Chapter 5: The Watchmaker's Neighbor
The Greyhound smelled like industrial cleaner and old upholstery, and by hour fourteen I'd stopped noticing either.
Texas turned into Louisiana turned into Mississippi, then Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas — a blur of gas stations and highway interchanges and sleeping passengers and the particular desolation of traveling by bus through American towns that existed primarily as exits on the interstate. I slept in two-hour intervals, waking each time the bus pulled into a terminal and the lights came on and a new rotation of passengers shuffled aboard with plastic bags and fast food.
The notebook stayed in my lap for most of the trip. Not open — just there, the weight of it a reminder. Brian Davis's entry was on page seven, circled in blue, surrounded by question marks I'd been staring at for days. The show had been vague about timing. Davis was dead before the pilot. Sylar had his telekinesis before the series started. But "before" could mean a day or a week or a month, and the difference between those windows was the difference between saving someone and arriving at a crime scene.
Hour twenty. Virginia. The bus stopped in Richmond at 2 AM and I ate a gas station sandwich on the curb outside the terminal — turkey and Swiss on bread that had given up being bread sometime around the Bush administration. The bread was stale, the turkey was thin, and I ate the entire thing because I hadn't had a proper meal since lunch on Thursday and my stomach had started making sounds that the woman in the next seat could definitely hear.
The sandwich sat in my stomach like a fist. I bought a coffee. It was worse than the one from the QuikTrip in Odessa, which I hadn't thought possible.
Hour thirty-two. New Jersey. The Manhattan skyline appeared through the right-side windows of the bus and three passengers pulled out cameras. Pre-smartphone cameras — disposables, point-and-shoots, one guy with a Kodak that still used film. October 2006. The Twin Towers had been gone for five years and the skyline still looked like it was missing teeth.
I didn't take a picture. The skyline was beautiful and terrible and in eight months a man named Peter Petrelli was going to stand in the middle of it and either explode or not.
[Queens, New York — October 7, 2006, 11:40 AM]
The address was on a residential block in Jackson Heights — a brick apartment building, five stories, fire escapes on the south face, a bodega on the ground floor with a handwritten sign advertising Dominican coffee and calling cards. I'd pulled the address from memory — the show had flashed Davis's apartment number in a brief scene, and I'd confirmed the street name during a Google Maps session on Zach's laptop before the trip. 62-14 Roosevelt Avenue, Apartment 4C.
The building's front door was propped open with a folded newspaper. I walked in, took the stairs to the fourth floor, and stood in front of 4C for thirty seconds before I knocked.
No answer.
I knocked again. A door down the hall opened — a woman in a housecoat with a cigarette, watching me with the practiced suspicion of a New York apartment dweller.
"He's not home," she said.
"Do you know when he'll be back?"
"Haven't seen Brian in... what is it." She counted on her fingers. "Four days? Five? His mail's stacking up. I'd call the super if I were you." She took a drag on the cigarette and narrowed her eyes. "You a relative?"
"School project. We were supposed to interview him for — it's a journalism thing."
"Huh." She didn't believe me. She also didn't care enough to push. "Super's in the basement. Buzzer says DELUCA."
The superintendent was a heavyset man named Frank DeLuca who answered the basement buzzer in a Mets jersey and sweatpants and spoke in the particular cadence of someone who'd been interrupted from something important, which turned out to be a daytime game show on a thirteen-inch TV.
"Davis? 4C?" He scratched his neck. "Been meaning to go check on that unit. Haven't seen the guy since... Tuesday? Wednesday, maybe. Wednesday. Yeah, because the garbage was out and he usually takes his cans down Wednesday morning and they were still there Thursday."
Wednesday. Five days ago. The timing sat in my chest like a cold stone.
"Did he say he was going on a trip?"
"Didn't say anything. Quiet guy. Paid on time, kept to himself. Some kind of office worker — accountant, maybe." DeLuca shrugged. "I figure he's visiting family or something. You want me to leave a note?"
"No. Thanks. I'll try back."
I walked out of the building and stood on the sidewalk in the October sun and tried to keep my hands from shaking. Five days. Davis hadn't been seen in five days, and in the universe I'd watched from a couch, that kind of disappearance had one explanation.
