It didn’t take us much longer to reach our destination. Midnd Circle was a tall building, but the upper floors weren’t of any interest to us. There was a loading dock at the side, the corrugated steel roller door lifting as Tony took the car in. There wasn’t much else here apart from the general debris you would see at a construction site—the floor was rough and unfinished, loose pnks of wood forming a path to the building’s interior.

  The building was deserted. Instead of any human workers, the shadowed figures of a half-dozen Iron Legion drones watched us silently from the sidelines, guarding the entrances.

  Tony parked just inside the garage door, which rolled shut behind us as a set of free-standing industrial lighting flickered on, letting us see where we were going as we stepped out of the car.

  “Gods, sorcerers, witches and dragons,” Tony said as we started down the path of pnks, walking side by side. He shook his head. “The world just keeps getting weirder and weirder. Halloween’s coming up—we gotta worry about vampires and werewolves, too?” There was a joking edge to his tone, but his smile faded a little when I stopped dead in my tracks and he turned to look at me.

  “Um.” I bit my lip.

  Tony stared at me for a moment, trying to decide if I was doing a bit or not. “No. You’re fucking with me. I’m not falling for that, Red.”

  I screwed up my face. “Ehhhh…”

  He let out a short, sharp sigh. “Seriously?”

  I thought about Werewolf by Night—I really wasn’t clear on when it was supposed to be set, timeline-wise. There’d been the titur werewolf in that, but I had no idea what his name was or anything like that. Come to think of it, Man?Thing and the Bloodstone family were out there somewhere. What was the main character’s first name? Elise? Elizabeth? I couldn’t even really picture her well. The actress had looked a bit too simir to Jessica to make a solid impression in my mind. As for vampires, I knew that there’d been a Bde movie in production, though it had been a ways off with no trailer or any other details apart from the actor attached to it.

  “Werewolf—singur—I can confirm. I don’t really know anything about him, though. There might be more, or he might be unique. I can honestly say that I have reason to believe that vampires are real as well but, again, no idea how common they might be.”

  “Red…”

  And the movies were based on the comics. I’d never been a comics fan, but I still knew that that meant… I licked my lips nervously, rubbing at one arm with my hand. “There’s actually a nonzero chance that literally Dracu might be real and it’s not really possible for me to expin why I might think that in any way that would make sense.”

  Tony was visibly struggling with this information. “I hate everything about that sentence,” he said after a moment.

  “Sorry,” I said, pulling a face again. “Let’s just pretend I didn’t say anything and go check out the dragon.”

  We made our way to the central chamber of the building. In front of us, a massive, vertical shaft plunged deep into the earth, illuminated by yellow and orange work lights. It was maybe ten metres square—a gaping, cavernous hole in the ground, with scaffolding over it holding a steel, cage-like elevator suspended over the empty space. There was something about it that gave the impression of an abandoned mineshaft, or perhaps something ancient that had been carved out with modern reinforcements.

  “Hey, so, I’m not an expert on active excavation and construction sites, but shouldn’t we be wearing, like, hard hats or something? Hi-vis vests? Steel-capped boots?” I asked. I knew I didn’t really need anything like that, but, on the other hand, I did think that I’d look really cute decked out in safety gear. I could snap a pic holding a shovel or something and send it to Nat. It’d probably make her smile.

  “We’ll be fine,” Tony said. “We’re both pretty hardheaded as it is. C’mon.”

  He gestured toward the elevator, but my eyes lit up and I scurried off to one side. There were some tools propped up against the wall and I picked up an honest-to-god pickaxe, the wooden handle rough in my hand. I hadn’t really expected to see anything like this here—I figured Stark Industries’ excavations would involve, like, ser mining drills or something. I felt a twinge of nostalgia as I weighed the pickaxe in my hand, thinking about the hours and hours of my other life that I’d spent swinging one in Minecraft.

  “You coming or what?” Tony asked dubiously.

  I turned to gre at him, clutching the pickaxe to my chest protectively. He rolled his eyes, gesturing to the elevator again.

  We stepped on and he activated it, locking us in the cage as it was lowered into the hole by the gentle hum of machinery. As we were carried deep into the bowels of the earth, the air changed. It felt heavy, somehow. Charged with power. I gnced at Tony, but, if he felt it, he didn’t give any outward indication.

