Chapter 2 : HUNTING SIGNATURES
Downtown Los Angeles hit me like a wall of noise and exhaust and humanity.
I'd grown up in a small town in Ohio—the old me, the dead me. Cities had always felt slightly overwhelming. Now, walking through crowds of strangers, that feeling multiplied by a factor I couldn't calculate.
Because some of them weren't strangers. Not really.
The detection ability worked like an itch I couldn't scratch. A low-grade awareness that certain people were different. Most were faint, background static. Dormant Inhumans who would never know what they carried in their DNA unless someone dropped a Terrigen crystal in their vicinity.
But they were everywhere.
I counted eight in the first three blocks. Eight potential earthquakes walking around in human skin, buying coffee and checking their phones and arguing about parking. Eight people who could level buildings or fly or phase through walls, and they had no idea.
The sensation was distracting. I kept turning my head, tracking signatures that meant nothing yet. A businessman in a tailored suit, carrying something like static electricity in his bones. A teenager with headphones, practically glowing to my senses with untapped potential. An elderly woman feeding pigeons, dormant power sitting quiet as a sleeping dragon.
None of them pulled at me the way Skye did. That distant song I'd felt from my apartment was still there, fainter now but constant. Northwest. Miles away.
I filed the direction away and focused on the immediate problem.
I needed to understand my copying ability before I could use it. Jake's journal had mentioned accidental absorption—a brush of hands, a jolt of warmth, something slotting into place. But his notes were vague on the mechanism. How much contact? How long? What determined whether a copy took?
The only way to find answers was experimentation.
---
The coffee shop on Third Street was unremarkable except for one thing: the barista was an Inhuman.
Dormant, obviously. She moved through the routine of making lattes and calling out names with no awareness of what she was. Early twenties, dark ponytail, tired eyes. The faint signature coming off her registered as something like vibration—a potential power I couldn't quite parse.
I got in line behind a woman arguing with her toddler about whether they needed "the big cookie or the small cookie." The kid was losing, but fighting valiantly.
When I reached the counter, the barista barely looked up.
"What can I get you?"
"Medium coffee. Black."
"Name?"
"Jake."
She scribbled it on the cup and rang me up. Three dollars and change. I handed over a five.
"Out of five." She counted back the change, and our fingers touched.
The warmth hit immediately. Not painful—more like stepping into sunlight after being indoors. Something in my chest opened up, reaching toward the dormant power in her cells. I could feel the connection forming, the beginning of a copy—
She pulled her hand back with the change. Two seconds of contact, maybe three.
The warmth faded.
I grabbed the coffee and retreated to a corner table, heart rate elevated. My palm still tingled, but when I focused inward, searching for whatever I might have copied—
Nothing. Empty. The connection had started but never finished.
"Damn." I wrapped my hands around the cup and thought.
The journal had mentioned drops. Moments of accidental contact. Jake had been copying fragments for weeks, but clearly the process required more than brief touch.
For dormant Inhumans, I was probably looking at hours of contact. Maybe days. Extended proximity. Which meant I couldn't just wander around shaking hands and stealing powers. I needed relationships. Access. Legitimate reasons to be near people.
Or I needed to find activated Inhumans—people whose powers were already expressed and readable. Those would copy faster. Easier.
The problem was that activated Inhumans were rare in 2012. The Terrigen crisis hadn't happened yet. Most of the powerful Inhumans were hiding or didn't know what they were.
Skye was dormant. Even if I found her tomorrow, copying her powers would take weeks of physical contact.
I sipped the coffee. It was better than the instant stuff in Jake's apartment, but not by much.
A new approach took shape. Forget rapid power accumulation. Focus on the long game. Get into SHIELD, get close to Skye naturally, and let the copying happen over time. Meanwhile, build the powers I could build—training the reflexes and durability I'd already copied, developing my detection range, learning my limits.
