"Listen," Jean began, "try sinking your consciousness to the deepest—"
"Skip it." Daisy was already on her feet. "The Phoenix isn't interested in me. Let's stay focused."
Jean stared at her. The Phoenix's attention had absolutely been on Daisy—she was certain of that, and she knew what she was looking for. She studied Daisy's posture, her smallest movements, her eyes, trying to determine which side of the line she was standing on.
Was she a host now?
"Relax. Your Phoenix Force already left," Daisy said, reading her without needing telepathy. "As long as you're alive, it won't turn its attention to anyone else."
This was a period when almost no one understood how the Phoenix Force actually worked. But Daisy had access to memory that spanned forward into years these people hadn't lived yet.
In the future—after Stark pooled every available intelligence—they'd cracked the outermost layer of the Phoenix's mystery. The Phoenix represented renewal. It was drawn to renewal. At its core it was the manifestation of a rule rather than a being.
What Daisy had done inside their shared mental space was force a vibration so specific and so vast that it simulated—briefly, partially—the shape of the Big Bang. The Phoenix's attention swung toward it instantly. She'd cut the connection and pulled her consciousness back into her body before it could reorient.
She kept all of this to herself. Jean didn't press.
Jean reached inward instead, taking a careful inventory. No Phoenix signatures on Daisy. The power was still resident in her own body, its presence unchanged.
No phoenix tattoos surfacing on Daisy's skin either—she checked.
Both women turned their attention to the street.
It was chaos.
Reed Richards stood to one side, apparently still working through the equations for returning everyone to their original state. The other three members of the Fantastic Four had all arrived—and all three were currently trying to hold Namor down.
Susan had maintained a force-field perimeter around the nearby civilians throughout the entire fight, using every bit of her power to keep them shielded. The Thing had split his attention between fighting and pulling people clear. Even with all three of them being careful, two buildings had partially collapsed and seven or eight cars parked along the street had been reduced to wreckage by the combat shockwaves.
"Johnny—pull him away from the city," Susan called out. "We're doing too much damage here."
Johnny was frustrated, but he understood priorities. He hammered Namor twice, hard, then turned and accelerated toward the horizon.
Namor followed immediately.
Susan activated her force field as a platform beneath herself, rising slowly into the air in pursuit. The Thing watched her go, then turned back to the street to treat the injured—airborne was not an option for someone who weighed over four hundred pounds. That ability of Susan's was still developing; she wasn't lifting Ben anywhere for a while yet.
Daisy watched Susan wobble in the air and made a decision.
Flying required training. Johnny had spent years doing extreme sports; he'd adapted naturally. Susan had apparently significantly overestimated her physical endurance for the new skill. She'd barely cleared the New York skyline when the horizon started tilting, her equilibrium dissolving into a nauseating spin.
An aircraft she didn't recognize pulled alongside her—a fighter she'd never seen before—and the cockpit canopy slid open.
"Get in." Daisy waved from the pilot's seat.
Susan half-climbed, half-fell through the hatch, and the floor under her feet had never felt so welcome. She sat for a long moment, not very gracefully, before finally looking around.
She was smart enough to have noticed the gaps in Daisy's story months ago. An orphan who grew up in the foster care system, living in an eighty-million-dollar property by twenty? American foster care had many virtues. Funding wasn't among them. Daisy had another identity—that much was obvious—and Susan had chosen not to ask.
But she had to ask now. Because this appeared to be a fighter jet.
"Daisy—what exactly are you...?" She trailed off at the sight of Jean in the co-pilot seat.
"My credentials." Daisy pulled one card from a thick stack and handed it over—S.H.I.E.L.D. agent certification. Then: "This is Dr. Jean Grey, faculty at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. Jean, you know Susan—Dr. Susan Storm, the Invisible Woman."
Doctors, Daisy thought, with a private frustration she kept entirely off her face. Both of them. I haven't even finished my undergraduate degree.
Women's friendships move fast when the personalities fit. A few exchanges of small talk and Jean and Susan were on easy terms—the mutant-and-human question a non-issue between someone who'd chosen to teach gifted teenagers and someone who was technically a cosmic-ray-altered human herself, and it was hard to say who would be judging whom.
"My assignment was to monitor Namor," Daisy explained quickly, giving Susan the overview. "I brought Jean in for this assignment. Didn't expect it to come to this. What you did—pulling him away from the city—that was exactly right." She paused. "But can you get them to stop?"
Susan looked genuinely apologetic—and relieved to learn Daisy wasn't after Johnny. Reed had been buried in anti-cosmic-ray research for weeks; team comms hadn't been built yet. No way to reach Johnny remotely. And Jean's telepathic channels needed time to recover after the strain of the past hour—she wasn't in shape to broadcast.
"Then we go after them." Daisy pushed the throttle forward and banked toward the heading where the two blazing figures had disappeared.
She'd laughed at Stryker being boxed in by institutional rules, back when that was someone else's problem. Now she was discovering what it felt like from the inside.
A fighter jet couldn't simply fly in a straight line. Military airspace required detours—not getting tagged by a friendly missile was a genuine operational priority—and the workarounds cost speed. Johnny and Namor, flying with no such concerns, pulled further ahead with every passing minute.
By the time the Quinjet crossed into Canadian airspace—and even at Mach 2.5, it still hadn't caught them—Daisy hit the cloaking system.
"Stealth mode." Canada was still a sovereign country, and she had no interest in an international incident. Another speed reduction. The irony was not lost on her.
"Why is Johnny still heading north?" The Arctic Circle was getting closer. "What is he thinking?"
"Probably that he can outrun anyone." Susan was generous about it. "Johnny has a lot of faith in his speed."
They caught up over Greenland.
The Quinjet broke through the overcast and there they were on the glacier below—two figures trading blows across a landscape of ice and blinding white. Extreme cold was irrelevant to Johnny, who sustained temperatures in the thousands of degrees. Namor in an environment saturated with water was a different problem entirely—he was in his element, and he fought like it. With the city's civilian density removed from the equation, both of them had opened up. The exchange had gone on long enough that it was still unresolved.
"Let's go." The more Daisy looked at Namor, the less she could stand the sight of him. She set the Quinjet to hover, stood up, and stepped out into the Arctic air.
Jean and Susan followed without discussion.
Susan's first instinct was to help her brother. Jean had watched Namor discount civilian lives without a second thought—that put him firmly in the category of people who need to be stopped. Their objectives aligned.
Johnny Storm looked up, registered three women dropping from the sky, started to open his mouth to ask what was happening—and watched, mouth still open, as Daisy reached Namor and started hitting him.
Thoroughly hitting him.
Jean didn't reach for the calming touch this time. She used kinetic telekinesis—direct, physical, no psychic negotiation. Susan brought her force fields to bear simultaneously; invisible walls and compression fields locked Namor from a different angle entirely. Caught between two sets of restraints he couldn't see and couldn't counter, he lost mobility completely.
Which left him unable to stop Daisy.
His superhuman endurance held for a while. Then it didn't.
Namor went down. His face a landscape of bruises, his nose bleeding, he went unconscious.