"Lost Stars"
Inside an apartment in Manhattan.
Hughie Campbell sat at the kitchen table, a jumble of things spread out before him.
His laptop was open, with a dozen or so handwritten sticky notes scattered beside it, densely covered in abbreviations and numbers.
Butcher had called him last night, then sent him an encrypted text.
The text was crammed with document numbers, initials, coordinate codes, and things labeled with abbreviations Butcher had invented himself.
It had taken Hughie two whole hours to decode it all into something intelligible.
The gist concerned the source of Compound V1 and the location Vought used for experiments, roughly pinpointed to Pennsylvania.
"For injections. Should be in a hospital, right?"
Hughie muttered to himself, drawing a circle on a sticky note with a red pen.
Frenchie stood at the kitchen stove with a pair of scissors, pruning a pot of basil he had been growing for three weeks.
Hearing Hughie, he replied without looking up:
"You could actually ask that Vought girl, the one you met in the park.
She's an insider. Maybe she knows more."
"Annie?"
Hughie fell silent for a moment. It was indeed a good idea, but how to broach the subject was a problem.
"That's the one."
Frenchie snipped off a leaf and held it beneath his nose for a sniff.
Hughie chewed on his pen cap without answering.
Of course he had thought about it.
The encrypted email address Starlight had given him had been sitting on his phone for days.
She was indeed a potential inside informant. Any information about Vought would be a gain for him.
But the Black Noir affair wasn't so easy to expose. After all, they were the ones who had done it...
So he hadn't dared tell the others, either.
Just then, Mother's Milk looked up from the living room sofa and rubbed his dry eyes:
"Say, should we eat first? There's still pizza left over from yesterday in the fridge."
"I don't want pizza."
Frenchie spoke.
"I'm fucking sick of pizza. I can make pasta with some basil leaves."
"Your basil hasn't even finished growing. Why are you cutting it?"
Hughie looked at the pot of basil in Frenchie's hand, pruned bare, and shook his head helplessly.
"This promotes growth."
Frenchie sounded thoroughly convinced.
"You don't know anything about plants."
What the hell does a STEM guy like you know about growing things?
Mother's Milk rolled his eyes, ready to return to his reports.
But just then, there was a sudden knock at the apartment door.
"Knock, knock, knock!"
Hughie glanced at Frenchie, and Frenchie glanced back.
Mother's Milk had already discreetly reached for the pistol beneath the sofa cushion.
"Who is it?"
Hughie asked, crouching down.
No one answered.
Frenchie put down the scissors, walked silently to the door, and pulled a Glock from the shoe cabinet drawer.
Mother's Milk was already on his feet, his thumb flicking off the safety.
Hughie took a deep breath, walked to the door, and peered through the peephole.
He saw a middle-aged man's face, with high cheekbones and cold hazel eyes set beneath his brow.
He wore a palm-brown uniform and held a shield.
Wait, what the fuck was going on?
Hughie's pupils suddenly dilated, and he staggered back as though electrocuted.
As a longtime die-hard superhero fan, he naturally knew what the outfit outside meant.
"Hughie, what happened?"
"Uh, guys... I think I just saw Soldier Boy."
"What?"
Mother's Milk wore the classic Black-guy-with-question-marks expression. He had a blood feud with Soldier Boy, but the man had clearly died long ago.
"Hughie, look carefully. You're sure it's not some cosplayer with too much fucking time on his hands?"
"I feel like... probably not."
Through the peephole, Soldier Boy had just finished a cigar, then casually tossed the butt to the ground and ground it out underfoot.
Then the knocking came for the third time.
This time, an exceptionally resonant male voice came through:
"Open up. I know someone's in there."
"Not talking? Then I won't play nice."
"Thud!"
The moment he finished speaking, the entire door tore free of the wall, hinges and splinters from the frame and all.
It flipped more than half a turn through the air, then slammed into the shoe cabinet in the entryway.
The tremendous impact sent the door sliding onward, its metal corners plowing deep white furrows in the floor until it struck a leg of the living room sofa and stopped.
The dust cleared.
Soldier Boy stood in the doorway in his signature outfit, shield in hand.
"Let me see if you pussies are the ones I'm looking for."
As he spoke, Soldier Boy pulled a photograph from his pocket and held it up, comparing it with the "lucky ones" present.
"Oh, it really is you guys. Come on, are you going to get on your knees and suck me off, or wait until I beat you so badly you can't take care of yourselves?"
Frenchie was clearly the quickest of the three to react.
The instant the door flew in, he dropped the scissors in his hand and grabbed the Glock from beneath the stove.
Without even aiming, he raised it and pulled the trigger toward the doorway.
Three shots rang out almost as one.
The nine-millimeter bullets flew toward Soldier Boy's forehead, left eye, and throat respectively.
Frenchie had spent some time in a gang, and his marksmanship was the best in The Boys Squad.
The bullets hit.
