The last full day in Boston began the way the best days did — without an agenda.
Ethan lay on the warehouse roof in the thin November sun and felt genuinely, uncomplicatedly good about the world. The sun was doing its work with the patient thoroughness it had demonstrated all month, and even in the pale output of a Boston mid-November, the calendar having made its position clear, the charging was real and present and continuous. He could feel it the way you felt a good meal settling, that deep, satisfied warmth of something being replenished properly.
He'd been awake since five, which was just how it was now, and had spent the early morning hours doing the financial accounting that the day required.
Two hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars in the two backpacks, plus change. Ten thousand of it was his — a working fund for New York, enough to cover accommodation and food and whatever incidentals came up while he was establishing himself in the new city. He'd calculated New York prices against what he knew of the era and decided ten thousand was comfortable without being excessive. He didn't want to walk around the city with a quarter million in a bag if he could help it.
The rest — two hundred and thirty-seven thousand dollars — was going to Dumar.
Not as a loan. Not with strings beyond the ones they'd already agreed to in the shop with the bent rebar on the workbench. It was capital, seed money for the legitimate enterprise that Dumar was better positioned than anyone to build, and the instruction attached to it was the simplest possible one: reinvest everything back into the empire until the empire stands on its own.
He'd thought about whether this was wise — handing that much cash to someone he'd known for six weeks, on the basis of a handshake and a developing read of a man's character. He'd thought about it and arrived at the same conclusion he always arrived at when he thought about Dumar: the man was not good in the technical sense, had never claimed to be, and was entirely honest about what he was. Dishonesty was not in the profile. Dumar was a person who dealt in things as they were rather than as he wished they were, and a person like that, given a legitimate path with genuine capital behind it, was not going to throw it away for short-term gain.
Also, if Dumar did somehow manage to disappear with two hundred and thirty-seven thousand dollars, Ethan could fly to wherever he'd gone in a couple of hours.
He let himself notice this about himself — the way the safety net of his own capability had changed his relationship with risk — and decided it was fine. It wasn't arrogance. It was accurate accounting.
The sun moved overhead with its slow, indifferent purpose, and he lay on the warehouse roof and didn't fall asleep, which required a modest ongoing effort because the warmth and the surface and the absence of any requirement to do anything were conspiring aggressively toward unconsciousness. He resisted. Barely. But he resisted.
---
In the afternoon, he went to buy the phone.
The mobile phone market in 1991 was, he was rapidly reminded, a different proposition from anything he'd known in his previous life. The phones were large — aggressively large, the kind of large that only makes sense if you remember that miniaturization hadn't happened yet and the engineering was still working out the fundamentals. They were expensive, they had service coverage that was best described as aspirational, and they had the features of objects that were new enough that their designers weren't sure which features were important yet and had erred toward simplicity.
He found what he needed in an electronics shop near the financial district — a retailer that catered primarily to business customers and therefore had the inventory to match. The salesman explained the service plans with the enthusiasm of someone who genuinely believed this technology was going to change the world, which it was, though probably not in the ways he was currently envisioning.
The phone was a Motorola, black, about the size of a small brick with the antenna of a radio telescope. It cost three hundred and eighty dollars, which he paid without significant pain, given the context, and the monthly service plan was forty dollars plus per-minute charges that he was going to ignore on the basis that Dumar was not a person who engaged in extended telephone conversations.
He bought a second phone of the same model for Dumar and added both to the backpack.
The evening was good pasta again, the Italian place, the rigatoni, the window table. He ate slowly and watched his city — he'd started thinking of it as his city over the past weeks, which was either appropriate or presumptuous and probably both — and thought about New York.
He'd been thinking about New York in the background continuously for weeks, but always as a future problem, a future city, a future context. Now it was tomorrow, which collapsed all the abstraction into something concrete and near.
New York in 1991 was a different city from the New York he'd known in his previous life. Not unrecognizably different — the bones were the same, Manhattan's vertical ambition unchanged, the boroughs doing their individual things with the same competitive energy they'd always had. But the surface was rougher than what he'd grown up seeing in photographs and films. The crack epidemic had done serious damage to certain neighborhoods. The murder rate was still years away from the dramatic decline that would arrive later in the decade. Times Square was still Times Square in the original sense, which was not a compliment. The city was large and vital and broke and dangerous and alive in the particular way of cities that hadn't yet been made comfortable.
