The morning had that particular Sunday quality of a city still deciding whether to be awake — half the shutters still down, the foot traffic sparse and purposeful, the streets carrying last night's cold into the new day without apology. Ethan walked with his hands in his jacket pockets and let his mind run.
He needed a revenue stream.
That was the clean, unsentimental way to frame it. The fifty-five dollars from last night's involuntary donor was already thirty-five after the motel, less after dinner, would be even less after breakfast, and would eventually reach zero with the inevitability of arithmetic. The technology stock plan was real and correct and would work beautifully — in a few years, once he had an identity, an address, a brokerage account, and enough capital to matter. Right now, it was a blueprint for a house he hadn't broken ground on yet.
So. Short term.
His mind had been circling the obvious since he'd walked out of the warehouse with a clearer picture of what his hands could do. The city had criminals. Criminals, in various configurations, had money. He had the physical capacity to do something about the gap between those two facts.
It was almost elegant, if you squinted.
He thought about the knife and amended elegant to possibly elegant, pending further testing. He was strong. He was fast. He could apparently bend industrial metal with a casual grip. But strength and speed were different categories than durability, and he'd been careful not to assume they traveled together just because they'd arrived at the same time. The cold not bothering him was a data point. It wasn't proof.
He needed to know if he was also the kind of person who could take a knife without it becoming a serious problem. Because showing up to real criminals and finding out the hard way that he was merely very strong and fast and also mortal was the kind of educational experience he was not interested in having.
And guns — that was the real question lurking under the knife question. He was not at all looking forward to finding that one out. He was going to be cautious about that one until he had better information, and he was going to be cautious about that one ideally in a situation where the testing was theoretical rather than immediate.
He was also aware, with the self-honesty of someone who had once spent too long thinking about how things sounded versus how they were, that finding criminals was not actually as straightforward as it sounded from the comfort of a warehouse. He didn't know this city. He didn't know its geography, its rhythms, its fault lines. He couldn't just walk around waiting for a crime to happen to him. That was not a plan. That was ambient hope with better-than-average footwear.
He needed information. And he needed it in a way that didn't flag him as anything other than what he was presenting as — a young guy, new in town, finding his feet.
The solution came to him while he was watching an older man open a hardware store on a quiet commercial block, moving through the familiar routine of rolling back the gate and unlocking the door with the ease of ten thousand repetitions. Locals. Older residents, the kind who'd lived somewhere long enough to have strong opinions about which streets were worth walking and which weren't. They were the most natural people in the world to ask, and asking them was the most natural thing in the world to do.
New in town. Don't want to end up somewhere I shouldn't. That was it. That was the whole pitch. Nobody found it suspicious. Everybody had an answer.
---
He bought breakfast first — an egg sandwich from a cart near a T station that cost him a dollar and was eaten in four bites, which he was still getting used to, the speed and completeness of his appetite. He'd have to be careful about that with company. In the meantime, he leaned against the cart's counter and ate and watched the morning gather itself and thought about the other thing.
The other thing being: was this actually just a regular world?
He'd been operating on the base assumption of dealing with the immediate problems first, philosophical questions later, which was sane and practical and had served him well through the warehouse and the fight and the motel. But the question was there, patient, waiting for a moment of lower urgency.
He was in Boston in 1991. His previous world had been modern, recognizable, without anything supernatural lurking underneath it. This world looked identical on the surface — same architecture, same newspaper, same egg sandwich with the same too-much-hot-sauce. But his previous world had not given him the power to throw people six feet with a casual punch, and something had clearly changed the terms of engagement between him and physics.
So, was there more?
He thought about the reading he'd done. The vast ecosystem of fictional worlds that is transmitted through books, film, and obsessive online discussion. Some of them had layers — things underneath the normal surface that the normal surface people didn't know about. Magic schools behind pub walls. Wizard government agencies. Monster-hunting networks operating in plain sight of an oblivious civilian population.
If this world had something like that, he'd find out eventually. Worlds with secrets tended to advertise them if you went looking, he suspected. He wasn't going to worry about it until it became relevant. If he stumbled into something supernatural while hunting down muggers in bad neighborhoods, he'd adjust.
He filed it under open question and threw away the sandwich wrapper.
The hardware store owner was sweeping his front step when Ethan came over.
"Excuse me," Ethan said. "Sorry to bother you — I'm new to the city. Just got in. Is there anywhere in particular you'd suggest I avoid? Just trying to get my bearings."
The man looked up at him, the broom handle resting in his hands, and did the brief calculation that strangers do. He came out on the side of ordinary helpfulness.
