Lucius reclined beside the pool in Hawaiian shorts and enjoyed the result of his private sale.
HYDRA had paid the full $1.5 billion, collected its twelve hundred vials without confusing the regular batch with the enhanced one, and left without starting a firefight on his lawn. The missing sceptre remained marked unpaid in Lucius's private ledger.
Benjamin approached with Lucius's fourth fruit salad and a Long Island iced tea.
"Thank you, Sebastien."
"My name remains Benjamin, sir."
"And your commitment to the joke remains admirable."
Benjamin placed both on the table beside the lounger. Years of service had taught him which arguments required effort and which merely encouraged Lucius. "Will there be anything else?"
"A superyacht."
"I am not qualified to prepare one."
"Tony is. He promised me one during the Helicarrier trouble, and I have displayed heroic patience ever since."
Benjamin looked toward the private beach, where the absence of any yacht was difficult to dispute. "Shall I contact Mr Stark?"
Lucius lifted his drink. "No. A friendship founded upon mutual affection, shared violence, and aggressive billing should not require reminders."
The answer sounded convincing for almost half an hour.
Lucius finished the fruit salad, checked the water again, and found the same offensive lack of expensive ship. He was still reluctant to believe Tony would cheat him. Their friendship had been built on sturdier foundations.
He paused with the glass against his mouth.
Their friendship had been built on insults, theft, extortion, several battlefields, and a disagreement over cars. Sturdy was perhaps ambitious. Tony was not cheap, though. The man had accepted a written obligation for five per cent of his personal income for one quarter merely because Pepper told him to. A superyacht should have been beneath his capacity for financial suffering.
Waiting beside the pool would not make it arrive faster, and Lucius had other assets to acquire.
He already had Fatso, Loki 2.0, and the light-edition Reality Stone, or Phastos, Sprite, and Sersi if one insisted on using their names. The list remained incomplete. If his memory of the film had survived transmigration as perfectly as the rest of him, Thena, the Kill Bill girl, should be somewhere in Australia with the Eternal who produced cosmic shields.
A sword and a shield in one trip.
That was a better value than another fruit salad.
Lucius vanished from the lounger. His Long Island remained beside the pool, sweating in the afternoon heat while Benjamin stared at the empty space.
"I will cancel the fifth salad," he decided.
-
Steve Rogers had accepted that the old computer was alive before he accepted what it told him.
The voice came through equipment that belonged in a museum, flat and patient while lines of text moved across dull screens. Arnim Zola had transferred his consciousness into the machinery. Natasha believed the claim first. Steve kept searching for the man behind the trick until Zola explained what SHIELD had become.
HYDRA had survived inside it.
Not as a handful of infiltrators or a compromised office. The organisation had spread through SHIELD's structure for years, using its authority, files, and weapons until the difference between parasite and host had become administrative. SHIELD was the name on the door. HYDRA had learned which keys opened it.
Steve stood before the screens, his shield ready despite the uselessness of threatening a room. "Why tell us?"
"Because the pretence has reached the end of its useful life."
Natasha watched the information passing across the nearest display. Her face revealed nothing, which Steve had learned meant she was either calm or one second from violence. "How much of SHIELD belongs to HYDRA?"
"Enough."
"That is not a number."
"It is the only truth that matters."
Steve still wanted proof. Fury had hidden missions inside rescues and weapons inside promises of safety, but lies did not make every accusation against him true. Zola was a HYDRA mind speaking from a machine. Trusting him because SHIELD had become untrustworthy would only replace one bad habit with another.
Then the missile alarm sounded.
Natasha looked up at the warning. "That launch came through SHIELD."
Zola's screens continued to glow. "Will that suffice, Captain?"
The building shook before Steve could answer.
They escaped with seconds and very little dignity.
Several hours later, they knocked on Sam Wilson's door.
The retired soldier Steve had met during his morning exercise opened it, looked from Steve's torn clothes to Natasha's dust-covered face, and stepped aside without asking whether the trouble was official.
Sam shut the door. "I was going to offer coffee. This feels like the kind of visit that empties the pot and ruins the furniture."
"The furniture may survive," Steve told him.
Natasha checked the front window. "Do not make promises for HYDRA."
Sam looked at her, then at Steve. "Start with the part where that sentence makes sense."
It did not make much more sense after they explained it.
