Tandy bit her nails again. I rolled my eyes. "You need to relax, Tandy." I took her hand in mine and squeezed. "It's going to be fine."
She looked at me and narrowed her eyes. "How do you know?"
I smiled and motioned to our blind lawyer, who was currently reading a document in Braille. "We have the devil's luck on our side."
Matt stopped and turned to me. "Does that make me the devil, then, Peter?"
"You certainly aren't any kind of angel," I smiled back before turning to Tandy and squeezing her hand again. "Relax. You'll be fine."
"I-I guess...it's just so soon," she replied. And she was right. It was only a week after Matt had taken on the case that we secured a court hearing, and another week after that found us here, sitting in the courthouse.
"Don't worry so much, Ms. Bowen," Matt said. "This case is a slam dunk. This trial is essentially a formality."
"R-right," she said, looking down, her hands shaking in mine.
I squeezed again. "Hey." She looked up. "We're right here with you, okay? Remember — you're not alone anymore. We're both right here."
Tandy nodded. "Yeah..."
"Mr. Osborn! Care to comment on the recent hearing?! Do you think the judge was fair?!"
"Mr. Osborn! Is it true your son is still in the hospital since Christmas morning?!"
"Mr. Osborn! Do you have anything to say to the people who blame you for the creation of the super villain known as Doctor Octopus?!"
I looked up and saw the courtroom to our far left emptying out as Norman Osborn himself emerged surrounded by his bodyguards and lawyers, who formed a wall to keep the cluster of reporters at bay. He looked furious as he marched past us without sparing a sideways glance.
"What happened to his case?" I asked Matt.
"He's losing," the Devil of Hell's Kitchen replied. "And badly. Everyone's blaming him for the actions of that maniac and the destruction caused during his little experiment."
I sighed. "Damn it..."
"Do you know him?" Tandy asked.
I nodded. "His son and I used to be best friends...a long time ago." I should visit Harry soon. The last time I had was on Christmas.
"What happened to him?" Tandy asked.
"He did something stupid," Matt replied, "and in response he lost everything. His company went into free fall — there are even talks of him losing it entirely soon."
Immediately all thoughts of Harry were replaced with the image of a madman in green. The Goblin. All of this — all of it — was because I hadn't been paying attention. I should have been watching more closely when Otto made his second attempt. It seemed destiny had a way of asserting itself regardless.
"Peter? Are you okay?" Tandy asked.
I smiled. "I'm fine. Hey — what do you say after this we go get some ice cream? I have a serious craving."
Tandy was slowly beginning to smile when a loud voice cut through the corridor. "TANDY BOWEN!" Tandy immediately flinched, recoiling from my touch.
Matt and I looked up. Approaching us from the direction of the courtroom were two people we hadn't expected to see again.
Tandy's mother and stepfather.
The woman looked a great deal like her daughter, only older and harder, with a more angular face and the kind of polished bearing that came from spending money deliberately. She wore an expensive white dress with a mink fur coat over it and pearl earrings and a matching necklace. Unlike Tandy's quiet, open nature, this woman looked permanently narrowed — eyes that found fault in everything they landed on.
The man beside her was Tandy's stepfather, Philip. Blonde, close-cropped, muscular, wearing a form-fitting suit and radiating anger. He had the rigid posture of someone with a military background, and from the marks I had seen on Tandy's body, I was fairly certain his anger didn't stay inside.
"Young lady, what the hell do you think you're doing?!" Philip demanded. "Getting a lawyer? Staging this farce of a case just to embarrass us?! Do you have any idea what your mother and I have had to put up with?!"
"Mr. and Mrs. Carlisle," Matt replied, stepping smoothly between the couple and Tandy and me. "Might I remind you that since custody of your child is currently in question, you are no longer permitted to approach her in such a manner. I would advise you to leave before this becomes a formal issue."
Philip's eyes narrowed and he drew a breath to respond when Tandy's mother, Melissa Carlisle, stepped forward. "Mr. Murdock, was it?"
Matt nodded. "Yes, ma'am."
"Mr. Murdock...I understand your firm is not terribly...well-funded." The woman reached into her purse and produced a checkbook. "My daughter is a fanciful girl. No doubt she has her own colorful ideas about how we treat her. I assure you — everything she has told you is a fabrication. I'm sure a man of your intelligence can see reason." She wrote out a significant number of zeros, tore the check free, and held it out toward Matt.
