The people in business class, like those in economy below, had masks on their faces but their oxygen had run out hours ago. They were all unconscious, and Natasha could only hope they survived long enough for her to get them to a safe altitude.

"Stay back," Triinu ordered.

"You've got the code?" asked Nat.

Triinu nodded. "But there's also a camera to show the pilot who's outside, and she can deny entry if she wants. You have to stay back." She lifted the back of her blazer and tucked one of the broken bottle shanks into the back of her waistband.

"Don't kill her," said Nat, slipping into an empty seat. She wanted the others to have every possible opportunity for the same second chance she'd gotten.

"I won't unless I have to." Triinu rolled her eyes.

Natasha slumped in her seat to keep out of sight, but her hands were tense as she gripped her wine bottle club. She would be on her feet as soon as the door opened, she decided. She needed Triinu's help right now, but the last person a black widow should make the mistake of trusting was another black widow.

Triinu moved her hair a bit to better show off the bruise where Natasha had struck her in the face, bit her own lip to make her mouth bleed, then dabbed her silk scarf in it and wrapped it around one hand. It was only a few short steps but it made her look like she'd had it far worse in the fight than she actually had. Next, she kicked off her high heeled shoes and ran up to punch in the entry code with tears in her eyes, deliberately getting it wrong twice before just pounding on the door with both hands.

"Dimitria!" she called out as if begging. "Dimitria, let me in!"

The door opened, and Dimitria looked out. She was a tiny woman with her hair in a blonde bob, and a rounded face and upturned nose that made people think she was years younger than her real age of nearly thirty. The expression on that girlish face, however, was so ferocious that Triinu actually took a step back, frightened that her smaller colleage would attack her at once.

"She got out, didn't she?" asked Dimitria. "Quick, get inside." She reached for Triinu's arm.

Natasha jumped up, but at that moment Triinu whipped the broken bottle out of her waistband and sliced into the side of Dimitria's neck. Dimitria's eyes went wide in shock and she made a gurgling noise before staggering a couple of steps forward, trying to stop the bleeding with her hands. It was no good, though – Triinu had cut her left carotid artery. Blood was flowing down her front, and she barely made it three feet before collapsing against Triinu. Triinu dropped her to the ground and brought the side of her hand down on the back of Dimitria's neck.

Natasha came running up to intervene, but it was already too late. "You said only if necessary!" she said.

"It was necessary," Triinu replied coldly, and headed into the cockpit.

Natasha retrieved the pilot's headset from Dimitria's fallen body and followed her, wiping the blood away from the microphone with her fingers as she went. There was no sign of any pilot or co-pilot, just a spilled coffee mug on the floor and some dark stains on the seats. The smell of blood seemed to coat the inside of her mouth with a thin layer of metallic sludge. Natasha did her best to ignore it.

"I'm gonna start bringing us down," she told Triinu. She put the headset on and began checking the instruments, getting their heading and fuel consumption.

"I'll get the chutes," Triinu said, and stepped out again. Natasha frowned and looked over her shoulder, to see Triinu opening an overhead bin. What did she want with parachutes? She didn't think they were going to bail out and leave everybody behind, did she? After a moment's hesitation, Nat decided to play it safe. She shut the cockpit door and locked it, then reprogrammed the autopilot for a lower altitude, one where everybody on board would be able to breathe. Once the computer acknowledged that, she reached to take the flight manual off its hook next to the co-pilot's seat.

As she flipped through the pages, looking for instructions on how to change the cockpit entry code, she used her other hand to fiddle with the radio tuner. The first thing she tried was a SHIELD frequency.

"SHIELD Q-12," she said. "This is the Black Widow. I have successfully taken control of AA-113 and am descending to ten thousand feet, over."

She waited for Chiba's reply, but there was only static. Had he already had time to make it to Nadi? If so... she checked their position, and found that with the plane's altered course, heading back towards Asia, they were out of range. They were also far, far away from any airport big enough to handle a plane this size. There was nothing below them but open water for hundreds of miles in every direction.

Chiba was probably frantically trying to get in touch with her, she thought, but his peace of mind wasn't her priority. The passengers were. She switched to a civilian channel.

