In the Light Between the Lines

Okoye led Shuri into Birnin Zana’s high-ceilinged air hangar. She stood by the entrance, one hand hovering near her weapon, a slight frown on her face. “They’re over there.” She gestured to three silhouetted figures huddled at the far end of the vaulted room. Two were tall and strangely bulky; the other appeared to be wearing some sort of metallic red overshirt that gleamed in the dim blue strip lights.

Shuri nodded to Okoye. The princess lifted her chin, pulling back her shoulders. “I’ll talk to them,” she said in Xhosa. “See what they want.” Injected confidence into every step, she approached the newcomers.

As she got closer, she realized that the two bulky strangers were wearing armored suits. Her heart leapt into her throat. She knew that Colonel Rhodes had gone back to New York to look for Tony Stark, and by the looks of it, he’d found him.

“Princess Shuri.” Rhodes addressed Shuri with a respectful dip of his head. He flipped up the face-plate on his helmet. His expression was conflicted; he smiled, but it was tense, forced. “I’ve brought some guests. Hope you don’t mind.”

Shrui raised an eyebrow. Her curiosity rose. She crossed her arms, tilting her head slightly as she surveyed the two figures standing in the shadows behind the Colonel. “It depends,” she said. “Is one of them Iron Man?”

The other bulky figure stepped out into the dim blue glow of the inner runway lights. Immediately, Shuri’s sharp eyes told her it wasn’t Tony Stark—it was his armor, yes, but someone else was inside the trademark gold-and-red shell. “Princess Shuri,” the figure greeted her. The voice was slightly filtered, electronic and crackling with static. But it was clearly female.

Shuri’s suspicions were confirmed. This wasn’t Tony Stark.

Who, then, was it?

“I’m Pepper Potts.” The woman in the suit reached up and pressed a button on the side of the helmet. It slid back, revealing her face. She was beautiful, middle-aged with red hair and kind eyes. At once, Shuri recognized her from various Stark Industries-sponsored social galas and tech-centered events. She was always by Tony Stark’s side, the woman behind a great man.

Shuri smiled. “Ms. Potts. You are more than welcome here.”

Pepper Potts smiled warmly. “Thank you, Princess Shuri.” She looked to Colonel Rhodes as if silently asking him what to do or say next.

Shuri, sensing her discomfort, turned to the third member of the little group. “And who are you?” she asked the figure in the shadows.

The figure stepped forward. Shuri was surprised to see that she was young, around Shuri’s own age, with dark curly hair and a mischievous half-smile. She held out a hand—a hand sheathed in what looked like metallic red spandex—to Shuri. “I’m Michelle Jones,” the girl said. She lazily blew a strand of hair away from her face. “My friends call me MJ.”

Shuri took her hand and shook it. “Welcome to Wakanda, Michelle Jones,” she said with a genuine smile. She gestured to the suit Michelle wore, which seemed to be made of some sort of cutting-edge nanotechnology. She couldn’t be sure until she got it back to her lab, but something told her the thin red-and-black armor (like the suits Ms. Potts and Colonel Rhodes wore) had been constructed using Stark Industries tech. “I haven’t seen this suit before. Or you, for that matter.”

Michelle shrugged. “I’m new.” Lifting an eyebrow and looking Shuri up and down, she added, “I like your cat suit. Very New-York-high-fashion meets high-tech-Halloween.”

Shuri laughed. “Thanks, I think?”

“No, it’s a compliment.” Michelle tilted her head. That mischievous little smile crept back onto her face. “You’re killin’ it.”

“This kid broke into the New York Avengers’ HQ and stole a multimillion-dollar Stark Industries tech suit,” Rhodes cut in, gesturing to Michelle. His tone was a mix of impressed and irritated. “I have no idea how she did it, which is the only reason she’s here now. I thought, well, maybe she can help out to make up for trespassing on and stealing Avengers property.”

Michelle rolled her eyes. She crossed her arms over her red-clad chest, where a black spider sat amid a web of black, webbed lines. “I was looking for someone,” she said. “I thought he might be there, but no luck. Found this prototype suit, though, and thought I’d help myself.”

