Stark Estate, Hollywood, California, September, 1947

The little convoy pulls up to Stark's house under a dark cloud. It was decided that Michael and Roger would switch vehicles - Michael driving for Sousa and Roger spending the most awkward half hour of his life up front with Margot. It was dead silent the rest of the way. Roger sat on pins and needles, waiting for something from her. But Margot kept quiet, just staring off into the distance.

Roger sighs with relief as he climbs out of the car into the cool, night air, running his fingers through his hair. He has to wave away a bee that hovers near his head - a little late in the day for that - but unclenches a little when he sees michael. The other man reaches his hand out and the two lace their fingers together. "She just needs some time," Roger assures his man.

"I think the problem is she's had too much time," Michael whispers back to him. "She wants answers now - can't blame her, but you and I both know it's not an easy bandage to rip off."

"Right. Well if there's one thing the two of you can agree on it's that there are some more pressing matters at hand." They turn to regard the truly palatial estate they've found themselves at. "Can't believe we're getting help from Howard Stark, though. He's the kind of capitalist I'd expect to be tossing money at HYDRA day and night to keep his interests secure."

"Stark's not like that," Sousa explains as he comes up behind them. He and Michael also had their own stony silent ride to the house, but their tension was more the kind that hovers in the air at a pub before a fist fight breaks out. "He may be arrogant, obnoxious, and freewheeling, but he's no fascist." He looks right at Roger. "You'll like him."

"You wound me, Mr. Sousa."

Peggy is already inside. "Mr. Jarvis! You should put the kettle on, we have guests."

Howard peeks out of the kitchen. "You'll have to make do with my services. Jarvis has been in the library all day with Sue and Rose."

"Doing what?"

"Who knows. She's been on some kind of tear, and I didn't want to interrupt. And Jarvis knows where all the books she's looking for are."

"You don't know where your own books are?"

"Don't need to. I buy 'em, I read 'em once, and I never forget 'em." He points his finger to his skull. "Steel trap."

Peggy looks at Howard with contempt and resists the urge to call him a blockhead. When she hears the door open and close again behind her she gestures at the others to come forward. "Well, let me introduce you to my associate Howard Stark. Howard, this is Roger Aubrey and Michael Carter."

Howard steps forward to shake their hands. "Pleasure to meet you too. Carter, huh? ISo this is the long lost brother we've heard so little about."

"I don't like to bring him up because he faked his death years ago," Peggy says coldly. "And these two killed Thompson."

Howard's hand goes limp in Michael's, and they both look at Peggy in shock. "He what?" Howard murmurs.

"Quite." She sees Michael's face. "What? There's no point in dishonesty. We might as well lay all our cards on the table to make sure we're playing with a full deck."

Michael nods. "Of course."

Howard steps back. "Let's wait a half hour or so, hmm? Wilkes and Samberley are on their way back from R&D, saying they had some findings they wanted to share in person." The kettle whistles and he starts pouring the tea. "Make yourselves comfortable. And uh…try not to kill any more of our allies, right fellas?"

Michael looks at his watch and realizes the time. Sheepishly he asks, "Would you mind if I use your telephone, Mr. Stark? It's rather important."

"He's got a Girl Friday in a bit of a bind, Howard," Peggy explains. Michael notes the subtle sneer in her voice.

"Cards on the table right?" Michael retorts.

"Of course."

"Anyway!" Howard cuts in. "Phone's on a side table to your left."

Malabar Foundry Company, Vernon, California

"Eh, Malabar Foundry, how can we help you?" Ivan answers the phone.

"Yes, I was wondering if I may speak with Emily Gower? Is she there? I understand she's accompanying a young lady who sometimes goes by Aleksandra Volkova," The voice on the other end is male, English, and very educated.

"Who's asking?"

"A friend."

"You will have to be more specific," Ivan replies.

"Does 'Union Jack' mean anything to you?"

Well that's a name Ivan hasn't heard in some time. The ghost of the Balkans and his band of supernatural commandos. He always thought the stories were exaggerated, but after the encounter with that thing in Santa Clarita, Ivan's may have to reconsider a few of his assumptions.

