-Broadcast-
Gwen stood at the Liberty Bar's entrance and turned the name over in her mind.
Barry.
She had heard it before — attached to a face she'd catalogued and filed under not relevant. The Barry she knew from campus was the kind of person you could share a lecture hall with for a semester and still struggle to place in context outside of it: glasses, minimal social footprint, the particular self-containment of someone who had decided early that most ambient social activity wasn't worth the overhead. Gwen had met him two or three times in the way you met people who moved through the same spaces without overlapping trajectories.
The wretched uncle who had just gotten her blacklisted from the best bar in Central City claimed to be that Barry's uncle.
This either made the uncle's behavior slightly more explicable — something in that family's orientation toward social consequences — or it made the whole thing more suspicious, and she hadn't decided which. Either way, the grudge was noted and would be addressed at a time and manner of her choosing.
She stayed at the door and waited.
The bar wound down across two hours while she watched. Venom's security team departed in a formation that suggested professional dignity restored; the star himself left without looking toward the entrance. The crowd inside thinned in the way bar crowds always thin — couples first, then groups with enough momentum to continue elsewhere, then the people who'd been drinking past the point of having a plan. By two in the morning the space between exiting customers had stretched to minutes, and the cleaning staff had begun moving through with their equipment.
Gwen's two friends had not come out.
She tried their numbers. Both went directly to voicemail — phones off, not just unanswered. Which happened, especially after a long night with low battery, but something in her chest was registering the absence at a frequency that felt different from reasonable concern.
She flagged down one of the cleaning staff and explained the situation. They contacted the security team. The security team searched the bar — corners, bathroom stalls, the sofa section where people sometimes fell asleep mid-evening — and came back with a clean result. No customers remaining inside. Everyone had left.
Gwen didn't accept this easily. She moved toward the entrance.
The security guard at the door held his position with the polite inflexibility of someone following policy rather than personal preference. The Venom incident was recent enough that she and Kizaru had been formally logged as unwelcome — the bar's most valuable patron had been distressed, and the staff had no interest in additional complications from the same party. The guard suggested alternatives: the small side door, perhaps, where her friends might have exited earlier. A hotel nearby, if they'd met someone they liked. These things happened.
He wasn't wrong that these things happened. He was also not the person she was going to believe right now.
She had the ability to go in regardless. The cameras were the problem — there were enough of them positioned at angles that covered the entrance, the facade, and the immediate surrounding pavement that anything above ordinary human behavior would be documented in detail. She did not want documentation.
She left.
Walking back toward campus, she rebuilt the evening's logic and found it held less well than she wanted it to. This was not the first time she and her roommates had closed down the Liberty Bar. They had a standing protocol: when it's over, find each other, walk back as a group. Young women new to a city, late at night — the calculus was simple and they had all agreed to it. Neither of her roommates would have abandoned the protocol for a random hotel stay without sending a message first.
And Central City had been in the news lately in a way that had not been typical.
Disappearances. Dozens per month over the past several months, distributed without obvious pattern — no consistent demographic, no consistent location, no consistent timeline within any given night. Serial in frequency, random in apparent selection. The police were working with whatever they had, which, by the tone of the public statements, was not much. The parts of Central City that had prided themselves on safety were adjusting their self-assessment.
Gwen's pace increased to a jog.
She moved faster than an ordinary college student moved at two in the morning — fast enough to cover ground efficiently, not so fast that the cameras along the route would need to do much processing to flag it. The campus perimeter arrived. She cleared it, ignored an acquaintance who called her name from a path between buildings, and went straight to her dormitory.
Third floor. Her door. Dark underneath it.
She told herself they might have beaten her back and gone straight to sleep. She had the door open before she'd finished telling herself this, and the room confirmed what she already knew: everything was exactly as they'd left it when they went out. Wardrobes untouched. Cosmetics in their positions. No bag dropped carelessly on a bed, no shoes kicked off, no indication that anyone had come back.
The room was how you left a room when you were going to return and hadn't yet.
Gwen sat on her bed and thought through the options. Reporting it now — this hour, this early into the absence — would produce the response it always produced: adults who had been to bars occasionally did not return at the expected hour. Come back in the morning if they haven't surfaced. This was not unreasonable as a general policy. It was also not useful to her ally, tonight.
She crossed to her wardrobe.
At the back, between the ordinary contents of a female college student's closet — the going-out clothes, the day-of-week clothes, the things kept because they might someday fit into an occasion — was something that fit into no ordinary occasion. She found it by feel before she could see it in the dark.
She turned on the dressing mirror light.
Black and white, composed in the proportions of something designed rather than assembled. The white hood caught the light differently from everything around it. At the collar and at discreet points across the body, if you looked carefully, pink spider-thread patterns caught the light — subtle enough to read as decorative from a distance, present enough to matter to whoever was wearing it.
It had been a while.
"Long time no see," Gwen said quietly, to herself and to the suit equally. She took it from the wardrobe with the ease of familiarity. "Let's go see what happened to them."
She dressed quickly, moved to the window, checked the angle of the nearest camera, and was gone before anyone had cause to note which direction.
In Central City's night, Spider-Woman was looking for her friends.