Second Skin - Chapter 0004

Chapter 4 — Luck

The mouth opened.

It wasn’t a mouth. Sebastian knew this just as he knew, without needing to count, how many wires came out of Frankenstein’s controller: it was knowledge that didn’t pass through reasoning, that arrived ready-made. Mouths had lips. Mouths had a limit, a point where the bone said ” up to here .” This had no limit. It opened in layers, one fold unfolding into another, the jaw descending far beyond where any joint should lock, and with each centimeter of opening, teeth sprouted from within the dark gum as if they were being expelled.

And they were all different.

That was what the broken part of Sebastian’s brain chose to register, and he never understood why. Not the height. Not the eight meters of emptiness beneath his feet. The teeth. There were teeth the size of kitchen knives, long, straight, yellowish at the base and clean at the tip. There were small teeth, crowded among the large ones, wedged into the gaps like shards of glass cemented to the top of a wall. There were rows upon rows, three, four layers deep, and some were barbed—pointed inward, curved inward, the way a fishhook is made so nothing can come back out.

And the tongue went up.

It emerged from the depths of the thing in a slow, vertical motion, thick at the base, tapering as it rose, glistening with saliva that dripped in long strands and didn’t fall, only stretched. The tip rippled in the cold air half a meter from his face. It wasn’t attacking. It was tasting . Sebastian understood, with a clarity he would have given anything to avoid, that the thing was savoring his fear before devouring the rest.

His body slumped down.

It wasn’t a decision. His shoulders slumped between the fingers that held him, his chin fell to his chest, his knees buckled into thin air. An animalistic shrinking, millions of years old, the same movement a rat makes under a shadow.

And his mind went blank.

That was it, exactly that: it went blank. There was no panic, no prayer, no life flashing before his eyes. There was the opposite. A blank. A low, even hum where there should have been thought, and Sebastian Cross—who could mentally calculate delivery routes in two seconds, who had rewritten the firmware of a headset one Saturday morning, who calculated everything, always, because calculating was the only thing he did better than others—was left completely empty. A shell. A thirteen-year-old boy hanging in mid-air, staring at it, with nothing happening inside.

Because there was no calculation to be made. That was the truth, and his body knew it before he did: when there is no way out, the mind stops searching. There was no angle. There was no trick. There was no part to be replaced, no weld to be redone, no makeshift solution to be invented. There was a mouth, and it was coming, and he was inside its hand.

The teeth came in.

And something hit one of them.

It was small. Absurdly small. Sebastian only noticed because he was looking directly at that spot: a bright dot crossed his field of vision in a blur, hit the side of one of the knife-like teeth with a dry, ridiculous click , the sound of a marble hitting porcelain, and bounced inside.

He was swallowed by the darkness of the throat.

What-

The explosion.

Sebastian closed his eyes reflexively, and yet he still saw the flash through his eyelids, a sudden redness from within his own flesh. The bang wasn’t like the gunshots. It was more muffled, thicker, a contained thud, the sound of something detonating inside something else. The hand that held him trembled all over. A wind ripped from nowhere hit his face, threw his hair back, pushed the snowflakes aside in a ring that opened and vanished.

And then: silence.

Not the silence of the square—the square continued screaming, honking, rushing, the world continued collapsing below. But there, in that cubic meter of air, a pause occurred. The roar had stopped halfway.

Sebastian opened his eyes.

Where the mouth should have been, there was no mouth.

There was white . A dense, fibrous mass, a dirty white like old milk, that filled the entire cavity and overflowed over what remained of the lips, hardening as he looked, clamping the jaws together in a crude gag. And it didn’t stop there. It trickled down his chin, descended his neck in crisscrossing and intertwining cords, spread across his red and black shoulders like a root searching for soil, fanned out across his enormous chest, descended his back, his legs, reached the plaza floor eight meters below and continued to spread out there, over the asphalt, over the trampled snow, a gigantic, living web drawing itself around the creature in irregular circles, sticking its back to the wall, its feet to the concrete, its entire body to the world.

A web.

