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Margaret took in the scene in front of her. Nadia had her feet up on the birch table, tilted back precariously in her acrylic chair. She had the VERA on her lap projecting a keyboard into the air that Nadia was manipulating with ease. Margaret glanced at the TV. The code that had previously been bright red—illegal output—was now blue. Clean and functional.
Nadia glanced up at Margaret, shaken out of her coding reverie. “Oh! I’m—” She dropped VERA back onto the table hastily, the keyboard vanishing. “It was staring at me. But I fixed it!”
Margaret sat back down across from her, all business. “I know. How?”
“It’s called CodePhage,” Nadia said. “It’s from MIT—”
“You told VERA to fix VERA for you.” Margaret shook her head. She looked delighted. “We didn’t have access to that program.”
“I mean, I don’t, either,” said Nadia, slyly. “But…”
“But.” Margaret winked at her in understanding. “Amazing work. Thank you.”
“Well, it helped me pass the time.”
“Right, I abandoned you cruelly,” Margaret said dramatically, still smiling. “Maybe this will make up for it. I want to help with your Like Minds project.”
“Really?!” Nadia tipped her chair forward, landing back on all fours with a thud. “Really?”
“Really.” Margaret nodded. “I think there’s a lot we could do together. Hank’s legacy. You know?”
Nadia had never thought of herself as Hank’s anything. Not even daughter. Not really. She rejected that label on purpose, after all the time the Red Room spent making her think that her connection to Hank was her only real value. Nadia was more Janet’s. Or her own, really. But she wasn’t going to dash Margaret’s dreams; not when she was so close to recruiting another member of G.I.R.L. And one so important, too! The lab had been so empty lately. Nadia allowed herself a brief moment to imagine what it would be like to walk into G.I.R.L. and find Margaret waiting for her with a project. It was a dream.
Plus, Margaret might finally be able to help Nadia implement one of her grander-scale ideas for Like Minds. Bobbi and Janet had been so insistent that Nadia stick to the parameters of Stark’s brief: local projects only. The rules were there for a reason, they kept saying.
But Nadia’s whole thing was rule-breaking. For good. She had always been that way. “Chaotic good,” as Shay would say.
Nadia made friends with her spy sisters; she purchased Pym Particles on the black market; she escaped from the Krasnaya Komnata in the dead of night; she was disrupting S.H.I.E.L.D.’s One Hundred Smartest People in the World list. She even broke the rules of physics! Rule-breaking, like liking things, was Nadia’s thing!
If Janet and Bobbi couldn’t understand that…maybe Margaret could.
“Listen, Nadia.” Margaret reached across the table and took one of Nadia’s hands. “I don’t know you that well, but I can tell you this. Everyone assumed I was some silly little rich girl who wasn’t good for anything more than marrying someone richer than my father. No one believed in me but me. I had to make everything—all of this—happen for myself. And I could only get here by knowing that my mission was worthy.” Margaret squeezed Nadia’s hand. “I don’t know what you’re using VERA for. But I know that G.I.R.L. is a worthy cause. And I know that you need to believe in yourself to make it a success. Okay?”
Nadia stared into Margaret’s clear eyes, and made a decision. More than anything, Nadia wanted someone to understand that she was more than just her projects and G.I.R.L. and Like Minds and the rest of it. She was finding a new part of herself through Maria’s journal, and Taina couldn’t understand that. Or, at least, she wouldn’t. But Margaret had a way of making Nadia feel like they were on the same page. Like she understood how Nadia’s mind worked better than most of the people she’d ever met.
“My mother—Hank’s first wife, Maria—she died before I could know her,” Nadia said. Margaret just held her hand, and listened. “I found her journal. She had a list of things she wanted to do with her future child one day—with me.”
Nadia hadn’t said it out loud before. Not quite like that. She was surprised at how it felt, how solidly it hit her that she was thought of. Considered. Loved. There was a time when she wasn’t alone, wasn’t an orphan. When she was a daughter, loved by her mother, who had plans to fill her life with beauty and color and joy and food.
“I have G.I.R.L. and I have Like Minds and I’m trying to learn to drive and one of my friends can talk to plants and the others are dating and I’ve never even been to high school—” Nadia took a deep breath. “But all I want to do is get through this list. And VERA’s already helping me with that. And that’s why I wanted to come meet you. And to…I don’t know.” Nadia faltered. “Say thank you, I suppose.”
Margaret squeezed Nadia’s hand again before letting go, and gave her a genuine smile. Not one of pity, like most people who learned that Nadia had never known her parents. But one of empathy and understanding.
“VERA,” Margaret said to the brick on the table. “Access Nadia’s VERA…with her permission, of course.”
“Granted,” confirmed Nadia.
VERA materialized an image of the full list of items on Maria’s to-do list. Margaret scanned the list while she talked.
“A secret in return,” Margaret said quietly, still reading the list. “I didn’t get an offer after my internship. Other people did—all the men in my cohort did, actually. Three of them. Cody, Ben, and Ryan.” Nadia could hear the venom in her voice, and she felt it in her bones. “When I didn’t get that offer, I swore to myself that I would make my own company, and that it would be twice as successful and twice as beneficial to the world as anything they did. I would prove to Hank Pym that I had it in me, even though he didn’t believe in me.” Margaret looked at Nadia. “And now I’m here.”
Nadia matched her gaze. “As someone who has spent her entire life escaping the shadow of Hank Pym,” she said softly, “I understand.”
Margaret held her eyes for a second and nodded. She flicked back to the list and spun VERA around, so the words were facing Nadia. She pointed in the air toward a bullet. “This one.”
“‘Watch the stars,’” Nadia read aloud.
Margaret jumped up and zipped around the table, pulling Nadia out of her seat. “C’mere. I’ve got something to show you.”
