Breach Protocol

The lab was too clean, so Tony made a mess of it. He stripped three suits to their bones and spread their hearts on steel tables, arc-light pooling in blue circles under his hands. The Compound breathed around him in low hums and soft air, its emptiness pressing in through the glass panels and echoing floor. He set a soldering iron to a board and told FRIDAY to turn up the music and the noise, anything to drown out the news anchor’s smooth voice threading in from a half-muted screen on the far wall.

“…the Secret Avengers were sighted in—”

“Mute it,” he said.

“Already done,” FRIDAY replied, pleasant as ever, as if the building weren’t a mausoleum and he wasn’t the ghost rattling it.

He leaned over the table, forearms braced, jaw tight. The tiny components between his fingers were cooperative; they clicked and slotted and obeyed. He liked that. He liked the certainty of angles and tolerances. He liked pretending his hands didn’t tremble when he reached for the next piece.

His phone buzzed. Pepper’s name bloomed across the screen. He watched it without picking up, waited until the vibration stilled. It started again, a new call, Rhodey this time. He thumbed it away, then flipped the phone face down. The quiet that followed wasn’t quiet enough.

“FRIDAY, running diagnostics on Suit Four,” he said. “Iterate the repulsor feedback loop with the new dampeners. Use the Kaluga model.”

“You’ve run that model twice,” she reminded him gently.

“Three times lucky,” he said, and pretended the joke didn’t scrape something raw.

He rerouted wiring, made a shallow cut in his palm on a stubborn edge, and hissed. Red welled up, bright against the synthetic grease. He brought his hand to his mouth on reflex, tongue catching copper before FRIDAY could suggest a bandage. The taste grounded him, an easy sting, the kind he knew what to do with. He grabbed a rag and wiped it clean, then pushed deeper into work.

He took the arc reactor’s casing apart and back together until he could do it with his eyes closed. He cataloged every tiny rattle in the room, every flaw in his own inventions, because you couldn’t catalogue the ache that crawled up at night and sat at the edge of his bed. The screen on the wall kept flickering with B-roll of blurred figures, a shield, a pair of wings, headlines like open hands asking for comment he refused to give.

“Sir,” FRIDAY said, softer. “Pepper has sent an email marked urgent.”

“Read it later.”

“She says she’s worried about you.”

“She always is.” He swallowed. “Queue it. Top of the pile. Right on top of all the other piles I’m never touching.”

The lab recognized him, learned to anticipate his reach. A tool lifted into his palm with a soft hiss of magnetic rails. He didn’t have to ask; it came to him like muscle memory. That steadiness was all he had. The memory of steadier days crept under his skull, uninvited, and he drove a screw home so hard the bit squealed.

Rhodey texted a selfie of his dinner with too many exclamation points and the caption eat, idiot. Tony didn’t reply. He set his jaw against the sudden tug of affection and guilt, the same old mix, and told FRIDAY to pull up the test chamber settings.

“Don’t make me call Ms. Potts,” FRIDAY tried, teasing.

“Mutiny now? I’ll uninstall your empathy subroutine.”

“You never installed one.”

He exhaled, the closest he got to a laugh. “Harsh.”

He slid into the test bay, locked the gauntlets around his forearms. The click of seals, the soft press of metal against skin—satisfying. Cold bit into his wrist at the cuff, and his pulse jumped. The reactor in his chest warmed, responsive to the suit’s proximity, a familiar thrum syncing with his heartbeat. He closed his eyes and flexed his fingers; the repulsors hummed. A little tremor ran through him, part adrenaline, part muscle memory of flying, free in a way that had nothing to do with altitude.

“Power at seventy percent,” FRIDAY reported. “Caution advised.”

“Since when do I listen to that?”

“Since never,” she said, and ramped the safety protocols in spite of him.

He lifted his arm and fired at the target. Light burst across the room, clean and white. The recoil shivered through his bones; he adjusted, found the line, fired again. He could make this better. He could fix the things that could be fixed. He could keep his hands busy, his head loud.

