Tony didn't need to be told twice. He didn't even go back for a jacket – it was in an MIT tracksuit and stocking feet that he followed Steve to the ledge and climbed down after him to the window-washers' platform. Steve unlocked the pulley and started lowering them back to the street.

"Zeke Stane asked me to autograph that bird I drew!" Steve said, shouting to be heard. Even though the snow had stopped, the wind was still loud and bitter. "He said it was a dinosaur!"

"Zeke thinks anything extinct is a dinosaur!" Tony said, rolling his eyes. His teeth were chattering, and he'd folded his arms tightly across his chest to keep his body heat in. "What do you need?"

"Do you know what kind of bird it actually is?" asked Steve.

"It's a fossil!" Tony said. "They've got a replica in the Museum of Natural History! Why? What's that got to do with anything?"

"That was the bird I rescued from the Achilles!" said Steve.

"Huh?" Tony asked.

They reached the bottom. Steve made sure the platform was back just as he'd found it. The wind would blow snow over his and Tony's footprints, and nobody would ever know they'd borrowed it. He tied off the ropes, and went to hail a cab.

One pulled over, and they climbed in. Tony rubbed his hands together and wiggled his toes, grateful to be out of the cold and wind. "Are we going to SHIELD?" he asked, still shivering.

"Not yet," said Steve, and leaned forward to talk to the driver. "Garden City Bird Sanctuary," he said.

The driver nodded and started the vehicle. The meter began to run.

As they pulled away from the curb, Tony peered at Steve as if trying to figure out what the punch line of this joke was going to be. "You... actually saw that bird?" he asked. "Alive? Did it have teeth? Were there claws on the ends of its wings?"

"I didn't look that close," Steve said. He'd been worried about getting the unfortunate animal out of a dangerous environment, not about the particulars of what it looked like. He would probably have never even paid attention to the tail if Janet Pym hadn't pointed it out. "I've been thinking: we were assuming that the tesseract was putting chunks of different places together. They've got trees like that in California, right? Giant redwoods."

"Right," said Tony, and quickly figured out where Steve was trying to go with this. "But nothing's missing, is it? If a volcano had vanished somewhere when it got moved to Norway, people would have heard about it, because that's weird. Or if a chunk went missing out of a redwood tree. Madame Director's probably had people looking for stuff like that because if course it has to come from somewhere. So if she'd found it, she would have said something."

"Yeah. She would have told me," Steve agreed, although he was no longer sure of that. Peggy kept a lot of secrets. That should have been obvious from the moment she'd told him she was now in charge of SHIELD, but somehow he had never drawn the logical conclusion that she would be keeping secrets from him.

"But if it's getting things out of other times, then we wouldn't find anything missing," Tony said.

"Exactly." Steve nodded. "You said the tesseract exists in multiple dimensions, right? Isn't one of those dimensions time?"

"Well, everything exists in time," said Tony. "If it didn't, nothing could ever happen. What's weird about the tesseract is that seems to exist in more space dimensions than the usual three. I guess there's no rule that says it can't also have multiple time dimensions, but I've got no idea what that would look like. I mean, the math would be pretty much the same as for space, but as for what it would mean in the real world, I can't picture it."

"You don't need to picture it as long as you can figure out how it works," said Steve.

"Right," said Tony. "I'll need more paper."


The Garden City Bird Sanctuary was a little plot of land on Long Island, some of it forested and some open with a pond, which had been set aside as a home for a variety of local species. It had foot and bike paths, an interpretive center, and a small hospital for rescued wildlife. Steve directed the taxi driver to park outside of this building.

Inside the front entrance was a waiting room with bare linoleum floors and uncomfortable-looking metal chairs, where a few people were sitting with animals they'd found. An elderly black woman appeared to be asleep with a racoon curled up in her lap. A few seats further down was a freckled girl of about eleven, accompanied by her grumpy-looking father and a large cardboard box. The contents of the box were moving around and making scratching sounds, clearly displeased with their incarceration. Steve passed them by, and rang the little bell on the counter.

The receptionist, a plump, dark-haired woman with enormous plastic-rimmed glasses, got up from where she'd been hunting for something in a drawer. When she saw Steve she immediately leaned back away from him, intimidated both by his size and by the intensity of his expression.

