Three weeks after the warehouse, Marcus had a system.
Days were Los Cuervos — jobs, collections, the back room on Calle Doce, the ordinary texture of being low-level and unremarkable. Nights were his. He'd go east past the city's edge where the scrubland opened up and nobody had any reason to be, and he'd work. Flight was getting cleaner. Speed was more manageable — his perception still lagging behind his body but the gap narrowing, the world staying legible at velocities that had been a blur three weeks ago. And every night, at some point, he'd go up.
High enough that the city became a diagram. High enough that the air thinned. Then he'd orient downward and push — not fall, not drop, but drive himself into the ground under his own power, flight speed stacked on top of whatever gravity was already contributing, the two combining into something that hit the scrubland floor with a force that had no business coming from one person.
He'd learned to read the warmth carefully. It only came when he'd actually crossed something — pushed past what his body had already adapted to. The same altitude twice in a row gave him almost nothing the second time, his body having already solved that specific input. He had to keep raising it. Higher origin point, steeper angle, more speed on the way down. The warmth told him when he'd found the new threshold. The density that remained after told him it had counted.
It was becoming the most important part of his day, which was fine, because the rest of his day was becoming less important in direct proportion.
He was thinking about this — specifically about last night's dive and whether he'd found the ceiling of what the current altitude could produce — when Ricky sat down across from him at the table in the back room and said:
"You don't bleed," Ricky said.
Marcus looked at him.
"Four days ago. The thing with Hernandez's guy behind the depot — he opened your arm with a box cutter. I saw it. Deep enough to matter." Ricky paused. "Next morning your arm was fine. Not healing. Fine. Like it didn't happen."
Ricky had been with Los Cuervos for four years. Twenty-two, lean, a mouth that ran slightly ahead of his judgment. Not stupid — four years was a data point — but with the confidence of someone who hadn't been seriously wrong about anything yet.
Marcus had noticed him paying attention about a week ago. The way his eyes tracked when Marcus came in. The way conversations near him sometimes paused a half-second too long. He'd waited to see where it landed.
Apparently here.
"Box cutter catches skin," Marcus said. "Looked worse than it was."
"I saw the cut, Marcus. That wasn't skin."
"You were pretty focused on my arm."
"I notice things," Ricky said, with the tone of someone who considered this a personal quality.
The room had two other people in it — Peso asleep in his chair, a newer recruit whose name Marcus hadn't bothered with. Tomas wasn't in. Marcus looked at Ricky and landed on the simplest response available.
"I heal fast," he said. "Always have. Some people do."
"That's not healing fast. That's something else."
"Call it whatever you want. It's not a big thing."
Ricky held the look for another moment then peeled a strip off his water bottle label and dropped it on the table. "You're a weird kid," he said. Not hostile. Just a man updating something.
"Probably," Marcus said.
Nosy fuck. I'll take care of him eventually.
He kept his voice easy and his face neutral and watched Ricky decide it wasn't worth pushing further — not because he believed the answer, but because he didn't have enough to do anything with the question yet. The folder stayed open. That was fine. It was a reminder to be more careful about what he let visible and for how long, nothing more than that.
The job that evening was a vehicle escort. Product from a stash house in the Jardines district to a handoff near the highway. Two cars, standard route, nothing complicated. Marcus rode in the second car with Ricky driving and a guy named Beto in the back who kept his hand inside his jacket like that was subtle.
The stop came three blocks from the handoff.
A truck pulled across the road. Two cars behind it. Men coming out of the alleys on both sides — not police, wrong body language, nobody announcing anything. Just bodies closing a box around two cars that had run out of road. Marcus counted eight in the first two seconds and stopped because the alley on the right had depth he couldn't see into and the number there was a guess.
Ricky hit the brakes and said something quiet.
Beto had his gun out.
"Put it away," Marcus said.
"They're going to —"
"Put it away and keep your hands where they can see them. Both of you."
Flat and certain. Beto looked at him and then outside and put the gun back. Marcus watched the men approaching and ran the math he'd been running since the truck pulled across the road. Eight visible, call it twelve total, two blocking vehicles, positions covered on both sides — prepared for exactly this. Someone had talked or the route had been watched, and that was a problem for later.
The immediate problem was the twelve men.
He could end it. He'd known that from the first second — the same way he knew last night's dive was solvable before he'd worked out the angle. Out of the car and through half of them before any gun in this street got raised. Drive the product to the handoff himself.