Rhodes sighed. He rubbed a hand over his face, shaking his head. “I was looking for someone, too. No luck on that, either.”

Ms. Potts looked down, her eyes darkening. Shuri read the truth off her face: Tony Stark was still MIA.

Formalities over, Shuri returned to the more pressing matters at hand. “I’m sorry, Colonel,” she addressed Rhodes, “but I need to get back to my lab. The fate of the world is at stake.”

Ms. Potts frowned, looking up. “I’m sorry,” she began, “but what happened? I’m still not clear on everything.”

Shuri sighed. “It would take a while to explain everything,” she said. “Come back to my lab with me. I’d love to get a look at your tech.” She turned and walked back toward the doorway, where Okoye stood guard. “The woman is Pepper Potts,” she told Okoye in Xhosa, “and the girl is Michelle Jones. They’re with Colonel Rhodes. They’ve come to help in whatever way they can. And,” she added with a smile, “I think I know exactly how to use them.”

Okoye looked somewhat skeptical. She stood aside, and Shuri led the way through the corridor, up several flights of stairs, and down the hall leading to her lab. The newcomers followed close behind, their armored footsteps echoing in the clean, well-lit spaces.

Back on Titan, Nebula located the Guardians’ ship. Quill and his crew had landed it on the other side of the rubble city; she found it sheltered beneath an overhang of red rock. It seemed intact—nothing she couldn’t fix in a few days—and mostly functional.

Which only left the moral side of her dilemma to consider. The question was, should she take this ship and go after Thanos herself, leaving Stark to die? Or should she offer him a place onboard and risk mutiny and failure? After all, he wanted to return to Earth, and she didn’t. Bringing him with her would be risky, and at this point, she couldn’t risk much. She’d already lost everything. The only thing keeping her going was the promise of revenge; if Stark took that away, she’d have nothing.

Sitting under the sharp, curved wing of the Benatar, Nebula crossed her arms and stared up at the swirling rubble high in Titan’s atmosphere. She sighed. She’d told Stark she was looking for water; it wasn’t strictly a lie, but she felt slightly guilty (a feeling she wasn’t used to) about leaving him to fend for himself in the growing heat. From what she could tell, his mental state was suffering. The longer he stayed on Titan, the worse he would get. Unless he returned to his own home world sooner than later, Nebula had the sneaking suspicion he would either lose his mind and die, or lose his will to live and die. Either way, she’d feel at least somewhat responsible for his death. And with so much already weighing on her conscious (even if the weight was buried deep, stashed away in the farthest, darkest recesses of her mind), she wasn’t sure she wanted to add any more names to her list of victims.

In fact, there was only one creature in all of existence she wanted to kill now. And to get to him, she would have to do horrible things.

She’d do horrible things, yes. Just not today.

Today, she decided to take a chance. Even if it felt wrong, even if it went against her very nature, she would let Stark live. For Gamora, she told herself, I will do this for my sister.

Gamora had been so fond of her human. If Gamora had seen something worth saving in a guy like Peter Quill, then surely Nebula could find a reason to save a hero like Tony Stark. She’d seen him fight—he’d been the last hero standing against the Mad Titan, determined and fearless to the end—and, in a way, she respected him. He’d stood up against Thanos when everyone else had failed. A mere mortal, fighting with the strength of an immortal, and the wild, reckless abandon that humanity seemed to have in spades.

Shielding her eyes with her metal hand, Nebula rose to her feet. She broke the combination code on the Benatar’s back door and climbed up into the ship. It took her less than a minute to find a cabinet full of dehydrated food and canteens of water. She took two of the largest bottles, cradling them under her arms. They were ice-cold, comfortably numbing her skin and driving out the pulsing heat of morning.

Stepping back out into the dust and rubble, she closed and locked the door behind her. Shading the bottles with her body, she turned her back on the rising sun and started down the narrow, eroded path toward Titan’s City Center.

She was halfway back when someone cried out. She recognized the sound at once—it was Stark. Setting the bottles down beside a long-dried fountain, she leapt gracefully down the stairs and raced toward the wreck of Thanos’s ship, heading in the direction of the piercing, soul-shattering sound.