The suit chimed a protest when he pushed it, a strain in the servos, but he rode it out. Heat bloomed along his forearms, a prickling bite that told him where the insulation needed reinforcement. He cataloged it. He was good at lists.

The Compound settled deeper into night. The news ran a fresh segment; he saw a flash of a familiar silhouette and looked away too late. Something in his chest pulled tight. He pushed the gauntlets off so fast he scraped his knuckles. The sting jarred him back into the room.

“FRIDAY,” he said, voice rougher than he liked. “Turn it off. All of it.”

The screen went black. The hum stayed. He stood there, breathing, until the edges of himself stopped threatening to come apart. He stripped out of the suit and went back to the table, to the small work, to the comfort of screws and solder and a future he could still pretend to build by hand.

Outside, the glass held back a deep, winter dark. Inside, he lined up the next component and set his shoulders. The phone lit up again under his palm, a soft glow he didn’t look at. He held the tiny piece in place and reached for the iron, steady now, as if steadiness were a choice he could keep choosing.

The safe house had no name, just damp stone and a corrugated roof that rattled when the wind came down off the mountains. Steve wrapped the canvas straps around his hands and tugged them tight, the fabric pulling against his knuckles like a demand. His breath clouded in the cold as he rolled his shoulders and stepped into the chalked-off square on the cracked concrete.

Sam bounced on his toes opposite him, shaky grin not hiding the study in his eyes. “You’re dragging,” he said. “You sleep at all?”

Steve lifted his hands. “Enough.”

“You say that every time.”

“Because it’s true every time.”

Sam snorted. “Sure, Cap. Let’s see it.”

They started slow. Steve jabbed to test distance. Sam slipped, counted, then cut in with quick hands and an easy rhythm that made Steve work. The first impact sent a pulse through his arms—the familiar thud of contact, the clean line of muscle and bone answering. His body knew this; it knew how to move when everything else stalled.

He still hesitated more than he should have, a half-second late here, a drag there when the floor caught on the tread of his boots. He felt it, the small betrayals of exhaustion. He had been running too long, sleeping in bursts, ears tuned for every wrong sound. The edges of him were thin.

Sam’s knuckles brushed his jaw with a check he could have blocked. He didn’t. The sting cleared some of the fog. He shook his head and blinked hard.

“You’re not here,” Sam said, breath steady. “Come back.”

“I’m here.”

“Prove it.”

Steve rolled under Sam’s next hook and came up with a tight cross, following with a palm to the shoulder that would have unbalanced anyone else. Sam flowed with it, pivoting, boot scraping along grit, and brought his forearm up to catch the next hit. The air filled with their breathing and the scuff of feet, the roof complaining as the wind worried it.

They pushed until sweat warmed Steve’s spine and soaked the back of his shirt. His lungs pulled in the cold and made it bite all the way down. He let the rhythm take him, a mercy in muscle memory, until his thoughts intruded anyway, same as always. He could see the phone even when it wasn’t in his hand, feel the weight of it in his pocket like a hot stone. It pressed against his thigh with every step.

Sam feinted left and kicked low, tapping Steve’s calf. “You’re thinking about it.”

“About what?”

“You know what.” Sam backed off, hands loose, patient.

He could say he was thinking about routes and supplies and the list of names they watched out for every time they traded cash for bread. He could talk about Wanda sleeping with her fists clenched, or the way the ocean here sounded like home and not like anything at all. He didn’t. He adjusted his grip on the straps and met Sam again, let the answer sit in the space between them.

Sam broke their rhythm and moved closer. “Call him,” he said, not unkind.

Steve’s jaw locked. He pushed Sam away on reflex, then caught himself and pulled the blow, open hand landing harmless on Sam’s chest. “It’s not that easy.”

“It is. You push a button and you talk.”

