The first image that surfaced in Daisy's mind was an old joke—a blackout at a women's bathhouse, everyone scrambling for the exit with their hands over their faces.
The second image was Susan, currently unaware of the situation.
Daisy moved without thinking. She pulled off her jacket and threw it over Susan, then grabbed her arm and hauled her into the nearest corner at a fast walk.
Invisible Woman was no sprinter. She stumbled after her, visibly alarmed, with no idea what was happening.
Daisy pointed at the relevant area. Susan went still for a moment—then felt it herself. The field she usually projected seamlessly over her entire body had a gap. One specific, unmistakable gap. Whatever had caused it was slowly being overcome by her own ability compensating, but that took a moment to resolve.
"What happened?" Susan didn't seem particularly bothered by the witness—they were both women—but she was curious about the failure mode. It might help her understand the mechanics of her own power.
"Probably my biomagnetic field," Daisy said, which was at least partially true. "Or you were a little agitated earlier."
That was the more defensible explanation. She suspected the real reason was subtler: during the space station incident, when Susan's genetics had been unstable, her body had been exposed to an external vibration frequency—and something in that cellular state had apparently retained a memory of it.
Whether that was actually what happened would require extensive testing to confirm, and it wasn't a test she was in a rush to run.
Susan considered both explanations and decided they were plausible. The adrenaline theory, specifically. Getting undressed in the middle of the street was not a calm experience, and she'd been far from calm when she'd collided with Daisy.
Daisy pointed the car back toward the Baxter Building.
"Actually—don't take me back yet. Long Island, please."
"Something happen?"
Susan was quiet for a moment, watching the city pass.
"Private?"
"Very. Sorry—forget I asked."
She hadn't been fishing. She'd just said it to fill the silence. She left it alone.
"Do you have a boyfriend?" Susan asked, studying the ring on Daisy's right hand. The design was intricate, the metal not immediately identifiable, and it didn't look like any conventional piece of jewelry she'd seen. The question was connected to something else she was thinking about.
Daisy blinked. The conversation had moved in an unexpected direction. She thought about it for a moment and answered honestly: "I have a girlfriend."
Susan's mouth opened slightly. It wasn't a dramatic reaction—it was genuinely not unusual, not in this city—but she'd expected a different answer. She thought about it. "Maki? The one who came to the Kennedy center with you?" She'd made certain assumptions.
Daisy couldn't exactly explain the actual nature of her relationship with Maki, so she let the assumption stand.
Susan wasn't interested in other people's private lives. But it did bring her back to her own situation, which was still making her furious. She looked out the window and let it out:
"You've seen the papers. You know what we're dealing with."
Daisy had. The tabloids had gone wild over the Fantastic Four situation—Mister Fantastic and Invisible Woman had become national curiosities overnight.
"Honestly? You got lucky, by most standards. People would kill for abilities like yours."
"Lucky." Susan made a sound that was not a laugh. "You want to know why I walked out today?"
How was Daisy supposed to guess? She shook her head.
What followed was a summary that Daisy translated, internally, as: Reed Richards had attempted to initiate intimacy and had—in a moment of what could generously be called enthusiasm—forgotten entirely about his own transformation-capable anatomy. The result had been an experience that defied comfortable description. Susan had no enhanced durability and no healing factor. She'd fled the Baxter Building in a state of considerable disarray, made it two blocks before New York's fearless and thoroughly unoccupied citizenry had descended on her with their phones out, and then—after a running chase that could charitably be described as undignified—ended up in Daisy's hands.
There was a beat of silence in the car.
"That's..." Daisy searched for the word.
What a story.
They shifted to other topics. Reed's ability was genuinely difficult to discuss in any setting. Susan mentioned the protective suit Daisy had asked her to carry during the space station incident—she apologized; by the time they'd regained consciousness, the Doom Group had already removed the station, and the cosmic radiation at the point of impact had been intense enough that the suit had almost certainly been destroyed anyway.
Daisy waved it off. The radiation itself had been more than accounted for. It was fine.
Susan's father's place on Long Island wasn't far from Daisy's villa, as it turned out. They exchanged numbers before Daisy dropped her off—tea sometime, shopping, whatever worked—and Susan walked toward the house with what Daisy assessed as a more settled expression than she'd had twenty minutes ago.
Daisy was almost at her own front door when the video call came through.
The Director. The single eye looking back at her was serious. "Emergency tasking. Back in now."
She was already calculating priorities. She changed into her tactical suit and teleported directly to Fury's office.
"Pentagon, with me. Blonsky situation."
She hadn't had the adjutant title formally attached to her name yet, but the role had been settling around her for some time without anyone making a fuss about it. She was fine with that.
She felt bad for Hill. But when it was time to move forward, she never retreated.
She followed Fury into the helicopter.
The pilot took them up. The machine was, from Daisy's perspective, slower than she'd prefer—but Fury wasn't trying to rattle the Pentagon's threat sensors, so the helicopter was the right call. On the way up, she quietly shifted into baseline human form. Her genetic signature would register as entirely ordinary—no anomalous electromagnetic frequencies, nothing outside the normal range. Even Fury, sitting eighteen inches away, didn't catch it. The shift happened at the molecular level.
They landed. They went in.
They stepped out of the elevator at the secure level at the same moment another elevator opened across the hall. Three people came out.
Fury nodded at the one in front—white-haired, sharp eyes, older—and extended a hand. "Colonel Stryker. It's been a while."
"Colonel Fury." The handshake was brief, perfunctory. "Indeed."