The barista called another name. She was already onto the next customer, no idea that some stranger had just tried to steal a piece of her soul through a handshake.
The guilt from this morning resurfaced. These weren't NPCs. Every dormant Inhuman I sensed was a real person with a real life. Copying their powers without consent felt invasive, even if they never knew it happened.
I'd have to think about the ethics later. Right now, I needed practicality.
---
I spent three hours walking.
The detection ability sharpened with use. By noon, I could distinguish between strong signatures and weak ones, between people carrying rare potential and those with common dormant genes. The city was a map of invisible lights, some bright, some dim, all unaware.
The Skye-pull stayed constant. Northwest. Always northwest.
I didn't follow it. Not yet. Showing up on her doorstep—or her van, technically—would be suspicious and probably creepy. Better to let SHIELD bring us together naturally.
Instead, I found a park bench near Pershing Square and watched people.
An old man playing chess with himself. Two signatures at the food truck, both dormant. A street performer juggling, zero signature but impressive coordination. A cop walking his beat, mundane as they came.
Normal people living normal lives in a world where aliens had invaded New York six months ago. The disconnect was jarring. How did anyone go back to normal after that?
My stomach growled. I checked the wallet—still sixty-three dollars minus the coffee. I needed income, eventually. Jake had been between jobs when I arrived, his last gig at a restaurant ending badly according to fragmentary memories.
But money was a tomorrow problem. Today was about understanding.
I closed my eyes and pushed at the detection ability. How far could I reach?
The signatures nearby stayed clear. The ones a block away became fuzzy. Two blocks, three blocks—barely perceptible. Maybe a quarter mile in every direction, with reliable resolution dropping fast after fifty yards.
Not great. But a starting point.
I opened my eyes and stood. Time to head back to the apartment and—
Shouting. Down the street, toward the edge of the square.
My enhanced reflexes kicked in before conscious thought. Sound processing, threat assessment, distance calculation. The shouting was two hundred yards away. Male voices, aggressive. A woman's voice, frightened.
I started walking. Then jogging.
The crowd thickened near a side street. People were pulling out phones, recording. Some were backing away. None were helping.
I pushed through to see.
Two men had a woman cornered against a brick wall. One had a knife. The other was grabbing at her purse, yanking her arm hard enough to make her cry out.
My body moved before my brain could catch up.
---
The first attacker didn't see me coming.
I grabbed his knife arm and twisted—a technique I didn't consciously know but Jake's copied reflexes supplied automatically. The blade clattered to the ground. The man yelped in surprise and swung his free hand.
Too slow. I ducked under the punch and drove my shoulder into his midsection, using his momentum to send him stumbling into his partner.
The second guy recovered fast. He shoved his friend aside and came at me with a wild haymaker.
I sidestepped. Caught his wrist. Used the pivot to slam him face-first into the wall. He went down and stayed down.
The first attacker scrambled for his knife. I kicked it away before his fingers closed around the handle.
"Stay down." My voice came out cold and flat. The crisis-Jake voice from the old me's imagination, except now it was real. "Stay down."
He looked at me. At his groaning partner. At the crowd of witnesses with their phones raised.
He ran.
I let him go. The other guy wasn't getting up anytime soon—his nose was bleeding freely and his eyes were unfocused.
The woman was crying, clutching her purse to her chest. I turned to her carefully, hands visible.
"Are you okay? Do you need an ambulance?"
She shook her head, tears streaming. "Thank you. Thank you, I thought—thank you."
"It's fine. You should call the police. There are plenty of witnesses."
I started backing away. The crowd had grown. More phones. More recording. A teenager near the front had his camera aimed directly at my face.
Too late to worry about that now.
I turned and walked. Not running—running looked guilty. Just walking, steady pace, around the corner and gone.
My hands were shaking. Adrenaline crash. I'd just fought two people and won without thinking, running on borrowed reflexes and instinct I didn't remember developing.
What the hell had Jake copied?
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