It was only when he'd been standing in front of the door of the suite that Jarvis had realized he didn't have the card key for it – the clerk on Monday morning had given them two, but Mr. Stark had kept both because Jarvis had no wallet. He returned to the elevator, hoping somebody at the concierge desk could be persuaded to issue him a replacement. Surely they would accept Mr. Stark's credit card number as proof that he was indeed staying in the room.

When the elevator doors opened back in the lobby, however, Miss Windham ran right into him, shoving him against the wall and then quickly pounding on the 'door close' button. Jarvis was both surprised and angry. What in the world did she think she was doing now?

"Miss Windham?" he asked.

"Mr. Jarvis." She turned around and grabbed his jacket. "You have to help me!"

Her eyes were wide and terrified, but part of Jarvis was suspicious – everything she'd said to him so far had been merely part of her game, so why should now be any different? He reached to pull his clothing out of her grasp.

Before he could actually speak to her, however, a long arm in a grey suit jacket reached into the elevator. The doors, half-shut, slid open again to admit the third person, and Mr. Huang stepped inside. With his right hand in his blazer pocket, he pressed the button for the second floor.

"We will leave through the parking garage, Miss Windham," he said calmly. "There is a car waiting there that will take you to a safe place. I'm afraid you're going to have to come with us now as well, Dr. Jarvis," he added. "I'm armed, and I don't want to cause an incident. Do you understand?"

Jarvis found his eyes drawn to Mr. Huang's hand in his pocket – he was clearly making a fist around some solid object. Through the cloth it was impossible to tell what this was, but Mr. Huang had definitely implied a firearm.

Under normal circumstances that wouldn't have mattered a bit to Jarvis, but the last few days had not been normal, and he felt as if he'd been dropped into ice-cold water as he realized that he was capable of dying. Those organs inside him... those could fail. A single bullet was enough to cause a human body catastrophic damage, and unlike any machine, it could not be repaired or restarted if it shut down. That was one of the things that made Mr. Stark's recklessness so very trying – and now it could happen to Jarvis. He could die.

Jarvis had never thought he'd last forever. Someday Mr. Stark would come up with something better to replace him, and he would no longer be needed except perhaps as a source of parts. At the very least he'd eventually have been repaired and upgraded so many times that, like the workshop robots, he would no longer be the same entity except perhaps by 'Washington's Axe' standards. That had always been a fact of JARVIS' life and while he didn't particularly like it, he was prepared to deal with it when it came. But the idea of dying, of life being snatched away while he still had things he could do... that was very different.

The doors opened on the second floor, and Mr. Huang waved them out of the elevator. "I'm afraid we'll have to blindfold you," he said. "We don't want you to see where we're going."

"How long can we expect to be your guests?" asked Jarvis. "I have a sort of appointment that I need to keep."

"Not long, Dr. Jarvis." Mr. Huang checked his watch. "You should be on your way by noon tomorrow at the latest."

There was something deeply ominous about those words – and Jarvis' stomach sank as he recalled once again Dr. Strange's mysterious command: where Stark is. Something bad was going to happen between now and noon on Thursday, and because Jarvis had been foolish enough to let Miss Windham affect him, he was not going to be where Stark is when the time came.

Tony had gone looking for Jarvis. After a few seconds of staring, stunned, at the closed stairwell door, he'd remembered the waiting elevator and gone down to the main floor, hoping to meet Jarvis at the bottom of the stairs. There, he decided, he would ask exactly how long Jarvis had been angry at him for. Had it just been the past couple of days? Or had that scolding actually been brewing for years, and this was just the first time Jarvis had actually been able to deliver it? Tony wasn't sure which possibility troubled him more.

Tony Stark knew for a fact that he was an intelligent person, brilliant even, but since his misadventure in Afghanistan he'd begun to come to terms with the fact that his brilliance was rather focused. If the task before him involved engineering, physics, mathematics, or programming, he was a genius. If, on the other hand, people figured into it in more than a superficial crowd-pleasing sort of way, it was often up to either Pepper or Rhodey to smack him upside the head and point out the bleeding obvious.

