Megan lived in a three-story apartment building on Sylvester Street, about twenty minutes' walk from the restaurant. It was a sad-looking property with short, balding grass, a metal fence, and no trees. The siding had once been while but was now yellow and stained, and the street was lined with power poles. Megan hurried in for her things and Natasha started unbuckling her seat belt to follow, but Steve grabbed her wrist to stop her.
"What if she runs off?" Natasha asked.
"Then let her," said Steve. Megan had given them what sounded like all the answers she had, and they hadn't come here to kidnap anybody.
A few minutes later, Megan reappeared. She'd changed into a colourful oversized sweater and black leggings, and was carrying both a small suitcase and a larger rectangular object covered by a cloth. She pushed the latter into Steve's arms before climbing into the car – when he raised the cloth, he found a cage containing a small green parrot with a red beak.
"That's Goji," said Megan.
The bird cocked its head at Steve and introduced itself: Gojira! Gojira! it squawked.
Megan smiled and put a finger through the bars. "Who's the cutest little city-destroying monster in the world?" she cooed, as the parrot nibbled affectionately on her nails. "It's okay, baby, we're going for a drive in the car! You like that."
Drive in the car! Goji agreed. It sounded pleased with itself.
Steve and Natasha shared a glance over Megan's head as she did up her seatbelt. Natasha didn't look like she had any better idea what to make of this than Steve did, but he was sure she would agree that a pet bird was a terrible thing to try to take along on a road trip, never mind for any sort of espionage.
"Okay." Megan sat up and pulled Goji's cage into her lap. "Just drive. Before I change my mind."
Sam flicked on the turn signal and pulled away from the curb. The bird made rustling noises in its cage, but there was no conversation in the car until they got onto the main road at Harry Hines Boulevard. As they passed through the Medical District, Megan looked up and said, "which route are we taking to Colorado Springs? Are we going through Wichita Falls?"
"We could," said Sam. "What's in Wichita Falls?"
"Oh, a restaurant I haven't been to in ages," said Megan, in the voice of somebody who was trying very hard to sound casual. "If I'm being dragged along on this I may as well eat some decent food."
Sam caught Steve's eye in the mirror, but all Steve could do was shrug. He didn't know what might be in Wichita Falls that she wanted to do without them knowing about it. On the other hand, her forced offhandedness seemed so deliberate that it made Steve wonder if she wanted them to be suspicious of her in order to divert their attention from something else. What could she hide by making them worry about where she wanted to go for dinner? Or was that crossing the line from 'careful' into 'paranoid'? Was he over-analyzing this? He wished he knew what to think – about Megan, or about anything else.
They arrived in Wichita Falls around seven, and found the restaurant according to Megan's directions. It was a little fast food place with the unpromising name of Joe Cucumber's, in the middle of a strip mall between an H&R Block and a Lenscrafters. The menu was mostly vegan substitutes for traditional restaurant fare, with the slogan convert your friends! Steve found the food all right, but he wasn't going to swear off meat on the spot.
They sky had clouded up and the temperature dropped during the afternoon, and now it was surprisingly chilly for Texas, even in February. The restaurant didn't seem to be heated, either, so they sat with jackets and sweatshirts on at a table by the front window, eating their veggieburgers and sweet potato fries. Megan had draped a towel over her shoulder so Goji could perch there, and the bird babbled intermittently while she fed it bits of tomato and lettuce out of her hand.
"What kind of bird is he?" asked sam.
"Goji is a rose-ringed parakeet," Megan replied. "And she's actually a female. The males have a dark stripe around their necks."
Sam took a piece of tomato out of his own burger and held it out, and the bird hopped onto his hand to nibble at it. "Why did you name her after Godzilla?" he asked.
"That's the name she came with." Megan smiled fondly, stroking Goji's smooth green feathers. "Her first owner was a regular at the cafe. He'd been diagnosed with cancer, and he couldn't afford to keep his pets and pay for his treatment, so I offered to take Goji. I adore birds," she said. "If I could pick one superpower, I would want to fly."