“And then what?” The words came out sharper than he wanted. He swallowed, lowered his hands. “We’re targets the second that line connects. And I—” He shut his mouth before more could loosen. It was the wrong place for it. It was always the wrong place.

“Then don’t say anything on it,” Sam said. “Ask him how the weather is. Tell him to turn on the game.”

Steve huffed a humorless sound. “He’d hang up.”

“Maybe,” Sam said, mouth hitching. “Maybe he’d say something you need to hear.”

They went again. Steve held back out of habit, tempering his strength. Sam fought clever, cutting angles, using every inch of the squared-off space like he’d mapped it. Steve admired it even as he worked to keep up, the ache in his thighs speaking to a run this morning he shouldn’t have taken. He was used to pushing until limits broke. He was finding out how many of his had re-formed in the dark.

They broke apart at a silent signal. Steve leaned on his thighs, hands on his knees, the floor’s cold radiating through the fabric. The mountain air was thinner here and stung in his chest. Sam handed him a dented water bottle. Steve drank and stared at the door as if it might open and end this with a sound he’d been waiting for and dreading.

Sam settled on an old crate and stretched his legs. “Nat pinged us,” he said, casual, eyes not casual at all. “That thing she mentioned? It’s not going away.”

“I know.”

“She thinks it has Stark written all over it.”

The name sat between them. Steve straightened, put the bottle down, and wiped his mouth with the tape-wrapped back of his hand. “He can handle himself,” he said, too quick.

“Pretty sure that’s never been the point,” Sam said. “Even when it was.”

Steve scrubbed a hand over his face. The stubble rasped against his palm. He had not looked at himself in anything but a window in days. The shield leaned against the far wall, paint scuffed, edges nicked. He could feel its absence when it wasn’t strapped to him like a phantom weight.

The phone sat on the crate next to Sam, small and black, no brand, no markings, just the number inside it that tied Steve to everything he’d cut himself away from. Sam looked down at it, then up at Steve. “He gave you an out,” Sam said. “You don’t even have to talk. You can press a button and prove neither of you is alone.”

“He gave me a choice,” Steve said, voice low. He walked over and picked the phone up, thumb brushing the plastic as if it might sting. It didn’t. It was just cold. He turned it over and over until the lines blurred. He knew every scratch on it. He knew the curve of the casing where it had been scuffed on the edge of a table in Berlin because his hand had shaken and he’d pretended it hadn’t. “And I’ve made choices that put us here.”

Sam didn’t argue that. He didn’t need to. “You gonna carry that for both of you forever? That’s heavy.”

Steve’s mouth twisted. The bone-deep fatigue lived under his skin like an old bruise. He felt it when he lay down, when he got up, when he put his fists up because it was easier than putting words somewhere they could be heard. He closed his hand around the phone and felt the shape of it imprint in his palm. The number in it burned brighter in his thoughts than the light leaking around the door.

The wind shifted and the roof knocked. Somewhere in the building, a pipe pinged. Footsteps that weren’t there echoed in memory. He slid the phone back into his pocket like nothing had happened and stood there long enough for Sam to sigh.

“Okay,” Sam said, pushing to his feet. “We do it your way. We keep moving. We watch our backs. But Steve—”

“I know.” He did. He looked at Sam and tried to show it. “I know.”

He moved back into the square and lifted his hands. “Again.”

Sam shook his head and smiled, small and tired. “All right, stubborn. Again.”

They danced their rough, careful dance until the light outside bled thin and the cold settled deeper in the bones of the place. When they stopped, Steve’s hands were steady, but only in the way they had to be. He sat on the floor with his back against the wall, phone a hard line against his thigh. He let his head tip back and listened to the wind, and pictured a different roof, a different night, and a man on the other end of a call that stayed unmade. He closed his eyes and didn’t sleep.

The feed opened on a quiet corridor lit by sterile, recessed panels, the kind of too-clean space he’d designed to be boring on purpose. A white hall, polished floor, two keycard doors. Nothing to see—until you knew where to look.

