Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The thing nobody told Andy Sachs about investigative journalism was that most of it happened in the dark, alone, with wet socks.

It was almost midnight, and she was crouched behind a dumpster in the loading alley of an Oscorp satellite facility in Hell's Kitchen, holding her phone at an angle that would not catch the light, watching two men in lab coats load unmarked crates into an unmarked van. She had been there for two hours. Her legs had gone from aching to numb to a strange philosophical acceptance somewhere around the ninety-minute mark. The rain had started twenty minutes ago, fine and cold and persistent, the kind that did not fall so much as hang in the air until you walked through it.

She should not have been there. That was the first thing her editor would say, if her editor knew, which she did not, because the Empire State University student paper did not technically authorize its reporters to conduct surveillance on Fortune 500 companies at midnight. It was the kind of thing that got a person a very stern email and, if they were lucky, a lawyer.

Andy did not feel lucky. She felt certain, which was worse, because certainty was the thing that got her into places like this alley in the first place.

It had started three weeks ago with a name in a leaked document: Project Arachne. A biomedical research initiative buried inside Oscorp's public health division, the same division that had spent the last year plastering the subway with ads about curing disease and unlocking human potential and a better tomorrow for everyone. Andy had a professional allergy to the phrase a better tomorrow for everyone. In her experience, it usually meant a worse tomorrow for someone specific, and that someone rarely got a vote.

So she had pulled the thread. She had cross-referenced grant filings and equipment purchase orders and the quiet, careful movement of money through three shell companies with names like they had been generated by someone who hated their job. And the thread had led here, to a loading dock that did not appear on any Oscorp facilities map, where men in lab coats were moving crates at midnight in the rain.

One of the men said something. The other laughed, the ugly private laugh of people who believed no one was watching.

Andy leaned forward two inches to get a cleaner angle on the license plate.

Her knee found a puddle. Her sneaker found a loose bottle. The bottle found with the enthusiasm of a small tragedy, the concrete.

The sound it made was not loud. In the daytime, it would have been nothing, a thing swallowed by traffic and pigeons and the ordinary noise of a city that never fully stopped talking. But at midnight, in an empty alley, it was a gunshot.

Both men turned.

There is a specific feeling that lives in the half-second after you have made a terrible mistake and before anything has happened yet, a suspended, glassy moment where the whole world seems to lean in to see what you will do. Andy had felt it before. She was, if she was honest with herself, a little addicted to it, which was a problem she intended to examine at length someday when she was not about to be caught.

"Hey," one of the men said. Not a question. "Hey, you."

Andy did the thing her body always did before her brain caught up. She ran.

The alley did not want her to run. It offered obstacles with the generosity of a place designed by someone who disliked pedestrians: a chained gate, a stack of pallets, a puddle deep enough to have opinions. Andy took all of them badly and kept moving, phone still clenched in her fist because some idiot part of her had decided the footage was worth dying for.

Behind her, footsteps. Not two sets. More. The alley had been emptier than it should have been, she realized now, too late for it to matter. They had wanted it empty. She had walked into a place that was already a trap for someone, and she had made herself convenient.

She hit the mouth of the alley and turned onto the street, and the street was worse, because the street was empty too, a long dark canyon of shuttered warehouses and dead streetlights, and the one working light at the far end seemed to recede as she ran toward it, the way things do in dreams and in the last five minutes of a person's life.

A hand closed on the back of her jacket.

She was yanked backward so hard her feet left the ground, and then she was against the brick, the breath knocked out of her, staring up into a face that was not cruel exactly, just closed, the face of a man doing a job he did not think about.

"Phone," he said.

"It's a really old model," Andy said, because apparently this was how she was going to die, being a smartass to a man twice her size. "You wouldn't even want it. The battery's terrible. It's basically a moral failing."

His hand went to her throat, not squeezing yet, just there, a promise. "The phone, or I take it off you after."

There was a lot Andy wanted to say about the phrasing of that sentence, and she was going to say some of it, she really was, when the streetlight at the far end of the canyon went out.

Not flickered. Went out, cleanly, like a hand had covered it.

The man holding her looked up. That was his mistake, though Andy would only understand that later. In the moment, all she saw was his attention move, and then a sound, a thin high whistle, like a blade of grass held between two thumbs, and then the man was not holding her anymore.

He was, in fact, ten feet away, upside down, stuck to the brick wall by what appeared to be an enormous quantity of something white and glistening, thrashing and shouting into a strand of it that had thoughtfully sealed itself across his mouth.

Andy hit the ground on her hands and knees. She looked up.

There was a woman on the fire escape above her. Except woman was not quite the word, because the shape crouched on the railing did not sit the way people sat. It balanced. It was poured into a suit of matte black that drank the little light there was, cut through with lines of deep arterial red that traced the ribs, the spine, the long muscles of the arms, ending in a mask where two pale reflective lenses tilted, considering, unhurried, like a cat that had found something on the counter it had not authorized.

"You," said Spider-Woman, and her voice through the mask was low and dry and unmistakably annoyed, "are having a truly remarkable night."

The other men were coming. Andy heard them, and Spider-Woman clearly heard them sooner, because she was already moving, unfolding off the railing in a way that made a mockery of gravity, dropping into the street between Andy and the mouth of the alley with a soundlessness that was somehow the most frightening thing about her.