He was looking forward to it.
He finished the rigatoni, walked back to the motel, lay in the dark, and thought about the list.
The list had been forming itself for weeks, items added and arranged as he'd gathered more confidence about where exactly he was and what the landscape held. It had the character of a project plan assembled by someone who understood that the items were suggestions rather than guarantees — the future was not fixed, especially not in a universe that had announced itself as a convergence of multiple canons, but having a direction was better than not having one.
The Benedetto network. The most immediate and concrete item — already investigated, already partially understood, the connection to the trafficking pipeline is a clear through-line from the Boston work. New York first, the obvious address.
Howard Stark. December. He had a few weeks. He needed to find the Starks' location, understand the geography of the threat, and be present in the right place on the right night. This was the item he thought about most carefully because it had the clearest deadline and the highest stakes — not just Howard Stark's life, but Maria's, and downstream from both of them, Tony's entire trajectory. The version of Tony Stark who grew up with his father killed by HYDRA, who found out on a video in a Siberian bunker — that was the version who broke. He didn't have any particular plan for managing Tony Stark's psychological development. He just didn't want the break to happen from that specific cause.
The X-Men. Or the people who would eventually be the X-Men — he didn't know the exact status, whether Xavier's school was operational in this timeline, whether the mutants he'd found traces of in the library archives had any organized relationship with each other yet. He wanted to find out. Not to interfere, necessarily — the mutant situation was complicated in ways that required more information before he had useful opinions about it. But to know. The mansion was in Westchester, which was just outside New York, which made it an easy reconnaissance once he had his New York situation stable.
The Sanctum Sanctorum. He thought about this one carefully. The Ancient One was almost certainly aware of him — he'd concluded this weeks ago, and the continued absence of mystical interference had only reinforced it. Walking up to 177A Bleecker Street and knocking was a different proposition from being known about from a distance. He wasn't sure whether introducing himself to the Masters of the Mystic Arts was a good idea, a great idea, or a potentially complicated idea. He filed it under gather more information first.
Peter Parker. This was the one he returned to most often, in the quiet stretches between other thoughts, because it was the most personal-feeling item on the list. Peter Parker was — he did the math — about ten or eleven years old right now, somewhere in Queens, living with Ben and May and being the specific kind of brilliant and earnest person that the universe had apparently designed to eventually be tested in particular ways. Ethan had no intention of interfering with Peter's trajectory — the powers, the growth, the becoming. He just had very strong feelings about the uncle.
He thought about the phrase. With great power comes great responsibility. The most important words Peter Parker would ever hear, and the specific person who needed to say them, and the specific mechanism by which the lesson was usually delivered. He was not going to allow the mechanism.
He wasn't sure yet how to manage it. Finding Ben Parker, establishing some kind of regular contact without it being strange, positioning himself to be present at the right moment — these were logistics he needed to work out. But the intention was firm.
He closed his eyes.
Tomorrow, he thought. New York tomorrow.
---
Morning came the way mornings came — too early and with total commitment.
He was packed with the efficiency of someone who hadn't accumulated much. The two backpacks: the hiking pack with the ten thousand dollars and his documents, and the Motorola and a change of clothes, the secondary bag with Dumar's phone and the bundled cash. Light, by any reasonable standard. He was eighteen and had the powers of Superman and was flying to New York. He didn't need much.
Dumar was outside with his coffee. Of course he was.
They went inside.
Ethan set the secondary bag on the workbench and pushed it toward him. "Two hundred and thirty-seven thousand. You can count it."
Dumar opened the bag and looked at the contents in the way of someone who was not going to count it in front of Ethan, not because he didn't want to, but because the quantity made the exercise feel different from the previous times. He closed the bag. "I'll count it later."
"Fair."
He produced the second phone and set it beside the bag, went through the basics of operation — which Dumar absorbed with the quiet competence of a man who learned things when things needed to be learned — and gave him the number.
"I'll call or message when I have something," Dumar said. "Or if something comes up here that needs your specific kind of attention."
