The Avengers Arrive

Russell slipped his phone into his pocket and cleared away the remaining military vehicles on the road, along with the bodies that were still in sight.

Yellow earth churned. A fissure opened and closed again. Within seconds, all that remained in the clearing was crushed grass and a few shallow tire tracks.

As he walked back, he brought up the virtual panel.

[Name: Russell]

[Age: 18]

[Mutant abilities: Defense (241/1000), level 2, passive skill, basic mental barrier

Superhuman Healing (1257/5000), level 3

Psychic Telekinesis (1423/5000), level 3, precision: macroscopic matter. Next precision tier: molecular level (57% progress, locked)]

[Emotion Points: 1341]

1,341 Emotion Points.

Based on his earlier experience, roughly 20 Emotion Points would unlock 1% of the progress bar.

The math was simple. From 57% to 100%, he needed another 43%, or 860 points. He had 1,341. More than enough.

Russell didn't hesitate. He focused on the "Molecular-level Control unlock progress" entry.

His Emotion Points began dropping rapidly.

1341... 1240... 980... 720...

As the number plunged, the progress bar advanced visibly to the right.

57%... 68%... 79%... When his points fell to around 360—

[Psychic Telekinesis molecular-level precision unlocked]

[Psychic Telekinesis · Molecular-level Control (1423/5000), level 3] Next precision tier: atomic level (locked)]

Almost the instant the notification sounded, Russell felt a faint heat deep in his eyes, as though something behind his pupils had gently flipped a switch.

He blinked instinctively. When he opened his eyes again, the whole world had changed.

The old oak by the road, half its crown burned away, was no longer merely bark, branches, and dead leaves to him.

He saw cell walls and cellulose molecular chains. He saw the carbon skeletons slowly breaking down within the remains of its chlorophyll.

The cracked asphalt beneath his feet resolved into a complex network of asphalt, aggregate, and polymer clusters. The silicon-oxygen tetrahedral structure of every grain of sand was as clear as a three-dimensional model in a textbook.

In the half-collapsed buildings farther away, he could make out calcium silicate hydrate gel in the concrete, dislocation lines in the steel's crystal lattice, even the molecular bonds broken where plaster had peeled from the walls.

It felt as though mountains were no longer mountains and water was no longer water.

Russell took a deep breath and shut off that overwhelming mode of vision.

The world returned to normal.

Trees were trees, roads were roads, and buildings were buildings. But the sense that he could see through anything at any moment remained deep in his mind, like a freshly unsheathed blade waiting quietly to be used.

He quickened his pace toward the room where Laura and Felicity were waiting.

10:17 a.m.

East of Downtown Manhattan, the cordon at the edge of the slums had been pushed back to the third block.

Yellow-and-black plastic tape rattled in the morning wind, cutting the entire area off as a vast no-entry zone.

NYPD patrol cars stood in a row, their roof lights still turning silently, but most of the uniformed officers had withdrawn to the perimeter.

What lay inside wasn't fit for ordinary people to see.

When the first black SUV arrived, the police inspector in charge was crouched beside the cordon, smoking.

He saw its license plate, ground out his cigarette beneath his shoe, and stood. His expression held relief, but also a deeper weariness.

"Finally."

The doors opened, and three people got out.

Steve Rogers was first. He wore his dark-blue tactical suit, his shield strapped to his back. His gaze went past the inspector's shoulder to the ruins still trailing wisps of smoke in the distance.

He said nothing, but his jaw was set tighter than usual.

Natasha Romanoff stepped out of the passenger seat, her red hair vivid in the morning light.

She didn't look at the ruins. Her gaze swept over the officers' expressions, the course of the cordon, and the tire tracks left on the ground. She looked like an intelligence processor running at full speed.

Tony Stark got out last. He wasn't wearing his Mark Armor this time, just a dark-gray casual suit, with his sunglasses pushed up onto his forehead.

He studied his phone for a few seconds, then looked up and whistled.

"The satellite images just came in." He turned the screen toward Steve and Natasha. "You need to see this."

The screen showed a gray-white aerial photograph.

From above, the slums looked as though a giant hand had torn them open down the middle. One building had burned to the ground, and several beside it had partly collapsed. A huge fissure that had since closed snaked across the block. At its end lay an almost perfectly circular pit more than twenty meters across.

"What is that?" Steve asked.

"Water." Tony enlarged the image and pointed to the reflections at the bottom of the pit where some of it had yet to soak into the ground.

"About three thousand tons of water, drawn from somewhere else and dropped from a height of roughly eight hundred to a thousand meters. The impact would be equivalent to—"

He did a quick calculation in his head. "A small tactical nuclear bomb. Without the radiation, obviously."

Natasha crouched and pinched up a little soil.

It contained fine metal fragments and something else she couldn't quite identify. It looked like ash from bones, or perhaps some kind of crystal that had melted under extreme heat and solidified again.

"This wasn't an ordinary Mutant conflict." She stood and brushed off her hand. "This was a small war."

The inspector had been listening nearby. At last, he broke in. "That's not all. You need to go inside."

At the center of the ruins, only one gable wall of the burned building remained standing, like a silent tombstone.

Steve walked slowly, each step crunching over broken glass and charred wood.

He saw blood on the wall. It hadn't spattered there. Some force had pressed it there, as though someone had been slammed against the wall before it collapsed.

He saw shell casings scattered everywhere, ranging from nine-millimeter rounds to 12.7-millimeter rounds. He studied their distribution. They were all concentrated around the outside of a circle less than ten meters in radius. At its center, there was nothing.

"They fired at a single point," Steve said quietly, almost to himself. "At least thirty people, shooting from every direction at once."

