The first candidate was a woman named Kala, formerly known as "Echo." Her power was a form of psychometry—the ability to read the emotional residue left on objects. Vought had used her to "authenticate" historical artifacts for their propaganda documentaries, until she'd accidentally uncovered a murder weapon one of their B-listers had used. They'd paid her off and buried her in a data-entry job, a human Geiger counter relegated to counting paperclips.
Marcus set the meet in a twenty-four-hour laundromat, the thrum of industrial dryers providing a constant, concealing white noise. I watched from the shadows of a nearby alley, my senses extended, a spectral sentinel. This was the first test of the concept, and the most dangerous. A single misstep, a flicker of betrayal, and the entire nascent network would collapse before it began.
Kala was a small, nervous woman who clutched her handbag like a shield. She jumped when Marcus slid into the plastic chair opposite her.
"Marcus," she whispered, her eyes darting around. "I shouldn't be here. If they find out—"
"They won't," Marcus said, his voice low and steady. He'd shed his Shatterstar bravado, replacing it with a quiet, convincing earnestness. "Because we're not doing anything wrong. We're just talking."
"I know what you're selling. A rebellion. It's suicide."
"It's not a rebellion. It's an insurance policy." He leaned forward. "Remember the Hamilton locket? The one you authenticated for the 'Heroes of the Revolution' special?"
Her face paled. "How do you know about that?"
"Because I listen," Marcus said. "The story Vought told was a lie. That locket wasn't a family heirloom. It was a payoff from a Senator that Homelander… persuaded. You felt it, didn't you? The fear, the corruption baked into the metal."
A single tear traced a path down Kala's cheek. "I told my handler. He said I was imagining things. That my power was 'unreliable.' They threatened to revoke my contract, send me back to the group home."
"That's how they control you," Marcus said, his voice softening. "They make you doubt yourself. They make you alone. But you're not alone anymore. We want to give you a choice. Not to fight. Just to… bear witness. To let us hold a copy of your truth, so that if they ever come for you, your story doesn't die with you."
He laid a cheap, encrypted burner phone on the table between them. "This is a dead drop. One-way communication. If you ever feel threatened, if you ever learn something they can't afford to have known, you send a signal. A single word. 'Echo.' That's all. We do the rest. We protect you."
She stared at the phone as if it were a live serpent. This was the crux of the gamble. We were asking for trust based on nothing but a promise and a shared understanding of Vought's cruelty.
"What's in it for you?" she asked, her voice trembling.
"The same thing that's in it for you," a new voice said.
I stepped out of the shadows and into the fluorescent glare of the laundromat. Kala gasped, shrinking back in her chair. My presence was a calculated risk, a demonstration of serious commitment.
"My name is Alex," I said, keeping my voice low and devoid of the power that usually crackled within it. "Vought calls me Mazahs. They want you to see me as a monster. But I'm just a man who saw the machine from the inside and decided to try and build a better one."
I met her terrified gaze. "I'm not asking you to follow me. I'm offering you a shield. Your power, your knowledge, is a weapon they fear. Let us help you keep it sheathed, until the day you might choose to draw it yourself."
The silence stretched, filled only by the rumble of dryers and the frantic beating of Kala's heart. I could feel the war within her—a lifetime of conditioned obedience versus the fragile, terrifying hope of autonomy.
Slowly, hesitantly, her hand crept across the Formica table. Her fingers closed around the burner phone. She didn't look at us. She just nodded, a single, sharp jerk of her head, before stuffing the phone into her bag and fleeing into the night.
Marcus let out a long, slow breath. "Well? Did we just win our first convert or paint a target on her back?"
"Both," I said, watching her disappear around a corner. "Every person who joins us is both a strength and a vulnerability. The network is only as strong as its weakest secret."
Over the next week, the pattern repeated, with variations. There was "Deep Dive," a hydrokinetic who could manipulate water pressure, who Vought had used to sabotage a rival corporation's underwater pipeline, an act that had caused an ecological disaster he was forced to publicly blame on "terrorists." We found him working as a pool cleaner, drowning his guilt in cheap vodka. We offered him a lifeline—not forgiveness, but a chance to ensure the truth would outlive him.
There was "Aegis," a woman who could generate localized force fields, who had been critically injured protecting a Vought executive from a genuine assassination attempt, only to be discarded when her injuries made her "unmarketable." Her medical bills were bankrupting her family. We couldn't give her money, but we could give her a purpose—becoming the guardian of the network's first physical safe house, a role that utilized her protective instincts without putting her in the line of fire.
They were the broken, the discarded, the silenced. And one by one, Marcus, with his street-level credibility, and I, with the chilling weight of my notoriety, offered them a deal: your silence for our protection. Your secret for a place in a new community.
It was slow, painstaking work. For every Kala who took the phone, two others fled in terror. But the network grew. A fragile, hidden web of whispered conversations and encrypted signals. It was a ghost in Vought's machine, a subtle corruption of its foundation.
I reported to Homelander and Mallory that my "pest control" mission was ongoing, that Shatterstar was a ghost. They seemed satisfied, for now. The illusion of my compliance was holding.
But late one night, as I reviewed the growing list of contacts—a list that existed only in my mind, a psychic registry more secure than any server—Maeve found me on the rooftop of the tower.
"The whispers are starting," she said without preamble, her face grim in the city's glow. "Homelander's heard them. Nothing concrete. Just… unease. He thinks it's Butcher. But he can feel the ground shifting under his feet. He doesn't like it."
She looked at me, her eyes searching mine. "This network of yours… it's a beautiful, dangerous dream. But dreams have a way of turning into nightmares when the wrong people find out about them. You're playing with souls, Alex. Not just your own."
"I know," I said, looking out at the city, at the millions of points of light, each one a potential ally or a victim. "But it's the only game left that doesn't end with a crater. We're not just building an army, Maeve. We're building an alternative."
The ghost network was live. It was silent, invisible, and utterly fragile. And it was the most powerful weapon I had ever created.