Chapter 1: Genesis
The face in the mirror belonged to someone else.
I gripped the edges of the bathroom sink hard enough to turn my knuckles white, staring at the reflection that stared back with equal disbelief. Narrow jaw. Brown eyes too big for the face. A teenager's acne scars across both cheeks. Hair that hadn't been combed today and probably not yesterday either.
Not my face. Not my hands. Not my body.
The last thing I remembered was the truck. A red eighteen-wheeler drifting across the center line on I-70 outside of Columbus, Ohio, at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday. I'd been driving home from a double shift at the warehouse, coffee going cold in the cup holder, some podcast about television playing through the speakers. The headlights had filled the windshield like a second sunrise. Then nothing. Then black. Then this — a teenager's bedroom in a house I'd never seen, in a body twenty pounds lighter than mine, with band posters on the wall and a camcorder sitting on a desk next to a stack of unlabeled MiniDV tapes.
I splashed water on the face. The face didn't change.
The bedroom told a story I could read. Film equipment everywhere — a prosumer camcorder, a cheap tripod with one bent leg, editing software boxes stacked against the wall. Band posters: Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie, The Shins. A bookshelf with more DVDs than books. A desk covered in loose papers, a graphing calculator, and a flip phone plugged into its charger. The phone said September 14, 2006, and the area code was 432.
West Texas.
I picked up the phone. The contacts list was short. Mom. Dad. Claire B. Three kids from what looked like school names. A pizza place.
Claire B.
My legs gave out. I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes until I saw stars because the alternative was accepting what the evidence was already telling me.
The camcorder. The band posters. The West Texas area code. Claire B. September 2006.
I was Zach. Claire Bennet's friend. The kid with the camera who helped her film her first regeneration tests at a quarry outside of Odessa, Texas, and who then vanished from the show like he'd never existed because the writers didn't need him anymore.
A character so disposable he didn't even get a last name.
The knowledge arrived like a flood breaking through a levee — not gradually, not piece by piece, but all of it at once, pressing against the inside of my skull with a weight that was almost physical. Four seasons. Seventy-eight episodes. Every death. Every betrayal. Every power, every lie, every explosion. Sylar carving open skulls in a line from coast to coast. Peter Petrelli absorbing abilities like a sponge until he became the bomb that was supposed to level Manhattan. Claire jumping off buildings to prove she couldn't break. Noah Bennet cleaning his glasses while ordering memory wipes on people who got too close to the truth. Linderman's plan to sacrifice eight million New Yorkers for a political puppet show. The Company. Level 5. The virus. Arthur Petrelli. The carnival. All of it.
I knew how every single person in this story was going to die.
My stomach folded in on itself. I made it to the bathroom and threw up into the toilet — nothing but bile and stomach acid because this body apparently hadn't eaten breakfast yet. My hands were shaking so badly the faucet handle took three tries.
The reflection was still there when I looked up. Still wrong. Still Zach.
"Okay," I said to the mirror. My voice came out higher than it should have. A teenager's voice. "Okay. Okay. Prove it."
[Odessa, Texas — September 14, 2006, 10:42 AM]
The heat was the first proof.
Texas heat in September hit different from Ohio heat. Drier, meaner, the kind of heat that turned asphalt into a griddle and made the air shimmer above every flat surface. I stepped off the front porch of a house I was apparently supposed to call home and the sun pressed down on me like a hand. My shirt — some band tee that didn't fit right across the shoulders — was damp within two blocks.
Odessa, Texas. Real Odessa, Texas. Not a set, not a backlot in Los Angeles where they filmed the show, but the actual town. Strip malls and chain restaurants and parking lots that went on forever. A Whataburger on every other corner. Pickup trucks outnumbering sedans three to one. The kind of flat that made you feel exposed, like the sky was too close and there wasn't enough between you and the horizon.
I walked south on a street called Dixie Boulevard, and each block made it more real. The convenience store on the corner had a hand-painted sale sign. A woman in a minivan honked at someone running a yellow light. Two kids on bikes cut through a gas station parking lot. Normal. Ordinary. A Tuesday morning in a town where nothing was supposed to happen.
Except everything was going to happen here.
I turned east on 42nd and walked until I could see the highway overpass. From the top of the pedestrian ramp, I looked north toward the industrial park, and there it was — a beige building with a sign out front that read PRIMATECH PAPER in blocky corporate lettering.
My mouth went dry.
