Before he went further with his new project, Tony felt like he had to set a couple of things straight with Rhodey. He caught his army pal in the midst of a presentation, where Rhodey was arguing that the air force would always need pilots. “No unmanned aerial vehicle will ever trump a pilot’s instinct, his insight, his ability to look into a situation beyond the obvious and discern its outcome... or his judgment.”

“Colonel?” Tony called out. “Why not a pilot without the plane?”

Rhodey saw him and rolled his eyes. “Give us a couple minutes, guys,” he said, and started walking with Tony. “Didn’t expect to see you around so soon,” he said.

“Rhodey, I’m working on something big,” Tony said. “I want you to be part of it.”

“You’re about to make a lot of people around here real happy,” Rhodey said, thinking Tony was talking about a new military project.

“This is not for the military,” Tony said. “I’m not...it’s different.”

“What, you’re a humanitarian now or something?” Rhodey asked.

Nobody believed Tony had actually had a change of heart. “I need you to listen to me,” he said.

“No,” Rhodey cut him off. “What you need is time to get your mind right. I’m serious.”

Tony knew people, and he knew when he wasn’t going to get anywhere by arguing. “Okay,” he said, taking a step back. He had hoped to show the new project to Rhodey so his friend would understand, but Rhodey was still thinking like a soldier.

That was part of the problem Tony wanted to fix.

Sketches and designs lay scattered across the worktable in Tony’s lab as he tinkered with his newest invention—a pair of shining metal boots. “Jarvis, you up?”

“For you, sir, always.”

“I’d like to open a new project file, index as Mark Two. Until further notice, why don’t we just keep everything on my private server?”

“Working on a secret project, are we, sir?”

“Don’t want this ending up in the wrong hands,” Tony said. “Maybe in mine, it can actually do some good.”

“Still having trouble walking, sir?” Jarvis asked.

“These aren’t for walking,” Tony replied.

He finished the adjustments, put the boots down, and marked a circle on the lab floor with electrical tape.

“Why are you marking up the floor?” the computerized butler asked.

“It’s a test circle,” Tony replied. “It’ll help me gauge the experiment’s success.”

“I’ll inform the cleaning staff,” Jarvis said.

Tony put on the boots and stepped to the center of the circle. He draped a bandolier-like control device around his shoulders and hooked it all into his chest unit.

“Ready to record the big moment, Jarvis?” he asked, gripping the bandolier’s joystick controls.

“All sensors ready, sir.”

“We’ll start off easy,” Tony said. “Ten percent power.” He pressed the activators on the joysticks.

The boot jets fired and he shot toward the ceiling. He wrestled with the controls, flipped sideways, barely avoided the ceiling, and careened around the workshop before finally crashing into the wall and falling into a pile of cardboard boxes in the corner.

As Tony lay upside down amid mounds of plastic packing material, Jarvis said, “That flight yielded excellent data, sir.”

“Great,” Tony replied.

Days later, Pepper came into the workshop as Tony fiddled with a pair of metal gauntlets. He put the gloves on, pointed them across the lab, and activated the Repulsor Technology pads in the palms.

A blast of light issued forth from his hands. It hit a toolbox fifteen feet away, knocking it over and scattering the wrenches inside across the floor.

Pepper frowned. “I thought you were done inventing weapons,” she said.

“It’s not a weapon,” Tony replied. “It’s a flight stabilizer.”

“Well, watch where you’re pointing your flight stabilizer, would you?”

He gave a sheepish grin.

“Obadiah’s upstairs,” she said. “Should I tell him you’re in?”

“I’ll be right up,” Tony replied.

As she left, she placed a small box on the edge of his worktable. Intrigued, Tony took off the gauntlets and ripped the package open.

Inside was his old chest device, encased in Lucite. The reactor glowed faintly inside the clear plastic. Tony knew it would continue to glow for years. The casing had an inscription: proof that tony stark has a heart. Tony chuckled and headed upstairs.

He reached the living room just as Obadiah Stane set a pizza down on the coffee table. Stane flashed the billionaire a concerned smile. “It went that bad, huh?” Tony asked.

“Just because I brought pizza from New York doesn’t mean it went bad,” Stane said. Then, after a pause, he added, “It would have gone better if you were there.”

