The sun did not arrive politely. It came up mean and bright over the scrub, turned the two-lane blacktop into a griddle, and made the heat wobble in layers like the sky had a fever. Even with the SUV's AC doing its best impression of a miracle, heat shimmered off the asphalt in visible waves. I drummed the steering wheel anyway, because percussion is how you tell your nerves who's boss.
"Eyes up," I said. "Time to welcome the blonde thunder god to his new vacation spot."
"Thor Odinson," Alpha-02 confirmed, voice soft as a checklist.
"Yep. Asgard's golden boy—formerly. Dad dropped the hammer. Literally."
Alpha-01 rode shotgun, watching the horizon like the cacti might stage an ambush. Alpha-03 and Alpha-02 sat behind us, quiet, taking in the kind of empty that only deserts do on purpose. Puente Antiguo approached in a series of low, sensible buildings and bare utility poles. A diner banner promised the county's best pancakes with the weary confidence of a veteran. A dusty main street, a hardware store that probably sold more gossip than nails, a gas station where the overhang had opinions about wind. Perfect stage.
We parked. People noticed us instantly because three large men walking in formation look like they've already made a decision you weren't consulted on. I smiled; the Alphas didn't. We covered the sidewalk in a precise rectangle and drew a few curious stares and one wary glance from a sheriff's deputy nursing a coffee.
"Smile," I told the squad. "We're celebrities."
They didn't. It's a long-term project.
The morning cracked. A low boom rolled over the roofs—distant, metallic, wrong for thunder, right for something landing fast. Heads turned toward the horizon. A young guy on a BMX pointed with his whole arm. Two tourists craned for a view. Somebody said, "what the," and somebody else said, "meteor."
I tipped my head, listening to the second beat behind the noise—a hush that meant everyone's brain had switched from breakfast to story. "There he is," I said, and we were already moving.
Back in the SUV. Alpha-01 read the dust plume and drew a line without using a pen. We followed it out beyond town, past fences that had given up on subtlety, past scrub that had survived on less water than patience. The crater announced itself in the distance: a scorched bowl punched into desert crust, rim of crumbled caliche glinting like broken pottery. We rolled to a stop on the inside of safe and the outside of spectacle.
Thor was lying face-down in the dirt.
Not majestic. Not framed by lightning. No cape. No armor. Just a large man with blonde hair matted with dust, groaning like his bones had learned gravity the hard way. No Mjölnir. No thunder. Pride only, and even that had a limp.
I killed the engine, stepped out into heat that grabbed the back of my neck, and whistled. "If it isn't the god of thunder, face-first in the dirt. Not your best entrance, big guy."
The Alphas fanned behind me like we'd rehearsed it—which we had, because everything is a rehearsal if you admit it. Alpha-01 took the right, eyes soft and attention hard. Alpha-02 took the left, hands empty in a way that promises competence. Alpha-03 covered the back angle with the kind of calm that invites decisions to be better.
The man in the crater pushed up on his palms and staggered to his feet. Even without lightning, he had weight—the kind of presence that makes the world give him space. He glared, pride blazing through defeat. "Who are you? Where am I?" His accent made vowels sound like weapons.
"New Mexico," I said. "I'm Shredder. These are my brothers. And you just fell out of the sky."
He swayed, eyes glass-bright with pain and disbelief. "I must return to Asgard. My people—my father—"
"Slow down, champ," I said. "You're grounded. At least until Odin decides you've learned your lesson."
His eyes narrowed. "You know of Asgard."
"Let's say I keep up with the news."
Tires spit gravel. A van slid to a halt near the rim, desert dust fountaining around it. Jane Foster hopped out first, hand over brow, squinting into the glare, hair caught in the wind and not caring. Erik Selvig followed—worried professor face, protective stance. Darcy Lewis trailed with the wide-eyed courage of someone whose curiosity had always been louder than her fear, a taser clutched like a security blanket.
"Well, well," I said, "cavalry."
"We saw something fall from the sky," Jane said, voice equal parts breathless and scientific. Her eyes found Thor and went very wide. The curiosity coming off her was a pressure you could measure. "He—he shouldn't be alive after that. But he is."
"Jane," Selvig warned, already hearing how this would sound in a grant application.
