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“Dr. Stacy,” Carlton Drake said quietly, drying his mouth with a napkin. “What can you tell me about symbiotes?”

Sitting across from him at a back table in the bistro where they’d just eaten a hearty lunch, Gwen Stacy took a long gulp of water from her glass. In the interval, she furnished her thoughts.

It had been a long time since she’d been involved with Peter Parker, but Carlton Drake reminded her of him, with his own quiet studiousness and fiercely spiraling thinking. But whereas Peter came up for air, most especially with her, Drake seemed to turn deeper and deeper inward, plunging into recesses inside himself where Gwen could lose sight of him, only for him to bring back true genius when he returned to the light.

She didn’t know if she had the same depths to plum within herself. Part of her hoped she didn’t. He always seemed to trail something out of those chthonian gulfs that he plummeted into, while Peter had been bright as the sun.

“Well, going by the sample you’ve brought to us here in New York, I would say they’re gestalt organisms. Your notes said that you forced mitosis with electroshock treatment, but I think all you did was force the… the Venom symbiote to break up into component parts, each one responsible for bonding with a different portion of the host’s anatomy. My guess would be you’ve sent these other ‘symbiotes’ to other labs, and each one of them consistently ‘bonds’ with only a single anatomical aspect. Maybe the heart, the lungs, or the liver…”

“And what does yours bond with?” Drake asked, his darkly gleaming eyes giving no indication whether she was right or wrong.

“The reproductive system,” Gwen said forthrightly. “We believe the symbiote is meant to reproduce via and alongside the host, gestating its own spawn along with the—in this case—human fetus. So this partial symbiote increases its host’s hormones, stimulates arousal, and increases… size. It puts them into heat, basically. The problem we’re facing is that, without the rest of the symbiote stabilizing the host, their system isn’t strong enough to take the changes. We have to separate them with sonics before the host dies.”

“Inexact match?” Drake asked.

“No, they’re stable, just—inordinately focused on the mating process. We’ve attempted to facilitate that, but as soon as the subjects begin mating, the symbiosis becomes unstable. I need the other parts of the symbiote to completely stabilize the process.”

“That’s out of the question,” Drake said. “Find a stronger host. Whatever it takes.”

***

His costume blending into the shadows until he was a vague impression of red and blue movement more than any human shape, Peter alighted on the rooftop of the Life Foundation building, crouching atop a parapet to scan the grounds. Nothing looked out of the ordinary, and his spider-sense didn’t mention anything about a trap. And there was the skylight, louvered open to allow in ventilation just as Gwen had promised. He dismounted in a slick flip, landing beside it and poking his head down into the building. Still nothing from his spider-sense: he could see cameras, but they were powered down, with no lights to say they were recording. Now or never, Parker… 
He descended down into the building on a webline, finding that the massive open-floor warehouse had been converted into a series of pens and corridors, with several ominous closed off modular installations that could only be laboratories. It reminded him of the backroom of some big-box store, with equipment and supplies stacked high on huge shelves that formed the twists and turns of the building’s floor plan. As well, there were plastic-wrapped slates piled high over wooden pallets, nestled between shelves and off to the sides of them. On top of one, a chemlight faintly glowed. From the ground, invisible, but easy as hell to see from the air. Giving his webline a little flick, Peter arced back and forth through the air, then let go to land alongside the pallet. Gwen was standing there, right next to him.