She was almost in Pittsburgh when her phone rang. The main one, not the burner. She looked at the restricted caller's ID for a while before accepting the call. She did not speak, waiting for the opening line.

"You there?" It was Clint.

"Yeah."

"Toss the sim card, they will be tracing it, if they aren't already," he said. He was using his businesslike, factual tone, as he always did during the missions they ran together, the one suggesting that there's no room for emotions. "Then contact me. You know how."

He disconnected. Natasha pulled over to the emergency lane, pried her sim card free, broke it in half and threw it out of the window, then, after a minute consideration, she threw the device as well. The phone serial number was in the database and it will get flagged the moment she turns it back on, even with a new sim card.

She rolled the window back up, took a deep breath and merged back into traffic.

She ran out of time.

She took the next exit and turned around. There was no point in going back to New York. If SHIELD was on her trail, they'll indubitably wait for her there.

A small, dinky motel on the outskirts of Indianapolis was where she stopped for the night. She sat on the single queen bed in the cramped room for long minutes before she pulled out her new phone and called Clint's home number. The signal modulated and changed as the call was redirected, then sounded a few more times before it went away, replaced by silence overshot with static.

"Hi, Clint," she said.

"What the fuck, Nat? Whe…" he stopped himself from finishing the sentence. He knew just as well as she did that revealing such information over an insecure line was an idiocy and none of them would stoop so low. His breath rustled in the headset. "There's a flag on you and an internal warrant to bring you in the moment you return," he said plainly. "Something about a crime scene in Ohio."

"Mhm."

"Tell me it's just some massive misunderstanding."

"I was there. I wasn't careful, I got shot and had to scram."

"Tell me you have a perfectly valid explanation for that."

"I don't." Not one he would accept, at least.

"You have to come in. I'll help you make it right. We will convince Fury together, tell him it's just PTSD – or whatever – making you act up. They will set you up with a battalion of shrinks and you'll be off the hook before you know it."

"No. I won't. I'm sorry, but I won't do it."

"It's still about Loki, isn't it?"

"Yes. Kind of. Not entirely, not anymore, but yes, he is in the center of it."

"What are you trying to do?"

"I'm going to track him down and help him escape."

There was a pause as Clint panted into the microphone, controlling an outburst that threated its way out. "Why?"

"Because he is my friend, Clint," she grounded through clenched teeth. "Because he was forced to attack us by a big, bad space alien who apparently goes with a 'Mad' in his nickname, who is still out there and just as much of a threat as he was before, and – no matter how much Loki suffers at our hands – that's not going to change. Because I already told Fury and he disregarded everything I said, too concerned with saving his warm seat to worry about one person getting hurt. Because the World Council has their grabby hands all over Loki and they are in the process of torturing him as we speak, and I can't allow that to continue. Because I stood aside and did nothing for way too long and now it's time to act. Because there's no one else willing to help him and it has to be me!"

"You make no sense."

"I make all the sense in the world and you'd see it if you could look at the world past the tip of your nose for five minutes instead of fondling your hate and anger all the time."

"Nat, please…"

"No. I'm sorry Clint, but I'm not going to play along. It's too late for that. I'm not going to lie to you, pretend everything is fine. It's not! If you can't accept that for what it is, then this is a goodbye."

There was another pause. "You can't expect me to believe all that."

"I don't expect anything. I'm going to do what I have to do and I'm not letting you, Fury, his little band of heroes, SHIELD, the Council or whoever else is pulling the strings to stop me."

"You're serious about that."

"The hell I am."

"Then there's nothing left for us to tell one another," he said numbly.

She hesitated. "There's one more thing. A warning. There's a force acting inside SHIELD and the Council. Other agencies too, presumably. I don't know yet how deep it runs or what the endgame is, but… Do not let this catch you unprepared. Be wary of who you trust, be careful of who you talk to and what about. Just… be careful, okay?"

"Nat…"

She hung up, pulled the sim card free and tossed it into the trash bin. Then she sat on the bed, staring at the flowery curtains until it got too dark to see at all.

This tie was the hardest of them all to sever, but there was no other way.

"You're getting the files?"

"Yes," Hanima said. "It's goes at a nosebleed speed, because the upload rate is atrocious."