He wasn't sure if people were involved now. That was the whole problem.

He waited at the foot of the stairs for nearly twenty minutes, but Jarvis did not reappear. Eventually Tony began to worry that he'd gotten turned around and was in the wrong stairwell. He thought about it a moment and decided it couldn't be. He distinctly remembered that it had been the stairs to the right of the elevators – but he checked the other stairwell just to make sure, and then asked several people in the lobby if they'd seen anyone answering Jarvis' description. Nobody had.

Maybe, he thought, Jarvis hadn't come down to the main floor at all. Maybe he'd wandered off and gotten lost – or was hiding – somewhere in the building. Tony tried dialling the number for the cell phone he'd given Jarvis, but it went straight to voicemail. Before the slide show about the seismology project, Tony had asked everybody in the room to turn their phones off. Jarvis had apparently never turned his back on.

Getting worried now, Tony went to the security desk. Happy was there, telling a woman off for eating donuts on the job. Tony had never believed in begrudging anyone a donut, so he didn't feel at all bad about barging in.

"Happy," he said. "Hey, I need some help with something. I've lost Jarvis."

"I know," Happy said. "It was on the news. Monday morning, right?"

"No, that's not what I meant." Tony helped himself to a donut, then took the box from Happy and handed it back to its owner. "Here, take a break," he told her. "Enjoy your snack." He shooed her away. "Happy, I've got a story to tell you, and I am not drunk, and I am not crazy – you can ask Pepper."

"She'd be the expert," said Happy. "What's going on?"

"Okay," Tony began, "I think we did tell you that on Sunday night, Pepper and I had a wizard over for dinner..."

Tony wasn't sure that Happy actually believed the story, but he did agree to page Jarvis over the PA. The donut woman was summoned back to the desk to do so.

"Could Dr. Jarvis please report to building security?" she asked, her voice booming through the speakers. "Mr. Stark would like to speak to you. Dr. Jarvis, please report to security."

More time passed, and Jarvis did not appear. Tony checked both stairwells again, shouting Jarvis' name into them and listening to it echo back, but there was no answer. He tried the cell phone, and when it directed him back to voicemail, he returned to the security desk. Happy had wandered off, but the donut woman was still there, and Tony had her page again, trying a different tactic.

"Could anyone who has seen Dr. Jarvis please report to building security? Dr. Jarvis is around six foot two, red hair, speaks with a British accent and is wearing a navy blue suit. Anyone who has seen Dr. Jarvis, please report to building security."

A minute later, Happy came hurrying back. "You mean that was him?" he asked.

"What?" Tony looked around. "Who was him?"

"The guy in the east stairwell!" Happy leaned on the counter and huffed – he was no longer in the kind of shape he'd been as a young man, and seemed to have run some distance. "I thought he was having a cigarette, so I told him not to smoke in there, but he said he was having an existential crisis."

"What?" Tony repeated. "What does that mean?" It didn't sound like something a computer ought to be capable of, and that made him all the more worried.

"I didn't like to ask him," Happy confessed. "When I checked a few minutes later, he was gone. I thought he was familiar. It was the voice that got me, but at the time..."

"Right, thanks," said Tony. "Send somebody to go check the east stairwell again, would you?"

Happy went and looked himself, but didn't find Jarvis. Tony and him checked the west side, too, just in case. There they interrupted two employees in the midst of things they should not have been doing on company time – but there was no sign of Jarvis.

During Tony's third attempt to call Jarvis' cell phone, Pepper arrived. "What happened?" she asked. "Happy said you lost Jarvis?"

"Well, I didn't really lose him," said Tony, "I just can't find him."

Pepper didn't understand the difference.

"We had an argument," Tony explained.

"I didn't know he argued with you," said Pepper. "I thought it was more banter."

