Brother Blood

Are you comfortable? Good. This story is about knowing yourself so well that no one can use your own mind against you.

There was a school on the outskirts of Jump City called the H.I.V.E. Academy. It was not a school for learning wonderful things. It was a school where young villains were trained in the art of causing trouble, run by a cold, calculating man who called himself Brother Blood. He wore robes and spoke in a measured voice and believed absolutely that he was destined to rule something, though he hadn't decided exactly what yet.

Brother Blood had been watching the Teen Titans for weeks. He had concluded that the most dangerous among them — the one whose abilities he most needed to neutralize or acquire — was Cyborg. Victor Stone's technology was extraordinary. His sonic systems, his titanium exostructure, his synthetic neural interface — if Brother Blood could replicate even part of that hardware across fifty students, he would have an army no single hero or team of heroes could stop.

He had tried to steal the blueprints remotely three times. Three times his systems were rejected. So he tried something simpler: he took Victor himself.

At a Jump City robotics exhibition, Brother Blood's agents moved through the crowd in ordinary clothes and separated Cyborg from the group in under two minutes. Robin turned around and Victor Stone was not there. By the time the Titans understood what had happened, Cyborg was already inside the H.I.V.E. Academy.

It took six hours to find the location and another half hour of careful, tense planning to decide how to approach the problem. The approach was complicated by Brother Blood's greatest weapon: a mind-control signal. It operated on a specific electromagnetic frequency and it disrupted organic human neural activity with chilling efficiency. Anyone with a normal brain was vulnerable to it the moment they entered the academy's range. Raven could protect herself using her empathic shielding, but only herself. The others would need to move quickly and carefully.

No one had fully considered the obvious solution until Beast Boy said, "Wait — can it even affect Cyborg? He's part computer."

The answer was no. It could not.

Brother Blood's signal passed through Cyborg's synthetic neural components without any effect at all. Cyborg had known this from the moment he was brought inside. He had played along — followed instructions, pretended to be confused, acted every inch the mind-controlled prisoner. And while the academy believed it had him completely under its control, Victor Stone had spent twelve hours doing something very useful.

He had memorized the entire building. Every security junction. Every guard rotation. Every locked door and back corridor and power line. He had catalogued all of it using his built-in systems and stored it in perfect detail, waiting for the moment it would be useful.

The rescue mission came together in a single coordinated push. Robin led the front assault on the academy's main gate — loud and precise and impossible to look away from, drawing the attention of every H.I.V.E. student who came to stop the intruder. Raven moved behind Starfire with one careful hand on her shoulder, maintaining an empathic barrier that kept Brother Blood's signal from reaching her. Beast Boy took a different route — as a ferret, small and silent, sliding through the ventilation shafts above the academy's corridors, cutting the power at each security junction he passed using the map Cyborg had transmitted to Robin's communicator.

The lights in the academy died one section at a time.

Cyborg walked out the front entrance carrying Brother Blood's main control console under his arm. He had retrieved it from the command room four hours earlier, when Brother Blood had briefly left the room and the guards were looking elsewhere.

"I've had this for four hours," he told Robin.

Robin stared at him.

"You were never actually under his control."

"Nope."

"You spent twelve hours gathering intelligence from inside the villain school."

"Yep. Figured I might as well be useful."

Starfire pressed both her hands to her face with an expression of pure delight. "That," she said, "is the most impressive thing I have witnessed on this planet."

"Including the whale thing?" Beast Boy asked.

"Especially including the whale thing," said Raven.

Brother Blood was arrested sitting in his own command chair, which the Titans agreed was the correct place for him. His students, freed from the signal, were mostly confused and a little relieved, and they were sent home to their families. The Jump City police spent the rest of the evening dealing with the paperwork.

Victor Stone sat in the T-car on the way home and didn't say very much, but he was smiling — a real, quiet, comfortable smile — because sometimes the most powerful thing you have is simply knowing exactly what you're made of.

Goodnight, little one. Know yourself well enough, and no one can use your own mind against you.