Now, I wish I could savor that moment forever, just sitting on my Abuelita’s barstool, eating Alessandro’s pizza while my mom and Ganke bond over the merits of writing their names on their clothing tags.
I’d risk my life to have another chance at that moment.
“But I need your help,” I say. “I can’t move this thing by myself.”
She rolls her eyes, replaces the lid, and hops down off the ladder.
“Fine. Thought you were Mr. This-is-how-I-got-this-buff, but whatever—”
“What?”
“I said make a web net, so we have something to put this in.”
CHAPTER 17
I’M already phrasing how I’m going to recall the story to Peter in my head:
And that’s how I ended up flying over Manhattan holding a chemically unstable canister of liquid nanobots feeding off a $4.5 million Rumidium-core gold statue, letting the granddaughter of Vulture, Spider-Man’s sworn enemy, carry me the whole way.
This is entirely fine.
I think about what my plan might be if she let go right now. I had a minor, healthy fear of heights before taking on this job, as most people do, but I had to drop that pretty quick after my first swinging lesson with Peter. But this! This?! This I’m afraid of. I’m dangling five hundred feet over New York City holding a glowing canister of explosive liquid, and my mortal enemy could drop me at any moment.
“Hey, uh,” I say to Starling, “I think this is a safe spot to land.”
“You sure?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say with a gulp, “I’m sure.”
She gets quiet, but she doesn’t slow down at all.
“You’re scared I’m going to drop you,” she says.
“No no,” I lie, “I just think we’re good here.”
“We’re over the docks,” she says. “Admit it, you’re scared.”
“I’m not,” I insist.
“Whatever,” she says. “I’m a lot of things, Spider-Man, but I’m not a killer. I said I’d get you to Manhattan. I’ll take you there, and then I’ll take my Crows, and I’ll move back home, and I’ll forget this ever happened.”
I sigh, knowing that as risky as it is to be dangling hundreds of feet over the city, holding this thing, it’s the best chance I have of saving the city. We have to take it right into the heart of the fray, where New York is still mostly birds. Feathers have made their way into the air, and onto the tops of buildings, blown about by strong gusts of autumn wind. The cars on the street become less scattered, more concentrated, and the headlights have started shutting off after running out of gas. The damage this whole debacle has caused makes any destruction Peter or I have caused look like two kids playing in a sandbox. Fire hydrants spew. News carts lie open and abandoned.
We sail over the south side of Manhattan where the birds are all shuffling below us, quieter now that it seems they’ve run out of humans to infect.
God, I hope this works.
I shut my eyes and take a deep breath, and then I realize…
…we’re… descending?
“Hey, what gives?” I ask as the canister gently rests on the roof below. My feet follow, and finally, Starling lands and retracts her wings.
“I can’t take you any closer,” she says, rubbing one arm with the other hand. “I… I know my grandfather is still over there somewhere. Maybe hiding out or setting a trap for the other Spider-Man? Anyway, I can’t let him see me. I can’t look him in the eyes and let him know that I undid… or helped undo… what he did. I just can’t.”
She looks so torn standing here in front of me. And I get what it’s like to be between two tough decisions like this.
“Starling, when you said the only one who looks out for you is number one,” I begin, folding my arms across my chest, “you were speaking from experience, weren’t you?”
After a brief pause, while she kicks her metal feet across the roof absentmindedly, she looks up at me and says, “When you grow up alone, thinking you were a mistake, you learn to think like that. When people look at you like their hardships are your fault, before they even get to know you? When you’re still just a kid? Yeah, you learn to think like that.”
I remember the face of the store owner—you know, before she transformed into a human zombie bird—the hatred in her eyes when she looked at me. She judged me before she even got to know me. Even if I had been the one to rob her store, she attacked me like I wasn’t some kid in need of a helping hand. Maybe since Steven and his dad came in the next day looking for help at F.E.A.S.T., that’s exactly what he was. Starling will never know the kid she recruited almost framed me for robbery, but she can at least know I relate somehow.
