Second Skin - Chapter 0002

Chapter 2 — Times Square

The avenue was empty, and that remained the strangest thing in New York.

Sebastian rode down Amsterdam Street, his body low over the handlebars, the cooler bag weighing diagonally across his back. Ahead of him were four lanes of clean asphalt stretching for three blocks without a single vehicle. No horns. No engines. None of those still metal walls that appeared in old videos, those grainy files from thirty, forty years ago, where the entire city looked like a circulatory system clogged with red and yellow cars and taxis stuck together like scales. He had seen those recordings dozens of times on the school tablet, searching for old Spider-Man footage between the buildings. And every time he had the same feeling of looking at a city that no longer existed, a version of his street that had been erased and drawn over.

Today the asphalt belonged to him.

A car drove by. Just one, and an old one: a sedan from two decades ago, its paint peeling off at the fender, the driver’s door a slightly different color than the rest, slowly turning north with a tired electric hum. The kind of car that survived because someone, in some garage, refused to let it die. Sebastian knew that kind of stubbornness well. He rode on top of it.

A little later came the other type. A low coupe, restored, mirrored black paint, round headlights, that old long hood design that only existed by choice and for money. It passed it, deliberately accelerating, the engine roaring in a way that no machine needed to roar anymore, a sound that was pure showmanship. Luxury vintage. People who spent the price of an apartment in Harlem to drive slowly, being seen.

These were the two species that still remained at street level: those too old to climb and those too expensive to care.

Sebastian knew why. Everyone knew. All they had to do was look up.

And he stood up, for a second, and the shadows passed over him.

They crisscrossed the sky in orderly rows, four, five layers high, a choreography the city had learned to perform without thinking. Floating cars. Hundreds of them, thousands if you counted the entire island, gliding between buildings in corridors marked by faint holograms that only truly appeared when you looked from below and at the right angle—blue and amber lines suspended in the cold air, pulsing slowly like runway markings stretched across the Manhattan sky. Their shadows crossed the street at regular intervals, darkening the asphalt for half a second, one after the other, and not a single pedestrian in the entire block bothered to look up.

It had been twenty years. Sebastian wasn’t even born when Stark released the first models to the public, and yet he knew the whole story by heart, because it was the kind of thing he read while the other boys read about sports. The first ones were outrageously expensive prototypes, toys for billionaires, three or four dozen units worldwide. Then came the second generation, and the third, and the manufacturing licenses, and the competitors, and the municipal air traffic control structure, and the laws, and the fines, and the insurance. Twenty years later there were popular models. Used models. Models financed in seventy-two installments with advertising on big screens promising “heaven within your family’s reach.” A nurse, a teacher, a supermarket manager—people who weren’t rich, ordinary middle-class people—today bought a car that floated, just as thirty years earlier one bought a car that drove.

And the ground emptied.

It was that simple. The city had moved upwards and left the streets behind, and the result was that a thirteen-year-old boy on an electric bicycle assembled from scrap metal parts could ride down an entire Manhattan avenue at forty miles per hour without encountering absolutely anything along the way.

Sebastian lowered himself further and twisted the throttle.

Frankenstein responded with that deep grunt he knew better than his own voice, and the icy wind began to attack from below, finding the gap between the collar of his coat and his hat, biting the bare skin of his neck. His eyes watered behind the thick lenses. His thighs burned in a good way, a way he no longer registered as pain after two hours on duty. On the makeshift dashboard—a repurposed screen from a dead cell phone, attached to the handlebars with cable ties and silicone—the numbers glowed green against a black background:

BAT 34% — TOWARDS 41°C — 18:38

Thirty-four percent. He did the math without thinking: he could get there and back, if he didn’t abuse the accelerator on the uphill sections of the return trip. Probably. The uphill sections of the return trip were a problem for future Sebastian.

There was only one delivery left in the cooler bag.