"I'll make sure to leave an official complaint on Starbuck's fan page about that."

Hanima sighed.

"Were you able to identify the people we saw on the camera feed?" Natasha asked.

"I tried. I got the best crops I could, then cross-referenced it with every database I could access. SHIELD, FBI, CIA, NSA, bank data, DMV, you name it. And nothing. Zilch. Nada. It's like they never existed."

"I didn't expect much, to be honest. What about the names Dr Mengele provided?"

"Dr Maxwell Sparks apparently worked in DC SHIELD RnD division, until a few months ago when he got transferred somewhere and the records got purged. Since then, no trace. The rest apparently doesn't exist, so those were either aliases or SHIELD is too good at protecting their agents' identities."

Natasha murmured noncommittally because both were equally probable. "So, is there anything useful in the files we got?"

"No idea. The transfer's still going, and the files are encrypted, it'll take time to crack the encryption."

"How long?"

"Again, no idea. I have a hint of what kind of scrambling they could be using, based on their network structure, but I'm still on the 'verifying the hypothesis' phrase with that. But it can be done, in a couple of days. A few weeks, tops."

"A few weeks," Natasha repeated. "That's… longer than I expected."

"I don't know what to tell you, the hardware I have access to took a long time to get under my circumstances as-is and something tells me this is not the kind of data that are safely sent outside. You said it yourself, we don't know who to trust."

"Yeah," Natasha sighed.

"I'm sorry. I know you want to help him… help all those people, as soon as possible. I promise, I'll get to you the moment I find anything that might look even remotely usable, but for now there's nothing neither of us can do to speed this up."

"Thanks, Hani."

"Don't mention it. No, seriously, don't. I'm deep enough in this shit as it is."

"I got myself a book. Yep, really. Who's a nerd now?" Natasha said and aimed the camera at the cover. "Norse Myths Illustrated" it read, just above a picture of a dragon fighting some Vikings on a boat. "Did you know that some of the names of the days of the week come from the Norse pantheon? Who am I kidding, I'm sure you did. Well, I didn't. That explains why I never much liked Wednesdays. Can't make up my mind about Thursdays though.

"You've been shafted, big time, by not getting your own. Thunder boy got one, papa sadist got one, but you did not. So, I'll pick one for you. It might not catch on, but we could still have it, between the two of us.

"I would go for the weekend, but those are boring. Nothing ever happens on weekends, good or bad. We can't have that. That left me with Monday, since everything else was taken and it made me feel bad, since, you know, people hate Mondays, and you deserve better.

"The thing is… why should we care about what people think? They don't know what we know. And I don't hate Mondays. It's the beginning of the week. And beginnings are much better than endings. It's a start of something new, something you haven't experienced yet. It can be scary, but there's hope in that, too. Kind of like you.

"So, yeah, Monday it is. I hope you like it because I'm not changing it now."

Days passed and the call from Hanima did not come. Natasha checked the news and other sources still available to her but found nothing that could suggest Hanima was compromised. And, if she weren't, it was too much risk to contact her directly, so all Natasha could do was sit and wait. Hanima promised and Natasha knew her well enough that if she didn't call, it meant she either couldn't or she didn't find anything yet.

She did not sit on her ass, doing nothing, far from it. She started reaching out the moment she arrived in California. Old sources and contacts, data fences, the crafty salesmen of equipment that disappeared off governmental trucks, forgers, crooks with ties to mob or local gangs. The kind of folk who fell trough the cracks and now thrived on the underbelly of the society. It was a dance to a familiar melody, even it's been a while since she last heard it.

She filled her days with busy work, talking, negotiating, gathering favors.

At nights, she sat on the floor of the small, one room flat with a single window facing highway overpass and exercised her magic.

Her explorations of powers around were going abysmally. She could sense them all right, the most obvious kinds at least: static and kinetic energy, gravity, the electricity in the wires and the magnetic fields in the air. But those seemed… incompatible, somehow, thrumming in a different rhythm than the one that swirled in her core and she could find no way to break the interference, to draw from it, to convert it to a more familiar form, to make it usable. And she still couldn't reach – or even sense – the strands of cosmic powers Loki spoke about. He told her she would need someone to guide her to find it, someone to show her how it's done, but she hoped that, in time, she could perhaps be able to do it on her own, at least feel something there. But, no matter how much she focused and how hard she tried, she had no luck with that, so far.

