Esteban did not move for a long time, standing before the body slumped in the iron chair with his hands hanging at his sides and the transparent dagger sheathed at his belt, while the rain whispered on the roof and the oil lamp had dimmed until its light was gray, leaning toward blue, and after a while he noticed that it was not gray at all, because the light was coming from in front of his eyes.
Blue writing appeared in the air, thin, in letters he had never seen so clearly before:
[Defeated: The Seventh Star, Rafael]
He stared at it.
Then it changed, and beneath it rose a line in larger, familiar letters:
[Lore Boss: Complete]
And below it, line after line, with the same silence, as if the air itself were telling the story:
"Rafael was a loyal servant of the Eraser all his life, never questioning and never objecting, and he told himself that what his master did was a necessity and not an evil."
"But an hour before his death, he told the truth for the first time."
"And the truth is this:"
"The Eraser did not kill half of humanity."
"He hid them."
Esteban did not breathe.
"In the Void: a place outside time and space, where there is no death, no change, and no aging. Whoever enters it remains as he is forever."
"Lucia is still six."
"Elena is as he left her."
"All of them are alive, waiting."
The letters trembled slightly, then went out.
He was alone in the warehouse.
He did not know how much time passed, perhaps a minute, perhaps an hour, because he had sat down on the concrete floor with his back against the wall, his knees drawn to his chest and his hands between them, and he did not weep, since he could not, as something larger than weeping was inside him trying to get out and finding no way.
*In the Void.*
He repeated the word without sound, like a man trying to learn a new language without a teacher.
*No death, no change, no aging.*
He remembered the stopped clocks of Olmo at seven minutes past twelve, the teacher's chalk caught between two letters, an apple that had never rotted in a child's satchel, and soup still warm on the fire of an eight-year-old boy ten years later.
They had not been riddles.
They had been answers, passing before his eyes every day while he failed to see them.
Anger tried to come back to him, the anger he had lived on for ten years the way a man lives on water, but it found nothing to feed on, because there was no killer, no grave, and no revenge, only one man who had taken everything and hidden it in a place no one knew how to reach, and that was harder than any killer.
*You'll live knowing they're alive, and you'll never see them.*
Rafael's sentence was still turning in his head as if it had just been spoken, and he knew it was the sentence that should have killed him, the one spoken to break him, but it had not broken him, or perhaps it had broken something else, the thing that had tied him to the graves.
How does a man grieve for the living, and how does he rejoice over the living he cannot touch? He had no answer, but he felt that in this question alone there was a direction, the first clear direction in ten years.
"Esteban."
He raised his head.
Rico stood at the door, having come in without a sound, his face white as paper in the faint light and his eyes red, and he had clearly been standing there for some time, and there was no need for him to say he had heard, because it showed in every line of his face.
"Your family."
"Alive."
Rico did not answer, looking at the body in the chair, then at the dagger in Esteban's belt, then at Esteban.
"You killed him."
"Yes."
"After he told you."
"Yes."
"Did you have to?"
Esteban did not answer at once, looking at his trembling hands, which no longer felt like his own, and said after a long while:
"I don't know."
"Do you regret it?"
"I don't know that either."
Rico sat down beside him on the floor, slowly, hesitantly, leaving a small gap between them, and said nothing, staring at the corpse, his fingers moving aimlessly on the cloth of his trousers like someone who does not know where to put his hands.
"I lost my mother and my sister too," he said in a very low voice.
"I know."
"And I thought they were dead."
"And now?"
"Now..." Esteban stopped and took a deep, shaky breath. "Now I don't know how to feel, as if the grief I carried for ten years no longer fits, as if I'd been carrying it in the wrong bag."
"That's better than carrying it in the right bag."
"Maybe."
"And I know how I feel." Rico wiped his nose roughly on his sleeve. "I'm afraid."
"Of what?"
"Of hope." He gave a short, hoarse laugh. "Because ten years ago I learned never to ask for it, since someone who asks for nothing loses nothing, and now you came, and after a bound man told you your family is alive, I've started dreaming about soup too."
"About soup?"
"My mother's soup." He looked at the floor. "If she's somewhere, maybe the soup is still on the fire."
Esteban did not answer, but he reached out and laid his hand on the young man's shoulder and left it there.
And for the first time in days, each of them smiled at the other, a small, tired smile that could barely be seen.
At last they stood.
Esteban looked at the body for a long time, then reached out and closed its eyes, which were already shut, he did not know why, a small movement from a hand that now knew how to kill and did not know how to stop.
"Shall we bury him?" Rico asked.
"I don't know if anyone here buries their dead."
"This man deserves a grave."
"Yes."
They dug a grave behind the warehouse between two trees, in cold wet earth that clung to their fingers, and the work was hard and slow, and neither of them spoke, so that they heard only the sound of the pick, their breathing, and drops of rain falling from the branches onto the ground, one after another.
Esteban was not thinking of anything when he and Rico lifted the body and laid it in the hole, only marveling at how light this man was, as if everything in him, all the secrets and the silence and the years, weighed nothing.
They filled in the earth.
Rico stood beside the grave for a while with his hands in his pockets, then said in a quiet voice without any mockery:
"He wasn't kind to me. He put me in the kitchen with a man who sells dreams of soup." He smiled in spite of himself. "But he didn't hurt me, and that's more than most of the people I've met."
