The envelope went under the door around seven o’clock in the morning, as the sunrise was sneaking in through the windows.

Malin, who was in the kitchen making breakfast, heard something scratchy sliding between the front door and the floor, touching the entrance mat. Someone had thrown a little package.

She stopped just before pouring a spoonful of coffee into the coffeemaker, hoping to pick up any other noise. Nothing. She didn’t hear footsteps outside, in the hallway, either. Whoever had just left whatever it was had been stealthy enough, making no sound while leaving. She poured the coffee into the machine and went to the living room.

‘Please, wipe your feet before getting in,’ the entrance mat had written. A few days earlier, Uri had made a peculiar observation: “Even the mat and carpets are boring in this apartment.” Part of the envelope got stuck under the mat.

The first thing Malin thought was: Be careful; it could be a letter bomb. That kind of trick is something from a century ago, but there will always be some nostalgic slob eager to use them in this day and age. Afterward, she shook her head. Why don’t you leave paranoia in your own country, gal? Things are different down here.

The envelope was small and way too thin to contain anything other than paper.

It was weird. As far as she knew, the superintendent didn’t use to go door to door, handing out envelopes; let alone at that hour. Maybe it was some urgent message from the building consortium. Or it could be the CAM expenses bill; she had heard Uri talking about it with this Trevor Homam guy.

She watched through the peephole. The hallway was empty. She opened the door and poked her face. Nobody. As she thought, whoever had dropped it had taken off pretty quickly… Or maybe was watching her in hiding. She closed the door, and although something told her there was nothing to fear, she found it convenient not to spare caution. She looked for some rubber gloves from the laundry room and put them on before lifting the envelope.

She shook it. Judging by its weight, there was nothing but a piece of paper inside. She looked at it against the light and confirmed her thoughts. She opened it, and the content fell to the ground, drawing a swing in the air and landing on the mat, covering part of the boring phrase.

It was a clipping from a printed newspaper—something that could already be counted as a curiosity by itself—belonging to the obituary section, where there was a photo of an old man with a wrinkled face and a serious expression. The data in the clipping’s header: ‘Proxima City. August 30, 2110’, according to the calendar they used on this continent—or, rather, in the rest of the world except in her country—showed it belonged to an edition of the previous month.

Someone had highlighted with a red marker a particular small paragraph, the one next to the old man’s photo.

Rodolfo Gutiérrez. May he rest in peace. He died on August 29, 2110, at the age of 88. Surviving him is his wife Aida Mendoza Gutiérrez. Funeral services will be held at 9 a.m., Friday at the Elysian Fields cemetery. Burial will be made in the same place.

A cold text for a person with a cold face, Malin thought.

Who was the deceased, and who might be interested in Uri, or both of them, seeing that article? Although, that man could also have been someone close to the apartment’s previous tenant. Well, there was an easy and quick way to find it out. She took the cell phone she had taken over, the one Uri had used for work, and spent the next half an hour searching for information about the deceased.

“Are you still here?” The question brought her back to reality. Uri had woken up.

“I slept well, thank you,” she replied.

Uri heaved a resigned sigh. “For a moment, I hoped to get up and not find you here.”

“Yesterday, I made my position clear.”

“So am I,” Uri said and took an empty cup.

Malin showed him the newspaper clipping. “Do you know this man?”

As he poured himself some coffee, Uri stretched his neck out to look at the picture. “Rodolfo Gutiérrez,” he said. “That’s written there, isn’t it?”

“I know. But do you know him?”

“Uh-uh,” Uri shook his head.

“Someone threw it under the door.”

Uri took the clipping—he still had the splint covering his index finger. “A rare kind of advertising.”

“Don’t be silly.” Malin took the clipping out of his hand. “I did some research on him; didn’t find much, though. How many Rodolfo Gutiérrez do you think there are in this city?”

“Thousands?”

“Millions!” she exclaimed, pissed. “Why doesn’t your country’s regents do a better job regulating the names of their citizens? Finding information about someone is almost impossible with so many repeated names. In Markabia and other Imperial Citadels, new names are made official every now and then to avoid situations like these. It’s one of the few good ideas the Army had. I’m telling you; if I hadn’t…”

Uri heard her rant while drinking coffee.

“Well,” he interrupted her, “did you find out anything about this particular Rodolfo Gutiérrez?”

