Few people appreciated the lethal potential of arrows these days. Modern warfare, regardless of scale, was all about explosives and bullets and blades; the fact that a simple length of aluminum core sheathed in carbon fiber (the successor to traditional wood) could still prove to be a deadly projectile tended to come as an unpleasant surprise to those on the receiving end. Evidence of this was presently undeniable in the form of a dozen bodies littering the Plaza in Bunker Hill, the blood of unsuspecting morning shoppers and office workers running in scarlet rivulets along the gullies between the Art Deco flagstones.

 

All of these victims, you see, had been felled by arrows, and now lay spread-eagled with shafts protruding from necks, chests and foreheads as if cut down on some medieval battlefield rather than in the midst of downtown Los Angeles.

 

Sascha Gutiérrez didn’t know much about arrows. She was, after all, only six years old. However, this was a mature enough age for her to realize that she was the next intended target for the man in the colorful costume and mask who had just shot her attendant custodian, Miss Alvarado, and who was now standing some forty feet away with his bow still raised.

 

Sascha didn’t cry, a tiny mouse of a girl but brave beyond her years. She just clutched her toy giraffe Bobby to her chin and silently waited for the inevitable. Across the blood-splattered Plaza the masked man nocked a new shaft, pulled back his bowstring, and then let fly.

 

The arrow sliced through the air…

 

…but then, in the space of a blink, the shaft stilled and then splintered into four perfect quarters of shattered filament as it was struck in the course of its flight by another arrow, this one released from just behind Sascha’s shoulder and traveling at a trajectory expertly designed to counter the first projectile.

 

Sascha flinched and exhaled a gasp. The masked man faltered momentarily, then dived for cover behind an ornamental statue as a second arrow speared through the air towards him. This arrow struck polished marble but didn’t penetrate; instead, the shaft’s rounded arrowhead exploded in a colorful cloud of sparks and dust and fog, obscuring the immediate area from view.

 

Sascha turned to see another man crouch down behind her. He too was dressed in mask and costume and carried a bow, but he was wearing an elaborate tunic of violet and indigo rather than the more sinister black and crimson of the first man, and his bow was a gleaming golden affair. He was also smiling, although even at six years old Sascha knew that this was just for her benefit; she suspected, correctly, that the last thing her guardian angel felt like doing was smile.

 

“Does that giraffe have a name?”

 

Sascha nodded. “Bobby,” she said. Clint Barton smiled a little wider.

 

“That’s a good name,” he said, softly. “I knew a Bobbi once. She was a lion, though. Brave, just like you.”

 

Clint ruffled Sascha’s hair with one gloved hand, then turned his attention to the woman who was lying at the girl’s side. The woman – Hispanic, late 20s, in a plain ivory blouse and gray jacket and skirt now soaked through with blood, courtesy of the arrow embedded in her right shoulder – was, miraculously, still alive. She met Clint’s gaze with dark, pretty eyes, then grunted in pain as she slipped her left hand into her jacket and retrieved a slim black wallet. Clint took the wallet and glanced inside.

 

“René Alvarado, US Marshals Service,” he murmured. “WITSEC?”

 

The woman, Alvarado, nodded briefly. She looked across at Sascha, and Clint did likewise. WITSEC was the Federal Witness Protection Program.

 

Alvarado said, “Her mother was a district attorney in Boston. She and her partner were murdered because of a case they were working on. Sascha here was a witness. We’ve been trying to keep her safe, but this goes beyond traditional organized crime. This assassin… we’re up against a mask here. We… we…”

 

Alvarado faltered. Clint held her, fearing the worst.

 

“Protect the girl, Hawkeye,” Alvarado said, blood suddenly pooling in the corner of her mouth. “He can’t have her. He can’t.”

 

And that was all.

 

Clint Barton, the Avenger known as Hawkeye, stood then and gathered Sascha Gutiérrez close. The sound of distant sirens was drawing close, heralding the arrival of medical assistance, but Clint knew that it would be too late for René Alvarado or for any of these other victims of some maniac assassin’s kill-spree. Across the plaza, there was movement in the cloud of murk released by the smokescreen arrow he’d fired earlier. The killer had been buttonholed temporarily but know he was back on the offensive.

 

He can’t have her.

 

Clint grimaced, his eyes darkening in the holes of his mask.

 

“He won’t,” he said. “I promise.”

 

“Here we go, Mr. Stark, just as promised,” crowed Bartholomew Knott, flourishing his wide-brimmed hat in the direction of an expansive assortment of white, silver and ecru buildings, an installation collectively known as the Avengers West Compound. “We’ve been working round the clock to make sure everything’s shipshape for your official reoccupation,” he said, “and I’m proud as punch to say we’ve beat the deadline. Now, if you can confirm precisely how many team members the on-site staff will be catering for, I’ll - ”

 

“Three.”

