Going out with his bare torso wasn’t something Uri had never done before. Mister Quintana, his only neighbor on the floor, had seen him a few times going out of the apartment almost naked when taking out the garbage or saying goodbye to one of his lovers. However, that night, going out shirtless and with his twin behind him, forcing him to move forward, gave Uri a feeling of embarrassment. He was more afraid of Juzo’s overreaction than what the tinkling of the window’s frame could mean.

“That must have been the wind,” he insisted, though he kept talking quietly just in case. “We’re on the 12th floor, y’know? The air currents are strong up here.”

“Maybe,” Juzo responded, also quietly, and glanced back over his shoulder. “But we can’t take risks.” He pointed to the elevators, and they entered one.

The trip to the first floor began.

Uri stood in front of one of the mirrors and watched the countless reflections of his brother and his own, projecting into infinity thanks to the set of facing mirrors. In one image was he bare-chested, and in the next, he was with shorter hair, a beard, and a military uniform. A true doppelgänger. One was him, the other wasn’t him; and the effect was repeating itself; one was him, the other wasn’t him, one was him, the other wasn’t him… The house of mirrors at the carnival.

In the reflection, he noticed a trail of blood peeking out of his nose. And when he wanted to ask Juzo why so much trouble over a simple nosebleed, the bell rang and the aluminum sheets set aside, revealing the entrance hall.

Uri came out of the elevator and walked to the entrance of the building, begging for Ruben to be somewhere else so he wouldn’t see him with Juzo. Any awkward situation should be avoided. Approaching the glass doors, he saw the caretaker outside, leaning on the pillar of the entrance, flipping through the Loud holo-magazine he had given him. Damn!

Alerted by the opening of the door, Ruben turned to them.

“You came for a change of clothes, and off you go now, almost naked,” he said to Uri, but when he saw Juzo, he dropped the card and the holo-magazine went out.

Uri barely waved him goodbye and hurried to his car. He had Juzo on his back and he didn’t want to receive another one of those hideous pushes just for having diverted his gaze to Ruben more than necessary. For the moment, it was better to play along until he knew exactly what was happening and who they were escaping from.

Uri got behind the wheel. Juzo, without taking his backpack off his back, climbed into the passenger seat and gave him a precise order, though nothing revealing: “Drive.”

The engine purred softly and the vehicle’s headlights gleamed like the golden eyes of a cat in the middle of the night. Uri put his foot on the pedal and stepped forward, not knowing where to go and afraid to ask.

The wind stirred the treetops, and some reddish leaves fell on the windshield. At that late hour of the night, there were few moving cars on those streets; most remained parked on one side, guarded by the yellowish glow of the light poles, silently waiting for the beginning of the next day.

Uri had the feeling that he was abandoning the tranquility of his neighborhood, perhaps forever; and trying to escape from so much fatalism, his mind filled with inopportune thoughts that blossomed out of nowhere, like what face would Trevor make when he met Juzo.

All right, enough with the nonsense, he thought, and after crossing the traffic light, he rubbed his nose, cleared his voice, and glanced at Juzo.

“Repeated epistaxis is a common immune response to an aggression caused by Red radiation,” his brother explained.

“Okay—What?”

“Epistaxis, a nosebleed.”

“Ugh!” Uri hit the steering wheel. “Not that, the Red radiation thing.”

“It is a special radiation emitted by a certain type of people,” Juzo said, detonating unprecedented terror in Uri; nothing good came from having bled with that of receiving radiation.

“Oh, C’mon! T-this isn’t the first time in my life that my nose bleeds, y’know?”

Juzo raised his hand to make him hush. “I’d agree with you if I hadn’t lived everything I lived today.”

“H-hey, and that radiation… is it dangerous? I mean, to the human body.”

“I don’t know.”

The astonishment he had experienced with such wonders like the Fotia and that propeller vanished from Uri in a blink of an eye. The idea of mortality had suddenly darkened his mind and put pressure on his chest. He neglected driving and passed a red light. A horn brought him back to reality, and in the rearview mirror, saw a car resuming its way down the street he had just crossed.

