Chapter 5 — What Hope Sounds Like
The Believe Expo was the kind of spectacle that called itself humble.
A mega-church arena wrapped in LED scripture, fog machines sighing like repentant dragons, a fifty-foot cross flanked by pop-star pyros. Booths sold bracelets, Bibles, and branded protein bars in equal measure. A choir rehearsed a hallelujah that would punch you right in the dopamine. Vought banners hung like commandments with legal teams.
Backstage, Annie January stood in a gold suit that reflected light like a sermon. Makeup had turned her freckles into bullet points. Her mother fussed at a curl that did not require fussing.
"You look radiant," Donna said. "God is going to use you."
Annie smiled at the floor. "Hope so."
Ashley Barrett blew in, headset first, smile stapled on. "Annie! We love the suit, we love the hair, we love the— everything. Quick reminder: stay on script. Hit the three beats—'Blessed to serve,' 'The Seven is family,' 'Modesty is power'—and then we go to Q&A where Pastor Joel will ask the pre-cleared questions that are totally not pre-cleared."
"Got it," Annie said pleasantly, which meant maybe.
A shadow fell over the room like someone had turned down gravity. Homelander arrived in a blue and white that turned cameras to gold, hands clasped behind him like a schoolboy who could drop a jet on your house.
"Break a leg," he said, and held her gaze a beat too long. "Inspirational, not political. You know?"
"Of course," Annie said, and resisted the urge to hug her arms to herself like a civilian.
He left a smell of cologne designed by a committee. Ashley followed him with a clipboard like a shield.
In the rafters, a rumor lay down along a lighting truss and listened to the building breathe.
Cian had already made his rounds—kissed the AV mains with a whisper of static, eased a relay into a friendly hum, taught the kill-switch to pretend to work while doing nothing at all. The teleprompter carried Vought's approved sermon; he left it intact and leaned a backup feed just off-angle, a window where truth could climb out if it got bold.
He slid along catwalks above the stagehands, ghosting past a stack of black Pelican cases and a coil of gaffer tape that had seen more sins than most priests. Down in the pit, the audio engineer tapped a red MUTE square on his touchscreen—just to test it—and nodded, satisfied as the meter dipped. Cian smiled and let him have the illusion. The house would go whisper-quiet; the broadcast would keep singing. Two truths. One crowd.
He had written it into the circuitry like a parable: You can't keep a real story off the record. You can only decide who hears it first.
A stagehand with a lanyard the size of a warrant shouldered past him without ever seeing him, swore at a cable, then praised Jesus for the cable tie that rescued his afternoon. Cian touched the truss, felt the hot thrum of light, and peered down at gold.
Annie stared at her hands like they were better than she'd let them be lately.
He dropped to a shadow just inside the hallway she'd take to the wings and waited until she passed, until the ushers with their best Sunday smiles turned their backs, until the universe did him the courtesy of an empty three seconds.
"Hey," he said.
She turned, startled but not frightened. She saw a man in black doing a very good impression of a stage tech, except his eyes had the bright, electric humor of a storm that chose its targets.
"Do we… know each other?" she asked.
"No," he said. "But I know you're about to tell the truth."
Her eyes flicked toward the hall camera. The little red light winked. He flicked his finger and it yawned. Annie blinked once. "If I do," she said, "they'll cut the mic."
"They'll try."
"You sound confident."
"I rigged the soundboard to lie," he said lightly. "House can mute. Broadcast can't."
"…who are you?"
"Someone who believes in miracles with very boring wiring," he said. He stepped back into the shadow where he lived. "Stay real."
She didn't ask more. She nodded, tiny and grateful, like a person who had packed courage in a carry-on and didn't want to unpack it too soon. Donna called her name. Annie squared herself and walked toward the light.
Cian went up into the dark where rumors keep their hands clean.
---
The arena filled like a lung.
Hymn, applause, sponsor video. A montage of smiling children meeting heroes, a shot of a hospital wing Vought had "built" onto a hospital Vought hadn't funded, cut with The Seven floating above a skyline like saints with better marketing. The crowd swelled at the right moments. Homelander did that little chin-lift that made people feel personally seen by a man who could frisbee a tank.
Ashley stood in the wing vibrating at a frequency only interns hear. "You're up," she whispered to Annie, which came out like don't ruin me.
Annie walked into fog.