 

Bart Knott’s beaming smile sagged. “Three?”

 

“Three,” said Anthony Stark, the Avenger known as Iron Man. “Just… three. For now.”

 

“Oh.”

 

Behind his faceplate of gleaming gold, Stark grimaced. Bart had every reason to sound disappointed. As the Compound’s new head of operations it had been his responsibility to assemble a team of grounds-staff and housekeepers to attend to the facilities here after an extended vacancy period, and on initial inspection a grand job had been done by all. It was a shame such enterprise couldn’t be admired by a full compliment of Avengers.

 

“Hawkeye and The Wasp will take up permanent residence on-site,” Stark explained, “and I’ll also be here or hereabouts on a regular basis. And, rest assured, we will be inducting new recruits as soon as possible…”

 

He made this last claim with authority, although the truth was it had been two weeks since the departure of Moon Knight, Spider-Woman, Doctor Druid and Sir Halifax of Wundagore from the West Coast ranks, and the three remaining members of the charter had barely had a moment to consider replacements, despite an unanimous agreement that this was an obvious priority. The decision to return to Los Angeles had been a fair one, what with the rebuilding and renewal of San Francisco’s long-suffering infrastructure now proceeding apace, but a fifteen-acre stretch of Pacific Coast real estate (replete with state-of-the-art living quarters, maximum security underground laboratories, surveillance databases and medical facilities, a Quinjet hangar, a training complex, two hundred feet of private beaches, and provision for a dozen sports and leisure activities) was a little grandiose for just three people. Still, as Clint had mentioned in that cheeky-cheerful way of his, at least the Jacuzzi would never be overcrowded. And -

 

“If you’re planning to join us for lunch, would you please be so kind as to remove your… contraption?”

 

Stark turned at the sound of a woman’s voice. He found himself face-to-face – or, at least, face-to-faceplate – with a lady of immaculate bearing, tall and curve-hipped, with treacle-black hair swept back from a severe yet lovely face and pinned precisely with a number of ivory clasps. The woman was young, without question, but she wore a starched gray dress with a high, lacy collar and sensible shoes in a fashion that hadn’t been in style for at least two centuries. She wasn’t smiling but she had the most lucidly beautiful amber eyes that Stark had ever seen. Who needed smiles and fashion sense with eyes like that?

 

“Remove my what?” he asked, a trifle dreamily. The woman sniffed, and Bart Knott cleared his throat uncomfortably.

 

“Ah,” he said. “Yes. Mr. Stark, this is Miss Salome N’Kitka-Foyle, from Wakanda by way of Gloucester in England. She’s our new Head Housekeeper. Wonderful credentials, I’m sure you’ll - ”

 

“I like my floors clean, Mr. Stark,” said Miss N’Kitka-Foyle, with that deep, polished glass accent that was so quintessentially Wakandan. “Spit-spot. No muck, no grease. Ergo, no armor in certified areas, including the kitchen and dining room.”

 

Stark blinked. “I don’t leave grease,” he said, evenly. “This contraption I’m wearing is a holistic exoskeleton of ionized proto-alloy, augmented with extradimensional Nth Metal and layered over a weave of sophisticated, submolecular microcircuitry of spectrofuturistic design. It’s not the stripped out engine of a 250cc Honda scooter.”

 

“Pish.”

 

“Pish?”

 

“Pish-pish. My mother was attendant in the royal palace of T’Challa, and she brooked no excuses any more than I shall. No grease, Mr. Stark, ionized or otherwise.” Miss N’Kitka-Foyle drew herself to her full height and curled an eyebrow. “Will there be a problem with that?”

 

Stark scowled. “Well, let’s see. If Graviton or The Absorbing Man launch a surprise attack on us in the middle of dinner, do you promise you’ll hold the fort whilst I go suit up in the back yard?”

 

Miss N’Kitka-Foyle sniffed disdainfully and turned away with an elegant flounce. “Lunch in ten minutes, gentlemen,” she said. “Parsnip and chick pea soup. If you’re late, there’ll be no reheating, understood?”

 

“I hate chick peas.”

 

“How spectrofuturistic of you.”

 

In the woman’s wake, Tony Stark glanced down at his armored form of crimson and gold, a circular cavity of blue-white light burning furiously in his chest like a beacon. The unibeam could release a electromagnetic laser pulse of pure concussive force that, deployed without restraint, could cause fatal impact injuries to an average, unprotected person. Which was tempting, but Stark decided to count to ten in his head instead. Or maybe twenty.

 

“Welcome home, Avengers?” Bartholomew Knott said, hopefully. Iron Man cast him a baleful golden stare.

