Crossover: agents of shield x twilight
Relationship: Daisy x Demetri
Sleep didn't come easily in unfamiliar places. It never hadânot since the group home, not since the years of moving through the world with no fixed point and nothing that qualified as safe, not since SHIELD had pulled her out of a van full of servers and handed her something that looked like purpose and turned out to be a life. She had learned early that waking up quickly was the difference between managing a situation and becoming one, and the lesson had never fully left her body, regardless of how many years of relative stability had tried to overwrite it. Daisy lay on the enormous bed in the Volturi guest room, staring at the canopy of carved stone above her, listening to a building that did not behave the way buildings were supposed to behave.
It was too quiet. Not the quiet of an empty place, but the quiet of a place full of things that didn't make noiseâbeings who moved without sound, breathed without rhythm, existed in the spaces between the acoustic cues she normally used to map her environment. The fire in the hearth provided the only consistent sound: a soft, irregular crackle that she found herself tracking the way she tracked Fitzsimmons on comms, just to confirm something was still there.
Fitz. Jemma. The thought of them arrived with the particular weight of things she was not going to let herself sit inside for long, because sitting inside it meant acknowledging the full shape of how far away they were, and she didn't have room for that right now. But the thought didn't stop at Fitzsimmonsâit kept moving, the way it always did when she let her guard down enough to feel the actual size of what she stood to lose. May, whose version of warmth had always looked like showing up and never leaving. Coulson, who had believed in her before she'd believed in herself and had never once made her feel like that was a debt she owed. Mack, solid and steady and the best kind of stubborn. Yo-Yo, who understood better than almost anyone what it cost to have power you hadn't asked for and to use it anyway. Deke, who had turned up from the future and stayed and somehow become family in the way that things became family when you weren't paying attention. And Koraâher sister, found so late and held so carefully, the relationship still new enough that she sometimes forgot she was allowed to depend on it. All of them, on the other side of wherever she was. All of them not knowing where she'd gone.
She stared at the ceiling and ran the intelligence instead.
The Chronicoms had upgraded their adaptive framesâshe'd confirmed it in the third unit's mid-fight recalibration, the way it had rerouted its strike patterns with a speed the earlier models hadn't possessed. That was a meaningful development and it needed to go into a report the moment she had a secure line out. More pressing was the portal technology itself. In her experience with Chronicom incursions, they'd used hijacked monolith tech and stolen temporal machineryâall of it repurposed, all of it leaving the particular signature of technology operating outside its designed parameters. The portal they'd used in the corridor had felt different: more precise, more deliberate, more like something that had been purpose-built rather than cannibalised from something else.
The targeting precision troubled her most. They hadn't found her by tracking her biology or her energy signature. They'd found her through the Time Stream, through probability modelling, which meant Sibyl or a successor system was still runningâstill operational, still calculating her future moves before she made them. The thought was not new. She had been living under that particular shadow long enough that it had become a kind of background radiation, constant and invisible, not something she could turn off by thinking about it differently. But the precision of this incursion suggested the model had been refined since the last time her team had encountered it. They knew more now. They had updated their predictions.
And they had Malachi running point, which meant the restraint was gone. Atarah had wanted to go back in time and prevent Chronyca-2's destructionâa desperate plan, a grief-driven plan, but one that still held the shape of the Chronicoms Daisy had first learned to understand: methodical, precise, fundamentally oriented toward preservation rather than conquest. The anthropologists in the early records had been observers, genuinely. Cataloguers. Beings who moved through the world like archivists through a libraryâthorough, careful, leaving everything exactly as they'd found it. Then Malachi had put a blade in Atarah and stood in front of the fleet and declared they were done trying to save the old world and would take a new one instead. The mutiny had lasted less than an hour. The Chronicoms that followed it were something different entirely, operating from a different set of instructions, and Daisy had been fighting that version ever since. She understood both, which was the thing that made her dangerous to them. She knew what they'd been before the grief curdled into something else.
She needed to get a message out. She needed to reach Fitzsimmons, needed to tell them what she'd seen, needed to know what had happened on their end when the portal had torn her out of the operation and deposited her through a hole in reality into an Italian corridor full of vampires. She needed to know if Fitz had identified the portal's origin point, if Jemma had found the upgrade pattern in the adaptive frames. She needed to know if Jemma had slept. She needed to know if Fitz had eaten.
