Grant Ward looked down at the tiny puncture wound on his arm. "That works fast."
He sat down heavily in the steel chair. He clamped his mouth shut. Whatever agonizing sequence of geopolitical decisions had ultimately led him here, sitting opposite a hacker and chemically compelled to tell the unvarnished truth, aggressively revisiting them now was absolutely not going to help him.
Coulson turned and walked out, the heavy metal door clicking shut.
Skye watched the door close securely, then slowly looked back at Ward with the focused, predatory attention of a brilliant hacker who had just been handed a completely unlocked, administrative-level terminal.
She casually took off her jacket, draping it over her chair, and leaned provocatively across the metal table. "You look tense, Agent Ward."
Ward met her dark eyes, his jaw locked. "I am currently reviewing my advanced counter-interrogation training protocols."
"How many people have you killed?" Skye asked.
A heavy pause. Ward closed his eyes briefly, fighting the violent chemical imperative, then opened them. "High-risk, sanctioned targets. All of them were fundamentally bad people." He sounded exactly like a man who was stubbornly reading from a prepared flashcard he didn't entirely believe anymore. "They were actively trying to hurt good people. I still... I still felt profoundly uneasy afterward."
Skye smiled slightly, moving around the table to his other side. "Did your sweet grandmother know?"
Ward's chiseled expression violently shifted into something dark that was absolutely not on the flashcard. "My grandmother?"
An hour later, Coulson found Skye standing alone in the Bus's main command room, looking exactly like a scientist who had just run a highly volatile experiment and was quietly deciding what the terrifying results actually meant.
"What did he tell you?" Coulson asked mildly, stepping up to the holotable.
"He's been to Paris. Apparently, he didn't see much of it." She paused, her eyes narrowing. "He said it would have been truly great if you had taken him to 'the island.' Something about a golden age he missed out on."
Coulson smiled a genuine, quiet smile to himself. "It was a remarkably golden place, Skye."
Skye looked around the humming command room—the sleek holographic displays, the aerospace architecture of it all, the overwhelming sense of functional purpose running through every single polished surface. "Ward really doesn't like your methods. I do."
Coulson's primary screen suddenly populated with an incoming, encrypted video feed. He casually gestured, throwing it to the massive main display for both of them to see.
It was grainy factory security footage. A large man—his dark hood fully down this time, his face clearly visible to the camera—was standing beside a loaded industrial cart that easily weighed several tons. He planted his feet and shoved it. Hard.
The massive cart didn't just roll. It violently crossed the concrete floor like it had been fired from a cannon, completely pulverized a row of heavy metal shelving units, and came to rest against the structural brick wall with the kind of concussive impact that left permanent craters in the concrete.
The floor supervisor in the frame was just staring at the man with his mouth hanging open.
"No civilian injuries reported," Coulson noted clinically. "But we desperately need to move."
Gary had not moved on his lucrative moral dilemma quickly enough.
By the time Mike Peterson was halfway down the dirty Los Angeles block, Gary had ruthlessly thought through both distinct options twice and definitively landed on the one with the vastly better long-term financial upside.
Mike as his high-paying client, not his S.H.I.E.L.D. informant.
Enhanced individuals with curated public profiles were pulling down massive, multi-million-dollar corporate sponsorship deals, exorbitant private consulting fees, and staggering television appearance rates. A desperate factory worker who could effortlessly move multi-ton loads without equipment, and who had a remarkably good face and a sympathetic, photogenic kid—that was a compelling human interest story. That was highly marketable.
Gary quickly pulled out his phone.
Mike walked down the sunbaked street with the government deportation notice still burning a hole in his jacket pocket, and the heavy weight of the morning's desperate calculation sitting squarely on his shoulders.
He had a job. That was the immediate, pressing problem solved. Ace had a local school, a reliable routine, a fragile sense of stability that Mike had been violently protecting ever since the terrible accident, the secret surgery, and the ironclad agreement he had signed with the shadow doctor whose name was prominently on the contract, but absolutely not on the glowing centipede device surgically grafted onto his arm.
He had just explicitly violated that non-disclosure agreement twice in one day.
The doctor would inevitably call again. He would answer it the exact same way he always did—he would nervously explain the situation, he would minimize the public exposure, and he would wait silently for the clinical compliance instruction. That was the unforgiving shape of the deal.
But what he was actually thinking about, walking slowly back toward the cheap apartment where Ace would be coming home from school in exactly four hours, was what the strange girl with the laptop had said to him in the coffee shop.
That being entirely unknown didn't actually protect him.
That the dangerous people who would inevitably come looking for him weren't all going to be wearing S.H.I.E.L.D. badges.
He had clearly seen the red light of the security camera in the factory corner automatically swivel to track him when he had violently pushed the massive cart.
He pulled his hood up and kept walking.