Mike looked at Skye and the first thing he did was open his hand. The steel pipe hit the concrete floor with a clang, rolling a few inches before settling. He glanced around at the four bodies, then back at her.
"It's not what it looks like."
"Little bit it is," Skye said carefully. "But I get it." She kept her voice level, her eyes doing a quick read of the room — the overturned racks, the blood on the floor, Mike's breathing. "We came to warn you. Looks like the warning was a few minutes late."
Donnie had come through the door two steps behind her and hadn't moved much further. He stood with his weight distributed, watching Mike with the focused calm of someone who had already decided where his threshold was.
Mike looked at him. "Who's he?"
"S.H.I.E.L.D.," Skye said. "He's here because you're in danger — the kind that doesn't stop when the shooters go down." She took a half-step closer. "We don't know yet who sent those men. But we know what they put in you."
The light moved across Mike's face — orange-red, quick, like a coal catching a draft — and was gone. He didn't seem to notice it. Skye did.
Mike was already moving. He cut through the empty floor toward the back of the building, his footsteps heavy and fast, and pushed through the door to the childcare room.
Ace looked up from the carpet. Figurines arranged in two loose factions in front of him — Paragons on the left, Avengers on the right. He hadn't heard the gunshots, or if he had, he'd decided they were factory noise.
Mike stood in the doorway and let the breath out of his chest slowly.
"Ace. We need to go."
Ace looked at him, looked at the toys, then started packing them into the box with the careful efficiency of a kid who'd learned that "we need to go" meant right now.
Donnie had followed at a distance. He stopped just outside the doorway and kept his voice low, angled toward Skye.
"The flash on his face. He's already destabilizing — the compound that got into him is pushing the process forward." He kept his eyes on Mike. "If that escalates to a full reaction, everyone in this room goes with him."
Skye nodded, barely perceptible. "I'm talking to him."
She stepped into the room. Mike had crouched next to Ace, helping him close the toy box, and he straightened when he heard her.
"Mike." She made sure he was looking at her. "You know what's inside you right now. You were there when that man at the lab exploded. You know exactly what that was."
Mike's jaw set. "I'm not him."
"I know you're not. But this isn't about willpower — it doesn't care how much control you have. The compound works on its own timeline." She kept her hands loose at her sides, her voice even. "S.H.I.E.L.D. has people who can fix this. Pull it out, or stabilize it — something that doesn't end with you and Ace and everyone on this block gone."
He grabbed her wrist. Not hard, but fast — the instinctive grip of someone whose threat response was running too hot.
Skye didn't flinch. "You're hurting me a little."
He felt it and eased off, his hand staying but the force bleeding out of it.
"The Avengers operate under S.H.I.E.L.D.," she said quietly. "You trust them. Then trust the organization behind them. They're not going to throw you in a cell and forget about you — they need to understand what's in you, and they can't do that if you're dead." She glanced at Ace, who was holding his toy box and watching his father. "Come with us. Both of you."
Mike looked at his son for a long moment.
Then the orange light pulsed again — brighter this time, spreading out from his skin like heat shimmer — and Mike's knees buckled. He caught himself on the wall. His free hand pressed flat against the concrete as if he could push the reaction back through sheer pressure.
Skye grabbed Ace and moved.
The cold hit the room like a wall falling.
Donnie's hands were already out, and the temperature dropped thirty degrees in under a second. The frost spread across the floor in a widening ring, climbing Mike's legs, locking up the chain reaction before it could crest. The orange light pulsed twice more — weakening, fighting the cold — and then faded. Mike stood frozen mid-collapse, suspended, the Extremis cascade arrested somewhere short of critical.
Skye was against the far wall with Ace's face tucked against her shoulder. He'd gone very still.
Donnie lowered his hands slowly. "Stable. For now."
Ward's voice came through the comms from his elevated position, scope still on the factory windows.
"Coulson. Target destabilized and was neutralized by Gill. He's frozen. Recommend immediate extraction."
Outside, Coulson lowered the radio and turned to the task force assembled behind him.
"Move in. Get both of them out. Isolation transport — now."
The team went through the factory entrance in a controlled flow. Within four minutes, a frozen Mike Peterson and a very quiet Ace — still holding his toy box — were loaded into the extraction vehicle and moving.
Back on the Bus, the news from Fitz and Simmons came through while Coulson was still writing his field notes.
They'd found a stabilizer.
The mechanism had come out of their work with Chen Haoran's biological samples — S.H.I.E.L.D. ran routine physicals on all active enhanced assets, and the biochemistry division maintained tissue archives as standard protocol. Haoran's fire resistance created a cellular framework that, when synthesized into a compound, interrupted the Extremis thermal cascade at the metabolic level. It wouldn't reverse the enhancement. But it would pull the detonator out.
Coulson set down his pen. He let himself sit with that for a moment.
Then he picked up the phone.
"Sir. First mission complete." He kept it clean and factual. "The Centipede serum is a combined-enhancement cocktail with a significant instability problem — but Peterson's compatibility profile is unusually high. Closer to Killian's baseline than any of the test subjects. Simmons has developed a stabilizing agent. Once administered, the self-destruction risk is eliminated."
Fury's voice came back steady, no particular excitement. "Good start."
"There's a secondary finding," Coulson continued. "If Simmons can map the compatibility threshold genetically, there may be a path toward reliable deployment. Subjects with the right profile could carry the enhancement without the liability." He paused. "I'd also recommend we bring Peterson in formally. He's uncomplicated, he's motivated, and he's a father — which means his leverage point is clear and his loyalty, once established, tends to hold. A few months of Academy training and he's a functional enhanced asset."
A beat on Fury's end. "The serum needs more work before we're putting it in anyone else. Get me the compatibility research." A pause. "But yeah. If the man wants a future for his kid, we can offer him one. Keep him."