Skye woke up with both hands in front of her face.
She'd been examining them in the dream too — same hands, same bitten thumbnail on the right, same faint scar on the left index finger from a kitchen accident three years ago. In the dream those hands had done something dramatic involving the Earth's crust. She stared at them for a moment while her brain finished the transition from sleep to waking.
That was not a small dream.
She sat up. The room she was in was one of Afterlife's guest quarters — spare, clean, a single window showing the pale grey of early morning on the mountain.
Jiaying pushed the door open and looked at her with the specific expression of a mother who has been checking on a sleeping person at intervals and is relieved to find them awake.
"How do you feel?"
"I had a dream that I punched the ground and the Earth shattered." Skye looked at her hands again. "The whole thing. Just came apart."
Jiaying sat on the edge of the bed and laughed — a genuine one, warm and slightly tired. "No one in Afterlife can do that. No Inhuman that has ever awakened could do that. That is not what vibration abilities produce, regardless of how strong they get."
"Good," Skye said.
She didn't mention that she'd woken up with the distinct sensory memory of it having worked, which was the part that had actually been unsettling.
"Vibration," Jiaying said. "That's your ability. Quake frequency — you generate vibrations from your hands outward, and with training you'll learn to attune them to specific materials, structures, bodies. The applications are extensive." She paused. "The control problems are also extensive, at least at first. Last night confirmed that."
"I remember the walls cracking."
"Yes."
"And then Smith knocking me out."
"He was very precise about it."
Skye felt a residual embarrassment that she decided to let go of quickly, because there was nothing useful to do with it. She'd had no control over a very large ability in a room full of people, and someone with sufficient capability and good judgment had resolved the situation cleanly. That was the best possible version of that outcome.
"Where is he?"
"He left this morning before you woke." Jiaying stood and crossed to the small table by the window, picked up a folded piece of paper. "He left you something."
Skye unfolded it. A tournament promotional poster — the blue dragon, the orange sphere, the text running in a column beneath it. Prize structure, qualification criteria, registration timeline.
She read it twice.
"The champion spars with Smith," she said.
"That's what it says."
She looked at her hands. Then at the poster. Then at her mother.
"I want to enter."
Jiaying looked at her with the patient expression of a woman who had anticipated this exact sentence and had not attempted to get ahead of it. "You awakened yesterday. Your ability nearly brought the hall down before you'd been conscious of it for two minutes. The registration period—"
"I know I'm not ready yet." Skye folded the poster and held it. "I'm saying I want to be ready. I want to train for it. Is there enough time?"
Jiaying looked at her daughter for a long moment — at the specifics of her face and the thing behind it that had been there since she was small, the quality that made Jiaying sometimes forget, when the world was being difficult, that she'd been worried about how Skye would find her footing in it.
"There's time," she said.
Skye swung her legs off the bed. "Then let's start now."
"You should eat first."
"I can eat while you explain things."
Jiaying picked up her jacket. "That's not how I was planning to run this lesson."
"I'm a fast eater," Skye said.
The upper level of Stark Tower had a quality of light that Howard Stark hadn't encountered in any of the other spaces he'd inhabited since Tony had installed him here — clear and high and without the amber warmth of enclosed rooms, coming in through glass walls on three sides.
He'd spent a week adjusting to the building, and another week adjusting to the year, and most of a month adjusting to what his son had become in the interval.
That last process was ongoing.
Tony stood across the workbench with his sleeves rolled up, looking at the blue vial between them with the expression of someone who had made a decision and was managing the last residual uncertainty before executing it.
"I finished the replication four months ago," Howard said. "The formula is consistent with Erskine's original work, adjusted for materials that didn't exist in 1943. The mechanism is the same." He paused. "JARVIS ran fourteen independent verification passes."
"I know. I reviewed them."
"Then you know it works."
"I know it should work," Tony said. "Knowing and knowing are different things when the thing involves injecting an experimental serum into yourself."
Howard looked at him with the specific look of a man who had spent thirty years of his life working on exactly this project. "I tested it."
"On yourself?"
"On myself. Last month. Before I told you it was ready."
Tony was quiet for a moment. "You could have told me that at the beginning of this conversation."
"I wanted to see how long it took you to ask."
Tony picked up the vial. "And the effect?"
"The strength enhancement is significant. The conditioning effect—" Howard considered his words. "Erskine's original protocol involved a ray exposure that we don't have access to, which limited the physical amplification compared to Rogers' result. The serum itself still produces a substantial enhancement over baseline." A pause. "It won't turn you into Rogers. It will turn you into someone who doesn't need to take a suit off before a fight becomes dangerous."
