A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0049

Chapter 49

From the outside, the warehouse continued to lie.

That was the word that came to Jack every time he returned home and saw the facade appear at the end of the dead street in the industrial district: a well-told lie. The same rusted zinc sheets, the same high windows with more board than glass, the same sliding gate that groaned on its tracks with the reluctance of an old man waking up early. Weeds grew in the cracks of the sidewalk. An old sign, illegible from fading, still hung crookedly over the side entrance, advertising a parts company that had closed when Jack was still in diapers. Anyone passing by, and almost no one did, would see only another building corpse on a street full of them, and would continue on without a second glance.

That was exactly what the facade was for. Jack had insisted, clause by clause, that the city’s funds not touch a single screw on the outside. The rust was camouflage. The neglect was a wall.

Inside, the warehouse had become something else entirely.

The sound arrived first, even before the eyes adjusted to the new light: the rhythmic clang of metal against metal, the low rumble of a treadmill heating up, the dry crack of leather being scraped. Where before there had only been empty concrete, dust, and the skeletons of dead machines, now stretched a black industrial rubber floor, and upon it a small territory organized with the logic of those who took this seriously. Racks of weight plates in rows, not neighborhood gym weight plates: solid plates, cast on demand, that began where commercial bars ended. A reinforced treadmill. Two punching bags, one of a decent size and another that looked like a tree trunk covered in tarp, hanging from a beam that needed to be braced twice. And in the center of it all, occupying the heart of the warehouse like an altar, the boxing ring.

It was Kevin’s idea, the ring. Jack had turned his nose up at it at first, saying that a tatami mat would do the trick, that a ring was vanity, and Kevin had replied that vanity was exactly the point, that training without a bit of theatrics becomes an obligation, and obligations are something you start skipping. He was right, of course. Almost every week the two of them climbed those ropes to challenge each other, and it had become a private institution, with its own rules, its own provocations, and a score that neither of them admitted to keeping track of, even though they both knew the numbers by heart.

That late afternoon, the score was still up for grabs.

Jack parried the elbow that was coming toward his head, felt the impact travel down his forearm to his shoulder like a train entering a station, and used the recoil to spin beneath Kevin’s guard. His friend was in his hybrid form, two and a half meters of muscle topped by a boar’s head, and even holding back his strength, even fighting with what he called his “polite manner,” each of his blows carried enough mass to remind Jack, with great clarity, why he never stood still.

“You’re slow today.” Kevin’s voice came out deep and a little drawn out by the long mouth and snout, but the fun was all there. “Did you sleep hugging the egg again?”

“The egg is on the nightstand.” Jack entered, touched two ribs with his fingertips, marking the points, and left before the enormous arm closed the space. “And slow is he who hasn’t hit me yet.”

“Hitting you isn’t my job.” Kevin spun his torso with a speed that didn’t match his size, and his open paw passed within a hand’s breadth of Jack’s chest, displacing enough air to mess up his hair. “My job is to tire you out. Then you’ll miss on your own.”

It was true, and that was exactly why those training sessions were worth their weight in gold. The suit gave Jack speed, precision, a reading of movement that bordered on cheating. None of that was of much use against an opponent who didn’t fall, didn’t bleed, and didn’t tire in the same way. Fighting Kevin was fighting against the worst possible scenario, every week, for free, and Jack had learned more in that ring in a month than in all the nights on the streets combined.

They danced for another three minutes. Jack scored points that, in an ordinary man, would result in a ruptured liver and a closed trachea; Kevin made a single touch, a glancing blow to the shoulder that sent Jack against the ropes and caused the entire ring structure to protest. They finished as they almost always did, without a knockout and without an official winner, both leaning against opposite ropes, gauging each other’s breathing.

“A draw,” declared Kevin.

“You say that every week.”

“And it’s true every week.” The enormous body began to shrink, the reddish-brown fur receding, the fangs tapering until they disappeared, and in about ten seconds it was just Kevin again, broad, red-haired, his poorly trimmed beard dripping with sweat, searching for the water bottle with the same urgency as always. He drank half in one gulp and pointed the bottle toward the corner of the shed, where a steel support welded to the wall held the weapon. “Tomorrow I want another hour with it. I’m still spinning wide from the downward stroke.”

Jack followed the gesture with his eyes.

On the stand, standing horizontally like a relic in a museum that did not exist, rested the kanabo.