"And then?" Natasha asked.

Steve didn't answer.

He crouched and pulled a bullet from a gap between the rubble. It had deformed, but not the way it would have after striking something hard. Some force had flattened it from the side, as though someone had crushed a grape between thumb and forefinger.

"And then every bullet was stopped." Tony came over, took the bullet from him, and turned it over in his hands.

Steve stood and looked toward the enormous fissure in the distance.

It had closed, but the mark remained: a raised fold in the earth winding for nearly a hundred meters, like a scar on skin.

"And the Sentries," Tony said, his voice turning more serious.

"I scanned the metal wreckage underground. Five of them. Three were crushed by water pressure, and two were buried fifteen meters down in the bedrock.

"They're Mark I units—prototypes from Trask Industries ten years ago. They should've been scrapped ages ago. Someone dug them out, modified them, stuffed them with third-rate weapons systems, and sent them here to die."

"Who sent them?" Steve asked.

Tony shrugged. "You'll have to ask the military. But the Sentries still had serial numbers. I checked: their last registered location was a military base in Virginia, under a department called the 'Superhuman Research Program.' Sound familiar?"

Steve fell silent for a few seconds. He remembered things he'd seen in the forties: Hydra's laboratories, "abnormal humans" strapped to operating tables, people in white coats discussing "modification" and "evolution" in detached voices.

Some things hadn't changed at all in seventy years.

"One more thing." Tony put his phone away. "I checked the fire department records for that burned building. The fire started around three yesterday morning and spread fast. By the time the firefighters arrived, it had burned through the roof.

"The preliminary finding is arson. Someone poured about forty liters of gasoline downstairs and lit it from two directions at once."

"For the insurance money," Natasha said suddenly.

She stood beside the surviving gable wall, looking at a chalk mark near its base. A police forensic examiner had left it to mark where a body had been found.

"The landlord was Happy Kowalski. These buildings were his only assets, valued at around $1.2 million. They were insured for $1.8 million. Thirty-seven people lived inside, most of them undocumented immigrants or homeless people."

Her voice was flat, as though she were reading a report.

But Steve could hear something colder beneath that calm.

"So someone set fire to buildings with thirty-seven people inside for $1.8 million," Steve said.

"Then the Mutant who escaped from the Laboratory killed the arsonist," Tony continued. "And the soldiers who came to capture him. Plus five antique Sentries."

The three of them were silent for a moment.

"It's not hard to see," Steve said at last. "He was protecting those people."

"Or he did it because they happened to be there," Natasha said. "We don't know his motives."

"I know one thing." Tony pointed toward the fissure. "A guy who can bury more than thirty fully armed soldiers in three seconds wouldn't stop at burning one building if he wanted to kill people. There are hundreds of people in those slums. If he'd really wanted to—"

He didn't finish. Everyone understood.

Steve took a deep breath and turned toward the cordon. After a few steps, he stopped and looked back at the ruins.

"We have to find him," he said.

By the time Spider-Man arrived, reporters had gathered around the outside of the cordon.

He crouched on the edge of a rooftop across the street, staring through his mask at the sealed-off area.

The morning breeze blew against his back, carrying an odd mixture of char and damp earth.

He shot a strand of webbing, swung to a closer building, and surveyed the scene from above.

He saw the fissure, the enormous water-filled pit, and the shell casings dug out of the soil.

He also saw several familiar figures moving through the ruins.

"Whoa," he murmured to himself. "The big names are here. Mr. Stark, too."

He wanted to go down and ask what had happened. But some instinct told him this wasn't the time.

The Mutant responsible for all this was already gone.

As Peter crouched at the rooftop's edge, he remembered something Uncle Ben had once said:

"When you don't know what happened, don't rush to pick a side."

He decided to get on with his own work first.

Patrol. Help people. Catch a few purse snatchers.

Those were things he knew how to do.

As for the Mutant who could control earth and floodwaters, he'd deal with that when he found him.

Peter fired a strand of webbing and swung away from the rooftop. Behind him, smoke still rose from the ruins, like a wound the city would never heal.

Six kilometers away.

At the edge of Manhattan, a luxury hotel clad entirely in glass stood at an intersection, half a city away from the lingering smoke over the slums.

When Russell led Laura and Felicity into the lobby, the attendant in a dark-blue uniform by the entrance gave them a second look.

Not because he recognized anyone. The three of them simply didn't look like they belonged in this hotel.

The lobby floor was laid with solid slabs of Italian marble. Crystal chandeliers hung from a ceiling three stories high, casting flecks of golden light.

Behind the front desk stood a tall Mexican woman in a neatly pressed black uniform. Her hair was pinned back without a strand out of place, and she wore a practiced smile.

"Will the three of you be staying or dining? Do you have a reservation?"

Felicity had spent the whole journey in a daze.

Her mind was still trying to process fragments of the battle a few hours earlier—the lake water falling from the sky, the bodies swallowed by the earth, the shock in the soldiers' eyes as they fell.

When the receptionist spoke, Felicity took several seconds to react. She edged closer to Russell and said under her breath:

"Lord Russell, this... isn't the sort of place we should come to."

The rest was written all over her face: We can't afford it.

Laura stood on his other side, expressionless as she surveyed every corner of the lobby—the angle of the revolving doors, the blind spots by the stairs, and the space beneath the front desk where weapons might be hidden.

She wasn't admiring the decor. She was making a tactical assessment before entering and clearing the place. The instinct was etched into her bones.

Russell ignored Felicity's hesitation. He pulled a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills from his pocket and set it on the marble counter as casually as if he were buying a bottle of water at a convenience store.

"Do you have a Presidential Suite available?"