The notification came at four in the morning while he was brushing his teeth in the flophouse bathroom.
LEVEL UP LEVEL 1 → LEVEL 2 10 STAT POINTS AVAILABLE ALLOCATE NOW?
He spat toothpaste into the rust-stained sink and stared at the blue interface floating in his peripheral vision. A hundred LP. Filled. He'd checked the bar before bed and it was at ninety-six and the last four must have trickled in while he slept, the system running its math on whatever residual proximity or memory or desire counted as input.
Ten points. Five stats.
He sat on the edge of the bathtub. The flophouse bathroom had a lock that worked and a light that didn't buzz and those were its two best features. He pulled up the allocation screen.
STR: 3 → ? SPD: 3 → ? DUR: 2 → ? STA: 4 → ? CHA: 5 → ?
He thought about the Hand. He'd never met the Hand but Felicia had mentioned them, casually, over coffee. An organization that employed people who could kill in the dark and didn't make mistakes. He thought about the Maggia warehouse, the gunfire, the sprint across rooftops where Felicia had been twenty feet ahead and pulling away because her body could do things his couldn't.
Speed. He needed to not be the slowest person in the room.
SPD: 3 → 6. Three points.
Strength. He'd struggled with the warehouse door, a reinforced steel thing that Felicia had popped with a device the size of a lighter. He didn't have devices.
STR: 3 → 5. Two points.
Durability. He'd taken a punch in the warehouse that had dropped him for three seconds and three seconds in a fight was dead.
DUR: 2 → 4. Two points.
Three left. He split them between Stamina and Charisma. STA: 4 → 5. CHA: 5 → 7.
CONFIRM?
He confirmed.
The change was immediate.
He stood up from the bathtub edge and his balance was different. Same weight, but lower in his feet, more stable. He rolled his shoulders and they moved faster than he expected. He reached for the towel rack and his hand was there before he finished deciding to reach.
He flexed his hand. Closed it. Opened it. The speed was there. His fingers blurred on the close.
He went outside.
Five AM. The street was empty except for a delivery van double-parked and a woman walking a dog that was dragging her toward a fire hydrant. The air was cool. He started walking and the walking turned into jogging and the jogging turned into running because his legs were faster and faster legs wanted to run.
Fast. He was fast. The buildings going past him at a rate that didn't match the effort in his legs. He was running at a speed that should have had his lungs burning and his heartbeat was barely up. The sidewalk unrolled under his feet and a cab pulled out of a side street and he adjusted his path without slowing, threading the gap between the cab's bumper and a parked car without thinking about it.
He ran ten blocks. Stopped. Checked his breathing. Elevated but controlled. His legs felt warm, loose, like he'd done a light jog instead of sprinting at a speed he couldn't have hit in his old body on a bicycle.
An alley off Tenth Avenue. A dumpster, industrial, the green kind that weighed empty what a person weighed full. He grabbed the edge and lifted.
The dumpster came up. Not easily. His arms shook and his back strained and the metal groaned. But it came up. Six inches off the ground, then a foot, the wheels swinging. He held it for three seconds and set it down and his forearms were burning and his hands were shaking.
Six inches off the ground. Then a foot. He held it for three seconds and his forearms were on fire and the veins in his neck were standing out and three weeks ago he couldn't have opened a stuck jar without running it under hot water.
He punched the dumpster. The metal dented. His knuckles split and the pain was sharp and immediate and he watched the blood well up and grinned because the dumpster had a fist-shaped dent in it and he'd made that dent with his hand.
Durability four. His knuckles should have broken on that punch. They hadn't. The skin split but the bones held. He flexed his fingers. They worked. They hurt, but they worked.
He walked back to the flophouse with bloody knuckles and a grin he couldn't wipe off.
The gym was a basement operation on Ninth Avenue. No sign. A steel door with a buzzer and a guy named Marco who charged ten dollars cash and didn't ask for ID. Heavy bags, free weights, a ring that smelled like sweat and bleach. The clientele was a mix of off-duty bouncers and guys who looked like they'd been hit professionally. You are reading on novelping.com, the official source.
Troy worked the heavy bag for an hour. The speed showed. His combinations were faster, the bag swinging harder, and the rhythm he found was new, a three-punch pattern that his hands fell into without him designing it. The reflex bonus from Felicia was in there, sharpening his timing, and the speed boost was multiplying it.
A woman on the treadmill was watching him.
He noticed because the LP bar ticked. One point. She was mid-thirties, athletic, headphones in, pretending to watch the muted TV on the wall. Her eyes kept drifting back to him. To his arms. To the sweat on his neck. She caught him looking and turned up the speed on the treadmill and didn't look again.
Two weeks ago that one-point trickle would have felt like progress. Now it was pocket change.
He toweled off and left. Walked east. Reached for his phone to text Felicia and remembered he didn't have a phone. The burner didn't do texts. He reached for it anyway, a second time, and caught himself and put his hand back in his pocket.
The scratches on his back itched. Three days old and healing but he could feel them when his shirt shifted, four parallel lines between his shoulder blades where she'd raked her nails into him on the floor of her apartment. He pressed his fingers against them through his shirt and the sting was immediate and behind it, right there, Felicia's face with her mouth open and her eyes closed and her back arching off the hardwood.
He stopped pressing. Kept walking.
Hell's Kitchen at dusk.
