The web missed it's target .
Peter didn't think about it immediately. He was between buildings on 47th, midswing, and the arc just felt shorter than it should have been. He landed on the ledge of a parking structure and his knees bent deeper than expected, like he'd misjudged a step in the dark.
He stood up. Looked at his hands. Nothing wrong with the web. Nothing wrong with the anchor point.
He shot another line and kept moving.
The city was doing what it always did on a Tuesday afternoon ;loud horns, pigeons, the smell of fried food drifting up from a cart he never saw. Peter let the rhythm of it settle him. He was tired. Three days of bad sleep and two nights of patrol back to back and his body was starting to charge interest. Proprioception got unreliable when he ran low like this. He knew that.
He told himself that.
He crested the roof of a building on 49th and stopped to breathe, and that's when he saw the line in the sky.
It wasn't moving. It ran roughly across the sky from somewhere above Midtown, pale against the grey, and it didn't look like a contrail or a crack in clouds or anything he had onced encountered. It looked like something had pressed too hard from the other side.
Peter stood there a moment too long, just staring.
Then the building across the street wasn't the building across the street.
It lasted maybe a breath. Taller. Darker stone. Different windows. A silhouette that didn't belong to anything on this block or any block he'd swung past in six years of doing this. Then it snapped back to itself and the pigeon that had been on the ledge was gone and Peter's stomach had dropped somewhere below his knees.
He gripped the edge of the roof.
Okay. That happened.
The street below had gone strange. A stretch of asphalt maybe thirty feet long had doubled, two versions of it sitting on top of each other, one slightly more solid, the other pale and wrong, and then the pale one collapsed inward and vanished with a sound like something snapping under tension. The cars on that section were fine. Just repositioned. A cab was facing the wrong direction. Its driver got out, looked at the front of his vehicle, looked at the sky, and got back in without a word.
Peter didn't blame him.
He dropped to street level fast. People had stopped moving. Not all of them, but most. That particular stillness spreading through the crowd in a rather peculiar manner. A woman near the curb had grabbed the sleeve of a stranger. The stranger hadn't pulled away.
Get ahead of it. Peter started moving through the crowd, keeping low, keeping his voice easy. "Hey. Hey, it's fine. Everyone move to the sides of the street, let's get off the road, just give me a second..."
Nobody was listening to Spiderman. They were all looking up.
He looked up too.
The second skyline had appeared.
That was the only word he had for it. A skyline, overlaid on top of Manhattan like someone had placed a transparency over a photograph. Taller spires, different geometry. Older somehow, though he couldn't have understood why. It wavered at the edges, and through it he could still see his city underneath, and the two of them together made his eyes do something painful when he tried to focus.
Four seconds. Maybe five.
Then it was gone.
Peter stood in the middle of 47th Avenue with the sounds of the city coming back in pieces around him; someone crying, a car alarm, a kid asking his mother what that was happening, the mother not answering.Peter found he was gripping a parked car's roof hard enough to dent it.
He let go.
Okay, he thought. And then he couldn't finish the thought. He tried it again. Okay, so.
Nothing.
His communicator buzzed. He ignored it. There was a bus that had phased halfway into the sidewalk, its front end occupying the same space as a fire hydrant in a way that wasn't geometrically possible, and the passengers inside were making sounds he needed to be closer to. He moved towards the bus.
He got the doors open. Got people out. A teenager near the back asked if it was Hydra and Peter said probably not and the teenager looked personally offended that the answer wasn't better.
He worked for a while. Long enough for the immediate danger to quiet down to background noise. By the time he had everyone clear and the bus was just a weird structural problem for someone else to figure out, the sky had gone back to looking like a sky.
Almost.
If he didn't look directly at it, he could still see the line. Just at the edge of his vision, pale and thin and wrong, like a seam.
His communicator buzzed again. He checked it this time.
Fourteen missed calls. Five from the same number, unknown, which he didn't answer. The rest were automated emergency alerts ; dimensional event, multiple reports, treat as evacuation advisory, avoid...
He stopped reading.
Dimensional event. Like someone already had a name for it.
He looked back at the sky. The line was still there. He'd thought it was new when he first saw it, but standing here now, he wasn't sure. It could have been there for a while. It could have been there for days, thin enough to miss if you weren't looking from exactly the right angle at exactly the right moment.
The thought sat in him uncomfortably.
He swung up to the roof of a building on the north side of the street, high enough to see across several blocks, and looked out at the city. Everything looked mostly normal from up here. Traffic was snarling, people were clustered on sidewalks instead of moving through them, but the buildings were solid and the streets were staying in one place.
Except for a shadow moving across a rooftop to the northeast.
Peter watched it closely.
The rooftop it was crossing didn't belong to any building on that block. He'd swung past there maybe three nights ago. He knew the skyline there, or thought he did. That rooftop was lower than this, and wider, and the silhouette of the figure crossing it was wrong in a way he couldn't specify. Too deliberate. Moving like someone who knew exactly where they were going in a city that didn't match the one Peter was standing in.
He tracked it.
The figure dropped out of sight between two buildings. Peter waited for it. Nothing came back up.
He fired a web and went after it.