Then, striding angrily through the undergrowth was the man who would give the order: the mighty Mandarin himself, with an expression pasted across his normally serene features that would paralyze a cow.

  “Mandy,” said Tony, “you seem stressed. You should get a massage.”

  The Mandarin hefted his sword, which had yet to drain the blood of a billionaire.

  “Yield, Stark. End this foolishness.”

  Tony shook his head. “No yielding for me today. And no respect from the troops for you.”

  The Mandarin could not hide his irritation. “That is not your affair. The team and I will work through our issues. As far as you are concerned, there are two options: you face the inevitable and submit to your decapitation, or you put up a fight and we shoot you, then decapitate your staged corpse. Not ideal, I admit, but better than nothing.”

  Neither of these options was great as far as Tony was concerned. After all, both ended with him dead and separated from his head, a head that had been responsible for most of his good ideas.

  “There are two more options, Mandy.”

  The Mandarin sighed like he was getting fed up with sighing.

  “One is you fight, I suppose? Then Freddie will shoot you before you can raise that gauntlet of yours. And the second…” The Mandarin paused, puzzled. “What is the second, Mr. Stark?”

  Tony laughed like he couldn’t believe he was about to do what he was about to do.

  “The second? Well, this is the second.”

  And he stepped backward over the edge of the cliff as if he were stepping onto a mall escalator.

  Dún Laoghaire Harbour, Dublin, eighty miles north of Little Saltee

  The “cavalry” that Stark was relying on had been flipping an omelet for a pop star—a rubber omelet for a robotic pop star. But a nanosecond after Tony’s coded secure distress signal got through to the Prototony’s operating system, the android froze like a deer sensing danger and seemed to sniff the air.

  The Prototony dropped the spatula and didn’t even stop to take off his apron. “I do apologize, Shoshona,” he said to the artificial girl in the golden bikini, “but I am needed elsewhere. Urgently needed, in fact. Sometimes only Tony will do.”

  Even robot Stark was a smart-ass.

  Following an expedited flight check, the Prototony blasted off from the deck into the morning sky, literally shedding his skin—and his apron—as he flew. Strips of plasti-skin peeled away from the android’s skull as he neared the sound barrier, revealing the helmet of an Iron Man suit beneath. That explained why Friday—or Saoirse, to be accurate—had believed the Prototony a little bulky: there was a functional flight suit hidden beneath the skin, another fact the paranoid billionaire had kept to himself.

  This particular one was an emergency Medi-suit tailored specifically to Tony Stark’s anticipated needs. It was, if you like, a sophisticated ambulance—albeit an ambulance with two weeks’ worth of life support in its battery.

  In spite of the dozens of cameras trained on the Tanngrisnir at that moment, only one photographer was sharp enough to snap a picture of the Prototony’s dramatic liftoff, and when he scrolled back to check his prize, he found himself looking at what appeared to be a flying chef.

  Digital glitch, he thought in disgust, and deleted the frame.

  The Prototony locked on to Tony’s signal and noted his elevated pulse and blood pressure. He saw that Tony was wounded, dehydrated, and fatigued, and placed him in the category distressed, which was a delicate way of putting it. The suit quickly accelerated toward the sound barrier and just as quickly decelerated, as enveloping the principal at that speed would break every bone in his body.

  The suit’s approach speed was not the only difficulty. Though Mr. Stark’s initial velocity had been a convenient zero feet per second, it was now fluctuating wildly, as was his trajectory, making docking calculations very complicated and decidedly unreliable. In short, the suit was having to make its best guess.

  A couple of things were, however, all too certain.

  One: it would have to be a subaquatic pickup.

  And two: bones would shatter.

  For the optimum pickup angle, Prototony dipped under the water’s surface while he was still one and a quarter miles from the calculated interception.

  Tony did everything he could to slow his descent with one repulsor, but he really shouldn’t have bothered. Any cliff diver could have told him that he would’ve been better off making like a pencil and cutting into the water, not pinwheeling through the air like a crazed firework. This was not the first time Stark had crash-landed in water, but last time he had been wearing a full battle suit and had barely felt the impact.

