CHAPTER X

Last time Alvie had felt fear like this, she had been locked up in the Raft with Athena broken and Bucky somewhere unknown, beyond her reach. This time Athena was working fine and she knew exactly where Bucky was, but neither of these circumstances was bringing her much comfort.

She sat in a small, glass room at the top of the Design Group's tallest tower, feeling rather like she was trapped in the biggest diamond in a tiara. Through the tiny speaker lodged into her ear canal she could hear the shouts and screams of Earth's Mightiest Heroes blare out in time to the devastation of the battlefield that she could see, surrounding her on the Wakandan plains. Her heart was in her mouth and it tasted metallic, like blood, like terror.

"He's coming back," she whispered to herself. He's coming back.

Unless he's not. Unless they lose while I'm sat here, stuck and useless, watching and doing nothing to help.

I helped. Vision's downstairs. I helped with that. She had gone down to see him, alone save for Shuri and the red-headed witch girl, his uncanny inhuman eyes flitting around the room as he lay immobile on the surgery table while the princess did her best to pry that stone out of his head.

"Alvie Kennings," he had said as she walked in. "Eva's friend. It's lovely to finally meet you – I only wish it were under better circumstances."

It had been nice, to be known as Eva's friend before fugitive or terrorist or cyber-genius. It made her feel like a civilian, for all of the weirdness of the situation she was in. "Can I help?" she'd asked the room at large. "I know some stuff about synthetic neuron forging from making Athena."

"Over here." Shuri had waved her over then, eyes not leaving the screen she was working on. She was wearing one of Alvie's coats; a bright orange jacket with a high collar that she had stolen from her wardrobe and promised half-heartedly to give back at some point in the distant future.

The witch's glare had followed Alvie across the room, she remembered, burning into the back of her brain as if she'd been reading her mind. Maybe she had.

"You see this?"

On the map of Vision's brain, a galaxy of glowing golden pathways forging itself into something resembling a human, there was a handful of glowing red knots tucked innocuously away. "They aren't synthetic," Shuri explained. "The rest of these came about fully formed when he was created, save for the odd thousand pathways here and there accounting for the learning of new information, but these are completely original. Not even one of my simulations could pick them up."

"Huh," said Alvie. "When I interned under Stark we hypothesised these. Ultron spots, he called them. This was years before the whole robot invasion thing. Completely unpredictable, uncontrollable, self-creating blips in the prefrontal cortex."

"What does that mean?" Wanda Maximoff asked.

"That he's evolving," Alvie explained. "Ultron spots can be dangerous – should be dangerous – are dangerous. They're what turn completely benign AI into murder machines."

"How?"

"It's my free will," Vision said quietly, and the three women turned to look at him. "They provide me the choice to succumb to destruction."

"They're what make ya human," Alvie replied. "They're your soul."

"Then why don't you?" Shuri had asked bluntly. "Why don't you kill and destroy like Ultron did?"

"Ultron was alone. I have people keeping me good."

Back in the diamond tower, Alvie felt tears burning at the corner of her eyes and blinked them away furiously.

I don't wanna lose him. I don't wanna be alone again.

I don't wanna go back to being the person I was before I met him.

She bit down on her knuckles, hard enough to draw blood. I won't. I can't. Pull yourself together, Kennings. If you can't think of anything useful to do, find summat.

Leviathan.

She closed her eyes, tilted her head back and let her mind fall blank save for that haunting, three-pointed star. If she could find and destroy that last, lingering ghost of Bucky's past, then he could come home to her after this terrible fight and they would, finally, be safe and whole and human. It would be her gift to him, then. His peace. Like Calypso, offering an eternity of it to any washed-up hero that fell into her arms. Only this time, that hero would not leave again.

Alvie switched off her feed to the Avengers' earpieces. She did not need the distraction.

She started with the now-public records of Hydra that Romanoff had leaked back in 2014, lilypadding from one file to the next on the hunt for anything that could be related. When she had done this before she had been looking for nothing but that symbol, but now she had a few breadcrumbs of information to get her started. Finally, deep into the grainy photo scans of files that had originally belonged to the SSR, she found a field report by P. Carter about a man with his larynx cut out.

That was enough to get her started. She followed the breadcrumb trail through tales of hypnosis, frenzy gases stolen from Stark archives and terrorist attacks, skim-reading old files of Soviet diplomats and the murders of their spoiled, runaway daughters. It was brutal and bloody, below-the-belt Cold War stuff, but Bucky was right – it stopped stone dead with a debriefing transcript between the Winter Soldier and his CO, describing the "erasure" of the last active Leviathan loyalists.

Active.

That word. It meant that there were some still alive, or had been at least, that had left Leviathan before the last traces of it were scrubbed from Hydra's history.

Check Hydra personnel files for Soviet agents that defected to SHIELD in the late eighties and early nineties.

Twelve candidates found.

Cross-reference with records of soldiers stationed in the Winter Soldier compound in the nineties. They were looking for Bucky, after all. They gotta have some connection to him.

Four candidates found.

