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  She waited, watching the slowly moving progress bar on the display. She was uploading the entire contents of the research tablet to S.H.I.E.L.D. It was going to take a few seconds.

  The bar stopped.

  Frowning, she tapped the keyboard for diagnostics. The transfer wasn’t going through. It looked as if no one was receiving, as if the world beyond the Savage Land was dead and unresponsive. That seemed unlikely. It wasn’t as if the entire global telecommunications network had suddenly gone down. The problem had to be at her end.

  She picked up the security tablet and started swiping through it. What had she missed? Some kind of security encryption somewhere, something that prevented anything except local comms? She thought she’d disabled that.

  What had she missed?

  She started to scroll. She checked dish alignment, QAM keying, and carrier strength. Everything was green. There had to be something. The pop-up window for the video feed had minimized, but it was still covering part of the display, so she moved to close it.

  Then she glanced at the research tablet and caught a faint reflection of the security guard getting up behind her.

  She turned and threw herself at him. Stupid-looking A.I.M. drum-helmets had their uses after all: They could deflect the lethal force of a point-blank Bite.

  The guard drew his gun. She crashed into him and they both went over, smashing into one of the wheeled chairs and unseating a dead, sagging operator. The gun went off. The weapon wasn’t suppressed, and the shot was loud. The bullet hit the main display of a console bank behind her, and the monitor exploded in a shower of sparks and pieces of screen.

  They grappled. She tried to twist the guard’s arm and break his wrist to make him drop the gun, but he fired again. His left hand clutched her throat. This was getting messy, and Natasha didn’t like messy. She aimed her right fist at his throat, but he was thrashing, and she hit the top of his chest plate instead.

  She kicked his right leg out from under him. As he fell sideways, she slammed his right wrist against the edge of the console. The wrist broke, but the guard’s fingers remained locked around the pistol. She let go of his arm, breaking contact with him so she wouldn’t share the charge, and fired the Widow’s Bite from her right bracelet into his unarmored left thigh.

  He collapsed, shuddering.

  Damn it.

  An alarm was pinging. The two unsilenced gunshots had set it off.

  She went back to the main console and tried to resend the transmission. Still nothing. How could the world be dead? She switched from direct data transmit to general voice.

  “Avengers, Avengers, Priority One,” she said into a borrowed headset. “This is Natasha Romanoff. Respond. S.H.I.E.L.D., respond. Urgent upload waiting. Please advise.”

  Nothing. Less than nothing. She said something vitriolic in her native tongue, and then realized that the mic was still live.

  Who the hell cared? No one was listening, anyway. No one could hear her.

  Why? Why?

  Whatever horror A.I.M. was manufacturing in the compound, whatever menace she and Barton had uncovered, it barely seemed to matter. What was frightening, what was truly unnerving, was that while they had been trekking through this forgotten pocket of prehistory, the rest of the world had gone dark.

  How the hell did something like that happen?

  Someone was banging on the hatch. She heard voices demanding that the door be opened immediately. She had locked the hatch, but she knew that A.I.M. could easily override that command.

  She swore again. There was a saying in Russia about lemons and what to make out of them. Stealth was no longer an option or a priority. It was a shame, because the Black Widow excelled at stealth operations. Fortunately, she was also frighteningly good at other methodologies. It was time for open dealings, for mokroye delo, without subterfuge.

  There was still a slick of contact adhesive on the back of the research tablet. She slapped it to her thigh and stuck it in place. Then she drew her nines.

  In just a few seconds, the hatch was going to be overridden and opened. Surprise them, she decided. Take it to them. Take the initiative. Take control.

  She pressed “release/open” on the security tablet. As the hatch opened, she began firing at the startled, yellow-clad figures beyond.

  NINE

  SIBERIA

  LOCAL TIME UNRECORDED, NO RELEVANT DATE

  THE ODINSON felt dismayingly mortal.

