Natalia had been in Poland when she received the sudden order to return to Headquarters in St. Petersburg. There was no explanation of why, just a notice that her mission had been cancelled and her presence was required immediately. She read the message, and then rolled her eyes as she burned it – this had been going on ever since the Soviet Union had fallen apart in 1991. The government kept trying to revamp or repurpose the black widows, using them for everything from conducting tours of old facilities for western reporters, to recovering cultural artifacts sold by the communist government, to breaking up gay pride demonstrations. If Natalia went back to St. Petersburg now, she'd be given a new mission and might not get to complete that one, either, before the whole cycle started again – just like last time.

She wasn't sure why this time she responded differently. Maybe she was just fed up. Natalia Romanova was eighteen years old and confident that she had already outstripped all the authority figures around her... and so she simply walked away. She stuck out her thumb and hitchhiked to Prague, telling the driver that she was an American student on holiday, and she never looked back.

Except for once.


It was just after the Rajaputra job, when Natasha – as she was now calling herself – found herself with a little bit of time and money for leisure. This was a rare thing and one she still found a little difficult to cope with. Black widows didn't get free time. Every hour of their waking lives, they were supposed to be doing something useful, something that served a purpose higher than themselves, and even on her own she had a hard time escaping that kind of thinking. She still had nine days before she was supposed to meet the guy in Budapest, and the payment from the diamond brokers was enough that she could go pretty much anywhere in the world... so where did she want to go?

Nobody had ever asked Natasha what she wanted to do. It was always what did she have to do, or what was she planning to do... but never what she wanted. It was only in the past three or four years, since the day she'd ignored the summons to St. Petersburg, that she'd even begun asking herself that. Now that she did, though, there was an idea that had been in her mind ever since she was very young.

As a very small child, Natasha had believed that if she did well at the tasks set for her, eventually she'd be allowed to return to the orphanage in Volgograd. That was where Baba Galina lived – it was kind of amazing that after all these nears, Natasha still remembered the woman's name – and Baba Galina had wanted to adopt her.

Of course, that had been a silly thought. The Red Room would never have allowed it, but even if they had, for all Natasha knew Baba Galina had made that same promise to every little girl somebody left on her doorstep. Yet of all the places on Earth, the orphanage was the only one where Natasha could ever remember wanting to be. So she covered her distinctive hair with a blonde wig, put some padding under her coat and some age makeup on her face, and got on a plane in Karachi.

It had been an unusually cold winter when Natasha had lived at the orphanage, and she always remembered the place as snowy. When she arrived, however, it was spring – the Volga was free of ice, and there were flowers blooming in the Square of Fallen Fighters. The wind was warm and smelled of clean water and fresh-cut grass, and people were walking around in sweatshirts and jeans, just like they might in the west. It was all wrong, as if Natasha had come to the wrong place.

And then there it was in front of her – the Volgograd State Home for Girls. It was a shabby old brick building of several stories, with a long peaked roof and the remains of a smokestack in back. Before being converted to an orphanage, it had been a flour mill. A number of little girls were running and playing outside while adults watched them. It was a strange thing to see, so... so directionless. When Natasha was told to run as a child, she'd been given a goal to reach, or a time to beat, or a package to deliver. These girls appeared to be just running for the joy of running. What was that like? Natasha could barely even imagine it.

She swallowed hard, not wanting to cry. Black widows did not cry unless they had something to gain by it. They were, as Madame said, made of marble.

The outside of the building looked familiar, but when she entered Natsaha found that the interior had been modernized. It smelled of fresh paint and linoleum glue, as if the renovations had only just been completed, and the scents told Natasha absolutely nothing. She'd expected, based on its outward appearance, to walk into this place and be overwhelmed by the familiarity of it – but instead it was entirely generic, a room that could have been anywhere or nowhere. Natasha had steeled herself for a wave of emotion, but instead, she felt nothing at all.

There was a young woman sitting at the reception desk working at a computer. She looked up and smiled when Natasha walked in.

"Good morning!" she said. "Can I help you, Ma'am?"

"I hope so," Natasha replied with a carefully calculated shy smile. "I'm looking for a woman named Galina Kiryanova. She worked here a very long time ago... twenty years." In fact, it had been just about exactly twenty years. Natasha had been taken from the orphanage when she was almost three.

