Sif moved through the palace corridors at the measured pace of a guard with nowhere urgent to be, which was exactly the kind of pace that attracted the least attention.
The chamber where Odin had stationed men around Jane was at the east end of the residential wing — four soldiers on rotation, two inside, two posted at the door. She let herself fall in behind the pair delivering the evening meal, close enough to seem attached to their detail, and they didn't question it. Nobody questioned Sif.
Inside, Jane was sitting at the edge of the bed with her arms crossed, looking at the tray of food the way people look at things they don't actually see.
"I'm not hungry," she said.
"That's fine." Sif stepped forward and produced the token — official seal, official weight, the kind that made guards stop reading faces and start reading brass. "I'm here by the king's order. She comes with me."
The soldiers looked at the token. Looked at each other. Stood aside.
Sif handed it back to her own pocket and turned to Jane. "Let's go."
They found the others at a corner junction halfway between the residential wing and the hangar levels, where two corridors crossed in a pocket of shadow that the patrol rotation left empty for approximately four minutes every hour. Thor had timed it.
Jane stopped walking when she saw who was standing beside him.
Loki looked back at her with the politely attentive expression of a man at a gallery opening. He had tidied himself up since the cell, though the manacles were still on his wrists.
"I'm Loki," he said. "You may have heard of me."
Jane walked up and slapped him across the face.
The sound of it was clean and flat in the stone corridor.
"That was for New York."
Loki turned his head back slowly. Touched his cheek once, two fingers. Then he looked at Thor with something approaching genuine approval.
"I like her."
Sif had her sword out before he finished the sentence, the blade angled up against the underside of his jaw. Not touching. Close enough.
"If you betray him," she said, "I'll kill you."
Loki looked down the length of the blade with the mild interest of someone examining a piece of cutlery. "Lovely to meet you too, Sif."
She held his gaze for another moment, then sheathed the sword and turned to Thor. Her expression shifted — not softer, exactly, but different. "You're really not taking me."
"This isn't your fight," Thor said. "And I need to know someone I trust is here if they come back." He held her gaze. "We need you more here than we need you there."
It wasn't what she wanted to hear. She didn't argue with it.
Thor gave her a brief nod, then turned and led his small group down toward the hangar.
Smith was already there.
He'd found a spot near the captured Dark Elf blade-ship — the same model that had torn through the palace hall two days ago, now sitting inert on the stone floor, surrounded by nothing particularly threatening. He'd been leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, giving the impression of a man who had been waiting a reasonable amount of time and would continue waiting a reasonable amount without complaint.
Loki pulled up short when he saw him. Something briefly genuine crossed his face before he got it under control.
"Brother," he said to Thor, "I genuinely didn't think you'd actually bring him. I thought you were exaggerating to impress me."
"Does this change anything?" Thor said.
"It changes everything. I'm considerably more confident about our odds of surviving this." Loki studied Smith for a moment with undisguised interest, then gave a short nod. "Good."
Thor crossed to Smith. "Thank you. Again."
"Let's get moving." Smith pushed off the wall and walked toward the ship's access ramp. "Everyone on board."
They followed him up.
The inside of the Dark Elf ship was narrow, angular, and designed around a control interface that assumed the user had grown up pressing these specific buttons in this specific order. Thor stepped up to it with the confidence of someone who had flown many things and found them intuitive.
He pressed something. A panel lit up. He pressed something else. The lighting configuration changed.
Loki watched this from across the cabin with his hands still clasped in front of him due to the manacles. "You don't actually know how to fly this thing, do you."
"How difficult can it be."
"Famous last—"
"Shut up."
Smith put his hand over his eyes.
It took another two minutes of Thor pressing things with the methodical determination of a man disarming a bomb in the wrong order before the engine caught and the ship shuddered to life. Loki observed this without comment, which was in itself a form of comment.
"Hah." Thor's shoulders dropped with relief. "There we go."
He took the controls.
They rose. The ship cleared the hangar floor, angled toward the great hall passage that led to the outer sky — and then Thor put it through a banking turn that was approximately forty degrees too sharp, and the leading edge of the hull sheared through the first stone pillar with a sound like the palace clearing its throat.
"There's still one left standing," Loki offered, observing the structural damage behind them.
Thor said nothing. He aimed for the sky and pushed the throttle.
They cleared the palace and broke into open air above Asgard, the golden light coming at them sideways as they banked hard and accelerated away from the palace precinct. Thor's flight path was enthusiastic. Smooth was a different question.
