𝒲𝑒𝒷 𝑜𝒻 𝓈𝑜𝓂𝑒𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝑔 ⋆♡︎.ೃ࿔:･
↪ Synopsis : A spider bite gives Alysa Liu extraordinary powers, but her greatest challenge may be falling in love.
A/n: little stressed hope u will like it guys ( Share your opinion in the comments or in my inbox :P) best fic I'v ever write btw
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There is a specific kind of invisibility that has nothing to do with being unseen.
Alysa Liu is seen every day. She walks through the hallways of Westbridge High School the same way she has walked through them for three years — head down, backpack slightly too heavy on her left shoulder because she refuses to use her locker because getting to her locker between second and third period adds four minutes to her route and four minutes is four minutes — and people see her. They step around her. They occasionally say her name if they need something, usually help with an assignment, usually at the last possible minute before it's due, usually with that particular tone people use when they need a favor from someone they have not previously thought about. She helps them. She always helps them. This is not because she is a pushover, though some people mistake it for that. It is because she is constitutionally incapable of watching someone struggle with something she could fix in six minutes.
She is, by every measurable standard, invisible in the way that matters at seventeen in a school like Westbridge. She is not invited to parties. She is not part of any social circle that has a name. She is not on anyone's radar in the particular way that radar operates in high school, which is to say: she is not someone people think about when she is not in the room.
She thinks about this sometimes, in the abstract, in the way she thinks about most things — methodically, without excessive emotion, as a problem with a set of variables that she could theoretically solve if she wanted to. She has decided she doesn't want to. The social architecture of Westbridge High feels, to her, like a system built on rules she didn't help write and doesn't particularly respect, and participating in it fully would require a kind of performance she doesn't have the energy for.
What she has energy for: her classes, which are genuinely interesting, all of them, even the ones people complain about. Her lab, which is technically the science prep room on the third floor that Mr. Okafor lets her use after school because she asked and he said yes and nobody else has ever asked. Her projects, which are numerous and complicated and which she works on with the specific, consuming focus of someone who has found the thing that makes the world make sense.
And, if she is being honest with herself, which she usually is: you.
You are, by every measurable standard, the opposite of invisible. You are Y/N Y/L/N, which at Westbridge means something specific and immediate and understood by everyone in the building. You are a junior, same as Alysa, same year, different universe. You are the kind of person who walks into a room and the room reorganizes itself slightly around your presence, not because you're trying, not because you're performing, but because you have some quality of aliveness that draws attention the way light draws attention — not because light is asking to be looked at, but because that's simply what light does.
You sit three rows ahead of Alysa in AP Biology. You tap your pen against your notebook when you're thinking, a quick irregular rhythm that Alysa has memorized without deciding to. You laugh with your whole face, which is an expression she has catalogued from the side-profile angle available from her seat, which tells her more than a straight-on view would, because the side profile shows the way the laugh starts in your eyes slightly before it gets to your mouth, and that sequence is — she has not found a word for what that sequence is. She has stopped trying to find one.
You have never spoken directly to Alysa Liu.
This is not a cruelty. It is simply the natural order of Westbridge, which Alysa has accepted the way she accepts other fixed conditions — the speed of light, the atomic weight of carbon, the fact that the elevator in the science wing has been broken since October and will presumably remain broken until the heat death of the universe. These are things that are. They do not require her feelings about them.
She has feelings about this one anyway. She keeps them in the category of noted but non-actionable, which is where she puts most things that she cannot solve in six minutes.
The day everything changes starts ordinarily.
Alysa is in the lab after school — which is to say, she is in Mr. Okafor's prep room on the third floor, which she has quietly transformed over the course of a year into something that functions like an actual research space, with three whiteboards covered in diagrams and a shelf of equipment that is technically the school's but which no one else touches and which she treats with the specific care of things that are practically hers. She is working on a project that she has been working on for six weeks, which she describes to Mr. Okafor as "an applied research project on enhanced adhesion polymers" and which she describes to herself, more honestly, as trying to figure out if the thing in my head can actually exist.
The thing in her head: a web-like structural polymer with tensile strength exceeding any currently existing synthetic material, deployable in a controlled filament, strong enough to support significant weight, degrading within approximately two hours. She has notebooks full of the theoretical basis for this. She has a shelf full of prototypes that have not worked. She is on prototype seventeen.
She is deep enough in the math that she doesn't hear the door open.
"Hey," says a voice. "Is this — sorry, is Mr. Okafor here?"
You are standing in the doorway of the prep room.
This is the first time you have been in close proximity to her outside of AP Biology, which means this is the first time she has seen you at anything other than three-rows-ahead distance, which means she is now confronted with the fact that you are even more specifically real up close than you are from a distance, which should not be surprising and yet somehow is. You are wearing your varsity jacket — you are on the swim team, she knows this, she knows more things about you than she has ever examined too closely — and you have a textbook under your arm and you are looking at her with an expression that is open and slightly apologetic and entirely without the particular quality some people have when they look at her, which is the quality of someone looking at a prop rather than a person.
You are looking at her like she is a person.
"He left at four," Alysa says. Her voice comes out at its normal register, which surprises her slightly. "I can leave a message if you need something."
"Oh, no, it's—" You look at the textbook under your arm, then back at her. "It's about the bio midterm. He said I could come by but I must have gotten the time wrong." You look around the room, and Alysa watches your expression shift from apologetic to curious, taking in the whiteboards, the equipment, the general evidence of someone who lives here in some meaningful sense. "Is this your—do you use this room?"
"After hours," she says. "For personal projects."
"Personal projects," you repeat, and there is something in it — not mockery, the very specific opposite of mockery, actually, something that sounds like genuine interest. "What kind?"
A pause. She looks at you. You are looking at her whiteboards, at the diagrams, at the shelf of prototypes. You are not doing the thing people usually do, which is to glance around politely and then redirect toward whatever they actually came here for. You are actually looking.
"Polymer research," she says.
"Like adhesion structures. Tensile polymer filaments." She hesitates. "Spider silk, basically. I'm trying to synthesize something with comparable properties."
"That's the coolest thing I've heard all week," you say.
You say it with the same quality that you do most things, which is to say completely and without reservation, without the social hedging that most people apply to statements about what they find interesting when talking to someone they don't know. You just say it, like it's true, like it's obvious that it's true, and then you come further into the room with the easy confidence of someone who moves through spaces without worrying about whether they're welcome in them.
