Bruce looked up from his work, taking a break from the delicate operation of constructing a sensor that could detect the Tesseract no matter where in the world it was being held. He looked out the window of his lab, just as a squad of armed S.H.I.E.L.D. agents escorted Loki past. Loki gave Bruce a knowing smile as he passed. Bruce wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t like it.

He rubbed his eyes and got back to work.

Loki was sealed into a glass-walled cell, approachable only by a catwalk. At the other end of the catwalk stood Nick Fury, looking down at the control panel linked to the cell’s revolving door. “In case it’s unclear,” Fury said, “if you try to escape, if you so much as scratch that glass . . . ” He touched a button on the panel, and the floor below the cell opened up like an iris. Loki looked down . . . all the way to the ground, thousands of feet below. “Thirty thousand feet, straight down in a steel trap. You get how that works?” Riffing on what Loki had said to him before, in the lab in New Mexico, Fury pointed at Loki and said, “Ant.” Then he pointed at the control panel and said, “Boot.”

Loki chuckled. “It’s an impressive cage,” he said. “Not built, I think, for me.”

“Built for something a lot stronger than you,” Fury said.

“Oh, I’ve heard. A mindless beast. Makes play he’s still a man. How desperate are you, that you call on such lost creatures to defend you?”

“How desperate am I?” Fury echoed. He walked slowly over the catwalk to stand in front of Loki. “You threaten my world with war. You steal a force you can’t hope to control. You talk about peace, but you kill because it’s fun. You have made me very desperate. You might not be glad that you did.”

“Ooh,” Loki said. “It burns you to have come so close. To have the Tesseract, to have power, unlimited power, and for what? A warm light for all mankind to share . . . and then to be reminded what real power is.”

“Well, let me know if real power wants a magazine or something,” Fury said, and walked away.

Loki knew he had been heard throughout the ship. He could hear the echoes of the speakers, and even if he had not, he always knew when people were listening to him. That was part of his power, to make them listen . . . and to make each of them hear something just a little different. Just what he wanted them to hear. Perhaps he was in a cage right now, but he had been in cages before. Not once had one been able to hold him for long.

“He really grows on you, doesn’t he?” Bruce said. They were gathered outside the detention area to debrief and figure out what to do now that they had captured Loki. None of them believed the mission was over. It had all been a little too easy.

“Loki’s going to drag this out,” Cap said. “So, Thor, what’s his play?”

“He has an army called the Chitauri,” Thor said. “They’re not of Asgard, nor any world known. He means to lead them against your people. They will win him the Earth, in return, I suspect, for the Tesseract.”

“An army,” Cap repeated. “From outer space.”

“So he’s building another portal,” Bruce said. “That’s what he needs Erik Selvig for.”

“Selvig?” Thor asked.

“He’s an astrophysicist,” Bruce said, thinking Thor needed an explanation.

“He’s a friend,” Thor said.

“Loki has him under some kind of spell,” Natasha said. “Along with one of ours.” She didn’t say who.

“I want to know why Loki let us take him,” Cap said. “He’s not leading an army from here.”

“I don’t think we should be focusing on Loki,” Bruce said. “That guy’s brain is a bag full of cats. You can smell the crazy on him.”

Thor took a step toward Bruce. “Have a care how you speak,” he warned. “Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard . . . and he is my brother.”

“He killed eighty people in two days,” Natasha pointed out.

Acknowledging this, Thor backed down a little. “He’s adopted.”

Bruce was already moving on to the problem at hand. “I think it’s about the mechanics,” he said. “Iridium. What do they need the iridium for?” They knew Barton had stolen a supply of iridium from under the Stuttgart Museum, taking advantage of Loki’s diversion. But they didn’t yet know what Selvig could use it for.

“It’s a stabilizing agent,” Tony Stark said as he entered with Coulson. “It means the portal won’t collapse on itself like it did at S.H.I.E.L.D.” Thor had turned to meet Tony as he came in. The Asgardian’s posture was aggressive, to say the least. “No hard feelings, Point Break,” Tony said. “You’ve got a mean swing.”

Thor didn’t understand the joke, but he understood the point of what Tony was saying. He let it go. It wasn’t the first time he had fought with someone who turned out to be an ally.

Tony went on. “Also, iridium will mean the portal can open as wide and stay open as long as Loki wants.” He had wandered out into Fury’s command station, and now he put a hand over one eye and tried to watch all of the monitors. “How does Fury even see these?”

“He turns,” Maria Hill said. Clearly she didn’t think it was funny.

“Sounds exhausting,” Tony said. “Anyway, the rest of the raw materials Agent Barton can get his hands on pretty easily. The only major component he still needs is a power source with high energy density. Something to kick-start the cube.”

“When did you become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?” Hill asked. She was still irritated by his mocking of Nick Fury.

Without missing a beat, Tony said, “Last night. Selvig’s notes. The extraction theory papers. Am I the only one who did the reading?”

“Does Loki need any particular kind of power source?” Cap asked. Like the rest of them, he was learning to ignore Tony’s constant joking.

“He’d have to heat the cube to a hundred and twenty million Kelvin just to break through the Coulomb barrier,” Bruce said. He was talking about the physical barriers to creating a portal between different places in space and time.

“Unless Selvig has figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunneling effect,” Tony said.

Bruce shrugged. “Well, if he could do that, he could achieve heavy ion fusion at any reactor on the planet.”

“Finally, someone who speaks English,” Tony said.

Cap looked at Thor. “Is that what just happened?”

Tony reached out to shake Bruce’s hand. “It’s good to finally meet you, Dr. Banner. Your work in anti-electron collisions is unparalleled. And I’m a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster.”

“Thanks,” Bruce said. He didn’t look too excited about Tony mentioning the Hulk.

“Dr. Banner is only here to track the cube,” Fury said as he came in. “I was hoping you might join him.”

“Let’s start with that stick of his,” Cap said. “It may be magical, but it works an awful lot like a Hydra weapon.” He’d seen plenty of those in action when he was fighting the Red Skull in Europe. Loki’s scepter seemed to use the same kind of energy, or at least that’s what it looked like to him.

“I don’t know about that, but it is powered by the cube,” Fury said. “And I would like to know how Loki used it to turn two of the sharpest men I know into his personal flying monkeys.”

“Monkeys?” Thor asked. “I do not understand.”

“I do!” Steve said. “I understood that reference!”

It was a small victory for him. Most of his slang was seventy years out of date.

“Shall we play, Doctor?” Tony asked Bruce.

Bruce gestured toward the corridor that led to his lab. The scepter was there and so was all of their equipment. “This way, sir.” FwZzWRxkPdngb6oCIikSAK73nD5/ELBySYvmIf7CyL+KsAx7Ilp+7x1ZYJ5PYD6P