Wanda did not dream often.
Not real dreams.
Sleep gave other people metaphor. Distortion. Memory softened into symbol and returned with enough distance to survive being examined after dawn. Sleep gave Wanda fragments sharpened by power into things less forgiving than dreams. Half-heard voices. Doors where there should have been walls. The red grammar of her own magic moving behind her eyes in shapes she sometimes understood only after blood had already been spilled around them.
That night, she dreamed of absence.
Not darkness.
Darkness was easy. Darkness still had texture. Sound. The expectation of depth. This was different. The negative shape of something that should have been there and was not. A place in reality where her power reached with all its old brutal instinct and found no mind-space at all. No fear. No memory. No loose edge of thought to catch and turn. Only the clean impossible failure of contact.
She woke before dawn with the sensation still on her skin.
Not literally. That would have been kinder. More local. This lived under the skin instead, somewhere behind the eyes and down through the spine, the body remembering what the mind could not yet file.
The room around her was still dark.
Not fully. Never fully. The blinds in the apartment she shared with Pietro no longer sat flush to the frame, and city light pushed through in narrow grey bars that cut the walls into strips. The radiator hissed once without conviction. Water moved in the pipes. Somewhere three floors below, a door closed too hard and a woman started arguing in Sokovian with someone who had almost certainly deserved it.
Wanda lay still on the narrow bed and looked up at the ceiling.
The warehouse was already reorganizing itself in memory.
Hydra's men. The chamber. The black casing under red emergency light. The way her power had answered it without permission, not because she understood what it was, but because some part of her had recognized structure older than language and hated the fact before thought arrived to explain why.
But none of that held center.
Not really.
Erikar did.
His name sat in her mind now with irritating clarity.
Erikar.
Too old a name for the face. Too calm a voice for the rooms he kept standing in. Too little visible reaction to things that should have forced reaction out of any ordinary person. And inside him, or where inside should have been, that impossible silence.
No.
Not silence either.
Silence was what existed after a sound ended. Silence still implied the possibility of noise returning if one waited correctly. What she had touched on the roof, then again at the warehouse, was not quiet. It was the absence of the category itself. A lock without a door. A room built in a frequency her mind did not know how to enter.
She hated it.
The honesty of that made her close her eyes again in annoyance.
Not because it frightened her.
Because it had interrupted certainty.
Wanda had lived too long inside other people's surfaces not to value the practical uses of her own curse. Minds opened. Even when they resisted, they still opened in types. Fear had patterns. Lies had rhythm. Guilt. grief. obedience. hunger. They all moved in recognizably human architecture if one knew how to listen at the correct depth. Even the difficult minds, the disciplined ones, the men who had been trained to hold thought in one hand and pain in the other without dropping either, still existed in the same weather.
Erikar did not.
Or rather, he existed. That was the problem. He stood there in front of her in blood and concrete and emergency light, answered questions, chose angles, read rooms, moved like someone who had been dangerous for a very long time and had learned to make danger look like economy.
But when she reached for the mind beneath it, the world stopped making sense.
Wanda sat up.
The blanket slid to her lap. The room was cold.
Across from her, Pietro was asleep on the other narrow bed with one arm thrown over his face and one leg half off the mattress, as though even unconsciousness had failed to persuade him that stillness belonged to him. Good. At least one of them had gotten something like rest.
She reached for the glass on the crate they used as a night table and found it empty.
Fine.
She let red thread through two fingers, caught the bottle on the windowsill, and pulled it gently across the room without noise. The water tasted metallic. Cheap pipes. Older building. Nothing surprising.
Her power still felt wrong.
Not weaker. Not stronger. Misaligned. As if the contact with the casing in the Hydra warehouse and the failed contact with Erikar's mind had left two different notes vibrating under everything else and neither of them had yet chosen whether they were going to become harmony or damage.
Pietro made a sound under his arm and shifted.
Wanda looked over.
He did not wake.
Good.
He would ask too many questions too quickly if he saw her awake with that expression. Not because he was stupid. Because he loved her in the specific invasive way only brothers believed counted as protection.
She set the bottle back down and rose.
The apartment was barely an apartment at all. Two rooms made to sound like more by the landlord and less by every tenant who had survived them. Small kitchen with one working burner. Table by the window scarred by old cigarettes and knife marks. Sofa no one sat on because it smelled like ten years of other lives refusing to leave. Books and papers in uneven stacks near the wall where Wanda had begun collecting every fragment she could find on Hydra shell sites, old folk symbols, intelligence scraps, and anything touching the black casing or the older wrongness beneath it.
Her bare feet made no sound on the floorboards.
She crossed to the table and turned on the small lamp.
Its yellow light was ugly and useful.