Tandy went rigid beside me. I could feel the fear radiating from her — the fear that Matt might accept.
He didn't. Not for one second.
Matt snorted. "Unfortunately, ma'am, I haven't been able to see anything for quite some time." He pressed the check back into her hands and turned away. "Come — we're leaving. Mr. and Mrs. Carlisle, we'll see you in court."
Tandy glanced back once as we walked away, fear written across her face as she watched her mother and stepfather simmering in their own contempt.
"Relax," I told her. "It'll be fine. You won't ever have to see them again."
---
An hour later:
Tandy's fear had melted away entirely by the time we stepped out of the courthouse. She threw her hands up into the air. "I'm free!"
The trial had lasted exactly as long as Matt had predicted — five minutes. Tandy's mother had come fully armed with an expensive attorney flown in from Washington D.C., billing at a thousand dollars an hour. Matt still dismantled him without breaking a sweat.
"It was a pleasure working with you, Ms. Bowen," Matt smiled as he reached for his walking stick.
"Please — call me Tandy!" She immediately threw herself at Matt and hugged him tightly. "Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!"
Matt chuckled. "It's really nothing."
Tandy stepped back and nodded. "Still. Thank you."
"If you want to thank anyone," Matt added with a chuckle, "it should be Peter. I doubt any of this would have happened without him."
"Oh, I know," Tandy grinned at me. "But he's already my hero. Now you're my hero too!"
I rolled my eyes. "So easily excitable. So — what exactly happens now?"
Matt sighed. "She'll be placed in temporary foster care while we locate her next of kin."
"My dad's brother, Michael Bowen, lives on the Upper East Side," Tandy offered. "I think he'd be happy to have me. He always liked me."
"Then why didn't you go to him in the first place?" Matt asked.
"Because he would have made me go back to my mom. He wouldn't have believed me if I told him what was really going on." Tandy looked down.
I took her hand once more. "Hey. I told you, didn't I? You don't have to be afraid anymore."
Tandy smiled, and this time it reached all the way to her eyes. "Yeah. You were right."
A government caseworker came and took Tandy away. Since she was now officially in the system, she couldn't continue staying with me. I wanted to argue, but Tandy wouldn't hear it. She said she was grateful for everything I had already done, and that any more would just be her taking advantage of us.
And just like that, Tandy Bowen drove out of my life.
It was an odd feeling. I honestly couldn't explain why I had cared so much — but the way the girl looked at me, that absolute trust in her eyes, it had made me want to try and make her life better in whatever way I could.
And with that settled, I could finally move forward. I was honestly looking forward to having my room back. But first — the Negative Zone.
---
That night:
I stood before the portal to the Negative Zone, the machine humming steadily as it charged. The portal and I were enclosed in a sealed room while Reed, Sue, and Johnny stood at the control terminal outside, monitoring the portal readings through the glass.
"Everything looks stable so far," Sue reported. "The portal is far more stable than the last time we went through. How did you two manage that?"
"Peter suggested establishing a filtering system in the portal array," Reed explained with a sigh. "Of course he did."
"Relax, Reed," Johnny patted him on the shoulder. "We're all in this together, right?"
Reed nodded. "Right..."
"Note the time and date of departure," I spoke into the mic. I was wearing a thermal multifunctional suit similar to what the FF used on their first jump.
"The time is 10:20 PM, the date is January thirtieth," Reed's voice came through clearly. "Are you okay in there, Peter?"
"Just peachy," I replied.
"I had a feeling you'd volunteer to go first," Johnny said.
"Right," I nodded. Out of everyone in this dimension I was the only one with real experience in the Negative Zone. Even Reed couldn't say the same.
"Why exactly are you doing this again?" Johnny asked.
"To go where no man has gone before?" I suggested.
"We've all been in the Negative Zone before, Peter," Reed pointed out.
"Right...then probably for all the gold," I replied with a shrug.
"There's gold in that world?!" Johnny gasped, his eyes lighting up.
"That's partly why I wanted to stabilize the portal in the first place. I'm working on something extraordinary and I need funding," I replied as I finished checking the suit's readings and strapped my bag of infinite storage onto my back.
