Chapter 5: Cancer's Shadow
Hospitals smell like the absence of accidents. Cleanliness weaponized into hope.
Adam stood outside the White family's room, hands in his pockets, pretending to be a man making a phone call so he could watch without being the kind of creep who watched. Through the glass, he saw Skyler's shoulders set like a building's façade. Marie talked with her hands; Hank punctuated her sentences with cop's jokes that landed like nerf darts on a brick wall. Walt Jr. leaned forward, an eager vessel, trying to learn his father's weather.
The word cancer moved like a ripple through the room. It rearranged posture, reallocated oxygen. Adam felt it at a cellular level, a set of costs suddenly itemized. There was empathy, real and clean. There was also a spreadsheet opening in his mind to fill with numbers that would motivate a man to compromise himself further.
He texted Jesse: Rent covered. Don't argue. Then sent a transfer through a hawala chain he had set up in the span of a day because he had to be the kind of person who could.
Jesse replied immediately with a string of emojis that looked like a cereal's marshmallows. Then: Thanks, man. For real.
He nodded toward the ceiling, as if the system were up there, and left the hospital to live out its fluorescent day. Skyler glanced through the window and saw a man leaving with a purposeful step and filed it under "to ask Walt about." He didn't mind.
Later, in a warehouse whose only virtue was that no one wanted it, he met Walt and Jesse like misfit kings meeting in exile. Walt was quiet, sour with knowledge. Jesse tried lightness and failed, then succeeded, flinging "yo"s into the air like confetti to slow the rate at which things landed.
"Let's work," Adam said, because the only thing that made it better was forward motion.
They did. The cook was efficient and precise, a ballet of vapors and temperatures. Walt's hands were sure even when his eyes betrayed the heaviness of more than one secret. Jesse fetched and grinned and kept a running commentary like it was the only way to hear himself think.
Adam didn't interfere. He observed. He negotiated pickup. He loaded. He sold.
Sell 4kg meth.
[Asset recognized: drugs (methamphetamine), quantity: 4 kg.]
[Confirm sale for $200,000?] Y/N
Y.
[Sale confirmed. Double-profit applied.]
[Proceeds: $400,000 credited.]
Balance: $220,000
Back in the world of bodies, a dealer decided Adam's face looked like an invitation. "You think you can just walk in here and throw money at people?" he snarled, and his fist came like punctuation.
Adam saw it as a series of frames: the shoulder telegraph, the elbow's angle, the wrist's tense line. He turned just enough that the punch glanced off his cheekbone instead of landing square, and it still rocked his head back with a flash of light. Pain flared, hot and focusing, and then receded like it had been told to behave.
He tasted that copper coin again, and spat pink into the dust.
"Okay," he said, calm because the calm made the other man nervous. He didn't swing back. He stepped in so close he could count the pores on the man's nose and said, softly, "Try that again and you'll need a straw for the rest of your meals."
The man hesitated, the human part of his brain asking the animal part if it really wanted this. He stepped back. The air in the room recalibrated.
Adam didn't chase the win with more violence. He had been given a body that would take a beating better now and heal faster, but the real upgrade was the confidence to choose not to escalate. He finished his business and left. He touched his cheek in the car and felt swelling that would have been worse yesterday. He smiled, small and private.
That evening, he swung by Jesse's with a grocery bag of real food: eggs, bread, a banana like a punchline. Jesse looked at it as if it were a magic trick that turned money into safety. "My rent, man," he said, awe leaking through the cracks in his slang. "You didn't have to."
"I did," Adam said. "Because I need you functional. And because your landlord doesn't accept 'yo' as payment."
Jesse laughed, then cut his eyes to Adam's cheekbone. "Yo, you get in a fight?"
"Doorframe," Adam said, and Jesse knew he was lying, but it was the kind of lie you accept, like "I'm fine" or "I'll call you."
Adam left a white envelope under Walt's windshield wiper that night. Inside was a fake hospital bill with a number circled in red that made a point better than any speech. Chemo's free, right? he had scrawled next to it, a line he let be a joke because it cut cleaner as one. He watched from half a block away as Walt found it. Walt's face did something complicated, a contortion that fit grief and anger and understanding in the space of three seconds. He crumpled the paper with surgical care and put it in his pocket instead of the trash.
Good, Adam thought. Let him be angry at the bill. Let him decide to pay it by burning the world more efficiently.
The ledger waited.
Balance: $220,000
Strength: 2x
Stamina: 1x
Durability: minor boost
He drove the city that night for no reason but to feel the gears catch. The desert's edge breathed cold at the windshield. He liked the way the night made the city invent itself—a bead of lights around voids. Somewhere out there, Hank watched a data wall and looked for patterns that didn't exist yet. Somewhere else, a man called Tuco drew a line of powder and laughed too loud at nothing. The world was gathering itself into shapes he knew the names of, and he, Adam Stiels, had decided to be one of the forces that pressed.
At a red light, he thought of the one that had killed him. The street here was dry. He leaned his head back, let the underside of the moment glow in his mind, and whispered to his empty car, "Not yet," again. This time, it sounded like a promise.
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