Natasha did not expect Coulson to let her off easy. Phil was a stand-up guy, and if there was one thing he had been clear on from the start, it was Ava. While he had wanted the kid to be with Natasha, his orders for Ava’s conduct were clear; she had her blades for drilling, but no guns and no other weapons. The only actions she could take were in self-defense, and any target practice required dummy ammo.
So how are you going to tell him what happened at the weapons depot?
Maybe she wouldn’t have to; Coulson had his hands full with whatever was going on with his Inhumans project. He wasn’t exactly one for sharing, and Natasha wasn’t one for asking. Between the two of them, they had managed to get on just fine with as much surviving and as little confiding as possible. But Coulson trusted Natasha, just like she did him. So what was she supposed to tell him now?
Ava would have killed Yuri Somodorov. She certainly would have tried to—and that alone might have killed her. At least it would have changed her life. Maybe even coming that close already has—
Natasha turned the corner to the elevator bay and waited, flattening her back against the wall. You wanted me to help her? Now look—I’ve helped turn her into the same kind of monster I am.
As if her life wasn’t bad enough already.
A bell tone sounded, and the elevator doors slid open. Natasha took a breath and headed inside.
Who else will be in this debrief? She tried to think.
Maria Hill, probably, who was a good agent and a friend—even outside their poker game—but who wasn’t going to advocate sending Ava back out into the field, either. Not after she got the report on Manaus.
Tony, probably. He’d want the full tactical download on how his gear had functioned, before anything. But the stolen warheads were going to throw him for a loop. He knew as well as Natasha how precariously the future of the world had been sitting atop its customary razor’s edge, lately; the last thing he’d want to hear about would be nuclear weapons in the wild.
Wait until he sees them—
The images that the Widow’s Cuff had recorded of the missiles were terrifying, even by S.H.I.E.L.D. standards. So were the drugs.
When it came to S.H.I.E.L.D., who could Natasha count on, and what could she really tell them?
Do my loyalties lie with Ava, who loved my family, or with Tony and Maria and Phil, who feel like family?
Natasha watched the lit numbers of the floors tick rhythmically by, one at a time. As one digit illuminated after the next, she found their sequential logic reassuring.
Seven leads to eight, which leads to nine and then ten—
That was what she needed now, to follow the logical path.
Rio leads to Recife, which leads to Manaus and then New York—
It would take her forward, all the way to the end, wouldn’t it? She just needed to stay the course until she reached the very bottom of it all.
Rio to Recife to Manaus to New York.
One, two, three, four.
It made sense. She just had to keep going.
Five, the missiles will move.
Six, we will find who moves them.
Seven will connect all of it to the Red Room.
Eight will connect the Red Room to the surviving Somodorovs.
Nine, Ava will return to the Academy.
Which just leaves me with ten, the Green Dress Girl.
Ten is trying to kill me—
Each of those things was bad enough—but taken together, they all worried Natasha exponentially more.
What’s the pattern I can’t see?
All Natasha knew, when the reflective steel of the elevator doors slid open, was that she remembered the first life she had taken as clearly as if it had happened yesterday—and that she wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
She was still lost in that thought when a familiar laugh interrupted her.
“Are you here for the big boy-girl dance, too? I came all the way down from Alpha Flight for this, it better be a good one.”
“What?” Natasha turned to see Carol Danvers holding open the door. The Widow felt a rush of relief. Thank God. Carol Danvers, a.k.a. Captain Marvel, was more than just one of strongest people Natasha had ever encountered, even among heroes.
Carol was also a steady force for right and truth and good, as unbelievably corny as it sounded. Soaring through the air in her red, blue, and gold suit, she was a symbol for something bigger than one person or one mission—though today she was in a flight jacket and cargo pants, with a cap covering up most of her trademark gold-blond hair.
It didn’t matter what she was wearing, Carol was an old-fashioned hero, through and through; in that way she reminded Natasha of Cap on his good days—his best days, really. Natasha couldn’t think of a greater ally in a time like this or in a room like this—and she found herself actually smiling, for the first time since she’d touched down at the base.