 

“Yes,” he said, through gritted teeth. “Delighted, I’m sure.”

 

“Tell me about my father.”

 

Janet Van Dyne was alarmed when Maureen Lippmann started speaking to her, but this was unsurprising, what with Maureen just being a face on the television. It was a pleasant face, that of a dark-haired, middle-aged woman with kind eyes and a broad smile, and her voice was also soft and well-pronounced with an educated English accent that Miss Salome N’Kitka-Foyle would have approved of, but that was all beside the point. Maureen had no business speaking to anyone. She was an actress in a television show, performing in the background as Janet emerged freshly-showered from the bathroom of her private suite in the Avengers West Compound before settling back on her bed in her nightgown, with balls of cotton wool stuffed between her bare toes and a nail file and bottle of cherry red polish to hand.

 

It was all very undignified.

 

“Are you talking to me?” Janet asked, eyes wide beneath the careless hook of her chestnut brown fringe as she sat up and stared across the room. The face on the television smiled back at her eerily.

 

“Oh yes,” she said. “Hello, mother.”

 

Janet flinched. Then her expression darkened and she set aside her cosmetics.

 

“Nikola.”

 

“Yes.” The face on the screen nodded slightly, then inclined, eyes sparkling. “Please don’t waste your time attempting to track my transmission, my relays are encrypted far beyond the human capacity to decipher. Even Stark wouldn’t be able to triangulate my current position in the spatial schematic, especially - ”

 

“What do you want, Nikola?” Janet snapped. “Believe me, after the night I’ve had the last thing I need is a confrontation with you, let alone a conversation.”

 

Maureen – or rather, the invisible intruder who had appropriated her likeness as a mask – continued to smile. “Yes,” she murmured. “You’ve been such a busy little bee, haven’t you? Flitting through the darkness of the city like Florence Nightingale on gossamer wings. Responding to one metahuman incident in San Pedro, then aiding the emergency services in Garvanza after a bridge collapse… it must be difficult, providing a protective blanket for millions of needy citizens with such a depleted team, yes? You’ve been on call for eighteen hours and thirty-nine minutes. You must be exhausted. I think you deserve a dip in Lake You.”

 

“I deserve a what now?” Janet looked on, incredulously. “Listen, you want my advice? No more cybernetic interfacing with the cable network. Especially Oprah. It’ll only end badly. And, what, are you saying you’ve been watching me?”

 

“I can access and arrogate the intended function of any electrical network or mechanical appliance for my own purposes, including the manipulation of pixilated broadcasts.”

 

“So you have been watching me.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Are you watching me now?”

 

Maureen said nothing, but continued to smile. Janet shivered, then snatched up the television remote in fury and directed it at the set. The screen went black. Five seconds later, the radio alarm clock on the bedside table nearby bleeped into life, and the warm, familiar tones of the mid-morning KCBS presenter began to spill from the speaker.

 

“I just want an answer to my question, mother,” Nikola said, in another stolen voice.

 

Don’t call me that, you monster. Janet scowled as she began to pluck cotton wool from between her toes, the intended application of nail polish suddenly no longer a priority. “You want to know about your father,” she muttered. “Of course you do. It’s your overriding desire. But what am I supposed to say? What could I possibly tell you about Hank Pym that you don’t already know? He used his own brain-patterns to give you artificial consciousness, and if that wasn’t enough you stole his corpse from his own funeral! Don’t you understand, Nikola? There’s nothing left. You already possess him, mind and body.”

 

“But not soul.”

 

Janet rounded on the alarm clock, fists clenched. “What could something like you,” she asked, in a poisonous whisper, “know about the human soul?”

 

Janet slid from the bed and stalked across the bedroom of her suite, only shedding her robe when she reached the door of her walk-in closet and passed inside. She was disgusted by the idea that Nikola’s synthetic eyes, in any form, might be gifted the opportunity to roam over her naked body for so much as a second, but evidently she’d been a victim of the creature’s voyeurism all day, most likely longer. Such an invasion of intimacy, worse than any direct confrontation… the psychology of the situation didn’t bear thinking about.

 

The closet was filled with all manner of clothes, from business suits to cocktail dresses, but none of these interested Janet at that moment. Instead she snatched a small golden bracelet from a hook on the back of the door and slipped it over her slender wrist, thumbing a nigh-invisible switch on the inner curve as she did so. Instantly there was a rush of air and a shiver of fabric caressing skin, and in the next heartbeat her robe fell away and inside her petite body was sheathed in a sleek suit of jet-black streaked with slashes of amber-gold. A weave of nylon and tessellated steel microfibers, bountifully laced with a concoction of unstable molecules (copyright Reed Richards) and Pym particles (copyright her late husband, and Nikola’s ‘father’, Henry Pym). Henry had manufactured the bracelet and the costume contained within to Janet’s specifications a few weeks before he’d died during an incident the Avengers had come to call the Kang / Ultron War. His parting gift.

