The invitation arrived as graffiti: a clean white stencil sprayed on a red-brick wall in SoHo, letters too crisp for a freehand, too smug for innocence—"OPENING NIGHT: WITNESS REQUIRED"—with an arrow that pointed down into a service stairwell that smelled like wet stone and old ambition . The Terminal tagged the paint with disdain: BAIT—LOW SUBTLETY—HIGH CONFIDENCE—SOURCE SIGNATURE: ADEPT, MASKED . "They want an audience," Kade said, twirling the bell in his hand like a coin he wasn't spending yet . "And a headline," Natasha added, because she understood predators who hunted the part of a person that wanted to be seen .
Fury set the perimeter with quiet tyranny, agents ghosting into doorways and air vents like punctuation marks placed by a grumpy editor . Spider-Man crawled along the ceiling, leaving discrete clappers under pipes—breadcrumb rhythm, in case the world decided to skip beats . Ethics confetti arrived in Kade's vision with a small clipboard: INFORMED RISK ONLY—ESTABLISH EXITS—PRE-WATER BREAK . He drank, because schedules weren't just for anomalies, and the bell's weight steadied like a heartbeat finding a metronome .
The stairwell descended to a platform that wasn't on any plan, a stage that had grown where a city forgot to say no . A circle of light held the Adept, mask dark as a closed file, coat falling like a curtain that never opened on time . Around them, eight freestanding frames hovered—doorways drawn in wire and glass, each containing a different, wrong view of New York: the skyline tilted; a subway car filled with mannequins; a school hallway that breathed . The Terminal whispered a taxonomy only a bureaucrat could love: PORTABLE INFERENCES—FRAMEWORKS FOR FALSE CONTEXT—FEED ON EYE CONTACT, EXHALE DREAD .
"Welcome," the Adept said, voice sweet as a lawsuit. "Tonight: A demonstration of honesty. We open doors" . Captions tried to crawl into the corners, italic and self-impressed; Kade thumbed the Redaction Anchor and paid the micro-fee without wincing . "We brought a bell," he said, letting the force-that-was-finally-named breathe steady with his words . Natasha drifted to flank, casual as a shadow; Spider-Man hung in the gloom, patience vibrating at a youthful hum .
The first frame flickered to life with a street that looked almost right—same lampposts, same gum constellation on the sidewalk—until the air wobbled and the pedestrians' faces turned toward the viewer with perfect, rehearsed despair . "A city drenched in its truth," the Adept murmured. "No captions, no context, only your own fear reflected back" . "That's still context," Kade said. "It's just lazy" . Ethics confetti: ACCURATE. WATCH TONE .
He lifted the bell but didn't ring. "Terms," he said to the frames. "You show on schedule, with plaques. You do not feed in the wild. You accept witnesses who can leave at any time, with water at exits" . The frames pulsed in affront; the Adept tilted their head. "You cannot curate terror," they said. "It must arrive unannounced to be pure" . "Purity is for chemicals," Natasha said dryly. "People deserve choices" .
The second frame snapped to a school corridor where lockers whispered; a third held a hospital waiting room where clocks refused to move; a fourth mirrored the platform itself, except the reflection Kade had no face . The corridor inside him tugged, testing the new hinges; he breathed, let the Force settle like sand in a jar, then fill the space between grains without pushing . "You want to be looked at," he told the frames. "You want attention. Take it on a schedule, and you'll get more of it, for longer, from people who will come back and pay to be brave" . The Terminal annotated: APPEAL TO SUSTAINABILITY—SMART .
The Adept's voice softened, which somehow made it sharper. "You had a word in you you would not say," they said. "Now you say it. Has it made you less hungry?" . "It made me less dishonest," Kade said. "There's a difference" . Spider-Man, bless him, held position and did not blurt a pep talk; growth looked good on him .
"Show us the trap," Natasha invited, polite as a locked door . The Adept obliged. The central frame flared open to a street that was genuinely here—live feed, not construct—crowd milling near a street performer and a suspiciously large crate marked AV EQUIPMENT . The Terminal pinged: LIVE-SIPHON—LATENT—TRIGGERED BY "LOOK HERE" PHRASE—THRESHOLD: 200 EYES . "They want us to use our own warning to pull focus," Kade said . "Classic misdirection," Natasha said .
Kade rang the bell once. The tone cut through the stairwell and, impossibly, through the live frame, mapping the street with a circle only a few would feel and fewer would understand . "New rules," he called, voice even, using the Hush Bubble for clarity. "Do not look at the crate. Look at your shoes. Count to ten. If you need help, wave" . On the street, a handful of people obeyed instinct they didn't know they had; S.H.I.E.L.D. ushers drifted in from nowhere, put water in hands, turned bodies gently toward exits . The live-siphon threshold slid away; the crate's hunger missed its mark and sulked .