“I know what that’s like,” I say. “People forget we’re human under these masks.”
She looks up at me and nods.
“I should go,” she says. “Take care of yourself, Spider-Man.” And with that, she tosses the ball of web over her shoulder at me and dives head-first off the roof. I scramble to catch it, but when I finally do, she whooshes back up into the sky, the moonlight glinting off her red feathers, and I turn back to look at the canister.
“What was that?” comes a familiar voice behind me.
I whip around, startled to see a slender figure about a foot taller than me standing in the shadows. Peter comes forward in his suit, into the light, and I smile.
“She’s not so bad,” I say, and then catch myself when Peter raises an eyebrow. “I-I mean, as villains go. She just seems… confused.”
“You got her to help you,” he says. “That’s… that’s amazing!”
I shrug and chuckle shyly. “Yeah,” I say. “Kinda borrowed some stuff you said, though.”
“Hey, glad I could help,” he says.
“By the way,” I say, “where’s Vulture?”
“Left him hanging to come find you,” he says. “You were pretty easy to find. Carrying this thing made you look like an overgrown lightning bug.”
“You… left him hanging? You mean that literally, don’t you?” I ask.
He nods.
“Yeah,” he smiles. “Yeah, I do. Now, any ideas on how we can figure this out?” he gestures down to the street, where I see three huge black birds flipping a burning taxi onto its side before the whole thing explodes in flames, much to their screeching, squawking delight.
“I kind of have a plan?” I say, although it ends up sounding more like a question. I step over to the canister and examine it closely, careful not to touch it. “These are the nanobots that are left,” I explain. Peter stands across from me so the canister is between us, and assesses it as I continue explaining. “Don’t touch them, though,” I say. “They’re volatile, and they might explode.”
“They might what?” he asks, stepping back so fast he almost trips. “And you put this thing on top of a residential building?”
My eyes go wide and I look over the edge of the roof to see if I can identify where we are. I can see a sign out front, now broken clean in half, that says Prospect Retirement Home.
I look up at Peter again and chuckle nervously.
“To be fair, she picked this place.”
He shrugs and sighs.
“Alright, how big of an explosion are we talking about?” he asks.
“No way to know till we try,” I say, looking up at him. He looks at me. “I think my web has antiseptic powers.”
“Woah,” says Peter. “So like, what? It’s flammable?”
“Not quite,” I chuckle. “Mixed with my DNA, it seems to disable the bots somehow? Ganke pointed it out. I webbed one of the birds in the face, and he seemed to… halfway start to un-transform?”
“So… you’re thinking,” analyzes Peter, “if we can figure out how to combine your web and these nanobots, we can release them and try to undo some of this?”
Suddenly, a flash of white, an explosion of pain across my face. I go flying backwards and the ground knocks the wind out of me. The sky is spinning, with stars. Stars! Which
I haven’t seen in forever because of the smog. I can smell blood.
“You’ll undo none of my masterpiece!” comes the familiar voice of Vulture. I peel myself up off the floor just enough to see Peter jumping up and leaping at Vulture.
“Thought I left you where you belong,” exclaims Peter, just as Vulture swipes his claws through Peter’s webbing. But Peter’s ready with another thwip as he sails through the air around Vulture.
Everything in my body is screaming at me to shut my eyes and hold my head, and wait for these stars I’m seeing to disappear. My head hurts. Everything hurts. For an old man, that Vulture guy has a mean right hook. I see flashes of red spandex and green metal, and even some yellow jetpack flames, and by the time I focus my vision on what’s happening, I hear Peter making choking sounds.
My eyes get huge as I register that Vulture is holding Peter by his neck, over the edge of the building. His feet dangle and he throws a desperate web at Vulture, but not before he can grab his wrist and redirect Peter’s web at… open air.
