The Ancient One passing the five-star ball to Kaecilius was not the choice he'd have predicted, but it wasn't without logic. Mordo had been her first attempt—a precise, principled sorcerer who'd encountered a world larger than his framework and responded by narrowing the framework further. The result, in the timeline Smith knew, was a man who'd eventually convince himself that the real threat to Earth was the existence of too many sorcerers, and act accordingly. Cold, surgical, self-righteous. The kind of danger that was hardest to argue against because it always had a reason.
Kaecilius was different in the ways that mattered. His wish was personal. His motivation was grief, not ideology. Those were not guarantees of anything—grief could become obsession, and obsession had its own pathologies—but they were better raw material than Mordo's rigid conviction.
Smith set it aside. The Ancient One's choices were her own. If Kaecilius stayed his course, Smith would invite him to the tournament like anyone else. If he didn't, the Fraternity had protocols.
He continued the survey.
The sixth ball came up quickly—submerged in glacial ice somewhere in the northern latitudes, well-insulated from the ambient world. No holder yet. It had simply come to rest there, possibly during the reactivation cascade, possibly drifting from wherever it had settled after the previous tournament. It would stay cold and untouched until someone with the right equipment or the right instinct found it.
The seventh ball was buried in soil. A villa yard somewhere temperate—manicured grounds, the kind of property that suggested either old money or new money trying to look like old money. No visible holder, but the location was specific enough for the Dragon Radar to triangulate when needed.
Two balls in shielded containers. He went back to them now that the others were accounted for, running the survey from a different angle.
The first container—the safe, double-walled, the Dragon Ball inside it sitting in what looked like foam padding—gave him very little. The view through the ball's perspective showed only the interior of the container and, beyond it, a larger room he couldn't resolve clearly enough to identify.
The second container resolved more cleanly this time. Smith found the edge of a frame, a wall panel, the particular aesthetic of a space that had been designed to look like a laboratory while functioning as a military operations room.
And then, briefly, a hand.
He recognized Killian's build from the footage Eddie's intelligence team had pulled together. The AIM director, turning the ball in his palm before setting it back in its case.
Smith let the connection drop and sat back.
So. Killian had one Dragon Ball and didn't know it was already compromised as a strategic asset—that the Paragons, the Ten Rings, and HYDRA had all been pointed in his direction within the last twelve hours for entirely unrelated reasons. He was sitting at the center of three separate closing operations and likely imagined himself the most dangerous person in his area.
Smith considered the odds of Killian surviving long enough to deliver his tournament ticket. They were not generous. The Dragon Ball would change hands. The question was whose hands it changed to.
He thought about that briefly, then stopped. He'd find out when he sent the tickets. Seven confirmed holders, seven balls, all accounted for. The survey was complete.
He filed everything, stood, and went to deal with the remaining portion of the evening.
Rose Hill, Tennessee
Harley answered the phone on the second ring. He had a half-eaten candy in his free hand and was considering a third bowl.
"Give me a full report," Tony said. "What's happening there?"
"I'm eating candy. Should I keep eating it?"
"How much have you had?"
Harley considered the question. "Two bowls. Maybe three."
"Can you see clearly?"
"Yeah."
"Then you're fine. Put the phone against JARVIS."
Harley balanced the phone against the Mark 42's faceplate and took another candy from the bowl.
Tony heard the characteristic shift in audio quality as JARVIS's receivers engaged. "Status report."
"All systems recovering as expected, sir. The charging process has resumed. Though I should note—I've been saying things incorrectly at the ends of sentences. Minor syntax corruption from the water exposure. It's resolving itself, but slowly." A pause. "Also, sir—your working theory about the Mandarin's broadcast origin is correct. Every time I access AIM's download server infrastructure, I can trace the broadcast signal back to its point of origin."
"Where?" Tony was already thinking geographically. Middle East. Eastern Europe. The footage had that insurgent aesthetic—somewhere with a political grievance and a media-savvy production team behind it. "Far East? North Africa? Pakistan?"
"Miami, sir."
Tony's hands tightened on the wheel. "Excuse me."
"Miami, Florida. The signal originates from a facility in southern Florida."
He pulled over. "Harley. Look at the address on the screen and read it back to me directly."