What followed, Andy would try many times to describe and never quite manage. It was not a fight the way fights were in movies, all rhythm and choreography. It was too fast for that, and too economical. Spider-Woman did not seem to hit people so much as remove them from the equation. A man lunged and was suddenly on the ceiling of the alley. Another swung something metal and it left his hand and stuck to a wall and he stared at his own empty fingers as if they had betrayed him. She moved through them the way a reader moves through a sentence she has read a hundred times, knowing every word before it arrived, bored by it, faster than boredom should allow.

And she talked the entire time.

"You know what I love about my night," she said, ducking under an arm, "it's the variety. One minute I'm home. The next minute, my whole evening is ruined because someone in a bad jacket decided to play investigative reporter in the one alley in Manhattan where that's a capital offense."

"It's a good jacket," Andy said, from the ground, with the wounded dignity of a person whose jacket had just been insulted by a superhero.

"It's a terrible jacket. It's the jacket of a woman who has never once in her life listened to the phrase, this seems dangerous, maybe don't." A man went sideways into a dumpster with a sound like a struck bell. "Stay down."

"I'm getting the plates," Andy said, and started crawling toward the van.

"You are absolutely not."

But Andy was, because that was the thing about Andy, the thing that four separate professors and one ex and her own mother had identified as her fatal flaw: she did not have an off switch. She had a lead, and a lead was a kind of gravity, and the van was right there, and if she could just get the plates, then the whole horrible night would have been worth something.

She got the plates. She actually got them, phone up, three clear frames, and she felt the small vicious joy of it, and that was exactly when the last man, the one Spider-Woman had not gotten to yet, brought the butt of a pistol down toward the back of Andy's skull.

Andy felt what happened next before she saw it, a rush of displaced air and a weight slamming into her from the side, and then she was rolling across wet asphalt with an arm locked around her, and the pistol was going off somewhere above them, the sound enormous in the narrow street, and when they stopped rolling she was underneath Spider-Woman, who had put her own body between Andy and the gun.

For a second, neither of them moved.

Andy was aware of a number of things in a very specific order. She was aware that she was not dead. She was aware of the weight of the other woman, solid and warm and breathing hard, one gloved hand flat on the ground beside Andy's head, the other still wrapped around her back. She was aware, distantly, that the lenses of the mask were inches from her face, and that this close she could see they were not opaque, that there was the faintest suggestion of movement behind them, of eyes.

She was aware, last of all and worst of all, that Spider-Woman was bleeding.

There was a long tear in the suit along the outside of the left forearm, the fabric split clean, and beneath it a line of red welling steadily, dark and real, running down over the black in a way that made Andy's stomach drop, because superheroes were not supposed to bleed, that was the entire point of them, and here was one bleeding on the ground in Manhattan with her arm around a journalism student she had known for ninety seconds.

"You're hurt," Andy said.

Spider-Woman was already up, hauling Andy with her by the collar of the terrible jacket, one clean efficient motion that left Andy on her feet and slightly dizzy. The last man was down. Andy had not seen it happen. The alley was full of groaning, cocooned shapes and the tick of the cooling van and the rain, which had never stopped, which was falling harder now.

"I'm fine," Spider-Woman said.

"Your arm is," Andy gestured, uselessly, "there's a lot of, that's a lot of blood, that's an actual injury."

"Observant. You should be a reporter." She said it flat, cruel, and then she pressed her own gloved hand over the wound, casually, like she was tucking in a shirt, and Andy watched her not react at all to what had to hurt, watched her decide not to feel it, and something in Andy's chest turned over and would not turn back.

Sirens now, far off but closing. Someone in one of the warehouses had finally called, or a silent alarm had tripped, or the city had simply decided it had allowed enough. Spider-Woman's head tilted toward the sound, and Andy understood she was about to leave, and Andy, who had never in her life let a source walk away without a fight, said the first thing that came into her head.

"Wait. Please. Just ten seconds. Who are you?"

The lenses fixed on her. Up close and standing, Spider-Woman was almost exactly Andy's height, which was somehow more unsettling than if she had loomed. "That's a stupid question."

"It's a great question. It's the best question. It's the only question."

"It's the question everyone asks, and no one should. You don't want to know who I am. Knowing who I am is how people in that," she nodded at the terrible jacket, "kind of jacket, end up in that," she nodded at the alley, "kind of situation, permanently." She was walking backward now, toward the wall, toward the fire escape, gathering herself in that liquid, unhurried way. "Go home. Delete the video."

"Absolutely not."

Something happened behind the lenses. If Andy had to name it, and she would spend a long time trying to name it, she would have said it was surprise, followed very quickly by something that was almost, against its own will, amused.

"You got the plates," Spider-Woman said. It was not a question.

"Three clean frames."

"You are going to get yourself killed."

"Probably," Andy agreed. "But not tonight, apparently. That was you."

And there it was again, that flicker, that reluctant almost-warmth, gone as fast as it came. Spider-Woman put one boot on the wall, and then she was going up it, straight up, wrong and beautiful, the blood on her arm the only thing about her that looked like it belonged to the same world as Andy.

At the top, she paused, one hand on the railing, and looked back down at the small, wet, stubborn person standing in the middle of an alley full of bad men she had personally defeated.

"For what it's worth," Spider-Woman called down, "whatever you think you found tonight, it's worse than that. Be careful who you trust with it."

"That sounds like a quote," Andy called back. "Can I use that?"

