The rug smelled like dust and something faintly chemical, a cleaning agent that had never quite left the fibers. Peter sat cross-legged on it with his eyes closed, the two cushions underneath him doing almost nothing against the concrete floor. His left ankle ached where it pressed against his right knee. His lower back wanted to round forward and he kept correcting it, pulling his spine straight, feeling the small muscles along his ribs complain.
Forty minutes. Maybe forty-five. The light coming through the high warehouse windows was grey and flat, not yet the color of actual morning. He could hear pigeons shifting on the beams above him, their claws ticking against metal. A delivery truck was starting up somewhere on the next block, the diesel engine turning over twice before it caught.
He was working Occlumency, the mental discipline that Harry had fought to develop across years of practice with Snape that Peter now carried as his own. He had stripped it down to something more structural than the original, less adversarial. No one was trying to break in. Just the daily work of keeping the architecture of his mind organized. Peter Parker here, accessible, current. Harry Potter's memories there, catalogued, reachable when he needed them but not flooding in uninvited. The barrier between the two functioned more like the membrane of a cell than a wall, selectively permeable, letting through what was useful and holding back what was not.
He was getting better at it. That was true. Three weeks ago the memories had a tendency to bleed through at odd moments, a smell or a sound triggering a cascade that left him standing in a school hallway with the distinct sensory impression of a castle corridor overlaid on the fluorescent lights. Now the boundaries held. He could reach into Harry's knowledge deliberately, pull out a spell structure or a piece of magical theory, and put it back when he was done. The compartments stayed separate. His spider-awareness, the heightened thing that tracked motion and pressure and intent in the space around him, no longer tangled with the magical perception as badly as it had in the first weeks. He could usually tell which system was firing, though not always, and not when he was tired.
But the thing he was organizing had gotten larger. The practice was working. The container it was managing had outgrown the container's original design.
He could feel the inner door. It had appeared during an Occlumency session in this same spot, the first time he had gone deep enough to touch the lower architecture of the meditative space. A threshold, a spatial sense in the mental landscape that there was an edge, and beyond the edge was something larger and darker and not his. It had been at the periphery then. Now it was closer. He was more aware of it the way you become aware of someone standing in a doorway before you actually look up.
He had not crossed it. He was not going to cross it. The Ancient One had been clear about that, and Peter did not need her clarity to understand why. What lived past that threshold was the reason she had locked away parts of his astral experience in the first place. But the door did not need him to cross it to make itself felt. It sat there in the architecture, and something came through the gap. A low thermal bleed, like standing near a heating vent that should not exist. His spider-awareness flagged it the same way it flagged a car accelerating behind him on the street: something moving in a direction that included where he was.
Last night he had practiced basic repair charms on a cracked circuit board, the kind of work that should have been routine by now. Reparo, targeted, specific, coaxing the fractured trace back into alignment. He had felt the magic settle into the work the way it was supposed to, precise and contained. But this morning, when he woke up, there had been three seconds where he did not know which life was his. Three seconds of lying on the foam mattress pad staring at the corrugated ceiling and not being sure if the ceiling was supposed to be stone. It had passed. It was not a crisis. But it was the third time this week.
The magic he practiced in controlled sessions was not fully going back to sleep between them.
He sat with this for another minute, holding the meditative space, noting the quality of the threshold without approaching it. The metallic taste at the back of his throat, like a spell gathering that he had not cast. His awareness prickling along the back of his neck, registering the attention the same way it registered someone watching him from across a cafeteria. Something on the other side of that edge knew he was here. He did not think it cared, exactly. But it knew.
Peter opened his eyes.
The warehouse looked the way it always looked in the early morning. Grey light on concrete. The workbench with its slight leftward lean. Tools hanging on the pegboard behind it in the order he had established during his first week here. Parts jars with handwritten labels. The camp chair. The foam pad with the blanket wadded at the foot where he had kicked it off, the fitted sheet coming untucked at one corner. The hot plate on the floor near the food corner, the kettle sitting on it, dented at its base the way it had been when he found it. The travel mug with the hairline crack in the handle, the one May had stopped using. The other mug, faded bank logo barely visible on the side, pulled from the back of the apartment cupboard. Both unwashed. The chipped bowl was cleaner than either of them.