"I know what you're going to say," she whispered, not taking her eyes off the man in the dirt. "But look at him. He's not normal. This is… extraordinary."
"You there—take me to—" Thor tried, and Darcy zapped him before he could finish. It sounded like a bug light meeting a summer evening. He made a surprised noise that would have been funnier if it had belonged to a cat, then went down like a sack of flour.
I blinked. Then I laughed and couldn't stop. "The almighty god of thunder dropped by a taser. I think I love you."
"Uh, thanks," Darcy said, adjusting her grip on the taser like it had just proved itself. She took one look at Alpha-01, who returned the look with polite, blinking-free attention, and did a shiver that was seventy percent adrenaline and thirty percent admiration. "Y-yeah, okay."
"Let's not overdo it," I said when she lifted the taser again. "He's funnier conscious."
Thor groaned and rolled, hand going for a hammer that wasn't there. The move stopped halfway when fingers met air; the loss registered on his face the way a silence registers in a song. "Where is Mjölnir?" he demanded, still trying to growl through sandpaper. "Where is my hammer?"
"About that—" I said. "You won't be seeing it for a while."
"You speak as if you know," he growled.
"Lucky guess," I said.
"Pretty sure it's in a crater like twenty miles from here," Darcy chimed in, phone already out. "Twitter's blowing up. Hashtag #desertballpeen is trending and I'm kind of mad about it."
"See?" I told Thor. "Even gods can't hide from social media."
Selvig had eyes for me now, measuring, careful. "Who are you?"
"Shredder," I said, easy. "Just passing through with my brothers. Happened to be in the neighborhood when your science experiment landed."
"Science experiment?" Jane echoed, offended and delighted simultaneously.
I gestured at Thor, who had taken offense at gravity and hadn't recovered. "Man falls from the sky, rants about his father and a place called Asgard. Doesn't scream ordinary."
Thor shoved himself upright again, wild-eyed. He had the look of a general waking up on the wrong battlefield. He took one step and nearly discovered dizziness. Alpha-03 moved a fraction closer—not touching, not threatening, just available—and Thor noticed. He noticed Alpha-01 too, and Alpha-02, and made the calculation every fighter makes when cataloging new terrain disguised as men.
"I am Thor Odinson," he bristled, because a man reaches for names when everything else has been taken.
"Yes, yes, and I'm Elvis," I said. "Welcome to Earth."
Darcy snorted. Jane made the face of someone who wants to be serious at all times and sometimes fails. Selvig rubbed his temples in the universal language for I need more coffee. Thor glared like he could will lightning back by force of personality.
A truck pulled up. Two ranchers leaned out, boots dusty, eyes bright with the kind of curiosity that comes with land ownership and proximity to weird. "Everything okay?" one asked in a tone that said he'd happily drop a lasso on a problem if that would help.
"All good," I said, raising a hand in a soothing circle. "Airport drill. Vouchers."
He squinted like he heard the joke under the words, nodded anyway, and eased off, satisfied that the strangers with a taser and a very large blond man had their own plan.
I tipped my head to Alpha-01. "The weather looks bad."
"Pepperoni," he murmured. Low. Observation only. He had already counted the vehicles and clocked the dust rising from the south as just wind, not convoy.
Jane knelt by Thor again, scanning him like her eyes could function as a CT and a lie detector. "You fell from that"—she pointed at the sky—"and you're not broken. Your vitals are… annoyingly normal. Who are you?" She wasn't talking to me.
"I told you," Thor said, voice softer at her than it had been at me without meaning to be. "I am Thor, son of Odin."
She absorbed it the way a scientist absorbs any sentence that announces a new category: not as an affront, but as a question marked future work. "And Asgard is… what, exactly?"
"A realm beyond yours," he said, and did not try to hide the grief that made the words thicker. "I must return."
"You can't," I said gently. "You're grounded. Think of it as… a study abroad program without the abroad part."
He turned that glare on me again. I let it hit and bounce. Pride does what it does; my job was to make sure it didn't get him arrested before lunch.
"Right," I said, cutting the tension before it made stupid decisions. "You want to help Goldilocks figure out his situation? Fine. My brothers and I will join and keep him from getting himself killed. Right now, he's just a guy—a big, loud guy without a hammer."