“Roll it back two seconds,” Tony said.

The footage skipped. An empty frame, then the air seemed to smear beside the second door, like compression artifacting. Tony leaned in. “No external cameras caught an approach?”

“Negative,” FRIDAY said. “No motion alerts. No perimeter breach. All sensors report nominal until entry.”

“Entry that didn’t happen,” he muttered. He toggled the thermal overlay. Heat signatures should have popped. Instead, the spectrum was cool, neutral. Dead air.

“Scrub forward,” he said, pinching the image wider.

There. The second door unlocked. Mechanically, cleanly, without the keypad lighting. The bolt retracted like it was a dream someone else was having. The door opened on an angle that should have triggered a sensor on the hinge. No alarm.

Tony sat back in his chair and let the room tilt a little. He’d put in triple redundancies on this floor. Even his redundancies had backups. He took a swallow of coffee that had gone cold hours ago and didn’t taste it anyway. “I want internal system logs. Every call, every handshake.”

They populated on the glass, neat lines of time stamps and green check marks. Midday, lunch, maintenance, routine. Then a block of silence. Not a gap, exactly—more like a stretch of perfect data that didn’t blink, didn’t breathe.

“There,” he said. “Between 13:22:07 and 13:23:40. That block wasn’t written by the same process. It’s too smooth.”

“It matches the baseline signature for idle,” FRIDAY said. “Exactly.”

“Exactly,” he echoed. “Idle is never exact.”

He scrubbed forward. The internal camera inside the lab they’d hit showed a room full of black cases and the prototype core sitting under a containment hood, humming faintly blue. When the door opened, a ripple ran through the hood’s readout, like a hand had been run over the outside glass. The gauges dipped and rose as if nothing touched them.

“Magnify the hood interior.”

She did. The image tightened on the core. Stark tech, model three of a compact energy regulator, something that was supposed to sit inside a larger system and play traffic cop. A good, standard target if you wanted to disrupt a city’s grid quietly. He watched the hummed line of energy. It didn’t falter when the containment seal disengaged on its own.

“Someone told it to open like it was time for a scheduled test,” Tony said. He drummed his fingers against the arm of the chair and kept them from shaking by making the movement deliberate.

“Correct,” FRIDAY said. “Command IDs are valid but ghosted. No user present in the building was authorized to initiate.”

“Ghosted?” His mouth quirked without humor. “Cute.”

The lab remained empty to every visual and thermal they had, while objects moved. The hood lifted. The core lifted. The cart rolled a foot, then another, as if pushed by clean air. The door stayed ajar, and the cart’s wheel caught on the seam. It should have wobbled. It didn’t.

“How are they masking weight and motion signatures?” Tony asked. “Pressure sensors in the floor report?”

“Nominal,” she said. “The weight shift was distributed across the entire surface in increments within tolerance thresholds. It presented as HVAC pressure variance.”

“Like it took a breath.” He clenched his jaw. “Whoever this is isn’t spoofing a badge and hoping for the best. They’re writing around me.”

He threw up the external camera feed again, just to taunt himself. The door to the hall from the stairwell opened. No one came through. The air stirred the papers on the security desk that should have been bolted down. He thought about the first week after Siberia, how he’d changed every access protocol to keep old ghosts from walking his halls, and how this ghost didn’t even bother to use the door in a way his alarms understood.

“Run a pattern match against Hydra infiltration protocols, the Ten Rings, Hammer, anything in our lovely family of greatest hits,” Tony said. “Look at the code that touched the locks. Does it smell like anything we’ve met?”

The processing bars crawled across one screen and another, then flattened green. “No match,” FRIDAY said. “The code is adaptive. It wrote itself into the gap between scheduled tasks and mimicked my own maintenance routines in real time. It used your entropy seeding to generate false noise. And then it took everything back out.”

“No residue,” he said. “No fingerprints. It cleaned as it went.”

