This was a women's party. Whoever had snuck in was a woman. And this one was running like someone who had done this before—no panicked stumble, no glancing back, no hand thrown against a wall for balance. Just fast, efficient footwork eating up ground toward the perimeter.
Daisy raised her hand.
The runner lurched to a stop. She threw herself forward with everything she had and went nowhere. The force field was invisible, completely indifferent to effort, and pulling her steadily backward.
She screamed. The noise swallowed it.
By the time she'd been drawn back into the room and suspended in midair, the fear was doing work the gravity control hadn't needed to.
"I didn't hear anything! I swear I was barely there—I don't know anything!"
Daisy looked her over.
Well put-together, she'd give her that. But the face was young—barely into her teens. About Lorna's age. Thirteen, fourteen at most.
As Daisy stepped closer, the girl's panic peaked. Her hands blazed to life with a cluster of light—crystalline, edged, hovering and wheeling as she swung her arms frantically. "Put me down! Don't come near me!"
Daggers of light.
Of course.
The Dagger of the Cloak-and-Dagger pair. Which made this girl Tandy Bowen.
The timing clicked. Emma had known this girl was here and left her behind deliberately—someone with a touch of mind-control ability, just enough to slow down pursuit. Standard defensive retreat. One piece used as a distraction on the way out.
"Alright." Daisy pulled a chair over and dropped into it like she had nowhere else to be. "What did you hear?"
The girl denied everything. Shook her head continuously. Swore on several things. "I swear, I really didn't hear anything!" she shouted, and kept shouting, hoping someone outside could hear. She was also, somewhere in the back of her panic, quietly mapping out how she might extort Daisy for money after the fact. That plan required getting out of this room first.
Unfortunately, the venue was too loud. Nobody outside could hear a word.
Daisy thought it through.
Practically speaking, the conversation with Emma had covered nothing sensitive. An invitation extended, declined. Simple. She wasn't inclined to traumatize a teenager over information she probably hadn't caught clearly anyway.
"Here's what happens. You swear on your father's name that you won't repeat anything from tonight. Then I let you go." She leaned forward slightly. "Surprised? I've met your father. I've met you before, Miss Bowen."
She had done neither of these things. The girl's father had died eight years ago. Eight years ago, Daisy had been nowhere near relevant social circles. But the delivery was smooth, and she'd produced the family name without hesitation, and the combination was doing the work.
The girl's face went blank. The light daggers dimmed.
"...Okay," she said at last, very quietly. "I swear on my father. I won't say anything about tonight."
Made in the register of promises that actually meant something—a vow taken on someone you'd lost. Daisy believed it.
She nodded, released the gravity hold, pushed the door open, and left the room.
Daisy rejoined Pepper, chatted with the assembled daughters for another stretch, and called it an evening at a reasonable hour. As for Dagger and Cloak—in her assessment, they were insignificant kids, not worth carrying in her head. Go home, sleep.
The financially strained Miss Bowen, who was known to slip into venues like this when she had time and pocket things that weren't hers, was very dejected. Seeing Daisy wasn't coming back, she dared not stay—that gravity control had been terrifying. She climbed out the window and ran into the night.
---
The next day, when the maid brought in two visitors, Daisy understood just how deep the connection between Dagger and Cloak actually ran.
Two people were shown into the living room: a Black woman, composed, watchful, gauging the room. Beside her, a young Black man with the expression of someone who'd been talked into this and was already regretting every decision that had led him here.
The aunt did the talking.
The young man's name was Tyrone Johnson. Same surname as Daisy. According to the aunt, they were related—some branch connection. He'd had a falling-out with his family back home and come to New York alone. She herself was in modest circumstances, she made sure to mention, and she hoped Daisy might see her way to offering some financial support, given the family tie.
Daisy sat across from them wearing her blankest face and thought: I haven't even made the trip to find my cousin Thanos yet, and these people already found me first.
The structure of the approach was transparent. Shared surname, vague relatedness, economic vulnerability framing. Classic. What the aunt was calling "support" was considerably more blunt in practice.
The nerve of it. Walking through her door with this—did they think her blade was slow? She quietly ran through her options: call in the underworld fixer, or call Crossbones. Neither felt proportionate. Yet.
She couldn't rule it out entirely, though.
The original Daisy Johnson's biological father was Mister Hyde—Calvin Zabo. She didn't have full visibility into what relatives that branch of the family had produced. And her own genetics were unreadable by now—the Eternal gene evolution had rewritten enough of the baseline that conventional testing would return clean on almost nothing.
She had no telepath available.
She thought, briefly and with some irritation, about Emma Frost. If the White Queen were on her side, this would take thirty seconds flat. A scan, a read, done.
She was not on Daisy's side.
The maid pulled Daisy aside while the two waited in the living room. "Miss, are you certain this isn't a relative?"
The question stopped her cold. She genuinely didn't know. Direct methods—she had agent-issue truth serum as an option—felt like bringing in Crossbones to deal with a stray cat. But the cat might technically be family. Maki's suggestion: give them a small amount, get them out the door, keep watch.
The boy ended it himself.
"That's enough." Said quietly, but with finality. "Sorry for disturbing you. I'm genuinely sorry." He pushed his aunt's hand off his arm, bowed ninety degrees to Daisy—a full, sincere bow—and walked to the door.
Daisy caught the maid's eye.
The maid moved. The aunt didn't get far.
Daisy looked toward the door Tyrone had just gone through. "He's a good kid. I'm not going to embarrass him over this." She turned to the aunt. "Con artistry isn't a capital offense—first time is free. If there's a second—"
The maid had her firearm out, barrel pressed to the underside of the aunt's chin, round already chambered. The message required no elaboration.
The aunt begged for a moment and then left at all available speed.
Daisy shook her head. As her name spread, so would the opportunists. Scammers, impostors, people with a story and a shared surname—they were inevitable. You couldn't stop the tax on visibility. You could only manage how much you paid.
Then her chest gave a sudden lurch.
Not pain—something older and faster. Her instincts firing.
A muffled boom rolled in from the garden.
She and the maid were outside in seconds.
In the lawn in front of the villa, a shallow crater had appeared—two meters (about six feet) across, surrounded by scattered stone. Cloak sat on the left side of it. Dagger sat on the right.
Both of them looked equally baffled about what had just happened.
Daisy had no time to stand there and watch this first meeting play out—whatever sparks it might eventually produce. She had one concern.
The lawn.
That was not a small crater.
Up on the roof, the construction workers had all stopped and turned. Even Mr. Rhino—the villa's permanent garden resident—had lifted his considerable head from where he'd always been in the garden and was observing the scene with what appeared to be genuine interest.
Everyone wanted to know what had happened.