By the time the helicopter carrying Nick Fury and Maria Hill reached the Project PEGASUS facility, the evacuation was already halfway done.
Hill saw it before the skids even touched down.
Vehicles were already pulling away from the lower service road in tight lines. Technicians were being shepherded out through the side access points in groups. Armed agents moved in clipped patterns around the perimeter with the forced calm of people who had not yet been told whether this counted as a containment failure, a weapons event, or the first scene of something much worse.
The Tesseract had started misbehaving, which in SHIELD language meant everybody with sense was already looking for the nearest exit.
Hill stepped down from the helicopter and looked over the facility with her jaw set just tight enough to pass for professionalism rather than nerves.
This was one of the rare times she had been allowed out.
Allowed was the right word, too, which annoyed her every time it crossed her mind. Since the Noctis disaster, and disaster was the honest name for it, no matter how bureaucratically people preferred to rephrase the paperwork, her movements had become strategic considerations rather than routine postings. The Director had cut a deal with Noctis to bury the hatchet. End the attacks on SHIELD and its personnel. Stop the escalating campaign of punishment.
The agreement had held. It simply had not covered her.
Maria Hill had been the agent who tried to blackmail Noctis with prison and procedure and official consequences, which had turned out to be the sort of bright idea that only looked intelligent before the monster took it personally. The aftermath had been educational. Everyone who had brushed the operation, touched it, signed it, guarded it, mishandled it, or merely been rude within the blast radius of his memory had been punished in some fashion.
Some died.
Some were broken openly enough that even SHIELD had to admit they had been hit.
Others had something taken from them, though the institution still lacked the language to describe it properly. Men and women came back wrong, slower, dimmer, with gaps where skill or memories should have been. Whole sections of their life and personality were scrambled. SHIELD did not know telepathy had done it; later, they learned it through Professor Xavier. They only knew Noctis kept finding ways to make a point long after the point should have gone cold.
From the lowest guard who had mouthed off to him to the Director himself, everybody had received something.
Except her.
That had not been mercy. It had been postponed.
Fury knew it too. That was why he had hidden her in safe houses and called it a security rotation when the truth was much simpler. SHIELD had no way to guarantee her safety, and the Director did not want to risk his second in command. The flying fortress had become the last safehouse she settled at least it had turbines.
Hill had left her safe houses only three times since that business began, and each time had felt less like duty and more like stepping out of cover while feeling a crosshair on her back.
Days earlier, Fury had told her Noctis had refused the Avengers Initiative.
She had not been surprised.
Some men wanted badges. Some wanted absolution. Noctis wanted revenge and amusement in roughly that order, depending on the day.
Now she found herself thinking that refusal had at least kept one particular bastard elsewhere.
Or so she hoped.
She had spent enough time aboard the Helicarrier to start treating its steel decks and impossible lift capacity like a charm against his attention. Not safety exactly. She was not stupid enough to call anything safe where Noctis was concerned. But altitude, secrecy, and layers of SHIELD paranoia had to count for something.
She exhaled once and kept moving. She stayed with Fury until they reached the command level. From there, she took her station and let the carrier familiarly flood her senses, clipped voices over comms, boots on steel grating, systems warnings, agents trying not to sound worried while moving faster.
It almost worked.
Then, much later, after the real disaster had already begun unfolding, she stood on one of the internal levels and watched a young agent half-hidden behind a console with a handheld screen tilted low.
Galaga.
In the middle of everything, the fool was playing Galaga.
Hill stared at him for a beat, then looked away as there were simply too many kinds of incompetence in the world, and she had already been forced to specialise.
Besides, she had larger problems.
If Noctis ever found out where she was, the carrier might as well be made of paper. She already watched what he did to steel armours.
--
Far from the Helicarrier and its oncoming catastrophe, Lucius was having an excellent day at the Alkali Lake facility.
He stood in the lab with his hands behind his back and considered whether the place needed a new name.