Outside the door, the corridor held its own specific stillness, and within that stillness the particular quality of a presence that had settled in and intended to remain. She had not asked him to stay. She had also not told him to leave, and she was choosing not to examine the space between those two things tonight. Tonight she had enough to examine already.
She rolled onto her side, pulled the heavy blanket up against the underground chill, and let the fire do its work. She did not sleep for a long time. When she finally did, it was without the jolting hypervigilance that usually bookended her rest in unfamiliar environmentsâno sudden surfacing, no heart-rate spike, no frantic reassessment of her surroundings. She slept steadily, all the way through to the deep hours before dawn, and didn't wake until the fire had burned low and the room had settled into the grey-blue quiet of early morning pressing through the narrow window.
The corridor, when she listened for it, was still occupied.
She lay there for a moment and let herself notice that, and then she got up.
Demetri had stood guard outside doors for a very long timeâlong enough that the act had ceased to require conscious attention, had settled into the same category as breathing: automatic, unexamined, requiring neither decision nor effort. He had stood outside rooms where the Volturi kings deliberated fates. He had stood outside cells where beings waited for outcomes they couldn't influence. He had stood outside corridors where silence was being enforced and outside chambers where violence was being planned, and in all of that the act of standing guard had meant exactly and only what it appeared to mean. Surveillance. Containment. The physical expression of authority.
This was not that. He was aware of the distinction with a clarity that didn't require analysis. He was not here because he had been told to be, and he was not here because the woman inside represented a risk that needed managing. He was here because the alternativeâbeing somewhere else in this building while she slept in an unfamiliar room surrounded by people she had no framework for trustingâwas not something he was willing to accept. The feeling behind that was not complicated. It was, in fact, one of the least complicated things he had experienced in several centuries, which was itself worth noting.
Her heartbeat had steadied into the deep, even rhythm of genuine sleep sometime in the second hour. He had tracked the transition with the full attention of his abilityânot the cold professional focus of locating a target, but something with a different texture, something warmer and more careful, the quality of attention you paid to a sound you wanted to make sure of. Her rest, when it came, had been unbroken. No spikes, no surfacing, no sharp shallow rhythm that accompanied nightmares in people who carried too much. She had slept as though something had released its grip on her. He chose not to speculate too much about what that might mean.
He had known about the mate bond theoretically for as long as he had been among the Volturi. He had observed it in othersâhad tracked the changes it produced in vampires who had previously been straightforward to understand, the way it rewrote priorities and created new categories of importance where only the old ones had existed. He had observed it in colleagues and in enemies and had filed it as useful intelligence about how certain individuals would behave under pressure. He had not given serious consideration to the possibility that it would happen to him, not because he believed himself exempt but because centuries of its absence had made him comfortable with the assumption that the bond was simply not part of what his centuries would contain.
The moment she had fallen through the portal had corrected that assumption with a thoroughness that left no room for negotiation.
What sat with him now, in the particular stillness of the corridor before dawn, was something he had been turning over since the throne room. The bond had formed the instant she arrivedâfully, immediately, without the gradual development that some accounts described. He had spoken to Marcus briefly in the night, in the quiet way that Marcus occasionally permitted, and Marcus had said only that the strength of an immediate bond was not unprecedented but was rare, and that in his experience it indicated a depth of compatibility that the slower formations sometimes lacked. He had said this with the flat precision of someone reporting an observation rather than offering comfort, which was, Demetri had found over the years, Marcus's version of both.
She was from somewhere else. He had understood this from the corridorâfrom the way she moved, from the technology she carried, from the creatures she had fought with the easy competence of someone for whom this was an established category of threat rather than an encounter with the impossible. She existed in a context he didn't yet fully understand, and she was carrying the weight of people she couldn't reach, and she was going to spend the morning trying to find a way back to them.
He did not resent this. He understood it, in the specific way of someone who had tracked people across great distances and knew what it looked like when a person was oriented toward something with their whole selfâthe particular quality of attention that preceded action, the barely-visible pull of an intention already formed. She was going home. Or she was going to try. And in the meantime she was here, and the bond was here, and he was going to be useful to her in every way he could manage, because that was what the instinct asked of him and because it happened, without any conflict, to be what he wanted to do.
The fire in her room had burned low. He heard the shift in her breathing that preceded waking, and straightened.
