Chapter 108: The Warehouse Trap
The damp, freezing wind coming off the Hudson River whipped across the tar-paper rooftop.
Ethan crouched near the concrete ledge, looking down at the shipping warehouse three stories below. From the outside, it looked like a hundred other abandoned properties in Hell's Kitchen. Rusted roll-down shutters covered the loading bays. Dead security cameras hung from loose wires near the front, while newer black domes sat tucked under the roofline where cops wouldn't notice.
It had Fisk written all over it—cheap front, expensive security, and shooters placed where cops would never look.
Two bored guards stood near the front loading dock, smoking cigarettes. A pair of unmarked black vans sat idling in the alleyway. Beneath the smell of exhaust and garbage, Ethan could feel it. A low, wrong vibration humming right through the concrete of the building.
Gwen was perched on the ledge to his left. She was fully suited up in sleek white, black, and pink, her mask pulled down over her face. She had been smug since they left the Sanctum, still riding the territorial high from the morning.
Natalie knelt on his right. She was dressed in pitch-black tactical gear, her red hair tied back tightly. She had a pair of low-light binoculars pressed to her eyes, silently tracking the patrol routes of the rooftop snipers.
"You follow my lead," Ethan told Gwen, keeping his voice low over the wind. "This entire place was built around your frequency."
"I know," Gwen answered smoothly. She didn't sound anxious. She sounded ready to tear the roof off.
"Knowing and listening are different skills," Natalie said flatly, not lowering her binoculars.
Gwen turned her masked head, glaring daggers at Natalie.
Inside the warehouse, Phineas Mason looked like he had been awake for three days and angry for all of them. His hair was greasy, his eyes were bloodshot, and his hands kept moving over the Vulture core even when the rest of his body looked ready to collapse.
His workspace was a chaotic mess of cannibalized shipping containers and heavy cables. In the center of the room, the jagged green core was mounted inside a crude, heavy steel stabilizer frame. Thick jumper cables ran from the alien metal directly into a massive, humming Oscorp industrial power cell. Hammer Industries diagnostic monitors were scattered across the folding tables, flashing with error codes.
Six Fisk mercenaries watched the doors instead of the machine, rifles loose in their hands, eyes moving like paid paranoia.
A sharp-dressed fixer from Justin Hammer's payroll stood next to Mason, looking at the glowing green core with clear frustration.
"Hammer paid two million dollars for a weapon, Mason," the fixer snapped. "Right now all I see is a glowing engine and your caffeine problem."
Mason let out a raspy sigh. He didn't even look at the man.
"You idiots keep calling it a gun," Mason muttered, tapping a few keys on his greasy laptop. "It's not a gun. Look at the energy mapping. Look at the sensory nodes. It's a nose. A nose pointed at one very specific spider."
A massive man in a tailored black suit—Fisk's representative—stepped forward from the shadows.
"Can it locate her?" the Fisk rep asked, his voice a deep rumble.
Mason picked up a wrench and tightened a bolt on the stabilizer frame. "Not yet. The core is damaged. The tracking loop is broken. But..."
He paused, looking at the glowing green metal. A sliver of genuine, terrified awe crept into his tired voice.
"If I boost the signal," Mason said quietly, "maybe the thing it was originally talking to answers back."
Up on the roof, Natalie moved first.
She didn't use portals or glowing shields. She used pure, lethal skill. She slipped over the edge of the building and dropped onto a narrow fire escape balcony in complete silence.
She bypassed a heavy steel service door in under ten seconds, cutting the alarm wire and looping the camera feed with a slim black bypass drive. A guard rounded the corner of the catwalk. Natalie didn't hesitate. She stepped out of the shadows, clamped a hand over his mouth, and pressed a shock disc directly into his vest.
He dropped instantly. She caught his body, lowered him silently to the grated floor, and unclipped his radio.
High above, clinging to the glass of the massive skylight, Gwen watched Natalie work.
