Lin Xiu lightly bit the tip of his tongue with his back teeth.
As the Oracle System's red warning flashed across his retina, he was crouched in the rainwater of an old Brooklyn alley, his fingertips still stained with the lingering chill of Loki's spatial rift.
The golden light from Kamar-Taj was like a thin needle, piercing the excitement that had just risen from his lightning energy compatibility surpassing 91%—what did the Ancient One's gaze mean?
He knew all too well.
"Shut down all external signals." He spoke softly to his wrist armor. The Nanite Swarm immediately receded into the armor's seams like a falling tide, and even the breathing lights dimmed into a gray that matched the night.
The communicator retained only the quantum-encrypted channel to Leo Kahn. That was the trust of an underground energy dealer he had bought with three crates of Vibranium scrap.
A vibration came from his palm.
Leo's holographic projection appeared through the curtain of rain. The middle-aged man, who always had a cigar clenched between his teeth, now had his brow tightly furrowed, static flickering around the projection's edges. "I just intercepted data from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s weather satellites. The Eye of the Storm will pass New York's offshore waters in three days." He brought up a stream of blue data. "A multi-cell thunderstorm, lasting seventeen hours. Its coverage includes... the abandoned radar station you tested at last time."
Lin Xiu's pupils contracted slightly.
His fingers swept through the air, and the data stream reorganized in the rain. The moment the thunderclouds' trajectory overlapped with the radar station's coordinates, he heard his own heartbeat drown out the rain.
Three days—enough time to set up energy reflectors and a quantum interference grid. More importantly—
"A signal source that simulates the Tesseract's frequency." He snapped his fingers