Esteban did not comment, looking at the fresh earth and wishing, without knowing why, that Rafael had heard.
Afterward they sat for several minutes on the edge of the filled grave, sharing a piece of dry bread and a bottle of cold water, and the bread was not food, but the silence between them was lighter than any silence before it, as though someone had lifted a stone from them that they had not known was binding them.
"Do you think he heard us?" Rico asked at last.
"I don't know."
"Do you think he wanted to die?"
Esteban thought for a long time.
"I think he wanted someone to ask him."
And no one said anything after that.
When they had set the last handful, the rain had finally stopped, and Esteban laid on the grave a small piece of wood on which he had carved with a knife a star with the number seven above it, and after some hesitation carved another line beneath:
*He did not ask. Then he asked.*
And when they walked away, the sun had begun to rise behind the hills, red and distant.
Esteban walked a few steps and then stopped and took from his breast pocket the small piece of wood on which Matteo had carved a house with a triangular roof, and looked at it for a long time.
"Are we going to look for them?" Rico said.
"Yes."
"In the Void?"
"I don't know where it is." Esteban raised his eyes to the horizon. "But someone does, the nine other Stars, and he does."
"The Eraser."
"Yes."
"And will we kill him?"
The rain had ended, but Esteban's face was still wet, and he did not wipe it.
"No."
Rico looked at him in surprise.
"I won't search for him in order to kill him." His words were calm and steady, as if spoken to the earth and not to people. "I'll search for him to bring my family back."
A short silence followed.
"Fine." Rico took his hands out of his pockets and scratched his head. "And where do we begin?"
Esteban took from his pocket the small leather notebook he had taken from the captain and opened it to the last page, ten stars in a single row with a line beneath each one, and ran his finger over them, one after another.
"The Fourth Star." He stopped at the line. "*The wounded ask for his name.*"
"Perhaps." He closed the notebook. "And one who knows how to bring the living back from wounds might know something about those who were hidden."
"That's a guess."
"It's all I have."
"I like your guesses," Rico said with a small smile. "At least they have movement in them."
And at that moment the blue screen appeared before his eyes.
This time it carried no warning and no news, simple and calm, waiting:
[Acquired: Seventh Star's Power, Melting]
"Would you like to:"
[Use the Boss's power]
[Split it into upgrades]
He stopped.
He closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them, and it had not gone away.
*Melting.*
He thought about it, about the room a thin man had dissolved in minutes, the iron that ran like honey, the floor that turned to mud, the boot that had died beneath his foot, and it was a terrifying power, and also, from the inside, something very simple, *nothing lasts.*
And when he thought about it a second time, he felt something like disappointment.
It was not interesting.
Yes, that was the word, and he did not know where it had come from, but it was true, because Melting was a power that ended things and did not make them, a power that emptied the world of its meaning, one thing after another, exactly what the man had done to himself throughout his life, dissolving into silence until nothing of him remained.
And Esteban did not want to dissolve, but to understand, to make, to restore.
He thought also of the first choice, to use the power as it was, to hold it and melt everything in his path, but something in his depths refused it firmly, not out of morality or principle but closer to a woodcutter's instinct, that some tools corrupt the hand that uses them.
He had seen what Melting had done to a man, and he did not want to become him.
*No.*
He reached out a finger and pressed the second choice.
[Split it into upgrades]
The screen trembled slightly, and then a new panel opened, with tidy rows of blue letters:
[Point Distribution]
[Fitness: 1 → 2 (+1)]
[Strength: 1 → 6 (+5)]
[Intelligence: 1 → 4 (+3)]
Then, beneath them, in fainter letters:
[Endurance: 1]
[Speed: 1]
[Speech skill: 1]
He stared at it for a long time.
Then, without being able to stop himself, he laughed.
It was a short, dry, genuine laugh, the first honest laugh in weeks, because his eyes had fallen on the last line, *Speech skill: 1*, and he suddenly understood why he spent his days in silence, why people looked at him as if he were a wall, and why Rico spoke of him as "that man who doesn't talk."
"What's the matter?" Rico asked, looking at him with concern.
"Nothing." He wiped his eye with a finger. "I just... discovered something about myself."
"What?"
"That I need more training in talking."
"That's true," Rico said with sudden seriousness. "But I thought you knew."
Esteban did not answer.
The panel was still before him, with its small blue numbers carrying everything he would become, more strength, a sharper mind, and the rest of him as it was, slow, weak in endurance, sparing with words, still at the beginning, still at the wood rank.
He looked at the numbers once more and felt something strange and warm creeping into his muscles, not a great change and not a revolution, but the feeling of a man lifting a heavy load and discovering it is slightly lighter than it was a second before, his arms and shoulders and even his thought itself all becoming a little firmer and clearer, as if someone had wiped dust from them that he had never known was there.
Then it went out with a thought.
And at the last moment, before it vanished completely, a final faint line rose that no one but him could see:
[Ascension: Wood Rank (+3)]
Nothing changed.
Esteban smiled a small smile, adjusted his bag on his shoulder, and set off toward the east where the sun was rising.
And Rico followed him, chattering, asking about the road and the food and the nine Stars and which of them liked soup.