Kath is a Stupid Genius
Everyone she knew said Kath was dangerously arrogant. She acted as though she knew everything, even when you were the one teaching her something. She spoke with an ingrained awareness that she was just right. She was prideful to the extreme that her friends sometimes wanted to break her nose just to get her to stop reveling in her own ingenuity.
Kath thought, frankly, that hacking into Tony-mothafucking-Stark’s private server constituted a bit of pride.
“Wa-wa-wait,” said Keys. He was a Black guy with buzzed hair and a crooked nose that had been broken way too many times for Kath to keep count. “Actually? For real? You actually did it? I cannot believe you actually did it. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God . . .”
Kath wiggled her eyebrows. “I’m in,” she sad, deepening her voice. She raised a finger to silence any more conversation so she could concentrate on making a back door. Fifteen minutes later, she grinned triumphantly.
The four of them—Kath, Keys, Kai, and Klark—were huddled together around a bright blue screen. The room they were in was practically crumbling; Kath was tempted to say it had seen better days, but she was actually almost positive the entire building was constructed with the purpose of being ugly and unsound, so better wasn’t really better at all. But, even though a rat lurked somewhere in the corner and the insulation was pretty much just wood and concrete and maybe a little Styrofoam in some places, the warehouse served its purpose sufficiently for the four of them: it was nondescript, had several holes in the walls for escape, and it was right smack dab in the middle of a really, really rough part of Queens.
Practically a criminal’s heaven.
Criminals like them, at least. People who didn’t have a better option and who could hold their own against any trouble that came with the abandoned warehouse.
The four of them, each wearing a black cloth mask, were all sitting on the floor. Ten hours ago, Kath had made the concrete resolution to never, ever, let her clothes actually come in contact with the floor; she would squat however long it took to smash into Stark’s servers. Two hours in, she had shifted her footing because perching on the soles of your feet in a cold warehouse is in fact not comfortable in the slightest, and that shift in focus had caused her to almost be detected by Stark’s pesky A.I. She had screamed, “Fuck!” and sat down and then had to spend the next thirty minutes adrenaline-filled and tense as she patched over every single trace of her digital footprint started all over. Once she had gotten the situation under a tenuous control, she had mentally calculated how much time she’d had before Stark’s A.I. noticed her. Three seconds. She hadn’t told the boys, and she had been sitting down ever since, acting like that was her plan all along.
Kai and Keys had gone out five hours ago to lift some blankets and food. They had offered Kath some, but she refused, choosing to operate in complete silence aside from the clicking of keys and Klark slurping his cold ramen.
“What do you see?” demanded Klark to her right, a pale-skinned guy with wavy, brown hair that reached his shoulders and bluish-greenish eyes. He was leaning over Kai’s shoulder, almost shoving him out of the way as he tried to get a look at the computer.
“Nothing, yet,” said Kath. “This is his server, but I haven’t opened any files yet. Didn’t think I’d make it this far.”
“You?” said Klark, scoffing. “You doubted yourself?”
“Crazy, right? It’s almost as if this is Tony Stark’s—Iron Man’s—private server.”
“Still, I thought you were all ‘I-am-capable-of-anything’.”
“Well, I clearly am capable of anything. I hacked into it, didn’t I? Doesn’t mean I was one hundred percent sure the whole time.”
“Shut your mouths and open something,” said Keys, leaning over her left shoulder.
Kath quirked her mouth to the side, then clicked on a folder titled ‘WIPs’. A dozen more folders were stored in it, with titles like ‘Team’s Upgrades’ and ‘Nanotech’. Kath’s eyebrows lifted of their own accord at the nanotech folder and she was browsing through its contents the next second, the boys quietly snooping with her.
“This is insane,” said Klark. He jabbed at a file called ‘Nanowire Dev’. “He’s building circuits with atoms.”
“And Kath managed to hack his server,” muttered Kai. With Indian ancestry and dark eyes, Kai was the most serious of the four of them. He had dark brown—nearly black—hair and scars on his knuckles. Out of the four of them, Kai was also the best fighter.
“Pshhh!,” said Kath with a wave of her hand.
“Click somewhere else,” said Klark eagerly, like a puppy. “And scoot forward. Kai’s shoulder’s too big for me to look around,” he whined.
