"You sure those aren't just clickbait from some third-rate website?" Hawkeye said, half-joking.
"Hawkeye." Fury's tone left no room for levity. "Most of what those sites put out is garbage—but some of it is deliberately planted to throw our investigations off course. Whoever these people are, they've been right under our noses the whole time. They never left." He needed his people taking this seriously.
Daisy wasn't part of the conversation. She sat curled up with her laptop, running calculations on how the Antarctic magnetic field would affect teleportation. Black Widow glanced over at the screen and promptly declared herself useless.
——
The jet flew through the night. By evening they were touching down on the Antarctic Peninsula, and Daisy got her first look at one of Fury's safe houses—a military installation operating under the code name Snowstorm.
"Black Widow has been here before," Fury said once they were inside. "You're all people I trust. Tonight we rest. Tomorrow we move on to the target. Daisy—you're with me. There's someone you need to meet."
Daisy had a feeling that "people I trust" carried real weight here, because the sheer scale of this base was staggering. Someone had carved an entire compound out of the Antarctic bedrock—hangar bays, two Quinjets with no S.H.I.E.L.D. markings, dozens of rooms stacked floor to ceiling with weapons, ammunition, and supplies. One look around told her exactly how much Fury had been quietly siphoning away from official budgets over the years.
All of it was evidence. You didn't get access to a place like this unless you were genuinely trusted.
She also knew, from what she carried in her memory, that this base would eventually be seized by the Avengers and repurposed as a watchtower for the Savage Land—which meant the Savage Land itself was nearby.
The Savage Land was an alien observation post established some two hundred million years ago. An extraterrestrial civilization had gathered specimens from Earth's species and released them into a volcanic basin to study the planet's evolutionary process. The real Jurassic Park, as it turned out.
When the aliens departed, Atlanteans moved in and colonized the region. Then the Great Flood came, Atlantis sank beneath the waves, and civilization abandoned this lost corner of the world. Over the centuries, a handful of explorers stumbled onto it—Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne among the more famous ones—but none of them could prove it existed.
The legend never died. The person most obsessed with finding it had been Hitler, who sent teams to Antarctica to search. That obsession was, in a roundabout way, the reason they were all standing here now.
Daisy reached out with her senses and picked up nothing. That was hardly surprising. Fury had built an entire military installation on top of the region, and the Nazis had been camped here for sixty years. None of them had found anything either. She wasn't going to crack it on a first pass.
She knew, somewhere in her memory, that the Savage Land contained Vibranium. But it might as well have been a castle in the clouds—without a specific method of entry, it was completely inaccessible. The alien spatial technology that sealed the place was on a level she couldn't hope to match with her current knowledge.
She followed Fury deeper into the base. The corridors were quiet.
Outside a medical bay, she found someone she hadn't seen in a long time.
Frank Castle.
The Punisher looked the same—massive, built like something armored—but his face was drained of color. He was on a treadmill, running at a slow, steady pace.
Fury brought Frank to Antarctica? Daisy's eyes cut sideways at him. What was he not telling her?
Fury tapped his own temple, then nodded toward Frank. "He still has a bullet in his head. It's lodged between the cranial sutures—there's no conventional surgical approach that can remove it safely. What you did for him that day wasn't a complete save."
Daisy nodded slowly. "I saw it at the time. But the brain is too precise. I couldn't control my ability at that level of detail."
"And now?"
She thought about it. "Still can't guarantee anything. What's his condition? And why keep him here? The medical facilities in New York are far superior."
Fury glanced toward his old friend. "His memory is fragmented. This is the only environment that keeps him calm." He moved toward the door. "Come say hello. It was Frank who recommended you to me in the first place."
They went inside.
The wounds from before had scarred over, but the sheer map of bullet holes and blade marks across Frank's body still made her chest tighten.
He saw Fury and gave a stiff nod. Then he looked at Daisy—a long, searching look, as if piecing something together from very far away. It had only been a year ago, but he seemed to need much longer to retrieve it.
"You're... you're that Chinese-American girl who pulled me back from the edge?"
Daisy nodded. "Let me take a look at those injuries." She gestured for him to lie down on the bed, then held her hands a few inches above his head and focused.
The results weren't good. Whatever Frank Castle ate growing up, his body's regenerative capacity was extraordinary. The damaged sections of his skull had actually begun to knit back together—which under any other circumstances would be a blessing. Right now it was a problem. The bullet was still there, still shifting fractionally, still putting pressure on his brain every moment of every day.
If she tried to extract it directly—like Magneto might do—Frank would be dead before she let go. And shattering it was even less of an option: the bullet wouldn't break. His brain would.
She ran through every powered individual she could think of. Shadowcat's ability might actually work... but Kitty Pryde hadn't developed her mutation yet. She was still just a normal human. And mutants, as a rule, didn't develop their abilities with any real precision until something catastrophic tore their world apart. Even if she tracked Kitty down today, there was nothing that girl could do for Frank right now.
Daisy lowered her hands, her expression grim. Both Fury and Frank read the answer without needing to hear it.
"I'll go back to New York and sit down with Dr. Pym," she said, thinking out loud. "See if he has any ideas. And there's a neurosurgeon in the city—Stephen Strange. He's supposed to be the best. He might have an angle no one's tried."
"Don't trouble yourself with any of that," Frank said, waving it off. "I'm fine. Nothing bothers me."
The three of them talked for a while. Frank was lucid at first—he even managed a few deadpan stories from old battlefields, the kind of dark humor that only people who'd been there could pull off. But gradually, something shifted. His expression went flat. His eyes drifted to a corner of the room, filling with something soft and distant. His lips began to move, barely, as if carrying on a conversation with someone only he could see.
Daisy and Fury exchanged a glance and quietly stepped out.
"Help him if you can," Fury said, once the door was closed behind them. "Consider it a personal favor."
——
The night passed without incident. Morning arrived, and with it came the ordeal of getting dressed.
Thermal base layer. Insulated jacket. Snow pants. Balaclava. Snow boots. Goggles. By the time Daisy had wrestled her way into all of it and stepped outside, the Antarctic climate still managed to freeze her solid.
Black Widow handled it marginally better—bundled up just as thoroughly, but at least she could still manage a few combat draws without looking ridiculous.
Hawkeye was in his own category. He'd flatly refused the base's cold-rated custom weapons and insisted on his bow. His outer layers matched the others', except he'd only bothered to put on a single pair of gloves.
Fury was simply a phenomenon. He'd added a cold-weather jacket over his usual leather duster, and that was apparently that.
The four of them boarded a purpose-built stealth snowcat and rolled out toward the coordinates.