Sepsis 6.3
"So what do you think? Not a bad spot, right?" Annie said with a smile, reaching for a fresh cocktail.
I just smiled back, listening to her voice. She was lying in a hammock beside me, holding my hand. All that stretched before us was sand, a clear blue sea, and an endless sky with a soft, easy sun. It felt like we'd wandered into paradise.
"I'll let you in on a secret," I said. "It's not bad at all. I think I could spend a day or two here." I smirked and took a sip of hot chocolate. "Maybe a little longer, if you stick around."
A full plate of cookies sat beside me, practically asking to be eaten. I reached for one — and then a thought hit me out of nowhere.
*Huh.*
My hand stopped just short of the plate. I stared at it, genuinely confused. Who drinks hot chocolate with cookies on a beach? And besides — I'd given these up years ago. Right after I found out that—
***
"…So tell us, what comes next? The youngest member of the Seven in history — that's clearly an achievement. A lot of people are already predicting you'll lead the team someday." The smiling talk show host sat across from me, holding a stack of index cards. The familiar set pieces of the show were arranged behind us — I'd appeared here several times before. The whole production crew was visible in the distance, a dozen cameras all pointed directly at us. "And if you don't mind — can I just call you Mark? Or would you prefer your hero name?"
"You know I've never liked being called by a made-up name," I answered, my attention drifting as I took in the surroundings. Everything seemed fine on the surface. But something was off. Some small detail nagging at me, keeping me from fully enjoying what should have been my moment of triumph.
And why was I here in the first place? Joining the Seven? I had no memory of that.
"Mark, come on — don't go quiet on me. A real hero has to know how to work with an audience. Can't be afraid of the people you protect." Homelander, sitting right beside me, clapped me on the shoulder with a bright smile.
I turned — and there were the rest of the Seven, sitting out of costume, talking casually about the new additions. The Deep and A-Train were trading jokes, Queen Maeve and Translucent were laughing at them, while Black Noir just smiled faintly at the edges.
Wait. Black Noir never gave personal interviews. And he never appeared out of costume — not after the accident at the nuclear plant, where Soldier Boy died. Except — he's alive. I just saw him. So what happened to Noir?
And where was Sage? Homelander said she was replacing Lamplighter. Something about all of this was deeply wrong. It was too much like—
***
"…Thank you, Mark. I'd be dead without you. You're a real hero."
I looked down at my hands. They were covered in blood up to the elbows. And for some reason the blood wouldn't obey me. My powers felt like they'd simply been switched off.
"What's the matter — can't live without your abilities?" A woman's voice came from somewhere around me, rippling like an echo. "Funny, when you think about how you died and how you got them in the first place."
I raised my head. A blond woman with green eyes was looking at me as though she could see straight through to the back of my skull. I hadn't seen that face in more than eleven years. But I still remembered it.
"Linda? I thought you were already—"
"Dead? Probably, yes. But you already sense that what's standing in front of you isn't quite me." She smiled, enigmatic.
A ringing noise was growing louder in my head with every passing second, making it harder to think — but I fought through it, trying to keep my mind clear. Trying to make sense of what I was seeing.
I started by looking around. The room was the same old space where psychology sessions used to be held. The office looked like it hadn't changed a single day in all the years since.
"Go on — all the pieces are already in front of you. All that's left is to put them together into one picture. I know you can do it." Linda's voice was growing more distant with each word, even as she sat perfectly still.
Then a bolt of pain shot through my skull like something physical, and I dropped to my knees. Except the floor beneath me was no longer gray stone — it was dark brown hardwood. The corridor floors of Red River.
"Come on, you know the answer." Stevie was crouching beside me, his smile stretched unnaturally wide, as though his jaw was ready to unhinge and swallow me whole. "Just say it. Admit it."
I tried to force out even a single word, but my mouth felt sewn shut. I fought back against whatever was pressing down on me — and with every effort, the pain spiked harder. Exponentially. Eventually it overwhelmed me entirely, and everything went dark.
***
I came back to myself slowly, blinking, trying to understand where I was and what was happening.
I was in the middle of a bedroom. Clearly a child's room. There was an old television set nearby showing a brightly colored cartoon about costumed heroes — the characters were speaking English — and building blocks and other toys were scattered across the floor. A green couch stood against one wall, and a small wooden coffee table held a spread of newspapers and magazines and comics.
This was the room where I had first seen this new world. Except my body was adult now, and certain details looked blurred and soft, as though memory had warped the reality of it over the years.
But what stood out most was the blood. It covered the walls, the floor, the ceiling. And with every passing second there was more of it, and every attempt I made to stop it was useless.
The door and windows were shut tight — trying to force my way out accomplished nothing. My strength had abandoned me. Every exit was completely sealed. Trying to listen through the walls only made the headache worse.
And still the blood kept rising. It was past my knees within a minute, and shockingly hot — hot enough to actually burn. I gritted my teeth and bore it. I couldn't afford to give up now.
I hit the door again, then stopped and took a long breath.
My mind was clouded. The ringing at the edge of my consciousness and the burning pain made it nearly impossible to concentrate. But I pushed, driven by nothing more than the need to survive.
I started breathing slowly and deliberately, turning my focus toward the pain itself. It filled my awareness and grew with every second — but as it grew, everything else fell away. The false images, the false sensations, they all faded, until my mind held nothing but that single feeling.
And then, once the meditation had cleared the last of the other thoughts, I began reaching toward the one sensation that was uniquely mine. If I was right — if my mind was under attack by a telepath — then I had exactly one way out of the illusion.
