1

  From the point where she grabbed the sculpture, Greta concluded her account so quickly that when she fell silent, she needed to draw air forcefully. The narrative ended with her arrival at the gas station.

  "And about what happened there, you know better than I do."

  Daros still hadn't recovered from the shock of hearing all the assaults this woman had endured.

  And there was something else too. A tingling. A warning he couldn't identify where it came from. A sign that some piece was missing from the picture.

  Who cares if something was missing? What Greta told him was already too much. Nothing could be worse.

  Although he himself had been involved in more episodes of violence than he'd like, he had difficulty understanding how a man could hurt a person he claimed to love. And Greta was a woman. No matter how strong she was, she didn't represent a physical threat.

  The attack was cowardly, brutal. Daros had little experience in romantic relationships, but for him marriage was a matter of choice, and a mutual choice. Forcing someone to remain in an unwanted relationship was as productive as forcing an employee to keep working for the success of a company he hates.

  He hoped to have the pleasure of meeting Valério someday. And not to talk.

  "I don't know what to say about this."

  "About what happened at the gas station?"

  "No, about what your husband did to you. From what you told me, he's alive. He just disappeared somehow, for some reason. I need to think about this, about what could have happened."

  His eyes were fixed on hers when he added:

  "I'm sorry. And I'm also sorry for what I did. I only helped make that day… and the ones after… even worse for you."

  "It's okay now. Really. But I want to understand more. What were you doing there? And why did you take me with you?"

  The first question was easy to answer. Daros told her about what he called his strange hobby. But to get to that point, he needed to open a door to the past, one he rarely crossed.

  2

  Daros Fischer wasn't good with people, never had been. He had difficulty taking an interest in them. He was quick-minded, so it didn't take long to perceive everything there was to know about someone: personality, goals, fears. That's why he preferred solitary activities to social events.

  He'd played sports in school, but that was as close as he came to joining any circle. He had only one friend at that time: a young man named Fernando, who shared Daros's same passion for electronics and information technology, besides being a fan of long walks. When they were small, they'd camp in Fernando's backyard, the maximum adventure the boy's parents allowed. A bit later, they received permission to take excursions in parks and secondary roads around the area.

  In everything else, Fernando was practically his opposite, being very popular among classmates. His good-boy manner captivated the girls. The two would meet at one house or the other to dismantle appliances and reassemble them again. Fernando's father complained about the pastime until his son started solving the house's electrical problems. Daros lived with his grandfather, who had a mechanic shop. That's why the old man saw the two boys' curiosity as a rehearsal for an honest job.

  It was during the exploration of a hill beside the city that Fernando shared the news that would change everything. He was in love. It was Maria Alice, the school principal's daughter. And the best part: his feelings were reciprocated. It had all started at that first school June festival, the one where Daros was too busy taking care of the electrical part of the speakers to enjoy a bit of real life.

  "But doesn't she already have a boyfriend? That clown son of the councilman?"

  His friend explained that the clown was in the past. Maria Alice had broken up with him to be with Fernando. That's all that mattered. Daros had a bad feeling right then. The rich kid didn't have a good reputation. If he decided to get revenge, it might not turn out well. Then he thought he might just be afraid of spending less time with the only person with whom he had a bit more intimacy, and so he was imagining things. A month later, he wished he'd listened to his inner voice, that instinct that clearly differentiates what's already coal from what's still burning.

  It happened on a Friday. Most of the city's young people had gone to watch drag races in an almost deserted area of the north zone, including Fernando and Maria Alice. Daros wasn't there: he fled social gatherings like the devil flees the cross. And this time he had no choice. He'd accepted a gig as a sound technician at a birthday party at a fancy club. It was part of his grand plan to pay for college, since his family couldn't help. He didn't need to be at the event to find out what had happened. Young people only tell the truth to other young people. Daros just needed to listen.

  Maria Alice's ex-boyfriend was one of the drivers. When the girl stepped away from Fernando to get sodas, he didn't let the opportunity escape: he rammed his car into his rival. To his friends, later, he said he'd miscalculated. He didn't mean to kill the guy: he only wanted to scare him. But the boy's injuries were so severe that he arrived at the hospital dead.

  Daros didn't know what to do with the black hole that began corroding his insides. The void tensed his muscles, tore at his chest, and made his jaw ache. His thoughts were sometimes only of longing. At other times, he let himself be dominated by rage. The world seemed to have grown larger and emptier, but he couldn't talk about it with anyone. He spent more and more time on the computer, trying to figure out how to ease the despair.

