Frostbloom

Chapter 8

Ashley found herself reluctant to open the manila folder. "What do you mean?"

Maureen said, "I'm going to have to go back a ways to explain fully. But I need to know where you got the information about Project Mirror, that it was to customize Compound V."

"Dr. Harriman told me when he requested the meeting. He said he thought he was on the verge of a breakthrough and wanted to give me an in-depth briefing on the project. When I tried to research it in the electronic database before the meeting, the files weren't there."

"Unsurprising," she said. "He'd also had time to steal the physical files for the project, so there was no danger of you finding out the truth."

"The truth about what?"

"Like I said, I'll have to go back a ways. From 1944, when Frederick Vought invented Compound V for the Nazi government in Germany, to now, there have been only two known outcomes of injection: the subject gains superpowers, the successful outcome, and the subject dies, the failure. It's been a closely guarded secret inside Vought that there is a third outcome. Please open the folder and go to the third green tab."

Ashley did as Maureen requested. The cover page read, Administration of Compound V to Infants: Non-Catastrophic Failure. "What's non-catastrophic failure in this context?"

"The third outcome. The compound was injected, and the subject did not gain superpowers but also did not die. A null outcome. It was not common, and Vought paid a lot of money to the parents involved to keep quiet about what had happened to their children."

"So there are people walking around right now who were exposed to Compound V and have no idea?"

"Correct," said Maureen. "While I was looking over the initial reports on the lab personnel from Analytics, I noticed that Harriman's hiring practices for the lab were…odd, to say the least. If this was one of Mr. Edgar's pet projects, one would think that he'd have only the best assistants, the most experienced, but the people actually assigned to the project didn't match that theory. Several of them had only worked for Vought for a brief time, and Mr. Miller had only gotten through his onboarding training before being brought in on the project. So there must have been something more about him that made Harriman select him for the job. Once I found that folder—misfiled, which is almost certainly the only reason we still have it—I had Analytics look through the electronic files for it, but it's as missing as the Project Mirror files."

Ashley flipped pages until she found a list of names. "Are these the people who didn't get the powers?"

"Yes. I highlighted the relevant names for you. Pink for the girls, blue for the boys."

Could she say it was a surprise as she ran her finger over the column of names to find, halfway down the first page, a pink-highlighted bit of text reading "Barrett, Ashley Jessica" with the names of her parents listed to the right? When she looked back up at Maureen, she didn't even try to keep the shock and sadness off her face. "So much I didn't understand makes sense now. My parents always were disappointed in me. It didn't matter what I did, no honor roll, no trophies, nothing was good enough for them. They must have thought I'd be their ticket to fame and fortune. I'd be Queen fucking Maeve, first woman in the Seven, a walking cash register. And I was nothing like her. They didn't understand you have to be jerkoff material to be a woman in the Seven. The only way I could ever get in is behind a mask."

Maureen sighed. "Ms. Barrett, focus. Everyone in the lab during the accident is listed here, including Dr. Harriman. I think the actual purpose of Project Mirror was to see if another administration of Compound V could kick-start the dormant Compound V in your systems. They couldn't go to injection again—there's a section in the file about that killing everyone they tried it with—but an aerosol application of the drug might work, might give you those powers you didn't get as a baby."

"I can see Stan Edgar wanting a return on a failed investment. Try to get good money out of the bad, put the red in the ledger into the black. He always kept his eye on the bottom line." The words felt like they came out of her mouth of their own volition, without her control. All her life she'd been a failure, and she hadn't even known. Outside of moments in her career, like when Starlight got her fired, and personal life, like when she broke up with Adam Bourke, when she had failed, she'd never believed it was an essential part of her. These had just been isolated incidents. But failure had been part of her, the rejection of Compound V and all its benefits by her very genetic material. Her body had chosen to fail.

"We've got to concentrate on the most important thing now. It looks like the basic idea worked. You and Dr. Rennie and Dr. Harriman and Mr. Miller all had your superpowers kick-started by the aerosolized Compound V."

But Ashley was shaking her head. "It's all because of the supes, their genetic material."

"I'm not sure that's true. That may have been a red herring that distracted us. The powers you've manifested may not be just a copy of Homelander's, and Icebreaker's. They may be the powers that you would have had if the first application of Compound V had taken. They may be your real powers."

