The world can't keep up with his mind. The miniscule goings-on of the tiny lives around him mean nothing. Merely the pursuit of delaying the inevitable. Some try to change it.

They all fail.

He sits with his back against a wall, slowly inhaling and exhaling the dust and soot that serves for air here. A hood cast over his head hides his face, but glittering eyes peer out from the shadows and watch their movements up and down the street. He sits hunched, shoulders forward. His chest caves in a little.

They all fail. The muck of unliveable lives presses down on his eyes, and he tosses his head slightly, a tight lipped smile pulling at his lips. He picks up a handful of dirt.

"Ashes to ashes," he mutters. The dirt slips between his fingers. He laughs.

The time between jobs is immaterial. He doesn't live then, in those spaces of inactivity. It's maddening. His crew has been grounded. His bones gather dust like a derelict.

It's maddening.

Something has entered his sight. A pair of young feet in plastic flipflops. They face him. He turns his head towards them, but does not look up. "I save for a ticket, mister, won't you help?" A tiny hand shows itself beneath his hood and waits expectantly. Never mind those tickets would get the child killed or incarcerated. Hope is alien to him. It amuses him.

He laughs again.

"You think those rigs'll get you up there, eh? Get you a nice new pair of slippers, eh?"

He glances up to see the boy's expression. It's blankly expectant, trained, like the boy has forced himself to wear it like a mask. It's also missing part of its nose. He watches the boy swallow once and then widen his eyes in something like fear when he lets his eyes crinkle in his tightlipped smile.

He takes the boy's hand between his hands and pats it once. "No, no, boy. They'll kill you up there, they will. Take your life and make it their property, huh." He pushes the boy away, suddenly but not violently. He does not like being violent to children.

They don't know any better.

The boy's plight falls away out of his attention when he pushes himself back up the wall and prowls away, a slavering wolf in ratty sheep's clothing lurking in a sleepy herd. He wonders that they do not see him for what he is, what he is to them.

He is the executioner, and they all let him eat at the dinner table. All of them.

Delacourt thinks she can own him. They think a simple deactivation order will stand in his way. They think they are above him.

Only in altitude, he muses.

They don't know any better.