Even though he didn’t show it, nervousness touched the pit of his stomach and his hair stood on end.

There might be no one there; the machines had said it, and even his sixth sense corroborated it, but still, Rigel was sure they would find something, or something would find them—another dead child like the one those students found long ago? He didn’t know, but something would come. Soon. Perhaps when they turned left.

End of the corridor.

They turned left.

Just a new arm of that building, one identical to the one they had just left behind; yards and yards of a corridor with pipes and air ducts running through the ceiling, although here the walls, covered with laminated plates, had doors on both sides, thus losing a little the appearance of a cave repurposed as a corridor that was so noticeable in the previous stretch. No exit in sight, though. And no hideous undead and no student killers.

However, undead or not, murderer or not, someone had walked this stretch and done it several times: in the dust, they could see footprints.

“Someone walked this way, alright,” Snow said.

Rigel quieted the ghosts in his mind and continued. How many feet had they already walked since they entered? Two hundred? Six hundred? Neither one of them was going to stop now for the chance of bumping into someone; after all, they were armed, and their flashlights and helmet lights still worked.

In that sector, the doors had small windows. He tried to see through them, but the reflection of the light on the dirty glass made it hard to tell what was inside.

One of the doors had a broken window. He approached to see what it kept and—

A head stood out in the dark.

Rigel jumped. There was someone in there.

No. It was not a person. He lit better and discovered that empty, pale face, looking at him with the only dark and lifeless eye he had, the mute expression of abandonment.

Even after realizing that he was looking at a Cyclops android, Rigel had to make an effort to steady his breathing.

He moved the flashlight, and there he found more androids, five or six, dust-covered and huddled together, like crash-test dummies dying in a car yard. Two were old A60-R8s; their oval eye visors and those etched irises in the center looked almost disturbing. The others had more boxy visors; those were B11-R8s, the ones that had replaced the A60s. Both models had been out of circulation for years. Behind them were several completely rusted metal filing cabinets, some with their drawers ajar, one of them spewing out what appeared to be rolled-up blueprints of a building, and there were also cardboard boxes stacked in a corner with who-knows-what.

“Anything?” Snow walked up to him.

“It looks like a storeroom,” Rigel replied.

And a canned resonance erupted in the hallway.

The noise was deafening.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Froia, who had come with his attention focused on trying to fix the sonar equipment, had accidentally kicked something metal that ended up rolling on the floor.

All three of them lowered their flashlights and aimed at the same spot.

At Froia’s feet lay a cybernetic body in pieces, surrounded by broken parts and a large dark stain that looked like blood: a puddle of oil. What remained of the torso was a metal casing shaped like a human chest, charred, and covered in a whitish layer of molten silicone. One arm was shattered, and the other was curled as if it had been twisted before being torn off.

What Froia had kicked was the android’s head. The face part was broken and somewhat detached from the head, like an ill-fitting mask. His visor was rounded, though not as big as the D02’s. Surely, he had been a C14 model, one more modern than those Rigel had seen back there, in that room. The peculiar thing about this C14 was that, under his visor, he had long and cartoonish handlebar mustaches with well-defined curves drawn with a black marker.

“Another Cyclops,” Froia said, pointing at the funny mustaches. “At least his owner had a sense of humor and wanted to humanize him.”

“Here’s who left these footprints on the floor,” Snow deduced.

Rigel noticed that, in the light, the splashes of oil did not look opaque, but rather shiny. He stepped on one and dragged his foot; the floor had gained a new stain. With the toe of his boot, he touched some of the molten silicone, found it wet and slimy, and confirmed his suspicion. “He hasn’t been destroyed for more than a day or two,” he said. He brought the flashlight forward. The footprints in the dust continued after the remains of the android, and these were clearer. “And he was coming from there when he was destroyed.”

“Destroyed by something or someone that leaves no footprints,” Snow said. “The same one who killed the students, perhaps.”

Froia crouched down in front of the android’s head, moved it a little, and observed a small dark box that was installed on the crown of it. “He had a four-frequency emitter plugged in,” he commented, and trying to close the idea that was spinning in his head, he thought out loud, “These transmitters prevent the circuitry from overloading, allowing a complex electronic mechanism, such as an android, to operate in electromagnetically destabilized sites. That means that…” He verified that his sonar signal was still being jammed and expressed his suspicions, “I think an EMP was detonated here. An electromagnetic pulse. And a big one, I must say, one that continues to cause problems to this day. No doubt whoever left this android as a custodian here knew about it.”

“Another mystery from this place,” Snow nodded.

Froia turned the Cyclops’ head again and exposed the part of the nape that was still intact. There, obscured by smudges of burns, was a tiny knob. “Well, here’s his regulation switch, intact,” he pointed out. “Bastards! If they wanted to put him out of commission, it would have been enough to lower this damn knob, instead of blowing him to pieces.”

“Is there sentimentality in your voice, Froia?” Snow joked.

“You know I’m a sucker for machines,” Froia continued. “It’d have been nice to rummage through his memory banks and see what they had to tell us. As burnt out as they are, I doubt his circuits are in the mood to talk.”

“What’s his license code? Does he have one?”

With his finger, Froia brushed away some of the soot from the back of the neck, revealing the small plate attached to it next to the switch.

“XXXX.Alfred,” he read. “Ha! Name without code. I suppose no one who has operated here would legally register their androids.”

Eager to see where the Cyclops Alfred had come from before he was destroyed, Rigel followed the tracks that led him almost to the end of the hall, to the right, at the foot of a swinging door, the same as the doors of the operating rooms in hospitals, although he couldn’t say that it was still hermetic, its hinges had come loose, causing its two leaves to not close well.

Right in front of that door, on the wall, there was a large opaque splash stain, already dried, which triggered the Detective’s suspicions about what it was, although it was too early to draw conclusions.

He turned toward the door; one of the leaves was slightly ajar and between the leaves, there was a vertical line of pure darkness. He rested the sole of his boot on the half-open leaf and pushed it. The laminated sheet snapped to one side, screeching; the noise was deafening.

The three held their breath until that deathly silence to which they had become accustomed returned.