“We need to make a decision,” Tony said, addressing the room.
Everyone had assembled for this conversation, the group loosely gathered near the system hosting Wanda-3. The AI was ‘there’ as well, her holographic representation hovering over the table to show she was active and listening. The ‘science team’, as I’d been thinking of them, were clustered near Tony. Killmonger and Bruce lounged casually on chairs, while Shuri idly tapped her fingers on the edge of the AI’s table interface, T’Challa standing stiffly nearby. He always looked like he was on edge—I don’t remember that being a thing, so it was probably my fault.
Steve’s body language was similarly tense, his arms folded defensively in front of his chest, his shoulders tight. He still wasn’t happy, but him actually showing up meant he was at least willing to hear us out. Bucky was glued to his side, his own stance a little looser, but still with an undercurrent of tension. Clint and Carol were more relaxed, standing on opposite sides of the gathering, both leaning almost casually against the walls.
Pietro had come over and pressed his shoulder against mine in an affectionate attempt to push me off balance—it seemed like most residual annoyance or anger he had had at me excluding him from my decision-making process had been washed away during the conversation with Wanda-3. I was… grateful. I was still feeling a bit fragile and having him there, being supportive, helped to shore up my resolve. Nat stood a few paces away, as well, shooting me a brief smile before settling in for the discussion. The two of us really, really had to have a proper conversation about our relationship and what we were to each other, but it could wait until after this whole crisis had been dealt with and we could talk with clearer heads.
“The basics are done,” said Tony, waving a hand for emphasis as he paced along the far end of the gathered group. “Kill switch is in. Now we just need to decide how and when to hit Eliza.”
Bruce leaned forward, chiming in to make it Tony’s implication clearer. “The longer we take, the more time we can spend prepping Wanda-3, but…”
“The more time Eliza has to fuck around and the more likely it is she hits us again first,” I said, finishing his sentence for him. He nodded.
Steve frowned. “We take as long as we need to make sure Wanda-3 can handle her without resorting to the kill switch. This doesn’t have to be a suicide mission.” He tone was firm—he wanted no argument, but I knew he was going to be disappointed.
“No,” Wanda-3 spoke up. “Whatever time we have we’ll use as best we can, but we need to hit her as hard and fast as possible, before she has any chance to see this coming. She isn’t going to suspect I exist. We have to take advantage of that, use the element of surprise before we lose it.”
Steve exhaled sharply, a little bit of tightly-reined anger creeping into his tone. “It sounds like you’ve already decided what you want to do.”
“I really don’t think we can risk her hitting us again,” Tony responded. “This is our best shot, we can’t afford to lose it.”
Shuri looked up, shrugging as she met Steve’s gaze. “We could keep tweaking and adding things forever and still not be sure who would come out on top. If Eliza was still working with outdated technology it would be one thing, but we lost our technical edge the moment she stole it from us.”
“So you want to go after her now?” asked Carol.
Tony nodded. “As soon as possible, yeah. We should start planning how we’re going to do this.”
“Where and how? You must have some ideas already,” Clint asked, stepping away from the wall to address Tony. “The NEXUS?”
“Nah.” Killmonger was the one to respond, shaking his head as he spoke. “We’ve been talking that through. She moves too quickly. If we just release Wanda-3 into the internet it’ll become a back-and-forth—Eliza’ll drag it out and maybe buy herself enough time to work out what’s going on. We don’t want this to turn into a running battle. We need to get Wanda‑3 in close enough for a knife fight.”
Natasha looked thoughtful. “Can we even do that? She’s in a lot of systems.”
Tony tagged back in. “She can move through systems and manipulate them through wireless connections, but we’ve been looking over how Wanda-3 is structured and as far as we can tell she’s like JARVIS, she does have some central core processes that are ‘her’ that can’t be copied.”
“So she has a soul,” Steve said bluntly, looking pointedly in Wanda-3’s direction.
She didn’t rise to the bait and I bit my tongue as well. It felt a little bit like Steve was grasping at straws at this point, trying to find any excuse or reason to hold back and give Wanda-3 more time. I didn’t blame him, honestly. Still, the ‘soul’ argument wasn’t one that was likely to hold a lot of sway with this crowd. Almost everyone here—excepting Shuri, I was fairly sure—had killed plenty of other people before. Starting a back and forth about the ‘sanctity of life’ or whatever wouldn’t be productive. It was also a little bit hypocritical, coming from a literal former soldier who’d seen front-line combat.
