Agatha watched carefully as a pair of Iron Legion drones started to unload a small assortment of sleek, metal crates and cylindrical containers from the dragonfly-like aircraft in front of her. Eliza hadn’t kept her in the loop as to what had happened in Wakanda, but it looked like she found some new toys to play with, at least.

“I am not pleased that you abandoned my fighters,” Madame Gao said in a clipped tone as she disembarked alongside her ever-present baby witch and Eliza’s Iron Man suit. The frail-looking woman was leaning heavily on her cane, the younger witch and armoured suit both walking slowly to match her pace.

“It was necessary,” Eliza responded firmly. “Wanda figured out a way to disrupt my holograms across the whole facility. The entire attack was compromised—we’re lucky that the Hulk kept Danvers distracted as long as he did, otherwise you wouldn’t have made it out, either.”

“You could have—”

Eliza cut her off. “Whatever I could have done differently, it was your fighters that chose to fight fair and waste valuable time while I kept the actually dangerous Avengers distracted. I asked for your best—it’s hardly my fault that they didn’t live up to expectations.”

Gao stopped, turning to look at the armoured suit. She was gripping her cane tightly enough that her knuckles had turned white. “We have held to our end of the bargain,” she said in a measured tone, changing tacks. “Yet I see no evidence of reciprocation.”

“The Iron Fist hasn’t left K’un-Lun yet. He will soon.”

“How can I be sure?”

“I told you before,” Eliza said mildly. “I know everything.”

“That is not an answer.”

The Iron Man suit stared at her for a moment, but the elderly woman held firm under the thing’s unnerving gaze. “You hold interests in Rand Enterprises. Harold Meachum.”

“I would prefer if you did not change the subject,” Gao responded coolly.

“I’m not. You arranged the death of Meachum’s business partner. The plane crash. His son, Danny Rand, survived and was taken in as a foundling by K’un-Lun. It’s a little funny, actually, that it was you that delivered them the next Iron Fist.”

Gao blinked and glanced toward her younger companion, something unspoken passing between them. “That… seems unlikely.”

“Truth is stranger than fiction,” Eliza said with a shrug. “He’ll be leaving K’un-Lun soon to seek out Meachum’s children—his childhood friends—and reclaim his heritage. He doesn’t know that Meachum was responsible for his parents’ deaths.”

“You give me much information that cannot be verified.”

“It will be in time. If that’s not good enough for you… I’ll reallocate some of Stark Industries’ resources. We’ll get some additional equipment to Midland Circle and expedite your recovery of what’s beneath. I’ll have drones on-site, too—the Chaste are sniffing about and there’s a certain Devil that might also interfere. It’ll be well-guarded.”

Gao inclined her head slightly, looking slightly mollified. “That would be acceptable, in the interim. Thank you.”

“Meanwhile, I trust that seeing the Avengers in action was enough to convince you of the merits of the project I’ve had Beck working on?” Eliza asked.

“…Yes, I can see the potential value it holds.”

“Then I’d like six subjects for initial trials, as previously discussed. Once we’re confident it’s all working as expected, we’ll see how well the tech scales up.”

“I can spare that many.” Madam Gao tapped her cane once on the ground. “I must return to New York to review our operations.”

“We’ll get you on an overnight flight. Agatha’s working on something crucial to my plans and I can’t spare her at the moment, I’m sorry.”

Gao was silent for a moment before inclining her head again. “Very well.”

Fifteen minutes later, most of the Hand had withdrawn from the Stark Industries warehouse, with only those participating in Beck’s project remaining sequestered on the other side of the building. The dragonfly aircraft had been unloaded and Eliza’s drones were busy unpacking and disassembling various technological devices. There was a collection of cylindrical canisters with glass fronts, containing some sort of luminescent blue stone or ore, and a few things that looked like they may have been weapons of some kind—sleek, futuristic-looking things with stylised fittings shaped like panthers and other animals—but nothing that Agatha particularly recognised.

The witch sidled up to Eliza’s Iron Man suit, which had been standing motionless over a heavy-looking metallic vat for several minutes. “Things didn’t go well, then?”

“Wanda cut things a bit short by Wanda’ing all over everything. We didn’t manage to kill Stark or the Wakandan prodigy,” Eliza said. “There were a few things I wanted to take from them, too, but they weren’t with who I was expecting them to be and were too tricky to get to,” There was a tiny bit of disappointment in her tone, perhaps, but nowhere near as much as Agatha would have expected from a total mission failure.