Seven had left. Two in Hamilton, one in Sugar Hill—that one took eleven minutes because the lady on the fourth floor wanted to check the contents of the box while he stood in the doorway, and then wanted to chat, and Sebastian didn’t have the courage to end it before the third sentence. Four were coming down. And there was the last one left, the one that was worth the most and scared the most: express delivery, fee paid, signature in hand, deadline by seven o’clock at night. A small package, absurdly dense for its size, wrapped in black industrial plastic and sealed with numbered tape, which sank into the bottom of his bag and pulled the strap against his chest with every braking maneuver. It must have weighed about six or seven kilos concentrated in something the size of a shoebox. Sebastian had resisted for forty minutes the urge to shake the package near his ear, and he had resisted poorly.

The address was in Midtown, two blocks from Times Square.

Which meant he was going to have to cross Times Square.

And if there was one thing in that city that Sebastian Delacroix would avoid at all costs, with any detour, accepting any extra mileage, it was crossing Times Square at seven o’clock on a Thursday evening.

The problem wasn’t fear. Or rather, it wasn’t only fear. The problem was that outsiders had this idea that a city protected by heroes was a safe city, and those who lived there knew that math didn’t work that way.

The heroes existed. They were there, every day, and they were real in a way that no other generation in history had ever known—there were more of them now than ever before, a new wave forming every year, young people with powers appearing in increasing numbers, regional teams, divisions, joint commissions with the government. But the big heroes were busy with big things. Threats that accumulated faster than they were resolved, a queue of planetary and interplanetary emergencies that kept growing, global security summits, treaties, orbits. The higher they climbed, the more the ground became unwatched.

And at the same time that heroes appeared, villains appeared. Always. That was the part that optimistic documentaries didn’t like to say out loud: the two populations grew up together, fed each other, and when the former went into space to decide the fate of humanity, the latter stayed. They stayed right here, at the curb, between the laundromat and the market, on the block where people lived who had no way to move.

So the streets were neglected. Not abandoned—neglected, which is different and worse, because nobody takes responsibility.

Sebastian crossed One Hundred and Ten and the scenery began to change texture, as it always did. The shop windows became more spaced out, the awnings more torn, the lampposts with one light on every two. He dodged a group of boys standing in the middle of the lane, five or six, baggy coats, shaved sides of their hair, one of them with a breathing mask hanging around his neck and spray paint drying on his fingers. Punks. They didn’t even look at him; they were busy arguing about something, shouting. Sebastian passed on the left, far away, without suddenly accelerating—suddenly accelerating drew attention, he had learned that the hard way in the third neighborhood where he lived.

He walked past an alley entrance and didn’t turn his head, only his eyes. A reflex. Inside, in the darkness between two buildings, three orange dots glowed at someone’s chest height, slowly rising and falling. The smell arrived with the wind: sweet smoke, chemical, something burning that wasn’t tobacco. A low voice said something and another laughed. Sebastian was already half a block away before the laughter ended.

Never walk down alleys. Never stop in an empty crosswalk. Never leave your bag on the sidewalk. Never look directly at someone for more than half a second. His rules. Written nowhere, reviewed every month, religiously obeyed.

At the next corner, a huge man emerged from a market carrying two bags, and huge here meant six feet tall, shoulders that filled the entire doorway, skin a uniform bluish-gray with darker patches running down his forearms. He stepped down the step with exaggerated care, like someone who had spent his whole life learning not to bump into things, and adjusted one of the bags before continuing. Across the street, a woman waited for the light with her son by the hand; both had the same greenish hue and the same pattern of fine scales along their jawline, and the boy kicked a piece of ice on the sidewalk like any boy would.

Sebastian walked past them without noticing anything unusual. It was just the street.

It had been almost forty years since the X-Men had joined the Avengers—back in the nineties, in an agreement that at the time seemed impossible and that today appears in textbooks on two pages with a photo—and it was this alliance that finally gave mutants visibility. A voice. Someone on the other side of the table when laws were written. Before that, they were a population without representation, and a population without representation is a population whose rights are debated by other people.

