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  McHale narrowed his eyes and stared at Banner.

  “Yeah,” he said, slowly.

  “Sometimes you have to play a role in a fairly extreme way,” said Banner. “I mean, when the stakes are really high.”

  McHale nodded.

  “You know what I mean? You understand?” asked Banner.

  “Yes, Doc,” said McHale.

  “Okay then,” said Banner.

  “You’re a treacherous piece of—” McHale snarled, and he lunged at Banner as far as his chain would allow.

  Banner backed away. For a second, they exchanged a knowing look.

  “I just wanted to check that you were okay,” said Banner. “That’s all. I’m sorry, McHale.”

  McHale told him where he could stick his apologies in an anatomically precise way.

  “Okay,” said Banner. “Just so long as we know where we both stand, and how much is at stake.”

  “I’m reading you loud and clear, Doc,” McHale spat.

  Banner shrugged and knocked on the door to be let out.

  He went upstairs to the High Evolutionary’s lab. Wyndham was writing calculations on one of the whiteboards.

  “Are you done, Doctor?” he asked.

  “No,” said Banner. “I needed a calculator.”

  He sat at the main bench and started to punch numbers into a small handheld device, noting the results.

  “I’m still bothered,” he said as he worked. “I’m sorry, Wyndham. It’s making it hard for me to concentrate.”

  “Bothered by what, Doctor?” asked Wyndham, glancing over.

  “The nature of the threat,” said Banner, sitting back. “I apologize, but I can’t help it. The unknown makes me anxious, and anxiety isn’t good for me. It’s playing on my mind and making it very hard for me to maintain a calm disposition.”

  The High Evolutionary nodded.

  “I understand, Doctor,” he said. He put down the stylus he had been using and walked over to the bench to face Banner. “I need you clearheaded, and I certainly do not wish you to become agitated. Let us spend a few minutes, and I’ll tell you what I know.”

  “Thank you,” said Banner. “You have to understand my misgivings. This is so big, Wyndham.”

  “Then let me explain, swiftly and concisely,” said the High Evolutionary. “Nine months ago, I first received contact from the representatives of...”

  He suddenly fell silent, as though he was listening to something Banner couldn’t hear.

  “What is it?” asked Banner. “Representatives of what?”

  “Not now,” said the High Evolutionary bluntly. “I have received a psionic alert. The New Men have just confirmed that S.H.I.E.L.D. tac teams are surrounding the building. We are out of time.”

  “Representatives of what, Wyndham?” Banner asked, more firmly.

  “Really, Doctor, not now!” snapped the High Evolutionary. “A raid is about to begin. There will be bloodshed. Our hand is forced. You and I will quit this facility via my teleport link. It will carry us to a safe location far away from here.”

  “Wyndham—”

  “Grasp the situation, Banner!” the High Evolutionary exclaimed. “S.H.I.E.L.D. is on to us. We are leaving. Now. There is no longer any opportunity to finesse this plan. We will be long gone by the time S.H.I.E.L.D. overruns the building. I will detonate the gamma bomb remotely, and then we will do what we can to repair the global situation and implement my plan.”

  Banner rose. He pulled something out of his pocket.

  “What is the threat, Wyndham?” he demanded.

  “Banner, you infuriate me! We must leave now!”

  “I think it’s time you grasped the situation,” Banner said quietly. “We’re not going anywhere. You’re going to tell me, right now, the nature of the threat. No more evasion.”

  He held up the object he had taken from his pocket.

  “Do you see this?” he asked. “It’s an EpiPen. I borrowed it from the medical kit in McHale’s cell. An epinephrine auto-injector, Wyndham. A high-dose shot of medical adrenaline.”

  Banner flipped off the cap and held the needle to his forearm.

  “Tell me what the threat is, Wyndham,” he said. “Tell me right now. Or I will shoot this into my arm. And you really, really don’t want me to do that.”

  NINETEEN

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  12.32 LOCAL, JUNE 12TH

  THE ARMOR wrapped itself around him.

