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+{"text":" \n#### The Eagle of Toledo\n\nThis book is dedicated to the memory of Mar\u00eda Jos\u00e9 Ant\u00f3n Jornet, and to Mar.\n\n#### Contents\n\nAuthor's Note\n\nAcknowledgements\n\nPrologue: The Reference Point\n\n1. 'Nunca Ha Sido Ni\u00f1o' ('He Never Was A Child')\n\n2. The Melon Thief\n\n3. Cycling's Most Famous Ice Cream\n\n4. The Gypsy Rider\n\n5. Pointing the Finger\n\n6. Loro\u00f1o v Bahamontes \u2013 A Knife in the Table\n\n7. The Dangers of 'Go-Fast'\n\n8. 1959 \u2013 'That Man From Toledo'\n\n9. 'The Bullfighter on Two Wheels'\n\n10. Goodbye to the Vuelta\n\n11. Exile\n\n12. A Pirate With a Pair of Pliers\n\n13. The Master and the Apprentice\n\n14. Into the Bushes\n\n15. La Vuelta a Toledo\n\nPalmares\n\nBibliography\n\nIndex\n\nCopyright\n\n#### Author's Note\n\nFor the sake of clarity for non-cycling fans and also because that is what the people of Catalonia call it, I have used _Volta a Catalunya_ or _Volta_ to describe the region's premier stage race (also known, outside Spain, as the Tour of Catalunya or Tour of Catalonia). For similar reasons I have used _Vuelta al Pa\u00eds Vasco_ rather than the Tour of the Basque Country, _Giro d'Italia_ or _Giro_ rather than the Tour of Italy, and the _Vuelta_ or the _Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a_ for the Tour of Spain. Given its overriding importance, the Tour de France is sometimes referred to simply as the Tour. (As Bahamontes likes to say: ' _Le Tour is le Tour_.')\n\nOn a completely different note, this biography contains extracts from a number of interviews with Federico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes but it is not an authorised version of his life. As Bahamontes put it: 'You can do it, provided you leave me in peace.' And, by and large, I did.\n\nAlasdair Fotheringham\n\nMarch 2012\n\n#### Acknowledgements\n\nFirst and foremost, my greatest thanks goes to Naomi, for making this book both possible and worth doing.\n\nSteve Farrand has been a rock of support throughout, and Jacinto Vidarte has provided everything from photographs of Bahamontes to a much-appreciated dry sense of humour about the whole project. To these two in particular, thanks.\n\nI am also very grateful to my mother, Alison Harding, for her support, knowledge and advice on reading and writing books, thinking about books and getting them published; to my brother William, for sound advice about the same, useful phone numbers, specific comments and general encouragement (not to mention getting me interested in cycling in the first place); to my father, Alex, for his interest and comments, as well as sharing the odd invaluable memory about 1950s and 1960s cycling; and to all three of them for helping to keep me motivated. Thank you.\n\nThanks also to Spanish cycling historian Javier Bodegas, for his support, comments, information and interest; to Philippe Bouvet of _L'Equipe_ for phone numbers, advice, and infectious enthusiasm; to Josu Garai for allowing me to take over _MARCA's_ photocopy machine for several hours; to Alex Hoskins, for being the ideal co-pilot around a large part of Spain and France in search of elderly former bike riders and the right kind of Patxaran; to Richard Moore for much-needed encouragement when the book was beginning to take shape; and at the other end of affairs, to Sam Harrison of Aurum and Martin Smith for their hard work and skilful editing when the book was being hammered into its final form. Also to (in alphabetical order) Geoff Brown, Alberto Contador, Pedro Delgado, Raul Esgueva, Hugh Gladstone, Rupert Guinness, John Herety, Miguel Indurain, Graham Jones, Alain Laiseka, Unai Larrea, Margarita Lobo, Edward Pickering, Dave Prichard, David Randall, Jorge Quintana, Phil Sheehan, Francois Thomazeau, Benito Urraburu, Antonio Valdivia Molina and Graham Watson. Finally to my agent, Mark Stanton of Jenny Brown Associates, both for his astute handling of all the boring bits of getting a book published as well as keeping the nerves of a first-time author from becoming overly jangled.\nPrologue\n\n#### The Reference Point\n\nBefore Alberto Contador made his mark on stage racing in the late 2000s, his hometown of Pinto, outside Madrid, was best known for being the geographical centre of Spain. Following his rise to fame, every time that Contador stood on the town hall balcony, waving at the cheering crowds after taking his latest Grand Tour, the people of the humdrum dormitory town must have felt they were at the centre of the sporting world, too.\n\nDuring one of these celebrations, someone tried to gatecrash the party. As Contador left the balcony and walked down the stairs to a reception, the bell at the main doors locked to keep out intruders, began to ring furiously. At the same time a voice could be heard shouting: 'Let me in! Let me in! It's Bahamontes!' Sure enough, it was. Smartly dressed in his usual dark suit and tie, his shock of wavy, unruly hair as neatly combed as it could be, Federico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes was outside bestowing embraces on friends and fans alike, signing autographs and grinning from ear to ear. After Bahamontes was admitted, Contador duly obliged by having his photograph taken for the press alongside the man known as the Eagle of Toledo. It was a symbolic moment: Spain's first winner of the Tour de France, and arguably the greatest climber the sport has known, and his latest heir (albeit a somewhat controversial one given Contador's positive test for the banned performance-enhancing drug clenbuterol).\n\nIn his home country, Bahamontes is considered to be the man who paved the way for future generations of Spanish cyclists who dreamed of taking the sport's most prestigious trophy. Unlike similarly iconic figures in other countries, and double Tour winner Fausto Coppi in Italy and Britain's 1965 World Champion Tom Simpson spring to mind, Bahamontes is anything but historically remote. Time and again he pops up, giving away prizes at race finishes, making statements to the press, and in the case of top riders like Contador or 2008 Tour de France winner Carlos Sastre, giving them reams of sound, often longwinded, advice from the other end of a mobile telephone. Even though that advice may be unsolicited, Bahamontes seems boundlessly confident that as the most important original source of inspiration for Spanish professional cycling, his presence and comments will always be appreciated. And is that so surprising given that his Tour de France win had such an enormous impact in post-Civil War Spain that it extended far beyond sport?\n\nBahamontes' Tour win in 1959 was the biggest international sporting breakthrough for Spain in a year when the country was, at long last, making advances socially and economically as well. The most important of these was undoubtedly the definitive end of the international isolation which had followed the victory of General Franco's forces over a democratically elected Republican government in the 1936\u201339 Civil War, and his regime's support in the first part of World War Two for Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy while technically neutral. Both Hitler and Mussolini had backed the General's coup and it was nearly two decades before the United States and the other Allies were fully willing to welcome Spain back into their midst.\n\nOn a sporting level, as arguably the country's biggest individual success at any point since Franco took power, Bahamontes' victory in the Tour 'proved' to the man on the street that Spain was returning to full membership of the international community, and marked an important watershed. Bahamontes' success coincided with the end of two devastating decades of economic recession, so bad they are still referred to as 'the years of hunger'. On 21 July, 1959, with Bahamontes' Tour glory less than a week old, the Government introduced their 'Stabilisation Plan', a series of radical reforms that heralded the modernisation of the Spanish economy.\n\nBahamontes, then, was not just opening a new chapter in Spanish sport, he was a surefire sign that the country's worst years were over, and that at home and abroad times were changing for the better. It was therefore small wonder that Franco's regime provided no less than fourteen military bands for the victory celebrations in Toledo. That Bahamontes' triumph in Paris came on 18 July, the anniversary of the start of Franco's uprising against the Republic, was an even happier coincidence for the country's rulers, not least because it reinforced that hallowed date in the Spanish calendar.\n\nEven better, winning the Tour was viewed as beating the despised French at their own game. France was resented by Franco for being the sporadic political ally of the defeated Republic and the closest example of democratic prosperity, as well as the alleged source of the liberal, subversive and modernist values that had corrupted his idealised view of traditional, authoritarian Roman Catholic Spain. Such a strong political interpretation of sporting achievement may strike twenty-first century readers as odd; however it continued to infect Spanish cycling right up until the 1990s when Miguel Indurain's string of victories in the Tour was seen as proof positive that Spain had finally made it into mainstream Europe. Indurain's runaway victory in the 1992 Tour, which visited all the European Union member states who had signed that year's Maastricht Treaty \u2013 including Spain \u2013 was the icing on the cake.\n\nBack in 1959, Bahamontes' Tour win represented a massive breakthrough. And like any breakthrough it would also shape the future. Victory in the greatest multi-day race of all left Spain's cyclists obsessed with stage racing. Even today, one-day Classics and track racing, two other major facets of the sport, barely receive the media attention or sponsorship they deserve. 'The mountains [are] the basic truth of cycling for Spaniards,' wrote Carlos Arribas, longstanding sports correspondent for _El Pa\u00eds_ , as recently as January 2012, 'and the cyclist [is] the only being capable of using the strength of his legs to challenge the force of gravity and fly.'\n\nAt the same time, being Spain's first Tour winner has left Bahamontes with a sporting sinecure for life. It is a label he has never ceased to exploit, even now when it is looking somewhat timeworn. Indeed, when Bahamontes receives journalists it is rarely at his home in Toledo; he prefers that they come to the headquarters of his _pe\u00f1a,_ his fan club. It is apparently irrelevant that this fan club, housed in a shabby warehouse on the outskirts of Toledo, is semi-defunct, the red lettering on the sign outside fading fast, and its website closed down. Bahamontes appears confident that the visitor will go away with a full appreciation of his importance. During interviews Bahamontes always sits behind an immense mahogany desk beneath a vast framed photograph of himself, besuited and smiling out from some time in the 1960s or 1970s. The life-size picture takes up almost the entire wall space and towers above the journalist. And if a reminder was needed of Bahamontes' nickname, you do not have to look far: to his left an alabaster eagle stares balefully and blankly out at the world from the top of a metre-high column. The dusty shelves in the room are crammed with trophies and photograph albums which are dedicated to his entire career and carefully labelled in Bahamontes' spidery scrawl.\n\nAs he talks, non-stop, giving answers that rarely last less than five minutes, postcards showing him in his pomp will be passed unrequested across the table, as well as posters of his _palmares_ , his achievements. The highlights are obviously his one Tour de France victory and the six King of the Mountains titles in the race, the latter a record that stood for nearly half a century. But there is more, much more. As Bahamontes never tires of pointing out, he took the King of the Mountains title in every stage race he competed in; even if this is not strictly true, his achievements are staggering nonetheless. Just one example: for fifty years no other professional crossed more of the Tour's highest category mountain passes in first place.\n\nSomewhere in this process of racking up victories and streaking away in the mountains, Bahamontes developed into cycling's most emblematic climber: the figure who, the moment the road steepened, would automatically power through the peloton, legs hammering away; the ultimate specialist in stretching the bunch beyond the limits of pain on the cols to the point where they would have to give up and let him go. 'Ask any Frenchman who the greatest climber is? And you know who'll they say . . . me,' Bahamontes once said. 'Probably the greatest climber ever,' concurred Sam Abt, the revered cycling correspondent of the _New York Times_ , a comment reinforced by the fact it was made during Abt's obituary of Charly Gaul, himself a major contender for the accolade.\n\nOne reason Bahamontes is undeniably right is that while other two-wheeled kings of the mountains \u2013 Pantani, Robert Millar, Van Impe \u2013 might have more impressive results to their name, none could match the Eagle for his impetuous, impassioned, hell-bent style of attack. Even in the comparatively anarchic racing of the 1950s, Bahamontes was praised as a throwback to a golden age of cycling when the sport was (supposedly) a spontaneous, non-stop _fiesta_ of uncalculating, hot-blooded attempts to drop the rest of the field. 'Whenever there were mountains, you'd know that Bahamontes would attack,' British sprinter Barry Hoban once said. 'Always. And you wouldn't see him again until the next morning.' Brian Robinson, Britain's first Tour stage winner, adds: 'He would pound away on those little gears, get a gap, turn around and look at us to see if anybody was able to follow. Normally, nobody could. Then he'd do it all over again. And then he'd be gone.'\n\nWhat frightened Bahamontes' rivals was that there was always an element of sheer enjoyment in his attacks, a slightly zany tendency to attack for the hell of it. He was, as arch-rival Raymond Poulidor says, a _provocateur._ 'He was a pure climber, able to stay off the front on the climbs even when he wasn't in form. I don't really think he was really too bothered about whether a climb was at the start or the finish of a stage. All he wanted was to be at the top first.'\n\nBahamontes legends abound. He was so sure of his racing power, they said, that he once attacked in the Alps then stopped at the top of a col to eat an ice-cream while waiting for the pack. Or, so it was rumoured, he would tell his team-mates they could all abandon and head for the team hotel at the foot of the last climb because he could handle the ride to the summit finish alone. His sense of honour could be so touchy that, allegedly, he once got off his bike during a race and attacked a spectator with a bike-pump for insulting him. His temper was so fierce, they said, that he abandoned a Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a after officials refused to re-admit a disqualified team-mate. He rode so deliberately slowly that day that he was booed and whistled along the route, and he finished more than an hour behind the rest of the field.\n\nHowever, for all he might be surrounded by stories and anecdotes, Bahamontes was also a solitary figure, and remains so. Once asked if he had ridden for a team who supported him, Bahamontes snapped back: 'Never. I was always alone.' Throughout his career he never had a full-time manager, no personal mechanic, no long-standing faithful _soigneur_ : none of the typical trappings top professional cyclists build up over the years. Given to fits of child-like petulance, Bahamontes often accused fellow riders and race directors of betraying his trust and abandoning him to his fate. Even the Spanish state, he claims, was prepared to sacrifice his chances of victory in the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a for the sake of its political interests. Barring a handful of allies, such as team worker Julio San Emeterio, Bahamontes was widely regarded as self-centred and self-isolating, convinced of his own sporting genius but rarely capable of appreciating efforts made to help him.\n\n'Federico?' former team-mate, and Tour of Spain winner, Bernardo Ruiz once said to me. 'He was never grateful to anybody for anything.' The Tour's quasi-official newspaper _L'Equipe_ called him: 'A sombre, melancholy figure like the El Greco figures from his native region of Castille,' adding bitingly: 'Bahamontes was too whimsical, too Bohemian, too capricious to win the Tour more than once.' Others are less polite. '[As a racer] he was what we could call \"madness personified,\"' says Josu Loro\u00f1o, a former cycling journalist and son of Bahamontes' deadliest rival, Jes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o. Josu elsewhere claims: 'It's always been about \"me, me, me\" . . . Yes, he [Bahamontes] was great, but he never appreciated what others could do.'\n\nHowever, this image of Bahamontes the eccentric individualist was far from being completely unintentional: while convinced that the world, by and large, was out to get him, this self-imposed isolation also contained ingredients of a craftily designed publicity stunt that allowed him to pursue his real objectives under a smokescreen. As Bahamontes never tires of pointing out, his 1959 Tour win came about partly because the other favourites, notably the French, thought his only interest was in the King of the Mountains jersey. By the time they realised their mistake, the Eagle of Toledo had flown.\n\nBahamontes still cannot resist the opportunity to add to the myth. During interviews, he will bring down from the shelves a copy of the book he had specially produced for the half-century celebrations of that success. Though a kind enough gesture, you cannot help noticing there are two or three dozen identical volumes still sitting on the bookshelf awaiting future admirers. In an adjacent room, the dust-enshrouded personality cult continues with another vast photograph of Bahamontes. This time, close to the end of his career, he is in full flight on a mountain climb: typically, his head and body jut forward, arms locked in an 'L' position, fingers splayed wide over the handlebars and legs beating out a relentless rhythm as he seeks one last win.\n\nEven after retiring following his last Tour in 1965, which he abandoned little more than a week in because his team allegedly refused to pay him, the almost manic energy that had driven him throughout his career remained intact. For years he ran amateur and professional teams. In the off-season, Julio Jim\u00e9nez, who won the King of the Mountains title three times in the 1960s, would join him in cruising around Spain in Bahamontes' gleaming Mercedes, milking a series of invitations as guests of honour at criteriums, winter club meets and inaugurations. Indeed, Bahamontes' restless energy seems to increase rather than diminish. When I met him early one morning in the spring of 1993, he walked so fast through the streets of Toledo, shouting at anybody who looked remotely sleepy that they should 'wake up, it's day-time', it was almost impossible to keep up.\n\nVisiting him never fails to produce dramatic moments. I once spent half an hour waiting in his Mercedes as he went into the local police station to nag them to fix a drain cover that was sticking up in the road. He was so keen to get into the building he forgot to put the handbrake on and the car, parked on a roundabout with me in it, rolled ten yards downhill and collided with a traffic bollard. He got back in and drove away as if nothing had happened.\n\nYet behind this nervous bundle of energy, the regrets and barely concealed bitterness remain. Bahamontes firmly believes he was the best climber cycling has seen; all that prevented him from winning more Tours was the lack of a decent team, a surfeit of loyal team-mates and the absence of summit finishes, which was fatal for a poor descender like him. However, the truth is far more complex. Bahamontes' Tour victory in 1959 was at least partly assisted by an internecine power struggle between France's top riders, who secretly preferred a Spaniard to win rather than one of their home rivals. And too often his impulsive nature, his sometimes excessive ambition and his bizarre abandons, left him overly isolated, even in the context of the cut-throat world of 1950s cycling.\n\n'If Bahamontes had been different, he'd have won a whole lot more,' reasons Jim\u00e9nez. The problem as Jim\u00e9nez saw it?: 'He [Bahamontes] wanted everything.' However, Bahamontes' single-mindedness should not detract from his successes, nor what he represents. It is fair to say that he is both one of the last great surviving figures from an era Spain wishes to forget, and one of the few living legends from a time for which cycling fans remain relentlessly nostalgic.\n\nIn Spain, quite apart from the political exploitation of his victories, Bahamontes' achievements became part of popular culture across the generations. 'He was a god in a country that, after the Civil War, was desperate for myths,' said Angel Arroyo, second in the 1983 Tour, in an interview. Older Spaniards remember clustering around the radio in the village bar to listen to his exploits in the 1959 Tour, the first live broadcast of a sporting event in Spain. Decades later, the Eagle of Toledo would still form part of children's street games. 'We'd cut out pictures of cyclists from magazines and put them inside the caps of Coca-Cola bottles with a piece of glass on top to keep them stuck in there,' recalls 1988 Tour de France winner Pedro Delgado. 'If you were lucky, you'd get Bahamontes. Then in your street \u2013 which usually wasn't paved \u2013 you'd make a circuit out of the sand with curves and hills and you'd flick the cap around it with your finger. The first one across the line won. Sometimes you'd secretly file down the edges to make the lid go faster. I suppose you'd call that our equivalent of doping!'\n\nCuriously enough, this game of _chapas_ is first mentioned in connection with Bahamontes in the sports daily _MARCA_ on 19 July, 1959, the day after he won the Tour. It claimed that children across Spain have 'changed from playing at footballers to playing with lids of pop bottles with their favourites glued to them . . . the lucky ones get Bahamontes, of course'. More than a decade later, as Delgado points out, Spanish children were still doing it.\n\n'That game was how I first heard of Bahamontes. In the 1970s there weren't many televisions in Spain, it was just what your parents had told you about him when the Tour came round. When Luis Oca\u00f1a won the Tour in 1973, everybody in the neighbourhood would pile down to watch the TV in the local bar and say, \"It's like Bahamontes all over again\". It made you think, \"Well, if Oca\u00f1a was like this, then what must Bahamontes have done?\"'\n\nAs tarmac and television spread across Spain, games like _chapas_ have long since disappeared from the lives of Spanish children, but Bahamontes remains the key reference point for his country's cycling. Others would follow, but none has had the dramatic potency of the lone climber, soaring high in the mountains, oblivious to the rest of the field and at the centre of his own universe.\n\n'I talk a lot to him, or rather he talks a lot to me, but I've always liked to listen to him,' says Carlos Sastre, who grew up in \u00c1vila, close to Toledo. 'When I was a junior, I was on the point of signing for his team, and he would go on to me about what I should and shouldn't do, saying I should sign with him because I'd be treated as if I was going to race for Real Madrid. I didn't sign, I wanted to race in the same team as Jos\u00e9 Mar\u00eda Jim\u00e9nez [Sastre's now late brother-in-law, another top climber] but I can remember him buzzing around in the races he'd organised, pointing out which riders were good. He's very direct, he calls a spade a spade and if he thinks you're a bastard, he'll tell you. He's given me loads of advice. He'd ring me up in a Vuelta and tell me, \"Don't trust him, he's a bastard\", or \"do that\". And I'd say to myself, \"If Fede's said that, it has to be for a good reason\".'\n\n'He is synonymous with cycling at its highest level,' says Contador. 'Bahamontes' personality is unique, not just because he opened up Spanish cycling to the world but because he has an innovative, inexhaustible way of seeing life in general.'\n\nDelgado believes: 'Bahamontes was the father of the sport and above all you'd think, my goodness, if there was such a big difference even in my time between what we had in Spain and abroad in terms of material and training techniques, how much bigger must the difference have been back then? It was cycling at its most epic, its most legendary. Another world.'\n\nAs with any legend, though, contradictions abound. Yet perhaps this is not so surprising. Getting accurate reports of what has happened in a bike race can be complicated, even now. There may be up to two hundred starters and television tends to focus on the leading few. This fact is something all riders, not just Bahamontes, cheerfully exploit to ensure they come out looking the best. As one top Spanish cycling journalist put it to me: 'It used to be impossible to be sure of what really happened before the live TV coverage came on, which was only when there were a couple of hours left to race. If the newspaper's sports desk asked you for an on-the-spot mid-stage report of what was going on, you'd just dive into the nearest public phonebox and make it up.'\n\nMore than half a century ago, that potential for being 'economical with the truth' was far greater. Before cycling was televised, and with fifty years separating the riders from the races, their versions of events tend to be even more disparate. At the same time, the clouds in the memories of men almost all in their ninth decade grow steadily thicker. As for Bahamontes, he has only had one full-scale biography published about him. That was back in 1969 and it has long been out of print. All the more reason, then, to dust down tales of those exploits, and to do so now before the hammering on the town hall doors falls silent for good.\nChapter One\n\n#### 'Nunca Ha Sido Ni\u00f1o' ('He Never Was A Child')\n\nOn the outside wall of the church of Val de Santo Domingo, the village in the province of Toledo where Federico Bahamontes was born on 9 July, 1928, is a half-metre high plaque that reads 'Fallen for God and Spain'. It is embossed with Spanish Fascist Party symbols and the name 'Jos\u00e9 Antonio Primo de Rivera', the party's leader until he was executed in the first months of the Civil War. Beneath are listed the fourteen men from the village who died for General Franco's Nationalist Spain during the bitter three-year conflict. For the Republicans of Val de Santo Domingo, there is still no similar memorial. As was the case until Franco's death in 1975, even now, more than three decades later, the opponents to his rule have no tangible commemoration here.\n\nIf the divisions that split Spain for forty years remain unchanged on Val de Santo Domingo's church wall, time has stood still in other ways in Bahamontes' home village: the plaque on the central square, too, has not changed its name from Plaza del General\u00edsimo. However, this is not as uncommon as it seems. In many of the pueblos of deepest Spain, not just Val de Santo Domingo, remnants of Franco's Spain linger on in street names, plaques on church walls. A few even have his honorific 'El Caudillo' [The Leader] added to the village name itself. And hidden from sight there are far grimmer reminders: the bodies of one hundred and forty thousand Republicans murdered in mass executions are still buried in unmarked graves along roads and in ravines across the country.\n\nThe names and memorial still on display in Val de Santo Domingo are also apt reminders that without Franco and the Civil War, the Eagle of Toledo might never have achieved his status as one of Spanish cycling's greatest legends. Curiously, though, public recognition of Bahamontes' links with the village are almost non-existent. There is one street named after him, but nothing on the signs at the village entrances to indicate that this is his birthplace. Certainly there is nothing as sophisticated as a museum, as there are in many famous bike riders' home towns. Moreover, the house where Bahamontes was born, situated on a slight rise just outside the town and opposite a huge restaurant built principally to feed workers from a nearby iron foundry, was knocked down a few years ago. Demolishing what might have become a site of pilgrimage for cycling fans was hardly a profitable move. The humble house made way instead for an unintended monument to the country's new economic malaise: one of Spain's myriad phantom industrial estates, where the tarmac, street lights and traffic signals are all in place, but the recession took hold before any factories were actually built.\n\nIn fact, Val de Santo Domingo is like hundreds of anonymous agricultural villages in the remoter regions of Spain. Its centre is a huddle of single-storey, century-old, terraced houses on poorly maintained roads around the main square and church. Farther out there are more recently-built, garish, double-storey residences, each with its own concreted garden space, tiny swimming pool and garage. Beyond that are a clutch of factories, none of which look particularly active, and in the background, the vast, windswept, uncultivated, unfenced and unchanging fields of central Castille.\n\nVal de Santo Domingo's deserted streets, even at 11 o'clock on a weekday summer's morning, give the place a decidedly spooky feel. But near a hermitage church overlooking the village at least one inhabitant is visible: an old man, Pablo Rodr\u00edguez, is walking his dog. Rodr\u00edguez vividly recalls Bahamontes coming back from the 1959 Tour and visiting Val de Santo Domingo for a celebration dinner at his school. He still has the photograph taken of all the schoolchildren, himself included, then aged eight, with Bahamontes in the middle. 'He used to come here a lot after he retired,' Rodr\u00edguez recalls, 'to visit a friend of his, Marcelino, who ran the bar on the corner next to the main road. But when Marcelino died, that was it. I've barely seen him since, except on the telly.'\n\nIndeed, just the day before, Bahamontes had popped up on the nation's screens when he appeared on the podium of the 2011 _Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a_ in nearby Talavera, helping France's Sylvain Chavanel don his red jersey as race leader. But in Val de Santo Domingo nowadays Bahamontes is barely a memory. His family left for Toledo when he was eight, and Rodr\u00edguez claims there are hardly any of Bahamontes' relatives left in the village: 'Just a cousin or two'. That is only true in the living sense: the graves in the local churchyard are jammed together, just a few centimetres apart, and perhaps one in every four of those buried there has Mart\u00edn, the surname of Bahamontes' father, either for their first or second name.\n\nRodr\u00edguez followed Bahamontes' career closely, and like so many of his fans he feels that despite winning so much Bahamontes' achievements are a fraction of what they could have been. 'It was Coppi who really guided him,' Rodr\u00edguez says in a convinced tone of voice, referring to the all-too-brief period when Bahamontes rode for the Italian champion's team. 'Without him, he wouldn't have won that Tour in 1959. Bahamontes should have won more though. But with the sort of head he has, could you really have expected it?'\n\nToo far from Toledo to become one of the typical Spanish dormitory towns with their avenues of high-rise housing, the church tower is still the highest landmark in Val de Santo Domingo, just as it was in 1928. Behind the locked church doors the font where Bahamontes was baptised remains in place, and so too does the parish register of births, baptisms, marriages and deaths. Perhaps appropriately for a rider whose career was often shrouded in conflicting accounts, myths and half-truths, there is even some uncertainty about Bahamontes' name: in the register of baptisms he is called Alejandro. Equally strangely, though his two surnames are Mart\u00edn Bahamontes, he is not known by his first, as is customary in Spain, but by his second. 'My uncle Federico was younger than my father, Juli\u00e1n, but Federico was the head of the family,' Bahamontes explains. 'And after the baptism he said, \"This one's going to be called after me\". So I was. As for Bahamontes, I used my mother's name because there were lots of Mart\u00edns out there.'\n\nAfter Federico was born, his parents had three more children, all girls, each born a year apart from 1929 to 1931. It was not a large family for the time, but thankfully in those days a road-mender's job came with a rent-free house next to the section of highway for which he was responsible. In early 1936 a position came up for a foreman on a large estate just outside Toledo owned by a local aristocrat, the Duke of Montoya. Juli\u00e1n's parents had run a farm in his youth and his agricultural knowledge was enough to land him the more profitable job.\n\nInitially the move was a real step up for Bahamontes' family, even if his father still earned only 3.5 pesetas a month (around 48 euros today). The family's income was supplemented by eggs, milk, meat and vegetables from the farm, and rabbits would appear on the kitchen table some mornings thanks to Juli\u00e1n's poaching. As for Federico, he was able to attend a charity school in Toledo run by nuns. Not surprisingly for someone as restless as Bahamontes, formal education was not something he remembers fondly. 'We spent hours sitting at desks trying to join up fancy-looking letters in blue-lined exercise books, and that was pretty much it,' Bahamontes recalls. 'It was boring as hell.'\n\nTedious as learning copperplate handwriting might have been, life on the Montoya estate was good for Bahamontes and his family. They had food on their plates, a roof over their heads and his father's job looked secure. However, in the space of one summer morning, a few months after they had arrived, this new-found stability was to shatter permanently.\n\nAt 7 a.m. on 21 July, 1936, an infantry captain named Vela-Hidalgo stood in the vast Alc\u00e1zar fortress in Toledo, reading out an official declaration of war. If that was not startling enough, this declaration was especially momentous because it was being made against the Spanish Republic, an institution the Army was sworn to protect. Doubtless, Vela-Hidalgo drew on the same justifications for this armed rebellion as one of its main ringleaders, General Franco, had used shortly after the uprising started four days earlier. Franco claimed that Spain was in mortal danger because 'revolutionary hordes, backed by foreigners, were destroying our monuments and paralysing the nation with their strikes'. To make matters worse, Franco argued, the Constitution had all but disintegrated and anarchists were stalking the country. If the rebel general was to be believed, Spain was hell-bent on self-destruction and in such dramatic circumstances it was up to the Armed Forces, as the country's moral guardians, to restore order. Seizing power in the process was merely a necessary evil \u2013 or a cynical and brutal abuse of military force, depending on how you looked at it.\n\nMilitary rebellions were far from uncommon in Spain, with thirty-seven attempted uprisings between 1814 and 1874 alone, twelve of them successful. Spain's only previous Republic, in the 1870s, had been brought down by the Army's intervention, and the still fledgling Second Republic (1931\u201339) had succeeded the military dictatorship (1923\u201330) of Primo de Rivera. As recently as 1931, there had been another attempt by the Army to overthrow the Republic, led by Franco's colleague General Sanjurjo.\n\nAt the time Spain was one of the poorest and least industrialised countries in Western Europe. Her established political classes were largely more interested in maintaining their own status than in improving the lot of the country's underprivileged workers. During the first five years of the Republic \u2013 Spain's first full-scale democracy \u2013 there had been some limited improvements for the working class, particularly in the education and status of women. But the country had also suffered a steady increase in political murders and general strikes as well as several attempts at all-out revolution, the most significant erupting in Asturias in October 1934.\n\nMeanwhile, the bulk of the Spanish Army's vast surplus of officers \u2013 at the start of the century there was one general for every hundred rank-and-file soldiers \u2013 did little but conspire for the restoration of traditional, authoritarian government. The working class, for its part, was increasingly frustrated by the Republic's failure to implement the urgently-needed land, education and legal reforms that would iron out some of the tremendous social inequalities in the country, and help reduce levels of unemployment running at almost twenty per cent.\n\nAdding to this simmering political tension were the Nationalistic movements in Spain's peripheral regions: Galicia, the Basque Country and Catalonia. Culturally very different to the rest of the peninsula, these areas were strongly Separatist and large parts of their populations dreamed of splitting away from what they viewed as a corrupt and inept central government. In the wealthy Basque Country and Catalonia, the Separatists also possessed the financial clout to make their case.\n\nThe social and political turmoil came to a head when a loose alliance of left-leaning political parties, the Popular Front, ousted the right-wing Government in the February 1936 general election. For the right, losing power democratically was like an open invitation to begin their latest military-led plot to return to government by force. As early as February, Franco even tried to convince the caretaker Prime Minister, Manuel Portela Valladares, not to allow the Popular Front to take power. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, hundreds of left-wing prisoners were freed even before a general amnesty was decreed. The incoming Popular Front, meanwhile, was disappointed to find that Spain's economic problems were even worse than in 1931. Sabotage of the peseta's value by right-wing industrialists had produced a radical drop in foreign investment, and the right-wing press churned out reports claiming the country was completely ungovernable, often fabricating political crimes as a means to justify the imminent uprising. Indeed, street violence, even if much of it was deliberately provoked by the Fascist-inspired Falange, was steadily growing. By 1936, even Spanish parliamentary deputies started attending debates armed; in April, a bomb was thrown, allegedly by a member of Spain's militarised Civil Guard police force, at President Manuel Aza\u00f1a during the Republic's anniversary celebrations. More shooting broke out at the civil guard's funeral.\n\nOn the streets strikers and demonstrators were regularly attacked by right-wing gunmen in hit-and-run raids. In Madrid in June, for example, the Falange machine-gunned pickets during a seventy thousand-strong building strike. Others would regularly drive through working-class districts, shooting indiscriminately. At the same time, land raids on the giant _latifundia_ estates in the south by local socialists and anarchists intent on farming them as cooperative communes free from money, religion and marriage, were becoming more commonplace.\n\nThe right-wing coalition opposed to the Republic (the Fascists, to their enemies) included the Monarchists, and the majority of right-wing parties including Spain's Falange. Later this alliance would became known, albeit in an amalgamated form, as _El Movimiento Nacional_ , or _FET de la JONS_ , the only political organisation permitted under Franco's dictatorship. The driving forces, as usual, were the upper echelons of the Armed Forces, with the support of the majority within the Spanish Catholic Church.\n\nThe final straw for the Right \u2013 even though the uprising was already well planned by this stage \u2013 was the retaliatory murder of a leading right-wing politician, Calvo Sotelo, on 13 July, 1936. Four days later, the _coup d'etat_ began; first among the garrisons in Spanish Morocco, where the Republic was weakest, and then, on 18 July, by the Army in mainland Spain.\n\nBroadly speaking, the Nationalists' common goals were an authoritarian state, the defence of the interest of the industrialists and landowners, the continuing domination of Spain by the Catholic Church and strongly centralised government. The Republicans, however, fought for a wide-ranging and diametrically opposed set of goals, from anarchist or socialist revolution through to independence for the Basque Country and Catalonia, to a simple desire to resist the continuing rise of the extreme Right across Western Europe.\n\nAlongside the anti-interventionist stance of the democratic governments of Britain, France and the United States, and the support for the Nationalists provided by Hitler and Mussolini, the diversity of political aims among the Republicans was one of the main causes of their eventual defeat. In July 1936, in cities like Seville and Oviedo where the authorities refused to arm the workers quickly enough, the military rebellion triumphed. However, in others, like Madrid and Barcelona, Army barracks were quickly surrounded and the uprising crushed within a few days. Indeed, the coup met with far more resistance than Franco and his co-conspirators had anticipated. A mixture of trade union militiamen, a handful of regular army units, Basque and Catalan Separatists, and foreign volunteers known as the International Brigades, rose to the defence of the troubled Republic. The result was the three-year Civil War that devastated Spain.\n\nThe Toledo that the Bahamontes family moved to in early 1936 was little more than a large town of around thirty thousand inhabitants. However, both militarily and historically it was far more significant. Singled out by the Roman historian Livy as being a well-fortified town as early as 192 BC, it was later the Visigoths' capital of central Spain. Following the Moorish conquest of most of Spain in the eighth century it was viewed as one of Europe's most culturally advanced and ethnically tolerant cities. Through much of the Middle Ages, Arab, Jewish and native Spanish communities lived side by side, and its market places, craftsmen and university thrived on what was an unusual example of successful integration. Today the architecture in the older parts of Toledo, particularly its labyrinthine Jewish quarter, is a vivid reminder of its bedrock of different cultures. However, the city's tolerant ethos came to an abrupt end in 1480 when, during their process of uniting Spain for the first time, the 'Catholic Kings' Fernando II of Arag\u00f3n and Isabella I of Castille announced that the Jewish residents of Toledo were forbidden to live in Christian areas. Far worse was to come in 1492. While across Spain the Arabs were forced to convert to Christianity, the Jews were expelled en masse.\n\nSixteenth-century Castille was Spain's industrial and commercial powerhouse, and while Toledo was only the country's capital for a brief period, it was the spiritual centre of Spain's Roman Catholicism for much longer. It had always been famous for its high quality metalwork, and as Spain's foreign policies grew increasingly belligerent following the country's unification in 1492, so too did the demands for the weaponry made in Toledo. 'Toledo blades' became world famous, and a symbol of the city: even today, winners of bike race stages that finish in Toledo will often receive a large commemorative sword.\n\nEven though Toledo lost its political stature in 1561 when Felipe II adopted Madrid as his capital, the town remained of key military importance. At the time of the Civil War, the Alc\u00e1zar fortress housed Spain's main military academy and Toledo's proximity to Madrid made it an ideal forward position for an assault on the Republican capital. Furthermore, as one of the largest military buildings in Spain, dominating the skyline of old Toledo, the Alc\u00e1zar attained huge symbolic value. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, as soon as the Civil War started, Toledo took a real hammering. Though by no means a major battle, the attempt by the Republicans to gain control of the Alc\u00e1zar was bitterly fought, and its successful defence by Franco's supporters was raised to near-mystical levels on the Nationalist side.\n\nThe alleged execution of the 16-year-old son of the Alc\u00e1zar commander after he refused to surrender (other reports say the boy was killed in reprisal for an air-raid) was seized on with zeal by Nationalist propagandists. Moreover, Franco's decision to divert his march on Madrid towards Toledo to ensure the Alc\u00e1zar did not fall into Republican hands is widely believed to have provided the definitive consolidation of his hold on the Nationalist leadership.\n\nAll this came at a high price to the city, though. By the time Franco visited the Alc\u00e1zar on 29 September after his supporters had held out for two months huge sections of Toledo held by the Republicans had been destroyed, both by artillery fire and inaccurate air-raids. Photographs from the siege's aftermath show the fortress looking like a sandcastle swept over by a succession of high tides. Towers lean at crazy angles, walls have caved in and foundations laid bare by vast craters. Little more than a quarter of the building above ground remained standing. Outside in the city itself, contemporary photographs show little more than a mass of tangled house beams, piles of bricks and gutted buildings. Destruction of this magnitude was far from uncommon in the Spanish Civil War, and the numbers of refugees ran into the millions. Among them were Bahamontes and his family.\n\nA veteran combatant of the Spanish war in Cuba in the 1890s, Bahamontes' father was too old to be recruited by either side. However, he still came within a whisker of becoming one of the Civil War's earliest victims. As news broke that a Republican column of troops and militia was on its way, Franco's forces retreated to the Alc\u00e1zar in Toledo and many civilians were enlisted to accompany the General's men to act as reinforcements, or more accurately cannon fodder. Juli\u00e1n was one of them. Realising his chances of survival were low \u2013 as it turned out, only half of the Alc\u00e1zar's one thousand defenders made it through the siege uninjured \u2013 he managed to escape undetected. That was far from being the end of his troubles, though. The Duke of Montoya's estate was the ideal location for the Republic's artillery in their siege of the Alc\u00e1zar. When Juli\u00e1n returned home, it was to find the whole area had been taken over by militiamen who, Bahamontes says scornfully, 'had come down from Madrid by taxi. And they called themselves Communists!'\n\nCommunists or not, Juli\u00e1n was ordered to open up the estate's storehouses so they could steal cooking oil. When he refused, they threatened to shoot him. Juli\u00e1n took to his heels for a second time that day and managed to shake off the ensuing manhunt by hiding in a doorway. By the time he reached the family house later that night, spent shell cases lay scattered across the surrounding farmland and the Republic's battalion of 102-millimetre guns was stationed in the middle of it, blazing away at the fortress. In a matter of hours, Toledo had gone up in flames and the whole area had become a war zone. Under the circumstances, Juli\u00e1n, his wife Victoria and their family had only one option: to join the long line of refugees making their way towards Madrid and relative safety.\n\nThe family reached the Spanish capital in the back of a cart in late July 1936. Once there they settled in a vast refugee camp set up in the grounds of Madrid University. 'We were living like gypsies, under canvas,' Bahamontes recalls. 'There were people there in their thousands.'\n\nFor the first few months of the war, after the Army's attempt to take the city had failed, Madrid remained the seat of the Republican Government. By late September the city was under siege from Franco's best forces at which point the Republican Government decamped to Valencia. But the combination of armed workers' militias, a few regular army units and later the International Brigades, saved the city for the Republic. As the initial turmoil subsided, and despite air-raids and trenches across many of the main streets, Madrid regained something akin to pre-war normality. In the centre, restaurants and expensive shops reopened, even though the front-line was only a few kilometres away. Indeed, Gran Via, one of the city's main thoroughfares, was known as 'Howitzer Alley' because of the number of shells that fell there. While refugees in cities like Barcelona were often installed in the homes of middle-class families who had fled, in Madrid they were largely left to fend for themselves. The Bahamontes family was no exception.\n\nAs soon as possible Juli\u00e1n moved his family again, away from the refugee camp, to stay with his sister in a flat in a cul-de-sac near El Retiro Park in central Madrid. Juli\u00e1n went to register their new address \u2013 'he had no choice if he wanted a ration card for the family,' as Bahamontes recalls \u2013 and this time he was promptly roped into the Republican Army. Juli\u00e1n's age meant he could only form part of the reserve and he was detailed to work in supplies. His experience with animals led to him being put in charge of a mule team hauling provisions from a vast depot at Atocha railway station on Madrid's south side up to the front at Brunete, a few kilometres outside the city. It was dangerous work, but it had some advantages. As Bahamontes points out, Juli\u00e1n could steal some of the Army's provisions.\n\nFederico, meanwhile, was also busy contributing to his family's upkeep by pilfering firewood from trees cut down in El Retiro Park. As the park had been closed, Bahamontes remembers that the only way to get the wood out was to perch between the iron spikes of the railings. It was a tight squeeze for an eight-year-old, but just about manageable. 'Once I'd got there, I'd throw a rope with a hook on it into the park and drag the fallen branches towards me,' Bahamontes says. 'Then we'd heave the branches over the railings, drag them home, and use the rope again to haul them up to my aunt's flat for fuel for cooking.'\n\nAs the air raids increased, Federico, his mother and sisters were sent to stay with relatives in the village of Villarubia de Santiago, to the south of Madrid. 'We had an aunt with an olive tree plantation, that was enough of a reason to go,' Bahamontes explains. With an increasing lack of food in Madrid, the capital certainly held little attraction. Toledo, now in Franco's hands, was unreachable, so the Bahamontes family spent the rest of the conflict in a village in one of the last Republican zones to surrender.\n\nWhen the war ended with Franco's victory on 1 April, 1939, the family were joined by Juli\u00e1n and remained in Villarubia de Santiago for another two years. There was nowhere else for them to go: the Duke of Montoya's estate had been swept away by the Civil War, and as a soldier on the losing side Juli\u00e1n was not entitled to any kind of pension. The only job he could find was breaking rocks as a road-mender's mate. Federico, now aged eleven, was expected to help him. 'His job was to split them up with a pick, and then I would break them up into smaller pieces,' Bahamontes recalls. 'That was it.'\n\nFor two years, Bahamontes' childhood consisted of little more than moving from one section of road to another and breaking stones. The monotony of the work can only be imagined. But as Bahamontes puts it, there was no other option. That said, since professional cyclists were dubbed 'the convicts of the road' by the media at the time, there is a slightly ironic edge to how he spent his early youth.\n\nIn early 1941 the Bahamontes family decided to return to Toledo. They could hardly have chosen a worse time. When Bahamontes started winning top international cycle races he quickly became a sporting hero for Franco's regime. It is ironic, then, that Bahamontes' youth was so distorted by the consequences of the war that placed Franco in power: mass poverty, an economy in ruins, famine, widespread ill-health and disease.\n\nNor did things improve quickly for the Spanish after the Civil War. There are a number of reasons for this: poor economic management by Franco's government; the seemingly endemic corruption in the one-party, military dictatorship he created; and, finally, the conflict in the rest of Europe and the Allies' partial blockade of the country. Even the end of World War Two had little positive effect on Spain's economy. A report by _The Daily Telegraph_ 's Spanish correspondent in the summer of 1946 from the city of Cordoba in the southern region of Andalusia leaves no doubt about the levels of poverty. 'All the usual revolting signs of famine are there: children with hideously swollen stomachs, fragile limbs and wizened, emaciated faces, women like human scarecrows with enormous eyes who are unable to move as their joints are swollen,' he wrote.\n\nHispanist Gerald Brenan, who travelled through the country in 1949, was equally graphic. 'The widespread corruption causes shame and dismay,' Brenan wrote in his account of his travels, _The Face of Spain._ 'The system of government controls is the despair of businessmen, whilst the severe inflation has reduced the middle and lower classes to great straits and the agricultural labourers to starvation. The feeling given out by Spain today is that of a country whose road to \u2013 I do not say prosperity \u2013 but simply any humanly tolerable condition is blocked.'\n\nAs for Toledo itself in the 1940s, Brenan describes it as 'a strange, dark, almost ominous city . . . built on a bare rocky hill in a loop of the Tagus \u2013 a fortress if there ever was one \u2013 it has, through the greater part of its history, been [a] citadel. What a rabbit warren its streets and houses and churches make! Like Fez it reeks of the Middle Ages: like Lhasa, of monks. Yet the thing that most impressed me on this occasion was the proximity of the bare, rocky hills beyond the river gorge, walking in narrow, crooked lanes . . . that harsh, waterless sierra, with its iron-coloured boulders looks as if it rose from the end of the street. Toledo, one says to oneself \u2013 though it is not quite true \u2013 is a fortress built in a desert.'\n\nBut like the rest of Spain, Toledo had almost nothing left to defend. If many Spanish middle-class families, according to Brenan, could only afford one full meal a day if they wanted to buy decent clothes, for ordinary working-classes families like Bahamontes', life became a desperate hand-to-mouth struggle against starvation. While the cost of living was five times higher in the 1950s than it had been before the war, it was only in 1954 that average incomes in Spain returned to pre-Civil War levels.\n\n'Federico never was a child,' his mother said on the eve of his greatest victory, the 1959 Tour de France. 'It just wasn't possible.' Like so many Spaniards under Franco, Bahamontes had to grow up far too fast for any notion of childhood.\n\nThe Bridge of Saint Martin, or _Puente de San Mart\u00edn_ to give it its name in Spanish, has always been one of Toledo's most popular attractions for travellers. That is partly because you cannot miss it. Built in the fourteenth century across the River Tagus to supplement the older, narrower _Puente de Alc\u00e1ntara_ , _San Mart\u00edn_ boasts five giant arches, the largest with a massive forty-metre span. At each end of the bridge there are two more gigantic archways set into towers; each tower is heavily fortified and bristles with cannon. It is the first man-made landmark anyone sees when they approach the city's outskirts, and it would have been as unforgettable and unmistakable a sight for visitors in the Middle Ages as San Francisco's Golden Gate is for globetrotters today.\n\nSix centuries later, as a child growing up in Toledo in the 1940s, Federico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes looked on the _Puente de San Martin_ rather more irreverently. True to his reputation for keeping an eye on the main chance, and particularly in pursuit of food in those days, the bridge was an ideal location for the odd spot of robbery. 'We'd climb up one of the towers just before a vegetable lorry went underneath,' Bahamontes recalls with an impish grin. 'When the lorry got there, it would have to slow because the archway's so narrow. And then we'd drop on top of the load and fill up a bag with beetroot. Or we'd slit open a sack with sugar or beets in it, fill up a bag, and steal those instead.' This kind of derring-do may sound like the stuff of Errol Flynn movies, but for Bahamontes and his teenage accomplices, stealing vegetables was no pastime: it was part of the daily fight to stave off hunger. 'Orange peel, stale bread, vine shoots, rotten fruit and cats \u2013 I ate them all in my childhood,' Bahamontes recalls. 'If I caught a cat, I'd cut off its paws and head, and skin it. Then my mother would gut it, fill up the cavities with salt, pepper and vegetables, and pop it in the oven. They tasted delicious. We called them \"baby goats\".'\n\nWhile the family could afford few scruples about where they got their food from, they were equally practical about what they wore. 'My mother would make us clothes out of hand-me-downs, given to her by people who took pity on us. She'd get old shoes, and remake them with canvas undersoles so we had something to wear on our feet. It didn't get so bad we had to beg, but we were always in debt. Even if we managed to pay our bills, we were never out of the woods. Always _atascados_ [bogged down].'\n\nBahamontes had one very dangerous way of making money: selling live ammunition dug out of old Civil War trenches around Toledo for scrap. 'It could have blown our heads off, but you don't think about that when you're starving.'\n\nThough Bahamontes says he never saw anybody die of hunger in or after the war, it was not uncommon. A report from the American embassy in Madrid estimated that infant mortality rates in Spain's poorest areas in the early 1940s ran at fifty per cent or worse. Living so close to the edge for so long, and working from such a young age \u2013 'I started at eleven and never stopped' \u2013 have clearly left their mark. Five decades on he can still recall exactly how much he was paid for one of his earliest jobs as a market worker.\n\nThroughout his life Bahamontes has shown what some regard as an obsession with money and financial security. His longstanding 1960s rival and friend Raymond Poulidor recalls:. 'He came up to me in a criterium and said, \"You remember that place where such and such happened\" \u2013 he was capable of protesting about something that had happened two years before, too \u2013 \"I bought you a stamp that day. You owe me for a stamp\". He had it all written down in a little book. To be honest, it made me laugh.' Back in the 1940s, though, the struggle for even a stamp's worth of money was a far more serious matter. As Bahamontes says, 'When you talk about times like that, it sounds like a kid's battle. But you wait until it happens to you.'\n\nApart from road-mending and robbing lorries, Bahamontes was regularly taken out into the fields by his father to help cut wheat or hay. When the harvest was over, however, father and son had to look for whatever work they could find for the winter. 'We came back in 1941 and in Toledo it was the most desperate year of a desperate era,' Bahamontes recalls. 'There was barely enough food to be had for anybody. My mother would get a lump of bread and some garlic, boil it up in some water, and we'd have that for supper. You know those [tv survival] programmes where they eat cockroaches on desert islands? That was nothing compared to '40 and '41'\n\nThe family of six lived in a three-roomed flat, with no electricity, no heating and no running water. Fuel was rarely available; in any case, as 'the coal carts had to come all the way from Madrid and the roads were so bad they would only get through once every three or four days'. Gainful employment was difficult to find, and Bahamontes is convinced his father's personality often worked against him. As Bahamontes puts it: 'He was shy, too shy, a nothing, a zero. If it hadn't been for my mother, we'd have all died in a ditch.'\n\nTo describe a parent like this, particularly when Bahamontes says he got on well with his father, sounds unbelievably harsh. But in his defence, the family bordered on the brink of starvation for most of his childhood and the majority of his waking hours were spent in search of food. Under the circumstances, shyness simply meant you stayed hungry longer. Fortunately Bahamontes had a similar temperament to his mother, and he was tenacious and versatile with it. By hanging around Toledo market long enough, he was finally hired to unload a cart, receiving fifteen centimos per one hundred and fifty kilo load. This was a ridiculously low sum, around twenty-five pence in modern currency, but it was money nonetheless.\n\nSlowly but surely Bahamontes became a regular hired hand at the market. 'You'd meet one person, make friends with them, and then you'd get to know another,' is how he explains it. 'It was all about contacts. And not wanting to be hungry.' Starting at six in the morning, he would begin his day by unloading lorries, then move on to picking out spoiled fruit and vegetables from the loads. He even had a nickname: _El Lechuga_ \u2013 the Lettuce-boy. This second job in the market was much more to his liking, because he quickly opened up a sideline with private auctions of any fruit rejected as unsellable. 'I'd gather it all up and sell it out the front. It wasn't too hard; people were desperate,' he recalled. 'One peseta fifty centimos [\u00a32 today], the box. Then after a while, I got enough together to buy a cart and I'd go around five different fruit shops selling produce to them direct.'\n\nBahamontes' business instincts were getting sharper and sharper, something that would prove invaluable later in his life. But with work in the market over by 10 a.m., by mid-morning he would find himself at a loose end again. So in 1946, when he was just eighteen, he decided to move into other, more illicit, business. To do that, though, he needed a more sophisticated mode of transport.\n\nBahamontes' first bike cost him one hundred and fifty pesetas (\u00a3250 in modern money). For an occasional market labourer, it was a small fortune. 'It was second-hand, too, and had no brakes or tyres either, which was a real worry because if you wanted to buy new ones you had to return the previous set,' Bahamontes recalls. However, he was convinced it was worth the investment. His plan was to ride from village to village, picking up illegal loads of bread, beans and flour, and selling them on in Toledo. Throughout Spain, villages had got off far more lightly in the Civil War, hiding stores of food from the authorities. With rationing still in force until the 1950s, the black market flourished. Typically, Bahamontes has no problem recalling how much money he made. 'The villagers would make a profit of at least two pesetas [\u00a33] a bike load. If they'd sold it wholesale, they'd have made far less. Also, I could sell it cheaper than the official rate. So we were all on to a good thing.'\n\nBahamontes was not the only Spanish cycling star who started riding a bike for illegal profit. Carmelo Morales, a top Spanish rider of the 1950s, started riding a bike aged eleven to deliver fish his family had 'forgotten' to pay the municipal tax on. He earned his nickname of _El Jabal\u00ed_ after he dodged the Civil Guard by diving into the bushes and wriggling away through the undergrowth so fast they told villagers that Morales was just as difficult to catch as a wild boar.\n\nBernardo Ruiz, the winner of the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a in 1948, also admitted that he 'only began riding a bike to shift goods around'. When asked what kind of things he would transport, he gave an embarrassed smile, and said: 'Well, black market goods.' Bahamontes, on the other hand, positively delights in revealing his 'criminal' past. As he puts it: 'It's all part of the legend.'\n\nBahamontes' parents were initially opposed to him buying the bike. But when they realised it had been purchased with the sole aim of making money on the sly, they gave their approval. Of course, black marketeering had its risks. The Civil Guard, the semi-militarised police force who handled all rural crime, watched the roads and anyone caught in possession of illegal goods faced a prison sentence. Bahamontes, though, had bought a racing bike, complete with drop handlebars, with good reason: to ensure he could make a fast getaway. Like his fellow conspirators from Toledo, he had other tactics, too. 'We deliberately timed it so we'd go to the villages when it was hottest. That way we'd be on the roads when the police were asleep under a tree. And we'd warn each other if our paths crossed \u2013 you know, just like cars flash their headlights nowadays when there's a speed trap coming \u2013 so you'd know if you had to change roads. We knew all the shortcuts and we knew their schedules. It worked.'\n\nBahamontes had a few close shaves, but riding the back lanes on his bike gave him a considerable advantage over the Civil Guard, who were either on foot or horseback. 'And I reckoned,' Bahamontes says with slightly disturbing nonchalance, 'that they would never shoot at a black marketeer.' Fortunately, he never had to find out. He managed to steer clear of the Civil Guard for nearly two years, though he paid a high price for his nearest miss. 'One of my friends gave me a tip-off they [the Civil Guard] were coming up the road I wanted to use and I had to hide under a bridge. I managed to get there just in time, but I was standing in stagnant water for so long I got bitten by a mosquito and ended up with typhoid.' Typhoid is not actually transmitted by mosquitoes, but whatever led to Bahamontes' illness, and whatever the illness was, the effects were highly unpleasant. 'I ended up so ill I couldn't leave the house for two months. I had bouts of high fever that were so severe they thought I might die. When the fever came down I was so hungry I would break open the padlock my mother had put on the larder door to steal whatever I could get. I was as thin as an anorexic. I must have weighed about forty-five kilos [a little over seven stones] at the worst point. I was so weak I couldn't walk. Two of my sisters would carry me between them around the town so I could get some fresh air. All my hair fell out, too. Before it had been straight, and when it grew again after I was cured it came out much curlier.' He was given a doctor's certificate, which stated that he had chronic chest problems and recommended he avoid all types of physically demanding sports. As Bahamontes would delight in telling journalists in the years to come, that obviously included cycling. But, of course, he continued riding. After all, blind obedience to authority has never been in his nature.\n\nSo what led Bahamontes to move from black marketeer to bike rider? The simple answer is money, and the talent to make it.\n\nBut if the driving force was economic, it was pure chance that first pushed Bahamontes to enter a race. On Wednesday, 18 July, 1947, as they would do every year on the anniversary of the start of the Civil War until his death nearly three decades later, General Franco's supporters celebrated his victory and rise to power. The country would grind to a halt. But not everybody spent the so-called _Fiesta Nacional_ in a public show of loyalty to the ruling regime. After his 1959 Tour win, the still severely censored Spanish media would claim that Bahamontes had made enough money from his market work to buy the bike on which he rode his first race a dozen years before. But, in fact, Bahamontes had spent that morning riding the thirty-one kilometres from Toledo to the town of Torres to pick up an illegal shipment of bread, flour and beans and bring it back in bags slung over his handlebars. For the black marketeers, 18 July was business as usual. The only difference for Bahamontes was that because the street market where he had his legal job was closed for the celebrations, he could make an earlier start.\n\nBy midday he was back in Toledo, his illicit consignment disposed of, and his bike pointing homewards. But a chance meeting with two other teenaged black marketeers took Bahamontes' life in a different direction altogether. His partners-in-crime were competing in a bike race, organised as part of the _Fiesta Nacional_ in the nearby village of Minasalbas. When they invited Bahamontes to join them, he jumped at the chance.\n\nAt this point it is worth recalling that Bahamontes had never taken part in a competition of any kind before. His one attempt to play a sport, in his case soccer, had ended when his father crept into his room in the middle of the night and cut his football to ribbons. He wanted to be sure his son had no distractions from work. However, when Bahamontes reached the start of his first race, he came up against an even bigger obstacle than his father: Spanish bureaucracy. It transpired he needed a licence to take part. Luck remained on his side. After a quick word with a government official, the required document was obtained and filled in. Even today in Spain, this kind of simple bureaucratic process can take weeks. That day, for Bahamontes at least, it took no time at all; perhaps because the race was sponsored by the Ministry of Education itself and was part of the official celebrations of Franco's victory, they felt the more riders they got to the start-line the better.\n\nNow Bahamontes was the owner of his first race licence and had become a _bone fide_ amateur bike rider. Unfortunately he had come completely unprepared. His work bike was a racer, true enough, but he had no sports clothes. Instead, as he was to recall thousands of times, he rode his first race in his usual trousers and a borrowed baseball shirt with reinforced shoulder pads. As for food, a lemon and a banana were his only sustenance; by the end of the event, he was so hungry he wolfed down the lot, banana skin and lemon peel included.\n\nThe race, around forty-five kilometres long, started well enough. As soon as the flag dropped, not knowing the textbook tactic was to conserve strength until the end, he made a move that was to become 'vintage Bahamontes'. As a handwritten note says on the first page in his privately published account of the 1959 Tour de France, 'my tactic from the beginning was attack, attack and attack again'. It would have caught the rest by surprise. Unfortunately there was a mechanical problem: Bahamontes' bike chain kept coming off. And not for the last time he was caught on a descent. Not all was lost, though. After sitting in the bunch for the rest of the race, Bahamontes amazingly finished second. Encouraged by this, he decided to come back the following week for more.\n\nBahamontes' next race was sixty kilometres long, and he still wore the same basketball shirt and trousers. At least he had sorted out the problem with his chain. On the downside, the opposition was far stronger. Of the twenty-five riders taking part, the youngest was Bahamontes' age, the oldest twenty-two or twenty-three. Fortunately Bahamontes had a secret weapon: 'Team Fede', a lorry-load of supporters. With his three younger sisters on board, as well as their respective boyfriends, the lorry drove along behind the race. Bahamontes could not see them, but knowing they were there was a major boost to his morale. The flag dropped. Almost immediately, he put his head down, stomped on the pedals and opened a gap. It was only his second race, but he already had a trademark move. By the halfway point, Bahamontes was still out in front, alone and pedalling his way slowly but steadily across the arid semi-desert which surrounds Toledo. His only company in the miles of featureless flatlands was a one-man police motorbike escort. A long way behind, a low dust cloud indicated the main pack of chasers. It had become a one-bike race. At one point, the outrider dropped back level with Bahamontes and looked across at him. 'Hey,' he shouted, 'aren't you bored out here by yourself?' Bahamontes looked back. 'Don't worry,' he replied, 'I'm doing just fine.'\nChapter Two\n\n#### The Melon Thief\n\nAfter victory in only his second race, Bahamontes endured another summer of backbreaking, poorly paid agricultural work with his father before deciding to start racing as a full-time amateur. The logic of the choice was almost purely financial. 'I could make more money out of winning one race than my father would make out of working in an entire harvest,' Bahamontes recalls.\n\nHowever, piecing together his progress in the early years of his career is anything but simple. The economic dificulties that faced races he took part in as an amateur are largely responsible: frequently events already curtailed for three years by the Civil War in the 1930s would appear and disappear again. This endemic problem would even affect the country's flagship professional event, the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a. Moreover, the erratic newspaper reporting in a country governed by a military dictatorship, and in the throes of its worst economic depression in a century, also contributed. 'The Spanish press makes a curious study,' writer Gerald Brenan observed in 1949. 'The first thing one notices is there is scarcely any news given in the Madrid papers about Spain. One is not told, for example, that the factories in Barcelona are only working two days a week. The foreigner casting his eye over the press might well suppose that nothing happens in the Peninsula except football matches, religious ceremonies and bullfights.' The arbitrary nature of the reporting meant that the Volta a Catalunya stage race, for example, was enormously popular in its own region and received huge amounts of column inches in the local newspapers. Beyond the Catalan frontiers, however, despite being Spain's biggest race between 1951 and 1954, it barely made an impact. In 1953 _ABC_ , the leading Madrid-based newspaper of the time, published exactly four paragraphs, all results, on the race's final stage.\n\nThe racing conditions themselves reflected Spain's extreme poverty and almost non-existent infrastructure. An early Government-funded documentary of the 1946 Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a, designed to promote Spain in the best possible light and shown in Spanish cinemas, cannot avoid revealing much of the country's true condition. For nearly a month, and on a course lasting three thousand eight hundred kilometres, the forty-six-strong peloton raced the length and breadth of Spain: from Madrid, south through Extremadura to Seville, then north and east to San Sebastian, via Barcelona, and finally back, through Santander and Valladolid, to Madrid again. Because it covered so much terrain, the documentary is probably one of the most complete visual 'snapshots' of Spain since the Civil War ended seven years before. The scars of the conflict are still clearly visible. Not just in the black-clad widows, many of them young women, who form dark knots in the crowds lining the route. The country itself is barely back on its feet: none of the roads outside the cities are tarmacked; the surfaces often just a tangle of ruts and badly spaced cobblestones. The consequences of that disrepair are also evident: every two minutes or so an injured rider is shown slumped on the side of the road as orderlies bandage him up.\n\nAnd not even a propaganda film can hide the occasional glimpse of bombed-out buildings in the background as the riders pedal by. The lack of infrastructure extends to the race itself where the black, high-sided support cars look pre-War in appearance \u2013 pre-World War One, that is. Handkerchiefs are used as flags, there are no banners except at the finish line, no barriers or advertising on or off the riders' dark clothing. The heavy-looking racing bikes have no numbers; instead they are pinned to the riders' backs. Certainly there is nothing like a winner's podium, no cups or bouquets, at least until the twenty-nine riders who complete the Vuelta reach the final stage finish at an athletics stadium in Madrid.\n\nThe poverty is unmissable, too. The wiriness of the spectators in the large crowds is visible even at a distance. In many cases their threadbare Sunday-best clothes hang off them, and a fair proportion of the women and children are barefoot, particularly outside the cities. One tall male spectator is wrapped in nothing but a blanket. Most telling of all is the difference in physical condition of the public and the cyclists: even after three weeks' hard racing the riders, traditionally scrawny alongside 'normal' people, look comparatively healthy and well-fed.\n\nCars, too, are a rarity. In one shot the few vehicles visible are outnumbered by horses and carts. Bikes, though, abound; many have been converted for carrying heavy loads. At one point three lads, very probably black marketeers to judge by the large, unmarked boxes and bags behind their saddles, look worriedly at the camera for a second before haring off at top speed. However, the biggest difference between these images of Spain and contemporary footage of, say, Great Britain, is the almost total absence of features you would take for granted in a twentieth-century European landscape: telegraph poles and wires, pavements, streetlights, parked cars, tarmac. There are barely any shops, few blocks of flats, no billboards, no parks. Remove the travelling circus of the Vuelta and you could be in the Spain of the 1840s: the sense of grinding economic misery is palpable.\n\nIn an interview in 1962, Spain's most successful racer of the 1940s, Juli\u00e1n Berrendero, recalled: 'We raced as if we had been abandoned by everybody. We had no help. We had bikes with just three gears rather than the ten you normally have now.' Asked how tough it was to race, he answered: 'If I suffered half now of what I had to put up with in my best years, I would be a millionaire. I put up with everything. In the 1937 Tour I fell and they gave me six stitches in my knee. The wound burst open, but I kept racing. They stitched me up, I went to bed, started again, it burst open again, and so on and so on until I completed the race. These days nobody could stand that sort of torture \u2013 nobody.'\n\nBorn in the village of San Agustin de Guadalix near Madrid, Berrendero was toughened by his harsh youth which included working long hours at a clay pigeon shoot for two pesetas (six euros) a day. But Berrendero's recollection of his racing days show that life in the peloton made significant demands for very little reward. The races, he confirms, were run with minimal infrastructure, but the riders got on with it. 'We were much more resistant to everything \u2013 cold, heat, rain. I don't know if it was because we were so desperate for the money, but there were no wages, no start money, and if you abandoned you had to make your own way home. When we raced the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a there were only half-a-dozen support cars and two or three journalists to keep the whole country informed. Now there are dozens of them.' Berrendero, amazingly, seemed to have a certain nostalgia for the savage racing conditions of two decades earlier. 'These days the trade teams have hugely improved things financially for the riders. Cycling has lost nothing as a spectacle, but it's lost the grandeur of those superhuman efforts. There are far more people involved, but their love of cycling has diminished.'\n\nIf the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a was the country's premier bike race, what must the provincial races of Bahamontes' early years have been like? With the country's transport and communication infrastructure so poor, and such long distances between the major cities, the bike racing 'scene' in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a series of chronically disconnected hubs of activity. Some, like Catalonia, were very dynamic; others, such as Andalusia, only sporadically so. What they all had in common was scant knowledge about what was going on elsewhere in the cycling world. It was something Bahamontes exploited to the full, whether consciously or not.\n\nRacing across the country, Bahamontes pops up under different names: first as Mart\u00edn, secondly Mart\u00edn Bahamontes, and thirdly, and most frequently, 'Bahamonde'. 'Bahamontes' only starts to appear in the newspapers with any degree of consistency in late 1953. Ask him these days about the name-changing and Bahamontes just grins. But he had reason to be happy with all of them. He should have used Mart\u00edn, his father's surname, but preferred his mother's. General Franco's second surname was Bahamonde, and for an ambitious young man like Bahamontes, letting the public think he shared a family name with the _General\u00edsimo_ was presumably appealing, if only because it caught the attention of the press. Most importantly, though, this ambiguity kept rivals in the dark about whether he was competing in a race until he appeared at the starting line. By then, of course, it was too late. Their concern was understandable since Bahamontes had discovered a formula that guaranteed him success: forming a combine with another rider, also from Toledo.\n\n'His name was Ladislau Soria and we were both strong riders. He didn't climb well but was good on the flat, and with me it was the other way round,' Bahamontes recalls. 'His brother, who was a telegraph operator at [nearby] Aranjuez railway station, organised our trips. He was our manager, but he didn't charge us any money. He'd ring up the villages and towns where he knew the annual _fiesta_ was coming up and he'd ask, \"Are you going to put on a bike race as part of the celebrations?\" If the answer was yes, then off we'd head. Nine times out of ten, we'd win.'\n\nWith cars scarce and the roads in terrible condition, there was only one way Bahamontes and Soria could travel between races: as hobos on the railways. 'We'd go in the guards van of goods trains so we wouldn't have to pay. [Soria's] mother would cook us up some breaded pork chops and omelettes, and we'd put them in a wicker basket for later.' With his transport, racing programme and sustenance all laid on by his colleague, Bahamontes was on to a winner. He did make a contribution, though, albeit a minor one: 'When I chipped in with a bit of bread that was us sorted for food.'\n\nSleepless nights and spectacularly long bike rides, often in the dark, were part and parcel of the dynamic duo's campaigns. 'There was the time we went from Toledo to Motilla del Palancar [three hundred kilometres] in one night. We travelled from Toledo to Aranjuez [60 kilometres] by bike, Aranjuez to Cinco Casas by train, then rode from Cinco Casas to Tomelloso [twenty kilometres] in the middle of the night in the pitch dark. Then it was back on the train again and we got to Motilla at seven in the morning. We ate a couple of bananas, drank a litre of milk, slept on four chairs pulled together for an hour, then went out to race.'\n\nThis 'hobo' image is not as surprising as it sounds. In many ways the Spanish cyclists of the late 1940s and early 1950s had more in common with other 'rootless' lifestyles of the time \u2013 like tinkers, itinerant musicians and theatre companies \u2013 than they did with professional sportsmen. The first time Jes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o, one of Bahamontes' main rivals, ran into the Eagle of Toledo was in 1953 when they were both en route to a bike race. 'He was lying under a tree, sucking on a lump of fat, and looking like a tramp in scruffy workaday clothes.' Loro\u00f1o's description was confirmed by another leading rider, Miguel Poblet. 'I first came across Bahamontes when I did my Military Service, and I competed in the military national championships in Toledo, riding for Catalonia. Suddenly riding along behind me I noticed this really scrawny kid wearing rag-tag clothes. He overtook us even though he had nothing to do with the race! Admittedly we had our rifles and bandoliers, but he still overtook us. And when I next saw Bahamontes, in a Volta a Catalunya, he told me it had been him.'\n\nHitching rides on goods trains meant there was little certainty about when the pair would get back to Toledo, or whether their supplies would last them. If money was tight the only solution was to steal fruit and vegetable crops from fields. Bahamontes recalls one nightmare ride from a race in Burgos to Toledo [400 kilometres] in which he and Soria ate nothing but purloined, half-ripe, watermelons. Bahamontes' partnership with Soria was a makeshift system but it was highly effective. 'We stitched them up time and again. I won one amateur Tour of Andalusia by over an hour, as well as four stages and a hill-climb to Sierra Nevada, then did the same all over again in the Tour of Cadiz. And I always finished alone. It got to the point that riders wouldn't want to start if they knew we were racing.'\n\nThis lucrative collaboration was interrupted in July 1949 when Bahamontes was summoned for National Service. Billeted at Canillejas, close to Madrid, the sudden loss of the freedom to travel more or less where he wanted, coupled with life in an army barracks after two years of making money hand over fist, came as a shock to Bahamontes. 'For eighteen months my life consisted of trying to eat as many black beans and lentils as I could,' he recalls. 'That's what I wanted to eat, anyway. But for some reason the saucepans in the barracks never seemed to hold anything bar water. We were always hungry. I'd ride over to Toledo to see my girlfriend [Fermina, who Bahamontes had met in the local market where she worked] and she gave me parcels of sausages and chocolate.'\n\nIn fact, financially, his life was picking up. He and his family had built their own house, principally out of rubble from bombed-out Civil War buildings. By 1950, aged just twenty-two, Bahamontes had opened a shop in Toledo, a one-roomed 'hole in the wall' where he rented out bikes. As he was doing his military service at the time, a former amateur rider who would become a life-long business associate, Faustino Su\u00e1rez, took over as manager. Fermina manned the cash register, as she would do in a series of bike shops Bahamontes was to own in Toledo. 'She was there on the front-line for her whole life,' Bahamontes says. 'Wherever there's money, the women are always there. They're the ones who look after it the best.'\n\nBahamontes was breaking through in other areas as well, taking the King of the Mountains title in the amateur Tour of \u00c1vila in 1948. The earliest reference to him in a national daily newspaper, albeit under one of his aliases, came in _ABC_ 's sporadic coverage of the same race on 26 May, 1949. After three stages, the first two having gone unreported, one 'Bahamonde de Toledo' was lying fifth, a minute and a half down. The final stage, on 27 May, was won by Bahamontes, though most _ABC_ readers may not have noticed: the story was tucked away in the bottom right-hand corner of page seventeen. Nonetheless, Bahamontes' win was there. A bold eight-line series of results records that at the end of a stage one hundred and nine kilometres long, which ran from Arevalo to \u00c1vila, 'Bahamonde' outstripped the pack in his last chance for victory. Soria, his combine companion, was fifth.\n\nEven if the media coverage was patchy, the prize money offered was still irresistible for even the least talented rider, and Bahamontes was far from that. Bernardo Ruiz recounts that when he first travelled to the Volta a Catalunya race in 1945, aged twenty-one, he had three hundred and fifty pesetas [\u00a3240 in modern money] in his back pocket and had never been outside the region of Valencia in his life. After winning the Volta a Catalunya, he came back home with several times that amount. Compared with Bahamontes' two peseta mark-up on each bike load from his black market trade in Toledo, there is no question which was the more profitable profession; it also explains why Bahamontes stuck at cycling so determinedly.\n\nFrom the earliest days his preference for a spectacular racing style over an effective one shone through. 'He always had to win alone,' recalled Luis L\u00f3pez Nicolas, an amateur rider at the time and later a journalist with _El Alc\u00e1zar_ newspaper. 'Sitting in and waiting for a sprint was too comfortable an option for him. He was a nervous rider who launched attack after attack, most of them inconsequential.' Bahamontes bought a lighter bike with his winnings: it weighed just twelve kilos rather than twenty, which increased his chances of victory. But he had a propensity to be involved in crashes, even if they were not all of his own making. According to _El Alc\u00e1zar_ one of the most spectacular was in the 1948 amateur national championships when a spectator crossing the road brought down the peloton. Bahamontes was in the thick of the ensuing pile-up, but still ran fifth. An animal was responsible for Bahamontes' next big crash, which took place when he was leading the 1948 Tour of \u00c1vila: during a descent a pig ran into the road and right into the pack. 'As the crash happened just after a corner, more and more riders blasted round the bend at 60 k.p.h. and slammed into the mass of bodies,' _El Alc\u00e1zar_ reported. 'One, Isidro L\u00f3pez de Salamanca, had his head split open like a watermelon and had to be taken to hospital. Fortunately he survived. The skin was ripped off the whole of Bahamontes left side \u2013 arm, leg, thigh and face \u2013 but fortunately he was all right apart from that.' Bahamontes made a supreme effort to try to catch an Asturian rider named Su\u00e1rez, who was lying second overall and who had dodged the crash. In an eighty-kilometre pursuit, Bahamontes managed to overtake several other riders, but lack of food, coupled with exhaustion and the after-effects of the crash forced him to abandon. Nevertheless it was an indication of the innate tenacity which would pay him dividends in the future.\n\nBahamontes' narrowest escape in his amateur years, though, did not happen while he was racing, but when he was taking one of his late-night rides between events with Soria. After finishing first and third in a race near Toledo, the two had to make it to Cuenca, two hundred kilometres further east, for another event the following day. But there were no train connections. Having ridden more than one hundred and fifty kilometres in pitch darkness, Bahamontes hit a stone in the road and went over his handlebars. Bleeding heavily from two major wounds, one in the arm, the other in his shoulder, he was unconscious for half an hour. 'Soria was really nervous, he thought I'd killed myself,' Bahamontes told _El Alc\u00e1zar._ The two arrived in Cuenca at 5 a.m., woke up four hours later and once again finished first and third, even though Bahamontes could only grip his handlebars with one hand. Sometimes Bahamontes' mishaps were caused deliberately by his rivals. At one race in Toledo, there were so many tin-tacks on the road he punctured eight times. But having sent his father home to get all the spare tyres he could find, Bahamontes still finished.\n\n'In 1948 he raced in San Sebasti\u00e1n for the first time, at the Ministry of Education's national champonships, and that was when he first saw the sea,' L\u00f3pez Nicolas recalls. 'Third overall, and second in the King of the Mountains competition, that was also where he told me he first felt really confident about his chances on the climbs.'\n\nSporadically, but steadily, more results for Bahamontes and his various aliases began to appear in the press: second in the opening stage of the Tour of \u00c1vila 1950; second in a hilly stage of the Tour of Madrid in 1951. He also took two overall victories in a stage race: at the Tour of \u00c1vila in 1951 and at the Tour of Cadiz the same year, rounding off his success in Cadiz with another stage win on the final day. Bahamontes also claims he won the Spanish Amateur National Championships in 1949. However, according to Spanish Federation records, what would have marked a breakthrough victory never actually happened: instead the title went to Eduardo Gadea.\n\nBut winning races was not the only source of income to be found in cycling: Bahamontes recalls he threw the following year's Amateur National Championships to 'Luciano Montero, while [Juan] Campillo came third. I did it because I needed the money'. If Bahamontes had reached a position where he was selling a race as important as the Spanish Nationals, this was ample proof that he had mastered the game and was ready to compete at a higher level.\n\nHis first opportunity to take on the professionals came in the week-long Tour of Asturias in 1953. It was one of the toughest professional races on the Spanish calendar and was frequently decided in the daunting Picos de Europa mountain range. The initial challenge for Bahamontes, though, was actually getting to the start. 'It was a five hundred-kilometre journey from Toledo and I did it all by bike,' he remembers. 'That sounds bad, but the long trip north had given me a great opportunity to hone my form and find a good race rhythm. So when I got to Asturias I was more than ready to go.' Nonetheless, he faced strong opposition. Barring those participating in the Giro d'Italia, which ran concurrently, all Spain's top professionals were present, plus some powerful national teams from Italy and Belgium. None of this deterred Bahamontes. Riding as an _independiente_ , or semi-professional, unsponsored, unaffiliated rider, he won the opening stage and the first professional King of the Mountains jersey of his career. He finished a more than respectable twenty-first overall out of the sixty-nine starters.\n\nThe stage win was no fluke, either. In a 120-kilometre run from Mieres to Luarca, incorporating three classified climbs, the 24-year-old took off halfway through. Sixty kilometres and two cols later, he was still alone at the head of the field. Just as in his amateur days, Bahamontes was determined to win in his trademark solo style. Also typical was his plummet in the overall classification on the next stage, held on the afternoon of the same day.\n\nFollowing his triumph in Asturias, Bahamontes competed in more races in Madrid. In one of them, the one-day Vuelta a los Puertos, the first signs emerged of his decade-long conflict with Jes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o, Spain's other top contemporary rider. Bahamontes and Loro\u00f1o broke away on the Navacerrada pass outside Madrid, on the steeper side known as 'The Seven Hairpins'. However, after arguing about who was going to set the pace on the front, the duo were reeled in. It was a minor incident, but it set the tone for a rivalry that was to divide Spanish cycling fans into _Bahamontistas_ and _Loro\u00f1istas._ Now all this success meant it was time for Bahamontes to make the move to the richest area of Spain and the only region where bike racing was truly flourishing: Catalonia.\n\nFor any self-respecting professional in Spain in the 1950s, a spell in Barcelona was inevitable. As the area least affected by the economic depression, Catalonia was 'where it was all happening', as Bahamontes put it. He explained: 'Catalonia had more money than the rest of Spain combined and it was much more advanced in all sorts of ways. Just take sport: in Madrid there was only one football stadium and one bullring, while Barcelona didn't only have that, it even had its own velodrome. [The singer-actresses] Lola Flores, Carmen Sevilla and [the boxer] Fred Galiana . . . all us big stars went there, artists and athletes alike. You could say my sporting roots are in Barcelona, and it was where I finally retired, too, with my last race [in 1965] in the Montjuic park.'\n\nBarcelona was also where Bahamontes found the first of the two key backers of his career: Santiago Mostajo, a businessman and former rider who twice won the Spanish national championships. Mostajo was a hugely influential figure in Barcelona's cycling scene at the time, and not just as a race organiser and team director. He was also one of those shadowy figures so often found behind the scenes in cycling and without whom the sport would grind to a halt: an affluent fan who was happy to take a few riders under his wing, help finance their racing and provide everything from transport to moral support, all in exchange for a little reflected glory. Mostajo's set-up involved four or five riders who were, as Bahamontes puts it, paid 'under the counter'. Indeed, Bahamontes suspected Mostajo was paying them using money that officials from Barcelona's town hall had given him to build a second velodrome. 'The velodrome was going to be an open-air one, but it never happened,' says Bahamontes. 'Basically he had us for nothing.'\n\nOthers, who are more generous to Mostajo, point out that the businessman put up riders in his own house, rent-free, with meals and laundry thrown in. And the second velodrome _was_ built \u2013 it just took a very long time (until 1961) to happen. 'Mostajo just wanted to be part of the scene,' comments 1955 Tour of Spain runner-up Antonio Jim\u00e9nez Quiles, who stayed in Mostajo's house as an amateur rider a few years after Bahamontes. 'He was a former rider himself and his son, also called Santiago, was a racer, but he wasn't very good. OK, he had a pretty dodgy used-tyre business and there was that stuff with the velodrome, but he never kept the prize money. Nobody else was doing what he did for cyclists in Barcelona. He just loved the sport.'\n\nMostajo directed Bahamontes' first professional squad, a small, eight-man team sponsored by Balanzas Berkel, a company who manufactured scales and weighing machines. Whatever the source, by the standards of his fellow Spaniards Bahamontes was now earning a reasonable wage of around five hundred pesetas a month. But the situation was not to his liking and his association with Mostajo did not last long. However, before the two parted company, the older man gave Bahamontes' career a significant boost. Despite his prot\u00e9g\u00e9's professional status, Mostajo helped Bahamontes into Europe's most prestigious training camp for amateurs, the _Campo Simplex._ The money may not have been good, but as Jim\u00e9nez Quiles points out, the logistical and psychological support Mostajo provided for Bahamontes was crucial. And the closeness between them comes across clearly in one of the few photographs to survive from Bahamontes' early career. Taken after his biggest victory of 1953, the King of the Mountains jersey in the Volta a Catalunya, it shows the finish line of the race and there, waiting to fling his arms around the young rider, is Mostajo. Both men, the trainer and his star pupil, display huge grins.\n\nIt was symptomatic of the economic gulf that separated Catalonia from the rest of Spain that the Volta a Catalunya, the region's top stage race, was for a while Spain's biggest cycling event. Nine days' long, as top Catalan sports newspaper _El Mundo Deportivo_ put it in its 1953 preview of the race, 'the Volta a Catalunya is our own little Tour de France'. Without the competition of the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a, which did not run between 1950 and 1955 due to financial problems, the Volta enjoyed massive media coverage in Catalonia. At the time, _El Mundo Deportivo_ published six or eight pages each day, and three or four of those would be dedicated exclusively to the Volta. And all written, its journalists were keen to point out, on typewriters provided free by Olivetti.\n\nEven today, one of road-racing's greatest attractions is that it is free to watch, and in the grip of an economic recession the Catalan public turned out for the two-wheeled entertainment in their thousands. That was not all. Villages would sponsor prizes, known as _primes_ , for the first rider through the main square; climbs would be jammed with spectators; and during the race newspapers would be plastered with advertisements for cycling-related products. At the end of the Volta a Catalunya, fourteen different sponsors were listed in the newspaper's reports as backing various prizes, from Cinzano for the King of the Mountains to Olivetti for the sprint competitions (as well as the journalists' typewriters).\n\nIf Asturias had seen Bahamontes fighting against a depleted field, that was not the case in the Volta a Catalunya of 1953, where nine four-man Spanish regional squads took part, as well as teams from Belgium, Germany and Holland. Only the French were absent after three of their single five man-squad failed to turn up. In controversial circumstances, the victor of the opening stage in Montjuic park was all-rounder Miguel Poblet, the previous year's winner and, in 1956, Spain's first leader of the Tour de France. Another rider, Miguel Bover, was actually first across the line, but he was penalised for accepting a wheel from a spectator. The rules were unclear at the time, stating that a rider could not receive 'a bike' from a spectator, and Bover's team claimed that a wheel was 'not a whole bike, but a part of one'. Unsurprisingly, the race officials disagreed, and Bover was demoted.\n\nThough sprinting was never his strong point, Bahamontes had been active in a break and that afternoon, in the stage's second section to Gerona, he showed again he was undaunted by the calibre of the opposition. Midway through the stage, after an earlier break of eight had disintegrated when a massive rut in the road wrecked several of their bikes, the Italians Giancarlo Grosso and Donato Zampini broke away. The bulk of the chasing pack eased back and let the pair go, but Bahamontes and the young Belgian rider Marcel Janssens managed to bridge the gap. As the riders reached Gerona, the quartet were a mere twenty seconds ahead, and the peloton appeared confident they could pull them back on the four laps of the city centre that followed. However, to their surprise, it emerged that times for the overall classification were taken at the start of the first lap, not at the finish line, meaning Grosso could claim the lead and Bahamontes a prestigious result as first Spaniard. To make matters even more confusing, the four lapped the pack and sprinted for the stage victory in the middle of the main field. Afterwards the top Spaniards were furious, but as the lead home rider in his biggest race to date, Bahamontes was ecstatic. 'Bahamonde [sic] is the big news of the race,' commented _El Mundo Deportivo_ , who brushed aside the protests about the rules with the testy comment 'although it would have been better if things had been explained to the pack before the race reached Gerona'.\n\nThings reverted to normal the following day on stage three to Granollers when Francisco Alomar, of Spain, took over as leader. Grosso had unfortunately drunk some water from a public fountain and suffered a severely upset stomach, losing nearly forty minutes. Bahamontes, meanwhile, remained third overall and fourth in the King of the Mountains competition. However, the next day, stage four, he made his first appearance on the front page of a Spanish newspaper. The photograph shows him in a plain jersey, with inner tubes strapped across his back, and staring piercingly at the camera. He was f\u00eated because he had performed above expectations on an exceptionally mountainous stage which followed the main road from Barcelona to Puigcerda and the French border before darting westwards to Andorra. Bahamontes did more than pull through, crossing the massive Collada de Tosas pass in the Pyrenean foothills in sixth place. He was then ninth into Andorra after a 200-kilometre trek through some of the wildest uplands of Catalunya.\n\nVictory went to Salvador Botella, another Mostajo prot\u00e9g\u00e9. Botella had made a lone attack that enabled him to gain a four-minute forty-second lead on Alomar. But it was the performance of the little-known Bahamontes that everybody was talking about. He was 'one of the Spanish revelations of the race', claimed _El Mundo Deportivo'_ s headline. His slide from third to seventh mattered little, the report insisting that by riding so well as a rookie professional 'even such defeats carry the whiff of victory'.\n\nThe next two stages developed into a phony war. Despite his racing against the clock being theoretically weak, Bahamontes lost just one place overall, dropping to eighth, in the fifty-four-kilometre midday individual time-trial that, incredibly by modern standards, was jammed between a forty-three-kilometre mass-start stage from Andorra in the morning, and a sixty-kilometre stage down to Lerida in the afternoon. Bahamontes continued to move up the mountains classification after he broke away briefly on stage seven to lead across the Collado de Lilla climb. However, it was on stage eight the next day that he really shone.\n\nBahamontes' achievements on the 251-kilometre ride from Tarragona on the coast to the Pyrenean town of Berga all but confirmed in a single day's racing that he was capable of becoming Spain's greatest stage racer. There were some spectacular twists and turns in the overall battle. Against all expectations, Botella cracked completely, leaving the way open for Zampini to gain a seven-minute advantage and the lead. Once again, though, Bahamontes stole the show, with a 146-kilometre solo breakaway through the streets of Barcelona, culminating in a lone ascent of the capital's best-known climb, the Tibidalbo. What Mostajo must have thought when his prot\u00e9g\u00e9, sporting the bright pink jersey of the King of the Mountains leader, arrived in Barcelona a full five minutes ahead of the pack can only be imagined. The media were certainly impressed. 'We need a few riders like Bahamontes,' _El Mundo Deportivo_ 's cycling correspondent wrote, 'who climb well, perform brilliantly on the flat and whose courage distinguishes them above all others. We need this type of rider, the kind who know how to fling themselves into the battle, with the sole intention of provoking a war. All the other teams' well-studied strategies went up in smoke thanks to one lone man's courage.' It was a story that would repeat itself time and time again.\n\nAfter a break of nearly an hour for lunch \u2013 a tradition that would soon die out \u2013 the riders set off from the summit of the Tibidalbo, separated by time gaps based on when they had reached the top of the climb. Bahamontes knew he had to make the most of his four-minute advantage, and after scooping up prime after prime, it was only at the foot of La Trona, the third and final climb of the day, that he was finally reeled in. Exhausted by such a long early break, he trailed across the line twenty-fifth, fourteen minutes down on Zampini, the new leader. In a lesson perhaps too well learnt by Bahamontes, the impact of such an impressive breakaway far outlasted the moment he was caught by the pack. As _El Mundo Deportivo_ pointed out: 'The crowds had heard about what he had achieved in the morning and applauded him even though he was dropped.'\n\nNot for the last time, Bahamontes' sanity was called into question. The newspaper described his breakaway as 'the adventure of a madman', concluding: 'It would be no bad thing if cycling were full of madmen like him.' Nor was such 'lunacy' unprofitable: Bahamontes earned thousands of pesetas from his breakaway. In the town of Manresa alone, the fans offered their own 'prime' of five hundred pesetas (\u00a3600 in modern money) for the first rider to pass through the centre; that was as much as he earned from Mostajo in a month. Moreover, Bahamontes' maverick style was praised in the press as 'harking back to the golden age of our sport' when legend had it that impetuous lone attacks, rather than cold-blooded conservatism, were the order of the day.\n\nBahamontes had shown he could compete with the established riders of the time. Former national champion Francisco Masip, Jos\u00e9 Serra, who finished third in the 1950 Tour of Spain, and Antonio Gelabert, the 1950 Volta winner, were all in the race. However, they all preferred to play a waiting game than risk burning themselves out in breakaways. The younger generation, like Bahamontes and Botella, exploited their caution to the full. Botella finally regained the overall lead for good after Zampini cracked on the final day, conveniently, the skeptical might say, in the middle of nowhere.\n\nIf eclipsing the big names was a major coup for Bahamontes, so too was the way his triumph was presented to the public by the press as a throwback to a long-lost era. _El Mundo Deportivo_ even went so far as to compare Bahamontes to Vicente Trueba \u2013 the 'Flea of Torrelavega' who won the Tour de France's first King of the Mountains jersey in 1933 \u2013 as well as other intrepid climbers from Spanish cycling history, like Federico Ezquerra and Julian Berrendero. Ezquerra, who was born in 1909, was the second Spaniard to win a Tour de France stage but is more widely remembered for his spectacular solo assault on the infamous Galibier climb in 1934. Berrendero, born three years later, won the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a and the Volta a Catalunya twice, as well as the King of the Mountains jersey in the Tour and Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a. For Bahamontes to be compared with those two was high praise indeed, and suggested a country eager to recapture past glories. 'Bahamontes proves our heritage of climbers has not disappeared,' the paper said.\n\nJust as today's cycling fans regard the 1950s and 1960s as a golden age of dashing heroics, so sixty years ago there was a sense that the sport had become excessively calculating. Bahamontes, therefore, was seen as a new hero who would break the mould, gain iconic status and increase newspaper sales in the process. Everybody, in short, was a winner.\nChapter Three\n\n#### Cycling's Most Famous Ice Cream\n\nLong before the days of budget flights, Spain had already become an important training destination for Britain's amateur cyclists. However, back in the early 1950s, while very few, if any, riders from the United Kingdom could say they had ridden alongside Federico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes, one, at least, could claim to have shared jugs of red wine with the future Tour winner across a dinner table in Cannes. That rider was Morecambe-born Ian Brown. He was selected in 1954 to take part in the Simplex training camp, sponsored by a components company for top amateurs from around Europe, which was where he met Bahamontes.\n\nIn charge of the camp was the former French cycling great Charles Pelissier, who had won eight stages in a single Tour, in 1930, a record equalled only by two other riders. He had also been joint leader of the race in 1931, the year Brown was born. 'Pelissier had us ride alternate days hard and easier,' Brown recalls. 'The more straightforward ones were approximately 100-kilometre rides along the coast and the _corniches_ in a big loop. The harder day was around one hundred and sixty kilometres, riding up through the Alps, then at a reasonably hard pace down to Cannes for lunch. The ride back from Cannes was supposedly an easy semi-individual ride along the coast road to the camp headquarters at Monte Carlo. Somehow Bahamontes and I always ended up at the same table for lunch in this really nice restaurant in Cannes. He didn't speak English, and I didn't speak Spanish and his French was even worse than my schoolboy French. Despite this we always ended up together, purposely the last two riders out of the restaurant. There'd always be this _pichet_ of wine on the table so we'd down that.