"I hear you there," Sam nodded.
Steve watched this conversation without participating. He was glad that Megan was relaxing a little, and starting to think that maybe the restaurant had been all she wanted. Something in him, however, was a bit upset that the person Megan had chosen to open up to was Sam. Of course, out of Steve, Sam, and Natasha, Sam was the one who best qualified to be called a 'people person'. And Steve would have liked to think that Sam and Peggy would have liked one another... but... no, Megan was not Peggy! Why had it been so much easier to separate Strong from Stark in his head? Was it the glasses? Had Clark Kent been right all along?
Megan leaned forward a bit, her face bright. "That's right!" she said to Sam. "You were one of the Falcons, weren't you?"
"Nowadays, I'm the Falcon." Sam grinned. "That's what all the newspapers said: Captain America, Falcon, and Black Widow expose Nazi Conspiracy Inside Washington!" Sam had collected a bunch of the more sensational headlines about the events and had the resulting collage professionally framed.
Megan's smile suddenly dropped. "Yeah," she said, and turned to stare out into the parking lot.
"Hey," said Sam gently. "We didn't know about you guys. We did what we thought we had to do. For what it's worth, we're sorry."
"Yeah," Megan repeated. "I just... I'll be right back. Hang on to Goji for me." She gently scratched the top of the bird's head with one finger, then got up, hitched her purse up her shoulder, and headed into the ladies' room.
Steve wondered if somebody ought to go after her, but he couldn't imagine that whatever she'd wanted to stop in Wichita Falls for involved a restaurant bathroom. Instead, he nudged Natasha with his hip. "I knew you knew who Peggy was," he said. "You just wanted to see how I'd react."
"Yep." Natasha dipped a fry in ketchup. "You didn't react very much, actually, but you had a lot on your mind that week."
He shook his head – all these months later it no longer seemed important. "What's your impression of Megan?"
"She needs some of those yoga classes the Cosmic Cafe was offering," Natasha replied at once. "Very high-strung. Can't be good for her blood pressure."
"You know what I meant," Steve said.
"She seems okay to me," Sam offered. "I don't know if we can believe everything she says, but I don't think she's lying to us on purpose. She's a heart-on-her-sleeve kind of girl."
Steve had noticed that, too – Megan didn't seem able to contain her emotions. That was probably what she'd been referring to when she'd called herself a shitty secret agent. Then again, why would she self-describe as a shitty secret agent to people whom she must know would be on the lookout for secret agents? "I want to trust her," he said. "But at the same time, I don't want to."
"She seems to be honest," said Natasha, chewing thoughtfully on a fry, "but maybe not aware of everything. I read her as her first loyalty is to the people she considers her family, and she'll turn on us the moment she thinks we're a danger to them."
Steve nodded. Movement caught his eye, and he looked up to see the ladies' room door open and shut, but the woman who stepped out was not Megan.
He felt torn. She'd been visibly upset when she left, and if she wanted to sit in the bathroom and cry for a while, then she deserved her privacy. Them hovering over her wouldn't make her feel any better, and anyway, he was the one who'd told Natasha to let her run away if she wanted to. At the same time, he couldn't stop worrying, and it got worse the longer Megan was absent from the table.
"Natasha," Steve said finally.
She stuffed one more fry in her mouth and stood up. "I'll check on her."
Natasha hurried off to the ladies' room, and Steve sat impatiently fidgeting while Sam teased Goji, tempting the parakeet over and over to nip at a napkin. The two men's eyes met for a moment.
"She'll come back," Sam said. "She told us she wouldn't go anywhere without her bird, remember?"
So she had – but was even that reliable? Steve thought about Natasha, and her knack for tricking people into revealing their secrets before they even realized she'd asked a question. What if that was what Megan was doing now? He tried to replay in his mind everything he'd said since meeting her. What if somewhere in there had been what she'd wanted to know, and now she had run off to deliver the information to Strong?
