Chapter 1: Dead Man's Shoes
Brooklyn, New York — January 14, 2008
The first thing was the taste. Copper and something chemical, like licking a battery. The second thing was the cold — linoleum against his cheek, the kind of cold that meant he'd been lying here a while.
Ethan Crawford opened his eyes.
Wrong ceiling.
His apartment had popcorn texture, a water stain shaped like Florida in the corner above the bed. This ceiling was smooth, yellowed, with a light fixture he'd never seen before — a brass thing with a frosted glass shade, one bulb dead. He was on a kitchen floor. Not his kitchen. The countertops were laminate, peeling at the edges, and a coffee mug sat on the counter with a brown ring dried inside it.
His hands pressed flat against the linoleum to push himself up, and that was when everything tilted sideways.
Wrong hands.
He stared at them. Broader across the knuckles than his own, a scar along the right index finger he'd never earned, calluses in different places. A watch on his left wrist — analog, silver, scratched face — that he had never bought, never worn, never seen.
His heart kicked once, hard, and then began to hammer.
Get up. Get up and figure this out.
He pushed to standing. His legs worked but they were off — the weight distribution was wrong, the center of gravity shifted. Taller than before. Maybe an inch, maybe two. He grabbed the counter and waited for the vertigo to pass.
A translucent blue rectangle flickered at the edge of his vision. Numbers, barely legible, arranged in rows:
[Status: Ethan Crawford] [Cultivation: Body Tempering 0 — Untempered] [STR: 9 | AGI: 8 | VIT: 10 | SPI: 2 | PER: 9 | FOR: 5] [Essence: 0] [Forge: Dormant] [Interface: Tier 0 — Fragment]
The screen hung there for three seconds, pale blue and perfectly clear, like subtitles projected onto the air in front of him. Then it dimmed and faded to nothing, leaving a faint afterimage. He blinked and it was gone.
Okay.
He gripped the counter harder.
Okay. So that's real.
The last thing he remembered — actually remembered, from the life that belonged to the hands he used to have — was the steering wheel. The Honda Civic, the Tuesday commute, the intersection on Route 9 where the light was always too short. A pickup truck running the red. The impact, the spin, the windshield turning white. Then nothing. Then this floor.
He touched his own face. Not his face. Jaw wider, cheekbones different, stubble heavier than he'd ever grown. He found the bathroom and stared at a stranger in the mirror. Late twenties. Brown hair, cut short but growing out. Circles under eyes that were hazel instead of blue. A face that wasn't ugly or handsome — just forgettable.
Whose face?
The apartment gave answers in pieces. He moved through it like a crime scene, touching things, opening drawers. It was a one-bedroom in what looked like a walk-up building — small, underlit, everything about five years past needing replacement. The couch had a permanent impression on one side. The bookshelves held mostly tech manuals and a single framed photo of a landscape — no people anywhere in the frame.
Bills on the kitchen table, still in their envelopes. ConEdison, Time Warner Cable, Verizon. All addressed to the same name.
Ryan Callahan. 1847 Flatbush Avenue, Apt 3B, Brooklyn, NY 11210.
More in the bedroom: a Stark Industries subsidiary employee badge clipped to a lanyard hanging from the closet doorknob. The badge read CALLAHAN, RYAN — IT SUPPORT, with a logo he recognized. Vistacorp. A subsidiary that handled Stark Industries' civilian infrastructure contracts.
IT support. Low-level. Invisible.
The medicine cabinet told the rest. Three bottles of prescription heart medication — metoprolol, lisinopril, aspirin — lined up on the shelf like sentries. Below them, a manila envelope torn open, its contents half-spilling onto the counter.
He pulled the papers out. A coroner's preliminary finding, delivered to the residence due to absence of next of kin.
Ryan Callahan. Age 28. Cause of death: sudden cardiac arrest. Found by building superintendent after neighbors reported smell.
No next of kin. No emergency contact listed. Discovered after approximately 36 hours.
The body he was standing in had been dead. Clinically, medically, legally dead. Long enough for a coroner to write it up and for no one in the world to claim the paperwork.
He set the papers down. Picked them up again. Read them a second time.
The status screen had called him Ethan Crawford. Not Ryan Callahan. Whatever he was now — whatever had happened between the windshield going white and this kitchen floor — the thing living behind these eyes was still him. In a body that had been empty long enough for the neighbors to notice the smell.