\n\n'But it wasn't the wine. Really we'd stayed there so we'd be the last out and back on our bikes, which we were as soon as the last of the other guys had gone. The aim was to catch and pass all the others on the way back to Monte Carlo. We were jumping on to the back of trucks, scooters, motorbikes and any other vehicles we could tuck in behind, doing \"bit and bit\" [taking turns to lead]. It was real fun, way better than riding on the wet slushy roads in England. I must admit the red wine we were allowed to have with lunch helped make it more fun, too. And we'd always catch everyone before we'd get to Monte Carlos. It was hilarious.'\n\nIt is somehow sobering to think of Bahamontes and his British friend, unable to communicate, but forming a loose, slightly inebriated alliance to score a few harmless points off the other amateurs. Up to that point, Brown and Bahamontes' careers had been curiously similar: neither had travelled abroad before, and both were still finding their feet outside their own country. British and Spanish cycling had been isolated from the rest of continental Europe, though for radically different reasons. For much of the 1940s athletes from Franco's Spain had been subjected to an extensive international boycott; Britain's sporting isolation was more cultural: before the pioneering Brian Robinson, in the 1950s, amateurs rarely ventured across the English Channel. 'Federico was always very open, very polite, a fun rider,' Brown says. 'But I also got the impression he was very glad to be out of Spain, what with Franco and the political repression.'\n\nBrown, one of the five-man 'Northern' team in the 1953 Tour of Britain, was the top rider in his category in the race for several days 'until I went on a breakaway', he remembers wryly, 'and blew to bits'. Nonetheless, his high-profile ride secured Brown his invite to the month-long camp in Monte Carlo. 'A train ticket turned up in the post in late January 1954, and away I went,' he says. 'It was wonderful to get down south and see yellow mimosa and orange blossom for the first time in my life. Then in Monte Carlo there was the palace across the bay from our hotel. We weren't allowed to dry our kit on the balcony, though \u2013 the royals might have seen it.' The Spaniard with whom Brown would make friends, meanwhile, was also thanking his lucky stars he was there: technically an _independiente_ , or freelance professional cyclist, Mostajo had wangled Bahamontes into the amateurs' camp thanks to his contacts within the parent company. For both, Simplex represented a hugely important rung on the ladder towards a full professional career. Agents and teams from across Europe would be keeping an eye on them and snap up those judged to be the most promising and talented.\n\nBrown recalls: 'During the last few days all the riders, including me and Fede, were taken to a clinic and given medical tests to see if we really had it in us physically. I had no idea what the tests were for. Being an out-of-the-way northerner, I did not even know there were such things as sports doctors. The next day we were all individually interviewed by Pelissier, who told us who among us were going to be super champions. Unfortunately I was not one of them, but [in Pelissier's words] \"that Spanish rider who you drink a lot of wine with at lunch in Cannes, and race back to Monte Carlo with, he is\".'\n\nNot only was Pelissier right about Bahamontes, but Brown says he was spot on about other riders, too. '[He said that] the Italian [Guido Messina] who was the oldest rider there, an ex-soccer player, he was going to be a super champion, too \u2013 and he was world pursuit champion that year. The Belgian rider [Jef] Planckaert, he was going to be a super champion, and in fact he made second in the Tour de France [1962]. And there was a Swiss rider, too, but unfortunately he was killed in a race going through an unlit tunnel.' Last but not least, Brown recalls Pelissier told him: 'The Luxembourg rider you ride with, he will be a super champion, too.' That was Charly Gaul, winner of the Tour de France in 1958 and known as 'the Angel of the Mountains'. Unlike Gaul, though, who became one of Bahamontes' most formidable rivals, Brown's path only crossed once more with the Eagle of Toledo following their slightly tanked-up training rides along the Cote D'Azur: in the 1955 Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a.\n\nAs the first Spaniard to attend a _Campo Simplex_ , as Bahamontes called it, his presence represented a breakthrough for his country's cycling at international level. Even though his federation rather shortsightedly threatened to revoke Bahamontes' professional racing licence for attending a camp meant for amateurs, the fact that a former rider as prestigious as Pelissier had selected Bahamontes was a major step forward. So, too, was Bahamontes' first international victory. It came just before the camp finished when his Balanzas-Berkel squad took part in the early-season Mont Agel hill-climb on the France-Monaco border. Held on the last day of February, it had the standard format for these events of a short, flattish opening segment whose sole purpose was to warm up the riders' legs, followed by the main challenge: a lengthy grind up to a mountain-top summit, in the case of Mont Agel, 3,700 feet above sea level. In other words, it was a race designed for thoroughbred climbers like Bahamontes, who would win seventeen of this type in his career. For his first, after pulling out of the pack three kilometres from the top, Bahamontes overtook French favourite Peruggi less than one hundred metres from the finish.\n\nThe victory did not escape the notice of Franco's regime; Bahamontes' team made sure of that. When _El Mundo Deportivo_ attempted to contact the team's director, Santiago Mostajo, by telephone at his Barcelona home to discuss the win, his daughter told them her father was already out at the Post Office sending a telegram about the success to General Moscard\u00f3, the Nationalist hero of the Alc\u00e1zar siege, and by 1954 president of the Spanish Olympic Committee and the Government's sports minister. Equally remarkable was _El Mundo Deportivo'_ s exploitation of the win to symbolise the renewal of Spain's moral and spiritual welfare. That a newspaper should try to forge such a far-fetched link between the two concepts is hard to conceive \u2013 until it is remembered that at the time the Spanish media was used by Franco's regime as a vehicle for its propaganda.\n\n_El Mundo Deportivo'_ s front-page report of Bahamontes' Mont Agel victory in its edition of 1 March, 1954, proved to be a precursor to the same kind of elegiac, nationalistic theories of innate Spanish sporting and human talent that were rife in 1959 after his Tour de France win. The article starts off with a fairly predictable description of Bahamontes as a 'Quijote of Toledo', a comparison to one of the most traditional Spanish literary ideals of the warrior-knight from Castille. But then citing the theories of Adolf Hitler, of all people, on the relationship between humanity and history, followed by a paean to the natural greatness and civilising influence of the Iberian macho, was an indication of how Nazi ideology was still politically acceptable in 1950s Spain. Piling on this pseudo-grandiose significance on one small victory in France illustrates how desperate the Spanish authorities were to exploit any kind of international success by a local athlete. Headlined 'Bahamontes wins the European criterium of cycling', the report then claimed that: 'History repeats itself, the [new] generations are created with the good that they inherited. When this sacred truth disappears, society will be chaos and primitive brutality will return. As Hitler wrote in his memoirs, \"He who is indifferent to history is a man with no ears, no face, of course that man can live, but what does his life have?\"' After comparing Bahamontes again to Quijote, and 'giving a warm welcome to this young man from Toledo', the writer then claims that 'while many novels and films drag us towards the conventional and morbid, it's encouraging to find that sport has sparked the re-forging of an ancient lineage. What is good and uplifting for national pride reaches deeper places . . . and Bahamontes, a Spaniard, has spoken in one of the Alps' highest summits, giving a new example that the Hispanic race has not extinguished and that its desire to exist and triumph is reborn with new motivation, just as one day it was a civilising light in two worlds . . .'\n\nThough the article can best be described as tepid Fascist propaganda wrapped up in a sports report, it demonstrated that right from the start Bahamontes' career was being exploited for political reasons. The role of sport, in any case, had become clear just a few years after the Civil War ended. By 1945 the running of sport in Spain was put into the hands of a specifically created delegation of the _Movimiento Nacional,_ the only political party permitted by Franco's regime, containing both Fascists and Monarchists. A law introduced in 1945 had specified the sports delegation was to be 'a service provided by _El Movimiento_ , and it is responsible for the direction and promotion of sport in all its aspects and modalities . . . it is the supreme authority'. The head of sport, or 'chief sports delegate', would also be named by Franco himself. The sports delegation's statutes rammed home the message about its importance with article 42 announcing that 'all the members of National [sports] Federations and the heads of clubs or sporting societies must have proven adhesion to the _Movimiento'_. In other words, on paper at least, only the party faithful would be allowed to have an officially approved career in Spanish sport. And there could be no doubt, either, as to who would take the credit for their success.\n\nIf nothing else, Bahamontes' victory showed that post-Civil War Spain was beginning to have an impact abroad in professional cycling. It had taken its time. The Spanish national team's first post-war participation in the Tour de France of 1949 ended with all six riders abandoning in less than a week. The riders were poorly equipped and given no expenses, though the Spanish Federation had promised seventy-five kilos of sugar in lieu of cash payment for their participation. But as Lucy Fallon and Adrian Bell point out in their book on the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a, _Viva la Vuelta!,_ the sugar disappeared into the black market before the riders saw it. That the sports director provided by the Federation was completely deaf was hardly a morale boost. Though the riders were criticised for lacking moral fibre when they pulled out \u2013 they were labelled 'dwarves of the road' by the Spanish press \u2013 their exits were not down to poor physical condition. Rather, they lacked decent logistical support, which in turn was due to a dearth in funding. When one Spanish rider, Dalmacio Langarica (Bahamontes' future team director), had a mechanical problem on stage five, the team car was in such poor condition it took nearly forty minutes to reach him. With the whole team instructed to wait for their leader, they failed to finish inside the time limit.\n\nAfter turning down Tour director Jacques Goddet's invitation to return in 1950 to avoid repeating the embarrassment, the Spaniards were back in 1951 and did far better than expected. Bernardo Ruiz took two mountain stages, one in the Massif Central after a day-long breakaway, the second in the Alps, and finished ninth overall. If that was not impressive enough, in 1952 Ruiz became the first Spanish rider to make it into the top three of the Tour de France. However, he was never in a position to beat the winner, Fausto Coppi. The following year, the Basque climber Jes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o clinched the King of the Mountains title by taking off alone on the Aubisque pass in the Pyrenees and winning at Cauterets, six minutes ahead of his closest pursuer, on the way to finishing fifth overall.\n\nIf the Spanish were beginning to make their mark in the Tour for the first time in twenty years, the country itself was slowly beginning to emerge from the economic consequences of the Civil War. By 1953 the Franco regime was starting to receive the huge loans it desperately needed after allowing the United States to build military bases there as part of their Cold War strategy against the Soviet Union. Another five years of recession followed, but at least by 1954 average Spanish incomes had finally regained pre-Civil War levels. Franco, though, showed no signs of ceding power, and constantly played up the alleged Communist threat to Spain, both for the benefit of the United States and internal rivals. 'Every newspaper gives the impression that war is imminent and that the whole of Europe down to the Pyrenees will be overrun by Russian armies,' Gerald Brenan commented. 'This anti-Red ballyhoo helps keep together the two parties on which the regime depends, the Monarchists and Falangists. But for the widespread fear of Communism . . . Franco would have left long ago.' Even if the country's economic position was no longer critical, the dictatorship was there to stay.\n\nThough the 13.4-kilometre pass of the Col de la Romeyere is far from being the hardest Alpine climb the crowd gathered on Monday, 26 July, 1954, for the seventeenth stage of the Tour de France, feeling a sense of mounting expectation. On this very hot day, the question foremost in their minds is, naturally, who will be first across the top? However, if any of them are expecting it to be Frenchman Louison Bobet, the 1953 Tour winner, who is lying second in the King of the Mountains competition, they are in for a big disappointment. Instead, the first rider across the summit, leading a break of four, is Spanish. And given that Federico Bahamontes has already made his mark in the Pyrenees, and has been on the attack in every mountain stage so far, there is no mistaking him, either. His shorts are rolled up high, and his head is raised and staring fixedly into the middle distance. Bahamontes is already well-known as the young leader of the King of the Mountains competition, even though there is not yet a distinctive jersey for the category. However, there is confusion in the crowd when Bahamontes crosses the summit first, claims the points and then immediately rides his bike off the road towards a metal cart selling ice cream. He gets off and without even so much as offering to pay, grabs a cornet. Bahamontes is mobbed by the crowd as he consumes his 'bonus prize', some trying to rip off his race number, and even his clothes, if the victim is to be believed. However, the story of Bahamontes licking away at an ice cream at the top of the Romeyere is guaranteed a permanent niche in the history of cycling.\n\nBike riders stopping for a snack in the middle of a race is not as uncommon an occurrence as might be thought. In one Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a in the early 2000s, the entire peloton apparently pulled over at a road-side hot-dog stall for a bite to eat. Yet there are key differences: the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a's 'hot-dog moment' was early on an endlessly flat, tedious stage somewhere in the bleak, empty moorlands of northern Spain; it was not at the top of the first Alpine climb in the Tour de France of 1954. To stop for an ice cream while at the head of the biggest bike race in the world seems bizarre and utterly subversive; it is as if the rider is almost wilfully disconnecting himself from his sport. Small wonder that if there is one story that cycling fans know about Bahamontes, it is that he was 'the Spanish climber who ate that ice cream on top of a mountain during the Tour'. Or as Bahamontes put it to me two decades ago in an interview for the magazine _Cycle Sport_ : 'I'm never going to hear the last of that ruddy ice cream.'\n\nHis explanation for what happened is very straightforward: 'I only stopped because two of my spokes were broken and I had to wait for assistance. I had got away with three guys, one of them a Belgian. The Belgian's team-car came up to him to tell him not to collaborate because that was only going to favour me. When his car came past me, it struck a stone, which bounced up and broke my spokes. The Romeyere was a shortish climb but very tough, with some very steep sections. When I got to the top, with my spokes broken, I was nervous and really angry. There was no sign of [Spanish team director Juli\u00e1n] Berrendero. So I stopped. The summit was packed, just like every summit of the Tour. But there were two ice cream carts. I picked up a cone from one of them and put in a scoop of vanilla ice cream. At the time, I was more angry with Berrendero than anything else.'\n\nThe impromptu ice cream stop was not the only unusual incident on top of the Romeyere, as Bahamontes reveals. 'As it was a good breakaway we had fourteen minutes' advantage \u2013 not like they call breaks these days, a proper one \u2013 but I didn't know that. I had to wait so long \u2013 the bunch had split apart and my director was stuck in race \"traffic\" \u2013 I actually got bored after eating the ice cream and went down to a stream a little way away. I got some water into a _bidon_ and when the bunch came past me I threw the water all over them.' Dousing the peloton in water earned Bahamontes a fine. However, it was the ice cream incident that made it into sporting history.\n\nBahamontes knew he would be riding in his first Tour as early as the summer of 1953, almost a year before. 'Even then, [team director] Juli\u00e1n Berrendero told me to get ready for the Tour, and when I asked him what my objective would be when the time came to take part, he told me, \"To try and win it\",' Bahamontes recalls. Today, making overall victory a target for a rookie Tour de France rider a year in advance would be ridiculous. However, it is an indication of how fast Bahamontes was progressing. After his King of the Mountains jersey in the Volta a Catalunya in 1953, big results began to pour in. In mid-October Bahamontes won an astonishing five stages in the Tour of Malaga, and by the spring and summer of 1954 he had grown so successful he sold another victory, in exchange for a contract for the following season. Bahamontes claims that in the one-day Classic, the Vuelta a los Puertos, he let a rival from the La Solera team win. 'I had been first over two of the climbs that day, los Leones and another one, but I was interested in going to Barcelona because that was where the money was. The man in charge of La Solera said to me during the race, \"If you let him [Bahamontes' rival] win, you've got a contract in Catalonia for next year\", and I said, \"That's a deal\".' The deal-maker kept his word: after racing in 1954 for three Barcelona-based teams \u2013 Circulo Barcelonista-Yaste, Balanzas-Berkel and Splendid \u2013 in 1955 Bahamontes had a La Solera jersey on his back.\n\nAfter his years as a black marketeer, swift negotiating came naturally to Bahamontes. As Mostajo's influence faded in late 1954, Bahamontes insists he became much more of a one-man show, just like his early days. 'It's true I received advice from another Catalan businessman, Evaristo Murtra \u2013 and I called him \" _padrino_ [godfather]\". He sponsored me sometimes, like when I had my bike shop in Toledo. But basically I fought every battle by myself. I did the deals by myself, and if I won it was all by myself as well. Always. I work alone better than anybody else can.' The Spanish expression he uses is _me muevo solo,_ or 'I move alone', which implies the physical sense of riding without back-up. It is a phrase that neatly sums up his career and even his life. And in the mountains of France, and for the first time on a worldwide stage, Bahamontes was going to prove that he could 'move alone' better than any other bike rider.\n\nPredictably, even though he had been told he would be racing in the 1954 Tour so early, Bahamontes' final selection was not without a minor drama. After winning the King of the Mountains in the Tour of Asturias for a second year, as well as in the Bicicleta Eibarresa in the Basque Country, Bahamontes claims that Berrendero came up to him and without further ado confirmed his promise with the words: 'You, you're going to the Tour de France.' Somewhat implausibly, Bahamontes recollects his initial reaction was to refuse to go because he had no suitcase and did not speak French. However, after demanding to be allowed to telephone his parents to discuss his dilemma, Bahamontes quickly changed his mind, raising suspicions that his initial refusal was merely attention-seeking. Given this definitive invitation to ride had only come in the third week of June, and the Tour started on 8 July, Bahamontes did little specific training for the race. In any case, his role was what the Spanish call 'a free electron', meaning he had no responsibility to his team leaders, and had complete freedom to concentrate on his own speciality, the mountains. So with eleven other Spanish riders, one of them a reserve, he flew from Barcelona to Amsterdam for the start of the Tour: Bahamontes' twelve-year relationship with the race that defined his career was about to begin.\n\nThe French sports daily, _L'Equipe_ , rated the Spanish line-up in 1954 as one of the strongest because it combined relative youth with experience. It says a great deal about the speed with which Bahamontes was progressing that despite being the youngest team member at nearly twenty-six, his presence was taken for granted by the Spanish media. 'Of the ten riders, there are no possible doubts about four of them: [1948 Vuelta winner] Ruiz, [former national champion Francisco] Masip, [1953 Volta a Catalunya winner Salvador] Botella and Bahamontes,' argued El Mundo Deportivo before criticising the inclusion of others who had not performed well enough to merit selection. 'I don't think we can win,' Berrendero said, 'but we'll do our best to get as high up the overall classification and I have high hopes for the mountain stages.' Berrendero even attempted to place Ruiz, Bahamontes and Manolo Rodr\u00edguez, who finished second in the 1950 Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a, on an equal footing as co-leaders. However, the fast-track promotion of Bahamontes and Rodr\u00edguez caused a near-mutiny within the team, and as a result Ruiz was declared sole leader. Bahamontes had to seek consolation in the huge headline that appeared in _L'Equipe_ just before the start declaring him as the 'centre-forward' of the Spanish team. Besides, he knew he had permission from Berrendero to race as freely as he wanted. Crucially for Bahamontes, Jes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o, King of the Mountains the previous year, was missing through injury, while all-rounder Miguel Poblet had pulled out at his own request because of poor form.\n\nThere were many other top names missing from the Tour, too, including all the Italians. Their federation refused to enter following arguments with the Tour organisers when they tried to incorporate commercial publicity on their riders' clothing. Their decision not to start was made easier when Fausto Coppi, the 1949 and 1952 Tour winner, had had a freak training accident in June, fracturing his skull after a wheel came off a lorry in front of him. Only the French, whose 'A' team was led by 1953 winner Louison Bobet, looked as if they would provide serious opposition.\n\nThe Spanish were certainly protective of their riders before the Grand Depart in Amsterdam, the first time the race had started outside France in its history. The build-up featured a spectacular pre-race launch in central Amsterdam, with the presentation of six former winners, including the race's first champion in 1903, Maurice Garin, by now eighty-three, and Odiel Defraye, who won in 1912. Berrendero banned his squad from eating cherries at the presentation dinner for fear they would catch dysentery, though they were permitted to eat melons, oranges and bananas. However, Berrendero's request that the cooks at their hotel use 'the delicious local Dutch butter', as he called it, to fry the riders' food fell on deaf ears; to his annoyance, the Dutch chefs had already opted for olive oil, which they thought the Spaniards would prefer. Bahamontes seemed unconcerned about all the fuss to the point that he was already playing up to his role as the loose cannon in the team. 'Tell the fans \"hello\" from me,' he instructed one journalist, 'and that they should forgive me if I do something \"mad\" in the race.'\n\nFor the first half of the Tour, as it slowly wended its way southwards, Bahamontes gave no indication that he had any acts of insanity planned. However, no sooner did the Tour reach the Pyrenees, on stage eleven, than he went on the rampage. It was a painfully early morning start at 8.15 bearing in mind the riders would get up three hours earlier to cram their bodies with the massive food intake required. Bahamontes was wide awake, though, and tried to forge the early break of the day along with the top French sprinter Andr\u00e9 Darrigade and three others. That move fizzled out, but on the descent of the Soulor pass Bahamontes was in the thick of the action again, forming part of an eight-strong breakaway group which included Charly Gaul. It was on the Aubisque, the first classified climb in the Tour's King of the Mountains competition that year, that Bahamontes finally shed a Tour pack for good for the first time. Initially chased by a Belgian, Richard Van Genechten, to the delight of the large numbers of Spanish fans who had crossed the nearby border, Bahamontes went clear. However, after reaching the summit of the Aubisque in first position, and with a forty-five-second advantage to boot, disaster struck. On a notoriously tricky descent made worse by fog, Bahamontes crashed and eventually struggled into the finish at Pau in thirty-second place, seven minutes down. Nonetheless, the Spanish press was jubilant. 'Bahamontes has confirmed that the great hopes we had in him were justified, although undoubtedly he did not take enough risks on the descent,' trumpeted _ABC_ the next day, Its caveat was perhaps harsh considering how many riders have crashed on that descent in the Tour's history. But it set the general tone for future press coverage: Bahamontes' descending skills would be called into question time and again.\n\nIn the Pyrenees the next day Bahamontes was back on the attack. Indeed, he came as close as he would in the whole of the 1954 Tour to a stage win: he lost by half a wheel in Luchon to the French 'discovery' of the race, Gilbert Bauvin, from a break of three. Before that, though, Bahamontes produced a typical 'yo-yoing' performance in which he pulled ahead on several occasions before falling back. He managed to cross in first place two of the Tour's best-known Pyrenean cols, the Tourmalet and the Peyresourde, with a third place on the Aspin in between. After crossing the summit of the Peyresourde with a one hundred-metre advantage over the Frenchman Jean Mallejac, yet again on the descent he was caught by the chasers, Mallejac and Bauvin. But though Bauvin proved to be the fastest at the finish in Luchon, Bahamontes had established a six-point advantage over Bobet in the King of the Mountains competition.\n\nIn a strategy set to repeat itself over the years, Bahamontes continued to rack up points in the King of the Mountains competition day after day by making an early attack then letting himself be swept up by the main pack, and then attacking again to gain more points. That was the tactic he used on stage fourteen from Toulouse to Millau, and again on stage fifteen, putting in a first-hour move with Frenchmen Rafael Geminiani and Robert Varnajo and taking second place on the Causse de Sauveterre climb. Finally on stage sixteen, on the Col de Pertuis and Col de la Republique, Bahamontes was again in the break, though he was not the first over the climb. His slightly less aggressive attitude as the race wore on led the Spanish press to speculate whether he was losing the form that had led him to shine in the Pyrenees. That was far from being the case.\n\nOn the first Alpine climb, la Romeyere, Bahamontes was on the move once more. This particular attack, though, thanks to what happened at the summit, would have a far greater long-term impact on cycling fans than he could have imagined. Ice cream breaks notwithstanding, what was particularly impressive was how Bahamontes battled throughout the Alps at the same consistently high level as he had during the Pyrenees, even if there were the same radical swings in performance within each stage. On stage eighteen, after scooping the points on the first two 'easy' climbs of the Laffrey and Bayard, where he outpowered Bobet, Bahamontes fell adrift on the Izoard. However, despite starting the climb in thirtieth place, he rode so hard that by the summit only Bobet managed to stay ahead of him, and that by a margin of just fifty-five seconds. Come the finish in Brian\u00e7on, in any case, Bahamontes was in an unassailable position in the mountains classification with thirty-three points more than Bobet, who had all but won the Tour that day. Yet Bahamontes wanted more.\n\nThe final big day in the Alps included an early assault of the infamous Galibier, the highest climb that year, with a special prime of one hundred thousand francs for the first rider to reach the summit. Though the 1955 Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a winner Jean Dotto had taken off alone, Bahamontes refused to let him go clear, overtaking the Frenchman and reaching the summit alone. Only a broken pedal on the descent prevented him from clinching his first Tour stage.\n\nEven so, Bahamontes' achievements in his first Tour were enormous. 'A couple of years ago, this cyclist was just wearing alpargatas [in those days, Spain's cheap alternative to leather shoes],' pointed out _ABC._ 'This has been amazing progress.' Not only did Bahamontes \u2013 dubbed, for the first time that year 'The Eagle of Toledo' by one admiring French journalist \u2013 take the King of the Mountains title by a huge margin, he was first over the Tour's two legendary climbs, the Tourmalet and Galibier, as well as the Aubisque. Of the biggest climbs that year, only the Izoard escaped him, and only Bobet, the overall winner, could beat him there. In fact, on every Tour stage with a classified climb in it, Bahamontes had increased his points total, and of the twenty-five classified climbs he had been first over twelve of them. Overexaggerating wildly, Bahamontes claimed at the finish in Paris that the mountains of France were 'nothing' in comparison with the steep slopes of the city of Toledo. 'We've got real climbs there, they are more difficult than any of the ones that they talk about here,' he said. 'All this talk about \"cols\", but none of them are as steep as Doctor Mara\u00f1on Street in Toledo. The roads here in France are too good, too well-surfaced, they're like riding across a dancehall. If the roads weren't so smooth they'd never have dropped me on the descents and on the flat.'\n\nBahamontes ended the race with ninety-five points, nearly double those of Bobet. Such a startling breakthrough came with a hidden price, though. Just as when he took the King of the Mountains crown in the 1953 Volta a Catalunya, such fast-earned success meant Bahamontes risked becoming too focused on one objective so early in his career. By ignoring the greater prize of the overall title so often, he would be accused of deliberately losing time at certain points in his races, and as such wasting his talent.\n\nAs Bahamontes says, it was not until 1959 that he seriously thought about winning the Tour itself. Yet earlier on in his career, fighting for the general classification was not an unrealistic prospect. In the final time-trial of the 1954 Tour, for example, Bahamontes was the best-placed Spaniard, even beating the more experienced Ruiz by twenty-four seconds. That achievement was buried in all the excitement about Bahamontes' climbing prowess. However, with the benefit of hindsight, what more could he have done overall if he had decided to work on improving his time-trialling? Or if there had been more summit finishes than just the handful in the whole of the 1950s?\n\nMuch was made of Bahamontes' poor descending, and it was a major chink in his armour. But as was so often the case with Bahamontes he deliberately exploited this defect. 'I knew everybody thought I was lousy at going downhill,' he reveals, 'so I decided to make the most of that impression. Every time the race went down a mountain, while others were concentrating on going as fast as possible, I was concentrating on recovering as best I could and eating as much as I could. Every morning I'd get out a stage map, and mark the points where I should eat with a cross before I got caught. Then when it came to the next climb I'd get caught, but I'd have eaten some more food, my batteries were recharged, and I was ready to go on the attack again. But that wasn't something I was going to reveal to the press in case my rivals got wind of my tactics. That would have been like in that story [about a besieged fortress] where they [the defenders] send out a message, \"Send us bullets, we're running out!\"'\n\nIf Bahamontes' descending tactics brought mixed reactions, it was not thought he could improve much in one other key area, that of weight. One of the most frequently used strategies for improving performance in cycling is for a rider to slim down, but in Bahamontes' case that was not practical. In 1954, he finished the Tour weighing sixty-six kilos, just one less than when he started. 'He is so thin,' _ABC_ reported, 'and his cheekbones stick out so much that he is in serious danger of cutting himself each time he shaves.'\n\nBack home, Bahamontes was showered with praise, with his first Tour de France title far outshining Ruiz's well-deserved, but hardly spectacular, eighteenth place overall. 'Bahamontes, a real discovery for the world of cycling, has confirmed beyond any doubt in this, his first stage race outside Spain, what we always knew about him,' claimed a report in _ABC_ before the race had even reached Paris. A photograph of Bahamontes filled the whole front page of the paper. 'All that climbing is much, much easier for him than it is for the vast majority of cyclists,' the article continued, 'and never before has a King of the Mountains racked up such an impressive quantity of triumphs: [first on] three first category climbs \u2013 at the time, the top ranking for climbs in terms of difficulty \u2013 [first on] five second categories climbs and [first on] as many third categories as he cared to take. The name of Bahamontes, familiar to hundreds of millions of Europeans, generates more excitement and enthusiasm than any other Spanish bike rider. Hundreds of fans charge up to him, greet him, open their arms to him . . . \" _Vive L'Espagne_ \", one Frenchman, who wishes he was Spanish, shouts.'\n\nIt is not surprising, then, that even a fortnight after the event, Bahamontes' return to Spain was marked by a huge reception at Barcelona airport which lasted an entire afternoon. When he arrived in Toledo at the end of August, despite a low-key performance at the World Championships where he abandoned, an estimated twenty-five thousand people filled the Plaza del General\u00edsimo to cheer him. Met earlier by the mayor of Toledo with his car in Madrid, thousands of banner-waving Bahamontes supporters had crammed into open lorries so they could follow the local boy's journey home. Some waited up to fifteen kilometres away from the city so they could be guaranteed the best spot in the makeshift procession. Once in Toledo, rockets were fired and bunting rained down on Bahamontes. Speeches were made in his honour by the city's top brass before Bahamontes laid bouquets at the feet of the statue of the Virgin Mary in the local cathedral. The only upset came after Bahamontes was invited to kick off a local football match between Toledo and a side from Madrid. The Toledo club president gave him a bejewelled brooch, and Bahamontes promptly lost it. After a frantic search, a ten-year-old girl finally found it and, rather than making off with it, handed it over to Bahamontes, who duly re-pinned it to his chest. Nothing, it seemed, could go wrong for Spain's newest sports star that day. Bahamontes freely admits now: 'That year was the most emotional I ever got about the Tour de France, even more so than in 1959. The reaction in Spain really affected me.'\n\nHowever, his success that year can not be allowed to cloud the implications of the ice cream incident. Not for the first time in his career, Bahamontes had shown a tendency to over-react to the most minor of events. It is not stretching a point to say that briefly Bahamontes had all but opted out of the race because of two broken spokes. He was leading comfortably on the climb but he still ended up losing eleven minutes by the finish. Such excessive sensitivity to even the smallest of misfortunes, coupled with a fragile ego, is not infrequent in top professional bike riders. Indeed, one team director I talked to likened one of his top riders to an expensive make of sports car: 'It goes wonderfully, but the smallest mechanical problem and the whole thing gets shot to hell.' However, with Bahamontes that extreme sensitivity seemed to be even closer to the surface than usual. What probably aggravated this particular character trait was that Bahamontes knew that even if he did fall wide of the mark on occasions, and even if he playacted, his talent was so great he could still win prizes beyond the wildest dreams of a former teenaged black marketeer and half-starved street urchin.\n\nIn fact Bahamontes seemed to pick up prizes even when he did not want them. In the 1950s the final stage is far from being the glorified criterium [exhibition race] it is now, in which only the sprinters are racing flat out. In 1954, when Bahamontes punctured late on, and lost a place to finish twenty-fifth overall, he was given the prize for 'Most Unfortunate Rider'. Then there were post-Tour criteriums, where the top riders would make more than they did in the race itself. That was certainly true for Bahamontes after Daniel Dousset, France's top agent for criterium contracts, took charge of his contracts. Just as many riders do now, Bahamontes prioritised criteriums over returning home straightaway. While he made five hundred thousand francs [\u00a39,000 in modern money] from his first King of the Mountains title, much of it was distributed to his team-mates. Where Bahamontes could really cash in was in the post-Tour events, and he calculated he made seven hundred thousand francs [\u00a311,000] in 1954 alone. 'I made more money than I would have done in five years as a professional,' Bahamontes pointed out. 'A top pro in Spain would have made about five thousand pesetas a month [\u00a31,300] while I [as a rookie pro] was making one thousand pesetas [\u00a3270] a month.'\n\nThe kudos from the King of the Mountains win was so good, in fact, that when he crashed badly at a criterium in Belleville, France, and the Spanish press got wind of it, Bahamontes had Dousset to ring up the organisers of the forthcoming Barcelona criterium to reassure them that even with a badly injured knee and elbow he was still coming. It seemed not even Dousset could stop Bahamontes from inside wheeler-dealing, though. A newspaper later reported Bahamontes had 'sub-contracted' his place in several French criteriums in 1954 to another Spaniard, Francisco Alomar, so that Bahamontes could race in the Volta a Catalunya, where, of course, he would be paid by the organisers as well.\n\nAs a further side-effect of his King of the Mountains success, Bahamontes came into closer contact with some of General Franco's most fervent supporters. One of these came at a formal reception in honour of his victory with Doctor Enrique Pla y Daniel, the Archbishop of Toledo and the first highly-placed figure of the Spanish Catholic church to support Franco's uprising. Then, straight after he had returned from his criterium campaign, Bahamontes met General Moscard\u00f3, the Nationalist hero of the Alc\u00e1zar siege. In peacetime, Moscard\u00f3 had become the chief of Franco's personal _corps de garde_ and as the sports delegate in Franco's government, the most powerful figure in sport in the country. According to media reports, their conversation rather improbably centred on how Bahamontes could improve in his track racing. Yet if Bahamontes was being sounded out by Moscard\u00f3 for his potential as a sporting idol by the ruling regime, as seems more likely, there was no immediate external sign of it. That summer the Government-controlled media at least preached caution about Spain's new star. 'Bahamontes is the only Spaniard who can win the Tour de France,' _ABC_ wrote, 'but he can mess it up, too. Moving fast [in sport] is a risky process, and Bahamontes is already receiving many laurels for him to sleep on. He has done nothing more than start.'\n\nAt least one other rider was blunt about Bahamontes' potential, and his potential limitations. As Tour winner Louison Bobet put it after the race: 'I have never seen such a great climber. Bahamontes can achieve a lot, if he stops clowning around.'\nChapter Four\n\n#### The Gypsy Rider\n\nIt is a cold, misty, early spring morning in Orihuela, an elegant, slightly battered-looking spa town in southeast Spain, bisected both by the wide, shallow waters of the River Segura and lines of six-foot-high palm trees. Close to the centre is the town's casino, a gracefully appointed nineteenth-century building with spacious, high-ceilinged rooms, wall-length windows and well-varnished wooden floors. The silence is broken only by the clattering feet of a stray, bow-tied waiter. That morning Bernardo Ruiz, the 1948 Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a winner, and I are almost alone. Yet, despite his age, and the absence of other customers, to judge from the furtive way Ruiz keeps looking around to check we are not being overheard we could be plotting a bank robbery. The explanation for his behaviour finally arrives when Ruiz places his coffee down with the cautiously calculated movements of an eighty-something-year-old, then leans forward and all but hisses: 'Does Federico know you're doing a book on him? And does he know you're talking to me?' More than half a century has passed, but Ruiz is apparently still worried sick about the consequences of what he can tell a journalist about bike racing and Bahamontes in the 1950s. Old habits, it seems, die hard. For Federico Bahamontes' generation, the so-called law of _omerta_ that has reigned for so long in cycling \u2013 about drugs, race-fixing, secret alliances and open treacheries, not to mention their real opinion of fellow riders \u2013 remains almost unbreakable.\n\nRuiz, a six-foot, muscular man, is a conundrum. He spills the beans on a lot of issues that cast Bahamontes in a poor light. At the same time, however, he still refuses to divulge a lot of what he knows about his old rival. He almost seems upset that the unwritten code of honour obliges him to stay silent about a fellow professional for whom (and this is being polite) he has scant sympathy. Along with Jes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o, and occasionally Miguel Poblet, Ruiz was one of Bahamontes' biggest rivals in Spain. However, that rivalry is not the main reason for his lack of appreciation for the Eagle of Toledo. What appears to be mutual dislike, fuelled by accusations of betrayal and mistrust throughout their careers, is reinforced because Ruiz cannot comprehend what made Bahamontes tick as a person. Yet they would frequently find themselves thrown together in the same team, most notably in the national squad for major Tours. Indeed, for a year, in 1960, Ruiz was Bahamontes' sports director in the trade team Faema. To judge by our conversation, it was not a happy twelve-month period for either of them.\n\nInterestingly, Bahamontes has no such problem with Ruiz or the rest of his contemporaries because he thinks they are too far beneath him. He has such a low opinion of them that he refuses point-blank to discuss them, once dismissing them all with the throwaway comment: 'How can I call them rivals, when none of them could beat me?' Ruiz, on the other hand, is cagey, and unhappy that he feels obliged to be so. The conversation is broken by silences, moments when he shakes his head as his voice trails off while muttering: 'The things I could tell you, the things I could say . . .' There is no getting past him, though, when he does not want to talk. Even when I promise that the book will be published first in English, he responds: 'Yes, but there are [Spanish] journalists who will read it.'\n\nEven so, of the few Spanish riders still alive who witnessed Bahamontes' career close up, Ruiz's reminiscences are telling: without giving too much away, he depicts his former rival as a rider whose excessive individualism made him an isolated figure, incapable of asking for or receiving assistance at crucial times. When I ask him if Bahamontes was someone who remembered favours done for him in the past, Ruiz stiffens visibly and finally booms out: 'Fede? He's never been grateful to anybody in his entire life.' As Ruiz sees it, 'He should have won [the 1957 Vuelta], but he didn't know how to position himself in the bunch to stop them wrecking his chances, and that's . . . why we always beat him.' And Ruiz later adds. 'He was a magnificent climber but he did not know how to use his own strength; he was out of control. One day he'd beat you, then the next he'd do nothing. [Personally], I couldn't work out what was going on inside his head.'\n\nRuiz had plenty of opportunities to try to find out. According to Spanish Cycling Federation figures, there were just twenty-three fully-fledged Spanish professionals in 1954, and across the three categories immediately below them ( _Primera aspirante\/Segunda aspir ante\/Primera independiente_ ) there were only another thirty-eight. It was a small world, where the same old faces appeared time and again in races; one where friendships formed rapidly and rivalries could harden just as quickly. In the case of Ruiz and Bahamontes, things went wrong on a personal level almost from day one. Ruiz admits he was initially at fault, but Bahamontes' ability to take everything to extremes turned a minor row into a major one. 'I first met him in 1954, in the Tour of Asturias,' Ruiz remembers. 'He was fighting to beat Rik Van Looy in the overall, and I don't know why but I said something stupid. We had raced over [the climb of] Pajares the previous day and he'd done well. Then in the next day's time-trial, which started with a descent, he started off just before me. As we waited there on the line to start, I jokingly said to him, \"Be careful, you'd better get out of the way on the downhill or I'll mount you from behind like you were a horse\", basically meaning, \"Either you get out of my way or I'm going to ride over the top of you\", because I knew he was a bad descender. It was a bit foggy and when I finally saw him, about forty or fifty metres ahead of me on the descent, I shouted out and, maybe because he took fright at my shouting, he took a curve badly and ended up going off the road. At the finish he told everybody I'd pushed him off the road, which was a total lie. I hadn't touched him, but when I won the race overall I got booed by the crowd all because of his big mouth. It's funny now, but back then that was what would happen . . . Bahamontes was a great climber, but he would lose his self-control easily and end up paying the price. He was always a bit naive, too. In the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a when I was his sports director and he abandoned [1960], he went off the rails completely, again.'\n\nThere were other reasons why they fell out. With such a small group of top professionals in Spain, it was not too hard for races to be fixed. However, as Ruiz explains, Bahamontes was reluctant to play the game, as he showed in the Volta a Catalunya in 1953 with his dramatic lone attack that upset the plans of his more conservative superiors. When deals were struck, Ruiz says, Bahamontes could all too often renege on them: he was too much of a loner and perhaps too distrustful to maintain 'honour among thieves'. 'Believe me, the number of things we did so that Fede could win races . . .' Ruiz says almost mournfully. 'But because of his character or whatever, he couldn't adapt. If something is agreed upon, then you have to stick to it. Within the teams, we'd agree before the race, \"I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, I'll let you sit on my wheel because if we break away you'll work for me afterwards, and so on\". But once the start whistle blew, what can I say? Everything we'd agreed beforehand went down the pan.'\n\nIt is ironic that, according to Ruiz, one of the biggest problems Bahamontes caused his fellow professionals was not that he refused to buy and sell races, but that he was too taken with winning for them to trust him to keep his word. Indeed, Bahamontes remains contradictory on the subject today, sometimes admitting to having sold races, at other times denying it. 'With time, Federico wasn't so wild,' says Antonio Jim\u00e9nez Quiles, who finished second in the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a in 1955, aged just nineteen. 'At first he thought he was the King of Kings. Later, he got taken down a peg or two and he became much more calculating. But he was always a really individual guy, always separate from the rest.'\n\nAntonio Jim\u00e9nez Quiles and Bahamontes became acquainted in 1955 when the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a returned after a five-year absence. However, at a time of severe political repression, prison camps and economic misery, that year's Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a was hardly a showpiece event. 'It was bloody miserable,' says Ian Brown, who rode for the Great Britain team. 'There were all these guys standing around with guns and helmets, nobody looked happy. When we flew into Spain, we did some training beforehand and went past a massive concrete building, maybe half a kilometre long, and there was a long line of guys all chained together. I asked a Spanish rider we were training with, \"What's that?\", and he said, \"You didn't see anything, it's political\". We started off in Bilbao and went down towards Barcelona, and the roads were terrible all the way. I got four punctures in one day.'\n\nAfter his success in the Tour de France the year before, Bahamontes was in Spain's national 'A' team. But according to Jim\u00e9nez Quiles and Ruiz, the idea of riders working for each other in the national selection was risible. 'There was never a friendly atmosphere,' Ruiz recalls. 'We were all fighting each other every day . . . and everyone would have problems, to a greater or lesser extent, with all the rest.' Jim\u00e9nez Quiles says: 'All the teams were the same \u2013 a bunch of guys flung together, and that was as far as it got. You ate together, you slept together, then you got on your bike and it was a case of \"last one to the finish is a poof\". It wasn't like these days where you have a single leader and some cohesion.' Jim\u00e9nez Quiles recalls that he was the only Andalusian rider at the 1955 Vuelta in a mixed team of Catalans and riders from Aragon. 'All the Catalans would sit in one table in their fine track suits and with their nice food, and I'd be all by myself at another,' he says. 'During the race, I got no help from them whatsoever. I ended up paying a guy from another team to give me his bike if I ended up crashing.' Another point of assistance was Bahamontes himself, but at a price. According to Jim\u00e9nez Quiles, throughout his career Bahamontes 'had an entire shop in his suitcase. He would sell gears, spokes, rims, inner tubes, the lot. He'd get them from France and sell them over here to the rest of us. You could get two types of inner tubes back then, the ones that were fresh out of the factory, and which would lose their tread after you'd ridden about two hundred kilometres. Then there were the ones which had been kept hung up for a year and dried out properly, and they had really good treads. Bahamontes would charge you a one hundred per cent mark-up on those. He would only take cash, no credit.' Somewhat uncomfortably to modern ears, Quiles adds: 'He was a right gypsy.' And he was not the only one to give Bahamontes that name: gypsy ( _el_ _Gitano_ _)_ was the nickname by which the entire peloton eventually came to know Bahamontes. Moreover, Bahamontes does not appear to object to it. Miguel Poblet, another of Bahamontes' rivals in the 1950s, and today someone who wears a toup\u00e9, says: 'When I ring Bahamontes up, I'll say, \"Hey, gypsy, how's it going?\" and he'll answer back, \"Hey, wiggy, you ok?\"' Given the degree of animosity in Spain towards that ethnic group, then and now, the nickname seems sadly apt for a loner like Bahamontes.\n\nWhile Jim\u00e9nez Quiles was isolated within his second-string regional team, yet still managed to finish runner-up to France's Jean Dotto, Bahamontes had a similarly miserable time in Spain's 'A' team, and ended up twenty-first. Though a breakaway on stage one with Loro\u00f1o looked promising, things began to go wrong for Bahamontes almost as soon as the Vuelta started. On stage five to Lerida, Bahamontes' left knee starting to give him grief. Calcium injections were little help, not surprisingly since their only effect is long-term strengthening of the bones. However, in those days the sport's medics were often little more than quacks, and riders would be given the most bizarre substances. By the rest day in Barcelona, there were rumours that Bahamontes would not only be unable to finish, but that the Tour de France was out of the question, too. However, Bahamontes' Barcelona-based professional team, La Solera-Cacaolat, came to the rescue by hiring a doctor, Joaquim Cabot, specifically to treat their star rider. Cabot confirmed that Bahamontes' knee injury was due to a twisted tendon, but was unable to identify the cause. Bahamontes initially claimed it was due to being kicked by a horse in his youth. Nonetheless, Cabot said he could continue racing. On the stage from Barcelona to Tortosa, Bahamontes was back in action, trying to get in several breaks. It was not the best of ideas. On the stage to Cuenca, Bahamontes was already in trouble, and when he got off the bike to greet his mother as the race reached Madrid, reporters noted he was limping again.\n\nMeanwhile, the 'A' team was falling apart as a squad with Loro\u00f1o bellowing for the benefit of the journalists: 'Team-mates? Where are my team-mates?' as he crossed the finish line at Lerida, after he had apparently been abandoned to his fate when he was dropped. Asked by a reporter in Barcelona why there were problems inside the team, Loro\u00f1o answered testily: 'Because we all want to win and only one of us can.' According to Chico P\u00e9rez's _Historia de la Vuelta,_ Loro\u00f1o added elsewhere: 'We've declared war all right, but it's a war between us team-mates.' Bahamontes was quoted by the newspaper _El Correo Catalan_ , as saying: 'We're all fed up with Loro\u00f1o and with what he says.' So much for team spirit.\n\nThe disunity in the top team contrasted with the success of the regional Spanish racers, one of whom, Rene Marigil, even took the yellow jersey for a couple of stages before Dotto moved into the lead. By the time the race reached Madrid Jim\u00e9nez Quiles was in the top three overall, and Loro\u00f1o was reduced to cheap criticism. He claimed that the reason for the top riders' relatively poor performance was because the 'B' [regional] teams are all watching the 'A' team like hawks, before hastily rectifying that with: 'I mean, everybody is watching us.' With three stages left, the press held out little hope for the best-placed Spaniards, with _ABC_ asking: 'What kind of support can Marigil count on? The truth is, very little. A lack of agreement between the riders of the \"A\" team has had fatal consequences. With a few exceptions, each rider has fought the race as an individual, not as a team. The fact that Loro\u00f1o was in yellow meant that Bahamontes did not make too big an effort and Poblet \u2013 after racing through his region \u2013 decided to pull out altogether. The second-level [regionals] have given our top men a lesson. The \"A\" team had the chance to win stages and make money and instead they've all attacked at the wrong time or without a clear aim.'\n\nIt was not only the riders in the Vuelta who had problems. The race co-director, Luis Bergareche, was badly injured when he fell out of a fourth-floor window in his hotel, plunging through a canopy and landing on a taxi bonnet. 'A' team trainer Juli\u00e1n Berrendero, meanwhile, received a public warning from the race organisers for 'talking to the press and not to his team'. Spanish hopes of a last-minute turnaround in fortunes sank even further when Marigil pulled out injured. Not even treatment with hydrocaine, a cocaine-based medication, could help him.\n\nAs for Bahamontes, he had tried to get over Leones, the climb in that year's Vuelta closest to Toledo, at the head of the field but was beaten to the punch by an Italian rider. Then, on the stage to Valladolid, to add to his misery he rode for the last hour on a spectator's bike after lending his own to Loro\u00f1o, who had punctured twice. It was a rare moment of fraternity between two riders normally at daggers drawn. To cap it all, later on the same stage Bahamontes fell and hurt his elbow and shoulder. His knee was also playing up again, increasingly seriously and when it was announced with three days of the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a to go that Bahamontes would not be doing the Tour de France, nobody was particularly surprised.\n\nIt has almost become a party trick. Bahamontes grabs your hand and puts it on the side of his knee, saying: 'Feel that?' And what you detect beneath his trousers is a lumpy protrusion roughly the size of a twenty pence piece. That was how he reacted in 1993 when I first interviewed him and asked him why there had been such a lean period in the Tour de France between his first King of the Mountains title in 1954 and the second in 1958. When I asked the same question in 2008, more because I suspected I would get the same response than because I was interested in the answer, out shot his hand again to provide the same explanation. 'That injury cost me a ride at the Tour in 1955 and I thought it would cost me my career,' Bahamontes says. 'It was so bad I could hardly walk, let alone ride my bike.' Bahamontes traced the root of the problem, a partly dried-out meniscus (the disks of cartilage that cushion the knee) to a badly-aligned shoe plate. It was just a few millimetres out of place, but that was enough for it to act as the metaphorical snowball that, eventually, provokes an avalanche. 'It altered the position of my foot, which in turn meant the angle of my leg was out of kilter every time I pedalled,' he says. 'And that caused some tissue in the knee joint to rub together. The injury ended up leaving me completely lame. I tried walking with Fermina half-supporting me and after fifty metres it was so painful I collapsed. I couldn't get on my bike, and as I couldn't get on my bike, I couldn't race. The thought of an operation really scared me. That and not being able to race.'\n\nSuch insecurity about a career-threatening injury is only to be expected, particularly as Bahamontes could not forget the abject poverty of his childhood and beyond. If Bahamontes wanted to see the consequences of being out of a job, he only had to look around at the pinched faces and ragged clothing that predominated in Spain then. Bahamontes was on the horns of a simple dilemma: racing was his ticket to financial security, but racing hard with an injured knee would only aggravate the problem.\n\nIn fact, things had started going sour for Bahamontes almost as soon as he stepped off the podium in Paris. After injuring his hip in a post-Tour criterium, then abandoning during the World Championship following a lacklustre performance, Bahamontes pulled out of the Volta a Catalunya with stomach problems. He blamed the water he drank from a fountain in the town of Matar\u00f3, but there were rumours he had overdone it on the post-Tour celebrations and was under-prepared.\n\nThe next setback was financial, and much closer to home: it involved Toledo's main cycling club and their star rider. According to a lengthy letter sent by the club to the newspaper _ABC_ , Bahamontes and fellow Spanish professional, Mariano Corrales, had agreed to take part in a criterium during the city's week-long fiesta in October. But, the letter went on, just a few hours before the race was due to take place Bahamontes and Corrales turned up in the club's offices, demanding 'start money' ['appearance money' in cycling jargon], which was refused. The organisers wrote that since the race was funded by the town council, they had reminded Bahamontes it was being run on a shoestring. They even claimed that Bahamontes had promised to race for free. Bahamontes and Corrales refused to take part a second time, and the start was delayed by twenty minutes before the race finally got under way without them. However, when the two turned up at the finish and demanded payment a third time, the organisers reacted by explaining over the loudspeaker system why the local hero was not in the peloton. Both riders were duly booed and wolf-whistled by the crowd in stark contrast to the ecstatic welcome Bahamontes had received just a few months before. Bahamontes says he has no recollection of any of this happening, but whatever the truth he did not come out of the affair well. 'Bahamontes has lost popularity and was whistled at by people from his own city,' a semi-humourous column in _ABC_ reported in early December, 'the problem being they have yet to see their hero turn a single pedal stroke. They have only read about the Aubisque in the newspapers.'\n\nThe next mini-scandal was physical, rather than financial, and blew up when Bahamontes allegedly lashed out at Miguel Poblet after the first stage of an early-season race, the Tour of Andalusia. As Poblet recalls it: 'We were in a break together and the bunch was on the point of catching us with about three kilometres to go, and I said to Federico, \"I'm not going to work with you because we're going to be caught and I'll have to sprint\". Well I won, and he got second or third, just a little behind me, and he was pissed off because I hadn't worked with him in the last kilometre. So he hit me with his bike pump. That's his nerves for you. He was very nervous, very temperamental, but it didn't go any further. The next day we didn't even remember what had happened.' The Catalan laughs away the incident now, but there was at least one newspaper report that the injury was so bad Poblet had to abandon and could not train for several days. Poblet's sports director told _ABC'_ s cycling correspondent that his rider had been kicked in the stomach by Bahamontes, 'in front of everybody, and I believe him'. Bahamontes, the sports director continued, was annoyed because Poblet had chased him down three or four times close to the finish and Bahamontes' attempts to block his path by zig-zagging across the road failed. Bahamontes' recollection of events is very different: 'He said I kicked him in the nuts but I never touched him. If I had kicked him there, how would he have been able to ride his bike?'\n\nYet amid the controversies, awards for Bahamontes' 1954 Tour success continued to roll in. The most important was the Baron de Guell Cup from the Ministry of Sports, one of biggest prizes in Spain for sporting achievements. The Spanish Cycling Federation named him their 'rider of the year'. In late October, aged just twenty-seven, his first biography was published, costing 1.5 pesetas [fifty pence] a copy.\n\nThe racing season started well enough for Bahamontes. He began it by beating future Vuelta winner Jean Dotto's record for the hill climb held on the infamously steep Mont Faron, just outside Toulouse, in February. He clocked the fastest time at both intermediate checkpoints, finishing the quickest by fifteen seconds. Over time he would prove that when it came to single-climb races he was all but invincible. 'It wasn't as tough as they said,' Bahamontes remarked afterwards, 'but now I have to win a race on the flat because if I don't I'll end up being considered a climbing specialist.' Dotto stated emphatically: 'There is nothing to do against Bahamontes in the mountains. He is simply the best of all us.' As if to confirm Dotto's words, Bahamontes then won the GP Monte Carlo despite not starting the race until the peloton was already out of sight. He had gone for a walk along the seafront and had not realised the race had begun.\n\nWith the knee injury threatening his embryonic career, Bahamontes sought emergency medical treatment after the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a in 1955. 'According to the doctor I saw in Madrid, L\u00f3pez Quiles, I had to have the knee treated, obviously,' he says. 'My knee swelled up and they drained the wound every few days. But thank goodness he said I didn't need an operation. Just a lot of rest. However, Bahamontes did not follow the medical advice. Instead after the Vuelta, he embarked on a lengthy campaign to prove his form ahead of the Tour de France, recording an impressive run of wins, including the Tour of Asturias and the Bicicleta Eibarresa stage races, and the Vuelta a los Puertos one-day event. It all seemed to be going well, and when the Federation doctor carried out a medical examination immediately before the Tour, the newspapers were able to report that 'several X-rays' indicated the knee was completely cured and there was no bone damage whatsoever. On 24 June, _ABC_ reported that Bahamontes had confirmed again that he was 'ready to take part in the Tour'. With a week to go he was named on the official list of participants. However, after placing an unremarkable nineteenth in the National Championships in Barcelona on 29 June, Bahamontes and his team-mates were given another medical. This time the result was different and Bahamontes was substituted by Antonio Gelabert, the new national champion. To describe this as a bombshell is no exaggeration. Bahamontes had won the Tour of Asturias less than a fortnight before, but the Federation's official report could not have been more damning. According to _ABC_ , a Federation communique stated: 'Having given all the riders their check-up, we have confirmed [their physical fitness] with the exception of Federico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes, who is suffering subjective pains in his left knee, and we therefore believe his participation in the Tour is not recommendable, given that possibly he will not perform well.' Calling Bahamontes' injury 'subjective' was like a green light to the press for some ferocious criticism of the Eagle of Toledo and they went at it with gusto. 'Our trump card of the Tour, Bahamontes, has gone up in smoke,' said _El Mundo Deportivo_ before displaying the blackest of humour and claiming: 'We hope that our explanation why this has happened \u2013 our man from Toledo has commited suicide \u2013 goes up in smoke, too, and that he gets well soon and that the phase he is going through is as brief as possible. If the official reason \u2013 \"doctor's orders\" \u2013 sounds odd given his statements of a few days earlier, we don't want to go into the real causes. My opinion is that Bahamontes, the real, great Bahamontes whose racing [was so spectacular it] caused Europe to grind to a halt last year, has been a victim of the \"frivolous\" Bahamontes. He saw money, contracts and laurels, and instead of taking care of himself and his future, he has let himself be worshipped, forgetting that riding a bike is such a tough sport.'\n\nHaving thrown Bahamontes to the wolves, the Federation then attempted belatedly to try and repair the damage to Bahamontes' image. 'His knee is suffering from malaise,' Federation president Alejandro del Caz claimed, 'and that's not what he wants, and neither do we.' With the Tour de France lost and his reputation for unreliability considerably reinforced, Bahamontes' knee finally received the rest it needed. When he returned in early August he was forced to pull out of the Vuelta a Galicia stage race, which caused a minor controversy because his team had no idea why he had abandoned, and the organisers insisted his team-mates had to quit as well. But Bahamontes bounced back in September when he took two stages of the Volta a Catalunya. By October it was business as usual as he planned the season ahead. It was typical Bahamontes. Just as he could swing unpredictably from feeling upbeat to exuding total gloom, on the few occasions he was injured seriously in his career he appeared equally capable of regaining his race condition in record time.\n\nHis knee, though, still clicks when he walks. And ever since 1955 he has been grabbing visitors' hands and getting them to feel the twenty-pence-sized hole that marks his old war wound.\nChapter Five\n\n#### Pointing the Finger\n\nIf Federico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes' career was put on hold by injuries during the summer of 1955, the following year it was on an upward swing again and he had chances of victory in all three major Tours. Yet he failed in all of them. Each time Bahamontes pointed the finger at something or somebody else being responsible, but never at himself. Then as now, self-criticism is something the Eagle of Toledo rarely indulges in.\n\nIt has been argued that 1956 represented Bahamontes' best chance of winning the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a. What the race highlighted again was that Bahamontes was no team player. According to Bernardo Ruiz, as early as 1955 his team-mates had discovered that Bahamontes was too much of an individualist when it came to making deals, even when he would have benefited from them.\n\n'Bahamontes was a gentle person,' says Brian Robinson, the Briton who finished eighth in that year's Vuelta, 'except when he was shouting at his team-mates or he got his hackles up with his team director. He could be very fiery then. When they [the Spanish team] did start arguing they would go on shouting for ever. They couldn't agree on anything. Just getting them to agree a menu for dinner would have been difficult enough.'\n\nRobinson is the British cyclist who knew Bahamontes and the Spanish the best. He first came across Bahamontes in 1956 on the Vuelta, and a year later they were nominally team-mates in the St. Raphael-Geminiani squad, though Bahamontes barely raced for them. Their careers would run parallel until Robinson retired in 1963. 'Bahamontes was a friendly, bubbly guy, I don't think I ever saw him down,' recalls Robinson, now in his early eighties. 'We'd talk in a kind of French, though his was a bit of a patois and he mangled Spanish and French together. If he had a puncture, a _crevaison_ , he'd yell out, \" _Je clavais! Je clavais_!\"'\n\nRobinson also travelled around Spain with Bahamontes, which gave him an insight into how widely appreciated he was on home soil. 'I once did a week's criteriums with him, Anquetil, Darrigade and various other local Spaniards. First we were riding down in Benidorm \u2013 which was just a fishing quay in those days and we spent the whole evening riding over cobbles \u2013 and then all across Andalusia, mostly on what seemed like football fields. There were good crowds and Fede was hugely popular. We stayed in the best hotels and got good money, paid on the nail, too. They couldn't muck around with the big names. Particularly Fede. They even did special flamenco dancing in these dives every evening, with the words in the songs all about Bahamontes.'\n\nHowever, if Robinson had no objections to riding alongside Bahamontes in exhibition races he would try and steer clear of him when it came to serious road-racing. 'We'd be friendly enough and if there was a gap in the bunch you'd shove him in it, no problem. He'd remember favours, and in criteriums it was all about putting on a show with as little effort as possible. You all pitched in. When it came to breaks, too, he'd work. At least I don't remember him ever \"swinging a leg\". But the problem was that the Spanish were more erratic than other nations in the peloton, tossing their bikes about, because they were more impulsive. They weren't as steady as others. [Miguel] Poblet was good because he had track experience, and [Jes\u00fas] Loro\u00f1o was solid enough; otherwise you always had to be careful if you were riding behind a Spaniard. If that Spaniard was Bahamontes, \"who was always switching about\", you had to be doubly careful.'\n\nEven though he could not speak any Spanish, Robinson had no problem appreciating their different personalities. He got on so well with Poblet, in fact, that he assisted him to his first Milan-San Remo win in 1957 by leading him out despite being on a different team. 'The team manager had said we should help him, it was something to do with us having the same bike company,' Robinson recalls. Robinson still finished third, at the time the best result in a major Classic by a Briton since the nineteenth century. 'Loro\u00f1o was calm as anything, and Poblet could get upset,' Robinson says. 'But Fede was definitely the most excitable of them all, he couldn't keep still. He always had very fixed ideas, too. Once he got an idea, you couldn't change his mind.'\n\nTo the rest of the cycling community, the Spanish stood out for reasons other than their poor bike-handling and constant arguing, not least their collective lack of money. Unofficially the Spanish were rated fourth in the world behind the Italians, French and Belgians, which was an amazing achievement considering it was just five years since they had returned to the international scene. But their finances placed them a lot further down the list. 'The Spanish were always a bit ramshackle as a national squad,' says Robinson. 'Normally a team would have its own bikes, but the Spanish would turn up and take the yellow Tour bikes the organisers would provide if you couldn't afford your own.' Despite their 'low-budget' look, Robinson knew Bahamontes was deadly in the mountains, and had to be respected. 'He used to go' \u2013 and Robinson makes a highly expressive sound to describe the noise of Bahamontes' pedals turning at high speed \u2013 ' _tsch-tsch-tsch-tsch_ and get a hundred metres, have a little look back at us, stay there, then go _tsch.-tsch-tsch-tsch_ again, really pedalling away on the low gears, get another hundred metres. Then he'd be gone. He'd just ride away. He wouldn't have won the prize for elegance in his riding. He had that funny position, more of a sitting position, with his arms looking so stiff holding the bars close up. But if he came to a race you'd know that he could drop me, Geminiani, Anquetil, the good boys if you like, on the climbs. He had the edge on all of us. When he put his mind to it.'\n\nSpain's ten-man 'A' team for the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a in 1956 was designed to put behind them the misfortunes of the previous season. That was the theory. In practice, the squabbling began before a pedal was turned in anger. Loro\u00f1o was furious that Luis Puig, the team's sports director, had decided Salvador Botella was to fight for the overall while he and Bahamontes would only go for the King of the Mountains competition. 'Botella has no right to be the boss,' Loro\u00f1o stated before the race left Bilbao. 'I've just won the Bicicleta Eibarresa [stage race], yet that doesn't seem to interest my sports director. I can't stand that. I'm the strongest and I should be the boss.'\n\nRobinson was there with fellow Britons Tony Hoar and Ian Steel thanks to an invitation from manager Phillipe Louviot to ride under a flag of convenience for the Swiss team. It was not a luxurious experience for any of the riders with little support from the organisers or teams. After each stage the peloton would grab their suitcases from the army jeeps which were acting as support vehicles, balancing their bags on the handlebars, and head off to low-budget _pensiones_ anything up to twenty kilometres away. 'The race was a bit of a shambles,' Robinson recalls, 'and the living conditions were so bad in Spain generally that I came back with dysentery. I was passing blood and spent six weeks off the bike. I don't remember ever getting any prize money, either. I remember you could get a made-to-measure suit of English Worcester completed for you in a night for a pound. So the guy who made it couldn't have earned much. And the food was really poor. It was pre-refrigeration days and all we got was eggs or a scrawny chicken that had been running around in the wilderness, no red meat and no fish unless you were by the sea. And I can't remember once seeing butter.'\n\nEven in 1959, when he next rode the Vuelta, Robinson says it was much like the infamous _Monty Python_ sketch where the cafe menu offered nothing but spam. 'They kept on giving us eggs and more eggs, and that got to some people. There was one hotel run by nuns and we were all seated round the dinner table when they came out with a great platter of eggs, and [Raphael] Geminiani suddenly shouted out, \"I'm sick of bloody _huevos!_ \" and threw the whole thing, bang!, against the wall.' It was not easy to look for alternatives, either. 'There'd be soldiers at every crossroads, and when we tried to snaffle some grapes once from a field, one of them started loading up his gun, putting the cartridges in, and making like he'd shoot us. We got out of there in a hurry.' Nutrition was such an issue in the 1956 Vuelta that the French team pulled out with food poisoning after claiming the lunchtime sandwiches provided were going rotten. The organisers responded by saying that the official responsible had given the team the wrong batch by mistake when he grabbed them from the back seat of the car. Assuming they were not lying, it is unclear for whom the dodgy _bocadillos_ had been intended. But if the British and French were unhappy, nobody knew about the lack of food in Spain better than the Spanish themselves. 'The Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a and the Tour de France were light years apart,' says Ruiz, 'right down to the food. I used to say to my team-mates when we did the Tour that even if we were at the back of the peloton it was better to be in France than in Spain, if only because we'd get good stuff to eat. You'd go into the hotel dining room after each Tour stage and you could have what you wanted \u2013 meat, jam, butter, bread. Here in Spain, we had nothing.'\n\nIf the food was dire, Robinson says the roads were equally poor. 'You'd see these women with baskets of stones on their heads, trying to repair them. But they had no proper surface. The only roads with macadam on them were on the coasts and that was very poor quality. When it snowed on one stage, they just cancelled it straightaway and made us go on trains, sitting on wooden slatted seats just like in the utility trains we'd had back home. With no toilets, the sanitary gutters ran through the middle of the roads, too, and it wasn't pleasant riding through all that.' Punctures and crashes were frequent on what were little more than cart-tracks. As a result, solid back-up from the team or even a hand from a friendly rival was crucial. However, Bahamontes' lack of negotiating skills and preference for going it alone meant, just when he needed them most, he was guaranteed neither.\n\nThe high point of Bahamontes' 1956 Vuelta came when he was just eight seconds behind leader Angelo Conterno of Italy after stage fourteen. With only three days' racing left he should have been poised for his first major Tour win. In fact, he soon found himself battling merely to survive, and battling with his team-mates, too. The first backwards step came with a major crash on stage fifteen, caused by the ruts in an unsurfaced road, which left Bahamontes with thigh and knee injuries as well as a broken set of handlebars. Loro\u00f1o then opened up a minute's gap on the main pack by the finish in Bilbao and put extra pressure on Bahamontes' second place. The next morning, as rain fell in Bilbao and mist closed in, a heavily anesthetised Bahamontes set off for Vitoria on stage sixteen. A puncture early on did not cause him any undue problems, but another on the climb of La Herrera most certainly did. Though Ruiz and three other Spaniards dropped back to assist him, by the time they regained the peloton following a furious pursuit Conterno and the rest of the the Italian team had raced away. At the summit of La Herrera, Loro\u00f1o and Conterno had established an advantage of ninety seconds over Bahamontes; by the finish in Vitoria, after two further punctures, it had stretched to more than three minutes. Bahamontes had dropped to fourth overall and was nearly four minutes back. With one stage left, and in the space of two days, Bahamontes had almost slid out of contention.\n\nSome claim that Bahamontes' injuries were the main reason he was so suddenly out of the running. But a key Spanish team-mate has told me that Bahamontes lost the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a that year because of an internal conflict: he refused to go along with plans to break a pact to keep Conterno in yellow. This version of events might sound implausible, but there are three facts in the team-mate's favour. Firstly, though Bahamontes was three and a half minutes down overall, with a mountain stage still to come, the gap was not unbridgeable. Secondly, though injured on stage fifteen, Bahamontes had still managed to drop the entire field on the first climb of Urkiola, so he was in good form. Thirdly, and most significantly, after stage sixteen had finished in Vitoria a rumour started up in the team hotels that Conterno, the race leader, had fallen seriously ill with bronchitis. So maybe there was still something to play for. The questions remained, though: was Bahamontes interested in playing and did he know how to?\n\nAccording to the team-mate, with a first Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a victory at stake, that evening word came that the Italians had requested that Conterno be allowed to keep his lead on the final day and other reports say they were willing to make cash payments to those who agreed. It has been claimed members of the Spanish team promised that they would not challenge the Italian. The Belgians, who were to provide Conterno with invaluable assistance the next day, certainly agreed. However, there were wheels within wheels. Despite Loro\u00f1o being the best-placed Spanish rider, in second spot, the would-be pact-breakers within the Spanish team wanted Bahamontes to go on the attack, and wreck all the previous arrangements to keep Conterno in yellow. 'In Vitoria all the teams had made agreements about who would win the stage, stay second, or keep the general classification as it stood,' the team member told me. Bahamontes, he claims, 'initially agreed to break the pact, but as he'd actually got quite a good placing overall he changed his mind and that annoyed a lot of people.'\n\nBahamontes version of events is far less convoluted: he attempted to attack on the following stage, but failed to get away because Conterno first held onto his shorts, and then because Conterno received 'external assistance.' Ultimately, the row that took place between Bahamontes and the rest of the Spanish team in Vitoria lacked any relevance since Conterno was helped on the last stage by the Belgians who pushed him up and over the Sollube, the last climb of the race. Conterno was given a thirty-second penalty for the obvious cheating, but still won the race from Loro\u00f1o by thirteen seconds. 'Conterno received all kind of assistance,' Loro\u00f1o claimed later. 'He rode up the Sollube without even realising he was going uphill.' And Bahamontes? He had offered Loro\u00f1o some limited support on the Sollube, but it was not the devastating solo move that others had been hoping he would make. If Bahamontes' foibles had provoked antipathy among his team-mates before, he was now in danger of becoming permanently isolated.\n\nTo modern sensibilities, such overt wheeler-dealing may seem shocking. But in a Spain suffering its worst economic recession of the century the pressure to make a fast buck was enormous. Though the money earned from cycling was often comparable to top football players in Spain, there was a key difference betweeen the two sports: no rider was guaranteed a salary from his team sponsor. Until the very end of the decade Spanish team sponsors rarely paid their riders anything except perhaps a few bonuses for victories, making prize money the only certain income. Local clubs would sometimes provide their professional riders with a basic subsidy which Bahamontes says was around one thousand pesetas [\u00a3300 in today's money] a month in the early 1950s. Others might come under the wing of directors like Santiago Mostajo, who in 1954 was paying his riders five hundred pesetas [\u00a3120] a month, though that was not enough to live on.\n\n'It was simple: whenever I went to a race in Bilbao, say,' explains Ruiz, 'I'd have to win, otherwise I wouldn't eat dinner that night. Then I'd go to Mallorca, on the other side of Spain, and it would be the same \u2013 first or second, or no food. I'd make damn sure I won, too, because if you didn't you wouldn't get a hotel to sleep in that night, either. You'd fight and fight with the riders to win, then fight and fight with the organisers to get them to pay for your hotel.' It is therefore not surprising that the top riders were so frequently at odds when their whole livelihoods depended on winning.\n\n'Given how much the train cost, you'd ride from Barcelona up to the Basque Country, seven or eight hundred kilometres at a time, ten or twelve of you in a line, praying the police wouldn't stop you because you'd be fined for riding in a group [which was considered dangerous to other traffic],' says Ruiz. 'If it rained you'd sleep wherever it caught you. You'd have a masseur lined up in Madrid or whatever, stop there, get a massage and a bit of kip, then go on.' Under such circumstances it seems logical that riders would work together to ensure certain results were fixed, if only to ensure a minimum income. But Bahamontes did not want to pitch in with the rest of his contemporaries. Instead he 'moved alone', as he liked to say. For that, at least initially, he paid a high price.\n\nIf Bahamontes was proving to be cycling's equivalent of Greta Garbo, it is not an unusual trait among climbers. In more modern times Scotland's Robert Millar also cut a lonely path in the peloton, while Charly Gaul became a notorious recluse after he retired, living alone in a wood with his shotguns and his dog, the crampons he invariably wore on his shoes the only reminder of his past. As a racer, though, Gaul was the complete opposite to Bahamontes in many ways: while Bahamontes was most effective in warm weather, Gaul seemed to come alive whenever the temperature dropped and the heavens opened. It was his ability to blast away in the coldest, most miserable of conditions that enabled Gaul to win both the 1956 Giro and the 1958 Tour. He is most famous in France for the attack in a rainstorm across the Chartreuse mountains that regained fourteen minutes on race leader Geminiani. Only the national team system, which put the rider from little Luxembourg at a distinct disadvantage, probably prevented him from winning more.\n\nThere could be no doubting Gaul's genius at breaking away whenever the roads steepened. Geminiani called the former abattoir worker 'a murderous climber'. French writer Antonie Blondin, perhaps the greatest of cycling journalists, described him as 'Mozart on two wheels'. 'When we raced we were irreconcilable,' Bahamontes told me when Gaul died in 2005. 'Going uphill even he admitted I was better, but when it rained he was impossible to beat.' But for all his affinity to Gaul, Bahamontes was kept at a distance like everybody else. 'Charly was friendly enough,' recalls Robinson, 'but you could never get close to him, never really get to know him.' And where Bahamontes was outspoken and fiery, Gaul was gloomy and withdrawn. 'He gives the impression that an evil deity has forced him into a cursed profession,' commented one writer.\n\nTeam-mates had the same problem with trying to get to know Bahamontes, which meant he received scant sympathy when things went wrong as they so often did in 1950s stage racing. It was a risky policy on Bahamontes' part. As his knee injury proved the year before, nobody could be sure they would not need a helping hand. In Bahamontes' case, his physiognomy meant he had to depend on team-mates. According to Ruiz: 'Bahamontes always had one or two days where he'd have a sudden physical crisis, and depending on the terrain he'd either be able to get over that crisis or not.' Known as 'the bonk' in British cycling circles, this sudden loss of energy is due to a rapid depletion of glycogen stores in the muscles. In Spanish it is called _una crisis_ or, more poetically, _una visita del hombre del mazo_ , a visit by the man with a mace. 'On the stage to Vitoria [in the 1956 Vuelta] he started to claim his brakes weren't working properly and he had punctures,' says Ruiz. 'That was why he had to stop on La Herrera, not for punctures. I had to stay with him to help him get there, using whatever means necessary, but I'm not going to tell you how.' Another member of Bahamontes' team is not so reticent on how this was probably achieved. 'He'd jam his arm between your elbow and you'd drag him alongside you,' says Jim\u00e9nez Quiles.\n\nLike so many climbers, Bahamontes lacked the technical skills for weaving his way through the bunch and relied on a 'sherpa' to guide him. He would also need help regaining time lost on the downhill sections. 'He and Charly Gaul had this thing in their legs so that whenever we got to the mountains it was \"Goodbye boys, we're off now\",' says Robinson. 'But Bahamontes was a bad descender, even worse than Gaul. And they'd both trail around at the back quite a lot. I can't remember Bahamontes doing a turn on the front. That's not the way to race and that limited the damage both could do.'\n\nEighty-three riders started stage eighteen of the Giro d'Italia in 1956; forty-two finished. One photograph sums up what they had to endure that day. It shows the previous year's winner, the Italian Fiorenzo Magni, halfway up one of the stage's five major cols. At that point it is snowing lightly. But in weather conditions still rated as the most extreme in the race's history, Magni will also have to battle through hailstorms, torrential rain and blizzards for nine hours and two hundred and forty-two kilometres. 'This day surpassed anything seen before in terms of pain, suffering and difficulty,' wrote the former Tour organiser Jacques Goddet. With behaviour that seems to border on the lunatic, Magni \u2013 who has been riding with a broken collarbone since stage twelve \u2013 has the end of one length of inner tube from his tyres clenched between his teeth and the other wrapped around his handlebars. He is trying to use the miniscule additional leverage he receives by pulling with the inner tube both to keep the front half of his bike as high out of the snow as possible and reduce the pain in his shoulder to a minimum.\n\nFor Magni to have reached the point where he is reduced to such painful measures just to keep going epitomises the extremes to which the participants were pushed on this stage. The exit of Ni\u00f1o de Filippis, the provisional leader, was one of the most memorable: with his fingers glued around the handlebars with cold, and having ridden himself to a standstill, he and his bike simply keeled over in unison. Magni, however, made it through. He finished third, just twelve minutes down on stage winner Charly Gaul, who also moved into the race lead. Bahamontes would have moved into top spot overall had he stayed with Magni. But around fifty kilometres from the finish, and the final ascent to the Bondone, Bahamontes abandoned. He then had to make his way through snow and freezing fog to the nearest farmhouse to seek shelter. 'It was impossible to race. There had been landslides and stones as big as a cupboard were all over the road,' Bahamontes recalls. 'Charly Gaul ended up partially deformed by the cold and I had frostbite in my hands and feet. I couldn't use them properly for a month.'\n\nAs winds reached speeds of 70 k.p.h., riders plunged their hands into bowls of warm water supplied by nearby inhabitants or downed glass after glass of brandy to try and regain some energy. Gaul was reduced to descending at a snail's pace because his fingers could not pull on the brakes. When he reached the finish he was trembling so violently his clothes had to be cut from him. 'I'd never known such bad weather. It was really frightening,' Bahamontes continues. 'We just stopped wherever we could, two here, six there, wherever you were you abandoned.' Bahamontes asserts that 'nobody got to the top on a bike', which is untrue of Gaul. However, his claims that a large number of the 'finishers' that day reached the line by car, has been corroborated. 'Me and [fellow Spaniard] Jes\u00fas Galdeano sneaked into somebody's house and put on some pajamas we saw lying about,' he says. 'Finally we were picked up by a lorry. We all quit. Anybody who says the opposite is lying because then they came by the hotels the next day asking who wanted to finish the Giro. But I hadn't reached the finish line so I wasn't starting.'\n\nWhile he now says it was the extreme cold that caused him to abandon, in a profile of Bahamontes' career cycling historian Javier Bodegas claims that was not the case. Rather, Bahamontes roundly blamed his sports director at the Girardengo-ICEP team for his race's premature end, saying he had sold out to Gaul and had deliberately driven ahead of Bahamontes in his team car on the ascent of the Bondone. There were also reports that when Bahamontes saw what had happened to De Filippis, falling like a deadweight on to the road, he was so frightened he stopped instantly. Whatever really happened, Bahamontes would surely have led the Giro had he finished the stage, and then gone on to become the first Spanish winner. He had started just six minutes down on the leader and ten minutes ahead of Gaul. Instead, Gaul, his face wrinkled with cold, his hands and feet blue, gained a seven-minute advantage on his nearest pursuer, Alessandro Fantini. 'Charly has the skin of a hippo,' remarked Geminiani; _El Mundo Deportivo_ called the stage 'a hecatomb', slaughter on a large scale.\n\nGaul's epic ride also brought him the record for overturning the largest overall disadvantage in the Giro to take the leader's jersey. It is a feat that, more than half a century on, no one has matched. Meanwhile, Spain's first winner of the Giro was not Federico Bahamontes in 1956, but Miguel Indurain in 1992.\n\n'There is always the Tour,' _El Mundo Deportivo'_ s editorial reflected after Bahamontes' exit from the Giro. But it was not as straightforward as that. Initially Bahamontes did not want to go to France; once there, he did not want the Tour to finish. 'If the 1956 Tour had lasted another week I'd have won it,' Bahamontes now claims. 'I lost nearly fifty-six minutes in the first two stages and every day I was pulling back time to the point where I finished fourth.'\n\nBefore the race, Bahamontes had suffered from sinusitis and stomach problems. 'My stomach swelled up,' he says, 'and it was so bad I had to cut my shorts open at the waist. That was when I started to use braces regularly. Fortunately the Tour doctor [Pierre Dumas] understood me well and gave me pills with carbon to get rid of all the extra gas and that sorted me out. In fact every day I was getting better and better and everybody was waiting to see if I would win.'\n\nRobinson has one word to describe the 1956 Tour, won by outsider Roger Walkowiak, and that is 'odd'. He says: 'Each day was like a blank sheet of paper. You had no idea what was going to happen. Breaks would go, but nobody really controlled anything.' The absence of Louison Bobet, winner of the three previous Tours, following a painful operation on a testicle, left a vacuum that no one was able to fill. In its post-race analysis, _L'Equipe_ commented: 'The Tour had a new appearance this year. No Bobet, because of his operation, and no [Jean] Robic because of an accident. Charly Gaul should have been the number one favourite, but he became overly involved in a fruitless combat with Stan Ockers for the overall and Federico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes for the King of the Mountains competition. Overall, the Tour lacked panache, particularly given \"Walko\" did not win a single stage.'\n\nBahamontes recalls: 'I was in the same breaks as Walkowiak, but as he was ahead of me in the overall I couldn't win. Still, which other rider apart from me could have been fifty minutes down and end up fourth, at ten minutes overall? I'm sure the Tour de France has never seen such a huge comeback. Everybody thought I could win.' However, the race was simply not long enough for Bahamontes.\n\nThings also did not go his way in the King of the Mountains competition. His tactic of attacking on the mountains, and then waiting for the pack, fell foul of a Tour that ran out of control and where breakaways were coming from unlikely scenarios. Bahamontes' strategy depended on a stage developing predictably, and the 1956 Tour was anything but that. _L'Equipe_ went so far as to describe it as 'hair-raising'.\n\nThough in poor physical condition early on, Bahamontes started to improve on stage four to Rouen, where he took third place in a short individual race against the clock, thereby proving that his time-trialling was better than people thought. However, as he points out: 'Even though the differences were not huge at that point overall, certainly not to start worrying about losing the race, we then lost a lot of morale in the next stage, when five of the Spanish crashed.' To make matters worse, on stage seven to Angers, a thirty-one-man attack, including Walkowiak, gained eighteen minutes on all the favourites. Another significant move on stage ten added nearly a quarter of an hour on the bunch. Bahamontes, significantly, was not part of either of them.\n\nAfter the first stage in the Pyrenees, Bahamontes found himself lying thirty-fifth overall, nearly fifty minutes behind race leader Andr\u00e9 Darrigade. Just the sight of Darrigade, a sprinter, donning yellow after a day that should have been reserved for the climbers confirmed Robinson's assessment that this Tour de France was indeed 'odd'. On paper the time gaps for riders like Bahamontes seemed insurmountable. Or as Bahamontes once rather poetically put it: 'They were as big as the distances between continents, and we had to row our boats day and night to try and arrive with enough time to conquer them.' However, that was only on paper. On the road Bahamontes pulled back four minutes on the second stage in the Pyrenees. Then he regained seventeen minutes in a five-rider break on a flat stage between Toulouse and Montpellier. 'My boat,' as he put it, 'could see land in sight on the continent ahead.'\n\nSuddenly back in the top twenty at a mere twenty-one minutes nineteen seconds behind new leader Jean Adriaenssens of Belgium, Bahamontes progress had not gone unnoticed. The prestigious _Miroir-Sprint_ magazine published an article entitled: 'And if Bahamontes were to win?' He pulled back another seven minutes on stage sixteen, another flattish day, and moved into thirteenth place overall. Andr\u00e9 Leducq, a Tour winner twice in the early 1930s and a team director in the 1950s, was quoted as saying: 'If he climbs as well as he did two years ago, Toledo may light up again . . . he's only eighteen minutes down and it wouldn't take a miracle for him to pull them back.' Bahamontes put it even more graphically. 'As I waited in the team hotel I couldn't stop ticking the minutes off for the next day's start in the Alps. I was sure that Fermina would light a candle for me when she heard it was getting so close . . . because what were eighteen minutes to a climber of my class?' Bahamontes, usually one of the most pragmatic individuals in the world, even went so far as to say: 'I will buy her a garage . . . she will no longer have to worry about the future. She is everything to me.'\n\nBut for all the emotionally hyped-up, gung-ho image Bahamontes presents of himself, it was not quite as straightforward as that. It was only logical that the closer he got to the yellow jersey, the nicer the things the press said about him, the less likely the rest of the pack were to let him go. Yet another massive break on a stage through the Alps to Turin enabled him to shave seven more minutes off the race leader's advantage, and move into ninth overall. At the same time, Walkowiak was proving a much trickier customer to shake off than everyone had anticipated. 'We never gambled on him being so dangerous, and we never raced together against him,' said Bahamontes. 'Still there was one big day in the Alps to go [the two hundred and fifty kilometres from Turin to Grenoble] and for sure Walkowiak wasn't sleeping easy in his bed the night before.'\n\nThe next day, Bahamontes attacked from the gun, taking Gaul with him. But he was predictably dropped on the descent of the mammoth Alpine pass, the Croix de Fer. Bahamontes finished in a three-man chasing group behind Gaul and moved up to sixth. However, it looked as though his poor downhill racing would cost him at least a place on the podium. It was during this stage that one of the most persistent of the Bahamontes myths emerged: that he threw his bike down a ravine in frustration at not being able to chase down Gaul. Bahamontes, however, denies its veracity. 'If I'd been able to stay with Gaul, everything would have changed,' he says. 'I'd have made up at least seven minutes on Walkowiak, but once again my descending skills let me down. Instead, Walkowiak got his moment of glory by making it into two breakaways on days when the big names forgot about him. He will always be remembered as the least deserving winner of the Tour de France.'\n\nThough 'winning _a la_ Walkowiak' has now entered cycling terminology as meaning 'to win from a flukey breakaway attack', not everybody agreed with Bahamontes' cold assessment. 'Little Walkowiak has beaten the biggest stars, so that makes him a \"big star\", too,' _L'Equipe_ argued. 'Maybe there were no great names in this race, but it was still a great Tour.'\n\nOne reason Gaul was not overly prepared to form an alliance with Bahamontes in the Alps had nothing to do with the overall classification. While Bahamontes had not made the King of the Mountains jersey a specific objective, with three days left there was just one point separating the pair at the top of the ranking. As a result, on the second last stage with classified climbs, when Gaul and Bahamontes _did_ get away together ahead of Walkowiak, there was anything but mutual collaboration. However, Gaul's refusal to do more than mark Bahamontes, and grab some more mountain points in the process, ended with the Spaniard gaining only another ninety seconds on Walkowiak overall. 'The King of the Mountains was decided on the eve of the race's arrival in Paris,' Bahamontes says, 'and Gaul formed an alliance with other riders so that I would not score any points.' In other words Bahamontes was outwitted. He ended up fourth in the overall classification and second in the King of the Mountains. But he was bullish enough to swear blind to anyone who would listen in the Parc des Princes, where the Tour finished, that in 1957 he would win the race.\n\nBahamontes' season petered out after that, so that 1956 became the only year of his career that Bahamontes finished with no victories at all. He dodged the Spanish Nationals because he was 'resting up for the World Championships', then abandoned them, claiming that the course did not suit him, though not before courting controversy by refusing to travel on the Spanish Federation's specially chartered flight. Finally, he again bypassed the Volta a Catalunya in favour of more profitable criteriums in France.\n\nThe highpoint of his year, in fact, had nothing to do with bikes. On 3 November Bahamontes married his longstanding girlfriend, Fermina Aguilar Sanchez. Like her new husband, Fermina had been working in the market in Toledo when they met. One of Federico's main charms for her, she informed the press, was that he 'always behaved like a real gentleman'. For example, she said: 'When we go out riding our bikes, he never overtakes me, not even on a climb.' A glance at the witness list \u2013 the Mayor of Toledo, the head of the Spanish Cycling Federation Alejandro del Caz, as well as his close business associate Evaristo Murtra \u2013 and the location (Toledo Cathedral) made it clear that socially Bahamontes was an established figure. In sporting terms, though, with three successive near-misses in the Grand Tours, his position was far less stable. Rather than mark a high point in the career of a young professional, 1956 established a pattern of unpredictability, isolation and blame games in Bahamontes' performances that was to dog the whole of his career.\nChapter Six\n\n#### Loro\u00f1o v Bahamontes \u2013 A Knife in the Table\n\nFederico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes seems to have fallen out with a large number of members of the Spanish peloton at one time or another. The most spectacular and longest-running dispute was with Jes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o. It turned into an eight-year duel which tapped directly into some of the most important divisions within Spanish society of the time and is still referred to as the most intense rivalry between two individual athletes in the history of sport in the country.\n\n'Bahamontes versus Loro\u00f1o is something that is hard to understand now, but at the time it was so serious it split Spain down the middle,' Josu Loro\u00f1o, son of the father, confirms between mouthfuls of croissant one rainy spring Sunday morning in a bar near Bilbao. 'It got to the point where there were families I knew who wouldn't talk to one another because they were either _Bahamontistas_ or _Loro\u00f1istas._ But I truly believe that just as Loro\u00f1o wouldn't have been so good without Bahamontes, so Bahamontes wouldn't have been so good without Loro\u00f1o. They were rivals, but they needed each other, too.'\n\nJes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o stopped racing in 1962 and died almost two decades ago, but he remains a star of the sport in the Basque Country, the heartland of cycling in Spain. If Loro\u00f1o is less famous internationally than Bahamontes or Miguel Poblet it is because he rarely raced abroad; when he did, though, he usually won as he showed in the Tour de France in 1953. Born in 1925 into a farming family in the village of Lattabetzu, close to Bilbao, Loro\u00f1o's first job at eleven was digging trenches in the 'Iron Belt', a line of fortifications built to defend the city in the first year of the Civil War. Five of his eight brothers and sisters were imprisoned in labour camps after the Basque Country fell to the Nationalists in July 1937, but Loro\u00f1o earned his living as a woodcutter. He became one of the region's top amateur cyclists, despite only being able to train at night (his mother used to threaten to take his woodcutter's axe to his bike in case he fell ill from sweating so heavily while out in the dark, cold Basque winters). Nonetheless, like so many Spaniards in the 1940s he thought his best option was to emigrate, in his case to Chile with one of his brothers. Before he could head to South America, however, Loro\u00f1o had to fulfil his military service. As it happened, his commanding officer was a cycling fan who not only encouraged Loro\u00f1o to train, but persuaded him to enter his first major race, the Subida a Naranco hill-climb in Asturias. Loro\u00f1o won, netting the considerable sum of seven thousand pesetas (\u00a33,500), and beat all the established domestic stars of the time. As a result he opted to stay in Spain and start a professional career in which he won the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a and Volta a Catalunya as well as a King of the Mountains title in the Tour de France. He became Bahamontes' deadliest rival and even when they had both retired the mutual antagonism never really died down.\n\n'Fede was and sometimes is like a child,' Loro\u00f1o told one of Spain's top cycling reporters, Josu Garai, shortly before he died in 1994. 'I was stronger than him time-trialling, and he never beat me, not on the flat, not on the climbs, not even in hill-climbs which suited him perfectly because you started the climb \"cold\". Well, he only beat me once, and that was in a sprint I messed up. But he refused to recognise my triumphs.'\n\nIn the public's eyes, particularly in a cycling heartland like the Basque Country, Loro\u00f1o's most important success was winning the toughest mountain stage en route to the King of the Mountains jersey in the 1953 Tour. 'My father told me his King of the Mountains jersey had a huge impact,' says Josu, once a cycling journalist, and now a councillor for the Basque Nationalist Party in Getxo, a dormitory town of Bilbao. 'When he came back from France that year the celebrations were far bigger than when he won the Vuelta. The reason was that for the Basques and for Spain, France in the 1950s was like another planet. Even twenty years later when I was growing up in the 1970s you went across the border to buy things that you just couldn't get in Spain. As late as the 1980s, when I was a journalist covering the Tour de France I remember the telecommunications in France were light years ahead. So just imagine when some kid like my father goes over the border in the 1950s and beats the French at their own game.'\n\nHowever, Loro\u00f1o was unable to defend his King of the Moutains title in 1954. And who should take it but Bahamontes. 'My father couldn't go because he was laid up in hospital for three months after crashing in the GP Eibar when he collided with a motorbike coming the wrong way. Jacques Goddet [the Tour director] had called my father his favourite [to win the Tour outright] that year, and that was his biggest regret: not being able to go to the Tour that year, far more so than in 1959.' Josu says the antagonism between Bahamontes and his father did not get serious until the 1955 Vuelta. But the fact Bahamontes had identical aims for the 1954 Tour as Loro\u00f1o had the year before, and succeeded in claiming the King of the Mountains jersey while its previous owner lay in a hospital bed, all added greatly to the grist of the pair's rivalry.