Smith's car moved steadily through the Malibu evening traffic, Pepper Potts in the passenger seat talking through everything Maya Hansen had told her. She'd pieced it together with the particular focused clarity of someone who'd been forcing herself not to panic for the past two hours and had finally found a productive outlet for it.
Killian. AIM. The Extremis virus. The fake Mandarin.
She laid it out methodically: Killian's visit to Stark Industries, the pitch she'd rejected, the bioelectric research that sounded legitimate until you understood what it was actually for. The connection between the explosion at the Chinese Theatre and an Extremis test subject losing thermal control. Maya's guilt, unspoken but obvious when Pepper had finally pressed her.
Smith listened and said nothing until she finished.
"If it's what you're describing," Pepper said, "we can find whoever's behind the Mandarin persona by going through Killian. Through AIM."
She has it backwards, Smith noted internally. It wasn't Killian serving the Mandarin. The Mandarin served Killian. The entire persona was a tool, a way to claim responsibility for Extremis test failures while AIM stayed invisible. Pepper had the causal chain inverted.
He didn't correct her. The conclusion she'd reached was operationally correct: find Killian, find the operation. The direction of loyalty between Killian and his front man didn't change that.
There was also another dimension to this that Smith found himself thinking about more than the tactical picture. Tony stripped of his armor and resources, off the grid in the middle of winter, forced to improvise and investigate without JARVIS's full support array—it was the worst possible situation by conventional measure. It was also, possibly, exactly what the anxiety diagnosis required. Tony had spent months since New York building bigger armor, more systems, more layers of technological insulation between himself and anything he couldn't control. Being dropped into Tennessee with a broken suit and no backup was the opposite of that. It might be useful.
He kept that observation to himself as well.
"Can you reach Tony now?" he asked.
Pepper's expression answered before she spoke. "I've tried. His suit is malfunctioning—he'd need to find a hardline to relay anything through JARVIS at this point. I might be able to leave a message through the system, but I don't know if he'll receive it."
"Then work the other angles," Smith said. "Contact Eddie and Xu Xialing. The Paragons are already running their own investigation, and the Ten Rings has nine teams in the field. Give them the Killian connection, the AIM structure, the Extremis mechanics. That's enough for both operations to pivot." He paused. "You don't have Xu Xialing's number."
"I've only met her twice," Pepper admitted. "I have Eddie—Tony's a Red Ribbon shareholder, so that line's been open for a while."
Smith found Xu Xialing's contact in his phone and sent it across. "She'll want to hear this directly from you. The Ten Rings have resources on the ground at every explosion site. If AIM left anything physical behind, they'll find it."
Pepper took the number, composed herself, and started making calls.
Rose Hill, Tennessee
The warehouse had been unlocked, which Tony chose to interpret as a sign rather than a security failure. He forced the door the rest of the way with his shoulder, dragged the Mark 42's inert mass inside, and propped it on the available sofa with a particular exhausted ceremony.
"There you go," he said to the armor. "You've earned a rest."
He found a workbench along the far wall and sat down with a pair of pliers to work a piece of shrapnel out of his forearm. He was three fragments in when the door opened and a kid walked through it pointing a potato gun at him.
Tony put his hands up without being asked. "You got me."
The boy—ten, maybe eleven, the kind of age that produced either interesting engineers or catastrophic ones—held his ground. Tony studied the gun.
"Barrel's a little long for that bore diameter," he said. "You lose accuracy at range."
The kid turned, aimed at a glass on the wall shelf, and put a potato round through it cleanly from fifteen feet. He turned back.
Tony lowered his hands. "And now you're empty."
The boy walked in, eyes moving from Tony to the sofa. He stopped when the desk lamp caught the Mark 42's surface.
"Is that—" He got closer. "Oh my God. Is that Iron Man?"
"Technically," Tony said, "I am."
The boy set a folded newspaper on Tony's knee. The headline read: MANDARIN ATTACKS—STARK BELIEVED DEAD. Tony's own face looked up at him from beneath it.