But she was already gone, up over the lip of the roof and into the dark, and Andy was alone in the alley with the rain and the sirens and a phone with three clean frames and, though she did not know it yet, a single red thought that had just lodged itself somewhere under her ribs and would not be dislodged for a long time.

She looked at the wall where Spider-Woman had climbed. There was a smear of blood on the brick, at shoulder height, drawn out in a long streak by the drag of a wounded arm.

Andy, being Andy, took a picture of it.

Then she ran, before the sirens arrived, because there was one thing she and Spider-Woman apparently agreed on, which was that Andy Sachs should not be found at the scene.

Andy's apartment was a fourth-floor walkup in a building that had been condemned by everyone except the city, which continued, against all evidence, to allow people to live in it. She shared it with a roommate named Doug who was almost never home and a radiator that made a sound like a man being slowly disappointed. She let herself in a little after one in the morning, dripping, shaking, high on the adrenaline that comes only after the danger is over, when the body finally admits how scared it had been.

She did not sleep. She had known she would not the moment her hands stopped trembling enough to hold a laptop.

She sat on her floor with her back against the bed because the desk chair felt too formal for what she was doing, and she watched the video eleven times. She watched a man threaten to take her phone off her body. She watched a light go out. She watched a shape drop out of the dark and rearrange the entire physics of a street. She watched a woman in a mask put herself between a stranger and a bullet, and get cut open for the trouble, and refuse to feel it.

Then she opened a blank document and did the thing she always did when the world had frightened her, which was to try to make it make sense in sentences.

She did not write a news story. That was the strange part, the part she would not admit to her editor. She had the plates, she had the crates, she had the beginnings of something that could genuinely hurt Oscorp, and she did not write about any of it. She wrote about her instead.

She is not what you think, Andy typed, and then stopped, and looked at the sentence, and did not delete it.

The city had a lot of opinions about Spider-Woman, and Andy had read all of them, over the last few months, with the professional contempt of someone who read everything. The tabloids called her a menace and ran grainy photos with red circles drawn around a blur that might have been a person. A morning show host had done a segment on whether she was a symbol of urban decay or a symptom of it, which was the kind of question people asked when they wanted to sound serious about something they had not thought about at all. A city councilman wanted her arrested. A sneaker company wanted her to sign something. A landlord in Chelsea had reportedly billed the city for webbing removal.

The internet was worse, and more honest. Fan accounts. Blurry sighting videos. Threads that ranked her suit against every other masked figure in the country. Whole factions had decided she was an Oscorp experiment, or a government weapon, or three women working shifts, or not strictly human. Some people slowed the footage down to argue about her height; others slowed it down for reasons Andy closed the tab on. Half the commentators had crowned her proof that a woman could be powerful, and the other half had already filed their complaints: too violent, too thin, too cold, too English, not interested enough in representing women the correct way. The men who did this for a living, Andy had noticed, were allowed to simply be men. Spider-Woman was somehow required to answer for all of them at once.

Everyone had decided what she was. And no one, as far as Andy could tell, had spent ten seconds wondering what it cost her, or whether she had anywhere to go when the sirens stopped.

Andy had spent ninety seconds inches from her face, and she could not stop wondering.

Because here was the thing no one else seemed to have noticed. The woman had been annoyed. Not thrilled, not triumphant, not performing heroism for an invisible camera the way the councilman clearly imagined. She had been tired and short-tempered and a little cruel, and underneath all of it, plainly, afraid, not for herself, that was the part that would not leave Andy alone, she had put her body over Andy's without a half-second of hesitation and then been furious about it, as if caring were a wound she kept getting no matter how carefully she guarded it.

You don't want to know who I am. Knowing who I am is how people in that kind of jacket end up in that kind of situation, permanently.

That was not the sentence of a menace. That was the sentence of someone who had already lost people, or was certain she would, and had decided the safest thing to be was alone.

Andy wrote for three hours. She wrote badly and then well and then badly again, the way you do at four in the morning, and somewhere in the middle of it the fear finally drained out of her and left behind the other thing, the worse thing, the thing that had lodged under her ribs in the alley: interest. Pure, bottomless, professionally inadvisable interest. She wanted to know who was under the mask the way she wanted to know everything, which was completely and without regard for her own safety.

She fell asleep on the floor with the laptop open and a half-finished sentence on the screen and, still on her phone, the photograph of a smear of blood on a wall, drawn out long by a wounded arm, at exactly shoulder height.

She had a nine a.m. seminar. She was going to be, she thought as she drifted off, so incredibly late.

Empire State University at nine in the morning was a machine for producing regret. Andy came up out of the subway into a wall of coffee-smell and cold light and the low hum of several thousand people who had all, individually, decided that this was the semester they finally had it together, and who were all, collectively, wrong.

She was forty minutes late. She had slept through two alarms and a phone call from Doug, who had come home at some point and left again, and she had woken on the floor with a keyboard imprint on her cheek and the horrible clarity of someone who had made important decisions at four in the morning and now had to live inside them.

The seminar was called Science, Ethics, and the Public Interest, and it was, on paper, the reason Andy had chosen ESU in the first place. It was cross-listed between the journalism school and the biomedical sciences program, which meant it was full of two kinds of people who did not like each other: writers who thought scientists were dangerous, and scientists who thought writers were stupid. The professor, a soft-spoken man named Dr. Harrison who had once testified before Congress and never fully recovered from it, treated the whole thing like a controlled experiment in whether the two groups could be made to coexist.

