He got out with the Rail Gun.
Felicia didn't try to stop him. She watched him pull it from the Panel, watched the weapon arrive in his hands from nothing, the third time she'd seen it today, and by now she'd stopped reacting to the arrival itself and was just watching what came next. He slung it and looked up at the rooftop. Four floors. The soldiers climbing the building's face were halfway up, moving fast on the brick with the adhesion that still made him uneasy no matter how many times he'd seen it. He had maybe forty seconds before they reached the top.
He didn't have a shot from street level, the rooftop's edge blocked his angle on the soldiers climbing. He needed height. The building opposite was three storeys, fire escape on the south face. He crossed the street at a run, went up the fire escape two steps at a time, reached the roof, and had the Rail Gun up before he'd fully stopped moving.
The angle was clean.
He put three rounds into the soldiers on the wall. At 3.8 kilometres per second the rounds didn't so much hit them as remove them, the carapace that shrugged off pistol rounds meant nothing at this velocity, and what had been climbing the wall was simply not there anymore, the remaining soldiers on the face dropping away from the impact. He tracked right, found two more coming around the building's corner at ground level heading for the entrance, put one round through both of them at the angle where the trajectory lined up, and then the Rail Gun was dry and he was already reaching for the next magazine.
On the rooftop across the street the fight had changed. Seven had become four, then two, then none, she'd finished them while he was handling the wall. She stood in the middle of the rooftop and looked across at him.
Thirty metres. Both of them masked. Neither of them moving.
He'd seen Gwen Stacy in the lab and the library and a coffee shop on Amsterdam Avenue. He knew her posture from those places. Slightly forward, weight on the front foot when she was thinking something through. He knew how she went still when something had resolved and she was waiting to see what came next. He knew all of this and he was looking at it right now, across thirty metres of Bay Ridge air, on a rooftop in the middle of an alien invasion.
She knew him too. He could see the moment it happened, a fractional stillness, different from the combat stillness, the stillness of a person who has just confirmed something they already suspected. Her head tilted very slightly. Not recognition of the mask. Recognition of him.
He didn't move. He let her look.
She crossed the rooftop to the edge and stood at the parapet and looked at him across the gap. When she spoke her voice carried the distance easily, the street below them mostly quiet now. "You didn't have to do that."
"Fourteen is too many," he said.
A pause. She was still looking at him with the same expression, not the lab expression, not the coffee shop one. Something he hadn't seen before. Like she was finishing a calculation she'd been running for a long time and the answer had just come back clean. "Yes," she said. "It is."
Another pause. The city moved around them. The invasion somewhere above and north. The street below them, which had been a war zone ninety seconds ago, was quiet.
"The Goethals is clear," she said. "I was up here for a reason. The swarm hasn't reached Staten Island yet. If you're heading out—" she stopped. She knew he was heading out. She'd seen the truck. "Go now. That window won't stay open."
"Are you—"
"I'm fine," she said. Quick. Then, after a beat, with something underneath it: "I'm glad you're fine."
He looked at her for a moment. There were things in that exchange he wasn't going to examine on a rooftop in Bay Ridge with an alien invasion running. He said: "Be careful."
She almost smiled. He could see it at the edge of her mask, the slight movement. "You too." She stepped back from the parapet. "Go."
He went back down the fire escape. He crossed the street. He got in the truck and put the Rail Gun in the back and pulled his seatbelt and looked at the road south and did not look at Felicia.
She was looking at him.
Not with anger. He'd prepared for anger, or the version of her that processed things through controlled silence and sharp questions later. That wasn't what he was getting. She was looking at him with an expression he hadn't seen on her before, calm, direct, and carrying something in it that had reached a decision. She'd watched the whole exchange. She'd watched Gwen look at him. She'd watched him let himself be looked at. She'd watched the pause before the last thing Gwen said and the pause before his answer and she'd read all of it with the precision she brought to everything she read.
He waited.
"Drive," she said.
He drove. Three blocks south she reached across and took his hand off the wheel and held it. He moved his hand to the lower wheel and drove one-handed and didn't say anything.
She didn't say anything either. She didn't need to. The hand said it, the claiming of it, direct and unhesitating, the same decisiveness she brought to everything she decided. He understood exactly what the hand said. It said: I see what that was. I'm not threatened by it. And I am here.
She held it until the Goethals ramp came into view. Then she let go and put both hands on the dash and watched the bridge ahead.
"Clear," she said.
"Clear," he confirmed.
He took them across.