The old gym breathed. Chains sang a thin metal note every time the sandbag snapped back. Fluorescents buzzed like flies caught in glass. Chalk dust hung and turned in the stale air. Hawke's fists kept the count.
Left. Right. Short exhale. Hips square. Again.
He didn't speak numbers. Numbers stuck if you said them; they grew barbs and caught on thoughts. He let them pass like mile markers—glimpsed, gone. The wrap on his right hand had bled a line of rust down the thumb crease. Tape tugged, then eased when sweat darkened it. He chased clean contact, not power: two knuckles, right on the pale circle printed into the leather. When a wrist stacked wrong, the chain above changed pitch. He corrected and moved on.
Breath set the metronome. Four punches per breath, then six, then four again when the lungs complained. The room learned his rhythm and stopped being a room. It became an instrument he played with his hands.
Somewhere behind the padlocked equipment closet, a radio coughed out a weather report and died. From the rafters, a pigeon shifted its weight and dropped a gray feather like a lazy snowflake. The bag swung, came back, asked for more. He obliged.
At every clean hundred something inside him nudged—an almost-click under the noise. Not a voice. Not a graphic. The softest bead sliding on a wire. Yes. Continue.
Cosmo Training. The phrase had just been there one morning, as if a dream had smuggled it in while he slept. Naming it made it harder to flee from. Ten thousand a day. A thousand days. He didn't like the calendar math—too airy. He pictured stone instead. Tunneling. Chip, chip, chip. Not to escape, just to see if daylight existed.
Sweat stung his eye. He blinked without breaking cadence. When breath ran short, he shortened the arc and let the elbows work; when breath returned, he lengthened and let the shoulders talk. The last ten of a set weren't louder than the first; he treated them alike. Consistency stacked better than fireworks.
He stopped only to fix the carabiner some cheerleader had left in the wrong notch when they'd hung pep rally flags in here. The bag settled in front of him, fat pendulum returned to center. The clock over the bleachers said six-thirty, which meant seven-ten in the outside world. He'd have time to shower if he didn't mind the water going cold at the end. He preferred it cold at the end. A cold line told the body the page had turned.
He went again.
The door rasped and let in hallway air.
"Yo. He's always in here."
The voice skimmed along the varnished floor, shiny with its own reflection. Hawke kept his eyes forward. He knew voices the way mechanics knew engines. This one asked for attention the way a dog offered a paw.
"Maybe skip it," a quieter voice said. Automatic. Unhopeful.
Hawke caught the bag, palmed its swing to a stop, and only then turned.
Flash Thompson leaned on the doorframe like leaning had rules and he'd written them. Hoodie slung over one shoulder. Two satellites hung half a step back—boys who laughed when he laughed and went still when he breathed in. Peter Parker stood by a dented locker, hands lost in a backpack as if a new pocket might appear if he believed hard enough.
Flash clocked tape, sweat, target circle. A grin edged into place. "What is it tonight, Rocky? Dry run for the big fight?"
"Not Rocky," Hawke said, adjusting the chain like it needed him.
"Right, right." Flash snapped his fingers. "You're the guy who never talks."
"I just did."
One satellite snorted, then became intensely fascinated with his own shoelace. Flash laughed because he'd planned to. "See? You poke the bear, you get a growl. We should cut you in for halftime entertainment."
Peter's eyes flicked across, then away. He zipped his backpack and didn't leave. Flash's boys drifted wider, not a half-circle, just a line bent enough to mean territory.
Hawke slid the loose end of tape under itself and tightened; the cloth squeaked against scab. "Is there a sign-up sheet for your audience," he asked the room, "or is it first come, first laugh?"
Flash turned the grin toward him; it thinned. "That deadpan work for you long-term?"
"Long-term's a myth," Hawke said. "You only ever get right now."
Flash stepped like he was admiring posture. "Right now I got a bus to catch." He threw Peter a look that was less a look than a headline. "You too, Parker. Don't miss your life."
He left last—performers never go first—and the door sighed shut behind him.
Peter hovered, hands still finding nothing. "For the record," he said, not quite meeting Hawke's eyes, "I like Rocky. The first two. Third one's… we do not discuss the third."
"Then don't," Hawke said.
"That's the plan." Peter tried a smile that made it halfway and then folded. "You didn't have to—whatever that was. Thanks."
"For what?"
Peter gestured vaguely at the space Flash had filled. "Redistributing the headlines."
"I didn't write them." Hawke glanced at the exit. "Bus."
"Yeah," Peter said, and his voice did that soft, put-upon thing like a backpack that had learned to apologize. "Story of my life."
