It was around five thirty in the morning when Natasha dropped an alert in the Avengers’ priority channel. Wanda MIA. Last seen approx 11.20am yesterday morning. Meeting room ASAP.

  Dialling in from DC was going to make this a bit awkward, but without portals, the alternative was a half-hour Quinjet flight, and Nat didn’t think she could sit still for that long. She was getting flashbacks to when HYDRA had abducted Wanda a couple of months ago, just before everything had kicked off with Eliza. No duress alarm this time, of course, but she was still kicking herself for waiting so long before deciding that something was actually wrong. She hadn’t wanted to be the sort of person who panicked and assumed the worst at the drop of a hat, but her delay last night meant that it had been around eighteen hours since anyone had seen Wanda. Even if Nat took the time she sent her first, pre?shower message as a starting point, that still meant Wanda had been missing for more than ten hours. If something had happened to her…

  Natasha called the meeting room from her tablet, tapping in the access key that let her remotely access the teleconferencing facilities. As the video feed of the room came onto the screen, she propped the tablet up on the table and sat down in front of it. While she waited, she tapped out a quick message to Rhodey, as well.

  It only took a few minutes for Steve, Sam and Bucky to arrive as a group, dressed in plain joggers. “Nat,” Steve said immediately as he walked in. “What’s the situation?”

  “Wanda’s missing,” Natasha said briskly. As she started to talk, Pietro blurred into the meeting room as well, a grim look on his face. “Tony was the last person to see her, around 11.20am yesterday. No one’s heard from her at all since then. She was due to check in with me last night, but didn’t show up and hasn’t responded to any messages. She’s not in my apartment. She didn’t tell anyone she was going anywhere.”

  “Yelena hasn’t seen her. I tried calling, too,” Pietro said, already pacing the length of the meeting room like a caged animal. “It just goes straight to voicemail.”

  A moment later, Tony joined the teleconference remotely, his face appearing off to the side of the room view on Nat’s screen. He was frowning. “Hey, guys and gal. We sure this isn’t a false alarm? Wanda was in a bit of a mood yesterday when she stormed off.”

  “What did you do?” Pietro demanded, anger kindling in his eyes.

  “Easy, Ace—”

  Natasha interjected abruptly, talking over Tony to address his question. “Not for this long. Not with zero contact.” She didn’t want to go off on a tangent with Pietro having a go at Tony. “Pietro, Tony and Wanda had an argument, but it’s not important right now. We need to focus on finding her.”

  Pietro scowled a little, but nodded. As he did, there was a firm knock at Natasha’s hotel door. She stood up, crossing the distance to the door in two long strides, and opened it. Rhodey was on the other side, looking like he’d gotten dressed in a hurry. “Nat?” he said, sounding concerned as she waved him in.

  She flicked the lock on the door behind him as she gestured toward the chairs at the table. “We’re dialled in.”

  The two of them sat down just as there was a murmured chorus of greetings, Bruce and Clint stepping into the meeting room on the other end of the call at around the same time. That was everyone.

  “Strucker’s definitely dead, right?” Clint asked as he sat down. “We’re not looking at round two of that mess, are we?”

  “Strucker’s definitely dead,” Steve confirmed. “But there’s almost certainly other HYDRA cells still out there. Could be one of them following in his footsteps.” He looked toward the camera, obviously addressing Tony. “Can you track her?”

  Tony made a face, hesitating for a moment before responding. “…The satellites she put in orbit for Stark Industries are equipped with advanced spectrometer suites. Bruce came up with the design. They can track the Mind Stone's gamma signature.”

  “Son of a bitch,” said Pietro, shaking his head. “You’ve been tracking her?”

  “Hey! No, I have not been tracking her,” Tony protested, a hint of annoyance in his tone. “We put in place some contingencies to track the WMD she wears around her neck, just in case something happened. You know, like right now, for example?”

  “Can you find her?” Natasha prompted before Pietro could snap back at him.

  “Mind Stone’s not showing up,” Bruce answered instead, peering at the screen of a tablet he had in his hand. He shook his head. “Last reading was at Midland Circle, when she went down with Tony. Lost the signal while they were underground—we’ve got good coverage of the planet, but the spectrometers still don’t have great penetration.”

  Tony nodded. “Most underground places will probably block them. No readings at all since then, though? Little weird. She could be in a bunker somewhere, magic might be involved, or…”

  “She might not be on Earth,” Bruce finished, grimacing a little.

  A heavy lead weight settled in Natasha’s gut—she’d been running through dozens of possible scenarios in her head already, and the one that stood out to her as most likely was… “What are the odds that Secretary Ross had Wanda black bagged?” she asked quietly.

  Rhodey looked over at her sharply. “Ross wouldn’t…” he trailed off.