After exchanging an amused look with Kai, Kath obeyed and Klark settled between her back and the wall, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and sticking his head in the crook of her neck. Kath tensed but otherwise was fine with the contact.
Back in the main page, Kath browsed through some of the files. Her heart kept doing a weird somersault with every abrupt noise or movement. She could tell her friends were jumpy, too. Still, even if it was nerve-wracking, they had not wasted the first week of their newfound freedom hacking into Stark’s server for nothing.
“OoOh!” exclaimed Klark excitedly. “ ‘Pep’s Gift Ideas’,” he read from the screen. “That’s gotta be Pepper Potts, right?”
Kath laughed in disbelief, a high-pitched noise that echoed in the chilly room. “Yeah . . .” It hit her again that these was Tony Stark’s personal files. Stuff on Potts, Black Widow, Captain America, Hawkeye, Hulk, Thor . . . all of it was in here. It gave her a rush.
Stark’s gift ideas for Potts were personalized tablet, advanced A.I. companion, nanotechnical jewelry, and a penthouse in upstate New York. Y’know, pretty casual gifts.
“Damn,” said Keys, examining the computer-generated diagrams for a nano-necklace. “He’s rich, rich.”
“Naw, those are actually the exact same ideas I had for your birthday,” replied Kath. “It’s funny, his diagrams are almost identical to mine.”
“Wow, even the necklace? Kath, you shouldn’t have.”
“Well, my necklace designs has hearts and rainbows in it. Stark clearly doesn’t know how to treat someone well.”
“You’re right,” said Keys, nodding seriously. “And you better have an island for me, Kath, not just some cheap ass penthouse in god damn upstate New York.”
Kath smirked but didn’t reply. Her gaze snagged on an anomaly in the terminal window she had open. The window, a small box in the corner displaying strings of code in green characters, suddenly glitched. Kath’s heart jumped up her throat.
“Fuuuuuuck . . .” she whispered, elbowing the boys to make room for herself. Her fingers flew across the keyboard, furious and rapid and panicky. The boys picked up on her anxiety and gave her some space. Klark moved out from behind her and began superstitiously picking up their belongings and gathering them into a bag.
Kath glanced up only long enough nod solemnly; they would need to run most likely.
“Bob,” she gritted through her teeth, mostly focused on the screen before her. “Run operation ‘Graffiti’ real quick for me, yeah?”
Her A.I., a little green cartoon that occasionally flitted around her screen, flashed a thumbs up and jumped into action. He was in charge of doing the mindless things that didn’t require any advanced problem solving. Operation ‘Graffiti’ was a little thing she and Klark had concocted—something that would leave their mark on Stark’s server.
“What’s happening?” said Kai, voice tense.
“Stark’s A.I. detected us. I—should’ve been paying more attention”—she paused for a moment to keep Stark’s A.I. from accessing her front view camera—“but the A.I. is good. It’s trying to access our files—voice recordings stored in Bob’s database, our camera—god damn—fuck—hold on . . . it’s trying to pinpoint our location. Damn it, that’s good. It’s really, really good.”
“Good for us?” said Klark hopefully.
Kath snorted distractedly. “Good A.I. Stark has a really good A.I. Too good. It’s formed a kind of trap. God damn it all to fucking hell—Jesus H. Fucking Christ—” she dissolved into a string of language so colorful Bob flashed onto the screen for a split second, raising his animated eyebrows comically. She halfheartedly smirked at her own creation.
The boys knew not to distract her when she was like this. Kath was a genius and a proud one at that. She was usually above showing such effort—cursing loudly was to her like saying ‘I’m losing and I can’t do anything about it but complain’—so that fact that she was very artfully doing it now meant they were in some deep shit.
After a few minutes of uneasy concentration, Kath said, “Problem. I think Stark has taken over for his A.I.” The code flashing before her eyes suddenly became more chaotic, unpredictable, but some of the cleverest bit of programming she had ever seen. “Bob, operation ‘Distraction’. Now.”