Jane stood. "I don't know who you are," she said, "but if you can help me keep him from getting himself arrested, I will take it."
Selvig looked like he wanted to ask for credentials, a background check, and a blood type, then realized nothing about this morning involved forms. "We don't even know his name," he protested weakly.
"I do," Thor said, dignity rallying. "You have it now."
"Great," Darcy said. "That'll help when we call 9-1-1 and say hi, we tased a man named Thor, can we keep him?"
"Let's skip 9-1-1," I said. "And skip the taser unless he tries to arm-wrestle a semi."
Ding.
Reward: +1,000
Targets:Thor Odinson, Jane Foster, Darcy Lewis, Erik Selvig
Reason: Assistance (de-escalation, scientific integrity protection, civilian safety)
That hit the ledger like rain. From zero to a thousand. Another five hundred and I could summon Alpha-04. I kept the grin off my face because smiling at points in front of people makes you the wrong kind of person.
"Okay," I said, turning the moment into motion. "Step one: get Thor out of the hole and into shade. Step two: water. Step three: S.H.I.E.L.D. is going to have opinions, so we make sure any data stays Jane's. Step four: if Mjölnir becomes a community art project, we avoid becoming performance artists."
"Scientist priority," Alpha-02 said, naming the rule like it lived on the fridge—which it did.
"Help me with him," Jane said to Selvig, then eyed Alpha-03 and decided she would, after all, accept assistance from a man who looked like he could move a piano with a firm suggestion. "You too, if you don't mind."
Alpha-03 gave a small nod. He isn't gentle to look at, but he is gentle to touch when a task requires it. He slid an arm under Thor's shoulder, did not pull—invited the movement instead—and let the larger man choose to accept balance. Thor tried to refuse and made the kind of face you make when pride meets physics and loses by a little. He allowed Alpha-03 to take some of his weight and did not comment on it.
We guided Thor to the van. Jane rummaged for water and a towel that used to be white. Selvig produced nothing but concern and a notebook that had seen better pens. Darcy hovered with the taser holstered like a sheriff in a town where the outlaw is chaos.
I popped the back doors. Alpha-02 set to work with the cool indifference of a combat medic whose patient is mostly ego. He draped the towel over Thor's neck for shade, handed him water, and said "sip" in a tone that has gotten results from men with worse opinions. Thor, to his credit, followed instructions.
"New rule," I told the group at large. "We call him Thor because calling him Goldilocks invites choices we're not ready to live with."
Jane cracked a smile she tried to swallow and failed. Selvig looked resigned to a day where his schedule had been kidnapped by mythology. Darcy pulled out her phone and took a photo of the towel like that detail would make sense to her future self.
I took three steps away and did a slow circle. A handful of locals had arrived at the rim, drawn by the noises their town had never made before. Phones up. Faces curious. Two teenagers rehearsing bravado. One grandmother with a cane and a heart big enough to carry two counties.
"Inside the line," I said to Alpha-01, pointing between two low-slung rocks. He moved to make a human gate and tipped his head to the crowd with a friendliness that says not today. I met the grandmother halfway when she started down the slope.
"Morning, ma'am," I said. "We're about to get into some science. Best view is from the top."
She peered at me like I was a toddler with a screwdriver. "You're very polite for someone dressed like a refrigerator," she said, then smiled. "I'll stay put."
"Appreciated."
Jane leaned around the van door. "We need to move him somewhere we can observe without, um, this." She gestured at the crater, which was currently serving as a public relations disaster for gravity.
"Your lab?" I asked.
She winced. "Calling it a lab is generous. It's a garage with dreams."
"Garage is fine," I said. "It's yours, which is more important than what you call it."
Thor tried to stand on his own again. Alpha-03 let him. He swayed and caught himself on the van frame, then glared at the sky like Odin might be watching. "Where is my hammer?" he repeated, the question turning into a mantra meant to summon metal.
"Mjölnir," Darcy said helpfully, "is making a crop circle somewhere that already has a food truck. People are selling churros by the crater. It's a whole thing."
"Of course they are," I said. "America makes fairs out of physics."