\n\nSport apart, there was also a major social divide between the two. For the Basques, Loro\u00f1o was a well-built, no-nonsense, working-class hero from Bilbao's industrial and agricultural hinterland, who was taking on the more eccentric, erratic wisp of a climber from some dusty city down south. Certainly their personalities could not have been more different. Loro\u00f1o was dour, pragmatic, straightforward and a direct kind of talker. Bahamontes, on the other hand, was far more Quixotic. Or as _El Pa\u00eds_ described him at the age of eighty: 'Affable, unique, contradictory, ultra-individualist and daring . . . as agile as an adolescent and as restless as a hyperactive child.' The biggest difference, though, was political. Loro\u00f1o's family were diehard Basque Separatists, whereas Bahamontes, from authoritarian, central Spain, was so popular with Franco he even met him personally at least once. As a result cycling's two leading figures came to symbolise one of the most damaging, deep-rooted divisions within Franco's Spain: the Basque Country versus Madrid.\n\nIf the 'Basque question' remains an important issue in Spanish politics even today, it was one of Franco's biggest headaches during his forty-year dictatorship. Of the eleven states of emergency Franco had to declare in Spain, six were in the Basque regions of Vizcaya and Guipuizcoa. Until a definitive ceasefire was declared in October 2011, the fifty-year drive by Basque terrorist group E.T.A. for an independent Euskal Herria was one of western Europe's most deeply ingrained and bloodiest conflicts. E.T.A.'s existence has historical links to the repression that followed the Civil War when the Basques were on the losing side. Despite being one of the most religious areas of Spain, which should in theory have placed them alongside Franco in the war, the political strength of the Basque separatist movement was such that two of the three Basque Country regions, Guipuizcoa and Vizcaya remained loyal to the Republic. Though they were cut off from the rest of Republican Spain from the earliest days of the war, the Basques held out for almost a year in Vizcaya. They pinned down a large number of Franco's troops and eased the military pressure on the main Republican strongholds. If their spirited resistance during and after the Civil War was not enough to make the Basque Country unpopular with the ruling regime and its supporters, the differences between Spain's most northerly region and the rest of the peninsula were far more extensive than whether the Basque _ikurri\u00f1a_ flag replaced the Spanish tricolor over the town halls of San Sebastian and Bilbao.\n\nThose differences certainly outweigh any similarities. Take economics, for example: for decades many of Spain's traditional 'heavy' industries like mining, ironworks or shipbuilding were concentrated in the Basque region. That meant the Basques were far better off than the agricultural centre and south. Half a century ago, John Hooper said in his book _The Spaniards:_ 'To visit the Basque Country is to take a trip in time back to the industrial North of Europe earlier this century. Its belching smokestacks, grimy buildings and dogged, pasty-faced inhabitants are the very stuff of Lowry paintings.' That was a far cry from the austere Castillian fortress towns like Toledo and the rugged, dry sierras of Teruel and Extremadura or the semi-deserts of Andalusia.\n\nBut the Basque Country had cultural and legal differences as well as its own language, Euskera. Deep into the twentieth century the Basques retained their traditional right to veto Spanish law and numerous other economic and social privileges. These _fueros_ created envy and resentment between the Basque Country and the rest of the country and Franco banned them as soon as he gained power.\n\nSport, meanwhile, has always been vastly more popular in the Basque Country than in the rest of Spain. But the political implications of sport have always been close to the surface in the north. For reasons no one can quite fathom that has been particularly true of cycling. It was not just a question of one team versus another or one individual versus another: entire races could fall foul of the political tensions. After Basque separatist violence caused the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a's final stages to be all but cancelled in 1978, Spain's biggest race did not return to the region until 2011. The fears that the race might be subject to terrorist attacks was no exaggeration: in 2005 E.T.A. threatened to attack it with rocket-launchers.\n\nIt was, therefore, only natural that the Loro\u00f1o versus Bahamontes rivalry intermingled with the Basque Country versus Madrid conflict. For central Spain the fact Bahamontes came from the town of Toledo just outside Madrid, combined with their ingrained dislike of the Basques, automatically made him their champion. Bahamontes might have been a shade temperamental at times, but he was clearly capable of taking on Loro\u00f1o and the Basques and that was largely all that mattered. Josu Loro\u00f1o is convinced that Spain's backward economic circumstances, as well as the political situation, fanned the flames of the rivalry. 'They fought each other during a crucial period for Spain \u2013 the post-Civil War era, a time of extreme [political] repression. Society's only safety valve was sport. It was the opium of the people.'\n\nOther countries had damaging rivalries between their top cyclists, particularly France, and in 1958 and 1959 Bahamontes would take full advantage of that. However, as Josu points out, none of those rivalries had the breadth of Bahamontes versus Loro\u00f1o, which had social, political, economic and sporting conflict rolled into one. Loro\u00f1o's son believes the closest example would be that between Coppi and Bartali which divided Italy in the 1940s and early 1950s. But, in comparison, Loro\u00f1o versus Bahamontes was wilder and less stage-managed than the elegant face-off between their Italian equivalents. It is hard, for instance, to imagine the genteel Bartali slamming his dinner knife into the table in front of Coppi if the two of them had raced in the same team. That is apparently what Loro\u00f1o did as a 'conversation opener' when he was once having dinner with Charly Gaul and Bahamontes during a Giro d'Italia. The 'knife in the table' anecdote, more reminiscent of a bad Western than cycling, has never been confirmed. But that was the whole point of Bahamontes versus Loro\u00f1o: it was a conflict with its own laws of engagement that went beyond everyday reality. Whatever outrageous stories the press made up about them, no one could prove that they were not true. 'Nowadays when you can see the whole stage of the Tour de France on television their rivalry couldn't have got so big,' Josu Loro\u00f1o comments. 'Back then, though, when the only way people could get information was by going to the bar or shop that had the only radio in their street or village, it was far easier for journalists to make things up \u2013 not necessarily lie, but to imagine stuff, fantasise, exaggerate. Actually, the press and the fans were behind quite a few of their so-called disputes. Neither of them complained, though.'\n\nQuite apart from the mutual dislike there was also fear in the case of Bahamontes. Josu claims that Bahamontes was sometimes so terrified of his father during their racing careers that he would hide in his hotel room to avoid him. As for Jes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o, he considered Bahamontes to be 'mentally weak . . . sitting in his room saying, [and Josu puts on a fake falsetto] \"Loro\u00f1o wants to hit me, I'm not coming out, Loro\u00f1o wants to hit me\".' Yet the two were not always on such bad terms. Josu Loro\u00f1o first encountered Bahamontes at the restaurant in Bilbao which his father opened after retiring, and where Bahamontes would sometimes drop in for a meal if he was in town. There were even times, he claims, when Bahamontes spent a few days as Loro\u00f1o's house guest. However, media-wise, any examples of friendliness between Loro\u00f1o and Bahamontes were brushed under the carpet for the simple reason that the rivalry was a newspaper reporter's dream.\n\nAnd Bahamontes and Loro\u00f1o fulfilled their roles to perfection: they cheerfully traded insults, refused to work together on the national team, and accused each other of betrayal, cheating and foul play. When it exploded it was pure dynamite. Physical aggression among cycling fans has traditionally been all but non-existent. Bahamontes versus Loro\u00f1o, though, was the exception that proved the rule. When Bahamontes was selected for the Tour and Loro\u00f1o was dropped, his fans threw stones at the national trainer's shop in Bilbao, spat at his wife and sent hate mail. On at least one occasion they tried to beat him up. In turn, contemporary photographs show Bahamontes' supporters parading in the streets wearing shirts with the words 'R.I.P. Loro\u00f1o' stitched in black ribbons on the front. Josu recalls: 'With time, it got very complicated and more divisive, not less. Families would be split down the middle because Loro\u00f1o had \"rebel\" supporters in the rest of Spain and Bahamontes had some in the Basque Country. For example, there was a well-known sports writer, Francisco G. Ubieta, who wrote for the _La Gaceta del Norte_ newspaper here in the north. He was a sympathiser of the Franco regime, but at the same time he was a real Loro\u00f1o fan.'\n\nHowever, over time, as happens with most conflicts, the original reasons for their falling-out became forgotten and the rivalry became self-perpetuating. But did it ever, to Josu's knowledge, get seriously violent between the two? 'Well,' he replies '[they say] there was the time that they hit each other with bike pumps, and what I have heard is that once he grabbed Bahamontes by the throat. That's what they say, anyway . . . and then there was the time Bahamontes refused to come out of the room because he was scared my father would hit him. Some kind of row, I imagine.'\n\nWhat really separated Loro\u00f1o and Bahamontes was that they could not have been more different as people and were therefore almost doomed to rub each other up the wrong way. Bahamontes refuses to discuss Loro\u00f1o. 'What's the point, if nobody's heard of him in France or Italy?' Loro\u00f1o was equally contemptuous of his rival. 'Bernardo Ruiz has told him more than once, \"Loro\u00f1o beat you fairly\",' Loro\u00f1o said in 1994, 'and it's about time Bahamontes recognised it.'\n\n'They had very different personalities,' Josu Loro\u00f1o says. 'One of them was what we would call madness personified, the other would always play it straight down the line. Perhaps my father was a bit too stiff-necked at times, but in any case he was the complete opposite to Bahamontes. My father was the kind of guy who when he said something was \"A\" it was \"A\" even if he was wrong.' Loro\u00f1o adds later 'He went so far as to say Bahamontes was weak \u2013 mentally weak \u2013 that he had no character.' And Josu says Bahamontes had a second problem with Loro\u00f1o: 'Bahamontes suffered from Loro\u00f1itis: when he saw my father he used to shit himself. My father dominated his mind.'\n\nNot only was 1957 the year that Bahamontes' conflict with Loro\u00f1o reached its peak, he was also in serious trouble with his latest team. Bahamontes had quit Faema, Spain's most prestigious squad, for whom he had barely raced in 1956, for a much smaller one, Mobylette. He had been convinced that he was the victim of a persecution campaign at Faema, only to find exactly the same problems with Mobylette. 'I left Faema because I was supposed to be leader and the mechanic was puncturing every wheel I had.' But when he moved to Mobylette he alleges that Loro\u00f1o only won the Volta a Catalunya 'because they paid off everybody else, including my team. The director I had was bought off by Miguel Torrello, the Faema boss,' he says, 'and then when I punctured five or six times on one stage, I can remember the Faema trainer laughing about what had happened.'\n\nIt would be easy to write Bahamontes off as being paranoid, but there were incidents that suggested he was the victim of a loosely organised conspiracy. The Volta a Catalunya of 1955 was a case in point. On stage six, Jim\u00e9nez Quiles was in a break with Loro\u00f1o and Bahamontes, and he says the Basque rider did everything to convince him to work against Bahamontes. 'I got into a move with the two of them with about twenty kilometres to go and they started making long, long drives on the front, much bigger than the ones they do nowadays,' says Jim\u00e9nez Quiles. 'It looked like they were trying to wipe each other out. Finally I got away ahead of both of them and my director came up to me on a descent and told me to stop because Loro\u00f1o had dropped Bahamontes. When Loro\u00f1o caught up he persuaded me that I should work with him and let him win, purely because Bahamontes was behind, and he wanted to beat him so badly, and so I did. Jes\u00fas gave me the trophies and all the prizes from that stage \u2013 the trophies are over there in that cabinet if you want to look at them \u2013 because he said they belonged to me anyway. All he cared about was beating Bahamontes.'\n\nThings were no better in the national team. 'Fede had more enemies in the national team for the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a in 1957 than out of it,' Bernardo Ruiz recalls. 'The line-up consisted of all my team-mates who I had recruited to get on the squad. Then they kicked me out to make way for Bahamontes because I was apparently past my sell-by date at thirty-three. So there he was, alone in a team and surrounded by all my team-mates.' At this point the simplest solution would have been for Bahamontes to get out his wallet and buy himself some allies. But Bahamontes' refusal to do so, perhaps because a man who had endured such poverty in his early years might be reluctant to pay for loyalty, let him down dearly. 'The entire team was effectively my Faema squad and Bahamontes wouldn't spend anything to gain the team's sympathy. He was a magnificent rider, but that was a very serious defect,' Ruiz says, particularly since it was considered almost normal at the time to buy and sell races.\n\nBy 1957, Bahamontes' enemies had two natural magnets in Ruiz and Loro\u00f1o. Just like the bulk of the country, the Spanish peloton divided into _Loro\u00f1istas_ and _Bahamontistas._ Barring a very few key Bahamontes _domestiques_ , like Julio San Emeterio, and a handful of notable 'neutrals' such as Miguel Poblet, Loro\u00f1o had far more supporters in the bunch. These included Ruiz and his young ally Salvador Botella, already the winner of the Volta a Catalunya back in 1953. One catalyst in the Loro\u00f1o-Bahamontes rivalry was Spain's team trainer, Luis Puig. An avuncular type given to bland, meaningless statements of goodwill that proved ideal for a political career that eventually led to him becoming president of the U.C.I., cycling's governing body, Puig was totally incapable of handling his two top riders. Instead, Puig relied excessively on Ruiz, who, unbeknown to him, was in the Loro\u00f1o camp, and then promptly washed his hands of any major conflict. It took the Spanish Federation two years, and a huge scandal in the Tour de France, to realise that with Loro\u00f1o and Bahamontes in the line-up, someone willing to bang heads together would be far more appropriate for the job.\n\nMeanwhile, the Loro\u00f1o-Bahamontes conflict continued unabated to the point where their _domestiques_ lined up and took pot shots at their leaders as well, even 30 years after the event. 'Bahamontes is the kind of bloke that if somebody he dislikes goes on an attack he goes after him even if it's flat and he [Bahamontes] is chasing all by himself,' Jes\u00fas Galdeano, one of Loro\u00f1o's most loyal supporters, told _El Mundo_ in the 1980s. 'He doesn't believe in his own possibilities. He wins in the mountains and gets half an hour, then he loses half an hour on the flat and blames everybody else.' Poblet, a rival but also a friend of Bahamontes, says: 'Fede wasn't a bad guy. He didn't kill anybody. He was always a happy sort, but he behaved differently to most other people. His personality was different. He was wilful, too: when he wanted to do something he'd do it whether it was right or wrong. I can remember we were in the same team, with Charly Gaul, in a Tour of Italy [1958] and there was a stage finish with a ten-kilometre climb just before, then a descent, then a few kilometres of flat. And I said to him, \"Don't attack before the climb, wait until there are a couple of kilometres to go, I'll watch your back, and then if I can, I'll win the sprint from the group behind\". Then what does he do? He attacks right at the start of the climb, gets a minute or a minute and a half, then gets caught on the descent by Anquetil and the rest. Fortunately I won the sprint, but he finished dead last when he could have won. Loro\u00f1o was much straighter, at least with me. But Bahamontes would tell you one thing and then the next day he'd go and do another.' Jim\u00e9nez Quiles adds: 'In any case, what did he expect? Those days if you were in front and you saw a team-mate attack, you'd know it was up to you to go after him.'\n\nIronically, Bahamontes' 1957 season got off to a flying start when he outsprinted Loro\u00f1o for victory in a Tour of the Levante stage \u2013 the one Loro\u00f1o said he messed up \u2013 and then took his second win in three years in the Mont Faron hill-climb in France. The Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a started equally well, too, despite Loro\u00f1o gaining a couple of minutes' advantage from a break on stage one. Forty-eight hours later Bahamontes bounced back with a vengeance to claim his first stage win and the leader's jersey after a solo attack in the mountains of Asturias. Loro\u00f1o, on the other hand, was at nearly thirteen minutes, tenth overall and itching to counter-attack for all that he and Bahamontes were in the same squad. Ruiz, meanwhile, exiled to a regional squad but with his usual Faema team-mates filling out the Spanish 'A' team, was watching and waiting in the wings. Knowing that Bahamontes hated the cold, Loro\u00f1o took advantage of a snowstorm en route to Le\u00f3n on stage four to move ahead. However, with the weather conditions becoming worse on the Pajares pass the organisers decided to suspend the stage. Loro\u00f1o was so furious at his misfortune that he continued pedalling uphill and had to be forcibly removed from his bike.\n\nBahamontes lost the lead briefly in Madrid to another team-mate, Botella, a close ally of Ruiz's. This was the first time that Bahamontes was indisputably let down by his team, and in particular Puig who failed to inform him of the sizable gap that Botella and other breakaways had gained. When Bahamontes found out, it was only thanks to the race organisers, not his team. He counter-attacked almost instantly, though not before having a shouting match with Puig for failing to tell him earlier. Just to complicate matters, when Bahamontes punctured the next day on the Navacerrada climb on a stage around the sierras of Madrid, Loro\u00f1o voluntarily gave him a spare wheel. Though it was in both their interests that Botella did not gain too much time, Loro\u00f1o later regretted this, telling the _La Gaceta del Norte_ newspaper: 'I was the idiot who saved Bahamontes in Navacerrada.'\n\nBahamontes was determined not to let the race slip through his fingers, and bounced back brilliantly two days later when he asked for and received support from the French in a break on the way to Cuenca. By allowing Roger Walkowiak and his compatriot Gilbert Bauvin to take first and second places, Bahamontes moved back into yellow. Loro\u00f1o, meanwhile, had dropped to eleventh and was nearly sixteen minutes behind. Puig confirmed to the press that Bahamontes would be the team leader from now on while Loro\u00f1o went for the King of the Mountains. All went well on the long drop down from the tablelands of Cuenca to the coast at Valencia, but the next day on the coast road to Tortosa, Bahamontes was to discover just how friendless he was.\n\n'I whispered in Loro\u00f1o's ear, \"Come with me\",' is how Ruiz explains the start of the mass attack in which Bahamontes lost twenty-one minutes and the yellow jersey to his arch-rival. Poetically appealing though Ruiz's recollection of events is, the truth is slightly more mundane. Ruiz and two other riders powered up the coast road in the first hour, and when they had opened a twenty-second gap Loro\u00f1o came across with four others. Then the race was on. But there was no doubt who the move was directed against. Another 1950s Spanish professional, Luis Ota\u00f1o, recalls Loro\u00f1o telling him: 'During the break Ruiz was yelling, \"Go, go, Jes\u00fas, Bahamontes is dropped and you're going to win the Vuelta. You're better than him, fuck it, go, ride!\"' Moreover, it was rumoured that Bahamontes' team-mates participated in the conspiracy. Some reports claimed that rather than help their stranded leader, they went as far as holding on to his shorts to prevent him counter-attacking. Certainly he received little support. 'With Loro\u00f1o ahead, and with all my Faema team-mates and friends in the national squad behind, nobody would work for Bahamontes,' Ruiz recounts with a hint of smugness. 'Bahamontes was the leader, he could have won that Vuelta, he should have won it, but he didn't know how to win over his team-mates.' Evaristo Murtra, Bahamontes' 'godfather', who was following the race, confirmed: 'He had no support whatsoever. Nobody wanted to help him, and the last anybody saw of Puig was when the break had gained two minutes, and he shot past in his jeep indicating with his hands to the riders that they should take it easy and not work to bring back Loro\u00f1o's break.'\n\nRuiz says: 'So we reached Tortosa miles ahead, [Italian Bruno] Tognacini gets the stage, Loro\u00f1o got first overall, I moved into second and Tognacini third, and that's when the scandals started. Even the Federation had to intervene.' It was a brutal, barefaced betrayal, but even fifty-five years on, Ruiz has no regrets. 'Fede says that we robbed him of that Vuelta. But he was vulnerable, he let himself lose it. And the ones who knew how to race, well, just like in this Vuelta, we beat him.' As for Loro\u00f1o, he claimed to be surprised at his success, but equally pitiless. 'I never thought I'd get the yellow jersey,' he says. 'From two-thirds of the way through the stage it was pretty clear what was happening. But if Bahamontes couldn't do anything then it was because he couldn't.'\n\nSomewhere in Bahamontes' office, amid all the rows of photograph albums and collections of newspaper cuttings, lurks a piece of paper that allegedly explains why he did not win the Vuelta in 1957. Given that at one point Bahamontes had an advantage of nearly sixteen minutes over Loro\u00f1o it seems almost more difficult for Bahamontes to have lost the race than to have won it. However, that was what happened.\n\nBahamontes' hand thrums on one knee and a ferocious glare comes over his face as he gives his explanation for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. He says he was 'robbed' by a government telegram, received while in Valencia, instructing him to throw the race in favour of Loro\u00f1o. In the middle of a military dictatorship there was no ignoring an official communication. That the rider who benefited happened to be his sworn enemy only added insult to injury. According to Bahamontes the instructions came from 'above', which is how Spaniards refer to the higher echelons of power. At the very least, Bahamontes says, it was the Minister of Sport Jos\u00e9 Antonio Elola who put his name to the telegram.\n\nWhoever decreed that Bahamontes should lose, if, indeed, such a decree was made at all, the logic behind the decision would have been purely political: Loro\u00f1o was Basque, the Vuelta was Basquerun, and Euskadi was the most troublesome region Franco had to deal with. Rather than let someone from the Madrid area win, Bahamontes believes that Franco's henchmen let the Basques get one over the centre of Spain to satisfy local pride. In some ways it was like the Roman emperors who kept the noisiest parts of the populace happy with 'bread and circuses'.\n\nIt is an extraordinary claim to make, but Bahamontes says he still has a telegram from the Ministry of Sport to prove it. He has certainly kept others, like the telegram from Toledo town hall promising him some prime building land in the city after the Tour victory in 1959, which he is always quick to locate in a photograph album for anyone curious enough to want to see it. Yet when asked if it is possible to see the document that proves he lost the Vuelta as a result of political manoeuvring, he says 'sure, sure', half-gets out of his seat, looks around and then slumps down again, as if he cannot be bothered. Or maybe he knows that the telegram cannot be found.\n\nEven so, he is still adamant about his side of the story. 'It was all because of a telegram from Jos\u00e9 Antonio Elola telling me that even though I was leader Loro\u00f1o had to win,' Bahamontes says now. 'I'm convinced Puig had a part to play in that, too, because Elola was staying in Puig's chalet at the time as a guest. In any case, the telegram said I had to settle for second and the King of the Mountains, and let Loro\u00f1o win because he was Basque and the race was Basque. I had to take it or leave it.' When interviewed a month after the Vuelta Bahamontes claimed: 'I didn't move because Loro\u00f1o was ahead.'\n\nThe press was equally confused by what happened on the stage to Tortosa. 'I've been told Bahamontes was under orders not to [counter-] attack,' commented _El Mundo Deportivo_ 's correspondent, 'and I admit it may be true. I can't understand what happened, though, and why a rider who fought so hard to get the jersey in Madrid was so prepared to sit back and let it go out of his reach so calmly. Isn't there one of Aesop's fables where somebody spends years and years putting together a fortune, then calmly throws it all down a mineshaft? That's what Bahamontes did yesterday with his yellow jersey.'\n\nHe was not the only reporter who suspected a possible government connection to the race's outcome. In the cycling gossip section of _La Regi\u00f3n_ , an Oviedo newspaper, an anonymous journalist going only by the name of 'Ricardo' wrote a one-line reference to the Tortosa stage, saying: 'Is this sport? Let us salute our \"comrade\" Elola for this case.' The correspondent of the pro-Loro\u00f1o _La Gaceta del Norte_ took a completely different point of view, running a story headlined: 'Puig-Bahamontes conspiracy against Loro\u00f1o'. But if there was such a plot then it is fair to say Puig and Bahamontes resoundingly lost it. _L'Equipe_ seems to have had a clearer idea of what Loro\u00f1o's attack represented. They ran a one-word headline for their Vuelta coverage the next day: 'Heresy'.\n\nRegardless of whether he messed up the race of his own volition or was annoyed because he had been told to throw it, newspaper reports claimed that Bahamontes spent most of that night's meal in the team hotel in Tortosa flinging insults at all and sundry. Finally, Loro\u00f1o grabbed Bahamontes and demanded to know what his problem was. At that point Bahamontes apparently fled to his room, asking that his food be sent up and refusing to come down while Loro\u00f1o was around.\n\nThough one journalist claimed that 'the Valencia-Tortosa stage was the execution wall for Bahamontes, and Loro\u00f1o and Luis Puig were the ones firing the rifles', in fact things were not much better between team director and Loro\u00f1o. While no friend of Bahamontes, and after failing to ensure the support of his team-mates, it later emerged Puig had sat even more firmly on the fence by trying to stop Loro\u00f1o from attacking, too. 'Puig kept blocking the road with his car, telling Loro\u00f1o he had to sit up,' Josu Loro\u00f1o recalls, 'but my father would dodge past, saying he was having none of it. Puig even shouted at him to stop at one point, and my father yelled back, \"Not even if the Civil Guard come and get me!\" And in those days, that was quite something to say about the _Guardia Civil_.'\n\nThe following day's stage between Barcelona and Zaragoza went calmly enough until ten kilometres to go when the Loro\u00f1o-Bahamontes war broke out again. Bahamontes went on the attack and Loro\u00f1o, who had been waiting for the move, immediately chased him down. Still riding a few metres ahead of the bunch, the two then began arguing with each other at the tops of their voices. Their row enabled a number of top foreign riders to take advantage and go clear. Indeed, by Zaragoza the leaders had gained a minute's lead on the Bahamontes-Loro\u00f1o group. Neither seemed to care. Loro\u00f1o then continued to claim to all and sundry that Bahamontes had been attacking him 'non-stop' since Barcelona, and 'that was how he paid me back for the help I gave him on the stage to Madrid'. The minor matter of his attack on Bahamontes while he was leading the race at Valencia was, strangely enough, never mentioned by Loro\u00f1o.\n\nTension levels in the Spanish 'A' team reached the point that after a crucial eighty-one-kilometre time-trial from Zaragoza to Huesca, the Spanish Cycling Federation decided they had to intervene. Their warning that both riders would be excluded from the race unless the insults stopped, coincidentally, arrived by telegram. A truce was officially agreed and toasts were drunk to mutual loyalty for the press's benefit. Loro\u00f1o and Bahamontes even shook hands publicly, and the media dubbed it 'the Huesca Pact'. Nobody was fooled, though, except perhaps the Federation; behind the scenes the war continued unabated.\n\nLater, the organising newspaper _El Correo Espa\u00f1ol_ ran a story in which it claimed Puig had taken the two riders into his hotel room, showed them the Federation telegram and told them in no uncertain terms to stop fighting otherwise they would both be excluded. He also apparently told Bahamontes, _sotto voce_ , that if Loro\u00f1o did not win the Vuelta, 'there was no way either he or Bahamontes would be allowed inside Bilbao [where the race finished]'. To add to the intrigue, it later emerged that Bahamontes tried to abandon the race the same night, and was only persuaded not to by his 'godfather', the Catalan businessman Evaristo Murtra.\n\nBahamontes rode flat out in the time-trial the following day, using a twenty-eight-spoke front wheel from a track bike, despite them being prohibited for road-racing. He was given a one-minute penalty which dropped him from second, six seconds behind Loro\u00f1o to third in the time-trial. But he had the minor satisfaction of ousting Ruiz from second place overall. 'They told me those wheels were banned, but then why were the French team all using them?' Bahamontes complained to me more than fifty years later. Loro\u00f1o bitterly criticised Bahamontes at the time-trial finish, saying: 'It's really annoyed me that he uses a wheel that he knows is illegal, even telling the race officials about it, because he'll get more benefit from using it than whatever he was going to be penalised. I'd have rather died on the road than lose the yellow jersey to him that way.'\n\nFor the last three days, with nothing to lose, Bahamontes attacked as and when he liked. However, given Loro\u00f1o and Ruiz were now firm allies, he was effectively fighting against two teams not one. Furthermore, Ruiz was happy to tip off Loro\u00f1o if Bahamontes made a move. 'Bahamontes was officially going for mountains points whenever he attacked, but there was one time when he got a one hundred-metre advantage on a climb,' Ruiz revealed to me. 'I told Loro\u00f1o, \"Don't trust him, he only needs to be twenty metres ahead, not leading by minutes\". And so Bahamontes was chased down. They kept on insulting each other all the time, though. It was incredible. Like something out of a film.'\n\nBahamontes rode brilliantly in the final mountain stages, taking out his rage at losing the overall title by attaining his first Vuelta King of the Mountains title with ease. Not that Loro\u00f1o or Ruiz were prepared to let him get too much of an advantage. On the stage to Bayonne Loro\u00f1o chased down every charge by Bahamontes, 'who attacked and attacked and attacked', according to _El Mundo Deportivo_ , 'turning around to see each time what Loro\u00f1o could do'. The report continued: 'But Loro\u00f1o went from strength to strength, hammering on the pedals every which way in order to be totally sure he was gaining the maximum distance possible. When he brought back Bahamontes to fifty metres, Bahamontes sat up, looking at him with a mixture of hatred and admiration. Loro\u00f1o kept on baring his teeth as if to show that even if he ran out of physical strength he'd defend himself by biting.'\n\nAgain, Bahamontes' apparent change of mind over the instructions to lose the race so late on raises yet more doubts about the existence of a telegram that nobody, barring Bahamontes, has apparently seen. However, it is difficult to conceive another explanation. Why should a rider who was in total control of a race suddenly allow a rival he loathed to gain such a huge margin and throw it all away, even if then he changed his mind again and tried to get it back? Ultimately, there are four possible explanations for Bahamontes' behaviour on the Valencia-Tortosa stage: extreme carelessness; a sudden attack of indifference; lack of team support; or external orders, perhaps from Elola. Whichever reason is the right one, fifty years on it is pretty clear that Bahamontes' bitterness endures. Furthermore, given he cannot turn the clock back he has no choice but to belittle the entire event. 'The Vuelta?' Bahamontes says. 'In those days it was just a bit of a joke.'\n\n'That telegram?' says Josu Loro\u00f1o. 'If he's got it, then he should produce it, which he never has. The day he shows somebody that telegram, that's an end to any arguments.' Until he does, Loro\u00f1o has his own interpretation. 'It's basically sour grapes. He's pissed, too, that he never won the Volta, the Vuelta or the Bicicleta Vasca. He's got a magnificent _palmares_ , but in that area he feels sore.' Loro\u00f1o argues that from a political point of view Bahamontes' claims are illogical. 'Given what my father was, from a Basque Nationalist family with two brothers in exile and a third doing time in a hard-labour camp in Cadiz because of the Civil War, the ruling regime would have far prefered Bahamontes to have won. Nobody can deny Bahamontes' achievements which are huge. But at the same time, he shouldn't deny what other riders achieved. It's all \"me, me, me\" and the rest are a heap of shit.'\nChapter Seven\n\n#### The Dangers of 'Go-Fast'\n\n7 July, 1957, Eastern France: In many ways it is the least significant of acts. In a quiet country lane, a bike rider draws up on a roadside, dismounts, takes off his watch and his shoes, and sits down on the ground. Yet how can it be insignificant? Federico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes, the race's big favourite, is abandoning the Tour de France. Instantly a huddle of journalists, spectators, race officials and team personnel crowd around him. They offer him water \u2013 it was already 36 degrees when the stage started in Besan\u00e7on a couple of hours back in one of the worst heatwaves of the 1950s \u2013 but Bahamontes refuses it. 'It's over, I'm not going on,' he insists.\n\nNot everybody is convinced: a Spanish team mechanic attempts to put his race shoes back on his feet, but Bahamontes grabs them from him and flings them into a ditch. The same mechanic then attempts to pick Bahamontes up and physically put him on the bike. 'Fuck, I said I'm not going on,' Bahamontes yells at him. He leans so heavily on the mechanic that he has to let him fall back down on to the ground.\n\nWhen his sports director Luis Puig gets out of his car and demands an explanation, Bahamontes says nothing but points at a swelling in his left arm. It has been caused, it will later emerge, by an injection given to him by Puig himself. Bahamontes cannot steer his bike, he claims, though that has not stopped him from taking part in the first break of the day.\n\nGrainy photographs of the scene show a glassy-eyed Bahamontes drawn up into a semi-fetal position, lying at the centre of a crowd which is steadily growing in size and variety. Two of his Spanish team-mates, Carmelo Morales and Antonio Ferraz, see his bike flung on the ground, stop, and plead with him to get back on into the race. 'Do it for the sake of your mother, Fede!' Ferraz shouts at Bahamontes over the heads of the crowd. Back from somewhere in the middle of the knot of people comes the muffled but increasingly determined answer: 'No.' 'For Fermina!' 'No!' 'For Spain!' 'No!' Then Ferraz plays his last card, and theoretically the best: 'For Franco!' Again Bahamontes spits out the answer: 'No!' He then picks himself up and gets in the race's 'broom wagon', the vehicle for riders who have abandoned.\n\nMeanwhile, Puig's initial sympathy has been replaced by anger. He refuses to believe that the injection is the real cause of the abandon and he attempts to provoke Bahamontes by claming he is not 'man enough' to continue. 'Go on then, quit,' Puig sneers. 'But when you're getting changed out of your clothes and putting on your trousers, take a look down at your chest and you'll see you've grown tits!' Bahamontes just ignores him and the broom wagon heads off: a spectacularly undignified exit for a Tour favourite, and arguably one of the most melodramatic and farcical in the race's history.\n\nLong-term, Bahamontes' departure will force Spanish cycling's top brass to finally face up to the country's chronic lack of unity and carry out a much-needed overhaul of the Federation. Above all it will produce a change of national team director, from Luis Puig to Dalmacio Langarica, from a director with whom Bahamontes was incapable of collaborating and who oversaw his most humiliating abandon of any bike race, to one whom he described as 'the best I ever had'. In fact, one of the most important seeds of Bahamontes' success in the 1959 Tour, the crowning moment of his career, is sown on a day when success is probably the last thing on his mind.\n\nBahamontes was interviewed a few days later in a hairdresser's shop in Toledo by the newspaper _Informaciones._ 'With the \"closed\" sign on the door and the guy in the chair, where better place to have a chat?' the reporter shrewdly observed in his article. During the conversation Bahamontes claimed that he had no choice but to abandon. '[Race director Jacques] Goddet told me that even if I reached the finish outside the time limit, I'd be allowed to continue,' he said. 'And I wanted to continue but my arm was far too swollen and painful. I had fever, sinusitis and laryngitis as well. I had to ride with my arm on my _musette_ [food bag] for the first eighty-five kilometres, the only part of the stage where things were calm. I didn't abandon for good reasons or bad reasons, I abandoned because I had no other choice.'\n\nNot everybody believed him. 'He was playing chicken,' Bernardo Ruiz told the Mayor of Barcelona, Juan Antonio Samaranch, a few days later. 'I've had those injections and they hurt a bit, but not that much. In any case, Fede is stronger with one arm than most of us are with two.'\n\nThe injection Puig had administered the night before was variously reported as containing lime, calcium, vitamins B and C or a combination of all four. The problem was not the mixture of medicines themselves, outlandish as it sounds. Rather, according to Bahamontes, Puig messed up the injection, jamming the needle in twice, which caused severe swelling and pain in his entire arm. In consequence, he could not control his bike, so had to stop.\n\nBut quite why Puig had given Bahamontes the injection in the first place was harder to establish. According to Puig, Bahamontes' morale was low and he needed a boost. And as he cheerfully, and very unwisely, told journalists: 'It's perfectly natural for me to give the riders injections.' The U.C.I. did not see it quite like especially since in France only doctors were allowed to inject patients. Nor were the Tour de France organisers impressed; even if the police cast a blind eye to some laws being infringed by the Tour, the only doctor allowed to administer injections was the official medic, Pierre Dumas. As a result of Puig's bragging, on the same day that Bahamontes abandoned Goddet told the Spanish Federation to make sure Puig 'did not return to the Tour next year, because he is unwelcome'. Politely worded as Goddet's message was it was still a bombshell: being unable to direct the national team in the biggest race in the sport meant Puig's career as national coach was over, and the French knew it. And Bahamontes? 'Federico Bahamontes has fallen from grace,' Goddet later wrote in his usual poetical vein in _L'Equipe_ , 'just at the point when he was the sole favourite of the race, and his departure leaves the way open to new challengers. It's perfectly logical that Federico suffered as a result of the injection his sports director gave him in his left arm. But what's not so comprehensible is that the Spanish champion has not tried harder to overcome his problem and to give it time to pass.' He was not the only person who thought that.\n\nThe scandal did not fade into the background immediately. The Spanish Federation banned Bahamontes and, separately, Miguel Poblet from racing abroad for a month, both for abandoning without due reason. The aim was to stop them making money from post-Tour criteriums. In Poblet's case this seems particularly harsh. Sixth in the Giro, and therefore with reasonable hopes of a strong ride in the Tour, the race was going to have a stage finish in his home town of Barcelona and he had been keen to win there. However, he was forced to abandon on stage four because of a boil 'the size of a golf ball in the part that most hurts a cyclist. Whenever I sit down, I see stars'. Bahamontes was also required to re-state his explanations for abandoning before a medical tribunal in Madrid in the autumn and ordered to undergo a health check before he was allowed to race again. 'I had to go to Madrid to prove I hadn't taken anything [illegal],' he said. 'Puig was a doctor and before the Alps, he injected me with Binerva and Redoxon [the brand names for vitamins B and C] in my arm. I was in agony. [Team-mate and future Vuelta winner Antonio] Su\u00e1rez told me that I shouldn't give up, but I refused to go down a climb steering with only one arm. By then the damage had been done, anyway. It fucked up my Tour completely.'\n\nThe word that was never mentioned throughout the controversy was, of course, doping. Though lists of banned substances existed at that time, very rarely was any concerted action taken to fight drugs. However, allusions to the problem are plain: Tour organisers made dark hints in their official report of the affair about 'practices of which we don't approve'. Then there were the unstated aims of the medical commission who investigated Bahamontes on his return. As far as I have been able to establish from a cross-section of professional cyclists and team doctors, calcium has no performance-enhancing benefits whatsoever. Nor does lime. Either Bahamontes did not know that and fell for some of the quackery prevalent in cycling at the time, or he did not know what was in the syringe but assumed that if Puig was administering it, it could only do him good. Either way, Puig had crossed a red line given that officially the only provider of legal medicines for the riders \u2013 be it injections or otherwise \u2013 was the Tour's doctor, Pierre Dumas. Brian Robinson, the British rider, recalls: 'Dumas would tell us which vitamins to buy. He told me the American products were the best. I'd bring it over with me from England and he'd inject me with it. He used to come by every couple of days. I remember I went to the local chemists in Yorkshire and asked for vitamin B and C in five hundred milligram ampoules, and they said, \"What do you want with that?\" When I told them, they said, \"Bloody hell, it's what we give horses!\"'\n\nUnlike Robinson, many riders wanted more than Dumas would give them. Far more. Les Woodland's _Yellow Jersey Guide to the Tour de France_ records that in cycling half a century ago: 'There were _soigneurs, fakirs_ , who came from the six-day [criterium] races. Their value was in the contents of their case. Riders took anything they were given, even bee stings and toad extract.' This was not a new development. As one of the toughest endurance sports, cycling had been infected with doping as early as the 1890s. It was particularly prevalent at track events where strychnine and arsenic were among the substances used. In 1896, the death of Bordeaux-Paris winner Arthur Linton was suspected, though never proved satisfactorily, to have been the first in sport caused by drug use. And that was only the beginning. As William Fotheringham's _Cyclopedia_ notes, in 1924 professionals Henri and Francis Pelissier once gave a graphic description of their doping to leading Tour journalist Albert Londres. Opening a pillbox, Henri showed Londres 'cocaine for the eyes . . . chloroform for the gums, and do you want to see the pills? We ride on dynamite. When the mud is washed off us, we are white as sheets, we are drained by diarrhoea, we dance jigs in our bedroom instead of sleeping'. Just to add to the grotesque horror of the interview, which was entitled 'Convicts of the Road' when published, Francis claimed that six of his ten toenails had fallen out, the strong implication being that it was due to doping.\n\nBy the 1930s drug-taking was so widespread that historian Benjo Maso records that the riders' contracts in the Tour stated that the costs of 'stimulants, tonics and doping' had to be paid for by the competitors. And two decades later Bahamontes' old training partner Ian Brown was to discover that, while it was possible to complete a race without dope, the decision not to take drugs could destroy what had looked a promising career. Brown had been disappointed not to be named as one of the future stars at the end of the Simplex camp. 'As I said to [Charles] Pelissier, I didn't want to go back to England. In fact I was a bit desperate to get out of the normal life of Britain,' he says.\n\nBrown's professional career started almost by chance, though, thanks to Simplex generously putting him up for a week in a hotel outside Brussels' Gare du Nord 'because Pelissier said the only racing on at that time of year, if I wanted to do it, was in Belgium. So I had to go there'. Its only initial drawback was that it was in the middle of the city's red-light district. 'There were all these sexy women in the shop windows, which was a bit of a surprise; we didn't have anything like that in Morecambe,' Brown recalls. 'But there was a race the following Wednesday, and I got third and a load of money when I hadn't even realised where the finish was and that I'd crossed the line. And I thought, \"Holy crikey, this is easy!\"'\n\nHowever, while some of his discoveries about life and professional racing abroad were appealing, others were not and led him to retire early. Brown makes it very clear when interviewed why he packed up prematurely: drugs, principally amphetamines, 'though there was other stuff going around. What, I don't know, because I never took it'. Brown has a collective term for all the substances, in any case: 'go-fast'. The evidence of Brown and other British riders indicates that there was little drug-taking in cycling on their side of the Channel. However, in mainland Europe the opposite was true, and Brown decided, with decidedly bleak logic, to opt out. 'I knew a lot of riders who later died by taking too much \"go-fast\", guys in their twenties or thirties, and I wasn't taking that stuff,' he says. 'Somebody who'd been Belgian pro champion twice, about ten years older than me, once offered me something called _la bombe atomique_ to win races. The next spring when I came back to the cafeteria where I was staying, he'd died. I'd see them head off the side of the road in the middle of races to get injections. And in Belgian races, with about two hundred riders, it was hard and fast to start with, so with about fifty kilometres to go they'd all take their pills. They called it \"parachute time\" because all the pills were in little bits of paper and when the bits of paper came flying back through the bunch they looked like parachutes.' Brown's career fizzled out in 1958, he says, 'because I knew if I'd gone back to try and win races the following season, I'd be asked to take stuff and I wasn't doing that'.\n\nBahamontes, on the other hand, maintains that it was still possible to win without doping. Not only does he state categorically that he did not use drugs, he claims there was little evidence of it, and that he only once saw 'somebody put something in a flask'. At most, he says, his success was caffeine-induced; in the 1959 Tour he drank two cups of coffee before destroying the field in an uphill time-trial at Puy de D\u00f4me. His comments could sound like a deliberate under-exaggeration given the extent of drug-taking that went on in the 1950s when there were no anti-doping controls in racing. In addition to Brown, it is easy to find people who disagree that the sport was relatively clean. When Josu Loro\u00f1o, the son of Bahamontes' arch-rival Jes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o, was asked what he had heard about drug-taking in that era, he answered, without batting an eyelid: 'There were a lot of amphetamines going around.'\n\nHowever, Bahamontes decries the idea that he personally could have taken drugs, saying: 'Your health takes priority over everything. If you don't take care of it, it's like not taking care of your wife or your car. Wherever you go, make sure your car has good tyres and good petrol, and make sure your wife has money so she's got nice clothes and good food. Because if you don't, then \u2013 pardon my being so direct \u2013 somebody else is going to fuck your wife and somebody else is going to steal your car. I never took anything, never. I saw a _soigneur_ put something in a _bidon_ , once, and that was it.'\n\nBut Bahamontes also refers to many of his former rivals 'being in the grave already'. As he puts it: 'You can be alive and not have much money, or have all the glory and be dead these thirty years past.' Bahamontes does not state it outright, but the implication is there: he got through the major Tours without drugs; others didn't and paid the ultimate price.\n\nRobinson partly supports Bahamontes' claims that it was possible to compete and win major races like the Tour without drugs. 'I could go along with that: that it was due to his athletic ability. I know I got over those hills myself [without drugs],' says Robinson. 'Anquetil . . . said you can't ride the Tour on water, but I proved you can . . . with a little bit of vitamin C, a bit of cola and a bit of this or that. Nothing drastic. On the other hand, I did the job as it was supposed to be done. I didn't bugger about at night. That's why [Tom] Simpson' \u2013 Britain's greatest professional who died of a mixture of amphetamine abuse and dehydration on the Mont Ventoux in 1967 \u2013 'and I split. He went to Belgium to further his career in that line, which was sad because he was the one [rider] who didn't need it.'\n\nRobinson's view that it was possible to race at a high level even if you were clean is corroborated by Brown, who says: 'You could ride just as well without [drugs] if you were crafty. I was better at stage races than I was at one-day races, because if you weren't taking \"go-fast\" then you'd be hanging for grim death in the first two days, but in the third you would be all right.' It should be noted that Brown's experience is based largely on week-long stage races, in which he did very well without being outstanding. However, the demands of week-long races are nothing compared to a three-week Grand Tour. Brown only did one of those, the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a in 1955, from which he abandoned. Bahamontes rode up to three major Tours in one year, and one season finished them all. Furthermore, while Bahamontes had numerous major highpoints in his career, Brown says simply and bleakly: 'It was just make money and eat and sleep well. I never had one [a highpoint], there weren't any at all.'\n\nWhile officially turning a blind eye, the Tour de France organisers were far from unaware what their riders were up to. Dumas himself spoke of 'medicine from the heart of Africa . . . healers laying on hands or giving out irradiating balms, feet plunged into unbelievable mixtures which could lead to eczema, so-called magnetised diets and everything else you could imagine. In 1953 and 1954 (Tours de France) it was all magic, medicine and sorcery. After that, they started reading _Vidal_ [the French medicine directory].' At best, the organisers carried out damage limitation when the doping got too blatant, as was the case in the 1955 Tour after the abandon of Jean Mallejac and Charly Gaul falling ill. Mallejac lost consciousness while ascending the Mont Ventoux and pulled out, almost certainly after using a 'bad batch' of drugs. Gaul was allegedly close to following suit, according to media reports of the time, because of the same batch. However, Gaul's director claimed in _L'Equipe_ that the rider had been victim of an attempted poisoning by being 'forced to dope'. Given the scandal surrounding Mallejac's abandon, the Tour issued a _communiqu\u00e9_ urging directors 'to watch how their riders take care of themselves' and advising that they should 'stop them using certain products that have not been prescribed by a doctor'. But that was as far as it went.\n\nSeven years later, as Bahamontes neared the end of his career, very little had changed. In the 1962 Tour, Gastone Nencini, the 1960 winner, and several other riders pulled out after eating what they claimed was rotten fish from the same hotel. The Tour organisers published a _communiqu\u00e9_ apparently proving their excuse was a lie, and warning grimly that 'the physical limits which athletes of various disciplines seek to attain are beyond all medical and psychological control'. However, they then suggested the best solution to a situation which they were incapable of solving was that Dumas should do a doctor's round of the riders' rooms each evening. The implication was that even if they could not stop them taking drugs, they would at least know what they were.\n\nIn that context, for Puig to be injecting his riders with calcium and other substances is hardly strange. However, to admit it in public was too blatant for the cycling establishment to swallow. Puig later stated that he 'only gave Bahamontes the injection because we couldn't find the race doctor in the team hotel'. Since there was no reason why Dumas should have been in the hotel, this excuse was ignored by the Tour authorities: they wanted Puig out. It is quite possible, of course, that Puig was only providing a badly-administered placebo to Bahamontes. As Robinson says: 'There was so much talk about what it does. \"You got to take this, you've got to take that\". A lot of it [the benefits of doping] is purely in your head.'\n\nAfter what was a bizarre abandon considering that by all accounts Bahamontes' injuries did not justify it, conspiracy theories abounded. One of the more popular was that Bahamontes was faced with a re-run of his Vuelta 1957 duel against Loro\u00f1o and psychologically could not take it. There were definitely parallels. Again Bahamontes had moved into a dominating position early in the Tour, surviving a wasp-sting, the blazing heat and the dreaded cobbled farm-tracks on the stage to Roubaix, to become sole leader of the Spanish team. No sooner had he done so, though, than Loro\u00f1o managed to counter-attack, not once but twice in two mountain stages in the Vosges, and move ahead in the overall. This was eerily reminiscent of the Vuelta stage from Valencia to Tortosa. For Bahamontes such a situation must have been impossible to accept, particularly as since his Vuelta defeat he had slowly been regaining a strong position in Spanish cycling. Now he was faced with that all-too-familiar scenario.\n\nThe season had started so well. In May Bahamontes had produced a dominating performance in the Tour of Asturias, his talismanic race. He won the first, the most mountainous stage, and led the race from start to finish before scooping the King of the Mountains jersey. On top of that the pace set by his Mobylette team was so intense that thirty-four of the seventy-five-strong peloton had abandoned by the finish. By then Bahamontes was showering his team-mates with stage wins. The only disagreeable incident for Mobylette during the race was when one of Bahamontes' team-mates, Rene Marigil, attempted to beat up an Italian rival for trying to get in a break by riding in the slipstream of the Italian team's car. Marigil was allowed to continue racing despite the controversy that followed, and even won a mountain stage. As a morale-boost Bahamontes could not have asked for more. Incidentally, his days of riding by bike to races like Asturias had long gone. As Bernard Ruiz says: 'The top riders of the time, like me and Bahamontes, earned more money than football players.' So, as one of Spain's top earning athletes, Bahamontes now travelled almost everywhere by aeroplane, car or train.\n\nBahamontes, though, was far less successful in his one venture abroad between the Vuelta and Tour, abandoning the GP Midi-Libre, then a one-day race, with cramp after a spectacular early mountain attack. Though he also pulled out after two stages of the Bicicleta Vasca, his last Tour warm-up race, it was suggested that his form was so good there was no point in him 'over-cooking it'. The only downside from Bahamontes' point of view was that the Spanish team's line-up was full of unfriendly faces like Ruiz and Loro\u00f1o. Bahamontes chose to make Ruiz, rather than Loro\u00f1o, the subject of his complaints. With hindsight it was an unwise move, though it revealed the depth of the disunity within the squad. Bahamontes said at the time: 'The whole line-up is wrong, but in particular the presence of Bernardo Ruiz, whom as everybody knows has been my public enemy number one for the last seven years. He envies me and I don't know why, but if he comes to France then I know I won't be able to expect anything from him at all. I suppose he might be useful as a _domestique_ , just like Loro\u00f1o. [Actually] if he comes, I refuse to be leader. He can be leader. I'll go as a _domestique_.' What particularly worried Bahamontes was that Ruiz and Puig were close, both being from the Levante area of Spain, and that Ruiz's far stronger character and veteran status would give him greater authority than the team manager. 'Ruiz is thirty-three years old and at that age should go for lesser objectives,' Bahamontes said. 'Everybody knows that if he goes to the Tour, he'll be the team manager because that's what he's always been. They ask him everything, right down to what the plans are for the stage and what time they ought to have dinner each night. I don't think he should be selected just because he won the [Vuelta] stage from Valencia to Tortosa.' Puig adopted his usual pose of sticking his head in the sand, claiming: 'Of course there will be unanimity. The race is so hard, Ruiz and Bahamontes are bound to get on.' In a sentence which neatly summed up Puig's inability to sort out internal team conflicts, he added: 'We'll agree on everything beforehand, just like we did in the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a in Bilbao.' Again it was Bahamontes who paid the price.\n\nThe Tour de France itself started brilliantly for Bahamontes. He was in two breaks on the first three stages and propelled himself into to fourth place overall. Significantly, at the same time Loro\u00f1o was most definitely on the back foot. After losing a little time on stage one \u2013 'the Belgians wouldn't let me move even a metre ahead' \u2013 Bahamontes bounced back the next day by making it into a move of nineteen that gained more than three minutes on 1956 winner Roger Walkowiak, and nearly five on France's rising star Jacques Anquetil. Twenty-four hours later, a timely shove by team-mate Su\u00e1rez propelled Bahamontes into another big break and he shot back up the overall classification to fourth, the best-placed of the favourites. The race was affected by a heatwave, which lasted ten days, and riders all but stampeded to take on water every time the race went past a drinking fountain. It was so debilitating that Charly Gaul abandoned on stage two because he could not stand the high temperatures. More importantly for Bahamontes was the incident that cost Loro\u00f1o his status as co-team leader. On the same day as Gaul's exit Loro\u00f1o decided to dismount and stand under a garden hose to cool down. He was enjoying his cold shower so much that by the time he came to his senses, more than quarter of an hour had passed, the race was miles ahead and he was fortunate to finish inside the time limit.\n\nStage four to Roubaix, however, marked the beginning of a relentless series of setbacks for Bahamontes. In one day alone he was stung by a wasp, hit hard in the eye by a bottle [flung unintentionally by another rider during the struggle to be first at a drinking fountain] and suffered a severe bout of sunstroke. The heat affected everyone. Of the one hundred and sixteen starters, twenty-eight abandoned in the first four days, while reporters' throats dried up so badly while dictating their copy by telephone they were reduced to swigging cough mixture to keep talking. At one point it looked as if Bahamontes was going to join the list of abandonments: he began weaving all over the road, dropping back from group to group. As he did so, he gave the Spanish correspondents covering the Tour more and more cause for alarm. '\"Sunstroke!\" Su\u00e1rez yelled at us when we drove alongside him and asked him what was wrong with Bahamontes,' recorded _El Mundo Deportivo's_ correspondent. The news from Dumas, the Tour doctor, was even more unsettling. 'Bahamontes had a kind of fit because of the heat,' he told the Spanish journalists, 'and he got off his bike, half-fainting. He recovered fairly quickly, though. When I put him back on it he was off like a rocket.' So much so that he regained eight minutes on the pack in three kilometres, albeit with some team support.\n\nPhotographs of Bahamontes at Roubaix after the stage show a miserable-looking figure; the swelling above his right eye caused by the wasp-sting was clearly visible. He was criticised by _El Mundo Deportivo_ 's man for failing to combat the sunstroke by putting lettuce leaves on his neck and nape 'as most riders do in extreme heat'. However, while Bahamontes had not lost time he was looking in trouble. Stage five, a longish grind from Roubaix to Charleroi in Belgium over some of the region's best-known cobbled climbs including the infamous Mur de Grammont, dealt Bahamontes a severe blow. Lightly-built climbers like Bahamontes are notoriously vulnerable to this kind of terrain because they cannot ride over the hills in low gears like the heavier Classics specialists. So while Bahamontes had survived the _pav\u00e9s_ of Roubaix, the Belgian murs took a punishing toll. The bunch split completely after an attack masterminded by Anquetil and riders reached the finish line in dribs and drabs. Bereft of team support, not even the encouragement provided by a solid wall of Belgian fans along the stage's one hundred and seventy kilometres could help Bahamontes. He slid from fourth to fourteenth overall. Loro\u00f1o saw his opportunity and took it with both hands. By sneaking into breaks in two stages in the Vosges mountains, Loro\u00f1o regained twenty-seven minutes on the main favourites, climbing thirty-eight places to seventh overall. Suddenly Bahamontes' role as sole team leader was severely undermined. The parallels between the Tour de France and the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a were evident, right down to Bahamontes' bizarrely passive attitude when his arch-rival went up the road. According to the Spanish team mechanic, Bahamontes' usual tactic when racing alongside Loro\u00f1o was to 'hide at the back of the bunch. Then if there was a break and the bunch split behind chasing, Bahamontes would sneak into the forward half without anybody noticing and he could claim he was protecting Loro\u00f1o's position as well as his own'. That was the usual scenario. However, one Spanish newspaper correspondent noted the change: 'When I saw Baha halfway through the second Vosges stage with the Loro\u00f1o break long gone, he was right at the rear of the main bunch, and I yelled, \"Always at the back!\" His only response was to smile.'\n\nAs Bahamontes slid from fourteenth to sixteenth, and Loro\u00f1o moved into the top ten, it was little wonder that his morale was sinking and that Puig should provide him with medical assistance. However, again with hindsight, it was not a wise move. 'Maybe a little lime spilled out of the syringe, but that's not why he abandoned,' was Puig's later interpretation of events. '[In fact] he wasn't ready to face up to the challenges of the Tourmalet [tackled the day after Bahamontes abandoned]. He was scared of failing in the mountains and he didn't have a strong enough sense of vocation.'\n\nBahamontes' business advisor, Evaristo Murtra, partly went along with Puig but like others he pointed out that the Federation and manager had failed to live up to their responsibilities by not designating Bahamontes as sole leader from the start of the Tour. 'Bahamontes' morale has suffered after seeing how much freedom Loro\u00f1o and Ruiz had,' Murtra told the press in a reference to Puig allowing Loro\u00f1o to get into two breaks in the Vosges without being reprimanded. 'Combined with the heat, the injection and his constantly being watched by the French, it all got too much for him.' Murtra had only turned up because he wanted to see his rider's attacks on the Tourmalet in person. Instead, both he and Bahamontes returned to Spain empty-handed, Murtra by aeroplane, Bahamontes by train, in a third-class compartment, which was all that the Federation were willing to pay for their fallen star.\n\nIf Loro\u00f1o's breakaways had provided a replay of Bahamontes' worst sporting nightmares, the knock-on effects of his abandon within the Federation were considerable. Not all of them were bad, though. The entire medical commission \u2013 three different doctors \u2013 resigned. This gave the Federation the opportunity to bring in a fresh generation of young medics who were not so inclined to accept at face value the quackery and outlandish cures that were so popular in cycling, as well as post-Civil War Spain. Even more importantly, Puig was gradually phased out and Dalmacio Langarica was brought in as coach for the 1958 Tour.\n\nFor Bahamontes, the arrival of Langarica was a huge turning point. He describes Langarica simply as 'the best coach in the Spanish team that I had, because he knew how to take decisions'. That was despite Langarica being a friend, former team-mate and regular room-mate of Loro\u00f1o's when he was a professional. Crucially, Langarica was far tougher than Puig. From the word go, Langarica told both Bahamontes and Loro\u00f1o in no uncertain terms that he was not going to take any nonsense from either of them. He also showed, albeit indirectly, which rider he favoured when he politely but firmly condemned Puig for allowing Loro\u00f1o to attack in the Vosges in 1957 when Bahamontes was already in a commanding position overall. 'Bahamontes is Spain's classiest rider, the greatest the country has ever known. While Loro\u00f1o did what he had to, it [the overall strategy of letting Loro\u00f1o attack] was throwing stones against our own roof,' Langarica was quoted as saying in an interview in August 1957. 'In that context, Bahamontes' abandon made perfect sense.'\n\nBahamontes will have welcomed this support even if it was clear Langarica did not believe a word of his explanation about the injection and attributed his abandon purely to his rivalry with Loro\u00f1o. Furthermore, unlike Puig, Langarica showed a keen understanding of Bahamontes' personality. 'Fede is like a child,' he used to say. 'If he doesn't like the people in charge of him, he'll lead you a merry dance. But if you know how to handle him, he'll come quietly enough.'\n\nOn 9 July, 1958, Bahamontes turned thirty. He could not have asked for a better birthday present: his first stage win in the Tour de France. The build-up to the victory on a short, sharp one hundred and twenty-kilometre stage through the Pyrenees from Pau to Luchon, was surprisingly straightforward. With the Aspin and the Peyresourde cols as the two main challenges of the day, Bahamontes needed no telling that it was a comparatively short distance from the summit of the Peyresourde down to Luchon, and if he gained enough time on the climb he could be in control. 'We got [team-mate Fernando] Manzaneque into a break with three French riders and then in the village of Sainte-Marie-de-Campan [at the foot of the Aspin] I hit the pedals hard twice, more than just at cruising speed, and left them all behind,' Bahamontes remembers. 'I overtook the rest of the guys ahead on the Aspin, and my advantage was one and a half minutes by the summit. The descent to Arrau was thirteen kilometres long and really awful, the hardest in the Pyrenees, but I actually gained thirty seconds, which ended up being fundamental. Then on the Peyresourde the race blew apart because Gaul and Geminiani attacked and I gave it even more on the climb, knowing that somebody had lit the fuse behind. Finally I got two minutes and a bit on Gaul and two and a half minutes on Bobet and Geminiani, and even though there were fifteen kilometres downhill left, I was determined not to get caught. I finished alone with about two minutes on the field. I'd promised my wife to do something dramatic and give Toledo a triumph to remember, and that's what happened.'\n\nHow come it looked so easy? There were a number of key differences between Bahamontes in 1957 and Bahamontes in 1958, not least that he was in exceptionally good form and morale. He finished sixth in the Vuelta after another bust-up with Loro\u00f1o, which cost them both the race. That was the last race where he would be directed by Luis Puig. 'Just as well he'd never direct me in the Tour again,' Bahamontes commented. Bahamontes nonetheless took a significant consolation prize in the King of the Mountains competition. Then he followed up by scoring his first stage win in the Giro. Bahamontes was part of a powerful Faema squad that year and had decided to use the Giro as Tour preparation. On stage four, with a summit finish in the ski station of Superga, Bahamontes inflicted stinging defeats on Charly Gaul and Loro\u00f1o, leading them home by twenty-seven and thirty-seven seconds respectively. Not huge, but enough to convince him that his decision to race the Giro had been the right one.\n\nAnother major difference was that on the 1958 Tour there was no Jes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o. After racing flat-out in both the Vuelta and Giro, Loro\u00f1o decided that the Tour would be asking too much of himself. His absence meant Bahamontes was finally the undisputed leader in a major Tour. In addition Bahamontes' relationship with his team-mates was apparently improving, albeit intermittently. The reported group cheating at the 1958 Spanish National Championships, categorically denied by Bahamontes, but given lavish eyewitness coverage in _El Mundo Deportivo_ , would seem to hint at this, too. According to _History of the Spanish National Championships_ by Javier Bodegas and Juan Dorronsoro, the 100-kilometre time-trial was completely fixed. In theory it was an individual event, but Bahamontes allegedly joined forces with two other Faema riders, first Salvador Botella, who waited for Bahamontes after a timely puncture, then Francisco Moreno, and the three rode as a unit over the second half of the course. To make matters worse, Bodegas and Dorronsoro claim, the police failed to stop traffic in either direction, allowing riders to benefit from assistance provided by motorbikes. Indeed, Bahamontes' illegal pacer crossed the finishing line just ahead of him. As a result of the alleged race-fixing, the favourite Loro\u00f1o had no chance despite building a fifty-second lead at halfway. He finally finished third behind Bahamontes and Botella.\n\nYet more significant than Loro\u00f1o's absence from the Tour was the change in the man behind the steering wheel in the Spanish national team. The replacement of Puig by Langarica meant Bahamontes could count on a degree of team loyalty, not least because it effectively ended Ruiz's role as the power behind the director's throne. However, Bahamontes respected Langarica for more than that: he also liked his team tactics and was willing to use them. 'Langarica dropped the previous director's strategies,' Bahamontes said in an interview at the time. 'He moved with the times. He was practical. Previously, we attacked where we could, but on the day I won we attacked at exactly the right moment to be sure I got my first of seven Tour stages. It was a daring move, but it was efficent, too.'\n\nCrucially, the Spanish took a large leaf out of the French team's book with Langarica drawing on the lessons learnt from Bahamontes' defeat the previous year. In 1957, after his superb start to the Tour, the French had refused to let Bahamontes go up the road under any circumstances, whereas Loro\u00f1o had been given a considerably longer leash. The tactic was to deliberately favour the less dangerous rider. This time round the boot was on the other foot and the switch in strategy was particularly effective in the Alps where Bahamontes gained a second stage win over the Vars and Izoard passes. Realising the squabbling French were willing to give Bahamontes some room for manoeuvre, Langarica encouraged Bahamontes to come up with a specific plan to win the stage. Initially doubtful, 'because plans are one thing and reality another', Bahamontes finally went along with Langarica since he believed the director had already got him his first Tour stage win in the Pyrenees. 'The night before we talked about the stage and Langarica said, \"You have to make the most of the war between the French and the way they're dealing with Gaul. They're all going to be watching each other, and you have to take advantage of that\",' Bahamontes recalled. Sure enough, after the Vars climb had whittled down the main pack to just a dozen, Bahamontes broke away on the Izoard, crossing the summit with a fifty-seven-second advantage on his closest pursuer, the Italian Nino Catalano. When he reached Brian\u00e7on to claim his second stage win, his advantage had only dropped to fifty seconds. It indicated that his poor descending was no longer automitically the handicap it had been.\n\nIn the past Bahamontes had used the tactics of eating on the descents, so he could attack with a full stomach on the next, and making early breaks to rack up points in the King of the Mountains competitions before easing back after a couple of cols. However, these strategies limited him, almost deliberately so. If the other contenders for the overall prizes did not 're-fuel' on the descents it was at least partly because they knew they risked losing time. In 1958, though, Bahamontes partly changed tack, and it is no coincidence that at the same time his descending radically improved. Bahamontes puts this down to greater experience, but it is clear from the way he won those two stages that his previous unwritten, unspoken agreement with the other favourites that he would stay away to the finish after making an early attack no longer applied. Rather than just focus on the King of the Mountains title, for the first time in the Tour Bahamontes was starting to think bigger. Now he was able to trust his sports director to come up with a plan that did not weaken his status compared with other rivals inside the Spanish camp. The reward was not only two stage wins but the King of the Mountains title as well. _L'Equipe_ still criticised him, though: 'In any other rider, what Bahamontes did would have produced admiration and respect. Not many other riders can get two big mountain stage wins, easily get the overall in the King of the Mountains title and finish eighth overall after being forty minutes down on the race leader prior to the Pyrenees. Only an athlete like Bahamontes can pull off an achievement of this calibre. But it loses its edge when we consider what a rider of his class is actually capable of doing. His tactics are extremely simplistic, and worthy of condemnation, consisting of playing dead in the first few days of the race so he loses any importance to the main favourites.'\n\nThe judgment is unduly harsh, but it contains some grains of truth. Bahamontes had been ill in the first part of the race, suffering from suspected appendicitis, but even so he had under-exploited his talent, and that needed to change. Not that Langarica could resolve all of Bahamontes' defects: he still had an almost pathological inability to race in cold weather. The day after he won in Grenoble, as the rain teemed down Bahamontes was dropped by Gaul on the Col de Luitel, the second of five Alpine cols. On a stage with nearly one hundred kilometres of climbing Bahamontes ended up losing five seconds short of half an hour on Gaul and dropped to tenth overall. He pulled back a couple of places overall in the race's final seventy-four-kilometre time-trial at Besancon to reach Paris in eighth place. Once again it showed that even if he was nowhere near as good as specialists like Jacques Anquetil or Roger Rivi\u00e8re, at the very least he could hold his own. And the following year in the Tour de France, that ability was to prove crucial.\nChapter Eight\n\n#### 1959 \u2013 'That Man From Toledo'\n\nLuis Ota\u00f1o has barely opened the door of his fourth floor flat before he comes out with a joke about the rider he helped guide to victory in the Tour de France, back in 1959. And it is not a polite one. 'I bet you anything in the world, Federico's asked you for money to do his biography, hasn't he?' he says. Before I have time to deny it, he yells through to his wife in the kitchen, 'Hey, I told you, Bahamontes asked him for money!' Chuckling to himself, Ota\u00f1o leads me through to a sunlit living room. We are high above the town centre traffic in Renteria, just outside San Sebastian. Through the windows the green foothills of the Spanish Pyrenees are visible in the distance. Just beyond them, but out of sight, lie the roads and climbs of France where more than fifty years ago Ota\u00f1o rode as part of the Spanish team who had Bahamontes at its head.\n\nCareer-wise, the Pyrenees mark a dividing line for Ota\u00f1o. On home soil he recorded numerous top-five finishes in the Vuelta, including second overall behind Raymond Poulidor in 1964. However, once on the other side of the mountains it was a different story: Ota\u00f1o rode in eight Tours de France and each time it was purely as a _domestique_ , a behind-the-scenes worker for whoever was Spanish team leader. That included Federico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes, of course. 'But not Fede's personal _domestique_ , eh,' Ota\u00f1o says with a grin. 'That was [Juan] Campillo. Bahamontes used to have him wash his socks and clean his shoes, he did.' The bald, sturdy man with a piercing stare lets rip a cackle. 'Me, I used to argue with Fede all the time, asking him, \"Why are you doing this?\" and \"Why are you doing that?\" even though I was younger than him. And he would mutter, \"Anquetil this\" or \"Anquetil that\". If Anquetil hadn't been there or if there had been more summit finishes, I'm sure Fede would have won a lot more.'\n\nOf Bahamontes' eleven team-mates on that 1959 Tour, Ota\u00f1o is one of three still living. So what was Bahamontes like to work for? 'Odd,' Ota\u00f1o says. 'On and off the bike. For example, he used to insist on us not eating any tomatoes for dinner because he said they were bad for our health, and we'd ignore him. When Loro\u00f1o used to drink a bottle of wine a night, that would piss him off even more because even a little wine used to make Baha dizzy. If he didn't like something then he tried to make sure none of us had it.' Not that they paid him much attention. Nor did the top French riders when he addressed them. 'Mostly, they'd laugh at his French. He'd say, \" _J'ai . . . gran fusil_ , _j'ai . . . gran fusil ['I have the top gun']\",'_ says Ota\u00f1o.\n\nCommunication was not at a premium in any case. Unlike today the countdown to racing did not start with anything remotely approaching a meeting to discuss strategy. Instead, Ota\u00f1o says: 'We'd talk a little bit among ourselves, decide who would help who. But that was as far as it went. There was no real plan, no tactics. At most, \"Wait for him if he punctures\". We'd mostly all wait for Fede when he did puncture, even Bernardo Ruiz in 1958. It'd always be pretty dramatic, though, lots of people shouting, \"Fede's punctured! Fede's punctured!\" In fact, everything was a drama with Fede.'\n\nDespite their antipathy, Ota\u00f1o agrees with Bahamontes on one key point: that incoming team director Dalmacio Langarica played a crucial role in pulling them together, and that he did not beat around the bush when it came to letting the riders know who was boss, either. 'Langarica was very tough, but good. He knew what he was doing,' says Ota\u00f1o. 'I remember when he came into the Tour de France hotel he brought a big walking stick with him. He put it down the middle of the dining table where we were sitting as if to say, \"Don't mess with me\". Only [Jes\u00fas] Manzaneque and [Antonio] Su\u00e1rez didn't pay much attention to him. Su\u00e1rez was always banging on about how he'd won the Vuelta and the Nationals, and they both wanted their own chance to go for the overall.' In the event, Manzaneque finished fourteenth in Paris, and Su\u00e1rez abandoned.\n\nDespite two 'renegades', support from nine team-mates was not bad compared with what Bahamontes had been used to on previous Grand Tours. However, some of that number are convinced that Bahamontes only succeeded because of them. Speaking in an interview in 2008, Jos\u00e9 Gomez del Moral said: 'If it wasn't for me, Bahamontes wouldn't have won. There was as much about him that was cack-handed as there was pure talent. He should have won four or five Tours and he only won one. The rest of the Spaniards finished outside the time limit and I was the one who guided him through the Dolomites.' Since the Dolomites did not feature on the 1959 Tour itinerary, or any other for that matter, it is difficult to know how seriously to take Gomez del Moral's comments. That said, his lack of sympathy towards Bahamontes is notably similar to Ota\u00f1o and his description of how he first fell out with Bahamontes sounds plausible enough. 'I first came across him in a race in Ja\u00e9n [in Andalusia], a hard one through a lot of hills that was one hundred and fifty kilometres long. It was called the Turkey Race because it took place at Christmas and because apart from a cash prize you got a turkey. My father heard Bahamontes boast he was going to give us a feather each from the turkey. Finally, though, I won.' By 1959, however, it was Bahamontes who ruled the roost.\n\nAs a rider twenty kilos heavier than Bahamontes, and no climber, Ota\u00f1o's main job was to lead the pack on the flat and watch out for breaks. Bahamontes required a lot of 'nannying', particularly when it came to being shepherded through the bunch. Ota\u00f1o reveals his subversive sense of humour again when he grudgingly admits that Bahamontes was not the worst strategist. 'He wasn't bad. He knew how to calculate, even if he calculated wrongly most of the time. On the stage to Aurillac, for example, he told us, \"Work until such-and-such a point, and then I'll go for it\". And he did.'\n\nWith his severely limited capability in the mountains, Ota\u00f1o's direct contact with Bahamontes was mainly in the early stages, as well as providing support when the climber was in trouble. He had a particularly inglorious personal mission: pushing his leader along on the rainy stages when Bahamontes was having one of his off-days. One of those came in 1958 on the stage into Aix-les-Bains, won by Charly Gaul, when Bahamontes lost thirty minutes. 'It was nearly dark, thunder and stormy, almost nobody around and Bahamontes was crying, grabbing any food he could get, and Langarica kept on yelling at me, \"Help him! Help him!\"' The pair finally finished twenty-nine minutes fifty-five seconds down. 'If I hadn't stayed with him, I'd have been second,' Ota\u00f1o says with no indication of resentment, just what he considers to be an indisputable fact. 'He would say, \"I'm the best, I'm the best\", but we pushed him just the same, his hand holding on to your leg. And he would fret while we did it, saying, \"What if somebody's attacking now?\" Us _domestiques_ did nothing more than push the big names, you see?'\n\nA solid ride in the Vuelta, when he finished eighth overall, guaranteed Ota\u00f1o a slot in the 1959 Tour team. However, nothing he says suggests he had any enthusiasm for Bahamontes' quest that year. This is more surprising than it sounds. As Charly Wegelius, Britain's top mountain _domestique_ in the last decade, has pointed out: 'Even if you don't like your leader, the fact that you're all riding together with a common objective ends up binding you. You get emotionally involved. It's inevitable.' Not so, it seems, for Ota\u00f1o. He went through the motions all right, but he seems devoid of any passion for the Tour in general, let alone for Spain's first win in it. Part of this lack of motivation could be because there was no guaranteed money from the Federation for taking part, not even expenses. 'I once got called up to Madrid to go over my taxes, and they said, \"You've raced the Tour, so you've earned x\". And I said, \"No, I've not earned a penny\". The same went for the World Championships. The kit the Federation gave you was rubbish, right down to the trousers [for wearing in the evenings]. We got nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a bike. We had to pay for all our equipment, right down to the inner tubes of our wheels. All we got was what we could make in prizes. I often thought somebody must have run off with the money from the travel expenses we were supposed to get.'\n\nAs if that was not enough to lower morale, the Spanish also had the most ramshackle equipment of all the top teams. 'In 1958, my bike had a range of gears from fourteen to twenty-two,' says Ota\u00f1o. 'I didn't have any higher gears. For time-trials, climbs, the lot. Try getting over the Alps with a bike like that. Bahamontes might have had slightly better gearing, maybe a twenty-four, but not much. Still, that bike was an improvement on the equipment Bahamontes used to have. I can remember when he first raced up here in Euskadi, he didn't have enough money to buy any race shorts; he'd wear a pair of those baggy dungarees like mechanics used to have.'\n\nIt was not just their clothing and equipment that were dire. With two mechanics, two _soigneurs_ , a sports director and two jeeps for twelve riders, the back-up team was stretched to the limits, although any accidents that the consequent fatigue inevitably caused were seen as amusing rather than annoying. Indeed, when a Spanish mechanic fell asleep at the wheel during the 1959 Tour, and fell out of the vehicle, his misfortune was greeted with hoots of laughter. No one seemed to be worried if he was injured.\n\nIf Ota\u00f1o and the other Spanish riders were not one hundred per cent concentrated on the racing, it was hard to blame them considering they were almost economic refugees from a half-starved Spain. Ota\u00f1o says: 'The best thing about the Tour was the food. In the Vuelta all we'd get was meat so tough it was black. It looked like they'd taken a horse and cart and cut the whole thing to pieces, cart included. To follow would be boiled rice pudding in paper, and the paper would be soaked in the liquid from the rice so you'd eat that, too. In France, you'd get some amazing food, some of it even came wrapped up . . . chicken, all sorts.'\n\nHowever, despite the better 'fuel' on offer in France, Ota\u00f1o did not make it to Paris. He had to abandon on stage thirteen. 'It was on the stage to Aurillac,' he says. 'It was baking hot, the tarmac was all twisted in the heat, and I punctured close to a control point. There wasn't anybody there, but I found a bag lying on the ground with an inner tube in it, so I used that. Then I punctured again, and [French rival Jean] Robic gave me another inner tube, and I changed it again. By that point Bahamontes was twenty minutes ahead and there were forty kilometres left to race. I said to myself, \"What's the point of killing myself to finish if I'm going to be outside the time limit?\", so I quit on the spot. Langarica wasn't too happy. He said they would have let me back into the race if I'd finished the stage. But there were four of us Spaniards outside the limit that day, so I don't know what would have happened.'\n\nThough not there to see it in person Ota\u00f1o was not surprised Bahamontes won the Tour that year. 'To win in 1959 he needed Langarica, that was for sure. Without Langarica he wouldn't have done it. But we could see it coming. He was in good shape. He's got a great _palmares._ What surprises me, though, is that he didn't win more.' It was not easy for Ota\u00f1o to discover why. Even though they were team-mates for two years in the trade team Margnat in the early 1960s, Bahamontes tended to keep his own counsel. 'There were stages like one in Brian\u00e7on in 1962 when we asked him why he hadn't won instead of some Belgian non-climber [Emile Daems], and he muttered something about Anquetil. Very odd, because Baha could have won it.' The professional relationship between the pair ended as soon as Ota\u00f1o packed his suitcase in the Margnat team hotel one autumn evening in 1963 and headed for another squad. On a personal level, it remains non-existent.\n\n'I read he said that if he'd had the support that Pedro Delgado or Miguel Indurain had, he'd have won several Tours,' Ota\u00f1o says now. 'All I can say is that some days us _domestiques_ would be going well, on others we'd be out the back with our tongues sticking out. We'd hold on for as long as possible; we'd try to be there. But we did what we could, whatever the circumstances. And he never said thank you.' In anybody else that lack of gratitude might be considered rude. But given Bahamontes' constant reference to how he 'moved alone', as well as his tendency to criticise team-mates for being disloyal or useless, it is hardly that surprising. What is strange is that Bahamontes did have some solid, loyal _domestiques_ , like Julio San Emeterio and Juan Campillo; indeed, from his days at Margnat, Andr\u00e9 Darrigade still prides himself on the amount of work he did for Bahamontes. True, nobody in the 1950s would have gone to the extremes of Britain's twenty-first century star Mark Cavendish, whose first words after a victory are almost always to thank his team-mates. But Bahamontes' relationships, even by 1959 when he no longer had to worry about Loro\u00f1o or Ruiz, never seem to have been fully functional. That did not even change under his greatest manager, Fausto Coppi, whose dealings with his _domestiques_ appear to have been extremely good. 'Compared with say Eddy Merckx, Coppi's _domestiques_ were more menial,' says William Fotheringham, who wrote the biography _Fallen Angel_ about the Italian champion. 'Coppi was more austere and certainly more capricious, even getting them to look after his daughter while he was with his mistress. I certainly can't imagine Coppi playing cards with them and larking about like Merckx did. They also never got to race for themselves in big races, unlike Merckx's. It was more feudal. That said, Coppi clearly appreciated them and they were devoted to him.' That is not something that can be said of Bahamontes.\n\nPerhaps part of the problem was Bahamontes' character. Climbers tend to be reclusive. Charly Gaul certainly was; so was Britain's best climber, Robert Millar. 'I think Millar's default mode was suspicion,' says his biographer, Richard Moore. 'He distrusted people, which made him an awkward leader. Yet at Peugeot he had great support from [team-mates] Allan Peiper and Sean Yates. Ronan Pensec was fond of him as well as Pascal Simon, though Millar felt the French generally resented him. He wasn't really suited to leading a team; he couldn't rally the troops.' However, neither Millar nor Gaul laid into team-mates with as much relentless gusto as Bahamontes did throughout his career.\n\nAnother reason _domestiques_ often have such poor opinions of their leaders, and vice versa, is connected to the claustrophobic lifestyle they endure during a major Tour. For nearly a month there is no escape from the other members of the team: they eat, sleep, room and ride together. The constant travelling means there is no opportunity to sneak off to the cinema or for a quick coffee as there would be in, say, a major football tournament. The only valid comparison in sport for such lengthy, intimate and unwanted contact with another person of the same sex is probably ocean racing. That, in turn, has parallels to life in prison. Both are intense bonding-experiences while counting the days until you are back on _terra firma_ , or on the right side of the walls. In cycling, once the final stage is over and the celebrations start, those harsh memories tend to fade very fast and the benefits of bonding remain. However, during the two hours I talk to Ota\u00f1o there is no sense whatsoever that he is proud to have been part of the first Spanish team to win the Tour de France. His attitude is partly because of the contradiction that underpins professional cycling: it is the only team sport where an individual wins. So no matter how many kilometres of pushing their leader they do, how often they clean his shoes, how many hours of the day they spend together and how many rice-paper containers they eat, the rest of the squad receives almost no recognition in return. If they had won football's World Cup, they would barely be able to get out of the front door without somebody offering to buy them a drink or do their shopping.\n\nThis degree of neglect strikes home even harder when Ota\u00f1o's wife comes in halfway through the interview, camera in hand and takes a picture of me talking to her husband. There could hardly be a more graphic illustration of how completely forgotten Ota\u00f1o's contribution to one of a handful of sporting highpoints in an impoverished, war-torn, politically repressed country, has been. So on the day, fifty-two years later, when a stray foreign journalist turns up to talk about the 1959 Tour, Ota\u00f1o and his wife want a photograph for their album, if only to be sure it really happened. Strange as it sounds, my only regret about interviewing Ota\u00f1o is that it mattered to him and his wife that much.\n\nThe start of Federico Bahamontes' _annus mirabilis_ was predictably dogged by the latest in his disputes with Jes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o. To his credit, Bahamontes had spent most of the previous six months avoiding his arch-rival. During the winter he had deliberately chosen not to re-sign for Faema, where the pair would have remained team-mates in name at least, opting instead to race for Fausto Coppi's Tricolfilina squad. Bahamontes had prepared the ground carefully for his move by inviting Coppi to go greyhound hunting with him in Toledo during cycling's closed season. Coppi, partly drawn by curiosity, and partly by his interest in signing Bahamontes, was keen to accept. After a morning's hunting, a midday meal of typical Madrid stew and some joking over how to drink wine out of a wineskin that invariably ends up with wine all over the novice's face, Coppi 'popped the question'. Coppi's logic was simple: as 1959 was to be his last season he would be racing more in spirit than anything else and he needed a star rider. Bahamontes' attempts to bluff and make his future employer nervous by pretending he had not heard the question, failed completely. 'You heard me perfectly,' Coppi told him. But even Bahamontes was not expecting what Coppi told him next: that he could win the Tour.\n\nBahamontes has since claimed that this was the turning point for which he had been waiting. Not so much for joining the team, who turned out to be far weaker than he would have liked, or the half a million pesetas a year wages [\u00a385,000 in modern money] which he never fully received, but because of the faith an international star (and double Tour winner and a rider considered a pioneer in so many areas) was prepared to show in him.\n\nThe deal was agreed there and then and Bahamontes' sadly brief spell as a team-mate of Coppi's began. Given that Coppi would only live for another year, and that 1959 was Bahamontes' most successful, what would have happened if Bahamontes and Coppi had collaborated together for longer? But the little time they had together they used to the full.\n\nThere were several reasons why Coppi worked so well with Bahamontes, says Raphael Geminiani. For instance, the older man realised the degree to which the younger rider's real potential had been underexploited. 'Coppi had his team, and his sponsor, though not a lot of money, and he knew that Bahamontes was a climber, and a climber in the Tour always plays a pivotal role,' explains Geminiani, 'So he told Bahamontes to forget the King of the Mountains and stick with Anquetil and Rivi\u00e8re. He told him to switch strategy and he gained his trust. It's as simple as that. He transformed him.'\n\nBut it was not just mind-games that Coppi was so good at. As Geminiani points out, the other techniques for racing which the Italian used as a rider, and briefly as a team director, were way ahead of his times. 'Coppi operated with a level of authority about all sorts of things that nobody else had,' says Geminiani. 'He was really advanced in terms of race strategy, training, equipment, nutrition. He was a pioneer in a lot of things. He knew how to direct a team when director and he inspired me as a manager. To give an example, Coppi's principles in the evening were to let the riders have their bath and massage, talk to them afterwards, but never discuss the next day's racing until after their meal. Then out the strategy would come: this, that, that, this, that . . . like a game of chess. Not before and certainly not five minutes before the start. That way, the message really sinks in.' With an impulsive rider, that was not always straightforward. But as Langarica observed, Bahamontes had a child-like nature, meaning that if treated the right way he would usually come round to your point of view.\n\nHowever, allying with Coppi would not help on a day-to-day basis in the event itself where riders again raced in national teams. In the last few weeks before the Tour the question of how Loro\u00f1o and Bahamontes could possibly race under the same flag intensified. Bahamontes, with his usual direct style, had made it quite clear what his position was. 'It's him or me,' he told Langarica in private conversations. On the record he was only slightly more polite. 'We haven't spoken in over a year and I won't eat at the same table as him,' Bahamontes told the Spanish press. 'But if he's leader, I'll play my part. He'll have my help, even though I don't actually rate him as a rider.' Loro\u00f1o was even more uncompromising. He insisted he would not support any other Spanish rider under any circumstances, and 'particularly not that man from Toledo'. To complicate matters further, another Spaniard, Antonio Su\u00e1rez, had won the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a in April. He also claimed that he could be a good leader of the Spanish squad in France. Langarica finally decided to go for Bahamontes and dropped Loro\u00f1o, a choice 'that man from Toledo' unsurprisingly thought was the right one. 'I could win the Tour and Loro\u00f1o couldn't,' Bahamontes reasoned later. 'And Loro\u00f1o hadn't won a single race in the whole of 1959, either.'\n\nHowever, the situation got completely out of hand when Langarica called all the riders to an emergency meeting in the Spanish Federation's offices to explain his decision. At the same time a list of the Tour riders was published outside the office building. 'In those days,' Bahamontes recalls, 'the line-up was as important in Spain as whoever got to play in the football World Cup.' Loro\u00f1o refused point blank to accept his exclusion and the conversation grew more and more heated. Then when he heard Su\u00e1rez had been admitted to the Tour team, talking gave way to shouting. Loro\u00f1o stormed out, slamming the door behind him. 'A few minutes later a gentleman whom I had never seen before came in asking for me,' Langarica recalled in an interview with _Informaciones._ 'He said to me, \"You can't direct a Spanish team because you are an undesirable Commie Separatist\".' Provoked by what was arguably one of the most insulting of insults in 1950s Spain, Langarica lashed out at the fan, who responded by thumping him back. 'I must confess,' Langarica said rather laconically later, 'that I lacked enough internal calm and I reacted violently.' The fighting only stopped when one of Langarica's fingers was broken after he swung a particularly enthusiastic punch. Then, as Langarica was making his way downstairs to leave the building, the scuffle broke out again.\n\nThe Loro\u00f1o supporter \u2013 rumoured to be a journalist from _La Gaceta del Norte_ \u2013 was finally ejected, but the press were waiting outside and the news spread fast. An overly frank telephone interview Langarica gave during the row to a 'friendly' journalist turned out to have been taped and the resulting conversation published verbatim. It ensured that the latest Bahamontes-Loro\u00f1o row remained in the headlines for several days. The revenge of Loro\u00f1o's fans did not end there, either: a few days later, while on the Tour, Langarica learnt that his bike shop in Bilbao had been attacked and its front window broken. Throughout the race he received anonymous hate-mail. Loro\u00f1o made a last-minute unsuccessful appeal to Langarica to ride in France, saying he would accept team orders. But he recognised how badly things had got out of hand and belatedly acknowledged the decision to leave him behind. His supporters' behaviour earned him a fine, though, as well as a two-month suspension from racing.\n\nBahamontes, meanwhile, told Langarica that he would have no regrets about excluding Loro\u00f1o. 'I told him I'd show him what I could do and I'd make [1958 winner] Charly Gaul suffer in the process!'\n\nLeaving Loro\u00f1o at home united the Spanish team. In a Tour which French cycling historians believe their country lost because of internal divisions that was no small matter. Bahamontes, though, was still as insecure as ever. No sooner had he seen off Loro\u00f1o than he began to worry about Su\u00e1rez's loyalty instead. But even he acknowledged the significance of Loro\u00f1o's absence. 'The atmosphere in the team will be better because of the absence of one of our team-mates,' Bahamontes rather smugly told _L'Equipe._ 'Our team is more cohesive than last year.'\n\nBahamontes had few other pre-Tour requests apart from asking for all the Spanish newspapers to be delivered to him twice a week. 'I want to be sure which of the journalists are my friends,' he said to the correspondent of Spanish sports daily _MARCA._ It was a warning he clearly intended to go around the press room. However, Bahamontes knew that he could count on one loyal supporter all the way around France. Jacques Daud\u00e9 was a French restaurant owner who became a fan after the ice-cream incident on the Romeyere in 1954. Daud\u00e9 followed Bahamontes throughout the 1959 Tour, paying his own way and organising sweepstakes on a Bahamontes' victory among the journalists. Bahamontes would always stop immediately after each stage to talk to Daud\u00e9. In return Daud\u00e9 would invariably produce a bottle of Perrier, a comb and some eau-de-cologne for Bahamontes to perform his post-race _toilette_ while he held on to the Spaniard's bike frame.\n\nWith Loro\u00f1o gone and Ruiz missing, Bahamontes was the only member of the Spanish squad with real Tour experience. Of his eleven team-mates who boarded a flight to France for the race start at Mulhouse, Su\u00e1rez was now the only possible threat to his authority. How much of a challenge Suar\u00e9z posed is hard to estimate. He was four years younger than Bahamontes and had his Vuelta win to reinforce his credibility, whereas Bahamontes had made another controversial abandon in his home race. Following a blistering start, including a spectacular stage win in Granada, Bahamontes had missed some crucial moves in the second week. After falling out with Fausto Coppi, Bahamontes competed in the Vuelta 'on loan' for the K.A.S. team. Coppi was particularly unhappy when he finally made it into a break only for Bahamontes to promptly chase it down. Bahamontes eventually pulled out on stage eleven, allegedly in protest after five of his key rivals from Faema were re-admitted despite failing to make the cut-off time. However, according to _Viva La Vuelta_ , the history of the race by Lucy Fallon and Adrian Bell, when asked for an explanation Bahamontes spat out: 'Because it's easier to go by car.' Bahamontes later alleged another reason: that he abandoned as the result of an anthrax infection, a disease usually affecting those working with animals. Yet more reports from the time suggest he had appendicitis.\n\nFurthermore, in June Bahamontes lost the Spanish national championships, a time-trial round Madrid, to Su\u00e1rez. Conversely, he came within a whisker of winning the Tour de Suisse that month despite a painfully poor start. Indeed, he commented later: 'I remember some woman in a bikini pushing me up a climb. I was creeping.' But he then picked up his form so fast that he took two stages, the King of the Mountains and had received 'an offer to buy the race off me'. This he refused, perhaps unwisely given he did not win. Yet despite those results Bahamontes still felt the need to assert his leadership once and for all. As usual with Bahamontes, there was only one way he knew to do that: attack. But this time he did things slightly differently: rather than wait for the mountains, Bahamontes went for it on the flat.\n\nThe Tour's first stage from Mulhouse to Metz was held in a downpour. It was the kind of weather that would normally have had Bahamontes grumbling at the back of the peloton. Instead he went on the rampage. Forty kilometres from the finish he suddenly lunged out of the pack. Two more riders, Rolf Graf of Switzerland and Frenchman Michel Vermeulin went with him. Fourteen others finally bridged across, and in a breakneck finish on a circuit through Metz they opened a gap of more than a minute. It was a sign of how fast they were going that the average speed for the stage was above forty-two kilometres an hour, which was very high for the era. Andr\u00e9 Darrigade took the stage, but the rest of Bahamontes' main rivals for the yellow jersey were nowhere. Best of all for 'that man from Toledo', nor was Su\u00e1rez. It was an audacious move and one which meant any attempt by Su\u00e1rez to claim the Spanish leadership had, at least partly, been stomped on. 'Su\u00e1rez had tried to break away earlier on several occasions, but it did not work out,' _MARCA_ 's correspondent wrote that evening. 'His problem is he doesn't like the rain.' Neither did Bahamontes, or so his rivals thought, but he had stolen a march on them of one minute twenty-nine seconds. 'It's very important I've done this because it shows my team-mates I'm not just here to win the King of the Mountains prize,' Bahamontes told reporters afterwards. 'This time I'm after the overall as well.'\n\nThe extent of Bahamontes' fear of Su\u00e1rez was shown later by his actions on stage eleven from Bagneres de Bigorre to St. Gaudens when Bahamontes attacked early on with Charly Gaul. The stage was structured so that the two big climbs of the day, the Aspin and Peyresourde, were crossed a long way from the finish, yet Bahamontes could not resist the opportunity. Bahamontes knew he and Gaul had no real chance of staying away, but he persuaded his unwilling accomplice to continue their near-suicidal attack. Bahamontes recalled: 'I had to shout at him all the way through a village to convince him.' The reason for Bahamontes' enthusiasm was that he had learnt Su\u00e1rez had been dropped from the bunch.\n\nBut if stage one had given Bahamontes the upper hand in his battle to ensure he was sole Spanish leader of the 1959 Tour de France, then stage two from Metz to Namur showed Su\u00e1rez was not willing to lie down and take his punishment so easily. Close to the finish he launched several attacks. His multiple moves failed to work out, though, and Bahamontes made a counter-charge at the finish on the steep uphill climb to the fortress of Namur. Only Gaul could follow Bahamontes. Just when it seemed they would be fighting for the yellow jersey, a policeman stationed at the entrance to one of the fortress's numerous tunnels misdirected the pair. By the time Bahamontes and Gaul had found their way out of the tunnel and on to the proper route again they had been caught by the peloton and they all reached the finish together. Su\u00e1rez complained bitterly afterwards that Bahamontes had failed to let him 'ride my own race, one that does no one any harm, particularly as all the favourites were asleep'. Bahamontes responded: 'Even if it had worked out, all we'd have got would have been a stage win.' He was clearly sticking to his line that the idea of Su\u00e1rez fighting for the overall classification was inconceivable.\n\nIf the Spanish were merely bickering, the French were riven by serious in-fighting. Sprinter Darrigade, the race leader, and the French squad's co-leader Jacques Anquetil were now refusing to talk to each other. Anquetil had apparently not taken kindly to Darrigade working in the first day's break which had directly helped Bahamontes. It looked like a minor tiff, but in fact it was just the beginning of the French team's troubles. The underlying problem was that all of their top contenders were in the same squad. It contained Anquetil, three-times Tour winner Louison Bobet, 1958 runner-up Raphael Geminiani and the up-and-coming Roger Rivi\u00e8re. Team trainer Marcel Bidot had tried to avoid conflicts before the start with the so-called 'Poigny pact' between all four under which they agreed to work for the common goal of a French win. 'It was risky having so many big names in the same team,' Bahamontes recognises. 'But there was more to it than that. Anquetil and Rivi\u00e8re were both time-triallists and that intensified their rivalry. They disliked each other off the bike, too. As for Bobet and Geminiani, they were at the end of their careers and this Tour represented their last chance to go out on top. Finally, when you're only in the same team for one race like the Tour, money becomes a lot more important, too.'\n\nThings had gone awry between the 'Big Four' in the previous year's Tour. Geminiani partly lost the race in the Alps because Rivi\u00e8re and Anquetil had been unwilling to help him. When Geminiani reached the finish line he realised his best chance of winning the Tour had gone up in smoke and he accused Anquetil and Rivi\u00e8re of being 'more treacherous than Judas'. That hardly augured well for the 1959 race. However, in addition to such a strong senior squad, there were three other French teams, the so-called 'regionals', who might lend a hand. Indeed, forty per cent of the riders in the Tour that year were French. For Bahamontes, his best hope was that there were too many big names in one single squad for power to be shared successfully. As Bahamontes put it with his usual directness: 'Which director was going to be brave enough to argue with any or all of them, and even more so when the Tour was the one race that they all rode for the same team?'