(Ethan)
Red Hook smells like river water and old rope after dark. The building Tony picked sits at the end of a cobbled street between a boat repair shop and a warehouse with its windows painted over, and nothing on the outside would make anyone look at it twice.
Gwen holds her wrist up under the one working streetlight and reads the code off her skin. The keypad takes it on the first try. The Digimon slip through the side door ahead of us, Gatomon first, checking every corner before she lets the rest of us past her.
The freight elevator opens straight into the loft, and Jessica stops so fast that Peter walks into her back.
Last night we slept on flattened boxes next to a mop bucket. Tonight we get a leather couch long enough for all four of us, a wall of windows looking out at the harbor, and, hanging over the kitchen island, a neon sign in cursive pink letters that says You're Welcome.
"He did not."
Jessica's already walking toward it like she needs to touch it to believe it.
Peter tips his head back to read it.
"He did. That's the decor."
Impmon claims the couch before anyone else can, flopping face-first into the cushions with a groan that sounds almost like a purr. Renamon takes the window, of course, one shoulder against the glass. Gwen opens the fridge, and for a second she just stands there with the door open, the light spilling across her face.
It's full, real food stacked on every rack, with one whole shelf given over to the fancy orange soda Jessica likes, the kind nobody buys for themselves.
Gwen pulls out a soda and tosses it across the island. Jessica catches it one-handed without even looking.
A laptop sits closed on the kitchen island under the neon sign, with a folded note on top in Tony's slanted handwriting.
Read-only copy of DSD's server archives, offline, no live connection. Look all you want. Touch nothing. Don't eat the caviar, it's a test. T.
Peter has the laptop open before I've even finished reading the note over his shoulder.
The rest of the loft gets loud. Jessica finds the caviar and eats it anyway. Gatomon and BlackGatomon argue over a beanbag chair. Somewhere behind me Impmon's snoring into the couch cushions. I lose track of all of it, because Peter's gone quiet in the way he only goes quiet when something's wrong.
"Ethan. Come look at this."
I lean in. He's got the archive's transfer logs open, rows of timestamps scrolling past too fast to read, and he stops them on one line. The date sits three weeks before launch. The whole EDEN core build went out in a single export, every file, to an internal account at the end of the line: svc-archive-07.
It isn't mine or Tony's. From how long Peter stares at it, it isn't his either.
"You remember that week?"
"I remember the pizza. That place on Ninth was delivering twice a day."
Peter scrolls, stops, scrolls back.
"Three times. The delivery guy started throwing in free garlic knots because he felt bad for us. You slept under the conference table."
"You slept sitting up in a desk chair with your headphones on. I have pictures."
Peter taps the date on the screen with one finger.
"Half the building had a server room key that week. The cooling contractors, the night guard, the guy who fixed the vending machine."
"The vending machine guy did not export our core build, Peter."
He doesn't scroll this time.
"Somebody did."
I reach for Tony's note to copy the account name onto the back, and Gwen's hand lands on my arm before the pen touches paper. She doesn't say anything. She just holds out her wrist, the door code still there in smudged ballpoint.
I write svc-archive-07 under it, and the note goes in the trash. Behind us, Jessica's laughing at something Gatomon did with the beanbag, and I don't turn around.
Nick Fury knew Tony Stark was in the building four minutes before Tony reached the fourteenth floor, because Tony had signed the visitor log as Your Favorite Consultant and the front desk had called up to ask whether that was an actual clearance level.
It wasn't. Fury let him up anyway.
Tony came through the door without knocking and without sitting down.
"Who signed off on the kids?"
Fury didn't move. He'd had forty years of practice at not moving.
"I don't discuss anything with consultants."
"Anything. So there's a thing."
Tony set both hands flat on Fury's desk.
"A rooftop two days ago, a warehouse this morning. What's on the calendar for tonight?"
"I've got a meeting in ten minutes."
"Great. I'll keep it to nine."
Every word of it was news to him.
He'd never approved a move on Kepler. He'd never seen a request for one. Coulson's last report on the Kepler group had landed on this desk nine days ago, and it had said, in Coulson's plain careful way, that three teenagers were checking on frightened civilians at incident sites while a fourth ran searches from home, and none of them posed a threat to anyone. Somewhere between that report and a rooftop, someone had sent armed agents after those same kids, and Fury was hearing about it from Tony Stark.
"Three kids, Nick. One of them's mine."
"Kepler isn't yours. He's his own problem, and now he's mine."
Tony's mouth twisted.
"Yours. You're still sitting on my father's notes like a dragon on a pile of gold, and you want to tell me who belongs to who?"
"I want you out of my office."
"Then give me a name, and I'm gone."
"You've got eight minutes, Stark."
His thumb pressed a little harder against the arm of his chair. Tony was too busy being angry to notice.
Tony straightened, looked at him a long second, and then went to the door.
"You know what I like about you, Nick? You're a terrible liar. It's very reassuring."
He paused with the door half open.
"I'll be back. Tell your tactical guys I said hi."
The door clicked shut behind him.
Fury waited until the elevator chimed at the end of the hall before he pulled up the operations index. No file existed under Kepler. One did under a numbered code, opened four days ago and classified two levels above the tactical teams who'd carried it out.
Coulson's report was attached as the source document, his exact words still sitting there at the bottom: no evidence of hostile intent.
The summary at the top read differently. Unauthorized operational-grade intelligence gathering against sensitive field activity in progress. It was the same kids and the same three weeks, rewritten into something a tactical team would move on without asking a single question.
The routing went through Jasper Sitwell. Above Sitwell sat a Council liaison code, one that never had to cross Fury's desk at all.
He read it twice. Then he closed the file, opened the bottom drawer of his desk, and took out a phone that wasn't on any SHIELD inventory, an old flip model with one number saved in it.
It rang once.
"You never call on this line."
"I need someone who doesn't show up in my files, Romanoff. Tonight."
The line went quiet for a beat, the kind of pause she used to decide things.
"Where?"
He gave her an address in Brooklyn that had never been written down anywhere. Then he hung up, pried the back off the phone, and pulled the battery before the screen had even finished going dark.
***
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