Chapter 5: The Sound of Vengeance
The hum of the containment fields was a toothache in the air, a steady, punishing frequency that vibrated in Edward’s molars. He moved through the auxiliary control room, a catwalk overlooking the main chamber, his boots silent on the grated metal. Below, the chamber was a ghost of its former horror—still sterile, still humming, but empty of its subjects. Just reinforced glass, chrome, and the ghost-echoes of screams.
Jimmy’s voice crackled in his earpiece, tinny with static. “Patriot, I’ve got a heat signature approaching the east airlock. Big. It’s gotta be him.”
“Acknowledged,” Edward murmured, his eyes scanning the labyrinth of service corridors on the holographic map Jimmy had pulled up. “Consuelo, you have visual?”
Static. Then her voice, clear and unnervingly calm. “I have the layout. I’m in the ventilation shaft above primary containment. I see him.”
A cold knot tightened in Edward’s gut. “Do not engage. Wait for my mark.”
Her silence was an answer in itself. He knew that silence.
Down below, the east airlock hissed open, and Charles walked in.
He looked like a magazine ad for predatory fitness. Chiseled jaw, swept-back golden hair, a custom silver and blue battlesuit that gleamed under the sterile lights. He moved with the entitled swagger of someone who’d never been genuinely hit. He was humming.
Edward’s hands clenched into fists. This was the product. The sanitized, corporate-sponsored hero. A guy who used his D4-enhanced strength to stop bank robbers on livestream before endorsing energy drinks.
Charles stopped in the center of the chamber, hands on his hips, and called out, his voice amplified and echoing. “Aris Thorne! I know you’re here. You really think hacking into a decommissioned testing facility is a smart move? The media’s already calling this a pathetic stunt.” He laughed, a sharp, broadcast-ready sound. “Come out. Let’s talk ratings.”
From the shadowed catwalk, Edward watched, every muscle coiled. The plan was simple: let Aris and Jimmy spring the trap on the lower level, draw Charles in, and then Consuelo would hit him from above with her scream, a frequency tailored from the facility’s own archives to disrupt D4 metabolism. Edward was the cleanup. The insurance.
But Consuelo’s silence stretched.
Charles sighed, theatrically. “Fine. We do this the hard way.” He raised a hand, and a surge of concussive force, visible as a ripple in the air, blasted from his palm toward the main control console.
The console exploded in a shower of sparks and molten plastic.
That’s when she dropped.
Not from her planned position. She fell from a vent directly above Charles, a crimson and black blur. No scream. Not yet.
She landed behind him, her boots making a soft, precise tap on the polished floor. Charles spun, surprise flickering across his perfect features before settling into a smirk.
“Well. This is a surprise,” he said, looking her up and down, taking in the corset, the casual stance. “A vintage model. You’re that missing relic, aren’t you? Prescott’s little ghost.”
Consuelo said nothing. She tilted her head, as if studying a bug.
“I’ve read your file,” Charles continued, circling her slowly. “Scary stuff. For the 1940s. Things have evolved, sweetheart. My compound is cleaner. More efficient. You’re basically a museum piece.”
Edward was already moving, sprinting along the catwalk, his heart hammering against his ribs. Idiot. Arrogant idiot. He seethed, but the anger was laced with a terrifying thread of anticipation.
“I’m supposed to bring you in,” Charles said, his tone turning conversational. “Alive, if possible. There’s a lot of interest in original Daisy stock. We could run some comparative tests. See what makes you tick.”
He lunged. It was fast, a blur of silver. A textbook flying tackle meant to crush a normal person against the wall.
Consuelo didn’t dodge.
She met him.
Her hand shot up, not with a wild swing, but with a brutal, economical precision Edward hadn’t seen in eighty years. She caught Charles by the throat in mid-air, using his own momentum to slam him down onto the floor. The impact cratered the reinforced composite tile, a spiderweb of cracks radiating out from his body. The sound was a sickening, wet crunch-thud.
Charles’s eyes bulged, his smirk replaced by pure shock. He fired a chest blast from his prone position.