Sebastian knew it. He knew it even before he knew the lyrics themselves. He’d seen it a thousand times in grainy videos from thirty years ago, in yellowed newspaper clippings stuck inside a school locker, in crayon drawings on the refrigerator door at home. He knew it the same way he knew his mother’s face.

But his brain was still empty, and the emptiness prevented any conclusion from entering.

And then the pulse exploded.

It came from below and from the right, so fast that the eye didn’t catch the trajectory, only the result: a dark metal disc crossed the space where the creature’s forearm was, exactly at the crease where the hand originated from the arm, and passed through.

It didn’t hit. It passed.

Sebastian felt the cut in his own body, in the sense that the hand holding him suddenly lost all tension. There was no resistance, no creaking bones, none of that scraping flesh he had heard all night. It was clean. It was obscenely clean. And he only managed to identify the object when it was already twenty meters ahead and below, embedded upright in the asphalt of the square like an axe in a log, still vibrating, the metal singing a thin, sharp hum that rose through the cold air.

A manhole cover.

A cast-iron manhole cover, the kind two men lift with a crowbar, had pierced the wrist of a five-meter-tall monster like a hot knife through butter, and still had enough speed left to bury itself in the ground.

For a few milliseconds—and Sebastian felt each one of them, stretched out, long—nothing happened. His body remained in the air, enveloped by the severed hand, the fingers still closed around his ribs, the arm no longer existing behind it.

Then gravity reminded him.

Physics all started working again at once, with that administrative indifference that physics possesses, and the world began to rise. Not the world falling: the world rising. The lights on the panels moved upwards, the signs moved upwards, the falling snow stopped falling and began to float, and Sebastian’s stomach rose along with everything, occupying the place where his throat should have been.

He didn’t scream. He was out of breath.

And before he touched the ground — before he could even imagine the ground — something white struck his chest.

He struck the dead hand that was still encircling him with a damp thud , and grabbed it. And pulled.

The jolt was horrible. The fall turned into a sudden surge, upwards and sideways, in a direction he didn’t have time to calculate, and the wind hit his face with the force of a slamming door. His eyes closed on their own, brimming with tears. His hair whipped back. The snow turned into white lines passing sideways. Sebastian was dragged through the air of New York at a speed he didn’t recognize, unable to see, unable to understand, with no part of his body responding to any command.

And then it stopped.

It stopped in an impossible way — without a jolt, without a rebound, a smooth and absolute deceleration, as if someone had simply decided that that movement was over.

Sebastian opened his eyes.

And it happened, right in front of him, less than an inch from his face, the thing he never imagined would happen. Not today. Not now. Not ever, if he were honest with himself on the nights he stayed up late drawing circuits.

There was a man on the wall.

Standing. Upright. Feet planted on the concrete of the building as if the concrete were the ground and the rest of the universe were wrong.

And he was dressed in the most recognizable outfit on the planet.

Red and blue. The red was deeper than it appeared on the screens, almost wine-colored, and over it the black, unpainted spiderweb lines— in relief , thin, raised cords that ran across the shoulders, chest, arms, backs of hands, a design Sebastian had copied with a pen in the margin of a physics notebook about a hundred times without ever getting the spacing right. The dark plates on the forearms. The reinforced joints. The taut fabric over a body that was tall—one meter and eighty-five, maybe more, a height that made Sebastian feel the same size as Camila.

And the mask.

The lenses were white, wide, with thick, black rims, and they moved . Sebastian saw them. They tightened and opened in a fraction of a second, adjusting the focus, a mechanical iris closing around his face, and in that instant they were closed, narrow, concentrated, staring at the boy who was now in his hands.

“Nas mãos,” in the plural, was an exaggeration.

It was a hand. And it wasn’t grasping anything.

Sebastian, who was still trapped inside the monster’s severed hand, and the monster’s severed hand was simply resting on the man’s open palm. No fingers closed around anything. No support, no hook, no edge. A touch. He held sixty or seventy pounds of alien and boy flesh with the same hand posture as someone resting their palm on a table.

And it didn’t fall. Nothing fell.

And Sebastian, his ribs aching with every breath, someone else’s blood drying on his face, his throat raw, opened his mouth and couldn’t.

