Light & Shadow

Chapter 3

Please, this trip has been planned for months. Nick Fury is influential, but I doubt today would have gone down like it did if he knew about it that far in advance.

"Wait, was this a coincidence?"

Fury sidesteps the question entirely. "I used to know everything. Then I come back five years later, and I know nothing." Welcome to my life, Nick. "No intel. No team. And a high school kid is dodging my calls.

"Here's what I do know:" There's a pause, and I press my headphones against my ears to pick up every word—mentally scolding myself for not putting a camera in there as well as mics. "A week ago, a village in Mexico was wiped out by a cyclone. Witnesses say that cyclone had a face." Ned snores, which interrupts Fury's speech. "Three days ago a similar event in Morocco. A village was—"

Mr. Harrington approaches the open door, blissfully unaware of the international spy master sitting in the room as he talks to Peter. I take the moment to pull up a map of the events. "ARTI, get me the location of that village in Mexico and put a pin in Morocco."

The door closes with a loud creak, and I thank myself for putting the mics in there. "Sorry, that was my teacher. You were saying?"

Nick continues with his speech. "A village was destroyed by what may well be another world-threatening—" Again, he's interrupted—this time by Betty. I zone out for a second, and that's when it clicks.

"ARTI, can you—can you pull up my gran's diaries? Look for any details that match the events Fury's describing. Don't worry about specifics. Give me all the matches—no matter how small." I give him a second, silently dreading that he'll affirm my fear.

"I found a close match."

"Let me guess, it fits her descriptions of her world ending."

"Mhm."

"You've got to be kidding me." I groan. "Wait, how is it happening here? Gran wrote that it was a natural repercussion of trying to alter the nature of people's gifts, and from what we've seen, the trials aren't even close. Can you find out any other specifics?"

"She never wrote it in her diaries, but I have it in the transcripts from Trish."

"Thank God she offered to help take care of Gran when I had to leave." I really wish I could've thanked her properly. "What does it say?"

"They were attempting to drain and infuse themselves with energy from their universe's infinity stones." ARTI explains. "She said the altering of the stones created an imbalance. To quote her, 'the universe had to fix the mistake. So it defended itself the only way it could. It created beings to reverse the damage by stripping everything back to the foundations.'"

"So why would they be appearing now? There are no infinity stones to mess with. Thanos destroyed all of them after the initial battle, and if there was going to be any reaction to messing with them, it would have been after the Snap or final battle, not years or months later."

"Not to interrupt you're train of thought, but would you like me to patch you in to Karen's system?"

"Yeah, I need eyes on what's going on." I anxiously tap my fingers against my leg as I try to figure out what could be causing all this.

It only takes a minute for ARTI to patch into Karen's system so I see and hear everything that Peter is. From what I can tell, he's on a motor boat with Fury, driving to who knows where. "Stark left these for you." Fury calls as he offers Peter a small wooden case.

"Really?" I feel a pang in my chest. He doesn't know it, but Dad left one for both of us. I've been trying to forget about it. There's too much potential for drastic errors, and I'm not ready to handle that responsibility.