He reached for the composition notebook under the edge of the mattress pad. Cheap, black and white marbled cover, corners softening. The early pages held fragments from the first weeks, things he had seen during his astral overreach that he had not had language for at the time: geometries that folded in on themselves, presences that registered as scale rather than shape, structures that felt like thought outside thought. He had tried to describe them and mostly failed. The recent entries were sparser, more like a lab log. He wrote the date and a few words. Threshold present, closer than Tuesday. Three-second confusion on waking, third instance this week. Thermal anomaly during practice. He closed the notebook and put it back.
His glasses were in his jacket pocket, where he had stashed them last night before sleeping here instead of going home. He should have gone home. May thought he was in his room. He put the glasses on, and the warehouse sharpened into its usual collection of problems and half-solutions.
The rice in the plastic bin was almost gone. He could see the bottom through what remained, maybe two servings, and he needed to buy more before the weekend. He put the kettle on, waited for it, and ate the last of the rice standing over the hot plate, spooning it out of the chipped bowl because both mugs were dirty and he did not have time to wash them. The rice was cold from the bin and he ate it that way, not bothering to heat it. His stomach registered the food and immediately started calculating how long it would last. Not long enough.
He checked the time on his phone. School in less than two hours. He had three blocks of papers to deliver first. The jacket he had worn yesterday was draped over the camp chair; he put it on, felt the slight weight of the embossed card in the inside pocket where it always was, and went out through the side door into the cold.
The air tasted like October. Exhaust and wet leaves and the mineral smell of concrete after rain.
The wrought-iron gate at 177A Bleecker Street had two gargoyles. Peter had been here enough times now that the hinges sounded familiar when the gate swung, a low groan that had more to do with the age of the metal than with rust. He did not need the embossed card anymore to find the address, but he still carried it.
He was carrying his school bag because he had come straight from Midtown. There was ink on his left hand from the math test he had finished twenty minutes and one subway ride ago. He had not done well on the test. He knew this the way you know a meal has disagreed with you before the symptoms fully arrive.
The Sanctum's front garden was quieter than the street. Quieter in a way that involved the air itself, as though the building absorbed ambient sound and replaced it with something denser. The magic worked into the building was structural, and Peter could feel the difference between the air inside the gate and the air outside it even when nothing specific was happening. His spider-awareness read it as a pressure change, a step up in resolution, like putting on his glasses after a morning without them.
He went up the steps and through the front door, which was unlocked, which it always was.
The Ancient One was already in the training hall. She stood near the center of the polished wood floor, hands folded in front of her, her orange and yellow robes catching the light that came through the high windows at an angle that did not quite match the time of day outside. The geometric patterns worked into the molding along the walls and ceiling were not decoration. Peter had figured that out during his second visit. They were part of the building's structural magic, the way rebar is part of a building's structural integrity.
She did not greet him. She did not ask how his day was.
"Stand here," she said, and indicated a spot on the floor about three feet in front of her and slightly to the left.
This was new. The sessions before this one had been more conversational, more exploratory. She would ask him questions and let the answers develop, or she would watch him practice something and offer observations that seemed aimed at a point slightly behind the thing he thought they were discussing. The mirror check-ins had a similar quality, the Ancient One's face appearing in whatever reflective surface was nearest, asking questions that were really instructions disguised as curiosity. Those sessions had felt open-ended. This felt decided.
"You will be here three days each week." Her voice was the way it always was. Measured, unhurried, every word set down with the deliberateness of someone who had centuries of practice at saying only what she meant. "You will arrive before I ask you to arrive. You will tell no one where you go on these days."
Peter stood where she had indicated. His bag was still on his shoulder. He put it down.
"The mirror conversations will continue," she said. "They are not a substitute for this."
