Stark Industries pretends to be calm.
Memos fly, meetings stack, and the espresso machine in the break room gets worked like a treadmill. On the surface, everything hums. Underneath, you can hear the screws loosen. Tony Stark has killed the weapons division, and every department is trying to decide whether to panic quietly or publicly.
I keep my head down, badge forward, eyes on my screen. The whispers sit under my ribs like a warm coin. Not loud. Waiting.
Pepper sweeps through the bullpen once, all crisp lines and quiet orders. Every step says I have thirty fires to put out and I am still on time. She pauses to ask a senior engineer for numbers, thanks him, moves on. When she passes me, she does not even glance down, and I feel weirdly grateful. Anonymity is a gift.
By lunch, the building has stopped pretending. Two executives hiss in a glass conference room with the blinds half closed. Somewhere above us, something heavy gets moved and the ceiling ticks in protest. A rumor slips through the air like smoke. Stane is meeting with the board. Stane is smoothing the investors. Stane has it handled.
The whispers twitch when I hear his name, a tiny pull like a fish moving on the line. I pretend I do not feel it.
I take my tray to the far corner of the cafeteria and practice being nobody. A pair of junior engineers gripe about reassignments. An intern brags about a late-night run to the lab I am not supposed to know exists. It is all background noise until a shadow crosses the table.
"Mind if I sit?"
Obadiah Stane is all gaze and teeth. My body says flee. My mouth says, "Of course, sir."
He sets down a bowl of soup and a phone, gives me a smile that would sell a thousand shares. Up close, it reads like gloss over a crack. "Jordan, right? We spoke in the corridor yesterday."
"Yes, sir."
"Good to see young people with work ethic." He stirs the soup like a man with no worries. "These are interesting times."
The whispers hiss. Slow, steady, like steam under a lid.
"I just try to be useful," I say.
"Useful." He tastes the word. "That is a good thing to be." A beat passes where he does not blink. "How are people taking the announcement, Jordan? You hear more in the halls than we do in the boardroom."
He is fishing. I offer water. "Mixed. Confused, mostly."
He nods like I have confirmed a suspicion. "Change rattles people. Stark Industries was built on reliability. Order. You understand."
Do not react, I tell myself. You knew he was a snake before you ever breathed here. Smile. Finish your fruit cup. Be decor.
"I understand," I say.
He taps the table once, a little drumbeat. "Keep your head down. The smart ones always do." He stands, still smiling. "Enjoy your lunch, son."
Son scrapes like gravel. He leaves without looking back.
The whispers fall quiet. My spoon shakes. I set it down before I drop it.
I do not last long after lunch. I shuffle work, hold up a wall, answer an email I do not remember writing. At five, I let the building spit me onto the sidewalk. The sky is a scraped coin of low cloud and dirty light. New York exhales hot air and exhaust into my face.
I tell myself I will go home. I will microwave leftovers and pretend to sleep. I make it two blocks before the pull starts.
Not a shout. A slow pressure behind the breastbone. Turn right. Now left. Keep going.
"Please be a pizza place," I tell the universe. "Or a bakery. I am very open to pastries as destiny."
No bakery appears. The pull drags me into a narrow avenue where scaffolding crisscrosses the front of a brownstone like ribs. A worker in a hard hat argues with a guy in a suit at the curb. A car idles with the hazards on. The wind funnels down the street and sets a plastic tarp flapping like a sail.
The whispers tighten.
The worker throws up his hands and climbs the scaffold. He is three sections up when the bottom pin slips with a dry click. The whole frame shudders. I do not think. I run.
"Hey," I shout, waving my arms. "Off. Now."
He looks down, annoyed. "Buddy, it is secure."
The pin drops.The world tilts.
The scaffold buckles like a folding chair. Lumber and metal shear from their bolts and tip toward the sidewalk in slow motion. People scream. The guy in the suit stares up with his mouth open. The worker clings to the crossbar and does the worst thing he could do, which is freeze.
My hand is already up.
Light jumps from my palm and slams into the falling section. It is not a beam. Not a clean line. It is a round wave, a short, brutal shove that knocks the top layer sideways enough to catch on the next brace. The impact ricochets through the frame. A second section peels off and crashes to the street, missing the guy in the suit by a whisper. The worker drops the last eight feet, hits the sidewalk, and rolls with a sound like a breath punched out of a body.
He groans. Alive.
People scatter, then surge. A woman grabs the man in the suit and drags him to the curb. The wind tosses dust into my eyes. Alarms start shouting from somewhere inside the brownstone.
The whispers do not release me. They pull again, sharp. Inside.
I vault under the hanging tarp into a dim foyer that smells like plaster and damp wood. A young woman is halfway down the stairs, clutching a cat that has decided today is the day to become shrapnel. She sees me and freezes, eyes big.
"The front is blocked," she says, pointing past me at the twisted metal.