Alkali Lake Facility lacked personality. It sounded like a budget line item or the kind of dead-eyed location label attached to documents nobody enjoyed reading. He was inclined towards something warmer, more humane, and therefore much more friendly. Bob was already taken. That left options like Barry, Nigel, Keith, Derek, Trevor, or perhaps Clive if he wanted the building itself to sound like a middle manager who had never once pleased a woman properly.
He would decide later.
For the moment, the array on the floor mattered more.
Another Array of Convergence spread across the reinforced concrete in interlocking circles and carved lines; the geometry of his hard work was made respectable through ritual. His soldiers stood at the perimeter in their usual obedient stillness, all free will long since edited into something less troublesome. The room smelled of blood, scorched metal, antiseptic, and the sort of hopeful anticipation only he could reasonably call cheerful.
Lucius had catalogued everything he had gathered from Xavier's mansion buffet.
X-Mansion, X-Men, X-Gene, X-whatever. Still, the X-menu had been generous.
Every mutation was transferred to over twenty believers and sacrificed properly.
Bobby Drake's cryokinesis now sat in him as something far beyond party tricks and snowstorms. Scott Summers had contributed optic lasers. Josh Foley, precious little biokinetic golden boy, had given him a healing command potent enough to make flesh obey like a reprimanded servant. The lonely boy will discover the meaning of Biokinesis later. Kitty's phasing had turned matter into an opinion instead of an obstacle. Rogue's absorption had added another beautiful obscenity to the pile, letting contact become more in ways Lucius found spiritually encouraging. He even left some amazing surprises for her; he did not want someone with powers to steal. No one can guarantee the dumb bitch will stay dumb enough and not learn to control her power. Hence, within a year, she'll be history. Piotr Rasputin's organic steel transformation had folded into his options too, which meant the walking metal wall had, in the end, done something genuinely useful for the first time in his life.
There had been others besides, enough to make filing him impossible. He just wished Illyana were there as well.
He still was not fully certain what sort of universe he had landed in. Earth-616 by smell, perhaps, but it looked more like it was patched together by the SMS entity with whatever divine glue that meddling thing preferred. He had not heard serious talk of Atlantis. No serious chatter about a daywalker cutting through vampires. No flaming skull on a chain roaming the public record. Either those threads were hidden very well, or they had not been invited to this little circus yet.
Lucius shrugged the thought aside.
He was richer in power than he had been yesterday, which remained the only cosmology worth immediate celebration.
His loyal soldiers, loyal in the same sense that furniture was loyal once enough nails had been used correctly, dragged in the last sacrifice and forced him into the circle.
The man was a SHIELD agent, or rather HYDRA in SHIELD colours, which was like saying a rat had worn a cleaner coat to the banquet. He was here for searching Noctis on SHIELD servers. Now he would serve a finer institutional purpose.
Lucius smiled at him with open warmth.
"Cheer up, most people die useless. You are being promoted."
The agent tried to speak. One of the soldiers forced his head down instead.
Lucius lifted his chin, looked over the array like a bishop about to bless the congregation, and spoke in a pompous tone.
"Convergence."
The circles lit at once.
While the array did its work, his mind had already wandered somewhere more interesting. Namely, the Chitauri ship. Was there a way onto it before the battle closed? Could he slip through the gap opened between Earth and that fleet, study the architecture, touch the metal, read the systems, get the principles out whole and leave before the nuke destroyed that thing?
The thought itself was magnificent and dangerous in exactly the right proportions.
-
Above the Helicarrier, the sky held steady and lied about how bad the day was getting.
Inside, the Avengers had started arguing in the exact way Loki had expected they would.
The sceptre sat there like a quiet infection in the room. The Mind Stone's influence pulls at grievances, bruised egos, suspicions, fears, and the thousand little weaknesses already present in people who thought themselves heroes.
Except for Tony, Lucius was going to help his friend.
Loki waited in his cell and listened to the discord with a knowing smile.
On the bridge, tension sharpened. In the lab, tempers rose. In the shafts and service ways, Barton's strike was already aligning with the chaos to come.
Loki rested one hand against the glass and smiled a little wider. Yes, everything was coming together nicely.