The bitter rind of dried Seville orange peel sat lodged between Maren’s lower left premolars, leaching a sharp, astringent oil across her tongue. It was a vile habit. Her dentist had told her twice it would strip her enamel to chalk, but chalk didn't shake, and chalk didn't have hands that fumbled with an eight-gauge patch cable while two grown men turned an electrical substation into scrap iron.
Above her, the gantry groaned.
Spider-Man caught a six-inch steel I-beam with both palms, the soles of his boots skidding across greased concrete until they hit the curb of the drainage pit. He didn’t drop his hips; he absorbed the kinetic shudder through his shoulders, the red-and-blue spandex pulling drumhead-tight over his ribs.
"Logan, listen to the cadence of my voice!" Peter’s breath came in ragged, compressed bursts, distorted slightly by the fabric over his mouth. "Does this sound like the voice of a guy who wants to spend his Tuesday peeling your sideburns off a transformer? Drop the blade. We put the pod in stasis, we run the diagnostic, we figure out whose bone marrow is cooking in there."
Logan didn't drop the blade. He didn't drop either set of three.
He lunged off the wall, boots leaving twin divots in the cinder block. He was short, squat, and moved with the heavy, unsparing momentum of a collapsed mine shaft. "Told ya twice, Parker. It ain't bone marrow. It’s a dead-man's valve. You cool that boy down, the nervous system panics and pops the canister. You’re holding an unpinned grenade because you like the paint job."
Wolverine slashed across Peter’s chest guard. The claws sang against the air—three high, clean notes.
Peter contorted backward, his spine bending at an angle that looked physiologically offensive, his toes barely kissing the grease-slicked floor as he whipped a line of webbing straight into Logan’s collarbone. He yanked. The physics should have flipped a two-hundred-pound man head over heels, but Logan weighed three times that with the metal coats on his skeleton; instead, the line simply closed the distance between them faster.
Logan slammed into Peter’s chest, taking them both over the railing of the low-voltage bay.
They fell hard into a nest of dead conduit. Dust erupted, smelling of pulverized concrete and twenty-year-old copper oxide.
Maren didn’t scream. Screaming wasted oxygen, and she needed every lungful to keep her fingers from seizing over the terminal keys. She bit down harder on the citrus rind, tasting the sharp, medicinal sting, and pulled the auxiliary lock on the primary gantry.
It was entirely outside her job description. Spider-Man had paid her four hundred dollars in crumpled twenties to run an unauthorized signal sweep on an ESU server node; he had not paid her to intervene in a territorial dispute between two masked vigilantes with high-tensile grudges. But if they smashed the containment pod sitting in the drainage trench, the aerosolized contents would ventilate directly through the floor grating and hit her lungs before she could clear the safety door.
Therefore, she dropped the three-ton magnetic hoist right between them.
The electro-magnet hit the concrete with a percussive *thwack* that rattled the enamel in Maren’s skull. A sheet of sparks washed across the pit.
Logan rolled out of the spray first, low and ugly, a streak of carbon scoring across his flannel shoulder. He glared up at Maren’s catwalk, his yellow cowl pulled back to reveal hair matted with gray grit and grease. His jaw worked, teeth clicking together.
"You touch that hoist lever again, girl," Logan rasped, his voice sounding like two dry flatstones grinding together, "and I’ll take the fingers off your left hand. Clear out. This ain't an academic exercise."
"Maren, stay behind the blast shield!" Peter called out. He was hanging upside down from the underside of the gantry, his fingers hooked into the structural rivets. His right shoulder hung an inch lower than his left; Logan had clipped the deltoid, and a thin, bright ribbon of crimson was soaking through the red web-pattern. "Don't listen to him. He’s cranky because he hasn't had his rabies booster."
"Shut your hole, web-head," Logan snarled. He circled the dropped magnet, his boots dragging slightly, tracking the containment unit nestled in the sump. The pod was four feet long, matte olive drab, sealed with heavy hydraulic clamps that were currently frosted over with liquid nitrogen exhaust. Inside the double-paned quartz viewport, a boy—no older than twelve, his skin the color of skim milk—floated in pale amber fluid. A braided central line ran directly into the base of his skull. "That kid was grown in an autoclave in Alberta. I know the smell of the juice he’s soaking in. It’s got a twenty-four-hour shelf life once the seal cracks. We burn the rig, or the whole zip code gets a lungful of synthetic hemotoxin."
"He's breathing, Logan!" Peter dropped, landing light and crouched on the top of the magnetic hoist, his palms flat to the rusted iron. The white lenses of his mask widened, then narrowed into sharp, defensive crescents. "His vitals are syncing with the monitor. Look at the telemetry—that’s human sinus rhythm. You don't get to execute the package just because you don't like the return address."
"It ain't an execution, it's a quarantine," Logan said. He stepped forward, claws clicking against each other—*snick, snick*—a nervous, predatory habit. "And you don't know the half of what came out of that clinic. You think you stumbled on this? You think your little radio scanner just happened to trip the right frequency?"
Peter’s fingers curled tight over the edge of the magnet. "I know enough."
"You don't know spit," Logan spat. "Ask yourself why the telemetry matched your frequency, Parker. Go on. Ask."
Peter didn't answer. That silence, heavy and deliberate, dropped between them like lead shot. He shifted his weight, shielding the pod behind his own slender, battered frame, but his shoulders remained locked. He knew something about the transmission origin—something he hadn't told Maren when he dragged her down into this rat’s nest, and something he wasn't offering Logan now.
Maren ignored them both and looked down at the green phosphorus trace on her diagnostic rig.
Her screen was cycling through the handshake protocol she had forced into the pod’s internal storage. Most of the memory banks were burnt slag, scrubbed by a thermite charge that had failed to detonate completely. But as the third partition unlocked, an identity string cleared the buffer.
It wasn't Department H. It wasn't Weapon Plus, or whatever off-brand butchers Logan had spent the last twenty minutes cursing under his breath.
The root certificate on the encryption header was stamped with an old blue four-spoke insignia, dated six years before the boy in the tank could have been born, under an authorization code labeled *RICHARDS-ALPHA-NINE*. Beneath it, running in an infinite recursive loop, was a sub-routine that had only one command line: *KEEP HIM ASLEEP UNTIL THE INHERITANCE CLEARS.*
Maren’s fingers froze on the plastic casing of the terminal. The citrus taste in her mouth turned suddenly flat and vile, like chewing on tinfoil.
"Spider-Man," she said, her voice small against the cavernous damp of the substation.
Neither of them looked at her. Logan took another dragging step forward, his posture settling into the terrible, rhythmic crouch of an animal that had stopped negotiating, and Peter coiled his legs under him, ready to take the hit.
The boy inside the glass didn't twitch, but the frost along the rim of the viewport had stopped spreading. It was beginning to liquefy, bead by bead, dripping silently into the rust below.