1990

Mitchell Carson never came back to work, nor did a handful of the scientists who had been working in the defense lab to replicate Hank Pym's particles. They'd obviously been tipped off by the death of Dr. Greiling that their cover was blown, and even their homes had been cleared out overnight, leaving no obvious traces of where they had gone. Still, Peggy set Mike at the head of a carefully selected team of agents — only those she was absolutely certain she could trust — to tracking them down. The only thing worse than a Hydra agent buried inside S.H.I.E.L.D. was a Hydra agent working freelance, away from their watchful eyes.

It was delicate, dangerous work, made all the more complicated by the fact that Peggy had to hide these activities from the Council itself; it was too soon for them to know of Hydra's existence.

And if that weren't enough, Peggy delayed her retirement and began to personally conduct a quiet but intensive audit of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s internal affairs. They knew they could not assume that all the rats had fled the ship; there were bound to be Hydra agents infiltrating other departments who had somehow escaped their notice, as Carson had.

Slowly, their investigations began to bear fruit. Mike and his team caught one scientist in Beirut. Another in Wellington. A third in Guangzhou. Each success yielded more information that helped lead them to the next. But Carson himself remained elusive.

Meanwhile, Peggy was making inroads in cleaning out the defense lab. The Hydra agents may have fled, but there was still work to be done. For the willfully clueless who seemed to have assisted Carson, perhaps unwittingly, there were demotions and downgrading of security clearances. Transfers to less crucial departments. Increased oversight by people Peggy trusted. And, most painful of all, she had revoked Howard Stark's access to the defense lab.

He'd been, predictably, furious. He'd accused Peggy of overreacting, of making him into a scapegoat for Carson's misdeeds. It had sickened Peggy to do it — despite the many times the two of them had butted heads over the years, she nevertheless considered Howard a friend — but she felt she had no choice.

"Being ignorant of Carson's intentions is no excuse," Peggy told Steve wearily. "The end result was the same; Howard helped Hydra. The fact of the matter is, I can't trust him anymore. He may mean well, but if they used him before, they could use him again. They know his weaknesses now."

Weeks stretched into months, and Peggy's mission to purge S.H.I.E.L.D. hit a dead end.

"There's something rotten going on around Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S., but I can't seem to pin anyone down," she told Steve one night.

She spread her papers out over the kitchen table and together they went over everything she had discovered. Most alarming were the discrepancies in various reports regarding the times and dates that the Tesseract was being put into use for its various energy experiments; it was clear that some of the technicians, at least, were not being honest about what they were doing with it.

Both Steve and Peggy had to fight their instinctive urge to remove the Tesseract in secret from the S.H.I.E.L.D. facility where it was being kept and store it somewhere only their family would know; if Hydra had infiltrated Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S., such a drastic move would tip them off, and then Mike and his team would have to chase yet another wave of fleeing Hydra agents around the globe. Better to take them as a group, unaware, if they could.

And so Peggy devised a wilier plan, using a scrap of information Natasha Romanoff had picked up from Carol Danvers during the years they had worked together post-Snap, which Nat had once mentioned to Steve. Steve hated working on third-hand information like that — hadn't that already gotten them into trouble? — but it was the best they could come up with.

It didn't take them long to find Dr. Wendy Lawson, freshly recruited by the U.S. Air Force to explore the potential for interstellar travel and actively searching for a powerful energy source that would work with her designs. Peggy immediately arranged for a meeting, which Dr. Lawson was all too eager to agree to, explaining to Peggy the moment she walked through the door that she had been trying for a month to arrange the meeting herself, but had been rebuffed by S.H.I.E.L.D.'s gatekeepers.

What followed was, as Peggy described it to Steve afterward, one of the most ludicrous conversations she had ever participated in, as Dr. Lawson earnestly strove to convince Peggy, step by step, that interstellar space travel might be possible, and if only Director Carter had come across any unusual energy sources during her time at S.H.I.E.L.D., and would be willing to simply lend it to the project for a time...

Peggy sank down on the couch next to Steve as soon as she got home, explaining with an expressive sweep of her arms: "There we were, two venerable ladies of a certain age, one of us human, one of us pretending to be, both of us knowing perfectly well that interstellar space travel is already happening-" Steve fought back an audible smile, not wanting to interrupt her story.

