Chapter 316
Three days after Fury's little visit, some guy on the Lower East Side puts his fist through a bakery window over a muffin.
I catch it secondhand, a clip on somebody's feed that Peter forwards to the group chat with zero context, just the video and a single question mark, and I watch it twice before it actually registers as strange instead of just dumb. His face is what actually gets to me, calm, almost bored right before he swings, like his hand belongs to somebody else and he's just watching it happen along with everybody filming him.
I don't say anything about it in the group chat. I close the video, put my phone face-down on the desk, and go back to a firmware log that's been ignoring me since lunch.
Gatomon's the one I end up telling, because Gatomon's always the one I end up telling, curled up on the windowsill in my room that night with her tail doing that slow, unbothered swish that means she's listening even when she looks like she isn't.
"Guy broke a bakery window today. Over nothing."
"People do that."
"Not like this." I pull the video back up, angle the phone so she can actually see it, and she watches the whole ten seconds without blinking, which for a cat is somehow more unsettling than if she'd reacted at all. "Look at his face. He's not mad. He's not anything."
"Could be drugs."
"Could be." I say it, but I don't believe it, not really, and she can probably tell, because she doesn't push the point either. We sit with it for a minute, the two of us, not saying anything useful, and then she yawns and says something about how not every weird thing in this city is my problem to solve. I let her have that one, mostly because I want it to be true, and mostly because some quiet part of me already knows better.
By the end of the week there's a woman who screamed at a bus driver for no stated reason and then apologized like she'd blacked out mid-sentence, there's a guy Gwen actually saw shove another commuter off a subway platform bench, no argument leading up to it, no shove back, just a hand on a shoulder and then a stranger sprawled on the concrete looking as confused as everybody else. Jessica hears about a third one from a friend of a friend, something involving a guy at a gas station and a tire iron that never made the news because nobody got hurt badly enough to matter to a headline. None of it's the kind of thing that makes the news cycle, but all of it shares the same texture if you squint, the same nothing-face right before the wrong thing happens, never a real reason once you ask why.
I start keeping a list. Not a formal one, just a note on my phone, dates and rough descriptions, and by the time I've got five entries I notice the list itself is the weirdest part, because nobody else seems to be keeping one. No follow-up articles. No local news segment connecting three unrelated assaults across two boroughs. It's like the city's decided these things happened in separate universes that don't talk to each other.
What actually gets under my skin isn't the incidents themselves. People are unpredictable, cities run on bad days colliding with bad luck, I get that. What bothers me is that nobody else seems to be noticing the pattern at all. Either nobody's looking, or somebody's making sure nobody looks, and I don't love either of those options as an answer.
So I do the responsible thing first, mostly because I'd like to believe that's the kind of person I am, someone who tries the sane option before he does something dumber. I reach out to Coulson.
I keep it light in the text, because that's how you keep things light with a guy whose entire personality is a poker face with a Bluetooth earpiece. Random question, you guys tracking any spike in weird civilian incidents lately? Assaults, erratic behavior, no clear trigger?
His reply takes four hours, which for Coulson either means he's slammed or he's thinking about how to answer, and knowing him, it's probably both.
Define weird.
Multiple unconnected people acting violently out of nowhere and then having no idea why. Ring a bell?
That's a broad category, Cipher. Most of Tuesday fits that description depending who you ask.
I actually laugh at that, alone in my room, because it's such a Coulson answer, deflect with a joke dry enough to double as evidence he heard the question and chose not to engage with it. I try again anyway, because I didn't come this far to let a bit land me off the trail.
I'm serious. I've got five incidents in under two weeks, all with the same weird nothing quality to them. You guys keeping data on anything like that?
If we were, that's not something I'd be discussing over text with a civilian contact, even one SHIELD likes.
So there's a "if we were." That's not a no.
It's also not a yes. Try the general incident line if you want an actual channel for this. I'll flag it on my end, no promises.
