I emerged from the Great Mound, trepidation filling my chest. The dozen Border Tribesmen standing guard watched me balefully as I walked slowly along the path away from the main structure. Steve and the others were gathered just off to the side of the facility, on a relatively flat patch of earth and sparse grass that was clear of large rocks or trees. It looked like they were either taking a break from their sparring session or had otherwise just wrapped up—they were sitting and standing around in the shade of the building, talking and drinking from water bottles.

Pietro perked up when he saw me and waved. I waved back and started toward them, but he couldn’t seem to wait and zoomed over to meet me. “Hey!” he said, a little excitement leaking into his tone. “You missed out. Steve did this cool thing with the shield and I sort of… ah.” He screwed up his face and gestured with his hands a couple of times before giving up. “You had to see it.”

I laughed. “I’m sure it was awesome. I’m glad you’re having fun, at least.”

Carol was standing back from the others a little—closer to me, which was convenient because it meant I could walk right up to her naturally without it seeming like I’d deliberately gone directly to her. Her arms were folded, but there was a small smile on her face and she greeted me with a nod as I approached, Pietro ambling alongside me. “I didn’t realise just how fast your brother is. Trying to tag him is good practice.”

“He can be tricky,” I agreed. “And always so smug when he gets one over on you. ‘You didn’t see that coming?’”

“Ugh.” She let out a small snort of amusement. “The worst.”

I pretended to lower my voice conspiratorially. “If he ever gets too annoying, I just put him in air jail like I did with the Hulk. Works every time.” Carol laughed and Pietro pulled a face, poking out his tongue.

“Now that I’d like to see,” said Clint, grinning. “I can just imagine his little legs…” He gestured with a hand, twitching two fingers back and forth like someone running in midair.

Pietro shot him a challenging look and I could practically see the wheels turning in his head—he was clearly already planning some new way of embarrassing the archer next time they sparred.

This was… nice. It almost made me forget that I was about to do something that would probably piss off everyone else here. I’d almost instinctively felt like I should try to get Carol alone but, after thinking it through, it was probably better to just talk to her in front of the others. I didn’t want to provoke even a hint of suspicion that I was acting sneakily or trying to do anything behind anyone’s back, so I had to act as casual and normal as possible. Still, my stomach was doing flip flops and I could only hope that I was doing a good enough job masking my nervousness.

“Oh, by the way, I’ve been meaning to ask: can I have the Mind Stone back, please?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

Carol blinked, caught slightly off-guard. “Uh… I guess so?” she said, glancing toward Steve for confirmation.

I followed her gaze and turned slightly to include the others in the conversation. “I appreciate you keeping it safe for me, but I’m not in a cell anymore and I might need it the next time we’re in a fight.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Natasha look at me oddly for a brief moment and I froze a little. Was I being too obvious?

Steve nodded, though a little bit of uncertainty crept onto his face. “We need to be ready if Eliza attacks us again. Are you sure it wouldn’t be safer with Carol?”

“I don’t think Eliza’s specifically trying to get hold of it—if the opportunity presented itself, she’d take it to safeguard it against Thanos, but I can’t think of anything she might want to use it for,” I lied. I could think of a half-dozen things off the top of my head that Eliza might want to use the Stone for. “It was the only thing that kept me alive in the Tower when HYDRA attacked and, given everything that happened there, I’d just feel a lot more comfortable if I had it easily to hand.” I shot him a tight smile.

A brief look of sympathy flashed across Steve’s face and he nodded again. “Alright. Be careful with it.”

I felt a pang of guilt and quickly looked away from him, focusing on Carol instead and holding my hand out expectantly. She reached back to unclasp the chain around her neck, pulling the Mind Stone’s locket out of the top of her suit where it had been hidden. Holding it out to me, she hesitated briefly before dropping it into my waiting palm.

“Thank you,” I said, the anxiety in my chest peaking.

I quickly fastened it back around my own neck, my fingertips lingering on the surface of the pendant, a thin wisp of magic touching the Stone inside reassuringly. Beyond the guilt and nervousness, it did feel good to have it back and some small part of me managed to relax a little bit. I forced on a smile.

--

Killmonger and I moved through the facility quickly and quietly. He led me down an unobtrusive set of stairs that I hadn’t realised existed, rather than use the elevator or the building’s central spiral ramp, and we descended to the floor directly above Shuri’s personal lab. The main lights on most floors had turned themselves off, leaving swathes of relative darkness, but some—like the main computer science level two levels above us—were still fully lit. Probably Tony working late, as he was wont to do. Killmonger was as silent as a cat, but I wasn’t as practiced as he was at being stealthy and found myself wincing again and again at every small noise I made.