"Back exit?"
"Basement," she says. "I do not have a key."
The whispers push down. I point toward the stairs. "Go. I will get the door."
She hesitates, then bolts. I take the steps two at a time. The basement is a low ceiling and flickering fluorescents. The exit is chained with a padlock the size of my fist. I put my hand on the chain and breathe.
"Please work," I tell whatever this is.
Light blooms under my skin like heat lightning. The links shiver. The padlock does not melt or explode. It just pops, clean and simple, like a jar you finally unseal. The chain slithers to the floor.
The woman barrels into me with the cat. I swing the door wide and we spill into the alley, air sweet in our lungs. She keeps running until the alley opens on the next block. When she finally stops, we both turn back and look at the building. The scaffold lists like a drunk. The street is a mess of metal and swearing.
She looks from the chaos to me. "How did you do that?"
"Do what?" I say, because I do not have the answer either.
Her laugh is wild and relieved. "Thank you." She squeezes the cat like a life preserver. "Seriously. Thank you."
"You are welcome." I back away before the next question. "Get a new lock."
I cut through two blocks of deli smells and laundry steam before the whispers finally ease. When they go, the fatigue drops in like lead. My hands tremble. My shoulder aches from where a bar caught me on the way in. Dust grits between my teeth.
I stop at a bodega and stare at the drinks like choosing a sports bottle is the same as choosing a life. I grab the blue one, pay in crumpled bills, and sit on the stoop outside to drink it. My reflection in the dark glass door looks like a person who ran through a building and argued with a chain.
"What are we doing?" I ask the air. "Are we doing this? Is that the plan?"
The whispers do not answer. They do not need to. The shape of the day already told me.
On the way home, the city offers me a test I did not ask for. Two kids on a corner trying to look older than they are. One has a backpack he should not have. Cash changes hands. The buyer is jittery in a way that ends in a morgue. I am five steps past when the pull hits like a hook.
No.
I stop.
This is not a burning hallway. Not a falling scaffold. This is a choice. Interfere and escalate. Walk by and live with it.
I hate that I know the math. A hundred bad decisions in this city tonight and I am not a cop and I am not a saint. I am a kid with a light in his hand and a voice in his bones.
The buyer opens the bag. The older kid glances up and sees me watching. His eyes go flat. He lifts his chin. Challenge.
I raise my hands, empty. "Not worth it," I say. "Walk away."
He smirks. The buyer shifts, angry and scared. The whispers rise like a tide.
"Walk away," I say again. "Please."
The older kid steps forward like he is going to make a point of me. My body lines up without asking. Feet set. Shoulders loose. Hands open.
The buyer bolts. Thank God. The older kid swears and reaches into his jacket. My stomach drops. I do not wait to see metal. My hand snaps out. The light hits him like a wall. He flies backward, feet over the curb, and skids across dirty concrete.
He lies there, stunned and groaning, breath sawed out of him in wet shreds. No blood on the pavement. His friend runs. The corner empties like the city has learned a trick.
I stand in the middle of the sidewalk with my palm smoking faint gold and want to throw up.
"Should have walked," I say, mostly to myself.
He rolls to his side, coughs, tries to get up. I back away and put two blocks between us and then three. My hands will not stop shaking. I tell myself I did not kill him. I tell myself it was force, not fire. I tell myself a lot of things I do not fully believe.
The apartment smells less like smoke tonight and more like dust and old coffee. I strip off my shirt and find a purple line of bruise across my ribs where the scaffold kissed me. The mirror over the sink offers me a stranger. Hair full of grit. Eyes older than this morning.
I try to laugh and it catches. "Hero," I tell the mirror, and I hate the way the word feels. Like a shirt that does not fit, too tight at the throat.
I sit on the bed and open the notebook because I cannot help myself. The tree waits on the page. The roots spiral deeper than last time. The branches reach wider. In the margins, the same four words keep repeating in my hand even when I do not remember writing them.
Balance.Choice.Tree.Remembered.
The memory of Obadiah's hand on my shoulder slides through my head like a cold blade. The whispers had howled when he smiled. They were calm when I knocked a kid across the sidewalk. I do not know which part scares me more.
I close the notebook gently and rest my palm on the cover like it is a patient animal. Outside, the city breathes. Somewhere, a siren unspools and fades.
I am tired of being dragged, but I am more tired of watching and doing nothing. Today was an accident, then a rescue, then a choice I did not want. Tomorrow will be more of the same. Stark Industries in the daylight. The city at night. Me in the middle, pretending I can hold both without tearing.
I lie back and stare at the ceiling until the plaster turns into stars. Sleep comes slow. When it finally finds me, the tree is already there. Roots in constellations. Branches across everything. The voice rolls through me like the tide.
Every universe remembers you differently. Which one will you become?
I do not have an answer yet. I only have a hand that lights when I ask it to and a city that will not stop asking.
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