Fortunately, connecting to living minds did not require powerful sources and she could progress further there. She drilled herself into keeping the expanded awareness of her surroundings at the edge of consciousness at all times, ready to be reached at will, without extra preparations. She did slip and lost her focus, time after time, but the longer she trained, the more natural it became.

She also spent time on meditation and exploring her core, poking at it from different angles, fiddling, pulling, observing how it reacted to her wishes and wants and fears. In there she found strands. Traces. The leftover of her connection with Marcus still hurt like a fresh scar, sitting there uncomfortably, evoking the traumatic recollections from within his mind. Right next to it sat a mark of her connection to the creature, burned deeply into her psyche with the amount of energy it transferred. Then there were whisps of little contacts she made along the way, the memories of brief encounters and handshakes, fading in the background.

Then, underneath it all were the vestiges of the link she shared with Loki. It felt different than all the others and she wasn't sure if it was because of the consensual nature of it, or because Loki's mind didn't work quite like any other and the link altered because of it. It was brittle and delicate, and she was anxious to even put it under scrutiny, fearing the barest graze could break it somehow. She wanted to hold onto it, its warm presence serving as a proof that what they shared wasn't just a vivid dream but something that truly happened.

After basking in it being there for a while, after she made sure it stays when she focuses on it, she grew bolder. It was there and if she could awaken it somehow… Perhaps there was a way to reestablish the connection, just for a brief moment. She balked at the notion at first, but the longer she considered it, the less irresponsible it sounded. A couple of seconds should be quick enough to fly under Odin's spell radar and still provide invaluable help, a lead, an idea to where Loki was kept. It was a risk, but a risk that might be worth taking, and it was looking more and more alluring, in a desperate way, as more and more options were exhausted without coming to fruition.

So, one of those nights, she sat down, closed her eyes, and focused on the trace, sending a pulse of bright energy. The path lit up and she tugged to grab onto it, drag her mind along and to the other side. Her focus slipped and it faded, without creating a connection. It was still just a mark on the map of her brain and not a true road that she could follow.

She tried again, and again, until she grew exhausted, and her head started to throb dully.

She tried every night after that.

It was the end of October when Hanima's phone finally called.

"Tell me you found something," Natasha said, just as she picked up the phone, not even waiting for Hanima to start talking. She was the only one who had that number.

"Natasha, right?" the voice on the other side said.

"Uhm, Sarah? Is that you?"

"Yes."

"Why are you calling me? Where's Hanima?"

There was silence on the other end for a long while, then a soft sob, and Sarah spoke again, her voice teary and shaken, "I was going to ask you the same thing."

Hanima's been gone for more than two weeks. One day she jumped into a car to go to the grocery store and never returned. The police simply threw their arms up. There were no witnesses, no physical evidence, no motive, not a hint of struggle. The recordings from street cameras in the neighborhood were useless as well. She popped on one feed, driving by like it's any other day and then nothing on the next that she should have passed two minutes later. No one noticed anything suspicious. One moment she was there and the other – poof – gone, like she never existed.

"They said she couldn't take the pressure of being a parent and ran away. That happens all the time, apparently," Sarah said. "But she would never do that."

"She wouldn't. I'm sorry," Natasha said. She was. "But why did you call me?"

"Don't pretend like you don't know. It must have something to do with you. She was out, really out, until you dragged her back in. And suddenly she was spending her every waking hour in the basement again, looking over her shoulder again, hiding things from me again" After that initial outburst, Sarah's voice was rough, but indifferent, seemingly devoid of emotion. Natasha would prefer to be screamed at over this. "It is your fault, and you know it."

Natasha bit down the repartee. The one about Hanima being an adult and knowing what she signed up for. It wasn't true. It was Natasha's fault, and she knew it.

"I'm sorry," she said again.

"I'm not calling to hear your empty platitudes."

"Then why are you calling me?"

"It's your fault."

"You said that already."

"You have to fix this. You have to find her."