"Mayday, mayday, mayday," she said, calm and precise as she enunciated the distress call. "This is AA-113. Alfa Alfa One One Three. I have lost pressure in the cabin. My passengers are hypoxic. I need to make an emergency landing as soon as possible."

This time there was a crackle of interference that suddenly dissolved into a voice. "SPA-113!" an excited voice replied. "The whole world's looking for you! This is Pacific control in Guadalcanal. Give us your coordinates and you will have absolute priority, over."

"Good to hear from you, too, Control," said Natasha with a smile. "Fuel shouldn't be a problem but I've got about three hundred and fifty passengers, and they may all need medical assistance. Let me repeat that: medical assistance for as many as three hundred and fifty." Behind her, she heard Triinu knock on the cockpit door. She would have to deal with that, but first she had to finish giving this man the important information. "I wouldn't mind a nice long runway while we're at it. I've landed plenty of planes but this is a big one. Over."

"Rogers," said Control. "Can you make Honiara? We've got two point one kilometers, over."

Natasha grimaced – that was pushing it. "It'll have to do," she said.

The cockpit door opened. Natasha had not yet had the opportunity to actually change the code, so Triinu was able to walk right in, carrying two packed parachutes. She looked as if she were about to say something, but then she heard the tail end of Natasha's conversation with the ground.

"Who are you talking to?" she demanded, surprised and angry.

"Guadalcanal," said Natasha. "I'm getting us a place to land."

"I'll tell them to expect you at Runway Six-Two-Four," said ground control. "Will you need any other emergency services besides medical?" Over."

Triinu dropped the parachutes and snatched the headset off Natasha's ear. "You said you would help me escape!" she said.

"I will!" Nat promised her. She began programming the autopilot for Honiara. "But we have to land somewhere and let the passengers off. We're going to Honiara International Airport in the Solomon Islands."

Triinu grabbed Natasha's wrist and bent it sharply – and this was the left wrist, the one she'd already injured by yanking it out of the handcuffs. "SHIELD will be waiting at Honiara, won't they?" she demanded.

"Only for the passengers," said Natasha. "If you want, I'll have them refuel the plane there and you can fly it anywhere you want. Vladivostok, Estonia, Australia – they won't care. But we have to let the passengers off first." She tried to work her hand free.

Triinu twisted harder, stopping just short of breaking Nat's wrist. "You said you were bringing us down!" she said.

"To an altitude with more oxygen," said Natasha. "I'm not going to crash a plane with three hundred people on board!"

The expression on Triinu's face was of utter incomprehension. "What is wrong with you?" she asked. "You got out! For years the Red Room thought you were dead, now you've got the perfect opportunity to disappear again but you're just gonna land, because of a bunch of strangers?"

Triinu had assumed that bringing us down meant crashing the plane, Natasha realized. She thought they were faking their own deaths in order to get a head start.

"There's no point in breaking with the Red Room if we're not going to be better than them," said Natasha.

"You're insane!" Triinu told her. "They will hunt you down to the ends of the Earth! You know that!"

"If you want to bail out, then bail out now," said Natasha. "I'll tell them you're dead."

Triinu shook her head. "Am I supposed to trust you? I know you don't trust me, but Madame made you, too." Her eyes darted down to Natasha's wine bottle club, which she'd left on the floor at the rear corner of the seat. Triinu scooped it up.

Nat thought fast. Having made it into the pilot's seat, she didn't want to leave it again if she didn't have to – she might never get back into it. She had to get Triinu out of the cockpit, however, at on the spur of the moment she could only think of one way to do that. Thus far she'd had the plane in a smooth descent. Now with her free hand she wrenched back on the control stick, bringing the nose up as sharply as she dared.

The plane pitched back, and Triinu lost her balance and had to let go of both Natasha and the bottle as she staggered backwards. Nat stood, grabbed the backs of her own seat and the co-pilot's, and braced against them to kick Triinu squarely in the chest with both feet. The other woman fell and rolled down the sloping business class aisle. Natasha slammed the door and engaged the lock, then wedged herself against it so that Triinu wouldn't be able to open it again without a fight.