He dropped it on the bench. "Fair."
The boy circled the sofa, studying the armor with the focused inventory of someone who already understood how things were built. "What happened to it?"
"I built it. I maintain it."
"That's a mechanic."
Tony didn't argue.
"If I was building one," the boy said, thinking out loud, "I'd install a mirror array. Make it invisible."
Tony looked at him. "Stealth mode."
"Good idea, right?"
"Better than you'd think," Tony said. He filed it. It actually was.
The boy reached out and touched one of the gauntlet fingers experimentally. The damaged joint cracked further.
"Don't—" Tony was across the room in two steps. "He's injured. Every joint in there is stressed. You want to break something that's already broken?"
The boy pulled his hand back. "Sorry."
"Are you actually?"
"Yeah."
Tony looked at him for a moment, then softened. "Don't worry about it. I'll fix it." He glanced around the warehouse. "Who's home?"
"Mom works at the restaurant. Dad went to 7-Eleven six years ago and never came back." The boy delivered this with the flat affect of someone who'd made peace with it a long time ago but still felt the shape of it. "Probably won the lottery."
Tony absorbed that. He knew exactly what a kid with an absent father and a mother working service industry looked like at school. He'd seen enough of them. "What's your name?"
"Harley."
"I need some things, Harley. Notebook, digital watch, a working phone, the cyclone thread from that cannon you built, a town map, a decent spring, and something to eat that isn't beige."
Harley considered this with appropriate seriousness. "What's in it for me?"
Tony appreciated the instinct. He walked back to the bench, reached into a compartment on the Mark 42's arm, and produced a small cylindrical device. He held it out.
"This is a compressed-gas deterrent. Don't point it at your own face—the pressure at close range is not subtle. Button on top. It won't put anyone in the hospital, but it will end a conversation. Consider it a loan against your goodwill."
Harley's expression shifted from skeptical to genuinely interested. He took it carefully.
"One more thing," Tony said. "The kid at school. The one giving you trouble."
Harley frowned. "How did you—"
"Educated guess. What's his name?"
"...Marcus."
"Tell Marcus that Iron Man knows where he lives." Tony said it with exactly the gravity required to be plausible to an eleven-year-old. "Now go get that sandwich."
Harley was already halfway to the door. He paused, swung the canvas bag off his shoulder, and reached inside with the distracted ease of someone checking for a phone. What he pulled out caught the warehouse light in a way that stopped Tony cold.
An orange sphere. Perfectly smooth. A single star pattern inside it, glowing faint gold.
"I almost forgot—I've got this magic item," Harley said. He held it up toward the Mark 42 with the kind of earnest theatrical energy that only kids managed. "O divine artifact, Dragon Ball, please grant my wish and restore the Iron Man suit before me to its original state."
He waited. The armor didn't move. The ball continued to glow at exactly the same intensity it had before.
"Scam," Harley said without real bitterness, and started putting it back in the bag.
"Hold on."
Tony's voice came out quieter than he intended. Harley stopped.
Tony knew about Dragon Balls for three years. He'd held a four-star ball himself before. He knew exactly what one looked like. He also knew, with sudden absolute clarity, that standing in a Tennessee warehouse with a broken suit and no resources, he had just been handed something worth more than the Stark Industries market cap.
He also knew what it would mean to a kid if he simply grabbed it.
"That item," Tony said carefully, "requires seven to work. One alone won't do much."
Harley looked at him with fresh suspicion. "You know about this?"
"I do."
"Is it real?"
"Very."
Harley turned the ball over. The glow moved with it, unhurried. "So it's worth something."
"It's worth quite a lot," Tony said. "Would you consider selling it?"
Harley's eyes narrowed in a way that suggested he'd inherited his mother's practical intelligence and not his father's. "What would you give me?"
