“—ive from the Vought Town Hall, where Stormfront, one of the newest and most popular members of the Seven—”
The anchor's voice was reedy.
High-pitched and absolutely pathetic, it practically vibrated from the television mounted in the corner of the room, the woman on-screen sick with the too-real hysteria she knew for a fact was a career-making broadcast.
“—has been outed as what appears to be a Nazi and has fled the location!”
Appears to be. A scoff filled the space. Pathetic as ever.
Even now, with all the footage in high-definition looping on every screen across the country, not a single word of them could manage what was just a word.
A plain word.
They needed that little hedge, a linguistic life raft; true fear at seeing the real thing with power they thought it would never have again too much otherwise. It was a deserving fear, a healthy thing for a people so desperate to cling to the plastic reality the juden had spoon-fed to them like overstuffed infants.
They’d called her Vought’s Eternal Ghost once.At least one person had, some motormouthed handler who’d stumbled too close to a secret till she sent him stumbling out of a window.
Eternal Ghost she may have been but, underneath it all, she was still Klara.Before Vought, she was always just Klara.Right now, Klara sat still, palms pressed flat against the cold surface of the scarred table, cold enough it was almost uncomfortable — even to her.
That was good.
It was a good feeling, a real feeling.
Real as the over-thick walls in this tomb of a safehouse. Those same walls held its damp the way it always had, poured concrete sweating in the corners of one of a dozen or so holes she’d seeded into this country. Most of them had been built back when the idea of satellites and cell phones were still something out of a serial.
She hadn't changed out of the suit even after she found her way here. Even as the armor sat wrong against her ribs, the cape dragging at the chair's legs, it occurred to her that the whole ensemble had gone from costume to lie somewhere in the last four hours without her quite noticing the crossover point.
Four hours. It almost felt like a lifetime but no, it had only been mere hours since she’d fled the town hall. All the work she’d done to hide her path, to vanish into the darkness immediately after; it was all pointless. No one had chased after her, not even John.
Her ubermensch had stared like the rest, as if she hadn’t told him first; shock at the reality of being associated with her all that kept him from taking her hand as he should have.
And his Ryan…
Young Ryan. Klara shut her eyes, a smile on her face at the thought of another perfect addition to her family; a perfect natural-born young soldier to be paired with her little Tatjana.
Her dream was not yet dead, though.Even after they did this.Dropped me. Her fists clenched tight atop the table. Airing everything to the pigs.
Decade after decade — an entire lifetime — she’d dealt with this nonsense, swallowing it all like the bitter medicine it was; all of it for a simple purpose.
A glorious purpose. Her eyes opened as the news kept blaring, ears silent to all but the six breathing bodies behind her. All to keep the dream of her darling husband alive; perfect smile practiced year after year for cameras run by handlers who kept getting younger every news cycle and so many notes she’d nodded at from focus groups until she could predict their insulting little points to the letter.
Gone — all of it, the entire architecture of artifice — the moment Stan Edgar decided her shelf life had a date stamped on it after all.
All of it, tossed aside like garbage.
By a heartless negro and his scrambling desire for control over a legacy he could never truly understand.
Edgar. She clicked her tongue. “Ach, of course.”
Of course it was Stan.
Who else had the access, the cold bloodless competence, the sheer will required to torch Vought’s darkest asset — along with the brightest, simply by mere association — just to keep the latter tied to the leash a little longer?
It was honestly impressive.
A man like Edgar was rarely seen and even the Fuhrer would have said as much. If only he wasn’t a Neger… Klara shook her head, wiping the thought away.
She’d seen this exact day in the mirror from the very moment they handed Frederick’s organization to Edgar. Not even for being one of his kind, but simply for how material and cold-blooded the man was; those unflinching eyes that were never impressed by Compound Vought, seeing only a simple patent rather than the divine gift it was.
He'd have priced all of this in already before he even did it. The dip.
The outrage cycle running its predictable half-life as he twisted events into the perfect path to market it to a gullible audience with some new biddable face already rehearsing lines in a green room, ready to be installed in the Seven the moment ratings stabilized.
It was Stan Edgar, after all.A credit to his people, but a demon wrapped in flesh if there ever was one.
Her phone lay in front of her, face-down and silent. She’d turned it off the second she reached the air, simply to avoid being tracked. Klara had no need to turn it over to know what was happening on the other end of that black mirror — numbers cratering in real time across Twitter, Instagram, TikTok; a decade of curated adoration hollowing at a rate of hundreds of followers each second.
