The air in the Collections Room was frozen, thick with the promise of violence. Maeve stood, her hand hovering over the bell jar, her body coiled like a spring. Noir was a statue in the doorway, his blank mask giving nothing away, the laser sight on his pistol a unwavering red eye on her chest.
Don't, I pulsed down the psychic thread to Maeve, the effort sending a fresh spike of pain through my shattered ribs. He will kill you. He's programmed to.
I know, her thought came back, sharp with frustration and fear. But we're out of time.
Noir took a single, silent step forward. The message was clear: retreat or be neutralized.
This was it. The end of the line. All the planning, the sacrifice, the battle at the dam—all for nothing, shattered by the silent, perfect loyalty of Homelander's first and most broken weapon.
And then, something shifted.
As Noir took another step, his boot came down not on the obsidian floor, but on a raised, almost imperceptible seam in the stone—a pressure plate even Maeve had missed. It wasn't an alarm. A section of the wall behind him slid open with a whisper, revealing not a weapon, but a small, hidden alcove.
Inside was a simple cot. A single, worn photograph was tacked to the wall. It showed a young, smiling Black Noir, his face unmarred and open, his arm around a woman with kind eyes. And on the cot, neatly folded, was a child's blanket, faded with age.
It was a shrine. A secret, hidden piece of the man he was before Vought shattered him and rebuilt him as a weapon.
Noir stopped. His head, ever so slowly, tilted towards the alcove. The laser dot on Maeve's chest wavered.
The psychic echo of his memory—the screaming child from The Aerie—surged within me, no longer a distant ghost but a screaming, present agony. He wasn't just looking at a memento. He was looking at the ghost of the boy he used to be.
And in that frozen moment, I understood. His loyalty wasn't to Homelander. It was to the only home he had ever known, the only identity he had left. But that identity was a cage, just like mine.
I had one card left to play. Not a card of power, but of empathy. A Hail Mary pass into the heart of a broken machine.
I poured every ounce of my will, every shred of the Hypnotist's subtlety and my own desperate hope, down the psychic thread. But I didn't send it to Maeve. I bypassed her completely and aimed it like a scalpel at the fractured consciousness of Black Noir.
I didn't send a command. I didn't send a suggestion.
I sent him a memory.
The shattered tube in the underground tomb. The empty cylinder that once held him. The placard: PROJECT: BLACK NOIR. The cold, clinical truth of his origin as a thing made, not born.
And with it, I sent a single, clear image: the record under the glass jar. The Sibyl Code.
The connection was a live wire of pure, agonizing truth. I felt his psyche recoil, a silent scream echoing back through the link. The laser dot on Maeve's chest vanished. Noir's gun arm lowered a fraction of an inch.
He didn't look at Maeve. He kept his blank mask fixed on the alcove, on the photograph of the boy he could never be again.
And then, he gave a single, sharp, almost imperceptible nod.
It wasn't an alliance. It was a momentary, silent understanding between two broken things. A temporary truce in a war against a common creator.
He took a step back, holstering his pistol. He turned and walked out of the Collections Room, the door hissing shut behind him. He was giving us the window. He was betraying his programming, for a few stolen seconds, for a ghost of a chance at a freedom he could never have.
GO! I screamed into Maeve's mind.
She didn't hesitate. She snatched the bell jar, not bothering to be gentle, and lifted it. The vinyl record was in her hands. She didn't have a player. She didn't need one. She held it up, and I focused my enhanced senses, even from fifty miles away, on the microscopic grooves in the vinyl.
I heard it. Not with my ears, but with my soul.
A sequence of pure, clean tones, woven into a haunting, simple melody. The Sibyl Code. The resonant harmonic of Homelander's cellular structure. The kill switch.
I absorbed it. Not as data, but as a new kind of power—a sonic template, a key that now lived within me, etched into my being alongside strength and lightning and gravity.
The penthouse alarm began to blare—a different, more urgent sound than the door alarm. Noir's silence had been noticed. Our time was up.
Maeve dropped the record, letting it shatter on the obsidian floor. The evidence had to be destroyed. She turned and ran, a phantom fleeing the sanctum she had violated.
The heist was over. We had won.
Lying broken on the dam, feeling the Sibyl Code settle inside me like a loaded gun, I knew the victory was fragile. We had the weapon. But using it would be an act of war that would change everything.
And Homelander would be back.