"Give it up for Starlight!" the emcee sang, paint-on charisma at full glitter.
Annie hit the mark. The prompter shone its cue: I'M SO BLESSED TO BE HERE…
"Hi," Annie said, and her voice carried the way spring carries on a day that isn't supposed to be warm yet. "I'm Annie."
A ripple—confusion, then a laugh.
She glanced at the prompter. It told her to talk about growing up in pews. She smiled at it, decided, and let her eyes move past it to the ocean of faces.
"I grew up believing that if I was good—and small—and careful—God would put me where I could help people," she said. The words weren't on any card. "And He did. He put me on a stage."
Ashley's smile hardened one molecule at a time.
"In the last few months," Annie said, "I've learned I can fly. I've also learned I can be hurt. I can be humiliated. I can be told to shut up and smile. I can be told the brand matters more than the person in the suit."
Homelander's expression didn't change. A vein ticked near his temple like a metronome with secrets.
"I came here to tell you," Annie said, steady now, "that being a hero is not a job title. It's a thing you do when no one is clapping. And sometimes it looks like saying no."
Backstage, Ashley jabbed the MUTE on the board. The house mix dipped obediently. The broadcast meters did not.
The audio engineer frowned. Tapped again. The crowd shushed itself, then rose, then shushed again, trying to self-mix morality.
Annie kept going, because the truth gives you a verb when you've run out.
"I was asked to compromise myself to keep a team comfortable," she said, eyes finding no one and everyone. "I'm not going to name names. I'm going to name the sin: we ask women to be grateful for the chance to be quiet."
A low sound rolled the arena—mothers recognizing a shape, daughters recognizing themselves, men recognizing their part and their surprise at recognizing it.
"From now on," Annie said, "I'm not going to be quiet."
Ashley hissed at the engineer, "Cut the goddamned feed—"
"It's— it's not responding," he stammered, tapping a screen that insisted everything was fine.
"Pull the plug!" she snapped at a stagehand.
The stagehand yanked a power distro. The board flickered, rebooted, came back with the sweetness of a computer that has no idea it's part of a coup. The broadcast truck's backup path—patched in earlier by a rumor with a sense of humor—kept humming to satellites like a bird who doesn't know a storm is scheduled.
Cian lay along the truss and watched the little red STREAMING light glow, glow, glow.
Homelander took a single step toward the stage and stopped when Stan Edgar's voice arrived in his ear like calm water. "Let it ride," Edgar said. "America loves a confession."
Annie swallowed. Her mother stood in the wing frozen in a prayer that didn't know whether to bless or block.
"I believe in God," Annie said, simple as bread. "I also believe in saying no."
Somewhere, girls texted each other did you see before the clip hit the platforms. Somewhere, a boardroom revised a strategy deck with the word authenticity circled so hard the paper begged for mercy. Somewhere, a woman at home who had never yelled at a TV yelled yes and scared her cat.
On the truss, Cian grinned, proud in the way you get proud of strangers. He took a still of the broadcast and dropped it, encrypted, into a queue labeled NEUMAN—RECEIPTS.
The emcee tried to pivot into worship like a man trying to steer a bull with a lanyard. Annie looked down at her own hands again, flexed them, and closed.
"Thanks," she said. "For listening."
The crowd didn't know whether to clap or change history. It clapped. Then it rose.
Ashley clapped too, out of reflex, then realized and turned it into fixing her headset with brisk, competent movements that fooled no one.
Annie stepped offstage into the narrow corridor where the air felt real. She exhaled like the room had been holding its breath for her. Her mother took a step forward, eyes wet. Annie braced.
"Baby," Donna whispered. "You were… brave."
Annie folded. Hugged her mother like a person, not a brand.
"Nice speech," Homelander said, appearing like a crime. "Very inspirational."
"Thanks," Annie said, polite to a fault even with wolves.
"Let's remember to keep things upbeat," he said with the friendly menace of a man who thinks tone is the jailer of truth.
"Sure," Annie said, and didn't move out of her mother's arms.
Homelander's smile lost a nanometer. He moved on, already arranging his face for a camera. Ashley swooped back in with a hand-sanitizer smile.
"So amazing," Ashley chirped, high on adrenaline and fear. "We'll tweak the messaging but, like, this was so raw. We love raw now."
"Do we," Annie said without a question mark.