So far the experiment was inconclusive.

Andy slipped in through the back door of the lecture room, which was really a small tiered hall with about thirty seats, and she was congratulating herself on her stealth when she realized the room had gone quiet the way rooms only do when someone is being taken apart at the front of it.

There was a woman standing at the podium.

Andy's first thought, uncharitable and immediate, was that the woman looked like she had been assembled by someone who had read about people but never met one. She was tall and pale and immaculate in a way that felt almost aggressive at nine in the morning, dark red hair styled so severely it looked like a decision, a charcoal blazer that fit like it had been sewn onto her, posture that suggested she had never once in her life slouched and considered slouching a moral failing in others. She was holding a laser pointer the way other people held knives.

On the screen behind her was a slide about Oscorp's public health initiative.

Andy stopped moving.

"The framing of the question is the problem," the woman was saying, and her voice was cool and precise and carried without effort to the back of the room, where it found Andy and pinned her to the door. "You keep asking whether the initiative is ethical. That is a sentimental question. It presumes ethics is a fixed quantity you can hold up to a program like a ruler. It is not. The relevant question is whether the outcomes justify the inputs, and every person in this room who has actually read the mortality data knows that they do, and is choosing to feel bad about it anyway because feeling bad is easier than being useful."

A journalism student in the third row, a boy named Marcus whom Andy vaguely knew and generally liked, made the mistake of raising his hand. "That's kind of a cold way to look at people dying."

"People are dying now," the woman said, without heat, which was worse than heat. "They died yesterday. They will die tomorrow, in numbers you have decided not to look at because the looking is unpleasant. I find that far colder than a spreadsheet. But you get to feel warm about it, so I understand the appeal."

Marcus opened his mouth and then closed it, and the room did that collective wince, and Dr. Harrison, from his seat off to the side, said mildly, "Thank you, Ms. Charlton, that is certainly a position," in the tone of a man who had long ago stopped hoping.

Andy should have sat down. There was an empty seat right there, at the back, in the dark, where she could have quietly nursed her four hours of sleep and her secret video and her aching everything. She looked at the empty seat. She looked at Ms. Charlton, whoever she was, standing up there certain as a blade, telling a room full of people that caring was a failure of nerve.

Andy did not sit down.

"That's a really clean argument," she heard herself say from the back, and thirty heads turned, and Ms. Charlton's pale blue eyes found her and narrowed by perhaps two degrees. "It's so clean it doesn't have any people in it."

"And you are?"

"Late," Andy said, and there was a small ripple of laughter, and she felt the room shift very slightly onto her side, which was the only currency she had, so she spent it. "But also, I'd argue the mortality data is exactly the sentimental part. You're using dead people you've never met to win a debate. That's not being useful. That's just doing the warm thing with cold words on top so it feels rigorous."

The room was very quiet now.

Ms. Charlton set down the laser pointer. She did it slowly, deliberately, the way you set something down when you have decided to give a conversation your full attention, and Andy felt a flicker of something that was not quite fear and was definitely not not fear.

"Interesting," Ms. Charlton said, in a tone that meant the opposite. "So your position is that data is a rhetorical trick and feelings are the true rigor. I want to make sure I have it right before I disagree with it in front of everyone."

"My position," Andy said, coming down the steps now, because if she was going to do this, she was not going to do it from the cheap seats, "is that you can't run a public health program on people you're not willing to be in the same room with. You can optimize outcomes all day. But somebody has to actually knock on the door and tell a family what happened, and it's never the person with the spreadsheet, and I've noticed the people with the spreadsheets always think that part is somebody else's job."

Something moved across Ms. Charlton's face. It was there and gone, too fast to name, but Andy, who made her living reading the half-second before people composed themselves, caught it and filed it away: not anger. She had expected anger. It was closer to recognition, the flinch of someone who has been shown a photograph of themselves they did not know had been taken.

Then it was gone, and the blade was back.

"You knock on a lot of doors, do you," Ms. Charlton said.

"Every chance I get."

"And how has that worked out. Professionally."

"Poorly," Andy admitted, and got the laugh again, and saw, to her genuine surprise, the corner of Ms. Charlton's mouth do something that on a less controlled face might eventually have grown up to be a smile, before it was ruthlessly put down.

"Ms. Sachs," said Dr. Harrison, who had apparently retained her name from the roster despite six weeks of her being late, "since you and Ms. Charlton have so much to say to each other, you will be delighted to learn that I was about to assign the term project."

Later, Andy would understand that this was the moment the entire course of her life changed, and that it had been delivered in the tone of a man announcing a parking regulation. In the moment, she only felt a cold drop of foreboding.

"You will be working in pairs," Dr. Harrison continued, consulting a paper with the serene cruelty of the tenured. "The assignment is a long-form investigation of a real institution operating at the intersection of science and public interest. You will produce a piece that is both journalistically sound and scientifically literate, which is to say, each of you will be forced to do the thing you are worst at." He looked up over his glasses. "Ms. Sachs. Ms. Charlton. Your assigned institution is Oscorp."

Andy heard herself make a small sound.

"Absolutely not," said Ms. Charlton, at exactly the same moment.

"Wonderful," said Dr. Harrison. "Agreement already."

