I shot back up into the sky, my astral form tracing a path back to my body. In my current state, the sudden disorientation of snapping back to the physical was almost overwhelming. The light was too bright—brittle, like shattered glass in my eyes—colours bleeding at the edges. My heartbeat pounded in my ears, echoing like it wasn’t mine. Trying to breathe was more like gasping, the air thin and cold and barely there at all. My limbs felt rubbery and far away, sharp pinpricks of pain tingling at my fingertips.

  I could hardly focus my eyes on Ikaris—he’d cocked his head to the side, eyes narrowed and about to fire again. Guess after seeing me in astral form, he wasn’t going to just wait any longer. Behind him, the curve of the Earth broke through the haze, a hard line between blue and black that shouldn’t have been visible. Not like this. It made the world feel small. Made me feel like I’d already fallen off it entirely.

  In the bare half-second I had before the Eternal blasted me full in the face with beams of cosmic energy, I felt a hand close around my shoulder. Firm. Reassuring. Eliza was there, a phantom standing in the sky beside me, her face set in a grim expression of concentration, and my own hands were suddenly up, a barrier already woven. Stabbing rays of golden power met a shield of chaos magic and were dispersed. I gritted my teeth, channelling what power I could muster into it—Ikaris was strong, but I didn’t need to keep it up forever. Just long enough.

  He squeezed, trying to break through the spell armouring my neck. I could feel the pressure of his fingers around my throat as the protection flexed, letting some of the force through so it wouldn’t shatter. It didn’t really matter right now—it wasn’t like I could breathe properly up here in any case.

  And then there was release.

  Ikaris suddenly moved, flinging me away from him like I was a piece of garbage as his eyes went dark and he turned away. I tumbled end over end for a disorienting moment before I managed to catch myself with my magic—willing that I remain in place, the Earth laid out in tableau above my head. I was just in time to see a golden comet rise to meet my opponent.

  Thena dove upwards, bladed wings spread wide, thrusting her spear toward Ikaris. He was ready for her and slapped the head of the weapon as she stabbed it forward, knocking it to the side. The move had been a feint, however, and as she continued upward, she brought her shield around in a wide arc, the edge catching Ikaris in the throat. He wheeled back, shock and pain passing across his face.

  I sucked in another half-breath—thin, knifing, insufficient. I needed more. My chest spasmed, desperate for air that wasn’t there. Ignoring it, I forced myself to turn upright, magic coiled in my palms as I reoriented myself.

  Below me—no, beside me now—Thena and Ikaris clashed in a blinding flurry of motion. Her wings flared wide, then stabbed inwards to catch his arm as he went to strike her, brilliant blades overlapping into a shimmering shield of cutting edges. The results were immediate and visceral: his shirt shredded, golden blades slicing deep into his arm. I saw red mist—his blood—burst out around the impact, crystallising in mid-air. But he didn’t stop. Didn’t flinch. With a snarl, he drove through it, his fist breaking through the forest of blades and connecting. She reeled back, losing altitude.

  I was already moving. I hurled a pair of scarlet bolts at Ikaris, intent on capturing his attention. The blasts weren’t particularly strong—there wasn’t much left in me—but I needed to help, to buy Thena a moment of reprieve, an opening to attack. Something.

  Ikaris turned, fury etched in every line of his face, and then he was on me before I could hit him again.

  His fist slammed into my gut like a meteor, hard enough that my already-overtaxed protection spell shattered with an audible crack, the magic unable to flex enough to absorb the hit. Pain exploded through my torso, hot and immediate. My ribs screamed in protest, a couple of them definitely cracked or worse. I’d already been struggling to breathe, but the tiny bit of air in my lungs was immediately expelled, leaving me shaking and gasping. With my shield gone, the cold raked across my unprotected body like knives.

  Ikaris swung again. I tried to duck, to dodge out of the way, but the world snapped sideways as his fist grazed my temple. Not even a full hit. Just a graze. But the speed, the strength behind it—it was like being hit by a crowbar swung from a speeding truck. My head snapped back violently, stars bursting across my vision. I lost control, tumbling as my magic failed and I started to fall.

