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“There he is!”
The waters in the river jostled their boat, but Yuri couldn’t feel anything beyond the anxious pounding of her heartbeat. She lost her footing for a moment as the officer swung the patrol boat around in the direction she’d pointed and stood straight again as the engine rumbled up to speed.
She was sure she’d seen the flash of red, bringing the uneasy comparison to a pool of blood drifting in the river’s current. She leaned forward over the edge and stumbled a bit as a choppy wave struck them.
“Where, Captain?” asked the uniform directing the spotlight mounted on top of the boat’s cockpit.
Yuri didn’t answer at first; she was shining her own flashlight, zigzagging its beam across the surface. Then: “There! Thirty feet!”
The helmsman pushed them forward in short bursts, not wanting to lose sight of the figure floating in the middle of the darkness or risk bumping him with their hull. The NYPD harbor patrol were experts, and Yuri trusted them to help her with her mission. Right now the only thing she cared about was getting to her partner. Damn the Raft, damn the escapees: let Spider-Man be alive.
She let the boat swing heavy around and waited as the spotlight officer focused its blinding beam on his red outline, bobbing bonelessly in their craft’s wake. She leaned out, farther than was wise, to grab his wrist with one hand. One of her men grunted a sound of caution, but they needn’t have worried; Yuri knew what she was doing. She always had a plan, and she always found her targets. She dragged Spider-Man’s body through the water, startled by his lack of response. She’d thought he’d at least be semi-conscious, enough to crack a weak, stupid joke as she pulled him from the river.
Her uniformed patrolman joined her at the boat’s side and reached out for his own handful, but the water and his skintight suit made it impossible. He had to wait for Yuri to get him half-out on her own, struggling with his sudden heft as the weight displacement from the water made him that much heavier. His masked head lolled backwards, and an icepick went through her gut.
“Is he breathing?” asked the uniform quietly, reverently. He was one of the good ones.
“Get him up,” Yuri said, her teeth sharp on the order. They heaved, hoed, and gave one final yank that got the superhero out of the river and splayed backwards onto Yuri’s chest as she went to her bottom, holding him to her. She rolled, holding his head, and lay him on the deck.
“To Bellevue,” she said next, directing her helm officer.
“But-”
“Now!”
“Yes, ma’am.” He pulled the boat around and headed south down the East River, skirting the many other NYPD harbor boats that were converging on the scene of chaos, going in the opposite direction. Yuri had gone out alone with only these two men after recovering from the helicopter crash, but the entire force knew by now that Spider-Man had been on scene. There was too much carnage with the escapees to ignore. The city itself would be quiet tonight, holding bated breath while it waited for the sun to rise and show the true catastrophe of what had happened here.
The other officer had his hands on Spider-Man’s chest, as if asking for permission to begin CPR. Yuri pushed them aside and slipped two fingers under the invisible seam of the mask, where she’d seen him pull it up to eat a half a sandwich she had offered once. She remembered the terror she’d felt when she saw the smooth, baby chin, the quick smile when he laughed at one of his own jokes. A child, she’d thought, he’s just a kid.
His heart was beating, but weaker than she wanted. “C’mon,” she whispered, a hair above sound. “He’s alive,” she said next, to the officer, who sat on his knees and stared down at the hero. They were probably the same age, she realized dimly.
“We’re almost there, Captain,” called the helmsmen. “Should I radio in a call?”
“No radios!” Yuri snarled. “Like I said before. There are ears listening.”
No, she would walk him into the emergency room herself. No cameras, no bystanders, no witnesses. Sable International’s priority target was going underground for a while.
When they docked at a small marina along the long boulevard of FDR Drive, Yuri ordered the two officers to help her. They wrapped Spider-Man’s lanky, loose-limbed frame in a woolen blanket used to warm water rescue victims, then hauled him from the deck of the boat onto the wooden dock like he was a rolled rug. The hospital was across the street – this would be slow going.
A police car tore down the road, its lights and sirens screaming. It was past midnight now, with fewer cars on the road, but the ruckus at Rykers and the Raft had caught attention. People would be at their windows, muttering into phones, furiously typing at their keyboards. They needed Spider-Man back on the street.
Yuri swallowed the taste of bile that burned the back of her throat then looked across the wide boulevard to the hospital. He would be safe there, to heal. She knew he would be up sooner rather than later – she’d seen him take baseball bats to the skull and come back swinging.