"Peter, if you just needed more funding you could have asked us," Sue replied.
"Half a billion dollars," I replied.
"Oh hell no. Good luck."
Reed snorted. "Alright, Peter — opening the portal now." There was no loud bang or dramatic explosion. One moment the space was empty; the next, a portal simply existed. "Everything reads stable. You can proceed."
"Right." I walked through and into the Negative Zone once again.
This time it felt less daunting, and more quiet. Eerily quiet.
"Heading out now — I'll search for familiar landmarks," I spoke into the mic. "How long can you hold the portal open?"
"As the Ancient One specified, thirty minutes," Reed answered.
"Then no time to waste." I took off at a run, moving freely in the slightly lighter gravity.
I was in a field of green molten magma, the entire plain sloping downward into a pit roughly twenty feet deep. I took out a few sample vials and filled them with the green magma and several other materials I found nearby — no reason not to, this was more than just a resource run. I sealed the vials and stored them in a container clipped to my left thigh.
Curious, I peered down into the pit.
"What the hell?" At the bottom sat a hut. An actual, man-made hut, with a fire pit set before its entrance. I stared for a moment, genuinely disbelieving. Nothing was supposed to live here. Nothing. Except...Doom.
A spark of cold anger hit me. This was where he had survived when we sent him through the portal. He was supposed to have died. But he hadn't.
"Peter? Are you all right?" Sue asked.
"I'm fine," I leaped down. "I just found where Doom was living during his time in the Negative Zone." I landed before the hut and walked inside. The walls were carved floor to ceiling with mathematical equations — calculations on dimensional travel and portal construction.
"What?! Doom built something out there?!" Johnny asked.
"He had to stay somewhere," I muttered as I took out a phone and began photographing the calculations methodically. Who knew — maybe he had actually discovered something.
And then I saw it. Sanskrit writing on a stone tablet.
Carefully and cautiously I picked it up. Three solid inches of carved rock, covered in Sanskrit script. Spells. He had taught himself magic.
Doom truly was a genius unlike any other. He had taught himself to manipulate the dimensional energy around him through raw will and intellect alone. I had a long way to go, but acknowledging that only made me more aware of just how worthy an adversary he was.
I stored the tablets in my bag and walked out of the hut. I looked around the pit walls and found more carvings. I documented those as well, then climbed out and continued exploring.
Ten minutes later I found a familiar-looking stretch of plain — a large flat expanse I recognized from before. I approached the field, crouched, and pressed my hand to the surface. Then I drew my fist back and drove it into the ground.
CRACK!
The rock split apart. I pulled the chunks free and saw a glittering shine beneath the surface. I carefully removed my gloves, exposing my skin to the open air of the Negative Zone. There wasn't anything immediately harmful that I couldn't recover from, so I lowered my hand and pressed my palm to the metal in the earth, closing my eyes and reaching out.
I felt it. It went far deeper into the ground than I had expected — a massive deposit. I reached down with my power and pulled. Slowly, a large chunk of metal rose out of the earth in a rough oval shape roughly my own height.
BAMN!
It hit the ground with a heavy thud, thick as a rolled-up log. I stared at it, astonished at the size of it, at the way it glittered under the dim light.
"Peter! You have to get back to the portal — five minutes remaining! Hurry!" Sue's voice cut through my earpiece.
"Right." I pulled my glove back on, grabbed the pillar of metal, and lifted it with one arm — thank you, spider-strength. I held my bag of infinite storage open with the other hand and slid the pillar inside. Then I ran.
I reached the portal with a minute to spare. The moment I crossed back through, Reed and the others shut it down and came rushing in.
"Are you all right? Did anything happen?" Sue asked at once.
"I'm fine," I replied. I waited as Reed ran his monitoring equipment over my body, checking for foreign contaminants.
"Well?" I asked. "Am I clean?"
Reed nodded. "No harmful anomalies. You do carry trace radiation, but it should decay within seconds."
"Right." I took out the collected samples and handed them over. "First batch. Go nuts."
Reed's expression lit up like a man who had just been handed Christmas early. "Don't worry," he said. "I will."
"Sis, Reed's starting to scare me a little," Johnny whispered.
Sue chuckled. "Yeah. Don't worry, I'll protect you." She then turned to me. "Did you get what you needed?"
