Tony Stark had been a technical consultant for exactly two days before he had delivered his verdict on every department in S.H.I.E.L.D.: the whole organization was a bureaucratic swamp.
Bureaucratic—everyone already knew it. Saying it out loud was a different matter.
The agents soured on him almost immediately, but Fury kept pretending not to notice. What he actually wanted was to use Stark's expertise while the ambient resentment built up a convenient common enemy, pulling the organization together through shared irritation. Calculated, in its way.
A month after Tony Stark—the walking cheat code—joined, the Helicarrier was ready for a classified test flight. Washington was obviously out—too many eyes, too much traffic. The whole party traveled somewhere that held particular significance for Daisy: the waters off Puerto Rico, where S.H.I.E.L.D. maintained a shipyard facility codenamed the Dock.
Strictly internal—no outside observers invited. Not that it mattered to Stark, who apparently had not noticed he was an outside observer. Once their carrier cleared US waters, he came roaring after them in the Iron Man armor.
He was Fury's valued technical consultant. You couldn't shoot him down. They let him tag along.
At the Dock, the intelligence division began pre-flight clearance procedures—all civilian aircraft were rerouted away from the Helicarrier's intended flight path, and private aircraft were barred from approaching the East Coast area entirely.
Below deck, Daisy was coordinating the Science Division's interface with Hill's bridge command systems.
"Measure reactor output."
"Primary propulsion link established. Turbine engines initiating Stage 1 test run."
"Log Stage 1 turbulence index. Check hover power..."
Daisy and Hill worked in fluid tandem, each picking up the next line before the other finished, moving through the pre-flight sequence with the ease of long practice.
Stark sat to one side in his armor—faceplate up, half a burger in one hand—watching them with the languid posture of someone who had walked into a particularly good movie.
He spoke toward Fury, slightly muffled by the food. "Do you always have this many female agents on staff? I feel like nobody ever told me about this particular perk."
It wasn't just Daisy and Hill. Black Widow was there, Mockingbird, Ms. Simmons—every one of them comfortably above average. Stark was momentarily struck by the impression that S.H.I.E.L.D. ran on beautiful women.
Fury was not going to discuss that with him. Baldy kept his face dark and watched the team work, visibly tense.
"Reactor output: 35%."
"Hover power: 8%."
All readings nominal. Daisy gestured to Hill: your call. Hill gave a small nod and issued the command: "Full engine ignition."
The massive turbine blades began to turn. Their calculations had been precise—even at full rotational speed the noise was dampened to near-inaudibility. Stark gave an approving nod that he probably thought nobody noticed.
The speed setting climbed from first to third. Reactor output hit 65%. Hill scanned the readouts and made the call: "Engage secondary reactor."
The two reactors found equilibrium, and the Helicarrier—slowly, enormously, improbably—lifted from the surface of the water under everyone's expectant gaze. A cascade of seawater sheeted off the hull as the vast steel machine rose into the air, ascending into view for the ground crew watching below.
The hard part done, Daisy had nothing left to manage. She found an empty chair and watched Hill run the bridge from a distance.
"I'm going outside to take a look. Coming?" Stark dropped his voice as he moved toward her.
She gave him the back of her head in response. Are you serious? Standing on the flight deck of a moving Helicarrier, ignoring the thrust and wind at ten thousand meters, in front of everyone? That was essentially tattooing POWERED PERSON on her forehead. She wasn't interested.
Stark headed out to enjoy himself. The bridge stayed busy. When the carrier climbed to 10,000 meters (32,800 ft), Hill activated the optical camouflage—Stark's design, and credit where it was due, it was flawless—and ground radar lost them entirely.
The Helicarrier ran its preset course in a wide loop around the country before descending back to Puerto Rico.
Cheers broke out. Daisy's assignment was officially complete. She didn't join them.
She walked alone on the flight deck, thinking.
Something was wrong. Even without receiving any signal back from that unnamed space, Daisy could feel the wrongness in herself.
A slow, incremental boost to her psychic power was explainable. Daily growth without pattern or logic was not. The Crimson Bands of Cyttorak sat wrong on every level she examined them. Her wardrobe had been drifting toward brighter reds—red dresses, red accessories, more of them each week. People at both S.H.I.E.L.D. and HYDRA had been commenting on her presence, on how her authority felt heavier. She'd initially attributed that to the power increase, but thinking through it carefully now, that wasn't quite right. Something else was feeding it.
Those things taken individually might mean nothing. But then Little Lorna had been brushing her hair one afternoon and looked up, delighted: Daisy, you have red strands!
The girl thought her own green-tipped hair and Daisy's red strands made a good match.
How is that possible? Hair didn't change color without cause. Daisy had been genuinely shaken. She'd passed a sample to CRISIS for analysis. The AI confirmed the DNA was hers—identical to every other strand under examination—but couldn't explain the pigmentation. Insufficient data.
She considered the Ancient One's instruction to go to K'un-Lun. The old woman had likely foreseen something. Did I develop some kind of link to the Phoenix after all?
The thought made her uneasy.
She arranged a dinner with Storm and worked up to the question as indirectly as she could. She didn't get the chance. Storm—usually composed, always graceful—turned out to have been starving, and once she established that Daisy was paying, she ordered half the menu. Then, before Daisy could even start circling toward Jean's situation, Storm released everything she'd been holding in.
Jean had changed enormously. The thoughtful, intellectually precise woman Daisy remembered had been replaced by someone fixated on minor details.
