Mount Wundagore as Jessica Drew remembered it was vast and magnificent—sheer peaks thrust upward into an overcast sky, ancient and immovable. In reality the mountain sat in the heart of Eastern Europe, every approach sealed for a hundred miles in every direction. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s records marked it as forbidden ground: site of an enormous battlefield left over from an age before recorded history.
Daisy knew the other reason. This was where Chthon—the Elder God—had been expelled from the physical world. He had been searching for a way back ever since, across eons of patient effort.
The connection between Viper and Jessica Drew wasn't coincidence. Viper had accepted Chthon's covenant; Jessica Drew's parents had chosen Wundagore for their spider-gene experiments. The fates of the two women had been bound together from those two moments onward.
She exhaled and went deeper.
The earliest memories were blurry at the edges. Young Jessica Drew had never left Wundagore—had grown up inside a Hydra-funded laboratory, fusing with spider DNA as she grew, spending her childhood on cold metal tables while her Hydra-affiliated father drew blood and ran his tests. The mountain was the only world she'd ever known.
Daisy followed the winding mental path between rocky outcroppings and scraggly trees until she reached a cluster of low flat-roofed buildings. A small square of grass grew in front of them.
In the grass sat Jessica Drew—age seven, wearing denim overalls—pressing her back into the dirt and scrambling backward as fast as her arms could push. A blue-faced figure stood over her, grotesque and leering, holding an enormous exaggerated syringe, advancing without hurry. She wanted to run. Her arms and legs wouldn't cooperate. She could only watch the grinning mouth open wide.
"What's the difference between a father like that and an animal?"
She'd sort out the fallout with Viper afterward. Right now: Daisy raised her hand, and fire took the blue-faced figure in one clean stroke.
She crossed the dream quickly and crouched in front of the girl.
The nightmare dissolved into embers. Young Jessica Drew sat in the grass, braced for something that was no longer coming, not yet understanding that it was gone.
Daisy gave her a gentle shake.
It took a moment. But the girl's eyes slowly focused.
What surfaced in them was everything at once—grief, helplessness, relief so sudden it was almost painful, and a rage that had nowhere to go. Seven years old, with no words for any of it. She did the only thing she could.
She cried.
Every test. Every injection. Every hour on the cold table and every loop of the nightmare. All of it came out as sound.
The dreamscape responded. Rain came down over the imagined slopes of Wundagore—heavy, continuous, the kind that doesn't stop.
"Let it out." Daisy pulled her close and rested a hand on her hair. "It gets easier once it's out."
The dream-rain lasted a long time. Neither of them counted. Eventually the crying thinned, the hitching breaths evened out—and then the years of accumulated pain, all of it released at once, became too much for the mind to carry. Jessica Drew's head sagged sideways. She fainted.
They were both back in the real room.
Tears had soaked through Daisy's jeans and were running down her shin through one of the ripped patches. She held still and let it happen.
A few stray hairs had worked through the gap in her collar and were tickling her collarbone. She held still for that too.
Daisy signaled through the door for a blanket. Then she told Sitwell to notify Hydra's European division: they were taking this one. She was keeping her.
Then she sat down outside the closed door and waited for the arrival she already knew was coming.
Two hours later, Viper pushed open the base entrance.
"Daisy Johnson, you've gone too far!" The composure she wore like armor was gone. Viper was always poised, always alluring, even in the middle of a fight. Now her face had no performance left in it—just fury, cresting toward something she couldn't quite control.
"She matters to me. You know what's good for you—hand her over. Don't push me." She had her combat suit on, whip and daggers at her sides, and she had clearly arrived ready to fight rather than negotiate.
Daisy glanced at Sitwell and the ring of Hydra agents behind him. One hand moved.
They all took the hint and cleared the corridor.
She looked at Viper. The faint vibration started at her feet—barely anything, just a suggestion in the floor.
Viper retreated two steps. "If you use that trick again, I'm warning you—"
Daisy cut across her. "Ophelia."
"Your frequency matches hers. Closely enough that I noticed." Daisy kept her voice level. "Your reaction goes considerably beyond what our history would explain. You dropped everything and got here in two hours."
"Your composure is gone. You don't look like yourself. She matters to you that much. What exactly is she to you?"
The questions landed one after another, and Viper had no wall left to put up against them. She didn't think. She just answered.
"Of course she matters to me—she's my daughter!"
The last word tore out of her at full volume, sharp and high and nothing at all like the low, honeyed voice she used for everything else.
The silence that followed was complete.
Viper looked as startled as Daisy felt.
Absolute nonsense, was Daisy's first coherent thought. Jessica Drew had her own parents—the researchers. This wasn't a melodrama where children got swapped at birth. And more to the point: Viper's body—like Black Widow's—had been confirmed as incapable. Daisy had verified it herself at some point.
So where exactly did this child come from? Did she conjure her out of thin air?
"Say that again." Daisy pointed at the door. "That girl in there—she's your daughter? Are you certain you're not talking nonsense?"
"She is. I think she is..." Viper's brow knitted. The words came out soft, uncertain—a hesitation completely unlike her. Something was pulling in two directions at once.
Daisy almost laughed. "I think she is" wasn't an answer.
Viper seemed to notice the same thing. She dealt in certainties.
Daisy pushed a stool toward her. Viper sat down with the air of someone who had briefly lost track of their own mind.
Her outfit, Daisy noted, had taken a turn since they'd last met—the back had always been bare, but now the sides had split open too, and from where Daisy was standing she could see considerably more than she had any particular wish to.
Viper stared at nothing, visibly sorting through memory.
"In winter of 1990 I should have been in Milan. Baron Strucker was there—I attended the Hydra leadership conference. I remember it clearly." A pause. "But I was also in a hospital in New York. Giving birth." Another pause, longer this time. "That's not right either—I closed a deal in Milan that same week. I remember closing it."
She stopped.
One set of memories put her at the conference table with Strucker. The other put her in a delivery room in New York. Both were vivid. Both felt real. Neither could coexist with the other, and she couldn't figure out which was true.
For the first time she could remember, Viper genuinely didn't know what had happened to her.