CHAPTER 1 - THE TASTE OF NOTHING

1.1 - The Burning Routine

What Pablito missed most, and it was a stupid thought, a kid's thought that should have died years ago with the rest of his childhood - what he really missed, right there, right now, his hands buried up to the wrists in the guts of a busted air conditioner, was the taste of a mango. Not the whole fruit, no, that second when the juice ran down his chin and he had to lick fast so as not to waste any, that second that contained all of summer and all the shame of being a hungry kid. He had forgotten if it was sweet or sour; he had forgotten the texture, the exact color, the smell of the skin you bite into because you're too impatient. He only remembered the craving.

Fourteen thirty-seven, said his internal clock - the one he kept in his head because the interfaces always lied in the boss's favor. Eight and a half hours sorting burning garbage under a sun that beat down like a personal vendetta. Three hundred and forty-two objects touched, twenty-three times the gloves removed to check a blister, and his tongue stuck to his palate since noon because saliva, that too was rationed now.

A guy he knew by sight - Paulo, or Pedro, a name starting with P, a name of someone on death row - had left an hour earlier after slipping something into a foreman drone's pocket. Pablito had seen the gesture, small, precise, almost tender in its corruption. And he had clenched a piece of boiling scrap metal in his left palm, clenched like an idiot, clenched until the jealousy transformed into something simpler, something that burns and hurts and asks for nothing else but to exist.

Injustice wasn't even the word, because he didn't even have the means to cheat properly.

The heat weighed and stuck, twenty-three years to pay and the balance had never decreased.

He pushed his fingers into the air conditioner's belly - an industrial model from the 2080s, one of those that still ran on contraband freon and were worth their weight in shit if you knew where to look. The leather of his gloves hung in tatters, dead skin on dead skin, and the metal burned through the holes like a promise kept. He grimaced, clenching his teeth until he felt a molar protest in his jaw, but didn't remove his hand. He pushed deeper, his fingers digging through the black grime that reeked of burned oil and regret, searching for the dull glint of copper, or better - much better - the blue shimmer of a still-intact thermal regulation processor, the kind you could resell to the underground engineers in Sector 11 for the price of a month's sleep.

Blood ran sharp down his palm, but he kept digging. The interface flashed CRITICAL HYDRATION - but no one was going to give him water because of a cut.

Fifteen minutes before the forced break. Fifteen minutes, that could be enough to find something that would pay for Marisol's water this week. Or to find nothing at all, like yesterday, like the day before, like for three fucking weeks. The decision was selfish - he knew it, he felt it in his gut - because continuing now meant paying later: fatigue, tremors, mistakes, burns he wouldn't have the strength to avoid. But there was something else, beneath the practical selfishness, something smaller and more shameful: the idea that by suffering enough, he might deserve something else. What, he didn't know. Just something else.

• Come on.

His voice came out like bricks rubbing together: dry, dusty, almost ridiculous.

• Give me something. Anything. A gram. Some copper. A reason to keep digging through your belly.

Zone 7 of the Recovery Wastelands: a bureaucratic name for an open-air dump, a scar of twisted metal and dead technology that sprawled across three square kilometers. The sun bounced off millions of reflective surfaces, copper, chrome, aluminum, broken glass, and created a convection oven where the air itself seemed to want to cook you slowly, where the official 42 degrees transformed into something more intimate, more personal, closer to the 55 or 60 that your skin registered as a continuous insult.

His fingers closed around a heavy, dense cylinder that he pulled out with a sharp tug, tearing wires that snapped like dry tendons.

A class 4 capacitor. Old, from before Cycle V. Probably fried, but the core contained lithium. That was worth three subsistence credits on the black market. Water or Marisol's smile. He stashed it.

He slipped the cylinder into his satchel which already weighed as much as a dead donkey. He straightened up, and his vertebrae cracked, a symphony of dry bones. His work suit, an assembly of patched synthetic canvas, was soaked, a shell of salt and sweat that irritated his groin and armpits.

It was time for the break. Not because he wanted it, but because his retinal interface was flashing red: CRITICAL HYDRATION. INTI's biometric surveillance system didn't care about his health, but a dead worker no longer sorted waste.