She should say she's busy. She is busy. She has seventeen prototypes on a shelf and a whiteboard full of math and a problem she has been trying to solve for six weeks and she does not have time to give a tour to the most distracting person in her AP Biology class.
You stay for forty minutes.
You ask questions. Real ones, not the performative questions people ask to seem interested, but the kind that follow from something you said before, that build on each other, that indicate that you are actually tracking what she's saying and thinking about it. You ask about the tensile strength targets and whether the two-hour degradation is a feature or a limitation and whether spider silk itself has been tried as a base material or if the synthesis has to be entirely artificial. You ask in the tone of someone who is genuinely curious and also genuinely aware that she is the one who knows things here, which is a tone that most people do not find naturally, which requires a particular kind of unself-consciousness.
You sit on the lab stool across from her workbench, your textbook long forgotten on the counter, and you learn about polymer chains with the focused attention of someone who has decided that this is the thing they are doing right now and they are doing it completely.
Alysa answers your questions. She finds herself explaining things in more depth than she usually bothers to with people who haven't already demonstrated they can follow along, because you can follow along, and there is something unexpectedly satisfying about that. She pulls out her notebook at one point to show you a diagram that explains the tensile property problem more clearly than her words are doing, and you lean in to look at it and you are close enough that she is briefly, acutely aware of how close you are, before she redirects her attention to the notebook.
When you leave — you have practice, you say, apologetically, you lost track of time, which she also did, which she is now noticing — you pause at the door.
"I'll come back," you say. "If that's okay. I want to hear how the next prototype goes."
You smile, the full-face version, the one she knows from three rows back, and you're gone.
Alysa sits in the lab for a moment after the door closes. Then she looks at prototype seventeen on the shelf. Then she looks at the door.
Then she picks up her notebook and goes back to work, and she does not think about how you said I'll come back and how that sentence has lodged itself somewhere in her chest with a particular and unreasonable warmth.
She does not think about this at all.
You come back on a Tuesday.
Alysa is mid-experiment when the door opens — she has her safety goggles on and her hands in the middle of something delicate and she cannot look up immediately, so she says "one second" to the room and finishes the measurement before she turns around.
You are sitting on your stool. You brought coffee — two cups, from the place on the corner, and you set one near her workbench with the ease of someone who has decided this is a thing that happens now.
"I looked up spider silk," you say, by way of greeting. "I went down a rabbit hole. Did you know the Darwin's bark spider produces silk that's ten times stronger than Kevlar?"
"Yes," she says, pulling her goggles up.
"How far off is yours from that?"
She looks at the shelf. "Prototype seventeen is closer than sixteen. The tensile strength is up. The deployment mechanism is still the problem."
"What's the problem with it?"
She sits down and explains. You listen with the same quality as before — complete, specific, following along. The coffee is the right order, she notices. She has never told you her coffee order. You must have seen it somewhere, or guessed, or —
She doesn't examine this.
This is how the next three weeks go.
You come by the lab two or three times a week. Sometimes you have questions about bio, which she answers, and then you stay for the project conversation anyway. Sometimes you come purely for the project, sitting on your stool with your coffee and your questions, and she works while you talk, and the lab which has always been comfortable and solitary becomes comfortable and inhabited, and the difference between those two things is something she is carefully not analyzing.
You learn her shorthand. Not the technical vocabulary — though you pick that up too, faster than she'd have predicted — but the personal shorthand, the way she uses specific phrases when something is working versus when it isn't, the particular silence that means she's in the middle of something that requires all her concentration, the difference between hm when she means I'm thinking and hm when she means that doesn't work and I know why. You learn to read these things the way you learn to read things about people you are paying close attention to.
Alysa notices this. She notices the precision of your attention, the way you have quietly become someone who knows how to exist in her space without disrupting it, which is something most people don't manage even when they're trying. You don't try, exactly. You just — adapt. You observe and adjust and after a while you simply know.
She keeps this observation in the noted but non-actionable category, along with everything else.
On a Thursday in October, prototype eighteen works.
Not completely — the tensile strength is still not where she needs it and the degradation timer needs calibration — but the deployment mechanism functions, for the first time, in the way she has been designing it for six weeks. The filament deploys in a clean arc, attaches cleanly to the test surface, holds.
"Oh my god," you say, from the stool, where you have been watching. "Oh my god, that held."
"It held," she says. There is something in her voice that she doesn't bother controlling because she is too busy looking at the filament and the test surface and the first prototype that has done the thing she designed it to do.
"Alysa." You are off the stool. You are beside her. "That worked. That actually worked."
She turns to look at you. You are grinning — the full version, bigger than the one she knows from three rows back, close enough that she can see every dimension of it — and your hand is on her arm, which you have placed there without thinking, the way people place hands on the arms of people they have been paying close attention to for three weeks.
"It's prototype eighteen," she says. "There are still — the strength isn't—"
"It deployed," you say. "The deployment works. You figured out the deployment."
She looks at the filament. Then at you. You are still grinning, still with your hand on her arm, still with the full force of your attention directed at her, and something in the noted but non-actionable category has shifted, very slightly, in a direction she is not going to examine right now.
"Yes," she says. "The deployment works."
"I'm coming back Friday," you say. "We should celebrate."
"It's one prototype," she says.
"It's the best prototype," you say. "It deployed."
She looks at you for one more second. Then she looks back at the filament.
The Westbridge annual science field trip to the Harrington Institute of Biological Research is, by the universal consensus of every student who has ever attended it, not a highlight of the academic calendar.
It involves a two-hour bus ride, a tour that is pitched at a level approximately four years below AP Biology, and a free period at the end that everyone uses to sit in the Institute's atrium and wait to go home. The exhibits are fine. The explanations are basic. The only people who get anything real out of it are the ones who ignore the tour and read the supplementary materials on the displays, which is exactly what Alysa does every year.
This year is different because you are in her AP Bio class, and the field trip seating is first-come-first-served on the bus, and you sat down next to her before she could put her bag on the seat in the way that discourages conversation. Not aggressively, not deliberately, just — you sat down and said "hi" and opened your phone and that was that.
She spent the two hours explaining the interesting parts of the Institute to you, quietly, because the tour guide was in the middle of something oversimplified about protein folding, and you were leaning slightly toward her to hear, and the bus was loud enough that this proximity was reasonable and unremarkable.
That is what she tells herself.
The Institute has a research wing that is closed to general tour groups, which Alysa has known about for years and has never been able to access. This year there is a small exhibit on advanced arachnid biology that is technically open, technically on the edge of the tour route, technically something the guide gestures at briefly before moving on.
