Horrified, Adam ran to see where the girl had fallen.

Holding on to the frame, he stuck his head out the window and brushed his long, wind-tossed hair back from his face. Down in the alley, there was no one. No one was crushed against the pavement, twelve stories below, or on top of the dumpster; nor did anyone fall on the roof of the neighboring building. It was night and the lighting in that area was not the best, but it should be enough to identify someone’s body.

Until he distinguished, among all the city sounds, a whistle like the turbines of an airplane, although much lower, and out of the corner of his eye, he noticed something hovering next to him. It was a pair of black boots. The blonde girl’s shiny high-heeled boots.

“It can’t be…”

Malin was suspended in the air; two rectangular thrusters had unfolded from the small chrome object she carried on her back, like metal wings. They didn’t seem to emit hot combustions or drafts, just a low hiss, plus a silvery aura. Antigravity jetpacks, Adam deduced. He had seen similar prototypes in demonstrations thanks to his job, though none were quite as satisfactory.

With her golden bangs blowing in the wind and her cheeks painted by the moonlight, the young woman’s gaze was once again filled with deep concern.

“Are you sure that…?” she began to say.

Adam thought she was talking to him. No, those light blue eyes were actually on Juzo, who was right behind him.

“Don’t worry,” the soldier said to his partner, trying a reassuring gesture. “Everything will be fine.”

Unconvinced, Malin returned the gesture and flew southeast, disappearing among the buildings, fading between the city lights and the shadows of the night.

It took Adam several seconds to speak again. On the one hand, he was disturbed by what he heard, her sorrowful look and his brother’s pretense of security, and on the other, he was amazed by the technological wonders he was seeing. Which of those two things would he have a better chance of getting an answer with? He chose one and asked, “Where did you guys get those thrusters?”

“We stole them,” Juzo said and returned to the living area.

Adam was left at a loss for words.

“We must go.” Juzo gathered the files from the table and stuffed them into his backpack. “I assume you must have a vehicle.”

Adam confirmed it, feeling for the car keys he kept in his pants pocket. “What’s going on?” he asked.

Shielding the small, folded thruster on his back, Juzo hoisted his pack onto it and then led Adam toward the apartment door. “I’ll explain it to you on the way,” he promised, and half-opening the door, he checked nobody was in the corridor.

“Hold on, I’ll get a shirt and—” Adam pivoted. But a tinkling sound came from the bedroom upstairs. One of the window frames must have knocked on the wall.

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Juzo asked him to keep quiet and pushed him into the corridor. There was no time to look for clothes.

“I always leave the windows open,” Adam whispered. “It must be the wind, that’s all.”

But Juzo didn’t listen.

Leaving his house bare-chested was not something Adam had ever done. Mr. Quintana, his only neighbor on the floor, had seen him a few times going out semi-naked, either when he was taking out the garbage or when he was saying goodbye to one of his lovers.

Yet tonight, going out shirtless and with his twin behind him, forcing him forward, gave Adam a feeling close to embarrassment. Juzo’s overreaction made him more anxious than the tinkling of the window and what that could mean.

“That must have been the wind, dude,” he insisted, though he kept speaking quietly, just in case. “We’re on the twelfth floor, y’know? Air currents are strong up here.”

“Perhaps,” Juzo answered, also quietly, glancing back over his shoulder. “But we can’t take risks.”

“And all this fuss over a nosebleed?” Adam wondered, demanding an answer as he approached the elevators, but his brother pointed to the stairs at the end of the corridor and led him there. When he tried to switch on the lights to illuminate the long way down, Juzo stopped him and they began to descend in the shadows, guided by the light that filtered through the small windows on the side.

He didn’t know if it was from anxiety, or from being shirtless and at the mercy of the low temperatures that flooded that deep vertical tunnel, but Adam shuddered, gasping for air, his teeth chattering. Hearing his footsteps more clearly than his eyes could see the steps only added to that feeling.

A Blam! rumbled throughout the passage. One of the doors connecting the stairs to the corridors of the building had been flung open and slammed shut, though the cacophony made it difficult to determine whether the sound had come from a floor above the one they were currently in or one below. Juzo looked up; Adam looked down. There were only two or three more floors left to reach the first floor, so they hurried.

Juzo peeked through the stairwell door into the entrance hall, seeing no one there, and motioned for Adam to follow him. Moving out, Adam found himself face to face with the mirror that covered the reception wall and had the impression he had mistakenly entered the house of mirrors at the carnival. There, the reflection revealed a bare-chested Adam next to another Adam with shorter hair, a beard, and a military uniform. Which of the two was a true doppelgänger?

“Hurry up,” Juzo whispered, giving him a shove.

Adam walked towards the entrance of the building, hoping that Ruben, the doorman, was somewhere else so that he wouldn’t see him with Juzo. Any awkward situation was to be avoided. Approaching the glass doors, though, he saw the old man outside, leaning against the entrance pillar, flipping through the Loud holo-magazine he had given him.

Alerted by the sound of the door opening, Ruben turned toward them.

“You came for a change of clothes, and off you go now, almost naked,” he told Adam, but upon seeing Juzo, he dropped the holo-magazine card and the projection turned off.

Adam barely waved him goodbye and hurried over to his car. He had Juzo close to his shoulder and he didn’t want to receive another one of those hateful pushes just for having diverted his gaze toward Ruben more than necessary. For the moment, it was better to play along until he knew exactly what was happening and who they were escaping from.

Adam opened the car and got behind the wheel. Juzo, without taking his backpack off his back, climbed into the passenger seat and gave him a precise, though unrevealing, order, “Drive.”

The engine purred softly, and the vehicle’s headlights shone like the silver eyes of a cat in the night. Adam put his foot on the pedal and moved forward, not knowing where to go and afraid to ask. The wind stirred the treetops, and some reddish leaves fell on the windshield. At that time of night, few cars were moving on those streets. Most remained parked to one side, guarded by the light poles, silently waiting for the beginning of the next day.

Adam had a feeling that he was leaving the tranquility of his neighborhood, perhaps forever; and trying to escape from so much fatalism, his mind was populated with inopportune thoughts that bloomed out of nowhere, like what Trevor’s face would look like upon finding out he had a twin brother.