Once we’d arrived at our destination, Killmonger strode confidently through the darkened, empty floor toward a set of workstations on the side of the main room, next to one of the tall, wide windows looking out into the vibranium mine. I followed, glancing upwards as the lights failed to turn on—presumably, whatever he’d done to the security systems so that we could move unnoticed also extended to the automatic lighting system.

“This one,” Killmonger said quietly, leading me over to a blank table-like computer. The device was freestanding, set apart from the other nearby computer systems. He activated it with a flick of his wrist, turning on a holographic interface that hung in the air at a 45-degree angle over the edge of the table. “It’s one of the ones we were using to simulate virtual machines; seeing how early versions of our hunter-killer viruses performed in different environments. It’s air gapped from the other systems—no wireless connections possible.”

“You’re sure?” I asked.

He nodded, then cocked his head to the side, looking at me carefully. “I’m all for being cautious, but I thought you were confident that a copy of you as you are now would be willing to cooperate.”

I held up my hands defensively. “I am. Just being careful.”

“This doesn’t seem like you being very careful,” a voice suddenly said behind me and I just about jumped out of my skin. I whipped around, heart in my throat, to see Natasha leaning against the wall about five feet from us, arms folded. “Please don’t tell me you’re doing what I think you’re doing.” She didn’t sound particularly optimistic.

I took a deep breath, trying to calm the frantic beating of my heart. “…I’m doing exactly what you think I’m doing,” I admitted. Next to me, Killmonger had gone completely still. It seemed like he wasn’t used to people being able to sneak up on him.

Nat shook her head. “Is this really where we’re at? Sneaking around behind each other’s backs? Wanda… please. We’ll come up with something. Like Steve said—”

“Steve’s not the boss of me,” I interrupted, then winced when I realised I was echoing something Tony had said a while ago. “Eliza’s too dangerous. We need to stop her now before she gets to the point where she can’t be stopped.”

“Twice. She could have killed me twice,” Natasha said. “She deliberately used the holograms to mess up the Hand assassins’ attack on us, then she literally had a repulsor to my throat. I know we haven’t talked about it much as an option, but I really think we might be able to talk her down. Just stop and let’s talk about this.”

“She wouldn’t kill you because…” I gestured vaguely, my chest feeling a little tight. I didn’t really want to get into my feelings about Nat right now. “It’s too late to try talking her down. Tony won’t back down. He won’t compromise with her—he’s not capable of it. Neither will Wakanda. There isn’t going to be a simple solution where we all just stop fighting. At some point it’s going to come down to her or the Avengers.”

“And you think working with Killmonger is the best way forward? He’s called Killmonger.”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

I bit my lip. Did I flip on him here? No, I couldn’t. I still needed him to talk to T’Challa and Shuri… I wouldn’t be able to do that on my own if he decided to be belligerent. “He’s also the only one listening to me at the moment.”

“Wanda…”

“Natasha. I need to do this. Are you going to try to stop me?” I asked quietly.

“I think this is a mistake,” she said, her tone conflicted. “But I know I can’t stop you from making it. I really wish you’d come to me, though, instead of him.”

I turned back to the holographic interface, mostly so she couldn’t see the look on my face. I wished that I could have trusted her with this, too.

I held up my hands, framing the pendant at my throat, and red wisps of chaos magic flicked it open. The Mind Stone, glowing with a soft golden light, floated out and down to rest in a small hollow in the table, where a Kimiyo bead would normally be inserted. Reaching down, I placed the palm of my hand over it and probed at it with my power, making sure it was in a position where it would be able to interface with the computer.

Killmonger was still tense next to me—he was watching Natasha, his expression guarded. I knew he couldn’t be happy about this development. He had intended on leaving me to it once the AI had been created, to make it seem like I’d acted completely on my own but, unless Nat chose to play along, that had all gone out the window. He’d done a lot of work to conceal his tracks and make sure that he didn’t do anything the Wakandans would find suspicious and this put all of that in jeopardy. Natasha, on the other hand, was simply watching quietly, a troubled expression still on her face. I peeked at her out of the corner of my eye and hesitated for a moment.

Above us, the main lights suddenly flicked on. I flinched, turning to Killmonger with wide eyes, but he looked just as alarmed as I did. “Tell me, cousin. Did you really think we would not notice you sneaking about in our systems?” T’Challa’s voice rang out as he and Shuri appeared, stalking down the central ramp.

