Second Skin (A Marvel Fanfiction)

[pararaio20]

Second Skin (A Marvel Fanfiction)​

Genres: Action, Adult, Adventure, Fanfiction, Romance

Tags: Male Protagonist, Superheroes

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New York, 2050.

Much has changed in the last few decades. Cars now crisscross the skies thanks to Stark technology, mutants have conquered their place in society, and the Avengers continue to protect the world from ever-increasing threats.

Peter Parker, the man who once patrolled the streets of New York as Spider-Man, has become the leader of the Avengers. His name is known in virtually every corner of the planet.

But while the great heroes are busy saving the world, life goes on for millions of ordinary people.

Sebastian is one of them.

At thirteen, he lives with his mother and younger sister in a small apartment in Harlem. His routine consists of school, studying, and deliveries he makes after school, riding an electric bicycle built from scrap parts.

Money is never enough, his mother works to exhaustion, and the thick-lensed glasses he's worn since childhood make his life even more complicated.

Despite everything, Sebastian has a dream he's carried since childhood: to become a hero like Spider-Man.

A rather distant dream for a frail boy who can barely defend himself against school bullies.

Everything begins to change one night in January.

During one of his deliveries, Sebastian ends up in the middle of a Carnage attack in Times Square. Surrounded by destruction and desperate people, he finds himself facing a creature that even the greatest heroes on the planet can't easily defeat.

By a stroke of luck, Spider-Man himself saves his life.

Sebastian manages to get home that night. Scared, hurt, and convinced that he never wants to go through anything like that again.

The next morning, however, something is different.

For the first time in his memory, he can see perfectly without his glasses.

And that's just the first change.

Something happened to Sebastian during the attack. Something he still can't understand, and something that could transform his old dream into a much more dangerous reality than he imagined. After all, growing up admiring heroes is one thing.

Discovering what it means to be one is something else entirely.

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Notice to Readers

This is a fanfic set in an alternate version of the Marvel Universe, featuring Sebastian, an original protagonist (OC) created by me.

The story takes place in 2050, in a future where Peter Parker is already a veteran hero and leads the Avengers.

This work has its own continuity. It does not follow the events of the MCU or the official chronology of Marvel comics.

The story will have gradual development, with special attention to the protagonist's growth, his relationships, his difficulties, and the consequences of the decisions he makes.

I don't intend to rush Sebastian's evolution just to make him powerful quickly. I want his achievements to make sense within the universe I'm building.

Criticisms, comments, and suggestions are welcome. I only ask that you respect the story's premise and check the tags before starting to read.

Advance Chapters and Support

If you enjoyed the story and want to support my work, you can become a member of my Patreon.

There I make advance chapters available for those who want to follow Sebastian's adventures before public releases.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/pararaio

I also have good news for those who want to read for free!

On my official website, you can find advance chapters without paying anything. In addition, the site gathers my other stories and future projects.

Official Website: https://parallelworldverse.com/

Thank you very much to everyone who decided to follow this story. I hope you enjoy Sebastian's journey!

Happy reading!

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Chapter 1 — The Delivery Man of Harlem

The bell at Douglass Avenue High School rang at 3:00 PM sharp, and the sound—an electronic hum that attempted to imitate the old brass bell but sounded more like a tired microwave alarm—wound through the hallways of the old brick building in the heart of Harlem.

It was Thursday, January 16, 2050.

Douglass Avenue wasn't a prestigious school. It didn't appear on lists, it didn't have Stark Solutions-sponsored labs, it didn't receive visits from heroes on holidays. It was a four-story building squeezed between a housing complex and an automated laundry, with heaters that worked intermittently and windows that let in the January wind through cracks that no one had fixed since before the alien war. But it was a school. It had teachers who cared when they could and too many students for the teachers who cared. It was the kind of place that futuristic New York passed over without looking down.

The classroom doors opened almost simultaneously, and the second-floor hallway filled up in the blink of an eye. Teenagers of all sizes spilled down the corridors like water breaking a dam—backpacks banging against shoulders, sneakers squeaking on the worn linoleum floor, voices overlapping each other in a cacophony of laughter, shouts, teasing, and plans for the rest of the afternoon.

In the middle of that river of people, a boy was swimming against the current.

He was easy to miss, which was exactly what he preferred. Short, thin in a way that made his coat look two sizes too big—because it was two sizes too big, bought at a thrift store on 125th Street precisely for that reason, "it'll last another two winters like this," his mother had said—a gray wool hat pulled down to his eyebrows and, underneath it, a pair of glasses with lenses so thick they slightly distorted the gray eyes behind them. Bottle-bottoms, as the kinder ones said. The less kind ones had worse names.

He walked quickly, head down, shoulders hunched, dodging larger figures with the automatic precision of someone who had spent years practicing the art of not being bumped into. A senior football player walked by laughing with his friends and almost hit him with his backpack; the boy spun on his heels, let the backpack pass inches from his face, and continued walking without breaking his rhythm, without raising his eyes, without anyone in the group even registering his existence.

Invisibility was a skill. He had perfected it in six different schools.

The cell phone vibrated in his coat pocket. He pulled it out without stopping walking—a device from three generations ago, with a cracked screen in the upper corner and the back held together with black electrical tape, but which worked perfectly because he himself had already replaced the battery twice and resoldered the charging connector once. On the screen, a message:

Mom: Remember to pick up your sister today. I received a message that the school buses won't be running. There's a problem with the system, I don't know. Sorry, my love. With love, Mom.

Sebastian Cross frowned, causing his glasses to slip slightly down his nose.

He did the math in his head in two seconds, because doing mental math was one of the few things that came free to him. Camila's school was a twenty-minute bike ride away, plus another ten minutes of waiting and talking, plus twenty-five minutes back home with the extra weight on the back, plus the time to get food ready, plus the commute to work... He was going to be almost an hour late to the delivery company. Again. Mr. Williams was going to give him that look. And fewer deliveries meant fewer tips, and fewer tips meant that the money he was saving for the new bicycle battery controller would remain a dream for another three weeks.

He typed back with his thumb, still walking:

Don't worry, I've got it.

Complaining was pointless. His mother wasn't to blame for the buses, and she already carried enough guilt for everything else—he saw it in her face every time she came home from her shift and found him awake, finishing his homework at midnight. Complaining would only add more weight to the pile. And Sofia Cross's pile was already high enough.

Locker number 14 was at the end of the first-floor hallway, near the side exit—another strategic choice. Sebastian turned the combination lock with quick, mechanical movements, 32-7-19, and the small metal door opened with its usual creak. Inside, taped to the door, was a single decoration: an old, yellowed newspaper clipping, a rare sight these days, showing Spider-Man suspended upside down between two skyscrapers, with the headline "HE'S STILL ONE OF US." The clipping was older than Sebastian. It had belonged to his father.

He made the switch with assembly-line efficiency: chemistry and history books into the locker, the battered school tablet and the physics notebook—the real notebook, the one where he drew circuits and scribbled ideas in the margins during class—into his backpack, along with the homework booklet. Finally, he grabbed the bunch of keys hanging on an improvised hook that he himself had glued to the inside wall of the locker: house key, bicycle lock key, and a smaller key for a toolbox that was kept under his bed.

He closed the locker and took a deep breath.

Around him, the hallway emptied in different directions. Most of the students dragged themselves along without haste—groups arranging to go to the corner convenience store, girls laughing at something on a holographic wrist screen, a bunch of people from the robotics club (which Sebastian desperately wanted to join but never could, because robotics happened exactly during work hours) carrying a box of parts to the lab. Nobody was in a hurry to face the winter outside. Nobody, except the few who, like Sebastian, had somewhere to run to.

He pushed the exit door open with his shoulder, and the New York winter hit him squarely in the face.

The January chill in the city wasn't a polite chill. It was a wind that channeled through the hallways of buildings, laden with moisture from the river, finding every crevice in clothing as if trained for it. Sebastian felt his eyes water behind his glasses and the icy air burn inside his nose. The temperature on the digital panel of the laundromat next door read 28°F, and the wind chill must have made it feel much colder. He pulled his coat zipper up to his chin and pulled his hat down further.

And then, as he did every day, he looked up.

From the school's staircase, Harlem stretched out before him in layers. First, the neighborhood's low, old buildings—red brick, rusty fire escapes, old antennas coexisting with new signal repeaters, clothes hanging on lines even in the cold. Then, further on, the mid-rise buildings of the previous era, twenty, thirty stories. And finally, to the south, rising above it all like a mountain range of glass and steel, Manhattan.

The skyscrapers of the new century looked like real mountains. The tallest of them, the super-school—the Institute, as everyone called it, that colossus where the children of geniuses, the young mutants, the hand-picked prodigies studied—disappeared within the low winter clouds, and its mirrored sides reflected the gray of the sky in patterns that changed as the smart panels adjusted to the wind. Between the towers, points of light moved: delivery drones on routes organized like shoals of fish, flying vehicles in the air lanes marked by faint holograms, and occasionally—if you were lucky, if you looked at the right time—something faster than all of that, a red or gold or silver blur cutting across the sky.

Sebastian stared for three full seconds, searching for a specific blur. Red and blue. An almost invisible thread of webbing connecting one building to another.

Nothing. Just drones and clouds.

"One day," he murmured to no one, his breath turning to white smoke. It was less a promise and more a habit, a short prayer he recited without even realizing it anymore.

He checked the time on his cell phone: 3:07 PM. He put the device away and ran down the stairs.

The bike rack was located on the side of the school, a metal structure covered by a leaky awning. Most of the spaces were empty—few people still used regular bicycles, and those who had factory-installed e-bikes could leave them anywhere, because the trackers and magnetic locks took care of the rest. Sebastian's bike was secured with a thick chain and an iron padlock, technology from the last century, but efficient nonetheless.

And there she was. Frankenstein, as he affectionately called her in his own thoughts.

At first glance, it was a monstrosity: an old mountain bike frame, sanded and spray-painted lead gray, a secondhand battery salvaged from a disused scooter, attached to the frame with industrial cable ties and protected by a plastic case that Sebastian had printed in parts on the public library's 3D printer over two months of free forty-minute sessions. The motor in the rear wheel hub came from a junkyard in Queens, with a bent axle—Sebastian had spent three nights straightening and rewinding it by hand. From the handlebars, carefully arranged wires with plastic spirals led to a panel he had assembled himself: a repurposed old cell phone screen, displaying speed, battery charge, motor temperature, and navigation route, all running on a program he had written himself, piecing together open-source code he downloaded from the library.

It was ugly. It was clumsy. None of the kids with factory-built e-bikes would look at it twice, except to laugh.

And she climbed the hills of Harlem carrying forty kilos of packages without overheating; she had more autonomy than most store models and never, not once, had she let Sebastian down. Every screw on her had been tightened by him. Every weld had a story.

Sebastian released the chain, wound it around the support under the saddle, put on the fingerless gloves he kept in his coat pocket—he needed his fingers free for the screen—and mounted. A touch on the panel: the system woke up with a discreet beep, the charge showing 84%. Enough for the whole day, if he didn't abuse the throttle on the climbs.

He abused the accelerator on the first uphill climb.

Frankenstein started with a deep hum, and Sebastian leaned forward, the winter-studded tires—another modification, made with short bolts threaded through an old tire—biting into the thin layer of dirty snow accumulated along the curb. He knew every street on that route as well as he knew the circuits themselves: he knew where the asphalt had potholes hidden under the snow, he knew which corner the wind hit from the side, he knew that in front of the church on 132nd Street there was always black ice at three-thirty in the afternoon because the shadow of the neighboring building prevented the sun from reaching it.

Harlem passed by him in fragments of sound and smell. The icy air carried smoke of roasted chestnuts from Mr. Okafor's stall, who waved to Sebastian with his ladle—Sebastian waved back with two fingers, without letting go of the handlebars. An autonomous delivery van waited patiently at a traffic light, its front LED flashing blue, while a human delivery driver from another company, huddled inside a thermal poncho, cursed the traffic stopped beside it. Music escaped from a barbershop with its door open despite the cold, the bass making the window vibrate. On a screen attached to the side of a market, a news anchor spoke without sound, and the automatic caption ran below: ...AVENGERS CONFIRM PRESENCE AT GLOBAL SECURITY SUMMIT NEXT WEEK...

And then, on 128th Street, Sebastian did what he did every day at that point in his route: he slowed down.

The wall covered the entire side of a six-story building, some thirty meters of brick transformed into a canvas. The graffiti was about five years old, but someone from the neighborhood always touched it up—you could see the layers of newer paint over the older, vibrant colors patching up the faded, like a wound that the community refused to let heal ugly.

The scene depicted was the Battle. The battle, with a definite article and a capital letter in the voice of anyone who spoke of it. Five years ago, when the sky over New York opened and the ships descended, and for three days the whole world held its breath thinking it was the end.

In the graffiti, the sky was purple and torn, and angular alien shapes—half insect, half machine, just as everyone remembered them from nightmares—descended in swarms over the city skyline. And against them, rising, the entire coalition: Iron Man in armor that looked like liquid gold, the Hulk in mid-leap that spanned two stories, Storm with white eyes and lightning bolts erupting from her open hands, Wolverine in the foreground with his claws embedded in something best left unexamined, Cyclops, Captain Marvel, Thor's hammer leaving a trail of light...

And at the center of it all, bigger than everyone, at the exact point where the eye was first drawn: him.

Spider-Man. Red and blue against a purple sky, crouching atop an antenna at the highest point of the wall, one hand shooting webs, his head turned toward the horde as if to say, "Come on." The original artist had painted the lenses of the mask in such a way that, depending on the angle, it looked like he was looking directly at you.

Thirty years of career. The man had started before Sebastian was born, before Sebastian's mother was an adult, and five years ago, in his fifties, he had led the defense of the planet and won. The aliens from the graffiti had remained only there: in the graffiti, in the recordings, in memory. The city around the wall remained standing, full of people buying chestnuts and complaining about traffic, and each brick of it was proof that the heroes had succeeded. That he had succeeded.

Sebastian walked slowly, his neck turned, his eyes traveling from Wolverine to the white lenses high on the wall, just like he did every single day.

One day.

Then the bicycle's panel beeped with the route reminder he himself had programmed, and the day became scheduled again. Sebastian straightened his body, twisted the throttle, and left the wall behind.

Hamilton Heights Elementary School was located on a street lined with bare trees, and when Sebastian turned the corner nineteen minutes later, the sidewalk in front of the gate was already teeming. Cars were parked in double rows with their hazard lights flashing, two autonomous private school transport vehicles were waiting with their doors open, parents were crouched down zipping up colorful coats, and a swarm of toddlers poured out of the gate as if the school were sneezing them out, all talking at once in a whistle-like frequency.

Sebastian leaned Frankenstein against the railing, stood on tiptoe and craned his neck, sweeping through the crowd of hats and hoods. Seven years old was an age when all the children were about four feet tall and shouted in unison, which made it difficult—

"SEBASTIAN! HERE!"

He didn't even need to look. The voice came from the left, sharp and imperious like a miniature siren, and two seconds later a girl in a shocking pink coat and a pom-pom hat broke through the crowd and shot toward him, backpack bouncing on her back, red braids escaping from under her hat, a crumpled drawing in one hand.

Camila Cross braked just inches from the bike, in the dramatic way she braked everything in life, lifted her freckled face to her brother and announced, breathless and without greeting:

"You took too long."

"Two minutes," said Sebastian. "I counted."

"It took two minutes," she confirmed, like a judge upholding the sentence. Then her face broke into that toothless grin—her front tooth had fallen out at Christmas and the new one was growing crooked, which only made the smile more devastating—and she held up the crumpled paper. "Look."

Sebastian picked up the drawing. It was, unmistakably, Spider-Man—unmistakably because Camila had written "SPIDER-MAN" on top with an arrow and everything, prepared for any doubt. The crayon hero swung on a web that looked more like a lightning bolt, and hanging from his back was a second, smaller figure, in a pink dress and orange braids.

"Is this you?" Sebastian asked, pointing.

"Obviously," said Camila. "The teacher asked us to draw 'who you want to spend the day with.' Zoe drew her mother." The tone made it clear what Camila thought of Zoe's level of ambition.

"And how was the rest of the day?"

"It was AMAZING." She grabbed the railing and started hanging on as she spoke, because Camila was physically incapable of recounting anything while standing still. "We had science class and the teacher brought in a REAL robot, a tiny one, that walks on its own and avoids things, and it bumped into Marcus's foot because Marcus wouldn't get out of the way, and EVERYONE laughed, and then at recess Zoe said that—"

"Tell me on the way," Sebastian said, suppressing a laugh and gently flicking the pom-pom on her hat. "We're late. Get on."

He carefully tucked the drawing into the outer pocket of his backpack—a detail Camila meticulously inspected until the zipper closed—and mounted the bicycle. The rear rack was another of his creations: a padded seat bolted onto the reinforced luggage rack, with footrests welded to the frame and a handle. Camila climbed on with the ease of someone who had been doing this forever, fitted her boots into the footrests, and wrapped her arms around her brother's waist, securing her gloved hands in front.

"Safe," he said, as always.

"I'm holding on," she said, as always, squeezing harder.

Frankenstein buzzed and left.

The commute home was Sebastian's favorite part of the day, though he'd never put it into words. The small, warm weight clinging to his back, the high-pitched voice narrating without pausing for breath—the saga of the robot that ran over Marcus covered six blocks; the complex politics of the lunch table, another four—and the little hands pointing over his shoulder at everything worth recording: a dog in a coat ("SEBASTIAN, LOOK AT THE DOG!"), a drone flying too low, a gray, melted, half-finished snowman someone had made in a flowerbed.

"...and then Priya said I can go to her birthday party, which will be in her building's party room, and her mom is making a two-tiered cake," Camila concluded, as they turned onto her street. "Can I go?"

"When is it?"

"Next Saturday."

"If Mom lets you and it's not far, I'll take you."

"Yay!" The shout went straight to his ear, and arms tightened around his waist in a celebratory, almost choking hug that nearly made him veer off course.

Sebastian grinned into the icy wind. This was what he could never quite explain, not even to himself: he had no group of friends, no best friend, not enough people in his life to fill a birthday table. Six schools in eight years did that to a person; he'd learned not to unpack his bags from the inside. But Camila made friends the way she breathed, anywhere, in two weeks, and there was something in her toothless smile recounting these achievements that warmed his chest as if the victories were his too. Maybe they were. He had kind of helped create that little person, after all.

