“Hold on.” Tony looked at him.
“You can fly.
On your own.
Without the armor.”
“Yes.”
“And your armor is—I assume it’s fast.”
“Faster than yours.”
“So what’s to stop you from simply flying faster than your own armor and then claiming you won?”
Leon blinked slowly.
“Am I really the type to do that?”
“You knocked me unconscious and called it reasonable.”
“Fair.” Leon turned to the garage ceiling.
“JARVIS — take the armor.
Run it unmanned.”
Tony stared at him.
“It can run unmanned.”
“Full autonomous flight, JARVIS subprogram.
Yes.”
“You built an armor that can operate completely without a pilot.” Tony said this the way you say something when you’re adjusting.
“Independently.
In flight.”
“How about it.”
“I—” Tony began.
Then: “I had that concept.
I’ve had it for a while.
I simply haven’t had the—”
“You’re really something else, Tony,” Leon said, which was not agreement.
Tony changed the subject with the decisiveness of a man putting something down somewhere and walking away from it.
“JARVIS.
Countdown.
We’re starting.”
“Of course, Mr.
Stark.
Three seconds.” A beat.
“Ready.
Three.
Two.
One.”
The two armors’ thrusters ignited simultaneously.
The sound inside the garage was significant.
They rose together and streaked out through the entrance, trailing parallel lines of fire that bent into the blue until the clouds took them.
Leon stood at the garage entrance and watched them go.
They’re both slow, he thought.
Not unkindly — it was just an observation.
The armors were genuinely extraordinary pieces of engineering by any reasonable standard, and by his current standard they were moving at the approximate speed of a patient person on a moving walkway.
“Well,” he said, to the empty garage, “armor has no real function for me except sentiment.”
He reached up and straightened his collar — both hands, a composed and entirely unnecessary preparatory gesture — and then activated the bio-force field.
The compression discharged upward.
He hit the cloud layer inside of four seconds, passed through it, and kept going.
In the stratospheric silence above the cloud ceiling, Tony Stark was having what he would later describe as a formative experience.
For millions of years, he thought, banking through thin cold air, the sky sat over every human being who ever lived.
Every person who ever looked up.
Every civilization that built towers and myths about it.
I’m in it.
He rolled left, extended, let the altitude open out below him — the California coast visible at the edge of visibility, the ocean a flat grey expanse from here, the atmosphere thinning above him into something that was almost not atmosphere at all.
“I built this,” he said, to no one.
“I built this and now I’m in it.
In the sky.”
He pushed the thrusters to eighty percent and felt the acceleration press through the suit, and laughed.
“JARVIS,” he said, when the laughter had settled into something more like triumph, “I have left Leon’s armor approximately four kilometers behind.
Confirm.”
JARVIS’s voice had the tone it used when delivering unwelcome information with minimum editorial commentary.
“Mr.
Stark, I regret to inform you that Leon’s armor, under my subroutine control, is currently 700 meters ahead of your position.”
Tony waited for the clarification that this was an error.
It didn’t come.
“That’s not possible.”
“The data is consistent across three independent sources.”
Tony looked up.
The sky above him was a gradient of white and pale blue and the suggestion of something darker, and wherever Leon’s armor was, it wasn’t visible from here.
“More thrust, JARVIS.
Whatever the current ceiling is, exceed it.”
The Mark II surged. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
The altimeter climbed.
The clouds below became a floor, and the air became thinner, and Tony watched the distance gap narrow from 700 meters to 600 to 480—
“Mr.
Stark,” JARVIS said, “the exterior temperature has dropped below the operational parameters for the current alloy composition.
I recommend—”
“The gap is narrowing.
Keep going.”
“At current rate of temperature decrease, ice formation on the hull will begin in approximately ninety seconds.”
“The armor is closing the distance.
More thrust.”
This was the part, in a different kind of story, where passion and refusal would bend the physics to accommodate the narrative.
Where Tony’s raw determination would produce a sudden system surge, some unlocked capability that the armor had been holding in reserve, and he would close the gap and overtake it and achieve the comeback his competitive spirit had earned.
This was not that kind of story.
The frost appeared on the Mark II’s shoulder plates first — thin, spreading rapidly, catching what little light remained at this altitude and refracting it dully.
It moved down the arms and across the chest, finding the joint seals, the sensor housings, the hairline gaps between overlapping panels.
The suit’s temperature readings dropped.
Then dropped again.
The gap was at 200 meters.
“Sir—”
The circuits went.
Not a gradual failure.
An instant one: every current path in the armor frozen simultaneously, the suit going dark in the same fraction of a second, every system offline at once.
The thrusters cut.
The stabilizers cut.
JARVIS’s voice cut.
The armor was still at altitude and now completely inert.