Ashley's smile tried to chew glass. "Let's just grab you for Pastor Joel, okay?" She whispered to a PA, "Find the mute. I don't care if you have to cut the cable."
The PA nodded and ran toward a cable he could not cut. Cian watched him go and laughed under his breath. He eased the power back to where it belonged; the room's hum normalized. The building settled like a horse told the rider isn't cruel today.
Annie looked toward the wing where no one stood and felt—without proof—that someone had handed her a little three-minute miracle and then declined credit. It made her chest hurt in a good way.
She walked back toward stage lights to do a Q&A she wouldn't answer. Cian slid into the catwalk shadow to listen for the first boo and the first cheer and the first stone in a landslide.
His phone hummed. NEUMAN: Nice wiring. Coffee later?
He thumbed back: You bring the law. I'll bring the lies to kill.
NEUMAN: Deal.
Down on the arena floor, a thousand phones turned into a single mouth telling the internet starlight said no.
Up in the rafters, a rumor grinned like a guilty altar boy and checked the time on a clock that lived outside the room.
He had somewhere else to be tonight, where love turned into overdoses and speed into apologies. But for a handful of good minutes, the sound in this building was exactly what hope sounds like when it stops clearing its throat and starts singing.
The building where Popclaw lived had opinions about rent and no convictions about plumbing. Mailboxes like missing teeth. A buzz-in panel that never learned manners. A hallway where the lights resumed flickering the moment a super left.
Butcher stood outside with a toolbox that said HVAC because crime is just theater with worse seats. Hughie held a coil of cable like a boy pretending to be a man pretending to be a contractor. Frenchie whistled something French that sounded like sin forgiven.
Up on the fire escape, Cian pressed two fingers to the brick and taught the building to be tired.
Cameras took polite little naps every fifteen seconds. Door sensors developed a cough. The super decided to argue with his television about baseball for exactly long enough to be useless. Cian made the buzzer stutter open like it trusted the wrong people.
They climbed.
"Rule five," MM had said earlier, "Frenchie knocks first."
Frenchie knocked. "Maintenance," he sang.
Popclaw opened on a chain, mascara smudged into raccoon bravery. She'd been crying or practicing. "Maintenance doesn't sing," she said.
"Then I am freelance," Frenchie said brightly. He tilted the toolbox so she could see coils and clamps and a device that, to the uncharitable, could pass for an air-quality monitor. She hesitated. Hunger fought caution. Hunger won. She unchained the door.
Cian made the building swallow the sound of it.
They moved fast. Butcher asked four questions no landlord ever asked about airflow. Hughie vanished into the kitchen with a cable and a prayer. Frenchie found a corner and plugged in a sensor disguised as a carbon monoxide alarm; it watched radio frequencies like a jealous god.
Cian ghosted the living room, palming the power strip behind the TV, tasting the sour ache inside the walls. He tucked a coin-sized lens under the lip of a shelf and gave it a little benediction of charge: see clean, send quiet.
Popclaw watched Butcher watch her apartment. She had that actor's habit of holding still when she wanted to be invisible. The script didn't call for stillness; it called for need. The vial on her dresser called louder.
"Bad day?" Butcher asked, affable in the way a wolf is affable at a picnic.
"Bad month," she said. "You here to fix the bad month?"
"Something like that."
He left before she could decide not to like him. Hughie smiled at her like a man who wants people to be good by default. Frenchie bowed in a way that felt less like mockery than like permission to keep some dignity.
The door shut. The chain slid home. Locks clicked. Silence rehearsed itself.
In the ceiling, Cian listened to the apartment try to hold a person together.
Popclaw put her hands on the dresser. She stared at herself in the mirror until her face looked like someone else's face. Then she took the vial.
Compound V. Blue like an argument.
She found a vein with the practised tenderness of a sinner who believes in absolution. Cian almost looked away and didn't. He doesn't turn from the mechanics of a choice.
The drug hit. The room found a new tempo.
Her heart picked up like it had been waiting for permission. The world brightened at the edges. Claws sang out of skin with a sound you can feel in your molars. She smiled, wounded and proud.
A knock. Not Frenchie's.
"Rent," the landlord said, a syllable that thinks it's a handshake.
She opened because men like him never wait for no. He leaned in like mildew, eyes doing math he didn't have a license for. Popclaw's smile learned teeth it hadn't meant.