They had arrived at it by process of elimination. Kevin’s problem had always been the same, ever since the fruit: hands that were too big. Not the big of a big man, big in another category, fingers that, in their hybrid form, encircled a motorcycle helmet like someone holding an orange. Firearms, for him, were a bad joke: no trigger would fit in that space, no stock would sit on that palm. They spent weeks discussing alternatives, and it was Kevin himself who one night showed up with the answer on his cell phone screen, an old Japanese print of a red-skinned demon holding a studded staff.

“If I’m going to look like a folklore monster,” he’d said, “I’ll at least choose folklore.”

The piece had been custom-forged in a workshop that asked questions Christopher Scott had taught him not to answer. Six feet long, a single piece of solid metal from handle to head, its octagonal body thickening towards the end covered in pyramidal studs. No human being could lift it from its support; it took three men and a hoist just to hang it there. In Kevin’s hand, it would become a baseball bat. Jack had already seen him, in the middle of a training session, spin it with one fist, in a lazy figure eight, and the sound it made cutting through the air was the sound that any animal’s instinct recognizes as the time to run.

The mastery was still raw, which was tender. Kevin would spin wide, telegraph the downward strike, forget the low point after the horizontal arc. But “raw” in Kevin was a relative concept. A mistake in form, in an arm that could rip countertops from the floor, would still end up with the target in another part of the state. And he learned quickly, with the stubborn patience of someone who had spent his whole life being underestimated, and Jack pushed him to the limit every day, without mercy, because mercy in training is a debt that is paid on the streets.

The vest was on the mannequin next to the stand, completing the portrait.

Black, matte, molded to the torso of the hybrid shape, rising into a rigid collar that closed the neck to the base of the jaw and leaving the arms entirely bare, because bare arms, on Kevin, were more of a message than a sign of carelessness. Beneath the outer ballistic fabric ran plates of an alloy that the armorer had described with almost religious pride and which, in practice, translated into a single number: the whole thing weighed more than two adult men. No other living being in the city would walk ten steps wearing that. Kevin wore it like someone wearing a tank top, and complained, at most, that it made him hot.

The result was a new kind of arithmetic in the nights of San Diego. Before, heavy caliber bullets would still find Kevin’s skin and take their toll, little, but something—a welt, a trickle of blood, a bruise that would disappear in hours. Now, not even that. The vest stopped heavy caliber bullets with a muffled bell-like sound and returned the crumpled bullet to the ground, and what advanced behind that sound was a tank with a boar’s head wielding a Japanese war club. Jack had seen entire groups drop their weapons at the mere sight of his silhouette filling a doorway.

“One hour tomorrow,” Jack agreed, stepping out of the ring through the ropes. “After the circuit. And this time you’ll be practicing against a moving target, because a stationary post doesn’t return fire.”

“A stationary lamppost doesn’t insult me ​​either.” Kevin grabbed the towel from the mannequin’s shoulder, dried the back of his neck, and stood for a moment looking around the warehouse, the gym, the ring, the new door in the back with the makeshift sign that Jack still thought was kind of ridiculous. Something softened on his face, that specific expression that Jack already knew how to read: the prodigal son reckoning with life. “One month, huh.”

“One month,” said Jack.

“We should buy a cake.”

“We should hire people.” Jack grabbed his own bottle and drank, leaning against the corner post of the ring. “I’m serious. Go to the room later and look at the pile of stuff that’s accumulated. Weapons maintenance is all in our hands, and I know how to clean and assemble them, but I’m not an armorer. The net in the intelligence room is hanging on a makeshift setup that any angry fifteen-year-old could knock down. And at some point Christopher will come back to take care of the city’s image instead of ours, and then we’ll need our own.”

“A technician, a digital security guy, a marketer.” Kevin counted on his thick fingers. “You’re describing a payroll, my friend. This has a name. This is a company.”

“It’s an agency.” Jack shrugged, but the corner of his mouth twitched. “Technically, it already is. They have a contract, they have their own tax ID number, they have a budget. They even have employees.”

“I am not your employee.”

“The paperwork says yes.”

“The paper says I’m a ‘founding contributor.'” Kevin pointed the towel at him like he was pointing a sword. “I drafted that clause myself, and it was the most important thing I’ve ever written in my life. Contributor. Founder. Decorate.”

“It’s on the organizational chart, Kevin. Right below me. There’s even a little arrow.”

“The little arrow is decorative.”

Jack chuckled softly, and Kevin chuckled along, and for a moment the two of them just stood there, sweaty, in the middle of the gym that a month before had been dust, listening to the hum of the new spotlights. Then Kevin threw the towel over his shoulder and headed for the back stairs, announcing over his shoulder that he was showering first and that there was cold beer with his name on it, and Jack stayed behind.