"Can I help you, uh..." her eyes flicked from Steve to Tony and back again. "Gentlemen?"

"There was a black bird dropped off here about a week ago, with part of a wing missing," said Steve. "It was found on the Achilles oil rig in Canada. Is it still here?" It would be just his luck if they'd sent it somewhere else.

The woman blinked at him a couple of times, then brightened. "Oh! The one with the funny tail!"

"We need to see it," said Steve.

"It's a matter of national security!" said Tony. "We're federal agents."

The woman pulled her glasses down her nose and looked him over, taking in his damp sweatshirt and lack of shoes, and pursed her lips. "Our patients are not pets," she said. "They're wild animals. We can't just let people in to look at them."

"It's not a random request – I'm the one who found the bird at Achilles," said Steve.

"Cheryl said Captain America had fo..." the woman began, but then her voice trailed off as she gave Steve another look-over and found him decidedly more impressive than Tony.

"And I'm Tony Stark," Tony put in. "America's youngest astronaut!" No less a person than President Reagan had called him that, and apparently he never intended to let anybody forget it.

"Let me call Dr. Alvarez," the woman decided.

Dr. Alvarez turned out to be a rather short man with thinning hair and a bushy mustache, who arrived dressed in a lab coat over a Harley-Davidson t-shirt. He was beaming as he offered Steve and Tony his hand to shake.

"A pleasure to meet you both!" he said cheerfully, in a broad New York accent. "Tommy Alvarez. I'm in charge of the animal hospital here. Captain Rogers, Mr. Stark. Always nice to have visitors. Jessie, if you'd just hold my calls while I give them a tour?" he asked the receptionist.

"Of course, Doctor," she replied, still looking a little unsure about the entire situation.

Alvarez held the door for his visitors, then led them down a hallway with fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling and a mix of things on the wall including wildlife paintings, lost dog posters, and bulletin boards with various bills and announcements pinned to them. "So you're here to see the Achilles creature," he said conversationally. "She's an odd little duck. A rara avis, if you will – ha!" he laughed at his own joke. "You speak any Latin?"

"Nobody speaks Latin," said Tony. "It's a dead language."

"Not true, my friend," Alvarez told him. "The whole former Roman Empire speaks it. Italian, French, Spanish... all just dialects of Latin! But rara avis is an expression that means something singular or unusual..."

"We know what it means," Steve assured him. "Rare bird. Did you figure out what kind of bird it is?"

Alvarez looked disappointed that he didn't have to explain the joke. "No, we didn't. Cheryl thought she might be a throwback of sorts, like those circus performers with the fur. If humans can be born with fur sometimes, then it stands to reason birds could be hatched with teeth..."

"It's got teeth?" Tony, who had fallen behind, lengthened his stride to come up between Steve and Alvarez. His wet socks were making squelching noises on the floor.

"Oh, yes. Sharp little buggers, too." Alvarez held up a bandaged finger. "Our initial feeling was we ought to put her down, since she'll never fly again, but she's so strange we decided to keep her and maybe use her as an educational animal. Now that she knows we have food she's become quite amenable to handling. That's assuming we ever put a name to her, of course. Donny thinks she might be something as yet undiscovered."

After passing a half dozen offices and records rooms, Alvarez unlocked a door at the end of the hall and took them into a room lined with cages. These were full of all sorts of animals, from sparrows to eagles, squirrels to skunks, and even a spiny, spotted snake. In one corner was a large freestanding care, possibly designed for a large parrot – and perched on a bar in the middle of this was the black bird from the Achilles. The wingtip Steve had amputated had a few stitches in it, but other than that the bird looked reasonably healthy, with glossy plumage and bright eyes.

Now for the first time, Steve was able to take a proper look at it. Its tail was long with a fan of feathers arranged down either side like the frond of a fern. That was the detail that had led Tony and Zeke to identify it as something prehistoric, but it was certainly not the only strange thing about this animal. The undamaged right wing did indeed have a couple of little dark claws on the leading edge, and it had no beak. Its snout, like its feet, was covered in a coat of short innermost claw on each foot was larger and more hooked than the others, and where a crow's eyes were beady and black, this creature's were greenish-gold, with a round pupil.

"Never seen anything quite like her," said Alvarez, shaking his head.