  Tony Stark stood, arms stretched out at his sides, allowing the gleaming plates and panels of the Iron Man suit to articulate into place. It made a soft hum as it engaged, locking and sealing—perfectly machined.

  He felt alive again: clean, whole, empowered.

  Better still, he felt his confidence rebooting.

  Let the world bring it. He was Iron Man, Avenger. He was renewed.

  “All set, sir?” asked Seavers, the S.H.I.E.L.D. tech assisting him.

  Stark nodded. He stepped forward from the open crate in which the factory-fresh Iron Man armor had been stowed, flexing his hands and rotating his arms.

  He retracted his faceplate.

  “I’m good,” he said.

  Seavers followed him out of the Helicarrier cargo space. In the adjoining workshop, the suit Stark had been wearing when he came aboard was laid out on a steel table. It was battered, scratched, and broken; parts of it were disarticulated. His torn undersuit hung over the back of a chair.

  Stark paused and looked at the damaged suit. Every mark on it told a story: the dents left by Ultron’s fists, the puncture marks from shrapnel, the burn damage, the cracks from nanoform impacts, the kinetic trauma, the collision distortions. The decaying effects of the nanobot swarm made the discarded armor look as though it had been sprayed with acid. Crusts of dead swarmbot residue caked the joints and seams. The ruptured palm emitters of the repulsor system were blackened by back-blast.

  “When the crisis is over,” Stark said over his shoulder to Seavers, “I want this shipped back to Stark Industries.”

  “You gonna recycle it?” the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent asked. “Strip it down for reusable components?’

  “No,” replied Stark. “I’m going to repair it.”

  He reached out with one of his brand-new gauntlets and gently touched the fingers of one of the dead gloves.

  “I’m Iron Man,” he said quietly. “The suit, the armor, it makes me Iron Man. Sure, I have a wardrobe full of these. Variants, specialist-builds, and plenty of spares. But each one has its own personality. This one saw me through a lot. It saved my life this morning, several times. I’m not going to just junk it. That would be ungrateful.”

  Seavers nodded. He was a tech specialist, and he understood Stark’s tech-head mindset. Stark knew that most people didn’t. Treating a hardware suit as if it were alive smacked of an uncomfortable sentimentality.

  But guys like Seavers got it. “I’ll prioritize it through decontamination and get it packed, sir,” Seavers said.

  Stark nodded his thanks. “Appreciate it,” he said.

  He walked up through the busy Helicarrier to the medical suite. S.H.I.E.L.D. agents hurried past him in the hallways, many of them shooting him a respectful greeting or even a salute. There was a sense of unified purpose.

  The hatch of the medical suite hissed open automatically when he approached it.

  “How are you doing?” he asked as he walked in.

  “Lousy,” said Quicksilver.

  Pietro Maximoff was awake and sitting at a trolley table. He had a thermal blanket wrapped around his shoulders. The Vision and Nick Fury were with him. Nearby, two uniformed S.H.I.E.L.D. specialists were studying complex data on a series of freestanding glass projection plates. They talked quietly to each other, adjusting and annotating the projected data with light-stylus instruments.

  “Got anything you can share with us?” Stark asked Pietro.

  “Wanda spoke to me,” said Quicksilver. “I ran here as fast as I could.”

  “She spoke t
o you?” asked Stark. He noticed that the table in front of Pietro was covered in pages torn from a legal pad. Pietro had been writing. A lot.

  “In my head,” said Pietro.

  “That happen much before?” asked Stark.

  Fury shot him a warning look. Stark cursed inwardly. His naturally flippant tone often made him sound sarcastic, even on the rare occasion when he wasn’t trying to be.

  “We have established that it is an unusual event,” said the Vision. “Given Wanda’s power-set, this would seem to be some form of magic-based communication.”

  ”She was in trouble,” said Pietro. “We have to go and help her immediately or—”

  “Whoa. What did she say, exactly?” asked Stark.