"I'll catch up," she tells the group, which no one in the group cares about except you, who falls back with her without being asked.
The exhibit is small but the content is real — genuine research-level information on spider silk production, structural biology, the specific proteins involved in dragline silk synthesis. She reads every panel. You read alongside her, which she is no longer surprised by. You have been reading alongside her for three weeks.
"This is what you're trying to replicate," you say, at the panel on dragline silk tensile properties.
"You're closer than this paper is," you say, pointing at the cited research date. "This is from four years ago."
She looks at the panel. You're right. The tensile strength numbers in her last prototype, while still below target, exceed what this paper was working with four years ago. She had not framed it that way before. There is something in the reframe that settles in her chest with a particular quality, the quality of being seen accurately rather than politely.
"I'm still not there," she says.
"You'll get there," you say, with the same uncomplicated certainty you say most things with, and she believes you the way she believes things that don't require proof.
The research wing is accessible through a door at the back of the exhibit that is marked authorized personnel only but which is, when she tries it on instinct, unlocked. She looks at it for a moment.
"The tour group is probably already in the atrium," you say.
Another beat. She looks at the door. You look at the door.
The research wing is quieter than the exhibit space, the low hum of equipment the only sound, rows of tanks and terrariums and lab benches with work in progress. She moves through it slowly, reading labels, taking in the scale of the research, the evidence of years of work. You follow her, close enough that she can hear you breathing, looking at the same things she looks at.
They are at the far end of the wing, near a row of terrariums containing various arachnid species, when the spider drops.
She doesn't see it happen. One moment she is reading the label on a terrarium, and the next there is a sharp, specific sting on the back of her hand, and she pulls it back and looks at it and there is a small welt rising.
"Alysa." Your voice is sharp with alarm, your hand closing over her wrist. "What happened?"
"Something bit me," she says.
She looks at the terrarium. On the glass, on the outside — it must have gotten out through a gap, must have been on the edge of the label she was reading — is a spider. Small, deep amber-colored, with a marking on its back she does not immediately recognize.
You look at it. Then at her hand. "Does it hurt?"
"A little," she says. "It's just a bite."
"We need to find someone," you say. "We need to tell a staff member."
"It's just a bite," she says again, but you are already steering her back toward the door, your hand still around her wrist, and she lets you because the alternative is arguing with you and she is currently distracted by the sensation in her hand, which is not exactly pain, more like warmth spreading outward, which is probably fine, which is almost certainly just a normal localized reaction.
They find the tour group. They do not tell anyone, because Alysa says she is fine, because she is probably fine, because the ride home is starting and the welt is already reducing in size by the time they are back on the bus and you are sitting next to her again and checking her hand every twenty minutes.
"I'm watching it," you say.
She looks at you from the side. There is a particular quality to the way you are watching her hand — not performing concern, just actually concerned, in the direct and uncomplicated way you do things.
"I'm fine," she says, softer.
You look at her. "I know," you say. "I'm still watching."
She looks out the window. The welt is gone by the time they pull into the Westbridge parking lot. She tells herself, and tells you, that it was nothing.
She sleeps for eleven hours that night and wakes up with her hands tingling.
The tingling goes away by morning. So does the tiredness. What doesn't go away — what presents itself over the course of the following week with the quiet inevitability of something that has already been decided — is everything else.
She notices the first thing on Monday, in the hallway, when she catches a water bottle that Marcus Kim drops from three feet above her head, in mid-air, without looking, without the reaction time that catching something requires. She holds the bottle and looks at it and thinks: hm.
She notices the second thing on Tuesday, when she climbs the stairs to the third floor and realizes she isn't breathing harder at the top, which she always does, which everyone does, because it's four flights and it's fast. She is not breathing harder. She could have gone faster. She is not sure how much faster.
The third thing is Wednesday, in the lab, when she is reaching for a beaker on the top shelf — the one that is technically too high for her without a step stool, which she has been using for a year — and her hand simply sticks. Not slips, not grabs. Sticks. Palm flat against the surface of the shelf, with a grip that doesn't require any effort from her, with a quality that is immediately, entirely recognizable to someone who has spent six months thinking about adhesion polymers.
She stands there with her hand stuck to the shelf for approximately fifteen seconds, processing this.
Then she unsticks her hand, which is also something she can simply do, intentionally, by — she does not fully understand how, it is like deciding to let go but more specific than that — and she stands in the middle of the lab and looks at her palm.
"Hm," she says, out loud, to the empty room.
She spends the next two hours testing this instead of working on prototype eighteen. She sticks her hand to the shelf, the wall, the window, the workbench. She peels it away cleanly. She tries with different pressures, different surfaces, different intentions. She falls off the lab stool at one point when she overbalances attempting to test the ceiling and grabs the wall instinctively on the way down, which results in her hanging sideways from the wall for a moment before she figures out how to let go and lands on her feet with a grace that is also new and also requires examination.
She lands on her feet from a sideways wall-hang with no impact and no stumbling.
She stands in the middle of the lab.
Y/N: how's 18 going, still at the lab?
She looks at the text. Then at the wall. Then at her hands.
You come by. You always come by when she asks, which is something she has not thought about too directly because thinking about it too directly takes her somewhere she has categorized as non-actionable.
You come in and you look at her standing in the middle of the lab, which she has been doing for twenty minutes, and you say "what happened" before she says anything.
"I need to show you something," she says. "And I need you to — I need you to be the kind of person you are, about this."
You look at her. "What kind of person am I?"
"The kind that doesn't panic," she says. "And doesn't ask questions I can't answer yet. Just watches."
She turns to the wall. She puts her hand flat against it. She walks up it.
Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. She puts her hand on the wall and then her foot and she walks, vertically, up the prep room wall to the ceiling, where she stays for a moment because she can, because gravity appears to have become optional, because the spider from the research wing has done something to her that she is not yet able to fully articulate but which she is currently demonstrating by being on the ceiling.
She looks down at you from the ceiling of Mr. Okafor's prep room.
You are looking up at her. Your expression is — she cannot fully read it from up here, but it does not look like panic, which is what she asked for. It looks like the expression you have in the lab when something works, when a prototype does something it wasn't doing before. It looks like the expression of someone watching something new become real.
"Okay," you say, from the floor. Your voice is steady. "Okay. Tell me everything."
She climbs back down and tells you everything.
Chapter Five : The Research Wing Spider
They spend six hours in the lab on Wednesday.