Cian didn't intervene. He never liked this part of the story; he also never lied to himself about who created it. The camera he'd set under the shelf watched the last minute a bad man deserved and the first minute a broken woman couldn't take back.
It was quick and ugly. It usually is.
After, Popclaw slid down the wall with a sound people make when history gets louder than the room. She stared at the mess on the floor and practiced breathing without taking responsibility for oxygen.
Butcher's text hit Hughie's phone two floors down: WE HAVE IT.
Hughie swallowed, shame and usefulness colliding in his throat. The footage uploaded to a server that did not officially exist, forked twice, went three places: Butcher, Mallory, and a mailbox Neuman would one day open with a calm face and shaking hands.
Cian set a tiny failsafe: if Vought scrubbed the cloud, the scrub would delete nothing and send a receipt that said congratulations.
---
The confrontation came later, in daylight that did not deserve its job.
Popclaw sat at her kitchen table like a woman waiting for a stage direction. Butcher put his phone on the table and pressed play. Hughie tried to think of any conversation that didn't start like this. Frenchie balanced on the arm of a chair like a thoughtful bird.
"We don't want to hurt you," Butcher said, pleasantly. "We want you to help us hurt someone else."
Popclaw's mouth flattened into the line you make when you've run out of smiles. "He won't forgive me."
"Good," Butcher said. "Forgiveness makes men sloppy."
She stared at the ceiling, at the place where a man had been a moment too long, where gravity had remembered its hobby. "What do you want?"
"Where he gets it," Butcher said. "Where he gets the blue."
She laughed like a cough. "You think I know?"
"Baby," Frenchie said gently, "you know everything lovers know. You know the lies they tell themselves."
Her eyes shone. "Clinic. Midtown. He calls it PT." She swallowed. "Physical therapy. His coach meets him there. They don't say V. They say vitamins." She smiled like she'd hurt herself. "Like high school."
"Names," Butcher said.
She gave them three. A doctor who was mostly a lock. A nurse who was mostly a conscience. An orderly who was mostly a door.
Hughie wanted to say thank you and wanted not to cheapen this. He said nothing. She nodded like he'd said the right thing.
When they left, Cian waited on the stairwell landing, a rumor with his hands in his pockets and his mouth a tight line. He wanted to hate her. He wanted to forgive her. He did the third thing: he decided to make it useful.
He brushed by the banister and left a small spark for later.
---
The clinic wore respectability like cologne: framed awards, laminate floors, a receptionist who could weaponize a smile. The sign read PhysioPlus over a tasteful logo that wanted you to think about stretch bands, not subsidies.
Cian walked in wearing a tracksuit that cost ninety dollars and a face that could be anyone's. He held a sports bag with nothing in it and a towel he didn't need. Sweat is camouflage.
He breathed into the building and tasted its lies.
— One fridge colder than the others, with a padlock that believed in aura more than metal.
— A back stair that led to a basement that had never once needed to exist.
— A landline used recently by a man who hated leaving messages.
— A camera over the loading dock with a field of view that forgot to include the door.
He signed in as Cal—because he likes a joke—and let the receptionist tell him where to stretch. He stretched for three minutes in a room where men pretended not to see each other's pain, then excused himself to "check his locker" and never returned.
Under the dock, he palmed the camera, smiled into it, and taught it how to count to seventeen very slowly.
He slid the door, followed the cold, and found the fridge.
Not hospital-grade. The kind of fridge a suburban dad would keep his hunting beer in. The padlock buzzed like a mosquito when he touched it. He hummed back, a tone only metal understands. It opened because stubbornness is a trait locks and men share.
Inside: blue. Vials in foam. Labels where medicine names should be, replaced by codes that meant budgets and promises and NDAs. He didn't take one. He took a picture with a camera that wasn't a camera—a tiny lens in a ring that sent truth to an inbox labeled NEUMAN—AFTER.
He put a coin-sized micro-drone—quiet rotors, dumb as a moth but loyal—on the rail under the shelf with a magnet that thought it was love. It would wake when it saw a hand with the tremor of need. It would follow like a tiny, nosy angel.
Then he kissed the lock and made it remember its job.
He was back in the lobby before the receptionist finished telling a patient how well he was doing for someone who was not doing well.
"Locker was fine," he said. He smiled a midwestern smile because it is a universal pass.