Bob must have detected the urgency in her voice (yay for artificial intelligence!) because he didn’t even animate himself on the screen. Working in the background, Bob began to penetrate Stark’s files—the real important ones with classified information like intel on the Avengers’ enemies, S.H.I.E.L.D mission reports, weaponry designs. Kath didn’t care for any of it but she knew Stark would flip out when he saw his highly secure files being accessed; he would be distracted; maybe she could use his shift in focus to wipe her virtual tracks from his software.
Maybe.
Stark’s A.I. countered Bob’s efforts to extract the files. Stark stayed focused on her. Kath gritted her teeth and tried to keep her fingers from trembling. Stark deployed numerous attempts to get her location, access to her camera, or control over her computer. Right now, she was on the defense. She evaded him by altering her IP to the remote computer she was stealing processing power from. The computer was somewhere in Russia, she thought, and had much better memory and CPU speed than the pathetic laptop she currently had. Kath managed to override his screen for a total of two minutes by forcing an image to appear whenever he typed in a character.
For the first second of those two minutes, she let herself laugh the tiniest bit. The image was a poor-quality meme from, like, seven years ago showcasing a hacker in a black mask saying “I’ve hacked the mainframe.”
The next one minute and fifty-nine seconds were spent ramming past Stark’s emergency defense protocols—operations that guarded control over his computers, bank accounts, suits, probably more that Kath couldn’t discern—without any other distractions. Bob was keeping Stark’s A.I. busy, Stark’s focus was on obliterating the Kath’s impromptu virus, and the boys, bless them, were utterly silent.
Kath took a deep breath and brushed her fingertip over the ‘enter’ command, breaking through the last of his software walls.
Immediately, the camera light flashed on, probably due to an if-statement written in Stark’s funky, ingenious code that executed an algorithm if a certain condition was met—the algorithm being to access her camera and the condition being a foreign presence in the software. “He can see us,” she said in a calm, engrossed voice. “Me. Not even going to try and fix it. I need to see what counterattacks he’s launched and stop them if I can. Don’t take your masks off.”
“No duh,” said Klark. “Told you we should’ve covered it.”
“And miss the chance to do this?” replied Kath, raising her left hand and flipping the bird. Her left fingers returned at once to the keyboard, continuing their furious typing as though they had never stopped.
“I wish she wasn’t so proud,” Klark said to Kai and Keys wistfully.
Kath didn’t bother replying as she searched for the right tool. All algorithms in the system were implemented through polymorphic code, changing so rapidly it was near-impossible to find anything. Searching took her complete concentration and her brain processed the code at lightning speeds. She needed to see if their location was found. She could technically give up now, smash the computer on the ground, and frantically run away with her friends, but the odds of Stark finding four kids in a part of town they were unfamiliar with were quite high. If she could locate and dismantle any tracking technology Stark had, then at the very least it would take several more hours for Stark to find them, and by that time her and her friends would be in the clear. As she poked around, nearly blind, Kath realized it was all one system. Stark’s server, his computers, his advanced devices were all connected for—she assumed—efficient communications. Stark was Iron Man. He probably fought people all the time and needed quick, easy access to all the tools he had. Between all the different systems were firewalls more impenetrable than the CIA’s, but still connected in a pattern Kath was beginning to see.
“This is amazing,” she muttered. “His code is unbelievably good.” The awe drained from her voice. “Too good. I don’t think I can find anything in here.”
“You got into his server, right? Just—” Kai broke off at Kath shaking her head.
“I got into his server after ten hours of carefully picking through all the defense systems and firewalls, using code that I had to almost completely imitate off Stark’s own code. I had to observe. It’s too fast right now. And this operating system—his own operating system he designed by himself with seemingly no influences from any known systems—I mean, it’s like he’s completely engineered his own way of coding . . . the pattern’s all geometric . . . I can recognize the OS’s programming pattern for sure but alter it?” She scoffed. “Maybe I can penetrate his kernel and shut down some operations—"
Bob flitted across the screen, his face the cartoony panicked expression she had animated herself.
Kath bit her lip and peered at her A.I.’s terminal. The little guy and Stark’s A.I. were communicating. The language was almost mesmerizing to try and decipher. It was a mash of her own code and Stark’s, but then something completely different at the same time, something distinctly resembling machine language with ones and zeros dominating the screen, but not making up the entire code. She peeked at Stark’s activity and nearly had a heart attack—oh, whoa, that’s clever! He had not managed to override her image-overlay virus yet, but judging by the hex codes of the image, he had made it nearly transparent so that he could view the terminal behind it.