  In fact, Rhodey had been with him on the previous occasion, which had been a suit demo off the Malibu Pier for a children’s charity. Iron Man and War Machine had blasted each other with flash bangs for a few minutes and were about to launch into a choreographed dogfight when Tony’s systems had suddenly frozen, sending the billionaire plummeting into the Pacific. Rhodey had laughed his head off while he fished Tony out of the surf and delivered him back to the workshop.

  “Man, you’re lucky the suit held up,” he’d said between chortles. “’Cause from that altitude, water feels like concrete.”

  Tony had laughed then, too.

  He wasn’t laughing now.

  The world flashed by in a kaleidoscope of blues and greens, and he barely had enough time to get his head up before he crashed into the surf feetfirst—feet that were protected only by pumped-up running shoes. The sneakers’ air-filled soles burst with a sound like a pistol shot, and then both ankles snapped; the left tibia and right fibula went milliseconds after, and Tony Stark lost the ability for rational thought as his entire world became a vista of pain. A single word chased itself around his head over and over.

  Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

  Tony would later wonder what he felt sorry for at the supposed moment of his death, but he would never be able to narrow it down to just one thing. Eventually, he would open up enough to talk about it with Rhodey, who would comment, “It doesn’t matter what you’re sorry about, bro. What matters is that you change your life enough so the next time you’re about to check out you feel better about yourself.”

  To which Tony would respond, “Thanks a bunch, Oprah.”

  To which Rhodey would take offense, and the two buddies would start wrestling in the den and knock a priceless Oliver Jeffers original dipped painting off the wall.

  But back to the crushing impact into the unforgiving Atlantic Ocean. Stark would have gone into shock and drowned had not the Iron Man Medi-suit matched his sink rate, scooped him up at ten fathoms—two fathoms above the underwater crags on which his body would surely have been impaled—and literally folded its reversible self inside out, cocooning the billionaire’s body in a protective layer of armor. In a matter of seconds, the interior of the suit was flooded with oxygen-rich air, and a thousand sensors scanned the patient’s body for traumas, of which they found plenty. Both legs of the suit inflated cast cushions that manipulated Tony’s bones into their proper place and secured them there. Microneedles pumped anesthetic into the trauma sites, and a larger needle jabbed a large dose of adrenaline into Stark’s chest, dragging him out of the valley of shock into which he had been sinking.

  “Sorry!” he blurted one last time, then came back to the present and realized that the Medi-suit was blasting toward the surface now that he had been stabilized.

  “No,” he said.

  To which the Prototony said, “No? No to what, Tony? I’m doing a lot of stuff here.”

  “No to surfacing,” said Tony, mightily relieved that the pain was subsiding. “Keep the suit submerged for the moment.”

  “Not a good idea, Tony baby,” said Prototony. “We’ve got maybe five minutes of breathables in this suit. After that, you’re sucking fumes.”

  “Do what I say,” snapped Tony, possibly made a touch irritable by the cliff fall and the broken bones. “Who is this, anyway? Which AI?”

  “It’s me. I mean, you. Or superficial public you, at any rate. The one beloved by paparazzi the world over. My behavior is learned from Internet footage of you, which makes me quite the shallow guy, which is funny at the moment, considering where we are. Get it?”

  Tony groaned with residual pain and mental anguish. Maybe it was true what Rhodey said about him.

  I am a pain in the butt, he realized. And does my voice really sound like that? I thought it was deeper.

  “Do we have access to another AI?”

  “Sorry, Tony baby, this is it. You’re stuck with me. This suit is a pretty basic model. Designed to get you home and that’s it. A flying stretcher.”

  A flying stretcher, thought Tony. Far from ideal, but it will have to do.

  “Okay. I’m overriding your mission parameters,” he said. “Keep us submerged for as long as possible, then full speed for Dublin docklands. I need to catch someone.”

  “You got it, Tony,” said Prototony. “Who are we chasing?”

