Chapter 17: The Budapest Breach

The alert reached Tony's lab at 4:12 AM, which was early even by his standards, routed through a SHIELD-adjacent sensor network he maintained independently on the grounds that SHIELD's automated threat-flagging had the response latency of a sedated golden retriever. FRIDAY processed it in under two seconds. Tony was looking at the preliminary data before his second coffee had finished brewing.

He stared at it for a long moment.

Then he said, quietly and with considerable feeling, several words that FRIDAY declined to log.