  There was a stinging weakness in his limbs, as if he had been half-drowned in the ice seas of Jotunheim. His spine and ribs felt as if they had been flattened on the anvils of Nidavellir. His belly burned with the ever-fires of Muspelheim, and his mouth and nostrils were clotted with blood, as if he had been cruelly poisoned by the Svartalfar. He tasted bile and decay, as though Hel itself rotted him from within.

  Mortal. Reduced. Diminished. His godhood gnawed away.

  He knelt, bowed down, on the mountaintop. Rain hammered him. He raised his hands and saw wisps of blue sorcery dissipating around his bruised fingers.

  Somehow, he had managed to haul himself back up over the lip of the cliff. His wounds were grave, but he knew in his heart that the sense of mortality he felt was due far more to his location. In the mundanity of Midgard, his god-state made him feel transcendent—his senses perceiving a glory of colors, tastes, smells, and textures. There, he was a higher being in a plainer world, alive to the cosmos in ways that mortals could not comprehend. Even in Asgard, he knew strength and boundless vitality.

  But here, on this bleak mountainside, he was crushed by an unparalleled intensity of enchantment. His soaring god-state was just a feeble spark next to the supernatural maelstrom that beset the place. Here, even the All-Father would have seemed a puny, terrified child in the face of the saturating levels of magic.

  He was no longer on Midgard. Thor knew that. He had come to a tract of Midgard, to the region called Siberia, but that earthly place had slipped away beneath his feet, plunging him into an otherness where mortal notions of time and natural law no longer held sway. This portion of the planet Earth had been dislocated into another reality, a reality where his god-state counted for nothing. Here, he was no more significant than a microbe.

  Mjolnir lay on the rock in front of him. He reached for its grip.

  “Don’t,” said a voice.

  It took him a moment to remember how to speak, and to find the strength with which to do it.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because I will hurt you again,” the voice said.

  He knew the voice. It was soft and female. It was Wanda, the friend who had betrayed him so utterly.

  “No,” he mumbled. “Why? Why have you done this?”

  The voice laughed.

  “Needs must,” it said.

  He raised his head and managed to lift himself into a kneeling position. Rain streamed down his face and washed out the blood clotting his hair. The Scarlet Witch, a red shape smudged by the rain, stood a bowshot away, watching him.

  He looked up, ignoring her. Through the fierce rain lancing down at him, through the noxious cover of black storm cloud and manifest night, behind the toxic, leprous zigzags of lightning, he glimpsed negative stars: black suns, radiating unlight, set in constellation patterns utterly unknown to him.

  Utterly unknown to every being in the Nine Realms, he fancied: an alien universe whose aspects had never before been glimpsed by mortal or immortal, let alone mapped or understood. It was a hyperspace gulf, infra-dimensional, a realm of horror where nameless black stars shone in a void bloated and bloodshot with decay. He wondered whether these new constellations had names. They were probably old names, unnaturally old, and the sound of them would trigger instant madness and despair. Just the sight of the alignments was making him feel sick.

  He started to rise.

  “Remain kneeling,” the Scarlet Witch instructed him.

  “I won’t,” he replied, and he got up.

  “I will
kill you.”

  “You were—” He paused, cleared his throat, and spat black blood and bile. “You were about to do that anyway. Or so you threatened. But you did not. Do it now, if you will, but I will meet death on my feet.”

  She raised her left hand—the fell hand of treachery, the sinister aspect. Through the rain, Thor saw it shimmer with wretched blue power.

  “I did not say I would kill you,” she hissed. “I said you were lost. That is worse.”

  “You do not sound like Wanda,” he said. He spat again. “What is in you? What speaks through you?”

  “You are lost,” the voice insisted.

  “Aye,” he nodded. “That much is clear. I know not where I stand. But you mean powerless, don’t you? You mean I am no longer able to influence these events.”

  “Yes. So submit.”

  He shrugged, then grimaced. It hurt to shrug.

  “I know a few things,” he said, “even though I am but an Asgardian warrior. The sagas taught me that gods are hard to kill. Very hard.”