I needed access to something that a hostile supe could not imitate or replace, because it existed completely outside their frame of perception. The same way a blind person cannot imagine color, a person without my ability cannot imagine the way my mind feels blood. That sense has no equivalent, no analog in ordinary experience.
The boiling liquid continued to burn me and fill the room, but because of that, with each passing second my mind pulled further and further away from the material world. With each breath I drew closer to that feeling — to the place where there was nothing but pain and—
The first heartbeat I heard was better than any music I could name. And more followed. One, two, three — three hearts beating near me. The crimson fluid moved through its impossibly intricate cycle, tracing paths through thousands of arteries and veins in patterns the human brain cannot even begin to map.
A second later, color returned to me. The whole world transformed into shades of red as the network of veins and arteries bloomed before my perception. Unique to every person, endlessly shifting, always in motion. I remembered spending hours as a child just looking at it, struck by the beauty of the human body.
Beyond my own blood, I felt Indira's and Kate's — standing a few meters away from me. And based on how intensely the latter's brain was working, my theory about her role in what I'd just experienced was confirmed.
I breathed out slowly. One thought was all it took.
She flew backward and hit the floor.
The moment she broke contact, the pain vanished instantly. I opened my eyes and confirmed what I already knew — the illusions were gone, and all three of us were inside the cabin.
"What?! How is that— my abilities—" The girl on the floor stared up at me with wide, stunned eyes.
"You're not the first telepath who's tried to rewire my brain. But just like the last one, you overlooked a single fact." I spoke with the kind of calm that comes from somewhere below temperature, pulling myself to my feet and steadying. "You can't dominate a mind you don't understand. And I can assure you — we see two entirely different worlds."
She was a teenager. I was not in a forgiving mood.
I closed my hand.
Kate screamed as her arms and legs twisted out at unnatural angles.
"Please, stop! She didn't do anything wrong on her own! I made her do this! I just wanted to protect you—" Indira rushed toward me, reaching out, her voice breaking — but none of it reached me. Right now there was only anger in my head. And a small flicker of something less rational.
"No. This doesn't get forgiven that easily. I'm not going to kill her — but I'm going to do something that makes her safe to be around. A threat like this has to be dealt with at the root." I snapped my fingers. The woman grabbed her head and dropped. I stepped toward the girl.
She was a supe, which made working on her considerably harder. But thirty seconds later she was out too.
I didn't bother carrying her anywhere else. I just lifted her onto the table in the living room where we stood. A quick examination confirmed she was completely healthy — physically, at least. I couldn't speak to her mental state with anywhere near the same confidence. But once I was sure of her physical wellbeing, I got to work.
Looking back, it was probably excessive. But I was running entirely on emotion at the time, and the image of being boiled alive was still burning behind my eyes. Thinking clearly wasn't an option.
The important thing was that none of it affected my ability to control the crimson fluid. If anything, the slight cloudiness in my mind seemed to make it stronger. More precisely — as though the boundaries of what I could do had shifted outward. And I intended to use that to its fullest.
I swept my hand over her body and instantly felt every drop of blood inside her. Focusing deeper, I began to sense the Compound V serum flowing through her veins.
A year and a half ago, when I'd gotten my hands on one of the formulas Butcher had acquired, I'd been forced to hand it over to Victoria Neuman almost immediately — in exchange for her help getting me in front of billionaires and power players. The woman, however, hadn't specified that the serum had to be delivered complete.
Compound V always grants powers when properly introduced — the level of ability simply depends on the purity of the serum. For the vast majority of supes, it was roughly the same across the board. But there were exceptions. In my entire life I'd seen three: Soldier Boy, the lightning mistress, and Homelander. Their serum was far more concentrated, far cleaner.
So I had successfully drawn off a few milliliters for myself — an amount that barely affected the rest of the vial. And that small quantity had been enough to analyze it and conduct some genuinely fascinating experiments.
Of course, even sixteen months hadn't been enough to fully understand how it functioned. This was a mystery that Vought's best minds had been working on for seventy years without arriving at any real answers.
The general consensus had always been that the formula altered the biology of the body at a cellular level in some way, causing the body to develop unique abilities — ones that sometimes defied the laws of physics and even logic.
But the foundation of all of it was blood. More precisely, the bone marrow, the spleen, the lymph nodes, and the stem cells that produced it — but the blood itself was enormously significant. Vought had noticed long ago that transfusing blood from an ordinary person to a supe could significantly weaken the latter, which was why it was something they avoided doing.
How exactly? Why? That was beyond my area. What I had managed to piece together, more or less, was the principle of how the body absorbed the serum. Which meant I had at least some idea of how that process might be reversed.
I placed my hands on the girl's shoulders, closed my eyes, and began my breathing exercise. My mind sank deeper and deeper into its awareness of the crimson fluid — absorbed by the concept of it, the idea of it at its core. What I needed now was to operate not as a doctor, but more like an artist — like a creator capable of thinking outside the structures I'd always worked within.
Because what is blood, really? A fluid and mobile connective tissue of the body's internal environment, composed of plasma and certain enzymes. But where exactly did my ability begin and end, in terms of what it could detect? The blood of supes and ordinary people differed quite significantly, but both fell within the range of my control.
And the difference was clear enough that I believed I could separate the grain from the chaff — purge the added formula from the crimson fluid entirely. It would be extraordinarily difficult. Right at the absolute edge of what I was capable of, given that I'd never attempted anything like it before. But without the willingness to reach for the unknown, no discovery is ever made.
I shut off every other sense and merged completely with my ability. In the whole world, there was nothing but blood and its gradations. I had never gone this deep into my power before. But right now — strange as it was — my mind happened to be in exactly the right state for it.
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