Chapter 2 : TWENTY-THREE HOURS
The alarm on the prepaid phone screamed at 5:15 AM and I was already awake.
I'd slept in pieces — forty minutes here, an hour there, snapping back to consciousness every time a door slammed in the hallway or a car alarm wailed in the street below. The host body wanted sleep. The brain inside it wouldn't allow it. Every time I closed my eyes, the countdown flared blue in the darkness, ticking down like a pulse I couldn't ignore.
Seventeen hours and change.
The shower ran lukewarm for thirty seconds before going cold. I washed fast, dried with a towel that smelled like it hadn't been laundered this month, and got into the work clothes. Jeans, flannel, steel-toes. The badge clipped to my front pocket: WESTON, C.
The walk to Adams & Reed Logistics took fourteen minutes. I timed it on the phone because timing things was what I did — project manager habits that survived death and interdimensional soul displacement, apparently. The warehouse sat on the edge of the Glades industrial district, a corrugated steel box the size of a football field with loading docks on two sides and a parking lot full of trucks that had been old when Obama took office.
I clocked in at the time punch by the entrance, feeding the badge into the machine like I'd done it a thousand times. The machine beeped. Nobody looked up.
The warehouse floor was organized chaos — pallets stacked fifteen feet high, forklifts beeping and reversing between narrow aisles, men in identical flannels moving boxes from trucks to shelves and shelves to trucks with the mechanical efficiency of people who'd stopped thinking about the work years ago. I found the section that matched the badge number and started doing what the guy next to me was doing.
Lift. Carry. Stack. Repeat.
The guy next to me was in his thirties, thick through the arms, a Rockets cap shoved backward on his head. He worked with the easy rhythm of someone who could do this blindfolded and frequently looked like he wanted to. Twenty minutes in, he glanced sideways.
"You look like shit, CW."
I almost didn't respond. CW. The host body's nickname. I filed it and manufactured a grimace.
"Headache. Didn't sleep."
"Yeah, you and me both. My kid had the stomach flu, spent half the night cleaning puke off the bathroom floor."
He kept talking. His name was Danny — that much I gathered from the supervisor calling him by name twice in the first hour. Danny talked the way some people breathed: constantly, without apparent effort, filling silence like it was a fire that needed starving. His kid was four. His wife worked nights at the Glades Memorial. His fantasy football team was having its worst season since 2009, which he attributed to a jinxed draft pick and not to the fact that his quarterback had a torn rotator cuff.
I nodded in the right places and copied his movements. Lift with the legs. Keep the boxes level. Stack from the corners in. The host body protested — soft muscles screaming after thirty minutes of continuous labor, lower back seizing up by the second hour, sweat pooling in places I didn't want to think about. Charles Weston's body had the conditioning of a man whose primary exercise was walking to the fridge.
"Six in Strength. Five in Endurance. This tracks."
Danny noticed the quiet.
"For real though, you good? You've barely said ten words."
"I'm fine. Just that headache."
"You want some Tylenol? My wife keeps a pharmacy in my lunchbox."
"I'm good. Thanks."
He watched me for a second longer than comfortable, then went back to his boxes. The host body had been more talkative, clearly. Someone who joked during shifts, who had rapport with the crew, who belonged here in the way that working-class men belonged to the places that used their bodies. I was a stranger wearing his skin, and the people who knew him could sense the gap even if they couldn't name it.
I kept my head down and worked.
---
Lunch was thirty minutes in a break room that smelled like old coffee and microwaved plastic. I bought a sandwich from a vending machine — ham and cheese, vacuum-sealed, disturbingly similar to the gas station offering from yesterday — and sat at a corner table away from the cluster of guys around the TV.
The TV was tuned to a local news channel. Traffic report. Weather. A segment on rising crime in the Glades that the anchor delivered with the carefully calibrated concern of someone who'd never driven south of 12th Street. Nobody in the break room watched. They lived the segment.
Danny dropped into the chair across from me with a tupperware container of last night's pasta.
"So Hendricks says they're cutting Saturday shifts next month."
