Chapter 4
There’s actually something kind of fun about getting knocked off your feet by an explosion. Her abilities minimize the pain of the impact, so most of what she feels is flying backwards through the air. It’s fun in the way a rollercoaster is fun, if immediately upon getting off the rollercoaster you had to go into the office and work overtime. Because funnily enough, she’s never been knocked off her feet by an explosion and then just gotten to walk away. There’s always work to be done when she stands back up.
She gets back to her feet and holds a hand out to Vira, who takes it. Steve’s several yards away, already back on his feet and running to the sidewalk to get a closer look at the explosion across the street.
She immediately notices something off about it. The explosion was powerful enough to knock them off their feet, but not enough to destroy the building itself. There’s damage to it--enough that they can see that that’s where the explosion originated--but it’s still mostly standing. Voices scream from inside the building, terrified, and Steve takes off running.
Leila sighs and follows after him. Vira arrives a few moments after they do. Crossing the street isn’t far enough for her to fall far behind, but Leila’s still holding onto the super-soldier serum, so the heels on her boots only slow her down behind Steve slightly.
Steve runs directly into the building, no hesitation, while Leila turns to Vira.
“Call SHIELD,” she says. “They should know about this.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Vira says. “The call I got. It was a warning.”
“What did they say?”
Vira takes a moment, like she’s preparing herself.
“They said ‘this is only the beginning.’”
“Vira,” Leila says, after all the civilians have been ushered out, “can you handle the picnic?”
“I’ve handled worse,” she says, and heads across the street. Leila turns back to Steve, hovering near the door of the library.
“This shouldn’t be possible. The explosion was too controlled.”
“You didn’t find a second site?” Steve asks, as if that’s not the first thing she would’ve told him upon returning from looking for one. She was going to stay and help with the civilians, but that’s the thing--it really wasn’t a two-person job.
“No. It had to have come from here.”
“So how’d it knock us off our feet from across the street and yet not kill a single person inside the building?”
Leila closes her eyes for a moment, thoughtfully. “Vira got a call right before the explosion hit. Voice was pitched, but apparently they said ‘this is only the beginning’ before hanging up.”
“So there could be another bomb about to go off at any moment,” Steve says.
“Exactly.”
“And if the bomber could figure out how to rig this--” he gestures to the library-- “they could also figure out how to rig something bigger and deadlier.”
She nods.
“Only question is,” he continues, “why would they? If they were going to kill people, why not do it now?”
“Theatrics,” Leila says.
“Or attention.”
“Same bitch.” Leila shrugs. “Vira called SHIELD. Couldn’t get through to anybody that matters.”
“So what do we do in the meantime?”
“We keep trying to get in touch and wait for further intel. SHIELD has the best hackers on the planet, aside from maybe Stark, and there has to be a digital trail behind this.”
“No. We need to act now,” Steve says, and he’s not being dramatic about it--the shift into Captain mode is seamless and almost unnoticeable--but she could swear she’s never seen anyone with that much conviction before. “Before more people get hurt.”
Leila considers this for a moment. On the one hand, it’s definitely against SHIELD protocol, and she hasn’t been given authorization to act. The reason intelligence exists is because when you go in without all the answers, sometimes you make things worse instead of better. And while she’s pretty sure her newfound status as an Avenger has given her some extra leeway on the leash SHIELD has her on, she’d rather not take the risk of getting locked up.
On the other hand, she knows that Steve is going to act no matter what she says, and the optics of her sitting on her ass while he does that is not going to win any favors from him, for her or for SHIELD. And surely trying to follow a direct order from Fury himself outweighs following protocol, right?
There’s a third, smaller factor, which is her own curiosity about the case, and as something shiny and black catches her eye on the ground, it becomes the deciding factor.
“Fine,” she says finally. “Executive decision. This is officially a SHIELD case.”
“You have that authority?”
“I mean, no one’s specifically told me I don’t,” she replies. “Now shut up.”
“Why--” he starts, but she waves a hand and follows the gleam of light to a piece of metal just inside the broken doorway, barely visible under the debris.