And then twelve men would be gone and two Cuervos cars would roll up to a handoff point alone and whatever investigation followed would have his name attached to it permanently.
Not tonight.
One of them came to the window and knocked. Ricky lowered it.
The man who leaned in was around forty, unhurried, the calm of someone with numbers on his side. He looked at Ricky. Looked at Marcus. His eyes stayed on Marcus a beat longer than they had any reason to.
"Where's it going?"
"We're just driving," Ricky said.
"You're Cuervos."
"We work in the area."
Another look at Marcus. "You're young."
"Yeah," Marcus said.
The man straightened and spoke to someone outside. A short exchange. Then he came back.
"Out of the car. Leave the product."
Ricky looked at Marcus.
Marcus looked at the truck, at the eight visible bodies, at the alley he still hadn't gotten eyes into.
"Okay," he said.
Tomas didn't take it well.
He moved through the loud stage fast and settled into the quiet one, which was worse. The product was gone. The route was compromised. Nobody was hurt, the cars were recovered, but the loss had a number attached to it and the number was significant.
"You just handed it over," Tomas said.
"Twelve men minimum," Marcus said. "Blocking vehicle, positions on both sides. We had three people and Beto had his gun out before anyone said a word."
"You don't know it was twelve."
"I counted eight before the alley cut my sightline. You want to argue about what was in the alley?"
Tomas was quiet for a moment. Then: "Ricky said you were calm."
"Getting shot doesn't make the product come back."
"That's not what I mean."
"I know." Marcus kept his voice level. "I was calm because it was the only move that kept us alive. That's it."
Tomas looked at him with that measuring expression — the same one from two weeks ago when Marcus had come back to the room and looked somewhere else. He was building a picture. Marcus could see him building it, adding details, and the picture wasn't wrong so much as incomplete in ways Marcus needed it to stay incomplete.
"Find out who they were," Tomas said to the room.
Marcus nodded and said nothing else and waited to be dismissed.
The thing that had actually bothered him about the evening wasn't the loss. It was the alley — that blind spot, the one variable he couldn't account for, the number he'd had to guess. It sat in the back of his mind like a loose thread.
Next time I want eyes on everything.
He went up that night later than usual.
High — higher than he'd gone for a training dive before, partly because the evening had left him wanting to push something and partly because last night's altitude had started returning less and he needed to find the next threshold. He climbed until the city was a pale smear of light far below and the cold was real and present against his skin and the air was thin enough to notice.
Then he oriented downward and pushed.
The acceleration was immediate and violent — gravity and his own output combining, the ground coming up fast, the air pressure building against him as his speed climbed and climbed and his body punched through the resistance and kept accelerating and the scrubland floor expanded in his vision from a dark blur to distinct terrain to individual rocks in the span of a second and a half and he hit it.
The impact was a different category than anything he'd managed before. Force driving through him from feet to skull, the ground compressing inward and downward under him in a tight deep crater, rock fracturing cleanly beneath his feet, everything contained exactly where he'd landed. He felt it in his joints, his spine, the roots of his teeth — a total systemic event, his body registering all of it simultaneously.
Then the warmth.
It hit harder than it had in nearly a week, which told him the altitude had been right — his body recognizing that he'd crossed something genuinely new, the additional speed producing forces it hadn't processed before. The warmth spread upward from his legs and through his chest and he stood in the crater and breathed and let it do its accounting.
It peaked. Held longer than usual. Faded.
What remained was the density — more than last night, more than the night before, the baseline shifting upward the way it always shifted after a real threshold crossing. He stood with it for a moment and felt the difference and wanted more of it immediately, which was also usual by now.
He climbed out of the crater and looked up at the altitude he'd dropped from and thought about going higher.
More speed on the way down, he decided. Steeper angle. See what the next threshold costs.
He filed it and flew back low toward the city, staying under the rooflines, and landed two streets from his building and walked the rest of the way in. The streets were quiet. Someone's television through an open window. The smell of food from a ground floor apartment.
He went upstairs.
Ricky's open folder. Tomas building his picture. The alley he hadn't gotten eyes into. Small things, each of them, but accumulating — a set of problems that all pointed the same direction. He needed to be more careful. Tighter. Let less be visible for less time.
He picked up the bullet from the windowsill and turned it over once in the dark and set it back down.
Slept.