"That's what it's supposed to be!" Tony said. "But we had an argument and he went off angry, and now I can't find him."

"What did you argue about?" Pepper wanted to know.

"Sushi."

"Sushi?"

"Well, it wasn't really about sushi," said Tony. "Remember when you were upset with me because I tried to give you strawberries without knowing that you were allergic? But it wasn't really about the strawberries, it was more about... uh..." he rubbed the back of his neck, trying to think how to phrase it.

"About you being an irresponsible ass and leaving me to do damage control?" Pepper suggested.

"Yes, that," said Tony. "This wasn't about sushi, it was about him giving me advice and me not listening to it. And I don't know if this is something Dr. Strange did to him, or if he's sort of been a real person this whole time and I just never noticed."

Which was worse, really? Tony had created JARVIS out of a set of learning algorithms he'd come up with at MIT. He'd improved and added to the software over the years, found all kinds of uses for it, gotten into the habit of bickering with it like they were an old married couple... but had never, at any point, thought of it as anything but a machine. JARVIS was more complex than something like Dummy, sure, but still just a computer. Could he have become truly sentient at some point, or was it Dr. Strange's magic that had given him real life?

Either way, Tony felt like a dick. He sat down in one of the white armchairs in the lobby, and gave Pepper a pleading look.

She thought for a moment. "Do you think he left the building?"

"I don't know," Tony said. "I don't know what he'd do. He probably knows the city. I had maps and stuff on his hard drive. He might go anywhere."

"Yes, but he'd have to have a reason to go wherever he went." Pepper sat down next to Tony and pursed her lips. "Would he go look for Captain Rogers, do you think?"

Tony's hopes leapt. "Maybe." Steve was the only other person Jarvis had hung around much since this began – him and Dido Windham, but there was no way Jarvis would have gone looking for her. "I'll call him." He pulled his phone back out and dialled Steve's number, but his optimism was quickly dashed. Steve had been hanging out in Santa Monica most of the morning, and hadn't heard from Jarvis. Tony thanked him and hung up.

"He hasn't talked to a lot of people besides me and Steve," said Tony. "He wouldn't look for Dido, and I doubt he'd want to find Rob from the Pier, either. He couldn't go back to the house because there wouldn't be any point, and he couldn't go back to the hotel because he doesn't have a key to the room." He pushed his fingers into his hair. "I don't know, Pep. I just don't know."

When Jarvis fixed the server, Tony had felt as if he'd just watched his son win a spelling bee – now he felt as if that son were lost and wandering in a big city with nobody to look after him. Jarvis might look like an adult, but he'd never had to deal with things like people and traffic. Anything might happen to him if he were on his own. He could be in an accident. He could be mugged. He could be murdered.

"Mr. Stark?"

Tony turned in his seat – it was the pink-haired tech from the server room. "Yes?" he asked.

"I just heard you were looking for your friend," she said. "I saw him on my lunch break. I was coming out of the Vietnamese place across the street, and I noticed him getting into a cab."

Tony stood up. "You're sure it was him?"

"Pretty sure," she said. "It was one of the green and white cabs, if that helps."

"Thanks! Pepper, give this woman a raise." He pulled out his phone again. "What's the number for the company with the green and white cabs?"

Pepper knew it – of course she did, Pepper knew everything. After some arguing with the cab company's answering service over issues of privacy and a number of other things, Tony was put in touch with the driver who'd picked up Jarvis and taken him to the hotel in Malibu. The man remembered him quite well: apparently there'd been some difficulty over the fare, which had been resolved when a woman in a red suit had offered to pay it in cash.

Tony had a bad feeling about that. Dido Windham wanted something from Jarvis, and Tony no longer felt confident that she couldn't get it.

Pepper took his hand as he ended the call. "Tony," she said, "why are you still here?"

"I thought I was trying to be more responsible today," he replied. That was the reason sushi had been an issue in the first place: because changing his plans and leaving work would have been irresponsible.

