Explaining all that has transpired since our last escapade together takes the better part of six hours. Good Loki is careful to praise Thor's endeavors which Bad Loki would rather sneer at, but with Romanova listening I can't so much as angle my words away from bold heroism toward fool-hearty oblivious arrogant assery, which is obviously the correct interpretation. She would notice. Thor paces back and forth while I describe my meeting with his father on Svartalfheim and my failed efforts to keep Asgard from imploding. I restate that I tried to forge an alliance to preemptively counteract Thanos's effort to win realms to his cause.

Thor mutters confirmation of all this. I've made certain not to say anything that he could leap on to contradict, which is important.

If I am brought back to trial on Vanaheim I will be executed; there is no way around that. Whether I'm helpful or not, truthfully the inescapable fact that I have impersonated the High-King without his permission during wartime is all the justification the Aesir need to have me torn limb from limb. They've been wanting a reason to destroy me for centuries, and here it is. So my plan to escape Thor and his friends after finding Smirna is two-part.

Firstly, I'm careful to accidentally let Good Loki slip just the right sigh behind words like "glorious battle" or a half-eyeroll that he doesn't quite catch in time. I have to get this part right. I have to be sure Romanova sees Good Loki's agitation without making his little tells so obvious that they look conscious, especially while he's explaining the politics behind the Elves' betrayal.

Oh, he makes Asgard look innocent, all right. For now. He doesn't tell them about Bor, and he doesn't use the word empire. The mortals have got to think they're fighting for their innocent peaceful allies against the Elves' underhanded grab for power. The complexities will come later.

Here is phase two in my escape plan: after Good Loki has proven himself to be decent fellow with a roguish streak, who fights for the greater good but hates authority, Asgard will be revealed as the totalitarian fascist regime it is. Asgard will look bad and—by extension—so will Thor. In contrast, my dislike of regulations will appear to be in the right and my opposition to the throne will make me come out favorably in their minds. Especially because, right now at the start, good Loki keeps using the honorarium Allfather when referring to Asgard's ruler. The All-Father, mortals, whose word is unquestionable law. Thor's democratic friends will defend me against their own warleader, and he'll be forced to either let me escape or lose his friendship with Midgard.

In spite of all my careful preparations, it isn't Romanova or Barton I'm worried about. Stark seems to spend the entire debriefing paying me and his warband not the least attention expect to ask detailed technical questions about interstellar and pan-dimensional travel, or make jokes about going to beat up Tolkein. Rogers doesn't like me and doesn't like that his warband is willing to trust me. He broods in the bar chair behind the others, watching me with his arms crossed, and says nothing at all. Dr. Banner is, most unhappily, absent. Otherwise, I suspect his dumb other self would be the easiest to persuade.

After this is finally done Thor insists that we feast to seal the start of our campaign. Eating together is incredibly trying because not only is the food bad but I loathe almost every person I'm forced to share a table with. However, this is how it comes to be that, if you're ever in New York and go to DeLoge Steakhouse and you look on the right-hand wall under the picture of the immensely large man who has eaten an entire 72 oz steak, you'll see a picture of me.

IN THE BEGINNING there was fire and there was ice. The fire came exploding from Muspelheim, Realm of Heat, to meet the dead ice searing out from the cold shores of Niflheim: Realm of Darkness and Mist. From this merging in the great Gap sprang forth all life in the cosmos. Yours. Mine. Thor's. The Mortals of Midgard.

Fire, and ice.

Jotunheim may be bitter ice, but Jotunheim is not like Niflheim. Jotunheim is only one world among many birthed by this Celestial Union: fire and ice, chaos and order, unmade and made. Niflheim is not a world. It is a place that exists at the edge of Nothing.

Niflheim boarders raw chaos. From Niflheim's tallest snow-capped peak one can see the light of Chaos licking above the horizon. There is no sun to warm Niflheim's fog-smothered brow, so the only illumination comes from a nearby spiral galaxy. The Fires of Chaos create a lensing effect across the galaxy's face, warping its light into a wide blurry ring. Morning rises above the mists as a heatless milky glow. Below, spreading out across the luckless realm's hostile terrain, is a frosty wasteland buried in perpetual mist and razor-edged ice crystals.

