The meeting ran three hours.
Three hours of Tomas working through the ambush from every angle — who talked, which route was compromised, whether the Jardines stash house needed to be moved, what the response should look like and when. Good questions, probably. The kind of questions that kept an operation alive. Marcus sat at the table and answered when addressed and watched the conversation circle back through the same three points for the fourth time and thought about last night's dive and whether the angle had been the limiting variable or the speed.
Tomas settled nothing conclusively. The meeting ended because people got hungry, not because anything was resolved.
Marcus was out the door before anyone else had stood up.
The rest of the day was coordination work — watching a location in the Rosales district for two hours, counting who went in and out of a building, reporting back. Simple. The kind of job that existed because someone needed eyes somewhere and Marcus was available and reliable.
He sat on a wall across the street with a water bottle and watched the building and knew within the first twenty minutes that the man Tomas was worried about wasn't there and wasn't coming. The pattern of movement in and out of the building was wrong for someone operating carefully — too relaxed, too routine, no variation. He could see it immediately.
He sat there for the full two hours anyway.
On the way back Ricky fell into step beside him without being asked, the way Ricky did sometimes, comfortable in silences that other people filled.
"You knew it was clean," Ricky said after a while. "The location. You knew inside the first few minutes."
"How do you figure that."
"You stopped actually watching about twenty minutes in. You were just sitting there."
Marcus glanced at him. "I was watching."
"You were somewhere else." Ricky said it without accusation. Just observation. "You do that a lot lately."
Marcus didn't answer. Ricky didn't push it. They walked the rest of the block in silence and split off at the corner without saying anything else.
Tomas had more for him in the evening. A delivery coordination problem that required Marcus to be present at the stash house in Jardines while two other crew members moved product through a revised route — insurance, basically, a body in the right place in case something went sideways again.
Nothing went sideways. The job ran clean. Marcus stood in a back room for ninety minutes doing nothing while two men he barely knew drove across the city and came back without incident.
He got out at midnight. Later than he wanted.
The irritation wasn't hot — it wasn't the coal-finding-temperature feeling from the warehouse. It was flat and practical, the irritation of a resource being wasted. His nights were the only part of the day that actually mattered and tonight he had less of one than usual because he'd spent ninety minutes standing in a room being insurance against a problem that didn't materialize.
He went east and went up fast, not bothering with the gradual climb he usually used to settle into it. Already thinking about what he wanted to try.
He'd been thinking about it since the meeting. Three hours of Tomas going in circles had given him time to run the numbers on last night — the altitude, the angle, the speed on impact — and he'd landed on a hypothesis. He hadn't been going hard enough. The warmth had been thinning out at his current parameters, which meant he needed to push the parameters, which meant more altitude and more speed and hit the ground harder than he'd managed yet.
Simple logic. More input, more output.
He climbed higher than he'd ever gone for a dive. The city below became a smear of light, the cold became serious, the air thin enough that breathing required actual effort. He oriented head first, pointed himself at the earth, and pushed.
The acceleration was immediate and enormous. Speed building fast, air pressure spiking and his body punching through it and continuing to accelerate, the ground expanding in his vision from abstract to real to imminent and he hit it head first at a velocity that was meaningfully beyond anything he'd attempted before.
The impact was total. The crater was deep. Rock fractured inward around his skull in a tight radius and the force drove through him completely and he felt every joint, every bone, the full systemic event of something serious arriving all at once.
He stood up slowly.
Something in his neck was wrong — not broken, just compressed, a deep ache that radiated down into his shoulders and sat there. His vision had a faint blur at the edges that took longer than usual to clear. He waited it out, rotating his neck once, feeling the ache move and then dull and then gradually — over maybe two minutes — fade to nothing.
Then he waited for the warmth.
Nothing.
His body had taken the hit, processed it, moved on. Like it hadn't even registered as a problem worth solving.
Huh.
He climbed out of the crater and stood in the scrubland and looked at the damage around him. Deep. Significant. More than anything he'd done before, physically speaking.
And nothing to show for it.
He went back up and tried again. Same altitude, same angle, more speed.
He hit and the neck ache came back sharper this time, his shoulders seizing up for a full minute before the compression released and the ache faded. He sat in the second crater and rubbed the back of his neck and waited for the warmth.
Still nothing.
He landed in the second crater and stood in the dark and thought about that.