"Heard the name. But that could be anyone," he counters. "It is an alias after all."

Confidently, the other answers, "On Miss Gower's left hand there should be a wedding band with six flush-set diamonds patterned like a leaf and some scroll detail. She acquired it in Amman in '42."

Ivan puts down the handset and goes over to the next room. Gower's kneeling next to the cot, tending to Volkova. She's using a handkerchief to dab sweat from Volkova's brow and doesn't look up as he enters.

"She needs water," Gower says softly.

"May I see your ring?" He demands, feeling like a blundering idiot.

"My ring?" she asks incredulously.

"Yes. The ring. I need to confirm something."

Gower stands, presenting her left hand and he takes it gently in his. As promised, there's a gold ring with six flush-set diamonds shaped like a leaf with scrollwork on either side.

"Come with me."

He leads Emily to the telephone in an office with some proper furnishing. Plywood desk, a dubious couch, and a view of the warehouse across the street. Comrade Ivan passes her the phone without much ceremony before stepping aside.

"Hullo?" she says.

"How are you holding up, Em?" Relief washes over Emily as she hears Michael's voice. She'd know it anywhere.

"I'm well," she answers. "How about you, where are you? Is Roger alright?"

"We're safe. Roger's safe. A little battered, but we'll pull through. We appear to be guests of Howard Stark."

"Really?" Emily replies shocked, but still trying not to give too much away. "How come?"

"Long story, I hope to tell it to you later. In any case, how's Dottie?"

"Bad way, still. Has a fever and chills. Eyes are clouded. She's rather weak. Started after an encounter with Deep ones."

"About when?" Michael asks.

"About… half past five, I reckon."

"About the same time we encountered them in the steel works," he replies. "I know you'll watch over her. But are they treating you well?"

The worried note. Michael doesn't care for when Emily's out of sight like this since London. Yet so far she's managed her current situation without too much damage. But it's still best to stroke an ego in these situations, however.

"My host has been a proper gentleman," Emily replies, looking right at Ivan, who stares right back from his corner.

"Very good," Michael says. "And word of advice, these Deep Ones don't care for fire and noise. Especially the vibrations. And tell the good comrade where Roger and I are. You'll know how to handle the rest."

"Understood."

Ivan holds out his hand for the phone and Emily passes it before stepping aside.

"You know I cannot let Volkova go. But we can return your woman," Ivan says casually.

"Therefore we're at an impasse as I promised Volkova her freedom once this is over. It is interesting you haven't killed her outright, knowing your lot. Rather merciful of you. Or you know that Emily would not have let anyone touch a hair on Vokova's head and you have a strong sense of self preservation."

Such bravado, but to be expected from the British elite.

"Maybe we have other reasons to keep her alive," Ivan lies. "But we shall contact you later to discuss this situation further."

He hangs up the phone and looks over at Gower, arms folded and a stony face looking out at him.

"Well, Emily Gower, I am interested in what Union Jack told you."

She's quiet for a long moment, staring at him, searching him. Taking his measure. "I am to tell you that Union Jack is currently a guest of Howard Stark. And that what is infecting Volkova does not like high temperatures or loud noises. Especially the vibration."

"You call them the 'Deep Ones', what are they? You said you had some knowledge of them"

How in the world do I tell a hardened materialist that myths are true? That magic is real? That monsters lurk in the woods and are out to get us?

"Do you remember when Pluto was discovered?"

Ivan leans back on the desk with a curious expression, "It has been a long time, but yes, I do remember."

"Still, it hasn't yet been twenty years since a new planet was discovered, we don't know what else is out there. We don't know what's at the bottom of the oceans. What's at the centre of our own planet. We are still trying to grasp how old the earth is. Hell, the Yanks dropped two nuclear bombs not that long ago. They unleashed the power to level cities by splitting a single atom. We haven't even begun to understand what we have discovered.

"The 'Deep Ones' is a term we borrowed from a friend of ours who's very familiar with these things. He grew up in their shadow. In a way, they're like a form of energy. They're like radiation, but a form that can think. They can plan and plot. They make their way to lost places, seeking to be found. Imagine if you will: a wolf with the ability to bend reality to its whim. Those things we encountered earlier on the freeway, those were just the servitors. You will never know what you are facing until it has its teeth around your throat and by then it's too late. All because we can barely comprehend what it could be. But far more importantly, HYDRA wants it."