Tony ran the calculation fast. His instinct was to name a number—four million, the current market rate—and be done with it. But four million dollars in the hands of an eleven-year-old whose mother worked restaurant shifts wasn't a gift. It was a target. The money would attract the wrong people before Harley was old enough to know how to protect himself from them.
"Education," Tony said. "A fund that covers everything—school, university, graduate school if you want it. Every cost, covered. On top of that, a living allowance for your family that takes the pressure off your mother. The principal stays locked until you're old enough to handle it yourself." He paused. "And if you graduate and you're interested, Stark Industries has a door open for you. I've seen how you build. That gun of yours showed real instinct."
He watched Harley think about it with genuine seriousness.
"This thing must be incredible," Harley said finally.
"It is."
A beat. Then Harley held it out. No hesitation, no second-guessing—the clean transaction of someone who'd made a decision and meant it.
Tony took the seven-star Dragon Ball carefully and set it on the bench next to the pliers. Seven balls, He'd just closed a significant gap in the field, and he'd done it in a broken suit in a borrowed Tennessee warehouse while technically dead.
Smith would find this story extremely funny. He'd probably hear about it in approximately three minutes once the man thought to check the Dragon Radar.
"Go get that sandwich," Tony said. "And grab the notebook on your way back."
AIM Facility, Rose Hill
Killian's phone buzzed. He stepped out of the studio corridor to take it.
"Report."
"The villa is gone. Complete structural collapse into the ocean. We swept the surrounding water and coastline for an hour." A pause. "No body. No armor surfacing."
"Understood." Killian ended the call and stood in the hallway for a moment. No body wasn't confirmation of survival—the suit could have sunk with him, the ocean was cold, the suit had taken documented damage during the attack. But it also wasn't confirmation of the alternative.
He'd have to proceed as if Stark was still operational. Adjust accordingly.
He pushed open the studio door. The room was arrayed with lights, cameras, and crew who'd all learned very quickly to keep their eyes down and their opinions private. At the center of it sat the man he paid to be the face of something Killian had built from the ground up—a washed-up character actor with an expensive drug habit and a genuine gift for menace when the script was handed to him.
"Listen carefully," Killian said to the room at large. "No eye contact. No talking unless I address you directly." He looked at the actor. "We're ready for you."
The man settled into character without being asked, and the cameras started rolling.
Brooklyn
Eddie Brock's apartment smelled like takeout and the particular comfortable disorder of two people who'd stopped apologizing for it. Anne was on the couch with her feet tucked under her, the television running the evening news recap of Tony Stark's presumed death and the subsequent statements from Xu Shang-Chi and various S.H.I.E.L.D. adjacent spokespeople.
"The Paragons don't have anything yet?" Anne asked.
"Ten hours in," Eddie said. "Intelligence summary in the morning. The technical team is working Mandarin's broadcast signal backward, but these things take time." He glanced at the TV. Smith had given a brief statement at the Malibu scene earlier—calm, measured, the kind of controlled public affect that told exactly nothing about what was happening internally. "Tony's fine. If he wasn't, Smith's statement would read differently."
Anne watched him for a moment. "You've gotten very good at reading him."
"Years of working for the man. You pick things up."
His phone lit up. Pepper Potts.
He answered immediately. "Ms. Potts. Are you alright?"
"I'm alright." Her voice was steady. "Eddie, I have intelligence I need to share directly with you. The Paragons' investigation may be looking in the wrong direction."
He sat up straighter. "I'm listening."
Pepper Potts laid out the AIM connection, the Extremis virus, the staged Mandarin persona, and Aldrich Killian's position behind all of it in clear, deliberate sequence. She didn't editorialize. She didn't ask for anything in return.
When she finished, Eddie was already reaching for his laptop.
"Thank you," he said. "This changes the entire framing of the investigation. Tomorrow morning's briefing is going to look very different." He pulled up the Paragons' shared intelligence channel and started typing. "The Paragons will have people moving on Killian and AIM by morning. If there's anything on your end we should know about Maya Hansen's level of cooperation, or what she's willing to testify to, that would help."