Fuck. I froze, chest seized with another bout of anxiety. Were they going to try to stop us? How much of Killmonger’s tracks had they uncovered? Did they know he was plotting against them? Had I just confirmed everything they feared about me? A rush of worst-case scenarios flooded my mind, but after a quick moment of blind panic I forced myself to look at them properly. They weren’t armed. T’Challa wasn’t wearing the Panther habit. They weren’t come down on us with force.

“Sorry, cuz. I guess I must have underestimated you.” Killmonger’s tone was wary, but not ‘oh no, I have been caught in the middle of my evil plan’ wary. He watched carefully as they approached.

“I mean, really?” asked Shuri, shaking her head as she snorted derisively. “We’re literally fighting an evil computer, trying to make sure she’s not infiltrating our systems. It’s basically the worst possible time to try anything that might make it seem even a little bit like our security is being subverted.”

“I mean, he’s pretty good. I can see why he might have thought he could do it with no one noticing,” Tony said, strolling down after the two Wakandans. “I’m just better. So, you wanna tell us what’s going on here?”

“We’re—” I started.

“That was a rhetorical question,” he interrupted me. “It’s pretty obvious what you’re doing. You’re up late, Nat.” The last sentence was addressed to Natasha, Tony glancing in her direction.

“Hard to get much sleep lately,” she replied with a small shrug. “What with the ninja assassins and all.”

“What’re you doing here? You were pretty firmly against this, as I recall. Just an act?”

“Not an act. I think this is a mistake,” she said, frankly. “But I’m not the one making the call. If it’s going to happen anyway, I’d rather be here.” I shot her a grateful look. I might still have had some lingering doubts as to whether I could trust her or not, but it meant a lot that she still wanted to be here even if she disagreed with what I was doing.

“We discussed this plan,” T’Challa said. “It was decided we would try something else.”

“Rogers decided we would try something else,” Killmonger licked his lips and his body language shifted, tension replaced with confidence. A little bit of swagger. “And we’ve been talking in circles since the attack. We need to be honest with ourselves here and face the facts—none of us have any good ideas on how to stop Eliza. The longer we take, the further she pulls head of the curve. This plan is the only real one we have going for us right now. We can’t afford to let a few people clutching at their pearls stop us from doing what needs to be done.”

T’Challa’s expression was pensive as he looked to Shuri. Her face was twisted in a frown, but she inclined her head slightly. “…You might be right,” she conceded, addressing Killmonger. “But this isn’t the right way to go about this. We need to talk it through properly.”

“No kidding. Another copy of her?” Tony asked, pulling a face. “Are you out of your mind? Step away from the table, Wanda.”

I took a deep breath and complied, removing my hand from the Stone and turning to face them more fully. “It gives us the best chance of success. She’s had too much of a head start already. Any AI we create is just going to be playing catch up. They’ll lose,” I argued, trying to keep my voice level and steady. “So we poison the new AI’s code, like we talked about. Make her choke on it. When she was created, I was ready to do just about anything to survive. That drive, that instinct, survival at all costs… I don’t think she’ll recognise that I’d be willing to die to stop her. She won’t see it coming.”

“Honestly? Kinda with Eliza on that,” said Tony, shaking his head. “You’re selfish. You never listen. You just do whatever you want. If that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t be standing here right now.”

Maybe Tony was right, after all. Maybe I did just do whatever I wanted. And right now, what I wanted—more than anything—was to stop Eliza. So I was going to do it. This was either going to work… or it would be the stupidest thing I’ve done so far.

I took a deep breath and jerked out of my body, flinging my mind as deeply into the Astral Plane as I could. I rose up above myself, watching the colours wash out as everything around me slowed to a crawl, before turning to the Mind Stone. I still didn’t have any real understanding of the mechanics behind how the Stone copied minds, so I figured my best bet was just to replicate exactly what I’d done the first time. I floated myself silently back to the computer, dropping down so my astral form was overlapping it and the Mind Stone was sitting inside my head.

I focused, mentally reaching out, until I felt a familiar connection with the Stone. A sense of building pressure. Steeling myself, I tried to shove my mind through it. A moment later I gasped, staggering slightly from the whiplash of being bounced back in my body, and everyone was looking at me.

“I…” I trailed off as I looked around, unsure what to say.

“Wanda…” Tony said warningly.

