Gwen wanted to get home to look after her mother and little brother. Peter wanted to go find his aunt and uncle. Even Lorna was shouting at Coulson: "Something's happened to Jessica—I called her and her voice was so weak, I think she's been in a car crash!"
"Nobody is going anywhere. That's an order. Someone will help her, I promise you." Coulson brought out all the authority of a level-eight agent and cowed the students into silence.
The school buses couldn't hold that many kids, and with the traffic in the city the way it was, getting behind the wheel now was flat-out suicide. So the two senior agents led the students, teachers, and custodians along the back streets. Along the way a few parents who'd heard the news joined the group.
Following S.H.I.E.L.D.'s defensive map, they picked a stretch of subway tunnel well clear of the Tesseract and ducked inside.
The tunnel was packed. City white-collars and immigrants from every minority alike were crammed in shoulder to shoulder, waiting on this alien invasion that felt like some kind of sick joke.
Some people were still holding forth, insisting it was a military conspiracy, proof of how incompetent and brain-dead the government was.
How could there possibly be aliens? That was what most of them thought. They couldn't believe their dull, ordinary lives were about to be turned upside down—but instinct and herd mentality drove them to take shelter anyway.
Plenty of them eyed the food and water in the students' hands, tempted for a moment, only to be backed off by Coulson's pistol.
After May put down four or five grown men, the group claimed a patch of the tunnel to hunker down in.
"You're not going back to help?" May asked Coulson under her breath.
"Captain America will lead everyone to beat the aliens. My job is to look after these kids. They might just be our hope for the future." Coulson's tone wasn't exactly grim, but he didn't believe for a second that Earth could sweep the aliens aside with ease. He'd cast himself in the role of preserving the seed of humanity, guiding them onto the right path afterward.
May caught the pessimism in it. "Is it that bad?"
Coulson glanced left and right. "The Avengers aren't unified. Daisy and Nick see this whole thing differently. It's a mess, basically…"
May leaned back against the wall and sighed. Strictly speaking, she didn't think much of the Avengers herself. Everyone could see how Nick Fury was propping up the Avengers now while sidelining S.H.I.E.L.D.'s own agents—and truthfully, she wasn't happy about it. She'd just been too busy with her divorce to pay it any mind.
Fury wanted to travel light, drop the dead weight, shake off the tiresome politicians and the strings they pulled. Daisy said no—she was determined to keep S.H.I.E.L.D. intact. The whole conflict between them came down to what S.H.I.E.L.D. was for.
"Let them sort it out." May wanted S.H.I.E.L.D. to survive, and to keep getting better, even if she was only a desk agent now.
Coulson wanted S.H.I.E.L.D. to thrive too, but he admired Fury's move to bring in Captain America. Caught between the two directors, he didn't know how to choose—so he'd just stepped out to look after the kids instead.
While the two adults vented and made the occasional call to keep tabs on the outside world, the half-grown kids huddled together to talk over the whole sudden mess, and Jessica's accident.
"I'm worried about my dad…" She and Lorna didn't get along, but Gwen had still worked her way into their little circle. Now she sat hugging her knees, her face uneasy, unable to reach her family on her phone. She was frantic.
Lorna had tried Jessica's number a few times—either it wouldn't connect or nobody picked up. Beside herself, she turned to Peter Parker, the level-headed one of the group.
"Peter… Peter, what are you doing?"
Peter was flapping his hand like he'd cramped up. The light in the underground tunnel was dim, and Lorna couldn't make out what he was up to.
"Ah, it's nothing, don't worry—Jessica's going to be fine." Peter shook the thing off his hand. A moment ago, when he'd braced himself against the wall, something seemed to have bitten him. It was too dark to see what it was; he'd just felt a sharp sting in his finger. Two quick shakes and it seemed fine now.
Vaguely, he had the impression the thing that bit him hadn't been big, and had barely weighed anything—several long legs? A spider, maybe? Peter Parker wasn't afraid of spiders. Never had been, not since he was a kid.
He quickly forgot the little incident and joined his friends' conversation.
There was nothing any of them could do about Jessica's accident, so they got to talking about their own parents. Every one of them was worried about their families.
Even Lorna was worried about the crew back at the villa. Wanda, dopey as ever, always hugging that big book and reading it like a fool—would she get hurt? Had Dumpling burrowed off into the woods by now? And poor honest, harmless Mr. Rhino—would he end up an alien's target?
The Long Island villa was Lorna's home. She even thought, half-amused, that if the place got blasted open with another hole in it, Daisy would probably hit the roof.
As it turned out, Daisy had nothing on selflessness-before-family. The moment she left the White House, she went straight back to her villa and got the household squared away.
"Wanda, do you have any magic to hide the villa? Like the kind in the old witch's cottage?"
If she could, she'd have hidden the whole planet. The Chitauri had no technology worth stealing and no genes worth harvesting—she had no interest in fighting them at all. Too bad Wanda couldn't manage it. And the one who could, the Ancient One, was playing coy day after day, completely unreachable.
Wanda's little mouth fell open, and she looked embarrassed. Her magic was middling at best, and this business of hiding whole buildings was truly beyond her. On top of that, Chthon's Darkhold was full of nothing but dark magic, while what she wielded was Chaos Magic. Trying to cast dark magic through Chaos Magic to hide the villa—she might as well just set the place on fire.
But looking at the hopeful expression on Daisy's face, she couldn't bring herself to crush this magic illiterate. Her delicate features knotted up. How was she supposed to spare Daisy's pride and tell her the truth at the same time?
"You can't? All right, never mind then." Daisy simply assumed Wanda didn't know any such magic, and settled for the next best thing. The other women were all off at work or school; even Elektra had gone off having a wild time lately. The only ones left home were the extremely homebody Wanda, plus Dumpling and Mr. Rhino.
She pushed the good-natured, guileless Mr. Rhino down into the basement first. No matter how strong a rhino was, it counted for nothing—the Chitauri could fly, and a few blasts from an energy gun would finish him off. He'd been part of the family a long time; she wasn't about to let him die a pointless death.
Dumpling didn't need to be found. The little rascal was clever—seeming to sense something was about to happen, he'd already hidden himself in the basement.
"Wanda, you get down there too. No matter what happens up top, don't come out." Daisy pressed the point again and again, then teleported away from the villa.
The moment she was gone, Wanda walked right back out of the basement, dark-red ripples surging up between her palms. Gentle on the outside, iron underneath—Wanda wasn't going to hide. And she didn't care what kind of aliens they were. In her eyes, aliens were no different from the Hydra scientists who'd used her as a lab rat. Let them come. Let them dare wreck her home. Wanda would kill every last one of them.