  Ikaris’s hand clamped around my wrist, halting my descent.

  A spike of pain shot down my arm, bones creaking and grinding together as his grip started to crush my wrist. I could hardly focus on him, my vision blurry, but there was a telltale moment of faint golden light that told me he was about to fire his eye beams at me again. I couldn’t weave another shield. He was going to cut me in half. I didn’t even have enough air to scream.

  Then Ikaris jerked backwards as a massive golden blade passed between us, carving a clean line through the air.

  And he was the one who screamed.

  His hand—still clamped around my wrist—came loose with a jerk, severed halfway to his elbow. I dropped, falling again, as the rest of him turned and lunged, hurtling back toward Thena. She swung the impossibly large sword once more before he crashed into her, the blade spinning from her hands and dispersing into torn threads of cosmic energy.

  There was a brief moment where I couldn’t track what was happening, my vision tunnelling as the two struggling figures grew smaller, but then I saw that Ikaris had somehow caught Thena from behind. One of her wings was caught in his hand and, anchored from there, he stomped down on the back of her head. Her helmet—the interface she’d made for the Mind Stone—shattered and the wing was torn from her back, both constructs dissolving into golden fragments.

  Thena dropped like she’d been fired from a cannon aimed at the Earth, my stomach dropping with her as the connection between us guttered to nothing. She shot past me in the blink of an eye, her body limp. Had he killed her?

  I didn’t have time to reach for her and find out. The Mind Stone was falling toward me, too. It was tiny, almost invisible against the sky, the faint shreds of golden energy still clinging to it the only thing that made me notice it at all. And above it… Ikaris, covered in his own blood, missing half an arm, dove down after us.

  I didn’t make a conscious decision; I just acted. I seized what little magic I could, wrenching myself from the physical and bursting out of my body again to shoot back up toward him weightlessly, a hand outstretched toward the Stone as I skimmed across the surface of the astral. Time didn’t slow. I needed to be able to use what magic I could.

  It was dangerous. An instant too late, and Ikaris would blast my untethered soul to nothing. But if I didn’t, he’d probably just kill us all anyway.

  Gold blasted forth from his eyes just as I touched the Stone, threads of chaos magic roughly drawing forth its power. A beam of cosmic energy lanced upwards, intercepting the ones stabbing down with a loud crack. Ikaris broke off, reeling back slightly as he stopped firing, a look of panicked surprise on his face.

  The Mind Stone hovering in front of my outstretched astral hand, I turned to track him, sweeping a continuous beam of power across the sky. The Eternal backed off, seeming to hesitate for a moment before he darted through a cloud and was gone. I hovered in place for a couple of seconds, eyes watching carefully for him to emerge again.

  Oh, shit. My body.

  I dropped downward, the Mind Stone suspended in a web of red threads between my fingers. Wrenched, spiralling disorientation took me again for a few moments, then I closed my flesh-and-blood fist around the Stone and took a wrenching, gasping lungful of actual air. Exhausted, my eyes bleary and scoured by the wind as it whipped past me, I groped blindly for my connection to Thena. Sudden relief filled me—it was still there. Barely, but it was. She was alive. She wasn’t far, but the ruddy, rough terrain of the Outback was still rushing up to meet us.

  I steered myself in the air, drawing on every scrap of magic I had left as I caught sight of her. Thin strands of scarlet coiled around her, redirecting, slowing, turning her plunge into an interception. We collided harder than I meant us to, but I still managed to catch her in a tight hug. I shaped our descent, the fall turning into a glide as my magic bled off our momentum.

  A minute later, we landed. Not with a crash. Not with a crater. I touched down gently, lightly, then released my grip on the magic that had protected us. My knees immediately buckled and I crumpled to the ground, still holding Thena close, shivering and trembling uncontrollably. My breath was coming in short, sharp gasps, each one accompanied by a stab of pain in my chest. Grimacing, I powered through the pain and craned my injured neck, looking skyward, searching for any sign of impending attack. None came.