My world-gate drops us into a snowbank. I cast warming charms on our party as we struggle to claw our way out. Thor grabs my arm.

"I like not this place you have brought us to," he says. "This mist could conceal an army. If you have betrayed us—"

I conjure up a wounded scowl. "I am sorry you no longer trust me, Brother. No, I have not betrayed you."

"Your word means nothing."

"I vow it. Hear me now, Thor son of Odin: I swear an oath that I spoke true and will no more set myself as your enemy." I grasp the hand grabbing my coat sleeve, and stare him in the eye. "I swear that upon Hallormr, Halldór, and Hallveig. May the souls of the dead bear witness to my words."

Surprise melts the harsh shadows from his face. Thor searches my eyes for any glint that I am lying; that rather than professing honor for the first time in a centu—four years—I have just sworn deceit upon my own children.

I make sure to give him none.

Stark pushes between us. "Guys? I'm getting some weird readings."

"Trouble?" I demand without breaking my staring contest with Thor.

Stark casts a few spells at the shrouded heavens, mutters to himself, then says, "Is there a singularity up there?"

"It is the Gap," Thor agrees. His shoulders relax. He looks at the mortal.

"What?" Romanova brushes snow from her jumpsuit, then stares at her hands—oh, is the snow not cold? My, my. Isn't knowing a sorcerer nice?

Stark says, "There's a black hole up there. Hey, uh, Bottle-Blonde?"

I honor him with my attention.

Stark says, "Are we going to get caught in a gravitational time dilation while on this place?"

"No, some of us actually have modern technology."

Stark begins wandering in a circle, staring upward. The rest of the mortal warband spreads out to secure our pocket in the fog. Barton kicks at a suspicious air hole in the snow that turns out to be nothing, then grouches, "Does it bother anyone else that we can breathe?"

Stark casts a spell to make his eye-catching faceplate disappears in whirring machinations. Underneath, he's wearing an expression that is half deep thought and half barbed wire. "And that opens up all kinds of questions. Is the atmosphere Earth-like or are we just in an alternate dimension? Or did someone terraform everything? Also, why are my readings telling me it's seventy-two degrees outside when it looks like minus-sixty?" He falls silent as Thor rallies us forward and we push into the fog, following my memory though an ethereal sea that blots out all land and sky. The ground is tough as marble due to the Helish temperature, but rather than provide reassurance this fact makes me acrophobic. How many frozen meters slumber between the crust and whatever rock lurks below? A fissure in the ice . . . a weak snowbank . . . and we'll plunge into Fates know what chasms. I had to teleport us away from the city's gates due to fear from being picked up on anyone's scrying scope. Except for the mad and the monstrous, nothing lives on the Fringe of Niflheim's wastes. What lives in the heart of Niflheim's wastes does not bear thinking about.

Even alone and unmolested the cold and the blind march infects us with slow poison. A prickling energy overtakes the group as dim shadow-shapes appear and disappear—ice crystals long and sharp as swords, stacked waystones, snow-cracked rocks. The fog is oppressive. To my primal hindbrain, the fog smells like cover. We smell like prey.

A morbid scene waits for us under a glacier's knifelike shelter. Ten skeletons lie eviscerated by jagged ice spears, having been staked to the ground and left to die. Opportunists in the years since have stripped their armor, clothing, and whatever goods the murderers left behind. None took the time to burn them.

"Jotnar," Thor names the murderers, overly careful to say this without emotion. My lip curls.

Romanova pauses to examine the site. "What's a Jotnar?"

"Frost Giants," Thor explains. "A long time ago."

We pass the skeletons and I can't shake a crawling feeling in the back of my throat. Those uncremated skeletons will be me, some day. I no longer harbor any rose-tinted ideas that Thor or Asgard will send me off in a fire—even if I should honor myself by dying in battle, which is unlikely. If I don't die in Thanos's dungeon or on Asgard's execution block I will go out alone and unmourned some place else, wherever my carcass happens to be at the time. Surrounded by spoils, probably, and despised by everyone I've come into contact with.

