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Hermione nodded, her expression unchanged.
"That's right. If there was a first, naturally there's a second. The Second Wizarding War happened about forty years ago, started by a man named Voldemort."
"He was immensely powerful, but his brain didn't quite work right. In the end, he died from superstition."
The room went quiet. A wizard died from superstition?
No matter how you heard it, that statement sounded bizarre. But Hermione clearly had no interest in elaborating, so no one pushed.
Coulson steadied himself and dragged his thoughts back to the present.
With that settled, the possibility of the Clairvoyant having genuine precognitive ability was off the table. If wizards of Hermione and Grindelwald's caliber couldn't do it, nobody in this room was willing to believe a mystery man called the Clairvoyant could manage it either.
"What about supernatural remote surveillance?" Coulson asked. That had been their other leading theory.
Hermione let out a short, derisive laugh, the sound of an expert humoring amateurs.
"Even less likely."
"If someone were using supernatural means to spy on this location, there's no way I wouldn't feel it."
She paused, then added with the kind of confidence that doesn't invite debate:
"And I'm not just talking about your skulking little 'Clairvoyant.' Even a Hogwarts professor — or the Ministry of Magic's most elite Aurors — would find it nearly impossible to remotely surveil me without tipping me off."
She looked around at their thoughtful faces and kept going.
"If this 'Clairvoyant' genuinely had the ability to slip past my perception and monitor us in real time... then his level would be somewhere in the neighborhood of Dumbledore's."
"And why would someone of that caliber spend his time messing with a squad of ordinary people? Going to all the trouble of laying traps, working through a small-timer like Quinn, just to figure out the secret behind your resurrection?"
She spread her hands, tone edging toward mockery.
"Wouldn't it be simpler to just kick down the Bald Egg's office door and make your Director kneel and sing 'Conquest'?"
PFFT, Tripp nearly lost it. He dropped his head fast and pressed his lips together.
Coulson's mouth twitched. His expression was helpless.
Hermione's analogy was unhinged, but the logic held. An existence at that level would have no reason to play convoluted games with a small team like theirs.
Everyone nodded. If Miss Witch said it, then whoever the Clairvoyant was, they weren't dealing with a superhuman.
But a second later, something else landed, and their faces fell.
Which meant they'd been run in circles by an ordinary person this whole time.
How?
Coulson's brow stayed tight. Hermione had just demolished every theory they'd built. If the Clairvoyant had no precognition and no supernatural surveillance...
Then where was the leak?
Unless,
"Information!"
Skye's head snapped up. Her eyes were bright, locked on something.
"It's information!" she said again, certain now.
"He doesn't need to predict the future. He doesn't need to watch us."
"He just needs to get his hands on our plans ahead of time. Personnel files. Equipment specs. Everything."
"With enough information, predicting our next move isn't even hard."
As a top-tier hacker, Skye understood the power of information at a level most people never reached.
Her words hit the room like a switch flipping.
Coulson's expression cycled through several shades. His heart sank, slow and steady.
Operational information that detailed. That classified. That close to the core of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s inner workings.
What that implied didn't need to be said out loud.
"A mole." Coulson finally said the words.
The air seemed to stop.
It was worse than a mysterious enemy with unknown powers. The word "mole" landed with its own particular cold. Because this meant the threat was already inside, someone who knew them, understood them, had been among them all along.
"And," Coulson drew a slow breath, "whoever has access to information at this level is no ordinary agent. Their clearance within S.H.I.E.L.D. has to be high. Very high."
Garrett and Ward exchanged a glance. Brief, controlled.
Shock. Resignation. A faint edge of the absurd.
The Clairvoyant.
What a perfect design. A fabricated entity with near-precognitive powers. Mysterious. Untouchable. The perfect shield.
Everything had been moving according to plan.
Until Hermione walked in and casually healed a fatal gunshot wound, sinking the plan's first step before it could land.
And now, in a handful of sentences, she'd punctured the entire Clairvoyant myth, nearly stripped it down to nothing.
Clearance levels. Access rights. Carefully engineered schemes. Against magic, all of it looked faintly ridiculous.
Garrett had left nothing to chance. He'd been certain of that. But meticulous planning, it turned out, was no match for a single offhand thought from someone operating at this level. Against an existence like this, ordinary people simply weren't equipped to compete.
The one saving grace: he hadn't been suspected.
He took a deep breath and pressed down hard on the storm churning behind his ribs. The easy, reliable smile stayed exactly where it was on his face.
And fortunately, Miss Witch didn't seem to have much interest in hunting down the mole herself.
Their cover was still intact. For now.
It was just, having a teenage girl see through his entire operation in this manner, in this tone, like she was pointing out something mildly inconvenient...
God, that was infuriating.
Hermione watched Garrett from the corner of her eye, quietly amused.
Espionage is so last patch, bro.
Skye threw her arms around Hermione with zero warning.
"It's all because of you! We spent all this time chasing superpowers and prophecy, and it turns out there's just some guy hiding in the back, pulling strings and playing ghost!"
She pulled back slightly, and her voice dropped.
"Coulson. If little Hermione hadn't been here today — what would you have done?"
The question settled over Coulson like weight. He was quiet for a moment.
"I would probably have stopped at nothing," he said finally, "to find a serum called GH325."
GH325?
Everyone except Hermione looked blank.
Another classified project they'd never heard of.
Coulson glanced around the group, his gaze pausing briefly on Garrett's carefully neutral curiosity.
"From what I know, after I... 'left'... that's what brought me back." He paused. "The specific details are top secret. Director Fury is the only one with the full picture."
His voice was low and even. He left the rest of it hanging there.
Then Hermione, who had been quietly working through her food this entire time, lifted her head.
"GH325?" she said. "Oh, I know what that is."
➤ Next: A Crazed Father, a Monstrous Mother, an Undercover Boyfriend, and a Shattered...
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