"I haven't heard of her," the receptionist said. "Let me ask." She picked up a phone to page somebody in charge.

While she made her inquiries, Natasha wandered around the foyer, which was decorated with photographs of various places around the city. Most of these had a line of children in the foreground, smiling politely at the photographer recording their field trip to Mamayev hill, or the Planetarium, or Friendship Park. The girls in the pictures had been taken all over the city to learn about its heritage. They looked well-taken-care-of, dressed in nicely-fitting uniforms with their hair in tidy braids. Natasha scrutinized the faces in each picture, looking for any she recognized. She was looking for herself, for any evidence she could find of a life before the Red Room.

She found none. The faces in the photographs were all strangers.

"Ma'am?" asked the receptionist. "Mr. Tarnovetsky is coming down to see you."

When Natasha had lived here there would never have been a man in charge, but it was a man, with thinning hair and a patchy mustache, who came in to greet her. "Vitaly Tarnovetsky," he introduced himself. "I'm the headmaster."

Natasha shook his hand. "Natalia Romanova," she said. She wasn't sure why she gave her real name... maybe she hoped somebody here would recognize it. It wasn't likely – she'd been here only a couple of months, and her name would be only a footnote, if that, in the orphanage's voluminous history. "Do you remember Ms. Kiryanova?"

"No, I'm afraid that was before my time," said Tarnovetsky. "I do know who she was, though. There are actually still some of her things in storage here. Nobody ever came to claim them. Are you family?" he asked. It wasn't personal interest. He was merely hoping Natasha would take the stuff away so he would no longer have to deal with it.

Natasha shook her head, although she wondered... if Baba Galina had no family, nobody to claim her things, did that mean she'd never adopted a girl? Was that proof that Natasha had been special to her? Or proof that she'd made the same promise to all and kept it for none. "May I look at it anyway?" she asked.

"Of course," said Tarnovetsky. "Follow me, please."

He led her up to the attic, under the steep roof. Unlike the newly repainted lobby, this place had a smell – it smelled of dust, mildew, and old paper. That was a scent that went with places where people put things they didn't want or didn't need, things they'd rather forget about. A few low shafts of sunlight were coming in through small widows and fell on hundreds of cardboard boxes and crates, all stacked up in rows like a bargain-basement version of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Natasha's immediate thought was that it would take weeks to find anything in here.

Tarnovetsky, however, seemed to know where he was going. He took her to a back corner, where there was an old metal trunk with several boxes stacked on top, most of them partially water-damaged. Draped over one box was a shawl knitted from very fine yarn that had once been white, but was now yellowed and frayed.

Natasha remembered that shawl. Baba Galina had always worn it. Her grandmother had knitted it, she'd said – and someday she would teach Natasha to know, when she was older and her fingers could handle the needles. Natasha glanced down at her hands. They'd worked with guns and knives, and with the controls of tanks and airplanes. Her fingers flew over computer keys and picked locks and choked men to death. She'd held syringes and pliers, she'd built bombs from scratch and defused those built by others... but she had never learned to knit.

"You can take anything you like," Tarnovetsky said. "Honesly, it's only worry that somebody would come looking one day that makes us keep it."

She reached out and gently pulled the shawl off the box. It had been there a very long time, and moving it raised a shower of dust that swirled in the sunbeams like a tiny golden snowstorm, but the yarn was still soft with a gentle halo of threads around it. Natasha could see places where Baba Galina had darned holes and repaired snags – and a brown mark that her trained eyes recognized as a bloodstain somebody had tried to wash out. Had that been the day Natasha was taken?

"Ma'am?" asked Tarnovetsky. "Are you all right?"

"Yes," Natasha raised her head and smiled at him. "Of course I am. Thank you, I won't take any more of your time."

Then she heard a sound outside. The nearest window was high up on the wall in the peak of the roof – Natasha hopped up on the trunk to look out, holding her breath. The window was missing one of its four panes, and through the opening she could smell the fresh outside air... as well as gasoline and gunpowder. Vans had pulled up around the building and men and women in blue fatigues, helmets, and bullet-proof vests were climbing out. They had guns and shields, and their vests had the letters СОБР across the back – it stood for Special Quick-Reaction Unit. The Russian equivalent of an American SWAT team.