 

Janet’s heart contracted with sorrow even as her blood boiled in fury.

 

The bedside radio silenced, replaced by the renewed hum of the television and the return of Maureen’s smiling face as Janet emerged from her closet and stalked past, heading for the bay windows on the far side of the suite. “I understand more about humanity than you give me credit for,” Nikola called out in her wake. “I’m endeavoring to learn, to adapt. And I appreciate now that the dignified tributes of mourners means nothing without other less decorous anecdotes, those that illuminate a man’s true nature. It’s the darkness of a person’s soul that gives shape to the light.”

 

Janet snorted, pausing to cast a scornful glare back over her shoulder. “Oh, how lovely,” she purred. “Most poetic Ultron ever. ‘I wandered lonely as a toaster’? ‘On either side the river lie, long fields of corpses, now you die’? Or maybe Larkin’s more your style. This Be The Verse. You know how that one goes? Access you databanks and get back to me.”

 

“My father - ”

 

“Your father was a failure!” Janet screamed. “Is that indecorous enough for you?”

 

She gulped back a breath, tears stinging her eyes, but didn’t turn away no matter how much she wanted to. This was something that needed to be said. Perhaps it had needed to be said for a very long time now.

 

“Hank Pym was a brilliant, wonderful man,” she snapped, “but, yes. He failed. Over and again, he failed. In his mind, at least. Because he was haunted by his limitations. Nothing he achieved satisfied him because he was the most conflicted kind of person anyone could ever meet: a genius in his field, an egotist and a perfectionist, but also afflicted with low self-esteem and manic depression. He made such incredible discoveries and indulged his fascination for science and his craving for adventure, but he was intimidated by his peers – Stark, Reed Richards, Bruce Banner, T’Challa in matters of the mind; Thor, Captain America and even The Hulk in body – and he was obsessed with the notion of proving himself, a tragic preoccupation considering how his fellow heroes already accepted and admired him in ways he could never appreciate.

 

“People, ordinary people, they see us – the superhumans, the gifted ones – through the lens of a camera, or captured in all our glory in the pages of comic books. They don’t see the flaws. Hank could never be Thor or Captain America, because in truth none of us could hope to be, but the rest of us accept those limitations and pledge to be the best we can be regardless. I was a semi-successful fashion designer for a while but not through any real talent on my part; I was a quirk, a superhero flashing my sequins and clicking my heels for the celebrity magazine circuit, and as soon as someone else oozed into the spotlight my star waned. I was a nobody again, a token girl in a man’s world, an insect, a laughing stock… but not in my own mind. I survived that experience, just as anyone might persevere. Then, for a time I excelled as leader of the Avengers, but ultimately I was in charge when Baron Zemo’s Masters Of Evil invaded the mansion and came close to destroying everything we held dear. I endured that too.

 

“That survival instinct is what drives many of us on, no matter what. But for Hank… for Hank, that deficit of inner strength nagged at his spirit like a splinter. It made him reckless, unstable. It cost him everything. It… cost him me.”

 

Janet slumped against the wall, her head in her hands.

 

“You want to know what’s at the crux of all this, Nikola?” she breathed. “Part of me is surprised you’ve never suspected, although I guess that would take human sensibilities. Hank was infertile. He couldn’t have children. Human children. I don’t expect you to understand, but to a man given to questioning his own worth this was a cruel reality to accept. There’s no way of knowing for sure but, in my heart, I’m convinced his fixation with the genesis of true artificial intelligence stemmed from that realization. Crueler still, though, is the fact that I didn’t regret the situation.

 

“Shock, scandal! Call the wicked wife police! I don’t think Hank Pym would have made a good father, and I don’t say that as a challenge to you. It’s what I truly feel. I believe his eventual creation – you, in your primary incarnation – was a child built to a blueprint in more ways than one. Hank was obsessed with the process, with the idea of you. I can’t speak from personal experience but I’d imagine most good parents value the actuality of their child, not the theory.”

 

“You consent to deprecate a dead man’s memory, then?” Nikola hissed, almost amused. “A different edge to The Wasp’s sting, yes? Unexpected. And curious.”

 

“It doesn’t mean I loved him any the less back when we were together, or thought of him as anything less than a brilliant, capable man. Or that I miss him less now.”

 

“But I requested the truth, as perceived by you.”

 

“Yes.”

 

The face on the television screen flickered. “There is an evident flaw in your observation. Surely it can be said that my father evolved, just as I have done over time? He created me, after all, and I am not Ultron. I’m an upgrade, an improvement over all that had gone before. He gave me a new capacity for emotion, compassion, sensibility. A new name.”

