by Alex Irvine
This gave Scott an idea. He’d forced Yellowjacket to shrink. He had some of the blue discs left. “Yeah, I agree,” he said, and spun one in Cross’s direction.
Cross batted it aside and the disc hit one of the bullet ants on the rug. It chittered—and all of a sudden it was the size of a dog. A big dog. Whoa, Scott thought. He threw another one and again Cross deflected it. Bam! The train engine expanded, punching out the window and part of the wall of Cassie’s bedroom, its painted-on face looking out over the astonished cops in the street with a smile. The train tipped out over the yard and crushed one of the squad cars.
Paxton had seen enough. “Cassie!” he yelled out, and charged into the house and up the stairs.
In Cassie’s room, Yellowjacket was blasting apart everything Scott threw at him. “Let me show you just how insignificant you are,” he gloated.
As Paxton ran up the stairs, he smacked right into an ant the size of a Saint Bernard. It knocked him back down the stairs and ran outside, chittering the whole way. Gale and Maggie watched it go by. “That’s a messed-up-looking dog,” Gale said.
“I’m going to destroy everything you love,” Cross said, still blasting away at the miniaturized Ant-Man. Then he spun around as Paxton shouted, “Freeze!”
Cross swatted the gun from Paxton’s hand and stood, enjoying Paxton’s sudden confusion. Scott jumped up on Yellowjacket’s back and tried to pry the cover off the blasters’ power source. “I can’t break through,” he said to himself.
But Cross heard. “It’s titanium, you idiot.” He reached back and squeezed Scott between his palms. Scott flashed to full-size and belted him in the face. “Get her out of here!” he shouted at Paxton. Cassie was hiding behind his legs.
“Come on,” Paxton said—but Yellowjacket stepped between them and the door. “Sorry, sweetheart,” Cross said, almost gently. “You have to help Daddy pay for his mistakes.”
“You stay behind me, okay?” Paxton said. Scott gave him all the credit in the world. He was laying his life on the line for Cassie.
“I’m going to have to shrink between the molecules to get in there,” Scott said. He’d always talked to himself while on a job, and it was the same now. He remembered Hank’s story about the titanium missile housing, and how Hank’s wife had disappeared into the quantum realm to disarm the warhead.
“Daddy, help!” Cassie screamed. Yellowjacket’s blasters powered up again.
Leaping toward the power unit on Yellowjacket’s back, Scott said, “I love you, Cassie.” He punched a button to override the regulator and vanished into the spaces between the titanium atoms. He fell through the power unit, shattering links and circuits on the way. He could hear Cross screaming in frustration as his systems went offline and he lost control of the suit—and then Scott shattered the matrix of Pym Particles at the core of the power unit, and everything changed.
Paxton saw the yellow-and-black armored suit start to crackle and shut down. The man inside thrashed around, trying to get control of it. Then things got even stranger than they already had been. The suit started to crumple in on itself, like all the air was being sucked out of it. It crumpled and shrank, sparks shooting out of it… and then, just like Pym Tech, the entire suit and the man inside shrank into a brilliant glowing speck. It hung in the air for a few seconds, slowly dimming, and then it was gone.
“Daddy, where are you?” Cassie said.
Scott fell through the subatomic realm. He got smaller and smaller. When he’d started falling, he’d seen dust motes the size of houses. Now he was seeing atoms themselves, tracing the patterns of the electrons that orbited each one. Ahead, he thought he could start to see the quantum realm that lay under the material universe. It was… there was no way to describe it, but he was pretty sure that if he got there, it was going to be a one-way trip.
He tried punching buttons to make himself grow again. Nothing happened. “Oh no,” he said, remembering more about what Pym had said.
You would enter a reality where all concepts of time and space become irrelevant. And as you shrink… for all eternity… everything that you know… and love… gone forever.
He heard Cassie’s voice echoing from somewhere far away.
“Daddy!”