He had turned her virus into a mere hindrance.
“Smart,” said Kath, groaning and continuing her frantic search for his tracking technology. Quickly, she gained control over the virus image’s hex code and bumped up the opacity again. She could practically feel Stark’s anger now, as his screen was once again overlayed with a crappy 2000s meme. It hit her like a truck that she was competing with Tony Stark in a virtual battle. She was actually interacting with Iron Man. She flashed a cheeky smile at the camera. Her brain operating faster than a bullet, she devised an algorithm that would hopefully stop Stark from messing with the hex codes again. She implemented it within the next thirty seconds, fingers zooming over the screen. She would have to add it to the original virus then re-launch it into Stark’s machine, but hopefully he wouldn’t have been able to patch her backdoor in the brief time he had regained visibility over his screen.
A minute later, she scrabbled to push her virus into Stark’s software. “Bob, keep on distracting, little buddy. If I have to fight them both, I won’t win.”
With a triumphant push of her pinky, her virus embedded itself once again into the software controlling Stark’s screen. She whooped but didn’t waste any more time before once again scouring the system for any software operating on Stark’s tracking devices.
“Yes!” she hissed through her teeth, finally picking up a bit of code that seemed to deal with IP addresses and longitudinal and latitudinal location rendering. She grinned at the boys, who for their part, did a pretty good job pretending they knew why she was happy.
Her smile fell half a second later.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, horrified by her computer screen.
“Run?” said Keys, hefting a backpack over his shoulder.
Kath stared at the screen a second longer, her mouth open. She nodded disbelievingly. “Run,” she agreed. “Bob, abort. Execute operation ‘Flee’.”
“Shit,” cursed Kai.
Kath slammed the laptop closed, jumped to her feet, and dashed over to the window. With practiced ease, she kicked the boards down from the window and chucked the laptop through the gaping hole. It fell about thirty feet before shattering on the asphalt outside.
Moonlight illuminated the eyeholes of four nervous teenagers.
Klark looked at her, his eyes burning with a question even as his mask hid his expression.
“Stark pinpointed our exact location five minutes ago,” Kath said in a rush. “I’m pretty sure he’s been—distracting me.”
“SHIT!” said Kai again, and the four of them sprinted out of the room. The warehouse was darkened, illuminated only through the hole Kath had just made. Soon, once they had passed deeper into the building, into the part that was more office space than expansive storage space, even that small bit of light vanished. The four of them ran in near silence through blindness, keeping track of each other through quick touches. Kai was in the front, leading them through pitch blackness.
The all flinched when the sound of wood being kicked in resonated throughout the building. A split second later, there was a loud thud, like something heavy hit the ground. Metal whirring, like . . . like a fan of some sort. Footsteps—Kath counted four pairs—echoed through the walls.
And then nothing. It was excruciatingly silent.
The four of them waited with bated breath for a few seconds. But they knew better than to stay in the same spot for too long with someone chasing them. They followed Kai further into the building, where Kath knew there was an eventual window they could break through onto the streets. They would need to split up after that—two and two. To take her mind off her anxiety, she thought to herself: At least I’ll only have to deal with one of them rather than three of them for a while. As long as it wasn’t Klark she might even get herself a little vacation.
There was no warning—suddenly, Kath found herself on the ground, her stomach on fire. She grunted from the impact. “Boys—run!!” she screamed, voice throaty and strained.
The sounds of fighting broke out around her. Klark groaned in pain, shrieking something like “Fucking cornfucks!” Keys was panting and the sound of fist on flesh floated around her mind. But Kath was out of breath, could barely think, there was no oxygen—
She drew in a shuddering breath and bolted upright, a hand automating flying to her stomach. Orange light penetrated her eye sockets. She realized what it was as Kai swung a fist at someone dressed in all black.
His fist was illuminated from a fire within.