She walked him through the training hall first. Here was the floor where he would work, polished wood with a grain that caught the strange light in ways that shifted when he moved his head. Here was the meditation chamber off the main hall, candles in iron holders, the shadows in the corners seeming to lean slightly inward. And here was a side room whose walls were lined with things Peter could not identify. Objects in glass cases, scrolls in leather tubes, a set of metal rings on a velvet stand that hummed faintly when he walked past. She did not name any of it. She was showing him the geography of the obligation. The contents would come when she decided they would come.
"I will not come to you," she said. "You will come here."
Peter nodded. Hands at his sides. Weight even. His left hand still had ink on it.
"Your instincts have outrun your formation." She stopped walking and looked at him. "You improvise well in the margins of what you know. This is useful. It is also becoming dangerous, and I have watched it grow."
She said this without emphasis or alarm. The serenity was real. What sat inside the serenity was something more exacting.
"If the instincts are going to keep growing," she said, "and they are, then they need structure to grow into."
She led him to the small room at the back of the training hall. A plain table, two simple chairs, an oriental tea set, two leather-bound books that he had never seen opened. The room was smaller than the training hall and felt different. Less worked upon. More like a place where a person might actually sit down.
She prepared tea. Huangshan Maofeng, the same green tea she had served the first time. Her hands moved with the particular precision of someone who had done this ten thousand times without it becoming mechanical. She poured his cup first.
Peter sat down across from her and took the card out of his jacket pocket, the embossed card she had given him the first time, the one with the Sanctum's address. He put it on the table between them while she poured. Just what his hands did when he was listening carefully and needed something to hold. The corner was slightly worn from handling. He picked it up again and put it back.
"Three times a week is a lot," he said. He meant it lightly.
She did not respond. She drank her tea.
The silence extended long enough for Peter to drink his own tea, which he did quickly because he was hungry and the warmth helped. She drank hers slowly, holding the cup in both hands. Peter thought about three afternoons a week. After school. While maintaining the paper route. While keeping May from asking questions he couldn't answer, though May already knew about the hot plate and had accepted, provisionally, that Peter had a workshop space for robotics. While keeping up with classes that he was already starting to let slide. He ran the numbers in his head while she drank her tea. The numbers were not good.
When she set the cup down, her voice changed. The pitch stayed the same. Something under it didn't.
"You are not to venture into the astral plane on your own between sessions."
Peter opened his mouth.
"Peter."
She said his name once. The name landed in the room with a finality that closed the conversation.
He closed his mouth.
She poured more tea. The moment passed into what came next, which was Peter finishing his cup and standing and putting his bag back on his shoulder and walking out of the Sanctum into the Bleecker Street evening. The light outside was lower than he had expected. He checked his watch. He had to get across Manhattan to Queens before May got home from her shift and found the apartment empty.
The same gesture. Forty times. His shoulder was burning by the twentieth repetition and the construct still would not hold past two seconds.
The Ancient One stood six feet away, watching. She had been watching for the last fifteen minutes without saying anything. Peter held his arm in the position she had placed it in at the start of the session, elbow at a specific angle, wrist turned slightly outward, fingers spread in a configuration that did not match any movement his body already knew. The construct was supposed to form between his palm and the air in front of it, a shaped intention, a boundary with a geometry she had demonstrated once and expected him to replicate.
Two seconds. It held for two seconds and then the alignment slipped and the construct dissolved and he was standing there with his arm extended and his deltoid aching and sweat on his forehead.
"The base," she said.
He adjusted. Tried again. The construct flickered into existence, held, wobbled, collapsed.
"Again."
This was what training looked like across days. Tuesday. Thursday. Saturday. The same floor, the same light moving across the polished wood in ways that suggested the Sanctum did not entirely agree with the sun about where afternoon was. The same corrections, delivered in the same spare language. Your left hand. The base. Again.
Spider-metabolism burned through energy fast and training burned through more. He arrived hungry and left hungrier. The sessions demanded a kind of concentration that was physical as much as mental, holding a posture that his muscles did not know while simultaneously holding an intention that his mind could almost grasp. The gap between almost and actually was where the work lived.
