"Arson," Agent Marsh said. "That's my professional opinion. We've had a long run of structural failures, and this is the first time somebody actually struck a match."
Adrian lay flat on a rooftop three hundred feet from the burned-out lot. Every time he breathed, a fresh line of stitches pulled taut under his shirt. He stayed perfectly still, listening to her voice carry across the freezing morning air.
He shouldn't have come. Sophia had told him so twice, using two entirely different tones of voice. He'd promised he was only watching and would be gone in ten minutes. She had just taped a second layer of gauze over his ribs and replied, "Ten minutes," in the exact tone she used to time her chemistry labs.
But he had come anyway. Because of the second woman.
She stood at the edge of the blackened gravel wearing a dark jacket, dark jeans, and a knit cap over red hair. She looked like a civilian who had wandered onto a crime scene by mistake. She wasn't looking at the wreckage of the workshop. She was looking at the dirt.
His Six Eyes read her the way they read everything: center of gravity low, hands loose, a body that spent every idle second physically prepared for the next one.
Zero cursed energy.
Natasha Romanoff.
She crouched by the chain-link fence, right in the exact spot Adrian had sat the night before, and touched two fingers to a dark stain on the gravel.
"Blood," she noted. "Not fresh. Six, seven hours old."
"Whose?" Marsh asked.
"Left leg, left hip. See the drag marks? He was favoring his right side. He came out of that building on his own two feet." Natasha turned her head toward the gutted shell of the Frigor-Pak plant. "And he didn't run. He sat down. Right here. And watched it burn."
"A man covering his tracks doesn't stay to watch the fire," Marsh pointed out.
"No," Natasha agreed softly. "But a man who wants to know how the story ends does."
Adrian stopped breathing. It hurt his ribs less that way.
"Stark says he never filed that archive request," Natasha went on, her tone flat and unhurried. "Queens anomalies. Twenty-four months of data. Stark didn't sound like a man covering his own tracks. He sounded like a man who just realized someone else had the keys to his house."
"Stark sounded scared?"
"For about four seconds. Then he made a joke." Natasha stood, brushing the ash from her knee. "Somebody wants to be found, Marsh. They scratched a spiral into the sign out front. They left the maintenance door perfectly picked. This is a conversation. We just don't speak the language yet."
She's good, Adrian thought, a cold knot forming in his stomach. She's really, really good.
The wind shifted, carrying the heavy stink of scorched steel and wet ash.
And right beneath it, thin and sharp as a piano wire, Adrian felt something else.
His head snapped toward the lot.
The cursed energy rose out of the ground like a held breath.
It gathered in the blackened gravel, in the charred loading bays, and in the ash still drifting on the morning wind. Three hundred neighbors had stood at their windows last night watching this building burn. Some of them had felt a spike of genuine, primal terror that the fire would spread to their homes.
That collective fear had soaked into the soil. Now, it was standing up.
It was tall and impossibly thin, built entirely out of soot and heat-shimmer. Its arms were too long for its body, and its mouth stretched wide and hollow like a brick chimney flue.
His Six Eyes categorized it instantly. Grade 1.
Not a boss. Not a world-ender. But a real, lethal threat.
And it was materializing exactly forty feet behind two women who couldn't even see it.
Adrian was already moving.
He threw himself off the roof in a dive, hit the street at a dead sprint, and cleared the chain-link fence in one long stride. His Six Eyes laid the battlefield out in front of him like a glowing architectural blueprint.
The curse's innate technique hung in the air right between its ribs: [Flashover].
Every flammable surface within a fifty-foot radius was about to ignite in sequence, burning from the outside inward. A ring of fire designed to close like a fist.
Its first target caught. A dry weed. A piece of trash. A cardboard box. The ring of orange flame flared to life and began rapidly shrinking.
"Left!" Adrian shouted. "Don't step on the seam!"
Natasha's gun was out before the first syllable left his mouth. Marsh spun, her handheld scanner shrieking an alarm. The ground around them erupted into a wall of fire racing inward.
Adrian hit the shrinking circle a heartbeat before it sealed.
There was a gap. There was always a gap. His eyes mapped the two-foot seam where the ignition sequence hadn't reached yet, closing at exactly eleven inches per second.
He grabbed Marsh by the collar, caught Natasha by the arm, and pulled.
"Hold your breath!"
They burst through the flame together, boots skimming the invisible seam. The raw heat scraped past them like a physical hand. Adrian dropped them twenty feet clear of the ring, stepped smoothly between them and the fire, and planted his feet.
For the first time in his life, he wasn't afraid of a Grade 1 curse. He knew exactly how its math worked.
The curse lunged. Its elongated, smoking arms whipped toward him in a deadly arc.
Adrian tilted his head a single inch, letting the first strike pass. He shifted his weight, letting the second breeze by his shoulder. His hands never even left his pockets. His Six Eyes calculated the third strike would arrive in 0.6 seconds.