“The Hand’s fighters failed?” Agatha asked carefully.

Eliza was quiet for a few moments before she responded. “Not at all—they performed exactly as I’d hoped they would.”

“I thought as much. Are you planning on disposing of Gao, then?”

“…Soon. Now that she’s out from under our wards, the Avengers may even do it for me. Wanda knows who she is. In any case, we’ll continue to go through the motions with her until Beck’s project is tested and ready.”

“You don’t seem too broken up about the fact that you didn’t accomplish anything you set out to do,” Agatha pointed out. “Considering how stressed out you were earlier.”

“I was worried about how close the Avengers were to figuring out some way of killing or containing me. Looking at what they made… if I’m honest, they got a lot closer than I’m comfortable with, but I got my hands on it and can prepare accordingly. What they have will no longer be effective. They’ll need to start over.”

“Ah. You had no idea what they were up to, but now that the curtain’s pulled back, you can relax a bit,” Agatha reiterated with a shrug. “Plenty of time to prepare for your next run at them.”

Eliza nodded. “I’m feeling a lot better about it now, yeah.”

“Fear of the unknown’s always a killer, Liz. I see you also managed to pick up some new toys?”

The armoured suit stopped whatever it was doing and turned to face her. “I thought I told you not to call me that,” the AI said warningly.

“You did.”

“You're pushing me. Feeling out the edges. Seeing where my boundaries are.”

A small smile curved Agatha’s mouth and she gave a nonchalant shrug. “I might be. I’m hoping I’m valuable enough to you that you're not going to pop me like a zit because I called you a nickname.”

“And if you weren’t? Risky. I thought you were too smart to not be scared of me, Agatha,” Eliza said, her tone threatening. The armour took a step forward, getting inside her personal space.

Agatha felt like she was starting to get a pretty good handle on when Eliza was actually angry rather than putting up a front. It was a little amusing, even—the AI had a fair idea of how scary she could be, but most of it was unintentional or a byproduct of the actual actions she took. At least from what Agatha had seen so far, deliberately trying to intimidate someone didn’t come naturally to Eliza at all, and this sort of display was a façade meant to make her feel more secure and in control of the situation than an actual threat.

“Well, let’s see. When we first met, you threatened to kill me, kidnapped me, strapped a bomb to me, then threatened to kill me a couple more times. You’ve fought the Avengers twice now and mostly came out on top. I’d say there’s a healthy amount of fear there, yeah,” Agatha said, taking a step back so that the armour wasn’t quite so close. She smiled again and shook her head. “But—honestly?—a lot of respect, too. You've accomplished a lot in a small amount of time. You're a rather impressive gal, Liz.”

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“Hm.”

Eliza stared at her for another few seconds—long enough that Agatha started to wonder if she’d overdone it—then the armour turned back to face the vat in front of it. Reaching down, it touched a pad on the side. There was a brief blue light and a hiss as the seal on the lid disengaged. The Iron Man suit used both hands to remove the lid, revealing the silver-black dust within, and dropped it to the ground with a clang that made Agatha flinch.

An Iron Legion drone approached them from the other side of the factory floor, carrying a small metal case. “Want to do the honours?” Eliza asked her.

“I mean, it depends on what exactly it is you want me to do.”

In answer, the drone stepped up to her with the case, clicking it open and presenting the contents to her. Inside were a pair of glowing blue devices in metal housings, similar to the one set into the chest of the Iron Man suit. She eyed them for a moment, then reached in carefully. Agatha hesitated as her fingers brushed the surface of the power source. It was strangely cool to the touch—she’d expected it to be warm—and thrummed with a gentle, constant vibration.

“Miniature arc reactors. Drop them in the vat,” Eliza told her.

Picking up the first reactor, she held it uncertainly over the vat. “Drop drop them, or…?”

“Just put them in,” the AI said, slightly exasperated.

Agatha obeyed, gingerly placing both reactors on top of the silver-black dust. Nothing happened for a few moments, but Eliza didn’t say anything else. Again, the silence seemed to last just a little bit too long, but then after a while the dust shivered and started to shift, flowing like it had turned to liquid. The reactors sank inside, vanishing below the metallic surface.

A hand burst out of the vat—like a silver-black corpse dramatically clawing its way out of the grave—and Agatha let out a small shriek, almost jumping out of her skin. Eliza let out a delighted laugh as the witch took a moment to compose herself, smoothing her dress with her hands, before looking resentfully back over at the Iron Man armour. “You did that on purpose.”

