Chapter 117: Everyone Has Thoughts About the Infinity Stones
Fury told Carol to rest first.
She didn't particularly want to rest. She had come back from the outer systems with the specific momentum of someone who had received a distress signal and traveled a significant distance to answer it, and arriving to find that the distress signal was about a man who ran a neighborhood in Manhattan was creating a particular kind of cognitive dissonance.
"Eat something," Fury said. "Meet the team. Hear the briefing."
Carol looked at the wreckage still being processed on the plaza outside.
"All of this was one person," she said.
"One person," Fury confirmed. "Plus a friend."
Carol thought about the physics of what she was looking at. Structural damage consistent with blast dispersal, vehicle impacts, and some kind of localized gravity effect. The specific pattern of a battle that had been entirely one-sided.
"Okay," she said. "Feed me first."
Fury watched her eat and thought about his next move.
The situation was cleaner than it had been a week ago, in some ways, and considerably more complicated in others.
He still needed Ethan Cross either controlled or removed. The SHIELD directorship situation — the political pressure from the incident, the questions already arriving from the oversight committee — made this more urgent, not less. He'd been protected so far by the fact that most of what had happened could be classified, but classified information had a way of becoming unclassified at the worst possible moment.
Carol was the ceiling raiser. He'd believed that before she arrived.
Now, looking at the plaza damage, he was slightly less certain.
Cross told me she wouldn't be enough, he thought. He said it the same way he said everything — like he'd already seen the outcome.
The question was whether that was confidence or foreknowledge. And if it was foreknowledge — of what?
"You're not telling me something," Carol said, without looking up from her food.
"I'm telling you what you need to know first," Fury said.
"What am I not ready for yet."
"That he knew you were coming back," Fury said. "By name. Before I'd told anyone outside my direct chain of command."
Carol looked at him.
"That," Fury said, "is what I'm still thinking about."
Downstairs at the Lucky Dragon, the Infinity Stone briefing had produced the expected range of reactions.
Wade's was the loudest, which was not surprising.
He had attached himself to Ethan's leg with the conviction of a man who believed proximity to the information source was the same as proximity to the objects in question. His reasoning, delivered rapidly while Ethan attempted to extricate himself, was that the Mind Stone would solve multiple ongoing problems in his life simultaneously, and he was prepared to discuss the details.
Ethan kicked him loose and declined to discuss the details.
"The person who currently holds the Time Stone," Tony said, once the room had settled, "the one you said you might not be able to beat — who is it?"
"The Sorcerer Supreme," Ethan said.
Tony filed this. "And you can't ask her for it."
"I could ask. The answer would be no." Ethan paused. "She's protecting the timeline. The Time Stone is specifically the one that shouldn't be accessed casually. Small changes compound."
Harry had been quiet for several minutes, which meant he had been building toward a question.
"If someone used the Time Stone," he said carefully, "and went back. Saved a person. What happens."
Ethan looked at him.
"You save them in a branching timeline," he said. "Your version of the past changes. Your version of the present doesn't, because you came from this present — not the new one."
Harry sat with that.
"So you can't actually save anyone in your own world," he said.
"Not that way." Ethan kept his voice steady. "What you can do is change the probability of things happening in the first place. Better information. Better preparation. Better choices before the critical moment." He looked at Harry directly. "That's the actual work."
Harry nodded slowly.
Wanda and Pietro had not asked about the Time Stone. Ethan had noticed this. They didn't ask because they'd already reasoned through the same paradox Harry had just encountered, and they'd reached the same place, and they were not going to say it out loud in a room full of people.
He wasn't going to make them.
Tony waited for the Harry thread to resolve, then said: "Can there be a seventh Stone?"
Ethan looked at him with the specific expression of a man deciding whether to say something.
"There are six in the established framework," Ethan said. "Whether the framework is complete is a different question."
Tony, who had learned to read the gap between what Ethan says and what Ethan knows, made a note to ask about this privately later.
Across the room, the social dynamics were sorting themselves out.
Doc Ock and Tony had resumed their conversation about photon energy density, which had apparently been paused mid-sentence when the Tesseract came out and was now completing itself. Sandman was talking to Frank Castle about the school's security arrangements with the calm practicality of two people who had both been on the wrong side of violence and had ended up on the same side of something else. Caine was, somehow, explaining a Wing Chun principle to Matt Murdock, who was following it with his hands rather than his eyes.
Little Ye and Richard Fisk and Jessica Jones had found a corner and were doing whatever children do when left alone in a room full of adults — which appeared to involve a card game, some argument about the rules, and a resolution that involved making up new rules.
John Wick was drinking tea and watching all of it with the expression of a man who had gotten exactly the retirement he wanted, which was to have interesting things happen around him that didn't require him to do anything.
Ethan felt it before he consciously identified it.
A quality of energy in the building — familiar, composed, precise. The specific signature of someone who didn't knock on doors because doors were not a relevant concept.
He made an excuse about going upstairs.
His room was as he'd left it. The Ancient One was sitting in the chair by the window, hands folded, looking at him with the expression she always wore — which conveyed approximately twelve things simultaneously and specified none of them.
"Ancient One," Ethan said. He closed the door. "I wasn't expecting you today."
"I know," she said. "You're rarely expecting me." She looked around the room with the calm attention she brought to all spaces. "Your house has changed."
"It's been upgraded."
"With the Space Stone's energy."
"Yes."
She was quiet for a moment.
"There are things I came to tell you," she said. "And things I came to ask. I find it's easier to start with the asking." She looked at him. "The second universe I sent you to — Earth-42. You haven't gone."
Ethan had, in fact, not gone. The Raimi universe mission had completed, the Sling Ring had activated, and then approximately seventeen other things had happened in rapid succession, and Earth-42 had remained on the list rather than on the itinerary.
"I was planning to," he said.
"I know," she said again. "You should do it soon." She paused. "The boy there is already making choices. The window for intervention is narrowing."
"Miles," Ethan said.
"The Prowler universe's version of him," she said. "He has no Spider-Man. He has no one showing him what being a Spider-Man can mean. What he has instead is a template that points in the other direction." She looked at Ethan steadily. "I need you to go."
Ethan thought about the full roster of things currently in motion. Pierce and HYDRA. Carol Danvers's arrival. The system upgrade. The Homestead gathering happening downstairs.
"When," he said.
"Before the week is out," she said. "I'll tell you what I know of the situation." She settled back slightly in the chair. "Now. The things I came to tell you."
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