The energy beam, blue-white and searing, hit Consuelo square in the stomach. It washed over the crimson corset, dispersing in a crackling nimbus of light. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t even look down at the smoke curling from the fabric.
She just tightened her grip on his throat and leaned down, her face close to his. “Your power is a toy,” she said, her voice soft, almost melodic. “You have no idea what to do with it.”
Charles snarled, thrashing. He got a hand free and punched upward, a blow that could crumple a tank. It connected with her jaw.
Her head snapped to the side. A normal neck would have shattered. She turned back slowly, her black eyes flat and endless. A tiny trickle of blood—real, red blood—welled from the corner of her lip. She smiled, licking it away.
“See?” she whispered. “You don’t know where to aim.”
Panic flooded Charles’s face. This wasn’t in the script. He tried to blast again, to scream for help, but her grip was like a hydraulic press. His enhancements kept his trachea from collapsing, but he was pinned, his power sputtering in useless, frantic bursts that scorched the ceiling.
Edward reached the observation window, his palms slapping against the cool glass. He watched, breath fogging the surface.
Consuelo stood up, dragging Charles up by his throat. He clawed at her arm, his feet dangling. She held him aloft like a struggling child. Then she began to methodically, brutally, beat him.
It wasn’t a brawl. It was dismantling. A short, jarring jab shattered his nose, spraying blood across the chrome wall. A knee drove into his ribs—a crisp, snapping sound. An elbow to the temple that made his eyes roll back. Each impact was clinical, efficient, born of a time when fights weren’t for cameras or endorsements, but for surviving the next five seconds in a sky full of flak and enemy metas.
Charles’s silver suit was dented, smeared with his own blood. His returning blows grew weaker, more desperate. He managed to grab her winged harness, yanking at it. A panel snapped, and with a sharp shink, one of her wings—a glorious, obsidian-black membrane stretched over a framework of bone-like alloy—sprang free, extending halfway, filling the space behind her with sudden, terrifying majesty.
The sight of it, the reality of what she was, finally broke Charles. He screamed, not in pain, but in primal fear.
Consuelo leaned into his ear. “You want to hear a real scream?”
She opened her mouth.
It started as a vibration, so deep it felt like the planet itself was groaning. The glass in Edward’s observation window began to quiver. Then the sound erupted—a raw, tearing frequency that was less a noise and more a physical assault. It wasn’t aimed at the D4 compound. It was aimed at everything.
Every light in the chamber exploded in a rain of glass and sparks. Holographic displays fizzed and died. The humming containment fields shorted out with a deafening pop. Reinforced glass windows, designed to withstand bunker busters, webbed over with fractures and then blew inward in a glittering, slow-motion cascade.
Edward ducked, shielding his face from the shards. The soundwaves punched through his invulnerability, not as pain, but as a nauseating, bone-deep resonance that made his vision blur. This was it. The Terror of the Sky. Unchained.
When the scream cut off, the silence was absolute, ringing, and thick with dust.
Edward lowered his arms.
Charles was on his knees, vomiting a thin, clear fluid, his hands clamped over his ears, blood streaming from between his fingers. He was shuddering, weeping openly, a broken doll.
Consuelo stood over him, her one extended wing slowly retracting with a series of soft, mechanical clicks. She was breathing heavily, her shoulders rising and falling. A strand of her curly black hair was stuck to the blood on her lip. She looked down at the sobbing hero with an expression of detached, almost bored, finality.
She raised her foot, positioning her boot over the back of Charles’s neck.
“Consuelo.” Edward’s voice, amplified by the ruined chamber, stopped her.
She didn’t look up. Her foot hovered.
“He’s done,” Edward said, walking down the blasted stairwell into the chamber. The crunch of glass under his boots was the only sound. “The mission was to get the data, not kill him. Killing him turns him into a martyr.”
She finally looked at him. Her eyes were black pits, still swirling with the aftermath of violence. For a second, he didn’t see his wife. He saw the weapon they’d made, the weapon he’d married, the weapon he’d lost and found. A shiver that had nothing to do with fear traced his spine.
