The hydraulic hiss of the service doors opening did not sound like an intrusion. It sounded like standard maintenance, a soft sigh of equalization that smoothed over the click of steel latches disengaging.
Then the lights went out.
The orange sodium floodlights died all at once, plunging the subterranean hangar into pitch darkness. For half a heartbeat, the only illumination was the faint tactical red glow from the open cargo ramp of Quinjet Six and the dying, smoldering ember inside the melted plastic of Ava’s phone.
Steve did not move his feet. His weight shifted down, centering over his hips. The rasp of leather against his forearm was the only sound he allowed to escape.
"Three on the catwalk," he murmured. The timbre of his voice vibrated through the composite floor straight into the soles of Ava’s boots. "Four at the threshold."
Ava stepped back against the steel flank of the Quinjet. Her left shoulder hit the cold fuselage, grounding her. Her hand dug into her coat pocket, her fingers closing tightly around the brass key. The metal was slick with sweat from her palm. The key possessed no cutting edge, no leverage against Kevlar, but her body clung to it anyway.
The dampener beneath her collarbone thrummed. It did not hum softly anymore; it pulsed with a frantic, metallic rhythm that sent needle-thin aches radiating down her left arm. The skin at the base of her throat went frigid, chilled by the regulator’s micro-coolant pumps, while the rest of her body flushed with sudden, sickening heat.
A cylinder rolled across the polished concrete. It bounced with a dull, rubberized tap.
"Eyes," Steve said.
Ava slammed her lids shut and turned her face into the aircraft’s hull.
The stun grenade exploded without a bang. It tore through the hangar with a sustained, ear-splitting scream of high-frequency white noise coupled with an ultraviolet flash so brilliant it painted the veins inside her closed eyelids in blinding crimson. The air pressure slapped Ava’s eardrums inward. Her inner ear dissolved into vertigo.
Steve had already moved.
The resounding crash of vibranium striking tactical plate shattered the white noise. Ava blinked through the afterimage—a violent purple scar dancing in the center of her vision—and forced her back straight against the jet.
Four men had cleared the service corridor. They wore matte-grey composite armor, stripped clean of insignia, unit patches, or national flags. Their helmets were sealed, smooth faceplates reflecting the dark bay with polarized, insectile neutrality. They did not carry standard assault carbines. They wielded pneumatic carbines loaded with weighted cable canisters and long, two-pronged shock batons that crackled with arcs of violet electricity.
They were not here to kill Captain America.
They were here to corral him.
Steve took the first operative off his feet with an upward sweep of his shield. The edge caught the man beneath the chin, lifting two hundred and twenty pounds of armor clean into the air before slamming him into the concrete deck. Steve spun with the momentum, his right elbow driving backward into the helmet of the second assailant with a sickening crack of polycarbonate.
The two on the catwalk opened fire.
Thick, compressed carbon wires arced down from the shadows above. They were weighted with magnetic anchor heads that slapped against the Quinjet’s outer skin with heavy clangs, snapping taut in a crosshatch pattern designed to box the landing ramp into a wire cage.
"Ava, inside!" Steve shouted.
A third operative lunged past Steve’s perimeter. The man did not look at Rogers. His visor locked directly onto Ava, his tracking gauntlet blinking with a rapid green pulse that chimed in direct harmonic frequency with the dampener vibrating inside her chest.
They had her biometric signature. They weren't reading her face; they were hunting the machine buried behind her ribs.
The operative raised a shock baton, the twin prongs buzzing like a hornet against the humid cellar air. He moved with an economy of motion Ava recognized instantly—the rigid, hip-forward stance of a graduate from the S.T.R.I.K.E. tactical academy at Camp Peary.
Ava did not have a weapon. She had four years of desk duty, a ruined phone, and a key.
She dropped beneath the baton’s horizontal swing. The ozone from the discharge singed the ends of her hair, the smell of burnt protein hitting her nostrils as the baton struck the Quinjet’s landing gear with an explosive shower of blue sparks.
