Green light swallowed Colin’s consciousness whole, tugging at it, pulling it apart at the seams.
Inside that light: shapes, countless of them, shifting in and out.
Laughing.
Wailing.
Arguing.
Fighting.
Flickers of lives that felt too vivid to be nothing and too fragile to be real.
When Colin opened his eyes again, the world around him had changed completely.
Cold concrete had given way to a warm, quiet room.
“Right on schedule.”
No surprise crossed his face.
None at all.
This happened to him daily now.
Close his eyes, and the light would drag his consciousness sideways into another World, another life, another stretch of hours spent wearing the name Colin Luper.
He’d wondered, early on, if this was just an oddly persistent dream.
Tested it.
Pushed at the edges of it, again and again.
And eventually arrived at a certainty he couldn’t argue his way out of.
This wasn’t imagination.
It was real.
As real as anything he’d ever touched.
“Guess even time travel comes with a two-for-one deal these days.”
He’d grumbled that thought to himself more times than he could count by now.
Back and forth, back and forth, day bleeding into night into day — even a time traveler could lose the thread eventually.
So he’d drawn a line for himself, a way to keep the two Worlds straight in his head.
This one — no superheroes, nothing strange, just an ordinary version of the life he remembered — he called the Main World.
The other one — heroes, powers, a skyline that didn’t match his memories no matter how hard he squinted at it — he called the Anti-World.
Positive, negative.
None of it meant anything beyond his own bookkeeping.
Just labels, stuck on for his own sanity.
A dull throb from his chest yanked his attention back to the present.
He looked down.
The wound that should have killed him — should have left him bleeding out on cold concrete — had shrunk down to a shallow, barely-there gash.
If it weren’t for the occasional flare of pain when he moved wrong, nobody would believe a bullet had gone through him minutes ago in another World entirely.
“Wonder what kind of mess I’m walking back into over there.”
He dug through the room on muscle memory alone, found the bandages, wrapped the wound without much ceremony.
Then he crossed to the cabinet, knotted his necktie with practiced hands, and shrugged into a dark gray overcoat.
A few test movements in front of the mirror confirmed the bandage wouldn’t restrict him.
Only then did he reach for the bowler hat waiting on the desk and settle it onto his head.
He rubbed his palms together against the cold, crossed to the door — then stopped.
Hesitated.
Turned back to the desk, pulled the drawer open, and lifted out an old revolver, worn smooth at the grip.
It went into his jacket pocket.
A man who’d taken a bullet to the chest an hour ago didn’t walk out unarmed.
Not again.
Not if he could help it.
Different World, sure.
Different city, different rules, different everything.
But nobody could promise him different meant safe.
He shoved the thought down before it could grow teeth, stood at the door a second longer, drew one steady breath, pressed the bowler hat firm against his skull, and pulled the door open.
New York greeted him on the other side.
Familiar in shape.
Wrong in every detail that mattered.
1931.
November wind cut through the streets like it had something personal against the city, bitter and unrelenting.
The Depression hadn’t loosened its grip yet, not by an inch.
Pedestrians moved fast and grim-faced, heads down against the cold.
Tramps drifted along the sidewalks with expressions scraped clean of anything — and somewhere under the rags, more than a few of them used to run farms.
Used to be engineers.
School principals.
Bank presidents, some of them.
Then the bottom fell out, and none of that mattered anymore.
Fortunes gone in days.
Whole lives, savings, decades of work — vanished, like they’d never existed at all.
Fortune magazine’s latest count, as of September: over 34 million men, women, and children out of work across the country.
Twenty-eight percent of the population.
Child labor was still legal here, which made that number even uglier than it looked.
And that figure didn’t even touch the 11 million farming households drowning right alongside everyone else.
Workers without jobs meant farmers without buyers.
Farmers without buyers meant workers without food.
Round and round it went, each side dragging the other further under.
The math had gone insane.
A full wagon of oats couldn’t buy a decent pair of shoes.
Planting an acre of wheat lost a man a dollar fifty.
Burning your own corn for heat made more sense than selling it and buying coal with the proceeds.
Livestock cost more to feed than it earned back at market, so farmers let animals die rather than sell them at a loss.
Milk got dumped straight into the Mississippi by the barrel.
Families thrown out of homes by the tens of thousands, every safety net gone at once.
That same year, people starved.
Actually starved, actually died of it — malnutrition working just as well as any other kind of hunger.
None of it was rare.
None of it was shocking anymore.
It was just what the world looked like now.
Colin used to know the Depression the way anyone born decades later knew it — black-and-white photographs, a paragraph in some textbook, numbers too large to mean anything.
It never landed.
Not really.
Not until now.
Living it now instead of reading about it, Colin finally got it — really got it, down in his gut.
A steady job wasn’t just hard to find in this era.
It was a luxury most people couldn’t even dream toward.
Men worked themselves to the bone for a full day and walked away with wages too thin to buy a single loaf of bread.
And that kind of work?
You needed luck just to find it.
It didn’t show up every day.
Sometimes it didn’t show up at all.
He passed beggars more than once on his way down the street.
Couldn’t avoid it if he tried.
Then there were the children — thin in a way that went past hunger, long past it, malnutrition carved into every visible bone.
They pressed close to their mothers, using bodies just as wasted as their own to block out a wind that didn’t care either way.
One mother stood with a hand raised to her lips, staring off at nothing, her eyes hollowed out by something worse than sadness.
Numb.
Empty.
Past hoping for anything better.
Colin’s steps slowed without his permission.
He wanted to do something.
Anything.
He had nothing to give that would matter.
Because this wasn’t one woman’s bad luck.
This was everywhere.
Every street, every city, spreading clean across the country and out into the rest of the West besides — a wound so wide it would go down in history books as the longest, deepest, ugliest economic collapse capitalism had ever produced.
He drew a breath and made himself look away from her.
Turned, walked fast out of the neighborhood, cut through a row of shuttered, empty storefronts, and finally came to a stop in front of an old house sitting on the corner.
Messenger Newspaper Office
He tipped his head back to read the sign, straightened the bowler hat, cleared his throat once.
Then pushed the door open and stepped inside.