Not that it had turned into a fairy tale. Sebastian had no illusions about that, because he saw it every day. There were many, many people who used the advantage genetics gave them for their own benefit and to the detriment of others; half the gangs that marked the walls in Harlem had at least one guy who did something that nobody else did. And there was the other side, the side that almost no one talked about in the news: people with mutations that only caused problems. That hurt. That consumed. People who couldn’t switch off whatever they had, who hurt anyone who came near unintentionally, who needed expensive sleeping pills. Being different didn’t always mean being stronger. Sometimes it just meant being different, and paying for it.

But the alliance gave them a roof over their heads. A structure, a place to complain, lawyers, committees, a banner. Rights were won and are respected—most of the time, in most places, always in writing and almost always in practice. There was still friction. On both sides. There always would be.

Because that was the real world, and the real world doesn’t close in round numbers.

He went further south, and New York City grew up around him.

Literally growing. The city had expanded far too rapidly over the past two decades, upwards and outwards, swallowing up land, piling up floors, and the result was that old blocks were sandwiched between new structures like baby teeth between permanent teeth. Sebastian moved from one world to another in a matter of meters: a 1930s brick facade, then a sixty-story frosted glass monolith with a vertical garden illuminated by purple LEDs, then new bricks, then a tower. The clear streets made everything move quickly. He flew.

And the walls told the story of those who had been left on the ground.

He passed a mural of Iron Man painted entirely in shades of gold on a steel shutter. A gigantic silhouette of the Hulk made only with a white outline, without filling, occupying five stories of a blank gable. A stylized, red web covering a power box—the kind that residents repainted from time to time, just like they repainted the Battle mural on 128th Street. And, pasted on top of all of these, always on top, the other layer: gang markings. Exploded letters, acronyms, tags crossing the heroes’ faces, a new symbol he’d started seeing all over the area about three weeks ago, three vertical lines scratched with dripping black paint. Sebastian didn’t know who it belonged to. He knew it was appearing faster than it was being erased.

In his right ear, a voice spoke incessantly.

The headset was ridiculous, and he knew it. A decades-old wireless model, found in a box of used electronics at One Hundred and Twenty-Five for a dollar and a half, with a cracked rubber tip and a completely dead original battery. Sebastian had replaced the cell, resoldered the charging contact, and rewritten the entire firmware in a Saturday morning, eating dry cereal straight from the box. It wasn’t good for music, or it was barely good. It was good for the only thing he wanted: tuning into the open frequency of the New York Police Department’s radio.

It wasn’t illegal. He had checked three times, because he was the kind of kid who checked three times.

And it was, by far, the most useful tool he had. Better than the navigation system, better than the new battery, better than anything on the dashboard. Because an incident on One Hundred and Forty-Five meant detouring onto Convent; because a vehicle stopped on Lenox meant pedestrian traffic pushed onto the west sidewalk; because knowing where things were happening was, for a thirteen-year-old, forty-five-pound deliveryman, exactly the same thing as knowing where not to be.

The streets were becoming dangerous. He didn’t need anyone to confirm it. But everyone did.

The mayor had said the previous week, in a speech shown on all the city’s screens and which Sebastian watched standing, with his bicycle leaning against his hip, in front of a convenience store window: that he was in direct contact with the coalition, that they were negotiating the formation of a permanent urban protection task force, and that the city deserved dedicated attention. Applause. Headline. Seven days and nothing.

There were heroes actively working in New York, of course. Several. Good people, people who made their presence felt. But the name everyone wanted to say, the name that lay beneath all that talk without ever being explicitly stated, was his.

Spider-Man.

And Spider-Man was now an Avenger. The world’s greatest hero, leader of the coalition, one of the main lines of defense for the entire planet, the guy who sat at tables with heads of state and decided the fate of continents before lunch. That’s what prevented Peter Parker from doing what he did thirty years ago, which was simply being on that corner every night. The city had gained a symbol and lost a neighbor.

Still—and Sebastian thought this with a stubbornness he would never have admitted aloud—still, almost always, if you looked up at the right time, you could see it. A thin line cutting between two buildings. A red and blue shape spinning in the void above the avenue, the way no one else in the world ever did.

