Finally Ava gave up, righting herself in her seat. She looked exhausted and ragged, but even still she couldn’t sleep. The stress was starting to wear her down, and Alex wished he could do something to help.
“Tell me something,” she said, curling against the plastic console that lay between them. He wished it weren’t there.
“Anything you want to know,” Alex said. He meant it.
He wasn’t too great at talking to girls, but he had been thinking about her ever since they’d boarded the plane. Even when he closed his eyes he found he could see her, as clearly as if he were looking at her still. It was all he could do to sit next to her without reaching out and taking her into his arms, pulling her close—
“How about—the dog?” Ava mumbled, closing her eyes again.
“The what?” He hadn’t been expecting that.
A cat, maybe. A dog? Yeah, right.
“Your dog. You had a dog, didn’t you?” She was half asleep now. “Brown, and kind of mangy. You snuck him food….”
Alex sighed. “I wish. I never had a dog.”
“You did.”
“I always wanted one, but my mom’s a cat person. And that’s putting it mildly.”
“Weird. I could have sworn you had a dog.” Ava opened her eyes again. “Potatoes,” she said suddenly. “He liked potatoes.”
“Who did?”
“Your dog. You fed him off your plate.”
Alex looked at her strangely. “Except he’s a cat and his name is Stanley and he has his own plate. With Santa Paws on it.”
She looked amused. “Really? Santa Paws?”
“And a different custom collar for every holiday. This one has—wait for it—jingle bells.”
“So no dog?”
“No dog.”
Ava sat up, her hair tousled. “Hmm. I don’t know. Did you always live in Mountain Clear?”
“Montclair? No. My mom never talks about it anymore, but I grew up in Vermont. I still dream about the trees in our old backyard. The trees and the snow.”
He didn’t mention that the dreams were nightmares, or that he was being chased into banks of snow higher than his head, sometimes while people were shooting at him. Sometimes the snow was spattered with his own blood. He figured Ava had enough nightmares of her own without having to hear about his.
“And then?”
“Then, the most boring story on earth. My parents split up and New Jersey happened. My mom became a travel agent. And, of course, a cat person, but I think we’ve covered that.”
“But you’re not. How did that happen?”
“She says I was switched at birth. We have basically nothing in common.”
“She’s not the Black Card type?”
“Not at all. She’s not exactly looking for a fight.”
“And you are?”
He shrugged.
Ava looked at him.
“What happened to your dad?”
“I don’t know. I guess he left, and she just gave up on everything.”
“Even your dog?”
“No dog, crazy.” Alex looked past Ava, out into the aisle of the plane. “But I’ll ask her if we had one that I’ve forgotten from when I was little. As soon as I get home. Or, you know. Call.” He looked at his watch. It was Sunday afternoon in New Jersey now.
My mom’s freaking out. She’s calling Dante’s dad. Dante’s probably covering for me. He won’t believe any of this, but I still wish I could tell him.
Then Alex felt a warm hand slip inside his own. “Brat,” Ava said suddenly, looking at him.
“Who, me?” His eyes were twinkling. “I’m insulted.”
She shook her head with a smile. “I remember now. That was your dog’s name.”
Alex looked at her strangely. This whole conversation was quickly getting very weird. “How would you happen to know that I even had a dog? Let alone his name?”
“Brat?”
“And what kind of name is Brat, anyway?”
“Not brat. Brat. In Russian,” she said, looking at him. “Think about it. Try to remember.”
Alex leaned back on his seat tiredly. “Brat.”
What is there to remember?
What kind of dog is Brat?
Brown, he thought suddenly.
He thought of brown fur, brown eyes, a brown nose.
Brown everything.
And warm.
He felt a warm heart beating and a warm furry lump curling up in his bed.
A ceramic dish brimming with dried kibble and breakfast potatoes.
The warm spot on the carpet beneath the ottoman, for sleeping.
A knotted length of rope, chewed soft as cabbage—
“Brother,” Alex said suddenly. He sat up. “Brat means brother. Because that dog was like my brother.”
“Do you remember? Really?” Ava’s eyes were wide. She smiled. “I knew I wasn’t imagining it.”
Alex felt at once more confused and more certain. In his mind, doors were opening in places he didn’t even know to look for them.
“When I was alone, that dog was the only family I had,” he said slowly.
It was unsettling, but still somehow real.
I really did have a dog.
He looked at Ava. “How could I forget that? And why don’t I remember my mom being there? Or even my dad, if it was so long ago?” Alex ran his hand through a lock of dark hair.
“People forget things,” she said. “Even dogs.”
It was making his head ache. He didn’t want to think about it, but he had the strangest feeling that he should—the feeling that even a long-lost dog was somehow very important.
And that Ava was somehow connected to all of it.
He studied her face now.
“You didn’t.” He watched the shadows fall back over her eyes. “How do you remember anything about me, Ava? We’ve never met. I’m pretty sure of that. So how do you know things about me that I don’t even remember?”