His day wasn’t over yet.

…

The large, canvas punching bag was the last item in his routine, and Jack saved it for last precisely because it was the only time of day he allowed himself not to think about technique.

He wrapped the bandages with his usual care, took his position, and began.

One, two. One, two, three. The leather crackled, the beam chain clanked, and Jack’s body did what it had been doing for months with a consistency that still surprised him when he stopped to notice: it improved. The suit amplified what already existed, that had always been the rule, and what existed now was another raw material. A month of real food in real quantities, of daily training with a partner who wouldn’t break, of sleeping on a new mattress. The punches that sank into the canvas carried a density that the Jack from the gas station wouldn’t recognize as his own, not even under torture.

And between one blow and another, to the hypnotic rhythm of the leather, the entire month passed before him.

What a month.

The city had changed. Not healed—changed was the right word, healing would still take years—but changed in a way that could be measured from a bus window. The center was the first sign: Chief Jones had taken over those blocks with his police, slowly, block by block, with the stubbornness of a man planting a fence in a gale, and where the police stopped, something would reopen. A diner here. A pharmacy that had removed the boards from its window there. Not much, small lights, but lights in a city that had spent years fading, and people noticed those small lights with a gratitude that people from healthy cities wouldn’t understand.

Their work fueled this engine from the ground up. The arrangement had found its natural rhythm: the police informant network and the warehouse intelligence room filtered the targets, Kevin’s senses did the rest, and almost every night the two went out to reap what the city had sown in years of neglect. The harvest was plentiful. Ten arrests was an average night; good nights exceeded that. The hammer fell on drug dens, warehouses, hideouts, dismantling workshops, with the regularity of a tide, and San Diego’s criminal network, accustomed to decades of calm seas, no longer knew where the dry season was.

The side effect had become national news, and Jack still laughed every time he remembered it: the county jail was overcrowded. Overcrowded in the bureaucratic and literal sense of the word, with the warden giving interviews with dark circles under his eyes to explain that they were chartering buses and negotiating spaces with prisons in other states because the city was arresting people faster than it was processing them. There were editorials complaining about the cost. There were editorials responding that this was the best problem San Diego had had in twenty years. Christopher Scott had cut out both and hung them in the intelligence room, side by side, with a note: “this is called a dominated agenda”.

And then there were the invitations. These arrived through the city hall, filtered by Christopher, and they kept coming: four television stations wanting studio interviews, two talk shows, a documentary, a magazine proposing a cover. Christopher handled it all with the discipline of a dam, repeating his mantra that scarcity is the only currency that appreciates on its own, and Jack agreed effortlessly, because every hour in the studio was an hour off the street, and the street was still where the work resided.

One, two. Hook. The chain jingled louder.

“Work,” Jack thought, and his thoughts drifted down a floor, to the part of the month that didn’t appear in the editorial.

Aside from Brad, locked up in special custody and slowly becoming an unprecedented legal problem for the state, two more meth addicts had fallen that month. Two. And each of them had taught them something.

…

The first one had come to prison, which already said a lot about his intelligence.

The alert came through Jones’s direct line one Wednesday night, around eleven: a man attacking the service gate of the county jail, alone, his rifle shots bouncing off him ineffectively, guards retreating to the towers. A meth trying to fight his way to the wing where half his gang awaited a hearing. The plan, if it deserved the name, was brute force and loyalty, and it might even have had a chance of succeeding in a San Diego two months earlier, when the answer to “bulletproof man” was a prayer and a perimeter.

The problem with the plan was the response time. And the response time now had four little legs.

Jack still remembered the faces of the guards in the tower when they arrived. Not the arrival itself; it had been too quick to have any quality witnesses: a blur of dark wood weaving through the empty avenues, doubling corners in skids that sent sparks from the metal, devouring miles of asphalt at a speed that no patrol car’s dashboard could keep up with. Dentes ran like the race cars Kevin watched on Sundays, and ran better, because race cars don’t climb stairs or go through alleys. From Jones’s warning to the prison gate, it was seven minutes. The methamphetamine was still in the third layer of the armored door when the trunk lid opened in the security plaza and spat out the city’s two protectors in the full light of the spotlights.

Jack had read the scene in seconds, and the reading had been almost disappointing. Skin turning to metal, that was the subject’s entire power: a man covered in living steel, strong in proportion to the steel, slow in the same proportion, with no reach, no projectiles, no surprises. A problem with only one variable. Jack stood where he was, arms crossed, and simply said: “It’s yours.”

And Kevin answered the call.

