Daisy made a slow loop around the cell block. She had to admit—this was a good era to be doing this in.
Ten years from now, once superpowered individuals were everywhere, the security tech on cells like these would be downright obscene. In that era, teleportation and mind control would be a dime a dozen; pick any three ability users at random and odds were one could teleport and another could read minds. Things weren't like that yet.
She waited for a gap in the patrol, judged the distance, and made a short teleport—skipping the traps entirely and dropping straight inside the cellblock.
Carefully avoiding the surveillance gear, she stayed invisible and pressed deeper.
The intel from the inside contact wasn't worth trusting. She dropped a guard fast and used telepathy to pull the information straight out of his skull.
Eyes shut, she spent two minutes sorting through all of it. The Scarlet Witch was in the castle, confirmed. But Quicksilver had been shipped off two days ago for experiments somewhere else.
Tough luck for you. Daisy offered Quicksilver a small, silent apology, then followed the mental map toward the deeper cells.
There were plenty of mutants down here, most of them twisted into strange, mismatched shapes. The few who still looked human were covered in scars, clearly the ones the base cared about most.
They were held in specially built cells, and most lay asleep on their cots, oblivious as Daisy slipped past.
But two of them had sharp ears and caught something wrong. They spotted her and started shouting. Lucky for her, the guards had long since grown sick of their test subjects, and the soundproofing on the cells was top-notch, so the alarm didn't carry the way the two had hoped.
If I can't get out, neither can you. People could be that petty, and Daisy figured that was exactly what these two busybodies were thinking. She wasn't about to gamble on how conscientious the guards were, so she broke into a quick jog. Between the shifting light and the strain of bending light rays for so long, her invisibility was almost spent.
She reached the very back of the block, where a single all-metal room blazed with light.
To suppress the Scarlet Witch's powers, and to keep her too worn down to use them and escape, Baron Strucker had built a glare room. White light poured out of it nonstop, twenty-four hours a day, all to keep her psychic energy flatlined and her abilities out of reach.
Without any formal training in magic, she could only manage a few basic abilities. The Scarlet Witch of the future might be terrifyingly strong, but right now she was a dragon stranded in the shallows—all that power and no way to channel it, which meant no way out.
Daisy took one look inside and nearly blinded herself.
"Wanda Maximoff?" She had to fall back on telepathy to reach whoever was inside.
"...Who?" The figure couldn't answer mind-to-mind, and asked the question aloud in a tiny voice.
It was barely a whisper, like a mosquito's hum, but Daisy caught it—and not just the words. She also caught the surveillance camera inside the cell quiver at the sound.
A worry nagged at her. What if this wasn't the Scarlet Witch at all? What if she had the wrong person, this was a trap, and the woman put a knife in her the second her guard dropped? That exact scene had played out in a thousand movies and shows. Worth guarding against.
A camera made things easy. Moving fast, she used the Trojan she'd planted earlier to slip into the surveillance system, hunted around, and finally pulled up the feed for this cell.
The camera was a custom build, its lens layered with a special filter that screened out all the room's harsh glare. And there, curled into a corner of the frame, was the Scarlet Witch.
In a white prison uniform, the Scarlet Witch couldn't tell whether the voice in her head had been real or a hallucination. She waited two minutes. When the strange voice didn't come again, she sagged, hugged her knees, dropped her head onto them, and went back to enduring the light as it tore at her.
Daisy was only so-so at the agent's toolkit of microexpressions and psychology, so she couldn't say for certain whether this girl was the real Scarlet Witch or a trap the enemy had laid.
She watched patiently for another two minutes, spotted nothing off, then opened a telepathic channel and started talking to the girl.
"Want to get out of here?"
"Yes."
"Do you hate the people out there?"
"Yes!"
"Do you want to kill them?"
"...I don't know."
Daisy asked, the girl answered. But when it came to killing, she gave no clear reply.
That left Daisy scratching her head. With an ordinary person she'd just dive into their mindscape and verify the truth, but the Scarlet Witch clearly didn't fall into the "ordinary person" category.
Chaos magic could go toe-to-toe with the Phoenix Force. Barge into a mind like that, and Daisy wasn't sure her own psychic energy could withstand the backlash.
She'd sooner take a stroll through Professor Charles Xavier's brain than set foot in the Scarlet Witch's mindscape.
Failing to rescue anyone and getting herself wrecked in the process—that would be peak stupidity.
Time to take a gamble. When was anything in life ever completely risk-free?
She made up her mind fast.
"I'll take you out of here. You want to come?"
"Yes!" The answer came without a flicker of hesitation. Then, two seconds into her excitement, she remembered: her brother was in this base too. "But what about my brother?"
"He's not in the base anymore. We'll come back for him later. Step back two paces. I'll get the door."
The Scarlet Witch backed two steps deeper into the room, assuming Daisy had a key or something like it.
Daisy didn't have a key. Her fist was the key.
She gathered the chi in her body, laced it with her vibration power, and drove a single punch into the alloy-steel wall.
This was a cell built to hold the Scarlet Witch, not the Hulk. Even a man as flush with cash as Baron Strucker wasn't going to waste ultra-hardened superalloy on a woman with hardly any physical strength.
If the Scarlet Witch could use magic, no alloy would hold her anyway. And if she couldn't, then there was no need for anything tougher.
The vibration tore through, and a third of the wall caved in. The blinding light made Daisy squint as she reached a hand inside and said, simply, "Come."
A slender, delicate hand reached toward the Scarlet Witch, still dusted with grit from the shattered wall. Looking at the broken metal, the witch could hardly believe a hand that fine and pale could carry that kind of power.
Freedom. Would she really get to be free? Could she actually walk out of this room, so bright she couldn't sleep, and out into the world? Light spilled in through the gaping hole, and for a moment the Scarlet Witch's vision blurred, her eyes stinging as they struggled to adjust.
If someone had asked her right then whether she'd leave a place of light to step into an unknown darkness, the Scarlet Witch would have said yes, more than anything in the world.
"Hurry." Daisy urged her again. The guards nearby had heard the commotion and were already running this way, and underneath it she could just make out the furious roar of the Fenris Twins.
The witch quickly put her hand in Daisy's.
Her hand was soft, but not the way Daisy's was, the kind that looked soft and could sink a small island. This was the real thing: hardly any strength to it, the muscles of her palm gone slack. Still, the skin felt nice enough.