His wrists got sore. A deep ache from channeling something through joints and tendons not yet conditioned for it. His shoulders developed new complaints. The spot between his shoulder blades became a permanent low-grade fire by the third session, and he started unconsciously rolling his shoulders between repetitions, trying to work something loose that was not going to come loose.
He could derive what she wanted. That was the frustrating part. He could see the geometry of the construct, could map it in his head the way he mapped equations, could understand the dimensional logic of why the base needed to be angled precisely so. His hands would not cooperate. His body could not execute what his mind had already solved. He wanted to explain to his wrists what they were doing wrong. His wrists did not care about explanations. Harry's memories contained enough magical training to know that this gap between understanding and execution was normal, that it closed slowly through repetition, and that knowing this did not make the repetition less annoying.
The Ancient One corrected through observation. She watched him fail and said one word. She placed her hand on his wrist and moved it three degrees to the left and said nothing. She watched him do it wrong four more times and then said "your weight" and Peter shifted his center of gravity slightly forward and the construct held for a quarter second longer. Three seconds instead of two. She watched it hold, then turned to the next thing.
He filled margins in his notebook during a water break. Equations that had nothing to do with the training, just his mind needing to process something it could actually solve while his shoulder recovered. The Ancient One noticed this. She did not comment on it.
Tea, after. The same small room, the same two chairs, the same tea prepared with the same precision. This was the only part of the session that had no task attached to it. No correction, no repetition. Just two people drinking tea.
He asked her a question during one of these moments. Something practical, about the construct's base angle. Whether the geometry was fixed or whether it varied with the caster.
She looked at him. "Hold your wrist where it needs to be, not where it's comfortable."
He turned this over on the subway home. She had answered a question about geometry with an instruction about practice, which either meant the geometry was always the same and only the body's relationship to it changed, or meant she did not think he was ready for the real answer. He was still chewing on it when he got to the apartment, dropping his bag by the door with barely enough time to splash water on his face before May got home.
Tuesday. Peter discovered in homeroom that the math assignment he had completed was due yesterday. The paper was in his bag, finished, correct as far as he could tell, done on what he'd thought was Tuesday night. But that had been Wednesday night. Yesterday had been Tuesday. The assignment had been due yesterday. He sat in his seat and stared at the paper and tried to reconstruct where the days had slipped. He had been thinking about Thursday's Sanctum session while doing the problems. Thursday's session was on Thursday because Tuesday had already happened. Except it hadn't. Except it had.
His math teacher took late work with a deduction. He turned it in and did not explain.
Wednesday. The route. He was sorting newspaper packets at the distribution point before dawn and running through the logistics of Thursday's session in his head, trying to figure out whether he could get from school to Bleecker Street and back to Queens in time, and he miscounted the east leg. Six houses on 43rd Avenue got each other's papers. Mrs. Kowalski on 43rd wanted her papers folded, not rolled, and she had made this clear on three previous occasions. Peter had delivered her a rolled paper belonging to the house two doors down. She called out from her stoop. He could not make out the words because he was already calculating the fix, doubling back on his bike with the cold air stinging his face and his hands numb on the handlebars. The fix took twelve minutes. He was late to school.
Thursday. English. Mrs. Ramirez was discussing narrative structure and unreliable narrators and Peter was aware that he was in the room. His body occupied a chair in the third row. His mind was running a parallel track that involved the base angle of the construct and whether he should tell the Ancient One about the threshold getting closer or whether mentioning it would lead to questions about the morning sessions in the warehouse that he was not sure he wanted to answer. Mrs. Ramirez said his name. He answered with the last sentence he could remember hearing, something about perspective and point of view. She looked at him for a moment longer than normal. Moved on.
The spider metabolism was a constant pressure underneath all of it. He burned through the lunch May packed for him before second period most days. Apple gone by 9:30. Sandwich by 10:00. Granola bar by 10:15. The back half of every school day was spent running on whatever he could get from the vending machine. A dollar seventy-five for a bag of chips and an orange juice. He ate the chips in the stairwell between periods and put the empty bag in his pocket because there was no garbage can on the landing.
