Chapter 17: The Bait's Unveiling
The race was on.
Jake didn't wait for anyone. He was already gone, melting into the compound’s corridors to prep. The silence he left in the med-bay was thick enough to lean against.
Bucky kept holding Sage’s hand. Her pulse beat against his fingers, a tiny, frantic bird trapped under her skin. “You don’t have to do this,” he said, too quiet for the others to hear.
Her eyes shifted to his. The clarity in them was terrifying. “Yes,” she whispered, the word barely a shape on her lips. “I do.”
Fifty-three minutes.
Natasha and Sam left to gear up. Tony’s voice became a constant stream in their earpieces, detailing the terminal’s layout and blind spots. Bucky just sat. He memorized the pattern of freckles on Sage’s wrist, the way her lashes cast faint shadows on her cheekbones.
The medical team unhooked her from the dialysis machine with practiced efficiency. The tailored blocker, a viscous blue liquid, went into her IV with a slow, steady push. She winced, a full-body shudder rolling through her.
“That’s the counter-agent,” a tech said. “Should neutralize the protocol’s chemical components. The physical… adaptations are another matter.”
“What’s that mean?” Bucky asked, his voice rough.
The tech wouldn’t meet his eye. “It means her biology has been fundamentally altered. The blocker is a stopgap, not a cure.” He finished and stepped away, leaving them in a bubble of sterile light.
Sage moved her free hand, slowly, deliberately, to rest it on her lower abdomen. She pressed down, as if testing for a landmine beneath her own skin. Her expression was unreadable.
Forty minutes.
They got her into a set of civilian clothes—soft grey sweatpants, a loose hoodie. She looked like any other patient being discharged, pale and exhausted. Bucky helped her sit up on the edge of the bed. Her legs swung down, bare feet hovering above the cold floor.
“Can you stand?”
She nodded, once. He slipped an arm around her waist, taking her weight. She was so light. She felt hollowed out. They took a shuffling step, then another. Her breathing was a controlled rasp.
“Good,” he murmured. “That’s good.”
Her head tilted toward his, her mouth close to his ear. Her breath was warm. “When we’re out there,” she said, each word precise, “don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re sorry.” She pulled back, her gaze locking onto his. There was a fierce, desperate anger banked there now. “You be the soldier. I’ll be the bait. We don’t break character.”
He swallowed hard and nodded. The guilt was a taste, copper and bile, at the back of his throat.
Thirty minutes.
A nondescript black van waited in the underground bay. Jake was behind the wheel, already wearing a worn Mets cap and a scowl. He didn’t glance back as Bucky helped Sage onto the bench seat in the middle, laying her down and covering her with a blanket.
Natasha slid the side door shut, plunging them into near-darkness. She was dressed for the city, looking like a tourist in a leather jacket and scarf. Sam was already airborne, a speck in the sky above them.
“Facial recognition is live in your optics,” Tony’s voice said. “I’m patched into every security cam and traffic light from here to 42nd Street. If he’s there, we’ll find him.”
“He’ll be there,” Jake said from the front, pulling the van into traffic. His voice was flat. “He can’t help himself. Guys like him need to see their work.”
The van merged into the midday flow. Bucky sat on the floor beside Sage’s bench, his back against a metal support. The city blurred past the tinted windows, a smear of grey and frantic motion.
Sage’s hand found his under the blanket. Her fingers were ice-cold. She didn’t look at him. She stared at the roof of the van, her jaw set so tight a muscle flickered in her cheek.
“Talk to me, Stark,” Jake said. “What’s the crowd density?”
“Midday foot traffic is peak. Thousands of moving targets. It’s a good choice. Too many variables for a clean grab.”
“It’s not a grab he wants,” Sage said, her voice sudden in the dark. She didn’t move. “It’s confirmation. He wants to see if I’m viable. If his… seed took.”
The word hung in the air, ugly and specific.
“So we give him a show,” Natasha said. She checked a small mirror, applying lipstick with a steady hand. “A distressed transfer, medical urgency, but stable. We sell it.”
Fifteen minutes.
The van descended into the labyrinth beneath Grand Central. The air changed, becoming cooler, smelling of diesel and damp concrete. Jake navigated the service tunnels without hesitation.
He finally pulled into a dim loading dock, killing the engine. The sudden silence was absolute. “Showtime,” he muttered, pulling off his cap and running a hand through his hair. His posture changed, shoulders hunching, becoming smaller. When he spoke again, his accent was thicker, his tone aggrieved. “I’m gonna be double-parked. They tow ya in thirty seconds flat here, I swear to god.”