Their building appeared on the corner: 419 Hadley Street, eight stories of brick darkened by time, a zigzagging fire escape on the facade, and a stubborn, leafless plant growing in a cracked pot beside the entrance. Decades ago, eight stories was a respectable building. Today, with the towers of Manhattan streaking the clouds in the background, 419 looked like a baby tooth in the mouth of giants. But the central heating worked—most of the time—the elevator worked—most of the time—and the rent was the cheapest Sofia Cross had found in two years of moving. They had been living there for fourteen months already. A recent record.

Sebastian got off his bike, opened the lobby door with the key (the building's electronic lock had burned out in November; the superintendent had been promising to fix it ever since, and Sebastian had already offered to do it for free twice, receiving in return two "let me handle it, kid" and no repairs) and pushed the bicycle inside. The lobby smelled of cleaning products and, vaguely, of someone's stew from the first floor. Frankenstein, despite the battery and the clutter, was light enough for him to maneuver it sideways into the old elevator, a cubicle with Formica walls imitating wood, a cracked mirror in the corner, and buttons yellowed from use.

He pressed the 6 button. The elevator went up grumbling.

"...and the cake will have strawberry frosting," said Camila, who hadn't stopped talking for a moment.

Apartment 6B announced itself even before the door opened: a faded doormat with the word WELCOME almost invisible and, stuck to the door at a child's eye level, a laminated drawing of a smiling sun, Camila's work at age five, which Sofia refused to remove.

Inside, the warmth welcomed them like a hug—the old radiator under the living room window working with its usual metallic tick-tick-tick, a sound so constant that the family could no longer hear it. Sebastian leaned his bicycle against its usual spot in the small hallway by the entrance, on a piece of cardboard that caught the melted snow from the tires.

The house was small. Three cramped bedrooms, a living room that also served as a dining area, a kitchen where two people could only fit if they really liked each other, and a bathroom with green tiles from another era. The living room sofa had a sunken seat on the left side and a crocheted blanket strategically covering a tear on the right; the blanket had belonged to Sebastian's grandmother, whom he barely remembered. The Formica dining table had one leg propped up with two popsicle sticks glued on—a repair Sebastian himself had done, categorized as "temporary since 2048." Nothing there was new, nothing matched anything else.

And yet, it was impossible to enter that apartment and not feel that a family lived there.

The walls told the story. Near the window, a crooked shelf (Sebastian had leveled it three times; it was the wall that was crooked) displayed mismatched picture frames: Sofia in her white uniform on the day of her nursing graduation, very young, very similar to Camila; the four of them together on a Coney Island beach one long ago, Sebastian small and still without glasses, perched on the shoulders of a tall man with gray eyes and a wide smile; baby Camila, sleeping with her mouth open on the chest of a six-year-old Sebastian terrified by the responsibility. In the beach photo, the glass in the frame was new—Sebastian knew, because he was the one who had replaced it after the last move, when the box fell. His mother had sat on the floor of the new living room for ten minutes holding that photo, and Sebastian had gone to the hardware store that same day to buy the glass with his lunch money.

The father. Rémy Cross smiled from that shelf with the same smile in three different photos, forever in his early thirties, forever in that summer. Sebastian had his eyes and nothing more—not his height, not his shoulders, not even a complete memory of him: only fragments, a deep voice humming in French, large hands teaching him how to hold a screwdriver. Camila didn't even have the fragments. For her, her father was the photos and the stories her mother told, and perhaps that's why she needed heroes on TV so much.

The rest of the room was divided territory. One corner undeniably belonged to Camila: a plastic box overflowing with toys, mostly secondhand, most notably three Spider-Man action figures in three different sizes—one of them missing its left hand, a war veteran—and a Hulk action figure whose head Sebastian had already reattached twice. Her drawings covered the refrigerator door and much of the low wall of the hallway, in a constantly rotating gallery curated by the artist. The other corner was Sebastian: an improvised steel shelf where shoeboxes labeled with masking tape and pen ("POWER SOURCES," "CABLES," "SENSORS," "ASSORTED SCREWS," "DO NOT TOUCH—SERIOUSLY, CAMILA") held the treasure of years collecting discarded electronics on the wealthy sidewalks of Manhattan on collection days.

Camila had already gone through her arrival routine—boots kicked away in two directions, coat hung on the arm of the sofa instead of the hook, an automatic warning from Sebastian ("Camila, the hook"), the coat repositioned with a martyr's sigh—and now she was settled on the good side of the sofa, remote in hand. The TV screen, an old model that Sebastian stubbornly kept alive, lit up directly on the children's channel.

"...in New York, nobody gets left behind!" sang the television, and Camila sang along, without taking her eyes off the screen.

It was the cartoon "The Adventures of United Heroes," the licensed children's program that aired every afternoon: rounded, colorful versions of the Avengers and X-Men delivering twenty-minute moral lessons. In today's episode, the cartoon Spider-Man—shoulders too broad, chin too heroic, nothing like the middle-aged man who appeared at real press conferences—was teaching a lost baby dragon to ask for help instead of hiding. Camila had already seen that episode at least four times. She knew the lines. She spoke along.

Sebastian left her with the dragon and went to the kitchen.

He opened the refrigerator and did the quick, automatic inventory of someone who had been running that kitchen for years: half a roast chicken from Tuesday's special, yesterday's rice in a bowl, eggs, half a broccoli, half a cup of milk, the jar of jam that Camila thought nobody knew she devoured with a spoon. Action plan: rice in the pan to loosen, shredded chicken on top, chopped broccoli hidden in the middle of the rice where Camila couldn't identify it and exercise her veto.

He worked quickly and efficiently, the way he did everything. The frying pan sizzled as the rice hit the hot oil; the smell of garlic from the sauté filled the small kitchen and drifted into the living room. While he stirred with one hand, the other was already washing the dish in the sink—an old porcelain sink, with a faucet whose seal he had replaced last month. Through the kitchen door, he could hear the cartoon and the commentator: "NO, little dragon, don't go in there! Tell Spider-Man WHERE YOU ARE!"

Five-thirty was technically too early for dinner. But the Cross household math didn't follow magazine schedules: Sofia had been on duty at São Lucas since seven in the morning and had texted earlier to say she might work a double shift into the evening—the emergency room was a mess with winter flu cases, and overtime was overtime, and the January heating bill wasn't going to pay itself. Sebastian wouldn't be back from work until around nine or nine-thirty. Which meant Camila would be having dinner alone, and having food ready on the table was the difference between her actually eating or "forgetting" and living on jam until someone arrived.

He plated the dish, covered it with another plate upside down to keep it warm, and left it on the table in front of her chair, with a glass of juice already poured beside it. He thought for a second, grabbed a sticky note pad from the drawer (every kitchen has a drawer for everything) and wrote: There's broccoli, but you won't find it. I doubt it. — B. He stuck it on the top plate. She would look for it. She would find half of it.

He went back into the living room, drying his hands on the dish towel. On TV, the little dragon was reunited with his family in pink clouds, and the animated Spider-Man was giving his final speech about asking for help.

"Hey, big ears." He gave her a light flick on the top of her head as he passed behind the sofa. "Listen. The food's ready, it's on the table, covered. Take a shower before you eat, otherwise you'll eat and dawdle and go to bed dirty, I know you. And if I get home too late today, I want you in bed by nine. Nine," he repeated, showing nine fingers over her shoulder, within her field of vision between her and the TV.

"Okay, okay, goood," Camila replied, in the universal drawling tone of younger sisters obeying bossy brothers, leaning her body to the side to continue seeing the screen behind the barrier of fingers.

"Camila."

"Shower, food, bed, nine o'clock," she recited, rolling her eyes, proving that the audio system worked even when her attention was elsewhere. Then, without looking away from the TV, she stretched her closed fist to the side, towards him.

Sebastian smiled, defeated, and pressed his fist against hers. The official seal. That was one she never forgot.

"Door locked. Doesn't open for anyone. Anything—"

"—I'll call you, I'll call Mom, I'll call 911, I'll press the button for Mr. Ramirez." The neighbor from 6A, retired, third line of defense. Camila recited the entire list as if reciting multiplication tables for the thousandth time. "Hurry up, you're late. You keep making a 'tic-tic-tic' sound with your foot when you're late."

He looked down. His right foot, the traitor, stopped.

"Nine o'clock," he said for the last time, picking up his bicycle in the hallway.

"NINE O'CLOCK!" she shouted back, already singing the cartoon's closing theme a second later.

Sebastian locked the door from the outside, tested the doorknob twice — habit, ritual, superstition, all rolled into one — and called the elevator.

Outside, the day was already dying. At 4:30 in the afternoon in January, the New York sun was an orange memory squeezed between buildings to the west, and the city lights were taking over: streetlights lighting up in sequence along Hadley Street, shop windows, the holographic signs of the larger businesses gaining color against the darkening sky. The temperature, which was already not generous, plummeted along with the light.

Sebastian checked the time, and his stomach sank slightly: 4:31 PM. He sighed, and the sigh turned to a cloud. He usually clocked in at four. Every minute late meant one less delivery on the shift, and one less delivery meant less money, and—he did the math while pedaling, because struggling with math was more productive than struggling without it—at this point today's shift was going to be about thirty percent below average. The new battery controller thanked him and said goodbye until February.

He lowered his body onto the handlebars and accelerated.

Meridian Express occupied the back of a red commercial building on the border of Harlem and Washington Heights: a small warehouse attached to the building, with a steel door, a once-showy hand-painted sign, and a yard where two of the company's electric vans spent the night. "Transportation company" was a big name for the operation—Meridian was what was left of the delivery market for small firms: the niche of deliveries that drones couldn't handle. Packages without standardized codes, addresses in buildings without landing platforms, elderly clients who didn't trust machines, shipments too fragile, streets too narrow, handwritten signatures required. The logistical waste of the giants was Meridian's bread and butter. And Sebastian's.

He placed Frankenstein back in its spot against the inside wall, took his ID badge out of his wallet—a laminated card with a photo of him at thirteen years old making a face like someone taking a photo ID—and tapped the reader next to the door. The device flashed green with a beep.

Inside, the warehouse was noisy and bustling with organized activity: steel shelves reaching the ceiling, the air smelling of cardboard and tape, an old radio playing salsa music at a low volume, and three employees working at the pace of the late afternoon—Rosa labeling boxes with a code gun faster than seemed humanly possible, Denny stacking volumes in a van with a Tetris-like technique that only twenty years of experience could provide, and, in the middle of the warehouse, clipboard in hand, the unmistakable figure of the owner.

Mr. Williams was a broad, bald, red-faced man who had worn the same winter jacket for at least three winters and managed his small cardboard empire with a real paper clipboard—Sebastian could count on his fingers the people he saw using paper in 2050, and Mr. Williams alone occupied three of those fingers, by sheer force of conviction. "Paper doesn't jam, doesn't run out of power, and doesn't get hacked," was his motto, usually delivered with a tap of his pencil on the clipboard, like a judge with his gavel.

The owner's small eyes met Sebastian the second the door opened.

"Look at him," Mr. Williams announced to the whole warehouse, pointing with his pencil. "Boy, arriving late again. At this rate, you'll soon be the one owing me at the end of the month."

"Sorry, Mr. Williams." Sebastian was already crossing the warehouse, taking his backpack off to exchange it for his delivery bag. "My sister's school bus broke down today, the whole system, I had to pick her up in Hamilton Heights and—"

Mr. Williams raised his free hand, dismissing the rest of the sentence. He glanced at the boy over his clipboard—his hat pulled down low, his glasses fogging up from the temperature difference, the face of someone who had cycled for twenty minutes in the cold and was now apologizing—and exhaled through his nose, a snort that twitched his mustache.

"If you didn't work harder than everyone else here, you would have been fired a long time ago," he grumbled, in the tone of someone repeating an old saying that they both knew by heart and neither of them took seriously. Rosa, at the counter, laughed without raising her head. "You're just wasting time and apologizing. Come on, let's get to work."

Sebastian approached the central counter. "What do you have for me today?"

The old man consulted the clipboard, running his pencil across the list with the ceremony of a notary. "Good. Your load is already set aside, it's right there." He pointed the pencil to a thermal delivery bag resting on the edge of the counter, visibly full, the seams honestly frayed. "Eight deliveries. Two in Hamilton, one in Sugar Hill, four going down to the center and," he paused, almost an apology, "one in Midtown. Client paid an express fee, hand delivery, by seven. You have little time for a lot of things, kid. In this cold and this traffic, I don't know if it all gets done today."

Sebastian looked at his bag. He drew the map in his head—he didn't even need the GPS anymore for the usual neighborhoods; the city lived inside his head in streets and shortcuts and one-way directions—he fitted the eight stops into a route, measured it against the clock and against the 84%... now 79% battery.

It was going to be tight. It was going to be very tight.

He looked up at Mr. Williams and smiled, that skinny, boyish smile that was eighty percent stubbornness.

"I'll make it, sir."

The owner's red face broke into a short laugh, a two-beat laugh, "Ha!", and he tapped the pencil on the clipboard—the judge's gavel, the sentence pronounced.

"Ha. That's why you're still here, kid. I'm watching you." He was already turning to yell something at Denny about the order of the boxes in the van. "Come on, go! The clock has no mercy on anyone!"

Sebastian grabbed the bag from the counter—the weight pulled his shoulder down and he adjusted the strap across his chest, distributing the load on his back the way he'd learned through practice—checked the digital address list Rosa synchronized with the boss's sacred clipboard on his phone, and stepped out the steel door into the icy twilight.

Outside, night was falling quickly, and the whole city was lighting up, floor by floor, tower by tower, until the lights of the skyscrapers mingled with the first remaining stars that the light pollution allowed to escape. It was already 5:02 PM. Eight deliveries, four neighborhoods, one urgency charge, seventy-nine percent battery, and a freezing cold.

Sebastian climbed onto Frankenstein, pulled the zipper up to his chin, touched the screen to load the route, and twisted the throttle.

The bicycle hummed and plunged down the avenue, a small, stubborn light descending toward the mountains of light of Manhattan—unaware, yet, of anything. Unaware that the entire city, that night, was a cog slowly turning toward Times Square.

For now, it was just a boy, a bicycle, and eight deliveries against the clock.

And Sebastian Cross had never lost track of time.

Author's Notice — Welcome to Second Skin

Hello everybody!

Once again, I'm here to present a new story! This time, we'll delve into the Marvel universe with Second Skin.

Before we begin, I'd like to clarify a few things so you know what to expect from this new journey.

First of all, this story takes place in an alternate Marvel universe. This means that many things will be different from what you know from the comics, movies, and other adaptations. The power levels, the characters, the events, and even the way the world works may present significant differences. Think of this story as its own version of the Marvel universe, with its own rules and possibilities.

Regarding the story's pacing: I want to make it clear that the beginning will be slower. I intend to dedicate the first chapters to developing the protagonist, building the world, and introducing the elements that will be important to the plot. However, don't worry! As the story progresses, the pace will increase considerably, especially when the main events begin to unfold.

And what about the harem? Well, those who follow my other stories know that I often work with this element. However, honestly, I have no plans to include a harem in Second Skin. At least, not at this moment. Depending on how the narrative develops, this could change, but I don't want to promise something that might not even happen.

Regarding the frequency of publication

Initially, I intend to publish one chapter per week on this platform. I cannot guarantee that this frequency will be maintained or increased, as it will depend on my availability and the progress of the writing.

However, for those who wish to follow the story more closely, I have good news!

My website and will have advance chapters and much more frequent updates than this platform.

So, if you like Segunda Pele and want to follow the events without having to wait so long for the next chapters, I recommend you check it out.

Of course, you can also continue following the story for free here. The main difference will be the pace of publications and the number of chapters available.

To conclude...

I sincerely hope you enjoy this new story. I have several ideas that I intend to explore throughout the chapters, and I want to develop this universe with a lot of freedom, without being tied to everything that has already been established in the original Marvel works.

So, keep in mind that we're entering a familiar universe, but one that may surprise you in different ways.

I would like to thank everyone in advance who decides to follow this journey, whether here, on my website, or on Patreon.

Welcome to Second Skin

And now, without further ado...

Let's begin this new journey!

---

Want to read ahead? Advance chapters are available for free on my official website: Parallel World (parallelworldverse.com)

Support me on Patreon: patreon.com/cw/pararaio

 

[pararaio20]

Chapter 2 — Times Square

The avenue was empty, and that remained the strangest thing in New York.

Sebastian rode down Amsterdam Avenue, his body low over the handlebars, the cooler bag weighing diagonally across his back. Ahead of him were four lanes of clean asphalt stretching for three blocks without a single vehicle. No horns. No engines. None of those still metal walls that appeared in old videos, those grainy files from thirty, forty years ago, where the entire city looked like a circulatory system clogged with red and yellow cars and taxis stuck together like scales. He had seen those recordings dozens of times on the school tablet, searching for old Spider-Man footage between the buildings. And every time he had the same feeling of looking at a city that no longer existed, a version of his street that had been erased and drawn over.

Today the asphalt belonged to him.

A car drove by. Just one, and an old one: a sedan from two decades ago, its paint peeling off at the fender, the driver's door a slightly different color than the rest, slowly turning north with a tired electric hum. The kind of car that survived because someone, in some garage, refused to let it die. Sebastian knew that kind of stubbornness well. He rode on top of it.

A little later came the other type. A low coupe, restored, mirrored black paint, round headlights, that old long hood design that only existed by choice and for money. It passed him, deliberately accelerating, the engine roaring in a way that no machine needed to roar anymore, a sound that was pure showmanship. Luxury vintage. People who spent the price of an apartment in Harlem to drive slowly, being seen.

These were the two species that still remained at street level: those too old to climb and those too expensive to care.

Sebastian knew why. Everyone knew. All they had to do was look up.

And he looked up, for a second, and the shadows passed over him.

They crisscrossed the sky in orderly rows, four, five layers high, a choreography the city had learned to perform without thinking. Floating cars. Hundreds of them, thousands if you counted the entire island, gliding between buildings in corridors marked by faint holograms that only truly appeared when you looked from below and at the right angle—blue and amber lines suspended in the cold air, pulsing slowly like runway markings stretched across the Manhattan sky. Their shadows crossed the street at regular intervals, darkening the asphalt for half a second, one after the other, and not a single pedestrian in the entire block bothered to look up.