Then she blinked, and she was back. A flicker of the woman from the roof, the one who’d held a photograph like a sacrament. She lowered her foot, stepping back from Charles’s prone form. “He talks too much,” she said simply, wiping the blood from her mouth with the back of her hand.
Edward walked over to her, stepping around the groaning Charles. He stopped in front of her, looking her over—the smoldering corset, the minor cuts already healing, the absolute, unshakeable competence. A slow, hard smile spread across his face. It wasn’t a pleasant smile. It was the smile of a man remembering a vital, terrible truth.
“Yeah,” Edward said, his voice low, a private rumble just for her. “He does.”
He reached out and brushed a thumb over the cut on her lip, wiping away the last trace of blood. The touch was possessive, reverent. The echo of her scream still hung in the air, a testament to what she was, and what he had, at long last, stopped trying to cage.
From the shattered doorway, Aris and Jimmy appeared, their faces pale with awe and something closer to terror. They looked at Charles, then at Consuelo, then at Edward.
Jimmy just stared. Aris’s eyes, however, gleamed with a fierce, hungry satisfaction. He’d gotten exactly what he wanted.
“The data’s secured,” Aris said, his voice cutting through the quiet. “We need to go. His backup will have felt that.”
Consuelo nodded, pulling her hair back from her face. She finally looked at Edward, really looked at him, and the ghost of her earlier, knowing smile returned. “Told you I’d follow your commands,” she murmured.
He let out a short, sharp laugh. “Like hell you did.”
He took her hand, his grip firm, and together they turned their backs on the weeping hero, walking through the glittering wreckage of the past and into the waiting
“Like hell you did.”
He took her hand, his grip firm, and together they turned their backs on the weeping hero, walking through the glittering wreckage of the past and into the waiting darkness of the service tunnel. The drive back to the safe house was conducted in a wordless, charged silence, broken only by the rumble of the engine and Jimmy’s occasional, nervous whistling that died in his throat each time Edward glanced at the rearview.
The safe house’s living room felt even smaller and dingier after the sterile vastness of the testing chamber. The moth-eaten curtains seemed to soak up the lingering adrenaline, leaving a flat, stale exhaustion in the air. Aris was already at the table, a sleek data drive plugged into a battered laptop, its screen casting a blue glow on his satisfied face.
He laughed as he walked into the living room, pleased with the results. It was a rich, unburdened sound that seemed to vibrate the empty whiskey bottles on the coffee table. “The encryption on this is seventy years old. A joke. We’ve got everything. Deployment schedules, compound batch numbers, internal disciplinary reports… it’s a history of their entire rot.”
Jimmy smiled at Consuelo and thanks her, his shyness momentarily overcome by genuine awe. “That was… I’ve never seen anything like that. They had never been able to recover so much information. Not even close.”
Consuelo squeezed his hand and says she’s glad to help. Her voice was warm, but her eyes were already drifting toward the hallway, toward the bedroom and its promised solitude. “It needed to be done.”
Edward huffed, a low, animal sound in his chest. He walked between them, his shoulder deliberately connecting with Jimmy’s to shove him out of his way as he leads Consuelo to their room. “Move.” The command was for Jimmy, but his hand on Consuelo’s elbow was firm, a proprietary steerage that brooked no argument even from her. The bedroom door clicked shut behind them, sealing them in the musty, private dark.
Consuelo sat in a chair while reading some files. She didn’t turn on the overhead light, just the small, brass lamp on the nightstand. Its pool of illumination fell over a new stack of folders Aris must have left for them. They were different from the mission briefs; these were older, their paper brittle, with the faded headers of internal corporate audits.
The sound of the shower kicking on in the attached bathroom was a wall of white noise. Edward was washing the facility’s dust and the phantom scent of ozone from his skin.
As Consuelo reads more, she frowns. The files talk about Edward in the 80s and why he was betrayed. Incident reports. Witness statements from teammates with names she didn’t recognize. Phrases leapt out: “unnecessary escalations,” “refused to de-escalate per protocol,” “deliberately undermined team cohesion.” One account described a hostage situation where Edward’s “chest blast” had collapsed a building facade, resulting in seventeen civilian casualties listed as “collateral.” The teammate who filed the report was later reprimanded for “insubordination.”
