Chapter 36 : Digital Shadows - Under Watch
New York, Queens – Alex's POV
The message sat there, unread.
No answer.
I stared at the screen for a while before finally setting the phone down beside my keyboard. I wasn't going to sit around waiting. Not tonight. Not after what I'd just seen.
If Gwen was out there — if Spider Woman was already on someone's radar — then the situation was already worse than I thought.
Time to see how deep this went.
I leaned forward, fingers brushing across the smooth surface of my cyberdeck. The machine hummed to life, lines of encrypted code flickering over the dark interface.
First step: confirm what I already suspected.
Spider-Man.
It didn't take long. The patterns were there — the way he moved, his build, the rough geography of his patrol zones. I'd noticed them before, but now I wasn't guessing. I filtered the feeds, cross-referenced a few surveillance captures, synced timestamps with known school schedules.
Not even five minutes later, I had confirmation.
Peter Parker.
And honestly, I wasn't even surprised. It made sense — the photography gig, the timing, the location overlaps. But what did surprise me was just how sloppy the digital trail around him was. Either he had no idea how much data he was bleeding into the net… or he didn't have anyone covering him.
Which meant I would.
I started by cleaning his digital shadow — quietly erasing identifiers, rerouting access points, deleting cached camera data from the bank and nearby traffic networks. Every byte I touched, I rewrote, leaving false trails leading nowhere.
Halfway through, I hit resistance.
Someone else was digging too.
A different signature — precise, methodical, government-level encryption.
I dove deeper, tracing the interference.
S.H.I.E.L.D.
Of course.
They'd already flagged Parker. Surveillance nodes across the city grid, data from drones and municipal networks — they were watching, but not acting. It looked like they were keeping other agencies out, deliberately blocking anyone else from touching the data. A silent claim of jurisdiction.
I exhaled slowly, tension biting the edge of my focus.
If they were watching him, Gwen couldn't be far behind.
Switching priorities, I turned all my attention to her side of the net.
Spider Woman.
I ran full sweeps of the city network — traffic cams, street security, local news servers, even the low-level police data feeds. Every mention, every frame that even hinted at her silhouette, I burned.
It wasn't easy. Some of the data was already being archived, copied, spread.
I had to move fast — faster than whoever else was sniffing around.
At one point, another intruder came through.
Different style — not government this time. Freelance, maybe private security or black-market intel brokers. I shut them out the hard way, launching a counter-intrusion pulse that scrambled their connection before they could anchor on any of my access nodes.
By the time I was done, the entire network trail for Spider Woman had been reduced to static.
No face.
No name.
No trace.
I leaned back, rubbing the bridge of my nose as my screens dimmed to a quiet glow.
It wasn't perfect — nothing ever was — but it would buy us time.
Opening a new window, I compiled a quick report for myself:
Entities actively tracking Spider activity in New York City.
I compiled the list carefully, each name a reminder of just how many eyes were turning toward the "Spider problem."
S.H.I.E.L.D. – active observation, restricted access to data. Aware of Spider-Man's identity, but not Gwen's — at least, not yet. I'd been meticulous about erasing her traces from day one. Still, now that she'd been seen working alongside him, the risk was rising fast.
NYPD (Special Crimes Division) – limited leads, no confirmed data. Most of their intel came from public footage, now conveniently erased.
Oscorp Security Division – data harvesting from tech-based sources; suspiciously consistent in pattern recognition. Probably running facial-matching software against their own databases.
Alchemax Research Group – discreet but active. Their data crawlers were combing through incident reports and material residue analyses. They weren't looking for a hero — they were looking for assets.
Anti-Meta Groups (Friends of Humanity / Human Council) – grassroots hatred turned paramilitary. Most of their chatter was noise, but their forums were spreading photos and grainy footage, feeding the paranoia. It only took one of them getting lucky to make things dangerous.
Hydra (unconfirmed cell) – encrypted traffic buried deep in proxy networks. The patterns didn't match any official intel groups, but the structure was too deliberate to ignore. If it was Hydra, they were watching Spider Woman with quiet interest — like they were waiting for something.