A snowball explodes against the back of my head.

I crane around, stupefied.

"Loki," Thor warns, beside me.

Snow crumbles from my hair down my back. Barton stares at me, hard-lipped. Stark, however, is looking in precisely the opposite direction. I enchant snow to smack him in the face.

"Hey!" Stark scrapes his eyes clear.

"Yes?"

" . . . Do magic again."

I can't now that he's asked, so I merely face forward again.

"Loki," Romanova says.

"Yes?" This time as Good Loki, who uses his professional voice.

"Should we be concerned about ambush before we reach the Fringe?"

"Not before. Prince Thor, Captain Rogers, with your permission I suggest that you allow me to conceal your team with magic once we reach the gates. Just until we can find better camouflage at an outfitter's. No offense, but astrium armor and a gold-and-crimson mechanical man will attract more attention than we need."

"Says the Terror of Stuttgart," Stark says.

"I can pass unseen when I wish."

"Which is never."

Thor laughs.

"True," I allow, "mostly never."

I turn around to find Rogers at the procession's read. "Captain?"

"Granted," Rogers says, frowning.

Thor says, "Very well, Loki. You may conceal us."

"Also," says Barton, "before we go sniffing around a criminal haven, who is it we're going to meet? Somehow you missed that part."

"An oracle," says Thor, because he asked me that already.

"The Oracle," I add. Good Loki explains, "The Oracle. Her temple is on the port's far side. Like the rest of this place she is a strange and dangerous force. She may help us or she may not."

"Rather like someone I know," Thor grumps.

Bad Loki smiles.

Some minutes later the fog is split by greasy yellow light. The Fringe emerges from grey-white mire, huge and ancient, less than fifty meters ahead. Its yellow search beam glares from a reinforced tower above the patchwork metal gate. The gate and titanic armored perimeter wall rises thirty meters high, guarded by a dozen energy turrets.

We take refuge behind a snow dune. Thor and I share a glance and he says, "My friends, prepare yourself. The effect of this magic is unpleasant."

Several heartbeats later we are six Alfr mercenaries. I've worked our colors and emblems into our illusionary armor for identification purposes. There is some obnoxiously childlike prattle as Thor's mortal friends rediscover each other and test my work by firing their pretend weapons . . . at one another's heads.

"You missed!" Stark jeers.

Barton hefts his plasma rifle. "I did not. You're cheating."

"Nuh-uh. I killed you first."

Thor interrupts, "Loki has disguised us as the enemy, so look well at what surrounds you. Should you see any of this shape besides the brothers and sister at your sides you must signal at once."

Romanova has been exploring her illusion's gear with an empty shark-like stare. She now directs a sweet-eyed look at me, which I take to mean that she's been trying to figure out how I might be plotting betrayal and thinks she's found a hole in my sheep's clothing. "Is there anything we should know for maintaining cover? Or breaking cover, if we happen to meet with other friendlies?"

"We do not expect to meet with friends," Thor says.

Romanova says, "In the event that we do, is there a way to deactivate this without relying on Loki?"

Ah. Does she fear I would turn them into the enemy and then leave them to be captured and executed by our own side? That sounds . . . well. Very much like me. I'm flattered. Good Loki gives a little cough and says, "The spell is tethered to your central mass. I'm afraid unless you are sorcerers as well—real sorcerers, not technomages—there is no way to deactivate it. Say as little as possible until we reach the outfitter's, at which point I will drop the illusion."

She watches me from under lowered lids.

Good Loki pretends not to notice. He continues, "As for maintaining cover: Elves have a low center of balance. And try to move as though you have ears on your entire body."

Being around so many people all at once makes me giddy. It isn't like when I played Odin, because then I had to hide and stay quiet. Being around people who know who I am, and who talk to me—real people who aren't illusions—I'd forgotten what this is like. I want to make the most of this time I've got in between my endless stints in solitary confinement. I'd like to enchant Barton to look like Romanova. I'd like to magic bits of snow to fall down Thor's collar and see how long it takes him to notice.