It had been twenty years. Sebastian wasn't even born when Stark released the first models to the public, and yet he knew the whole story by heart, because it was the kind of thing he read while the other boys read about sports. The first ones were outrageously expensive prototypes, toys for billionaires, three or four dozen units worldwide. Then came the second generation, and the third, and the manufacturing licenses, and the competitors, and the municipal air traffic control structure, and the laws, and the fines, and the insurance. Twenty years later there were popular models. Used models. Models financed in seventy-two installments with advertising on big screens promising "heaven within your family's reach." A nurse, a teacher, a supermarket manager—people who weren't rich, ordinary middle-class people—today bought a car that floated, just as thirty years earlier one bought a car that drove.

And the ground emptied.

It was that simple. The city had moved upwards and left the streets behind, and the result was that a thirteen-year-old boy on an electric bicycle assembled from scrap metal parts could ride down an entire Manhattan avenue at forty miles per hour without encountering absolutely anything along the way.

Sebastian lowered himself further and twisted the throttle.

Frankenstein responded with that deep grunt he knew better than his own voice, and the icy wind began to attack from below, finding the gap between the collar of his coat and his hat, biting the bare skin of his neck. His eyes watered behind the thick lenses. His thighs burned in a good way, a way he no longer registered as pain after two hours on duty. On the makeshift dashboard—a repurposed screen from a dead cell phone, attached to the handlebars with cable ties and silicone—the numbers glowed green against a black background:

BAT 34% — MOTOR 41°C — 18:38

Thirty-four percent. He did the math without thinking: he could get there and back, if he didn't abuse the accelerator on the uphill sections of the return trip. Probably. The uphill sections of the return trip were a problem for future Sebastian.

There was only one delivery left in the cooler bag.

Seven were already delivered. Two in Hamilton, one in Sugar Hill—that one took eleven minutes because the lady on the fourth floor wanted to check the contents of the box while he stood in the doorway, and then wanted to chat, and Sebastian didn't have the courage to end it before the third sentence. Four on the way downtown. And there was the last one left, the one that was worth the most and scared the most: express delivery, fee paid, signature in hand, deadline by seven o'clock at night. A small package, absurdly dense for its size, wrapped in black industrial plastic and sealed with numbered tape, which sank into the bottom of his bag and pulled the strap against his chest with every braking maneuver. It must have weighed about six or seven kilos concentrated in something the size of a shoebox. Sebastian had resisted for forty minutes the urge to shake the package near his ear, and he had resisted poorly.

The address was in Midtown, two blocks from Times Square.

Which meant he was going to have to cross Times Square.

And if there was one thing in that city that Sebastian Cross would avoid at all costs, with any detour, accepting any extra mileage, it was crossing Times Square at seven o'clock on a Thursday evening.

The problem wasn't fear. Or rather, it wasn't only fear. The problem was that outsiders had this idea that a city protected by heroes was a safe city, and those who lived there knew that math didn't work that way.

The heroes existed. They were there, every day, and they were real in a way that no other generation in history had ever known—there were more of them now than ever before, a new wave forming every year, young people with powers appearing in increasing numbers, regional teams, divisions, joint commissions with the government. But the big heroes were busy with big things. Threats that accumulated faster than they were resolved, a queue of planetary and interplanetary emergencies that kept growing, global security summits, treaties, orbits. The higher they climbed, the more the ground became unwatched.

And at the same time that heroes appeared, villains appeared. Always. That was the part that optimistic documentaries didn't like to say out loud: the two populations grew up together, fed each other, and when the former went into space to decide the fate of humanity, the latter stayed. They stayed right here, at the curb, between the laundromat and the market, on the block where people lived who had no way to move.

So the streets were neglected. Not abandoned—neglected, which is different and worse, because nobody takes responsibility.

Sebastian crossed One Hundred and Ten and the scenery began to change texture, as it always did. The shop windows became more spaced out, the awnings more torn, the lampposts with one light on every two. He dodged a group of boys standing in the middle of the lane, five or six, baggy coats, shaved sides of their hair, one of them with a breathing mask hanging around his neck and spray paint drying on his fingers. Punks. They didn't even look at him; they were busy arguing about something, shouting. Sebastian passed on the left, far away, without suddenly accelerating—suddenly accelerating drew attention, he had learned that the hard way in the third neighborhood where he lived.

He rode past an alley entrance and didn't turn his head, only his eyes. A reflex. Inside, in the darkness between two buildings, three orange dots glowed at someone's chest height, slowly rising and falling. The smell arrived with the wind: sweet smoke, chemical, something burning that wasn't tobacco. A low voice said something and another laughed. Sebastian was already half a block away before the laughter ended.

Never walk down alleys. Never stop in an empty crosswalk. Never leave your bag on the sidewalk. Never look directly at someone for more than half a second. His rules. Written nowhere, reviewed every month, religiously obeyed.

At the next corner, a huge man emerged from a market carrying two bags, and huge here meant six feet tall, shoulders that filled the entire doorway, skin a uniform bluish-gray with darker patches running down his forearms. He stepped down the step with exaggerated care, like someone who had spent his whole life learning not to bump into things, and adjusted one of the bags before continuing. Across the street, a woman waited for the light with her son by the hand; both had the same greenish hue and the same pattern of fine scales along their jawline, and the boy kicked a piece of ice on the sidewalk like any boy would.

Sebastian rode past them without noticing anything unusual. It was just the street.

It had been almost forty years since the X-Men had joined the Avengers—back in the 2010s, in an agreement that at the time seemed impossible and that today appears in textbooks on two pages with a photo—and it was this alliance that finally gave mutants visibility. A voice. Someone on the other side of the table when laws were written. Before that, they were a population without representation, and a population without representation is a population whose rights are debated by other people.

Not that it had turned into a fairy tale. Sebastian had no illusions about that, because he saw it every day. There were many, many people who used the advantage genetics gave them for their own benefit and to the detriment of others; half the gangs that marked the walls in Harlem had at least one guy who did something that nobody else did. And there was the other side, the side that almost no one talked about in the news: people with mutations that only caused problems. That hurt. That consumed. People who couldn't switch off whatever they had, who hurt anyone who came near unintentionally, who needed expensive sleeping pills. Being different didn't always mean being stronger. Sometimes it just meant being different, and paying for it.

But the alliance gave them a roof over their heads. A structure, a place to complain, lawyers, committees, a banner. Rights were won and are respected—most of the time, in most places, always in writing and almost always in practice. There was still friction. On both sides. There always would be.

Because that was the real world, and the real world doesn't close in round numbers.

He went further south, and New York City grew up around him.

Literally growing. The city had expanded far too rapidly over the past two decades, upwards and outwards, swallowing up land, piling up floors, and the result was that old blocks were sandwiched between new structures like baby teeth between permanent teeth. Sebastian moved from one world to another in a matter of meters: a 1930s brick facade, then a sixty-story frosted glass monolith with a vertical garden illuminated by purple LEDs, then new bricks, then a tower. The clear streets made everything move quickly. He flew.

And the walls told the story of those who had been left on the ground.

He passed a mural of Iron Man painted entirely in shades of gold on a steel shutter. A gigantic silhouette of the Hulk made only with a white outline, without filling, occupying five stories of a blank gable. A stylized, red web covering a power box—the kind that residents repainted from time to time, just like they repainted the Battle mural on 128th Street. And, pasted on top of all of these, always on top, the other layer: gang markings. Exploded letters, acronyms, tags crossing the heroes' faces, a new symbol he'd started seeing all over the area about three weeks ago, three vertical lines scratched with dripping black paint. Sebastian didn't know who it belonged to. He knew it was appearing faster than it was being erased.

In his right ear, a voice spoke incessantly.

The headset was ridiculous, and he knew it. A decades-old wireless model, found in a box of used electronics on 125th Street for a dollar and a half, with a cracked rubber tip and a completely dead original battery. Sebastian had replaced the cell, resoldered the charging contact, and rewritten the entire firmware in a single Saturday morning, eating dry cereal straight from the box. It wasn't good for music, or it was barely good. It was good for the only thing he wanted: tuning into the open frequency of the New York Police Department's radio.

It wasn't illegal. He had checked three times, because he was the kind of kid who checked three times.

And it was, by far, the most useful tool he had. Better than the navigation system, better than the new battery, better than anything on the dashboard. Because an incident on One Hundred and Forty-Five meant detouring onto Convent; because a vehicle stopped on Lenox meant pedestrian traffic pushed onto the west sidewalk; because knowing where things were happening was, for a thirteen-year-old, hundred-pound deliveryman, exactly the same thing as knowing where not to be.

The streets were becoming dangerous. He didn't need anyone to confirm it. But everyone did.

The mayor had said the previous week, in a speech shown on all the city's screens and which Sebastian watched standing, with his bicycle leaning against his hip, in front of a convenience store window: that he was in direct contact with the coalition, that they were negotiating the formation of a permanent urban protection task force, and that the city deserved dedicated attention. Applause. Headline. Seven days and nothing.

There were heroes actively working in New York, of course. Several. Good people, people who made their presence felt. But the name everyone wanted to say, the name that lay beneath all that talk without ever being explicitly stated, was his.

Spider-Man.

And Spider-Man was now an Avenger. The world's greatest hero, leader of the coalition, one of the main lines of defense for the entire planet, the guy who sat at tables with heads of state and decided the fate of continents before lunch. That's what prevented Peter Parker from doing what he did thirty years ago, which was simply being on that corner every night. The city had gained a symbol and lost a neighbor.

Still—and Sebastian thought this with a stubbornness he would never have admitted aloud—still, almost always, if you looked up at the right time, you could see it. A thin line cutting between two buildings. A red and blue shape spinning in the void above the avenue, the way no one else in the world ever did.

He raised his head now.

Floating cars. A delivery drone. Low clouds with the orange glow of the city reflected below.

"One day," he murmured, and the wind carried it away before it even turned to smoke.

Around the corner of Forty-Eighth, Sebastian entered the block he always used to get to Times Square—a narrow, dimly lit side street with a Korean restaurant and a closed repair shop, which cut through and avoided the main avenue by three more minutes. He knew this block as well as he knew his own room.

And it was upon leaving it that the city changed its physical state.

That's exactly how it was: a sudden transition, almost a shock, like sticking your head underwater backwards. From an almost empty alleyway to a solid wall of people.

The number of pedestrians multiplied a hundredfold in twenty meters. Times Square was New York's most famous tourist spot and still was, but in recent decades it had also become something else, something bigger and harder to name: a permanent event center, a place where every category of person in the city converged. Tourists in new coats taking photos with trembling hands. Entire families. Punks in studded jackets sitting on the red steps as if they owned them. Street vendors with carts of chestnuts and churros. Dance groups with makeshift speakers vying for space five meters apart. Preachers. Street performers dressed as every hero ever depicted, including two competing Spider-Men with faded masks, and Sebastian felt the usual mix as he passed them: a pang of vicarious embarrassment and a pang of something else he didn't like to examine.

Speeding up there would only cause problems. Speeding up there would mean running someone over in ten seconds.

Then Sebastian jumped off Frankenstein.

It was a movement as automatic as breathing: weight on his left leg, his right leg passing over the saddle, both feet on the ground without the bicycle ever stopping, and immediately his hands firmly on the handlebars pushing the frame alongside his body. The bicycle was higher than his waist. Pushing it through the crowd was like guiding a large, obedient animal.

He joined the crowd.

Shoulders. Coats. Bags. The absurd heat that a crowd of people produces even below zero degrees, a dirty heat, smelling of perfume and fried food and old exhaust fumes. Sebastian moved low, between elbows, and his height, which was a source of jokes at school, became a tactical advantage there: nobody sees a five-foot-tall boy in Times Square. He squeezed through gaps that didn't exist for adults, turned the handlebars sideways, dodged, kept going.

Even so, he kept his left hand resting on the handle of the cooler bag. Always.

Because invisibility had its limits, and he wasn't naive. He knew perfectly well that in that sea of people there were trained eyes that did the opposite of his calculation: a small boy, alone, at night, carrying a delivery bag with visible cargo. He wasn't a person at that moment. He was an inventory item. Prey, to use the right word, and Sebastian used the right word even when it hurt.

Above the crowd, the walls were alive.

The giant screens covered the buildings from the ground floor to the tenth floor, on all sides, all at once, and cast colored light onto the street with such intensity that Times Square had no night—it had a false day, blue, magenta, and white, that pulsed and changed color every four seconds. A soda ad the size of an entire building. A thirty-meter-tall model turning her face in slow motion. An institutional advertisement for the coalition, with the emblem slowly rotating on a dark background and the phrase THE DEFENSE OF THE EARTH IS EVERYONE'S. An exclusive news screen, silent, with automatic captions running underneath: ...METHUMAN OCCURRENCE RATES UP FOR THE THIRD CONSECUTIVE QUARTER, SECOND...

And the police were everywhere.

Sebastian noticed because he always noticed. Two officers on the corner of Seventh Avenue. Two more at the base of the stairs. A police car parked with its lights on but silent, a folded traffic barrier beside it. A pair walking slowly against the flow of pedestrians, hands clasped in front of their bodies, that specific way of walking. An ostentatious presence. This was new since last year, and it said more about the city than the mayor's entire speech.

Sebastian pushed his bicycle, looked at the time on the panel — 6:47 PM — and calculated. Four hundred meters across the square, plus two blocks, plus the elevator and the signature. He would arrive at seven o'clock sharp. He would arrive.

In his ear, the radio continued to mumble its vocabulary. Codes, units, addresses. A female voice dispatching a call to the Thirty-Fourth. Another officer confirming position. The usual background noise, that hiss that had become his constant companion.

That's why he didn't hear it.

The sound came from behind and above, or at least that's how he reconstructed it later: a sound that crossed the square amidst the music from the speakers and the hubbub and the four competing advertisements, and yet managed to be heard by some people first. Shouts. Not the normal shouts of Times Square, which were there all the time—salespeople's shouts, laughter, people calling out to each other. These were of a different kind. They had a different frequency, a sharp, raspy quality that the human body recognizes before the brain.

And what happened next happened in waves.

The people who were nearby heard and saw. The people next to them saw the people screaming and looked in the same direction, and screamed too, because fear is the most contagious thing there is. And then the third layer, which no longer knew the reason, and the fourth, and in four or five seconds the whole square knew that something was wrong without ninety percent of them having any idea what.

Half started running. The other half did the most dangerous thing possible: they stopped. They froze in place, turned their faces away, and raised their cell phones.

Thirty meters away, leaning against the base of the lamppost on the corner of Forty-Sixth, Officer Dean Kowalczyk reached for the radio on his shoulder before he had even finished turning his body.

He scanned the square with his gaze in a single, practiced movement, reflexively counting the blue uniforms he could see from there—two on the staircase, two on Seventh Avenue, the mobile pair near the kiosk, himself and his partner. Eight. Eight officers for a square that at that moment had, in the conservative estimate of someone who had worked in that post for nine years, between six and seven thousand people.

Eight.

Dean pressed the button.

"Central, Central, this is Officer Dean, badge four-one-seven-two, Adam-Three-Four unit, on foot at the intersection of Seventh and Forty-Sixth."

His voice came through in the flat, rapid register of someone trained to remove all emotion from the transmission, because emotion on that frequency distracts the listener.

"There is an ongoing disturbance on the east side of the square, the origin of which is still unidentified. Crowd movement fleeing north. High risk of being crushed."

He took two steps to the side, searching for an angle between the bodies that were already beginning to break apart, but he found none. He only saw the effect, not the cause. He only saw the wave.

And after nine years there, Dean knew that a crowd that size didn't behave that way because of a bar fight, and he also knew what the other kind of thing was that made Times Square go wild.

"Central, the density here is critical, I repeat, critical. I request ten-eighty-five, multiple units, top priority, and send me containment support in the Seventh. I recommend preventive alert to the coalition."

A pause. A hissing sound.

"Central to Adam-Three-Four, received, units en route."

And in the right ear of a thirteen-year-old boy pushing a bicycle less than a hundred meters away, all of that entered in real time.

Sebastian stopped walking.

It took him a fraction of a second to form the sentence in his head, the way bad things do: ongoing disturbance, intersection of Seventh and Forty-Sixth, high risk of being crushed. Seventh and Forty-Sixth. He was at Seventh and Forty-Sixth. He was right there.

He ripped the earpiece out of his ear with two fingers and stuffed them in his pocket without looking, and the world returned all at once, unfiltered, at its true volume.

And the actual volume was panic.

Sebastian lifted his head—the head he kept down out of habit, for survival, for six schools of training—and turned his body, trying to understand. There were people running in three different directions. There was an overturned chestnut cart, embers scattered on the wet sidewalk, hissing as they went out. There was a man shouting someone's name, the same word repeated endlessly. There was a woman on her knees trying to pick up a phone from the ground while legs passed by on either side of her.

And he couldn't see.

That was the worst part. Five feet tall meant that, within a standing crowd, Sebastian's horizon was backs. Coats, backpacks, shoulders, an organic wall of fabric thirty centimeters from his face. He stretched onto his tiptoes, hung slightly on the handlebars to gain height, and managed, between two heads, a thin strip of vision.

Enough.

About forty meters away, the mass of people was coming toward him. Not walking. It was coming like dammed water that had burst its sluice gate, a compact front of open faces, gaping mouths, eyes that weren't looking where they were stepping because they were looking behind them. Running from something. Running in the specific way an animal runs from a predator, without strategy, without direction, just away.

Sebastian saw a woman try to look back as she ran, saw her foot cross over her own ankle, saw her disappear into the ground. He didn't see her get up.

He saw a second body fall on top of the first.

His eyes widened behind the lenses.

Get out of here.

He turned, pushed the handlebars, and ran.

Two steps. On the third, his right foot encountered the hardened, trodden ice that formed every night on that stretch of sidewalk, where water dripped from the ventilation grate and froze without any sun to melt it, and the worn sole of his sneaker didn't stand a chance.

His foot slid out.

Sebastian didn't fall. By a hair's breadth, purely by reflex, he didn't fall—but his body opened at a horrible angle, his right leg going too far forward, his hip twisting, all his weight shifting to his left arm. And he saved his balance on the bicycle. He clamped both hands onto the handlebars and turned Frankenstein into a crutch, a support, a third leg, and the machine held up, because the machine always held up.

But then his leg went weak. That strange, immediate weakness that comes after a muscle strain, the thigh trembling, the knee lacking confidence.

