The rain hitting the pane of Aria Parker's apartment window was not a sound; it was an atmosphere. It was New York's low, constant sigh, a sound that usually managed to smother the relentless noise of the Queens street below, but tonight, even the rain felt muted. The city wasn't sighing; it was holding its breath.
Aria sat curled in a thrift-store armchair, the only light source in the room the harsh, blue-white glare of the flat-screen TV balanced precariously on a milk crate. She wasn't watching the news; she was soaking in the static dread it emitted.
"...unprecedented. The loss of New York's greatest protector has shaken the entire Eastern Seaboard. Authorities are still silent on the exact cause of death, but the tragedy, which occurred late Tuesday evening near the newly-finished Oscorp Data Hub, has left a vacuum in law enforcement, security, and morale. The question remains: who steps up now that Spider-Man is gone?"
The image on the screen shifted: a high-resolution, slightly blurry still of the iconic red-and-blue mask, then a solemn shot of a makeshift memorial in Times Square—mountains of flowers, handwritten notes, and candles flickering weakly in the perpetual wind tunnel.
Aria felt nothing. Which, in a city overflowing with collective grief, made her a monster.
She pinched the bridge of her nose, rubbing away the persistent ache behind her eyes. It wasn't sadness for the dead hero; it was exhaustion. Exhaustion from her double life: her public self, the quiet, efficient lab assistant at a biotech research facility; and her hidden self, the daughter of a disgraced scientist, quietly dismantling her mother's secret past.
Spider-Man's death, she thought, was just another headline, another piece of noise she needed to tune out to focus on the signal.
She stood, the old chair groaning under her weight, and walked to her small, organized workbench. The scent of ozone and sterile cleaning solutions clung to the cramped space. Her mother, before she vanished, had left behind one singular obsession: data. Years of her life were condensed into hard drives, fragmented journals, and complex theoretical physics equations scrawled across whiteboards that Aria now spent every night trying to decode.
Her current project was simple: an old, beat-up wooden lockbox. It had sat under the floorboards of the apartment for two decades, untouched since her mother's hurried departure. Aria had only found it three weeks ago, two days before the news of the tragedy hit.
She crouched, running a thin, surgical wire around the corroded brass latch. She didn't have the key; her mother rarely used simple things like keys. She used complexity.
The TV reporter's voice faded back in, louder now, cutting through the silence of the room.
"...and while the Mayor confirms the police are investigating, Oscorp CEO Norman Osborn Jr. made a clear statement this morning, calling for calm and promising that Oscorp's new security initiatives would fill the void left by our fallen hero…"
At the mention of "Oscorp," Aria's hands stilled. That name—Oscorp—was a venomous whisper in her family history. Her mother had worked there, dreamed there, and been crushed there. Aria felt a low, familiar burn of resentment twist in her gut. She focused the feeling, channeling it into her fingers.
Click.
The lock sprang open.
Aria pushed the lid back, revealing the box's contents: not gold or journals, but three small, sterile objects wrapped neatly in tissue paper.
A delicate, aged silver key on a chain—too ornate for this box.
A small, unmarked, sealed glass vial containing a pale, viscous yellow liquid.
A modern, shrink-wrapped DNA collection kit, specifically branded with a generic black-and-white label.
She picked up the kit. It felt unsettlingly clinical. Why would her mother—a woman paranoid about centralized databases—have a DNA kit, let alone hide it? It must have been recent, perhaps a desperate last-minute action before she left.
Aria looked back at the TV. The memorial footage was still running. The masked hero, eternally still.
A slow, cold thought crept into her mind. Her mother's disappearance had been sudden. The apartment had been scrubbed clean of personal touches, but she had left this behind.
Aria felt the strange compulsion that overtakes people when they stand on the edge of a decision that will irrevocably change their lives: the urge to pull back, followed by the immediate, forceful urge to jump. She jumped.
She took the kit to her workbench. A single, encrypted email address was printed on the back. It was not a public server, but one her mother had often used for secure communications.
Following the instructions, Aria took the swab, gathered her sample, and sealed the envelope. She then took a second swab and walked back to the lockbox, retrieving the vial of yellow liquid. It was a perfect match for the vial slot on the kit.
Genetic Code Analysis. Second Sample: Unknown Biological Subject.
Aria found the courage to prick the seal, drawing a drop of the old, precious fluid onto the second swab. She sealed the kit, went to her computer, and uploaded the encrypted data package to the specified address.
The screen immediately showed a progress bar: ANALYZING BIOLOGICAL DATA. 0%... 10%...
The process took fifteen agonizing minutes. Aria sat frozen, her eyes glued to the percentage counter, the TV news still murmuring in the background about the city's tragedy. It was a perfect encapsulation of her life: her small, quiet terror set against the backdrop of the world's screaming public one.
Finally, the bar hit 100%.
A new window popped up. The headline was blunt, clinical, and devastatingly certain.
GENETIC CODE ANALYSIS: PRIMARY MATCH
The page listed her information first, confirming her identity. Then, directly below it, was the cross-match result for the second sample.
She read the words three times, her breath catching in her throat, the city's grief finally piercing her armor.
Subject NamePeter ParkerRelationshipPrimary MatchPercentage99.98%
The headline on the TV flickered: "The Hero We Lost."
Aria stared at the cold, black text. The man the world was crying for, the legend whose memory had just fueled a multi-billion dollar corporate statement on security, was suddenly more than a legend, more than a headline.
He was family.
Her hand trembled as she pushed herself up, stumbling back from the desk, knocking the flimsy chair over. Her whisper was swallowed by the sound of the rain outside, but it was the first sound of true, genuine grief she had allowed herself to make.
"Brother?"