Four faces flashed up at her: three men and a woman, late forties to early fifties, digital photos that had been taken within the last decade at least. The last mention of them was in SHIELD records, working at the Triskelion when the helicarriers had fallen. Three had survived, by the looks of it. One had not. Soviet slug to the chest. Killed by their own creation.

Very Frankenstein.

So that was it, then. Revenge. It made sense, at least. But something about it didn't seem right – or not the whole picture, at least. Highly trained sleeper agents didn't just hang about for a few years until their target was semi-retired in the most well-protected country in the world, then try and get to him via a woman that they didn't even know for certain had any connection to him beyond the fact that they were both strangers in a foreign land. It didn't seem… logical.

Since when have I been able to understand logic?

Don't ask questions. Just do it. Take 'em out.

Right. And how do I do that, again?

She opened her eyes, rolled her neck and groaned. She didn't even feel scared any more; she was angry instead, angry and determined. What had she even been scared of, anyway? It had escaped her brain completely. This always happened. She got so caught up in her own head she forgot the real world even existed.

Something was moving around behind her, breathing heavily like some kind of massive dog. Or cat. Most likely cat, considering whose building she was in. Panthers for pets wouldn't surprise her at all.

"He really oughta keep you on a leash," she said out loud to the big cat, as its claws sang in screeching notes across the vibranium ore floor. "Merde. What is that smell?"

She turned around.

Oh, no.

That's not a cat.

Outriders. Parasitic alien race. Drone minds. Source: SHIELD.

Cheers, Athena. That helped a bunch.

The alien moved slow, torso close to the floor with its four front arms holding itself up. Something black and sticky dripped from its mouth, hitting the floor with soft plicks. There were no eyes that she could see, but its head was trained exactly in her direction. It must have been able to smell her perfume.

"Bad kitty," she whispered, as a growl rumbled in its throat. "Bad… bad kitty."

I'm gonna get et by Jar Jar Binks' inbred cousin.

This is not how I wanna die.

The growl turned into a snarl, and the alien edged closer. Alvie took a deep breath and held it in case it could sense the disturbance in air patterns, and slowly inched her arm out of her lab coat. The monster seemed to have locked her down, now; it had moved away from the room's entrance completely and was lowering itself to the ground, hind legs rising up ready to launch the body forwards. Knees trembling with terror, Alvie shrugged her other shoulder out of the jacket and froze as it fell, pockets weighing it down with the numerous knick-knacks and snacks she carried around. The rustling of fabric made the alien freeze, turn silent, re-adjust its stance. Whether by movement or smell or sound, it was tracking the noise of that jacket now. Balling the fabric up in her fist, she let out the breath she had been holding and got ready to run.

"Good kitty," she breathed. "Fetch!"

She flung the jacket away from her to the farthest corner of the room and forced herself to wait for the millisecond it took for the alien to leap after it, going straight for the spot where it would land. The moment the way out was free Alvie bolted, sprinting out of the room and slamming the door shut behind her.

Lock! Lock it!

Door 176b deadlocked.

The J'Bari wood that it was made out of shook with such a ferocity that she felt it in her teeth as the alien, now aware of its mistake, flung itself against it in an attempt to get out and reach her. Alvie didn't hang about to see if it would succeed. She went straight for the staircase, not wanting to be trapped in an elevator, slipped on the third step and fell with a scream the rest of the way, bones smacking against the smooth vibranium stone. Any other material and she would have broken every bone in her body – as it was, the metal absorbed the impact and she rolled down to the bottom of the spiral with her skeleton shaken severely but still intact. Dragging herself to her feet, Alvie braced herself against the wall and started to run again, headed straight for Shuri's laboratory.

The first thing she saw was the torn-open body of a Dora Milaje abandoned on the floor, limp like a flung ragdoll. Alvie tripped over one of her legs as she stumbled into the lab, every inch of her body pounding with pain, taking in the smashed window and the empty surgery table where Vision was supposed to be. Then she saw the small figure in orange, dropped unmoving on the floor.

"NO!" she screamed.

Alvie ran over and dropped to her knees, grabbing Shuri's shoulders. "Don't be dead," she begged, "please, please don't be dead, please –"

Vitals detected. Unconscious but stable; without serious injury.

Alvie let out a sob and pulled Shuri's prone form close to her, cradling the girl like she was her own kid. "Don't scare me like that," she cried out, although nobody was present and correct enough to hear her. "What's going on? What's happening?"

In response, Athena switched on the Avengers' intercom again. Wincing at the sudden burst of static, Alvie set Shuri back down and stood up to look out of the broken window, breeze pulling her hair across her face. Down in the forest she could see something otherworldly shimmering, and lightning crackling out from some unknown source.

The signal was breaking up. Alvie hit the side of her head, straight over her ear, in case it was a problem with her end. It seemed something was interfering with the signal, which shouldn't be possible: she had built the system herself.

An anguished roar broke through the static and Alvie yelped as it pierced her eardrum. The signal started to get stronger and she could hear heavy breathing – Steve's – and a distant, low voice that she could just about make out.

"You…"

She narrowed her eyes. Athena, she thought. Isolate that voice.

Wavelength enhanced.

"You should have gone for the head…"

Snap.