\n\nThe Spanish team was almost unrecognisable at the end of stage three. Just like the rest of the peloton, they were covered in mud from head to foot, having ridden more than half the course through an interminable series of treacherous, waterlogged country lanes in northern France. By the time they reached the finish at the Roubaix velodrome, their nerves were shattered and their bodies jangled by the huge cobblestones that pockmark that part of the country. _MARCA_ rather predictably dubbed the stage 'Hell'. The Spaniards suffered twelve punctures between them and Rene Marigil damaged his bike so badly he had to change it three times. Su\u00e1rez had to change his twice. Remarkably, Bahamontes neither punctured nor crashed. Others were not so fortunate. While most of the Spaniards, including Bahamontes, had avoided the one big pile-up of the day, 1947 winner Jean Robic fractured one of his fingers. He struggled on but never fully recovered and was finally eliminated for falling too far behind on the stage to Chalone-sur-Sa\u00f4ne, just two days before the finish.\n\nWhile the Spaniards were never experts in racing over cobbles and had enough trouble staying upright, the battle for the overall continued and the classification had changed considerably. Fortunately for Bahamontes, though, they were not important in the long-term. The biggest change had come after an opportunist ten-man move, not containing any top favourites, had broken away early on the Grammont 'Wall' in Belgium, which had caused Bahamontes such grief in 1957. Since none of the riders was considered to be any real threat, the break was allowed to gain more than eleven minutes on the main peloton. The French were particularly happy to see it go, gambling that their one representative in it, Robert Cazala, would be fastest on home soil in the velodrome. The gamble paid off. Cazala, who was only in his second year as a professional, not only won the stage but found himself leading the biggest bike race in the world. He would stay in the yellow jersey for a further six days, the highpoint of his career.\n\nFor the next week the race wound its way first westwards to the Atlantic, then southwards to the foot of the Pyrenees at Bayonne. Bahamontes concentrated on staying out of trouble. 'There is a midweek time-trial, which though it's short, is where I would like to make my presence known,' Bahamontes told reporters early on in the Tour. 'But essentially I'm riding with the same kind of strategy that Gaul did in 1958: lay low and wait for the mountains.' Cunningly, he even opted to shadow Gaul, who had a much stronger team to back him up. Though not particularly great mountain riders, they were experts at sheltering their climber against attacks by the French and Belgian squads. Where one climber could shelter, Bahamontes reasoned, so could two.\n\nIf Bahamontes' spirits were rising 'the further away we get from those _pav\u00e9s_ and the horrible weather in the north', the race itself suffered a major tragedy en route when a five-year-old child was hit and killed by a vehicle from the Tour's publicity caravan on the stage to Rennes.\n\nThe time-trial on stage six was won by Roger Rivi\u00e8re, though it had little long-term significance. However, during the race against the clock Bahamontes felt he had been the victim of yet another French 'conspiracy', and he made sure the world knew it, too. This time Bahamontes' opportunity to accuse his rivals revolved around the starting order for the riders, something usually decided by their position in the overall classification. Bahamontes, being twelve places better placed than Jacques Anquetil, should have started the time-trial later than the Frenchman. Instead he found at the start-line that Anquetil was starting immediately after him, not before. The disadvantage for Bahamontes was that Anquetil would be able to use him as a 'moving target' and adjust his pace accordingly. On top of that, given Anquetil's position as one of the world's top time-triallists, Bahamontes was sure to be overtaken. Being 'caught' is always a huge blow to any rider's morale and even more so for a rider with a fragile ego like Bahamontes. His vigorous protests were ignored and he had to make the best of a bad job. When he was caught by Anquetil, Bahamontes simply fell in behind and adapted his pace to the Frenchman's, limiting the time deficit to two minutes. He even sprinted for the line, beating Anquetil by a wheel's breadth. The gesture was not received well by the race organisers, who promptly fined him one thousand francs. Apart from the financial penalty Bahamontes had no other reason to complain. He had finished tenth on the stage, the best-place Spaniard, which helped reinforce his position over Su\u00e1rez. In addition, while Rivi\u00e8re had gained three minutes on Bahamontes, none of the other favourites had taken more than two. For someone who rode only reasonably well in time-trials, as a damage-limitation exercise it was a significant triumph. Even better, the Tour now headed southwards towards the hotter weather. 'I function on solar energy,' Bahamontes liked to say, 'and with any luck my rivals will melt on the roads of the Pyrenees.'\n\nAs it turned out, he did not have to wait that long for two opponents to fall by the wayside. On stage nine from Bordeaux to Bayonne temperatures soared into the high thirties. After one hundred and fifty kilometres of racing through the airless pine forests of south-west France, the peloton was ready to crumble under the slightest pressure. The honour of wrecking the peloton fell to the Belgian team, who had been given a roasting by their director at Bordeaux for failing to ride aggressively enough. So it was predictable that it should be one of their number, Marcel Janssens, who led the attack. Janssens's move quickly split the bunch and twenty-two riders forged ahead, including most of the favourites. However, both Raphael Geminiani and Su\u00e1rez missed it, as did Cazala, the race leader since Roubaix. Su\u00e1rez finally lost six minutes, while Geminiani finished twelve minutes down, thereby relinquishing all hope of victory in Paris. France's 'Big Four' had become the 'Big Three'. Eddy Pauwels, a young, inexperienced Belgian rider, took over in the yellow jersey, but with the Pyrenees looming he had little hope of remaining there for long. Bahamontes, meanwhile, was poised to strike.\n\nSeventeen kilometres long, the Tourmalet is the highest and most formidable mountain pass of the Pyrenees. Its nickname in French is _l'incontournable,_ the unavoidable one. 'We gave it that name because it's the only way through that part of the Pyrenees,' Phillippe Bouvet, _L'Equipe_ 's head journalist, told the British magazine _Cycle Sport_ a few years back, 'and because it's been a part of the Tour for so long all of its riders must face it at one point or another.' In 1949, the Tourmalet was the starting point of what remains arguably the most spectacular comeback in Tour history. Fausto Coppi was thirty minutes behind the leaders when the race reached the climb, but his attack there was so stunning he went on to win the race by an incredible ten minutes. Now, ten years later, the riders would take on the biggest single challenge of the Tour on the race's first day in the mountains when they often had problems adapting physically from multiple stages on the flat.\n\nStrange, then, that when eleven riders moved ahead in the 1959 race just before the Tourmalet, the French team failed to react. Surely they would want to control one of the most important stages of the race and win it? Instead, the breakaway group opened a gap of eleven minutes by the foot of the mountain. Behind, the phony war of the Tour's first ten days continued. Finally, after an hour of waiting for the French to increase the pace and start reeling in the break, Bahamontes could contain himself no longer. Eleven kilometres from the summit, on a series of broad hairpins just before the village of Bar\u00e8ges, he charged up the road. It was the first big mountain attack of the Tour and it looked very good indeed. Gaul, Rivi\u00e8re and Anquetil followed at first, but with another blast on the pedals, Bahamontes and Gaul were clear. This could have been a race-winning move, the sort that has earned riders countless victories in the Tour. But then, to the bewilderment of the crowds of Spanish fans lining the route, Bahamontes eased back, inviting Gaul to move ahead and keep the pace high. Gaul did so, but noticing Bahamontes' reticence he did not go flat out either. By the summit their advantage over the first chasing group of Rivi\u00e8re and Fernando Manzaneque was two minutes eight seconds: a good margin but by no means decisive. From the summit of the Tourmalet there was another twenty-eight kilometres to the finish at Bagn\u00e8res-de-Bigorre. But rather than widen the gap Bahamontes and Gaul crossed the line with an advantage of just one minute twenty-two seconds over Anquetil, Rivi\u00e8re and Bobet.\n\nThe big question after the stage was why Bahamontes and Gaul had failed to put more daylight between themselves and the French when they had the chance. Even the traditionally loyal _MARCA_ ran a headline the next day: 'Disappointing Performance By Top Climbers on the Tourmalet', which was a none-too-veiled criticism of the Spaniard's failure to drive home his advantage. Bahamontes' explanation was that he had wanted to prove to the French who was the strongest man in the mountains, but with Gaul on his wheel he had not wanted to risk an all-out attack. 'I'm biding my time,' was all he would say. 'I'll go for it when it suits me.' With the benefit of hindsight, Bahamontes' strategy was probably the right one, even if it inevitably provoked a sense of anti-climax. If he and Gaul had opened up a bigger margin on the rest of the field with two weeks' racing still to go they would have had an uphill task defending their lead all the way to the Alps and beyond. The French would almost certainly have become more united against the two clear enemies, and for Bahamontes with an inexperienced Tour team to back him that was too great a risk. At least short-term, then, Bahamontes needed Gaul as an ally, not as a rival for yellow.\n\nBahamontes certainly seemed fairly relaxed. In his daily column for the local Toledo newspaper _El Alc\u00e1zar_ , he barely discussed the race during the Pyrenees. Instead he thanked the 'Frutos Ramos' wholesalers of Toledo for sending a box of fresh Spanish fruit every day for the team. He also claimed, in his latest conspiracy theory, that the Italians were getting preferential treatment because 'they've posted a supporter on every corner of the Pyrenean climbs with bottles of water. I hope the race officials do something about this so we're racing on a level playing field'. But there was no comment on why after being so gung-ho in the flatter stages, he was suddenly no longer as aggressive as he could have been in the mountains.\n\nHowever, there were good reasons for Bahamontes' patient policy. The French squad still dominated the race after one day's racing in the Pyrenees, but their ferocious discussions about who was the leader continued apace. The longer Bahamontes sat back, it seemed, the worse the disagreements grew. 'Our boat is still sailing, but it's leaking from all sides,' was French trainer Marcel Bidot's graphic description of their disunity. 'We have to work harder together and control the breaks, because that's exactly what we didn't do today.' Bidot had formulated the famous 'Poigny pact' between France's top four riders. But rather than work in their favour, the pact became an excuse for the quartet to watch each other like hawks for the slightest sign of weakness as well as failing to agree basic tactics like chasing down breaks.\n\nWith Bahamontes not willing to declare open war, and the French too divided to do so this lack of aggression led to some bizarre consequences. The second stage through the Pyrenees was won by Darrigade, a sprinter, not a climber. Even stranger, the Tour left the mountains with the overall classification led by Michel Vermeulin, a rider for the lowly Paris-Nord'Est team whose full-time job was as a telegraph operator in Paris. Vermeulin was part of the eleven-man break over the Tourmalet, but he could have had little idea of what effect the move would have or that he would end up wearing the yellow jersey. Anquetil and Rivi\u00e8re could only look on enviously from the sidelines. 'The Tour is being taken over by greenhorns,' was Bahamontes' acerbic analysis. 'Something's going to have to happen.'\n\nBahamontes' words proved prophetic. On stage thirteen's trek through the hills of central France the race was finally blown apart. The French were mainly responsible, but it was a day in which the cracks in their team became chasms. For two hundred and nineteen kilometres, on a day of blazing heat and rugged terrain, the Poigny agreement disintegrated as the French relentlessly chased down each another's attacks. Anquetil remained nominally in contention, but France's chances of winning the Tour had suffered a serious setback. Meanwhile, in the muddle of the mutual self-destruction, eight riders failed to finish within the official time limit and were eliminated from the race. The two riders who gained most were Bahamontes and Henry Anglade, the French national champion who bizarrely rode for the regional Centre-Midi team rather than the country's top squad. The rider who suffered most was the winner of the previous year's Tour, Charly Gaul. He had been forced to stop at one point on the Col de Monsalvy climb to beg a farmer for some water and eventually crossed the line more than twenty minutes down on Bahamontes. As he put it: 'I was so exhausted I thought I would end up crawling all the way there in my underpants. I could hardly see, there was so much sweat pouring down my face.' The heat was so extreme that even at 10.30 in the morning, before the stage started, Tour officials distributed free sunglasses and sun cream to the riders. 'We Spanish didn't wear them, but we put them in our pockets,' Bahamontes recalled later, 'just in case.' Gaul, though, was in need of far greater help.\n\nGiven how badly the stage ended for the French, it was ironic that it was their decision to attack which caused them to suffer such a stinging defeat. After fifty kilometres, the French 'A' squad had a team worker, Rene Privat, and Darrigade up the road in a seven-man break. By the first feeding station at Rodez, when the leading group had only a two-minute advantage, Bahamontes attacked. The move had been planned well in advance. Bahamontes had even ordered the Spanish team's car driver to wait with his food bag on the opposite side of the road and wear a red jersey so he would be sure to see him. Nonetheless, with one hundred and forty kilometres left, it looked an insanely bold move. Despite the riders already suffering badly in the heat, Anquetil responded immediately by jumping on Bahamontes' wheel. Rivi\u00e8re and Bobet, happy to see one of their internal rivals take part in such a suicidal long-distance attack, opted to stay in the bunch. Four other riders, among them Anglade, reigning world champion Ercole Baldini and his team-mate Roberto Falaschi of Italy, also followed Bahamontes and Anquetil up the road.\n\nFor thirty kilometres, the six-man chasing group hovered somewhere in no-man's land between the early break of seven and the bunch. Finally, on a small third category climb, after Falaschi had driven so hard he cracked completely, the two front moves merged. When Radio Tour reported that the two leading breaks had become a twelve-man group, panic overtook the peloton. After sitting so smugly behind, Bobet and Rivi\u00e8re quickly realised that rather than overplaying their hand, Anquetil and Anglade now held the trump cards. Bobet lost his nerve and broke away from the bunch in an attempt to bridge the gap alone. But Anquetil, on hearing the news that Bobet was chasing, decided to increase his pace at the front of the leading group as well. The situation, then, was that one French rider from the 'A' team was chasing while his team-mate was riding as hard as possible ahead. The much-vaunted French _entente cordiale_ had suddenly come apart at the seams. Quickly realising that this was too good an opportunity to miss, Bahamontes started to collaborate with Anquetil. Behind yet more French riders came to Rivi\u00e8re's assistance, while ahead Anglade, Bahamontes and Anquetil had formed what proved to be a highly effective working alliance.\n\nIn the blazing heat the leading break shrank to nine. Privat was so exhausted he later collapsed on the line and needed to be taken to hospital. However, Bahamontes, Anquetil and Anglade were in no mood to throw in the towel despite the depleting numbers. On the second category climb of Montsalvy, sixty-five kilometres from the finish, Bobet's lone chase between bunch and break came to an end when he cracked completely. He was overtaken by the Rivi\u00e8re-led group and ended up twenty minutes down, all hope of adding another victory to his three previous Tour wins totally destroyed. He was not the only rider to suffer so badly. Gaul reeled off the road on the Montsalvy and dismounted in a desperate search for water. He, too, lost all chance of victory. The bunch began to crumble as Rivi\u00e8re tried to raise the pace even more. But he had run out of _domestiques_ to support his counter-attack and only the Belgian Jos Hoevenaers offered some feeble collaboration. The rest were exhausted. Whatever orders Bidot had given to Rivi\u00e8re behind or Anquetil in front, they were ignored. The speed in the break ahead was so great that press cars and officials had serious problems overtaking them on the Midi's narrow, winding roads. When they finally did, close to the finish at Aurillac Velodrome, it was to find the leading break had now shrunk to just four: Britain's Brian Robinson, Anglade, Anquetil and Bahamontes. 'Robinson went for it [in the closing metres] for the stage win, and I followed him, but I was too impetuous,' Bahamontes recalls. 'We reached the velodrome together, but then Anglade went high up the side of the track and he used his speed from descending again to overtake me to win. Then I saw Anquetil pass me, too.' Bahamontes took third, Robinson fourth.\n\nBehind the four stage leaders, it was carnage. Hoevenaers, who took over the yellow jersey, led in a group containing Rivi\u00e8re at nearly four minutes, while Gaul and Bobet crossed the line a massive twenty minutes forty seconds down. To add insult to injury Gaul had another thirty seconds tagged on to his time for accepting pushes from spectators. Bahamontes, meanwhile, had shot up the overall classification from ninth to fifth and was just over seven minutes behind the leader; twenty-four hours earlier he had been more than fourteen minutes behind.\n\n'We've wiped out Gaul and Bobet, and Rivi\u00e8re is almost out of the running, too. It has been an excellent day,' Bahamontes reflected. It was made even sweeter by news that Su\u00e1rez had been forced to abandon. As the Tour reached its crucial phase Bahamontes found himself in an ideal position overall. Barring the inexperienced Anglade, he had become the best-placed climber, and still to come was a mountain time-trial followed by three major stages in the Alps. Suddenly Bahamontes had moved from being just another potential contender to the rider most likely to win the Tour.\n\nSince a Spaniard had never won the race before, the country was understandably abuzz with the news of Bahamontes' success. For the first time in his career, Bahamontes felt certain he could live up to their expectations. 'The war has started and it is the most ferocious combat on two wheels of recent times,' reported the newspaper _Informaciones._ 'Bahamontes is the favourite of this year's Tour.' _El Alc\u00e1zar_ even put a photograph of Bahamontes on its front page for the first time during the 1959 Tour with the headline underneath: 'Congratulations, Fede . . . Fede could become the real star of Spanish cycling.' The Toledo publication added: 'Even Jacques Goddet came up to our newspaper's correspondent at Aurillac, pointed at Bahamontes and said, \"There you have the winner of this year's race\".' Bahamontes would later recall: 'At Aurillac, the time and the day had finally arrived that I was sure that I could win.' However, at the time he did not let the opportunity pass to criticise his team-mates and the rest of the break, saying yet again: 'Nobody would help me.' In his later years he claimed he was fully focused on his future Tour de France win. 'The prince was about to become a king and the eyes of an entire country were waiting for my coronation.' It would not be a long wait, either.\n\nAlmost every account of the 1959 Tour, at least outside Spain, has perpetuated the widespread belief that the race that year was all but decided between the agents for the criteriums, the closest that some top riders of the era, including Bahamontes, had to a manager. The theory is straightforward: Rivi\u00e8re, Anquetil and Bahamontes had the same agent, Daniel Dousset, while Anglade was with Roger Piel. Therefore, it was in Anquetil and Rivi\u00e8re's interests that if they could not win, then another Dousset 'client' should, namely Bahamontes. 'The 1959 Tour was the war between the managers,' says Raymond Poulidor. 'Dousset was the well-established figure \u2013 I used to call him Al Capone \u2013 and Piel the breakaway competition. There wasn't any difference in what they charged: both got ten per cent. But Dousset was only interested in big riders, and Piel was happy to go with the smaller ones while they were still on the way up. In 1959, [that was] Anglade. By the time Dousset got to me, though, I was with Piel; it was too late.' Not everybody agrees that Piel and Dousset made such a big difference to the race. Raphael Geminiani, himself a wheeler-dealer of considerable skill, and unlike Poulidor, part of the 1959 Tour peloton, is convinced Dousset's role was minor to the outcome. But the myth has persisted. Three years later, in 1962, when a satirical 'A\u2013Z of cycling' pamphlet did the rounds of the Tour de France press room, 'A' was for [Rudy] Altig \u2013 described as 'a treacherous German in a Spanish comedy' in reference to his 'robbing' team-mate Anquetil of the 1962 Vuelta victory \u2013 'D' for Dousset: 'When he arrives, the Tour is over and everybody can go home.'\n\nWhile the theory that Dousset helped shape the outcome of the Tour probably contains some grains of truth, it is impossible to prove. Either way it is certainly far too simplistic to say: 'Bahamontes won the Tour thanks to Anquetil and Rivi\u00e8re.' As Robert Millar once said about the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a he lost to Pedro Delgado because of a Spanish combine in 1985: 'Other riders can't make you win, but they can make sure you lose.' That is almost certainly what happened to Anglade in 1959. His compatriots' tactics wrecked his race. Not that he would definitely have won, but what they wrecked was his _chance_ to win. And there is a big difference between the two. A more pertinent question is whether Anquetil and Rivi\u00e8re combining against Anglade, with perhaps Dousset as 'puppet-master', devalues Bahamontes greatest win? The answer has to be no, not least because if that is the case then numerous other victories in major Tours during the 1950s would also have to be discredited.\n\nEven if we rewind just one year to 1958, the French national team's refusal to help Geminiani, who, like Anglade, was in a regional team, arguably cost their fellow Frenchman the Tour, too. But does anybody claim Charly Gaul's victory was a gift, even if he benefited from these divisions? 'Bahamontes was strong enough to be there in the breaks and there on the attack,' points out _L'Equipe_ 's veteran cycling journalist Philippe Bouvet. 'Whatever the French got up to, nobody can take that away.' Anglade himself has refused to condemn the combine that lost him his chance of winning the Tour; half a century ago such skulduggery was far more part and parcel of racing than it is today. Besides, for Bahamontes to win he had to be in the right place at the right time. As Raphael Geminiani pointed out to me: 'It's not like Anquetil and Rivi\u00e8re were called up on the phone by Dousset during the stage. They decided to do what they did, not Dousset. He wasn't in the French national team car giving orders.'\n\nTwo days after Bahamontes' knock-out performance in Aurillac, the Tour's next big challenge was a 12.5-kilometre uphill time-trial at the Puy de D\u00f4me, an extinct volcano near Clermont Ferrand. The road up the Puy is well-surfaced and not particularly narrow, and appears deceptively easy at first; it is the second part that causes the damage to riders. Like a helterskelter at a fairground its steepest section winds remorselessly round and round the edge of the Puy to the summit. On the right, painted on the cliffside, are the names of former winners: on the left, a low stone wall, and then a precipice. Though not as long and demanding as the single hardest climb in France, Mont Ventoux, the Puy's gradients are far more challenging. And, like Ventoux, there are no breaks, either, no false flats to catch your breath; it is just one long exercise in pain. The climb had only been used on one previous occasion, during the 1952 Tour, and its appearance then had an encouraging historical precedent for Bahamontes. Seven years before, his trade team boss Fausto Coppi had blasted off to victory there, dropping Dutchman Jan Nolten in the last three hundred metres. However, there was one crucial difference: by the time the Tour reached the Puy de D\u00f4me stage in 1952, Coppi already had the race sewn up; in 1959, Bahamontes still had to prove he could win it.\n\nOne of Bahamontes' weapons on his most important Tour de France stage win was an artificial stimulant, albeit a legal one. 'I didn't use to drink coffee in those days, but as I was heading towards the start of the stage I was feeling nervous. I knew it was going to be a very important day,' Bahamontes recalls. 'So when I saw a publicity vehicle from the Tour I stopped and grabbed a coffee. An expresso. Then, because it didn't look like much in the cup, I thought, \"Hey, have another one, at least that way you'll notice you swallowed something\".'\n\nApart from the caffeine coursing through his veins, Bahamontes had other advantages on his side as the Puy de D\u00f4me loomed, the most important being that standing-start mountain time-trials were his speciality. Indeed, he had won the early-spring hill-climb to Arrate on several occasions. This was only the second time a mountain time-trial had been held during the Tour and Bahamontes had finished second to Gaul in the first one on Mont Ventoux the previous year. He was, therefore determined to make the most of it. In his favour, for the rider who 'functioned on solar energy', was the heatwave France was still enduring. Bahamontes says Langarica told him it was the hottest summer in France for a century. By way of a morale boost the team director cunningly pointed out that Gaul would be suffering more than most in the searing heat as a result. Additionally, for once the Spanish were not to be outdone technically, either. A special combination of gears was put on Bahamontes bike \u2013 rear cogs of fourteen, sixteen, nineteen, twenty-one, twenty-two and twenty-three with a forty-four and fifty-one double chainring on the front \u2013 were designed to cope with the opening section on the flat. He also had special lightweight silk 'tub' tyres, which were sometimes risky in wet weather but not in the baking heat. Not huge advances by any means, but given the usual ramshackle nature of the team they made a difference.\n\nThere were other, smaller issues that were tilting things towards Bahamontes. Rather than driving the Spanish team car, Langarica opted to open the car's sun-roof and lean out of the window to give his star rider orders and encouragement. For Bahamontes, with his love of dramatic gestures, having his director so close was an important plus. Then, though Bahamontes did not know it, Gaul was not his only key rival in trouble. Clermont-Ferrand is an important railway junction and Rivi\u00e8re, who would be starting two minutes before, had been kept up all night by the noise from trains in the marshalling yard close to his hotel.\n\nMost importantly of all, perhaps, the mountain time-trial was a section where Bahamontes needed no external assistance or team-mates. On the Puy de D\u00f4me he was able to do what he always said he did best and 'move alone': and moving alone, he soared.\n\nEven before Bahamontes reached the steepest uphill section it was clear he was going to have an exceptionally good day. After four and a half kilometres of rolling terrain he was clocking the fastest time and was already fourteen seconds ahead of Gaul, fifty-one seconds up on Anquetil, and more than a minute in front of Rivi\u00e8re. With his shorts rolled up extra high so he felt more comfortable, and sitting in his classic climbing position, hands slumped slightly over the handlebars, Bahamontes said before the start he was 'super-nervous and ready to eat the road'. Clearly the coffee had already had quite an effect. Before halfway he had Rivi\u00e8re in his sights and two-thirds of the way up he overtook the Frenchman. Needless to say Bahamontes was the fastest through every checkpoint. By the time he reached the summit the damage he had inflicted on the field was colossal: Gaul had beaten him by thirty-one seconds on the more difficult Ventoux climb in 1958, but over such a short distance he was the closest at one minute twenty-six seconds. Anglade was at three minutes and the two great French time-trial specialists, Rivi\u00e8re and Anquetil, were even further back. This was not a defeat, it was a rout. While Jos Hoevenaers clung on to the yellow jersey, Bahamontes was just four seconds behind, and with the Alps to come his path to overall victory looked increasingly free of obstacles.\n\nNow only Anglade, thirty-nine seconds behind Bahamontes, could be considered a viable threat. Anquetil, the strongest of France's 'Big Four', was now more than five minutes back, and Rivi\u00e8re more than seven. Bahamontes revealed that Rivi\u00e8re's relatively strong performance in the middle section had been the spur to do even more damage, exactly at the point where the climb was steepest and hurt his rivals the most. 'I'd decided not to go too hard,' Bahamontes said, 'because I didn't think the gaps would be that big in such a short a distance. I thought I'd catch Rivi\u00e8re quite quickly, though, and I was surprised that I didn't so I started going flat out to try and get past him. It was only afterwards that I realised he had got fourth and I discovered I'd done a far better time than I'd thought possible.' Bahamontes' time was so good, in fact, that he was the only rider to average more than 20 k.p.h.\n\nThe French took their defeat in radically different ways. Anquetil made the most of Rivi\u00e8re being overtaken by Bahamontes to take a sideswipe at his rival and tell reporters: 'That'll teach Rivi\u00e8re to boast.' As for Jean Robic, who finished fifty-second, nearly ten minutes back, he gave the most laconic of answers when asked about his experiences. 'It went brilliantly,' he said, 'I actually had to brake quite often to try and slow down a bit.'\n\nAmazingly for such a short distance nine riders finished outside the time limit. However, the race officials applied a rule that allowed them arbitrarily to increase the percentage of the winner's time within which riders had to finish. As a result, only four were eliminated. One, though, was Bahamontes' team-mate Aniceto Utset, the 1956 Volta winner. 'That was our only worry after the Puy de D\u00f4me,' Bahamontes said. 'I was running out of team-mates. By that point, I only had six left with three big Alpine stages to come.' However, two of the other three were powerful French _domestiques_ and that could only strengthen his hand.\n\nThe loss of Utset had reduced the Spanish team from twelve starters to just seven. Under the circumstances it was important to look for allies. Bahamontes did not have to look far. Charly Gaul had been performing so badly there were rumours that he had actually left the race, and the 1958 winner was keen to show his face at the front.\n\nStage seventeen to Grenoble, where Gaul and Bahamontes launched their joint attacks, did not look overly promising. Of its two second category climbs, la Romeyere, where Bahamontes had eaten his ice cream back in 1954, was more than sixty kilometres from the finish. Assuming their rivals were organised then in theory they would make mincemeat of the two climbers on the long, flat run-in to Grenoble. However, that was the point: Bahamontes' main rivals, the French, _weren't_ organised. They had shown that again the day before. Rivi\u00e8re and Anquetil had planned a joint ambush of Bahamontes on the lumpy run through the Massif Central from Clermont-Ferrand to Grenoble. Rivi\u00e8re was so convinced of his chances he had even requested a special gear, a thirteen-cog sprocket, so he could blast away that much quicker. However, when Rivi\u00e8re was revving up for the move on a descent where they knew Bahamontes would be most vulnerable, Jean Grazyck, a French _domestique_ , came rushing through the peloton with a message. He said: 'Jacques says to tell you he's not coming. His legs hurt.' And so the attack was aborted. Even more telling was that Anquetil did not bother to talk in person to Rivi\u00e8re: with internal communication so limited it hardly suggested they were really prepared to collaborate against Bahamontes.\n\nThen again, perhaps they did not need to worry, given that Bahamontes' first attack on the stage from Saint Etienne to Grenoble the next day bordered on the suicidal. Desperate to take the yellow jersey, and ignoring Langarica's orders for once, Bahamontes rocketed off the front on the Col de Gran Bois with more than one hundred and ninety kilometres left to go. He was joined by Gaul and a Frenchman from Anglade's Centre-Midi squad, Francois Huot, but their lead was only thirty-five seconds at the summit. This was too small and too soon in the day. The trio eased back and were absorbed by the bunch. On the Romeyere, though longer and with some brief, steeper sections, Bahamontes went for it again. Taking advantage of a crash that split the bunch, he attacked 'and this time I wasn't going to stop for any ruddy ice cream at the top'.\n\nInitially alone, Bahamontes blasted up the steady but largely shallow climb with such speed that by the summit he had a sixty-seven-second advantage on Gaul, and was nearly three minutes clear of the bunch. While there was no stop for a cornet, food was still on Bahamontes' mind, an indication that he recognised that the sixty kilometres to Grenoble would be no easy task. 'He crossed the line at the summit of the Romeyere yelling, \"Bananas! Bananas!\" at us,' _MARCA_ reported. 'We weren't sure what was happening, but if he had the strength to shout for food, we knew he had the strength to pedal too.' In what is surely one of the more surreal moments in Tour de France history, _MARCA_ 's correspondent and his colleagues then embarked on a 'banana hunt' to find Bahamontes the food he had requested. The sight of a bunch of sweaty, middle-aged foreign journalists, dressed primarily in singlets and shorts, bursting into local houses and asking for bananas is worthy of French farce at its best. But their mission proved unsuccessful. 'We coudn't find any bananas, not one, all the way to Grenoble,' _MARCA_ reported mournfully, 'and we checked in a lot of houses.'\n\nCrucially, rather than plough on alone, Bahamontes soon realised that Gaul was 'the best company I could have. He needed the stage win, I needed the lead. He was miles back overall and no threat to me. It all made sense'. Equally importantly, Gaul was able to guide Bahamontes on the descent. By the foot of the Romeyere the duo's advantage had stretched to four minutes. Then, even on the flat valley floor that stretches for nearly fifty kilometres through Voreppe and Saint-Egreve en route to Grenoble the two climbers managed to hold off an entire pack. While the conspiracy theorists point to this failure to reel them in as another sign of French indifference to Bahamontes winning the Tour, media reports at the time suggest that on this occasion the French were united in trying to close down the breakaways. It was Rivi\u00e8re who had co-led the chase early in the stage and Rivi\u00e8re again who worked hardest to keep Bahamontes and Gaul at bay towards Grenoble. On neither occasion did the chase work. But rather than their failure to catch the two escapees, there is a more important question: why did Rivi\u00e8re, and to a lesser extent Anquetil, try to keep Bahamontes out of the yellow jersey and maintain Anglade's chances on one day, yet once Bahamontes had the lead why did they then collaborate to keep him there and wreck Anglade's Tour the next? Assuming that this was a sophisticated anti-Anglade conspiracy, the answer could be that on the road to Grenoble Rivi\u00e8re and Anquetil's plan was to make a symbolic contribution to Anglade's chances rather than a real one. That they only pulled back twenty-seven seconds of the four-minute deficit over forty-five kilometres lends strength to this theory. From the French team's point of view, the advantage of keeping Anglade in contention was that the roles of Rivi\u00e8re and Anquetil as 'king-makers' would remain intact, roles which if Bahamontes became a clear Tour winner at this juncture, would be irrelevant. They needed to maintain the illusion of an Anglade-Bahamontes duel for as long as possible before their cards were turned up on the table.\n\nIn any case, the results still stand and they cannot fail to impress. Whatever the reasons for the failure to chase down Gaul and Bahamontes, they cannot detract from stage seventeen of the Tour de France 1959 being one of the few occasions when two lightweight climbers managed to break and stay away from the pack over a forty-five-kilometre stretch of flat terrain. It was a monumental achievement. On top of that, while Bahamontes showed strategic sense in waiting for Gaul and striking the bargain with him, he would have needed to ride to the limits of his physical strength to maintain that deal in the two-hour battle against the peloton.\n\nWhen they reached the Grenoble velodrome Bahamontes had to respect the unspoken deal with Gaul and let him win the sprint. In practical terms he had no choice: he had a punctured front wheel. 'The crowd whistled and booed when I let Charly get the stage,' he recalls. 'It was only when the race commentator held up the front wheel between his finger and thumb and showed them I had punctured that they started to applaud me, too. Letting him win was the right thing to do. I had got the yellow jersey and increased my lead in the King of the Mountains competition. That was enough.' Bahamontes was not the first Spaniard to lead the Tour (Miguel Poblet had worn the yellow jersey for a day in 1955 in Dieppe), but with a four-minute fifty-one-second advantage over Anglade, he was certainly the first from Spain with a real chance of winning it. 'We just thought he was going for the mountain points,' Anquetil told _Informaciones_ at the finish. 'If he isn't just interested in the King of the Mountains, then the Tour is his.'\n\nAs usual, Bahamontes opted for a melodramatic description to sum up his achievements. 'Grenoble was the city where three hundred years before Bayard the \"Knight With No Fear\" had died, I showed I had no fear, either,' he wrote in his privately published account of the 1959 Tour. It was not strictly true as Bayard was born close to Grenoble, but died in Italy, though Bahamontes' point was clear. 'The Alps were still to come,' he went on, 'but for me the race was done and dusted because I was clearly superior in all areas. The only possible problem was the lack of a strong team.'\n\nIn his daily column in _El Alc\u00e1zar_ , Bahamontes said: 'Getting the yellow jersey was not as hard as I expected. In my terrain, the mountains, nobody bothers me. Anquetil is my closest enemy and he is at nine minutes, Rivi\u00e8re and Baldini at over eleven, and Gaul at over twenty.' Pointedly, he did not mention Anglade. However, as he rode around the velodrome on a lap of honour, clad in yellow and soaking up the applause, Bahamontes could be forgiven for not wanting to think about the next day's racing. Just getting this far was impressive enough.\n\nThe eighteenth stage from the Lautaret valley in France to Val de Aosta in Italy started and finished with the same rider in yellow. And Bahamontes managed to maintain an almost identical advantage overall. However, what happened during those two hundred and forty-three kilometres caused one of the biggest scandals in French sport as an unholy, though unspoken alliance between Bahamontes, Anquetil and Poulidor all but ensured the Spaniard, not Anglade, won the Tour.\n\nThe mammoth Alpine stage across the Galibier, Iseran and Petit St. Bernard passes, which included sixty-nine kilometres of climbing, should have suited Bahamontes. Instead, he twice came within a whisker of losing the lead. The French, logically enough, attacked Bahamontes on his two weakest points, the descents and in wet weather, and on both occasions their strategy worked perfectly. But the scandal arose because they then failed to follow through with their initial success: it seemed to be enough for them to have Bahamontes in trouble, not out for the count. The first attack came on the descent of the Iseran, where Geminiani took off on what Bahamontes later called a 'suicide mission', and took with him Anglade, Anquetil and eight of the top eleven overall. Neither Gaul nor Bahamontes were present, and Anglade upped the pace as best he could to haul back some of his five-minute deficit. However, neither Anquetil nor Rivi\u00e8re offered their help. After five kilometres of climbing on the Petit St. Bernard Bahamontes and Gaul had managed to rejoin the main group, thus resolving what Langarica later called 'one of the most dangerous moments of the entire race'.\n\n'They could have had me up against the ropes,' Bahamontes recalled, 'but the fact that Anglade was in a regional team was impossible for them to handle psychologically.' However, if Anquetil and Rivi\u00e8re deserve at least part of the blame, the bulk of the responsibility has to rest on the shoulders of Marcel Bidot, the French team trainer. Bidot had no money to make from criteriums and no deals with Daniel Dousset, just his duty to ensure a French victory. 'Rather than organise the break with Anglade, for some reason Bidot stayed driving alongside me,' Bahamontes recalls, 'to be sure, so he said later, there were no \"dodgy tactics\". Under what were very critical circumstances, given he gave up on what were his real duties, Bidot was a real ally for me.'\n\nThe second crunch moment came forty-five kilometres from home on the descent of Petit St. Bernard. Bahamontes had no problems keeping up with the rest of the pack on the climb, but when the heavens opened on the descent he was in trouble when he punctured. The only good news was that he was not the only favourite to suffer: so, too, did Anquetil, Rivi\u00e8re and Geminiani; one Italian, Michele Gismondi, punctured six times. Indeed, just six riders in the front group, among them Bahamontes and Anglade, did not have to dismount at one point or another in the freezing rain. One by one, the field slowly picked their way down the treacherously wet single-track dirt road. If racing was the last thing on their mind it would have been hard to blame them. That, though, was not the case.\n\nAnglade took advantage of the drop in pace to go clear and steadily increased his lead on the pack. When Gaul and several others joined him, Bahamontes was again in trouble. With only Gomez del Moral to help him, Bahamontes' fear that lack of team support could be his undoing looked more than justified. But again Anquetil and Rivi\u00e8re were willing to give him their support, this time directly as they hammered away at the front of the group to chase down Anglade. In the end, the gap between Anglade's group and Bahamontes was halved to forty-seven seconds. But that was nothing compared to the damage done to French morale. 'At the finish, all that anybody could talk about was the way Anquetil and Rivi\u00e8re had betrayed their country,' Bahamontes said. 'On France's national holiday [14 July] as well. What a great way to commemorate it.' To increase the host nation's humiliation, Louison Bobet abandoned the Tour in the most melodramatic of fashions on the summit of the Iseran. He never returned.\n\n'I had to make a great effort on this stage,' Bahamontes said in _El Alc\u00e1zar_ , 'but I'm sure my enemies have worked even harder. Some people were thinking I would attack, but when you're in yellow you can't take any risks. The shame is that it's not sunny otherwise I would annihilate all my rivals.'\n\nWhile the Spanish press chose to ignore how Anglade had been stabbed in his back \u2013 'an uneventful day' was _MARCA_ 's anodyne description of the stage \u2013 the French were forced to admit that beating Bahamontes was now almost impossible. 'It's not complicated,' claimed Rivi\u00e8re. 'Bahamontes has won the Tour.' Langarica, the Spanish team director, did not agree, claiming that Bahamontes' advantage was insufficient for him to be sure of victory. 'If Bahamontes doesn't attack on the last mountain stage, he could lose the lead in the final time-trial,' Langarica warned. But he then explained, presumably tongue in cheek, that Bahamontes had only lost time on the final descent of the Aosta stage 'because he had more to lose than the rest, so had to be more cautious'. Had it not been for the French disunity, though, Bahamontes might have lost the race completely.\n\nAcross Spain, and particularly in Toledo, the news that Bahamontes was just days away from winning the Tour de France left few people unaffected. 'When the news broke that Fede had taken the yellow jersey, you could hear the cheers right the way across Toledo,' reported _MARCA._ 'Shop windows across the city were filled with posters congratulating Fede on his victory in the Tour. And the demand for yellow ribbons to pin to lapels was so great that the haberdashers ran out of yellow cloth. One photographer's shop displayed an enormous photo of Fede with a yellow ribbon pinned to his chest. And in Bahamontes' bike shop it was as packed as Charmartin [one of Madrid's two main railway stations] on a cup final day.'\n\nCongratulatory telegrams galore were sent to the team hotels, though Fermina Bahamontes reported that in her one telephone conversation with her husband, the connection had been so poor they were unable to hear each other. However, the couple would soon be reunited as she was heading for Paris in a relative's Seat car, along with the president of the Spanish Cycling Federation, Alejandro del Caz. All that was needed now, of course, was for Bahamontes to win.\n\nIf the first Alpine stage of the 1959 Tour was dominated by thunderstorms and French self-destruction, the race's final day in the mountains, from Aosta to Annecy, was a damp squib. Once again, the weather was the main reason. The Col du Gran St. Bernard, the first climb of the day and the most difficult, was shrouded in fog and the riders refused point-blank to attack if it meant risking their necks on the descent. The only excitement came when Gaul started yelling at Bahamontes after a Spaniard, Carmelo Morales, attacked close to the summit. 'His only objective was to stop my rivals gaining any points in the King of the Mountains competition,' Bahamontes primly explained a little later. On the descent, with cars crawling at ten kilometres an hour through the thick fog, the whole peloton regrouped. 'The descent was lethal,' said Bahamontes. 'I had some broken spokes, but I didn't stop for fear of being attacked. Everybody was waiting for a chance to attack me.'\n\nThe Forclaz, far shorter, much steeper, but fog-free, did a lot more damage. An attack by Switzerland's Rolf Graf and regional French rider Gerard Saint shredded the bunch to twenty-two with Bahamontes' support reduced to just Morales. It was at this point that Bahamontes, having played it conservatively all day, took the one option still open to him and attacked. Yet again Bahamontes showed that even if the civil war between the French had all but guaranteed him the Tour, nobody deserved the win more. Anglade attempted to follow, but was dropped, thereby proving that for all the French rivalry, in their first and only full-on mountain duel as the two top challengers, Bahamontes beat Anglade hands down. By the summit, with Gaul by his side again, Bahamontes had a two-minute five-second advantage on the field. For once the French rallied round the common cause of helping Anglade, but they only seemed to do so when it was clear he was going to lose. On the descent Anglade's bad luck continued with a puncture. By Annecy, though Graf won the stage Bahamontes had added another sixty-three seconds to his overall advantage. With his recently-arrived trade team boss Fausto Coppi nodding sagely by his side at the finish, Bahamontes pointed out that: 'The French tried it on the first day in the Alps, but in the second they had to admit they were beaten.'\n\nThe sixty-nine-kilometre time-trial round Dijon remained, but even if it all went disastrously wrong at least Bahamontes now had an unassailable lead in the King of the Mountains classification. Whatever the final result, he would go down in cycling history as the first rider to take the mountains' title three times. 'I had one bottle of champagne ready to celebrate that particular achievement,' Bahamontes said, 'but I had the feeling I might need a few more.' Anglade, now five minutes forty seconds adrift, was more forthright about his chances. 'What will it take to beat Bahamontes now?' he said to reporters. 'Somewhere between here and Paris I'd need to cut his legs off. That might do it.'\n\nThe time-trial was more confirmation of what had been clear since Annecy: that Bahamontes was going to win the Tour de France. The citizens of Toledo continued to dream up more exotic ways of celebrating Bahamontes' victory with the unofficial prize going to the shopkeeper who put a bike in his window with a live eagle perched on top. Bahamontes, meanwhile, prepared for the most important time-trial of his career with a rather more mundane twenty-kilometre training ride through the Bourgogne vineyards. And then he was off. As Bahamontes preferred, Langarica avoided any vocal encouragement from the following car, simply providing him with advice and updates on the number of kilometres covered. At the time, with no radio communication between riders and the team cars, there was no way for Bahamontes could know how his rivals were doing except from the timekeepers' boards at fixed points on the side of the road. There was a brief moment of panic when Bahamontes suddenly slipped to three minutes behind Anglade after fifty kilometres, more than sixty per cent of his overall advantage. However, that was as bad as it got: Bahamontes opened up the throttle and finished ninety-nine seconds down on Anglade, the Tour safely in the bag.\n\nBahamontes explained later that he preferred only to go all-out at the end of the time-trial 'because if you go hard earlier and start thinking you might be about to crack, that could make you feel even more nervous'. Langarica said: 'He's lost more or less what he should have, but we didn't want to go too hard because the race isn't finished yet.'\n\nAs still tends to happen in cycling whenever there is an exceptional performance, certain elements of the press, in this case the Italians, tried to breathe life into some insinuations, albeit minor ones, that Bahamontes was guilty of doping. Even after the time-trial, amid all the euphoria, Langarica felt obliged to respond to these accusations. However, given how clumsy his comments were, he might have been better off saying nothing at all. 'For the record Bahamontes didn't \"take\" anything,' Langarica said, 'although I'm sure there were other riders who did today.' Now, though, barring one final, marathon stage to Paris in which the leader was traditionally not attacked, the Tour was effectively over.\n\nWhile Anglade remained in second place overall, the battle for third was far tighter. Finally, despite Rivi\u00e8re taking a second time-trial victory, Anquetil moved on to the podium, displacing Francois Mahe, whose one moment of Tour glory remained leading the race way back in 1953.\n\nThe media attention was now all on Bahamontes. Yet while the camera flashes popped, the journalists scribbled away in their notebooks and the praise poured in, there were no tears or emotional tributes to those who had helped him along the way. Instead Bahamontes, despite having sealed the biggest prize cycling could offer, kept his eyes firmly on the financial benefits. One of the first questions he was asked was what he would do when he completed the Tour. Bahamontes' disarmingly frank response was: 'Talk to Dousset to see what kind of criterium money I can get. Anquetil, Rivi\u00e8re, Bobet and Baldini race for a quarter of a million francs each, and I don't want any less.'\n\nHis first message to the good folk of Toledo was equally pragmatic: 'Tell the Mayor if he's willing to give me that land he promised me for my house [if I won] then that would be wonderful.'\nChapter Nine\n\n#### 'The Bullfighter on Two Wheels'\n\nFrom the Nationalist Government's point of view, Federico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes could not have chosen a better day to win Spain's first Tour de France. The final chapter of the country's greatest individual sporting achievement of the Franco era was written on 18 July, the day the General\u00edsimo had begun the so-called 'glorious uprising' back in 1936. Fast forward twenty-three years: the newspapers' front pages across Spain carried the usual anniversary photograph of General Franco, complete with thanks to the man who had apparently singlehandedly made it possible for generations of Spaniards to be brought up in an atmosphere of, and to use his words quoted in _MARCA_ , 'peacefulness, hard work and renewal'. However, in 1959, in addition to the images of Franco there were huge photographs of Bahamontes pedalling away during the last three hundred and thirty-one kilometres towards Paris and victory.\n\nThe treatment of the two subjects by a conservative, traditional newspaper like _ABC_ was typical: on its cover it carried a full-size picture of Franco, and inside a lengthy editorial insisting that the Spanish remain 'on guard and alert' against the 'Soviet virus' of socialism and anarchism. 'It has been twenty-three years since the uprising and we can still find new and legitimate reasons to justify it,' _ABC_ trumpeted. 'Look how there is barely the slightest difference between the last will and testament of [Russian emperor] Peter the Great and the Communist International Congress' plans for expansion. But we remain alert and [maintain] the same spirit . . . of 1936, [fighting] against those who attempted to subjugate our country to the rule of the hammer and sickle.'\n\nThe editorial's aim was clearly to remind Spaniards why Franco was so good for them politically. But after a series of strategically-placed advertisements came some of the best evidence about why Franco had been so good for Spanish sport, too: a picture of a triumphant Bahamontes in Paris. The subliminal message was depressingly simple: just as Franco was writing a glorious page in Spanish political history, now Bahamontes was in the process of doing the same in sport, approved and overseen by the ruling regime, of course. No doubt about it: this was a victory signed, stamped, sealed and sent out from the Nationalist headquarters in Madrid in triplicate on the tissue-like multi-coloured folios so beloved of twentieth-century bureaucratic Spain. What else could be possible, given that the Spaniard had managed to win on such a hallowed date as 18 July?\n\nThe telegram sent by the governor of Vizcaya province to Bahamontes and Dalmacio Langarica, care of the Spanish embassy in Paris, shows just how neatly Nationalist and sporting pride blended together thanks to the '18 July factor'. It read: 'Your triumph embodies our Spanish pride and our admiration, enthusiasm and praise goes to the hero of the Vuelta [sic] in a victory for our fatherland that is, above all, [placed] in the indelible context of such a glorious date.' The tone of the telegram suggests that the sender might be congratulating one of Franco's generals on winning a battle against the Communists, rather than the winner of a bike race. Celebrations for Bahamontes' win became so absorbed by the anniversary of the Civil War that it effectively became a political hijacking. Bahamontes quickly discovered this for himself. When he arrived at the Spanish embassy in Paris during the evening of 18 July for the _de rigueur_ round of congratulations, it was to find that they were already in the midst of a party to commemorate Franco's uprising. Bahamontes' success simply became an excuse for an even bigger and more patriotic fiesta.\n\n'Bahamontes' win made an already beautiful date even more beautiful,' exclaimed the editorial in _MARCA,_ the most important sports daily in Spain outside Catalonia. It then went on to outline how victory in such a non-elitist sport like cycling could transform all areas of Franco's supposedly ideal society. 'Bahamontes' triumph pushes the pedals of the priest as he goes to say mass in a village, of the worker as he goes to his building site, of the road-mender as he goes to work on his stretch of road, of the message boy as he rushes through the streets of Madrid at midnight to the newspaper printer's with this article. Football is too specialised in comparison with cycling. From today onwards, all the bicycles in Spain will be lighter, happier, as if the wind of Bahamontes' triumph were pushing them onwards.'\n\nLooked at with fifty years of hindsight, such claims seem corny at best, sinister at worst: a crass line of Fascist propaganda, idealising the working class and reinforcing the illusion of a harmonious pyramid of a society topped off by a benevolent, beloved dictator. Yet it was difficult to find anything else in the Spanish press. The Madrid daily _Informaciones_ , for example, not known for its hard-line pro-Franco stance, had an almost identical presentation of Bahamontes' victory. It started with a speech by Franco and an editorial celebrating the anniversary of Franco's uprising and Spain's successful onward march to economic stability. At the bottom of the front page were photographs of Bahamontes. 'Spain is not rich but it is on the way towards becoming so . . . in twenty years we have done more than in the last hundred,' the editorial claimed. 'With Franco we advance and conquer new international credibility in a world in which Red Imperialism barely had any problems until we, the Spanish, took up arms against them. And now we work in the common task of fighting Communism, whose only real defeat has been at the hands of Franco.' Given Bahamontes' defeat of the French was just underneath these claims it would have been difficult not to associate such political 'victories' with his success. This association continued inside the newspaper. The first report in _Informaciones_ was dedicated to Franco's inauguration of the Ministry of Housing headquarters in Madrid and the handing over of 20,931 low-rent, state-owned houses to needy families. Then came a double-page special describing in lurid detail the 'Communist Plot' of July 1936, which Franco's rebellion foiled. And after that it was straight on to the Tour de France, and another feather in Franco's cap.\n\nCuriously enough, Toledo's 'local' newspaper, _El Alc\u00e1zar_ , was one of the rare cases where Bahamontes' victory was afforded a low degree of prominence. But that was down to its early press deadline which meant it could not include pictures from Paris. Instead _El Alc\u00e1zar_ opened with details of a study showing that Spaniards were on average two centimetres taller than a decade before, and continued with a report of military manoeuvres in Castille, complete with photographs of Franco peering at a model landscape and a spectacular fake nuclear explosion, giant mushroom cloud included. A feature on page four reported on the 'crisis in British pubs'. The article claimed in shocked tones: 'The ones in London date from Queen Victoria's time and nowadays have stacks of greasy sandwiches in display cabinets on the bars.' Only now did _El Alc\u00e1zar_ describe the opening section of the final stage into Paris. However, it made up for lost time in the edition of 20 July (no newspapers were published on 19 July) when the front page consisted of a large portrait of Bahamontes. Inside there was a special pull-out that included a first-person piece, 'Fede \u2013 how I won the Tour', plus all the details of the celebrations in Toledo, and the first segment of a week-long mini-biography entitled 'This is the Eagle of Toledo'.\n\nBahamontes' Tour victory was the only sport shown on Spanish television on 18 July, 1959. Not surprisingly, since the footage would have been flown in from France, the fifteen-minute programme of race coverage was shown late at night on the country's one channel. However, the number of people who had access to a television set in 1950s Spain was extremely small, and radio together with the cinema newsreels were a far more important means of communication. Typically, villagers in rural Spain would gather around the _pueblo_ 's one radio to listen to major events. Indeed, it acted as a social 'glue'. But the broadcasts were no freer of the shackles of Franco's censorship than any other type of media and his regime was able to exploit shamelessly the success of Bahamontes and other leading sporting stars, most notably the football team Real Madrid. By way of example, in 1955 when Real Madrid won the shortlived Latin Cup tournament, Franco gave the entire team the Imperial Medal of Yoke and Arrows, the symbols of the Fascist Party, as part of his 18 July celebrations.\n\nHowever, the most significant method by which Bahamontes could be pushed forward as the poster boy of Franco's regime was through the _noticias-documentales,_ widely known in Spain as _no-dos._ These were eleven-minute newsreels, produced from 1943 onwards, which were shown before feature films in Spanish cinemas. They were the only newsreels permitted and were an obligatory part of all schedules across the country. 'They were the main access to any kind of information on current affairs for a large percentage of Spain's population,' says Margarita Lobo, an expert in _no-dos_ at Spain's Ministry of Culture. 'Given the level of illiteracy in Spain at the time, more than the press, they were the most important form of internal propaganda. People would go to the cinema which, appealingly for an impoverished population, was cheap and warm, for up to seven hours at a stretch, from three to ten, and watch the double bill of films twice over. This meant watching the _no-dos_ twice over, too. The _no-dos_ were very anodyne and always had the same structure. They would start off with a news item, some kind of inauguration of a building by Franco, say, then be followed by a catastrophe \u2013 a bridge collapsing, maybe, or a flood. But this catastrophe would always be in a foreign country, to remind the public that in Spain nothing so awful happened. Then there would be the Spanish news section, more often than not featuring Franco, and finally the \"miscellaneous\" section, which would include sport.'\n\nLobo says that Bahamontes would have been obvious, prime-time, _no-do_ material in 1959. 'Up until 1950, internationally Spain didn't \"exist\" because of the boycotts. From the 1950s onwards Spain slowly started to create links with the outside world again, particularly with the United States. As a result, any event [such as winning the Tour] that could be used to bring us closer together was given huge importance. If the _no-dos_ exploited any kind of success so intensely, it was because they had very few other options. In Bahamontes' time there were barely any other top-level athletes \u2013 perhaps a horse rider or two as well as the gymnast Joaquin Blume [winner at the European Championships in 1957, but whose career was cut short in its prime when he was killed in a plane crash in 1959]. On top of that, if a person did not have a high level of sympathy for the regime then they wouldn't be given as much importance.' That is why Jes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o, for example, rarely appeared in the _no-dos:_ nor was Loro\u00f1o's King of the Mountains title in the 1953 Tour covered, yet Bahamontes crossing the Tourmalet in first place in 1954 was given its own special report.\n\nOn 27 July 1959, Bahamontes' victory opened the sports section with paeans of patriotic praise ringing out. 'The most famous race in the world sees a brilliant performance by our Spanish hero, taking our first ever triumph,' the commentator crowed. He then listed Bahamontes achievements (King of the Mountains, a stage win, fourth in the points prize and so on) before finally describing him as a 'bullfighter on two wheels'. A month later, on his return to Spain after the criterium _tourn\u00e9e_ ('Triple the number of engagements we expected,' according to his agent, Daniel Dousset), a homage in the comparatively minor city Matar\u00f3, just outside Barcelona, was given headline billing. The film showed Bahamontes receiving rapturous applause in a rather dark outdoor velodrome, Bahamontes receiving a gold watch in recognition of his success, Bahamontes wobbling rather nervously round the track into the gloom. 'He has done twenty-eight criteriums in thirty days,' says the commentator in awed tones, 'and travelled twelve thousand kilometres.' Its position on the _no-dos_ news agenda is designed to give the public the impression that in Franco's Spain such successes can almost be taken for granted. But only successes: after the disastrous 1960 tour for the Spanish, the only sports the July _no-dos_ covered were a horse race in Hamburg, car racing in Reims and a regatta in Kiel. It was as if the Tour had been cancelled.\n\nHowever, the bottom line of the authorities' desire to appropriate Bahamontes' triumph and make it a universal success was down to the fact they had absolutely nothing to lose by doing so. Coming from Castille, Bahamontes was the perfect rider on whom to base the regime's unspoken aspirations. Unlike Loro\u00f1o or Catalan Miguel Poblet, there was no chance of a region with separatist goals appropriating the victory. Even so, thanks to Langarica's role in Bahamontes' success, fans in the largely anti-Franco Basque Country could join in the fun and enjoy a rare excuse for pro-Spain celebrations. That was equally true in Asturias, one of the staunchest Republican areas in the Civil War but also a cycling heartland. Bahamontes' regular success in their local Tour, with two overall victories and two wins in the King of the Mountains competition, had brought him huge popularity. In the final days before he reached Paris local newspapers had recalled repeatedly that Bahamontes' first major triumph had been in the Tour of Asturias in 1953. Six years later fans poured into the newspaper offices in Oviedo, seeking news from France. As a result, the offices had to be barricaded and loudspeakers installed to broadcast news of the race to those outside.\n\nBahamontes implicitly recognises that his victory was appropriated by Franco's regime, recalling that when he met Franco, 'the Caudillo [Franco] told me I had planted the Spanish flag at a height it had never reached before.' However he also insists that 'it was a great moment for all the Spanish Communists in France who'd been there since the [Civil] War. They could all come out of hiding and say, \"We're proud to be Spanish again\"'. As Bahamontes sees it, his victory briefly managed to close the old Spanish Civil War wounds \u2013 but politically at least, Franco's propaganda machine, always interested in keeping those wounds open, saw his Tour win very differently, and the winner's personal opinion would barely have counted.\n\nUnsurprisingly, though, Toledo could not be matched for 'Bahamania'. From the moment he took the lead in Grenoble the streets and shop windows had been plastered in yellow ribbons and the local council put up a giant neon sign over the town hall saying 'Bahamontes King of Toledo'. When Radio Toledo confirmed at 4.40 on the afternoon of 18 July that he had won the Tour outright, the city went Bahamontes crazy. For more than a week the daily post was delivered in vans adorned with yellow ribbons, the market where Bahamontes had worked was similarly decked out and the city's bars re-dubbed the standard 'ca\u00f1a' measure of beer a 'leader' or a 'yellow jersey'. Some doctors' prescription forms even had the words 'Bahamontes will win the Tour' stamped across the bottom. 'All the rockets in Toledo's one pyrotechnics shop have sold out and to judge from the noise here it often sounds like they were all used to celebrate Bahamontes' win at the same time,' said _Informaciones._ 'Every car I see with a Toledo number plate still has yellow ribbons on it,' wrote _El Alc\u00e1zar_ 's columnist German L\u00f3pez a few days later, 'and the streets of Madrid are still full of people with Bahamontes flags.' A newsagent in Toledo added: 'All my newspapers are sold, two hours before their usual time. I don't think anybody, as an individual, has ever managed to sell so many newspapers as Bahamontes just because of what he's managed to do.'\n\nJust like the most famous Spanish bullfighters, it was only a question of time before Bahamontes had a ' _pasodoble_ ' (the traditional folksong and dance) dedicated to him. Entitled with predictable unoriginality, 'Bahamontes King of the Tour', and like many _pasodobles_ eminently forgettable, the song starts by claiming that 'on his steel steed, he rides towards Paris, what honour and glory will await him there . . .' Dire though it may have been, it was an indication of how deeply Bahamontes' success had struck home in Spain.\n\nThe unofficial prize for the most diehard Bahamontes fan, though, must go to Se\u00f1or Talavera, president of his fan-club in Toledo. Talavera purchased a live eagle and planned to fly with it to Paris so he could release the bird in the Parc des Princes when Bahamontes climbed on to the podium. However, last-minute visa problems meant both he and the eagle remained in Spain.\n\nEven if an eagle from Toledo failed to make it to the Parc de Princes velodrome in time for the finish of the Tour, the Eagle of Toledo himself, resplendent in his yellow jersey, was most definitely present. Yet even as he received the final bouquets of flowers, and Fermina broke down in tears on the stadium steps, Bahamontes insists that the scale of his had not sunk in. 'I don't think it will do, to be honest, until I cross the Spanish frontier,' he said. 'I do know that I won this race more with my head than with my legs.' For all Bahamontes' climbing skills his greatest win did not come just because of his ability to get up mountains faster than anybody else, it was also down to the tactics worked out with Langarica. As Tour director Jacques Goddet pointed out: '[Strategically] he has changed considerably. He is not the rider I used to know. The reputation he has of being a dreamer is no longer valid. I'm sure he's had to keep a handle on his temper and impetuosity at times, too.' Goddet also recognised that Bahamontes had outwitted his rivals by anticipating them, claiming the lead before they expected. 'He moved into yellow a day early, and for that reason on the last day in the Alps he barely had to push himself. If there had been any real battles in the Alps, in any case, he was so strong he would have been at a real advantage. If he had done what he did this year in previous Tours, I'm sure he would have won the race before.'\n\nBahamontes acknowledged the huge differences Langarica had made in planning his strategies. 'I could never have won with Puig,' he said after the time-trial in Puy de D\u00f4me. 'Langarica was much more intelligent and Puig had never ridden a bike.' Langarica was also more practical. Every evening, without fail, Langarica would go to Bahamontes' room with a copy of the overall classification and the stage route for the next day. It might take hours, but only after they had hammered out an agreement on the strategy to be employed would Langarica get up and leave.\n\n'The French team was tied up in knots by their friendships,' argued _Informaciones._ 'Bidot went for compromise, even if he knew this fantastic \"cocktail\" of riders would not yield any particular result. Langarica, on the other hand, dispensed with Loro\u00f1o. And it would be useful to ask all those critics [of that decision] what they think of a result when a Spaniard tops the Tour de France for the first time. The years of [directing the Spanish team by] Luis Puig, incapable of taking the same kind of responsibility that Langarica did, make it clear what the consequences would have been.' Langarica told _Informaciones_ : 'I never managed to convince Federico he could win until this year. I could not accept the war that went on inside the Spanish team in 1958. Then, after one man from Vizcaya [Loro\u00f1o], advised by another man from Vizcaya, said he would not take part . . . a real Spaniard arose, Bahamontes, labelled as being mad and with all that past history of failures, abandons and betrayals. He called me to tell me he would come with me to the Tour, and that's where it all started.' Team-mate Carmelo Morales said simply: 'He would have won more often had he been directed better, sooner, in his career.'\n\nThe influence of Fausto Coppi on Bahamontes, for many the most crucial factor in his victory, was only highlighted in the Italian press. The man who Bahamontes said had inspired him to win during the course of a long conversation over the meal in Talavera the previous winter, had been convinced his star rider would take the Tour as soon as the day after the Puy de D\u00f4me. 'My only fear,' Coppi told Italian journalists, 'was that Bahamontes would do something stupid, because of the strange ideas that sometimes run through his mind.'\n\nBahamontes told _El Alc\u00e1zar:_ 'I had a huge sense of responsibility before the race started. Hadn't I been forced to abandon the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a? I knew that everybody would expect more of me, and I expected more of myself. That said, I was a bit hurt by the way the French newspapers only put me as sixth favourite before the start rather than making me an indisputable top favourite. But, in fact, not racing the Giro and being forced to abandon the Vuelta made all the difference. I was a lot stronger and in the mood for a fight. By the time I had won the Puy de D\u00f4me time-trial, the race was practically won. Gaul even came up and congratulated me then, saying, \"This year it's yours. Don't let it slip out of your hands\".'\n\nThe French, predictably, were hammered mercilessly by their national press and fans, who whistled and booed Jacques Anquetil as he stood on the podium in Paris in third place. Apart from pointing out that Bahamontes had defeated four former Tour winners in Jean Robic, Louison Bobet, Charly Gaul and Anquetil, _L'Equipe_ added that he had defeated 'French egotism'. The disputes rumbled on, with the blame being placed on the overly conservative approach of Bobet, who was conveniently absent in Paris after his abandon. Roger Rivi\u00e8re, meanwhile, directed his ire at another of his other team-mates. 'If I had known Jacques Anquetil a bit better I'd have won the Tour,' he said. 'And without Bobet in our line-up, either Jacques or I would have beaten Bahamontes.' He said the French had expected the winner to self-destruct, and that they had underrated Anglade, even though he was the French national champion. 'We watched everybody we were supposed to \u2013 Gaul, Ercole Baldini \u2013 but we forgot about Anglade and Bahamontes. The only times we thought about Bahamontes we remembered his eccentricities, which generally end up wrecking his chances. So we let Bahamontes seem to lord it over the rest of us and then we expected Charly Gaul to wipe him out. But instead of that Gaul did nothing and Bahamontes, whom nobody rated, ended up taking the yellow all the way to Paris.'\n\nThe French were not the only ones to underestimate Bahamontes. 'We all thought that Bahamontes was just going for the mountain points, and look what happened,' said Baldini, the reigning world champion, and 1958 Giro winner. _Informaciones_ summed it up: 'In sporting terms, the Tour has been mediocre. Some of the stars were not up to scratch and others feared to lose what they had. Only Bahamontes has really given it any life.'\n\nAndr\u00e9 Darrigade shakes his head as he tells me: 'That year it was a disaster.' The Frenchman's green jersey in the race, plus his stunning victory in the World Championships, effectively saved his country's season. He was one of the few riders who willingly sacrificed his chances for his team-mates. 'He was the perfect _domestique_ and our default winner,' Bidot said. 'If he had raced more for himself and he hadn't been so unlucky, he'd have won ten more stages.' Darrigade is unfailingly polite and does not make a single disparaging comment about Bahamontes. He seems curiously innocent, too, and fifty years on he still finds it difficult to believe that two of his country's greatest stars could destroy the chances of a third (Anglade) simply because their egos would not let him triumph.\n\nDarrigade watched the greatest team France had fielded in a decade disintegrate in front of him; the only words to describe what he seems to feel are barely disguised despair. 'It was really, really bad. Bobet and Anquetil: that [their relationship] was terrible, and Rivi\u00e8re and Anquetil, that was even worse. Anglade could have won the Tour when he broke away, but Anquetil and Rivi\u00e8re agreed to bring Federico back up to Anglade because they preferred Federico to win. On top of that, Geminiani and Coppi were close friends and don't forget that Coppi was Bahamontes' manager. The rivalry was a problem. Each one preferred Bahamontes to win rather than the rest.'\n\nFor Spanish cyclists, Bahamontes' success ended their role in the Tour as a sideshow confined to the mountains. 'Climbers of the calibre of Vicente Trueba and [Juli\u00e1n] Berrendero were known here as the Fleas of the Pyrenees,' recalled leading French journalist Rene Dunan of the winners of the King of the Mountains titles in 1933 and 1936 respectively. 'They only appeared when the Tour approached the mountains near their country, and their victories were applauded all the more warmly because they were clearly without any long-term significance. The Spanish were like marionettes who did their \"number\" on the stage and then left. They created the legend of the Spanish climber, but they've always been considered eccentrics.' Bahamontes might initially have appeared to be similar to Trueba and Berrendero, but his win brought Spanish cycling up to a completely different level.\n\nOn a wider plain, the Tour de France was just one of many examples of progress being made by Spain in 1959. That winter United States President Eisenhower paid his first visit, thereby symbolising the end of the country's political isolation. Severo Ochoa's Nobel Prize for Medicine confirmed that scientifically Spain was no longer a backwater. Economically, too, Spain broke out of the recession that had gripped the country since the Civil War. In the future, 1958 was to become the last of the so-called ' _A\u00f1os de Hambre_ ' [Years of Hunger], and 1959 the first of the ' _A\u00f1os del Milagro_ ', the years of Spain's economic miracle. And this was not just Nationalist propaganda: in 1959 a 'Stablisation Plan' was implemented, backed by the International Monetary Fund, and the peseta devalued; Spain's economic revival began with a radical increase in foreign investment. On the day of Bahamontes' victory, there was also a high-level political meeting in Brussels to decide whether Spain had advanced enough to join the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation, the O.E.C.E. or O.E.C.D. as it was later known. A week later Spain was in.\n\nThe biggest development, though, was in tourism. The ending of the requirement for Western Europeans to obtain entry visas that year might not seem an earth-shattering change, but it was to have a huge effect on the travel industry. It opened up the country to package holidays in which Spain would do a roaring trade during the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time Spain began its transition to a far more urban society; the number of agricultural workers fell by half between 1960 and 1976 as they sought better living standards in the towns and cities.\n\nBahamontes appeared in his last _no-do_ as an athlete in 1964 when they recorded an homage to him in Madrid. The newsreel amply reflected the developments and giant strides the country had made in just five years. The film opened with news of a trade centre in Bilbao, then introduced a new long-distance bus 'complete with a bar, a hostess and headphones, just like the best aeroplanes'. A longer feature showed university students going to help out in the country, pitchforking hay and teaching classes of grimy-nailed farmers' wives, 'wiping out the last traces of illiteracy from the country', according to the documentary. If such activities, vehicles or buildings were unthinkable even ten years before, so too was the location of Bahamontes's homage: Madrid's Sports Palace. As he and several other top riders wheeled around a specially-built artificial track on special track bikes, waving to the fans, behind them were advertisements galore: for rum, cigarettes, a festival and even _El Cortefiel_ , Spain's first major chain of department stores. Compared to a decade earlier, the opulence and comfort on offer in Spanish society was manifest.\n\nIn 1959, though, the fruits of change lay ahead. From the regime's point of view Bahamontes' Tour de France victory was just the sort of image-changing international success the country needed. Apart from an indisputable display of modernity, it was also proof positive that even for the poorest, least developed sectors of Spanish society there was some light at the end of the tunnel after decades of misery and civil conflict. 'Bahamontes represents the transition of a person from the \"Spain of hunger\" to the \"Spain of development\",' historian Manuel Espin said in an interview published on 21 June, 2009, in the newspaper _El Mundo_. 'He took the path from that hard, battered Spain to a nation that started to open up to the world.'\n\nHowever, no matter what a trailblazer Bahamontes was for cycling in his country, the fact remained that when the Eagle of Toledo finally got his claws into the Tour he was not the young, fresh-faced Anquetil of 1957, or Eddy Merckx in 1969, set to dominate for nearly a decade. Bahamontes was thirty-one. As such, Bahamontes was therefore no pioneer: rather, after years of trying to get the pieces of the jigsaw the right way round, in 1959 the puzzle had finally fallen into place.\n\nAnd in 1960, while Spain made giant leaps forward in social and economic areas, for Bahamontes it was back to square one.\nChapter Ten\n\n#### Goodbye to the Vuelta\n\nFederico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes basked in the glory of the greatest triumph of his career for the rest of the year. However, within months of the start of 1960 it all went sour. He was about to become embroiled in the greatest sporting scandal of his life.\n\nBahamontes' season had gone askew almost from the start of 1960. Initially it looked as though he was en route to making a fortune by building on his success in the Tour de France. The first setback came when Fausto Coppi's team collapsed when the Italian died in January from malaria. Bahamontes bounced back quickly by signing for Faema, his former enemies, allegedly for the astronomical sum of eight hundred thousand pesetas [\u00a3450,000 in modern money] a year. He was not deterred by the presence of Bernardo Ruiz, his old rival, as sports director or having Antonio Su\u00e1rez, who had attempted to usurp him as top Spanish contender in the Tour the previous year, as a team-mate.\n\nIt was just as much of a rollercoaster once he was on the bike. Following a crash on 13 March in the Tour of Levante, Bahamontes spent thirty-six days with his fractured femur in plaster. He returned, after just twenty-five days' training, to win the Arrate hill-climb. Then came the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a. It was a race Bahamontes was on the point of not starting because he was ill and had fallen out with his team. Later, on 17 May, he would tell _MARCA_ that he had not been able to 'move his guts' since before the start of the race, hence his unwillingness to take part.\n\nBut that was only the beginning of his problems. As Chico P\u00e9rez writes in _The Vuelta 1935\u201385:_ 'The great Federico was constantly polemical and in only ten days went from the \"genius\" of Spanish cycling to its \" _enfant terrible_ \".' The Vuelta had barely begun in Gijon when Su\u00e1rez crashed in the opening team time-trial and suffered major bruising and huge scrapes all over his body (the dreaded road-rash as cyclists call it). Bahamontes also went down in the crash, ripping off half his right thumb-nail. Without Bahamontes wishing it, Su\u00e1rez's accident had conveniently sidelined his main opposition from inside the team. Then, on stage five from Orense to Zamora, Bahamontes underlined his suddenly improving form and position in the squad by embarking on a long-distance attack. To call it long-distance is actually an under-exaggeration: he was off the front alone for two hundred and forty-three kilometres, the longest single breakaway of his career, and the longest in the history of the Vuelta at that time. But since he was the reigning Tour winner his move was impetuous in the extreme: the peloton were never going to let a figure of his stature establish such a commanding lead so early in the race. Bahamontes was caught thirty-two kilometres from the finish, first by Frenchman Antoine Abat\u00e9 and then by the bunch. _El Mundo Deportivo'_ s headline the next day, 'A genius or a madman?' summed up the general consensus. Likening his 'stupid, useless effort' to the adventures of Don Quixote, the writer's only explanation was 'that like every big star, he has ended up having a psychological dependence on getting into the newspapers'.\n\nBahamontes' strange attack contributed to a widespread feeling that something was not quite right in the Vuelta. The underlying unease continued even as Bahamontes attempted another dramatic breakaway the next day on the stage from Zamora to Madrid in which he was accompanied by Faema team-mate Fernando Manzaneque. This time the gamble paid off: the move gained almost four minutes on the peloton, and even if the stage win went to an earlier breakaway, the leader's jersey still ended up on the shoulders of Manzaneque. Bahamontes, though, was still twelve minutes down despite those two gung-ho performances. Conscious that he could not lose any more time he fought back hard when Charly Gaul made his one and only major attack of the race on stage seven, a mountainous trek through the sierras of Madrid. Gaul jumped twenty-one places to fourth overall and ahead of Bahamontes by seventy-four seconds. Despite complaining of an upset stomach, Bahamontes ended the stage with a tenuous lead in the King of the Mountains competition.\n\nThe narrow gap between Gaul and Bahamontes briefly raised expectations of a duel between the two mountain kings: however, that particular battle was overshadowed by a more significant turn of events the following day when the entire race started to go off the rails. The stage from Madrid to Zaragoza was an extremely long run, one of five exceeding two hundred and fifty kilometres and seven in a row that were more than two hundred kilometres in length. The riders requested another feeding station mid-stage, and when the organisers refused they went on the first of five major go-slows which turned the Vuelta into a farce. As a result of the first protest the race reached Zaragoza at nearly half past nine at night, two and a half hours later than scheduled. The thirty thousand spectators whistled and booed as the riders inched their way around the finishing circuit. But worse was to come. The near-unanimous apathy continued for another four days. There were isolated incidents of picket-breaking: an eleven-rider break of non-favourites gained a forty-minute advantage over the bunch on the stage into Barcelona; a ten-man break claimed a nineteen-minute advantage on the next stage into Barbastro and, after a rest-day, a four-man break finished twenty-four minutes ahead into Logro\u00f1o. Just a handful of young Belgian riders seemed interested in racing, and they dominated the overall. The rest of the reduced peloton of forty-seven was effectively on strike, and the race had become, as Chico P\u00e9rez put it, 'a total disaster'. Race organiser Luis Bergareche begged the directors to get their riders to do more than pedal mechanically at ridiculously low speeds, but nobody paid him any heed.\n\nBahamontes and Gaul were now more than fifty-one minutes down on Belgian leader Armand Desmet. 'No \"Bahamontes miracle\" today', _El Mundo Deportivo_ sardonically reported. However, the next stage from Logro\u00f1o broke the pattern of the previous five days. A breakaway by Bahamontes, all but from the gun, managed to stick this time. Two hundred kilometres later at the finish in San Sebastian he was still ahead of the field with a three-minute twenty-two-second advantage over his closest pursuer. Such a spectacular move could have saved the race's image. However, after four days of trundling across Spain the general mood of disillusion among the press and fans was so great that day-long breakaways like Bahamontes' had a decidedly hollow ring to them. If the rest of the field were so apathetic, what did it matter what one rider achieved? Had Bahamontes opened up a bigger gap on the stage \u2013 ten minutes, say, or even twenty \u2013 it might have resurrected a sporting corpse. But the organisation shot themselves in the foot. For some reason nobody had bothered to give Bahamontes details of the time difference he had over his rivals as they should have done. Instead, Bahamontes pedalled away for two hundred kilometres with no idea of the effect he was having until he punctured close to the finish. By then, though, it was too late. His stage win strengthened his lead in the King of the Mountains competition and in the race's 'most combative rider' classification. However, since he only moved from twenty-eighth to twenty-first overall this was barely noticed. Bahamontes' answers to the press at the finish \u2013 even if they were serious \u2013 did little to alter the view that the race had become meaningless. When asked what his objectives had been with such a long attack, without batting an eyelid, he replied: 'To get over the mountains first and finish half an hour ahead of the field. Why not? That's what has happened every day up until now.' When Su\u00e1rez staged an eight-hour breakaway to win the 'Queen Stage' to Vitoria the following day it gained the same lukewarm reaction from observers. There were even rumours that the race was so discredited there might not be a Vuelta in 1961.\n\nThen, in the early hours of the morning after the Vitoria stage, the news began to circulate that Bahamontes was threatening to stage a 'go-slow' because the organisers were refusing to readmit Julio San Emeterio, Bahamontes' prized _domestique_ after he had failed to finish inside the time limit. If carried out, Bahamontes' departure would be a major blow to the race, especially as it came just hours after Gaul had quit stage fourteen for no clear reason other than he could not be bothered to continue. The organisers could ill afford to lose another star. Yet they were faced with a dilemma: if Bahamontes' demands were met, and San Emeterio reinstated, then two other teams, Licor 43 and K.A.S., said they would abandon en masse. With the race already reduced to thirty-four riders the organisers risked either losing Bahamontes or another twelve riders, five of whom were in the top ten. According to Bernardo Ruiz, now Faema director, the reason the teams decided to put the Vuelta organisers in such a position was because they had learnt of Bahamontes' strategy to save his Vuelta and knew that San Emeterio was crucial to it. Bahamontes had deliberately told San Emeterio to take it easy, even if he finished outside the time limit, because the next day they would make a joint attack. Unfortunately for Bahamontes, San Emeterio blabbed about this cunning plan when he finished the stage: small wonder the rival teams did not want to see him start, particularly when they discovered the organisers had initially acceded to Bahamontes' demands.\n\n'I directed Bahamontes that year and he was a man out of control,' Ruiz told me. 'Julio San Emeterio finished outside the time limit in Vitoria and said afterwards that he had taken it easy because he wanted to win the stage to Santander. At first the organisers readmitted him without anyone knowing, but then the other teams got wind of it, protested and they kicked him out again. I went to talk to the director of the Vuelta and I said, \"Look, does it really matter to you [if San Emeterio is readmitted or not]? I've got Fede sitting outside your office and he's a shade annoyed about all this. And Bergareche said to me, \"Don't get me annoyed about this either. I can't do it because of what San Emeterio has said about winning in Santander\".' Ruiz went back to Bahamontes and told him that San Emeterio was out of the race. 'So I said to Federico, \"It's not going to happen\", and his response was, \"Right then, I'm going to finish outside the time limit to see if they exclude me, too\". And that's what he did. On the next stage he went deliberately slowly and of course they threw him out. I said to him, \"Who the hell do you think you are?\"'\n\nEven half a century afterwards Ruiz's anger towards Bahamontes is still palpable to the extent that he talks in the present, as if the controversy had happened yesterday and not in 1960. 'What do you want me to do, [should I] kill him? [During the stage of the go-slow] I give him a couple of riders to bring him up to the front of the bunch and he stops, he tells them to go on, because \"I'm going to finish outside the time limit\".' And then Ruiz repeats: 'What do you want me to do, kill him?'\n\nThe confrontation with Bahamontes, and the general mood of discontent among the riders, was not all the Vuelta had to face that grim morning in Vitoria. On the same day one newspaper ran a story in which Lucor 43 rider Miguel Pacheco claimed he had been 'exiled' from Faema, the team with whom he had initially signed that year, because of his good relationship with Bahamontes. 'I could not imagine my friendship would end up with me being barely considered for races [by Faema],' he said. 'I have been declared an outlaw.' Pacheco claimed that as Bahamontes' decision to join Faema 'was not seen favourably, they took it out on me because I was his friend'. He even said that attempts had been made to bribe Licor 43 so that he would not take part in the Vuelta, and that Faema had formed an alliance with the Belgians to try and squeeze him out of third place overall. Quite apart from highlighting Bahamontes' difficult position in the team, Pacheco's allegations were effectively confirmed on the final stage to San Sebastian when he punctured and the Faema-Belgian alliance tried to eliminate him. Pacheco's claims were the latest bombshell for a Vuelta already cowering under the table, and they did not go down well with the fans lining the roadside and reading their morning newspapers as they waited for the race. After Gaul's abandon Bahamontes remained the main target for the public's dissatisfaction. And given his duel with Jes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o, Bahamontes' popularity was precarious anyway with fans from the Basque Country where the race was due to pass. While news of the Pacheco story circulated at the start in Vitoria, Bahamontes was in the middle of a blazing row with Bergareche about San Emeterio. As Bahamontes pointed out, in the 1959 Vuelta a similar situation had occurred when Roger Rivi\u00e8re and five members of the Faema team had been allowed back in despite finishing outside the time limit. At the time Bahamontes' protests had gone unheard and he had pulled out of the race. A year later his protests on the start-line were just as fruitless. San Emeterio was also present, ready to start, but Bergareche refused to succumb to what he described as 'blackmail' and threatened to take the case to the Federation. Bahamontes took his appeal to the international _commissaire_ for the race, but it did no good: San Emeterio was out and he stayed out.\n\nThe stage kicked off with spectators shouting insults at Bahamontes and these increased when they realised that he was about to stage what looked like a deliberate go-slow. The newspaper reports about Pacheco only added to the tension. Around the eighty-kilometre mark, just outside Bilbao near the town of Sollube, Bahamontes could no longer handle the constant jeering and insults and dismounted, bicycle pump in hand.\n\n'He assaulted a group of fans both verbally and physically,' the official report into the incident said later. At that point a pro-Bahamontes supporter intervened in an attempt to calm everybody down. It did not succeed. According to newspaper reports, as well as Antonio Jim\u00e9nez Quiles's account of events, Bahamontes' team-mate Herrero Berrendero dismounted as well. In the midst of the argy-bargy and shouting he apparently accidently struck the Bahamontes supporter, thinking he was about to attack his leader with a bottle. 'I didn't hit anyone,' Bahamontes told me. 'There's a photograph of me with my arm raised and a pump _about_ to strike someone, but I didn't manage to do it. It was Herrero Berrendero and he got the wrong person.' At this point Luis Bergareche intervened and told Bahamontes that he had to go on riding, and reportedly adding: 'If you don't, I will take you to the U.C.I. and I assure you that you will remember me for the rest of your days.' Finally everybody calmed down and the race continued.\n\nIf Bahamontes had intended to cause chaos and delays he certainly succeeded. The fact that thirteen other riders joined him, albeit protesting about something else, was another indication that the Vuelta was coming apart at the seams. 'Half the time we were starving because they wouldn't let us take on extra food,' Jim\u00e9nez Quiles, who joined the protest, recalls. 'It got to the point where we'd end up stopping, get off our bikes and break into people's houses to rob bread. So that's why I was in that group with Bahamontes that day.'\n\nKeen to see the outcome of the fourteen-rider 'strike', around one hundred and fifty vehicles containing journalists and race followers formed a massive convoy grinding along at snails' pace behind the mini-peloton. But if they could not see much of the race they had no need to worry about getting bored. As the press cars rolled through one village Bergareche and Faema representative Miguel Torell\u00f3 could be seen standing on the pavement arguing at the tops of their voices. Then, at the entrance to the town of Castro Urdiales the fans' ill-feeling towards Faema and its director Bernardo Ruiz was clearly expressed in a huge poster reading: 'Bernardo: this is a country of _hidalgos_ : no traitors here'. Bergareche also ran the gauntlet of spectator protests, which had developed into death threats. After the controversial abandon of another Vuelta rider, P\u00e9rez Frances, a poster greeted the race director at the entrance to one town in northern Spain: 'Bergareche: P\u00e9rez Frances was born here'. That might have been inoffensive in itself except that the message appeared to be written in blood. Another sign went up in San Emeterio's village, which the Vuelta passed through the day after Bahamontes' exit: 'Bergareche, San Emeterio will be your cemetery'. If anything was designed to make Bergareche feel less favourably towards Bahamontes and the riders in general it was messages like these.\n\nFifty kilometres from the finish in Santander four of the fourteen realised that they were almost certainly facing expulsion and darted away from the Bahamontes group. They finished between thirty-five and forty-five minutes down on the winner, the Belgian Arthur DeCabooter, twenty minutes or more behind the rest of the field, but more importantly just inside the cut. There was no reprieve for the rest. Like Bahamontes, they were summarily thrown off the race. According to the official inquiry into the stage, as well as some well-publicised accusations from Faema sports director Miguel Torrello, Bahamontes was the ringleader of the rebellion: he had allegedly urged the others to remain with him and even refused any support from his team-mates who had briefly dropped back to try and guide him back to the main peloton. Instead, the report concluded, Bahamontes had continued his two-wheeled protest. Combined with the incident involving the bicycle pump and the fan, there were a multitude of reasons why Bahamontes could not be allowed to continue. Quite apart from anything else the organisers had race regulations of the most mundane kind to back them up: by the finish the Bahamontes group was more than fifty minutes slower than DeCabooter and they were outside the time limit. End of story.\n\nBergareche told the newspaper _El Diario Montan\u00e9s:_ 'With people like this it is impossible to organise a Vuelta. My only regret is that I tried to do so.' Bahamontes responded in kind: 'With these people [organising it], I'm not racing the Vuelta again.' His defence to the press, which was contradicted by everybody from the organisers to eye-witnesses, was not that he was annoyed about San Emeterio, but that he 'did not feel well and could not go any faster. Do you want me to die on the roadside just because the race is going to Bilbao?'\n\nThe organisers were not the only ones upset by the scandal. Antonio Anglade, Faema's chief executive, said he was 'obliged to consider' withdrawing sponsorship of the team, as well as expressing 'displeasure at what has happened'. He added: 'These events are far beneath the category of this race and the dignity of this sport.' _El Mundo Deportivo_ summed up the prevailing mood: 'Bahamontes has not known how to digest the huge number of homages and tributes he gained after his phenomenal win last year and he believes he can wreck the essence of this sport. There is a path to take for every rider who does not consider himself a demigod: either withdraw from the race or withdraw from his profession.'\n\nThe Vuelta itself was in major trouble. Quite apart from the fact that only around a quarter of the starters made it to the finish, the winner Frans De Mulder was a Belgian of very little standing whatsoever. His winning margin of fifteen minutes from another team-mate, Armand Desmet, confirmed the abysmally low level of competition in the race.\n\nIf Bahamontes' reputation was damaged, the long-term financial consequences were minimal. Though the Vuelta's official communiqu\u00e9 confirmed he had been excluded from the race, the Federation's investigative committee fined him the risible sum of twenty thousand pesetas and declared the case closed. If Herrero Berrendero was involved in the fracas with spectators, as Jim\u00e9nez Quiles claims, that was not even mentioned. There have been suggestions that Bahamontes was too important a figure, after his Tour de France win, for the Federation to mete out the level of suspension he probably deserved. But the Tour was less than a month away and for the defending champion not to go to France was unthinkable.\n\nYet there was a price to pay for letting him walk away from the Vuelta of 1960 all but unscathed: Bahamontes had been allowed to put one over on his country's cycling authorities. Giving one rider that much unspoken power was not the wisest strategy, particularly in view of the way he had already behaved in the Vuelta. 'Everything that happens here is a consequence of his personal interpretation [of events] or a consequence of his absence,' _El Mundo Deportivo_ complained the day after his expulsion. In a lengthy interview with _Alc\u00e1zar_ , Bahamontes denied that he had even got off his bike and that, contrary to what the photograph published in _ABC_ suggested, he had not planned to hit a spectator on the roadside. Somehow Bahamontes managed to draw his old enemy Jes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o into the conflict, claiming that the person he was gunning for was 'an individual in Loro\u00f1o's team car who had been laying into me for three or four days'. Bahamontes also claimed that Faema director Torrello had only warned two of the riders in the go-slow protest that if they did not reach the finish within time the jury would show no mercy and they would not be allowed to start the next day, and he was not one of them. 'I am ill,' he said, 'and that's why I was unable to race properly. I should be able to cure myself. If they ask me to do the Tour, I'll go, but that doesn't depend on me.'\n\nWhoever was right or wrong, the failure of those in authority to punish Bahamontes more stringently was an admission of their dependency on him for results. However, if the short-term consequences were minimal or even beneficial to Bahamontes, in the longer-term they had a considerable knock-on effect: the events of May 1960 saw a definitive rupture between the rider and Spanish cycling. Except for a final, low-key appearance in the 1965 Vuelta, Bahamontes never returned to his country's biggest race; from 1961 he spent the last four and a half years of his career in foreign squads.\n\nThe clearest indication of what the Bahamontes affair meant in the wider political arena came from the reaction of Franco's regime: they simply blanked him of their _no-dos_. He only made fleeting appearances in the big-screen documentaries during 1963 and 1964; as Margarita Lobo, the _no-do_ expert, pointed out, anyone who failed to deliver the goods disappeared from view. In the newspapers, never again would Bahamontes be hailed as the social and sporting example to follow in the unqualified way he was in 1959. Instead the old labels of the 'unpredictable genius' were revived to describe him, and they stuck for the rest of his career. 'Physically Bahamontes is gifted for racing, but mentally he is not at the same level,' claimed _MARCA_ in 1963. Later that summer, after an equally controversial Tour, _ABC_ described him as having 'justified fame as a champion, but at the same time [also] for being over the top and abnormal'. The authorities were no more sympathetic. 'Any problem can affect his nervous system,' Federation president Alejandro Del Caz said. 'He is like a child and has to be treated as such.'\n\nAs for the Vuelta, it never reached such a low point again, not even in 1978 when protests by Basque separatists forced the last stage to be cancelled. As _MARCA's_ special correspondent wrote: 'The 1960 Vuelta is over: may God forgive it.'\n\nIf Bahamontes turned around both his season and his career after a disastrous Vuelta in 1959 by his performance in the Tour, there was to be no repeat in 1960. Quite the opposite, in fact. 'The Eagle of Toledo has become a corn-fed chicken and corn is all he has in his head,' Tour director Jacques Goddet said after Bahamontes pulled out on the second stage in France. 'He has lost his honour as a cyclist and has shown himself to be unworthy of the attention he received last year from his compatriots who were so proud to have a Tour winner in their midst. [The Eagle] has let himself be stripped of his plumage without any desire to put up a fight.'\n\nIndeed, Bahamontes was a shadow of the 1959 champion. After losing time early on during the second stage across northern Belgium to Malo les Bains in Dunkirk due to a mechanical problem, Bahamontes began drifting out of the back again in the final hour of racing the same day. 'I couldn't respond when the peloton accelerated,' he recalled later. 'My guts hurt too much.' The constant bashing along the cobbled roads of north-west Flanders that day probably made any pain even worse. Eight riders from the fourteen-man Spanish team stayed with him for support, but it was no good. Forty-five kilometres from the finish Bahamontes slowed to a standstill, wrapped himself in a blanket and sat down by the side of the road. Then, for the second time in four years, the last his team-mates saw of him was a gaunt, dejected figure, slumped in the back of the race's 'broom wagon'. His compatriot's noisy attempts to persuade him to continue had failed, though this time there were no appeals to his patriotic duty or loyalty to his wife. Those minor details apart, history really was repeating itself.\n\nIt is not difficult to understand why Goddet was so furious: Bahamontes' abandon so early left the Tour director without the leading favourite for no clear reason other than a lack of motivation; for a former Tour winner to act like that was nothing short of treachery. Physically, for all he claimed his stomach hurt, Bahamontes did not seem to be in bad shape. Unlike 1957 there were no wasp stings, no reports of sunstroke or suspect injections. Nor did anybody see this one coming: Bahamontes had finished with the main bunch in the first section of the opening stage, between Lille and Brussels. Though he lost nearly three minutes to Anglade and Britain's Tom Simpson, so too had Rivi\u00e8re, for example. And while he lost nearly four and a half minutes to Rivi\u00e8re in a twenty-seven-kilometre time-trial on the race's second section in the afternoon, that was only slightly more than he had lost to the Frenchman in the final time-trial at Dijon during the 1959 Tour.\n\nAgain, with the benefit of hindsight there was perhaps one indication of what was to come: Bahamontes' anger at team-mate Fernando Manzaneque because he had misunderstood a race official's instructions and as a result the Spanish team leader had to start the time-trial earlier than he wanted. Instead, Bahamontes had to roll only a few minutes after eating his lunch, the time when his digestive system apparently hurt the most and he found it harder to pedal. But the team, it seemed, had no real idea that anything was wrong right up until he decided to pull out. 'If the doctors don't know what's wrong with him, how am I expected to know?' Team trainer Juli\u00e1n Berrendero fumed over the phone to a journalist that night. 'He's sitting in his [hotel] room refusing to eat anything but pills.' Team-mate Rene Marigil added: 'It's incomprehensible that he abandons like this. If he was so ill he shouldn't have asked the rest of us to lose time as well. All of us, barring three Spanish riders, stayed back with him.'