Gravity, which had been patiently waiting, resumed its normal activity.
Tony fell.
The suit fell around him — not protecting him, because it had stopped being an active system, just falling with him, a very expensive cage with no recourse.
He was spread-eagled inside it, limbs pushed outward by the air resistance as the speed built, the altimeter he could no longer read doing things he didn’t want to think about.
“JARVIS—” No response.
“JARVIS!” Nothing.
The intercom lines were ice.
He could hear the wind.
He’d never been able to hear the wind before.
The suit had always filtered it.
“Leon.”
The word came out louder than he’d intended.
It might have been a shout.
“Leon, I need—”
Something caught the suit at the center of mass — not a collision, more like a wall appearing exactly where the suit needed a wall to be.
The deceleration was immediate and total.
His teeth clicked together.
And then they were stationary, floating, and Leon’s voice came from somewhere above and to his right.
“Got you.”
Tony stayed still inside the frozen suit and experienced several consecutive seconds of being completely unable to form a sentence.
“Oh my God,” he said, when speaking was an option again.
“That was — that was more exciting than I intended.”
“It was,” Leon agreed.
“You were down there watching.”
“I got here faster than you could fall.
The watching was minimal.”
“You were watching.”
“I wanted to see if you’d stay calm.”
Tony considered the question of whether he’d stayed calm.
“The armor needs the gold-titanium alloy,” he said, eventually.
“That’s what you were talking about.
Icing at high altitude.”
“Yes.”
Tony said nothing for the rest of the flight down.
In the garage, the mechanical arms helped Tony out of the Mark II section by section.
The suit was still partially frosted, which Tony found aesthetically objectionable on top of everything else.
He sat down.
“Leon.” He looked at the floor.
“You won.”
Leon’s armor descended from the garage entrance under JARVIS control and settled onto its storage mount.
Leon himself walked over and sat down beside Tony, not touching him, just present.
“Actually,” Leon said, “you did.”
“Think about what happened here,” Leon said.
“I came down to your workshop.
I spent a day reading your research.
I built a suit based on your design principles, your material knowledge, your propulsion theory.” He turned toward Tony.
“If you taught what you know to any competent engineer and gave them enough time, they could do the same.
The knowledge transfers.
That’s not the remarkable part.”
“Then what is.”
“You started with nothing.
No predecessor suit, no archived design, no one who’d solved these problems before.
You had physics and materials and an idea and you built it.” Leon’s voice was level.
“That’s the part that doesn’t transfer.
The first time someone has an idea and decides to build it — that’s the thing.
Everything after that is iteration.
Iteration is valuable.
It’s not the same thing.”
Tony was quiet.
“Without you,” Leon continued, “we’re probably twenty years away from a small-scale Ark reactor.
Forty from a powered exosuit.
I didn’t invent those things.
I improved them.
You invented them.” He looked at the Mark II.
“I won the comparison.
You won everything that mattered more than the comparison.”
Tony stared at the suit for a while.
“I could have added the gold-titanium alloy,” he said, eventually.
“I had the materials.”
“I know.”
“I just didn’t have time to get to it.”
“I know that too.”
A long pause.
“Give me some time,” Tony said.
“Everything you did — give me the same time you had, plus what I know about the icing problem now, and I’ll produce a better suit.”
“I know that,” Leon said.
“That was my point.”
He put a hand on Tony’s shoulder briefly.
“You just needed the same thing everyone needs when they’re ahead of their own timeline.
A little more of it.”
Tony was quiet for another moment.
Then:
“Leon.
You’re—” He seemed to be choosing between several possible completions.
“You’re different than you were.”
“I’m basically a junior Superman who hasn’t done enough sunbathing yet.
Of course I’m different.”
“Not that.” Tony shook his head.
“I mean — you’ve grown up.”
Leon considered this.
“Was that a compliment?”
“It was absolutely a compliment.”
“Well, Tony—” Leon turned toward him with the beginning of an expression that suggested he was about to return the favor, “—I’d say the same thing about you, you know.
After Afghanistan, you really have changed.
For the first time in your life, you seem to understand how to—”
“Stop.”
“—communicate with people, how to prioritize—”
“I said stop, why are you insulting me in the middle of a—”
“What did I just say?
That was a compliment.”
Tony opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Looked at Leon.
Looked away.
“…You win.
Again.
I am standing by my earlier position that your desire to win at every possible category of human interaction is a developmental issue and you should address it at Columbia.”
“You’re getting anxious,” Leon noted.
“Go away.”
“Leaving right now.” Leon picked up his armor and walked briskly toward the stairs.
“This kid,” Tony said, to the empty garage.
He shook his head slowly, and then, because there was no one to see it, he laughed.
“It’s really something.”