The internet cafe was a fucking graveyard.
Premium cafe, the sign outside had claimed. Premium prices, too—twenty bucks an hour for the privilege of sitting in a room that smelled like the inside of a dead man's lung.
But premium was just a word. It was the kind of word people used to make themselves feel better about the choices they'd made, about the life they'd settled for, about the fact that they were spending a Tuesday afternoon in a cubicle the size of a coffin, watching pixels move across a screen while the world went on without them. The walls had once been white, probably, back when this place opened, back when someone had believed in it, had painted it and decorated it and thought maybe this would be the thing that turned their life around. Now the walls were the color of old cigarette smoke, that particular shade of yellow-brown that doesn't come from paint but from years of human desperation exhaled into the air. The smell had seeped into the walls years ago and never left. It was in the carpet, in the ceiling tiles, in the very bones of the building. You could tear this place down to the foundation and build something new on top, and ten years later it would still smell like nicotine.
The computers were ancient, the keyboards sticky with the residue of a thousand lonely men who came here to watch porn and pretend they had somewhere else to be. the guy behind the counter hadn't looked up from his phone once. He didn't care who came in, didn't care what they did, didn't care if they burned the whole place down as long as they paid for the hour upfront.
Jack slapped a twenty on the counter, grabbed the keycard for a booth in the back, and didn't wait for change.
The booth was a coffin. A tiny cubicle with a leather chair, a monitor and a CPU. The walls were thin enough that he could hear some fat bastard two booths over grunting at whatever was on his screen, that wet, rhythmic sound of a man who had forgotten how to be ashamed. The smell was worse in here. Like old sweat and something else, something that had a sweetness to it that made Jack's stomach turn. Like semen. There was no other word for it. The smell of semen, dried into the chair, into the very air, a monument to all the lonely men who had come here to be alone together.
Jack sat down. Cracked his knuckles. And felt his mind shift.
It was like someone had thrown a switch in his head. The fog that had been there since he woke up—the confusion, the disorientation, the slow processing of a brain still getting used to a new soul—it all just fucking vanished. His thoughts started moving faster. Cleaner. Sharper. He could feel the connections forming in his skull like roads being paved at lightning speed.
Everything he'd ever known about computers, about systems, about the way information moved through the world, it all came together, reorganized itself, built itself into something new. Not just the things he'd learned in school, in the years before he died, in the life that had ended with a stop and a darkness and a new beginning. But everything. Every movie he'd ever watched about hackers, every news story he'd ever read about data breaches, every idle thought he'd ever had about how the internet worked, all of it was there, all of it was accessible, all of it was being processed and sorted and turned into something that looked like understanding.
He'd never hacked anything in his life. Not really. He'd downloaded a movie once, maybe torrented a game, that was the extent of it. But now? Now he was looking at the computer like it was an open book, like he could see the code running underneath the interface, like he could reach into the machine and pull out whatever the fuck he wanted.
The Thor powers weren't just strength and lightning. They were this. A mind that could process information faster than any human had a right to. A brain that could learn in seconds what took other people years.
He cracked his knuckles again, grinned at the flickering screen, and got to work.
The license plate was his starting point. He pulled up the traffic camera database—didn't even take him five minutes to find the back door into the city's system, the encryption was a joke, a child's puzzle that his new mind solved while he was still thinking about the first step. It was like the people who built these systems had never considered that anyone would try to break in, or maybe they had considered it and just didn't care, because who would want to? Who would want to watch hours of grainy footage of intersections and parking lots and the slow crawl of a city that never slept? He found the black Chevelle, tracked it through the city, watched it move through intersections and down side streets like a thread through a needle, like a fish through water. The footage was timestamped, dated, organized by camera ID, and he moved through it like he'd been doing this his whole life.
The car was smart. Jack had to give Butcher that. It kept to the edges, avoided the main arteries where cameras were thickest, stuck to residential streets and back alleys, the kind of roads that didn't get much attention from the city's surveillance network. But it wasn't smart enough. There was always a corner, always a blind spot that wasn't quite blind, always some convenience store camera or ATM lens or traffic light rig that caught a glimpse, just a glimpse, just enough to keep the thread alive.
He followed it for six hours of recorded footage in about twenty minutes of real time. His eyes moved faster than the images, his brain filing away every detail, every turn, every stop. And then the car pulled into a parking garage, stayed there for forty-three minutes, and came out with a different plate.
