"What happened to Doctor Klein?" asked Stark eventually.

"Shot dead. In the forehead. Right here," she touched the spot right above her right eyebrow. "He moved to the Ukraine, before the Berlin Wall fell, and stayed there after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Natasha found him ten years ago."

"What she called you earlier–"

"Aleksandra Avgustovna Nevskiy."

"Yeah, that. That's your real name?"

Sasha hesitated. "It's Russian, which is close enough. Aleksandr Nevskiy was a prince of Kiev."

Stark nodded.


"Who's your mother? I mean, your real mother," Stark clarified.

"I don't have one," she said, slightly emphasizing one on accident. Damn it.

Stark frowned.


"So how many?"

"Excuse me?"

"How many people's DNA? I think they're called donors."

She closed her eyes. "Four."

"And how many of them factor into your proficiency of hacking?"

"None of them. There are two donors, one male and one female, for any given gene, but genetics doesn't create ability. Klein...Klein thought you could just shove genes in and get a genius."

"You said this guy was smart?"

"I didn't. And it was the nineties."

Stark thought for a moment. "Why're you telling me all this?"

Sasha shrugged. "I never got to talk about it before. I might as well now, now that everything is out. And I don't know what S.H.I.E.L.D. will do with me, if I do what Natasha wants me to do. I guess it's an 'someone has to know my story' idea. I'm not in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s file about Klein. I have no paper trail for them to clean up. Natasha burned the Klein's filed about me, and she destroyed the house."

It had been less a house and more a bunker, and old Soviet one. When she asked about it once, Klein told her it was from World War Two, an old remnant of the patriotic war.

Natasha had told the girl to stay in her car while she destroyed the building, but Sasha knew how to get out: Klein had taught her to hotwire cars two years before. She stood in front of the building when Natasha came out of the front door, her bag free of the explosives she brought.

The woman didn't blink when she saw Sasha standing outside.

The explosion was incredible.


"So why do you call her 'Mom'?"

"It pisses her off," replied Sasha. That was the original answer, the first time she'd done it.

"She's not very fond of you," he observed. She shrugged.

"She broke protocol because of me. I'm a ten–year complication and if they found out..."

"Then why didn't she leave you in Russia?"

"Ukraine," she corrected him. "And she did leave me in Russia, for a month."

"What happened?"

"You mean, why did she bring me to America?" she asked, and shrugged. "Orders."

"But you said–"

"S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn't know about me. But Natasha's first handler did."

"And who was that?"

"Me," the man behind them said. Stark and Sasha turned towards the doorway. The man stood in full gear, just behind the threshold; Natasha stood behind him, arms crossed.

"Hi, Clint," said Sasha.


The woman marched into the police station, ignored all the people around her, and went straight to the officers' desks. She dumped herself into a seat facing the highest–ranking cop on duty, and put her bag on the ground. The man looked up from his computer, startled.

Alexandra Cole raised her hands in surrender, and rolled her eyes as she spoke. "I'm here to turn myself in, blah blah blah."

It was 11 PM.