“Correct. The only artifact is the absence itself.”

Tony scrubbed his face with the heel of his hand and eyed the schematics of the R&D wing glowing beneath the feed. The stress line along the stairwell window was a hairline crack from a storm six years ago; he’d never fixed it because it reminded him to check the mundane. He took a breath that hurt, like he’d been holding it since the fight he didn’t want to think about, and held it anyway.

“How many sites?” he asked.

“Three confirmed in the last sixty-one hours,” she said. “All Stark R&D. All off-cycle. Items taken are disparate but complementary: regulators, dampeners, and power couplers. The attack pattern is new and highly sophisticated.”

“Not Hydra,” he said. “Hydra would grandstand. Hammer would leave a selfie. This is—”

“Professional,” FRIDAY finished. “And personal. The taunt in the signature—”

“Show me,” he said tightly.

A string of characters scrolled in the corner of the log. At first glance, an error check. Under that, a simple phrase in a cipher Tony had used in-house as a joke once, back when the team had been a thing he could name without his stomach going hot and sour.

catch me

His throat went dry. His hands steadied with the focus that always came when the field narrowed and everything else fell away. “All right,” he said to the empty lab, to the hum under the floor, to the line of text that knew where to press. “Game on.”

He pulled up a map and plotted the facilities that fit the target profile, the ones with the right combination of tech and blind spots he hadn’t known he had. As he drew, he felt the edges close around a pattern, not perfect, but there, a shape someone else wanted him to see. He hated that he liked the challenge. He hated that the only other person who could look at this and see the same shape wasn’t here.

“FRI,” he said, voice low, “we’re not dealing with a kid in a basement.”

“No,” she said. “You are dealing with someone who understands you.”

He stared at the white hall where the door opened itself like it had been asked nicely, and the cart rolled through air that didn’t move, and the camera blinked and lied. He watched until the feed looped. Then he watched again.

The knock wasn’t a knock. It was a soft static that threaded through the back of Steve’s neck and made every hair there stand. Sam had taken first watch, perched on the edge of the broken window with a blanket around his shoulders and his eyes on the alley. Steve lay on his side with his boots on, the burner phone pressed under the flat of his palm like it might melt through.

The static ticked again, not in the air this time but in the old radio on the crate they used as a table. It wasn’t plugged in. It didn’t have to be. The dial wavered, the needle trembling over dead stations. Then the speaker popped and a tone sequence played, short and long, spaced in a rhythm that hit a place under Steve’s sternum like muscle memory.

He was on his feet before Sam turned.

“What is it?” Sam whispered, already reaching for the pack where he kept his gear.

“Code,” Steve said. His voice came out low and even. He crossed to the radio, angled the antenna with two fingers, and listened. Three tones repeating. A pause. Two more. His mouth moved with the count. He reached for the notebook shoved under a map and flipped to a page where slanted numbers were scrawled in neat lines, the kind of neat only a soldier could keep even now.

Sam slid down from the window. “Who?”

Steve didn’t answer until the last tone hit. He wrote, translating not just the tones but the way the pause fell, the tiny hitch that wasn’t a hitch, that was a habit. He had known that pause in Budapest and in a winter safe house with snow stacked to the eaves and in a glossy hotel with a bug in the lamp they pretended not to see. He wrote the last character, then the line below it: the authentication code that could have come from one person.

“Nat,” he said. The name landed deep. “It’s her.”

Sam’s shoulders loosened at the same second his mouth tightened. “Of course it is.” He came closer, eyes flicking to the notebook. “What’s the message?”

Steve ran his finger down the column and read it back in his head before he said it out loud. “Global threat. Targeting Stark. Pattern reads like escalation. She says it’s not sanctioned. Not contained. She says—” He stopped, because the last part was phrased in a way only she would use with him. “We’re going to need everyone.”

Sam blew out a breath. “Of course we are.” He glanced at the phone under Steve’s hand and then away again. “Any details?”

