“First, lemme tell you, your secretary’s amazing,” Malin spoke on the other end of the line. “She deserves the best holiday bonus in the whole world.”

“Rita is the best,” Adam confirmed.

“Second, today I built a case against the names and surnames of this city, now I will do it against the sectors. What is this nonsense about assigning them a color? It’s a city, not a freaking rainbow!”

“Proxima has about sixty-seven neighborhoods, Malin,” he said. “Maybe it’s easier for you, but most of us who live here prefer to divide the city using colors rather than learning the names of each one of them and their location. I guess, in Markabia, you have…”

“Numbers. The sectors are cataloged with numbers.”

“Oh, of course! Because surely, it’s easier to remember a number than a color, right?”

“I’m not saying that, but… Yellow? Magenta? Cyan?! How the hell do I know where it is…?”

“You just have to take the RGB color mixing diagram as a reference and you will know,” he explained. “Proxima’s shape lends itself to that. What a detective you turned out to be if you didn’t realize how those colors were arranged!”

Malin went silent for a minute. “Ugh! Forget it!” she said later. “Are you interested in what I found out, or shall we continue talking about color theory?”

“Go ahead.”

“Okay. The old Rodolfo died of heart failure in his sleep. Well, nothing strange for an eighty-eight-year-old patient, almost eighty-nine in tow. And it is that, after suffering an accident, the poor man was never the same. However, before that, Rodolfo might have had a thousand reasons to justify the grumpy face he had in the photo, but I doubt the economic factor would have been one of them. You see; before his home was reduced to a room in the elderly care home, he lived in a beautiful house in the suburbs, in a very nice neighborhood full of gardens, south of the city.”

“The Flower Quarter,” Adam said, “in the Blue Zone. A neighborhood of old people with a lot of money.”

“There you go! Early this afternoon, I visited the deceased’s house; it’s beautiful. Now, the new widow can spend what’s left of her life in that house, accompanied by her entourage of cats. Aida’s an elegant and very active old lady, y’know? Her housekeepers should learn to cover windows better with those cute curtains, though; you never know who might be snooping around from the outside.”

“I see you were very, very busy.”

“Pretty much. Your secretary told me Rodolfo was a real estate broker. As I understand it, Homam Enterprises has worked or has some kind of contact with the law firm in charge of Rodolfo’s papers. And you’ll think, as a real estate agent, he’ll have had several properties under his name…”

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“Not necessarily.”

“Well, I’ll tell you that Rodolfo Gutierrez had nothing but his own house, two very old cars, and—listen to this: A wrecked-car warehouse on the outskirts of the city he bought at auction, to which he never conditioned, nor gave it a more productive use than as a junk deposit.”

“Malin, I don’t know what business transactions are like in your country, but I’m telling you that not all businesses here thrive the way one would like. I know! What a surprise, isn’t it?”

“You’re being sarcastic.”

“And rightly so. Buying a wrecked building and letting it rot under the sun is not an eccentricity, Malin; it’s the result of bad business. Some people still cannot get out of the hole they fell into during the great economic collapse of Proxima, which happened fifty years ago!”

“Sure. But what do you say if I tell you that, in his will, Rodolfo asked not to sell the lot where the warehouse is?”

“Okay, that could be considered an eccentricity.”

“Of course, the widow could never talk about the subject with her husband, because, by the time she knew about it, Rodolfo’s head was traveling the unknown paths of senility.”

“Knowing you, I don’t have to ask if you…”

“If I went to check out the warehouse? Lemme remind you: military intelligence soldier with free time.”

Adam couldn’t help but smile. “I’m seriously reconsidering training with you,” he said. “I can’t stand the way you’re wasting yourself. Going after the trail of a stupid newspaper clipping! What a waste of time! Anyway, what did you find in that place?”

“Besides the accumulated filth, entire families of rats, and a carpet of dust thicker than the rug in your room? A pile of junk and a bunch of pressed cars piled up in a corner; nothing more. From the looks of it, I can tell you that place has not received maintenance in more than a decade, and in all this time, it has become the favorite refuge for the homeless of the area.”

Adam chuckled. “Are you telling me that your meddling ruined a bunch of hobos’ naps?”

She responded with another laugh. “I didn’t find anyone, but there are paths in the dirt on the floor made by people’s footsteps, and of course, I also found dried remains of—Well, y’know; too big to be a dog’s thing. I checked the place inch by inch, but the only relevant thing about my intrusion was that a pigeon decided to deposit his poop on my shoulder.”

“One very productive day,” he said. But in that instant… Crackles. Footsteps.

Even though natural light was almost extinct in the sky, and the park’s artificial lighting did not reach that sector so surrounded by trees, he perceived a shadow; a giant shadow that soon covered him completely.

A bang stung his ears, a dark liquid splashed on the grass very close to his feet, and a trail of sparks arced over his head, dragging something down in front of him. What had just fallen was the severed head of a Cyclops still holding a long sparking wire as part of its spine.

Adam stepped back and stepped on something gelatinous; chunks of solid silicone coated with oil. A little further back was the torn torso of the android park ranger, dressed in a green jumpsuit. With his eyes open, as he removed the headphones from his ears, he turned, and out of the corner of his eye, he detected something dark coming at his face, too close already to dodge it.

An immense weight rested on his right cheek, and then a lot, a lot of pain.

In the blink of an eye, he found himself on the ground, lying in the bushes; his face, numb, and his head, spinning a thousand times. He had lost his phone and headphones, who knows where they had ended up falling. Had he been hammered? Some sons of bitches had hit him with a sledgehammer?! Criminals with mallets!

But no, it hadn’t been a hammer. It had been a punch.