Harry let himself in through the side door, the one that avoided the main foyer and its usual gauntlet of staff asking if he needed anything.
He didn’t need anything.
He needed to not talk to a single person for the rest of the day.
He heard his father’s voice before he even reached the stairs — low, clipped, coming from the study down the hall, the door left slightly ajar.
“—no, I understand the servers are the priority, Carlton, but I am telling you the priority and the problem are not the same thing—” Harry paused at the bottom of the staircase.
Through the gap in the door, he could see his father pacing, phone pressed to his ear, free hand pinching the bridge of his nose the way he did when a headache was winning.
“I don’t care what your people are telling you,” Norman said, voice sharpening.
“I had a school tour in that building.
I had children in that building.
If this happens again—” Harry didn’t wait to hear the rest.
He climbed the stairs quickly, quietly, the old instinct kicking in without him even thinking about it — the one that had been trained into him since he was young enough to know that when his father’s voice dropped into that register, the smartest thing to do was disappear.
He shut his bedroom door behind him and dropped his bag on the floor, sitting heavily on the edge of his bed.
Down the hall, muffled through two closed doors, he could still hear the faint, sharp rhythm of his father’s voice rising and falling.
Harry stared at the ceiling for a long time.
He didn’t bother trying to make out the words.
He was used to this.
That was the worst part.
In the study, Norman finally stopped pacing and sank into the chair behind his desk, jaw tight.
“Walk me through it again,” he said.
“From the top.
Because from where I’m sitting, Carlton, someone hit my building, hit your asset, and walked out with prototype servers they had no business knowing existed.” On the other end, Dr.
Carlton Drake’s voice came through smooth, unbothered in the particular way that always made Norman’s skin crawl.
“The Life Foundation has enemies, Norman.
So does Oscorp.
I’d wager the overlap in that Venn diagram is smaller than you think, which narrows things considerably.” “Narrows it to who?” “That’s what I intend to find out.” A pause, the faint clink of ice in a glass.
“Whoever hit us knew exactly which floor to target and exactly which servers to lift.
That’s not a smash-and-grab.
thats Someone who has grudge against me.” “A client working with someone on the inside,” Norman said flatly.
“Careful, Norman.” “I’m not accusing you.
I’m stating a fact you should already be worried about.” Norman leaned back, staring at the ceiling.
“My security teams have combed every inch of that breach.
Whoever hired those mercenaries left nothing behind.
No comms chatter, no financial trail, no faces.
That level of clean isn’t cheap, and it isn’t local.” “Agreed,” Drake said, some of the smoothness finally dropping out of his voice.
“Which is exactly why I’d rather handle this quietly, through my own channels, before it becomes a headline neither of our companies can afford.” “And the spider?” Norman asked, voice going colder.
“The one we lost track of during the outage?” A long silence stretched on the other end of the line.
“Contained losses happen, Norman.
We’ll find it.” “You’d better.” Norman’s grip tightened on the phone.
“Because if that thing is loose in my city, Carlton, this stops being your problem and starts being everyone’s.” He ended the call without waiting for a response, sitting alone in the dim study for a long moment, turning his phone over slowly in his hand.
Then he scrolled to a contact with no name attached — only a string of numbers — and dialed.
It picked up on the second ring.
No greeting.
“I have a job for you,” Norman said quietly.
A pause.
Then, a voice on the other end, low and unreadable: “I’m listening.” “Find out who hit my building.
I don’t care what it costs.
I want a name before I want an explanation.” Another pause, shorter this time.
“Consider it done.” The line went dead.
Norman sat alone in the dark study for a long while after, staring at nothing at all.
Devil’s Kitchen didn’t sleep, even at this hour — a maze of narrow streets and flickering signage that hadn’t seen honest daylight in years.
In the back room of an unmarked warehouse three blocks off the main strip, Wilson Fisk sat behind a heavy oak desk that looked older than the building around it, hands folded, watching the mercenary leader from the Oscorp raid stand at ease across from him.