The notes lay where she had left them after coming back from the warehouse. Hydra site maps. Names she didn't trust. Transit routes. Facility sketches copied from memory fast enough that some of the lines still looked angry. In the center of it all, on a blank page torn from a legal pad, one word written harder than the others:
Erikar
She stared at it.
Ridiculous.
The page had begun as practical notation. A name mattered. Names attached shape to a target. But sometime after coming home, after showering concrete dust and smoke off her skin, after pretending to Pietro that the operation had merely gone sideways in one of the ordinary ways, she had written it again lower on the page. Then once in Sokovian script out of reflex and crossed it out because that made it more personal than she wanted.
Now the whole sheet looked like evidence of poor discipline.
She should burn it.
Instead she sat at the table and pulled a second page toward her.
What are you.
She had asked him that twice now in different forms and hated both versions in retrospect. Not because the question was wrong. Because it had surrendered too much. Surprise. Interruption. The ugly little crack in certainty that happened when power reached for the world and the world refused the terms.
What had he said.
Not yours to name.
Wanda's mouth tightened.
She reached for the pen and wrote the line down exactly as he had given it. Then beneath it:
Felt it.
Answered.
No psychic signature.
No telepathic architecture.
No fear-response to contact.
No visible disorientation.
The notes looked clinical.
Good.
Better that way.
She kept writing.
Movement:
too controlled for ordinary operative
not Hydra
not police
not military in standard posture
reads field immediately
protects angles before people
intervenes with minimum force until forced otherwise
Voice:
calm
irritating
not performative
older than face
Mind:
impossible
She stopped there.
The radiator hissed again. Outside, the city had started moving toward dawn in the slow ugly way cities did, first through trucks, then delivery doors, then the false morning heroism of men who believed shouting at machinery counted as labor.
Wanda looked down at the word impossible and pressed the pen into the page hard enough to threaten the wood beneath.
No.
Not impossible.
That was the mistake people made when they gave up too quickly. Impossible was only a word for systems not yet correctly described.
He had a mind. He had to. He spoke. Chose. Assessed. Reacted. There was no such thing as a man without mental architecture. The absence she hit wasn't absence in the absolute sense. It was absence relative to her. Relative to the channels she knew how to use. Relative to the frequencies her power had been taught by pain, experimentation, and survival to find.
That did not make him empty.
It made him elsewhere.
Interesting.
She hated that too.
A floorboard snapped softly behind her.
Pietro's voice came from the doorway between the rooms, thick with sleep and annoyance.
"If you are writing revenge plans before dawn again, at least make coffee first. I am tired of waking up in other people's war rooms."
Wanda didn't turn immediately. "Go back to sleep."
He ignored that and leaned against the frame with all the moral discipline of a man who believed concern and intrusion were twins separated only by tone. Hair wrecked. Shirt half-buttoned. Expression already too awake for the hour.
"You came back wrong."
She looked over her shoulder. "That is not a sentence."
"It is from me."
"That makes it worse."
Pietro folded his arms. "Hydra."
"Yes."
"Dead."
"Some."
He took that in. Then his eyes dropped to the table and the scattered notes. To the center page. To the name she had written harder than the rest.
His mouth shifted.
Wanda saw it and hated him preemptively for whatever version of the next sentence he was currently assembling.
"Ah," Pietro said softly. "So that is the problem."
"It is not a problem."
"You wrote his name."
"I write lots of names."
"Not like that."
Wanda stared at him long enough that lesser brothers would have interpreted the silence as warning rather than opening argument.
Pietro, unfortunately, had survived her too long.
He crossed to the kitchen counter, found the coffee tin by memory, and began the ugly practical ritual of making something drinkable from old grounds and bad equipment.
"Tell me," he said.
"No."
He measured water into the dented kettle and gave her a look that in another family might have been called patient. In theirs it was usually best translated as I will absolutely stay here until information regrets not arriving faster.
"Wanda."
"He is not Hydra."
Pietro paused.
Then resumed with less noise.
"Good."
"He was at the warehouse."
"Less good."
"He wanted the same thing."
"Also less good."
She looked back down at the page.
Pietro lit the burner and leaned one hip against the counter. "And."
Wanda said nothing.
He waited.
That was new enough to irritate her into honesty.
"I couldn't get in."
Silence.
Not the room's. Pietro's.
She looked up.
He was watching her now with the expression he had when jokes had finally failed him and he had decided the world had become serious enough to deserve his full attention. She had seen that look on him too often in Sokovia. In Hydra corridors. In rooms where power and fear had been made into tools and handed to men too stupid to know they were always holding both by the wrong end.
"What do you mean."
She pressed the pen down on the table and let go before it broke.
"I mean I reached for him and there was nothing."
Pietro's brow tightened. "Nothing like shielded."
"No."