Though the Library doors are still closed tight, the other members of Peggy's confidants are gathered in the study. "So, who wants to go first?" she asks.

"I may as well," Michael says as he stands up. "I get the sense I have the best sense of the big picture right now.

"By this point I'm sure everyone here is aware that HYDRA didn't get stamped out alongside Schmidt, just like how there are Nazi remnants the world over trying to get their power back. Well, after the war officially ended, the team Roger and I led were put towards fighting the battles behind the scenes. Espionage, assassination, anything to make sure England could stay in power. Of course, they wanted to point us towards any perceived threat to King and Country, not just the fascists. As time went on it got harder and harder for us to turn down missions we couldn't agree with. Then one mission went belly-up, and we hit our breaking point. We stayed in contact the best we could, but ultimately we became our own rogue cells in order to combat HYDRA and its allies without government interference."

"And a good thing, too, since HYDRA seems to be consolidating all their operations to the Americas," Roger adds. "Manpower in South America, teaming up with the various scientists who fled there to hide with their sympathizers. But the money and espionage is all in the States - including plenty of people in government positions."

Michael nods. "Now, the thing about HYDRA is they've never stopped poking their nose in things they shouldn't have. Their original goal after being restructured from the Hydra Freikorps was scientific advancement, much like the SSR for the Allies, but Baron von Strucker and his scientists, they bought into the ideas of the occult just like Hitler did. Biggest difference - what they were finding was working. That's why my team was so important: we could fight fire with fire. Fight magic with magic."

"Bold move to come into a scientist's house and start talking about magic," Samberley quips.

Roger shrugs. "When you think about it, a lot of the things our lot have faced seem to come right out of a fairytale."

"Sufficiently advanced technology," Sousa mutters. The others turn to look at him. "Oh, it's uh, it's something a guy I met over in London said once. That if the rate of technological advance stays the same, by the 21st century it would seem like magic to us."

"That's a fair point," Stark admits.

"Anyway, in our travels we found that there was a sect of HYDRA very devoted to locating a set of three artifacts - what we'd come to refer to as the Three Crowns." He counts off his fingers. "Serpent, Wolf, and Thorns. We don't know for sure where they came from, but they're impossibly ancient. Serpent and Wolf are accounted for, and both of them we gave to our allies to hide them away from prying eyes. But as far as we know, HYDRA has the Thorn Crown."

"And what exactly do they do?" Peggy asks.

"Well I've never seen them in action, so I don't know how they work, but the general idea we got was that when they're all together they can be used to summon monsters." His sentence is cut off as the library doors burst open and Sue emerges, looking tired yet invigorated, leading Jarvis and Rose as they wheel in a blackboard of her own.

"Mr. Stark? Miss Carter? I -" She catches herself when she sees the rest of the group in the study. "Oh, sorry I didn't know you had company. I can come back later -"

"No, no, it's fine," Howard waves her off with a smile. "What have you been so busy at? I haven't seen you all day."

"Well - I hope I wasn't intruding, but I was looking at the research you'd been doing previously and I - again, I don't mean to overstep, but I saw one of the pictures in there was of an equation? And I'm no expert but I'm good with numbers, and the more I looked at it the more I could tell something was wrong." She gestures to the blackboard, and Peggy's no mathematician either but she can guess that the equation Sue is referring to is the one they found at Isodyne. "Anyways, I copied it out so I could fix it. I think somebody changed it to throw you off in some way." She holds out the photo to Peggy. "See miss? That smudge there, it looks like somebody erased something and added in a random numeral to keep things from working."

Jason has already stood up and moved to the board, disregarding Rose (who looks incredibly proud to have helped Sue with whatever this is) and Jarvis (who looks like he took a spill through a chalk factory). "Is this the formula for an Einstein-Rosen Bridge?" he asks in awe.

"Well, maybe. No one's been able to actually make one," Sue states. "But also, it's not enough. In my opinion."

