The tunnel had swallowed Hill's car whole.
One moment she'd been behind the wheel, pushing the engine hard to cut off Loki's escape route on the far side of the underground access road. The next, the ground had simply given up — concrete groaning, supports shearing, the entire ceiling dropping in sections as the base's structural integrity collapsed inward.
The car took a direct hit from the debris. Hill clawed her way out through the crumpled door, her forehead split and bleeding, ears ringing with the deep percussion of the collapse still settling around her. She pressed her back against a half-buried concrete pillar and took a slow breath.
Alive. Barely.
The walkie-talkie crackled in her hand.
Two hundred feet above what remained of the base, Nick Fury stood on the edge of a helicopter with the hatch thrown open. Below, the earth had caved into a massive depression — months of construction, billions in funding, and the only Tesseract research program on the planet, all gone in under ten minutes.
He'd watched Loki's vehicle punch through the surface exit. He'd ordered the pilot low. He'd done the only thing left available to him.
Three shots at the cab. None of them connected cleanly enough to stop Barton, whose hands stayed locked on the wheel despite the spider-webbed windshield.
Then the scepter answered.
The blast came from the back seat — pale blue, precise, and completely indifferent to the helicopter's armor. The aircraft lurched sideways as fire spread from the rotor housing. Fury read the angle, estimated the altitude, and jumped.
He hit the ground hard and rolled, coming up on one knee with his pistol already tracking the retreating vehicle. He squeezed off two more shots. One spark off the rear quarter panel. The other missed entirely. The truck kept moving.
He lowered the weapon.
The walkie-talkie on his belt hissed. "Director Fury. Are you reading me?"
He picked it up. "The Tesseract has been stolen." He glanced at the helicopter still burning thirty meters away. "We have casualties. Hill, what's your status?"
Hill's voice came back clipped but steady. "Still extracting. Unknown number of personnel buried. I don't have a headcount yet."
"Issue emergency orders. Everyone not on rescue duty tracks that vehicle. I want eyes on it before it goes cold."
"Understood."
Fury straightened. "Coulson. Return to base and issue a Level Seven alert." He stared at the cratered earth where the facility used to be, the rising smoke catching the last light of the afternoon. "The war has already started."
A pause on the other end. "What do we do, sir?"
"Assemble the Avengers."
The Fraternity's headquarters was quiet.
Smith Doyle had gone to bed early.
He'd heard nothing from S.H.I.E.L.D. — no alert had reached him, no priority flag from Friday, no frantic call from Coulson. As far as the night was concerned, it was just another night. He lay on his back with his hands behind his head, tail curled loosely at his side, and stared at the ceiling for exactly as long as it took to get comfortable before he closed his eyes.
Loki was on Earth. The Tesseract was stolen.
The Battle of New York was a footnote compared to what was coming. Back when he'd first arrived in this universe, that battle had felt like the first real test, the moment where everything could fall apart. Now, with Saiyan blood running through him and an army at his back, he looked at the incoming Chitauri invasion the way a chess player looks at a three-move problem. Solved. Just not yet played.
The Infinity Stones were more interesting, academically speaking. The Tesseract and the Mind Stone both had obvious values but even there, the urgency felt muted when he thought it through clearly. He was eventually going to learn both Goku's Instant Transmission or Kibito's teleportation from the system.
When that happened, the Tesseract's became redundant. And the Mind Stone's mind-control capability had a cleaner DBZ equivalent in Babidi's methods, which came with fewer strings attached.
What he wouldn't do was let Thanos eventually collect everything and snap his fingers. That was non-negotiable. But that was a future problem.
Right now, tonight, there was nothing he needed to do.
He closed his eyes and was asleep within minutes.
Across the Atlantic, in a room on the third floor of a building on Sorensky Square, Natasha Romanoff was tied to a chair.
She wasn't particularly concerned about this. Being tied to a chair was, in the broad catalogue of things that had happened to her, fairly minor. She'd been tied to chairs on four continents. The methodology varied by region. These men were professionals — the knots were tight, they'd taken her weapons during the initial grab, and they'd hit her hard enough in the face to establish dominance without wasting effort on cruelty for its own sake.
The blow had caught her across the nose. Her eyes had watered automatically, the way eyes do when the septum takes an impact regardless of what the brain thinks about it. She'd let the tears come because wiping them away would have required straining against the restraints, and she wasn't ready to let them see how her hands moved yet.
The general in charge of this operation was a broad man in his late fifties with the particular arrogance of someone who had spent decades in rooms where he held all the leverage. He paced the length of the room with his hands clasped behind his back, regarding her the way a gallery visitor regards a piece of art he finds technically competent but ultimately overrated.
"Tonight didn't go the way I planned," he said.
Natasha let her head rest back slightly against the chair. "I know what you're thinking," she said. "Trust me. This arrangement works in everyone's favor."
The general studied her face. "Who are you working for? Lermantov?" He let the name sit for a moment. "Does he think we still need his authorization to move our product?"
One of his subordinates stepped behind her chair and tipped it backward without warning, the rear legs lifting off the floor so that she was suspended at a steep angle, nothing beneath her but a very long drop to the floor below. On a different day, against a person who hadn't spent eighteen years training for exactly this sort of situation, that move would have produced immediate cooperation.
Natasha didn't change her expression. But she answered.
"I was under the impression that General Sorohov handled the export side of the operation."
The subordinate righted the chair. Apparently, that name carried weight.
The general's lip curled slightly. "Sorohov is a front man. A middleman. A face we put on the operation for people who need to believe there's a legitimate address attached to the money." He looked at her with something close to contempt. "Outdated intelligence is a liability in this business."
His eyes moved over her again, more slowly this time. "The famous Black Widow." A dismissive sound escaped him. "Turned out to be beautiful decoration."
"You really think I'm beautiful?" Natasha said.
He didn't answer. He turned away from her and walked toward the table along the far wall — the one with the instruments on it. The subordinate beside her read the signal without being told and moved to her face, gripping her jaw in both hands to hold her mouth open.
Natasha watched the general select a pair of pliers from the arrangement on the table.
Then a cell phone rang.
The subordinate holding her jaw paused. The general paused. Everyone in the room collectively registered the mundane intrusion of a ringtone in a moment that was supposed to be escalating toward something else entirely.
The subordinate released her and answered his phone. His expression shifted through three distinct phases in about four seconds — confusion, realization, and something that edged toward alarm — before he crossed the room and held the device out toward his commander.
"It's for her," he said.
The general took the phone with the weary authority of a man who was used to being the most important person in any room he entered. "Listen to me," he began.
"Third floor, 114 Sorensky Square." Coulson's voice was conversational, calm in the way that specific kind of calm is actually a threat. "There's an F-22 on station eight kilometers out."
A pause.
"Put that woman on the phone. Or I level the entire block before you reach the lobby."
"Put the woman on the phone," Coulson continued, "or I level the block before you make it to the lobby."
The general lowered the phone slowly. He looked at Natasha again — really looked this time, not with contempt but with the careful attention of a man recalibrating a situation he'd badly misjudged.