Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado
NORAD Operations Floor 02:41 A.M.
"Say that again."
Major Ellen Price doesn't raise her voice. She never does when something is wrong. Stands behind the consoles, arms crossed, eyes fixed on the main display.
Senior Sergeant Mark Reynolds swallows once before answering.
"Vertical object. No transponder. Speed exceeding Mach nine. Acceleration still increasing."
Price tilts her head slightly. "Missile?"
Reynolds shakes his head. "No arc or burnout. No separation."
"Aircraft?"
"No lift profile, wings or control surfaces."
A younger operator nearby mutters, "Then what the hell is it?"
Price ignores him. She points at the screen. "Overlay civilian radar."
The track doesn't disappear.
It sharpens.
"That's not noise," Reynolds says quietly.
A lieutenant steps closer, tablet in hand. "Ma'am, this vector doesn't match any known Vought flight pattern. Homelander doesn't"
"I know how Homelander flies," Price cuts in. "I've seen it on parade routes."
She stares at the rising line.
"This thing isn't performing," she adds. "It's leaving."
Peterson Space Force Base
Joint Aerospace Monitoring
Dr. Caleb Hsu rubs his eyes and leans back in his chair. He's been awake for twenty hours and hates that this is the thing keeping him awake longer.
"Run thermal again," he says.
The image refreshes.
A tight, violent heat bloom rips through the upper atmosphere, peaking briefly before vanishing into black.
"No plume," Linda Moore says again, slower this time. "No exhaust or debris."
A colonel at the back of the room folds his arms. "Could it be classified tech?"
Moore turns in her chair. "If it is, sir, it violates three treaties and five laws of physics."
Hsu adds, "And nobody told NASA."
That lands poorly.
A tech snaps his fingers. "We've got visual. Satellite 7B just caught it."
The room leans forward as one.
Of feed jitters, stabilizes
Three frames.
On the third frame, the room collectively inhales.
"That's a person," someone whispers.
Human silhouette. No wings, vehicle, thrusters.
Just a figure.
And eyes that glow hard enough to bloom the image.
Then the screen goes black.
"What happened?" the colonel demands.
"It didn't explode," the tech says, frantic fingers running diagnostics. "No EMP spike. No debris field."
"So where's the satellite?"
The tech looks up slowly.
"Offline. evaporate completely
Silence stretches.
Hsu breaks it. "It looked at us."
No one laughs.
Langley, Virginia
CIA Secure Briefing Room
The image is projected large on the wall. Grainy. Incomplete. Still unmistakable.
Deputy Director Robert Mallory stands with his jacket still on, tie loosened, coffee untouched.
"Let's say the obvious part out loud," he says. "This is not a Vought asset."
Agent Nina Calder nods. "No branding. PR signature. handler pattern."
A Defense Department liaison scoffs. "You're telling me Vought built something that can hit orbit and didn't monetize it?"
Calder looks at him. "I'm telling you Vought doesn't lose control of assets like this."
Mallory taps the frozen image.
"And this thing," he says, "destroyed a satellite without a weapon discharge."
"Which means?" someone asks.
Calder answers. "Which means it didn't need one."
A folder slides across the table.
Stamped: NON-VOUGHT / ORBITAL EVENT
Mallory opens it.
"Is it hostile?" a general asks.
Mallory considers. "Define hostile."
"It destroyed U.S. hardware."
"Disabled observation," Mallory replies. "That's different."
"So it's intelligent."
"Yes."
"And not answering to anyone we know."
Mallory closes the folder.
"That's where the concern starts."
Someone near the end of the table speaks up hesitantly. "Could this be… natural?"
Calder almost smiles.
"Nothing that looks back at a camera is natural."
Orders come fast, but quietly.
No public statement.
military response.
Vought notification yet.
"Track everything," Mallory says. "Orbital anomalies, power spikes, atmospheric disturbances. Anything that smells like this."
"And if it comes back?" the general asks.
Mallory meets his eyes.
Later, when all the panicked commanders had already left.
Calder studies the image again.
The eyes.
Not angry or wild.
Focused.
"Who are you?" she murmurs.
Because in a world full of loud gods, she's learned to fear the quiet ones most.
Somewhere beyond the planet's curvature, beyond flags and contracts and narratives, something unknown drifts freely.
And on Earth, the people who believe they manage supes are forced to confront an uncomfortable truth:
This one didn't ask permission.
And it didn't need it.
I don't leave right away.
Hours pass.
