The fight had carried them down the street and back toward the car where the shield had lodged in the SUV door panel. Steve got his hand on the strap and pulled it free, and the geometry of the exchange changed immediately — the knife couldn't find the same angles with the disc between them.
They circled. Steve pushed the initiative, driving Bucky back with the shield edge, and in the press of it got one hand on the face of the mask.
He used the grip to throw.
The Winter Soldier went down. The mask came off.
The face that came up from the pavement was one Steve Rogers had last seen at the bottom of a crevasse, diminishing, when he'd reached too late and the train had been going too fast and there was nothing he could do.
He said the name without meaning to.
"Bucky?"
The Winter Soldier stood and looked at him.
"Who the hell is Bucky?"
He drew his sidearm. Steve was standing flat-footed, shield down, not moving.
The Lasher symbiote's tendril came in from the side and swept the Winter Soldier's arm wide before the shot fired. Jessica had come off the bridge — the sonic cannon operator was down, the flamethrower had run dry, and she'd processed the rooftop situation in two seconds before dropping off the railing.
She'd caught Sam on the way, grabbing him out of a three-on-one tangle where two Winter Soldiers had the Falcon suit's wing frames and were working on tearing them off his back.
Bucky recovered from the tendril sweep and came up with the gun again.
Natasha had the grenade launcher. She'd found it on the pavement where Bucky had dropped it in the second exchange and had been waiting for a clean window. She fired.
The blast caught the space where the Winter Soldier had been standing. When the smoke moved, there was no one there.
The police sirens had been building for the past two minutes. S.H.I.E.L.D. armored vehicles were coming in from both ends of the block — six, eight, more — and the tactical units were already out of the vehicles and spreading into position before the column fully stopped.
Rumlow came through the perimeter at the front of the group, weapon up.
"Put the shield down, Captain. On your knees. Now."
Steve looked at the perimeter. Forty-plus agents, all armed, all positioned. Overhead, a news helicopter had appeared — the distinctive red and white of Global Daily News. A camera on a long lens was pointing down at the street.
He set the shield down and raised his hands.
Rumlow came up behind him and kicked the back of his knee. Hard. Not incapacitating — operational. But there was nothing professional about the angle of it. Steve went down.
"On the ground. Now."
Rumlow snapped the magnetic restraints on, and Steve registered without reacting that they were significantly heavier than standard cuffs.
In the sky, the news camera was still running. Rumlow caught this and looked at the agent to his right, whose rifle muzzle was approximately four inches from Steve's forehead. The agent's expression was carrying more information than it should have been for a standard apprehension.
"Put the rifle down," Rumlow said. "Not here."
The agent lowered the weapon. The camera kept rolling.
Sam was brought in, cuffed. His cuffs were standard.
Rumlow looked at Jessica and Natasha.
"You two violated department protocols. I need you to come with me." He kept his voice even. "You don't need cuffs. I'm not going to insult the department's people like that." He paused. "Or Director Smith."
Natasha said: "Because of Smith?"
Rumlow looked straight ahead and said: "We all work for the same director."
In the transport vehicle, Steve looked at the floor.
Sam said, from the bench across: "What happened out there? You just stopped."
"It was him." Steve's voice was flat. "He looked right at me. He didn't know me."
Sam was quiet for a moment. "Seventy years, man."
"Zola." Steve looked at his wrists. "Bucky's unit was captured in 1943. Zola ran experiments on the soldiers. That's probably what kept him alive when he came off the train." He paused. "Someone found him after that."
"Steve. This is not on you."
He didn't answer. "Even when I had nothing, I had Bucky."
Sam looked over at Natasha, who was sitting against the far wall of the vehicle with her hand pressed against her shoulder. He looked at the commando agents in the vehicle and said: "She's been shot. Someone get a doctor in here or apply pressure to that wound. Left shoulder. If it closes over without removal she'll need surgery."
The commando beside him reached toward his vest.
The motion resolved into something unexpected — he pulled a high-voltage stun baton from his kit, looked at the agent on his right, and drove it into the man's ribs. The discharge was short and targeted. The agent went down. The second agent started to react and took a knee kick to the temple and joined him.
The operative removed the ballistic helmet.
Hill looked at Sam, looked at Steve, and said: "Who is he?"
The convoy continued until it stopped under a tunnel junction. Rumlow stepped out, gave the orders for the transfer to interrogation, and walked to the prisoner transport vehicle.
He opened the rear door. The two unconscious guards were still there. The floor had a circular opening in it, about the circumference of a person, neatly cut. There was nobody left in the vehicle.
Rumlow looked at the hole for several seconds.
"I knew I shouldn't have trusted those two," he said. He said it to himself, because there was no one else there to say it to.
Tony was running the Mind Stone scepter's internal architecture through JARVIS's analysis interface — the outer casing was straightforward, the interesting work was in the crystal's processing layer — when JARVIS interrupted.
"Sir. The Level 1 search you initialized has produced a match."
Tony stopped. "Show me."
The surveillance footage from the street engagement was already identified and timestamped. JARVIS had pulled it from multiple traffic cameras across a three-block radius and assembled a clean composite. The relevant frame was isolated: the mask coming off, the face underneath.
