Mechanical-Arm Spider #76
The building had taken damage, revealing everything the facade had been holding together.
The jazz club on the ground floor had its front window blown in, glass swept outward across the sidewalk in a pattern that said the pressure had come from inside rather than out. Someone had driven a car into the utility pole on the corner at some point in the night -- the pole listed at thirty degrees, the transformer still attached, a low electrical hum coming from the junction box that suggested it hadn't fully decided whether to fail or not.
The stairs going up were intact.
Canary took them two at a time without thinking about it, and Jake stayed close, close enough that the pheromone output didn't have to work hard to maintain what had been established. The stairwell smelled like old wood and smoke.
By the second landing it was less present. By the third it was mostly the building again, that particular smell of places people have lived in long enough that the living itself has become part of the material.
She had her key out before she reached the door.
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The apartment was a walk-up above the jazz club and it showed -- the ceiling was lower than standard, probably where the club's original design had given over to the landlord's math, and the walls along the south side were covered in acoustic paneling that had been painted over so many times the texture had softened into something almost decorative.
A record player sat on a low shelf near the window -- a belt-drive setup that had been maintained rather than replaced. The window behind it looked out over the street, and through the glass the smoke from the Glades was a grey-brown line across the morning sky.
The morning light came in at an angle and showed everything -- the takeout container on the counter from two days ago, the training gear piled near the door that she'd stepped over without registering, the small framed photo on the windowsill that faced inward toward the room rather than outward toward the view.
Canary moved through it all like someone moving through their own space, which she was, and the ease of it was the wrong thing to watch given what the pheromones were doing to the ease.
Jake stood near the door.
The mechanical arm hung frozen at his left side. The interface filaments had cooled since the intersection but the connection was still present -- a low, continuous read at the elbow joint. Castellan was the solution to that. Castellan was the solution to several things, and the morning was moving whether or not he moved with it.
"Feel at home," Canary said. Her jacket was already hooked by the door and she was pulling the hair tie from her wrist, using it to push the fallen blonde strands back from the side of her face where the impact had marked her. The domino mask was still on. She hadn't taken it off. "I'll get it."
"What is it?" he said.
She smiled at him. It was unguarded in a way that her smiles in the intersection had not been -- those had been compliance working through expression, and this was something the pheromones had loosened rather than manufactured. "Let me get it first," she said. "Some things are easier to explain once they're in front of you."
She moved to the center of the living room and pulled back the rug.
Beneath it was a floor vault -- a recessed panel with a combination lock installed with real intention rather than afterthought. The panel was set flush with the boards and the rug had clearly been placed over it deliberately, the edges aligned in a way that someone who wasn't looking for it wouldn't notice.
She worked the combination from memory, no hesitation, and the panel released with a sound that was more felt than heard.
Inside, a flight case -- the kind touring crews use for equipment that can't be replaced at the next stop. Black exterior, aluminum corner guards, two latches on the front. She lifted it out with both hands and held it carefully, not like something heavy, like something she didn't want to set down wrong.
"The room's deadened," she said, carrying it toward the table. "Foam panels, the curtains -- I redid all of it when I first moved into the city. I've got a training voice, and before that I spent six months working out what frequencies my warm-up would generate and whether any of them could reach in here from the hall." She set the case on the table. "Most people think I'm careful about my voice because of the Cry. That's part of it. The rest is this."
She unlatched the case.
Inside, velvet and acoustic foam in fitted layers, and nestled in the center of it -- a record. Seven-inch, acetate, the label handwritten in ink that had faded to a brown-grey at the edges. No sleeve. The surface of the disc had the particular quality of something that had been handled carefully for a long time.
"My mother recorded it before I was born," Canary said. Her voice didn't change. She said it the way someone says something they've said before, to themselves, enough times that the words have worn into a shape that fits. "Direct-to-disc -- no master, no copy. What's on the acetate is all that exists." She ran a thumb along the edge of the case, not touching the disc itself. "She didn't know she was going to become what she became. She was just a woman who sang, and someone had the equipment, and she recorded one song because someone asked her to." A pause. "I've never left it behind. Not once."
Jake's eyes were on it.
He'd felt the hunger register the moment she opened the case -- the Navigation's thread line flicking hard at the edge of his vision, the interface tab blinking with an urgency that was separate from anything he was deciding. The pull had a direction to it. The disc was sitting three feet away and the hunger understood exactly what it was.
He held himself where he was.
She looked at him for a moment, and whatever she found decided her next move.
She lifted the disc from the case with a care that had its own language -- two hands, edge grip, the way you handle something that has no replacement -- and crossed to the shelf by the window. The record player had a mat that she checked before she set the disc down, adjusted the tonearm weight from memory, and lowered the needle.
The hiss of acetate filled the room before the music.
Then the voice.
It was not accompanied by anything elaborate -- a piano, played simply, and a voice above it that did not need ornamentation because the voice itself was the structure. It was warm and unhurried and it filled the deadened room in a way that made the acoustic foam feel like the right decision, like the room had been built for this specific purpose.
Jake went still.