He raised his head now.

Floating cars. A delivery drone. Low clouds with the orange glow of the city reflected below.

“One day,” he murmured, and the wind carried it away before it even turned to smoke.

Around the corner of Forty-Eighth, Sebastian entered the block he always used to get to Times Square—a narrow, dimly lit side street with a Korean restaurant and a closed repair shop, which cut through and avoided the main avenue by three more minutes. He knew this block as well as he knew his own room.

And it was upon leaving him that the city changed its physical state.

That’s exactly how it was: a sudden transition, almost a shock, like sticking your head underwater backwards. From an almost empty alleyway to a solid wall of people.

The number of pedestrians multiplied a hundredfold in twenty meters. Times Square was New York’s most famous tourist spot and still was, but in recent decades it had also become something else, something bigger and harder to name: a permanent event center, a place where every category of person in the city converged. Tourists in new coats taking photos with trembling hands. Entire families. Punks in studded jackets sitting on the red steps as if they owned them. Street vendors with carts of chestnuts and churros. Dance groups with makeshift speakers vying for space five meters apart. Preachers. Street performers dressed as every hero ever depicted, including two competing Spider-Men with faded masks, and Sebastian felt the usual as he passed them: a pang of vicarious embarrassment and a pang of something else he didn’t like to examine.

Speeding up there would only cause problems. Speeding up there would mean running someone over in ten seconds.

Then Sebastian jumped out of Frankenstein.

It was a movement as automatic as breathing: weight on his left leg, his right leg passing over the saddle, both feet on the ground without the bicycle ever stopping, and immediately his hands firmly on the handlebars pushing the frame alongside his body. The bicycle was higher than his waist. Pushing it through the crowd was like guiding a large, obedient animal.

He joined the crowd.

Shoulders. Coats. Bags. The absurd heat that a crowd of people produces even below zero degrees, a dirty heat, smelling of perfume and fried food and old exhaust fumes. Sebastian rode low, between his elbows, and his height, which was a source of jokes at school, became a tactical advantage there: nobody sees a five-foot-tall boy in Times Square. He squeezed through gaps that didn’t exist for adults, turned the handlebars sideways, dodged, kept going.

Even so, he kept his left hand resting on the handle of the cooler bag. Always.

Because invisibility had its limits, and he wasn’t naive. He knew perfectly well that in that sea of ​​people there were trained eyes that did the opposite of his calculation: a small boy, alone, at night, carrying a delivery bag with visible cargo. He wasn’t a person at that moment. He was an inventory item. Prey, to use the right word, and Sebastian used the right word even when it hurt.

Above the crowd, the walls were alive.

The giant screens covered the buildings from the ground floor to the tenth floor, on all sides, all at once, and cast colored light onto the street with such intensity that Times Square had no night—it had a false day, blue, magenta, and white, that pulsed and changed color every four seconds. A soda ad the size of an entire building. A thirty-meter-tall model turning her face in slow motion. An institutional advertisement for the coalition, with the emblem slowly rotating on a dark background and the phrase THE DEFENSE OF THE EARTH IS EVERYONE’S. An exclusive news screen, silent, with automatic captions running underneath: …METHUMAN OCCURRENCE RATES UP FOR THE THIRD CONSECUTIVE QUARTER, SECOND…

And the police were everywhere.

Sebastian noticed because he always noticed. Two officers on the corner of Seventh Street. Two more at the base of the stairs. A police car parked with its lights on but silent, a folded traffic barrier beside it. A pair walking slowly against the flow of pedestrians, hands clasped in front of their bodies, that specific way of walking. An ostentatious presence. This was new from the last year, and it said more about the city than the mayor’s entire speech.

Sebastian pushed his bicycle, looked at the time on the panel — 6:47 PM — and calculated. Four hundred meters across the square, plus two blocks, plus the elevator and the signature. He would arrive at seven o’clock sharp. He would arrive.

In my ear, the radio continued to mumble its vocabulary. Codes, units, addresses. A female voice dispatching a call to the Thirty-Fourth. Another officer confirming position. The usual background noise, that hiss that had become its constant companion.

