The moment Daisy went down — coughing blood, badly hurt — Logan and Mariko were ripped through after her.
Honestly, Daisy's portals weren't what anyone would call a pleasant experience even under ideal conditions. An interrupted, out-of-control portal was something else entirely. Logan and Mariko weren't guided through — they were flung. Cargo dropped from a moving vehicle.
Logan recovered fast. That was the thing about him. Adamantium claws punched out and he swept the area in a single predatory scan, every muscle coiled, ready for an ambush.
Mariko rubbed her lower back and pushed herself upright.
"Where are we?" She asked in Japanese first. When it was clear Logan hadn't understood a word, she switched to English.
Logan had no better answer. Everything had happened too fast — he hadn't been able to make sense of any of it.
Wherever this was, it was a forest. Trees in every direction, birdsong somewhere in the distance, leaves rustling in a light wind.
"We need to — first things first — we can't leave my blood here." Daisy's voice was fraying at the edges. She dug a syringe from inside her tactical suit — a compound she'd synthesized herself, designed specifically to dissolve her own blood — and shoved it at Logan. "Handle it."
The effort of one simple motion made her skull feel like it was splitting down the center. She forced herself upright anyway. Mariko got Daisy's arm across her shoulders, tried to get a bearing on their location, failed, and started heading north. It wasn't much of a plan, but it was something.
Logan turned the syringe over in his palm, held it up to the light. No labels, no markings. He thought briefly that these S.H.I.E.L.D. types were paranoid to an extraordinary degree — but he also knew what an Inhuman's blood was worth on the open market. He'd heard enough stories.
As life skills go, Logan had developed an unusual collection over the years — a substantial portion of which involved sweeping streets. He looked around. No landmarks. He crouched down, squeezed two drops of the solution onto the blood pooling on the ground, and watched it evaporate in seconds. A quiet sound of surprise escaped him. Then he used his claws to dig a shallow pit and buried the remaining residue. Thorough.
By the time he'd finished and caught up with the other two, three minutes had passed.
"I'm going to kill that old woman," Daisy told herself through gritted teeth, fighting to stay conscious.
Those red-clad ninja were not Madame Viper's people, and they had no particular grudge against the Yashidas. They were The Hand. They'd come for her.
Her powers were still there. The portal was the problem — broken mid-transit, her focus shattered, mind and body running on different tracks. She felt like she'd been thrown back into the body she'd first arrived in: raw, unsteady, stripped down.
She concentrated hard enough to think in straight lines. A quick check of her surroundings. She'd been aiming for the Yashida estate. The displacement had thrown her god-knows-where — she wasn't even sure they were still in Japan.
"Do you know where we are?" she asked Mariko in Japanese.
Mariko's entire life ran between two points — bodyguards to her door, maids inside it. She had no idea what forest looked like from the inside. She shook her head between labored breaths.
Daisy's vision swam. More than half her body weight had transferred to Mariko's shoulders. Her attention drifted — and caught, involuntarily, on the design of the kimono. The back of a woman's kimono left a considerable expanse of neck exposed. Hard to ignore, really.
She looked. Just for a moment.
Focus.
She redirected her attention and noticed the second problem with Mariko's kimono: it was extremely beautiful and completely unsuited for fleeing for your life. The skirt was too narrow for real strides — she could only manage short, shuffling steps. The tabi socks and wooden sandals made every step a balancing act. Combined with the dead weight of Daisy on her shoulder, Mariko was drenched in sweat and had covered maybe two hundred meters (~650 feet) in what felt like an eternity.
Daisy became dimly aware that something was accumulating in the back of her mind. Her will was softening at the edges. She caught a blurry shape through the trees — Logan catching up at last — and that was the last thing she registered before the darkness closed over her.
The space behind her eyes had no color, no texture. Then it did — a wash of pale gold that suffused everything, and Daisy found herself like a leaf on water, drifting down a river with no visible end or beginning.
It wasn't her eyes or ears that perceived it, but she saw and heard regardless: somewhere impossibly far away, a vast red dragon was roaring. The creature seemed to reach across time and space itself. It looked at her — one long, direct gaze — and looked away.
She had lost the ability to think in any meaningful sense. All she could receive was a voice speaking to her, the words completely unintelligible.
Gold threads crossed the sky. Through a process she didn't understand, they began integrating into her — becoming part of whatever she was. She hadn't yet worked out what the change meant when a tremendous force seized her and pulled her down through a narrow channel, and the last of her awareness dissolved into black.
Consciousness returned slowly. Her head felt cracked in half.
She couldn't quite help it. She made a sound — soft, involuntary.
"She's waking up." That sounded like Mariko.
"Quick — switch the incense." A second female voice, one she didn't recognize.
A few moments later, a scent reached her — warm, subtle, clean. It spread through her nasal passages and eased something in her mind, giving her enough space to begin pulling her body back under conscious control.
Physically, she was fine. She'd lost some blood — hardly significant for a superhero — and with her mind settling, her body was catching up quickly.
She pushed herself upright, pressing a hand to her head, and discovered she was hungry. Very hungry.
"Miss Mariko — where are we?" She looked around. Wooden structure. A small incense burner in the corner, a single stick burning, the smoke curling and pooling in the still air. The scent was extraordinary. One breath and she felt lighter.
A young woman sat cross-legged beside the burner, her hair in a high ponytail, wearing loose athletic clothes. Pretty, with a pair of distinctive arched brows.
"This is Miss Colleen Wing," Mariko said. "We're at her retreat. We're north of Sendai."
The explanation was brief: the three of them had been making their way through the forest when they encountered Colleen mid-training. She recognized Mariko — difficult not to, given the family's prominence — and after a short explanation, brought them here to rest. The specialty incense had been Colleen's idea, a way to help with the mental injury. Daisy had been out for two days.
"Thank you, Miss Wing." Daisy hesitated. "My... clothes. Was that you two?"
She'd only now noticed she was wearing a white T-shirt and loose sweatpants. Not hers.
The T-shirt was tight across the chest and short at the hem — clearly cut for someone smaller and slimmer.
Colleen's clothes, obviously. The woman was a little shorter than Daisy, and noticeably more slender.
Both women seemed to find nothing remarkable about having changed her clothes. They confirmed it matter-of-factly.
"Is there anything to eat?" Daisy held out as long as she could. It wasn't long enough. She was absolutely starving.