\n\nIf everyone was at a loss for an explanation it was hardly unfamiliar territory. This was Bahamontes' fourth controversial abandon in just over three years and his enemies were quick to take advantage. 'It is just like 1957 all over again,' his old director Luis Puig said, 'except there is less of a show than there was back then. But the substance of the matter is the same.'\n\nOn one point at least Puig was wrong. The scandal in Spain surrounding Bahamontes' latest premature exit was far larger than three years before: Bahamontes was the country's first Tour winner after all. His victory then was supposed to be representative of the new, dynamic, prosperous Spain. Instead, the grainy agency photographs which appeared in the next day's newspapers showed an ill-looking rider in Spanish team kit, clearly ignoring the cameras and jammed into the back seat of what looked like an Army jeep. It gave Bahamontes the appearance of a war refugee trying to clutch on to the last shreds of personal dignity as his world collapses around him; certainly not that of a top athlete or the poster-boy for Spain's international success.\n\nNeither did Bahamontes' behaviour in France on the way home do anything to deflate the sense of national disquiet. After catching a train in Dunkirk to Paris he stopped off at his friend Jacques Daud\u00e9's restaurant. There an immaculately suited Bahamontes was photographed drinking some light soup. It was the only thing, he claimed, that his stomach could handle at the time. However, he looks perfectly healthy in the picture which was exactly what he did not need if he wanted the Spanish authorities to feel better disposed towards him. The photograph is odd for another reason: the presence of Swiss rider Willy Trepp, the only other occupant of the broom wagon when Bahamontes abandoned. For some bizarre reason he stayed with the Spaniard the next day, too, all the way to Daud\u00e9's restaurant. It contributed to the sense that something was out of place, but nobody knew quite what. This time, though, the Federation was not going to let Bahamontes off the hook so lightly.\n\nNo sooner had Bahamontes set foot in Spain than he was summoned to the Federation by its president, Alejandro Del Caz. Bahamontes turned up for the appointment half an hour late, but even he was not able to avoid the formal, full-scale inquiry into why he had abandoned. As usual with Bahamontes, the reasons for pulling out never quite added up. One of the more surreal stories behind his Tour-start-and-instant-abandon was the case of the poor translation service. Del Caz had apparently tried to get in touch with Bahamontes in France five days before the race began. Bahamontes had arrived early to see a doctor to try and sort himself out, though he later claimed he was taking part in criteriums. Del Caz called to tell him he had to return to Madrid for the obligatory pre-Tour medical check-up. However, Bahamontes was unreachable, and Del Caz was sidetracked into talking to a Tour de France official who apparently assured him that Bahamontes was well enough to start the Tour. It emerged later that Del Caz had little idea what the official was telling him. The conversation had been in French and by the time the official translator was roped in, Del Caz had already got it into his head that he was being told Bahamontes was in good shape. By the time the opposite was discovered to be true Bahamontes was out of the Tour and on his way home. This could have reflected badly on Del Caz, of course, except Bahamontes was equally insistent that things had been going fine. How could he possibly have wanted to start a race, Bahamontes said, if he knew he was going to have to abandon so soon? Bahamontes pointed out he had even paid twenty thousand francs (around \u00a310,000 today) to the French doctor who saw him before the Tour to ensure all was in order. (There are unconfirmed reports this was Dumas, the Tour's own medic.) Even after the opening time-trial, Bahamontes was still telling journalists that his stomach pains had disappeared.\n\nHowever, there were wheels within wheels: much later Bahamontes claimed that he had been under massive pressure from the Federation to start the Tour, which he had not wanted to do. Others, he argued, should have read the signs correctly and noticed, for example, that he had finished nine minutes down on the leaders in the Tour des Pyrenees, a warm-up race immediately before the Tour. 'I shouldn't have started,' Bahamontes said. 'I felt really bad, as bad as in the Vuelta. But I wanted to please everybody.' Neither the last-minute trip to Paris to try and cure a stomach upset that had plagued him since the Vuelta, nor the few days' rest in Melun at Jacques Daud\u00e9's country house, did much to solve the problem. The key point, though, was that there was too much at stake for Bahamontes _not_ to start. The Spanish authorities were so keen to have Bahamontes in the Tour line-up that they were prepared to bend their own rules over the obligatory check-up and assume a French official was telling them what they wanted to hear about his condition. While Bahamontes knew he was ill he felt obliged to start. Berrendero, who had the least to lose over the whole affair, thought it was nothing to do with illness or cramps, 'just that our _vedette_ [diva] had a real attack of nerves. It was completely out of the ordinary.'\n\nMeanwhile, as the Spanish newspapers ran full-page photographs of Bahamontes' abandon, it seemed that everybody had an opinion, which they were invited to express. One magazine _,_ _Informaci\u00f3n_ , even placed advertisements in the daily newspapers asking readers 'from Madrid, Toledo and Spain', to send in their reactions for a special edition about the issue.\n\nOver the years another possible contributory element to his untimely exit has emerged. Following disagreements a year earlier, it seems the night before the start in Lille an unwilling Bahamontes was forced to sign a deal with his team-mates over how prize money would be shared out. Could the answer to the Bahamontes question have been financial? Bahamontes has denied that he had been paid a prime by the Tour organisers to start that year, so there was no initial slice of the cake for the others to have. Luis Ota\u00f1o, for one, said that he received his correct share from the 1959 race. However, if disputes over money did affect Bahamontes, it would not be the last time financial disagreements tipped the balance when it came to him pulling out of races of whatever size. It is perhaps worth noting, too, that when Del Caz gave Bahamontes a public roasting in the Federation's offices, one of the things he berated Bahamontes for was putting financial interests above representing Spain.\n\nWhat is most striking about how the Federation dealt with Bahamontes is their total lack of faith in what he told them. From the word go they insisted on seeing the reports from the French medic who had examined Bahamontes before the race to compare them with their own doctors' analyses. At one point this was not going to be just a physical check-up, either: Del Caz wanted Bahamontes to see a psychiatrist. Initially the Federation president had defended Bahamontes, but he ended up roundly criticising him for failing to communicate with the Federation in the run-up to the Tour. As the scandal grew, any sympathy for Bahamontes evaporated completely.\n\nHowever, unlike 1957 when it was relatively straightforward for the Federation to give Bahamontes the green light again, this time their investigation was exhaustive. He was poked and prodded by nine different doctors, from specialists in the heart and lungs, ear, nose and throat, the digestive tracts, the stomach, as well as an ophthalmologist, the Federation's head of medical services, a family surgeon and another medic with unspecified skills. They found four specific physical problems: breathing, chronic throat and sinus infections and dyspepsia, which produced large quantities of wind. None of these were exactly life-threatening even if combined, as Bahamontes claimed, with a major dental trouble. Bahamontes later revealed that he was suffering from caries in four canine teeth and had to have them removed in the aftermath of the Tour. Strangely, given how thoroughly he was investigated, this operation was not mentioned anywhere in the official report. However, when the problems were combined they were enough for the Federation to 'declare him useless', as _ABC_ rather cruelly put it, and take away his racing licence. That effectively barred him from racing in any of the profitable post-Tour criteriums had there been any invitations in any case. Typically, Bahamontes was so annoyed his licence being withdrawn that he initially refused to apply to renew it. It was thanks to his wife that his career did not finish there and then. 'Finally it was Fermina who did it,' Bahamontes recalls. 'She and [Bahamontes business associate] Evaristo Murtra, went and got the licence sorted out again behind my back. Evaristo told me later he knew that was the only way it would get resolved \u2013 if Fermina did it.'\n\nThe Federation turned a blind eye when he made his return to racing on 31 August, four weeks earlier than he was supposed to. However, his performance in the two-day GP Priego de Cordoba was a minor triumph. Though it was hardly a major race, Bahamontes took both stages, the King of the Mountains classification and the overall. Suddenly it looked as though a strong end to the season was in prospect. The looks were deceptive. In the Spanish regional championships, his final race of the year, Bahamontes made another abandon described in the press as 'incomprehensible and unjustified'. Bahamontes' three-man Castille squad were the reigning champions in the team time-trial event held in front of a huge home crowd in Madrid's Casa del Campo park. However, after the first four of eight laps the Castillians were losing time and were ninety seconds down on the time set by the Catalans. They were still just about on course for a respectable result until first Fernando Manzaneque and then Bahamontes lost contact with team-mate Su\u00e1rez for reasons none of them were prepared to explain. In Manzaneque's case, the local media claimed it was a lack of general fitness. Indeed, he collapsed on the side of the road and needed medical assistance. Su\u00e1rez and Bahamontes raced on without Manzaneque, and with a minimum of two riders required to finish could still have defended their title. But rather than work together the two longstanding rivals began racing on opposite sides of the road. Su\u00e1rez finally dropped Bahamontes and continued alone. Bahamontes then abandoned and cunningly left Su\u00e1rez and Manzaneque to face the outraged fans at the finish by flinging his bike into the back of a car and driving off. His high-speed getaway probably neatly summed up his feelings about 1960: he could not get away from it quickly enough.\n\nWhy Bahamontes should have cracked so badly in the two most important events of the year was probably down to a lack of external guidance. The two biggest factors missing from his life in 1960 were his directors: Fausto Coppi died and Dalmacio Langarica was unavailable to manage the national squad in the Tour. He had resigned on 21 May, 1960, telling the press it was because of expanding business in the bike shop he owned. That did not stop him returning to directing later on, though, with the legendary K.A.S. squad. Bahamontes has always maintained that these two individuals were the keys to his racing success, albeit in different ways: Coppi had inspired him to win the Tour; Langarica had shown him how to do it. Crucially, Bahamontes respected them both in a way he never did Luis Puig or Bernardo Ruiz.\n\nIn the 1960 Vuelta with Faema, it is arguable that Bahamontes' volatile personality, combined with his increased sense of self-importance after the Tour win, was a fatal combination. His ego would not let him accept that one of his main support riders could be eliminated from the race. Having Ruiz, his old enemy, as director can only have heightened the tension inside the team. As far as the Tour was concerned, it seems Bahamontes underestimated his own problems.\n\nHowever, with his worst season following hard on the heels of his most outstanding one, not even Bahamontes could avoid the key question: how on earth was he going to put his career back on track?\nChapter Eleven\n\n#### Exile\n\nAndr\u00e9 Darrigade is a gentle, softly-spoken man who is keen to please. As he talks he springs around the room, dragging out boxes and bulging envelopes containing mountains of photographs from the time when he was a friend and team-mate of Federico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes. His office in the well-appointed bungalow in one of the more chic areas of Biarritz is crammed from floor to ceiling with trophies, medals and pictures of his victories. And they are not from the smallest of races. The winner of a staggering twenty-two stages from fourteen starts in the Tour de France, as well as being the 1958 world champion, Darrigade was one of France's greatest cyclists. A sprinter by profession, he won the opening stage of the Tour five times out of a possible six: not even Mark Cavendish, the 2011 world champion and unquestionably the fastest rider of modern times, has matched that yet.\n\nEven half a century on, and with limited contact between the two, Darrigade still feels a great deal of affection for Bahamontes, who was a respected colleague in the French Margnat squad for four years from 1962 to 1965. Darrigade's presence was a key reason why Bahamontes stayed so long with the team and did not keep switching at the end of each season as he had done before. For the first time in his professional career he felt sufficiently appreciated to want to stay. With a team-mate like Darrigade that is hardly surprising. Bahamontes once told me that Darrigade was his 'only friend among the foreigners in the peloton'. Darrigade recalls: 'We liked him, we really did. He wouldn't shut up, but he talked to everybody. He was a good rider. He could be cunning strategically and he wasn't the type who'd go out and party on stage races. In fact, I can remember him once ordering the entire team to get to bed.'\n\nThe universally popular Darrigade was a top sprinter who could climb well. But he was also a superb _domestique_ to the extent that he was sometimes criticised by directors for sacrificing his own chances to help the team's overall contenders. It was rare to find that degree of selflessness in the cut-throat world of cycling in the 1950s and 1960s. 'There was never a problem with Fede as a leader,' Darrigade told me. 'I'd do my work for the team and then I'd sprint, too. I did that for Anquetil, for Bobet and I did it for Federico. If he was ahead in the mountains, I'd try to slow down the rest [by chasing down counter-attacks], including Anquetil.'\n\nAs a heftily-built, tall sprinter, Darrigade's principle role within the team was to take care of Bahamontes ahead of the mountains, guiding him through the pack. By positioning himself just ahead of Bahamontes he could ensure that his leader had plenty of elbow room and would not get blocked in. 'It was difficult for Federico,' Darrigade says. 'Without me he'd have had to try to find enough space by himself. That's why he lost so often with the Spanish because they wouldn't pay him much attention. He was particularly vulnerable in side-winds and in echelons and he'd invariably lose time there in the north, in Belgium. So when he got to the mountain stages he'd be out of touch. I could warn him when problems were coming up. I would look at the maps and warn him what was going on, right down to looking at the width of the road. It was the kind of stuff I'd done with Anquetil countless times.'\n\nLike Miguel Poblet, Darrigade says that Bahamontes post-1962 was a different rider than in his younger days. 'Federico was willing to learn new tactics, like when he went training for an hour in 1964 before the start of a big mountain stage in Andorra, and he did the same again in Luchon the next day. Even before the stage started, he'd ridden over the Peyresourde pass to warm up. And as I knew Anquetil and Poulidor really well, I could tell how they were feeling and pass that information on to Federico, too.' Both Darrigade and Bahamontes point out that their new director at Margnat, former French professional Raoul Remy, was another catalyst in Bahamontes' renewal. Unlike Fausto Coppi, Remy was not a pioneer in terms of technology. But he did not have to be. Some of the changes Remy introduced were very straightforward, and quickly integrated, but they produced major results. For instance, in 1963, he suggested changing the gearing on Bahamontes' time-trial bike, so that he used a fifty-three-inch chain-ring rather than a fifty-two; it enabled Bahamontes to improve significantly when riding against the clock. Other innovations, such as bringing Darrigade and Jean Grazyck into the team, took longer to engineer but were equally beneficial.\n\nDarrigade repeatedly expresses his incomprehension that Bahamontes had received such poor support from the Spanish in the past. He partly blames Bahamontes, though, saying: 'It was in his character.' Things changed at Margnat after the Tour returned to trade teams rather than national squads in 1962. 'He was our leader,' says Darrigade. 'We knew he could win the Tour, so he got a team that worked with him. _C'est normal, non?_ ' However, as Darrigade emphasises, by now Bahamontes was thirty-four and within sight of retirement age for a professional. 'The tragedy was that it all happened too late.'\n\nBahamontes' career can be characterised as a series of brilliant flashes interspersed with sudden, dramatic falls from grace. However, after the turmoil of 1960 he went through a comparatively calm patch for two years which led to some of his most consistent and impressive results. The most significant development during 1961 and 1962 was that Bahamontes discovered that even at his age, and after a two-year absence from the race, he still had it in him to go for the overall classification in the Tour. Equally importantly, he also found that he was far better off in a French trade team than in any Spanish squad at the time. Neither discovery was straightforward: Bahamontes missed the 1961 Tour because his trade team, the Italians V.O.V., did not have the money to enter. In his one Grand Tour that year, the Giro d'Italia, he abandoned, citing injuries, though it later transpired the team had been unable to pay its riders for the entire season. If leaving a team because of money problems was not new to Bahamontes \u2013 he had run up against similar problems when he raced for Tricolfilina and would again, he claimed, in his final year with Margnat \u2013 he did not simply turn his back on the foreign option, as he might have done before. Rather than return home to ride for, say, Faema, Bahamontes decided to stay abroad in 1962 and join the French team. 'I was respected more outside Spain than in it,' he explains. He was also able to stipulate some basic conditions in this contract: he would not ride in the Classics as he had been forced to do with V.O.V; a definite ride in the Tour de France; plus the signing of a loyal _domestique_ , Juan Campillo.\n\nIn a sense the decision to stay abroad was the culmination of an ongoing process that began with Dalmacio Langarica and the Tour in 1958. Bahamontes had realised then that with the right tactics, and the right man in the driving seat as sports director, he could do more than just win the King of the Mountains prize. But after changing his attitude towards the Tour even more after Coppi's insistence that he could win it, 1960 proved Bahamontes was as good at forgetting advice as he was at taking it on board. However, in 1961 he lurched back towards taking a more objective, less impulsive approach to racing. After the 1960 debacle it seemed he might be changing for good on a personal level. 'Federico was very different in his later years, very different,' recalls Miguel Poblet. 'When he started racing, and we were sharing rooms, he was a right tearaway. You couldn't teach him anything. I remember at some point, in some race, we started being given these clear plastic cards, and I'd rip out the page of the route book and put it inside them. Bahamontes was lying on his bed, and he says, \"What's that? Can you do me one please?\" So I did. And when the race was over I ask him how using the card had gone. And he said, \"What card? It's still in my jersey. I don't understand it at all!\" That was Bahamontes in his early years. Later on, the more he raced, he got more sophisticated. He was willing to learn. There was a transformation over three or four years. It made sense because either you changed or you'd have to be a numbskull and Bahamontes was never a numbskull. He just liked to say what he thought.' One thing did not change, though, according to Poblet: 'He was very disorganised in the hotel room. His suitcase was so chaotic you'd have to walk round it on tiptoe and get the _soigneur_ to come and clear it up. But he was growing up all the same. With age he got a whole lot sharper.'\n\nBahamontes' various analyses of the advantages of being with Margnat vary wildly: while he admits in his account of the 1959 Tour that he had a better structured season with the French team, and that Remy was a great director, on other occasions when asked if he ever had a good team, he responds categorically: 'Never.' He elucidates: 'In the companies [teams] I joined, if there were [good riders], they didn't pay them, so they weren't there long. In a sporting sense it was always a disaster. If I'd ridden with [the legendary Spanish team of the 1960s] K.A.S., I'd have won more than one [Tour].' It is certainly true that in 1962 Margnat did not have a strong squad, underlined by the fact that they had only three finishers in the Tour, one of them Bahamontes. To their credit Margnat brought in some top reinforcements in 1963 as Bahamontes had requested.\n\nAt the same time Bahamontes recognises that going to Margnat solved a dilemma: it meant he did not risk offending either of the two top Spanish teams, K.A.S. and Ferrys. 'Margnat was the team who paid the best,' he says. 'They all turned up in Toledo \u2013 K.A.S., Ferrys and Margnat \u2013 with offers of half a kilo [five hundred thousand pesetas \u2013 \u00a3210,000 in today's money] each. I had a letter and a verbal offer from Raoul Remy [at Margnat] and I said to myself, \"If I race with Ferrys, then K.A.S. will race against me all season; if I race with K.A.S., then Ferrys will be against me\". So it was neither K.A.S. nor Ferrys; I was off to France. I took Juan Campillo with me [in 1964] and Antonio Blanco [in 1964]. I went for 475,000 pesetas a year, [\u00a3200,000] which was less than I'd get in a Spanish team. But the difference was they even paid my social security.' On top of that, he points out, as a 'foreigner', he could charge start money for races in Spain, which was apparently impossible if he was racing with a local squad.\n\nOne race Bahamontes did not ride again was the Vuelta. After the events of 1960 that probably suited both sides perfectly. Since his Tour win he had a lot to lose in smaller races he would be expected to win, and little to gain. In France, though, he could concentrate on the Tour with a squad who would support him. After a comparatively lacklustre 1961, Bahamontes' return to the Tour in 1962 followed an impressive first half of the season. Just as in 1961, Bahamontes hit the ground running. Whereas twelve months earlier his successes petered out after he abandoned the Giro when his old femur injury played up, in 1962, the good results stretched into July and beyond.\n\nBahamontes' return to form started with memorable victories in the Mont Faron time-trial and road race. 'I told my team-mates that when we got to Toulon [at the foot of the climb] they could go to the hotel and I'd handle the last part myself.' It was no idle boast. Just as the year before he won two hill-climbs back-to-back near Nice. But this time he followed them up with wins in May and June, on the Arrate hill-climb for a fifth time, then in a stage in the Tour of Romandie, widely used as the warm-up race for the Giro d'Italia. Even more encouragingly he was fourth and King of the Mountains in the week-long Dauphin\u00e9 Lib\u00e9r\u00e9, France's third biggest stage race after the Tour and Paris-Nice.\n\n'He was in great shape in the Dauphin\u00e9 Lib\u00e9r\u00e9,' confirmed fellow Spaniard Jos\u00e9 Bern\u00e1rdez. 'If he was brave enough to descent fast then he'd be unbeatable. But I don't think he's a match for Anquetil and Van Looy's strong teams.' _MARCA_ was wary about Bahamontes' Tour chances, saying that he was 'in great shape, but we'll have to give it a couple of stages to see what his real condition is like'.\n\n_MARCA's_ caution proved to be wise. On the opening stage from Nancy to Spa, a front group of twenty-three containing all the race favourites barring Bahamontes and Gaul, gained a massive margin. While Gaul lost two minutes, Bahamontes finished seven minutes forty-two seconds down with just Campillo supporting him. It was not quite game over but it was definitely not the return to the Tour for which Bahamontes had been looking.\n\nMost of the media attention centred on the post-stage bust-up between Belgium's sprint legend Rik Van Looy and stage winner Rudy Altig, the Vuelta champion. But the Spanish journalists were waiting for Bahamontes, who informed them he had been caught out. 'We rode well but the bunch split. It was hot and we were unlucky,' was Bahamontes' facile explanation. This time, though, Bahamontes did not just abandon and go home. He simply continued to lose chunks of time here, there and everywhere: ninety seconds to Jacques Anquetil on stage two's time-trial; six minutes on the first section of stage seven to Henry Anglade and Tom Simpson; and three minutes to Anquetil in the afternoon time-trial the same day. The totals were adding up and Bahamontes had little to say to the press apart from bland clich\u00e9s: 'The important thing is to stay close to the front,' he said after one stage; 'The Spanish are doing well, I'll try to do something in the mountains,' after another. Perhaps more notably, he recognised that Luis Ota\u00f1o and Antonio Su\u00e1rez 'are the ones defending our country the best'.\n\nThere were parallels to his disastrous performance in the first part of the 1956 race when he found himself even further behind the frontrunners. But unlike six years before this Tour was following a standard pattern rather than being what Brian Robinson called 'a blank sheet every day where you never knew what was going to happen'; it was going to be harder for Bahamontes to regain time. There were occasional attacks which raised hopes and when he chased down a break at the finish of the stage into San Malo it earned him his first mention of the race in _L'Equipe._ There were also brief flashes of the old self-confidence. As Raymond Poulidor recalls, Bahamontes would be telling riders when and where on the course he would eliminate them. In 1962 it was not just the more impressionable Tour rookies like Poulidor who could receive their marching orders from the Eagle of Toledo, it was big names like Rik Van Looy, too. 'Van Looy was attacking every single stage with his famous Red Guard. We got to the foot of the Pyrenees racing at 45 k.p.h. all the way from the start,' Poulidor told me. 'Then on the morning of the first Pyrenean stage we're all there at the signing-on, me, Van Looy and Bahamontes . . . and Bahamontes goes up to Van Looy and says, \"You, this evening, you're on the train out of here. It's me that's got the keys to the race now\". And, sure enough, that day Bahamontes was on the attack in the Pyrenees and that evening Van Looy was on the train, just like Bahamontes had told him.' And that was Bahamontes' level of confidence on an average Tour.\n\nMore than half the Tour had passed when the race finally headed into the Pyrenees and Bahamontes duly took off. He went over the Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde in first place. It was as spectacular a performance as any of his earlier mountain rides and earned him the front cover of _MARCA_ with the headline: 'The Eagle Takes Flight Again.' However, while it racked him up a healthy twenty-three-point lead in the King of the Mountains competition, in terms of the overall it was all but meaningless. Caught by Rolf Wolfshohl on the Tourmalet's descent, and again on the Aspin, Bahamontes was duly reined in sixty kilometres from the top of the Peyresourde. Game over. 'When you see that [Robert] Cazala, a sprinter who got over middling-size hills in reasonable shape, won the stage, that just about sums it all up,' Bahamontes fumed. 'I couldn't have won. To go on would have been crazy.' Next up, though, was an 18.5-kilometre mountain time-trial from Luchon to Superbagn\u00e8res, one of Bahamontes specialities and he duly delivered. But though he won the stage by eighty-five seconds over race leader Josef Planckaert, and gained seven minutes on the Belgian overall, he was still nearly twelve minutes behind the yellow jersey and remained pessimistic. 'I can't win, it's impossible,' he said. 'I've taken ninety seconds on Anquetil, but he'll regain six minutes on me in the time-trials.' As was so often the case in Bahamontes' mind, others were responsible for the situation. 'My team isn't sufficently strong for me to pull this off,' he claimed, 'though I'm ready to say that I prefer it to the one that was with me in 1959.' Bahamontes may have been critical of the Margnat team but they were not as weak as he made out: Ota\u00f1o, for example, was lying fifth overall after Superbagn\u00e8res.\n\nUnhappily, the Alps lost their relevance for Bahamontes in terms of the overall before he even reached them. Like Ota\u00f1o, he lost a huge amount of time the day after his stage win and trailed into Carcassonne more than thirteen minutes down on all the other favourites. Having praised him for his classy performance during the two days in the Pyrenees, _MARCA_ now highlighted his erratic nature, saying: 'He is a formidable rider \u2013 he gets formidable wins, then formidable defeats.' This tongue-in-cheek attitude was reinforced when they dragged up an old anecdote in which Bahamontes had apparently said he had suffered from a non-existent illness called _limaquitis_. 'Remember when he caught _limaquitis_? Nobody knew what it was because it was only an illness for him, and only he knew what that illness was.' For once Bahamontes blamed himself for a momentary lack of attention: he was at the back of the bunch when a sudden acceleration wrenched it into two. It left him with only the King of the Mountains jersey and another stage win as possible goals over the eight remaining days before Paris.\n\nBahamontes succeeded with the former, but not the latter. He blasted away alone in the Alps on the Tour's first assault of the Restefond Bonnette, Europe's highest pass at 2,802 metres above sea level. On the Izoard he was twenty seconds ahead of the main favourites. However, he was easily caught on the drop into Brian\u00e7on and had to settle for sealing his fourth King of the Mountains jersey. Once again that competition had been a one-man show: Bahamontes had a colossal sixty-point advantage over Italy's Imerio Massignan, who had won the title in his absence in 1961. At the finish in the Parc des Princes the French press dubbed the only three Margnat riders to complete the course (Ota\u00f1o, Campillo and Bahamontes) 'The Three Musketeers'. They had all finished inside the top thirty which led journalists to wonder what would have happened had the race been ridden with national teams.\n\nBahamontes' popularity remained high in Spain as one journalist from _El Mundo Deportivo_ testified when he came down into the lobby of the team hotel after Superbagn\u00e8res to find it overflowing with telegrams congratulating Bahamontes on his win. His old French friend, Jacques Daud\u00e9, was equally delighted by Bahamontes' return to winning ways. Just as in 1959, Daud\u00e9 funded his own trip around the Tour so he could be there at each finish with a bottle of water for his favourite rider. He had also become Bahamontes' minder, forcing journalists, and particularly Spanish ones, to ask him permission to talk to Bahamontes. 'It's easier if you're a foreigner,' one huffy Spanish journalist wrote.\n\nThe Tour route in 1962 did not particularly favour Bahamontes as he constantly pointed out. It contained four time-trials, albeit one of them uphill and one of them a team time-trial, making one hundred and eleven kilometres of racing against the clock. Made to measure, in other words, for Anquetil. Many of the finishes were also placed a long way from the top of the last mountain pass: it occurred after both the Tourmalet and the Izoard. Bahamontes was undoubtedly not helped by a lack of team support, not least because the last of the seven Frenchmen who started had abandoned in the Alps. But that would have been more significant if Bahamontes had been in contention, and that, as he admits, was at least partly his own fault.\n\nSo the 1962 Tour was a classic case of whether the glass was half-full or half-empty. Bahamontes felt the pros outweighed the cons. 'The important thing about 1962 was that it put me back on the map, even for those people who had claimed that I was on the way down,' he says. That in itself, given he was now thirty-three, was no mean achievement. So, too, was Bahamontes finally finding a trade team that suited him \u2013 and vice versa.\nChapter Twelve\n\n#### A Pirate With a Pair of Pliers\n\nMy ears hurt. Raphael Geminiani has just yelled, 'Who? Where? Who says Anquetil tried to buy Bahamontes?' at the top of his voice. For good measure he has slammed his fist on the kitchen table. Even at eighty-six, ' _Le Grand Fusil_ ' \u2013 Mr Top Gun is probably the closest translation \u2013 remains a force to be reckoned with. Interviewing Geminiani is not for the fainthearted. At six feet tall, he is a mountainous man with huge hands and tree-trunk thighs to match his girth. His laugh is like a long, dry drain and he has a leery, shark-like grin. If Geminiani had a previous life, it probably had something to do with bottles of rum, high seas and buried treasure. Instead he played the role of pirate on dry land. He had a near-legendary ability for wheeler-dealing and was one of the great managers, representing everybody from Louison Bobet to Anquetil, Lucien Aimar to Stephen Roche, and even briefly Eddy Merckx. Geminiani was and remains cycling's ultimate buccaneer, a champion of the sport's non-conformists. He was expelled from France's 'A' squad to a regional team in 1958 for being a firebrand. But only a raging storm in the mountains of Chartreuse, and a climber of the talent of Charly Gaul, prevented 'Gem' from embarrassing France's top team by winning the yellow jersey outright.\n\nGeminiani was equally fearless when it came to taking on race organisers and cycling's governing body, the U.C.I. Indeed, he staged a near one-man battle to have the names of trade sponsors included on team jerseys, something that is now taken for granted. In fact, in one race as a team director he instructed his riders to take off their jackets to reveal their logo-encrusted jerseys only seconds before a stage was due to begin to beat the ban on sponsorship. Just as fascinating is Geminiani's penchant for ridiculing the authorities. Typical is the story of the pet donkey he received from a fan at the 1958 Tour start and named after the French national trainer, Marcel Bidot, in revenge for his non-selection to France's 'A' team for that year's race. Parading it around the streets of Brussels where the race began, Geminiani then presented it as a gift to Bidot before as many photographers as he could assemble at the World's Fair, held in the Belgian capital that year. It was the kind of publicity stunt he took a positive delight in.\n\nThat, though, was more than half a century ago. These days, as Geminiani potters around his village near Clermont-Ferrand in central France, his giant frame squeezed into a tiny car, cigarette jammed into one corner of his mouth, he looks almost inoffensive. But this is the man who had one of cycling's stormiest and most intensely-lived careers.\n\nRight now, he is furious that anyone could suggest Anquetil wanted to pay off Federico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes. He yells again at the top of his voice: 'Where? Who?' In that mythical former life Geminiani would probably have been jabbing a sword in my chest. A neighbour has dropped in with a home-grown lettuce the size of a large cannonball for Geminiani's lunch; he watches this verbal dust-up across the kitchen table with all the impassivity of a countryman who has seen these kind of fireworks many times before. At this point I cop out. I do not have the nerve to tell Geminiani that the allegation comes from Bahamontes himself, who describes how Geminiani rang him one night during the Tour and offered to buy the race from him on Anquetil's behalf.\n\nIn any case, I have given Geminiani the right of reply. When he finally calms down he insists: 'I only ever had one rider in my team, a Belgian, who once sold a Paris-Roubaix, and when I threw him out and Anquetil said I'd been tough on him, you know what I said? \"My sponsor doesn't pay riders to make their rivals win\". But that's typical, they [the press] never say it's the strongest who wins, it's always a cheat, a doper or someone who's been bought. You say that Bahamontes helped Anquetil? I've got two sons and four daughters, and my honour, and I'm telling you [on all of them]: no. Never did anybody help Anquetil win anything. Whatever.' I leave it at that. After all, this is a man who allegedly swung a bicycle pump so hard during a Giro d'Italia he knocked five teeth out of a fan's mouth. His biography is titled _400 Fits of Bad Temper and Rifle Shots_. I have no desire to become the victim of the four hundred and first. As he reaches for his fifth cigarette in about an hour, and pours another black coffee, we continue.\n\nGeminiani was one of the first French riders to get to know Bahamontes well, and that as far back as 1956. So he was able to witness first hand the growth in the Spaniard's popularity in France. He also knew his weak points. 'We did the whole of the _tournee_ [post-race series of criteriums] of the Tour de France in 1956 in my car. It was me who drew up the route, me who chose the hotels and me who \u2013 he-he-he \u2013 chose the restaurants,' claims Geminiani between loud sucks on his cigarette. 'Daniel [Dousset] had told me to look after Bahamontes because he had no idea about France.' In the criteriums, Geminiani recalls, Bahamontes proved to be just the sort of ally he wanted. 'I remember we went to a crit in Chateaulin, the best paid in France. We got to the start and there was the Bobet mafia and the Anquetil mafia. And I said to Gerard Saint, \"Gerard, you do the first five laps and get all the primes\". Then, \"Federico, it's you [to another five laps] and afterwards it's me\". It worked. The mafia only got to win the fifty-franc primes and we got all the hundred thousand primes. And that evening in the distribution of the primes at Chateaulin town hall, I remember saying to the two mafias, \"All right, lads? Those fifty-franc primes feel good?\"' He hoots with laughter at the memory.\n\n'With time, we grew to trust each other. I taught him some French. He didn't speak much, but when he did people liked it.' Just as Andr\u00e9 Darrigade had suggested, Geminiani says that Bahamontes was enormously popular, 'even more so here than in Spain. They liked him here, he was _spectaculaire._ Everybody knew about that ice cream incident and they loved him for it. Maybe he only ate it because he'd needed a wheel change, but it caught their attention. But he wasn't so big in Spain because he'd never won the Vuelta. Whatever.'\n\nThe massive round of applause Bahamontes received in 1962 at the Tour presentation in Nancy goes some way to indicating how much he was appreciated in France as the leader of a French team. And there is some more intriguing confirmation of his fame in the most unlikely of places: the film _Amelie._ The heroine finds a box of toys left behind in a flat and upon returning them to their owner, a middle-aged man, he is reminded of watching Bahamontes win the 1959 Tour. Bahamontes concurs with the verdicts of Geminiani and Darrigade about how he is perceived in France. He once told me: 'Go anywhere there and ask a Frenchman who the best climber in the world has ever been? Bahamontes.' Geminiani, being Geminiani, could see Bahamontes' popularity in France was something he could exploit. When he sought alliances to defeat Bahamontes, he went to the Spanish riders. 'Given the situation it was easy to work with them against Bahamontes,' he says. 'It wasn't just that he was the man to beat. The aim of the game for the Spanish was to beat the man who was popular in France. But I can't say anything bad about him, he was somebody I liked.'\n\nFor all that Bahamontes was popular in France, it was no longer something he could take for granted on the other side of the Pyrenees. By early 1962 Bahamontes was no longer the number one sports star, let alone cycling star, in Spain. Two years of failing to make an impact in Grand Tours, and the rise of new stars like Angelino Soler and Jos\u00e9 P\u00e9rez Franc\u00e9s, contributed to a drop in interest in the man from Toledo. Furthermore, Bahamontes raced for a foreign team and never took part in the Vuelta. By the time his old rival Jes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o retired at the end of 1962 the two rarely raced against each other any more: Bahamontes competed mainly abroad and Loro\u00f1o seldom ventured out of Spain. Besides, the external factors of an inward-looking, isolated and economically-backward Spain that had helped drive their conflict had begun to fade. Not that Bahamontes was complaining. Racing for a French team automatically made the Tour the number one target of his season, something which in the Italian squad V.O.V., with its huge interest in the Giro and the home market, had by no means been guaranteed. Bahamontes was happy to be where he was, too: in 1963, for the first time in his career, he opted to stay with the same team for more than one season. Margnat were delighted with his success in the King of the Mountains in 1962, but their signing of two double winners of the Tour's points jersey, Jean Grazyck and Darrigade, showed they had bigger ambitions for Bahamontes than the previous summer. Indeed, ensuring he did not lose time on the flat could only mean one thing: Margnat wanted their star rider to have a crack at the overall title.\n\nIf news of Bahamontes' switch of strategy towards regaining the Tour overall had filtered out of Margnat's team before the race start, most French fans would not have been displeased. However, among French riders his new-found ambition drew a mixed reaction. 'We used to detest Bahamontes, but only because he was so good,' Raymond Poulidor says. 'Whatever the stage he would always be positioned a long way forwards on his bike, pedalling furiously. He'd attack at the foot of the first col and we wouldn't see him until the evening of the same stage. We didn't want to let him get out of our sight, but we didn't have any choice. He used the \"coffee-grinder\" style of pedalling: he would use a big gear to get away for his first attack, but then he'd spin a small gear really fast and keep up the same speed to create the really big time gap. If you tried to go with him, it was like committing suicide.'\n\nEven in 1963, when he turned thirty-five, Bahamontes made a great start to the season, gaining resentment and respect in equal measure from those who were less prepared. Poulidor recalls: 'It was always the same. Every year. I remember the Mont Agel hill-climb race early in my first year as a pro in 1960. Nobody had done any training \u2013 I'd maybe ridden three or four hundred kilometres before it \u2013 and we just had a pump on our bikes to carry as little weight as possible. Bahamontes, though, had a pump, a bottle and spare wheels on his. But who was the first at the top? Bahamontes.'\n\nIn 1963, then, Bahamontes came to the Tour de France with far more ambitious plans than 'just' another King of the Mountains jersey. 'Raoul Remy [Margnat's director] told me that there was no point in going for it again, people would take that for granted,' Bahamontes recalls. 'On top of that, the route was far more mountainous than usual. We had to go for the overall.' Anquetil won the Tour despite the organisers doing their best to level the playing field by cutting more than thirty kilometres from his strongest suit of time-trialling, reducing it from one hundred and eleven kilometres in 1962 to seventy-seven in 1963. However, what nobody expected was, as Tour director Jacques Goddet put it: 'The one rival who would be at his level was our old acquaintance, Federico Bahamontes.'\n\nBahamontes' crowning moment of glory came in the ski resort of Isere. A day after taking an Alpine stage win in a lone break, for the first time in four years he captured his first yellow jersey since 1959. True, his overall advantage over Anquetil was almost risibly small: just three seconds. Yet given he celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday the day he took the lead in the Tour for the second time in his career, it was a landmark achievement.\n\nEverything had fallen into place in 1963 starting with morale-boosting King of the Mountains wins in both the Midi Libre and Dauphin\u00e9 Lib\u00e9r\u00e9 warm-up races in June. Significantly for his team, on the first stage of the Tour Bahamontes had managed to get into the earliest possible break alongside Britain's Alan Ramsbottom and Belgian Eddy Pauwels and gained an eighty-eight-second advantage over Anquetil. For a squad like Margnat's this was crucial: just as today, much store was set in a team by a contender's ride in the Tour's prologue. Bahamontes gaining time _outside_ the mountains so early in 1963 showed his troops that their often erratic leader was on form and keen to do battle. Small wonder Margnat rallied around him, and he had some powerful team-mates to back him up. 'Bahamontes had a great team for the flat in 1963,' Poulidor recalls. 'Darrigade and Grazyck were two key players. His only weakness, curiously enough, was in the mountains: not many riders to support him there.' _MARCA_ waxed lyrical about this early success: 'He has turned up with the same kind of strength he used to have as a junior. Bahamontes is \"Baha\" again, flying over the Tour.' However, they added a sting in the tail, noting that in previous years, 'Anquetil has shown he is the best'.\n\nBahamontes' early break meant that even after an unremarkable seventh place for Margnat in the team time-trial on stage two he still remained fourth overall. He continued to go from strength to strength, staying out of trouble on the _pav\u00e9s_ to Roubaix. Then he lost just ninety-eight seconds to Anquetil in the first individual time-trial on a technically difficult course which contained sixty dangerous curves in 24.5 kilometres. 'I'm in great shape, but I don't drop them like I did before,' Bahamontes said, 'but at least I'm not losing time on the flat, either.'\n\nAnquetil tried his best to ambush Bahamontes before the mountains, attacking with Raymond Poulidor, Henry Anglade and Jean Stablinski on the long stage from Limoges to Bordeaux. However, Margnat combined with the Basque squad K.A.S. to pull back the move, prompting Bahamontes to tell journalists: 'Finally I am in a good team. Other times I raced the Tour as an individual. What do you think Van Looy or Anquetil could do without team-mates?' The difference between 1963 and previous years was that sometimes at least Bahamontes alternated his criticisms of his team-mates with dollops of praise. Margnat must have been doing something right.\n\nHowever, while Bahamontes and his team rode far above expectations on the flat, things did not go to plan in the Pyrenees. All his attacks were neutralised, and though he took a solid hold on the King of the Mountains competition with some early breaks Margnat's only stage win came thanks to Darrigade, who secured the twentieth of his twenty-two career Tour victories. It was earlier in that stage that Bahamontes made a serious error. After attacking on one mountain section very early on, and despite having team-mate Claude Mattio with him for support in atrocious weather conditions, he then opted to sit up at a point where he could have inflicted serious damage on his rivals. 'He missed out because he listened to his director's instructions to wait for the peloton,' _MARCA_ claimed later. 'If he had not done that it would have been Bahamontes on the highest step of the Tour de France podium that year.' Others agreed and also blamed the team. 'Fede lost the race in the Pyrenees,' Rik Van Looy said later. 'He couldn't handle the rain. If he had been in my team he and no other would have won the Tour for the simple reason I would have thought for him. That isn't what those who directed him did.'\n\nThe Alps were a different story. After Jacques Anquetil gained a thirty-second time bonus on Bahamontes at Aurillac, Bahamontes fired back the next day en route to Grenoble when he launched a devastatingly effective, short-range attack over the Col de Porte. Just nineteen kilometres from the finish Bahamontes blasted away alone on the first category climb. After reaching the summit with a two-minute advantage, for once he managed to maintain the gap all the way to Grenoble. It was the city where he had taken the yellow jersey four years before; now he was just twenty-four hours away from recapturing it in Isere. 'It was one of the most brilliant operations the Spaniard has ever carried out,' _MARCA_ claimed, before warning: 'But it did not get us the result we wanted. Unless Bahamontes takes five minutes in any one of these stages any earlier moves will have been in vain.'\n\nTaking the yellow jersey was almost a formality. On the Iseran pass the leader Gilbert Desmet of Belgium cracked completely, but with no real reaction from the main contenders. Desmet slid backwards, the rest trundled upwards. Bahamontes and the rest of the top names grouped together between the three-metre high snowdrift walls at the summit with only one brief attack from Poulidor to liven up proceedings. Bahamontes sardonically observed later that it was the only one Poulidor made in the entire race. However, Poulidor was not uppermost in Bahamontes' mind as they came down from the Iseran. With Desmet out of the running, Bahamontes was now ahead of Anquetil. One major Alpine stage and one long time-trial remained; the duel for the 1963 Tour, Bahamontes observed, was about to begin.\n\nOne of cycling's hidden attractions is that a lot of what remains memorable in an event is not what happens in the race but what happens around it. In the 1963 Tour it was the off-race controversy surrounding the crucial last Alpine stage that has come to dominate fans' memories, even though the key incident lasted all of twenty seconds. At the foot of the Forclaz, the last key climb of the race, Anquetil raised his hand to denote his bike needed repairing. Raphael Geminiani sped forward and cut the brake cable on Anquetil's bike with a pair of pliers when the officials, even the one in his car, were either not paying attention or could not see it. As a result of the 'broken cable' Geminiani was able to claim Anquetil should have a replacement bike, and quickly provided him with a lighter model. As a result of those twenty seconds, the three weeks and three thousand or more kilometres of the 1963 Tour were delivered into Anquetil's hands. Because as Geminiani puts it: 'If it hadn't been for the Forclaz, Bahamontes would have won the Tour.'\n\nSitting at his kitchen table now, Geminiani says: 'Bahamontes was the big rival we defeated that day and Poulidor lost seven minutes, but it was the organisers who made a mistake.' To say that Geminiani relishes discussing the Forclaz, and the tale of Anquetil's cable, is no exaggeration. He gives a lengthy, no-holds-barred explanation of what happened. He freely admits he cut the cable, but insists the fault was not his: it was the organisers' for failing to spot it.\n\n'That year, before the race, it was said that on that stage we'd go over the Grand St. Bernard pass, go down to Martigny and then take the A road over the Forclaz. Not a hard climb. But there was a landslide [he laughs heartily at the memory] and that blocked the Forclaz. So . . . I was lucky enough that someone told me beforehand we would have to go over the pass on the old sheep track that we'd gone over in 1948 when everybody went up it on foot. I looked at the pieces of paper the organiser had given us, and there was no change on it . . . but I knew that we'd have to be careful and change bikes, which was prohibited. So I prepared another bike with a twenty-six-tooth sprocket [which was far more suitable for an untarmacked climb]. I told Anquetil what we'd do, but obviously we'd need some kind of mechanical problem.' He chuckles again. 'So I made the problem happen: I cut his cable. I told the official watching that Jacques' rear cable was broken and that we'd need a replacement bike. And that is how, when Bahamontes attacked on the Forclaz, he dropped everybody, but not Anquetil. Not on his light bike.'\n\nThat was not the only thing the officials failed to notice that day, Geminiani points out. He outlines a second, less well-known, game-changing piece of cheating. 'When we got to the other side, I gave Anquetil his old bike back, but with his time-trial gearing instead of his usual mountain gearing to do the last, flatter, thirty kilometres to Chamonix.' Bahamontes had tried his utmost to shake off the Frenchman, but he had been outwitted. When the pair reached Chamonix, Anquetil took advantage of the latest switch of bikes to outsprint Bahamontes and win the stage. The time bonus of a minute \u2013 Bahomontes received a thirty-second bonus for second place \u2013 meant Anquetil landed the yellow jersey by a comfortable margin of twenty-seven seconds.\n\nWith only Anquetil's strong suit of a time-trial to come, Bahamontes' dream of a second Tour had evaporated. For all _MARCA_ claimed that he lost the Tour in the Pyrenees, and rebuked him for attacking earlier in the same day and wasting energy, the Forclaz had been his great opportunity to regain that time and turn the tables again. But thanks to Geminiani's sleight-of-hand that was rendered impossible. 'Bahamontes' defeat by Anquetil shows he had real talent,' Geminiani recognises. 'At Chamonix, it took a really strong Anquetil to beat him. And, like I said, if it hadn't been for the Forclaz, he'd have won the Tour.'\n\nWhen Geminiani reached the finish he faced a storm of protests about cutting the cable. But he tackled them head-on.\n\n'Remy protested for Bahamontes, [manager Antonin] Magne for Poulidor and I was surrounded by officials and journalists, and so on,' he remembers. 'Magne said, \"You cut the cable!\" And I said, \"Did you see it? That's slander, be careful, eh?\" So I said to the race official, \"Can you tell this gentleman what happened?\" And he said, \"I saw there was a mechanical problem.\" And I said, \"Do I have the right to change a bike if there's a mechanical?\" \u2013 \"Yes\" \u2013 \"Well that's what I've done.\" And Remy said, \"Well I could have done that, too!\" and I said, \"Well, did you?\" \u2013 \"No\" \u2013 \"In that case, your rights to do so are denied\".' He howls with laughter at the memory.\n\n'Me, though, I'd done my job, respecting the rules,' Geminiani insists to me, tongue clearly in cheek. Then he chortles at having beaten officialdom and the opposition in one fell swoop. Not to mention winning the Tour.\n\nApart from his specific accusation that Geminiani tried to buy the race from him, Bahamontes has very mixed feelings about the 1963 Tour. Keenly aware that he could have won the race, a torrent of resentment runs just beneath the surface when he discusses it. 'Geminiani was really scared of what I could do that year,' he says. 'When I attacked over the Grand St. Bernard, he got everybody he could to chase after me. I'd gone on the attack, waited to see if anybody came, nobody did, and [Margnat director] Raoul Remy came up and said, \"Where are you off to?\" and I said I just wanted to get to the top to settle the King of the Mountains competition. And then when I got to the summit of the Grand St. Bernard I had five minutes. And if you're at the top of a climb with five minutes' advantage, what do you do?' So on Bahamontes went, despite being weighed down by a large potato, kept in his back pocket to try to prevent an over-large _maillot jaune_ from ballooning out. 'All the teams were chasing like crazy, the Belgians and the Dutch and Gem's team, because they knew I could win the Tour. Then there was only the Forclaz left and Geminiani was there with Anquetil. Geminiani gets a kick these days out of telling people how just at the point where it got toughest he changed Anquetil's bike and pushed him up the climb round the steepest corners. On the climb itself Poulidor got dropped when I attacked and there was just Anquetil left. He sat on my wheel and he was suffering badly because I went up on the left-hand side so he'd be riding into the wind as well. But Geminiani had changed his bike, cutting the cables with some pliers, and then he pushed Anquetil round each bend. On the descent Anquetil attacked, I didn't have good brakes and my foot came out of the pedal on a bend and he got fifty metres on me.'\n\nAfter Forclaz, on a bike with gears suited for a sprint, wrapping up the race was easy for Anquetil. 'There must only have been three kilometres left when Geminiani told Anquetil to ride like it was a time-trial, but I was ready for that attack,' Bahamontes recalls. 'Then a motorbike belonging to the race organisation came up \u2013 it had no right to be there \u2013 and helped Anquetil attack again. And that wasn't the only time that happened by a long shot.'\n\nAt other moments, though, Bahamontes was capable of recognising that Anquetil rode the 1963 Tour 'like a great champion. He was well organised, he had no need of Poulidor'. Yet almost in the same breath, in an interview with _L'Equipe_ at the finish in Paris, Bahamontes once again accused Raymond Poulidor of 'working for Anquetil on the Grand Saint-Bernard. Without that, I would have got six minutes. I'm not mad. I saw them talking together two days before that'.\n\n_MARCA_ said in their post-race analysis: 'He is the best Spanish rider in history and he deserved the triumph had it not been for those errors he made. At thirty-five, to go on being a great figure in his sport at the same level as the winner has its merit.' The Franco regime woke up to the fact that Bahamontes was back on top of his game, though it was noticeable that they took advantage of Jos\u00e9 P\u00e9rez Franc\u00e9s's third place behind Bahamontes, as well as Angelino Soler's sixth place overall, before singling out Bahamontes only briefly. It was a long way from the ecstatic reception and political exploitation that Bahamontes' Tour win had received four years earlier. 'I congratulated him and all the Spanish who have made the race Spanish again,' commented Jos\u00e9 Antonio Elola, who remained in control of sport. 'Even in different teams, you [the Spanish] cannot deny that your style of racing and sporting strategies have united you above brand names and tactics.'\n\nThe most intriguing analysis of Bahamontes' near-miss came from Damian Pla, P\u00e9rez Franc\u00e9s's director, who claimed that had it not been for Anquetil, 'Bahamontes would have lost twenty minutes on the flat', and with it all chance of a podium finish. 'Anquetil ended up blocking the race [by being so strong], he made everybody race more conservatively,' he said. That sounds like sour grapes because Bahamontes finished ahead of P\u00e9rez Franc\u00e9s. Besides, barring that crucial error of not opening up a gap in the Pyrenees, he hardly raced conservatively: as early as the first stage Bahamontes was taking time from Anquetil. As for Bahamontes' claims that Anquetil had been helped to win the Tour, the issue was skilfully fudged by _L'Equipe._ The newspaper shrewdly pointed out: 'Federico accuses, comments and regrets with the same degree of sincerity.' However, the writer then dodged the issue of Anquetil by focusing on another rider altogether: Poulidor, who finished eighth. 'His arguments lack any foundation . . .' _L'Equipe_ blithely added. 'Poulidor was always behind him, he was never able to bring back this devil of a man who flew towards the summits.' Anquetil did, however, even if occasionally he needed a pair of pliers and a shrewd, piratical manager to be sure.\nChapter Thirteen\n\n#### The Master and the Apprentice\n\nIn 2011, Luxembourg's Andy Schleck jumped away from the pack on the Alpine stage over the Izoard pass and up the mythical Galibier climb and rode the sixty-five kilometres to the finish alone. His closest pursuer was two minutes seven seconds adrift and it took him within fifteen seconds of the yellow jersey. Ultimately he finished second overall in that year's Tour de France.\n\nThe move was hailed as a throwback to the glorious days of long-distance mountain attacking. It was almost Bahamontes-esque in its execution. Indeed, it was almost a carbon-copy of another devastating break by Federico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes back in 1964. Bahamontes attacked at the foot of the first of four Pyrenean cols with just one other rider, Julio Jim\u00e9nez, for company. After riding over the Peyresourde, Aspin, and Tourmalet together he dropped Jim\u00e9nez on the Aubisque and reached the summit alone. Forty-five kilometres later he crossed the line in Pau nearly two minutes before anyone else. As a result Bahamontes moved to within thirty-five seconds of the yellow jersey in second place. He finished third overall in Paris.\n\nThe similarities between the two moves, forty-seven years apart, are clear. Bahamontes' spectacularly long breakaway provided perhaps his greatest stage win of all in the Tour. However, outside Spain his two hundred-kilometre dash for glory is still considered merely a sideshow in the drama of the 1964 Tour. For proof of that lack of interest you could do worse than look at _L'Equipe'_ s mammoth 1,500-page history of the Tour: Bahamontes' two wins in 1964 \u2013 in Brian\u00e7on and Pau \u2013 do not even earn a mention. In fact, the only reference to the Eagle of Toledo is in one (wildly inaccurate) headline: 'Poulidor climbs better than Bahamontes'. His lack of recognition that year is down to the fact that he was considered the third man in what is still viewed as an epic two-way duel between Jacques Anquetil and Raymond Poulidor. Often cited as one of the five most exciting Tours in living memory, it was the year of Anquetil's near-collapse coming out of Andorra, of Poulidor's clown-like mechanical problems near Toulouse and of his stunning fightback to Luchon. Above all, it is the year of the Anquetil-Poulidor _t\u00eate-a-t\u00eate_ duel, shoulders straining against one another, on the slopes of the Puy de D\u00f4me. Bahamontes actually finished ahead of both of them on the Puy, but he was never considered to be a serious challenger. In the words of Raphael Geminiani, Anquetil's director: 'Bahamontes was all spectacle. He wasn't a threat.'\n\nYet when Bahamontes rode alone across the summit of the Aubisque he had an advantage of six minutes on the pack and the lead in the Tour de France was within his grasp. Bahamontes remains convinced that he could have won the Tour that year. Geminiani, as a biased observer, might not agree, but an astute neutral like Andr\u00e9 Darrigade says: 'He's not wrong; he could have.' Darrigade explains: 'When Bahamontes attacked that day in the Pyrenees Anquetil used the Pelforth team against him. There was a sort of conspiracy, or manipulation of events, against him.' And then, of course, there was Julio Jim\u00e9nez.\n\nRemembering how difficult Bahamontes' relationship was with his predecessor as Tour's King of the Mountains, Jes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o, it is perhaps reasonable to suppose that Bahamontes' relationship with the man who succeeded him was never going to be a marriage made in heaven. As Darrigade points out, though, it is ironic that on that stage from Luchon to Pau in 1964 Jim\u00e9nez was the man who held the key to a second Tour victory for Bahamontes. But Bahamontes failed to reach out and claim the crown. 'If he'd been a bit craftier,' Darrigade observes, 'he'd have said to Jim\u00e9nez, \"You take the stage win, and I'll go for the Tour\". If the two had ridden together and worked together all the way to the finish Bahamontes could have done it. He could have won the Tour.'\n\nTrue, with Jim\u00e9nez riding for K.A.S. and Bahamontes for Margnat, the alliance of Spain's two great climbers on stage sixteen was never going to be more than a temporary fusion of mutual interests. Of course, both wanted to win the King of the Mountains title, and both wanted to finish as high in the overall classification as possible. But under normal circumstances an understanding between the pair was far from unprecedented in cycling. Putting as much daylight between themselves and their rivals as possible was to their mutual advantage and far more likely if they combined forces. After that the two could divide the spoils, Bahamontes going for the Tour and Jim\u00e9nez for the stage and the King of the Mountains title. The problem was that while Bahamontes wanted the overall, he did not want to relinquish the King of the Mountains jersey. As a result, his best chance of winning the race that year disappeared on the long road to Pau.\n\nBahamontes made his move after three kilometres. 'I attacked early to see if I could get rid of the _domestiques_ ,' he claims, 'and force the leaders to come across. When I heard Julio Jim\u00e9nez was trying to bridge across my director, Remy, told me to wait. I let him move ahead on the summits of the three climbs that followed. But when he had taken them all and moved ahead of me on the mountains classification he then refused to work any more. At the top of the Aubisque I had six minutes thirteen seconds on the bunch, more than double the advantage I'd had at the foot, but that was when the suffering started. I had all that way to go to Pau, but I was alone, nobody was there to work with me and that's what I needed, above all, when I had a group with Anquetil, Poulidor [and nine other riders] chasing behind. With a head-wind in the last ten kilometres the ride to the finish seemed to be interminable, and behind they rapidly reduced my advantage. But I still had nearly two minutes on them at the finish.'\n\nWith Spain able to watch the race live on television for the first time that year, what proved to be Bahamontes' last full Tour, and his last stage win, turned into a memorable dessert to serve for his supporters back home. 'It was,' Bahamontes once said, 'one of the most meritorious days of my career, but my hard work did not allow me to reap the full rewards. The distance from the summit of the Aubisque to the finish in Pau was so far that it allowed the chasing group, unable to beat me individually, to beat me as a unit.' Overall, though, Bahamontes had made serious inroads, moving to just thirty-five seconds behind leader Georges Groussard, while Anquetil was fifty-one seconds back and Poulidor at a minute.\n\nThough Bahamontes took a trouncing in the time-trial that followed the next day, losing four minutes in forty-two kilometres, there was still an outside chance of regaining time a few days later on the Puy de D\u00f4me, the race's final summit finish. Instead, Bahamontes was unable to follow Julio Jim\u00e9nez's attack late on, admitting that he miscalculated, and his second place at the finish line simply allowed Bahamontes to consolidate his third place overall. A podium place was no mean achievement for a thirty-six year old and his two mountain stage wins were confirmation that he was still mounting an aggressive campaign, and not just riding conservatively.\n\nOn occasions Bahamontes has attempted to explain away his defeat by saying that he wanted to finish third in the 1964 because he had already finished first, second and fourth overall. At other moments, though, more realistic feelings take over. '[In 1964] I took my sixth and final overall classification in the King of the Mountains,' he once wrote. 'But above all I felt that I had missed a great opportunity.' The real shame was that in all the hullabaloo surrounding Poulidor and Anquetil hardly anyone outside Spain noticed.\n\nBahamontes stood on the finish line in Brian\u00e7on, a week into the race, and pronounced: 'I have prepared myself exclusively to try and win the Tour de France.' At that point, after the first major mountain stage of 1964, he was clearly the best placed of the favourites to do so. There was only one rider ahead of Bahamontes after Brian\u00e7on \u2013 Georges Groussard \u2013 a reliable but not exceptionally talented _domestique_. The Frenchman had played his cards perfectly by getting into a break in the Vosges mountains and being allowed to go clear by the big names. Two days later he was into a lead he would hold for nine stages. For once, though, Bahamontes had managed to come through the first week of the Tour without losing too much time. Compared to Anquetil, the key reference point, he was around two minutes down, most of it lost in a twenty-kilometre team time-trial on stage three. However, it was one thing for a veteran like Bahamontes to stay in contention, another to move ahead. But Bahamontes, being Bahamontes, took the first opportunity he could. His declaration of war on the Tour's eighth stage was anything but subtle: he let his troops soften up the opposition in the first one hundred and seventy kilometres, before going clear on the second category Telegraphe. He widened the gap yet further on the most challenging Alpine climb of them all, the Galibier, then maintained his advantage on the long drop down the valley to Brian\u00e7on. Second home was Poulidor, at ninety-two seconds, with Anquetil finishing a further seventeen seconds back. Overall Bahamontes was behind Groussard, but he was thirty-two seconds up on Poulidor, with Anquetil eighth nearly two minutes back. Asked if he dared attack the quadruple Tour winner, Bahamontes answered defiantly: 'The aim is to try. Both Anquetil and his _domestiques_ want to stop me; they'll have to suffer.' However, Bahamontes' onslaught was not quite as beneficial as it could have been: in hindsight, a later, punchier attack on the Galibier, even if it did not rack him up as many King of the Mountains points, might have been more productive in terms of the overall.\n\nThe next day Bahamontes' attack over the La Bonette-Restefond climb enabled him to crown what was (and remains) the highest tarmacked mountain pass in France alone and ahead of the field for the second time in three years. It was a magnificent achievement, and Bahamontes wheeltracks \u2013 in the Tour at least \u2013 remained unfollowed for nearly thirty years until Scot Robert Millar became the next rider in the race to cross the summit of the pass, in 1993. Though not exceptionally steep La Bonette Restefond is daunting for its exceptional length \u2013 twenty-three kilometres \u2013 and its fifteen hundred metres of climbing. The altitude is another intimidating factor since anything above two thousand metres, like La Bonette-Restefond's summit, causes oxygen debt. The appalling road surfaces also pose problems. In 1964 it was only a gravel descent and in 1993 I can remember driving along poorly tarmacked roads, barely a car's width across and with no barriers separating us from a vast, impossibly deep ravine.\n\nMillar told British magazine _Cycling Weekly_ at the time that he had been 'honoured' to be the first rider to reach La Bonette-Restefond's summit since Bahamontes, and in a curious echo of Bahamontes' rider four decades earlier, Scot and Spaniard employed identical tactics on the descent. Just as Bahamontes had done in the foggy drop off La Bonette-Restefond in 1962, I can recall Millar saying he used the race motorbike's brakelights to guide him down as fast as possible, too. When the motorbike braked, so did Millar.\n\nHowever, there were more parallels \u2013 none of the attacks worked out. Just as Millar's lone break in 1993 ended with him being caught on the flat roads that followed La Bonette-Restefond, so both of Bahamontes' breaks proved fruitless. This was no surprise the second time round in 1964 as the stage ended in Monaco, 130 kilometres further on. To add insult to injury, Anquetil outsprinted Tom Simpson at the finish for a minute's bonus: so for all his exploits, including taking the lead in the King of the Mountains competition, Bahamontes ended up losing time on his main rival.\n\nFor Bahamontes the big problem remained the same as it had been in every Tour since 1954: the summits were too far from the finishes for him to benefit. As a descender whose ability ranged from poor to mediocre, it was a real disadvantage. In 1964 that handicap became evident on the Bonette-Restefond stage; five days later, on the road from Andorra to Toulouse, when the whole field had Anquetil up against the ropes, the message was really rammed home.\n\nFor Bahamontes the planning for the Andorra stage started twenty-four hours earlier when he learnt that Anquetil was spending the rest day at a barbecue. 'They told me, \"Anquetil's having a right party in the house up there, he's drinking champagne\",' Bahamontes recalls. 'So I said to myself, \"Tomorrow all that champagne's going to be coming out of his ears\", and I got hold of [team-mate Jos\u00e9] Segu and I said, \"Tomorrow we'll have breakfast three hours earlier than usual, and then ride the twenty-five or thirty kilometres to the start.\"' The objective was to be fully 'warmed up' as soon as the race started the first ascent of the day, the twenty-kilometre Envalira pass out of Andorra which began almost before the stage had left the start town of La Vella. 'When we started, we were all fired up and \u2013 boom! \u2013 we went off \u2013 boom! \u2013 on the attack. After two kilometres they came up and told us that Anquetil had abandoned, and then the whole of his team had had to drop back to help him get over.'\n\nBahamontes was far from being the only one with the idea of putting Anquetil to the test on the Envalira, even though it emerged that his abandon was no more than a rumour. The photograph of Anquetil at the party stuffing himself with lamb from a barbecue, and Geminiani pouring him a drink, rather than embarking on the usual rest day's light training, had appeared in that morning's newspapers. Geminiani is adamant that it was just a mock-up for the press. Mock-up or not it was certainly unwise: Henry Anglade and the Pelforth team, defending Georges Groussard's yellow jersey, along with Raymond Poulidor, all went training before the start with the same intention. The mass attack they then staged was arguably the only way to sink so strong a rider as Anquetil, and the Frenchman was four minutes adrift by the summit of the Envalira, albeit partly as a result of his alleged indigestion.\n\nNot for the last time, with three mountain stages ahead, and only two minutes down, Bahamontes seemed to be in the driving seat. But then Bahamontes and Poulidor, who led over the summit in dense fog, made two strategic mistakes. The first was not to wait for the first chase group, all of whom would have been more than happy to collaborate to eliminate Anquetil from the running. Secondly, they underestimated Anquetil's self-esteem: he pulled out all the stops on the descent, taking risks in the fog that neither Bahamontes nor Poulidor had been prepared to, and regained his position in the peloton. 'The fog saved him,' Poulidor would later say. 'The cars had their lights switched on because of the fog and that was a reference point [for Anquetil on the descent]. Without that fog, we would have waited for the group behind and he would never have seen us again.'\n\n'Anquetil was kaput,' recalls Geminiani. 'They had all attacked and he'd been dropped one hundred metres after the start.' But his star rider's problems had nothing to do with the previous day's lamb or wine, he said. 'The problem was that some astrologer had predicted he'd die on stage thirteen and it had been published in _France Soir_ , the biggest newspaper around at the time. All the _Poulidoristes_ had sent him copies of the newspaper, and Anquetil was like, \"What do I do? Go home?\"' Anquetil was so worried that Geminiani even got his wife to visit to persuade him to calm down and not pull out. Anquetil spent most of the rest day in bed. Geminiani says: 'I got really pissed off with him lying there in bed and dragged him off to that barbecue. But the next morning he didn't want to get on his bike. I made him do it. One hundred metres after the start he was dropped. He was so far back he was the last rider over the Envalira. Then, at the summit, the fog was so thick it seemed like the end of the world. And I was so pissed off I went up to Jacques and yelled at him, \"Hey! If you're going to die like that astrologer says, die at the head of the race and not in front of the broom wagon!\"'\n\nAnd that, by and large, was that. What had started as a mass mutiny against the winner of the three previous Tours fizzled out. Anquetil pulled off a stunning descent, first catching the Groussard group and then Bahamontes.\n\nIt is difficult to disagree with Bahamontes when he says the Tour was weighted in Anquetil's favour. It was not just the route or the lack of summit finishes, it also helped Anquetil that the organisers split the individual time-trials into three different stages. Each had a one-minute time bonus and they were all won by the Frenchman. Additionally, the Tour's decision to revert to trade teams made it impossible for Bahamontes to exploit any disunity between the major stars in the French team like he had in the 'bad old days' when the Tour was run with national squads. With television cameras now filming the race it was far harder to work against theoretical allies or pull a fast one on your team-mates without anybody noticing. All Bahamontes could do was play Anquetil at his own game and try and form alliances with rivals to outmanoeuvre him. And who better, in theory, than Julio Jim\u00e9nez?\n\nJulio Jim\u00e9nez settles back in the armchair in the first-floor flat he calls home in \u00c1vila. Now well into his eighth decade, and nearly five decades after one of the defining moments of the 1964 Tour, when asked what his problem was that day with Bahamontes, Jim\u00e9nez's answer is 'he [Bahamontes] wanted everything.' This is the Julio Jim\u00e9nez so memorably described by the late Geoffrey Nicholson in _The Great Bike Race_ as a 'small, bird-like figure . . . he was also balding, grey-faced and never looked particularly well, but on the first steep slope he would prance away as if he had springs in his calves'. Jim\u00e9nez, who weighed fifty-seven kilos (eight stone thirteen pounds) when in form, has thickened with age. However, he still zooms about his living room at speed and with a bounce in his stride that would do credit to Zebedee in _The Magic Roundabout_. He constantly picks up and puts down pieces of paper and photographs, his head darting from side to side and talking nineteen to the dozen. Clearly none of the nervous energy that saw him secure three King of the Mountains titles in the Tour and Vuelta, and finish second in the Tour in 1967, has been lost. In his own slightly skittish way Jim\u00e9nez is as keen as Bahamontes to ensure the visitor cannot miss the scale of his success. For one thing, he uses the pennants that he received for each of his five Tour mountain stage wins as rather painful head-rests (they are studded with brass knobs) for his sofa. And if the hat-trick of stags' heads he received as best climber in the Tour's Alpine stages between 1965\u201367 were lined up a little lower in his hallway, a tall guest might be tempted to hang his coat on them.\n\nDelve into Jim\u00e9nez's personal and sporting history and there are many other similarities with Bahamontes, right down to them both wearing grimy, non-regulation sports jerseys in their first races: Bahamontes in his basketball shirt complete with shoulderpads, Jim\u00e9nez in 'an \u00c1vila football shirt that had been washed so many times you could barely read the letters'. And the parallels continue: both come from working-class backgrounds in central Spain. Though not as poor as the Bahamontes family, Jim\u00e9nez's parents could not afford any luxuries like bicycles, either. In fact, Jim\u00e9nez only acquired his first bike because his mother worked as a maid for an army general who had several. Jim\u00e9nez spent so much time staring at them, he recalls, that the general felt sorry for him and ended up buying Jim\u00e9nez a tricycle. Both Bahamontes and Jim\u00e9nez started their professional careers late: Bahamontes at almost twenty-five, Jim\u00e9nez at twenty-seven. Finally, they both spent large parts of their early twenties making their own way across Spain to races. Just a few years after Bahamontes, Jim\u00e9nez would travel up to five hundred and fifty kilometres to Asturias and the Basque Country for his first big races. But in a sign of Spain's slowly improving economy he did so on a battered Vespa, not a racing bike like Bahamontes.\n\nJim\u00e9nez was nicknamed the 'Watchmaker of \u00c1vila' because that was his original trade. He also cut his cycling teeth in Barcelona, staying in Santiago Mostajo's house. He received his first professional contract in 1961 with a small Catalan squad. Three years later K.A.S. gave him the chance he so desperately wanted: to ride the Tour. Jim\u00e9nez's first stage win came with an attack on the approach roads to the Envalira pass into Andorra in 1964. Like Bahamontes, he was a poor descender, but he still retained enough of an advantage on the pack at the Envalira summit to make it down to the finish to victory. It was on stage fourteen to Pau that Bahamontes and Jim\u00e9nez, the old master and the young apprentice, found themselves together at the head of the field for the first and last time. There were four mountain passes ahead of them. As radios across Spain transmitted reports of the developing breakaway, crowds gathered in bars and the nation held its collective breath. With two such adept climbers at the head of the field who knew what would happen?\n\nBack on the road in the Pyrenees, however, there was a problem. And it was not an easy one to resolve. 'The thing was we were a bit pissed off with each other,' Jim\u00e9nez says now, 'It wasn't like we were working together at first. We would each make long accelerations on either side of the road until his director came up and told him to work with me. At that point, the idea was, \"I would be the first across each climb\" \u2013 which Jim\u00e9nez was \u2013 \"and he would go for the [yellow] jersey\". We did a couple more climbs together. The break was going all right, [even if] Fede was sprinting for the points at the top of the climbs.' That, of course, went against their agreement. 'Then on the last climb I had a tough moment and I got dropped,' says Jim\u00e9nez. Strategically, if Bahamontes really believed he could challenge for the overall it would have made more sense for him to wait. However, Jim\u00e9nez claims that he did not have the courage to ask Bahamontes to do so, and Bahamontes never suggested it. 'To tell you the truth, I'd done absolutely everything I could to help him in that break and I was shattered. He even told me, earlier on, not to go so hard because there was a long way left to go. So that was it. We exchanged a couple of words and he went on. He was my idol; it was my first Tour. How was I going to say to him, \"Go a bit easier because on the other side of the Aubisque there's sixty kilometres to go and you might need me there?\"'\n\nAs Jim\u00e9nez hints, that kind of distance without any further climbs, is an extremely long way for any lone rider to fend off a group of chasing rivals. But Bahamontes and Jim\u00e9nez could not agree on a tactic that would benefit both of them. 'He wanted everything: to go over the top alone and win the stage and he forced the pace deliberately [to drop me] because you can tell when someone does that,' Jim\u00e9nez says. 'So I went up at my own pace, and I said to myself, \"If I manage to catch him, I'm going to attack him and he's going to pay for what he did\".'\n\nBy the time he was halfway down the other side of the Aubisque Jim\u00e9nez was under no illusions that he would catch Bahamontes again. He stopped and bought himself a Coca-Cola and sandwich in a bar. These days that would probably get him fired from his team; back then it was seen as perfectly normal. While he knocked back his Coke, his director told him to hurry up because a large chasing group was about to go through. Sure enough, about five minutes later the likes of Poulidor, Groussard and Anquetil came hammering down the road. Jim\u00e9nez gulped down his quick snack and latched on to the back. He insists, perhaps a little too much, that he did not assist in the ongoing pursuit of Bahamontes, something that Bahamontes claims both Jim\u00e9nez and K.A.S. team-mate Francisco Gabica had done. 'I got on their wheel and I barely moved from the back, I swear, though I didn't take one turn on the group. I swear it,' says Jim\u00e9nez. 'But in any case they were flying and when we got to the square in the middle of Pau he just had a couple of minutes. However, if he'd waited for me we might have gone up [the climb] a minute slower, but I think on the flat we'd have held them off for longer, and he'd have been closer to getting the yellow jersey.' Instead, Bahamontes' determination to retain the King of the Mountains jersey had betrayed him and ultimately the greater prize eluded him.\n\nThe tale has been told and retold so often that the reality of what was actually said between Jim\u00e9nez and Bahamontes is irretrievably buried under a blanket of half-truths. But Bahamontes' desire to take both the King of the Mountains title and fight for the overall, rather than sacrifice the first, was not the only problem. When asked if Bahamontes could be trusted in 'gentlemen's agreements', whilst Bahamontes insists he respected all deals with Jim\u00e9nez, Jim\u00e9nez answers straightaway. 'Not in my case,' he says. That, it emerges, was the reason for the lack of collaboration at the start of the stage which lost them both time: Jim\u00e9nez claims he had already been too badly burned in at least one previous breakaway with Bahamontes. 'I don't remember where, but there was some mountain stage in the Tour that year [almost certainly stage nine to Monaco where Bahamontes took the lead in the King of the Mountains], and where he'd told me the day before, \"Look, if I go on the attack, don't follow me because it could ruin the break, and I'm going for the lead\". And I thought I'd respect that because he was a god, an idol, in Spain and I was a piece of shit in comparison. However, when I talked to my director, Dalmacio Langarica [Bahamontes' director in 1959], he said, \"Don't trust him\". But I did. And, sure enough, Fede attacked and got away. But then his team-mates started fighting me for the points that remained on the third category climbs in the King of the Mountains. When I asked him later what was happening with his team-mates I realised that he wanted the King of the Mountains competition, too, and that he didn't care whether he finished second or third in the overall. The Mountains was the one he was after. That would be fair enough, but it was the way that he did it. That wears you out and pisses you off, and you end up feeling like you're stupid.'\n\nJim\u00e9nez is not the only one to claim he had this sort of problem with Bahamontes. Poulidor, too, has recollections of Bahamontes \u2013 who says he cannot remember the event \u2013 'pulling a fast one' on him the first time they raced against each other. 'After Bahamontes won the Tour in 1959, I was an \"independent\" [non-sponsored] rider and we both got in a break in the Bol d'Or de Monedieres-Chaumeil. I attacked alone on the climb and the only one who could get across was Bahamontes. He said he wouldn't go for the King of the Mountains prize at the top, which surprised me because I knew that was almost more important for him than winning. But I fell for it, we worked together, and then he outsprinted me at the summit. Then he told me as we rode towards the finish that he wasn't going to work any longer, but I didn't fall for it a second time. And even though we had two minutes' advantage at twenty kilometres we were both caught and finished fourth. To tell the truth, he gave me a very poor first impression of him.' Fast forward five years to the 1964 Tour and Jim\u00e9nez felt the same as Poulidor. But this time Bahamontes arguably paid a heavier price.\n\nFast forward another thirty-five years and Jim\u00e9nez is still resentful that Bahamontes will not give him the recognition he feels he deserves. He recalls when he and Bahamontes went to visit the Vuelta and Bahamontes was handing out postcards with his _palmares_. When somebody told Jim\u00e9nez that Bahamontes had left him one and he went to pick it up, he saw it read, 'To my friend and _domestique_ , [signed] Federico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes'. As Jim\u00e9nez points out, quite apart from being a put-down, he could never have been Bahamontes' _domestique_ , given the two never rode in the same team!\n\nOnce started Jim\u00e9nez cannot stop coming out with examples of Bahamontes' unwillingness to acknowledge his merits. There is little to be gained in listing them all, but several illustrate the point about how Bahamontes' pride did not permit him to admit that riders he claimed 'could never beat me', had in fact done so. At times it seems Bahamontes is trying to re-write history. 'There was the Subida [hill-climb] a Urkiola, where I beat him, and Bahamontes said he'd never ridden it,' says Jim\u00e9nez. 'I had to get someone to download some classifications off the Internet and show them to him; that was the only way he would accept it. I said to him, \"Look, you didn't even finish second behind me, you got third!\"' Then there are the calculated putdowns. Jim\u00e9nez scoffs at Bahamontes' insistence that he 'let' him win on the Puy de D\u00f4me in 1964: 'And I joked to him maybe I'd have let him win, if he'd come up with a ruddy great cheque. I wasn't anybody then and needed the money' Another time Bahamontes was quoted as saying that his only rival in the mountains was Charly Gaul. 'And only when it rained.' Jim\u00e9nez was not even mentioned.\n\nAt the root is the age-old rage of the apprentice who knows he is outstripping the master but who never feels he gets the recognition he deserves, and the master who feels his time is passing but is determined to go out anything but quietly. Dignified it is not, but there is no denying it is part of human nature. Jim\u00e9nez says: 'The most reasonable thing for a star to say [on approaching retirement] is that \"the young riders are breathing down my neck\". And that \"my successor was the Watchmaker of \u00c1vila who won three Kings of the Mountains and should have won a fourth\".' That is how numerous other stars have behaved, Jim\u00e9nez says. Bahamontes, though, was always a case apart. Ultimately, these futile spats boil down to the fact that neither rider was willing to let the other gain predominance in the public eye if it meant they risked losing out. That, perhaps, was why Bahamontes was not prepared to let Jim\u00e9nez share in his ride to glory in Pau; he wanted to prove he remained the boss even if it meant losing the Tour.\n\nNor was this rivalry straightforward, either. While Jim\u00e9nez admits that every Spanish climber was naturally keen to beat Bahamontes, because outdoing the star of the sport automatically brought added recognition, there were outbreaks of friendship and camaraderie. The two have travelled together to countless events around Spain. As recently as 2010 they went to the Vuelta presentation in Benidorm 'in a benzene-powered Audi with the race director all the way from the Paseo de la Castellana [in central Madrid]'. Yet amid the bonhomie, fast cars and backslapping, the resentment and mistrust lingered. In 1970, with Bahamontes long since retired and Jim\u00e9nez desperate for a team as his career faded, he approached his old rival's professional team, La Casera, and asked for a ride. Jim\u00e9nez did not have the nerve, or perhaps he had too much pride, to ask Bahamontes directly. In any case the answer came back immediately through an intermediary: No. 'I suppose that was because he thought they would forget about me quicker,' Jim\u00e9nez says. And echoing Josu Loro\u00f1o's words about Bahamontes, he says: 'It was all me, me, me . . . only he existed.'\n\nIn fairness to Bahamontes it is possible that Bahamontes rejected Jim\u00e9nez purely because he did not think he was worth having on his team; he was at the tail-end of his career, after all. However, if it was the case that Jim\u00e9nez paid the price for Bahamontes' unwillingness to share the glory in 1964, that reticence seems to have backfired completely. Others think it would have made no difference. When I interviewed Geminiani he claimed he did not believe that Bahamontes could have challenged in the 1964 Tour. 'He and Jim\u00e9nez were welcome to put on all the shows they wanted to, but we knew how much time he had and we based our game around that. Apart from on the Forclaz [in 1963] he was never Anquetil's rival.' However, the way Anquetil forged alliances with Pelforth to reel in Bahamontes, both in the Alps and Pyrenees, suggest the opposite. Darrigade also feels that Bahamontes could have won the Tour. He might not have been a major threat like Poulidor, but threat he was, hence their frantic chase on the descent of the Aubisque. You can not imagine, either, that Anquetil would have forgotten Bahamontes' victory in 1959 or how close he came to winning in 1963.\n\nThat day in the Pyrenees the mistrust between the two top Spaniards was arguably what cost Bahamontes the chance of winning the Tour. The King of the Mountains had been 'his' for too long for him to give it up so easily. Most likely Bahamontes preferred to hedge his bets, thinking that even if he worked with Jim\u00e9nez there was no guarantee that he would win overall. But if the two pair had worked together in 1964 the history of the Tour might read very differently indeed.\nChapter Fourteen\n\n#### Into the Bushes\n\nIt took Federico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes five months from the moment retiring from cycling first crossed his mind to his final, irrevocable decision. The process, during 1965, was in keeping with much of his career: occasionally farcical in appearance, often controversial in substance and nearly always driven, beneath the surface, by hard economics. The first and biggest sign that Bahamontes, now thirty-seven, was nearing the end of the road came in the 1965 Tour. After finishing second in 1963 and third in 1964, he had regained the status of favourite, particularly in the absence of Jacques Anquetil \u2013 allegedly because the Frenchman felt he had reached his sell-by date and did not want to risk being beaten. However, Bahamontes abandoned on stage ten, blaming knee injuries at the time, but later suggesting his main sponsors, Margnat, had not been paying him. 'The whole company was going to the dogs,' Bahamontes says, 'and they didn't pay anybody \u2013 neither me, nor Ota\u00f1o, nor Darrigade.' Andr\u00e9 Darrigade has denied this was the case and that he was paid regularly by Margnat during his time there. When I passed this information on to Bahamontes he looked, to say the least, thunderstruck. Bahamontes says he had a major argument about the lack of money with his sports director, Raoul Remy, in the morning before the start of stage nine between Dax and Bagneres. When Remy dodged the issue and suggested he talk to the company director, Bahamontes rode off in a huff. He finished second last, forty minutes down.\n\nYet more fruitless discussions followed that evening in the team hotel. The next day on another Pyrenean stage from Bagneres de Bigore to Ax-les-Thermes, Bahamontes went on the attack just before the Portet-d'Aspet climb 'to show them what they would be missing'. However, if anyone expected him to reach the summit alone and at the head of the field as had been the script of so many Tours, they would to be sorely disappointed. Instead Bahamontes opened a gap, then when out of sight bizarrely rode off the road and into some bushes. 'I wanted to give them all a surprise; it was a joke,' he tells me thirty-six years later, still smiling to himself at his antics. 'They wouldn't be able to find me, the bushes were quite high. Of course, when they did find me all hell broke loose.'\n\nFor someone famed for his eccentricity and individualism it is somehow appropriate that the final image of Bahamontes on two wheels in the Tour de France is arguably the most surreal of his entire career: he is riding a road-bike, but he is not actually riding it on a road. Taken from behind, in the photograph Bahamontes can be seen heading over a broad grassy verge, well past a motorbike parked on the side of the road, and pedalling towards a dense bank of long grass with a line of trees beyond. A couple of seconds later and he would have disappeared completely. With the end of his career beckoning, the picture gives the impression that roads and civilisation no longer interest Bahamontes; complete with bike, team kit and bottle of water he is off to find himself in the jungle like the lead character in Jos\u00e9ph Conrad's novel _Heart of Darkness_. In fact, Bahamontes' Kurtz moment quickly passed. The next photographs taken that day show the cyclist putting on a tracksuit beside a team-car, talking with his director, and ready to abandon. It was his first step on the road to retirement and arguably the most important.\n\nHis Margnat team-mate Andr\u00e9 Darrigade recalls: 'When he left the Tour, it was a big disappointment. He was the team leader, after all; we'd all worked for him. Nobody could see it coming.' Bahamontes said at the time that he could not continue because of the knee injury, and 'you can't race the Tour on one leg'. Given he was in a breakaway when he abandoned that excuse is unconvincing. It was, though, consistent with previous controversial abandons. His antics were also highly reminiscent of the child-like behaviour he had shown back in the days when he staged go-slows in the Vuelta or pulled out of the Tour after two stages. Perhaps it was another indication that after years of self-control in the Margnat squad, Bahamontes was reverting to his 'true' self.\n\nCoincidentally, the first rider across the Portet-D'Aspet that day was Julio Jim\u00e9nez, who had won the previous day's stage after a breakaway. 'I heard Bahamontes had been dropped and turned on the heat,' Jim\u00e9nez says. 'To be honest I wanted to pay him back for 1964.' That was not lost on the press either, and Jim\u00e9nez was again hailed widely as Bahamontes' successor. Extensive interviews appeared with both riders with the Spanish magazine _Actualidad Espa\u00f1ola_ , on 15 July, the day after the Tour finished. Tellingly, Jim\u00e9nez, who won the King of the Mountains jersey that year as well as stages in the Alps and Pyrenees, has a full-page photograph on the cover and receives four pages inside; for Bahamontes, there are just two pages. There was no doubt who was the coming man. The interviews revealed that the rivalry between the two was now a full-scale power struggle for the top spot in Spanish cycling: Jim\u00e9nez was determined to see Bahamontes gone, while Bahamontes was adamant that he would fight back. Underneath the headline, 'The Eaglet takes over from the Eagle', and resplendent in his Spanish national champion's jersey, Jim\u00e9nez claims at first: 'I can't believe that he [Bahamontes] is finished, I'd prefer to think he's not gone . . . he deserves a dignified exit'. But, perhaps rather too quickly, he reflects that Bahamontes' retirement is, in fact, 'due to happen soon', adding: 'Time waits for no man. Your natural abilities fade and if you don't abandon in due time you're bound to sink.'\n\nThen Jim\u00e9nez really sticks the knife in, suggesting that Bahamontes had failed to realise he was past his sell-by date. 'Curiously enough, he'd told me that morning that he was going better than ever in the flat, and that observation made me doubt that he was,' said Jim\u00e9nez. 'He's a climber and I'm a climber. Whenever I notice I'm going better on flat stages I know that my climbing form is going to be worse. Strange but true.' Sensing blood, the interviewer asks: 'Would you give Federico any advice?' Sure enough, Jim\u00e9nez recommends that 'he should already have retired. Nothing better than an honourable retirement at the height of his powers. A minute later [on stage nine] and he'd have finished outside the time limit.' Leaving nothing to the reader's imagination, he added: 'This is the rider who forced so many others to finish outside the time limit when he won his stages and he was about to suffer the same fate. How humiliating for Federico!' Showing a keen knowledge of what drove Bahamontes on, Jim\u00e9nez segued into the financial reasons for a retirement and argued that Fede's 'earning days' on the bike were long past. 'The best thing he could do now is stay at home. He's got a business going and he's not going to lack for anything. It's understandable that somebody is unwilling to renounce their best source of income when it seems like easy money. But sooner or later there aren't any rich [sponsors] left, and he shouldn't wait until they throw him out \u2013 not somebody as prestigious as Federico.'\n\nAs a declaration of how prepared Jim\u00e9nez, already thirty and no spring chicken, was to step into Bahamontes shoes the _Actualidad_ interview could hardly have been clearer. However, such a violent attack by one cycling star on another was also perhaps an indication of how unsure Jim\u00e9nez was that Bahamontes was really going to retire. It was true that Bahamontes had ridden the Vuelta in 1965 for the first time in five years and finished tenth overall without any of his usual fireworks. 'It was,' as _Actualidad_ put it, 'as if Bahamontes had abandoned the race, even though he was still there.' Bahamontes' disinterest in the Vuelta was such that Poulidor recalls he won a mountain time-trial, the Spaniard's speciality: 'I overtook six or seven riders, who had all started before me at minute intervals. The last one I caught was Bahamontes'.\n\nBut Jim\u00e9nez was right to be worried. In other races that year Bahamontes had shown there was still life in the old dog yet. If you ignored the Vuelta and the Tour, Bahamontes had not had a disastrous season at all: not only had he taken second place in the Arrate hill-climb he had captured an overall win in the Circuit du Provencal ahead of Jan Janssens, a future Tour de France winner, and Britain's Tom Simpson. Could Bahamontes really be finished? Not if his defiant first answer in the _Actualidad_ interview was to be believed: 'I'm not dead, though. Me, dead? Leave off it, please. The deader people take me for the more alive I am.' However, the longer the interview went on, the more Bahamontes played it hot and cold, hinting at one point he could retire, but at another that his racing days were still not over. Presumably still holding out for payment from Margnat, Bahamontes blamed his Tour abandon on his old meniscus injury from 1955. However, when asked about the future, in different answers he was either unusually non-committal or adamant that his Tour days were finished. Something, the journalist concluded in the article, was brewing in Bahamontes' mind, but it was not clear what. 'I'm thirty-seven, not thirty-eight as some people say, and though I've lost some of my top-end speed, with time I've gained a lot of experience,' he said. 'I know I'm due to perform less well with age but I don't muck about as much as I used to.' That comment was barely credible given his recent premature exit from the Tour. 'I had and I have class,' Bahamontes nonetheless insisted. 'If I didn't I wouldn't be able to propose doing what I've got planned.' 'Such as?' asked the journalist. 'Well . . . things,' Bahamontes responded clumsily. 'Things that some people don't believe and which I don't care about if they do.' But he did reveal: 'This was my last Tour. You can be sure of that', adding by way of a rather trite explanation that: 'It's very hard.' As for racing the Vuelta, Bahamontes argued: 'That would depend on the sponsor.'\n\nHowever, when asked directly if he would retire, Bahamontes seemed to leave his options open. 'It has to come some time. That's life. I don't race with the same idealism or willingness to sacrifice myself to the sport as when I started.' Such an off beat, mixed response showed it was not going to be easy for Bahamontes to leave the sport behind. There again, he had not ruled it out. By September, retirement had loomed a little closer when his sporting pride suffered a huge blow, thanks to the Federation.\n\nOddly enough, Bahamontes' beef with the Spanish Federation this time was not down to disagreements over Grand Tours, his strongest suit, but an event in which he had never shone: the World Championships. Indeed, his best result in the World Championships was seventeenth place in 1961. Long after the World's road race, held that year in San Sebastian on 5 September, Bahamontes claimed that his dream had been to end his career in front of a home crowd and wearing the rainbow jersey of the world champion. Whether he would actually have retired had he fulfilled this highly unrealistic ambition is hard to say. But the humiliation Bahamontes suffered in the process of having to fork out money to watch a race he had desperately wanted to take part in was sufficient to tip him even closer to the edge. 'They didn't just not select me, they made me pay for my ticket to get into the circuit,' Bahamontes fumes. 'I'd ridden the Tour of Luxembourg to get into shape, and to get to San Sebastian in time I abandoned on the last stage thinking that I was in the Worlds. And then they didn't choose me. But on top of making me pay, when they [the organisers] realised I was in the stands they came up and asked me if I would cut the ribbon at the start. I said, \"Don't come bothering me, I've paid for my ticket, I'm just a spectator \u2013 for one thing it's like you don't know me, and for another you come looking for me specially\".' Bahamontes lays the blame on Gabriel Saura, the national coach, 'for being so envious of me. I had wanted to retire as world champion, but Saura was so jealous he made me pay for it, and I've never forgiven him for it, in all my life. I was ready to take part. Did he really not think I was one of the top eight riders in Spain?'\n\nBahamontes' assumption that he was one of the top eight riders in Spain, and therefore due automatic selection for the World Championships, was far from Saura's view. Bahamontes had already, without any reason offered, decided not to take part in the National Championships, which did not go down well. As Saura explained to _MARCA_ : 'I can only say that Bahamontes has not raced anywhere he could have shown that he has recovered from his abandon in the French race, which he said was due to injury.' Abandoning the Tour of Luxembourg did not, contrary to Bahamontes' opinion, help his case.\n\nOn 8 September, following the row with the Federation, Bahamontes announced pointblank that he would not race any more. He then apparently called up the Volta a Catalunya organiser, the U.D. Sants cycling club, to tell them just two days before he was due to race there that he was retiring from the sport. 'I'm demoralised, and it's the right thing to do. I've thought about it, and when you have no morale, it's no good,' he told the Catalan newspaper _El Noticiero Universal_. He raced on, nonetheless, taking part in the Subida a Naranco hill-climb in Asturias where he finished eighth. Given the mixed signals, some like Margnat director Raul Remy did not believe he was going to retire. 'I consider Bahamontes to be a good rider, and with enough experience to continue for another year,' Remy said, 'though he should choose his races more carefully and pay particular attention to how he races the Tour.' The organisers of the Subida a Arrate hill-climb attempted to persuade Bahamontes to continue at least until their event the following spring. Even as late as 1 October Bahamontes was undecided, saying: 'It'll be me who decides whether I retire or not. I belong to a commercial firm [trade team] and the rest is rubbish. I'm still keen, I've still got fans, and I'm still keen to fight.'\n\nStill wavering wildly over what to do, the final decision was not taken until he had ridden what was traditionally the race that brought down the curtain on the Spanish season, the Subida de Montjuic in Barcelona. Even more appropriately for Bahamontes' last race, Montjuic was his signature event, a hill-climb. It was held in two sections with a mass start and an uphill time-trial. Bahamontes did not win either. He was beaten into second place in both races by Raymond Poulidor. However, in warm sunshine, and watched by huge crowds, he received enormous rounds of applause in the city where his professional career had effectively begun. 'We saw Bahamontes, risen again from the ashes, and climbing formidably well,' claimed _El Mundo Deportivo'_ s correspondent, before adding, a shade pretentiously, that Bahamontes 'received an effusive welcome from the fans who seemed inspired by enthusiasm [we would see] in the olden days . . . the public came here to savour the finest essence of cycling'. And for their main photograph to illustrate the event, what better than Bahamontes powering up a climb between a wall of fans one last time?\n\nBahamontes says he had barely finished in Barcelona when his longstanding Catalan business associate, Evaristo Murtra, told him in no uncertain terms that his career was over and that he should concentrate on his business in Toledo. 'He came up to me and said, \"Right, now you are going to Toledo to sell bikes and motorbikes in your shop with your wife\". I disagreed, saying, \"Now that they pay me double, I'm going to stop?\" Murtra replied, \"It's not worth it. What's best for you are motorbikes and bikes and that's the future. That's where the easy money is.\"' With that alluring prospect in mind Bahamontes could have announced he had ended his career there and then. However, there were rumours that he would continue racing at least until the Six Days of Madrid track race, an exhibition event he had won the previous year. Here again versions vary of what actually happened. While Bahamontes insists to this day that he had decided to stop after Montjuic, the Madrid organisers told _MARCA_ they were convinced he was going to be taking part in their event, because 'he wants to end his career in front of a home crowd, in Madrid'. However, it was claimed that a disagreement over the appearance money Bahamontes would be paid ruined what would have been a more spectacular send-off, especially as results are often pre-arranged in such exhibition events: he would have had a reasonable chance of going out with his arms aloft in victory one last time.