"Can you elaborate on that?" Stark asked, not condescendingly but with an air of excitement.

"Right, so, how many of you are familiar with the idea of an Einstein-Rosen Bridge? A one-dimensional tube?" Stark and Samberley put their hands up, but the others look at Sue blankly. "Figures. I call it a wormhole anyway. It's not exactly popular mechanics these days, highly theoretical." She grabs a piece of paper off the table. "Let's say that one side of this paper is Los Angeles, and the other is New York. Normally a trip like that would take the better part of a day by plane. But! It's been proposed by several scientists that the space between them can be warped." She folds the two sides of the paper together so that they overlap. "It creates a one-dimensional doorway that matter can pass through instantaneously. But you see, this formula - it's designed to create a bridge, but it doesn't have coordinates. Even if you define your current location as point A, without a point B you'd just be tearing a hole to a totally random location."

"Sounds like how they opened the Zero Matter rift in the first place," Sousa says.

"Right," Wilkes confirms, before looking back to Sue. "A few weeks ago, a rift was opened in town that threatened to spill zero matter across the city. Fortunately we were able to build a device that closed it." He gestures to her calculations. "The woman who originally developed that formula is the one who opened it to begin with."

Sue looks between him and the others gathered. "Y'all have such fascinating lives. Zero matter?"

"It's a type of energy source. We believe it's from another dimension," Peggy clarifies.

"'Energy' might not be entirely accurate," Wilkes says. He leans over to Samberley who's handing him some documents. "After the ballistics examination, I had Samberley do some other kind of tests. On myself." He hands one copy to Stark. "It seems that tonight's events have proven our fears that despite closing the rift, the Zero Matter continued to be present in the bodies of those it infected - Whitney Frost, Dottie Underwood, and Myself. So I had Samberly take some blood samples." He hands the other copy to Peggy. "This here is our analysis of a controlled human blood sample. And this -" he turns the page - "is mine."

The difference is immediately clear. The control blood has what Peggy can recognize as platelets and blood cells, but Jason's contains dark splotches with spidery tendrils wrapped around several of the cells. "We've been looking at Zero Matter like an energy source, and it is to a certain degree. But it's also some kind of parasite."

"That's a concerning thought," Sousa breathes. "But I guess an…'energy parasite' explains how it did what it did to those men back there. And Manfredi."

"It's more than alive. It can think." Peggy looks at Michael. "You heard it. It was after the Crowns too. And it's in Dottie. How exactly did you get a hold of her, anyway?"

"Wait, they've got Miss Underwood with them too?" Jarvis blurted out.

"Yes. Funny story, that," Michael says as he starts pacing the room. "During the latter stages of the war, because of our proximity to Soviet lines, we learned of an organization called 'Leviathan' and that it was some wing of Soviet intelligence. We kept an eye on them because the knives were coming out at the time - we were mostly aligned with Tito's partisans. We learned that they were a deep science and espionage organization much like the SSR and HYDRA."

"The British equivalents seem to be scattered across the different branches of the Ministry of Defence," Roger adds.

"We've heard of them," Peggy replies. "And they seem to be the organization behind Dottie Underwood and all the other Soviet girl assassins."

"Right, in any case, this all goes back to London," Michael says. "When we discovered that those giving us orders were more afraid of communism than they ever were of the Nazis, we needed to take action. I'm no advocate for the Soviet Union and Stalin, not after what happened in Spain, but in my opinion fascism is the deadlier philosophy - if you can call it that. We found threads of a plan and took action."

"So how does Underwood fit into this?" Sousa asks.

"She came to our attention because of Cornelius van Lundt. He was one of the middle men for going between the fascist underground who managed to piss off enough people with how he handled the money."

"Well color me unsurprised," Howard snarks. "Always something shady about him."

"Quite," Michael continues. "Romulus' faction wasn't happy with the Council of Nine and put van Lundt up to get the Crown and their other secrets. And that's where Dottie Underwood fits in."

Dottie lets out a pained moan. Emily turns to Ivan, pleading, "Please, let me help her, she is very sick."

