This chapter is titled "Answers." Here are two for you, from questions in guest reviews. I normally don't do that in the chapter, but these I really felt I ought to. (1) Does Jane know Loki's adopted? No. I presume two things. First, Thor never followed up "He's adopted" (and don't get me started on that line) by "and he was born to blue people who grow ice from their palms," and second, in Western culture, generally speaking, being adopted is really not a big deal, so I figure of the things about Loki that trickled down to Jane (not much, her focus was on the interstellar travel stuff), this wasn't one of them. She hasn't had a ton of contact with the people who were in the room when Thor said that, anyway. Thor never told her because his family decided that this secret would be Loki's and Loki's alone to tell or not, I'm not sure which chapter this was in... (2) Why did no one ask Loki where he got that (British) English accent when he says he's from Canada? Where to begin. (Warning: Guest, please believe me, I rant not at you, but at one of the unavoidable conventions of the sci-fi genre.) WHY IS HE SPEAKING ENGLISH IN THE FIRST PLACE? LOL. Since there is no reasonable explanation for that (and I refuse to try to pretend there is), I basically 100% ignore the accent/language issue. But you are AWESOME for noticing it. OK *very short version of my rant* aside, I do have an in-story explanation for it (I have an explanation for everything, I think). In Ch. 27 "Fun," Jane made a crack about Loki not knowing an expression, and him being from Canada. And he said he knew the expression, but he was born in Canada and grew up all over. So, assuming Loki has even picked up on the fact that he "sounds English" (and...why...?), and he's asked about this, his answer would be: "My parents are from England, and I spent several years there in my childhood." Loki has an explanation for everything, too. (Also, more recently I've heard of the "All-Tongue" thing in the comics - this is actually IMO quite a brilliant device. But I didn't know about it when I started this story, and I don't treat the comics as canon anyway, so no All-Tongue here. They just speak English because English is a Really Cool Language and all the cool aliens know it.)
Without further delay...I kinda like this chapter. I hope you do, too.
/
Beneath
Chapter Thirty-Nine – Answers
Thor sat at the end of one of the heavy oak benches in the chamber of the Healing Room used for relatively minor injuries. He had been here countless times before throughout his life, had relaxed around the crackling fire with his friends recuperating and laughing over whatever it was that had brought them here.
He wasn't relaxing now, even though his head kept threatening to fall back against the bench and drag him into sleep. And of his closest friends, only Sif was with him. Pressed close to his side, she leaned slightly forward, her head resting lightly in her hands, her elbows on her knees. Like him, she'd taken a severe blow to the head, but unlike him, her skull had actually fractured. Over the course of a day and a half of treatment it had been healed, along with her broken arm, but she was still feeling sick and weak and needed one final treatment before she could be released. Thor's head was pounding too, and there was nothing he could do for either of them.
When he went to the Healing Room after the last portal had finally been closed, Sif was the first one – the only one – he spotted. He'd breathed a sigh of relief then called to her; she'd run to him and embraced him. There hadn't been as much comfort in it as he'd expected, and he'd returned the embrace in a rather mechanical fashion. He was drained to the point of numbness.
The room was packed to the brim with warriors standing, sitting on benches or the floor, and some lying down. More stones were being prepared in the fire, and as wounds were treated with salve or fresh stone, healed warriors left while others walked or were carried in. The man next to Sif had given up his seat to Thor and refused to take it again when Thor said he didn't need it, so he'd relented and squeezed in. Fandral and Hogun, Sif said, had more complicated injuries and were in another area of the healing room. She had spoken with Hogun, but Fandral had still been unconscious when she'd been released to this room, and to avoid chaos in the crowded chambers visitors were forbidden except to those not expected to live. Sif hadn't known Jolgeir had been injured, and didn't know his status. She didn't know any more than he did about what had happened at the palace, and neither, it seemed, did anyone else in the room. She'd only been awake a few hours herself, but she'd already heard stories of the battles Asgard had fought while she slept. "There's nothing wrong with me, Thor. I swear to you, the only reason I feel sick is because I was flat on my back unconscious while Asgard was attacked from the city to the valleys to the forests to the mountains," she'd declared with a venomous expression, and that was when she'd folded over and let her head fall into her hands. She hadn't moved since.
