The Meaning of Infinity

The Hulk did end up telling Will that Carrie would be absent for the rest of the day- and probably tomorrow. It hadn’t been too surprising, considering the guilty look that had been on his face throughout most of their conversation, that he had been amenable to at least that small favor. 

Carrie only met Will’s eyes for a brief moment before she was hauled into the street and cuffed, but that was enough. She felt suddenly grateful that she had let him into the private network of her double life, because Will was no idiot- she could see him whipping out his phone and dialing what she assumed to be Homebody’s main number before she could even be shoved into the van the Hulk had ridden in to get there. 

Maybe they wouldn’t find out about her little operation after all, Carrie mused. If the rest of the representative copies could wipe their slates clean and disappear in time, Homebody could probably flee with the cash and start over. All she had to do was keep her mouth shut and wait for the right moment to die. Then everything would be fine, right? Homebody would know better than to wait around for her to answer or come home. 

***

“I’ve been having a lot of fun with this.”

Romanoff’s smile was tight as she slid into the seat across the interrogation table from Carrie. The dark-haired woman’s eyes narrowed on the phone Natasha waved tauntingly in front of her face. She fought the urge to tug against her cuffs. 

Natasha waited for a moment, watching for a reaction or a response. When nothing came, she continued speaking. 

“I followed Bruce back to your little pizza parlor. Nice playground, very cute, by the way.”

Carrie’s frown twitched. She didn’t speak. 

“You have a lot of good encryption. And your little dog didn’t seem too keen on letting me have it- but here I am, right?”

“What did you do to Will?” Carrie snapped, her eyes flickering wider with rage. Natasha laughed. 

“Nothing. I’m not a monster, and it’s not like he had a chance of stopping me anyway.” 

She lay the phone flat on the table in front of her, face-up. She tapped her nails, one by one in a line, across the screen. Carrie relaxed, but only slightly. Her gaze slipped down, trained on the dark screen of the phone.

“Imagine my surprise when I unlocked this thing to see the notifications scrambled into gibberish. You’re obviously careful, you work hard… too bad we work harder.” 

Carrie sighed. She let her head fall back, staring up at the ceiling of the small interrogation room. Almost absently, she jiggled her wrists inside her cuffs, making them clatter noisily against the back of the chair where they were secured. 

“You want me to start talking,” she guessed. Natasha waited patiently, and only when the silence seemed like it would stretch forever unbroken did Carrie speak again. “Sorry, I won’t.”

Natasha’s smile fell away. Her fingernails stilled on top of the phone. 

“It’s not like your phone is going to stay encrypted.” She shifted gears- obviously, Carrie wasn’t going to be baited into talking until she was absolutely sure Natasha had already cracked into what she was hiding. She seemed to know better than to speak when there was a potential she could be spilling info that hadn’t already been uncovered. 

“Maybe not,” Carrie hummed. “I guess you have nothing to worry about, then.” 

Natasha glared. Carrie picked her head back up, observing her. Facing off with a renowned super-spy and deadly agent shouldn’t have been an everyday occurrence for her- and Natasha was sure it wasn’t. But for some reason, she seemed unbothered. At least, much more unbothered than a regular woman should have been. She stared back at Natasha with dead, dull eyes, giving nothing away. 

Natasha’s fingers twitched. She felt the phantom sensation of an index finger hooking over hers, pushing down, and…

Natasha blinked. Just a split second, to not have to look back at those eyes, to not have to imagine the bullet-hole between them. That was all she could, and would, allow herself. How could she look away? She should have been the one with the power here. For all intents and purposes, she was; Carrie was handcuffed. She hadn’t even tried to fight back, according to Bruce. She obviously knew she was outnumbered and outpowered. 

Well. Maybe not outnumbered, Natasha reminded herself. She wished she had paid more attention during the war- she didn’t know how Carrie’s power worked or what was required to use it. So far, it didn’t seem as if she’d tried to. But she could have copies out and about, still- in fact, Natasha was almost positive she did. After all, there were already two, and it was clear they had been living somewhat separated lives. But still, both of them had that look in their eyes…

Blood in Tony’s office. 

Wet, gray flesh sagging out through a mess of auburn hair. 

That smile, those eyes, already intent upon death, rushing forward…

Focus, Natasha. Try again.  

