Spider-Man: Cumming Home - Chapter 10 (A Spider-Man Fanfic) (Patreon)

Chapter 10: Doctor's Orders

Strange did not knock.

The door that Christine had left half-open for the sake of professional optics swung the rest of the way on a ripple of gold light, and the Sorcerer Supreme stepped through it like a man who had already decided the universe owed him an apology. The Cloak of Levitation settled around his shoulders with the particular rustle it reserved for situations it did not approve of. His eyes went first to my face, then to Christine’s hand still resting over the obvious, thickening shape under what was left of the suit, then back to my face with the expression of a man who had opened the wrong cabinet in his own kitchen and found a raccoon hosting a dinner party.

“Parker,” he said.

“Doc,” I said.

Christine did not snatch her hand away. That was the first interesting choice of the morning. She left it exactly where it was, palm warm through the torn fabric, fingers still shaped around the heavy outline of me like she had been mid-measurement and the interruption was a scheduling conflict rather than a moral event. Her other hand stayed flat on my chest. Her cheeks were pink. Her voice, when it came, was the same voice she used on interns who tried to skip a neuro check.

“I am in the middle of an exam.”

Strange pinched the bridge of his nose. The cloak twitched, offended on his behalf. “Of course you are.”

“You said thirty-five minutes,” I offered, helpful as a brick. “We’re still inside the window.”

“I bought you time,” Strange said, like the words physically hurt him. He looked at Christine, then at me, then at the half-open door as if considering whether sealing the entire west wing in amber would solve more problems than it created. “The next signature is holding. Wong is reinforcing the wards. I have delayed the projected breach. You have a window. Not a vacation. A window.”

Christine’s thumb shifted a fraction against me. It could have been accidental. It was not.

“How long?” she asked.

“Long enough for you to finish helping the boy,” Strange said. He put a very specific emphasis on helping, the kind of emphasis that meant he knew exactly what he was walking in on and had chosen, for the sake of the city’s structural integrity, not to have a conversation about it. “Stabilize him. Get the residual energy under control. Then I want him functional and outside. If I come back and this room looks like the last room I opened a portal into, I am leaving both of you in a mirror dimension until the heat death of the universe.”

“That’s fair,” I said.

“It is not a joke.”

“I know. That’s why it’s funny.”

Strange stared at me for one extra second, the way a man stares at a leak he has already patched twice. Then he looked at Christine again.

“Finish helping the boy,” he repeated. “I have bought you time. Use it like adults.”

He turned. The cloak flared, unnecessarily dramatic, and he stepped back into the gold ring without waiting for a thank you. The portal snapped shut. The room smelled like ozone and antiseptic and the faint leftover heat of a woman who had been touching me through fabric and had not yet decided whether she was going to stop.

Silence sat down between us and made itself comfortable.

I smirked. I couldn’t help it. The confidence that had been building since the airport video—since MJ on the warehouse roof, since May in the hallway, since Angie against the wall—sat warm and stupid and bright in my chest. Christine Palmer had her hand on my cock in a Sanctum medical bay while the Sorcerer Supreme issued a hall pass. The universe had a sense of humor. It was a terrible sense of humor. I was living in it.

“So,” I said. “Doctor’s orders.”

Christine took her hand off me.

Not fast. Not like she’d been burned. She lifted it the way she would lift a stethoscope off a patient’s chest at the end of a listen, deliberate, complete, and already moving on to the next step of a protocol only she could see. She walked to the door. She closed it. She turned the old brass latch until it clicked. When she came back she pulled a pair of fresh gloves from the kit on the metal table and did not put them on. She set them down next to the forceps instead, a quiet little declaration that whatever this exam was about to become, latex was no longer invited.

“No,” she said. “I am examining you. That is what I told him. That is what this is.”

“Christine.”

“You will sit still. You will answer when I ask. You will not smirk at me like this is a date.” She picked up a flexible tape measure, a penlight, and a small digital recorder she did not turn on. “Elevated baseline. Residual dimensional energy. Systemic enhancement I have only been able to observe under crisis conditions. I am not wasting a stable window on your ego.”

I sat still. Mostly. The smirk stayed. It had earned its place.

She started at my shoulders.

Her hands were warm and sure, the kind of sure that came from years of putting people back together while the building shook. She mapped the line of muscle from the base of my neck down across the deltoid, thumbs pressing in, checking tone, checking heat, checking the way the scrapes from last night had already gone from raw to tight pink. She talked while she did it, low and even, like narration for a chart that did not exist.

