"Is Mr. Stark alright?" Eddie asked before Pepper could end the call.
"Tony's fine," she said. "Thank you for asking."
Eddie hung up and looked at Anne. She raised an eyebrow.
"Told you," he said.
He was already reaching for his second phone before the first one finished hitting the cushion. He dialed the intelligence department's direct line and waited two rings.
"Everyone pull everything we have on Aldrich Killian. I want a complete file on my desk before tomorrow morning's briefing—birth to present, every company connection, every AIM filing, every name he's ever put on a contract. Anyone who works through the night gets triple pay." He paused. "Don't disappoint me."
He set the phone down and looked at Anne. "If everything holds, we'll know who we're dealing with by morning."
Anne watched him with the quiet assessment she'd developed over years of being married to a man bonded to an alien organism with its own opinions. "And then what?"
"Then the Paragons go pick him up."
Across the city, Pepper made her second call. She read Xu Xialing's number off the screen—Smith's contact, sent twenty minutes ago—and hit dial.
Xu Xialing picked up on the second ring with the clipped alertness of someone who hadn't really put their phone down since Tony's address appeared on the news.
Pepper kept it clean and efficient. Killian. AIM. Extremis. The Chinese Theatre as collateral damage from a handoff gone wrong, not a coordinated strike. She gave Xu Xialing everything Maya had given her, in the same sequence, with the same precision.
There was a brief silence on the other end.
"We'll move on this tonight," Xu Xialing said. She didn't waste words on gratitude—she was already issuing commands to someone in the background before the call ended.
In the back seat of Smith's car, Maya Hansen stared at the passing streetlights and said nothing. She'd watched Pepper activate two separate intelligence operations in under fifteen minutes, both of them now pointed directly at a man Maya had spent years working alongside. She thought about what Killian had done to the villa. She thought about the helicopters.
I hope you haven't gone too deep, she thought. Because if you have, this ends badly for everyone.
Pepper didn't notice. She was watching the road.
Rose Hill, Tennessee
The town had the particular stillness of places that had once been notable for something terrible and hadn't quite recovered the habit of being ordinary. Tony noticed it the way he noticed structural weaknesses—automatically, without having to think about it.
He and Harley walked the main street while Tony catalogued what Harley had actually managed to source. The sandwich was acceptable. The spring was visibly oxidized. The watch currently on Tony's wrist featured a cartoon character he didn't recognize and belonged to Harley's six-year-old sister, who apparently considered it a collector's item.
"A limited edition," Harley said, completely serious.
"I can see that," Tony said, studying it. The character appeared to be winking. "I was expecting something with at least a second hand."
"She's six. Come on."
They came to an open square near the center of town. It wasn't much—some faded municipal landscaping, a low concrete border around a deep irregular pit in the pavement, and along one wall, a row of memorial items: flowers, photographs, small flags. Above the items, the blast shadow of the explosion had burned five human silhouettes into the brick.
Tony stopped.
He'd seen this in JARVIS's database. The Rose Hill incident. Six dead, classified as a suicide bombing. The thermal signature was the one that had matched the Mandarin attacks almost exactly—three thousand degrees, same profile, same lack of casing fragments. And it had happened before the first Mandarin claim.
He counted the shadows again.
Five.
"Six people died," he said. "But there are five shadows."
Harley came to stand beside him. "People say the shadows are where their souls went when they left. Chad Davis fell into hell, so his shadow went with him. That's why there's only five."
"Do you believe that?"
Harley thought about it with genuine honesty. "That's what everyone says."
Tony didn't answer. He believed in the soul—hard not to, after spending three years in proximity to Smith Doyle and watching a dragon the size of a building materialize out of light to grant wishes. But the shadow on the wall was a thermal imprint, not metaphysics. Chad Davis had stood somewhere when the blast hit, and the wall behind him had recorded it.
Which meant Davis had been standing with the others. Which meant the sixth person hadn't died with them.
The sixth shadow was somewhere else when it happened.
Harley was still looking at the pit. "You know what this reminds me of?" he said, gesturing at the crater's shape. "That wormhole in New York."
Tony's next breath came out wrong.
"What does it remind you of?" Harley pressed, with the complete social obliviousness of children who haven't yet learned which questions to leave alone.
"Nothing," Tony said. "Drop it."
"Do aliens ever come back? Like, are there more of them?"
"I told you—" Tony started walking. Faster than he intended.
Harley followed. "Does talking about it make you uncomfortable? Is that a panic thing? Do you have anxiety? Do you need medication? Do you—"
Tony stopped walking. He was at the corner of the square, and his chest was doing something he didn't fully have a name for yet, though JARVIS had given him several clinical ones. The world had gone slightly sideways—not spinning, just tilted at an angle he couldn't correct by looking at a fixed point.