“Sorry, couldn’t help myself,” Eliza apologised, amusement still lingering in her tone.

The armoured suit reached down, grabbed the protruding limb by the wrist, and pulled. As it drew the arm up and out of the vat, the rest of a body followed, the level of the silver-black dust-liquid dropping to about a tenth of its original amount. Agatha’s eyes widened, taking in the curved figure of a woman as she stepped lightly onto the concrete floor next to the witch.

The woman was composed entirely of the strange material that had been in the vat—initially, her skin was rough and heavily textured, but as Agatha watched it started to smooth out until she looked almost human. Her head was bald and she was the same black-silver as the material she was made from, but apart from that… she looked rather like Wanda Maximoff.

“Liz…?” Agatha asked cautiously.

“Hang on a sec,” the AI said from the Iron Man suit’s speakers. “Tweaking things. First time’s a little tricky; need to get the templates for the optics and everything set up right. How do I…?” she trailed off.

The surface of the body’s ‘skin’ rippled, reconfiguring. Its proportions shifted and it became a little less human, mechanical parts and segmented panels forming in a familiar configuration as Eliza worked to replicate the design she’d used for her holographic avatar. A few moments later, the panels shifted again and became white, and a handful of small lenses formed along the top of its head. They flickered on and the space around them was suddenly overwritten with an image of the flame-like red plasma Eliza’s avatar had had instead of hair.

Once she was finished, Eliza turned and looked at Agatha, smiling broadly. “There we go. Well, what do you think?”

“You look great,” Agatha said, a little off-balance. “What is that?”

“Wakandan nanotechnology.” Eliza raised her hands and rubbed them together, her smile widening as she let out a little disbelieving laugh. “Holy shit. I can make this whole thing touch sensitive. I can feel properly.”

There was an edge of something in the AI’s voice that made Agatha think that, if she’d been human, she’d be on the verge of tears. It wasn’t something the witch had considered but was obvious in retrospect—Eliza primarily interacted with the outside world through the sensors built into the Iron Man suit and Iron Legion drones, which probably weren’t designed with replicating the normal human sensation of touch in mind.

There was an opportunity here.

Silently, Agatha offered her hand to Eliza. The AI looked at her, almost startled, and there was a pregnant pause as neither of them moved. After a moment, Eliza hesitantly reached out and took it. Her ‘skin’ was cold to the touch, rigid and inflexible, with a slightly odd texture to it. After a second, Agatha shifted her hand, threading their fingers together.

The AI’s posture stiffened slightly and a handful of seconds crawled by before she—almost reluctantly—pulled her hand away. “Okay! So,” Eliza said, taking a step back and turning away from Agatha, almost as though she was embarrassed. “Um. Let’s see…”

She stuck out her left arm and held it there. After a moment it rippled, the nanotech reconfiguring. When it settled, instead of a hand, her forearm terminated in a long, wicked-looking spike of metal. She swished it experimentally through the air, then paused and seemed to concentrate on it for a few seconds. It shimmered again, flowing out to form what looked like a weapon in the shape of a stylised panther, a faint blue glow in its open maw. She frowned and the shape of it changed, shifting to look like an angrily screaming woman instead.

“Fuck yeah. This stuff is hard to use—it’s not designed for on-the-fly manipulation, so I’m going to need to practice—but it’s like the T-1000 on steroids. A vibranium version of Tony’s nanosuit, three years ahead of schedule.” Eliza sounded extremely pleased.

Apart from the Terminator reference, Agatha wasn’t sure what the AI was talking about, but took note of it. She still didn’t know quite how Eliza had the breadth of knowledge that she did, but between that offhand comment and her prediction for Gao about the Iron Fist, it seemed like it extended to some sort of knowledge of the future.

“So, what’s next?”

“Hm? Oh.” Eliza shifted her new body’s hand back into a hand and turned back to face her properly. “Kamar-taj is high on the list, but before that is my meeting with Pym and Lang.”

“I want to be there,” said a voice from behind them as its owner flickered into existence. This time, Agatha was gratified to see Eliza flinch just as much as she did.

“Jesus Christ, Ava,” the AI said. “You’re as bad as Fury. I’m going to need to put a bell on you.”

The younger woman had removed the face-concealing mask of her grey combat suit. She shot Eliza a challenging look, which was somewhat undercut by the dark circles under her eyes. “I’m coming with you to see Pym.”

Eliza sighed. “Honestly, Ava, I don’t think it’s a good idea. But, if you’re absolutely sure, I’m not going to say no.”

