As Fury turned to leave, Daisy suddenly remembered. "Wait—what about Namor?"
"I'll have him transferred and contained. He needs seawater contact once a day—that's handled. Don't worry about it."
Fury was a little afraid of Daisy's particular brand of chaos. A simple surveillance job had somehow turned into excavating Captain America. He didn't know whether to call it luck or a curse—but he was fairly certain that if she stayed involved, they'd be pulling Red Skull out of a glacier by tomorrow and unearthing Hitler by Thursday.
For humanity's sake, it was best she stay at the base and build things.
He left. Daisy stayed, and got to work on the arc reactor.
This wasn't a small-scale build. A reactor of this magnitude demanded extreme precision in the design, exceptional quality materials, and skilled hands at every stage of fabrication. Done alone, it would have been nearly impossible—just sourcing the components would have consumed months and a fortune. But with S.H.I.E.L.D.'s full institutional weight behind her, none of that was a problem. Any material she needed could be procured. Any equipment she needed could be found.
Daisy was formally appointed project lead. Her direct team of scientists numbered nineteen, including Dr. Riva—a mix of in-house S.H.I.E.L.D. experts, contracted professors, and what appeared to be Dr. Riva's somewhat ambiguous "rehabilitation through contribution" arrangement with the agency.
She didn't dwell on the details. From both a scientific and command standpoint, managing this group required zero effort.
The most enthusiastic person in the room by a wide margin was Dr. Riva. He'd been puzzling over the arc reactor's data for months, circling the same unanswered questions until he'd nearly driven himself mad. A handful of key values had eluded him entirely.
The more he'd thought about it, the less sense anything made.
Now, staring at Daisy's blueprints, he watched those missing pieces fall into place one by one. His face lit up. He bounced with excitement.
He had no idea that the first reactor had been built by brute-forcing the answer with supernatural powers, or that the blueprints in his hands were the result of working backward from that answer using an AI. In his mind, Daisy had always understood the reactor completely—a once-in-a-generation genius who'd held back the sensitive values the first time around for security reasons, and was now finally sharing them with a trusted colleague.
The revelation of new knowledge dissolved much of his resentment toward S.H.I.E.L.D.'s forced recruitment.
But the more carefully he studied the schematics, the more questions surfaced. He was confident he could build this reactor by following the plans—yet he still didn't understand why the values were what they were. The derivation process was a complete mystery to him.
"Miss Johnson, this value here—"
He didn't get to finish.
Daisy cut him off. She hadn't come here to teach a graduate seminar. Not understanding was good for him. If he fully understood, what exactly was she being paid for?
"Get started immediately. I'm short on time—and your role here is critical, Doctor." She redirected him to the fabrication floor with a breezy wave of authority, parceled out work to each of the remaining scientists with herself retaining overall responsibility for the project, and—once everyone was visibly busy—stretched her arms overhead, walked into her temporary office, and sat down to rest.
She'd been running on fumes for days. Monitoring Namor. The shock of Dark Phoenix. Then the Arctic dig. Then seventy-two hours of uninterrupted design work. Even with her physical and mental endurance far beyond baseline human, she was running low. She folded her arms on the desk, put her head down, and drifted off.
She didn't know how long she'd been asleep when she became aware of a voice near her ear—soft and low, with an unmistakable edge of arrogance. The air around her was thick and hot, pressing in from all sides.
Did Lorna set the villa on fire? That kid. Daisy forced her eyes open with considerable effort.
She frowned.
The room around her was burning. But it wasn't her villa.
She was in a small space—one wall intact, one collapsed to a broken remnant. Crayon drawings hung from the crumbling brickwork like faded decorations. The intact wall bore a pink curtain printed with cartoon characters. No walls behind her or to her right. Above her, a ruined ceiling that looked ready to give up entirely.
This whole place is about to come down.
Behind her, white—a vast, hazy expanse of cotton-like fog, radiating intense heat.
Not her room. Not her villa. She was certain of it.
Where am I?
Before she could get any further with that thought, a red-haired woman in a long dress stepped out of the flames.
The moment she appeared, everything shifted. Like a stage play where the lead finally walks on and the whole set comes alive. A desk materialized in front of Daisy, and a chair. That was the entirety of her space—a few square meters at most. Everything else, as far as she could see, belonged to the red-haired woman.
And as the woman moved, the one remaining wall groaned.
It was covered in fractures. Some force kept repairing them—but the damage spread faster than the repairs could seal it. The whole structure was collapsing in slow motion, and there was only so much time left before it went down entirely.
The red-haired woman's eyes had gone white, blazing with endless energy. On her chest, half-merged with the fabric of her dress, a great bird of fire spread its wings—vivid, pulsing, unmistakably alive.
Not an image. Not a symbol. An entity. Something with intelligence and raw, terrifying power behind it.
Phoenix. Or Jean Grey's dark alter ego. Possibly both.
She hadn't read countless webnovels for nothing, and her own abilities gave her a baseline understanding of psychic space. She wasn't walking in blind. The burning house was Jean's mindscape. The small, separate patch of ground beneath Daisy's feet was her own psychic space, somehow overlapping with it.
"Burn it all down." Dark Phoenix swept her arm wide, voice ringing with dramatic conviction. "If this rage cannot be contained, then let the world burn!" She was really committing to the performance—spouting the most embarrassingly over-the-top lines with complete sincerity.
Daisy's heart had been hammering when it started. But after watching for a minute, she began to relax. Dark Phoenix seemed completely absorbed in her own performance—did she even know Daisy was here?
Daisy tested the connection. She tried to withdraw from the overlap. No luck—the link between them was deep and tight. Her best guess was that it wouldn't break until one of them woke up.
At first she watched from the desk with her feet up, observing the show with reluctant interest. After a while, though, the spectacle grew repetitive. She turned her attention to the desk itself—and started going through whatever her psychic projection had deposited there.