  “You don’t sound completely sure about that,” Bucky pointed out, his jaw set. He looked as tense as Nat felt. “After what happened the other day?”

  Bruce nodded grimly. “Wanda’s strong, but she’s been taken by surprise before. I really wouldn’t put anything past Ross… He doesn’t cope well when he doesn’t get his way.”

  “Hold on, now,” Sam interjected. “We shouldn’t just jump to conclusions here.”

  Steve nodded his agreement, placing both of his hands flat on the table and looking around at everyone. “We need to consider all possibilities before we decide what to do. What are our other scenarios?”

  Clint lifted his hand, counting off possibilities on his fingers. “Space, Ross, can’t discount a HYDRA cell, given what happened before…”

  “Wakanda,” Pietro added flatly.

  Steve looked at him, a flicker of something that Nat couldn’t quite identify on the small screen passing across his face. “I don’t think…” he said slowly, but stopped.

  Nat didn’t like it, either, but it was hard to dismiss out of hand as a possibility. King T’Chaka might have decreed that time served and exile were sufficient punishment for Wanda’s crimes in Wakanda, but there was still the outstanding issue of the Heart-Shaped Herb. There was a religious element to that that they still didn’t fully understand, and Nat didn’t like how little they knew of Wakanda’s internal political landscape. Beyond T’Chaka or T’Challa simply changing their minds, it could just as easily be an internal splinter faction, acting independently, that didn’t agree with the king’s decree. It was hard to count Shuri out as a potential factor, too. She was still afraid of Wanda, and even the smartest teenagers could make stupid decisions sometimes.

  “Hell,” Clint said with a small sigh. “If we’re going to start adding allies to the list, Kamar-taj should be on it too. The Ancient One has a truce with Wanda, but she might have changed her mind.”

  Tony let out a derisive snort, his eyes flicking to something off-screen for a moment. “Wanda sure has pissed off a lotta people,” he said. “Honestly, I’m a little surprised that no one’s put me on the list yet.”

  Nat pressed her lips together in a thin line. “I know the two of you had a fight, Tony, but no one thinks you’d do something like this.”

  “Wouldn’t I?” he asked, gesturing with a hand. He leaned back in his chair, arms folded. “I feel like if Wanda was investigating her own disappearance, I’d probably be pretty high on the list of suspects. Last person to see her, she vanished immediately after having a fight with me…”

  This wasn’t a productive line of conversation. They needed to start ruling out possibilities. “Can we rule out space?” Natasha asked. “We know it’s a huge effort for Wanda to open an off-world portal—she wouldn’t do it on a whim, and I really don’t think she’d go anywhere without at least talking to someone first. If she’d just decided to go see Carol, she wouldn’t have gone radio silent.”

  “Unless she was taken,” Steve pointed out.

  “Alien abduction?” Bruce asked. “By who?”

  “Thanos,” Steve responded. “Wanda’s carrying an Infinity Stone. According to her visions, he isn’t due to make his move for a couple of years, but we’ve already seen how things can change in response to our actions. Schedules can be accelerated.”

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  “‘The order of events no longer aligns’,” Tony quoted.

  Bruce tapped at the tablet he was holding. “It’s basically just speculation, but we could do some checks, at least. Reach out to SWORD and NASA, look over atmospheric and local astronomical data from the last twenty-four hours to see if there’s any evidence we might’ve had some sneaky visitors.”

  Steve nodded. “Good call. We can touch base with Carol, too, see if she’s in a position to do some checking on her end. What else?”

  “Maybe…” Pietro started, then paused. Everyone looked at him expectantly, and an uncomfortable expression flitted across his features. He looked at Nat through the room’s camera. “She could have gone back to Westview. Maybe something happened.”

  “Something like what?” Tony asked, a little testily.

  “Something,” Pietro hedged.

  “It’s private. But a possibility,” Nat responded. Wanda hadn’t wanted the other Avengers to know what had gone down on their road trip to Westview. It wasn’t worth spilling the details yet, but it’d be smart to do a quick check for mysterious doors at least. “Pietro can cover it,” she said firmly.

  “What about the Eternals? The guys you paid a visit recently?” Tony asked, looking at Steve.

  Nat winced a little, but didn’t say anything. They hadn’t intentionally hidden anything from Tony; they just hadn’t involved him. He hadn’t been fully debriefed on what had happened when they’d visited Australia, but he knew that an initial approach had been made.

  Steve nodded. “The two we met, Thena and Gilgamesh, wouldn’t have any reason to go after Wanda. But there are a couple of others that could cause some serious problems if they found out that we’re planning on interfering with the Emergence.”

  “No chance that she’s just gone to hang out with her new pals and seriously lost track of time?” Tony asked.