The soul displacement. The system mentioned BT0, Untempered — baseline mortal. This body isn't enhanced, isn't special. Just... vacant.
The Forge. Dormant, the screen had said. A cold pocket dimension sitting somewhere inside his soul like an empty room. He couldn't access it, couldn't use it. The numbers beside his stats were single digits, barely above average — the physical profile of a twenty-eight-year-old man who'd spent his life at a desk eating takeout and neglecting his heart until it gave out.
He needed information.
---
The newspaper was in the recycling bin by the door. The New York Times, dated January 12, 2008. Two days old, give or take.
January 2008.
The television took thirty seconds to warm up — an old CRT, rabbit ears on top, a VCR still plugged in underneath. He cycled through channels. CNN had a piece on the New Hampshire primary. Fox was running economic anxiety coverage. A Stark Industries advertisement played during a commercial break — Tony Stark's face grinning from behind tinted glasses, the Jericho missile system, the tagline Peace Means Having a Bigger Stick.
Tony Stark. Alive. Still a weapons manufacturer. Still months away from a cave in Afghanistan.
He typed into the laptop on the kitchen table — the password was saved in the browser, which told him everything about Ryan Callahan's security awareness. A search for "Iron Man" returned results about the Black Sabbath song. "Avengers" gave him a 1960s British TV show. "Captain America" brought up World War II history pages and a Smithsonian exhibit listing.
He pulled up a world atlas. Found Wakanda on the map. Third-world African nation, landlocked, primary exports listed as textiles and agriculture. GDP below most of its neighbors.
So. No vibranium revelation yet. No Iron Man. No SHIELD exposure. No Avengers.
He searched one more name — Nick Fury — and found nothing public. A ghost, exactly where he should be at this point in the timeline.
Ethan closed the laptop. The screen reflected the face of a dead man staring back at him, and he pushed the computer away.
He sat on the floor with his back against the couch for a long time. The apartment creaked around him. Pipes in the walls. A car alarm on the street outside, the rhythmic wail cycling through its patterns before someone killed it.
I'm in the MCU. Pre-Phase One. Years before anyone falls from the sky, before the Chitauri, before Thanos. I have a dead man's name, a dormant system with stats barely above average, and something called a Forge that won't turn on until I kill someone worth killing.
And I know everything that's coming.
---
The coffee was in a canister above the microwave. Folgers, half-empty, stale enough that the grounds had clumped together. He brewed a pot anyway because his hands needed something to do and the body — this body — craved caffeine in a way that felt bone-deep, cellular, a habit written into muscle memory by a man who wasn't here anymore.
He sat in Ryan Callahan's chair. Drank from Ryan Callahan's mug. The television murmured stock prices and weather forecasts. The coffee tasted different in this mouth — more bitter than he remembered coffee tasting, the sweetness muted, the heat landing in a different part of his tongue. Everything was two degrees off. The way his shoulders sat. The way his breath moved. The way his eyes tracked.
The status screen pulsed once, faintly, at the edge of his awareness. A reminder that it existed. That the numbers were real and the Forge was waiting, cold and empty, for someone to feed it.
What I know: the MCU timeline from 2008 through 2023. Every major event, every character, every death. Hydra inside SHIELD. The Infinity Stones. Thanos.
What I have: a dead man's apartment with the lease paid through March, twenty-four hundred dollars in savings, an employee badge for a job I can't do, and a body with the cardiovascular fitness of someone who died of heart failure at twenty-eight.
What I need: time, strength, and a target worth killing to wake the Forge up.
He washed the mug. Dried it. Set it back on the counter exactly where he'd found it.
Then he pulled an envelope from the kitchen drawer — junk mail, something about refinancing — flipped it over to the blank side, and uncapped a pen.
The list was short.
Physical conditioning — this body can't run a mile.2. Test the technopathy — figure out what Latent actually means.3. Confirm the timeline — cross-reference everything. 4. Find someone worth killing.
He tapped the pen against the fourth line. Read it again.
The pen went back in the drawer. The envelope stayed on the counter, weighted down by the coffee mug, the ink still drying.
Outside, Brooklyn settled into its evening. Car horns, distant music, the bass thump of a passing SUV. January cold pressed against the windows.
Ethan turned off the television, stood in the dark, and began stretching muscles that didn't belong to him.