“Accelerated epithelial repair. No sign of infection. The webbing residue is inert.” Her palm flattened over my right pec, then the left, comparing. “Pectoral density is significantly above baseline for your age and frame. Respiratory excursion is normal. Heart—” she paused, two fingers finding the pulse at my throat first, then sliding down to rest over the center of my chest again “—too strong. Too even. If I didn’t know better I’d think you were sedated.”

“I’m very calm,” I said.

“You are half-hard on my table and your pupils are blown. That is not calm. That is compensated.”

She made me lift my arms. She measured the circumference of my biceps with the tape, noting the number under her breath without writing it down, then had me flex. The muscle jumped under her hands. She held the contraction longer than a normal exam required, feeling the way the enhanced tissue locked and stayed locked without tremor. When she released me she let her fingers trail down the inside of my forearm to the wrist, checking capillary refill with a press of her thumb that lingered a half-second past clinical.

“Grip,” she said.

I took her hand. I was careful. Spider-strength made careful a choice instead of a default. I closed my fingers around hers just enough to let her feel the reserve, the unused capacity sitting under the skin like a second engine. Her breath caught. She did not pull away. She turned my hand over and examined the palm, the calluses from the web-shooters, the faint residual spark-burn from Electro that had already faded to nothing.

“You could break bone without meaning to,” she murmured.

“I don’t.”

“I know. That’s the part I can’t chart.”

She moved lower.

The ruined upper half of the suit came off under her direction, what was left of it peeling away from my ribs and dropping to the floor in a sad little heap of cracked plating and good intentions. Cool Sanctum air hit bare skin. Christine’s gaze did the inventory it had done the first time she’d walked in on me—chest, stomach, the line of hair trailing down, the way the remaining waistband of the suit sat low on my hips—and then she put her hands on me again like looking was not sufficient data.

She measured my chest. Tape around the ribcage at rest. Tape again on a held inhale. Her knuckles brushed my nipples on the way around and she did not apologize. She listened to my lungs with her ear close enough that I could feel her breath. She pressed along the abdominal wall, checking for guarding, finding none, finding instead the hard stacked plane of muscle that the spider-bite had turned from skinny-kid-who-missed-lunch into something that made her fingers slow down.

“Core recruitment is complete even at rest,” she said. “That’s not training. That’s structural.”

“Occupational hazard.”

“Stop saying that.”

“It’s accurate.”

She shot me a look that would have dropped a resident at twenty paces. Then she hooked two fingers in the torn waistband and tugged it down an inch, just enough to expose the cut of my hip, and the smirk I had been nursing widened.

“Exam,” she said, before I could speak.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

She was right.

She had me stand.

The remaining suit peeled the rest of the way off under her hands. No ceremony. No striptease. Just a trauma surgeon removing an obstacle so she could see the rest of the patient. I stepped out of it. The medical bay was cool. I was not. The heavy length of me hung thick between my thighs, already more than half-interested from the last ten minutes of her hands and her voice and the ridiculous fact that Stephen Strange had personally allotted us a timeslot. It thickened further as she looked, the shaft lifting in a slow, obvious arc, the broad head flushing darker, a single bead of wetness gathering at the slit like my body had opinions about being studied.

Christine stared for a full three seconds of complete professional silence.

Then she picked up the tape measure again.

“Sit back. Edge of the table. Feet on the floor. Knees apart.”

I sat. I spread my knees. The position put everything on display under the floating candlelight and the faint blue glow of her instruments. She stepped between my thighs without hesitation, the same way she had when she’d been cleaning burns, except now there was no fabric left to pretend this was only about residual energy.

She started with my legs.

The tape went around my right thigh first, high, close to the hip, her fingers tucking the end against skin that jumped under the contact. She read the number softly. She moved the tape lower, mid-thigh, then again just above the knee. She did the left side the same way, comparing, frowning a little like the symmetry itself was a finding. Her palms followed the tape, mapping the dense muscle of the quadriceps, the hard line of the adductors, the way the tissue felt denser than it had any right to feel on someone who still got carded at some box offices.

“Thigh girth is disproportionate to pre-bite photos,” she said. “You’ve seen the news packages. They keep using the homecoming footage. This is not that body.”

“I grew.”