He tried again. His mouth trembled. His jaw trembled. It came out in a voice he didn’t even recognize as his own, thin, broken, in pieces:

“You are… you are…”

He could see. That was the strange part, the part that only became clear to him many days later, when he was already able to think about the sequence again. He had lost his glasses—that thing’s tongue had ripped them from his face and they had vanished spinning down there, and the world had become a shapeless soup of light. But myopia is a specific kind of cowardice. It steals the distant and returns the near. And there, an inch away, the man was clearer than anything Sebastian had ever seen in his entire life: the texture of the fabric, the dull sheen on the plates of his forearms, a thin scratch across the left edge of the lens, a dark splash drying on his shoulder.

Crisp. Real. Ali.

But the man was no longer looking at him.

The lenses had turned downwards, and the black edges wrinkled—truly wrinkled, the material gathering into folds around his eyes, like a furrowed brow—as he stared at the square.

Sebastian didn’t look along. He didn’t need to. He’d already seen enough with his eyes and would see the rest for the rest of his life with his eyes closed. But he saw the face looking, and that was almost worse, because the most famous white lenses in the world were tightly closed and motionless, and there was something in that stillness that wasn’t in any toy, in any cartoon, in any thirty-meter graffiti on 128th Street.

Down below, Times Square was bathed in blood under the pink light of soda commercials.

And the voice came from inside the mask.

“Well, young man.” Serious. Calm. A calmness that didn’t fit at all. “I don’t know if you’re lucky or unlucky.”

Sebastian recognized that voice.

He knew that voice the way one knows a news jingle, the sound of a front door, the hum of the living room radiator. He had heard that voice in press conferences broadcast on large screens, in subtitled interviews on the supermarket screen, in anniversary documentaries of the Battle, in crackling audio from thirty years ago that he downloaded on his school tablet. He had heard that voice all morning, on a Saturday, while eating dry cereal straight from the box.

“But, considering the fact that you’re alive and relatively whole,” the voice continued, and the lenses returned to him, opening slightly, “let’s consider that you’re in luck today.”

Peter Parker.

Spider-Man.

The greatest hero on Earth, the leader of the Avengers, the man who had commanded the defense of the planet when the sky opened, the guy who sat at tables with heads of state and decided the fate of continents before lunch.

She was standing an inch from his face, vertically, against a wall on Seventh Avenue, holding Sebastian in the palm of her hand.

Sebastian couldn’t answer. There was no air, no voice, not even a complete thought—just a fragment, spinning: it’s him, it’s him, it’s him.

And it was over his shoulder that the shadow appeared.

Sebastian’s eyes widened. She came along the wall, sideways, with that awkward movement he had already learned to recognize in a single night: one of the black things, clinging to the concrete, climbing onto all fours with her head down and her mouth already open, so close that he could see the strands of saliva between her teeth.

He tried to scream. His throat wouldn’t obey. A dry sound came out, a scratchy breath.

There wasn’t even time for that.

Spider-Man let go of the wall.

That was all he did—he let go. His body fell half a meter, rolled sideways with Sebastian and his dead hand beside it, and the creature passed by the spot where he had been a tenth of a second before, its teeth snapping shut in the void with a metal door clatter. Its claws ripped a strip of concrete from the facade. Dust and splinters rained down.

Sebastian didn’t even get to feel the shock properly. The shock was delayed, it arrived too late, and when it did, it was too late to fit in.

The creature roared—that wet, fleshy sound he felt in his teeth before hearing with his ears.

And Spider-Man, with his free hand, threw another one of those little things.

Sebastian saw it this time. He saw it up close: a tiny, dark object, about half the size of a thumb, emerging from his fingers in an almost lazy, weak wrist movement, lacking any force or shoulder thrust. And, an instant before touching the creature, it opened.

The explosion made the air tremble. And out of nowhere, from a point without volume, a white mass collapsed outwards in all directions at once, enveloped the black thing mid-jump, pinned its arms against its body, its head against its chest, and glued the entire package to the building’s facade with a dull thud. A cocoon. A two-meter-high web cocoon stuck to the Times Square wall, with something struggling inside and going nowhere.