That’s why he didn’t listen.

The sound came from behind and above, or at least that’s how he reconstructed it later: a sound that crossed the square amidst the music from the speakers and the hubbub and the four competing advertisements, and yet managed to be heard by some people first. Shouts. Not the normal shouts of Times Square, which were there all the time—salespeople’s shouts, laughter, people calling out to each other. These were of a different kind. They had a different frequency, a sharp, raspy quality that the human body recognizes before the brain.

And what happened next happened in waves.

The people who were nearby heard and saw. The people next to them saw the people screaming and looked in the same direction, and screamed too, because fear is the most contagious thing there is. And then the third layer, which no longer knew the reason, and the fourth, and in four or five seconds the whole square knew that something was wrong without ninety percent of them having any idea what.

Half started running. The other half did the most dangerous thing possible: they stopped. They froze in place, turned their faces away, and raised their cell phones.

Thirty meters away, leaning against the base of the lamppost on the corner of Forty-Sixth, Officer Dean Kowalczyk reached for the radio on his shoulder before he had even finished turning his body.

He scanned the square with his gaze in a single, practiced movement, reflexively counting the blue uniforms he could see from there—two on the staircase, two in the Seventh Battalion, the mobile pair near the kiosk, himself and his partner. Eight. Eight officers for a square that at that moment had, in the conservative estimate of someone who had worked in that post for nine years, between six and seven thousand people.

Eight.

Dean pressed the button.

“Central, Central, this is Officer Dean, badge four-one-seven-two, Adam-Three-Four unit, on foot at the intersection of Seventh and Forty-Sixth.”

His voice came through in the flat, rapid register of someone trained to remove all emotion from the transmission, because emotion on that frequency distracts the listener.

“There is an ongoing disturbance on the east side of the square, the origin of which is still unidentified. Crowd movement fleeing north. High risk of being crushed.”

He took two steps to the side, searching for an angle between the bodies that were already beginning to break apart, but he found none. He only saw the effect, not the cause. He only saw the wave.

And after nine years there, Dean knew that a crowd that size didn’t behave that way because of a bar fight, and he also knew what the other kind of thing was that made Times Square go wild.

“Central, the density here is critical, I repeat, critical. I request ten-eighty-five, multiple units, top priority, and send me containment support in the Seventh. I recommend preventive alert to the coalition.”

A pause. A hissing sound.

“Central to Adam-Three-Four, received, units en route.”

And in the right ear of a thirteen-year-old boy pushing a bicycle less than a hundred meters away, all of that entered in real time.

Sebastian stopped walking.

It took him a fraction of a second to form the sentence in his head, the way bad things do: ongoing disturbance, intersection of Seventh and Forty-Sixth, high risk of being crushed. Seventh and Forty-Sixth. He was at Seventh and Forty-Sixth. He was right there.

He ripped the headphones off his ears with two fingers and stuffed them in his pocket without looking, and the world returned all at once, unfiltered, at its true volume.

And the actual volume was panic.

Sebastian lifted his head—the head he kept down out of habit, for survival, for six schools of training—and turned his body, trying to understand. There were people running in three different directions. There was an overturned chestnut cart, embers scattered on the wet sidewalk, hissing as they went out. There was a man shouting someone’s name, the same word repeated endlessly. There was a woman on her knees trying to pick up a phone from the ground while legs passed by on either side of her.

And he couldn’t see.

That was the worst part. Five feet tall meant that, within a standing crowd, Sebastian’s horizon was backs. Coats, backpacks, shoulders, an organic wall of fabric thirty centimeters from his face. He stretched onto his tiptoes, hung slightly on the handlebars to gain height, and managed, between two heads, a thin strip of vision.

Enough.

About forty meters away, the mass of people was coming toward him. Not walking. It was coming like dammed water that had burst its sluice gate, a compact front of open faces, gaping mouths, eyes that weren’t looking where they were stepping because they were looking behind them. Running from something. Running in the specific way an animal runs from a predator, without strategy, without direction, just away.