It also told him exactly where the curse's core sat. Right behind its ribs, in the hollow of the chimney flue, wound as tight as a spring.
Three moves.
He stepped inside the curse's guard on the first move. He drew two fingers from his pocket, pooling his cursed energy into a hyper-dense needle-point at his fingertips.
He pressed those fingers against the exact microscopic seam where the soot knit together, and pushed.
Not hard. Not fast. Just with absolute, flawless precision.
The curse froze.
Its mouth stretched impossibly wide, releasing a sound that was less a scream and more like a long, dry exhale. Then, the entire towering shape collapsed inward, sagging before completely disintegrating into harmless ash.
The ring of fire died instantly. The gravel was scorched in a perfect circle, but nothing else was burning.
The entire fight had taken twelve seconds. He'd spent less cursed energy than he used fixing Mr. Kowalski's metal shutter.
The silence that followed was suffocating.
Adrian turned around. Agent Marsh was on her knees, gasping for air, her cracked scanner gripped tight in her fist.
Natasha Romanoff was standing perfectly straight. Her pistol was aimed dead center at Adrian's chest. She hadn't so much as flinched.
She stared at his glowing blue eyes. He watched her make the conscious tactical decision to not ask about them.
"You're the tidy one," Natasha said.
"Depends who's asking."
"Natasha." Her voice was calm, almost conversational. "The gun is just a formality. I'll put it down if you promise not to do anything interesting."
"I try not to do interesting before noon."
The corner of her mouth twitched. It wasn't quite a smile. "That was a nice trick. The air, the fire. That invisible thing you were standing in front of."
"Freak accident."
"Nobody has an accident that clean." She tilted her head slightly. "You navigated a closing ring of fire by counting inches. I saw your lips moving."
Three seconds, Adrian thought. She saw my lips move for three seconds in the middle of an inferno, and she already deduced the technique.
"I got lucky," he said.
"Sure." Natasha holstered her gun slowly, deliberately letting him watch her hands. "Did you burn the workshop?"
"No."
"But you were inside."
"Briefly."
"And then you sat by the fence with a bleeding hip and watched someone else's fire." She let the silence hang for a beat. "What was in there?"
Adrian actually considered telling her. He thought about the spirals. The hijacked drone. The Chitauri metal. Everything he couldn't explain without unraveling his knowledge of the timeline.
"Something curious," he said finally. "And a lot smarter than it looked."
Natasha's expression shifted by a fraction of a degree. Adrian recognized that look from the movies. It was the look she got when a puzzle piece finally clicked into place.
"Stark is going to want to talk to you," she said.
"I'd really rather he didn't."
"I figured. That's why I'm the one who found you." She glanced down at Marsh, who had stopped coughing and was watching the exchange with wide eyes. "If it comes down to me or him hunting you, you want it to be me. I'm quieter and I don't bring the suit."
"Is that supposed to be reassuring?"
"It's supposed to be honest."
Adrian held her gaze for a long moment. Then, he took two steps backward toward the fence.
"Thanks for the offer," he said. "I'll think about it."
"You won't."
"No," Adrian agreed. "But it was nice of you to ask."
He was vaulting over the chain-link fence when she called out after him.
"Blue eyes! What do I call you?"
He glanced back over his shoulder. The morning wind whipped the ash around her, catching the red edges of her knit cap.
"Shutter guy," he said.
He dropped down into the alley and vanished before he could hear her response. But Agent Reyes told him later that evening, secondhand and very carefully, that Natasha Romanoff had stood in the burned lot for a full minute after he left.
Then, with zero expression, she had simply said: "Huh."
"An Avenger," Sophia said slowly, "has your face."
"She has a partial physical description and a very good memory."
"Adrian."
"She didn't arrest me. She didn't call it in to SHIELD." He sat on the edge of the kitchen counter, wincing as Sophia pressed down on his stitches. "She offered to be the one who finds me instead of Stark. Practically speaking, that's a kindness."
"That is a threat with manners."
"Also possible."
Sophia finished her final check, taped the gauze down, and stepped back. She rested her hands on her hips and stared at the corkboard.
Five index cards sat in a neat row above the map. Beneath them, taped directly in the center, was the printed screenshot from the Frigor-Pak workshop: Adrian's own face, frozen on the rooftop, with a single clean ? hovering beneath it.
Sophia picked up a sharpie, pulled a fresh card, and wrote in bold block letters.
AVENGERS. Romanoff. Has seen your face. Wants to be found first.
She pinned it right next to the question mark and took a step back.
"Two of them now," she said quietly. "Something that doesn't have a name, and someone who does. And both of them know exactly what you look like."
"Yeah."
"Which one scares you more?"
Adrian looked at the two cards hanging side by side under the harsh kitchen light.
He didn't answer her. And Sophia, to her credit, didn't force him to.