“Alex,” Ava said slowly. “Sometimes I remember much, much more than that.”
Alex looked at her, and by the look on her face he could tell that this was about something other than just a dog.
“You mean like how you know things about Natasha Romanoff? Or like how I know Russian?”
She nodded. The words came slowly and with great difficulty. “My dreams aren’t always just about her.” She looked up at him. “And they didn’t just start now.”
“Who are your dreams about? Besides the dog?” The realization dawned on him. “Wait—you mean me?”
Ava nodded again.
“What are you saying?” Alex was trying to push the pieces together in his mind, but he couldn’t. There were too many of them, and they were too broken. Nothing made anything close to sense.
“I dreamed you,” she said. “About you. Before I even met you.”
He tried to logically process what she was saying, even if it wasn’t rational. “Like a premonition?”
Ava shrugged. “A little more than that.” She paused, staring at his face as if she were searching for something.
He wished he knew what.
“I used to think of it as destiny,” she finally said, so softly that he had to lean close even to hear.
“The dreams?”
“Not just the dreams.” Ava blushed. “It’s stupid; I know it is. A person can’t be a destiny.” Alex watched the flush of her cheeks as it deepened from pink to red.
He still didn’t quite get what she was saying, but he could see how important it was to her. And how nervous she seemed, how badly she wanted him to understand.
Help me, Ava.
Help me put the pieces together.
I want to remember.
I want to know everything.
Especially you.
“Destiny, eh?” He tucked a stray copper curl behind her ear. “How do you know what a destiny looks like?”
Then she took a breath. “Here. It’s probably better if I just show y
ou. Just don’t freak out, okay?” She reached down to the backpack at her feet and pulled out what looked like a tattered old notebook. “I’ve never shown anyone but Oksana.”
She put it in his lap and waited for him to open it. He only had to see the first sketch to understand why she was so unnerved.
“That’s me?” He studied it. “That is me. And there’s Brat. And the forest behind—I think it was our old house. I think I remember the forest. I’ve dreamed about that too. This is incredible.”
The trees and the snow.
The ones from my nightmares.
Alex shivered and looked more closely. “That is Brat. No wonder you remembered him. God, these are incredible. You’re an amazing artist.”
Ava didn’t respond. She could barely look at him, and he realized how difficult this was for her. How private she was.
Ava can’t stand people looking through her underwear drawer any more than Natasha Romanoff can.
His head was still pounding as he took in the sketches.
Maybe neither can I.
As he turned the pages, the immense scope of what he was looking at struck him over and over again—like some kind of ancient church bell, ringing for the first time in years.
“But I don’t remember most of this,” he said slowly. The realization was still coming. “Why can’t I?”
“I don’t know,” Ava said. “Why can I?”
He looked up from the sketchbook. “How could you possibly know more about my life than I do?”
“It doesn’t make much sense to me, either.”
Alex flipped through the pages, seeing the sketches without really seeing them. It was all he could do to make sense of the words in his own head.
She remembers things I don’t know myself.
Things that happened to me years ago.
He turned another page.
How?
He flipped the page again.
And how is this real, either? How am I on a plane to Ukraine? Sitting with a girl who sees my life in her dreams?
He felt her hand on his arm.
And why doesn’t this seem weirder than it does?
“Are you okay, Alex?”
“I’ll be fine.” Alex took a steadying breath and turned back to both Ava and the book. “This is my house in Montclair. Where I live now.”
“That’s what I thought.” She smiled. “Mountain Clear. I should fix the caption. But did I get the house right?”
“Perfectly.” He studied the drawing more closely. “You’ve pulled off a weird perspective, though. You’d basically have to be standing on the roof of the house across the street to see it like that.” He smiled at her. “Have you been climbing the Flanagans’ roof again?”
“You caught me,” she said, mustering a smile.
He moved to another image.
“This one, this just happened.”
“That’s right. A few days ago.”
“Sofi’s party. On Dante’s back porch. This one looks like you drew it from all the way at the end of their yard, where the hedge is.” He shook his head. “Which is only weird because I thought I heard someone out there that night.”
“Busted again.” She smiled. “I’ve been living in Dante’s hedge for three years now. He’s not too observant.”
“Tell me about it.”
Now Alex studied a sketch of himself on the fencing strip. “So first you dreamed me. Then you just, what? Found me? Bumped into me at the NAC?”
Ava nodded slowly. “I wasn’t expecting to. I was as surprised as you were.”
“Which is why you said I looked familiar?” He looked back down at the massive sketchbook. “Because I did. Of course I did.” He reached out and took her hand, even as he kept turning the pages. “How is this possible?”
“How is anything that’s been happening lately possible?”
Alex didn’t answer. He was examining a sketch of the Odessa warehouse. Now the surrounding docks. Now a city in winter. Now crumbling gray buildings and twisting streets. “And these?”
“Just bits of things I remember. My old home, mostly.”
“So that’s where we’re headed now? Home to Odessa. That’s crazy. I’ve never even left the country before this.”
