Chapter 5: EXTRAS
The sun hadn't cleared the buildings when I reached 47th Street.
Midtown in pre-dawn was a different animal than Midtown at rush hour—quieter, emptier, the kind of hollow silence that made your footsteps echo off glass storefronts. The production barricades were already up, NYPD sawhorses marking the three-block perimeter where Vought had rented the city for the day. A single patrol car sat at the corner, officer inside drinking coffee and scrolling on his phone.
I walked the perimeter three times before anyone from the crew arrived.
Camera positions first. Four Vought rigs marked on the call sheet—two mobile, two fixed. The fixed ones pointed at the intersection where the staged "rescue" would happen. The mobile ones would chase the Starlight body double through the choreographed sequence.
But Vought's cameras weren't the only eyes on this block.
Building security cameras: two visible, probably three more I couldn't see from street level. Traffic cameras at both ends of the shoot zone. And the east side of the barricade—the side that stayed open to pedestrian traffic—that was where the phones would be. Every tourist, every commuter, every teenager with a TikTok account.
Uncontrolled footage.
The shimmer pulsed when I mapped it in my head, like a cat watching a bird through a window.
The prop truck arrived at 6:15.
I helped the grips unload—not my job, but useful for building goodwill and getting a look at inventory. The truck held the usual production debris: fake rubble, collapsible vehicles for stunt work, costume duplicates for the body doubles.
And in the back corner, in a crate labeled "SEVEN HERO PROPS — DOCUMENTARY USE ONLY," a collection of replica weapons and accessories.
Translucent's invisible-pattern bodysuit. A-Train's racing goggles. Queen Maeve's sword, obviously rubber from the flex in the blade.
And a shield.
Fiberglass. Lightweight. Painted to look like burnished metal with a star-and-stripe pattern that screamed American Hero in the most obvious possible way. Probably designed for background shots where the real props would be too expensive to risk.
I palmed it while pretending to inventory the crate, slid it into my coordinator's bag when the grips weren't looking.
"Visual prop," I thought. "Something that reads as hero on camera."
The shield fit perfectly.
Call time was 7:00. Drew Keener was already in full-volume mode by 7:15.
"I want the crash cars in position by eight! Where's my Starlight? Tell makeup they've got twenty minutes to make her look less like a substitute teacher!"
I stayed in my lane. Positioned extras for the crowd reaction shots—twelve people playing "grateful citizens," eight more playing "terrified bystanders," all of them earning SAG day rates to pretend a fake superhero had saved their fake lives.
The actress in the Starlight costume walked past me toward the primary camera. Blonde wig, costume padding, the kind of determined smile that said she'd been doing this for years and had long since stopped caring about the content.
She wasn't Annie January. But she was playing her, and somewhere in Vought Tower the real Annie January was probably watching a monitor and wondering when she'd stopped being a person and started being a brand.
"Soon," I thought. "Soon you'll meet Stormfront and everything will get worse before it gets better."
The shimmer pulsed. Knowing the future didn't make it easier to watch the present.
Lunch break. 12:30.
The production caterer had set up a tent on the closed portion of the street, tables full of sandwiches and salads that would go mostly uneaten. Crew members clustered in familiar groups—camera with camera, grips with grips, coordinators alone because nobody wanted to talk shop during their thirty-minute break.
I bought a hot dog from a street vendor instead.
Two dollars and fifty cents for something that was probably forty percent sawdust, but it came with mustard and sauerkraut and the vendor didn't ask questions. I ate it leaning against a NYPD sawhorse, watching the real New York flow past the fake New York we were building.
Tourists. Commuters. A woman pushing a stroller while talking on her phone. A guy in a suit who walked like his mortgage payment was three days late. Three teenagers in matching hoodies, probably skipping school, stopping to take selfies with the Vought camera equipment in the background.
None of them looked at the set. None of them cared that a corporation was manufacturing heroism thirty feet from where they walked.
"This is normal to them," I realized. "Superheroes are just... content. Background noise. Part of the scenery."
In my old world, if superheroes existed, people would stop and stare. They'd care. They'd be awed or terrified or something other than indifferent.
Here, Supes were just another brand. Another product. Another thing to scroll past on your way to the next video.
The hot dog sat heavy in my stomach.
"Vaughn."
Jenna Park appeared at my elbow, coffee cup and planner in hand. She had the look of someone who'd been awake since 4 AM and was running on caffeine and spite.
"What's up?"
"You keep checking your phone."
Shit.
I had been. Every ten minutes, pulling it out to glance at the screen, putting it back. Not for messages—for time. For the creeping awareness that the afternoon was slipping away and nothing was happening.
"Weather reports," I said. "There's a front moving in. If it rains, the whole shoot's a wash."
Jenna looked at the sky. Clear blue, not a cloud visible.
"It's July. It's not going to rain."
"Better safe than sorry."
She studied me for a moment longer than comfortable. That same searching expression from the day before—like she was trying to find the version of Harley Vaughn she'd worked with for eight months and couldn't quite locate him.
"You know," she said, "if something's going on, you can tell me. We've known each other a while."
Have we? I wanted to ask. Did the original Harley know you, or did he just work near you? Did you ever have a real conversation, or were you both just furniture in each other's lives?
"Nothing's going on," I said instead. "Just antsy. Big shoot. Lot of moving parts."
She didn't believe me. But she nodded anyway.
"Standing offer," she repeated, and went back to coordinating something that needed coordinating.
I put the phone away and forced myself to stop checking.
2:00 PM. 2:30. 2:45.
The afternoon light shifted from harsh to golden, the kind of hour cinematographers loved because it made everything look expensive. The Starlight body double ran her sequence for the fourteenth time. Drew Keener called "Cut!" and "Reset!" until the words lost meaning.
Nothing happened.
No V-enhanced individuals bursting through buildings. No Supe-related incidents on the police scanner. No chaos, no crisis, no opportunity.
The shimmer at the edge of my vision stayed exactly as it had been—present but dormant, patient but hungry. It didn't judge. It didn't demand. It just waited, the way a trap waits for something to walk into it.
"This was always a gamble," I reminded myself. "You positioned yourself. You did the math. Now you wait."
But waiting was harder than planning. Planning felt like action. Waiting felt like dying slowly.
3:00 PM. 3:10.
Drew called for a lens change. The camera operators clustered around the primary rig, arguing about something technical. The extras wandered toward the craft services tent. Jenna's radio crackled with chatter about tomorrow's call sheet.
I watched the east barricade—the open side, where pedestrian traffic flowed past without stopping—and felt the frustration of a man who knew this world ran on chaos but couldn't make it happen.
"Maybe tomorrow," I thought. "Maybe next week. Maybe—"
The boom came from the east.
Three blocks away. Glass shattering, the sound sharp and immediate even at distance. Car alarms triggered in a cascade, one after another, the acoustic signature of something very wrong.
Every head on set turned.
"What the hell was that?" Drew's voice cut through the sudden silence.
The NYPD liaison was already on his radio, face going pale as the response came through. He looked at Drew. At the crew. At the eastern horizon where something was happening.
"Everyone stay here. Lock it down. Something's happening on 48th—reports of a powered individual."
Powered individual.
The phrase hung in the air like smoke.
The crowd started to scatter. Camera operators backed away from their rigs. The extras huddled near the tent, pulling out phones, faces caught between fear and the desperate need to record something for social media.
I grabbed my coordinator's bag—the one with the shield inside—and started walking east.
"This is it," the shimmer seemed to say. "This is what you've been waiting for."
Forty-seventh Street. Forty-eighth was one block up. The sound of destruction got louder with every step.
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