Even if it wasn’t noticeable, Rigel’s hair stood on end; he felt the anxiety in the pit of his stomach.

That place might be empty; the equipment had said so, and even his sixth sense supported it. But still, he was sure they would find something, or that something would find them. Another dead child like the one those students found two years ago? He didn’t know, but something was coming. Soon. Perhaps when they turn right.

End of the corridor. They turned right. Nothing. Just another branch of the building, identical to the one they just left behind; yards and yards of black and white flooring and more doors. No exit. No hideous creature in sight. No killer.

Although, hideous creature or not, murderer or not, someone had walked this stretch not long ago; And they had done it several times: the footprints in the dust exposed it.

“Maybe Serrano was right,” Snow said, and pointed at the marks on the floor.

Rigel shooed off the ghosts of his mind and continued; no one was going to stop now for the possibility of running into someone; after all, they were armed and their flashlights still worked.

In this sector, the doors had small windows. He tried to see through them, but the reflection of the light on the murky glass made it hard to tell what was inside.

One of the doors had a broken window. He went over to see what was inside and jumped up.

There was a head trimming darkness. Someone was in there, less than three feet from him.

No. It wasn’t a person. He lit well and discovered that empty, pale face, watching him with the only dark and lifeless eye he had; the mute expression of abandonment.

Even after realizing he was looking at a Cyclops droid, Rigel had to make an effort to steady his breathing.

He moved the flashlight, and there he found the rest of the cybernetic body; disassembled and covered in dust, surrounded by metal parts and pieces of solid silicone. And there wasn’t just one; there were five or six androids; all huddled together, with those featureless heads and those eyes that stared at nothingness, like crash test dummies, dying in a workshop warehouse.

“Anything?” Snow approached.

“Lots of droids,” Rigel replied.

Suddenly, a tinny resonance erupted in the hallway and made them jump. Froia had kicked something metal that rolled on the floor. All three of them lowered their lights and pointed to the same point.

At Froia’s feet lay a cybernetic body, all torn apart, surrounded by broken pieces and a large dark stain that seemed like blood: a puddle of oil. What remained of the torso was a human-pectoral-shaped metallic shell, scorched and covered with a white layer of molten silicone. One arm was shattered, and the other was curled as if it had been twisted before being torn off.

What Froia had kicked was the android’s head. The part of the face was broken and a little detached from the head, like a poorly fitted mask; and under the visor, it had long, cartoonish handlebar mustaches with well-defined curves drawn with a marker.

“Another Cyclops,” Froia said and pointed at the funny mustaches. “At least his owner had a sense of humor and wanted to humanize him.”

Rigel noticed that, in the light, the oil splatters didn’t look opaque, but bright. He stepped on one, dragged his foot, and proved his suspicion. The floor had gained a new stain.

“The oil’s still wet,” he said.

“It must have been destroyed just a few days ago,” Snow deduced. “Maybe the killer.”

Froia crouched in front of the android’s head, moved it a little, and observed a small dark box installed on its crown. He checked that the signal from his sonar remained jammed and commented: “He had a four-frequency emitter plugged in.”

With his eyes, Rigel asked him to explain himself.

“These transmitters prevent circuits from overloading,” Froia said, “allowing an electronic mechanism, such as an android, to operate in electromagnetically destabilized places,” he added and pointed to his surroundings with the sonar.

“Whoever left this Cyclops as a custodian, knew about this strange phenomenon,” Snow guessed.

Froia turned the android’s head again, exposing the part of the back of his neck that was still intact. There, covered with burn marks, was a tiny knob.

“Well, here’s his regulation switch, all right—and it’s fine,” he noted. “If they wanted to put him out of service, it would have been enough to pull this damn knob down, instead of blowing him to pieces.”

“Is it sentimentalism what’s coming from your voice, Froia?” Snow joked.

“You know I’m a sucker for machines,” Froia continued. “It’d have been nice to dig into his memory banks and see what they had to tell us. As burnt as they are, I doubt their circuits will be in the mood to speak.”

“What’s his license code? Does he have one?”

With his finger, Froia removed part of the soot from the back of the neck and discovered the small plate attached next to the switch. 4547.BRU he could read before the burn stains erased the rest.

“Well, at least we know his name started with Bru.”