Ava looked at him wistfully. “I don’t know if Odessa is my home. I barely remember it, except in pieces. Even then it’s mostly things I don’t want to remember. Nightmares. The warehouse. Soldiers. Ivan Somodorov. I don’t know if I want to think of that as my home. Maybe nowhere is, now.”
Alex understood. “So it’s just a place you once lived. Sometimes I feel that way about New Jersey.” He tried to get her to smile.
“It’s a place I know my mother worked with Ivan Somodorov. And also the last place I saw my father.” Her eyes were dark.
He squeezed her hand. “Also the last place you saw any of them, right?”
Ava nodded.
“And your mother was a scientist?”
“Both of my parents were, for the government. Quantum physicists. My mother was even head of a lab. Before Ivan took me away.” She reached over to flip a few pages. “That’s her. My mother.”
Ava pulled an old photo of her mother loose from the page. In the picture—once black-and-white, now yellowing with age—she was standing on the docks.
“She was beautiful,” Alex said. “She looked a lot like you.”
“Maybe she did. I hope so. I tell myself she did,” Ava said, handing him the photograph.
He flipped the picture over in his hand. There was one word written on the reverse side of the photograph, in fading pencil.
Odessa.
There could be no turning back now.
But as Ava’s head settled against his shoulder, Alex knew it didn’t matter. Not for him. He wasn’t going anywhere without her. Not if he could help it.
Because Ava was wrong. Sometimes a person could be a destiny.
Sometimes there was no difference at all.
Ava didn’t move her head from Alex’s shoulder, not even when she heard his breathing fade into sleep. Not even when it turned to something halfway between a snort and a snore.
She found she still couldn’t move. She couldn’t do anything but think, because she had realized something. Something important, she thought. Alex was the one who had made her see it.
The one similarity in all her sketches. The odd distance, the removed perspective.
The barrier that could never be crossed.
She never drew herself into the picture. Most of the time, she wasn’t even in the same plane as Alex but at a noticeably different height or distance or even angle.
She had come to think of it romantically, as the space between the two of them—between living and dreaming, the real and the imaginary, real life and Tattoo Boy.
Now she wasn’t so sure.
You’d basically have to be standing on the roof of the house across the street…
Check. Possible.
I thought I heard someone out there that night.
Check. Also possible.
Think. The one with the black gloves.
Check. She didn’t know why she hadn’t recognized them earlier.
The one with the gun.
Check. The pistol. The one she carried at her waist.
I’m not spying on Alex. But I think I know who is.
Natasha Romanoff. It’s always been Natasha Romanoff.
Ava had known she was dreaming of Alex almost every night—but even though Ava wasn’t dreaming of Natasha Romanoff—she was starting to have the feeling she was dreaming as her.
It would make sense, wouldn’t it?
That I’m seeing things as Natasha Romanoff? Seeing the world through her eyes, when I’m asleep? When I’m not seeing it through my own?
Especially given the quantum entanglement link. When I’m unconscious, our brains could easily be even more intertwined and I might not even know it.
And if that’s true—
Nata
sha is the connection to Alex.
She’s watching him, and I can see it. I see it through her eyes.
But why? Why would Natasha Romanoff be watching Alex Manor?
And why would she have been, not just now, but for two years?
It didn’t make sense.
It had to mean something.
You may want me to think this is all about Ivan Somodorov, sestra, but there’s more going on here than that, isn’t there?
Odessa would bring answers. It had to.
Not just for her, but for Alex, too.
The next time Ava found herself facing Natasha Romanoff, she wouldn’t be caught by surprise. She’d know what to do and how to play it. She would also know what any part of the mess had to do with Alex Manor—for both of their sakes.
Ivan Somodorov or not.
What is your game, Black Widow?
Sleep never came again for her, and Ava watched the window until the clouds blew away and the bleak, gray sky welcomed them to Moscow.
S.H.I.E.L.D. EYES ONLY
CLEARANCE LEVEL X
LINE-OF-DUTY DEATH [LODD] INVESTIGATION
REF: S.H.I.E.L.D. CASE 121A415
AGENT IN COMMAND [AIC]: PHILLIP COULSON
RE: AGENT NATASHA ROMANOFF A.K.A. BLACK WIDOW, A.K.A. NATASHA ROMANOVA
TRANSCRIPT: DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, LODD INQUIRY HEARINGS.
S.H.I.E.L.D. FIELD BULLETIN
OUT TO ALL OPERATIVES
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BLACK WIDOW’S APARTMENT
LITTLE ODESSA, BROOKLYN
Ava Orlova is only seventeen years old. How far can she really get?
Natasha sat in the empty kitchen of her apartment in Little Odessa, staring at the tiny black thumb drive in her hand. On it was everything S.H.I.E.L.D. had on either Alex or Ava.
If the QE link holds, Ava Orlova is not just a seventeen-year-old.
Black Widow: Forever Red Page 17