  Ikaris was gone.

  “Thena! Wanda!”

  Gilgamesh flew through the air in a massive arc, landing with a loud thump a couple of dozen metres away from us. Man could definitely jump. He covered the rest of the distance between us with massive strides, golden armoured gauntlets still wrapped around his forearms, eyes torn between us and watching the skies for signs of our opponent. He dropped to one knee in front of me, and I let Thena roll out of my unsteady arms into his.

  Her hair was matted with blood, but I was relieved to see her wince and let out a small groan, eyes fluttering open as Gil cradled her. She struggled to focus her eyes on him, her breathing low and shallow. “Thena,” he repeated, more quietly this time, but with the same sense of urgency to his tone. “Hey! Come on. You’re okay.”

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  “Gil… always taking care of me,” she murmured softly, a smile touching the corners of her mouth.

  “Always,” he said, grinning encouragingly back down at her. “Any time, on any planet.”

  I took a minute to sit there, just thankful to be able to breathe again, even if every lungful burned and scoured my throat. My head was pounding, a cold, raw feeling above my left eye where Ikaris had clipped me—it was starting to swell up, pressing my eyelid closed. My neck was fucked, too, protesting every movement with sharp, stabbing pain. My chest was tight, and gently probing at my ribcage sent even more interesting pain signals shooting through me. If I hadn’t had the protection spell up, Ikaris probably would have put his fist clean through me.

  I couldn’t believe we were all still alive. We’d been extremely lucky. Ikaris had been hurt pretty badly, but even so, if he’d kept coming for us, I didn’t think we could have stopped him. That final blast of energy from the Mind Stone must have spooked him, made him reconsider, thinking that I still had more tricks and power in the tank than I actually did. I stared at his severed hand, lying dead in the dirt next to me. Its skin had faded to a greyish pallor.

  Ikaris’s words from earlier suddenly clawed their way back into my mind. An involuntary shudder ran through my body, anxiety gripping my insides as I broke out in a cold sweat. “Thena,” I choked out, the words hitching in my throat as I forced them, each breath still sending a fresh wave of prickling pain through me. I felt like throwing up. “My ring. I need my ring. Ikaris, he… he said…”

  He’d said Tony was dead.

  Thena took a deep breath, then reached up to grab Gilgamesh’s shoulder, using him as support as she pulled herself to her feet, then gently pushed him away with the flat of her hand. I rose with them, my legs trembling, and she took a step back. “If you want your possessions back,” she said, and the familiar words made the tightness in my chest twist into a spike of incredulous anger. “You know what you must do.”

  “Thena…” Gil said imploringly, looking back and forth between us with a stricken expression on his face.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I spat from between clenched teeth. “Ikaris almost killed us. My friends are in danger. I am done with this shit. Give me my ring. Now.”

  My face felt hot. My eye had swollen all the way shut now, and what vision I did have left was blurred. At my side, the hand holding the Mind Stone was balled into a fist, clenched so tightly that I could feel the rough edges of the Infinity Stone cutting into my skin.

  “This is… important,” Thena said. She looked and felt like she might be even worse off than I was, like she was barely managing to stay on her feet. Semi-dried blood was crusted on her face, in her hair, and across her half-torn, formerly-white top. She took another half-step back into a ready stance, listing slightly to one side. Despite everything, I could still feel an edge of stubborn determination through our connection. “You don’t get what you want handed to you. It won’t fall in your lap. Even when… even when you think you’ve earned it. Even when you need it the most. If you want something, you need to fight for it.” As she spoke, golden wireframes formed in her hand, but crawling through the air sluggishly, struggling, before resolving into a sword.

  The black anger rising inside me sharpened my resolve, casting the world into sharp relief around me as my magic burned hot and fast under my skin. I raised my empty hand. There was a beat of silence, then my spear—sleek, silver-black vibranium—snapped into my hand, moving so fast that the air sang and it met my palm with an audible crack. I was still panting, dry, cracked lips slightly parted.

  Gil folded his arms and, with a pained grimace, looked away.

