“Clearly.”
“And you might want to rethink the whole no guns thing, too.”
She shrugged. “The Red Widow can be flexible.”
“Does the Red Widow also have forty-five pounds of stolen spy equipment in her duffel bag?” Alex raised an eyebrow.
“Maybe in her lair.”
“Oh, she has a lair now?”
“Where else would she keep her cat?”
“Right, okay. Now I’m getting it.” He laughed.
Ava smiled, looking a little embarrassed. “I even practiced my autograph signature. First I’d draw her big red hourglass, and then I’d cross it out by drawing my own right over it.”
“Double hourglass? Isn’t that a cross?”
She looked like she was going to hit him again. “No, it’s not a cross. Think about it.”
“I’m thinking about it. You’re saying you’d be the Red Cross? Because that’s already a thing.” Alex shook his head.
“Not a cross.” Ava made a face.
“You mean, like a flower, then?”
“Not a flower.” She punched him in the other arm.
“Ow, okay, fine. Why not a spider?”
“Hello, Spider-Man?” She rolled her eyes.
“You put a lot of thought into this, didn’t you?”
Ava shrugged. “I had a lot of spare time.”
“Apparently.”
She ignored him, turning back to study the space around them. But the walls of the container were perfectly smooth—as smooth as the room itself was empty, except for the dust that now spiraled up into the air.
“Nothing’s here,” she said, sounding disappointed.
“That’s because it’s there.” Alex pointed to an outline of a trapdoor cut into the floor of the container—and he guessed the warehouse itself, beneath it.
“Is that—?” Ava crouched over the trapdoor, running her hand along its seams. “A door.”
“So this isn’t a container at all. It’s some kind of secret entrance,” he said.
“Hidden in plain sight.” Now Ava was on her knees. “Looks like Ivan was getting smart in his old age.”
“Not smart enough to stay away from a Romanoff, I guess.” Alex rapped on the door. “It’s definitely hollow. So there’s some kind of space below us.”
He wrenched the rusted panel upward, and a shower of dust gave way as it finally creaked open.
A wooden stepladder descended into the darkness beneath the floor of the container. Alex stuck his head over the edge, trying to get an idea of what lay below. “I think it’s some kind of secret basement.” He pulled his head back up. “Let’s check it out.”
Ava was already holding her flashlight in front of her, and she began to move down the ladder. Alex followed right behind.
Once they entered the darker room below, the beam from the flashlight cut across the shadows, flickering off the far walls. The space under the warehouse was immense. Sealed and protected by a layer of concrete, the lower level had been perfectly preserved in time.
“This place is practically a bomb shelter,” Ava said. “I mean, it even sort of looks like one. And I should know, I grew up in 7B.”
“But it still makes no sense.” Alex shook his head. “A bomb shelter? For protecting who—and from what?” He picked up a mug from what seemed to be some kind of security station. It left a perfect ring in the dust. “And why the guards, if nobody uses the place anymore?”
“I have no idea.”
“Are you sure? Think about it. You’re the one who brought us back here,” he said, hesitating. He almost didn’t want to ask the question, but he had to know. “How did you know we’d find this?”
Ava didn’t answer. Instead, she moved the light in front of her, focusing it on what looked like a hallway. “Look. I think this part is even bigger than upstairs.” She edged toward the hall, pulling Alex after her.
“That’s not exactly an answer to my question.”
“I didn’t know that we’d find anything, Alex. Not for certain. I just knew we had to come back to where Ivan had taken me. Where he’d—” She gave up. “Where I met Natasha.”
She was done talking about it.
Alex got the message.
Instead, they explored. The first hallway branched into others, until it became clear the basement was a whole little world of its own. Dusty old maps of Russia lined the walls, dotted with the locations of former safe houses, munitions depots, secure recon posts. Boxes of electrical parts—coils of wire and old circuitry—sat abandoned on empty desks next to what resembled outdated phone books and discarded departmental handbooks. An old kitchen with yellowing linoleum sat next to a room with a sagging couch and a long-dead television.
Ava turned on a rusting faucet at the sink. Nothing came out.
“I think people might have lived here. At least spent a whole lot of time here,” Alex said. From where they now stood, they could see past the shadows extending out in front of them to where a row of doorways methodically punctuated the hallway walls.
“There. That’s the way,” Ava said, motioning to the wall of doorways.
“To what?”
“I don’t know. I just—it feels like the way.” Ava stopped. “I think—I know this place.” She pushed onward through the shadows, reaching out to touch the first three doors that she passed, finally opening the fourth. “This one. This is it.”
She stepped inside, transfixed.
It looked to Alex like she was moving through a waking dream, almost like Ava was becoming her old self. She’s remembering.
“My mother would stay here with me.” Ava rounded the corner slowly into the next office. “There. Right there. That’s her desk. I used to call it my cave. One safe space all my own. I think I used to play house under it.”
Ava crawled beneath, dragging a valley through the dust. “Her mind was always somewhere else, but I didn’t care, because I knew where she’d be. Sitting right at this desk. So even when she seemed like she was a million miles away, I never minded.”
