Chương 62

Queen Maeve was furious. Homelander had exposed her as a lesbian and dragged her girlfriend into the movie as well. When Maeve had first told him to stay away from her girlfriend and stop following her, Homelander had only smiled.

"I'm just starting to have fun," he had said. Maeve understood the warning behind those words. He was not going to lose interest and walk away. He would keep following them until he managed to destroy Maeve or the woman she loved. That was when Maeve began forming a plan. She had no way to know whether it would work, but she hoped she could at least pull her girlfriend out of Homelander's reach. If the plan worked, it might also quiet some of the guilt Maeve still carried from the plane.

Her first step had been to visit one of the survivors of that flight. It was the same little girl Maeve had abandoned in the cabin when Homelander refused to save the passengers. The girl's father had answered the door and refused to let Maeve see her. Maeve had been ready to leave when the girl came downstairs herself. There had been no sympathy in the girl's eyes.

"You're a demon pretending to be human," she had told Maeve. Then she had ordered her to leave. Maeve had gone away with those words still in her mind. The girl's anger brought back everything Maeve had tried not to think about after the plane. She had left a child there to die, and the child knew exactly what kind of person had abandoned her. The meeting had also given Maeve an idea. The girl and the other survivors knew the truth about Homelander.

Homelander could not ignore the survivors as easily as he ignored Maeve. The survivor was only one part of the plan. Maeve still needed help with the rest, so she went to The Deep.

"If you want to return to the Seven," Maeve told him, "you have to do one thing for me." The Deep looked at her and nodded.... At Sage Grove Center, The Boys followed the lead Annie had found in Stormfront's email. The message had pointed them toward the facility where Vought was hiding its secret research. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. M. M., Frenchie, and Kimiko entered dressed as hospital staff.

Adam remained close while they moved deeper into the building. They kept going until the public part of the center was behind them. Adam could sense people behind the locked doors around them. Heartbeats came from one room after another. There were too many for the place to be an ordinary medical center, and nearly every person was being kept alone. With M. M. leading the way, they reached the control room. Adam stopped beside the monitors while M. M.

sat at the main terminal and opened the security feeds one after another. Frenchie and Kimiko stood close enough to see every screen. The first cameras showed rows of cells. A person was locked inside each one. The number of prisoners was disturbing, but that was not what made M. M.' s hand stop over the controls. Power appeared inside one patient's cell. M. M. changed the feed, and the next person had a different ability. He moved through more cameras, but the truth remained the same in every room.

No two prisoners had the same ability. Frenchie leaned toward the monitors. Kimiko watched the patients while M. M. stared at the screen in front of him. The three of them had expected hidden research, but they had not expected to see an entire building filled with test subjects. They did not need to find a report explaining the project. Vought was giving the people in those cells Compound V and trying to turn them into Supes. The older method had begun in childhood.

Compound V was given to a child before anyone knew which ability would appear, and the process continued until the ability became permanent. Only then could the doses stop. Raising one person through that process took years and cost a great deal of money. The company had reduced the expense over time. Marketing already earned it plenty of money, while merchandise and movies earned even more. That was still not enough for Vought.

Sage Grove was its attempt to perfect the drug so that an adult could receive permanent abilities without years of preparation. If the research succeeded, Vought could create a Supe whenever it wanted and spend far less doing it. Adam was not afraid of the people in those cells. When his synchronization had been at five or ten percent, he had worried that several Supes together might beat him or even kill him. Now it had passed forty percent.

His growing fame and repeated use of his powers kept pushing it higher, and the old fear no longer controlled him. One patient caught his attention. Adam watched the woman on the monitor and gave her a name in his mind: Adult Eleven. Her ability reminded him of Eleven from the Netflix series. Adam had always found that character fascinating, and the patient in Sage Grove looked like an adult version of her to him. He kept watching her feed for another moment before M. M. moved to a different terminal. M. M.

began entering a security code. The system accepted it, and another recording opened on the largest screen. Stormfront entered a room where a patient was being tested. The camera showed her speaking to the person, but the recording did not capture their conversation. Then Stormfront turned toward a man standing beside her and motioned for him to step forward. The man moved in front of the patient and raised both hands. Fire burst from his palms. It covered the patient before anyone on the recording could move.

The flames kept burning until the person inside the room was reduced to ash. Frenchie stared at the screen. Kimiko did not look away. Adam remained calm because he already recognized the man in the footage. Mother's Milk stopped beside the terminal.

"Lamplighter."