“Captain,” said the younger officer, who was helping her side-by-side with his heavy torso, hefting the man’s weight like they were a couple of furniture movers. He jerked his head across the street. Yuri looked away from the crossing light and into the campus of the hospital.
A Sable APC was parked outside, with two masked goons standing at weapons-ready. She heard the distant crackle of their radios, their muffled voices.
“Back, back, back,” she hissed, wanting to get out of the light of the crosswalk, away from the openness of the sidewalks. The trio shuffled backwards, as awkward as ever, back down the sloping ramp, then lowered their cargo down to catch their breath.
“Where to now?” asked the older officer. His steel eyes were hard with concern. She would have to remember commendations.
“I need a cab.”
If they had questions, they didn’t ask. If they thought she was insane, they didn’t argue. Both went back up to street level and had a yellow cab idling in the bike lane in moments. They helped her carry the fallen hero once more, into the back of the cab where he slumped against the door, wrapped like an old woman. Yuri leaned in and adjusted the blanket, covering his mask, and settled into the seat beside him. She met the eyes of the cabbie in the rearview mirror and held up her golden badge. His gaze flicked away. Before she closed her door, she looked up at the two officers standing there, obviously confused. They had probably thought they were going with her to continue the adventure.
“I’m going to lay low,” she said quietly to them, involving them in the final act for closure. “Thank you for what you’ve done tonight. I don’t have to remind you to… be discreet. There are more enemies out here than just these prisoners.”
They both nodded, looking stoic and grim. They were proud of what they had accomplished. Yuri was proud to have them on her force.
“If you need to, call me on my private cell,” she said, slipping the older one a card from her pocket. She slammed the door and gave the cabbie her address.
The drive was long. Several streets were closed with strobing red and blue lights, her peers attempting to cordon off escapees, herd them back in from the chaos. Several times the cabbie had to pull a grumpy U-ey, cursing in Hindi.
Three blocks from her street, the wrapped figure beside her moaned and moved. Yuri’s hand shot out to fix the draped fabric around his head. “Stay still,” she muttered, leaning into him. He still appeared to be out of it and didn’t reply, though she could practically hear his voice cracking a comment back at her.
When they parked on the side of the road in front of her building, Yuri leaned forward with three twenties between her fingers. “For the trouble,” she said. Her voice was not kind when she said it, and the cabbie nodded, looking at her in the rearview mirror again.
She got out from her side and went around the back to pull open the door, bracing the hero as he slumped out.
“Do you want help?” asked the cabbie, rolling down his window.
“No,” Yuri said. She pulled Spider-Man out and up, her arms beneath his armpits, his head against her shoulder, an adult-sized toddler. The cloth fell away from his legs and revealed a red and blue boot, webbing design up the calf. She twirled like a dancer, jerking the blanket back around, and stood for a moment with the hero in her arms.
The cabbie pulled away from the sidewalk and went down her quiet street. Yuri panted for a second, bracing herself, then walked up the stoop to her building’s door, dragging the unconscious man’s feet against the steps.
“You had to make this as difficult as possible,” Yuri grunted, digging one-handed in her pocket for her keys. At least he’s not dead, she thought next, immediately sobering.
She almost wept for joy when she got him into the elevator and the doors closed – it had been closed for maintenance on and off for weeks and would go down without notice, sometimes when you were already inside. But the lift hummed, the metal box moved, and the doors opened to her hallway, quiet and dimly lit.
Her door was second on the left. She got this one open, brought her charge through the doorway, and dropped him as carefully as she could onto her couch in what felt like a blink of an eye, compared to the length of the night already. She pulled the blanket from around him and tucked it around his waist and legs, then checked his pulse again.
“Spider-Man,” she murmured. She had never wanted to hear his voice more than in that moment. “Spider-Man, I need you to wake up. Tell me you’re okay.”
He was breathing, but it sounded shallow, pained. Several ribs were probably broken. What on earth had happened to him?
She went to the kitchen and filled a glass with water. When she returned to his side, she reached out and very gently peeled his mask upwards to just above his nose. His mouth was bloody and already bruising. He’d taken a beating, that’s for sure.
“I have water,” she said, holding the glass to his beestung lips. She tipped it a centimeter at a time, wetting his mouth, then let a small sip fall onto his tongue. His breathing stopped, choked, but he swallowed it. She repeated this twice, then set the glass on the table.
