The first thing Arabella Stark noticed when she woke up was that her phone had exploded. Not literally—that had happened once, with a prototype—but the screen was lit up like a Christmas tree, notifications stacked so high they blurred together. It was the first day of senior year, and the world was already clamoring for a piece of her.

Her room was a testament to a life lived in the crosshairs of attention. A framed photo of her father and mother at a gala sat on her nightstand, next to a half-finished equation scrawled on a sticky note. A signed poster from a boy band her father had bought at an auction hung slightly crooked on the wall. Outside her window, Manhattan stretched out, glittering in the early morning light.

Downstairs, the familiar sounds of Stark Tower waking up filtered up through the building—the low hum of machinery, the clatter of something being moved in the workshop, and her mother's voice, calm and commanding, on a business call. Somewhere, probably, her father was already elbow-deep in an engine block or inventing something that would change the world by lunch.

A threat, delivered with the kind of grace only Pepper Potts could manage. It was going to be that kind of day.