“Kiddo,” he croaks, as he claws at Vulture’s hands around his neck. “The… canis—”
“Oh, you mean this canister!” exclaims Vulture, turning and aiming his grappling hook at it. My pulse races in my throat but I force myself up, despite every bone in my body screaming for rest.
A guy who doesn’t give up.
“Enough, Vulture,” I say, rising to my full height and holding my arm up to him, aiming straight at him. I’m prepared to catch his hook with my web the minute he lets go of it.
“Isn’t it ironic, Spider-Man?” asks Vulture, throwing Peter across the roof. He lands on the floor with an oof, kicking up dust as he tumbles. “You bring your apprentice to his first rodeo,” he aims his second grappling hook in Peter’s direction and turns his evil grinning face back to me, “and I bring mine.”
I narrow my eyes and wish so much that I could tell him exactly what his “apprentice” did to help me get the canister here in the first place. But if there’s one thing I know I can’t do, it’s tell on Starling. The help she offered was possibly critical in saving the city. How could I punish her for that?
“Coincidental,” I say.
“Huh?” asks Vulture.
I glance from Vulture to Peter, and back to Vulture again, and wonder if what I said was… well… ridiculous.
“I, um…” I clear my throat and say it again with confidence. This is my choice of words, and I’m sticking to it. “I said it’s… coincidental. Not ironic. Irony is the expression of meaning by using opposite terminology. You mean… coincidental.”
Vulture stares at me with the look of someone equal parts insulted and mocked, but Peter chuckles. Vulture turns his glare to Peter.
“What?” asks Peter with a shrug. “Kid’s got a point.”
I smile in spite of myself. Vulture may be pissed, but at least my hero thought it was funny. A clicking sound rings from Vulture’s grappling hook as he jerks it toward me threateningly, before aiming it back at the canister.
“Shut up, both of you!” he hisses. “You kids think this is a game?! I’ve spent my life fighting, conniving, and clawing my way to victory, just to end up as somebody’s science experiment in a lab!”
Starling’s words surface in my head.
You were just going to let him waste away in Rykers for the rest of his life, weren’t you? Just left him to die without even getting the chance to fulfill his dying wish.
She said his dying wish was to be free. That’s what she thought. She thought all her grandfather wanted was to be out of prison and free to spread his wings and fly like a regular old retired guy. And he could’ve. We would’ve let him if he didn’t have a sentence to fulfill. But no, he had to bust out early, steal blueprints from S.H.I.E.L.D. and a statue from the Photojournalism Gallery, and then turn half the city into zombie birds.
And for what?
Revenge on a single company?
If we’re talking strictly efficiency here, it would’ve been faster to just attack their headquarters. But he dragged his granddaughter and her Crow recruits into this by lying to her, making her think he’s a helpless old man who needed her help making things right.
“Give it up, Vulture!” I yell. “Let these innocent people go!”
“These innocent people?” he challenges, poking out his chest in defiance. “These ‘innocent people’ got to go about their daily lives while I boiled alive in Rykers! Every day I sat by my window, my whole body screaming for reprieve, wanting peace. I just wanted peace!”
“Is this the peace you were hoping for?” I hiss. Now, I’m mad. I know this dude isn’t about to play victim here when all of this is his fault.
“It’s what they deserve,” he says, narrowing his eyes at me. He glances from me, to the canister, to me again. I hear a click, and it all goes into slow motion. His grappling hook launches through the air, and I have a split second to decide what to do.
I launch my ball of web, hoping it makes it to the canister first, but I can’t tell. All I see is green. All I feel is gravity pulling me through the air. Everything’s a haze, and when I finally open my eyes to see myself falling, and Peter falling a few feet away head-first, instinct kicks in.
I reach out and grab him around the waist with one arm, and web-sling with the other, latching onto the nearest rooftop terrace railing and flinging us up onto the nearest building.
I fall to my knees and collapse wherever we’ve landed.