Steve turned to Tony. "What do you think?"

Tony leaned in close to the bars for a look. "I haven't read anything about these in years," he said, voice carefully neutral. "I wasn't expecting the fuzzy feet, but it could be."

"You think you know what she is?" asked Alvarez.

"Possibly,"said Steve. "There's somebody we'll have to show her to."

"Why do you think it's a she?" Tony wanted to know.

"We gave her a checkup," Alvarez assured him. "Definitely a female, although she's a bit strange internally, too. She's got both ovaries. Birds usually only have one. Except kiwi birds, but she doesn't look anything like a kiwi."

"Do you have an x-ray?" asked Tony eagerly.

"We do," said Alvarez. "I can't release it to you, but we've got a Polaroid here somewhere. We'll get a picture of it. If your expert needs a better look, I'm afraid he'll have to come here."

"We'll manage," said Steve.

Alvarez took a picture of the x-ray and then left it upside-down on a table to develop while one of the volunteers put on large gloves and moved the bird – or whatever it was – into a smaller cage for transport. Steve expected it to struggle and scream like it had on the rig, but instead it went very quietly, and accepted a tidbit of fish as a reward for its good behaviour. The Achilles had been a place of pain and fire and panic, but here must seem quite safe. Tony insisted on being the one to carry the cage out, while Steve followed with some photocopies and the x-ray.

It wasn't until they got outside that Tony finally unleashed his enthusiasm, which he'd been holding in like a boiling pot about to blow its lid. "Holy shit, I thought I was going to die in there!" he said. "I knew if I told what it was that guy would never let us take it!"

"It's definitely something extinct, then?" asked Steve.

"Totally!" Tony agreed. "I mean, I was never all that into dinosaurs because they were all dead and it seemed like why should we bother with all the time and effort for something that's gone forever. If I'd known this was coming I would have paid more attention. But I've seen the reconstruction in the Museum of Natural History and it's more colourful and less feathery but this is really close." He was thrilled. "So that stuff that ended up in the arctic last week... that started off in the Jurassic period?"

"I guess," said Steve. "Can the tesseract do that?" Determining what the tesseract was capable of had always been Howard's area, not Steve's. Whatever it could do, Steve's job had always been to keep anybody from doing it.

"Can we go back to SHIELD and get Dad's stuff?" asked Tony.

"I'm afraid not." Steve shook his head. "I left it with Stane."

"What? Why?" asked Tony. "He's too stupid to understand what it's all about!"

"He said he would give it to you," said Steve.

Tony snorted. "Fine, I'll just have to redo the math from memory."

Dr. Alvarez had asked Jessie the receptionist to call another cab for them. It pulled up now, and they climbed in. "Are we going to show it to a paleontologist?" asked Tony.

"No, we're going to show it to Peggy," said Steve.

Their first stop was Steve's apartment. Tony borrowed a pair of his sneakers and a spare jacket, both of which were far too big for him. Then they went to the Duane Reade up the street for dry socks, snacks, and note paper, before piling into Steve's car to head for Washington, where Diane had assured them Peggy was spending the night.

It began to snow again as they paid the toll for the New Jersey turnpike. Steve rolled the window back up and turned on the wipers, and spent a moment being grateful for how much faster, quieter, and generally more comfortable cars were in the 1980s than they'd been in the 1940s. Tony sat in the passenger's seat, leaning forward to support his notebook against the dashboard as he scribbled. The bird was in the back, whistling to itself intermittently as it moved around inside its cage. Steve felt rather sorry for it – he'd thought he was displaced in time, but he had nothing on this poor creature.

"How long was Stane planning on keeping you locked in your room?" he asked Tony.

"He said until I learned some respect," Tony replied sourly. "I don't care. I was just gonna sit in there and work until Mom convinced him to let me out."

Steve frowned. Stane hadn't set an end date for the grounding? That wasn't right. Even criminals in prison got a time limit on their sentence. "What did your mother say about that?"

"She says I have to be nicer to him," Tony said. "She says he's going to be the man of the house and I need to respect him."

"And you don't feel like he's earned your respect," Steve guessed.