He was already slipping into his cover, a harried cabbie waiting on a fare.
The back doors opened. Cold, public air rushed in, carrying the distant murmur of the terminal. Bucky stood, pulling the blanket from Sage. He slipped his arms under her, lifting her as if she were fragile. She went limp, letting her head loll against his shoulder, playing her part.
Natasha hopped out, immediately on her phone, gesturing with urgency. “This way, the ambulance is supposed to be at the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance! They said to bring her through the concourse.”
They moved into a service corridor, then through an unmarked door that dumped them onto the main concourse floor.
Sound and light and motion crashed over them.
The vaulted ceiling soared, a constellation of fake stars glittering in the gloom. A sea of people flowed around them, a chaotic river of briefcases, winter coats, and distracted faces. The air was a cocktail of perfume, pretzels, and the ozone smell of the trains below.
Bucky held Sage tighter, starting to push through the crowd toward the imagined ambulance on 42nd Street. “Coming through, please,” he said, his voice strained. “Medical emergency.”
People parted, their faces a blur of curiosity and annoyance. Bucky felt hyper-exposed, a beetle on a plate. Every stranger’s glance felt like a potential trigger.
“I have a possible visual,” Sam’s voice said in his ear. “North balcony, by the Apple store. Male, dark coat, watching the crowd. He’s not moving with the flow.”
“Confirm,” Tony snapped. “Running facial rec… negative. It’s not him.”
“He wouldn’t be that obvious,” Jake’s voice grumbled in their comms. He was somewhere in the tide, invisible. “Keep scanning. Look for the guy who isn’t rushing. The one who’s… appreciating.”
Sage’s breath hitched. Her hand fisted in Bucky’s shirt. “Ten o’clock,” she breathed into his chest, the words meant only for him. “The information desk. Not looking at the board.”
Bucky’s gaze sliced through the crowd. A man in a crisp beige trench coat stood at the edge of the information desk rotunda. He held a paper coffee cup. He was not looking up at the departure boards. He was watching the space where the concourse opened up, his head tilted at an analytical angle.
It was him. The nose was perfectly straight, unbroken. The face was calm, clean-shaven. But the eyes held that same detached, surgical curiosity.
“Visual confirmation,” Bucky whispered into his comm. “Information desk rotunda. Beige trench.”
“I see him,” Natasha said, her voice a purr in his ear. She was thirty feet away, pretending to look at a map. “He’s got an earpiece. He’s not alone.”
The Pharmacist’s gaze swept the concourse. It passed over Bucky and Sage, lingered for a half-second, and moved on. There was no recognition, no triumph. It was a quality check.
Then he gave a small, almost imperceptible nod.
From the stream of commuters near the Oyster Bar, two men broke off. They moved with purpose, heading not toward Bucky, but on an intercept angle toward the 42nd Street exit.
“He’s not coming for her,” Sam said, urgency spiking his tone. “He’s cutting off your exit path. He’s herding you.”
“Change of plan,” Jake’s voice cut through, all pretense gone. “Barnes, turn right. Head for the tracks. Gate 23.”
Bucky pivoted, shouldering his way toward the marble staircase that led down to the platforms. The two men altered course, matching them.
“They’re armed,” Natasha reported. “I see bulges. They’re professional.”
The Pharmacist watched from his vantage point, sipping his coffee. A faint smile touched his lips. He was enjoying the experiment.
Bucky hit the stairs, taking them two at a time, Sage a weight in his arms. The air grew warmer, smelling of brakes and concrete dust. The crowd thinned to occasional travelers.
Gate 23 was a service gate, slightly ajar. Bucky barreled through it onto a deserted platform for a closed track. The relative quiet was deafening.
He set Sage on her feet behind a pillar. “Can you run?”
She nodded, her eyes wide but focused. “Yeah.”
The two men burst through the gate behind them. They didn’t speak. They just raised their pistols, fitted with suppressors.
A shape dropped from the ceiling grid above them, a whirl of white and silver.
Moon Knight landed between the gunmen and Bucky. The crescent staff was a blur. It shattered the first man’s wrist before he could fire. The pistol clattered to the concrete.
The second man got a shot off. It sparked off Marc’s armored shoulder.