The fight had lasted less than Kevin’s walk to him. The meth had landed a punch on the chest of the vest, an honest punch, with his whole body, and the sound was like a hammer hitting a bridge; Kevin hadn’t even adjusted his stance. Then the kanabo described two short, almost didactic arcs, one to each side, and the discussion ended there. Metal skin stopped blades, stopped bullets, stopped fire. It didn’t stop mass. Seven kilos of alloy in motion don’t ask what the surface is made of, they only ask what’s underneath, and underneath were arms and legs, and the arms and legs of the man of steel bent in directions that no steel should bend. He lay limp on the ground of the security plaza, his limbs twisted like old fence wire, groaning behind his own metallic skin, and the police only needed to frame him, handcuff him over the folds, and register the incident.

“Methamano in custody number two,” Jones had said on the phone the next day, in that pharmacist voice he used for the best news. “Do you have any idea what that’s worth?”

Jack had it. The fear kept switching sides.

…

The second methamphetamine of the month was another story altogether, and it was the story Jack avoided revisiting when he wanted a good night’s sleep.

It started with a pattern in the reports: women disappearing in the east side of town, always at night, always on streets with closed shops, no witnesses, no useful cameras, no bodies. Four in three weeks. The police had a map full of clues and no thread connecting them, until a discordant report came up in the intelligence room’s triage: a scavenger who swore he saw “the ground moving” behind a woman on Thirty-Two Street. The shift had filed it away as delusion. Kevin had unarchived it.

“The ground that moves,” he said, tapping his finger on the screen. “This smells like something of ours.”

It was there. Two nights of surveillance in the east side, the suit sweeping the streets with its tracking function while Kevin’s snout, in hybrid form, read the wind, and the trail appeared: a smell that Kevin described with a grimace, urine and disease and something sweet underneath, a trail that snaked through the sewers and led to a disused slaughterhouse near the canal. And along with the trail, that same night, the sound. A woman’s scream, short, swallowed halfway through.

They arrived at the minute it still mattered.

The man was homeless, or had been at some point before his downfall: a grimy figure under layers of coat, his face lost behind crust and beard, his eyes with a misguided gleam. And around him, above him, at his service, power. Rats. Not an infestation, an army: the slaughterhouse floor was a living carpet, brown and gray, thousands of small bodies moving in a single organism that responded to that man’s will as fingers respond to a hand. The woman lay beside a gutter, her ankles tied, alive. The fifth. By then, the two already knew what the searches in the back of the slaughterhouse would confirm about the first four.

But they also knew what they were dealing with, because this time the target had been studied before even touching the door. A man who commands a plague isn’t defeated with a punch, but with preparation, and the preparation was hanging on the shoulders of the two men in two canvas bags full of bottles. Molotov cocktails, assembled the previous afternoon on the shed’s workbench, with the improvised solemnity of a backyard production line. Kevin had written “pesticide solution” on one of the bottles, with a pen, because Kevin was Kevin.

The fire had done what fire does. The army of rats was numerous, but numbers burn equally, and the panic of thousands of burning creatures broke the meth man’s control faster than any blow: Jack saw the exact moment when the man’s misguided eyes became just misguided and alone, the living tide receding from him in despair, the power turning to smoke along with the troop. After that, he was just a man in a burning warehouse with two city protectors between him and the exit.

The beating that followed was not a fight, and Jack wouldn’t call it a fight, not even in his own mind.

Because it was there, with the woman crying, tied to the gutter, and the smell of the slaughterhouse’s backwaters filling his nostrils, that Jack had felt, for the first time since the beginning of everything, the clean, silent urge to execute a man. Not anger. He knew anger; anger was hot and passed. This was cold and didn’t pass: a conclusion. The world would be better off without that item, and Jack had the means to carry out the subtraction on his belt, and his hand had already begun its journey when Kevin’s paw landed on his shoulder, heavy and still.

“It’s not the right time,” Kevin had said quietly, just to himself. No, “don’t do it.” No, “this is wrong.” Kevin had chosen his words with the care of someone disarming a charge, and the words were an argument, not a sermon: it’s not the time. A month into his career, the whole city learning to trust him, the contract fresh, cameras everywhere. To debut with an execution was to mortgage everything they were building to pay a single bill.

And Jack had agreed. The hand had returned. The conclusion, however, had not.

Which doesn’t mean he held back entirely.

The report would later mention polytrauma, with a list of fractures that occupied the next page and a half—bones not broken but pulverized—and the rat-catcher had been handed over to the police breathing with the aid of machines, and to this day he remained breathing like that, in a monitored bed in a prison ward, in a coma about which the doctors spoke with increasingly less constrained verbs. Jack highly doubted he would wake up. And he had made peace with the exact magnitude of that doubt, which was none.