Kath swallowed her pain and got to her feet. She rose just in time to see their assailant land a kick on Kai’s face. He went down like a puppet being cut from its strings. Kath seethed and dove at the figure, heat building inside her. She threw her arms around the assailant and tackled them to the ground, her arms alight with an internal orange light. She raised her fist, intent on planting a nice punch right in the nose of whoever attacked her friends—
Natasha Romanov stared at her and Kath froze.
A second later, the Black Widow socked her right in the eye and threw her off. A beat of her heart passed as Kath tried to process what had happened; she just laid there, her mouth open in a surprised Pikachu face. The Black Widow was so damn fast. Pain fulminated behind her eyes as a forceful foot rammed into the side of her head. Kath faintly heard Keys and Klark scuffling with the female Avenger. Flashes of orange light flickered in the darkness.
She blinked and the next thing she knew was the sound of someone shouting, “KATH!”
Consciousness swung into her almost instantly.
Keys and Kai were battling two figures. One of them was Black Widow. The other was a broad, blue-clothed man with . . . a fucking shield. Klark was exchanging blows with a man in red armor equipped with wings.
“Why do I get Fly Guy?” complained Klark, launching himself in the air to throw a kick at his opponent’s face.
“Hey, I’d watch my mouth if I were a human glowstick,” retorted the man, dodging Klark’s attack and cuffing Klark on the ear.
Klark careened to the side, grinning madly, and vaulted himself viciously at the man, who Kath now recognized as the Falcon.
Kath picked herself up, humiliated from being incapacitated not once but twice by the same person. She glanced around, back to the wall. There had been four footsteps entering the building.
Where was the fourth person?
Her entire head throbbed in agony. Not for the first time, she wished the virus in her would heal all her wounds, not just the fatal ones. Still, maybe she shouldn’t complain. Their affliction—the virus in her, Kai, Keys, and Klark—made them capable of stopping even Captain America’s fist midair.
Kai was doing that right now, in fact. While he was holding a very surprised Steve Roger’ fist, Klark gave a war cry and slogged his own fist at the man. Keys was going hand to hand with Black Widow. Keys was a good fighter—the strongest of them—and he was stronger than a human by nearly five times, but Black Widow was a fucking menace. She wove out from his punches like she was dancing and hit him hard in his most vulnerable places. She planted a kick in Keys’s midsection and the boy doubled over, wheezing painfully. Klark, enraged, swung at the woman but of course, she ducked, and Klark was left stumbling through the air. Kai and Captain America were battling fist on fist, ducking and punching, jumping and kicking, deflecting and attacking with inhuman speed and strength, but Kai was no match against a supersolider in the long run.
They needed Kath.
Wincing, she stepped towards them, the entire room spinning. Hands wrapped around her from behind. She thrashed in the new grip, fire accumulating in her veins, and whacked her elbow behind her. It connected satisfyingly with a nose. Her attacker groaned and their arms dropped immediately.
Kath spun on her feet and came face to face with Hawkeye. She threw a fist at him in a feint, then dropped to the ground to kick his legs out from under him. Hawkeye pitched to the side but with deadly grace managed to grasp onto her shoulders and roll with her. Kath grunted and blindly punched at him, her world a spinning jumble. A gloved fist came out of nowhere and she only just managed to tilt her head to the side, the fist missing her by centimeters. With a cry, she heaved with her arms and legs and sent Hawkeye about five feet from her. Her limbs glowed, and she knew her eyes would appear like molten lava. She jumped to her feet. Hawkeye, again with lethal ease that only a practiced killer could have, rolled with the momentum of her shove and landed squarely on his feet.
She got a half-glimpse of Hawkeye with his bow aimed at her face before something blue and sparky overtook her vision. Kath had about quarter of a second to think What the fuck?! before the object smacked into her forehead. Sharp prongs plunged straight through her cloth mask and into her skin. Jolts of excruciating electricity pushed into her.
She thought maybe she released a whimper.
Her eyes rolled to the back of her head and she stood there, immobilized, involuntarily trembling, wheezing. She willed the pain away. She had never wanted anything more than the pain to stop. Electricity sliced into her flesh like a barbed sword. Her vision went blurry, but she could still see the orange, fiery figures of her friends struggling against the Avengers. She gasped and shook like a fish out of water.
“Kaaaath!” screeched Klark, but his voice sounded a hundred miles away. He would be furious on her behalf. He would incinerate their attackers. Keys was the strongest of the four them. Kai, the best fighter. Kath was the smartest.
