The spaghetti had been good the first time. He ordered the rigatoni.
It was also great. The place had the consistency of somewhere that had found its level decades ago and saw no reason to deviate — the same red checked tablecloth, the same low lighting, the same background murmur of a kitchen that took its work seriously without taking itself seriously. Ethan sat by the same window and looked at the same street and felt like a significantly different person than the one who'd sat here twenty-four hours ago.
He ate slowly and let his mind do what it had been doing since he'd walked away from that electronics shop window — the thing that felt less like thinking and more like a large structure settling into new ground, the deep creaking adjustment of beliefs and frameworks accommodating new load.
He was in the Marvel universe.
Okay.
He turned that over the way you turn a stone, looking at each face.
The first question that mattered — the one that determined almost everything downstream of it — was which Marvel universe. Because that was not a trivial distinction. He'd spent enough time in his previous life reading, watching, and discussing the extensive and genuinely baroque architecture of Marvel's multiversal continuity to know that the Marvel universe covered an enormous range. At one end: the MCU, relatively grounded, threats that were large but comprehensible, a world where normal humans still mattered, and the worst days had happy endings. At the other end: the comics, particularly the more cosmically-inclined runs, where multiversal annihilation events happened on a schedule, where entities existed that made planets feel like dust motes, where the sheer density of apocalyptic threat was such that the world had been destroyed and rebuilt so many times that destruction had lost some of its gravity.
He would very strongly prefer the MCU end of that spectrum.
Not because he was a coward — he was increasingly confident that he was not, in fact, a coward in this new configuration — but because carefree and perpetual multiversal crisis were genuinely incompatible lifestyles and he'd put in a specific request about which one he wanted.
He picked up rigatoni with his fork and thought about the Ancient One.
This was the thought that had, oddly, steadied him on the walk back from the electronics shop. If he were in a Marvel-adjacent world, then the Ancient One existed. And the Ancient One was, by any reasonable accounting, the kind of being who would know about him. Who would have seen him arriving? Who would have noted the particular cosmic irregularity of a soul deposited from outside normal continuity, carrying Superman's power set, landing in Boston in 1991 with forty dollars and a lot of questions?
And the Ancient One had not done anything about it.
No visitors. No ominous strangers appearing with cryptic warnings. No sling ring portals opening in his motel room in the middle of the night. Nothing.
Which meant either the Ancient One didn't know — possible, but he rated it unlikely — or the Ancient One knew and had assessed and decided he wasn't a problem. Maybe even decided he was useful. Or maybe had simply observed the future and found that the thread of Ethan Coles, Boston, 1991, didn't end anywhere catastrophic enough to require intervention.
Whatever the reason, the absence of mystic interference was information. He filed it as a tentative positive and tried not to make too much of it.
He flagged the waiter for another water and thought about what he needed to find out.
Mutants. Were there mutants in this version? The X-Men existed in certain Marvel configurations, and not others — the MCU had famously sidelined them for years before the multiverse opened that door. If mutants were active and visible, that told him a lot about where on the spectrum he was sitting. He could probably find out just from newspaper archives — mutant incidents, if they were happening, made news. That was a library errand, and libraries were free.
Wakanda. He didn't know how to find out about Wakanda without it being strange, but he suspected it was there. In almost every version, it was there. The question was whether it was isolated-there or engaged-there, and that distinction mattered for the world's overall technological level, and for certain future events he was already beginning to think about.
Captain America. The news segment had mentioned the shield. Which meant Rogers was either active or historical — the shield being held somewhere was news, which suggested it was in some kind of transitional status. He needed to read more. That was also a library errand.
He finished the rigatoni, turned down the offer of dessert, and left a reasonable tip.
Outside, the evening had settled fully over the city, Boston doing its nighttime thing — the bars warming up, the foot traffic shifting in demographic and purpose, the streets lit in the particular mixture of orange sodium and white fluorescent that defined the American city night of this era. He walked back toward the motel with his hands in his jacket pockets, and his face turned slightly upward, where the sky between the buildings was a deep blue-black with the city glow swallowing most of the stars.
He thought about Superman.
Not as a character, exactly — more as a power set. A capability profile. He'd been working from the available data: strength in excess of a thousand pounds with apparent room above that, speed of perception and reaction significantly beyond normal human, durability sufficient to deform a knife pressed with full force, cold tolerance that had been consistently remarkable since he'd woken up in the alley.
What he hadn't tested: heat vision, which required him to be somewhere private and relatively fireproof. Super speed in full expression rather than just the reaction time advantage he'd been clocking. Freeze breath, which he hadn't been sure was real and still wasn't. And flight.
Flight.
