Chapter 2: DEAD MAN'S SHOES
The apartment was a studio on the fourth floor of a building that had given up trying to be nice around 1987.
I climbed the stairs because the elevator made sounds that suggested mechanical failure was a matter of when rather than if. The hallway smelled like cooking grease and someone's attempt at lavender air freshener. Door 4C had a peephole and a deadbolt and a welcome mat that said "GO AWAY" in cheerful yellow letters.
The keys worked. That was something.
Inside: clean but impersonal. One room plus bathroom, kitchenette against the far wall, bed that folded out from a couch, bookshelf crammed with film production manuals. No photos on the walls. No art. Nothing that said someone lived here except the mail stacked on the counter and the cold pad thai in the fridge.
I stood in the doorway for thirty seconds, cataloguing.
Window: facing the fire escape, bars on the outside. Good for security, bad for emergency exits. Chair: single, wooden, positioned at a small desk with a laptop. Closet: clothes that looked like mine now—work jeans, plain t-shirts, a single button-down still in dry cleaning plastic.
No family pictures.
No vacation souvenirs.
No evidence that Harley Vaughn had anyone waiting for him to come home.
"Lonely bastard," I thought. And then: "Lucky me."
The mail confirmed it. No personal correspondence. Utility bills. A credit card statement with a zero balance. A renewal notice for some industry magazine I'd never heard of.
Harley Vaughn lived alone. Harley Vaughn had no debts. Harley Vaughn paid his bills on time and kept his apartment clean and apparently spent his free time reading about camera angles and stunt choreography.
The laptop password was saved in the browser. Amateur hour, but I appreciated it.
Social media: two accounts, both professional. LinkedIn with a hundred-something connections, all industry. Instagram with maybe forty posts spread across three years, all behind-the-scenes stuff from various productions. No comments. No engagement.
Email: work, work, more work. Coordination schedules. Equipment requests. A chain from six months ago about transitioning from stunt double to coordinator.
Browser history: industry news. Action movie analysis. A lot of YouTube videos breaking down fight choreography.
No dating apps. No personal blogs. No embarrassing search history that suggested Harley Vaughn had any interests beyond his job.
"You really were nobody, weren't you?" I muttered to the empty apartment. "Just a guy who went to work and came home and waited for something to happen."
Something did happen. Something killed the original Harley Vaughn and put me in his place.
I still didn't know what.
A knock at the door made me jump.
I crossed the room in four steps—Harley's legs were longer than mine had been—and checked the peephole.
Woman. Sixties, maybe. Dark skin, gray hair, reading glasses pushed up on her forehead. Holding a Tupperware container.
I opened the door two inches.
"Mrs. Okafor?"
The name came from somewhere. Maybe the mailbox labels. Maybe something deeper, some fragment of memory that didn't belong to me but lived in this body anyway.
"Harley, baby." Her voice was warm, concerned. Caribbean accent underneath the New York. "You look pale. You getting sick?"
"Stomach thing." The lie came easier now. "Going around the set."
"Mmm." She didn't believe me, but she wasn't going to push. "I made too much rice and peas. You take this. Eat something that isn't from a cardboard box for once."
She handed me the Tupperware before I could argue.
"Thank you, Mrs. Okafor. You didn't have to—"
"You're a good boy, Harley. You remind me of my nephew." A pause. Her eyes searched my face. "You sure you're alright? You seem different today. More... awake."
Ice in my stomach. First test. First person who knew the original well enough to notice.
"Bad dream," I said. "One of those ones where you wake up and everything feels off. You know?"
"I know." She patted my arm. "Get some rest. And eat that rice. I put the good peppers in."
I watched her go back to 4B. Closed the door. Leaned against it until my heartbeat settled.
"More awake," she'd said.
I needed to be careful.
Three hours disappeared into research.
The laptop told me the world. The phone told me what the world thought about itself. I cross-referenced everything, building a map.
Compound V was public now. The congressional hearings were ongoing. Vought's stock had taken a hit but not a killing blow—Stan Edgar was too good at damage control for that. Homelander was doing a rehabilitation tour, lots of patriotic photo ops, lots of interviews where he talked about being "betrayed by rogue elements" within the company.
The Boys were wanted fugitives. FBI manhunt, considered armed and dangerous. Butcher's face was on a poster next to words like "domestic terrorism" and "multiple homicides."
Starlight was still on The Seven. Her interviews had the brittle quality of someone saying all the right things while screaming internally.
A-Train had disappeared from public view—injury, the official story said. The Deep was doing some kind of self-help retreat in Ohio. Queen Maeve was drinking in public and not caring who photographed it.
And Stormfront—
I searched the name. Got nothing. She wasn't announced yet. Still waiting in the wings.
"Soon," I thought. "She shows up soon."
The timeline was a weapon. Everything I knew about the next three seasons was a weapon. But weapons were only useful if you survived long enough to use them.
The sun shifted while I worked. Afternoon became evening became the kind of purple dusk that New York specialized in—pollution making the light interesting, fire escapes casting geometric shadows across the building opposite.
I ate Mrs. Okafor's rice and peas standing at the kitchen counter. Good peppers. She wasn't wrong.
The pad thai from the fridge was next. Cold, but edible. Someone else's takeout order, but my stomach didn't care about the philosophical implications.
The shimmer at the edge of my vision hadn't faded. If anything, it was clearer now, like my brain was finally adjusting to its presence. I couldn't read it—there was nothing to read yet—but I could feel it. Potential. Dormant power waiting for a trigger.
"Public belief," I thought. "That's how it works. That's always how it works."
Systems like this ran on reputation. On fame. On the gap between what people thought you were and what you actually were. I'd seen enough isekai stories to recognize the pattern.
Which meant the system was useless until someone believed in me.
And right now, nobody believed in Harley Vaughn.
I pulled up a clip on the laptop. Homelander at some kind of rally, waving at a crowd that screamed his name like he was a messiah instead of a murderer.
The shimmer pulsed.
I paused the video. Played it again. Watched the shimmer.
It was responding to him. Not to the video specifically—to the concept of him. To the density of belief that surrounded Homelander's image, the weight of millions of people projecting their hopes and fears onto a man who could kill them all without breaking a sweat.
"You want that," I thought at the shimmer. "You want to be in the middle of that."
No response. But the pulse felt like agreement.
The clock on the laptop said 9:47 PM when I finally closed it.
Tomorrow I'd go back to Vought Studios. I'd coordinate extras for a propaganda documentary. I'd keep my head down and learn the terrain and figure out what the original Harley Vaughn's life looked like from the inside.
I'd also start planning.
Because somewhere in this city, a woman with Nazi ideology and lightning powers was about to start a culture war. Somewhere in this city, a conspiracy was building toward a presidential assassination. Somewhere in this city, the most dangerous man alive was one bad day away from burning everything down.
And I had a system that fed on belief.
I just needed to figure out how to use it without getting killed.
The shimmer pulsed one more time—faint, almost gentle—and I could have sworn it was laughing.
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