But Klark . . .
Klark was the most ruthless.
And one of them being shocked repeatedly with electrical prongs would not sit well with him at all. Not after everything they had been through. Not after the labs. The missions.
A male voice screeched in agony, the sound ripping into Kath’s eardrums and grating on her soul. She knew just from the sound of it that it wasn’t one of her friends. A second later, a wave of searing hot washed over her. There was a cacophony of yelling, shouting, and several foreboding thuds, groans of pains, hard smacks.
“We got one!” This voice was closer, unfamiliar. “Cap, Nat, retreat! Rogers, grab Wilson!”
Kath closed her eyes, the crystal clear pain washing over her again. She twitched, her nerves on fire.
Hawkeye, looking blurry and distorted, appeared in her line of sight. With a cold swiftness, he ripped the device out of her head. Kath gasped and collapsed backwards, the instant relief feeling like heaven. He caught her, his face hard. Kai and Keys were on the ground, clutching at their injuries and looking at her with terror written all over their faces. Klark was standing tall, his entire body flooded with light. His veins stood out like stark red rivers in every exposed bit of skin.
“N-n-nooooooo,” she mumbled. “Stop. Don’t . . . don’t give in. Klark.” He couldn’t hear her. He was struggling to contain the heat within him. She could see pain in his eyes. Her head lolled to the side; everything felt like mush.
Her world tilted and spun as Hawkeye slung her over his shoulder. She couldn’t even fight back. She went limp, her only view of a sideways world that bounced with every step.
For the second time that day, when she blinked, she opened her eyes to somewhere else. A black van flashed in her vision. She noticed it had the real nice, real expensive leather seats she absolutely fucking loathed. She was dumped carelessly onto the floor of the van. Her head thumped and bounced a little.
“Barton, drive—Sam, can you fly with your injury?—Widow—”
“I’m with Stark and the threat in the back.”
“Right. We need to hurry—looked like it was going to explode—Sam, breathe, you’re going to be just fine--”
The door to the van slammed shut and Captain America’s voice cut off abruptly.
“Klarrrk,” Kath moaned.
“Stark, this is more than we realized . . .” said Black Widow.
Kath shifted her head and noticed for the first time that Tony Stark was staring down at her. She lifted her eyebrows in mild surprise. His hair was more . . . bronzier than in the photos she had seen of him. The mustache was just as aristocratic and somehow arrogant-looking as the pictures, though. He wore a pair of expensive black sunglasses, which Kath thought was frankly unnecessary given it was nearly midnight and they were also currently in a van.
“Oh, I’d say it’s a shit ton more than we realized,” were the first words that came out of his mouth.
Black Widow leaned down and fastened a zip tie around Kath’s wrists. She observed Kath’s unfocused eyes. “Yeah, you’re not going anywhere. Clint got you pretty good.” To prove her point, the Avenger picked Kath up herself and made her face Tony. Kath couldn’t even sit up without her head lolling to the side. Her entire being throbbed.
“Kinky,” she muttered to Black Widow, who didn’t respond.
She realized the van was in motion now. She felt a bump in the road and nearly fell over sideways. With some grit, she exercised enough exertion to at least keep herself upright and lift her chin.
“Let me go,” she demanded, voice cracking. “My friends—”
“Your friends,” cut Tony Stark, “just mortally injured a member of my team.”
“Who? The Falcon? What happened?” demanded Kath. “And they still need my help—one of them—”
“One of them looked like he was about to implode from within,” interrupted Romanov. “I was there. Nothing I can do about it. Nothing I much care to do about it considering they tried to kill me and nearly managed to do so to my friend.”
“He could blow himself up—”
“We aren’t concerned with him at this moment,” said Romanov. “Stark here calculated the blast radius and no other buildings will be impacted if detonation occurs.”
Black Widow leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and stared her hard in the eyes.
“What we’re concerned with is you,” she said in a threatening voice. “If you cooperate, when we find your partners, we will consider a lesser sentence for all of you. If you cooperate.”
Kath pinched her mouth and seethed.
“Let me go,” she snarled in her most dangerous voice.