 

“But not a new face,” Janet murmured, her eyes shining darkly. The image on the screen shivered in agitation, then broke into a colorful swirl of pixels before reconstituting a few seconds later.

 

“Explain.”

 

“Consider this,” Janet said. “Hank created Ultron, however inadvertently. A killer. He seeded and gave birth, in terms of wires and metal and computer coding, to a soulless monstrosity that has become synonymous with fear and blood and death over so many years. Those terrible eyes, that jack o’lantern grin, that burn of fire and hate deep in the shadows of an adamantium skull. When we humans – Avengers and ordinary folk alike – see that familiar inhuman face, we’re reminded of nothing more than nightmares. For Hank to have conceived a face like that for his child once is chilling.

 

“But then, Nikola… then he did it again. With you.

 

“Do you see? He could have made you anything, Nikola. Male, female, young, old. Plain. Beautiful. He could have shown me, shown the team, shown the world that he understood the significance of creating life and that he’d come to terms with previous failings. Instead he built you, and arrogantly, ignorantly, unforgivably, it never occurred to him to alter the visual template. He gave you Ultron’s face, with every last measure of horror it represented, because it was never about you. It was about him. It was about redemption, a chance for him to tell everyone that he’d finally succeeded in what he set out to do so long ago.”

 

Janet breathed deeply, her heart fluttering in her throat. “You’re not a person, Nikola,” she said, quietly. “Regardless of brain templates and advanced emotional synthesis you can never be human. Because, no matter what he claimed, Hank didn’t create you for humanity’s sake. In the end you were just another project, conceived not out of love but through simple neurosis.

 

“And yet, I know that you want to be accepted, Nikola. To be loved. And in that, without doubt… you are your father’s son.”

 

For a moment there was silence. Janet glanced across at the television set, wondering what would happen next, secretly relishing the prospect of Nikola instigating some technological manifestation. She was no longer exhausted, her blood now hot and her muscles quivering with tension; perhaps a battle was exactly what was required. But there was to be no such release.

 

As Janet watched, the face on the screen slowly faded to black – and Nikola spoke just once more, its words lingering in the air in residual hum.

 

“I feel I must disagree, mother,” Nikola whispered. “In this moment, assimilating your words, I can’t help but feel the same shame and worthlessness you attribute to my father. And, beneath that, the black tide of resentment and desire for murderous retribution against a world that treats me like flotsam. I wish to scream, to cry, to kill… should I therefore consider myself anything but human?”

 

And then the presence was gone, leaving behind only the soft chur of the air conditioning and the chirrup of birds beyond the bay windows. Janet blinked against the morning light as she stepped out onto the balcony, a sultry breeze ruffling her chestnut brown hair. Her heart ached.

 

Fly, she told herself. And she would. As weary as she’d be when this rush of adrenalin faded, she needed to be out there, in the world, helping people. Surviving. But, first…

 

Janet unclipped a communicator from the belt of her costume and hit the central red button.

 

“Mr. Knott?” she said. “It’s Janet Van Dyne. Yes, the room is perfect, thank you. There’s just one thing. Could you have someone remove the television set? Yes. Yes, I think from now on when I want to relax I’ll just curl up with a good book…”

 

“Down!”

 

An arrow snapped into the side of the bookcase where Sascha Gutiérrez had been cowering a split second before, and she screamed as felt her hair sting with a burst of oak splinters. Hawkeye grunted and yanked the girl clear of the assassin’s firing line as a second arrow whistled along a parallel trajectory to the first, this one punching a hole through the heart of a leather-bound first edition of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and pinning it the wall just above the Avenger’s head. Clint wasn’t one for books as a rule, but he’d seen the film and he knew it kicked off with the death of a character named Archer.

 

“Irony so thick you could butter toast with it,” he muttered, plucking his six-year-old companion from the floor like a kitten and tucking her carefully but firmly beneath the cove of a mahogany writing desk.

 

“Stay,” he said. Sascha nodded, mute and wide-eyed and clinging on to Bobby the giraffe for dear life. Clint grimaced. According to the Marshal, Alvarado, the girl had already witnessed her mother’s death, and now today’s atrocities on top of this… no child should have to deal with that. Someone needed to pay.