U.S. Army – Special Operations Command (Ross Division) – classified activity logged near the same digital trails as S.H.I.E.L.D. surveillance. Ross wasn't subtle; he never had been. If he thought Spider-types were enhanced humans, he'd want them cataloged, controlled, or contained.
I saved the list, encrypting it behind three layers of decoy code — each one rigged to self-corrupt if anyone even tried to peek inside.
Then I leaned back, staring at the names glowing faintly on my monitor.
Every one of them was a reminder that Gwen's world was getting smaller — and that if I wanted to keep her safe, I'd have to stay several steps ahead of all of them.
As I stared at the encrypted list, a cold realization settled in.
If S.H.I.E.L.D. already had Peter under surveillance, then no one around him was really off the grid anymore — not his school, not his home, and certainly not anyone close to him. Which meant the Stacys were probably being watched too.
And by extension… me.
I knew my cyberdeck was secure — airtight, built from custom architecture and layered encryption that no external signal could penetrate. Our communications hadn't been intercepted.
But that didn't mean they'd gone unnoticed.
A sudden uptick in encrypted traffic, unexplained bandwidth shifts, untraceable pings — those things left patterns. And for an agency like S.H.I.E.L.D., patterns were enough to raise suspicion. They didn't need to hear the content to start asking the wrong questions.
Which meant that every call, every silent connection I'd opened with Gwen, could've left a trail of digital fingerprints — faint, but still visible to the right eyes.
That meant one thing: talking at home wasn't safe anymore.
Not for me, and definitely not for Gwen.
I leaned back, letting out a slow, steady breath as plans began forming in my head. The only way to stay ahead was to assume every device was compromised — even the ones I built. Especially the ones I built.
So I did what I always did when the walls started to close in — I got to work.
I opened a clean environment on my cyberdeck, air-gapped from everything else. My fingers moved fast, half-instinct, half-paranoia. Line after line of code took shape: a localized interference generator, designed to emit a layered pattern of white noise and counter-frequencies that scrambled both analog and digital listening attempts.
The principle was simple — confuse the sensors, overwhelm the inputs, bury real sound in a chaos of signals so dense that no algorithm could cleanly extract speech.
By the time the prototype build finished, my room was filled with a low, almost imperceptible hum. Most people wouldn't notice it — but anyone trying to record would only get static.
I tested it twice, once through my phone, once through a hidden mic I'd planted weeks ago just to check for leaks. Both returned nothing but digital hiss.
I allowed myself a small, grim smile.
At least now, when Gwen and I finally talked, we could do it without an audience.
My screen lit up with a soft chime — a new message.
Gwen:I'll be home in 10. Can we talk then?
I exhaled slowly, fingers hovering over the keyboard for a moment before I typed back:
Alex:Yeah. Come by my room when you're back. Use the door.
The phrase carried more meaning than it seemed. Use the door — our quiet code for don't come as Spider Woman. No suit, no mask, no risks. Just Gwen.
Ten minutes.
That wasn't long, but it felt like forever. I spent the time pacing across my room, my thoughts looping in a blur of frustration and worry. The low hum of the white noise generator filled the silence — the only sound besides the faint ticking of the clock on my desk.
I'd told myself to stay calm, to keep my head clear. Anger wouldn't help either of us. But every time I replayed the footage of that hostage situation, the knot in my chest tightened. Seeing her there, surrounded by chaos, bullets flying, alongside Spider-Man — without me even knowing — it made something in me twist.
Finally, the soft creak of the front door broke through the static. A few seconds later, the sound of light footsteps echoed down the hallway.
Then a knock.
"Alex?"
Her voice was quiet — careful.
"Come in," I said, turning toward the door.
Gwen stepped inside, closing it behind her. She looked tired, her hair still a little messy from the wind, dressed simply — hoodie, jeans, no trace of the mask or the persona that came with it.
For a moment, neither of us said anything. The hum of the white-noise field filled the space between us like a third presence — invisible, insistent.
Then our eyes met, and all the things I'd been holding in — the worry, the anger, the disbelief — pressed just beneath the surface.