The knock was light and precisely timedânot tentative, not commanding, the knock of someone who had assessed the situation and chosen an approach accordingly. Daisy was already sitting up when it came, her internal clock having logged the change in her sleep quality several minutes earlier.
The door opened. Demetri stood in the frame holding a tray with the easy competence of someone who had been given an unfamiliar task and decided to do it well rather than minimally. Coffeeâreal coffee, the smell of it reaching her before she'd fully processed anything elseâbread, cheese, fruit, and a small folded note in handwriting so theatrically deliberate it could only be Aro's.
"He keeps human food?" she asked.
"He keeps it for guests," Demetri said, setting the tray on the table near the window with a care that suggested he'd thought about where she'd want it. "He also maintains a kitchen, because he finds the concept of hospitality meaningful and understands that it requires different things for different beings. The coffee is imported from a particular estate in Colombia. He cannot drink it himself, but he believes that experiencing something vicariously through the responses of others constitutes a genuine form of appreciation."
Daisy considered this for a moment. "He's been collecting experiences he can't have."
"For some centuries, yes."
She looked at the tray, and at Demetri, and made a decision. "Pull up a chair. You've been in that corridor all night and it seems unkind not to offer youâ" she gestured at the table, "whatever the vampire equivalent of company at breakfast is."
Something moved briefly in his expressionâquick and slightly less controlled than everything else about him, the passage of something that hadn't been prepared for. He pulled the chair from the corner and sat across from her with the unhurried grace that appeared to be simply how he moved through space, and met her eyes with the full, steady weight of his attention.
She poured the coffee and drank it and found that it was genuinely excellent, the kind that reframed your understanding of what the thing was allowed to be. She let herself have the moment.
"Okay," she said. "He gets points for the coffee."
"You're going to tell him?"
"He will read it from someone's memory within the week," Demetri said, with the serenity of someone who had made his peace with this reality long ago. "There is little point in withholding it."
"Having a boss who reads minds must make performance reviews extremely efficient."
"It eliminates misrepresentation as a viable strategy," he agreed. "Which simplifies most interactions considerably."
She ate bread and cheese and asked him what she needed to know before she walked into Aro's study. He told herâstarting with Aro himself, who was, Demetri said, genuinely curious in a way that was not the same thing as safe, but that could be worked with. Aro would engage seriously with real information and respond better to directness than to careful management. He had been waiting for a problem of sufficient scale to justify his full attention for some time, and Daisy had apparently provided one.
"A strategist. He will have spent the night recalculating the threat landscape and his primary question will be operationalâwhat resources does this require, what does it cost, what does the Volturi gain from involvement. He does not warm easily, but he respects demonstrated competence, and you demonstrated it yesterday in his corridor." Demetri paused. "He also has a long memory for slights and an equally long memory for people who did not insult his intelligence. You did not insult his intelligence."
A different quality entered Demetri's voiceânot quite tenderness, but the careful register of someone speaking about a wound that had never healed cleanly. "Marcus has not been fully present in the world for a very long time. The loss of his mate took something from him that has not returned in the centuries since. He sees the connections between beings with a clarity that has nothing to do with engagementâhe can read the shape of a relationship in a room without caring particularly about the people in it." He was quiet for a moment. "Last night was the clearest I have seen him in some time."
Daisy absorbed that and did not press it.
She reached for the folded note from Aro and opened it. It was, as she had suspected, elaborateâthree paragraphs in careful copperplate, the opening sentence alone containing two subordinate clauses and a reference to Heraclitus. The substance, once excavated, was an invitation to his study at her convenience, an assurance that she would find refreshments waiting, and a postscript that read: *I have taken the liberty of beginning the translations of the relevant records. I suspect you will find the eleventh-century accounts in particular worth your attention. I will say nothing further, as I find anticipation improves most experiences.* She set the note down.
"He's enjoying this," she said.
"He has not had a genuinely novel problem in some time," Demetri agreed. "Try not to hold it against him."
She almost smiled. "I'll try." She finished the coffee, looked once more at the note, and stood. "Okay. Let's go see what eight centuries of records look like."
Aro's private study was dense with the evidence of genuine curiosity accumulated across centuriesâshelves rising to the ceiling in every language, manuscripts and instruments arranged with the comfortable disorder of things used regularly rather than displayed. Aro himself stood by the window when they arrived, hands clasped behind his back, the expression of someone who had found the morning light meaningful for a very long time and had not lost the habit of noticing it.
