The city looks at me differently now.
Or maybe I'm imagining it.
Since the fire, I can't shake the memory of those eyes on me. Wide, stunned, afraid. Nobody said thank you. Nobody asked what I was. They just stared, like I had pulled back a curtain they were never meant to see.
And maybe I did.
The whispers are quiet this morning, almost smug, but they never really leave. They hum under everything the way fluorescent lights do, a constant buzz I only notice when the room goes still.
At Stark Industries, the halls buzz with a tension you can taste. Tony Stark's announcement about shutting down weapons manufacturing dropped like a grenade. Engineers grumble in the corners. Executives pace with phones pressed to their ears. Interns shuffle papers like they might explode if you breathe wrong.
I keep my head down. Coffee runs, data entry, the usual pretend-I-belong routine. If I move like a ghost, no one will notice I am barely holding myself together.
I am halfway down a corridor when I hear it. Footsteps. Heavy, measured, deliberate.
"Jordan Brooks," a voice says behind me.
My spine goes rigid. I turn.
Obadiah Stane fills the hallway like a wall. The suit is immaculate. The smile is warm and practiced. His eyes, up close, are knives heathed in velvet.
"I have seen your name on a few reports," he says, like we are old friends. "Research intern, right?"
"Yes, sir." My mouth is dry.
He moves closer, slow and easy, and claps a hand on my shoulder. It is a friendly gesture with too much weight behind it. "Good. We need sharp minds around here, especially with Tony's recent decisions." The smile never falters, but something tightens at the corners of his eyes. "Change is hard. Company needs people who show up."
The whispers slam into me like static. My ears ring. My stomach knots. Every hair on my arms lifts.
Danger.
Not a fire. Not a falling beam. Not a knife in the dark.
A person.
I force my face into something polite. "Happy to help, sir."
"Loyalty," he says, like it is a prayer. "Hard work. That is what built Stark Industries. That is what will keep it strong." His hand squeezes once. "Not impulsive announcements to make headlines."
I feel my jaw stiffen. Smile, I tell myself. Nod. You already know who he is. You cannot let him know that you know.
"Understood," I say.
Obadiah studies me for a beat longer than is comfortable, eyes flicking over my face like he is searching for a hairline crack. The whispers hiss in the back of my skull, a soft chorus that sounds too much like get away.
Then he releases my shoulder and steps back. "Good talk, Jordan." He pats the lapel of his suit, turns, and walks away humming something cheerful that does not match the storm boiling in his wake.
The whispers go quiet the second he turns the corner. I realize I have been holding my breath. It leaves me in a rush, and I have to brace a hand on the wall until the hallway steadies.
I have felt them warn me about danger before. The toppled casings. The gas leak. The alley knife. The fire. But this feels different. It is not a warning about what might happen. It is a verdict on who stands in front of me.
I shove my hands into my pockets and keep moving like nothing happened. If I run, I will look guilty of something, and Obadiah Stane strikes me as a man who collects guilt the way other people collect coins.
The rest of the day blurs. Pepper glides through chaos with tight smiles and clipped instructions. The lab murmurs about new prototypes no one is allowed to see. My fingers type notes I do not remember. All the while, one thought loops in my head.
The whispers do not just see accidents. They see intentions.
The city is cooler when I step onto the sidewalk that night, the kind of breeze that smells like wet concrete and street food. I tell myself to go home. Eat something that is not coffee. Sleep.
I do not make it a block before the pull starts.
It is not a voice, not really. More like a tide around my ribs, a slow, patient tug that says turn here, now there, keep going. I try to bargain with it under my breath. Maybe this time it is a bakery. Maybe the universe finally understands the value of a good cannoli.
The universe does not laugh.
The pull takes me toward a quieter part of Midtown, where streetlights buzz and a laundromat vents warm detergent air onto the sidewalk. I am halfway across the intersection when headlights skid, brakes scream, and a car spins into a light pole hard enough to bend steel.
The impact is a sick thud that I feel in my teeth.
I am already moving.
The driver door kicks open and a young guy stumbles out, clutching his forearm. Blood snakes down between his fingers. His girlfriend spills out the other side and tries to drag him away as smoke curls from under the crumpled hood.
"Back up," I shout, sprinting toward them. "Away from the car."
They scramble. The guy is dazed, legs wobbling. The girl is crying, trying to pull him faster than his body can move. The hood pops with a bang. Fire licks up like a tongue. I throw an arm out without thinking. Light floods my palm.
The blast that jumps from my hand is not heat this time. It is pressure, an invisible shove that rolls the newborn flame back, buys us three seconds. It is enough. We stumble out of the blast radius as the hood blooms into a proper fireball that lights the street orange.
We collapse on the curb. The guy hisses in pain and cradles his arm. The girl searches my face like she cannot decide if I am real. Sirens chatter in the distance.
"Thank you," she whispers.
I blink. No one said it before. No one said it in the fire. The sound hits a place I did not know I was protecting.
"Yeah," I say, too soft. "You are welcome."
Before she can ask how I did it, I stand and step back into shadow. The glow fades from my hand the way a screen goes dark. The whispers dim to a satisfied hum. I wait until the first red lights paint the intersection before I melt into the next block.
By the time I reach my building, the adrenaline is crashing. My hands shake when I fit the key into the lock. The apartment smells faintly of smoke again, like it followed me home just to prove a point. I drop into the chair at my tiny table and stare at the notebook I keep promising myself I will not open.
I open it.
The pages are a riot of lines and words I swear I did not write. Timelines. Names. Doodles that are not doodles. The tree spreads across half a page, roots braided into stars, branches scraping along the edges like they are trying to escape the paper. In the margins, the same words repeat in my handwriting.
Balance.Choice.Tree.Remembered.
It should feel like a puzzle I can solve. It does not. It feels like a warning in a language I almost know.
My mind drifts back to the hallway. Obadiah's hand on my shoulder. The way the whispers went from murmur to alarm in a breath. The bright, empty smile he wore like armor.
Is this what it will be now? Will the whispers judge everyone I meet? Will they show me the rot under a smile, the crack hidden in a voice? And if they start showing me other people that way, how long before they turn me inside out and hold up the mirror?
I close the notebook before the roots can climb off the page.
Sleep does not come easy. When it does, the tree is waiting like it always is, lit in cold blue and soft purple, roots sunk into constellations, branches clawing at infinity. Shadows move along the boughs like figures you almost recognize and then lose again. The voice arrives the way it always does, not so much heard as remembered.
Every universe remembers you differently. Which one will you become?
This time there is something else coiled beneath the words. Not a new sentence. A pressure. A promise that there will be a cost for every time I lift my hand and let the light out.
I wake with my heart in my mouth and the taste of smoke in the back of my throat. For a long time I just lie there, counting the cracks in the ceiling, listening to the city breathe through the open window. Somewhere, far below, a siren sings and fades. Somewhere, above, a plane rips a thin line through the night.
I want to be ordinary. I want to go to work, refill the coffee machine, make dumb small talk about prototypes I do not understand, and pretend I am not an anomaly the universe keeps tugging around like a kite.
The whispers answer with silence that feels like a hand on my shoulder. Not warm. Not cold. Just there. Waiting.
I do not know if I am a hero. I do not know if I am a monster. I only know the city keeps pulling, and I keep moving, and somewhere in the middle of all that, a man with a smile too wide puts his hand on my shoulder and calls it loyalty.
Morning comes. I get up. I clip the badge to my shirt. I step into the hallway.
The hum is back under my skin, soft as a current.
And I already know I will follow it.