"-and then her pretending she doesn't already know about the existence of the Tesseract," Peggy went on, "and me pretending I haven't already decided to hand it over to her, and putting on a big show of being reluctant-" Peggy dissolved into laughter, a sound that had grown all too rare during this period of Hydra-hunting. "Oh, Steve, I could hardly keep a straight face!"

"So when is the transfer?" Steve asked.

"I'm going to hand it over to Dr. Lawson in four days. That should be enough time to disconnect the Tesseract from the hardware and arrange for transportation," Peggy said. She took in a deep breath and let it out, the smile slowly fading from her face. "And Howard is already furious with me. I can just imagine what he's going to say when he finds out I'm taking the Tesseract from him and giving it to another researcher."

"He hasn't made any headway with it in a long time," Steve said. "And he has plenty of other projects in his own company to occupy his time."

"I know," Peggy said. "But he thinks of the Tesseract as his. He was the one who fished it out of the ocean."

"Yeah, well, once he's gone through as much as I have trying to keep that thing out of the wrong hands, then I might think about letting him have a say."

Steve couldn't quite keep a hint of bitterness from creeping in. Of all the Stones, the Tesseract was the one that had weighed on him the heaviest. He'd had to fight not one, not two, but three power-hungry tyrants to stop them from misusing it, and to add insult to injury, images of the Tesseract had figured heavily in his post-traumatic flashbacks in the months immediately following his revival from the ice; he knew he wasn't fully capable of being objective about it anymore.

The day arrived. Peggy headed to work to oversee the transfer, and Steve ended up going over to Sarah's house, mostly to distract himself from thinking about the Tesseract.

There was always something going on at Sarah's house, and today was no different; when Steve pulled up in his Jeep, her three youngest children were out in the driveway, drawing on the concrete with sidewalk chalk. Fourteen-year-old Maggie was sitting back in a lawn chair under the willow tree with sunglasses perched on top of her head and a magazine resting in her lap, which she was ignoring in favor of actively supervising the other three kids. She had always thrived on being put in charge, which suited Dave and Sarah just fine: while Bram was the oldest and had always been pretty responsible, taking care of his younger siblings was not his favorite thing to do.

Steven, Amanda and Joe were all fully absorbed in their chalk art, but when they saw Steve coming, they dropped everything and ran to mob him with hugs that left chalky handprints all over his shirt. Steve had learned long ago to stop being bothered by things like that — in fact, it tended to give him a wistful kind of regret that his own children had grown up far too quickly — and he spent the requisite amount of time admiring their artwork before going over to where Maggie was sitting. He put a hand on her shoulder, and she reached back and put her hand on top of his, tipping her head back and smiling up at him.

"Hey, kiddo," Steve said.

"Hi, Grandpa."

"Where's your mom and dad?"

"Dad's working in the lab in the back," Amanda answered before Maggie could — despite being next-to-youngest she tended to do most of the talking for the other children, and it was a running joke in the family that she had really been intended for Mike's family but had ended up in Sarah's by mistake — "and Mom's working there, too, and Bram's helping her."

"How come they never let us help?" Joe asked grumpily as he scribbled on the concrete with a piece of green chalk. It looked like he was drawing alligators. Or maybe dinosaurs? No, definitely alligators.

Maggie opened her mouth to answer, but Amanda interrupted. "Bram gets to help because he's in the Captain America Club!" she said.

"So is Maggie, and she never helps in the lab!" Joe shot back.

"I'm watching you three," Maggie said, settling back more comfortably in the lawn chair. "That's my job in the club."

Steven had already become reabsorbed in his drawing, silently adding broad strokes to a well-executed figure in armor riding a horse and shutting out the squabble with the skill of someone who had been doing it for a lifetime. But Amanda looked discontented, holding her piece of chalk but not using it.

"Grandpa, can't I join the club?" she asked pleadingly.

"You sure can. In a few years."

"Can't I join early?"

"Amanda, no one joins until they're 13," Maggie said with a touch of impatience. "That's why Harrison was the last to join. It's just him and Natty in their family, and me and Bram in ours. You have to wait your turn like we did. Steven's next, not you."

"He doesn't even care about the club!" Amanda objected.

"Yes, I do," Steven said quietly, although he was still concentrating on his art and to all appearances hadn't been paying attention to the conversation. "The Captain America Club isn't the kind where you meet in a treehouse to play games and eat cookies, Amanda. It's a grown-up thing. Can't you see that?"

"You don't even know!"