"Why do you care so much?" he asks, his face hard as stone. "She's a traitor, an enemy of the people, and infected by those 'Deep Ones' you speak of."

She grabs his shirt front to make him listen. "Because someone has to! Because I cannot tolerate seeing someone suffer through no fault of their own. Because Dottie Underwood - Aleksandra Volkova - she never asked for such a curse. Because for all her real crimes she was never a traitor to the Soviet people. Because she's a bloody human being, and is that not enough?"

"You clearly do not understand what Leviathan was, and need I remind you that Volkova sold herself to a fascist criminal," Ivan counters.

"Did you hear nothing? She isn't a traitor. Dottie went to work for Cornelius van Lundt to get back into your lot's good graces."

"And how would you know? You do not understand what Leviathan was."

"I sacrificed everything to burn down the same HYDRA faction she was hunting." Emily feels the tears pricking at the corner of her eyes. It's too close now. She lets go of Ivan, steps back trying to regain her composure. "I'm sorry. I'm wasting time."

She walks out, striding across the hall to the other room, returning to Dottie's side. Her sleep is that of a consumptive; less than restful and her breathing laboured. "She needs water, and we will need to make this room as hot as possible."

"So what you are saying is that Volkova was trying to get intelligence on a HYDRA cabal that wants to gain control of this 'living energy'?"

"Yes," Emily replies, unbuttoning the top of Dottie's blouse so she can breathe a little easier. "I'll explain once I get some bloody water, if you please."

Ivan walks off to the kitchen. He can't believe what he's doing, going to fill a pot with water to potentially help her. Why didn't he just execute Volkova and have it done with? He turns on the faucet and tries clearing his mind. Why does he trust Gower to stay put? To not escape with Volkova?

He knows what he saw. But another part of him hopes to wake up and realize it was all a dream. Because he remembers all those fascist pigs did to his country and fears what they could do again with such power.

Because the image of Emily Gower standing on a burning car with her glowing gold eyes is seared into his mind.

He takes a washcloth and returns to the room. Gower eyes him suspiciously as he enters, so he tries some charm.

"I am overly curious. It's a bit of a condition."

Her face softens a little and she gives a quiet, "Thank you."

She sets aside the used handkerchief for the washcloth and goes back to tending Volkova. "Take a seat, it's a bit of a tale."

He pulls out a chair for Gower, but she ignores that and starts her story.

"This story… well… to truly tell it I'd have to go back to Cairo, during the war, but we don't have that much time. I guess London's a good place to start." Emily takes a breath. Centres herself so her mind doesn't drift far. "My unit was designed to fight HYDRA, to fight the strange and bizarre. Stuff like what happened earlier. And we continued doing that after the war, but more to keep the empire going, you know. Didn't take us long to realize that something wasn't right. Kept getting contradictory orders and told to not ask questions even when we had good reason to. Still, it took a mission going wrong at the arse end of Chile for that to really sink in. Finally realized that our masters had sold their souls to the fascist devils a long time ago. And that they saw us as nothing more than weapons.

"We started figuring out they were moving HYDRA assets around to South America, and that there was this cabal looking to gain control of these powerful artifacts, the crowns. They needed something to replace the Tesseract-powered weapons after it and the Red Skull disappeared. We hid two of these crowns. HYDRA has the third - the Thorned Crown. SIS didn't like us going out on our own. Didn't like Union Jack having his own opinions. Didn't like our insubordination, and got punished for it."

Emily closes her eyes, trying to keep those few memories locked away. Dottie's hand twitches under hers, bringing her back to the present. She hadn't realized she'd reached out for Dottie.

Get to the point.

She looks up, expecting indifference or a cold, disapproving glare. Ivan is staring at her, but it is with sympathy, not a rebuke.

"Take your time," he says softly.

"Dottie… Aleksandra… We came across her because of Cornelius van Lundt, a slumlord who fancies himself a real estate kingpin. And as it turns out, an important node to this cabal because he handled a lot of the money. But like most fascists he's greedy and was skimming off the top. Cassandra Romulus got to him first."

"Who is she?" Ivan asks.

