Chapter 1 : New Skin
Queens, New York — July 21, 2013, 6:47 AM
The first breath tore through me like swallowing fire.
My eyes snapped open. A water-stained ceiling stretched above me, plaster cracking outward from a dead light fixture in yellow-brown rings. Not my ceiling. Not my room. Not my lungs struggling to pull air that tasted wrong— thinner, metallic, laced with dust from a place I'd never been.
I sat up and the world tilted. Cheap polyester sheets clung to skin that didn't belong to me. Static hissed against arms that were too thin, too smooth, too pale. I held up my hands. The fingers were longer than mine. Narrower. Nails bitten down to raw crescents where mine had always been trimmed clean on Sunday nights.
Okay. Breathe. Count to four. You know how to do this.
Except I didn't know anything. The last thing I remembered was M Street in Georgetown, 11:40 PM, walking back to my car after a source meeting at a bar off Wisconsin Avenue. Two whiskeys over three hours— not drunk, not even close. Daniel Whitfield didn't get drunk on source nights. Twelve years at the Washington Post had taught me that much. I'd stepped off the curb between two parked SUVs, and the headlights had come from nowhere— high beams filling my vision like twin suns. The impact was a sound more than a feeling. A crunch. Something inside my chest folding inward, ribs buckling around organs that weren't designed for that kind of force. Then weightlessness. Pavement. A taste like pennies and gasoline.
Then nothing.
Then this.
I swung my legs off the bed. Cold linoleum met bare feet, gritty with the kind of dirt that accumulates in apartments where nobody vacuums. A studio the size of a generous closet— kitchenette crammed against the left wall, a door that probably led to a bathroom, one window leaking gray dawn through curtains that might have been white during the Clinton administration. Everything smelled like stale coffee grounds and loneliness.
My body moved wrong. Every motion arrived a fraction late, the signal traveling an unfamiliar distance from brain to nerve to muscle. Like wearing a suit that almost fit but pinched in places you couldn't quite identify.
The bathroom door stuck. I shouldered it open and found a mirror with a crack running diagonally from one corner, splitting the reflection into two uneven halves.
Green eyes stared back at me. Not brown. The face was younger— late twenties, angular where mine had been square, clean-shaven where I'd always kept a day's worth of stubble because my ex-wife said it made me look less like an accountant. Dark hair, too long, falling across a forehead that didn't match the one I'd shaved in front of every morning for thirty-two years.
My stomach rolled. I gripped the sink— porcelain cold, faucet dripping— and leaned over it until the nausea passed. It didn't pass completely. It just retreated to a manageable depth, like floodwater dropping from chest height to knee height.
You died. You died on M Street in Washington, D.C., and now you're standing in a bathroom that isn't yours, looking at a face that isn't yours, breathing with lungs that aren't yours.
So what happens now?
I splashed water on the stranger's face. Copper taste. Lukewarm. The pipes groaned like they resented being used.
Back in the main room, instinct took over. Not survival instinct— journalist instinct. The compulsion to gather facts when nothing makes sense. I'd been doing it since J-school at Northwestern, long before the Post, back when my idea of investigative reporting was catching the campus dining hall serving expired milk. You don't panic first. You report. You collect. You build a picture from fragments and let the picture tell you what to feel.
The nightstand drawer held a half-empty bottle of ibuprofen and a phone charger. Kitchen counter: a jar of instant coffee, a newspaper, a stack of unopened mail. Jacket on the back of the only chair— I went through the pockets.
Wallet. Cracked leather held together by habit more than material integrity.
New York State driver's license. The face from the mirror smiled tiredly back at me. Nathan Cross. Born March 14, 1984. Address: this apartment. Twenty-nine years old.
Debit card, Bank of America. Behind it, a bank statement printed on cheap paper, folded twice. Checking account balance: $847.32. No savings account listed. No credit cards.
I kept searching. The laptop on the counter was an old MacBook with a cracked case and a journalism conference sticker peeling off the lid— some panel about digital reporting from 2011. I opened it. The desktop was a graveyard of half-finished ambitions: folders labeled PITCHES, CLIPS, INVOICES, PERSONAL. The pitches folder held thirty-seven documents. I opened five at random. Crime coverage angles pitched to outlets across the city. Dates spanned two years. Not a single reply logged.
Nathan Cross, freelance journalist. Thirty-seven pitches into the void. Nobody answering.
A prepaid flip phone on the nightstand. No missed calls. No texts. Eleven contacts, all publications. No friends. No family. No emergency listing.
I found the press credentials in a kitchen drawer— a local news outlet, Queens Community Wire. Expired eight months ago. The lanyard was fraying.
I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed both palms against my temples.
He was nobody. This Nathan Cross was nobody. No family— parents dead, no siblings, no partner. Three years of trying to break into journalism in the most competitive city on Earth, and he couldn't even get an editor to hit reply. He lived in this apartment alone, ate alone, worked alone, and if he'd died in his sleep, the landlord would've found him when the rent stopped coming.
And now you're here. Wearing his name. Sitting on his bed. With his eight hundred dollars and his dead parents and his lonely, invisible life.
The guilt hit like a sucker punch. Not because I'd done anything wrong— I hadn't asked for this, hadn't chosen it, didn't understand it. But because some part of me, the part that had survived twelve years in newsrooms and a divorce and the grinding machinery of professional ambition, recognized how convenient this was. A blank slate. An identity with no one to contradict it. No coworkers who'd notice the personality shift, no friends who'd catch the different laugh, no family who'd see the wrong memories behind the right eyes.
I stood up before the thought could finish forming.
