Coulson pulled up to the site and got out of the car without rushing. The field around him was flat, mostly dead grass, far enough from the nearest town that there was no ambient noise. Just wind.
He walked the periter of the impact pattern first. The Rainbow Bridge left a specific signature — a radial scorch pattern with a distinct geotric quality, the kind of mark that implied directed energy rather than any natural phenonon. He'd seen one before, when Thor had arrived in New xico. The scale and the geotry matched.
"Bifrost," he said. "Asgardian point-to-point transit. Whatever ca through here, it ca through with Asgard's authorization. That's not a process you can shortcut or fake — Heimdall controls the gate."
May had stayed near the car, which she'd been clear about from the start. She looked across the field at him. "So it's not hostile."
"Almost certainly not. Though I'd note that Loki also cleared that bar at one point."
"You said that was a fair point earlier."
"It was. I'm not dismissing it." Coulson crouched and looked at the center of the pattern more closely. The grass there was gone entirely, pressed flat in a spiral that radiated outward for about twelve ters. Recent. Days, not weeks. "Whoever it is, they've been on the ground for a while. We're behind the curve on this one."
He stood and looked at the treeline at the field's edge. Nothing obvious. If the Asgardian arrival had left anything behind besides the landing site, it wasn't visible from here.
"We canvas the surrounding area," he said. "Ask around. Soone in the nearest town saw sothing — that kind of arrival doesn't pass unnoticed."
May walked over and looked at the site herself. "And if we find whoever it is?"
"We introduce ourselves and ask why they're here. If Asgard sent soone during an active Dragon Ball cycle, the answer to that question is almost certainly Dragon Ball-related." He turned back toward the car. "Which makes it our business."
He opened the driver's side door of Lola. The 1962 Corvette — cherry red, fully restored, classified modifications that Coulson had never fully disclosed to anyone — had been in the cargo bay of the Bus when May landed, and it had co off the ramp ahead of both of them. This was apparently non-negotiable.
May got in the passenger side and didn't comnt on the car. She'd decided, sowhere around the third ti she'd been asked to help load it, that the car was simply a condition of working with Coulson.
"Thirty minutes to the nearest populated area," she said, checking her tablet.
Coulson started the engine. "Then we have thirty minutes to figure out what questions to ask."
The nursing ho was quiet in the early afternoon.
It had rained earlier. The grounds were still wet, the grass dark and soft, the path between the parking area and the main building faintly muddy at the edges. Steve Rogers walked it carefully — not because he couldn't handle the footing, but because he wasn't entirely present. He'd been moving on autopilot since Fury gave him the address, running through versions of this conversation that beca less coherent the closer he got.
Seventy years. He'd done the arithtic enough tis that it had stopped feeling like arithtic and started feeling like a fact about soone else. Peggy Carter had lived a full life inside the span he'd spent frozen, and now she was here, in a care facility, and he was twenty-seven years old in a world that had moved on without him.
He didn't know if this visit would be good for her.
He didn't know if she'd want to see him.
He decided, at the last mont, that he wasn't going to knock on the door without looking through the window first. He needed to see her before she saw him. He needed to know what he was walking into.
He stepped off the path onto the grass.
His boot ca down on sothing hard beneath the soft surface, and he felt it roll — just slightly, just enough to shift his balance for half a second. He caught himself without going down and looked at the ground.
The object was half-buried in the wet soil near the base of a hedge, barely visible. He reached down and pulled it free.
It fit neatly in his palm. Orange and opaque, with a smooth surface that felt warm even in the cold air, and six small five-pointed stars embedded across its surface in a pattern he couldn't imdiately identify. The mont his skin made contact with it, sothing moved in his mind — not a sound, not a vision, but information, arriving with the quiet certainty of sothing that had been waiting to be received.
He stood there for a long mont, reading what had just been placed in his head.
Then he looked at the object again.
"There's actually sothing like this in the world."
He turned it over in his hands, studying the stars. The information in his mind was complete and coherent — the Dragon Balls, the tournant, the wish, the rules. All of it. As if the object had been specifically designed to deliver a complete briefing at the mont of contact.
He looked around the grounds. Nobody nearby. No sign of anyone watching.
He thought about the war. About the Tesseract, and Red Skull's obsession with it, and every resource of the Reich thrown at a single cosmic object because power that defied natural limits was worth any price. And then he thought about what was sitting in his hand, and about what the information in his mind said it could do.
"If Schmidt had found this instead of the Tesseract," he said quietly to himself, "there wouldn't have been a war to fight. There'd have been nothing left to fight for."
He slipped the Dragon Ball into his jacket pocket. Whatever this was, whatever it ant — he wasn't leaving it in the grass.
He turned back toward the window he'd been heading for.
In his office at the Fraternity, Smith looked up from nothing in particular.
He'd removed the information block so ti ago — the one he'd placed early in the cycle to avoid being inundated with Dragon Ball tracking data before he needed it. The block had served its purpose. He knew now which balls were in play and roughly where the remaining unconfird holders were. The Winter Soldiers' appearance at Rose Manor had told him everything he needed to know about where HYDRA's Dragon Ball was coming from.
The mont Steve Rogers made contact with the six-star ball, the information arrived cleanly, and Smith shifted perspective to confirm it.
Steve Rogers. Standing on wet grass outside a nursing ho, turning the Dragon Ball over in his hands with the expression of a man recalibrating his entire understanding of the world.
Smith watched him pocket it, watched him turn back toward the building, and let out a breath that was sowhere between a laugh and a sigh.
"I don't know whether that's good luck or bad luck for you," he said. "But I hope the ball doesn't pull you sowhere you don't need to go."
Rogers had heart. He had integrity. He had a power level of eight, in a field that was going to include people who broke asuring equipnt by standing near them.
He was going to need sothing more than heart.
Smith kept watching as Rogers approached a ground-floor window and looked through the glass at the woman inside — white-haired, resting, still unmistakably the person he'd been carrying for seventy years.
Rogers stood there for a long ti without moving.
Then he walked to the front door and knocked.
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