She had no mother. She could be said to have a father, if the definition of such was stretched to include an unadorned genomic sequence. Even that had been altered; altered to produce an egg, altered to make a male child into a female.
But there was more to fatherhood than mere paternity, and she had no father in that sense. She was the truest orphan that had ever been. She could not even claim a name of her own. Just a designator. Numbers and letters. If pressed, with no family and no friends, with no records of her birth and life, she could not prove her own existence.
Those were not things that she thought of frequently, however. Certainly not when she was crouched in a narrow ventilation duct with a hundred thousand dollars' worth of stolen listening equipment spread out around her. It was dark and hot in the duct, far warmer than the weather outside. Sweat eased between her skin and her clothes, slicked her hair against the edges of her face. She could taste salt in every breath.
She pressed the earpiece against her skull and closed her eyes, trying to restrict the sensory input to sound only. It didn't entirely work; she could still feel the tremors of the air conditioning system, could still smell the myriad scents of the building drifting through the duct - including the burnt-ozone tang of the laser grid that she had bypassed on her way in.
"- timetable is still uncertain, sir," a voice was saying. A soldier of no rank and no importance. His report had been stammered and difficult to hear, even for her. Yet it had been vital to hear every detail, and she had very nearly reached her tolerance limit while he rambled.
"I fail to see the point of looking at this situation at all," another voice said, cutting into the conversation with a tinge of irritated boredom. She knew who the voice belonged to; a four-star general sitting on the President's Cabinet. He had arrived at the building in an armored limousine bristling with bodyguards. She could have killed him in under five minutes.
"The point is," the third voice said, louder and more clear than the others combined, "that we are facing a potential coup."
She knew that voice, too, and she scowled at it with her eyes closed.
Laughter, tinny and derisive, from the general. "Really, now, Colonel. He's shown no inclination whatsoever-"
"I'm not talking about him, General." The colonel's tone bordered on insubordination. "I'm talking about his creations. You can't deny that they're powerful weapons easily capable of -"
"Saving the world," the general interrupted, now not only annoyed but chill. The ice reached her unmelted in the heat. "Or have you forgotten so quickly?"
Silence crackled in her ear. In the confined world of the duct, it was louder than the steady in- and-out rush of her breathing.
The general's voice finally ordered, "Drop this line of inquiry. The Pentagon directive stands. I don't want to hear another word of this. Especially words from this agency. Understood, Colonel?"
"Understood, sir," the colonel said, stiff and formal, biting the words off. The aggression lurking in his tone was unmistakable.
A door shut with a muffled click. The colonel sighed. "What's the timetable?"
"Sometime in the next twenty-four hours," the nameless soldier answered, hesitant.
Someone, most likely the colonel, slammed a fist against an unyielding surface. "I can't tell if this is madness or just plain stupidity. Trask and his Sentinels are the biggest threat to national security since Baron Zemo - Yes? What is it?"
"Sir, there's been a perimeter breach. One of the laser grids in the ventilation system is registering as non-functioning."
"Move to lockdown and have the ducts swept."
But when the SHIELD agents crawled through the ducts, all that they found was a hundred thousand dollars' worth of abandoned listening equipment. It was difficult to catch someone who didn't exist, and more difficult yet to keep them.
And Weapon X23 did not exist.