But they didn't do a fucking thing.
The bullets struck Soldier Boy's skin, warped, flattened into three irregular little metal pancakes, and clattered onto the floor.
Only three faint white marks appeared on Soldier Boy's forehead, and they vanished in less than two seconds.
He hadn't even blinked.
Shit!
Frenchie's pupils contracted sharply. His finger instinctively kept pulling the trigger, sending bullets into Soldier Boy's chest, shoulder, and abdomen in turn.
But the result was the same.
Soldier Boy simply stood there like a statue, his face full of disdain.
"Seriously, can't you pussies try something different?"
While Soldier Boy was speaking, Mother's Milk swiftly drew the modified M1911 from beneath the sofa cushion.
Mother's Milk had kept this gun specifically for dealing with superhumans. He called it the "Can Opener."
Then he raised the gun one-handed and aimed at the back of Soldier Boy's left knee.
Even if he couldn't penetrate the skin, joints were a shared weakness of all living creatures.
"Bang!"
Soldier Boy merely swayed slightly, then raised his head and looked at Mother's Milk as though examining a rare insect.
"Fuck."
Mother's Milk gritted his teeth.
Then Soldier Boy moved, not quickly, but strolling forward as though on a walk.
Frenchie dropped the empty gun, pulled a chef's knife from the knife rack, lowered his body, and assumed a street-fighting stance.
The knife tip pointed toward Soldier Boy's abdomen, his left hand loosely curled before his chest for balance as he shifted nimbly from side to side.
He was waiting for an opening, a chance to drive the knife into the man's eye or throat.
But Soldier Boy simply walked straight up to him and reached for his collar.
Frenchie dodged sideways, thrusting the knife upward at a tricky angle toward Soldier Boy's armpit.
No one could train that spot. It was one of the softest parts of the human body.
The tip did strike its target, but it shamefully snapped off.
"Buddy, who the fuck do you think you are?"
Soldier Boy caught Frenchie's collar and lifted him like a cat.
Frenchie's feet left the floor. He struggled wildly in midair and kicked Soldier Boy in the ribs.
But Soldier Boy remained completely unmoved. Instead, pain shot through Frenchie's toes, as though he had kicked an iron plate.
"Completely useless."
With that, Soldier Boy flung him aside, sending Frenchie flying sideways.
His back struck the refrigerator door, smashing a deep, human-shaped dent into the metal panel.
"Frenchie!"
Mother's Milk charged in from the side, snatched the stainless-steel kettle from the kitchen counter, and swung it in a full arc at the back of Soldier Boy's head.
The kettle crumpled and dented the instant it met Soldier Boy's skull.
Soldier Boy turned his head and gave him a somewhat impatient look.
Then he delivered a backhanded slap, and the bridge of Mother's Milk's nose cracked sharply.
He toppled backward, sliding a long way across the kitchen floor on his back.
Just then, a low growl came from deep in the hallway.
"Who the fuck's on drugs?"
Soldier Boy's brow twitched slightly. He turned and looked toward the hallway.
A small, thin shadow burst out of its dark far end, racing low to the ground on all fours.
"Wait... Aren't we past the plantation era by now? Why the fuck are you still keeping slaves..."
Soldier Boy tilted his head as he watched her charge.
Kimiko leaped from three meters away, launching herself into the air with her knee forward and driving it hard toward Soldier Boy's chest.
Ordinarily, the force of this strike would have been enough to send a grown man flying ten meters.
But Soldier Boy merely spread his feet slightly, lowered his center of gravity, and took the blow head-on with his chest.
The good news was that Soldier Boy took half a step back.
The bad news was that not a damn thing happened.
Using the recoil from the impact, Kimiko flipped through the air, planted both hands on the floor, and landed steadily like a cat.
Then, without the slightest pause, she sprang up and attacked.
She planted a foot on his knee for leverage, jumped, clasped Soldier Boy's head in both hands, and drove her knee into his temple.
Once she landed, she immediately slid between his legs, twisting his ankles backward with both hands in an attempt to trip him.
But Soldier Boy still stood there as though nothing had happened.
"Chick, are you fucking done playing?"
Just then, Kimiko grabbed his wrist, wrapped her legs around his arm, and sharply twisted her body into a textbook armbar.
She clamped her legs tight and thrust her hips upward, concentrating all her weight and strength on Soldier Boy's elbow in an attempt to snap his arm.
Soldier Boy reached out, crushed Kimiko's jaw, then grabbed her entire face and threw her away like garbage.
Her back smashed into the television hanging on the wall, and she fell to the floor, violently coughing up a mouthful of blood.
But this amount of damage was likewise no problem for Kimiko.
She could heal herself and keep fighting.
But Soldier Boy wasn't about to give her that chance. During the fight, he had already discovered that Kimiko possessed self-healing abilities.
And he was naturally equipped with an attribute that countered superhumans.
An orange-red glow gradually began gathering in his chest.