Butcher had switched them. Clean swap, probably had a set ready to go, the kind of thing a man like that kept in his trunk for exactly this reason. Jack watched the new plate roll out of the garage and felt a surge of respect. The bastard was professional.
But Jack was faster now. He was smarter. He tracked the new plate through the same system, the same cameras, the same endless spiderweb of surveillance that every city draped over itself like a fishing net. The car moved east. Out of the city center. Past the suburbs. Past the strip malls and the housing developments and the places where people still pretended things made sense.
It stopped at an address in New Jersey. An abandoned restaurant. The sign out front said Tony Cierce's, the letters faded and half-missing, the parking lot cracked and overgrown with weeds. The SUV was there, parked behind the building, hidden from the road. Jack zoomed in on the satellite view, saw the layout, the entrances, the exits. A place no one would look twice at. A place where no one would hear you scream.
He sat back in the chair. Let the information settle. The hatred in his chest pulsed once, twice, three times, a heartbeat that wasn't his own, a voice that said go, go, go.
He shut down the computer, didn't bother wiping the history—let them find it, let them come, he didn't give a fuck—grabbed his coat, and walked out. The guy behind the counter didn't look up. Jack was already gone, already walking, already moving, the address burned into his mind like a brand.
...
Two hours away, in a warehouse that smelled of oil and rust and the particular funk of men who had been living in fear for too long, Hughie Campbell was having the worst day of his life.
He'd thought the worst day was when Robin turned into a red spray on the sidewalk. He'd thought the worst day was when he'd agreed to help Butcher. He'd thought the worst day was when they'd kidnapped a fucking superhero and shoved him in a cage like an animal.
He'd been wrong. This day was worse.
He was leaning against the wall, his back pressed against the cold concrete, his hands shoved in his pockets so nobody could see them shaking. His heart was hammering so hard he could hear it in his ears, a dull thud-thud-thud that matched the rhythm of his breathing, which was too fast, too shallow, the kind of breathing that came right before you passed out.
Across the room, Frenchie was squatted down in front of the cage like a frog studying a particularly interesting insect. His tools were spread out around him—needles, scalpels, a fucking drill at one point—all of them useless. Translucent sat in the middle of the cage, invisible except for the faint shimmer where the light bent around him, his voice a constant stream of threats and insults that never stopped, never let up, like a radio station that only played one song.
"You think this is going to work?" Translucent was saying, his voice muffled by the cage but still clear enough, still dripping with contempt. "You think you're the first assholes to try and hurt me? I've had bullets bounce off my chest. I've had knives snap against my skin. I've had fucking RPGs, you hear me? Rocket-propelled grenades. Walked away like it was a fucking sunburn. You're nothing. You're less than nothing. You're the shit I scrape off my boot in the morning."
Frenchie ignored him. He was holding a small scalpel, turning it over in his fingers, his brow furrowed. He'd tried everything. The mouth was a dead end—Translucent had thrown up the first time they'd tried to force anything down his throat, and the second time, and the third. His gag reflex was as invulnerable as the rest of him. The nose was the same. The ears. Every hole that led inside was sealed by the same carbon-metamaterial that made his skin unbreakable.
Frenchie looked up at Butcher, who was standing by the door, arms crossed, face unreadable. His good eye was fixed on the cage, his bad one doing whatever it did, but his attention was absolute. He hadn't moved in ten minutes.
"There is one way," Frenchie said slowly, his accent thickening the way it did when he was thinking hard. "One way that always works. You put something inside the skin, yes? But you cannot go through the skin. So you must go where there is no skin. Where the body opens itself." He looked at Butcher, a small smile playing at the corner of his mouth. "Through the mouth, he vomits. Through the nose, he sneezes. The body protects itself. But there is one hole. One hole the body does not protect. One hole that does not close. One hole that—"
"His ass," Butcher said. No hesitation. Just the flat, dead certainty of a man who had already seen the answer before the question was finished.
Frenchie's smile widened. "Exactement. The anus. The rectum. The—"
"I know what a fucking asshole is, Frenchie."
"Yes, yes, of course. But you see, the colon, it is not protected like the skin. The metamaterial, it covers the outside, not the inside. If we put something up there, something small, something explosive, it will go where the skin cannot follow. And then—" He made a gesture with his hands, a blooming flower, a cloud of smoke. "Poof."
.....
Love Interest -Starlight?
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