A web bomb , Sebastian thought, and the thought came on its own, a piece of machinery fitting itself into a head that was still disassembled. He doesn’t shoot webs. He hurls them. It’s a radially dispersed capsule. How does he control the volume—

And that thought — small, idiotic, technical — was the first thing that started working again within him within fifteen minutes.

Spider-Man was already targeting another building.

His arm rose, his wrist twisted, and the line shot out—thin, straight, shooting across thirty meters of snowy air and clinging to the corner of a building across the avenue. Sebastian felt his body being pulled again, but now it wasn’t a jolt: it was a curve. A fall that turned into an ascent. The billboards passed beneath them in patches of blue and gold and pink, the shouts from the square came and went like a wave passing under a boat, and the snow spiraled around them.

They landed vertically on the wall of the other building.

Spider-Man looked down.

“Good.” His voice was completely normal, the way a man fixing a sink comments on the state of the plumbing. “Carnage will be out of service for a while.”

Sebastian, hanging beside him inside a severed hand, followed the gaze.

Down below, in the middle of the square, under the light of the soda advertisement, the red and black thing was glued to the ground inside a twenty-meter white star. Its body writhed beneath the web, its shoulders arching, the red and black mass swirling under its skin like liquid trapped in a thin shell, and the white gag over its mouth swelled and shrank with each attempt to roar. The sound that came out was muffled, distorted, monstrous, and pathetic all at once.

“Carnage ,” Sebastian repeated inwardly. “That’s Carnage.”

He knew the name. Everyone knew the name. It was one of those names that appeared in archival documentaries, on lists of “the worst in history,” in episodes that mom would turn off when Camila was in the room.

“But something tells me,” Spider-Man continued, and now there was a hint of something else in his voice—weariness, perhaps, or the kind of dry humor that only exists on top of very old weariness—”that his offspring won’t like being left alone.”

No sooner said than done.

The creatures that were surrounding the father all dropped to the ground at the same time.

Sebastian saw from above, and what he saw made no sense given their size. Things of that size shouldn’t move like that. They climbed the facades in leaps that spanned three floors at once, grabbed onto each other, let go, leaped again, cutting the distance along the sides and over, one of them crossing the avenue in a single flight and hitting the opposite wall with enough force to shatter glass. They were closing the route. They weren’t coming in a straight line—they were coming from the sides , from the flanks, cutting off the escape route like someone closing a door.

And they arrived.

They clung to the wall surrounding Spider-Man, and Sebastian, inches away from everything, saw each one of them with a clarity he didn’t want.

The first one was black with gray details, and she was different from her siblings. Where the others were bulky, piled with muscle, she was slender—almost thin, almost elegant, a tapered silhouette with arms and legs that were too long, just like her father. Her fingers had three more phalanges than they should have. And, as Sebastian watched, her arm grew —stretching half a meter effortlessly, the black flesh elongating in a way that was painful to look at.

The second one had a mouth that was too big even for that family. It took up her entire head, from ear to ear and beyond, and when she opened it, there was no face left: only two white lenses floating above a well of teeth.

The third one was all muscle. There was no neck, no waist, no visible joints: it was something made of stacked blocks, shoulders the size of engines, a chest that looked like a container wall.

And the fourth one was fat, wide, short, and had a tongue that was already sticking out of its mouth before it arrived—long, thick, dragging along the wall and leaving a glistening trail on the concrete.

They all surrounded it.

And they all attacked at the same time.

Sebastian understood, looking at it from inside the circle, that he was about to witness someone die up close for the third time in twenty minutes.

Spider-Man simply wasn’t there anymore.

That’s how it seemed. There was no preparation, no body stabilizing, no moment when a fighter decides where to go. He had already gone before the movement began, and the movement happened in the empty space.

The one with the long arms arrived first. The gigantic hand swept across the wall horizontally, a wide swipe that didn’t require aiming because it covered everything—and Peter jumped over his own arm . He didn’t dodge: he stepped. A short step onto the creature’s forearm, using its flesh as a springboard, and Sebastian felt the jolt in his body as the two climbed an entire floor in half a second.

And it was there, in the air, that Sebastian saw his arm.