“You’re very observant,” Natasha sighed. She sounded annoyed, Carrie noted. She didn’t think the super-spy was faking it, either- which set Carrie on edge, if only slightly. Natasha’s eye caught on the most miniscule of movements- and suddenly, if possible, she looked slightly less annoyed. So, she could tell she was having an impact, at least. Carrie was sure that no matter how poker-faced she was, Natasha would know when she reacted. 

“I guess I am,” Carrie mumbled. “I’ll level with you. If you tell me what you already know.” 

Natasha rolled her eyes. Her fingers resumed their tapping pattern, back and then forth again, across the phone. 

“I don’t need you to tell me what I already know, ” she said, her voice venomously calm. “I need you to tell me what I’m missing.”

“How can I know what you’re missing if I don’t know what you have?” Carrie shot back, not missing a beat. 

“You can just tell me everything,” Natasha replied, her voice dry. Carrie let out a soft scoff, and Natasha’s lip twitched with slight anger. 

Carrie schooled her expression. You’re not the only one who can switch tactics, she thought, and then took a deep breath. 

“I’ll talk to Banner,” she said plainly, a type of confidence in her voice that was almost stilted- like a bad actor reciting a line. Natasha’s fingertips pressed down against the phone. Her knuckles turned white for a moment. Then, she scooped the thing up, tucked it back into her pocket, and disappeared through the door in the corner of the room. 

***

Carrie’s ears have been ringing all day. The first gunshot she’d heard had been somewhere in the streets late into the night yesterday. Maybe today, technically. It wasn’t an uncommon noise, in this part of Hell’s Kitchen. Hell, she was sure some of her tenants- the real ones, not her copies- were involved in some kind of organized crime. But she had never cared; she could commiserate. 

The second gunshot, she had imagined. Then the third, fourth, and fifth. And as she began frantically sifting through files on her laptop, logging into various accounts, moving money around, and closing out servers to be deleted and abandoned, she kept hearing them. Gunshots, gunshots, gunshots. 

There were a pile of messages on her phone she couldn’t be bothered to fully read. She glanced at the forum every so often- another rep confirming their money had been moved, even though she didn’t need to be told. She had been combing through the accounts again and again, checking and re-checking them in a sequential list every few moments. She knew where the money was at- and she didn’t want to see the messages that followed them, not really. 

HOMEBODY: Alright. Reps, sell and disappear. 

ST IND REP: Guess this is goodbye.

That wasn’t the only sign-off sitting nestled in the investing forum, but it had been the first- and the only one Carrie had bothered to truly read. She didn’t need to read to hear the gunshots. 

Doesn’t all have to be gunshots, her mind supplied bitterly. The copy at Amazon could’ve gotten her hands on one of those flamethrowers. 

Would the main cover make it back, Carrie wondered absently? She hadn’t gotten confirmation- Carrie wondered if she had even checked her phone today. She was probably blissfully unaware at Antonio’s- and now that she was thinking of it, Carrie probably should have called the restaurant, made sure she could pass along the news: The jig was up, and fucking bigtime. 

She pushed her chair back from the laptop, groaning in frustration. While transfers were processing, she’d better start packing things up. She moved from room to room, grabbing whatever clothes seemed the most generic and the least recognizable from the closets. She shoved away valuables- jewelry, electronics, scattered wallets- and the few choice sentimentals shared between her usual copies into duffle bags, throwing them close to the door. 

Her phone buzzed in her pocket- somebody was calling. Well, that someone could wait- she needed to get out of here, the sooner she could get packed up, the better. She ignored it. 

***

“Did you decrypt that thing yet?” Natasha snarled, practically slamming the door behind her as she came back into the conference room they had stationed themselves in, just down the hall from the interrogation room Carrie was being held in. Tony glanced up at her, eyebrow raised. 

“Almost.” 

“Almost?” she huffed, slumping into the chair next to him and peering over the screen. “Aren’t you a supergenius? Coding wizard, or something?”

“Hey, it’s good encryption,” he defended, tugging the laptop closer toward him like a child hogging their favorite toy. Natasha rolled her eyes. “I’m kind of shocked. Melissa never worked on any programming, as far as I was aware.”

“ Carrie, ” Natasha corrected. “Not Melissa.” This time, Tony rolled his eyes. 

“She tell you anything?” he asked, typing something into the screen. He pressed enter, and the code on the screen re-wrote itself. An error popped up, and he groaned in annoyance. 

