Out of thin air, Juzo had created some sort of plasma lamp, just like those found in school laboratories or museums, but made of pure energy; so pure that it burned like fire. The soldier relaxed his fingers and the lightning swarm dissolved without a trace.

“H-How did you do that?”

Juzo repeated the show, this time with his other hand, letting the discharges cover it again. Blue flames twirled over his hand, but they didn’t seem to harm him.

“We call it Fotia,” he said.

Uri’s green eyes, as wide open as his mouth was, went back and forth from Juzo’s hand to his hand. Until a while ago, he had been debating whether or not to believe what he heard, now he was debating whether or not to believe in what he had seen.

“T-That’s b-because of the project?” Uri mimicked the movement with his hand; obviously, nothing happened. Well, of course! What did you think would happen, silly?

“W-Why can’t I do it? “C-Can I do it?”

“No,” Malin said, and to shock Uri a bit more, she also created spheres of electrical discharges in her hands. “This has nothing to do with the project Juzo was talking about. He did it to shut your mouth for a while; didn’t you, Juzo?”

Juzo rolled up his uniform’s sleeve and showed Uri the inner side of his wrist. Under the skin, just before the joint, there was a small, microchip-shaped flat object.

“An implant! But how could they achieve—?” Uri couldn’t believe it. He took Juzo by the arm and approached him to see it closely. There was the little scar where the chip had entered. “Who developed it? You know it? Do you know if it’s Morris & Co.?”

“It’s part of a scientific-military program,” Juzo said. “Grenadiers. Elite soldiers.”

“Amazing! How come I’ve never heard of this? Why don’t your superiors go public with such a fantastic thing?”

“First, because it’s a secret program,” the girl said. “And second, because of twenty soldiers trying to become Grenadiers, only one survives the treatment,” she added, pointing at the veins in her arm. “The implant is just the trigger; what gives us power is a chemical serum that not all bodies can resist.”

“Oh, right…” The spirit of a marvelous entrepreneur disappeared from Uri. “The deaths give a bad image and that would waste the business, wouldn’t it?”

“Arms science and technology have come a long way behind the rest of the world, boy,” she added. “It’s not wise to dismiss what we tell you about the project just because it sounds ridiculous.”

Uri shook his head.

“I understand… Malin—was that your name? But one thing is to undergo treatment with a serum and an implant, Malin, and quite another is to get you into a machine as a baby, and then throw you to the nearest orphanage and wait for you to become a super being. I work where technological devices are manufactured, and I’ve never—”

And suddenly, he fell silent. They all fell silent.

A trickle of blood had trickled out of Uri’s nostrils.

“Oh, come on! Not again!” Uri growled as he perceived warm blood, kissing his lips, sliding down his chin. His already stained T-shirt won another red spot.

He quickly pressed his nose, took his head back, and saw the two looking at him with concern.

“Don’t worry. It’s nothing,” he told them and went to the bathroom.

He turned on the light with his elbow, turned on the faucet in the sink, and rinsed his face. Like the previous time, the bleeding ended as quickly as it had begun. He wiped his nose with a tissue and took off his T-shirt.

Juzo and Malin saw him pass by with his bare torso, heading for the laundry room.

“I hope these bloodstains come out,” he murmured as if they cared.

He sprayed the shirt with a stain remover and put it in the washing machine.

“Now, I want you to tell me more about that project and those implants,” he said. The fascination of having seen those spectacular spheres of power displaced the horror of seeing them.

“When did you bleed?” Juzo asked.

“Say what?”

Juzo took a step forward. “You said ‘not again’. At what other moment tonight did you have a nosebleed?”

Uri made a stop. Hold it! It was the first interrogative phrase that came out of Juzo. First time for everything, huh?

And when he returned to the living room area, he ran into a strange state of alertness in the face of those two. Damn! What happened to them? His twin had performed a trick that would have thrown the entire board of Homam Enterprises on its ass, and now he looked worried by a simple nosebleed? Okay, the bleeding could be gross, but it was nothing out of this world.

“At what point?!” Juzo insisted.

Uri shrugged.

“In the nightclub, shortly after you caught me off guard in the bathroom. Why?”

Juzo took another step toward him. He seemed to be holding back so as not to burst into panic.

“Listen to me carefully,” he said. “Tell me everything unusual that happened to you at that nightclub.”

