In Manhattan, Peter Petrelli is the younger brother Nathan Petrelli an overly ambitious and unscrupulous candidate for the next New York congressman, and he dreams and believes that he can fly. He decides to prove his theory and jumps from the roof of a building in an alley and his brother flies and saves him. In Texas, cheerleader Claire Bennet learns that she is literally indestructible and can not harm herself or die. She saves a fireman in a fire in a train, but does not take the credit. In Tokyo, Hiro Nakamura believes he can control time and space continuum. In India, Mohinder Suresh moves to the Brooklyn, New York, where his father, that was researching a secret project called Genesis about genome and DNA, is killed in a taxi cab. In Lower Manhattan, the painter Isaac Mendez paints pictures of the future. In Las Vegas, stripper Niki Sanders borrows $30,000 from a powerful local mobster to get her young son into school, and does not have the money to pay her loan. She sees a different image of her in the mirror, and when two gangsters come to her house to collect the money, one of them hits her and she faints. Later Nikki wakes up, and the two thugs are dead... literally torn apart by her evil alter ego.

Four months after the events of Peter's explosion, we find the heroes at different places in their lives. Claire, HRG and family try to stay below the radar in their new town, but a classmate of Claire's with some powers of his own knows there's something different about her. Matt Parkman and Mohinder Suresh are now guardians of Molly Parker, who has been suffering from horrible nightmares about the man who is more evil than Sylar. Mohinder and HRG are still trying to take the company down. Kaito Nakamura and Angela Petrelli receive ominous notices of their impending deaths, clearly sent by one of "the elders". Nathan has pushed his family away and is in a very dark place, feeling that Peter has survived and is alive somewhere. In Ireland, we find Peter Petrelli is alive, but doesn't remember who he is. Maya and Alejandro, two new characters, are wanted for murder due to her accidentally killing multiple people because of her ability to host a plague.