He didn't decide to. His weight just stopped redistributing, his breath just settled, and the morning pressed in through the window and the music moved through all of it and he was not in Star City anymore and he was not thinking about Castellan or the arm or the time.
Two weeks. Fourteen days, of which he remembered most of them in a sequence that had started with a burst of spider-sense that had probably saved his life and had not stopped since. The chemical factory. The tunnels. The bank. The old Gazette building in Gotham. Harley Quinn. The arm. The arm coming off. The fifty-three -- he knew the number, the way you know something you haven't looked at directly because looking at it directly would mean something had to happen afterward.
The voice kept singing.
"She used to hum it," Canary said. She was still near the record player, one hand resting on the shelf. "When she was tired, or when things had been bad. Not the full song -- just the shape of it. I didn't know for years where it came from. Then I found the disc in her things after she died and I listened to it and it was like --" She stopped. Looked at the record turning. "Like finding the source of something you'd carried your whole life without knowing you were carrying it."
She looked over at him.
He was standing in the middle of the room with his hands at his sides and his expression still and his eyes somewhere past the window. The mechanical arm hung where it had been hanging, its interrupted gesture unchanged.
She crossed the room.
"Hey," she said, her voice low, nothing performed in it. "You don't have to--." She lifted a hand toward his arm. "Whatever's in there -- it's okay that it's in there."
He swallowed.
Something moved through his jaw, a tightening and release that he wasn't controlling. The music was still going and the room was still quiet around it and she was close enough that the pheromones weren't the whole story anymore.
He stepped back.
One step, deliberate. She registered the distance and held where she was.
He crossed to the record player and lifted the needle.
The room went quiet.
He stood there for a moment with the disc still turning, slowing, the acetate catching the window light. He picked it up the same way she'd picked it up -- two hands, edges, the grip of someone who understood the value of a thing even if what they understood it as was different from what she understood it as.
"T.Finder," he said. "Register totem."
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[Totem collected!]
Category: Uncommon
Reward: +48h to your Time Bank
Redeem totem to receive reward? (Y/N)
🕸️
He looked at the screen for a long time.
The interface sat in his vision, patient, waiting on the input. Forty-eight hours. The disc in his hands converted to black light, absorbed, added to the bank -- and with it, the bonus rewards. The kill milestone reward that was seven away, the Sleeper extension or whatever else the system had queued behind that.
Seven.
He knew what that number had looked like this morning, before the music. It had looked like a threshold on the way to something necessary. He understood, standing here, what the song had actually done to that number -- not changed it, but made it visible in a way that the last two weeks of movement had not allowed it to be. Fifty-three. The way each one had been a decision made fast enough that the cost of the decision stayed behind him while he moved forward. The way moving forward had been the only available option.
The record was still in his hands.
Canary folded around him from behind -- her arms crossing his chest lightly, her chin near his shoulder, her voice close.
"It's okay," she said. "Whatever you're feeling right now -- you're allowed to feel it." She was quiet for a moment. "And if you want to listen to it again -- I understand. I do it too. When things get heavy and I don't know what else to do." He could feel her exhale. "You can stay here for a little while. You don't have to keep going yet."
He looked at the interface.
Looked at the disc in his hands.
Looked at the N.
He wanted to play it again. He was aware of that the same way he was aware of the hunger -- as a pull with a direction, pointing somewhere specific. The part of him that the music had reached was still standing in the open, waiting to hear what came next, and the song had been the first thing in two weeks that had felt like it was speaking to that part rather than demanding something from it.
He set the needle down for one second. The hiss of the acetate. The first note from the piano.
He lifted it again.
"No," he said. "We don't have time."
He held the disc carefully -- aware that Symbolic Extraction wasn't available for Uncommon tier, aware that Canary's usability between here and Castellan was still an open question, aware that the totem unredeemed was a choice with its own cost. He kept the N in place. The interface closed.
He touched the symbiote at his chest and felt Sleeper respond -- the mass shifting outward, making space.
He placed the disc against his chest.
The symbiote covered it slowly, velvet-black layering across the acetate until the disc was held in place, sealed, the foam and velvet of the case replaced by something that ran on different principles but understood the instruction. Canary watched it happen.
"The casing," she said. Her voice was careful. "You should take the casing -- if the disc gets --"
"It won't," he said.
She looked at his chest where the disc had disappeared into the symbiote. Then at his face. Then she nodded, and through the compliance and the warmth the pheromones had been building since the intersection there was something else -- something present in her eyes that the mask and the chemistry and the morning's damage couldn't fully reach, something that was pressing outward from inside and finding no exit.
Her hands had been very slightly unsteady when she nodded.
Jake turned toward the door.
"The mechanical arm," he said. "Castellan has what I need to align it."
"I know." She was already moving past him to get her jacket. "And we're not swinging there." She pulled it from the hook by the door, checked the pocket by habit, looked up. "There's a parking structure two blocks south. My bike is on the second level." A beat. "Faster than swinging. And less visible, if that matters."
It mattered.
"Let's go," he said, and held the door for her, and they went down the stairs together while the morning moved outside and the smoke from the Glades drifted across the sky and somewhere inside the symbiote the acetate disc sat undamaged in the dark.
~MimicLord
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