Instead, Good Loki has to lead my not-brother and his warband from behind our dune to the gate's far left side, where a small personnel airlock is wedged into the wall's interlocking plates. Four guards of varying descents meet us with rifles at the ready. Leather creaks—Thor is clenching a fist around Mjolnir's handle, under his Alfr disguise.

Good Loki conjures a bribe. They let us through.

This is how the Fringe works.

Thor tugs me aside while we're journeying through the long tunnel under the wall. "Where did you get that gold?"

"What gold?"

Beyond the second airlock is raw chaos. I drop our warming spells as heat replaces the terrible cold.

"Wow," Rogers sighs.

The Fringe weaves up and up in a knotted spiderweb of scaffolds that span an ice canyon system twenty kilometers from end to end. The entire city is above groundlevel, in the scaffolding, as buildings built upon buildings—upon other buildings—upon long struts—cram every conceivable nook in both lurid and earthy colors. Homes, storefronts, sellers, buyers, and beggars commingle in a phantasmic display. A writhing, living, real sea buys or trades or steals or argues all around us. A thousand thousand voices blot out the empty Nothing lurking in the back of my head.

I breathe easier.

"Huh. Well. That's settled," Stark announces. "I'm buying a spaceship."

"Which way?" Thor demands.

The Blind Outfitter's is tucked inside a burrow halfway up the rickety Second Flea Trench. Its owner is a Dwarf who spares us only a happy nod. The Blind Outfitter is so called because its keeper stocks her floor with everything anyone might need for a quick anonymous transformation—no questions asked. The store is empty, and a back corner in the labyrinthine shop provides enough privacy from even my paranoia that I can dismiss our illusions.

"Dress as mercenaries," Good Loki commands. "Oh, and brother, find a mask to wear and a weapon that isn't one of the most recognizable icons in nine realms. Mr. Stark, magic your armor into its smaller form and hide it under a cloak."

"It's called robotics, Gandalf."

I add, "From here on in, nobody speak my true name. I am known to many in the Fringe, none of whom we wish to meet."

Barton raises his eyebrows. "Just how many people did you piss off last time you were here?"

"Only the last time?" Smirking, Good Loki taps his heels together in a salute before slipping behind the nearest shelving island. He and I can both hear Thor grouching in the distance, but while my twin counterpart and nemesis is only mildly annoyed that his prince does not appreciate the black market refuse around us, I want to strangle Thor. He is a liability, but not one I can discard. I blow out a breath to steady my nerves, remove my clothes, and change sex. My female shape is a disguise by itself. I've never wandered around the Fringe in my natural shape while female. Satisfied with that base, I go to work picking over the shelves for appropriate wear.

Some minutes later Thor wanders around the corner, now dressed in a good approximation of the outfits worn by people he's spent his military career crushing under his boot.

"I want this coat," I lament. "A mercenary wouldn't wear this. I suppose I could be a mercenary who does wear this."

"Do you think that I look like Ragg the Berserker?" Thor gives his new battle axe an experimental swing. "I thought Ragg had good taste in armor."

"Yeah, a taste for armor and Aesir flesh." I look him over. "Hold out your arms, let's see about your foray into the make-pretend."

Thor does and examines himself in the chipped mirror beside me, evidently pleased with the effect. "I think I look like Ragg."

Good Loki smiles. "Congratulations. You're the universe's most expensive private guard." I grab the embroidered silk covering his gorget and tear.

Thor grabs my arm. I roll my eyes at his betrayed expression.

I say, "The idea is to be realistic, not perfect. A perfect illusion isn't believable. Have good and bad happen to you. You've got nice armor, and now it's old nice armor."

Thor's eyes narrow. But he stares at my arm trapped in his fist. "Where did you get that mark?" Oh, goody, he's found my odd caved-in what-the-hell scar. The one on my forearm I don't remember receiving. The one that probably predates the Chitauri, since they—for the most part—don't leave visible marks.

Thor says, "Is this magic?"

"No."

"Are you certain? It does not look like any injury I have ever seen."

"Yes, I'm certain. Of the two of us, which one is actually a sorcerer?"

"Does it hurt?"

"No."

Keeping my right arm imprisoned, he prods the bullseye wound with his free hand.