Steve missed being able to trust people. He trusted Sam, of course, and Natasha, but it hadn't been all that long ago when he'd felt like he could trust his superiors, trust his co-workers, trust his neighbours. It had all been an illusion, of course, but it had been such a comfortable illusion.
Natasha returned to the table at a fast walk and grabbed her bag. "She's gone," she announced. "One of the waiters said she asked if she could go out the back door because she was hiding from an ex-boyfriend."
All an illusion.
Steve threw some cash on the table to pay for their meal, and grabbed the rest of his burger to take with him. "Let's go. If she's on foot she won't have gotten very far." If she'd found a ride, they might never see her again.
"You two stay back and let me talk to people," Natasha said as they left the building. "A woman looking for a friend gets help. Two big men looking for a girl get reported to the cops." She glanced at Sam's hand, where Goji the parrot was still perched. "And hang on to the bird."
A group of friends smoking behind the strip mall told Natasha they'd seen Megan walking away from the shopping complex heading southwest, which would have taken her to Kemp Boulevard. Natasha thanked them and followed, with Steve and Sam keeping up about a block behind, but it soon began to look as if they'd lost Megan permanently. Night was falling, and with the cold wind very few people were out and about. Somebody driving by might have seen Megan, but any such witnesses were already long gone. A man walking a small dog said he might have seen a blonde in a dark coat go by, following the main street south, but he hadn't been paying particular attention.
The three continued in that direction anyway. They'd gone a couple of blocks, when Goji suddenly fluttered off Sam's arm and flew away down a side street.
"Hey!" Sam exclaimed.
The bird paid him no mind. They saw its tiny shape cast a shadow as it flew under a street lamp.
"Hey!" Sam repeated. "Get your feathery butt back here! She told us to look after you!" He ran after the vanished parrot, calling its name. Steve and Natasha, not wanting the group to get separated, followed.
They found Goji outside an ugly brick box of a condo building, chattering happily in a mix of whistles and sentence fragments while Megan, huddled in the shadow of a doorway, tried desperately to shush her pet. She moaned when she saw the group catching up with her.
"I was coming back!" she protested. "I told you I was!"
"Yeah, but we figured it would be more like two minutes than twenty," Natasha said.
"I just wanted to check on him." Megan's face crumpled. "Oh fuck."
I love you, Mama, I love you, said Goji.
"I love you, too, Goji," Megan sighed. She sat down on the step heavily, curling her knees to her chest against the cold air. "I didn't want anybody to know because I didn't want him to have to drop everything and run, too," she said, "but he's not answering the door."
"Who's he?" asked Steve.
"Evan," Megan replied. "Evan Grant."
Maybe it was a good thing that all the clones had names that invoked Steve's own. Nobody needed to ask who Evan Grant was.
"He could be at work," Megan said forlornly. "He could be doing night shifts."
Steve looked at Sam, then at Natasha, and saw both nod. They needed to know if Evan were all right, and to warn him. "We could leave him a note or something," Steve suggested, a flutter in his stomach. He did want to meet one of his own clones, but at the same time, he dreaded doing so. Talking to Strong had been weird. Megan was worse. What would it be like to meet a person who was himself – and yet not?
"Let me." Natasha took an object out of her pocket, which at first appeared to be a folding knife. When she inserted the blade into the lock and squeezed the handle, however, there was a hissing sound followed by a clunk. She pulled her sleeve over her hand and turned the knob, and the door opened. They followed her inside.
"How much stuff did you steal when SHIELD collapsed?" Sam asked. He was directly behind Natasha. Megan followed him, and Steve brought up the rear. When Steve brushed against the doorknob on the way by, it found it was ice-cold, far colder than the chilly air could account for. That was probably some effect of her lock pick mechanism, but it was cold and breezy inside the building, too, so much so that Steve could see his breath turning to mist. Somebody had left the air conditioning on full.
"I didn't steal it," Natasha replied firmly. "This, the binoculars, and the ring were all in my car when it happened. Nobody's going to ask for them back, so they're mine now." She stepped into the kitchen and turned on the light.
