Like all third-world Hell-holes, this one was cold, dark, and prone to crime and intestinal parasites, and like all people living in third-world Hell-holes, Kyla Amano had found herself able to ignore it after a lifetime of breathing the toxic air and listening to the wolf-whistles as she walked down the street. She was the master of tolerance and the conqueror of the slum.

She lived in Brazil, but she didn't like it there. In fact, she would have left the moment she escaped from the church orphanage she grew up in, but the thing about customs agents…they don't like it when you don't officially exist in any record book. She was a 19-year-old illegitimate child with an illegitimate background and an illegitimate way to earn her living; she stole from people. Albeit, they were very bad people, but still. It wasn't ideal. Only one thing kept her from being splattered all over the local drug cartel's floor, and that was her gift. She had super powers…at least what a comic book would refer to as a super power. Kyla could climb up walls like a gecko, jump ten feet straight up, and had martial arts skills that Bruce Lee might envy. She had a very specific skillset, and that skillset just happened to suit the criminal career path rather well.

Now as Kyla moved with cat-like stealth down the back alley of the "Dancing Lady", she went over her most recent employer's orders in her head.

"Don't make a mess…" He had ordered in Portuguese. "…Don't waste time, don't hesitate to kill, and don't…Forget…My…Damn…Drugs!"

So here she was, stealing pot from a drug dealer for a bigger drug dealer all for…what was it…2%? Her talents were greatly abused, but what could she do?

Kyla smiled to herself, creating a mental picture of their expressions when she ripped them both off simultaneously and turned them in to the angry brother of the first dealer. (He had offered her a hell of a lot more than 2%...)

With this goal in mind, she crouched behind a long disused dumpster and looked up at the top floor window of the dance club. All the rich boys and their girlfriends were inside tonight, drawn like moths to porch-lights by the massive sale of drugs going down tonight. Kyla was repulsed by the lot of them. She stole it and sold it. She didn't use it.

Kyla was dressed all in black. That included her black hoody, black skinny-jeans, and black sneakers. As she continued to watch the window waiting for the light to go out she reached into her backpack and pulled out her knife. She clamped it in her teeth and pulled her long black hair into a ponytail and tucked it under her hood. She then bent down and took off her shoes. Given the large amount of broken glass and shattered beer bottles on the ground this would usually be unadvised, but Kyla knew full well that her gift wouldn't work through sneakers. Now barefoot and suited up, all she had to do was wait.

Another five minutes passed without incident and she spent that time focusing on her strategy. Get in, take out any security, lock the door from the inside, and get out the window with as much weed and intel as she could carry, and hey…if she happened to find a couple hundred dollar bills in an easy to crack safe, who'd be the wiser? Suddenly there were voices in the window above her and the light went out. The sound of a closing door was her signal to go.

Throwing her pack on, she stood up and walked to the other side of the alley, opposite the club building. She checked both ways to make sure no one was watching, and launched herself across the alley, lightly sticking to the brick wall like a frog on a leaf. Her bare feet and hands were more than enough to support her small 90-pound frame and without hesitation she clambered up the wall. She stopped just below the window and slowly lifted her head up just enough to peer in the closed window. The room beyond the glass was dark, but Kyla gave a silent swear when she noted that the window was locked. It wouldn't stop her, but she didn't like to be detained. She let one hand release from the wall and pulled her knife out of her teeth. She spat out the taste of the rust metal in her mouth and got to work on the cheap latch on the window. It was off in less than a minute and Kyla wondered vaguely what these guys would do if they walked in on her steeling their drugs. She figured that all of them were probably too stoned from second-hand smoke to put up much fuss anyway, so she got back to work.

She momentarily had to release both of her hands from the wall to open the dirty window, but after doing this a couple hundred times, falling off a building seemed like a rooky mistake. She did a second quick check of the room to make sure no one was asleep inside before she slipped in, leaving the window open behind her. The room was pitch-black, the only light coming through the crack under the door. The whole place smelled sickeningly of drugs and beer. Kyla blinked back the water her eyes immediately began to produce in the toxic atmosphere and got to work. She pulled a flashlight out of her old pack and shined it into a dark corner of the room. She nearly screamed, and she wasn't the screaming type.