“What kind of person emits radiation like this?” He looked at Juzo sideways. “Are you doing it now?”

“No. It’s emitted only by some Eddanics.”

Uri was terrified, his voice threatened to get stuck in his throat.

“Eddanics? And who are those people?”

“The natives of the Edda Peninsula.”

“Where’s that?” Uri looked back to Juzo. “You and your girlfriend come from there?”

“We come from another place, north of that peninsula. From Markabia.”

“Markabia?” It took Uri a second to pinpoint mentally what part of the planet that city occupied, though it took him longer to process what that meant. “The capital of the Markabian Empire?” he said. “That’s across the ocean, on the eastern continent.”

Of course, that’s where the strange accent of those two came from; no wonder it had been difficult to define. He, who even moved within an active social circle, could count on his fingers the number of people he knew who had visited that territory, and all of them had been for work reasons and their stay hadn’t lasted more than a couple of days, to close a commercial deal or a political treaty, none had gone on vacation. And there were plenty of reasons not to. Now it made sense why Juzo was wearing a uniform.

“Right! You guys live under a military regime,” Uri pointed out. “I know citizens are prohibited from leaving the territory, right? I heard of people who died trying to escape your country and…” Then, he looked at the sorry state of Juzo’s uniform and remembered the mud stains that both he and the girl had on their boots, and believed he understood everything. “Oh! I see. You and your girlfriend are fugitives from the regime. That’s why you guys stole those thrusters and stuff; am I right? We are running away from them, right?”

Juzo showed a part of the small pocket of his jacket, next to the heart, and Uri noticed that the fabric was torn as if there had been something that was ripped off. From the same pocket, Juzo withdrew a crimson medal with the image of a white horse with wings shaped like laurel wreaths. Uri knew the crest; it was from the Markabian Empire. Juzo opened the window and tossed the little shield out onto the street.

Uri gritted his teeth. A fugitive in the passenger seat was a problem. A fugitive with a face identical to his who was making him an accessory to a crime that could spit a cataract of international trouble on him was too much.

“Are we running away from them?” he insisted once more.

Juzo did not reply, and Uri slammed against the steering wheel.

“This is not the time to play the mysterious man, damn it!”

The silence seemed to cut the car in half. It was time for both of them to renew the air in their lungs.

Calmer, Uri sighed.

“I need to know what this is about, okay?” he said. His tone of voice was almost a plea. “On the one hand, I was part of an experiment that could have turned me into a who-knows-what, but that’s been canceled for years. Now I find out that this project may have developed on another continent, and that there are people there who can emit a type of radiation that causes nosebleeds. How do these things relate to each other? Tell me.”

Juzo took some air.

Uri clung to the wheel. A long story was on the way, and he needed to get ready for it.

“Thirty-something years ago, a group of scientists found mutant proteins in a progeny of identical twins,” Juzo said. Upon hearing mutant proteins, Uri gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Each protein could combine with that of its partner and generate a chemical blast that released large amounts of energy. Binary Proteins, they called them. Tests were made joining the blood of the twins, mixing their genetic codes, but…”

“None survived, right?” Uri clenched his jaw. “Those are the other babies your girlfriend was talking about.”

Juzo nodded, always looking straight ahead.

“They all ended up… consuming themselves in pure energy, reduced to fire and ashes,” he said. “Until you and I came in, and we survived the first instances of the project. They discovered that physical maturity was essential to withstand the energy bombardment caused by the binding of proteins, so they decided to postpone the experiment and distance us to prevent us from coming into contact prematurely. Our union was scheduled for four years ago. Everything would have ended there if it had not been for a laboratory accident that killed the people in charge of the project.”

Uri smacked his lips.

“Hey, but I’ve felt nothing out of place,” he said. “I mean those proteins. If I’d had something weird in my blood, I’d have felt… I don’t know. Something would have appeared in some medical test, right?” He shrugged. “What about you?”