They'd found her.

Out of the corner of her eye, Natasha saw something move. She did a backflip off the trunk, grabbed a man by the throat with her free hand and threw him to the ground before she even bothered to look at his face and realize it was only Tarnovetsky. He stared up at her in dumbfounded shock as she held him to the floor.

"Did you call them?" she asked. He could have made a phone call between the receptionist's summons and him coming downstairs, although it would only have been a brief one. Or he could have had the receptionist herself do it.

"No!" he clawed at her hand. "I swear! I don't even know who you are!"

Natasha decided he was telling the truth, and let him up. "Is there another way out of this building?" she asked. "A basement? Someplace they don't know about?"

"No," he repeated, leaning on a box as he gasped for air. "I don't even know who you are," he repeated, as if he thought that would save him from her.

"Attention!" a voice boomed outside, magnified by a bullhorn. "Natalia Romanova, you are surrounded. Come out with your hands in the air and allow yourself to be taken into custody."

Natasha glanced at Tarnovetsky, cowering terrified by the wall, and then decided to ignore him. She quietly took off her coat and the padding she'd been wearing underneath it, tossed her wig aside and pulled out an alcohol wipe to remove her makeup. Then she began opening boxes, pushing aside the ones full of records or old toys until she found one that contained clothing. Was it Baba Galina's? It probably didn't matter. She pulled out a white blouse with small blue flowers embroidered on it and put that on, then stepped into a mid-calf skirt before turning to look at Tarnovetsky again. He said nothing. It was patently clear that he had no idea what was happening.

"Take me to the kitchen," she ordered.

The largest room downstairs was the dining hall, where the orphaned girls sat at long tables to eat. The walls were painted with scenes from fairy tales, a far cry from the blank whitewashed cinder blocks Natasha remembered. The girls themselves were crying and huddled under tables in their caretakers' arms... and that gave Natasha a momentary flash of memory.

Curled in a cupboard while men opened drawers and pulled things out, searching for her... sobbing quietly as she drew ever closer, realizing there was nothing she could do to escape them...

She shook her head, unwilling to give in to the emotion. Was that the last time Natasha had ever honestly cried? It might have been. She'd never cried in the Red Room. She hadn't wanted to let them think they could break her.

In the kitchen Natasha found sugar and baking soda. In the fireplace in the common room there was wood ash. Natasha made a casing out of a glass jar and some tin foil, and then added the little bottle of pepper spray she carried as part of her personal arsenal. She couldn't open a door to lob the result at the SWAT team – she didn't doubt they had orders to shoot on sight. Instead, she took it back upstairs. She put on a pair of swim goggles and wrapped Baba Galina's shawl around the rest of her face, then pulled the rest of the attic window out of its pane and threw the bomb outside.

The jar smashed on the ground and the can of mace exploded, producing a quickly expanding cloud of stinging smoke. That would burn any exposed skin and make it difficult for the police to see or breathe. As people cried out in surprise and pain, Natasha climbed out the window and onto the roof, and from there leaped to the old smokestack. Missing and broken bricks provided plenty of hand and foot holds as she climbed to the ground, as nimble as a monkey.

Upon reaching the bottom, she dashed straight for the nearest SWAT officer and knocked him to the ground. He had an AK-47 – Natasha wrestled it out of his hands and kicked him in the face, then stood up. Other officers were starting to get their bearings, and a few had put gas masks on. They raised their own weapons and shields, but Natasha wasn't planning to aim for them. Instead, she fired at their vehicles, rupturing the fuel tanks. Gasoline spilled to the ground.

Another item Natasha always carried was a cigarette lighter. She flicked it open and threw it into the spilled gas. With a rushing roar and a breeze that blew her hair back, it burst into the flames. Blue fire raced across the surfaces of the spreading pools like a living thing, and the first of the SWAT vans exploded in a fireball that strewed burning wreckage up and down the black.

The hedges outside the orphanage caught fire first, then the wooden steps.

The scene quickly disintegrated into utter chaos. As people blundered around coughing in the smoke and calling for help, Natasha slipped through the ring of fire and vanished into the city.


