Jane landed hard on a stone floor in the dark.
"Darcy!" Her voice bounced off something large and close. No answer. She got to her feet and looked around.
The space she'd fallen into was massive — vaulted, ancient, the kind of place that felt carved rather than built. Stone columns rose around her, thick as old trees, and at the center of the nearest one a deep red light pulsed from somewhere inside the rock itself. Not fire. Something slower and more deliberate than fire.
Jane walked toward it. The readings would have been extraordinary. She didn't have the meter anymore. She walked toward it anyway because she was Jane Foster and that was what she did.
The red substance moved when she got close — not like a liquid responding to proximity, more like something that had been waiting. The Aether particles crossed the distance between the column and her skin before she'd fully processed the motion, and then they were inside her, and the world went sideways.
At the edge of the known universe, in the cold dark of a dead fleet, Malekith opened his eyes.
Around him, in their thousands, his people stirred from the long sleep. The ship's systems came online one by one, pulling power from the convergence itself.
"The Aether has awakened us," he said. "The alignment has begun again."
On Asgard's Bifrost, Heimdall watched the universe turn.
Thor arrived from the direction of the celebration hall with the look of someone who had attended his own party under obligation and left the moment protocol allowed.
"Sometimes celebrating is more exhausting than the fighting," Thor said.
Heimdall looked at him without sympathy. "Then you must be doing something wrong at one or the other."
Thor accepted this. "How are the Nine Realms?"
"Stable. For now." Heimdall returned his gaze to the deep field. "Do you remember what I told you about the celestial convergence?"
"The alignment. It's close."
"The last occurrence predates my watch." Heimdall's voice was thoughtful, almost reverent. "Most beings cannot feel it coming. Fewer still can see it when it arrives. It brings chaos with it. But it is genuinely beautiful."
Thor looked out at the stars. "I don't see anything."
"That's because you're not looking for it."
Thor said nothing for a moment. Then: "How is she?"
"Your mortal is perceptive. She's been studying the convergence without knowing that's what she's studying. Her instruments are more sensitive than she realizes." Heimdall tilted his head slightly. "Although —"
He stopped.
Thor read it immediately. "What's wrong?"
Heimdall's expression, which rarely showed anything that could be called uncertainty, showed it now. "I can't see her."
Smith's phone rang. Unknown number. He looked at the screen.
"FRIDAY. Who is it?"
"Darcy Lewis, sir. Jane Foster's associate. She attended the third tournament as a spectator."
He picked up.
The voice on the other end was fast and slightly too loud in the way people get when they're keeping themselves calm by talking. "Mr. Smith — hi, I'm so sorry, this is Darcy Lewis, Jane Foster's friend. She gave me your number a while back in case of something like — she's gone. We were at a warehouse doing field research and she just — there was a reading spike and she walked into a wall and disappeared, and I don't know what to do."
Smith listened to the whole thing without interrupting. "I remember you," he said. "You were in the spectator section for the last tournament." He was already standing. "Send me the address. I'll come to you."
He considered a wormhole for half a second, then set it aside — the Nine Realms convergence was already active enough to distort spatial anchoring. Precise targeting through folded space, in a field this unstable, was the kind of gamble that ended with someone in the wrong dimension. He went out the window and flew.
The warehouse district was easy to locate. Darcy was standing outside with two other people — a young man holding a phase meter with both hands and the expression of someone deeply regretting his internship choice, and four children who were watching Smith descend from the sky with the calm assessment of kids who had already seen several impossible things this morning and had a high threshold.
"Is she alright?" Darcy asked the moment he landed.
"Take me inside first."
The spatial distortion was apparent as soon as he crossed the threshold — a layered interference in the local field, several dimensional membranes compressed into overlapping proximity by the convergence. Without a stable positional anchor, a teleportation attempt in this environment would scatter the traveler across a stack of parallel spaces.
"The local field is severely disrupted," Smith said. "Jane must have passed through one of the membrane boundaries accidentally." He looked at Darcy's expression and gave her the version that would actually help. "She's in an adjacent dimensional layer. The convergence is pulling those layers toward each other right now, which means the boundaries will drift back toward alignment on their own." He looked up toward the upper level. "She'll come back through. Stay out here."
Darcy pointed at herself and then at Ian. "Stay. Got it. Yes." She pointed at the children. "You too. Everybody stays."
Five hours passed.
Smith sat outside the building's main entrance on a concrete barrier, phone in hand, working through the stack of inspection reports that had accumulated while he was in Austria. The convergence field pulsed occasionally — visible as a faint distortion in the air above the roofline, like heat shimmer but directional.
He felt the boundary shift when it happened. The membrane alignment had tightened enough for the gap to close.
"She's out," he said.
Darcy was on her feet before he finished the sentence. Thirty seconds later, Jane came out of the warehouse at a half-run, blinking in the grey London light like someone returning from a very long sleep.
Darcy covered the distance between them fast. "Jane. Jane. Where did you go?"
Jane was already looking past her. She spotted Smith sitting on the barrier and her expression moved through several stages in quick succession — recognition, relief, embarrassment, and the specific guilt of someone who realizes their scientific curiosity has inconvenienced a person of significant importance.
She jogged over. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, you came all the way here because of me — Darcy, did you call him?"
"What else was I supposed to do?" Darcy spread her hands. "I didn't have Thor's number."
"You could have called the police — no, actually don't do that, if S.H.I.E.L.D. finds out about that gravitational field they'll lock this entire district down and we'll never get access to —" Jane stopped herself, looked at Smith, recalibrated. "Thank you. Genuinely. I'm sorry for the trouble."
It had started raining at some point while she was talking — a proper London downpour coming in off the grey sky. Except it wasn't reaching Jane's head. Or Smith's.
Jane noticed this the same moment Darcy did.
Darcy tipped her face up at the dry air directly above them. "That is very weird."
Jane looked sideways at Smith. "Is this you? Are you — managing the rain?"
Smith shook his head. "Look over there."
Jane turned.
Thor was standing twenty feet away in the rain, soaked through, not using a single godly ability to address this situation, just standing in it like he deserved it.
Jane Foster stared at him for about two seconds. Then she crossed the distance between them at speed and hit him across the face with an open palm, the crack of it audible over the rain.
Darcy made a sound.