Fox paused in the doorway. "Is there anything special about them? What exactly do our people need to do when they find them?"
Smith considered the question. "I'm not certain what condition they're in right now. They could have developed abilities already, or they could still be entirely ordinary. Either way—" he shook his head slightly— "all I need is for someone to find them and bring them to the base. I want to meet them myself."
He turned to the corner of the room where Friday's compact frame stood at rest. "Friday, I need portraits. I'll describe them — have someone draw them up."
"Yes, Master," Friday said.
Smith walked Fox through the descriptions from memory — Wanda first, then Pietro — and within the hour a sketch artist had produced two portraits close enough to work with. Fox studied them both with the focused attention of someone already running search parameters in her head.
"With these," she said, "I'd expect to have them in front of you within three days."
Smith nodded. "Good." He leaned back in his chair. "While you're here — what's the situation in New York? Post-battle recovery."
Fox set the portraits down and shifted into the other kind of briefing. "The civilian situation is not good. We moved fast with evacuations and the casualties were lower than they could have been, but the property damage across the central island is extensive. The numbers are still being tallied." She paused. "The insurance landscape is developing badly."
She laid it out. The companies that had aggressively marketed superhero property insurance over the past years had looked at the scope of the Chitauri damage and made a coordinated decision. The damage, they argued, had not been caused by a superhero incident. It had been caused by an alien military invasion. An alien military invasion qualified as an act of war. An act of war was force majeure. Force majeure voided the policy. They were refusing to pay.
The companies that couldn't sustain even the public relations burden of that position had chosen bankruptcy instead — which in the insurance industry functioned identically to waiting to be acquired at a discount.
Smith's expression had gone flat. He knew exactly what this was. Capital didn't lose money honestly when it had any other option available.
Fox continued: "Through the post-disaster fund — your capital, Tony's, Ivan's — we're already recovering and cataloguing the Chitauri equipment left behind and converting it to operating funds. We're also filing litigation on behalf of affected residents against the companies that are refusing to pay out."
"Good," Smith said. "And the bankruptcy acquisitions?"
"We can absorb them through our insurance company and compensate affected people from there. It won't be clean — these companies chose bankruptcy precisely because the payout exposure is too high for normal operations to sustain — but it's manageable."
Smith thought for a moment. "Route a portion of the proceeds from Chitauri equipment and weapons sales through the Avengers base directly into the insurance pool. That keeps the fund liquid while the litigation moves." He looked at Fox steadily. "And we push Congress for legislative clarification. The force majeure language in these policies was never written with alien military action in mind, because no one writing policies had alien military action in mind. That's not a loophole — it's a gap. Companies cannot void coverage by pointing at a category of threat the policy authors never anticipated. We need a federal standard requiring superhero property insurance to cover losses regardless of whether the aggressor is human, enhanced, or extraterrestrial."
Fox was writing steadily. She looked up. "You're operating on the assumption that this kind of engagement happens again."
Smith said, "It's not an assumption."
Fox noted that too — not the legal point, but the weight behind it. She'd learned years ago that when Smith said something that sounded speculative, the practical thing to do was treat it as intelligence.
"Any other instructions?"
"That's all for now."
Fox stood, tucked the portraits under her arm, crossed to the desk, and kissed him. Then she was at the door and moving, already composing operational orders in her head: search team to Sokovia, Widow's local contact for ground intelligence, combat capability assessment on arrival.
Smith watched her go and turned back to his desk.
In Sokovia, the news had been running the same footage for six hours.
Pietro sat on the edge of the couch with his elbows on his knees, watching the aerial shots of the Manhattan portal — the scale of it, the Leviathans banking between towers, the Paragons moving through the engagement in ways that the broadcast cameras kept losing track of.
"Wanda." He turned his head toward the other room. "Aliens. In New York."
Wanda looked up from her book, glanced at the screen, and looked back down. "Be grateful it happened in New York and not here. We don't have anyone like that in Sokovia."
Pietro turned back to the footage. "If it had happened here, God would have come. Him and the whole team. The Avengers, the Paragons — all of them."
Wanda said, "God fights alongside Tony Stark."
Pietro went quiet.
The name landed in the apartment the way it always landed — with the specific weight of something that had happened when they were eleven years old and had never fully left. The Stark Industries logo on the casing. Two days against a wall, their parents already gone, waiting for something to go off that didn't.
"Wanda. We agreed."
"You brought up the team."
"I brought up God."
"Same team." Wanda turned a page without reading it. "I'm just noting a fact."
Pietro looked at the screen. The broadcast had cut to the moment Smith Doyle had ended the ground battle — the drone footage, three hundred meters out, slightly overcompressed. He'd watched this segment multiple times already. He watched it again.
"If I were enhanced," he said, "I'd want to do exactly that."
Wanda set her book down and stared at the ceiling for a moment. "If I were enhanced," she said, "I'd make him understand what it felt like. What it felt like to be eleven years old and wait two days for something to kill you."
"Wanda."
"I know." A pause. "I know. Besides that—" she thought about it genuinely— "I don't know. The Paragons selection was interesting. The income looked decent. It would improve things."
Pietro's expression had already moved somewhere else. "I'd go straight to God's organization. The Fraternity, or the Red Ribbon. Somewhere I'd actually be useful." He looked at the footage again — at the figure above the Manhattan skyline, arms extended, the city below him already clear. "To fight alongside someone like that. That would be something worth doing."
Three knocks at the door.
Pietro went. He pulled it open and found two women in the narrow hallway — one close to his age, one older, both standing with the specific stillness of people who had not knocked by accident and were not lost.
He noticed the folder the younger one was carrying. He noticed, on the top sheet, what appeared to be his own face.
"Pietro Maximoff," the younger woman said. Not a question.
Pietro kept his hand on the door frame. "We're looking for you and your sister Wanda Maximoff."
He looked at them for a moment. "Do we know each other?"