“Girlfriend?” Natasha asked. “You met her when? A few days ago?”
Great.
“And a headache the size of the Atlantic,” he said, ignoring her. He rubbed his temple.
You’re still just a kid.
She felt sorry for him. For both of them, really.
He looked so young, lying there on the cheap mattress, surrounded by dirty carpeting and peeling wallpaper and water-stained plaster.
And she suddenly felt so old.
“It hurts, right? When you try to remember?” Natasha moved to sit by him on the bed, handing him her bag of ice. “The first time the Red Room wiped me, I felt like my head was going to explode. I thought I had a brain tumor. I was almost relieved when Ivan told me the truth.”
“Relieved?” He sat up, taking the ice.
“Well, those were my Red Room days. The bar was low.” She looked at him. “Even now, the pain comes back when I try to think about certain things.”
“Like me?” Alex draped the bag of ice across his forehead, tipping his head back against the mattress.
“Like you.”
He pressed the ice against his eyes now. “I actually think someone dropped a grenade into my skull.”
“Here. You want to hit the nerve, right…there.” Natasha repositioned the ice for him. Her eyes flickered down to his. “Speaking of potential hazards, you and Ava seem pretty…close.”
“Smooth.” Alex tried to sit up, but Natasha shoved him back down.
“You need to rest.”
He groaned. “Oh my God. You’ve been my sister for what, two minutes? And you’re going to start lecturing me about girls?”
She looked more uncomfortable than he did. “Just—be careful. A relationship is dangerous for both of you, at least in our world. People will use your feelings against you. Look what happened to the two of us.”
“I don’t know what world you live in. My planet is Earth, and there, people are allowed to like each other.” He shook his head. “What happened to you, Agent—” He paused suddenly. “What do I call you? What did I call you?”
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t know.
Alex tried again. “What happened to make you…like this, Natasha?”
Where do I begin?
“I got shot at. Blown up. Betrayed. Dropped out of planes. Attacked with knives. Hit by every kind of moving vehicle on the planet. Any other questions?”
“Yeah.” Alex replaced the ice pack on his pounding head. “Who did this to us, and why would they do it?” He winced.
“Let me.” Natasha reached out, tentatively, and took the ice pack from him, holding it in place. It was a caring gesture, one of the few she had. At least a Romanoff version of one. She was pretty good with a flesh wound and a bandage, too. She let her hand rest against his forehead now.
What did you used to call me, little brother?
Why don’t I know? How is that fair?
It’s our life.
It was.
It was our life, and they took it.
Finally Natasha looked up at him.
“Tasha.” She looked at her brother over the ice bag. “That’s what my friends used to call me, I think. From what I remember. I don’t know if it’s real.”
Alex nodded. “Tasha, then.”
She stood up, suddenly embarrassed.
“And it was Project Blank Slate. The people who did this to us. It appears to be some kind of radical security protocol, and it looks like S.H.I.E.L.D. had something to do with it. They must have somehow gotten us to agree to it. I found the name in our files, but I can’t tell you much more than that. Not yet. Basically, all I know is that you’re in hiding.”
“And what does any of this have to do with Ivan the Strange?”
“It’s possible that he’s the thing you’re hiding from. Maybe we all should be.” Natasha pushed the ice against his head even harder. “But like I said, I don’t have all the answers. I didn’t even know the questions before Sunday.”
Alex looked past her, to the dirty window. “So, no Vermont? Where do I come from, really?”
She looked shy. “Probably Stalingrad. That’s where my family—our family—is from.”
He nodded, trying to keep his face composed. “And New Jersey?”
She shrugged. “A cover. For your own protection.”
Alex sighed. “Well, I guess that explains my love of New Jersey junk food. I’ve only had it for two years.” His eyes flickered to her. “Which would make my mom an agent?”
Natasha hesitated. “Highly trained operative. One of the best. That’s not a small job.” She looked at his hand, as if she wanted to take it. “I’m sure she cares about you.”
“Super,” Alex said. “That makes everything better.” He looked away. “At least now I know why I got this.” He pulled up his sleeve to show Natasha the red hourglass inked on his bicep.
Her face lost all its color. “Where did you get that?”
“A tattoo parlor, probably.”
She glared at him.
“What? I just woke up with it one morning.” He tried to pull his arm away. “I think.”
She shook her head. “That’s no random tattoo. That’s a message. For me.”
“Message? What kind of message?”
“That they can get to you. That you’re not safe. No one is.”
“But I am safe. I’m right here. Nothing happened to me.”
And what would I do if it did?
Slowly, awkwardly—for the first time in years, most likely—Natasha Romanoff reached out and touched her brother’s hand.
“Alexei—”
She took his hand in hers.
Alex cried out suddenly, like all the air was being sucked out of the room.
The cheap mattress shook as he grabbed his sister with both arms and cried into her shoulder as hard as he could.
Ava clutched her towel to her chest as she pressed her hand against the bathroom door. The warping door was sticky with steam beneath her fingers, but she didn’t even notice. The water was still running; she hadn’t wanted them to know she was out.
