The Undead Spider #92.
The words sat between them without moving.
Jake's mind ran through the deal fast, parallel, arriving at the same answer from different directions and finding it consistent each time.
Half his life-force. Half of what remained after the explosion and the pool and however long he'd spent suspended in the cocoon, which was already less than he'd started with. Half of that, given away to go back to a mission he hadn't chosen, a world that had chewed through him systematically, a system that had watched him lose an arm and drown and detonate and had kept the clock running through all of it.
The number should have scared him more than it did.
He turned the Reaper's two options over and looked at them from every angle he had, and what he found each time was the same thing -- that both choices were designed to end him, and that the Reaper believed it had covered the exits. Give up and die by the scythe, or give half your life to go back and run down the clock on what remained. The system discarding a collector it had deemed inefficient. A clean resolution either way.
Except he'd survived the explosion.
He'd come apart in a blast that had leveled city blocks and he'd come back together, because the Reaper had pulled him out the same way it pulled souls, which meant it hadn't wanted him gone -- it had wanted him here, in this room, going through exactly this.
He thought about the cocoons. About the tech components scattered across the floor, too deliberately engineered to be debris. About the scythe thrown into his hands rather than through his chest when the Reaper had the angle for either.
The system needed a collector. Active. Functioning. And the endgame -- whatever the totems were building toward, whatever completion looked like at a hundred percent -- needed him to be the one to reach it. He didn't know what that endgame was and he wasn't going to find out by asking. But he knew what it meant.
He had leverage.
"You've made your choice," the Reaper said.
"Not so fast." Jake held the Reaper's gaze across the phosphorescent half-dark. "Half my life-force is worth more than a trip back."
"This isn't a negotiation."
"It's far from one," Jake said. "But that doesn't change my worth."
The room held the silence with weight, with patience, with the suggestion that it had been here before and would be here after. The Reaper stood in it and let it stretch, and Jake stood in it too and didn't move, and eventually the Reaper said:
"What can be granted, may be."
"First." Jake let a breath out through his nose, and something in his chest shifted register -- not relief, something more complicated, something with grief in it he hadn't finished processing and wasn't going to process here. "Harley Quinn. Whatever's left of her -- stays intact. Nothing happens to her."
The Reaper's hood angled a fraction. "What makes you think she's still here?"
"She left a permanent mark on me." He said it evenly, without heat, which was harder than the heat would have been. "I know she's here."
"You could have destroyed her cocoon," the Reaper said. "During the fight when you pulled several loose."
"You're not the kind to lose leverage that easily." The words came out steadier than he felt them. "She stays the way she is until we finish our business." He paused. "That's a condition."
"Wishful thinking," the Reaper said. "And?" the and carried the shape of someone who had already calculated the remaining items on the list.
"Full recovery." Jake let the pause sit, then added: "The arm stays. The marks stay."
He wasn't sure where that came from until after he'd said it and found it was true. The arm was a reminder. The marks on his face were a record. He'd earned both and he wasn't interested in pretending the earning hadn't happened.
"You're not finished." the Reaper said.
"I choose where I go back. And the totem icon updates for the new location." He let that land, then finished: "Those are my terms. For half my life-force."
The room went quiet in a way that was different from the quiet it had been doing. The Reaper held its scythe at its side and looked at him and didn't speak, and Jake held the silence back and waited.
Then the tech components on the floor began to glow.
It started at the edges -- a blue light coming up through the circuit boards and wire and housings scattered across the metal, ambient, sourceless, traveling through the components the way current traveled through something designed to carry it.
The glow spread outward from each piece and met the glow from the next, and the room stretched around the light, the walls pulling back, the floor extending in every direction until the scattered components were islands in a dark that had become something vast.
Above him the cocoons intensified. Gold, slow-pulsing, the web threads between them beginning to carry the light from one to the next -- not all at once, in sequence, rippling outward from the convergence point at the ceiling's center in waves that moved like a heartbeat through an enormous body. The room was waking up. He could feel it through his feet, through the thread of his spider-sense, a hum that had no single source because the source was everything.
The interface assembled in his vision.
It didn't snap into place the way it normally did. It came up like a system under load -- one word at the center of his sight, white against the dark:
🕷️
Processing.
🕸️
The hum continued. The cocoons pulsed gold. The blue light traveled its web of components across the floor and Jake stood in the middle of it and waited, and then the interface resolved:
🕷️
2 of 3 demands met.
🕸️
A pause, and then below it:
🕷️
Where to next?
🕸️
He ran through it. He knew the answer before he'd finished asking himself the question, had been circling it in the back of his calculations as the place where the hunt would eventually need to go. He was about to think it directly into the system when the Reaper's voice arrived from somewhere that had moved closer without him hearing it move.
"Why there?"
Jake's jaw shifted. "Why else?"
"To continue the hunt."
It was true. It wasn't all of it. Somewhere underneath the tactical reasoning was a different answer, one about a path he was hoping to intersect, a face he'd been keeping at the edge of his thinking because keeping it at the edge was the only way to keep moving. He didn't say that.