“Was that what I said?” Tony asked rhetorically, looking around. “I feel like that’s not what I said.”
Bucky grunted. “I dunno, it sounded like that’s exactly what you said.”
“Bucky…” I sighed.
Tony waved the two of them off, bulling through the flimsy argument to return to his previous point. “Soul or not, what I meant was she’s always ‘in’ a specific place, she can’t just create copies of herself in whatever systems she wants.”
Pietro glanced to the side, shooting me a brief look of confusion before he turned back to Tony. “Wait, why not? Isn't she just code? A computer program?”
“What we are is a lot more complicated than that. More complicated than it’s worth trying to get into,” Wanda-3 responded.
Bruce grimaced, running a hand through his hair then dropping forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “She’s right. These AIs aren’t like anything we’ve worked with before. Honestly, sometimes it feels closer to biology than it is to normal computer science.”
“If it were that easy, I’d have had backups of JARVIS,” Tony said with a shrug. “Long story short, once you reach a certain point of complexity, even the best copying process starts to introduce errors and with something like Eliza or Wanda-3, it essentially becomes impossible.”
“Unless you have an Infinity Stone,” Natasha said.
“Right. Unless you have an Infinity Stone,” he acknowledged, shooting me a pointed look.
Carol was nodding along slowly. Funnily enough, I realised that this plan had echoes of what she’d described when she’d talked about destroying the Kree Supreme Intelligence. “So we need to get Wanda-3 directly into whatever system Eliza is using to host her core processes at the time,” she said. “But that could be anything, right? How would we know?”
“And even if we did know which system she was in, she could just jump ship if she felt threatened,” Killmonger pointed out.
While some of this was new information to me, it all seemed to align with what I remembered of Ultron. He’d generally always used a ‘main’ body as an avatar to interact with the Avengers. Eliza was probably doing the same, just trying to be less obvious about it. “She’d want something defensible and mobile. I’d bet cash money she’s mostly using the suit she stole from Tony,” I said, feeling relatively confident. “We didn’t see it at all when she attacked us. She’s saving it.”
Steve’s stance had loosened up a bit—he still looked unhappy, but the tactical talk was bringing him out of his shell a little bit. “Alright. If we assume that’s correct and she’s using the suit, how would we get Wanda-3 in?”
“With a variable nanotech interface,” Shuri piped up, giving a self-satisfied smile. “I have a design. We just need to get it into physical contact with the hardware and it’ll make its own connection.”
Bruce grimaced. “Feels like it’d be too obvious. I mean, she’s not just going to sit there and let us plug something into her, right? She’s smart. She’ll abandon the suit the second we try.”
“Can we can trick her, somehow?” Natasha asked. “Make it seem harmless?”
I looked over toward Clint, a thoughtful expression on my face. “Can you make it small enough to fit on an arrowhead?” I asked Shuri, still looking at the archer.
The Wakandan princess frowned, but nodded. “We could do that.”
“You want me to take the shot?” Clint asked, a surprised expression momentarily flickering across his face. “I mean, I can. Just not what I expected.”
“It’s not what she’d expect, either. Out of all of us, I’m pretty sure Clint is the one she feels least threatened by,” I said, looking around the room at the rest of the gathered heroes as I spoke. I glanced at him, brow creased apologetically. “No offense, Clint.”
He shot me a flat look. “Some taken.”
“It’s sensible,” admitted Steve, a little grudgingly. “Hitting her from range if possible makes the most sense and you’re the best shot out of any of us. She’s less likely to dodge or destroy an arrow than she is a missile shot by Tony. If we’re really doing this, we might only have one shot and we need to make it count.”
“Well, we have a weapon, a target and a delivery system. Sounds like we’re basically ready to go, then?” Tony said, looking around for signs of agreement. “All we have to do now is work out how, when and where we want to hit her. Wanda, can you open a portal direct?”
I thought about it. “I don’t know. I can usually portal directly to people, but I’m not sure if Eliza is ‘people’ enough for the magic to recognise her.”
Steve shook his head. “It’d be better if we knew where she was beforehand anyway, so we can plan our approach. Dropping into an unknown location blind isn’t a good idea,” he said firmly. “Besides, she knows you can make portals. She’ll have some sort of plan in place. We want to catch her off-guard, so we should try to hit her from an angle she’s not expecting.”
“She has to have a base of operations of some kind, right?” Natasha asked, her expression thoughtful.