Malin took a sip from his cup. “Little to nothing. He was a real estate agent. Though he may not have been a very good one, I only found just a few transactions made under his name.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Uri said. “I doubt you know much about the real estate topic.”

“The other thing I found out was that the guy spent the last six years of his life in a residential care home,” she told him. “I entered into that place’s database, and I identified him thanks to the patient photo registry.” She raised her hand and made a caveat. “I gotta tell you—if all computer security in this country is as easy to hack as this one, any technician from mine who wants to have some fun causing Cyber terrorism would have a feast in here. Hell! Even I did it with a trifle like this cell phone.”

“Thank you for the tip,” he said. “I’ll tell the guys in the company to improve the firewall against info petty thieves like you.”

“Anyway,” she went on; “this man, Rodolfo, was lost in a mental ocean thanks to severe senile dementia.”

“Like the seventy percent of the elderly in Proxima,” Uri pointed out. “What makes him stand out among the remaining sixty-nine-point-nine percent so that his death goes under this door?”

Malin shrugged. “I don’t know, you tell me. Why would anyone throw this under the door?”

“Good grief, Malin; less than a month ago, an old married couple was renting this apartment. Your old man must have been a relative or an acquaintance of them; what else? Whoever sent the obituary certainly didn’t know a new tenant was living here.” Uri smirked. “You heard? I said tenant, in the singular.”

Malin ignored the comment.

“Do you know how many times I’ve received clues like this in my life?” she said. “Thousands! And how many of them didn’t lead to anything? Many! But when I was serving in the army, I belonged to the Break-in Squadron, and the first thing an intelligence soldier learns is not to rule out anything until you run out of resources.”

Uri took the last sip of his coffee. “I see you’re pretty excited about a silly newspaper clipping.”

“Uri, I may no longer be an Intelligence soldier, but habits are hard to break. Now I’m very bored and with a lot of free time. What the hell do you want me to do?”

“Hey, don’t get me wrong,” he said while washing his cup. “I’m okay with you playing the private eye; that way you won’t be all over me all the time. I also have a lot of very important things to do, like lock myself in to listen to some music, go to the gym and turn some seawater into vapor.”

Then, after seeing her so excited, he said:

“In the contact list of that cell phone—which you have confiscated, by the way—you’ll find Rita Okinawa. She’s my secretary, the most efficient woman I’ve ever met. Text her passing yourself off as me and ask her for information about this Gutiérrez guy. See what she can find. She’ll surely answer you detailing even the zodiac sign of the nurse who changed his diapers in the residential care home.”

Without hesitation, Malin stuck her eyes on the phone.

The day-to-day city racket, that conglomeration of sounds that went from the murmur of people to the street traffic, to a thousand noises, between music and the nearby crossing of a plane about to land, did not exist in that place. There, she could only hear the distant bantering of some children playing, the creaking of the insects announcing the fall of the sun, and the dull hum of the vehicles driving down the highway, beyond the slum at her back.

Malin arrived at her destination after having crossed through the gigantic metropolis combining buses, using the subway, and walking for several blocks. How much time she’d have saved if she’d been wearing her thrusters! But she had left it folded in the apartment; she hadn’t even touched it since bringing it from Markabia, the last time she’d used the Lavra Geysers to get here. That Friday night, when Juzo asked her to check the disco, she had flown because time was pressing; now things had changed and she couldn’t risk being seen soaring through the skies, right? Many vultures were hovering nearby, as Uri had said a few days ago; vultures in suits and ties that she had to avoid, one way or the other. Impractical as it was, for the moment it was better to move on land.

With her arms akimbo, she stopped in front of an old rusty wire fence and gazed out at the vacant lot behind it. A vast piece of land with nothing but brush and garbage, and an abandoned warehouse in the middle, about three hundred feet from the fence. A huge old car hangar turned into a sanctuary for carelessness.

She looked around; no one was there; she went over the fence with a couple of jumps, and immersed in the gloom of dusk, ran toward the warehouse. A couple of iron sheets from the sidewall had fallen off for lack of maintenance, creating a gap that looked like the gaping mouth of a homeless man with several missing teeth. Before her eyes could make out what was inside, beyond the rusted beams of the structure, by smell, Malin knew she would find dust, moisture, and neglect. Then she took a deep breath and slipped through the hole, plunging into the darkness.