  “For more than ten hours, with no contact at all?” Nat shook her head. “I really don’t think that’s likely.”

  Nat could see Wanda going to visit Thena and Gil—there was always the possibility she might’ve wanted a stiff drink after she argued with Tony—but that still wouldn’t explain her not checking in. There was, she supposed, a slight possibility that Wanda had the most unfortunate timing in the entire universe and had managed to show up while Ikaris or one of the others was visiting and it had snowballed, but Nat’s impression was that the two Eternals-in-exile typically didn’t see the others for years at a time.

  “Do we know where they are?” Clint asked.

  Steve shook his head. “Thena and Gilgamesh are somewhere in Australia. The Outback. We don’t have an exact location.”

  “That’s a pretty huge haystack to go looking for a needle in,” Bruce pointed out, making a bit of a face. “We can’t narrow that down?”

  “They’re shielded,” Steve responded. “Some sort of Celestial technology that keeps their location hidden. It covers magical methods as well—Wanda couldn’t portal straight to them. I don’t think they’ll be easy to find without her.”

  “What about the others, though? The problems?” Sam asked.

  “Other than their leader, the one Wanda was most concerned about is called Ikaris,” Natasha said, biting the inside of her lip. “She said she wouldn’t want to try fighting him without both Carol and Thor backing us up.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Tony muttered under his breath. “Do we know where he is? Do we know where any of them are?”

  Nat hesitated a beat, then nodded. “One.”

  “Kingo,” Steve added. “He’s a Bollywood actor. Should be easy to locate.”

  “Kingo?” Tony asked, a note of surprise in his tone. “Huh. I actually met the guy last time I was in Calcutta, a couple years back.”

  “We might be able to get him to lead us to the others,” Clint suggested.

  “I could reach out,” Tony said. “Been a little while since I was in India.”

  Bucky shook his head, a frustrated expression on his face. “This is a waste of time. Ross is the most likely culprit here.”

  Rhodey, who’d been quiet until now, spoke up. “Where would they have hit her? She’s not easy to keep track of, and we know she wasn’t here or at Nat’s apartment. There’d be evidence. And what, the subpoena, the stuff with the committee, it’s all a misdirection? Ross never intended to have Wanda show up at the hearing? I don’t know, feels pretty tenuous to me. Doesn’t sit right.”

  “He could have changed his mind after meeting her,” Tony suggested wryly. “She does sometimes have that effect on people.”

  Bruce dropped the tablet on the table and leaned back in his chair, looking troubled. “Ross has been keeping his distance until recently, focusing on his political career, but I know what he’s like.” He glanced at Steve, looking pensive. “Wanda wasn’t wrong when she said this could be the Hulk all over again.”

  “Bucky’s right,” Natasha said. “I think Ross is the obvious actor here. Clearest means and motive, even if we don’t have a specific idea of what happened. If he’s decided that he needed to work extrajudicially…”

  “Then we need to know and we need to stop it,” Bucky said firmly.

  Rhodey sagged slightly in his chair. “Goddamn it. Even when she’s not here, Wanda can’t help but make everything more complicated than it needs to be,” he muttered. Louder, he said, “Agreed, we need to know if Ross is involved. I can talk to the President—”

  “If the President wasn’t the one to give the order,” Clint pointed out.

  There was a pause, and a number of uncomfortable glances were exchanged at that statement. What would they do if that were the case? How far would this go if the US Government was black bagging their allies with authorisation from the President? No one was happy thinking about that scenario.

  “If Ross is responsible,” Bucky asked. “Where would she be being held?”

  “At a guess?” Sam answered. “That new supermax that’s been built to hold Enhanced. The Raft.”

  The Raft was a United Nations initiative—a maximum security facility built in international waters. It was nominally jointly operated by the member states of the UN Security Council, but, realistically, the US Navy were the ones actually securing the site.

  “The Raft’s a possibility,” Natasha said with a frown. “But it’s not the only one. Wanda’s magic can be inhibited with the right sedatives. The government has full access to Strucker’s files from the Sokovian HYDRA research base, so they’d be able to hold her essentially anywhere if they took the right precautions. There’re too many possibilities to check.”

  “If he didn’t just have her killed,” Tony said quietly.

  Natasha’s stomach turned and she balled her hands into fists to still the slight tremble that had run through them. She had been studiously trying to avoid thinking about it, but it was hard to rule out the possibility that Wanda could already be dead. If she’d reacted quicker, if she’d sent out an alert last night… it still might not have been enough. There were eight full hours between when Wanda left Midland Circle and when Natasha had texted her that evening, but still… she could be dead. Wanda could be dead, and it would be Nat’s fault.

  She didn’t think she could take it if that turned out to be the case. She didn’t know what she would do.