The gym exhaled. Hawke palmed the bag and felt a tiny flat spot in the lower left quadrant. He made a note—hit the opposite side more this week to balance the leather. He finished the set he'd paused not because he needed the number but because leaving a thing uncounted made his skin itch.
Showers fogged the mirrors into a version of him with no edges. Pipes clanged; water ran warm, then honest-cold. He pressed his palm to tile for a slow five-count, turned the handle off, and listened to the last hiss die like a snake deciding to sleep. He dressed in the same order he always did: clean T-shirt, hoodie, jeans with the left knee reinforced from the inside by ugly stitches that held anyway. Tape went into the side pocket. Bus card into the cracked plastic sleeve. Locker check—eyes, then hands. Move.
The hallway smelled like mop water and trophies. Posters peeled at the corners where last year's tape had given up. He killed the gym lights—two switches, second one half-hidden behind stacked bleachers—and waited for the hum to sink from a hive to a breath. Then he walked.
He finished the last dozen punches in the doorway, shadowboxing them into the air because numbers were numbers even if the bag was gone. Outside, the parking lot held the day's heat in low silver pockets along the asphalt. A gull yelled at something it didn't understand. The orange bus shouldered around the corner and sighed at the curb. Diesel breath fogged the evening.
Flash lived near the side mirror, telling a story with his hands. Laughter rose on cue. Peter kept three widths of human between himself and the performance, busy with nothing. Hawke drew a straight line through the space, not a challenge, not a retreat. He nodded at the driver out of habit.
"Card," the driver said, bored without malice.
Hawke tapped the cracked plastic to the reader. The machine thought about it and beeped like a small apology. He set one foot on the first step, hand to the metal rail. Skin stuck to humidity for a half second. Then something tugged.
No thunder. A different note—thin, dry—the sound of a blade drawn lightly across glass.
He looked up.
Above the jagged teeth of water towers and rooftops, where cloud had been becoming night, a diagonal seam had appeared as if a giant had made a careful incision and changed his mind about closing it. It wasn't bright like lightning. It was bright like the wrong layer in a picture—present but not belonging.
The door inhaled, impatient. Hawke's foot didn't move. The seam shivered. A hair-fine filament crawled along it from left to right—slow, deliberate—like someone testing a zipper. Where it passed, the cloud did not knit shut again.
Peter looked up too, face tilted, mouth forgetting to pretend. Flash didn't; he was busy harvesting laughs. The driver muttered at a sedan that cut too close to the bumper and only saw the seam as a faint reflection in his windshield glass.
Hawke's fingers tightened until the rail answered back. The smallest bead-click rolled under his skin—uninvited this time, not part of any count. It wasn't louder than before. It was simply other.
A second line budded from the first and ran at an angle, forming a long, narrow triangle of sky that wasn't sky. The edges glowed and went dull and glowed again like something beneath a thin skin trying to remember how to breathe.
He stepped backward off the bus without thinking about stepping, the way you avoid a wave that changes its mind mid-crest. One of Flash's satellites noticed and turned, laughter hitching. Conversations on the curb hiccuped and then tried to act normal.
"Storm front," someone said, confident. "Heat lightning."
The filament pulsed once. A sound like far metal peeled from deeper in the seam. The triangle widened a fraction. Dusk slid through it wrong, as if the light on that other side had missed a memo.
Hawke felt the urge to resume the count—ridiculous, automatic, like the body trying to write order over an uncooperative page. He loosened his grip on the rail, flexed the hand to make the tape creak, and set his feet as if a bag he couldn't see were about to swing.
Peter stepped to the curb, up beside him, as if proximity to another person could standardize reality. "Do you see—"
"Yes," Hawke said.
"What is it?"
"A seam," Hawke said, because naming the shape was safer than guessing the cause.
A breeze moved across the lot and came back carrying a smell that didn't have a name in his head—neither rain nor ozone nor burning—but the part of him that had spent a thousand evenings counting punches labeled it important. People began holding phones up in little rectangles. Flash finally looked skyward because people were looking skyward and he couldn't miss the chance to be in the middle of it.
"Whoa," he said, helpful.
Hawke watched the seam and nothing else. Somewhere, a siren started in the low distance, then another, staggered. The driver called something to the kids about getting on or getting out of the way and nobody listened properly because there was a drawing being made across the sky and it was halfway done.
The filament paused. For the length of a held breath, the whole scene went frame-still—the bus door, Peter's lifted chin, the gull's wing beat. Hawke heard his own inhale cross the dry place in his throat and wait.
Then the line jumped—like a pulse—once.