“I think I know how they controlled the explosion,” she says, her fears confirmed, and pulls the metal out from under the wreckage, dusting it off. It’s about 8-by-5, and definitely metal, but beetle-black and scaly, and still warm from whatever it was just used for.
She holds it up for Steve to see, and he recognizes it immediately.
“They have Chitauri tech.”
“Did we see any explosions like that during the battle?”
“There was a lot going on, I wasn’t paying attention to explosion patterns.”
“Me either,” she says with a sigh. “But it has to at least hypothetically be possible to direct the vibrations of an explosion like that. I mean, we saw what they were capable of. It can’t be a coincidence.”
“So how’d the bomber get access to alien technology?”
“I mean, you said it, Cap. It was a big mess. Fuck, there’s still probably chitauri leftovers floating around the black market.”
“Fantastic.”
“I know.”
“What about the call? Can we track him that way?”
“If we had SHIELD analysts on our team, maybe. I’ll ask Vira to go through people who might have her number, but it’s more likely they managed to hack one of the lower security SHIELD databases.”
“So there’s basically no way to trace this guy?”
“I didn’t say that.” She turns back to the library. “And don’t assume it’s a guy.”
It’s a guy.
Hacking isn’t Leila’s strongest ability, but she’s decent at it, and while most of the public computers in the library are damaged, the head librarian is all too willing to let them borrow one of the private ones, once Leila flashes her a badge.
She can’t see a lot about the guy--she checks both the city’s cameras outside and the library’s indoor security cameras--but she can tell it’s most likely a man, probably on the shorter side but not short. It’s always infuriating how effective a baseball cap can be.
“So that was useless,” Leila says irritably, turning around in the swivel chair. Steve steps back to dodge her just barely.
“At least we ruled out half the population,” he says.
“Probably. Not definitively.”
He doesn’t argue. “So now what?”
“Now we profile.” She keeps spinning in the chair; it’s helping her think, weirdly. “People set off bombs for three main reasons. He didn’t kill anyone. In fact, he went out of his way not to kill anyone.”
“Good for him.”
“And he wasn’t trying to be a hero, otherwise he wouldn’t have left the scene and not come back.”
“So that means he was trying to send a message,” Steve adds.
“We just don’t know what.”
“Which means he’ll have to do it again. Try to make his point louder this time.”
“We just don’t know when or where.”
Working it out with him out loud feels natural, almost too natural. It doesn’t even feel like a conversation; more like a stream of consciousness. Every time she has a thought, he voices it.
Steve’s not quite a stranger anymore, but they aren’t, like, friends, although she doesn’t know if he’d say describe it that way. It’s a little unsettling, but it’s also sort of thrilling, and it probably doesn’t say anything good that connecting with another human is so foreign that it feels good to talk about a bomb threat, but she sets that aside for now. She’s never been under the impression that her particular form of introversion is healthy; it’s not news.
“Steve,” she says, “what are the odds that he’d set off a bomb--”
“Right across the street from the Howling Commandos family reunion?” he finishes.
“Which only meets once a year?”
“I’d say not good. He wanted our attention.”
“He wanted your attention. No one knew I was gonna be here. Unless you were bragging about it, which is understandable.”
He rolls his eyes, but she can see a smile tugging at his lips. “Okay. What’d he want my attention for? What did he think was gonna happen?”
“I mean, he knew you’d get involved. It is your brand.”
“Okay, but why me, specifically?”
“Have you managed to piss anyone off in the five minutes you’ve been awake?”
“Enough to make them set off a bomb? Not to my knowledge.”
Leila thinks on this, spinning faster. “Then I don’t know,” she says finally, annoyed at her own lack of conclusion.
There’s a silence in the room for a moment. There’s an ace in the hole she can use, but she’s not supposed to use it without authorization unless it’s an absolute emergency. She doesn’t think it is, yet, but doing it might reflect well on SHIELD for Steve--
Before she can finish her train of thought, Vira comes in, followed by the head librarian, both ashen.
“You’re going to want to see this,” Vira says.