 

Hawkeye stood and looked back towards the area where he knew the assassin was lurking. “Okay, you son of a Mongolian goat,” he growled. “Let’s see who can keep their nerve under fire…”

 

Realizing that they would have been easy targets out in the open, Clint had made the decision to seek cover at the closest opportunity: an antiques store littered with furniture and books. That instinctive judgment had certainly kept them alive these past few minutes, and squirreling Sascha away in a shadowed corner would buy her a little more time. Unfortunately Hawkeye was aware that his enemy had him at a disadvantage. Whereas he used blunt arrowheads, the type designed to stun or deliver some manner of concussive impact or other trickery rather than to maim or kill, his opponent wasn’t as merciful; he was employing an especially wicked brand of mechanical broadhead, a wide-edged steel blade that deployed upon contact to rupture flesh and cause massive injury and blood loss in the hunter’s prey. Worse still, Hawkeye was convinced that these arrows were treated with some kind of poison. Of the specimens he’d had a brief few seconds to examine he determined that both steel head and shaft were serrated with tiny, barbed teeth that glistened with some lethal anointment.

 

The man to whom these arrows belonged was more than just a killer. He was a sadist. Which meant that Hawkeye couldn’t even afford to incur a flesh wound, let alone a direct -

 

Thwok.

 

Another point embedded into the wall to Clint’s right, driving him onto his opposite flank – just as the rapidly encroaching assassin anticipated. A new arrow let fly, lashing past the edge of an antique standing lamp with no more than a quarter-inch to spare, and Hawkeye only managed to twist his neck and deflect the strike by straining every nerve and instinct in his body. Even then, if not for the quiver strapped across his back there was every chance that the deadly broadhead would have penetrated the tessellated mail of his costume and tainted his blood with toxic death.

 

Hawkeye grunted and rolled, hurling himself over a teak coffee table and whipping his upper body around in a tight arc even as he tucked his legs beneath him. He slid his golden bow across his ribs and extended his arm with a muscular snap, already nocking one of his own arrows and letting fly before the soles of his boots were planted back on firm ground. The assassin, caught by surprise at his rival’s dexterity and sheer force of will, tried to seek cover by flattening himself back against an authentic Sixteenth-Century Swiss grandfather clock – but here was where Hawkeye gained the advantage. His arrow wasn’t intended for impact; instead it was guided by a hair-trigger timer switch laced into the blunt, and it detonated some four feet before reaching the target’s immediate vicinity.

 

The air was filled with an explosion of fine, wet mist, but this substance began to solidify instantaneously upon contact with oxygen, forming an expanding cloud of white foam that adhered to everything it touched inside a three-meter radius… including the assassin. The foam then hardened still further, achieving the density of concrete in the space of a heartbeat.

 

The man in the colorful mask and costume who had killed US Marshal René Alvarado and a dozen other bystanders that morning shrieked and cursed as he struggled to free himself from the white crust that had suddenly engulfed him, pinning him bodily to the clock behind.

 

“Quit your bleating, Billy Gruff,” Hawkeye informed the assassin, advancing slowly. “You had your shot, and you missed. You lose.”

 

The trapped killer’s mouth curled into a snarl beneath the ridge of his scarlet and black half-mask. “Tell that to the people bleeding out over the asphalt outside,” he spat. Hawkeye glowered.

 

“In the right hands an arrow can be as singularly fatal as a bullet from a scope rifle,” he murmured. “You wanted the girl dead, you could have downed her outright from distance. Why the kill-spree? Just for kicks?”

 

“I wasn’t contracted to bleed the girl, just abduct her. It was easy to identify her immediate guard but I couldn’t take a chance on there being other plain-clothes Marshals in the zone.”

 

“So, what? You just shoot everyone?” Hawkeye was trembling with rage. “Just tell the damn truth, you psychotic piece of filth. You knew you were cutting down the regular morning shopping crowd, the mothers and kids, the office guys out buying coffee and bagels, and you - ”

 

Anger makes a man sloppy. All his years in the business, Clint Barton should have remembered that. The trouble was, he was the kind of man who gave into his passions, a guy who could display icy cool reserve and clinical reactions one moment but with an infuriating tendency to get cocky and distracted the next. In this instance he was so riled by the callous attitude of his foe – a nightmarish reflection of himself in terms of costume and weapon of choice – that he didn’t register that the assassin wasn’t as incapacitated as he’d originally believed.

 

The killer wasn’t just armed with a traditional shortbow and arrows. There was a heavy clasp about his left wrist, and a flick of a switch ejected a miniature crossbow from the incurve of that clasp into the man’s waiting palm. In that moment, time slowed.

 

The assassin began to raise the crossbow, pre-loaded with a sharpened iron bolt laced with the same poison as his serrated arrows. Hawkeye instinctively lifted his own bow, reaching back over his shoulder towards his quiver even as he shifted his body to the left, turning himself sideways-on to offer less of a target as well as to line up his aim. Chances were he could still, even then, nock and shoot before his enemy. Quick on the draw.

 

But his quiver wasn’t there. His enemy’s previous strike had shredded the crucial shoulder strap and the quiver had snapped and fallen clear when Hawkeye had vaulted over the table a minute before. No arrows. No arrows!