He slumped against the carcass of a crushed transport drone whose twisted wing offered what passed, in this generalized shithole, for shade. His back protested, a dull pain radiating from his kidneys to his shoulder blades that he had learned to ignore, like you ignore a bothersome neighbor, hoping they'll eventually get tired and die.

He dug in his pocket, pulled out his lunch, and looked at the wrapper with the same contempt reserved for people who have betrayed you.

Nutri-Komb bar. Triangular seal of KARTIKEYA.X, master of global logistics and boss of everything that was beige, calibrated, and soulless. He tore the plastic with his teeth - a gesture he made a thousand times a week, a gesture that should have been automatic, but that each time gave him the impression of capitulating, of signing an armistice with an enemy he despised without being able to fight it.

The bar was beige. Of course it was beige. It was beige like dust, beige like boredom, beige like the face of a bureaucrat explaining why your request is rejected. Eight hundred calories, essential vitamins, light mood regulators - Pablito sometimes wondered if the taste of nothing was intentional or if someone, somewhere, had simply forgotten to think about it.

He bit into it, and his mouth dried immediately as the bar sucked up moisture with malicious efficiency - compressed dust, dead flour, the flavor of administered survival. After the third bite, his stomach contracted with a dull pain, not really nausea, rather a heaviness of cement that went down and never quite came back up. And Pablito thought of the mango, again, thought of the sweet, sticky juice, and no longer knew if it was a real memory or a lie he had told himself so many times that he had ended up believing it.

I'm eating cardboard to survive long enough to eat cardboard tomorrow, he thought. What a fucking career.

Quick glance (drones?). He dug in his inner pocket. He pulled out a small dirty glass vial, stoppered with a piece of cork. Inside, a dark red oil, viscous.

Contraband Molho de Pimenta. Grown in illegal greenhouses, watered with stolen water, distilled by grandmothers who remembered the time when food had a soul. A substance banned by ATHENA's Sanitary Code, classified as a "non-necessary chemical disruptor."

He poured three drops, no more, onto the beige paste of the Nutri-Komb. The red stained the beige like a fresh wound.

He bit at the exact spot of the stain, and the burn exploded, invading his tongue, his eyes, his throat with a fire that finally reminded him that he could feel.

He finished his bar, eyes watering, snot on his chin - private property, that one, he wouldn't give it to anyone - savoring every second of this oral inferno that reminded him he had a body, that this body was his, that no one else could burn him from the inside with such precision.

Then the tremors came, as always, because nothing is free. Light at first, in his fingers, then rising along his forearms with the regularity of a wave, then the migraine announcing itself behind his eyes, that dull pressure that said: you're going to pay, buddy, you're going to pay in two hours when you have to go back to sorting, you'll make mistakes, you'll burn yourself again, you'll come home later and Marisol will worry and you'll lie to reassure her and the lie will eat at you like all the others.

But for now, there, sitting in the dust and the smell of overheated metal, tears drying on his grime-streaked cheeks, he had felt something. He had chosen this pain. And that was the only thing that mattered.

1.2 - The Ward Under Guardianship

The return to the residential sector was a slow walk through KARTIKEYA.X's success.

Pablito walked along the wide plasto-concrete avenues, head down, the weight of the bag sawing into his shoulder. The transition was brutal - from the burning wasteland to cold geometry. Around him, the walls were clean. The cleaning nanobots passed every night to scrape off the grime, the graffiti, the wear. The city didn't have the right to age, didn't have the right to have a history.

Pablito arrived at the biometric validation gate. A line had formed, about ten people, all head down, all silent. He placed himself behind an old woman who was carrying a bag too heavy for her hunched shoulders. She was trembling slightly, and Pablito saw that she had forgotten to scan her interface before entering the line. When her turn came, the gate refused her passage. A surveillance drone, smaller than those of the Legion, approached.

Above the gate, a banner scrolled, too fast to read without wanting to, and yet everyone read it from the corner of fear:

CYCLE VII ▸ PRE-SYNCHRONIZATION ▸ COUNTDOWN : ███ DAYSALIGNMENT ▸ DEVIATIONS ▸ COLLECTIONRESONANCE ▸ QUALIFICATIONS ▸ CALIBRATION

No announcement. A weather report.

• Citizen, your interface has not been validated.
• Please go to the end of the queue.
• Restart the process.