\n\n'He asked for two hundred thousand pesetas [\u00a336,000],' the organisers told _MARCA_ , 'which is what we paid him the previous year. But we offered him what [Spanish track start] Guillermo Timoner was going to get, and he didn't want to do the selection test for the event, anyway.' Afterwards, the organisers were adamant that 'his absence wasn't noticed'.\n\nWhatever the truth of these claims, Bahamontes did not take part. He was moving on. An ex-cyclist now, he quickly adopted a new role as expert commentator on Spanish cycling. That winter he took part in a round-table conference in Bilbao with his old rival Jes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o, which predictably turned into a rose-tinted look back at their careers and how much better racing had been in the past. While Loro\u00f1o said he believed Spanish cycling 'needed a rivalry like me and Federico had', Bahamontes claimed: 'If you take a look at my _palmares_ there is no rider in Spain who's done better than me this year. [Top Spanish riders] Patxi Gabica, [Valentin] Uriona and Jos\u00e9 P\u00e9rez Frances could have got better results,' he claimed. In fact, Gabica and Uriona had both won two stages in the Volta a Catalunya, while P\u00e9rez Franc\u00e9s had won a stage of the Tour and finished sixth overall. 'But they just sit behind other riders' wheels [in the pack]. They're cold-blooded and never attack.' Since Bahamontes had just opted to retire because it made more sense economically this was at best a case of the pot calling the kettle black.\n\nThere is a certain irony that, rather than back out because he felt he had nothing more to give to the sport or that his time was up, Spain's top athlete of the 1950s retired using exactly the same kind of hardheaded financial logic with which he started riding a bike in the first place. In that sense, at least, Bahamontes had come full circle.\nChapter Fifteen\n\n#### La Vuelta A Toledo\n\n_When you're going well, you don't suffer, you enjoy it. Nothing can go wrong because you can see that it's not you that's suffering, it's the rest of the field. Every turn of your pedal feels like a fresh round of applause a singer receives._\n\n**Federico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes**\n\nAugust may be the hottest month of the year in Spain, but it still feels pretty chilly at 7 a.m. as dawn breaks over the broad, busy avenue in Toledo where Federico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes' fan club, his _Pe\u00f1a,_ is based. A shadowy group of men in their forties and upwards traipse back and forth between the building and a cluster of half a dozen vehicles parked nearby. As the sun rises the stickers on the hefty four-wheel drive cars become slowly legible. Across the top of the windscreens each one reads ' _Vuelta a Toledo 2011_ '. The chain gang in shorts and T-shirts heaving boxes and folders out of the _Pe\u00f1a_ are the race's back-up staff, and they are putting the finishing touches to that day's final stage of one of the biggest under-23 races in central Spain.\n\nThe reason for the painfully early start is simple: the race starts rolling at 9.30 a.m. and is finished by midday, well before the real heat kicks in. 'Fede? The boss doesn't come til later,' one says of those carrying boxes containing the trophies for the presentation. Sure enough, just before 8 a.m., Bahamontes arrives in person, bustling around and barking orders. The convoy of six vehicles moves off soon afterwards towards the start, which is held in the most uninspiring of settings: slap bang in the middle of a semi-deserted industrial estate on the outskirts of town. On one side there is a line of wholesale dealers closed for August, on the other a huge metal fence and a severely under-used petrol station the size of a football stadium. It looks like the ideal location for a particularly gruesome gangland murder. However, the police motorbike planted in the centre of the road, blue light whirling, is only there to deter traffic. At one end a race steward in bright yellow safety vest guides team cars and race vehicles to their parking spots. In the middle Bahamontes blasts away on his whistle, stomping up and down the lines of cars to make sure they park absolutely where he wants them. The race's centre of activity is just in front of a shop selling knock-down furniture. Three girls stand behind a long trestle table and serve coffee and snacks to the handful of spectators, a trio of blue-shirted officials from the U.C.I. and the small army of organisers and hangers-on.\n\nWhat the start lacks in scenery, though, it makes up for in good vibrations. The twelve-strong motorised corps of Civil Guards wander around munching croissants, chattering away cheerfully and, in the way Spanish policemen do, half-hiding the morning's first cigarettes in cupped hands behind their backs. Riders weave their way to the signing-on table just outside the shop, then dart back to their team cars, one hand on the handlebars, the other clutching a cup of coffee. Nobody seems stressed: for the organisers and police 9 August marks the last leg of their work, and though the classification is still undecided the participants know they will also be heading home soon. At one point Bahamontes waves over the race leader, a tall amiable Frenchman from the G.S.C. Blagnac club and demands to know: _'Tu aller gagner?' 'Je pense que oui,'_ replies the younger man with a broad smile before quickly pedalling away. Bahamontes, meanwhile, looks a shade smug about being able to speak the rider's language sufficiently well to hold the brief conversation. There is more of a communication problem, though, when the race doctor forms a brief huddle with the event's one injured rider, a Japanese amateur, whose knee and arm are a mass of injuries and seeping blood from a crash the previous day. The doctor bellows in Spanish at the rider's French director: 'Tell him he can take the bandages off in a couple of days.' The director looks blank, the Japanese rider even blanker. 'Two days,' the doctor shouts again before making strange handsigns.\n\nThings, though, could not be friendlier. There are no restrictions, V.I.P. areas or team buses to deter the public from getting close to the riders. Though the location for the start is hardly ideal, the spectacular finish at the Plaza del Zocodover in the heart of Toledo's old town more than makes up for that. The riders and team staff look pleased with the warm weather and free food as they ogle the gaggle of publicity girls, barely out of their teens and teetering in ridiculously white high-heels. To judge from the slogan plastered on one girl's T-shirt \u2013 ITV Oca\u00f1a \u2013 a government M.O.T. vehicle centre is a sponsor.\n\nWith no houses in sight there are few children present. One who is must be about two years old and he is clutching his grandmother's arm. As they pass Bahamontes the boy receives a quick lesson in cycling history. 'That man is called Bahamontes and he won a big bike race called the Tour de France,' Grandma says. The two-year-old looks far more interested in the huge, empty filling station opposite than a grizzled man more than eighty years his senior, but it is a nice gesture all the same.\n\nLike any sports event, part of this race's appeal is its predictability. Here, a PR vehicle consisting of a large man with a small microphone, a booming voice and a couple of loudspeakers strapped to the roof, draws up and begins informing everybody of what they already know. 'This is the Vuelta a Toledo, the fourth and final stage, and it's about to start.' Finally, after much to-ing and fro-ing and more pointless bellowing to corral the riders, Bahamontes dons the most incongruous headgear imaginable: a sailing cap. It clashes dreadfully with his sharply-ironed trousers, sensible brown shoes and immaculate white top and makes him look like a bank manager who has wandered into a landlocked marina. But as his way of indicating the race is about to start, it certainly stands out.\n\nAnd the race starts with a bang, too. Running in a long southwesterly loop out and back to Toledo, the pack shatters almost immediately on two short but painfully steep climbs on the southern, rural side of the River Tagus. At the top of each one the bunch is in a line and gasping for breath, edging over the summit in groups of five or six. The race leader is just behind the first group of riders, looking far less happy than when he spoke to Bahamontes. On the roller-coaster roads which follow, past vast cattle ranches and foul-smelling pig farms, there is little chance of regrouping.\n\nThe twenty or so members of the race organisation act like sheepdogs around a worried, highly mobile flock. They warn the riders of upcoming dangers by waving flags or arms; they honk their horns at roadside fans to warn them the race is approaching; they power ahead to check that any obstacles have been cleared, then remove all the evidence of signs, barricades and bottles that showed Toledo's biggest bike race has just passed through. It is a non-stop operation but it proceeds smoothly. Since Bahamontes has been in charge for all the race's forty-six years, that is perhaps not so surprising. As for Bahamontes himself, he is a co-pilot in a two-seat, open-top sportscar, preceded by the two front-runners from the race's police escort. While a U.C.I. official runs the internal workings of the race, keeping an eye on the head of the pack, Bahamontes is responsible for ensuring any last-minute hitches are cleared. It is also impossible not to notice that as the spearhead of the race he soaks up the maximum attention possible. La Vuelta a Toledo is, in a sense, the Vuelta de Bahamontes, which is appropriate as Vuelta also means 'return' or 'comeback' in Spanish, as well as 'tour'. If on one level it is a race, on another it represents Bahamontes going back to his roots on a circuit of the villages and towns where he raced as an amateur. That said, despite being Toledo's greatest sports star Bahamontes is more than happy to knuckle down. He pulls down barriers, whizzes across from one side of the road to another at junctions with red tape to discourage oncoming vehicles, and yells and waves should any official vehicle be too close to the pack for his liking.\n\n'Fede's never been one to work in a team and we're all used to that,' comments Basilio L\u00f3pez, a close friend and head of sports at a local town hall, who drives a car for race guests and V.I.P.s in his holiday time. 'He's just too hands-on to delegate responsibilities. I keep on telling him that he should just ease back and let others take over. But he's just too keen to get involved. It's the philosophy of the workers who were born under Franco: you don't stop working till you drop.' Basilio has been part of the organisation for the last decade and reveals that the heart of the tour is the Bahamontes' _pe\u00f1a_ itself. While barely functioning now as a supporters' club, its main role is to run four or five bike races. In a town with no cycling clubs like Toledo that is hugely important. As the effects of the recession continue to affect Spain the number of teams has dropped though, by around a third. The chances of another rider following the wheeltracks of a former winner like modern-day Spanish Classics star Juan Antonio Flecha and making the big time are increasingly limited.\n\nHowever, even if Bahamontes spends a large part of his year chasing up money from the towns and villages who host the tour \u2013 he has the list of debtors kept permanently in his inside jacket pocket \u2013 the commercial sponsors remain solid. Wurth and the M.O.T. centre at nearby Oca\u00f1a have been loyal for years, and if Coca-Cola's sponsorship of the signing-on table at the start is hardly the most generous of efforts by the biggest multi-national present, at least there are free cans of fizzy pop to drink as a result. There are national backers as well for a bulging portfolio of different prizes within the race: RENFE, the Spanish state railway, and the Spanish branch of Shimano, the bike components manufacturer, back two different sprint competitions. A local transport company has forked out for the King of the Mountains prize and a Toledo-based builder specialising in swimming pools funds the points jersey competition.\n\nAs usual in bike races the smaller the town and the further it is from the big cities the greater the interest. When the race passes through Galvez, a town where Bahamontes used to go to pick up bags of corn and wheat as a black marketeer more than sixty years ago, it seems that every front doorstep has a little child squatting on it, with grandma sitting on a canvas chair just outside and elder brothers and sisters lined along the pavement. On the outskirts of Toledo, though, barely anybody stops to look.\n\nWhile returning to Toledo ahead of the race Basilio stops to give a co-worker a lift: it is the _pe\u00f1a's_ treasurer, Jos\u00e9 Ignacio. The _pe\u00f1a_ is still going, he reveals, but it is crumbling at the edges. Almost all its members are in their sixties or older and the days are long gone when its numbers ran into the thousands and they had separate sections for hunting and skeet shooting. Now the number of card-carrying _pe\u00f1istas_ is down to just one hundred. Ignacio remembers the day of glory in 1959 when Toledo was awash with yellow ribbons and the bars served 'yellow jerseys' and 'leaders' rather than glasses of beer. 'I'd joined the _pe\u00f1a_ a few years before,' he recalls, 'but when Fede won I was on my honeymoon. Still, anywhere I'd go, the minute I told them I was part of his _pe\u00f1a_ , it was drinks on the house for me,' he cackles. 'That's the spirit of Spain that we've now lost,' Basilio reflects. 'The old, real Spain.'\n\nBahamontes might have fallen out with the Spanish Cycling Federation after the events of 1965 but as a recently retired rider he had no intention of leaving the world of cycling. He bought his bike shop premises outright from its former owner after apparently helping to speed up the process by threatening to apply pressure in Toledo's town hall after the owner had been embroiled in a scandal involving a priest. Almost immediately he started directing the first in a series of amateur and professional teams. Initially encouraged by his success with junior teams, and using his fan-club headquarters as the logistics base for all these teams, the 'La Casera-Pe\u00f1a Bahamontes' ran as a ten-rider amateur team in 1968, and then with a squad of twenty-three in 1969. It became a professional team in 1970 and quickly moved into the middle ranks of the Spanish cycling hierachy. With the help of experienced co-director Miguel Moreno, La Casera took a stage victory in the Giro d'Italia in 1970 through Miguel Mari Lasa as well as the sprints competition in the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a. Joaquim Galera even won Bahamontes' old favourite, the Arrate hill-climb in the Basque Country.\n\nWith Lasa gone, though, 1971 and 1972 were leaner years. But the team bounced back in 1973 when Pedro Torres took the team's first (and only) stage win in the Tour de France as well as the King of the Mountains competition. (Jos\u00e9 Luis Abilleira had pulled off the same 'double' in the Vuelta where La Casera also won the team prize.) Then in 1974 Abilleira landed the King of the Mountains jersey in the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a for the second year running. However, with major arguments breaking out behind the scenes between Bahamontes and his riders that proved to be La Casera-Bahamontes' last season as a professional squad.\n\nFrom Bahamontes' point of view, La Casera-Bahamontes was a victim of its own success. He became increasingly disappointed and frustrated with his riders, who, he claims, grew more and more demanding with each triumph. 'We built the team up category by category, from juvenile to junior to amateur to professional and we signed the best riders from all the other teams,' Bahamontes recalls. 'We had an advantage in that we had a big backer [La Casera] and the owner told me to do the maths and we turned pro. We had some good riders, and we were the first team out there to buy a bus for the riders to travel in to the starts. But after racing Milan-San Remo one year the riders wanted to go back by plane rather than in the bus, and I told them they couldn't, not after all the money we'd made the owner pay for it. If they didn't like the bus they could ride back home on their bikes.' That, says Bahamontes, was the beginning of the end. 'Then they started to make more and more demands [across the board]: they wanted to be Napoleon without having won the war. I had teams [amateur and profesional] for nineteen years. But [the professional team didn't fold] because of what it cost, the problem was what the cyclists demanded \u2013 and what they couldn't have.'\n\nBahamontes did not just run a shop and a bike team. Almost as soon as he retired his _pe\u00f1a_ took over the role of Toledo's main cycling club, organising the prestigious four-day Vuelta a Toledo and other stage races. Another long-term project was a bike museum, located in the unlikely setting of an industrial tools factory, forty minutes' drive from Toledo. It contains around twenty frames from Bahamontes' career, as well as bikes donated by everybody who was anybody in Spanish cycling, from Miguel Indurain to Oscar Freire, the three-times world champion. It even includes the wooden-rimmed models Bahamontes used during his days as a black-marketeer. In addition, there are heavy woollen jerseys, posters, photographs and other paraphernalia from his past. Had Bahamontes' plans to transfer the museum to Toledo's city centre succeeded it would have been more appealing to normal tourists. But for bike fans the trip to the Wurth factory is well worthwhile.\n\nBahamontes had no qualms about milking the celebrity circuit during his retirement. For years he would travel the length and breadth of Spain, and occasionally France, in a gleaming Mercedes to attend everything from velodrome openings and cycling club prize-givings to annual get-togethers of former star riders. There is still no stopping him. In 2011 he twice presented the prizes at the finishes of different stages of the Vuelta, in Talavera and El Escorial, and was there again in Madrid, springing on to the podium to hand over the King of the Mountains' jersey to David Moncouti\u00e9, of France. He is always willing to turn up for cycling celebrations or ceremonies, sometimes uninvited, as Alberto Contador once discovered. He is a regular interviewee in various forms of media on the state of Spanish cycling, though he is none too polite about modern cycling in general. Indeed, he said in an interview a few years ago: 'It's no longer the same since it became pure business. It's got a lot softer, too compassionate. Breakaways in my time weren't like the ones [1988 Tour winner Pedro] Delgado used to do, in the last five hundred metres and with a big team. These days if somebody punctures the rest of the field is supposed to wait. Back when I was riding you'd use that to get an extra couple of minutes. Sport's no longer got that edge to it. It's like if you cut someone's eyebrow in boxing, should you stop trying to hit it? Of course not.'\n\nTo many observers, Bahamontes seems incapable of slowing down to a more settled lifestyle. It has got to the point where it is jocularly suggested that his multifarious activities would wear out someone twenty years his junior. 'Bahamontes or how to freeze time', ran the headline in Spanish sports daily _AS_ during the 2011 Vuelta. Underneath was a photograph of Bahamontes at the race taking pictures with the Agfa Optima III camera he has had since 1960. 'Federico was a popular hero in a Spain that was just opening up to the world,' the article said, 'and a media phenomenon, perhaps the first of [Spanish] sport . . . [he was] over the top, provocative, extravagant, impulsive and vain. A genius of the bicycle.'\n\nWhen asked the secret of his longevity Bahamontes always has two answers: the first, he claims, is that he did not take dope, with the tacit implication that others of his generation did and paid a high price. The second is work. 'If you come tomorrow, on Saturday and Sunday, you'll see me doing the same as I did today,' he told _El Pa\u00eds_ in June 2011 'I started work at eleven, flinging stones into a truck [when he and his father were road-menders]; now I work from the morning until two or three when I stop for lunch. And half an hour later I'm back in there again. I get up at seven [in the morning] and I don't stop.' In a sense it is a continuation of his life as a professional rider. He has always been 'the last to go to bed and the first to get up'. At weekends he occupies himself on his small area of farmland, checking and tending crops, but his weekday routine centres on office work at the _pe\u00f1a_. Much of his time is spent chasing up unpaid bills from recession-hit town halls who have hosted the starts or finishes of the Vuelta a Toledo. In one of our most recent interviews, he showed me the foot-high pile of paperwork detailing money due. Periodically he will drive off to hound the defaulters in person. It seems the final chapter of Spain's leading sportsman from the first half of the Franco regime could be that of an unofficial, ageing debt-collector.\n\nHis lifestyle will probably remain frenetic. It is in his genes. He told _El Pa\u00eds_ : 'My maternal grandfather had the same character. He was a small guy, but dynamic. My mother always used to say \" _alto y flojo, como el hinojo\"_ ['tall and weak, just like fennel'] because when they [people] are taller, they can't reach down so easily and they can't work so hard.' And how did he feel about reaching eighty-three? 'You can't turn back the clock and be in the thick of the action all the time.' But if he did not work, he admits: 'I would be sunk.'\n\nHe is still married to Fermina and has frequent visitors to his _pe\u00f1a_ , but there are still flashes of his old solitary self when he was the Eagle of Toledo flying through the mountains of France, Italy and Spain. When I asked him once if he had any good friends, either in sport or out of it, his answer was: 'Just one: Evaristo Murtra.' But that was all. And in interviews he gives the strong impression that his relationship with Murtra was founded on business rather than a personal friendship. However, that sense of isolation does not seem to bother him; it just sums up his life-philosophy As he puts it: ' _Solo me muevo mejor que nadie_ ' ('alone, I move better than anybody else'). And given what he achieved flying solo, can that really be doubted?\n\nThe _palmares_ cannot fail to impress: six King of the Mountains titles and Spain's first victory in the Tour de France; two podium finishes in the same race when aged over thirty-five; seven Tour stage wins plus notable victories in every other major stage race of his time. The big unanswered question in Bahamontes' career, though, is whether he could have done even more? Or was he riding so far above his usual level in 1959 that further victories in the Tour were never really on the cards? And was he the world's best climber of all time? There will never be definitive answers. Yes, Richard Virenque may have one more King of the the Mountains title, and Lucien Van Impe more mountain-top stage wins and as many mountain titles as Bahamontes. But Virenque did not win the Tour and Van Impe never came close to Bahamontes' record of crossing Tour mountain passes in first place fifty-three times. And without Bahamontes, so the story goes, there might not have been a Van Impe at all: the Spaniard provided the inspiration for the Belgian to get on a bike in the first place. Indeed, it is said that Bahamontes used his influence to get Van Impe his first professional contract after seeing him win the King of the Mountains title in the Tour de L'Avenir, France's top race for promising amateurs. When I asked cycling's all-time top rider Eddy Merckx what he thought of Bahamontes' place in cycling history, he said: 'There are different eras, different people and it's very hard to compare. But he was certainly one of a very few, one of the very, very greatest.'\n\nThe question remains, though, whether a rider who could climb so well that others, like Raymond Poulidor, say that to attempt to follow him was to 'like committing suicide', might have acheived more than near-blinding, but erratic, flashes of brilliance. So why didn't he? Quite apart from Geminiani's skulduggery in 1963, his failure to collaborate with Julio Jim\u00e9nez in 1964, or even that elusive telegram from the Franco Government during the 1957 Vuelta, the single biggest factor in his failure to shine even more brightly must be poor management. On a good day, he could be the best climber there has been. However, lack of consistency was his biggest downfall: to gain it a volatile, erratic personality like Bahamontes needed a firm hand directing him; too rarely did he have one.\n\nFrom Geminiani to a man I met near a graveyard in Val de Santo Domingo, the common consensus is that Coppi was the best manager he had, certainly in terms of his motivational skills. Dalmacio Langarica was the one Bahamontes valued most for his practical abilities, but Coppi was the one who inspired him to greatness and the man with his finger on the pulse when it came to technological advances in the sport too.\n\nThe tragedy, though, is that even if the Tricolfilina-Coppi team's financial difficulties had not existed, Coppi's untimely death in early 1960 leaves unanswered the question of what Bahamontes' career might have been with the Italian by his side for longer. And Langarica, his other guiding light, was only with Bahamontes for one Tour. For that reason 1959 became a watershed for Bahamontes. When he had the natural strength of a young man he did not have the team or director he needed; then when he did have the team and the directors, particularly post-1959 with Raoul Remy, he no longer had the natural power of a younger man. Remy in any case, made some strategic errors such as when he ordered Bahamontes to sit up during his Pyrenean attack in 1963. It was only in 1959, when Bahamontes was thirty-one, with Coppi overseeing him and Langarica's faultless guidance of the team in the Tour that the twin elements of brute strength and sound strategy fully blended. When that happened, nothing could stop the Eagle of Toledo.\n\nOne indication of just how perfectly the planets lined up for Bahamontes that year is that he remains one of only six riders to win the Tour's overall classification and the King of the Mountains in the same race. It is surely no coincidence that Coppi, Bahamontes' mentor, took both titles in 1949 and 1952. But since 1959 only Eddy Merckx (in 1969 and 1970) and Carlos Sastre, by default in 2008 after Austrian Bernard Kohl was banned for doping, have managed the difficult double.\n\nIt was inevitable that such a huge triumph for Spain was exploited so ruthlessly by General Franco's regime. Starved of international recognition, and in constant need to justify its existence to the Spanish population as memories of the Civil War faded, sport provided both a pressure valve on social unrest for the Franco dictatorship and as a propaganda vehicle. As a Castillian taking what was arguably Spain's biggest individual athletic triumph since the Civil War, Bahamontes' Tour de France win was too good an opportunity to miss. As such, Bahamontes acts as a bridge between the two key periods of the Franco era: a reminder of the harsh, post-Civil War recession and international isolation of the earliest years, and the transition to the economic well-being of the 1960s and 1970s.\n\nIn terms of sport, at least, Bahamontes is one of the last, and certainly the most important, link between the two eras. But even today in Spain he is rarely cited as such. One of the rare high-profile analyses of Bahamontes' significance for Spanish society came in a keynote speech made by _MARCA's_ former editor, Eduardo Inda, to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the newspaper in 2011. In it he singled out Bahamontes as the one person who 'gained our affection because he confirmed that the \"botched-up\" Spain was giving way, little by little, to the Spain of excellence. His Tour and his six Kings of the Mountains prizes carried us to seventh heaven'. Inda went on to describe what the success of Bahamontes and other athletes meant to the people of Spain at the time. 'We feel grateful, emotionally, to the most veteran members [of our sport] because you made our long night of dictatorshp more bearable. With sport, the suffering was less painful, even knowing that the former regime used sport generally . . . as a sleeping pill which would make us forget the anxiety we had for freedom and the harsh economic and social post-war reality . . . they gave colour to a black-and-white Spain, to that Spain we have recorded in our minds as if it were an interminable _no-do_.' As Inda sees it, Bahamontes and his co-stars at the time played a beneficial role even while they were being exploited by the regime to help justify its existence.\n\nThen there is his continuing role as the father figure for Spanish cycling, as Pedro Delgado calls him, and in particular for their most valued facet of the sport, stage racing. 'I'm from a much later generation,' says Miguel Indurain, Spain's five-times Tour de France winner and for many his country's top all-time athlete. 'I grew up watching Merckx and Hinault, but we all knew how Bahamontes was the one who staged the break-through for us in the Tour. In the mountains, he was unmatchable, even if consistency never was his strong point.'\n\nPerhaps thinking of Jes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o and Vicente Treuba, Indurain says: 'There were riders before him who were important, but Bahamontes was the Tour pioneer. He was an impulsive, very fiery rider \u2013 and that's still the case now. He just keeps going, he never stops. But he was hugely important, particularly when you consider that back then the Tour de France was as big as [football's] World Cup here in Spain. Not like now.'\n\nThe pioneering aspect of Bahamontes is one of his most appealing legacies. Perhaps one of the hardest aspects for fans to accept is how big a part money had to play in his career. Yet he was far from being the only big name to view cycling as a business as much as a sport. In William Fotheringham's biography of Tom Simpson, he writes of the British star: 'His contemporaries all noted his financial hunger.' And according to Paul Howard's biography, one potential reason why Jacques Anquetil failed to go for a sixth Tour de France was that it did not make financial sense. 'For him [Anquetil], the notion of a palmares was absurd if it didn't add value commercially,' top French cycling journalist Philippe Brunel tells Howard.\n\nApart from the precarious nature of his profession, as Carlos Sastre points out, this was an era in Spain when the struggle for survival was not just a question of being better or worse off. Like a large percentage of the population, including many of its greatest cyclists, Bahamontes lived through an era in which the spectre of starvation was never far away. It is hardly a surprise that whatever 'life-philosophy' he and other Spanish professionals learnt then was applied so aggressively to their racing. If this explains some of the sport's less savoury aspects, then arguably the same fear of financial ruin also helped drive Bahamontes and his fellow professionals along the path to greatness. 'You mustn't forget he was living in a time when nutrition as we know it didn't exist. It was a question of survival, pure and simple,' Sastre believes. 'That made them fight hard for sustenance and that kind of fighting experience was what made them such tough cyclists. Now we have all we want to eat and we just think about stupid things like buying cars. In the jungle, you're looking for food, not for the best car or the nicest house, just to survive.'\n\nRaphael Geminiani concurs with Sastre's analysis, but goes further. 'He was more worried about making money than anything else,' he says. 'And that's why he didn't do his job so well, because he wasn't sufficently dedicated to his profession.' However, if money was the reason which drove Bahamontes to racing, and which spurred him on in his amateur years, ultimately it may have been what let him down, too. Right from the start the richer Bahamontes became, the more King of the Mountains titles he amassed, the less willing he seems to have been to opt for the riskier goal of going for the overall titles. There were exceptions, like the 1959 and 1963 Tours, but by then it seems the overall had become increasingly more difficult for Bahamontes to avoid. Matters reached a head in 1964: had he reached a deal with Julio Jim\u00e9nez that had worked, such as conceding the King of the Mountains title, Bahamontes could have found the ally he needed on the long road to Pau. The margin between himself and Anquetil going into the time-trial that followed would have been smaller. But Bahamontes could not give up his 'surefire guarantee' of the King of the Mountains and beneath that lies a fascinating contradiction: the less likely his attacks were to succeed in winning the biggest prize, the greater his reputation as cycling's best 'pure' climber, and as the dreamer who never gave up. Or, to use a very Castillian metaphor, the eternal tilter at windmills.\n\nAll great sports stars have their critics and there are those who believe that rather than Bahamontes' career going largely unrewarded, in 1959 he simply got lucky and was in the right place at the right time when the French started to fall out among themselves. Geminiani, who was riding in the French 'A' team that year as one of the 'Big Four', does not agree. 'Bahamontes was not the climber he's been taken for,' Geminiani says. 'He was more spectacular than efficient. But then just when Bahamontes was getting on in years, just when Charly Gaul was at the height of his powers, just when he has all of the top French riders \u2013 Anglade, Rivi\u00e8re, Anquetil \u2013 lined up against him, Bahamontes goes off and wins the Tour. It's true they say that he was able to take advantage of the war between the agents, but that's not the case. Anquetil did not want Rivi\u00e8re to win \u2013 true. Rivi\u00e8re did not want Anquetil to win \u2013 true. But that Anquetil and Rivi\u00e8re ganged up against Anglade \u2013 not true. They stayed out of it. It wasn't their fight. All we saw that year was an Anglade-Bahamontes duel. And Bahamontes deserved to win it.'\n\nAnother damaging factor for Bahamontes' career was his erratic, sometimes eccentric, personality. But at least in 1959 Coppi and Langarica were there to resolve those problems. The knock-on effect was noticed by the newspapers. 'He is as hyper-nervous as Coppi, but now his brain controls those nerves,' argued _El Alc\u00e1zar_ after his Tour win. 'That extreme nervousness is what all great champions have . . . Coppi, aware he was close to losing a Tour [in 1952], once told a mechanic to get the right wheel as soon as possible or he'd shoot his head off. That kind of temperament is a two-edged weapon. If used rightly then it's a huge advantage. Bahamontes' issues make him seem what he is not \u2013 vain, proud and anti-social \u2013 when in reality he is simply childlike.'\n\nIn his role as a latter-day commentator Bahamontes is wont to say: 'People don't enjoy cycling as much as they used to because there aren't any more breakaways like mine.' Note the use of the word 'breakaways' rather than 'wins'. Therein may lie the nub of why Bahamontes remains such an inspiring figure: because his concept of racing borders on the artistic, or as _L'Equipe_ once said of him, on the 'Bohemian'. It is almost an anti-sporting way of racing a sport. Climbing up mountains at the head of the pack just because they are there, not because of what you can gain, underlines the fact that sport is ultimately an exercise in futility, albeit a fascinating one. That futility can even have a subversive edge as when Bahamontes stopped for his ice cream on top of the Romeyere. The effect was unintentional, but to the world it looked as if he was walking away deliberately from his chance of glory. And given his self-destructive racing style in the years that followed, the tantrums and the multiple abandons, that is why the image of Bahamontes opting for an ice cream, rather than continuing, retains so much power. Even if he did not mean it, it looked like 'typical Bahamontes'.\n\nBahamontes lingers in the memory precisely because of his wayward eccentricity and love of seemingly pointless, impetuous, attacking. Unfulfilled potential is far more romantic than a series of brilliant results, as Bahamontes, talking to reporters after his fruitless break across the Bonette-Restefond in the 1964 Tour, was keenly aware. As he put it: 'This will have made the bars in Toledo a lot of money this afternoon.' However, there was always an eminently practical bent to it all, too: after blasting across the mountain pass at the head of the Tour, Bahamontes was also the same man who stuffed his suitcase full of spare bike parts to sell back home in Spain. He was the one whose first thoughts when he talked to reporters after winning the Tour in 1959 was how much money he could make out of it. And that is perhaps his greatest achievement, that Bahamontes was driven by a desire for financial gain, but simultaneously maintained the rather far-fetched but appealing image of the eccentric climber forging his own solitary, almost dream-like path far from the vices of civilisation.\n\nTo race just for the money is straightforward enough, and so it is to race idiosyncratically. To do both, simultaneously, for twelve years as a professional is a tough call indeed. It is something only a handful of athletes have managed to pull off as convincingly as the Eagle of Toledo.\n\nIf the grimy, run-down setting for the start of the Vuelta a Toledo was a pretty faithful reflection of life in the suburbs of postindustrial Spain, the finish could hardly be more 'teepical Spanish', as the natives themselves say when the country's caricatures are so brazenly displayed. It is staged in the central Zocodover square at the top of a sharp, cobbled rise into old Toledo. The feel that this is the touristy part of town is reinforced by the woman in a tight flamenco dress, and even tighter hairbun, standing on top of the podium and belting out traditional folksongs. The crowd of around one hundred is mostly foreign, too. Eventually an MC from the race organisation takes over. Not even his inane patter \u2013 'they're coming very fast, the bunch is all over the place, they're coming very fast, what's going to happen?' \u2013 causes the crowd to thin. All that matters is that they are enjoying themselves: it is a fine, sunny day and they are about to witness a free spectacle. For bike races in the summer that is the way it has always been.\n\nMeanwhile, at the finish, which stretches down one cobbled side of triangular square in the shadow of the town hall, Bahamontes is once again in full flight. Striding up and down between the barriers and under the finishing gantry, it is Bahamontes who waves through what little race traffic there is before the peloton itself turns up. He is constantly peering at the descent to see if the riders are on their way. He bustles, he fusses, he is never still for more than ten seconds. The characteristic energy he exudes is irritating and fascinating in equal measure. When the riders finally appear the barriers are thick with the public. Bahamontes disappears from view as a blizzard of glittering bike frames and brightly coloured, tensed bodies, roar past. One, a shovel-jawed, burly teenaged Spaniard in a gaudy red, yellow and blue jersey, bellows with delight as he scoots across the line for both the stage win and, it later emerges, overall victory.\n\nNo sooner has the stage finished than Bahamontes is back in action. Beneath the curtain behind the podium his brown leather shoes can be seen darting around at high speed. The announcer spends a long time requesting riders, most leaning on team car bonnets and comparing stories before the long trip home, to come up for their prizes. Finally, perhaps half an hour after the race is finished, the ceremony starts. 'A big hand for Teresa, the godmother of the Vuelta a Toledo,' the MC says as another publicity girl teeters across the stage, clutching a bag of cakes and sweets provided by local manufacturer Miguela\u00f1ez instead of bouquets or a trophy. The Frenchman who was leading the race overnight, looks gloomy at getting beaten but still receives the prize for best under-23 rider, courtesy of the M.O.T. centre. He cheers up appreciably when he receives a couple of kisses from the PR girls. Then, when a couple of slightly inebriated friends in the crowd start bellowing his name and pointing at the sky, he positively beams.\n\nEach time the winner of a different trophy comes out, Bahamontes again dashes out from the wings, fidgeting behind the publicity girls, pulling at their sleeves to ensure they stand correctly on the podium for the photographs. There is one cringeworthy moment when he all but manhandles a small child, clearly the son of a sponsor and allowed on to the podium as a treat, out of the way of the prizewinner. 'Can't he just enjoy it?' says one member of the public, a bike rider himself judging by his shaven legs. 'He's so nervous about everything.' There are a few moments when Bahamontes is recognised: 'Fede, you're the best', one man shouts, and another asks for a photograph with the 1959 Tour winner. But that is it: his time, it seems, has gone. Or perhaps not. When the riders have all had their pictures taken, raised their arms and brandished their trophies, Bahamontes leaps on to the stage again clutching handfuls of postcards bearing his picture and a list of his palmares which he flings gleefully into the crowd. Is it a pure ego trip? There is only one answer to that.\n\nHowever, in a country where the sport is drying up in the worst recession since the 1950s, his bike race endures. In fact, the Vuelta a Toledo is the only Spanish race of its level that has never been cancelled, not once in its forty-six-year history. And it is a world away from the Ministry of Education race held nearby that offered Bahamontes his start back in 1947. But the connection between the two persists in the shape of a man still driven onwards by the same manic energy that enabled him to rule the Tour de France mountains for more than a decade.\n\nAnd the legend, albeit increasingly distorted, lives on as well. 'Bahamontes?' the taxi driver says as I head away. 'Not many people know who he is now, but he was the greatest in his time.'\n\nThese are perhaps the final images we should retain of the Eagle of Toledo, the ones from the Vuelta a Toledo in August 2011: Bahamontes, arms waving in the air, whistle blowing, as he guides his race through the province where it all began; Bahamontes, determined to maintain his place in the public's consciousness and act as an inspiration for the younger generations of riders even if it all comes down to an eighty-three-year-old flinging pieces of paper into the crowd; Bahamontes, standing at the top of the climb to the Zocodover square, alone again naturally, but waiting to see who will be the fastest rider to power up the hill and join him.\n\nBahamontes being Bahamontes, he might even get an ice cream.\n\n#### Palmares\n\n**Federico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes**\n\nPlace of birth: Val de Santo Domingo, Spain\n\nDate of birth: 9 July, 1928\n\nTurned professional: 1953\n\nRetired: 1965\n\n**1953 TEAM: BALANZAS BERKEL\/SPLENDID**\n\n**Wins**\n\nTour of Asturias: stage 1 and King of the Mountains (K.O.M.)\n\nCircuito del Sardinero: stage 1\n\nTour of Malaga: overall\n\nVolta a Catalunya: K.O.M\n\n**Selected places**\n\nVolta a Catalunya: 8th\n\nTour of Asturias: 21st\n\n**1954 TEAM: CIRCULO BARCELONISTA-YASTA\/SPLENDID-D'ALESSANDRO**\n\n**Wins**\n\nMt. Agel hill-climb\n\nTour of Mallorca: stage 3 (first sector)\n\nTour of Asturias: K.O.M.\n\nTour de France: K.O.M.\n\nBicicleta Eibarresa: K.O.M.\n\n**Selected places**\n\nTour de France: 25th; stage 18, 5th\n\nBarcelona\u2013Palamos: 2nd\n\nBicicleta Eibarresa: 2nd\n\nTour of Mallorca: 3rd\n\nTrofeo Masferrer: 5th\n\nSpanish Regional Championships: 7th\n\n**1955 TEAM: PE\u00d1A LA SOLERA**\n\n**Wins**\n\nTour of Asturias: overall, K.O.M. and stage 6\n\nBicicleta Eibarresa: stage 2\n\nVolta a Catalunya: stages 7 (2nd sector) and 11\n\nMont Faron hill-climb\n\nCl\u00e1sica de los Puertos\n\nGP Monte Carlo\n\n**Selected places**\n\nVuelta a Espa\u00f1a: 21st; stage 2, 2nd\n\n**1956 TEAM: FAEMA\/GIRARDENGO-ICEP**\n\n**Wins**\n\nNone\n\n**Selected places**\n\nMont Faron: 2nd\n\nTour de France: 4th; K.O.M. 2nd\n\nVuelta a Espa\u00f1a: 4th: K.O.M. 2nd)\n\nGiro d'Italia: stage 7, 2nd; stage 16, 2nd\n\n**1957** **TEAM** **:** **MOBYLETTE** **GAC** **\/** **ST** **-** **RAPHAEL** **-** **GEMINIANI**\n\n**Wins**\n\nVuelta a Espa\u00f1a: 2nd\n\nTour of Levante: stage 3\n\nTour of Asturias: overall, stage 1 and K.O.M.\n\nMount Faron hill-climb\n\nGP Jerez\n\nGP San Lucar de Barrameda\n\nGP Toledo\n\n**Selected places**\n\nVuelta: stage 3 and K.O.M.\n\nGP Europe: 3rd\n\nTour de France: stage 3, 4th\n\n**1958 TEAM: FAEMA**\n\n**Wins**\n\nTour de France: stage 14, stage 20 and K.O.M.\n\nVuelta: K.O.M.\n\nGiro d'Italia: stage 4\n\nSpanish National Championships\n\nArrate hill-climb\n\n**Selected places**\n\nVuelta a Espa\u00f1a: 6th\n\nTour de France: 8th\n\nGiro d'Italia: 17th\n\n**1959 TEAM: TRICOLFILINA-COPPI\/CONDOR\/KAS**\n\n**Wins**\n\nTour de France: overall, stage 15 and K.O.M.\n\nVuelta a Espa\u00f1a: stage 4\n\nSpanish Mountains Championship\n\nArrate hill-climb\n\nAntequera\u2013Cabra\u2013Antequera: stage 1\n\nTour de Suisse: stages 3 (b) and 5 and K.O.M.\n\nTour of Levante: K.O.M.\n\nTour of Cerde\u00f1a: K.O.M.\n\n14 criteriums\n\n**Selected places**\n\nTour de France: stage 17, 2nd; stage 13, 3rd; stage 19, 4th\n\nVuelta a Espa\u00f1a: stage 1 (1st sector), 4th; stage 1 (2nd sector), 3rd\n\nMont Faron hill-climb: 2nd\n\nSpanish Regional Championship\n\nSpanish National Championships: 2nd\n\n**1960 TEAM: FAEMA**\n\n**Wins**\n\nVuelta a Espa\u00f1a: stage 13\n\nGP Priego: two stages 1 and 2, overall and K.O.M.\n\nTour of Asturias: K.O.M.\n\nArrate hill-climb\n\n3 criteriums\n\n**1961 TEAM: V.O.V.**\n\n**Wins**\n\nArrate hill-climb\n\nMonaco\u2013Mont Agel hill-climb\n\nNice\u2013Mont Agel hill-climb\n\nTour of Cerde\u00f1a: stage 4\n\n**Selected places**\n\nWorld Championships: 17th\n\nSpanish Regional Championships: 2nd\n\n**1962 TEAM: MARGNAT-PALOMA**\n\n**Wins**\n\nTour de France: stage 13 and K.O.M.\n\nArrate hill-climb\n\nMont Faron hill-climb\n\nMont Faron time-trial\n\nTour of Romandie: 7th\n\nDauphin\u00e9 Lib\u00e9r\u00e9: K.O.M.\n\n4 criteriums\n\n**Selected places**\n\nTour de France: 14th; stage 19, 3rd\n\nDauphin\u00e9 Lib\u00e9r\u00e9: 4th\n\nTour of Romandie: stage 3\n\n**1963 TEAM: MARGNAT-PALOMA**\n\n**Wins**\n\nMont Faron time-trial\n\nTour de France: stage 15 and K.O.M.\n\nMidi Libre: K.O.M.\n\nDauphin\u00e9 Lib\u00e9r\u00e9: 4th\n\n**Selected places**\n\nTour de France: 2nd\n\nTour of Romandie: 2nd\n\nDauphin\u00e9 Lib\u00e9r\u00e9: K.O.M.\n\n**1964 TEAM: MARGNAT-PALOMA**\n\n**Wins**\n\nTour de France: stages 8 and 16 and K.O.M.\n\nNaranco hill-climb\n\nMont Faron hill-climb\n\nMont Faron time-trial\n\nMidi Libre: stage 5\n\nSix Days of Madrid (with Rik Van Steenbergen)\n\n**Selected places**\n\nTour de France: 3rd\n\nDauphin\u00e9 Lib\u00e9r\u00e9: 6th\n\n**1965 TEAM: MARGNAT-PALOMA**\n\n**Wins**\n\nCircuit du Proven\u00e7al: overall\n\n**Selected places**\n\nVuelta a Espa\u00f1a: 10th; stage 4, 5th; stage 16, 6th\n\nMontjuic hill-climb: 2nd\n\nUrkiola hill-climb: 8th\n\nNaranco hill-climb: 8th\n\n#### Bibliography\n\nA NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR ON SOURCES\n\nAmong the many people willing to give up their time to be interviewed, for which many thanks, first and foremost is, of course, Federico Mart\u00edn Bahamontes himself.\n\nMany thanks, too, to the following willing interviewees (in alphabetical order) for their time and invaluable insights:\n\nIan Brown (8 March, 2011)\n\nAndr\u00e9 Darrigade (7 April, 2011)\n\nRaphael Geminiani (11 July, 2011)\n\nMiguel Indurain (22 March, 2012)\n\nAntonio Jim\u00e9nez Quiles (15 April, 2011)\n\nJulio Jim\u00e9nez (13 September, 2011)\n\nJosu Loro\u00f1o (9 April, 2011)\n\nLuis Ota\u00f1o (8 April, 2011)\n\nMiguel Poblet (21 March, 2011)\n\nRaymond Poulidor (1 July, 2011)\n\nBrian Robinson (29 March, 2011)\n\nBernardo Ruiz (18 January, 2011)\n\nCarlos Sastre (15 January, 2012)\n\nBOOKS\n\n_(Published in English)_\n\nBeevor, Antony \u2013 _The Spanish Civil War,_ Penguin, 1982.\n\nBorkenau, Franz \u2013 _The Spanish Cockpit_ , Faber & Faber, 1937.\n\nBrenan, Gerald \u2013 _The Spanish Labyrinth_ , Cambridge University Press, 1950.\n\nBrenan, Gerald \u2013 _The Face of Spain,_ The Turnstile Press, 1950.\n\nFallon, Lucy & Bell, Adrian \u2013 _Viva La Vuelta_ , Mousehold, 2005.\n\nFotheringham, William \u2013 _Put Me Back On My Bike: In Search of Tom Simpson_ , Yellow Jersey Press, 2002.\n\nFotheringham, William \u2013 _Roule Britannia: A History of Britons in the Tour de France_ , Yellow Jersey Press, 2009.\n\nFotheringham, William \u2013 _Fallen Angel: the Passion of Fausto Coppi,_ Yellow Jersey Press, 2009.\n\nHooper, John \u2013 _The Spaniards_ , Viking Press, 1986.\n\nHoward, Paul \u2013 _Sex, Lies and Handlebar Tape: The Remarkable Life of Jacques Anquetil,_ Mainstream, 2009.\n\nMcGann, Bill & Carol \u2013 _The Story of the Tour de France_ , _Volume 1_ , Dog Ear Publishing, 2006.\n\nMoore, Richard \u2013 _In Search of Robert Millar_ , Harper Collins, 2007.\n\nThomas, Hugh \u2013 T _he Spanish Civil War,_ Simon & Schuster, 1994.\n\n_(Published in Spanish)_\n\nBodegas, Javier & Dorronsoro, Juan \u2013 _Con Ficha de la Espa\u00f1ola 1960 \u2013 2003_ , Uriziar Edizioak, 2003.\n\nBodegas, Javier & Dorronsoro, Juan \u2013 _Historia de la Bicicleta Eibarresa\/Euskal Bizikleta_ , Dorleta, 2000.\n\nBodegas, Javier & Dorronsoro, Juan \u2013 _Historia del Campeonato de Espa\u00f1a,_ Urizar, 2003.\n\nGarai, Josu \u2013 _Ciclismo del Norte,_ Recoletos, 1994.\n\nMart\u00edn Bahamontes, Federico \u2013 _La Sombra del Aguila,_ Wurth, 2009.\n\nP\u00e9rez, Chico & Guerra, Adrian \u2013 _Vuelta Ciclista a Espa\u00f1a 1935\u20131985,_ Caja Postal, 1986.\n\nPreston, Paul \u2013 _Francisco Franco, Caudillo de Espa\u00f1a,_ Grijalbo, 1998.\n\n_(Published in French)_\n\nVarious \u2013 _Tour de France 100 Ans_ , L'Equipe, 2002.\n\nPAMPHLETS\n\n_(Published in Spanish)_\n\nBodegas, Javier \u2013 _Bahamontes,_ Dorleta, 2000.\n\nBodegas, Javier \u2013 _Jes\u00fas Loro\u00f1o,_ Dorleta, 2000.\n\nNEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES\n\n_(Published in English)_\n\n_Cycle Sport_\n\n_Velo News_\n\n_The Independent_\n\n_The Guardian_\n\n_(Published in Spanish)_\n\n_MARCA_\n\n_El Pa\u00eds_\n\n_El Mundo_\n\n_ABC_\n\n_El Mundo Deportivo_\n\n_AS_\n\n_Deia_\n\n_La Vanguardia_\n\n_Urtekaria_\n\n_El Alc\u00e1zar_\n\n_Informaciones_\n\n_(Published in French)_\n\n_L'Equipe_\n\n_Le Dauphin\u00e9 Lib\u00e9r\u00e9_\n\n#### Index\n\nAbat\u00e9, Antoine ref1\n\n_ABC_ ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14\n\nAbilleira, Jos\u00e9 Luis ref1\n\nAbt, Sam ref1\n\n_Actualidad Espa\u00f1ola_ ref1, ref2, ref3\n\nAdriaenssens, Jean ref1\n\nAimar, Lucien ref1\n\nAlc\u00e1zar fortress, Toledo ref1, ref2\n\nAlomar, Francisco ref1, ref2, ref3\n\nAltig, Rudy ref1, ref2\n\nAmateur Championships, Spain:\n\n1948 ref1, ref2\n\n1949 ref1\n\n1950 ref1\n\nAndalusia, Tour of ref1, ref2\n\nAnglade, Antonio ref1\n\nAnglade, Henry ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18\n\nAnquetil, Jacques ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33, ref34, ref35, ref36, ref37, ref38, ref39, ref40, ref41, ref42, ref43, ref44, ref45, ref46, ref47, ref48, ref49, ref50, ref51, ref52, ref53, ref54, ref55, ref56\n\nArrate hill-climb ref1, ref2\n\n1960 ref1\n\n1962 ref1\n\n1965 ref1\n\n1966 ref1\n\n1970 ref1\n\n_AS_ ref1\n\nAsturias, Tour of:\n\n1953 ref1, ref2, ref3\n\n1954 ref1, ref2\n\n1955 ref1\n\n1957 ref1\n\n\u00c1vila, Tour of:\n\n1948 ref1, ref2\n\n1950 ref1\n\n1951 ref1\n\nAza\u00f1a, Manuel ref1\n\nBahamontes, Federico:\n\n1953 season ref1\n\n1954 season ref1\n\n1955 season ref1\n\n1956 season ref1\n\n1957 season ref1\n\n1958 season ref1\n\n1959 season ref1\n\n1960 season ref1\n\n1961, 1962 seasons ref1, ref2\n\n1963 season ref1\n\n1964 season ref1\n\n1965 season ref1\n\namateur racing ref1\n\nattacking style ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33, ref34, ref35, ref36, ref37\n\nattacks a spectator ref1, ref2\n\nattacks other cyclists ref1\n\nbike shop ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9\n\nbiography ref1, ref2\n\nbirth ref1, ref2\n\ncelebrity circuit ref1\n\ncheating ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\nchildhood ref1\n\nclimber ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29\n\ncrashes ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6\n\ndescents ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13\n\ndoping ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8\n\neccentric nature ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6\n\nego, fragile ref1, ref2\n\nerratic nature ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\nfame ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5\n\nfans ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33\n\nfinances ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33, ref34, ref35, ref36, ref37, ref38, ref39, ref40, ref41, ref42, ref43, ref44, ref45, ref46\n\nfirst bike ref1\n\nfirst professional race ref1\n\nfirst race ref1\n\ngypsy ref1\n\nhobo image ref1\n\nice cream in Tour de France, eats ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8\n\nignores greater prizes for King of the Mountains title ref1\n\nillness ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5\n\ninjections ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8\n\ninjuries ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18\n\nKing of the Mountains ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33, ref34, ref35, ref36, ref37, ref38, ref39, ref40, ref41, ref42, ref43, ref44, ref45, ref46, ref47, ref48, ref49, ref50, ref51, ref52, ref53, ref54, ref55, ref56, ref57, ref58, ref59, ref60, ref61, ref62, ref63, ref64, ref65, ref66, ref67, ref68\n\nlife after retirement ref1\n\nloner ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20\n\nmadness ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6\n\nmanic energy ref1, ref2, ref3\n\nmarries ref1\n\nnames ref1, ref2\n\nNational Service ref1\n\nnicknames ref1, ref2\n\nposition on bike ref1, ref2, ref3\n\nrecord ref1, ref2\n\nretires ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\nrivalries _see under individual rival name_\n\nsells races ref1, ref2\n\nteam director ref1\n\ntemperament ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6\n\nToledo cycling club and ref1\n\nweather and ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7\n\nyounger riders and ref1, ref2, ref3 _see also under individual rider name_\n\n_see also under individual event name_\n\nBahamontes, Fermina (wife\/girlfriend) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12\n\nBahamontes, Juli\u00e1n (father) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8\n\nBahamontes, Victoria (mother) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10\n\nBalanzas Berkel team ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\nBaldini, Ercole ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\nBaron de Guell Cup ref1\n\nBartali, Gino ref1\n\nBasque Country ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18\n\nBasque separatist movement ref1, ref2, ref3\n\nBauvin, Gilbert ref1, ref2, ref3\n\nBergareche, Luis ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6\n\nBern\u00e1rdez, Jos\u00e9 ref1\n\nBerrendero, Herrero ref1, ref2\n\nBerrendero, Juli\u00e1n ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9\n\nBicicleta Eibarresa:\n\n1954 ref1\n\n1955 ref1\n\n1956 ref1\n\nBicicleta Vasca ref1\n\n1957 ref1\n\nBidot, Marcel ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7\n\nBlanco, Antonio ref1\n\nBlondin, Antonie ref1\n\nBobet, Louison ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17\n\nBodegas, Javier ref1, ref2\n\nBotella, Salvador ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9\n\nBouvet, Philippe ref1, ref2\n\nBover, Miguel ref1\n\nBrenan, Gerald ref1, ref2, ref3\n\nBrown, Ian ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5\n\nBrunel, Philippe ref1\n\nCabot, Joaquim ref1\n\nCadiz, Tour of ref1\n\n1951 ref1\n\nCampillo, Juan ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7\n\nCampo Simplex ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\nCatalano, Nino ref1\n\nCatalonia ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9\n\nCavendish, Mark ref1, ref2\n\nCazala, Robert ref1, ref2, ref3\n\nCentre-Midi team ref1, ref2\n\nChavanel, Sylvain ref1\n\nCircuit du Proven\u00e7al, 1965 ref1\n\nCivil War, Spanish (1936\u201339) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22\n\nContador, Alberto ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\nConterno, Angelo ref1, ref2\n\nCoppi, Fausto ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21\n\nCorrales, Mariano ref1, ref2\n\n_Cycle Sport_ ref1, ref2\n\n_Cycling Weekly_ ref1\n\nDaems, Emile ref1\n\nDarrigade, Andr\u00e9 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18\n\nDaud\u00e9, Jacques ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\nDauphin\u00e9 Lib\u00e9r\u00e9:\n\n1962 ref1\n\n1963 ref1\n\nDe Mulder, Frans ref1\n\nDeCabooter, Arthur ref1, ref2\n\nDefraye, Odiel ref1\n\nDel Caz, Alejandro ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6\n\nDelgado, Pedro ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6\n\nDesmet, Armand ref1, ref2\n\nDesmet, Gilbert ref1\n\ndomestiques ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13\n\nDotto, Jean ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\nDousset, Daniel ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7\n\nDumas, Pierre ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7\n\nDunan, Rene ref1\n\nE.T.A. ref1, ref2\n\nEibar, GP ref1\n\n_El Alc_ \u00e1 _zar_ ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11\n\n_El Correo Catalanref1_\n\n_El Correo Espa\u00f1ol_ ref1\n\n_El Diario Montan\u00e9s_ ref1\n\n_El Movimiento Nacional_ ( _FET de la JONS_ ) ref1, ref2\n\n_El Mundo Deportivo_ ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21\n\n_El Noticiero Universal_ ref1\n\n_El Pa\u00eds_ ref1, ref2, ref3\n\nElola, Jos\u00e9 Antonio ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\nEmeterio, Julio San ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8\n\nEspin, Manuel ref1\n\nEzquerra, Federico ref1\n\nFaema ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20\n\nFalange ref1, ref2\n\nFalaschi, Roberto ref1\n\n_Fallen Angel_ (Fotheringham) ref1\n\nFantini, Alessandro ref1\n\nfascism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7\n\nFerraz, Antonio ref1\n\nFerrys team ref1\n\nFilippis, Ni\u00f1o de ref1, ref2\n\nFlecha, Juan Antonio ref1\n\nFranc\u00e9s, Jos\u00e9 P\u00e9rez ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5\n\nFranco, General ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33, ref34, ref35, ref36, ref37, ref38\n\nFreire, Oscar ref1\n\nGabica, Francisco ref1\n\nGabica, Patxi ref1\n\nGadea, Eduardo ref1\n\nGaldeano, Jes\u00fas ref1, ref2\n\nGalera, Joaquim ref1\n\nGarai, Josu ref1\n\nGarin, Maurice ref1\n\nGaul, Charly ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33, ref34, ref35, ref36, ref37, ref38, ref39, ref40, ref41, ref42, ref43, ref44, ref45, ref46, ref47, ref48, ref49\n\nGelabert, Antonio ref1, ref2\n\nGeminiani, Rafael ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23\n\nGirardengo-ICEP team ref1, ref2\n\nGiro d'Italia ref1, ref2, ref3\n\n1953 ref1\n\n1956 ref1\n\n1957 ref1\n\n1958 ref1, ref2\n\n1961 ref1, ref2\n\n1970 ref1\n\nGismondi, Michele ref1\n\nGoddet, Jacques ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8\n\nGraf, Rolf ref1, ref2\n\nGrazyck, Jean ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\nGrosso, Giancarlo ref1\n\nGroussard, Georges ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5\n\nHerria, Euskal ref1\n\nHoevenaers, Jos ref1, ref2\n\n'Huesca Pact, the' ref1\n\nHuot, Francois ref1\n\nInda, Eduardo ref1\n\nIndurain, Miguel ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5\n\n_Informaci\u00f3n_ ref1\n\n_Informaciones_ ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8\n\nInternational Brigades ref1, ref2\n\nItaly, tour of, 1958 ref1\n\nJanssens, Marcel ref1, ref2, ref3\n\nJim\u00e9nez, Julio ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12\n\nK.A.S. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8\n\nKohl, Bernard ref1\n\n_L'Equipe_ ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17\n\nLa Casera team ref1, ref2\n\n_La Gaceta del Norte_ ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\n_La Regi\u00f3n_ ref1\n\nLa Solera team ref1, ref2, ref3\n\nLangarica, Dalmacio ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28\n\nLasa, Miguel Mari ref1\n\nLeducq, Andr\u00e9 ref1\n\nLevante, Tour of:\n\n1957 ref1\n\n1960 ref1\n\nLicor 43 team ref1, ref2\n\nLinton, Arthur ref1\n\nLobo, Margarita ref1, ref2\n\nLondres, Albert ref1\n\nL\u00f3pez, Basilio ref1, ref2\n\nL\u00f3pez, German ref1\n\nLoro\u00f1o, Jes\u00fas ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33, ref34, ref35, ref36, ref37, ref38, ref39\n\nLoro\u00f1o, Josu ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8\n\nMadrid, Tour of, 1951 ref1\n\nMagne, Antonin ref1\n\nMagni, Fiorenzo ref1, ref2\n\nMahe, Francois ref1\n\nMalaga, Tour of, 1953 ref1\n\nMallejac, Jean ref1, ref2\n\nManzaneque, Fernando ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5\n\nManzaneque, Jes\u00fas ref1\n\n_MARCA_ ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22\n\nMargnat team ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17\n\nMarigil, Rene ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5\n\nMasip, Francisco ref1, ref2\n\nMaso, Benjo ref1\n\nMassignan, Imerio ref1\n\nMattio, Claude ref1\n\nMerckx, Eddy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6\n\nMidi Libre, GP:\n\n1957 ref1\n\n1963 ref1\n\nMilan-San Remo ref1\n\n1957 ref1\n\nMillar, Robert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5\n\n_Miroir-Sprint_ ref1\n\nMobylette ref1, ref2, ref3\n\nMoncouti\u00e9, David ref1\n\nMont Agel hill-climb:\n\n1954 ref1\n\n1960 ref1\n\nMonte Carlo, GP ref1\n\nMoore, Richard ref1\n\nMoral, Jos\u00e9 Gomez del ref1, ref2\n\nMorales, Carmelo ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\nMoreno, Francisco ref1\n\nMoreno, Miguel ref1\n\nMoscard\u00f3, General ref1, ref2\n\nMostajo, Santiago ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8\n\nMont Faron hill-climb:\n\n1955 ref1\n\n1957 ref1\n\n1962 ref1\n\nMurtra, Evaristo ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8\n\nNicolas, Luis L\u00f3pez ref1, ref2\n\nNolten, Jan ref1\n\n_noticias-docummentales_ ( _no-dos_ ) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\nOchoa, Severo ref1\n\nOta\u00f1o, Luis ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6\n\nPacheco, Miguel ref1\n\nPauwels, Eddy ref1, ref2\n\nPeiper, Allan ref1\n\nPelforth team ref1, ref2, ref3\n\nPelissier, Charles ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\nPelissier, Francis ref1\n\nPelissier, Henri ref1\n\nPensec, Ronan ref1\n\nPeugeot ref1\n\nPiel, Roger ref1, ref2\n\nPlanckaert, Josef 'Jef' ref1, ref2\n\nPoblet, Miguel ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16\n\n'Poigny pact' ref1, ref2, ref3\n\nPoulidor, Raymond ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26\n\nPriego de Cordoba, GP ref1\n\nPrivat, Rene ref1\n\nPuig, Luis ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22\n\nPyrenees, Tour des, 1960 ref1\n\nQuiles, Antonio Jim\u00e9nez ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10\n\nQuiles, L\u00f3pez ref1\n\nRamsbottom, Alan ref1\n\nRemy, Raoul ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9\n\nRivera, Jos\u00e9 Antonio Primo de ref1, ref2\n\nRivi\u00e8re, Roger ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25\n\nRobic, Jean ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5\n\nRobinson, Brian ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13\n\nRoche, Stephen ref1\n\nRodr\u00edguez, Manolo ref1\n\nRodr\u00edguez, Pablo ref1\n\nRomandie, Tour of, 1962 ref1\n\nRuiz, Bernardo ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33\n\nSaint, Gerard ref1, ref2\n\nSalamanca, Isidro L\u00f3pez de ref1\n\nSamaranch, Juan Antonio ref1\n\nSastre, Carlos ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\nSaura, Gabriel ref1\n\nSchleck, Andy ref1\n\nSegu, Jos\u00e9 ref1\n\nSerra, Jos\u00e9 ref1, ref2\n\nSimon, Pascal ref1\n\nSimpson, Tom ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7\n\nSix Days of Madrid, 1965 ref1\n\nSoler, Angelino ref1, ref2\n\nSoria, Ladislau ref1, ref2, ref3\n\nSotelo, Calvo ref1\n\nSpain:\n\nCivil War (1936) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19\n\neconomy\/poverty ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19\n\nfascism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8\n\nrole of sport in\/use of Bahamontes victories ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5\n\ntourism ref1\n\nSpanish Cycling Federation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28\n\nSpanish Fascist Party ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\nSpanish National Championships ref1, ref2, ref3\n\n1955 ref1\n\n1956 ref1\n\n1958 ref1, ref2\n\n_Spanish National Championships_ (Bodegas\/Dorronsoro) ref1\n\nSplendid team ref1, ref2\n\nSt. Raphael-Geminiani team ref1, ref2\n\nStablinski, Jean ref1\n\nSteel, Ian ref1\n\nSu\u00e1rez, Antonio ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18\n\nSu\u00e1rez, Faustino ref1\n\nSubida a Naranco hill-climb, ref1, ref2\n\n1965 ref1\n\nSubida de Montjuic, 1965 ref1\n\nSuisse, Tour de, 1958 ref1\n\nTimoner, Guillermo ref1\n\nTognacini, Bruno ref1\n\nToledo ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33, ref34\n\nTorell\u00f3, Miguel ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\nTorres, Pedro ref1\n\nTour de France:\n\n1903 ref1\n\n1930 ref1\n\n1931 ref1\n\n1933 ref1, ref2\n\n1936 ref1\n\n1937 ref1\n\n1949 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\n1952 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5\n\n1953 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8\n\n1954 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9\n\n1955 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\n1956 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\n1957 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6\n\n1958 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13\n\n1959 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33, ref34, ref35, ref36, ref37, ref38\n\n1960 ref1, ref2, ref3\n\n1961 ref1\n\n1962 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10\n\n1963 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8\n\n1964 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\n1965 ref1, ref2\n\n1967 ref1, ref2\n\n1973 ref1, ref2\n\n1983 ref1\n\n1988 ref1, ref2\n\n1992 ref1\n\n2008 ref1\n\n2011 ref1\n\npost-Tour criteriums ref1, ref2, ref3\n\nTrepp, Willy ref1\n\nTricolfilina ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\nTrueba, Vicente ref1, ref2, ref3\n\nU.C.I. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7\n\nUbieta, Francisco G. ref1\n\nUrdiales, Castro ref1\n\nUriona, Valentin ref1\n\nUtset, Aniceto ref1\n\nV.O.V. ref1, ref2, ref3\n\nValladares, Manuel Portela ref1\n\nVan Genechten, Richard ref1\n\nVan Impe, Lucien ref1, ref2\n\nVan Looy, Rik ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5\n\nVarnajo, Robert ref1\n\nVermeulin, Michel ref1, ref2\n\nVirenque, Richard ref1\n\n_Viva la Vuelta!_ (Bell\/Fallon) ref1, ref2\n\nVolta a Catalunya ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\n1945 ref1\n\n1950 ref1\n\n1953 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6\n\n1954 ref1\n\n1955 ref1, ref2, ref3\n\n1957 ref1\n\n1965 ref1\n\n_Vuelta 1935-85, The_ (P\u00e9rez) ref1, ref2\n\nVuelta a Espa\u00f1a ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5\n\n1946 ref1\n\n1948 ref1, ref2\n\n1950 ref1, ref2\n\n1953 ref1\n\n1955 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8\n\n1956 ref1, ref2\n\n1957 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\n1958 ref1, ref2\n\n1959 ref1, ref2\n\n1960 ref1, ref2, ref3\n\n1962 ref1\n\n1964 ref1\n\n1965 ref1, ref2\n\n1978 ref1\n\n2011 ref1, ref2\n\nVuelta a Galicia, 1955 ref1\n\nVuelta a los Puertos:\n\n1953 ref1, ref2\n\n1955 ref1\n\nVuelta a Toledo ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\nWalkowiak, Roger ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5\n\nWegelius, Charly ref1\n\nWolfshohl, Rolf ref1\n\nWorld Championships ref1\n\n1954 ref1\n\n1955 ref1\n\n1956 ref1\n\n1958 ref1\n\n1959 ref1\n\n1961 ref1\n\n1965 ref1, ref2\n\nYates, Sean ref1\n\nZampini, Donato ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4\n\n#### Copyright\n\nFirst published in 2012  \nby Aurum Press Ltd, 7 Greenland Street, London NW1 0ND\n\nThis eBook edition first published in 2012\n\nAll rights reserved  \n\u00a9 Alasdair Fotheringham, 2012\n\nThe right of Alasdair Fotheringham to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988\n\nThis eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publishers' rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.\n\neBook conversion by CPI Group\n\nISBN 978\u20131\u201378131\u2013037-3\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \n### Sobre _La Era de Huesos_\n\n\u00abUna oscura, aguerrida y maravillosa novela de fantas\u00eda.\u00bb\n\n__\n\n_The_ _Observer_\n\n\u00ab _La Era de Huesos_ nos transporta a un submundo del futuro, donde la clarividencia existe. Un mundo de unas dimensiones impresionantes, repleto de fantas\u00eda, distop\u00eda e intriga.\u00bb __\n\n__\n\n_Vogue_\n\n\u00abEl ritmo de _La Era de Huesos_ raramente se ralentiza, y la fuerte e ingeniosa Paige resulta una hero\u00edna memorable.\u00bb __\n\n_BookPage_\n\n__\n\n\u00abMe atrap\u00f3 irremediablemente... Samantha Shannon es una autora joven con un gran futuro por delante, de todo menos dist\u00f3pico.\u00bb __\n\n_Stylist_\n\n__\n\n\u00abUna fantas\u00eda oscura y exquisitamente representada. Est\u00e1 descrita de una forma \u00fanica. _La Era de Huesos_ es una lectura obligada.\u00bb\n\nKAMI GARC\u00cdA, autora de _Hermosas criaturas_\n\n__\n\n\u00abSamantha Shannon tiene un talento enorme e ingenioso, y una imaginaci\u00f3n desbordante. Ha empezado a trabajar a todo gas.\u00bb\n\nSUSAN HILL, autora de _La mujer de negro_\n\n\u00abShannon escribe tan bien que consigue mantener el inter\u00e9s desde el principio... Un mundo de ficci\u00f3n original y entretenido... La verdad, el final me tuvo absolutamente en vilo.\u00bb\n\n__\n\n_The Telegraph_\n\n\u00abMarca la llegada de una escritora brit\u00e1nica extraordinariamente talentosa, preparada para desafiar el monopolio de las listas de m\u00e1s vendidos internacionales de las series _Crep\u00fasculo_ de Stephenie Meyer y _Los juegos del hambre_ de Suzanne Collins.\u00bb\n\n_The British Fantasy Society_\n\n\u00abNo encuentro palabras para describir la maravillosa y confiada escritura de Samantha Shannon, sobre todo en un debut literario... La historia que m\u00e1s me ha atrapado en el \u00faltimo a\u00f1o, y la primera novela m\u00e1s absorbente y convincente que he le\u00eddo desde _Jonathan Strange y el se\u00f1or Norrell._ La recomiendo fervientemente.\u00bb\n\n__\n\n_Forbidden Planet International Blog_\n\n__\n\n\u00abEn _La Era de Huesos_ encontramos los adolescentes y la distop\u00eda de _Los juegos del hambre_ , sumados a una historia de amor al estilo de _Crep\u00fasculo_. Eso s\u00ed, con una mayor calidad literaria.\u00bb\n\n_SFX Magazine_\n\n__\n\n\u00abCon ecos de _Los juegos del hambre_ y de la trilog\u00eda _Cr\u00f3nicas del_ _mago negro_ de Trudi Canavan, este es un excelente debut literario que atrapar\u00e1 al lector de principio a fin, y lo dejar\u00e1 con ganas de m\u00e1s.\u00bb\n\n_Irish Examiner_\n\n__\n\n\u00ab _La Era de Huesos_ surge del inter\u00e9s de Shannon por obras como _El cuento de la criada_ y _La naranja mec\u00e1nica_ , pero tambi\u00e9n de su fascinaci\u00f3n por la poes\u00eda de John Donne.\u00bb\n\n_The_ _Sunday Times_\n\n_Para los so\u00f1adores_\n\nPor encima de esta tierra y de la raza humana que la puebla, existe un reino de esp\u00edritus, un mundo invisible, pero que nos rodea y est\u00e1 en todas partes.\n\nCHARLOTTE BRONT\u00cb, _Jane Eyre_\n\nMe gusta pensar que al principio \u00e9ramos m\u00e1s. No muchos, supongo. Pero s\u00ed m\u00e1s que ahora.\n\nSomos la minor\u00eda que el mundo no acepta. No nos acepta fuera del \u00e1mbito de la fantas\u00eda, que est\u00e1 en la lista negra. Somos como los dem\u00e1s. A veces actuamos como los dem\u00e1s. En muchos aspectos, somos como otro cualquiera. Estamos por todas partes, en cualquier calle. Llevamos una vida que podr\u00edais considerar normal, siempre que no os fijarais demasiado.\n\nNo todos nosotros sabemos lo que somos. Algunos mueren sin llegar a saberlo. Algunos lo sabemos, y nunca nos descubren. Pero estamos aqu\u00ed.\n\nCreedme.\n\nDesde los ocho a\u00f1os, hab\u00eda vivido en esa parte de Londres que se llamaba Islington. Iba a un colegio privado para chicas, y a los diecis\u00e9is me puse a trabajar. Eso fue en el a\u00f1o 2056. AS 127, seg\u00fan el calendario de Scion. Se esperaba de los j\u00f3venes que empezaran a ganarse la vida donde pudieran, y normalmente era detr\u00e1s de alg\u00fan tipo de mostrador. Hab\u00eda mucha oferta de empleo en el sector servicios. Mi padre cre\u00eda que yo llevar\u00eda una vida sencilla; que era inteligente pero poco ambiciosa, que me contentar\u00eda con cualquier trabajo que la vida me ofreciera.\n\nMi padre se equivocaba, como siempre.\n\nDesde los diecis\u00e9is a\u00f1os hab\u00eda trabajado en el mundo del hampa de Scion Londres (SciLo, como lo llam\u00e1bamos en las calles). Trataba con implacables bandas de videntes, todas dispuestas a derribarse unas a otras para sobrevivir. Esas bandas formaban parte de un sindicato que abarcaba la ciudadela entera, dirigido por el Subse\u00f1or. Empujados hacia los bordes de la sociedad, nos ve\u00edamos obligados a delinquir para prosperar. Y por eso nos odiaban a\u00fan m\u00e1s. Hac\u00edamos reales las historias que contaban de nosotros.\n\nYo ten\u00eda mi sitio en aquel caos. Era una dama, la protegida de un mimetocapo. Mi jefe, Jaxon Hall, era el mimetocapo responsable del sector I-4. \u00c9ramos seis los que trabaj\u00e1bamos directamente para \u00e9l. Nos llam\u00e1bamos los Siete Sellos.\n\nNo pod\u00eda cont\u00e1rselo a mi padre. \u00c9l cre\u00eda que trabajaba de dependienta en un bar de ox\u00edgeno, un empleo mal pagado pero legal. Era una mentira f\u00e1cil. Si hubiera tratado de explicarle por qu\u00e9 me pasaba el d\u00eda con delincuentes, no lo habr\u00eda entendido. Mi padre no sab\u00eda que yo me parec\u00eda m\u00e1s a ellos que a \u00e9l.\n\nTen\u00eda diecinueve a\u00f1os el d\u00eda que mi vida cambi\u00f3. Por entonces mi nombre ya sonaba en las calles. Tras una semana especialmente dura en el mercado negro, ten\u00eda previsto pasar el fin de semana con mi padre. Jax no entend\u00eda por qu\u00e9 necesitaba un poco de tiempo libre (para \u00e9l, no hab\u00eda nada digno de nosotros fuera del sindicato), pero \u00e9l no ten\u00eda una familia, y yo s\u00ed. O no ten\u00eda una familia viva. Y a pesar de que mi padre y yo nunca hab\u00edamos estado muy unidos, sent\u00eda que no deb\u00edamos perder el contacto. Una cena de vez en cuando, alguna que otra llamada de tel\u00e9fono, un regalo por Novembertide. El \u00fanico problema era su lista interminable de preguntas. \u00bfD\u00f3nde trabajaba? \u00bfQui\u00e9nes eran mis amigos? \u00bfD\u00f3nde viv\u00eda? Yo no pod\u00eda contestar. La verdad era peligrosa. Si se hubiera enterado de a qu\u00e9 me dedicaba, es posible que \u00e9l mismo me hubiera mandado a la colina de la Torre. Quiz\u00e1 deber\u00eda haberle contado la verdad. Quiz\u00e1 eso lo habr\u00eda matado. Fuera como fuese, no me arrepent\u00eda de haber entrado en el sindicato. Mi trabajo era deshonesto, pero estaba bien pagado. Y como siempre dec\u00eda Jax, era mejor ser un forajido que un fiambre.\n\nEse d\u00eda llov\u00eda. El \u00faltimo d\u00eda que fui a trabajar.\n\nUn equipo de soporte vital manten\u00eda mis constantes. Parec\u00eda muerta, y en cierto modo lo estaba: mi esp\u00edritu se hab\u00eda separado parcialmente de mi cuerpo. Era un delito por el que habr\u00edan podido condenarme a la horca.\n\nHe dicho que trabajaba en el sindicato. Dejadme que lo aclare: era una especie de hacker mental. M\u00e1s que leer otras mentes, era una especie de radar de mentes, en sinton\u00eda con lo que pasaba en el \u00e9ter. Percib\u00eda los matices de los onirosajes, y la presencia de esp\u00edritus solitarios. Cosas que estaban fuera de m\u00ed. Cosas que los videntes normales no pod\u00edan percibir.\n\nJax me utilizaba como herramienta de vigilancia. Mi trabajo consist\u00eda en seguir la pista de cualquier actividad et\u00e9rea en su secci\u00f3n. A menudo me hac\u00eda vigilar a otros videntes, para averiguar si ocultaban algo. Al principio, solo me ped\u00eda que observara a personas que estaban en la misma habitaci\u00f3n (personas a las que yo pod\u00eda ver, o\u00edr y tocar), pero pronto se dio cuenta de que yo pod\u00eda ir m\u00e1s all\u00e1. Pod\u00eda percibir cosas que suced\u00edan en otro sitio: un vidente que pasaba por la calle, una reuni\u00f3n de esp\u00edritus en Covent Garden. Mientras tuviera soporte vital, pod\u00eda captar el \u00e9ter en un radio de dos kil\u00f3metros alrededor de Seven Dials. As\u00ed que si Jaxon necesitaba que alguien cotilleara lo que estaba pasando en el I-4, pod\u00edas apostar cualquier cosa a que me llamar\u00eda a m\u00ed. Dec\u00eda que yo ten\u00eda potencial para ir a\u00fan m\u00e1s lejos, pero Nick no quer\u00eda que lo intentara. No sab\u00edamos qu\u00e9 consecuencias podr\u00eda acarrearme.\n\nToda forma de clarividencia estaba prohibida, por supuesto, pero aquella con la que se pod\u00eda ganar dinero era directamente pecado. Ten\u00edan un t\u00e9rmino especial para designarlo: mimetodelincuencia. Comunicaci\u00f3n con el mundo de los esp\u00edritus, con la intenci\u00f3n expresa de obtener beneficios econ\u00f3micos. El sindicato se basaba en la mimetodelincuencia.\n\nLa clarividencia pagada en efectivo estaba muy extendida entre quienes no lograban entrar en ninguna banda. Nosotros lo llam\u00e1bamos limosnear; Scion lo llamaba traici\u00f3n. El m\u00e9todo oficial de ejecuci\u00f3n de quienes comet\u00edan esos delitos era la asfixia por nitr\u00f3geno, comercializada bajo la marca NiteKind. Todav\u00eda recuerdo los titulares: \u00abCastigo sin dolor: el \u00faltimo milagro de Scion\u00bb. Dec\u00edan que era como quedarse dormido, como tomarse una pastilla. Todav\u00eda hab\u00eda ejecuciones p\u00fablicas en la horca, y alg\u00fan que otro caso de tortura por alta traici\u00f3n.\n\nYo comet\u00eda alta traici\u00f3n por el simple hecho de respirar.\n\nPero volvamos a ese d\u00eda. Jaxon me hab\u00eda conectado al equipo de soporte vital y me hab\u00eda enviado a hacer un reconocimiento del sector. Yo llevaba tiempo cercando una mente que rondaba por all\u00ed, un visitante frecuente del sector 4. Hab\u00eda hecho todo lo posible para ver sus recuerdos, pero siempre hab\u00eda sucedido algo que me lo hab\u00eda impedido. Aquel onirosaje no se parec\u00eda a nada que yo hubiera visto hasta aquel momento. Incluso Jax estaba perplejo. Por las diferentes capas de mecanismos de defensa, habr\u00eda jurado que su due\u00f1o ten\u00eda miles de a\u00f1os de edad, pero no pod\u00eda ser eso. Era algo diferente.\n\nJax era muy desconfiado. Lo que correspond\u00eda en esos casos era que si un nuevo clarividente llegaba a su sector se anunciara a \u00e9l en un plazo de cuarenta y ocho horas. Jax dec\u00eda que deb\u00eda de haber otra banda implicada, pero ninguna de las del I-4 ten\u00eda experiencia suficiente para obstaculizar mis reconocimientos. Ninguna sab\u00eda lo que yo pod\u00eda hacer. No era Didion Waite, que dirig\u00eda la segunda banda m\u00e1s grande de la zona. No eran los limosneros muertos de hambre que frecuentaban Dials. No eran los mimetocapos territoriales especializados en hurto et\u00e9reo. Aquello era otra cosa.\n\nCientos de mentes pasaban a mi lado lanzando destellos plateados en la oscuridad. Iban deprisa por las calles, como sus due\u00f1os. Yo no reconoc\u00eda a esas personas. No pod\u00eda ver sus caras; solo vislumbraba los bordes de sus mentes.\n\nHab\u00eda salido de Dials. Mi percepci\u00f3n estaba m\u00e1s al norte, aunque no pod\u00eda precisar d\u00f3nde. Segu\u00ed aquella sensaci\u00f3n de peligro que tan bien conoc\u00eda. La mente del desconocido estaba cerca. Me llev\u00f3 por el \u00e9ter correteando como una luci\u00e9rnaga, sorteando otras mentes. Se mov\u00eda deprisa, como si me hubiera notado. Como si intentara huir.\n\nNo deb\u00eda perseguir esa luz. No sab\u00eda ad\u00f3nde me llevar\u00eda, y ya me hab\u00eda alejado demasiado de Seven Dials.\n\n\u00abJaxon te ha dicho que lo encuentres.\u00bb Era un pensamiento lejano. \u00abSe va a enfadar.\u00bb Segu\u00ed adelante, a una velocidad mucho mayor de la que jam\u00e1s hab\u00eda alcanzado con el cuerpo. Luch\u00e9 contra las limitaciones de mi f\u00edsico. Ya pod\u00eda distinguir la mente de aquel solitario. No era plateada, como las otras; no, la suya era oscura y fr\u00eda, una mente de hielo y piedra. Corr\u00ed hacia ella. Estaba tan cerca... No pod\u00eda dejarla escapar.\n\nEntonces el \u00e9ter tembl\u00f3 a mi alrededor y, de repente, el intruso desapareci\u00f3. Su mente volv\u00eda a estar fuera de mi alcance.\n\nAlguien me zarande\u00f3.\n\nMi cord\u00f3n arg\u00e9nteo (la conexi\u00f3n entre mi cuerpo y mi esp\u00edritu) era extremadamente sensible. Era lo que me permit\u00eda percibir onirosajes a distancia. Tambi\u00e9n pod\u00eda devolverme a mi piel. Cuando abr\u00ed los ojos, Dani estaba ilumin\u00e1ndome la cara con una linterna de bolsillo. \u00abLas pupilas reaccionan \u2014dijo para s\u00ed\u2014. Estupendo.\u00bb\n\nDanica. El genio del grupo, con una inteligencia que solo Jax superaba. Era tres a\u00f1os mayor que yo y ten\u00eda todo el encanto y la sensibilidad de un golpe a traici\u00f3n. Cuando la contrataron, Nick la clasific\u00f3 como soci\u00f3pata. Jax dijo que era parte de su personalidad.\n\n\u2014Despierta, So\u00f1adora. \u2014Me dio un cachete\u2014. Bienvenida al mundo de la carne.\n\nLa bofetada me doli\u00f3: era buena se\u00f1al, aunque desagradable. Levant\u00e9 una mano para quitarme la mascarilla de ox\u00edgeno.\n\nLa guarida fue cobrando definici\u00f3n. La vivienda de Jax era un almac\u00e9n secreto de contrabando, lleno de pel\u00edculas, m\u00fasica y libros prohibidos, todo amontonado en estantes y recubierto por una gruesa capa de polvo. Hab\u00eda una colecci\u00f3n de fasc\u00edculos de terror, de esos que pod\u00edas conseguir en Covent Garden los fines de semana, y un mont\u00f3n de panfletos grapados. Era el \u00fanico sitio del mundo donde yo pod\u00eda leer, ver y hacer lo que se me antojara.\n\n\u2014No deber\u00edas despertarme as\u00ed \u2014dije. Dani conoc\u00eda las normas\u2014. \u00bfCu\u00e1nto rato he estado all\u00ed?\n\n\u2014\u00bfD\u00f3nde?\n\n\u2014\u00bfD\u00f3nde crees?\n\nDani chasc\u00f3 los dedos.\n\n\u2014Ya, claro. En el \u00e9ter. Perdona. No lo he contado.\n\nImprobable: siempre me cronometraba.\n\nMir\u00e9 el reloj Nixie azul del equipo. Lo hab\u00eda fabricado Dani, y lo llamaba Sistema de Auxilio Mortal, o SAM. Monitorizaba y controlaba mis funciones vitales cuando percib\u00eda el \u00e9ter a distancia. Vi las cifras y me dio un vuelco el coraz\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Cincuenta y siete minutos. \u2014Me frot\u00e9 las sienes\u2014. \u00bfMe has tenido una hora en el \u00e9ter?\n\n\u2014Puede ser.\n\n\u2014\u00bfUna hora entera?\n\n\u2014Las \u00f3rdenes son las \u00f3rdenes. Jax dijo que quer\u00eda que descifraras esa mente misteriosa antes del anochecer. \u00bfHas podido?\n\n\u2014Lo he intentado.\n\n\u2014Eso quiere decir que no has podido. Te has quedado sin bonificaci\u00f3n. \u2014Se bebi\u00f3 el caf\u00e9 de un trago\u2014. Todav\u00eda no puedo creer que perdieras a Anne Naylor.\n\nEra inevitable que sacara aquello a colaci\u00f3n. Unos d\u00edas antes me hab\u00edan enviado a la sala de subastas a reclamar un esp\u00edritu que le correspond\u00eda a Jax: Anne Naylor, la famosa fantasma de Farringdon. Hab\u00edan ofrecido m\u00e1s que yo.\n\n\u2014Jam\u00e1s habr\u00edamos conseguido a Naylor \u2014dije\u2014. Didion estaba muy pendiente del martillo, despu\u00e9s de lo que pas\u00f3 la \u00faltima vez.\n\n\u2014Si t\u00fa lo dices. De todas formas, no s\u00e9 qu\u00e9 habr\u00eda hecho Jax con una duende. \u2014Dani me mir\u00f3\u2014. Dice que te ha dado el fin de semana libre. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Razones psicol\u00f3gicas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 significa eso?\n\n\u2014Significa que tus aparatos y t\u00fa me est\u00e1is volviendo loca.\n\nMe tir\u00f3 el vaso vac\u00edo.\n\n\u2014Cuido de ti, golfa. Mis aparatos no pueden funcionar solos. Podr\u00eda largarme a comer y dejar que se te secara esa birria de cerebro que tienes.\n\n\u2014Hoy se me podr\u00eda haber secado.\n\n\u2014Qu\u00e9 pena me das. Ya sabes c\u00f3mo funciona esto: Jax da las \u00f3rdenes, nosotros las cumplimos, nos pagan. Si no te gusta, vete a trabajar para Hector.\n\n_Touch\u00e9_.\n\nDani me dio mis botas gastadas de piel. Me las puse.\n\n\u2014\u00bfD\u00f3nde est\u00e1n todos?\n\n\u2014Eliza duerme. Ha tenido un episodio.\n\nSolo dec\u00edamos \u00abepisodio\u00bb cuando alguno de nosotros ten\u00eda un encuentro casi fatal, que en el caso de Eliza era una posesi\u00f3n no solicitada. Mir\u00e9 hacia la puerta de su taller.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEst\u00e1 bien?\n\n\u2014Lo estar\u00e1 cuando haya dormido un poco.\n\n\u2014Supongo que Nick la habr\u00e1 visto.\n\n\u2014Lo he llamado. Est\u00e1 con Jax en Chat's. Me ha dicho que te acompa\u00f1ar\u00e1 a casa de tu padre a las cinco y media.\n\nChateline's era uno de los \u00fanicos sitios a los que pod\u00edamos ir a comer, un bar restaurante con clase en Neal's Yard. El due\u00f1o hab\u00eda hecho un trato con nosotros: le d\u00e1bamos buenas propinas, y \u00e9l no les dec\u00eda a los centinelas lo que \u00e9ramos. La propina costaba m\u00e1s que la comida, pero val\u00eda la pena si quer\u00edas salir una noche.\n\n\u2014Pues llega tarde \u2014dije\u2014. Algo debe de haberlo retenido.\n\nDani cogi\u00f3 el tel\u00e9fono.\n\n\u2014No, no te molestes. \u2014Me recog\u00ed el pelo debajo de la gorra\u2014. No quiero interrumpirlos.\n\n\u2014No puedes ir en tren.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed puedo.\n\n\u2014Vas a palmar.\n\n\u2014No me pasar\u00e1 nada. Hace semanas que no vigilan la l\u00ednea. \u2014Me levant\u00e9\u2014. \u00bfDesayunamos juntas el lunes?\n\n\u2014Puede ser. Le debo unas horas extras a la bestia. \u2014Mir\u00f3 la hora\u2014. Ser\u00e1 mejor que te vayas. Son casi las seis.\n\nTen\u00eda raz\u00f3n. Ten\u00eda menos de diez minutos para llegar a la estaci\u00f3n. Cog\u00ed mi chaqueta y corr\u00ed hacia la puerta, saludando con un r\u00e1pido \u00abHola, Pieter\u00bb al fantasma que estaba en el rinc\u00f3n; a modo de respuesta, \u00e9l emiti\u00f3 un resplandor tenue, aburrido. No vi el destello, pero lo sent\u00ed. Pieter volv\u00eda a estar deprimido. A veces, estar muerto lo aflig\u00eda.\n\nTen\u00edamos una forma establecida de trabajar con los esp\u00edritus, al menos en nuestro sector. Con Pieter, por ejemplo, uno de nuestros fantasmas asesores (una musa, t\u00e9cnicamente): Eliza dejaba que la poseyera durante unas tres horas diarias, y dedicaba ese tiempo a pintar una obra maestra. Cuando terminaba, yo iba corriendo a Covent Garden y vend\u00eda el cuadro a alg\u00fan coleccionista de arte incauto. Pero Pieter era muy temperamental. A veces pasaban meses sin que tuvi\u00e9ramos ninguna obra nueva.\n\nEn una guarida como la nuestra no hab\u00eda cabida para la \u00e9tica. Suele pasar cuando obligas a una minor\u00eda a moverse en la clandestinidad. Suele pasar cuando el mundo es cruel. No hab\u00eda m\u00e1s remedio que seguir adelante. Sobrevivir como fuera, sacar un poco de pasta. Prosperar a la sombra del Arconte de Westminster.\n\nLa base de mi trabajo (de mi vida) estaba en Seven Dials. Concretamente, seg\u00fan el exclusivo sistema de divisi\u00f3n urbana de Scion, en el sector 4 de la cohorte I, o I-4. El sector estaba construido alrededor de una columna que se erig\u00eda en un cruce cerca del mercado negro de Covent Garden. En esa columna hab\u00eda seis relojes de sol.\n\nCada sector ten\u00eda su propio mimetocapo, hombre o mujer. Juntos formaban la Asamblea Antinatural, que en teor\u00eda gobernaba el sindicato, aunque cada uno hac\u00eda lo que le parec\u00eda en su sector. Dials se encontraba en el centro de la cohorte, donde el sindicato ten\u00eda m\u00e1s fuerza. Por eso lo hab\u00eda elegido Jax. Por eso segu\u00edamos all\u00ed. Nick era el \u00fanico que ten\u00eda su propia casa, m\u00e1s al norte, en Marylebone; solo la utiliz\u00e1bamos en caso de emergencia. En los tres a\u00f1os que yo llevaba trabajando para Jaxon, esto solo hab\u00eda ocurrido una vez, el d\u00eda que la Divisi\u00f3n de Vigilancia Nocturna (DVN) hab\u00eda hecho una redada en Dials con el fin de detectar alg\u00fan rastro de clarividencia. Un recadista nos avis\u00f3 con unas dos horas de antelaci\u00f3n. Conseguimos desaparecer en la mitad de ese tiempo.\n\nEra una t\u00edpica noche de marzo, fr\u00eda y lluviosa. Percib\u00eda esp\u00edritus. Dials hab\u00eda sido una barriada en la \u00e9poca pre-Scion, y todav\u00eda hab\u00eda gran cantidad de almas desconsoladas que deambulaban alrededor de la columna a la espera de nuevos encargos. Convoqu\u00e9 a una bandada de esp\u00edritus; un poco de protecci\u00f3n nunca ven\u00eda mal.\n\nScion era el no va m\u00e1s en seguridad amaur\u00f3tica. Toda referencia a la otra vida estaba prohibida. Frank Weaver nos consideraba antinaturales, y como muchos Grandes Inquisidores antes que \u00e9l, hab\u00eda ense\u00f1ado al resto de Londres a detestarnos. A menos que fuera imprescindible, solo sal\u00edamos en horas seguras. Es decir, cuando dorm\u00eda la DVN y tomaba el relevo la Divisi\u00f3n de Vigilancia Diurna (DVD). Los agentes de la DVD no eran videntes. No les estaba permitido emplear la misma brutalidad que a sus hom\u00f3logos nocturnos. Al menos, no en p\u00fablico.\n\nLos agentes de la DVN eran diferentes. Clarividentes uniformados. Obligados a servir durante treinta a\u00f1os antes de someterse a la eutanasia. Un pacto diab\u00f3lico, seg\u00fan algunos, pero que les proporcionaba una garant\u00eda de treinta a\u00f1os de vida desahogada. La mayor\u00eda de los videntes no ten\u00edan tanta suerte.\n\nLondres hab\u00eda acumulado tanta muerte en su pasado que era dif\u00edcil encontrar un sitio donde no hubiera esp\u00edritus. Formaban una red de seguridad. Aun as\u00ed, ten\u00edas que confiar en que los que consiguieras fueran buenos. Si utilizabas un fantasma d\u00e9bil, tal vez solo lograra aturdir a tu agresor durante unos segundos. Los mejores eran los esp\u00edritus que hab\u00edan tenido una vida violenta. Por eso ciertos esp\u00edritus se pagaban tan bien en el mercado negro. Por Jack el Destripador se habr\u00edan pagado millones si alguien hubiera conseguido encontrarlo. Hab\u00eda quienes todav\u00eda aseguraban que el Destripador era Eduardo VII: el pr\u00edncipe ca\u00eddo, el Rey Sangriento. Scion afirmaba que \u00e9l hab\u00eda sido el primer clarividente, pero yo nunca me lo hab\u00eda cre\u00eddo. Prefer\u00eda pensar que siempre hab\u00edamos existido.\n\nFuera oscurec\u00eda. El cielo estaba te\u00f1ido del dorado del atardecer, y la luna era una fina sonrisa blanca. Debajo se alzaba la ciudadela. The Two Brewers, el bar de ox\u00edgeno de la otra acera, estaba abarrotado de amaur\u00f3ticos. Gente normal. Los videntes dec\u00edamos que estaban aquejados de amaurosis, del mismo modo que ellos dec\u00edan que nosotros lo est\u00e1bamos de clarividencia. A veces los llamaban \u00abcarro\u00f1os\u00bb.\n\nNunca me hab\u00eda gustado esa palabra, su referencia a la putrefacci\u00f3n. Me parec\u00eda hip\u00f3crita llamarlos as\u00ed, dado que \u00e9ramos nosotros quienes convers\u00e1bamos con los muertos.\n\nMe abroch\u00e9 la chaqueta y me tap\u00e9 los ojos con la visera de la gorra. Cabeza agachada, ojos abiertos. Esa era la ley que yo acataba, y no las de Scion.\n\n\u2014Se\u00f1ora, le leo la buenaventura por un chel\u00edn. \u00a1Solo un chel\u00edn, se\u00f1ora! El mejor or\u00e1culo de Londres, se\u00f1ora, se lo prometo. \u00bfTiene algo para un pobre limosnero?\n\nLa voz pertenec\u00eda a un hombre delgado, acurrucado bajo una chaqueta tambi\u00e9n delgada. Hac\u00eda tiempo que no ve\u00eda a ning\u00fan limosnero. No abundaban en el centro de la cohorte, donde la mayor\u00eda de los videntes pertenec\u00edan al sindicato. Le\u00ed su aura. No era un or\u00e1culo, sino un adivino; y un adivino muy est\u00fapido, pues los mimetocapos despreciaban a los mendigos. Me dirig\u00ed hacia \u00e9l.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 demonios haces? \u2014Lo agarr\u00e9 por el cuello de la chaqueta\u2014. \u00bfTe has vuelto loco?\n\n\u2014Por favor, se\u00f1orita. Estoy muerto de hambre \u2014dijo \u00e9l, con voz ronca a causa de la deshidrataci\u00f3n. Ten\u00eda los t\u00edpicos tics faciales de los adictos al ox\u00edgeno\u2014. No me queda ni un chavo. No se lo diga al Vinculador, se\u00f1orita. Solo quer\u00eda...\n\n\u2014Pues l\u00e1rgate de aqu\u00ed. \u2014Le puse unos billetes en la mano\u2014. No me importa ad\u00f3nde vayas, pero vete de la calle. C\u00f3mprate una dosis. Y si ma\u00f1ana tienes que limosnear, hazlo en la cohorte VI, no aqu\u00ed. \u00bfMe has entendido?\n\n\u2014Gracias, se\u00f1orita.\n\nRecogi\u00f3 sus escasas posesiones, entre las que hab\u00eda una bola de cristal, o de un material m\u00e1s barato que el cristal. Lo vi salir corriendo en direcci\u00f3n al Soho. Pobre hombre. Si malgastaba ese dinero en un bar de ox\u00edgeno, al poco tiempo volver\u00eda a estar en las calles. Muchos lo hac\u00edan: se conectaban a una c\u00e1nula y aspiraban aire aromatizado durante horas. Era la \u00fanica droga recreativa que pod\u00eda obtenerse en la ciudadela. Fuera lo que fuese lo que hiciera ese limosnador, estaba desesperado. Quiz\u00e1 lo hubieran echado del sindicato, o lo hubiera rechazado su familia. No pensaba pregunt\u00e1rselo.\n\nNadie preguntaba.\n\nNormalmente, la estaci\u00f3n I-4B estaba llena. A los amaur\u00f3ticos no les importaba viajar en tren. No ten\u00edan auras que los delataran. La mayor\u00eda de los videntes evit\u00e1bamos el transporte p\u00fablico, pero a veces los trenes eran m\u00e1s seguros que las calles. La DVN no ten\u00eda suficientes agentes para cubrir toda la ciudadela. Los controles al azar en los trenes eran poco frecuentes.\n\nHab\u00eda seis sectores en cada una de las seis cohortes. Si quer\u00edas salir de tu sector, sobre todo por la noche, necesitabas un permiso de viaje y una buena dosis de suerte. Los metrovigilantes se desplegaban al anochecer. Eran una subdivisi\u00f3n de la DVN, formada por videntes a quienes les garantizaban poder llevar una vida est\u00e1ndar. Serv\u00edan al Estado para seguir vivos.\n\nYo nunca me hab\u00eda planteado trabajar para Scion. A veces los videntes eran crueles unos con otros (y, hasta cierto punto, yo entend\u00eda a los que se volv\u00edan contra sus semejantes), pero aun as\u00ed sent\u00eda cierta afinidad con ellos. Habr\u00eda sido incapaz de detener a uno; sin embargo, cuando llevaba dos semanas trabajando a destajo y a Jax se le olvidaba pagarme, estaba tentada de hacerlo.\n\nEscane\u00e9 mi pase cuando solo me quedaban dos minutos. Una vez que hube pasado las barreras, solt\u00e9 a mi bandada. A los esp\u00edritus no les gustaba que los llevaras demasiado lejos de sus guaridas y, si los obligaba, no me ayudar\u00edan.\n\nMe dol\u00eda la cabeza. El medicamento que Dani me hab\u00eda administrado por v\u00eda intravenosa estaba dejando de hacer efecto. Una hora en el \u00e9ter... Desde luego, Jaxon estaba forzando mis l\u00edmites.\n\nEn el and\u00e9n, un Nixie luminoso verde mostraba los horarios de los trenes; por lo dem\u00e1s, hab\u00eda poca luz. La voz pregrabada de Scarlett Burnish se o\u00eda por los altavoces:\n\n\u00abEste tren para en todas las estaciones del sector 4 de la cohorte I, direcci\u00f3n norte. Por favor, tengan preparados sus pases para la inspecci\u00f3n. Est\u00e9n atentos a los boletines ofrecidos por las pantallas de seguridad. Gracias y buenas noches\u00bb.\n\nPara m\u00ed no era una buena noche en absoluto. No hab\u00eda comido nada desde el amanecer. Jax solo me dejaba parar para comer si estaba de muy buen humor, lo que ocurr\u00eda muy de vez en cuando.\n\nApareci\u00f3 otro mensaje en las pantallas de seguridad: TDR: TECNOLOG\u00cdA DE DETECCI\u00d3N RADIEST\u00c9SICA. Los otros pasajeros no se dieron cuenta. Pon\u00edan esos anuncios continuamente:\n\n\u00abEn una ciudadela tan poblada como Londres, es normal pensar que podr\u00eda estar usted viajando junto a un individuo antinatural. \u2014En la pantalla apareci\u00f3 una pantomima en la que cada silueta representaba a un ciudadano. Una se volvi\u00f3 roja\u2014. La SciOECI est\u00e1 poniendo a prueba el escudo TDR en la terminal de Paddington, as\u00ed como en el Arconte. Para 2061, esperamos tener instalado el escudo TDR en el ochenta por ciento de las estaciones del centro de la cohorte, lo que nos permitir\u00e1 reducir la presencia de agentes de polic\u00eda antinaturales en el metro. Para m\u00e1s informaci\u00f3n, dir\u00edjanse a Paddington, o pregunten a un agente de la DVD\u00bb.\n\nAparecieron otros anuncios, pero yo me qued\u00e9 pensando en ese. El TDR era la mayor amenaza para la poblaci\u00f3n vidente de la ciudadela. Seg\u00fan Scion, pod\u00eda detectar el aura a una distancia de seis metros. Si sus planes no sufr\u00edan un gran retraso, en 2061 no podr\u00edamos pisar la calle. Era t\u00edpico de los mimetocapos: a ninguno se le hab\u00eda ocurrido una soluci\u00f3n. Se limitaban a seguir peleando entre ellos. Y a pelear sobre sus peleas.\n\nLas auras vibraban en la calle, por encima de m\u00ed. Yo era una especie de diapas\u00f3n que zumbaba con su energ\u00eda. Para distraerme, saqu\u00e9 mi pase, que llevaba mi fotograf\u00eda, nombre, direcci\u00f3n, huellas dactilares, lugar de nacimiento y profesi\u00f3n. \u00abSe\u00f1orita Paige E. Mahoney, residente nacionalizada del I-5. Nacida en Irlanda en 2040. Trasladada a Londres en 2048 en circunstancias especiales. Empleada de un bar de ox\u00edgeno del I-4, de ah\u00ed el permiso de viaje. Rubia. Ojos grises. Metro setenta y cinco. Sin rasgos distintivos salvo los labios oscuros, seguramente a causa del h\u00e1bito de fumar.\u00bb\n\nYo no hab\u00eda fumado en la vida.\n\nUna mano h\u00fameda me agarr\u00f3 por la mu\u00f1eca. Me sobresalt\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Me debes una disculpa.\n\nMir\u00e9, desafiante, a un hombre de cabello oscuro con bomb\u00edn y un sucio fular blanco. Deber\u00eda haberlo reconocido por su hedor: Hector de Haymarket, uno de nuestros rivales menos higi\u00e9nicos. Siempre ol\u00eda a cloaca. Por desgracia, tambi\u00e9n era el Subse\u00f1or, el jefazo del sindicato. A su territorio lo llamaban Devil's Acre, como la barriada de la \u00e9poca victoriana.\n\n\u2014Ganamos la partida. Con todas las de la ley. \u2014Apart\u00e9 el brazo\u2014. \u00bfNo tienes nada que hacer, Hector? Lavarte los dientes, por ejemplo.\n\n\u2014Y t\u00fa podr\u00edas jugar limpio, tramposa. Y aprender a ser m\u00e1s respetuosa con tu Subse\u00f1or.\n\n\u2014No soy ninguna tramposa.\n\n\u2014Yo creo que s\u00ed. \u2014Hablaba en voz baja\u2014. Por muchos aires que se d\u00e9 ese capo vuestro, los siete sois unos mentirosos y unos estafadores de mierda. Dicen que eres la m\u00e1s astuta del mercado negro, mi querida So\u00f1adora. Pero desaparecer\u00e1s. \u2014Me acarici\u00f3 la mejilla con un dedo\u2014. Todos acaban desapareciendo.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa tambi\u00e9n desaparecer\u00e1s.\n\n\u2014Ya lo veremos. Y pronto. \u2014Las siguientes palabras que pronunci\u00f3 me las susurr\u00f3 al o\u00eddo\u2014: Que tengas un buen viaje y llegues sana y salva a casa, golfilla.\n\nSe esfum\u00f3 por el t\u00fanel de salida.\n\nTen\u00eda que andarme con mucho cuidado cuando Hector estaba cerca. Como Subse\u00f1or no ten\u00eda ning\u00fan poder real sobre los otros mimetocapos (su \u00fanica tarea era convocar reuniones), pero ten\u00eda muchos seguidores. Estaba picado desde que mi banda hab\u00eda vencido a sus lacayos jugando al tarocchi, dos d\u00edas antes de la subasta de Naylor. A los hombres de Hector no les gustaba perder. Y Jaxon, que siempre los provocaba, no ayudaba mucho. La mayor\u00eda de los de mi banda hab\u00edan evitado que los pusieran en la lista negra, sobre todo manteni\u00e9ndose al margen; pero Jax y yo \u00e9ramos demasiado insolentes. La So\u00f1adora P\u00e1lida (as\u00ed era como me llamaban en las calles) estaba en su lista de sentenciados. El d\u00eda en que me acorralaran, podr\u00eda darme por muerta.\n\nEl tren lleg\u00f3 con un minuto de retraso. Ocup\u00e9 un asiento vac\u00edo. Solo hab\u00eda otra persona en el vag\u00f3n: un hombre que iba leyendo _El descendiente_. Era vidente, un m\u00e9dium. Me puse en tensi\u00f3n. Jax ten\u00eda enemigos, y muchos videntes sab\u00edan que yo era su dama. Tambi\u00e9n sab\u00edan que vend\u00eda cuadros que no pod\u00eda haber pintado el verdadero Pieter Claesz.\n\nSaqu\u00e9 mi tableta de datos y seleccion\u00e9 mi novela autorizada favorita. Sin una bandada que me protegiera, la \u00fanica medida de seguridad que pod\u00eda adoptar era parecer tan normal y amaur\u00f3tica como fuera posible.\n\nMientras pasaba las p\u00e1ginas, vigilaba al otro pasajero con el rabillo del ojo. Yo sab\u00eda que \u00e9l me ten\u00eda en su radar, pero ninguno de los dos dijo nada. Dado que no me hab\u00eda agarrado por el cuello y no me hab\u00eda pegado hasta dejarme inconsciente, deduje que no deb\u00eda de ser un aficionado al arte al que hubieran embaucado recientemente.\n\nMe arriesgu\u00e9 a echar un vistazo a su ejemplar de _El descendiente_ , el \u00fanico peri\u00f3dico que segu\u00eda public\u00e1ndose en papel. El papel se prestaba demasiado a usos inadecuados; con las tabletas de datos, en cambio, solo pod\u00edamos bajarnos los pocos medios aprobados por el censor. Vi las t\u00edpicas noticias. Dos j\u00f3venes ahorcados por alta traici\u00f3n, un centro comercial sospechoso clausurado en el sector 3. Tambi\u00e9n hab\u00eda un art\u00edculo largo en el que se rechazaba la idea \u00abantinatural\u00bb de que Gran Breta\u00f1a estaba pol\u00edticamente aislada. El periodista llamaba a Scion \u00abun imperio en fase embrionaria\u00bb. Llevaban diciendo eso desde que yo ten\u00eda uso de raz\u00f3n. Si Scion todav\u00eda estaba en fase embrionaria, os aseguro que yo no quer\u00eda estar por all\u00ed cuando saliera del \u00fatero.\n\nHab\u00edan transcurrido casi dos siglos desde que se hab\u00eda instaurado Scion en respuesta a la amenaza de una \u00abepidemia de clarividencia\u00bb percibida por el imperio. La fecha oficial era 1901, a\u00f1o en que se atribuyeron cinco asesinatos espantosos a Eduardo VII. Aseguraban que el Rey Sangriento hab\u00eda abierto una puerta que ya no podr\u00eda volver a cerrarse; que hab\u00eda tra\u00eddo al mundo la plaga de la clarividencia; y que sus seguidores estaban por todas partes, reproduci\u00e9ndose y matando, obteniendo su poder de una fuente de una maldad terrible.\n\nA continuaci\u00f3n lleg\u00f3 Scion, una rep\u00fablica construida con el fin de erradicar la enfermedad. A lo largo de los cincuenta a\u00f1os siguientes se hab\u00eda convertido en una m\u00e1quina de perseguir a videntes, donde todas las pol\u00edticas importantes giraban en torno a los antinaturales. Los asesinatos siempre los comet\u00edan los antinaturales. La violencia aleatoria, los robos, las violaciones, los incendios... todo suced\u00eda por culpa de los antinaturales. Con el tiempo, el sindicato de videntes se hab\u00eda desarrollado en la ciudadela, hab\u00eda formado un hampa organizada, y hab\u00eda ofrecido refugio a los clarividentes. Desde entonces, Scion se esforzaba a\u00fan m\u00e1s para erradicarnos.\n\nCuando hubieran instalado el TDR, el sindicato se vendr\u00eda abajo y Scion lo ver\u00eda todo. Ten\u00edamos dos a\u00f1os para ponerle remedio, pero con Hector como Subse\u00f1or, yo no abrigaba muchas esperanzas. De momento, su mandato solo nos hab\u00eda aportado corrupci\u00f3n.\n\nEl tren pas\u00f3 sin incidentes por tres estaciones. Acababa de terminar un cap\u00edtulo cuando se apagaron las luces y el tren se detuvo. Me di cuenta de lo que estaba pasando una mil\u00e9sima de segundo antes que el otro pasajero, que se enderez\u00f3 en el asiento.\n\n\u2014Van a registrar el tren.\n\nIntent\u00e9 decir algo, confirmar sus temores, pero mi lengua parec\u00eda un trapo doblado.\n\nApagu\u00e9 la tableta. Se abri\u00f3 una puerta en la pared del t\u00fanel. El Nixie del vag\u00f3n anunci\u00f3 una ALERTA DE SEGURIDAD. Sab\u00eda qu\u00e9 pasar\u00eda a continuaci\u00f3n: aparecer\u00edan dos metrovigilantes. Siempre hab\u00eda un jefe, generalmente un m\u00e9dium. Nunca hab\u00eda presenciado uno de esos controles, pero sab\u00eda que muy pocos videntes se libraban de ellos.\n\nEl coraz\u00f3n me martilleaba en el pecho. Mir\u00e9 al otro pasajero tratando de calibrar su reacci\u00f3n. Era m\u00e9dium, aunque no especialmente poderoso. Lo sab\u00eda, aunque no pudiera explicar c\u00f3mo; mis antenas lo detectaban, sencillamente.\n\n\u2014Tenemos que salir de este tren. \u2014Se levant\u00f3\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9 eres, guapa? \u00bfUn or\u00e1culo?\n\nNo le contest\u00e9.\n\n\u2014S\u00e9 que eres vidente. \u2014Tir\u00f3 de la manija de la puerta\u2014. Venga, tesoro, no te quedes ah\u00ed sentada. Tiene que haber alguna forma de salir de aqu\u00ed. \u2014Se sec\u00f3 el sudor de la frente con la manga\u2014. Ten\u00eda que haber un control precisamente hoy, precisamente el d\u00eda...\n\nNo me mov\u00ed. No hab\u00eda forma de escapar. Las ventanas estaban selladas; las puertas, cerradas con seguro. Y se nos hab\u00eda agotado el tiempo. Los haces de las linternas iluminaron el vag\u00f3n.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 muy quieta. Metrovigilantes. Deb\u00edan de haber detectado a cierto n\u00famero de videntes en el vag\u00f3n, o no habr\u00edan apagado las luces. Yo sab\u00eda que pod\u00edan ver nuestras auras, pero querr\u00edan averiguar qu\u00e9 clase de videntes \u00e9ramos exactamente.\n\nEntraron en el vag\u00f3n: un invocador y un m\u00e9dium. El tren segu\u00eda movi\u00e9ndose, pero no hab\u00edan vuelto a encenderse las luces. Se dirigieron al hombre primero.\n\n\u2014\u00bfNombre?\n\nEl hombre se enderez\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Linwood.\n\n\u2014\u00bfMotivo del viaje?\n\n\u2014Vengo de visitar a mi hija.\n\n\u2014De visitar a tu hija. \u00bfSeguro que no vas a una sesi\u00f3n de espiritismo, m\u00e9dium?\n\nAquellos dos quer\u00edan pelea.\n\n\u2014Tengo los certificados del hospital. Mi hija est\u00e1 muy enferma \u2014replic\u00f3 Linwood\u2014. Tengo permiso para visitarla todas las semanas.\n\n\u2014Si vuelves a abrir la boca, se te van a acabar los permisos. \u2014Se volvi\u00f3 hacia m\u00ed y me grit\u00f3\u2014: \u00a1T\u00fa! \u00bfD\u00f3nde est\u00e1 tu pase?\n\nLo saqu\u00e9 del bolsillo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfY el permiso de viaje?\n\nSe lo di; hizo una pausa para leerlo.\n\n\u2014Trabajas en el sector 4.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n ha expedido este permiso?\n\n\u2014Bill Bunbury, mi supervisor.\n\n\u2014Ya. Pero necesito ver algo m\u00e1s. \u2014Me ilumin\u00f3 los ojos con la linterna\u2014. No te muevas.\n\nAguant\u00e9 sin parpadear.\n\n\u2014No tiene visi\u00f3n espiritista \u2014coment\u00f3\u2014. Debes de ser un or\u00e1culo. Hac\u00eda tiempo que no ve\u00eda ninguno.\n\n\u2014Yo no hab\u00eda visto un or\u00e1culo con tetas desde los a\u00f1os cuarenta \u2014observ\u00f3 el otro metrovigilante\u2014. Esto les va a encantar.\n\nSu superior sonri\u00f3. Ten\u00eda un coloboma en cada ojo, una se\u00f1al de visi\u00f3n espiritista permanente.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1s a punto de hacerme muy rico, jovencita \u2014me dijo\u2014. Deja que vuelva a examinarte los ojos.\n\n\u2014No soy un or\u00e1culo \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014Claro que no. Cierra el pico y abre esos ojitos.\n\nCasi todos los videntes me tomaban por un or\u00e1culo. Un error f\u00e1cil. Las auras eran similares; de hecho, eran del mismo color.\n\nEl vigilante me separ\u00f3 los p\u00e1rpados del ojo izquierdo con los dedos y me examin\u00f3 las pupilas con el fino haz de la linterna buscando el coloboma. Linwood corri\u00f3 hacia la puerta abierta y les lanz\u00f3 un esp\u00edritu (su \u00e1ngel guardi\u00e1n) a los metrovigilantes. El \u00e1ngel se estrell\u00f3 contra el vigilante de refuerzo e hizo un revoltijo con sus sentidos.\n\nPero el primer metrovigilante era muy r\u00e1pido. Antes de que los dem\u00e1s pudi\u00e9ramos movernos, hab\u00eda hecho aparecer una bandada de duendes.\n\n\u2014No te muevas, m\u00e9dium.\n\nLinwood lo mir\u00f3 fijamente. Era un hombre de escasa estatura, de unos cuarenta a\u00f1os, delgado pero nervudo, con cabello casta\u00f1o oscuro y las sienes encanecidas. Yo no pod\u00eda ver a los duendes (no pod\u00eda ver pr\u00e1cticamente nada, porque me deslumbraba la linterna), pero me estaban debilitando tanto que no pod\u00eda moverme. Cont\u00e9 hasta tres. Nunca hab\u00eda visto a nadie controlar a un duende, y mucho menos a tres. Not\u00e9 un sudor fr\u00edo en la nuca.\n\nCuando el \u00e1ngel gir\u00f3 sobre s\u00ed mismo para volver a atacar, los duendes empezaron a describir c\u00edrculos alrededor del metrovigilante.\n\n\u2014Ven con nosotros por las buenas, m\u00e9dium \u2014dijo este\u2014, y convenceremos a nuestros jefes para que no te torturen.\n\n\u2014Hagan lo que tengan que hacer, caballeros. \u2014Linwood levant\u00f3 una mano\u2014. Con los \u00e1ngeles a mi lado, no le tengo miedo a ning\u00fan hombre.\n\n\u2014Eso dicen todos, se\u00f1or Linwood. Pero cuando ven la Torre, ya no se acuerdan.\n\nLinwood lanz\u00f3 su \u00e1ngel hacia el fondo del vag\u00f3n. No vi la colisi\u00f3n, pero esta sacudi\u00f3 violentamente todos mis sentidos. Me obligu\u00e9 a levantarme. La presencia de los tres duendes estaba minando mis fuerzas; Linwood ten\u00eda mucha labia, pero era evidente que a \u00e9l tambi\u00e9n le afectaba y que estaba haciendo todo lo posible para fortalecer a su \u00e1ngel. Mientras el invocador controlaba a los duendes, el segundo metrovigilante recitaba el treno: una serie de palabras que compel\u00edan a los esp\u00edritus a morir por completo, envi\u00e1ndolos lejos del alcance de los videntes. El \u00e1ngel tembl\u00f3. Para hacerlo desaparecer habr\u00edan necesitado saber su nombre completo, pero mientras uno de los dos siguiera recitando, el \u00e1ngel ser\u00eda demasiado d\u00e9bil para proteger a su hu\u00e9sped.