Although it had hardly felt pleasurable to have a Ljosalf arrow pulled from his shin – it was worse than he'd initially thought, the broadhead arrow had scraped bone – the glittering dust of a healing stone had quickly chased away most of the pain, leaving only a dull ache and that annoying itching behind. The cuts on his left arm and right leg were too small to waste a stone on much less worry the exhausted and overstretched healers with; they would heal on their own in a day or two. Volstagg, he'd learned from someone else, had decided the same about his own wounds, whatever they were.
Just as Thor was on the verge of deciding his head would be fine without a healer – he'd come here more to check on his friends than for his own treatment, which he could have taken care of himself albeit with a bit less skill and a bit more pain – when he heard his name and title being called. He and Sif and probably everyone else in the room looked up to see two very young trainee healers entering the chamber. "Here," Thor called and the two bustled over, stepping carefully over the legs of those lying on the floor – a brown-haired boy in light silver armor over a green tunic, rectangular patches of light blue fabric over his shoulders, and a red-headed girl in a long loose-fitting brown dress with the same light blue rectangles over her shoulders.
"The All-Father has sent word that you should go to the Ambassadorial Estates," the boy said.
"After you're done here," the girl said, making her way behind the bench while the boy stood in front.
"How old are you?" Thor asked, wrenching his head away from the boy who tried to grasp it and still looked to be in his youth.
"Nineteen. But I completed my studies. Or close enough."
"I'm twenty," the girl said.
The boy reached for his head again and pulled it down firmly, while the girl leaned over him and ran her fingers through his hair and over his head.
"Nineteen," Thor muttered. Practically a child. Not that he'd felt that way about himself when he was that age.
"I'm old enough," the boy said from above his head. "My best friend is nineteen, and he was out there fighting. Where I should have been."
"What is his name?" Thor demanded, pushing his head up and interrupting the girl's work. But the boy clamped his mouth shut. No one under twenty was supposed to be engaging in battle. Thor frowned and dropped his head again. There was no use in pursuing this; he had more important things to deal with than whether some youth was raising a sword in Asgard's defense a few months earlier than he should be. The girl went back to work and whatever she was doing was bringing back that awful itching sensation.
"Check his vision," the girl said, picking her way back around the bench.
The boy told him to look left and right, up and down, and Thor did it, though it made him feel like a child, especially with this youth directing him to do it. The boy looked positively surly, his resentment of his duties almost palpable. "So why are you here, when you want to be out there?"
"Thor, let it go," Sif said from beside him.
"Because I happen to have a knack for healing magic. So I was informed I could either sit in my classes with hardly any teachers or work here."
Whether it was the green tunic, the discontent, or simply Thor's nostalgia for the brother of his youth who should've been out fighting with him these last two days, the boy reminded him of Loki, and Thor couldn't let it go. "How many have you treated here?"
The boy unfurled a sturdy piece of parchment stitched into a band of cloth over his left wrist and passed his hand over it. The girl meanwhile released his head and moved over to Sif. "Four hundred and twenty three, including you," he answered, bending down to examine Thor's leg. He pressed a hand against the healed arrow wound, and a second later the last of the pain disappeared there. He stood up again.
Thor met his eyes. "Out there you would be one. In here you are four hundred and twenty three."
The boy stared at him, frozen. The surliness was still there, but he seemed to be thinking about what Thor had said, and that would have to be good enough.
"What's your name?"
"I apologize, Lady Sif, I'm not qualified to treat your head injury. You'll have to wait until one of the trained healers can come," the girl said while the boy stood there silently.
Sif sighed and grumbled something that Thor didn't catch, waiting as he was for the boy to answer.
"Fridulf Hjalmarson," he answered, reluctantly enough that Thor guessed he wouldn't have if Thor weren't his crown prince.
Thor nodded and Fridulf and the girl began making their way through the room.
"I'm going with you," Sif said, standing up when Thor did.
"It's a meeting, Sif, not a battle. Rest, heal. The war isn't over. Only the opening salvo. We'll need you."
She set her jaw, but in the end did not argue. "Fine. Just don't let me miss it again. Drag me out there unconscious if you must. I'll wake up when someone swings a sword at me."
Thor squeezed her shoulder and smiled. She was speaking in hyperbole of course, but he understood exactly what she meant. She was lying in bed while Asgard's warriors fell, and there was nothing she could have done about it.