“Having his entire code wouldn’t have done much either,” Rigel said. “Those who’ve operated here wouldn’t have legally registered their androids. C’mon, let’s keep going.”

The three continued to advance through the long corridors.

Rigel tried to open another door, but like all of them, the lock was stuck.

“There’s something here, colonel,” Froia announced.

Rigel pivoted toward the voice—and the echo—and saw his officer standing in front of a door, bigger than the others and with two sheets. That had to be the entrance of an emergency room or the morgue; those kinds of doors made the comes and goes of gurneys much easier.

One of the door’s sheets was slightly ajar, and between sheet and sheet, there was a vertical line of pure darkness.

Rigel set the sole of his boot on the half-open sheet and pushed it. The metal door jerked open with a squeal; the sound was deafening.

The three of them held their breath, until that deathly silence with which they were already familiar returned.

The room welcomed them with a stroke of hot air, and the flashlights revealed that it wasn’t a morgue after all, but a huge operating room.

“Puff! I’m glad to wear the helmet,” Snow said. “I feel nauseous just thinking about the smell that must be here.”

There was burned junk here and there, plus an operating table and a dented stretcher, surrounded by what appeared to have been an extensive network of patient monitoring equipment; all destroyed.

Although, the striking part was something else. Junk, walls, floor, ceiling; everything was stained with black splashes, like furious strokes of a mad artist.

“Is this where the short circuit originated?” Froia wondered; his voice echoed.

“It seems ground zero of an explosion,” Snow said.

Rigel was about to touch one of those black stains on the wall, but the flashlight gave him a better idea of what that really was. It wasn’t black as much as dark red. Plus, sprinkled all over it, glued to the tiles, there were tiny fragments of things. He detached one and looked at it closely.

“Don’t touch anything!” he ordered, right on time to stop Froia from doing so. “These aren’t burn marks; this is blood.” He held up the fragment for the others to see it. “There are shattered bones on the walls.”

Snow and Froia were astonished. They turned their lights to the floor and found torn clothing everywhere, all covered in dried blood; also, shapeless things here and there: the desiccated remains of those who had once dressed them.

Froia got sick; it was understandable.

“There was a power surge here, alright,” Snow said. “And I’m definitely glad I don’t have my nose exposed now.” Then he and Rigel continued inspecting the room, which was bigger than they thought.

A few steps forward, their beams of light found an enormous machine.

At the back of the room rested an immense ivory-colored apparatus; it was far from where the explosion had originated, which apparently had saved it from being covered with human remains; it just had a few spots. It was an assembly of machines of different sizes and shapes, stacked one on top of the other until reaching the ceiling, joined by cables and steel tubes, with boards full of switches and pressure gauges, plus some black screens that gave the impression to be the blind eyes of a cybernetic creature.

“Looks like a monolith,” Snow said.

With his hand, Rigel brushed the dust off the old control board. He pressed a couple of buttons and switches, hoping the machine would come back to life, but nothing. The screens were dead.

“These types of dashboards were discontinued decades ago,” Snow said. “If the mother disk is still intact…”

“I doubt it,” Froia said.

And while Snow and Froia stood in front of the artifact, almost worshipping it, Rigel aimed his light at a mess of snarled wires on the floor and traced its trajectory from the back of the computer to the darkest part of the room.

The wires disappeared at the entrance of a chamber. The idea that this dark threshold was a mouth spitting shadows, came to his mind as vividly as the image of the hideous creature had in the hallway.

He kept going, and upon getting into that dark mouth, he felt the cold kiss of a shiver on the back of his neck. Fear?

Rigel halted for a second: was he feeling scared? He, who had seen hundreds of violent crimes, was now afraid of the dark? Rigel shook his head. His old girlfriend told him that his will was strong and that his stubbornness was as heavy as a bull; against those two things, fear couldn’t hurt him.

And when he reached the doorway frame, and the flashlight showed him what was inside, his insides twisted even more than they had back there with the image of that stuffed massacre. His thick eyebrows rose, and his small eyes widened behind the transparent cover of his helmet.

Horror had struck Colonel Rigel Beta as nothing had done in years.

Now, at home, that image was still there, in front of his eyes, like a mirage.

It took him almost two hours to get to sleep.