(Ethan)
Dee, the woman who owns the shop and owes Olivia a favor from way back, keeps the storage room light on a timer, and at seven sharp it clicks on over four people who managed maybe three hours of sleep between them.
Peter got the worst spot, curled against a sack of rice with his torn jacket balled up under his head. The cut over his eyebrow scabbed overnight into a dark, crooked line. Gwen sits with her back to the shelving, in the exact position she was in when I fell asleep, so I doubt she slept at all. Jessica's sprawled across two flattened boxes, Impmon asleep on her stomach and rising and falling with her breathing.
The Digimon took the door again. Renamon hasn't moved from it since we got back, and Gatomon's tail keeps flicking against the frame every time a truck goes by outside.
We're four now, in a room built for a mop bucket and canned tomatoes. For three weeks Peter was a status line in a group chat, and the rest of us were three pairs of sneakers on three different sidewalks. I count heads anyway, Gwen, Jessica, Peter, me. Every elbow in here is touching somebody else's elbow, and I wouldn't trade a single one of them for more floor.
Peter wakes up cursing at the rice sack.
"Who keeps rice in a storage room?"
Jessica doesn't bother opening her eyes.
"People who sell rice. Welcome back, by the way."
Breakfast is four coffees and a bag of day-old rolls from the bodega, and Jessica smooths the receipt flat on her knee afterward like she's reading a bill she can't pay.
"Eleven dollars. Between the trains back last night and this, that's the whole bank now."
Jessica tips her head toward the door without looking at it.
"Dee came in at six. Some guy in a windbreaker was asking up and down the block about teenagers with, and I quote, weird pets. She didn't tell him anything. She also wants us out by the weekend, and I can't even be mad at her about it."
Gwen's been scrolling through Jessica's phone since the coffee showed up. She logged into her email on it last night, the only thing she could reach without her own phone.
"My dad sent me something." Her thumb stops moving. "Two words. Call me. He writes me paragraphs about parking tickets, Ethan."
Captain Stacy doesn't do two-word emails. I don't say that part, because Gwen already knows it better than I do.
Jessica sits up, careful not to dump Impmon on the floor.
"Olivia texted me a question mark at midnight. Just the question mark. I think that's worse."
The four of us sit with that for a while, the coffee going cold.
Jessica holds up one finger.
"So here's my plan. We don't die. We stay down here, we let whatever this is burn itself out, and we pop our heads up in a month when somebody else is the story."
Gwen sets the phone face-down on her knee.
"It won't burn out. They came after Peter on his regular patrol route. They know where we go and how we move, and every week we hide, they get another week of that."
"And every week we don't hide, they get another shot at one of us."
Jessica isn't wrong, and neither is Gwen, and I'm stuck in the middle of the two of them like a kid watching his parents fight over the car keys.
Gwen turns the phone over in her hands a couple times first.
"We could call Tony."
Just like that, the whole room goes still. Even Impmon wakes up for it.
I've thought about Tony since the rooftop. Of course I have. Tony signed the partnership papers for EDEN with a pen he stole off my desk. Tony stood next to me on launch day with an arm slung around my shoulders, grinning for about forty cameras. Tony would help. That's the problem. Tony would help loudly, with lawyers and a suit and probably a press conference, and every single photo from that launch day would end up on the same wall as ours.
I pick at the lid of my coffee cup.
"He's got his own problems with SHIELD already. We call him, and his name goes on the same list as ours. Maybe for good."
Peter's been quiet through all of it, sitting with his back against the rice and his knees pulled in, turning the torn edge of his jacket over and over between his fingers.
He doesn't look up from the jacket.
"I was alone for maybe four minutes last night. Before you guys showed up. Four minutes, three of them, and I had no idea who they were or who to call, because I'd gone out there by myself on purpose so I wouldn't drag anybody into it."
He lets go of the fabric.
"Four minutes was plenty, man. I'd take being on a list with Tony over another four minutes like that."
Last night in this same room, I was the one who thought waiting only feels safer because nobody has to move. Hearing Peter say the same thing with a cut on his face lands a whole lot harder than hearing myself say it.
I set the cup down.
"Okay. Okay. We call Tony."
Jessica lies back down across her boxes and stares at the ceiling.
"Great. With what? Eleven dollars and my phone, which a guy in a windbreaker is probably already tracking?"
Peter's already sitting up straighter.
"Not a phone. EDEN. We log in from a public terminal, library or a café, under a throwaway account, and message his avatar in-world. He checks his EDEN mail more than his real mail, I've seen his inbox. Nothing routes through SHIELD if it never leaves our servers."
Gwen's still turning the plan over.
"Our servers keep logs."
He pauses.
"Yeah, and we're the ones who read them. Mostly."
Gwen's expression doesn't change.
"Mostly."
Peter holds his hands up like he's surrendering, which isn't much of a defense of the plan, but it isn't a no either.
Peter's plan is the only one on the table, and we all know it. Peter takes the bodega receipt off Jessica's knee, borrows the pen clipped to the shelf inventory sheet, and writes on the back in his cramped engineer's handwriting: the name of a library three subway stops north, a throwaway username, and under that, Tony's EDEN handle, the one we all joke about because he picked it himself.
He folds it once and hands it to me.
I tuck it into my pocket, right behind the line that says four coffees, $9.40.
***
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