“A Stark facility?” I suggested. “We know she’s been using them, but there’s a bunch so there’s no specific obvious location, it’d be convenient for resources, and some would have everything on-hand for servicing the drones and suit, right?”
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“That makes sense,” Tony said with a nod. He pulled a face before continuing. “I’m not keen to put Pepper at risk, but she and Happy might be best placed to do some more poking around without raising alarm bells if Eliza notices them.”
“I don’t think Eliza would find it particularly suspicious if the two of them were ‘independently’ investigating what’s going on with Stark Industries. If she catches them, she might very firmly tell them to back off, but I really doubt she’d hurt them unless she thought she had to,” I said.
That was, after all, her MO so far—she tried to kill Tony because she had to, she hacked Wakanda because she had to, she attacked us because she had to. I didn’t really want to speculate exactly what it might take before she felt like she had to do something drastic about Pepper and Happy, but I felt pretty certain they’d be safe so long as they didn’t push too hard.
“Holding pattern, then,” Steve said, a vague bit of relief creeping into his voice. He looked at Tony. “We’ll get in touch with Pepper via portal, then sit tight and wait until we have more information about where Eliza’s operating from. In the meantime, you do everything you can to prep Wanda-3. We can—”
I blinked as a glimmer in the air near him grabbed my attention. A bare instant later, a small spark of orange energy flared brightly into being, expanding and spreading in a spinning vortex as a sorcerous portal manifested.
The room exploded into motion as everyone reacted to the sudden intrusion—diving for cover, shouting in alarm, raising weapons. I summoned wisps of energy to my hands, swearing, a frisson of panic grabbing my heart in a vice-like grip. We couldn’t handle another attack right now! It was too soon!
Calmly, the Ancient One stepped through the portal into the room. Mordo and Wong followed a second later, their combat-ready stances decidedly less calm. They all looked a little worse for wear—their robes were fresh, but they bore other signs that they’d been in a fight not all that long ago. Certainly long enough for them to clean themselves up, but a shower and a change of robes wasn’t enough to conceal the bruises, nor the bandage tightly wrapped around Mordo’s left forearm, just barely visibly peeking out from his sleeve, or the palm-sized plaster covering a cut along the side of Wong’s face. The Eye of Agamotto hung around the Sorcerer Supreme’s neck.
“T’Challa! Stand down!” Steve had gotten his feet under him first—he’d spun into a low crouch, drawing his shield from his back to interpose it between himself and whatever threat may have emerged from the portal. When he’d realised no attack was incoming, he’d immediately switched targets to the Wakandan prince, managing to catch him a scant instant before he pounced on the intruders.
“Who are you?” T’Challa demanded. He wasn’t wearing the Panther habit, but I noticed him flexing his fingers at his sides as if they were claws.
“Our apologies for intruding unannounced, Prince T’Challa,” the Ancient One said, inclining her head in a shallow bow. “I’m called the Ancient One. With me are Masters Mordo and Wong, of Kamar-taj.”
Steve straightened up. “They’re not our enemies,” he said, though his tone was slightly guarded and he kept his shield held at the ready. “What are you doing here?”
The Sorcerer Supreme gave a small, tight smile as she cast her eye over the room, noting the arrayed heroes who’d been a bare second away from unleashing hell on her. I took a breath, trying to calm my jangling nerves, and her gaze ended up resting on me as she spoke. “Apologies once again for the unexpected visit. We’ve just had one of our own, in fact, from a mutual acquaintance,” she said, inclining her head as she looked back at Steve. “You sought to help Kamar‑taj once before, captain. I hope the offer is still on the table?”
Steve looked back at me, then at Tony and T’Challa. “It might be,” he allowed. “We are kind of in the middle of something, though.”
“This mutual acquaintance…” I said slowly, worried that I might already know the answer.
“I think you may know her very well,” the Ancient One replied. I heaved a heavy sigh. Of course. This just had to get even more complicated than it already was.
“Eliza,” Tony said.
“The very same,” she confirmed. “I was in meditation when I foresaw an immediate threat. We had little time to plan.”
Most likely, that meant she had been trying to catch up on things using the Eye of Agamotto and barely managed to pull together a last-second response to what was going to happen. I hadn’t thought about it before now, but she’d already been scrambled by my arrival, my foreknowledge shattering her carefully prepared timeline into trillions of new possibilities. The particular thread we’d ended up with, with the creation of Eliza—a second source of unpredictable, uncontrolled ripples—had probably made everything even worse for her.