He couldn't think about flight with the same clinical detachment he applied to the other abilities. Flight was the one that bypassed his internal economist and went straight to something more elemental. He'd catch himself thinking about it and have to actively redirect.
Tomorrow evening. After the Dumar business, away from people, somewhere open. He'd find out then.
He had also, walking in the dark and reviewing everything carefully, become reasonably confident that he was not carrying Spiderman's powers. The wall-sticking ability was the easy test — he'd been in contact with dozens of surfaces since waking up in this body and had not once inadvertently adhered to any of them, which seemed conclusive. The proportional strength aspect was harder to rule out, but it just felt wrong — whatever he'd lifted in the warehouse was well beyond the proportional range, and the knife test had produced results that suggested the durability was deeper than Spiderman's.
The solar absorption was the thing that kept pulling him back to the other conclusion. He'd noticed it yesterday — that warmth, that sense of energy accumulating in a way that had nothing to do with temperature — and today in the direct sun on the walk to the industrial area, he'd felt it more clearly. A subtle, consistent charging quality. Like being a battery and a solar panel simultaneously.
If that was what he thought it was —
He shook his head, smiling slightly at the October pavement.
There was no reasonable response to what if I had Superman's powers in the Marvel universe, except to go to sleep and find out tomorrow. He was a fairly grounded person, and he intended to remain one.
He booked another night at the Harborview, exchanging the same wordless transactional greeting with the clerk, and lay in the dark thinking about one more thing before sleep found him.
Whether he'd find someone. In this life. Whether there was a person out there in this city, this world, this version of things — someone he'd meet, know, keep. He'd had relationships in his previous life, nothing lasting, nothing that had ended badly enough to count as tragic. He'd been, he thought, good at caring about people. Warm toward them. He'd missed that about his previous life more than he'd expected to miss it.
He fell asleep thinking about it, which was a comfortable thing to fall asleep to.
---
Morning came at the same unreasonable earliness as the day before, his body's new enthusiasm for consciousness apparently a settled policy rather than a fluke. He dressed, declined to think too hard about his continued excellent physical condition, and walked back through the neighborhood he was starting to know — the coffee cart, the dry cleaner rolling up its gate, the particular smell of a Boston morning that was brick and exhaust and river and October.
Dumar was already at the auto body shop when he arrived, which meant Dumar was an early riser or someone who never really slept, the two possibilities that tended to produce the same observable behavior. He was standing outside with a coffee, watching the street, and nodded when he saw Ethan coming.
"Cole."
"Morning."
They stood for a moment in the not-unfriendly silence of two people deciding what kind of conversation they were about to have.
"You said you had work," Ethan said.
"I did." Dumar sipped his coffee, still watching the street rather than looking directly at him, which Ethan had decided was just how Dumar processed the world — tangentially, never fully committing his attention to a single thing. "What I have is a problem. I thought about whether you were the right person for it after watching you yesterday."
"And?"
"I think you might be." A pause. "It's a hit."
Ethan let the word settle without reacting to it. He'd thought about this possibility since he'd heard real money and jobs in the same sentence from a man running an underground fight ring in a rough neighborhood. He hadn't ruled it out.
"Tell me about the target," he said.
Dumar turned to look at him for the first time in the conversation. Reading him. "His name is Ricky Vales. He runs a crew out of two neighborhoods over. Six months ago, they were just another crew — corner business, territory disputes, normal." He said normal with the flat inflection of someone for whom the word applied to things that would not read as normal to most people. "Then Ricky expanded. Started moving people."
"People," Ethan said.
"Women. Some kids." Dumar's voice had taken on a different quality — not emotional exactly, but flatter, the tone of someone pressing something down. "I got word last month. I wanted to believe it wasn't what it sounded like. Last week, I got confirmation. He's got a pipeline going through the port. Product moving out, people moving in." He stopped. "I don't work with that. Won't have it in any neighborhood I operate in. And Ricky Vales knows I know, which means this has a timeline."
Ethan looked at the street.
Human trafficking. The words sat in his mind with their full weight. Not abstract — specific. Women and children moved through a port in boxes, and a man named Ricky Vales made money from it.
"You want him dead," Ethan said.
"I want the problem ended," Dumar said. "Which means him, yes."
"How do you know I won't just take the advance and disappear?"
The look Dumar gave him contained several thousand words of response, compressed into a single flat expression. It said: I've been in this business for twenty years. I know what a person looks like when they're deciding whether to run. You're not deciding that.
"There's no advance," Dumar said. "Fifteen hundred on completion. And anything you find on him or in his place is yours."
"I want confirmation first. Proof that what you're telling me is accurate."
"You can have him in front of you and ask him yourself," Dumar said. "I have no objection to that. I just need the result."
