SHIELD helicarrier.

“What is it, Nick?” Natasha asked as she and Clint came into the room. Normally she’d be more formal, but well, it was private.

“We may have a problem,” Fury said. Next to him, Bruce shook his head, looking worried.

“You mean bigger than the aftermath of an alien invasion?” Clint asked. The monitors behind Fury were still showing the clean up activity, dead Chitauri leviathans being removed from the roads while crews of LEOs were trying to track down all the tech that had been scattered over the city.

“Yes.” Fury gestured at one screen, a map of the United States on it. “Loki may have been more active than we knew.”

“After the fight,” Bruce said. “Tony and I were working on a worldwide system—SPYEYE, to detect any further attempts to open a portal.”

“But Thor has the Tesseract,” Natasha said.

“But the power from the Tesseract might be something someone could duplicate.” Banner shrugged. “Tony has some ideas on that, and he’s locked himself in his lab.”

Natasha glanced at Clint, and he gave an almost imperceptible nod. Of all of them, Tony had the least experience in combat. Given his past… instability, Natasha had a good idea of what Banner meant.

“But, SPYEYE started getting hits last week, three weeks after the invasion,” Fury said, calling up a close map of a city called Arcadia. “Sporadic, and the signature is…”

“Different from either the Tesseract or the Bifrost, but definitely related.” Bruce shook his head. “Just a few at first, but now we’re getting these little flashes, like clusters, all through the city, though we can’t really localize them.”

“But open up enough little holes…” Clint said, leaning forward.

“And you can bring through a big army.” Fury called up another image, this one showing children running around, some waving their arms frantically. One Asian girl, fully dressed, was screaming at people to stop looking at her, trying to cover herself with her hands. “And then this happened—an entire school had a simultaneous freakout, involving bad dreams, which happened to them when they were awake. It’s only by good luck none of them were hurt—” the imagery cut to a security camera showing the road in front of the school and a kid almost being hit by a truck as he ran from something invisible.

“Loki’s staff?” Clint hissed. “He used it on kids?”

“We don’t know,” Bruce said. “None of the adult victims behaved so erratically.”

“No, we just killed people,” Clint said. “And did the best job we could of it.”

Natasha winced. Clint really hated Loki.

“But Loki is gone, the staff is waiting for Thor, and we don’t know what impact gradually losing its influence would have on children,” Fury said. “Just like we don’t know what was so important in a little bedroom community to attract Loki.”

“And make him subtle,” Bruce said. “Remember New York.”

Natasha had a sudden, worried feeling. “What if he was deliberately keeping quiet here?”

“That, Agent Romanov, is one of our biggest worries. What if New York was the distraction and Arcadia the main event? You and Hawkeye will be flying in today—we have a covert field for the jet. Rodgers will be joining you in a few days.”

“What about Bruce?” Hawkeye asked.

“I’ll be refining SPYEYE,” Bruce said. “We’ll be moving closer, but until we figure out what caused that,” he pointed at the school and panicked children. “I don’t think you want the Big Guy around.”

Natasha didn’t have the feign her shudder. “Cover?”

“Some teachers decided they wanted to take their sick days. The school’s been shorthanded for some time, so you’ve got a PE gig, Clint. and Natasha will be replacing the nurse.”

“Great,” Clint said. “High school.”

Natasha nodded. Good cover, though, nobody bothered to get to know subs, and between PE and the nurse's office, they’d be well suited to cover the school.

“What about Rodgers?” she asked.

“He’ll be staying in a hotel, doing the tourist thing. He’ll be around, but no need for you to meet except by accident.”

Good. And not many people are likely to recognize him. There hadn’t been a lot of good shots during a small war in NYC, after all. And for people new to town, bumping into each other would be easy, though they could also use their coms.

“Not the best cover,” she said. “But it should work, especially if you want us to trigger a re—”

A sudden beeping sound interrupted her as the image of Arcadia started blinking.

“What is it?”

“More signals. They’ve been getting more common.” Banner frowned. “I don’t like this, guys.”

“Which means we’re running out of time,” Fury said. “Barton, Romanov, you have your orders.”

The tennis ball flew through a portal, only to fly out of another one in time to nearly bean Jim in the head before he got his shield up.

“Almost got you, Jim,” Claire said.

“And you’re not even breathing hard,” Toby said. “You’ve been making portals for almost an hour!”

“Not big ones,” Claire pointed out.

“But far bigger than any you’ve made before, especially in such short succession,” Blinky said. “To say nothing of your ability to enable us to enter this deserted warehouse!” The Troll looked around the dimly lit building. “A place both large and secluded, where we have no worries of being discovered!”