Daisy was tall for a woman, but she still fell well short of Cap's six-foot-two frame, so she borrowed instinctively from K'un-Lun's method of channeling force—toes barely grazing the pavement, body light as a skimming bird, quick and nearly weightless.
She'd completed two circuits alongside Cap when her phone rang. She pulled up short.
It was Storm. The situation was serious. Jean had run away.
"Impossible. You're joking."
Daisy was genuinely baffled. Jean had been perfectly fine—why on earth would she run away from home?
Storm's voice came through breathless—she must have been doing something strenuous. "Jean left a note saying she wants to travel the world. Out of nowhere. What is she thinking?"
Storm's tone was laced with frustration. With the current climate between ordinary humans and mutants this tense, wandering around freely was reckless to the point of stupidity.
Daisy's expression twitched. It wasn't because I spent time talking to Dark Phoenix about what the cosmos looks like, was it? That couldn't have filtered through to Jean. Right?
"Professor X thinks she's headed to Ellis Island. They're preparing a world leaders' summit there on the mutant question. He's worried she might—"
Daisy got it immediately. She already knew about this summit; S.H.I.E.L.D. was part of the security apparatus.
If Jean had a breakdown at a venue like that, the scale of damage would be catastrophic. After causing that kind of destruction, knowing Jean's nature, she'd most likely choose to end her own life. Once the Phoenix needed a new host, Daisy—who had been casually borrowing traces of Phoenix Force through her conversations with Dark Phoenix—was exactly the kind of ambient resonance point the Phoenix might gravitate toward. She did not want that attention.
Setting aside the self-preservation angle: her friendship with Storm and Jean—and her relationship with Dark Phoenix—was genuine. She couldn't just stand by and watch Jean walk into something she might not walk back out of. From a pure self-interest standpoint alone, Jean absolutely could not be allowed to come to harm right now. Storm saw this as a mutant-human relations crisis. For Daisy, the stakes were more immediate.
She promised to help, and immediately started running through the question of where to begin looking.
"Need a hand? This sounds serious." Cap materialized at her elbow, reading her expression.
She looked at him. He was clearly coming whether she wanted him to or not.
"You drive, I'll handle the logistics." Too many people nearby for a clean teleport. She waved for him to follow, already moving—and having this particular man along had the practical advantage of outsourcing any upcoming physical confrontations directly to him.
Recalling his run-in with traffic enforcement a few days back, she added: "Drive fast. They won't stop my car."
Equipped with the Super-Soldier Serum, Cap's reflexes were superhuman across the board. He piloted the Porsche with terrifying commitment, weaving nonstop, and as she'd predicted, no one stopped the car.
On the way, Daisy had her team pull surveillance footage from every train and long-distance bus station in the area. Jean was distinctive in ways that didn't disappear in a crowd. But all the way to New York, her team found no sign of her.
Daisy stared at the results. How does someone like Jean Grey just vanish?
More confusingly—where were Storm and Cyclops? They'd called her for help and gone silent.
"Steve. Let's try the station. If she's going to Ellis Island, Grand Central Terminal is the obvious drop point. You know Grand Central?"
Cap nodded, clearly falling into memory. "The Vanderbilt family started construction in 1903. Officially opened in 1913. Manhattan landmark. Last time I came through, the entire place was packed wall-to-wall with wounded soldiers…"
"It's different now. The Vanderbilts have been in decline for sixty years."
They were in street clothes. Cap kept glancing at the city around him—recognizing the bones of it, thrown by everything built on top—like a man walking simultaneously through two different decades.
Daisy had no room for nostalgia. She pushed her awareness out to its maximum range, showed Cap a photo of Jean, and they split up.
A call a few minutes later: Storm and Cyclops had ridden bicycles all the way out of Xavier's and had only just flagged down a taxi to New York. En route.
"I'm sorry. We'll be there as soon as we can. Logan left ahead of us—he should already be in the city by now."
Storm's voice was all apology. Daisy let it go.
She was moving through the terminal, scanning the crowd, when Cap's psychic signature lurched hard. Something wrong.
She ran.
They hadn't been far apart—a few hundred meters at most. She pushed into one of the cars and found Cap slumped against a red-upholstered seat, face drained of color, his left hand locked around a young woman's arm.
The girl wore a green blouse. Honey-blonde hair framing a small oval face—pretty, under normal circumstances. Right now: pure terror.
Was a superhero really going to go down like that? She'd come here to find Jean Grey, and now this girl was popping up instead. Storm had said Wolverine was already in New York—where was he? The people who were supposed to show up weren't showing up, and the ones who had no business being here kept materializing one by one.
One look was all she needed. Rogue.
Anna Marie. The walking exploit. Absorb anyone's powers, emotions, and memories through skin contact—mutant, non-mutant, no restrictions. Life force too. In her later years she'd be able to hold multiple people's abilities simultaneously inside a single body; with a few notable exceptions, nearly anyone in the solar system was fair game.
"Let go!" Daisy wasn't offering herself up for any power drain. She snapped into her Inhuman state and flicked a shockwave—compact and precise—between them, breaking the contact.
"Steve, are you all right?"
Cap was already breathing deliberately, color returning. He'd been touched only briefly before the interruption. Two deep breaths, and he was on his feet.
"What are you—" He'd been about to demand who or what she was, but he took in the young face looking up at him, and swallowed it.
Rogue had absorbed a fair amount of Cap's abilities and life force in that brief contact—enough that her complexion had turned noticeably rosy. She knew exactly who the handsome man was. Her mouth was slightly open, eyes wide with something very close to disbelief.
A living Captain America.
"You escaped from Xavier's?" Daisy shot her a look that communicated her feelings about teenagers who stirred up trouble over petty romantic nonsense every single day and expected the whole world to sort it out. "I'll have someone take you back."
A voice from outside—deep, resonant, rich with a magnetism that wasn't purely metaphorical. "She won't be going with you, Agent Johnson."
Draped in a purple cloak, wearing a black Kevlar combat suit, the old man descended from above with unhurried grace. He wore a partially enclosed metal helmet that looked, from a distance, somewhere between imposing and faintly ridiculous—the kind of thing you'd mistake for a motorcycle helmet if you caught it at the wrong angle.
"Mr. Erik Lehnsherr." Daisy tracked him with full attention, cataloguing everything. "I've heard so much about you."
Magneto. Lorna's biological father. The strongest magnetic manipulator alive.