"Nothing like trained."
"No."
"Nothing like panic or drugs or interference."
"No."
The kettle had not yet begun to boil. The room still had time left before sound made this easier.
Pietro pushed away from the counter and came closer to the table. Not too close. He had learned that distance the hard way. Protective enough to count. Not so near that she had to spend energy resisting comfort on top of memory.
He looked at the page.
Then at her.
"That is impossible."
There was the word again.
Wanda's laugh came sharper than she intended. "Yes. Thank you. Very useful."
Pietro ignored the tone. "No, listen. If he is a person, then there is something. You always find something."
She looked at him.
Always.
As though that were comfort.
As though her power discovering a way into anyone and anything should still feel like mastery and not contamination.
Pietro saw enough in her face to stop. Good.
The kettle began to mutter.
He looked away first, which was one of the kinder things about him when he remembered to do it.
"Then maybe he isn't a person," he said.
Wanda was on her feet before the sentence fully ended.
The chair scraped back hard enough to make both of them wince.
"No."
Pietro held up both hands. "I meant in the Hydra way. Not in the monster way."
"There is no Hydra way and monster way. There is only people making categories after damage because it helps them sleep."
Pietro looked at her, then at the notes, then at the burner.
"Fine."
Wanda stood very still.
The room felt smaller now, compressed around the thing he had nearly said and the thing she had already feared he would. It wasn't that she liked Erikar. The thought was absurd. She had exchanged fewer than twenty real sentences with him and disliked half of them on principle. It wasn't that she trusted him. She didn't. The unreadable were often more dangerous than the obvious.
No. The violence in her reaction came from something else.
Hydra had taught her too well what happened when human beings were treated first as anomalies and only later, if at all, as persons.
Erikar was a problem.
He was also a man.
Those two facts had to remain in the same room.
Pietro understood that now. She could see it in the way he re-centered himself around the kettle instead of the argument.
After a while he said, "Coffee first. Philosophy later."
Wanda sat again.
The kettle hissed into full boil. Pietro poured. The room filled with the bitter thin smell of survival pretending to be ritual.
He brought her a cup and set it by the papers without comment. Good. Better that way.
She wrapped both hands around it and let the heat ground them back into the table, the notes, the room, the city beginning to wake outside.
Pietro leaned against the counter and watched her over his own cup.
"So," he said at last. "His name is Erikar."
"Yes."
"You think he wants what Hydra took."
"Yes."
"You think he is not with them."
"Yes."
"You think he can fight."
She gave him a long look.
He lifted one shoulder. "Fine. I know he can fight."
Wanda looked down into the coffee.
The surface reflected the lamp badly. Good. She had no use for metaphor this early.
Pietro said, "And he felt you."
There.
Not because she had said it aloud. Because Pietro knew how to listen where she left gaps. He had been doing it since they were children and the world had become too loud to survive without that skill.
Wanda didn't answer immediately.
Then, quietly, "Yes."
That mattered more than the rest and they both knew it.
Most people never noticed the touch at all. The lighter brush. The first testing pressure. They only felt the consequences once she had already entered further than politeness, law, or morality would have liked. The ones who did notice felt intrusion, panic, pressure, nausea, pain. Never recognition.
Erikar had felt it.
And answered.
Not with power. Not with defense she could read. Only with awareness so clean it made the failure worse.
Pietro looked at her over the rim of his cup and, because he loved her more dangerously than anyone else alive, chose not to make a joke there.
"What are you going to do."
Wanda took one careful drink of the terrible coffee and set it down again.
On the page before her, his name still sat harder than the rest of the notes.
The warehouse mattered. Hydra mattered. The black casing mattered. The old wrongness under the city mattered. All of that remained true.
But now another truth sat beside it.
She would find him again.
Not because of fascination. Not yet. Not because of romance, which would have been laughable if anything about the last forty-eight hours had still resembled the kinds of stories romance liked to happen inside.
She would find him because the world had presented her with an unreadable mind and she had spent too long surviving systems built on the assumption that everything eventually yielded to the right violence.
If Erikar did not.
Then she needed to understand what that meant before Hydra did.
Wanda picked up the pen again and, beneath his name, wrote one final line.
Find him first.
Pietro read it upside down from the counter and exhaled through his nose.
"That usually ends well."
She did not look up.
"No," she said. "It usually ends early."
Outside, dawn finally broke over New York in thin grey strips between buildings too tired to pretend beauty at this hour.
Inside the apartment, coffee steamed, the radiator hissed, and Wanda sat with Hydra's routes, the memory of a black chamber, and the impossible shape of a mind she could not enter.
For the first time in years, her power had reached into a person and found nothing it knew how to call human.
And instead of making her step back, that had only made the need to know sharper.
End of Chapter 25