"Anyone who's paying attention could guess that much," Steven said, although his tone toward his sister was mild and not accusatory. He seemed so certain of himself that Steve wondered briefly if he had already noticed something different, about his older siblings or maybe even himself. He was 12 years old; it wasn't too soon for some of the changes, and Steven had always been more observant than most, spending more time watching and listening than talking.

"Are you in the Captain America Club?" Joe asked Steve, and then he pointed at Steve's shirt pocket with a second, silent question in his eyes — he knew perfectly well that was where the butterscotch candies were kept.

"Not only am I in the club, but I am one of the founding members," Steve told them as he fished out four candies and passed them around. "Me and Grandma Peggy." He skirted around the chalk art carefully so he wouldn't scuff it. "I'm going to go back and talk to your parents. Maggie, have you got everything under control here?"

"Yep."

"Okay. Come and get me if you need anything; don't bother your parents while they're working."

"I know."

Steve went through the gate to the backyard and headed for the shed — which looked like a sizable, comfortable place to do wood-working projects, at least from the outside. He typed the code into the keypad and waited to hear the lock release before opening the door and walking into the cool interior.

At first it looked like Dave was the only one in the room, perched on a stool pulled up to one of the long stretches of lab counters, which were well-sanitized and scattered with the various tools of his and Sarah's trade — microscopes and centrifuges and computers and medical refrigerators. Dave was squinting at a square glass microscope slide as he carefully used a dropper to add a drop of blue liquid from a vial, but he looked up when Steve walked in and nodded to him in greeting.

"Is that the new strain?" Steve asked curiously, coming over to see.

"Yes. Osteo-3. I just added it to a sample of my own hematopoietic stem cells. Want to see?" Dave clipped the slide into place, and Steve leaned over the microscope and looked in.

"The cells are transforming," Steve murmured.

"Yeah, it works all right," Dave said, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. "On a cellular level, anyway. It's the animal testing where it all falls apart, just like with Cardio-5 and all the variants that came before."

"Obviously you're doing something right," Steve said.

"And obviously, I'm doing something wrong too." Dave didn't sound frustrated, though, just a little tired. He had the tenacity of a bulldog and the patience of Job, even if he didn't make a big show of it. After he and Sarah had hit a wall with the cardiovascular strain they had first developed, he'd simply shrugged his shoulders and started working on the strain of the serum that affected the bones. Whenever and however the two of them managed to fix the stability problem, they'd have a good head start on two medicines now instead of just one.

"Did Sarah tell you? We're going to have Bram be a lab assistant and help with the testing phase of this variant," Dave said, replacing his glasses and peering down into the microscope to take a look at the sample himself.

"He's ready for that?"

Dave nodded. "He's pretty apt. Says he likes doing this stuff better than his schoolwork." He shot a grin at Steve. "I guess there's worse problems to have with a 16-year-old kid, right?"

"Probably," Steve agreed with a smile. "Where is he, and Sarah?"

Dave pointed to the other end of the room, where Steve could hear Billy Joel's staticky voice coming from the radio around the corner, crooning "This is the Time." He followed the music, which led him past the lab counters and around the corner to where Sarah's family had set up a little sunny nook with a couch and a mini-fridge and a TV. There, he found Sarah and Bram, kicked back on the couch with their feet up on the coffee table, reading comic books.

"I thought you were supposed to be working," Steve said mildly.

Sarah glanced up from her comic book. "I'm researching," she said defensively. "And Bram's reading his family history. He got a new issue today."

Considering the amount of information that needed to be imparted to the grandkids once they were old enough to understand, and how much of it was pretty heady stuff involving time travel, aliens and various world disasters, Sarah and Mike had agreed that for their children, they would slowly parcel out Steve's Avengers comics over the course of their teenage years, giving them a chance to get used to each revelation about the future before they burdened them with another. So far it seemed to be a good system.

"Hey, Grandpa," Bram said, glancing up long enough to scoot over to make room for Steve to sit down. His legs looked ridiculously long, stretched out on the coffee table, and as Steve settled down on the couch he found himself wondering what his grandson would look like when he reached manhood, which suddenly didn't seem all that far away.

He snuck a surreptitious look at Bram, who was intent on his new comic book, and studied his maturing face: the square jaw, the straight nose, the hair just exactly the same color as Steve's, parted and combed neatly to the side in a quiet but deliberate defiance of the fashion of this time.