Ava drove her right fist forward. She did not aim for the man’s armored chest. She drove the dull, squared head of the brass key straight into the soft seal where the operative's tactical glove met the wrist guard.
Bone yielded beneath the brass.
The man grunted—a short, muffled choke behind his visor—and his fingers reflexively sprang open. The baton clattered to the deck. Ava caught the grip before it stopped rolling, her thumb finding the toggle switch on the rubberized handle.
She rammed the live prongs into the exposed mesh of the man’s inner thigh.
The arc took him violently. The operative’s body seized, his spine snapping backward in a rigid arch as eighty thousand volts cycled through his nervous system. His armor clattered against the jet’s wheel well before he collapsed into a heap of slack limbs and twitching fingers.
Ava dropped the weapon. Her hand shook so violently she couldn't close her fingers.
The dampener in her chest shrieked. A sharp, burning spasm knotted the muscles around her heart as the implant tried to counter the sudden surge of ambient electric charge. She staggered, one knee hitting the oily concrete, her vision greying at the margins.
"Ava!"
Steve was back. He stood over her, his chest heaving, his leather jacket torn across the left shoulder where a shock charge had melted the cowhide down to the grey canvas lining. Two more operatives lay motionless behind him. The hangar smelled of burnt rubber, ruptured capacitors, and blood.
Above them, the remaining sniper on the catwalk racked a fresh canister into his launcher.
Steve did not throw the shield. He grabbed the heavy steel tongue of the Quinjet’s tow hitch with one bare hand, ripped it from its mounting pin with a terrifying burst of sinew, and hurled it upward into the darkness.
The catwalk buckled with a shriek of twisted iron. The steel beam snapped, the catwalk platform plunging ten feet before hanging by a single suspension wire. A body tumbled over the railing, hitting the lower gantry with a wet, heavy thud before rolling onto the bay floor.
The hangar went dead quiet again.
The only sound was the coolant pipe dripping and the frantic, shallow rhythm of Ava’s breathing.
Steve turned, dropping to one knee beside her. His gloved hand hovered near her shoulder, not touching her, cautious and heavy with restraint. "Did they hit you?"
"No," Ava gasped. Her voice sounded thin, shredded by the pressure in her throat. "The implant. It’s... drawing an inductive load from the batons."
Steve reached out, his bare fingers pressing against the side of her neck to find her pulse. His skin was scorching hot against her icy jaw. His brow furrowed as he felt the wild, erratic flutter beneath his thumb.
"You're in arrhythmia," he said.
"It'll pass." Ava pressed her palms against the deck and pushed herself upright. She refused to stay on her knees on the cold floor. She dragged herself up the aircraft's ramp, using the hydraulic arm for balance until she stood inside the dim red cabin of Quinjet Six. "They had my telemetry, Steve. They didn't tap the tower's communications. They tapped me."
Steve followed her inside, his boots ringing hollowly on the ribbed titanium deck plates. He didn't question her. He stepped to the cockpit bulkhead, his fingers flying across the manual override toggles. The instrument panels flared to life in pale green and amber, the jet’s auxiliary turbine whining as it spool-fed fuel to the internal reactors.
"Manual flight controls are responsive," Steve said. "External hangar baffles are still cycling on Sam’s maintenance loop. We have three minutes before the doors lock down permanently."
Ava leaned against the interior jump seat, her hand clutching her chest. Through the thin silk of her blouse, the skin above her sternum was cold as a butcher's slab.
"They were S.T.R.I.K.E.," she said.
Steve paused, his hand resting on the throttle yoke. He looked back at her over his shoulder, his blue eyes sharp in the cockpit's tactical glow. "Pierce's men were scattered after the Triskelion. Rumlow's crew is in federal custody or dead."
"Not all of them." Ava reached down with trembling fingers, unbuttoning the top three buttons of her blouse.
Beneath the collarbone, nestled just above the scar tissue where the SHIELD surgeons had cut her open three years ago, a tiny red diode was blinking beneath the skin. It did not pulse with the slow, green cadence of a medical regulator. It flashed in a steady, three-beat sequence: *dot-dash-dot*.