  “She didn’t really say anything,” said Pietro. “I just felt her. She was reaching into me, into my heart. I felt her message rather than hearing it. She was in danger, and in darkness. A dark place. A dark realm. The Thunder God was with her. He was in danger, too. There was fire. But none of that matters! We’re wasting time with this talk!”

  “We’re not doing anything until we work out what we’re up against,” said Stark.

  Pietro glared at him.

  “You mentioned fire?” asked Stark.

  Pietro shrugged. “And stars,” he said impatiently. “Stars in alignment, in a circle. That was important somehow. Stars in a great circle. Or fires in a circle. Both. Neither. I don’t know.”

  “This relates to Siberia,” said Fury.

  “Yeah, figured that,” said Stark. “Any chance this could be something…someone else? Making you think it was Wanda?”

  Pietro shook his head.

  “It was her,” he said with great conviction. “In my heart, and in my blood, I know it was my sister. I can’t explain it, and I have no proof to show you, but it was her. And we must go to her now!”

  “What’s this?” Stark asked, pointing to the pages of handwriting.

  “I asked him to write down anything he could remember,” said Fury. “It can open up the memory sometimes and free up things you don’t realize are blocked.”

  “Okay,” said Stark.

  “Maximoff wrote all this down in about two minutes,” said Fury. “It was some crazy stuff. He broke my pen.”

  “I can write fast,” said Pietro. “I can do everything fast. But this was not conscious. It was… what is that process called?”

  “Automatic writing,” said the Vision.

  “Yes. That. I just wrote. I did not know what I was writing, what it meant, or where it was coming from. I just wrote. I think Wanda’s magic put things in my head, and it all came out.”

  Stark picked up one of the sheets and looked at it.

  “What is this? Equations? Mathematical combinations?”

  The Vision motioned toward a glass panel display on which the S.H.I.E.L.D. specialists were working. The plates were covered in glowing holotype projections.

  “I have transcribed it,” the Vision said. “I share Pietro’s desire to go to Wanda’s assistance as swiftly as possible. I was trying to assess her location. The flow of the material is not clear. It is broken in places, as though the data were jumbled or incomplete. But I believe it is a mathematical expression of dimensional space.”

  Stark looked at it.

  “Yeah, I see that now,” he agreed. “It’s describing the spatial terms of something. Not Earth. Not our reality. But something expressed in relation to ours.”

  “You can read that stuff?” asked Fury.

  “Not really,” said Stark. “It’s not my field. But I get the basics well enough to see what it’s doing.”

  “I called in these experts to consult,” said Fury, gesturing to the techs. “Quantum specialists, dimension-phase engineers. Our best.”

  “Perhaps Wanda is trying to tell us something,” said the Vision.

  “Well, yeah,” said Stark.

  “I mean specifically. Perhaps she is trying to send us information that she hopes we can use. About where she is. Where, when, and how. Where that place is in relation to us.”

  “Yeah, either deliberately or accidentally,” said Stark.

  “What do you mean?” asked Pietro.

  “Well, this isn’t Wanda’s field, either,” said Stark. “She wouldn’t understand the quantum mathematics. But if she…whatever it is she does…cast a spell? Are we okay with that terminology?”

  “Go on,” said Fury.

  Stark paced a little, miming a conjurer with a wand.

  “She’s desperate. She’s in trouble,” he continued, thinking out loud. “She casts a spell—frantically, maybe, to communicate to her brother a simple concept. Where she is.”

  He pointed to the panels.

  “Magic’s not my field, either, so bear with me,” he said. “But it’s like she makes a wish. Let Pietro know where I am. And at Pietro’s end, that comes out as a literal download of data. A detailed scientific description of her location. A quantum map.”

  Tony glanced at the techs.

  “You guys getting that?” he asked.

  “Absolutely, sir,” said one of them, an older man. The name patch on his suit read “Willings.” “This section here—” He pointed to one of the plates. “—this is pretty much a mathematical representation of our planet. Specifically New York, which is where Mr. Maximoff was when this began. The rest, for the most part, is something else entirely.”