She thought about it for a few moments. "If that's true, that would mean that Dr. Rennie wasn't lying about not getting her powers through sleeping with the Deep. And Dr. Harriman didn't get his fire powers by sleeping with Firewhirl." The ideas flew around in her head. If the original Compound V had worked as intended, she'd be stronger than Homelander, would have been that strong all her life. But it still wouldn't have helped her get into the Seven. Only conventional, fashionable beauty would have done that. "And I didn't get some powers I would have expected to get from Homelander: the hearing, the sense of smell. I was just glad I'd managed to miss out on those."

"Understandable," said Maureen. "I don't think anybody wants to go suddenly from a normal sense of smell to a bloodhound's."

Ashley had a thought. "But do we know that Harriman actually has fire powers? We know Firewhirl was in the vicinity of the lab when the fires started, and all the security cameras that would have caught her were destroyed. Are we sure it wasn't just her setting the fires herself?"

"No, we aren't, but best to err on the side of caution and assume he does have fire powers. That way, when he's confronted, we don't get caught flat-footed when we expect one firestarter and get two."

"Agreed." Ashley sat at her desk, staring blindly at the list of names in front of her, the pink and blue text blurring into senseless smears of color. Her parents had done this to her, given her over to Vought's experimenters for injections that for all they knew could have killed her. Was the lure of money and fame, even second-hand fame as the parents of Frostbloom, so compelling that they had been willing to roll the dice on her life to get it? Unfortunately, the answer seemed to be yes. "How is Harriman keeping track of the progress of his experiment?"

Maureen looked surprised. "I…hadn't thought that he was. He can't come back here or Security will take him into custody. How could he? As far as he knows, the experiment was a complete success.""

"Only if he got the fire powers himself. Otherwise, if he isn't keeping track of his experiment, he'll have no way of knowing what's going on with everyone else. I assume he could figure out that most of the people in the lab died. Dr. Rennie and Mr. Miller were in the ward with him, so he should know that they're alive. He might not be sure about me, though. And none of us had started manifesting powers before he did his breakout from the Tower."

"There's no way he—"

Before she finished speaking, Ashley's hands were on the keyboard of her computer, her fingers flying even as she reminded herself not to strike the keys too hard or she would break the keyboard and probably her desk as well. "I was looking over Firewhirl's application for American Hero and something stuck in my mind, but I couldn't bring things into focus until how." After having found what she was looking for in the database, she picked up the phone next to her and speed-dialed Security. "Have we disabled Dr. Alan Harriman's access to the Vought mainframe?"

The man's voice on the other end of the line sounded shaky. "Yes, Ms. Barrett. As soon as his badge access was revoked."

"Good. Thank you." Ashley disconnected the call.

Maureen breathed a relieved sigh. "See? There's really no way he could know what's going on with everyone who was in the lab."

"As a civilian Firewhirl was a computer programmer, some kind of software expert. Did you know that programmers always have to leave a back door into any system they design, just in case the end-point user locks the system up to the point where the programmer can't get in any other way? And she had months to work on Harriman, use his access to set up her own somehow, make sure he could always watch over his test subjects, like a doting father."

"Shit," said Maureen.

"Exactly. I'm going to have our security experts start going over our systems, looking for weaknesses where she might have been able to get access and seal off those pathways. That should be enough to get a response from the good Dr. Harriman."

"You actually think he'll contact you if he loses access?"

"From a secure means of communications, of course, but yes. He's a scientist first and foremost. He'll want the details on how we're all doing." The wretched piece of shit…

"What do we think is his endgame here? He's completed his trial. What does he do now?"

Ashley sighed. "I'd imagine he wants that happily-ever-after for himself and Firewhirl. That involves being out of the reach of Vought. Being beyond our reach involves two things: truly obscene amounts of money and protection like you can only get from a foreign government. My best guess was that he took all the files and backups of his research and plans to auction it off to the highest bidder. Vought's had a lock on the superhero industry since the end of World War II. I bet China would like to have its own version of the Seven. And so would Russia, and Saudi Arabia, and North Korea, and any little tinhorn dictator who wants their very own Praetorian Guard of supes. Harriman can ask his own price and get it."

Maureen saw the logic there and didn't like it. "How are we going to stop him?"