  He broke many of his inventions with blows during fits of fury, but destruction didn't serve as medicine. He needed a goal, something to wait for, and it didn't take long to find one. Reading more about how to learn to kill on the internet, he discovered he needed to learn French if he wanted to serve in the military in Europe, which he accomplished in record time. He was a determined son of a bitch.

  When he came of age, he informed his grandfather he would enlist in the Foreign Legion. Christmas was only a few days away. Even in December's heat, the old man was eating soup. He kept his eyes fixed on the bowl while his grandson spoke, so the boy wouldn't see the sadness of separation stamped there. Clearing his throat, he asked his grandson, already knowing the answer, if the Brazilian army wouldn't do.

  "No, sir, grandpa. You yourself say the military only taught you to march. I want to learn more than that."

  Daros left out of the conversation the worst account his grandfather gave of his time in service. During a punishment for insubordination to a superior, Daros's grandfather had been ordered to spend an entire afternoon squatting on one step and another of a long stone staircase, cleaning the area. In practice, he had to pull out a branch here and there of weeds and dandelions, without permission to stand and stretch his legs. And that's what he did, for the four longest hours of his life. He ended the day in the barracks infirmary, howling with pain. He was diagnosed with severe dehydration and heat stroke. But the worst was having suffered permanent muscle contracture: the posterior muscles of his thigh and calf had shortened chronically. He would never again be able to bend to touch his feet without pain, and would walk with a slightly shorter step for the rest of his life. The small pension he received was incapable of covering the damages.

  His grandfather reminded him that Daros still needed to settle accounts with the army anyway, since he'd come of age, after all. Seeing the disappointment in his grandson's eyes, the old man made sure to remember that the region where they lived had an excess of military service applicants, so it wouldn't be a big deal to be dismissed. And it wasn't. Daros asked his grandfather what he could do for him before leaving. The grandfather simply pointed his index finger at the young man and demanded:

  "Come back alive, boy. That's all. Make sure you come back alive."

  Daros spent the next five years in Europe, learning to kill. Basic training in Castelnaudary was the first step in transforming the lost boy into a cold soldier. Of every ten recruits who entered, only one completed the program. Most gave up in the first weeks, unable to bear the brutal combination of constant physical exercise with implacable discipline. But for Daros, who had always lived in his own world of routines and patterns, the military structure was as comforting as a second home.

  At the end of training, he received his first supervised rest. He preferred to stay near the unit to which he'd been allocated in N?mes, in southern France. The barracks occupied a nineteenth-century manor house, built in honey-colored stone, with narrow windows and vast courtyards that merged with the horizon.

  After calling his grandfather, who could barely contain his joy at hearing news, he didn't know what to do next. He had no more friends in Brazil and hadn't forged bonds with anyone in the platoon.

  He stood outside the Roman amphitheater for a few minutes. The construction, erected for gladiator spectacles, echoed his new life. He still wasn't a free warrior, but a cog in the system. He bought a cheap ticket and climbed to the top to look at the city. The scenery was stunning, but his invisibility became much greater when measured from above.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  He began wandering through the city aimlessly, more to exercise than to sightsee. At first, the narrow streets of the place bothered him, threatening to close in on him. The impression soon changed, transforming into a sensation of welcome. The houses closing in on him invoked protection.

  He entered a cheap café away from the center, packed with old men playing cards. He ordered a strong black coffee, or "un rétro," as they said in the Legion, and watched the older men, with stories carved into furrowed faces, wondering if he would one day have a story worth sharing with someone at a bar table. Otherwise, he would be just a name on a birth certificate.

  He received the end of his rest with relief. Daros got anxious when he didn't know where to focus efforts and attention.

  Military French became his second language, weapons a natural extension of his body. He now processed firing angles and escape routes with the same precision with which, before, he dealt with circuits and gears. The concentration he applied to fixing electronic equipment was redirected to the deadly art of hand-to-hand combat.

  Soon after basic training, his skills caught the attention of superiors, who began sending him on increasingly complex missions. Daros discovered that his difficulty with social interactions was an advantage in covert operations. He could spend days in solitary surveillance without the discomfort others felt in isolation.

