The last thing Marcus Webb did before he died was look up.
He was standing outside a small grocery shop on a street that was neither busy nor quiet, the kind of street that exists in every city without anyone really noticing it. He had just bought a bottle of water. He was twenty-three. He had a shift in two hours and had been walking slowly because the weather was decent and there was no reason to rush.
The sound was what made him look up. A sharp crack from several floors above, the kind that doesn't mean anything until it does. He had just enough time to step back before a ceramic plant pot hit the pavement directly in front of him and exploded into about forty pieces. Soil everywhere. A sad little succulent rolling into the gutter.
He stood there with his water bottle and looked at where his feet had been a second ago.
A woman leaned out from a window far above. She shouted something apologetic. He waved up at her to signal he was fine, because he was. He was completely fine. His heart was going but he was fine.
He stood there for another moment, then shook his head and started walking again.
What happened next was the kind of thing that could only happen to one specific type of person.
At the end of the street, a food delivery driver on a bicycle hit a pothole, swerved hard, and clipped a fire hydrant. The hydrant did not burst dramatically the way they do in films. What it did was send the bicycle spinning sideways across the pavement directly into a street vendor's cart, which tipped, which sent approximately four dozen loose oranges rolling across the road in every direction at once.
A passing driver swerved to avoid the oranges.
That driver's car nudged the back of a parked truck.
The truck was not parked particularly well. It was on a slope Marcus had never thought about because you don't think about slopes on streets you walk down every day. It rolled.
He heard it before he saw it. By the time he turned around there was no time left to do anything at all, and the sound the world made was enormous, and then it stopped completely.
The nothing that followed was not like sleep.
It was not like anything.
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He woke up because of the television.
It was on in the corner of the room, volume low, one of those morning news programmes that runs in the background of places without really being watched. He lay completely still and let the sound wash over him without trying to process it. His head felt full in a way that had nothing to do with pain.
The ceiling above him was not his ceiling.
He knew that immediately, the way you know things before you're fully awake. Wrong colour, wrong everything. He turned his head slowly and saw a small room. A desk with school textbooks stacked on it. A window with the curtains half open. A city outside.
He sat up.
The moment he did, something shifted in his chest. A pressure, low and constant, like a second heartbeat that had been there the whole time and was only now making itself known. He put his hand flat against his sternum and felt it pulse once, slow and deep, and then settle.
On the television, the news anchor was saying something about a Roxxon Energy press conference scheduled for later in the week. Behind her, stock footage of a glass building in midtown. The Roxxon logo in the corner of the screen.
He stared at it.
Something moved at the back of his mind. Not a thought exactly. More like a door opening onto a room he hadn't known was there.
Then the memories came.
They didn't arrive gently. They came all at once, a rush of images and feelings and knowledge that wasn't his, a whole life belonging to someone else pressing itself into the space behind his eyes. A kitchen that smelled like coffee. A woman's voice calling from downstairs. A school hallway, a locker, the particular exhaustion of a Tuesday morning. A father who wasn't there and hadn't been for a long time. A name that wasn't Marcus.
He gripped the edge of the bed and waited for it to pass.
It didn't pass, exactly. It settled. Like sediment after water has been disturbed, everything slowly finding its place. When it was done he sat very still and took stock of what he now knew.
He knew this room. He knew the woman downstairs was his mother, or the mother of the person whose body this was, and that she would call up in about twenty minutes to ask if he wanted breakfast. He knew this city was New York. He knew he was sixteen.
He was not sixteen. He had been twenty-three.
He looked at his hands. Younger than he remembered. He stood up carefully and found the mirror above the dresser and looked at the face in it for a long moment.
Not his face. Someone else's entirely.
On the television behind him the anchor had moved on to something about a disturbance near a public transit station in Harlem. Eyewitnesses describing a figure in a red and black suit moving across rooftops at speed. Footage, shaky and distant, of something swinging between buildings.
He turned around slowly and looked at the screen.
The footage was bad, the way phone footage always is when something is moving fast and the person filming is startled. But it was clear enough. The suit. The movement. The way the figure cleared a gap between buildings that no person should be able to clear.
He sat down on the edge of the bed.
Spider-Man, the anchor was saying, in the tone journalists use when they're not sure whether to take something seriously. The figure called Spider-Man.
He sat with that for a moment.
Then he looked around the room again. The textbooks. The city outside. The pressure in his chest that had not gone away.
He had died. He was certain of that. He remembered the truck, the sound, the nothing that came after. He had died and he had woken up here, in a body that was not his, in a city where Spider-Man was real and Roxxon was on the morning news.
He understood what that meant.
He had read enough, spent enough time in enough corners of the internet, to know exactly what kind of story this was.
He just had not expected to be in one.
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He found out about the phone by accident.
It was on the nightstand. He picked it up without thinking and it unlocked on muscle memory with a thumbprint that wasn't his but apparently worked anyway. He scrolled through it for about thirty seconds, half reading a conversation with someone saved as Ned, before something shifted in his chest and the screen went black and stayed that way.
He pressed the side button. Nothing. He pressed it again.
He put the phone back on the nightstand and sat with his hands in his lap.
The pressure in his chest had been there since he woke up. He kept noticing it and then forgetting about it and then noticing it again, the way you notice a sound in a building that has always been there. Low and steady. Not painful. Just present, the way your own heartbeat is present when the room is quiet enough.
Downstairs he could hear movement. Cabinets opening and closing. The particular sounds of a morning routine belonging to someone who had been doing it for years.
His mother. Not his mother. He didn't know what to call her.
He looked around the room again. The textbooks. A jacket hanging on the back of the door. Outside the window the city was fully awake now, going about its business without him.
He thought about the footage on the news. The figure moving between buildings in a way that should not have been possible. The anchor saying Spider-Man in that careful tone.
He sat with that for a while.
Then a voice came from the bottom of the stairs asking if he wanted eggs.
He opened his mouth, closed it, and tried to remember what his own voice sounded like now.
"Yeah," he called back. "Yeah, that's fine."
It came out almost normal.
He picked up the dead phone one more time, looked at his own reflection in the black screen for a moment, and set it back down.
He didn't know what came next. He wasn't sure he was supposed to yet.