Not measured. racked. Just… passing.
At first the influx of energy is too much to think through properly. Solar radiation keeps pouring into me, unfiltered, constant, insistent. My body adjusts in layers, like a system tuning itself while already running at full load. Muscles stabilize. Neural activity evens out. Whatever threshold I crossed on the way up, my cells slowly learn how to live on the other side of it.
Eventually, the noise fades.
Not silence control.
I stop feeling like I'm being filled and start feeling… steady.
That's when thinking comes back.
They saw me.
This such is obvious.
You don't burn through orbit and erase a satellite without someone noticing. I replay the moment in my head, not emotionally this time, just mechanically. The angle. timing reflex. Burning it was instinct. Fast. Too fast to be clean.
Still.
I force myself to slow down and actually analyze what that moment means.
They detected something.
Not me.
I give the AI a simple directive , not aggressive. Just curiosity with teeth. It moves while I stay still, combing through what's already leaking into public-facing systems, institutional chatter, misfiled telemetry.
Minutes later, the answer settles in.
No facial data or clear biometric capture.
Good usable visual ID.
Just a silhouette. A dark shape. Light where eyes should be, blown out by exposure and distance. Enough to scare analysts. Not enough to identify anyone.
I let out a breath I didn't realize was holding.
That was the real risk.
And it didn't happen.
They can speculate all they want.
Supes. Tech. Vought. Non-Vought.
None of it points to me.
I'm still anonymous.
Still clean and safe. Not for me but for my family I can't be with my mother all the time, the same with her parents, relationships, bonds and at the same time weaknesses that I can't get rid of.
Up here, with Earth turning slowly beneath me, the realization lands fully for the first time:
I crossed a line tonight.
Not a physical one.
The world now knows that something exists outside its existing boxes.
And as long as they don't know it's a person
as long as they don't know it's Ethan
I control what happens next.
I stay a little longer after that.
Not because I need to.
Because now that my body has adjusted, space doesn't feel overwhelming anymore.
It feels… usable.
And for the first time since I left the ground, my thoughts are calm and empty as this bottomless sky.
I don't rush the return.
That would be the mistake.
If they're watching anything now, they're watching patterns angles, heat, repeat behavior. A straight descent would be clean, fast, and obvious. The kind of thing that invites a second look.
I don't want a second look.
So I think it through slowly, letting the plan form without forcing it.
The atmosphere is the problem.
Space isn't watched the same way.
Land is predictable.
Water isn't.
The ocean solves several issues at once.
It breaks trajectories.
Eats heat.
If I come down hard and disappear below the surface immediately, whatever they tracked becomes a question mark instead of a line. Analysts start using words like probably and likely.
I angle down shallow this time, bleeding speed long before friction can flare. I don't fight gravity, just let it take its share. When the air thickens again, I stay slow enough to look uninteresting, fast enough to stay brief.
The ocean rises to meet me like a dark sheet.
I don't brace.
Just let go.
Impact.
Then silence.
Cold wraps around me instantly, pressure stacking in familiar layers. The surface chaos vanishes in seconds, replaced by the steady, honest resistance of water. Down here, everything behaves the way it should.
I sink.
Move horizontally once I'm deep enough, keeping my profile small, letting currents smear anything I might leave behind. No bubbles rush. Just motion
Eventually, I slow.
I hover in the water, surrounded by nothing but pressure and distance. My body doesn't complain. It hasn't needed air in a long time. Energy still flows cleanly, stable now, no longer overwhelming.
That's when the interface flickers.
Soft. Polite blue light
Out of place.
MISSED CALL
ANNIE J.
I stare at it longer than necessary.
Here, of all places.
Under hundreds of meters of water, after orbit and satellites this is what pulls at my attention.
My suit must have picked up a signal when I fell into the ocean, unlike my internet access, I didn't bother with phones, so in the vacuum I had no signal.
Annie doesn't call randomly.
She thinks before cals. Rehearses. Second-guesses. If she reached out, something pushed her past that.
I feel a tightness in my chest that has nothing to do with pressure.
I check the timestamp.
Recent.
Not hours ago.
Minutes.
Which means whatever happened… is still happening.
I remain still in the water for a moment longer, listening to nothing, letting the weight of that sink in.
Whatever I just became to the world
To her, I'm still just someone she knows well enough to call.
And that matters more than it probably should.
I start moving toward shore
at a speed that terrified any creature I passed along the way.
The missed call stays in my vision the whole way.
Waiting.