She shook her head, but she was smiling as she did. "You had a fight with your friend and he stormed off," she said. "The responsible thing to do is to go after him and talk it out."

"Are you sure?" asked Tony. After all, she was the one who'd wanted him to come in to work. Jarvis' comment from that morning – your record of keeping your promises to her for more than half a day at a time is not very good – stung all the more now that Tony thought he might have meant it.

"Yes, I'm sure," she said. "I'll take care of things here, and you go take care of this."

He squeezed her fingers. "Thanks, Pepper. I'll come back as soon as I've found him, okay?"

"Okay." She kissed his cheek.

Tony didn't think it would be hard to find Jarvis at the hotel. There were only two places Tony could imagine him being: either he'd managed to convince the hotel staff to issue him a key, in which case he'd be in the room – or he hadn't, which would probably leave him where he'd been last night, sitting outside the door and nodding off to sleep out of boredom. When he found him, Tony would shake him awake and tell him to turn his cell phone back on. Then they could grab a bite to eat, and talk about this properly.

An unpleasant surprise was waiting for Tony in the hotel parking lot: several police cars were parked in front of the building, one of them with red and blue lights still flashing, and an ambulance. Tony's brain immediately presented him with a set of horrible possibilities, mostly in the form of imagined newspaper headlines about the unidentified man who'd been found dead in a Malibu hotel. He told himself firmly that he was just being paranoid. The police presence probably had nothing to do with Jarvis.

There was certainly no sign of a murder or accident – the only person the paramedics were taking any interest in was a man in a grey suit, who was sitting on a curb with a bag of ice held against his head. The police didn't seem to be doing anything besides asking questions. Even so, a sizable crowd had gathered to watch and speculate, and Tony had to squirm his way through in order to reach the doors. Inside, waitresses and bellhops were hanging around the front windows in order to see what was going on outside. There was only one person at the check-in desk – Sarah, the clerk who'd tried to have Tony and Jarvis thrown out on Monday.

"Afternoon," said Tony amiably, leaning on the marble countertop. "Remember me?"

She looked up at him, and the colour drained from her face. "Yes, Mr. Stark," she squeaked.

"My friend didn't happen to stop by here earlier to ask for a second key, did he?" If Jarvis had spoken to this same woman, she probably would have given it to him, no questions asked. "I don't know if you'd have recognized him," he added jokingly. "He would have had clothes on this time – at least, I hope he did."

The woman shook her head hard, her ponytail bouncing. "I didn't see him!"

Then he was probably upstairs. "Thanks," Tony said to her. He glanced over his shoulder at the crowd outside, then leaned over the desk and added, "hey, do you know what's going on with all the cops out front?"

"I think somebody was kidnapped," Sarah said uncertainly. "Somebody came to the desk and reported seeing a woman get chased into an elevator, so Mr. Velasquez called the police. That's all I know."

Tony breathed out, relieved, and sternly informed his hindbrain that he'd told it so: the incident was nothing to do with him or Jarvis. He thanked the clerk a second time, and turned to head for the elevators.

"STARK!" roared a voice.

Tony jumped. For a moment he tried to convince himself that he had to be hearing things – but no, when he turned around, there was Balthazar Windham storming towards him.

The first thing most people noticed about Windham was his height: at five foot five, he was noticeably shorter than his daughter. The second thing they noticed was that his height was actually irrelevant: he was built like a brick wall, despite being nearly seventy. It made him a remarkably intimidating man, even when he only came up to Tony's nose.

"Stark!" he repeated, marching up. Tony quickly stood up straight in order to be as tall as possible. "What did you do with her?"

"What?" asked Tony. "With who?"

"You know who!" snarled Windham.

Tony blinked at him. "Voldemort?"

Windham wasn't amused. "Where is Dido, Stark?"

