Adam let out a terrified cry and jumped back, knocking the chair over, tripping over its legs, and stumbled until he could regain his balance.

Out of thin air, Juzo had created a kind of plasma lamp, just like the ones found in school labs or museums but made of pure energy; so pure that it burned like fire. The soldier relaxed his fingers and the swarm of lightning dissolved without a trace.

Adam was frozen. He couldn’t even blink, while his heart did nothing but gallop. His reason assured him that such a fantastic display could not have been anything but a trick, but his shock was greater than any logic.

“H-how did you do tha-that?”

Juzo repeated the show, this time with his other hand, letting the discharges cover it again. Blue flames twirled over his hand, but they didn’t seem to harm him.

“We call it Photia,” he said and dissolved it again.

Adam’s green eyes went back and forth from Juzo’s hand to his hand. If until a while ago he had been debating whether to believe what he heard or not, now he was debating whether to believe what he had seen or not. He mimicked the motion with his hand, and obviously, nothing happened. Well, of course! What did you think would happen, you silly? he scolded himself.

“Why can’t I do it?” he asked.

“Because that has nothing to do with the project you two were a part of,” Malin said. “It was a demonstration for you to shut your mouth for a while.”

To shock Adam even more, she also created spheres of electrical discharges in her hands, two bombs of crackling light identical to Juzo’s, which also ended up dissolving after she contracted her fingers a second time. Then, extending her arm in Adam’s direction, she showed him the palmar aspect of her wrist. Under the skin, just before the joint, there was a small, flat, microchip-shaped object.

“An implant! But how could they achieve to…?” Adam held the girl by the arm and came closer to take a closer look. There was a small scar that the chip had left when entering. “Who developed it? You know that? You know if it’s Morris & Co.?”

“It’s part of a relatively new military program,” Malin said. “Grenadiers, elite soldiers.”

“Amazing! How come I never heard of this? Why don’t your superiors go public with such a fantastic thing?”

“First, because it’s a secret program,” she emphasized. “And second, because out of twenty soldiers trying to become Grenadiers, only one survives the treatment,” she added, indicating the veins on her arm. “The implant is just the trigger; what gives us the power is a chemical serum that not all bodies can resist.”

“Oh, right…” Adam’s marvelous entrepreneurial spirit vanished. “Deaths give a bad image and that would be squandering the business, right?”

“The Grenadier program may only have been active for about four years, but weapons technology has been advancing behind the rest of the world’s back for a lot longer than that, dear,” she pointed out. “There are hundreds of projects like these that no one knows about; it’s not wise to dismiss what we’re telling you just because it sounds ludicrous.”

Adam shook his head.

“I understand—Malin was your name? But it’s one thing for an adult to voluntarily undergo treatment with a serum and an implant, Malin, and quite another to put a baby in an incubator on steroids. There are moral boundaries crossed there. Who in their right mind authorizes something like this project…? This… Binary Alavistic?”

Malin glared at him. “The Binary Atavistic Project is obviously illegal… Besides secret,” she said.

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Adam held up his hands for a truce. “Well, I’m glad that’s clear. And c’mon, don’t look at me that way! It could very well have been one of the military-scientific programs conducted by your… superiors. And I say this because their projects always have the stupidest names. I mean, Atavistic? What the hell is that? But, hey, who knows what they do without people finding out, right? I work manufacturing technological devices, and you wouldn’t believe the number of protocols we must comply with, while there are clients who do not give a single fu—”

And suddenly, he fell silent. They all fell silent.

A trickle of blood had begun to trickle down Adam’s nostrils.

“Oh, c’mon! Not again!” he growled as the warm blood touched his lips. His already-stained white T-shirt gained another red stain.

He quickly pressed his nose and tilted his head back. Those two looked at him, concerned. “Don’t worry. It’s nothing,” he told them and went to the bathroom.

He elbowed the light on, turned on the sink faucet, and rinsed his face. As before, the bleeding ended as quickly as it had started.

Then Juzo and Malin watched him go by as he took off his T-shirt and went to the laundry room behind the kitchen area.

“I hope these bloodstains come out,” he murmured, as if they cared. He sprayed the T-shirt with a stain remover and put it in the washing machine. “Now, tell me more about that project,” he asked. “Those implants and the serum have anything to do with—?”

“When did you bleed?” Juzo asked.

“Say what?”

“You said, not again,” Juzo repeated. “At what other point of tonight did you have a nosebleed?”

That was the first interrogative sentence Adam heard coming from Juzo. But when he returned to the living room thinking about the answer, he ran into a strange state of alertness on the faces of those two. What happened to them? They had pulled a stunt that would have thrown the entire board of Homam Enterprises on its ass, and now they were dismayed by a simple nosebleed?

Juzo took a step forward. “At what point?!” he insisted.

Adam shrugged. “At the nightclub, after you caught me off guard in the restroom. Why?”

Juzo took another step toward him, restraining himself from bursting into panic. “Listen to me carefully,” he asked Adam. “Tell me every unusual thing that happened to you at that nightclub.”

“Unusual? And how about we try with everything?” Adam sighed. “I argued with my best friend, I bumped into you, and I bumped into a crazy lady, or rather, she bumped into me—And while we’re asking questions, what was that stupid thing to show up and storm off like that?”

“Too long to explain,” Juzo dismissed it.

“And why don’t you take the time?”

Malin stepped between the brothers. “Adam, that woman, did she do something to you?”

Adam’s eyes widened; how did she know what had happened?

“She dug her nails into me,” he said, showing them the marks on his arm. “Here. See?”

Malin and Juzo exchanged glances.

“They didn’t need to stop by here because they already caught him,” she said.

“Means they could be on their way,” Juzo concluded. “We’d better go.”

Adam raised his hand, asking for time. “What are you talking about? Who got me? Go where?”

Juzo removed a couple of new items from his bag; this time they were chrome rectangles the size and thickness of a medium book. Both he and Malin put one on their backs like little metal backpacks, fastening them with wide elastic straps that crisscrossed their chests, buckled in the middle.

“A what’s that?”

“Tell me more about the woman at the club,” Juzo said. “Did you know her? What did she look like?”

Adam hesitated between answering or continuing to ask questions that surely no one would answer, but upon hearing the word aspect…

“Damn!” he said. “Bald, without eyebrows, with violet eyes and….”

“...Almost bluish skin,” Malin contributed, and Adam nodded. “Anything else?”

“She was tall and sexy, about sixty, maybe? She was wearing a miniskirt… And huge earrings. I’d never seen her before.”

Malin turned to Juzo. “I know,” she said, anticipating what he might ask. “I’ll go to that club. I’ll look for her.”

“I doubt she’s still there, but she’s our only lead,” Juzo said.

Malin turned to Adam. “Remind me of the address of that nightclub.”

“Fifth and Tenth Avenue.”

“Good.”

Juzo unplugged the chargers he had plugged into the outlets—the light from the lamp returned to normal—he took one of the sets of bracelets and put them on.

Malin did the same with the other pair, sliding her fingers across one of the bracelets, revealing a small holographic display projected onto its surface. “They’re low on battery,” she said, “but it’ll be enough to keep the comm channel open.”

“A bracelet communicator?” Adam snorted, disappointed; he had expected them to be something else. “Not even Morris & Co. would dare to produce something so grotesque that it requires so much energy to…”

Malin went to one of the windows, the one next to the laundry room, facing the side of the building. She opened it, sat on the windowsill with half her body out, and threw herself into the void.

“What—?!”