Primatech Paper. The front company for an organization that tracked, cataloged, tagged, and — when convenient — imprisoned or erased people who'd developed superhuman abilities. The building where Noah Bennet reported for work every morning in his horn-rimmed glasses and his off-the-rack suits, kissing his daughter goodbye and driving to a facility that kept human beings in cells underground. The Haitian was in there right now, probably. Standing silently next to someone's chair while they forgot everything that made them dangerous.
From up here it looked like any other office building. That was the whole point.
I gripped the railing and counted breaths. The metal was hot enough to sting.
Two blocks east of Primatech, I could make out the flat sprawl of Union Wells High School. Football field. Parking lot. The kind of building that looked like it had been designed by someone who'd given up halfway through. In approximately two months, a man named Gabriel Gray — who now called himself Sylar — was going to walk through those hallways during a Homecoming game looking for a cheerleader whose brain he wanted to open with his finger.
In canon, he found the wrong girl. Jackie Wilcox took Claire's credit for a rescue, Sylar tracked Jackie's name, and Jackie died in a locker room with her skull sliced open while Claire hid and Peter Petrelli tried to be a hero.
Jackie Wilcox was alive right now. Walking around with a ponytail and a varsity jacket and eight weeks to live, and she had no idea.
I walked down from the overpass on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else. Which, technically, they did.
The gas station coffee was terrible. Burnt and thin, the kind that had been sitting on the warmer since dawn and had given up pretending to be a beverage. I bought it with three crumpled dollar bills from Zach's wallet and sat on the curb outside the QuikTrip, and the first sip was the best thing I'd ever tasted.
Because it was real.
The heat on my neck was real. The concrete under me was real. The coffee was real. The sweat running down my back, the sound of traffic, the smell of diesel from the pumps — all of it. A dead man drinking bad coffee in a fictional town that turned out to be a real town in a body that used to belong to a character so unimportant the writers couldn't be bothered to write him out properly.
I laughed. It came out too loud and the woman at the next pump gave me a look, and I didn't care because this was simultaneously the worst and most incredible thing that had ever happened to anyone.
I was dead. The truck had killed me. Twenty-six years old, warehouse worker, no wife, no kids, a studio apartment in Columbus with a Netflix queue and a shelf of graphic novels, and all of it was gone. Every person I'd ever known — my mom, my sister, the three guys I drank beer with on Fridays — none of them existed here. Not in this world. Not in any way that mattered. I was sitting on a curb in 2006 drinking gas station coffee and the person I used to be was just... absent. Like a file that had been deleted.
But.
I was also alive. In a world with people who could fly, who could stop time, who could heal from anything. In a world where I knew every major event for the next four years. Every death. Every save. Every betrayal. Every window of opportunity.
A man named Brian Davis was alive right now in Queens, New York. A telekinetic — could move objects with his mind. In canon, he'd be Sylar's first kill. His death would give Sylar the signature power he used to murder his way across the country. If I could get to Davis first, if I could even just warn him...
But that was future planning. Right now the coffee was cooling and the sun was starting its afternoon descent and I needed to get my head straight before I did anything that mattered.
I pulled out Zach's phone. The contact list was still there. Claire B.
I knew her entire life. The regeneration. The adoption. Nathan Petrelli — her biological father, a man she wouldn't meet for months. Her mother Meredith, the pyrokinetic. The Company experiments. The Homecoming attack. Peter Petrelli catching her when she fell. Her slow transformation from reckless teenager to something harder and sharper and more dangerous.
I knew all of it, and she knew none of it, and I was going to have to look her in the eye and pretend to be a sixteen-year-old boy with a camcorder who thought the biggest problem in the world was getting through junior year.
The coffee was done. I crushed the cup and stood up.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
Claire B: hey r u free tmrw? i want to film something and i need ur help. bring the camera. ill explain when u get here
I stared at the screen for a long time. The cursor blinked, waiting for a reply.
Somewhere in New York, Brian Davis was going about his day. Somewhere in Virginia, Sylar was planning his next move. Somewhere in this town, behind a sign that said PRIMATECH PAPER, a man in horn-rimmed glasses was cataloging people like livestock.
And a cheerleader wanted me to bring a camera to the quarry.
I typed back: yeah im free. what time?
The reply came in eight seconds. after school. like 4? meet at the usual spot
The usual spot. A place I'd never been, in a friendship I'd inherited, with a girl who could survive anything except the truth about the person she was texting.
I pocketed the phone and started walking back to Zach's house.
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