Hench (hench, #1)

In a world where superheroes and supervillains are a recognized part of society, ordinary people work as "henches," temp workers who fill support roles for villains through a staffing agency. Anna Tromedlov is a broke, underemployed hench struggling to afford groceries when the Temp Agency calls with a new screening session. At the agency, she and her best friend June, a fellow hench with enhanced senses of smell and taste, both pick up contracts with Electrophorous Industries, a company run by the supervillain Electric Eel. Anna does remote data entry, building what appears to be an identification database for superheroes; June works on-site.

Anna's work earns her an on-site position and an invitation to attend a televised press conference as part of Electric Eel's entourage. The event turns catastrophic. Electric Eel hijacks a municipal broadcast to deliver a ransom demand, producing the kidnapped twelve-year-old son of the mayor and using a device called the Mood Ring to manipulate the boy's emotions into docility. Before the boy can be forced to mutilate himself, Supercollider, the world's most powerful superhero, crashes through the window with his sidekick Accelerator and partner Quantum Entanglement. In the chaos, Electric Eel flees, a bodyguard's weapon kills a researcher, and Supercollider casually shoves Anna out of his path, shattering her femur. She requires emergency surgery and a metal rod in her leg. While recovering, she receives a fruit basket from Electrophorous containing her termination letter. When police and a poorly disguised Supercollider visit her hospital room, Anna shows them the handprint-shaped bruise on her leg, but the officers dismiss her account.

Anna moves into June's apartment to recover, enduring months of painful rehabilitation and financial strain. Her application for Superheroic Insurance is denied because the police report attributes her injuries to "nefarious activities." Obsessively calculating the human toll of Supercollider's actions, she discovers Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), an academic framework for measuring disaster impact. She determines that in six weeks, Supercollider cost 468 lifeyears, a rate comparable to a catastrophic earthquake over his projected career. She launches a blog called the Injury Report documenting these findings. The blog gains traction as tips pour in from henches, morgue workers, and ordinary people harmed by heroes, but June grows anxious about the dangerous attention it attracts.

When the supervillain Leviathan sends a car for Anna, impressed by her Injury Report and resourcefulness, she accepts his offer of employment. Her visceral hatred of heroes seals the deal. Her belongings are moved to Leviathan's compound without warning, and June, who comes home to find Anna simply gone, assumes the worst. At the compound, Anna proposes using predictive data modeling and targeted harassment to destabilize heroes and assembles a team. Their early successes include getting a hero accidentally flash-frozen during a prison media tour and engineering the public meltdown of Glassblower, a hero spiraling after a breakup. Anna personally tases Glassblower with a weapon concealed in her cane during a field operation. These victories earn her the professional title "the Auditor" and growing respect from Leviathan and Bob Keller, his head of Enforcement.

While visiting June, Anna is abducted off the sidewalk by operatives of the Draft, the governmental agency that selects, transforms, and deploys superheroes. She is taken to a facility beneath the Dovecote megaprison, where Supercollider declares he must "remove her from the board." Surgeons open her skull and begin cutting while she is conscious, intending to blunt her cognitive abilities, but Leviathan's strike team storms the operating room before the procedure is complete. Back at the compound, Leviathan's medical team repairs the damage with advanced cybernetics and activates latent superpowers that childhood screening had missed, granting Anna enhanced vision including infrared and ultraviolet perception. June, learning of the abduction, severs all contact.

Leviathan tasks Anna with dismantling Supercollider's entire support network. She targets Accelerator first, assigning her social engineer Nour to seduce the sidekick and stoke his desire for independence. Accelerator breaks from Supercollider, and Anna places a bounty on him through middlemen. Reckless and overconfident, the young hero is ambushed and dies of sepsis days later. Nour, traumatized, leaves the team. Anna next targets the world's perception of Supercollider and Quantum Entanglement. She contacts McKinnon, a journalist who uses a wheelchair after being injured by Supercollider's mentor Doc Proton, and helps produce "Collision Course," an article documenting the human cost of heroism that sparks the viral hashtag #mycollision. Anna's team then orchestrates the public exposure of Quantum's affair with a minor hero named Melting Point. When Draft operatives murder Melting Point and his ex-partner and Quantum is framed, she is forced to make a public apology but instead says "I can't do this" and vanishes. Leviathan, seeing Supercollider's composure crack, declares the hero fatally weakened and flies off alone to confront him, abandoning Anna's unfinished plan.

Leviathan kidnaps Doc Proton and lures Supercollider to his compound. The two arch-enemies fight in the courtyard while Anna watches from an armored vehicle. Supercollider rips the vehicle open, lifts Anna by her hair, and wraps his hand around her throat, dropping her only when other heroes arrive. Anna loses consciousness. When she wakes, a body in shattered black armor lies on the ground, and the world declares Leviathan dead.

Anna refuses to accept it. She evacuates remaining staff to a safe house and takes command, eventually identifying that the armor on the corpse is inert, removable material, whereas Leviathan's armor is his actual body, the result of experiments performed on him. Quantum Entanglement appears at the safe house offering information in exchange for help identifying Melting Point's killers. Anna sends Quantum, carrying a hidden surveillance device, to visit Doc Proton at the Hadron, a retirement facility for aging heroes, where Doc confirms that Leviathan's armor is biological. Anna also discovers that Quantum lied about the protocol's timeline, meaning she believed Leviathan was already dead when she approached them. Anna arranges for McKinnon to interview Doc, who confesses that Supercollider accidentally killed Entropy, Leviathan's mentor, during a Draft-ordered intimidation mission, and that the original hero team covered it up. This betrayal transformed Leviathan into the villain he became. When the article's editor refuses to publish, Anna contacts Cassowary, a villain who owns media companies, and the piece runs.

With the article live, Anna leads her forces to Dovecote. Quantum joins the assault in exchange for a chance at revenge against Supercollider. The confrontation is devastating: Quantum uses her phase-shifting powers to fold Supercollider's flesh into itself, systematically collapsing his limbs and face into his torso until he is a nearly unrecognizable mass. Anna's team uses his biometric signatures to bypass security and descends to a containment cell where Leviathan sits alive but deeply traumatized, initially believing Anna is a hallucination. When hired enforcers dump Supercollider's ruined body at his feet, Leviathan screams, not in triumph but in raw grief.

Back at the rebuilt compound, Leviathan does not speak to Anna for weeks. When he finally summons her, he acknowledges her accomplishment and admits he was wrong to abandon her strategy. He reveals his next ambition: to apply the same approach not to individual heroes but to the entire Draft. Despite her exhaustion, Anna reaches toward his hand and says, "I'll run the numbers."