His body was too fast sometimes when he was tired, the spider-reflexes cutting in ahead of his conscious decisions. He caught a textbook sliding off someone's desk before it cleared the edge, his hand already there, and had to pretend he'd been reaching for something. He took the stairs two at a time and realized halfway up that he was moving at a speed that drew a glance from a kid coming down. He slowed. Shoved his hands in his pockets. Walked the rest of the way at normal speed, which felt like wading through something thick.
Mr. Thompson called him in on Friday. Not to the distribution point but to the back of the shed where the route sheets were pinned to a corkboard and the air smelled like newsprint and cold. Mr. Thompson was holding a clipboard. He always held a clipboard.
"Wednesday was the second time," Mr. Thompson said. He looked at the clipboard, then back at Peter. "The Kowalski complaint was the third contact I've had about the east leg this month."
"I know. I mixed up the packets at the sort. It won't happen again."
"You're good at this job, Peter. I want you to stay good at it." Mr. Thompson turned the clipboard around and tapped something on the route sheet. "But I need you to actually be good at it. Not good at it on the days you're paying attention. One more like Wednesday and we need to talk about whether this arrangement is working."
Peter said it would not happen again and meant it. He walked out into the cold and got on his bike and rode toward school. The warning had been fair.
The Sanctum sessions were going well. The constructs held for three seconds now, consistently. His posture corrections were sticking. The Ancient One had started introducing a second form, something that built on the first, and Peter could feel the logic of it, the way the second construct used the base angle of the first as a foundation. He was progressing. He was actually, measurably getting better at the one obligation he could least afford and least explain.
Everything around the progress was fraying.
At home, May passed through the kitchen one evening while Peter ate standing over the stove because he did not have time to sit down. She said something about dinner together tomorrow night and Peter said "yeah, sounds good" while calculating how long Thursday's session would run and whether he could make it back by seven. She looked at him. He did not see the look because he was eating rice from the pot with a serving spoon and trying to remember whether he had turned in the English reading response that was due this morning.
At the hideout, he got there less. When he did get there it was later than he had planned and he was tired enough that the Occlumency practice fought him instead of settling. The threshold sat in its place, closer than it had been Monday. One night he skipped the meditation entirely to catch up on the English reading he had missed while sitting in Mrs. Ramirez's class thinking about construct geometry, and then he lay on the foam pad staring at the corrugated ceiling and did not sleep for a long time.
May had started buying a third loaf of bread. She had not said anything about it.
Ned was already at Peter's locker when Peter got there between second and third period. This was how it always worked. Ned arrived places first. He was leaning against the metal with his phone in one hand and his bag slung over one shoulder, and he looked up when Peter rounded the corner.
"Dude." Ned looked at him. "You look like you slept in a dryer."
Peter opened his locker and began exchanging textbooks. "I'm fine. Didn't sleep great."
"You haven't slept great in like two weeks. That's not a phase, that's a condition."
"The route's been rough. I'm still getting the timing down." Peter found the English textbook he needed and put it in his bag. "It's an adjustment period."
Ned watched him. Everything showed on Ned's face; it always had. Right now what showed was a kind of focused concern, eyebrows drawn together, mouth slightly compressed.
"Are you eating?" Ned said.
"Yes, I'm eating."
"Are you eating enough? Because you look like you're burning through whatever you eat before it gets a chance to do anything."
"I'm eating," Peter said, and closed his locker. The clang of it echoed off the hallway tile.
Ned looked at him for another second. "Okay." He said it in a voice that held something back. He had made a decision, and Peter could see the decision, and Ned could see Peter seeing it. The moment hung there between them. Then Ned shifted his bag on his shoulder and they walked to the cafeteria.