"How the hell am I supposed to know? I don't have her. I don't want her. Why would..." Tony cut himself off as something connected. Police out front. A woman being chased. "Is she missing?"

"I've been trying to get in touch with her since I landed," said Windham. "I knew it! I knew when she called me last night that she was in danger! And now I arrive and they tell me the last anyone saw of a girl in a red suit, she was being forced into a car by three men in the parking garage! Where is she, Stark? I know you're behind this! You and your robot!"

"What?" That seemed to be Tony's favourite word today. "What robot? I've got a lot of robots."

"The one who's been fucking my daughter!" Windham snarled.

Tony didn't like repeating himself, but after a moment spent convincing himself that he really had just heard what he thought he'd heard, that merited a third and even more emphatic, "What? Listen," he said. "There are two things I will absolutely not build a robot to do, and the other one is kill people." Good lord. He was going to have to do some good, hard drinking to scrub his brain of the mental image of Dido... compromising... some of his lab equi...

Lab equipment.

Lab equipment.

"Wait," said Tony. "You don't mean..." It couldn't be. Dido wouldn't. And Jarvis couldn't. Well... actually he probably could. There was no reason why he shouldn't be physically capable. But even if they did, how would Balthazar Windham have known about it? Did Dido tell him stuff like that? Who shared that sort of thing with their father? And where would Windham get the idea that Jarvis was a robot to begin with?

"Yes," Windham said. "That robot."

"He's not a robot," Tony said. "It's kind of a story and nobody seems to believe me when I tell it."

"Where is he, Stark? Where is it?"

"I actually don't know. I was just looking for him right now." Tony gulped – if Dido and Jarvis were both missing, did that mean they'd gone off somewhere together to... fondue? He didn't think he could handle that. "I'll tell you what," he said. "I'll get back to you when I find him, okay? Okay."

Windham's scowl deepened, and for a moment it looked as if he weren't going to let Tony leave – but then, mercifully, his phone rang. With a sideways glare at Tony, he pulled it out to answer it, and Tony seized the opportunity and fled.

He made it up to the top floor without being further accosted, but Jarvis wasn't waiting in the hallway. Maybe he'd had a key after all, and Tony had just forgotten about it. Tony let himself into the suite, only to find that it, too, was empty. He checked every room and called Jarvis' name, but there was no sign of him.

Tony stood in the middle of the room and looked left and right, as if expecting to find that Jarvis had been there all along and he'd just somehow missed him. He'd spent the last couple of days half-ignoring the whole Jarvis situation because he didn't want to admit, even to himself, how it was preying on him. It was something he was powerless to do anything about, and Tony did not like feeling powerless. He was one of the richest men in the world, not to mention a goddamn superhero – if he had a problem he could usually either buy it off or blow it up. Tony didn't like magic because he had no control over it. And he definitely didn't like when the results of that magic vanished on him, just when he'd realized he needed to deal with them.

Maybe, he thought suddenly, Jarvis hadn't even come upstairs. Maybe he was still on the ground floor among the rubberneckers, and Tony had simply missed him in the crowd. Maybe he was even the one who'd reported seeing Dido chased into the elevator, and the police were questioning him.

Tony was halfway out the suite door again when his cell phone rang.

If he'd had his usual phone, the one he'd designed and programmed himself, it would have told as a matter of course not only who was on the line, but where they were – it automatically triangulated off the nearest cell towers to trace every call it received. But that was the phone that wouldn't run if JARVIS was offline. With this off-the-shelf model, all that came up was the caller's number. That in itself, however, was enough to make Tony shut his eyes and sigh in relief: it was the phone he'd given to Jarvis.

He sat down on the sofa and pressed the talk button. "Jarvis!" he said. "Where are you, buddy? I've been looking for you!"

But the voice that answered wasn't Jarvis'. It wasn't anybody's. Instead, he was greeted by the monotone of a speech synthesizer.

Good afternoon, Mr. Stark. We would like to discuss conditions for the return of your employee.