"He doesn't respect me," said Tony. "Okay? Dad didn't like me but he knew I wasn't a child. Obi treats me like I'm nine." He had so far been trying to control his voice, but now he began to get louder, anger creeping in at the edges of his words. "When he talks to Mom it's always, you don't need to worry about that, let me take care of it for you. Like she can't do anything herself. And if I try to say anything about it, suddenly I'm the jerk, because he's just trying to be helpful. Dad's only been dead since April! He has no right!"

Maybe it was just because they'd gone over a bump, but at that moment, the point of Tony's pencil broke. He rammed it into a sharpener and twisted, letting the curls of wood fall onto the floor at his feet.

"Have you talked to your Mom about it?" Steve asked.

"I can't," said Tony. "When I try, he's always there. It's like he's following her around or something." He returned to his writing for a moment, then suddenly sat back and stared out the window instead, tapping his pencil against the dashboard in impotent, fidgety frustration. "Or maybe I'm just imagining the whole thing, because I'm an angry teenager and I see the world through a haze of hormones," he said bitterly.

Steve couldn't deny that 'angry teenager' was exactly what Tony was, but none of this sounded like something he was making up. Not when Stane was shutting him up in his room and refusing to allow his mother to talk to him. Tony said Obi treated him like a child, but no decent person treated children that way. That sort of handling was for an enemy somebody wanted to contain... for example, because that enemy was the only thing that might come between you and the wealthy widow you hoped to marry.

"I'll have a word with Maria, maybe," Steve suggested. "After we've got this tesseract thing figured out."

Tony's head turned to look at him, eyes big and pleading. "Will you?"

"I don't know how much good it'll do," Steve warned. "But I'll give it a try." Maria was Howard's wife, and Steve had been Howard's friend. He didn't know Maria terribly well, but he felt he owed her some form of friendship. After all, he'd been the one who'd gotten her husband killed.


They stopped at a McDonald's in Philadelphia for lunch. Tony ate while continuing to work on his tesseract math, on sheets of note paper and napkins spread out over half their table and spilling onto a neighbouring one. He brought the bird in with him, and fed it bits of his hamburger patty while he worked. Steve wondered what the grease content of modern fast food would do to the digestion of a creature millions of years old. If the bird suddenly dropped dead, they would know why.

"Getting anything?" he asked, leaning to see if there were anything recognizable in the math. It had by now left both numbers and letters behind, and featured a great many Greek symbols and squiggly lines.

"I'm still reconstructing Dad's original equations," said Tony, mouth full. "I remember the assumptions he used, but deriving them is a long process. Lots of topology."

"Isn't that the study of landscapes?" Steve asked.

"No. That's topography," said Tony. "Topology is the study of surfaces in multi-dimensional space-time." He flipped through his pages. "Except that all the equations I'm getting are for multiple dimensions of space. The tesseract can do weird things to space, but it doesn't seem to affect time any differently from anything else." With a shrug, he returned to the page he'd been working on. "Have you heard anything from the Russian lady?"

"Not yet," said Steve. Now that he thought about it, that was a bit strange. Fyodorova had sounded like her request for help was rather urgent. If she hadn't come back, something must have been keeping her away... or maybe she'd decided that Steve and Tony weren't going to be any use after all, and had gone to take care of it herself.

In the evening, with snow now falling heavily, they arrived in Washington. The city was preparing for Christmas. Steve had been so busy thinking about other things that he'd forgotten it was holiday season, and was a little surprised to see the colourful lights and the bright displays in the shop windows. 1986 was almost over, he realized. What was 1987 going to be like?

When Peggy visited the capital she liked to stay at the Jefferson Hotel – Steve remembered her mentioning it a few months earlier. He found a spot in the parking lot behind the elegant gray brick building, and they headed into the black and white tiled lobby. The man working at the front desk obligingly looked Peggy up and placed a call to her room, and a few minutes later she stepped out of the elevator. She was still dressed in her business clothes, a pants suit with the jacket slung over her arm, and a red silk scarf around her neck.

"Steve!" she said. "What are you doing here? Why is Tony with you?" She looked at the bird cage Tony was carrying. "What is that?"

"I know I'm supposed to be hiding," said Steve. "But we've got some findings for you."

"And these findings are important enough for you to risk your life and Tony's?" she asked.

Steve scowled – Peggy knew him better than that. "Where can we talk?" he asked.

