"That technology was stolen by Oscorp years ago when they swallowed up a small company by force," Felicia said. "Miniature climbing claws. Custom silent tactical boots. My father, Walter Hardy, designed them. Oscorp stole his life's work and drove him into a corner."
There was real killing intent in her eyes, and Clark caught it.
"I'm not here to steal anything," she said. "I'm just a daughter trying to take back what belonged to her father."
The moment she said that, the cold front Clark had only just managed to build up collapsed instantly.
Because he knew she meant it.
With his super-hearing, he could hear her heartbeat, and while she was saying those words, it stayed steady.
She was not lying.
She really had only come to take back her father's things. It was not some dangerous weapon meant to harm innocent people, and Clark had no intention of stopping her.
If anything, if she needed help, he might even help her.
He had no love whatsoever for a corporate predator like Oscorp, especially not one that had done more than its fair share of dirty work in the shadows.
"You'd better be quick, upperclassman." Clark released the pressure he had been keeping on the situation.
"One minute. I'm giving you one minute, and then I'm gone. If you get caught after that, you'll have to explain everything to Norman Osborn yourself."
Felicia shot him a surprised look.
She had not expected this terrifyingly powerful boy to let her go through with it.
Had he already fallen for her?
Of course, that was wrong.
It was just one of life's classic delusions.
"Thank you, sunshine boy."
Felicia moved fast.
She pulled out a specialized cutting tool and carved a perfect circle in the blast glass. Then she reached in and lifted out the two silver briefcases inside.
Once she had them, she reattached her line.
And just as she was about to leave, Felicia suddenly leaned in midair and planted a quick, light kiss on Clark's cheek.
"You've got more secrets than I thought, Clark Parker." Her catlike eyes glittered in the dark with sly amusement. "Don't think you can keep hiding in the crowd forever. I'm going to uncover every secret you're hiding."
Then the line retracted, and Felicia vanished into the ventilation shaft almost instantly.
Why didn't Clark answer?
Why didn't he do anything at all?
Because his brain had gone completely past the point of overheating.
Across both his lives, this was the first time anyone besides his mother had ever kissed him first.
The moment Felicia leaned in, time stopped in Clark's eyes.
He could see every detail of her flawless skin, every fraction of the distance as her lips moved closer, and his heart started pounding like crazy.
And after a long internal argument between the little angel and the little devil in his head, he ultimately...
Did nothing.
When it came to things like this, he could never be as mature as he acted everywhere else.
In this area, he had absolutely no experience.
Across two lifetimes, this had always been how he was with girls: either he did nothing, or he ran away and let things develop on their own.
Clark touched the cheek she had kissed and let out a helpless sigh.
"Figures. The second she kissed me, I should've known she was trouble."
In the end, Clark calmly left the area and headed back toward Peter and the others.
"Clark! Get over here!" Peter shouted excitedly from a distance, waving some strange piece of material around. "I found corrosion-resistant components we can use for the web-shooters!"
"Coming." Clark looked at his clueless little brother and smiled.
Still, today had been... pretty great.
At the same time, far from Manhattan and across the river in Brooklyn, the scene changed entirely.
Compared to the high-tech polish of the Oscorp warehouse, this place looked like another world, even though it was still New York.
Dim streetlights.
Oil-stained pavement.
The smell of cheap motor oil mixed with stale beer.
Inside an underground chop shop called Sal's Auto Repair, Eddie Brock was lying beneath a nearly dead Ford truck, wearing a grease-stained tank top with a filthy towel slung around his neck, wrenching at a stripped bolt.
"Damn it, you old bastard, the thread on this thing's completely shot. How am I supposed to turn this?" Eddie snapped, already in a foul mood. Then his wrench slipped and smashed into his hand, drawing blood immediately.
He gritted his teeth and wiped the blood onto the dirty towel, feeling completely miserable.
Deep down, Eddie had always wanted to become somebody important. Somebody strong enough to protect the people around him, someone other people feared.
But his explosive temper and his unstable home life had made high school a stop-and-start mess.
His best friend Peter was a once-in-a-generation genius.
Clark, meanwhile, was a mountain Eddie could never climb: steady, strong, reliable, almost absurdly perfect.
To Eddie, Clark might as well have been the ideal man.
And standing next to those two always left him with a crushing sense of inadequacy.
All he really had was his ability to throw punches in a street fight and grind his hands raw in this crooked auto shop just to hang onto some shred of pride.
It wasn't that the neighborhood hadn't tried to help him.
It was that his pride wouldn't let him accept it.
He didn't want to be useless.
He had his own dignity.
He wanted to build something with his own hands.
"Hey! Brock! Quit dragging your feet and get the hell out here!"
The garage owner, a fat man with a thick gut and a face like carved meat named Sal, stood in the doorway of the shop floor yelling at Eddie from outside.
"Pull the roller door down! We're closing early today! Get to the storage room in the back, and no matter what you hear, you stay there and keep your mouth shut! Got it?"
Eddie slid out from under the truck, tossed the wrench into the toolbox, and looked at Sal with the kind of expression that suggested murder was not entirely off the table.
He knew Sal too well.
On the surface, he was just a garage owner.
Behind the scenes, he was one of Kingpin's local operators, handling fake plates for gang cars and modifying stolen vehicles for smuggling runs.
Whenever Sal acted like this, it meant someone important from higher up was coming.
"Got it," Eddie said, wiping his hands and sounding obedient enough as he headed toward the storage room.
But he did not actually shut the door.
Instead, he left the tiniest crack open and crouched behind a pile of old tires.
As a die-hard admirer of Ben Parker, the big-deal reporter, and as someone who had practically grown up around the Parker household, Eddie understood those values better than most.
He had a near-fanatical attraction to investigative reporting.
He still remembered the Daily Bugle front-page exposé from a few days ago, and to him, this felt like the kind of opportunity that could change his whole life.
If he could photograph Sal doing business with gangsters over high-tech weapons and hand that evidence to Uncle Ben, then not only would he be helping bring down these bastards, he might even use it as his ticket into the Daily Bugle as an investigative reporter.