The thing about New York rooftops is that nobody looks up.

Gwen had learned this three months, two weeks, and approximately seventeen near-death experiences ago, and it remained the most useful piece of information her new life had given her. People looked down at their phones, looked sideways at each other with that particular blend of suspicion and exhaustion that marked native New Yorkers, looked straight ahead with the thousand-yard stare of commuters who had long since stopped seeing the city as anything other than an obstacle course between home and work. But up? Up was for tourists. Up was for dreamers. Up was for seventeen-year-old girls in white spandex who stuck to walls like particularly stubborn wallpaper and hadn't slept more than three hours consecutively in longer than they wanted to admit.

She was perched on the corner of a water tower, one leg dangling over nothing, her mask pushed up past her nose so she could breathe air that didn't taste like recycled fear and the particular mildew scent that had colonized the suit's fabric. The city spread below her like a circuit board, all lights and lines and the distant wail of sirens that her enhanced hearing picked apart into component frequencies: two police cruisers heading east, an ambulance stuck in traffic on Forty-Second, and somewhere far away, a car alarm that had been singing its one-note song for so long it had become background radiation. Her hands were shaking. They did that now, after. The adrenaline had to go somewhere, and since she couldn't exactly explain to her father why his daughter needed to run laps around the block at two in the morning, she just... sat with it. Let her body process the chemicals of almost-dying while her mind catalogued everything she'd done wrong.

Three muggings stopped. One attempted carjacking. A woman who'd been walking too fast in heels that were too high, and Gwen had caught her before the fall could break anything important, then vanished before the woman could do more than gasp. Small stuff. Tuesday-night stuff. The kind of heroism that wouldn't make the news but might make the difference between someone getting up tomorrow hopeful or afraid. She pressed her palm flat against the water tower's metal surface and felt the vibration of the city humming through her bones, a frequency she'd learned to read like sheet music—this was New York at rest, as close to peaceful as eight million people crammed onto a handful of islands would ever get.

The footsteps behind her shouldn't have been possible. The roof access door was rusted shut; she'd checked. The fire escape was on the other side, too far for anyone to have climbed without her hearing. And yet.

Her spider-sense wasn't screaming. That was the only reason she didn't move, didn't yank her mask down and disappear over the edge in a scatter of web-lines and plausible deniability. Whatever—whoever—had managed to get up here, her body didn't register them as a threat. Which was either very good or very, very bad, because the list of people who could sneak up on her was extremely short and mostly populated by individuals she'd rather avoid. Gwen turned her head just enough to catch motion in her peripheral vision, blonde hair falling across her face like a curtain she was too tired to push aside.

"If you're here to fight, I should warn you that I'm exhausted, cranky, and I haven't eaten anything except vending machine coffee since lunch," she said, her voice rough at the edges. "So either this is going to be really easy for you or really embarrassing for both of us."

Gwen's bedroom told the story of a girl who had stopped living in it.

The evidence was everywhere, if someone knew how to read it: the bed made with military precision because she hadn't actually slept in it for four days, catching brief naps on rooftops and in the space between her desk and the wall where she could brace her back against something solid; the drumsticks on her nightstand, gathering dust like artifacts in a museum exhibit titled "Things Gwen Stacy Used To Care About"; the physics textbook open to the same page it had been open to for two weeks, the homework inside it untouched, the grade slipping from a number she could defend to her father into territory that would require explanations she didn't have the energy to fabricate. Her laptop was open to a news article about the Lizard attack, the one that had happened three weeks and two days ago, the one that the papers called a "tragic incident" and Gwen called the night she learned that having superpowers didn't actually mean she could save anyone who mattered.

She was sitting on the floor with her back against her bed, knees pulled to her chest, still wearing the hoodie she'd thrown on over her suit because she'd come in through the window forty minutes ago and hadn't moved since. The white and teal fabric peeked out at her wrists, at her ankles—accusatory glimpses of the person she became when she wasn't busy being the hollowed-out shell of Captain Stacy's perfect daughter. There was a text notification on her phone. She knew who it was from without looking. She also knew it was the seventh message she hadn't answered today, and that the number of unanswered messages was becoming its own kind of communication, a silence loud enough to echo.

A year. They'd been together for a year—a year of stolen moments between classes and band practice, of someone actually seeing past the sarcasm and the perfectionism and the desperate need to be enough, of learning what it felt like to be wanted for all the sharp and difficult parts of herself instead of despite them. A year of building something that felt dangerously close to the future she'd stopped letting herself imagine. And now Peter was dead, and Gwen couldn't close her eyes without seeing him, couldn't look at the empty seat in chemistry class, couldn't exist in her own skin without the weight of knowing that everyone she loved was a target she was painting by proximity.

The knock on her window wasn't a surprise. She'd heard the footsteps on the fire escape, tracked the familiar heartbeat that her enhanced senses had memorized somewhere in the first month of dating—a rhythm she could pick out of a crowd, a frequency she'd learned to find like a radio station she kept tuned to even when she pretended she wasn't listening. Her hands curled tighter around her knees. She could pretend to be asleep. She could pretend to not be home. She could open the window and say all the cruel things she'd been rehearsing, the ones designed to make staying seem worse than leaving, the ones that tasted like ash in her mouth every time she tried to practice them.