…

One, two, three. Cross. The canvas bag swung heavily in the current.

His weapons had been born that same month, and the city already knew them better than it knew his face.

They came from one of the rounds. Not the big one, one of the small ones, a mid-month offer made almost as a formality, and the die had landed on a modest number that delivered, on the living room table, a long, dark wooden case that Jack didn’t recognize from any world he could name. Inside, in worn velvet, the pair. Two revolvers, if the word still served that purpose: enormous weapons, with long, octagonal barrels, the metal a deep, almost bluish gray, covered in fine engravings that were not decoration; Jack would bet the contract on it, although he had never managed to read them. The caliber wasn’t listed in any table. The gunsmith Christopher had recommended had measured the chamber twice, taken off his glasses, and said that this wasn’t handgun ammunition, it was artillery ammunition with pretension, and that the recoil from a shot would shatter the wrist, elbow, and possibly shoulder of any living shooter.

From any shooter without the suit.

In Jack’s hand, with the fabric’s fibers locking his entire forearm at the instant of the shot, the two barrels spoke with the voice of a pocket-sized thunderclap, and what that voice said, San Diego had learned quickly. Each bullet was a final argument. Jack rarely shot people, he didn’t need to: he shot things, and the things ceased to exist. A pointed rifle turned into scrap metal spinning in the air along with the numb fingers of whoever held it. An engine block became an anchor. An armored door became the past. And on the rare nights when he decided to shoot a bandit, when the situation crossed the line he himself had drawn, the devastation was of another nature, the kind that survivors later described in hushed voices and without adjectives, because no adjective could improve the account.

The practical result was a new rule in effect on the city streets, not written into any law and enforced better than any other: don’t mess with him. And the second clause, which Jack cultivated even more carefully: when the Knight gives an order, obey. He had seen the clause work two nights ago, in a junkyard, twelve armed men and him alone at the entrance, both barrels still in their holsters. He had asked, in his usual polite tone, that they drop their weapons and kneel. Eleven obeyed before the final point. The twelfth hesitated, and Jack drew and fired once, and the pickup truck next to the man lost its entire front axle in a bang that lit up lights three blocks away. The twelfth knelt so quickly that he scraped his knees.

The rest of the arsenal was stored inside Dentes.

This had been a gradual discovery and, like almost everything involving the trunk, slightly absurd: the creature’s bottomless stomach held whatever Jack asked it to hold, and returned it on demand, dry, clean, and in order. Over the course of the month, the inventory had grown with each seizure that the paperwork allowed and each purchase that the budget permitted: shotguns, rifles for the nights when a rifle made sense, ammunition in boxes, flash grenades, ropes, trauma kits, a circular saw that Kevin had insisted on including “on principle.” A mobile arsenal with dog legs, trotting behind its owner through the city. Jack had never known, in any of the stories he had read his whole life, better logistics.

And Dentes, in turn, had become something else that no one had planned: a symbol.

The blame lay partly with Christopher, who had understood before everyone else what he had in his hands. The Knight was admired, the Wild One was feared and respected, but the chest, the chest was loved, and love, in Christopher’s accounting, was worth more than the other two combined. A wooden monster with its tongue sticking out and the enthusiasm of a stray dog ​​disarmed any city. There were cell phone videos with millions of views: Teeth trotting behind Jack down an avenue, Teeth receiving affection from a child under the petrified gaze of the mother, Teeth yawning, the lid opening in that crooked smile of overly white teeth, during a mayoral press conference. People treated him like the duo’s official pet, and Christopher was already talking about trademark registration with a glint in his eye that Jack preferred not to look at for long.

And around the trunk, the vest, the kanabo, the two pocket thunderbolts, the fame of the two had grown to a level that neither of them quite knew how to inhabit. Kevin handled it better: the Savage was popular in the simple and solid way of good giants, strength, courage, the defense that no bullet in the city could pierce. With Jack, things had taken a stranger turn. Beauty and stature had done half the work, that was expected, Christopher had foreseen the fan pages before they existed. But the other half no one had foreseen: the mystical air. Because the Knight, in the eyes of the city, was a man from whom impossible things simply came. The outfit that no one recognized. The dagger that wounded what no weapon could wound. The living trunk. The weapons of nonexistent caliber. Strange abilities that appeared without warning and without explanation, and which he never explained, and his elegant silence about all of them only watered the harvest. There were entire forums dedicated to theories. Sorcerer, one current said. “Alien,” one theory suggested. “Heir to some ancient order,” a third wagered, and this was Kevin’s favorite, who sometimes read the theories aloud at breakfast, between bites, in the voice of a documentary narrator.