She tells you about the bite, the symptoms, the sequence of observations. She shows you the wall demonstration three more times, the ceiling grip, the strength test where she lifts the lab table with one hand and puts it down and it makes a clean impression in the floor and she will have to deal with that later. She shows you her palm, which looks completely normal, which you examine with the focused attention you bring to everything you examine.
You do not panic. You ask exactly the questions she cannot answer yet, which is what she asked you not to do, but you ask them in the tone of someone who is helping figure out what the answers might be rather than demanding she have them already. You bring your notebook. You are taking notes. She is too.
"The spider," you say, at some point. "Did you get a look at it?"
"Small. Amber-colored. Dorsal marking I didn't recognize."
"We need to figure out what species."
"The Institute would have records."
"I know." She looks at her notebook. "I also think — the silk."
"The bite. The adhesion. The filament I've been developing." She turns to the whiteboard, where she has started a new diagram, the one she has been drawing for the past three hours that connects prototype eighteen to what her hands are currently doing. "I don't think this is unrelated. The spider's silk production. I think the bite — I think I have something in my biology now that's analogous to what I was trying to synthesize."
You look at the diagram. Then at her hands. Then at the diagram again.
"You have the deployment mechanism," you say.
"You've been building the external version for months and the spider just—"
"Alysa." Your voice has something in it. "You have the deployment mechanism."
She looks at her hands. Then at the diagram. "I need to test it."
"Yes," you say. "Obviously yes. How?"
She looks at the prototype eighteen housing on the shelf — the wrist mechanism she's been developing for deployment. She has been testing it with the synthesized polymer, with decreasing success because the polymer still isn't strong enough. But if what she thinks is happening is actually happening — if her body is now producing something analogous, something that comes from the same biology she's been trying to replicate—
"I need to rebuild the housing," she says. "Smaller. More precise. If I can direct the deployment biologically, through the mechanism, without the synthesized polymer—"
"You'd have what you've been trying to build for eight months," you say.
She looks at you. You are watching her with the particular quality of your attention, the full version, and there is something in your expression that is not just scientific interest, something warmer and less categorizable, something she puts in the non-actionable file without looking at it.
"I need to go home and work on the housing," she says.
"You don't know how to build—"
"I know how to hand you things and not touch things I shouldn't touch and ask questions that make you explain your thinking more clearly," you say. "You've told me that's useful."
She has told you that. She has told you that the questions you ask make her articulate things she was processing silently, which often helps. She has told you this as a fact, neutrally, and you are now deploying it as a reason to stay and she doesn't have a counterargument.
"Fine," she says. "Come on."
They go to her apartment. Her parents are out. You sit at the kitchen table and watch her rebuild the housing, and you hand her things when she asks, and you ask the questions that make her explain her thinking, and by midnight she has something that might work and you are asleep on the couch with your jacket as a blanket, which is something she observes and puts in the non-actionable file along with everything else.
She covers you with the blanket from the back of the couch, which is something she does without examining whether she is doing it.
Then she goes to her room and sits on her bed and looks at the modified housing on her desk.
The next morning she tests it.
Here is the thing that Alysa understands about herself, which she has understood for a long time and which has shaped the specific architecture of her life at Westbridge: she is not a person who does things halfway.
This is not a personality trait she selected. It is simply how she is built. When she is interested in something, she is completely interested, and the interest does not modulate itself to fit the available time. When she commits to a problem, she commits with the entire force of herself, and she does not stop until the problem is solved or until she has run out of approaches to try, which has not yet happened.
This quality, applied to schoolwork, produces the best grades in the junior class. Applied to the lab, it produced prototype eighteen and the modified housing. Applied to the post-bite situation, which she is tentatively calling the development because she does not yet have a better name for it, it produces the following, over the course of three weeks:
A complete suite of modified housings, one for each wrist, built to her exact specifications, black metal with a tensioned filament mechanism that deploys with a specific motion of her wrist and retracts cleanly. A costume that she is somewhat embarrassed about but which is functionally necessary — coverage, movement, anonymity — built from materials she sourced with care and assembled with the same precision she brings to lab work. A testing protocol that starts in her apartment, moves to the roof of her building, moves to the alley behind her building, moves progressively outward as she understands more about what she can do and how to do it.
The strength: she can lift approximately eight times her body weight. She can fall from the third floor of her building without injury, which she tests with some caution and some scientific excitement and some genuine terror. She can run at a speed that makes the city feel smaller.
The webs: the housing works. The filament deploys cleanly, attaches to surfaces with the adhesion she has been trying to synthesize for eight months, holds her weight and more. She swings between her building and the next on a Thursday evening and lands on the opposite roof and stands there breathing hard from the adrenaline of it and looking back at the space she just covered, which is not a large space, which is not a record-breaking distance, but which was air and is now traversed.
She stands on a rooftop in the October dark and understands that something has changed in a way that is not reversible.
The other things are tests she runs and data she collects. This is a realization she arrives at, not a test. This is standing still and understanding, with the particular quality of certainty she has about things that are true, that the development is not something that happened to her and is going to stop. It is something she is now. It has joined the architecture.
She goes home and sits at her desk and thinks.
She looks at her phone. Then at the housings on her desk.
You come over. She shows you the housings, the deployment, the controlled filament. She does not take you to the roof yet because it is eleven PM and she has not thought through the logistics of the roof with an audience. You sit on her bedroom floor across from her and you watch the filament deploy from the housing and attach to the far wall and hold, and your expression is the expression from prototype eighteen, the full-face grin, the close-enough version.
"You built the real thing," you say.
"The development built it," she says. "I just made the housing."
"You built the housing for six months first," you say. "You were already there. The spider just — completed the circuit."
She looks at the filament attached to her wall. Then at you.
"What do I do with it," she says. This is not rhetorical. She is asking you the way she asks you things in the lab — genuinely, because you are someone whose thinking she finds useful, because you have this quality of seeing the angle she hasn't tried.
You think about it. Not the quick-answer version of thinking, but the real version, the one where you actually sit with something before responding.
"I think," you say, slowly, "that you already know what you do with it. And I think you're asking me because you want someone to say it out loud so you don't have to be the one who decided."
She looks at you for a long moment.
"The city is right there," you say. Quietly. Not dramatic. Just factual. "You can do things most people can't do. People need things."
"I'm not—" She stops. "That's not—"
"You help people you can help," you say. "That's just what you do. You always have. This is bigger."
She looks at the housing on her wrist. The filament still attached to her wall.