Looking at him, Steve suddenly froze with recognition. In a flash he knew something he had never known before: he had already seen Bram in his manhood. The pallbearer at Peggy's funeral, the man around his own age who had stood beside him as they shouldered the casket together, wearing a dark suit and blinking back a haze of tears as valiantly as Steve himself had done: That had been Bram. It was all Steve could do to fight the sudden rush of emotion that swept over him.

I must have been blind, Steve thought, breathing quickly as he looked over Bram with new eyes. He even looks like me. But of course he wouldn't have noticed the similarities, or understood them if he had. At the funeral he had intentionally resisted looking any of Peggy's family in the eye, except Sharon — it had still been too painful to think of the family Peggy had had without him. And he had been dizzy with grief, not to mention distracted by the Accords; the whole day had passed by in a blur and one of his principle impressions of that day was gratitude that Sam had been there to help him get from Point A to Point B, because he'd never been thinking less clearly in his life.

Steve took in several deep breaths, permitting himself the time he needed to absorb this. This was not a discovery he could share with anyone: Peggy didn't want to know anything of her death, and he never told anything to the children or grandchildren that Peggy didn't already know. He'd had to leave Peggy's funeral out of the comic book issue Bram was currently reading for that very reason.

After a minute, when Steve had regained his equilibrium, he patted Bram's knee. "So what's new?" he asked, and he was pleased that his voice managed to sound normal.

"Oh, uh, Mom and Dad tested me on everything again yesterday," Bram answered, glancing up from his comic book again. He reached back and pulled a folded-up piece of paper out of his back pocket, looking a little shy but offering it to Steve anyway. "You want to see?"

Steve took the paper and unfolded it. On it was listed stats for speed, weight lifting, endurance, reflexes, healing factor and more, side by side with his stats from when they had first tested Bram at age 13.

"Looks like everything's gone up," Steve said, scanning through the list.

"He's now about 72 percent of what you are," Sarah put in. "That might inch up a little more once he's reached his full growth, if he's anything like me and Mike, but probably not much more."

"I'm less of a Captain America, and more of a Lieutenant America," Bram said, deadpan. He didn't look like he minded, though. He'd taken a few fighting lessons from his Uncle Mike, enough to be able to defend himself if he needed to, but like his mother his heart wasn't fully in it. By contrast, his cousin Harrison at age 13 was already shaping up to be quite the fighter.

"Notice anything interesting there, Dad?" Sarah continued, nodding at the paper.

Steve answered readily. "There was less attrition than we expected. Just like with you and Mike."

Sarah nodded. "Yeah. I think this pretty well proves Dave's hypothesis: the genes that were serum-enhanced are disproportionately dominant. Otherwise we would see the enhancements cut by 50 percent with each generation. You can see there is a decline in ability, just not that much."

"So does that tell you anything useful?"

"Yeah," Sarah said, tucking back a strand of hair that had escaped her ponytail. "It says to me that after a certain number of generations we're going to lose the benefits of the serum, and Dave and I better figure out Erskine's secrets quickly, before-"

"-before I keel over and you lose my blood samples," Steve finished helpfully.

"I wasn't gonna say that, Dad," Sarah objected, smiling at Steve. "But it would definitely be nice if we figured out how to make these serum extractions from scratch, instead of spinning it out from your blood. Then we wouldn't have to jab you with needles all the time."

Bram closed the last page of "Captain America: Civil War" and sighed deeply. "Wow," he said softly.

"What did you think?" Steve asked.

"That was... a lot. I'm sorry, Grandpa. That all must have been horrible."

"Yeah. But we had no one to blame but ourselves."

Bram fingered the edge of the comic book. "Every time I read one of these, Grandpa, I end up thinking about things a little differently," he said slowly. "Like when I read the first one. Most of my life I thought of Abraham Erskine as just a co-worker of Grandma's back in the day. I mean, sure, he invented something pretty cool, but it didn't really mean much to me personally, even though he was my namesake. At least, that's what I thought."

"Our family owes him a debt," Steve agreed. "One that can't ever really be repaid."

"Well, if we can figure out how to do what Dr. Erskine did, it would be a start," Sarah said. "Dave and I did the math once. If we could cure just one thing — heart disease — then every year we could save the same number of lives Hitler took during each year of the war."

Bram opened up his comic book to a certain page and showed it to Steve, frowning. "Is this really the end of the story, Grandpa? I mean, I know I'm supposed to be relieved that all the Winter Soldiers died before they got thawed out, but I was kind of curious to see what they transformed into."

