The Odin codex was dense reading — not because the language was obscure, but because the content demanded that each section be held in mind against everything else in the section before it. Smith worked through it methodically, cross-referencing what he already understood about the Space Stone against what Odin had chosen to record across thousands of years of study and experimentation.
The applications were broader than he'd appreciated. Directional teleportation was the obvious foundation — point-to-point transit, what the Tesseract housing already did in its basic configuration. But the codex went considerably further. Random displacement. Corridor generation — stable wormholes held open for sustained transit rather than instant jumps. Offensive applications that reframed the Stone entirely: spatial fracturing, which split matter at the boundary between dimensional layers; spatial exile, which was exactly what the name suggested; spatial distortion, which bent the geometry of an area in ways that made conventional movement and combat effectively impossible for anything operating inside it. And at the far end of the chapter, a careful note on controlled event horizon generation — a miniaturized black hole, sustainable for limited duration with sufficient energy input.
Smith set the book down.
The Space Stone was not a transportation device. It was a complete rewrite of the operating rules for three-dimensional space. The fact that Odin had spent millennia carrying it around in a decorative cube and using it primarily to send his sons on interdimensional errands said something interesting about the gap between possessing power and fully understanding it.
He didn't intend to make the same mistake.
He put the codex back into storage and took out the two objects he'd secured from the New York battle, setting them on the table in front of him.
The Tesseract. The Mind Scepter.
He looked at them.
Two Infinity Stones. Earth currently held three, counting the Time Stone at Kamar-Taj. Odin's warning about resonance — multiple stones concentrating in one location, generating a detectable signal across significant distances, drawing collectors — had confirmed what Smith had already begun to suspect about Thanos's strategy. The delivery of the Mind Stone through Loki hadn't been incidental. Three stones in one location made the remaining three easier to triangulate. It was a patient play, the kind of strategy that made sense if you were operating on a timeline measured in decades and had no particular reason to rush.
The question Smith genuinely couldn't answer was which Thanos he was dealing with.
The movie version of him had a very specific goal: keeping the universe's population in check. Some theories said the real reason behind it was to stop the Celestials from being born. By wiping out half of all life, he kept planetary populations too low for those giant space gods to hatch and destroy the planets they were growing inside. For him, the Infinity Stones were just a tool to get the job done. That was one kind of threat.
The comic book versions were completely different. Some of them used the Stones just to impress the literal embodiment of Death, treating the snap like a twisted religious offering. Others just wanted endless power for no real reason other than wanting to have it all.
He didn't know yet which version was sitting on a throne somewhere in the universe. He'd find out eventually. The important thing was that by the time he found out, the answer would no longer matter to the outcome.
He turned the Mind Scepter over slowly. The Mind Stone at its tip pulsed with its faint blue-gold light. He'd noticed it seemed to dim slightly in his presence, as though it had taken accurate measure of him at some point and concluded that the confrontational approach was not worth pursuing.
His thoughts moved to Wanda and Pietro Maximoff.
Pietro had been a speedster, but speed alone wasn't enough. He'd died to gunfire—an outcome inevitable when a body's structural durability didn't evolve alongside its acceleration. The velocity was real; the reinforcement wasn't. Push any physical system past the limits of what its frame was built to endure, without upgrading the frame itself, and you ended up with exactly what happened to Pietro in another version of this story. The power wasn't the flaw. The chassis was. And chassis problems were something Smith had the means to solve.
Wanda, however, was a far more complex calculation. Smith had spent time in his previous life thinking about the Stark Industries bomb—the one that had landed in her apartment and sat there for two days while she and Pietro waited for death. Stark Industries didn't manufacture duds; their quality control bordered on religious fixation. The bomb hadn't failed on its own. Something had stopped it. And the most likely explanation was a terrified eleven-year-old unknowingly reaching for a power she had no language for.
Chaos magic that hadn't been named yet. Power that had no idea it was power.
The HYDRA experiments with the Mind Stone had activated something in both of them. But Smith's working theory was that the activation had functioned as a key finding a lock that already existed — not the creation of new capacity, but the forced opening of something that was already there. The question was whether that lock could be opened differently. More carefully. More completely. Without months of Strucker's people treating two human beings as research variables.
He had the scepter. He had a better approach.
He needed to find them first.
"Friday, tell Fox to come to my room."
The small robot in the corner swiveled its head and said, in its characteristic flat tone, "Connecting to Fox now."
The knock came a few minutes later. Fox let herself in with the ease. She looked at the Tesseract and the Mind Scepter on the desk with the efficient assessment of a woman who had learned to read a room in a single glance, then looked at Smith.
"I thought you'd stay in Asgard longer."
Smith smiled slightly. "With the Tesseract, distance is a matter of preference." He gestured toward the chair. "I have something I need you to arrange."
Fox sat, produced her tablet, and waited.
"I need you to find a pair of twin siblings," Smith said. "Wanda Maximoff and Pietro Maximoff. Born in Sokovia. They should still be in the city — or at least that's where they started."
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