"I'd need a better costume," she says.
"And a name is probably—"
"A name would help, yes."
She looks at you. You are looking back with that particular quality, and something in the non-actionable file is straining at its category, has been straining for weeks, is becoming harder to keep contained.
"I don't know how to do this," she says.
"You know how to do this," you say. "You know how to learn things, which is the same as knowing how to do them eventually. Start small."
She nods. She looks at the wall where the filament is attached. She thinks about the roof, about the alley, about the distance between her building and the next one that she crossed on Thursday.
November. Three weeks after the roof.
The thing about becoming someone who swings between buildings at night is that it changes your relationship with insomnia. Alysa has always been a light sleeper, has always had nights where the math in her head won't quiet down, where the next step of a problem presents itself at two AM with the urgency of something that will not wait. Those nights used to mean hours at her desk and too much coffee and tiredness the next morning. Now they mean putting on the suit and going out, which is both a worse idea than staying at her desk and a better one, because at least when she is out she is doing something with the restlessness.
She has, in three weeks, stopped a mugging in the East Village (her first real one, not a practice scenario, not a test — an actual person with an actual knife, which she handled with less grace than she wanted to and more effectiveness than she expected), helped extract two people from a car accident on 7th Avenue, and caught a man who jumped from a fire escape on the third floor and would have hit the pavement badly if she hadn't been passing below at exactly that moment. She is not yet fast enough, or practiced enough, to be doing this comprehensively, with the coverage of someone who knows the city from above. She is learning the geometry of it — the swing radius, the web attachment points, the way certain building facades work and certain ones don't, the weight distribution of different moves.
She is, in short, a work in progress.
You know all of this because she tells you. This has become the architecture: she goes out, she comes back, she texts you, and you parse it together. Not surveillance — you are not her handler, she does not check in because you require it. She checks in because you are the only person who knows, which means you are the only person she can be honest with about this specific dimension of her existence, which means the texts have taken on a particular quality of relief. Saying it to you makes it real in a way that the suit and the city cannot do alone.
ALYSA: mugging on 9th, handled it, scraped my knee on the landing
Y/N: the landing or the takeoff
ALYSA: the landing. I overrotated
ALYSA: yes, again, I'm working on it
Y/N: want me to come over
She looks at this text every time. She looks at it and she says no, she's fine, it's late, she has school tomorrow. She says this every time.
Y/N: ok. ice for the knee
She doesn't sleep. But she tries, which she counts.
The other thing that happens in November is that the city starts to notice.
Not her, specifically — no one knows who she is, the mask and the costume have done the job she designed them to do. But someone is swinging between buildings on the east side and stopping things that used to not get stopped, and the city notices this the way the city notices everything, which is loudly and with strong opinions.
The first Daily News piece is brief, buried in the Metro section, and calls her "a masked vigilante of unclear motivation." The second one is bigger and calls her "the city's newest costumed figure." The third one is a week later and has the word Spiderwoman in the headline, which is not a name she chose, which is a name derived from someone's description of the web she left at a scene because she ran out of time to clear it, but which is now apparently what she is.
She reads this piece in the lab, on her phone, while you read it on yours sitting on your stool.
"I didn't name it," she says.
"I know. Do you hate it?"
She considers. "No," she says. "It's fine."
"It's actually pretty good," you say. "Descriptive. Clear."
"Everything is derivative," you say. "Does it fit?"
She looks at the article. At the description of the figure someone saw swinging through the East Village at two AM. At the word Spiderwoman in the headline.
"Yes," she says. "It fits."
You nod. You look back at your phone for a moment, and then you look up and you have an expression she hasn't seen before, something that is complicated in a way you're not trying to hide but also not naming.
"You're going to keep doing this," you say.
"I know," you say. "I just — I want to make sure you know I know. That this is the thing now."
She looks at you. "It's the thing now."
You nod again. Something in your expression settles, resolves into something simpler, the something that you usually have when you've processed a complicated thing and come out the other side.
"Then I'm in," you say. "Whatever that means. However you need it."
She looks at you for a long moment, long enough that you look back with curiosity, long enough that whatever is in the non-actionable file presses against its category with specific and unhelpful intensity.
AP Biology has a lab practical this week, which means the seating arrangement changes, which means Alysa is no longer three rows behind you but beside you at a shared lab bench, which is an arrangement that happens every few months and which she has always handled fine.
She handles it fine now. She is handling it fine.
You are pipetting a solution with the focus you bring to things you are genuinely trying to do correctly, which is all things, which is one of the things about you that she has stopped trying to categorize and simply accepts as a quality you have. You are wearing your swim team hoodie. You have your hair back in the specific way you do it when you are working on something that requires concentration.
"You're doing the contamination check wrong," she says.
"You are. The order matters."
"The order — does the order matter for this?"
"For sterility, yes. Always rinse the outside of the pipette before the inside."
You look at the pipette. Then at her. "Why does no one teach that."
"It's in the supplementary materials."
"Of course it is." You correct your technique. You do it correctly. "Thank you."
She goes back to her own bench section. Two minutes later:
"Why does it have to be outside first?"
She explains it. You listen. The lab practical continues. At some point you are leaning toward her to look at her diagram and you are close enough that she is acutely aware, in the specific and unhelpful way she has been for two months, of exactly how close you are.
"Your contamination ring is smaller than mine," you say. "Mine looks like a crime scene."
"You've done this before."
"Show me the motion again?"
She shows you the motion. She does it with her hands over yours, very briefly, correcting the angle of the pipette, and then removes them and steps back and goes back to her section with the calm of someone who is not thinking about anything specific.
You get it right on the next attempt.
"There it is," you say, quietly, to yourself, with the tone of someone who gets a small private satisfaction from getting something right. She is not supposed to hear this. She hears it anyway. She files it in the non-actionable category, which is becoming alarmingly full.
After class, in the hallway:
"The Christmas showcase thing," you say, falling into step beside her. "For bio club. Are you presenting?"
"The polymer project. Yes."
She looks at you. "It's open to the school."
"I know. I'm asking if you want me there specifically."
You nod. "Then I'll be there."
You split off toward the gym. She continues toward the third floor. She walks up all four flights without any change in her breathing, as has been the case since November, and she arrives at the lab and puts her bag down and stands in the middle of the room for a moment.
She opens her notebook to a clean page.
She writes: non-actionable.
She closes the notebook and gets to work.
Chapter Nine : What Everyone Else Sees
The thing about Y/N Y/L/N is that she is not oblivious.