  I ran my tongue along my teeth, sucking in a bit of air noisily between them as I opened my magical senses to my surroundings a bit more—there was a raw edge to it that vaguely reminded me of the way cosmic energy felt when I channelled it from the Mind Stone. Absently, I touched the pendant at my neck with a finger, reassuring myself it was still there.

  “Everything okay?” Tony asked, catching my eye. His voice echoed hollowly in the vertical shaft.

  With the acoustics and the pickaxe in my hand, I just couldn’t help myself. “Down and down into the deep, who knows what we’ll find beneath? Diamonds, rubies, gold and more; hidden in the mountain store,” I sang. Tony blinked, his brow furrowing as I lifted the pickaxe dramatically and started to sway slightly from side to side in time to the lyrics. “Born underground! Suckled from a teat of stone. Raised in the dark! The safety of our mountain home. Skin made of iron, steel in our bones—” I turned more fully toward Tony, my eyes gleaming, a grin on my face. “To dig and dig makes us free, come on, brothers, sing with me!” I paused and tilted my head, as though I was waiting for him to join me for the chorus.

  Tony let out another short, sharp sigh. “Red…” There was an exasperated edge to his voice.

  Eh, whatever. He was honestly lucky that I’d managed to make it this long without doing something to annoy him. As the elevator reached the bottom and the steel mesh doors slid open, I raised my voice and sang as loud as I could as I strode forward into the excavation proper, hefting the pickaxe over my shoulder. “I am a dwarf and I’m digging a hole! Diggy diggy hole, diggy diggy… Oh.” I trailed off and came to a stop almost immediately, feeling a small spike of disappointment. “I’d forgotten all about this.”

  To be fair to myself, most of the Defenders series had been extremely forgettable and I’d only seen it the one time, what, six or seven years ago? I cast my eyes thoughtfully over the unexpected barrier to our progress. Not too far from the elevator was a massive, smooth wall of stone—at least a dozen meters long before it disappeared into the bare rock of the cavern. The wall’s surface was engraved with lines of writing in a nguage I didn’t know, the lines thick and precise. It looked a little like Arabic, but didn’t match anything I knew off-hand.

  Tony stepped forward, his phone in his hand. He pointed it at the wall and holographic light pyed over the surface, highlighting the characters. “We haven’t been able to get past it—the surrounding rock is as tough as solid steel. Thought it was better to call you in before we hit it too hard. Do you know what it is?”

  “Magic wall,” I said unhelpfully, letting my arm fall and the head of the pickaxe thunk hollowly against the rough-hewn stone at our feet. Letting go of the handle, I left it sitting there as I stepped forward, scanning the lines of writing, looking for something that I might recognise. “Do you know what nguage this is?”

  “No idea,” Tony said, a little bit of testiness entering his tone. “I thought you might be able to tell me. It looks reted to Sanskrit and Chinese but it isn’t a match for either—there aren’t any records of any nguage quite like this in any database on Earth.”

  “Because it’s not from Earth,” I said quietly. My guess was that Kamar-taj would probably have some records of this sort of thing—maybe they’d even have had contact with the Seven Heavenly Cities before—but it made sense that there wouldn’t really be any other easily-accessible historical records.

  “It’s from the same pce as the interdimensional ninja, right?” Tony asked. “K’un-Lun, you called it?”

  “The Hand needed the Iron Fist to break this down so they could access the dragon bones,” I recalled as I walked along the wall, tracing the length of it with my eyes. This was annoying. I was pretty sure that Danny Rand was months away, at least, from returning to New York. Could I portal to K’un-Lun? I could try, but I was guessing probably not. Sling rings were designed to let sorcerers navigate between local dimensions, but, if it was as simple as getting a sorcerer to open a gateway for them, it wouldn’t have taken the Hand literally thousands of years to manage to make their return. K’un?Lun was probably warded from magical entry, somehow.

  “And what’s the Iron Fist?”

  “Not just ‘what’, ‘who’,” I corrected him, still thinking things through.

  The wall might specifically need the Iron Fist to break it down—maybe the power’s specific chi signature acted like a key of some sort—but, if we extended the metaphor… locks could be picked. We’d seen that the Hand had access to witches, but, even so, they didn’t have access to anywhere near the same level of magical potential that I could bring to the table. Maybe I could pick this apart myself, without waiting for Danny.