“Three intruders broke into the New York sanctum and used its doorway to invade Kamar-taj’s library,” the Ancient One continued, eyeing me appraisingly. “Their leader was Eliza. She wore your face, spoke with your voice. I don’t know her precise connection to you, but…”
“It’s complicated,” I said.
“She’s not wrong,” interjected Tony. “But, long story short, we’re not Eliza’s biggest fans, either.”
The Ancient One nodded. “Their target was the Book of Cagliostro.”
“That was the same book that Kaecilius stole the ritual from?” Steve asked, looking between us for confirmation. I nodded, looking questioningly at the Ancient One. I had no idea why Eliza would bother trying to steal the book. It wasn’t like she’d be able to decipher it—I wasn’t sure she was capable of learning magic at all.
“It may be that they believe they can use it to divine Kaecilius’s whereabouts,” the sorcerer supplied. “One of Eliza’s companions was a witch.”
My insides twisted, an icy knife stabbing through my guts. That was not good news. While witches more generally apparently existed, there was only one that I—and, by extension, Eliza—was personally familiar with.
Something must have been obvious about my expression and a hand touched my shoulder. “What is it?” Nat asked me softly.
I didn’t respond directly, focusing on the Ancient One in front of me instead. “What did this witch look like?” I asked faintly, trying to keep my voice steady.
“Young. Asian—Chinese, I believe. She was much more concerned with escaping than fighting. They stole a relic from the New York sanctum she relied on as a weapon. A minor practitioner, at best.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding in. Thank god. If it had turned out that Eliza had managed to get Agatha fucking Harkness to work with her, I had no clue what we’d do or how bad things might have gotten. The Darkhold was an extremely dangerous wildcard and I was extremely glad it was still out of play for the foreseeable future.
I thought back to our working theory about how Eliza had infiltrated the Wakandan border. “The Hand. She would have gotten her through the Hand. It’s gotta be the woman that fled alongside Gao. I wish I knew who she was.”
An Asian witch… she wasn’t anyone I’d see on-screen, I didn’t think, but this world was bigger than the movies and she could even be someone from the comics. I scrunched up my face, thinking back. I thought there was a young Asian magic-user of some kind in the Runaways series, which I was pretty sure was Marvel (if of dubious canonicity to the wider cinematic universe). Nico, or something? Was she a witch? I’d never actually sat down and watched it, so I couldn’t really remember anything useful.
“Did she have a sling ring?” I asked, almost absently.
The Ancient One looked at me curiously. “Not that we saw. Why?”
“I… lost yours. Sorry. Eliza’s been moving about unpredictably, we thought she might have had it.”
“A witch wouldn’t be able to use a sling ring without training as a sorcerer,” Mordo said dismissively. “They do, however, have their own Ways of travelling via magic.”
I frowned. “Wait, why wouldn’t they be able to? I can use a sling ring.”
“The Scarlet Witch breaks the rules in many ways,” the Ancient One responded smoothly. I pretended not to notice the look Tony shot me as she called me by my title. “Your magic is marked by chaos.”
Pietro tentatively raised a hand like a schoolkid. “What about the book? Can they use it to find Kaecilius?”
The Ancient One looked thoughtful for a moment, considering her words, but then shook her head. “It could be possible for a witch to be skilled enough to leverage the sympathetic connection between the book and its pages as well as powerful enough to cast a spell capable of breaking through Kaecilius’s wards. Those aligned with the spirit sign can have surprising skill in such areas. However, I could count on one hand the number of witches I’ve heard of during my lifetime that I might guess could accomplish such a thing.”
I nodded, thinking it through. “I think if Madame Gao had access to a very powerful witch, things would have turned out a lot differently for her than they did in my visions,” I said slowly. “Not to mention how Eliza might utilise a resource like that.”
Mordo grunted his assent. “Much more likely that this is a minor talent, and one sorely overestimating her own skill, at that.”
“Who was the third?” Steve asked. “You said there were three intruders. Eliza, the witch, and…?”
“A woman capable of phasing through matter,” the Sorcerer Supreme said. “Nonmagical. She was unlike anything we’ve encountered before.” Behind the Ancient One, Mordo’s expression visibly hardened, but he didn’t add anything to her explanation.
“Ghost,” I said, nodding to myself. “Makes sense. It’s who I’d choose for a heist if I could.”