She is, by some measures, one of the more perceptive people at Westbridge, which is not something people would necessarily list first when describing her because what they list first is usually something about her presence, her energy, the way a room responds to her. But underneath that, she notices things. She notices the way people's expressions change when they're uncomfortable versus when they're performing discomfort. She notices when someone is struggling with something they haven't said yet. She notices the specific quality of silence in different people, what it means when Marcus Kim goes quiet versus what it means when Jenny Park goes quiet, and she has learned to respond to the difference without being obvious about the fact that she's noticed.
She has been noticing things about Alysa Liu since October.
Not the technical things — those she was already noticing before October, before the prep room, before the lab visits became a fixture. She noticed Alysa before she ever spoke to her, in the particular way you notice people who are doing something completely independently of whether you are looking at them, which is a quality very few people at Westbridge have. Most people at Westbridge are performing their existence to some degree, for some audience. Alysa is not performing anything. She is simply doing what she is doing, with her whole self, with no apparent awareness of or interest in whether anyone is watching.
She found this interesting before she found it anything else. She finds it something else now.
She finds, specifically, that she is thinking about Alysa with a frequency and specificity that has been increasing steadily since October and which she has not interrogated too closely because she is not sure she wants to know what the interrogation produces. She finds that the time in the lab has become the part of her day she looks forward to with a particularity that she is careful not to examine. She finds that when Alysa explains things to her — the polymer, the housings, the bio lab techniques, the city from above, the specific geometry of swinging between two particular buildings — she is listening with more attention than she gives to most things, and that this attention has a quality that is not entirely academic.
She also finds that Alysa is — and she has been slow to land on this word, not because she isn't sure of it but because once she lands on it she will have to decide what to do with it — beautiful. Not in the obvious way, not in the way Westbridge would vote on it, not in the way that gets noticed. In the specific, close-range way of someone who has been paying attention to all the details of a face for two months and has arrived at a conclusion that is more comprehensive than the one you'd reach from a distance.
She sits in AP Biology and looks at Alysa from three rows back, and she thinks: I am in significant trouble.
She does not tell Alysa this. She is fairly confident Alysa does not know. Alysa moves through the world with the focused specificity of someone who is thinking about the next problem, and when she looks at you she looks with interest and attention and warmth and also — sometimes, in the specific way of something being managed — with a quality that suggests there is something she has decided not to look at directly.
You recognize this quality because you are also deploying it.
The difference, which you have not fully worked out yet, is what to do about it.
It is a Tuesday in December and your phone buzzes at two in the morning.
You are awake. You are usually awake at two, not because you have insomnia but because you have a long-standing inability to go to sleep at a reasonable hour, which your mother has been commenting on since you were twelve. You are on your phone, reading something you found in the rabbit hole that started with Alysa's polymer research and ended, six links later, at a paper on arachnid silk gland evolution, which is not something you ever expected to be reading at two in the morning and which you find genuinely interesting.
ALYSA: nothing I couldn't handle. just — bad.
ALYSA: there was a fire. apartment building, East 14th. I got the people out but I was — I wasn't fast enough for one of them. she's okay. the paramedics got to her. but I wasn't fast enough.
ALYSA: she was unresponsive when I found her. she's okay now. she is. but
YOU: but you keep thinking about the before
ALYSA: you have practice at six
ALYSA: give me fifteen minutes
She comes in through your window, because this is something she can do now, something that you have both adapted to with a practicality that still occasionally strikes you as surreal. She comes in through the second-floor window and drops down onto your floor and she is already out of the suit top, just the undershirt, and she looks — she looks tired in a way that the suit and the movement usually mask and that is more visible now, in your room at two AM, in the specific light of your desk lamp that is the only light on.
She sits on the floor. You sit on the floor next to her, because the floor is where she chose to sit and you are not going to make this into something it doesn't have to be.
"Tell me what happened," you say.
She tells you. The building, the fire on the third floor, the people on the upper floors who couldn't get down. The woman on the fourth floor who was unconscious when she got there, who she carried down, who the paramedics took before Alysa could know for certain. The waiting on the rooftop across the street while they worked on her, watching, not being able to know.
"She was okay," you say. "You said she was okay."
"She was okay by the time I left," she says. "Responsive. They had her."
"I know she was okay," Alysa says. "I know. I keep—" She stops. She is looking at her hands, which are fine, which are not injured, which have the specific non-state of hands that did not get to do the thing they needed to do fast enough. "I know she was okay."
"I keep thinking about the window," she says. "There was a window of time where if I had been thirty seconds faster she would never have been unconscious at all. If I had been thirty seconds faster."
"You don't know that," you say.
"I know the timing," she says, and this is Alysa, this is the specific way her mind works, precise and relentless, running the numbers even when the numbers are hurting her. "I know what I could have done differently."
"And in six months," you say, "when you know more, when you're faster, you will do it differently. You will have been doing it differently for six months." You look at her. "You started three weeks ago."
She is quiet for a moment.
"You are three weeks into this," you say. "You saved everyone else in the building. You have stopped four other things this month. You are learning and you are doing it while you're learning and that woman is alive because you were there." A beat. "Three weeks ago you were only doing it from the roof of your building."
She looks at her hands again. The lines of them, the adhesion capability, the thing she has spent months thinking about in a purely technical register and is now thinking about in a completely different one.
"Yeah," she says, quietly.
You sit there for a while. The desk lamp makes a small warm circle. Outside, the city does its 2 AM thing — quieter than it is at any other hour, but not silent, because the city is never silent, because the city is exactly what she said it is, the thing that holds together.
At some point you get off the floor onto the bed because the floor is uncomfortable and you are both seventeen and you have practice at six, and she is on the far side with her arms around her knees and you are on your side facing her and neither of you says anything for a while and it is not uncomfortable, it is the specific comfortable silence that has been building in the lab for two months, the one that exists between people who have been in enough silences together that they know what the other person's silence means.
"Thank you," she says. Eventually.
"You would have figured it out by morning," you say. "I just made it faster."
"That's not—" She stops. She looks at you, and in the lamp light her expression has shed some of the layer she usually keeps in place, the managing-quality, and what's underneath it is something warmer and more direct and completely, thoroughly non-actionable.
"I know," you say. Because you do know. Because you have known for a while.
You fall asleep before she does. She lies awake for another hour in the specific comfortable quiet of your room, which smells like chlorine and the vanilla candle you keep on your desk and something else she doesn't have a name for that is simply the smell of your space, and she looks at the ceiling, and she thinks.