"If he's holding an auction for his research, he has to get the word out. I'll tell Analytics to keep their ears to the ground for anything even remotely connected to Compound V and let us know soonest."

"How long do you think it will take?"

She shrugged. "Not long, I hope."

"Yes, the sooner we get this handled the better for the company it will be."

"Maureen—" Ashley hesitated, drew in a shallow breath, and continued. "This next thing I'm going to tell you is beyond confidential. Homelander cannot know about this until I figure out a way to tell him." She fell silent again, imagining his reaction. But that was something she could put off, unlike the situation with Harriman. "I think the powers are only temporary."

"What?" The other woman stared at her with growing apprehension. "May I ask why you think that?"

"Yesterday I had an…incident…where one of the powers failed. X-ray vision, to be specific. I was with Homelander when it happened, but he was distracted and I managed to cover well enough that he didn't notice. You know how he feels about humans, and me in particular. I just don't want to open that can of worms until it's absolutely unavoidable."

"Have you tried using it since?"

Ashley nodded. "It works now. But I can't count on that continuing. Since the x-ray vision was the first power I got, I think we can count on the powers failing in the order I manifested them."

"So the experiment was just another failure, then."

"I wouldn't say that. With more experimentation, it might be workable. The supes would have to have regular treatments of the aerosolized Compound V, but as long as it didn't cause cancer like Temp V, it might be an avenue for research. The pool of test subjects is limited to the people on the list you gave me, but there are still people who could use it." Or be used for it by Vought or whatever government is the lucky winner of Harriman's auction.

"But if Harriman doesn't have any powers himself, he wouldn't know about the possible failure."

"No," said Ashley. "Even if he did, and his fire powers are becoming unreliable, it's the last thing he would tell anybody he was trying to sell his product to. I still think it must have something to do with the supe DNA. Or maybe it's a mixture of everything. We'll never know without more research, but I don't think this is an experiment than can be repeated. Or that should be."

"So you're going to shut down the project?"

She nodded. "Without Harriman there's not much point; plus, being experimented on against my will gives me a fresh understanding of the ethics of human trials. And Vought can't stand much more bad publicity over Compound V. I'd hate to have the company go under on my watch." And Homelander would kill her if he had no further use for her. No matter what had happened between them on the island, she had to remember the bedrock of their relationship, that she was dispensable.

"It's probably for the best."

Ashley sent an e-mail to Vought's IT department regarding possible weak points where Firewhirl could have created access to the mainframe, then turned back to Maureen. "I'm sorry I ruined your plans to get me into the Seven. I don't think it would have worked out anyway."

"It would have been nice to have someone reliable on the team, someone who could be counted on not to embarrass the company. Someone who knows how things are."

"Frostbloom." When the other woman gave her a confused look, Ashley laughed a little. "Frostbloom. That's what I'd decided on for my superhero name."

"It's…nice." She could tell that Maureen didn't like it as well as she'd liked Frostflower, but it was a moot point now. Within weeks, and probably days, the powers she'd manifested would fade, and she would be the ordinary Ashley Barrett again, normal human Ashley, and she'd go back to living in physical terror of Homelander. A surge of resentment welled up inside her. It wasn't fair. Why shouldn't she win just once in her life? As bad as all the supes thought they had it, at rock bottom they could keep themselves safe, mostly. And now she wouldn't have even that left to her.

Maureen seemed about the say something else, but Dr. Clay walked into the office without knocking. Ashley looked at him in surprise. "Dr. Clay. How can I help you?" He'd better not be trying to put her in a detention cell again. If, as she suspected, the powers were failing, she intended to get as much use out of them while she still had them as she could.

"You remember I told you about the nurse that Shane Miller put into an active dreaming state?"

"Yes," said Ashley. "What about her?"

"She regained consciousness five minutes ago. We're still treating her, but it seems as if she's none the worse for wear. She seems lucid and oriented, although there may be underlying brain damage that we haven't detected yet. I've just ordered another MRI for her."

"Well, it's good that she's come to." If only because that meant one less dead bod for Ashley to arrange disposal for. "Do we know why she regained consciousness?"

Clay smiled. It had a malicious edge to it. "Oh, I'm relatively sure of what caused her recovery."

"And what was that?" And why did she sense impending doom?

"Mr. Miller died ten minutes ago."