  Thena’s eyes moved over to him briefly, but he refused to look at her. She nodded to herself, then turned slightly, narrowing her profile in a fencing-style stance. There was a beat of silence, then we lunged at each other.

  Gilgamesh moved faster, golden cosmic energy glimmering into his gauntlets as he stepped forward, interposing himself between us. Thena’s sword was blocked with an upraised forearm, while his other armoured hand closed around the blade of my spear. Red dust blasted away from us, scattered by the force of the impacts, and Thena’s sword shattered into golden fragments that quickly dispersed. She staggered to the side, almost losing her footing entirely before she managed to catch herself, glaring resentfully at her companion.

  “Gil,” she snapped, and there was real annoyance there, as though he were the one in the wrong here.

  “No. I’m putting a stop to this. If I don’t, you’re going to kill yourself,” he told her, then glanced in my direction. “Or she will.”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  “You’re not listening to me, Thena. I said no.”

  I bit my tongue, anger still simmering in my chest. Gilgamesh had stepped up. He was handling this. Besides, he was right—if Thena tried to fight me now, I wouldn’t hold back. Not after what had just happened. Maybe I really would kill her.

  Thena’s shoulders sagged slightly and she didn’t respond right away. When she did, there was a note of resignation in her voice. “Okay,” she said quietly. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  Slipping her fingers beneath the waist of her trousers for a moment, she retrieved my sling ring from a hidden pocket. I took a deep breath and held my spear out to Gilgamesh, who took it from me as I stepped past him. Thena dropped the ring in my palm and I paused, looking at her with a hard expression. “Necklace?”

  Thena straightened slightly and looked off to the side, toward the direction of the house. “I dropped it.”

  I nodded, then focused my magic. A moment later, the necklace that Pietro had bought me shot through the air to hover in front of me. Opening my hand holding the Mind Stone, I levitated it up and flicked the pendant open with a twitch of my fingers. The Stone flew into place, then the necklace—suspended on threads of chaos magic—went around my neck. Thena had cut the chain when she’d taken the Stone, but my magic twisted the ends together firmly, bending the silver to pin it back in place.

  “Your other belongings are—”

  “Not important right now,” I said curtly, cutting her off with a small shake of my head that I immediately regretted, a fresh spike of pain radiating down my spine and up into my skull.

  I hesitated for a second, then Ikaris’s severed hand levitated in the air as well, caught in a web of misty red threads of magic, coming to rest in front of Gilgamesh. He made a bit of a face, but obediently plucked it out of the air with his free hand.

  As he did so, I slipped my sling ring onto my fingers. Gently, carefully, I probed at the ugly purple-black bruising that spiderwebbed over my wrist with the fingers of my free hand for a moment. Just bruising, it seemed. Nothing broken.

  I took a deep, shuddering breath, held up my hands, and hesitated. If this didn’t work, I… fuck. I pictured Tony in my mind and started to gesture, feeding a spark of magic into the relic.

  The magic caught immediately and my guts wrenched in relief as a red, wispy portal was spun into existence. “Unauthorised portal detected,” the familiar, Irish-accented voice of FRIDAY announced, and I practically fell over myself lunging through the gateway into the lab on the other side.

  “Gah!” Tony yelped as I crashed into his chest. “Fuck! Ow, fuck, Red?!”

  I pulled back for a moment, just looking at him. One of his hands had gone to his chest and his face was twisted in a grimace of pain even as he looked at me with wide, surprised eyes. He’d been hurt—there was a large, angry purple bruise crawling its way up from the collar of his shirt to the side of his neck. But he was alive.

  We were standing in one of the engineering labs at the Avengers compound, bits of armoured plating suspended from robotic arms beyond a holographic interface he’d been working at. Shuri was on other side of the room, looking over at us with wide eyes as she stopped what she was doing. Behind me, I heard footsteps as Gilgamesh and Thena stepped through the open portal.

  “FRIDAY, can you—”

  “Already done, boss.”