"Baron von Strucker's mistress and heiress to the Isodyne fortune. Anyway, aside from stealing from the till, van Lundt had a mistress all his own with expensive tastes and was spending more than he should have. Romulus cornered him and got to steal all the Council of Nine's secrets, including their crown."

"Well, Schmidt was the only thing holding the different factions together. With him gone, they shattered," Ivan muses. So much for two heads growing back when they start fighting each other.

Emily nods, "Now it's a fight to become king of the hill. This is where Aleksandra comes in. It's a sore spot for her, working with fascists, but there was an opportunity to rob HYDRA of more secrets, expose their networks within 'special relationship', and maybe take their crown for the good of the Soviet people. But Romulus or van Lundt - maybe both - weren't careful enough and someone in the Council found out. They sent their chief goon, an FBI agent named Vernon Masters, to deal with the problem, tipping off the SSR about Dottie's robbery attempt. Romulus still tried to kill van Lundt to keep him from talking."

"Which is how Volkova found her way here," he says. Emily looks at him quizzically. He shrugs, "I do not operate completely in the dark."

"Eyes and ears everywhere, is it?" she sighs.

"Our work would become very difficult if we did not."

They are quiet for a long moment, now realizing they've come to an impasse.

"You do understand that she is still a dangerous criminal. A Black Widow assassin," Ivan quietly says. "The organization she worked for went far beyond their mandate and became a dangerous vector of fascistic thought."

"I know that. I know a lot more than you think." Emily grips Dottie's hand a little tighter. "I'm not defending her on that. But I can't in good conscience let you take her. I know what you will do."

"She is infected by the 'Deep Ones' as you call them. Would it not be better to end her suffering?"

She's too tired to be angry, she just wants to help a poor soul. "What do I have to do to make you understand that killing the host does nothing? It's worse than nothing. I've seen it before. A weaker one of these will crawl to a new host if you don't destroy it immediately. The stronger ones can just re-animate the corpse - and then it doesn't have to fight the host's mind for control. Can really do some damage." Emily looks Ivan in the eyes, angry and barely holding back her tears. "So are you going to help me, Comrade? Or are you going to stand there spouting the Party line?"

"Michael, you said you didn't know how the Crowns operated. Could they be the coordinates this formula needs?"

"Um, potentially?"

"Yes!" Sue declares. She starts drawing a diagram on the blackboard. "It sounds like Romulus is rich as the Devil, so I don't doubt she'd be able to commission a machine and the energy necessary to open another rift. With the crowns, she wouldn't just be opening to a random hole in the Zero Matter dimension - she could be after a specific location."

"Or entity," Michael adds grimly.

"Well, assuming the theory of the Zero Matter being alive is correct…yes." Sue shivers. "An entire ecosystem of life forms operating on physics completely alien to us." She turns back to the comfort of her equations. "But a single crown would be risky. The rift would be unstable, for one, and if Three Crowns act like an address then one Crown is only worth knowing what city a person lives in."

"Like walking through New York and asking for every man named 'James'," Roger says with a smirk. "And Cassandra's arrogant enough to think she can find her man in one try."

"And spill countless amounts of Zero Matter onto our side of things while she does it," Peggy confirms.

Cassandra Romulus stands in the middle of the massacre on the factory floor. When the violence first began she made her men stand outside the door of the office and ensure that nothing intervened. One of them didn't make it, and the other…well, he was wishing he hadn't made it when she put a bullet in his head.

Fortunately, she was able to radio for backup, and now the place is swarming with her FBI goons and patsies to ensure that nothing here can be traced back to her or her operations. They also brought her handmaiden, who is making sure none of the surrounding gore made it onto her person and gingerly picking away small splatters with a pair of tweezers. "Careful of the fabric, dear," Cassandra insists. "It's taffeta."

"No trace of anything, ma'am," one of the men says as he approaches her. "Or, well, plenty of traces of the men who were here, but nothing we can use to figure out where the ones who killed them went."

"That's not something you'll need to worry about," Cassandra assures him. "I had the foresight to make sure a bug would be planted on them before they left."

"A bug? I didn't hear anything about that from Flynn. What frequency should we listen in on?"

Romulus pats the man on his cheek. "Oh, not that kind of bug. Don't be so small-minded. Trust me, by morning we'll know exactly where they are and what they're planning."