“Unusual? What if we try with: everything?” Uri sighed. “I argued with my best friend, I ran into you, and I ran into a crazy woman—or rather, she ran into me.” Juzo and Malin exchanged glances. “And since we’re asking questions, what was that stupid thing about showing up and storming off like that?”

“Too long to explain,” Juzo dismissed it.

“And why don’t you take the time?”

Malin stepped between the brothers. “Uri, did that woman do something to you?”

Uri widened his eyes; how did she know what had happened?

“She dug his nails into me,” he said, showing them the marks on his arm. “Here. See?”

Malin and Juzo exchanged glances again.

“They didn’t need to stop by here because they’ve already found him,” she said.

“It means they might be on their way,” Juzo concluded. “We’d better get going.”

Uri raised his hand as a stop sign.

“What are you talking about? Go where?”

Juzo pulled out a couple of new items from the backpack. This time it was chrome rectangles the size and thickness of a small book. With the help of elastic X-shaped straps, both he and Malin adjusted one of these objects to their back, carrying them as if they were a small metal backpack.

“What are those things?”

“Tell me more about the woman at the nightclub,” Juzo

said. “Did you know her? What did she look like?”

“Good heavens… Hmm…” Uri didn’t know whether to answer what they were asking him or to continue asking questions that surely no one would answer. “Well, she was a tall and sexy lady; fifty-something? She had black skin and gray hair. I don’t remember seeing her before.”

Juzo turned to Malin.

“I need you to find out who that woman is,” he ordered. “Go to the nightclub; I doubt she’s still there, but it’s our only clue.”

“Consider it done,” Malin agreed, and walked over to Uri. “Hey, pretty boy, remind me of the address of that club.”

“Five and tenth avenue.”

“Great.”

Juzo unplugged the chargers he had plugged into the outlets—the lamp returned to normal—took one set of bracelets and put them on.

Malin did the same with the other pair, and sliding her fingers across the surface of one of them, revealed a holographic screen.

“Their battery is low, but it will do to keep the communication channel open.”

Uri snapped his fingers.

“So those things are wrist phones!” He exclaimed. “Where did they get them? What company produces them? They’re from Morris & Co., right? Those bastards got ahead of us! I knew that—”

Before Uri’s watchful eye, Malin went to one window, the one next to the laundry room and facing the side of the building; she opened it, sat on the windowsill with half her body out, and threw herself into the void.

“What—?!”

Horrified, Uri ran to see where the girl had fallen. Clinging to the window frame, he looked down at the alley.

There was no one there. No one was crushed against the pavement, twelve stories below, or on top of the dumpster; neither did anyone hang from the power line, nor fell on the roof of the neighboring building. It was night and the lighting in that area was not the best, but it should be enough to identify someone’s body.

Until he distinguished, among all the city sounds, a whistle similar to the turbines of an airplane, although much lower, and out of the corner of his eye, he noticed something hovering next to him. It was a pair of black boots. The blonde girl’s shiny high-heeled boots.

“It can’t be…”

Malin was suspended in the air; with her golden bangs weaving by the wind and her cheeks painted by moonlight. Two rectangular thrusters had unfolded from the small chrome-plated object on her back, like metal wings. They didn’t seem to emit hot combustions or drafts, just a low hiss, and a silvery aura. Antigravity devices, Uri deduced. He’d seen similar prototypes thanks to his job; none of them had shown such satisfactory results as the one he was witnessing now, though. That was for sure.

Malin smiled and, after winking at him, flew southeast and got lost between the buildings, blurring between the city lights and the shadows of the night.

It took Uri several seconds to talk again.

“Where did you guys get such beautiful things?”

“We stole them,” Juzo said, putting the files and photographs back in his backpack.

Uri was speechless.

“We must go now.” Juzo pointed out the exit. “I imagine you must have a vehicle; we better go on it. It’s gonna be harder for them to track us down.”

“Who will find it harder to track us?”

Carrying his backpack over that small propeller that he had folded on his back, Juzo led Uri toward the apartment door.

“I’ll explain it to you on the way,” he said, and half-opening the door, he checked nobody was in the hallway.

“Hold on, I’ll get a shirt and—” Uri pivoted. But suddenly, they heard a tinkling sound coming from the bedroom upstairs. One of the window frames must have knocked on the wall.

Juzo asked him to keep quiet and pushed him into the hallway. There was no time to go for a shirt.

“I always leave the windows open,” Uri whispered. “It must be the wind, just that.”

But Juzo didn’t listen.