A locating beacon.
"In Lagos," Ava said, the words falling from her lips like shards of broken glass, "I wasn't pulled out because of heat exhaustion. I was pulled out because a team under Commander Rollins took me to a field hospital in Victoria Island."
Steve’s expression darkened. The planes of his face hardened into something cold and terrible. "Rollins was Pierce’s right hand."
"They told me the thermal regulation in my blood was breaking down after the chemical exposure," she continued, her voice flat, devoid of panic now, hollowed out by the clarity of the trap closing around her. "They told me the dampener was a prototype from Fitz-Simmons to keep my core temperature from frying my liver. It wasn't a medical device, Steve. It’s a transponder. A remote tether."
Steve stood up from the pilot's chair. He walked the four paces down the cabin aisle until he stood directly in front of her. The smell of copper and leather drifted from him. He looked down at the tiny, malignant spark of red blinking beneath her pale skin.
"They didn't want you to keep me in New York," Steve said softly. "They used me to flush you out."
"I was the asset," Ava whispered.
The brass key in her pocket felt heavy enough to pull her through the floor. The tenement on 137th Street hadn't been demolished by a routine urban renewal project; it had been an unregistered safe house operated by Division Six until the year Steve Rogers was pulled out of the ice. She had carried the key because she thought it was her own quiet rebellion against Stark’s sterile glass towers, a small anchor to a past before the world cracked open.
It wasn't an anchor. It was an inventory tag.
The Quinjet’s primary turbine roared outside, a deep, bone-rattling vibration that signaled the flight computers had achieved pre-ignition pressure. Above them, the hangar ceiling groaned as the massive hydraulic leaves of the primary launch doors began to pull apart, exposing a narrow slit of rainy, slate-grey New York dawn.
"We can't launch," Ava said, backing away from him until her spine hit the bulkhead. "If we take this jet up, that transponder will broadcast our vector to every tracking station on the Eastern Seaboard. Tony won't be able to protect you. The Accords committee will have the legal authority to shoot this aircraft down over the Atlantic."
Steve reached down. He did not touch the controls. He reached past her, his massive hand closing around the emergency medical kit mounted to the cabin wall. He ripped the steel box from its brackets with a sharp wrench of his wrist.
He flipped the latches open on the jump seat table. Inside lay rolls of sterile gauze, antiseptic wash, and a pair of heavy, ceramic-bladed surgical shears used for cutting away flight suits.
Steve looked from the instruments to her face. The gold flecks in his eyes had returned, bright and unyielding beneath the red cockpit lamps.
"We aren't going to the Atlantic," he said.
"Steve—"
"Bucharest is out. The safe houses are burned." He picked up the ceramic shears, testing the tension of the hinge with his thumb. "And you aren't flying with a leash inside you."
Ava looked at the dull white edge of the shears. The dampener in her chest gave another sharp, cold twist, the machine’s internal circuitry protesting the encroaching chill of her own flesh.
She looked at Steve Rogers—a man who had spent seventy years being preserved, directed, and pointed at other people's wars, standing in the belly of a stolen gunship with a weapon in his hand and a look of absolute, terrifying clarity in his eyes.
She didn't feel afraid. That was the strange thing. The fear had burned out with her phone on the concrete deck below.
In its place was a flat, cold stillness that settled deep into the marrow of her bones.
Ava reached up with both hands, took the lapels of her charcoal coat, and pulled it off her shoulders, letting it fall onto the deck plates with a soft rustle of silk and wool. The brass key hit the floor with a hollow *clink*, rolling against Steve’s combat boot before coming to a final, dead stop against the steel toe.
She sat down on the edge of the jump seat, tilted her head back against the bulkhead, and exposed the pale, scarred line of her throat to the red light.
"You don't have an anesthetic," she said.
Steve set his jaw, the muscle ticking once against his cheek.
"I know," he said.
Outside, the hangar doors opened wider, swallowing the cabin in the wet, grey wind of a city waking up to hunt them.
***