He lost the figure twice.
Once behind a water tower that shouldn't have had a shadow that long at this time of day. Once again near a fire escape on a building whose brickwork pattern Peter didn't recognize, which bothered him more than he expected. He'd logged a lot of this city in his head over the years. This block was near enough to his regular routes that he should have known it. The bricks were right but the pattern of them wasn't.
He stopped on a ledge and tried to get his bearings.
Below, a man walked out of a coffee shop, looked at the street, walked back inside. A few seconds later another man came out, stood in the same spot, turned his face up to the sky with an expression Peter couldn't read from this angle. Turned and went back inside too.
Two different people. Same reaction. Like there was something in the air that everyone could feel and nobody knew what to do about.
Peter's chest felt tight. Not injured tight. Something else.
He pulled out his phone. The emergency alerts were still coming in. A partial street collapse on 38th. Reports of structural phasing near the Flatiron. Someone on the scanner using the phrase temporal overlay three times before the channel went to static. Peter had no idea what temporal overlay meant in practical terms and he didn't love that.
He moved north.
The city was bleeding at the edges. That was how it felt from up here , small pockets of abnormality scattered across the grid like a map with water damage. A building would flicker. A stretch of street would go briefly pale. He passed a block where two fire hydrants occupied the same point in space, one solid and one barely there, and a police officer was standing in front of them just staring.
He stopped at the officer. "You need help?"
The officer looked up at him. Young, maybe twenty-three. "You explain to me," she said, pointing at the hydrants, "what that is and I'll let you know."
Peter looked at the hydrants. "I cannot explain that."
"Then no," she said. "I don't think I do."
He kept moving.
The reports on the scanner were getting stranger. Civilians claiming they'd been somewhere else moments before. One man insisting he had been standing in what he described as a different city and then the ground had shifted under him and he was here. He didn't know what city. He'd never been there before. He'd only been there for a second.
Peter filed that away and didn't know what to do with it.
He was near 52nd when the radio chatter changed.
Not the topic, but the tone. There was a layer of something under the routine that Peter had learned to hear years ago, that particular quality of voices trying to stay official while something adjacent to panic was running through them. He slowed down and listened.
"Unknown vigilante. Black suit...Cape. Engaged three suspects, non-lethal, near the corner of...''
The channel shifted. Then came back.
"All units be advised, the individual is armed with..."
Static.
"...capabilities unknown. Do not approach without..."
Gone again.
Peter stood very still on the ledge.
Black suit. Cape. Not a description that matched anyone in his immediate mental file. Non-lethal takedowns. Moving through a city that wasn't theirs, or maybe was, or some version of was.
His first instinct was that someone had crossed over with the merge. Made sense. His second instinct was that this person probably wasn't the problem and wasn't working with whatever was causing this.
His second instinct wasn't based on much.
He tracked the last reported location and started moving.
The block he arrived at was quiet in the way that follows something rather than precedes it. A few people moving quickly away. Three men on the ground near a dumpster, zip-tied with something dark and thin, all of them breathing. One had a knife still half-drawn. None of them looked like they'd gotten a good look at whoever put them there.
Peter crouched beside the nearest one. "Who did this?"
The man looked up at him. "Something from a story," he said. Then looked away like he regretted saying it.
Peter straightened. Scanned the alley. His spider-sense was doing something low and constant like background static.
At the far end of the alley, where it met a wall and the shadows pooled thickest, something shifted.
Peter's sense spiked. He moved left and put his back to the wall.
The figure that stepped out of the dark was already watching him. Had been, Peter suspected, for longer than he'd been in the alley.
Tall. Dark suit. No color to speak of. A cape that settled like it had weight. And eyes that weren't looking at Peter so much as cataloguing him, moving across his suit, his posture, the way he was standing, the web-shooters on his wrists, and then settling somewhere around Peter's face with the focused patience of someone running a calculation.
Peter's first thought, absurdly, was that he looked expensive.
Neither of them moved.
The distant sound of sirens. A building flickering somewhere two blocks east, concrete going pale and then solid again. The city misbehaving at the edges while the two of them stood here deciding something.
Peter raised one hand. "Hey. So. Rough afternoon."
The figure said nothing.
"I'm Spider-Man. In case the suit didn't..."
"I know who you are," the figure said. Low. Deliberate. "The question is which one."
Peter opened his mouth and didn't immediately have an answer for that.
The figure stepped fully out of the shadow and the line of light from a streetlight caught the edge of a symbol on his chest , a bat, outlined in dark on dark, barely visible.
Peter's brain did something complicated. He'd heard of Batman. Everyone had heard of Batman in the way you hear of things that might not be real, urban legend bleeding into credible rumor, a story that kept coming from Gotham but Gotham wasn't a place Peter had ever had reason to visit. He'd always half-assumed the story was exaggerated.
The man in front of him did not look exaggerated.
"Which one," Peter said. "What does that mean?"
Batman was looking at him with a look that wasn't suspicion exactly. More like he was waiting for Peter to answer a question Peter hadn't been asked yet.
Somewhere above them, the line in the sky had gotten slightly wider. Peter could see it even from down here.
He didn't point it out. Neither did Batman.