He pushed on anyway, limping, trying to run alongside the bicycle with the ice giving way and slipping beneath both feet, and the cooler bag with that last absurdly heavy delivery swinging diagonally across his back, pulling him sideways with every step, seven kilos that now felt like twenty, a pendulum fighting against him.

And the wave arrived.

It came too fast, because his legs were short and the others' weren't, because he was pushing forty kilos of steel and batteries, and because whoever is running from something runs faster than whoever is just leaving. The first shoulder hit his back, directly on the bag, and the impact spun Sebastian a quarter turn. The second came on his arm. Someone grabbed the bag strap unintentionally, a blind tug of a hand searching for anything to hold on to, and for half a second Sebastian was dragged backward before the hand let go.

Then there were many more. They passed by him, through him, on both sides, an entire river rushing past a rock. An elbow caught his glasses and the frame rode up and down on his face. He tried to accelerate but there was no way to accelerate. He could only hold onto the handlebars and not fall, because falling there would be the end of the story and he knew that with icy clarity.

And then, behind him, the sound changed.

It was a huge crash.

It wasn't the sound of a person or object falling. It was a massive impact against concrete, a deep, short rumble that Sebastian felt travel up the brake cable, through the handlebars, through the bones of his fingers, and then through the entire floor via the soles of his shoes. The ice near his foot cracked with a dry snap, a white line cutting its way across the surface.

His heart beat once, very strongly, in the middle of his throat.

And then came the other sound, and the other sound was worse, because it wasn't mechanical.

It was wet.

A viscous, loud dragging sound, of something large writhing on the asphalt, a sound of flesh and liquid that shouldn't exist in that volume or in that place, and which swept over all the shouts in the square as if the shouts were secondary.

Sebastian turned his head.

That was all. He didn't stop, he didn't look straight ahead, he just twisted his neck over his shoulder in an involuntary movement, the kind no body can avoid.

And he didn't see it.

The glasses had slipped to the tip of his nose with the jostling, and the world behind the lenses had split into two incompatible halves—a sharp strip below, a blur of stretched light above. Everything else was smudge. Color, movement, and smudge.

Still, between one fleeing body and another, about thirty meters away, under the blue and magenta light that the screens poured onto the square, something occupied the ground.

Black. That he could discern. A wet, glossy black that reflected the light from the panels in distorted streaks. Tall—too tall, even fallen, even curled up on itself. And streaked with red spots, vivid red, scattered across the dark surface in patterns that moved, or seemed to move.

The thing struggled. It banged against the concrete once, twice, with enough force to send shards of ice flying through the air, writhing as if it were fighting against itself.

And then it stopped.

It stopped abruptly, completely, and amidst seven thousand people screaming, it was the quietest thing Sebastian had ever seen.

Then it began to stand up.

Sebastian didn't wait to see the rest.

He snapped his head back forward, pushed his glasses against his face with the back of his hand, dug his fingers into Frankenstein's handlebars, and rode off.

...

---

Want to read ahead? Advance chapters are available for free on my official website: Parallel World (parallelworldverse.com)

Support me on Patreon: patreon.com/cw/pararaio

 

[pararaio20]

Chapter 3

Run.

It was the only word that still worked inside Sebastian's head, and it beat to the rhythm of his own feet against the soaked asphalt, one syllable per stride, run, run, run. Everything else had shut down. The delivery list, the schedule, the cold, the eighteen dollars in change in his coat's inside pocket, the promise to be home by nine—all of that belonged to a boy who existed ten minutes ago, and that boy had been left behind along with the corner where it all began.

Not looking back was the second thing.

He didn't know what was behind him. He only knew the horror, and the horror didn't need form to occupy space: it filled his chest like ice water seeping through a crack, rising up his throat, squeezing his lungs from the inside. It was a physical thing, with weight. Sebastian pushed Frankenstein alongside his body, one hand on the handlebars, his feet slipping every two steps in the trampled snow mud, and each time the urge to turn his head came, he swallowed it and ran faster.

Because if he looked, he would stop. He knew this about himself just as well as he knew the order of the wires inside the bicycle's dashboard. If he looked, his legs would understand the magnitude of the problem, and his legs would give up.

So, instead of looking, he thought about his mother.

He thought about Sofia walking through the door of 6B at eleven o'clock at night, the smell of seventy percent alcohol still clinging to her uniform, taking off her shoes in the hallway so as not to wake anyone, finding the covered plate on the table, the note, the half-empty juice. He thought about her sitting on the sunken side of the sofa to wait. He thought about her waiting a long time.

And he thought about Camila.

Camila's hair was still wet from her bath at this point, or maybe it wasn't, because Camila would drag out her baths and her brother always knew. Camila went to bed at 9:20, swearing it was exactly 9 o'clock. Camila would wake up the next day and someone would need to tell her something. Someone would need to choose the words, and there were no words for it, and yet someone would have to say it, and she would have that small seven-year-old face turned upwards, waiting for the end of the sentence.

That's what made him run faster than he thought he could. Not courage. The thought of the two faces receiving the news.

Looking ahead, Times Square had ceased to be a place and had become a movement.

The entire square was teeming with people rushing around. A sea of coats, hats, backpacks, abandoned shopping bags rolling across the ground, hands grabbing other hands, a woman shouting a name that was lost before reaching anyone's ear. Tourists tripped over their own feet on the red staircases. A hot dog cart lay on its side with its crumpled parasol, and the griddle still spewed smoke into the icy air, a smell of grease and onions so common, so typical of a Thursday, that Sebastian felt his brain freeze for a split second trying to reconcile it with the rest.

Above all, the panels remained on.

Thirty meters of screen on the facade of the corner building, showing a model in a white coat walking slowly through artificial snow, smiling. A soft drink advertisement on loop. A news banner running in red, delayed, still talking about the following week's global security summit. The light from those screens fell on the crowd in waves of blue, gold, pink, painting the faces of the people running with advertising colors. Sebastian would carry this for the rest of his life: the memory of people fleeing to die under a very pretty pink light.

Among the bodies, he saw the blue uniforms.

The police officers were trying to cross against the flow of traffic, shoulder to shoulder, pushing the sea of people aside with both arms, trying to reach the place where everyone was fleeing from. One of them was shouting something into his shoulder radio. Another had lost his cap and didn't seem to have noticed. They advanced slowly, like someone entering a river from the wrong side, and Sebastian felt, amidst the terror, a pang of something else he couldn't name as he watched those men going in the opposite direction from him.

That's when something fell.

He heard before he understood: a displacement of air, a short, heavy whistle, and the impact. It wasn't a falling sound. It was a dry, deep bang, the sound of something very dense meeting concrete and winning the argument. The ground transmitted the shock through the soles of his sneakers to his knees. Shards of pavement flew horizontally, a shallow rain of gravel and broken ice that swept across the square and hit the right leg of his pants hard enough to sting.

It fell three, maybe four steps away. If he had swerved to the side a moment earlier, if he had chosen to go around the hot dog cart to the right as he almost did, he wouldn't have survived.

Sebastian didn't stop. His legs continued on their own, and he thanked them later, much later.

Through his peripheral vision—and his peripheral vision was terrible, it always had been, the thick lenses robbed the edges of the world and left only a clear tunnel in the middle—he caught a black shape. Large. Too tall to be human. The kind of shape that the corner of the eye registers as wrong before the rest of the brain has time to weigh in. It was very similar to the first one, the one he hadn't looked at, the one behind him.

He didn't turn his face away. He lowered his head and accelerated.

A second after he nearly died, the shooting started.

Sebastian knew that sound. It was a silly thing to know at thirteen, but he knew it: he had grown up in three different neighborhoods where the dry noise of fireworks-that-weren't-fireworks appeared in the early morning and his mother would enter his room without saying anything and sit on the edge of his bed until it passed. There, in the square, the sound was different in quantity. Quick, overlapping crackles, echoing between the glass facades and returning from all sides at the same time, without direction. And with them came the sparks, incandescent flashes coming from the hands of the men in blue, small explosions of white light that appeared and disappeared, marking on Sebastian's retina the outline of raised arms, pointed at whatever was causing it.

And then came the roar.

It wasn't an animal sound. Sebastian had heard lions on a school trip, dogs fighting under the window, sirens, alarms, the roar of the subway entering the station. This wasn't any of that. There was something damp in the sound, something that resembled meat, and a low frequency that he felt in his teeth before hearing it with his ears.

After the first one, came the others. A second one, further to the left. A third one, far away, near the ticket counter. A fourth, and another, and another, until the roars echoed across the entire square and filled all the remaining space between the buildings, and there wasn't a single person on that corner of the world whose heart didn't fill with terror at the same time.

Something grazed his body.

It was quick as an arrow, a thin, dark blur cutting through the air less than a hand's breadth from his left shoulder, and the shifting wind made his cap ride up an inch on his forehead. The thing continued forward and struck the chest of the policeman who was standing right in front of him.

Sebastian saw it up close. He saw it too close.

It was a rope. A thick, black rope, with gray details running along its length like veins, and it didn't hit the man: it snapped open. It spread across the chest of his blue uniform like spilled paint, like a giant hand with thin fingers grabbing everything at once—his vest, his shoulders, the radio buckle—and in the next instant it became taut.

The police officer was pulled away.

There was no struggle, no time to react. The man simply left the ground, both feet losing contact with the concrete at the same time, his boots still pointed forward in the stance of the step he never managed to complete, and was dragged backward through the air, over Sebastian.

Reflex. It was just a reflex. Sebastian threw Frankenstein over his own body, twisted his hip and threw himself to the ground, and the dirty ice of the square carried him sliding two meters sideways, his coat scraping against the frozen mud, the handlebars of the bicycle hitting his chest. And as he slid, with the world turned upside down and his cheek almost touching the black snow, he kept his eyes open and followed.

The policeman passed over him. Close. The man's face was turned downwards, and he was looking at Sebastian, and what was on that face wasn't pain. It was astonishment. It was the face of someone mid-sentence.

Sebastian stood up. He should have kept running, and afterwards he could never quite explain why he didn't—he only knew that he stood up, turned his body and looked back, because a part of him still needed to understand the shape of the problem, still thought that understanding was useful for something.

There was something there that shouldn't have been there.

A humanoid. That was the least wrong word. Tall, almost twice the size of a man, with strange musculature, exaggerated in the wrong places, shoulders and arms too large for the waist that supported them, as if someone had drawn a human body from memory and in anger. The skin was black, not the color black: it was a surface that swallowed the light from the advertising panels instead of reflecting it, traversed by gray details that ran through the muscles like strands of molten metal. The eyes were white, sharp, long, and empty. And the mouth.

The mouth didn't fit on the face. It stretched from one side of the head to the other, open in rows and rows of thin teeth, thousands of them crooked, overlapping, and an overly long tongue hung out and swayed in the cold air.

The creature effortlessly lifted the policeman by both hands, in the same way that Sebastian lifted his sister to sit her on the bicycle rack.

And with a single bite, it tore off the man's upper body.

Its teeth snapped shut at the waist. What remained fell to the ground, and the sound it made was the ordinary sound of something falling, and that was the part that broke something inside Sebastian: the normal sound. The man's legs and arms, also severed, lay in the snow illuminated pink by the soda advertisement.

His chest tightened. He couldn't believe his own eyes, and the worst part was that his eyes weren't asking permission; they kept sending images, kept showing, and every detail entered and stayed.

And it wasn't just one.

Throughout the square, the same scene repeated itself in copies. Sebastian turned his head and saw, in the distance, dark ropes crisscrossing the air in different directions, emerging from the hands, arms, and backs of those things, fastening themselves to whoever was running. A man with a shopping bag. A woman in a red overcoat. A teenager with headphones. The ropes opened around the bodies, tightened, and the people were ripped from the ground and pulled backward, all with the same astonishment on their faces, all with the same fate awaiting them at the other end of the wire.

Sebastian didn't think about anything else.

Fear took over. He bent down, straightened Frankenstein with a tug, and even with his legs trembling, even with his knee burning inside his torn pants, he climbed onto the bicycle in a single movement, his entire body thrown onto the frame.

His right hand went under the handlebars. There was a small metal lock there, installed by himself with a screw and a pen spring, and it existed for a simple reason: so that he wouldn't accidentally kill himself. Sebastian had built that bicycle from scratch, piece by piece, each weld with a story, and at some point between the third and fourth version of the controller he discovered that it was possible to push the motor far beyond what any factory manual would allow. It wasn't safe. It burned the battery like a lighter burns gasoline. He had adapted the circuit anyway, because he was thirteen years old and because audacity still came before caution, and he christened it overload, and used it exactly twice in his life, both times on an empty street, both times just to see if it worked.

The acceleration of that overloaded engine would have made many cars from the last century envious.

He unlocked it.

The lock came loose with a loud, metallic snap, and the panel in front of him flashed red with a warning he himself had written and never imagined reading in the middle of something like this. The rear wheel started spinning before it hit the ground: it spun freely on the ice with a high-pitched buzz, spitting frozen mud backward in a fan shape, and the back of the bicycle even lifted a hand's breadth and slammed back down.

The noise echoed across the square.

And the creatures turned around.

All of them. At the same time, with that wrong head movement, snouts raised and shaking in the air, as if they were tasting the sound. Sebastian saw in the rearview mirror—a child's bicycle rearview mirror he'd found in a Queens container and glued together with epoxy—he saw all those black heads turned toward him, and he saw the white eyes, and there was no anger in them. There was hunger. It was worse.

The wheel bit into the asphalt.

The force first hit his navel and then his chest, a backward pressure, as if a huge, flat hand were pushing his sternum against his spine. The handlebars almost slipped from his hands. The icy air turned like a blade on his face, entering through his nostrils and open mouth, and his eyes watered behind the thick lenses. Frankenstein sped down the street in an abnormal way, too fast, too wrong, and Sebastian's vision blurred at the edges, the world narrowing into a tunnel of stretched lights: red, gold, white, the billboards turning into long streaks of color.

For a second — just one second — he thought he was going to make it.

That's when he felt something strange on his back.

It wasn't pain. It was a weight that appeared out of nowhere, a slight tug, like a hand lightly resting on the shoulder to get attention. He looked in the rearview mirror.

His heart leaped in his chest.

A rope, identical to the others, the same one that had ripped open the policeman's chest, was attached to the thermal delivery bag—not to him, to the bag, spread over the fabric of the Meridian Express, dark fingers gripping the handles, the zipper, the frayed seam on the side. And it stretched behind him, thinner with each meter, tightening like an elastic band that someone was pulling from both sides.

And he understood. He understood exactly what was going to happen, with the clean, useless clarity of someone who understands half a second too late.

The elastic band had reached its limit.

His body felt light.

All the force that had propelled him forward suddenly returned, in the opposite direction, multiplied, and Sebastian was ripped from his bicycle and thrown upwards. Frankenstein continued alone for a few meters, its handlebars crooked, and fell sideways onto the street, and he didn't see it because at that moment he was going uphill.

Going up very fast.

The force gradually diminished, and there was a moment—there really was, he would remember it—when it reached zero and the world stopped pulling. Sebastian remained up there, at the highest point of the arch, his body limp and his arms outstretched, gazing at the New York sky.

Even though it was night, he could see the clouds. They were low and tense, illuminated from below by the city's glow in a reddish-orange hue, and they moved slowly. And the snow had begun. The first flakes, still scattered, rose and fell around him without any hurry, passing through the beam of the panels, shining for an instant when they caught the light.

It was silent up there. The roars, the gunshots, the screams, everything had faded below, muffled, as if he had buried his head in the water. His chest beat slowly. He was falling and didn't even know it yet, and for three full seconds the most frightened boy in town floated in the snow, staring at the clouds.

Then his body collided with something.

The impact came from behind and expelled all the air from his lungs at once. Sebastian tried to turn his head, tried to understand what he had hit, and what he saw made no sense even after seeing it.

It was a different creature.

The same white eyes, the same wrong shape, the same overly wide mouth. But this one was bigger. Much bigger. And its body wasn't black: it was covered in something red and black at the same time, and the two colors moved beneath the surface, dripping and returning, as if the skin were made of liquid trapped inside a thin shell. It was standing in the middle of the square, and how tall it was was clear from the height Sebastian found himself at: above all the others. Above the awnings. Above the line of parked cars.

Its tongue was pointed at him. It was unusually long, thick at the base, and it swayed slowly in the air between them, and there was attention in that. There was interest.

The creature raised its head. And its mouth began to open.

It didn't open like an animal's mouth. It opened in layers, the jaws spreading far beyond what any joint would allow, and the teeth jutted out as it opened, each row pushing the next, dozens of them emerging from the dark gums like needles being expelled.

An adrenaline surge coursed through Sebastian's body, and his body reacted before his brain.

He raised both arms.

That was all. He raised his arms above his head, and the straps of the cooler bag slipped off his shoulders, elbows, and hands—and the bag, with the three remaining packages and the handwritten Midtown address label, tumbled down toward that mouth.

And Sebastian fell too.

He spread his legs in the air, and it was the shortest calculation he'd ever made in his life, short enough to fit in the space between one kick and the next: his left foot found the bottom row of protruding teeth, his right foot found the top one. He felt the sharp point piercing the sole of his shoe, felt the slippery, warm ivory under his own weight, and used that as a platform.

He pushed.

With a twist, turning all the force of his body at once, Sebastian threw himself in front of the creature, passed over its shoulder, felt its tongue brush against his trouser leg, and fell.

He fell awkwardly, rolled on the concrete, his hat came off, his shoulder hit it, the roll ended with him face down in the dirty snow and his glasses miraculously still on his face, crooked, fogged up, but there. He spat. He lifted his head.

And he found himself surrounded.

The other creatures had arrived. They were all around, a dozen of them, forming a wide circle, and Sebastian stood on the ground in the middle of it all, waiting for the end.

The end didn't come. Because they weren't looking at him.

They approached the red one. All of them. And they did it in a way Sebastian didn't expect, an almost... submissive way. Their heads lower than their shoulders. Their steps short. The cadence of an animal slowly approaching another, larger animal, without taking its eyes off it. Their monstrous mouths closed.

Sebastian crouched down further, placed a hand on the icy ground, and tried to stand up.

The arm came.

He saw the movement begin and didn't have time to do anything with that information: the red creature's arm stretched out supernaturally, extending seven or eight meters as if made of rubber, and closed around him.

The hand was so large that it didn't need a palm. Just the fingers were enough. They closed completely around his body, pinning his arms against his ribs, pressing his coat against his skin, leaving only his head and legs exposed, which dangled from side to side in the air, kicking at empty space.