Changing the access code hadn't been a priority earlier. It was now. Nat used both arms and one leg to hold the door and reached with the other foot to snag the flight manual from where it had fallen among the dropped parachutes. She scraped it across the floor towards her and picked it up, still doing her best to push the door shut as Triinu tried to open t from outside. As long as her opponent didn't discover something she could use as a battering ram.

"AA-113?" the man in Guadalcanal was trying to get back in contact. "Come in, AA-113!"

Natasha found the instructions and entered the new code. The numbers she chose were Nick Fury's birthday – Triinu wouldn't be able to guess that, because nobody knew when Nick Fury's birthday was, not even Agent Hill. Natasha herself had discovered it only after weeks of detective work, but it had all been worth it to see the look on his face when the clown dropped off the balloon bouquet.

Door secure, she left Triinu to hammer ineffectively and returned to the pilot's seat. This time she buckled herself in, in case Triinu broke the door down and tried to forcibly remove her.

The first thing she did then was correct the plane's attitude, lowering the nose again to return to ten thousand feet. Then she dusted off the radio headset and contacted the ground. "This is AA-113, over," she said, trying not to let the controller hear her panting.

It didn't work. "Do you still have hostiles on board?" the man asked urgently.

Natasha wasn't sure how to answer that. Technically she did, and she wasn't feeling terribly charitable towards them at the moment. If she said yes, however, they would land to find Honiara crawling with police, or even military. Fury might listen to her if she said that the three widows deserved a chance at rehabilitation, but she doubted anybody else would. If it came to a fight, there was a very good chance of civilian casualties. The right person to deal with this was Fury.

"I'm gonna give you a number for an agency that can handle this," Natasha said. "Tell the guy who answers that Nat sent you, and tell him we're going to Honiara. If the police, the army, or Interpol are needed, he'll arrange it."

Chiba would have done it without a second thought, but from this man there was an indecisive pause. Natasha had just asked him to do something very much outside his normal job description – air traffic control ran on standard procedures and strict rules. She had to convince him to trust her.

"Listen," she said. "What's your name?"

"John Matabang Espinoza," he replied.

"I'm... Natalie Rushman," Natasha said. "I work as a legal assistant at Stark Industries in Los Angeles. I was on the flight home when the hijackers took over, but you don't get to be Iron Man's lawyer without learning a few tricks. The number is for a friend of Mr. Stark's who works in the American government. He can call anybody from the cops to the Avengers." The Avengers and SHIELD rated fairly high in public opinion since the Chi'Tauri invasion, so the name-dropping would hopefully reassure him.

"All right," he decided. "Give me the number."

Natasha passed it on. She had considered telling him who she really was, but the Black Widow was a shadowy figure, still fairly new to the public consciousness and with dangerous associations. Iron Man was more familiar and friendly, and people almost always preferred to trust male authority figures over female ones. The identity she'd created for her undercover work ought to still exist – Espinoza would be able to run a background check on her, although he might be puzzled by the lack of any indication that Natalie Rushman knew how to fly a plane.

Triinu was no longer banging on the door. She must have realized that Natasha had changed the password, and retreated to decide what to do next. The problem with locking her out was that it left Nat in control of the plane but not of Triinu herself, and she might do just about anything. Maybe she'd even go downstairs and free Kamila and Yelena, although Natasha doubted it – the black widows weren't kind to traitors. Of course, Kamila and Yelena might also manage to free themselves, and they weren't the type who gave up easily. Quitters were of no use to the Red Room.

The safest thing, really, would have been to do it Triinu's way and just kill the others. That was what Natasha had been trained to do, and as she'd told Triinu, she had to be better than that.

"Natalia!" she heard a shout.

Nat looked up at a small screen, where a feed from the security camera showed what was outside the cockpit door. At first she saw nothing but the bloodstained carpet and Dimitria's fallen body, but a moment later a stocking foot kicked Dimitria's arm out of the way, and Triinu appeared in the camera's field of view. She was carrying a body over her shoulder – a child of about seven or eight – and had a shard of broken bottle glass in her hand.

"Natalia!" she repeated. "Open this door!"

The boy was not Cooper Barton – but he was still somebody's child. Natasha turned on the PA system. "I am not turning you in," she said. "I told you, I'm going to land and let the passengers off. After that I don't care what you do. Just put the kid down and be reasonable."