  “I don’t think so,” Bruce said, shaking his head. “Ross wouldn’t want to waste access to someone like Wanda. If he’s responsible, he’d want to see if her abilities could be replicated. Weaponised.”

  “He’d want to experiment on her.” Nat’s mouth twisted. “I’ll check his office, get into his system. See if there’re any clues, leads we can follow,” she said briskly.

  Steve looked at her, concern flashing across his face. “You want to break into Foggy Bottom? Are you sure that’s a good idea, Nat?”

  “He’d probably be working with the Pentagon, but Foggy Bottom’s the softer target. Easier to get access to Ross’s files than the DoD,” Bucky said, standing up. “I’m on my way. Wait for me.”

  Steve stood as well, putting a hand on Bucky’s arm. “Hang on, Buck. We still don’t know this was Ross. Let’s sort out all of our plans first.”

  “Steve,” Bucky said, an urgent tone in his voice.

  “I know,” Steve said quietly. His voice was barely audible through the tablet speakers. “I’m not going to stop you. Just give us a minute to go over everything, okay?”

  Bucky looked frustrated, but nodded and folded his arms.

  Steve turned to look around the table. “Clint, can you go with Bucky and link up with Nat?”

  Clint just nodded.

  Sam looked at Steve. “I’ll stick with you, Cap.”

  “I’m going to be really cross if it turns out Wanda’s just dicking around somewhere,” Tony said with a sigh. “Looks like Kingo’s filming in Mumbai. I’ll drop in on him, see what I can find out.”

  Nat felt a spike of concern. “Steve, you’re okay to bring Tony up to speed on what we know about the Eternals and their capabilities?” she asked. “What the risks are?” She placed a little bit of subtle emphasis on the word ‘risks’, hoping he’d pick up on the implication.

  Wanda had pretty specifically been worried about Tony messing with the Eternals, but it didn’t seem like there was going to be any benefit to arguing, and they needed to start ruling out possibilities as quickly as they could. She felt a little conflicted about it, but their options were limited.

  “Will do,” Steve responded, tilting his head in a small nod of confirmation.

  “I’ll go to Westview,” Pietro said.

  “I’ll touch base with SWORD and NASA, and try to refine our satellite data in the meantime,” Bruce said. “See if there’s anything that might lead in the alien abduction direction.”

  Steve nodded. “I guess that means I’ll be making some calls, too. Carol, Wakanda, Kamar-taj… see if anyone knows anything or can help.” There was a brief pause as he glanced around to make sure everyone was clear on what to do and all their avenues were being covered. “Alright, people. This is priority one at the moment. Keep everyone updated on progress.”

  “I’ll be wheels up in five,” Bucky said, glancing briefly toward the camera, before striding quickly toward the exit.

  Steve intercepted him, a hand on his arm again. “Buck…” he said, lowering his voice a little. “Don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

  “How can I?” A small smile tweaked the corner of Bucky’s mouth. “I’m leaving all the stupid here with you.”

  Nat tapped the screen, disconnecting from the meeting room, then leaned back in her chair, already starting to plot out a plan of attack for infiltrating the State Department. There was some gear in the Quinjet, and there was an old, off-the-books SHIELD safehouse not far from the Truman Building that she was pretty sure was still secure and would have the tools they needed. It’d all be old-school, though… It was a shame that she wouldn’t be able to get hold of a photostatic veil or anything else similarly advanced on such short notice.

  Rhodey was watching her, an uneasy expression on his face. “…I can’t be involved in this. The less I know, the better.”

  “I know,” she said with a slight shake of her head. “There’s still the subpoena to deal with. Can you handle all of that by yourself for a bit?”

  He grimaced. “I really shouldn’t, Nat. I’m not an Avenger.”

  Nat put up a mask, letting a small, easy smile touch the corners of her mouth as she leaned forward a little, reaching over to touch Rhodey’s arm and locking eyes with him for a brief moment. “You’re one of us in every way that matters, Rhodey, same as Wanda,” she said.

  The comparison had an unspoken implication—‘we’d be doing the same for you’—which was true, of course, but highlighting it in his mind would influence his considerations and actions. She wasn’t lying to him, but she needed to shore up his perception of whose side he was on in case Ross—or worse still, the President—really had ordered Wanda’s abduction. Rhodey was a good guy, but his loyalties were divided and, even with the efforts he’d put forward so far, Nat knew that Wanda wasn’t necessarily his first priority.

  Rhodey looked anxious, but nodded. “Be careful, okay?”

  “Oh, it’ll be fine. All we need to do is infiltrate a highly-secured government building, where everyone already knows our faces and capabilities, in the middle of the morning on a weekday,” she said lightly, giving him a small, lopsided shrug. “Simple.”