Darcy looked at Smith.
Smith shrugged. "My girlfriend doesn't do that."
Thor took the slap without flinching, which said something about either his constitution or his conscience. Then he stepped forward and took Jane's face in both hands and kissed her, which rendered the slap a somewhat complicated gesture.
When he let her go, he kept his hands where they were, thumbs at her jaw, and looked at her with the direct intensity of a man who had been worrying about exactly this for the last several hours. "Where were you? Heimdall lost sight of you entirely."
"I don't know," Jane said. She was already recalibrating from the kiss, which had clearly not been the outcome she'd planned when she crossed the distance. "I was somewhere else and then I wasn't. When I woke up I was back in the warehouse." She pulled back slightly. "Where you were, however, is a completely different conversation. Once a month, Thor. You promised. You didn't come to the diplomatic establishment — I waited at the site."
"The Nine Realms were in open rebellion after the Bifrost fell," Thor said, and he had the decency to look genuinely apologetic about it. "Every kingdom that had been held in check by Asgard's reach decided to test what remained. I've spent months putting it back. I returned to Asgard this morning and Heimdall told me you'd vanished before I'd even sat down."
Jane looked at him for a moment, revising. "You really didn't know."
"I knew nothing of what happened on Earth. Tell me."
"Asgard has an embassy in New York now. Lorelei is the ambassador."
Something moved across Thor's expression that wasn't quite surprise and wasn't quite concern — more like the recognition of a specific complication. "Lorelei."
"Is that a problem?"
"It's not nothing." He glanced toward Smith. "It seems I have a great deal of catching up to —"
Smith cleared his throat.
Both of them turned.
"Jane has been missing for five hours," Smith said. "Whatever entered her in that other dimension is still with her. That takes priority over the diplomatic briefing."
Thor looked at him with genuine warmth. "Smith. It's been too long." He extended his hand and Smith shook it. "What happened to her while she was gone?"
Smith opened his mouth to answer. The answer became unnecessary.
A burst of deep red energy erupted from Jane's chest — not a controlled release, not intentional, just a sudden overflow from whatever was inside her, sweeping outward. Smith stepped in front of Darcy on pure reflex, absorbing the edge of it across his back. Thor took the main force straight on and barely shifted his footing.
Jane hit the ground. Thor caught her before she finished falling.
"Are you hurt?" He was already checking her over, hands moving.
Jane looked at her own hands. "What was that? What just happened?"
Smith looked at the fading red dissipating in the rain. "Something happened during those five hours," he said. "Thor. Don't waste time on the ground. Take Jane to Asgard, get her to a medical room. I need to speak with Odin."
Thor nodded, stood with Jane in his arms, and looked up. "Heimdall."
The Bifrost column came down in a cascade of color and motion, the light catching the rain around them and turning the whole street momentarily into something that belonged in a different world entirely. Smith stepped into it.
He looked back at Darcy as the effect built around them. "We need to get her examined. Get yourself away from this location — the field here is going to destabilize further."
Darcy stood in the rain watching the three of them dissolve into the column of light. Her intern materialized at her elbow.
"If you'd gone," Ian said, "I'd have been stranded here alone."
"You're a grown adult," Darcy said, staring at the spot where the Bifrost had been. "I have never been to Asgard."
The Bifrost arrival was everything the physics of it implied — a disorienting cascade of compressed spatial transit, light and color and the sensation of being everywhere simultaneously for a fraction of a second, and then Asgard's bridge platform, the vast golden city spread ahead, and the impossible depth of space visible beyond the bridge's edge.
Jane looked around with her mouth slightly open. "We have to do that again."
Heimdall watched her with the patient amusement of someone who had seen this reaction from every first-time visitor for several thousand years. He turned to Smith. "Welcome, Mr. Smith."
"Heimdall." Smith looked out at the city briefly. He had questions about the Bifrost's mechanics that Bulma would find professionally fascinating. Later.
On Svartalfheim, the Dark Elf fleet had already made landfall.
Malekith crouched in the grey dirt of his home world and let a handful of it run through his fingers. The texture of it. The weight of it. Memory encoded in soil.
"I had almost forgotten," he said quietly.
Algrim stood behind him. "Our revival is your greatest legacy."
Malekith stood and threw the remaining dirt from his hands. "What was taken from us will be repaid a thousandfold. I will reclaim the Aether. I will end this universe's long corruption." He looked at the ruins around him. "And the warriors of Asgard will understand what they cost us."
Asgard's medical wing was more intuitive than Smith had expected — less like a hospital and more like a precision instrument. The healing chamber Jane was placed in generated diagnostic light in slow sweeping patterns, charting whatever was happening inside her with a specificity that the Asgardian healer managed with visible confidence and equally visible concern.
Jane lay still and stared at the energy lines above her. "What is this thing?"
"Do not move," the healer said pleasantly.
Thor watched the deep red light moving in slow pulses around Jane's heart and ribcage, and looked at the healer beside him. "It's not from Earth. What is it doing to her?"
"The energy reading is unlike anything catalogued. The volume of it exceeds her body's natural capacity to contain it." The healer's tone was careful. "She is not in immediate crisis. But she cannot hold this indefinitely."
Smith had already pulled out his scouter and pointed it at Jane. The device gave a sharp ascending whine, climbed through its measurement range in under two seconds, and shattered.
Jane sat up slightly at the sound. "Did I just break that?"
"The energy the stone is projecting read above this unit's ceiling before it gave out." Smith turned the broken casing over in his hand."
Jane stared at him. Then something lit up in her expression that was clearly going to cause problems. "So I'm — I have superhuman power right now? Like, registering-on-a-scale superhuman power?"
"You have a very old and very unstable piece of the universe inside your body," Smith said. "That's not the same thing as having power you can use."
"But theoretically —"
"Jane."
"If someone with a power level in the fifties can go toe-to-toe with the threats you deal with, and I'm reading above the ceiling —"
"Jane, if you could fully mobilize and release what's inside you right now, you would destroy this planet." Smith said it with the flat precision of someone reading a measurement. "You cannot mobilize it. Your body is a container that wasn't built for this. That's the problem we're currently solving."
Jane looked at her hands for a moment.
Then she made a small fist, experimentally.
"Jane," Thor said.
"I know," she said. "I know. I'm not going to do anything." She uncurled her hand. "It's just a lot to process."