Brun felt dizzy as if someone were pulling his head, wanting to rip it off his neck. What caused this suffering? The children? No, that dreadful feeling came from his awakening.

Brun squeezed his eyes, and when he reopened them, he was no longer in the web of purple nebulae or the dark, but inside a huge box with green walls, a room covered with hideous stains.

Yes, he remembered this place. This is where he was napping. Back there was that monstrosity with metal tentacles and copper hairs rising to the ceiling. The creature with a bunch of heads and black eyes, one on top of the other, that kept the treasure inside. A being that everyone seemed to worship, even the doctors who had—

What had happened in that place? It was a mess!

“Don’t worry about it now,” the child said, holding him by the hand.

He was horrified by what he saw. Was he the one who—?

“Those men did something good for us…” said one.

“But if they had kept going, they would have ruined everything,” finished another.

“They had to be eliminated.”

Yes, memories about that were coming back. Wait a minute! Someone else had been there. His brother.

Broga. Yes, he remembered now. His brother’s name was Broga. Broga had taken care of him.

“Don’t worry, Brun,” his brother used to tell him. “You’ll feel better soon. I’ll help you.”

Although the duplicate children whispered in his ear that he didn’t need help, that he was fine without Broga’s help. The duplicate children didn’t like Broga, they didn’t like Broga’s plans; they couldn’t do anything against Broga either, though. The duplicate children knew well that he, Brun, would do nothing to hurt Broga.

“All right. Move,” one of the children pulled his arm.

“Go find the threat,” said another.

“Yes, before the threat gets here and takes our treasure.”

He left the room and went into a long, dark tunnel with green walls as well. There, he saw him. A slim, elegant man dressed in a black suit was coming in a hurry to welcome him. It was a bald man, and his face was weird. He had only one eye in the middle, huge and red, and long, funny mustaches.

He knew him. He’d seen him working with his brother Broga. Was he the threat the children were talking about?

“Master Brun, you have awakened,” said the mustache man; something odd because he had no mouth to speak. “I will inform your awakening to Master Broga,” he added, and turning around, he returned in the direction where he had come from.

“Brun, stop him!” the duplicate children ordered.

“Broga must not know you’re awake.”

Confused, Brun looked at the children. Why—?

“It would ruin the surprise!”

What a surprise?

“Brun, stop him right now!”

The children’s voices sounded in unison and made his ears hurt. Brun covered them, though, there was nothing to stop that horrible sound. He had to obey them for them to shut up. So, he stretched out his arms to the bald, one-eyed man, and held him from behind. But when his fingers came into contact with him, the poor man blew up into pieces and colorful sparks; something similar to what had happened to the doctors, long ago.

Poor mustache man!

“Now, go find the threat, Brun,” the children insisted.

Wait! Didn’t he already have? He was so confused!

Suddenly, the nebulae spread in front of him, and as he stepped forward, he found himself in another tunnel; one gray and rocky, licked by shadows, full of square, black eyes.

No, they weren’t eyes; they were holes in the wall.

The good thing was that in that place there were also lights, spots of light similar to the nebulae, only yellow instead of purple: lamps. And there were other things, too. Tools. He’d seen tools like that; Bernardo used to have a couple of those in the garage, as he recalled.

He was in a cave, and someone has been working there. The intruder!

One of the duplicate children pulled his hand again.

“Brun, kill the bad boy who comes to take what is ours,” he ordered, and suddenly, his voice grew deep like an adult’s, just like his. “Kill him, now!”

What bad boy was the child talking about?

Whom—

He turned to see around him, and that’s when he spotted them. One, two, three, four, and five. Five youngsters; four boys, and a girl. No, there was a sixth one, a young man who was fleeing, hurrying towards the red light at the end of the tunnel. The thieves!

Where had those young thieves appeared from? Had they been there since the beginning, and he hadn’t seen them? How long had he been there? How long have those people been there, working, stealing from him?

The five ones who remained there were staring at him as if he had magically appeared among them. It wasn’t magic, you fools! The nebulae had brought him there! But why didn’t they take their eyes off of him? Was it because his butt could be seen a little bit through the untied gown?

The lamps flashed, and suddenly, the yellow lights went away; only the red light that came from afar remained to combat the gloom.

He took a step, and the boys shrieked. Why do you guys want to take our treasure? he wanted to ask them.

He extended his arm to the young girl near him and took her by the head. He knew that by pressing certain points of what people had behind their eyes—brains, they called them—you could prevent the other from doing things that you did not want them to do. He’d learned that long ago; he didn’t remember when or where; perhaps Bernardo had told him, or perhaps Bernardo had done it to him. Or he’d learned it from Lucy—Who was Lucy? No matter; he would try to do it with the girl. He would press some parts of her brain so she would stay away from what belonged to him and the duplicate children.