"You're going to ditch the plane," Triinu ordered. "If we land and run, they'll look for us. You know they will."

"SHIELD can protect you," said Natasha.

"I don't want SHIELD! I don't want anything to do with SHIELD!" Triinu insisted. "You stupid bitch, you don't even know what SHIELD is!"

"If we ditch this plane, the passengers will die," said Natasha. "Don't you think you've got enough blood on your hands?"

"If the passengers mean so much to you, then don't make me start killing them!" Triinu let the child's body slither off her shoulders and then held him up with her improvised knife at his neck. "Open the door," she ordered. "You have ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven."

Once again, Natasha had to do something immediately. A moment ago, she'd thrown Triinu out of the cockpit with a steep climb. Maybe the best weapon she had was the one in her hands – the airplane itself. It couldn't do the stunt flying of a fighter or a quinjet, but it could probably be pushed a lot further than most people realized. If she went into a dive, Triinu might fall on top of the child and injure him by accident, so Natasha pulled back on the stick again, putting the plane into a second steep climb. On the screen she saw Triinu stumble backwards again, dropping the child on top of Dimitria's body as she did.

But they couldn't climb too high. Nat had to stay at a safe altitude and let the passengers wake up. Once they'd come to, she would have allies against the other widows, and their sheer numbers would give them an advantage. She leveled out again, then flipped on the fasten seat belt light – just in case anyone had already started coming around – and cranked the column to the left. Commercial jets weren't supposed to roll more than sixty degrees. She would see what this one could do.

Both the ocean horizon in the window and the artificial one within the cockpit turned counter clockwise through thirty degrees, then sixty, then ninety. Nat could hear unsecured objects falling in the cabin, and on the screen the bodies of both Dimitria and the child rolled out of sight. The angle reached a hundred and twenty degrees, nearly upside-down, and the control stick started shaking while a computerized voice chanted stall... stall... stall...

Nat didn't dare do a full aileron roll. The instruments indicated that she was losing altitude already. She decided to use that, and put the plane into a dive so that the g-forces would throw Triinu to the back of the cabin.

God, she hoped that kid was all right. She would make Fury pay his medical bills if he survived. If he didn't... well, she would have to deal with that. With all the red in her ledger, what was one more child?


The day was sunny but the wind was cold outside of Larkino, stinging the cheeks and numbing the fingers. Knitted hats and mittens would have been much appreciated, but there weren't any to be had at the moment – nor were there boots with grip, despite the slippery crust that had formed on top of yesterday's snow. The girls were out in thin shoes and light jackets. Anything more would have to be earned.

Today's way of earning it was an obstacle course. The girls, all between the ages of seven and nine, were instructed to run over open ground, crawl through culverts, climb walls, cross the Mezenskaya Pizhma, and wiggle into an abandoned building to plant an imaginary bomb. If they didn't reach the target before the timer ticked down to zero, chemicals in the dummy bombs would give their carriers a nasty burn. One of the staff had protested, but Madame had told him that a real bomb would not wait just because the individual carrying it was a child.

Normally there were twenty-eight girls. Today there were only twenty-five. Nobody dared to ask what had happened to the other three.

Natalia was not even thinking about them right now. Her entire attention was on the timer slowly counting down as she pushed it ahead of her through a narrow, damp concrete pipe, full of the smells of dirt and sewage. Her fingers and toes were numb and there were ice crystals forming in her eyelashes, but she couldn't stop to try to warm herself. She had less than five minutes left to make it to the other end. Natalia would not be the first to deliver the payload, but she was determined to get it done.

After the men had taken her away from Baba Galina, the woman called Madame had looked at Natalia Romanova and snorted that she was soft and fat, and would fall dead from exhaustion within a week. Natalia herself had taken that to mean that if she could do what Madame asked of her without collapsing, she would be allowed to go free. So she had spent the last four years pushing herself further and harder every day – she knew she was not the strongest or the fastest, but she was determined to be the toughest. Madame would not break her, and she would pass the tests and return to the nearest thing to a home she'd ever had.

That had been the assumption of a three-year-old. Natalia was a lot older now, in body but even more so in spirit. She knew that she would never see Baba Galina again, or get to read Mama's letter that had been left for her. By now, however, her determined work ethic had become an ingrained part of her personality. Keep going. Fall down, get up again. Walk when she couldn't run, and crawl when she couldn't walk. Pass every test no matter what it took.