The red and blue fabric clung to the forearm muscle under the tension, and beneath it the veins bulged, tracing the entire outline of the hand down to the elbow, thick cords pushing against the uniform from the inside.

“He won’t be able to contain himself ,” Sebastian thought.

He couldn’t contain himself.

The blow landed on the creature’s abdomen, and the sound wasn’t a punch. It was a thick bang, a sound of something closed bursting open from the inside, and the black and gray thing came out . It didn’t fly like people fly in a fight: it was ripped from the building horizontally, crossed the entire avenue without touching anything, disappeared above the sign on the other side and continued disappearing, and Sebastian never knew where it landed. He couldn’t follow it. Its body became a point, the point became nothing.

And the only thing Sebastian could think about, with the wind still whipping his face, was: how many meters? How many meters did she go?

The others came from behind.

The tongue came out first, a wet whip four meters long cutting through the air toward Peter’s back—and Peter turned his hip half a hand’s breadth. That was all. Half a hand’s breadth. The tongue grazed past, continued, and struck the big-mouthed sister who was right behind her, and the two of them tangled against the wall in a knot of black limbs and furious squeals, punching each other, fighting with a violence that made no distinction of family.

The muscular man came up through the middle. He didn’t deviate, he didn’t angle: he came from below in a straight line, both arms outstretched to grab, a two-ton thing that knew no other idea than to close in.

Peter jumped over his head.

One single leap. Short, economical, almost disdainful—and at the highest point of the leap, with Sebastian still hanging from the palm of his other hand, he spun his body and brought his fist down on the creature’s nape.

What happened next was that Sebastian felt it rise up the entire building. The thing descended the eight floors in less than a second and slammed onto the ground in Times Square, and the concrete opened up around it in a circle of cracks that crossed the pedestrian crossing, lifted a slab of asphalt, and swallowed half of a parked car. Snow flew from the ground all over the square, a white splatter, and one of the suspended loudspeakers came loose from somewhere and plummeted down.

Two remained.

They came together, from both sides, pinching, which was the only intelligent thing either of them had done all night.

Peter shot a web line into one’s chest.

And he pulled.

Sebastian saw it, and saw it clearly, and even then he didn’t believe it: Spider-Man didn’t pull the creature towards him. He used the line like someone using a fishing hook—a twist of the torso, an arc of the arm, and the three-hundred-kilogram thing was ripped from the wall and described a full-length curve in the air, held by its chest, arms, and legs spread open by centrifugal force.

And he hit his brother right on the mark.

The two collided with a wet thud and plummeted together, spinning, hitting an awning, scaffolding, the hood of a car, until they came to a stop thirty meters below in a tangle of limbs that didn’t move after that.

Spider-Man let go of the line and stood still against the wall.

And it was then, only then, that Sebastian realized something that frightened him in a way completely different from anything that had happened up to that point.

He wasn’t trying.

It hadn’t been a fight. Sebastian had watched fights—in videos, on broadcasts, on the big screen at the market—and a fight has rhythm, it has exchanges, it has someone landing blows and someone getting hit. This hadn’t had any of that. This had been a man walking through a room full of furniture. He dodged before the blows even existed, as if each of the creatures’ movements was announced a second in advance somewhere inside his head. As if the whole world were in slow motion and only he knew.

And, more than that: Sebastian had the clear and distinct impression that he was joking . That he hadn’t even used half of it. That this was a grown, tired man pushing four dogs out of the way to get to the gate.

Thirty years, Sebastian thought, with a dizziness that had nothing to do with the height. Thirty years of this.

The wind hit his face again.

Sebastian closed his eyes reflexively — again the jolt, again the world turning into lines, again his stomach being left behind — and when he opened them, a few seconds later, he was somewhere else.

On top.

The roof was flat, covered in gravel and snow, with enormous ventilation ducts spewing white steam into the black air and an old satellite dish tilted in one corner. It was high. Very high. The noise from the square arrived muffled, distant, filtered, like the sound of a television on in the neighbor’s apartment.

Spider-Man set him down on the ground.

Sebastian’s legs wouldn’t hold up. They simply weren’t there. He slid down on his backside onto the icy gravel with a thud, sitting up, still wrapped from the waist up by the severed hand, the black fingers clamped onto his ribs like a finger armor.

