The scarlet energy did not simply fill the room. It moved.
Slow, purposeful currents of it turned through the air like something alive, rising from the floor and folding back down, tracing paths that had no geometric logic to them. The light they cast was deep and red and made the shadows along the walls shift and breathe.
At the center of it all, Wanda hung suspended roughly a meter above the floor, cross-legged, her dark red ceramite plate catching the ambient glow. Her hands were moving constantly, fingers drawing shapes in the air that began to dissolve even as she completed them, only to be replaced by new ones. Her expression was one of absolute concentration, eyes half-closed, lips pressed together.
Around her, in a circle that stretched the full width of the room, more than thirty people knelt in silence. Men and women both, wearing nothing, every visible surface of their skin covered in patterns: lines and whorls and dense repeating symbols carved in dark ink, some of them still raw at the edges. They were utterly still. None of them breathing in any rhythm that suggested consciousness.
Jessica stood in the doorway and took it all in.
Doom came to stand beside her, his dark green cloak drifting in a current that had nothing to do with ventilation.
"An ancient prophecy ritual." His voice was level, anticipating her reaction before she had formed it. "Large-scale. I needed Wanda's ability to anchor it, and the sacrifices to sustain it. Without both, it could not be completed at the necessary scope."
He paused.
"They are not dead. They are in a medically induced coma. Every one of them is a convicted killer, multiple counts. I borrowed them. I did not break them."
He looked at her.
"If you doubt me on that, you should not doubt the Lamenters. If I were taking people off the street for this, the battle brothers would have already dealt with it themselves."
Jessica studied the figures on the floor for a moment. Then she exhaled and turned to face him fully.
"Even if everything you're saying is true, Doom. What is this? What are you actually doing?"
She kept her voice low. The energy in the room seemed to thicken around the question.
"I know what the Cosmic Cube is. David briefed me. But Fury is one man, and even with alien assistance, he's been running from us for weeks. He can't hold out indefinitely. Is he really worth this? Repeatedly ignoring David's transfer orders. Pushing it to the point where my teacher might hear about it directly."
She took a step closer.
"And you've seen what Chaos does. You were there a year ago. Blood sacrifice rituals, even ones dressed up in witchcraft, are exactly the kind of thing that none of us are supposed to go near without authorization. David and I might be able to keep this contained for now, but if Lord Nolan comes back and finds out what you've been doing in here, have you actually thought through what happens next?"
Her voice was not angry. It was earnest, and that was worse.
Doom did not look away from her.
"I have thought through nothing else." He clasped his hands inside the cloak. "And I intend to tell Lord Nolan everything when he returns. Every detail. I will take the consequences myself, whatever they are."
"Then tell me," Jessica said. "Why."
A long beat.
"At the beginning," Doom said, "I admit I let it become personal. Fury slipped past our surveillance more times than he had any right to, and I pushed harder because of it. That was a mistake in judgment, and I recognized it."
He walked a few steps to the side, looking at Wanda's suspended form.
"What changed was this: I was tracking a contact of Fury's network. One of the alien intermediaries. By the time I reached him, he was dying. In the time I had, he told me something."
Doom turned back.
"Nick Fury is not simply running. He is attempting to activate the Cosmic Cube."
The currents in the room shifted, as if they had heard it too.
"Lord Nolan told me what the Cube actually contains. A Space Stone. One of the fundamental stones governing the laws of the universe." Doom's voice remained measured, but something underneath it had sharpened. "Its function is not simply transportation between locations. It can open a portal to anywhere in the universe. Any location. Any dimension. Randomly, if the user does not know what they are doing."
He let that settle.
"You understand what I mean when I say dimension." It was not a question. "The witchcraft I use draws from a border region, a fragment of a dimensionless space between realms. What I pull from is nothing. A threshold. The hell dimensions recorded in human myth, the ones only the Sorcerer Supreme has ever ventured into, those are real places. Organized, populated, ruled. And beyond those, there are countless others, most of them without names in any human language."
He spread his hands slightly.
"If Nick Fury activates the Cosmic Cube without understanding it, he may simply escape us. That is the best outcome. Or he may open a door into something that has been waiting on the other side for an opportunity. Something that does not care about his intentions or his politics."
He dropped his hands.
"He has already accepted help from an alien race we have no file on. We know almost nothing about their capabilities or their interest in the Cube. Are we willing to accept that outcome on the assumption that a man who has spent his career surviving by betraying people will suddenly develop a conscience at the critical moment?"
Jessica held very still. Her face had gone from solemn to something harder to name.
Doom watched her and said nothing more. There was something in his expression, though, some calculation that had pulled back just before it reached the surface. He had told her enough. He had not told her everything.
In the center of the room, the quality of the light changed.
The scarlet energy began to contract. What had been spread across the full width of the chamber started folding inward, slowly at first, then with increasing momentum, all of it flowing back toward Wanda in long ribbons of red that wrapped around her and were absorbed. The kneeling figures around her did not stir. The ritual had run its course.
Wanda sank gently toward the floor. Her boots found it. She opened her eyes.
"Teacher." She looked at Doom first, and her voice carried real brightness underneath the exhaustion. "I think we have found them. Their last hiding place."
She steadied herself and pressed her fingers to her temple.
"Manhattan Island. Underground. Somewhere deep, far below street level. The space is enormous, and there is wreckage everywhere: collapsed metal structures, broken concrete, debris that has been there for some time." She shook her head slightly, trying to articulate a visual impression. "It felt familiar. As if the shape of it had a memory attached."
Doom frowned, his attention sharpening. "Underground. New York's sewer network?"
He was still turning the thought over when Jessica's armor made a sound. The soft servomotor noise of her fists closing.
Jessica dropped to one knee in front of Wanda. She looked up at her with an expression that had gone through three or four changes in the space of two seconds and landed somewhere between disbelief and fury.
"Sister Wanda. The underground space. The metal structures. Does it feel like you've seen it before? Like somewhere you recognize, even if you can't place it?"
Wanda blinked. "Yes. I had that feeling throughout the ritual. But how do you know that? Can you see visions too?"
"No." Jessica's voice came out very flat. She looked at Wanda for one more second, then turned her head toward Doom.
Doom's expression had already arrived at the answer.
"Before you two joined the team," Jessica said, each word deliberate, "Mr. David built our first base underground. On Manhattan Island."
A pause.
"Damn Nick Fury actually played the dark game and hid in our old home!"
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