Sebastian was lifted.

Its arm retracted, and he rose back up, faster than he could follow, and stopped at the level of the thing's face. His feet hung about eight meters off the ground. Its mouth was closed now, and even closed, its teeth showed through the gaps. Its white eyes, large as windows, were less than a meter from his.

The creature looked into Sebastian's eyes. And smiled.

Then it bent down a little, bringing her face closer, and he stared back, with no choice, his eyes wide behind the ice-cracked lenses, his chest rising and falling in quick, short jerks.

"Look at that," said the creature.

The voice came out incredibly distorted, several layers superimposed, deep and raspy, a sound that didn't come from any throat. And beneath it, in the background, strangely, delayed by half a second, Sebastian could hear something else: a man's voice. A real man, with an accent, with a sick glee in his words, saying exactly the same thing the monster was saying.

"How I missed this." Its tongue twitched in the air. "The flesh. The blood. Years trapped in that hole, years, and finally freedom."

It squeezed a little. Sebastian's ribs cracked, and he couldn't even get enough air to scream.

"Be happy, kid. You'll be the first to satisfy my craving."

The tongue stretched out again, in a supernatural way, and spread across his face.

Sebastian felt the damp heat creeping across his cheek, forehead, and the corner of his mouth, carrying a smell of iron and something rotten. The tip snagged on the arm of his glasses and ripped them from his face.

The glasses fell, spinning, and disappeared somewhere down below in the snow.

And Sebastian's world faded at the edges first, then entirely, turning into a shapeless blur of light, red and black and pink, with nothing clear anywhere, and he closed his eyes in terror as he felt his own body, his own head, being pulled toward the creature's mouth.

Those teeth about to close.

And with the smell of it filling the air, Sebastian closed his eyes tightly and thought about nine o'clock.

...

---

Want to read ahead? Advance chapters are available for free on my official website: Parallel World (parallelworldverse.com)

Support me on Patreon: patreon.com/cw/pararaio

 

[pararaio20]

Chapter 4 — Luck

The mouth opened.

It wasn't a mouth. Sebastian knew this just as he knew, without needing to count, how many wires came out of Frankenstein's controller: it was knowledge that didn't pass through reasoning, that arrived ready-made. Mouths had lips. Mouths had a limit, a point where the bone said "up to here." This had no limit. It opened in layers, one fold unfolding into another, the jaw descending far beyond where any joint should lock, and with each centimeter of opening, teeth sprouted from within the dark gum as if they were being expelled.

And they were all different.

That was what the broken part of Sebastian's brain chose to register, and he never understood why. Not the height. Not the eight meters of emptiness beneath his feet. The teeth. There were teeth the size of kitchen knives, long, straight, yellowish at the base and clean at the tip. There were small teeth, crowded among the large ones, wedged into the gaps like shards of glass cemented to the top of a wall. There were rows upon rows, three, four layers deep, and some were barbed—pointed inward, curved inward, the way a fishhook is made so nothing can come back out.

And the tongue went up.

It emerged from the depths of the thing in a slow, vertical motion, thick at the base, tapering as it rose, glistening with saliva that dripped in long strands and didn't fall, only stretched. The tip rippled in the cold air half a meter from his face. It wasn't attacking. It was tasting. Sebastian understood, with a clarity he would have given anything to avoid, that the thing was savoring his fear before devouring the rest.

His body slumped down.

It wasn't a decision. His shoulders slumped between the fingers that held him, his chin fell to his chest, his knees buckled into thin air. An animalistic shrinking, millions of years old, the same movement a rat makes under a shadow.

And his mind went blank.

That was it, exactly that: it went blank. There was no panic, no prayer, no life flashing before his eyes. There was the opposite. A blank. A low, even hum where there should have been thought, and Sebastian Cross—who could mentally calculate delivery routes in two seconds, who had rewritten the firmware of a headset one Saturday morning, who calculated everything, always, because calculating was the only thing he did better than others—was left completely empty. A shell. A thirteen-year-old boy hanging in mid-air, staring at it, with nothing happening inside.

Because there was no calculation to be made. That was the truth, and his body knew it before he did: when there is no way out, the mind stops searching. There was no angle. There was no trick. There was no part to be replaced, no weld to be redone, no makeshift solution to be invented. There was a mouth, and it was coming, and he was inside its hand.

The teeth came in.

And something hit one of them.

It was small. Absurdly small. Sebastian only noticed because he was looking directly at that spot: a bright dot crossed his field of vision in a blur, hit the side of one of the knife-like teeth with a dry, ridiculous click, the sound of a marble hitting porcelain, and bounced inside.

It was swallowed by the darkness of the throat.

What—

The explosion.

Sebastian closed his eyes reflexively, and yet he still saw the flash through his eyelids, a sudden redness from within his own flesh. The bang wasn't like the gunshots. It was more muffled, thicker, a contained thud, the sound of something detonating inside something else. The hand that held him trembled all over. A wind ripped from nowhere hit his face, threw his hair back, pushed the snowflakes aside in a ring that opened and vanished.

And then: silence.

Not the silence of the square—the square continued screaming, honking, rushing, the world continued collapsing below. But there, in that cubic meter of air, a pause occurred. The roar had stopped halfway.

Sebastian opened his eyes.

Where the mouth should have been, there was no mouth.

There was white. A dense, fibrous mass, a dirty white like old milk, that filled the entire cavity and overflowed over what remained of the lips, hardening as he looked, clamping the jaws together in a crude gag. And it didn't stop there. It trickled down its chin, descended its neck in crisscrossing and intertwining cords, spread across its red and black shoulders like a root searching for soil, fanned out across its enormous chest, descended its back, its legs, reached the plaza floor eight meters below and continued to spread out there, over the asphalt, over the trampled snow, a gigantic, living web drawing itself around the creature in irregular circles, sticking its back to the wall, its feet to the concrete, its entire body to the world.

A web.

Sebastian knew it. He knew it even before he knew the word itself. He'd seen it a thousand times in grainy videos from thirty years ago, in yellowed newspaper clippings stuck inside a school locker, in crayon drawings on the refrigerator door at home. He knew it the same way he knew his mother's face.

But his brain was still empty, and the emptiness prevented any conclusion from entering.

And then the pulse exploded.

It came from below and from the right, so fast that the eye didn't catch the trajectory, only the result: a dark metal disc crossed the space where the creature's forearm was, exactly at the crease where the hand originated from the arm, and passed through.

It didn't hit. It passed.

Sebastian felt the cut in his own body, in the sense that the hand holding him suddenly lost all tension. There was no resistance, no creaking bones, none of that scraping flesh he had heard all night. It was clean. It was obscenely clean. And he only managed to identify the object when it was already twenty meters ahead and below, embedded upright in the asphalt of the square like an axe in a log, still vibrating, the metal singing a thin, sharp hum that rose through the cold air.

A manhole cover.

A cast-iron manhole cover, the kind two men lift with a crowbar, had pierced the wrist of a five-meter-tall monster like a hot knife through butter, and still had enough speed left to bury itself in the ground.

For a few milliseconds—and Sebastian felt each one of them, stretched out, long—nothing happened. His body remained in the air, enveloped by the severed hand, the fingers still closed around his ribs, the arm no longer existing behind it.

Then gravity reminded him.

Physics all started working again at once, with that administrative indifference that physics possesses, and the world began to rise. Not the world falling: the world rising. The lights on the panels moved upwards, the signs moved upwards, the falling snow stopped falling and began to float, and Sebastian's stomach rose along with everything, occupying the place where his throat should have been.

He didn't scream. He was out of breath.

And before he touched the ground — before he could even imagine the ground — something white struck his chest.

It struck the dead hand that was still encircling him with a damp thud, and grabbed it. And pulled.

The jolt was horrible. The fall turned into a sudden surge, upwards and sideways, in a direction he didn't have time to calculate, and the wind hit his face with the force of a slamming door. His eyes closed on their own, brimming with tears. His hair whipped back. The snow turned into white lines passing sideways. Sebastian was dragged through the air of New York at a speed he didn't recognize, unable to see, unable to understand, with no part of his body responding to any command.

And then it stopped.

It stopped in an impossible way — without a jolt, without a rebound, a smooth and absolute deceleration, as if someone had simply decided that that movement was over.

Sebastian opened his eyes.

And it happened, right in front of him, less than an inch from his face, the thing he never imagined would happen. Not today. Not now. Not ever, if he were honest with himself on the nights he stayed up late drawing circuits.

There was a man on the wall.

Standing. Upright. Feet planted on the concrete of the building as if the concrete were the ground and the rest of the universe were wrong.

And he was dressed in the most recognizable outfit on the planet.

Red and blue. The red was deeper than it appeared on the screens, almost wine-colored, and over it the black, unpainted spiderweb lines— in relief, thin, raised cords that ran across the shoulders, chest, arms, backs of hands, a design Sebastian had copied with a pen in the margin of a physics notebook about a hundred times without ever getting the spacing right. The dark plates on the forearms. The reinforced joints. The taut fabric over a body that was tall—one meter and eighty-five, maybe more, a height that made Sebastian feel the same size as Camila.

And the mask.

The lenses were white, wide, with thick, black rims, and they moved. Sebastian saw them. They tightened and opened in a fraction of a second, adjusting the focus, a mechanical iris closing around his face, and in that instant they were closed, narrow, concentrated, staring at the boy who was now in his hands.

"In his hands," in the plural, was an exaggeration.

It was a hand. And it wasn't grasping anything.

Sebastian was still trapped inside the monster's severed hand, and the monster's severed hand was simply resting on the man's open palm. No fingers closed around anything. No support, no hook, no edge. A touch. He held sixty or seventy pounds of alien and boy flesh with the same hand posture as someone resting their palm on a table.

And it didn't fall. Nothing fell.

And Sebastian, his ribs aching with every breath, someone else's blood drying on his face, his throat raw, opened his mouth and couldn't.

He tried again. His mouth trembled. His jaw trembled. It came out in a voice he didn't even recognize as his own, thin, broken, in pieces:

"You are... you are..."

He could see. That was the strange part, the part that only became clear to him many days later, when he was already able to think about the sequence again. He had lost his glasses—that thing's tongue had ripped them from his face and they had vanished spinning down there, and the world had become a shapeless soup of light. But myopia is a specific kind of cowardice. It steals the distant and returns the near. And there, an inch away, the man was clearer than anything Sebastian had ever seen in his entire life: the texture of the fabric, the dull sheen on the plates of his forearms, a thin scratch across the left edge of the lens, a dark splash drying on his shoulder.

Crisp. Real. There.

But the man was no longer looking at him.

The lenses had turned downwards, and the black edges wrinkled—truly wrinkled, the material gathering into folds around his eyes, like a furrowed brow—as he stared at the square.

Sebastian didn't follow the gaze. He didn't need to. He'd already seen enough with his eyes and would see the rest for the rest of his life with his eyes closed. But he saw the face looking, and that was almost worse, because the most famous white lenses in the world were tightly closed and motionless, and there was something in that stillness that wasn't in any toy, in any cartoon, in any thirty-meter graffiti on 128th Street.

Down below, Times Square was bathed in blood under the pink light of soda commercials.

And the voice came from inside the mask.

"Well, young man." Serious. Calm. A calmness that didn't fit at all. "I don't know if you're lucky or unlucky."

Sebastian recognized that voice.

He knew that voice the way one knows a news jingle, the sound of a front door, the hum of the living room radiator. He had heard that voice in press conferences broadcast on large screens, in subtitled interviews on the supermarket screen, in anniversary documentaries of the Battle, in crackling audio from thirty years ago that he downloaded on his school tablet. He had heard that voice all morning, on a Saturday, while eating dry cereal straight from the box.

"But, considering the fact that you're alive and relatively whole," the voice continued, and the lenses returned to him, opening slightly, "let's consider that you're in luck today."

Peter Parker.

Spider-Man.

The greatest hero on Earth, the leader of the Avengers, the man who had commanded the defense of the planet when the sky opened, the guy who sat at tables with heads of state and decided the fate of continents before lunch.

He was standing an inch from his face, vertically, against a wall on Seventh Avenue, holding Sebastian in the palm of his hand.

Sebastian couldn't answer. There was no air, no voice, not even a complete thought—just a fragment, spinning: it's him, it's him, it's him.

And it was over his shoulder that the shadow appeared.

Sebastian's eyes widened. It came along the wall, sideways, with that awkward movement he had already learned to recognize in a single night: one of the black things, clinging to the concrete, climbing onto all fours with its head down and its mouth already open, so close that he could see the strands of saliva between its teeth.

He tried to scream. His throat wouldn't obey. A dry sound came out, a scratchy breath.

There wasn't even time for that.

Spider-Man let go of the wall.

That was all he did—he let go. His body fell half a meter, rolled sideways with Sebastian and the dead hand, and the creature passed by the spot where he had been a tenth of a second before, its teeth snapping shut in the void with a metal door clatter. Its claws ripped a strip of concrete from the facade. Dust and splinters rained down.

Sebastian didn't even get to feel the shock properly. The shock was delayed, it arrived too late, and when it did, it was too late to fit in.

The creature roared—that wet, fleshy sound he felt in his teeth before hearing with his ears.

And Spider-Man, with his free hand, threw another one of those little things.

Sebastian saw it this time. He saw it up close: a tiny, dark object, about half the size of a thumb, emerging from his fingers in an almost lazy, weak wrist movement, lacking any force or shoulder thrust. And, an instant before touching the creature, it opened.

The explosion made the air tremble. And out of nowhere, from a point without volume, a white mass collapsed outwards in all directions at once, enveloped the black thing mid-jump, pinned its arms against its body, its head against its chest, and glued the entire package to the building's facade with a dull thud. A cocoon. A two-meter-high web cocoon stuck to the Times Square wall, with something struggling inside and going nowhere.

A web bomb, Sebastian thought, and the thought came on its own, a piece of machinery fitting itself into a head that was still disassembled. He doesn't shoot webs. He hurls them. It's a radially dispersed capsule. How does he control the volume—

And that thought — small, idiotic, technical — was the first thing that started working again inside him in fifteen minutes.

Spider-Man was already targeting another building.

His arm rose, his wrist twisted, and the line shot out—thin, straight, shooting across thirty meters of snowy air and clinging to the corner of a building across the avenue. Sebastian felt his body being pulled again, but now it wasn't a jolt: it was a curve. A fall that turned into an ascent. The billboards passed beneath them in patches of blue and gold and pink, the shouts from the square came and went like a wave passing under a boat, and the snow spiraled around them.

They landed vertically on the wall of the other building.

Spider-Man looked down.

"Good." His voice was completely normal, the way a man fixing a sink comments on the state of the plumbing. "Carnage will be out of service for a while."

Sebastian, hanging beside him inside a severed hand, followed the gaze.

Down below, in the middle of the square, under the light of the soda advertisement, the red and black thing was glued to the ground inside a twenty-meter white star. Its body writhed beneath the web, its shoulders arching, the red and black mass swirling under its skin like liquid trapped in a thin shell, and the white gag over its mouth swelled and shrank with each attempt to roar. The sound that came out was muffled, distorted, monstrous, and pathetic all at once.

"Carnage," Sebastian repeated inwardly. "That's Carnage."

He knew the name. Everyone knew the name. It was one of those names that appeared in archival documentaries, on lists of "the worst in history," in episodes that Mom would turn off when Camila was in the room.

"But something tells me," Spider-Man continued, and now there was a hint of something else in his voice—weariness, perhaps, or the kind of dry humor that only exists on top of very old weariness—"that his offspring won't like being left alone."

No sooner said than done.

The creatures that were surrounding the father all dropped to the ground at the same time.

Sebastian saw from above, and what he saw made no sense given their size. Things of that size shouldn't move like that. They climbed the facades in leaps that spanned three floors at once, grabbed onto each other, let go, leaped again, cutting the distance along the sides and over, one of them crossing the avenue in a single flight and hitting the opposite wall with enough force to shatter glass. They were closing the route. They weren't coming in a straight line—they were coming from the sides, from the flanks, cutting off the escape route like someone closing a door.

And they arrived.

They clung to the wall surrounding Spider-Man, and Sebastian, inches away from everything, saw each one of them with a clarity he didn't want.

The first one was black with gray details, and it was different from its siblings. Where the others were bulky, piled with muscle, it was slender—almost thin, almost elegant, a tapered silhouette with arms and legs that were too long, just like its father. Its fingers had three more phalanges than they should have. And, as Sebastian watched, its arm grew —stretching half a meter effortlessly, the black flesh elongating in a way that was painful to look at.

The second one had a mouth that was too big even for that family. It took up its entire head, from ear to ear and beyond, and when it opened it, there was no face left: only two white lenses floating above a well of teeth.

The third one was all muscle. There was no neck, no waist, no visible joints: it was something made of stacked blocks, shoulders the size of engines, a chest that looked like a container wall.

And the fourth one was fat, wide, short, and had a tongue that was already sticking out of its mouth before it arrived—long, thick, dragging along the wall and leaving a glistening trail on the concrete.

They all surrounded it.

And they all attacked at the same time.

Sebastian understood, looking at it from inside the circle, that he was about to witness someone die up close for the third time in twenty minutes.

Spider-Man simply wasn't there anymore.

That's how it seemed. There was no preparation, no body stabilizing, no moment when a fighter decides where to go. He had already gone before the movement began, and the movement happened in the empty space.

The one with the long arms arrived first. The gigantic hand swept across the wall horizontally, a wide swipe that didn't require aiming because it covered everything—and Peter jumped over its arm. He didn't dodge: he stepped. A short step onto the creature's forearm, using its flesh as a springboard, and Sebastian felt the jolt in his body as the two climbed an entire floor in half a second.

And it was there, in the air, that Sebastian saw his arm.

The red and blue fabric clung to the forearm muscle under the tension, and beneath it the veins bulged, tracing the entire outline of the hand down to the elbow, thick cords pushing against the uniform from the inside.

"He's not going to hold back," Sebastian thought.

He didn't hold back.

The blow landed on the creature's abdomen, and the sound wasn't a punch. It was a thick bang, a sound of something closed bursting open from the inside, and the black and gray thing came out. It didn't fly like people fly in a fight: it was ripped from the building horizontally, crossed the entire avenue without touching anything, disappeared above the sign on the other side and continued disappearing, and Sebastian never knew where it landed. He couldn't follow it. Its body became a point, the point became nothing.