  My face was burning, my vision going blurry again as a fresh wave of hot tears pricked at the corner of my eye, my lips trembling. “You—you’re alive! I thought… I thought you were dead, you asshole!” The words hitched in my throat slightly and I sniffed, wiping at my nose for a moment before I shoved Tony’s shoulder. “How dare you make me worry about you!”

  “Ow! You worry about me? I’m not the one that disappeared into thin air and had everyone running around looking for her! Jesus, look at you. What happened?”

  I screwed up my face, my chest full to absolute bursting with more emotions than I could identify. I needed to… do something. Scream. Cry. Hit something.

  I started slapping him. Not hard, just little ones. A rain of slaps pattering down on his shoulder and face, avoiding his bruised side.

  “Ow, ow, ow!” He took a step back, but I followed him. “Stop—stop that! Red! Ow! Quit it! Ow, ow!”

  The door to the lab moved and a blur shot through, Pietro appearing at my side before it finished opening. “Wanda!”

  I stopped hitting Tony, my face breaking into a smile as I turned to my brother. His hands hovered over me, like he wasn’t sure if he could touch me or not, concern and anxiety written across his face. I grabbed one of his hands out of the air and pulled him into a hug. My hands were shaking. “Hey! Miss me?”

  “You’re… О боже, what happened? You’re hurt,” he returned the hug, but gingerly, as though he might break me. “Come on, we need to get you looked at.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, though a tremor ran through my voice as I said it. “I’m okay.”

  “You, uh, gonna introduce your friends?” Tony said. “I’m going to guess that—”

  “Thena. Gilgamesh,” Pietro interrupted, sparing him only a glance. “The Eternals.”

  “Ikaris, he—” my voice hitched as I spoke and I stopped, trying to swallow the lump that had appeared in my throat, my tongue feeling thick and dry in my mouth. My eyes were burning—it was hard to even see Pietro in front of me.

  The door to the lab hissed open again. More footsteps. More familiar blurred shapes.

  “Wanda!” Natasha’s voice, then her hands were on me as well.

  My chest seized. I could barely breathe. I staggered forward, legs weak and buckling under me, not really caring who caught me. I buried my face in what I was pretty sure was Pietro’s neck, his and other arms going around me again, and suddenly I was sobbing—shoulders shaking silently at first, then loud and messy and unstoppable, raw, ugly gulps that tore at my sore throat and left me gasping. It wasn’t just Ikaris and Tony. Everything just felt so overwhelming, the last few days catching up to me all at once in a complicated burst of emotions that I just didn’t have the capacity to process properly.

  We stayed like that for what was probably an awkward amount of time as I tried vainly to regain some degree of composure. Once the worst of it had passed, I lifted my head to find that I was sandwiched halfway between Pietro and Natasha. Standing a little further back were Bucky, Bruce, Clint and…

  “Carol?” I asked incredulously, sniffing and scrubbing at my eyes with the back of my hand. “You’re here, too?”

  “Heard you might need some help,” she said mildly, a grin quirking the corner of her mouth.

  I reached out a grabby hand toward her, and she let out a small chuckle before obliging me and coming in for a hug as well. I squeezed her, then gestured for the rest of them. There was a beat of hesitation, Bruce looking a little awkward, but after a moment, the rest of them came in for a group hug as well.

  It helped.

  Once that was done, I pulled back, looking around and wiping at my face again, making a horribly unattractive snotty sound as I did so. “I need… is anything exploding? Right now?”

  “I don’t think so?” Natasha said, her voice breaking a little. I looked at her properly. Her face was red—she’d been crying just now, too.

  “Good. Can I just… I need some time to just…”

  She nodded a few times. “Yeah, of course. We can talk when you’ve had a chance to…”

  “A shower. I need an actual, proper shower. And… you. You come,” I told her firmly. Straightening slightly, I looked at Carol and took her hand, giving it a little tug. “Come.”

  Carol let out a little snort of amusement. “Okay.”

  Glancing back at the others, I shook my head. “Debrief later. Five… teen… forty minutes.” I paused, a frown creasing my forehead. “Actually, how about we just call when we’re ready.”

  Tony let out a small sigh. “Good to have you back, Red.”