“This dance?” Natasha shrugged. “Whatever. I’m just here to spike the punch bowl and beat up the boys in the parking lot.”
“My kind of girl.” Carol grinned. “Let’s get this party started.” She clapped Natasha on her back, and Natasha tried not to wince from her raw shoulder.
Phil Coulson and Maria Hill were two of the most respected S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives in the history of the organization. There wasn’t much either of them didn’t know; between the two of them, Natasha had a hard time imagining there was anything.
Now they sat on the same side of the table; Tony and Carol and Natasha sat on the other. They had taken over the conference table in Natasha’s favorite room of the Triskelion, a room everyone called the Brain Trust. It wasn’t large; this morning it held only the five allies—some of the New York Triskelion’s finest—but together they composed what was, even by S.H.I.E.L.D. standards, a remarkable team.
“You look like crap, N-Ro. Do you want something to eat, maybe a banana?” Tony looked her up and down. “Your face is green like you’re thinking vomity thoughts. That’s when Pepper makes me eat a banana.”
“No thanks,” Natasha said, quirking an eyebrow as she poured a cup of coffee from the electric pot in the center of the table. “No banana.”
“Yeah, you don’t really strike me as a fruit person,” Coulson said.
What is with you people?
“Good to see you both, too.” Natasha slammed the pot back onto its warming base. “For the record, I’m not not a fruit person. In fact, I might have an all-fruit dinner after this.”
“You mean breakfast,” Carol said, patting Natasha’s arm. “I know it’s hard to tell when you’re a mile beneath the East River, but it’s nine a.m.”
“The only thing I’m tracking is those five missiles,” Natasha said. “Which is why I hightailed it up here.”
“Same reason I hightailed it down,” Carol said.
“Good thing, too. We don’t know when those five missiles will go airborne. So we need to be smart and work quickly,” Maria Hill said. She tapped a digital tablet in front of her, and the walls of the room began to animate with the flow of information. The message was clear: time for small talk was over.
Natasha let the hot black coffee seep into her system. Everyone in the room—heroes and operatives—stared silently up to the center of the Brain Trust’s soaring ceiling, where holographic images began to take shape, composed of row after row of wire-thin beams of light. Now scans of the stolen missiles projected into the space, snapping themselves to a geometrical grid diagram and rotating in three dimensions. Radiological readings spun on either side of the images; the Brain Trust’s data banks had automatically incorporated the readings from the ComPlex and Natasha’s Cuff.
“Wow,” Coulson said soberly. “You weren’t kidding. Those really are B-61s.”
“Whoa,” Carol said, staring up from her seat at the table. “You know, when you said Somodorov had gotten out the big guns, I didn’t think you were talking quite so literally. Where did you say you found them again?”
“Brazi
l,” Natasha said. “An abandoned rubber factory in a forest preserve in the Amazon Basin, to be exact.”
Tony chewed on the end of his pen as he studied the hologram. “Phil’s wrong. Those aren’t our B-61s. I had my Like Minds program redesigning ours all summer. They’re not this.”
Carol looked at Maria. “Are we really talking about this? It’s a classified program.”
Maria nodded, dropping five army-green folders on the table in front of them, all marked top secret. “Consider yourselves read in on it, as of now.” Read in was army talk for cleared to know—something that didn’t happen very often, around here.
Never a good sign, Natasha thought.
Maria sat back in her chair. “That’s why I brought Carol in; she’s been consulting on the NASA side, to try to keep toxin by-products out of the atmosphere.”
“Not consulting, arguing. I don’t build bombs, and I don’t want them junking up our atmosphere. First we pollute our own planet, and then we move on to the whole solar system? I don’t think so.” Carol shook her head. “Now you’re messing with my turf.”
“I hear solar warming’s a fiction.” Tony shrugged.
“You try telling that to the sun,” Carol groused.
“The missiles,” Coulson prompted.
Carol continued. “The B-61 weapons program has been going on for years. The DOD’s basically retrofitting old nukes for modern war; it’s a classified weapons upgrade program they’ve undertaken with NASA.”