The truth, Jack thought, fitting one last hook into the bag, the truth wasn’t in any forum, and it was stranger than all the bets.

He gripped the bag with both hands, stopping the swinging motion, and remained like that for a moment, his forehead almost touching the canvas, sweat trickling down his chin and dripping onto the rubber floor. His breathing slowed. Somewhere above, muffled by the concrete slab, he could hear the television on and Kevin’s footsteps in the kitchen.

One last thing still lingered in his mind, a loose thread from the month: the corrupt. Jones’s police force was slowly rebuilding, a process that had taken years, and the bottleneck in this process had names and surnames scattered across spreadsheets that no one could close, the badges that, during the decade of the fall, had chosen the other side and remained on the payroll, tucked away, waiting for the wind to change again. Jones hunted his own with the care of someone removing fish bones in the dark. And Jack had been wondering, with less and less laziness in the question, if there wasn’t a way he could help in this hunt. The suit heard what no one else heard. The trunk went where no one else went. It was a conversation to have with the chief, one of those conversations that would require a closed door and no minutes.

Later. Everything in its own time.

Jack unwrapped the bandages, hung them on the rack, and crossed the shed to the steel table against the wall of the intelligence room. And he smiled, as he always did, even before he had decided to smile.

On the table, inside a transparent acrylic container that he himself had assembled and lined with thermal insulation, lay an egg.

White, the size of a small melon, its smooth shell speckled with green spots in a pattern that never repeated. Perfectly still, perfectly ordinary, if ordinary were a word that still served to describe anything in Jack’s life. He had recognized the egg the instant the die stopped and the reward materialized on the table, and the recognition had come from a deep, ancient place in his memory, from hundreds of hours of a poor childhood spent in front of a small screen, walking, walking, walking, counting steps to hatch creatures from inside eggs identical to that one.

An egg from the world of Pokémon.

The deal that had brought him there was the biggest he’d ever made, and it hadn’t been cheap. Seven hundred thousand dollars. Not in cash—that amount of money would have taken half a year to gather without attracting attention; in value, in the currency the system accepted with the same appetite as always, and the most abundant source of concentrated value in a sick city was drugs. Fifteen days of dedicated hunting. Fifteen nights in which the choice of targets had discreetly leaned towards the links in the network where the merchandise pooled: warehouses, cargo in transit, mouth-to-mouth safes. The police got the arrests, the evidence, and the headlines; a fraction of the merchandise, weighed by eye by an honest and flexible mathematician, went down Dentes’ throat before the sirens turned the corner. At the end of the second week, the account was settled, and Jack had dumped everything at once on the offer, and the die had spun faster and longer than he had ever seen it spin, its faces blurred in a roulette of light, and then stopped.

And he handed over the egg.

He found himself speculating about what slept inside with a frequency bordering on the ridiculous. What generation it came from, what region, what species. A seven hundred thousand dollar offer suggested something worthy, and his hope, fueled by discipline, rested on a strong creature. But even the worst-case scenario didn’t frighten him: in that specific world, he knew better than anyone, there were no useless creatures, only trainers without imagination. An animal that emitted sparks was already a generator. One that dug was already a rescue team. He had spent his life studying that world for fun, without suspecting that one day the study would become a profession.

Jack dried himself with the towel, opened the container, and picked up the egg with both hands, with the automatic care that had become a habit. The shell was warm, it always was, a degree above the room temperature, the only sign that something was waiting inside. Since turning it, the egg hadn’t left his side. It went up with him, it came down with him, it slept on the nightstand next to the bed, because no manual had accompanied the delivery and Jack had no idea when, or how, the hatching would happen. I only knew that I wanted to be there.

The scraping of paws on the rubber floor announced the arrival of the escort.

Teeth trotted in from the corner where he’d spent the last hour dozing, his lid slightly open, his long tongue hanging out and wagging in rhythm with his trot, and took up position half a step behind his owner with the punctuality of someone who takes his job seriously. He followed Jack up the stairs step by step, his four little paws drumming on the metal plate, his wooden hindquarters swaying. From any angle, he was a dog that wouldn’t leave Jack alone, and Jack had long since given up pretending he didn’t like it.

He opened the door at the top of the stairs and the apartment welcomed him.

…

To call that an improvised apartment today would be slander.

