The Helicarrier was stabilized once Tony got the turbine going, but with Thor and the Hulk gone and Romanoff tied up hunting down Barton, there was no way for the S.H.I.E.L.D. crew to stop Loki from escaping in the stolen Quinjet. All they could do was triage the wounded and do a head count to see how many they had lost. Nick Fury himself headed for the detention area, knowing that was where Coulson had been going.

He found Coulson sitting on the floor leaning against the wall. He was pale, his eyes heavy-lidded and his breath shallow. He looked up as Fury approached and knelt in front of him. Fury took the gun off his lap and set it on the floor.

“I’m sorry, boss. The god rabbited,” Coulson said.

“Just stay awake. Eyes on me.”

“No. I’m clocking out here.” Even on the edge of death, Coulson kept his cool. Clocking out, Fury thought. How many soldiers could make a little joke in the last moments of their lives? Coulson was one of a kind.

“Not an option,” Fury said. He couldn’t afford to lose this man. Not after everything else they’d lost today.

“It’s okay, boss,” Coulson breathed. “This was never going to work . . . if they didn’t have something . . . to . . . ”

He never finished what he was going to say. With a last slow sigh, Agent Phil Coulson died. Nick Fury bowed his head. He’d lost plenty of men during his military career and plenty more with S.H.I.E.L.D. . . . but this one hurt.

“Agent Coulson is down,” he said over the intercom.

“A medical team is on its way to your location,” said a dispatcher in return. But it was too late. Fury knew it was too late, and when the medical team arrived, they knew it, too.

If they didn’t have something to . . .

That’s right, Fury thought. Coulson was right. They needed something to pull them together, to make them see beyond themselves.

Now Fury was going to make sure they saw that. This battle had hurt them badly, but the war was not over. Not by a long shot.

A few hours later, after the casualties had been counted up and the first critical repairs were under way, Fury gathered the surviving members of the team in a conference room. Usually this was where he spoke remotely to the World Security Council, and he was looking forward to this conversation about as much as his meetings with them. Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Natasha Romanoff, Maria Hill, and him. That was all that remained of the team. Loki had struck them a crippling blow.

But Fury wasn’t ready to give up. He stood by the table near Steve Rogers and said, “These were in Phil Coulson’s jacket. I guess he never did get you to sign them.” He tossed blood-stained Captain America trading cards on the table. Rogers picked one of them up and looked at it. It was a picture of him from World War II, before he’d started going after Hydra in the mountains of northern Europe.

“We’re dead in the air up here. Our communications, the location of the cube, Banner, Thor . . . I got nothing for you.” He paused, trying not to get emotional. “I lost my one good eye,” he added, meaning Coulson. “Maybe I had that coming.”

No one else said anything. That was fine with Fury. He needed them to listen more than he needed a discussion.

“Yes,” he said. “We were going to build an arsenal with the Tesseract.” There was no longer any reason not to admit that. Fury didn’t regret hiding it from the team. It wouldn’t have done them any good to know. “I never put all my chips on that number, though, because I was playing something even riskier,” he went on. “There was an idea, Stark knows this, called the Avengers Initiative. The idea was to bring together a group of remarkable people to see if they could become something more. To see if they could work together when we needed them to, to fight the battles that we never could.”

Tony was looking at him now, and Fury’s next words were for Tony Stark and Tony Stark alone. “Phil Coulson died still believing in that idea,” he said. “In heroes.”

Tony suddenly got up. Fury thought for a moment that he was about to say something, but after a moment, he just left the bridge.

“Well,” Fury said. “It’s a old-fashioned notion.” hpiP4zA1WLqOxP9w+ZxvByypcBvamR8K9hNrrP6pSmo9aZBcKNhZECzK5UoHD+/U