Juzo squinted at that strange syringe with the needles exposed at the ends.

All he needed to do was stick one end into Adam’s heart and the other into his own for the complex system to kick in, just as he’d seen it on the Totem; the proteins in his blood had to be removed directly from the heart, where the impulse was strongest. Then, that mysterious, shiny white liquid would do the rest.

“Adam White is the only one of us without special abilities,” Broga said, “and you won’t always be there to save him. With the project complete, at least he’ll have something to protect himself with.”

“Protect himself?” Juzo shook his head. “What will they do with him when he reaches that higher state of existence that the files spoke of? They will turn him into a weapon.”

Broga gave another snort. “You could show some trust in your brother,” he said. “He still has his own will.”

Juzo took a deep breath and, bowing his head, accepted his sentence. He hoped he was doing the right thing, although he also wasn’t in complete control of his body to refuse to do it. How long would it take for these proteins to awaken in his brother’s body, and how would they do it? Who knows! Sure, it wouldn’t be easy or nice for Adam, but at least he would have a chance to survive tonight, unlike him.

He dropped to one knee on the grass next to his brother, and taking him by the back, sat him down. Adam’s head tilted back, revealing his face; his eyes were closed, and his expression was serene, very different from the one he’d had before falling unconscious. Shaking the dirt off him, Juzo leaned him back, exposing his chest, and probed with his fingers for the spot where he should stick the needle.

“Wait,” Broga stopped him and modified the weapon in his right hand, reducing the muzzle until it was as thin as a spike. He aimed at Adam and fired a brief laser flare, then turned to Juzo and fired another. One shot had scored a point on Adam’s bare chest, right in the area of the heart, and the other had done the same to Juzo’s chest, piercing part of his military jacket.

Realizing what he had to do, Juzo took Adam’s tiny wound as a reference, rested one of the syringe’s needles there, and plunged it to the bottom. He snuggled up to his brother and let the other pointed end of the container sink where Broga had marked it, right into his heart.

Strangely, there was no pain, although the pumping of his blood fluctuating through the small cylinder was so noticeable that it gave him a somewhat uncomfortable sensation. The hot flow of that strange white liquid disappearing from the container and entering his body, spreading throughout his system with a tingling that made his skin crawl. And the energy flowed, energy that burned like the sun and pulsed as if it were a living organism.

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Overwhelmed by a deep feeling of surrender and a slight stinging in his chest, he thought he heard the crackle of flames. Was it the sound of the fire consuming the car crash on the avenue, on the other side of the park? No. The sound wasn’t coming from there, the sound was coming from the Primary Plasma. It was the sound of power.

And so, for better or worse, the Binary Project reached its final phase and Juzo threw himself into it.

His life was ending, and not in the way he’d imagined. He did it far from the battles of his country, not even on a battlefield surrounded by an army of enemies, but in a city park, surrounded by two miserable thugs and a man who hid a face just like his behind an android mask.

Juzo was dying with the greatest defeat that could have fallen upon him; a defeat that nonetheless felt like a strange triumph.

Broga retracted the laser cannon and sharp instruments from his hands and knelt in front of the twins, catching a weakened Juzo from falling to the ground prematurely.

“Don’t go too deep,” he told him as if Juzo was in a position to listen. “Leave some of the Plasma for me. I have my own plans and I need some of it.”

“Will you... watch over Adam?” Juzo asked Broga; his voice, already broken, almost imperceptible.

Broga clicked his tongue again as if to say, ‘Don’t you know who you’re talking to yet?’ “I bet one of my arms that you made that bitch friend of yours promise that same thing,” he said.

“Malin…” Juzo called her.

It would have been nice to have her by his side to tell her how happy he had been with her company, to apologize for having pushed her aside at the last moment, the most important moment of his life and when he needed her the most, and then, to warn her about how dangerous and elusive Tau radiation might be, now that he’d experienced it himself and was paying for it. But he no longer had a way to get his message to her, only to say goodbye to her from a distance and wait for her to receive it in her soul, wherever she was, and trust that everything would be fine.

Malin, he sighed one last time, and his heart stopped.

And, just before the last drops of that radiant white substance disappeared from the crystalline container and entered Adam’s body, Broga pulled the brothers apart. He laid them out on the grass and did it slowly, even with a certain delicacy.

He removed the syringe from Adam’s chest and contracted the needles, causing the metal sheet to cover the crystalline container once again; he didn’t want his eyes to catch the remains of the Plasma that were still in there. It was better not to fall under that spell again.

He returned the syringe to its metal cigar shape and tucked it into the pocket of his ragged purple raincoat. Then, with his robotic fingertips, he closed Juzo’s eyes.

“Easy,” he said. “If my theory is correct, this will not have been a definitive ending for you.”