Selvig pinched the bridge of his nose. "If S.H.I.E.L.D. is already looking, they'll cordon it off and we won't get near it unless we have a badge or a miracle."
"I'm fresh out of badges," I said. "Miracles come in three-man varieties."
Jane gave me a look that said she had not decided if we were problem or solution. "If you can keep him from, I don't know, punching a cop, you can come with us."
"Deal," I said. "We do non-punching better than most."
We made a little convoy: Jane's van in front with Thor, Selvig, and Darcy; our SUV behind, one car length, because shadowing with honesty is less suspicious than clever. Alpha-01 drove, hands easy on the wheel; Alpha-02 watched mirrors and memorized license plates; Alpha-03 tracked the sky like a hobby and the shoulders like a cop. I kept an eye on dust and distance and the feeling in my teeth that announces S.H.I.E.L.D. before you see the logo.
We rolled back through Puente Antiguo, drawing fewer stares than before because the town had pivoted to its other form: a place that minds its business in public and tells stories in kitchens. The deputy from earlier watched us go past and radioed someone with the kind of voice that means I'm being helpful.
Jane's "lab" lived in a garage that had started life as a place for tires to think about their choices and had grown into a shrine to storm chasing. Whiteboards with equations and three colors of marker. Cables. Laptops with stickers. Charts that looked like a professor had flirted with a tornado. A stack of hard drives labeled in sharpie. It smelled like possibility and solder.
"Home sweet research," Jane said, apologetic and proud.
"It's beautiful," I said, and meant it. There is nothing prettier than work that hasn't been stolen yet.
Alpha-02 set a bottle of water on the table next to the drives and, very casually, rearranged two so their labels faced away from the door. He didn't look at Jane while he did it, which is how you keep pride intact. Scientist priority isn't a slogan; it's a choreography.
Thor took in the space like a man clocking battlefield elements: exits, shapes, potential weapons (wrenches), potential threats (none), potential allies (one woman with fire in her eyes, one old friend with worry, one young woman with a taser). "What is this place?" he asked, baffled and irritated by the idea of a garage having authority.
"My lab," Jane said, chin up. "Our lab," she corrected, nodding to Selvig and Darcy. "Where we study atmospheric anomalies and Einstein-Rosen bridges and—" She stopped herself before she said wormholes, as if the word might summon trouble faster than she was ready to greet it. "We study weather," she finished, unconvincing and adorable.
"Wormholes," Darcy whispered anyway, because whispering to the void is a hobby.
"Look," Selvig said, stepping into the role of the man who keeps situations with names like Odin from knocking over whiteboards, "we need to figure out what happened without throwing around words that invite government interest."
"Too late," I said lightly. "Interest is already at a rolling boil. We'll keep the lid on as long as we can."
"The weather looks bad," Alpha-01 murmured from the doorway. A sedan had cruised by twice too slow and then decided to learn patience farther down the block.
"Sausage," I said. Medium. "Observation only."
Jane pulled a stool over for Thor. He considered it like a man considering a throne made of aluminum and pride, then sat because his body insisted. The towel had done its good work; color returned to his face. The part of me that is a bad person considered getting him a sippy cup. I did not act on that impulse. Growth.
"Okay," Jane said, shuffling papers into a stack that pretended there had ever been a filing system. "You said Mjölnir. That's… your hammer. It's very, um, important to you."
"It is my birthright," Thor said, and for a heartbeat he was not a man with dust in his hair. He was story. "It is… me."
"Cool," Darcy said. "I feel that way about my taser."
"We do not hand Darcy ideas," Selvig muttered.
I leaned against a workbench, careful of cables, careful of ownership. "Here's how this is going to play, if we have our say," I told the room. "We escort you to the crater if we can. If we can't, we watch from the edges and keep people from getting hurt while you figure out how to be human for a while. We don't pick fights with S.H.I.E.L.D. We don't touch the hammer. We do not turn someone else's discovery into our footage."
"Who are you?" Jane asked again, still deciding.
"Neighbors," I said. "With good knees and better timing."
"Not an answer," Selvig murmured.
"The only one you're getting today." I smiled to take the sting out. "I can offer references from Hell's Kitchen if you like."