“She said she’d only talk to Bruce,” Natasha huffed. Tony barked out a laugh, his eyes shining gleefully as he tore them away from the screen to mock her. 

“That’s gotta hurt,” he teased. “You’re always the interrogator.” 

“Yeah, it seemed like that’s why she said it,” Natasha hissed back, lip curling. “She doesn’t want to have to deal with me.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” Tony snickered. He typed something new, hit enter. A moment later, the code on the screen blinked away, and a file opened up. Tony snapped his fingers, grinning. “There we fucking go. FRIDAY, can we make it look like the phone interface?”

Natasha peered over his shoulder. The file disappeared, and instead a small section of the screen opened up to a phone-sized window, a plain, default background over most of it. There was nothing else on the home screen, and no organization on the tab with all the apps- it seemed like Carrie mostly just accessed the apps through the search bar, instead of the dock. 

“Let’s get Bruce in there,” Tony hummed, turning his chair to face Natasha. “FRIDAY can start combing through all this, but it would be easier if we knew what to look for.” 

***

When Bruce ducked into the interrogation room, turning sideways just to fit his shoulders and coming just a hair too close to smacking his head on the doorframe for comfort, he looked decidedly unhappy to be there. 

“I don’t want to do this,” he said plainly, after carefully lowering himself onto the too-small chair and shuffling himself around for a moment to get comfortable. Across the table, Carrie smiled at him. 

“I know. That’s why I asked for you.”

Bruce stared back at her. He looked almost miserable, Carrie thought. She wondered why he was so torn up over this, why her presence was bothering him so much. Was he just that kind of person? He definitely wasn’t used to masking his expressions, or wasn’t trying to- not like Natasha had, which was good.

“Why were you spying on Stark Industries?” he asked, looking expectantly back at her. When she didn’t reply, he tried again. “Or was it the Avengers?”

“Does it have to be mutually exclusive?” Carrie joked. Bruce just sighed. 

“They’re decrypting your phone, you know. We’ll know eventually.” 

“Why would I make it faster for you?” 

Bruce’s oversized fingers folded together, his thumbs tapping back and forth against one another with no apparent rhythm. He shifted in his seat, the fabric of his clothes creaking with him. Carrie could deal with this, and it was a much easier game to play with Bruce than with Natasha. 

In some odd way, she had actually found she kind of liked Bruce. She had been enjoying their conversation, before he had restrained her and taken her into the tower. He seemed nice. It was for that reason that Carrie felt a bit bad for what she said next.

“You guys didn’t put out an official statement about Spider-man.” 

She could see the impact immediately. Bruce’s nose wrinkled slightly and his lip pulled back, as if he had smelled something foul. 

“No. No, we didn’t,” he said quickly. “We didn’t… Tony’s had trouble talking about it.” Carrie raised an eyebrow. She felt a bit less bad. 

“So he gets to grieve first?” she asked, tone incredulous. Bruce winced. 

“No, that’s not what I meant,” he rushed out. “We just- we need him to confirm some things before we can run an official statement.” 

“ So, he gets to grieve first,” Carrie repeated, lips pressing into a thin line. Bruce avoided her gaze. 

“I didn’t come in here to talk about Spider-man.”

“Why not? Don’t you want to hear about how I know him?” Carrie hummed, and Bruce’s gaze snapped to hers, his eyes searching her face for some kind of direction. It was clear he wasn’t particularly good at this part of the job- he was weary of taking the bait and just as weary of not knowing what information she might have shared. 

“Sure,” he finally said. “If that’s relevant.” Relevant to what, he didn’t say- and Carrie was sure, he didn’t know. Even with Stark working to decrypt her phone, she was sure it would take a while. She had paid big money for those firewalls, after all. 

“Sure, it’s relevant. I met him here.”

“ Here? ” Bruce asked, his voice straining with disbelief. Carrie shrugged. 

“My copy could’ve given you more detail, but I’m sure she’s dead now.” 

Bruce grimaced. “Come on, that isn’t fair.”

“What’s so unfair?”

“We didn’t kill her.” 

Carrie smiled. She leaned back in her chair. “I know.” 

“Then why say it?” he asked, his voice dragging.

Carrie leaned her neck slowly to the left, until it cracked. “What did the Wakandans do with my corpses?”

“Alright, now you’re just pissing me off.”

“Am I?”

