She-Hulk: Gamma Grace by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/She-Hulk-Gamma-Grace-1302197497#image-1

She-Hulk: Gamma Grace ANIMATION

Viridian Nightfall

The city never meant to go missing. It was patient, like a wound that learned etiquette — swelling in private before anyone noticed. Jennifer Walters knew the city well enough to name its polite parts: the municipal teeth of downtown, the slow ligament of the river, the neighborhoods that pretended not to be neighborhoods at all. She thought she knew its dark chambers too. She had been in courtrooms and fistfights, in laboratories and apartments that smelled of burnt coffee and better intentions. She had been both counsel and consequence. Still, whatever had begun to devour people in the blighted blocks beyond the skyline felt like a secret the city kept even from itself.

The first body—if you could call something that wasn't found but felt, wasn't corpse but absence—arrived as a rumor in a bar where the neon forgot to be kind. A server with an old scar and the composure of someone who'd never been fooled said, "They took the musician by the river. His saxophone's in the alley like it left without him." The second came as a frantic message from a friend: tiny shoes, gone; a janitor's son, gone. The third was a plea from a woman whose husband had been swallowed while coming home from work, his briefcase still on the stoop. Each disappearance was a punctuation mark the city couldn't parse.

Jennifer answered the summons in her own way. She walked through the city in a suit that promised normalcy and carried in her head a file of questions like a sharp-edged talisman. If the problem could be litigated, she would litigate it. If it must be beaten, she could become large enough to be decisive. But on this night she allowed neither courtroom nor fist to dictate the first move. She listened.

Bodies leave traces, even when they are more spirit than matter. She felt the residuals as a lawyer feels precedent—like a set of repeated mistakes. Each vanished person had been seen in the week before their absence near a building no one mentioned in polite conversation: an old textile factory repurposed into anonymous studios and worse, soaked in mildew and memory. The locals called it the Loom. Its brick face was pockmarked with graffiti that resembled prayers and threats written in the same hand.

She stood opposite the Loom under a wet sky and watched the bricks swallow the light. It did not exhale its secrets. Instead it hummed, a low, indifferent vibration almost like a radio between stations. Jennifer stepped forward and felt a pressure at the base of her skull, a tickle of something ancient and patient. She did not immediately Hulk out; that would have announced her presence, and some things worked only in the dark.

Inside, the Loom breathed different air. The scent was of fabric, rust, and something like lemon peel — falsely domestic. The corridors were a spiderweb of shadows and threads, and the threads seemed to move when she wasn't looking. She felt watched, as if stitches had eyes. A whisper followed her: a rumor of silk sliding against itself, of footsteps that didn't match the number of bodies in the rooms. She paused, and a soft voice said, "You found the seams."

Jennifer turned. The figure at the end of the corridor wore a coat of emerald silk, tailored to defy logic. The coat fit a woman whose face was too composed for the room; high cheekbones clipped like knives, hair the color of oil at twilight. Her eyes were the same green as the coat, but deeper, slower — like the pause before a heartbeat. She smiled without humor.

"You're a long way from the courthouse," the woman said.

"You're a long way from a business meeting," Jennifer replied. "Who are you?"

"Names cost too much," the woman said. "But I will trade you a hint. I am—" She let the end of the sentence fall like a thread cut. "—someone who repairs what the city tears."

There was a charm to her voice, not the kind used for seduction alone but the kind that made other words softer, more malleable. Jennifer felt it a half-second later, an electric suggestion: trust, confide, be small. She steadied herself. "People are disappearing. I'm here to stop it."

The woman's face folded into what passed for amusement. "Perhaps you are here to be changed."

"You work here. What goes on in the Loom?"

The woman gestured, and the building answered. Lights flickered in a syncopated rhythm, fabrics shivered like men in a rainstorm, and the air rippled as if heat had been applied to its surface. "We weave wh
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