Chapter 11 Julia
JULIA
Julia Van Veen sits in her private office on the sixty-second floor of Global Dynamix’s headquarters, the Manhattan skyline glittering behind her like a crown she’s long since earned.
The lights are dimmed. The door is locked.
On the wall-mounted screen, Vanguard slides a milkshake across a sticky diner table toward Mia Baxter, and something in Julia’s chest tightens like a fist.
She watches him lean forward. Watches the way his eyes track the journalist’s movements—the tilt of her head, the curve of her mouth around the straw. Watches him smile. Watches his ice blue eyes burn. Not the camera-ready performance she conditioned into him, but something raw.
Something real.
Something she’s never seen directed at her.
But God, how she’s wanted it.
Julia pauses the CCTV footage, freezing the frame on his face.
That face was already handsome and needed no perfecting, but the rest of him, she sculpted like clay.
She spent four years creating the genetic modifications that made his body into a weapon, into a superhero, the world’s first, the conditioning that transformed a broken soldier into America’s symbol of hope.
She took the great man Nate Whitaker was and made him into something greater. Something extraordinary.
He’s perfect. She made him perfect.
And now, he’s looking at someone else like she hung the goddamn moon.
“Replay,” she says, and the footage begins again.
She’s watched it eleven times now. Each viewing reveals something new, whether it be a micro-expression, a change in posture, or the way his pupils dilate and nostrils flare when the journalist laughs.
Julia catalogs each detail with the clinical precision that made her the foremost neuroscientist of her generation.
Mia Baxter is pretty in an obvious sort of way—dark hair, warm dark eyes, expressive brows, and a flirty mouth.
Julia pulls up her file again on a secondary screen: King’s College London, double degree, bylines in various international publications.
Clean background. Almost too clean, but then again, she’s used to working with unscrupulous people.
What concerns her, though, is the way Vanguard is behaving.
In the years since his enhancement, she’s seen him with women before, models, actresses, socialites who threw themselves at America’s golden boy.
He’d indulged occasionally at the start—he has certain drives, after all, drives Global Dynamix would love to keep buried—but he’d never been distracted, never let anyone get under his skin.
Until now.
Julia watches him talk about his sister—his sister, for God’s sake—and feels something ugly coil in her stomach.
Not jealousy. No, Julia Van Veen doesn’t get jealous.
She gets even.
Her tablet chimes, and Marsh’s name comes up.
She considers ignoring it, but Conrad Marsh, despite being her intellectual inferior in every measurable way, still holds the CEO title.
He still has the board’s ear and all the control he hasn’t earned, all because he was a billionaire tech-bro who knew someone who loaned someone money who blackmailed Elron Masters, or so the rumors go.
Politics. The one arena where brains and brilliance aren’t enough and at the same time don’t count for much.
She accepts the call. “Conrad,” she says tiredly.
“You’re needed in my office, Julia.” His face fills the screen, all sharp angles, dyed black hair, and white veneers. “We need to discuss our asset.”
Our asset. As if he had anything to do with Vanguard’s creation. He just swooped in after and took all the glory.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Julia says and ends the call.
Conrad Marsh’s office is everything Julia’s is not: a hard mix of glass and chrome and toxic masculinity, designed to intimidate rather than inspire.
Designed to make people snooze, more like it.
He’s standing by the window when she enters, hands clasped behind his back, playing at being a visionary like the ones you see in the movies. Julia isn’t fooled.
“I’ve seen the footage from the diner,” he says without turning around. “The journalist.”
“Mia Baxter,” she supplies, already feeling defensive. “You know we all signed off on her.”
“I’m aware. What I want to know is why our billion-dollar asset is sharing childhood trauma with some British reporter over chocolate milkshakes.” He turns to face her, jaw tight, his handsome face turning ugly. “He talked about his sister, Julia. That’s not in any press-approved talking points.”
“No,” Julia agrees, settling into one of his uncomfortable chairs that resembles a torture device, “it isn’t.”
“Then explain to me how this happened. You assured me he was manageable.”