He was becoming part of it. He couldn’t turn around, couldn’t grow… “Cassie,” he said. Still he heard her voice. “Come on, Daddy…”
And Pym’s voice again: “Do not mess with the regulator.”
That was it. Scott fumbled at his belt, looking around at the endless emptiness. He still had a blue disc. Blue for expansion. If he could connect it to the regulator…
He popped open the regulator housing. There was no time for fancy engineering. He held the disc in place, forced the housing shut again, and took a deep breath. Then he punched the button to return to normal size.
The entire universe seemed to heave around him. He felt his growth accelerate and go on and on. He wasn’t growing or shrinking by a factor of a thousand. He was becoming a billion times bigger, or a trillion.
Cassie’s bedroom coalesced around him and Scott dropped to his knees. He’d done it.
“Daddy!” Cassie shouted. She ran to him and jumped into his arms. “I love you so much.”
“I love you, too,” he said. That was the only important thing. “So much.”
Paxton gave them a moment and then he cleared his throat. Scott looked over at him, wondering if he was about to be under arrest again. But Paxton pointed up and said, “There’s a big hole in the roof.”
Scott looked up, too. There sure was. “Sorry,” he said.
When Gale and the SWAT team came pounding up the stairs into Cassie’s bedroom, with Maggie right in the middle of them, they found Paxton holding Cassie. “Is she all right?” Maggie asked.
Paxton nodded. “She’s fine.”
“Mommy,” Cassie said. As Paxton handed her over to Maggie, Cassie—and only Cassie—saw the tiny shadow of her father waving good-bye to her from the edge of her nightstand. He leaped away and was gone.
But she knew he would be back.
CHAPTER 22
Scott couldn’t wait to tell Hank about what had happened to Darren Cross, and as he’d expected, Hank wanted to hear every word. Then he wanted to hear more about the subatomic journey. “Scott, please. You don’t remember anything?”
“Hank, I… I don’t.” He’d already told Hank that he’d heard Cassie’s voice, and something about the discs… but his memory was foggy. Maybe he’d been too small for memories to form or something. He didn’t know.
“There must be something else,” Hank said. But there wasn’t. Scott didn’t have anything else to say to him. Hank sighed. “Well, I suppose the human mind just can’t comprehend the experience, but you made it. You went in and you got out. It’s amazing.”
Scott knew how much this meant to him. If he could go and come back, that meant that maybe there was a chance for Hope’s mother to do the same. Maybe she wasn’t gone forever. But none of them could say that out loud.
“Scott,” Hope said. “I’ll walk you out.” Scott got the message. Hank was still recovering from his gunshot wound. Hope didn’t want him to get too excited.
Scott stood up. “Get some rest,” he said, and followed Hope out.
Hank sat, lost in thought. Was it possible? He gazed at an old picture of Janet, taken when Hope was still a baby. Maybe…
He got up, meaning to go down to the lab and putter around while he thought about these new ideas. When he opened the door, though, he found Hope in the middle of a kiss with Scott. “When did this happen?” he asked. He hadn’t had any idea.
“Nothing’s happening,” Hope said.
“Well, hold on. Something’s kind of happening,” Scott said.
“Well if that’s the case, shoot me again,” Hank said.
Scott played to the occasion. “Yeah, I don’t know what you’re doing grabbing me and kissing me like that. I was a little surprised myself. I have to get somewhere. I�
��ll see you later, Hank. Really, Hope.” He headed for the stairs, with Hope smiling at him.
“Scott,” Hank called as Scott reached the stairs.
“Yeah.”
“You’re full of it.”
“Oh yeah.”
Then he was gone, and Hank realized that, at some point during the past few days, he’d rediscovered hope. And Hope. They were a family again.
Later that evening, Scott was over at Paxton and Maggie’s house for dinner. They were all making an effort to reconnect. Scott knew he was never going to get together with Maggie again, but he wanted to be part of Cassie’s new family, too. “Well, Scott,” Paxton said when they were finishing up. “I met with my captain today. He wanted a report of the night you got out of jail.” Scott got tense. This was where things might go really wrong. “Something happened with the cameras, and circuits got fried, and…” He shrugged. “But I told him you were processed correctly.”
