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Nadia became determined to find the smartest girls in the world so they could form their own lab, together. She started with the immediate New York City area, because that’s where she was located, flying long-distance was taxing, and she didn’t have her driver’s license. Yet.
But she was working on it.
She’d already managed to find the four best lab partners in the entire world, anyway, and they were all right here in G.I.R.L. HQ, right behind these doors, ready to surprise Nadia with streamers and balloons and…would there be cake?
Ooh. Nadia really liked cake.
She took a deep breath, thinking very hard about a convincing “surprised” face as she swiped her key card and the sliding lab doors opened.
“Surprise!”
The sound of her friends’ voices echoed off the hard surfaces of the lab tables and state-of-the-art equipment in the most beautiful cacophony. Nadia slapped her hands onto her cheeks and pulled her mouth into a perfectly formed Oh! of feigned shock.
“Oh my goodness!” Nadia said, her hands still on her face. “I am so surprised!”
An entire lab’s worth of girls stared at Nadia for a moment in silence, the streamers and confetti still gently floating to the floor.
“She totally knew.” Taina rolled her eyes and rolled her way over to the cake. “I’m cutting this now.”
“I didn’t know!” Nadia insisted, rushing forward to look closer at the cake. Taina was already jamming a fork into the first slice. The slice (including a D from HAPPY NAME DAY, NADYA, which, close enough) revealed the cake’s flavor: funfetti. Obviously.
“Sure,” Priya said, but Nadia could tell by the way she rolled her eyes at the ceiling that she didn’t buy it.
“Nadia, you are many things,” said Ying, swinging her legs down off the cake table, skillfully avoiding getting any white icing on her signature all-black athleisure ensemble. ?
?But why don’t you leave the deception to me?”
Shay elbowed her girlfriend. “We can’t all be super-spies.”
“She was actually trained to be a super-spy,” Ying corrected. Shay quieted Ying down by popping some funfetti directly into her mouth. Ying shrugged and chewed.
Shay wasn’t wrong, but neither was Ying. Nadia’s childhood wasn’t exactly what you would call traditional. In fact, pretty much everything after her parents’ wedding was utter chaos, if Nadia was honest with herself. Hank Pym, who would later be better known in some circles as the original Ant-Man, had married Maria Trovaya, a brilliant Hungarian scientist fleeing from behind the Iron Curtain. While on their honeymoon, Maria was kidnapped by Red Room agents and later killed.
Right after she gave birth. To Nadia.
Hank hadn’t even known that Maria was pregnant.
Nadia had been born and raised in the Krasnaya Komnata—the Red Room, a secret intelligence facility created by the KGB to train girls who would become the best spies in the world. Most people are more familiar with it as the Black Widow Ops Program; but what people usually don’t know is that there is more than one way to become a Widow.
Some girls like guns. Others like gears. Nadia was the latter.
Her handlers thought that her gift for science was genetic. They encouraged Nadia to study constantly. But Nadia knew that her skills weren’t inherited; they came from her and her alone. It wasn’t like the shape of her head made her brain better at math, no matter how much they’d wanted her to believe it.
Nadia worked hard. She made progress. Then she found a way to work harder. The only Red Room handler she’d ever liked—the only one who almost treated her like she was her own person and not just a product of parents she never knew—was a man with a silver arm. Nadia could still recall the big red star on his shoulder, though she couldn’t remember her own mother. The man with the silver arm encouraged her to keep reading.
So she’d studied. And she’d learned. And then she’d studied some more. (She later learned his name was Bucky Barnes, and he would escape the Krasnaya Komnata and become a good guy, too!)
Of course, there was your traditional Red Room training. No one escaped a supersecret instructional spy facility without learning how to take down a man twice their size while also executing clean fouettés into a perfect double pirouette (Nadia’s favorite combination to this day), sometimes simultaneously.
Nadia used her studies in science and her ballet training to help her in combat exercises; after all, it was a lot easier to take down a man twice your size if you knew how to properly destabilize his center of gravity, and strong ankles never hurt your chances.
The Red Room handlers didn’t want their charges to get too close; to say they fostered an atmosphere of competition instead of cooperation would be an understatement. But Nadia liked people, and she especially liked Ying, another scientist of the Red Room who excelled in biochemistry. Nadia and Ying hid their friendship, hoping they wouldn’t be separated or used against each other.
They were, eventually. But that came later.
When Nadia finally managed to obtain a Pym Particle on the black market, she knew she’d found her way out. Reverse engineering her father’s research, Nadia learned how to use the particles to shrink—and promptly shrank her way out of the Red Room and on to freedom.
It wasn’t an easy journey from Siberia to New York City. But she’d made it.