In her bathroom, she found ibuprofen and nothing else. She didn’t stockpile medicine the way some people did, preparing for any emergency. Who in their right mind entertained the idea of maybe someday hosting a severely injured superhero on their couch?
She returned with the bottle and found him moving. “Spider-Man!” she cried softly, not wanting to wake the neighbors. “Can you hear me?”
His head was rolling, his mouth working. He made a few soft mewls of pain and then lay still again.
“Damn it,” she breathed. She put two ibuprofen on her cheap coffee table, crushed them with the bottom of the bottle, and sprinkled the dust into the water. “I need you to drink,” she said. “I don’t know what else to do, so you have to drink this.”
She tipped a large gulp into his mouth. He spluttered this time, splashing a mouthful back onto his neck and chest, and his mouth opened.
“…Yuri?”
“Oh, thank god,” she said, closing her eyes. “You’re safe,” she continued immediately. “You’re in my apartment.”
“And here I am… with no housewarming… gift.”
“Shut up,” she exhaled on an exasperated chuckle. “I tried to get you to a hospital, but Sable forces were stationed outside.”
“Good thinking.” His insect eyes in the mask moved a bit, surveying the lay of the land inside her apartment. His chest rose and fell in shorter breaths; now that he was conscious, breathing was all the more painful. “You need… art on your walls.”
“I’ll take interior decorating tips from you later,” she said, rolling her eyes. “What happened inside the Raft?”
Spider-Man turned his head into the back of the couch and his eyes seemed to close. He made a few small grunts of pain. Reliving it was unpleasant. Finally, he spoke in more of that halting pace: “Villains… my enemies… ganged up. Six against one.”
“Who?” Yuri leaned forward. She knew she would have to call this part in. If superpowered villains were among escapees from Rykers and the Raft, she would have to assemble NYPD task forces. Sable would almost certainly involve herself and her crew.
“Rhino. Scorpion. Li. Vulture. Electro.” He made another noise, this one almost like a sob.
Yuri put a whole painkiller on his tongue and helped him swallow a gulp of water, feeling absurdly like a mother with a feverish son in bed. Something uneasy prickled across her skin. “That’s only five. Who was the sixth?”
Spider-Man moaned, turned his head away. He reached up with one battle-damaged hand and pulled the mask back down, hiding his face again. He moved slow, like a hospital patient. She worried he had internal bleeding and would die quietly on her couch in the night.
“Spider-Man,” she murmured.
“I don’t… I’ve never faced him before.”
“What was his, you know, deal? Give me a description I can put out.”
He began to cough, his body wracked with spasms as he flinched after each. She put her arms out to hold his shoulders, though she knew the touch was more for her than him.
“You need to go to a hospital,” she said.
“Just rest,” he sighed. His eyes closed.
“Spider-Man! You might have a concussion. Don’t go to sleep.”
He chuckled weakly. “That’s actually… false. You’re supposed to sleep after… traumatic brain injury. Helps heal.”
“Tell me about the sixth man.”
He didn’t answer for several heartbeats. Then: “Arms. Robotic. Coming out of his back.”
The visual was absurd, but Yuri knew better than to question it or him. Stranger things had come out of this city, after all.
“I failed, Yuri,” he whispered, startling her. His voice was thick with blood and emotion.
“Not yet, you haven’t.” She leaned forward, cupping the roundness of one shoulder. “Listen to me. Not yet. We still have a chance. I know we can save the city.”
“It’s not… the city I was talking about.” His voice faded.
“Just rest,” she said. She hesitated, then put her hand on his head, near his ear.
After a few moments, he was either asleep or unconscious from the shock. Maybe there was no difference in the two. Yuri left him and grabbed her radio from its dock. She kept work with her at home and had been reprimanded for it more than once, but she’d never returned it. She dialed into her Chinatown precinct frequency and spoke to the dispatcher quickly, relaying as much information as she knew. She asked for an update and was told that Rykers had fallen, with an 87% escape rate. Raft prisoners had been contained – the lesser inmates had been rounded up in the water or from the nooks and crannies of the structure. Only the superpowered five who had regained use of their suits and equipment had evaded capture.
“There’s a sixth, unknown person,” Yuri said. “Unknown description except for robotic arms.”
The dispatcher asked her to repeat it. Yuri told her everything she knew, omitting only the source of her information. When she hung up, she turned back to the figure on her couch, lying folded and feeble among the woolen blanket. He looked very small.