In the morning she is gone before your alarm, which is what she usually does when she ends up here. There is a text on your phone from 5:47 AM.
ALYSA: go get in the water
You smile at your phone before you're fully awake. Then you get up and go to practice.
After the holidays — after two weeks apart, which Alysa spends at her grandmother's in a way that is too long and too quiet and that has a shape she doesn't examine too directly — January arrives with the specific quality of a month that is cold all the way through and asks nothing cheerful of you.
She is back at the lab. The project has evolved past the housing, past the suit, into something she is now thinking about in operational terms rather than engineering ones — the improvement of her technique, the expansion of her coverage area, the nights when she goes out earlier and comes in later and the data she is collecting about the city's patterns and her own response times. She is getting faster. The overrotation on landings has mostly resolved. The swing radius is larger.
You are back on your stool.
The weeks in between have produced something — she is not sure what to call it, it is something she notices in the way she notices changes in her prototypes, by comparing what is in front of her to what she remembers. You are the same as before and also there is something different, something that is not dramatic and has no announcement, something that exists in the specific quality of how long you hold eye contact before looking away and in the way you lean against the door frame sometimes when you are leaving, like leaving requires a moment of decision.
She puts this in the non-actionable file. The file is at capacity. She is aware of this.
"The Post did a thing on Spiderwoman," you say, on a Tuesday, looking at your phone.
"They called you a menace."
"Two days before that they called you a hero."
"Journalists are not consistent." She does not look up from the workbench.
"They want to know who you are," you say.
"Everyone wants to know who I am."
"What would you say? If someone asked."
She looks up. You are looking at her with a question in your expression that is both the question you asked and something other than the question you asked, something larger and less specific.
"I'd say it doesn't matter," she says.
She considers this with the honesty she brings to most things. "Yes," she says. "But the part that matters is the one that exists here, not out there." She gestures vaguely at the window, at the city outside, at the press coverage and the rumors and the growing accumulation of public opinion about a woman in a red and black suit. "Out there, the identity is a problem. It makes the people I care about into targets."
"People you care about," you say.
"Specifically, one person," she says, and then she realizes she has said this out loud and she looks back at the workbench with the specific focus of someone redirecting very quickly.
The silence in the lab has a different quality for a moment.
"Okay," you say, quietly.
She does not respond. She is pipetting something she does not need to pipette. She is giving this pipetting her complete attention.
"I'm not a target," you say. "For the record."
"You don't know that," she says.
"I don't know what this becomes," she says, to the workbench. "I don't know how visible it gets, or what the visibility means for the people connected to me. I don't—" She stops. She puts the pipette down. "I need to know that what I'm building stays separate. That you stay—"
You are quiet for a moment.
"I understand that," you say. "I do. But I'm already in it. I've been in it since the prep room." You say this carefully, not dramatically, in the tone of someone stating a position they have thought about. "I know what that means. I'm making an informed choice."
She looks at you. "You're seventeen."
She doesn't have a response to this. She looks at you, and you look back, and the non-actionable file in her chest is making itself very loudly known, and she is about to say something, she is in the process of deciding what to say, when your phone buzzes.
You look at it. "I have to go," you say. "Practice ran over, I forgot to tell my mom." You slide off the stool, pick up your bag, and then you pause at the door in the way you have been pausing at the door more lately, the pause that takes a moment to resolve.
"I'm not going anywhere," you say. "For the record."
You go. The door closes. She stands in the lab for a moment and then she goes back to the workbench and she pipettes the thing she was pretending to pipette earlier, this time because she actually needs to.
Alysa's name is in the school paper.
Not for Spiderwoman. For the polymer project, which she presented at the bio club showcase in December and which one of the students on the paper wrote a brief item on, which ran in January, and which resulted in three things: an email from a professor at Columbia who wants to hear more about the project, an email from a bio competition coordinator about a citywide showcase in March, and the specific kind of visibility she has been trying to manage since November.
She is, briefly, something at Westbridge. Not the kind of something you are — she does not walk into rooms and have them reorganize — but the kind of something that produces recognition, people saying her name in the hallway with the specific quality of people who have recently learned it, the bio teachers mentioning the item in class, Harmon (the AP Bio Harmon, not related to the fictional editor in the previous story) asking her to present the project to the junior seminar.
She handles this fine. She is used to the work being visible even when she isn't. This is different from social visibility, which requires performance. The work standing on its own is something she has always been comfortable with.
What she is less comfortable with is the shift in your presence at school.
You have always been, by the natural order of Westbridge, someone who moves in circles that don't include her. Your circle is large and warm and inclusive in the specific way of someone who doesn't build walls, but it is still a circle, and she has been adjacent to it rather than inside it for three years. The lab visits are their thing — separate, specific, not something that has migrated into the hallways or the cafeteria or the rest of the school day.
You stop by her locker on a Tuesday, which you have never done before. You do it in the way you do things — naturally, without ceremony, like it is simply a thing that happens and you are doing it. You are talking to someone from the swim team and you see her and you say her name and include her in the conversation with an ease that leaves no room for awkwardness, and then you say see you later when you have to go and the swim team person says nice to meet you and she stands at her locker processing the fact that you stopped by her locker.
On Thursday you sit next to her at lunch.
You eat with your usual people, most days. Your social gravity pulls you there, and it is not a cruel gravity — you are not one of the people who categorizes, who excludes deliberately, who builds walls. But you eat with your people, and your people are not her people, and this has simply been how it is for three years.
You sit next to her on Thursday with your tray and you say hey and you eat and you talk to her and to the two people from the bio club who are also at this table, and when the swim team people come by looking for you, you introduce everyone without making it a production and they sit down and the lunch is — it is fine. She handles it fine. The swim team people are not awful, they are ordinary, and she can navigate ordinary.
But she notices, and she files it, and the non-actionable file has been over capacity since January and she is not sure what to do about that except continue to manage it.
On Friday, after school, in the lab:
"You keep doing things," she says.
You look up from your stool. "What things."
"The locker. Lunch. The — including."
"The including," you repeat.
"You keep including me," she says, not accusatorially, just — stating it, the way she states things she is trying to understand the logic of. "Deliberately. In places you haven't before."
You look at her for a moment. "Yes," you say.
"Because I want to," you say. And then, more carefully: "Because I've been thinking about the categories."
"The one where the lab is ours and the rest of school is something else," you say. "I've been thinking about whether that needs to be true."