“Fat chance,” said Stark. “No one hacks into my private server without consequences.” He leaned over, his hand reaching toward her, and Kath flinched away. Stark, utterly nonplussed, just held her shoulder to still her and plucked the mask off her face. Kath was hit with a rush of air.
She was a scrawny girl, with cheekbones that stood out and a jawline that screamed “underfed” . Her eyes were a chocolate brown, and her hair was bronze-colored. Her nose was slightly big, and usually only slightly crooked, but right now it was an ugly purple, a line of red jutting across it and disfiguring it.
Natasha Romanov and Tony Stark stared at her, shocked.
Kath gave them the cruelest smile she possibly could.
“An actual Script Kiddie hacked me,” Stark said after a while, swallowing. He exchanged a glance with Black Widow, the unspoken communication between them nearly palpable.
Kath bristled, then scoffed. “Script Kiddie? Seriously? I just hacked you, man. Have enough respect for yourself not to call me an amateur.”
“What are you, fifteen?”
“I’m as much an adult as you are. You have no right to call me a kid—”
“No right?” said Stark in disbelief. “No right?”
Kath met his stare challengingly, not backing down.
Stark tightened his mouth, an emotion on his face that toed the line between fury and—something else. “Kid, you and your friends hacked into my private server—”
“—that was all me, actually—”
“Oh, well then I guess your friends are completely innocent, then. Excepting the fact that they resisted an Avengers arrest, attacked my team members, then maimed one of them.” Stark, however concerned he was about her age, definitely sounded enraged now. The anger laced his tone, infused it, and Kath had never felt so—
Reprimanded.
She huffed. She was not a child.
“Black Widow attacked us first,” she pointed out.
“After you and your—what was that thing? An A.I.?—after you and your A.I. attempted to extract valuable, classified information from an Avenger,” said Stark. “That’s akin to breaking into the CIA and robbing them of critical governmental files.”
“Like you’ve never hacked into a government agency,” said Kath snarkily. She was guessing, of course; there was no way she could with a hundred percent certainty prove he had done any such thing. But the man was, like herself, a bit arrogant. A bit arrogant and a genius. She quirked her mouth to the side. “In fact, I’d bet money that you regularly hack S.H.I.E.L.D.’s database just because you’re curious and you can.”
Stark did not react aside from angling his eyebrows slightly. “You see, skiddie, the difference there is the intent. I’ll hand it to you, I’ve nosed my way into a lot more shit than I’d care to admit. But I’ve never attempted to steal highly classified files, because I am aware of the damage that could be done to thousands of people if the information got into the wrong hands.”
Kath breathed a little sigh that was half a laugh. “Stark, you’re practically building my argument for me. I didn’t steal the files; my A.I. attempted to steal them. It was a distraction for your A.I. . . . Friday? Is that its name? Your use of ASCII is a bit wonky of course, but I think that’s what your programs referred to it as.” She was getting off track. She did that a lot. “Anyway, I didn’t want your files. We didn’t want your files. We didn’t even look through all the highly classified shit. All I saw were your nanotech designs and your cute little gift ideas for ‘Pep’.”
At that, something hardened in Stark’s eyes. There was a palpable shift in his composure. He went from regarding her as a potential threat and angry because she hacked him to looking at her with barely concealed fury.
“Stark,” said Black Widow, apparently having noticed the change as well.
Stark seethed, opened his mouth, clamped it.
Kath might have—possibly—started to perhaps, just a little bit, really not much at all—she was starting to think she should not have hacked this man. When Klark suggested it, that goofy, intense grin on his face, she should have countered with, “How bout we just spend the day hacking the CIA and then go on with our lives.” It could have been fun, even. She could’ve implanted a virus that wreaked waves of havoc through all government agencies. Or even leaked some of the shit the CIA gets into online. That would have been so interesting.
But, perhaps like a dunderhead, she said to Klark, “Ooh, good idea,” then promptly demanded he go steal her a laptop.
And now she was tied up in a van belonging to the Avengers, Tony Stark staring at her with an emotion that made her chest twinge, and Klark—
Bluntly, things were not looking good for her, her friends, or their freshly free lives. She was not getting out of this easily.
So Kath took a deep breath and told herself the only way out was through.