He left Sif and the trainees and the chamber crowded with the wounded and headed out, surprised to see the sun rising already. Some two and a half days, then, it had been since the explosion in the palace and the opening of the first portals. The streets were quiet; after leaving the vicinity of the Healing Room Thor passed no one other than sentries at their posts. He nodded to them and hurried past, until he came to the circular-walled housing and recreational complex known as the Ambassadorial Estates. He paused at the entrance; the Einherjar on duty directed him to the first floor of Midgard's chambers. None of the chambers were occupied, of course – they were only ever used for high-level visiting delegations anyway – but Midgard's chambers had never been occupied in the history of the building, so it was a logical space to commandeer away from the palace.
"They had an incredible advantage. Why didn't they press it?" someone was asking. Thor entered the chambers and observed what was clearly a heated discussion in which no one was using the chairs at the long narrow table that had been brought into the room. No one even noticed his presence for a moment other than the four Einherjar whose eyes had flitted toward him as he'd approached the chambers, in what was, for Einherjar, a sign of nervousness. Thor's eyes went directly to his father and examined him as carefully as he could; he could find no sign of injury or even fatigue in him. His face was grim but radiated strength and determination. A small scorch mark on the left shoulder of his armor made Thor wonder if the All-Father had once again led his warriors in battle. It worried him, and the worry led to a somewhat unsettling realization – he'd always thought of his father as invincible, but no one was, he was coming to understand now.
"Their advantage was temporary," Volstagg said. "Once our men returned to their positions, we made short work of them."
"You exaggerate, Volstagg," Tyr responded sharply. "The battles were fierce and we took heavy losses. It's true that by the end, their rate of loss was as great as ours, greater even. That does not change the fact that we are vastly outnumbered. All they need do is open more portals, send more warriors. They can continue the attacks longer than we can sustain the defense against them. We must go on the offensive," he said, slamming a fist into a palm.
"You exaggerate, Tyr," Bragi put in. "Every single one of our warriors is highly trained and many have experienced hard-fought battles before. The Vanir, to name but one example, do not train all of their men to be warriors. Their farmers have strong backs and know how to use the scythe and the pitchfork, but they have little skill with warcraft."
Tyr, Senior Strategy Advisor and retired commander, shook his head. "One skilled Aesir with a sword, a battle-ax, and a mace on his person against a thousand untrained Vanir with scythes is one dead Aesir. You fought in the Vanir-Aesir War, did you not, Bragi? We made a truce with them in the end because a victory would have cost us so much as to be little different from defeat."
"But at that time, they-"
"I agree a war somewhere else is infinitely better than a war here," the public welfare advisor said quickly, trying to stem the argument. "Supplies Advisor Geirmund has told us that many of our fields have been trampled to oblivion and our people would soon face hunger had we not harvested early. But where should we attack? Seven realms. They'll all be well-defended, and we must still maintain defense here against the other six."
Murmurs and grumbles from the twenty or so men in the room followed, but before anyone else could speak up, Odin was saying his name, and Thor stepped the rest of the way into the room. The men greeted him warmly, hands clasped his shoulder, and the group opened for him to join.
"Mother?" Thor asked, although he knew he shouldn't in these circumstances. But he hadn't seen her in days.
Odin merely nodded in acknowledgement, but there was no sign of worry in him. "We're waiting for a report from our engineers. The rubble has been cleared away, and we will soon learn if the central structure is safe. The private wing was undamaged."
Thor nodded in reply and, with that last pointed piece of information, was finally satisfied that his mother was unharmed. "Is there no word on what caused the explosion? No enemy was found?"
It was First Einherjar Hergils who fielded the question. "No enemy was found anywhere in the palace. We searched three times. What disturbs me is that the magic shield surrounding the throne room was never breached."
Thor wrinkled his brow at that, for it made no sense. "There were only six of us able to come and go freely from the throne room. Four of us are in this room. None of us are traitors."
"Six of us had free passage," Hergils said with a nod. "Many more had access. Court's clerks, Einherjar, servants. A cleaning woman was among the dead."
"Any of these people permitted inside would have been highly trusted. I myself let none in but one clerk who has served my father for centuries, and my four most trusted friends, including Volstagg, until afterward."
"It was likely none of them who attacked the palace," came a woman's voice, just entering the room. It was Maeva Mordidottir, the woman who'd put up the protections in the first place. Thor watched her with a sudden glint of suspicion. Six had free passage, plus one who had created the shield and was the only person able to remove it. Thor knew her but not well, not anymore; she'd once been a friend of Loki's. "Friend" was a vastly oversimplified term – they'd had a stormy relationship that had ranged from friendly to adversarial to what Loki used to call with a sly smile "very friendly."