“ Yes! ” Bruce smacked one hand down on the interrogation table as he snapped, and the metal groaned, indenting from the force of it. He blinked in surprise, staring down at the divet he had created in the otherwise smooth tabletop. He took a deep breath. “Yes.” 

“You seem pissed off,” Carrie agreed, after watching him in silence for a moment. “But is that my fault?” 

“You’re trying to provoke me,” Bruce mumbled helplessly. Carrie huffed in amusement. 

“You’re being provoked,” she pointed out. “That 's all you. You have a very expressive face, has anybody ever told you that?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” He let his head hang slightly lower. “How’d you meet Spider-man here? ”

“Well, at least you can stay on track,” Carrie teased lightly. Despite the circumstance, there was no real mockery in her tone. Bruce glared up at her, head still hung. “He caught me snooping around, just like I’m sure one of you did earlier.” 

“What?” Bruce’s brows knit closer together, and he sat up a bit straighter. “Don’t lie to me. Tell me how you really met.”

“I’m not lying.”

“But we would have known about that.” 

Carrie shrugged. “Guess he didn’t tell.” 

***

“What’s taking Bruce so long?” Tony complained. Natasha looked up from her seat across the conference table. She was picking at her cuticles, one leg crossed over the other and propped on the edge of the tabletop. 

“The AI will be faster,” she mumbled. “Bruce feels too guilty. He’s not going to press her very hard.” 

Tony hummed an acknowledgement. “You’re probably right. He looked miserable when he handed her off to you.” 

“Miserable is an understatement. Hey- what happened to Danvers?”

“She had some event to go to, S.H.I.E.L.D. thing. She said to update her later, but at this point, I'm sure this is a little below her paygrade. More of an internal issue.” 

Natasha nodded. She watched Tony type something out on the laptop, grimace, and then spam the backspace key with vigor. “Why don’t you just let FRIDAY do it?”

“She’s not going to give me the rundown until her scan is finished,” Tony grumbled back. He clicked into another application on the display window of Carrie’s phone screen- he had been scouring the multitude of investment apps for what felt like an hour, but had probably only been twenty minutes. None of them were helpful- even though Bruce had been fairly sure Carrie hadn’t checked or done anything with her phone after he had arrived, it was as if everything had been wiped. Despite the overwhelming volume of different financial apps downloaded, none of them were logged in to an account. When he had checked the phone’s saved passwords, he had found a few- but attempts to log into those accounts revealed they had already been deactivated. 

“Did you check her messages?” Natasha asked, casually, and Tony blinked blearily up at her over the screen. Her face fell into a shocked grimace. “Tony, seriously?” 

“I- there are other things on here that just- just seemed more important,” he defended, ducking his head again. He clicked away from the app he had been fiddling with, and began scouring the dock of apps for messenger. 

It didn’t reveal much. Carrie had some kind of generic-brand phone- it wasn’t a Stark phone, which Tony would have had a much easier time dealing with, and it wasn’t Apple, either. The phone’s generic messenger was mostly barren- there were text messages with somebody named Will, who seemed like a friend of Carrie’s, and older messages from an Antonio- based on the messages, which were sparse and mostly peppered with requests for her to call him, he was her boss. The last of them had been sent the day of the snap, Tony realized with a sinking feeling in his stomach. 

ANTONIO: Better bring those receipts back here, woman. I’ll fire you. 

CARRIE: No you won’t :)

Tony had been informed, at some point following his return to Earth, that Carrie had appeared and assisted in the battle against Thanos’ forces. Someone had even made it a point to mention to him how surreal it had felt to see her on the battlefield, wearing a waitressing uniform of all things. It was becoming clear to him that this message had been sent after she had ditched work to join them. He clicked out of it, searching momentarily from the alleged contact from Spider-man which had been made on the same day, requesting her presence, but he came up empty. He did find one outgoing call to a contact labeled “Ant Man Lang” from the same day, which at least confirmed Bruce’s story that she had relied on Scott to pass along her phone number, he supposed. 

His eye twitched a bit at the thought that Carrie’s phone contact had probably been sitting somewhere in Bruce’s phone for the entirety of the past few months, and nobody had even thought to follow up with her. Well, hindsight is twenty-twenty. 

She had whatsapp installed as well, but scouring through that, Tony only really found a few brief interactions with someone who he assumed to be an uncle- and not one she was close with, if the tone of those messages were anything to go by- and a couple very old group chats from college courses or group projects. 