"I…" she paused and took a deep breath. "I don't know how. I don't know why they took her. Hell, I don't even know who! Hanima was helping me to research a case, but she stopped talking before… I have no idea what it is that she found that put her in danger."

"That's another reason why I'm calling you."

Natasha's heart skipped a beat. "Go on."

"Hanima might not have trusted me with everything she did, yet she trusted me with being her destruction switch."

"She did?"

"In case something happened, if she was arrested or…" Sarah paused and turned away from the headset, yet Natasha could still hear the muffled sniffle. "I was to come down here and destroy everything. Erase every drive, destroy every memory card, then run a program she wrote that would fry the hardware."

"Did you do it?"

"I stalled. For days, now. But I can't keep on putting it back anymore. So, it's today. I came down here for the first time and… Everything is destroyed. Everything besides this phone that has only one number in it and the main computer. And I'm looking at it, now."

Natasha kept silent, waiting for the woman on the other end to continue.

"Everything seems to be gone here as well. The main drive is almost empty, the others don't even show up, so they must be fried."

"So… There's nothing." Natasha said and pressed her fingers to her eyes. It was all for naught. And now Hanima was gone. Another red bullet point in her ledger.

"There is one file. Right in the middle of the desktop, so she wanted me to see it. It's a text file, with your name as the title."

"Don't open it! No matter what it is, you're better off not knowing. I'll set up a secure e-mail, I'll tell you how to send it to me. But please, do not make yourself a target!"

"Too late," Sarah said. "I already opened it. And there's no need to send it. It's just five signs. SK dash twelve."

"That's it?"

"Yes."

"There's anything else in that file?"

"No."

"Perhaps if you scrolled down, or…"

"I checked. There's nothing hidden in it. Nothing in metadata. It's not converted from any other filetype. It doesn't lead to any other file in the system. It's a five-byte text file with five symbols in it. That's it."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. Do you know what it means?"

Natasha scratched her nose. "I have no idea."

Hanima thought that was important. Important enough to risk leaving it for Natasha, even if she knew there were people on her tail. The problem was that Natasha truly had no idea what it could signify. A codename for a project or mission? A location? A unit designation? Some initials?

Did Hanima know the meaning or was it just something that she judged important from context?

Natasha googled it first. There was a World War Two German plane model of that name and she studied the photos and technical description for minutes before deciding that's either not it or she is not smart enough to figure it out for now. Then some kind of a safety knife, some water pump, a gun from a video game and then a multitude of other products with the string of symbols somewhere in their name or serial number.

Then she turned to the dark web and it proved just as inconclusive.

A few hours later she was ready to admit defeat.

If she could only access SHIELD's database, if it was something connected to the military or agency operations it would be there, at least mentioned…

Well, she could try. There was a decent chance her credentials still worked. It was standard procedure for luring out rogue agents. Leave the access on, then flag and trace every login. It even might not lock her out immediately, giving them more time to get to her. She could still get some intel out of it if she played it right.

Using her laptop right here in her apartment slash hidey hole was out of the question. She already needed to toss her old device and she used some ancient machine she grabbed in a pawn shop. She really wanted to avoid getting another one, even if the IP address wasn't enough of an issue. She would use routing, of course, but they would trace her anyway, eventually. No, she needed to get as far away as possible before making an attempt.

The mall was located on the other side of the city and was a busy place with a lot of visitors at all times of the day, which made it just perfect.

She parked on the street, two blocks away, making sure no city camera covered the place. If it came to a stand-off, the underground garage exits could be blocked too easily, trapping her inside. Plus, they would indubitably check security recordings and she didn't feel like getting yet another car.

She checked her disguise in the shop window. The long blonde wig she got in a secondhand shop (along with a long, pink dress and awful yellow pumps to throw the seller off her scent and make the purchase seem like early Halloween shopping) smelled of moth killer formula with a hint of lavender, which could be one and the same thing. Along with a cheap-looking two-piece it made her look like low level office assistant on a lunch break. It would be better with some obnoxious stiletto heels a woman of her height would wear in an office environment, but she wasn't going to trade comfort in case she needed to dash for that extra bit of credibility.