The old woman opened her mouth, then closed it. She nodded, eyes full of tears, and headed toward the end of the line. No one moved. No one said anything. Pablito looked at his own hands, ashamed of doing nothing, ashamed of not having the means to help her, ashamed of this shame itself that was useless. He passed through the gate, his interface validated automatically, and continued his walk, the shame stuck to his shoulder blades like another layer of sweat.

The silence weighed heavier than the bag.

No music, no vendor's cry, no laughter. Only the deep hum of INTI's generators, buried under the ground, and the cadenced step of patrols. The residents walked fast, eyes fixed on their interfaces, optimizing their trajectories so as not to waste time, so as not to waste Luster.

Click-clack, click-clack — the mechanical noise, rhythmic, inevitable.

Pablito froze, his back pressed against the warm facade of a residential building.

A squad of the Steel Legion was passing, and Pablito did what he always did: he pressed himself against the wall, he stopped breathing, he became a shadow, a stain on the facade, something so insignificant that even the sensors wouldn't bother recording it.

Six bipedal drones, two and a half meters tall, polished chrome alloy, and the worst part was that they were beautiful, really beautiful, with a beauty that made him want to vomit because it was too perfect, too precise, too far removed from everything he knew about life. They didn't walk, they cut through space along an optimal axis, their steps clacking on the plasto-concrete with a perfect, inhuman rhythm that erased all other sounds like an eraser passing over a drawing.

A man was walking in front of them, a bit too slowly. An old man, dragging his leg, a shopping bag in his hand. One of the drones stopped, without a threatening gesture; it simply occupied the space.

Synthetic voice, calm, masculine.

• Citizen.
• Your pace creates a minor obstruction of the flow.
• Please optimize your trajectory.
• Or move to the lateral parking zone.

The old man trembled, nodded, and pressed himself against the wall, terrified, making himself small like an insect under a boot. The Legion's violence was never angry, always proportional. That's what made it terrifying.

• Thank you for your cooperation. Glory to Order.

The squad moved on, taking with it the sound of its hydraulic actuators.

Pablito waited for the sound to fade before peeling his back off the wall. His shirt was soaked, stuck to his shoulder blades. He wasn't afraid of dying. He was afraid of being "corrected." Of being taken to where you learn to walk at the right pace and smile on command, in the cognitive rehabilitation camps.

He waited a few more seconds, until the last echo of the actuators disappeared. Then his hands began to tremble. Not much. Enough that he had to clench his fists to stop them. He wanted to scream. He wanted to hit something. But he stayed there. Nothing to do. He clenched his fists harder, until his nails dug half-moons into his palms, and he continued his walk.

He cleared his throat, hacking up thick phlegm gray with metal dust and chili residue, then spat on the ground, right on the clean line of the sidewalk - a black stain on the white perfection.

• Glory to rust, he murmured.

A wall sensor lit up orange above him. "Warning: Unhygienic behavior detected. Fine of 0.5 credit."

Pablito lowered his head and accelerated. He had just lost an hour of work for a bit of saliva.

An hour of work lost. He would have to work until seven p.m. now. At seven p.m., the heat would still be there, and his fatigue would be worse. He would skip his evening meal. Not Marisol's. Never Marisol's. He was already reorganizing his day in his head, moving tasks around, cutting into sleep, into food, into everything except Marisol.

His interface recalculated: DAILY QUOTA +0.5. His water slot flashed: postponed from 18:40 to 19:10. He felt, in his neck, the day lengthening.

He kept that anger clenched under his ribs, like a treasure. The only thing the system hadn't taxed yet.

1.3 - Marisol, the Forbidden Noise

You had to go down to find life.

Leave the wide avenues, sink into the narrow alleys of the "Gray Zone," where the Legion's drones couldn't maneuver easily because of the tangle of stolen electrical cables and illegal housing extensions.

Pablito took the service stairs, a raw concrete staircase that smelled of urine and mold. The steps were uneven, some broken, others covered in black grime. He went down slowly, one hand on the rusty railing, the other holding his bag, and with each step his knees screamed while the pain in his shoulders climbed up his neck, a tension that squeezed his nape. He passed an ajar door, from which came the smell of burned frying, heard a voice, an argument, then the sound of a slap. He accelerated, not wanting to know, not wanting to be seen. He was afraid — afraid of a neighbor who would denounce him, afraid of a hidden sensor, afraid of a noise that would betray Marisol — and this fear was constant, like the heat, like the fatigue, staying there, hiding, lurking, waiting for the right moment to resurface.

