For once, Jude had timed things right.
When he rolled the food truck into the residential streets near Professor Stein's house, he left the side panels open. There was no barrier between the cart and the world—just the full, unobstructed reach of the smell, drifting outward in slow, warm waves. The sign on the cart read: ONE DOLLAR FRIED CHICKEN.
Satsuki had thoughtfully cranked up the internal heating to keep the food at its best. She'd been more cooperative since the last delivery of energy bars, which Jude chose not to examine too closely. An Autobot with opinions about compensation was a variable he'd deal with later.
The street was quiet, residential—the kind of neighborhood that didn't usually see street vendors. But Jude had spent enough months crisscrossing Central City that his presence had stopped registering as unusual. People had grown accustomed to him: the Asian guy with the food truck who appeared at odd hours in odd places, whose food always sold out faster than made any logical sense, and whose name circulated in small circles—the precinct, S.T.A.R. Labs, a few others—without ever quite spreading into the general population. Nobody knew exactly what he served. They just knew it disappeared quickly and that the truck traveled improbable distances.
Today, the smell was doing most of the work. Even from half a block away, the aroma had enough authority to make people pause and turn. Crispy skin. Rendered fat. Something in the seasoning that bypassed the conscious brain and went straight to the hindbrain. By the time Jude had made it three streets over, he'd already sold half the cart to passersby who hadn't even planned to stop.
He was starting to calculate whether he'd have enough left when his Advanced Tracking Mastery—dormant for long enough that he'd almost forgotten it was there—quietly tapped him on the shoulder.
Someone's following you.
He didn't break stride. Didn't glance back. He just kept pushing the cart, letting the smell do its work, moving at the unhurried pace of a man with nowhere in particular to be.
He walked straight past Stein's building like he hadn't noticed it.
At the corner, he reached down and eased the lid closed. The aroma cut off cleanly.
Behind him, footsteps slowed. Then, after a beat, they quickened.
Jude stood at the curb, waiting for the light to change with great patience. A few seconds. Five. The footsteps behind him grew more urgent, then stopped just short of his shoulder.
"Excuse me." The voice was tired—a particular kind of tired that went considerably deeper than sleep deprivation. "Could I get a piece of fried chicken?"
Jude turned around with his best professional smile already in place. "Of course. How many pieces?"
Ronnie Raymond's body. Martin Stein's eyes.
There was no missing it. Caitlin had described this, and she'd been perfectly accurate: Ronnie's face carrying expressions that didn't belong to a twenty-something engineer, wearing hunger and exhaustion in heavy layers, dressed in clothes that had clearly been salvaged rather than bought. He was skeletal under the fabric, and the instability showed—not dramatically, not obviously, but in the small things. The way his focus kept adjusting, like a signal drifting in and out of range.
"One dollar?" he read off the sign, then looked at Jude again. "One dollar for fried chicken?"
"Honest and fair."
Something shifted in the man's expression—a loosening, almost. Nostalgia, Jude realized. Which made no sense for Ronnie Raymond, who was in his mid-twenties. It made complete sense for Martin Stein, who was closer to sixty, and for whom a one-dollar chicken leg probably carried the specific weight of a particular era—a time when he'd been younger, sharper, full of conviction, and had just won his first Conway Medal. A time before particle accelerators and military confiscations and nine months of living rough in a city that didn't know he existed.
"Could I do half a dollar?"
"Sure." Jude reached into the cart and produced a chicken leg already wrapped in a paper bag, still radiating heat. "While it's hot."
Stein took it, then stopped. "You'd really take fifty cents for this?"
"Actually, it's on the house." Jude nodded at the state of him. "You don't look like you've got a lot on you."
The man touched his pocket reflexively—the unconscious gesture of someone checking for something they already know isn't there. Coins melted. Bills burned. The single worn half-dollar he was carrying had been given to him by someone at a homeless camp two weeks ago, by a stranger who had less than he did and had offered it anyway.
He'd survived the past nine months on scavenged change and whatever could be salvaged from the garbage—him and Ronnie both, taking turns behind the wheel of a body that neither of them fully controlled. When Professor Stein's mind was dominant, he found his way to this street, drawn into orbit around the building where his wife lived. When Ronnie's consciousness came forward, he drifted toward S.T.A.R. Labs, toward Caitlin, close enough to feel the pull of the life he'd had before the explosion turned it into something unrecognizable.
The flames were the other problem. When their minds clashed badly enough, control slipped, and when control slipped, things in a three-meter radius burned. He'd woken up twice in the last month to find scorched concrete around him and, mercifully, nobody nearby. He'd stopped sleeping anywhere that had people.
He couldn't use the shelter system. He couldn't apply for assistance. One bad episode in a populated area and he'd either hurt someone or surface on General Eiling's radar—and Stein understood, with the cold clarity of a man who had spent his career knowing exactly how military research acquisitions worked, what would happen if the government got hold of something called a Firestorm Matrix that happened to be walking around in a human body.
What Professor Stein didn't know—what he had no way of knowing—was that General Eiling was currently buried under enough public controversy to make a covert acquisition project politically radioactive. This was, in fact, the safest period he'd had in months. But safety you don't know about doesn't feel like safety.
He bit into the fried chicken.
Then he stopped trying to be polite about it and just ate, because the body didn't have any reserves left for performing composure over a piece of food.
It took about fifteen seconds.
"Thank you." He turned the empty bone in his hand with the slightly dazed expression of someone who had just been forcefully reminded what it felt like to not be hungry. "It's been a long time since I've had a proper meal. Good food does something to the mind. Calms it."
It really does, Jude thought. Otherwise, the sedative in the fried chicken would've been completely wasted.