Twenty-four hours later, she was sitting calmly in a cafe in Budapest reading a newspaper, with Baba Galina's old shawl draped around her shoulders. In a back section of the paper there was a note that the Volgograd State Home for Girls had burned down the previous day in a terrorist attack. Nine staff and twenty-six children had died, including Headmaster Vasily Tarnovetsky, along with four SWAT officers, two firefighters, and eight other people as the blaze spread to surrounding buildings.

For a moment, Natasha thought again of the little girl hiding in the bottom of the pantry, knowing that terrible things were about to happen to her and powerless to do anything about it. Twenty-six girls had stayed crouched under the tables in the dining hall with their guardians, as smoke filled their lungs and their world went up in flames around them. How had they felt in those last moments? Were any of them as young as Natasha had been? Did they have any concept of death? Or had the end been nothing to them but the moment when the pain and fear finally stopped?

She swallowed her tears and turned the page. The important thing was that she had escaped. Lacking any other directive, that had been her mission. Besides, Natasha Romanov hadn't cried in twenty years and she wasn't going to start now. Black widows were made of marble.


It wasn't often that Natasha wished Tony Stark were around, but she could have used his formidable mathematical brain – and his friendly supercomputer – as she tried to figure out where to find AA113. Using the last known coordinates and speed as provided by Espinoza, and the weather report, she could guess where it had probably ended up... but the area she had to search was still hundreds of square miles and if they were still at ten thousand feet, there would be no contrail for her to follow. Instead, she had to rely on the Yak's targeting radar to look for other aircraft.

She spotted a few, but most were headed in the wrong direction, going away from the Indian Ocean instead of towards it. Even so, she checked in with each, making contact and getting flight numbers and headings. Nat identified herself differently every time, just to see if any of them would compare notes and realize she was lying. None of them did.

Then, finally, there was one who didn't answer.

"Unknown aircraft, this is Natalie Rushman in Yak-38 over the Philippines," she said. She wasn't sure why she gave that name this time... maybe it was a hunch. "Please identify yourself."

Again, there was no reply, only static.

"Am I speaking to AA113?" asked Natasha. "Can anybody hear me?"

Nothing.

She got closer. It was a 747-400, painted in Air Aurora's colours – and there was the registration AU-YBBW. Somebody had closed the emergency door the windows had bailed out through, but Natasha's harpoon, with the line trailing from it, was still embedded in the aircraft's skin near the rear cargo door. Nat had done this once, she could do it again... even if there were no safety equipment this time.

As she approached, Nat could see that there was nobody in the 747's cockpit. Other windows, however, showed people looking out – the lower altitude had allowed the passengers to regain consciousness. What did it feel like to wake up on a plane with no pilots? Nat waved to them, trying to let them know that help was on the way. A few people, both adults and children, waved nervously back.

In order to get on board, she was going to have to get close – closer than Chiba had come in the quinjet, and closer than the computerized warnings on either plane would be happy with. This might well be the most dangerous thing Natasha had ever done... moreso even than commandeering a Chi'Tauri vehicle. That at least hadn't had as far to fall.

When this was over, she thought, she was going to hole up somewhere even Fury couldn't find her, and sleep for a week.

Nat lost altitude, dropping below the passenger jet and then coming up from underneath to stay out of the jetblast from the engines. There was a tiny slice of relatively quiet air between the engine exhaust and the side of the plane. That was where the harpoon line was flapping free, and that was where Natsaha needed to be. She could feel the change in the air as she brought the fighter jet into position – the turbulence faded away, and she could hear the wind whistling through the seams of the canopy, which had never quite closed tight after she took off with it open.

Once the line was right above her, Natasha did up her harness and then opened the canopy again. The six hundred mile per hour wind ripped the bubble right off its hinges and it was quickly out of sight. Nat reached up to grab the line.

In the violent air it was whipping back and forth. The first time her fingers got close to it, then end was suddenly snapped across them, cutting her across the top of her palm and drawing blood. Nat scowled and tried again. This time she made it, getting her fingers through the ice-cold carabiner still attached to the end. With all her strength she pulled it down and attached it to her harness. Then she stopped, closed her eyes and took a deep breath, rehearsing in her head. The timing of what she was about to do had to be exactly right.