"Who then?" he asked, watching her carefully. Maeva was flanked by two men and two women – Thor recognized one of them as an engineer – but she was clearly the leader among them.
"I can't tell you that, my prince. What I can tell you is that there is no doubt the explosion was produced through magic, and that the means to implement it was in place before I shielded the throne room. Creating magic that powerful would have triggered an alarm that was part of the shield, and neither the alarm nor the shield itself was tampered with. The only person in all the Nine Realms who could have done this after the shield was in place, in fact, is me. Assuming of course that you are willing to take my word that I didn't do this, only one option remains: someone planned for this and had this magic in place before the shield was up, before we reached the deadline. This person would have to be highly skilled, to keep such magic so well hidden. I never noticed it when I was planning and creating the shield…but I confess, I was not searching for such a thing, either."
Maeva fell silent, and her left hand came to rest on the dagger she wore sheathed at her waist. A moment of silence was shattered by a sudden cacophony of questions and demands and accusations, and somewhere among all the raised voices Thor heard Loki's name over his own shouted questions. His narrowed eyes scanned the room to try to identify the man who'd said his brother's name amidst words like treachery and betrayal and cowardice and dishonor.
Silence returned when Gungnir struck the floor. "Where was the blast centered?" Odin asked.
The man Thor recognized as a senior engineer, to the left of Maeva, stepped forward. "Based on both the pattern of damage and the residual energy disturbance, it originated near your study, All-Father."
"Inside or out?"
"Impossible to say. Very near the wall between the study and the throne room. Possibly in the wall itself."
Thor ignored the engineer and watched his father. In the past he'd paid little attention to Odin's moods or expressions, for he'd hardly considered him to have any – outside the rare occasions when he allowed himself to relax and enjoy himself with his family or friends – seeing him as almost a monolith. In the aftermath of Loki's loss at the bifrost, however, he'd begun to realize how much he'd missed. He wondered how many others saw what he now saw, or if he was the only one to miss such things all along – the little lines around his father's eyes, the slight lowering of his eyelid, the press of his lips. Odin was furious.
"Is the structure sound?" Odin asked, no hint of anger in his voice.
"The ceiling is unstable over the throne room, but it and the walls of the adjacent rooms are being shored up now. In another day it'll be safe to use, but it'll take longer to have it looking as it should."
Odin gave a slight nod. "Tyr, Hergils, Bragi, Maeva, Thor, Volstagg. Remain a while longer. The rest of you, go. We'll meet again in the Feasting Hall at midday."
As the others filed out, Thor turned his attention back to Maeva Mordidottir. She was not a warrior, but she almost looked the part. She wore a lavender tunic-dress with brown leggings, protective brown leather pieces worked into the garb, and over her chest mail armor that looked so delicate it should be useless – he suspected she'd enchanted it, because she wasn't the type to wear it for decoration. Her long reddish-blond hair was in a practical braid down her back.
Odin turned his attention to her as well. "Is there any other foreign magic?"
She shook her head. "I've checked thoroughly for it in the throne room and adjacent rooms. I'll inspect your chambers next, with your permission, All-Father."
"You have it from me. Obtain it from the queen as well before you begin. After our midday meeting."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
"Tyr, you will prepare at least three strategies for an attack against Vanaheim, and present them tonight before dinner to me, and to Thor. We will then present one or more of them to the council after dinner, and consider our course."
"Vanaheim, Your Majesty?" Tyr asked. "I had thought Svartalfheim. Or perhaps Alfheim, to convince them to leave this alliance. Alfheim is less well-defended, and-"
"Vanaheim, Tyr. Thor, explain why."
Thor blinked in surprise as five men's and one woman's eyes all fell on him. "Gullveig's public message. He seeks to incite rebellion among our people."
"Not only that."
He lowered his head to think, to escape some of the weight of everyone's gaze. He enjoyed attention, even basked in it, but not like this, not when asked to somehow divine his father's war strategy. He thought back to what Maeva had said; something in it had angered his father. And then he knew. "It was Gullveig. Before the truce was broken, when we were still in talks, Gullveig came here as an ambassador of his people. He flaunted our trust and good faith. The entire time the three of us were speaking, his chief of security was with him, standing against the wall. The wall between your study and the throne room."
"But this is…this is treachery," Bragi said.
"And cowardice," Volstagg said. "This is not the way wars are meant to be fought."
Tyr nodded. "We have an uncooperative enemy."