I sneer. "Ooh, that doesn't hurt at all. Disappointed?" Actually, it isn't until this moment that I realize I've still got feeling in the scar. You'd expect a wound that's severe enough it's deformed my arm to either sting from permanent nerve damage or feel dead as ice. Mine feels . . . normal.

Thor says, "That does not hurt? When we return to Vanaheim I will have Eir look at this."

"I'm flattered you care."

Thor drops me. "I am only concerned because you were a captive for a long time. I would feel better knowing what it was and that you are not being used still by Thanos—by your will or against it."

A chill worms down my spine. I back away from him and paste a smile on my face. "Well, you're in luck. It's not magic. See? Magic would burn or corrupt. Remember Kurse?"

Thor does not look convinced.

I snap, "Find a mask and we'll call your disguise complete." I banish the blond-color from my hair and walk around the corner to where the mortals are digging through arms racks like children at Midsummer Fest.

Barton and Romanova have a quiet zen thing going on sifting through blades, plasma blades, cursed arrows, personal shields, energy polearms, and firearms. Aww. Adorable. Stark is hovering around a chipped balloon-print breakfast table which he's dragged off to one side, hard at work dismantling an energy bomb. Rogers alone is ignoring the weaponry to watch a holo-book about Bor's Conquest, which is making a line form between his brows. I leave all the arms stuff for my not-brother to critique, and supervise the final touches on their costumes. Barton and Romanova look perfect, which I am annoyed surprises me, Rogers is passable, and . . .

"You look like an inbred city guard," I inform Stark. I toss him a chest plate. "Put this on instead of the cuirass."

Stark looks up with a barb visibly readying itself on his lips—but falls silent. He untangles himself from his armor with no objections at all and even lets me assist in sealing him in good plate. I assume he's just caught up fondling the bomb's scattered components until I notice his eyes lingering on my chest.

"What time do you get off work?" Stark says.

He doesn't recognize me in this shape. That makes me unspeakably happy.

I quickly dredge up the most obnoxiously feminine simper imaginable. "Any time for you, darling. But what happened to your Miss Potts? Not that I mind being—"

Stark recoils as if I've burned him. "Who are you?"

"The sorcerer who brought you to Niflheim."

He stares at my face. "Oh. Oh, God, no."

Smiling from ear to ear, I spell together his left pauldron and leave him there—hopefully stewing on a preview of his nightmares for the evening: me in any shape.

A few minutes later we reconvene to make our purchases, and the mortals have gone from goggling at a molecular destabilizer, children's toys, religious pamphlets, and propaganda, to goggling at yours truly.

". . . Why?" says Barton.

"Just for you." I take a breath.

Rogers interrupts, "Are you a woman? He calls you 'brother', so I assumed—"

"No, I am neither. I am a shapeshifter."

Rogers says, "How would you like to be addressed?"

"Now? As a woman. You may call me Aedoa. And, Brother, you must choose another name for yourself."

"He looks like Bane," Stark says. "Can we call him Bane?"

I say, "Bane is a good name for a mercenary." Thor's faceplate is a dark bronze contraption that serves to obscure him from neck to eyes. Ten white knobbly straps secure the device around his head. "I think he looks like a Midsummer Roast."

"Shut up . . . Aedoa," says the Roast.

Stark says, "And, also, Aedoa? Did you get that from your unused Scrabble pieces? I am never going to remember that, and I usually make an effort for at least a few hours."

"Sif," Thor suggests.

"Sif I can do," Stark agrees.

"Not Sif," I say.

Of course Thor ignores me to address Stark. "And thank you for the suggestion, Tony Stark, but I shall be called Erik to honor a friend who is absent." Because Thor gets to choose his own name. But Good Loki wouldn't argue with her beloved prince, so I can only shrug and pay for our accumulated lies with more illusioned gold. Afterward, once Erik and his band are safely preoccupied tailing an important-looking man who "might lead us to the Oracle"—

—I abandon them to find a street Healer.

A/N: Updates should go quicker for the next few chapters, now that they're actually in the Fringe. I hope to be updating weekly throughout this next sequence.