“Yeah, yeah. Precision targeting, more controlled detonation,” Tony said. “Building a better bomb, as if that’s not an oxymoron.”
“Exactly,” Carol said. “The program was always pretty controversial.”
“Because making better bombs only makes it more likely that you’ll use them,” Coulson said.
“Right. But looking at that hologram, I’m starting to think someone else has actually started upgrading our B-61 upgrade program.”
“What?” Natasha looked surprised.
“Upgrading how?” Tony frowned.
“This looks to me like someone’s taken up where the DOD left off,” Carol said. She pointed to one end of the holographic missile. “See those back fins, the way they taper? NASA shot down that design a year ago because it was too unstable. The nose is different, the diameter is wrong, and from what I can tell, this missile segments differently, which means an entirely unpredictable detonation procedure.”
Tony stared. “Are you telling me some unknown third party is experimenting on NASA’s experimental nuclear weapons?”
“Basically. But, you know, it sounded cooler,” Carol said. “The way I said it.”
“We know, we know. You wrote a book,” Tony said, rolling his eyes. “You’re so great, Captain Marvel.” They teased each other like terrible twin siblings; sometimes Natasha thought it was because Danvers seemed like the only one of them actually strong enough to take it—without turning into a big green earthquake.
Carol shrugged. “And did mention I live in space?”
“Can we stick to the briefing?” Tony asked loudly.
“I can also fly,” she whispered loudly.
“The missiles.” Natasha glared at both heroes. “Who has that kind of infrastructure? It would have to be a foreign government, right? Or at least a pretty significant setup. The Manaus guys didn’t exactly look like they were experts in nuclear physics. There wasn’t a lab facility or anything like that,” she said.
“Absolutely,” Carol said. “You’d need a secure facility, component parts, and a whole lot of expertise.”
“Like, Tony Stark–level expertise. And Tony Stark–level money,” Tony said. “That’s a whole lot of money.”
“Which leads us back to our current set of problems. Who made them, who sold them, who bought them—?” Coulson dropped his top secret folder on the table.
“And how did the Manaus guys get their hands on them—?” Carol added.
Maria sighed. “And, of course, where are they planning to use them?”
“Nukes,” Tony said, shaking his head. “Who stashes nukes in the Amazon?”
One, two, three, four.
Rio to Recife to Manaus to New York.
There had to be a pattern there somewhere—a sequence and an order, just like the numbers in the elevator. There always was, Natasha knew.
I just have to find a way to see it.
S.H.I.E.L.D. EYES ONLY
CLEARANCE LEVEL X
SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES & INDIVIDUALS (SCI) INVESTIGATION
AGENT IN COMMAND (AIC): PHILLIP COULSON
RE: AGENT NATASHA ROMANOFF A.K.A. BLACK WIDOW
A.K.A. NATASHA ROMANOVA
AAA HEARING TRANSCRIPT (TEXT EXCHANGE)
CC: DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, SCI INQUIRY
COULSON: How did we get here? What happened to the rest of your leads on the Red Room’s South American network? I thought you found a guy in Panama.
ROMANOFF: Someone else found him first. Clean shot, right between the eyes. All we got from Panama was food poisoning.
COULSON: What about Buenos Aires? I seem to remember something about a sleazy internet café address?
ROMANOFF: A washout. Pipe bomb.
COULSON: That’s actually a blowout.
ROMANOFF: Either way, it was closed before we got there. If by closed you can mean a smoking black crater in the ground.
COULSON: And São Paulo was a red herring, if I remember?
ROMANOFF: The reddest. Bloodred. We found him in a Dumpster.
COULSON: So no leads. There’s your lead. Someone was working hard to cover their tracks.
ROMANOFF: That’s how it looked. Dead ends. Dead operatives. Dead everything.
COULSON: The Red Room way.