Peggy took them up to her suite and ordered room service. The men had only just eaten an hour and a half earlier, but Steve had an enhanced metabolism and Tony was a teenage boy, so neither complained when a bellhop arrived with a tray of snacks. Tony had a sandwich in his hand as he spread out his papers on the bed, and Steve was munching carrot sticks as he watched.

"I haven't worked through it as thoroughly as I should," Tony admitted, "and there's a lot of approximations because there's only so much math you can do in a moving car. I need a few more iterations for a proper proof, and there's a spot where I had to assume Fermat's Last Theorem applies even though I'd prefer a known axiom. It looks to me, though, like the tesseract has nothing to do with time."

"No?" asked Peggy.

"The tesseract exists outside of time," said Tony. "Entropy doesn't apply to it. Entropy is the tendency of all matter in the universe to move into a more disorganized state," he added. "It's probably the reason time runs in the direction it does, so if the tesseract doesn't experience entropy, then it doesn't..."

"I know what entropy is," said Peggy. "Why is this important? Why are we asking about the tesseract's relationship with time?"

"Oh." Tony looked at the birdcage – its occupant was sleeping now which it didn't seem to be able to do on a perch. Instead, it was curled up on the cage floor with its head tucked under one wing. "That bird, the one Captain Rogers found on the oil rig. It's either an Archaeopteryx or something very similar. It's over a hundred million years old."

Peggy blinked. She looked at the bird, then at Tony, and then at Steve. Steve nodded.

"I see," said Peggy. She probably didn't want to believe that, Steve realized, but she felt she had no choice. She trusted what he and Tony told her. "And you're saying it couldn't be the tesseract that brought it here?"

"Not on its own," said Tony, and took another bite of sandwich. "Even if the tesseract did affect time, it can't move matter. If you had the tesseract open you could make a wormhole and walk through it from one place to another, or this critter could fly through it, but you shouldn't get parts of volcanoes or trees transposed from one place to another. Unless Dad missed something, it's not the tesseract alone that's doing this. And Dad didn't miss things," he added proudly.

"He missed the point of the message from Schmidt," Peggy noted as she thought about it. "Although I suspect he'd have cracked it if he'd had a little longer. But what about the places where these events have been turning up?" she asked. "Tønsberg and the Achilles. These are places where the tesseract is definitely known to have been. It can't be a coincidence, so what's the connection?"

"Well, like I said, it's possible to have a tesseract sort of thing that would warp time while remaining unaffected by space, although I don't know what that would look like since apparently it would be everywhere at once." Tony shrugged. "You'd need a way to tap into it, something like the tesseract's containment box. Maybe the two objects are... I dunno, trying to find one another." He gestured vaguely.

"Have you checked on the tesseract?" asked Steve. "Is it here?"

"It's under the Pentagon," Tony said. "Right?"

"What?" asked Peggy, startled. "No, it's not! I wouldn't keep something so dangerous there. What gave you that idea?"

"Captain Rogers said you'd mentioned Washington," Tony explained. "And I remember reading this old conspiracy theory that they kept the guy who really killed Kennedy – supposedly he had some kind of superpowers – in a cell under the Pentagon. That's my second-favourite Kennedy theory," he added. "My first is the one about how the phone company killed him."

Peggy shook her head. "I know who killed Kennedy," she said, "but that's neither here nor there. The tesseract is not in Washington. I've checked on it, and it's fine."

Steve was relieved to hear both these statements. Fewer things to worry about. "I guess you still won't tell me where it is," he observed.

"Not in a place that's probably a lot easier to bug than SHIELD is," said Peggy. "In SHIELD I already know about all the bugs, and in the new building I intend that anyone trying to place one will find the available spots already filled." She stood up from the table and began to pace the room. "So we have a theory, but how do we find this time tesseract and stop it doing whatever it's doing?"

"I don't know yet," said Tony. "I need to finish up these calculations before I can start reformulating them for a time version. Which would be a lot quicker if Captain Rogers hadn't given all Dad's stuff to Obi," he said, shooting Steve a glare.

"We can't do anything about that now," said Steve, and took a deep breath. Here came the part of this conversation he'd been dreading. "Peggy, I have an idea who might know what the connection is. Have you found Konstantina Fyodorova?"

