The Weight of the Mask
Rain needles the city at two in the morning, turning every streetlight into a smear of amber and every rooftop into a hazard of black ice disguised as water. Peter Parker feels each drop like a tiny verdict as he swings between buildings, web line singing out from his wrist, body arcing through the gap between two towers in Hell's Kitchen. He used to love this part. The freefall, the snap of silk-thin webbing catching him at the last possible second, the way gravity became something he negotiated with rather than obeyed. Now he just thinks about his shoulder.
It twinges on the upswing—not pain exactly, more like a memory of pain, an old rib that healed wrong after a fight with a Rhino knockoff two years back. Nothing the serum couldn't fix, not really, but nothing it fixed all the way either. He's thirty-one years old wearing a twenty-three-year-old's spandex, and lately his body keeps sending him invoices for damage he thought he'd already paid off.
The warehouse squats between a shuttered laundromat and a parking garage, its brick face streaked with decades of soot, a faded sign reading GENTECH PHARMACEUTICAL DISTRIBUTION barely legible under a newer coat of graffiti. The…