"They didn't transform into anything," Steve said, puzzled by the question.

"But all the rest of you did," Bram pointed out. "You and Schmidt, and Banner and Blonsky. You all came out of your experiments looking wildly different from how you did before. How come the Winter Soldiers didn't?"

"The super-soldier treatment had a three-pronged approach, Bram," Sarah said, lowering the comic book she was holding in order to fully join their conversation and slipping comfortably into scientist mode. "First there was the serum itself — a chemical composition that works by loosening genetic patterns and leaving them open to change. Then there was the radiation, which provides a burst of highly concentrated energy for any subject who needs a significant increase in mass."

"E=MC2," Bram supplied.

"Yep. Just like Einstein said. So, if you were, say, a 5-foot-4, 100-pound guy who needed to grow 10 inches and more than double his weight-"

"-or if you wanted to be a 8-foot-tall green giant..." Bram added wryly.

"Right. Of course, now we know that the Vita-Rays were a more stable form of radiation than gamma rays. That's why your Grandpa's transformation was permanent instead of cyclical, like Banner's. Anyway, the radiation is optional. Schmidt didn't get it at all, and neither did Blonsky in the first stage of his transformation."

"So after the serum and the radiation, what's the third factor?" Bram asked.

Sarah shook her head and smiled sadly. "I wish I knew. Something that determined the new structure of the subject's genetic code. If you look at the four subjects who received either Erskine's original formula or a serum that was derived from your Grandpa's blood, they all ended up with a dramatic change in appearance. But Bucky, who got Arnim Zola's variant, and the rest of the Winter Soldiers, who got Howard Stark's... they got stronger, yes, but they didn't change appearance. Obviously there was something in Erskine's formula that integrated with the subject's original genetic structures that the serum loosened, and that "something" provided a new pattern. And it was apparently a unique pattern for each individual... we ended up with a walking death's mask, a green giant, a hideous abomination, and-" She smiled ruefully at Steve. "-a college quarterback."

"Wasn't it just some form of genetic engineering?" Bram asked. "I mean, they can alter plant DNA now to make crops that produce more per acre..."

"Your father thought of that, but it doesn't fit," Sarah said. "For one thing, genetic engineers today stand on the shoulders of a lot of other scientific discoveries that hadn't been made yet in the 1940s. Obviously, Dr. Erskine was ahead of his time in some ways, but I don't think he could have taken that big of a leap on his own. For another, less than a week passed between when they chose Grandpa for the experiment and the day they actually carried it out. There wouldn't have been time to map out his genetic code, much less tinker with it strand by strand."

"Well... however Erskine did it, maybe Zola and Howard's formulas were an improvement," Bram said slowly. "I mean, at least Bucky and the others didn't end up looking like monsters."

"But they were mentally unstable," Sarah pointed out. "Bucky was left susceptible to mind control, and the other Winter Soldiers were so violent and unpredictable that even Hydra despaired of trying to control them. The original four did end up with personality amplification, of course — Banner's anger, and Blonsky's lust for power, and Schmidt's megalomania — but that isn't quite the same thing as actually going crazy. Whereas Grandpa managed to stay completely sane, and for that matter so did all of his quasi-super-soldiered descendants."

"So far," Bram quipped with a grin.

"Anyway, I do think Erskine's formula was the superior one," Sarah continued, "if we could ever figure out what that missing third factor is... and why the physical pattern Grandpa ended up with was so much more appealing than what the other three got." She picked up the comic book she'd been reading when Steve first came in, and flipped through it, skimming with her eyes more than reading it.

The three of them fell into a comfortable silence, sitting side by side on the couch as the sunshine streamed in through the window and the leaves of the aspen tree in the backyard fluttered in the breeze. On the radio Jon Bon Jovi was singing "Blaze of Glory," around the corner they could hear Dave's clinking microscope slides, and in the distance they could hear the younger kids laughing in the front yard.

"Dad?" Sarah asked curiously, breaking the silence after a few minutes. "What is this?" She pointed to the open page of the comic book she was looking at, the volume Steve had drawn about his own transformation at Camp Lehigh. Steve leaned over to look.

The panel Sarah was pointing at depicted Erskine and himself sitting in the barracks the night before the procedure, facing each other, holding drinking glasses.

"Schnapps," Steve said. "From Augsburg."

"No, I know that. What is that?" Sarah repeated, pointing to a piece of paper Steve had drawn into the scene, tacked up on the wall of the barracks just behind the bottle of schnapps.