"Daisy," he said, turning with the warmth of a host whose guest has arrived precisely when expected. "Please sit wherever feels right. I find people think better when they're not performing the act of sitting correctly."
She took the chair nearest the deskâwall at her back, door in her sightline. Aro noticed and did not comment. Demetri positioned himself near the door, his attention distributed between the room and her with the consistency she was beginning to recognise as simply his default setting.
Aro settled across from her with the ease of someone for whom furniture was optional but socially useful. "I spent much of the night reading," he began, "through every record we hold that touches on what you described. Synthetic beings, non-biological intelligence, unusual visitors whose behaviour did not align with any category we had established." He folded his hands. "We have more of these accounts than I expected to find."
Daisy leaned forward slightly. "How many?"
"Dozens of confirmed sightings across nine centuries. Possibly more in the older fragments, but the correlation is less certain there." He gestured toward a folder on the corner of the desk, thick and worn at the edges. "I have had the most relevant ones translated into English. I read them against the originals myself."
She took the folder and opened it. The first account was twelfth century, Northern Italyâa monastery record in careful scholarly prose describing beings who had arrived, politely requested access to records about a comet's trajectory from several decades prior, taken notes with instruments the monk couldn't describe with precision, and departed without incident. The monk had found them strange because they asked exactly the right questions and showed no interest in any of the wrong ones.
She turned pages. The accounts were distributed across centuries and continents but the pattern heldâpurposeful arrival, specific information gathered, clean departure. No acquisition beyond the objective. No curiosity beyond the scope of the mission. No aggression, no coercion, no collateral damage. Just data, collected with the efficient thoroughness of beings who understood that knowledge was the only resource that compounded without limit.
"This is pure anthropologist-model behaviour," she said, more to herself than to Aro, her voice carrying the particular flatness of someone recognising something they'd hoped not to find. "Long-range observation, non-interference, systematic cataloguing. They weren't here as a threat. They weren't here with an agenda." She turned another page. "For most of their history, Chronicoms were exactly thisâobservers. That was their entire purpose. They travelled across star systems cataloguing civilisations, building the most complete record of intelligent life in the galaxy that had ever existed. They weren't conquerors. They were archivists. Extraordinarily patient, extraordinarily thorough archivists."
Aro tilted his head. "We have records of unusual visitors in this region going back to the ninth century. Several accounts I found last night described beings who asked questions about our kindânot threateningly, but with the focused interest of scholars. They seemed to already know we existed. They wanted specifics." He paused. "We assumed, at the time, that they represented some rival power seeking intelligence. We were incorrect about the nature of the interest."
"Noâyou were right that they were gathering intelligence," Daisy said. "You were wrong about why. They weren't gathering it to use against you. They were gathering it because they gather everything. It all goes into the same model." She set the page down. "Then Chronyca-2 was destroyed. Late 2018, early 2019âa creature called the Shrike, a planetary extinction event contained in a single organism, wiped their homeworld out. The survivors seized Confederacy warships, and those who remained were led by a Chronicom called Atarah. Her plan was time travelâgo back, prevent the destruction, save Chronyca-2. Desperate and grief-driven, but still recognisably the mission of someone who wanted to restore what had been lost rather than take something that wasn't theirs."
"Time travel," Aro said, with the careful tone of someone who has encountered stranger things and is choosing not to dismiss the concept out of hand. "You say this as though it is an established fact."
"In my world it is," Daisy said. "I've done it. It's not pleasant and it doesn't solve as many problems as you'd think, but it works." She moved on before he could follow that thread. "Atarah's plan failed. Not because the time travel didn't work, but because Malachi and the hunters decided they were tired of what they called her peaceful methods. Mid-2019, they mutinied. Malachi assassinated Atarah, took command of the fleet, and declared they were done trying to save the old world. They would take a new one instead." She looked up. "That is when the mission changed. That is when the centuries of observation dataâeverything your records represent, everything they gathered here across eight hundred yearsâstopped being an archive and became a targeting system."
"The hunters who came through the portal yesterday," Aro said, "are operating from Malachi's directive."