I nodded. "You bet."
After the residual radiation cleared I was released from the sealed room. I headed straight to my lab with Johnny and Sue in tow — Reed had elected to stay behind and start analyzing the magma samples immediately.
I opened my bag of infinite storage and removed the enormous slab of rock and metal, placing it on the examination table in the center of my lab.
"Wow," Johnny whispered, staring at the thing. "It kind of looks like a giant rock turd."
I blinked and looked back at it. "Damn it. Why didn't I think of that."
"Maybe because you're starting to mature?" Sue suggested with a weary eye roll.
"Yeah...no," I shrugged. "Now then — let's crack this rock turd open, shall we?"
Sue sighed. "I work with children."
Johnny grabbed a hammer and chisel. Sue took a drill. I extended a single stinger on each hand. I had the most indestructible metal in the known universe attached to my hands — there was absolutely no reason not to use it.
Johnny started at the base while Sue and I worked from the top, cutting and drilling the outer rock into smaller, more manageable pieces.
I was just about to cut into the inner section where it glittered like gold when Sue called out, "you both need to see this."
We stopped and moved to her side. Before her was a cracked-open section of rock, and inside it sat a chunk of perfectly transparent crystal — solid, natural, larger than my finger.
A diamond.
"Yeah," Johnny grinned. "We're rich."
---
A week passed quickly. I had made daily trips into the Negative Zone, which meant Reed had an ever-growing supply of samples to analyze and the rest of us had more precious metals to extract and sell.
Sue had gotten in contact with several dealers in rare materials who offered excellent prices. Gold and diamonds weren't the only things we recovered — we also found platinum and silver, though the former was rare and the latter sold at lower margins.
I used my powers to compress and reshape the gold into clean bars. My claws helped cut the diamonds down to manageable sizes, since we couldn't exactly bring oversized stones to market without raising questions.
So far the total came to eighty million dollars. Sue allocated half for the Baxter Foundation's operating funds; the other half I kept for my own project. A long way still from the half billion I ultimately needed — but where there was a will, there was a way.
---
On Monday of the new week I found myself back in my personal purgatory, Midtown High. Liz and MJ were chatting beside me at the lockers. I largely tuned them out — until I started hearing the whispers.
"Check out the new girl."
"Who the hell is she?"
"Oh my God," Liz gasped. "Tandy?!"
That got my attention. I looked up from my locker. Sure enough — there she was. Tandy Bowen. Hadn't I just told myself I wouldn't be seeing her again?
"Tandy?" I asked, surprised. "What are you doing here?"
The girl smiled at me. "Well, I talked to my uncle and he agreed — since I already had friends here, Midtown High would probably be the best fit for me."
"What?! Oh my God, this is perfect!" Liz cried out as she and MJ immediately grabbed Tandy and began steering her around the hallways. Tandy kept up with their rapid-fire questions, but before she was fully swept away she turned around and gave me a wink.
I snorted. "Looks like things are going to get interesting again."
---
That night:
I stood on a rooftop overlooking the alley below. This was the back exit of the Street Rats' last remaining active hideout. Two teenagers were outside on guard duty, and I narrowed my eyes and listened.
"Man, I hate this," the first one said. "They don't respect us at all. Otherwise we'd be in there with them, not standing out here in the cold."
The second one shrugged. "It is what it is."
"Man, you're spineless. If you don't grow a backbone they're going to keep rolling right over you."
"I don't care," the second replied. "I don't care about respect. I just need the money."
"Why are you so desperate for cash?"
The second one was quiet for a long moment before he answered in barely a whisper. "My mama. She's sick."
I felt a pang at that. What I was about to do didn't sit entirely comfortably. But it had to be done.
"Sexy — trigger the first alarm inside," I murmured. Immediately the alarm inside the hideout blared. The people inside would be scrambling to evacuate, and would quickly discover that the front entrance was blocked — I had slipped around earlier and sealed it with concrete webbing.
They would realise shortly that their only exit was the back. Which meant they were coming outside in three...two...one.
The back door burst open. The members of the Street Rats gang poured out in a wave of confusion and noise. Perfect. I took out five spider-shurikens and threw them forward, taking out every lamp post in the alley simultaneously.
"What the hell?!"
