All-Chemical Spider #106
The camera app was open.
Jake's hood was pulled lower, his mask turned at an angle, the lenses catching no identifying light.
The mechanical arm he tucked behind his back, the web carriers stacked against the stone beside him, and what the camera saw was a figure in dark clothing standing over a spread of currency that covered most of a stone ledge.
He took three shots and reviewed them.
The second one worked. He cropped the frame tighter, cutting the roofline and the angle of the wall that would place him, and then he opened the browser and navigated through the steps he'd set up at the cybercafe -- the proxy chain, the session key, the routing that bounced the connection off two dead relays before it reached the market's backend.
The post loaded.
Three responses already, one of them asking about verification.
He typed the update into the reply field.
Proof attached. Cash transaction, denominations confirmed in image. Check the description for the drop point and time.
He attached the second photo and sent it and closed the app and cleared the browser history and powered the phone off.
He powered it on again to check the time.
The lock screen photo was of a dog belonging to the person Jake had lifted the phone from. It was half past noon.
He crunched the phone in his palm, threw it away, and gathered the carriers.
If the tide was on his side, somebody would show up at night. And if nobody did, he'd find a different channel and lose another day to it.
The Spider-Serum synthesis had acquired sufficient financing backing. Now it required a steady supply chain, and Jake was going to find it.
His face hardened with resolve as he went over the estate wall.
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The sitting room was still overturned from the last visit -- the armchair demolished, the mirror spread across the floor in a silver fan, the shelving hanging at its broken angle from the wall.
He set the carriers down in the center of it without ceremony, the bundles spreading across the floor in an uneven stack, and he didn't make an effort to arrange them or conceal them because there was no one in the building to find them and because arranging them would be a waste of time he was already short on.
He checked the navigation thread.
It ran northwest, steady and unhurried, the same bearing it had been holding since the clock tower. He'd been giving it room, letting the distance between himself and Constantine accumulate to a number that felt like enough time for the man to settle somewhere and stop moving, and standing in the broken sitting room with the money on the floor he decided the distance was sufficient.
But first.
The basement door was at the end of the service corridor, and the darkness below it was the same darkness he'd left, and what was in the darkness was the same thing he'd left. He went down the stairs with his sense already ranging out ahead of him through the stone and found what he expected -- cold, and stillness, and the faint, regular movement that was the only sign the thing at the room's center was still alive.
He stood at the bottom of the stairs and let his eyes adjust.
Cheetah hung in the center of the vault room, suspended between the ceiling and the floor by a system that had taken him the better part of an hour to construct from what the room had to offer.
The web silk ran in anchor lines from the ceiling beams, four of them, each connected to a wrist or an ankle and pulled to the degree that her limbs were spread and fixed in all four directions -- enough tension in each line that moving one would load the others, and her claws, which were the only mechanism she had for cutting herself free, were angled outward and away from anything useful.
The chains were older. They'd come from a rack on the vault's far wall, heavy iron links that had been in the collection long enough to have their own weight to them, and he'd wrapped them over the web lines at the load points, adding mass where the silk alone might give way to sustained effort.
The sword through her chest was the cleanest piece of improvisation in the arrangement. A god-killer, as it happened -- one of four in the collection, housed in a display case on the vault's eastern wall that he'd opened by removing the hinges.
It was narrow-bladed and old and its edge had not lost anything to the centuries, and it sat through her now with its crossguard flush against the sternum, pinning her against the web and chain arrangement the way a key pins a lock, and the cold it was generating was seeping outward in a radius that he could feel from the doorway.
Her fingers moved.
A faint, involuntary curl, the reflex of something that was alive and wanted to be more alive than it currently was but couldn't find the path to it.
He crossed the room and began replacing the dissolved sections. The silk lines had lost integrity at the anchor points -- not failed, but thinned, the load distribution shifting toward the chains -- and he went through each connection, reinforcing the ceiling anchors first, then the wrist lines, then the ankle lines, the fresh silk going over the old and bonding to it.
He worked around the sword without touching it. The cold coming off the blade had a quality to it that his possessed arm registered before the rest of him did -- a deep resonance, the weapon's history humming against the dark energy in his palm -- and he kept the contact distance clean.
When he was done, her hands had no angle toward anything that mattered. Her claws faced out into empty air. The sword sat where it had been, and the cold sat with it, and the faint curl of her fingers was the only movement in the room.
He looked at her for a moment.
The fury was still there even in the suspension, even cold and unconscious, something in her face that hadn't resolved into stillness the way sleep did. It held its tension. He filed that away.
Then he went back up the stairs.
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He followed the navigation thread northwest.
