Chapter 1: The Wrong Skin
The alarm screamed at 6:12 AM and I didn't know where I was.
Ceiling. Wrong ceiling. White paint with a water stain shaped like a boot, not the cracked beige of my studio apartment in Portland. Sheets that smelled like fabric softener instead of the perpetual mustiness of a building with broken ventilation. Morning light coming from the wrong angle.
I sat up too fast. Head swam. Hands grabbed the bedframe and those weren't my hands—too calloused, too big, nails bitten down to the quick instead of my neurotic habit of keeping them trimmed even.
"Evan. Evan, get up, you'll be late."
A voice from downstairs. Male. Tired in the specific way of a man who'd stopped sleeping properly years ago.
Memories crashed into my skull like a drunk driver—
Danny Hebert. My father.
Annette Hebert. My mother. Dead three years. Car accident. The driver walked away with a suspended license and I—
No.
I pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw stars. Those weren't my memories. My mother was still alive in Tempe, Arizona. My father sold insurance. I was twenty-six years old, I had a useless English degree and seventy thousand dollars in student debt, and last night I'd been driving home from my overnight shift at the distribution center when—
When what?
Headlights. Wrong lane. The sound of metal screaming.
Then the alarm at 6:12 AM.
I peeled my hands away from my face and looked at the room. Posters I didn't recognize but somehow remembered hanging. A bookshelf with titles I'd never read but could recall the plots of. A closet door slightly ajar, clothes inside that would fit a body six inches shorter than mine—
Shorter than my old body. This one matched.
I stood up. Legs worked. Crossed to the mirror hanging on the back of the door.
Brown hair, not black. Jaw slightly softer. Same general face shape but younger—eighteen instead of twenty-six. Dark circles under eyes that were the wrong shade of blue.
Evan Hebert. Eighteen years old. Part-time dockworker for the Brockton Bay Dock Workers' Association. High school dropout who'd gotten his GED last year. Danny's disappointment. Taylor's distant brother.
"Evan!"
"Coming," I said, and the voice that came out was too young and too hoarse and not mine.
I grabbed a shirt from the floor—his shirt, muscle memory guiding the movement—and pulled it on. Jeans from the chair. Socks that didn't match.
My hands were shaking. I made fists until they stopped.
Think. Think about what you know.
Brockton Bay. Earth Bet. The web serial I'd read twice during college when I should have been studying for my thesis. Danny and Annette Hebert. Taylor Hebert, the protagonist, the bug controller, the girl who'd save the world and lose her mind doing it.
And Evan Hebert.
Who didn't exist. Who was never mentioned in the story. Who was impossible.
I made myself walk to the door. Made myself open it.
The hallway was narrow. Bathroom to the left—I could see Taylor's toiletries on the sink through the cracked door. Her room was across from mine. Closed. Empty.
She was already downstairs. I could hear the clink of a spoon against a bowl.
I went down.
The kitchen was exactly like I remembered it and nothing like anything I'd ever seen before. Danny stood at the counter with his back to me, pouring coffee from a pot that had been brewing since before I was born. Taylor sat at the table, hunched over a bowl of cereal, eating with the mechanical efficiency of someone who wanted to be anywhere else.
"Morning," I said.
Danny turned. He looked tired—not just sleep-tired but bone-tired, years-tired, the exhaustion of a man who'd been holding everything together with fraying thread. His eyes flicked over me and I watched him not ask if I was okay.
"Coffee's ready," he said instead.
"Thanks."
I crossed to the counter. Poured myself a cup. The mug had a chip on the rim that I'd apparently been ignoring for months. The coffee was terrible—burnt and bitter, the kind you could strip paint with.
It was the first warm thing I'd felt since waking up dead.
I sat down at the table. Taylor didn't look up. She was wearing a hoodie too big for her frame, shoulders curved inward like she was trying to occupy less space. January. The locker had been in January.
Three months ago, in this timeline. Three months since she'd triggered. Since she'd gotten her powers and started going out at night and planning to be a hero.
She didn't know I knew.
"I can drive you to school," I said.
Taylor's spoon stopped. She looked up—actually looked at me—with an expression caught somewhere between surprise and suspicion.
"You never drive me to school."
"Yeah, well." I took a sip of the terrible coffee. "Maybe I should start."
Danny was watching us. I could feel his attention like a physical weight.