She'd once hoped to see something change in Madame when she succeeded, to see the beginnings of at least respect, if never affection – but Madame was made of stone, and had no concept of such gentle emotions. She watched all the girls with the exact same impersonal blue stare. If she had favourites, she never let on. If there were any she disliked, she never showed that, either. She was as cold and empty as the Siberian wastes where they practiced, while all the while she insisted that she loved them.

"Girls!" a voice crackled in Natalia's radio. "Leave your bombs and return to base at once!"

Natalia scowled – she was so close to the goal! She didn't want to give up now, but the first thing you learned in the Red Room was never to disobey an order. Since she was closer to the far end of the culvert, she pushed her way through the last few feet and left the bomb there, then climbed up the embankment and took off across the field to return to the row of trailers where the girls and their caretakers were camped.

There, with the cold wind whistling through the structures, she fell into line with her classmates. They had a usual order they stood in, to make them easier to count, and as she took her own place Natalia noticed that there was still no sign of the three missing girls. That was not exactly unusual – girls did disappear from time to time. There'd originally been thirty-one in this particular class, but three had already gotten too ill, too tired, or too injured to continue, and had been placed elsewhere, in Madame's disquieting phrasing.

The three who had vanished today, however, were particularly worrisome to Natalia in particular. They were the three girls from Volgograd – Yelena Belova, and the twins Irina and Ilona – who had come from the same State Home as Natalia herself. If all three of them had been placed elsewhere, could it be that Natalia herself was next?

There was one possible source of comfort and that was that all three of them had come from Chernobyl in the Ukraine, while Natalia had been born in Volgograd. Maybe the other three had fallen ill because of the nuclear accident. Maybe Natalia was safe.

Then, however, the door of the largest trailer opened and the girls came out, one by one. Irina and Ilona were first, shivering in their uniforms. They hadn't even been able to keep warm by moving around, as the girls outside had. Behind them was Yelena – and she was in a winter coat with a scarf and boots, looking rosy-cheeked and very pleased with herself.

Natalia exchanged a worried glanced with Triinu, on her left. Everybody in the class knew that when somebody was shown that kind of favour, it was bad news for the rest of them.

Last of all was Madame, dressed in her trademark white fur and green scarf. She smiled, although it was a smile as cold and unfeeling as any of her other expressions, and put her hands on Yelena's shoulders.

"Girls," Madame said, "do you know why you're here?"

"To serve the State!" they replied in unison. From their first day in the Red Room, they had been told that this was their destiny.

"And is there any greater honour a young lady can aspire to," Madame asked, "than that of furthering glorious Soviet supremacy?"

"No, Madame!" the girls chorused.

Madame nodded. "Wouldn't it be silly," she said, "if there were some among you who didn't want to be Soviet heroes? Yet it seems there are." She looked at the twins, who were huddling up to one another on her right. At a nod from Madame, the trainers moved in to forcibly separate them. Both girls whimpered and reached out for each other, but could do nothing against the adult men who pinned their arms behind their backs.

"Fortunately," Madame went on, "there are also those who aspire to greater things. Yelena here told the dormitory supervisor that she had heard Irina and Ilona plotting to run away together. This was foolish for many reasons – we're in the middle of nowhere, without another human being for miles. The weather is cold, they had no food to take with them, and they would have died after a few days, so really, they're very lucky that Yelena told me. The most foolish thing of all, however, is that they thought there could be anything better than what we're doing here, which is serving the State and the Party. For her good deed in reporting their mischief, Yelena will be rewarded – and for their stupidity in trying to leave, the twins will be punished."

A shiver ran through the girls. They had all, at some point, been punished for a transgression. It was always worse than they expected. It might be extra torture training, or forced sleeplessness, or the awful sensory deprivation chamber... all things they had to go through anyway, but things none of them wanted to do more often than absolutely necessary.

"Madame?" asked Yelena.

"Yes, Yelena?" the woman asked. Her tone of voice should have been kind, but it was all wrong. It sounded artificial and overdone, like the red smile painted on the face of a clown.