Marc didn’t flinch. He closed the distance, driving the head of the staff into the man’s sternum. A sickening crunch echoed in the tunnel. The man folded.
The first man was scrambling for his gun with his good hand. A Widow’s Bite disk hit him in the neck. Blue electricity arced over his body. He went rigid, then slack.
Natasha stepped from the shadows, a smoking gauntlet on her wrist.
Silence, except for the distant rumble of other trains.
“He’s gone,” Sam’s voice reported. “The Pharmacist. He vanished the second his goons moved. He was just here to observe.”
“He saw what he needed to see,” Sage said. Her voice was steady, cold. She was looking at the two unconscious men. “He knows I’m mobile. He knows I’m protected. He knows the seed is being fought.” She looked at Bucky, then at Marc. “He’ll change the protocol now. Escalate.”
Marc’s mask dissolved, revealing Jake’s fierce, sweat-sheened face. He was breathing hard, adrenaline bright in his eyes. “So we hit him before he can.”
“How?” Bucky asked, the frustration boiling over. “He’s a ghost!”
Jake stalked over to the first goon, kneeling and patting him down. He pulled a slim, encrypted smartphone from the man’s inner pocket. He held it up. It was already buzzing with an incoming, untraceable call.
“We don’t find him,” Jake said, a brutal smile spreading across his face. He hit answer and put the phone on speaker. “We let his own panic find us.”
He held the phone out toward Sage. Her expression closed down, becoming a mask of perfect, icy calm. She understood.
She took the phone. She brought it to her ear.
“Hello, Doctor,” she said, her voice devoid of all tremor. “Did you get the data you needed?”
A pause crackled on the line. Then, the Pharmacist’s calm, modulated voice filled the space around them. “Subject resilience is noteworthy. The foreign counter-agents are an interesting variable.”
“You failed,” she stated, simple and clean.
Another pause, longer this time. When he spoke again, the clinical curiosity was edged with something darker. “Failure is a necessary step in iteration. The envarium is prepared. You will be collected.”
The line went dead.
Sage lowered the phone. Her hand was shaking now, the cold composure cracking. She looked at the blank screen, then at the men on the ground.
“He just declared war,” she whispered.
Jake took the phone from her. “Good,” he said, his voice a low promise. “Now we know the battlefield.” He looked at the dark tunnel leading into the city’s bowels. “He’s underground. Somewhere he can build a garden.”
The momentum shifted, a deep, seismic click. The hunt was no longer reactive. They had a vector.
The trap had sprung, but they hadn’t caught the prey. They’d only glimpsed its den.
And now they had to go in.
The van ride back to the compound was a vault sealed in silence. Jake drove, his knuckles white on the wheel. Sage sat wedged between Bucky and Natasha, her gaze fixed on the floor, seeing nothing. The phone felt like a bomb in Jake’s pocket.
Back in the med-bay, the stillness broke.
Tony’s holograms spun, tracing the call’s faint digital ghost through a maze of proxy servers. “He’s routed through a dozen botnets, but the signal originated downtown. Probably under it. The old freight tunnels.”
“So we go digging,” Sam said, shrugging off his flight harness.
“It’s a labyrinth down there,” Natasha countered, her arms crossed. “We need a better map than ‘somewhere underground’.”
“He said ‘envarium’,” Sage’s voice cut through the tactical chatter. Everyone turned. She was sitting on the edge of a bed, her hands pressed flat on her knees to still their trembling. “A controlled ecosystem. It needs specific conditions. Climate control, sterile air filtration, hydroponic feeds for nutrient supply.” Her words were technical, detached, a report from a nightmare. “It’s not a room. It’s a facility.”
Jake had been leaning against the wall, eerily quiet. He pushed off now, his movements precise and predatory. He stopped in front of Bucky, his eyes narrowed. “Back in that cell. You said you had to override the neural command. To get her out of catatonia.”
Bucky felt the floor tilt. He gave a tight nod. “Yeah.”
“How.” It wasn’t a question. It was a demand for a confession.
“Jake,” Marc’s voice surfaced, a warning ripple in their shared voice. “Not now.”
“How.” Jake’s gaze was a drill.
Bucky’s metal hand creaked as he clenched it. He looked over at Sage. She was watching him, her face a pale mask. She gave the faintest nod. She wanted it out. She couldn’t say it herself.
