Chapter 319
(Myotismon)
The Numemon come to me low and shuffling, eyes anywhere but mine. I let them squirm before asking what they've brought.
One finds its nerve. Something crawled deep tonight, reached for the file, got turned back before it could touch anything.
"Turned it back." I let the phrase sit in my mouth like a bad vintage. "You say that as though it should please me."
It has no answer. Being pleased was never the point.
I ask how deep the intruder got. How it moved. How, precisely, something as slow as a Numemon pack let it slip free once the chase began.
The answer comes stammered. Something pulled it out. Reached from outside and yanked it clear before the pack could close the distance.
It got pulled, not fled, and that's the only detail worth having.
A human alone doesn't get dragged clear of a breach like that. A human alone doesn't get that deep into a system this well guarded either. But a human with creatures of our own kind bonded to him, answering him the way a soldier answers a general he trusts, that human might manage exactly this.
I've had my eye on the boy since before he understood what he'd let loose into the world with his little kingdom of code. I suspected. Suspicion has never been in short supply where he's concerned. Tonight it hardens into something closer to certainty.
A laugh works loose before I decide whether to allow it, not a happy one, though real pleasure sits under it. He came looking sooner than I expected, barely out of his own celebration and already pulling at a thread that leads back to me.
"Adequate."
Their shoulders loosen at that, relief already leaking through before I finish.
"Which is not the same as good. I expect adequate from vermin. What follows requires better."
They don't need to understand that. I dismiss them, their function discharged, whatever comes next no longer theirs to carry.
The timetable I'd set for him no longer suits a boy willing to breach SHIELD on a hunch. He'll try again, better prepared. I won't wait for him to grow competent first.
Better to move now, while he still believes himself undiscovered. Better to let Pierce's hand find him before he knows there's a hand to fear.
I send the Numemon back to their posts and turn toward the channel that answers only to me. One word, and something unravels that a boy like him has never had to survive.
Let him enjoy his victory a while longer.
* * *
(Ethan)
Nobody says anything for a second after I finish talking, and that's somehow worse than if they'd all started yelling at once.
Gwen's sitting on the edge of my bed with her knees pulled up, Peter's got his laptop open but hasn't touched it, and Jessica's standing by the window with her arms crossed like she walked in ready for a fight and hasn't decided yet whether she still wants one. Gatomon's on the sill behind her, ears tracking every voice in the room like she's keeping score. The rest of the crew's scattered around the room the way they've been all night, half awake, half just there for backup.
I told them everything. The hack, the file I couldn't touch, the Numemon chasing me out, all of it, no editing for how bad it makes me look.
Jessica's the one who breaks the quiet.
"You promised us." She keeps her arms crossed, keeps her ground, and somehow that lands harder than if she'd shouted. "You looked me in the eye and said you weren't doing this alone."
"I know."
"Do you, though? Because from where I'm standing, you did the exact thing you said you wouldn't do, and the only reason we're finding out now instead of never is that it went wrong."
I don't have a version of that where I come out looking good, so I don't try. "You're right. There's no excuse I can give you that makes it okay."
She holds my eyes a second longer, like she's checking whether I actually mean it or I'm just saying the thing that ends the argument fastest. Whatever she finds, she lets it go, arms still crossed, but the fight drains out of her stance a little.
Gwen hasn't said a word this whole time. That's the part that actually gets to me. Jessica yelling I can handle. Gwen quiet, picking at a loose thread on my blanket instead of looking at me, that's the one that sits wrong in my chest.
Gatomon's ear flicks toward her, then back to me, watching the two of us like she's waiting to see which one of us moves first.
"Gwen."
"I'm not mad." She still isn't looking up. "I just don't get why you didn't come to me first. Of everyone."
I don't have a good answer for that either, not one that doesn't sound like an excuse dressed up as a reason, so I just say her name again, quieter, and let it sit there instead of filling the silence with something that isn't true.
Peter's the one who finally moves things forward, because apparently somebody has to. "Okay, can we table the trust stuff for a second? I need actual details. What did the file look like? Encrypted how, what kind of protocol, did you get a size on it, anything?"
"I got a few seconds of eyes on it before I had to bail. It was locked down tight. I couldn't even get a read on the format."
"And the Numemon. How many, how'd they move, did they seem coordinated or just swarming?"
"Coordinated. Like they knew exactly where to converge." I think back on it, the way they didn't scatter, didn't waste motion. "It wasn't random. It felt planned."
"Digimon guarding a human file inside a federal intelligence agency."
Peter turns the words over slow, like he's testing whether they make more sense out loud than they did in his head.
"That's not a security system SHIELD built. Digimon don't just fall into that kind of formation on their own either. Somebody configured that, decided in advance what counts as a threat and how to answer it. That's not instinct. That's a handler."
"So somebody put them there." Jessica's arms come uncrossed. "On purpose. Somebody with access to Digimon, working from inside SHIELD."
The room goes quiet again, but it's a different kind of quiet than before, less about me and more about the size of what we're actually looking at.
"That means there's a Tamer in SHIELD we don't know about." Gwen finally looks up, and for a second the hurt from a minute ago gets shoved somewhere she can deal with later, replaced with something sharper. "Or something worse than a Tamer."
Nobody wants to say what worse might mean, so nobody does.
"We don't have enough to know which."
Peter's gaze flicks to me for half a second, not unkindly, just making sure it lands.
"But we need to find out, carefully, without anyone walking back in there solo."
"So what, we just sit on it?"
"No. We split it." Peter's already thinking a step ahead, the way he does when a problem's finally shaped itself into something he can work. "I can dig at the tech side from outside, look at what I can pull on SHIELD's infrastructure without going anywhere near their live systems again. You three keep tracking the civilian incidents, the Shadowstone stuff. If there's a connection, it'll show up from both directions eventually."
"And nobody goes anywhere alone." Jessica looks straight at me on the line, like it's a rule now, not a suggestion.
"Nobody goes anywhere alone."
It's the least I owe them right now.
That seems to settle something in the room, enough to get everyone moving again. Peter starts packing up his laptop, already muttering something about where he wants to start looking. Jessica peels off the window and stretches, the tension in her shoulders finally letting go now that there's an actual plan instead of just a mess to be angry about.
Gwen lingers after the others start filtering toward the door, Agumon trailing Peter out, BlackGatomon needling Jessica about something I don't catch. It's just the two of us for a second, and my Digivice on the nightstand, and Gatomon still perched on the sill pretending not to watch us.
"I should've told you first. Not because you're better at this than the others. Just because you're you."
Gwen doesn't answer right away. She reaches over and takes my hand instead, quick, like she's deciding something as she does it rather than before. She's the one who catches what I miss half the time, the pattern I'm too close to see, and I went and cut her out of the one night that actually needed her for that.
"Don't do that again." Her grip on my hand tightens instead of easing, telling me all the way down that she means it. "Not because I don't think you can handle yourself. Because I don't want to find out something happened to you after the fact."
"Okay."
She doesn't quite meet my eyes for another second, like there's more sitting under the surface than either of us is ready to dig into tonight. Her hand stays in mine a beat longer than it needs to.
***