Chapter 24: Accountability in a Tower Full of Gods

The negotiations happened on floors I wasn't invited to.

I knew this the way I know most things in the tower — by the specific quality of the silences, the altered traffic patterns of people who are accustomed to moving at velocity suddenly moving at the deliberate pace of people choosing their words. Thor went up to fifty-one at two in the afternoon and didn't come down until nearly midnight. Rhodey made three calls I wasn't privy to and one I was, because he took it in the corridor outside my office and his voice carries in a way he's never seemed to notice. Vision floated — literally, two inches off the ground, which he does when he's processing something that requires more than his standard allocation — past my door at intervals I eventually stopped tracking. Wanda, I didn't see at all. Carol, I saw twice, and both times she looked like someone who had decided what she was going to say and was conserving everything else for the moment she said it.

Natasha I did not see. I had not expected to.