I had no idea who Hendricks was.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Budget thing. Which is horseshit, because we're running double loads every Thursday to make up for the Consolidated contract dropping."
"Queen Consolidated?"
Danny snorted.
"Who else? They pulled their shipping contract last quarter. The golden boy goes missing for five years and the whole company starts bleeding money."
He stabbed a piece of rigatoni.
"My wife says the kid's coming back soon. Some rescue thing. She reads too many tabloids."
Something cold crawled up my spine.
"Oliver Queen?"
"That's the one. They supposedly found him on some island. Bet you twenty bucks he comes back with a tan and a reality TV deal."
He was right about the return. Wrong about the tan. Oliver Queen was coming back with a bow and arrow and a list of names and a five-year supply of trauma, and Starling City was about to learn that billionaire playboys could be the most dangerous things in the room.
I finished the sandwich without tasting it.
---
The shift ended at three. I signed out, collected my badge, and walked into a Starling City afternoon that had gone from gray to the kind of yellowed overcast that promised rain without delivering. The walk home was longer than it needed to be.
I took the long way deliberately. Two blocks south of the warehouse, the streets narrowed and the buildings hunched closer together and the demographics shifted in ways the show had only hinted at. 4th and Rackham — I knew that intersection from a Season 1 episode, a throwaway line about drug trafficking in the Glades. In person it was a corner bodega with a metal shutter halfway down and three men on plastic chairs outside, watching the street with the professional patience of people who were working, just not the kind of work that came with a time clock.
I didn't slow down. I didn't make eye contact. I crossed to the opposite sidewalk and kept walking.
Three blocks later, a group of teenagers materialized behind me. Four of them, hoodies up despite the weather being merely cool, moving in that loose formation that could be innocent foot traffic or the prelude to something that would leave me bleeding in a gutter with no System to put me back together.
My breathing changed. Shorter. Faster. The host body's adrenal glands did their job even if nothing else about it was particularly impressive — heart rate spiking, peripheral vision sharpening, the ancient mammalian math of am I prey right now running faster than conscious thought.
I turned onto a busier street. A laundromat with the lights on. A woman pushing a stroller. Two old men playing dominoes on a folding table. The teenagers peeled off, disappearing around a corner like water finding a new channel.
My hands trembled the entire remaining walk home.
---
The apartment was exactly as I'd left it — chair under the door handle, map spread on the bed, prepaid phone on the nightstand counting down hours I couldn't stop watching.
Nine hours. Give or take.
The host body's freezer held one last frozen dinner — a Salisbury steak with mashed potatoes and a sad rectangle of brownie in its own compartment. I microwaved it and ate it standing at the counter because sitting down felt like admitting I was home, and this place wasn't home. It was a borrowed room in a borrowed life in a borrowed body, and in nine hours something was going to happen that would either make it real or prove I'd gone insane in the final seconds before that truck crushed my chest.
The Salisbury steak tasted like salt and regret. The mashed potatoes were wallpaper paste. The brownie was the best thing I'd eaten in this body and I let myself have that small, stupid victory.
I washed the plastic tray because Charles Weston apparently didn't own real dishes. Then I sat on the bed with the city map and the prepaid phone and the blue countdown burning in my peripheral vision, and I waited.
The sirens started around ten. Not unusual — the Glades had sirens the way other neighborhoods had birdsong, a constant ambient soundtrack of someone else's crisis. I triple-checked the locks. Jammed the chair tighter. Turned off the lights because a lit window in the Narrows at midnight was an advertisement.
The phone clock ticked past 1:00 AM. Past 2:00. The countdown inside my skull shrank from hours to minutes and each minute lasted longer than the one before it, time stretching like taffy as the number approached something that couldn't be taken back.
I sat on the edge of the bed. Shoes on. Hands flat on my knees. Spine straight.
Two hours. One hour. Thirty minutes.
The body wanted sleep. I pinched the inside of my forearm hard enough to leave a mark and kept my eyes on the clock.
2:45 AM. Two minutes.
"Whatever you are — whatever this is — I'm ready."
I wasn't ready. But saying it helped.
The clock hit 2:47 and the world went white.
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