Ethan thought about it.
He thought about it honestly, which meant not dressing it up. He was being asked to kill a man. That was the clean version. He'd always had a theory about himself, in his previous life — a model of his own capabilities and limits that he'd never tested against real extremes. He thought he was the kind of person who could, when the situation genuinely required it, turn off the part that hesitated. He'd seen it in the alley, smaller scale: the coldness that came over him when someone threatened harm, the switch that flipped from warm and easygoing to clear and completely without mercy. He'd always known it was there.
But knowing a switch exists and throwing it are different things.
If Ricky Vales was what Dumar said he was — and if he could confirm it himself, face to face — then he had no problem with it. He was nearly certain he had no problem with it. The kind of person who moved women and children through a port had already decided what category he occupied, and Ethan's internal ledger was simple.
"Details," he said. "Where he lives, where he spends his days, how many people are around him?"
Dumar produced a folded piece of paper from his jacket, which meant he'd already decided Ethan would say yes. Ethan took it without remarking on this.
---
The party supply shop was a strange place to visit at nine-thirty in the morning, but party supply shops were open at nine-thirty and had no particular reason to remember customers or question their selections. He found what he needed in about four minutes — a simple full-face clown mask, the cheap plastic kind that covered everything from forehead to chin. White base, red mouth, not particularly frightening, not particularly memorable. It cost three dollars and forty cents and fit in his jacket pocket without difficulty.
He stood outside the shop on the sidewalk and unfolded Dumar's paper.
An address. A description of a building. A note about usual hours — daytime, usually at the place on Meridian, evenings either there or the bar two doors down. A physical description: medium height, heavy, shaved head, usually has two or three people with him.
He committed it to memory, folded the paper back up, and started walking.
The neighborhood he was heading into was different from yesterday's geography — closer to the water, the industrial-residential mixture that Boston had along certain stretches of its waterfront, the kind of streets that were busy enough for anonymity but not busy enough for indifference. He walked with the specific casualness of someone who had no particular destination and had therefore chosen to be exactly here.
He found the building from the description without difficulty — a three-story walk-up with a ground-floor commercial space that had its shutters partially rolled, the kind of semi-open that meant occupied but not publicly. He walked past it on the opposite sidewalk, timed at a natural pace, and took it in with peripheral attention.
He found a recessed doorway half a block down and stopped.
He thought about what he was planning to do.
Not philosophically — he'd done the philosophy over rigatoni and had reached his conclusions. Practically. The clown mask in his pocket was a start, but it was an incomplete plan, and he knew it. He needed to approach Vales, get enough access to confirm what Dumar had told him, do the job, and leave without being connected to it.
He was strong enough that the physical component was not a serious concern. He was durable enough that whatever protection Vales traveled with was not a serious concern either, even factoring in guns — he was still uncertain about bullets in a technical sense, but the knife test had given him enough confidence that he wasn't operating scared. He could move faster than most people could react.
The question was less can I do this and more what does it look like to do it cleanly.
He turned the clown mask over in his pocket and thought.
Down the block, through the partially open shutter of the building, he could hear voices. Low, unhurried, the rhythm of a conversation that was happening in a place where these people felt comfortable. He tracked the sound with the enhanced perception he was getting used to relying on and picked out three separate voices, possibly four.
He spotted the man from Dumar's description about twenty minutes later, emerging from the building's side door with the proprietorial ease of someone on familiar ground — medium height, heavy, shaved head, the thick-necked posture of a man accustomed to having people around him who shared his interests. Two others with him, flanking without making it look like flanking.
Ethan watched from his doorway.
The target moved to the front of the building and stood on the step, talking to someone who'd come to meet him, conducting whatever morning business required face-to-face attention. He was relaxed. Comfortable. He had the energy of a man who had recently made good decisions and expected more good decisions to follow.
Ethan looked at him and felt the switch begin to move.
He also felt, alongside it, the more complicated texture of a question he'd been avoiding until he had the target in front of him: Can I actually do this? Not wouldn't. Could. Was there some deep architectural feature of himself that would resist, that would find a reason to hesitate at the final moment, regardless of what his conscious reasoning had decided?
He stood in the doorway and watched Ricky Vales conduct his morning, and thought about the people Dumar had described moving through the port, and waited for the hesitation.
It didn't come.
What came instead was something cooler and more deliberate — the focused patience of someone solving a problem who has already decided the problem will be solved and is now only working out the geometry.
He began to think through approaches, entry points, and timing. How to get close. How to get Vales alone long enough for the confirmation. What he would say. What Vales would say, probably. How it would end.
His hand rested on the cheap clown mask in his pocket.
This is the life you've got now, he thought. Might as well be worth something.