The kitchenette offered instant coffee and a packet of powdered creamer. I boiled water in a dented kettle that took three tries to light on the gas burner—click, click, click, blue flame. The coffee tasted like someone had burned cardboard, filtered it through chalk, and added a chemical approximation of milk. I drank it standing by the window.
Queens spread out below in the gray morning light. Delivery trucks on the avenue. A woman in scrubs walking fast toward the subway entrance. A man in a hard hat eating a banana at a bus stop. The city moved with the automated rhythm of seven AM— people going to work, to school, to wherever the day pulled them. A world grinding forward on its axis like nothing had changed.
The newspaper on the counter.
I'd been ignoring it. Some part of my brain had been circling it for minutes, the way you circle a door you're afraid to open. I picked it up. Daily News, local edition.
July 21, 2013.
The mug froze halfway to my mouth.
July. 2013.
The date detonated inside my skull. Not a journalist's instinct this time— something deeper, stranger, rooted in hundreds of hours spent on a couch in Georgetown watching television while eating pad thai from the place on P Street.
September 23, 2013. I'd watched the pilot episode three times. The date was seared into my memory alongside my mother's birthday and the combination to my Post desk drawer. That was the day Raymond Reddington— former U.S. Naval intelligence officer, twenty years on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, the man they called the Concierge of Crime— walked into FBI headquarters and surrendered himself to a woman he'd never officially met. Elizabeth Keen. A rookie profiler on her first day. He'd offered them a deal: he'd help catch criminals no one else could find. His Blacklist. The only condition was Keen.
Two months from now. Sixty-four days.
I set the mug on the counter. Missed the edge. It tipped, spilling brown liquid across the newspaper, and I caught it before it shattered on the floor. My hands—his hands— were shaking.
Ten seasons. Two hundred eighteen episodes. You watched every single one.
The knowledge unspooled inside my head like a film reel catching fire at the edges. I knew Reddington wasn't Reddington— the real one had been dead since the early nineties, and the man wearing his face was someone else entirely, someone whose identity the show never fully confirmed. I knew about the Cabal, the shadow government that pulled strings across continents. The Fulcrum— the blackmail file that kept them in check. I knew Tom Keen was a spy planted in Elizabeth's life before she ever joined the Bureau. I knew Meera Malik, the CIA liaison on the task force, would be murdered by an operative of a man called Berlin during the first season. I knew Elizabeth herself would die in season eight, shot by a man named Vandyke outside a restaurant while her daughter waited inside.
I knew who lived. Who died. Who betrayed whom and when and why. Every twist, every reveal, every corpse.
And I had $847, a cracked laptop, a dead man's press credentials, and a flip phone with no one to call.
So what's the play, Cross? Because standing here leaking bad coffee on a newspaper isn't a plan.
The old Nathan Cross— the real one, the one who'd lived in this body before whatever happened happened— had been a journalist. A failed one, but the degree was real and the skills were there, even if the results weren't. And the mind now wearing his name had twelve years of experience at one of the most respected papers in the world. I knew how to build sources. I knew how to pitch editors. I knew the rhythm of investigative work the way a carpenter knew wood grain.
This body had the credentials. This mind had the skill. And in two months, the biggest story in the history of American law enforcement was going to walk through the FBI's front door.
I opened the laptop. Wiped the coffee ring off the counter first. Created a new folder on the desktop.
Named it PLAN.
The cursor blinked on an empty document. I flexed fingers that were still learning my neural rhythms and started typing.
Step one: build bylines. Get published. Establish credibility with editors who'll matter later.
Step two: map the media landscape. Identify outlets that cover federal law enforcement, organized crime, national security. Those are the ones that'll matter when Reddington surfaces.
Step three: develop sources. Start local. Court clerks, precinct cops, public defenders. Small fish who know which way the current flows.
Step four: stay alive. Because this world isn't a television show anymore. The people in it carry real guns, run real criminal empires, and kill real journalists who ask the wrong questions. And you don't have a writer's room to guarantee a happy ending.
The gas burner clicked behind me. I'd left the stove on. I got up, turned it off, sat back down.
Step five: figure out the rules. Can events be changed? Is this the show's universe or something adjacent? Are you the only variable, or did the world shift when you arrived?
Step six: there's something else. Something you can't explain yet. A pressure behind your eyes like a migraine that isn't quite a migraine. A hum at the edge of perception, like tinnitus but lower, more rhythmic. You've been ignoring it since you opened your eyes because the face in the mirror was a bigger problem. But it's there. And it's not going away.
I stopped typing. Read it back.
Six steps. The foundation of something. Not a plan yet— more like the skeleton of a plan, waiting for muscle and skin and the thousand small decisions that would turn intent into action.
The flip phone sat on the nightstand. No messages. No calls. No one wondering where Nathan Cross was this morning, because no one had been wondering for years.
I saved the document. Closed the laptop.
Outside, a siren rose and fell somewhere deep in Queens, and the city kept grinding forward like nothing had changed. Because for everyone else, nothing had.
I picked up the expired press credentials and turned them over in my hands. Queens Community Wire. The lanyard smelled faintly of sweat and ambition that never went anywhere.
Sixty-four days. And the first thing you need is a byline.
I grabbed the laptop, the wallet, and the flip phone. Shoved the credentials in my back pocket out of habit. Headed for the door.
The lock stuck. I had to jiggle the key— a trick this body's muscle memory knew even if my mind didn't— and the door groaned open onto a narrow hallway that smelled like cooking oil and cat litter.
First stop: the public library. Free internet, no IP trail, and nobody asking why a freelance journalist was researching his own identity.
Want more? The story continues on Patreon!
If you can't wait for the weekly release, you can grab +10, +15, or +20 chapters ahead of time on my Patreon page. Your support helps me keep this System running!
Read ahead here: [ patreon.com/system_enjoyer ]