“You mutated.” Her hands slid to the inside of my thighs and stayed there, thumbs pressing in, testing give, testing heat. “The muscle fiber recruitment is… complete. No wasted motion. If I asked you to lift this table with me on it you wouldn’t brace first. You’d just do it.”

“Do you want me to lift the table?”

“I want you to stay still.”

I stayed still. It cost me something. Her hands were warm and sure and moving closer to where the heat in me had decided to live, and every slow inch of that approach pulled another pulse of blood into the thick, hanging weight of my cock until it stood fully, obscenely rigid against my stomach, the shaft dark and mapped with veins, the head glossy, the whole length of it looking almost implausible in the quiet room. My balls hung heavy underneath, drawn up tight with want, the skin there warm and taut.

Christine’s eyes dropped. Held. She swallowed once.

“Secondary characteristics,” she said, and her voice had gone quieter. “Consistent with the primary mutation. Increased vascularity. Disproportionate development. The circulatory demand—”

“You said that last time.”

“I’m confirming.”

She put the tape down. She did not pick it back up. She used her hands instead.

She cupped my balls first.

The sound I made was not professional. Neither was the way her fingers spread under them, lifting, weighing, rolling the heavy pair in her palm like she was checking for torsion and had gotten distracted by the sheer solid heat of them. They filled her hand. They sat full and tight and obvious, and she held them long enough that the clinical pretense stretched thin as old tape.

“Temperature elevated,” she murmured. “Volume is… significant. No tenderness.” She glanced up. “Tell me if there’s tenderness.”

“There isn’t.”

“I’m being thorough.”

“I noticed.”

She squeezed, gentle, then firmer, watching my face for a flinch that did not come. Spider-durability made a lot of things feel like pressure instead of pain. This felt like pressure that had a direct line to the base of my spine. My cock jumped in the air between us, a slow, thick pulse that made the shaft flex and the bead at the tip stretch into a thin thread before it broke and ran down the ridge of the head.

Christine watched it happen. Then she leaned in.

She did not kiss it. She didn’t put her mouth on it. She turned her face and breathed in, close enough that I felt the warmth of the exhale along the underside of the shaft, close enough that the smell of me—skin, clean sweat, the faint leftover ozone of the night’s fights, the salt already gathering at the tip—had to be filling her head. She stayed there for a second that lasted longer than a second. When she pulled back her pupils were wider.

“Pheromone load is higher than a standard endocrine profile would predict,” she said, and it was the least convincing sentence a doctor had ever said with her face two inches from a cock. “Or I’m inventing language because the alternative is admitting I just smelled you on purpose.”

“You can admit it. Strange bought us time.”

“I am examining you.”

“Okay.”

She wrapped her hand around me.

Even now, after MJ, after May, after Angie, the first full contact of a new hand still dragged a sound out of my chest. Christine’s fingers didn’t close all the way. She tried. She adjusted. She used both hands, stacking them, and there was still a thick, flushed stretch of shaft left above her grip, the broad head pushing into the air like it had somewhere to be. She stroked once, slow, base to tip, spreading the wetness that had gathered, and her breath left her in a controlled little rush.

“Response time is immediate,” she said. “No refractory delay from the prior twenty-four hours, which, given the scene I walked into last night, is medically unhinged.”

“Spider stamina.”

“I am going to put that in a paper and then set the paper on fire.”

She stroked again. Slower. The kind of slow that was supposed to be assessment and had become something else without asking permission. Her thumb swept over the head on every upstroke, gathering the slick, spreading it down the vein that ran the underside. The wet sound of it was quiet and filthy in the candlelit room. I gripped the edge of the table. The metal creaked.

“Strength,” she said, glancing at my hands. “You’re denting my table.”

“You’re doing that on purpose.”

“I am mapping response. Stay still.”

I stayed still the way a man stays still when a fuse is lit. She kept the pace glacial. Long pulls. A pause at the top to look, to turn me slightly, to watch the way the thick shaft flexed in her grip. She leaned in again and this time she did not pretend it was about pheromones. She breathed against the head, lips a fraction from skin, and then she spit.

It was not delicate. It was a doctor deciding that dry friction was a bad data set. The spit landed hot on the flushed crown and ran down in a shining line. She used it. Both hands, twisting on the way up, spreading the slick until the whole heavy length of me was glossy under the blue-edged light. The smell of it—salt, skin, her—thickened the air. My hips wanted to punch up into the circle of her fingers. I didn’t let them. Yet.