The club was on the corner of Forty-Sixth and Tenth. No name outside, just a red door and a velvet rope and two guys in suits who were too big to be regular bouncers. The building was three stories, brick, with blacked-out windows on the upper floors. A neon sign in the ground-floor window said LOUNGE in cursive. The money walking through that door didn't need a sign to find it.
Troy bought a coffee from the cart on the opposite corner and watched.
Seven PM. The first customers arrived. Town cars, mostly. Men in suits, women in dresses that cost more than his monthly rent. A few faces he recognized from the news, or thought he did. The bouncers checked a list, not IDs. You were on the list or you weren't.
Eight PM. A delivery truck pulled up to the side entrance. Three men unloaded crates that were heavy enough to require two people per crate. Armed. All three. He could see the outlines under their jackets from across the street because his eyes were better now, the reflex bonus sharpening his peripheral vision into something he could actually use.
Nine PM. A black SUV. The back door opened and a man in a gray suit got out and the bouncers straightened up and the one on the left opened the red door without checking the list. Old. White hair, hard face, spine straight, shoulders square, a man who'd been giving orders for decades. Silvermane. Had to be. The man went inside and the SUV pulled away.
Ten PM. Three people left through the side entrance, fast, heads down, escorted by one of the delivery guys. One of them was limping.
People disappear here. Felicia had said that. He watched the three figures get into a car at the end of the block and the car drove away and nobody on the street noticed.
He mapped it. Front entrance: red door, two bouncers, list. Side entrance: deliveries, armed personnel, secondary exit. Upper floors: blacked out, no visible fire escape on the front, probably one in the alley. The camera situation was professional: four visible, angled to cover approaches, rotating on what looked like a fifteen-second cycle. He'd need to watch for at least two more nights to confirm the pattern.
The coffee was cold. He drank it anyway.
The diner was on Forty-Fourth, east of Ninth. A place with a counter and booths and fluorescent light that made everybody look like a police sketch. He got there early and took the booth in the back. Sightlines to both doors. His back to the wall.
She walked in at eight-fifteen.
It took him a second.
Civilian clothes. Jeans, boots, a leather jacket over a white t-shirt. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail, platinum going to gold under the fluorescent, and without the catsuit she was taller than he'd thought, or maybe the boots had a heel. Bare face, or close to it.
She was more attractive without the suit and he couldn't figure out why. The catsuit showed everything. This showed less and hit harder. She ordered coffee without looking at the menu and he watched her mouth form the words and forgot what he'd been thinking about.
She slid into the booth across from him. Her knee bumped his under the table. She didn't move it.
"You look different," she said.
"I got a haircut."
"You didn't get a haircut." She studied him. Eyes moving over his face, his shoulders, his hands on the table. "You're bigger. Your shoulders are wider. And you're sitting like a person who doesn't expect to get hit, which is new."
"I've been working out."
"In a week."
He shrugged. Her knee was warm against his. He could feel it through the denim, warm through the denim.
She pulled a napkin from the dispenser and took a pen from her jacket pocket and started drawing. The Maggia club. Floor plan, rough, from memory. She'd been inside. Of course she'd been inside. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
"Front entrance is a funnel. Two bouncers, a metal detector they don't always turn on, and a coat check girl who's definitely reporting to Silvermane. The main floor is a lounge, bar, tables, a stage for jazz on Thursdays. The real business is upstairs. Second floor: private rooms. Third floor: offices. The safe is on three, behind a wall in Silvermane's office."
She drew the safe. Circled it.
"Four-tumbler combination lock with a biometric backup. Nothing I can't handle. The problem is getting to three without being seen. The staircase has a guard and a camera and the elevator requires a key card."
"I go through the front."
"You go through the front. Dress nice, act rich, Charisma your way past the list. Get upstairs. Disable the camera on the staircase landing. I come through the roof hatch and meet you on three."
"The camera."
"It's hardwired. There's a junction box in the second-floor men's room, behind the mirror. Pop the cover, pull the third cable from the left. You'll have ninety seconds before the monitoring station notices."
"And if they notice before ninety seconds."
"Then we improvise. I'm good at improvising." She took a sip of his coffee without asking. Made a face. "This is terrible."
"It's a diner."
"I've been in diners with better coffee."
"You've been in vaults with better coffee."
She smiled. Small, fast. Her knee pressed harder against his for a second, then eased.
"Thursday night," she said. "Jazz night. The crowd's bigger, the staff's stretched thin, and Silvermane doesn't come on Thursdays. We go in, we get the documents, we get out. Thirty minutes."
"And the money?"
"The safe has cash too. I'll split it. Plus the apartment. Plus my contact list, which gets you a phone, a cleaner, a fence, and a bartender who doesn't ask questions."
She folded the napkin and tucked it into his jacket pocket. Her fingers stayed on the fabric. Then they didn't.
"Thursday," he said.
"Thursday." She stood. Pulled her jacket straight. Looked at him. "Get a suit. Something dark. Nothing cheap. I'll text you the address of a place that won't ask for credit."
"With what phone."
She reached into her bag and pulled out a phone. Not a burner. A real one, slim, with a case. She set it on the table.
"That one. My number's already in it. Don't call me before noon."
She walked out. The bell above the door jingled. He watched her through the window, crossing the street, hailing a cab. Her ponytail swinging. The leather jacket catching the streetlight.
His knee was cold where hers had been.
He picked up the phone. Unlocked it. Her contact was listed under a cat emoji and nothing else.
He put the phone in his pocket. Looked at the napkin floor plan. Drank the terrible coffee.
Thursday was three days away.