Tomas called it a promotion.
He laid it out over coffee in the back room on a Wednesday morning — Marcus would sit in on route planning discussions, act as backup on higher-value collections, have visibility into more of the operation. Tomas said it like he was doing Marcus a favour, which from where Tomas was standing he probably was. More trust. More access. More responsibility. The kind of upward movement that meant something in this world.
Marcus listened and nodded and said he appreciated it.
He spent the walk home calculating how many additional hours per week this was going to cost him.
Four, minimum. Probably six. The route planning discussions alone ran long because Tomas liked to talk through every variable twice and the people in the room with him weren't the type to move things forward efficiently. Six hours a week of back rooms and folding chairs and conversations that circled back on themselves.
He accepted because refusing would have required an explanation and explanations created attention and attention was the one resource he couldn't afford to spend right now. But he accepted with the immediate understanding that the six hours needed to come from somewhere and that somewhere wasn't going to be his nights.
He'd figure it out.
The first route planning discussion was Thursday afternoon. Four people around the table, Tomas at the head, a hand-drawn map of the distribution routes spread out with three options marked in different colored pen. The problem was straightforward — one of their regular routes had been compromised in the ambush and two of the proposed alternatives had overlapping risk factors that nobody had fully mapped yet.
They'd been talking for forty minutes when Marcus looked at the map and saw it.
The overlap wasn't in the routes themselves. It was in the timing — both alternatives passed through the same two-block radius within a twenty-minute window of each other on collection days, which meant any surveillance on that radius would catch both. The solution was to offset the timing on the second route by forty minutes, which eliminated the overlap entirely and didn't require changing either route.
He waited to see if anyone else got there.
They didn't. They kept working through the routes themselves, debating distances and visibility and whether the third option had too much foot traffic.
After another ten minutes Marcus said: "Offset the timing on route two by forty minutes. Same roads, different window. The overlap disappears."
Silence for a moment while everyone looked at the map.
"That's it," one of them said.
Tomas looked at the map for another few seconds, then looked at Marcus. Not suspiciously. More the way you looked at something when you were updating how you understood it. He nodded slowly and moved the discussion forward and said nothing else about it.
But Marcus felt the look and knew what it meant. Tomas was adding it to the picture he'd been building. Competence read differently when it arrived too fast — it stopped looking like preparation and started looking like something else, something Tomas didn't have a word for yet but was getting closer to finding one.
Marcus kept his expression neutral and his eyes on the map.
Ricky caught him outside after, falling into step the way he did.
They walked half a block before Ricky said anything.
"You ever get tired?"
Marcus glanced at him. "Of what."
"Any of it. The hours. The sitting around." A pause. "You're always — present. But you never look like you need a break."
"I'm fine."
"I'm not asking if you're fine. I'm asking if you get tired."
Marcus looked at him for a moment. Ricky's face was open, genuinely curious, the question sitting there without any particular angle behind it. Not a trap. Just Ricky noticing something and following the thread the way he always did.
"Everybody gets tired," Marcus said.
Ricky seemed to consider whether that was actually an answer. He let it go. They reached the corner and split off without anything else passing between them.
Marcus didn't look back.
Still watching. He wasn't a problem yet. But the questions were getting more specific and more specific meant the picture Ricky was building was gaining resolution. At some point resolution became clarity and clarity became a decision about what to do with it.
Not yet. But the timeline was moving.
He spent the next few days quietly restructuring.
Nothing obvious. Nothing that would read as avoidance or disengagement. He volunteered for the jobs that required movement — deliveries, location checks, courier runs — over the jobs that required presence. Presence meant rooms and tables and hours. Movement meant he could finish the task and be gone, no obligation to stay, no meeting to sit through until Tomas decided it was over.
He let himself be slightly less available in the mornings, blaming a shift he'd picked up at a legitimate job that didn't exist. He positioned himself in the later part of Tomas's day when decisions had mostly been made and his input wasn't going to be solicited much. He made himself useful in short, visible bursts and absent in the longer stretches where absence was easy to explain.
It wasn't rebellion. It wasn't contempt. It was just engineering — adjusting the variables until the output matched what he needed.
By the end of the week he'd recovered three hours. Not six yet. But three was a start.
Thursday night he went out late and kept it simple.
He knew what worked now. The angle, the speed ratio, the balance between his own thrust and gravity — he'd found the right combination and didn't need to search for it again tonight. Just apply it. Confirm the adaptation was still tracking.
He went up to a measured altitude — not the maximum, the correct one — oriented head first, and dove.
The impact arrived clean and total, force concentrating through his skull and neck and spine in the sequence he'd learned to expect, the crater forming tight and deep beneath him. The neck compression came, that familiar deep ache radiating into his shoulders, and he stood in the crater and waited it out. A minute, maybe slightly less. The ache unwound itself gradually and was gone.
Then the warmth.
Right on schedule. Moving up from the impact point with the steady clarity of a process running correctly, his body doing its accounting, returning the adaptation. He stood with it and breathed and felt the density settling and checked it against where he'd been a week ago.
Further. Still moving.
He climbed out of the crater and looked at it for a moment. Tight, controlled, exactly what he'd aimed for.
Good.
He wasn't discovering anything tonight. He was confirming that the system worked and that he was applying it correctly. There was a different satisfaction in that — less sharp than the first time the warmth had arrived, more solid. The difference between finding something and knowing how to use it.
He went up afterward and stayed there.
The city spread below him, the grid of it visible from here in a way it never was at street level — the main roads carrying the most light, the residential districts darker, the industrial zone to the east a dim peripheral smear. He could see Calle Doce from here roughly, the block where the mechanic's shop sat dark and closed.
He was upside down again without having meant to be. The city above him, stars below. He'd stopped fighting it. This was just where he ended up when he stopped paying attention to orientation.
He thought about the week.
Six hours of gang obligations had become three recovered hours through careful adjustment, which meant he was still net negative three hours from where he'd been before Tomas's promotion. The training was continuing to produce results — the adaptation was tracking, the system was working. But the working required time and the time was the constraint and the constraint was getting tighter not looser.
The scrubland east of the city had served him well enough. Isolated, unremarkable, nobody with any reason to be there in the middle of the night. But he'd been using the same creek bed, the same general area, for weeks. His craters were overlapping. The surface was becoming familiar to his body in ways that probably reduced the efficiency of each session — ground his cells had already learned, impacts his biology had already catalogued.
He needed new surfaces. New environments. Different densities of rock and soil, different combinations of variables to solve for.
The problem was that new environments required range, and range required time, and time was what he had least of.
He looked at the city above him — all of it contained within maybe thirty kilometres of where he was floating — and felt for the first time the specific quality of its smallness. Not emotionally. Just as a practical observation, the same way you'd observe that a room had limited space. The city was finite. The scrubland around it was finite. The inputs available within easy reach of Culiacán were finite.
He wasn't at the edge of those inputs yet. But he could see the edge from here.
He righted himself and started back, keeping low over the rooflines, the city resolving back into street level as he descended — individual buildings, specific blocks, the familiar grid shrinking back down to the scale it occupied when you were inside it.
He landed two streets from his building and walked the rest of the way in.
The constraint was time and the time was being consumed by a structure that had been useful and was still useful but was useful in ways that were beginning to cost more than they returned. That math hadn't finished resolving yet. It would.
He went upstairs. Slept.