Return | Bucky Barnes | Book Two | Marvel Cinematic Universe

Chapter 57

Kat stifled her groan as her body slammed into something solid, choking back the urge to vomit after her second episode of hurtling through a Quantum Vortex that left her wanting nothing more than to curl into a ball until the world stopped spinning.

But she didn't have time for that.

Bracing her hands against the thing she had crashed into – a stone wall, she realised – she pushed herself into an upright position. A windowless, dimly lit, empty corridor. Her coordinates had been correct.

She had made it to Hydra's Sokovian fortress.

Making her shaking legs straighten, she glanced down to check on the vial of red particles that had been inserted into her suit at her hip. It was empty.

The reality of what she had done, the risk she had taken made her stomach jolt further. If she had miscalculated this even a little, she would be stuck here. If Steve and Tony didn't get more particles, they'd all be trapped in the past.

And she'd be trapped in a fortress filled with people who would just love to get their hands on a living escapee of the Winter Soldier Programme.

But it was the only way to get the stones, she reminded herself grimly, hitting the control on her tracker that made her helmet and suit fold back, leaving her stood in her black tactical suit. The suit that was emblazoned with SHIELD emblems, as part of her last cover.

"Shit..." She breathed softly, looking down at herself and giving the badge on her shoulder an experimental tug, grimacing as it didn't budge. It wouldn't help with her plan to be invisible.

Scrubbing her hand over her jaw, she glanced up and down the corridor once more, trying to visualise the paper plans she had been made to memorise as she had prepared to move the Winter Solider Programme from Siberia to this fortress. If she had remembered correctly, and had aligned her coordinates right, she was already stood in one of the lower levels of the main fortress that housed the laboratories. It was where the Sceptre would be found by the Avengers in a year's time. It was where Wanda would encounter it for the first time, a handful of months from now. Currently, it was being used to experiment on naïve volunteers who wouldn't survive the encounter with the Mind Stone. People who didn't understand what they were signing up for, simply knowing they had been promised a better life. A chance to protect their loved ones.

It was a familiar lie, the best one Hydra told. The one Kat had believed for too long.

Exhaling a heavy breath, she steadied the rising tide of twisted emotion in her chest. Frustration, anger, fear... They wouldn't serve her here.