The Adept's mask tilted, acknowledging the move. "Refusal as ritual," they said. "How pious" . "How effective," Kade returned, and let the bell's weight remind him that avoidance could be a tool, not a pathology, when labeled and scheduled . He turned to the frames. "Sign," he said, holding up the Curator's Seal. "Museum-mode only. Plaques, witnesses, exits, water. Tuesdays at fourteen-hundred we do fear with consent. The rest of the week belongs to groceries and rent and boring, blessed errands" .
The frames flickered through options: show, sulk, shatter . Spider-Man thumbed his confetti cannon but didn't fire; he just held it like a reminder that joy was a weapon too . Natasha's baton remained holstered; her stance was language for "not today" . The Adept lifted a hand, palm bare, as if to say wait—and the room's captions tried to burst past the Anchor and failed, dying like moths gently escorted out by a librarian . "If I refuse?" they asked . "Then we name you 'coward with props,'" Kade said. "And worse, we ignore you" . Ethics confetti: STRATEGIC STARVATION—APPROVED .
The central frame quivered, the live feed collapsing into a plaque: FIELD DEMONSTRATION—CANCELLED DUE TO ETHICS . One by one, the frames accepted the Seal; the brass stamp glowed on glass, an aesthetic somewhere between gallery chic and bureaucratic threat . The Adept's shoulders lifted on a breath that wasn't human. "You will make them soft," they said . "We will make them safe enough to choose hard things," Natasha answered .
The bell chimed once, sealing it. "Containment Credits: +160," the Terminal sang. "Compliance Score: 75%. New group protocol: Look-Away Drill—crowd de-escalation via directed attention shift" . "We invented 'stare at your shoes' as a spell," Spider-Man whispered, delighted . "It's always been a spell," Kade said. "We just gave it a plaque" .
The trap, denied its audience, tried a tantrum. The stairwell shook; dust fell with performative menace; a frame spiderwebbed and then neatly repaired itself because the plaque said property damage required a work order . The Adept's voice lost its veneer. "You cannot curate a tear in the world," they hissed . The seam behind them—small, neat, recently taught to wear a tie-off loop—trembled . Kade lifted the Safety Line, flicked it, and the loop caught like a friendly pier catching a rope . "We can manage how wide it opens," he said. "And when" .
Something old and narrative-hungry looked at him through the mask, and for a second Kade felt like a book being thumbed to the end to see how he died . He rang the bell, not loud, not defiant—present . The gaze blinked and slid off, bored by lack of spectacle . "We are not protagonists," Kade said to the mask. "We are staff" . Ethics confetti: HEALTHY ROLE IDENTIFICATION—EXCELLENT .
The Adept folded, not defeated, not triumphant—recalculating . "We will write our own plaque," they said . "Bring it Tuesday," Kade answered . Natasha stepped forward, just enough to suggest that if the Adept tried to make this a duel, it would instead become paperwork . They didn't. They stepped backward into a frame that now bore a brass seal and vanished with the tidy hypocrisy of art that likes to pretend it's above commerce .
Agents filtered in, rolling the frames onto dollies like very polite burglars . Fury's voice arrived as a verdict. "Good," he said. "Clean. No headlines I have to smother with favors" . The Terminal posted the ritual card to the city's quiet places: LOOK-AWAY DRILL—ON BELL: LOOK DOWN, COUNT TEN, BREATHE, REQUEST WATER . "We're teaching people to fail to look," Spider-Man said, half-appalled, half-impressed . "We're teaching people to choose what to feed," Kade said .
On the way up, the graffiti at the top of the stairwell had changed. Someone—something—had added a neat stencil under the invitation: TUESDAYS ONLY . Spider-Man pointed at it like he'd spotted a rare bird. "Is that…compliance graffiti?" . "Culture shift," Natasha said, which might have been a joke if jokes wore knives .
Outside, the city did that thing where it pretended not to be weird out of courtesy . The DO NOT READ flyer purred under Kade's arm, content that the frames had accepted their labels and would not try to steal its brand again . The Terminal slid the banner: CASE FILE 007—THE ADEPT SETS A TRAP—RESOLVED. NEXT: CASE FILE 008—S.H.I.E.L.D. ETHICS COMMITTEE (LIVE) . Ethics confetti fell like a calendar invitation in festive mode: YOU ARE INVITED TO A MEETING—AGENDA: BUDGET, BOUNDARIES, BELL USAGE .
Kade groaned purely on principle. Natasha's mouth ghosted toward amusement. "You'll do fine," she said . "You practiced honesty today" . He tapped the bell against his palm. "Practiced boring," he said . "Boring keeps people alive," Fury's voice rumbled from the comm, which was as close to a benediction as a man like that could offer . Kade nodded to the rhythm of traffic and time. "See you Tuesday," he told the city, and for the first time, it sounded like a promise everyone wanted to keep .