"Students can't drink coffee—fine, I understand that one. But the faculty too? She expects us to model the rules? This is whose vocabulary? I've never heard that phrase before in my life!"
Storm went on. A per-category bonus system. Incentives for effort, penalties for idleness. The Grey Order—the first directive, which had since grown to number fifteen, covering an entire wall of the school's main corridor from floor to ceiling.
"Jean is still my closest friend. I would die for her. But I think she's going somewhere she shouldn't."
Storm picked her words carefully, as if trying to get the thought exactly right.
"I'm not opposed to strict standards for students. But we don't need to raise warriors. They're children—it's not their turn to fight yet. The world is still fundamentally at peace. And frankly, I think she's been led astray by that radical Cyclops."
Daisy laughed softly and said she'd just wanted to take her out to dinner—nothing more to it. Storm shed the weight she'd been carrying, ate a magnificent meal, and went back to school looking considerably lighter.
Daisy had CRISIS monitor her sleep patterns for two more nights. The AI reported that her brainwave activity had periods where it seemed to travel somewhere the instruments couldn't track.
Her working theory: she had developed some form of connection to Jean. To the Phoenix.
This required immediate attention.
She requested leave from Fury. He looked at her steadily for a moment before asking, with the gravity he brought to everything, "Where are you going?"
Daisy had used searching for my birth parents as an excuse enough times that it was starting to feel insulting to everyone's intelligence; her behavior didn't suggest she'd given her parents a second thought in years. She chose her words more carefully.
"During the fight with Doctor Doom, someone gave me a direction to follow. I need to go east and find something that will let me push further."
Fury studied her. Trying to read truth from performance. He exhaled slowly. "How long?"
She honestly didn't know. Whether K'un-Lun would accept an outsider, whether the Ancient One's name carried enough weight to open the doors, whether anyone there could even confirm her identity—all unknown. Her transposition could theoretically carry her in and out regardless of the dimensional barrier; the ten-year limit didn't seem to apply to her. So time, at least, wasn't a hard constraint.
"Three months, roughly?"
Fury nodded. He thought for a moment. Then, from the inside pocket of his coat, he produced a pager. An old one—cheap-looking, practically a relic.
Daisy took it, baffled. Then she looked more closely. No assembly seams. The casing was seamless, cast as a single piece. Not a single gap anywhere.
Fury, apparently reading her confusion, gave her a short explanation: "Take it with you. Even if you leave Earth, it'll still receive signals. S.H.I.E.L.D. needs you."
Then Baldy walked out without looking back.
Daisy turned the pager over in her hands. Externally, it looked like what it was. In every other respect it was not. The frequency it operated on was like nothing she could calibrate to Earth technology, and when she reached for it with her frequency perception, the material object read back with the signature of something built from concentrated psychic energy.
Manifested from intention.
She couldn't make sense of it. She put it in her bag.
She spent half a month putting everything in order. S.H.I.E.L.D. had Baldy; HYDRA had Viper to hold the line. The villa and Hammer Industries were briefed and set on autopilot. She suggested to Maki that it might be time to defuse the Elektra situation, but the maid was, for one of the few times Daisy could remember, unmoved.
Maki's exact words: I have it entirely under control.
Daisy thought of what the original timeline's Elektra and Maki had been capable of. Now Maki had the resources of S.H.I.E.L.D., HYDRA, and Hammer Industries at her disposal—against one outnumbered, isolated Elektra. One determined spy against a small empire. If Maki wanted to play, let her play.
On a Sunday morning, Daisy shouldered her pack, picked up her gear, and set out alone toward the east.
She went to Afghanistan first. She traced the route the Mandarin had used to flee, working from memory—if the opportunity to recover a few more rings presented itself, she wasn't going to argue with fate. Fortune favors those who reach for it.
The trail was cold. Too cold. The scene had been thoroughly erased, and though she'd checked and rechecked the route before leaving, the landscape offered nothing but snowfields and more snowfields. The Mandarin was likely buried very deep.
She changed course for Nepal.
Wong had given her the address of Kamar-Taj. Daisy wanted the Ancient One's read on her use of the lasso. The Ancient One was out—off exploring the multiverse, by Wong's account.
"I don't know where the Master is right now. I'm sorry to say her knowledge extends far beyond what I can follow." Wong was genuinely cordial. He didn't mention the incident where she'd deposited several of his fellow sorcerers in the Mirror Dimension.
"Remarkable." Daisy meant it completely. She struggled to make it to an alien planet; the Ancient One was out touring the multiverse for fun and had apparently grown bored with it. The gap between them was not small.
She helped Kamar-Taj's young students set up a network connection—a small gift to let them experience the modern world in between their training—and, to the warm send-off of several enthusiastic novices, walked up into the mountains alone.
Cross-dimensional transposition was new to her. Her calculation was that finding the point where K'un-Lun and the material plane intersected would give her the smallest margin of error.
She was one day into the mountain range when she found the trap five meters ahead of her, sighed, and thought: How boring.
Her boot hooked a pebble off the ground and flicked it against the trip line in one smooth motion. Three spears—green-tipped with something that was quite obviously contact poison—snapped out from the opposite side on a spring mechanism, traveled several hundred meters, and disappeared into the trees. Empty air, precisely where she'd been standing.
The ambush broke instantly. A dozen Hand ninja materialized out of the tree cover and the undergrowth, surrounding her.
Her old enemies. Old acquaintances, really, at this point.