"Yes. And they have the benefit of everything the anthropologists built before them. Eight hundred years of data on this Earthâpopulation patterns, geological surveys, historical trajectories, the behaviour of every category of being that exists hereâ" she glanced at him briefly, "âincluding yours. All of it fed into a predictive model that has been running calculations on this world for longer than most nations have existed. The anthropologists didn't build a weapon. They built something considerably more dangerous. They built a complete picture. And Malachi took it and turned it into a plan."
"Then their predictions about what will resist them," Aro said quietly, "would be precise in ways we cannot easily account for."
"Yes." She turned another page. "Which is why I need to understand exactly what they collected here. What they mapped. What they flagged as significant."
Three pages in, she stopped.
The account was dated 1117 and had originated from a Volturi contact in what was now northern France. It described, in the measured language of someone documenting rather than interpreting, an encounter with a group of beings found mapping the region's underground geological formations. Not observing the population. Not gathering social or historical data. Mapping rock, water table, fault lines. The recorder had noted, with evident puzzlement, that the beings had shown particular interest in a specific formation beneath a collapsed Roman structureâa natural cavity approximately forty feet below the surface, accessed through a narrow shaft the recorder hadn't known existed until the beings led him to it.
Daisy read the paragraph twice. Then she read the paragraph below, which described the beings' departure, and the paragraph below that, which recorded the observer's note that the cavity had appeared to briefly emit light from within, several hours after the beings leftâa light with no apparent source, lasting only moments.
She sat back slowly. This was different from the other accounts. The other accounts were data collectionâobservation of people, events, trajectories. This was infrastructure. This was a Chronicom team doing something with a purpose that went beyond cataloguing, something that would only make sense if someone, at some point, was going to need to move through this location rather than simply document it.
"This one is unusual," she said carefully. "The geological mappingâthe underground cavityâthis isn't standard anthropologist behaviour. This is site preparation." She looked up at Aro. "The light the recorder described, hours after they leftâthat's a portal signature. Low-power, probably a calibration test rather than a full opening. They were marking a location." She paused. "The question is whether they were marking it for the observersâas a reliable transit point for future data-collection visitsâor whether someone further down the line used the same infrastructure for something else entirely."
"Does the distinction matter operationally?" Aro asked.
"It matters because if it was built for observers, the calibration will be set for low-power transits between two fixed points in the same universe. Malachi's hunters would need to recalibrate it for cross-universe useâassuming they even know it exists." She tapped the page. "But if they found this in the observer records, and if their Time Stream flagged this Earth as the target, then this cavity is the first place they would look when they come through properly." She met Aro's eyes. "Is the structure still standing?"
"We have identified two candidates based on the geographic description." He paused. "We were hoping you could tell us what to look for."
"I can tell you exactly what to look for." She pulled the folder closer and moved to the next account. And then stopped again.
This one was older. Mid-tenth century, sourced from a contact in what the annotation identified as an eastern Mediterranean trade port. The recorder described the beings in terms consistent with the other accountsâthe precision, the purposefulness, the clean departureâbut what had flagged it for Aro's attention was a detail in the margin, added in different ink and what appeared to be a different hand, possibly years after the original was written. The marginal note read: *They spoke of their origin when asked directly. A star-system in the northern sky, in the formation the Greeks named for the swan. They were precise about this. They said they were cataloguing. They said it was their purpose. They asked nothing in return.*
Daisy stared at the margin note for a long moment.
The formation the Greeks named for the swan.
Cygnus. The same constellation she'd cited in the corridor yesterday. The same origin she'd described to the assembled Volturi from her own knowledge of Chronicom history. She had told them where the Chronicoms came from, and the record in her hand confirmed that the Chronicoms themselves had answered the same question eight centuries agoâwithout evasion, without agenda, as a simple statement of fact, because in the tenth century it had been a simple statement of fact. They had been observers. Pure ones. Cataloguing this world the way they had catalogued countless others, moving through the centuries with the patience of beings who measured time in data cycles rather than lifetimes, building a model of Earth that was by now eight hundred years deep and almost certainly more precise than anything SHIELD had ever managed about its own planet.
She set the page down and looked at the far wall of the study without seeing it.
There was something wrong with that conclusion. Something that didn't sit flush.
She had described the Chronicoms' origin to the Volturi yesterdayâCygnus, the destruction of Chronyca-2, the colonisation planâand the records confirmed the origin. That part matched. But the Chronicoms in the tenth century had been pure observers, long before Chronyca-2's destruction, long before any colonisation agenda existed. Which meant that when they came hereâwhen they built their portal anchor in northern France in 1117, when they catalogued the fault lines and the underground cavitiesâthey weren't here because of a plan. They were here because Earth was simply one world among many they were documenting. One data point among hundreds, possibly thousands. One entry in a catalogue that spanned the galaxy.