"A dishonorable enemy," Hergils added angrily. "He came here under a banner of peace and we permitted him access to our inner sanctum."
"It shows that they fear us," Thor said, his voice a low rumble. He thought of the Vanir warrior whose life he'd spared out of a sense of honor and gripped Mjolnir tighter. He was probably being given food and a bed now, when Thor had not seen a bed in so many days he'd lost count, and the same could be said of each man in the room.
"Perhaps," Odin responded, in a voice that Thor had come to learn meant he didn't entirely agree. "For now, go, rest for a while if you can. We reconvene at noon. Thor, join me. We'll call on your mother."
Thor nodded. "Father, there's still the matter of shifts for the warriors."
Odin sighed; he'd forgotten. "Volstagg, see to it. Work with Hergils."
"Of course, Your Majesty," Volstagg said with a bow and salute.
"All-Father…" Hergils began, haltingly, "There's one thing I…I must do first. I need to appoint a new chief palace Einherjar."
Odin nodded as Thor spoke up. "Is Jolgeir…"
"He still lives. But…he cannot resume his duties."
Thor stood frozen, feeling very small, until his father urged him on.
/
/
Loki intended to sleep. Complete oblivion in fact would have been most welcome. But it didn't come. Instead he laid in bed with Jane's angry accusations his constant irritating companion.
"Heartless monster." I am all that and more. He wondered how long it would take them all to freeze to death if he destroyed all their power generators. He would find it extremely unpleasant himself – how ironic! – but the cold wouldn't kill him, not if hunger and thirst and lack of air hadn't. Perhaps I would fall into some form of hibernation. The LokiSleep, he thought with a dark, quiet laugh. Perhaps that wouldn't be so terrible, if it were temporary. And the panic and chaos that would come before… He pictured Jane's accusing eyes. The frostbite on her fingers spreading upward, her limbs frozen and dying. It was an ugly image. Her eyes still accused.
She has no right to such sanctimony. To be so quick to judge. So quick to assign guilt. I am guilty. Guilty of existing. He thought back to those papers, Jane's little lesson for her student. One thousand two hundred and whatever. Ridiculous. A few in that New Mexico facility. A few in SHIELD's flying monstrosity. A few in New York. And they were all necessary. Casualties of war. And one thousand, on this planet of seven billion, even if it were true – a tiny blip. And babies, he thought with disgust. There were no babies. That is a lie. I would never do such a thing. No baby deserves…
An image of himself as a baby flashed before his mind's eye. His mother had shown it to him once, from her own memories, when he'd asked about it as a youth. Chubby, pale, bald, happy. Happily living a lie. He hadn't looked like that when he was born, though. I must have been repulsive. The hideous offspring of hideous murderous monsters. Heartless monsters. How easily, how quickly Laufey leapt at the chance to slay Odin. Not honorably, in battle, but cowardly, treacherously, while he lay defenseless in a Sleep far deeper than sleep. Yet Odin saw such a thing, that fiend's son, and took it in.
"You're my son." Loki remembered the words with the taste of bile at the back of his throat. There can be no more malicious jest in the entire cosmos. Taken for a purpose. Rejected – not good enough even to be a pawn, a vassal under your thumb? You should have known you were getting substandard goods. He laughed out loud. Worse than that. Even the Frost Giants saw no future in me. No wonder I never lived up to your plans. I was a reject from the moment I was born. I was never supposed to live. Loki laughed again, louder, longer. The kind of laugh others might hear and think him mad. "It is all your fault, Father. Had you not interfered with your enemies' intentions, had you not taken me for your grand schemes, one thousand two hundred and whatever Midgardians would still be alive." No one could hear his words, but as always when he addressed Odin since learning the truth, he wished the words could be heard. He wished for Odin to hear them, to be cut by their sharpness, to be burnt by the hatred in them.
Babies, Loki thought with no less disgust than before. He thought back to the destruction he'd wrought on Jotunheim. There, he realized, he might have killed babies. Then he had to correct himself, for of course he'd killed babies. The built-up energy of the bifrost had destroyed indiscriminately, it would have destroyed the land, the ice, whatever it was, from underneath their feet. But this did not concern him. He knew what they would grow up to be. The rest of the realms were better off without them. They were better off not growing into their destiny.
No regrets, he told himself. No guilt.
Loki swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. He touched the tips of his fingers together and quickly drew them apart, a mirror appearing and growing between them. He grasped it in his left hand and with his right spun up particles he now thought of by Midgardian names. In the resulting light he examined his neck. Bruising in the shape of his own hands was becoming evident there, and his throat still felt tight.
