Edge of Queens. An abandoned chemical plant.
Rusted iron frames stabbed up out of the concrete like the ribs of something dead. The air smelled like sulfur and old engine oil, and somewhere underneath that, the sour rot of dead rats in a storm drain a hundred meters away.
Peter could smell all of it. Every layer. Separately.
He stood in front of a crumbling red brick wall, staring at his hands.
Same hands. Same pale palms, same fingerprints, same hands that couldn't throw a shot put past the ten foot line in gym class.
Except this morning those hands had crushed a brass door handle like a paper cup.
"Electrostatic adhesion," he muttered. "Or metal fatigue. Could be metal fatigue. Old handle, weak alloy, temperature cycling over years causing micro fractures in the."
He pressed his right hand flat against the brick.
The words stopped.
Something happened at his fingertips. Not a feeling he had a name for. It was like his skin dissolved at the contact point and reformed into something else. Thousands of microscopic hooks, too small to see, sinking into every crack and pore in the stone surface.
Locked. Solid. Like his hand had become part of the wall.
Peter swallowed. His Adam's apple jumped.
He lifted his left foot and placed it flat against the vertical surface.
It held.
He lifted his right foot off the ground.
He was standing on the wall. Sideways. Gravity pulling at his back, trying to peel him off, and his body just said no.
His heart was hammering. Blood roaring in his ears.
He started climbing.
Not slow. Not careful. Once his body understood what it could do, it wanted to go fast. His hands and feet found holds that weren't holds, stuck to surfaces that shouldn't hold anything, and he went up the wall like a lizard on a hot rock.
Five meters. Ten. Thirty.
The wind sharpened into a whistle. The abandoned cars below shrank to the size of thumbtails.
No rope. No net. No plan for what happened if his hands stopped sticking.
He flipped onto the rooftop and lay on his back, gasping, staring at the sky.
"Okay." Breathing hard. "Okay. So I can. I can do that."
He sat up. Looked out over the industrial park. From up here he could hear a fly cleaning its legs on a dumpster five hundred meters away. Could feel the vibration of a car engine three blocks over through the concrete under his feet.
The information wasn't overwhelming anymore. It was organized. Layered. His brain was sorting it automatically, building a map of everything around him without him trying.
"Spider-Sense." He said it out loud. Tested how it felt in his mouth. "Is that what this is?"
He clenched his fists. His knuckles popped. Every muscle in his body felt loaded. Coiled. Ready.
His eyes found the cooling tower. Fifty meters away. Thirty meters up.
His gut said he could make that jump. Not a guess. A certainty. His muscles already knew the answer before his brain finished the question.
He dropped into a crouch. His thigh muscles coiled tight.
"Here I go."
He jumped.
BOOM.
The cement under his feet cracked open in a web of fractures. His body shot forward like something fired from a cannon, tearing through the air in a long, rising arc. The ground fell away. The wind roared. The sky was right there.
He was flying.
For about two seconds, Peter Parker felt like the most powerful thing in the world.
Then physics remembered he existed.
He'd jumped too hard. Gone too high. The arc peaked and his body started coming back down, and the speed was building, and the landing spot wasn't the cooling tower platform.
It was the forest of rusted rebar sticking up from the rubble below.
"Oh no. Oh no no no no."
Weightlessness turned his stomach inside out. He flailed his arms, grabbing at air, and something twitched on the inside of his wrist. A pressure. A swelling. Like something was trying to push through his skin from the inside.
He curled his middle and ring fingers by instinct. Palm out.
THWIP.
A line of white shot from his wrist and stuck to the edge of the cooling tower. It went taut instantly. The jolt nearly ripped his arm out of the socket, but it stopped his fall. He swung, pendulum style, feet dangling thirty feet above the rebar.
"Ha!" He was hanging by one arm, spinning slowly, grinning like an idiot. "Organic web. Okay. That's not scientifically possible but that's. That's pretty great actually."
He looked at the strand. Thicker than fishing line. Stronger than steel cable by the feel of it. Coming out of his wrist.
If I can swing on this, I can swing on anything.
The thought took hold and wouldn't let go.
"Okay. Okay. One more. Just one more."
He let go of the web. His body swung upward. He aimed his wrist at the next water tower.
THWIP.
The web stuck. He swung. The arc was wider this time, faster, the wind screaming past his ears.
But he'd forgotten about angular momentum. And he'd fired the web half a second too late. The swing turned into a spin, the centrifugal force whipped him sideways, and instead of a clean arc he was tumbling through the air toward a pile of jagged scrap metal with zero control.
"Bad. Bad bad bad bad bad."
The ground was coming up fast. He could see the texture of the rust on the rebar. Could count the flakes.
I'm going to die. I just got superpowers and I'm going to die because I don't understand pendulum dynamics.
I was on the roof of the next building over. I'd been watching Peter test things out for the last twenty minutes. The climbing was fine. The rooftop stuff was fine. Even the first jump was fine.
Then he tried to swing.
[Trajectory analysis: Impact in 2.1 seconds. Surface: Exposed rebar. Outcome: Fatal.]
I slammed the dial.
Green flash. My body exploded outward. Three feet of height in a second, two extra arms punching out of my sides, skin hardening to red plate. The roof cracked under my new weight.
No time to admire the transformation. I jumped.
