The trigger came a week later. His little brother, Ray, sixteen and all sharp angles and fragile pride, got jumped. It was not serious, just a message written in bruises and split skin. But the rage that erupted in Marcus was a tectonic shift. It was hot, chaotic, a volcanic surge that felt good. It filled the hollow space with a glorious, burning purpose. It had a voice, a sibilant whisper that coiled in his brainstem: Never be powerless again. Make them ash.
He found a stolen Glock, his hands moving with a muscle-memory that felt both intimate and alien. He would erase the whole corner, scrub it from the map with lead and fire. It was the code. It was the only grammar of justice he knew. But as his thumb found the safety, he saw Mama Ayo's face—not as she was now, but as a young woman on a distant shore, her eyes holding a sorrow so vast it could swallow history.
He stopped. The gun was a dead weight, a blasphemous object. The rage was still there, a furnace in his gut, but it felt borrowed. Ill-fitting. And beneath its roar, he heard it clearly now: a parasitic whisper, a thing that was not him, feasting on the heat of his anger. They deserve it. They disrespected your blood. Do it. Feed us.
He dropped the gun. The clatter on the concrete was a small, shameful sound. He ran, not from any enemy on the street, but from the enemy that had taken up residence inside his own skull. He burst into Mama Ayo's apartment, his chest a bellows, his breath ragged.
Something is in me, Mama, he gasped, collapsing into a chair. It is not me.
She turned, her gaze a steady anchor in his storm. I know, child, she said, her voice low and weathered. It has been a tenant in this family for a long time. It came over on the ship. It worked in the fields. It knows our name.