In the Soul Realm, Peter Parker and Aunt May found Ned Leeds crouched over a ten-inch-wide crevasse. The gray sands of the flat, endless plains slid into the crack with a dull hiss. Ned seemed entranced by it, his hand hovering cautiously over the gaping, bottomless abyss.

Peter called Ned’s name as he approached. Ned stood up, spinning around with an expression of dawning excitement on his face. He ran to meet Peter; Peter opened his arms, grinning widely, and they met in a rib-shattering hug. “Dude,” said Ned, breathless with relief, “I thought you were dead for sure.”

“Dude, we are dead,” said Peter. They broke apart. Peter put a hand on Ned’s shoulder, still smiling way more than what seemed appropriate given the situation. He forced himself to sober up; turning to Aunt May, he gestured between the three of them. “All of us, right now, we’re dead. It’s a long story, so I’ll try to just give you the Cliffnotes.” He took a deep breath, bracing himself. “Okay, here goes. So this evil guy, Thanos—he’s from space, like a real alien from outer space—sent some other evil alien dudes down in this high-tech donut ship—y’know, Ned, the one we saw from the bus?—and so I got on the ship, then Mr. Stark turned up, and we went into space. But then we crash-landed on this alien planet, and the main alien dude, Thanos, showed up and we got in a huge fight. Which we lost, I think. And then Thanos killed half of everyone, which was his evil plan all along.”

Ned reached out and put his hand on Peter’s shoulder, bracing himself. “Are you fucking kidding me? You went to space? Holy shit, that is so cool!”

Aunt May, hovering by Peter’s shoulder, frowned. Peter, who wasn’t sure if it was due to Ned’s strong language or the revelation that her nephew had been playing real-life Superheroes vs. Aliens when he was supposed to be at school, decided to change the subject as quickly as possible.

“So, that crack.” Peter gestured to the crevasse, which seemed to have grown impossibly wider in the half-minute since he’d first seen it. “You have any idea how it got there?”

Ned nodded. “Yeah, man. I watched it open up like five minutes ago. It’s weird—there was this bright flash of green light, and then the ground started shaking. Like an earthquake, only more intense. Then the crack opened up, and it’s been getting bigger ever since.”

Peter swallowed hard. He looked past Ned at the crevasse. The hairs along his arms and on the back of his neck stood on end. Shivers ran up and down his spine. “We should move back,” he told Ned and May. “Just in case, I think we should stay back.”

Ned looked like he wanted to protest, while May looked relieved. The three of them took a few steps back from the crevasse. Peter never took his eyes off it.

“I wonder what caused it,” May voiced Peter’s thoughts aloud. She frowned, rubbing her wrist nervously. “Peter, you seem to know a lot more about what’s going on than we do. Do you know anything about this?”

Peter opened his mouth, hoping that the gesture itself would invite a moment of revelation, but nothing came to mind. He shook his head. “I wish Mr. Stark was here,” he admitted. “I bet he’d know what it is.”

Suddenly, the ground shuddered. Peter stumbled back; Ned caught him by the arm, barely stopping him from falling. Aunt May went down with a cry. With a thunderous boom, the crevasse yawned suddenly wider. The trickling sand became an avalanche. It slid around them with a horrible hiss, rushing toward the gaping void and pulling them with it.

“Run!” Peter yelled. He grabbed Aunt May’s hand, tugging her back to her feet. He caught Ned by the wrist, pulling him along as he took off at a dead sprint.

Behind them, the crack widened. The sand rushed in torrents of gray.

“This is so fucked!” Ned yelled.

“I know!” Peter held his breath as he ran, finding that he didn’t need to breathe to maintain his speed. “I wonder if we can die in here, since we’re already dead!”

“Don’t say that,” Aunt May yelled back. Her face was a mask of panic. “Just shut up and keep going!”

“Sorry, Aunt May!” Peter ducked his head against the breeze, which seemed to be picking up. It was like the crack was sucking everything into its depths—sand, air, and souls. With his heart beating wildly in his chest, Peter gritted his teeth, fixed his gaze on the distant horizon, and focused every bit of his formidable energy on getting himself and his companions out in one piece.