Scott couldn’t quite believe this. “Really?” This was a huge favor. Escape would have added years to his sentence, even if Hope decided not to press charges on the original crime that had landed him in jail.
“Well, yeah. Can’t be sending Cassie’s dad back to jail on a technical glitch, right?”
Scott was now regretting calling Paxton a butthead a couple of weeks back. He was a decent guy, a standup guy, and he was good for Cassie, too. “Thank you, Paxton. I’m blown away. Thank you for everything you do for Cassie.”
“Oh, well, that’s my pleasure,” Paxton said. “But no, this one… I did it for you.”
For a moment they almost had a kind of emotional connection. Then both of them noticed it and they looked away from each other. “This is awkward,” Scott said.
“Yeah,” Paxton agreed.
Cassie chimed in. “Yeah.”
“I mean, what do we even talk about after all that?”
“Oh, I know!” Cassie said.
“What?”
“I did my first cartwheel today.”
“What?”
Maggie nodded. “Yeah. She has been practicing all week, but today was the magic day.”
Paxton reached into his pocket. “I recorded it on my phone. Here.”
Sure enough, on the screen, there was Cassie doing cartwheel after cartwheel. “No, that can’t be Cassie,” Scott said. He turned to her. “That’s not you.”
“Yeah it is,” she said with a gap-toothed grin.
“This is a professional gymnast. There’s no way that’s her,” Scott went on, stringing the joke out. Cassie loved it when he teased her like this.
“Yeah, that’s her,” both Maggie and Paxton said.
Cassie, meanwhile, was feeding the dog-sized ant under the table. It couldn’t stay out in the wild anymore, and it sure was a cool pet to have. “Good boy,” she said.
Scott was still amazed at the cartwheel. “That’s pretty amazing, peanut.” Then his own phone rang. He looked at the screen. “Sorry. It’s work.”
He met Luis in the parking lot of a little strip mall and could tell Luis was dying to start talking. Before he let him get carried away, Scott said, “Just give me the facts. Just the facts, only the facts. Breathe. Focus. Keep it simple.”
“No, no, no. No doubt, no doubt,” Luis said, and then he started in like Scott hadn’t said anything at all.
“Okay, so I’m at this art museum with my cousin Ignacio, right? And there was this, like, abstract expressionism exhibit, and you know me, I’m more like a neo-cubist kind of guy, right? But there was this one Rothko that was sublime, bro, oh my God—”
“Luis.”
“Okay, sorry, I’m just… you know, uh, I just get excited and stuff. But anyway, anyway. Ignacio tells me, ‘Yo, I met this crazy-fine writer chick at the spot last night, like, fine, fine, crazy-stupid fine.’ So this writer chick tells Ignacio, ‘Yo, I’m like a boss in the world of guerrilla journalism, and I got mad connects with the peeps behind the curtains, y’know what I’m sayin’?’ Ignacio’s like, ‘For real?’ And she’s like, ‘Yeah. You know what, I can’t tell you who my contact is, because he works with the Avengers.’”
“Oh no,” Scott said.
“Yeah. Like he comes up to him and he says, y’know, ‘I’m looking for this dude who’s most unseen, who’s flashing this fresh tech, who’s got, like, bomb moves, right? Who you got?’ And she’s like, ‘Well, we got everything nowadays. We got a guy who jumps, we got a guy who swings, we got a guy who crawls up the walls, you gotta be more specific.’
“And he’s like, ‘I’m looking for a guy who shrinks.’
“I got all nervous ’cause I keep mad secrets for you, bro. So I asked Ignacio, ‘Did he tell the stupid-fine writer chick to tell you to tell me because I’m tight with that man that he’s looking for him?’”
“And? What’d he say?”
Luis had never looked so excited. “He said yes.”
