(Myotismon)
Pierce was a full minute into his report before Myotismon took any interest in what he carried. It was a small black drive, hanging from his fingers at his side, and Pierce had yet to offer it to anyone.
Myotismon stood at the far end of the room, where the fog ran deepest, with his cape drawn back behind him. The fog lay across the floor in slow banks, thick enough to swallow the sound of Pierce's shoes, and the room offered nowhere to sit, as it never had. Pierce stood in the middle of it with his weight even, laying out a failure one clean sentence at a time.
"My people have had this since before the launch."
Pierce raised the drive an inch and lowered it again.
"Four teams, three approaches each, and none of them got past the first layer. It doesn't run. It doesn't even fail in a way that teaches us anything. Cipher never explained a line of it to anyone, so there's no thread to pull. Nobody else ever found one."
Myotismon let that lie. The fog near the door stirred, and Pierce, who understood silence better than most men, pressed on before it could turn into a question.
"There's also the matter of the kids. The rooftop went wrong, and the warehouse went worse. Twice now they've walked away from people I sent."
Myotismon gave no outward reaction. The fog at Pierce's feet climbed to his shins instead, thick and slow, and Pierce shifted his weight, the only tell he ever allowed himself.
"One more item. Fury opened the operation file tonight, under his own credentials."
"At twenty past the hour. He read it twice, and then he closed it."
Pierce stopped. The fog at his shins sank back to the floor, and he did not ask how Myotismon knew.
"Then you know how close he is."
Pierce squared himself to the room, and for the first time that night he spoke faster than he needed to.
"I've sat across a table from Nick Fury for years. He doesn't drop a thread once he's pulled it. Give him a week and he'll have a name, and it won't stop at Sitwell's. Let me end it now, while half his own people still call him paranoid."
"You're asking me to hurry, Mr. Pierce."
"I'm asking you to be practical."
"I remember explaining the difference between the two."
The fog rose an inch around Pierce's knees and stayed there, and Pierce offered no more argument.
"Let him look. A dead director is a loud thing. The Council would come, then the press, then every agency that ever wanted a reason to open its own books, and I'd have the whole building awake before I'm ready for it. He's searching a house you built. A man in that position finds the rooms you left him."
Humans with files were common. Myotismon had watched a great many of them come and go, and each had been sure the file would matter. Fury was one more. The boy was another matter, because the boy's work carried a shape that belonged somewhere else, and that shape was the only reason Myotismon had bothered with any of this.
A muscle worked in Pierce's jaw, and he let the argument drop.
"Understood."
The fog along the floor slid away from Pierce and banked against the door, and nobody had knocked yet.
"Stay, Mr. Pierce. The one who can read that drive has arrived."
"I wasn't told anyone was coming."
"No."
The door opened without a sound, and the fog drew aside for the man on the other side of it. Loki was still a prince of Asgard on paper, and he carried himself like one. His eyes were green, no spear filled his hands, and he crossed the room as though he had walked it on many nights before.
"Mr. Pierce."
Loki inclined his head with a courtesy polished to a point.
"You look tired. Mortals always do, this late."
"It's been a long week."
"So I have heard. Your doors are thinner than they appear. The one-eyed ones always see more than one would like, and I would keep that in mind."
Pierce's gaze cut to Myotismon, and Myotismon let both remarks pass without an answer.
Loki turned a slow half circle in the fog, taking in the bare floor and the bare walls.
"You have still not furnished this room."
"Chairs are for those who mean to stay."
"Even the cells beneath Asgard have benches."
"Then your jailers were kinder than I am."
Loki's mouth thinned, though his face stayed pleasant.
"I was told a seat would be provided."
"When the room is ready for one."
"And is it ready?"
Myotismon offered no reply.
Loki turned one hand palm up, and a chair stood behind him, high-backed and dark, the kind that belonged in a hall hung with banners. He sat, laid his forearms along the arms of it, and waited.
Myotismon allowed the chair to remain. The fog drifted toward its legs across the floor.
"You found it, then."
"I said I would."
Myotismon put out a hand, and Pierce, after a pause he would have denied, set the drive in it. Myotismon carried it across the fog and placed it in Loki's palm. Pierce's hand stayed half raised after the drive left it, then dropped to his side.
Loki did not plug the drive into anything. He balanced it flat on his palm, and green light rose off the casing in thin threads and wound down between his fingers, and the fog around the chair stilled where it touched them. For a while amusement stayed on his face. Then the threads slowed, and his thumb stopped moving along the edge of the drive, and the amusement left him a line at a time.
"Someone built a doorframe and never hung the door."
Pierce kept very still. Myotismon watched Loki's face and paid no attention to the light.
"It is meant to keep a place open, and the place is not here. Everything in it points elsewhere, and it points at nothing I know."
"What does it need?"
"A key, and a hand strong enough to turn it. There is one on this realm, as it happens."
Loki did not say where. He was enjoying not saying, and it showed. Myotismon did not ask twice.
"The Tesseract."
Loki's brows rose.
"A mortal who knows the name. How refreshing."
"SHIELD has it."
Myotismon offered his open palm. Loki took a moment longer than the gesture required before he gave the drive back, and nobody in the room remarked on the delay.
"And the boy who built it? I trust he remains in one piece."
Loki studied his own fingers as he spoke.
"The boy has uses yet."
"Yes. I imagine he does."
Myotismon knew the sound of hunger. Loki wore it well, and Myotismon found that he despised it anyway.
By now the fog had reached the chair, and it had not curled around the legs as it had around Pierce's shoes. It ran through them unbroken and pooled on the far side. The chair was never there. Whatever part of Loki sat in it, that part was not all of him, and never had been. Myotismon filed the fact away and kept it to himself.
The drive lay cool in his palm. A strip of masking tape ran across its casing, and on the tape, in blue ballpoint, someone had written svc-archive-07.
***
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