The rest of the seminar happened somewhere very far away. Andy sat down in the nearest empty seat, which happened to be one row behind and to the left of where Ms. Charlton, Emily, she had heard Harrison say Emily, returned to sit with the rigid displeasure of a woman who had been assigned a lab partner made of wet cardboard. Andy stared at the back of her head, red hair severe and immaculate, and thought about Oscorp and thought about the video on her phone and thought about the fact that the universe apparently had a sense of humor and it was not a kind one.

She was still thinking it when Emily reached up to tuck back a strand of hair that had committed the crime of coming loose, and the sleeve of the charcoal blazer slid down, just an inch, just for a second.

And Andy saw it.

On the outside of Emily Charlton's left forearm, just below the elbow, there was a bandage. Fresh, clean, medical, the kind you put on yourself in a hurry. It had been placed carefully, high enough to be hidden by a normal sleeve, and it had slipped, and beneath the edge of it, where the tape did not quite reach, was the top of a long thin line, angry and red, the raised furious skin of a cut that had happened very recently.

It was on the outside of the left forearm.

It was long, and thin, and clean, like something torn open rather than sliced.

It was in exactly the place where, eight hours earlier, in an alley in Hell's Kitchen, in the rain, Andy had watched a woman in a black-and-red mask get cut open by a bullet, and press her own hand over it, and refuse to feel it.

Andy stopped breathing.

It was nothing. It was a coincidence. People got cuts. Chemistry students got cuts constantly, on glassware, on scalpels, on the sharp edges of their own ambition. There were nine million people in this city and probably four thousand of them had cut their left forearm in the last day and exactly none of the others were secretly a woman who could walk up a wall.

It was in exactly the place.

Emily Charlton turned her head, just slightly, the way you do when you feel someone looking at you, and for one long second her pale blue eyes met Andy's across the row, cool and flat and utterly unreadable, and then dropped, deliberately, to where Andy was staring at her arm.

The sleeve came down. The bandage disappeared. It was so smooth, so unhurried, that if Andy had not been watching for exactly this, the small covering of a small secret, she would have missed it entirely.

"Something on my arm, Ms. Sachs?" Emily said, very quietly, so that no one else could hear, and her voice was perfectly light, and her eyes were not light at all.

"No," Andy said. "Sorry. Long night."

"Mm," said Emily Charlton. "Try to keep up."

She turned back to the front. Andy sat in the ringing silence of her own skull and looked at the sleeve that had come down over the cut in exactly the place, and she thought, with the dawning horror of someone who has found a loose thread and understood, all at once, how much unravelling it was going to cost her: oh no.

Oh no.

She got out her phone under the desk, and she did not open the video, because she did not need to. She had watched it eleven times. She could see it with her eyes closed. She opened, instead, a fresh note, and she typed two words, and then sat looking at them for the rest of the hour like they might get up and leave if she stopped watching.

Emily Charlton, the note said.

And under it, a question mark she already knew the answer to.

Emily Charlton did not run from the seminar room, because Emily Charlton did not run from anything, but she walked out of it at a pace that would have been running in a less disciplined body, and she did not let herself think until she was three floors up and two corridors over, in the disabled bathroom in the old chemistry wing that no one used because the light buzzed, where she locked the door and put both hands flat on the sink and looked at herself in the mirror and said, silently, precisely, a word her mother would have been appalled to hear her think.

Then she rolled up her sleeve and assessed the damage, which was the only useful thing to do, and Emily had built an entire self out of doing the only useful thing.

The bandage had slipped. She had known it slipped, had felt it go the moment she reached up to fix her hair, a small betrayal of adhesive and bad decisions, and by the time she had gotten it covered again the girl had already seen. She peeled the tape back now and looked at the wound underneath with the detached professional interest she reserved for her own body. It was healing fast. Too fast, if anyone were counting, which was the entire problem with everything about her life: the healing was too fast, the reflexes too sharp, the hearing too good, all of it just slightly outside the range a person could explain, and so all of it had to be hidden, constantly, at a low and grinding cost that she had stopped noticing the way you stop noticing a sound you have been hearing for years.

The bullet had not hit her. That was the part she kept returning to, standing in the buzzing light, prodding at the edge of the healing cut. It had not hit her. It had come close enough to open the suit and the arm underneath, a graze, nothing, and it had come close because she had been slow, and she had been slow because she had been busy putting her body over a stranger.

A stranger in a terrible jacket.

Emily closed her eyes.

She had a system. This was the thing people did not understand about her, the thing the boy in the third row with his kind soft objections would never understand: the coldness was not cruelty, it was architecture. She had built a system, over years, out of the raw material of a childhood in which affection had been a performance review and pain had been a thing you did not mention at dinner, and the system was elegant and it worked and its central load-bearing principle was very simple. If she was useful enough, fast enough, good enough, if she never failed and never faltered and never needed anyone to catch her, then she would be safe. Not happy. She had given up on happy somewhere around sixteen, in a lab, in the dark, with a small pain in her hand she had told no one about. But safe. Untouchable. Beyond the reach of the one humiliation she could not survive: being seen wanting something and not getting it.

The system had exactly one flaw, which was that it required her to be alone, and Emily had made her peace with that flaw the way you make peace with a chronic condition. You did not enjoy it. You managed it. You did not, under any circumstances, let a journalism student with wet hair and a bad jacket and eyes that saw too much stand in a lecture hall and describe your entire interior life back to you as though she were reading it off a slide.

Somebody has to actually knock on the door and tell a family what happened, and it's never the person with the spreadsheet.