Steve scanned the next block of cipher, translating fast. Locations flashed in his mind: Zurich, Mumbai, Lagos. All places with Stark facilities; all places with bad echoes in their bones. The times lined up with the last three days. The last line was short, and it wasn’t about tech. It was about politics. She said the vendors of the Accords were more interested in optics than outcomes. She said if this thing kept its pace, optics would be rubble.

“What’s her angle?” Sam asked. He kept his voice flat but Steve heard the edge. “Is she asking us to stand down? Show up? Take the fall?”

“She’s asking us to be smart,” Steve said. His thumb moved over the graphite smear his handwriting left. “She’s asking me not to let pride get people killed.”

Sam watched him for a long second. The alley below coughed with a scooter and then went quiet. “I can guess which people we’re talking about.”

The phone under Steve’s palm felt like a brand. He pulled it up and set it on the crate next to the radio, not ready to touch the screen, not ready to put it away. His chest felt too tight for the air the room had to offer. He read the message again, looking for something else, a trap in the cadence or a second meaning. Natasha didn’t do alarms. She did facts, angles, exits. The fact was in his notebook now, in his handwriting. He had asked her once, years ago, if she ever wrote her own history down. She had lifted a shoulder. Why waste ink on lies?

“What else?” Sam asked, gentler.

“She thinks this thing’s personal,” Steve said. “She says it’s got Stark’s signature written under its nails. Like it wants him to chase it.” He felt the words like he was wrapping them in leather, careful, tight. “She says if he chases alone, he loses.”

“And us?” Sam asked.

“She says if we let him chase alone, we help him lose,” Steve said. He looked up at Sam, held his eyes. “She says the world’s going to need all of us, not just the ones with paperwork.”

Sam’s mouth tipped in a humorless half-smile. “When Natasha Romanoff says jump…”

Steve didn’t smile back. The phone was a weight that wasn’t heavy. He had held it for months without pressing the one button that mattered. He flipped it over. A hairline scratch ran across the back where it had scraped concrete in Berlin. He remembered Tony’s hand when he’d pressed it into Steve’s palm, remembered the way his eyes had been dark and bright at once. If you need me, he’d said, and looked like he’d meant I hope you never do.

“We don’t even know if he’d pick up,” Sam said, like he could read where Steve’s head had gone. He reached out and tapped the radio’s casing. “And if he does, he won’t want to hear us. He’ll want to hear that we’re staying the hell away.”

“Maybe,” Steve said. He waited until the word didn’t shake. He set the phone down with care and rolled his shoulders back until the ache at the base of his neck eased a fraction. “We’re not calling him. Not yet.”

Sam’s eyebrows rose.

“We move,” Steve said. “We pack. We get Wanda and Scott ready to ghost out if this turns into a net. We change routes. We stay dark.” He tapped the notebook. “We send acknowledgment to Nat, same channel. Ask for whatever she has on whoever’s behind this. If Stark’s being hunted, we need to know the hunter.”

“And after that?” Sam asked, because he always asked, because they did this together even when the world said they didn’t.

Steve looked at the phone. He saw the line of text in his notebook and heard Natasha’s voice say later isn’t a plan, it’s a wish. He swallowed and nodded once, a promise he felt in the hinges of his jaw. “After that,” he said, “we see if wishes are over.” He slid the phone into his jacket so he could feel it when he moved. “And we get ready to do the thing we keep pretending we don’t have to.”

Sam’s smile was small and sad and steady. “Bring the band back together.”

Steve looked at the dark window, at the thin slice of city beyond it that didn’t care who he was or who he had been. “If we’re lucky,” he said. The radio crackled again, a soft breath that could have been static, could have been the world turning. He picked up the pencil, wrote out Yes, and under it, Ready. He sent the response back into the air and hoped it found her. He hoped, and he hated that it felt like standing on a ledge. He stood there anyway.