  “I really don’t like it when you do that,” Tony said, sounding a little exasperated.

  I turned to him, frowning a little as the sharpness in his tone snapped me out of my thoughts. “When I do what?”

  “That.” He waved his hand in my direction to emphasise his point. “When it’s really obvious that you know something, but are thinking ‘Hm, should I bother to tell Tony?’.”

  I made a face. I mean, I did do that sometimes, but I wasn’t doing it now. “That’s not—”

  He cut me off, which annoyed me even more. “You don’t like it when I keep you out of the loop on things, but you still keep all your cards to yourself. I’m trying to work with you here, and you’re still just—”

  “Tony,” I barked, a warning in my tone as my hands clenched into fists at my sides. “If you could just shut your mouth for a second?”

  He gred at me, but stopped talking.

  I took a deep breath, fighting to loosen the tight ball of anger in my chest. I was still feeling a bit irritable after yesterday’s confrontation with Ross, and I really didn’t need Tony fucking Stark having a go at me as well.

  “The Iron Fist is a warrior, the guardian and protector of K’un-Lun. They have a mystical power passed down through generations—also called the Iron Fist—which lets them channel their chi into their hands and strike with incredible force.” I’d been pnning on telling the Avengers about all this at some stage anyway. I felt retively confident that the information wouldn’t cause any real problems. “The current Iron Fist is Danny Rand—that’s ‘Rand’ as in ‘Rand Enterprises’.”

  Tony thought about that for a moment. “I’ve met the Rand CEO a couple of times. Ward Meachum. I think I remember something about Rand and his family dying in a pne crash ages ago?”

  “Harold Meachum—Ward’s dad—and Rand were business partners. Harold fell in with the Hand.” Actually, now that I was thinking about him, the resurrected Harold Meachum could potentially be a problem. He was unstable and, with Gao gone, he’d be a loose cannon. Not an urgent or overly dangerous threat, but something I should think about acting on when I had a spare moment. Maybe I could fix whatever the Hand’s resurrection magic had done to his head? I set aside that thought for now. “He had Rand and his family killed, but Danny survived the crash. He was found and taken in by K’un-Lun. Sometime next year, he’ll return to New York to reconnect with Ward and Joy Meachum. They were childhood friends. They don’t know their father had Rand killed, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Huh.” He didn’t have anything else to say to that and seemed appropriately mollified by the information I’d shared.

  I turned back to the wall, summoning chaos magic to my hands before reaching forward and brushing the smooth stone with my fingertips. Huh. I had sort of been expecting magic, but the power infusing the stone felt different to anything I’d touched before. My closest comparison point was cosmic energy, actually, more than magic—it wasn’t exactly the same, but it felt reted somehow. Was this chi? Life energy?

  Feeling it out, I cast my magical senses deeper, exploring the extent of the infusion of power. It sunk deeply into the solid rock on all sides, covering a vast area. That made sense; it was probably forming a shell or cocoon around the dragon skeleton, to stop anyone from tunnelling around. The wall itself was more like a keystone or lock for the… whatever this was. It wasn’t particurly like a magical enchantment, nor was it like a construct of cosmic energy. Instead, it felt more like raw power had been poured into the stone and was somehow reinforcing its nature—rock was solid, and that solidity had been ramped up somehow on what felt like a basic, fundamental level.

  Still, it felt enough like cosmic energy that I was pretty sure I could get a handle on maniputing it. I just needed to work out what the best way to approach this was. Red wisps of energy spread along the surface of the wall as I concentrated, tracing the contours of the chi infusion and pooling in the carved writings.

  “I should be able to disperse the energy,” I said aloud. “Just gotta go slow and careful.” As I said the words, I tried to press my magic into what I thought was a seam or join in the infusion, trying to get some leverage that I might be able to use to—

  Suddenly, there was a loud rumble of protest and the ground bucked beneath my feet, hard enough that I stumbled and fell forward, banging my knees on the carved wall. The entire excavation shook as an earthquake ripped through the area, the ceiling cracking armingly and showering Tony and me with a cascade of rocks and dust—my heart leapt into my throat for a moment and I flung up a hand, creating and then reinforcing a telekinetic shield over our heads. For a brief, panicky moment I thought the whole pce was going to colpse and we’d be buried alive.