"Oh, that's a sketch I made of myself," Steve answered. "Of what I thought I would look like after the procedure."

He'd drawn himself in full Army gear, looking tall and strong and serious — much the way his father had looked in the only photo Steve had ever possessed of him, dressed in his own U.S. Army uniform days before being shipped out to fight in the Great War — a fight he had never returned from.

Sarah squinted at the tiny picture within a picture. "Is that a literary flourish, or is that something you actually did?"

"It's real. I drew that a few days before I was chosen. It was part of the testing they put us through, with the hypnosis session and everything."

Bram looked over at him strangely. "Whoa, wait. Dr. Erskine hypnotized you?"

"He hypnotized all the final candidates," Steve said. "It's really not that surprising. Hypnotism was a big trend during the years he was training in his profession. A lot of doctors in both America and Europe were experimenting with it in those days, using it for all kinds of things. I know it sounds kind of hokey now, but-"

"Hypnotism isn't hokey," Sarah said quickly. "There's plenty of evidence that it does work for certain things — I mean, it's terrible for recovering repressed memories, and it can't make people do things they don't want to do, no matter how many movies insist that it can — but you can use hypnotism to tap into the subconscious. I'm just trying to understand why he needed to do that to administer the SSR tests. What kinds of things did he say to you while you were under? Can you remember?"

"He gave me ethical scenarios," Steve said, "and asked what I'd do in those situations."

Sarah nodded slowly. "Makes sense. He already knew about the personality-amplifying side effect because of Schmidt. He wanted to make sure he wasn't going to give the serum to a bad egg. But what does that have to do with this drawing you made?"

"Well, after we talked about the scenarios, he asked me to describe in detail what I would look like after the experiment, if I was chosen."

"But how could you be expected to know?"

Steve shrugged. "He explained it to me in general terms — that I'd be in perfect health, and that I'd be stronger and faster than before, and so on." He scratched the back of his neck. "Anyway, I was kinda embarrassed to tell him what I was picturing, but he insisted it was part of the test, and after a while I said it would be easier for me to draw it than to say it, so he tore a paper out of his notebook and had me sketch it out."

"While you were still hypnotized?" Bram asked.

"I guess so. I felt pretty relaxed."

Sarah looked back down at his sketch, and blinked a couple of times. "Dad, this is uncanny. I mean, your sketch is a dead ringer for you. You predicted your new body exactly. You're sure he didn't describe your appearance to you in detail? With measurements and all?"

"I'm sure. After I drew that, he asked me how tall I would be. I said, 'I don't know. How tall would the serum make me?' And he had me guess how tall I thought the perfect soldier should be. I guessed 6 feet, 2 inches, and he said that was exactly right, that that's how tall the serum would make me."

Sarah stared at him. "Dad, that doesn't make any sense."

"Why not?"

"Because Dr. Erskine had no earthly idea how tall the serum would make you."

Steve frowned. "How do you know?"

"Because-" Sarah suddenly jumped up and dug out a thick packet of papers from a stack on top of the filing cabinet. "-he and Howard Stark had a big dust-up over exactly that issue. It's all right here in Howard's notes that Mom copied for me out of the S.H.I.E.L.D. archives. Howard was building the Vita-Ray chamber using titanium, which is not exactly cheap, and they were already way over budget. He didn't want to build the chamber a single inch longer than it needed to be, so he kept pestering Dr. Erskine to tell him exactly how tall the subject would end up, but Erskine couldn't tell him. Not until almost the last moment." She flipped through the pages for a minute. "See, here it is. Right here." She pointed at the date in Howard's notes.

Steve looked at the entry for a long moment. "What does that mean?" he asked at last.

"I don't know. I don't understand how Dr. Erskine could tell you that you were right in guessing your future height, when Howard Stark was chomping at the bit to know and Erskine didn't tell him until the day after he administered your tests."

Just then, they heard the door around the corner opening, and then Dave greeting Peggy. The next moment Peggy came around the corner, with Dave following at her heels.

"How did the transfer go?" Steve asked, but already his heart was sinking, because he could see how serious she looked.

Peggy shook her head, gray curls bouncing, and pressed her lips together in a straight line.

"As badly as it could go." She met Steve's eyes, her expression furious. "The Tesseract's gone missing."

TO BE CONTINUED

Author's note: Let me know what you think! Please leave a review.