Emily's hands were not quite steady as she re-taped the bandage. She noted this with cold displeasure and did it anyway.

The girl had seen the cut. That was a fact, and Emily did facts. The question was what the girl would do with it, and the answer, based on approximately four minutes of acquaintance, was: everything. Absolutely everything. She had watched Andy Sachs come down those steps rather than argue from a distance, had watched her spend her own credibility with a room to make a point about people she would never meet, and Emily had recognized her instantly, the way one predator clocks another across a crowded room, as a person who simply did not stop. A person who followed threads off cliffs. A person who, having noticed one strange thing about Emily Charlton, would now notice all of them, relentlessly, warmly, with a smile, until there was nothing left to notice.

It was, Emily thought, exactly the kind of person who got herself killed in an alley in Hell's Kitchen. Which she nearly had. Which was how they had met the first time, eight hours before they met the second time, and only one of them knew it.

The thought should have been a problem to solve. Emily was good at problems. Instead it sat in her chest, warm and unwelcome, next to the healing wound, and refused to be solved, and Emily stood in the buzzing light and hated it, this warmth, hated it the way she hated all warmth, which was to say she was terrified of it and had decided long ago that the safest thing to do with anything you were terrified of was to be extremely rude to it until it went away.

She rolled her sleeve back down. She fixed her hair properly this time. She looked at the woman in the mirror, perfect again, restored, a decision rather than a person, and she made herself a promise in the cold flat voice she used for promises.

She was going to do the assignment. She had no choice about the assignment; Harrison was immovable and reassignment was, she had already decided in the four seconds after he announced it, impossible without raising exactly the kind of questions she could not afford. She was going to investigate Oscorp with Andy Sachs, at a careful arm's length, and she was going to control the flow of information the way she controlled everything, and she was going to make absolutely certain that the girl never once got close enough to the biggest thread of all.

And she was not, under any circumstances, going to think about the way the girl had looked at her arm. Not with suspicion. That she could have handled. With something else, something that had flickered under the suspicion, quick and involuntary, the same thing that had flickered when Emily had climbed the wall in the rain and looked back down and seen a small stubborn person refusing to be afraid.

Emily unlocked the bathroom door. The corridor was empty. Somewhere far below, the university went on with its noise and its hurry, and Emily Charlton walked back into it upright and perfect and alone, exactly the way she liked it, exactly the way that kept her safe, and if there was a new sound underneath all the old sounds, low and warm and impossible to name, she had a great deal of practice in the art of not noticing things.

Andy caught up with Emily on the front steps of the science building, which was a mistake, because the front steps of the science building were wide and public and Emily descended them like a woman who had somewhere better to be and resented the geometry that put people in her way.

"Charlton. Emily. Hi."

"We are not friends," Emily said, without slowing, without looking. "You do not get to use my first name as though we are friends."

"Great, noted, Ms. Charlton," Andy said, matching her stride, which took effort, the woman walked like she was being timed. "We have a project. A big one. We should probably talk about how we're going to not fail it."

"We are going to not fail it," Emily said, "by you staying out of my way. I will handle the science, which you do not understand, and the analysis, which you are not equipped for. You may do the part where you knock on doors and cry at people until they tell you things. I understand that is your specialty."

"You know, for someone who thinks feelings are sentimental, you spend a lot of energy on being mean. That's a feeling. That's you having a feeling right now, at me."

Emily stopped.

They were at the bottom of the steps now, in the cold flat noon light, and students flowed around them the way water goes around two rocks that have decided to have a problem with each other. Emily turned, slowly, and gave Andy the full weight of her attention, and Andy discovered that having the full weight of Emily Charlton's attention was a physical sensation, like standing too close to something with a current in it.

"Let me be clear," Emily said, quietly. "I did not ask for a partner. I did not ask for you. I have spent a great deal of effort arranging my life so that it does not contain surprises, and you are, as far as I can tell, made entirely of them. So we are going to do this project the efficient way. You will send me what you find. I will tell you what it means. We will meet as rarely as the syllabus allows, and when we do, you will not," she paused, and something flickered, "you will not look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you are taking notes."

Andy, who had in fact been taking notes, felt the accusation land with uncomfortable precision. "That's just my face."

"It is not just your face. I have watched your face for two hours. Your face is doing something specific." Emily's eyes moved over her, quick and clinical, and then away, as if she had caught herself doing the very thing she was objecting to. "Whatever you think you saw this morning, you did not see it."

And there it was, laid on the table between them, so direct that Andy almost missed how much nerve it must have taken to say it plainly rather than let it lie.

"What did I not see?" Andy asked, carefully.

"Anything," Emily said. "You did not see anything. You are a tired person who was up too late chasing whatever it is that keeps you in that jacket, and you saw a woman with a cut on her arm, which is the single most ordinary thing a chemistry student can have, and your imagination, which I already do not trust, did the rest. Do you understand me."

It was, Andy thought, a genuinely excellent denial. It was specific and reasonable and it accounted for the evidence and it gave her a graceful exit, a way to be wrong that cost her nothing. A smarter person, a safer person, would have taken it.

"How'd you cut your arm?" Andy asked.

The silence lasted exactly one second too long. One second. Emily Charlton, who had an answer for everything, who could dismantle a room full of ethics students without raising her voice, took one full second to answer a question about a cut, and in that second Andy watched her decide which lie to use, and that decision, that visible instant of choosing, told Andy more than any answer could have.