Gwen's jaw tightened beneath her mask. The maid outfit had been easy to hate. Cheap, obvious, insulting.
This was worse.
Natalie moved through the warehouse like she belonged there—quiet, useful, dangerous. Not decoration. Not a joke. Someone Ethan could actually use in the field.
Ethan followed last. No door, no window, no noise. One breath he was on the roof; the next he was standing on a steel beam above Mason's lab.
He looked down at the Vulture core. Golden light stirred in his eyes as he read the ugly rhythm around it.
Mason had rebuilt the signal wrong. Ethan could see it immediately. The damaged core was no longer a tracker. Not really.
It was a cracked bell.
Feed it enough power, and it would not quietly point toward Gwen. It would ring. Loud. Far. Into places that should never hear her name.
Ethan tapped his earpiece. "Natalie. Do not let him hit full power."
"Working on it," Natalie's calm voice crackled back over the comms. She was already moving through the lower shipping containers, marking the heavy shooters.
"What happens if he does?" Gwen asked over the channel. She was still clinging to the skylight glass.
"Bad things hear you," Ethan said bluntly.
Gwen gripped the glass a little tighter, the words hitting her hard. But she forced the anxiety down, burying it under a layer of attitude.
Down on the floor, Natalie slipped behind a stack of wooden crates, closing in on the main lab.
Natalie had marked every obvious shooter. This one was not obvious.
He was crouched behind a heat-baffled tarp on the far catwalk, his rifle angled through a gap between two hanging chains. Even the low-light cameras would have struggled to catch him. He slowly racked the bolt of his suppressed rifle, centering the crosshairs right on the back of Natalie's head.
Ethan's attention was on the Vulture core, because the damn thing was already starting to hum.
Gwen's spider-sense caught the killing intent first.
She didn't hesitate. She didn't wait for the signal.
"Gwen—" Ethan started.
Too late.
She was already through the glass.
She dropped through the falling shards, firing a webline at a steel crossbeam. She swung perfectly through the air, rearing her legs back to launch a brutal kick right into the sniper's chest.
She never made it.
The moment she swung past the hanging industrial lights, she crossed Tinkerer's invisible tripwire.
No net snapped out. No gun fired.
The trap screamed straight into her spider-sense.
Gwen's body locked in mid-swing. For one horrible second, every direction became danger. Up, down, left, right—all of it hit her at once, sharp and freezing, like someone had jammed a live wire into the base of her skull.
Her grip on the webline failed completely.
She plummeted twenty feet, crashing hard through a wooden table and slamming onto the concrete warehouse floor in a shower of splinters.
For the first time since putting on the suit that morning, Gwen did not feel like Ethan's woman, or Spider-Woman, or anyone's partner.
She felt like prey.
Every single monitor on Tinkerer's folding tables violently flashed to life. The screens bled neon green.
TARGET CONFIRMED.
SPIDER-FREQUENCY LOCKED.
TOTEM RESPONSE ACTIVE.
Mason dropped his wrench. He stared at the screens, completely stunned.
"It worked," Mason breathed.
The sound of racking gun bolts echoed through the warehouse. The Fisk mercenaries immediately raised their rifles, advancing on the wreckage of the wooden table.
Gwen lay in the splintered wood, fighting to move. Her fingers twitched. Her legs refused to answer. Her spider-sense screamed from every direction at once, turning the whole warehouse into one giant warning.
Behind the crates, Natalie turned sharply, drawing two suppressed pistols in a blur of motion.
Natalie's eyes flicked from Gwen to the sniper to the core. For half a second, the mission split into three bad choices.
Then she chose Gwen.
Up in the rafters, Ethan's face went still. The glow in his eyes did not get brighter. It got colder.
A heavy mercenary stepped forward, looming over Gwen. He unclipped a thick, blinking restraint collar from his tactical vest.
"Careful," the merc ordered the men around him, stepping closer to the twitching Spider-Woman. "Fisk wants her alive."
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