Spotted
May enforced the curfew on Wednesdays.
She'd started doing it after Peter came home at two AM three weeks in a row with excuses that got thinner each time. The skateboarding injury. The late bus. The study group that ran long. She hadn't believed any of them and she'd said so with the specific calm that meant she was done negotiating. Wednesdays and Thursdays, Peter was home by nine. In his room. Door open a crack so she could hear him moving around.
He was at his desk with a chem textbook open and the new suit folded under his bed and the window locked because May checked. The house was quiet. Ben's crossword pen scratching downstairs. The TV on low in the living room, whatever channel Ben left it on when he fell asleep in his chair.
Through the wall, MJ's breathing. Steady, even. She'd been in the guest room for three nights now. May hadn't asked how long she was staying and MJ hadn't offered a timeline. She came down for breakfast and helped with dishes and called May "Mrs. Parker" and went to school and came back and did homework in the guest room with the door closed and the window cracked an inch.
The house was fuller with her in it. A third toothbrush in the bathroom. A second pair of shoes by the front door. May making three servings instead of two and a half. Peter kept catching traces of her through the day. The lavender hand soap smell in the bathroom after she showered. Her handwriting on the grocery list (she'd added oranges without asking). A hair tie on the counter that wasn't May's.
Peter could hear her phone buzzing. A text, then silence. Then another text. She was talking to someone. He didn't listen harder. The wall wasn't that thick and he didn't want to know whose name was on her screen.
His phone lit up on the desk. Cindy.
practice ran late. coach is making us do drills until our legs fall off. tuesday game against dalton. you coming?
Wouldn't miss it.
bring snacks. the concession stand sucks.
What kind?
the kind that exists. i'm not picky when i'm starving.
He put the phone down. Picked up his pencil. Looked at the chem textbook. The chapter was on molecular bonding and he'd read it twice already in another life and the information was still there, lodged in a brain that had taken gen-chem at community college and gotten a B plus.
He did the problem set. It took twenty minutes. It should have taken an hour.
Through the wall, MJ's light clicked off. Nine forty. She went to sleep earlier than he'd expected. At home, with the voice through the wall, she probably didn't sleep at all.
His phone lit up again. Not Cindy.
Felicia. One message.
We need to talk. Tomorrow.
He looked at it. His spider-sense didn't fire. The phone sat on his desk with six words on the screen and his stomach dropped anyway because Felicia didn't text "we need to talk." Felicia texted "fire escape, midnight" or "bring the lockpicks" or "your suit has a tear in the left knee, fix it." She didn't announce conversations. She just had them.
He typed: About what?
The read receipt appeared. She didn't reply.
He put the phone face-down on the desk. Stared at the chem textbook.
He didn't sleep great.
She was on the fire escape at ten the next night. Thursday. May's other curfew night, but Peter had learned to work around it. Window open, climb out, close it behind him. The trick was the sill catch. He'd rigged it so the window looked closed from inside but could be pushed open from outside.
Felicia was sitting with her back against the railing and her legs stretched out along the metal grating. Civilian clothes again. Jacket, boots, her hair down. She had a takeout coffee cup balanced on her knee.
"Hey," he said.
She took a sip. Looked at him over the cup.
"Last night," she said. "I went out."
"I know. May had me locked down."
"I noticed." She set the cup on the grating. "I ran the Chelsea route. Your route. I've been learning the patterns. Which blocks are quiet, which ones aren't, where the sight lines are. I passed through Hell's Kitchen on the way."
She paused. Her jaw worked once.
"Someone else works those rooftops. West of Ninth, between 47th and 55th. Red suit. Dark red, almost black. No webs, no flight. Just acrobatics and spatial awareness. Fast. Precise." She looked at Peter. "Gone before I could get a better look. He moves like he knows exactly where everything is without looking at it."
Red suit. Hell's Kitchen. Peter knew who that probably was. The MCU had cast him with a blindfold, but this wasn't the MCU and the details would be different.
"Territorial?" he asked.
"Definitely. He saw me. Let me see him seeing me. Then disappeared. Message received."
