because Carl refused to take the fall for any of the prison gangs, they came after him. He was jumped in the showers, the yard, and the mess hall. He took a lot of beatings early on, but it forced an evolution. Carl was already built like a freight train; the prison just taught him how to use his momentum. He learned how to fight, how to drop a man with one punch, and how to survive.
"And just when I thought I couldn't take another day of looking over my shoulder," Luke said, his voice a low rumble in the quiet law office, "a group of suits showed up. Military brass. They pulled a dozen of us out of the yard. I still don't know exactly what criteria they were looking for."
Luke dragged a massive hand down his face, the memory pulling his posture tight.
He remembered the officer standing at the front of the lineup. His boots were polished to a mirror shine.
"You are the absolute scum of society!" the officer had barked, pacing the concrete floor. "You are trash. You are dog shit. But you should thank God today, because the United States military has found a use for dog shit. We are giving you useless bastards a chance to serve your country. We are building the next Captain America, and he might just be born from the gutter!"
The officer had screamed in their faces, offering a choice: volunteer for a classified super-soldier serum trial and receive a five-thousand-dollar medical stipend, or rot in general population.
"I don't even know why I asked," Luke muttered, staring at the grain of the conference table. "But I spoke up. I asked him if surviving the experiment meant I got a commuted sentence."
"And what did he say?" Matt asked.
"He just laughed. Looked me up and down and said, 'You ever seen Captain America sitting in a federal cell, son?'"
Matt frowned, his lawyer instincts immediately flaring. "So you volunteered for a military trial under heavily coercive circumstances. Did they make you sign a non-disclosure agreement? A liability waiver? Any physical contract?"
Luke shook his head. "No. Just a verbal yes."
Matt leaned forward, resting his chin on his hands. "No paper trail. Good. Keep going."
Luke took a slow sip from a plastic water cup. It looked absurdly small in his grip.
After saying yes, the volunteers were transferred to a segregated, high-security sub-level of the island. They got private cells, better food, and actual beds. It felt too good to be true. Carl started talking to the other recruits through the vents, trying to figure out why they were chosen.
A terrifying pattern emerged.
Every single man on the block was built like a heavyweight boxer. None of them had a history of substance abuse. None of them had committed high-profile federal felonies. And crucially, none of them had active gang ties on the outside.
"We were clean," Luke whispered. "Nobody was going to come looking for us. Nobody was going to ask questions if we disappeared."
Two days later, the disappearances started.
Guards would pull an inmate from his cell for a "routine skin test." The inmate never came back. When Carl asked the guards where they went, the guards just smirked and said the inmate failed the baseline test and was transferred back to Rikers.
"It was a joke," Luke gritted his teeth. "You don't transfer a guy at two in the morning over a skin patch test. I knew right then none of us were making it out. But I couldn't do anything. I was just a guy behind a steel door."
Luke's massive hands clenched into fists, the knuckles turning white. "Dying isn't the worst part, Murdock. It's the waiting. It's sitting in a concrete box, staring at the door, just waiting for the boots to stop in front of your cell."
Matt heard the subtle, jagged hitch in Luke's breathing. He tracked the accelerated thumping of the man's heart. For a man who was completely bulletproof, the trauma was still tearing him apart from the inside.
"Take your time, Mr. Cage," Matt said softly. "I'm listening."
Luke exhaled sharply. "A month and a half went by. I memorized the faces of every guy they took. Then... it was my turn."
The guards marched Carl down a long, fluorescent-lit corridor toward a restricted basement door. But they didn't escort him inside. They unlocked the heavy steel deadbolt, shoved him through the frame, and slammed the door shut behind him.
The first thing that hit him was the smell.
It was the thick, hot copper stench of an abattoir. Carl walked slowly down the pale, sterile hallway. The lights buzzed overhead. He pushed open the double doors to the main laboratory, and his stomach violently hurled itself into his throat.
His fellow inmates were there. All of them.
They were dead. They had been completely vivisected. Their chests were cracked open, their internal organs surgically harvested, and their skulls cleanly severed by bone saws. The hollowed-out corpses were hanging from heavy steel meat hooks suspended from the ceiling, arranged in two long rows like a butcher's welcoming committee.
Along the walls, glass cabinets were lined with hundreds of jars. Inside them floated human organs. Some were grotesquely enlarged. Others pulsed with a sickening, radioactive green bioluminescence.
"I heard someone cursing," Luke said, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper. "I used to work the docks. I recognized the language. It was Japanese."
An elderly Japanese man in a blood-spattered surgical apron stepped out from behind a surgical table. In his left hand, he casually held a freshly decapitated human head. He looked at Carl, a polite, chilling smile spreading across his face.
"Ah," the professor had said, in heavily accented English. "You have arrived."
"I panicked," Luke said, his chest heaving. "I turned to run. But these guys---they just dropped from the ceiling. Dressed in all black. Masks. They hit me with something heavy, knocked me cold."
Luke dragged his hands across the table. "When I woke up, I was strapped into a vertical centrifuge chair. Blinding lights everywhere. The pain... it felt like my blood was boiling in my veins. My skin felt like it was turning to molten iron. I just started screaming, and tearing, and pulling---and the titanium restraints just snapped."
The masked men swarmed him. One of them swung a katana directly at Carl's neck.
The razor-sharp steel hit Carl's skin and shattered into a dozen useless pieces.
"I didn't stick around to figure out what happened," Luke said flatly. "I just ran. I hit the reinforced concrete wall of the lab going full speed, and I blew right through it. I kept running until I hit the edge of the island, and I dove straight into the Hudson River."
Luke leaned back in his chair, the plastic protesting under his weight. "I knew they'd hunt Carl Lucas. So I drowned him. I crawled out of the river as Luke Cage. And then I started asking around the Kitchen for a lawyer who wasn't afraid of the dark."
Matt sat perfectly still. He absorbed the information, his mind assembling the terrifying jigsaw puzzle.
Illegal military contracts. Unsanctioned super-soldier serums. Japanese assassins wielding katanas in the shadows.
Matt kept his face entirely neutral, but his grip on his guide cane tightened. A conspiracy involving the United States military and the Hand was far beyond the scope of a municipal courtroom. Subpoenas weren't going to fix this.
He was going to need a very specific kind of help. Luckily, Matt knew an Avenger.
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