“Miles?” comes Peter’s voice form somewhere in the haze. “Miles, you did it! Look!”
I force one of my eyes open and try to focus on something—anything—I can identify.
Everything is a hazy glow of darkness, faint orange scattered everywhere, and a looming lime green plant sprouting from the top of a building across the way, its fronds growing down, down, down. And then I realize—that’s no plant. It’s… is that… is that… a cloud?
“Look!” urges Peter again, pointing downward. This time, I follow his finger to the ground where I see the faint outline of thousands of bobbing, black-feathered creatures turning their beaked faces up to the sky just as the green smog settles over them, little by little.
They lift their wings.
They shed their feathers.
The gray fades from their now exposed hands, faces, backs, and heads, and melds back into the symphony of skin shades that makes New York… well… New York. I feel a drop or two of rain on my skin, and, alarmed, I look down and realize bits of my outfit are torn. My skin is just barely visible through tears in the gloves covering my hands… and the hoodie right across the front of my chest.
“Oh no,” I say.
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll get you all fixed up in no time,” says Peter. I look up at him. His mask is slashed a bit, just under his chin. We’ve both been through so much today. I’m tired.
I didn’t give up, Dad, I think, remembering how he looked when he walked up those steps. How certain he was that he was where he was supposed to be, doing what he was meant to do. And as hard as this job is, as much as it hurts…
Sometimes literally…
This. This? Is what I was meant to do.
I take a deep breath and feel my eyes welling with tears, and I throw my arms around Peter’s waist and rest my head on his chest. I feel his arms encircle me back, tightly, and he rests his chin on the top of my head.
“Ay, man,” I say, feeling the rain picking up and pelting both of us as we sit here on this rooftop together. “Thanks.”
I feel him nod.
I open my eyes and look down at everyone on the ground below. They scramble to find bits of clothing wherever they can. They drape themselves in blankets and pass around the clothing they can’t use. Children run through the streets looking frantically for their parents. One guy is wandering the street in shorts, clicking what looks like an electronic car key in search of his vehicle. A man is collecting papers off the ground and stuffing as many as he can back into what rema
ins of his news stall. A young girl shrieks in delight as her dog sprints out from behind a potted shrub on a porch and jumps into her arms, reunited at last. A man in the street with a blanket fastened around his waist cups his hands over his mouth and hollers, “David? David, where are you? David, it’s me! I’m okay!” before another man stumbles so fast out of a nearby apartment front door that he nearly falls down the front porch steps before falling into his arms in gratitude and relief. I smile as I recognize them as the couple from the beginning of this whole thing.
A young man kneels and scoops a toddler up into his arms, rocking side to side and caressing the back of his head.
I pull away and look up at Peter.
“These people still need our help.”
“That’s why we’re still here,” he nods with a smile and open arms.
“Wonder if JJ still thinks we should be a ‘regulated city-ordained service’ now,” I say.
Peter throws back his head and laughs.
“Pretty sure he’d rather have un-regulated help instead,” he says. “From anywhere he can get it.”
I laugh, and as Peter helps me to my feet, something catches my eye in the distance. The faintest outline of three figures, which are standing so still atop a nearby roof a few blocks away that at first I think they’re statues.
Eagle statues, maybe, but bipedal. And then the middle one moves, turns, expands her wings, and dives off, followed by the next, and then the third. And as they take off into the gray, stormy clouds and fade into the night, I wonder if Starling will ever trust her grandfather again. I wonder if she’ll really move back home, wherever home is. And I wonder if, maybe one day, she might use her strength and tenacity—I know firsthand what she’s capable of—for good.
“Let’s go,” says Peter, clapping his hand on my shoulder, “Spider-Man.”
“How’d I do?” I ask. He looks down at me in the rain and squeezes my arm.
“You saved the city, Miles,” he says. “I couldn’t have done this without you. You did your best.”
Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales Page 19