I dropped into the crowd and began working — light taps and controlled strikes, each one landing with the force of a crowbar to an ordinary person. They went down steadily, one by one.
"Someone get a light!" a large man bellowed as he drew his gun.
Thwip!
I snagged the gun with a web line and flung it over my shoulder before launching myself forward and driving a kick into his gut that sent him flying back into three others, the whole group landing in a heap against the trash cans.
"I've got it!" someone finally dug their phone out and turned on the torch, sweeping it frantically around the alley. I was already behind him.
"Hey!" I called out cheerfully. He spun and leveled his gun at me. Too slow. I cracked him across the jaw before he could fire, sending him skidding into a pile of his friends.
I looked around. The alley was carpeted with groaning bodies. Five minutes, forty people. Not bad.
I quickly webbed them all and called it in. Ten minutes later five police cruisers arrived and began loading the criminals in one by one. I watched from the rooftop across the street. Hopefully the drug supply these men were running would at least slow down.
I sighed as I looked out at the city. There had been so much happening lately — magic lessons, alternate dimensions, the Sinister Six, a faked terrorist threat against the President, and then the whole situation with Tandy. Honestly, I had barely had time to patrol properly. There was always something else demanding attention. But now, maybe, I was finally free to focus on what New York actually needed.
The real question was: why did crime still exist here at all?
Genuinely — it was an honest question. After alien invasions, dimensional portals, gods walking the streets — how were the criminals still so convinced they were the worst thing this city had to deal with?
That kid talking about his sick mother had gotten to me. It was sympathetic, but it didn't justify poisoning other people's children. Still — it made something click into place.
The reason crime was still rampant was because there was a need not being met.
The Mafia had formed in Italy because the people couldn't rely on the government for protection — so they built their own. Same story here. People felt insecure, left behind, ignored. That was why crime had actually increased after the world found out aliens existed. Fear was a growth accelerant.
If I were a narcissist like Otto Octavius in his Superior Spider-Man phase, I might believe the answer was to beat everyone bloody and deploy surveillance drones to blanket the city in a permanent police state. Big Brother with a mask.
But that was treating the symptom, not the disease. A temporary measure at best. At worst, the people would grow to despise you and call you a dictator — which was exactly what happened to the so-called Superior Spider-Man.
So: what was the disease? It could be any number of things — poverty, lack of public investment, institutional neglect. Any of those could drive a street kid up through the ranks of organized crime. But what kept those structures in place?
Only one answer. Politicians.
I knew how that sounded. But if you thought it through it made sense. Nick Daves — the man Felicia and I had caught on tape actively facilitating criminal operations — he was corrupt and everyone knew it. He fed the growth of organized crime and stole from public funds. How many more were there like him?
If the heads of the system were at fault...then maybe it was time to change the heads. Go after the ones who kept the criminals in business. Remove the corrupt, and the criminal networks would have nowhere left to shelter.
But if I went that route, I would become a pariah. Right now the city acknowledged Spider-Man as its hero. Politicians who resented my presence kept their mouths shut because they knew the public would turn on anyone who openly came after me. But if I started going after elected officials...I would be a criminal in every sense. A vigilante targeting the government itself.
Fine. I hadn't started this to be popular. I was a criminal in the technical sense already. It was time to start making actual change.
Starting with mapping out who the real players in this city were. Which was going to require surveillance. A lot of it. Sitting on rooftops and in alleyways watching boring people do boring things instead of swinging around stopping muggings.
God damn it. I hated this already.
---
A few days later:
I groaned and slammed my head on the cafeteria table. "I hate this."
"What are you complaining about?" MJ glared as she sorted through a stack of notes. "You probably already know all of it. You're not the one who might have to repeat the year."
I sighed. "Yeah, I know. It's still a pain." I looked at the mathematics textbook in front of me — AP level for me, standard for everyone else. Either way, there was a very important exam today.
"Hey, Parker — what's this?" Flash slid his notes toward me and pointed at a symbol.
I raised an eyebrow. "It's an 'i'."
"I know that! What does it mean?!"
"It means the number is imaginary," I sighed at his blank expression, then began to explain it properly. By the time Flash was satisfied, Mark had appeared with a few questions of his own.
I ended up spending most of lunch teaching the rest of them. Not that I really minded — as MJ pointed out, I was probably going to pass regardless.