And if they were cataloguing multiple worldsâ
If the Time Stream contained data not just on this Earth but on other Earths, on parallel versions of the same world observed across different branchesâ
"Aro," she said, and her voice came out even, which required more effort than it had a minute ago. "Your records. The historical accounts that don't involve the Chronicomsâthe human history, the political events, the notable figures. How thoroughly are they documented?"
Aro's expression shifted into something more careful. "Extensively," he said. "We have maintained first-hand accounts of significant events in this region since the eighth century, and secondary records of varying reliability for much of what preceded that."
"Tell me something that happened here. Something specificâa political event, a notable figure, a decision that had consequences. Something your records describe in detail."
He studied her for a moment with the attention of someone who understood that the shape of the request mattered and had decided to honour it honestly. He reached to the shelf beside him without looking, with the ease of a man who knew every volume in the room by position, and withdrew a slim bound document. He opened it and read a passage aloudâa specific event, a specific year, a specific location, a name.
The event was real. The year was right. The location was right.
Not slightly wrongânot a translation issue, not a transcription error, not the kind of variance that crept into historical records over centuries of copying. The name was simply a different name, belonging to a different person, in a position that in her history had been held by someone else entirely, and the decision that name had made in that year had produced a sequence of downstream events that in her timeline had gone differently, and the difference was not marginal.
She sat with that for several seconds.
"Read me another one," she said.
He did. She listened. The broad strokes heldâthe geography, the century, the nature of the conflict describedâbut the details were wrong again. Different wrong. A different kind of variance, a different branching point, a different name in a different role making a different choice with a different outcome.
He read a third. She held up her hand before he finished, and he stopped.
The study was quiet. The fire crackled in the hearth. Demetri had not moved from his position near the door, but she was aware of his attention on herâsomething in its quality had shifted, had become more specific, the way the attention of a tracker changed when the thing being tracked changed direction unexpectedly.
"The Chronicoms didn't portal me across your planet," she said. The words came out with the flatness of someone stating a conclusion they had fully verified and were not yet ready to feel. "They portalled me across universes." She looked at Aro. "I'm not from a different location. I'm from a different Earth. A parallel universeâsame planet, same history in broad structure, but different in the details in ways that compound over centuries until the divergence is significant. The name you read in the first account: in my history that position was held by someone else. The decision they made went differently. The downstream events went differently. Not catastrophically, not in ways that would change the face of the worldâbut enough that if I cross-referenced your records against our SHIELD archives, the divergence points would compound backward to at least the ninth or tenth century." She looked at the folder. "Which is when your Chronicom observation accounts begin. Which means the anthropologists weren't just observing this Earth. They were observing multiple Earths across the multiverse, building parallel models, comparing civilisations. When Malachi took over and the colonisation directive began, they weren't looking for any Earthâthey were looking for the best one. The one their centuries of data said would be most viable, where resistance was most manageable." She set the folder down. "This Earth. Yours. Not mine."
The last sentence landed differently than the ones before it. She heard it land with the full weight of everyone it containedâFitz and Jemma, May, Coulson, Mack, Yo-Yo, Deke, Koraâand she did not allow herself to sit inside it. Not here. Not now. Later, when she had privacy and the luxury of falling apart in a controlled way, she would let it be as large as it actually was. Right now she needed to keep moving.
Demetri crossed the room without a word and sat in the chair beside her, and the proximity of himâsteady, present, utterly unhurriedâwas something she accepted without examining why she accepted it.
Aro watched this with the expression of someone whose assessment of a situation has just been revised in multiple directions simultaneously. "Then your people," he said gently, "cannot reach you through conventional means."
"No," Daisy said. "They can't."
"And the Chronicoms' portalâthe one that brought you hereâ"
"Would be the only known mechanism for crossing back. If it can be reverse-engineered. If the anchor points on both sides can be identified and stabilised." She stopped. There were a lot of ifs, and listing them was not useful right now. "It's a problem with potential solutions," she said instead, in the voice of someone who had learned to describe impossible things as engineering challenges because it was the only way to keep working. "I just need to figure out what the solutions are."