Ned talked about a coding problem he was working through for computer science, something about sorting algorithms and an edge case that produced a stack overflow under specific input conditions. Peter tracked it. He tracked it because Ned was interesting and the problem was interesting and this was real and good. But his responses lagged by a beat, his brain catching up to where Ned already was in the explanation. He kept losing the thread and picking it up a sentence later.
At their usual table, Peter ate. He ate with the focused intensity of someone running on vending-machine chips since 10:15. Ned handed him half of his own sandwich without comment, just set it on the table between them, and Peter took it and said thanks and ate that too.
"You're demolishing food like it owes you money," Ned said.
"Growth spurt," Peter said.
"Must be some spurt. You lost weight and you're eating more. That's not usually how growth spurts work."
Peter didn't have an answer for this. He took another bite of Ned's sandwich and chewed and looked at the cafeteria table and thought about the third loaf of bread.
They sat there in the noise. The cafeteria was loud with voices and trays and the squeak of chairs on linoleum. Peter finished eating. Ned finished eating. Ned said something about the coding problem again, a new approach he wanted to try, and Peter said something back that was approximately right, and they gathered their bags and went to class.
May had been on a double shift. Peter could see it in how she moved through the kitchen, the careful economy of someone whose feet had been on a hospital floor for fourteen hours. Her scrubs were still on. The hospital lanyard was still around her neck. She had put food on the table and now she was standing by the counter with a glass of water, watching Peter eat.
He was trying to eat at a normal pace. He was failing. The plate held rice and beans and the chicken she made when the grocery budget allowed it. He finished everything on the plate in what he suspected was an unreasonable amount of time and looked at the pot on the stove.
May came over and put the back of her hand against his forehead. She held it there for a few seconds. Her hand was cool. Peter's skin was warm from everything, the training, the route, the walk home, the constant metabolic burn. He closed his eyes.
She took her hand away. Went back to the counter. Picked up her water.
"Are you sleeping?"
"Yeah. Mostly. Some nights are better."
"Are you eating at school? Enough, I mean. Not just the lunch I pack."
"I eat the lunch. And I get stuff from the machines when I need to."
"Is the route getting to be too much right now?"
Peter took a breath. "The route's fine. I had a rough week but I fixed it. Mr. Thompson and I talked."
"Mr. Thompson had to talk to you?"
"It wasn't a big deal. I mixed up some deliveries. I fixed it."
May drank her water. She was looking at him over the rim of the glass.
"You've lost weight," she said.
"I'm eating." He said this to the plate. The plate was empty.
She came back to the table and put more chicken on it without asking. Refilled his glass. Sat down across from him and watched him start eating again.
"The look on your face when you saw the pot," she said. "You looked like I was going to take it away."
Peter almost laughed. A short exhale through his nose. "I'm just hungry."
"You're always hungry lately."
"I'm fifteen. Isn't that the deal? You eat everything and grow two inches?"
"You're eating everything and losing weight. That's a different deal." She paused. "Is something happening at school?"
"School's fine."
"That's the third time you've said some version of 'fine' in the last two minutes."
"Because things are fine. I'm just. The route and school and getting the timing right. It's an adjustment."
May watched him. She took a sip of water. Then she said, "Do you want me to switch you to decaf?"
Peter stopped eating. "I don't drink coffee."
"Exactly. So imagine how tired you'd be if you did and I took it away."
He laughed. A real one, surprised out of him, and May's face shifted, the worry lines easing into something warmer. She had got him and they both knew it, and for a few seconds the kitchen was just a kitchen where two people were having dinner.
They finished eating. She washed the dishes. He dried. The radiator clicked. Someone's television hummed faintly through the ceiling, muffled past recognition. Peter dried the plates and put them in the cabinet and thought about the Sanctum. About the threshold. About the packets he needed to sort correctly tomorrow morning.
May said good night from the hallway. Peter went to his room and sat on the edge of his bed. He unlaced his shoes, set them by the door, and lay back. The ceiling was off-white with a water stain near the window that had been there since before he could remember. He listened to May's evening routine through the wall. The bathroom faucet. The creak of her bedroom door. Then quiet.