The upstairs of the warehouse had undergone the same silent revolution as the downstairs, and the difference assaulted his memory: where Jack remembered a mattress on the floor, a two-burner stove, and a refrigerator that made more noise than ice, there was now a fully functioning home. A large, new television dominated the living room wall, bought with the second installment of the funds after a negotiation between the two that Kevin had conducted with the seriousness of someone closing a merger. A new rug under their bare feet. New flooring. And the kitchen, the former shame of the house, had become a truly planned kitchen, with long cabinets, a countertop, a stove with more burners than they used, and a range hood that Kevin nicknamed. Impressive, Jack thought every time he crossed that door, what money could do. He had spent his whole life hearing that money couldn’t buy happiness, and he had concluded that the phrase had been invented by someone who had never taken a hot shower in a port winter.

Jack placed the egg on the padded shelf, went to the new refrigerator, took out a bottle of water, and drank half of it standing up, feeling the cold go down. Behind him, a scraping of wood and a wet licking of tongues indicated that Dentes had taken his place beside the counter, the lid open in the universal expectation of dogs in kitchens.

Jack opened the bottom drawer of the refrigerator and took out a whole chicken.

“Here, kid.”

The chicken described a short arc in the air. The lid swung open, the row of white, crooked teeth greeted the bird in mid-flight, and the chewing began immediately, loudly, enthusiastically, without any of the formalities that separate furniture from beings. Jack watched for a second, shook his head slowly, and left the girl eating.

In the living room, the television was on, and the new armchair was occupied.

Kevin, showered, clean t-shirt in hand, beer in hand, occupied the seat with the relaxed majesty of a king on his day off, his feet on the coffee table, the remote control balanced on the armrest. On the screen, the evening news was doing what San Diego news programs had been doing every night for the past month: talking about themselves. The news bulletin displayed, for the umpteenth time, the artwork that some newsroom had created and all the others had copied, the two silhouettes side by side, the giant with the boar’s head and the slender man in the overcoat, under the logo that the whole city already read without needing to read: Savage and Knight.

“We’ve arrived at the best part.” Kevin raised the bottle without taking his eyes off the screen. “They’re going to show the segment about the building. Again. The third time today, I counted.”

Jack grabbed a beer from the fridge, opened it, and sank into the other armchair.

On screen, the anchor delivered the report with that rehearsed gravity of someone announcing a tragedy with a happy ending, and images from the previous night began to play. The residential building in the east side of town was ablaze, the fire shooting out of the third-floor windows in orange tongues against the black sky, illuminating the entire street. The report explained what the police had already confirmed that morning: arson, retaliation by a gang against residents who had been cooperating with reports. A message written in fire, in the city’s old dialect.

The message was not delivered.

The shaky cell phone footage, recorded from the opposite sidewalk, showed what the entire city had already watched on a loop. First, the entrance: the Knight crossing the main door of the burning building without breaking stride, and behind him, trotting into the fire with the same enthusiasm with which he trotted behind him on a sunny day, the wooden trunk. The crowd on the sidewalk shouted for the two to return. The two did not return. They disappeared in the smoke, and for long minutes the video showed only that, the building burning and the street praying, windows shattering one by one in the heat, and no sign of them except for shadows that were perhaps imagination, a silhouette in an overcoat passing behind a curtain of smoke on the third floor, a dark rectangle climbing the internal staircase where no rectangle should have been.

Inside, Jack had made the job run like an assembly line. He cleared a path, broke down doors locked by panic, dragged people from under beds and out of bathrooms, and Dentes came half a step behind, the lid wide open, receiving each resident Jack handed him and swallowing them with the incomprehensible delicacy of a monster who understands his own job. A lady. A couple. Three children at once. Floor after floor, door after door, all dispatched to the dark, dry, and cool shelter of that impossible stomach, far from the smoke that killed more than the fire, while the building creaked and gave way around them.

And then, the part the whole country had watched on a loop: the exit. The Knight emerging from the main door enveloped in smoke, his overcoat streaked with soot, alone, and behind him the trunk, trotting out of the flames unscathed, and the confused silence of the crowd lasting exactly until the trunk stopped in the middle of the street and opened its mouth. The lid flung open, the long tongue unrolled onto the asphalt like a ramp, and from inside that opening, from the throat of a piece of furniture, people began to emerge. The first, a lady in a nightgown clutching a cat, elicited a collective scream from the crowd that the cell phone captured in its entirety, a sound that was half fright and half something unclassifiable, and then came the others, one by one, blinking against the emergency lights, coughing slightly, intact, thirty-seven residents returned to the cold night by the mouth of a wooden monster, under the eyes of an entire sidewalk that oscillated between panic and applause and ended, as it always ended with Dentes, choosing applause. The firefighters arrived to extinguish a fire in a building with no one inside. The gang responsible woke up today with half of its members arrested and the other half having disappeared from the city on their own accord.