“Lubrication improves glide and reduces micro-abrasion,” she said, voice rough now. “Also I wanted to.”

“Honesty looks good on you.”

“Don’t talk.”

She spit again. Worked it in. The wet, filthy slide of her fists down the veined girth and back up made my thighs tense hard enough that she felt it against her hips where she stood between them. She looked at that, at the way the muscle locked, and something in her expression finally dropped the last of the chart-voice.

“Okay,” she said.

Just that.

She stepped back far enough to pull the sweater over her head. The jeans went next. No show. No slow reveal aimed at an audience. Christine Palmer undressed the way she did everything else—efficient, committed, already past the point of negotiating with herself. The bra was plain. The underwear was plain. What was underneath was not plain at all. Compact, strong, the body of a woman who ran trauma bays and still found time to be angry at Stephen Strange about shared bathroom space. Small, tight breasts, nipples already peaked. A soft dark thatch between her thighs. A flush that started at her chest and climbed.

“This is still an exam,” she said, and it would have been funnier if she hadn’t been wet enough that I could see it when she hooked her thumbs and pushed the last of the fabric down.

“Doctor’s orders,” I said.

“Yes.” She stepped back between my knees. “Doctor’s orders. You will sit. You will not grab me like I’m one of the women you left wrecked in Queens. You will let me control the depth until I say otherwise. If the table breaks, you are explaining it to Wong.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She climbed into my lap.

The first contact of her bare heat against the slick, spit-shined shaft dragged a sound out of both of us. She reached down, wrapped her fingers around me again, and dragged the broad head through her folds, not taking it yet, just painting herself with the wetness she had put there. She was soaked. She had been soaked, I realized, for a while—probably since she’d first put her hand on me through the suit, probably since last night when she’d stared too long in a bedroom that smelled like sex and bad timing.

“Medically speaking,” she whispered, lining me up, “this is a terrible idea.”

“Noted.”

She started to sink down.

The stretch hit her immediately. I felt it in the way her thighs shook, in the way her mouth fell open around a sound that was not a word, in the way her nails bit into my shoulders. She was tight. Not untouched—she was a grown woman with a life—but tight around something that did not care about prior experience. The fat, flushed crown pushed in and kept pushing, the thick shaft following, and she had to stop halfway with a broken little inhale, forehead dropping against mine.

“Hot,” she gasped. “It’s—God—it’s so hot. You’re burning.”

“Enhanced circulation.”

“Shut up. Don’t you dare make a joke while I’m—” She eased down another inch and the rest of the sentence turned into a raw sound. “—splitting.”

I kept my hands on the table. It cost me. Spider-strength wanted to grab her hips and seat her in one stroke. I did not. I let her work. She lifted a fraction, sank again, took more, the wet heat of her inching down the spit-slick length until her ass finally met my thighs and the entire heavy column of me was buried inside her. She sat there shaking, full, overstretched, breathing like she had sprinted a hallway.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay. That’s—that’s all of it. That’s insane.”

“You took it.”

“I am aware.” She laughed once, incredulous and wrecked, and the laugh made her clench. We both felt it. “Do not move. I need a second. You feel like a fever. Internal temperature is— I can’t even— Peter, it’s so hot.”

I kissed her because the alternative was talking and talking would have ruined the way she looked right then. She kissed back immediately, hungry, no more protocol. Her hands fisted in my hair. Her hips rolled in a tiny, testing circle that dragged every thick inch against her inner walls and punched a moan into my mouth.

Then she started to ride.

Slow at first. Doctor’s orders, still, even now. She lifted until the flared head stretched her rim and sank back down with a wet, filthy sound that filled the small chamber. Each drop seated me to the root. Each lift left the shaft shiny with her. Her breasts moved with the motion, small and tight, and I finally put my hands on her waist because sitting still had become a lie I could no longer tell with a straight face.

“I said don’t grab—”

“I’m not grabbing. I’m spotting.”

“That is not what spotting means.”

I grinned against her mouth and let her feel a fraction of the strength—just enough to lift her an inch and set her back down on the next stroke so she took me at the angle that made her eyes go unfocused. She swore. She did not tell me to stop. She planted her feet on the table’s edge, used my shoulders for leverage, and began to fuck herself on me in earnest.

The table complained. The candles flickered. Somewhere in the Sanctum a very old floorboard decided this was not its problem.

