The Ta Lo village guy had attached himself to the Ten Rings three weeks ago, and Xu Xialing still hadn't decided what to do with him. He was talented — strong enough to spar with her without embarrassing himself, occasionally edging ahead on technique — and the situation between them had drifted into something neither of them had formally named. She was aware of it. She was also aware that she had an organization to run and didn't have time to deal with it properly.
She was thinking about that, vaguely, when her phone lit up.
The name on the screen stopped her cold.
Smith Doyle. His number had been sitting in her contacts for months, saved during the formal business around her father joining the Fraternity. In all that time, it had never once produced an incoming call. She was Wenwu's daughter, not Wenwu — the connection existed at the margins of things that actually mattered to a man operating at his level.
She answered on the second ring.
"Is this Xu Xialing?"
"Yes." She kept her voice level. "What can I do for you, Mr. Smith?"
"Tony Stark and I need to confirm something with you. There's a terrorist who's been active in American media — nine bombings, three confirmed publicly. He's claiming to be the leader of the Ten Rings Gang. Calls himself the Mandarin."
The words landed like a fist to the sternum.
For half a second, Xu Xialing didn't speak. Then everything came out at once, sharp and clear and furious.
"That's slander. Blatant slander." She was already moving around the operations table, the Ta Lo guy looking up at her change in posture. "Mr. Smith, I can tell you with complete certainty that there is no one in the Ten Rings leadership called the Mandarin. Not one. I've spent months restructuring this entire organization. I redefined our operating policies myself. Terrorism is not something we do — it has never been something we do under my watch."
She stopped pacing. "My parents are both in the Fraternity. My brother is in The Paragons. I am fully aware of what those affiliations mean and what they require. Someone impersonating us is not just an insult. It's a provocation."
Across the restaurant table, Tony watched Smith's expression as he listened. His own frown deepened. He'd come in half-prepared to confirm his suspicion about inside involvement. Now it was clear he'd been wrong about the source.
"We believe you," Smith said. "Tony's going to investigate. I wanted you to know directly."
Xu Xialing exhaled through her nose. "Give me the chance to run this down from our end. Whoever is using my father's no MY organization as a mask — that's a problem for the Ten Rings to resolve. I'll bring people to New York and coordinate with Mr. Stark directly."
Smith glanced at Tony, who nodded once.
"Do that," Smith said. "I'll let Tony know to expect you." He ended the call.
He set the phone down and looked across the table. "Someone built a fiction and hung it on the Ten Rings name."
"A convincing fiction," Tony said. "Nine explosions, no casings, no recoverable device fragments. That takes resources and a particular kind of expertise." He drummed two fingers on the table. "Which I have, as it happens — I've been developing mid-air intercept systems that should be able to catch whatever delivery method they're using. And the Ten Rings name gives them reach. Someone knew exactly what they were borrowing."
"You and Xialing can run it down," Smith said. "You've got the tech. She'll have intelligence on anyone who might have been adjacent to the organization without actually being in it."
Tony nodded slowly, already working through the logistics in his head. His eyes were red at the edges — two days of no sleep visible in the way his focus kept re-settling, as if the image kept slipping.
Smith noticed. "Before any of that, you should sleep."
"Einstein slept three hours a year," Tony said, with the reflexive ease of someone who had used that line before. "Look at what he managed."
"Einstein didn't fight off an alien invasion."
Tony didn't answer that directly. He looked down at the table for a moment. "You've grown fast," he said. "The end of that battle. That was..." He shook his head. "I'm glad you're on our side. That's all I'll say about it."
Smith didn't have a ready response to that. He started to say something about the armor development, but before he got the sentence out, two kids appeared at the edge of the table.
The girl was holding a drawing — crayon, the kind of dense, energetic work that children produced when they were trying to fit everything important into a single sheet of paper. Smith could make out his own figure in the center, mid-air, a cluster of Chitauri forms around him. Iron Man was in the frame too, and other shapes that were probably the rest of the Avengers, rendered in the particular way that children rendered things they'd seen on screens and in photographs.
She held it up. "Can I get your autograph?"
Smith took the drawing and looked at it properly. "You sure you don't want Iron Man's signature first?"
Both kids turned to Tony simultaneously, and the girl said, with the confident practicality of someone who had already thought this through: "Can we get both on the same picture?"
Tony reached over and took the drawing from Smith, studying it with an expression that was almost soft. "What's your name?" he asked the girl, then glanced at the boy beside her and added, "You look like you wandered in from a Christmas movie."
He uncapped the crayon she handed him and leaned over to sign — and snapped it clean in half on the first stroke.
He stared at the two pieces in his hand.
Smith watched him.
Tony pressed both hands against his face, elbows on the table, and held that position for a moment that stretched slightly too long.
The girl leaned forward. "Are you okay, Mr. Stark?"
Smith put a hand on Tony's shoulder. "Hey. You're fine."
The boy, apparently unbothered by Tony's earlier dig at his appearance, leaned in close and dropped his voice to a near-whisper. "Were you scared? When all those aliens came through?"
Tony's head came up. Something moved behind his eyes that he didn't manage to keep off his face in time. He pushed back from the table and stood up, fast enough that his chair scraped.
"I need some air," he said.
He was already moving toward the door, his stride not quite steady, one hand going to the back of his neck. He pushed through onto the sidewalk and stood there in the daylight, and Smith could hear him through the glass, half to himself:
"I need to get checked out."