He let the thread lead and didn't think about where it was taking him. Constantine had the coat. The coat was the current totem. Letting it walk any further into the man's possession was a cost he'd been absorbing since the clock tower and was done absorbing.
The thread bent east near a railway bridge and he followed it down from the roofline, dropping to street level at the base of a residential block where the buildings were narrow and close and the street between them hadn't seen direct light since before the war.
He read the building fronts as he walked. Third from the left had a light in one upper window, dim and inconsistent in the way that candlelight is inconsistent when it's the only light in the room, and the navigation thread was pointing at it with the flat certainty of a compass that has found its north and stopped needing to search.
He looked up at the window.
Then he went up the building's face.
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The Chronos Temporis had been sitting on the floor where Constantine had dropped it the previous night, and it had taken him until mid-morning and two measures of something he'd been saving since 2019 to pick it up again.
He sat now in the room's one functional chair with the book open across his knee and a glass in his free hand that he hadn't put down since the second measure. The window behind him was doing its dim afternoon work on the pages, and he was trying very hard to think clearly through the residue of what the clear thinking was requiring him to drink to achieve.
The spell in the clock tower had not gone as Constantine had designed it.
This was -- he took a pull from the glass and turned a page -- not strictly speaking a new experience for him. Spells went off script constantly and in directions that only felt inevitable in retrospect, and a caster's value lay mostly in what he could salvage from the deviation rather than in preventing it. Constantine was exceptional at salvaging deviations.
What had happened in the tower was something else.
He'd structured the casting as a collector's arrangement -- the spider doing the actual work, the dangerous work, the work that carried the consequences Constantine had outlined and meant every word of and had also been careful to outline in a way that kept his own name away from the sharpest edge of.
He'd been the guide wire, the channel, the man holding the lamp while someone else went into the dark, and the energy that moved through the Chronos Temporis during a casting of that magnitude was supposed to move through and be spent.
It had not left.
He looked at the book in his lap and felt the weight of it, which was not the weight of paper and binding. The golden thread -- the one that had risen from the spider's chest and wrapped around the time-current in the tower, the one Constantine had not prompted and had not accounted for and had briefly assumed was the spell borching before it did something he'd never seen a spell do -- had fed the book on its way through the circle.
Fed it considerably.
He closed it and held it closed with one hand and felt what was stored in it through the cover, and the measure he took from the glass was longer than the previous ones.
The energy in the book was not what he'd needed to wipe three weeks.
It was more.
Enough to go back further than three weeks. Much further. To find the event -- the specific event, the one with the shape of a door he'd been walking past for years without letting himself look directly at -- and fold it out of the current the way the spell was designed to fold things out of the current.
He set the glass on the floor and pressed the heel of his hand against his eye and held it there.
This was the kind of thinking that required more drinking and less sobriety, which was unfortunate, because he'd already had enough of both.
The thing about a gambler's understanding of the world was that it didn't let you look away from the odds. The odds said: the energy in this book is enough. The odds also said: using it will require a channel, and the channel will be the spider, and the spider--
He picked the glass back up.
The coat was on the chair's arm beside him. He'd taken it off when he came through the portal and it had been there since.
He looked at it.
Most people never looked at it twice. They only saw a coat, saw London, saw a man who hadn't replaced his wardrobe since the Thatcher era, and moved on. The spider had looked at it like a man dying of thirst looks at a river, which Constantine had clocked at the bar before he'd clocked much else about the situation, and which had been, he was comfortable admitting to himself at this level of inebriation, what had made him stay in the conversation past the point where prudence would have sent him out the back.
The spider had found him at the bar.
Found him at the construction site.
Constantine turned this over and examined it, and the examination led to the obvious conclusion -- the coat was a lodestone and the spider was whatever a lodestone attracts. There was also very little chance that whatever was pulling him to it had stopped pointing.
Constantine was thinking this thought and taking the last pull from the glass when the wall came in.
The frame and the glass and the plaster and the lath behind it arrived in the room together with the cold and the grey London afternoon, and something rolled with the debris that resolved, as the dust moved, into a figure already rising from the floor with the axe in hand, the blue and red of him catching the light from the new gap in the wall, and Constantine looked at him over the rim of his empty glass.
"Spider," he said, and his voice had the careful enunciation of a man who had been drinking steadily and was not going to let it show. "I was -- quite literally -- just thinking about you."
He gestured at the debris around the figure's feet and the hole in his wall.
"You had the door," he said.
Jake looked at the hole, and at Constantine.
"You had your chance," Jake said, and his eyes locked on the coat on the chair arm between them.
"To say your goodbyes."