Natasha had moved to lean over the back of his chair as they combed through the messages. When he closed out of Whatsapp, her eyes narrowed, and she jutted her thumb toward an app in one corner of the screen. It had a purely gray icon with no symbol, and the name hovering below it looked like complete gibberish, to the point it wasn’t even in English lettering. 

“This is the same encryption that was blocking up her notifications,” Natasha mumbled, and Tony leaned closer, clicking into the icon with a short breath of trepidation. He had already been beaten down hard enough cracking through the encryptions that had been blocking them out of the phone altogether, and if he had to get through more just to access this app, he might break his damn laptop in half. To his and Natasha’s surprise, though, the app opened without much fuss- not even a login screen. It seemed to be another messenger, and Tony let out of the breath he had been holding in, a smile creeping across his face. “Bingo.”

There were roughly ten or fifteen chats open on the application, which, he noted, seemed a bit home-brewed. He wouldn’t be surprised if Carrie actually had created this herself- he would have bet that the encryptions had been hired work, but this looked much more like something someone could make on their own. It didn’t have the typical functions of a messenger- he couldn’t have opened up a new chat with his own phone number, if he tried. The chat logs appeared to be pre-programmed specifically into the app. In the top middle, above the list of chats, there was a label reading MAIN COV. 

There was also, Tony noted, a chat on the list titled “MAIN COV direct line.” Most of the other chats were some other variation of the same format, but with varying words replacing ‘MAIN COV.’ And, he noted, they mostly seemed to be ticker symbols. It made some amount of sense, based off of the ungodly amount of financial applications that were downloaded on the phone.
The only chats which didn’t seem to be labeled after ticker symbols were the MAIN COV direct line, and another which replaced the ticker with the word HOMEBODY. There was another chat labeled “HOMEBODY one way,” and one labeled “ALL forum.”

“Click into Main Cov,” Natasha mumbled, leaning closer over Tony’s shoulder, and he nodded, doing just that. It seemed like there were messages from a plethora of different users, but the ones that had been sent out of this phone, appearing on the right instead of the left, all labeled ‘MAIN COV’ as the sender. 

“So these are monikers?” he breathed, his brow furrowing. Homebody seemed to be the most common user of the chat other than Main Cov, though there were spatterings of other messages if he scrolled far enough. All the users besides those had the same ticker codes in their names, followed by ‘REP.’

“I’m starting to get the picture,” Natasha huffed. She reached over him, taking the mouse. She clicked out of the direct line, opening up ‘ALL forum’ instead. There were several, much more recent messages here, mostly from the users with ticker codes as their names. Natasha scrolled backward through them- most of them were related to the sale of stocks, but there was a pattern to the messages that was beginning to disturb her. 

APPL REP: Everything sold on my end. 

EXON REP: Same here.

ISRG REP: This blows. We just went through all that effort to re-apply to new positions after the snap.
APPL REP: Yeah, I’m sure it blew for ST REP too. Lmao.

APPL REP: Bye everybody. 

EXON REP: Bye from me as well. 

ISRG REP: All sold here. Goodbye. 

Natasha was starting to get a much better idea of what kind of operation this was. She skimmed more, but stopped reading any message with a ‘goodbye’ written in it. 

Tony took the mouse back, scrolling back further until he had well passed any messages from earlier that day. He re-traced back until the beginning of the day, and began reading again from there. Eventually, he stopped short, and grimaced. 

ST IND REP: Looks like they didn’t forget about us. Whole thing’s comped- sell now. 

HOMEBODY: How comped?

ST IND REP: Wiping my phone.

HOMEBODY: Alright. Reps, sell and disappear. 

ST IND REP: Guess this is goodbye. 

“Jesus Christ,” he mumbled, pushing his chair away from the table and letting his head fall back against the support of its backing. “Think they all... went that way?”

Natasha shot him a look, her hands bracing the chair backing on either side of his head as she stood up straighter, tearing her attention from the screen. 

“Go look at the other one,” she mumbled, ignoring his question. 

Tony sighed, picking up the mouse again to click out of the ‘ALL forum’ and into the chat titled  ‘HOMEBODY one way.’ This chat seemed to be more of a train of announcements and directives, with Homebody as the only user. The final messages had been sent earlier today, Tony noted, around the same time Melissa- or, he supposed, Carrie- had been caught. 