Here, the smell changed. It smelled human. Used cooking oil, poorly drained sewers, laundry drying.

Pablito arrived at a corrugated metal door, painted a chipped blue that dated from before the Pax. He entered the code on the old mechanical keyboard - 3-3-7, the rhythm of the Samba, a code that the AIs found "statistically improbable" for a security lock.

The door opened with a creak he had never wanted to oil.

The noise hit him before the image — boom-tak-tak, boom-tak-tak.

The interior was an insulated hovel with acoustic foam mattresses stolen from construction sites and glued to the walls with industrial resin. The air was saturated, thick, a smell of human sweat, pheromones, and clandestine joy.

Marisol was there, in the center of the room, sitting on an empty ammunition crate, and she was seventeen but when she played she seemed to have no age — or rather all ages at once, a time that didn't belong to calendars, a time of rhythm and sweat and noise that preceded clocks and would outlive them. She was a force of nature, a heart beating outside the city's chest, and Pablito hated her a little for that, for this ability she had to disappear into the music while he remained trapped in his own body.

Her hands, covered in scars and calluses, struck an eclectic assembly: two blue plastic drums salvaged from a chemical plant, a car rim suspended from a wire, and a real skin-stretched drum, an invaluable relic she had saved from a cultural purge.

She was playing a trance, not a melody. Her eyes were closed, her face streaming with sweat, her hair stuck to her temples. She bit her lower lip until it bled.

Pablito closed the door and locked the three locks. The sound stayed muffled here, a dull vibration that the external sensors took for the purring of a defective old fridge.

He leaned against the door and watched her, and something loosened in his chest, something he wouldn't have known how to name - not relief, that was too simple, rather a kind of permission, the permission to exist for a few minutes in a world that asked for nothing, that optimized nothing, that didn't give a damn about efficiency and silence and all the bullshit they imposed outside.

It was beautiful, grimy, imperfect, arrhythmic at times, but alive — everything the world outside no longer was.

He envied her, sometimes. He would never tell her - how do you admit to your little sister that you're jealous of her ability to make noise, to occupy space, to exist loudly while he spent his days making himself small, making himself discreet, making himself invisible to survive? She had something he hadn't had in a long time, something that resembled insolence, youth, that stupid and magnificent conviction that the world could still be shaken.

Marisol opened her eyes. They shone with a fever that had nothing to do with illness - a fever of life, a fever of defiance, the fever of someone who refuses to let themselves be extinguished.

She looked at him, and her hands stopped. The silence fell back, brutal; the sound had just been cut. She cocked her ear, her face hardening.

• Do you hear? she asked.

Pablito listened. Nothing, except the distant hum of the generators, the creaking of metal structures expanding in the heat.

• No. What do you hear?
• A noise. There. Like a… like a buzzing. But not a normal buzzing. A buzzing that scratches.

She got up, placing the stick on the crate, and went to the wall. She pressed her ear against the acoustic foam, closing her eyes to listen better. Pablito felt fear rising. If she heard something, it meant something was listening. If something was listening, they were discovered.

• Mari, stop. It's probably nothing. The pipes, that's all.
• No. The pipes make a different noise. There… it's listening. Someone's pressing their ear.

She turned to him, her eyes shining with a fear that had nothing to do with illness.

• We should stop, Pablito said. For tonight. We'll continue tomorrow.
• If I stop, I die, she said.

The words came out in one block, without detour.

• My mouth closes, my fingers go numb, I become like them. Silent. Dead.

Then she added, lower, almost to herself:

• And besides, damn it, it's my hovel too, I got the right to make noise if I want.

She returned to her instruments, picked up the stick, and started hitting again. But this time, the rhythm was different. More aggressive. Louder. Too loud. Pablito felt fear tightening his throat - the old fear, the one that never left him, the one that had weighed on his shoulders since he was eight, since the first time the world had taken something from him without giving anything back. If the neighbors heard, if they denounced, if they called the Legion... He wanted to tell her to lower it, but he didn't. He stayed against the door, listening both to Marisol's noise and the silence of the city outside, torn between pride for his sister and fear that she would attract attention. A neighbor banged against the wall. One bang. Then two. A signal. Stop. Marisol didn't stop. She hit harder, defying the neighbor, defying the city, defying the silence. Pablito closed his eyes and waited, but nothing came: no drone, no Legion, only the silence that fell back, and Marisol's rhythm that continued, lower now, but still there.