  “Me. We’re chasing me.”

  “Hey,” said Prototony, “that makes three of us.”

  On the Little Saltee cliff top, Spin Zhuk nudged her quad bike to the edge and peered over.

  “I cannot believe this man did such a thing,” she said. “The idiot forgot he could no longer fly.”

  “’E is terrified, non?” said Freddie Leveque. “Zat is it. ’E prefers ze quick fall.”

  The Mandarin said nothing for a while, simply stroking his moustache thoughtfully.

  “I think that Mr. Stark preferred to choose his own fate,” he said finally, “rather than accept the one I had chosen for him. Perhaps he was not the idiot I believed him to be.”

  “Ze man jumped from a cliff,” said Leveque. “Zerefore, he is ze idiot.”

  The Mandarin squinted at him. “Are you serious, Freddie? Zerefore? Remember that Stark bested us both, if temporarily. And without his marvelous suit.”

  Leveque shrugged. “Perhaps. But ’e is dead now, so not so clever, eh?”

  “It does not matter,” said the Mandarin. “Stark is dead. We still have a green light. Tell the boat to watch the impact spot for five minutes, then return to the dock. After that, complete radio silence. Not so much as a text to your loved ones until after the mission is complete. One message is enough to triangulate us all. We will give our Pyro one hour to complete his mission and return here. If he does not, then we leave without him.”

  “And the girl?” asked Spin Zhuk. “What should we be doing with her?”

  The Mandarin held out a hand to Leveque, who returned his rings to him.

  “Do you perhaps think that something has changed, Miss Zhuk?”

  Spin Zhuk was no wilting wallflower and had in her time taken down an entire team of Russian Spetsnaz troopers, armed with only a spork and two hairpins, but she was not brave enough to hold the Mandarin’s glare.

  “No, chef. I am not thinking this thing.”

  The Mandarin had a point to make. “Perhaps you believe that because Stark chose the coward’s way out rather than face me, somehow my authority is compromised?”

  Zhuk paled and shook her head. “No, chef. I would never believe this. I would never believe it. I am only alive on this day because of you. My life is yours.”

  “Well then, Miss Zhuk, why do you ask me this question? You know full well what must happen to the girl, do you not?”

  Leveque was eager for blood. “Allow me, chef. I am in ze terrible mood.”

  “No, Freddie,” said the Mandarin. “Miss Zhuk asked the question, and now she must answer it with steel.”

  Zhuk swallowed but did not object. If she objected, she would be taking the same route as Stark had over the cliff’s edge.

  “I will do it, chef,” she said. “Consider it done.”

  “Good, excellent,” said the Mandarin, his mood restored. “Make it quick. Or slow, as you like. We have an hour.”

  Quick, Zhuk decided. It would definitely be quick.

  She opened the quad bike’s throttle and roared along the coastline toward the medieval prison before she could change her mind.

  Teenagers suffer from many common ailments: acne, asthma, and negative body image, to name a few. But the adolescent trait that often drives the rest of the population’s blood pressure skyrocketing is their tendency to know it all. There is even a medical term for it: metacognitive naivety. This is where teenagers do not consider their thoughts to be possible interpretations of events but direct lines into the truth soul of the planet. Most teens are gently moved away from know-it-allness by the simple process of growing up and all the emotional upheaval contained therein, but Saoirse Tory was about to be traumatically cured of metacognitive naivety by being killed to death.

  The ironic thing was that recent events had already set her on the road to recovery, so a cure was not technically necessary.

  Though I doubt the Mandarin will take that into account, Saoirse thought now, waiting for the terrorist’s lackeys to come back and carry out her sentence.

  Saoirse knew all about metacognitive naivety but did not believe that she herself suffered from it, as she actually did know it all. Or she had known it all before the Mandarin turned her ingenious plan inside out. This depressed the Irish girl for a while, until she realized that actually the Mandarin had not turned her plan inside out; he had just piggybacked on it for his own ends.

  So in fact, my plan was a work of total genius.