And the only thing Sebastian could think about, with the wind still whipping his face, was: how many meters? How many meters did it go?

The others came from behind.

The tongue came out first, a wet whip four meters long cutting through the air toward Peter's back—and Peter turned his hip half a hand's breadth. That was all. Half a hand's breadth. The tongue grazed past, continued, and struck the big-mouthed sibling who was right behind it, and the two of them tangled against the wall in a knot of black limbs and furious squeals, punching each other, fighting with a violence that made no distinction of family.

The muscular one came up through the middle. He didn't deviate, he didn't angle: he came from below in a straight line, both arms outstretched to grab, a two-ton thing that knew no other idea than to close in.

Peter jumped over his head.

One single leap. Short, economical, almost disdainful—and at the highest point of the leap, with Sebastian still hanging from the palm of his other hand, he spun his body and brought his fist down on the creature's nape.

What happened next, Sebastian felt rise up the entire building. The thing descended the eight floors in less than a second and slammed onto the ground in Times Square, and the concrete opened up around it in a circle of cracks that crossed the pedestrian crossing, lifted a slab of asphalt, and swallowed half of a parked car. Snow flew from the ground all over the square, a white splatter, and one of the suspended loudspeakers came loose from somewhere and plummeted down.

Two remained.

They came together, from both sides, pinching, which was the only intelligent thing either of them had done all night.

Peter shot a web line into one's chest.

And he pulled.

Sebastian saw it, and saw it clearly, and even then he didn't believe it: Spider-Man didn't pull the creature towards him. He used the line like someone using a fishing hook—a twist of the torso, an arc of the arm, and the three-hundred-kilogram thing was ripped from the wall and described a full-length curve in the air, held by its chest, arms, and legs spread open by centrifugal force.

And it hit its sibling dead on.

The two collided with a wet thud and plummeted together, spinning, hitting an awning, scaffolding, the hood of a car, until they came to a stop thirty meters below in a tangle of limbs that didn't move after that.

Spider-Man let go of the line and stood still against the wall.

And it was then, only then, that Sebastian realized something that frightened him in a way completely different from anything that had happened up to that point.

He wasn't trying.

It hadn't been a fight. Sebastian had watched fights—in videos, on broadcasts, on the big screen at the market—and a fight has rhythm, it has exchanges, it has someone landing blows and someone getting hit. This hadn't had any of that. This had been a man walking through a room full of furniture. He dodged before the blows even existed, as if each of the creatures' movements was announced a second in advance somewhere inside his head. As if the whole world were in slow motion and only he knew.

And, more than that: Sebastian had the clear and distinct impression that he was joking. That he hadn't even used half of it. That this was a grown, tired man pushing four dogs out of the way to get to the gate.

Thirty years, Sebastian thought, with a dizziness that had nothing to do with the height. Thirty years of this.

The wind hit his face again.

Sebastian closed his eyes reflexively — again the jolt, again the world turning into lines, again his stomach being left behind — and when he opened them, a few seconds later, he was somewhere else.

On a rooftop.

The roof was flat, covered in gravel and snow, with enormous ventilation ducts spewing white steam into the black air and an old satellite dish tilted in one corner. It was high. Very high. The noise from the square arrived muffled, distant, filtered, like the sound of a television on in the neighbor's apartment.

Spider-Man set him down on the ground.

Sebastian's legs wouldn't hold up. They simply weren't there. He slid down on his backside onto the icy gravel with a thud, sitting up, still wrapped from the waist up by the severed hand, the black fingers clamped onto his ribs like a finger armor.

And the hero crouched down in front of him.

Sebastian stared upwards, his eyes squinting, blinking wildly, trying to focus on a world that had become a mass of light from about half a meter away. The white lenses narrowed again. And his hands went to Carnage's hand.

"Hold still for a second."

He began to spread his fingers.

Sebastian felt the pressure release from his ribs in stages—one finger, two—and only felt how much it hurt when the pain stopped. Spider-Man's hands worked quickly and without violence, forcing the dead joints back with a wet crack, and Sebastian could see, up close, the care with which he did it: separating the alien flesh from the tattered coat before pulling, so as not to tear the boy away along with it.

"Breathe," said the hero, without lifting his head. "You haven't breathed properly once since I caught you."

Sebastian breathed.

It was awful. The cold air rushed in and cut all the way to the bottom, and something on the right side of his chest protested with a white flash of pain, and he coughed, and the cough hurt more, and along with the cough came a sound he hadn't expected, a thin, wet sound that escaped him without permission.

He clenched his teeth and swallowed.

Not here. Not in front of him.

The last finger snapped open. The black hand fell onto the gravel beside him with a heavy thud and lay there, open upwards, its fingers slowly retracting on their own like a dead spider.

Spider-Man stood up.

"Okay, kid." He was already turning toward the edge. "Stay here while I handle the situation. And try not to cause any trouble."

Sebastian opened his mouth.

He was thirteen years old and had a question stuck in his throat, and it wasn't any of the questions he'd rehearsed his whole life in case he bumped into Spider-Man on the street. It wasn't "how do you do that with the webs?", it wasn't "can you take a picture?", it wasn't "my dad had a cutout of you?", it wasn't "my sister has three action figures of you and one of them lost its hand."

That was it: it's not going to happen.

Nothing came out.

And Spider-Man jumped.

He didn't run to the edge. He took three steps and simply went, a high, clean leap that launched him off the building far above the parapet, and at the highest point of the arch he spun—spun completely in the air, unhurriedly, and his head drooped down and his body straightened, and he began to fall headfirst, in freefall, straight into the square, with his arms glued to his body.

Sebastian stood up.

He didn't know how. His legs were still rubbery, his knee burned inside his torn pants, the right side of his chest protested with every movement, but he stood up and staggered to the edge and gripped the icy railing with both hands.

And he looked down.

And he saw almost nothing.

That was it, and he felt the injustice of it as if someone had laughed at him. The entire Times Square, eight stories below, was a melting watercolor—patches of blue and magenta and gold running into each other, the enormous white of the web in the center, dark shapes moving within the blur, siren lights already beginning to flash red and blue at the edges. Without his glasses, the world more than two meters below was a visual murmur, a suggestion of things.

But he could see the movement.

He watched the red and black blur fall down the facade in freefall, a straight, swift line cutting through all that soup of color.

He saw the blur stop in mid-air at the last instant, in an impossible arc, and shoot forward close to the ground.

He saw the dark shapes rise from the broken concrete, one, two, three, coming back together, drawing closer to the white center where their father struggled.

And he saw the red blur move into the middle of them.

Alone.

Sebastian stood there, both hands on the parapet, the snow falling on his bare head and melting into his red hair, his breath escaping in short, quick wisps, and he watched.

That was the man on the wall on 128th Street. That was the man in the yellowed cutout pasted inside locker number 14. That was the man in the crayon drawing on the refrigerator door, with a little girl with orange braids hanging on his back.

And down there, in the midst of a massacre, that man went in against the monsters in the same way that Sebastian went into the Meridian warehouse at five in the afternoon.

As if it were just another day.

Sebastian gripped the railing until his fingers ached inside his fingerless gloves.

He didn't know—he couldn't have known, nobody there could have known—that twelve meters below where he was, clinging to the damp shadow of a ventilation duct on the roof of the same building, something small and dark had just stopped crawling.

Something else that had also been thrown away that night.

And that, for the first time in his entire short and flawed existence, it had found something warm to pursue.

...

---

Want to read ahead? Advance chapters are available for free on my official website: Parallel World (parallelworldverse.com)

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[pararaio20]

Chapter 5 — Audience

The cold first arrived through the ears.

Without the hat, they had been exposed to the wind sweeping across the roof, and now they ached in a way that rose from his temples and settled behind his eyes, a clean pain, of pure ice, without anything dirty about it. Sebastian only noticed it when it became too long to fit at the end of the line. Because there was a line. After his ears came his ribs, protesting with every breath as if someone had left a closed hand around them and forgotten to remove it. Then came his knee, exposed by the tear in his pants, burning against the frozen gravel. Then came his right foot, where the sole of his shoe now had a hole the size of a coin, and through that hole ice seeped in every time he moved his toes, a constant reminder of the tooth that had pierced it.

And then the face appeared.

From his forehead to the corner of his mouth, the skin still bore the traces of its tongue: a sticky film that the wind couldn't carry away, that dried and pulled and smelled of iron and something rotten beneath the iron. He didn't have the courage to wipe it off. Wiping it off would mean touching it, touching it would mean feeling it, and feeling it would mean admitting that it had really happened and was still stuck to him.

So he stayed where he was. Sitting on the gravel, his back against the metal plate of an industrial air conditioner, his legs drawn up against his chest, his hands tucked into his coat sleeves. Breathing slowly, shallowly, so his ribs wouldn't complain so much.

He didn't know how long he had been there.

The gravel had a thin layer of frost that reflected the light coming from below, and each pebble, ten centimeters from his eyes, was almost offensively clear. Gray with white veins. One with a stain of blue paint, dried for years, a splatter from someone's paint can who once painted something up there. A crumpled cigarette butt, the filter yellowed. He could see all of this. He could see his own hands when he took them out of his sleeves, the red knuckles, a thin cut at the base of his left thumb that he didn't remember making. He could see the seam of his coat, the head of a rusty screw in the sheet metal behind him, his own breath turning to smoke and dissipating before reaching a hand's breadth from his face.

One meter. That was all that was left of the world. One meter of clear things and, after that, watercolor.

He knew this watercolor. He woke up inside it every morning: the bedroom ceiling was a white blotch, the door a darker rectangle, and the restless pink figure standing beside the bed was Camila, waiting for him to open his eyes, with the patience of a dog that needs to go out. Every day, before groping for his glasses on the nightstand, Sebastian lived for a few seconds in a world without edges. He knew how to navigate it. He knew how to find the bathroom, he knew that a small figure jumping was his sister and a large, still figure was the wardrobe, he knew how to count the steps to the kitchen.

He'd never needed that kind of training for anything other than getting to the bathroom without stubbing his toe.

On the other side of the roof, a few meters from the parapet, the back of one of Times Square's giant billboards rose like a steel lattice wall, buzzing. The billboard breathed. A warm air escaped through the cracks, a breath of electronics that had been on for a long time, and the light the screen cast over the square seeped through the edges and tinged the bellies of the clouds blue, then pink, then white, and blue again. Four seconds per color. Sebastian knew because he had crossed that square pushing a bicycle more times than any tourist, and he also knew why, at some point that night, he had tried to count the cycles to have something to hold on to.

He lost count before reaching twenty. He tried again. Lost again. By the third time, he couldn't tell if he'd even started.

And below that low wall, things continued to happen.

He could hear. No one had taken that away from him.

Roars, still. Fewer than before, or spaced differently, it was hard to tell. A long, smacking sound of glass, an entire facade collapsing in shards that tinkled for a while after the bang. Sirens arriving from afar, still far away, rising through the canyons of the side streets. And a new, repeated sound, no longer a gunshot: something lighter. A dry crack followed by a whistle, a snap and a beep, like a clothesline stretched and then loose, stretched and then loose. Sebastian knew it from a thousand videos watched with the volume at maximum and his cell phone pressed against his ear under the blanket. He had never heard it live.

The sound was what pulled him from behind the air conditioner. He had no courage left; he had already understood that about himself that night. All that remained was the crack and the whistle. He placed his hand on the cold plate, swallowed the groan that his ribs sent up, and went to the low wall, dragging his injured foot, half-crouched, as if being crouched would do any good against what was down there.

The low wall was about seventy centimeters high. He rested his forearms on the concrete, felt the frost bite through the fabric, and looked.

Times Square, seen from above and without glasses, was an aquarium.

Colors floating in dark water. Enormous blocks of light, the panels, which he knew were rectangles but which melted at the edges and bled into one another: a blue the size of a building, a flickering white, a pink that occasionally swallowed everything else. Between them, a floor of nothing. Stains. Shapes that moved and shapes that had stopped moving, and about those he did what he could to avoid thinking.

And, cutting all that out, the blur.

Red and blue.

It moved from one side of the square to the other in arcs that never touched the ground. It climbed up a facade and returned, hovered for a moment and fell onto a black blotch, and the black blotch screamed and fought back and the blur was no longer there. Sebastian saw no arms or legs, he saw no web, he saw no white lenses of the mask. He saw a comet. A quick brushstroke of wet paint that left behind it, for half a second, a streak that perhaps was a web, perhaps was just his eye trying to invent what he couldn't focus on.

Thirty years of career. Every afternoon, three seconds standing on the school steps looking south. One day. And the day had arrived, it was fifty meters below his elbows, and Sebastian could see from there exactly as much as he could see of the clouds.

On the opposite side of the square, where Seventh Avenue opened to the north, a constellation twinkled.

Hundreds of tiny white dots, flickering on and off aimlessly, scattered across a larger, darker blotch that filled the entire mouth of the avenue. It took him a moment to understand, because the first thing his mind tried to do with it was to turn it into fire. They were flashes. Cell phones. The crowd that had been running away from Times Square twenty minutes earlier, or an hour earlier, or however long ago, had stopped running. Had turned back. Now they were crowding the corners with their phones raised above their heads, filming, because Spider-Man had arrived, and Spider-Man's arrival meant they could look.

His stomach turned all the way around.

Those people were on the ground, thirty or forty meters from the creature that had ripped a policeman from inside his own uniform. Wearing glasses. With both eyes working. With their phones recording in high resolution, someone surely turning on slow motion, someone surely shouting his name with a faltering voice. Tonight, even before Sebastian entered the door of 6B, it would be everywhere. Edited, subtitled, with music playing over it. He would watch it under the covers, with his cell phone ten centimeters from his face, and he would see for the first time what had happened fifty meters from him.

He was going to watch, like everyone else. Like someone who wasn't really there.

The anger rose so quickly that he didn't even have time to feel ashamed of it. Anger at his own eyes, which had never been good for anything anyway. Anger at the tongue that took his glasses. Anger at that crowd of imbeciles with cell phones that he himself would have been, without a second thought, on any other night of his life. Anger at being alive and not being able to see.

Shame followed soon after, and it was a big one.

There were dead people in that square. He had seen a man ripped open at the waist, had seen what was left of the man fall into the snow with the ordinary sound of something falling, and now, five minutes later, or ten, or an hour, he was leaning against a low wall, furious that he couldn't watch the show. That's what he was, then. Sebastian bit his lip until he tasted it and kept watching, because he couldn't do anything else.

Down there, somewhere among the stains, was Frankenstein.

Lying on its side on Seventh Avenue, where it had fallen when the elastic ripped it from the saddle. Forty kilos of steel and battery, each weld with a story, the panel he had programmed late into the night, the bent-shaft motor he had straightened by hand over three nights. Lying in the street with those creatures walking over it. He tried to find a gray blur among the other gray blurs and gave up, because gray on the ground in Times Square, today, was everything. And the cooler bag had gone into that mouth with the package from Midtown, the express delivery one, the signature on hand by seven. Seven. He didn't know if it was already seven. He didn't know if Mr. Williams had already written anything on the clipboard.

His hands trembled. He noticed it because the frost on the parapet had begun to melt beneath his forearms, and the water trickled down the concrete in thin streaks, and the streaks trembled too. It wasn't from the cold. It was from something that had stayed with him and wouldn't go away just because the teeth part was over: his body lifted off the ground, his feet dangling in the void, his ribs slowly giving way. His mouth opening in layers. He discovered that his teeth were chattering and he clenched his jaw, and the teeth continued to chatter inside.

Down below, the red and blue blur struck another black spot, and the roar that followed was different from the previous ones. Shorter. More surprised.

The buzzing started so faintly that he mistook it for the billboard.

A vibration deep in his ear, directionless, the kind of sound that reaches the enamel of your teeth before it actually reaches your ear. Sebastian thought it was the steel truss, the electric breath on his back. Then he thought it was his own blood. Then the buzzing grew, and kept growing, and went past the point where he could pretend it didn't exist, and he felt the low wall respond beneath his arms, a subtle tremor in the concrete.

He raised his head.

Clouds. The same low, gray cloud cover as every winter, illuminated from below by the dirty orange of the city, drifting eastward. And in the middle of them, a black dot.

It was growing. It was coming in a straight line toward the square, too fast, much faster than anything licensed to fly that low, and the first explanation that came to his mind was the only sensible one: the police. Police aircraft. Everyone had seen one land on top of a building on the news, with that high-pitched whistle of a small turbine.

What was coming from there wasn't whistling. It was roaring. An engine too big for the police, and the black dot had already become too big for the police.

It was the light that decided.

A blue line lit up along the body of the spacecraft, vibrant, electric, the way engines light up when someone steps on the brakes in the sky. Not the blue of the panels. A different blue. Colder, deeper, a blue that Sebastian had seen in a thousand videos of landings and takeoffs, in live mission broadcasts, always with the sound cut off by distance. And on the belly of the spacecraft, against that blue, a huge red mark.

A V.

Blurred, without an outline, but a V, and that red. There was no other red like it in the world. It was the red of the emblem slowly spinning in the institutional advertisement on the corner, THE DEFENSE OF THE EARTH BELONGS TO EVERYONE. The red on the shoulder of every uniform, on the packaging of every action figure sold in every store on the planet. Sebastian didn't need an outline to know. He had spent his whole life learning that red from afar.

The Avengers.

He exhaled without realizing he was holding his breath. Reinforcements had arrived.

And from the other side, almost at the same time, a black stain appeared.

He only saw it because his head was raised and the movement caught the corner of his eye, the corner that was always the worst. A dark shape coming from the west, between the buildings, like a pendulum. It went up, it fell, it went up. The same pattern in the air that the red and blue blur made down below, the same arcs, that specific way of bending the body at the highest point of the curve that Sebastian would have recognized anywhere in the world, because he had spent hours of his life freezing videos at that exact moment to copy the angle in his physics notebook.

But it wasn't red. Nor blue. It was black, completely black, and it tumbled into the square like a stone and disappeared among the other stains.

Sebastian stood there for a second, his mouth agape in the cold. Someone who moved like him. And he hadn't the slightest idea who it was.

The spacecraft landed.

It didn't land. It stopped in mid-air above the square, at the height of the tallest billboards, and the roar turned into a continuous thunder that made the steel truss behind him sing in a high note and the loose gravel from the roof slide towards the parapet. The wind from the engines reached him, a warm wind with the smell of hot metal, and for a few seconds the blue light from the belly of the craft bathed the facades, the windows, the dirty snow, and the whole of Times Square turned that pool-bottom color, the advertisements swallowed up.