She sat with that for a moment, and then something else arrivedâcooler, sharper, the part of her that had been trained to find the angle even when the situation had no obvious angles.
"The portal that brought me hereâthe cross-universe displacementâthat was a mistake," she said. "Their mistake." She looked at Aro. "Chronicoms don't make mistakes. Their targeting precision is the foundation of everything they do. If they were using the Time Stream to track me on Earth-616 and the portal misfired into a different universe, then either the technology failed in a way it shouldn't have been able to fail, or the model had a gap in it that nobody caught." She sat back slowly. "Either way, they know I ended up somewhere else. They know it went wrong. And the fact that it went wrong means their probability calculations for my behaviour just became significantly less reliableâbecause I am now operating in a context their data does not cover. Their records are about your Earth. Not mine. Every move I make here is outside the parameters of what they predicted for me." She allowed herself a small, grim satisfaction at the thought. "They hate noise. And right now I'm the noisiest thing in their model."
Aro's expression had shifted into something that combined the brightness of a collector with the precision of a strategist. "You are turning their error into an advantage before the room has finished absorbing the news," he observed, with what sounded very much like admiration.
"It's the only thing worth doing with it," Daisy said flatly.
"Then we will help you do it," Aro said, and the simplicity of itâno conditions attached, no calculus of advantage made visibleâwas unexpected enough that she looked at him directly.
"Why?" she asked. "I'm not from your universe. I have no resources here, no institutional backing, no leverage. Whatever arrangement we might makeâI can't hold up my end of it if I'm on the other side of a dimensional barrier."
Aro tilted his head with the patience of someone who had been underestimated by better-prepared individuals than this and had found it more interesting than offensive. "Because the Chronicoms have been on my Earth for eight centuries, building toward something, and you are the only person in any universe who currently understands both what that something is and how to stop it. Because a mate-bond is not a thing the Volturi regard lightly, and Demetri has not looked at anything the way he looks at you in the entire time he has served me." His gaze moved briefly to Demetri and back. "And because I am, whatever else I am, genuinely curious about what comes next. I have found, over the centuries, that genuine curiosity is a better guide than strategic calculation in matters that have never happened before."
Daisy held his gaze for a long moment.
Then she picked up the folder again. "Show me the eleventh-century accounts. All the geological mapping onesâevery location they surveyed. If they were placing anchor points, I need the full picture. Because if we can find an existing anchor, we don't have to build one from scratch. We just have to figure out how to activate it in the right direction." She glanced at Demetri. "And I need to know the underground geography of this city. Everything you have."
Demetri's expression held the same steady quality it had carried since the corridor, since the throne room, since the hour before dawn outside her doorâbut there was something in it now that had the quality of a decision already made and fully accepted, of someone who had looked at the shape of a situation and arrived at their position within it without drama or announcement.
"I know these tunnels better than anyone," he said. "Every passage, every chamber, every wall that has been built and rebuilt across the centuries. If there is something beneath this city that was placed here by your enemies, I will find it."
Daisy looked at himâjust for a moment, just long enough to take in the specificity of the offer, the absence of caveat, the way it was given as a plain fact rather than a gesture.
"Okay," she said quietly.
Aro reached for the bell on his desk that summoned the kitchen, because he had promised better coffee and intended to deliver it, and because he had found across many centuries that the best work was done when people were warm and caffeinated and had been reminded that someone was attending to the practical details on their behalf. The morning, he thought, had become considerably more interesting than he had anticipated. And he had anticipated quite a lot.
Marcus arrived some minutes later and settled into the chair by the window with the quiet self-sufficiency of someone who carried their own atmosphere with them. He looked at Daisy for a long moment with the particular clarity he occasionally producedâthe rare focus of someone who was usually observing from a great internal distance and had chosen, briefly, to close it.
"You are far from home," he saidânot with pity, not with distance, but with the flat, compassionate accuracy of someone who has experienced that specific condition and knows its weight precisely.
"Yeah," Daisy said. "I am."
Marcus nodded once, as though this confirmed something he had already known, and turned his gaze to the window.
The coffee arrived. Outside the narrow window, Volterra held its midday warmth against the underground cold, and somewhere below the city, in chambers that had not been mapped and passages that had not been walked in centuries, something waited that might be the way home.
Daisy opened the folder to the eleventh-century accounts and began to read.