"Not a trace," said Peggy. "I've combed the entire Eastern Seaboard, trying to figure out how she got into the country. It wasn't with the smugglers, they're all accounted for, so somebody else must have helped her but I'll be damned if I know who." She sighed. "Even she would have had to leave some trace, and yet there's nothing."

"She didn't get in across the Atlantic," said Steve. "She told me she walked across the Bering Strait once the sea ice froze."

Peggy stopped short. "You didn't tell me that," she said.

"I didn't seem important," said Steve. At the time, it hadn't.

Peggy's forehead furrowed and her lips thinned. "Steve," she said severely, "I've just spent the past week wasting SHIELD's time and resources on the wrong coastline! She could have been on the deportation ship by now!"

Steve bristled – after all the things she'd kept from him, she had the nerve to lecture him about something that had merely slipped his mind? "Then it's a good thing I didn't!" he replied. "We can't deport her, Peggy, we need her help."

"We most certainly do not!" said Peggy.

"Yes, we do," Steve insisted. "She said she saw something in the arctic she didn't like, and she wanted my help dealing with it..."

"And mine," Tony chimed in.

"But she disappeared again before I could ask for more details," Steve added. "I don't know where she is now, but I'm sure she knows something about all this."

"The Achilles is in the arctic," said Tony. "And Norway's pretty close."

"There's gotta be a reason she hasn't contacted me again," Steve went on, and then remembered something else Peggy had said. "These smugglers you mentioned, maybe they were also looking for her..."

Peggy interrupted. "She hasn't contacted you again because she knows you're not an utter chump!" she said. "I can promise both of you, whatever she said about needing your help was only intended to flatter your egos. She intends to use you for something."

"I don't think she does." Steve said. "She told me..."

"I don't care what she told you," Peggy snapped. "I've met half a dozen others like her and they were all the same – they will say and do whatever it takes to get their mission done, and they answer to nobody but their superiors in Moscow, or whoever those superiors have loaned them to."

"She gave us the information we needed to rescue the Odyssey astronauts," Tony pointed out.

"Because that was the job she'd been told to do," said Peggy.

"You said you expected us to get her out of jail and enlist her help," Steve reminded her.

Peggy nodded sharply. "I expected you to do that precisely because it was a bloody stupid thing to do!"

"She said the Russians had been going to execute her," Steve insisted. "She said that now you knew her face she was no more use to them."

"And it gained your sympathy very nicely, didn't it?" Peggy said. "Here you are defending her when you of all people ought to know better."

"Even if she's using me," Steve insisted. "It's just possible she knows something relevant. We have to at least try to question her. Can you please trust my judgment on this one?" She trusted him when he talked about time travel, but not about asking questions of a woman who'd helped them before?

Peggy was not amused. "Trust the judgment of a man who thought it was a good idea to take a 15-year-old into space?" she said.

He bristled. "I didn't think that was a good idea! Tony thought that was a good idea!" Steve pointed to the young man.

"Hey, leave me out of this!" Tony protested.

"You didn't stop him!" said Peggy.

"There wasn't time," said Steve. "There were lives on the line! There may be lives on the line now!" He realized he was shouting, and made an effort to calm down. Yelling couldn't help. Peggy had always been at least as contrary as Steve himself. "We need to talk to her," he said. "You can question her yourself if you want but I'm convinced she knows something we need to know."

Peggy rubbed her forehead. "We'll talk to her, all right," she said. "But I decide what we do with her after that. We have to catch her first, though, so if you'll excuse me, I have to make a couple of phone calls and re-direct the efforts of at least fifty SHIELD agents and half the NYPD." She snatched up the hotel room's phone, and dialed with a certain amount of violence. "Hello? I need to speak to Commissioner Ward. Yes, I'll hold." She pursed her lips and tapped her foot impatiently.

Steve rather doubted the NYPD could do anything. This was a woman who'd been able to vanish from Tony's bedroom with only a few seconds' warning. He finished his sandwich and got up. "Do you have a picture of her?" he asked. "She must have had an employee file when she worked at SHIELD or something."

"I do," said Peggy, "although it probably doesn't look a thing like her anymore."

"I'd like a copy," Steve said. "I've got some ideas of my own where to look."