Chapter 20 : Under the Knife
Pain woke me before the sun did.
Not sharp pain—more like my entire face had been replaced with a bruise that someone kept pressing on. Every heartbeat sent a pulse of pressure through my cheeks, my nose, my jaw. The bandages wrapped around my head felt tight enough to crack my skull.
I reached for the call button and pressed it. Three minutes later, a nurse appeared—different from yesterday, older, with gray streaking her black hair and the kind of tired efficiency that came from decades in medicine.
"Dolor?" Pain?
"Sí."
She adjusted something on the IV drip, and within seconds the edges softened. Not gone—nothing would make it gone—but manageable. Tolerable.
"El doctor vendrá pronto." The doctor will come soon.
I lay back and stared at the ceiling. The room was the same one from yesterday—simple, clean, functional. The window showed early morning sky, pale blue with hints of pink. Somewhere, a rooster crowed.
My throat hurt less than yesterday. When I swallowed, it felt like sandpaper instead of broken glass. Progress.
Dr. Vargas arrived at eight, white coat crisp, tablet in hand. He pulled a chair beside my bed and studied me with clinical assessment.
"How do you feel?"
"Like someone took a hammer to my face." My voice was rough, barely above a whisper. "But I'm alive."
"The procedure went well. No complications." He showed me the tablet—X-rays of my skull, before and after images that meant nothing to my untrained eye. "Rhinoplasty complete. Genioplasty complete. Swelling will peak today or tomorrow, then gradually decrease over the next two weeks."
"When can I see?"
"See what?"
"My face."
Vargas shook his head. "Not yet. The swelling is too severe—you'd be judging something that doesn't exist yet. Week two, when we do the implants, we'll remove the bandages. By then you'll have some sense of the shape emerging."
A week of blindness. A week of trusting that what lay beneath these bandages was worth the price.
"Complications I should watch for?"
"Infection—unlikely with our protocols, but possible. Excessive bleeding—you'd feel it, warmth spreading beneath the bandages. Breathing difficulty—some congestion is normal, complete blockage is not." He made a note on his tablet. "The nurses check on you every four hours. Any concerns, any changes, tell them immediately."
"And the pain?"
"Will decrease daily. By day three or four, you'll be on oral medication instead of IV. By week two, over-the-counter should suffice." He stood. "Rest, Mr. Torres. That's your only job now."
The day crawled.
Without NZT, without my phone, without anything to do but lie in a hospital bed and wait for my face to heal, time moved at a pace I'd forgotten existed. Every hour felt like three. Every three hours felt like a day.
I tried sleeping but could only manage brief naps before the discomfort woke me. The nurses brought liquid food—broth, juice, some kind of protein shake that tasted like chalk—which I consumed through a straw. My jaw worked, but chewing was impossible. The muscle movements pulled on sutures I could feel but not see.
By afternoon, the swelling had gotten worse. My eyes were nearly swollen shut, reducing my vision to narrow slits. Breathing through my nose was impossible—gauze packing blocked the passages entirely. Every breath came through my mouth, drying my throat, making my lips crack despite the chapstick the nurses applied.
I looked like a monster. I knew this without a mirror, from the way my face felt beneath my fingertips—puffy, distended, wrong.
Trust the process, Vargas had said.
Easy for him to say. He hadn't sold his face to the universe in exchange for a chance at a new life.
[ALBUQUERQUE — AFTERNOON]
Badger counted the cash three times before he was satisfied.
Two hundred forty dollars. Not bad for a day's work, especially considering he wasn't actually dealing product—just information. The kind of information Pete had taught him to gather and sell.
"You're sure about this?" The buyer was a mid-level guy named Reyes, someone Badger had seen around but never worked with directly. "Tomás is really skimming from Little H?"
"My sources don't lie." Badger kept his voice steady, the way Pete had coached him. Confidence without arrogance. Facts without embellishment. "What you do with the information is your business."
Reyes nodded slowly. "If this is good, there's more work."
"I'll be around."
The deal closed. Reyes disappeared into the afternoon crowd. Badger pocketed the cash and pulled out his phone to update the ledger—another one of Pete's systems, tracking income and expenses like they were running a real business.
Which, Badger supposed, they kind of were.
Pete had been gone a week now. Family emergency, California, aunt with cancer or something. He'd left detailed instructions: keep operations small, don't take unnecessary risks, document everything, and under no circumstances get involved with anything touching Jesse's new cooking operation.
That's a different game, Pete had said. Higher stakes, higher heat. We stay in our lane.
Good advice. Jesse had been acting strange lately—jumpy, guilty, not sleeping. Word on the street was he'd gotten into something heavy with that old guy everyone thought was a teacher. Badger didn't want to know the details.
He walked to his car, counted the cash one more time, and drove to the drop location where Combo would collect and log the day's take. Just like Pete had set it up. Just like clockwork.
[TIJUANA — EVENING]
The second night was worse than the first.