RUDE BREWS COFFEE HOUSE
FORT GREENE, BROOKLYN
While Natasha was at the Triskelion, Ava was supposed to be waiting at her apartment. Instead, she had set out on a mission of her own—leaving behind the jungles of the Amazon Basin for the wilds of Flatbush Avenue, where her oldest friend, Oksana, worked. Ava had managed to make the same trip on the last Friday of every month for as long as she’d been at the Academy.
She took the subway, even in her filthy camo pants. She wasn’t thinking; she was in robo-survival mode now. She’d stolen a sweatshirt and black rubber shower slippers out of the landing-bay locker room at the Triskelion.
Neither fit.
“You look terrible and you smell worse and you’re still the most beautiful girl on the train,” Alexei said, hanging from the rail in front of her.
“I can always stop off and shower at the Y,” she said, smiling.
“I bet.” He laughed.
“That’s the one good thing about having survived living on my own in a basement.”
Alexei raised an eyebrow. “You know where to find all the free showers in Manhattan?”
“Mostly Brooklyn. But also all the free food.” She smiled, resting her dirty hair back against the plastic seat beneath her.
The old man one seat down from her got up and shuffled to the back of the car with a glare.
Alexei burst into laughter. “Did you see? That was so good.”
“I’m so glad I’m here to amuse you,” Ava said, because it was how she felt.
Just let me feel it. I’m so tired of worrying all the time, about how I feel and how she feels and who will know what we feel—
If she let herself, she knew she would fall asleep right then, so she forced herself to sit back up, and spent the rest of the ride telling Alexei a story about trying to give Sasha a shower at the Y when she first found her, and when the poor kitten had looked as bedraggled as Ava herself did now.
It was so nice to be able to talk to him again, she almost missed her stop.
When Ava got to Flatbush Avenue, she immediately found her way to Rude Brews. It wasn’t Starbucks. It was basic, a no-frills indie coffee shop—not too stylish and not too comfortable, so nobody felt inclined to stick around lon
g enough to hog the tables and ask to use the wireless. And if they did, well, that’s where the whole rude concept came in; the baristas would just insult you until you left. “You got somewhere to be, pal? Or were you just planning on moving in?” “Oh, I see, you’re ‘writing.’” “You know we can hear your Adele through your earphones, right, buddy?”
Sana had gotten a job as a Rude Brewista six months ago, which was why Ava found herself standing outside the window now. Making sure Sana was still okay was always Ava’s first priority. Sana, and then Sasha Cat, who Ava had left in Sana’s care….
Ava looked at Alexei. “You have to go,” she said, pausing pointedly at the door.
Alexei flattened himself against the glass in front of her. “What if I don’t want to? Because I don’t—”
“We can’t make trouble for her. It’s her job,” Ava said, pushing him aside to pull open the door to the shop.
“Look,” Alexei said, pointing to a slogan that had been scrawled on the glass in bleeding marker. “‘To you it is just coffee. To us, it is…also just coffee.’” He laughed. “That has to be Sana, right?”
Ava looked at him affectionately. “I’ll say hello for you.”
“No you won’t.” He sighed.
“Nope,” she said, disappearing inside.
Sana—pink cheeks, brown skin, her trademark headband holding up her curls—stood behind the counter of the coffee shop, which seemed to be thriving. The line for coffee was long, and Ava had time to stow away all the details she could gather: face fuller, hair cleaner, and a relatively new-looking T-shirt beneath her Rude Brews apron. She’s fine. More than fine.
She’s happy.
After Alexei died, the girls had tried to keep in touch, but Ava hadn’t been capable of talking then, not to anyone. When she finally found enough strength to force herself to answer Sana’s emails and texts and occasional calls, Ava felt like she’d become a different person. She hadn’t been much of a friend to anyone since then; she imagined Sana had had to grieve her loss while Ava had been grieving hers.
And then there was the issue of Ava’s new life. Though Sana had met Alexei, she didn’t know the whole truth about him—or that he had been murdered. The only thing Sana knew about Ava and her S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy gig was that when Alex had died, his sister had used all her connections to get Ava some kind of rare scholarship to military school. It was true enough, in a way, and Ava couldn’t correct her, anyhow.
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