The question nagging at Coulson was how the Extremis virus had leaked in the first place. Who had passed it along — and whether whoever supplied it had any connection to the Paragons. According to intelligence Chen Haoran had sent back, every member of the Paragons held documentation on the Extremis research, alongside the Red Ribbon Group and the government agency that had held Killian. Killian himself had already been executed. That door was closed.
Back in Skye's truck, she finished the last of her work, closed her laptop, and paused. She reached under a book sitting on the equipment shelf and found what she'd tucked there — three small chips, each one preloaded with specific hacking tools she'd built herself. She palmed one, slipped it into her waistband, and left the other two where they were.
She turned around. "Should be good. Let's head back."
May was already starting the engine.
Mike Peterson arrived at the factory with Ace on his hip.
He set his son down at the entrance to the factory's childcare room — a small, well-lit space tucked off the main floor that management had quietly added when enough workers started bringing kids to long shifts. Mike crouched to eye level with Ace.
"I'm back at work now, buddy. We got through the hard part." He squeezed his son's shoulder. "It only gets better from here. Yeah?"
Ace looked at him with complete seriousness. "Team."
Mike laughed. "Team."
He straightened up and almost walked into Gary, who had materialized in the doorway holding two gift boxes — one in each hand. The left had a Paragons figurine set on the cover. The right had Avengers.
"So this is little Ace." Gary's face split into a grin. "He is handsome, Mike." He held out both boxes. "Didn't know which team you were into, so — one of each."
Ace's eyes went wide. He looked up at his dad.
"Go ahead," Mike said. "Thank Uncle Gary."
Ace grabbed both boxes and clutched them to his chest. "Thank you, Uncle Gary."
Gary put an arm around Mike's shoulders and steered him out of the childcare room. "Good to have you back. You bring those treatment records I mentioned? The injury docs?"
Mike reached into his jacket and handed over a folder. "Medical records and invoices. Should cover most of what you need."
Gary flipped it open, skimmed two pages, and snapped it shut with a satisfied nod. "With this? No problem at all — we can recover a solid chunk." He tucked it under his arm. "But Mike, leaving Ace here at the factory every day isn't sustainable long-term. I've been thinking."
He lowered his voice — not conspiratorially, just the way a man does when he shifts from small talk to the actual pitch.
"You know the big boss has been trying to hire superhumans for months now. High salary, no luck. And I've got two ideas for how you fit into that." He paused. "First option: I introduce you. You go on as his part-time bodyguard and social asset. He doesn't need you for any specific operations — he just wants a superhuman in his corner. Makes him credible in certain rooms. Easier to open doors."
"What's the offer?" Mike asked.
"Ten million a year."
Mike stopped walking.
He ran the math reflexively — the factory floor, the overtime, the layoff check, the hospital bills, Ace's tuition down the road. Ten million dollars a year. That was the end of every financial problem he had ever had, stacked on top of each other, with room left over.
Gary read his face. "I know. And the downside is real — you'd have to accompany him to events, be visible, probably spar with other superhumans hired by his competitors. The social scene these people operate in gets complicated." He shrugged. "But the man is cheap. Ten million sounds like a lot to us. For a genuine superhuman, that's him lowballing and knowing it. He hasn't found anyone willing to take it."
Mike filed that away.
"What's the second option?"
The grin came back — the one Gary had been holding in reserve.
"I build a production team around you. Photography, editing, everything. You don't show your face — full mask, full armor, whatever you want. But we shoot content. Short films, action footage, behind-the-scenes training. Superhuman content." Gary leaned in slightly. "YouTube and Facebook both launched mid-length video programs this year. They're paying out traffic revenue now. And Mike — there are not enough superhumans making content. The Paragons films can't keep up with demand. You could go masked, never say your name, and still pull massive numbers."
Mike raised an eyebrow. "Masked and still get that kind of following?"
"Superhumans are rare and everyone wants to watch them," Gary said flatly. "Getting a million followers without showing your face? Doable. Ten million? That's harder, but the revenue between one and ten million is already life-changing. Once it builds, it clears the same floor as the boss's offer — and the ceiling is higher."
Mike thought it over for less than thirty seconds. The second option kept him anonymous. The doctor's warning was still sitting in the back of his head — keep quiet, don't lose control — and stepping into a billionaire's social circuit felt like exactly the wrong direction given where things stood.
"Second one," he said.
Gary's hand came out. "Smart choice."
They shook on it, and spent the next twenty minutes working through the split — profit share, early-stage investment Gary would front, the equipment budget. Gary left the meeting with a folder of medical records and a new business plan. Mike went back to work.
Inside the Bus.
Ward had his sniper rifle laid out on the table in front of him, breaking it down and reassembling it with the methodical quiet of someone who found the process calming. His operational logic was simple: if the assignment was to neutralize an unstable explosive, you did it from distance.
Coulson hadn't bothered with long-range equipment. If Ward's solution failed, Donnie was the contingency. He was genuinely curious whether Donnie's cryokinesis could neutralize the Extremis reaction — drop Mike's core temperature fast enough to halt the cascade before it reached critical.
Fitz and Simmons approached together, which was never a good sign for the complexity of the news they were carrying.
"Sir." Simmons clasped her hands. "He didn't blow up because he was angry. Anger is a factor, but it's secondary. What we're looking at is closer to a chemical chain reaction — it builds toward a threshold regardless of emotional state."
"Calming him down buys time," Fitz added. "It doesn't stop it."
Coulson looked at Simmons. "Is there a solution?"
"Isolate him. Remove him from populated areas."
"Or?"
Fitz's jaw tightened. "We blow his head off." He said it flatly, like a calculation rather than a suggestion. "If he dies, the metabolic process stops. No fuel, no chain reaction."
Simmons nodded. "That's the mechanism, yes."
Donnie had been listening from across the room. He crossed his arms. "Let me try freezing him first. Drop his temperature fast enough — does that interrupt it?"
Fitz turned to him. "Temperature reduction is theoretically effective. We don't know what the result looks like in practice. Whether it stops it cleanly or just delays it with complications."
Coulson looked over at Ward, hands still moving through the rifle assembly, and made his decision quietly.
"Let's not make Ace an orphan if we don't have to." He turned back to Fitz and Simmons. "Figure out another way."
Simmons opened her mouth. "Sir, the timeline—"
"Don't tell me it can't be done." His voice didn't change pitch. "This is your job. Do it."
He walked out.
May and Skye had returned by the time Coulson came back through, and within minutes Skye had the full picture.
"What?" Skye stared at him. "He's going to explode? Like — like what happened at the lab?" She pushed a hand through her hair. "That stuff is still out there? How does something like that even get leaked?"
"We're working on that question."
"What's the plan? Just — kill him?"
"We're not there yet. We're looking for options that don't end with his son losing a father."
"But he can't go on working at the factory." Skye's voice sharpened. "If he goes off in there—"
"I know."
She exhaled. "The whole building. Every single person in it." She looked at the floor. "And if it's in a populated area it spreads another two, three blocks. And the compound in him — it's not even straight Extremis, is it. It's more concentrated than what was at the lab."
"That's our read, yes."
Across the command room, Fitz and Simmons had both abandoned any pretense of casual work. Their stations were covered in data, biochem readouts, thermal modeling pulled from the explosion reconstruction. They were hunting for a crack in the problem — a suppression agent, a cooling mechanism, a delivery method for something that could interrupt the cascade without killing the subject.
Coulson picked up his phone and put in the call to S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Los Angeles field office. He needed bodies on the ground. Whatever the solution turned out to be, the first step was getting Mike Peterson out of that factory.