But something went wrong. He heard a crack! And all of a sudden, his fingers got stuck in that girl’s head.

He shook his hand to free his hand, but the girl somehow pulled her head so as not to let him go. He shook it and shook it until he could finally withdraw his hand from her. The poor girl fell to the ground.

The other thieves got scared. One of them pounced on him, raising an iron stick with a long nail at the top; and when he wanted to grab it, the nail moved on its own and ended up nailed to the boy.

Why was everything going so wrong?

He caught up with the others who were running away. Were they taking something that wasn’t theirs?

He took one by the shoulder and turned him over to see what he stole, but the young man threw himself against the cave wall, smashing himself against the rocks.

“Wwhhy?” he asked.

No better luck with the other two, though. Wherever he rested his fingers, crack! and more cracks! were heard. Why were these people so fragile?

He looked at them lying on the floor. None of them seemed to hold anything that didn’t belong to them; that was good.

So, he went for the last of those nosy youngsters; the one who had fled the cave when he’d arrived. He let the purple nebulae lead him to the boy. There, where the nebulae were beating hard, where those traces of gas were seen moving like tongues of fire—green at their tips, violets in their center—that was where he should go.

Without hesitation, he got into that dark place, full of plants and trees. It felt strange to make his way through the plants; the leaves tickled his legs. It felt weird, but not unpleasant.

Until he finally found the last of the young thieves. This one was hiding something in his arms, a dirty tile.

I’m not gonna hurt you. Just give me back what you’ve got there, he meant to say; but the thief was crying. And what was he supposed to do with the people that were crying? He should hug them and comforted them until they stopped crying. And that’s what Brun did, and that’s what he got; that everything went silent once again, that there were no more tears.

“What have you done, Brun?” one of the duplicate children asked him.

Suddenly, that legion of creepy kids had surrounded him again. How could they have followed him from the cave to there? Oh, right! They could also swim in the nebulae, just like he could.

“What did you do, Brun?” a duplicate child asked.

“Protecting the treasure,” he replied as if asking ‘what else?’. He picked up the ugly tile from the floor and showed it to the children. “They had already started stealing things from our house.”

“They’re not the ones who came for our treasure,” the other child replied.

Brun stared at them, confused.

“The bad boy we were talking about is him!” another one pointed out, and all the duplicate children pointed in the same direction.

Brun gazed up, and amid the darkness and the trees, he saw another sea of nebulae; one very different from his. These nebulae buzzed, sprinkled with pretty dots of light, but kind of cold; just like the stars of space.

And from these strange nebulae, a person appeared; a man who came from who knows where heading toward him, staggering. Was he hurt? No, this man walked weirdly because the shape of his body was weird.

He looked the stranger in the face and realized this man was very much like him. Was it Broga? No, it wasn’t his brother. His brother didn’t have such a… funny-looking body.

“He is an aberration, Brun,” one of the children said.

“A being that shouldn’t exist,” another one added.

It was true. There was something about this guy he didn’t like. To begin with, he was a creep, because he was naked and did nothing to cover himself. But also… There was a word Bernardo used to describe this kind of body: misshapen? Yes, that was the word! Misshapen!

This guy’s body was misshapen; his head was bald, just like his, but it was slumped forward, showing a grotesque hump rising from behind. His eyes were ugly; all white, as if someone had erased them. On one side he had an arm thick like a log and so long that it touched his knees, while on the other side he had two arms! One thin and the other as small as a child’s. Also, he had something from behind, peeking out between his legs. A tail? No. It was a third leg, as tiny as a baby’s. It was horrendous!

Also, the guy had a lot of scars that went from one side to the other, all over his body; marked lines like the ones he had around his head, crossing his forehead. Broga, his real brother, had left that mark on his head when he had tried to help him, a long, long time ago. Stitch marks, they were called.

But this guy had a lot of stitches, and not just on the forehead like him, but on the chest, on the giant arm, on the legs. The poor man was so full of patches he looked just like that garment that the nurses who lived with Bernardo had mended after he tore it to pieces.

Who are you? he asked, but the stranger didn’t answer.

“An impostor who wanted to be you and your brother at the same time,” a duplicate child said. “That’s what he is.”

“An impostor who comes looking for what is not his.”

“The treasure is ours by right, Brun. You must not let him take it away from us!”

“Protect the treasure! Protect it!” the duplicate children repeated.

So, Brun lunged at the misshapen man and protected what was theirs.