"Until we meet again. Good hunting." The Reaper raised one of its appendages on the right side -- something in its hand that Jake's eyes tried to resolve and didn't finish resolving before it discharged, and the adrenaline hit a beat after the fact, his body catching up to an event that had already happened, and the room came apart in circles -- or he came apart in circles, or the distinction between the two stopped mattering -- and his last coherent thought was that he'd meant to tell the Reaper they wouldn't be meeting again any time soon, and then the thought wasn't finished and the circles were everything and then the circles were nothing and then--
Light.
Blue, enormous, pressing through his eyelids and refusing to be ignored. He lay with his back against something warm and solid and let his mind try to catch up to his body, which had arrived somewhere before the rest of him had. The light was too much after so long in the dark and he kept his eyes mostly closed and let the other senses come in ahead of it.
The warmth first. Real warmth, radiating downward from above, settling into the surface beneath him and coming back up through his shoulders, his spine, the backs of his legs. The cold had been in him so long he'd stopped noticing it as an intrusion and started carrying it as a condition, and now it was leaving, and the leaving felt like something he hadn't known he was waiting for.
The air next.
He breathed it and it was clean -- not the stale compressed quality of the Reaper's room, not the chemical undertone of Gotham, not the smoke of Star City. It moved across his face with the unhurried ease of air that had come from somewhere open and was going somewhere open, carrying something green in it, something that had crossed water recently.
Then the interface came back up, resolving at the edge of his vision with the web motif he knew, and:
🕷️
3 of 3 demands met.
🕸️
It dissolved into the display he recognized -- three tabs settling into position. The totem icon tab first, the card spinning through the question mark placeholder and then slowing, the faces of it catching and settling on an object he had to look at for a moment before the shape of it came clear.
A dagger, the blade dark along its length and marked near the base with symbols that had been worked into the metal rather than added after, the hilt wrapped in something that had once been living. It was old in a way that had nothing to do with age -- the oldness of an object that had been used for a purpose so complete it had changed what the object was.
The navigation tab loaded beside it -- white threads resting in their positions, and there, already active, a red thread moving north.
The progress tab last -- time bank, collection progress, system tools, all of it updating for a new location with a quiet efficiency that confirmed the third demand without announcing it.
He let the interface sit there while his eyes finished adjusting to the light.
Blue sky above him, open and wide, the kind of blue that came from altitude and clean air and a sun that meant it. He turned his head and saw the edge of the roof -- a low raised border and then nothing, and beyond the nothing the tops of other buildings, their faces in stone and brick and glass, old and dense and pressed close together, the skyline carrying the weight of centuries in the way it was stacked rather than built upward.
A red double-decker moving on a road below, seen for a moment between two buildings before it disappeared. The particular green of a park in the middle distance, more parks than cities usually allowed themselves. The river catching light somewhere south.
He was in London.
He pushed himself up slowly, testing what his body had, and found more than he expected. He sat straight and looked at his left arm -- the mechanical arm, which had always carried a slight lag in its responses, a fraction of a second between intention and action that he'd compensated for without thinking about it. He flexed the hand. The fingers moved and kept moving, tracing through a range he hadn't had before, and the lag was gone -- not reduced, gone, the response arriving before he'd consciously finished sending it, the arm reading the intention ahead of the nerve signal in a way that felt strange and then felt right and then felt like nothing at all, which was the best it could feel.
He shot a web from it without deciding to first.
The line went where he was looking, fast and clean, sticking to the raised border at the roof's edge and holding, and he released it and looked at the wrist and felt something he didn't have a name for, something between gratitude and grief, because nothing was going to replace the hand he'd lost but this was close, and being close mattered.
He looked down at himself. The classic suit -- red and blue, no Carnage black threading through it, no symbiote moving at the edges of his awareness. The absence was strange in a way he couldn't place and he held it for a moment, turning it over, and found he didn't know yet whether it was good or bad. He'd been carrying Sleeper so long the weight had become baseline. He'd figure out what baseline meant without it.
Later. He'd figure it out later.
Right now he was on a rooftop in London with clean air coming off the river and the sun on his face and a warmth in his body that had nothing mechanical about it, and the red thread in the navigation tab pulling north, and the dagger spinning slowly in the totem icon display.
Not what he'd hoped for when he'd named the location. He'd had someone in mind, a path he'd been hoping to intersect from the start, and the dagger was a detour. But it was his detour, in his city, under an open sky, and for the first time since he'd arrived in this world -- for the first time in longer than that, if he was being truthful with himself -- he was not moving toward something or away from something or managing the distance between himself and the next thing that was trying to end him.
He was just here.
The sun was doing what it did this far north in the morning, sitting low and throwing long gold light across the rooftops, and the air had that quality it had in cities built near water, and somewhere below a bus was running its route, and none of it was asking anything of him yet.
He knew it wouldn't last. The thread was already blinking. The clock was already running. The stress would come back and it would come back fast and there would be a point in the next few hours where he would not be able to remember clearly what this felt like.
He stood up.
Shot a web to the building across the street, felt the line go taut, and stepped off the edge.
The swing opened up the city below him -- rooftops and streets and the green of the parks and the river silver in the distance -- and he let the arc carry him out over it, and the wind came up and hit him full in the face, and he released at the top and for one moment he was nothing but momentum and air and the city spread below him in every direction, and then the next line was out and catching and he was swinging again, and the sound of the city came up to meet him, and he was moving through it, and it was enough.
For right now, it was enough.