Chapter 10: Recovery Mission
Though cruel the world may be, it is, alas,
A flower no mountains are deep enough to hide.
~Anonymous, Kokin Rokuji, Zoku Kokka Taikan 35111, trans. Edward Seidensticker, from The Tale of Genji
The portal the sorcerers and Wanda stepped through took them from the Sanctum directly to a small, cold room in a psychiatric hospital in the Patagonian city of Neuquén. The room's sole occupant, a boyishly handsome twenty-something man, screamed at their appearance. Strange waved a hand that made the walls glow with a crackling white light.
"Soundproofing spell," Wong explained.
Wanda didn't respond. She couldn't take her eyes off the young man, who was bound in a straitjacket.
"Felipe Lorenzo-Correa," Strange addressed him. "We're here to help. Ayudar. Soy un doctor."
"Brujos!" Felipe screamed. "Brujos!"
"Well, he's not wrong," Strange shrugged. "You're up, bruja."
Wanda didn't move for a moment.
"Are you okay?" Wong asked her.
She shook her head, then nodded. "Yeah. I can do this."
Trying to ignore Felipe's screams and thrashing, she approached him slowly, red glow spreading from her outstretched hand. She entered his mind, finding a similar chaos and wildness as she'd found in Dr. Mills' head. They same feral terror and desperation, but even worse. Fresher.
The mountain. The trail. His companions. Shadows moving across the mist. Footsteps behind them. Inhuman footsteps. Hands reaching from the rocks, grasping. Manolo was missing. Manolo was behind them, striking with a pickax. Juanita pushed Manolo off the cliff. Something crawled out of him, peeling him off like a snake shedding its skin. Glowing ghost, moving like a heat wraith. They ran. They tripped. They lost sight of each other. Rayen climbed up a rock and hid in a crevice where no one could reach her. He tried to convince her to come out, to keep running, but she refused. He found Sergio. There was something wrong with his eyes. His eyes were glowing with that strange light, just like the thing in Manolo. Felipe struck him with a rock as hard as he could, then ran. Hands reached for him from the rocks. Not hands; claws.
He made it to Cholila, but everyone had that look in their eyes. It was too late. Everyone in the world was possessed but him. They overpowered him. They locked him up. They couldn't possess him, so they were going to drive him insane.
Wanda backed out and opened her eyes. Felipe wasn't screaming anymore. He was in a trance, still lost in the visions Wanda had inflicted on him in the process of seeing his memories.
"You okay?" Strange asked her.
She nodded.
"Did you see them?"
She nodded again. "How many hikers have been found?"
"Six. Why?"
"They started off with eight, including Felipe." She got that count from his memories. "One of them was named Manolo. He's dead. There was a young woman named Rayen. When the hikers started going crazy, she hid in a cave that only she could fit in. She's still on the mountain."
"She's been up there alone for five days," Strange said thoughtfully. "It's not overwhelmingly likely, but she could still be alive. The hikers were scaling a mountain called Cerro Anexo. If we go there, do you think you could find the place?"
"Yes," Wanda answered. She knelt next to the unresponsive Felipe and put a hand on his shoulder. "We'll find her," she promised.
They stepped through a portal and found themselves on a snow-covered mountainside, just above the tree line, overlooking a large lake.
Wanda looked around, then levitated herself high into the air for a better view. She landed again a minute later.
"The trail goes around that hill," she said, pointing. "I think it was somewhere on the other side of it."
They portaled themselves to the other side of the canyon and soon found the trail. Wanda and Strange flew along the hillside, Wong kept up with them by portaling his way along the trail.
After about half an hour, Wanda stopped and looked around, taking in the view of the lake, of the distant peak, and of the nearer ridges and boulders.
"It was around here," she announced.
"Lead the way."
She followed the trail on foot, looking for signs of struggle and familiar landmarks.
"How are you doing?" Wong asked her. "You seem shaken up."
"It was hard on me to see Felipe like that," she said. "When... After the U.N. bombing, when...Tony and Steve–Captain America–fought...I was locked up for a while after that. They put me in a straitjacket too. It's not that I resisted arrest, they just thought I was too dangerous."
"That must have been terrible. To be so feared not because of anything you did, but only what you are."
"It was. It sucks."
"But you are dangerous," Strange pointed out. "However, what makes you so dangerous is precisely what makes you useful."
"So you think it was okay that they put me in a straitjacket and locked me up?"
"Not 'okay,' but from their standpoint a sensible precaution."
"So not 'okay,' but justifiable?"
"Not as justifiable as you not letting them would have been," he answered.
She was about to say not letting them lock her up hadn't been an option, that she hadn't been powerful enough to resist. But the truth was, she hadn't tried. Steve and Bucky had escaped, so they had completed their mission. Sam, Clint, and Scott were willing to be arrested, and she didn't want to risk anyone else getting hurt, and wasn't sure she was strong enough to resist successfully. And, of course, she'd had no idea how horrific her incarceration would be. It had been a nightmare.
Thinking about that time, she inevitably recalled the battle that preceeded it, and the way, even though they were fighting on opposite sides, Vision had gone to her when she was down, cradling her gently, with deep concern.
It occured to her that she hadn't thought about Vision for several minutes. She'd been so concerned about finding the missing hiker, her own troubles had sunk from the forefront of her thoughts. And, she admitted to herself, the responsibility of helping to save the world was giving her a drive that she hadn't felt for a long time. In spite of everything, she still cared about this world, and the people in it.
They all spotted Manolo's body at about the same time. His body was at an odd angle on a pile of scree at the foot of a cliff. Wanda noted that there was no evidence of a monster breaking out of his body, as Felipe remembered; that must have been a hallucination.
Strange and Wong looked at the body without comment.
"His name is Manolo," Wanda said. "The demon killed him."
"Are we close to where the girl hid?" Strange asked, more concerned with the living than the dead.
"Pretty close, I think. They ran that way." She pointed up the slope. The hikers had left the trail here, taking a steeper but apparently more direct path to the other side of the ridge.
After a few minutes of searching from the air, Wanda saw a rock formation she thought was the one Rayen hid in. She landed by it and sent out threads of power, looking for the signature of a human mind.
"She's alive, but she's unconscious," she said when the sorcerers came up behind her.
"Where?" Wong asked.
Wanda flew up the rock slope and looked into a narrow crevice. The young woman was there, but so hidden by shadows, her coat, and her backpack that a casual observer wouldn't identify the shape as human.
She was about to use her power to pull her out when she heard Wong exclaim "Aiya!" at the same instant that Strange muttered "Shit!"
She looked back, and red energy flared around her hands to join the golden auras the sorcerers had conjured.
They were surrounded.