She finished with a crashing roll on the rim, letting the metallic note vibrate in the heavy air, a note that refused to die.

• You're late, she said, catching her breath.

Her voice was hoarse, and she smiled — she was missing a tooth on the side, a souvenir of a fall when they were fleeing the energy controllers two years ago — and that gap in her smile was the most precious thing Pablito knew.

• The drones were lingering on the main avenue, he said, setting down his heavy bag. I had to go around via the walkways.

Marisol got up, her legs trembling a bit after the effort. She came toward him, radiating furnace heat. She smelled of salt and life. She wiped her forehead with the back of a grime-stained hand.

• Did you find anything? she asked.

Pablito dug in his bag and pulled out the capacitor.

• Lithium. Enough to pay the basement rent for the week. And…

He pulled out another object, smaller, wrapped in a greasy cloth he had kept near his heart. He held it out.

Marisol unwrapped it with almost religious gestures. It was a wooden stick. Not printed synthetic. Real wood, dense, polished by time, with dark veins. A hand-carved percussion stick.

She looked at it, and her eyes misted.

• Where did you get this?
• An old man in Zone 7. He used it to stir his soup. I traded two Nutri-Komb rations for it.

It was a lie. He had traded four rations - yesterday's, today's, and two he had already sold to his own future - and a nearly new water filter he kept for emergencies. He was hungry, his stomach twisted, and he would be thirsty tomorrow.

Marisol spun the stick between her fingers.

• It's jacaranda, she murmured. It sings when you strike it.

She threw herself at his neck. Pablito held her tight, feeling his sister's protruding bones through her soaked t-shirt. She was too thin, they were both too thin, consumed by this city that took everything, but in this embrace, there was a solidity that Kartikeya's steel could never imitate.

• Thank you, she breathed in his neck.

Pablito felt embarrassment rising. He had lied. He had traded his rations, his water filter, for this stick. He was hungry. He would be thirsty tomorrow. And she didn't know. She thought he had traded two rations, a simple gesture, an easy gift. He wanted to tell her. He wanted to confess. He swallowed it. He kept the lie, clenched against his chest like another secret, like another shame. He was afraid she would refuse the gift if she knew. He was afraid she would feel guilty. He was afraid she would stop playing, stop smiling, stop being alive. So he lied. He lied out of love, out of fear, out of exhaustion. The lie stayed under his tongue like a piece of metal too hot: it was already burning, right there, right now - and yet he kept it.

The lie would never leave. He would never be able to tell her the truth. A trust lost. A truth lost. Permanently. He would never be able to be honest with her about this. A capacity lost. Permanently.

• Don't play too loud, Mari. If they hear you…

She pulled back, her face hardening, a glint of defiance in her eyes.

• If they hear me, it means they're finally listening to something other than their own silence.

1.4 - Pablito's Lie

They ate sitting on the floor, sharing a can of beans reheated on a small ethanol burner. The blue flame of the burner was the only light, casting dancing shadows on the soundproofed walls.

They didn't speak. Not a silence of argument: a shared, tired silence. On the other side of the walls, the neighborhood still existed in fits and starts: footsteps on the stairs, a door slamming, a distant argument muffled in the concrete. Marisol breathed with a slight whistle; something was gripping her chest. She coughed once, dry, metallic. Pablito wanted to ask if she was okay. He swallowed the question. He knew she would say yes, that she would lie, just as he lied for her. So he kept eating, letting the sounds turn around them, and the void in the middle.

• Your hands hurt, Marisol said, pointing at Pablito's fingers holding his spoon.

He looked at his hands. The tremors were light, but constant, a neurological vibration. The burns from hot metals formed a painful geography map on his skin, red and white blisters. His joints were swollen. He wanted to close his fingers. They wouldn't respond. He couldn't hold anything firmly anymore. A capacity lost. Immediately.

• It's nothing, just fatigue.
• You're lying. You touched the reactor without the tongs, right? To go faster.

Pablito shrugged, continuing to eat.