“You told me to lie low,” Tony said. “That’s what I’ve been doing. I lie low and you take care of all...”

Stane nodded, appearing genuinely touched. He took a deep breath, too. “Come on,” he said. “In public, sure. The press. But this was a board of directors meeting?”

“It was?”

“The board is claiming you have post-traumatic stress. They’re filing in an injunction.”

Tony’s jaw dropped. “What?”

“They want to lock you out.”

Tony began pacing again. “How can they do that? It’s my name on the building—my ideas that run the company!”

“Well, they’re going to try,” Stane said. “We’ll fight them, of course.”

“With the amount of stock we own, I thought we controlled the company,” Tony said.

Stane shook his head. “Tony, the board has rights, too. They’re making the case that you and your new direction isn’t in the company’s best interests.”

Stane offered some pizza to Tony, but Tony declined. He was working up a good fury against the board. “This is great,” he said, and turned away from Obie. “I’ll be in the shop.”

“Hey, hey! Tony, listen. I’m trying to turn this thing around, but you have to give me something.” Obie came closer to Tony and tapped the RT in his chest. “Let me have the engineers analyze that. You know, draw up some specs.”

“Absolutely not,” Tony said. “This one stays with me.”

Obie looked like he might pursue it, but then he just picked up the pizza. “All right, well, this stays with me, then.” He offered Tony a slice.

“Thanks,” Tony said.

Good humor between them restored, Stane asked, “Mind if I come down there and see what you’re doing?”

“Good night, Obie,” Tony said, and went back to the lab.

It took him a few more days to hook the boot units, the control bandolier, and the new gauntlets together. Once he’d done it, though, he couldn’t resist trying out the setup.

“Shall I alert the rescue squad?” Jarvis asked as Tony fastened the last of the connections.

Tony flexed his arms. The tubing connecting the pieces felt stiff—but it was only a prototype after all. All he was wearing were the boots and gauntlets, just to try out flight stability. He had one of his lab robots, affectionately named Dummy, on fire control. “If you douse me again and I’m not on fire, I’m donating you to a city college,” he warned Dummy, who didn’t have a perfect grasp on its duties.

“All right, nice and easy,” Tony said. “Just starting with one percent thrust capacity.” He activated the boot jets and manipulated the controls.

Slowly, he rose off the floor and hovered in the air. The repulsor stabilizers in the gloves kicked in, steadying his flight. He moved up in the air, holding his arms out like a tightrope walker.

“And let’s bring it up to two point five,” he said. The surge of energy nearly crashed him into the ceiling, and it took him some flailing around to get the hang of using the gauntlets to keep himself steady while the boots provided life.

After gaining his balance, he floated slowly around the room, dodging expensive pieces of electronic equipment and avoiding the cars, workbench, and other obstacles.

He nearly bumped his head on the ceiling twice and came perilously close to the roof of his Porsche, but he didn’t hit anything. His papers and a few light objects scattered out of his way as he flew, repelled by the repulsor forces powering the boots and the gauntlets.

“See?” he said. “Nothing to it.”

He cut the propulsion, landed softly near his workbench, and grinned at one of Jarvis’s sensors.

That was when Dummy unloaded on him with the fire extinguisher. “No!” Tony shouted. When Dummy cut off the extinguisher, Tony briefly considered using it as repulsor target practice. Then he changed his mind. After all, he’d just done something incredible. What was a little fire-extinguisher foam? That wasn’t going to dampen his mood.

“Yeah,” Tony said. “I can fly.”

Half a world away, Raza stared at the gray suit of armor being assembled on the lab table in his new hideout.

“Amazing,” he muttered. Amazing that something like this could nearly destroy his whole operation.

It would be difficult to complete the reassembly without either Yinsen or Stark to guide his workers, but Raza knew the job would eventually get done.

And then he, Raza, would own a weapon that would be the envy of even the largest corporations and governments.

The warlord smiled and, for once, he did not mind the stiffness of his scarred face. w3Q7RecjR+g959lTqoLuf6EC7P+F4TaJJauMj0YZYAOaI45I67nHFN+x+AaXiLcW