Steve was getting tired of surprises.
The condo's small kitchen was decorated in the earthy tones that Steve had learned were typical of the seventies. The wallpaper was faded and the linoleum was curling, and it had been a while since anybody had cleaned up: newspapers were spread out on the table, there were pots on the stove, and the dishwasher was open. Flies were buzzing around, but they weren't there for leftover spaghetti sauce. They were after the naked, bloated corpse on the kitchen floor.
"Shit," said Sam, looking away.
"What? Oh, no, please don't..." Megan tried to push past Sam for a look. Steve reached to stop her, but she ducked under his arm and shoved Sam aside. For a moment she stared at the body as if willing it to be a hallucination. Then she screamed. "No!" she wailed. "No, no, no, no, no! It's not fair! It's not fair!"
"Megan." Sam put a hand on her shoulder. Steve expected her to push it away, like she had with his in the car, but instead she threw her arms around Sam and sobbed into his shirt.
Natasha took charge. "Take her outside," she ordered. Sam nodded and wrapped his arm around Megan to escort her out. Once they were gone, Natasha turned to Steve. "Help me," she said.
"But that's..." Steve gestured feebly to the body.
"Are you telling me Captain America can't handle looking at a corpse?" she asked.
She was right – Steve had seen plenty of dead bodies before now. Some of them had belonged to friends and colleagues, and he'd grieved for them. Some had been enemies, and he'd felt grim satisfaction. A lot of them had simply been faceless soldiers who happened to be on the other side of the fight. It was different, though, when the body was Steve's own flesh and blood. He hadn't been able to look into his mother's coffin at her funeral, and the body of Evan Grant was, in its own way, an even more intimate relation.
Natasha didn't have time for him to be indecisive. She was already kneeling next to the body, taking note of its injuries while touching it as little as possible. "His legs are both broken," she observed, and then gently prodded the chest. "Several ribs, too, and a clavicle. He was beaten badly."
"Same as Reeves," said Steve, recalling the newspaper report of the young man's injuries. He got down on one knee and gingerly turned the corpse's head. It rolled limply, like a bowling ball in a bag. The texture of the clammy, loose skin made bile rise in the back of Steve's throat. "Injury to the left side of the neck," he said. The articles he'd looked up online had mentioned some of the other clones having their throats cut, but this wasn't a long slice like Steve would have pictured. It was a short, precise cut that had been forced open to expose the left carotid artery – and yet, he realized, there was not a drop of blood on the floor. If Grant had been allowed to bleed out in his kitchen, he ought to have been lying in a pool of it.
Natasha gently flexed Grant's knee, inspecting the broken femur protruding from his thigh. "Rigor mortis has come and gone. That means he's been here at least three days. The marrow was taken." She set the leg down and stood up, stepping over the body to wash her hands in the kitchen sink. "This wasn't done by any sort of weapon, HYDRA's or anybody else's. Somebody was in here, beat him senseless, and then bled him dry."
"They can't want his DNA," said Steve. "We know now that the serum didn't alter it." If it had, the clone would have been Captain America – and might have been able to defend himself from this ruthless attacker. This made no sense.
Natasha dried her hands on the seat of her pants. "Wash up," she said. "I'd say don't touch the towels, but your DNA is identical to his. Forensics won't even notice it."
Steve looked at her, then back at the body on the floor. "We can't just leave him here," he protested.
"Yes, we can," Natasha said. "The person who finds a body is always the first person questioned in connection with the death. We don't have the time to explain this to the police. We don't even know what we'd be explaining."
"So he's just going to lie there and... and rot?" Steve had a hard time dealing with that. This wasn't a battlefield. This was the poor man's kitchen.
"Somebody will find him," said Natasha. "The landlord, or the police, or a neighbour. It just can't be us."