“The sensory command was a full lock,” Bucky said, the words ash in his mouth. “To override a dominating signal… you need a stronger, more visceral one. Pain was unreliable. It had to be a primal system shock.” He couldn’t look at Jake anymore. He stared at a scuff mark on the floor. “It had to be a threat to… integrity. Autonomy.”
The med-bay air turned to glass.
Jake stood perfectly still. His understanding wasn’t gradual. It was instantaneous and absolute. His eyes flicked to Sage—to the haunted vacancy still clinging to her—then back to Bucky. The brutal calculus of it assembled itself in the grim lines of his face.
“You hurt her.” His voice dropped, terrifyingly soft.
“I…,” Bucky started, but there was no verb that could hold the truth.
Jake was on him. No superhero charge, just a street fighter’s lunge. He drove a fist into Bucky’s gut, then an uppercut that snapped his head back. Bucky didn’t block it. He took the hits, stumbling into a instrument trolley with a crash.
“You put your hands on her?” Jake snarled, grabbing Bucky’s vest and slamming him against the wall. Spittle flew. “That was your play? After what they did to her?”
“Stand down!” Sam shouted, stepping forward.
Natasha was faster. She wedged herself between them, a hand on Jake’s chest. He didn’t budge. His eyes, blazing with a fury that was all Jake Lockley, were locked on Bucky.
“It was the only way to get her brain back online,” Bucky gasped, making no move to fight back. His lip was split. “It was the window. The only one she had.”
“A window?” Jake shook him, his voice raw. “You think that makes it clean?”
“I know it doesn’t!” Bucky roared back, finally shoving Jake off with a metallic heave. They stood inches apart, chests heaving. “You think I don’t feel it? You think I don’t see it every time she looks at me?” He jabbed a finger toward Sage. “He was in her head, making her a passenger. I had to… to be the thing that pulled her to the surface. However I could.”
Sage’s voice, quiet and utterly drained, stopped them cold. “He’s right.”
Jake turned his head, the motion stiff.
“It was a tool,” she said, looking at the space between them. Not at their faces. “A horrific, rotten tool. He used it. I used him to use it. To get out.” She finally lifted her eyes to Jake. The defiance there was scorched, but real. “So you don’t get to punish him for it. Your anger has the wrong address.”
Jake’s breath escaped in a sharp, furious stream. He took a step back from Bucky, the violent energy coiling inward. His gaze swept over Sage, taking in her resolve, the shame in Bucky’s posture, the awful truth of it. The blunt cab driver logic processed it, relabeled it.
“Fine,” he spat, the word sharp as a shiv. He pointed at Bucky. “Your debt’s not to me.” He then turned that pointed finger toward the ceiling, toward the city above. “It’s to the bastard who built the room. Who made that the only window.”
The atmosphere didn’t clear. It tightened into a new, more lethal shape.
“Then we burn his garden down,” Marc’s voice said, firmly in control again, smoothing the rough edges from their shared facade. He touched his split knuckle, his expression grim. “Sage. What would he need? Be specific.”
She closed her eyes, thinking. “Constant, stable power. Major water lines. Secure vertical access, but not through public grids. Old infrastructure. Private.”
Tony’s fingers flew across a holographic keyboard. “Filtering for those parameters… under the financial district. There’s a pre-war subterranean depot. Owned by a shell company that’s a subsidiary of another shell company.” He pulled up a schematic. “Heat signatures are masked, but there’s a consistent water draw that matches a small-scale hydroponic system.”
A 3D map of tunnels bloomed in the air.
“That’s it,” Sage whispered, a tremor of revulsion in her voice. She recognized the layout from some half-remembered, drugged haze. “That’s the place.”
Sam studied the routes. “He’ll have the approaches wired. Motion sensors, biometrics. We go in loud, he flees or floods the place with neurotoxin.”
“So we don’t use the approaches,” Jake said, his anger now a cold, focused fuel. He zoomed in on the schematic, on the sewer line that ran close to the depot’s eastern wall. It was old, crumbling. “We go through the waste pipe. It’s brittle. We can breach it.”
“That’s a three-foot diameter pipe full of…” Natasha trailed off.
“Yeah,” Jake said, a humorless smile touching his lips. “He’ll never see it coming. And he’d never think anyone would be desperate enough to try.”
Bucky wiped the blood from his mouth. He looked at Sage, then at the dank tunnel visualized in light before them. The path was clear. It was vile. It was perfect.
“We suit up,” Bucky said, his voice low. “We go through the dark.”