She picked up the coffee cup. Took another sip.
"After Hell's Kitchen," she said. "I came back through Chelsea. West 20th. And I saw a girl."
His stomach tightened.
"Red and white suit. Organic webs. Swinging through Chelsea at eleven thirty on a Wednesday night." Felicia's voice was flat and careful. "She stopped a purse-snatcher on 22nd. Clean. Efficient. Webbed his hands to a mailbox and kept moving."
Peter said nothing.
"I followed her. Twenty minutes. She didn't know I was there." Felicia's mouth pulled. "I watched her stop two more times. A guy harassing a woman on 24th. Webbed his shoes to the sidewalk. Then a car alarm on 19th that turned out to be a kid trying to break in. She webbed the kid's hands together, called the cops from a payphone, and left before they showed up. Clean every time."
Peter said nothing.
"She moves like you but lighter. Faster. The webs are faster."
"Felicia."
"She stopped on a rooftop near the High Line and pulled her mask up to drink water. Korean-American. Young. Beautiful." Felicia looked at him. "The organic webs. The marks on your neck. 'Her name is Cindy.' That's her."
"Yeah," he said. "That's Cindy."
"She has a costume."
"She made it. A few weeks ago. From her own webbing."
"A few weeks." Felicia's voice was even. "She's been out on the streets for a few weeks and you didn't mention it."
"I was going to-"
"When?"
He didn't have an answer. He'd been putting off this conversation because he knew how it would go. Felicia had asked to meet Cindy. He'd stalled. And while he stalled, Cindy started patrolling the same neighborhood Felicia considered her territory.
"You could have told me," Felicia said. "I had to find out by seeing her swing past my building."
"I know."
"Your building? No. MY building. She swung past the water tower on 21st. I sit on that water tower."
Felicia set the coffee cup down. Stood up. She was taller than him when she stood on the fire escape grating because the grating added an inch and she wore boots with heels. She looked down at him.
"She's good," Felicia said. "The purse-snatcher was handled. Clean takedown. She knows what she's doing."
Peter looked up at her. Her mouth was a flat line but her eyes were calculating.
"She's out there every night?"
"Most nights. Not as late as me."
"Does she know about me?"
"About you, specifically?"
"Does she know that Spider-Man's girlfriend is a thief who runs the Chelsea rooftops."
Girlfriend. Neither of them had used that word before. Felicia had just dropped it without flinching.
"She knows you exist," he said. "She doesn't know your name. Or your face."
"But she knows there's someone."
"Yeah."
Felicia looked at the city. Her mouth was pressed thin and her hands were relaxed.
"I want to meet her," she said. The second time she'd said it.
"I know."
"Not a request this time."
"Let me talk to Cindy first," he said. "Give me a day."
"One day."
"One day."
She held his eyes for a second. Then she nodded. Picked up the coffee cup. Finished it. Crushed the cup and dropped it in the takeout bag she'd brought it in. Even on a fire escape, Felicia didn't litter.
"The guy in Hell's Kitchen," Peter said. "The red suit."
"What about him?"
"Stay out of Hell's Kitchen for now. If he's territorial, he's territorial for a reason."
"I wasn't planning to go back." She swung one leg over the railing. "That neighborhood has nothing worth stealing."
She dropped. He heard the grappling hook catch. Then nothing.
Peter sat on the fire escape. The metal grating was cold through his jeans. Through the wall behind him, the guest room was dark. MJ was asleep.
He pulled out his phone. Thought about texting Cindy. Hey, so, the other girl I'm seeing found out you're Silk and she wants to meet you and she's a cat burglar and she bites.
He put the phone away.
Tomorrow. In person. Because this conversation was going to need his face and his voice and probably his ability to duck.
The fire escape was cold. He went inside. Closed the window. Heard May's breathing from down the hall. Ben's snoring from the bedroom. MJ's silence from the guest room.
He got in bed. Felicia had called herself his girlfriend. Cindy didn't know any of it yet.
He closed his eyes. Tomorrow.