I stare at that for a while, turning it over the way you turn over a coin trying to figure out if it's actually rigged or if you're just paranoid. Coulson's not lying to me, not exactly. He's doing something worse, giving me a true answer shaped specifically to tell me nothing, and the fact that he's good enough at his job to make that distinction matter is somehow more annoying than if he'd just blown me off outright.
I try the general incident line anyway, because apparently I hate myself a normal amount for a teenager running a tech company. It's exactly as useful as you'd expect from something called a general incident line: a recorded message, a case number, an email that auto-replies with a promise somebody will review my submission within five to seven business days, like there's a pattern of unexplained violence rippling through my city and the appropriate bureaucratic response time is the same as returning an Amazon package.
"This is insane," I mutter, staring at the confirmation email like it personally insulted me. "Something is actually happening and the system's response is a case number."
Gatomon, from the bed, doesn't even look up. "Welcome to bureaucracy."
"I liked it better when the problems I dealt with just tried to punch me. At least that's honest."
I get Gwen, Peter, and Jessica together over the weekend, ostensibly to hang out, actually because I want three more sets of eyes on a problem that's stopped being funny to keep to myself. We end up crammed into my room with takeout containers going cold between us, my incident list pulled up on the big monitor, and everybody talking slightly over everybody else the way people do when they're trying to solve something instead of just discuss it.
"Okay, but the bus lady," Jessica says, gesturing with a fork like it's evidence, "she apologized right after. Like actually apologized, called the driver ma'am and everything. That's not somebody who meant to do that."
"The subway guy didn't apologize," Gwen says. "I was right there. He just looked confused, like he genuinely didn't clock what he'd done until after he'd done it."
"So maybe it's not the same thing happening to all of them." Peter's got his own phone out, scrolling back through whatever he's managed to dig up on his end, which from the look on his face isn't much. "Maybe we're pattern-matching stuff that's actually unrelated."
"Maybe." I don't believe that either, and judging by the way nobody jumps to agree with him, neither does anybody else in the room. "But five unrelated incidents with the exact same nothing-face right before they happen is a weird coincidence to just shrug off."
"You said SHIELD's not sharing anything," Gwen says, not as an accusation, just laying the fact down flat on the table between the rest of the facts.
"Coulson gave me a very professional version of 'no comment.'"
"So that's a dead end." Peter says it like he's testing whether it's actually true, and when nobody argues, he sets his phone down. "If this is connected to something bigger, and it's the kind of something bigger that lives in a SHIELD database, none of us can actually get in there and look. That's not exactly a thing regular people can just do."
Nobody says anything for a second, and it's an uncomfortable one, the kind where everybody's arrived at the same wall at roughly the same moment and nobody wants to be the first to say it out loud.
I'm the one who ends up saying it, mostly to myself, after everybody's gone home and the takeout containers are in the trash and I'm sitting alone at my desk with the list still glowing on the monitor.
Regular people can't get into a SHIELD database, and I'm not exactly regular people. I've got Hacking Level 2 sitting in my skill list doing basically nothing except making my Digivice occasionally light up when I walk past a locked terminal, and I've spent the better part of two years pretending that particular skill is just flavor text, something I leveled because it seemed useful in theory and never actually used in practice, because using it means crossing a line that doesn't have a version of uncrossing itself once I'm on the other side of it.
I sit with what that actually means for a long minute, the kind where you already know which way you're going to land and you're just making yourself feel the discomfort of it first, out of something like respect for how bad an idea it actually is. If I get caught, there's no version of "just a curious teenager" that survives contact with Nick Fury's actual reaction to somebody poking around his agency's systems. If I don't get caught, I still have to live with having done it, quietly, on my own, without asking anybody's permission first.
I close the laptop anyway.
Gatomon's watching me from the bed when I look up, not saying anything, just watching, the way she does when she already knows what I've decided and is waiting to see if I'll actually say it.
"I'm going in," I tell her. "SHIELD's systems. I'm not asking anybody else to help with this part."
She doesn't try to talk me out of it. She just tips her head, once, and settles back down like the conversation's already over, and somehow that's worse than if she'd argued.
***