"I'm sorry," Jordan said. "I think so."
He put a hand briefly on Scott's shoulder. "When I found the van, there were three piles of ash near the external equipment. The quantum relay had been running unmanned."
Scott absorbed this slowly.
Hope. Hank. Janet.
He'd just gotten them back. The family, the relationship, the version of his life that had started to actually make sense—gone, in the span of however long it had taken him to come through a portal and roll across a lawn. Scott Lang, who had spent a long time climbing out of one hole, discovered that the universe had prepared a different hole for him, and it had the same measurements.
He sat with that for a moment.
Then he looked up. "You said there's still hope. Through the quantum realm. Why?"
The captain looked briefly at Tony and Banner, which was the look of a man who understood the conclusion but had lost track of the supporting argument.
Help, said the captain's expression. Someone help me.
"Let me explain," Jordan said.
He turned to Scott. "Simple question. How long do you think you were in the Quantum Realm?"
"About—" Scott paused, counting backward. "Two minutes? Maybe three? Time's hard to track in there, but I wasn't in long."
Tony and Banner exchanged a look. Something sharpened in both their expressions simultaneously.
"Here's the thing," Jordan said. "You think you were in there for three minutes. You were actually in there for fifteen days."
Scott's mouth opened.
He closed it again. "Fifteen—" He started, then stopped. Then: "Right. You mentioned—I think the captain said—" His forehead creased. "Dr. Pym told me once. Time in the Quantum Realm doesn't run parallel to time here. In some areas it moves faster, slower, backwards. Time vortexes where cause and effect stop cooperating." He paused, the pieces assembling in front of him. "If you got trapped in the wrong one, you'd never—"
"You'd never come out," Jordan agreed.
Steve Rogers, who had been quietly following the logic, arrived at the destination. "So. You can use that property to travel through time. Move backward or forward relative to the present." He paused. "That's what you're saying."
Nobody contradicted him.
"The captain is exactly right," Jordan said.
Steve processed this.
Tony and Banner shared one look, brief and complete.
"Time to work," they said, within about a second of each other.
Tony pressed his chest plate, the nanotech armor materializing around him. "I'll run the AI through a spacetime momentum model. Need a mathematical framework for navigating the time vortex without dying."
Banner was already rolling his sleeves up and walking toward the van. "I'll strip the equipment and redesign it for multiple simultaneous users. The current setup is single-occupancy."
Tony ignited his boots and was gone in a streak of gold-red fire. Banner pulled open the van's rear panel, assessed the internal machinery, and muttered something to himself about leverage.
"If I could just use Hulk's strength for about thirty seconds—"
A sound came from inside the van. Specific, large, irritable.
The next moment Bruce Banner exited the van at speed, horizontally, with a rapidly de-greening head, and hit the lawn.
"Ah." He sat up. "He still won't cooperate."
"I'll give you a hand," Jordan said.
"Thank you, Jordan."
Three days later, the quantum shuttle occupied a significant portion of the Avengers compound's main hall.
The platform was large enough for a full strike team—ten-plus people entering the Quantum Realm simultaneously, the channel stable, the targeting framework mathematically grounded. Tony and Banner had done the heavy lifting, but somewhere in day one Jordan had accidentally used Mirror Magic to replicate a completed component, and Tony—realizing he'd acquired a human fabricator who operated on essentially zero lead time—had immediately offered to pay him to stay.
While the engineers built, Steve Rogers was doing what Steve Rogers did: planning. A strategy for acquiring the Infinity Stones at points before the original snap, minimum footprint, maximum efficiency, without creating timeline paradoxes that would make everything worse. The Avengers had better options this run than they'd had the first time—a fact that several members of the team were collectively trying not to think too hard about—so Clint Barton's retirement was going undisturbed.
On the third day, Jordan found himself working alongside Banner on the final calibration sequence.
"Banner." He set down the component he'd been fitting. "If you had the chance to properly resolve things—between you and Hulk—would you want that?"
Banner stopped working. He turned the question over with the expression of a man who had been asked it before, mostly by himself.
"I'd want it," he said. "Whether the big guy would cooperate is a different question."
"I can be persuasive."
Banner looked at him.
"When the time is right," Jordan said, "I'll help you with it."
The situation with Hulk was, at present, genuinely poor. Thanos had beaten him badly enough—not just physically, but something more fundamental, the specific injury of encountering something your entire identity was built around and discovering it was insufficient. Hulk had retreated. Not from Banner's body, but from everything else: from the surface, from combat, from communication. Sulking in the deep architecture of a shared psyche, refusing contact, refusing deployment.
If the AT Field-wielding pilots from the Eva unit next door had shown up looking for backup right now, the Hulk's cooperation would not have been forthcoming.
"I've wanted to—find a way to coexist with him," Banner said, quietly. "Not fight him. Not suppress him. Actually live alongside whatever he is." A pause. "It's never quite worked."
"Trust me," Jordan said, with the specific warmth of someone who has fixed considerably stranger problems. "This is my area. When I say you'll be alright, you'll be alright."
Banner smiled—the particular smile of someone who hasn't been told that by someone believable in a long time.
"That's good to hear."
"What are you two grinning about over here?"
Tony Stark descended through the compound entrance with his faceplate retracted and a four-meter articulated mechanical arm folded over one shoulder—the kind of component that generally requires either a crane or Hulk to transport, deployed here by way of nanotech assist and sheer disregard for the logistics.
"Looking forward to the future," Jordan said, moving to help.
Together they walked the arm to its installation point. Tony set one end down, studied the mounting groove, and reached for it with his left arm—the armor reconfiguring from gauntlet to full iron hammer with a smooth mechanical sound.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
Rhythmic, precise. Three strikes to seat the base bracket into the mounting slot, perfectly flush, no shimming required.
Then the arm shifted configuration again—hammer to high-temperature welding torch—and the jet of focused flame ran the seam in one continuous pass.
Jordan watched this sequence with genuine appreciation. There was a reason Tony Stark's engineering was what it was. He didn't separate the thinking from the doing; they ran in parallel, and the result was that process that looked like showing off was actually just how he worked.
"What else needs doing?" Jordan asked.
Tony stowed the torch, examined the seam, and nodded once at his own work.
"We're close. Once this arm is calibrated to the channel controller, the machine is—"
He paused. Looked at the overall structure.