Chapter 3: Rising Action
Cindy got off him slowly, like the ground might not hold her either. She sat down against the dumpster, knees up, staring at her hands. The mark below her collarbone was already fading, sinking back under the skin.
"We should get out of the alley," Peter said. His voice sounded like gravel in a can. "Somebody's going to look out a window eventually."
"Your place?"
"You remember where it is?"
"You gave a press interview from the fire escape in October." She pulled what was left of her costume back over her shoulders. "Queens. The one with the terrible curtains."
The curtains were, if anything, worse at night. Peter came through the window first, one arm cradled against his ribs, and dropped onto the couch with the grace of a dropped laundry bag. His healing was already working, he could feel the jaw knitting, the ribs sealing, but it ached the way a marathon aches, every bone complaining about the schedule.
Cindy came in behind him and stood in the middle of his apartment, dripping a little. She looked around at the science projects, the comics, the mold-streaked coffee mugs, and something crossed her face that wasn't anger for once.
"You live like a raccoon," she said.
"Thirteen years of visitors, and I get raccoon."
She sat down on the far end of the couch, as far as the furniture allowed, and pulled her knees up. The silence stretched. Peter could hear the fridge humming, the radiator ticking, and underneath it her heartbeat, still fast, still not settling.
"So," she said. "The thing. In the alley."
"Yeah. The thing."
"It's the spider." She said it fast, the way people change the subject. "Same spider, same bite, same whatever. Our spider-sense isn't just danger anymore, it's tuned to each other. And there's a chemical component. Pheromones. Our bodies are basically screaming at us to breed like rabbits."
"Breed like rabbits."
"That's the scientific term, Parker."
"Okay. Sure." He flexed his good hand, watching the knuckles move. "That explains it. Same spider, cross-signaling, pheromone loop. I buy it."
"You buy it."
"I do. It's actually elegant, in a horrifying way." He turned his head to look at her, and the swelling made the turn slow. "But there's a more important question."
She braced visibly. "What is it?"
"Will you go on a date with me?"
Cindy stared at him. Then she laughed, a short baffled burst, and put a hand over her mouth like she'd been caught with something. "What?"
"A date. Dinner. Maybe a movie if dinner goes okay."
"We just tore each other apart in an alley and then... in an alley."
"Life is short." He shrugged, and his ribs made him regret it. "Believe me, I know the statistics better than anyone. And you're so cute when you're threatening to break every bone in my body."
"I broke every bone in your body like four hours ago."
"So you've noticed my situation. Dinner works around it."
She was laughing again, shaking her head, and it changed her whole face. Thirteen years fell off her at once and he saw the girl from the lab photos, quick and bright, the one who'd bit her lip in yearbook pictures. "You're insane. You're actually insane."
"People say that."
"I'll give you my number." She stood, smoothing the shredded suit down her legs like that would help. "That's it. That's all I'm agreeing to. A number. Texts. Possibly acoffee at some undefined future point."
"That's a start."
"Downstairs." She was already at the window. "My old place is on the fourth floor. Maybe something survived."
The Okafor woman, mercifully, was asleep. Cindy went through the roof door again, moving through her own hallway like a ghost touring a wreck, and Peter followed at a respectful distance, favoring his knee. Her old room had been turned into a home office. A treadmill sat where her bed had been. But in the closet, high on the shelf, under a box of tax records, there was a shoebox, and inside the shoebox her old phone, dead, dust-furred, in a case printed with cartoon webs.
She held it up in the light of her phone flashlight, new phone, and her throat worked. "Charger's dead too. But the SIM's probably fine." She looked at Peter. "I need your charger."
"Fourth floor, trade you for my number."
It took twenty minutes of charging on his kitchen counter before the old phone sputtered to life, and Cindy typed her number into his with the focused intensity of a bomb tech. "There. That's all you get. Number, and nothing more."
"That's plenty."
They stood in his kitchen in the flickering lamplight, two half-naked people in ruined costumes, and Peter realized they'd skipped several steps somewhere between the bunker and the alley.
"We should probably do this properly," he said. "Introduce ourselves. All over again. Clean slate."
"Cindy Moon." She stuck out her hand, dead serious. "Eighteen years old. I like puzzles, apparently, I had a lot of time for them. I was going to go to Oxford. I can play the cello. And I'm faster than you."