  This cheered her up until she remembered that Tony Stark was more than likely dead because of her, and soon several environmental ministers would be joining him in the afterlife.

  Not that I’ll live to see any of that, she recognized gloomily.

  She fantasized about taking the floor in a European court and explaining how none of this was her fault, as in fact she had just been trying to save her sister, Liz, and some African girls.

  Maybe I do suffer from metacognitive naivety after all, she realized.

  The plucky part of Saoirse’s personality reared its irrepressible head.

  Get up, girl. No one is dead yet. Maybe Stark escaped. And maybe he’ll save the day. Do you want to go to your grave with all those souls on your conscience? Especially if they might not even be dead yet and you could save them?

  No, she decided emphatically. She did not.

  So, how to get out of there? There must be a way for a smart girl like herself to outwit a couple of terrorists.

  As it turned out, there was only one terrorist to outwit: Spin Zhuk, who had been sent to kill the young patsy Saoirse Tory. Spin’s heart was not in the job. Not that she hadn’t killed before, but she was more of a wheel spinner than a trigger puller.

  They are not calling me Pull Zhuk, after all.

  She was annoyed with the Mandarin for this misuse of resources but quickly cut off that train of thought, for many believed that the Mandarin could read minds, and he would not brook insubordination, even the mental kind.

  But it was difficult not to be unhappy with the assignment.

  After all, who wanted to kill a kid?

  Nobody, that was who. Except maybe Freddie Leveque, who was never happier than when he was strangling someone with his bare hands.

  “Zere is nozink like zat feeling of life leaving ze body,” he had told her one day recently, repeating it several times until she understood.

  Spin shuddered. Life leaving ze body. She had no intention of experiencing that feeling. A quick shot in the head from behind was how she intended to dispatch the kid. The Irish girl would never even see it coming. Spin parked her quad in the courtyard and walked briskly and with intent across the salt-coated flagstones. The prison must have been some operation back in the day, but now it was falling apart. The constant pound of surf was literally shaking the place to its foundations. The humans had been driven out decades before—all except Saoirse Tory and her crazy grandfather—and in another century there would probably be nothing left above sea level for the gulls to nest on.

  This place is driving me crazy, thought Spin, with the screeching and the pooping and the vibrations. I cannot wait to be gone.

  The best idea, she decided, would be to take the girl down to the harbor on the pretense of loading her on the boat. Then a quick pop, and into the water she’d go.

  Simple and tidy. Not even a body to be buried.

  I am hoping she is falling facedown, Spin thought, so I am not having to look at the eyes.

  And then she thought, Why am I thinking in English? I need a holiday in Kiev.

  Spin paused at the ramp that led down to the cell area and patted the Sig Sauer P220 holstered under her shoulder.

  Don’t let me down, baby, she broadcast at the pistol. But she knew it would not. The Sig had seen her safely through countless altercations and would perform this task without hesitation.

  I am the one who will hesitate, she realized.

  All thoughts of hesitation vanished suddenly when Spin trotted down the ramp to see Saoirse Tory’s cell without Saoirse in it. Spin’s first thought was one of those irrational mind farts the brain throws up in times of panic.

  The Irish girl has disappeared. She is a fairy leprechaun.

  “Leprechaun!” she blurted.

  Her next thought was slightly more sensible.

  Under the bunk. The girl hides underneath the bed.

  Spin was angry with herself for shouting out leprechaun and instantly transferred her annoyance to Saoirse.

  “Stupid child!” she said. “You are making my job easier.”

  Zhuk went into the cell angry, but even when angry she was no amateur; she drew her pistol, ready for surprises.

  “Okay, kid. Be coming out from under there.”

  No kid emerged, and there was nowhere else she could be. The cell was three stone walls and a fourth wall of bars, with one army cot in the middle of the floor. Spin considered shooting through the bed itself, which would surely neutralize anyone who was hiding underneath, but shooting a bed would be tantamount to admitting that a mere child could unnerve her. Instead, she grabbed the edge of the bed and wrenched it upward, which was exactly what the girl had wanted her to do.