He dropped to one knee on the cold pavement.
"Wait—" Harley was beside him immediately, all the chatter gone, replaced by the kind of practical concern kids produced when they'd spent enough time around adults in genuine distress. "Are you okay? Do you need a bag? I can get a bag."
Tony grabbed a handful of snow from the gutter and pressed it against his face. The cold registered clean and immediate through the cortisol spike, and after a few seconds the tilt began to correct itself.
He packed the remaining snow into a loose ball and threw it at Harley.
Harley took it in the shoulder and grinned.
"Don't," Tony said, standing up and brushing off his knee. "Don't look at me like that."
"You look really funny when you convulse."
"I'm going to remember this when I'm deciding your school fund allocation." Tony straightened his hat. "Okay. Back to work." He looked at the memorial wall one more time. Six deaths. Five shadows. "Chad Davis's mother—where does she spend her time?"
"There's a bar," Harley said. "She's there most nights."
"Take me there. Then stay outside."
Tony spotted the bar from across the street and told Harley to hold position on the corner. He adjusted his hat, which did essentially nothing to disguise him—Iron Man's face was on every television in the country, and the headline under it said he was dead—but the effort was reflexive.
He was almost at the door when a woman came out and they collided. Her bag went sideways. Tony caught it, steadied it, handed it back.
She turned. Red hair, mid-forties, a scar along one jaw that she didn't try to hide. She looked at him the way people looked at things they were cataloguing rather than seeing.
"Thanks," she said, taking the bag.
Tony noticed her looking at the watch. The cartoon character winked up at them both.
"Nice watch," she said.
"Limited edition," Tony said, with complete sincerity.
She smiled—a small, precise thing—and walked away. Tony filed her and went inside.
The bar was the kind of place that had found its level and stopped trying to be anything else. Tony scanned it once and walked toward the far end, where a woman sat alone with the particular stillness of someone who'd been waiting long enough to stop looking like they were waiting.
He stopped at the table. She looked up.
"Can I sit down?"
"World's a free place," she said.
He sat. "I'm sorry about your son, Ms. Davis. I want to understand what happened."
She studied him for a moment, then slid a manila folder across the table. The tab read Confidential File: Missing in Action. "I brought that for whoever was coming. Take it. Whatever it says in there—that wasn't him. That wasn't what he wanted."
Tony opened it. Photographs. Service record. A name: Corporal Chad Davis, multiple commendations, zero disciplinary history, no indication of instability prior to the incident. Someone with a record like this didn't walk into a public square and detonate himself.
"You're waiting for someone else," Tony said. "Someone contacted you. That's why you're here tonight."
She nodded once.
"Ms. Davis—your son didn't do this to himself. He didn't hurt anyone. Someone used him." He watched her face carefully. "Someone used him as a delivery mechanism."
She looked at him for a long moment, then reached for the folder. "You're not the person who called me, are you."
"No," Tony said. "I'm—"
The woman from outside sat down at the table.
She moved differently inside than she had on the street. The casual collision in the doorway hadn't been accidental—Tony understood that now, looking at the angle of her shoulders, the way she placed herself between him and the exit. She was already reaching across the table when Tony started to stand, and she was faster. She got his wrist, twisted, and had him face-down on the table with a zip tie around both wrists before he'd completed the motion.
The bar went quiet.
The sheriff at the far end of the bar pushed his stool back and stood up. "What's going on? Who are you?"
The woman held up a Homeland Security badge with her free hand. "Federal business, Sheriff. Stand down."
"Need a little more than that, ma'am."
She walked toward him. Her right hand—the one holding the badge—was glowing. Not metaphorically. The skin along her palm had gone the deep amber-red of a heating element, and the badge itself was beginning to warp from the contact temperature.
Tony registered this from his position on the table and thought: Extremis. That's an Extremis subject. Which means she's AIM, not Homeland Security, and she has no particular reason to care about civilian casualties.
He was on his feet and moving for the door before she finished pressing the superheated badge against the sheriff's face.
Behind him: the crack of a confiscated pistol, screaming, furniture going over. Tony didn't look back. He hit the street at a run, sucked in a breath of cold air, and shouted back through the door with his best attempt at drawing attention away from the people still inside.
"Hey! Hey, come on—just you and me out here! Let's go!"
He was already running.
He made it two steps into the street before a car door opened and a man got out directly in his path, arm extended, a cup of coffee tilting toward the ground as he raised his other hand.
Eric Seven. Tony recognized him from Happy's security footage
Tony changed direction.
Behind him, the coffee cup hit the pavement. Eric Seven pulled a gun.
Three shots cracked across the empty street—and then a snowball hit Eric Seven square in the shoulder, hard enough to break his aim. The shots went wide, punching into the asphalt well clear of Tony.
Tony ran.
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