"Peter Parker. Also eighteen. I take photos of myself for money, which is a long story. I like pot roast and I worry too much." He shook her hand. "And Spider-Man."
"Spider-Man, huh." She tilted her head. "That's the whole name? No last name?"
"Just Spider-Man." He grinned through the last of the swelling. "What about you? Full name, for the record."
"Cindy Parker." It came out of her smooth as silk, no hesitation at all, and then her eyes went wide. "Your wife. Cindy Parker, your w— no. No. Cindy Moon. Moon. That was, that came out of nowhere, I don't—"
"Parker, though."
"Shut up."
"Cindy Parker." He was grinning so hard his cracked jaw ached. "You jumped straight past girlfriend. There wasn't even a boyfriend stage in there."
"It's a pheromone thing," she said furiously. "It's the spider. It's making my mouth say things."
"Sure. The spider wants us married. Breeding rabbits, and now matrimony. Very natural."
"I'm going into the other room to change." She snatched the clothes she'd grabbed from her old closet, an old flannel of her father's and jeans that wouldn't fit anyone current, and pointed at him. "Don't follow me. And don't look at me."
"I would never."
"I mean it, Parker."
She disappeared into the bathroom and shut the door. Peter waited exactly eleven seconds. Then he walked silently across the floorboards, spider-graceful, and looked through the gap where the old door had warped off its frame.
She was fighting the jeans up over her hips, hair everywhere, still smeared with his blood at the temple, and she was muttering to herself in a low furious stream. "Cindy Parker, honestly, Moon, say Moon, it's one syllable..." She caught her own reflection in the mirror and stopped, and looked at herself for a long moment, and her expression went somewhere private and sad and then came back.
He must have made a sound, or she smelled him, because her head snapped toward the door. "I said don't look!"
"You said don't follow you and don't look at you," Peter said, not moving. "You said them as two separate instructions. Legally that's two chances."
"I'm going to break your other kneecap."
"Tomorrow at eight." He leaned on the doorframe. "Dinner. It's just a date. Say it."
She stood there in her father's flannel with the sleeves rolled four times, flustered, furious, and the corner of her mouth kept twitching against her will. "Tomorrow at eight. It's just a date."
"And confirm the rest. We're a couple now. Boyfriend, girlfriend. Officially."
"That's not how couples work, you don't just declare..."
"Confirm it, Parker. Sorry. Moon."
She exhaled through her nose. "Yes. Fine. Boyfriend. Girlfriend. You're my boyfriend. The spider and I have discussed it and we're keeping you."
"That's all I needed." He paused, and his heart did something stupid. "Will you marry me?"
The silence went on long enough for the fridge to cycle off.
"Are you out of your mind?"
"Probably, yes. You're so beautiful. Marry me."
"You broke every bone in my hand four hours ago and now you're proposing."
"You broke mine first. We're even, and apparently I process grief through life decisions. Cindy. Marry me."
Her mouth opened, closed, opened. Whatever impulse had put Parker on her tongue in the first place was clearly still in the room. "Yes," she heard herself say, and pressed her hand over her own mouth.
"Okay." His voice cracked. "Okay. Next week? We could..."
"Why wait?" She dropped her hand, stunned at herself, and the words came out before she could stop them, matching his momentum like they matched each other's punches. "Fine. Now. Tonight. Before one of us comes to our senses."
They were still laughing about it, half-giddy, when the window exploded.
Not the glass first. The sound first, a shriek of tearing air, and then the glass, and then the thing that came through it. A crowbar, ordinary-looking, pointed at one end, trailing a thin plume of vapor like it had ridden something hot to get here. It crossed the kitchen faster than either of their spider-senses could finish the thought.
Peter's sense fired a half-second late. His head turned, his weight shifted, and that was all the time the universe gave him. The pointed end went into his abdomen just left of his navel and kept going, punching out the back of him, and the momentum carried him backward off his feet. He hit the kitchen floor with the crowbar standing up out of him like a flagpole.
He tried to say her name. Nothing came out. His mouth moved and produced only a wet click, and then blood, welling up past his teeth in a way that was nothing like the alley, nothing like a broken nose. This was deep. This was where he kept everything.
"Peter." Cindy's voice came out tiny, wrong, a child's voice. "Peter, no, no, no."