“The servers,” Fisk said, voice a low rumble that filled the room without needing to rise.
“Intact?” “Every byte,” the mercenary confirmed.
“Clean extraction.
No trace.” “Good.” Fisk gestured, and one of his men set a hard drive on the desk between them.
“My client will be pleased.” “You still haven’t told us who that is.” Fisk’s eyes flicked up, cold and unblinking.
“No.
I haven’t.” The mercenary held his gaze a moment, then wisely decided not to push it.
“The data on those servers,” Fisk continued, folding his hands again, “is worth considerably more than the fee I paid you to retrieve it.
Genetic research.
Biotech schematics.
Things men have killed for less.” A faint, humorless smile.
“I supply.
I don’t ask questions about what my clients intend to do with what I supply.
It’s better for everyone that way.” “And if Oscorp comes looking?” “Let them look.” Fisk’s smile didn’t reach his eyes.
“They’ll find nothing that leads back to me.
They never do.” He waved a hand, dismissing the mercenary from the room, and sat alone in the dim light of his office, turning the hard drive over once in his massive hands before sliding it into a drawer and locking it away.
Somewhere out there, a client was waiting.
Fisk intended to make sure they stayed satisfied — and stayed unaware of exactly how much he already knew about what they planned to do with what they’d bought.
Back at the warehouse, Peter rolled his shoulders and looked around the empty space with far more confidence than he’d had that morning.
He had maybe two hours before he needed to be home.
Two hours, and an entire body’s worth of questions he intended to start answering properly this time.
He started with the crates.
The stack he’d cracked open that morning had been mostly empty — old machine parts, scrap metal, nothing heavy enough to really test anything.
This time, Peter dragged over an old engine block half-buried under a tarp in the corner, something that had to weigh at least a few hundred pounds by itself.
He lifted it one-handed like it was nothing.
“Okay,” he muttered, setting it down carefully.
“Okay, that’s — that’s a start.” He found an old flatbed cart shoved against the far wall, loaded with rusted steel beams left over from whatever this place used to manufacture.
He did rough math in his head — steel density, approximate volume, the kind of numbers that used to just be homework and were apparently now a survival skill — and guessed the whole loaded cart weighed somewhere close to two tons.
He gripped the frame and lifted.
It came up smooth, easy, like lifting a gym bag.
Peter stood there a moment, arms trembling — not from strain, but from disbelief — staring at two tons of dead steel held above his own head without so much as a strained breath.
“No way,” he breathed, lowering it back down carefully.
“No way.” He kept going, working methodically the way his scientist brain always did best — testing, adjusting, pushing incrementally further each time.
He wedged himself under a fallen support beam that must have weighed several tons and heaved upward, feeling it give, feeling concrete groan and dust rain down around him as he lifted it clear off the floor before setting it down with careful, controlled precision.
His hands weren’t even shaking from effort.
Just adrenaline.
He moved to speed next, sprinting the length of the warehouse floor and skidding to a stop at the far wall in what felt like less than a second — faster than he could consciously process his own legs moving, the whole building blurring past him in streaks of gray.
He tried a punch next, careful, aimed at a stack of empty oil drums in the corner.
He held back as much as he could manage.
The drums didn’t just dent.
They folded, crumpled inward like paper, sent skidding a dozen feet across the concrete floor from the force of a single restrained hit.
Peter stood there, breathing hard, staring at his own fist like it belonged to someone else entirely.
Ten tons, he thought numbly, doing the math on the beam he’d lifted, on the engine block, on the crumpled drums scattered across the floor.
Fifteen.
Maybe more.
I don’t even know where the ceiling is.
He sat down slowly on an overturned crate, elbows on his knees, staring at his own hands in the fading afternoon light filtering through the broken skylights above.
Few days ago, he’d been an ordinary sixteen-year-old worried about a physics test.
“heh….” he chuckled to himself Peter checked the time, wiped the dust from his hands, and started the walk home, the weight of everything he still didn’t understand pressing down far heavier than any beam ever could.