This was the work of a monster, he thought. Not who he thought he'd been all his life. He'd sworn to her just one day earlier – it seemed like so much longer – that he wouldn't hurt her. And he was being sincere. He needed her. But it wasn't just that. It wasn't just that. He'd come to respect her. He could even admire her courage in the face of someone who'd nearly killed her in anger. Or laugh at her for her foolishness, he thought, although no laughter came now.
A moment later he laughed after all. He hadn't sworn not to hurt her, he remembered. He'd sworn he had no desire to hurt her. And Loki had always been comfortable in the gray between the absolutes, had learned to choose his words carefully to allow himself that gray.
He looked back at himself in the mirror he'd forgotten about and realized he felt no more comfortable than he had before. He closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind. It worked, for a while at least, so he brought a hand to his throat to try to reduce the swelling. He breathed a sigh of relief – a deep one. It worked.
/
/
Jane woke up Friday morning, April 2, having slept, but poorly. It had taken her a while to fall asleep, and she'd woken several times during the night, twice with some kind of vague anxiety dream in which she couldn't breathe and she woke gasping. She got dressed and steeled herself for another day with Loki, reminding herself again and again that he couldn't hurt her without hurting himself the same way. And while he might not shed any tears over her death, she was pretty sure he didn't have a death-wish himself.
He didn't knock on her door, for which she was grateful; instead she found him eating oatmeal in the galley. She got a fresh croissant and a double espresso and sat down across from him. Trying to avoid or ignore him was pretty pointless. She wasn't in much of a mood for polite small talk with him, though, so she sat in silence. Loki, it seemed, felt no need for small talk either, though in her peripheral vision she thought she saw him start to speak a couple of times.
Austin stopped by their table to invite them to an informal concert that night; Jane gave a noncommittal reply for them both. The brief interaction reminded Jane of the normal flow of life at the South Pole and the other people who inhabited it and were continuing about their work and social life in oblivion. It reminded her of Selby. Her stomach dropped and she knew it showed on her face, but Loki remained silent. The last time she'd exchanged more than a bare "hello" with him she'd been ranting at him like – in retrospect – a madwoman, convinced he was here to spy on her and simply lacking the guts to admit it. Selby, who she'd started out thinking might become her closest friend here, because they had so much in common. Her eyes darted up quickly toward Loki's, but he was staring at his oatmeal. Loki meant what he said. All this time, he's been doing everything he can to keep me focused on getting him back to Asgard. Even doing his best to make sure I didn't make any friends here… But how did he know Selby knew about SHIELD? He must have overheard us talking at some point… A day or two ago it would have made her furious. Wrecking a budding friendship seemed pretty trivial next to near-strangulation, though. Now she realized he could've just killed Selby. Maybe he wanted to but knew he couldn't. Jane quickly rejected that idea. He likes to think he doesn't kill innocent people…
"Shall we go?" Jane asked with a forced smile when it seemed both of them were done. A few minutes later they were suiting up and heading out.
"You're feeling well?" Loki asked in a voice almost bare of inflection, keeping his gaze fixed on the jamesway they'd commandeered and were now approaching. It was easier than when he'd been facing her.
"Uh, yeah," Jane said after a moment's hesitation.
They walked the rest of the way in silence.
As the computer whirred to life, Jane felt some of the old excitement return. The first file she opened was the one that should have taken a whole series of different data readings and roughly plotted where the Pathfinder probe had wound up. Instead an error message popped up.
"What does that mean, 'Unresolved'?" Loki asked, watching at Jane's side, taking care not to touch her even glancingly.
"Well…I guess it means wherever the probe went is beyond the stars we've charted. It's not that surprising, really. We think there are some two or three hundred billion stars in the Milky Way alone. Our galaxy."
"I know what the Milky Way is, Jane. I've been a good student."
She bit back a retort. "Then you know that the Milky Way is only one of who knows how many galaxies, and we've only mapped a tiny fraction of its stars. So, okay, the probe went somewhere beyond what we've mapped. Let's check out the imagery."
Loki nodded and watched anxiously as she navigated through the files the analysis programs had created. He hadn't held much hope for the utility of learning the physical location of the probe in some kind of three-dimensional coordinates. It would mean nothing to him; he wouldn't recognize Asgard by a series of numbers determined relative to Midgard's location. He knew Asgard as Yggdrasil's crown, and the other realms by their metaphorical locations relative to Yggdrasil. No one on Asgard cared a whit about whatever barren uninhabited rock happened to be physically closest.
