Dominic had left him with a leather-bound folder containing his "new" history. According to the state of Kansas, Jeremy Creek was a ward of the court under the private guardianship of a LuthorCorp-funded medical trust.
Lex Luthor was playing the philanthropist, but Jeremy knew the man's reputation from the memories of a life he shouldn't have lived yet. Lex didn't do anything out of the goodness of his heart. Lex was a collector of anomalies, and right now, Jeremy was the rarest specimen in his gallery.
The billionaire had been obsessed during their brief meeting at the hospital. Jeremy remembered the way Lex had looked at him—not with sympathy for a boy who had lost twelve years, but with the intense, narrow focus of a scientist looking at a biological impossibility.
"You haven't aged a day, Jeremy. Not a wrinkle, not a gray hair, not even the typical muscle atrophy of a long-term coma patient. You're a boy frozen in amber."
That was the hook. Lex didn't know about the blue arcs of light or the way Jeremy could "feel" the power grid of the city. He just knew that Jeremy was a glitch in the system of time. And Lex Luthor hated a mystery he couldn't solve.
Jeremy sat on the edge of his new bed, clutching the heavy envelope of cash. Three thousand dollars. It was a king's ransom for a teenager in 2001. It was also a leash. Every dollar spent was a data point for Lex to track. Every phone call made on the sleek Nokia would be logged.
'You want to watch me, Lex?' Jeremy thought to himself, careful not to express his thoughts aloud to the heavily monitored room. 'Then I'll give you exactly what you expect to see. A confused, grieving kid who just wants to fit in.'
He tucked the money into a drawer and grabbed a worn denim jacket Lex's people had provided and put it on over his gray sweatshirt. He needed to get out. The walls were closing in, and the "static" in his chest was starting to itch, a restless pressure that demanded an outlet.
The walk to the edge of town was long, but Jeremy welcomed the burn in his legs. It reminded him he was alive, even if he was a decade out of sync. He kept his head down, the hood of his gray sweatshirt pulled low, but his senses were dialed to an eleven.
Every power line he passed felt like a tether, a faint thrum-thrum-thrum vibrating in his molars. But there was another sound—the crunch of gravel and the rhythmic idling of an engine two blocks behind him.
Jeremy didn't turn around. Instead, he caught the reflection in a shop window: a nondescript silver sedan, tinted windows, moving at a crawl. Dominic hadn't been lying; Lex was "investing," and investors liked to watch their stocks.
Jeremy ducked into a narrow alleyway behind a row of hardware stores. He felt the heavy surge of an industrial transformer mounted on a pole nearby. Closing his eyes, he reached out a hand, not touching the metal, but "tugging" at the magnetic field.
Snap.
A localized surge blew the fuse in the transformer, showering the alley in orange sparks and plunging the immediate block into a brownout. In the confusion of flickering streetlights and car alarms, Jeremy vaulted a chain-link fence and cut through a drainage pipe. By the time the silver sedan rounded the corner, he was a ghost in the cornfields, heading for the twisted metal graveyard on the outskirts of town.