Chapter 1: The B&B That Didn't Exist

Jazz had a talent for dragging unconscious men through locked doors. Twenty-three years of picking locks had given her the hand-eye coordination for it, along with a certain flexibility that made shoving a six-foot-two guy through a rusted gap look almost easy. She gripped the back of his tank top, hauled him sideways through the gap, and kicked the door shut behind them with a boot heel that echoed off the concrete.

The hallway smelled like burnt wiring and something chemical that she couldn't quite place. No windows. Motion sensors lined the ceiling at regular intervals, their little red dots blinking like they were watching them right now.

"Really nice B&B," she muttered, still pulling him upright by the collar. "Some B&B this is. No B. No B&. Just the B that doesn't exist and the B that did, except you led us to a goddamn military compound instead."

Jarrin's eyes were half-open. They had the glazed quality of a man who'd been asleep twenty minutes ago and had woken up in the wrong coordinate system. He leaned on her shoulder with the casual weight of someone who trusted her to hold him up, which she could have appreciated if the situation hadn't been so thoroughly screwed up.

"Jazz." He blinked at her like he was trying to solve a math problem. "Where are we? I swear I was following a sign that said Bed and Breakfast."

"You followed a sign that said 'Maintenance Access - Do Not Enter.' Which you translated in your head as 'Bed and Breakfast.' That is actually the funniest thing that has happened to me this year."

He didn't respond. His eyes had dropped to the hallway stretching ahead of them, and for a split second the sleepiness drained out of his expression like water down a drain. His feet started walking before his brain finished catching up.

"Hey, I said --"

"This way, Jazz." His voice came out slurred, like he was half-awake and half-remembering something. "Down this hallway. We need to go fast."

"I didn't even say we were going anywhere."

His stride was already carrying them forward. He wasn't looking at her. His head was tilted slightly forward, like a man reading signs that only he could see. The hallway was dim, lit by overhead fluorescents that buzzed and flickered. Burnt wiring smell got worse.

The footsteps ahead of them told a different story. Shouting, coming from somewhere further down the corridor. Then something metallic, like a vent ripping off its mounts and crashing to the floor. Jazz grabbed Jarrin's arm. He didn't seem to feel it.

They rounded a corner into a wide hallway that should not have contained four unconscious men.

Steve Rogers lay on his back with a dented shield two feet from his hand. The shield itself was scratched and dented at the edges, the paint still visible through the gouges. Tony Stark's helmet sat cracked open beside him, faceplate up, repulsor gauntlets smoking from the fingers down. Natasha Romanoff was slumped against a support column, her grip on a pistol still firm even as her eyes stayed closed. Clint Barton had fallen near a shattered overhead vent, his bow lying in pieces three feet away, carbon fiber segments scattered across the tile.

At the far end of the hall, a man stood behind a console buried under cracked screens. Omar Kazir, though neither of them knew the name. He wore a dark jacket, and one hand was raised in a rigid gesture, palm flat, like he was holding up the air itself. Below that hand, a munitions crate pulsed with a faint orange glow. A digital countdown glowed red above it, ticking down in digits that jumped fast enough to make Jazz's stomach tighten.

The man's mouth moved. No sound came out, or the sound was too low to reach them. He looked like a man mid-prayer, mid-ritual, mid-something that involved no regard for whether the people in the hallway survived the next few seconds.

Jazz dropped behind the nearest support column and yanked Jarrin with her. His weight was still that of a man who barely registered gravity.

She pressed her back against the concrete and whispered into Jarrin's ear. "Wake. Up."

He blinked at her. "Do we need to be quiet? I think I hear people. Or is that just my imagination? My imagination is getting really loud lately. I think I should get that checked --"

"Jarrin." She grabbed his face. Both hands. Squeezed his cheeks together like she was wringing a wet towel. "Look at the floor. Four people on the ground. Look at the man at the end of the hallway. Look at the glowing box with the red numbers counting down. This is not a B&B. This is a bomb. And that man is about to push the button."

Jarrin's eyes moved. They traced the column, down to the floor, to the bodies. Rogers. Stark. Romanoff. Barton. He stared at them for a long moment, then at the countdown. The numbers had dropped by four since she'd last looked. Maybe five.

Then the awareness snapped into place like a switch flipping. His pupils contracted. His breathing changed. All of a sudden he was awake, fully, completely awake in a way that made him look like a different person than the one Jazz had been dragging through the door.

"What the hell is that?" He pointed at Kazir. "Is that a -- is he --"

"I don't know what he is. I do know he's going to kill us, and him, and everyone else in this building, and probably most of New York State if the countdown keeps going."