Ava closed her eyes.
She was only a few meters from Natasha now—just on the other side of the door—and as far as their quantum entanglement was concerned, she might as well have been standing next to a bonfire.
Ava could feel it all.
Disbelief and confusion and relief and sadness and guilt and—
What is that?
That other feeling?
It fluttered in her chest, rippling all the way to her fingertips. There were other feelings too, but this one was new.
It ricocheted through her, even now, straight through her heart.
Love.
Natasha Romanoff loved her brother more than anything in the world.
It wasn’t something she would ever admit—and it wasn’t something Ava had ever felt from her before.
Could Natasha Romanoff be…happy?
I’m from a family of superheroes.
As the three of them rode the public bus into the center of Odessa, Alexei Romanoff was reeling.
He had a sister now, and a girlfriend, and he was sitting behind both of them.
What he didn’t have was a mother, though it was impossible to imagine that the person he’d thought was his mother was not, and that she—whoever she was—was not actually going to ground him for the rest of his life when he got back to New Jersey.
Who was going to ground him now?
The Black Widow? Was she his guardian? She was certainly his closest living relative. That wasn’t speculation. It was the truth. He knew it; he just didn’t know how to process it, and he certainly didn’t know how he felt about it.
He stared out the window as Odessa streaked by.
The bus dumped them out on the corner of Deribasovskaya and Havannaya, into a startling, piercing cold that seemed to entirely negate the late-morning sunshine. They’d plodded across the snowy street in silen
ce—Alex kicking the snow out of his stupid loafers—until they reached the far sidewalk. Then they’d crawled gratefully out of the snow and into a warm corner table at the first lit café they could find, ordering platefuls of eggs and steaming milky cappuccinos and fruity hot kompot.
Alex smothered his confusion with sugar and pastry. As he managed his fourth plate of strudel, Natasha and Ava studied the stolen O.P.U.S. project files.
“I can’t believe I missed it.” Natasha was annoyed.
Ava nodded. “That his lab was right beneath the warehouse all along? All of S.H.I.E.L.D. seems to have missed it.”
Natasha frowned. “And these names are test subjects? All of them? How can that be? There are more than a hundred names on this list.” She looked up from the folder. “A hundred test subjects means there could be a hundred more Entangled Avas out there.”
Ava picked up her coffee.
“You mean a hundred deep-cover operatives waiting to start psychically linking to a hundred heads of state or CEOs or dignitaries the minute Ivan Somodorov gives them the high sign.” Alex put down his fork, shoving away his latest empty plate.
“Depending on what kind of access those children grew up with, Ivan could have positioned every single one of them to now be exactly where he wants them.” Natasha turned a page. “As his spies or operatives. Or even an army of assassins.”
“His own massive, worldwide Red Room.” Ava shook her head. But something more seemed to be bothering her. “A hundred Entangled children? Like me? Where were they on the night of the raid?”
Natasha looked at her. “I didn’t find any other test subjects but you. Ivan was dragging you around as if you were the only one.”
“It’s all a blur.” Ava sighed.
“My name is on that list too, right? So where was I?” Alex asked.
“Maybe this mission was about Ava,” Natasha said.
“But that probably was the whole point, right? That Ava was the only one you found?” Alex stared at his empty plate ruefully, as if he had eaten the answers he wanted.
“What are you getting at?” Natasha asked.
“What if Ivan wanted you to rescue Ava, because he wanted you to bring her back to the United States? What if he wanted an entry point to S.H.I.E.L.D.—and to you, Tash? What if it was all a setup?”
Natasha’s eyes flickered over at her brother. Tash?
He shrugged good-naturedly.
“Even if it was, what do we do?” Ava was frustrated. “If he really does have a hundred Entangled zombies in place, taking out Ivan himself can’t even stop it. We don’t know who or where the targets are. What the threat is. We only have this list of names from what, eight years ago? They could be anywhere.”
“So we’d better get started.” Natasha looked at them. “We find Ivan and move before things get any more complicated.”
Alex looked from Ava to Natasha. “So we take this to S.H.I.E.L.D.?”
Ava winced. “After how we left the Triskeleon? They’re not going to be too happy with us.”
“I’m not happy with them,” Natasha said fiercely. “They’re the last place we can take this. Someone at S.H.I.E.L.D. wiped our memories, and I don’t know who we can trust.”
Nobody said a word.
“So what now?” Ava tossed her napkin to the table, discouraged.
“Maybe there is a way,” Natasha said slowly. She glanced at Ava. “I hate to even bring it up—”
“But you’re about to,” Alex said. “Eh, Tash?”
She ignored him, speaking only to Ava. “If the documents in these files are right, and O.P.U.S. was your mother’s program—”
“It was.” Ava cut her off. It clearly wasn’t her favorite subject.
“That just might give us the advantage.”
“How?” Alex leaned forward over the table.