"Woah," Jane said. "That's not what I expected."
Loki stared at the smears of color, bits of blue and red and yellow mixed into purples and oranges and large swaths of black. No shape or even pattern was identifiable. "What did you expect?" he asked with a frown. He wasn't sure exactly what he'd expected, either, but when she'd said "imagery" he'd expected something that looked like an actual image.
"The camera takes infrared images. But it was intended for seriously long-distance imagery. I think we're looking at…well, the equivalent of a close-up."
"Of what?" Loki asked, beginning to wonder pessimistically what the point of any of this was.
"I don't know. But I've got an image processor program on here that'll smooth this out and hopefully convert it into something more useful."
"But it'll still just be these…these colors. Infrared images. Distinguishing hot from cold. You could have mentioned that in the beginning."
"A Canon point-and-shoot doesn't exactly work out in space, Lucas." Jane froze for a second. Then drew in a slow, deep breath. "Loki. But don't you see? This tells us something important. A close-up. That means there was something close. The probe didn't travel just anywhere. It traveled somewhere with features of different temperatures, and it was relatively close to those features."
"You think it reached one of the other realms," he said with a slow nod.
"It's kind of jumping to a conclusion…but yeah, I do."
"How long will this program take?"
"Half an hour? Maybe an hour. I haven't used it for anything quite like this before." No time like the present, she thought, and started the program running on the four images the probe had returned.
Jane pulled up file after file, most of them meaningless to Loki, either because the data reflected some aspect of Midgard's science that he hadn't learned, or because he didn't see how knowing that particular bit of data – such as the frequency of a set of light waves – was supposed to help them figure out whether the probe had made it to Asgard, or one of the other realms. He realized that without his help – his help, not Lucas's – she would've had no hope of determining the probe's destination. She would've had to have been satisfied with knowing whether it reached a habitable environment. And it did appear to be habitable.
The atmosphere was similar to Earth's. Jane grew excited over that one, but it meant little to Loki. The atmosphere was fine in each of the Nine Realms – at least for the hardy inhabitants of eight of them – if not entirely enjoyable on Muspelheim. No one worried about percentages of specific molecules in the air.
The temperature was 17 degrees Celsius, or 62 in the Fahrenheit system he was more familiar with from its frequent use in conversation at the South Pole. That told him something useful. It ruled out Muspelheim and, more importantly, Jotunheim, which brought him more relief than he would care to admit. Although, he thought with a short bittersweet laugh at himself, at least Jotunheim would probably feel refreshingly warm right now.
"What?"
Loki turned to look at Jane.
"You were laughing."
He frowned, looked back at the computer. There was no reason to keep it from her, he supposed. "The temperature narrows it down to six realms. It's too cold for Muspelheim and too warm for Jotunheim."
"Jotunheim…" Jane tried to remember what Thor had told her about it, when they spoke in New Zealand. It was the realm he'd said was angry with Asgard because of something Thor did – something that had gotten him banished to Earth – but the people who lived there, the Frost Giants, had no means to do anything about it.
"Yes, Jotunheim. The realm I destroyed," Loki said nonchalantly, turning a deliberately casual gaze her way.
Jane stared at him, and several seconds passed before she realized her jaw had fallen open and clamped it shut.
"What, he didn't tell you? I'm surprised. He was rather upset about it at the time."
Jane shook her head, more to clear up her own thoughts than in response to Loki. "He said he did something stupid that started a war between Jotunheim and Asgard. He never said you had anything to do with it, or anything about destroying Jotunheim."
Loki turned back to the computer, though there was nothing new on its screen. These were strange words. Thor taking responsibility for his actions? Does he weep now over each Frost Giant life he took? Amazing. Pitiful. And irrelevant. "Well, I suppose I wasn't as successful as I'd hoped, then," he finally said, partly to needle Jane but largely out of utter sincerity.
With a shudder Jane sat back in her chair. "You know, Loki…you're good at a lot of things, I'm sure. But convincing people they're safe around you really isn't one of them."
"You have nothing to fear. You aren't a Frost Giant," he said flatly.
"You noticed that, huh?"
Loki's eyes swept quickly over Jane's petite form and gave a short laugh, with a smile that showed a bit more in his eyes than on his lips.
