Coulson looked at Skye and nodded. "What'd you find?"
Skye thought for a moment. The man's face was already out there — no point playing coy. She pulled the employee badge she'd lifted from Michael and slid it across the table.
By then, May, Fitz, Simmons, and Donnie had all made their way back from the explosion site and filed onto the plane. Coulson touched the receiver at his ear.
"May, Fitz, Simmons — in here."
The four of them came through the door. Coulson handed the badge to Fitz without comment.
"Run his information."
Fitz took it to the workbench in the command room and laid it flat on the scanner. The readout came back fast.
"Mike Peterson. Factory worker. Married, one kid." Fitz scrolled down. "Work injury, laid off. Wife left."
Coulson absorbed this for a moment. "Good man. Just had a rough run." He straightened. "Most likely someone found him and told him they could fix all of that. Give him his strength back. Maybe more."
Across the room, Skye had spotted Donnie Gill the moment he walked in. She tilted her head. "Frost-Byte. I saw you at The Paragons tryouts."
Donnie smiled but didn't bite.
May, standing off to the side with her arms crossed, redirected: "Who has that kind of technology? And what do they want with it?"
Coulson didn't answer. He turned to Fitz instead. "Pull up whatever surveillance you recovered before the blast. The last few minutes."
Fitz put the footage on the main screen. Two figures. One visibly agitated, closing the distance on the other.
May studied the image. "What's happening there?"
"That one's angry at the other one," Fitz said.
A beat of silence while everyone waited for more.
Simmons cut in. "The data's incomplete."
"Right," Fitz said, "I can't sync the time code because there isn't a—"
"What if you had audio?" Skye said.
Everyone turned.
"I was running surveillance on that lab earlier," she said, her voice level. "I had a directional mic aimed out my truck window before the explosion. The files are still in the vehicle."
"Background noise is too heavy for me to parse, but you could probably clean it up."
Fitz was already running the calculation in his head when Simmons jumped in. "Find a sync point and cross-validate — you could—"
"I can't extract the pattern from the vocal expressions," Fitz said.
They looked at each other for about two seconds, then both turned back to their respective screens.
"Send us the audio," they said, more or less in unison. "We need it now."
Coulson glanced at Skye. "Your truck's parked outside. You're right that we couldn't crack your encryption." A pause. "We didn't."
Skye's mouth curved. "The encryption's tied to the GPS. Get the truck back to that alley and I can open it from there."
"May will go with you." Coulson glanced toward the back of the plane. "And wake Ward up on your way out."
May was already moving.
Smith Doyle was asleep aboard his personal spacecraft.
Tony Stark, meanwhile, had taken it upon himself to confirm what he already suspected — that Smith was not on Earth. He flew to the Fraternity HQ and landed on the balcony.
Fox met him in the office.
"Tony." Fox kept his expression neutral. "Smith is in seclusion. I'll have him reach out when he's back."
Tony looked at him. "Fox. He's not on Earth, is he."
It wasn't really a question. Fox paused, which was answer enough.
"Why would you say that?"
"You just did." Tony dropped into a chair. "You didn't push back, you paused. That means you're not sure either."
Fox and Bulma had already talked through the possibility. Neither of them had a definitive answer. Tony raising it plainly was only confirming what they'd been quietly circling.
Before Fox could respond, Bulma came in from the adjacent room.
"It's highly probable," she said, settling at her workstation. "I ran a check. Smith's cell signal isn't registering anywhere in the world — not any tower, not any satellite ping. I confirmed with Friday that the phone wasn't off before that energy spike."
Tony exhaled slowly. He leaned back and stared at the ceiling for a moment. "So you also don't know why he released his energy or why he left."
Fox let two seconds pass. "What I can tell you is that after each Dragon Ball wish, Smith would release his full power once." He straightened slightly. "We don't know why it was different this time. But he'll be back."
Tony nodded, once. "Okay. We wait." He stood. "One other thing — the Loki scepter. Is it with Smith, or here?"
"It's here," Bulma said. "With me. Whether you can borrow it for research is Smith's call, not mine."
"Fair enough." Tony picked up his helmet from the side table. "I'll be in touch when he's back."
He walked to the balcony and let the suit close around him, then dropped off the edge.
Fox watched the repulsor trail arc away over the city. "Is there anything significant about the scepter?"
Bulma shook her head slowly. "I figured out the universal capsule from the Tesseract. Smith took the cube and left the scepter — I haven't had a chance to study it yet." She tapped a stylus against her wrist. "From what I can tell, its only distinguishing features are a psychic pulse — the mind-control capability — and the energy projection. Not nothing, but not the Tesseract."
Fox filed it away. "Smith's trophies tend to have history behind them. Let's not leave it exposed." He moved toward the door. "I'll post a werewolf detail here for physical security and rotate a vampire team to you as close protection. Until Smith's back, nothing moves in or out without authorization."
Neither of them said out loud how long that might be. They made their preparations and left it at that.
Early morning.
Mike Peterson walked through the hospital corridor with a bouquet of flowers tucked under his arm, took the elevator to the right floor, and pushed open the ward door.
The woman in the bed looked up. Her expression shifted — surprise, then recognition.
"You're — you're the one who—"
"You look good." Mike smiled. "Really glad to see it."
She took the flowers. "Thank you. They're beautiful."
The attending physician, seeing the visitor had arrived, gathered his chart and slipped out.
The door clicked shut.
Her expression dropped instantly. The warmth left her face like a light switching off.