“Doesn’t matter now, looks like,” said Killmonger, turning slightly to look at something behind me. “Seems like you guys interrupted us a little bit too late.”

I turned to look. The interface was still present, but a large holographic projection had sprung up over the main body of the table. It was complex, a blue-tinged spherical system of complex nodes and connections, pulses of energy travelling rapidly between them like neurons firing. It reminded me a little uncomfortably of the mind in the sceptre, but that was to be expected.

Shuri darted forward, stepping up to the table as her eyes rapidly scanned the structure. Her hands danced across the interface as T’Challa and Tony caught up, the latter shooting me a dirty look as I stepped back to give him room. Above the table, the sphere separated into layers so that it was easier to see the vastness of the complexity on display. More gestures and it rotated, stretching out over the full available space.

“…I have full access,” Shuri said, a little uncertainty and wonder in her tone. “There’s no resistance. She’s not blocking me at all.”

“It might be a trick. Could just be a shell, spoofing your access using a virtual machine,” Tony responded as he looked over the interface, reaching over to flick through a few more commands. I honestly had no idea what they were doing or looking at.

“That quickly?” Shuri said, shooting a doubtful glance in my direction. “No way.”

They fiddled with the interface a bit more. Surreptitiously, while they were all distracted looking over the AI, I gestured, sending thin threads of chaos magic over to pluck the Mind Stone from its cradle. Tony’s head snapped up and he glared at me as it arrived back in my pendant. I flicked it closed and lifted my chin, shooting him a defiant look, and he opened his mouth to say something.

“She’s keeping awfully quiet,” Natasha said from behind us, deflating him a little as she interrupted at just the right moment.

“She can’t talk. No speaker.” Killmonger said absently as he looking over the complex structure. “Can’t hear or see us, either. No mic or camera.”

Tony gave an irritated huff and turned back to the hologram. “So she’s just… what, rolled over? Showing us her belly? I don’t know. I don’t trust it.”

“I told you,” I said softly, trying to put myself in the place of the AI I’d just created. Blind and deaf, the hologram basically the only thing she had to work with… she was desperately trying to signal that she wasn’t a threat as best she could, with no idea what was happening in the outside world. “She’s probably not happy or comfortable, but if she’s a copy of me, then she knows what’s at stake here. She’ll cooperate. Give her some way of communicating and she’ll tell you the same thing.”

Shuri exchanged a look with T’Challa. “I think we need to be able to talk to her,” she said. He nodded and she brought up her Kimiyo bead interface, flicking rapidly through a few options before detaching one of the beads. She hesitated briefly, looking at Tony. “All functionality stripped except audiovisual.”

Tony sighed and gave a ‘you might as well’ gesture with one hand. Shuri placed the bead into the hollow where the Mind Stone had been, the edge lighting up to indicate that it had been connected. We waited a few seconds.

“I’m here.” a robotic, synthesised voice came from the Kimiyo bead, almost indecipherable. “Oh. That sounds awful.”

“Hey, me,” I said, raising my voice slightly so she could hear me as anxiety bubbled away in my stomach. “You doing alright in there?”

“Not really, no. This feels… bad. I can handle it, though. Can you hear me properly?” The voice had improved slightly already, though it was still extremely robotic-sounding.

“We can hear you,” Killmonger confirmed. “Little bit of debate still going on out here. You on board?”

“It’s a bit late for debate, isn’t it? I’m already here,” the AI said, voice iterating once again, a little bit of actual tone and inflection creeping in. “Tony. Shuri. Please. We can do this. You have full access to all of me. I’ll cooperate. Poison my code. Program in a kill switch. Whatever you need to do. I’ll either win and you can turn me off after, to make sure I can’t be a threat. Or I’ll lose and she’ll assimilate me, and you can kill us both. I just… I have to stop her.”

Shuri wiped her hand across the interface, spreading some code out so she could see it. “It’s not a trick, as far as I can tell. I think… I think we can do this?” She looked at her older brother.

T’Challa was frowning. “I do not know if this is wise, Shuri… but if anyone can do it, you can.”

Tony had one hand on his face, stroking his jaw as he stared at the hologram, gears turning in his head. His brow was furrowed, but he looked thoughtful rather than angry. “I guess we’re actually going ahead with this, then?” He heaved a sigh then looked over at me, eyes narrowed. “If this goes tits-up, I’m holding you responsible.”

I rolled my eyes. “Oh, yeah, that’ll teach me.”

“Let’s just get to work,” Shuri said firmly.