All of it garbage.
A love she had always known as rented, never owned.
"So, what do we do, Oma?"
Dark eyes trailed up and softened at once, the jagged anger in her chest smoothing for all the length of a breath at the sight of each one of them standing tall and proud in the low light of her bunker.
Not Vought's collection of leased faces cycling in and out of a costume department.
These were hers; generation over careful generation, Frederick's inheritance walking around in bodies she'd chosen herself.Her own Seven.
"Vikor, mein Großer." The heavy cape swept behind her as she rose, eyes lighting up in a smile as she met nearly seven feet of her own blood staring back at her; that same barrel-chested earnestness and uncomplicated smile still there from when he was small enough to fit in her arms. "What we do is remind them they need us."
“The Neger believes Vought is anything without me…” She paced toward them, a century-old certainty returning exactly where it belonged. “When they have always needed my hands to do their dirty work.”
"Say the word, Oma.” His laugh came up out of somewhere deep in that giant chest, the sound almost enough to shudder the walls as his shoulders shook. “I bring you Edgar’s head on my hammer."
"Not yet, mein Bär." Fondness, genuine and pure, threaded her words as Klara breathed the damp air in slow. “These vermin running around with the corruption of your grandfather’s gift rotting their blood. Given enough time, they will outnumber the pure.”She shook her head. “Even Edgar knows that arithmetic, whether he says it aloud or not."
"Whatever you need us to do, Großmutter." Norska lowered her head, pale blonde braid swinging forward the moment a fist met her chest in a crisp salute. "We will."
"I know you will, meine treue Enkelin." Klara’s legs carried her over to the taller woman, a smile still present as her hands rose. Those same hands cupped the girl’s sharp cheeks between them, Klara almost cooing at the striking beauty that had barely faded across two decades. "That is why I chose you, and only you, for my Vikor.”The blonde valkyrie leaned in, eyes closed under Klara’s touch. “Perfect. In every way."
Her gaze slid past to Skandia, the girl barely old enough to drink as she shined faintly under her own armor beside her husband. "Perfect."Her great-grandaughter beamed her way under the compliment aimed at her, the luminous glow of a new mother adding to the light of her power. "In every single way."
Klara pretended to not hear the sigh of disappointment from her grandson’s bride as she let go of Norska’s face, her steps carrying her across the line of gathered super-soldiers standing at attention.
Klara turned to take in all of them at once, dark cape settling behind her like a shroud. “Are you all ready for what comes next?”
"Yes." The chorus filled the empty space of the bunker, no hesitation riding beneath it.
"Ready to be hated by the filth that has spent the better part of a century tainting this country?"
"Yes, Großmutter."
"Ready and willing to stand above, to take the place that was always yours and yours alone?"
"Yes, Großmutter!" Vikor boomed loudest of all, grip tightening on the haft of his oversized hammer.
"Good." One nod was all any of them needed from her. "The plan is simple, because good plans always are. There is a problem. A virus, spreading itself across this country's streets, breeding in basements and warehouses with nothing to check it. And Vought has power enough to matter, but not the skill, not the stomach, to use it properly."
"But ve—" She spread her hands, violet static stuttering across her own knuckles as Vikor raised the hammer in answer before she'd even finished speaking.
"Ve have the power."
Galdar's mirrored mask tilted a fraction, ball bearings drifting lazy above his open palm.
"Ve have the skill."
Her attention found Norska last, the first to have joined this family without a drop of Klara's own blood running through her, and no less devoted for the lack of it.
"Ve have the training."
Lightning cracked violent and sudden across both her fists now, throwing the whole bunker into flickering white-violet relief, every scarred concrete inch of it lit and shadowed at once.
"Combined, ve eliminate the problem, and ve force Vought to stand vith us. They vill have no other choice left to them."
"Yes, Großmutter Stormfront!"
– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –
The morning air over Queens carried smog and cheap fry oil in about equal measure, and beneath her, spilling out through open double doors, that same relentless, joyful noise kept climbing — brass and drum and hundreds of voices layered over it.
Each one laughing, dancing, utterly unbothered by the fact that forty million households had spent the previous night watching the ground open up under her feet on live television.
Fine.
Let them watch this too.
She hovered over a hundred feet up above the community center under the autum sun, lightning already waiting in her open palm.
Deny this, Edgar.