"Glassware," Emily said. "In the lab. It happens constantly. Ask anyone."

"Sure," Andy said. "Glassware."

"You don't believe me."

"I believe you cut your arm," Andy said, which was true, and watched Emily register the shape of what she had not said, and watched, with a small guilty thrill, the exact moment Emily understood that the graceful exit had closed, that the tired girl in the terrible jacket had looked at the door being held open for her and walked, instead, straight into the wall.

"You are going to be a problem," Emily said. It came out lower than she seemed to intend, almost to herself, and for just a moment the blade was gone and there was only a very tired person looking at a very stubborn one with something that was not, quite, dislike.

"People keep telling me that," Andy said. "I'm starting to think it's a compliment."

"It is not."

"Agree to disagree." Andy stuck out her hand. "Partners?"

Emily looked at the hand as though it were a piece of evidence. She did not take it. But she did not walk away either, and the not-walking-away lasted long enough to mean something, and then she said, "Send me the Oscorp files by Friday. All of them. And Sachs." She was already turning, already reassembling into the woman who had somewhere better to be. "Whatever you were doing last night. Stop."

She left. Andy stood at the bottom of the steps with her hand still out and watched that severe red hair move away through the crowd, straight-backed and untouchable, and she thought about the one second of silence, and the choosing of the lie, and the way Emily had said stop as though she knew exactly what Andy had been doing last night, as though she had, perhaps, been there.

Andy lowered her hand.

"Not a chance," she said, to no one, and went to find coffee and a way to get her hands on everything Oscorp had ever tried to bury.

The offices of the Empire State Sentinel occupied a basement room that had, in a more optimistic decade, been a darkroom, and still smelled faintly of chemicals and the ghosts of student ambition. Andy loved it with an intensity she found embarrassing. It had bad chairs and a coffee machine that produced a liquid best described as legally distinct from coffee, and it was the only place in the world where being the kind of person who could not leave a mystery alone was treated as a qualification rather than a diagnosis.

Her editor, a perpetually exhausted senior named Priya who ran the paper the way a tugboat captain runs a harbor, listened to exactly forty seconds of Andy's Oscorp pitch before holding up a hand.

"Stop. Back up. You went where at midnight?"

"That's not the important part."

"It is aggressively the important part, Andy, it's the part where you're alive to pitch me anything at all." Priya pinched the bridge of her nose. "You cannot do surveillance on Oscorp for a student paper. We do not have lawyers. We have a coffee machine that's committing a crime and a printer that only works if you apologize to it. If they decide to come after you, there is no us. There's just you, and a very expensive law firm, and your future."

"They were moving unmarked crates out of a facility that isn't on any map," Andy said. "At midnight. In the rain. People who are doing nothing wrong do not move crates at midnight in the rain, Priya, that's just true, that's a law of nature."

"And you know this how?"

Andy opened her mouth, and then closed it, because the honest answer was because a woman in a mask saved my life and told me it was worse than I thought, and that was not a sentence she could say in a basement to a person who could take her off the story.

"I have plates," she said instead. "I have a paper trail. And I have," she hesitated, "it turns out I've got an in. The project got cross-listed with the ethics seminar. I got assigned a partner from the science side. She's a nightmare, but she's a genuinely brilliant nightmare, and she knows the biotech well enough to tell me what all this actually means. Academic cover. Nobody sues two students doing a class assignment."

Priya considered this with the narrow attention of a woman looking for the catch, because there was always a catch with Andy. "A partner. A brilliant nightmare." Something in Andy's face must have moved, because Priya's eyebrows climbed. "Oh no."

"What."

"I know that face. That's the face you had about the whistleblower guy. And the professor with the grant fraud. And the entire month of the composting scandal that gave you an ulcer." Priya leaned back. "You've found a thread, and you're going to pull it until something bleeds, probably you. Fine. I can't stop you, I've never once been able to stop you, it's why you're the best I've got and also why I'm going gray. But we run it straight. Oscorp, the crates, the money. A real story. Not," she pointed a pen at Andy with unerring accuracy, "whatever else is going on behind your eyes right now."

"There's nothing going on behind my eyes."

"You have a Spider-Woman folder on your phone."

"Everyone has a Spider-Woman folder," Andy said, with dignity. "She's a public figure. She's newsworthy."

"Mm," said Priya, in a tone Andy was going to hear from a completely different mouth on a set of front steps in a few hours and not enjoy any better the second time. "Just remember she's not the assignment. The company is the assignment. Whatever the masked one is up to, it's not our lane, and it's the kind of thing that gets a student reporter turned into a cautionary tale."

Andy said the right things. She said them convincingly, because she was good at her job, and one of the requirements of the job was being able to agree out loud with things you had privately already decided to ignore. She left the basement with an assignment she meant to actually do and a second one, unsanctioned and unspeakable, that had its own gravity, and she spent the whole ride uptown with her phone in her hand, not opening the folder, thinking about a cut on a forearm in exactly the place, and a one-second silence, and the way certainty felt, right at the start, before it had cost her anything.

It felt, she would think much later, exactly like standing at the edge of a very tall building and looking down and being, against all sense, unafraid.

By eleven that night Andy's bedroom wall had become a crime.