The air compressed around my body as I crossed the gap. Three tons of Tetramand muscle moving at sixty miles an hour, aimed at the point where Peter's trajectory intersected with the rebar.
I hit the intercept point a half second before he did.
Peter saw the rebar. Saw his own reflection in a shard of broken metal. Closed his eyes.
The impact came. But it wasn't sharp. It wasn't cold. It was like hitting a moving wall. A wall that was warm.
Two arms caught his torso. Two more braced his legs. The landing shook the ground hard enough to crack the concrete, sent a shockwave through the scrap yard that blew loose metal outward in a ring, and kicked up a cloud of dust that billowed ten feet high.
Peter opened his eyes.
Red skin. Hard as rock. Muscles bulging in shapes that didn't exist in any anatomy textbook. Two arms cradling him like a kid who'd fallen off a swing, and two more supporting his legs.
His gaze traveled up.
Four eyes. All of them looking at him. A face that was broad and heavy and alien, like something carved out of a cliff.
Three meters tall. Red. Four arms.
The thing was holding him by the back of his hoodie with one hand, like a mother cat carrying a kitten.
Peter's brain emptied out.
Every bit of confidence he'd built in the last hour evaporated. This thing made his wall climbing and his web swinging and his super strength look like a kid doing card tricks.
"Th." His teeth were chattering. "Thank you?"
I looked down at him.
All four eyes rotating to lock on Peter dangling from my fist.
But he had no idea what he was doing up there. Zero. If I hadn't been here, Dad would be identifying a spider kebab at the morgue tomorrow.
"Full marks for takeoff." My voice came out deep and heavy, rattling the metal around us. "Zero for landing."
I tossed him. Gentle. Just enough to drop him on his feet on a flat patch of concrete.
Peter stumbled, caught his balance, and stared up at me.
"Listen up, spider boy." I crossed all four arms. My shadow covered him completely. "America doesn't need more corpses. Especially not corpses that forgot high school physics."
I pointed at the rebar he'd almost landed on.
"You don't swing again until you understand inertia. Angular momentum. Pendulum dynamics. The web doesn't do the work for you. You have to calculate the release point, the attach point, and the arc. Every time. Or you end up as a stain on the ground."
Peter's mouth was open. His eyes were doing that thing where they kept getting wider and wider, like his face was trying to make room for how much information his brain was trying to process.
Then the fear broke, and what came through was pure, unfiltered Peter Parker.
"You have four arms."
"Yes."
"You have four arms. That's. Are you born like this? Or is it radiation? What's your muscle density? Your bone structure has to be completely different to support that mass distribution. Can you withstand an anti tank round? What's your caloric intake? How do the secondary shoulders attach to your spine?"
"I'm Tetramand." I cut him off before he could ask me my blood type. "Not a radiation product."
"Tetra. Tetramand. Is that a species? Are you from another planet? Are there more of you? Can you."
"Enough."
Peter shut his mouth. Opened it again. Shut it.
I turned around. Started walking.
"Change the hoodie," I said over my shoulder. "You look like you just crawled out of bed."
I bent my legs. The ground cracked under the force. And I launched, clearing the factory roof in a single jump, gone before Peter could get another question out.
Peter stood alone in the scrap yard.
Dust settling around him. The dent in the concrete where the red giant had landed still warm to the touch.
"Tetramand," he said to himself.
His heart was still going. But it wasn't fear anymore. It was something else. Something that made his hands shake and his face hurt from grinning.
He wasn't the only one.
Whatever had happened to him, whatever that spider had done, he wasn't the only freak walking around New York. And the other freak had just caught him out of the air with four arms and told him to study physics.
He looked at his wrists. At the spot where the web had come from.
"He's right."
Peter looked at the rebar. At the cooling tower. At the sky.
"I'm too weak. And I need to learn how this works. All of it."
He paused. Looked down at his hoodie.
"And I need a suit. Something. Better than this."
Several kilometers away. Osborn Tower. Top floor.
The bio lab was dark except for the holographic screen, which painted everything in a sick green glow.
Norman Osborn stood in front of it in his lab coat, gripping a glass of whiskey so hard his knuckles had gone white. His eyes were bloodshot and locked on the waveform spiking across the display.
A biological tracking signature. Captured from the Queens industrial district. The peak readings were off the chart.
"Have you located it?"
His voice was hoarse. The kind of hoarse that came from not sleeping and not caring.
The assistant at the terminal was typing fast, sweat running down the side of his face. "The signal source is in the abandoned industrial park, sir. The bio frequency is a direct match for Specimen Fifteen."
"Fifteen."
Norman tilted his head back and poured the whiskey down his throat. The green light from the screen carved his face into sharp angles, and the smile that spread across it had nothing warm in it. Nothing human.
Specimen fifteen. The cross species gene fusion project he'd spent half his life building. The thing that was supposed to cure the disease eating his family from the inside out.
It had found a host. And the host was thriving.
"Find him." Norman's voice dropped. Quiet now. Almost gentle. "That boy is the breakthrough we've been waiting for."
CRACK.
The crystal glass collapsed in his grip. Shards and whiskey and blood ran down his fingers, dripping onto the white lab coat.
Norman didn't look down. His eyes stayed on the screen.
In his mind, the blood and whiskey on his hand looked like something else entirely.
Like a cure.