She picked a small electronics store on the ground floor, right past the main entrance. Something bigger and more crowded would be better, but the only other candidate was an iStore, located on the mezzanine, and the exit routes looked poorly, with only one escalator leading down and the access to staircases secured with fire doors. As in, the kind that stayed close unless a fire alarm has sounded. That was an option, true, but not the best one.

She strolled through the store for a few minutes, eyeing a couple of different laptops on display. There was only one other customer by the smartphone showcase and two clerks, one sitting behind the counter, engrossed with a book, the other eyeing her and the other guy in the store with mild disinterest.

"Excuse me," the guy by the phone display said and waved at the clerk, "can someone help me here?"

The sales assistant went over and stroke a conversation with the customer, and she used the chance. She picked the cheapest model on display, one that would look within the price range her current disguise could afford, thus avoiding unnecessary suspicions.

Her credentials worked, just as she hoped they would. SHIELD could be too predictable sometimes.

There were five direct hits then a couple of partials. The first was a mission from late nineties, with that codename assigned. She skimmed through the brief. Dehli, gun deal gone wrong, resulting in a hostage situation. Suspicion that weapons of an unknown origin were used, unconfirmed. She ran through the list of casualties and agents involved, but nothing obviously connected to what she was looking for caught her attention.

The second one was a part of a license plate from a kidnapping in Melbourne. The perps were never caught, and the victim's body was located in a lake two weeks later. One of the witnesses said they saw one of the perps hover in the air. Confirmed false, the witness was just a junkie.

She moved onto the third result and the page hung on loading, then gave her an error. "Come on," she muttered under her breath.

"Yeah, we have famously shitty wi-fi for an electronics company," said the second salesman, now standing behind her. Her back was turned and didn't see him coming over.

She brought forth a bright smile. "Well, it will be just perfect testing environment for me then," she said.

"Try refreshing the page," the clerk suggested, and she pushed the key, hoping it wouldn't work this time either. It worked, because of course it did. "Oh, what's that?" the guy said and peeked over her shoulder.

"Work e-email. I'm waiting for an important message. Might get some work done just as well if I'm hanging out in the mall during workhours, right?" she laughed and turned, subtly, enough to obscure the view of the screen.

The clerk stepped around her and peered at the monitor again. "Ugh, that's gross."

The screen showed a photo from a plane crash in the Ural. One of the SK-12 planes, crashed in the sixties, the report said, found fifty years later. Coroner eval judged the times of death of the pilot and two passengers at twelve hours prior.

"Tommy!" the first clerk called. "Can you get me one of those but in red from the storage?"

Tommy grunted. "Sure," he yelled back. "If you excuse me…"

"Sure," Natasha said and smiled, then returned to the report.

Before she got further than two sentences in, there was a dark blur in the corner of her eye. She looked up, careful not to make her moves too rapt. A black SUV just came to a screeching halt on the other side of the glass door, right by main entrance, and two agents stepped out. Damn, they were quicker than she expected.

She didn't bother with closing the page or wiping the history. There was no point, they had the record of her search and they knew she was here anyway. She turned and left, disregarding the sideway glance the clerk sent her way.

She was halfway through the venue before she spotted another pair of agents. Those were being a bit more inconspicuous, wearing civilian clothes and walking a bit less like trained soldiers, but still obvious enough. She pulled out her phone and started typing, keeping her head down until they passed, then she turned into a side alley leading to lavatories. A "staff only" door down the hallway had a keypad next to it, but the mag-lock was broken and the door was cracked open. She dove through and pushed it close behind herself.

There was a staff room a bit down the service hallway, currently empty. She grabbed a high visibility vest from one of the lockers and picked a pad with some papers clipped to it.

It was a widespread joke by that point, not only between the intelligence agents, but within the general society as well: a high visibility vest can get you anywhere if you act confidently enough. But damn it if it wasn't true. She passed multiple staff members on her way out and nobody even graced her with more than a cursory glance. It would be even better with a hardhat.

She opened the evacuation door leading to the supply zone. There were a couple of warehouse workers outside, unhurriedly rolling the hand pallet trucks and moving boxes. No agents. They didn't expect her to come out this way. She saved rejoicing about the fact for another time.

The wig landed in the thrash bin in the back alley, the vest followed. She took off the jacket and put on shades. A few more dark vans passed her as she walked down the street, but no one bothered her until she reached the car.