\n\nLa sangre me lat\u00eda en las sienes. Ten\u00eda la garganta cerrada, los dedos entumecidos. Si no hac\u00eda nada, nos detendr\u00edan a los dos. Me vi en la Torre, sometida a torturas, condenada a la horca...\n\nNo, no estaba dispuesta a morir ese d\u00eda.\n\nCuando los duendes se cernieron sobre Linwood, le sucedi\u00f3 algo a mi visi\u00f3n. Me centr\u00e9 en los metrovigilantes. Sus mentes vibraban junto a la m\u00eda, dos aros pulsantes de energ\u00eda. O\u00ed el golpe de mi cuerpo al caer al suelo.\n\nSolo pretend\u00eda desorientarlos, ganar tiempo para huir. Contaba con el factor sorpresa: me hab\u00edan infravalorado, porque los or\u00e1culos necesitaban una bandada para representar un verdadero peligro.\n\nYo no.\n\nMe invadi\u00f3 una oleada negra de miedo. Mi esp\u00edritu se separ\u00f3 de mi cuerpo y se introdujo en el del primer metrovigilante. Antes de darme cuenta de lo que estaba haciendo, me hab\u00eda estrellado en su onirosaje. No contra \u00e9l, sino dentro de \u00e9l, a trav\u00e9s de \u00e9l. Lanc\u00e9 su esp\u00edritu al \u00e9ter, dejando su cuerpo vac\u00edo. Antes de que su compinche pudiera reaccionar, le hab\u00eda sucedido lo mismo.\n\nMi esp\u00edritu regres\u00f3 a mi cuerpo. Not\u00e9 un fuerte dolor detr\u00e1s de los ojos. Jam\u00e1s hab\u00eda sentido un dolor semejante; era como si me clavaran pu\u00f1ales en el cr\u00e1neo, como si me ardiera el cerebro; estaba tan caliente que no pod\u00eda moverme ni pensar. Era vagamente consciente del suelo pringoso del vag\u00f3n contra mi mejilla. Fuera lo que fuese lo que acababa de hacer, no ten\u00eda ninguna prisa por repetirlo.\n\nEl tren se balance\u00f3. Deb\u00eda de estar llegando a la siguiente estaci\u00f3n. Me incorpor\u00e9 apoy\u00e1ndome en los codos, y me temblaron los m\u00fasculos por el esfuerzo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSe\u00f1or Linwood?\n\nNo me contest\u00f3. Me arrastr\u00e9 hasta donde estaba tumbado. Cuando el tren pas\u00f3 junto a una luz de servicio, vi su cara.\n\nEstaba muerto. Los duendes le hab\u00edan extra\u00eddo el esp\u00edritu. Su pase estaba en el suelo. William Linwood, cuarenta y tres a\u00f1os. Dos hijos, una con fibrosis qu\u00edstica. Casado. Empleado de banca. M\u00e9dium.\n\n\u00bfSab\u00edan su mujer y sus hijos que ten\u00eda una vida secreta? \u00bfO eran amaur\u00f3ticos y no sab\u00edan nada?\n\nTen\u00eda que recitar el treno, o Linwood quedar\u00eda atrapado en aquel vag\u00f3n para siempre.\n\n\u2014William Linwood \u2014dije\u2014, vete al \u00e9ter. Est\u00e1 todo arreglado. Todas las deudas est\u00e1n saldadas. Ya no tienes que morar entre los vivos.\n\nEl esp\u00edritu de Linwood flotaba cerca de su cuerpo. El \u00e9ter produjo un susurro cuando \u00e9l y su \u00e1ngel desaparecieron.\n\nEntonces se encendieron las luces, y se me cort\u00f3 la respiraci\u00f3n: hab\u00eda dos cuerpos m\u00e1s en el suelo.\n\nMe agarr\u00e9 a una barra y me levant\u00e9. Ten\u00eda la palma sudorosa y apenas pod\u00eda sujetarme. El primer metrovigilante estaba a solo unos palmos, muerto; todav\u00eda ten\u00eda la expresi\u00f3n de sorpresa en la cara.\n\nLo hab\u00eda matado. Hab\u00eda matado a un metrovigilante.\n\nSu compa\u00f1ero no hab\u00eda tenido tanta suerte. Estaba tendido boca arriba, con los ojos fijos en el techo; le resbalaba un hilillo de saliva por la barbilla. Cuando me acerqu\u00e9 a \u00e9l, se sacudi\u00f3 un poco. Not\u00e9 un escalofr\u00edo, y el sabor de la bilis abras\u00e1ndome la garganta. No hab\u00eda empujado su esp\u00edritu lo suficientemente lejos, y se hab\u00eda quedado flotando en las partes m\u00e1s oscuras de su mente: las partes secretas, silenciosas, donde no pod\u00eda habitar ning\u00fan esp\u00edritu. Hab\u00eda enloquecido. No: yo lo hab\u00eda hecho enloquecer.\n\nApret\u00e9 las mand\u00edbulas. No pod\u00eda dejarlo as\u00ed; ni siquiera un metrovigilante merec\u00eda semejante destino. Le puse las manos, fr\u00edas, sobre los hombros y me arm\u00e9 de valor para practicarle la eutanasia. El metrovigilante dio un gru\u00f1ido y susurr\u00f3:\n\n\u2014M\u00e1tame.\n\nTen\u00eda que hacerlo. Se lo deb\u00eda.\n\nPero no pod\u00eda. No pod\u00eda matarlo.\n\nCuando el tren entr\u00f3 en la estaci\u00f3n I-5C, me coloqu\u00e9 junto a la puerta. Subieron otros pasajeros y vieron los cad\u00e1veres, pero ya era demasiado tarde para atraparme. Yo ya hab\u00eda subido a la calle y me hab\u00eda calado la gorra para ocultar mi cara.\n\nEntr\u00e9 sin hacer ruido en el piso y colgu\u00e9 mi chaqueta. Vic, el vigilante de seguridad que trabajaba a jornada completa en el complejo Golden Crescent, estaba haciendo su ronda cuando me col\u00e9 por el portal, y no vio la palidez extrema de mi cara ni mis manos temblorosas cuando saqu\u00e9 la tarjeta para abrir la puerta.\n\nMi padre estaba en el sal\u00f3n. Vi sus pies, enfundados en unas zapatillas, apoyados en la otomana. Estaba viendo ScionVista, el canal de noticias que cubr\u00eda todas las ciudadelas de Scion, y en la pantalla Scarlett Burnish anunciaba que acababan de cerrar el metro que atravesaba la cohorte I.\n\nCada vez que o\u00eda esa voz, me estremec\u00eda. A sus veinticinco a\u00f1os, Burnish era la Gran Anecdotista m\u00e1s joven de la historia: la ayudante del Gran Inquisidor, encargada de transmitir su voz y su inteligencia a Scion. La gente la llamaba \u00abla puta de Weaver\u00bb, quiz\u00e1 por celos. Ten\u00eda la piel clara y unos labios enormes, y llevaba un grueso perfilador de ojos rojo a juego con su pelo, recogido en un elegante mo\u00f1o trenzado. Sus vestidos de cuello alto siempre me hac\u00edan pensar en la horca.\n\n\u00abEn el \u00e1mbito internacional, el Gran Inquisidor de la Rep\u00fablica Francesa, Beno\u00eet M\u00e9nard, visitar\u00e1 al Inquisidor Weaver con motivo de las fiestas de Novembertide de este a\u00f1o. A falta de ocho meses, el Arconte ya est\u00e1 haciendo los preparativos de lo que promete ser una visita francamente estimulante.\u00bb\n\n\u2014\u00bfPaige?\n\nMe quit\u00e9 la gorra.\n\n\u2014Hola.\n\n\u2014Ven a sentarte conmigo.\n\n\u2014Voy enseguida.\n\nMe fui derecha al cuarto de ba\u00f1o. Estaba empapada de sudor.\n\nHab\u00eda matado a una persona. La hab\u00eda asesinado. Jax siempre me hab\u00eda cre\u00eddo capaz de cometer un asesinato incruento, pero yo nunca le hab\u00eda cre\u00eddo. Ahora era una asesina. Y peor a\u00fan: hab\u00eda dejado pistas: un superviviente. Adem\u00e1s hab\u00eda perdido mi tableta, que ten\u00eda mis huellas dactilares por todas partes. No se contentar\u00edan con someterme a NiteKind; eso habr\u00eda sido demasiado f\u00e1cil. Me esperaban la tortura y la horca, sin ninguna duda.\n\nNada m\u00e1s entrar en el cuarto de ba\u00f1o, vomit\u00e9 en el v\u00e1ter. Cuando lo hube sacado todo menos los \u00f3rganos, temblaba tan violentamente que apenas me ten\u00eda en pie. Me quit\u00e9 la ropa y me met\u00ed, tambaleante, en la ducha. El agua caliente me aporre\u00f3 la piel.\n\nEsa vez hab\u00eda ido demasiado lejos. Por primera vez en la vida, no me hab\u00eda limitado a tocar otros onirosajes, sino que los hab\u00eda invadido.\n\nA Jaxon le iba a encantar.\n\nSe me cerraban los ojos. Ve\u00eda desarrollarse una y otra vez la escena del tren. No me hab\u00eda propuesto matarlos, solo quer\u00eda darles un empuj\u00f3n, lo suficiente para provocarles una migra\u00f1a, quiz\u00e1 hacer que les sangrara la nariz. Causar una distracci\u00f3n para ganar tiempo.\n\nPero el p\u00e1nico se hab\u00eda apoderado de m\u00ed. El miedo a que me encontraran. El miedo a convertirme en otra v\u00edctima an\u00f3nima de Scion.\n\nPens\u00e9 en Linwood. Los videntes nunca se proteg\u00edan unos a otros, a menos que pertenecieran a la misma banda, y sin embargo su muerte me produc\u00eda un gran cargo de conciencia. Me llev\u00e9 las rodillas hasta la barbilla y me sujet\u00e9 la dolorida cabeza con ambas manos. Si hubiera sido m\u00e1s r\u00e1pida... Hab\u00edan muerto dos personas, y otra hab\u00eda enloquecido; y a menos que tuviera mucha suerte, yo ser\u00eda la siguiente.\n\nMe acurruqu\u00e9 en el rinc\u00f3n de la ducha, con las rodillas pegadas al pecho. No pod\u00eda quedarme escondida all\u00ed toda la vida. Al final siempre te encontraban.\n\nTen\u00eda que pensar. Scion ten\u00eda un procedimiento de contenci\u00f3n para esas situaciones. Despu\u00e9s de despejar la estaci\u00f3n y detener a los posibles testigos, llamar\u00edan a un narco (un experto en drogas et\u00e9reas) y administrar\u00edan \u00e1ster azul. Eso restituir\u00eda temporalmente los recuerdos de mis v\u00edctimas, y los har\u00eda visibles. Cuando hubieran grabado las partes relevantes, le practicar\u00edan la eutanasia al metrovigilante que hab\u00eda sobrevivido y llevar\u00edan su cad\u00e1ver a la morgue del II-6. A continuaci\u00f3n revisar\u00edan sus recuerdos y buscar\u00edan entre ellos la cara de su verdugo. Y entonces me encontrar\u00edan.\n\nLas detenciones no siempre ten\u00edan lugar por la noche. A veces te atrapaban de d\u00eda, cuando sal\u00edas a la calle. Una linterna alumbr\u00e1ndote los ojos, una aguja en el cuello, y estabas perdido. Nadie informaba de tu desaparici\u00f3n.\n\nDe momento no pod\u00eda pensar en el futuro. Un intenso dolor volvi\u00f3 a sacudirme la cabeza y me devolvi\u00f3 al presente.\n\nRepas\u00e9 mis opciones. Pod\u00eda volver a Dials y esconderme un tiempo en nuestro cubil, pero si los centinelas ya hab\u00edan salido a buscarme, los conducir\u00eda hasta Jax. Adem\u00e1s, no pod\u00eda volver al sector 4, porque hab\u00edan cerrado las estaciones. Me costar\u00eda encontrar un taxi pirata, y por la noche se reforzaban los sistemas de seguridad.\n\nPod\u00eda quedarme en casa de alguna amiga, pero las pocas amigas que ten\u00eda fuera de Dials eran amaur\u00f3ticas, chicas del colegio con las que ten\u00eda poco contacto. Si les dec\u00eda que me persegu\u00eda la polic\u00eda secreta porque hab\u00eda matado a una persona con mi esp\u00edritu, me tomar\u00edan por loca. Y seguramente me denunciar\u00edan.\n\nMe puse una bata vieja; fui descalza hasta la cocina y puse un cazo de leche a calentar. Era lo que hac\u00eda siempre cuando volv\u00eda a casa; no me conven\u00eda alterar la rutina. Mi padre hab\u00eda dejado fuera mi taza favorita, una grande con la inscripci\u00f3n: \u00abNo hay nada como un caf\u00e9 por la ma\u00f1ana\u00bb. Nunca me hab\u00eda entusiasmado el ox\u00edgeno aromatizado, o Floxy\u00ae, la alternativa de Scion al alcohol. El caf\u00e9 era m\u00e1s o menos legal. Todav\u00eda estaban investigando si la cafe\u00edna pod\u00eda desencadenar la clarividencia o no. Pero \u00abNo hay nada como el ox\u00edgeno aromatizado por la ma\u00f1ana\u00bb no habr\u00eda tenido tanto gancho, claro.\n\nUtilizar mi esp\u00edritu hab\u00eda tenido consecuencias en mi cabeza. Apenas pod\u00eda mantener los ojos abiertos. Mientras vert\u00eda la leche, mir\u00e9 por la ventana. Mi padre ten\u00eda un gusto impecable en lo relativo al dise\u00f1o de interiores. Tambi\u00e9n ayudaba que tuviera dinero suficiente para pagar una vivienda de alta seguridad en el exclusivo Barbican Estate. El apartamento era amplio y luminoso. Los pasillos ol\u00edan a popurr\u00ed y a ropa limpia. Hab\u00eda grandes ventanas cuadradas en todas las habitaciones. La m\u00e1s grande estaba en el sal\u00f3n, un ventanal enorme que cubr\u00eda toda la pared orientada a poniente, junto a las elaboradas cristaleras por las que se acced\u00eda al balc\u00f3n. De ni\u00f1a sol\u00eda contemplar la puesta de sol desde esa ventana.\n\nFuera, la ciudadela segu\u00eda con su ritmo vertiginoso. Por encima de nuestro complejo se alzaban los tres edificios de arquitectura brutalista de Barbican Estate donde viv\u00edan los funcionarios de Scion. En lo alto de la Torre Lauderdale estaba la pantalla de transmisi\u00f3n del I-5. Desde esa pantalla se proyectaban todas las ejecuciones p\u00fablicas los domingos por la ma\u00f1ana. En ese momento mostraba la insignia est\u00e1tica del sistema de Scion (un s\u00edmbolo rojo semejante a un ancla) y una sola palabra escrita con letras negras, SCION, todo sobre un as\u00e9ptico fondo blanco. Luego estaba aquel espantoso eslogan: EL LUGAR M\u00c1S SEGURO. Deber\u00eda haber sido \u00abEl lugar m\u00e1s inseguro\u00bb. Al menos para nosotros.\n\nMientras me beb\u00eda la leche a sorbitos, observ\u00e9 aquel s\u00edmbolo y me cagu\u00e9 en \u00e9l. Luego lav\u00e9 la taza, llen\u00e9 un vaso de agua y me fui a mi habitaci\u00f3n. Ten\u00eda que llamar a Jaxon.\n\nMi padre me intercept\u00f3 en el pasillo.\n\n\u2014Espera, Paige.\n\nMe par\u00e9.\n\nMi padre, irland\u00e9s de nacimiento, con una mata de cabello pelirrojo, trabajaba en la agencia de investigaciones cient\u00edficas de Scion. Cuando no estaba en el trabajo, estaba garabateando f\u00f3rmulas en su tableta y hablando extasiado sobre bioqu\u00edmica cl\u00ednica, una de sus dos licenciaturas. No nos parec\u00edamos en nada.\n\n\u2014Hola. Perdona que llegue tan tarde. He hecho unas horas extras.\n\n\u2014No tienes por qu\u00e9 disculparte. \u2014Me hizo se\u00f1as para que entrara en el sal\u00f3n\u2014. Deja que te prepare algo de comer. Te veo paliducha.\n\n\u2014Estoy bien, solo un poco cansada.\n\n\u2014Mira, hoy he estado leyendo un art\u00edculo sobre el circuito de ox\u00edgeno. Ha habido un caso horrible en el IV-2. Personal mal pagado, ox\u00edgeno sucio, clientes que sufren ataques epil\u00e9pticos... Muy desagradable.\n\n\u2014Pues los bares del centro est\u00e1n bien. Los clientes exigen calidad. \u2014Mi padre empez\u00f3 a poner la mesa\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9 tal t\u00fa en el trabajo?\n\n\u2014Bien. \u2014Levant\u00f3 la cabeza y me mir\u00f3\u2014. Paige, ese trabajo tuyo en el bar...\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 pasa?\n\nUna hija trabajando en las esferas m\u00e1s bajas de la ciudadela: no pod\u00eda haber nada m\u00e1s embarazoso para un hombre de su posici\u00f3n. Qu\u00e9 inc\u00f3modo deb\u00eda de sentirse cuando sus colegas le preguntaban por sus hijos, suponiendo que ser\u00edan m\u00e9dicos o abogados. C\u00f3mo deb\u00edan de cuchichear cuando se enteraban de que yo trabajaba en una barra de bar, y no en un bufete de abogados. Minti\u00e9ndole le hac\u00eda un favor. Mi padre jam\u00e1s habr\u00eda podido asimilar la verdad: que yo era una antinatural, una delincuente.\n\nY una asesina. Solo de pensarlo me daban n\u00e1useas.\n\n\u2014Ya s\u00e9 que yo no soy nadie para decirlo, pero creo que deber\u00edas plantearte volver a solicitar una plaza en la universidad. Ese empleo tuyo es un callej\u00f3n sin salida. Mal pagado, sin porvenir. En cambio, la universidad...\n\n\u2014No. \u2014Lo dije m\u00e1s alto de lo que era mi intenci\u00f3n\u2014. Me gusta mi trabajo. Lo escog\u00ed yo.\n\nTodav\u00eda me acordaba del d\u00eda en que la directora del colegio me hab\u00eda entregado las notas finales. \u00abLamento que no hayas solicitado plaza en la universidad, Paige \u2014me hab\u00eda dicho\u2014, pero quiz\u00e1 sea lo mejor. Has faltado demasiado a clase, y eso no se considera correcto en una joven distinguida. \u2014Me hab\u00eda entregado una carpeta delgada, con el emblema del colegio grabado en las tapas de piel\u2014. Aqu\u00ed tienes una carta de recomendaci\u00f3n de tus tutoras. Destacan tus aptitudes para la educaci\u00f3n f\u00edsica, el franc\u00e9s y la historia de Scion.\u00bb\n\nNo me importaba. Siempre hab\u00eda odiado el colegio: el uniforme, el dogma. Marcharme de all\u00ed hab\u00eda sido lo mejor de mis a\u00f1os de formaci\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Yo podr\u00eda hacer algo \u2014dijo mi padre. Le habr\u00eda encantado tener una hija instruida\u2014. Podr\u00edas volver a solicitar el ingreso.\n\n\u2014En Scion el nepotismo no funciona \u2014dije\u2014. Deber\u00edas saberlo.\n\n\u2014A m\u00ed no me dejaron elegir, Paige. \u2014Le tembl\u00f3 un m\u00fasculo de la mejilla\u2014. No tuve ese lujo.\n\nNo me apetec\u00eda mantener esa conversaci\u00f3n. No quer\u00eda pensar en lo que mi padre hab\u00eda dejado atr\u00e1s.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTodav\u00eda vives con tu novio? \u2014me pregunt\u00f3.\n\nLa mentira del novio hab\u00eda sido un error. Desde que me lo invent\u00e9, mi padre siempre hab\u00eda querido conocerlo.\n\n\u2014He roto con \u00e9l \u2014dije\u2014. No nos iba bien. Pero no pasa nada. Suzette tiene sitio en su apartamento. Te acuerdas de ella, \u00bfno?\n\n\u2014\u00bfSuzy, tu amiga del colegio?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\nMientras hablaba, not\u00e9 una fuerte punzada de dolor en un lado de la cabeza. No pod\u00eda esperar a que mi padre preparara la cena. Ten\u00eda que llamar a Jaxon, contarle lo que hab\u00eda pasado. Ya.\n\n\u2014Mira, me duele un poco la cabeza \u2014dije\u2014. \u00bfTe importa que me acueste pronto?\n\nMi padre vino a mi lado y me tom\u00f3 la barbilla con una mano.\n\n\u2014Siempre te duele la cabeza. Est\u00e1s demasiado cansada. \u2014Me pas\u00f3 el pulgar por la cara, por las ojeras\u2014. Est\u00e1n dando un documental muy interesante. \u00bfNo te apetece verlo? Puedes tumbarte en el sof\u00e1.\n\n\u2014Ma\u00f1ana, a lo mejor. \u2014Le apart\u00e9 la mano con suavidad\u2014. \u00bfTienes alg\u00fan analg\u00e9sico?\n\nAl cabo de un momento, mi padre asinti\u00f3 con la cabeza.\n\n\u2014En el cuarto de ba\u00f1o. Ma\u00f1ana por la ma\u00f1ana preparar\u00e9 un desayuno completo al estilo de Ulster, \u00bfte parece? Quiero que me cuentes muchas cosas, _seillean_.\n\nLo mir\u00e9 fijamente. No me hab\u00eda preparado el desayuno desde que yo ten\u00eda doce a\u00f1os, ni me hab\u00eda llamado con ese apodo desde que viv\u00edamos en Irlanda. De eso hac\u00eda diez a\u00f1os. En otra vida.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPaige?\n\n\u2014Vale \u2014dije\u2014. Hasta ma\u00f1ana.\n\nMe fui a mi habitaci\u00f3n. Mi padre no dijo nada m\u00e1s. Dej\u00f3 la puerta entreabierta, como hac\u00eda siempre que yo estaba en casa. Nunca hab\u00eda sabido c\u00f3mo tratarme.\n\nLa habitaci\u00f3n de invitados estaba tan caldeada como siempre. Mi antiguo dormitorio. Me hab\u00eda mudado a Dials nada m\u00e1s terminar el colegio, pero mi padre nunca hab\u00eda alojado a ning\u00fan inquilino, porque no lo necesitaba. Oficialmente, yo todav\u00eda viv\u00eda all\u00ed. Era mejor dejarlo as\u00ed en el registro. Abr\u00ed la puerta del balc\u00f3n que discurr\u00eda entre mi cuarto y la cocina. Mi piel hab\u00eda pasado de estar fr\u00eda a arder, y notaba una extra\u00f1a sensaci\u00f3n de tirantez en los ojos, como si llevara horas mirando fijamente una fuente de luz. Lo \u00fanico que ve\u00eda era la cara de mi v\u00edctima, y la vacuidad (la locura) reflejada en la del que hab\u00eda dejado con vida.\n\nHab\u00eda infligido esos da\u00f1os en cuesti\u00f3n de segundos. Mi esp\u00edritu no solo era un explorador, sino que era un arma. Jaxon llevaba tiempo esperando que sucediera algo as\u00ed.\n\nCog\u00ed el tel\u00e9fono y llam\u00e9 a la habitaci\u00f3n de Jaxon en el refugio. Jaxon contest\u00f3 inmediatamente:\n\n\u2014\u00a1Vaya, vaya! Cre\u00eda que me hab\u00edas abandonado todo el fin de semana. \u00bfD\u00f3nde est\u00e1 el incendio, coraz\u00f3n? \u00bfTe has pensado mejor lo de las vacaciones? No las necesitas, \u00bfverdad? Ya te lo dec\u00eda yo. No puedo prescindir de mi andarina dos d\u00edas enteros. S\u00e9 buena, querida. Estupendo. Me alegro de que est\u00e9s de acuerdo. Por cierto, \u00bfhas conseguido a Jane Rochford? Te traspasar\u00e9 unos cuantos billetes de mil m\u00e1s por si los necesitas. Pero, por favor, no me digas que ese desgraciado estirado de Didion nos ha robado a Anne Naylor y a...\n\n\u2014He matado a una persona.\n\nSilencio.\n\n\u2014\u00bfA qui\u00e9n? \u2014dijo Jax con voz rara.\n\n\u2014Una pareja de metrovigilantes intentaba detener a un m\u00e9dium y...\n\n\u2014\u00bfLos has matado?\n\n\u2014He matado a uno.\n\nJax inspir\u00f3 bruscamente.\n\n\u2014\u00bfY el otro?\n\n\u2014Lo he mandado a su zona hadal.\n\n\u2014Un momento. \u00bfLo has hecho con tu...? \u2014Como no contest\u00e9, se ech\u00f3 a re\u00edr. Le o\u00ed dar palmadas contra el tablero de la mesa\u2014. Por fin. \u00a1Por fin! \u00a1Paige, peque\u00f1a taumaturga, lo has hecho! \u00bfVes como no puedes perder el tiempo con esas sesiones de espiritismo? Y ese tipo, el metrovigilante, \u00bfse ha quedado convertido en vegetal?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed \u2014contest\u00e9\u2014. \u00bfEstoy despedida?\n\n\u2014\u00bfDespedida? \u00a1Por el _zeitgeist_ , tesoro, claro que no! Llevo a\u00f1os esperando que saques provecho de tu talento. Te has abierto como la flor de ambros\u00eda que eres, mi adorable prodigio. \u2014Me lo imagin\u00e9 dando una calada a su puro para celebrarlo\u2014. Vaya, vaya, mi onir\u00e1mbula ha entrado por fin en otro onirosaje. Y solo ha tardado tres a\u00f1os. Y dime, \u00bfhas podido salvar al vidente?\n\n\u2014No.\n\n\u2014\u00bfNo?\n\n\u2014Ten\u00edan tres duendes.\n\n\u2014Venga ya. Ning\u00fan m\u00e9dium podr\u00eda controlar a tres duendes.\n\n\u2014Pues ese m\u00e9dium s\u00ed pod\u00eda. Me confundi\u00f3 con un or\u00e1culo.\n\nJax ri\u00f3 por lo bajo.\n\n\u2014Aficionados.\n\nMir\u00e9 por la ventana, hacia la torre. Hab\u00eda aparecido otro mensaje: LES INFORMAMOS DE QUE HAY RETRASOS INESPERADOS EN EL METRO.\n\n\u2014Han cerrado el metro \u2014dije\u2014. Ahora me est\u00e1n buscando.\n\n\u2014No te dejes llevar por el p\u00e1nico, Paige. Es poco decoroso.\n\n\u2014Bueno, espero que tengas un plan. Han bloqueado toda la red. Y necesito largarme de aqu\u00ed.\n\n\u2014No te preocupes por eso. Aunque intenten extraerle los recuerdos y lo consigan, el cerebro de ese metrovigilante no es m\u00e1s que pur\u00e9 de patata. \u00bfEst\u00e1s segura de que lo empujaste hasta su zona hadal?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Entonces tardar\u00e1n como m\u00ednimo doce horas en extraerle los recuerdos. Me sorprende que ese pobre desgraciado siga vivo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 me est\u00e1s diciendo?\n\n\u2014Te estoy diciendo que ser\u00e1 mejor que esperes y no te des de cabeza con una persecuci\u00f3n. Est\u00e1s m\u00e1s segura con tu papa\u00edto de Scion que aqu\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Tienen esta direcci\u00f3n. No puedo quedarme sentada esperando a que vengan a detenerme.\n\n\u2014No te van a detener, cari\u00f1o m\u00edo. Hazme caso. Qu\u00e9date en casa, duerme un poco, y ma\u00f1ana por la ma\u00f1ana enviar\u00e9 a Nick con el coche. \u00bfQu\u00e9 te parece?\n\n\u2014No me gusta.\n\n\u2014No tiene por qu\u00e9 gustarte. T\u00fa duerme para estar guapa y fresca. Aunque no te hace ninguna falta \u2014a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014. Por cierto, \u00bfpuedes hacerme un favor? P\u00e1sate por Grub Street ma\u00f1ana y recoge esas eleg\u00edas de Donne que tiene Minty, \u00bfquieres? No puedo creer que haya vuelto su esp\u00edritu, es completamente...\n\nLe colgu\u00e9.\n\nJax era un capullo. Un genio, s\u00ed, pero tambi\u00e9n un adulador, un agarrado, un insensible y un capullo, como todos los mimetocapos. Pero \u00bfa qui\u00e9n pod\u00eda acudir yo? Con un don como el m\u00edo, era m\u00e1s vulnerable si estaba sola. Jax era el menor de dos males.\n\nNo pude evitar sonre\u00edr al pensar eso. Que Jaxon Hall fuera el menor de dos males dec\u00eda mucho de c\u00f3mo estaba el mundo.\n\nNo pod\u00eda dormir. Ten\u00eda que prepararme. Hab\u00eda una minipistola en un caj\u00f3n, escondida bajo un mont\u00f3n de ropa. Tambi\u00e9n hab\u00eda una primera edici\u00f3n de uno de los panfletos de Jaxon, _Sobre los m\u00e9ritos de la antinaturalidad_ ; __ en \u00e9l enumeraba __ los distintos tipos de vidente, seg\u00fan sus investigaciones. Mi ejemplar estaba lleno de anotaciones hechas por \u00e9l: ideas nuevas, n\u00fameros de contacto de videntes. Cargu\u00e9 la pistola y saqu\u00e9 una mochila de debajo de la cama. Mi mochila de emergencia, guardada all\u00ed dos a\u00f1os atr\u00e1s, lista para el d\u00eda que tuviera que huir. Met\u00ed el panfleto en el bolsillo delantero. No pod\u00eda arriesgarme a que lo encontraran en casa de mi padre.\n\nMe tumb\u00e9 en la cama, sin quitarme la ropa, con una mano sobre la pistola. O\u00ed truenos a lo lejos, en la oscuridad.\n\nDeb\u00ed de quedarme dormida. Cuando despert\u00e9, not\u00e9 algo raro. El \u00e9ter estaba demasiado abierto. Hab\u00eda videntes en el edificio, en la escalera. No era la se\u00f1ora Heron, la anciana del piso de arriba, que utilizaba un andador y siempre sub\u00eda en ascensor. Eran las botas de una unidad de asalto.\n\nHab\u00edan venido a buscarme. Por fin hab\u00edan venido.\n\nMe levant\u00e9 de inmediato. Me puse una chaqueta encima de la camisa, los zapatos y los mitones. Me temblaban las manos. Para eso era para lo que Nick me hab\u00eda entrenado: para correr como un animal salvaje. Pod\u00eda llegar a la estaci\u00f3n si me lo propon\u00eda, pero esa carrera pondr\u00eda a prueba mi resistencia. Tendr\u00eda que encontrar y parar un taxi para llegar al sector 4. Los taxis piratas paraban a cualquiera con tal de sacarse unas monedas, aunque fueras un vidente fugitivo.\n\nMe colgu\u00e9 la mochila, met\u00ed la pistola en un bolsillo de la chaqueta y abr\u00ed la puerta del balc\u00f3n, que el viento hab\u00eda cerrado. La lluvia me aporre\u00f3 la ropa. Cruc\u00e9 el balc\u00f3n, me sub\u00ed al antepecho de la ventana de la cocina, me agarr\u00e9 al borde del tejado y me sub\u00ed a \u00e9l de un fuerte tir\u00f3n. Cuando llegaron al apartamento, yo ya hab\u00eda empezado a correr.\n\n\u00a1Pum! Echaron la puerta abajo sin llamar, sin avisar. Al cabo de un momento el sonido de un disparo raj\u00f3 la noche. Me obligu\u00e9 a seguir corriendo. No pod\u00eda volver. Nunca mataban a amaur\u00f3ticos sin motivo, y menos a\u00fan a empleados de Scion. Seguramente deb\u00eda de haber sido solo un disparo tranquilizador, para controlar a mi padre mientras me deten\u00edan. Para abatirme a m\u00ed iban a necesitar algo mucho m\u00e1s fuerte.\n\nLa urbanizaci\u00f3n estaba tranquila. Mir\u00e9 por encima del borde del tejado, para inspeccionarla. No vi al vigilante de seguridad, que deb\u00eda de estar otra vez haciendo la ronda. No tard\u00e9 mucho en encontrar el furg\u00f3n policial en el aparcamiento: una furgoneta con las ventanas tapadas y los faros encendidos. Si alguien se hubiera molestado en mirar, habr\u00eda visto el s\u00edmbolo de Scion en las puertas traseras.\n\nSalv\u00e9 una brecha y trep\u00e9 a una cornisa peligrosamente resbaladiza. Mis zapatos y mis guantes se agarraban bastante bien, pero tendr\u00eda que vigilar d\u00f3nde pon\u00eda los pies. Pegu\u00e9 la espalda a la pared y avanc\u00e9 despacio hacia una escalerilla de emergencia; la lluvia me pegaba el pelo a la cara. Trep\u00e9 hasta el balc\u00f3n de hierro forjado del siguiente piso y, una vez all\u00ed, forc\u00e9 una ventana peque\u00f1a. Atraves\u00e9 el apartamento vac\u00edo a toda velocidad, baj\u00e9 los tres tramos de escalones y sal\u00ed por el portal del edificio. Necesitaba salir a la calle, perderme por un callej\u00f3n oscuro.\n\nLuces rojas. La DVN estaba aparcada justo delante, bloqueando mi ruta de huida. Di media vuelta, cerr\u00e9 la puerta de golpe y activ\u00e9 el cierre de seguridad. Con manos temblorosas, cog\u00ed un hacha contra incendios de una vitrina, romp\u00ed la ventana de la planta baja y sal\u00ed por ella a un peque\u00f1o patio. Me cort\u00e9 en los brazos con el cristal. Volv\u00eda a estar bajo la lluvia, trepando por ca\u00f1os de desag\u00fce y alf\u00e9izares, agarr\u00e1ndome por los pelos, hasta que llegu\u00e9 al tejado.\n\nCuando los vi se me cort\u00f3 la respiraci\u00f3n. El exterior del edificio estaba infestado de hombres con camisa roja y chaqueta negra. Varias linternas me enfocaron, me apuntaron a los ojos. Era la primera vez que ve\u00eda ese uniforme en Londres. \u00bfEran de Scion?\n\n\u2014No te muevas.\n\nEl que estaba m\u00e1s cerca avanz\u00f3 hacia m\u00ed. Llevaba una pistola en la mano; usaba guantes. Percib\u00ed un aura muy intensa y me apart\u00e9. El l\u00edder de los soldados era un m\u00e9dium extremadamente poderoso. La luz de las linternas revel\u00f3 una cara demacrada, unos ojos peque\u00f1os y una boca grande de labios finos.\n\n\u2014\u00a1No corras, Paige! \u2014me grit\u00f3 desde el otro extremo del tejado\u2014. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 no sales de debajo de la lluvia?\n\nHice un r\u00e1pido barrido del entorno. El edificio de al lado era un bloque de oficinas abandonado. Tendr\u00eda que dar un salto enorme, porque deb\u00eda de haber unos seis metros de separaci\u00f3n, y debajo hab\u00eda una calle concurrida. Nunca hab\u00eda intentado saltar tanta distancia, pero, a menos que quisiera atacar al m\u00e9dium y abandonar mi cuerpo, tendr\u00eda que intentarlo.\n\n\u2014Mejor que no \u2014dije, y ech\u00e9 a correr.\n\nLos soldados dieron un grito de alarma. Salt\u00e9 a una parte m\u00e1s baja del tejado. El m\u00e9dium me persigui\u00f3. O\u00eda sus pasos por el tejado, pegados a los m\u00edos; estaba entrenado para aquellas persecuciones. No pod\u00eda permitirme parar ni un instante. Era ligera y lo bastante delgada para colarme entre barrotes y por debajo de las vallas, pero mi perseguidor tambi\u00e9n. Cuando dispar\u00e9 con la pistola por encima del hombro, \u00e9l se agach\u00f3 sin detenerse. El viento arrastr\u00f3 su risa, de modo que no supe calcular a qu\u00e9 distancia estaba.\n\nVolv\u00ed a guardarme la pistola en la chaqueta. No ten\u00eda sentido disparar; no pod\u00eda acertar. Flexion\u00e9 los dedos y me prepar\u00e9 para agarrar un canal\u00f3n. Me ard\u00edan los m\u00fasculos y ten\u00eda los pulmones a punto de estallar. Un dolor en el tobillo me alert\u00f3 de una lesi\u00f3n, pero ten\u00eda que continuar. Pelear o huir. Correr o morir.\n\nEl m\u00e9dium salt\u00f3 por encima de la cornisa, r\u00e1pido y fluido como el agua. La adrenalina corr\u00eda por mis venas. Mis piernas se mov\u00edan con fuerza y la lluvia me golpeaba en los ojos. Salt\u00e9 por encima de tubos flexibles y conductos de ventilaci\u00f3n. A medida que ganaba velocidad, trataba de dirigir mi sexto sentido hacia el m\u00e9dium. Ten\u00eda una mente poderosa, tan r\u00e1pida como su cuerpo. No consegu\u00eda inmovilizarla, ni siquiera definirla. No pod\u00eda hacer nada para disuadirlo.\n\nLa adrenalina iba paliando el dolor de mi tobillo. De pronto me encontr\u00e9 ante un abismo de quince pisos. Al otro lado de la brecha hab\u00eda un canal\u00f3n y, m\u00e1s all\u00e1, una escalera de incendios. Si lograba bajar por ella, podr\u00eda desaparecer en las arterias palpitantes del sector 5. Podr\u00eda huir. S\u00ed, lo conseguir\u00eda. O\u00eda la voz de Nick alent\u00e1ndome: \u00abLas rodillas hacia el pecho. Los ojos en el punto donde esperas aterrizar\u00bb. Ahora o nunca. Me di impulso hacia arriba y me lanc\u00e9 por encima del precipicio.\n\nMi cuerpo choc\u00f3 contra una pared s\u00f3lida de ladrillo. Se me parti\u00f3 el labio, pero no perd\u00ed el conocimiento. Mis dedos se agarraron al canal\u00f3n. Mis pies golpearon la pared. Emple\u00e9 la poca fuerza que me quedaba para impulsarme hacia arriba, y el borde del canal\u00f3n se me clav\u00f3 en las manos. Se me cay\u00f3 una moneda de la chaqueta, y se precipit\u00f3 hacia la calle oscura.\n\nMi victoria dur\u00f3 poco. Cuando consegu\u00ed subirme al borde del tejado, con las palmas de las manos en carne viva, un dolor atroz me recorri\u00f3 la espalda. Estuve a punto de soltarme, pero segu\u00ed agarrada al tejado con una mano. Estir\u00e9 el cuello para mirar hacia atr\u00e1s, jadeando. Ten\u00eda un dardo largo y estrecho clavado en la parte baja de la espalda.\n\nFlux. Ten\u00edan flux.\n\nEl f\u00e1rmaco se extendi\u00f3 r\u00e1pidamente por mis venas. Al cabo de seis segundos todo mi torrente sangu\u00edneo estaba comprometido. Pens\u00e9 dos cosas: la primera, que Jax me matar\u00eda; y la segunda, que no importaba, porque de todas formas iba a morir. Me solt\u00e9 del tejado.\n\nNada.\n\nDur\u00f3 una eternidad. No recordaba cu\u00e1ndo hab\u00eda empezado, y no ve\u00eda el fin.\n\nRecordaba movimiento, un rugido ronco, que me hab\u00edan atado a una superficie dura. Luego una aguja, y el dolor apoder\u00e1ndose de m\u00ed.\n\nLa realidad estaba deformada. Me hallaba cerca de una vela, pero la llama crec\u00eda hasta alcanzar las dimensiones de un infierno. Estaba atrapada en un horno. El sudor me goteaba por los poros como la cera. Estaba hecha de fuego. Ard\u00eda. Me sal\u00edan ampollas y me chamuscaba; luego me congelaba, anhelaba acercarme a una fuente de calor, cre\u00eda que iba a morir de fr\u00edo. No hab\u00eda t\u00e9rmino medio, solo un dolor infinito, ilimitado.\n\nEl AUP Fluxion 14 era el resultado de un proyecto de colaboraci\u00f3n entre los departamentos m\u00e9dico y militar de Scion. Produc\u00eda un efecto paralizante llamado fantasmagor\u00eda, que los videntes resentidos llamaban \u00abpeste cerebral\u00bb: una v\u00edvida serie de alucinaciones, causada por distorsiones del onirosaje humano. Intent\u00e9 superar una visi\u00f3n tras otra, chillando cada vez que el dolor se hac\u00eda demasiado intenso para soportarlo en silencio. Si tuviera que definir el infierno, dir\u00eda que es eso: un chute de flux.\n\nHac\u00eda arcadas tratando en vano de expulsar el veneno de mi cuerpo; el pelo se me adher\u00eda a la cara, mojada de l\u00e1grimas y sudor. Lo \u00fanico que quer\u00eda era que terminara todo. Algo ten\u00eda que librarme de aquella pesadilla, ya fuera el sue\u00f1o, la inconsciencia o la muerte.\n\n\u2014Bueno, tesoro. No queremos que te mueras todav\u00eda. Hoy ya hemos perdido a tres.\n\nUnos dedos fr\u00edos me acariciaron la frente. Arque\u00e9 la espalda, me apart\u00e9. Si no quer\u00edan que muriera, \u00bfpor qu\u00e9 me hac\u00edan aquello?\n\nPasaban flores secas roz\u00e1ndome los ojos. La habitaci\u00f3n se enroll\u00f3 formando una h\u00e9lice, daba vueltas y vueltas hasta que no supe d\u00f3nde estaba arriba y d\u00f3nde abajo. Mord\u00ed una almohada para ahogar mis gritos. Not\u00e9 sabor a sangre y deduje que hab\u00eda mordido otra cosa: mi labio, mi lengua, mi mejilla; no sab\u00eda qu\u00e9.\n\nEl flux no sal\u00eda de tu cuerpo as\u00ed como as\u00ed. Por muchas veces que vomitaras u orinaras, segu\u00eda circulando, transportado por tu sangre, reproducido por tus propias c\u00e9lulas, hasta que lograbas inyectarte el ant\u00eddoto. Intent\u00e9 suplicar, pero no consegu\u00eda articular palabra. Me invad\u00eda una oleada tras otra de dolor, hasta que me convenc\u00ed de que iba a morir.\n\nEntonces percib\u00ed otra voz.\n\n\u2014Basta. A esta la necesitamos viva. Trae el ant\u00eddoto, o me encargar\u00e9 de que te administren el doble de la dosis que le han administrado a ella.\n\n\u00a1El ant\u00eddoto! Quiz\u00e1 sobreviviera. Intent\u00e9 ver algo m\u00e1s all\u00e1 del velo ondulado de las visiones, pero solo consegu\u00ed distinguir la llama de la vela.\n\nEstaban tardando demasiado. \u00bfD\u00f3nde estaba mi ant\u00eddoto? No importaba mucho. Quer\u00eda dormir, sumirme en el m\u00e1s largo de los sue\u00f1os.\n\n\u2014Su\u00e9lteme \u2014dije\u2014. D\u00e9jeme salir.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1 hablando. Trae agua.\n\nEl fr\u00edo borde de un vaso choc\u00f3 contra mis dientes. Beb\u00ed a grandes tragos, sedienta. Levant\u00e9 la cabeza e intent\u00e9 ver la cara de mi salvador.\n\n\u2014Por favor \u2014dije.\n\nUnos ojos me miraron. Estallaron en llamas.\n\nY de pronto ces\u00f3 la pesadilla. Me sum\u00ed en un sue\u00f1o negro y profundo.\n\nCuando despert\u00e9, me qued\u00e9 muy quieta.\n\nTodav\u00eda ten\u00eda sensibilidad suficiente para hacerme una idea de d\u00f3nde estaba: tumbada boca abajo en un colch\u00f3n duro. Ten\u00eda la garganta abrasada. Era un dolor tan intenso que me oblig\u00f3 a recobrar el sentido, aunque solo fuera para buscar agua. Entonces me di cuenta de que estaba desnuda, y me sobresalt\u00e9.\n\nMe tumb\u00e9 sobre un costado y apoy\u00e9 el peso del cuerpo en un codo y una cadera. Ten\u00eda restos de v\u00f3mito en las comisuras de la boca. Cuando pude enfocar, busqu\u00e9 el \u00e9ter. Hab\u00eda otros videntes conmigo en aquella c\u00e1rcel.\n\nMis ojos tardaron un rato en adaptarse a la penumbra. Estaba en una cama individual, con s\u00e1banas fr\u00edas y h\u00famedas. A mi derecha hab\u00eda una ventana con barrotes, sin cristal. El suelo y las paredes eran de piedra. Una fuerte corriente de aire me hizo estremecer. Echaba nubes de vaho por la boca al respirar. Me tap\u00e9 con la s\u00e1bana hasta los hombros. \u00bfQui\u00e9n demonios me hab\u00eda quitado la ropa?\n\nEn un rinc\u00f3n hab\u00eda una puerta entreabierta. Vi una luz. Me levant\u00e9 y evalu\u00e9 mis fuerzas. Tras asegurarme de que no iba a caerme, fui hacia la luz. Lo que encontr\u00e9 fue un lavabo rudimentario. La luz proven\u00eda de una sola vela. Hab\u00eda un v\u00e1ter viejo y un grifo oxidado, colocado a bastante altura en la pared. El grifo estaba fr\u00edo al tacto. Gir\u00e9 una v\u00e1lvula que hab\u00eda cerca y me sepult\u00f3 un diluvio de agua helada. Intent\u00e9 girar la v\u00e1lvula hacia el otro lado, pero el agua se resisti\u00f3 a calentarse m\u00e1s de medio grado. Decid\u00ed ir moj\u00e1ndome las extremidades una a una, coloc\u00e1ndolas bajo aquella cosa que no merec\u00eda llamarse ducha. No hab\u00eda toallas, as\u00ed que me sequ\u00e9 con las s\u00e1banas de la cama, sin dejar de envolverme con una. Intent\u00e9 abrir la puerta de la habitaci\u00f3n, pero estaba cerrada con llave.\n\nMe picaba todo el cuerpo. No ten\u00eda ni idea de d\u00f3nde estaba, ni por qu\u00e9 estaba all\u00ed, ni qu\u00e9 pensaban hacerme mis captores. Nadie sab\u00eda qu\u00e9 les pasaba a los detenidos, porque nunca hab\u00eda vuelto ninguno.\n\nMe sent\u00e9 en la cama y respir\u00e9 hondo varias veces. Todav\u00eda estaba d\u00e9bil tras tantas horas de fantasmagor\u00eda, y no necesitaba un espejo para saber que parec\u00eda, m\u00e1s que nunca, un cad\u00e1ver.\n\nNo temblaba solo de fr\u00edo. Estaba desnuda y sola en una habitaci\u00f3n oscura, con barrotes en la ventana y sin rastro de una ruta de huida. Deb\u00edan de haberme llevado a la Torre. Y me hab\u00edan quitado la mochila y el panfleto. Me acurruqu\u00e9 contra el pilar de la cama e hice todo lo posible por conservar el calor corporal mientras el coraz\u00f3n me lat\u00eda con fuerza. Ten\u00eda un nudo en la dolorida garganta.\n\n\u00bfLe har\u00edan algo a mi padre? \u00c9l era valioso (buena materia prima), pero \u00bflo perdonar\u00edan por haber albergado a una vidente? Eso era encubrimiento de traici\u00f3n. Pero mi padre era importante. No pod\u00edan perderlo.\n\nPerd\u00ed la noci\u00f3n del tiempo durante un rato. Me sum\u00ed en un sue\u00f1o irregular. Por fin la puerta se abri\u00f3 de golpe, y despert\u00e9 bruscamente.\n\n\u2014Lev\u00e1ntate.\n\nUna l\u00e1mpara de queroseno entr\u00f3, oscilante, en la habitaci\u00f3n. La sujetaba una mujer. Ten\u00eda la piel morena y lustrosa, y una estructura \u00f3sea elegante; era m\u00e1s alta que yo. El cabello, largo y rizado, era negro, como el vestido de talle alto, cuyas mangas le llegaban hasta las puntas de los dedos enguantados. Era imposible discernir su edad: podr\u00eda haber tenido veinticinco a\u00f1os, o cuarenta. Me ce\u00f1\u00ed la s\u00e1bana alrededor del cuerpo mientras la observaba.\n\nMe llamaron la atenci\u00f3n tres cosas de aquella mujer. La primera, que ten\u00eda los ojos amarillos. No era ese tono ambarino que, con seg\u00fan qu\u00e9 luz, pod\u00edas llamar amarillo. Eran realmente amarillos, un poco verdosos, y resplandec\u00edan.\n\nLa segunda, su aura. Era vidente, pero nunca hab\u00eda visto un aura como la suya. No habr\u00eda sabido explicar por qu\u00e9 era tan extra\u00f1a, pero mis sentidos no encajaban bien con ella.\n\nY la tercera (y la que me hel\u00f3 la sangre en las venas), su onirosaje. Era id\u00e9ntico al que hab\u00eda percibido en el I-4, ese que no hab\u00edamos sabido identificar. El del desconocido. Mi instinto me impulsaba a atacarla, pero sab\u00eda que no podr\u00eda abrir una brecha en un onirosaje como aquel, y mucho menos en el estado en que me encontraba.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEstamos en la Torre? \u2014pregunt\u00e9 con voz ronca.\n\nLa mujer ignor\u00f3 mi pregunta. Me acerc\u00f3 la l\u00e1mpara a la cara y me escudri\u00f1\u00f3 los ojos. Me pregunt\u00e9 si todav\u00eda estar\u00eda sufriendo peste cerebral.\n\n\u2014T\u00f3mate esto \u2014dijo.\n\nMir\u00e9 las dos p\u00edldoras que ten\u00eda en la mano.\n\n\u2014T\u00f3matelas.\n\n\u2014No \u2014dije.\n\nMe peg\u00f3. Not\u00e9 sabor a sangre. Quer\u00eda devolverle el golpe, pelear, pero estaba tan d\u00e9bil que apenas pude levantar la mano. Me tom\u00e9 las p\u00edldoras con dificultad, por culpa de la herida del labio.\n\n\u2014T\u00e1pate \u2014dijo mi captora\u2014. Si vuelves a desobedecerme, me asegurar\u00e9 de que no salgas de esta habitaci\u00f3n. Al menos, no con la piel sobre los huesos.\n\nMe tir\u00f3 un fardo de ropa.\n\n\u2014Rec\u00f3gela.\n\nNo quer\u00eda que me volviera a pegar. Esa vez no lo aguantar\u00eda. Apret\u00e9 las mand\u00edbulas y recog\u00ed la ropa del suelo.\n\n\u2014P\u00f3ntela.\n\nMir\u00e9 la ropa; me goteaba sangre del labio, y apareci\u00f3 una mancha en el blus\u00f3n blanco que ten\u00eda en las manos. Ten\u00eda las mangas largas y el escote cuadrado. Tambi\u00e9n hab\u00eda un faj\u00edn negro, a juego con los pantalones, los calcetines y las botas, ropa interior negra y un chaleco negro con una peque\u00f1a ancla blanca bordada. El s\u00edmbolo de Scion. Me vest\u00ed con movimientos r\u00edgidos, obligando a mis fr\u00edas extremidades a moverse. Cuando termin\u00e9, la mujer se volvi\u00f3 hacia la puerta.\n\n\u2014S\u00edgueme. No hables con nadie.\n\nFuera de la habitaci\u00f3n hac\u00eda un fr\u00edo tremendo, y la ra\u00edda alfombra no contribu\u00eda a suavizar la temperatura. En su d\u00eda deb\u00eda de haber sido roja, pero estaba deste\u00f1ida y manchada de v\u00f3mito. Mi gu\u00eda me llev\u00f3 por un laberinto de pasillos de piedra, con ventanitas con barrotes y antorchas encendidas. Aquello parec\u00eda demasiado luminoso, demasiado crudo, tras la luz fr\u00eda y azulada de las farolas de Londres.\n\n\u00bfSer\u00eda un castillo? No sab\u00eda de nadie en dos mil kil\u00f3metros a la redonda de Londres que tuviera un castillo (no hab\u00edamos tenido monarcas desde la reina Victoria). Quiz\u00e1 fuera una de aquellas viejas c\u00e1rceles de Categor\u00eda D. A menos que fuera la Torre.\n\nMe aventur\u00e9 a echar un vistazo fuera. Era de noche, pero distingu\u00ed un patio iluminado por varios faroles. No sab\u00eda cu\u00e1nto tiempo hab\u00eda estado bajo los efectos del flux. \u00bfMe habr\u00eda visto esa mujer mientras sufr\u00eda? \u00bfRecib\u00eda \u00f3rdenes de la DVN, o recib\u00edan ellos \u00f3rdenes suyas? Quiz\u00e1 trabajara para el Arconte, pero me extra\u00f1aba que emplearan a una vidente. Y pod\u00eda ser otras cosas, pero desde luego era vidente.\n\nLa mujer se par\u00f3 ante una puerta. Empujaron a un ni\u00f1o al pasillo. Era un cr\u00edo muy flaco, con cara de rata, con una mata de pelo rubio rojizo y todos los s\u00edntomas de la intoxicaci\u00f3n por flux: ojos vidriosos, cara p\u00e1lida, labios azules. La mujer lo mir\u00f3 de arriba abajo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfNombre?\n\n\u2014Carl \u2014contest\u00f3 \u00e9l con voz ronca.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo dices?\n\n\u2014Carl. \u2014Se notaba que estaba desesperado de dolor.\n\n\u2014Muy bien, te felicito por haber sobrevivido al Fluxion 14, Carl. \u2014Por su tono de voz no parec\u00eda que lo celebrara en absoluto\u2014. Quiz\u00e1 no vuelvas a disfrutar de unas horas de sue\u00f1o hasta dentro de un tiempo.\n\nCarl y yo nos miramos. Yo sab\u00eda que deb\u00eda de ofrecer un aspecto tan lamentable como \u00e9l. Seguimos recorriendo pasillos y fuimos recogiendo a m\u00e1s videntes cautivos. Sus auras eran potentes y distintivas; fui adivinando qu\u00e9 era cada uno. Un profeta. Una quirom\u00e1ntica (o palmista) con el cabello corto, te\u00f1ido de azul el\u00e9ctrico. Un tase\u00f3grafo. Un or\u00e1culo con la cabeza rapada. Una chica morena y delgada, de labios finos, seguramente una suspirante, que por lo visto ten\u00eda un brazo roto. Ninguno aparentaba m\u00e1s de veinte a\u00f1os, ni menos de quince. Todos estaban p\u00e1lidos y enfermizos a causa del flux. Al final \u00e9ramos diez. La mujer se volvi\u00f3 hacia su peque\u00f1o reba\u00f1o de monstruos.\n\n\u2014Me llamo Pleione Sualocin \u2014dijo\u2014. Ser\u00e9 vuestra gu\u00eda en vuestro primer d\u00eda en Sheol I. Esta noche asistir\u00e9is al serm\u00f3n de bienvenida. Hay una serie de normas sencillas que deb\u00e9is cumplir. No pod\u00e9is mirar a ning\u00fan refa\u00edta a los ojos. Deb\u00e9is mirar al suelo, donde corresponde, a menos que os inviten a hacer otra cosa.\n\nSin apartar la mirada de sus pies, la palmista levant\u00f3 una mano.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 es un refa\u00edta?\n\n\u2014Pronto lo averiguar\u00e9is. \u2014Pleione hizo una pausa\u2014. Y otra norma: no deb\u00e9is hablar a menos que un refa\u00edta se dirija a vosotros. \u00bfTen\u00e9is alguna duda?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. \u2014Era el tase\u00f3grafo. No miraba al suelo\u2014. \u00bfD\u00f3nde estamos?\n\n\u2014Lo sabr\u00e9is enseguida.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCon qu\u00e9 derecho nos tratan as\u00ed? Yo ni siquiera estaba limosneando. No he transgredido la ley. \u00a1Demuestren que tengo aura! Pienso volver a la ciudad, y usted no es nadie para...\n\nSe detuvo. Le salieron sendas gotas de sangre de los ojos. Hizo un d\u00e9bil ruido y se derrumb\u00f3.\n\nLa palmista dio un grito.\n\nPleione mir\u00f3 al tase\u00f3grafo. Cuando volvi\u00f3 a mirarnos a los dem\u00e1s, ten\u00eda los ojos azules como una llamarada de gas. Desvi\u00e9 la mirada.\n\n\u2014\u00bfAlguna pregunta m\u00e1s?\n\nLa palmista se tap\u00f3 la boca con una mano.\n\nNos condujeron a una habitaci\u00f3n peque\u00f1a con las paredes y el suelo h\u00famedos, oscura como una cripta. Pleione nos encerr\u00f3 bajo llave y se march\u00f3.\n\nAl principio nadie se atrevi\u00f3 a hablar. La palmista sollozaba, al borde de la histeria. Los otros todav\u00eda estaban demasiado d\u00e9biles como para hablar. Yo me apart\u00e9 y me sent\u00e9 en un rinc\u00f3n. Ten\u00eda la piel de gallina bajo las mangas del blus\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTodav\u00eda estamos en la Torre? \u2014pregunt\u00f3 un augur\u2014. Parece la Torre.\n\n\u2014C\u00e1llate \u2014repuso alguien\u2014. C\u00e1llate ya.\n\nAlguien empez\u00f3 a rezarle al _zeitgeist_ , nada menos. Como si fuera a servir de algo. Apoy\u00e9 la barbilla en las rodillas. No quer\u00eda saber qu\u00e9 nos har\u00edan. No sab\u00eda cu\u00e1nto resistir\u00eda si me aplicaban el submarino. Hab\u00eda o\u00eddo hablar a mi padre del submarino, dec\u00eda que solo te dejaban respirar unos segundos. Dec\u00eda que no era tortura, sino terapia.\n\nUn profeta se sent\u00f3 a mi lado. Era calvo y de hombros anchos. No lo ve\u00eda muy bien en aquella penumbra, pero distingu\u00ed sus grandes ojos, oscuros e intensos. Me tendi\u00f3 una mano.\n\n\u2014Me llamo Julian.\n\nNo parec\u00eda asustado, m\u00e1s bien tranquilo.\n\n\u2014Paige \u2014dije yo. Era mejor no usar apellidos. Carraspe\u00e9 y dije\u2014: \u00bfDe qu\u00e9 cohorte eres?\n\n\u2014Del IV-6.\n\n\u2014Yo, del I-4.\n\n\u2014Ese es el territorio del Vinculador Blanco, \u00bfno? \u2014Asent\u00ed\u2014. \u00bfDe qu\u00e9 parte?\n\n\u2014Soho \u2014respond\u00ed. Si dec\u00eda que estaba en Dials, \u00e9l deducir\u00eda que pertenec\u00eda al c\u00edrculo de Jaxon.\n\n\u2014Te envidio. Me habr\u00eda encantado vivir en el centro.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014All\u00ed el sindicato tiene mucha fuerza. En mi sector nunca pasa gran cosa. \u2014Hablaba en voz baja\u2014. \u00bfLes has dado motivos para detenerte?\n\n\u2014Mat\u00e9 a un metrovigilante. \u2014Me dol\u00eda la garganta\u2014. \u00bfY t\u00fa?\n\n\u2014Tuve una discusi\u00f3n sin importancia con un centinela. Resumiendo: el centinela ya no est\u00e1 con nosotros.\n\n\u2014Pero t\u00fa eres profeta.\n\nLa mayor\u00eda de los videntes miraban con desprecio a los profetas, una clase de adivinos. Como todos los adivinos, se comunicaban con los esp\u00edritus a trav\u00e9s de objetos; en el caso de los profetas, cualquier cosa reflectante. Jax odiaba con toda su alma a los adivinos (\u00abFarsantes, tesoro, ll\u00e1malos farsantes\u00bb). Y a los augures, ahora que lo pienso.\n\nJulian debi\u00f3 de leerme el pensamiento.\n\n\u2014No crees que un profeta sea capaz de matar a nadie.\n\n\u2014No con esp\u00edritus. No podr\u00edas controlar a una bandada lo bastante grande.\n\n\u2014Entiendes de videntes. \u2014Se frot\u00f3 los brazos\u2014. Tienes raz\u00f3n. Le dispar\u00e9. Pero eso no les impidi\u00f3 detenerme.\n\nNo le contest\u00e9. Del techo goteaba un agua helada que me ca\u00eda en el pelo y me resbalaba por la nariz. La mayor\u00eda de los otros prisioneros estaban callados. Un chico se mec\u00eda adelante y atr\u00e1s, en cuclillas.\n\n\u2014Tienes un aura rara. \u2014Julian me mir\u00f3\u2014. No s\u00e9 qu\u00e9 eres. Dir\u00eda que un or\u00e1culo, pero...\n\n\u2014Pero \u00bfqu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Hace tiempo que no oigo hablar de ninguna mujer or\u00e1culo. Y no creo que seas una sibila.\n\n\u2014Soy acutum\u00e1ntica.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 hiciste? \u00bfLe clavaste una aguja a alguien?\n\n\u2014Algo as\u00ed.\n\nFuera se oy\u00f3 un estruendo, seguido de un grito espantoso. Todos dejamos de hablar.\n\n\u2014Eso ha sido un berserker \u2014dijo una voz masculina cargada de temor\u2014. No ir\u00e1n a meter a un berserker aqu\u00ed, \u00bfverdad?\n\n\u2014Los berserkers no existen \u2014asever\u00e9.\n\n\u2014\u00bfNo has le\u00eddo _Sobre los m\u00e9ritos_?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Pero solo es un tipo hipot\u00e9tico.\n\nNo pareci\u00f3 que mi afirmaci\u00f3n lo aliviara mucho. Acordarme del panfleto hizo que se me helara a\u00fan m\u00e1s la sangre. Pod\u00eda estar en cualquier sitio, en manos de cualquiera: una primera edici\u00f3n del panfleto m\u00e1s sedicioso de la ciudadela, lleno de anotaciones y detalles de contactos. Era imposible que yo estuviera en posesi\u00f3n de una cosa as\u00ed sin conocer a su autor.\n\n\u2014Van a volver a torturarnos. \u2014La suspirante sosten\u00eda el brazo roto contra el pecho\u2014. Quieren algo. Si no, no nos habr\u00edan dejado salir.\n\n\u2014Salir \u00bfde d\u00f3nde? \u2014pregunt\u00e9.\n\n\u2014De la Torre, idiota. Donde todos hemos pasado los dos \u00faltimos a\u00f1os.\n\n\u2014\u00bfDos a\u00f1os? \u2014Se oy\u00f3 una risa medio hist\u00e9rica que proven\u00eda de un rinc\u00f3n\u2014. Querr\u00e1s decir nueve. Nueve a\u00f1os.\n\nOtra risotada, y luego una risita.\n\nNueve a\u00f1os. Que nosotros supi\u00e9ramos, a los detenidos se les ofrec\u00edan dos opciones: entrar en la DVN o ser ejecutados. No hab\u00eda ninguna necesidad de almacenar gente.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 nueve? \u2014pregunt\u00e9.\n\nNo hubo respuesta desde el rinc\u00f3n. Al cabo de un minuto Julian dijo:\n\n\u2014\u00bfAlguien m\u00e1s se ha preguntado por qu\u00e9 no estamos muertos?\n\n\u2014A todos los dem\u00e1s los mataron. \u2014Era una voz nueva\u2014. Yo pas\u00e9 meses all\u00ed. A los otros videntes de mi ala los ahorcaron a todos. \u2014Una pausa\u2014. Nos han escogido por algo.\n\n\u2014SciOECI \u2014susurr\u00f3 alguien\u2014. Vamos a ser conejillos de Indias, \u00bfverdad? Los m\u00e9dicos nos quieren diseccionar.\n\n\u2014Esto no es SciOECI \u2014dije yo.\n\nHubo un largo silencio, solo interrumpido por las amargas l\u00e1grimas de la palmista. Por lo visto no pod\u00eda controlarse. Al final Carl se dirigi\u00f3 a la suspirante:\n\n\u2014Dices que deben de querer algo, susu. \u00bfQu\u00e9 crees que podr\u00edan querer?\n\n\u2014Cualquier cosa. Nuestra visi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014No pueden quitarnos nuestra visi\u00f3n \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014Por favor. T\u00fa ni siquiera tienes visi\u00f3n. No quieren a videntes discapacitados.\n\nContuve el impulso de romperle el otro brazo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 le ha hecho al tase\u00f3grafo? \u2014La palmista estaba temblando\u2014. Sus ojos... \u00a1Lo ha hecho sin moverse siquiera!\n\n\u2014Pues yo ten\u00eda claro que nos iban a matar \u2014dijo Carl, como si no entendiera por qu\u00e9 los dem\u00e1s est\u00e1bamos tan preocupados. No ten\u00eda la voz tan ronca\u2014. Yo aceptar\u00eda cualquier cosa que no fuera la horca, \u00bfy vosotros?\n\n\u2014Pues puede que nos cuelguen \u2014dije, y se qued\u00f3 callado.\n\nOtro chico, tan p\u00e1lido que parec\u00eda que el flux le hubiera consumido toda la sangre de las venas, estaba empezando a hiperventilar. Ten\u00eda pecas en la nariz. Hasta ese momento no me hab\u00eda fijado en \u00e9l; no ten\u00eda ni rastro de aura.\n\n\u2014\u00bfD\u00f3nde estamos? \u2014pregunt\u00f3. Apenas pod\u00eda articular palabra\u2014. \u00bfQui\u00e9n... qui\u00e9nes sois?\n\nJulian lo mir\u00f3.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa eres amaur\u00f3tico \u2014dijo\u2014. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 te han tra\u00eddo aqu\u00ed?\n\n\u2014\u00bfAmaur\u00f3tico?\n\n\u2014Debe de ser un error. \u2014El or\u00e1culo parec\u00eda aburrido\u2014. Lo matar\u00e1n de todas formas. Mala suerte, chico.\n\nDaba la impresi\u00f3n de que el chico iba a desmayarse. Se puso en pie de un salto y tir\u00f3 de los barrotes.\n\n\u2014\u00a1No s\u00e9 qu\u00e9 hago aqu\u00ed! \u00a1Quiero irme a mi casa! \u00a1No soy antinatural! \u2014Estaba a punto de llorar\u2014. \u00a1Lo siento! \u00a1Siento lo de la piedra!\n\nLe tap\u00e9 la boca con una mano.\n\n\u2014Basta. \u2014Algunos de los otros lo insultaron\u2014. \u00bfQuieres que te deje frito a ti tambi\u00e9n?\n\nEstaba temblando. Deb\u00eda de tener unos quince a\u00f1os, pero era muy inmaduro. Me acord\u00e9 de otros tiempos, cuando yo tambi\u00e9n era una ni\u00f1a asustada y sola.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo te llamas? \u2014le pregunt\u00e9 tratando de que mi voz sonara amable.\n\n\u2014Seb. Seb Pearce. \u2014Se cruz\u00f3 de brazos, tratando de retraerse\u2014. \u00bfSois todos... antinaturales?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, y haremos cosas antinaturales con tus \u00f3rganos internos si no cierras el pico \u2014le espet\u00f3 una voz.\n\nSeb se estremeci\u00f3.\n\n\u2014No le hagas caso \u2014le dije\u2014. Me llamo Paige. Este es Julian.\n\nJulian se limit\u00f3 a asentir con la cabeza. Por lo visto, me correspond\u00eda a m\u00ed charlar con el amaur\u00f3tico.\n\n\u2014\u00bfDe d\u00f3nde eres, Seb?\n\n\u2014De la cohorte III.\n\n\u2014El anillo \u2014observ\u00f3 Julian\u2014. Muy bonito.\n\nSeb desvi\u00f3 la mirada. Le temblaban los labios de fr\u00edo. Seguro que cre\u00eda que lo descuartizar\u00edamos y nos ba\u00f1ar\u00edamos en su sangre en un frenes\u00ed ocultista. Yo hab\u00eda ido a una escuela de secundaria del anillo, que era como llam\u00e1bamos en la calle a la cohorte III.\n\n\u2014Cu\u00e9ntanos qu\u00e9 pas\u00f3 \u2014dije.\n\nSeb mir\u00f3 a los dem\u00e1s. No pod\u00eda reprocharle su temor. Desde que ten\u00eda uso de raz\u00f3n le hab\u00edan explicado que los clarividentes eran el origen de todos los males del mundo, y ahora estaba en la c\u00e1rcel con ellos.\n\n\u2014Un chico de sexto me meti\u00f3 contrabando en la cartera \u2014dijo. Seguramente una piedra de adivinaci\u00f3n, el _numen_ m\u00e1s frecuente en el mercado negro\u2014. El director me vio intentando devolv\u00e9rselo en clase. Pens\u00f3 que me lo hab\u00eda dado uno de esos mendigos. Llamaron a los centinelas del colegio para que me registraran.\n\nUn chico de Scion, sin duda. Si su colegio ten\u00eda sus propios centinelas, deb\u00eda de provenir de una familia tremendamente rica.\n\n\u2014Tard\u00e9 horas en convencerlos de que me hab\u00edan tendido una trampa. Tom\u00e9 un atajo para volver a mi casa. \u2014Seb trag\u00f3 saliva\u2014. Hab\u00eda dos hombres vestidos de rojo en la esquina. Intent\u00e9 pasar de largo, pero me oyeron. Llevaban m\u00e1scaras. No s\u00e9 por qu\u00e9, pero ech\u00e9 a correr. Ten\u00eda miedo. Entonces o\u00ed un disparo y... creo que me desmay\u00e9. Y despert\u00e9 vomitando.\n\nNo sab\u00eda qu\u00e9 efecto tendr\u00eda el flux en los amaur\u00f3ticos. Lo l\u00f3gico era que aparecieran s\u00edntomas f\u00edsicos (v\u00f3mitos, sed, terror inexplicable), pero no la fantasmagor\u00eda.\n\n\u2014Qu\u00e9 horror \u2014dije\u2014. Seguro que todo esto es solo una equivocaci\u00f3n terrible.\n\nEstaba segura. Un chico amaur\u00f3tico de buena familia como Seb no pintaba nada all\u00ed.\n\nSeb parec\u00eda un poco m\u00e1s animado.\n\n\u2014\u00bfMe dejar\u00e1n volver a casa?\n\n\u2014No \u2014dijo Julian.\n\nAguc\u00e9 el o\u00eddo. Pasos. Pleione hab\u00eda vuelto. Abri\u00f3 la puerta, agarr\u00f3 al primer prisionero que encontr\u00f3 y lo levant\u00f3 con una sola mano.\n\n\u2014Seguidme. Recordad las normas.\n\nSalimos del edificio por una puerta de doble batiente; la suspirante guiaba a la palmista. El aire, g\u00e9lido, nos cortaba cada cent\u00edmetro de piel descubierta. Me sobresalt\u00e9 cuando llegamos a la horca (quiz\u00e1 aquello s\u00ed fuera la Torre), pero Pleione pas\u00f3 de largo. No ten\u00eda ni idea de qu\u00e9 le hab\u00eda hecho al tase\u00f3grafo, ni de qu\u00e9 hab\u00eda sido aquel grito, pero no pensaba preguntarlo. Cabeza agachada, ojos abiertos. Esa iba a ser mi norma all\u00ed.\n\nNos gui\u00f3 por calles desiertas, iluminadas por l\u00e1mparas de gas y mojadas tras una noche de lluvia intensa. Julian se coloc\u00f3 a mi lado. A medida que and\u00e1bamos, los edificios eran cada vez m\u00e1s grandes, pero no eran rascacielos, ni mucho menos. No hab\u00eda armazones met\u00e1licos, ni luz el\u00e9ctrica. Aquellos edificios eran antiguos y extra\u00f1os, construidos en una \u00e9poca en que dominaba otra est\u00e9tica. Fachadas de piedra, puertas de madera y ventanas con cristales emplomados te\u00f1idos de rojo intenso y violeta. Cuando doblamos la \u00faltima esquina, se present\u00f3 ante nosotros una imagen que nunca podr\u00e9 olvidar.\n\nLa calle que se extend\u00eda delante era extra\u00f1amente ancha. No se ve\u00eda ni un coche: solo una hilera larga y sinuosa de viviendas destartaladas que la recorr\u00eda de punta a punta. Las paredes de contrachapado sosten\u00edan los techos de chapa de zinc. A ambos lados de esa peque\u00f1a poblaci\u00f3n se alzaban otros edificios m\u00e1s altos. Ten\u00edan puertas de madera maciza, ventanas altas y almenas, como los castillos de la \u00e9poca victoriana. Me recordaron tanto a la Torre que tuve que mirar hacia otro lado.\n\nA escasa distancia de la chabola m\u00e1s cercana hab\u00eda un grupo de figuras esbeltas en un escenario al aire libre. Estaban rodeados de velas que iluminaban sus caras enmascaradas. Bajo las tablas sonaba un viol\u00edn. M\u00fasica de videntes, una m\u00fasica que solo los suspirantes pod\u00edan interpretar. Una nutrida audiencia los contemplaba desde abajo. Todos los espectadores llevaban un blus\u00f3n rojo y un chaleco negro.\n\nLas figuras empezaron a bailar, como si hubieran estado esperando nuestra llegada. Eran todos clarividentes; de hecho, all\u00ed todos eran clarividentes: los bailarines, los espectadores, todos. Jam\u00e1s hab\u00eda visto a tantos videntes en el mismo sitio, compartiendo apaciblemente el espacio. Deb\u00eda de haber un centenar de observadores alrededor del escenario.\n\nAquello no era ninguna reuni\u00f3n secreta en un t\u00fanel subterr\u00e1neo. Aquello no era el brutal sindicato de Hector. Aquello era diferente. Cuando Seb me dio la mano, no lo apart\u00e9 de m\u00ed.\n\nEl espect\u00e1culo se prolong\u00f3 unos minutos. No todos los espectadores prestaban atenci\u00f3n. Algunos hablaban entre ellos mientras que otros abucheaban a los actores. Estaba segura de haber o\u00eddo a alguien decir \u00abcobardes\u00bb. Despu\u00e9s del baile, una chica con mallas negras se subi\u00f3 a una plataforma m\u00e1s alta. Llevaba el cabello, casta\u00f1o oscuro, recogido en un mo\u00f1o, y una m\u00e1scara dorada con los extremos con forma de alas. Se qued\u00f3 all\u00ed de pie un momento, quieta como una estatua; de pronto salt\u00f3 de la plataforma y agarr\u00f3 dos largas cortinas rojas que hab\u00edan soltado desde el telar del escenario. Enrosc\u00f3 los brazos y las piernas alrededor de las cortinas y, tras trepar hasta una altura de seis metros, adopt\u00f3 una pose. Recibi\u00f3 algunos aplausos del p\u00fablico.\n\nTodav\u00eda estaba muy confusa por efecto del flux. \u00bfQu\u00e9 era aquello, una especie de secta de videntes? Cosas m\u00e1s raras hab\u00eda o\u00eddo. Hice un esfuerzo y examin\u00e9 la calle. De algo s\u00ed estaba segura: aquello no era SciLo. No hab\u00eda nada que delatara la presencia de Scion. Grandes edificios antiguos, espect\u00e1culos p\u00fablicos, l\u00e1mparas de gas y una calle adoquinada: era como si hubi\u00e9ramos retrocedido en el tiempo.\n\nDe pronto supe exactamente d\u00f3nde estaba.\n\nTodos hab\u00edamos o\u00eddo hablar de la ciudad perdida de Oxford. Formaba parte del programa de estudios de Scion. Un incendio hab\u00eda destruido la universidad en oto\u00f1o de 1859. Lo que quedaba estaba clasificado como Sector Restringido de Clase A. Estaba terminantemente prohibido acceder all\u00ed, por temor a una indefinible contaminaci\u00f3n. Scion la hab\u00eda borrado de los mapas. Yo hab\u00eda le\u00eddo en los archivos de Jaxon que un periodista intr\u00e9pido de _El Pendenciero_ hab\u00eda intentado entrar all\u00ed en 2036 y amenazado con publicar un art\u00edculo, pero unos francotiradores hicieron salir su coche de la carretera y nunca m\u00e1s se supo de \u00e9l. _El_ _Pendenciero_ , un peri\u00f3dico sensacionalista, tambi\u00e9n desapareci\u00f3. Hab\u00eda intentado demasiadas veces revelar los secretos de Scion.\n\nPleione se dio la vuelta hacia nosotros. La oscuridad nos imped\u00eda verle bien la cara, pero sus ojos segu\u00edan ardiendo.\n\n\u2014Es indecoroso quedarse mirando \u2014dijo\u2014. No deb\u00e9is llegar tarde al serm\u00f3n.\n\nPero aquel baile segu\u00eda atrayendo nuestras miradas. La seguimos, pero no consigui\u00f3 que apart\u00e1ramos la vista.\n\nDesfilamos detr\u00e1s de Pleione hasta llegar ante una gran verja de hierro forjado. Dos hombres abrieron la verja; ambos se parec\u00edan a nuestra gu\u00eda: los mismos ojos, la misma piel satinada, las mismas auras. Pleione pas\u00f3 majestuosa a su lado.\n\nSeb ten\u00eda muy mal color. Le cog\u00ed la mano y no se la solt\u00e9 mientras recorr\u00edamos los jardines del edificio. Aquel amaur\u00f3tico no ten\u00eda por qu\u00e9 importarme, pero parec\u00eda demasiado vulnerable para que lo dejara solo. La palmista estaba llorando. Solo el or\u00e1culo, que iba frot\u00e1ndose los nudillos, parec\u00eda no tener miedo. Mientras and\u00e1bamos, se nos unieron varios grupos m\u00e1s de reci\u00e9n llegados, todos vestidos de blanco. La mayor\u00eda parec\u00edan asustados, si bien unos pocos se mostraban entusiasmados. Nuestro grupo iba api\u00f1\u00e1ndose a medida que llegaban m\u00e1s prisioneros.\n\nNos estaban arreando como si fu\u00e9ramos ganado.\n\nEntramos en una sala alargada de techos altos. Unos estantes de color verde oliva llenos de preciosos libros antiguos cubr\u00edan las paredes hasta el techo. En una de las paredes hab\u00eda once vidrieras. La decoraci\u00f3n era cl\u00e1sica, con suelos de m\u00e1rmol con dibujos geom\u00e9tricos. Los prisioneros nos empuj\u00e1bamos unos a otros formando filas. Yo me qued\u00e9 entre Julian y Seb, con los sentidos en alerta m\u00e1xima. Julian tambi\u00e9n estaba en tensi\u00f3n. Miraba uno a uno a los cautivos, evalu\u00e1ndolos. Formaban un verdadero crisol: una muestra representativa de los distintos tipos de videntes, desde augures y adivinos hasta m\u00e9diums y sensores.\n\nPleione nos hab\u00eda dejado. Ahora estaba subida a un estrado, lo mismo que otros ocho seres que deduje que tambi\u00e9n deb\u00edan de ser refa\u00edtas. Mi sexto sentido tembl\u00f3.\n\nUna vez que estuvimos todos reunidos, un silencio sepulcral se apoder\u00f3 de la sala. Una mujer dio un paso adelante y empez\u00f3 a hablar.\n\n\u2014Bienvenidos a Sheol I.\n\nLa oradora med\u00eda casi dos metros. Sus facciones eran perfectamente sim\u00e9tricas: nariz recta y larga, p\u00f3mulos prominentes, ojos hundidos. La luz de las velas se reflejaba en su pelo y en su lustrosa piel. Vest\u00eda de negro, como los otros, pero las mangas y los costados de su t\u00fanica, acuchillados, dejaban entrever un forro dorado.\n\n\u2014Soy Nashira Sargas. \u2014Ten\u00eda una voz fr\u00eda, grave\u2014. Soy la soberana de sangre de la raza de los refa\u00edtas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEs una broma? \u2014susurr\u00f3 alguien.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Chisss! \u2014susurr\u00f3 otro.\n\n\u2014En primer lugar, debo disculparme por el angustioso inicio de vuestra estancia aqu\u00ed, sobre todo si hab\u00e9is pasado un tiempo alojados en la Torre. La gran mayor\u00eda de los clarividentes tienen la impresi\u00f3n de que van a ser ejecutados cuando son llamados a nuestro lado. Utilizamos Fluxion 14 para asegurarnos de que el traslado a Sheol sea seguro y sencillo. Una vez sedados, se os lleva en tren a unas instalaciones de detenci\u00f3n, donde sois vigilados. Se os han confiscado la ropa y los objetos personales.\n\nMientras escuchaba examin\u00e9 a la mujer asom\u00e1ndome al \u00e9ter. Su aura no se parec\u00eda a nada que yo hubiera percibido hasta entonces. Me habr\u00eda gustado verla. Era como si hubiese cogido varios tipos de aura diferentes y hubiera forjado con ellos un extra\u00f1o campo energ\u00e9tico.\n\nPero hab\u00eda algo m\u00e1s. Una frialdad ins\u00f3lita. La mayor\u00eda de las auras emit\u00edan una se\u00f1al tenue y c\u00e1lida, como cuando pasas por delante de un calentador; la suya, en cambio, me produc\u00eda escalofr\u00edos.\n\n\u2014Comprendo que os haya sorprendido ver esta ciudad. Quiz\u00e1 la conozc\u00e1is por el nombre de Oxford. Vuestro gobierno neg\u00f3 su existencia hace dos siglos, mucho antes de que nacierais. Supuestamente se puso en cuarentena despu\u00e9s de un incendio, pero es mentira. La cerraron para que nosotros, los refa\u00edtas, pudi\u00e9ramos venir a vivir aqu\u00ed.\n\n\u00bbLlegamos hace dos siglos, en 1859. Vuestro mundo hab\u00eda alcanzado lo que llamamos el \"umbral et\u00e9reo\". \u2014Hizo una pausa y evalu\u00f3 nuestra reacci\u00f3n\u2014. La mayor\u00eda de vosotros sois clarividentes. Sab\u00e9is que vivimos rodeados de esp\u00edritus, demasiado cobardes o testarudos para enfrentarse a la muerte definitiva en el coraz\u00f3n del \u00e9ter. Pod\u00e9is comunicaros con ellos, y ellos pueden protegeros y guiaros. Pero esa conexi\u00f3n tiene un precio. Cuando el mundo corp\u00f3reo experimenta una superpoblaci\u00f3n de esp\u00edritus errantes, estos producen profundas fisuras en el \u00e9ter. Y cuando esas fisuras se ensanchan demasiado, el umbral et\u00e9reo se rompe.\n\n\u00bbCuando la Tierra rompi\u00f3 su umbral, qued\u00f3 expuesta a una dimensi\u00f3n m\u00e1s elevada, el Inframundo, donde residimos nosotros. Ahora hemos venido aqu\u00ed. \u2014Nashira dirigi\u00f3 la mirada a mi fila de prisioneros\u2014. Vosotros, los humanos, hab\u00e9is cometido muchos errores. Hab\u00e9is llenado vuestra f\u00e9rtil tierra de cad\u00e1veres, la hab\u00e9is cargado de esp\u00edritus errantes. Ahora pertenece a los refa\u00edtas.\n\nMir\u00e9 a Julian y vi mi miedo reflejado en sus ojos. Esa mujer ten\u00eda que estar loca.\n\nSe produjo un silencio en la sala. Nashira Sargas ten\u00eda toda nuestra atenci\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Los miembros de mi pueblo, los refa\u00edtas, somos todos clarividentes. Entre nosotros no hay amaur\u00f3ticos. Desde que se produjo la escisi\u00f3n entre nuestros mundos, nos hemos visto obligados a compartir el Inframundo con una raza par\u00e1sita, los emim. Son seres salvajes, bestiales, a los que les gusta la carne humana. Si no fuera por nosotros, habr\u00edan traspasado el umbral. Habr\u00edan venido a destruiros.\n\nLoca. Estaba loca.\n\n\u2014Fuisteis todos detenidos por humanos que trabajan para nosotros. Se llaman \u00abcasacas rojas\u00bb. \u2014Nashira se\u00f1al\u00f3 a una fila de hombres y mujeres, todos vestidos de rojo, que estaban al fondo de la biblioteca\u2014. Desde nuestra llegada nos hemos hecho cargo de muchos clarividentes humanos. A cambio de protecci\u00f3n, os entrenamos para destruir a los emim (y, as\u00ed, proteger a la poblaci\u00f3n de \u00abnaturales\u00bb) formando parte de un batall\u00f3n penal. Esta ciudad act\u00faa como baliza para esos seres, los aleja del resto del mundo corp\u00f3reo. Cuando abren una brecha en sus muros, llamamos a los casacas rojas para que los destruyan. Esas brechas se anuncian mediante una sirena, pues exponen a la poblaci\u00f3n a un grave riesgo de mutilaci\u00f3n.\n\n\u00abY tambi\u00e9n hay un grave riesgo de que todo esto est\u00e9 pasando solo en mi cabeza\u00bb, me dije.\n\n\u2014Os ofrecemos este destino como alternativa a lo que os ofrece Scion: la pena de muerte en la horca o mediante asfixia. O, como algunos de vosotros ya hab\u00e9is experimentado, una larga y oscura condena en la Torre.\n\nEn la fila que ten\u00eda detr\u00e1s, una chica empez\u00f3 a gimotear. Las personas que ten\u00eda a los lados la hicieron callar.\n\n\u2014No tenemos que trabajar juntos, por supuesto. \u2014Nashira empez\u00f3 a pasearse a lo largo de la primera fila\u2014. Cuando vinimos a este mundo, comprobamos que era vulnerable. Solo un porcentaje m\u00ednimo de vosotros sois clarividentes, y a\u00fan sois menos los que ten\u00e9is habilidades m\u00ednimamente \u00fatiles. Habr\u00edamos podido dejar que los emim os atacaran. Habr\u00eda estado justificado, debido a lo que vosotros le hab\u00e9is hecho a este mundo.\n\nSeb me estaba aplastando la mano. Not\u00e9 un d\u00e9bil zumbido en los o\u00eddos. Aquello era rid\u00edculo. Una broma de mal gusto. O eso, o peste cerebral. S\u00ed, deb\u00eda de ser peste cerebral. Scion intentaba hacernos pensar que nos hab\u00edamos vuelto locos. Y quiz\u00e1 fuera verdad.\n\n\u2014Pero tuvimos clemencia. Nos apiadamos de vosotros. Negociamos con nuestros gobernantes, y creamos esta peque\u00f1a isla. Nos cedieron esta ciudad, que nosotros llamamos Sheol I, y cada diez a\u00f1os nos enviaban a cierto n\u00famero de clarividentes. Nuestra fuente principal era y sigue siendo Londres. Fue esa capital la que trabaj\u00f3 siete d\u00e9cadas para desarrollar el sistema de seguridad de Scion. Scion ha aumentado considerablemente la posibilidad de reconocer, reubicar y rehabilitar a los clarividentes en una nueva sociedad, lejos de los llamados amaur\u00f3ticos. A cambio de ese servicio, nosotros nos hemos comprometido a no destruir vuestro mundo. En lugar de destruirlo, nos hemos propuesto controlarlo.\n\nNo estaba segura de haber entendido lo que estaba diciendo, pero una cosa estaba clara: si dec\u00eda la verdad, Scion no era m\u00e1s que un gobierno t\u00edtere. Subordinado. Y nos hab\u00eda vendido.\n\nLa verdad es que no me sorprendi\u00f3.\n\nLa chica de la fila de detr\u00e1s no pudo soportarlo m\u00e1s. Dio un grito ahogado y ech\u00f3 a correr hacia la puerta.\n\nLe dispararon. No pudo hacer nada.\n\nHubo gritos por todas partes. Y sangre. Seb me clav\u00f3 las u\u00f1as en la mano. En medio del caos, un refa\u00edta se adelant\u00f3 y grit\u00f3:\n\n\u2014\u00a1Silencio!\n\nEl ruido ces\u00f3 de inmediato.\n\nBajo la cabeza de la chica se form\u00f3 un charco de sangre. Ten\u00eda los ojos abiertos. En su cara persist\u00eda una expresi\u00f3n de angustia, de terror.\n\nEl asesino era humano y vest\u00eda de rojo. Enfund\u00f3 su rev\u00f3lver y junt\u00f3 las manos detr\u00e1s de la espalda. Dos compa\u00f1eras suyas cogieron el cad\u00e1ver por los brazos y lo arrastraron hasta el exterior.\n\n\u2014Siempre hay un casaca amarilla \u2014dijo una de ellas, lo bastante alto para que lo oy\u00e9ramos todos.\n\nEl suelo de m\u00e1rmol estaba manchado. Nashira nos mir\u00f3 con gesto imperturbable.\n\n\u2014Si alguien m\u00e1s quiere huir, este es el momento de hacerlo. Pod\u00e9is estar seguros de que hay sitio en la tumba.\n\nNadie se movi\u00f3.\n\nSe produjo un silencio, y me aventur\u00e9 a echar un vistazo al estrado. Uno de los refa\u00edtas me miraba.\n\nDeb\u00eda de llevar rato examin\u00e1ndome, esperando a que yo lo viera, buscando un atisbo de disconformidad; su mirada se uni\u00f3 a la m\u00eda. Su piel, de un dorado oscuro semejante al de la miel, hac\u00eda resaltar sus ojos, amarillos y de p\u00e1rpados gruesos. Era el m\u00e1s alto de los cinco varones, con cabello casta\u00f1o oscuro y \u00e1spero; vest\u00eda un traje negro bordado. Lo envolv\u00eda un aura extra\u00f1a, difuminada, ensombrecida por las otras presentes en la sala. Era la cosa m\u00e1s hermosa y terrible que yo jam\u00e1s hab\u00eda contemplado.\n\nNot\u00e9 un doloroso espasmo en las tripas. Baj\u00e9 la vista al suelo. \u00bfSer\u00edan capaces de dispararme solo por mirar?\n\nNashira segu\u00eda hablando y pase\u00e1ndose entre las filas.\n\n\u2014Los clarividentes hab\u00e9is desarrollado un gran poder a lo largo de los a\u00f1os. Est\u00e1is acostumbrados a sobrevivir. El simple hecho de que est\u00e9is aqu\u00ed, de que hay\u00e1is evitado que os capturen hasta ahora, es un testimonio de vuestra capacidad de adaptaci\u00f3n colectiva. Vuestros dones han resultado valios\u00edsimos para mantener a raya a los emim. Esa es la raz\u00f3n por la que, a lo largo de diez a\u00f1os, recogemos a cuantos podemos de vosotros, y os mantenemos en la Torre esperando vuestra transici\u00f3n desde Scion. Llamamos a esas levas decenales Eras de Huesos. Esta es la Era de Huesos XX.\n\n\u00bbEn su debido momento recibir\u00e9is vuestro n\u00famero de identificaci\u00f3n. Los que sois clarividentes ser\u00e9is asignados a un guardi\u00e1n refa\u00edta. \u2014Se\u00f1al\u00f3 a sus compa\u00f1eros\u2014. Vuestro guardi\u00e1n es vuestro amo en todo. \u00c9l o ella evaluar\u00e1 vuestras habilidades y calcular\u00e1 vuestro valor. Si alguno de vosotros muestra cobard\u00eda, recibir\u00e1 el blus\u00f3n amarillo: el de los cobardes. Los que sois amaur\u00f3ticos, es decir, los pocos de vosotros que no entend\u00e9is ni una palabra de lo que estoy diciendo \u2014a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014, trabajar\u00e9is en nuestras residencias. Para servirnos.\n\nMe pareci\u00f3 que Seb hab\u00eda dejado de respirar.\n\n\u2014Si no aprob\u00e1is el primer examen, o si os gan\u00e1is el blus\u00f3n amarillo dos veces, os pondremos al cuidado del Capataz, que os formar\u00e1 para ser actores. Los actores son los responsables de nuestro entretenimiento, y del entretenimiento de nuestros empleados.\n\nReflexion\u00e9 sobre las dos opciones: monstruo de feria o servicio militar obligatorio. Me temblaron los labios, y la mano que ten\u00eda libre form\u00f3 un pu\u00f1o. Hab\u00eda imaginado muchos motivos para que detuvieran a los videntes, pero ninguno como aquel.\n\nTr\u00e1fico de humanos. No, tr\u00e1fico de videntes. Scion nos hab\u00eda convertido en esclavos.\n\nO\u00ed llorar a varias personas; otros se hab\u00edan quedado entre absortos y horrorizados. Nashira no pareci\u00f3 notarlo. Ni siquiera hab\u00eda pesta\u00f1eado cuando hab\u00eda muerto la chica. No se hab\u00eda inmutado.\n\n\u2014Los refa\u00edtas no olvidamos. Los que os adapt\u00e9is a este sistema ser\u00e9is recompensados. Los que no, castigados. Nosotros no queremos que eso suceda, pero si nos falt\u00e1is al respeto, sufrir\u00e9is. A partir de ahora, esto ser\u00e1 vuestra vida.\n\nSeb se desmay\u00f3. Julian y yo lo mantuvimos en pie entre los dos, pero era un peso muerto.\n\nLos nueve refa\u00edtas bajaron del estrado. Mantuve la cabeza agachada.\n\n\u2014Estos refa\u00edtas han ofrecido sus servicios como guardianes \u2014nos inform\u00f3 Nashira\u2014. Ahora decidir\u00e1n a qui\u00e9nes de vosotros quieren llevarse.\n\nDe los nueve, siete empezaron a pasearse por la sala, entre las hileras de prisioneros. El \u00faltimo (ese al que yo hab\u00eda mirado) se qued\u00f3 junto a Nashira. No me atrev\u00ed a mirar a Julian, pero dije en voz baja:\n\n\u2014Esto no puede ser verdad.\n\n\u2014M\u00edralos \u2014repuso \u00e9l sin apenas mover los labios. Lo o\u00ed porque est\u00e1bamos muy juntos, uno a cada lado de Seb\u2014. No son humanos. Son de alg\u00fan otro sitio.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTe refieres a eso que ha llamado Inframundo? \u2014Cerr\u00e9 la boca porque pas\u00f3 un refa\u00edta a mi lado, y luego continu\u00e9\u2014: La \u00fanica otra dimensi\u00f3n que existe es el \u00e9ter. No hay nada m\u00e1s.\n\n\u2014El \u00e9ter existe junto al mundo de la carne: alrededor de nosotros, y no fuera de nosotros. Esto es diferente.\n\nDentro de m\u00ed borbote\u00f3 una risa desquiciada.\n\n\u2014Scion se ha vuelto majara.\n\nJulian no dijo nada. Al otro lado de la sala una refa\u00edta cogi\u00f3 a Carl por el codo.\n\n\u2014XX-59-1 \u2014dijo\u2014, te reclamo.\n\nCarl trag\u00f3 saliva; lo condujeron al estrado, pero mantuvo una actitud valerosa. Una vez que lo hubieron dejado all\u00ed, los refa\u00edtas siguieron dando vueltas, como ladronzuelos escogiendo a una v\u00edctima adinerada.\n\nMe pregunt\u00e9 qu\u00e9 criterio aplicar\u00edan para elegirnos. \u00bfSer\u00eda malo para Carl que lo hubieran escogido tan pronto?\n\nPasaban los minutos. Las filas iban menguando. La suspirante, que ahora se llamaba XX-59-2, se march\u00f3 con Carl. El or\u00e1culo se fue con Pleione; no parec\u00eda que le interesara mucho aquel tr\u00e1mite. Un refa\u00edta de rostro cruel arrastr\u00f3 a la palmista hasta el estrado. La chica empez\u00f3 a llorar, suplicando en vano. Luego se llevaron a Julian. XX-59-26. Me lanz\u00f3 una mirada, asinti\u00f3 con la cabeza y acompa\u00f1\u00f3 a su nuevo guardi\u00e1n al estrado.\n\nCambiaron otros doce nombres por n\u00fameros. Llegaron al 38. Solo qued\u00e1bamos ocho: los seis amaur\u00f3ticos, un cantor y yo. Alguien tendr\u00eda que escogerme. Varios refa\u00edtas me hab\u00edan examinado, fij\u00e1ndose mucho en mi cuerpo y mis ojos, pero ninguno me hab\u00eda reclamado. \u00bfQu\u00e9 pasar\u00eda si ninguno me escog\u00eda?\n\nEl cantor, un chico menudo con el pelo recogido en trencitas cosidas, se march\u00f3 con Pleione: 39. La \u00fanica vidente que quedaba era yo.\n\nLos refa\u00edtas miraron a Nashira, quien a su vez nos mir\u00f3 a los que qued\u00e1bamos. Se me tens\u00f3 la columna vertebral.\n\nEntonces el que me hab\u00eda estado mirando dio unos pasos adelante. No dijo nada, pero se acerc\u00f3 a Nashira y lade\u00f3 la cabeza hacia m\u00ed. Nashira me mir\u00f3; levant\u00f3 una mano y me hizo se\u00f1as con un largo dedo. Llevaba guantes negros, igual que Pleione. Todos llevaban guantes negros.\n\nSeb segu\u00eda inconsciente. Intent\u00e9 deslizarlo hasta el suelo, pero se aferr\u00f3 a m\u00ed. Al percatarse del apuro en que me encontraba, otro amaur\u00f3tico me lo quit\u00f3 de los brazos.\n\nTodas las miradas estaban fijas en m\u00ed cuando camin\u00e9 por el suelo de m\u00e1rmol y me par\u00e9 ante aquella pareja. De cerca, Nashira parec\u00eda mucho m\u00e1s alta, y el otro refa\u00edta me sacaba casi dos palmos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTu nombre?\n\n\u2014Paige Mahoney.\n\n\u2014\u00bfDe d\u00f3nde eres?\n\n\u2014Cohorte I.\n\n\u2014Pero tienes otro origen.\n\nDeb\u00edan de haber visto mis documentos.\n\n\u2014De Irlanda \u2014contest\u00e9.\n\nUn leve temblor recorri\u00f3 toda la sala.\n\n\u2014\u00bfDe Scion Belfast?\n\n\u2014No, de la Irlanda libre.\n\nAlguien dio un grito ahogado de asombro.\n\n\u2014Ya veo. Un esp\u00edritu libre. \u2014Sus ojos parec\u00edan bioluminiscentes\u2014. Tu aura nos tiene intrigados. Dime, \u00bfqu\u00e9 eres?\n\n\u2014Soy cifradora \u2014respond\u00ed.\n\nMe mantuve impert\u00e9rrita bajo su atenta mirada.\n\n\u2014Tengo buenas noticias para ti, Paige Mahoney. \u2014Nashira le puso una mano en el brazo a su acompa\u00f1ante\u2014. Le has llamado la atenci\u00f3n al consorte de sangre: Arcturus, Custodio de los Mesarthim. Ha decidido ser tu guardi\u00e1n.\n\nLos refa\u00edtas se miraron. No dijeron nada, pero me pareci\u00f3 que sus auras se tensaban.\n\n\u2014No es habitual que se interese por un humano \u2014continu\u00f3 Nashira en voz baja, como si me confiara un secreto muy bien guardado\u2014. Puedes considerarte muy afortunada.\n\nYo no me sent\u00eda nada afortunada. Estaba horrorizada.\n\nEl consorte de sangre se inclin\u00f3 hasta ponerse a mi nivel. Tuvo que inclinarse mucho. No desvi\u00e9 la mirada.\n\n\u2014XX-59-40. \u2014Ten\u00eda una voz grave y suave\u2014. Te reclamo.\n\nAs\u00ed que ese tipo iba a ser mi amo. Lo mir\u00e9 a los ojos, pese a saber que no deb\u00eda. Quer\u00eda saber qu\u00e9 cara ten\u00eda mi enemigo.\n\nYa hab\u00edan escogido a todos los videntes. Nashira elev\u00f3 la voz y se dirigi\u00f3 a los seis amaur\u00f3ticos.\n\n\u2014Vosotros seis esperar\u00e9is aqu\u00ed. Enviaremos una escolta que os llevar\u00e1 al cuartel. Los dem\u00e1s ir\u00e9is con vuestros guardianes a las residencias. Buena suerte a todos, y recordad: aqu\u00ed sois libres de tomar las decisiones que quer\u00e1is. Solo espero que tom\u00e9is las correctas.\n\nDicho esto, se dio la vuelta y ech\u00f3 a andar. La siguieron dos casacas rojas. Yo me qued\u00e9 all\u00ed plantada con mi guardi\u00e1n, petrificada.\n\nArcturus fue hacia la puerta y me hizo una se\u00f1a con la mano para que lo siguiera. Como no obedec\u00ed al instante, se par\u00f3 y se qued\u00f3 esperando.\n\nTodos me miraban. Me daba vueltas la cabeza. Lo vi todo rojo, y luego blanco.\n\nLo segu\u00ed.\n\nLa primera luz del alba acariciaba las torres de los edificios. Los videntes salieron detr\u00e1s de sus guardianes, en grupos de tres o cuatro. Yo era la \u00fanica que ten\u00eda un guardi\u00e1n para m\u00ed sola.\n\nArcturus se puso a mi lado. Demasiado cerca. Se me agarrot\u00f3 la espalda.\n\n\u2014Debes saber que aqu\u00ed dormimos durante el d\u00eda.\n\nNo dije nada.\n\n\u2014Tambi\u00e9n debes saber que no tengo por costumbre aceptar inquilinos. \u2014Qu\u00e9 forma tan bonita de llamar a los prisioneros\u2014. Si apruebas tus ex\u00e1menes, vivir\u00e1s conmigo de forma permanente. Si no, me ver\u00e9 obligado a desalojarte. Y aqu\u00ed las calles no son nada acogedoras.\n\nSegu\u00ed callada. Ya sab\u00eda que las calles no eran acogedoras. No pod\u00edan ser mucho peores que las de Londres.\n\n\u2014No eres muda \u2014dijo\u2014. Habla.\n\n\u2014No sab\u00eda que pudiera hablar sin permiso.\n\n\u2014Te concedo ese privilegio.\n\n\u2014No tengo nada que decir.\n\nArcturus me escudri\u00f1\u00f3 con la mirada. Sus ojos conten\u00edan un calor mortecino.\n\n\u2014Estamos instalados en la residencia de Magdalen. \u2014Se coloc\u00f3 de espaldas al amanecer\u2014. Supongo que tienes fuerzas suficientes para andar, \u00bfno, chica?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, puedo andar \u2014contest\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Estupendo.\n\nNos pusimos en marcha. Salimos del edificio; en la calle, el siniestro espect\u00e1culo hab\u00eda terminado. Vi a la contorsionista cerca del escenario, guardando sus sedas en una bolsa. Nuestras miradas se encontraron un momento, y luego ella mir\u00f3 hacia otro lado. Ten\u00eda el aura delicada de una cartom\u00e1ntica. Y los cardenales de una prisionera.\n\nMagdalen era un edificio espl\u00e9ndido. Era de otra \u00e9poca, de otro mundo. Ten\u00eda una capilla, campanarios y altas ventanas de cristal tras las que brillaba la intensa luz de las antorchas. Mientras nos acerc\u00e1bamos y entr\u00e1bamos por una puerta peque\u00f1a, sonaron cinco campanadas. Un chico con blus\u00f3n rojo nos salud\u00f3 con una reverencia cuando entramos en un soportal. Segu\u00ed a Arcturus al interior en penumbra. Subimos por una escalera de caracol de piedra y nos detuvimos ante una puerta maciza, que \u00e9l abri\u00f3 con una llave peque\u00f1a de bronce.\n\n\u2014Por aqu\u00ed \u2014me dijo\u2014. Este ser\u00e1 tu nuevo hogar. La Torre del Fundador.\n\nMe asom\u00e9 a mi c\u00e1rcel.\n\nTras la puerta hab\u00eda una gran c\u00e1mara rectangular. Los muebles eran francamente opulentos. Las paredes, blancas, estaban desprovistas de adornos; lo \u00fanico que hab\u00eda colgado en ellas era un emblema con un dibujo en blanco y negro coronado con tres flores. Un tablero de ajedrez con los escaques oblicuos. A ambos lados de las ventanas, que daban a unos patios, colgaban unas gruesas cortinas rojas. Hab\u00eda dos butacas ante una espl\u00e9ndida chimenea donde ard\u00eda la le\u00f1a, y en un rinc\u00f3n, un div\u00e1n rojo con un mont\u00f3n de cojines de seda encima. A su lado hab\u00eda un reloj de p\u00e9ndulo. En un gram\u00f3fono colocado sobre un escritorio de madera oscura sonaba \u00abGloomy Sunday\u00bb, y junto a la gran cama con dosel hab\u00eda una mesilla de noche elegante. Una gruesa alfombra estampada cubr\u00eda el suelo.\n\nArcturus cerr\u00f3 la puerta con una llave que a continuaci\u00f3n se guard\u00f3.\n\n\u2014No s\u00e9 mucho acerca de los humanos. Quiz\u00e1 tengas que recordarme cu\u00e1les son tus necesidades. \u2014Dio unos golpecitos en el escritorio con un dedo\u2014. Aqu\u00ed hay unas sustancias medicinales. Tienes que tomarte una pastilla de cada todas las noches.\n\nNo dije nada, pero le ech\u00e9 una ojeada a su onirosaje. Antiguo y extra\u00f1o, endurecido por el tiempo. Un farol m\u00e1gico en el \u00e9ter.\n\nAquel intruso del I-4 era, sin duda, uno de ellos.\n\nNot\u00e9 que sus ojos le\u00edan m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de mi cara. Estudiaban mi aura; estaba tratando de averiguar qu\u00e9 tipo de carga se hab\u00eda echado encima. O qu\u00e9 tesoro escondido hab\u00eda descubierto. Ese pensamiento aviv\u00f3 mi odio.\n\n\u2014M\u00edrame.\n\nEra una orden. Levant\u00e9 la barbilla y lo mir\u00e9. Por nada del mundo iba a dejar que viera el miedo que me inspiraba.\n\n\u2014No tienes visi\u00f3n espiritista \u2014observ\u00f3\u2014. Eso ser\u00e1 un inconveniente aqu\u00ed. A menos que tengas alguna forma de compensarlo, por supuesto. Quiz\u00e1 un sexto sentido m\u00e1s potente.\n\nNo repliqu\u00e9. Siempre hab\u00eda so\u00f1ado con tener aunque solo fuera una visi\u00f3n espiritista parcial, pero segu\u00eda siendo ciega espiritista. No ve\u00eda las lucecitas del \u00e9ter; solo las notaba. Sin embargo Jaxon nunca lo hab\u00eda considerado una debilidad.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTienes alguna pregunta?\n\nExaminaba cada cent\u00edmetro de mi cara con sus implacables ojos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfD\u00f3nde dormir\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Har\u00e9 que te preparen una habitaci\u00f3n. De momento dormir\u00e1s aqu\u00ed. \u2014Se\u00f1al\u00f3 el div\u00e1n\u2014. \u00bfAlgo m\u00e1s?\n\n\u2014No.\n\n\u2014Hoy tengo que salir. Durante mi ausencia puedes familiarizarte con la ciudad. Volver\u00e1s todos los d\u00edas antes del amanecer. Si suena la sirena, volver\u00e1s inmediatamente a esta habitaci\u00f3n. Si robas o tocas algo, lo sabr\u00e9.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, se\u00f1or.\n\nEl \u00abse\u00f1or\u00bb se me escap\u00f3.\n\n\u2014T\u00f3mate esto. \u2014Me tendi\u00f3 una pastilla\u2014. T\u00f3mate otra ma\u00f1ana por la noche, junto con las otras.\n\nNo la cog\u00ed. Arcturus llen\u00f3 un vaso de agua de una jarra, sin mirarme. Me acerc\u00f3 el vaso y el comprimido. Me humedec\u00ed los labios.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 pasa si no me la tomo?\n\nHubo un largo silencio.\n\n\u2014Era una orden \u2014dijo por fin\u2014. No te lo he pedido. Te lo he ordenado.\n\nEl coraz\u00f3n me palpitaba. Hice rodar el comprimido entre los dedos. Era de color verde gris\u00e1ceo. Me lo tragu\u00e9. Ten\u00eda un sabor amargo.\n\nArcturus cogi\u00f3 el vaso.\n\n\u2014Otra cosa. \u2014Arcturus me agarr\u00f3 por la nuca con la mano que ten\u00eda libre, y me oblig\u00f3 a mirarlo. Not\u00e9 un escalofr\u00edo\u2014. Te dirigir\u00e1s a m\u00ed \u00fanicamente por mi t\u00edtulo solemne: Custodio. \u00bfEntendido?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\nTuve que esforzarme para decirlo. \u00c9l me mir\u00f3 a los ojos, grab\u00e1ndome su mensaje a fuego, y entonces afloj\u00f3 la mano.\n\n\u2014Cuando regrese, iniciaremos tu entrenamiento. \u2014Se dirigi\u00f3 hacia la puerta\u2014. Que duermas bien.\n\nNo puede evitarlo: solt\u00e9 una d\u00e9bil y amarga risotada.\n\nArcturus volvi\u00f3 un poco la cabeza. Vi que sus ojos se vaciaban. No dijo nada m\u00e1s y se march\u00f3. La llave gir\u00f3 en la cerradura.\n\nLos destellos rojizos del sol entraban por la ventana. La luz me sac\u00f3 de un sue\u00f1o profundo. Ten\u00eda mal sabor de boca. Por un instante cre\u00ed estar en mi dormitorio del I-5, lejos de Jax, lejos del trabajo.\n\nEntonces lo record\u00e9. Las Eras de Huesos. Los refa\u00edtas. Un disparo y un cad\u00e1ver.\n\nNo, no me encontraba en el I-5.\n\nLos cojines estaban en el suelo; los hab\u00eda tirado mientras dorm\u00eda. Me incorpor\u00e9 y mir\u00e9 alrededor; me frot\u00e9 la agarrotada nuca. Me dol\u00eda la parte baja de la espalda, y me martilleaba la cabeza. Una de mis \u00abresacas\u00bb, como las llamaba Nick. De Arcturus, el Custodio, no hab\u00eda ni rastro.\n\nEl gram\u00f3fono segu\u00eda lament\u00e1ndose. Reconoc\u00ed la \u00abDanse Macabre\u00bb de Saint-Sa\u00ebns inmediatamente, y eso me alarm\u00f3: Jax la escuchaba cuando estaba de muy mal humor, generalmente tom\u00e1ndose una copa de vino a\u00f1ejo. Siempre me hab\u00eda puesto los pelos de punta. Apagu\u00e9 el gram\u00f3fono, descorr\u00ed las cortinas y ech\u00e9 un vistazo al patio orientado a levante. Hab\u00eda un guardia refa\u00edta apostado junto a una puerta gigantesca de roble, de doble hoja.\n\nHab\u00edan dejado un uniforme limpio encima de la cama. Encontr\u00e9 una nota manuscrita sobre la almohada, escrita en tinta negra:\n\nEspera a que suene la campana.\n\nPens\u00e9 en lo que nos hab\u00edan dicho en el serm\u00f3n. Nadie hab\u00eda mencionado ninguna campana. Arrugu\u00e9 la nota y la tir\u00e9 a la chimenea, donde otros trozos de papel esperaban a que los quemaran.\n\nPas\u00e9 unos minutos registrando la habitaci\u00f3n, revisando cada rinc\u00f3n. Las ventanas no ten\u00edan barrotes, pero no pod\u00edan abrirse. En las paredes no encontr\u00e9 junturas ocultas ni paneles deslizantes. Hab\u00eda otras dos puertas, una de ellas oculta tras unas gruesas cortinas rojas y cerrada con llave. La otra conduc\u00eda a un gran cuarto de ba\u00f1o. Como no vi ning\u00fan interruptor, me llev\u00e9 una l\u00e1mpara de aceite y entr\u00e9. La ba\u00f1era era del mismo m\u00e1rmol negro que el suelo de la biblioteca, y la rodeaban unas cortinas transparentes. Un espejo dorado ocupaba casi toda la pared; me acerqu\u00e9, pues sent\u00eda curiosidad por saber si la mutilaci\u00f3n que hab\u00eda sufrido mi vida se reflejaba en mi cara.\n\nNo, no se reflejaba. Con excepci\u00f3n del corte en el labio, estaba igual que antes de que me capturaran. Me sent\u00e9 en la oscuridad y me puse a pensar.\n\nLos refa\u00edtas hab\u00edan cerrado su trato en 1859, exactamente dos siglos atr\u00e1s. Si no recordaba mal lo que hab\u00eda aprendido en el colegio, eso correspond\u00eda al mandato de lord Palmerston. Mucho antes del fin de la monarqu\u00eda, en 1901, cuando una nueva Rep\u00fablica de Inglaterra asumi\u00f3 el poder y declar\u00f3 la guerra a la antinaturalidad. Esa rep\u00fablica hab\u00eda llevado al pa\u00eds por casi tres d\u00e9cadas de adoctrinamiento y propaganda, hasta que en 1929 pas\u00f3 a llamarse Scion. Fue entonces cuando eligieron al Primer Inquisidor, y Londres se convirti\u00f3 en la primera ciudadela de Scion. Todo eso me hac\u00eda pensar que, de alguna forma, la llegada de los refa\u00edtas hab\u00eda desencadenado el advenimiento de Scion. Todas esas sandeces sobre la antinaturalidad solo eran un cuento para saciar a esos seres llegados de qui\u00e9n sab\u00eda d\u00f3nde.\n\nInspir\u00e9 hondo. Ten\u00eda que haber alguna otra explicaci\u00f3n. No sab\u00eda c\u00f3mo, pero lo entender\u00eda. De momento mi prioridad consist\u00eda en salir de all\u00ed. Hasta que lo consiguiera, buscar\u00eda respuestas en ese lugar. No pod\u00eda largarme sin m\u00e1s, ahora que sab\u00eda ad\u00f3nde enviaban a los videntes. No pod\u00eda olvidar cuanto hab\u00eda visto y o\u00eddo.\n\nPrimero buscar\u00eda a Seb. Su condici\u00f3n de amaur\u00f3tico y su ignorancia hac\u00edan que estuviera m\u00e1s asustado que los dem\u00e1s. Solo era un ni\u00f1o: no se merec\u00eda eso. Cuando lo hubiera encontrado, buscar\u00eda a Julian y a los otros detenidos de la Era de Huesos XX. Quer\u00eda saber m\u00e1s cosas sobre los emim, y hasta que volviera mi guardi\u00e1n, ellos eran mi \u00fanica fuente de informaci\u00f3n.\n\nSon\u00f3 la campana de la torre de mi edificio, y al cabo de un momento son\u00f3 otra a lo lejos. \u00abEspera a que suene la campana.\u00bb Deb\u00eda de haber toque de queda.\n\nPuse la l\u00e1mpara en el borde de la ba\u00f1era. Mientras me echaba agua fr\u00eda en la cara, consider\u00e9 mis opciones. De momento lo mejor que pod\u00eda hacer era seguirles la corriente a los refa\u00edtas. Si sobreviv\u00eda el tiempo suficiente, intentar\u00eda ponerme en contacto con Jax. Jax vendr\u00eda a buscarme; nunca dejaba atr\u00e1s a un vidente. Al menos, a ning\u00fan vidente que trabajara para \u00e9l. M\u00e1s de una vez le hab\u00eda visto dejar morir a limosneros.\n\nEn la habitaci\u00f3n cada vez estaba m\u00e1s oscuro. Abr\u00ed el caj\u00f3n del medio del escritorio. Dentro hab\u00eda tres bl\u00edsters de pastillas. No quer\u00eda tom\u00e1rmelas, pero supon\u00eda que el Custodio las contar\u00eda para asegurarse de que lo hab\u00eda hecho. A menos que yo las tirara.\n\nSaqu\u00e9 una de cada bl\u00edster. Roja, blanca y verde. Ninguna estaba etiquetada.\n\nLa ciudad estaba llena de no humanos, llena de cosas que yo todav\u00eda no entend\u00eda. Quiz\u00e1 esas pastillas sirvieran para protegerme de algo: toxinas, radiaci\u00f3n... Esa contaminaci\u00f3n sobre la que nos hab\u00eda advertido Scion. Quiz\u00e1 no fuera mentira. Quiz\u00e1 deb\u00eda tom\u00e1rmelas. Tarde o temprano tendr\u00eda que hacerlo, cuando \u00e9l regresara.\n\nPero todav\u00eda no hab\u00eda llegado. De momento no pod\u00eda verme. Tir\u00e9 las tres pastillas por el desag\u00fce del lavamanos. Que se tomara \u00e9l sus medicinas y se atragantara con ellas.\n\nCuando intent\u00e9 abrir la puerta, comprob\u00e9 que no estaba cerrada con llave. Baj\u00e9 los escalones de piedra y volv\u00ed a los soportales. La residencia era enorme. Al llegar a la puerta de la calle, vi que una chica huesuda con la nariz rosada y el cabello de un rubio sucio hab\u00eda sustituido al chico de rojo. Al acercarme a ella, levant\u00f3 la vista.\n\n\u2014Hola \u2014me salud\u00f3\u2014. T\u00fa debes de ser nueva.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Bueno, has iniciado tu viaje en un sitio estupendo. Bienvenida a Magdalen, la mejor residencia de Sheol I. Soy XIX-49-33, portera de noche. \u00bfEn qu\u00e9 puedo ayudarte?\n\n\u2014Quiero salir.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTienes permiso?\n\n\u2014No lo s\u00e9.\n\nY tampoco me importaba.\n\n\u2014Muy bien. Voy a comprobarlo. \u2014Su sonrisa estaba volvi\u00e9ndose tensa\u2014. \u00bfPuedes decirme tu n\u00famero?\n\n\u2014XX-59-40.\n\nLa chica consult\u00f3 su registro. Cuando encontr\u00f3 la p\u00e1gina, me mir\u00f3 con los ojos muy abiertos.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa eres a la que ha hospedado el Custodio.\n\nBueno, si quer\u00eda llamarlo \u00abhospedar\u00bb...\n\n\u2014Nunca hab\u00eda hospedado a ning\u00fan humano \u2014continu\u00f3\u2014. En Magdalen muy pocos lo hacen. Generalmente solo hay refas, con unos pocos asistentes humanos. Tienes mucha suerte de alojarte con \u00e9l, \u00bflo sabes?\n\n\u2014Eso me han dicho \u2014repuse\u2014. Si no te importa, tengo unas cuantas preguntas sobre este sitio.\n\n\u2014Adelante.\n\n\u2014\u00bfD\u00f3nde puedo conseguir comida?\n\n\u2014El Custodio ha dejado instrucciones sobre eso. \u2014Me puso en la mano un pu\u00f1ado de agujas despuntadas, anillos de hojalata baratos y dedales\u2014. Toma. Son _numa_. Los bufones siempre los necesitan. Puedes cambiarlos por comida en los puestos de ah\u00ed fuera (hay una especie de asentamiento ocupa), aunque no es muy buena. Yo esperar\u00eda a que tu guardi\u00e1n te diera de comer.\n\n\u2014\u00bfHay probabilidades de que lo haga?\n\n\u2014Puede ser.\n\nBueno, eso ya estaba aclarado.\n\n\u2014\u00bfD\u00f3nde est\u00e1 ese asentamiento? \u2014pregunt\u00e9.\n\n\u2014En el Broad. Tuerce a la derecha al salir de Magdalen, y luego gira por la primera a la izquierda. Ya lo ver\u00e1s. \u2014Pas\u00f3 la hoja de su registro\u2014. Recuerda, no debes sentarte en zonas p\u00fablicas sin permiso, ni entrar en ninguna residencia. Tampoco debes llevar nada que no sea el uniforme. Ah, y sobre todo, debes volver aqu\u00ed antes del amanecer.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Ver\u00e1s, los refas duermen de d\u00eda. Supongo que es m\u00e1s f\u00e1cil ver a los esp\u00edritus despu\u00e9s de la puesta de sol.\n\n\u2014Y eso hace que el entrenamiento sea m\u00e1s f\u00e1cil.\n\n\u2014Exacto.\n\nNo me gustaba nada esa chica.\n\n\u2014\u00bfT\u00fa tienes un guardi\u00e1n?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Pero ahora est\u00e1 fuera.\n\n\u2014\u00bfD\u00f3nde?\n\n\u2014No lo s\u00e9. Pero estoy segura de que ha ido a hacer algo importante.\n\n\u2014Entiendo. Gracias.\n\n\u2014De nada. Que pases una buena noche. Y recuerda \u2014a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014, no cruces el puente.\n\nMenudo lavado de cerebro. Sonre\u00ed y segu\u00ed adelante.\n\nAl salir de la residencia empec\u00e9 a echar vaho por la boca, y me pregunt\u00e9 d\u00f3nde me hab\u00eda metido. El Custodio. Susurraban su nombre como si fuera una oraci\u00f3n, una promesa. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 \u00e9l era diferente de los otros? \u00bfQu\u00e9 significaba \u00abconsorte de sangre\u00bb? Me promet\u00ed que m\u00e1s tarde intentar\u00eda enterarme. De momento necesitaba comer. Luego buscar\u00eda a Seb. Por lo menos ten\u00eda un sitio donde dormir cuando volviera; tal vez \u00e9l no hubiera tenido tanta suerte.\n\nSe hab\u00eda formado una fina niebla. No parec\u00eda que hubiera electricidad en la ciudad. A mi izquierda hab\u00eda un puente de piedra cuyos lados estaban iluminados con l\u00e1mparas de gas. Ese deb\u00eda de ser el puente que me hab\u00edan prohibido cruzar. Una hilera de guardias vestidos de rojo bloqueaba el camino entre la ciudad y el mundo exterior. Al ver que me quedaba quieta, los diez me apuntaron con sus armas. Armas de Scion, militares. Con las diez miras clavadas en mi espalda, me puse en marcha, dispuesta a explorar la peque\u00f1a ciudad.\n\nLa calle discurr\u00eda junto a los jardines de Magdalen, separada de la residencia por un alto muro. Pas\u00e9 por delante de tres s\u00f3lidas puertas de madera, todas custodiadas por un humano ataviado con el blus\u00f3n rojo. El muro estaba rematado con p\u00faas de hierro. Agach\u00e9 la cabeza y segu\u00ed las indicaciones de 33. La siguiente calle estaba tan desierta como la primera, y no hab\u00eda l\u00e1mparas de gas que me alumbraran el camino. Cuando sal\u00ed de la oscuridad, con las manos cortadas por el fr\u00edo, vi que me encontraba en algo parecido al centro de la ciudad. A mi izquierda se alzaban dos grandes edificios. El que estaba m\u00e1s cerca ten\u00eda columnas y un front\u00f3n decorado, como el Gran Museo de la cohorte I. Pas\u00e9 de largo y llegu\u00e9 al Broad. En los escalones de las puertas y los alf\u00e9izares de las ventanas hab\u00eda velitas encendidas. Los sonidos de la vida humana invad\u00edan la noche.\n\nA lo largo del centro de la calle hab\u00edan montado tenderetes desvencijados y puestos de comida iluminados con faroles sucios. Eran raqu\u00edticos, l\u00fagubres. A ambos lados hab\u00eda sendas hileras de casuchas rudimentarias, chozas y tiendas hechas de chapa de zinc ondulada, contrachapado y pl\u00e1stico: toda una barriada de chabolas en pleno centro de la ciudad.\n\nY la sirena. Un modelo mec\u00e1nico viejo con un solo cuerno enorme. Nada que ver con los sofisticados equipos electr\u00f3nicos de los puestos de avanzada de la DVN, dise\u00f1ados para su uso en caso de emergencia nacional. Confi\u00e9 en no o\u00edr nunca el sonido que sal\u00eda de sus rotores. Lo \u00faltimo que necesitaba era que me persiguiera una m\u00e1quina asesina.\n\nEl olor a carne asada me arrastr\u00f3 hacia la barriada. Me dol\u00eda el est\u00f3mago de hambre. Entr\u00e9 en un t\u00fanel oscuro y estrecho y me dej\u00e9 guiar por el olfato. Las chabolas parec\u00edan conectadas por una serie de t\u00faneles de contrachapado, remendados con trozos de tela y metal. Ten\u00edan pocas ventanas, y estaban iluminadas con velas y l\u00e1mparas de queroseno. Yo era la \u00fanica persona que vest\u00eda blus\u00f3n blanco. Toda aquella gente llevaba ropa mugrienta. Los colores no mejoraban el aspecto de su cutis cetrino ni de sus ojos, apagados e inyectados en sangre. No vi a nadie que pareciera sano. Esos deb\u00edan de ser los actores humanos que no hab\u00edan aprobado los ex\u00e1menes y hab\u00edan sido condenados a entretener a los refa\u00edtas durante el resto de su vida, y seguramente tambi\u00e9n en su otra vida. La mayor\u00eda eran adivinos o augures, las dos clases de videntes m\u00e1s frecuentes. Unos cuantos se fijaron en m\u00ed, pero pasaron de largo. Me dio la impresi\u00f3n de que no quer\u00edan entretenerse mucho mir\u00e1ndome.\n\nEl origen del olor era una gran sala cuadrada con un agujero en el techo de chapa de zinc para dejar salir el humo y el vaho. Me sent\u00e9 en un rinc\u00f3n oscuro y trat\u00e9 de no llamar la atenci\u00f3n. Estaban sirviendo la carne en lonchas finas como una oblea; todav\u00eda estaba rosada y tierna en el centro. Los actores repart\u00edan los platos de carne con verduras y sacaban crema de unas soperas de plata. Se peleaban por la comida, se la met\u00edan en la boca a toda prisa y se chupaban los dedos para recoger el jugo caliente. Antes de que pudiera preguntar, un vidente me puso un plato en las manos. Estaba esquel\u00e9tico e iba vestido con poco m\u00e1s que unos harapos. Llevaba unas gafas con los cristales gruesos muy rayados.\n\n\u2014\u00bfMayfield todav\u00eda est\u00e1 en el Starch? \u2014me pregunt\u00f3.\n\n\u2014\u00bfMayfield?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, Abel Mayfield. \u2014Repiti\u00f3 el nombre tratando de vocalizar mejor\u2014. \u00bfTodav\u00eda est\u00e1 en el Arconte? \u00bfTodav\u00eda es Gran Inquisidor?\n\n\u2014Mayfield lleva a\u00f1os muerto.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n hay ahora?\n\n\u2014Frank Weaver.\n\n\u2014Ah, vale. No tendr\u00e1s un ejemplar de _El descendiente_ , \u00bfverdad?\n\n\u2014Me lo han confiscado todo. \u2014Mir\u00e9 alrededor buscando un sitio donde sentarme\u2014. \u00bfDe verdad cre\u00edas que Mayfield todav\u00eda era Inquisidor?\n\nEra imposible no conocer la identidad del Inquisidor. Exceptuando a Scarlett Burnish, Weaver era el alma de Scion.\n\n\u2014Oye, no te pongas as\u00ed. \u00bfC\u00f3mo iba a saberlo? Solo nos llegan noticias una vez cada diez a\u00f1os. \u2014Me agarr\u00f3 por el brazo y me llev\u00f3 hasta un rinc\u00f3n\u2014. Dime, \u00bfvolvi\u00f3 a publicarse _El pendenciero_?\n\n\u2014No. \u2014Intent\u00e9 soltarme, pero el chico no me dej\u00f3.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSigue Sinatra en la lista negra?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Qu\u00e9 pena. \u00bfY el Fleapit? \u00bfLo encontraron?\n\n\u2014Cyril, acaba de llegar. Creo que necesita comer un poco.\n\nAlguien se hab\u00eda percatado del aprieto en que me hallaba. Cyril se volvi\u00f3 hacia una joven que lo miraba con los brazos cruzados y la barbilla levantada.\n\n\u2014Eres una cascarrabias de mierda, Rymore. \u00bfHa vuelto a salirte el diez de espadas?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, cuando pensaba en ti.\n\nCyril la mir\u00f3 con odio, cogi\u00f3 su plato y se larg\u00f3. Intent\u00e9 agarrarlo por la camisa, pero era \u00e1gil como un carterista. La chica sacudi\u00f3 la cabeza. Ten\u00eda una cara de facciones peque\u00f1as, muy expresiva, enmarcada por una mata de rizos negros. Los labios, pintados de rojo, destacaban como una herida reciente contra su piel.\n\n\u2014Te dieron el serm\u00f3n anoche, hermanita. \u2014Ten\u00eda una forma peculiar de pronunciar las erres\u2014. Tu est\u00f3mago no habr\u00eda soportado esa clase de comida.\n\n\u2014Com\u00ed ayer por la ma\u00f1ana \u2014repliqu\u00e9.\n\nNo supe si re\u00edrme de que aquella cr\u00eda tan peque\u00f1aja me llamara \u00abhermanita\u00bb.\n\n\u2014Es el flux, cr\u00e9eme. Te ha jodido el cerebro. \u2014Mir\u00f3 alrededor y a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014: R\u00e1pido. Ven conmigo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfAd\u00f3nde?\n\n\u2014Tengo un refugio. All\u00ed podremos hablar.\n\nNo me convenc\u00eda la idea de seguir a una desconocida, pero necesitaba hablar con alguien. La segu\u00ed.\n\nMi gu\u00eda parec\u00eda conocer a todo el mundo. Por el camino entrechoc\u00f3 las manos con varias personas, sin dejar de vigilarme para ver si todav\u00eda la segu\u00eda. La ropa que llevaba parec\u00eda en mejor estado que la de los otros actores: una blusa fina con mangas acampanadas y unos pantalones que le quedaban cortos. Deb\u00eda de estar congelada. Descorri\u00f3 una cortina deshilachada.\n\n\u2014R\u00e1pido \u2014volvi\u00f3 a decir\u2014. O nos ver\u00e1n.\n\nDetr\u00e1s de la cortina estaba en penumbra, pero un hornillo de parafina manten\u00eda las sombras a raya. Me sent\u00e9. Un mont\u00f3n de s\u00e1banas sucias y un coj\u00edn formaban una cama rudimentaria.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSiempre recoges a los perros callejeros?\n\n\u2014A veces. S\u00e9 por lo que se pasa cuando se llega aqu\u00ed. \u2014La chica se sent\u00f3 junto al hornillo\u2014. Bienvenida a la Familia.\n\n\u2014\u00bfFormo parte de una familia?\n\n\u2014Ahora s\u00ed, hermana. Y no se trata de una secta ni nada parecido, si es eso lo que est\u00e1s pensando. Es una familia formada para protegerse. \u2014Se puso a manipular el hornillo\u2014. Me imagino que vienes del sindicato.\n\n\u2014Es posible.\n\n\u2014Yo no. En el centro no necesitaban a gente como yo. \u2014Una d\u00e9bil sonrisa acarici\u00f3 sus labios\u2014. Llegu\u00e9 aqu\u00ed en la Era de Huesos anterior.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCu\u00e1nto tiempo hace de eso?\n\n\u2014Diez a\u00f1os. Yo ten\u00eda trece. \u2014Extendi\u00f3 una mano encallecida. Dud\u00e9 un instante, y luego se la estrech\u00e9\u2014. Liss Rymore \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014Paige.\n\n\u2014\u00bfXX-59-40?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\nLiss detect\u00f3 mi desagrado.\n\n\u2014Lo siento \u2014se disculp\u00f3\u2014. Es la fuerza de la costumbre. O quiz\u00e1 que me han lavado el cerebro.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa \u00bfqu\u00e9 n\u00famero tienes?\n\n\u2014XIX-49-1.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo es que sabes mi n\u00famero?\n\nVerti\u00f3 un poco de alcohol de quemar en el hornillo.\n\n\u2014En una ciudad tan peque\u00f1a como esta, las noticias vuelan. No nos llega informaci\u00f3n del exterior. No les gusta que nos enteremos de lo que pasa ah\u00ed fuera, en el mundo libre. Si es que se puede llamar libre a Scion. \u2014Prendi\u00f3 una llama azul\u2014. Todo el mundo habla de tu n\u00famero.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014\u00bfNo te has enterado? Arcturus Mesarthim nunca hab\u00eda alojado a un humano en su residencia. De hecho, jam\u00e1s se ha interesado por los humanos. Siento decirlo, pero eso ha sido un notici\u00f3n. Es lo que pasa cuando no puedes leer los peri\u00f3dicos sensacionalistas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSabes por qu\u00e9 me eligi\u00f3 a m\u00ed?\n\n\u2014Supongo que Nashira se ha encaprichado de ti. \u00c9l es el consorte de sangre, su prometido. Nosotros procuramos no acercarnos a \u00e9l. Aunque la verdad es que nunca sale de esa torre. \u2014Puso una cacerola sobre el hornillo\u2014. Antes de hablar, d\u00e9jame prepararte algo de comer. Lo siento, hace a\u00f1os que los bufones no comemos en mesas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfLos bufones?\n\n\u2014Es como los casacas llaman a los actores. No les caemos muy bien.\n\nCalent\u00f3 un poco de caldo y lo verti\u00f3 en un cuenco. Le ofrec\u00ed unos cuantos anillos, pero ella neg\u00f3 con la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Invita la casa.\n\nDi un sorbo de caldo. Era inodoro y transparente, y sab\u00eda a rayos, pero estaba caliente. Liss me observ\u00f3 mientras yo dejaba el cuenco limpio.\n\n\u2014Toma. \u2014Me pas\u00f3 un pedazo de pan rancio\u2014. _Skilly_ y _toke_. Ya te acostumbrar\u00e1s. La mayor\u00eda de los guardianes se olvidan de que necesitamos comer con regularidad.\n\n\u2014All\u00ed hab\u00eda carne. \u2014Se\u00f1al\u00e9 la sala central.\n\n\u2014Eso solo es para celebrar la Era XX. Este _skilly_ lo he preparado yo antes con los jugos. \u2014Se sirvi\u00f3 un cuenco\u2014. Contamos con que los carro\u00f1os no nos dejen morir de hambre. Esta porquer\u00eda viene de las cocinas \u2014dijo se\u00f1alando el hornillo y la cacerola\u2014. Se supone que solo pueden cocinar para los casacas rojas, pero, cuando pueden, roban algo de comida y nos la dan. Sin embargo, se muestran menos dispuestos a ayudarnos desde que pillaron a una de las chicas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 pas\u00f3?\n\n\u2014A la carro\u00f1a le dieron una paliza. Al vidente al que estaba alimentando lo castigaron con cuatro d\u00edas de privaci\u00f3n de sue\u00f1o. Cuando lo soltaron, estaba delirando.\n\nPrivaci\u00f3n de sue\u00f1o. Era un castigo nuevo. Las mentes videntes funcionaban en dos niveles: vida y muerte. Era agotador. Mantener despierto a un vidente durante cuatro d\u00edas equival\u00eda a hacerle enloquecer.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n trae la comida a la ciudad?\n\n\u2014Ni idea. Quiz\u00e1 la traigan en tren. Hay una l\u00ednea que une Londres con Sheol I. Nadie sabe d\u00f3nde est\u00e1n las entradas del t\u00fanel, evidentemente. \u2014Acerc\u00f3 m\u00e1s los pies al hornillo\u2014. \u00bfCu\u00e1nto cre\u00edste que te hab\u00eda durado la peste cerebral?