  “It’s non-Euclidian geometry,” said another tech, a woman. Her patch read “Gainsborough.” “It’s describing a universe that obeys entirely different physical laws.”

  “That’s where we think she is,” said Willings. “Or, at least, where the data was sent from.”

  “Do we have a match?” asked Stark. “I mean, we’ve tangled with folks from other dimensions before. We have data. Does this match anything? Any prior events? Space-time breaches? Wormholes?”

  Gainsborough shook her head.

  “Nothing so far,” she said. “Bear in mind, many of our systems are shut down. We don’t have full archive access, and we can’t pull anything from the Avengers’ database.”

  “You said ‘for the most part,’” said Stark, looking at Willings. “What did you mean?”

  “There’s one section here,” he replied, indicating another part of the display. “It’s small, like a side note. I don’t know what it is.”

  “Give me your best guess,” said Stark.

  Willings shrugged.

  “If this,” he said, sweeping his hand across the left-hand section of the display, “is our universe, and this—” he gestured to the right-hand portion, “—is the other place, the alien dimension, then this is an anomaly.” He was indicating a small part of the central section.

  “It’s small,” said Gainsborough. “It describes a pocket of reality, separate from our universe but contained within it as a sub-set. It’s not part of the other, whatever the other dimension is.”

  Stark stared at the display. “If the Siberia event is an incursion into our universe from another dimension, we have to act on this now. It’s what Wanda’s trying to tell us. It’s a wormhole event, the intersection of two entirely different universes.”

  Contessa de la Fontaine entered the room.

  “We’re about to go live, Director,” she said. “Two minutes, and we’ll be ready to try an uplink with London.”

  Fury nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “Keep working on this while Stark and I go and talk to Europe. Maybe they’ll be able to help us fill in some—”

  A rumble cut him off. The Helicarrier shuddered.

  “The hell was that?” Fury asked. Sirens began to wail.

  Fury snatched up a remote and activated one of the room’s large monitors.

  “Are we under attack?” he growled. “Talk to me!”

  De la Fontaine was listening to her earpiece.

  “Shots fired, upper deck,” she announced. “Reports of an explosion.”

  Fury used the remote to flash up
a security-cam feed. The image was grainy black-and-white, with no sound. It showed the massive upper deck of the helicarrier, with taxiways, parking stands, and fuel pumps. Stark could see S.H.I.E.L.D. warplanes on launch cradles, tow-carts, and munition carriers.

  “The hell?” said Fury.

  A bright flash of light suddenly burned out the screen settings for a second; when the picture dimmed again, one of the warplanes was on fire. Flight crews were running for cover. There were agents down. Security teams in body armor rushed onto the deck, assault rifles trained.

  Fury panned the view. Stark froze.

  “Oh my god,” he said.

  A humanoid figure was advancing slowly across the deck. Little specks of white showed the sparks of the automatic fire bouncing off its armored shell.

  Despite the black-and-white resolution, the identity of the humanoid figure was unmistakable.

  It was Iron Man.

  Stark slammed his faceplate closed and accelerated out of the medical suite. His backwash made the others flinch. Pietro’s handwritten pages billowed into the air.

  “Stark!” Fury yelled. “Stark!”

  The Vision flew silently after Iron Man, phasing through the wall into the hallway in time to see Stark rocket down the corridor. S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel ducked out of his path.

  Stark reached a through-deck service well, swung upright, and descended feet first, boot jets flaring.

  His mind was racing. He fought back horror and tried to focus.

  He understood what was happening.

  It was all his fault.

  * * *

  THE UPPER deck was in chaos. Alarms were sounding, and gunfire chattered. Two parked S.H.I.E.L.D. interceptors were on fire. Deck crews were fleeing to the platform exits while the S.H.I.E.L.D. security teams laid down covering fire.

  The Iron Man was approaching down the center line of the flight deck. Bullets pinged off it. It was dragging a body behind it, a body that it clutched by the throat.

  Stark landed near the main exterior hatch, beside the security teams. They were blasting away, littering the deck grills with hot shell casings.

  “Get back!” Stark ordered them.