When she thought she was ready, she raised her right hand and hit the eject button, at the same time as her left pushed the control column sharply up.

Nat was thrown from the plane seat and all. The Yak's tail dropped, and then it was gone behind her. She was now dangling from the line attached to the side of the plane. The next thing she had to do was hut the parachute on the ejection seat free, because if she didn't it would open and the force might tear the harpoon out of the side of the jet. She pulled the line to release it – it went flying and then it, too, was long gone behind her.

There was no fallback now. Natasha had to make it to the cargo door, or else fall ten thousand feet into the ocean. Even Captain America probably couldn't land on his feet after that.

She grabbed the line and began dragging herself towards the door. It was a very slow process – pull herself a few inches up, then move the carabiner up the line, again and again. She tried not to rush it. The plane still had at least an hour of fuel, and Natasha could not afford a mistake.

Finally, after what felt like days, she was near enough to clip herself directly to the harpoon. When she did, she heard a creak. The adhesive was starting to come free. Natasha's heartbeat quickened – maybe she should be rushing after all.

Opening the cargo door did not produce any decompression this time, either – at this altitude they didn't need it. Nat hooked her hands in the door and used the muscles in her shoulders to pull herself inside, then unclipped the carabiner and slammed the door behind her.

Done.

For a few minutes, Natasha lay on her side in the cargo hole, still buckled into the Yak's ejection seat. Her exhaustion was catching up with her... after everything she'd done in the past few hours, she simply didn't have any adrenaline left. It was only after several long minutes that she forced herself to unbuckle the harness and get up, taking a moment to let her head finish spinning and her nausea subside before she stumbled towards the emergency hatch that led up to the passenger cabin.

She pushed it open, and heard a startled cry.

"It's okay!" Natasha called up, and began to climb through. Her grip faltered – the cut on her palm was still bleeding and her fingers didn't want to stay curled – but then a pair of hands grabbed her and pulled her the rest of the way. When she saw her helper's face, Nat realized it was the flight attendant she'd first seen unconscious on the floor, all those hours ago. She managed to give the woman a smile, then staggered over to lean on an unoccupied seat as she tried to get her breath.

"Thank you," she murmured.

"Where in heaven's name did you come from?" the flight attendant asked.

"I was on the fighter," Nat replied. "I'm here to help. Give me a moment to get myself together." She couldn't remember ever being this tired, even after New York – but then, after New York they'd all immediately gone out for lunch. Nat hadn't eaten or drunk anything in nearly ten hours. "I wouldn't mind a sandwich and a bottle of water, if you have them."

"Of course!" said the flight attendant – her nametag said Callista. She hurried forward tot he next kitchen area, with the relieved expression of somebody who'd been preparing for a heroic task but would much rather just make lunch.

A couple more people came to help Nat sit down in one of the unoccupied seats. She smiled at them, too – there was an enormous Asian man who looked like a sumo wrestler, and the tiny woman in the red Chinese blouse whom Nat had first found sleeping across the last row of seats. "Is everybody okay?" she asked. "You guys were without oxygen for a while."

"I have a splitting headache," the man said.

"You'll get over it after a good night's sleep," Nat promised him.

"Who are you?" he wanted to know, eyeing the Cyrillic script on her flight suit.

Natasha was about to answer when she felt a prick.

Her reaction was all instinct – she was on her feet and had ripped the syringe out of her arm before she even had time to realize what had happened. For a moment she stared right at the woman in the red blouse, who backed away from the ferocity of her gaze, but then she lowered her eyes to look at the syringe instead. It was empty, the plunger pushed all the way to the bottom. "What was this?" she demanded.

"No English!" the woman said quickly, in a strong accent.

"Shì shénme ne?" Nat repeated the question, grabbing the woman's collar and forcing her against the wall. The last thing she'd expected, after everything she'd been through already, was yet another unpleasant surprise waiting for her on this damned airplane. In that moment she was too tired to even be angry – or to care if she ended up needing to break this woman's neck. "You're not a black widow," she added. Nat wouldn't have been able to pin her so easily if she were. "Who the hell are you?"