Another detailed a physical altercation after a mission debrief. Subject Prescott became verbally combative, then physically violent, when his tactical decisions were questioned. He fractured Agent Walsh’s jaw and two ribs. He was belittling and humiliating them, always seeking to stand out himself.
Consuelo remembers how Edward was during the war—boastful, conceited, yes, violent, but not with his teammates. His arrogance had been a weapon pointed at the enemy, a shared blade that protected their unit. This was different. This was a slow, calculated poisoning from within.
The shower stopped. Consuelo realizes Edward is after something more than just taking down Charles.
The bathroom door opened, steam curling into the cooler room. Edward came out of the bathroom with only a towel slung low around his hips, water beading on his chest and in the dark curls of his beard. He scrubbed another towel through his hair, then stopped, seeing her face in the lamplight.
“You look like you just bit into a lemon,” he said, his voice still rough from the steam. “What’s with the look on your face?”
Consuelo stands up, the file in her hand. She held it out, not like an offering, but like evidence. “What’s your plan?”
Edward’s green eyes flicked from her tense expression to the file. He dropped his hair towel on the bed. “My plan was the raid. It worked. We’re back. What’s your problem?”
“This isn’t about Charles.” She tapped the paper. “This is about you. This is always about you. What’s the real plan?”
Edward pretends not to know what she’s talking about. He turned and walked to a small dresser, pulling out clean boxers. “I don’t have time for riddles, Consuelo. We won. Enjoy it.”
“You were violent with your own team,” she said, the words sharp and clear. “You got people killed for no strategic reason. You humiliated anyone beside you so you’d shine brighter. That’s not the man I knew. That’s a man building a specific reputation.” She took a step closer. “Why were you really betrayed? And what do you want now that you can’t get from just killing Charles?”
He turned, fast, the movement tight with suppressed anger. “You’re reading their lies. They were cleaning house. Making way for the new, polished models. I was a liability because I was actually effective.”
Consuelo gets upset. She threw the folder onto the bed, the papers scattering. “Stop it! The truth! You never did anything for the common good, always for your own benefit. In the war, it was for glory. With me, it was for possession. Now, it’s for what?” Her voice rose, filling the small room. “You want your face on the lunchboxes again? Is that it?”
Annoyed, a muscle ticking in his jaw, Edward closed the distance between them. He loomed over her, the heat from his body cutting through the room’s chill. “Fine. You want the truth? If I prove Charles is a crazy killer and I kill him, I’ll end up as everyone’s savior.” He spoke slowly, as if to a child. “The public sees a monster, and they see the only man strong enough to put it down. The Corporation’s current golden boy is a stain. They’ll need a replacement. A familiar face. A proven commodity.”
He leaned down, his breath warm on her face. “And the mega corporation will make me the face again.”
The pieces snapped together with an almost audible click. It wasn’t rebellion. It was a hostile takeover. He wasn’t destroying the system; he was auditing it, removing a rival CEO, and staging a triumphant return to the corner office.
Consuelo laughs, annoyed and mockingly. The sound was hollow, devoid of any real humor. She shook her head, taking a step back from him as if from a sudden, foul odor.
“Of course!” she said, her voice dripping with a bitterness that dwarfed the anger. “Of course it had to be a plan for you to be the brilliant hero!”
The hollow victory of the raid curdled in her stomach, sour and heavy. She turned away from him, toward the grimy window and the indifferent city beyond. The corset felt like a costume now, a stupid, romantic lie. “All that. The screaming, the broken glass. Just a campaign stunt for your comeback tour.”
He moved then, a blur of contained motion. His hands locked around her bare upper arms, fingers digging into the golden skin hard enough that a normal woman would have bruised. He spun her back to face him, holding her against the solid, unyielding wall of his chest. The damp from his shower seeped into her clothes.
“It’ll be like before,” he said, his voice low, intense, a promise and a threat welded together. “We can be together like before.”