Natasha looked at Ava. “She’s your mother. You were there at her side the whole time. You probably know more about her than anyone—including her scientific brain. Which means you might even know more about the O.P.U.S. than you think you do.”
“We can’t be sure of that,” Ava said uncertainly. “And I don’t know anything about her. Why she let Ivan take me, what became of her. What she was doing working with Ivan in the first place. I don’t know what good I could do.”
“You did remember much more about the warehouse than you thought you would,” Alex said, looking at her. “Maybe it was starting to come back?”
Ava didn’t answer. A waitress came by, shoving their empty plates onto her tray. Nobody said anything until she was gone again.
Natasha lowered her voice. “So we try to amp up our QE connection, one more time. Just you and me, like it was back at the river. Or like with Tony’s machines. I swear I saw a glimpse of something, before one of his machines exploded.”
“Because that was so great?” Ava looked skeptical.
“Think about it. We make the most powerful connection we can. You let me in, and I’ll see what I can find about O.P.U.S. in your own memories.”
“It’s too dangerous. Last time Ava couldn’t even stay conscious.” Alex sounded panicked.
“I know,” Natasha said. “But there’s no other way.”
Alex reached for Ava’s hand. “I still don’t think it’s a good idea.”
Ava looked at him. “But she’s right. Reestablishing our connection could be the key to figuring out how to break the entanglement.”
“Or it’s not,” Alex said, “and you risk it all for nothing.”
“Not for nothing. For every other person Ivan ever held in that warehouse.”
The conversation was over. Ava’s mind was made up.
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: You mean to tell me, upon learning you yourself had been the recipient of some kind of compulsory cognitive reset--
ROMANOFF: Call it what it is. Just say it. Brain wipe.
DOD: You had zero qualms about conducting an unauthorized cognition experiment of your own, on a minor asset? In some fleabag hotel room in Ukraine? On Ivan Somodorov’s own doorstep?
ROMANOFF: No, sir. That would not be a truthful statement.
DOD: Excuse me?
ROMANOFF: There were not zero qualms. There were qualms. There are always qualms, sir.
DOD: Yet you didn’t stop for one minute to consider the validity of your own concerns? You didn’t once ask yourself why you were doing any of this “Kumbaya” mumbo-jumbo brain garbage at all?
ROMANOFF: No, sir.
DOD: Why not?
ROMANOFF: Only guitar players and Americans do that, sir.
DACHA ODESSA HOTEL
ODESSA CITY CENTER, UKRAINE
Ava and Natasha sat cross-legged, facing each other on the sagging bed. Alex leaned uneasily against the only door to the room, waiting.
“Give me your hand,” Natasha said.
Ava didn’t want to, even if she didn’t have a choice. And Natasha Romanoff didn’t exactly want it either. But this was where they were. This was the moment they’d found each other at now. This impasse, or this opportunity—depending on the moment that came after.
For once in their lives, both Devushki Ivana knew they had to force themselves to drop their mental defenses.
Even the idea of it was torture to Ivan’s girls.
Ivan had done terrible things to them—to both of them.
Not just in the Red Room for Natasha. Or in the labs of the O.P.U.S. project for Ava. The cold reach of Ivan Somodorov went much deeper than that.
Ivan had condemned them to always live their lives in the solitary shadows, to always believe they were alone, that they could never be anything but
alone. That was life beneath Ivan’s dumpling moon. That was his curse.
Deep down, neither girl had ever thought it could be broken.
There was nothing more powerful in the universe than the cold truth of Ivan Somodorov, than their hatred of him and their fear.
Or so they had thought.
Until now. Until there were two of them—
Entangled into something bigger, something more.
An irrefutable truth of their own.
Together, they reached for each other’s hands. Together, they looked into each other’s eyes. And together, they did the last thing anyone expected them to be able to do.
They let it happen.
As Ava’s fingers touched Natasha’s, their minds rolled forward, intertwined, endlessly combining and recombining, Ava gave in to the pain that always came with linking to Natasha’s psyche—but the moment she stopped trying to resist it, the sensation overwhelmed her, swallowing her whole, until she could no longer separate what hurt from what did not, the way a fish could no longer sense the water.
Whether the pain swallowed her or she swallowed the pain became impossible to say, and she felt nothing at all.
She felt nothing, but saw everything.
Soon it was almost impossible to tell one memory from another—or even to know whose mind they were in one moment to the next.
They were both. They were always.
They were at the end and the beginning, all at once.
The memories flowed.
A scared Tasha presses herself against elaborately painted wallpaper in Stalingrad, as heavy boots tramp down cobblestone streets and shots ring out beyond her playroom windows. Tasha reaches through the bars of the crib next to her. Don’t cry, Alexei. I’m not going to let the bad men hurt you. She looks down at the little brown puppy, whining by her feet. Will we?
A young Ava refuses to let go of her father’s hand, following him down the stairs to the street as she begs him not to leave their old Moscow apartment. I don’t care if it’s your job. Mama and I don’t want to go to Odessa without you.
Black Widow: Forever Red Page 22