HOMEBODY: Don’t bother with the forum. Everything is compromised: sell and disappear. 

HOMEBODY: Official final check-ins on your OWN direct lines where I can see them. I will wipe the accounts and take care of the transfers. 

HOMEBODY: Goodbye. 

Tony clicked back out of the chatline, mouth set in a thin line. Natasha pushed away from the back of his chair, pacing back to the other side of the table. 

“We have to find the copy sending the directives,” she mumbled.

Tony glanced over at her. “Nat...” he protested, but she shut him up, glaring back at him. 

“She’s probably planning to run. The one we have right now is just biding her time to die,” she spat. Tony grimaced at the harsh phrasing, but slumped back in her chair. Natasha was right, after all. 

“Alright,” he gave in, holding up his hands. “When FRIDAY is done with the scans, we can find out where she lives and go-”

He was cut off abruptly. Natasha and Tony’s heads whipped around at the voice which rang out from the doorframe of the conference room, surprised expressions on both of their faces. 

“No need.” 

***

By the time Carrie had everything she needed ready to go, all stacked by the door, a couple of hours had passed. She still needed to wipe the rest of her paper trail, even though all of the various financial accounts had been taken care of.  She darted back and forth between her laptop and the window, anxiously checking to make sure nobody was coming to find her yet. By the time she finally remembered to check her phone, it was far too late.

Missed call from William 2:07 PM

Missed call from Willian 2:19 PM

“Fuck!” She hissed, unlocking her phone to call him back. On the table, her laptop sat open, cursor hovering over the coding screen for the encrypted messenger application she and her copies had been using all these years. The phone rang once, twice, three times, before it connected. 

“Carrie!” Will answered, voice frantic. “Where are you? Did you leave!?”

“No,” Carrie hissed back, pressing the phone to her ear. She skittered back over to the window overlooking the street below, peeling the curtain back to peer out. “What happened? Did she see my messages?”

“I- no, I don’t know,” Will replied, stuttering slightly. “Fuck, you need to get out of there. The fucking Hulk came down here and took her, and the Black Widow came back for her phone!”

Carrie stilled, the curtain falling slack from her fingertips. She was suddenly nauseous, a kind of vertigo creeping over her that made it feel like she had fallen even though she was still standing straight up. 

“Okay. Okay, shit,” she breathed out, trying to shake herself into motion. She stood frozen for a couple moments longer. “Don’t come back here, Will. Go home,” she said firmly, and hung up the phone. 

She stumbled back from the window, rushing back over to her laptop on the table. She bent over the keyboard, frantically typing new code into the window that would erase all of the past messages at once. 

“Idiot, idiot,” she hissed to herself. “I’ve got to get out of here. I should’ve done this first, someone could have already decrypted this! I don't have time to- fuck, I've gotta-”

“Too late.” 

Carrie froze, straightening up her spine like a deer just seeing headlights as they crest over a hill. In the reflection of the window, she could see a man standing just inside the doorframe. Slowly, as slowly as possible, she turned around to face him. 

“Carrie Greenwall. A pleasure to finally meet you,” he hummed, his one visible eye narrowing. He took a small step forward, and then another, starting toward her. “You’re attracting a lot of attention to yourself, today, did you know that?”

Carrie kept perfectly still. The man came to a halt in front of her, not two feet of space left between them. He leaned lower, to speak at her height. 

“Your phone has good encryption.” 

Carrie’s eyes widened, and a soft tch of annoyance slipped through her gritted teeth. The man straightened back up, examining her. After a moment, he leaned over her again, then reached one arm past her, closing her laptop where it lay on the table behind her. 

“You should leave that. I’m sure Stark is playing with it now… not that it matters. You see, we’ve been tracking you for a while now.” 

“And who is we ?” Carrie managed, her voice shaky as she forced herself to speak. The expression of the man in front of her didn’t waver. 

He straightened back up to his full height. As he did, he caught his hand against her shoulder. His fingers pressed into her skin, and her expression flickered nervously to watch them for a moment. “S.H.I.E.L.D. has taken a keen interest in your power.”

Carrie cursed under her breath. “How did you find out?”

The man raised an eyebrow. “The war.” 

Carrie’s eyes slipped close, a frustrated look flickering over her face. “Right.”

The man watched her. Although he didn’t smile, he seemed pleased. 

“I’m here to offer you a deal.”