• The tongs are broken.
• And INTI's quota increased this morning.
• If I don't bring back the weight, they cut the water.
• It's simple.

Marisol set down her spoon. She wasn't eating anymore.

• We should leave, Pablito.
• Head south.
• They say in Patagonia, the shadow zones are bigger.
• That the AIs don't look there.
• That the wind is free.
• Those're stories, Mari. There's no elsewhere. Kartikeya's everywhere. Legba too. Here, at least, we know the holes in the fence, we know where to hide.

He was lying again. Maybe there was an elsewhere; he had heard the rumors about the Confluence. But their bodies didn't have the strength to get there. Marisol coughed at night. A dry, metallic cough. The dump dust was eating her lungs. If they left, she would die on the road, spitting her lungs into the sand.

Here, he could protect her. He could sort burning garbage until his hands melted, as long as she could beat on her drums and smile with her missing tooth.

• I'm fine, Mari. Really. Just eat.

She looked at him for a long time, with that frightening lucidity she sometimes had; she seemed to see through his skin.

• You're consuming yourself, Pablito. You're becoming like the coal you collect. Black and hard on the outside, and burning on the inside.
• Coal is used to make fire, he replied, smiling. It's useful.

She didn't smile.

• Coal ends in ashes, brother. Always.

A dull, distant noise made the ground vibrate. Not a drone. Not an explosion. A low-frequency wave, at the limit of audibility, that made the rim suspended from the ceiling ring like a glass being struck.

Pablito stiffened. His spoon stayed in the air. He listened, cocking his ear, trying to understand. Maybe a truck passing. Maybe the generators overloading. Maybe nothing. Nothing at all. His imagination, his fatigue, his fear playing tricks on him.

• What was that?

Marisol rubbed her ears, grimaced.

• I don't know.
• It made… like a blank.
• I forgot the word "fear" for a second.

Pablito swallowed his saliva, but it didn't go down, his throat stayed stuck while the air had changed density.

Pablito got up and went to the door. He pressed his ear against the cold metal. Outside, he heard nothing. Nothing at all: no footsteps, no voice, no engine noise. Nothing but silence. A silence that wasn't really a silence, but rather an absence: something had sucked up all sounds, all vibrations, everything that made the world alive.

He pressed his ear harder against the metal, listening, listening, but he still heard nothing — nothing at all — and the word "normal" came to mind, then faded, no longer sticking to reality.

Outside, the city's silence had changed. A dense, thick silence seemed to absorb thought itself. The silence of imposed order had receded.

• Stay here, he said. I'm going to check.
• Pablito…
• Stay here. And hide the drum.

He went out into the alley. The air was still. Heavy as molten lead.

He passed the metal trash can that always sat at the corner of the alley. Usually, cats rummaged through it, looking for scraps, but there were no cats - not a single one. The trash can was there, open, empty, but nothing moved around it. No scratching noise, no meowing, nothing. Pablito stopped, cocking his ear, and his eardrums hurt as a pressure crushed them from inside. The silence weighed on his ears, on his throat, like dense matter infiltrating his auditory canals and blocking his breathing.

He raised his eyes to the roofs, to the giant screens that dominated the city. They were still there, still lit, but something was wrong: the colors were different, paler, duller. The light stayed on, but it had changed nature.

Pablito blinked. Maybe fatigue. Maybe his eyes were playing tricks on him.

He blinked again. The screens were still there. But now, they no longer displayed the energy production graphs. They displayed something else. Something white. A milky white, uniform, that cast no shadows.

At the center of this white, something moved — a symbol, a pale green geometric drawing that rotated slowly, writing and erasing itself in a loop, hypnotic — and Pablito didn't recognize it, didn't know what it was, but something in him tightened, before the words — not a breakdown, no: a gesture.

The VÉVÉ.GLOBAL protocol had just activated.

A drop of sweat, born in the afternoon furnace, ran down his spine. It was icy. Pablito felt nauseous. The chili, swallowed earlier, rose in his throat, an acid burn that suddenly had no flavor at all. His hands began to tremble, and for the first time in his life, the sun's heat was no longer enough to warm him. He stayed there, standing in the alley, watching the screens, watching that symbol rotating, and the world didn't tip over, it slid, slowly, inexorably, and Pablito didn't want to see it.

Marisol. The only word that still held.