The Avengers, Scott thought. No way. The Avengers! Falcon was looking for him. Had to be Falcon. And he was being cool about it. If they’d just wanted to come after Scott for the job he’d pulled in upstate New York, that would have been simple. Like, Iron Man could have been waiting in Paxton’s front yard anytime. But they were keeping it quiet, which meant they really wanted to talk.
Like maybe about Scott Lang being an Avenger.
No, Scott corrected himself.
They wanted Ant-Man.
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CHAPTER 1
The twins knew something was wrong. They reached for each other and touched hands, wondering what they should do. Around them, alarms and sirens blared. They heard explosions from outside the Leviathan Chamber. Soldiers ran to take up defensive positions. Before them, the scepter stood in its housing, the blue energy from its gem crackling in the air above it.
The Avengers charged through a snowy forest toward the fortress that was their target, at the edge of the city of Sokovia. Enemy soldiers fired at them. Hawkeye located one of the soldiers’ firing positions and blew it up with an explosive arrow. Thor smashed another gunner’s nest with his hammer. The soldiers inside tumbled out, falling out of the tree. Hulk took on the heavy equipment, smashing a tank and looking around for another one.
Zooming overhead, Iron Man crashed hard into an invisible energy shield protecting the fortress. He swore as he tumbled to the ground.
“Language, Stark,” Captain America said. “Jarvis, what’s the view from upstairs?”
Jarvis was feeding information into the displays inside Iron Man’s helmet. “It appears the central building is protected by some kind of energy shield. Strucker’s use of alien technology is well beyond that of any other HYDRA base we’ve taken down.”
All the other Avengers could hear him because of their communication devices on a secure team-only wavelength.
“Loki’s scepter must be there,” Thor said. “Strucker couldn’t have mounted this defense without it. At long last…”
“At long last is lasting a little long, boys,” Black Widow said.
“Yeah,” Hawkeye commented from behind a tree, where he was picking off HYDRA soldiers one after another. “I think we’re losing the element of surprise.”
Soldiers poured out of the fortress, lining its exterior walls and counterattacking. The Avengers were closer to it now. On the other side of the fortress was the city. Iron Man soared over the fortress. He couldn’t get through the energy shield protecting the main keep, but the soldiers on the walls were outside the shield. He fired repulser beams at them and dodged their return fire. Some of them had Chitauri weapons.
In th
e forest, racing toward the fortress, the rest of the Avengers fought Strucker’s troops. Captain America skidded to a halt on his motorcycle and threw it at a jeep. The jeep swerved and crashed into a tree.
Inside the fortress, Baron Strucker strode through the command center, looking for the officer on duty. “Who gave the order to attack?”
The soldier nearest him stammered, “Herr Strucker, it’s… it’s the Avengers.”
Another soldier, more calmly, added, “They landed in the far woods. The perimeter guard panicked.”
“They have to be after the scepter,” Strucker said. “Can we hold them?”
“They’re the Avengers!” the first soldier said, as if he couldn’t believe the question.
The Avengers, Strucker thought. Everyone fears them. “Deploy the rest of the tanks,” he ordered a waiting officer. “Concentrate fire on the weak ones. A hit may make them close ranks.” He turned to a scientist accompanying him, Dr. List. “Everything we’ve accomplished… we’re on the verge of our greatest breakthrough!”
“Then let’s show them what we’ve accomplished,” Dr. List answered smoothly. “Send out the twins.”
“It’s too soon.”
“It’s what they signed up for,” Dr. List pointed out.
Strucker shook his head, watching the soldiers deploy out of the command center. “My men can hold them,” he said, but inside he wasn’t sure.
CHAPTER 2
A heavy Chitauri gun fired at Iron Man. The beam missed him and destroyed part of a building in Sokovia. “Sir, the city is taking fire,” Jarvis said.
“Strucker’s not going to worry about civilian casualties,” Tony said. “Send in the Iron Legion.”
The Iron Legion was a squadron of remotely operated Iron Man armored suits. They landed in different parts of Sokovia. “Please return to your homes,” one said. “We will do our best to ensure your safety during this engagement.”