She had not meant for it to. She had come home telling herself she would sleep, an actual eight hours, a functional adult amount, and instead she had eaten a granola bar over the sink and then found herself, without any conscious decision, taping printouts to the wall above her desk. It had started with the license plate. Then the Oscorp org chart she had built over three weeks. Then, because her hands would not stop, a printed still from the video, a black-and-red shape suspended impossibly in the air above a wet street.

And then, at the center, where she had told herself she would not put it, a photograph she had taken with her phone under a desk that morning and cropped so tightly that it could have been anything: a sliver of pale forearm, the edge of a bandage, the top of a long thin line.

She stood back and looked at it. The wall looked back.

"This is insane," Andy told the wall, with great sincerity, and then got a marker and drew a line of red string between the two images anyway, because she did not have real red string, so she used a red marker straight on the plaster, which meant she was definitely not getting her security deposit back, which meant she had decided, on some level below the level where sensible decisions were made, that this mattered more than her security deposit. That it mattered more than a lot of things.

She knew how it looked. She was a journalism student who had been rescued by a superhero and had responded by building a shrine and drawing lines to a woman she had known for one class period. If Doug walked in right now, she would have to move out and change her name. If her editor saw this, he would gently suggest a leave of absence. If Emily Charlton saw this, she would say something cold and precise and true, and Andy would deserve it.

But.

But the cut had been in exactly the place. And Emily Charlton had covered it with a smoothness that was not the smoothness of a person hiding an ordinary cut, it was the smoothness of a person who had hidden many things, for a long time, and had gotten frighteningly good at it. And when their eyes had met across the row, in the half-second before Emily composed herself, Andy had seen the thing she had also seen in an alley in the rain: not guilt, not fear of discovery exactly, but a bone-deep, weary, practiced dread. The look of someone bracing to be seen.

It was the same look. It was the exact same look on two different faces that were, Andy was becoming horribly certain, the same face.

She sat down at the desk and opened the document she had started at four in the morning, the one that was not a news story, and she read the first line again. She is not what you think. She thought about deleting it. She thought about the whole reckless machinery of her own attention, the way it had chosen this, out of everything, the way it always chose the one thread guaranteed to hurt her.

Then she kept writing, because that was the other thing about Andy, the thing that lived right next to the fatal flaw and was possibly the same organ: once she had decided to know something, the not-knowing became unbearable. And she had decided. Somewhere between the alley and the seminar and the red marker on the wall, without ever quite choosing it, she had decided.

She was going to find out who was under the mask.

She was going to be so careful about it. She was going to be professional, and skeptical, and rigorous, and she was absolutely not going to develop feelings about a woman who thought compassion was a weakness and had told Andy to try to keep up in a tone that Andy had, embarrassingly, thought about at least six times since.

She wrote until her eyes blurred. At some point she got up to close the window against the cold, and she stood there for a moment with her hand on the sash, looking out at the fire escape and the dark canyon of the street and the wet gleam of the rooftops opposite, the ordinary indifferent city, and she thought about how strange it was that somewhere out there, right now, on one of those roofs, a woman was probably crouched in the dark deciding not to feel a wound.

She did not know how right she was.

Two blocks east and four stories up, on the tar-paper roof of a walkup with the wind coming hard off the river, Spider-Woman crouched in the dark and told herself, for the ninth time, that she was on patrol.

It was a very thin lie, and she knew it was thin. Patrol did not, generally, route itself past the apartment of one specific journalism student. Patrol did not, generally, involve sitting motionless for twenty minutes with a healing arm and a cold coffee she had bought three neighborhoods away and a view of a lit fourth-floor window in which a small figure moved back and forth, taping things to a wall.

Emily could not see what the things were at this distance, even with eyes that saw farther than they should. She did not need to. She had watched Andy Sachs get the license plates off a van with a gun coming down at her skull. She knew exactly what kind of wall that was.

This was, she informed herself, a security assessment. The girl had footage. The girl had a wall. The girl was, by any reasonable measure, a liability that needed monitoring, and monitoring was a rational activity, and if Emily's own heartbeat had done something complicated and unwelcome when the figure in the window paused at the glass and looked out, hand on the sash, gazing into the dark almost exactly toward the roof where Emily crouched, then that was simply the residual adrenaline of a difficult week and nothing whatsoever to do with the warmth she had spent all day refusing to notice.

The girl could not see her. Andy stood lit up in her window, framed and bright and utterly unaware, looking out into a darkness that was, for once, looking back. There was something almost unbearable about it, the two of them held apart by two blocks and a lie and a mask, one of them searching and one of them watching, and only one of them knowing that the search would eventually succeed, because Emily had seen Andy work and she was under no illusions about what happened to threads Andy Sachs decided to pull.

You are going to get yourself killed, Emily had told her in the alley, and meant it, and the horrible new truth of the evening was that she had spent all day discovering she cared about the answer.

The window closed. The figure moved back to the desk, sat and bent over a laptop, and did not come to the glass again.

Emily stayed a while longer than a security assessment strictly required. Then she stood, and the wind took her coat of shadow, and she looked one last time at the lit window with its small determined occupant, the girl who had fallen into her life through the roof of an alley and refused, so far, to fall out of it.

"Go to sleep," she said, to no one, to the window, to the two blocks of cold air that would not carry it. "Delete the video. Stop looking for me."

The light in the window stayed on.

Of course it did.

Spider-Woman turned and ran to the edge of the roof and threw herself off it into the dark, and the city caught her the way it always did, and somewhere behind her, a girl kept writing a story she did not yet understand was about to become her whole life.