Grey ground. Purple sky. Pillars of black stone standing up out of the dust like broken teeth.
It looked exactly like the eleven dead worlds before it. Arthur sent the wave out ahead of him before his second foot landed, and it came back and told him what the colour of the air had already said.
There was no red anywhere on this world.
Fast as he had been, he was too late.
He found Jane Foster forty yards on, sitting in the dust beside a rectangular block of dark stone with a hollow socket cut into the face of it. Her sleeve was pushed up past the elbow and she was rubbing at the inside of her own forearm, hard, the way you go at a stain that has already set.
Minutes. He had missed it by minutes.
"Arthur?"
Her head came up, and her whole face opened, and he felt something turn over in his chest, because she was so glad to see him. She got to her feet too fast and put a hand against the stone to steady herself, already talking, holding herself together with both hands.
"This thing." She put a hand flat on the black stone without looking at it. "There was red inside it, moving, and it wasn't behaving like a liquid, it wasn't behaving like anything, and then it came at me and then there was nothing at all." She pushed the sleeve higher and held the arm out towards him, like evidence, like an offering. "It's in me. I can feel it in me. Please tell me you can get it out."
"You were asked to stay away from the anomalies."
"Thor told me that." Something old and tired flashed through it. "Thor tells me a lot of things. He's a god, everything is a portent with him. I didn't take it seriously."
"That was not Thor's warning. That was mine, and he was carrying it for me, and you knew the difference the moment he said it."
Jane paled. Whatever she had been building went out of her all at once.
"I know. I'm sorry, and I mean that." She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. "I sat on my hands for two days, Arthur. Then Erik called me at six in the morning about a gravity inversion in North London and I was in the car before he finished the sentence." She dropped her hands. "It felt exactly like the old days. New Mexico. Before everything."
Arthur looked at her a moment longer.
Prevention had failed. Everything from here was damage control, and standing in the dust of a dead world scoring points off a frightened woman was not damage control.
"Give me your arm," he sighed softly.
—
Speed was the only thing that mattered now. Every single hour the Aether spent inside her fragile human body was another hour of it settling in, leaving things behind that no scan would find until much later.
Fortunately, he had come prepared for exactly this worst-case scenario.
He knew the Aether could be pulled out of a living host, because in the future he half remembered, a talking raccoon had done exactly that with a syringe. So Arthur had spent weeks building his own version of that extractor.
He pulled a sleek, cylindrical device from his jacket. It was forged from pure vibranium and heavily etched with nine interlocking Asgardian containment runes. Rocket's had been cruder, and Rocket's had worked. Arthur had simply never in his life built the version that only just worked.
"This is going to pull it out of you," Arthur said, stepping closer.
Jane took a nervous step back. "Will it hurt?"
"You will not notice a single thing."
He moved two fingers, and she was asleep before her shoulders reached him.
Arthur caught her, lowered her against the black stone, and fitted the extractor to her arm. It hummed as it woke, and then the note dropped and steadied, and the first thin thread of red came up through her skin and into the vibranium.
He sat back on his heels and looked down at the sleeping astrophysicist.
Arthur knew perfectly well why she had ignored the strict warning.
Jane had confided in Eileen, and Eileen had naturally relayed the information to him. Jane's relationship with the God of Thunder was falling apart at the seams. Because of Arthur's early interventions, there had been no dramatic, multi-year separation between the two lovers. But maybe that distance would have been significantly better for them in the long run.
The core reason was terribly simple.
Asgard ranks people. It does not write the ranking down anywhere and would be sincerely offended to hear itself accused of it, but every soul in that golden city knows where every other soul stands. Warriors first. Mages after them. Then everybody else.
Jane Foster was neither of the first two. Her life's brilliant work was a rudimentary science that Asgard had mastered and moved past millennia ago. To them, she was a child playing with wooden blocks.
Then there were the heavier things.
Odin simply never looked at her. Jane could easily tell that the All-Father did not think a fragile mortal was anywhere near worthy of standing beside the future king. Frigga had shown her nothing but warmth, but many times that pitying kindness felt vastly worse than Odin's coldness. The first four visits to the golden realm had been pure breathless wonder. After that it was an enormous golden city where nothing and nobody needed her.
