Resilience | ✔

Chapter Eighteen

Marley stared down at the package. With the bomb in it. The cardboard box with the bomb in it. It was a package. It had an Amazon label on it. And it had a bomb inside. She opened her mouth—to say what she didn't know—and couldn't make a sound.

There was a bomb sitting on her kitchen counter.

01:43

"Hey, Marley?" Beck's voice floated out from the hallway, and she came in carrying Marley's computer a moment later. "Your LGBT blog just got an anon that says 'Enjoy the surprise, I hope you die.' Is that something we should be worried about? Should we tell Tony or Steve?"

01:32

Marley couldn't move or speak.

"What's wrong?" Out of the corner of her eye, Marley saw Beck put the computer down. "You look like you've seen a ghost. Not to be cliché."

Another pause, in which Marley tried to breathe but didn't. She could only watch the clock tick down. Beck said, in a dark, wanting-to-be-wrong tone, "Is that the surprise?"

"I think so," Marley whispered, finally wrangling control over her voice. She looked up at her friend. "It's a bomb."

"It's a bomb?" Beck shouted. She spun and ran to the doorway and bellowed, "RHODEY! STEVE!" 

She ran back to Marley. "Get away from it—"

01:09

Beck dragged her away from the box. Rhodey came sprinting in, looking highly alarmed. "Beck? What is it?"

"Bomb," Beck said, letting go of Marley to point at the box.

Rhodey's eyes bugged. He lunged to the box. "Shit! F.R.I.D.A.Y., let everyone know there's a bomb in the kitchen. And get Wanda in here ASAP." He looked at Marley and Beck. "You two get out of here. Go to the western edge of the woods and stay there."

West—as far away from the kitchen as possible. Some strange part of Marley wanted to stay, to help—but she knew she'd be useless. Beck hauled her out of the kitchen into a dead run. By the time Marley had the wherewithal to say something like Be careful to Rhodey, they were out of earshot. They had a minute, tops, to get out of the building and to the western edge of the woods. She didn't think they were fast enough to make that happen, but she'd always had a bit of a skewed sense of time, so who knew?

How much of the building would the bomb take out? What if it killed everyone? Shit. She was going to be the girl who killed the Avengers. Who killed Tony—her own father. Tony. "Tony," she panted at Beck.

"He'll be fine!" Beck didn't look back. Marley was simultaneously pissed and grateful that she didn't. Pissed because it was her father and everything was her fault and Beck would be heartless not to let her go back—and grateful because Beck was stronger than her and knew to keep them from going back and getting in the way. Because they would get in the way. The Avengers were a well-oiled machine; they had each others' backs, and knew their duties without needing to be told.

They burst through a door onto a metal and glass deck a story off the ground. Beck, hand still a vise on Marley's arm, made a beeline for the stairs. Marley wasn't wearing shoes. She was half afraid the deck would crack beneath her feet and leave shards of glass in her heels. She'd always been afraid of glass in her feet for some dumb reason.

They charged down the stairs, both of them nearly tripping in their haste, and broke into a sprint across the lawn. Marley threw glances over her shoulder at the other side of the compound as they ran—the bomb was bound to go off soon.

They were halfway to the edge of the woods when Marley threw a look back over her shoulder and saw a streak of red dart into the sky above the compound—Wanda's power. She slowed, wrenching her arm out of Beck's grasp, and turned to watch. The red fire pushed the Amazon box into the sky, and it had to be a good hundred feet off the ground when Wanda shot after it—with the unmistakable red and gold of the Iron Man suit close behind. Marley felt her stomach drop to the ground. No, she thought, and didn't know who or what she was directing it at.