Manageable. As if Vanguard were a dog to be leashed.
“He is manageable,” Julia says evenly. “What you’re seeing is a minor deviation.
He’s forming an attachment. It happens occasionally.
The psychological template we built on had strong bonding instincts, protective impulses.
It’s part of what made him an effective soldier and the perfect candidate for the program.
” She pauses. “Those instincts don’t disappear simply because he graduated. They adapt, find new targets.”
“And this journalist is his new target?”
“It appears so, though I suspect it’s novelty more than anything genuine.
He hasn’t had much opportunity for meaningful connection.
We’ve kept him isolated by design.” Julia allows herself a thin smile.
“He’s simply responding to the first person who’s treated him as something other than a product. ”
“What are our options?” Marsh asks.
“I’ll speak with him. Remind him of his priorities. His responsibilities.” Julia keeps her voice light, unconcerned. “He responds well to direct guidance.”
“And if that doesn’t work?”
Julia meets his eyes. “Then we have contingencies. The neural implant we installed during his last enhancement isn’t just for monitoring his vitals. If he ever truly went off the rails—became a liability—we could activate the failsafe, trigger a shutdown.”
“We’ve never done that before. You don’t even know if it works.”
“Then we’ll tweak it some more.” She waves a hand dismissively. “But we’re nowhere near that point. This is a distraction, not a defection.”
Marsh’s shoulders relax slightly. He likes having a kill switch. It makes him feel powerful, as if he doesn’t have enough power already.
“Handle it,” he says. “I want him back on script.”
“Of course.” Julia rises, smoothing her jacket. “I’ll have a report on your desk by morning.”
She’s almost to the door when Marsh speaks again. “This journalist. Should I be concerned about her?”
Julia considers the question. There is something about Mia, something that trips her alarm bells quietly, but she just can’t put her finger on it.
“I’m looking into it,” she says, “but for now, let’s focus on what we can control.”
The sublevel laboratories are quiet at this hour. Julia walks the sterile corridors alone, her heels echoing off concrete walls, until she reaches the room she thinks of as her chapel.
The monitoring station fills one wall—screens displaying Vanguard’s location, his vitals, neural activity in real time. She can see him now, a blinking dot on the Manhattan grid, currently at his penthouse. Heart rate elevated. Dopamine levels higher than baseline.
He’s thinking about her. She just knows he is.
The pesky journalist.
Julia pulls up his emotional mapping, watching the neural patterns pulse and shift.
The tech is still quite new and not always reliable, but there’s a new cluster of activity, bright and insistent, centered around memory centers she knows intimately.
Attachment. Attraction. The beginning of something that could become problematic if left unchecked.
She doesn’t want to take the chance and doesn’t want to dismiss it.
She could, of course, intervene directly, call him in for a routine calibration, adjust his neurochemistry until Mia Baxter becomes nothing but a mild curiosity.
She’s done it before—there was a handler, early on, who got too close.
That problem was corrected swiftly without him ever knowing.
But heavy-handed intervention leaves traces, makes him suspicious. And a suspicious Vanguard is a dangerous one.
Better to be patient. Let this play out a little longer. See what the journalist is really after, and whether Vanguard’s fascination burns itself out naturally.
And if it doesn’t…well, she has options.
Julia touches the screen, tracing the outline of his neural signature with one finger. Her creation. Her masterpiece. The man Nate Whitaker used to be is gone—buried beneath layers of genetic modification and conditioning. What remains is Vanguard.
And Vanguard belongs to her.
“He is mine, in the end,” she murmurs to the empty room. “I made him.”
She pulls up Mia’s file again, studying the photograph. So pretty and young.
But so very temporary.
Whatever this woman thinks she’s doing, if she thinks she’s found something in Vanguard, it won’t last. It can’t last. Because at the end of the day, Julia holds the strings. Julia always has.
She closes the file and dims the screens, leaving only Vanguard’s tracking dot pulsing softly in the darkness.
She’ll be watching. She’s always watching.
And when the time comes to remind him who he belongs to, she’ll be ready.