Instead, she just sat there, frozen between the person she wanted to be and the person grief was turning her into, and watched the curtain move in the draft from the window that never quite sealed properly.

"It's unlocked," she said finally, and her voice came out like something that had been left in the rain too long—rusted, waterlogged, barely functional. "It's always unlocked. That's probably a metaphor for something, but I'm too tired to figure out what."

She didn't look up when the window opened. Looking up meant seeing concern she didn't deserve, meant confronting the fact that she'd been pulling away for weeks with all the subtlety of a building collapse, meant acknowledging that the distance she was trying to build was hurting someone who had never done anything except love her through every version of herself she'd been brave enough to show. The hoodie sleeve slipped, revealing more of the suit beneath, and she tugged it back down with fingers that wouldn't stop trembling.

"You should stop coming here," Gwen said to her knees. "I'm not—I can't be what you need right now. Maybe not ever. And if you keep showing up, I'm going to keep letting you in, and then something's going to happen to you because of me, and I can't—" Her voice cracked, splintered, reformed itself into something sharp enough to cut. "I already have one ghost following me around. I can't make another one."

The alley smelled like garbage and copper and the particular ozone-burn of electrical discharge, and Gwen was intimately familiar with all three because she was lying face-down in them.

This was not, she reflected with the detached clarity that came from massive blood loss, how she had planned to spend her Thursday night. Thursday nights were supposed to be for band practice, for pretending she was a normal teenager with normal problems, for coming home and eating reheated leftovers while her dad complained about departmental politics. Thursday nights were not supposed to involve a man with mechanical tentacles and a grudge, or the discovery that her healing factor had limits, or the slow creeping realization that she couldn't actually feel her left leg anymore and that was probably something she should be more concerned about than she currently was. The concrete was cold against her cheek. That seemed important. Cold meant she was still alive enough to register temperature, which was more than she'd been able to say ten minutes ago when everything had been hot and bright and screaming.

Her suit was torn in at least six places she could count without moving, and moving wasn't really an option right now—she'd tried, once, and the world had done a sickening lurch that suggested her inner ear and her sense of balance had filed for divorce and were no longer on speaking terms. Blood had pooled beneath her in a shape she couldn't see but could feel, tacky and warm where it met the cold concrete, and her mask was half-off, shoved up past her nose by the impact that had introduced her face to a dumpster with more force than was strictly polite. She was breathing. That was something. Each inhale rattled in her chest like dice in a cup, and she had enough medical knowledge from late-night Wikipedia spirals to know that was bad, but not enough to know exactly how bad, and maybe that was a mercy.

The footsteps registered before the presence did—her spider-sense was flickering in and out like a dying fluorescent bulb, giving her fragments instead of warnings, impressions instead of information. Someone was coming. Someone was close. Her fingers twitched toward the web-shooter on her right wrist, the one that wasn't pinned beneath her body, but the motion sent lightning up her arm and she heard herself make a sound that she would later deny with every fiber of her being. It was not a whimper. Ghost-Spider did not whimper. Ghost-Spider was fine. Ghost-Spider was just taking a brief horizontal break in an alley that smelled like death and Thai food, and everything was completely under control.

The shadow that fell across her was familiar. The heartbeat that her fading senses struggled to identify was one she knew better than her own, a rhythm she had memorized in quiet moments, in the spaces between crisis and collapse where she let herself pretend she could have something soft. Her eye—the one that wasn't swelling shut—focused on shoes. Familiar shoes. Shoes that should not be here, should not be anywhere near here, should be safe and far away from the wreckage she made of everything she touched.

"Oh," Gwen said, and the word came out wet, came out wrong, came out with a bubble of something she really hoped wasn't what she thought it was. "That's... that's not good. You shouldn't..." She tried to push herself up. She failed. The world tilted again, and this time it brought darkness at the edges, a creeping void that whispered sweet promises about how easy it would be to just stop fighting for a minute. "You shouldn't be here. 'S dangerous. There was a... guy with... arms. Extra arms. Very rude about it."

Her laugh turned into a cough, and the cough turned into something worse, and by the time her body stopped convulsing she had lost track of whether she was still talking or just thinking about talking. The cold was spreading. That was probably also bad. She blinked up at the figure above her, and for just a moment, her vision cleared enough to see a face instead of a blur—a face that shouldn't have to see her like this, broken and bleeding and so far from the invincible hero she pretended to be.

"I'm fine," she whispered, which was so obviously a lie that she would have laughed again if she'd had the breath. "Just... give me a minute. I heal. I heal fast. I just need..." Her eyes were closing without her permission, her body making executive decisions that her mind hadn't approved. Her hand found fabric—a sleeve, a pant leg, something to hold onto while the darkness pulled at her. "Don't... don't call my dad. He can't know. Promise me. He can't..."

The rest of the sentence dissolved into the black, leaving only the sound of her breathing—wet and wrong and stubborn—and the distant wail of sirens that might or might not be coming for her.