"So, Peter," Tandy asked, sounding slightly nervous. "Are you doing anything this weekend?"
I raised an eyebrow. Technically yes, but I didn't think surveilling the District Attorney's office constituted a social engagement. "I might have some work at the Baxter Foundation. We're in the middle of something significant. Why do you ask?"
Tandy looked down quickly. "N-no reason, forget it." I narrowed my eyes. I caught her pheromones — disappointment, self-directed frustration, and something else. Oh.
I turned to MJ and raised an eyebrow. She rolled her eyes and scribbled something in her notebook before nudging it toward me. 'She's into you. She wants to ask you out for Valentine's Day.'
My eyes widened. I quickly wrote back: 'Valentine's Day?! When?!'
MJ groaned and scrawled: 'A week from Sunday. You work too hard. Both as Peter and Spider—' she immediately scratched that last word out. Good instincts.
I sighed and wrote: 'I don't have a choice. Important things coming up.'
MJ glared: 'Like what?'
'Secret,' I wrote back with a smile. She groaned again.
I was about to add something else when my spider-sense went off. Hard. It was jarring — almost painful. I felt my claws beginning to deploy and jammed my hands beneath the table, trying to keep it controlled. My heart rate spiked. Something was wrong, something was very—
"Hey, you guys — what's up?"
I turned. Standing behind me was Harry Osborn, giving everyone his best carefree smile. And just like that, the spider-sense cut off entirely. I stared.
"H-Harry?" I said.
He smiled. "Hey, Pete. Long time no see."
I didn't know what to say. But Flash did. "Harry! You're back!"
The table immediately erupted. Everyone except Tandy and me shot to their feet, surrounding him. More students arrived from nearby tables, drawn in by the commotion, and soon Harry was at the center of a small crowd, nodding and laughing through it all.
I couldn't process it — and more importantly, I couldn't explain why Harry Osborn had just triggered my spider-sense.
"Peter? Who is that?" Tandy asked quietly.
"A...friend," I replied, getting to my feet carefully and walking over. Harry noticed me coming and cleared a path without being asked. "Hey, Harry. You're back."
Harry smiled broadly. "I am. And—" he reached behind him and produced a small box wrapped in red paper with a green ribbon — "sorry this is a little late."
I blinked. "What are you talking about?"
"Your Christmas present," Harry said as he tossed it to me. I caught it. "You already gave me mine, so I figured better late than never."
I slowly removed the wrapping. Inside was a box set of the first season of *The Universe*, a science series the original Peter Parker had loved. And it was signed. Neil deGrasse Tyson.
I looked up at him. He smirked. "Come on. You're the only person alive who'd give me *The Mask of Zorro* for Christmas. I figured it was only fair — especially since it was the only gift I got this year."
I looked at his face. He was healthy. More than healthy. He looked like he was ready to compete in the Olympics. Taller, broader, fuller. Something was wrong.
"Harry...how are you standing?" I asked. "Last time I visited, you—"
"—Were in a coma, I know," Harry grinned and shrugged. "But I got better. Thanks for visiting, Pete. It meant a lot."
"He's back, people!" Flash crowed, throwing an arm around Harry. "Come on, man — you've got to tell us everything!"
Everyone sat back down. More people gathered as Harry recounted waking up a week ago and undergoing intensive physical therapy, his father having him transferred to a specialist facility in Switzerland before he recovered enough to come home.
And while he talked, my mind was running hard.
Harry couldn't have improved this dramatically in such a short time. That kind of physical transformation didn't happen naturally — not even with the best medical care available. But I could recover that fast. I could, because I had...powers. Enhanced biology.
An Osborn getting badly hurt. A mysterious recovery. A dramatic physical transformation. Norman Osborn's desperation in trying to save his son. And the Green Fields project — a serum shelved after five years of failed trials.
Oh no.
Norman Osborn must have injected Harry with the Green Goblin formula to accelerate his recovery. That was why my spider-sense had fired. Because Harry Osborn was now a ticking time bomb.
"Peter?" Harry asked suddenly. "Are you all right? You look like you've seen a ghost."
I blinked. "Ah — no, I'm fine. Glad you're back, Harry."
Harry grinned. "Me too." He looked to his side and his eyes landed on Tandy. "Oh — and who's this? I don't think I've seen you before. What's your name?"