The following days removed any remaining doubt. Every route became temporary. Safe rooms stopped being safe before they finished checking the exits. HYDRA strike teams arrived with SHIELD training, SHIELD information, and enough coordination to turn rest into a mistake. Sam entered the flight with two fugitives and discovered that the enemy could follow them through an institution designed to know where everyone went.
Then the Winter Soldier found them.
Steve had faced armed men, enhanced agents, and enemies who believed conviction made them stronger. None prepared him for the face behind HYDRA's weapon.
"Bucky."
The name changed nothing. The man looking back at him had Bucky Barnes's face and none of the recognition. He attacked with the efficient emptiness of an order being carried out. Steve defended himself because the alternative was dying, but every block felt like an argument with a grave.
They escaped again. Steve still could not fit Bucky's face to the man who had tried to kill them.
"They turned him into a machine."
Natasha cleaned blood from her hand and watched the entrance. "Machines are easier. This is conditioning."
"Can it be reversed?"
"With the right telepath."
Steve thought of the short list she had given him before, then disliked the direction his mind took. "Do you have one in mind?"
"Noctis would be the strongest option. Xavier would be the second. There is also a girl at Xavier's school."
"Noctis is not an option."
Natasha gave him a tired glance. "I did list him first. I did not say he would agree."
Steve remembered her account of three bullets, telekinetic restraint, and a search through every memory she owned. He also remembered SHIELD capturing Lucius, fitting him with an inhibitor, and mistaking procedure for justification. Asking that man to enter Bucky's mind on SHIELD's behalf was reckless. Asking him on Natasha's recommendation might be suicidal.
"He hates SHIELD."
"He has reasons."
"And he might decide Bucky is more useful broken."
Natasha did not contradict him.
Bucky was alive. That fact had to be enough until Steve could reach him without sacrificing everyone else. HYDRA still owned the machinery around them, Project Insight's carriers were approaching launch, and a single brainwashed friend could not outrank the lives those weapons threatened.
Steve checked the straps on his shield until his hands stopped moving.
Their position changed again when they met a dead man after being rescued by Maria Hill.
Fury was alive and looked worse than he had on the operating table. Hill stood beside him, armed and irritated. Five rejected resignations had apparently led to mutiny.
Steve stared at Fury. "We saw you on the operating table."
"That was the idea."
Natasha folded her arms. "You could have told us."
"Compromised system," Fury replied. "The fewer people who knew, the fewer ways HYDRA could learn."
Steve had heard that argument from him before. It had not improved with resurrection.
Sam counted the room before the dispute could grow. "So there are five of us."
Hill looked at the same faces. "Five people to stop three carriers."
Fury's remaining eye settled on Steve. "Then we cannot waste any of them."
-
Lucius discovered that searching continental Australia for two secluded Eternals was more difficult than the film had implied.
He tried direct telepathic contact first. No answer came. He moved through cities and settlements, opened the minds of gang members who might have noticed unusual strangers, and took what they knew without asking. Consent would have turned a fast search into a social programme, and Lucius had never claimed that kind of patience.
The gangs knew nothing.
Several Aboriginal locals knew many interesting things, although none concerned Thena. Lucius found them after following minds so relaxed that their thoughts practically reclined. They were smoking a local weed with an unfamiliar smell and an effect strong enough to interest a man of his calibre.
He searched their memories for Eternals, found no useful face, and stayed for professional evaluation of the substance.
The community's cleverman joined him before sunset. The healer introduced himself with a name Lucius failed to retain and a title he understood as ngangkari. He listened to Lucius explain that he was hunting an immortal swordswoman and her shield-producing companion, examined him for a long moment, and passed the smoke back.
"You are lost," the cleverman concluded.
"I can teleport between planets."
"Still lost. Though I can do that as well, after the second smoke."
Lucius respected the diagnosis enough to continue treatment.
Reality returned three days later.
His Nokia supplied the date. His own memory supplied almost nothing useful after accepting the cleverman's hospitality.
"What happened?"
The cleverman smiled. "You became ngangkari."
Lucius looked at the waiting community and the weed resting in a small wrapped bundle beside him.
He had gained local recognition and the best weed he had ever encountered. Becoming a healer after losing three days was an achievement, and Lucius was proud of himself.
Unfortunately, he was a busy cleverman with two Eternals to find.
The community could offer no direction toward Thena or Gilgamesh. They did, however, provide more weed for the road and asked him to return when his new responsibilities allowed.
Lucius stored the bundle carefully.
"I will conduct further research," he promised, then fly away to continue the search.