Sebastian saw a woman try to look back as she ran, saw her foot cross over her own ankle, saw her disappear into the ground. He didn’t see her get up.

He saw a second body fall on top of the first.

His eyes widened behind the lenses.

Get out of here.

He turned, pushed the handlebars, and ran.

Two steps. On the third, his right foot encountered the hardened, trodden ice that formed every night on that stretch of sidewalk, where water dripped from the ventilation grate and froze without any sun to melt it, and the worn sole of his sneaker didn’t stand a chance.

The foot came out.

Sebastian didn’t fall. By a hair’s breadth, purely by reflex, he didn’t fall—but his body opened at a horrible angle, his right leg going too far forward, his hip twisting, all his weight shifting to his left arm. And he saved his balance on the bicycle. He gripped both wrists onto the handlebars and transformed the Frankenstein into a crutch, a support, a third leg, and the machine held up, because the machine always held up.

But then my leg went weak. That strange, immediate weakness that comes after a muscle strain, the thigh trembling, the knee lacking confidence.

He pushed on anyway, limping, trying to run alongside the bicycle with the ice giving way and slipping beneath both feet, and the cooler bag with that last absurdly heavy delivery swinging diagonally across his back, pulling him sideways with every step, seven kilos that now felt like twenty, a pendulum fighting against him.

And the wave arrived.

It came too fast, because his legs were short and the others’ weren’t, because he was pushing forty kilos of steel and batteries, and because whoever is running from something runs faster than whoever is just leaving. The first shoulder hit his back, directly on the bag, and the impact spun Sebastian a quarter turn. The second came on his arm. Someone grabbed the bag strap unintentionally, a blind tug of a hand searching for anything to hold on to, and for half a second Sebastian was dragged backward before the hand let go.

Then there were many more. They passed by him, through him, on both sides, an entire river rushing past a rock. An elbow caught his glasses and the frame rode up and down on his face. He tried to accelerate but there was no way to accelerate. He could only hold onto the handlebars and not fall, because falling there would be the end of the story and he knew that with icy clarity.

And then, behind him, the sound changed.

It was a huge shock.

It wasn’t the sound of a person or object falling. It was a massive impact against concrete, a deep, short rumble that Sebastian felt travel up the brake cable, through the handlebars, through the bones of his fingers, and then through the entire floor via the soles of his shoes. The ice near his foot cracked with a dry snap, a white line cutting its way across the surface.

His heart beat once, very strongly, in the middle of his throat.

And then came the other sound, and the other sound was worse, because it wasn’t mechanical.

It was wet.

A viscous, loud dragging sound, of something large writhing on the asphalt, a sound of flesh and liquid that shouldn’t exist in that volume or in that place, and which swept over all the shouts in the square as if the shouts were secondary.

Sebastian turned his head.

That was all. He didn’t stop, he didn’t look straight ahead, he just twisted his neck over his shoulder in an involuntary movement, the kind no body can avoid.

And he didn’t see it.

The glasses had slipped to the tip of his nose with the jostling, and the world behind the lenses had split into two incompatible halves—a sharp strip below, a blur of stretched light above. Everything else was smudge. Color, movement, and smudge.

Still, between one fleeing body and another, about thirty meters away, under the blue and magenta light that the screens poured onto the square, something occupied the ground.

Black. That he could discern. A wet, glossy black that reflected the light from the panels in distorted streaks. Tall—too tall, even fallen, even curled up on itself. And streaked with red spots, vivid red, scattered across the dark surface in patterns that moved, or seemed to move.

The thing struggled. It banged against the concrete once, twice, with enough force to send shards of ice flying through the air, writhing as if it were fighting against itself.

And then it stopped.

It stopped abruptly, completely, and amidst seven thousand people screaming, it was the quietest thing Sebastian had ever seen.

Then he began to stand up.

Sebastian didn’t wait to see the rest.

He snapped the head back forward, pushed his glasses against his face with the back of his hand, dug his fingers into the Frankenstein’s handlebars, and rode off.