"T-Tandy," she replied, nervous but managing a smile.
"Great to meet you, Tandy. I'm Harry. Are you new here?"
"Y-yes, I am."
"Well, this is the best school in the world — especially with people like Peter around," Harry said, turning to me with a wink.
I felt fear settle into me. Not for myself. For Tandy. Harry had already clocked her.
This was very bad.
---
School ended. I went to my locker to grab my things and leave, but MJ, Liz, and Tandy cut me off before I reached the door.
"Hey, Peter — the group is throwing a little welcome-back thing for Harry at the café down the street. You coming?" MJ asked.
"Ah...no, I...I have something to do."
"Like what?" Liz asked. "What could be so important that you can't stay and celebrate a friend getting out of hospital?"
"Something important," I said, sharper than I intended. I slammed the locker shut. "Call me if something comes up."
I walked away. My enhanced hearing picked up the conversation behind me as I went. "What's wrong with Peter?" Tandy asked.
"Who knows," Liz snorted. "Come on, girl — let's go rally the others. And maybe on the way we can work on helping you grow the nerve to ask him out."
"Liz!"
So she did have feelings for me. Wonderful. One more problem I didn't have a solution to.
I slipped into an alley, changed quickly, and swung out, heading straight for Oscorp. The tower loomed against the skyline as I approached and found the ventilation entry point I had mapped earlier. I crawled through the ducts using the building's schematics that Sexy had pulled from City Hall records, located the secure server room, and dropped in.
I plugged Sexy into the main terminal. "Find everything you can about a serum with performance-enhancing or regenerative properties — something analogous to the super-soldier formula. Search for anything tagged with the keywords 'Green' and 'Goblin'."
"On it, Spider," Sexy replied. After a pause: "I have one result. It's minimal — a single file. The rest has been completely wiped from the servers. I can't even trace the IP that did it."
"Display the file," I ordered. I held up my SA and swiped through it quickly, reading as fast as I could.
It was a basic project closure report — the Green Fields project being formally shelved after five years of failed clinical trials. The project code was right there in the header.
There was no doubt left in my mind. This was the Green Goblin serum. Which meant Norman had used it on Harry.
Damn it, Norman. I can't believe you went this far.
I downloaded the file, unplugged Sexy, and got out the same way I had come in. I swung straight back to the café and landed on the roof, changed out of costume, dropped down into the alley, and walked inside.
My friends were clustered near the back, talking loudly and happily.
"Peter?" Tandy spotted me first.
"Hey — look who finally turned up!" Harry laughed.
"Peter? I thought you had something to do?" MJ asked, confused.
I looked at all of them. And I realized — what would I even say? Harry Osborn is going to become a monster and kill us all? No. I had no proof strong enough for that. What I did have was the ability to watch.
I smiled. "I decided this was more important." I sat down next to Tandy, one arm resting across the back of the couch behind her in a way that was casual but deliberate, while the other hand stayed hidden beneath the table.
Harry smiled and clapped his hands together. "Now this is what I'm talking about. So — Tandy, how did you end up in our little circle?"
While Tandy, Liz, and MJ told the story, I kept my eyes on Harry.
He won't hurt my friends. Not now. Not ever.
---
That night:
After the gathering broke up, Flash pushed for clubs and Harry declined, citing his ongoing recovery. Which alone told me something — Harry Osborn turning down a night out was not normal behavior.
I followed him from the rooftops in costume, tracking him to his penthouse. From the roof of the building opposite, I watched through his window.
Harry entered his home and moved west through the apartment. I swung over, ducked behind an AC unit on the adjacent wall, and watched as he entered his father's study. Norman was already waiting.
They were too far for even my enhanced hearing to catch clearly. I needed to get closer. I swung to the building below their window and pressed myself against the wall directly beneath it. From there I could extend my senses enough to pick up the words, though the glass muffled them.
"—They were happy to see me — Peter — confused. Do you — I need more," Harry said.
"Right here, son. Make sure you — timely manner — recovery is still ongoing," Norman replied.
I looked up and peered through the bottom edge of the window frame.
And there it was. Norman was holding out a vial of green liquid to his son.
If there had been any doubt remaining in my mind, it was gone the moment Harry took the vial, popped it open, and drained it in a single swallow.