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Prologue

When Kenny was taken, it was in the middle of his work week.

It wasn't unusual for the factory workers to feel lightheaded after four hours milling plastic and inhaling the fumes. He wasn't even mandated to wear a mask — and most of the time, he chose not to. It felt less extreme that way, with how the strings wrapped around his ears and made him feel as if he were in some dystopian death chamber.

Perhaps it was a dystopian death chamber. Either way, he could push that away just so long as he was able to pretend.

He had just finished the third round of production for that day. His job was to stamp the company logo onto their tupperware containers, which turned out to be much more laborious than one would expect — his arms were nearly double the size they had been since he'd started, with all the back and forth it took to pull down on those stamps.

When the man in the hat had come to supervise him, he thought it'd perhaps been an inspection of some sort. Those happened quite often at the factory — the townsfolk called for safety regulations to be enforced, but each time, a little bit of money was passed off and the factory continued on as usual. It wasn't unusual for people to come in and look around, just to keep up the appearance of effort being taken.

When he came to speak with Kenny, however, was when things began to go haywire.

"If you could have any one thing in the world, what would it be?" he asked.

At first, Kenny scoffed. "A million bucks," he said. "A million bucks and to sit up there in the stalls and watch all the little ants down here do their work." He pointed up to the glass window near the ceiling, where his boss could be seen looking out over the massive warehouse.

"You wouldn't choose invincibility? Or immortality?" the man asked.

"No, probably not." If Kenny were less experienced then he might have smashed his hand under the stamper as he pressed it down, still keeping eye contact with the man. "There's not much I want. Maybe just the ability to hold my kid in thirty years' time, once this place has done its damage."

That seemed to delight the man. "So you'd like strength, then?"

Kenny shrugged. "Yeah, why not. I'd like super-strength. Be one of those new comic heroes or whatever."

"Very well," he replied. "Once your shift ends, meet me in the back parking lot — I've got something I think you might be interested in."

Before Kenny could say no, he was already walking off. He wondered where the man thought he was going — there was nothing but heavy machinery and toxic gas in the direction he was headed. But he didn't speak up; what better did he have to do, anyway? His plans for the day were to head home and crack open a beer, before sleeping until the start of his next twelve-hour shift. Who knows, maybe the man was telling the truth about having something Kenny might like.

When his shift ended, he could barely keep his eyes open. Still, he made his way to the parking lot — he didn't have a car, so he'd never actually been there, and it took him a while to find it — and found the man sitting atop the hood of a red beater, smoking a cigar.

"You were expecting me?" Kenny said as he rounded the car.

"Yes. If I told you I could change your life, would you accept?"

Kenny didn't even think as he said, "Yes."

The man pressed a cloth to his mouth and waited for the life to fade from his eyes. When Kenny woke up, it was a thousand kilometers away, deep in the confines of the Washington mountains. They had promised super-strength, and that is what they gave: Under the condition that he never, ever left.