CHAPTER 2: THE EXPERIMENT'S EVE
The preliminary testing chamber hummed with the sterile efficiency of scientific ambition. Pietro strapped himself into the neural monitoring chair with practiced ease, letting his face show the right mixture of eagerness and controlled hatred. Dr. List bustled around him, adjusting sensors and checking readings on his tablet, while Baron Strucker observed from behind reinforced glass.
"Play the part," Pietro reminded himself. "Angry young man seeking revenge. They need to see exactly what they expect."
"Tell me about your motivations, Subject Twelve," Dr. List said, his German accent turning the words clinical and cold. "What drives your desire for enhancement?"
Pietro let his jaw clench, channeling every ounce of genuine fury he'd felt as a child watching his parents die. "Stark's bomb killed our parents. His weapons have murdered thousands of Sokovians. I want the power to make him pay."
List nodded approvingly, making notes. "And you're prepared to accept the risks? Seventy-three percent of subjects have died during preliminary exposure to the artifact's energy field."
"Better to die fighting than live as a victim." The words tasted like ash, but they were what List needed to hear. Pietro forced conviction into his voice. "Stark's tower should burn with him inside it."
"God, forgive me for what I'm about to do."
The neural activity monitor beside him began displaying his brainwave patterns in real-time. Pietro watched the readouts from the corner of his eye, subtly adjusting his emotional state to create exactly the profile Hydra wanted: intense determination, focused rage, and just enough mental flexibility to potentially survive an Infinity Stone's touch.
What the monitors couldn't detect was the void energy he was channeling through his nervous system—microscopic amounts, barely above background radiation, but enough to alter his bioelectric signature in specific ways. The transmigrator memories had given him detailed knowledge of how the Mind Stone's enhancement process worked, and he was going to game the system.
"Fascinating," List murmured, reviewing the data. "Your neural patterns show unprecedented coherence under stress. Most subjects display mental fragmentation when contemplating the enhancement process, but your thought patterns are remarkably... evolved."
Pietro shrugged. "Maybe I'm just more focused than your average volunteer."
From behind the glass, Strucker stepped forward and activated the intercom. "Dr. List, compare those readings to the baseline we established for Subject Thirteen."
List pulled up Wanda's neural profile on a secondary screen. Pietro's chest tightened as he saw his sister's brainwave patterns—more chaotic than his own, shot through with the psychic turbulence that would make her so compatible with the Mind Stone's reality-altering properties.
"Remarkable," List breathed. "The twins show complementary patterns. Where Subject Thirteen displays high psychic volatility, Subject Twelve shows exceptional mental stability. They might actually enhance each other's chances of survival."
"That's the plan," Pietro thought grimly. "Wanda's chaos magic will help stabilize my void-corrupted speed force. And my dimensional energy will give her an anchor point when the Mind Stone tries to remake her reality."
"Are we finished here?" Pietro asked, beginning to unhook the sensors from his skull. "I have preparations to make."
"Of course." List stepped back, still studying his tablet. "Report to the medical bay tomorrow morning for final blood work. The actual enhancement begins in precisely forty-seven hours."
Pietro nodded and left the chamber, but instead of returning to his cell, he took a detour through the facility's lower levels. His enhanced senses—another side effect of the void energy that Hydra hadn't detected—told him Wanda was in the common area, probably reading one of the technical manuals she used to understand their situation better.
He found her exactly where he'd expected, curled in a corner chair with a dog-eared copy of "Principles of Quantum Mechanics" balanced on her knees. The sight of her, so young and hopeful despite everything they'd endured, made his heart ache with protective fury.
"Tomorrow night is our last night as ordinary humans," he thought. "I have to make sure she understands how much she means to me, just in case everything goes wrong."
"Light reading?" he asked, settling into the chair across from her.
Wanda looked up, smiling slightly. "Dr. List mentioned something about 'quantum entanglement' during my session yesterday. I wanted to understand what he meant."
Pietro's blood chilled. Quantum entanglement—the phenomenon that allowed particles to remain connected across vast distances, sharing information instantly. If List was studying that in relation to the twins' bond, he might be planning to weaponize their connection somehow.
"Another reason to be very, very careful about what happens in that chamber," Pietro noted. "Hydra doesn't just want enhanced individuals. They want enhanced individuals they can control."
"Find anything interesting?" he asked aloud.
"The book talks about how two particles can become so connected that changing one instantly affects the other, no matter how far apart they are." Wanda's eyes met his. "It made me think of us."
Pietro reached across the small table and took her hand. "We've always been connected, sestra. That won't change."
But even as he spoke, he felt the weight of his secrets pressing down on him. The transmigrator memories, the void energy, his knowledge of what was coming—all of it drove a wedge between them that hadn't existed before. He was lying to the person he loved most in the world, and the necessity of it was eating him alive.
That evening, he came to Wanda's cell instead of staying in his own. They'd done this occasionally since childhood—sharing space when nightmares or anxiety made solitude unbearable. Tonight, Pietro needed the comfort of her presence more than ever.
"Can't sleep either?" Wanda asked, making room for him on her narrow cot.
"Tomorrow is a big day." Pietro settled beside her, close enough to feel her warmth. "I keep thinking about what comes after."