“The proteins are in our blood. Trust me,” Juzo replied. “Mine is R-type and works as a reactor, while yours is a C-type…”

“‘C’? So what? Would mine be some kind of catalyst or something?”

Once again, Juzo nodded again.

“And how supposedly would those proteins have come into contact?” Uri asked; he was afraid of the answer, though.

Juzo gave him a grim look.

“By removing them from the one heart and putting them into the other,” he said.

Uri gulped.

“Well, that sounds terrible.”

Juzo took his hand in the jacket pocket.

“One ignition spark, and the proteins will release their power.”

Uri looked at him out of the corner of his eye; Juzo was hiding something there. The lighter to cause that spark of ignition, maybe? He didn’t dare to ask him. He was afraid the answer was what he imagined. And perhaps because he was bare-chested or because the edge of tragedy kissed his neck, but he felt chills.

“And if that…” He cleared his voice. “And if that were to happen, then what? Are we gonna explode into lights or something?”

“I’m in no hurry to know,” Juzo said.

The lack of a concise answer had sparked a thousand hypotheses in Uri, all negative.

The traffic sounds drew his attention back to the wheel.

“I learned about the project, and I came looking for you,” Juzo said, “because I think you have as much right as I do to know what they did to us. Malin joined me, but…” He paused, searching for the words to continue. “On the way, we learn that someone seeks to finish what those scientists left halfway. Someone who managed to follow us, and who is now onto us.”

Uri’s heart sank again.

“Who is it?” he asked. His lips were shaking. “A surviving scientist on the project?”

“His name is Broga,” Juzo said.

Uri shook his head.

“Broga doesn’t sound like a scientist’s name,” he said. “He’s one of those Grenadiers, like you or your girlfriend, isn’t he? Or is it one of those that emit radiation?”

“Shortly before the lab accident,” Juzo said, “the scientists began using robots for monitoring tasks…”

Uri felt his stomach spasm as if he were chained deep in a pool with piranhas, eager to taste his flavor. Juzo had just uncovered a pot of seething paranoia in front of him. He no longer felt the chills, now he suffocated.

“That Broga guy, it’s a freaking Cyclops model android, right?” he said, and didn’t need to be validated, Juzo’s silence had just proved him right. “Of course, Protocol 128! Shit! You said these files were discovered during an investigation. They probably found the Cyclops as well, and they must have tried to go through his memory banks. If they didn’t insert his license code correctly or didn’t know the password, they may have launched Protocol 128.”

“Trigger programming,” Juzo confirmed.

Uri clicked his tongue. “Yes,” he said. “His masters could have left it dormant for the droid to resume his original programming in case… well, that something happened to them. Damn it! It’ll be difficult to stop him if he’s already started… started chasing us. Shit!”

“For an underwear model, you know a lot about androids,” Juzo said.

“My old job and my new job. And I see that you know quite a bit about me. Too bad I can’t say the same.”

Running his hand through his hair, Uri watched in the rear-view mirror that no one was following them. If the droid was using one of those thrusters, though, then he could follow them from above. He could be in the sky or on the roof of the car right now, and he wouldn’t know it. He stuck his head out the window and looked up. Nothing.

Meanwhile, Juzo remained serious, cold. Or maybe he was just as worried as Uri was, he just didn’t allow himself to express it.

“Hey, I know you’re a fugitive, but we should seek the protection of the police,” Uri suggested. “The android may see us as test subjects and not rest until he removes that protein from us, but someone can do the work for us and take him down, and he will have nothing left to do but to eat tons of lead. I assume you know about Directive 001.”

“No android will kill or raise its fist against another living being,” Juzo said. “It won’t do any good. Broga has come with mercenaries.”

Another answer Uri didn’t expect to hear.

“You got to be kidding!”

“And among them, there’s an Eddanic woman,” Juzo added. “Because of your bleeding, it is likely that…”

“Damn!” Uri cursed, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “And to think you came so close to bumping into her at the disco! What a wonderful night!”