He heard shuffling, the sound of a bowl being set down, footsteps across the warehouse floor. Then Harley's voice, reading carefully: "Miami, Florida. That's what it says."
Tony sat in the car for a moment. Miami. He'd been mentally placing the Mandarin somewhere with geopolitical texture—desert, civil unrest, broadcasting infrastructure built on grievance. Miami had grievances, certainly, but not the right kind. This was a corporate production. Studio lighting, professional editing, a hijacking apparatus that required serious technical investment. All of that was available in Miami. It just didn't fit the image.
Which was the point, probably.
"Okay," he said. "Armor status."
"It won't charge," Harley said helpfully.
"Master," JARVIS corrected, "it is charging. The problem is the power supply. Household current can't drive the Mark 42's regeneration cycle at full speed. We may not achieve full operational status for some time."
Tony got out of the car.
The cold hit him the same way it had the first time—immediate, unambiguous, indifferent to his circumstances. He stood on the roadside and looked at the winter sky and processed the fact that his armor was stuck in a warehouse charging on domestic current like a phone left plugged in overnight.
"That's my armor," he said, more to himself than to anyone. "I need—I can't just—"
He stopped.
His chest was doing the thing again. He recognized it now—not quite the same as the acute episodes, but the same family. The thought-current that ran underneath everything since New York, surfacing when he got cornered or out of options or just when his hands ran out of things to hold.
He sat down on the car's bumper and put his hands on his knees.
Harley's voice came through the phone, which Tony had apparently kept in his hand. "Are you having another one?"
"I didn't even mention New York," Tony said.
"I didn't either."
"You said you didn't say it. That's saying it."
"Oh." A pause. "Sorry."
Tony pressed the back of his wrist against his forehead and let the cold air do its work. The twitching that had come with the worst episodes wasn't here yet, but his hands weren't steady.
"Tony." Harley's voice had shifted from curious to something more careful. "Listen. Breathe. Just for a second."
Tony breathed.
"You said you were a mechanic," Harley said.
"I said that."
"So why don't you build something and fix it?"
Tony sat with that for three seconds. Then he stood up.
The thing about Harley, he was beginning to understand, was that the kid had no patience for the gap between identifying a problem and addressing it. That was either wisdom or ignorance and Tony genuinely couldn't tell the difference from the outside, but the effect was the same. The armor needed power. The positioning device he'd pulled from his forearm earlier needed reinstalling if he was going to summon anything remotely. Both of those were engineering problems. Engineering problems had solutions.
He got back in the car.
"I'm going to the hardware store," he said. "Keep an eye on the suit."
"Which hardware—"
"The one that's open. I'll be back in twenty minutes."
He came back in forty, two shopping carts' worth of components loaded into the back seat and trunk of the borrowed car. Harley opened the warehouse door before he finished parking, which Tony chose to interpret as helpfulness rather than impatience.
The first order of business was the charging circuit. The household line couldn't push enough current, but Tony could build a step-up transformer from the components he'd bought, bridge it to a portable capacitor array, and feed the Mark 42's regeneration cycle a more appropriate voltage. It wasn't elegant—nothing about this situation was elegant—but it would work.
The second problem was the positioning device. Without it reinstalled and calibrated, he couldn't call the suits down remotely—not the ones in the underground garage beneath what had been the Malibu villa, not the one in storage waiting on the satellite. He needed that link operational before he moved on Miami.
He set up at the workbench and started laying components out in order.
Harley watched for about ninety seconds before asking the first question. Tony answered it. Then the second. Tony answered that one too. By the fourth question he'd simply handed the kid a secondary task—holding components in position while Tony soldered—and they worked in companionable silence broken by intermittent, increasingly technical questions from a ten-year-old who retained the answers and asked follow-ups.
The transformer came together in forty minutes. The capacitor array took another twenty. Tony connected them to the Mark 42's charging port, watched the power indicator shift from its flat-line failure state to a slow, climbing increment, and let out a breath he'd been holding for some time.
"That's actually working," Harley said.
"Of course it's working."
"You seemed worried."
"I wasn't worried." Tony picked up the next component. "Get me the needle-nose pliers. The small ones, not the ones you used on my armor."
"That was one time."
"The small ones, Harley."