Esteban opened his eyes, and the rain was still seeping through the roof of the warehouse, its drops falling on the concrete floor at their slow rhythm as if they had never stopped, while the oil lamp had relit itself and swung above the iron chair, throwing its trembling shadow across the face of the bound man.
His fists were still clenched on the collar of the gray coat.
He had come back.
He did not know how long he had stayed in that distant place, among the firewood and the blue stone and the old blacksmith and the black horses and the melted room of the Star, feeling as though a whole lifetime had passed and as though nothing had passed at all, and the pain in his shoulders was still there, and the wounds of the last two days still throbbed, while on his chest, under his shirt, the stone pulsed quietly, as if watching.
He let go of the collar slowly.
He said nothing, because he had nothing to say, having spent three days asking questions and then, in the last few minutes, with his eyes closed, answering everything he had been asking about himself.
And Rafael was looking at him.
Outside, behind the rickety wooden door, Rico had been sitting beneath the eaves for three nights staring at the rain and never going in, having heard the captive's screams at first, then the silence, then fewer screams, and every night he told himself he would go in and stop all of this, and then stayed where he was, because he was not sure he wanted to know what he would find.
And on the other side of the door, Esteban did not know it.
"Do you think you're the first to come seeking revenge?"
His voice was low, hoarse from screaming, but calm and unchanged, and there was no sign that the man had suffered or feared or tired, his gray eyes open and looking at Esteban the way a teacher looks at a student who has just begun to understand.
Esteban did not answer.
"You're not the first." Rafael smiled a small, weary smile. "And do you know what's stranger? You're not even the first who took this stone."
Esteban froze.
He did not move or raise his hand to his chest, but the stone shuddered, one strong beat, like a heart that had been struck.
"Ah." Rafael laughed. "I hit it."
And then he began to laugh.
It was not a short laugh this time but a long one, faint and broken, shaking his shoulders and making the diamond restraints sway on his wrists, the laugh of a man who had emptied himself of everything he carried and was left with nothing but astonishment, and he laughed until he coughed, and then laughed again.
"Sorry." He wiped his eyes on his shoulder. "You needn't look at me like that, it's only that you can't imagine how many times I've seen this moment."
"What moment?"
"This one." He nodded toward Esteban's chest. "A man looking at me, in pain, carrying this stone, and thinking he is alone."
"I'm not alone."
"You're always alone." He said it with a cruel gentleness. "They were all alone."
"Men came before you." Rafael's voice returned to its calm and his eyes drifted, as though looking through the walls. "Many of them, I don't know how many, dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands, and no one was counting, each one appearing suddenly with his face uncovered and this blue thing in his chest and an endless anger in his eyes."
"Thousands?"
"We were told the stone is older than this earth." He shrugged. "I don't know if that's true, and no one does, and I don't know what it wants, or why it chooses, or what it sees in you."
Esteban felt the stone burn against his chest with a faint, questioning heat.
"I remember some of them." Rafael's voice had grown closer to nostalgia. "A man in the north who built a ship from the wood of a single tree and said it would cross the sea to wherever his family had gone, and we sank it before it left the harbor, and a boy of fifteen who lasted only three days, who cried the whole time and asked for his mother." He fell silent. "And a woman, the only one, who made dolls from wood for absent children and left them on the doorsteps of shuttered houses, who never hurt anyone, and still an order came to kill her."
Esteban said nothing, feeling something heavy settle in his stomach.
"Every time we killed one of them," the corner of Rafael's mouth lifted, "the stone went to a new man, in another place, at another time, and no one knows how, and every time we stopped it, it came back."
"You stopped it..."
"We?" He laughed. "I never stopped anyone myself, because I'm the Seventh, but I heard, all the Stars heard, and there are things everyone here knows without anyone speaking of them."
Esteban was still standing, not sitting, not moving, but his breathing had grown heavier.
"Then we noticed something." Rafael tilted his head to one side. "It seems to have evolved, the stone, I mean..." He stopped, like a man searching for a word. "At first it was merely a tool, a silly tool owned by some man, who used it to turn wood into a stick and the stick into a knife, something that made us laugh when we heard of it."
"You laughed?"
"We laughed." He said it without shame. "Then slowly we noticed that everyone who came after was more dangerous, stronger, cleverer, and every time we defeated one..." He shook his head slowly, with something like weary admiration in his eyes. "He came back with someone stronger."
Esteban did not respond.
He stared at the bound man, not knowing whether he was hearing a truth, a threat, or something third and unnamed. The source of this chapter is g.com.
"You won't last long."
Rafael said it without cruelty, the way a doctor speaks to a patient.
Something trembled in Esteban's chest.
"I don't say that to frighten you, because it's what always happens." He took a slow breath. "They all die, some after a year, some after a month, some after a week, and one held out three years, which was the longest I ever heard of, and not one of them reached the summit, not one."
"And I..."
"You'll die soon." He said it with terrifying honesty. "I don't know how or when, but the stone knows, and it doesn't care."
The words entered Esteban's head and stayed there, heavy and cold, like pebbles at the bottom of a well.