"Why are you here."
Mike's posture didn't change. "I went back to work, Doctor. Things are stable. I'm keeping my head down until everything settles — or until there's something new from your end."
She swung her legs off the bed and stood. Her voice stayed flat and even. "What you need to do right now is keep the serum dormant. Don't trigger it. Don't use it publicly." She met his eyes. "Our first subject lost control. He walked into the lab with a bomb strapped to him. I ended up in this bed. He ended up nowhere." A beat. "You saw what happened to the building."
"I'm not him," Mike said.
"You were caught on camera at the factory." Her jaw tightened. "That's a second violation of the agreement."
Mike's expression flickered — something between guilt and frustration. He reached out and closed a hand around her forearm. "The first time was to pull you out of that fire. The second time was to keep my job. I have a kid, Doctor. I have a life I'm trying to rebuild."
She pulled her arm free, clean and deliberate. Her eyes cut sideways to the window — checking the glass, the reflection, whether anyone was in the corridor.
"You've exposed me," she said, her voice dropping. "You've exposed the program. The people behind this technology — they are not forgiving people. The enhanced have to disappear. You can't be seen using that strength in public."
Mike was quiet for a moment. Then he walked to the window. He looked down — ten floors of open air, the street a thin line below — and turned back to her.
"You're right. The hooded hero has to disappear." A pause. "But that's the hooded hero. Not Mike Peterson."
Something in her face shifted — a half-second of recalibration.
"Good," she said. "You understand. Keep the serum quiet. Don't lose control like the last one did. I'll reach out when I'm discharged and I have a new facility set up."
Mike nodded. He turned back to the window, looked down once more.
"I'll do my best," he said. "But this — what I can do now — this is the foundation of something new." He paused. "Maybe that's where the story starts."
He stepped forward. And jumped.
From the tenth floor, he dropped clean and fast and hit the sidewalk without a sound that carried back up.
May pulled Skye's truck into the alley, the same stretch of cracked asphalt they'd been in before. Skye was already reaching for her equipment, keying her access through the GPS-linked decryption as she spoke into the radio.
"Audio's uploading now. Give it a minute — it's uncompressed, so the file's large."
Fitz's voice crackled back from the Bus. "Copy, I'm on receive. And hey — when you get back I'll show you my thing."
A pause.
"My — thing. The hardware. The device. Not me." Another pause. "Let's just — I'm hanging up."
The line went dead. On the Bus, Coulson watched Simmons work without looking up from the alien fragment on the bench. The electric drill whirred against it and a thick, slow liquid began to bead along the crack.
"I thought the fracture pattern and the dispersion were what caused the detonation," Coulson said.
Simmons shook her head, leaning in closer. "It isn't. The material itself is saturated with gamma radiation." She watched the liquid drip. "It's genuinely fascinating — and deeply alarming."
Ward came through the door, pulling his jacket straight. "What do we have?"
"Encrypted files from Skye on the Centipede organization," Coulson said. "And audio from just before the explosion. Fitz has it loaded."
Fitz moved to the open floor in the center of the command room, ran through a quick technical setup, and looked up.
"I'm going to reconstruct the scene using virtual imaging. Think of it as holographic evidence." He held up a hand. "It's science. Not magic. Just — science that looks like magic."
The holographic reconstruction bloomed into the air in front of them — two figures, a cluttered room, the clock on the feed counting backward toward zero.
Ward studied the scene with his head slightly tilted. "Explosive device in the case?"
"Watch." Fitz keyed the audio.
"Please, calm down. Let me check your vitals."
The figure in the reconstruction moved with agitated, tight energy — hands clenching, weight shifting forward.
"I feel good. I want to feel better. Where's the doctor? Where is she?"
The man in the white coat held his ground. "If you won't calm down, I'll sedate you."
The figure grabbed a chair and brought it down on the table. The crack of it was audible even through the cleaned-up audio. "Where is she?"
Fitz hit pause. "Stop. Look at his arm."
The image scaled up. The detail resolved: a device nestled in the crook of his arm, following the line of a vein.
"Centipede," Ward said.
Simmons crossed the room and leaned in. "That's an intravenous blood filter. And this substance —" she straightened — "it reads as very similar to the serum Dr. Erskine synthesized in the forties. The base compound, at least."
"Super-Soldier," Coulson said.
Simmons nodded. "Along with the alien metal Fitz recovered, gamma radiation, and at least three other identified enhancement sources combined into a single delivery system."
Coulson looked at Fitz. "Source of the explosion. Fast-forward to the end of the recording."
The reconstruction jumped forward. The man in the scene began to glow — a deep, molten orange pushing out from under his skin like heat through metal — and then the image went white.
Coulson stared at the frozen frame for a moment. Then: "Extremis. A modified strain, and an unstable one."
He'd read the file. The information had come through S.H.I.E.L.D. — originally sourced from Chen Haoran. The organization had studied the virus, had even attempted to adapt it for broader application. The results were consistent: every subject outside of Haoran overheated and self-destructed. The virus worked. The hosts didn't survive it.
"That man didn't bring any explosives into the building," Simmons said quietly.
"Which means Mike Peterson—" Ward started.
"Has the same compound running through his system," Coulson finished. He let that land. "And based on what we've seen of his strength, probably a higher concentration."
Fitz said it plainly: "If he loses control, everyone within two blocks is gone."
Coulson turned to Ward.
"You've been wanting to defuse a bomb." He held Ward's gaze. "There you go."