Yelena smiled viciously. "I think they should be punished by running the obstacle course naked!" Yelena said viciously.

Madame gave an approving nod. "That is a marvelous idea!" she said. "The rest of you will continue this exercise tomorrow – for today, you will all come inside for an extra English class and a review of your capitalist currencies." She took her hands off Yelena's shoulders. "Remember, girls... the State loves you, and it will always bring you home again. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, Madame!" the girls said.

Madame turned and went back inside. The girls trooped after her, and Natalia breathed a very private sigh of relief. She was not in danger, then – it was only a coincidence, and the fact that all three spoke the same dialect of Ukrainian, that had gotten the Chernobyl girls in trouble. She would have to watch herself in the coming weeks, though. With two of the four from Volgograd having tried to run away, Madame and the trainers would surely keep an eye on Natalia for a while, just in case.

The twins did not come to supper that night, nor were they in their beds that evening. In the morning, the trainers acted as if there were nothing amiss, so everybody else did, too. Everybody except Yelena, who sat and ate her extra ration with a smug smile on her face.


Natasha left the plane in its dive for as long as she dared, then pulled quickly out of it, turning right-side-up again to let everything settle and reduce the strain on the engines. More warnings were blaring now, lights flashing and voices delivering stall and terrain warnings. They were only a thousand feet above the ocean, which was not nearly enough for such a big plane. As she righted the aircraft, Natasha spotted a fishing boat out of the corner of her eye. She wondered what the people on board were thinking. Were they terrified, convinced a plane was about to crash on top of them?

"Are you willing to listen to me now?" Nat asked over the PA system. "I am going to help you, Triinu, I promise I am... although you're not exactly making me want to. But I have to help these passengers first. That's why I'm here. That's how you knew I'd be here, because there was something on this flight I had to save! Let me do that, and you can go anywhere you want."

Nothing moved on the security camera screen, and Natasha began to think perhaps her acrobatics had knocked Triinu out. Then the phone that allowed the crew to communicate with the cockpit rank, and Natasha picked it up.

"Are you ready to be reasonable?" she asked.

"Are you?" Triinu replied.

"I'm being perfectly reasonable!" Natasha informed her. "I'm trying to get the passengers on the ground because there is no reason at all why they should have to die. If you want to fake your own death, I know people who..."

"No," Triinu interrupted. "You just want to see me thrown in prison, or brainwashed by Nazis like you!"

Natasha bristled. "Maybe I will take you in," she said. "Just so you can call the heads of SHIELD Nazis to their faces!" Where the hell had that come from? During her time in the Red Room Natasha had heard Americans called a lot of things, but Nazis was a new one.

"Now you listen to me," said Triinu. "Every person on this plane is my hostage. I want you to..."

Natasha pulled the nose up again. She didn't climb far this time, just enough to remind Triinu whose hands were on the wheel.

"I'm sorry," she said over the intercom. "What was that about you having hostages? I'm flying the plane. That makes you my hostage. Now if you can't cooperate like you said you wanted to, at least sit down and stop making me wish I'd dropped you out the door into the ocean."

She let go of the button and focused for a few moments on making sure all the systems on board were still okay while waiting for the phone to ring again. When after a few minutes, it had not done so, Natasha began to get worried.

Then a warning light came on.

Natasha frowned and looked closer. The light was telling her that somewhere on board, a door was open. What was Triinu doing? The parachutes were still in the cockpit with Natasha, but with four widows originally on board they must have had more than two. Perhaps they'd even had five, since they had probably figured if they had to bail out they would take Natasha with them. If Triinu had jumped, then at least she was no longer Natasha's problem... but if she were up to something else, then there might be a whole new set of problems again.

She checked her position. Still two hours from the Solomons. That was a long time for things to go wrong in.

The warning light went out.

Natasha's breath caught. If Triinu had jumped, she could hardly have closed the door behind her. Something else must be going on down there. It wouldn't be the passengers or stewardesses doing anything – they wouldn't be opening and closing doors. Either Triinu had thrown something (or somebody) out, or Yelena and Kamila had escaped and were up to mischief of their own. Natasha didn't dare leave the pilot's seat to find out. She was going to have to ask.

She turned on the PA system again. "What are you doing down there?" she demanded, and waited for an answer.