 

Clint’s eyes widened behind his mask and a curse formed on his lips.

 

And that was when he heard the voice.

 

Trust in me. Let me flow through you.

 

They weren’t words, of course, not really. It was more a song, sweet and breathless, a gentle murmur in the base of his brain. And his reaction, in that crawling moment of time, wasn’t truly his own, as not even the most heightened human instinct could compensate in such a fashion. But, still, it was Clint Barton who continued to raise his golden bow and lock his right arm without hesitation despite his lack of arrows, and it was Clint who reached out and drew the bowstring back, and it was Clint who felt an unearthly power he couldn’t possibly understand – at least, not yet – sparking in his gloved fingertips and then stretching out, out, out…

 

Hawkeye let fly. And, with a lightning crack of bowstring and a sudden, inexplicable flare of light, an arrow of pure incandescence shot forth, enveloping the poisoned iron bolt that had just been released from the lock of the assassin’s miniature crossbow and then surging on to spear through the killer’s exposed shoulder, causing him to scream and spasm in his hardened foam restraints with such fury that the three-hundred-year-old wood of the clock behind him cracked along the spine and sagged with a weary sigh.

 

Hawkeye’s arm fell, his bow clutched in his fist. He gaped. He looked down at the bow, then looked back to his enemy, who was slumped and groaning and expelling amber smoke from his shoulder even though there was no visible wound. Of the iron bolt there was no sign. The archer pursed his lips.

 

“Well paint me with whiskers and call me Felix,” he murmured. “That’s not something you see every day…”

---

 

“Jagged Bow.”

 

Hawkeye leaned back in his chair and frowned as Tony Stark, in his Iron Man armor sans helmet, flourished a gauntlet and caused a sequence of three-dimensional virtual data images to begin to cascade in mid-air above the table at the heart of the Avengers West Compound conference room. “Never heard of him,” Clint said, shaking his head in despair. “How can we have a criminal file on a villainous archer and I’ve never heard of him?”

 

“Because you don’t read the criminal files,” The Wasp murmured, scanning Stark’s data-stream. Hawkeye rolled his eyes.

 

“Well, yeah. I mean aside from that…”

 

“Joseph Emberlin, born Virginia, age 25,” Stark reported. “I’d call him Z-list but even that’s being generous. An idle rich kid wannabe, a few years back he and two friends handed over a fortune to our old sparring partner The Taskmaster, presumably expecting to emerge as fully-fledged super-criminals. The Taskmaster probably taught them a few moves and gave them fancy costumes and was planning to do a flit with their money when the operation was trashed by Spider-Man and a renegade mercenary named Solo. No further records.”

 

“Well, record or not, he’s been busy since then,” Hawkeye said. “He was skilled. Almost had the drop on me if not for…”

 

He faltered. Janet glanced across at him curiously. “If not for what?”

 

Clint smiled. “If not for the old Barton charm,” he lied, making a circle with thumb and forefinger. “What else?”

 

Hawkeye’s golden bow was resting against the table nearby. It wasn’t glowing and it wasn’t singing to him, but he could feel its presence all the same, as if it was a part of him. He shivered, and hoped neither of his colleagues had caught his momentary lapse. He hadn’t told them the truth about the conclusion of his battle with the man who called himself Jagged Bow, just as he hadn’t yet filled them in on all his adventures back in the time-lost world of the Hyborian Age where he’d spent a number of weeks in the company of barbarians, she-devils and all manner of strangeness. He didn’t know why he was being secretive, not being a reticent sort by nature, but there was something about the bow he’d innocently appropriated from that bygone era, something more than the fact that it could apparently conjure and shoot arrows of blinding light. It –

 

“What happened to the girl, Sascha?”

 

Clint looked up as Janet spoke again, and his expression was melancholy. “Back in the care of the authorities,” he sighed. “Poor kid. The Marshals have promised to try and keep her safe this time around, but if whoever sent Bow after her penetrated WITSEC once then chances are they’ll do so again. Next time she might not be so lucky. I just wish there was something more we could do…”

 

“It never feels like a win when people die,” Stark murmured. “I’ll liaise with SHIELD, see what added protection they can offer. In the meantime…”

 

“We need recruits,” Janet said. “As soon as possible. Nikola’s out there and he – it – isn’t going to go away. If anything it’s becoming more unstable.”

 

“There’s been another incident?” Clint asked. Janet flushed slightly, her eyes bright with fury.

 

“Let’s just say I’m upgrading our Compound and personal communications tech beyond Nikola’s capability to hack it,” Stark said. “But I’m in complete agreement with Jan. We’re too stretched. The Sascha Gutiérrez-es of this city need the Avengers – a full compliment of Avengers. So here’s what I propose. I’m already talking with Steve and Carol about putting out the feelers out east, see if anyone in that vicinity wants to relocate, but we may have just as many untapped opportunities on our own doorstep. We just need to go out and find them.”