He needed to be at the Sanctum in eleven hours.
Peter was wrapping his wrists with the athletic tape he kept in his bag. The training session had been long and his forearms had the deep ache that came from holding constructs at angles his tendons were still learning. He was standing near the entrance to the training hall, bag at his feet, working the tape around his left wrist while his mind was already halfway to the subway.
"Peter."
He turned. The Ancient One stood in the doorway of the meditation chamber. She had not been there a moment ago, or she had been and he had not noticed.
"The things you saw in the astral plane." Her voice was quiet. Quieter than her teaching voice. The measured cadence was the same but whatever usually cushioned it had been removed. "They are not memories. They are still there. They were aware that you were there, and that kind of awareness does not diminish because you stopped looking."
Peter stood with the tape half-wound around his wrist.
"Are they a threat right now?"
"Not actively, as far as I can determine." She paused. "But you should understand that they are real. And you should understand why I had to lock away what I locked away."
He finished wrapping his wrist. His hands needed to be doing something. He had felt the threshold growing closer during morning practice. He had sensed the attention from the other side. But hearing it confirmed by someone who understood the actual scale of what lived in those deeper places turned a private suspicion into a fact he would have to carry.
"Okay," he said.
She had already turned back toward the meditation chamber. He put the tape in his bag and left.
The 7 train from Manhattan to Queens ran on elevated track for most of the route. Peter held the overhead bar and watched the rooftops go by. The windows were reflective enough to show his face against the passing city, and he looked thinner than he remembered. His hoodie sat differently on his shoulders. He noticed this and then let it go because he could not do anything about it on a subway car.
The train rocked on the curves. A woman with grocery bags was sitting three seats down, rearranging something inside one of the bags. A man in a construction jacket was asleep against the window across the aisle, his hard hat on the seat beside him. The fluorescent light made everything look slightly ill.
Peter's shoulder ached. His wrists were sore under the tape. He was thinking about the third loaf of bread and then about Mr. Thompson's clipboard and then about the construct holding for three seconds. The three seconds were real progress. Everything around the three seconds was falling apart.
He tried to figure out the week. Monday: route at 5:30, school at 8, Sanctum at 3:30, home by 6:30 if the trains cooperated. Tuesday: route, school, homework, hideout if he could get there. Wednesday: route, school, Sanctum. Thursday: route, school, catch up on whatever he'd missed. Friday: route, school, Sanctum. Saturday morning the route ran late because the weekend edition was heavier. Somewhere in all of that he was supposed to sleep and eat and be a person May recognized when she looked at him across the kitchen table.
He could not figure out what to drop. He kept turning each piece over. School was what May worked double shifts to pay for. The route was money for the parts jar and the rice bin and the gauze he went through. The hideout was the only honest place he had, the only geography where all of it fit together without a cover story. The Sanctum was the structure the growing instincts needed. Without it they would grow into something unmanaged, and he had seen what unmanaged looked like on the astral plane and he was not going back there.
The woman with the grocery bags got off at Queensboro Plaza. Someone else got on and sat in her seat.
He needed to get better at this. He did not know how yet. He did not have time to figure out how. He had time to do tomorrow's route and go to school and get to the Sanctum and come home and answer May's questions and do it again. Eventually a pattern would emerge from the repetition, or he would figure out some efficiency he hadn't seen yet, or he would just keep running at this pace until something gave or nothing gave and he kept going.
The train pulled into his stop. Peter got off and walked through the turnstile and up the stairs into the Queens night. The air was cold and smelled like exhaust and wet leaves and the particular mineral scent of concrete that had been rained on and dried and rained on again. His bag was heavy. His shoulder ached. He walked the six blocks home and let himself into the apartment quietly and found the plate May had left for him in the refrigerator, covered in foil. He ate it standing at the counter in the dark, rinsed the plate, put it in the rack. He would set the alarm for the route. He would do the papers before school. He would figure out the rest of it later, the way he always figured out the rest of it later, which was not a plan but was what he had.