"Give it two weeks minimum first," Ethan said. "Let the neighborhood settle. The work we did should hold for a while without reinforcement."
"And if it doesn't?"
"Then call me, and I'll come back." He paused. "I can be here in two hours from New York. Less, once I've pushed the speed more."
Dumar nodded. He looked at Ethan with the expression he'd been wearing since the bent rebar — the one that had incorporated the new information and arrived at a revised and still-stabilizing picture. "Whatever you are," he said, "I hope New York is ready for it."
"Probably not," Ethan said. "But that's not really my problem."
He shook Dumar's hand, picked up the hiking pack, and walked out into the December morning.
He went to the end of the block. Checked the street — a few people, a car passing, nobody looking up. He bent his knees slightly, engaged the mechanism that had become more reliable with each passing day, and rose.
He went up fast — fifty feet, a hundred, the city falling away beneath him into its map-version, the harbor to the east catching the pale morning light in a long silver line. He leveled off at about three hundred feet, the altitude that felt right for urban navigation, and turned south.
Behind him, somewhere on a block in South Boston, a man with twenty-two years of organizational knowledge was standing outside a shop with a coffee, watching a figure accelerate into the southern sky.
Ethan didn't look back. He was already thinking forward.
---
At a hundred and fifty miles an hour, the distance between Boston and New York was less than three hours. He pushed slightly beyond that — the speed increasing naturally as he relaxed into it, his sense of the flight maturing, the ceiling rising — and found a comfortable hundred and seventy over the open stretches above Connecticut, the landscape below doing its winter thing in browns and greys and the occasional bright line of a river catching the sky.
He thought about the X-Men mansion. Westchester County, which was coming up below him now, the suburban geography of the area organized into the patterns that distinguished it from the city it orbited. He didn't have an exact address, but he had enough reference knowledge to know the general area, and with x-ray vision and altitude, he could cover a significant amount of geography in a short time.
Not today. Today was about getting situated. Finding the hotel, establishing his New York base, and beginning the reconnaissance that December required. The X-Men visit was soon. The Sanctum was soon. Peter Parker was a patient, long-term item that would unfold over the years if he managed it right.
The city appeared on the southern horizon.
He'd seen Manhattan from the air in his previous life, in photographs and film, enough times that the shape of it was deeply familiar — the island's vertical ambition, the surrounding boroughs, the bridges connecting everything with the functional elegance of engineering that knew exactly what it was for. But photographs and film were not the same as floating at three hundred feet with the wind moving past him and the December morning crisp and clear and the whole thing spread below him like something that had decided to be impressive whether you were ready for it or not.
He descended as he crossed into the outer boroughs, dropping altitude and speed, shedding the flight to something barely faster than a car would manage. He came down in an industrial stretch of Queens where the December morning had the area mostly to himself, landing in a space between two warehouses with the practiced casualness of someone parallel parking, and walked out to the street.
He flagged the first cab he saw.
The driver was a man of late middle age with the specific weary alertness of New York taxi drivers, which was its own category of human attentiveness — you noticed everything, you reacted to nothing, you had an opinion about all of it. He looked at Ethan in the rearview with the automatic professional assessment of someone calculating tip potential from observable variables.
"Nice hotel," Ethan said. "Midtown. Your best recommendation."
A pause in which the driver balanced personal recommendation against professional neutrality and came out on the side of personal recommendation. "The Helmsley Palace, if you want old money. The Marriott Marquis, if you want to be in Times Square, though I'd personally—"
"Helmsley Palace," Ethan said.
The driver approved of this implicitly and moved into traffic with the fluid aggression of someone for whom Manhattan's vehicular ecosystem was simply the medium they existed in.
The city came at him through the cab windows with the full force of itself. Boston had been welcoming in its particular way — compact, knowable, a city that revealed itself gradually and rewarded familiarity. New York didn't do that. New York presented everything all at once and left you to sort it out. The buildings, the noise, the density of human activity, even in the first weeks of November — it was a different order of magnitude, a city operating at a pitch that Boston maintained only occasionally.
He watched it and felt the appropriate thing, which was appetite.