"I have work at seven-thirty," he said slowly. "If you're taking the truck—"
"I'll drop you first," I said. "Then Taylor. I'm not on until nine."
The silence that followed was the kind that meant something had shifted. Taylor was still staring at me. Danny was still not asking if I was okay.
"Fine," Taylor said finally. She went back to her cereal.
I drank my coffee and watched the morning light hit the bay through the kitchen window. Salt and rust and the faint chemical undertone that meant you were downwind of the Docks. The first warm thing I'd felt since waking up dead, and it tasted like burnt grounds and broken promises.
But I could work with that.
Danny left for the union office. Taylor left for Winslow. The house settled into the specific kind of quiet that meant I was alone.
I stood in the middle of the living room and tried not to panic.
Okay. Okay. Inventory.
What I knew: Worm. The entire web serial, or at least the major plot points. The web serial I'd read twice, the first time because someone on Reddit recommended it and the second time because I'd been unemployed for three months and it was free.
April 2011. That's when the story started. That's when Taylor joined the Undersiders and everything went to hell.
I crossed to the calendar hanging in the kitchen. April 8, 2011.
Three days.
In three days, Lung was going to hunt the Undersiders. Taylor was going to intervene. The whole thing was going to spiral into bank robberies and Endbringer attacks and a bodycount that I'd stopped tracking somewhere around the Slaughterhouse Nine.
I had three days before the opening night of an apocalypse.
I went upstairs. Found a city map in Evan's—in my desk drawer. Spread it out on the bed.
The Docks, here. ABB territory, clustered around the warehouses and shipping containers. E88 to the north, swastikas and skinheads and powers that made Nazis even more dangerous. The Boardwalk, where tourists pretended the city wasn't rotting. Downtown, where the Protectorate pretended they had things under control.
And underneath all of it, invisible on any map, the cape population. Lung and Oni Lee. Kaiser and his Empire. The Undersiders in their hideout. Coil in his base, pulling strings that nobody saw until it was too late.
I traced the route from the Hebert house to the warehouse district. Three miles. Twenty minutes on foot if you moved fast.
April 11. That was the date. Lung hunts the Undersiders, Taylor intervenes, the story begins.
I had three days to figure out what I was doing here. Three days to prepare for... what? Intercepting Lung? Joining the Undersiders? Dying?
Something shifted at the edge of my awareness.
Not a sound. Not exactly. More like the feeling you get right before a storm breaks—that sense of potential energy about to become kinetic. Something different about my mortality, something I couldn't quite name or touch.
I pushed it away. Filed it under things to worry about later.
Right now, I had work to do.
I pinned the map to my bedroom wall and marked the Docks in red.
The afternoon passed in a blur of reconnaissance that looked like errands. I walked the route to Winslow and memorized the streets Taylor would take. I stopped at the convenience store near the Docks and bought a cheap prepaid phone with cash. I ate a sandwich at a diner that Evan apparently frequented and nodded at people whose names I didn't know but whose faces triggered recognition from borrowed memories.
By the time I got home, Danny was already back, sitting in the living room with a beer and the thousand-yard stare of a man watching his life fall apart in slow motion.
"Good day?" I asked.
He looked at me like I'd spoken a foreign language.
"Same as always," he said eventually. "You?"
"Same as always."
Neither of us believed it. Neither of us pushed.
Taylor came home an hour later. She went straight to her room. The sound of her door closing was louder than it needed to be.
I made dinner. Spaghetti with jarred sauce and garlic bread from a bag. Simple. The kind of thing even I couldn't screw up.
When I called them to the table, Danny stared at the food like it might be poisoned.
"You cooked," he said.
"I cooked."
"You never cook."
I shrugged. Served the plates. Sat down.
Taylor emerged from her room with the expression of someone being led to execution. She took her seat. Looked at the food. Looked at me.
"This is weird," she said.
"Just eat your dinner."
She ate. So did Danny. I watched them both and tried to memorize the way they moved, the way they interacted, the shape of a family I'd inherited without choosing.
Somewhere in the city, a man who could turn into a dragon was planning to hunt a group of teenage villains. Somewhere else, the Protectorate was pretending they had things under control. And somewhere underneath everything, the beings that wore human faces like masks were waiting for the end of the world.
I had three days.
I finished my spaghetti and started planning.
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