Brighter Thread, Smaller Budget

New chapter is on the board.

Suit up. Queens is not getting quieter.

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The torn shoulder lay across the worktable, bright red on one side and an expensive mistake on the other.

Peter held the needle May had given him against the edge of the rip. The hole ran farther than it had looked on the van. Once he took the suit off, he found a strip of blue mesh split under the red panel and a line of small abrasions where the van door had driven the seam into his skin. The fabric had kept the metal from cutting him. It had not kept the blow from hurting.

"I can stitch the mesh first," he said.

May put her glasses on. She did not reach for the suit. "You can tell me whether you're bleeding first."

"No. Scraped."

"Show me."

Peter turned his shoulder. Ben, beside the television, lowered the volume until the anchors became moving mouths. May examined the mark without touching it. That was sometimes worse than being touched. She could see the length of the scrape, the angry color beneath it and the way Peter kept his arm lower than usual.

"Can you raise it?" she asked.

He could. It pulled. He raised it anyway.

"Not for a demonstration," she said. "Tell me what that cost."

"A complaint. No sharp pain."

"If that changes, we stop talking about thread."

He nodded. She believed the answer enough to return to the table, not enough to stop watching his face.

On the television, the footage from Tenth Avenue showed the van door striking him from an angle the camera made look almost tidy. Ben paused it. Peter had seen the clip online, but Ben had chosen the frame before the impact, when the red shoulder was still intact. A girl in a yellow coat stood beside her mother at the bottom of the image.

"You waved at her," Ben said.

"She looked scared."

"She saw you before the door."

Peter glanced at May. She was lifting the torn panel by its edge, following a stitch line with her eyes. He had wanted the mask to give frightened people a person to see. In the video, it had. He had also given every camera a clean red target.

"The dark panel underneath took the scrape," he said. "I could widen it. Keep the red on top."

May held the black-blue piece against the lamp. "And when the top tears again, this is what people see."

"Something that doesn't split on the first door?"

"Something that turns you into a shadow with white eyes."

"Shadows are harder to shoot."

"Are they?" She set the panel down. "We watched a man aim a van door at a red shoulder. I won't pretend color prevented that. You don't get to pretend black fabric would have stopped him."

There was the exact line Peter did not want to cross. He could make the fabric more resistant to abrasion. He could not make it proof against a baton, a door or a bullet without inventing a material he did not have. The old opaque patch was useful against scraping and miserable at being the face the city would meet.

He moved his phone clear of the torn cloth. Ruiz's 8:18 message was still on the screen.

"Statement. Tomorrow. No excuses."

He read it again. Nothing new had arrived, and tomorrow had not become tonight. He still had to decide what to tell her.

Ben saw the name. "Can you call?"

"I can." Peter set the phone face down. "I don't know what I can say without making Tessa's situation worse."

"Then tell Ruiz that part when she asks. Don't make silence do your thinking for you."

"I know."

He did not pick the phone up. Ben left the silence where it was. The detective's request would still exist after the shoulder was sewn. Peter could not turn a repair into a completed statement by working late enough.

May folded the opaque piece once. "If you choose red, we'll need more of it. The scrap from the jacket won't cover this."

"I can buy it."

"With what?"

He opened his mouth, then shut it. Forty-seven dollars of failed suit already lay on the table. His next lab shift paid on Friday. The cash in his pocket was for a transit pass and the adhesive ingredients he'd promised himself not to charge to anyone else.

"I could use the blue from the sleeve I ruined," he said.

"You could, if the weave matched. It doesn't."

May made him put both fabrics over the lamp. The old blue sleeve stretched diagonally where the red barely moved. Sewn across his shoulder, one would pull the other into a ridge. The ridge would press against the scrape each time he reached overhead. He had made that mistake once before with a glove and called it a design choice until his thumb went numb.

Ben came over and looked at the hole from the inside. "Before you buy anything, how fast can you get out of this?"

"Fast enough."

"Show me."

"It's in pieces."

"Before the door hit you. If your right arm stopped working, could you take it off without someone pulling that shoulder?"

Peter pictured the narrow neck opening, the wrist seals he'd made tight so the web shooters would sit still and the back zipper he'd placed exactly where a person alone could not reach it. He had designed for staying inside the suit during a fight. He had not designed for a paramedic trying to get it off afterward.

"Not quickly," he said.

Ben nodded as if an honest answer were a useful tool. "Then that goes on the list ahead of looks."

"A loose seam opens during a swing."

"I didn't ask for loose. I asked for a way out."

May checked the wall clock. The garment shop near the elevated tracks closed at nine-thirty. It was already twenty to nine. She took her keys from the hook.

"One roll," she said.

"May, I said I can pay."

"You said you could. Your transit pass disagrees. I will pay for one roll of red repair fabric. Not a second roll of black lining. Not the specialty mesh that comes with a price tag pretending to be a grant proposal. You can tell me which red you need."

Peter hated how grateful he felt. "I'll pay you back Friday."

"You can put money toward groceries Friday. This is my decision tonight."

"You don't have to fund a uniform you didn't ask me to wear."

"I asked for you to be visible. That wasn't a blank check."

Ben pulled a chair toward the machine. "I'll stay with the machine. It has looked at me funny all week."

"No sewing while we're out," May said.

"I was going to negotiate with it."

"Don't. It wins."

