Jiaying shook her head. "That's not enough," she said. Not unkindly — just honestly. "Good deeds within your means. You're describing the life of an ordinary person. And an ordinary person doing ordinary good barely offsets their own passage through the world, let alone anything larger." She looked at her daughter steadily. "You are not ordinary. You have never been ordinary. You just don't know what you are yet."
Skye looked at her. "What are you saying?"
"I'm going to awaken you," Jiaying said. "Make you what you were always meant to be. After that, you'll have the ability to actually matter — to Mr. Smith, to S.H.I.E.L.D., to whoever you choose to stand beside." She paused. "You could become a real hero. Not a symbol — a functioning one."
The word awaken landed somewhere specific in Skye's chest. She had spent years researching enhanced individuals, tracking down the stories, building files on people whose abilities had changed their lives or others'. She had always written herself off as the person who documented it, not the person it happened to.
Jiaying watched the shift move across her face.
"I'll invite Mr. Smith to witness the ceremony," she said. "It's only appropriate. He made this possible."
Back in New York, Smith had his feet up and the television on.
The anchor handed off to a field reporter standing in front of Stonehenge in the grey English morning. Behind her, police tape, a cluster of constables, and the remnants of what had clearly been a strange morning for the tourists involved.
"— responding to calls just after eight a.m. A male visitor, identified as the renowned astrophysicist Dr. Erik Selvig, was discovered running through the site unclothed, carrying scientific instruments, and shouting warnings at passersby. Dr. Selvig was taken into custody and is currently being assessed at —"
Smith lowered the remote.
Erik.
He leaned forward slightly, elbows on his knees, running the timeline. Selvig's breakdown at Stonehenge was the signal — the Nine Realms were converging. The dimensional boundaries between planets were thinning, spatial distances collapsing toward each other in the rare cosmological event that occurred once every five thousand years. And when the convergence peaked, the Aether would manifest somewhere accessible.
He had expected more lead time. He hadn't.
The math ran itself quickly. Jane Foster would find the Aether — that was essentially fixed, given her instruments and her location. The absorption would happen in the same window. The question was Malekith.
Smith thought it through. Extracting the Reality Stone from Jane's body was a serious medical problem — it wasn't passive cargo, it was an active symbiotic process once absorption occurred, and Bulma's expertise ran toward engineering and physics rather than biological interface at that level. Replacing Jane as the host entirely would require getting ahead of the convergence, which he hadn't done.
He let the alternative settle. Jane absorbs it. Malekith comes for it. Smith takes the Reality Stone from Malekith at the appropriate moment, without Jane taking any damage in the process.
The rightful ownership question was simple enough. Frigga would die protecting Asgard if the canon held. That sacrifice deserved something. The Reality Stone should go to her.
He turned the television off and sat with the timeline for a moment, then reached for his phone.
London. The same morning.
Jane Foster woke up, looked at the ceiling, looked at the empty space beside her, and accepted that the count of broken promises
The doorbell helped.
She opened it in her pajamas.
"I just woke up. What do you want?"
"Your instruments." Darcy was already pulling a handheld unit out of her bag. It was beeping. "The ones I've been holding for you. You need to look at these readings right now."
Jane took the unit and turned it over. The readings cycled — not a malfunction pattern, not interference. Something real.
"Is this broken?" she said.
"That was my first thought too."
Jane knocked it against her palm twice, then against the wall.
Darcy stared at her. "I tried that already. I thought you'd be more scientific."
Jane looked at the readout again. She knew her own equipment. This wasn't broken. "Give me five minutes."
Twenty minutes later, the three of them — Jane, Darcy, and Darcy's intern Ian, who introduced himself twice before anyone acknowledged him — were standing outside a derelict shipping facility in the London industrial quarter.
"RUNICO Storage," Darcy said, reading the signage with the enthusiasm of someone arriving at a theme park. "This is so exciting. Even Ian's excited."
"My name is Ian," Ian confirmed.
"Phase meter," Jane said. "Come on."
Inside, the building had the smell of abandonment and the specific echo of large empty spaces. Birds scattered from a rafter as they entered. Shapes moved behind draped plastic sheeting.
Then the children appeared from behind a rusted truck and a stack of pallets — five of them, ranging from about eight to twelve, watching the newcomers with the territorial assessment of kids who had found something and weren't sure whether adults were a threat to the discovery or a useful resource.
"Are you police?" the youngest girl asked.
"Scientist," Jane said. She crouched down slightly. "What did you find?"
The boy at the front — the one who had clearly been running the operation — looked at the others, reached a consensus, and said, "Come see."
They led the group to the truck. Four of the children positioned themselves at the bumper, slid their hands underneath, and pushed. The truck rose off the concrete floor, rotated slowly, and hung in the air like it had forgotten gravity was supposed to apply to it.
Darcy made a sound that was mostly vowels.
The children led them to the building's middle floor. The girl with the water bottle held it out over the open shaft at the center of the space, then released it. The bottle fell, reached a certain point, and vanished.
A second passed.
Jane looked up. The bottle reappeared ten feet above them, fell, reached the same point, vanished again. The loop repeated.
"Where is it going?" Jane asked.
The girl pointed up, meaning everywhere and back again. She shrugged with the philosophical acceptance of someone who had already worked through the part where this should be impossible.
Jane pulled the phase meter from Ian's hands and started reading. The numbers matched the pattern she had last seen in New Mexico, two years ago, during the event that had introduced her to Thor and the Bifrost and the general concept that the universe was considerably larger and stranger than her prior models had accounted for.
"New Mexico?" Darcy said.
Jane was already moving toward the stairs. She went up without waiting, meter out in front of her, following the gradient in the readings. Darcy and Ian followed at a distance that suggested they had learned something from prior experience about running directly behind Jane Foster when she had a meter in her hand.
On the roof level, the reading spiked.
Jane was still moving forward, eyes on the display, and then the air at the corner of the stairwell doorway stopped being air. Something pulled — not a wind exactly, more like a direction that shouldn't exist. The meter screamed.
The force took Jane off her feet. She crossed the threshold of the anomaly in a half-second and the wall received her and then she was through it and gone.
The beeping continued for a moment from the meter she'd dropped.
Darcy stood at the top of the stairs, staring at the empty space where Jane had been. Ian stood beside her.
"Jane?" she said.
Nothing.
Darcy looked at Ian. Ian looked at Darcy.
"I'm going to need to make a call," Darcy said.