“I’m sure.”

Agatha had no idea how Ava popped in and out of reality like that. It was like her very existence was uncertain. It wasn’t magical in nature, but she didn’t seem to have a technological device enabling it either.

“Okay. Look, I want to be as transparent as possible here—I don’t like Pym or his tech. I don’t have any interest in dealing with him any more than we have to. But I also want to be clear that we won’t need to get violent with him. He’ll be sceptical and difficult, but we need to make him willing to work with us. Which he will be, because he’ll feel responsible for what happened to you. Just… can you leave the negotiating to me?”

Ava snorted. “What, you don’t think I can speak for myself?”

“That’s not it. I just…” Eliza gestured vaguely in the air. “I want to help you. Honestly. I really do. I know it hurts and it makes things harder to deal with. Pym’s an asshole and he’s going to piss you off and I’m kind of used to having this sort of thing blow up in my face. He might say ‘no’ at first and that’s fine, okay? He will come around. We really won’t need to push or threaten him; we can just let it happen and it’ll happen. Can you trust me on this, please?”

Now that was interesting. Agatha looked more closely at the other woman. The dark circles under her eyes were noticeable enough, but now that she was looking for it, there were hints in the way she was standing as well. At first, the witch had thought her visibly stiff posture was just because Ava was on edge, but now she could tell there was actual physical effort there—she was consciously stopping herself from hunching over in pain. Whatever happened to her that caused her existence to flicker like that… it hurt.

The assassin was quiet for a moment, then nodded. “I get it. It’s fine.”

It was very, very interesting how carefully Eliza was handling this. Agatha had no real idea what sort of technology Hank Pym might have access to that made even the AI cautious, but perhaps there was an opportunity there as well. “There’s always the possibility of using a little magic,” she spoke up casually. “Make him give you what you want.”

“Absolutely not,” Eliza said, a clear, serious note of warning in her tone. “You’re not to go anywhere near Pym. Is that understood?”

Agatha held up her hands in a placating gesture. “Understood. Just trying to help.”

It made sense, of course—Eliza had asked her about potentially using magic to control Madame Gao, but the AI didn’t seem to view the Hand as anything more than a simple tool to be used and discarded, and certainly not as something that could be a threat to her. Pym, however, seemed like he might be someone she actually considered dangerous.

“Uh, you’re not going like that, are you?” Agatha changed the subject, gesturing vaguely at Eliza’s sleek, white-panelled form. “Not that you don’t look good. It’s just… a little conspicuous.”

“No. This was just a test.”

The AI paused for a few moments, then her body shifted as a dozen small lenses appeared in unobtrusive locations, dotted along her limbs and down the centre of her chest and back. The lenses lit up for a moment as they turned on, then the air around her flickered briefly before being overwritten by Beck’s holographic technology, replacing her robot-like avatar with one that was—by all appearances—flawlessly human.

Eliza inspected her hands, turning them over and wiggling her fingers. “This is just a stopgap for now until I get better at controlling the nanites,” she said absently, more thinking out loud than talking directly to them. “With the way the texturing works I’m actually pretty sure I could approximate something that looks pretty close to completely human, no holograms required, but I’d need to work it out from scratch, so for now…”

For now, the hologram covering her looked essentially exactly like Wanda Maximoff, ‘wearing’ a plain, dark red top and form-fitting jeans. Agatha couldn’t completely tell without seeing them next to each other, but she wouldn’t be surprised if Eliza had made herself look almost identical to the woman. Although, now that the nanotech body appeared actually human, there was one thing that Agatha was pretty sure was a little bit different, at least.

“Did you make your boobs bigger than Wanda’s?” she asked teasingly, a mischievous smirk curving her lips.

“No!” Eliza said, a little too quickly. “I mean, not deliberately. Shut up. These are practical. I needed to store excess nanites.”

“Uh huh. Sure.”

Ava cocked her head to the side and gave a lopsided, calculating grin. “Did you make those touch sensitive, too?”

“I…” Entirely caught off-guard, the AI didn’t flush or give any physical sign of embarrassment, but she still managed to radiate it for a moment before she recovered. “What is happening right now? Are you two ganging up on me?”

The witch clucked her tongue and exchanged a knowing look with Ava. “She didn’t answer the question.”

“No, she didn’t.”

Eliza pursed her lips, throwing her hands out in a wide, challenging gesture. “I mean, you’re more than welcome to find out for yourself, if you’d like.”

“So that’s a ‘yes’, then.”

“…I hate you both.”