Alex watched her in the shadows, all curled up now, hiding beneath the desk like a child. He let her talk. He let her do whatever it was that she’d needed to do. Whatever reason she’d come for, whether or not she even knew.
“Look,” her voice echoed. “Come see. My name is still here. The one I wrote with permanent marker on the underside of the wood.”
Alex sat down on the concrete floor next to Ava, who was huddled against her knees. “I wanted to make it permanent. This was my place, with my mom, even when my dad was in Moscow. If we had to be here, I wanted to be right by her side, forever.”
Alex ducked his head next to her. They both couldn’t fit, so he lowered his head to rest in Ava’s lap.
She shone the flashlight on the wood across from her. There, in painstaking lettering, was her name.
AVA ANATALYA.
But above the name there was something more, and Alex reached for it carefully. Gently. “Ava,” he said, pulling a dusty black-and-white photograph free from where it had been tucked away, hidden up in the wooden slats supporting the desk drawer.
Her hands shook as she took it from him.
It was a picture of Ava as a young girl, holding her mother by the hand. Alex recognized Dr. Orlova from the picture of her on the dock he’d seen earlier.
Here, Dr. Orlova looked thin and drawn, wearing some kind of government-issue lab coat that was a few sizes too large. Her dark, haunting eyes seemed too big for her face, and the grip she had on her daughter’s hand was iron, judging by the angle of Ava’s chubby arm beneath it. Ava was gripping something tightly in her arms.
“Karolina. My doll,” Ava said sadly. She traced the picture of the doll with her finger. “I loved her almost as much as my parents. She was the closest thing I had to a sister when I was little. See?” She moved the flashlight, and now Alex could see two more words, written next to two little arrows on the wood.
MAMOTCHKA was written nea
r the top of the desk.
KAROLINA was written near the bottom.
Ava wiped her eyes with her sleeve, blinking rapidly. “It’s all gone now, isn’t it? They’re all gone?”
“It looks like they are,” Alex said, reaching around her until his arms completely encircled her, and their two bodies were just one warm, beating thing. “They’re gone but I’m here.”
“I know,” she said, letting the tears come. “This was my home, Alexei.”
“It was, Ava Anatalya,” he said, reaching his warm hand up to her face, rubbing away her tears as they fell. “You’ve come home.”
“I’m broken,” she said, her face wet. “I know I am.”
“You’re not,” he answered. “You’re strong. Look. You’re the one who’s still here, when everything else is gone.” She nodded.
He hoped she believed him.
“Have you seen enough?” Alex asked. She nodded again.
He slid outward, pulling himself free from the desk, then her. He lifted her in his arms until she was back on her feet, her toes barely touching the floor.
“I think I want to kiss you now, Alexei Manorovsky.” She whispered the words into his cheek, as if pulling her face completely away from his was something she could not even imagine.
“I think I do too,” he whispered back, lowering his mouth down to hers, as gently as if she were made of the snow that was falling steadily and silently from the sky outside.
She raised her tear-streaked face to his. The moment their lips first touched, in the first kiss of many, he knew.
He knew it from how he could feel the kiss in his toes, from how her fingers seemed to burn against his jaw where she touched him.
He knew it from how a single kiss could make him want to burst into laughter and tears all at once.
The feeling was so intoxicating that he craved even more of it—and so terrifying that he dreaded feeling it ever again.
It was all he could do not to tell her right then. He told himself there would be plenty of time for that later. Time when they weren’t being hunted by madmen from afar or threatened by operatives at home.
Time when they weren’t hiding in the secret basement of a burned-out warehouse in a snowy foreign land. Love could wait, even when so many other things could not.
Couldn’t it?
As Alex and Ava were leaving Dr. Orlova’s office, Alex noticed a row of identical gray metal filing cabinets lining the far wall of the room.
“What do you think?” He looked at Ava, and she swung her flashlight across the faces of the cabinets. She took a deep breath, steadying herself.
“My mother kept meticulous records,” she said.
“Do we have time?”
Ava checked her watch. “Four minutes.”
Alex took a closer look. Ava was right; it was her mother’s carefully inked labels that caught his eye. The neat row of hand lettering kept to all capitals, as if whatever was inside this row of cabinets was particularly important, at least to the person writing the labels. He moved instinctively to the center of the cabinets.
O.P.U.S.
Alex paused at the sight of the label. I’m broken. He could still hear Ava saying the words. He didn’t want to do this to her. Not now. She had been through enough, hadn’t she?
It was Ava who spoke up from behind him. “No, you have to. We have to. It’s why we’re here.” She moved her fingers to the handle next to his. “Don’t worry about me. Whatever’s in there, I’ll be okay.”
She didn’t wait for him to answer. Ava pulled on the cabinet as hard as she could. The file drawer still didn’t move.
“Locked,” she said, taking out her switchblade.
“You going to Red Widow it?” Alex raised an eyebrow.
She rolled her eyes, then handed him the flashlight. “I knew I was going to regret telling you that. Just give me two minutes.”