It was not fear of death that he felt, since he had grown used to death long ago, but something stranger, a cold anger at something he could not strike, at a stone that did not speak, did not explain, did not apologize, a stone that had settled on his chest one ordinary morning and given him everything, and carried with it, without warning, an appointment with the grave.
"Why didn't it tell me?" he asked in a low voice, more to himself than to Rafael.
"Because it doesn't speak." Rafael shook his head. "And it won't apologize, and it won't teach you, which is what none of you understand at first."
"And that's why I'm sorry for you." He smiled. "That's why I didn't try to do anything to you in the fortress, though I had every chance."
"You melted my foot."
"I melted your boot." He corrected him calmly. "And if I had wanted your feet, I would have taken them."
Esteban could not argue.
"Why are you telling me all this?"
"Because I'm tired."
"Of what?"
"Of silence." Rafael smiled a sad smile. "I served a man who didn't want to be questioned, and I learned to be silent when I was young, to carry out and not speak, to obey and not think, until silence became part of me, and you're the first to ask me anything in ten years."
"And you could have answered from the first day."
"I needed to be sure you deserved the answer."
"And are you sure?"
"No." He shook his head. "But I've grown tired of waiting."
And in the silence that followed, he felt again something rising in his chest, something that had begun to stir since that night in the hearth room, when this man had said, *we hide.*
"My family."
He had not meant to say it, and it left his mouth like a final breath.
Rafael looked at him with eyes holding no trace of amusement.
"Alive."
Rafael did not say it aloud, but the way one sets something heavy on the ground.
"Your family is alive."
Esteban did not move.
The whole world had gone silent, the rain, the lamp, his own breathing, leaving only the word, turning slowly in his head, trying to find somewhere to land.
*Alive.*
"Your wife and your daughter, both of them." Rafael bowed his head. "And I'm glad, believe me, I don't say it to comfort you, I'm glad for you."
"Where..."
"But you'll never find her."
The sentence fell on his chest like a stone.
"I can't."
"You can't or you won't?"
"Both." Rafael did not look away. "And if I wanted to, it wouldn't change anything, because the place where they are cannot be reached by anyone, not you, not me, not the nine other Stars, and not the stone on your chest."
Each word opened a door in Esteban's chest and then shut it.
"Never," Rafael repeated gently. "Not by the stone, not by force, not by a hundred years of searching. You'll live the rest of your life knowing they're alive, and that is the worst of it, because you'll know that Lucia is still six, and that Elena is waiting for you somewhere with her apron, saying to you, 'You're late.'" He raised his eyes. "And you'll never see them, and never touch them, and never feel them before you, never."
He fell silent.
And no one said anything.
A drop of water fell from the roof onto the concrete, then another, then another.
Esteban did not know how long he stood there.
He felt as though his face were not his own, as though something inside him had been frozen and then quietly shattered, not anger and not grief but an emptiness, though a strange one, an emptiness that held in its depths a small light that had not been there an hour ago.
*Alive.*
He said the word to himself over and over, like a man learning a new language.
For ten years he had slept on two dead names, for ten years he had carried in his pocket the drawing of a child he believed was ashes, for ten years he had filled the world with graves that did not exist.
And in three words, from a man who could not move, his daughter had been returned to him.
He did not know how to feel, because he felt everything at once, joy torn by grief, hope torn by despair, a love with no one to aim it at, and a hatred he did not know how to stop.
Then he breathed.
One deep, slow, heavy breath.
And drew the dagger from his belt.
The transparent diamond gleamed under the lamp, small and clear and cold, and Rafael did not turn to look at it, looking only at Esteban's face, and in his gray eyes there was something like relief, as if he had been waiting for this moment for a very long time.
"Thank you."
Esteban said it in a very quiet voice, quieter than at any point in the three days.
Rafael raised his eyebrows slightly.
"Thank you for telling me my family is alive." His face did not move. "I didn't know, and no one told me in ten years."
"Esteban..."
"I'm finished with you."
He did not shout, or hesitate, or tremble.
The blow was single, quick, clean, without anger, and the transparent blade entered the chest of a thin man in a gray coat, beneath the small tattoo on the back of his left hand, the way light enters water.
Rafael said nothing.
He looked at Esteban, then at the blade, then at Esteban again, and slowly closed his eyes, like a man achieving at last something long awaited.
And in the silence of the warehouse Esteban heard the last breath leave his chest.
Then he heard nothing.
Esteban stood in front of the iron chair with the transparent dagger still in the man's chest and his palm still upon it.
He did not withdraw it at once.
He looked at Rafael's face, calm and unchanged except for the absence of life, with no pain on it, no fear, no regret, as though he were asleep, and on the back of his left hand, over the dried blood, the small star with the number seven sat black and still.
At last he pulled out the blade with a slow motion, laid it on the dead man's chest for a minute, then took it and wiped it with a cloth from his pocket.
He did not feel what he had thought he would, no triumph, no relief, no joy, only weight, and cold, and a single sentence turning in his head without pause, in a faint voice like the whisper of a girl from very far away:
*Alive.*