“Thirty-seven,” said Kevin, pointing the bottle at the screen, where the number appeared in large letters. “You know what I like most about that number? Not a single resident wanted to sue us for being swallowed by a treasure chest. Not a single one. Christopher was genuinely thrilled.”

“He texted me at seven in the morning. It simply said ‘THIS IS PRICELESS’, in capital letters.”

“The boy loves what he does.”

On screen, the story reached where Kevin wanted it to, and he increased the volume with a hint of ceremony. The recording changed texture, from a cell phone camera to a professional camera: the interview, conducted live in the early hours of the previous morning, on the sidewalk in front of the still-smoking building, minutes after the rescue.

The reporter was young, from one of the channels that covered the duo with fan-like dedication, and was visibly off-script. Not because of the story, but because of the proximity: the Knight had responded to her wave and crossed the street, and now he was standing a meter away, soot scratching his beige overcoat without managing to ruin it, his glasses reflecting the emergency lights, and the girl’s face, in the involuntary close-up of the camera, was a study in professionalism losing the battle. Her cheeks were the exact color of the sirens.

“Knight,” she began, needing half a second to find her own voice, “thirty-seven people owe you their lives tonight. What goes through the mind of someone who enters a burning building… four times?”

“Seven times.” The correction came gently, with the half-smile that the forums had already turned into study material. “And what goes through your head is really very little. The next floor. The next door. Fire is a simple adversary, it only knows how to be in a hurry. The advantage of whoever enters is knowing why they entered.”

“And why did you come in?”

“Because it was their house.” The Knight turned his glasses toward the building behind her, toward the windows still spewing thin smoke. “Someone thought fire was an argument against people who decided not to be afraid anymore. Thirty-seven people just responded. I only held the ladder.”

The reporter swallowed hard, stared blankly for a moment, and asked the question that clearly wasn’t on the notepad.

“The trunk. The people… they went inside the trunk. They are… what’s it like inside?”

“Dry, dark, and safe.” A precise pause. “Better than many guesthouses in this city, I was told today.”

Her laughter escaped live on air, nervous and genuine, and became a meme before dawn. The Knight slightly inclined his head, the brief greeting of someone concluding a hearing, and was already turning to leave when the young woman, in a final burst of professional courage, raised the microphone.

“One last thing! The city wants to know. Who are you, Knight? Beneath all this?”

He stopped. He turned halfway around, and the emergency lights spun once in his sunglasses before he responded.

“Someone this city made,” he said. “The rest is detail.”

And it went into the trunk’s mouth, and the trunk shot down the street, and the camera kept shaking behind it until it became a dot, and the reporter took three audible seconds to remember to return to the studio.

In the armchair, Kevin laughed with his whole body, the beer threatening to stain his clean t-shirt.

“‘The rest is just details,'” he repeated, wiping his eye. “I was across the street handcuffing people and I almost dropped everything to applaud. Where’s the kid who stuttered when asking for a raise at the gas station? Have you two been introduced yet?”

“The outfit helps.”

“The suit, I know.” Kevin pointed the bottle at him, his smile softening to something older. “The suit doesn’t write the dialogue, brother. The suit just holds your face in place while you talk.”

Jack didn’t answer. He took a sip, slowly, and kept his eyes on the screen, where the news program continued, now showing a story about the reopening of two more shopping streets in the city center. The reporter was walking along a sidewalk where there were people, ordinary people, with shopping bags in their hands, at the time of day when, a year ago, that same street would have been empty and locked up. The anchor was talking about crime rates falling for the fifth consecutive period. She spoke of hope with the caution of someone who had been wrong before, but she spoke nonetheless.

Jack looked around the room. The new television. The rug underfoot. His friend sprawled in the armchair beside him, laughing to himself again at his own memory. The white egg with green spots sleeping warmly on the shelf, full of tomorrow. And down below, through the floor, the thin, contented sound of a creature from another world finishing a chicken in the renovated kitchen.

A year ago, at this time, he would have been counting coins in a musty-smelling cubicle, figuring out if the month would end.

Jack leaned back in his armchair, gently raised the bottle towards the screen in a toast that no one needed to see, and smiled.

His life was changing, day by day. And, for the first time in his lifetime, it was changing for the better.