Malin lowered her jacket’s zipper, and with a tweak to her hair, she brought back life to her appearance.

She raised an eyebrow. What a dumpster! that face said. The room on the inside looked as bad as it looked on the outside. It was a second-rate place going down for the third degree; so small, only a bed and a table fit in. It was poorly lit; it looked ugly and smelled like wet carpet mixed with a cheap vanilla freshener. Behind the bed was a door; that had to be the bathroom, though she didn’t bother to find that out; she’d already decided she wouldn’t set foot in there.

“Couldn’t you have paid for a better place?”

“It took you a while,” he received her and handed her a towel. “Is everything all right?”

She made a funny face and sneezed, then she sniffed the towel to make sure it was clean.

“Besides freezing to death, and what I told you on the way, all good.”

As she dried herself up, she watched her friend looking at her as if he were waiting for her to say something.

Juzo Romita was a weird guy, and quite fascinating at the same time. Fascinating, in the sense that a genius or a psychopath could be to a therapist. Juzo hid a handsome face behind a frown; a pair of green eyes immersed in an eternal melancholy; brown hair always neat, and a stubble that never grew thick. His personality was as overwhelming as the weather outside, sometimes just as stormy, and his life was more than interesting. Shrink food, some would say. Demanding and sometimes insufferable, she would state, if asked for an opinion.

However, she understood him better than perhaps even himself and appreciated him more than anyone in the world.

This time, though, besides serious, Malin noticed anxiety in him. Juzo had the expression covered with shadows, and she bet all her chips the key to such darkness was in the way he was dressed up.

“You know uniforms don’t stimulate my fantasies, right?” she said, trying to break the ice, but he didn’t smile.

Juzo was wearing the olive-green privates’ uniform of the Markabian Imperial Army: a tight-fitting combat jacket with a wide belt, the white and crimson shield held close to the heart; cargo pants, and black boots. Those clothes meant only one thing: trouble.

“I remember when I used to dress one of these,” she said. “Did I hate it! It didn’t do my figure any justice.”

She glanced around, looking for a clue as to what they were doing there. Juzo’s backpack was on the bed; maybe that’s where the secret lay. “So, what’s the big plan? Are we going to infiltrate another convoy?”

Juzo ignored her questions, asking another: “Did you find out what I asked for?”

“About a group of scientists named The Order that worked near the South Tropical Canyon,” she said and shrugged. “Sorry. Nothing. And just to keep this in mind, in the rest of the continent, there are eight hundred lodges, organizations, and companies with that name; unless you have a list of participants, it will be impossible to pinpoint a specific group. The Order and The Group are the names most used by cartels and other criminal organizations because with such a generic name it’s impossible to identify their members.”

Juzo didn’t seem surprised by the answer. He paused, thought for a while, and continued:

“What about the other thing?”

“Same luck. Before the crime of the students, the Empire didn’t keep data on a lab in the Canyon,” Malin said, and this time she noticed the disappointment in him. “Not even my former teammates in the Break-in Squadron, who have the largest record of clandestine labs on the continent, were aware of it. Though I don’t know if you know, a child’s body was found a few years ago in that same grotto. The Gamma district was in charge of the investigation. The case closed ridiculously quickly and had not been solved. It was as if someone…”

“…Had deliberately ignored the case to prevent someone from finding out the lab?” Juzo completed the sentence, and picking up his backpack from the bed, he withdrew some files from it. “Yeah, that’s what I’ve been told.”

“If so, it would mean that someone with authority knew of it,” she replied while trying to see what those files were. “That’s all I could dig around, though. Why are you interested in a case like this, anyway?”

“Just because.”

Her face turned red. “Excuse me?” She took a deep breath; her hands on her waist. Did she cross a hell of a storm only to receive such an empty, unacceptable reply? And when she realized she wouldn’t get an extended answer on the matter, she got impatient. She looked him up and down. “Why do you dress like that?” She needed an explanation about whatever, but she didn’t have any luck with that either. “Why are we here?”

Juzo kept glancing at the files he had in his hand. The bastard was buying time to find an excuse to tell her; she knew it; she knew him pretty well to fall in such a silly ruse.

“I didn’t want us to meet in the usual place,” he said. “There’s an information leak in our group, and I wanted to keep this as far away as possible.”

Malin showed him around.

“I think we’re covered in that regard. Now, talk.”

Juzo looked up at her but kept silent. The storm was howling outside.

“Juzo, I have almost two years associated with your group of Rowdy Ones, playing cat and mouse with the military,” she said. “That’s all I’ve been doing since I deserted. Two years, Juzo! And in all this time, we’ve discovered several who promised to die for the revolution, when they really sought to identify the ringleaders of the movement and run to the nearest imperial post to open their mouths and collect a reward. That there’s a snitch is not news; there are lots of them, and every group or association has at least one. There will always be roaches in restaurants’ kitchens, and we were never free from them!”

“Don’t get mad,” he said.

Malin sighed.

“Look, Juzo, I know you well,” she stated. “I know you brought me here for a more serious reason than an information leak, and you expect me to get into your game and try to decipher it as if it were the mystery of the day. ‘Let’s play roulette! Is Juzo truly concerned about a snitch, or is there a coded message in his words?’ If I can’t guess what you want, we’ll leave this filthy room and I’ll still don’t know why I left my house with this weather and I drove all the way here, freezing my butt, just to tell you something I could have told you on the phone.” She took her cell phone out of her pocket and shook it. “You know these lines are ready to operate on seven-frequency, and there’s nothing safer than that. Now, open your damn mouth! I wanna know why you disguised yourself as an imperial soldier, and why your face is sourer than usual.”

Malin crossed her arms, dropping the baton of the dialogue on him.

Juzo left the excuses aside; pulled his hair back, made a face a father would make to tell his son mom and dad won’t live together anymore, and handed the files over to her.

“Yesterday, Rigel gave me this,” he said. “Old files they found in a hidden lab in the Canyon.”

Intrigued, Malin started to read them, glancing at the pictures attached to them. Her eyebrows arched, and her eyes went wide.

Seeing her friend so engrossed and unable to utter a word, Juzo saw reflected in her the same bewilderment he must have manifested the night before when he read those files for the first time. He would never forget it.