Jarrin stared at the countdown. Thirty-one seconds. Twenty-nine. Twenty-six.

His body moved before he could think. A pale figure materialized beside him, white skin and blue bandana, a skull on its chest, red eyes fixed on the crate at the end of the hallway. Jolly Roger. The pirate figure stepped forward, arm extended, and a bubble formed at the tip of its finger. The bubble drifted through the hallway like it had all the time in the world, floating past the unconscious bodies, past the support column, past Jazz's outstretched hand.

It landed on the crate.

The bubble expanded, swallowing the crate whole. For a second the crate was gone, replaced by a shimmering sphere that pulsed with something inside it. Then it popped. A concussive wave rolled outward, and the crate sat on the floor looking like exactly what it was: a metal box filled with inert concrete blocks.

The countdown kept ticking. Twenty-two seconds. It wasn't tied to the charges. The charges were separate.

Kazir's head snapped toward them. The detached focus on his face cracked into something colder. He stomped his boot against the concrete.

The floor beneath Jarrin and Jazz's feet cracked. A deep orange glow spread through the concrete in branching lines, like roots growing outward from wherever Kazir had planted his foot. The floor wasn't cracking anymore. It was changing. The concrete was softening at the edges, turning translucent, pulsing with that same orange light that had been in the crate.

"Card," Jazz said. She pulled one from her sleeve and flicked it toward the wall. The card hit the concrete and vanished, and Jazz stepped through the space where it had been, reappearing on an overhead pipe twenty feet away. She reached down and hauled Jarrin up by his collar.

The floor detonated.

The fireball rose three stories and threw shrapnel into every corridor that branched off the main hallway. Jazz and Jarrin hung from the pipe above the blast zone, and the heat of it climbed the walls on either side of them. The shockwave hit the pipe and bent it outward. Jazz's free hand grabbed the pipe hard enough to turn her knuckles white. Jarrin's feet dangled over the void where their standing ground used to be.

Kazir raised both hands. The ceiling above them bulged. Rebar snapped audibly, and the concrete compressed inward, curving into a sphere of steel and stone that pulsed with that same orange glow. Thirty feet across. Forty. It was going to drop on them like a hammer.

"Card," Jazz said again. She pulled a second card from her sleeve and threw it into the air. It spun toward the wall on their side, and as it passed through the boundary between normal space and not, she grabbed Jarrin's arm, hooked her leg around his waist, and stepped through the card's space.

The portal opened beside them, a shimmering slit in reality that looked like a window into the hallway they'd just left. Jazz pulled them through.

Behind them, the wing exploded.

The detonation wasn't one sound. It was a series of them, chain reactions rippling through the facility's steel and concrete. Jazz felt it through her legs, through Jarrin's grip on her shoulder. The portal deposited them back in the same hallway they'd been in, three seconds before the blast. The air tasted like ash. Soot streaked her fishnet stockings and red jacket, and Jarrin's blue Hawaiian shirt was already gray with dust.

He coughed. Jazz coughed. They stood there for a second, breathing in the aftermath, watching the hallway stretch ahead of them.

Steve Rogers was groaning. The man was pushing himself up off the floor with his shield in one hand, though the shield had gone through a metamorphosis since before the blast, with fresh dents and scorched edges. Tony Stark was already prying the faceplate off his helmet with one hand while the other flexed his repulsor gauntlet, which had smoked itself into a useless lump. Natasha Romanoff had pushed herself to one knee and was already scanning the hallway with her pistol drawn. Clint Barton was checking his bow, though the bow was a mess of carbon fiber and splintered wood, and he was going to need a new one.

They all looked up at Jazz and Jarrin.

The woman in fishnets and a choker covered in gray dust. The man in a Hawaiian shirt and black tank top, coughing and shaking and looking like he hadn't slept in days. Both of them still breathing. All four of them had just survived a blast that should have turned the entire wing into a crater.

Rogers stared at Jazz. Jazz stared at Rogers. Somewhere behind them, a sprinkler system decided to start, and cold water began to rain down on them in the hallway, washing gray streaks across Jazz's fishnets and making Jarrin's hair plaster against his skull.

"Who," Rogers said, "are you?"

Jarrin opened his mouth. Jazz opened her mouth.

"We took a wrong turn," Jarrin said.

"Bed and Breakfast," Jazz said.

The sprinklers kept falling. Kazir was somewhere up ahead, and the countdown was still ticking, and four super-soldiers and a billionaire were staring at them like they had just walked out of a bomb that shouldn't have had anyone walking out of it.