And from the spacecraft, while it was still in the air, a lightning bolt descended.

A red line. Straight, perfect, thick as a column, it emerged from the aircraft at a sharp angle and struck the plaza floor directly on top of one of the black spots. The sound came half a second later: a sharp, enormous crack, a steel door being slammed shut by someone the size of a building, and the black spot simply ceased to stand. It bent or flew away; Sebastian couldn't tell which.

It was the clearest thing he had seen all night.

A line of light doesn't need focus. It has no edge for the eye to miss. Sebastian understood then and there, with his fingers digging into the concrete, that the only thing in that watercolor world his eyes could still truly read was light. And that light was ruby-colored. There was only one person on Earth who could do that.

"Cyclops," he said aloud, to no one, and his voice came out hoarse and cracked and much younger than he wanted it to be.

Scott Summers. One of the coalition's tactical commanders, one of the most popular, and one of Sebastian's favorites for reasons he had never been able to properly explain to Camila, who only admitted to one favorite hero, and that hero was red and blue. Maybe it was the visor. A man who carried his own power behind a pair of lenses and who, without them, couldn't look at the world without destroying what he saw. Sebastian was thirteen years old, wore thick glasses, and had a favorite hero who needed glasses to avoid destroying everything. It didn't take much to connect the dots.

The shapes began to fall from the ship.

The first one fell quickly, the way someone who trusts the ground falls. A blue blur, a blue he recognized: the uniform. And it was there, with the blue blur plummeting thirty meters and landing in the square without a single sound reaching the roof, that Sebastian had the most idiotic thought of the entire night, a thought that appeared ready-made and without asking permission, and one he would never tell anyone.

I'd like to know which uniform.

The coalition changed uniforms from time to time, and there was a variant for the cold, a thicker fabric, a different cut at the shoulder, and there was an entire discussion in three different forums about whether or not the Cyclops' winter version had an extra stripe on the side of the leg. Sebastian had read every page. He had formed an opinion. And there was the man himself, fifty meters away, in the middle of January, wearing the answer, and Sebastian saw a blue blotch.

He was that kind of person. Even now. Especially now.

The second shape did not fall.

It descended. There was a difference that even a blur showed: the blue shape had plummeted, and this one came through the air like a leaf, unhurried and weightless, a red dot against the dark hull of the ship gliding in a straight and gentle line to the square. Red as fire. Red as hair, he thought, and the thought arrived with a name hanging from it, because there was only one person who descended from the sky like that alongside Scott Summers.

Jean Grey. His wife. If it really was her, and Sebastian would have bet his bicycle that it was, the whole square was about to turn into something else.

After her came others, and that's when Sebastian lost track.

Shapes. Two, three, more. One that emerged from the ship and opened up in the air as if flying. One that fell and the ground responded, a thud he felt on the concrete wall. One small and one large, one that shone and one that didn't. His mind did what it always did: it raced to the catalog. He began to match silhouettes to names, a list of two hundred heroes in alphabetical order that he had known by heart since he was eight years old. He didn't match any. Without an outline, a silhouette isn't a silhouette. It's a blur with legs.

He gave up. It hurt.

Down below, the struggle changed in nature.

Before, it was chaos. A quick blotch against many slow blotches, the red and blue doing the work of ten. Now there was rhythm. The ruby lines began to sweep the square one after another, short, precise, and with each line a black blotch emerged from its place. The dark ropes, those that crossed the air and opened over people like hands, still flew; he saw their streaks cutting through the light. But now the ropes were cut before they arrived. They snapped mid-air and fell.

And between the red lines, something happened that Sebastian took a while to believe: the black spots began to rise.

One. Then two. They would leave the ground and hang in the air five, six meters high, attached to nothing, shaking their limbs like insects in a web that no one could see, and the roar that came from them was different, sharper, thinner, the sound of a creature that doesn't understand what is being done to it. They would stay there. Waiting. And the red and blue blur would come from the other side of the square like a stone from a sling and pass through each of them, one by one, and they would fall.

One held on. The other hit.

Sebastian watched it repeat itself four, five times, and even in a blur, even without seeing a single face, he understood that he was looking at people who had been doing this together for longer than he had existed. Something planned. A dance that the square hadn't rehearsed, but that they knew by heart.

It worked. The roars became less frequent. Not because the creatures had fallen silent, but because there were fewer and fewer of them left to roar.

Only one stain did not rise.

The big one. The red and black one, at the center of everything, the shape twice the size of the others, which Sebastian now saw as a dark clot where the two colors never stopped switching places. The red and blue blur didn't move away from it. It circled around, went in, went out, and with each entry the red thing swelled, cracked the ground, roared with that voice of many voices at once that Sebastian knew all too well.

He pressed his forearms against the concrete until it hurt, so he wouldn't have to think about its tongue.

That's when he heard it.

The voice echoed across the entire square—the roars, the thunder of the spaceship, the crackling of the red lines—and reached the rooftop clear as if it had been spoken right beside him. Nothing like the voice from the interviews. Nor like the one in Camila's drawing, nor the one in the speeches on the corner billboard. It was hoarser, older, and it was shouting a name.

"Carnage!"

A pause in the roars. The time it takes for a blow. Then more words, which the wind caught and undid before rising, something that ended in a tone Sebastian knew from twenty years of interviews: the tone of someone joking with a mouth full of blood. And the red thing's response was laughter. Layered laughter, with the man's voice delayed half a second in the background.

Sebastian took a while to find the name within himself.

It wasn't in the first drawer. It wasn't with the villains he followed on his feeds, the ones that appeared every week, the ones the city already considered bad weather. It was further back, with the old things. With the newspaper clipping from his school locker. With the documentaries he watched while his mother slept on the sofa, those with grainy images and a deep-voiced narrator, about the years when the city almost fell several times in a row. Carnage. A word that always appeared in those documentaries with the same kind of music underneath. The worst of them, they said. One of the worst Spider-Man had ever faced, back when Spider-Man was just a man in red and blue in a city with no coalition whatsoever.

Decades. It hadn't appeared in decades. Sebastian had never seen that name associated with anything that wasn't in the past.

And the thing had said, with its hand closed around his ribs: years trapped in that hole.

A nagging feeling had settled in the back of his mind before he had time to get rid of it. There wasn't a hole, anywhere, that could accidentally release something like that. There wasn't a cell, on a planet full of people who knew how to build cells, from which a name like that could walk out on a Thursday in January to eat a policeman in Times Square. Something had happened. Something was wrong long before he turned the corner of Forty-Eighth, and the whole city, with its billboards, its mayoral speeches, and its global security summits, had either not noticed or had noticed and hadn't told anyone.

He kept the question to himself. It wasn't the right time.

The other black blob, the one that had arrived from the west, was also fighting. Sebastian would lose it and find it again among the shapes, always in motion, always in the same arcs that Spider-Man made, but against the smaller creatures, far from the red clot. It never stopped long enough for him to try to understand. Only once, when he passed near a white panel and the light hit it from the side, did he see that the black had something red in it. Details. Lines, marks, a design, there was no way to tell. Red on top of black, moving like Spider-Man.

The catalog spun again. Again, it didn't stop at any name.

And then the snow decided it was its time.

The snowflakes that had been falling sparsely since the beginning of the night suddenly thickened, as if someone up there had opened their hand. Large, heavy, so many that the air became a curtain. They landed on the sleeve of his coat and for a second each one was a perfect thing, a six-pointed drawing ten centimeters from his eyes, clearer than anything had been that night, and then it turned to water. They landed on his eyelashes. They landed on the frost of the low wall and didn't melt anymore.

And between him and the square, the curtain closed.

Sebastian almost laughed. A sound escaped his nose that wasn't quite laughter. At that instant, that damned instant, with the Avengers in the square and Spider-Man fifty meters away and Cyclops shooting beams of light that even a blind man could see, the sky chose precisely that moment to take away what little remained of his sight. The watercolor turned into television static. The blocks of color on the panels turned into embers behind a sheet. The ruby lines still appeared, wider, more diffuse, a red flash that lit up all the snow at once and then went out. But the red and blue blur, that he lost.

He kept his ears.

A roar. A red flash, the crack of steel. A shorter roar. The crack and hiss of the web, the crack and the hiss. A thud he felt on the concrete, something heavy hitting the ground all at once. The voice of layers laughing, and then not laughing. A roar. Silence where before there had been a roar. The thunder of the ship, continuous, now lower. Sirens from three directions at once, from four, from all directions, a wall of sirens rising through all the canyons of the island. A red flash. Nothing. A roar. Nothing.

Nothing.

He waited for the next one. It didn't come. He waited a little longer, with the snow accumulating in his hair and melting on his neck, and what came instead was a sound he took a while to recognize, because the last time he had heard it was in a stadium broadcast: the crowd.

Not screaming in fear. A wave that rose from the mouth of Seventh Avenue, from the corners, from the stairways, from everywhere where the flashes still blinked behind the curtain, and it grew, and became one thing. Applause. Voices shouting a name. Sebastian heard it rise up the facades to the roof, pass over him and continue to the clouds, and he remained there, his forearms on the concrete, alone, his foot punctured and his ribs aching and his face still smelling of iron.

It was over.

The square knew. The square had seen. And he, who was closer than any of those telephones, who had been inside that thing's hand, who had stepped on its teeth to stay alive, had seen nothing.

He moved away from the wall and sat down again on the gravel, his back against the metal plate, and the snow continued to fall as if it didn't concern him.

He took the cell phone out of his pocket. This he could see: the black electrical tape holding the back cover, the old crack in the corner of the screen, and above it new cracks, a thin web that hadn't been there in the afternoon. He pressed the button. The screen went black. He pressed it again, held it down. Nothing. Sebastian knew that device better than the palm of his hand; he had replaced the battery twice with a soldering iron and patience, and he knew that that cell hated the cold, that below a certain temperature it simply stopped and pretended to be dead until someone warmed it up again in his pocket. It would come back. Probably. In the dark glass, ten centimeters from his face, a pale, blurry face stared back at him, and even that he couldn't see properly.

He put his cell phone away.

He tried to do the usual thing. Go back to the last number. Eighteen forty-seven on the bicycle's display, at the corner of Seventh and Forty-Sixth. From there, add up what he had lived, what he knew, how long each thing had lasted. He always knew. Even before he learned to read a clock, he knew. He knew how long his mother took in the shower, how long the rice took to cook, how much time was left until Camila was truly asleep after swearing she was already asleep. It was a clock that lived somewhere between his stomach and his chest and that had never, not even once, been late.

He went looking for that inner clock.

It wasn't there.

Ten minutes? An hour? Had seven already passed? Camila was already in bed, it was already nine, his mother had already entered 6B and found the covered plate, the note, the half-empty juice, and a house that was too quiet? Sebastian didn't know. He would pull the thread and the thread wouldn't lead anywhere. He had the teeth, he had the roof, he had the buzzing and the red lines and the snow, and between one thing and another there were holes he couldn't measure, as if someone had cut the tape in several places and glued the ends together without worrying about the order.

He stared at his own hands, the only clear thing left in the world, and they were still trembling.

Sebastian Cross had never lost track of time.

Until that night.

...

---

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[pararaio20]

Chapter 6 — Focus

The wind arrived before anything else.

It wasn't the wind from the roof, the one that had been whistling through the gravel ever since he sat down there and had already become part of the cold. It was a blow. A displacement of air coming from below and from the front, dry, that threw the flakes back as if someone had opened a door in the middle of a storm. It hit Sebastian's face, stole his breath for half a second, and brought with it the smell of hot stone.

There was no landing sound. He recorded that later. No thud, no scraping of soles on concrete. Just the wind, and then the presence.

He raised his head.

On top of the low wall, in the same spot where his forearms had melted the frost, there was a stain.

Red and blue.

The same. He had spent the entire night looking at it down there, scanning the square from one side to the other, passing through the black stains like a stone passes through glass, and now it was three meters from him. Standing still. Crouched on the low wall with its knees apart and the fingers of one hand resting on the concrete, in the way no human being ever leans on anything. And it was big. Much bigger than it looked from above. The height of the wall added to the height of its crouching body made it something that occupied the sky, with the orange clouds behind and the snow falling around without touching it, or touching it and disappearing.

It was facing him.

Sebastian didn't decide to get up. His legs did it on their own, just as they had done in the square: first his hand on the cold air conditioning unit, then his aching knee, then his ribs complaining with a sharp, white pain that he swallowed silently. He stood up. He took one step, dragging his foot, pierced by the gravel, and another, and stopped less than an arm's length from the low wall, his chin raised, his hands hanging by his sides, unsure what to do.

The stain moved.

One of his hands rose to his own head. There was a short movement, a tug from below upwards, and the top of the stain changed color: the red vanished and in its place was something darker, brown, crumpled, which the wind immediately began to tousle. Hair. That was all Sebastian could see, a brown blur on top of a blue blur, and yet his stomach churned, because he knew what it meant. He had taken off the mask. Right there. For him.

The voice came on top of the wind.

"Okay. I think you dropped that."

It wasn't the voice behind the mask. It was closer, without the muffled sound of the fabric, without the distance that existed in all the recordings he knew. A tired man's voice talking to a boy in the cold, and nothing more.

Sebastian saw the arms rise.

He saw them the way he saw everything at that distance: two dark shapes standing out from the blue, thick, dense, a pair of forearms that seemed to have ropes wrapped around them beneath the fabric. They came towards his face. Slowly. He didn't move. After everything that had come towards his face that night, there was no reflex left for that, and perhaps it was better that way.

He felt the cold touch on his temples.

Then the weight.

A small, precise weight that settled high on his ears and the tip of his nose as if it had never been there, and which Sebastian recognized before recognizing anything else, because it was the first weight he felt every morning and the last he took off every night. The arms of the glasses slid behind his aching ears. The frame touched his skin and was cold, cold as snow, and there was a drop of water on one of the lenses that trickled down when he blinked.

The world returned.

It didn't return all at once. It returned like an image someone pulls from the water: first the edges, the outline of a shoulder against the orange sky; then the hairline, dark against the cloud; then the shadows within the face, which ceased to be shadows and became a forehead, an eyebrow, the bone of a cheek. Sebastian blinked twice, because his eyes still didn't trust him. On the third blink, the face was there, whole, clear, a meter away from his.

He recognized that face.

He knew him from the screens in markets, from press conferences, from documentaries played at a low volume while his mother slept on the sofa. But the screens showed a face the size of a building, or the size of a thumb, and never the size of a face. Peter Parker was in his fifties. Sebastian knew the math by heart, and the math said middle age. But the last few years had been good to that man, that much was clear, and the man crouching on the low wall looked like someone entering his thirties. Smooth skin, without wrinkles, a firm jaw, a red mark on his forehead where the mask had tightened. His brown hair was short, crumpled by the fabric and tousled by the wind, with melting snow in it. Only his beard gave anything away: thick, trimmed close, a shade darker than his hair, it gave his face a weight that the rest of his face lacked, as if it had been left there on purpose so that people would take that man seriously.

And he was smiling.

A small, half-smile, like someone looking at something they find amusing but won't say what it is. In his left hand, hanging forgotten on his knee, the mask stared at the gravel with its empty white lenses.

Sebastian opened his mouth.

Nothing came out. It wasn't like against the wall, when his throat had tightened with fear; it was the opposite, everything open and nothing passing through, as if so much wanted to come out at once that the door was clogged. He had questions. He had thirteen years of questions kept in order, revised, rehearsed under the covers, and none of them were where he had left them. There was only one thing inside him now, and that thing wasn't a sentence. It was a buzzing. A pressure behind his eyes and in the middle of his chest that rose, and rose, and had nowhere to go.

The man's smile widened slightly.

"Would you like a photo?"

Sebastian nodded. Up and down, once, twice, too fast, his glasses slipping a millimeter and him pushing them back down with the back of his hand in a gesture so ancient it was practically part of his arm.

Peter chuckled silently through his nose and climbed down from the low wall.

It was a descent, not a leap: one foot on the gravel, then the other, his whole body unfolding until he was standing, and suddenly the low wall and the sky and the square ceased to exist, because there was a man six feet tall there and the world was his size. Sebastian had to raise his chin higher. The uniform, up close, smelled of sweat, smoke, and something chemical, and there was melting snow on his shoulders and in the creases of his elbows, and a dark stain drying on his chest that he preferred not to examine.

He put his hand in his pocket.

The phone was where it had been, pressed against his body, and it was warm. Sebastian removed it with unsteady fingers and held the side button with his thumb, and for a full second nothing happened, and in that second he saw everything go wrong: the hero there, waiting, and him with a black brick in his hand. Then the cracked glass lit up. The logo. The loading bar, slowly, the way that device did everything. Sebastian stared at the screen like someone holding their breath in a hospital corridor.

Peter was looking too.

Sebastian noticed out of the corner of his eye and felt his face heat up despite the cold. There was no way he couldn't look. The black electrical tape holding the back cover together, with a poorly made fold at the corner. The old crack and the new ones on top. And, at the top of the screen, the front camera, which wasn't from that phone: a lens larger than the hole where it had been fitted, with a darkened epoxy ring around it and a wire from the circuit board showing from the side, because the donor device was from another brand and nothing on it had been made to fit there. Sebastian had spent three nights getting that camera to communicate with that system. It worked. That was what mattered. But, under Peter Parker's gaze, the device in his hand looked exactly what it was: a patched-up thing for someone who couldn't afford another one.

The bar finished loading. He opened the photo app with his thumb, touched the front camera icon and saw his own face in the cracked glass, and almost turned the phone off again.

He didn't turn it off.

Peter, without being asked, crouched down. One leg bent, the other knee on the gravel, until his head was level with Sebastian's, and the movement was so natural that Sebastian understood, with a slight pang, that he had done this a thousand times, for a thousand children, in a thousand places. It didn't matter. It didn't matter at all. Sebastian stretched out his arm. On the screen, the two faces appeared side by side: one bearded, smiling slightly at the lens with the ease of someone who has been taking photos for thirty years; and the other, his own, pale as wax, with a dry dark stain from his forehead to the corner of his mouth, his eyes red and enormous behind the thick lenses, and his red hair plastered to his head by the snow.

He tapped the button.

The entire screen flashed white, and for an instant the two faces disappeared in the light.

"Did it turn out well?"