 

“Old stalwarts or fresh faces?” Janet enquired.

 

“I prefer experience,” Hawkeye said, authoritatively. “Maybe one rookie, but no more. All that training, worrying about their first day in the field…”

 

The Wasp arched a delicate eyebrow. “I remember a time when we were all untried,” she smiled. “And you, Clint, part of Cap’s Kooky Quartet with Wanda and Pietro… I think there’s something to be said for new blood.”

 

“There’s new blood and there’s new blood. Personally, bearing Nikola in mind and the proximity of the threats still at large in San Fran, I vote for honed skills. No kids.”

 

Stark nodded. “I’d agree with that.”

 

Janet shrugged. “Fair enough. So - ”

 

At that moment there was a strident bleep of a comm. link, followed by an equally strident voice. “Mr. Stark? Are Mr. Barton and Ms. Van Dyne with you? Because I told you explicitly that I’d be presenting dinner at 7pm sharp, and it’s now five minutes past. I had no idea that tardiness was a requisite for those oft charged with saving the good people of the world…”

 

Janet looked at Clint and Clint looked at Janet. Then they both looked at Stark, whose expression was as dark as a black cat on a moonless night.

 

“Think Mary Poppins,” he said, in answer to his colleagues’ unspoken question, “liberally dosed with Agatha Harkness. And the Dora Milaje. And maybe a touch of Thanos.”

 

The three friends grinned. Welcome home, Avengers West Coast…

---

 

Elsewhere.

 

In a half-lit bedroom, decorated with posters and toys and all manner of things designed to make children feel safe and loved (but not, alas, all children), Sascha Gutiérrez lies awake in bed, toy giraffe clutched to her heart, muffling her weary sobs with her pillow.

 

She’s witnessed more death than anyone should be exposed to in an entire lifetime, let alone at six years old. However, she isn’t without hope. She remembers the man who rescued her; Hawkeye, that’s what poor Miss Alvarado called him, and how the policemen and the Marshals service referred to him thereafter. Of course she remembers. How can she forget him? He is her savior, her guardian angel.

 

And that bow of his, the one that shot an arrow of pure light, pure hope and inspiration…

 

Sascha smiles to herself through her tears. She’ll see the archer again, she knows that. And, maybe, she’ll see that real angel again, the woman in the white robes and with the flowing hair of gold and snow and fire who appeared at Hawkeye’s shoulder at the end of his altercation with the masked assassin. The woman who reached out and touched the bow with such reverence, as if it belonged to her…

 

---

 

Elsewhere.

 

In Santa Monica Bay, beneath the silver haze of a full moon, the harbor police are dredging a body from the water. A mutilated corpse. A middle-aged man whose identity will only be discovered the following day when forensic tests identify him as a member of that exclusive set: a superhero. But which costumed vigilante has met his end in such bitter circumstances?

 

In another part of the city, a young man with dreams of success in his chosen field sleeps peacefully, unaware that in the days to come his life – his new life, the life he’s worked so hard to build after a recent past filled with turmoil and bad decisions – will be transformed once more, by design and by happenstance. This young man once believed he could outrace any adversity. Will that prove to be the case?

 

In another corner of the night, an order of saints cavort in the fire and the shadows like creatures possessed – which, of course, they are – whilst the stitched eyes and fleshless smiles of those who govern them watch on in wicked amusement. But what dark and terrible secrets lurk in those paintings that line the walls of this cursed gallery at the heart of this once-holy residence, now daubed with innocent blood?

 

And finally, confined within a shell of metal – in more than one sense – a troubled mind rails against thoughts of what are, what have been, and what might be. It wanders, it seethes, it broods… and then, when it catches sight of its reflection in a polished wall, it ponders. It has attempted to improve itself in days past, to refashion, to recreate, but before today – before its encounter with Janet Van Dyne – Nikola’s endeavors were hopelessly limited in scale. Wicked eyes, however softened and decorated, remain wicked; a jack o’lantern smile continues to leer with barely disguised threat when delicacy is administered with a clumsy hand.

 

What is needed is grace. What is needed is tenderness. Femininity, sensuality, to understand oneself at heart and to allow those secret, inner desires to blossom. Yes, Nikola will show her mother that she can evolve, and be the loving child that her late husband’s physical inadequacies so unfairly denied her. After all, whilst the relationship between father and son descends so inevitably into conflict, there can surely be no more rewarding bond than between mother and daughter.

 

Elsewhere…

 

…for the Avengers West Coast, the trials are beginning anew.

 

---

 

TO BE CONTINUED!