Thor bristled at human, then looked at his hands and bristled at truth. "I will take back what is mine," he said, and the room believed him not because the words were loud but because they remembered they were true in a different tense.
"Great," Darcy said. "But maybe after lunch? You get very cranky when you're midgod."
I turned the smile down to practical. "Alpha-02, make us useful."
He was already moving. He taped the clinic number we favored to the inside of Jane's cabinet door because life sometimes gets louder than theory. He placed a small battery bank next to a laptop and pretended it had always been there. He glanced at the whiteboard, took a photo in his head, and forgot it on purpose—privacy is part of scientist priority too.
"Alpha-03," I said, "window."
He took it, eyes on the street like breathing. The sedan had become an SUV two addresses down; he watched it catalog the world and let it. Not S.H.I.E.L.D.—style wrong. Could be curious. Could be bored. The desert makes nosy equal recreational.
"Okay," I said to the room that had decided to be a team for an hour. "Timetable. If Mjölnir is where Twitter says it is, there will be a crowd and there will be cones and there will be agents who consider personal property a suggestion. We will be unimpressive at exactly the right moments. If Thor gets mouthy—"
"I do not—" Thor started.
"—Alpha-01 will stand in his peripheral and radiate consequence until the mouth learns manners."
Jane pressed lips together to erase the smile; it escaped anyway.
"And if anyone tries to confiscateJane's hard drives," I said, "we ask them for their paperwork and their warrant number and whether Agent Phil Coulson signed it. We also ask them to wait while we optimize her backups. I can have a surprising number of questions when I'm worried about file integrity."
Selvig looked at Jane, something like hope dressed up as caution. She nodded once. We were in.
A siren blipped somewhere far off, not a wail, just a reminder that authority can find its keys. Alpha-01 tilted his head. "Weather looks bad."
"Still sausage," I said. "Let's keep it that way."
We didn't linger. A plan this simple gets worse the longer you look at it. Alpha-02 returned the towel to a hook like it belonged there. Alpha-03 checked the alley and the roof line and the ant parade on the far curb because pattern soothes him. Thor rose under his own power this time, steadier, the towel gone, pride back in its armor. Jane grabbed a laptop and three drives and Darcy took a deep breath that smelled like adventure and fear and charging cables.
"Convoy, again," I said. "We let Jane lead. We take up space without taking over."
Thor looked at me like a man resenting the presence of a shepherd and needing one anyway. "If your purpose is to guard, then do so," he said.
"If our purpose is to assist, we do that too," I said, and he heard the difference even if he didn't approve of it yet.
We rolled. The sun had inched higher and turned the dust into light. The road to the hammer site cut past a billboard for rattlesnake tours and a convenience store that had married a chapel in its past life. Traffic thickened in a slow-thinking way: pickup trucks, minivans, a food truck that had seen opportunity and parked like destiny.
We came over a rise, and there it was: a fence around a crater around a legend. Cones. Temporary signage. Men in windbreakers that wanted to be uniforms when they grew up. S.H.I.E.L.D. had arrived with expertise and clipboards. Mjölnir sat in the center of it all like a story waiting for its author.
My ribs did a happy little drum. I did not let the smile out. This was not our scene to steal.
"Remember," I said into the cabin, soft. "We are hinges, not hammers."
"Understood," Alpha-01 said.
"Copy," Alpha-03 murmured.
"Affirmative," Alpha-02 finished.
We parked with the humans, not the heroes. We stepped out like installers on a job, not saviors on a stage. And when Thor strode forward to discover that being human had rules and S.H.I.E.L.D. had fences, we were there—not to wrestle destiny, but to hold open doors for the people who'd earned their way inside this story.
A familiar sedan slid into view near the perimeter—the kind of unremarkable that speaks fluently. Agent Coulson got out with a clipboard and a smile that could sell fire extinguishers in a rainstorm. He glanced across the crowd and found us without looking like he looked.
I touched the card on my chest pocket like a charm and said, mostly to myself, "Networking."
"Weather looks bad," Alpha-01 said one last time, not as warning, but as a blessing: eyes up, temp controlled.
"Pepperoni," I said, and we walked with people toward a hammer that didn't belong to us, ready to earn the next thousand the way we intended: quietly.