It only took one. Ava yanked the cabinet open and scanned the collection of hanging files inside. “This is it. I think we hit the jackpot.”
“Looks that way,” Alex said, shaking his head. “Holy Mother.”
Each institutional green-paper file was stuffed with graphs and charts and marked with a Russian name, followed by a series of numbers. Alex opened the first file. “They’re the names of the test subjects,” he said. “That’s what it says here, on the front file.”
He pointed. There it was—ORLOVA, AVA ANATOLYEVA. “That’s you, right?”
She nodded. “My father was Anatoly, so I was Anatolyeva. Anatalya for short.”
“So you were part of this O.P.U.S. project, Ava.”
Ava went pale. “Test subject? I was a test subject?”
“That’s what the report says.” Alex nodded. “In Dr. Orlova’s program.”
“She was testing me? Her own child? She knew I was part of the study?” Ava looked like she’d just been slapped in the face. Two bright pink spots appeared on her cheeks. “So I wasn’t here because Ivan took me. I hadn’t been abducted. I was here because she gave me up. She was using me.”
She was fighting tears, he could see it.
He could see she was fighting back tears. He wanted to reassure her, but he couldn’t think how. If Ava was right, her mother was a monster who failed to protect her own child from even greater monsters.
If she was wrong—how would they ever know?
Alex thought about it.
“Your name in this file only explains how Somodorov found you.” He opened another file. “We don’t know anything for certain. Let’s take these files and get out of here. Actually, we should probably grab as many as we can.”
Ava nodded, but she still looked stricken as she turned back to the cabinet. He reached for her trembling hand and squeezed it tightly.
“Hey,” he said. “Don’t do this to yourself.”
She didn’t look at him. Instead, she grabbed handfuls of files, again and again, as if clearing out the old cabinets would somehow clarify the muddle in her own brain.
Alex gave up and did the same.
As he began pulling files, he couldn’t help but check for his own name. Not that he was expecting to find it, but still.
You never know.
You speak Russian, don’t you? It’s possible.
Nobody’s ever really explained that away.
There were no Alex Manors—not even any Alexei Manorovskys—in the cabinets, though, and he breathed a sigh of relief.
By the time they’d stuffed two dusty cardboard boxes with everything they could fit, Alex had stopped worrying about it altogether.
It was Ava who found the photo.
“Wait. What’s this?” Ava stood in front of the cabinet, holding a second file in her hand, in addition to her own.
“What? I can’t see. It’s too dark in here.”
She shone her flashlight on the folder for him. There was a photograph clipped to the file, and he found eyes as dark as his own staring out at him from the front of the green paper.
And a face. A childish, chubby-cheeked face under a head of sprouting curls. With a number stamped along one side of the folder, just like all the others.
“Look at this. He looks just like you.”
“Isn’t there a name?” He looked at the boy’s face. He looked like Alex, but he was also a stranger.
“I don’t see a name. Not in this part of the file.” She looked at him.
“Does it say anything more about the program?” He was impatient.
“There’s a whole stack of reports here.” Ava split them in half and shoved a pile of paper into his arms. “Here. Look.” Ava held another page beneath her flashlight. “This transcript calls it Ivan’s spiritual companion to the Red Room program.” She shivered.
“‘But this time, he’s not holding back’?” Alex looked up from the page he was reading. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s not.” Ava frowned. “This says the children of O.P.U.S. are to be trained as master spies—listen to this
—‘until such a time as their placements with top foreign governments can be assured. Only the highest-level access, particularly with Western heads of state, will allow us to execute our glorious plan.’”
“That’s crazy.”
Ava looked like she was processing ten years at once. “But then the Black Widow showed up, and the warehouse got blown to oblivion, and after that I was nowhere to be found—”
Alex finished the thought. “And everyone thought Ivan was dead. End of program.”
“Except now Ivan’s back in town, and kids are disappearing again….” Ava sifted through papers as she spoke.
Alex shook his head. “But if something’s up and running, there’s no way of knowing what targets have already been compromised, is there? Short of asking Ivan himself?”
Ava pulled a page out of the stack of files and froze. “Alex. That boy. There he is again, the one who looks like you.”
“What about him?” Alex watched, now impatient. He wanted to get out of there. The dust was choking and the darkness was unsettling.
Ava pulled page after page out of his file, scanning each one rapidly. “He has a name, only I don’t think it’s Manor, or even Manorovsky.”
She looked up at him with dark eyes—holding out the paper.
“It’s Romanova.”
Alex stared.
Ava repeated the word, this time in English. “You know. Romanoff.”
He heard the words, but he couldn’t understand what she was saying. He couldn’t and he didn’t want to hear it.
She pressed the open file into his motionless hands.
“And I think he’s you.”
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.
DOD: Did it ever occur to you that you were in too far? All three of you?
ROMANOFF: I’m always in too far, sir.
DOD: It just seems to me that, even for you, Agent Romanoff, this one was different.
ROMANOFF: That’s what deep cover is all about. Your government isn’t going to come bail you out from a black-ops mission that never officially happened. You have to know that going in. I did.
Black Widow: Forever Red Page 20