There was a man there, well dressed and in his mid-forties. He had short brown hair and had the air of someone Kyla rarely saw around the slums…a government worker. He had that stuck up, "I-know-everything-that-you-wish-you-did" look to him and he was smiling, something that people in the slums just don't do.

"Hello Kyla Amano." He said. American. Great.

"Eu não falo Inglês…" ("I don't speak English…") She rattled off, putting on her best dumb-girl face. The truth was that she spoke flawless English, but this approach usually worked with the few government snoops she had dealt with over the years. It wasn't working on this guy.

"My name is Agent Coulson. I want you to…"

He reached his right hand into his jacket and instinct took over. She dealt "Agent Coulson" a sidekick to the head and a punch to the stomach. He dropped like a stone with a loud cough and yell of surprise.

"Dammit." Kyla muttered.

Down the hall outside of the room came the footsteps of men yelling obscene phrases in Portuguese. Mixed in there was something about "someone's in the weed room!"

"Dammit…" Swore Kyla. "Dammit, dammit, dammit…" She made a run for the window, but paused, one leg out, looking back at the now unconscious Coulson. She looked out the window to freedom, and back at whom she knew to be a dead man. If there was one thing stereotypical about drug dealers in Brazil it was their proficiency in torture and willingness to draw out death. A government guy didn't stand a chance.

"Droga..." She said again, this time in Portuguese. She darted back into the room and kicked Coulson in the ribs. "Get up!" She barked. He groaned and his hand shifted, revealing what he had been pulling out of his jacket, and it wasn't a gun. She swore and grabbed the envelope from his limp hand. Printed it was the all caps name, "SHIELD" in silver ink. She didn't have time to wonder what that was, not with the majority of the drug dealers this side of the Amazon banging on the door. She rolled her eyes and grabbed Coulson under the arms. She started to drag him to the window and it was at this point that she saw two flaws with her plan… a)Would Coulson fit through the window?...and, b)What if he did? That was a three story drop!

Why can't everyone spider-crawl up walls? She thought bitterly.

She figured that she'd have to go out first and pull him down with her, praying that he didn't wake up half-way down.

She dumped him unceremoniously on the floor and crawled out of the window, supporting her weight on her feet on the vertical surface of the wall. She leaned over the windowsill, grunting at she lugged Coulson's dead weight over the floor toward her. The voices had stopped at the door and were listening. She knew she would have to do something to stop them from coming in.

"Eu tenho uma arma! Ficar de fora!" (loosely translated to, "I've got a gun! Stay out!")

She strained her not-insignificant muscle mass pulling the unconscious man out of the window. When he was halfway out his weight shifted and she nearly fell backwards as he tumbled out of the window and onto her shoulder. She yelled in frustration and stress, dropping Portuguese swears like leaves in the fall. She took a few steps down, awkwardly supporting Coulson's weight and listening to the cusses of the guys still on the other side of the door. She picked up the pace a little, letting her fingertips and toes brush the brick rather than get a firm grip on it. She was just getting to the second story window when she heard the slamming open of the door. Crud…

Looking up, Kyla came face to face with one god-ugly man. She gave him her signature shrug that all too clearly said, "Well this is a turn up, isn't it?" and continued to crawl down the wall. Once the man got over his shock at the spider-crawling girl on his building, he barked some incoherent orders to his men in the room behind him. Kyla was a foot past the second floor window when it was thrown open. Without thinking, she dropped Coulson letting him fall two stories, but thankfully hearing the thump of his body landing in the cardboard-filled dumpster, not on asphalt. Kyla reached up to punch the man now leaning out of the window grabbing at her, but he blocked her effortlessly. He held her arm and twisted it with a crunch. She gasped in pain and tried to lay a kick on him, but by doing so lost her grip on the wall. She was pulled inside of the building and her last sight was of the envelope Coulson had tried to give her falling through the air. It landed silently beside the unconscious agent…unread by its intended recipient.