“I got Toby into the office today,” Natasha said. Everyone was listening in. “He tried to grill me.”

Clint chuckled. “How far did that go?”

“Well, he knows I’ve been to Budapest,” Natasha said. “And I got his life story—mostly what we know, but over the last couple of months, he’s been doing something, and he was trying to hide it.” Natasha shook her head in her apartment. The kid had made the typical mistake—describing some things in painful detail, normal, ordinary things that you just didn’t remember, and then barely able to remember things that he should have remembered. He’d invented a story but never planned to actually have to tell it.

“Are they human?” Fury asked.

“Yah.” Clint chuckled. “Or they have teenage hormones. Mary made a joke about Jim and Claire being late for sexy face-time reasons, and I think he might have actually caught fire he turned so red.”

“So why are they running around making portals, and who are they talking to?” Fury said. “And are they being used by Loki?”

“Thor said that the staff’s effects should have faded, and they all did,” Steve said. “I think this is something different. You got my report on the town, right?”

“We’ve finished looking at all the old records,” Fury responded. “And we found something very interesting.” A holograph was projected in front of Natasha’s face.

“What am I looking at?”

“Hobo symbol for danger. Apparently, during the Great Depression, Arcadia was the one place that had no hobo problem—at least not more than one day. At night they got out, or vanished.” Fury flicked another image up. “1970s, they had the Milk Carton Epidemic. Over forty kids vanished from the town and surrounding regions. Tapered off during the 1980s, and it was assumed to be the work of a serial killer. SHIELD of the time investigated, but they bounced.” He shrugged. “It’s only been in the last few decades that the town has recovered. Not many people wanted to live here for most of the 1980s and 1990s.”

“So, not Loki.”

“Unlikely,” Thor said. He was with Fury on the carrier.

Thor was great in a fight, but other than the Hulk, Natasha couldn’t think of anyone less likely to fit in. Tony was at his mansion, working on a new suit of armor, but at the speed he flew, that wasn’t an issue.

“I got a bug on Toby and Jim,” Natasha said. “Claire’s been a bit harder. I didn’t want to tip my hand.”

“Any talk?” Fury asked.

“Normal stuff,” Natasha said. “But they’ve been—” Abruptly, the pad gave a beep. “They jumped again.”

“SPYEYE shows that it’s from the Nunez’s house… second signature at the Lakes and… the Domzalski house and a fourth one close to where the bugs’ signals vanished.” Bruce paused. “Well, now we know they’re controlling it and how nobody sees them running around.”

“So why haven’t they ported directly to their destination?” Fury asked.

“Maybe they can’t see before they arrive—they might not want to risk appearing in front of someone,” Natasha said. But then the bugs started relaying words, and everyone fell silent.

“Jim, Angor isn’t going to wait very long,” Claire’s voice sounded.

“I know, Claire, but we can’t exactly try to chop his hand off—remember Mom?”

“I know,” Claire huffed. “But I just wish we could fix this—I’m worried about Enrique, what might happen to him…”

A hostage situation? But she’d seen Claire’s brother yesterday. “Fury, I think we’re on a time limit here.”

“Agreed. Rodgers, Barton, Romanov, meet them. Stark, get in your suit and get here ASAP. Thor, you as well.” Fury’s voice was grim. “Detain and interview.”

“I’ll focus on tracking them if they try to portal away,” Bruce said, not sounding unhappy at all to be missing a fight.

Natasha was furious. The tracker she’d put on Jim had shown where he and the other kids kept going—and then it vanished like it was some kind of shielded location. They couldn’t let them get there, especially since they had no idea of potential allies—or more likely, captors. Worse was the audio they now had as they were closing on the kids.

“We can’t fight him,” Jim had said. “For now, I have to do what he tells us to.”

“Jim, we can help—”

“But what about my Mom? And they can be anyone.”

Which means they’re definitely being blackmailed, possibly mind-controlled. Worse, they could be telling the truth.

“I’m on route to cut them off from where they go off coms. Clint?”

“On it.” Clint was moving over the rooftops, trying to get ahead of the kids. A bedroom community, with its low buildings and spread out housing really didn’t play to a sniper’s strength.

“Moving in from the North,” And there was Steve.

“Thor and Stark are inbound,” Fury said.

“Don’t trust us to handle three kids?” Natasha asked, trying to lighten the mood. On the other hand, Thor and Iron Man would go a long way to convincing anyone, especially three teens, that starting a fight was a bad idea.

“If they are kids,” Fury said.

“They are,” Clint said, his voice certain. “Did you hear Lake start stuttering when Mary joked about him and Claire? I don’t care how good you are. You can’t fake that.”

“Right,” Steve said. “We don’t know if they’re being controlled, blackmailed, or just don’t know what’s going on, but they may fight us with lethal force. But they’re kids. We take them down fast, and we do it non-lethally. Tony, what have you got?”

“Not a lot,” Tony said, rocketing towards Arcadia. “Fury told me we might be seeing more Chitauri, so I’m loaded up with heavy firepower… A couple of foam tips for my missiles, and I can turn the repulsors down, but that’s it.”

“I’ve got enough,” Clint said. “But the kids are fast—they’ve been sandbagging at PE. Don’t underestimate them.”

“Right,” Tony said. “Fast, but gentle… and that really didn’t sound as creepy in my head as it just did aloud.”

“They’re two blocks short of the bridge where they keep vanishing,” Natasha said. “I’ll intercept them first, do the talking.”

“Counting on teen hormones?” Clint asked. “Lake’s head over heels for Claire.”

“No, I’m hoping they won’t want to beat up their nurse, and that’ll give us time to de-escalate.”

“Well, that’d be a first for us…” Tony said.

Nobody gainsayed him.