Adrian Toomes dragged his finger across the map a third time, and the black marks still didn’t move in his favor.
He stood at the workbench, hands flat on the plywood, staring down at what his fixers had spread out for him — the harbor marked in three colors, fields worked clean in red, fields still dirty in yellow, and the ones somebody else had stripped before his crews could get to them in black.
Too much black.
Way too much black.
“Same signature every time,” Mason said from the doorway.
The man had grease under his nails and a clipboard he didn’t need.
“Clean pull.
No debris.
No scorching.
Whoever’s doing it knows what they’re after and gets out fast.
Professional.”
“Professional,” Toomes said.
He didn’t look up.
“You mean better than us.”
“I mean disciplined.
Surgical.
Like they’re working to a plan, not just grabbing whatever glows.”
Toomes dragged his finger across the black marks — six fields in three weeks, all of them in the Financial District crescent he’d been bleeding since the cleanup crews moved north.
Small hauls, nothing that’d make the feds look twice, but steady.
Consistent.
The kind of consistency that put food on a table and kept the lights on.
Somebody else’s table.
Somebody else’s lights.
“They working the same fields twice?” he asked.
“No.
One pass, then gone.
Next week it’s a different block.”
Smart.
Hit it, take the cream, move before the sweeps or the competition could mark the pattern.
Toomes had been doing the same thing for months, and he’d thought he was the only one in the harbor careful enough to make it work.
Apparently not.
He straightened and looked at the wall behind the bench — schematics pinned in rows, wing-frame iterations and lift equations and a half-finished harness mock-up that’d take another year and money he didn’t have.
The world had dumped a fortune in alien scrap into the water and told men like him to go back to tearing out drywall for seventeen an hour while Stark Industries built a tower on top of it.
No.
He’d earned his piece.
His crew had earned their piece.
They’d bled for it in the ruins while the feds were still counting bodies, and nobody — not Stark, not Damage Control, not some disciplined little thief with a clean signature — was going to take that away because they thought he wouldn’t notice.
“You got a location?” Toomes asked.
Mason hesitated.
“Not solid.
But the pattern says they’re working out of somewhere near Pier Eleven.
That’s the center of the radius.
And there’s been talk.”
“Dockworker saw something three nights ago.
Thought it was a barge, but it was too high and too quiet.
Didn’t think much of it till I started asking around.
Another guy swears he saw lights over the condemned platform off Eleven last week.
Just for a minute, then gone.”
Toomes turned that over.
A platform.
Condemned, which meant the city wasn’t watching it, and close enough to the good fields that you could work them and be home before dawn.
He’d used a setup like that himself two months ago, before the harbormaster started checking registrations.
“You think they’re camping it?” he said.
“Could be.
Or using it as a depot.
Either way, it’s the closest thing we’ve got to an address.”
Toomes looked back at the map.
Pier Eleven.
He knew the stretch — old industrial, mostly wreckage and rats now, a place a crew could hole up in if they didn’t mind the smell and kept their heads down.
A crew.
Not one man.
You didn’t pull six clean fields in three weeks alone, not with the feds and the weather and the scrap turning half the waterfront into a hot zone.
You needed hands.
Discipline.
A foreman who knew what he was doing.
Like Toomes did.
The thought sat wrong for a second — not anger, just…
recognition.
Somebody out there was doing the same math he was, making the same moves, feeding the same kind of people the same way.
Working men who’d been shut out and told to go home empty while the rich sorted the haul.
Part of him — the part that’d grown up in Queens watching his old man get squeezed by every contractor who could afford to — wanted to respect it.
The rest of him had a wife and a daughter and eight men on payroll who trusted him to make the next month’s rent happen, and respect didn’t put food on the table.
“What do you want us to do?” Mason asked.
Toomes was quiet for a long moment.
His gaze drifted to the wing schematic — the frame that’d let a man fly, if he could just finish it, if he had the time and the materials and nobody taking his fields while he worked.
“I want to know who they are,” he said.
“Faces.
Names.
How many.
Then I want them off my water.”
“You want us to board them?”
“I want you to take the fields back.
If they’re not…” He shrugged.
“Then they’ll learn.”
Mason nodded slowly.
“When?”
“Soon.
Few days.
I want a clean picture first.
No mistakes.
We do this quiet, we do it right, and we do it so they know the piece they’ve been taking wasn’t theirs to begin with.”
“Got it.”
Mason left.
The door banged shut behind him, and the warehouse went quiet again — just the hum of the space heater and the faint tick of cooling metal from the work Toomes had been doing before the fixers came in with their black-marked map.
He stood there for another minute, hands still flat on the plywood, looking at Pier Eleven.
Professional, Mason had said.
Disciplined.
Maybe.
Or maybe just desperate, same as him, and good at hiding it.
Either way, it didn’t matter.
The harbor was shrinking.
The feds were tightening.
Stark had his tower and his fortune and his smug billionaire smile, and Toomes had a warehouse and a half-built dream and a family that needed him to come home with something to show for the bleeding.
He wasn’t going to lose that to some careful little thief who thought being smart was the same as being untouchable.
He pulled the map toward him and circled Pier Eleven in red.
A few days.
Get the picture.
Take the fields back.
Send the message.
Then get back to work.
He folded the map, tucked it into his jacket, and killed the lights on his way out.
The city hummed cold and indifferent around him, and somewhere across the water, a crew that didn’t know it yet was about to learn what happened when you took food off a working man’s table.
Toomes didn’t smile.
He just walked to his truck, started the engine, and drove home to his family.
The boarding could wait till the weekend.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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