"After we're enhanced?" She turned onto her side to face him, her expression serious in the dim light. "We make Stark pay for what he did. We protect people like us. We become the heroes Sokovia needs."
Pietro studied her face—the determined set of her jaw, the fire in her dark eyes. In less than forty-eight hours, that fire would be tested by an Infinity Stone, and she would emerge from the trial transformed into one of the most powerful beings on Earth. But she would also emerge haunted, carrying the weight of chaos magic that could accidentally destroy everything she touched.
"Wanda," he said quietly, "I need you to promise me something."
Her eyebrows drew together. "What kind of promise?"
"If something goes wrong during the enhancement—if the process starts to kill me—I need you to survive. Don't try to save me. Don't sacrifice yourself. Just... live. Find a way to escape this place and live."
Wanda's face went pale. "Pietro, you're scaring me. What aren't you telling me?"
"Everything," he thought desperately. "I'm not telling you everything, and it's killing me."
But he couldn't reveal the truth. Not about the transmigration, not about his foreknowledge of events, not about the void energy that was already changing him in ways he didn't fully understand. The only thing he could give her was his honest emotions.
"I love you," he said simply. "You're my sister, my twin, my best friend. You're the only family I have left, and the only person in this world I trust completely. If I don't survive tomorrow, I need to know that you will."
Tears gathered in Wanda's eyes. "We survive together or not at all. That's always been our rule."
"Rules change." Pietro reached up to touch her face, memorizing every detail. "Promise me, Wanda. Please."
She was quiet for a long moment, searching his expression. Finally, reluctantly, she nodded. "I promise. But you have to promise me something too—you'll fight to come back to me. Whatever happens in that chamber, you won't give up."
"I promise," Pietro said, and meant it completely.
They talked quietly for another hour—memories of their childhood, hopes for their future, speculation about what their enhanced abilities might look like. Eventually, Wanda fell asleep against his shoulder, and Pietro was left alone with his thoughts and his borrowed time.
"Thirty-six hours," he thought, watching the digital clock on Wanda's desk count down toward dawn. "Thirty-six hours until everything changes."
Once he was certain Wanda was deeply asleep, Pietro carefully extracted himself from the cot and moved to the center of her cell. Then, as quietly as possible, he began the most dangerous experiment of his new life.
The void energy responded to his call immediately, eager to be used. Pietro guided it through his nervous system, mapping the pathways it would need to follow during the Mind Stone enhancement. The Infinity Stone's power would try to rewrite his biology from the ground up—cellular reconstruction, genetic optimization, the creation of entirely new organ systems to channel superhuman speed.
But if Pietro could create a buffer layer of void energy beneath his skin, the Mind Stone might interact with that dimensional power instead of his raw biology. The void had already proven it could interface with reality in impossible ways—his shadow stepping was proof of that. If he could trick the Mind Stone into enhancing the void energy rather than his human cells, he might survive the process that had killed so many others.
It was incredibly risky. The void energy was hungry and alien, barely controlled even in small amounts. Flooding his entire body with it could kill him just as surely as the Mind Stone's unfiltered power. But it was the only plan he had.
Pietro spread the void energy through his circulatory system like a secondary bloodstream, careful to keep the concentrations low enough to avoid detection but high enough to create a meaningful barrier. The process was exhausting and painful—the dimensional power felt like ice water in his veins, carrying whispers from destroyed realities that made his bones ache.
But when it was finished, he could feel the difference. His body was no longer entirely human. He was carrying fragments of collapsed universes in his cells, dimensional scars that made him partially exist outside normal reality.
"If I survive this," Pietro thought, settling back onto Wanda's cot as carefully as possible, "I'll be something new. Something that's never existed before."
The countdown clock ticked toward morning, and Pietro closed his eyes, knowing that when he opened them again, everything would begin to change.
Dr. List reviewed the overnight sensor readings in his private laboratory, a cup of bitter coffee growing cold at his elbow. The twins' cells were monitored around the clock—video, audio, biometric, even atmospheric analysis to detect unusual chemical signatures.
Subject Twelve's readings were... curious.
Throughout the night, his bioelectric field had fluctuated in patterns that matched no known human baseline. Brief spikes of electromagnetic activity, lasting only seconds but intense enough to register on the most sensitive instruments. Almost like he was generating some form of exotic energy.
List pulled up the historical data and compared it to readings from previous enhancement subjects. Nothing matched. The closest analog was Subject Seven—a Bulgarian physicist who had generated similar energy spikes just before his cellular structure collapsed during preliminary exposure to the artifact.
But Subject Twelve showed no signs of cellular degradation. If anything, his biological markers indicated perfect health, enhanced reflexes, and a nervous system that was somehow more efficient than baseline human norms.
"Anomalous but not alarming," List murmured, making notes in the margin of his report. "Subject may be naturally generating bioelectric phenomena in response to stress. Recommend increased monitoring during enhancement process."
He submitted the report to Baron Strucker's morning briefing queue and returned to his coffee, unaware that he had just documented the first scientific evidence of dimensional energy existing within a human host.
Outside, dawn broke over the Sokovian mountains, and the countdown to enhancement continued.