She looks at you. This is a direct conversation, more direct than either of them usually does in this particular direction, and she can feel the edge of it, the place where this conversation could become the conversation that she has been managing around for months.
"The lab being ours doesn't stop being true if the other things are also true," you say. "They're not mutually exclusive."
She is quiet for a moment.
"What happens to the categories," she says, slowly, "if the other things are also true."
You look at her steadily. "I think you know what happens."
She looks back. The non-actionable file is open. She is looking directly at it, and it is looking back at her, and every argument she has assembled — the complication, the risk, the specificity of what she is now and what that means for anyone close to her — is present and real and none of it is sufficient to change the fact of what she is feeling.
"Alysa," you say. Quietly.
She picks up her notebook. She opens it to the page that says non-actionable, which she underlined in December.
She crosses out the word.
You watch her do this. Something in your expression opens — not surprise, she doesn't think it's surprise, more like relief, like something that has been held at a particular tension finally being able to release.
"I still don't know what it means," she says. "For the rest of it. For — what I am."
"It's complicated in ways—"
"I know," you say again. "I've been next to the complicated for four months. I'm not leaving because it's complicated."
She looks at you for a long moment. Then she looks at the notebook in her hands, at the crossed-out word.
Neither of you moves for a moment. The lab is the same as it always is, the equipment and the whiteboards and the light at this hour going golden, and she is sitting on her lab stool and you are sitting on yours and the distance between the two of them is approximately four feet, which is a workbench width, which is nothing.
She comes. She stands in front of you and you are looking at her with the full version, the one she knows from prototype eighteen, the close-range version, and she looks back.
You reach up and tuck a piece of her hair back, very gently, with the specific care of someone doing something for the first time that they have been thinking about for a long time. She stays still for it. Your hand comes to rest at the side of her face, and she turns into it slightly, not dramatically, just a small lean, and something in her chest that has been noted but non-actionable for four months resolves into something simple and certain and completely present.
"I've been thinking about doing this for a while," you say.
"I observe things," she says. "You know this about me."
You laugh — the full version, the close version, the one she has now seen many times but which she does not think she will ever fully adapt to, because it is the specific quality of a thing that is complete rather than a thing that performs being complete.
She kisses you. It is the first time she has kissed anyone and she is aware of this and also aware that it doesn't feel like a first time in the way people describe first times, doesn't feel fumbled or uncertain, feels like the logical conclusion of four months of everything else, like something that was going to happen at the exact moment when they both had the right information and decided to use it.
You kiss her back with the same completeness you bring to everything.
The lab is the same as it always is. The equipment hums. The late afternoon light comes through the windows at the angle it comes through at this hour. Prototype eighteen is on the shelf where it has been since October, the first thing that worked.
She is, she thinks, the second.
February becomes something new, in the way months become something new when the architecture of your life changes in the middle of them.
It is not dramatic. It does not remake every surface. It is subtler than that — a shift in the quality of specific things, the lab and the hallways and the two-AM texts, all of them the same and also different, the difference being that she now gets to kiss you when you stop by her locker, that you reach for her hand sometimes in the hallway without looking around first to see if anyone is watching, that the 2 AM texts have a different register when she's been out and comes back to them, something warmer and more specific, something that says you specifically in a way that the texts already said and now say louder.
You are careful with her. She notices this and she does not put it in any file at all, she simply holds it, the way you hold things that you don't want to categorize because categorizing them risks diminishing them. You are careful with the suit, with what it means, with the specific complications of being the person who knows. You have been careful since October. Now the care has a different quality, the quality of someone who has a personal stake rather than an intellectual one, and she feels the difference.
She is also careful with you. She is careful with the identity, which she has been careful with since November, but now the carefulness has a specific shape, a specific fear that has settled into the architecture alongside everything else: the fear of the day when someone figures out that Spiderwoman is a specific person rather than a symbol, and traces that person to the people she is near. She carries this fear with the same precision she brings to everything — cleanly, specifically, managed rather than avoided.
March arrives. The citywide bio showcase. She presents the polymer project, the official version, the one that does not include the development, the one that is purely the synthetic research. It wins its category. The Columbia professor shakes her hand. The competition coordinator mentions graduate programs that she is, technically, seven years away from, but which she files as something to examine later.
You are there. You are in the audience, which is not a small thing, it is a Tuesday afternoon in March and you rearranged your practice schedule to be there, which your coach was not happy about and which you did anyway. She sees you when she walks to the podium and you are in the third row with the full version of your expression, the close-range one, and she looks at you for exactly one second before she begins speaking.
It is the best presentation she has ever given.
After, in the lobby, you say: "Outside first, then inside."
"The contamination check," you say. "I've been thinking about how to apply that principle to the suit's grip release mechanism. Outside force first, then internal adjustment. Would that give you more precision?"
She stares at you. "You've been thinking about my grip release mechanism."
"I think about your grip release mechanism a lot," you say, and there is something in it, a deliberate note of the other meaning, and she starts laughing, which she doesn't do often enough, and you are grinning, and the lobby of the competition venue is not the lab and it is not the 2 AM rooftop and it is not the school hallway, it is something else, something new, something that is a part of the architecture that didn't exist in September.
She is, she thinks, doing all right.
There is a building on the corner of 23rd and 8th that Alysa has started thinking of as hers, not because she owns it, not because it is special, but because the water tower on the roof has a particular vantage point on the west side grid that she finds useful for situation assessment, and because she has been up there enough times that it feels familiar in the way things feel familiar when you have been in them enough times, settled-in, known.
She is up there on a Tuesday in April, the suit on, the city below her in its April state — colder than it should be still, the specific stubborn cold of a New York April that refuses to concede spring until it's absolutely forced to — and she is doing what she does up here, which is watching.
Not for anything specific. For the pattern. For the system. For the way the city moves at eleven PM on a Tuesday, the specific rhythm of it, the particular way the lights organize themselves and the streets move and the whole thing works.
Y/N: I can see the water tower from my window
She looks south. The window of your apartment building is visible from here, lit up, your silhouette behind the glass.
She raises one hand. A wave.
A beat. Then, from your window, a wave back.
She looks at the lit window for a moment. The city goes on below her, and the cold is still the specific April cold that hasn't given up, and she is on a water tower in the suit she built out of a housing she built out of a development that started with a spider in a research wing in October, and twelve floors down and three blocks south you are at your window watching for her.
She looks at the city. She looks at your window.
She goes back to watching.
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