Chapter 2: Tarmac, Blood, and Captain Marvel

The rooftop smelled of jet fuel and ozone and the particular metallic cold of a Manhattan December pressing down from a sky the color of old pewter. Viktor became aware of these things in the following order: the cold first, then the smell, then the fact that he was on his hands and knees on a surface that was not the linoleum floor of Bay Seven, and then — with the slow-motion clarity of a man whose nervous system had just been disassembled and reassembled by something with no formal training in human anatomy — the pain.

It arrived the way disasters do. All at once, and having apparently been waiting.

He catalogued it without moving: deep laceration across the left forearm, already wet against his sleeve; something fractured in the ribcage, three or four degrees of separation when he breathed; the particular nauseating brightness behind his eyes that he would later identify as photonic sensitivity but that registered now simply as *wrong, wrong, wrong* against the city's ambient light pollution. His reading glasses were gone. His leather research log — he reached instinctively for his coat pocket and found it still there, improbably, a small triumph — his leather research log was present. His pen was not.