---
The Helmsley Palace on Madison Avenue was exactly what a hotel called the Helmsley Palace on Madison Avenue in 1991 was going to be — high ceilings, marble, and the particular atmosphere of a place that had decided that luxury was not a selling point to advertise because advertising it would undermine the point. The lobby was warm and quiet in the way of spaces that had been carefully designed to feel like retreats from the city directly outside their doors.
The front desk clerk took him in with the professional poise of someone trained to register nothing unusual about an eighteen-year-old with a hiking backpack checking in for a week, because New York, and because the money was real.
Six hundred dollars for a week, which he paid in cash with the confidence of someone who had decided that being the kind of person who paid for nice hotels in cash was simply his life now.
The room was on the fourteenth floor and had a view of midtown that, in the November late afternoon, was doing everything a midtown view was supposed to do — the lights coming up across the city as the sun dropped, the buildings asserting their individual geometries against the darkening sky, the whole operation carrying on with the magnificent indifference to individual observation that made cities cities.
He set the backpack on the luggage stand and sat on the bed.
The bed was remarkable. That was the only word. He'd been sleeping on a twenty-dollar motel mattress for six weeks, and the motel mattress had not been a problem — his body's relationship with physical comfort had simplified considerably since the transmigration, in the direction of everything being generally fine rather than some things being uncomfortable. But this bed was genuinely, actively remarkable, the kind of surface that made the act of lying down feel like an event.
He lay back on it and looked at the ceiling.
New York. First night. Six weeks since waking up in a Boston alley with fifty-five dollars and a clown mask and a cosmic entity's idea of carefree beginning to make itself felt in his hands.
He thought about December.
He thought about Howard Stark somewhere in this city, going about the business of being Howard Stark — the brilliant, difficult, driven man who had built something significant and was a month away from dying on a road because of a program that had nothing to do with him personally, that had reached out of the Cold War's long shadow to take him because he'd been useful once and was now a liability.
He would stop it.
He thought about everything downstream of that decision — about Tony Stark growing up with his father, about what that Tony became and whether it was better or worse or simply different, about the butterfly effects of any intervention in a timeline that was already not quite any timeline he'd studied. He'd decided weeks ago that the uncertainty didn't change the calculation. A man he could save was a man he would save. The downstream effects were for the downstream to sort out.
He thought, less urgently and more gently, about the other question.
He'd been in this world for six weeks. He'd been, in the practical sense, extremely busy for all of them — the survival mechanics of the first days, the working relationship with Dumar, the nights in the city, the training, the accumulating understanding of his own capabilities. There hadn't been much space for the quieter human questions.
But lying on this remarkable bed in this Manhattan hotel room, the city doing its thing beyond the window, the December evening settling in around him, the question arrived in the particular way of questions that had been patient.
Was there someone in this world for him?
He thought about the kind of person he'd been drawn to in his previous life — not a type exactly, more a quality. People who were genuinely interested in things, in ideas and problems, and the texture of the world. People who were honest about themselves without performing the honesty. People who could be warm and also have edges, who had decided that kindness and strength were not opposing forces.
He had abilities that were going to keep growing past anything a normal human could relate to. He had knowledge of this world's future that was partial and unreliable and couldn't be fully shared. He had a life that was going to look, to any outside observer, extremely strange — the travel, the night work, the income source that couldn't be explained straightforwardly, the physical capabilities that would eventually become impossible to hide entirely from someone close enough.
He thought about all of that and found, at the bottom of the thinking, that it didn't make him pessimistic. It made him thoughtful. The obstacles were real, but they were the specific obstacles of a specific, unusual life rather than some fundamental incompatibility with connection.
Somewhere in this city, or in the world that this city was the center of, there was probably a person who fit the space he had available. He'd find them or he wouldn't. He'd be open to finding them, or he'd be too busy, and the busy was a choice he was making, and choices could be unmade.
He closed his eyes.
Tomorrow: reconnaissance. The geography of Manhattan, the Stark Industries footprint in New York, and the early shape of what December would require.
Tonight: the most comfortable bed he'd lain in across two lifetimes.
He pulled the duvet over himself with one hand and was asleep in a minute, the city humming its permanent hum fourteen floors below, the November night doing its patient work outside the windows.