She was on her knees beside him before she remembered crossing the room. Her hands hovered over the crowbar and didn't know what to do, and Cindy Moon, who had broken seventy bones in one night with perfect precision, could not make her hands work. Blood was spreading under him in a wide black pool, soaking into the floorboards, moving faster than his healing should have allowed, faster than anything should.
"Okay. Okay, we pull it out, no, we don't pull it out, that's the first thing, you leave it in, they teach you that, they teach..." She was talking to herself, to him, to nobody, her words tumbling and colliding. "Ambulance. Phone. Where's my phone, where's your..."
His hand found her wrist. His good hand, the one she'd broken and the one that had healed first, and his grip had almost nothing in it. That was the detail that broke her. In the alley he'd held her wrist with the strength to bend steel. Now it was just a hand, warm and getting cooler, holding on because he couldn't do anything else.
"Don't," she screamed at him, and she didn't know what she was screaming about. "Don't you dare. You don't get to, we just, you proposed, you absolute idiot, you proposed, you said next week, you don't get to..."
His eyes were still open. They found her face and stayed there, and there was an apology in them so enormous it didn't fit through his swollen pupils, and his mouth moved again, shaping something. Her name, maybe. Sorry, maybe. She couldn't tell, and the not-knowing would live in her head forever, she understood that already, some cold detached part of her filing it away alongside the crack pattern in the bunker ceiling.
His spider-sense, she realized. She could feel the bond now, wide open, the way it had been in the alley, and on his end of it there was nothing but a long gray static, like a radio losing its signal. His heartbeat, which she could have heard across a city block six hours ago, was stuttering under her palm where she'd pressed it flat against his chest.
"Stay." Her voice shredded. "Stay with me. You heal. That's the whole point of you, you said, you always heal, so heal, heal NOW, you stupid..."
The crowbar hadn't come from anywhere in this world. She knew that the way she knew the smell of the bunker. It had come down through the sky, burning, aimed, thrown by something with an arm the length of an orbit. She didn't have room in her head for that yet. She filed it with everything else.
Blood came out of his mouth in a thicker pulse and his back arched, and she screamed, actually screamed, a sound with no words in it at all, and pressed both hands down around the wound even though the iron bar sat in the middle of it, even though the hot wetness pushed up between her fingers no matter how hard she squeezed. The flannel sleeves of her dead father's shirt went dark to the elbow.
"Look at me. Peter. Look at me. You don't get to leave me in a box again, you opened the door, you opened the door, you opened the door, you have to stay..." She was rocking over him now, her forehead almost touching his, blood on her face where her hands had touched it. "Say something. Say one thing. Call me Parker. You always call me Parker, I hate it, I hate it, say it..."
His fingers tightened on her wrist. A fraction. It was either strength coming back or the last of it going out, and she couldn't tell, and she sobbed at the not-being-able-to-tell.
Then his spider-sense went through the room like a struck bell, hers answering it, both of them screaming the same direction, and she felt it before she heard it: something else, up in the cold over Queens, coming down.
She looked up through the shattered window. High above the city, past the clouds, a point of light was descending. Not falling. Descending, unhurried, correcting its own course the way nothing natural ever had.
Her heartbeat, which had been a runaway train, went very slow and very clear. She looked back down at Peter, at the gray spreading through the bond where his end of it used to be, at the man she had agreed to marry four minutes ago on the floor of an apartment that smelled like old coffee and blood.
"Okay," she said. Her voice came out level. Flat. The bunker voice, the winter voice. "Okay."
She pulled the crowbar out of him in one motion, because no ambulance was going to arrive before the sky did, and if he was going to die he was going to do it with his hands free. He made a sound, the smallest sound, almost a word. She pressed her palms into the hole in him and felt his blood push back and did not look away from the window.
The light above Queens kept coming down.
She bent and kissed his forehead, blood and all, gentle, exactly as gentle as she'd been in the alley when she brushed the smear from his cheek. "You don't die," she told him, quiet, a fact being laid down for the record. "You heal. I remember. We're stuck with each other, Parker. Forever, probably. You said it first."
She stood, still pressing his wound closed with one hand, and raised her face to the falling light.
"Whoever you are," she said to the sky, "you threw it from orbit. That's not a weapon, that's a signature." Her free hand flexed, and the silk came up off her wrists, glossy and black in the flickering lamplight, ready. "So let's see who you are."
The light touched the edge of the rooftop above, and the building shuddered.