And as much as Steve hated it, he knew she was right again. He'd left the body of Stan Reeves in the water after calling the police because he didn't want to attract attention. The same thing applied here, despite the domestic setting. He washed his hands, scrubbing hard to try and get the memory of the cold flesh out of his skin, and then followed her Natasha back outside. She shut the door behind them, sleeve over her hand again, and Steve realized that it wasn't to protect her palm from the cold metal. She just didn't want to leave fingerprints.
Sam was sitting on the front step with an arm around Megan, who was babbling through tears. Goji was perched on her collar preening her hair, murmuring I love you Mama, I love you, over and over.
"He used to cook for us," she was saying, "but it always turned out looking awful. The recipe book would have a photo of something crisp and colourful and his version would turn out all brown and limp. It looked like the sort of thing you'd find a picture of on instagram tagged nailed it." She blew her nose. "It tasted great, though. We figured somewhere out there was a guy whose cooking looked great but tasted like cardboard, and when the two of them found each other and teamed up, they would rule the world!"
She didn't seem to notice that Steve and Natasha were back until Sam moved to look up at them. Then she raised her head for a moment before quickly lowering it again and fiddling with her handful of kleenex, trying to find a spot that wasn't already wet.
"What are we gonna do?" she moaned. "What are we gonna do?"
Sam grabbed the porch railing to help himself and Megan to stand. "It's time to go," he said. "Come on."
They walked back to the restaurant as a group and climbed into the car. Natasha drove this time – Sam was still trying to comfort Megan, and Steve was shaking too badly. He sat in the front passenger seat, gripping the handle above the window to the point of cracking the plastic as he tried to make himself calm down. Steve had been beaten up plenty of times before the serum, but never as thoroughly as Evan Grant. Never to the point of broken bones. He wondered if Grant had said anything to his attackers. Had he begged them for mercy? Or had he looked the assailants in the eye and told them, I can do this all day?
"Megan," Natasha said softly.
"What?" Megan sniffled. She was still leaning on Sam, clearly not wanting to let go of the one person out of the three of them to whom she felt some connection.
"I know you're grieving," said Natasha, "but I need to know: when was Strong in your restaurant? The website had the time the photo was uploaded, but not when it was taken."
"Day before yesterday." Megan licked the corners of her mouth, grimacing at the salt taste of her tears. "Wednesday. About ten in the morning. We'd just opened."
"How did he get there?" was Natasha's next question. "Had he rented a car?"
"No, he was in his cab. He'd been working for a taxi company in Orlando."
Natasha nodded thoughtfully. "Grant's body showed no rigor mortis, and the abdomen was starting to bloat," she said. "That means he died on Tuesday at the latest, maybe before that. It was cold in the apartment, and the alack of blood might have..."
"Oh my fucking god!" Megan put her hands over her ears. "Shut up!"
"Hey, maybe we can talk about this when she's not around?" Sam suggested.
Natasha asked no more questions, but Steve had already figured out what she wanted to know. "Strong didn't do this, then," he said softly, hoping Megan wouldn't hear. "He was still in Florida on Tuesday morning."
"I didn't get to his place until midnight," Natasha agreed, "so for all we know he was still there in the evening, too. Even if he left immediately after he dropped you off in Tampa, there's no way he could have driven to Wichita Falls and arrived before early Wednesday morning. Even if he did, he would have had to backtrack to be at the Cosmic Cafe by ten. There's just not time."
"So Strong didn't kill Grant," Steve repeated, "which means he probably didn't kill the others." Between that and the way the clones had died, it seemed their initial theory of a DNA targeting weapon was out. What did that leave, though? "They're after DNA. My DNA." In bulk, apparently. "It's no good for making super-soldiers, so what are they doing with it?"
"Maybe the serum is just dormant in the clones, and they're trying to figure out how to activate it," said Natasha. "Maybe they're creating an engineered virus that will target you and only you. Maybe they want a way to reverse the effects of the serum and change you back." She shrugged. "That's just off the top of my head, of course."
Steve gave her a sideways look, then laughed in spite of himself. "Boy, I'm glad you're on my side."
"What can I say? I'm a worse-cast-scenario kind of person," she replied with a smile.