The meta-knowledge was clear: Gabriel Gray — Sylar — had visited Davis at the suggestion of Chandra Suresh's research list. Davis was a telekinetic, and Sylar's hunger to understand abilities, to see how they worked, had led him to kill Davis and take his power. First kill. First taste. The snowball that started the avalanche.
Five days ago meant I was two days too late. Minimum.
[Gray & Sons Watch Repair — Queens, October 7, 2006, 1:15 PM]
Six blocks. That's how far it was from Brian Davis's apartment to the small storefront on a side street with gold lettering on the glass: GRAY & SONS — WATCH REPAIR — EST. 1962.
The shop was closed. Blinds drawn over the front window. A handwritten card in the door read AWAY — BACK SOON in careful block letters. I cupped my hands against the glass and looked through a gap in the blinds. Dark interior. Workbench visible in the back, lit by a sliver of light from a rear window. Tools arranged in precise rows. A magnifying lamp on a swing arm, turned off but positioned over the bench as if someone had stepped away mid-task.
Gabriel Gray's workshop. The place where a watchmaker had learned he could understand the mechanisms of anything — including human brains.
I pressed closer to the glass and something stirred in my chest. Not the warm hum of Claire's regeneration, not the steady signal I'd spent weeks learning to read. This was different. Faint, residual — a heat signature left on a surface after someone's hand has moved away. A trace. The Evo-Sense equivalent of walking into a room where someone had been smoking an hour ago. You couldn't see the smoke, but the air still tasted wrong.
Something powerful had been in this shop recently. Something that left a mark on the space even after it departed.
Sylar. Or what was left of his presence.
My hands dropped from the glass. The street was quiet — midday Saturday, most of the block closed for the weekend. A dry cleaner two doors down was still open, and the sound of a radio drifted out through its propped door.
Davis was dead. I didn't need a body or a police report or a headline to know it. The five-day absence, the stacked mail, the closed shop six blocks away, the residual trace on the glass — the evidence pattern matched the meta-knowledge perfectly. Sylar had his telekinesis. The first kill was done. The list was active.
I sat on the steps of Davis's building and ate the other half of the Richmond gas station sandwich, which had been in my backpack for eighteen hours and was now technically a health hazard. I ate it anyway because I was hungry in a way that went past the stomach and into the bones. The kind of hungry that came from thirty-six hours of bus travel and no sleep and the specific, hollowed-out feeling of arriving somewhere too late to matter.
A woman walked past with a stroller. Two guys on a stoop across the street argued about the Mets. A delivery truck double-parked and the driver jogged into the bodega with a dolly of boxes. Normal Saturday in Jackson Heights. Nobody within a ten-block radius had any idea that a serial killer had graduated to his first power six blocks away, or that the quiet watchmaker's son they might have nodded to on the street was now the most dangerous person in New York.
The sandwich was done. I balled up the wrapper and dropped it in the nearest trash can.
Twenty-two hours on a bus to confirm what I should have suspected: meta-knowledge was a depreciating asset. I'd known Davis was Sylar's first victim. I'd known the approximate timing. I'd planned the trip, booked the ticket, told the lie, crossed seventeen hundred miles. And I'd gotten here two days late because "before the pilot" was not the same as "before September 25" and the show's writers hadn't bothered to specify the exact date a background character died.
The Greyhound back to Texas left at 3:45 PM. I bought the ticket and sat in the Port Authority terminal, backpack on my lap, notebook inside, and spent twenty-two hours staring out a bus window recalculating every assumption I'd made since waking up in Odessa.
Davis was gone. Telekinesis was gone. Slot 1 would have to be something else. Claire's regeneration was the obvious play — constant proximity, trusted access, an ability that kept me alive in a world full of things designed to kill. But Absorption was still dormant, and I didn't know what activation looked like, and the only way to find out was to keep standing next to Evolved Humans and hoping my body figured it out.
Somewhere between North Carolina and Tennessee, I pulled out Zach's phone. Five texts from Claire.
where are u?
zach??
we had a session today
seriously answer your phone
fine. monday.
I stared at the messages for a long time. The bus hummed. The highway stretched. I didn't reply because my phone had been off since Friday morning and replying now would mean explaining why, and every explanation I could construct was another lie.
I put the phone away and watched the dark roll past.
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