Too much. That was the variable. Not too little — too much. He'd pushed past whatever threshold triggered adaptation and his body had simply absorbed the excess the way it absorbed anything that wasn't new, anything it had already categorized as survivable. The impact had been enormous but it hadn't been the right enormous. It had been past the ceiling of what produced a response, not under it.
More isn't the answer.
He stood with that for a moment.
Correct is the answer.
He went up again but differently this time — lower than the max dive, deliberately lower, and instead of just pointing himself down and accelerating he started adjusting variables. Entry angle first — instead of straight down he angled at roughly seventy degrees, hitting the ground obliquely rather than head on, the force distributing differently through him on impact. Nothing. Baseline recovery, no warmth.
He tried steeper. Tried shallower. Tried varying when he stopped using his own thrust and let gravity take over versus driving himself down the whole way. Tried packed soil instead of rock, rock instead of packed soil, a dry creek bed with a layer of loose stone over harder ground beneath.
The creek bed produced something.
Not the full warmth — a suggestion of it, a faint version, his body registering that something about that specific combination of variables had landed in a range it needed to respond to. He stood in the shallow impression it had left and pressed his hand against his sternum and felt the faint density shift beginning and knew he was close.
He adjusted the angle slightly. Added more of his own thrust on the way in, less gravity, so the force arrived faster rather than harder — sharper impulse rather than heavier weight.
Hit the creek bed again.
The warmth came.
Not as strong as the best sessions — stronger. Moving up through him from the point of impact with a clarity that the brute force attempts hadn't come close to producing, his body recognizing that whatever this specific combination of variables had delivered, it was exactly in the range that required a response. He stood in the new crater and breathed and felt the density settling and understood what the evening had actually taught him.
His body adapted to stress it could measure. Stress that overwhelmed it just got absorbed. He wasn't training by hitting harder — he was training by hitting correctly, finding the precise threshold where his biology had to work rather than just brace.
More wasn't the variable. Precision was the variable.
Okay. Good to know.
He stood in the creek bed and felt the warmth peak and begin to fade and felt the density that remained and was already thinking about what the correct variables looked like at the next level up — what combination of angle and speed and surface would produce this response from a higher baseline, once this baseline had been fully adapted to.
It was a more interesting problem than he'd had this morning.
He didn't go straight back.
He went up instead — not to dive, just up, climbing until the city was fully below him and the cold was real and the air was thin and the lights of Culiacán spread out to the west like someone had scattered something across the dark. He leveled off and stayed there, not moving, just suspended.
He did this sometimes between sessions. Not intentionally — it had started happening naturally, a pause state, his body settling while his mind ran through whatever needed running through. Up here the thinking was cleaner. No movement, no sound except wind, the city far enough below that its noise didn't reach him.
He noticed at some point that he'd rotated. He was upside down — had drifted there gradually without registering it, the city now above him and the sky below, stars underneath his feet. It didn't feel wrong. If anything it felt more settled than right-side up, like his body had found a preferred resting orientation that gravity had no say in.
He stayed that way for a while.
From up here — inverted, the city a ceiling of light above him — the whole shape of his situation was easier to look at. The meeting that had run three hours. The two hours on the wall in Rosales. The ninety minutes standing in the Jardines stash house. Four and a half hours of his day that had produced nothing except the continued functioning of a structure he was present in but not really part of.
The gang was useful. Still true. Money, cover, invisibility inside something larger — all still true. But useful and free weren't the same thing and lately the gap between them was where most of his irritation lived.
He needed his nights to be fully his, which meant his days needed to stop bleeding into them. That meant the gang's claim on his schedule needed to shrink. Not dramatically. Just enough that he stopped losing hours to back rooms and stash houses and meetings that resolved nothing.
A scheduling problem. It had a solution.
He'd work it out.
He righted himself eventually, the city returning to its correct position below him, and started back. The cold had worked its way into the surface of his skin, not deep, just present.
Dawn was maybe two hours out. Enough time to sleep.
He came in low over the rooflines, landed two streets from his building, walked the rest of the way in. The streets were quiet and dark.
He went upstairs and lay on his back on the thin mattress and looked at the water stain on the ceiling and thought about the creek bed and the angle and the warmth arriving clean and strong and how the next session needed to start from what tonight had established.
Correct, not harder.
He slept.