She didn’t struggle. She went utterly still, a predator assessing a new kind of trap. A brittle, disbelieving laugh escaped her. “Like before?!” Her black eyes searched his face, looking for a hint of the man from the photograph and finding only the patriot. “Do you mean when you used everything at your disposal to threaten everyone I cared about, just because I told you I wasn’t going to sleep with someone who wasn’t my husband?”
He flinched, his grip tightening. “That was different.”
“Or how you forced me to be a housewife,” she continued, her voice rising, sharpening like a blade, “because that’s what women do? I was the best in the Air Force. The best. And I ended up polishing silver while you played hero.”
Annoyance flashed across his features, erasing the attempted intimacy. “That’s what you were supposed to do! You’re a married woman!” He gave her a little shake. “If you want to put your powers to use so badly, fine. You’ll be a superheroine. You can fight crime and all that stupidity. We’ll be a team. The public will eat it up.”
She stared at him, genuine astonishment cutting through her anger. “Do you realize what you’re saying? You do it because you want to be adored! I did it because a madman was threatening the world, hurting and torturing people!” She shoved against his chest, a tremor of real power behind it that made him rock back a half-step. “Do you want me to look the other way when one of those so-called heroes does the same thing behind closed doors? Become part of the decoration for your ego?”
“That won’t happen if I’m in charge,” he shot back, pulling her close again, his breath hot on her forehead. “Things will be better. I can fix it.”
“Like how?!” She was yelling now, the words ripping out of her. “You were in charge for forty years, and look how you rotted everything! When we started, we were a group of people wanting to do good! When you took charge of leading the new teams starting in the 60s, the problems began!” She twisted a hand free, gesturing wildly toward the scattered files on the bed. “My god, Edward, this talks about drugs, sex, and violence! You already led, and you did it horribly. You rotted a group of people who only wanted to do good!”
“I didn’t force them to do anything!” he roared, his own control snapping. The vase on the nightstand vibrated.
“But you caused all of this!” Her sonic scream was a phantom pressure in the room, compressing the air. “They saw it was easier to manipulate those who are rotten inside than those who truly want to protect people, thanks to you! You set the tone! And now you want to pretend to save everyone, just to be the face again?!”
The fight seemed to drain from him suddenly, leaving behind a raw, weary desperation. His voice dropped to a murmur, his forehead nearly touching hers. “But now you’ll be with me. I’ll have someone to guide me. You can… you can help me do it right.”
The plea in his voice was worse than his anger. It was a vacuum, threatening to suck her back into a history of compromise and diminishment. Consuelo’s voice went flat, cold, final. “And you, my husband, want to take me to a place so rotten just so you can polish your ego? You would do that to me?”
He fell silent. The truth of it echoed in the space between them, loud and undeniable.
“I need to think,” she said, the words barely more than a breath.
She moved. Not with her super-speed, but with a determined, human force that broke his stunned grip. Two strides took her to the window. She didn’t bother with the latch. Her palm struck the center of the grimy pane, and the entire sheet of glass blew outward in a cascade of silent, glittering fragments into the night.
She didn’t look back.
She stepped onto the windowsill and pitched forward into the cool, open dark. Her wings snapped out, a dark aperture against the city’s glow, and with a single, powerful downstroke, she was gone.
“Wait!”
Edward’s yell was swallowed by the wind rushing through the broken window. He lunged to the empty frame, gripping the splintered wood, his knuckles white. He stared into the emptiness where she had been, the cold air washing over him. Below, only the mundane sounds of the city—a siren, a distant train—filled the void her wings had left.
He stood there for a full minute, motionless. Then, with a wordless roar of pure frustration, he drove his fist into the wall beside the window. Plaster and lath exploded inward, leaving a crater the size of his torso. Dust billowed, settling on the scattered files that documented his ruin.
The door flew open behind him. Aris stood there, eyes wide, Jimmy peering over his shoulder. Aris took in the destroyed wall, the shattered window, the absence.
“Problem?” Aris asked, his voice carefully neutral.
Edward didn’t turn. He kept his back to them, his shoulders heaving. “She’ll be back,” he said, the statement meant for himself more than them. It sounded like a prayer, or a curse. He wasn’t sure which.