Sebastian looked. The photo was there, frozen behind the cracks. He nodded again, up and down, and this time the movement came with a tightness in his throat that he couldn't swallow in time, and something warm ran down his dirty cheek and he pretended it was snow.

Peter smiled and stood up.

"Well, it's time for us to go downstairs."

Sebastian didn't have time to understand the sentence.

An open hand rested on his back, between his shoulder blades. That was all. A palm flat against the fabric of his coat, fingers extended but not closing, a grip that wouldn't be able to hold a bag of rice. And his body lifted off the ground. Completely. His feet left the gravel and he hung in the air against the man's arm like a forgotten piece of clothing on a clothesline, held by nothing, held by a hand that didn't squeeze. He felt the grip. It wasn't finger pressure; it was the entire coat, the wool and the lining and the undershirt, all clinging to that palm as if it were a magnet and he were iron.

Peter took three steps and jumped.

The wind whipped against his face again, but this time Sebastian kept his eyes open, because now he had eyes. The building rose. The orange clouds swirled. And, twenty centimeters from his face, Peter's free arm stretched forward, his wrist turned, and Sebastian saw.

The launchers.

They were small. Absurdly small. Two flattened volumes attached to the inside of each wrist, the size of a matchbox, painted the same red as the uniform with such precision that they didn't exist from a meter away. Only up close could you see the seam. Only up close could you see the mouthpiece, a narrow mouth of dark metal, and the flat trigger that Peter's two middle fingers reached when he bent his palm. Sebastian had read about it his whole life. Leaked schematics, fan drawings, canceled patents, an entire thesis on a forum about the pressure mechanism. None of that was it. The line came out with a dry snap that he felt in the arm pressed against his, and the world shook, and went down, and the fall turned into a curve.

It was gentle. After the night he'd had, it was almost indecently gentle.

And then there was ground.

Sebastian felt the asphalt beneath his feet before feeling a hand release from his back, and he staggered, and a firm hand gripped his shoulder for a second before letting go.

Times Square was upside down.

It was no longer a watercolor. It was a photograph that was too focused, and he didn't know where to look first. Ten meters away, the asphalt had been ripped open from one end of the square to the other by a straight, deep cut, its edges melted and darkened, as if someone had run a hot knife through a block of black butter. The snow had evaporated within a two-meter radius around him, and the ground was still steaming. Sebastian didn't need to think. There was only one thing in the world that did that, and he had seen its color from the roof.

Further on, the crater. A sunken concrete circle where the muscular thing had fallen, with half a car swallowed by the rim and the loudspeaker he had seen plummet crushed beside it, covered in snow.

And, leaning against a row of newly erected metal barriers, a truck.

Large, armored, with no windows in the cargo area, its rear doors open and a ramp. Two men in dark uniforms climbed up it, leading a third. The third man was wearing orange. An orange jumpsuit torn at the knees and chest, with an entire sleeve missing, and he walked as if he no longer knew where he was. Behind him, inside the truck, in the dim light of the compartment, Sebastian saw more orange. Three, four, maybe five men sat on metal benches, all wearing the same torn jumpsuits, heads bowed and hands tied in front of their bodies. None of them moved. Sebastian didn't want to think about what had torn those jumpsuits from the inside.

And, deep down, the spaceship.

It was now resting, or almost, its dark hull a meter off the ground and the ramp open, the blue light of its belly spilling onto the snow. People were coming and going. People in uniform, people in white overalls, and among them, being carried two by two with the care one takes when carrying something that might explode, were tubes. Thick glass cylinders, taller than Sebastian, secured in metal frames with wheels. And inside the tubes, a liquid.

Black.

Not still. Sebastian looked for just a second, but saw that it was moving on its own, slowly, climbing up the glass walls and trickling back down, and that the blue light from the ship wasn't entering it. It hit the glass and stopped there.

He looked away.

"Are you okay?"

Peter was standing beside him, the mask still in his hand, looking at him with his head slightly tilted.

Sebastian nodded in agreement.

It was a lie, and it wasn't. His ribs ached with every step, and something inside him cracked when he took a deep breath. But he wasn't going to say that. He couldn't speak, to begin with, and even if he could, he wouldn't. The man beside him had a spaceship, a truck full of people in orange, and an entire square waiting, and Sebastian knew, with a clarity that almost hurt, that every minute Peter Parker spent there was a minute ripped away from something else. He wasn't going to be a burden anymore. Not to him.

"Good." Peter looked the boy up and down, a quick, practical glance, like someone who's done this many times before. "From what I can see, you don't have any serious injuries, and we already have too many people giving statements. I believe you can be released now, young man."

Sebastian nodded once more.

And they walked on. Peter started walking and he followed, without anyone having planned anything, crossing the trampled snow and the shards of glass and the stains on the asphalt that Sebastian chose not to look at. They stopped. And only when they stopped did he realize where they were, and he found it strange, because he hadn't guided anyone there.

Frankenstein was at his feet.

It lay on its side, with the handlebars twisted downwards and the front wheel flipped, the dashboard blank, one tire half-buried in a puddle of dirty snow. Someone had run over it. There was a shoe print on the frame and a car tire mark two hand spans from the battery.

Sebastian bent down.

The first touch was on the battery, as always. The printed plastic cover was scratched, but intact, and the clamps held it in place. He ran his hand over the gray frame as if searching for a broken bone in an animal, felt the weld on the rear, the attachment of Camila's seat, the motor in the wheel hub. He spun the wheel with his hand. It spun freely, without scraping. He adjusted the handlebars with a tug that made his ribs scream, and the handlebars snapped back into place. Then he pressed the instrument panel.

The screen lit up.

Red. The warning he himself had written was still there, flashing, the warning he never imagined he'd read in that square, and below it the battery number. Eleven percent. Sebastian ran his finger across the screen, closed the alert, saw the engine data return. Normal temperature. Controller responding. He exhaled slowly. The overload had drained the battery like gasoline, but hadn't burned the rest. There hadn't been time. He never reached the end of the acceleration, because Carnage's rope had ripped him from the seat before that, and the thing that had almost killed him had, in the same movement, saved the bicycle.

"Lucky you," the man had said on the wall. "Let's consider that you're lucky today."

On the other side of the bicycle, Peter Parker looked at the boy.

He had looked before. He had looked on the wall, on the roof, when the photo was taken. But it was the look you give anyone you pull out of the middle of something like that, the look that checks if there's blood, if there are bones showing, if the person can walk. This was different.

The cell phone. He had seen it on the roof, up close, without wanting to see it: a camera ripped from another device and grafted onto this one with epoxy and patience, working. It wasn't the kind of thing you do in a repair shop. It was the kind of thing you do on a kitchen table, in the middle of the night, with parts that shouldn't even be talking to each other.

The bicycle. He noticed now what it really was: an old mountain bike frame, a scooter battery, a hub motor that someone had rewound by hand, a dashboard made from the screen of a dead phone. Each piece from a different origin. Nothing there had been born together. And the boy had run his hand over it as if he knew every screw by name.

And the clothes. The coat two sizes too big, worn at the cuffs. The thrift store pants, frayed at the knees even before the tear. The fingerless gloves. Sneakers with a hole in the sole, on a night below freezing.

He wasn't a normal boy. Peter saw it the way he would see a wrong move in the middle of a fight: effortless, thoughtless, information that simply appeared ready-made.

He opened his mouth to ask if it had been him. If that thirteen-year-old boy had done all that with his own hands.

"Spider-Man!"

The voice came from behind, from the direction of the ship, loud, cutting through the square.

Peter closed his mouth. He turned his body, and his face came with it, but his eyes lingered for a second longer on the boy crouching beside the bicycle, and in that second there was no smile in them. There was attention. Then he pulled the mask over his head, and his eyes turned into lenses, and the lenses turned to the other side.

Sebastian watched as his back walked away.

He got up with his bicycle. He didn't call out. He wouldn't have a voice, and even with a voice he wouldn't have the courage, because everything in that square said that that man was needed somewhere else and that the boy from Harlem had already received much more than his share of life. He turned the handlebars and rode off in the opposite direction.

The nearest exit was through Seventh Avenue, where the barriers were still being erected. Men in reflective vests unrolled yellow tape from one post to another; behind them, a truck unloaded trestles, and further back, someone was already measuring the gap across the ground with a laser device. They were closing everything off. Forensics, maintenance, whatever came after something like that. Sebastian pushed Frankenstein through the opening between two fences before anyone could close that one too, and nobody stopped him. A boy with a bicycle was nobody.

On the other side of the fence, the world waited.

The crowd he had seen from the rooftop, the constellation of tiny white dots, was two meters away from him and was made up of people. People leaning against the railings, people on top of the benches, people with their arms raised and their cell phones pointed into the square, filming the uniforms in the distance, the spaceship, the cut in the ground, the truck. Nobody was filming the boy. He passed under the raised arms, between a couple arguing about whether that was really Jean Grey and a man narrating everything aloud to his own phone, and the bicycle cleared a path where his body could not.

Exciting, he thought. It had been, let's say, an exciting night.

The thought came to him fully formed, dry, with a voice he didn't recognize as his own, and he almost laughed, and that almost-laughing hurt his ribs.

Then the reporters arrived.

There was a line of them along the sidewalk, cameras with white lights pointed at pale faces, microphones stretched out in front of people wrapped in silver blankets. Survivors. Sebastian recognized their faces before he recognized anything else: the fixed gaze, the hands that wouldn't stop moving, the mouths saying yes, yes, Spider-Man, yes, he got me out of there. A woman was crying as she answered. A man in a suit was showing the size of something with his hands. There were many. There were many indeed, and they all had a better story to tell than a voiceless boy, and Sebastian walked behind the cameras, between the cables and the vans, head down and handlebars in hand, and no light turned on him.

And he arrived on the street.

An ordinary street. Wet asphalt, a convenience store with its door open and the owner standing there looking at the sky, a flying taxi passing high and slowly as if it too were curious. The noise of the square faded into the background, became nothing.

Sebastian got on.

Eleven percent. Almost a hundred blocks. The hills of Harlem, all of them, waiting at the end. He looked at the screen, looked at the empty street ahead, and rested his feet on the pedals.

His night was not yet over.

…

The bedroom door closed with a click that he felt all the way up his arm.

The plastic clock beside the bed showed half past eleven, the red numbers floating in the darkness like the only thing awake in the apartment. Sebastian stood there with his hand on the doorknob, looking at them, waiting for them to say something else. They didn't.

The battery had died around Ninety-Six.

He knew it was going to end. He'd done the math as he left the square, and the calculation had gone wrong, like everything else that night, and the dashboard went out halfway up a hill, the engine letting out a low groan before dying, and from then on it was just his legs. Forty kilos of bicycle and his own weight on top, climbing Harlem in the dark, his punctured foot filling with snow with every pedal stroke, his ribs marking the rhythm. He didn't remember the last thirty streets very well. He remembered stopping once to vomit in a sewer, with nothing to vomit. He remembered the building's door, the elevator going up with its usual grumbling, and him leaning against the Formica wall with his forehead pressed against the cracked mirror.

Camila's door was closed. He had stopped there for a second, in the hallway, and listened through the crack to her breathing, that breathing of a child sleeping with their mouth open, and only then did he know he was home.

Now there was only the bedroom.

The coat fell to the floor where he dropped it with a dull thud. He didn't take off his sneakers with his hands. He stepped on the heel of one with the toe of the other, ripped them off, kicked them both under the bed, and one of them hit a cardboard box that had been there since the move. The torn pants fell to the floor. The t-shirt. The fingerless gloves, which he didn't even remember wearing. Sebastian stood in his underwear in the middle of the room for a moment, shivering, his arms crossed over his ribs, and the winter chill passed over him as if he were nothing.

He fell onto the bed.

The mattress cradled his body with its usual groan. He pulled the blankets up to his chin, both of them, wrapped his legs in them, and lay with his eyes closed, waiting for the warmth to arrive. It took a while. While he waited, he thought of the red lines cutting across the square. Of the black blur that moved like Spider-Man. Of the open hand on his back and the disappearing ground. He thought of the tubes.

After that, he didn't think about it anymore.

It wasn't a choice. The exhaustion came from a place deeper than thought and shut down thought along with everything else, like someone turning off a light in a room and leaving it. His breathing slowed. Deeper. His hands, which had spent the entire night clenched on something, opened on their own on the blanket. And in a few seconds, Sebastian's body completely passed out, the way only a thirteen-year-old's body passes out after a night like that: all at once, without transition, like something falling.

The room became quiet.

It was a small, dark room, with no light other than the red numbers on the clock, and to top it all off, it was a mess: boxes from the last move that had never been fully unpacked, a pile of clothes on the chair, the toolbox shoved under the table. The living room radiator ticked away in the distance, behind the wall. A car sped past on the street, its light sweeping across the ceiling and disappearing.

And on the floor, the clothes moved.

It was a small thing. A fold in the coat sleeve that straightened itself, without any wind. Then the pants, thrown haphazardly with the ripped knee sticking up, rippled for a second as if something had passed through them. One of the sneakers, under the bed, fell to the side.

Something came out of the shoe.

Small. Black. The size of a walnut, dripping from the hole in the sole like a drop of oil dripping from an engine, only rising against gravity and reaching the ground without making a sound. It stood still for a moment. Then it began to crawl, leaving a wet trail on the wood that dried behind it, towards the bed.

Another one came out of the coat.

It came out through one of the tears, and this one was a little bigger, and slower, and it was stretching a thin filament in front of the body like a slug groping. From the pants, through the open knee, a third one.

They met beside the bed.

There was no struggle. There was no hesitation. Each one touched the other and simply ceased to be a separate thing, the pieces slipping into one another and becoming a single mass, black and shiny, which came together on the ground with a damp sheen and lay motionless, throbbing, if indeed it throbbed. It was still small. Smaller than a closed fist. It would fit inside a glass. And it trembled, the way something trembles when it's cold.

It climbed up the side of the bed.

It stretched upwards like a drop stretching in reverse, touched the wooden bed frame and gripped it, and the rest of its body climbed behind, slowly, silently, scaling the foot of the bed and then the edge of the mattress and then the fold of the sheet, always along the same thin path, always clinging first and letting go later. It reached the blanket. It stepped over it like a shadow across a field, a black shape advancing slowly over the thick wool, climbing the curve of Sebastian's leg, the curve of his hip, the valley of his ribs, until it reached the place where the blanket ended and his chin began.

It stopped.

Sebastian's face was turned toward the ceiling, his mouth slightly open and his glasses still on his nose, because he had fallen asleep without taking them off. His skin was cold. The dry stain on his forehead was still there.

The black mass moved toward him.

It was gentle. That was the strangest thing of all, and no one was there to find it strange: the gentleness. It opened up, spreading thinly like a film of water over the skin, and passed over the chin, the mouth, the nose, the lenses of the glasses without smudging the glass, the forehead, the hair. It circled the closed eyes. It stayed there for a whole instant, covering the boy's face like a second, darker skin, and nothing about it pressed, and nothing about it hurt. Then it receded. It trickled back down the jaw, the neck, found the gap between the blanket and the skin and went in.

Underneath the blanket, in the dark, it slid down his body.

Over his thin chest, over the ribs that could be counted one by one, over the spot on the right side where the skin was purple and hot. Over his stomach. Up his legs to his feet. It traced every inch as if measuring, as if checking, and then returned. It climbed again. And settled on his chest, right in the center, on the sternum, where the heart beat slowly beneath.

There, it spread.

It opened in all directions at once, thin, and enveloped Sebastian's torso like a pair of arms encircling someone: around his chest, his sides, his back, closing over his entire body in a single embrace. And the heat from his body passed into it. Sebastian was cold on the outside, but inside there was a thirteen-year-old oven burning, and the black mass drank it in, and as it drank it stopped trembling. Little by little. One wave at a time. Like a wounded animal that has spent the whole night crawling on the ice and finally found a warm hole to fit into, and curls up, and stops moving, and for the first time in a long time is not running from anything.

It stayed like that for a long time.

And then it began.

It wasn't from above. It was from within. The film on Sebastian's skin trembled entirely, just once, and then began to unravel, and unraveling there meant something else: it split. In two. Into four. Into thousands. Each piece smaller than the last, each finding a pore in the boy's skin and entering through it, pushing, forcing its way through a hole made to let sweat out, not to let that in. There was no hurry. That's what hurt. One piece at a time, one pore at a time, the black substance descending through the skin like ink running down fabric, only the fabric was human and felt it.

Sebastian's body reacted before he did.

His hands clenched. His fingers tightened on the blanket, his nails digging into the wool. A groan escaped his half-open mouth, low, long, a sound from within sleep, and his legs curled up and then stretched out, and his back arched a hand's breadth above the mattress and fell back down. The skin of his chest shivered in waves, from the outside in, each wave following a piece that went in. Sweat. A cold sweat broke out on his forehead and lip and trickled down his temples into his ears. The veins in his neck appeared, thick, blue in the darkness. His heart raced beneath the black hand that still covered him, and the black hand felt it, and didn't stop.

He didn't wake up.

There was enough pain there to wake a grown man, and Sebastian didn't wake, because exhaustion had gone deeper than the pain could reach. He lay in the dark, trapped beneath his own sleep, while his body screamed silently. And the substance continued.

It entered through the skin and found the flesh, and mingled with the flesh. It passed between the fibers of the chest muscles like water between roots, thread by thread, black and alive, and where it passed the fiber trembled and then yielded. It descended further. It found the bone. It found the ribs, one by one, and the rib on the right side where something was cracked, and there it lingered, and there it hurt in a way that made Sebastian's whole body clench like a fist. Then it continued. It spread through the bones like cold spreads through iron, inside, in the marrow, and reached the spine, and climbed it vertebra by vertebra to the nape of the neck, and descended it to the hip, and everywhere it passed it left a little of itself mixed with what was already there, so that there was no longer a place where Sebastian ended and something else began.

And it sank.

Deeper and deeper inside, deeper and deeper towards the center, behind the sternum, behind the heart that beat like a caged bird, in the place where what a person is is kept. The film over the skin was disappearing. Diminishing. A thin layer, then a sheen, then nothing, the boy's skin returning to being just skin, white and sweaty in the dark, rising and falling too quickly.

The clock showed 11:51.

The room was quiet again. The clothes on the floor were just clothes. Sebastian slept with his mouth open, his glasses perched crooked on his nose, his hands still clasped on the blanket, and his breathing slowly, gradually slowing down again.

And in the middle of it, in the exact center of everything that it was, something nestled, and became still, and stayed.

...

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