"Why did you want to destroy them?" The words were short, quick, easy. But she had just asked Loki why he wanted to destroy a whole planet full of people, no differently than if she'd asked why he'd worn a white dress shirt today. She hoped she wasn't on dangerous ground.
Loki took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Thor really never told you about them?"
"No. Just what I told you, and that they have no way to reach Asgard although they might be looking for one."
"They're frightful, despicable creatures."
Jane watched as Loki spoke, staring straight ahead with unfocused eyes and a malevolent expression. He looked fearsome, but she wasn't afraid. The malevolence clearly wasn't directed at her.
"And big, I'm guessing?"
"Big. Hideous. Skin that doesn't look quite like skin. They barely clothe themselves, it's almost as though they were clothed in living ice. They live on a frozen wasteland of a planet. Like summer here, perhaps. They can make ice spring from their own bodies, daggers and swords of sheer ice, and they freeze anything they touch. They're deceitful and traitorous and…and they deserve to die."
Jane's face had gone to a pained grimace by the end. They sounded like some kind of mythic version of the Abominable Snowman. And Loki clearly hated them; if she doubted his words she need only look at his face, or the taut rigidity in his posture, or his tight grip on the edge of the table they stood at. But Thor hadn't spoken of them that way. He seemed regretful of whatever mistake it was that he'd made there that led to hostilities. And regardless, Loki hadn't actually answered her question. Unless Loki thinking you're unattractive and dishonest and have freaky talents with ice is really enough to get you on the top of his worthy-of-destruction list. But Jane figured she should quit while she was ahead and try to bring the tension down a few hundred notches. "What do they eat?"
He stared at her in confusion, no idea what she was talking about.
"You said it's a frozen wasteland. Like summer here. We can't grow food here and no animals can survive here, even in summer. What do they eat?"
Loki fixed her with a dismissive scowl. "I have no idea. Perhaps they chew on ice. Perhaps they're cannibals."
"So glad I asked," Jane said with another grimace. She was just wondering if she should venture to ask about Muspelheim, and whether he had anything against those people or had perhaps tried to destroy them lately, when a tab at the top of the screen started flashing and caught her eye. Probably for the best, she thought, and opened the tab.
The image she saw now was largely blue, with a few patches of warmer colors near the top. She clicked to the next image. Still a wide expanse of blue across the bottom third, yellowy green in a patch in the center, bits of yellows and oranges in patches above the blue, a burst of red in the upper left quadrant. Clouds. Or maybe a river, she thought, looking at the blue. It would help to know what kind of angle this was taken from… She was about to click forward to the third of the four images when a long thin finger touched the screen, in the middle of the blue part.
For Loki, it had snapped into place almost the second he saw this image.
Jane looked at him expectantly, eyebrows raised.
"This is the Grand Falls."
She glanced between him and the computer screen, noting both his suddenly wistful expression and tone of voice, and the likelihood that he was referring to a waterfall, and that yes, a waterfall was a logical source for that swath of blue, if the camera was directly facing it.
"This is the broken bifrost," he said, pointing to the yellowy-green. "This," he said, pointing to one of the vaguely triangular bits of deeper orange above, "is the royal palace."
Loki sat back, brought his hand away from the screen. He didn't know exactly what he was feeling – too many things at once, many of them unwelcome – but it made him tremble slightly, every nerve in his body alive with…something. Anticipation, anger, longing, hate, need, fascination with this odd rendering of the place he'd spent almost his entire life, desperate urgency to leave Midgard for bigger and better things.
"I'm still waiting for you to say it."
Loki glanced over at Jane; he'd forgotten she was there. He saw no reason not to indulge her. To indulge himself. "This is Asgard."
/
Previews for Chapter 40: Loki & Jane navigate working together after the incident in her room; Jane insists on a safety feature but doesn't tell Loki precisely the real reason why; Jane gets another taste of magic and notices something she hasn't before; Odin provides input into the other realms' strategy; Thor provides an insight of his own; Frigga loves her sons - both of them.
And excerpt:
Thor's brother. In the real world, it could have been fun. There was still so much she didn't know about Thor, and here she'd had two whole months with his brother. She could have found out the good, the bad, the ugly, and the utterly humiliating and infinitely tease-worthy. But Loki wasn't exactly Don's brother Jim-the-orthodontist. Her gaze drifted down to his hands again. Loki wasn't the kind of guy you asked about embarrassing childhood stories and then shared a good laugh with.
Except maybe…