Christine was loud once she stopped pretending she wasn’t going to be. Every downstroke dragged a sound out of her—short, punched, disbelieving. She kept coming back to the heat, like her brain could not file it. “It’s hot—Peter—you’re so fucking hot inside—I can feel you throbbing—” Her voice cracked on throbbing. I thrust up to meet her on the next drop and the crack turned into a cry.

“That’s it,” I said, low. “Take it. You wanted the exam. Finish it.”

“I hate you.”

“You’re dripping down my balls.”

“I hate that too.”

She did not hate it. She rode harder. The wet slap of her ass meeting my thighs filled the room. I held her steady with enhanced strength, making the depth consistent, making sure every stroke bottomed out the way she kept chasing even while she complained it was too much. Her clit dragged against the base of me on every grind. I could feel her tightening in waves, the flutter starting low and spreading.

“I’m—” She didn’t finish. Her whole body locked. She came with her mouth open against my shoulder, a broken, high sound she tried and failed to muffle, walls clamping down so hard around the thick shaft that I had to grit my teeth and push through the sudden vice of her. She soaked me. Heat spilled around the base and over my balls and onto the table. She kept shaking through it, still seated all the way down, still full of me, and the aftershocks milked the length of me in helpless little pulses.

I did not come.

Not yet.

I stood up with her still impaled, the strength making it easy, and turned, laying her back on the exam table without pulling out. Instruments rattled. A penlight rolled off and hit the floor with a small, undignified clack. Christine’s legs wrapped around my waist on instinct. I hooked my arms under her knees, opened her, and started driving into her the way the last twenty minutes of slow hands had been promising.

Deep. Controlled. Relentless.

The table legs scraped. She grabbed the far edge with one hand and my forearm with the other and held on while I fucked her through the oversensitive come-down and straight toward the next one. Every thrust pushed the heavy, spit-and-slick shaft to the root. Every withdrawal left her fluttering around the head like her body didn’t want the empty second in between. She was still talking, or trying to, the words falling apart.

“Too deep—God—it’s still so hot—Peter—don’t stop—don’t you dare stop—”

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

I snapped my hips harder. Spider-strength made the pace unfair. I kept it just this side of too much, watching her face, watching the way her mouth stayed open, watching the flush climb to her hairline. When I dropped a hand between us and rubbed tight circles over her clit she jerked like she’d been shocked.

“That’s not—that’s not a standard—”

“Add it to the chart.”

She came again, sharper, a cry she didn’t bother swallowing. I fucked her through that one too, the wet sound of it obscene against the quiet sanctum walls, her release making every stroke slicker, louder. The smell of sex overtook the antiseptic. I could hear voices somewhere far off—Wong, maybe Ned—too distant to matter. The door was locked. Strange had bought time. I used it.

I flipped her.

One motion, still inside, strength making the turn clean. She landed on her stomach over the table, toes barely finding the floor, ass up, the full thick length of me still buried. I gripped her hips, hauled her back onto me, and started pounding. The new angle made her louder. I gave one cheek a firm open-handed spank just to feel her clench, then another, watching the skin pink. She pushed back into it, doctor’s orders abandoned on the floor with her jeans.

“Harder,” she demanded, voice wrecked. “If you’re going to be enhanced, be enhanced. I already wrote the disclaimer in my head.”

I gave her harder. The table slammed the wall. A glass jar of something blue and probably priceless wobbled and decided to live. I leaned over her, chest to her back, one hand braced beside her head, and drove into her until the only sounds left were the wet collision of hips and the broken, rhythmic noise she made every time the blunt head kissed the deepest part of her.

“Come on,” I growled against her ear. “One more. Then I have work to do.”

“You—asshole—”

She came on the next stroke, sudden and messy, a full-body shudder that ran down her spine and into the way she squeezed around me. That was it. The coil at the base of my spine snapped. I buried myself to the hilt and let go, pulsing thick and hot into her in heavy, rhythmic spurts that seemed to go on longer than was reasonable even by my new standards. She moaned at the heat of it, at the feel of being filled, still twitching, still murmuring the same stunned observation like her brain was stuck on the one finding it could not dismiss.

“So hot. You’re so fucking hot. I can feel you coming. It’s—God—”

I stayed deep until the last throb faded. Forehead against the back of her shoulder. Both of us breathing like the exam had gotten away from us, which it had, several minutes ago, around the time she spit on me and called it lubrication.