Yuri turned the lights off and let the ambient city light come into the room. She slept restlessly, curled in the armchair beside the couch, waking at every cough or moan that came from her partner. She forced another ibuprofen on him after two hours, after she checked his pulse on his neck and felt the burn of fever. Maybe his resting temperature was higher than normal. Maybe that meant he was healing. Maybe that meant he was beyond help.
Groggy, disoriented, Yuri woke suddenly from her most recent bout of catnap, unsure why she had woken. The acid-green of her digital watch readout burned 4:23 into her eyes when she checked it. She looked over at Spider-Man, saw that he hadn’t moved, heard that he was still breathing.
The pounding knock at the door repeated, the bottom of an angry fist against the cheap wood. Yuri stood, flexed her calves to regain sensation in them, and hobbled to her door without opening it. “Who is it?”
“Open the door, Captain Watanabe.”
“What do you want, Sable?”
“I said open the door!”
“And I asked what do you want?”
“I will not hesitate to kick the door down.”
Yuri knew she meant it. She opened the door with the security latch still attached. Silver Sablinova glared at her from the narrow opening. Two goons flanked behind her, and Yuri felt a momentary rush of smug superiority that the mercenary wasn’t brave enough to confront her on her own.
“What do you want?” Yuri repeated, forcing her voice to be even.
“We have reason to believe that you’re harboring the fugitive Spider-Man.”
“I haven’t seen him since we crashed into the Raft.”
Sable scowled at her. She would have a pretty face if she tried smiling. “He was last spotted on top of the Raft building.”
Yuri waited, then said, “And?”, knowing the deliberate hostility would infuriate her.
“And,” snapped Sable, her teeth bared. “We know you were in the water directly after.”
“I was in the water with a hundred other officers,” she sneered.
“And yet now you’re home.”
“I needed a few hours’ sleep. Which you’re now interrupting.”
“Let me in.”
“Fuck off.”
Sable must have signaled somehow; the two helmeted goons moved forward and slammed the door backwards. The chain latch splintered the doorframe, pulling away. Yuri was able to stumble backwards in time to avoid getting smacked in the face by the door as it swung in towards her. She drew her gun but kept it pointed to the floor, her trigger finger straight against the pistol’s slide.
“Sable, I’m going to tell you this once. If you come into my home I will shoot.”
The goons rushed her, held her arms. One of them disarmed her with a nasty twist of her wrist. She grunted but didn’t give them the satisfaction of struggling.
Sable came into the room and turned on the overhead light. The front door looked directly into the living room area, with the couch only a few steps behind. Yuri turned her head, held by the thugs, and saw an empty couch, the blanket draped across one half.
Sable marched through the living room and turned left into her bedroom. Yuri heard the sounds of a search: closet and bathroom doors being thrown open, furniture being shoved aside. When she came back, there was gray fire in her eyes.
“If I find out you are hiding him, you will have more to answer to than a negligence hearing,” Sable hissed, sticking her face into Yuri’s. She turned and stomped back through the door, her goons silent behind her. Yuri followed and slammed the door on their backs. She was shaking and went to her armchair with jelly-legs, the adrenaline making her shiver.
Spider-Man dropped from the ceiling but didn’t stick the landing; he fell to his knees and grunted, holding one hand to his stomach. “Did they hurt you?” he asked.
“No. Bitch.” Yuri flexed her fingers. “How are you?”
Spider-Man was struggling to stand, and she got up to help, her shoulder beneath his arm. “Not doing so hot,” he fake-laughed beside her.
“Can I take you to a hospital now?”
“No. Just… keep doing what you’re doing. I just need to sleep for a bit.”
She helped him back to the couch and pulled the blanket back over him. “Drink more water,” she said, and he obliged, holding the glass on his own. She didn’t like seeing him bloody, and the mask only showed the smallest hint of the injuries on him when it was pulled up like that. She could only imagine what his torso looked like. She turned the lights back off. City lights came in through the window again. On the far horizon, the red burn of fire lit the sky in a gradient.
He put the empty glass on the coffee table and settled back, whimpering a bit as he moved. “Yuri.”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for saving my life.”
She sighed as she leaned back in her armchair, closing her eyes. “Don’t mention it, partner.”
Spider-Man chuckled. “You’ve never called me that before.”
Hadn’t she? She would have to start.