  I’d gotten as far as managing to get my ring onto my fingers as the tremor subsided. When it didn’t seem like we were at risk of imminent crushing death, I stopped and straightened up, looking over to check on Tony.

  He’d just finished scrambling back to his feet and was staring at me angrily, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps. “You call that slow and careful?”

  “Uh, sorry,” I said. “I haven’t encountered anything exactly like this before, but I thought—”

  “You thought you’d poke at it and see what happened, even though you’ve got no idea what you’re doing,” he snapped, cutting me off. I bit my tongue, trying not to yell back at him as he turned away from me and addressed the open air. “FRIDAY, what the hell was that?” As he spoke, he lifted his phone, the dispy immediately lighting up. With a flick of his wrist, a small, blue-tinged hologram of some kind appeared above it. Some kind of topographic or structural scan? He tilted his head as the AI responded in his ear, then gnced in my direction again, still looking pissed off. “Okay, well, your little experiment just hit downtown with a four point six on the Ritcher scale. Mind backing away from the magic wall now, please?”

  I winced, even though I really wasn’t happy with how he was talking to me. “Look, I didn’t realise how sensitive it was going to be,” I said, trying to keep my tone restrained and not snap back at him.

  I honestly did think I could pick this apart, given a bit more time, even knowing now how careful I needed to be. I had the level of fine control that I’d need to do something like this. The only complicating factor was that, with the way the infusion of chi energy seemed to be tied into the bedrock, it was a little like pying a game of Operation. I just needed to spend a bit more time examining it more fully, pnning my approach, before I made another attempt.

  “I can deal with this,” I continued. “I just need to—”

  “This was a mistake,” he said with a derisive huff, shaking his head. “Don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Will you stop interrupting me?” I snapped at him, anger starting to rise in my chest.

  Tony's gre didn’t soften. “I brought you down here because I thought you could help—not so you could rip the goddamn city in half.”

  I folded my arms tightly, jaw clenched. “Well, maybe if you’d just listen instead of jumping to conclusions every five seconds—”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he snapped, cutting me off again. “Was I—”

  “Tony,” I snarled at him, eddies of red magic starting to coalesce around my hands as I cut him off right back. I thrust up a hand to point a finger at my face. “Look at me. Look at me! Shut. The fuck. Up. Shut all the way the fuck up until you reach the top of shut fuck mountain, where there are no more fuck ups to shut.”

  He cmped his jaw shut for a moment, looking absolutely furious. “You know, I was actually starting to think we were bonding a little bit today,” he ground out. “I didn’t like it.”

  I made an incomprehensible noise of anger in the back of my throat and gestured with my hands, rapidly spinning up a portal. Tony went to say something else—to get in one final st word, no doubt—as I stepped through, but I was so angry I didn’t even really hear him. The portal snapped shut behind me an instant ter, leaving me in the entryway of Nat’s apartment.

  I paced back and forth for a moment, fingers flexing as I clenched my hands into fists and then opened them again several times, trying to calm down a little bit. A thought suddenly occurred to me and I stopped: Had the earthquake damaged the elevator? If it had, I might’ve just left Tony stranded down there.

  After a moment, I sniffed. Whatever. He had reception, at least, otherwise he’d not have gotten that report from FRIDAY so quickly, so if he was stuck he could call for help. Maybe being stranded three hundred feet below the earth for an hour or so would give him time to reflect on what a fucking asshole he was.

  God, I needed a distraction. I thrust my hand into my pocket and pulled out my phone, checking the time. Nat had said she’d message me tonight, but that was going to be at least eight hours or so away. I was pretty sure that Pietro and Yelena were out doing stuff together today, and I didn’t think they’d be overly happy with me interrupting. What about…?

  I did a quick time zone calcution in my head. It was te there—did Eternals need to sleep? I couldn’t remember, but hopefully they wouldn’t be too annoyed at another sudden, unannounced drop-in appearance of their friendly neighbourhood Wanda. Gilgamesh and Thena had both said that they still owed me one, after all, and I really fucking needed a proper drink after all the bullshit I’d been dealing with.

  Spinning up another portal, I stepped halfway across the pnet.