What followed was a five-minute education in the specific geography of Boston's rougher edges, delivered with the mix of genuine civic concern and personal editorial that only comes from someone who has watched a neighborhood for decades. There were specific streets mentioned. Specific intersections. One block near the waterfront had apparently been a consistent problem for years, regardless of what the city kept trying to do about it. Somewhere near Downtown Crossing. An industrial corridor that saw a different kind of traffic after dark, or on certain days, or — the man paused and reconsidered, editing for the young stranger's benefit — just generally.
Ethan thanked him genuinely, asked two follow-up questions that made the man feel usefully expert, and moved on.
He had three more conversations of roughly similar content with a woman walking a dog, a man eating a late breakfast outside a diner, and a teenager on a bicycle who turned out to have the most specific and recent information of the group and delivered it with the casual authority of someone for whom this knowledge was simply practical geography.
By the time he finished, he had a working map in his head. He also had a plan for the next step of the day, which was the knife test.
---
The corner shop was small and sold the practical miscellany of neighborhoods that needed a little of everything and a lot of nothing in particular. He bought a bag of pretzels, a bottle of water, and a basic folding knife from the rack near the register that had the quality and price point of something purchased for utility rather than enthusiasm. The man behind the counter sold it without comment. Ethan was eighteen but looked older, and in 1991, in a Boston corner shop, the knife rack was not a complicated transaction.
He found an alley two blocks away with the privacy he needed — no windows overlooking it, the entrance from a quiet street, the exit to an even quieter one. He stood in it with the knife in one hand and his other hand open, palm up, and thought about what he was doing.
He was going to stab himself. Carefully. Incrementally. With a folding knife that had cost him a couple of dollars.
When he put it like that, it sounded insane. He opened a pretzel, ate it, and acknowledged that it was in fact a little insane, but that knowing was worth more than not knowing, and that he'd rather find out here than in a situation where the knife belonged to someone who wished him harm.
He started light. The tip of the blade against the center of his palm, pressure applied gradually, the way you'd test how sharp a knife was by pressing it to a fingertip — except his version of light was calibrated to his new sense of his own strength, and light was still considerably more than most people's serious effort.
Nothing. The skin didn't indent. Didn't redden. He increased the pressure.
He kept going up through what he gauged to be the first quarter of his strength, the first third. He was pressing hard enough now that the knife should have been going through his palm and probably his hand, and the process should have been involving a great deal of blood and him calling for an ambulance.
The knife tip deformed.
It wasn't dramatic — a small, squashed change to the geometry of the blade's point, the kind of thing you'd see if you pressed a knife into hard oak with real commitment. He'd bent the tip. He hadn't scratched his palm.
He kept going. At what he estimated to be half his genuine strength, the blade had bent noticeably, the handle flexing in his grip, the steel complaining in structural terms. His palm was unmarked. No redness, no indentation, not even the white pressure-mark you got from pressing something dull against skin.
Full strength.
He pressed with everything he had.
The knife folded. Not at the hinge — the blade itself bent, the metal giving way in a slow curve, the handle warping in his grip. He stopped when the thing was functionally a sculpture rather than an implement and opened his hand and looked at his palm.
Nothing.
He turned his hand over, checked the back. Nothing.
He stood in the alley and exhaled slowly through his nose.
Alright. So blades were not going to be a problem. He filed bullets under unknown, proceed with caution and made himself a genuine promise to remain cautious about that one until he had some reason to believe otherwise. Being knife-proof was not a guaranteed transit to bullet-proof. He wasn't going to get cocky about firearms until he had actual data.
But the data he had was encouraging.
He dropped the ruined knife into a trash can, ate the rest of the pretzels, and headed toward the areas he'd been told not to go.
---
The neighborhoods shifted gradually. Not dramatically, not a sudden line where good became bad — it was subtler than that, a slow accumulation of signals that read differently in aggregate than any one of them did alone. More security grates on shopfronts even during business hours. Fewer people making eye contact, more people making very deliberate non-eye contact. The quality of maintenance on the buildings is declining in that specific way that was less about poverty and more about nobody expecting anyone important to come here and see it.
He thought about flying while he walked.
The thought arrived with the light randomness of a brain doing its housekeeping. He had strength, speed, and apparent durability. What else? His mind ran the checklist with the slightly embarrassed energy of someone aware they were having a very specific kind of fantasy.
Telekinesis. Some kind of — probably not. That seemed like a different category. Heat projection? He'd noticed warmth radiating off his hands at the warehouse, or thought he had, but he wasn't sure if that was real or manufactured. X-ray vision, which was a strange concept, was not going to be tested in a populated area under any circumstances. Super hearing — actually, that was worth checking. He'd been catching conversations at what seemed like a longer range than normal all morning, but he'd attributed it to the quiet streets.
