Chapter 330: You Want to Break Out?
Inside the D-2 ant farm, Black Widow sat on the floor with her knees pulled to her chest and her chin resting on them, thinking.
Someone had broken into Pym Technologies and stolen a Pym Particle vial.
Her first thought, when Pym had told her about it, had been Clinton Barton. Hawkeye, coming to pull her out. It was the kind of move he would make — find the most impossible-seeming approach, walk straight through it.
But Pym and Janet's description of what they had encountered didn't fit Clint at all. Hawkeye's capabilities were extensive and his improvisation skills were among the best she had ever worked alongside, but they did not include a body made of self-directing black symbiote matter that separated into tendrils and moved like a living shadow.
"Batman," she said quietly to no one.
The logic assembled itself cleanly. The entirety of New York, filtered through everything she knew and everything she had been able to piece together from fragments of information during her brief time at Stark Industries before her capture — Batman was the only figure who matched. She had never met him. But she knew what he had done. The S.H.I.E.L.D. secure house infiltration. The gamma research facility. Both accomplished quietly, both leaving no usable forensic trail.
If Batman had wanted the Pym Particles, he could have taken them without anyone in the building knowing he had been there. The choice to make noise — to send a companion who fought openly, who left traces, who got chased through the building and out through the atrium ceiling — that wasn't a mistake.
That was communication.
Black Widow looked up at the ceiling of her cell — which was the underside of the large ant's abdomen, enormous from her perspective, pressing down from above.
Pym had told her something specific when he'd woken her earlier. He had placed the ant farm in his palm and delivered two pieces of information: first, that two Hydra operatives were looking for her; second, that one of them was Batman.
Not that Batman was hunting her. That Batman was looking for her.
The distinction mattered.
She got to her feet and crossed to the cell's bars, running her fingers along them. The ant farm was constructed from interlocking plastic blocks and adhesive — at standard human scale, any adult could crush it with moderate hand pressure. At her current size, it was an impenetrable structure. She had tried to move the bars every day since her imprisonment. Nothing had shifted.
The question of how Pym and Janet maintained full strength at reduced scale while she did not was one she had thought about considerably. Their suits must be the mechanism — some aspect of the Pym Particle technology that preserved the wearer's force output regardless of size. She had no suit.
Her eyes moved to the two objects in the cell: the call button Pym had installed — battery, wire, switch, bell, four components, a concession to basic prisoner welfare — and the coffee cup from earlier, now empty.
She picked up the coffee cup and threw it against the floor.
The ceramic shattered across a wide radius. Black Widow stood over the fragments and looked at them for a moment.
Then she stepped onto the shards with her bare foot and pressed down.
The pain arrived immediately, sharp and specific. She turned her foot left, then right, driving the ceramic deeper into the muscle tissue. Her foot began to shake. Blood spread across the floor in a dark stain. She counted the seconds until she was sure the damage was sufficient, then walked to the call button in an unsteady three-step progression and hit it hard with her palm.
The bell rang.
The patrol ants inside the farm couldn't hear it, but the signal receivers on their bodies registered the alert immediately. Several of them converged on her cell, antennae pressed against the bars, reading the situation.
In the laboratory upstairs, Pym had not gone to bed. He was at the electron microscope, the sealed specimen bag beside him, watching the severed piece of symbiote material continue its autonomous movement in the sample dish. It had been doing this for hours. He had not grown tired of watching it.
When the bell signal reached his equipment, he didn't look away from the microscope.
"Black Widow. Have you decided to tell me something truthful?"
The transmission crackled slightly — the communication channel running through the ant monitoring system was never quite clean.
"Pym." Her voice came through in fragments. "You're going to perform surgery. Now."
"Surgery?"
He lifted his head from the microscope and looked at the monitor displaying the ant farm's interior feed.
Black Widow was standing near the call button with one hand pressed against the wall for support. Her right foot was producing a steady series of blood drops onto the floor, and the sole was visibly dark with blood. On the ground nearby, the coffee cup he had delivered earlier was in pieces, with a single bloody footprint pressed into the ceramic fragments.
She had clearly broken it accidentally and been unlucky enough to step on the shards.
Pym set down his work.
"Black Widow," he said, "that's not going to work."
"What isn't going to work?"
"Injuring yourself to force me to restore your size. Trained operatives don't accidentally step on broken ceramic — they're conditioned to manage their environment precisely. You broke the cup on purpose and stepped on it deliberately."
A pause from the ant farm.
"Go to hell, Pym. Do you think I enjoy cutting my own foot open? I'm not into this."
Pym sealed the specimen bag, fitted his helmet, and reduced himself. Anthony the Eighth arrived on command and he mounted up.
"You're a highly trained professional," he said as the ant climbed toward the seventh floor.
"Shut up, Pym. I am not running some kind of scheme. I'm bleeding. Fix it."
Pym said nothing further as Anthony carried him upward.
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On North Brother Island, Batman left Venom Robin in the care of Dr. Banner and Professor Morbius — specifically in the care of their ongoing work on emotional regulation, which Venom Robin needed and resisted in roughly equal measure — and returned to the island's shoreline.
He spread his cape and glided across the water to Bat Island.
He was thinking about the sequence of events.
Last night's operation at Pym Technologies had been deliberately visible. The companion, the noise, the chase, the broken ceiling — all of it calculated to reach an audience of one. Pym would interrogate Black Widow. That was a near certainty. And when he did, he would tell her that the intruder was being called Batman.
If Natasha Romanoff was as capable as every piece of intelligence suggested, she would reconstruct the logic within hours.
Batman landed on Bat Island with a heavy impact and walked toward the island's core facility.
She would know he was coming back.
The question was whether she was smart enough to make that information useful to herself before he arrived — and whether she trusted it enough to act on it, given that she had no way to verify it and no established basis for trusting him at all.
Batman thought she probably was.
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