Tony looked at the vial for a moment longer.
Then he walked to the injection apparatus his father had set up along the far wall — a clean-room cylinder, pressure-sealed, designed for exactly this purpose — and stepped inside.
"If this goes badly," he said, through the glass, "JARVIS has instructions."
"It won't go badly," Howard said.
He pressed the activation control.
The serum moved through the injection system with the quiet precision of something that had been engineered many times over. Tony stood inside the cylinder with his eyes open, tracking what his body was doing with the information arriving in his bloodstream, and didn't say anything for approximately ninety seconds.
Then he stepped out.
He raised one arm and bent it slowly, feeling the resistance, testing where the new capacity had added itself to the existing architecture.
Howard picked up the scouter from the bench — a standard commercial unit, second-generation, exactly the kind they both had access to — and looked at the reading.
The number sat well above the eight-point threshold the tournament had established as its floor for entry.
"As I replicated it," Howard said.
Tony rolled his shoulder experimentally, then his neck. "It feels—" He stopped. Tried to find the word. "Complete. Like something was missing and now it isn't."
Howard set the scouter down. "Erskine always said the serum enhances what's already there. Rogers was someone whose body had been fighting his whole life to do more than it could. The serum gave the body what the person already wanted for it." He looked at his son. "You know what you want for it."
Tony looked at his hands — both of them, no armor, just his own hands — and flexed them once.
"I'm going to make Ivan's life very difficult at this tournament," he said.
"He's improved considerably since you last compared notes."
"I know. That's the interesting part." Tony walked to the window. The city was below them, going about its day without any awareness that someone had just made a decision in this room that was going to change several things. "Bucky," he said, without turning around.
Howard was quiet.
"JARVIS still hasn't found him in any surveillance footage. Not here, not anywhere we've checked." Tony kept looking at the city. "I put the announcement out. Super soldier serum replicated, credited to you, fully public through the appropriate channels." He paused. "If whoever is running him is paying attention—"
"They're paying attention," Howard said.
"Then they know the serum exists again. Freely. Replicated. No longer a single-source secret worth killing to protect." Tony turned from the window. "Let's see what they do with that information."
Howard nodded slowly. He didn't say what both of them understood — that doing nothing would also be information. That Bucky had been someone he'd known, someone who had deserved better than what had happened to him, and that the question of what had been done to him in the interval between WWII and that road in 1990 was one Howard wasn't done asking.
They let it sit in the room for a moment.
Then Tony straightened his collar and said, "JARVIS."
"Yes, Boss."
"Register me for the World Martial Arts Tournament."
The Avengers training facility had the specific smell of a room where serious work happened daily without anyone making it comfortable — rubber flooring, recirculated air, the faint ghost of chalk and effort. Steve Rogers was on his back looking at the ceiling with the calm of a man who had been put there recently and had decided the ceiling was interesting enough to examine before standing up.
Jessica Jones stood over him, breathing hard, hands on her knees. She looked like she'd won, because she had.
"Your strength went up again," she said.
"Did it?" Steve sat up. "Didn't feel like it helped."
"It helped. You held that last exchange twice as long as the last time." She sat on the floor beside him with her back against the wall. "You're still not using the shield."
"I know."
"Only a captain with a shield is a real captain. I'm not saying that to be difficult, I'm saying it because you move differently when you're holding it. Your whole defensive posture changes."
Steve looked at his hands. He was biologically twenty-seven and chronologically ninety-seven and those two numbers had not yet finished negotiating with each other about what that meant for how he was supposed to operate. "I'll work on it."
Jessica leaned her head back against the wall. "Fury mentioned the tournament."
"I heard."
"He said it's voluntary. Open registration, any enhanced individual with qualifying numbers." She looked at the far wall. "I'm entering."
Steve was quiet for a moment. "How high do you think the field is going to run?"
"High. They said open — that means everyone. Tony. Ivan Vanko. People from the Paragons." She paused. "Thor, if he decides to come back for it."
"Thor's reading is significantly above mine."
"So is mine."
Steve didn't take offense at this, because it was accurate. He'd been catching up. He hadn't caught up. Those were different situations.
"Fury wants participation from the Avengers," Jessica said. "For visibility, if nothing else — shows that the legitimate hero infrastructure is engaged with the tournament rather than watching from the outside."
"Then I'll enter," Steve said. "But I'm not entering to watch from the quarterfinals."
Jessica looked at him sideways. "Training schedule starts tomorrow at five."
"It already starts at five."
"Then it starts earlier," she said.