  The Scarlet Witch did not respond. Blue flames flared around her raised hand.

  “You threaten me,” Thor said, “but gods are difficult to be rid of. Our forms may be broken, our blood spilled, our souls scattered, but our essences endure. Even with magic of this magnitude at your command, it would be hard to annihilate me utterly. To make me fully extinct.”

  “Try me.”

  “I think I might, at that.” He smiled, paused, and tested his front teeth with the tip of his tongue. Two were loose. He tasted blood on his lips.

  “If you could kill me easily, you’d have done it by now. You’ve brought me low instead, tamed me into submission.” He gestured in the rain, indicating the infernal vortex that encircled the mountainside. “You have raw magic here, unleashed on a scale beyond anything I have ever seen. But you need it, do you not? A universe of daemon magic, and yet you need it all. You don’t want to waste any culling me unless you really have to. Whatever you’re doing here, you’re loath to expend the magic necessary to actually kill a god.”

  “Submit, or I will hurt you again.”

  “Creature, I am an Asgardian. I have been hurt and hurt and hurt again. As the mortals would say: Bring it. Again, I know a few things. Here’s another—I can see through the lies of sorcery.”

  “Yes? And what saga taught you that?” she mocked.

  “No saga,” he replied. “A friend. Her name is Natasha. She told me about psychologies. I should have listened more closely, because much of it I do not recollect. I was too busy admiring the fairness of her form. Still, I remember some. Mortals—immortals, too—they all have tells. Some are obvious...very obvious.”

  “And what is my ‘tell,’ Odinson?”

  “I suppose…standing in the rain with your hand on fire ordering me to submit. Threatening me. I don’t know what this is, what world-end you’re engineering, but you wouldn’t threaten me if I were no longer a threat to you. You’d leave me for dead and get on with your apocalypse.”

  “I don’t think that’s an idea you should test,” she said.

  “Another threat. You know, I think I will force you to kill me, to waste enough magic to annihilate a god. Drain you so much you can’t complete this ritual. That’s a death that would make me happy. I think that’s what you’re afraid of.”

  He took a step toward her.

  “No further,” she snarled, the blue flames around her hand dancing higher.

  “Another friend of mine has a phrase,” said Thor. “He uses it in fights, and also when he wagers in card games. His name is Clint Barton. He says, ‘Put up, or shut up.’”

  Thor snapped out his hand. Mjolnir flew up from the wet rock and planted itself securely in his grip. He swung and hurled it.

  The Scarlet Witch unleashed the blue fire wreathing her hand. The power had been brewing to strike him, but he had forced her to counter the hammerhead missile streaking toward her. The spell broke the air into sapphire blisters as it stopped Mjolnir mid-flight. The hammer shivered, and then flew back at Thor.

  He grabbed it out of the air and turned the catch into another powerful swing.

  “Again!” he said.

  The hammer hurtled at her. Blue magic blocked it, and it rebounded. Thor caught it again, but the Witch blasted him in the chest before he could launch it a third time.

  He gasped in pain, staggered, and dropped to one knee, coughing blood. His heart felt cooked, as though it was about to burst. He launched the hammer anyway.

  Wanda laughed as it rushed toward her. She raised both hands together and unleashed an azure flash that froze the whizzing hammer in midair, rotated it, and fired it back at the Odinson.

  Mjolnir struck him in the torso and knocked him onto his back. He felt his ribs splinter under the impact. He lay for a moment—stricken, panting, the smoldering hammer across his chest.

  “Felled by m-my own hammer,” he rasped, blood in his throat. “That’s n-not going to look good in a s-saga…”

  She was standing over him.

  “Neither is this,” she said.

  The fire around her hands had turned almost cobalt with malevolent fury.

  “You are perceptive,” she said. “I require such reserves of magic for this act, I am reluctant to spare any. And I will indeed need a great deal to obliterate you. But I have enough. And since you have resisted submission, killing you will be worth the expense.”

  The cobalt fire swirled and became a blade of light.