And the hero crouched down in front of him.

Sebastian stared upwards, his eyes squinting, blinking wildly, trying to focus on a world that had become a mass of light from about half a meter away. The white lenses narrowed again. And his hands went to Carnage’s hand.

“Be quiet for a second.”

He began to spread his fingers.

Sebastian felt the pressure release from his ribs in stages—one finger, two—and only felt how much it hurt when the pain stopped. Spider-Man’s hands worked quickly and without violence, forcing the dead joints back with a wet crack, and Sebastian could see, up close, the care with which he did it: separating the alien flesh from the tattered coat before pulling, so as not to tear the boy away along with it.

“Breathe,” said the hero, without lifting his head. “You haven’t breathed properly once since I caught you.”

Sebastian breathed a sigh of relief.

It was awful. The cold air rushed in and cut all the way to the bottom, and something on the right side of his chest protested with a white flash of pain, and he coughed, and the cough hurt more, and along with the cough came a sound he hadn’t expected, a thin, wet sound that escaped him without permission.

He clenched his teeth and swallowed.

Not here. Not in front of him.

The last finger snapped open. The black hand fell onto the gravel beside him with a heavy thud and lay there, open upwards, its fingers slowly retracting on their own like a dead spider.

Spider-Man stood up.

“Okay, kid.” He was already turning toward the edge. “Stay here while I handle the situation. And try not to cause any trouble.”

Sebastian opened his mouth.

He was thirteen years old and had a question stuck in his throat, and it wasn’t any of the questions he’d rehearsed his whole life in case he bumped into Spider-Man on the street. It wasn’t ” how do you do that with the webs?” , it wasn’t ” can you take a picture? “, it wasn’t ” my dad had a cutout of you? “, it wasn’t ” my sister has three action figures of you and one of them lost its hand .”

That was it: it’s not going to happen.

Nothing came out.

And Spider-Man jumped.

He didn’t run to the edge. He took three steps and simply went, a high, clean leap that launched him off the building far above the parapet, and at the highest point of the arch he spun—spun completely in the air, unhurriedly, and his head drooped down and his body straightened, and he began to fall headfirst, in freefall, straight into the square, with his arms glued to his body.

Sebastian stood up.

He didn’t know how. His legs were still rubbery, his knee burned inside his torn pants, the right side of his chest protested with every movement, but he stood up and staggered to the edge and gripped the icy railing with both hands.

And he looked down.

And he saw almost nothing.

That was it, and he felt the injustice of it as if someone had laughed at him. The entire Times Square, eight stories below, was a melting watercolor—patches of blue and magenta and gold running into each other, the enormous white of the web in the center, dark shapes moving within the blur, siren lights already beginning to flash red and blue at the edges. Without his glasses, the world more than two meters below was a visual murmur, a suggestion of things.

But he could see the movement .

He watched the red and black blur fall down the facade in freefall, a straight, swift line cutting through all that soup of color.

He saw the blur stop in mid-air at the last instant, in an impossible arc, and shoot forward close to the ground.

He saw the dark shapes rise from the broken concrete, one, two, three, coming back together, drawing closer to the white center where their father struggled.

And he saw the red blur move into the middle of them.

Alone.

Sebastian stood there, both hands on the parapet, the snow falling on his bare head and melting into his red hair, his breath escaping in short, quick wisps, and he watched.

That was the man on the wall on 128th Street. That was the man in the yellowed cutout pasted inside locker number 14. That was the man in the crayon drawing on the refrigerator door, with a little girl with orange braids hanging on his back.

And down there, in the midst of a massacre, that man went in against the monsters in the same way that Sebastian went into the Meridian warehouse at five in the afternoon.

As if it were just another day.

Sebastian gripped the railing until his fingers ached inside his fingerless gloves.

He didn’t know—he couldn’t have known, nobody there could have known—that twelve meters below where he was, clinging to the damp shadow of a ventilation duct on the roof of the same building, something small and dark had just stopped crawling.

Something else that had also been thrown away that night.

And that, for the first time in his entire short and flawed existence, he had found something warm to pursue.