Chapter 12

The steady beep of a heart monitor was the only audible sound when I woke up sometime later. The pain was completely gone – whether from my enhancements or from whatever was in the drip going into the back of my right hand, I wasn't sure.

I lay in a hospital bed in a medium-sized room. It was white-walled and clean, with medical paraphernalia on the benches and shelves around the walls. A large doorway in the far wall led into what appeared to be an operating theater.

I took all this in slowly as the drug-induced fog cleared from my mind, noting the cuffs that bound my chest, wrists, thighs, and ankles to the bed frame under the white sheet I'd been covered with. It was a familiar feeling with a lot of bad memories attached. HYDRA had tied me down like this numerous times, and there had always been pain involved.

I tried to move the fingers of my cybernetic arm and found the limb dead. It wasn't much of a surprise given where I assumed myself to be, but it did nothing to relieve the fear steadily growing within me either.

I turned my attention to my normal hand, trying to pull it free from its restraint. Even on a bad day I should have been able to break the cuff with a simple jerk of my wrist, but right now I couldn't.

I eyed the stainless steel IV stand beside my bed, a sick feeling growing within my stomach. There were several bags of fluid hanging from it, silently mixing only goodness knew what with my blood, and I was willing to bet one of them was responsible for my loss of supernatural strength.

I was powerless, weaponless, and tied down within the enemy's base.

A memory from years ago, of lying strapped to a hard bench while Zola experimented on me, rose to the surface of my mind, overlapping with the present until I couldn't tell what aspects of my surroundings and situation belonged to which.

Somewhere to the side, the heart monitor began to beep faster.

I started to struggle, trying with all of my severely limited strength to break free of the restraints. I needed to get out – out of the cuffs, out of Zola's lab, out of the flashback. Restraints meant pain, and I was terrified of it.

Voices cut through my blind panic, and I became aware of footsteps approaching outside the room. I pulled back out of the flashback just as the door to the right of my bed opened.

A man in his mid-to-late thirties strode into the room with a doctor in tow. He was brown-haired, clean-shaven, and slim. The silver emblem of what appeared to be a partial eclipse adorned the left breast of his black military fatigues.

I watched from my semi-reclined position as he moved to the foot of the bed and met my gaze with serious brown eyes set in a handsome face.

"You good?" He spoke in English and his accent, though faint, was American.

I stared back at him coldly. I wasn't thrashing around anymore, but I couldn't help my ragged breaths or the way my body still shook. There was no point answering that question so I asked another. "Where am I?" My voice was rough and dry.

The man moved to the small table beside my bed and poured water from a jug there into a plastic cup. "You're in the Saros Scientific Military Base. Drink?"

"No." I was thirsty, but with my hands bound he'd have to hold the cup while I drank and I wasn't fond of that idea.

"Okay. No pressure." The man set the cup down. "You heal remarkably fast," he said, and there was a note of genuine admiration in his voice. "Two days' sleep after surgery and our doc" – he gestured to the doctor standing by the far wall – "says you're pretty much good to go. Anyone else would take months to recover from your kind of injuries – what with the collapsed lung and all."

His praise was meaningless, though I appreciated knowing how long I'd been here – and where here was, even if the name was new to me. There was something vaguely familiar about the man's voice, but I couldn't place it.

"My name's Dominic Rogan," the man continued. "General Dominic Rogan. I was in the U.S. Army for over a decade and honorably discharged before coming here to start up this place."

So he was the second man I'd seen when they found me after the chopper explosion. That's why he sounded familiar.

"I know you're wondering what this place is, what's happened to your powers, and what's going on," Rogan continued. "I know we didn't get off to the best start."

"You tried to kill me," I corrected him bluntly.

Rogan grimaced. "I had no idea who was in that chopper. If I'd known it was you…" He shook his head. "I'm truly sorry about that. We're not your enemies, Barnes."

"Then why am I strapped down here without my strength?" I asked.

Rogan made a placating gesture. "The drug we gave you was more for the sake of my medical team than you," he said reassuringly. "It's not permanent. Given the state of your arrival, we simply didn't want to take any chances of you reacting badly to finding yourself here."

He must have noticed the skepticism in my expression because he added, "If you were here to die, Barnes, I wouldn't have gone to the trouble of having you fixed up."

"So why am I here?" I asked.

"Because I think you can help me," Rogan replied simply.

I smiled without humor. Did Rogan really think I was going to trust him? This was where the Molniya had come from. "I'm not gonna help you with anything," I said.

Rogan shrugged, calm and unconcerned. "We'll see. But for now, you need to rest without any more of this panic attack business, okay?" He stood and moved aside as the doctor approached with a full syringe.

Panic surged through me once more and I tried to break free, but the restraints held. Then the doctor was sliding the needle into a vein in my arm and carefully pressing down on the plunger until the syringe was empty.

"Get some sleep," Rogan said as the fog began to descend in my mind once more.

And completely against my will, I complied.

A black-clad guard entered the hospital room a few minutes after I woke the next morning – or when I assumed to be morning. He deposited a tray of food on the bedside table, removed the IVs, and uncuffed my normal hand before stepping back to watch me eat. One hand rested on his holstered gun.

The food was decent, but I didn't have much of an appetite. I was too busy wondering what was going to happen to me, and managing plastic cutlery with one hand was just frustrating anyway.

When I stopped eating, the guard removed the rest of my bonds and jerked his thumb at a pile of clothes lying on one of the benches. "Get dressed," he ordered in Russian.

I obeyed silently, discarding the hospital gown I'd been wearing, and pulled on plain black fatigues like those worn by Rogan and the guard. There was a pair of combat boots with the clothes and I sat on the edge of the bed to do them up, grateful that they had clasps instead of laces. It had been hard enough to get dressed with only one arm.

I briefly entertained the idea of attempting to overpower the guard, then decided against it. With my powers dulled, I'd be dead before I got halfway to him. Just the act of dressing myself had left me feeling shaky.

Rogan walked in as I was doing up the last clasp on my left boot. "Sleep well?" he asked.

I glanced at him briefly before turning my attention to my right boot. "I slept."

Rogan nodded, polite as ever. "You're off your pain meds now, but if there's any problem just ask for more."

"I'm fine." I stood up, feeling the stiffness of my muscles and a slight ache in my left side. I'd seen a scar there when I dressed, a dull pink ridge with the stitches already removed. The other shrapnel wounds were completely healed.

I faced Rogan. "What do you want?"

"I want you to understand," he replied earnestly. "Come."

He left the room and I followed, a second guard joining us so that there was one on either side of me. We walked along a narrow, door-lined hallway with a bare concrete floor, then turned right into another just like it. As before, I worked to memorize the path we took through the complex.

A few other black-clad men and women passed us in the corridors, and then we stopped at the open doorway of a large training room. And it was full of Molniya.

I really had come to the right place.

I just wished I knew what I was doing.