“So you want our help getting your book back?” Tony asked, tapping his chin with a finger. He shrugged. “I mean, we’re already going to be going after Eliza, so the more the merrier, I guess. A little bit of magical muscle backing us up wouldn’t go astray. You literally just interrupted a planning session, actually.”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “Why are you coming to us for help with this?”
The Ancient One inclined her head, acknowledging the question. “Eliza is a… robot?” she asked, looking to me for confirmation. I nodded and she continued. “The Masters of the Mystic Arts specialise in handling threats to the mundane world that originate from beyond it—the magical, the supernatural, the extradimensional. Eliza is an advanced piece of technology who has other allies also with powerful, nonmagical abilities.”
“You’re the experts on these sorts of foes,” Mordo interjected to clarify the Ancient One’s point, looking toward Tony and the rest of the science team. “Whereas we are as unfamiliar with their capabilities as you would be, were your enemies the N’Garai of the Flickering Realms.”
“We are not afraid to ask for help with things that lie outside our areas of expertise,” the Ancient One concluded.
“…Fair enough,” I said. I had no idea what the N’Garai were—questions for later—but I took their point.
Steve nodded, looking over at T’Challa for confirmation. “We won’t turn away more allies for this fight,” he said. The Wakandan prince frowned, but inclined his head slightly, and Steve continued. “We don’t know where she’s based, but we have some thoughts on how we can find her. We can coordinate once we have more information.”
The Ancient One waved her hand dismissively, the corner of her lips quirking upward. “That won’t be a problem.”
Wong opened his mouth and spoke for the first time since they’d arrived. “Kamar-taj’s library has not lost a book for over a thousand years. I will not be the first librarian to break that tradition,” he said, a determined look on his face.
There was a very brief moment of silence. “You can track them,” Natasha gave voice to the realisation that we’d all more or less come to at the same time.
Huh. Of course. That made perfect sense—I’d always wondered why Kaecilius hadn’t taken the whole book.
“Yes,” the Ancient One confirmed. “Each of the books in my private collection have an extensive series of enchantments woven into them to protect them from harm and allow them to be traced. I do not know of any wards strong enough to mask them from us.”
“These enchantments weren’t strong enough to stop someone from ripping out a few pages, though?” Tony snarked.
“Kaecilius is a Master of the Mystic Arts,” the Ancient One said, emphasising his title, her voice otherwise unperturbed by the dig. “While the tracking spells themselves would have been difficult and time-consuming to unravel, he obviously was still able to bypass one of the less-robust protections.”
“So we can find her. Right now,” I said suddenly. “We know how to find her.”
“Yes. I checked the tracking enchantment again before we came to speak with you,” the sorcerer said with a nod. “When they fled Kamar‑taj, they retreated to the New York sanctum, and from there it looks like they travelled to a location in San Francisco. They have not moved for several hours.”
Once again, the seemingly-deliberate dramatic timing of certain things tweaked at my sensibilities. We had just been trying to work out a reliable way to track down Eliza, only to have one miraculously happen to fall into our lap at exactly the right time. It wasn’t something you’d necessarily notice unless you were thinking in terms of fictional tropes, but once you did it hit you over the head with how obvious it could be at times. The sorcerers, in particular, seemed particularly adept at showing up exactly at the right time (or wrong time, depending on your perspective, I guess). Then again, ‘A wizard is never late, nor is he early—he arrives precisely when he means to’.
Steve glanced in my direction, a slight frown twisting his features. “We can’t rush into this,” he hedged. “We need to be sure.”
I shook my head, eyes blazing as I turned to meet his gaze. “I am sure. If Eliza really thinks that that book might be able to lead them to Kaecilius, then she won’t let it out of her sight. She’ll be there. We need to move quickly, before she figures out the book is useless to her and she gets rid of it.”
We’d still need to plan, of course, but this wasn’t going to be the holding pattern Steve had originally envisioned. The science team wasn’t going to get days or weeks of time to prepare Wanda-3 for the assault. Depending on where exactly Eliza was, there was a good chance we’d be able to move today.
“Steve…” Nat said hesitantly. “Wanda’s right. If we’re doing this, we can’t afford to hesitate.”
He set his jaw and was about to respond, but I beat him to it, turning back to the Ancient One. “Alright. If you can give us a more precise location in San Francisco, we can start planning our approach.” Steve shot me an annoyed look, but I ignored him, continuing to address the sorcerers. “Let’s get you up to speed on what Eliza is, exactly, and how we’re planning on taking her down.”