The shop was half-lit and smelled of cardboard tubes and hot dust. The owner was pulling a shutter across the rear shelves. Peter found two reds in the remnant rack. One was close to the old jacket, but slick and thin. The other was louder, a dense stretch knit with a matte finish. It gave under his fingers without turning transparent at the knuckles.

"The bright one," May said.

"It's less abrasion-resistant."

"How much less?"

He checked the label instead of inventing a number. The old dark panel had a coated outer face. This roll had none. "It'll scuff faster. I can keep a narrow strip of the mesh underneath, away from the tear. I can't make it do the old panel's job."

"Then don't call it armor."

The owner cut the small roll free and rang it up. May counted bills from her wallet while Peter watched the running total on the register. The cost was not heroic or cinematic. It was money she could have kept for the apartment, spent on cloth because he'd chosen a name in front of a crowd. She took the receipt and gave him the roll. He carried it home without pretending it weighed nothing.

In the basement, Ben had laid the suit open on clean paper. He had drawn one chalk line under the arm, not through the shoulder.

"A side opening," he said. "You can reach it with your left hand if the right is hurt. Then the neck doesn't have to drag across the sore part."

"The seam will show."

"I'm comfortable with that."

"You aren't wearing it."

"I'm the person who may have to cut it off you. I'd rather not start with the neck."

Peter wanted to argue that nobody would need to. The scrape on his shoulder made the claim sound childish before it reached his mouth. He cut along Ben's chalk line. May watched to make sure he didn't take the side opening all the way into the load-bearing shoulder seam.

The sewing machine took one short run along the panel's lower edge. On the second, at the thick shoulder overlap, the needle bent and jammed in the plate. The motor made a noise like a drawer being forced shut. Peter took his foot off the pedal.

"Do not make it stronger by pushing harder," May said.

"I stopped."

"I saw. Unplug it before you put your fingers underneath."

He unplugged the machine. The bent needle came free with pliers; the thread had snarled around the bobbin. Ten minutes vanished while he cleared it and reset the tension. A test on scrap pulled another knot beneath the plate. He had broken two needles making the first suit. This time he had only one spare and one roll of new fabric. He unplugged the machine again and set the spare aside; it would not sew the loaded panel. May did not take over. She showed him where to flatten the layers, then handed the work back.

May held the red panel flush while Peter hand-stitched the curved shoulder join and the remaining inner edge. The first line came out too tight, pulling the new cloth into a raised shoulder ridge. Peter could feel where that ridge would sit against the scrape. He took the seam out, losing another quarter hour and a little of the roll's usable edge. The second pass took forty minutes by hand. He left enough give for the reach Ben had asked him to test. The panel lay flat at rest, though the shoulder seam still puckered. It resisted when Peter lifted his arm.

"That feels wrong," he said.

"It feels like a repair," May said. "Those aren't always the same thing."

Ben found two flat snaps in May's tin. They were ordinary coat snaps, not hardware invented for a superhero. Peter reinforced the side opening with a narrow strip of the old mesh and sewed the snaps below the ribs, where they would be less likely to pop during a swing. They could still pop. He wrote that on a scrap of paper rather than call them safe.

"Test it," Ben said.

Peter put the suit on over a thin shirt. May checked that the red covered the opaque patch when his arm hung by his side. Ben made him pin his right arm against his chest, then reach across with his left. The first snap opened. The second stuck. Peter tugged and the new shoulder seam pulled painfully.

"Stop," May said.

He stopped. Ben widened the cloth loop on the second snap so Peter could grip it without using his injured arm. They tried again. Left hand to side, two snaps open, fabric down over the left shoulder first, then eased off the right without dragging across the scrape. It took longer than anyone wanted. It was possible.

"Again with your eyes shut," Ben said.

"I will be very offended if you blindfold me."

"You may be dizzy. Or the lights may be out."

Peter closed his eyes. He found the loops by touch and got the suit halfway off before the shoulder caught. He changed the angle, slowed down and finished. Ben did not congratulate him. May wrote the order on the scrap beside the note about the snaps, then crossed out the word "fast" Peter had put at the top.

"Reachable," she wrote. "Not fast."

The television had gone to weather by the time he hung the repaired suit from the basement pipe. The red panel was brighter than the one he'd torn and stiff at the shoulder where new stitches crossed old. He could feel the ridge through the thin shirt he wore after taking it off. Tomorrow, under a buttoned shirt, it would probably complain every time he reached for a door.

Ruiz's message was still on his phone. He typed "I saw the van driver and two thieves. I can come in tomorrow," then stopped. The alley, Tessa and the unanswered questions were larger than the line he'd written. He deleted the draft rather than send a partial account and call it cooperation. He set the phone beside the receipt from May's purchase, both things he owed and neither settled tonight.

"Call her in the morning," Ben said, turning off the television. It was not a command that erased Peter's choice. It was a time a person could check.

"I will."

May looked at him over the top of her glasses. "And sleep before the sun decides to make you say it again."

He almost smiled. The room smelled of hot machine oil and newly cut cloth. May had paid for one roll. Ben had demanded an exit. Peter had chosen red over the opaque layer and lost protection he could actually name. The suit could be removed now, though not quickly, and it could tear again. Ruiz still needed his statement.

He turned out the basement light, leaving the brighter shoulder hanging where morning would find it.

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