So she came home to Earth and threw herself at her work. Her work was hers. Nobody in her laboratory looked over her head when she spoke.
And then there were the fights, and the fights were always about the clock, even when they were about something else.
Weeks of dead silence, and then Thor appearing at her door, glad to see her, with no idea that anything had happened at all. Because to a nearly immortal being, a few weeks of silence was nothing. It was a long weekend. He was not being careless or cruel. He simply did not feel the passage of time the way she did. But to Jane, it felt like Thor had completely forgotten about her existence.
Add the cultural gulf on top of that, and the whole thing stood permanently one bad night away from ending.
Arthur had no idea how it would finally go. They would have to sort it out themselves. Both of them understanding the other and giving something up on purpose, which is the unglamorous work that turns a thunderclap into a marriage.
The soft chime of the extractor pulled Arthur from his thoughts.
—
The extraction was over. The Aether was completely out of Jane.
Arthur checked her before he checked anything else. Her breathing had gone slow and even. Her colour was back, her pulse had settled under his fingers into something a doctor would have been pleased with, and the thing that had been moving under the skin of her wrist was not moving there anymore.
He would still have her under a full scan the moment they were home. There would be residual traces. There was always residue and he had no intention of finding out in ten years' time that he had left something behind in her because he had been in a hurry.
But she was alright for now. Which meant it was time to take the Aether and get off this dead world.
He held the cylinder up to the dim light.
The Aether filled it the way blood fills a jar, thick and dark and slow, sliding across the runed window and away again. At a glance it was an ordinary liquid behaving in an ordinary way, and it went on looking like that for exactly as long as you did not pay attention.
Watch it intently for three seconds and the illusion came apart. It moved against the metal in a slow deliberate circuit, touching each wall in turn, taking its time about it.
Arthur was not worried. Nine runic containments layered through solid vibranium, sealed and anchored and keyed to him. Nothing short of him personally taking it apart rune by rune was getting anything out of that cylinder.
He had exactly enough time to proudly think that entire arrogant sentence.
When the Aether abruptly went dead still inside the glass.
And then, it lit.
Not a flare. Nothing so theatrical. The red simply brightened inside the metal, once, the way a dying coal brightens when air moves across it, and for a fraction of one second it threw light out through the runed window and laid a small red glow over his hands and the grey dust at his feet.
Arthur had time to see the light.
He did not have time to do anything about it.
Because the vibranium extractor was no longer in his hands.
It did not suddenly shatter. Nothing opened. It was ust gone. And gone in a specific and unbearable way, which was that his hands had never been holding anything, and there had never been a cylinder, and the drawer he had taken it out of eight months ago had never had one in it.
The runes had not failed him. Vibranium had not failed him. Nothing in that cylinder had been tested at all, because the thing inside it had not attacked the container.
It had simply revised the part of the universe where the container was, and nothing made of matter got a vote on that.
The red liquid shot directly in through his hand, and it was deeply inside his chest before he even felt it move.
"Damn."
You were not supposed to be sentient, he thought, with the clarity that arrives about half a second too late to be any use.
That was the part he would come back to afterward, over and over. He had been so sure. The Mind Stone had shown him exactly what a waking stone looked like, and the Mind Stone had the word mind sitting right there in the name of it, which had made a tidy sort of sense at the time. Awareness belonged to the one that was about awareness. He had filed that away as reasoning and moved on.
The Aether was a substance. A parasite, the archives called it. A force. A weapon that needed a host.
He had considered the other possibility. That was the galling part. He had turned the question over, and then gone looking, and the evidence had all pointed one way. It had lain inside Malekith, and inside Jane Foster, and in neither of them had it ever once done anything that looked like a decision. Bor's people had written down everything they saw it do in the war, and not one line of it described the thing wanting something.
Then why now?
Fifty centuries of perfect stillness, and it broke them for him.
What are you doing?
For a long moment, nothing happened at all.
He felt it settle in his chest and go quiet, exactly the way it had gone quiet in Jane, and his mind was already moving ahead to the second extractor, because there was a second extractor. He built everything in twos. It was sitting on his bench in the workshop, exactly one gateway and forty seconds away.
Then, everything changed.
Arthur went down onto his knees in the dust, and the pain arrived all at once and from everywhere.