"Why didn't you let me drive from the start?" Loki said, from the co-pilot's seat. "My spatial awareness is demonstrably better. Look at this — look at what you're doing to that altitude indicator."
"Of the three of us," Thor said, not looking up from the controls, "you're the only one who can't fly. Your spatial awareness—"
"I don't need to fly. I need to navigate. Those are different skills."
Loki's eyes slid sideways toward Smith, who was seated in the rear section with the expression of someone conserving energy for later. The implication was clear: the other one who could fly. Loki had noticed.
Before he could say anything else, a sound came from the rear of the cabin — a soft, sudden collapse, fabric against the floor.
Jane had gone down.
Smith was moving before anyone else. He crouched beside her, two fingers on her wrist, reading her quickly. Her eyes were open but unfocused, her breathing shallow, the faint dark-red flicker of the Aether tracing patterns just beneath the skin of her forearm.
"Thor." Smith looked up. "She's running out of time. Whatever we're doing, we need to do it now."
Jane's hand lifted slightly from the floor. "I'm fine," she said, which was the most unconvincing thing anyone had said in the past hour.
Thor didn't argue. He pointed the ship toward the outer edge of Asgard and pushed the throttle to its limit.
Odin's people didn't intercept them. Whether that was because Heimdall had left the path open or because Odin had quietly decided not to know about this, no one said.
Thor flew badly for another three minutes, came within arm's length of a communication tower, and then finally set his jaw and turned to Loki.
"The rest is yours. Take us to the passage."
Loki raised his manacled hands with quiet satisfaction, turned forward, and reached for the controls. "I thought you'd come around after you took the head off that last statue."
He pulled the ship into a steep dive toward the sea.
The water came up fast. Very fast. Below them, a mountainous spit of rock jutted from the waves — sheer faces, no obvious entry point, no obvious anything except solid stone and the ocean breaking white against its base.
"Loki—" Thor started.
"If it were easy to find, anyone would find it." Loki accelerated.
"Are you insane?"
The cave mouth appeared at the last possible second, a black gap in the rock face barely wide enough for the ship's wingspan. Loki threaded it without adjusting course, and the darkness swallowed them — a single jarring impact against the cave ceiling, sparks, a sound like a held breath — and then the tunnel collapsed into something that wasn't a tunnel anymore.
The wormhole opened.
The Dark World spread out on the other side.
Aboard the Dark Elf mothership, the bridge was quiet except for the sound of Algrim's heavy footsteps approaching Malekith's position.
Malekith had his back to the room. The left side of his face was still a geography of damage — scar tissue over where the lightning had hit, layers of healing that would take weeks more to finish. He hadn't looked in a reflective surface since the palace.
"My lord," Algrim said. "Should we move now?"
"No." Malekith didn't turn around. "We don't need to go to Asgard."
A pause.
"The Aether is already coming to us."
He could feel it, distant and distinct, the way a compass feels north — the Reality Stone's frequency pulling through the dimensional barrier now that the wormhole had opened. They had entered his world.
He could wait a little longer.
Loki was standing over Jane's prone form when he said it.
She'd gone down again after they landed, the Aether's energy cycling visibly through her now, too much power in a body that hadn't been built to contain it. Loki watched the red light move beneath her skin with an expression that was more calculating than concerned.
"If I had that kind of energy at my disposal," he said, "I could—"
"No," Smith said.
Loki looked at him.
"The Stone's mine. That was the arrangement before we left." Smith's voice carried no particular heat. It was simply a closed door. "Once it's out of her, it comes to me."
"He's right," Thor said. "And it's not a discussion. That thing would consume you, Loki — you have no idea what it actually is."
"I know exactly what it is." But Loki's voice had shifted, some of the momentum behind the thought deflating. "You have the Dragon Balls. You have the Tesseract." He looked at Smith directly. "Couldn't you spare one for your brother?"
"It's a joint decision," Thor said. "Father agreed. Smith saved Mother's life. The Aether is his."
Loki stood very still for a moment.
Then something in his expression did something unexpected. Not the performance of emotion — the real thing, small and fast, before he could stop it.
He turned to Smith.
"Thank you," he said. Quietly, and without the usual architecture of irony holding it up. "For what you did. That's what you're owed. And beyond that—" He held Smith's gaze. "I owe you a life."
Smith looked at him for a moment. Loki had meant it. That wasn't a thing he handed out casually, and they both knew it.
"I've noted it," Smith said. "Let's both hope I never need to collect."