  It was during a joint operation in Mali, in Africa, that observers from the German KSK noticed him. A confidential recommendation passed from hand to hand through joint Franco-German committees, until it took the form of an official invitation delivered by a French commander as a natural career progression. They needed someone with Daros's unique combination of technical skills and emotional detachment. The Legion had a limited number of annual vacancies for exchange with the KSK, and he'd been selected after brutal but equally impressive performances.

  The course, they said, didn't intend to form soldiers, but to dismantle them and reassemble only the essential components of each one. There, Daros would no longer be a legionnaire. He would be just a Bewerber: a candidate. And one of only two foreigners in a row of impassive German faces, for whom discipline wasn't imposed, but inspired in the icy air.

  The next two years were dedicated to refining his systematic art: advanced urban infiltration techniques, sophisticated surveillance methods, the science of disguise. Language was a barrier, the food strange, and homesickness a forbidden luxury. But it was in the programmed exhaustion of the Langstreckenm?rsche, the long-distance marches, and in the controlled isolation of the überlebensübungen, the survival exercises, that he found, paradoxically, his version of belonging. He ended up discovering he belonged to the group of those who survive through pure stubbornness, through the indomitable spirit of never surrendering.

  The final result was an impassive soldier, whose obstinacy in hostile terrain frightened even his companions, men determined to learn from the errors of judgment of the nation's past. A soldier capable of disappearing into crowds, surviving alone, and resisting the most relentless interrogations. A soldier who could defuse a bomb or assemble a precision rifle with the same methodical skill with which he used to fix radios in his youth.

  The true transformation wasn't physical, however: it was the creation of a new identity. The teenager who'd lost his only friend to violence now had the tools to do something about it. Daros had become a weapon, yes, but a weapon with its own purpose. He'd established his own mission from the beginning, and now the time had come to fulfill it.

  Back in Porto Alegre, he began the search for his target at the same time he passed the entrance exam for Computer Science. It wasn't difficult to find a guy who liked to flaunt his own weaknesses on social media. There were photos with countless women, countless drinks, and all the superficiality typical of excess.

  He began frequenting the same places as the man who'd killed Fernando. He was waiting when the guy left bars and clubs completely drunk. He made a mental note to only attack the target when he was sober. He wanted the enemy to be fully aware of what was happening to him and why.

  The perfect opportunity arose when the guy announced on social media that he'd be on vacation in a pretentious coastal city. Daros made sure to rent a house in the place. Hotels were rarely a good choice: too many people paying attention to each guest. The exception was motels: employees were rigorously trained to do the opposite.

  He dedicated about twelve hours daily to covering Xangri-Lá both by car and on foot in the first days. He wanted to know the place like the back of his hand. It was useful for drawing up escape plans and discovering the least frequented spots. He could only devise an action plan when he discovered the exact address where the scumbag would be. For that, it was enough to frequent the bohemian part of the city, park the car where he could have a privileged view of several nightclubs at once, and wait.

  He got lucky on the fifth night. The man left a bar stumbling, clinging to a very thin blonde young woman, who struggled to maintain her meager balance with the large man hanging on her. Daros waited for them to get into his car to follow them. Even drunk like that, the guy insisted on driving, making it very clear he wouldn't be missed at all in society. He followed the vehicle to the upscale area of the city, where the Audi sports car disappeared into the garage of an illuminated mansion.

  That would be the new address of the vigil, which persisted for the following week. Daros discovered that the target spent most of the day sleeping, rising at night like a vampire getting up from the coffin in search of the blood of eternal youth. The creature was a complete nullity. He decided he would enter the house during the day, while the worm was curing a hangover. He bet it would always be like that.

  He decided to act on a Wednesday. The afternoon was muggy, the air dense and charged with static electricity, as if it captured Daros's expectation. He watched the mansion from atop a nearby dune, the construction's silhouette casting a shadow over the other, less imposing houses. The place could perfectly illustrate the word wealth in a dictionary: high walls, surveillance cameras, armed guards on lazy rounds through the neighborhood, and an automatic lighting system that created more shadows than light during the night.

  Leaving his observation post on the sand mound and returning to the car, he checked the equipment one last time: a lightweight laptop, fiber optic cables, a compact signal jammer, and a Glock 19 pistol with silencer. He wore dark clothes, tactical gloves, and boots that muffled the sound of his steps.

  The first step was to neutralize the residence's communication network. Using the jammer, he interrupted cell phone and Wi-Fi signals in a short radius, though sufficient to prevent emergency calls without alerting the security company. Next, he approached the secondary power panel, camouflaged behind a hedge. With a precise cut to the right cables, he partially deactivated the external cameras, leaving some active to preserve the illusion of normality.