  “A-and was I right about the voice?” he choked. “You…you are n-not Wanda, are you?”

  “I am not,” she said. “I am the slayer of the Odinson.”

  She drove the blade down savagely.

  There was a shriek. Thor hoped very much that it hadn’t come from him.

  Bright white light engulfed the blue blade and shattered it before it could impale him. The Scarlet Witch staggered backwards, her cloak on fire.

  “Who dares?” she roared.

  “At the risk of total confusion,” said Wanda Maximoff, “I do.”

  One Scarlet Witch stood facing the other. The real Wanda was upright and defiant, a corona of white energy surrounding her raised hands. The other was hunched and scowling, her cloak burning, her fists oozing blue smoke.

  “T-two of you,” mumbled Thor.

  “Seems so,” said the real Wanda, her gaze never wavering from her impostor.

  “I had a d-dream like this once,” he added.

  “Thor,” the real Wanda warned.

  “It wasn’t quite so violent or painful,” he said.

  “Not now, Thor,” said Wanda.

  The false Witch cursed and lashed out. Wanda met her roaring, scalding magic with a silent ray of pearlescent radiance. The rival conjurations sparked and fought against each other.

  “Idiot child,” declared the false Witch. Her voice was no longer quite female, or even human. “I have the power to slay a divine being. I will not be stopped by a weakling practitioner like you.”

  “And yet…” replied Wanda through gritted teeth.

  “You will exhaust your feeble power momentarily,” said the other.

  “I know,” Wanda agreed.

  “Then you will burn.”

  “I know.”

  “Yet you persist?”

  “I do. Just…how did you put it? Momentarily.”

  “And then what?” laughed the false Witch.

  “Then this,” said Thor.

  Mjolnir slammed into the false Witch’s head. The blow hurled her—screaming, flailing and burning—right across the platform of black rock.

  She caught herself at the lip and tried to rise. Her clothing hung in scorched tatters. Her hair was gone. Her flesh was blackened. Ugly light shone out of her gaping mouth and vacant eye sockets.

  Thor slung the hammer. It struck the false Witch, and she disappeared over the edge. Her scream fell away into the night and the storm.

  Thor caught the returning hammer and looked
around at Wanda. She subsided, breathing hard.

  “Took your time there, Thunder God,” she said.

  “I had issues standing up,” he replied, nursing his shattered ribs. “When did you arrive?”

  “I was about an hour behind you. I arrived at the zone right before it…” Wanda paused. “Right before it fell out of reality.”

  “How do we…” Thor hesitated. He was trying to find the right terminology, and nothing appropriate was coming. “Shove it back into place?”

  “Give me a moment to regain my strength,” she replied. “If I can define the nature of the ritual at work here and understand the invocations in use, perhaps I can reverse it.”

  “I liked everything about that except the word ‘perhaps,’” said Thor.

  “Correction: There is no ‘perhaps.’ This arcane act is irreversible.”

  The words stung the air like the aftershocks of an earth tremor. Beyond the cliff edge, where the false and burned Witch had plunged away, a figure was slowly rising into view, suspended on a disk of indigo light.

  He was disturbingly tall. His robes were a blend of midnight gray and imperial purple, embellished with threads of black that formed elaborate, baroque patterns around his arms, shoulders, and horned collar. His head was a block of fierce, living flame out of which eyes and a mouth flickered and loomed.

  He was the dread mage-lord of the Faltine, the master of the shunned Dark Dimension—the most powerful and vile magical being in all existence.

  Wanda Maximoff flinched and let slip an uncharacteristic expletive.

  “I was just thinking that,” said Thor.

  “It’s—” Wanda began.

  “Oh, I know who it is,” said Thor.

  “Then you also know how much trouble we’re in,” she said.

  The Odinson nodded. There were no words in any language, mortal or otherwise, that properly did justice to the true malignancy of the dread Dormammu.

  Dormammu raised his left hand. Eldritch green light snaked around it, spiraling and coiling.