And flying.
He was not going to randomly leap off a building to test flight. That much was clear. But the thought that it might be on the table — that he might be the kind of thing that could simply go up if he chose to — sat in his chest with a warmth that surprised him with its intensity.
He had grown up reading certain things. Watching certain things. There was a particular archetype that occupied a specific, load-bearing location in the imagination of anyone who'd spent time with that material. The idea that he might be that archetype — that some vast cosmic entity had looked at carefree and interpreted it as giving him the most carefree possible existence, which is the one where he can do anything essentially —
He shook his head firmly. He was getting ahead of himself again. Warehouse. Knife. No superspeed demonstrated yet, no flight, not anything exotic. He was strong, durable, and fast to react. That was what he knew. Everything else was imagination as of now.
He turned onto a street that matched the description he'd been given and slowed to a casual pace.
---
It was early enough that the worst of what these streets did at night was still sleeping it off, but some of the infrastructure of the informal economy was already operational. A group of men outside a car repair shop that may or may not have been primarily a car repair shop. Someone moving between buildings with the trajectory of deliveries that didn't want witnesses. A card game visible through a chain-link fence, conducted with the relaxed intensity of people who did this every day.
Ethan took it in without staring, doing the city pedestrian thing of seeing everything by looking at nothing in particular.
He needed a specific type of person. Not the lowest rung — not the people doing the street-level work, who would know nothing useful and would be territorial about being asked. Someone with a bit of organizational awareness. Someone who managed things.
The man he eventually approached was standing outside a bar that was open despite the hour, engaged in what appeared to be an administrative conversation with a younger man who nodded a lot. Late thirties, heavyset, the kind of watchful stillness that came from long practice at reading situations. Good jacket. Clean shoes. The shoes were the tell — in Ethan's experience, which now spanned two lifetimes and was still developing, the people who bothered with their shoes in rough neighborhoods were usually the ones with something to protect.
Ethan waited until the younger man had moved on, then approached from an angle that was visible and unhurried and clearly meant to produce conversation rather than anything else.
"Hey," he said. "Sorry to interrupt. I'm new in the area. Trying to find my feet." He let the implication of that sit for a moment — new, trying to fit in, not a cop, looking for something. "Someone told me there are fight clubs around here. Places where a guy can make some quick cash if he can handle himself."
The man looked at him. This was a serious, professional look — the kind that assessed rather than just perceived. It went from Ethan's face to his shoulders to his hands and back.
"Who told you that?"
"Guy I met. Didn't catch his name."
A pause that could have gone several ways. Then something in the man's expression settled, some calculation completing itself. "You got a couple hours?"
"All day."
"Come on then."
He didn't give his name. Ethan didn't offer his. They walked for five minutes through a sequence of turns that Ethan tracked carefully, noting landmarks, and arrived at a building that announced itself as a former auto body shop and still smelled like it — oil and metal and old rubber underneath the newer smells of people and effort. Inside, the floor space had been cleared. Rope had been strung between four poles in roughly the configuration of a ring, low-tech but functional. Folding chairs arranged in a loose U. A makeshift table against the wall with a cash box on it that was doing its best to look casual.
There were maybe a dozen people present, in various states of warming up or watching others warm up. Nobody looked at Ethan with particular alarm. Several looked at him with assessment. He was the tallest person in the room by three inches and the youngest by at least five years.
The man with the good shoes had a word with someone at the table, then turned back.
"First bout's in about two hours. You're in it if you want to be. Purse is a hundred dollars, winner takes sixty percent."
Sixty dollars for winning a fight that he was, with the absolute confidence of someone who had bent steel with his bare hand twenty minutes ago, going to win. It wasn't a fortune. But it was a start, and more importantly, it was a proof of concept for a revenue stream that didn't require ID, a bank account, or anything except showing up and not losing.
He accepted, gave the name Cole when asked, and moved to the edge of the room to watch and wait and figure out the single most important question of the next two hours:
How hard could he hit someone without them waking up in a different ZIP code?
It was a narrower margin than he would have liked to calibrate in real time, in front of an audience, against a living person who had also presumably eaten breakfast and had opinions about his continued upright status. But he'd managed it once already in an alley with no preparation and only mild context. He could manage it here.
Controlled, he told himself. Always controlled. He wasn't here to hurt anyone seriously. He was here to win, collect twenty-four dollars, and learn something about what measured effort looked like when the measurement required active management.
He watched the other fighters warming up and picked the smallest fraction of his strength he thought he could reliably produce on demand, and then halved it again for safety.
The room smelled like oil and anticipation, and somewhere outside, the city was having an ordinary Sunday, completely unaware of the thing it had acquired.