"Cross-reference confidence?"
"Ninety-four point seven percent. Bucky Barnes, formerly Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, WWII service, confirmed killed in action 1944. Current status: active, enhanced, unaccounted."
Tony looked at the frame for a long moment.
The facial recognition sweep had been running since his father had told him about the face at the car. He'd been thorough about it — every public camera database, every news archive, every event footage going back decades. The sweep had come back empty on anything recent. Until today.
"Steve's been arrested," Tony said.
"S.H.I.E.L.D. has him in custody as of approximately twenty minutes ago."
Tony tapped the bench and thought about the particular shape of this situation. Barnes was active. Barnes had shown his face in a public engagement that was now on every news channel. Barnes was connected to the Winter Soldier program, to whatever Pierce was running, and now to the direct involvement in today's street fight.
"I'm going to need to talk to Steve," Tony said. "And before that, I need to understand exactly what kind of situation I'm walking into." He looked at the scepter, then set it aside. "Hold the analysis. We'll come back to it."
He walked out.
At the HYDRA base, two technicians were working on the left arm's elbow actuator when the input from the right side became unscheduled.
Bucky's hand came down on the closer technician's forearm and the technician went sideways. The guards in the room came up out of their chairs with weapons raised.
Bucky sat in the chair and didn't move.
In the five seconds between the first movement and the stillness, something had crossed the threshold in his memory that hadn't been accessible before. The bridge. The street. A face with a specific expression on it. A name said in a specific way. Before that: a train. A voice saying his name, urgency in it. Snow. The drop. A laboratory. A man in a white coat looking at him like a material.
The modification process has begun.
The images had no narrative connection to each other. They were just present where they hadn't been before.
Pierce came in. The guards lowered their weapons but stayed up.
Pierce pulled up a chair facing him and sat down. "Mission report."
Bucky looked at him.
"Mission report," Pierce said again, with the specific patience of someone who has done this many times.
"Who was the man on the bridge?"
Pierce said: "Someone you encountered earlier this week on another mission."
"I know him." Bucky said it twice, three seconds apart. The second time it came out differently — not a statement of recognition, but something that was trying to be a question and wasn't succeeding.
Pierce leaned forward. "What you do matters. What you've always done matters. We're at a threshold point. If you don't complete this assignment, everything we've built — everything that keeps the world on the right trajectory — stops." He held Bucky's eyes. "I need you tomorrow. Not the past. Tomorrow."
"I know him," Bucky said.
Pierce stood up. "Prep him. And freeze him again."
The senior technician said: "He's been out of cryo too long. The standard refreeze cycle won't—"
"Then wipe him and start over."
The technicians set up the apparatus. Pierce didn't stay to watch. He moved through the adjacent room where the five other Winter Soldiers were being monitored and checked each status board. Five of them were operational or close to it. That would have to be sufficient.
The base beneath the dam was dry and quiet, lit by the low-frequency hum of emergency generators. Hill had brought them in through a service tunnel that dead-ended three levels below the public infrastructure and had a door in it that required a palmprint and a twelve-digit code.
Inside: a functional operations room, a medical bay, and a small office.
Hill pushed the office door open.
Nick Fury was sitting at the desk.
Jessica looked at him and then looked at Natasha and then looked at Fury again.
"I thought you were dead," she said. "I was planning to do something about the people who killed you." She crossed the room and put her fist through the surface of the desk. The wood gave. "You were sitting here the whole time."
Fury looked at the desk. "I wasn't sitting here the whole time."
Natasha was still standing in the doorway. She'd processed the visual data three times in the time it took Jessica to cross the room. "I saw the body. There was an armor-piercing entry wound through the wall and a hole in his chest that I could have put my hand through. No one survives that."
Jessica leaned toward Fury and inhaled. "No symbiote. Nothing that would explain a recovery."
Steve was looking at the man at the desk. "Who are you. And who died."
Hill came in behind them and said: "The man who died was him. And so is the man in front of you." She let that land. "We needed whoever wanted the director dead to believe the director was dead. A confirmed kill doesn't get followed up. A body that's been buried doesn't come back to answer questions." She paused. "The person standing in front of you is the same person, by every measure that matters. What died was a biological duplicate. The living version is here."
Steve looked at Fury. "You couldn't tell us."
Fury said: "I didn't know who else I could trust."
The doctor came in with instruments. Natasha sat down and took her jacket off. The doctor looked at the shoulder, probed the wound's edge, and said with some degree of professional surprise: "It's already beginning to close. I need to open it back up before the tissue seals over the fragment."
"Go ahead," Natasha said.
Sam looked at the closed wound and the rate at which it was progressing and said: "That's what the serum does?"
"Among other things." Natasha held still while the doctor worked. "The drawback is exactly what you just identified. If it's not addressed quickly, the body treats everything as material to incorporate."
Jessica Jones looked at Fury across the room. "Smith Doyle is acting director. You're officially dead. The Security Council isn't going to reverse course on that."
Fury picked up the black cube from the desk and held it in his hands. "No," he said. "I don't think the Council will be taking my calls."