  Daros scaled the back wall with feline agility, landing on the other side without emitting a single sound. He advanced through the shadow cast by the roof, using the guards' patrol route against them and timing each movement. A guard came out of the residence without warning, still pulling up his pants zipper. Shit. He must have gotten along well with the drunkard owner of the house, or at least well enough to have permission to use the bathroom, but tough luck for him. When he got too close, Daros immobilized him with a quick, silent stranglehold, hiding the unconscious body among the bushes.

  At the side entrance, a biometric reader protected access. Daros connected the laptop he took from his backpack to a hidden maintenance port, using an exploit he'd prepared specifically for luxury home security systems. In less than two minutes, the door opened with a soft click.

  Inside the mansion, the air was permeated with the smell of marijuana and stale beer. Muffled music leaked from the upper floor. Daros moved like a shadow, his glacial gaze ignoring the ivory-colored furniture, each step bringing him closer to fulfilling his promise of revenge. The playboy had no idea that hell had already opened its doors, and the demon was inside the house.

  He followed the sound of the music upstairs. The door to a large suite was open, and the smell of burning weed was all the clue he needed about the room's occupant.

  The guy was sprawled in a jacuzzi at the heart of the room, with his arms resting on the edge. He had an ashtray, with the joint still burning, and a bucket with ice and champagne beside it.

  Daros quickly assessed the room, in order to detect the presence of anyone else and calculate his movements: the sheets lay disheveled on the bed, the table between two armchairs had lines of white powder scattered, and the target remained with eyes closed in the water, ignoring the danger.

  He entered without making noise, putting the Glock back in the holster at his waist. He'd changed his mind about the means of execution. He covered the meters that separated him from the jacuzzi in a determined march. He pulled the champagne bottle from the bucket and broke it on the table. His friend's killer barely had time to open his eyes when Daros buried the shard of glass he held in the man's right forearm, increasing the tear with a pull. He made the same movement on the guy's left wrist.

  "What the…" the man stammered, his eyes wide with astonishment. "What are you doing?"

  Daros pulled a fancy chair and positioned it facing the bleeding man, his face showing the calm of a mission accomplished. There was no hurry. Each second was a tribute to a promise made over a coffin. He pointed the Glock at the guy before answering.

  "I'm doing what you should have done instead of killing a guy named Fernando Mancini. My only friend."

  "But I don't even know…" The playboy's expression betrayed the sudden memory. "Please, call an ambulance. I'll pay whatever you want. And I'll forget this all happened, I swear."

  "You'll forget, that's for sure," Daros crossed his feet on the edge of the tub and checked the watch on his wrist. "You'll forget in one to three minutes, because your radial and ulnar arteries are done for. I'm going to stay here until you lose consciousness and slide to the bottom of the fucking jacuzzi. I'm only leaving after no air bubble comes out of your goddamn corpse."

  The man would have screamed if he hadn't started getting drowsy. His heavy arms no longer responded to any command, and the target closed his eyelids for the last time, before the only witness to his end.

  The fury began dissipating in the invader's chest, who contemplated the corpse before him. Slowly, the body began sliding into the red-tinged water of the tub. The mission was complete.

  At the end of the show, Daros analyzed the environment for possible clues that could identify him. There were none. Without abandoning his usual calm, he collected the few objects he'd brought to the crime scene and prepared to leave.

  Hours later, he drove aimlessly through the city streets, hearing sirens in the distance. He didn't need to follow the flashing lights to know where they were going, but decided to pass near the victim's house once more. He could see the small groups of onlookers growing, about to unite into a crowd in shock at the news. He'd just reinforced the theory that a criminal always returns to the scene of the crime.

  From the corner of the dead man's house, he contemplated the red and blue lights dancing on the property's wall. He closed his eyes and saw images of Fernando. In the first, the two were lying on the hood of Fernando's father's car, opening and closing their short children's legs as they witnessed the first snow of their lives, hands behind their heads, during a trip to S?o José dos Ausentes. Daros would see snow many times after, but Fernando, never again. In the second memory, his friend disappeared as he completed a curve on the bicycle he was riding, winning the race bet between the two. Fernando hadn't looked back to gloat about the victory, but had let a laugh escape.

  Yes, the mission was accomplished. And with it, his promise. But the peace Daros longed for didn't come.

  It didn't come that night or the following ones. It never would come.