Pain medication kept the sharp edges dulled, but nothing could stop the relentless pressure of swelling. I woke every hour, sometimes every half hour, from discomfort or thirst or the simple wrongness of breathing through my mouth. The nurses were kind but busy—other patients needed attention, and my case was straightforward. Just a man recovering from elective surgery. Just another face being remade in the quiet corridors of a clinic that asked no questions.
Around two in the morning, I gave up on sleep and let my mind wander instead.
Seven weeks since I woke up in Skinny Pete's body. Seven weeks since I opened my eyes in a meth addict's apartment and found a supernatural bag in my pocket containing pills that made me superhuman. Seven weeks of building something from nothing—contacts, money, a network that operated in Albuquerque's criminal shadows.
And now this. Lying in a Mexican clinic, face destroyed and remade, waiting to become someone new.
Marcus Webb, I'd decided. The name would need documents to back it up—driver's license, social security card, the paper trail of a legitimate existence. But those could be arranged. Everything could be arranged, if you had money and patience and the willingness to operate outside legal boundaries.
The old me—the hedge fund analyst who'd died in some other universe—would have been horrified. Marcus Gilbert had believed in rules, systems, the careful accumulation of wealth through legitimate channels. He'd never broken a law more serious than jaywalking.
That person was dead. Literally, cosmically dead. Whatever brought me here had ended his existence and dropped his consciousness into a body and world that operated by different rules.
Adapt or die, I thought. The universe gave me a second chance. I'm not going to waste it following rules written for people who never got murdered and resurrected in a television show.
Day three brought relief.
The swelling peaked and began to recede. My eyes opened wider—still puffy, still bruised, but functional. The nasal packing came out, leaving bloody gauze and immediate improvement in breathing. For the first time in forty-eight hours, air moved through both nose and mouth.
Vargas checked the sutures, proclaimed everything healing as expected, and switched me to oral pain medication. The pills were weaker than the IV but sufficient—the agony had downgraded to severe discomfort, and severe discomfort I could handle.
"You're progressing well," he said. "Better than average for this stage."
"When can I walk around?"
"Today, if you feel capable. The courtyard is available for recovering patients. Fresh air and gentle movement will help circulation." He made a note on his tablet. "Don't push too hard. Your body needs resources for healing—exhausting yourself delays everything."
I pushed myself upright after he left. The room spun briefly, then stabilized. My legs were stiff from two days of bed rest, but they held my weight when I stood.
The bathroom mirror was covered—Vargas's orders, he'd said, to prevent premature judgment. I appreciated that now. Whatever lurked beneath these bandages wasn't ready to be seen, and my imagination was cruel enough without adding reality to the mix.
The courtyard was small but beautiful.
Flowering bushes bordered a central fountain where water splashed in quiet rhythm. Benches sat in the shade of an old olive tree. The air smelled like jasmine and the dry heat of northern Mexico.
I sat on a bench and let the sun warm my arms. The bandages on my face blocked most sensation, but I could feel the light through the gaps—warmth on skin, life continuing despite everything.
A hummingbird appeared.
It hovered near a red flower, wings blurring too fast to see, extracting nectar with its needle-thin beak. Such a small thing. Such focused purpose. It didn't worry about the future or regret the past—it simply did what hummingbirds do, moment to moment, flower to flower.
Lucky, I thought. I'll call you Lucky.
The bird moved to another flower, then another, then disappeared over the courtyard wall. A thirty-second visit that somehow made the whole morning feel lighter.
Days four and five blurred together.
The swelling continued to recede. Colors emerged beneath my eyes—purple and green and yellow, the bruises cycling through their healing phases. Vargas changed my bandages daily, making satisfied sounds at the progress while revealing nothing about the results.
"Your nose is setting well," he said on day five. "The chin advancement is integrating properly. When we add the implants next week, the overall effect will be quite striking."
"Striking good or striking bad?"
A thin smile. "Striking different, Mr. Torres. Which is what you're paying for."
I spent my days in the courtyard, reading paperback novels from the clinic's library. Spanish-language thrillers, mostly—good for practicing comprehension, simple enough to follow with my recovering brain. Each page turned was a small victory, proof that life continued, that this suspended state wouldn't last forever.
Lucky the hummingbird visited every afternoon around four. I started leaving early just to guarantee I'd see the small green blur hovering among the flowers. Silly, maybe. But in a week without NZT, without my network, without any of the tools I'd come to rely on, that hummingbird became an anchor. A point of stability in the chaos of transformation.
[ALBUQUERQUE — DAY 5]
Jesse stood outside Tuco's compound and tried to remember how to breathe.
The place was a fortress. Concrete walls, barred windows, guys with guns patrolling the perimeter like this was a military installation instead of a drug dealer's house. Mr. White—Walter—stood beside him, looking calm in a way that seemed insane given the circumstances.
"You sure about this?" Jesse asked.
"It's the logical next step. We have product. He has distribution. Basic economics."
"Basic economics doesn't usually involve people who beat other dealers to death with their bare hands."
Walter's jaw tightened. "Do you have a better suggestion?"
Jesse didn't.
They walked toward the gate.
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