The gathered crew attempts to make a plan for everything, but the unfortunate truth is that it has been too long a day and nobody trusts ideas made on so little sleep and so much caffeine - the wartime adrenaline hasn't necessarily carried over for everyone into the present.

After a brief discussion of what they needed to accomplish, it is agreed that they will adjourn until morning. Peggy and Sousa go to their own rooms, and Jarvis assures the others that three of the guest suites are already prepared to keep them should they desire to stay instead of making the drive home. "Some of you may have to double-up, I'm afraid."

"I'll volunteer for that," Roger declares, throwing a casual arm over Michael's shoulder. "We're used to bunking together from back in the day."

Jarvis' eyebrow rises ever-so-slightly, but he says nothing - he is a professional. He turns his attention to Sue instead. "Miss Storm, would you like me to help you return anything to the study before you retire?"

"No, no thanks Jarvis." Sue is still standing perfectly straight and staring holes into her research. "I want to take another look at this, make sure everything still adds up."

"Are you kidding?" Howard says as he walks up beside her. "I've looked over this thing a hundred times since you wheeled it out and it's perfect. I know Peg mentioned you had a good head for numbers, but I never expected this. Where did you study?"

"Oh, well, just normal school I suppose," Sue admits. "I mean, I've picked up what I can when I get the chance. The libraries in my neighbourhood usually don't get the very advanced stuff but when I'm able to I can stop in the one downtown and grab what they let me. I've had to copy the notes out of quite a few books just so I can keep them…on hand…" she trails off as she sees Mr. Stark's bewildered expression. "I'm so sorry, Mr. Stark, I know I should have asked before I intervened, I just figured that maybe I could be of use to you after imposing myself so suddenly. I'll help Mr. Jarvis put all this away."

"No! Keep it!" Howard says with excitement. "You - Sue, you realize how brilliant you are, right? To only be self-taught and do all of this!" He gestures to the board. "Imagine what you could accomplish if you actually had the chance to advance your abilities."

"Well, I'm flattered Mr. Stark, but I tried applying to the University of California and they passed over me. I imagine they already reached their quota for colored girls there."

"Not if I have anything to say about it," Howard declares, grabbing the phone. "I know the Dean of Admissions. Probably. Well, I know his sister." He hangs up. "Old bastard's probably asleep."

Sue's holding her hands in front of her chest, not yet used to dealing with Howard when he gets in one of his moods. "Mr. Stark, I appreciate your…enthusiasm, but you really don't need to do anything. There's no way I could afford that school anyway. I don't have any job or savings, and even if I did I'm happy to just finish my secretarial studies."

"No you're not, I can tell. I can see it in your eyes." He rounds the couch again and takes her shoulders with glee. "First thing tomorrow I'm calling that school, and if you won't let me pay for everything then you can earn your way in my R&D department. Wilkes could use the help."

It takes a moment but suddenly Sue realizes that Howard isn't just excited and rambling - he means every word he's saying. "You're serious, aren't you?"

"Deadly serious. Susan Storm, I think you could change the world."

Mama?

Mama, where are you?

Alya looks around the room. It's big, with tall windows on one side and cots lined up against the walls. The room was filled with gold light. Maybe it's morning. Maybe it's evening. But it's strange. She knows it's not home. She needs to find her mother.

She wanders around the room, looking under cots and in wardrobes. But Mama isn't there.

The corridor outside the big room is dark and disappears into shadows at both ends. Alya tries different doors, hoping one of them will open and reveal Mama.

Did I do something wrong?

None of the doors will open.

Where are you, Mama? Why can't I find you?

She can feel something behind her. Something cold and dark. Something she dare not look at.

Mama! Mama, please! I'm scared!

Alya bangs on the doors and rattles the handles as she races down the endless hall. Trying to outrun whatever is behind her.

Mama, I'm scared!

There are doors and doors, all locked, and Alya is trapped.

I don't want to die!

She's alone. She's alone and no one is coming to save her. The darkness catches up to her.

Mama, why did you leave me!

The world goes dark and very cold and deathly silent…