Army of One ★ Steve Rogers

04

Steve watched as the medical team accompanied the figure on the floating bed to the medical bay. He followed close behind but stayed outside the glass room, with Nakia and Okoye next to him. The bed came to a standstill under a large lightbox. Several images and scans began to appear, like 3D holograms, around the figures head. Different members of the team flicked different holograms onto portable, clear glass screens and the glass walls of the medical bay. The room was soon alight with the various scans and renderings.

Some showed the vascular system, others the skeleton, others the brain and spinal cord. Lastly, there appeared a precise rendering of the figure's head, from the crown down.

Everyone's attention snapped to it, as the seemingly dead heart beat one lonely beat.

The figure's face began to appear on the rendering. It was hard to make out at first, but it was a woman. She was emaciated. It looked like her skin had been pulled taut over the contours of her skull. Her cheeks and eyes were sunken. She reminded Steve of the people he had liberated from the prison camps during the war.

Shuri was furiously typing away at a screen; it was showing a loader at 80%. Steve had a deep furrow in his brow, and his whole body was tense. He watched as after more than a minute her heart beat again for the first time.

The loader reached 100% and the word 'clear' appeared on the screen. Shuri exclaimed, "No pathogens found. Let's get her out of that shroud."

The team set to work at cutting away the layers of fabric.

Steve hadn't noticed that T'Challa had joined him, Nakia and Okoye outside the medical bay. Ayo was nowhere to be seen.

"Remarkable." Muttered the king.

Steve wasn't sure if that's the word he'd use but said nothing. He wondered if his rescue had played out like this. He didn't know what happened to him before he woke up in the staged room in New York. Perhaps it looked a lot like what he was witnessing now.

The woman's heart rate didn't change as the layers came off. The inside of the innermost layer of her shroud showed many faded runes. The team worked to remove this layer carefully. The woman lay on the table, wearing what looked like a short linen dress. Her hair was grey-white and wrapped around her body, her hands on top of the ends resting on her chest.

Okoye and Nakia shared a few words in Wakandan.

A man in a white coat straightened the woman's arm and inserted a drip needle on top of her wrist. The rest of the medical personnel were examining the various scans burning around the room.

"Wait, whats that?" Exclaimed Shuri, pointing at the throat area on a 3D rendition of the neck. With a motion of her hand, she peeled away the layers of skin and muscle on the 3D model.

Everyone in the room gathered around the image, Steve, Okoye, Nakia and T'Challa squinted to see what they were looking at.

"There's something lodged in her throat," said Shuri as she turned to a tray covered with a blue cloth. She lifted it and removed long forceps. She made her way over to the woman, gently tilting her head back and opening her mouth.

"Light." She ordered, and a person appeared at her side shining a light down the woman's throat.

She carefully inserted the forceps and Steve watched as they sank deeper and deeper into the woman's throat. They were still for a moment as Shuri caught the object in a secure grip.

With her elbow sticking up in the air, Shuri began to extract the object slowly. Steve could hear a pin drop as everyone stood, rapt in what Shuri was doing. The second the object was out of the woman's body, her heart rate started to climb rapidly, and an audible breath entered her lungs as her chest expanded, arching her back off the table.