I pulled out slowly. A thick trickle followed, running down the inside of her thigh, white against flushed skin. The sight of it made my spent cock twitch with residual interest. Christine stayed draped over the table for a long few seconds, then pushed herself up on shaking arms and looked over her shoulder at me with the expression of a woman who was already composing the world’s least publishable case note.

“Residual energy,” she said, hoarse, “appears to have been… redirected.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. The sound came out raw and real. “That’s one word for it.”

She stood carefully. Her legs did not want to cooperate. I steadied her with a hand at her elbow and she let me, which felt more intimate than the last ten minutes in a way I was not going to examine. She reached for her underwear, thought better of it, and used a clean drape from the kit instead, wiping between her thighs with the same efficient motion she used on everything else. Her hands were not quite steady. That was new.

“Heart rate,” she said, more to herself, two fingers finding her own pulse at her throat. “Elevated. Expected. Yours?”

I held out my wrist. She took it. Counted. Shook her head once, almost fond, almost annoyed.

“You are not allowed to be that calm after that.”

“Spider stuff.”

“I am going to invent a new specialty and then never practice it.”

We dressed in the kind of silence that was not awkward so much as crowded. She pulled the sweater back on. I stepped back into the ruined suit because it was what I had, the waistband doing a poor job of hiding the fact that I was still half-interested and shiny. Christine glanced at that, exhaled through her nose, and handed me a spare Sanctum shirt from a shelf that had no business containing spare Sanctum shirts.

“Wong stocks extras,” she said. “Do not ask why. Put it on. If you walk into the foyer like that Ned will have a religious experience and Strange will have an aneurysm.”

I pulled the shirt on. It was too wide in the shoulders and still managed to cling. Christine smoothed her hair into the ponytail again, checked her face in the dark glass of a cabinet, and decided that flushed and freshly-fucked was going to have to pass for professional.

She unlocked the door.

I caught her wrist before she opened it. Not hard. Just enough.

“Hey.”

She looked at me.

“That was a good exam.”

The corner of her mouth twitched. “It was a catastrophic lapse in judgment that I am going to file under extraordinary circumstances and never discuss with Stephen.”

“So I can come back if the residual energy acts up.”

“Peter.”

“Doctor’s orders,” I said, and the smirk returned because it lived here now.

She pointed at the door. “You have work to do. The breach window will not hold because you have a nice smile and a medically unhinged refractory period. Let’s go.”

“That’s my line.”

“Then say it and move.”

I said it.

“I have work to do,” I told the quiet room, and then, because the joke had already been sitting in my mouth since Strange walked in, “Let’s go.”

We stepped into the corridor together. The Sanctum smelled like old paper and incense again, the sex-heat of the medical bay falling behind us like a door closing on a secret. Distant gold light flickered under a far archway. Strange’s voice carried, clipped and impatient, listing signatures and probabilities. Ned said something about the coffee machine that I chose not to understand.

Christine walked beside me with her professional mask back in place, except for the faint limp she was pretending not to have and the look she shot me when our shoulders brushed.

“Next time you land on my table,” she murmured, low enough that it stayed between us, “you will be actually injured. Try to arrange that, if you can manage it.”

“I’ll see what the multiverse has available.”

“Do that.”

We turned the corner into the foyer. Strange looked up from a hovering map of the city that was doing an excellent impression of a migraine. His eyes flicked from my face to Christine’s to the fact that I was wearing a shirt that had not been in the room when he left. He closed his eyes for one long, suffering second.

“Functional?” he asked.

“Stabilized,” Christine said, crisp. “Residual energy redirected. He’s cleared for the field.”

“I did not ask for the mechanism.”

“Good,” she said. “I wasn’t going to give it to you.”

I took the restraint device out of the ruined suit’s pocket and bounced it once in my palm. It was still warm. The city was still out there, still leaking other people’s villains into my zip code, still full of cameras that knew my name. None of that had gotten smaller. It had just been given a window, and we had used the window the way adults used windows when the Sorcerer Supreme told them to.

“Alright,” I said. “Where’s the next hole in the world?”

Strange pointed at the map. A gold spark pulsed over the river, then another over midtown, then a third that made the Cloak of Levitation flinch.

“All of them,” he said. “Try to keep your shirt on this time.”

I glanced at Christine. She did not look at me. She was already moving toward the kit she had abandoned, already a doctor again, already pretending the last hour had been about energy signatures and not about the way she had sunk down on me and sworn at the heat.

I pulled the mask from my belt.

“No promises,” I said, and I went to work.