He left into noon. The Speed Force tugged his sleeve toward later. He told it soon.
---
A-Train arrived with the swagger of a man who thinks no one's faster than consequences. Hoodie up. Sunglasses that cost as much as regrets. He signed in as Reggie because lies sound more honest when they're almost true.
He went straight to the locker room, splashed water on his face, stared into a mirror that did not help, and texted someone a lightning bolt because language fails addicts.
Downstairs, the fridge door opened to a hand that shook like a drummer counting a song too fast.
The micro-drone woke, blinked its insect eyes, and latched to the underside of the cooler bag as if it had always lived there. It hummed once in a frequency Cian heard from three blocks away.
"Got you," Cian said, and slipped onto the clinic roof with a grin he didn't celebrate.
A-Train trotted up the stairs, cooler bag in hand, explanations rehearsed. He told the receptionist he was headed to PT. She wished him luck. He smiled like a billboard.
Outside, Cian jogged the city's little moods—two lights in a row, a squad car's route, a cyclist's sudden urge to check his chain—until A-Train had a clear path to where boys with speed go to hide their fear.
Popclaw's phone rang and rang. He didn't leave a message.
He went to her place anyway.
Cian didn't intervene. Sometimes a story drives itself into a wall before you can build a better road.
He took the fire escape like a rumor and found a shadow in the ceiling as A-Train let himself in and tried on contrition.
"Babe," A-Train said, soft. "You okay?"
Popclaw sat small on the couch, hands cuffed around each other. "I told them," she said. Simple. She didn't cry. Her face had given up secrets for the day.
A-Train's mouth twitched. He could outrun feelings; he couldn't outrun facts. "Who?"
"The ones who hate you," she said. "The ones who know you better than you do."
He sat beside her, the cooler at his shoes. It hummed faintly. The micro-drone hummed back.
"We can fix it," he lied to himself. "We can—"
"They have video," she said, and saved him the trouble of inventing a future that didn't exist.
He looked at her the way men look at their own reflection in a window at night: full of himself and empty of everything else. Then his face broke. "I love you," he said, and reached for the cooler.
Cian touched the wall with his palm, poised between interfering and letting the ugly finish. He could freeze the room, take the needle, re-route the day, buy the girl time she might not use. He didn't.
A-Train pulled heroin from the cooler like a man pulling a lever. He joked, because cowards often do. He wept, because cowards sometimes do. He found a vein on Popclaw's arm with hands that had held trophies.
"I'm sorry," he said, and made it so she wouldn't tell anyone anything ever again.
Cian closed his eyes. He didn't move. He recorded nothing. He kept the drone's feed pointed at the bag, the bag, the bag—proof of where the blue came from and who ran it, not a snuff film to sell grief.
The apartment got quiet the way rooms do after bad weather: the kind of quiet that knows what it cost.
A-Train sat with her a long minute and then remembered that the living are selfish and left.
The micro-drone followed the cooler bag down the stairs, out to the car, into the city. It sang a location string into Cian's phone like a prayer in code.
Cian put his forehead against the plaster and let the Speed Force buzz through him like an apology that never got to its second sentence.
He texted Butcher: PACKAGE ON THE MOVE. CLINIC—> STORAGE. PING LIVE.
He texted Mallory: NURSERY TRAIL CONFIRMED.
He texted no one about the body on the couch.
He left the way rumors leave—without ceremony, with the door remembering it had been closed all along.
---
On a bench two blocks away, Hughie stared at a city that had pressed its thumb into him until his shape changed.
Butcher sat beside him, chewing gum like it had made him a personal promise. "We've got him," he said, eyes on the street, voice a shade too gentle.
"Who?" Hughie asked, like the question had too many answers.
"Them," Butcher said. "Where it starts."
Hughie nodded. "And her?"
Butcher's jaw worked. "We keep moving."
"I hate that answer," Hughie said.
"Me too," Butcher said. "That's how I know it's true."
They stood because the job required feet. The city tilted toward the next mess. A bus sighed. A siren decided to be someone else's problem.
Up on a rooftop, Cian watched A-Train's cooler cut a bright line through the map. It ended in a building with a smiling mural and a name that sounded like charity.
He smiled without humor. "Alright, nursery," he told the concrete. "Let's hear you cry."
—End of Chapter 5.