They weren't friends. They weren't enemies, not here. They fell into step together down the corridor without introducing their respective aides.
Daisy looked past Stryker at the younger man behind him. Close-cropped hair. Deep-set eyes. Something in the way he carried himself suggested someone who was actively working to keep his hands away from other people's throats. A permanent half-smirk at the corner of his mouth that didn't reach his eyes.
She recognized him. The one who had broken into her ALS research hospital and stolen the experimental data. The one who had turned to the camera on the way out and waved.
He'd recognized her too. The look he sent her was deliberate provocation.
"You stole my research data," Daisy said, keeping her tone light. "I think you owe me an explanation."
He opened his mouth. Stryker cut it off smoothly without looking back: "Miss Johnson's conclusions on metabolism-linked genetic optimization were quite insightful. They gave us a great deal to work with. Ajax acted impulsively—he was frustrated by the slow pace of our own experiments. On behalf of him, I apologize."
The delivery was flat, the apology entirely pro forma. But Daisy couldn't push it further, not here. She let out a small sound of acknowledgment and dropped it.
The woman behind Ajax—East Asian, compact, very still, moving with the deliberate weight of someone who knew exactly how dangerous they were—said nothing. That particular combination of characteristics pointed toward one person in Stryker's rotation. The one who shared Logan's ability and his healing factor. Lady Deathstrike.
Fury had brought Daisy as an emergency option if things went bad inside. Stryker had brought two enhanced operatives for the same reason. Neither side trusted the Pentagon not to move against them if the opportunity arose.
The difference showed at the first checkpoint.
The scanner went off for both of them.
Stryker spent several minutes arguing with the guards. The guards didn't argue back. They had their orders. Mutants did not pass the checkpoint—full stop.
Stryker sent his people to wait outside with a visible effort to keep his expression neutral, and he walked back in wearing one that had gone several degrees colder.
Daisy caught Fury's eye and said nothing. Fury made a sound that a charitable person might call a laugh.
Two of the generals who'd been in Stryker's orbit for years were laughing in the background too. The calculation was deliberate: targeting the man, not the program. Operational relationship with the Weapon X infrastructure intact. Personal antagonism visible.
Stryker's discomfort had zero effect on Daisy or Fury. It landed considerably harder on the technical staff suddenly convinced they'd done something wrong.
Five minutes later, Stryker returned. The same aide group that had been laughing scrambled back to work. Two officers who spent more time perfecting their posture than doing their jobs fell into line at double speed.
By that point the conference was ready.
The Secretary of Defense opened the session. Robert Gates, formerly of the CIA—analyst, then director, then this—was someone the internal S.H.I.E.L.D. assessment generally respected. More careful than his predecessor. Willing to look at things from more than one angle. He laid out what had developed.
"The Department of Defense has been tracking online communications connected to the Hulk situation. They trace back to someone calling himself 'the Big Head.'" He pulled up the display. "Samuel Sterns. PhD, cellular biology, SUNY Grayburn College."
A face appeared on screen. Middle-aged man, angular nose, unremarkable features. He could have been anyone.
"Yesterday evening, Dr. Sterns injected himself with Banner's blood. This is the footage recovered from his lab."
The video was degraded—something had interfered with the recording—but it was legible enough. Sterns administering the injection. Then his skull began to change. The forehead expanding, the cranium rising, deforming with agonizing deliberateness, until his head was roughly twice the normal size. His skin took on a greenish tint. The audio caught sounds that nobody in the room enjoyed listening to.
"Sterns appears to have developed some form of psychic ability. He walked into this building thirty minutes ago, walked Blonsky out past a full security contingent, and nobody in this corridor saw him. We found out when the cameras were reviewed ten minutes after they were both gone."
The room went very quiet for a moment.
Gates let that settle before continuing. The proposal: joint operation, Defense Department and S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Weapon X program. As compensation, the DoD would release the $5.5 billion previously held in dispute—all of it available to S.H.I.E.L.D. without restriction—and authorize the weapons-package upgrade on three of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s carrier-class assets. Weapon X got the bodies: the one they'd designated "Big Head" and the one designated "Abomination." Research use only.
"That's the situation. Any thoughts?"
Daisy looked at the display for a moment.
A mind-control operative loose in a civilian environment. That was the part that mattered. Nobody in this room would say it out loud, but everyone who'd spent any time in intelligence work was running the same calculation: the secrets they were each carrying, and what happened to those secrets if someone with that kind of access got close enough.
Fury looked at her. The eye said: anything you've got, say it now.
She had no certainty her K'un-Lun ring was a complete counter. She wasn't eager to walk into a room with someone who could walk past security without being seen. She wanted a different option.
She ran the math. Checked it twice. Then she spoke.
"Secretary Gates. Gentlemen. I can write an algorithm—on the spot, right now—that will locate them remotely. Then we target them from a distance."
She kept the technical explanation short, because the generals didn't need the architecture, just the result: "Standard search methodology would take weeks. But Banner's blood is significantly gamma-irradiated. That signature is detectable. I'll need access to military satellite infrastructure to scan the Eastern Seaboard for mobile gamma-radiation sources. Once we have a confirmed location, you can deploy a strike."
General Greene—the one she knew from Kandahar, now back in D.C. — exchanged glances around the table, got the nods, and turned to her. "The approach is sound. The algorithm itself—"
"I'll write it here."
A few of the generals had the expression of people watching someone say they were about to improvise a bridge. But Gates was interested. If it could be done in the room, they weren't going to argue about it.
A laptop appeared in front of her.
She got to work.