\n\n\u2014Una eternidad.\n\n\u2014Pues dur\u00f3 cinco d\u00edas. Dejan a los novatos en el infierno cinco d\u00edas antes de administrarles el ant\u00eddoto.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Para que se enteren lo antes posible de cu\u00e1l es su sitio. Aqu\u00ed no eres m\u00e1s que un n\u00famero, a menos que te ganes los colores. \u2014Liss se sirvi\u00f3 un cuenco de caldo\u2014. As\u00ed que est\u00e1s en Magdalen.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Supongo que estar\u00e1s harta de o\u00edrlo, pero puedes considerarte afortunada. Magdalen es uno de los sitios m\u00e1s seguros para los humanos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCu\u00e1ntos hay?\n\n\u2014\u00bfCu\u00e1ntos humanos?\n\n\u2014No, cu\u00e1ntas residencias.\n\n\u2014Ah, vale. Bueno, cada residencia es un peque\u00f1o distrito. Hay siete para humanos: Balliol, Corpus, Exeter, Merton, Oriel, Queens y Trinity. Nashira vive en la Residencia del Suzerano, que es donde recibiste el serm\u00f3n. Luego est\u00e1n la Casa, un poco m\u00e1s al sur; el Castillo (la penitenciar\u00eda); y este vertedero, el Poblado. La calle se llama el Broad. La otra calle paralela es el Paseo Magdalen.\n\n\u2014Y m\u00e1s all\u00e1, \u00bfqu\u00e9 hay?\n\n\u2014Campos desiertos. Nosotros lo llamamos la Tierra de Nadie. Est\u00e1 sembrada de minas y trampas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfNadie ha intentado nunca cruzarla?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\nSe le tensaron los hombros. Di otro sorbo de _skilly_.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 tal en la Torre?\n\nLa mir\u00e9.\n\n\u2014A m\u00ed no me llevaron a la Torre.\n\n\u2014Naciste con buena estrella, \u00bfno? \u2014Frunc\u00ed el entrecejo, y Liss sacudi\u00f3 la cabeza\u2014. Reclutan a los videntes de cada Era de Huesos durante diez a\u00f1os. Algunos se pasan una d\u00e9cada en la Torre antes de que los destinen aqu\u00ed.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEs una broma?\n\nEso explicar\u00eda lo de aquel pobre diablo que llevaba all\u00ed nueve a\u00f1os.\n\n\u2014No. Son muy astutos en lo referente a mantenernos sumisos. Conocen nuestros puntos d\u00e9biles, saben c\u00f3mo destrozarnos. Diez a\u00f1os en la Torre acaban con cualquiera.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 son?\n\n\u2014Ni idea. Solo s\u00e9 que no son humanos. \u2014Moj\u00f3 un poco de pan en el _skilly_ \u2014. Se comportan como dioses. Les gusta que los tratemos como si lo fueran.\n\n\u2014Y nosotros somos sus adoradores.\n\n\u2014No solo eso. Les debemos la vida. No nos dejan olvidar que nos est\u00e1n protegiendo de los zumbadores, y que la esclavitud es \u00abpor nuestro bien\u00bb. Dicen que es mejor ser esclavos que estar muertos. O fuera, victimizados por el Inquisidor.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 son los zumbadores?\n\n\u2014Los emim. Nosotros los llamamos as\u00ed.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Siempre los hemos llamado as\u00ed. Creo que se lo inventaron los casacas rojas. Son ellos los que tienen que combatirlos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfLo hacen muy a menudo?\n\n\u2014Depende de la \u00e9poca del a\u00f1o. Atacan mucho m\u00e1s en invierno. Debes estar atenta a la sirena. Un solo toque sirve para llamar a los casacas rojas. Si el tono empieza a cambiar, m\u00e9tete dentro. Significa que vienen.\n\n\u2014Sigo sin entender qu\u00e9 son. \u2014Part\u00ed un trozo de pan\u2014. \u00bfSe parecen a los refa\u00edtas?\n\n\u2014He o\u00eddo muchas historias. A los casacas rojas les gusta asustarnos. \u2014Las llamas del hornillo proyectaban sombras danzarinas en su cara\u2014. Dicen que los emim pueden adoptar diferentes formas. Puedes morir por el simple hecho de estar cerca de ellos. Hay quien asegura que pueden arrancarte el esp\u00edritu del cuerpo. Otros los llaman \u00abgigantes pudrientes\u00bb; a saber lo que significa eso. Otros dicen que son huesos andantes que necesitan piel para cubrirse. No s\u00e9 qu\u00e9 hay de cierto en todo eso, pero lo que s\u00ed es cierto es que comen carne humana. Son adictos a la carne humana. No te sorprendas si ves por aqu\u00ed a gente a la que le falta alguna extremidad.\n\nSus palabras deber\u00edan haberme asqueado, pero me dejaron atontada. No parec\u00eda real. Liss estir\u00f3 un brazo y movi\u00f3 la cortina para que no pudieran vernos desde fuera. Me fij\u00e9 en un mont\u00f3n de seda de colores.\n\n\u2014Eres la contorsionista \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTe ha gustado mi actuaci\u00f3n?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, mucho.\n\n\u2014As\u00ed es como me gano la vida aqu\u00ed. Por suerte, aprend\u00ed deprisa. Antes actuaba en los teatros callejeros. \u2014Se relami\u00f3 para limpiarse los labios\u2014. Te vi pasar anoche con Pleione. Tu aura dio mucho que hablar.\n\nNo dije nada. Hablar de mi aura pod\u00eda ser peligroso, sobre todo con una chica a la que acababa de conocer.\n\nLiss se qued\u00f3 escrut\u00e1ndome.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTienes visi\u00f3n espiritista?\n\n\u2014No.\n\nEra verdad.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 te detuvieron?\n\n\u2014Mat\u00e9 a un metrovigilante.\n\nCierto.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo?\n\n\u2014Con un pu\u00f1al \u2014respond\u00ed\u2014. En un momento de exaltaci\u00f3n.\n\nFalso.\n\nLiss se qued\u00f3 mir\u00e1ndome largo rato. Ella ten\u00eda visi\u00f3n permanente, un rasgo t\u00edpico de los adivinos. Ve\u00eda mi aura, roja, con la misma claridad con que ve\u00eda mi cara. Si investigaba un poco, descubrir\u00eda a qu\u00e9 categor\u00eda correspond\u00eda yo.\n\n\u2014No te creo. \u2014Tamborile\u00f3 con los dedos en el suelo\u2014. T\u00fa nunca has derramado tanta sangre.\n\nEra buena, para ser adivina.\n\n\u2014No eres un or\u00e1culo \u2014expuso, como si hablara sola\u2014. He visto a muchos or\u00e1culos. Eres demasiado tranquila para ser una furia, y desde luego no eres m\u00e9dium. De modo que tienes que ser... \u2014el reconocimiento se reflej\u00f3 en sus ojos\u2014 una onir\u00e1mbula. \u2014Volvi\u00f3 a mirarme\u2014. \u00bfCorrecto?\n\nLe sostuve la mirada. Liss, en cuclillas, se ech\u00f3 un poco hacia atr\u00e1s.\n\n\u2014Bueno, ahora lo entiendo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 entiendes?\n\n\u2014Por qu\u00e9 Arcturus te ha elegido. Nashira nunca ha encontrado a ning\u00fan andar\u00edn, y est\u00e1 deseando dar con uno. Quiere asegurarse de que est\u00e1s bien protegida. Si eres la humana de Arcturus, nadie se atrever\u00e1 a tocarte. Si Nashira cree que existe la posibilidad, por remota que sea, de que seas una andarina, ir\u00e1 por ti.\n\n\u2014\u00bfY eso?\n\n\u2014Esto no te va a gustar.\n\nA esas alturas, dudaba mucho que algo pudiera sorprenderme.\n\n\u2014Nashira tiene un don \u2014dijo Liss\u2014. \u00bfTe fijaste en qu\u00e9 aura tan rara desprend\u00eda? \u2014Asent\u00ed\u2014. No tiene una sola capacidad. Puede recorrer diversos caminos por el \u00e9ter.\n\n\u2014Eso es imposible. Todos tenemos un solo don.\n\n\u2014Mira, olv\u00eddate de la realidad. Sheol I tiene sus propias reglas. Ac\u00e9ptalo ya, y todo ser\u00e1 mucho m\u00e1s f\u00e1cil. \u2014Acerc\u00f3 las maltrechas rodillas a la barbilla\u2014. Nashira tiene cinco \u00e1ngeles guardianes. No s\u00e9 c\u00f3mo lo hace, pero consigue que se queden con ella.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEs vinculadora?\n\n\u2014No lo sabemos. Debe de haberlo sido en alg\u00fan momento, pero su aura se ha corrompido.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 la ha corrompido?\n\n\u2014Los \u00e1ngeles. \u2014Frunc\u00ed el entrecejo, y ella suspir\u00f3\u2014. Esto solo es una teor\u00eda. Creemos que puede utilizar los dones que ten\u00edan los \u00e1ngeles cuando viv\u00edan.\n\n\u2014Eso no pueden hacerlo ni los vinculadores.\n\n\u2014Exacto. \u2014Me mir\u00f3 a los ojos\u2014. Si quieres un consejo, mant\u00e9n la cabeza agachada. No dejes que se note lo que eres. Si Nashira se entera de que eres una andarina, est\u00e1s perdida.\n\nMantuve una expresi\u00f3n neutra. Mis tres a\u00f1os en el sindicato me hab\u00edan habituado al peligro, pero ese sitio era diferente. Tendr\u00eda que aprender a esquivar nuevas amenazas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo puedo evitar que lo averig\u00fce?\n\n\u2014Ser\u00e1 dif\u00edcil. Te examinar\u00e1n para que reveles tu don. Eso es lo que significan los blusones. Rosa despu\u00e9s del primer examen, rojo despu\u00e9s del segundo.\n\n\u2014Pero t\u00fa suspendiste los ex\u00e1menes.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, por suerte. Ahora respondo ante el Capataz.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n era tu guardi\u00e1n?\n\nLiss dirigi\u00f3 la mirada hacia el hornillo.\n\n\u2014Gomeisa Sargas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n es?\n\n\u2014El otro soberano de sangre. Siempre hay dos, un var\u00f3n y una f\u00e9mina.\n\n\u2014Pero Arcturus est\u00e1...\n\n\u2014Comprometido con Nashira, s\u00ed. Pero \u00e9l no es de \u00abla sangre\u00bb \u2014dijo con un deje de asco\u2014. Solo los miembros de la familia Sargas pueden acceder a la corona. Los soberanos de sangre no pueden formar pareja: eso ser\u00eda incestuoso. Arcturus es de otra familia.\n\n\u2014Entonces es el pr\u00edncipe consorte.\n\n\u2014Es el consorte de sangre. Es lo mismo. \u00bfM\u00e1s _skilly_?\n\n\u2014No, gracias. \u2014Liss meti\u00f3 el cuenco en un barre\u00f1o lleno de agua grasienta\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9 hiciste para suspender los ex\u00e1menes?\n\n\u2014Me mantuve humana. \u2014Compuso una sonrisita\u2014. Los refas no son humanos. Por mucho que se parezcan a nosotros, no son como nosotros. No tienen nada aqu\u00ed. \u2014Se dio unos golpecitos en el pecho\u2014. Si quieren que trabajemos con ellos, tienen que librarse de nuestras almas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo?\n\nAntes de que Liss pudiera responder, descorrieron la cortina. Un refa\u00edta muy delgado apareci\u00f3 en el umbral.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa \u2014le gru\u00f1\u00f3 a Liss, y ella se llev\u00f3 las manos a la cabeza\u2014. Lev\u00e1ntate. V\u00edstete. Holgazana de mierda. \u00bfY con una invitada? \u00bfAcaso eres una reina?\n\nLiss se levant\u00f3. Toda su fuerza hab\u00eda desaparecido, y de pronto parec\u00eda peque\u00f1a y fr\u00e1gil. Le temblaba la mano izquierda.\n\n\u2014Lo siento, Suhail \u2014dijo\u2014. 40 es nueva aqu\u00ed. Quer\u00eda explicarle las normas de Sheol I.\n\n\u201440 ya deber\u00eda conocer las normas de Sheol I.\n\n\u2014Perd\u00f3name.\n\nEl refa\u00edta levant\u00f3 una mano enguantada como si fuera a pegarle.\n\n\u2014S\u00fabete a las sedas.\n\n\u2014Cre\u00eda que esta noche no ten\u00eda que actuar. \u2014Retrocedi\u00f3 hacia el rinc\u00f3n de la chabola\u2014. \u00bfHas hablado con el Capataz?\n\nMir\u00e9 con detenimiento al interrogador. Era alto y ten\u00eda los ojos dorados, como los otros refa\u00edtas, pero no percib\u00ed aquella mirada extraviada que hab\u00eda apreciado en sus semejantes. Cada arruga de su cara estaba cargada de odio.\n\n\u2014No necesito hablar con el Capataz, miserable marioneta. 15 sigue indispuesto. Los casacas rojas esperan que su idiota favorita lo sustituya. \u2014Estir\u00f3 los labios mostrando los dientes\u2014. A menos que quieras reunirte con \u00e9l en la penitenciar\u00eda, tienes que actuar dentro de diez minutos.\n\nLiss se retrajo. Meti\u00f3 los hombros hacia el pecho y mir\u00f3 hacia otro lado.\n\n\u2014Entiendo \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014As\u00ed me gusta, esclava.\n\nAl salir, el refa\u00edta arranc\u00f3 la cortina. Ayud\u00e9 a Liss a recogerla del suelo. Temblaba ostensiblemente.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n era?\n\n\u2014Suhail Chertan. El Capataz siempre est\u00e1 un poco tenso bajo todo ese maquillaje teatral. Responde ante Suhail si nosotros hacemos algo mal. \u2014Se dio unos toquecitos en los ojos con la manga\u2014. 15 es Jordan, el chico al que sometieron a privaci\u00f3n de sue\u00f1o. Es el otro contorsionista.\n\nLe quit\u00e9 la cortina de las manos y vi que ten\u00eda el blus\u00f3n manchado de sangre.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTe has cortado?\n\n\u2014No es nada.\n\n\u2014Algo te ha pasado.\n\nLa sangre siempre significaba algo.\n\n\u2014Estoy bien. \u2014Se frot\u00f3 la cara, y le aparecieron unas manchas rojas bajo los ojos\u2014. Solo me ha cogido un poco de brillo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo dices?\n\n\u2014Se ha alimentado de m\u00ed.\n\nEstaba segura de que no la hab\u00eda o\u00eddo bien.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQue se ha alimentado?\n\nLiss sonri\u00f3.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSe les olvid\u00f3 mencionar que los refas se alimentan de aura? \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 ser\u00e1 que siempre se les olvida?\n\nTen\u00eda la cara manchada de sangre. Se me hizo un nudo en el est\u00f3mago.\n\n\u2014Eso es imposible. El aura no sustenta la vida \u2014dije\u2014. Sustenta la videncia. No...\n\n\u2014Sustenta su vida.\n\n\u2014Pero... eso significar\u00eda que son algo m\u00e1s que clarividentes. Significar\u00eda que son la encarnaci\u00f3n del \u00e9ter.\n\n\u2014Puede que lo sean. \u2014Liss se ech\u00f3 una manta ra\u00edda sobre los hombros\u2014. Para eso estamos aqu\u00ed los bufones. Nosotros solo somos m\u00e1quinas de aura. Forraje para refas. De vosotros, los casacas, no se alimentan. Ese es vuestro privilegio. \u2014Mir\u00f3 el hornillo\u2014. A menos que suspend\u00e1is los ex\u00e1menes.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 un momento callada. No pod\u00eda concebir que los refa\u00edtas se alimentaran de aura. El aura era una conexi\u00f3n con el \u00e9ter, \u00fanica para cada vidente. No me explicaba c\u00f3mo pod\u00edan utilizarla para sobrevivir.\n\nPero esa informaci\u00f3n arrojaba luz sobre Sheol I. Por eso acog\u00edan a los videntes. Por eso no liquidaban a los actores si no pod\u00edan combatir a los emim. No los quer\u00edan solo para que bailaran, como es l\u00f3gico. Eso eran distracciones necias, para que no se aburrieran con tanto poder. No solo \u00e9ramos sus esclavos, sino tambi\u00e9n su fuente de alimento. Por eso pag\u00e1bamos nosotros por los errores humanos, y no los amaur\u00f3ticos.\n\nY pensar que solo unos d\u00edas atr\u00e1s estaba en Londres, viviendo mi vida en Seven Dials sin saber que exist\u00eda esa colonia.\n\n\u2014Alguien tiene que pararlos \u2014dije\u2014. Esto es una locura.\n\n\u2014Llevan doscientos a\u00f1os aqu\u00ed. \u00bfNo crees que alguien los habr\u00eda parado ya?\n\nMe volv\u00ed. Me martilleaba la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Lo siento. \u2014Liss me mir\u00f3\u2014. No quiero asustarte, pero llevo diez a\u00f1os aqu\u00ed. He visto luchar a muchos, a gente que quer\u00eda volver a su antigua vida, y todos acabaron muertos. Al final dejas de intentarlo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEres profeta?\n\nSab\u00eda que no lo era, pero quer\u00eda ver si me ment\u00eda.\n\n\u2014Lectora. \u2014Era un t\u00e9rmino anticuado para denominar a los cartom\u00e1nticos, un t\u00e9rmino del argot callejero de una d\u00e9cada atr\u00e1s\u2014. Lo supieron la primera vez que le\u00ed las cartas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 viste?\n\nAl principio cre\u00ed que no me hab\u00eda o\u00eddo. Entonces fue hasta el fondo de la chabola y se arrodill\u00f3 junto a una cajita de madera. Sac\u00f3 una baraja de cartas de tarot atadas con una cinta roja y me dio una. El Loco.\n\n\u2014Siempre supe que estaba destinada a que me tocara la china \u2014dijo\u2014. Y ten\u00eda raz\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPuedes ech\u00e1rmelas?\n\n\u2014En otro momento. Ahora tienes que irte. \u2014Liss sac\u00f3 una pastilla de colofonia del arc\u00f3n\u2014. Ven a verme otro d\u00eda, hermana. No puedo protegerte, pero llevo una d\u00e9cada aqu\u00ed. Quiz\u00e1 pueda impedir que te mates. \u2014Me sonri\u00f3 cansada\u2014. Bienvenida a Sheol I.\n\nLiss me indic\u00f3 c\u00f3mo llegar a la Casa Amaur\u00f3tica, que era adonde el Guardi\u00e1n Gris (Graffias Sheratan, el refa encargado de controlar al peque\u00f1o grupo de trabajadores amaur\u00f3ticos) hab\u00eda llevado a Seb; y me dio un poco de carne y pan para que se los diera.\n\n\u2014Que no te vea Graffias \u2014me advirti\u00f3.\n\nHab\u00eda aprendido mucho en solo cuarenta minutos. La revelaci\u00f3n m\u00e1s inquietante era que me hallaba en el radar de Nashira; no me entusiasmaba la perspectiva de convertirme en su esp\u00edritu esclavo para la eternidad. Siempre me hab\u00eda dado un miedo tremendo no acabar en el centro del \u00e9ter, el lugar donde mueren todas las cosas. Me horrorizaba la idea de ser un esp\u00edritu inquieto, un poco de munici\u00f3n con la que los videntes podr\u00edan comerciar y a la que podr\u00edan maltratar. Con todo, eso nunca me hab\u00eda impedido llamar a bandadas de esp\u00edritus para que me protegieran, ni pujar en nombre de Jax por la enojad\u00edsima Anne Naylor, que era una cr\u00eda cuando la asesinaron.\n\nAdem\u00e1s, la advertencia de Liss me pon\u00eda muy nerviosa. \u00abAl final dejar\u00e1s de intentarlo.\u00bb Se equivocaba.\n\nLa Casa Amaur\u00f3tica quedaba fuera de la zona donde se erig\u00edan las residencias. Tuve que pasar por varias calles abandonadas para llegar hasta all\u00ed. Hab\u00eda visto mapas de la ciudad en un ejemplar antiguo de _El_ _Pendenciero_ (otro objeto de inter\u00e9s que Jax le hab\u00eda quitado a Didion Waite) y ten\u00eda una idea aproximada de d\u00f3nde estaban la mayor\u00eda de sus monumentos. Me dirig\u00ed hacia el norte por la calle principal. Vi a unos casacas rojas apostados delante de ciertos edificios, pero solo me miraron de pasada. Deb\u00eda de haber alg\u00fan tipo de barrera que nos imped\u00eda escapar, adem\u00e1s de las minas de la Tierra de Nadie. \u00bfCu\u00e1ntos videntes habr\u00edan muerto intentando atravesarla?\n\nAl cabo de pocos minutos encontr\u00e9 el edificio. Era discreto y austero, con una peque\u00f1a media luna de hierro sobre la cancela. Lo que hubiera escrito all\u00ed con anterioridad hab\u00eda sido sustituido por las palabras CASA AMAUR\u00d3TICA. Debajo hab\u00eda una frase en lat\u00edn: DOMUS STULTORUM. No quer\u00eda saber qu\u00e9 significaba. Me asom\u00e9 entre los barrotes y mi mirada se encontr\u00f3 con la de un guardia refa\u00edta. Ten\u00eda el cabello rizado, casta\u00f1o oscuro, y lo llevaba suelto sobre los hombros. El labio inferior, carnoso, le confer\u00eda un aire enfurru\u00f1ado. Deb\u00eda de ser Graffias.\n\n\u2014Espero que tengas un buen motivo para estar cerca de la Casa Amaur\u00f3tica \u2014dijo con una voz cargada de desd\u00e9n.\n\nNo se me ocurri\u00f3 ninguno. La proximidad de ese ser me helaba la sangre.\n\n\u2014No \u2014contest\u00e9\u2014. Pero tengo esto.\n\nLe ense\u00f1\u00e9 mis _numa_ : anillos, dedales, agujas. Graffias me mir\u00f3 con tanto odio, tanto asco, que me estremec\u00ed. Casi prefer\u00eda aquella otra mirada, cruel.\n\n\u2014Yo no acepto sobornos. Ni necesito esas despreciables alhajas humanas para acceder al \u00e9ter.\n\nMe guard\u00e9 las despreciables alhajas humanas en el bolsillo. Qu\u00e9 idea tan est\u00fapida. Claro que no necesitaban esas chorradas. Eran la moneda de los mendigos.\n\n\u2014Lo siento \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014Vuelve a tu residencia, casaca blanca, o llamar\u00e9 a tu guardi\u00e1n para que venga a castigarte.\n\nSac\u00f3 una bandada de esp\u00edritus. Me di la vuelta, me alej\u00e9 de la verja hasta quedar fuera de su campo de visi\u00f3n y no gir\u00e9 la cabeza. Cuando estaba a punto de echar a correr hacia Magdalen, o\u00ed una vocecilla por encima de mi cabeza.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Espera, Paige!\n\nVi asomar una mano entre los barrotes de una ventana del segundo piso. Afloj\u00e9 los hombros, aliviada. Era Seb.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEst\u00e1s bien?\n\n\u2014No. Por favor, Paige. S\u00e1came de aqu\u00ed. Por favor \u2014dijo con voz entrecortada\u2014. Tengo que salir de aqu\u00ed. Siento... Siento mucho haberte llamado antinatural. Lo siento...\n\nVolv\u00ed la cabeza para comprobar que no hubiera nadie mir\u00e1ndome. Trep\u00e9 por la fachada del edificio, met\u00ed una mano bajo mi blus\u00f3n y le di el paquete de comida a Seb.\n\n\u2014Te sacar\u00e9 de aqu\u00ed. \u2014Le apret\u00e9 la mano helada desde el otro lado de los barrotes\u2014. Har\u00e9 todo lo que pueda para sacarte, pero tienes que darme tiempo.\n\n\u2014Me matar\u00e1n. \u2014Desenvolvi\u00f3 el paquete con dedos temblorosos\u2014. Me morir\u00e9 antes de que puedas liberarme.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 te hacen?\n\n\u2014Me hacen fregar el suelo hasta que me sangran las manos, y luego tengo que seleccionar cristales rotos, y escoger los trozos m\u00e1s puros para sus ornamentos. \u2014Me fij\u00e9 en sus manos, llenas de cortes profundos y sucios\u2014. Ma\u00f1ana tengo que empezar a trabajar en las residencias.\n\n\u2014\u00bfDe qu\u00e9 clase de trabajo se trata?\n\n\u2014Todav\u00eda no lo s\u00e9. No quiero saberlo. Creen que soy un... que soy uno de los vuestros. \u2014Ten\u00eda la voz tomada\u2014. \u00bfPara qu\u00e9 me quieren?\n\n\u2014No lo s\u00e9. \u2014Me fij\u00e9 en su ojo derecho, hinchado e inyectado en sangre\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9 te ha pasado en el ojo?\n\n\u2014Uno me peg\u00f3. Yo no hab\u00eda hecho nada, Paige, te lo prometo. Dijo que era escoria humana. Dijo que...\n\nAgach\u00f3 la cabeza y le temblaron los labios. Era su primer d\u00eda y ya lo hab\u00edan utilizado de saco de boxeo. \u00bfC\u00f3mo iba a sobrevivir una semana, un mes? \u00bfO una d\u00e9cada, como Liss?\n\n\u2014C\u00f3mete eso. \u2014Le apret\u00e9 las manos alrededor del paquete\u2014. Ma\u00f1ana, intenta ir a Magdalen.\n\n\u2014\u00bfT\u00fa vives all\u00ed?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Seguramente mi guardi\u00e1n no estar\u00e1. Podr\u00e1s darte un ba\u00f1o y comer algo. \u00bfDe acuerdo?\n\nSeb asinti\u00f3 con la cabeza. Parec\u00eda que deliraba; seguro que sufr\u00eda una conmoci\u00f3n cerebral. Necesitaba ir a un hospital, que lo viera un m\u00e9dico. Pero all\u00ed no hab\u00eda m\u00e9dicos. Seb no le importaba a nadie.\n\nAquella noche yo no pod\u00eda hacer nada m\u00e1s por \u00e9l. Le di un apret\u00f3n en el brazo, me solt\u00e9 de la ventana, ca\u00ed de pie y me dirig\u00ed hacia el centro de la ciudad.\n\nLlegu\u00e9 a la residencia al alba. El portero de d\u00eda, vestido de rojo, me entreg\u00f3 una llave de la c\u00e1mara del Custodio.\n\n\u2014D\u00e9jala encima de su mesa \u2014dijo\u2014. Ni se te ocurra qued\u00e1rtela.\n\nNo le contest\u00e9. Sub\u00ed por la oscura escalera evitando a los dos guardias. Me horrorizaba ver brillar sus ojos en los pasillos; parec\u00edan reflectores naturales en la oscuridad. Y se supon\u00eda que esa era una residencia segura: no quer\u00eda imaginarme c\u00f3mo deb\u00edan de ser las otras.\n\nSonaron las campanas de la torre: era la se\u00f1al para que los humanos volvieran a sus prisiones. Ya en la c\u00e1mara, cerr\u00e9 la puerta con llave y dej\u00e9 la llave encima de la mesa. No hab\u00eda ni rastro del Custodio. Encontr\u00e9 una caja de cerillas en un caj\u00f3n y las us\u00e9 para encender unas velas. En ese mismo caj\u00f3n hab\u00eda tres pares id\u00e9nticos de guantes de piel negros, y un gran anillo de plata con una piedra roja engarzada.\n\nEn una pared hab\u00eda una vitrina de madera oscura de palisandro. Abr\u00ed las puertas de cristal, y mi sexto sentido me dio una punzada. Dentro hab\u00eda una colecci\u00f3n de instrumentos; reconoc\u00ed algunos porque los hab\u00eda visto en el mercado negro. Algunos eran _numa_. La mayor\u00eda eran solo baratijas: una tabla de escritura espiritista, un poco de tiza, una pizarra de espiritismo... la clase de art\u00edculos in\u00fatiles que los amaur\u00f3ticos asociaban con la clarividencia. Otros, como la bola de cristal, los utilizaban los profetas para predecir el futuro. Yo no era adivina; ninguno de aquellos objetos me serv\u00eda para nada. Como Graffias, no necesitaba objetos para tocar el \u00e9ter.\n\nLo que necesitaba era un equipo de soporte vital. Hasta que encontrara alg\u00fan aparato de ox\u00edgeno, tendr\u00eda que vigilar la frecuencia con que me desprend\u00eda de mi esp\u00edritu. As\u00ed era como ampliaba mi percepci\u00f3n del \u00e9ter: pod\u00eda desplazar mi esp\u00edritu de su ubicaci\u00f3n natural y llevarlo hasta los l\u00edmites de mi onirosaje. El problema era que si me demoraba demasiado, mi reflejo respiratorio se deten\u00eda.\n\nMe llam\u00f3 la atenci\u00f3n un estuche peque\u00f1o, rectangular, con una estilizada flor de madera grabada en la tapa. Ocho p\u00e9talos. Solt\u00e9 el cierre y lo abr\u00ed. Dentro hab\u00eda cuatro viales que conten\u00edan un l\u00edquido viscoso de color rojo muy oscuro, casi negro. Cerr\u00e9 el estuche. No quer\u00eda saber m\u00e1s.\n\nNotaba un dolor sordo en un ojo. No vi ropa de dormir; no s\u00e9 por qu\u00e9 esperaba encontrarla. Al Custodio no le importaba lo que yo llevara puesto ni si dorm\u00eda bien. Lo \u00fanico que le interesaba era que respirara.\n\nMe quit\u00e9 las botas y me tumb\u00e9 en el div\u00e1n. En la habitaci\u00f3n hac\u00eda un fr\u00edo tremendo con la chimenea apagada, pero no me atrev\u00ed a tocar las s\u00e1banas de la cama del Custodio. Apoy\u00e9 la mejilla en un gran coj\u00edn de terciopelo.\n\nEl flux me hab\u00eda dejado d\u00e9bil y cansada. Mientras rondaba por los umbrales del sue\u00f1o, mi esp\u00edritu entraba y sal\u00eda del \u00e9ter. Iba rozando onirosajes, captando oleadas de recuerdos. El dolor y la sangre eran denominadores comunes. En esa residencia hab\u00eda otros refas, pero sus mentes eran absolutamente impenetrables. Los humanos estaban m\u00e1s abiertos, pues el miedo debilitaba sus defensas. Sus onirosajes desprend\u00edan una luz intensa, molesta, que delataba aflicci\u00f3n. Al final me qued\u00e9 dormida.\n\nMe despertaron los crujidos del suelo de madera. Abr\u00ed los ojos y vi entrar al Custodio por la puerta. La \u00fanica luz, aparte de las dos velas que quedaban encendidas, era la que desprend\u00edan sus ojos. Cruz\u00f3 la habitaci\u00f3n y vino hasta mi rinc\u00f3n. Me hice la dormida. Al cabo de un rato que me pareci\u00f3 eterno, se march\u00f3. Ya no caminaba con tanto cuidado, y por el ritmo de sus pasos me di cuenta de que cojeaba. Cerr\u00f3 la puerta del cuarto de ba\u00f1o.\n\n\u00bfQu\u00e9 pod\u00eda haber capaz de lastimar a un ser como un refa\u00edta?\n\nTard\u00f3 unos minutos en salir; el coraz\u00f3n me golpeaba tan fuerte en el pecho que pod\u00eda contar cada uno de sus latidos. Cuando vi que giraba el picaporte, volv\u00ed a taparme la cabeza con los brazos. El Custodio sali\u00f3 completamente desnudo. Cerr\u00e9 los ojos.\n\nSegu\u00ed fingiendo que dorm\u00eda mientras \u00e9l iba hacia la cama; por el camino tir\u00f3 al suelo una bola de cristal. Unas ondas oscilaron por el \u00e9ter. Corri\u00f3 las cortinas del dosel de la cama y desapareci\u00f3 de mi vista. Hasta que su mente se seren\u00f3, no abr\u00ed los ojos y me incorpor\u00e9. No detect\u00e9 ning\u00fan movimiento.\n\nDescalza, me acerqu\u00e9 a la cama y met\u00ed los dedos entre las cortinas, separ\u00e1ndolas lo suficiente para ver al Custodio. Estaba tumbado de lado, tapado con las s\u00e1banas, y su piel brillaba en la penumbra. El cabello, enmara\u00f1ado, le cubr\u00eda la cara. Mientras lo observaba, una luz tenue brill\u00f3 bajo las s\u00e1banas, cerca de donde \u00e9l ten\u00eda el brazo derecho.\n\nMe acerqu\u00e9 a su onirosaje. Algo hab\u00eda cambiado. No lo entend\u00eda muy bien, pero percib\u00eda que hab\u00eda algo que no estaba como deber\u00eda. Todos los onirosajes ten\u00edan una especie de luz invisible: un resplandor interior, imperceptible para los sentidos amaur\u00f3ticos. La luz vital del Custodio se estaba apagando.\n\nPermanec\u00eda quieto como un muerto. Mir\u00e9 las s\u00e1banas y vi que estaban salpicadas de un l\u00edquido amarillo verdoso, ligeramente luminoso. Ten\u00eda un d\u00e9bil olor met\u00e1lico. Not\u00e9 como si tiraran de mi sexto sentido, como si estuviera inhalando el \u00e9ter. Retir\u00e9 la pesada ropa de cama.\n\nEl Custodio ten\u00eda una mordedura que supuraba en el lado interior del brazo. Tragu\u00e9 saliva. Vi las marcas de unos dientes, la piel toscamente desgarrada. La herida rezumaba gotas de luz. Sangre.\n\nEra su sangre.\n\nDeb\u00eda de haber dicho a los otros refa\u00edtas ad\u00f3nde iba. Los otros deb\u00edan de saber que hab\u00eda ido a hacer algo peligroso. Si se mor\u00eda, no encontrar\u00edan ninguna prueba que me incriminara.\n\nEntonces record\u00e9 lo que me hab\u00eda dicho Liss en la choza. \u00abLos refas no son humanos. Por mucho que se parezcan a nosotros, no son como nosotros.\u00bb __\n\nComo si fuera a importarles que no hubiera pruebas. Pod\u00edan inventarse las pruebas. Pod\u00edan decir lo que quisieran. Si el Custodio mor\u00eda en su cama, podr\u00edan decir que yo lo hab\u00eda asfixiado. As\u00ed Nashira tendr\u00eda una excusa para matarme pronto.\n\nQuiz\u00e1 deb\u00eda hacerlo. Esa era mi gran oportunidad para librarme de \u00e9l. Ya hab\u00eda matado una vez; pod\u00eda volver a hacerlo.\n\nTen\u00eda tres opciones: quedarme all\u00ed sentada vi\u00e9ndolo morir, matarlo o tratar de impedir que muriera. Prefer\u00eda verlo morir, pero intu\u00eda que ser\u00eda mejor salvarlo. En Magdalen estaba relativamente a salvo. Lo \u00faltimo que quer\u00eda hacer, de momento, era mudarme.\n\n\u00c9l todav\u00eda no me hab\u00eda hecho da\u00f1o, pero seguramente me lo har\u00eda. Para poseerme tendr\u00eda que subyugarme, torturarme, obligarme a obedecerlo por todos los medios que fueran necesarios. Si lo mataba ahora, quiz\u00e1 me salvara. Estir\u00e9 un brazo hacia una almohada. Pod\u00eda hacerlo, pod\u00eda asfixiarlo. \u00abS\u00ed, vamos, m\u00e1talo.\u00bb Dobl\u00e9 los dedos, agarr\u00e9 la tela de algod\u00f3n. \u00ab\u00a1M\u00e1talo!\u00bb\n\nNo, no pod\u00eda. Se despertar\u00eda. Se despertar\u00eda y me partir\u00eda el cuello. Y aunque no me lo partiera, no podr\u00eda escapar. Los vigilantes que hab\u00eda fuera me mandar\u00edan a la horca por asesinato.\n\nTen\u00eda que salvarlo.\n\nAlgo me dec\u00eda que no deb\u00eda tocar las s\u00e1banas. No me fiaba de ese l\u00edquido. El resplandor parec\u00eda radiactivo, y no pod\u00eda olvidar las advertencias de Scion respecto a la contaminaci\u00f3n. Fui al caj\u00f3n y saqu\u00e9 un par de guantes. Eran enormes, confeccionados para manos de refa\u00edta. Con ellos puestos, mis dedos perd\u00edan toda la destreza. Desgarr\u00e9 una de las s\u00e1banas m\u00e1s limpias. Eran muy finas, no abrigaban nada. Cuando hube hecho unas cuantas tiras largas, me las llev\u00e9 al cuarto de ba\u00f1o y las empap\u00e9 en agua caliente. Quiz\u00e1 no funcionara, pero quiz\u00e1 s\u00ed: tal vez despertara y pudiera pedir ayuda a los otros refa\u00edtas. Si ten\u00eda suerte, claro.\n\nVolv\u00ed a la habitaci\u00f3n y me seren\u00e9. El Custodio estaba absolutamente inm\u00f3vil, y el fr\u00edo de su piel me atravesaba los guantes. A todas luces parec\u00eda muerto. Ten\u00eda la piel gris\u00e1cea. Escurr\u00ed la s\u00e1bana y me puse a trabajar en la herida. Al principio lo hac\u00eda con cuidado, pero \u00e9l no se mov\u00eda, y comprend\u00ed que no iba a despertar.\n\nFuera, detr\u00e1s de las ventanas, la luz empezaba a cambiar. Escurr\u00ed la s\u00e1bana sobre la herida y limpi\u00e9 la sangre y la arenilla incrustada en la carne. Al cabo de lo que me parecieron varias horas, hab\u00eda conseguido algo. Ve\u00eda subir y bajar el pecho del Custodio al comp\u00e1s de su respiraci\u00f3n, sus d\u00e9biles degluciones. Con otro trozo de s\u00e1bana hice un parche que coloqu\u00e9 sobre la herida, y le sujet\u00e9 el ap\u00f3sito improvisado con el faj\u00edn de mi blus\u00f3n. Luego volv\u00ed a taparlo con la ropa de cama. Ahora ya era asunto suyo sobrevivir o no.\n\nDespert\u00e9 unas horas m\u00e1s tarde.\n\nDeduje, por el silencio reinante, que no hab\u00eda nadie en la habitaci\u00f3n. La cama estaba hecha. Hab\u00edan puesto s\u00e1banas limpias. Las cortinas estaban atadas con tiras de tela bordada, y la p\u00e1lida luz de la luna ba\u00f1aba las paredes.\n\nEl Custodio se hab\u00eda ido.\n\nPor los cristales de las ventanas resbalaban gotas de condensaci\u00f3n. Me sent\u00e9 junto al fuego. Era imposible que me hubiera imaginado toda aquella escena, a menos que todav\u00eda estuviera sufriendo los efectos del flux. Pero hab\u00eda tomado el ant\u00eddoto. Ya ten\u00eda la sangre limpia. Eso significaba que el Custodio, por el motivo que fuera, hab\u00eda vuelto a marcharse.\n\nEncima de la cama hab\u00eda un uniforme nuevo, junto con otra nota escrita con la misma letra. Rezaba, sencillamente:\n\nMa\u00f1ana.\n\nAs\u00ed que no se hab\u00eda muerto mientras dorm\u00eda. Y mi entrenamiento se hab\u00eda retrasado un d\u00eda m\u00e1s.\n\nLos guantes hab\u00edan desaparecido; deb\u00eda de hab\u00e9rselos llevado \u00e9l. Entr\u00e9 en el cuarto de ba\u00f1o y me lav\u00e9 las manos con agua caliente. Me puse el uniforme, saqu\u00e9 las tres pastillas de los bl\u00edsters y las tir\u00e9 por el desag\u00fce del lavamanos. Quer\u00eda seguir recabando informaci\u00f3n. No me importaba lo que dijera Liss: no pod\u00edamos aceptar la situaci\u00f3n sin m\u00e1s. No me importaba si los refas llevaban all\u00ed doscientos a\u00f1os o dos millones: no pensaba permitir que abusaran de mi clarividencia. Yo no era su soldado, ni Liss era su merienda.\n\nLa portera de noche anot\u00f3 mi salida de la residencia en el registro. Fui al Poblado y me compr\u00e9 un cuenco de gachas. Sab\u00edan a lo que parec\u00edan, cemento, pero me obligu\u00e9 a com\u00e9rmelas. La actriz me dijo en voz baja que Suhail rondaba por all\u00ed; no pod\u00eda sentarme a comer. Le pregunt\u00e9 si sab\u00eda d\u00f3nde pod\u00eda encontrar a Julian, y se lo describ\u00ed lo mejor que pude. Me indic\u00f3 que mirara en las residencias centrales; me dio sus nombres, me dijo d\u00f3nde estaba cada una y luego sigui\u00f3 ocup\u00e1ndose de su hornillo de parafina.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 de pie en un rinc\u00f3n oscuro. Mientras com\u00eda, observaba a la gente que pululaba a mi alrededor. Todos ten\u00edan la misma mirada apagada. El colorido de su ropa resultaba casi insultante, como los graffiti en una l\u00e1pida.\n\n\u2014Dan ganas de vomitar, \u00bfverdad?\n\nLevant\u00e9 la cabeza. Era la suspirante a la que hab\u00eda visto la primera noche. Llevaba un vendaje sucio en un brazo. Parec\u00eda aburrida, y se sent\u00f3 a mi lado.\n\n\u2014Me llamo Tilda.\n\n\u2014Yo soy Paige.\n\n\u2014Ya lo s\u00e9. Dicen que acabaste en Magdalen. \u2014En una mano ten\u00eda un cigarrillo liado de cualquier manera de cuyo extremo sal\u00eda un humo denso que ol\u00eda a especias y perfume. Reconoc\u00ed el aroma del \u00e1ster morado\u2014. Toma.\n\n\u2014No, gracias.\n\n\u2014No seas tonta, solo es un poco de _regal_. Es mejor que el _tincto_.\n\nEl _tincto_ , o l\u00e1udano, era el vicio preferido de los amaur\u00f3ticos dispuestos a correr el riesgo de alterar su estado mental. No a todos les gustaba el Floxy.\n\nDe vez en cuando deten\u00edan a alg\u00fan amaur\u00f3tico sospechoso de antinaturalidad, y luego la DVN descubr\u00eda que se hab\u00eda intoxicado con l\u00e1udano. A los videntes no nos hac\u00eda gran cosa; no era lo bastante fuerte para alterar nuestros onirosajes. Tilda deb\u00eda de consumirlo por hacer algo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfDe d\u00f3nde lo has sacado? \u2014le pregunt\u00e9, pues dudaba de que los refas permitieran el consumo de drogas et\u00e9reas.\n\n\u2014Hay un narco que lo vende a pondos. Dice que est\u00e1 aqu\u00ed desde la Era XVI.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCuarenta a\u00f1os?\n\n\u2014Desde que ten\u00eda veintiuno. Antes he estado hablando con \u00e9l. Parece simp\u00e1tico. \u2014Volvi\u00f3 a ofrecerme el porro\u2014. \u00bfSeguro que no quieres una calada?\n\n\u2014No, paso. \u2014Me qued\u00e9 mir\u00e1ndola fumar. Tilda ten\u00eda toda la pinta de los adictos al \u00e1ster, o cortesanos, como ellos mismos se hac\u00edan llamar; solo una yonqui habr\u00eda dicho \u00abpondos\u00bb en lugar de \u00ablibras\u00bb. Quiz\u00e1 pudiera ayudarme\u2014. \u00bfC\u00f3mo es que no est\u00e1s entren\u00e1ndote?\n\n\u2014Mi guardi\u00e1n se ha marchado a no s\u00e9 d\u00f3nde. \u00bfY t\u00fa?\n\n\u2014Por lo mismo. \u00bfQui\u00e9n es tu guardi\u00e1n?\n\n\u2014Terebell Sheratan. Parece una cabrona, pero todav\u00eda no ha intentado vapulearme.\n\n\u2014Ya. \u2014Sigui\u00f3 fumando\u2014. \u00bfSabes qu\u00e9 son esas pastillas que nos dan?\n\nTilda asinti\u00f3.\n\n\u2014La blanca es un anticonceptivo normal y corriente. Es raro que no la hayas reconocido.\n\n\u2014\u00bfUn anticonceptivo? \u00bfPara qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Para que no nos reproduzcamos, evidentemente. Y para que no menstruemos. A ver, \u00bfqui\u00e9n querr\u00eda parir en un sitio como este?\n\nTen\u00eda raz\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014\u00bfY la roja?\n\n\u2014Es un suplemento de hierro.\n\n\u2014\u00bfY la verde?\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo?\n\n\u2014La tercera pastilla.\n\n\u2014No hay tercera pastilla.\n\n\u2014Es un comprimido \u2014insist\u00ed\u2014. De color verde gris\u00e1ceo. Tiene un sabor amargo.\n\nTilda neg\u00f3 con la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Lo siento, ni idea. Si me traes una, le echar\u00e9 un vistazo.\n\nSe me contrajo el est\u00f3mago.\n\n\u2014Vale \u2014dije. Tilda se dispon\u00eda a dar otra calada, pero la interrump\u00ed\u2014: T\u00fa estabas con Carl, \u00bfno? En el serm\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Yo no me relaciono con ese renegado. \u2014Arque\u00e9 una ceja; Tilda exhal\u00f3 un humo de color lila\u2014. \u00bfNo te has enterado? Es un traidor. Sorprendi\u00f3 a una carro\u00f1a pas\u00e1ndole comida a Ivy, esa palmista del pelo azul, y se chiv\u00f3 a su guardi\u00e1n. Tendr\u00edas que haber visto lo que le hicieron.\n\n\u2014Cu\u00e9ntame.\n\n\u2014Le dieron una paliza. Le afeitaron la cabeza. No quiero acordarme. \u2014Le temblaba un poco la mano\u2014. Si eso es lo que hay que hacer para sobrevivir aqu\u00ed, prefiero que me manden al \u00e9ter. Me ir\u00e9 sin rechistar.\n\nSe produjo un silencio. Tilda tir\u00f3 su porro de \u00e1ster.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSabes en qu\u00e9 residencia est\u00e1 Julian? \u2014pregunt\u00e9 al cabo de un rato\u2014. 26.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEl chico calvo? Creo que en Trinity. Puedes echar un vistazo por la verja que hay en la parte de atr\u00e1s. Los novatos se entrenan all\u00ed, en el jard\u00edn. Pero procura que no te vean.\n\nLa dej\u00e9 li\u00e1ndose otro porro.\n\nEl \u00e1ster era muy apreciado. Seguramente era la planta de la que m\u00e1s se abusaba en las calles. La adicci\u00f3n estaba muy extendida en sitios como Jacob's Island. Las flores pod\u00edan ser de color blanco, azul, rosa o morado, y cada una ten\u00eda un efecto diferente en el onirosaje. Eliza fue adicta al \u00e1ster blanco durante a\u00f1os; me lo hab\u00eda contado. Comparado con el azul, que recuperaba los recuerdos, el \u00e1ster blanco produc\u00eda un efecto que llam\u00e1bamos \u00abencalado\u00bb, o p\u00e9rdida parcial de memoria. Durante un tiempo, Eliza hab\u00eda olvidado hasta su apellido. Despu\u00e9s se enganch\u00f3 al morado, pues dec\u00eda que la ayudaba a pintar. Me hab\u00eda hecho jurar que jam\u00e1s probar\u00eda ninguna droga et\u00e9rea, y yo no ten\u00eda ning\u00fan motivo para incumplir mi promesa.\n\nMe preocupaba saber que a m\u00ed me daban una pastilla m\u00e1s que a los otros prisioneros. A menos que lo raro fuera que a Tilda solo le dieran dos. Tendr\u00eda que pregunt\u00e1rselo a alguien m\u00e1s.\n\nLa residencia de Trinity estaba vigilada por el lado que daba a la calle. Borde\u00e9 el barrio de chabolas y me gui\u00e9 por mi limitado conocimiento de la ciudad para averiguar d\u00f3nde estaba la parte trasera de la residencia. Acab\u00e9 ante la empalizada que cercaba sus extensos jardines. Tilda ten\u00eda raz\u00f3n: hab\u00eda un grupo de casacas blancas en el jard\u00edn, dirigidos por una refa. Julian se encontraba entre ellos. Empujaban a unos esp\u00edritus por el aire con unos bastones rebordeados, alumbr\u00e1ndose con unas l\u00e1mparas de gas que emit\u00edan una luz verdosa. Al principio cre\u00ed que eran _numa_ , objetos por los que pod\u00eda circular el \u00e9ter de los que los adivinos obten\u00edan su poder; pero nunca hab\u00eda visto que se utilizaran objetos para controlar a los esp\u00edritus.\n\nDej\u00e9 que actuara mi sexto sentido. Los onirosajes de los humanos estaban agrupados en el \u00e9ter, y la refa funcionaba como una especie de eje que atra\u00eda a los humanos como insectos hacia un farol.\n\nLa refa eligi\u00f3 ese momento para cargar contra Julian. Enarbol\u00f3 su bast\u00f3n y le lanz\u00f3 un esp\u00edritu furioso. \u00c9l cay\u00f3 de espaldas al suelo, aturdido.\n\n\u2014En pie, 26. \u2014Julian no se movi\u00f3\u2014. Lev\u00e1ntate.\n\nNo pod\u00eda levantarse. Y no me extra\u00f1\u00f3: un esp\u00edritu furioso acababa de golpearle en la cara. Ning\u00fan vidente habr\u00eda podido levantarse despu\u00e9s de un golpe as\u00ed.\n\nSu guardiana le propin\u00f3 una fuerte patada en un lado de la cabeza. Los otros casacas blancas retrocedieron tambale\u00e1ndose, como si a continuaci\u00f3n la refa fuera a pegarles a ellos; sin embargo, se limit\u00f3 a mirarlos con frialdad antes de darse la vuelta y echar a andar hacia la residencia, con la t\u00fanica negra ondeando. Los humanos se miraron y la siguieron. Ninguno se qued\u00f3 a ayudar a Julian, que estaba tendido en el suelo, en posici\u00f3n fetal. Intent\u00e9 abrir la verja, pero estaba cerrada con una gruesa cadena.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Julian! \u2014lo llam\u00e9.\n\nHizo una mueca de dolor y alz\u00f3 la cabeza. Al verme, se levant\u00f3 y fue hacia la verja. Ten\u00eda la cara cubierta de sudor. Detr\u00e1s de \u00e9l los faroles se apagaron.\n\n\u2014En el fondo me adora \u2014dijo esbozando una sonrisa\u2014. Soy su alumno aventajado.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 clase de esp\u00edritu era eso?\n\n\u2014Un fantasma viejo. \u2014Se frot\u00f3 los ojos\u2014. Lo siento, todav\u00eda veo cosas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 ves?\n\n\u2014Caballos. Libros. Fuego.\n\nEl fantasma le hab\u00eda dejado una impresi\u00f3n de su muerte. Era una de las facetas desagradables del combate contra esp\u00edritus.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n era esa refa? \u2014pregunt\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Se llama Aludra Chertan. No entiendo por qu\u00e9 se ha ofrecido voluntaria para ser guardiana. Nos odia.\n\n\u2014Todos nos odian. \u2014Ote\u00e9 la extensi\u00f3n de c\u00e9sped. Aludra no hab\u00eda vuelto\u2014. \u00bfPuedes salir?\n\n\u2014Puedo intentarlo. \u2014Se llev\u00f3 una mano a la cabeza e hizo una mueca\u2014. \u00bfTu guardi\u00e1n ya se ha cebado contigo?\n\n\u2014Casi no lo he visto. \u2014Prefer\u00ed no mencionar lo que hab\u00eda pasado la noche anterior, por precauci\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Ayer Aludra se ceb\u00f3 con Felix. Cuando recobr\u00f3 el conocimiento, no pod\u00eda parar de temblar. Y aun as\u00ed le oblig\u00f3 a entrenar.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo le fue?\n\n\u2014Estaba aterrorizado. Durante dos horas no pudo percibir el \u00e9ter.\n\n\u2014Hacerle eso a un vidente es una locura. \u2014Gir\u00e9 la cabeza para ver si hab\u00eda alg\u00fan vigilante\u2014. Yo no dejar\u00e9 que se ceben conmigo.\n\n\u2014Quiz\u00e1 no puedas evitarlo. \u2014Desenganch\u00f3 un farol de la verja\u2014. Tu guardi\u00e1n es muy famoso. \u00bfDices que casi no lo has visto?\n\n\u2014Sale mucho.\n\n\u2014\u00bfAd\u00f3nde va? \u00bfQu\u00e9 hace?\n\n\u2014No tengo ni idea.\n\nJulian se qued\u00f3 mir\u00e1ndome. A esa distancia vi que ten\u00eda visi\u00f3n espiritista permanente, como Liss. Los videntes con visi\u00f3n parcial pod\u00edan activar y desactivar su don, pero Julian ve\u00eda peque\u00f1as hebras de energ\u00eda continuamente.\n\n\u2014A ver si puedo salir \u2014dijo\u2014. No he comido nada desde ayer por la ma\u00f1ana. O por la noche. Yo qu\u00e9 s\u00e9.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTe dar\u00e1n permiso?\n\n\u2014Puedo pedirlo.\n\nLo vi alejarse hacia la residencia, y se me ocurri\u00f3 pensar que tal vez no volviera a salir.\n\nLo esper\u00e9 cerca del Poblado. Estaba a punto de desistir cuando vi el destello de un blus\u00f3n blanco. Julian sali\u00f3 por un peque\u00f1o portal, tap\u00e1ndose la cara con una mano. Le hice se\u00f1as.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 ha pasado?\n\n\u2014Lo que era inevitable. \u2014Parec\u00eda congestionado\u2014. Me ha dicho que pod\u00eda comer, pero que no podr\u00eda oler la comida, ni apreciar su sabor.\n\nSe quit\u00f3 la mano de la cara. Aspir\u00e9 bruscamente entre los dientes. Le resbalaba sangre por la barbilla, le estaban saliendo cardenales bajo los ojos y ten\u00eda la nariz roja e hinchada.\n\n\u2014Necesitas hielo. \u2014Lo empuj\u00e9 detr\u00e1s de una pared de contrachapado\u2014. Vamos. Los actores tendr\u00e1n algo para curarte.\n\n\u2014Estoy bien. No creo que la tenga rota. \u2014Se toc\u00f3 el puente de la nariz\u2014. Tenemos que hablar.\n\n\u2014Podemos hablar mientras comemos.\n\nMientras atravesaba el Poblado con Julian, iba buscando alguna arma. Cualquier cosa habr\u00eda servido: una horquilla afilada, un fragmento de cristal o metal. Pero no vi nada. Si los actores estaban desarmados, no tendr\u00edan forma de defenderse si los emim entraban en la ciudad. Los refas y los casacas rojas eran su \u00fanica protecci\u00f3n.\n\nLlegamos a la choza de la comida y obligu\u00e9 a Julian a beberse un cuenco de _skilly_ y a comer un poco de _toke_ ; luego di los _numa_ que me quedaban a un adivino a cambio de un paquete de acetaminof\u00e9n robado. No quiso decirme a qui\u00e9n se lo hab\u00eda robado, ni c\u00f3mo, y se perdi\u00f3 entre el gent\u00edo en cuanto tuvo las agujas en la mano. Deb\u00eda de ser un acutum\u00e1ntico aut\u00e9ntico. Llev\u00e9 a Julian a un rinc\u00f3n oscuro.\n\n\u2014T\u00f3mate esto \u2014le dije\u2014. Y que nadie te vea.\n\nJulian no dijo nada. Se meti\u00f3 dos pastillas en la boca y se las trag\u00f3. Encontr\u00e9 un trapo y un poco de agua en una chabola vac\u00eda. Julian se limpi\u00f3 la sangre.\n\n\u2014Bueno \u2014dijo con voz un poco pastosa\u2014, \u00bfqu\u00e9 sabemos sobre los emim?\n\n\u2014Yo, nada.\n\n\u2014He estado investigando sobre c\u00f3mo funciona este sitio. \u00bfTe interesa?\n\n\u2014Claro que me interesa.\n\n\u2014Los casacas blancas realizan el entrenamiento b\u00e1sico durante unos d\u00edas. Combate con esp\u00edritus, sobre todo: tienes que demostrar que puedes formar bandadas, y cosas as\u00ed. Luego haces el primer examen. Entonces es cuando tienes que verificar tu don.\n\n\u2014\u00bfVerificarlo?\n\n\u2014Demostrar que es \u00fatil. Los adivinos tienen que hacer una predicci\u00f3n. Los m\u00e9diums tienen que incitar a una posesi\u00f3n. Ya te imaginas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 es lo que consideran \u00fatil?\n\n\u2014Tienes que hacer algo para demostrar tu lealtad. Estuve hablando de eso con el portero de Trinity. No quiso contarme gran cosa, pero dijo que su predicci\u00f3n hab\u00eda facilitado que llevaran a alguien a Sheol I. Tienes que mostrarles lo que quieren ver, aunque con eso pongas a otro humano en peligro.\n\nSe me hizo un nudo en la garganta.\n\n\u2014\u00bfY el segundo examen?\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1 relacionado con los emim. Supongo que si sobrevives pasas a ser un casaca roja.\n\nRecorr\u00ed la choza con la mirada. Entre los actores hab\u00eda un par de blusones amarillos.\n\n\u2014Mira \u2014dijo Julian en voz baja\u2014. Esa del rinc\u00f3n. F\u00edjate en sus dedos.\n\nMir\u00e9 hacia donde me indicaba. Una joven se tomaba el _skilly_ mientras hablaba con un hombre de aspecto enfermizo. Le faltaban tres dedos de una mano. Recorr\u00ed la habitaci\u00f3n con la mirada y vi otras lesiones: manos amputadas, cicatrices de mordeduras y ara\u00f1azos en brazos y piernas.\n\n\u2014Se ve que les gusta la carne humana \u2014coment\u00e9; Liss no me hab\u00eda mentido.\n\n\u2014Eso parece. \u2014Julian me ofreci\u00f3 su cuenco\u2014. \u00bfQuieres acab\u00e1rtelo?\n\n\u2014No, gracias.\n\nNos quedamos un rato callados. No volv\u00ed a mirar, pero no pod\u00eda parar de pensar en las lesiones que hab\u00edan sufrido aquellas personas. Las hab\u00edan ro\u00eddo como si fueran huesos de pollo, y luego las hab\u00edan tirado a la basura. Estaban en peligro continuo en ese tugurio miserable y desprotegido.\n\nNo quer\u00eda que los refa\u00edtas supieran lo que yo era, pero para aprobar el primer examen tendr\u00eda que demostr\u00e1rselo.\n\n\u00bfQuer\u00eda aprobar los ex\u00e1menes? Me pas\u00e9 los dedos por el pelo, pensativa. Tendr\u00eda que esperar a que regresara el Custodio y enterarme de qu\u00e9 quer\u00eda que hiciera. Me di cuenta de que el Custodio controlaba mi destino.\n\nLlevaba unos minutos observando a los actores cuando vi una cara conocida: Carl. Se produjo un silencio. Los actores le abrieron paso y agacharon las cabezas. Estir\u00e9 el cuello y vi qu\u00e9 era lo que estaban mirando: su blus\u00f3n rosa. \u00bfQu\u00e9 hac\u00eda Carl en el Poblado?\n\n\u2014Tilda me ha dicho que Carl hab\u00eda aprobado su primer examen \u2014le dije a Julian\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9 crees que ha tenido que hacer? \u00bfSolo delatar a Ivy?\n\n\u2014Es adivino. Seguramente solo tuvo que encontrar a su difunta t\u00eda en una taza de t\u00e9 \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014Eso lo hacen los augures. \u00bfT\u00fa no eres adivino?\n\n\u2014Yo nunca he afirmado que sea adivino. \u2014Esboz\u00f3 una sonrisa\u2014. No eres la \u00fanica que tiene un aura enga\u00f1osa.\n\nEso me dio que pensar. Se consideraba a los adivinos la clase m\u00e1s baja de clarividentes; al menos eran los m\u00e1s frecuentes. Quiz\u00e1 Julian lo considerara insultante. O quiz\u00e1 yo no fuera tan buena identificando a videntes como afirmaba Jax.\n\nJax. Me pregunt\u00e9 qu\u00e9 estar\u00eda haciendo. Si estar\u00eda preocupado por m\u00ed o no. Seguro que estaba preocupado: yo era su onir\u00e1mbula, su dama. No sab\u00eda qu\u00e9 har\u00eda para encontrarme. Quiz\u00e1 a Dani o a Nick se les ocurriera algo. Ellos ten\u00edan empleos en Scion. En alg\u00fan sitio ten\u00eda que haber una base de datos de prisioneros que el Arconte manten\u00eda en secreto.\n\n\u2014Intentan sobornarlo. \u2014Julian estaba mirando a dos actores; le ofrec\u00edan _numa_ a Carl y hablaban con \u00e9l\u2014. Deben de creer que ahora tiene poder sobre los refas.\n\nLo parec\u00eda. Carl los rechaz\u00f3 y ellos se apartaron.\n\n\u2014Julian \u2014dije\u2014, \u00bfa ti cu\u00e1ntas pastillas te dan?\n\n\u2014Una.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo es?\n\n\u2014Redonda y roja. Creo que es hierro. \u2014Se tom\u00f3 el _skilly_ \u2014. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9? \u00bfCu\u00e1ntas te dan a ti?\n\nClaro. Scion fabricaba una inyecci\u00f3n para la contracepci\u00f3n masculina, pero no ten\u00eda sentido esterilizar a ambos sexos. Carl me ahorr\u00f3 tener que contestar esa pregunta.\n\n\u2014Y entonces mir\u00e9 dentro de la piedra \u2014le estaba diciendo a un casaca blanca, bajo la atenta mirada de varios bufones\u2014, y decid\u00ed hacer una predicci\u00f3n acorde con sus deseos. Resulta que est\u00e1 ansiosa por encontrar a un tal Vinculador Blanco y, por supuesto, nada m\u00e1s ver su cara supe exactamente d\u00f3nde estaba. Por lo visto es el capo del I-4.\n\nSent\u00ed un fr\u00edo mortal. Ese era Jaxon.\n\n\u2014Paige \u2014dijo Julian.\n\n\u2014Estoy bien. Esp\u00e9rame aqu\u00ed, solo ser\u00e1 un momento.\n\nMe levant\u00e9 sin pensar y fui derecha hacia Carl. Lo agarr\u00e9 por el blus\u00f3n y lo arrastr\u00e9 hasta un rinc\u00f3n. \u00c9l se qued\u00f3 perplejo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 viste? \u2014le susurr\u00e9.\n\nCarl me miraba con gesto de sorpresa, como si me hubiera crecido otra cabeza.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 le dijiste del Vinculador Blanco, Carl?\n\n\u2014Me llamo XX-59-1.\n\n\u2014No me importa. Dime qu\u00e9 viste.\n\n\u2014Eso no es asunto tuyo. \u2014Le ech\u00f3 un vistazo a mi blus\u00f3n blanco\u2014. Se ve que no has progresado tan deprisa como todos esperaban. \u00bfQu\u00e9 ha pasado? \u00bfHas decepcionado a tu guardi\u00e1n especial?\n\nAcerqu\u00e9 la cara a la suya. A esa escasa distancia Carl a\u00fan se parec\u00eda m\u00e1s a una rata.\n\n\u2014Esto no es ning\u00fan juego, Carl \u2014dije en voz baja\u2014. Y no me gustan los renegados. Dime qu\u00e9 viste.\n\nLos faroles que ten\u00edamos m\u00e1s cerca parpadearon. Nadie pareci\u00f3 notarlo (los actores ya no nos prestaban atenci\u00f3n), pero Carl s\u00ed. Vi un destello de temor en sus ojos.\n\n\u2014No vi exactamente d\u00f3nde estaba \u2014admiti\u00f3\u2014, pero vi un reloj de sol.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSe lo dijiste?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 quiere del Vinculador?\n\nLe agarr\u00e9 m\u00e1s fuerte del blus\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014No lo s\u00e9. Yo solo hice lo que me ordenaba. \u2014Se apart\u00f3 de m\u00ed\u2014. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 me haces tantas preguntas?\n\nMe rug\u00eda la sangre en los o\u00eddos.\n\n\u2014Por nada. \u2014Le solt\u00e9 el blus\u00f3n\u2014. Lo siento. Es que estoy nerviosa por los ex\u00e1menes.\n\nCarl se relaj\u00f3, halagado.\n\n\u2014Es l\u00f3gico. Estoy seguro de que pronto conseguir\u00e1s tu siguiente color.\n\n\u2014Y despu\u00e9s, \u00bfqu\u00e9 pasa?\n\n\u2014\u00bfDespu\u00e9s del rosa? \u00a1Entramos en el batall\u00f3n, por supuesto! Estoy deseando echarles el guante a los cabrones de los zumbadores. Dentro de nada conseguir\u00e9 el blus\u00f3n rojo.\n\nYa lo ten\u00edan cautivado. Ya era un soldado, un asesino en potencia. Compuse una sonrisa forzada y me march\u00e9.\n\nCarl ten\u00eda motivos para estar orgulloso. Era un buen profeta. Hab\u00eda utilizado a Nashira para enfocar a un sujeto, para verlo en la superficie reluciente del _numen_ de su elecci\u00f3n. Ese era el don de los adivinos, y tambi\u00e9n de algunos augures. Pod\u00edan encajar su don en los deseos de otra persona, el solicitante, para leerles el futuro. Los cartom\u00e1nticos y los palmistas lo hac\u00edan continuamente. Y dijera lo que dijese Jaxon, muchas veces resultaba \u00fatil. El \u00e9ter era como Scionet: una red de onirosajes, cada uno de los cuales conten\u00eda informaci\u00f3n a la que se pod\u00eda acceder pulsando un bot\u00f3n. El solicitante proporcionaba una especie de motor de b\u00fasqueda, un medio para ver con los ojos de los esp\u00edritus que vagaban a la deriva.\n\nCarl hab\u00eda encontrado a una solicitante perfecta en Nashira. No solo hab\u00eda visto a Jax, sino que tambi\u00e9n hab\u00eda visto una pista acerca de su paradero: uno de los seis relojes de sol de la columna de Seven Dials.\n\nTen\u00eda que prevenir a Jax, y pronto. Ignoraba qu\u00e9 pod\u00eda querer Nashira de \u00e9l, pero no pensaba permitir que lo llevara a Sheol I.\n\nJulian me sigui\u00f3 afuera.\n\n\u2014Paige. \u2014Me sujet\u00f3 por la manga\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9 te ha dicho?\n\n\u2014Nada.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1s muy p\u00e1lida.\n\n\u2014Estoy bien. \u2014Cuando vi el pan que ten\u00eda en la mano me acord\u00e9 de Seb\u2014. \u00bfVas a comerte eso?\n\n\u2014No. \u00bfLo quieres?\n\n\u2014No es para m\u00ed. Es para Seb.\n\n\u2014\u00bfYa lo has encontrado?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, en la Casa Amaur\u00f3tica.\n\n\u2014Vale. Tiene gracia: en Londres encierran a los videntes y aqu\u00ed, a los amaur\u00f3ticos.\n\n\u2014Quiz\u00e1 para ellos tenga sentido. \u2014Me guard\u00e9 el pan en la manga\u2014. Nos vemos ma\u00f1ana al anochecer, \u00bfvale?\n\n\u2014Vale. \u2014Hizo una pausa\u2014. Si puedo salir, claro.\n\nLa Casa Amaur\u00f3tica estaba a oscuras cuando llegu\u00e9. Hasta las l\u00e1mparas de fuera estaban apagadas. Prefer\u00ed no intentar convencer a Graffias para que me dejara pasar, y trep\u00e9 directamente por una bajante.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSeb?\n\nNo hab\u00eda luz en la habitaci\u00f3n. Ol\u00eda a aire viciado. Seb no me contest\u00f3.\n\nMe agarr\u00e9 a los barrotes y me puse en cuclillas en el alf\u00e9izar.\n\n\u2014Seb \u2014insist\u00ed\u2014. \u00bfEst\u00e1s ah\u00ed?\n\nNo, no estaba. No hab\u00eda ning\u00fan onirosaje en esa habitaci\u00f3n. Los amaur\u00f3ticos tambi\u00e9n ten\u00edan onirosajes, aunque sin color. No detect\u00e9 matices emocionales, ni actividad espiritual. Seb se hab\u00eda esfumado.\n\nQuiz\u00e1 se lo hubieran llevado a trabajar a alguna residencia. Quiz\u00e1 volviera m\u00e1s tarde.\n\nO quiz\u00e1 aquello fuera una trampa.\n\nMe saqu\u00e9 el pan de la manga, lo pas\u00e9 entre los barrotes y baj\u00e9 por el ca\u00f1o. No me sent\u00ed a salvo hasta que volv\u00ed a tener los pies en el suelo.\n\nPero esa sensaci\u00f3n no dur\u00f3 mucho. Nada m\u00e1s volverme hacia el centro de la ciudad, not\u00e9 que me agarraban con fuerza del brazo. Unos ojos abrasadores se clavaron en los m\u00edos.\n\nEstaba quieto como una estatua. Llevaba una camisa negra de cuello alto, con ribete dorado. Las mangas le cubr\u00edan el brazo que yo le hab\u00eda vendado.\n\nMe mir\u00f3 con gesto inexpresivo. Me humedec\u00ed los labios y trat\u00e9 de pensar alguna excusa.\n\n\u2014Bueno \u2014dijo, y se me acerc\u00f3 m\u00e1s\u2014. Vendas heridas y alimentas a los esclavos amaur\u00f3ticos. Qu\u00e9 curioso.\n\nLa repugnancia que sent\u00ed me hizo dar una sacudida con el brazo, y \u00e9l no me lo impidi\u00f3. Yo pod\u00eda pelear si no estaba acorralada, pero entonces vi a los otros. Cuatro refas, dos varones y dos f\u00e9minas. Los cuatro ten\u00edan ese onirosaje acorazado. Adopt\u00e9 una postura defensiva, y ellos se rieron de m\u00ed.\n\n\u2014No seas necia, 40.\n\n\u2014Lo \u00fanico que queremos es hablar contigo.\n\n\u2014Pues hablad \u2014dije con una voz que no parec\u00eda la m\u00eda.\n\nEl Custodio segu\u00eda mir\u00e1ndome fijamente. Bajo la luz de una l\u00e1mpara de gas cercana, sus ojos ard\u00edan con un nuevo color. \u00c9l no se hab\u00eda re\u00eddo como hab\u00edan hecho los dem\u00e1s.\n\nMe sent\u00ed rodeada, como un animal acorralado. Intentar salir de esa situaci\u00f3n no habr\u00eda sido solamente est\u00fapido, sino suicida.\n\n\u2014Ir\u00e9 \u2014dije, y el Custodio asinti\u00f3 con la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Terebell \u2014dijo\u2014, ve a ver a la soberana de sangre. Dile que tenemos a XX-59-40 bajo custodia.\n\n\u00bfBajo custodia? Mir\u00e9 a la refa\u00edta. Deb\u00eda de ser la guardiana de Tilda y de Carl, Terebell Sheratan. Me volvi\u00f3 a mirar con ojos firmes y amarillos. Su cabello, negro y reluciente, rodeaba su cara como una capucha.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, consorte de sangre \u2014dijo.\n\nSe coloc\u00f3 en cabeza de la escolta. Yo mantuve la vista en el suelo.\n\n\u2014Vamos \u2014dijo el Custodio\u2014. La soberana de sangre nos espera.\n\nNos dirigimos al centro de la ciudad. Los guardias se quedaron atr\u00e1s, a una distancia respetuosa del Custodio. Me fij\u00e9 en que sus ojos s\u00ed ten\u00edan un color distinto: eran naranja. Se dio cuenta de que lo estaba mirando.\n\n\u2014Si tienes alguna pregunta \u2014dijo\u2014, puedes hacerla.\n\n\u2014\u00bfAd\u00f3nde vamos?\n\n\u2014A que hagas tu primer examen. \u00bfAlgo m\u00e1s?\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n te mordi\u00f3?\n\nMantuvo la mirada al frente. Al cabo de un momento dijo:\n\n\u2014Te retiro el permiso para hablar.\n\nEstuve a punto de hacerme una herida en la lengua. Capullo. Me hab\u00eda pasado horas limpi\u00e1ndole las heridas. Habr\u00eda podido matarlo. Deb\u00ed matarlo.\n\nEl Custodio conoc\u00eda muy bien la ciudad. Recorrimos varias calles hasta llegar a la parte trasera de otra residencia, la misma donde nos hab\u00edan dado el serm\u00f3n. Fuera hab\u00eda una placa que rezaba: RESIDENCIA DEL SUZERANO. Los guardias saludaron con la cabeza cuando el Custodio pas\u00f3 ante ellos, y se llevaron un pu\u00f1o al pecho. \u00c9l no se molest\u00f3 en saludarlos. Las puertas se cerraron detr\u00e1s de nosotros. El sonido met\u00e1lico de los cerrojos hizo que se me tensaran los m\u00fasculos. Pase\u00e9 la mirada por las paredes, buscando hasta en el \u00faltimo recoveco algo a lo que pudiera agarrarme con las manos y los pies. Las fachadas de los edificios estaban recubiertas de enredaderas, arom\u00e1ticas madreselvas, hiedras y glicinas, pero solo hasta una altura de unos palmos por encima del suelo. Despu\u00e9s estaban las ventanas. Recorrimos un sendero de color arena que bordeaba un \u00f3valo de hierba en el que se alzaba una sola farola con los cristales rojos.\n\nAl final del sendero hab\u00eda una puerta. El Custodio no me mir\u00f3, pero se detuvo.\n\n\u2014No digas nada de las heridas \u2014me dijo en voz tan baja que apenas le o\u00ed\u2014, o tendr\u00e1s motivos para lamentar haberme salvado la vida.\n\nLe hizo se\u00f1as a su escolta. Dos refas se colocaron a sendos lados de la puerta; el otro, un var\u00f3n de cabello rizado y mirada deslumbrante, se coloc\u00f3 a mi otro lado. Flanqueada por los guardias, traspuse la puerta y entr\u00e9 en el fresco interior del edificio.\n\nMe hallaba en una habitaci\u00f3n estrecha y recargada, con paredes de piedra de color marfil. Por la pared de la izquierda se desparramaban manchas de colores c\u00e1lidos gracias a la luz de la luna refractada por las vidrieras de colores. Distingu\u00ed cinco placas conmemorativas, pero no tuve tiempo de pararme a leerlas: me estaban conduciendo hacia un arco iluminado. Subimos tres pelda\u00f1os de m\u00e1rmol negro, y entonces el Custodio se arrodill\u00f3 y agach\u00f3 la cabeza. El guardia me mir\u00f3 fijamente, y yo imit\u00e9 al Custodio.\n\n\u2014Arcturus.\n\nUna mano enguantada le levant\u00f3 la barbilla. Me arriesgu\u00e9 a mirar.\n\nHab\u00eda aparecido Nashira. Esa noche llevaba un vestido negro que la cubr\u00eda desde el cuello y que ondulaba como el agua bajo la luz de las velas. Bes\u00f3 al Custodio en la frente, y \u00e9l le puso una mano sobre el vientre.\n\n\u2014Veo que has tra\u00eddo a nuestro peque\u00f1o prodigio \u2014dijo Nashira con la mirada puesta en m\u00ed\u2014. Buenas noches, XX-40.\n\nMe mir\u00f3 de arriba abajo, y tuve la sensaci\u00f3n de que intentaba leer mi aura. Levant\u00e9 unas barreras preventivas. El Custodio no se movi\u00f3. No le ve\u00eda la cara.\n\nDetr\u00e1s de la pareja hab\u00eda una hilera de refa\u00edtas, todos con capa y capucha. Sus auras llenaban la capilla y apenas le dejaban espacio a la m\u00eda. Era la \u00fanica humana presente all\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Supongo que sabes por qu\u00e9 est\u00e1s aqu\u00ed \u2014dijo Nashira.\n\nMantuve la boca cerrada. Sab\u00eda que me hab\u00eda buscado un problema llev\u00e1ndole comida a Seb, pero pod\u00eda haberme buscado un problema por much\u00edsimas cosas m\u00e1s: vendar al Custodio, escabullirme, ser humana. Lo m\u00e1s probable era que Carl hubiera informado de mi inter\u00e9s por la visi\u00f3n de Nashira. O quiz\u00e1 supieran lo que yo era.\n\n\u2014La hemos encontrado delante de la Casa Amaur\u00f3tica \u2014declar\u00f3 el guardia. Era el vivo retrato de Pleione; la forma de sus ojos era id\u00e9ntica\u2014. Escabull\u00e9ndose en la oscuridad como una rata de alcantarilla.\n\n\u2014Gracias, Alsafi. \u2014Nashira me mir\u00f3, pero no me invit\u00f3 a levantarme\u2014. Tengo entendido que le has llevado comida a uno de los empleados amaur\u00f3ticos, 40. \u00bfHay alguna raz\u00f3n que lo justifique?\n\n\u2014Que lo est\u00e1is matando de hambre y maltrat\u00e1ndolo como si fuera un animal. Necesita un m\u00e9dico, un hospital.\n\nMi voz reson\u00f3 por la oscura capilla. Los refa\u00edtas encapuchados guardaban silencio.\n\n\u2014Siento mucho que pienses as\u00ed \u2014dijo Nashira\u2014, pero a los ojos de los refa\u00edtas, los ojos que ahora son los responsables de tu pa\u00eds, los humanos y las bestias se encuentran al mismo nivel. Nosotros no tenemos m\u00e9dicos para las bestias.\n\nSent\u00ed que palidec\u00eda de ira, pero me mord\u00ed la lengua. Si replicaba, solo conseguir\u00eda que mataran a Seb.\n\nNashira se dio la vuelta. El Custodio se levant\u00f3 y yo lo imit\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Quiz\u00e1 recuerdes, 40, que en el serm\u00f3n os explicamos que nos gusta examinar a los humanos que recogemos durante las Eras de Huesos. Ver\u00e1s, enviamos a nuestros casacas rojas a buscar humanos con aura, pero no siempre podemos identificar las habilidades de esas auras. Confieso que en el pasado cometimos algunos errores. A veces, un caso que parec\u00eda prometedor resulta menos emocionante que un cartom\u00e1ntico vagabundo. Pero no me cabe duda de que t\u00fa ser\u00e1s mucho m\u00e1s interesante. Tu aura te precede. \u2014Me hizo se\u00f1as para que me acercara y a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014: Ven, mu\u00e9stranos tus talentos.\n\nEl Custodio y Alsafi se separaron de m\u00ed. Nashira y yo nos quedamos cara a cara, solas.\n\nSe me tensaron los m\u00fasculos. \u00bfQu\u00e9 quer\u00edan, que peleara con ella? Yo no habr\u00eda podido vencerla. Sus \u00e1ngeles y ella destrozar\u00edan mi onirosaje. Los notaba girando alrededor de Nashira, preparados para defender a su hu\u00e9sped.\n\nPero entonces record\u00e9 lo que me hab\u00eda contado Liss: que Nashira quer\u00eda un onir\u00e1mbulo. Intent\u00e9 pensar. Quiz\u00e1 yo pudiera hacer algo que ella no tuviera poder para impedir, alguna ventaja que pudiera utilizar contra ella.\n\nPens\u00e9 en lo que hab\u00eda pasado en el tren. Sin un onir\u00e1mbulo o un or\u00e1culo en su s\u00e9quito, Nashira no pod\u00eda alterar el \u00e9ter. Y a menos que hubiera consumido el esp\u00edritu de un ilegible, yo podr\u00eda soltar mi esp\u00edritu en su mente.\n\nPodr\u00eda matarla.\n\nMi plan A se vino abajo cuando volvi\u00f3 Alsafi. Llevaba en brazos un cuerpo fr\u00e1gil, un cuerpo con una bolsa negra cubri\u00e9ndole la cabeza. Sentaron al prisionero en una silla y lo esposaron a ella. Se me quedaron los dedos entumecidos. \u00bfSer\u00eda uno de los otros? \u00bfHabr\u00edan encontrado Dials, habr\u00edan encontrado a mi banda?\n\nPero no percib\u00eda ning\u00fan aura: ten\u00eda que tratarse de un amaur\u00f3tico. Pens\u00e9 en mi padre y me dio un mareo, pero aquel cuerpo era demasiado peque\u00f1o, demasiado delgado.\n\n\u2014Creo que os conoc\u00e9is \u2014dijo.\n\nLe quitaron la bolsa de la cabeza. Me qued\u00e9 helada.\n\nSeb. Se lo hab\u00edan llevado. Ten\u00eda los ojos tan hinchados que parec\u00edan dos ciruelas; le colgaban mechones de pelo ensangrentado alrededor de la cara, y ten\u00eda los labios partidos y manchados de sangre. El resto de su rostro estaba recubierto de una costra de sangre seca. Ya hab\u00eda visto otras palizas graves, cuando las v\u00edctimas de Hector ven\u00edan arrastr\u00e1ndose hasta Seven Dials a pedirle ayuda a Nick, pero nunca nada como aquello. Nunca hab\u00eda visto a una v\u00edctima tan joven.\n\nEl guardia le arre\u00f3 otro porrazo en la mejilla. Seb estaba casi inconsciente, pero consigui\u00f3 levantar un poco la cabeza y mirarme.\n\n\u2014Paige.\n\nSu voz quebrada hizo que se me agolparan las l\u00e1grimas en los ojos. Me volv\u00ed hacia Nashira.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 le hab\u00e9is hecho?\n\n\u2014Nada. Se lo vas a hacer t\u00fa.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Ya va siendo hora de que te ganes tu pr\u00f3ximo blus\u00f3n, XX-40.\n\n\u2014\u00bfDe qu\u00e9 demonios est\u00e1s hablando?\n\nAlsafi me peg\u00f3 tan fuerte en la cabeza que casi me derrib\u00f3. Me agarr\u00f3 del pelo y me dio la vuelta para que pudiera mirarlo.\n\n\u2014No uses estas palabras en presencia de la soberana de sangre. Cuida tu lenguaje o te coser\u00e9 la boca.\n\n\u2014Paciencia, Alsafi. Deja que se enfade. \u2014Nashira levant\u00f3 una mano\u2014. Al fin y al cabo, en el tren estaba enfadada.\n\nMe zumbaban los o\u00eddos. Aparecieron dos caras en mi memoria. Dos cuerpos en el suelo del vag\u00f3n. Uno, muerto; el otro, loco. Mis v\u00edctimas. Mis presas.\n\nEse era mi examen. Para ganarme el nuevo blus\u00f3n, ten\u00eda que matar a un amaur\u00f3tico.\n\nTen\u00eda que matar a Seb.\n\nNashira deb\u00eda de haber adivinado lo que yo era. Deb\u00eda de haber adivinado que mi esp\u00edritu pod\u00eda abandonar mi cuerpo, su ubicaci\u00f3n natural. Que era capaz de matar sin derramamiento de sangre. Quer\u00eda ver c\u00f3mo lo hac\u00eda. Quer\u00eda verme bailar. Quer\u00eda saber si val\u00eda la pena robarme ese don.\n\n\u2014No \u2014dije.\n\nNashira no se inmut\u00f3.\n\n\u2014\u00bfNo? \u2014Como no dije nada, continu\u00f3\u2014: La negativa est\u00e1 descartada. Obedecer\u00e1s o nos veremos obligados a deshacernos de ti. Seguro que el Gran Inquisidor se alegrar\u00e1 de corregir tu insolencia.\n\n\u2014Pues m\u00e1tame \u2014repliqu\u00e9\u2014. \u00bfA qu\u00e9 esperas?\n\nNinguno de los trece jueces dijo nada. Nashira tampoco. Se qued\u00f3 mir\u00e1ndome fijamente. Tratando de averiguar si me estaba marcando un farol.\n\nAlsafi no se anduvo con rodeos. Me agarr\u00f3 por la mu\u00f1eca y me arrastr\u00f3 hasta la silla. Me retorc\u00ed y patale\u00e9 mientras \u00e9l me rodeaba el cuello con un musculoso brazo.\n\n\u2014Hazlo \u2014me gru\u00f1\u00f3 al o\u00eddo\u2014, o te aplastar\u00e9 las costillas y te ahogar\u00e1s en tu propia sangre. \u2014Me sacudi\u00f3 tan fuerte que me tembl\u00f3 la vista\u2014. Mata al chico. Ahora mismo.\n\n\u2014No.\n\n\u2014Obedece.\n\n\u2014No.\n\nAlsafi me apret\u00f3 m\u00e1s fuerte. Le clav\u00e9 las u\u00f1as en la manga. Le ara\u00f1\u00e9 un costado, y encontr\u00e9 el cuchillo que llevaba al cinto. Era peque\u00f1o, del tama\u00f1o de un abrecartas, pero servir\u00eda. Bast\u00f3 una pu\u00f1alada somera para hacer que me soltara. Me sub\u00ed a un banco; todav\u00eda ten\u00eda el cuchillo en la mano.\n\n\u2014No te me acerques \u2014le advert\u00ed.\n\nNashira ri\u00f3 y los jueces la imitaron. Al fin y al cabo, para ellos yo solo era otra clase de int\u00e9rprete. Otra humana endeble con la cabeza llena de confeti y fuegos artificiales.\n\nPero el Custodio no ri\u00f3. No apartaba la vista de mi cara. Lo apunt\u00e9 con el cuchillo.\n\nNashira vino hacia m\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Impresionante \u2014coment\u00f3\u2014. Me gustas, XX-40. Tienes temple.\n\nMe temblaba la mano.\n\nAlsafi se mir\u00f3 el corte que le hab\u00eda hecho en el brazo. Su piel rezumaba un fluido luminoso. Cuando mir\u00e9 el cuchillo, vi que la hoja estaba recubierta de esa sustancia.\n\nSeb lloraba. As\u00ed el pu\u00f1al con m\u00e1s fuerza, pero ten\u00eda las manos sudadas. No pod\u00eda atacar a todos aquellos refa\u00edtas con un abrecartas. Adem\u00e1s, no se me daba nada bien el combate con armas blancas, y no habr\u00eda podido lanzar un cuchillo con precisi\u00f3n.\n\nExceptuando a los cinco \u00e1ngeles que rodeaban a Nashira, no hab\u00eda esp\u00edritus con los que hacer una bandada. Tendr\u00eda que acercarme mucho m\u00e1s para soltar a Seb. Y luego tendr\u00eda que encontrar la forma de salir los dos de all\u00ed con vida.\n\n\u2014Arcturus, Aludra: desarmadla \u2014orden\u00f3 Nashira\u2014. Sin usar esp\u00edritus.\n\nUno de los jueces se quit\u00f3 la capucha. Era una mujer.\n\n\u2014Ser\u00e1 un placer \u2014dijo.\n\nLa examin\u00e9. Era la guardiana de Julian: un ser taimado, con cabello rubio liso y ojos felinos. El Custodio se qued\u00f3 detr\u00e1s de ella. Med\u00ed sus auras.\n\nAludra era una salvaje. Pod\u00eda parecer civilizada, pero percib\u00ed que estaba conteni\u00e9ndose para no babear. Estaba deseando pelear, excitada por la debilidad de Seb, y sedienta de mi aura. El Custodio era m\u00e1s oscuro, m\u00e1s fr\u00edo, y sus intenciones eran m\u00e1s misteriosas, pero eso lo hac\u00eda m\u00e1s letal. Si no consegu\u00eda leer su aura, no podr\u00eda predecir sus movimientos.\n\nDe pronto se me ocurri\u00f3 una cosa. La sangre del Custodio me hab\u00eda hecho sentir m\u00e1s cerca del \u00e9ter. Quiz\u00e1 volviera a funcionar. Inhal\u00e9, sosteniendo el cuchillo cerca de mi cara. El aroma fr\u00edo despert\u00f3 mis sentidos. El \u00e9ter me envolvi\u00f3 como un agua helada y me sumergi\u00f3. Di una sacudida con la mu\u00f1eca y lanc\u00e9 el cuchillo hacia la cara de Aludra, apunt\u00e1ndole entre los ojos. Ella lo esquiv\u00f3 por los pelos. Mi punter\u00eda hab\u00eda mejorado mucho.\n\nAludra agarr\u00f3 un pesado candelabro y se abalanz\u00f3 sobre m\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Ven aqu\u00ed, ni\u00f1a \u2014dijo\u2014. Baila conmigo.\n\nMe ech\u00e9 hacia atr\u00e1s. Con el cr\u00e1neo destrozado no iba a servirle de nada a Seb.\n\nAludra me embisti\u00f3. Su misi\u00f3n era derribarme y cebarse con lo que quedara de m\u00ed. Si mis sentidos no se hubieran agudizado, seguramente lo habr\u00eda conseguido. Rod\u00e9 sobre m\u00ed misma para evitarla y, en lugar de aplastarme, el candelabro se estrell\u00f3 contra la cabeza de una estatua. Me puse r\u00e1pidamente en pie, salt\u00e9 por encima del altar y corr\u00ed por la capilla, pasando al lado de los refas encapuchados que se encontraban en los bancos.\n\nAludra recuper\u00f3 su arma. O\u00ed silbar el aire cuando la lanz\u00f3 hacia el fondo de la capilla. El candelabro pas\u00f3 por encima de la cabeza de Seb, que grit\u00f3 mi nombre.\n\nFui hacia la puerta, que estaba abierta; pero un guardia la cerr\u00f3 desde fuera, y me encerr\u00f3 en la capilla con mi p\u00fablico. Como no tuve tiempo de reducir la velocidad, me empotr\u00e9 contra la puerta. El impacto me cort\u00f3 la respiraci\u00f3n, y perd\u00ed el equilibrio. Me golpe\u00e9 la cabeza contra el m\u00e1rmol. Al cabo de una mil\u00e9sima de segundo, el candelabro se estrell\u00f3 contra la puerta. Apenas me dio a tiempo a moverme antes de que cayera al suelo, justo donde hac\u00eda un instante estaban mis piernas. El ruido reson\u00f3 por la capilla como una campanada.\n\nNotaba un dolor sordo en la parte trasera del cr\u00e1neo, pero no hab\u00eda tiempo para descansar. Aludra me hab\u00eda alcanzado. Me rode\u00f3 el cuello con sus dedos enguantados y me apret\u00f3 la garganta con los pulgares. Me ahogaba. Mis ojos se llenaron de sangre y dej\u00e9 de ver. Aludra me estaba robando el aura. Sus ojos se iluminaron con una luz roja y abrasadora.\n\n\u2014Basta, Aludra.\n\nNo pareci\u00f3 que lo hubiera o\u00eddo. Not\u00e9 un sabor met\u00e1lico.\n\nEl cuchillo estaba en el suelo, a mi lado. Estir\u00e9 los dedos hacia \u00e9l, pero Aludra me agarr\u00f3 la mu\u00f1eca.\n\n\u2014Ahora me toca a m\u00ed.\n\nSolo ten\u00eda una opci\u00f3n. Cuando Aludra me acerc\u00f3 el cuchillo a la mejilla, empuj\u00e9 mi esp\u00edritu hacia el \u00e9ter.\n\nEn forma de esp\u00edritu ve\u00eda con otros ojos, en otro plano. All\u00ed s\u00ed ten\u00eda visi\u00f3n espiritista. El \u00e9ter era un vac\u00edo silencioso, tachonado de esferas semejantes a estrellas; cada esfera era un onirosaje. Aludra estaba f\u00edsicamente cerca de m\u00ed; su \u00abesfera\u00bb, por lo tanto, no estaba muy lejos. Habr\u00eda sido suicida intentar entrar en su mente (era muy antigua, muy poderosa), pero sus ansias de aura hab\u00edan debilitado sus defensas. \u00abAhora o nunca\u00bb, me dije, y me lanc\u00e9 contra su mente.\n\nAludra no estaba en guardia y yo fui muy r\u00e1pida. Llegu\u00e9 a su medianoche antes de que ella se diera cuenta de lo que hab\u00eda pasado. Cuando se percat\u00f3, me vi expulsada con la fuerza de una bala. Volv\u00eda a estar dentro de mi cuerpo, con la vista fija en el techo de la capilla. Aludra, arrodillada, se sujetaba la cabeza con ambas manos.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Sacadla de aqu\u00ed! \u00a1Sacadla! \u2014gritaba\u2014. \u00a1Es onir\u00e1mbula!\n\nMe levant\u00e9 con dificultad, jadeando, y me lanc\u00e9 contra el Custodio, que me sujet\u00f3 por los hombros. Me hinc\u00f3 los dedos enguantados. No intentaba hacerme da\u00f1o: solo quer\u00eda sujetarme, contenerme; pero mi esp\u00edritu era como una planta carn\u00edvora y reaccionaba al peligro. Casi sin propon\u00e9rmelo, volv\u00ed a intentar el mismo ataque.\n\nEsa vez ni siquiera llegu\u00e9 a tocar el \u00e9ter. No pod\u00eda moverme.\n\nEl Custodio. Era \u00e9l. Esta vez era \u00e9l quien me estaba robando la energ\u00eda, sorbi\u00e9ndome el aura. Me sent\u00ed atra\u00edda por \u00e9l como una flor por la luz del sol; y, conmocionada, no pude hacer nada.\n\nEntonces par\u00f3. Fue como si se partiera un cable que nos un\u00eda. \u00c9l ten\u00eda los ojos de un rojo intenso como la sangre.\n\nLo mir\u00e9 fijamente. El Custodio dio un paso atr\u00e1s y mir\u00f3 a Nashira. Se produjo un silencio. Entonces los refa\u00edtas encapuchados se levantaron y aplaudieron.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 sentada en el suelo, aturdida.\n\nNashira se arrodill\u00f3 a mi lado y me puso una mano enguantada en la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Preciosa. Mi peque\u00f1a onir\u00e1mbula.\n\nEstaba perdida: Nashira lo sab\u00eda.\n\nSe levant\u00f3 y se volvi\u00f3 hacia Seb, que observaba la escena, aterrorizado. Con un ojo entreabierto sigui\u00f3 la trayectoria de Nashira, que se coloc\u00f3 detr\u00e1s de su silla.\n\n\u2014Gracias por tus servicios. Te estamos muy agradecidos. \u2014Le puso las manos a ambos lados de la cabeza\u2014. Adi\u00f3s.\n\n\u2014\u00a1No, por favor! \u00a1No quiero morir! \u00a1Paige!\n\nNashira le gir\u00f3 bruscamente la cabeza hacia un lado. Seb abri\u00f3 m\u00e1s los ojos, y de sus labios escap\u00f3 un grito ahogado.\n\nLo hab\u00eda matado.\n\n\u2014\u00a1No! \u2014exclam\u00e9. No pod\u00eda creer lo que acababa de ver. Me qued\u00e9 mir\u00e1ndola\u2014. Has... has...\n\n\u2014Demasiado tarde. \u2014Nashira solt\u00f3 la cabeza de Seb, y esta cay\u00f3 hacia un lado\u2014. Podr\u00edas haberlo hecho t\u00fa, 40. Sin dolor. Solo ten\u00edas que hacer lo que te he pedido.\n\nFue su sonrisa lo que me impuls\u00f3. Porque sonre\u00eda. Me lanc\u00e9 contra ella con la sangre hirvi\u00e9ndome en las venas. El Custodio y Alsafi me tomaron los brazos y me sujetaron. Patale\u00e9 y me retorc\u00ed hasta que qued\u00e9 empapada de sudor.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Zorra! \u2014grit\u00e9\u2014. \u00a1Zorra! \u00a1Zorra asquerosa! \u00a1Seb ni siquiera era vidente!\n\n\u2014Tienes raz\u00f3n, no lo era. Pero los esp\u00edritus amaur\u00f3ticos son los mejores sirvientes, \u00bfno te parece?\n\nAlsafi estuvo a punto de dislocarme un hombro. Le clav\u00e9 las u\u00f1as en el brazo al Custodio. En el brazo malo, el que yo le hab\u00eda curado. \u00c9l tens\u00f3 los m\u00fasculos; no me import\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Os matar\u00e9 \u2014dije, dirigi\u00e9ndome a todos. Casi no pod\u00eda respirar, pero lo dije\u2014. Os matar\u00e9. Juro que os matar\u00e9.\n\n\u2014No hace falta que nos jures nada, 40. Deja que nosotros juremos por ti.\n\nAlsafi me tir\u00f3 al suelo y me golpe\u00e9 la cabeza contra el duro m\u00e1rmol. Perd\u00ed moment\u00e1neamente la visi\u00f3n. Intent\u00e9 levantarme, pero algo me inmovilizaba. Una rodilla sobre mi espalda. Estir\u00e9 los dedos por el suelo. Entonces not\u00e9 un dolor atroz en el hombro, el dolor m\u00e1s terrible que jam\u00e1s hab\u00eda sentido. Ardiente, demasiado ardiente. Ol\u00ed a carne quemada. No pude evitarlo: grit\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Juramos tu lealtad eterna a los refa\u00edtas. \u2014Nashira no desviaba la mirada de m\u00ed\u2014. La juramos con la marca de fuego. XX-59-40, est\u00e1s unida para siempre al Custodio de los Mesarthim. Desde ahora renuncias a tu verdadero nombre para el resto de tus d\u00edas. Tu vida nos pertenece.\n\nEra mi piel lo que ol\u00eda a quemado. Solo pod\u00eda pensar en el dolor que sent\u00eda.\n\nYa estaba. Hab\u00edan matado a Seb, y ahora iban a matarme a m\u00ed. Vi el destello de una aguja.\n\nTen\u00eda demasiado flux en la sangre.\n\nCorr\u00ed describiendo c\u00edrculos por mi onirosaje. El flux lo hab\u00eda deformado, hab\u00eda roto las formas y los colores.\n\nO\u00eda los latidos de mi coraz\u00f3n, el aire abras\u00e1ndome al pasarme por la garganta y la nariz.\n\n\u00abMe est\u00e1n matando.\u00bb Eso pens\u00e9 mientras luchaba contra mi mente, mientras la ve\u00eda desmenuzarse como la le\u00f1a en un horno. Ya estaba. Nashira hab\u00eda descubierto qu\u00e9 era. Me hab\u00eda envenenado, y ahora me estaba muriendo. No pod\u00eda durar mucho; al fin y al cabo, los cad\u00e1veres no pod\u00edan conservar el onirosaje. Entonces ese pensamiento se deshilach\u00f3 y pas\u00f3, y me qued\u00e9 rondando por las partes m\u00e1s oscuras de mi conciencia.\n\nEntonces la encontr\u00e9. Mi zona soleada, donde habitaba la belleza. La seguridad. El calor. Corr\u00ed hacia ella, pero era como correr por la arena h\u00fameda. Unas nubes oscuras se me adher\u00edan y tiraban de m\u00ed hacia las nubes y las sombras. Forceje\u00e9 para defenderme del flux, me retorc\u00ed y patale\u00e9 para soltarme de \u00e9l, y ca\u00ed rodando hacia la luz, hacia el prado de flores.\n\nTodos ten\u00edamos un onirosaje, un hermoso espejismo dentro de nuestra mente. En sue\u00f1os, hasta los amaur\u00f3ticos ve\u00edan su zona soleada, aunque no con mucha claridad. Los videntes pod\u00edan ver el interior de su propia mente, pod\u00edan vivir all\u00ed hasta morir de hambre. Mi zona soleada era un prado de flores rojas, un campo que ondulaba y cambiaba seg\u00fan mi estado de \u00e1nimo. Ve\u00eda fragmentos del mundo que me rodeaba, notaba el movimiento de la tierra cuando vomitaba el escaso contenido de mi est\u00f3mago. Pero dentro de mi mente estaba tranquila, mientras el flux causaba estragos a mi alrededor. Me tumb\u00e9 entre las flores y esper\u00e9 a que llegara el final.\n\nVolv\u00eda a estar en la habitaci\u00f3n de Magdalen. El gram\u00f3fono desgranaba una melod\u00eda, otro de los temas prohibidos favoritos de Jaxon, \u00abDid You Ever See a Dream Walking?\u00bb. Estaba tumbada boca abajo en el div\u00e1n, desnuda de cintura para arriba. Me hab\u00edan recogido el pelo en un mo\u00f1o.\n\nMe llev\u00e9 una mano a la cara. Piel. Piel fr\u00eda, pegajosa. Estaba viva. Dolorida, s\u00ed, pero viva. No me hab\u00edan matado.\n\nEl dolor me imped\u00eda permanecer quieta. Intent\u00e9 incorporarme, pero el peso de mi cabeza solo me dej\u00f3 levantarme unos cent\u00edmetros. Notaba una laceraci\u00f3n abrasadora detr\u00e1s del hombro derecho. Otro dolor, punzante, en la ingle me indicaba el lugar donde me hab\u00edan inyectado el f\u00e1rmaco; pero esa vez los da\u00f1os eran m\u00e1s profundos.\n\nEl flux era de los pocos f\u00e1rmacos que funcionaban mejor inyectados en las arterias que en las venas. Ten\u00eda el muslo caliente e hinchado. Mi pecho sub\u00eda y bajaba al ritmo de mi respiraci\u00f3n. Estaba ardiendo de fiebre. El refa que me hab\u00eda hecho aquello hab\u00eda sido muy cruel adem\u00e1s de muy torpe. Recordaba vagamente haber visto a Suhail sonri\u00e9ndome con lascivia antes de que se apagaran las luces.\n\nQuiz\u00e1 hubieran intentado matarme. Quiz\u00e1 estuviera muri\u00e9ndome.\n\nVolv\u00ed la cabeza hacia un lado. Hab\u00edan encendido la chimenea.\n\nY hab\u00eda alguien en la habitaci\u00f3n: mi guardi\u00e1n.\n\nEstaba sentado en su butaca contemplando las llamas. Lo mir\u00e9 con odio desde el div\u00e1n y volv\u00ed a notar sus manos sujet\u00e1ndome, impidi\u00e9ndome salvar a Seb. \u00bfSe sent\u00eda culpable por aquel asesinato gratuito? \u00bfLe importaban algo los indefensos esclavos de la Casa Amaur\u00f3tica? Me pregunt\u00e9 si habr\u00eda algo que le importara. Hasta sus interacciones con Nashira parec\u00edan mec\u00e1nicas. \u00bfHabr\u00eda algo que lo hiciera vibrar?\n\nEl Custodio debi\u00f3 de advertir que lo estaba mirando porque se levant\u00f3. Me qued\u00e9 muy quieta; me dol\u00edan tantas partes del cuerpo que no me atrev\u00eda a moverme. El Custodio se arrodill\u00f3 a mi lado. Levant\u00f3 una mano, y me retraje. Pos\u00f3 el dorso de los dedos sobre mi ardiente mejilla. Volv\u00eda a tener los ojos de un dorado neutro.\n\nLa fiebre me hab\u00eda resecado la garganta.\n\n\u2014Su esp\u00edritu \u2014alcanc\u00e9 a decir. Hablar era un suplicio\u2014. \u00bfSe solt\u00f3?\n\n\u2014No.\n\nTuve que emplear todas mis fuerzas para enmascarar mi dolor. Si nadie hab\u00eda recitado el treno, Seb quedar\u00eda atrapado. Todav\u00eda estaba asustado y solo; y lo peor de todo: todav\u00eda estaba prisionero.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 no me ha matado? \u2014Las palabras me irritaron la garganta\u2014. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 no ha acabado definitivamente conmigo?\n\nEl Custodio no me contest\u00f3. Tras examinarme el hombro, cogi\u00f3 un c\u00e1liz de la mesilla de noche. Estaba lleno hasta el borde de un l\u00edquido oscuro. Mir\u00e9 a mi guardi\u00e1n; \u00e9l me acerc\u00f3 el c\u00e1liz a los labios, sujet\u00e1ndome la parte de atr\u00e1s de la cabeza con una mano. Intent\u00e9 apartarme. El Custodio dej\u00f3 escapar un d\u00e9bil gru\u00f1ido.\n\n\u2014Esto reducir\u00e1 la hinchaz\u00f3n de la pierna \u2014dijo\u2014. Bebe.\n\nGir\u00e9 la cabeza. El Custodio me apart\u00f3 la copa de los labios.\n\n\u2014\u00bfNo quieres curarte?\n\nLo mir\u00e9 fijamente.\n\nDeb\u00eda de haber sido un accidente que sobreviviera. No hab\u00eda ninguna raz\u00f3n para que no me hubieran matado.\n\n\u2014Te han marcado \u2014dijo\u2014. Tienes que dejar que te cure la herida durante unos d\u00edas, o se te infectar\u00e1.\n\nGir\u00e9 la cabeza para mirarme el hombro, tap\u00e1ndome los pechos con las s\u00e1banas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfMarcado? \u00bfCon qu\u00e9? \u2014Resegu\u00ed la herida por la piel, tirante, y me temblaron los dedos. _XX-59-40_. \u00a1No!\u2014. Cerdo asqueroso. Te matar\u00e9. Cuando est\u00e9s dormido...\n\nMe dol\u00eda demasiado la garganta. Par\u00e9 de hablar; respiraba entrecortadamente. El Custodio escudri\u00f1\u00f3 mi cara, como si intentara descifrar un texto escrito en un idioma extranjero.\n\nNo era idiota. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 me miraba as\u00ed? Me hab\u00edan marcado como a un animal. O como algo peor. Con un n\u00famero.\n\nSolo se o\u00edan mis jadeos. El Custodio apoy\u00f3 una mano enguantada en mi rodilla. Apart\u00e9 la pierna, y la descarga de dolor me lleg\u00f3 hasta los dedos del pie.\n\n\u2014No me toques.\n\n\u2014La marca dejar\u00e1 de dolerte con el tiempo \u2014dijo \u00e9l\u2014, pero la arteria femoral es otra cosa.\n\nDesliz\u00f3 la mano y me apart\u00f3 las s\u00e1banas de la pierna. Cuando me vi el muslo, cre\u00ed que iba a volver a desmayarme. Estaba hinchad\u00edsimo y cubierto de cardenales que se extend\u00edan casi hasta la rodilla. La zona alrededor de la ingle estaba negra e inyectada en sangre. El Custodio me aplic\u00f3 una liger\u00edsima presi\u00f3n en la pierna, apenas suficiente para accionar un gatillo de precisi\u00f3n. Vomit\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Esta herida no se curar\u00e1 sola. Las heridas causadas por el flux no sanan sin un segundo ant\u00eddoto m\u00e1s fuerte.\n\nCre\u00ed que me morir\u00eda si ejerc\u00eda una pizca m\u00e1s de presi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Vete al infierno \u2014dije con un hilo de voz.\n\n\u2014El infierno no existe. Solo existe el \u00e9ter.\n\nApret\u00e9 los dientes y tembl\u00e9 del esfuerzo por no sollozar. El Custodio apart\u00f3 la mano de mi pierna y se dio la vuelta.\n\nNo sabr\u00eda decir cu\u00e1nto rato permanec\u00ed all\u00ed tumbada, d\u00e9bil y delirante. Solo pod\u00eda pensar en c\u00f3mo deb\u00eda de estar disfrutando \u00e9l con aquello, viendo que volv\u00edamos a representar cada uno el papel que nos correspond\u00eda. Esa vez era \u00e9l quien ten\u00eda poder sobre m\u00ed, poder para verme sufrir y sudar. Y esa vez era \u00e9l quien ten\u00eda el remedio.\n\nEmpezaba a clarear. El reloj avanzaba. El Custodio estaba sentado en su butaca e iba echando le\u00f1a al fuego. No ten\u00eda ni idea de a qu\u00e9 esperaba. Si lo que pretend\u00eda era que yo cambiara de opini\u00f3n con respecto al remedio, iba a pasarse mucho rato all\u00ed. Tal vez solo le hubieran ordenado vigilarme, asegurarse de que no me suicidara. No voy a decir que no me lo planteara. El dolor era insoportable. Ten\u00eda la pierna r\u00edgida, y se me contra\u00eda espasm\u00f3dicamente. La piel, hinchada, estaba tensa y brillante, como una ampolla a punto de reventar.\n\nTranscurr\u00edan las horas, y el Custodio iba de un sitio a otro: la ventana, la butaca, el cuarto de ba\u00f1o, el escritorio, la butaca otra vez. Como si yo no estuviera all\u00ed. En una ocasi\u00f3n sali\u00f3 de la habitaci\u00f3n y volvi\u00f3 con un poco de pan caliente, pero lo rechac\u00e9. Quer\u00eda que pensara que estaba en huelga de hambre. Quer\u00eda recuperar mi poder. Quer\u00eda hacerle sentir tan insignificante como me hab\u00eda sentido yo.\n\nEl dolor del muslo no remit\u00eda, sino todo lo contrario. Me apret\u00e9 la piel oscurecida. Segu\u00ed apretando m\u00e1s y m\u00e1s, hasta que vi destellos luminosos. Ten\u00eda esperanzas de que eso me hiciera perder el conocimiento, porque as\u00ed dispondr\u00eda de unas horas de alivio; pero lo \u00fanico que consegu\u00ed fue volver a vomitar. El Custodio me mir\u00f3 mientras yo arrojaba una bilis \u00e1cida en un barre\u00f1o. Ten\u00eda la mirada inexpresiva. Estaba esperando a que yo cediera, a que le suplicara.\n\nMir\u00e9 el barre\u00f1o; lo ve\u00eda todo borroso, pero comprob\u00e9 que estaba empezando a vomitar gruesos co\u00e1gulos de sangre. Dej\u00e9 caer la cabeza sobre los cojines.\n\nDeb\u00ed de perder el conocimiento. Cuando despert\u00e9, volv\u00eda a oscurecer. Julian deb\u00eda de estar pregunt\u00e1ndose d\u00f3nde me hab\u00eda metido, suponiendo que hubiera podido salir de su residencia, lo cual era muy dudoso. Mi cerebro pod\u00eda concentrarse en esas cosas porque todo el dolor hab\u00eda desaparecido, inexplicablemente.\n\nIgual que toda la sensibilidad en la pierna.\n\nEl miedo se apoder\u00f3 de m\u00ed. Intent\u00e9 mover los dedos de los pies, girar el tobillo, pero no consegu\u00ed nada.\n\nEl Custodio volv\u00eda a estar a mi lado.\n\n\u2014Tal vez deber\u00eda mencionar \u2014dijo\u2014 que, si no tratamos la infecci\u00f3n, es muy probable que pierdas la pierna. O la vida.\n\nLe habr\u00eda escupido, pero los v\u00f3mitos me hab\u00edan deshidratado. Sacud\u00ed la cabeza. Estaba perdiendo la visi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014No seas necia. \u2014Me agarr\u00f3 la cabeza y me oblig\u00f3 a mirarlo\u2014. Necesitas las piernas.\n\nMe ten\u00eda acorralada. Ten\u00eda raz\u00f3n: no pod\u00eda perder la pierna. Necesitaba poder correr. Esa vez, cuando me sujet\u00f3 la cabeza con una mano, abr\u00ed la boca y beb\u00ed del c\u00e1liz. El l\u00edquido sab\u00eda muy mal, a tierra y a metal. El Custodio asinti\u00f3 con la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Muy bien.\n\nLe lanc\u00e9 una mirada que quer\u00eda ser de odio, pero el cosquilleo que me recorri\u00f3 la pierna la suaviz\u00f3. Me beb\u00ed hasta la \u00faltima gota de aquel l\u00edquido repugnante, y me limpi\u00e9 los labios con la mano.\n\nEl Custodio volvi\u00f3 a levantar las s\u00e1banas. Mi muslo ya estaba recuperando sus dimensiones normales.\n\n\u2014Ahora estamos en paz \u2014dije. Me ard\u00eda la garganta\u2014. Ya est\u00e1. Yo te cur\u00e9 y t\u00fa me has curado a m\u00ed.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa nunca me has curado.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo? \u2014dije, titubeante.\n\n\u2014No he sufrido ninguna herida.\n\n\u2014Pero \u00bfno te acuerdas?\n\n\u2014Eso no pas\u00f3.\n\nNo dud\u00e9 ni un instante de que lo que hab\u00eda pasado fuera real. El Custodio todav\u00eda llevaba los brazos cubiertos, de modo que no pod\u00eda mostrarle las pruebas; pero hab\u00eda sucedido. Por mucho que \u00e9l lo negara.\n\n\u2014Entonces deb\u00ed de equivocarme \u2014dije.\n\nEl Custodio no desvi\u00f3 la mirada de mis ojos. Me miraba con inter\u00e9s. Un inter\u00e9s fr\u00edo, desapasionado.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed \u2014dijo\u2014. Te equivocaste.\n\nY esa fue mi advertencia.\n\nSon\u00f3 la campana de la torre. El Custodio mir\u00f3 por la ventana.\n\n\u2014Puedes irte. No est\u00e1s en condiciones de empezar a entrenarte esta noche, pero deber\u00edas buscar algo de comer. \u2014Se\u00f1al\u00f3 la urna que estaba sobre la repisa de la chimenea\u2014. Ah\u00ed dentro tienes m\u00e1s _numa_. Coge todo lo que necesites.\n\n\u2014No tengo ropa.\n\n\u2014Eso es porque te corresponde un nuevo uniforme. \u2014Levant\u00f3 un blus\u00f3n rosa\u2014. Felicidades, Paige. Te han ascendido.\n\nEsa fue la primera vez que me llam\u00f3 por mi nombre.\n\nTen\u00eda que largarme de all\u00ed: eso fue lo primero que pens\u00e9 cuando sal\u00ed al intenso fr\u00edo de la noche. Sheol I estaba igual que antes, como si Seb nunca hubiera recorrido sus calles; yo, en cambio, hab\u00eda cambiado. En lugar del blus\u00f3n blanco, llevaba otro de color rosa claro. El ancla bordada en mi chaleco nuevo era del mismo rosa horrible. Estaba manchada.\n\nNo pod\u00eda hacer el siguiente examen. De ninguna manera. Si en el primero hab\u00edan matado a un ni\u00f1o, \u00bfqu\u00e9 ser\u00edan capaces de hacerme en el segundo? \u00bfCu\u00e1nta sangre habr\u00eda que derramar para que me convirtiera en casaca roja? Deb\u00eda irme. Ten\u00eda que haber alguna forma de huir, aunque para ello hubiera que sortear las minas. Cualquier cosa ser\u00eda mejor que esa pesadilla.\n\nMientras me abr\u00eda camino por el Poblado, con la pierna derecha d\u00e9bil y pesada, un fr\u00edo extra\u00f1o se extendi\u00f3 por mis tripas. Cada vez que un actor me miraba, mudaba la expresi\u00f3n. Su gesto se volv\u00eda inexpresivo, o agachaba la cabeza. Mi blus\u00f3n era una advertencia: \u00abSoy una renegada, una traidora. Al\u00e9jate de m\u00ed. Soy una asesina\u00bb.\n\nNo, no era ninguna asesina. A Seb lo hab\u00eda matado Nashira, no yo; pero eso no lo sab\u00edan los actores. Ellos despreciaban a cualquiera que no fuera un casaca blanca. Deber\u00eda haberme quedado en Magdalen aquella noche; pero entonces habr\u00eda tenido que estar con el Custodio, y no soportaba pasar ni un minuto m\u00e1s en su compa\u00f1\u00eda. Recorr\u00ed, cojeando, aquellos pasadizos claustrof\u00f3bicos. Necesitaba encontrar a Liss. Ella pod\u00eda ayudarme a salir de aquella pesadilla. Ten\u00eda que haber una forma.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPaige?\n\nMe par\u00e9; me temblaba la pierna. Ten\u00eda que hacer un esfuerzo agotador para andar. Liss hab\u00eda asomado la cabeza. Le ech\u00f3 un vistazo a mi blus\u00f3n rosa y se puso tensa.\n\n\u2014Hola, Liss.\n\n\u2014Aprobaste.\n\nSu cara se ensombreci\u00f3.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed \u2014afirm\u00e9\u2014, pero...\n\n\u2014\u00bfA qui\u00e9n ayudaste a apresar?\n\n\u2014A nadie. \u2014Me mir\u00f3 con gesto de incredulidad, y comprend\u00ed que ten\u00eda que cont\u00e1rselo\u2014. Intentaron obligarme a matar a... Seb. El amaur\u00f3tico. \u2014Agach\u00e9 la cabeza\u2014. Y ahora \u00e9l est\u00e1 muerto.\n\nLiss dio un respingo.\n\n\u2014Vale \u2014dijo\u2014. Pues hasta luego.\n\n\u2014Liss, esc\u00fachame, por favor. T\u00fa no...\n\nCorri\u00f3 la cortina de su puerta de un tir\u00f3n y me dej\u00f3 con la palabra en la boca. Exhausta, resbal\u00e9 hasta el suelo con la espalda pegada a la pared. No era uno de ellos.\n\n\u00abSeb.\u00bb Dije su nombre mentalmente, tratando de hacer salir a su esp\u00edritu de donde lo hubieran escondido, pero no sali\u00f3 nada del \u00e9ter. Ni siquiera una leve punzada. Ni siquiera logr\u00e9 nada a\u00f1adiendo su apellido; seguramente me faltaba alg\u00fan nombre. Una vez muerto, el ni\u00f1o que tanto hab\u00eda confiado en m\u00ed, que tan seguro estaba de que yo lo salvar\u00eda, era un desconocido para m\u00ed.\n\nMe dio la impresi\u00f3n de que la cortina me miraba con odio. Liss deb\u00eda de considerarme pura escoria. Cerr\u00e9 los ojos y trat\u00e9 de ignorar el dolor sordo del muslo. Quiz\u00e1 encontrara a otro casaca rosa con quien intercambiar informaci\u00f3n, pero me resist\u00eda a intentarlo. No pod\u00eda confiar en ellos. La mayor\u00eda eran asesinos. La mayor\u00eda hab\u00edan delatado a alguien. Si quer\u00eda hablar con alguien que no fuera un renegado, tendr\u00eda que demostrarle a Liss que pod\u00eda confiar en m\u00ed. Me levant\u00e9 haciendo un esfuerzo que me dej\u00f3 empapada de sudor y me dirig\u00ed a la choza de la comida. Tal vez encontrara a Julian all\u00ed. Seguramente \u00e9l tampoco querr\u00eda hablar conmigo, pero quiz\u00e1 me diera una oportunidad.\n\nMe llam\u00f3 la atenci\u00f3n una luz. Un hornillo. Un grupo de actores fumaban en un cobertizo diminuto, tumbados sobre los costados, agitando de vez en cuando una mano como si quisieran atrapar algo. \u00c1ster, otra vez. Tilda estaba entre ellos, con la cabeza apoyada en un coj\u00edn, el blanco blus\u00f3n sucio y arrugado como un pa\u00f1uelo de papel usado. Busqu\u00e9 a tientas en mi chaleco el comprimido verde que me hab\u00eda llevado. Me arrodill\u00e9 junto a Tilda procurando no lastimarme la pierna.\n\n\u2014Tilda.\n\nAbri\u00f3 un poco los ojos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 pasa?\n\n\u2014He tra\u00eddo la pastilla.\n\n\u2014Un momento. Todav\u00eda estoy reinando. Dame un minuto, cielo. O quiz\u00e1 dos. O cinco. \u2014Se puso boca abajo; una risa silenciosa la sacudi\u00f3\u2014. El onirosaje se ha vuelto morado. \u00bfEres real?\n\nEsper\u00e9 a que se agotara el efecto del \u00e1ster. Tilda se pas\u00f3 un minuto entero riendo; estaba roja como un tomate. Notaba el desenfreno de su aura, c\u00f3mo se sacud\u00eda y cambiaba por efecto de la droga. Los otros videntes no daban se\u00f1ales de querer despertar. Con manos temblorosas, Tilda se frot\u00f3 la cara y asinti\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Vale, ya estoy destronada. \u00bfD\u00f3nde est\u00e1 esa pastilla?\n\nSe la di. Tilda la examin\u00f3 desde todos los \u00e1ngulos. Pas\u00f3 un dedo por su superficie, analizando su textura. La parti\u00f3 por la mitad. Aplast\u00f3 una mitad entre los dedos. Oli\u00f3 el residuo, lo prob\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Tu guardiana ha vuelto a salir \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014Sale mucho. \u2014Me devolvi\u00f3 los restos de la pastilla\u2014. Es herbal, pero no sabr\u00eda decirte qu\u00e9 hierba lleva.\n\n\u2014\u00bfConoces a alguien que pueda dec\u00edrmelo?\n\n\u2014Podr\u00edas probar en la casa de empe\u00f1os. A lo mejor el tipo que me vendi\u00f3 el \u00e1ster sabe dec\u00edrtelo. La contrase\u00f1a es _specchio_.\n\n\u2014Ir\u00e9 a verlo. \u2014Me levant\u00e9\u2014. Te dejo con tu \u00e1ster.\n\n\u2014Gracias. Hasta luego.\n\nSe desplom\u00f3 sobre el coj\u00edn. Me pregunt\u00e9 qu\u00e9 les har\u00eda Suhail si los descubr\u00eda.\n\nTard\u00e9 un rato en encontrar la casa de empe\u00f1os. En el Poblado hab\u00eda muchas habitaciones, la mayor\u00eda ocupadas por grupos de dos o tres personas. Se pasaban el d\u00eda en aquellas peque\u00f1as chozas, apretujados alrededor de un hornillo de parafina, y dorm\u00edan sobre s\u00e1banas que apestaban a humedad y orines. Com\u00edan lo que encontraban. Si no encontraban nada, pasaban hambre. Permanec\u00edan juntos por dos motivos: porque no hab\u00eda suficiente espacio, y por el fr\u00edo intenso que hac\u00eda en la ciudad. No hab\u00eda instalaciones higi\u00e9nicas, ni m\u00e1s medicinas que las que pudieran obtener robando. Era un sitio adonde se iba a morir.\n\nLa casa de empe\u00f1os estaba escondida detr\u00e1s de una serie de gruesas cortinas. Ten\u00edas que saber d\u00f3nde buscar; yo la encontr\u00e9 despu\u00e9s de interrogar a una bufona. La chica parec\u00eda reacia a revelarme la informaci\u00f3n, y me previno sobre los sobornos y los precios elevados, pero se\u00f1al\u00f3 en la direcci\u00f3n correcta.\n\nVigilando la tienda estaba el cantor al que hab\u00eda visto el d\u00eda del serm\u00f3n. Se hallaba sentado en un coj\u00edn, jugando con unos dados. Ya no llevaba el blus\u00f3n blanco; deb\u00eda de haber suspendido el examen. \u00bfPara qu\u00e9 pod\u00edan querer los refa\u00edtas a un cantor?\n\n\u2014Hola \u2014lo salud\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Hola \u2014me contest\u00f3 con una voz dulce y pura; la voz de un cantor, sin duda.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPuedo hablar con el prestamista?\n\n\u2014\u00bfContrase\u00f1a?\n\n\u2014 _Specchio_.\n\nEl chico se levant\u00f3. Ten\u00eda los p\u00e1rpados del ojo derecho hinchados debido a una infecci\u00f3n. Descorri\u00f3 las cortinas y entr\u00e9.\n\nLas casas de empe\u00f1os de Londres eran establecimientos por lo general peque\u00f1os y sin licencia de las peores zonas de la cohorte central. Tambi\u00e9n hab\u00eda muchas en Chapel, en el II-6. Aquella no era diferente. El prestamista hab\u00eda montado su negocio en una especie de tienda de campa\u00f1a hecha con pa\u00f1uelos parecidos a los que usaba Liss en sus actuaciones. La mitad del espacio, iluminado por una sola l\u00e1mpara de parafina, se hab\u00eda convertido en un palacio de espejos. El prestamista, sentado en un sill\u00f3n de piel maltrecho, contemplaba las superficies de cristal moteado. Era un hombre de cabello cano con demasiada barriga para ser actor. Los espejos delataban su especialidad: la catoptromancia.\n\nCuando entr\u00e9, se puso el mon\u00f3culo en un ojo y examin\u00f3 mi reflejo. Ten\u00eda los ojos empa\u00f1ados de los profetas expertos.\n\n\u2014Creo que no te hab\u00eda visto nunca. Ni en mis espejos ni en mi tienda.\n\n\u2014Era de Huesos XX \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014Entiendo. \u00bfDe qui\u00e9n eres?\n\n\u2014De Arcturus Mesarthim.\n\nEstaba harta de ese nombre; de o\u00edrlo, de pronunciarlo.\n\n\u2014Vaya, vaya. \u2014Se dio unas palmadas en la panza\u2014. De modo que eres su inquilina.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo te llamas?\n\n\u2014XVI-19-16.\n\n\u2014Me refiero a tu verdadero nombre.\n\n\u2014Ya no me acuerdo, pero los actores me llaman Duckett. Por si prefieres usar los nombres reales.\n\n\u2014Pues s\u00ed.\n\nMe agach\u00e9 para echar un vistazo a sus existencias. Casi todos los art\u00edculos eran _numa_ : espejos de mano rajados, botellas de cristal, cuencos y tazas, perlas, bolsas llenas de huesos de animales, cartas y piedras de adivinaci\u00f3n. Luego estaban las plantas. \u00c1ster, brezo blanco, salvia, tomillo y otras plantas de quemar. Tambi\u00e9n hab\u00eda art\u00edculos m\u00e1s pr\u00e1cticos, esenciales para la supervivencia. Examin\u00e9 el mont\u00f3n: s\u00e1banas, cojines mullidos, cerillas, unas pinzas, alcohol de uso t\u00f3pico, aspirina y oxitetraciclina, latas de Sterno, un cuentagotas de \u00e1cido fus\u00eddico, vendas y desinfectantes. Cog\u00ed una vieja caja de yesca.\n\n\u2014\u00bfDe d\u00f3nde has sacado todo esto?\n\n\u2014De aqu\u00ed y de all\u00e1.\n\n\u2014Supongo que los refas no saben que lo tienes.\n\nEsboz\u00f3 una sonrisa.\n\n\u2014Dime, \u00bfc\u00f3mo funciona esta tienda ilegal?\n\n\u2014Bueno, supongamos que eres espatulom\u00e1ntica y necesitas huesos para practicar la clarividencia. Si te confiscan los huesos, tienes que buscar m\u00e1s. \u2014Se\u00f1al\u00f3 una bolsa con la etiqueta \u00abRata com\u00fan\u00bb\u2014. Yo te encargo una tarea. Puedo pedirte que me traigas determinado art\u00edculo, o que entregues un mensaje por m\u00ed; cuanto m\u00e1s valioso sea el objeto que necesites, m\u00e1s peligrosa ser\u00e1 la tarea. Si consigues realizarla, yo te doy los huesos. Si lo que quieres es un pr\u00e9stamo por un tiempo limitado, tienes que entregarme cierto n\u00famero de _numa_ , que yo te devuelvo cuando t\u00fa me restituyes el objeto. Es un sistema sencillo, pero eficaz.\n\nNo parec\u00eda una casa de empe\u00f1os convencional, que prestaba dinero a cambio de art\u00edculos empe\u00f1ados.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCu\u00e1nto cobras por dar informaci\u00f3n?\n\n\u2014Eso depende de la informaci\u00f3n que busques.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 es esto? \u2014pregunt\u00e9 ense\u00f1\u00e1ndole la pastilla.\n\nSe qued\u00f3 mir\u00e1ndola un momento; entonces se quit\u00f3 el mon\u00f3culo y la cogi\u00f3. Le temblaban los dedos, gruesos.\n\n\u2014Por esto \u2014dijo\u2014 podr\u00eda darte cualquier cosa que quisieras de la tienda. Gratis.\n\nArrugu\u00e9 el entrecejo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQuieres qued\u00e1rtelo?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, claro. Es muy valioso. \u2014Se puso la mitad en la palma de la mano\u2014. \u00bfDe d\u00f3nde lo has sacado?\n\n\u2014La informaci\u00f3n tiene un precio, Duckett.\n\n\u2014Si me traes m\u00e1s, nunca te cobrar\u00e9 nada. Ll\u00e9vate lo que quieras. Un art\u00edculo por p\u00edldora.\n\n\u2014Si no me dices qu\u00e9 es, no hay trato.\n\n\u2014Dos art\u00edculos.\n\n\u2014No.\n\n\u2014La informaci\u00f3n es peligrosa. No se le puede poner precio. \u2014Acerc\u00f3 el comprimido a la l\u00e1mpara de parafina\u2014. Lo que puedo decirte es que es una p\u00edldora herbal, y que es inofensiva. \u00bfTe basta con eso?\n\nDos art\u00edculos por cada pastilla. All\u00ed hab\u00eda art\u00edculos que pod\u00edan salvar vidas en el Poblado.\n\n\u2014Tres \u2014dije\u2014, y trato hecho.\n\n\u2014Excelente. Sabes hacer negocios. \u2014Junt\u00f3 las yemas de los dedos y a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014: \u00bfQu\u00e9 m\u00e1s sabes hacer?\n\n\u2014Soy acutum\u00e1ntica.\n\nEra la mentira a la que sol\u00eda recurrir. Una especie de test de competencia. Me gustaba ver si me cre\u00edan o no. Duckett ri\u00f3 entre dientes.\n\n\u2014No eres adivina. Si yo tuviera visi\u00f3n, dir\u00eda que est\u00e1s en el otro extremo del espectro. Tienes un aura caliente. Como las brasas. \u2014Tamborile\u00f3 con los dedos en un espejo\u2014. A\u00fan resultar\u00e1 que la de este a\u00f1o ha sido otra era interesante.\n\nMe puse en tensi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo dices?\n\n\u2014Nada, nada. Hablaba solo. Cuando llevas cuarenta a\u00f1os aqu\u00ed, es lo mejor que puedes hacer para no volverte loco. \u2014Sus labios esbozaron una sonrisa\u2014. Dime, \u00bfqu\u00e9 te parece el Custodio?\n\nVolv\u00ed a dejar la caja de yesca encima de la mesa.\n\n\u2014Cre\u00eda que era obvio \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014En absoluto. Aqu\u00ed hay gran variedad de opiniones. \u2014Duckett pas\u00f3 el pulgar por la lente de su mon\u00f3culo\u2014. Muchos opinan que el consorte de sangre es el m\u00e1s atractivo de los refa\u00edtas.\n\n\u2014Quiz\u00e1 t\u00fa pienses as\u00ed. Yo lo encuentro repugnante. \u2014Le sostuve la mirada\u2014. Me llevo mis cosas.\n\nDuckett se recost\u00f3 en la silla. Cog\u00ed una lata de Sterno, unas aspirinas y el \u00e1cido fus\u00eddico.\n\n\u2014Ha sido un placer hacer negocios contigo \u2014dijo\u2014. \u00bfSe\u00f1orita...?\n\n\u2014Mahoney. Paige Mahoney. \u2014Le di la espalda\u2014. Por si prefieres utilizar los nombres reales.\n\nSal\u00ed de aquel cubil con la mirada de Duckett clavada en la espalda.\n\nMe sent\u00eda interrogada. Estaba segura de no haber contestado nada que no debiera. Hab\u00eda dicho exactamente lo que pensaba del Custodio. No ten\u00eda ni idea de por qu\u00e9 Duckett quer\u00eda o\u00edrme decir otra cosa.\n\nAl salir le tir\u00e9 el \u00e1cido fus\u00eddico al cantor. \u00c9l me mir\u00f3 con la cabeza ladeada.\n\n\u2014Para el ojo \u2014le dije.\n\nParpade\u00f3, y yo segu\u00ed caminando.\n\nCuando llegu\u00e9 a la choza que buscaba, llam\u00e9 golpeando la pared con los nudillos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfLiss? \u2014No me contestaron, y volv\u00ed a llamar\u2014. Soy yo, Liss. Paige.\n\nDescorrieron la cortina. Liss sujetaba un farolillo.\n\n\u2014D\u00e9jame en paz \u2014dijo con una voz cargada de resentimiento\u2014. Por favor. Yo no hablo ni con rosas ni con rojos. Lo siento: no hablo. Tendr\u00e1s que buscar a otros casacas, \u00bfvale?\n\n\u2014Yo no mat\u00e9 a Seb. \u2014Le ofrec\u00ed el Sterno y las aspirinas\u2014. Mira, Duckett me ha dado esto. \u00bfPodemos hablar un momento?\n\nMir\u00f3 mis art\u00edculos y luego me mir\u00f3 a la cara. Arrug\u00f3 la frente y frunci\u00f3 los labios.\n\n\u2014Bueno \u2014concedi\u00f3\u2014, ser\u00e1 mejor que entres.\n\nNo llor\u00e9 cuando le cont\u00e9 lo de mi examen. No pude. Jax odiaba las l\u00e1grimas. (\u00abEres una chica dura de los bajos fondos, querida. Comp\u00f3rtate como tal, hazme el favor.\u00bb) Incluso all\u00ed, donde \u00e9l jam\u00e1s podr\u00eda verme, sent\u00eda que observaba cada uno de mis movimientos. Sin embargo, recordar el cuello roto de Seb me produc\u00eda n\u00e1useas. No pod\u00eda olvidar la expresi\u00f3n de sorpresa en sus ojos, ni c\u00f3mo hab\u00eda gritado mi nombre. Cuando termin\u00e9 de contarle la historia, me sent\u00e9 y estir\u00e9 la pierna r\u00edgida ante m\u00ed.\n\nLiss me acerc\u00f3 un vaso humeante.\n\n\u2014B\u00e9bete esto. Si quieres protegerte de Nashira, necesitas conservar tu fortaleza. \u2014Se recost\u00f3\u2014. Ahora ya sabe qu\u00e9 eres.\n\nDi un sorbo. El l\u00edquido sab\u00eda a menta.\n\nMe escoc\u00edan los ojos y todav\u00eda me dol\u00eda la garganta, pero no iba a llorar por Seb. Habr\u00eda sido irrespetuoso llorar estando Liss sentada a mi lado. Ella ten\u00eda la cara hinchada, moratones en el cuello y el hombro dislocado, y sin embargo hab\u00eda antepuesto mi bienestar al suyo. \u00abAhora formas parte de la Familia, hermana\u00bb, me hab\u00eda dicho. Con una sola mano, me aplic\u00f3 un emplasto caliente en la marca del hombro. Ya no notaba aquel ardor tan intenso, pero Liss me asegur\u00f3 que la quemadura me dejar\u00eda cicatriz. De eso se trataba: de recordarme, todos los d\u00edas, a qui\u00e9n pertenec\u00eda.\n\nJulian dorm\u00eda bajo una s\u00e1bana deste\u00f1ida. Su guardiana se hab\u00eda marchado con su familia, los Chertan. Antes de que se quedara dormido, yo le hab\u00eda dado una aspirina. Su nariz ten\u00eda mejor aspecto. Como yo no hab\u00eda aparecido al amanecer, hab\u00eda ido all\u00ed a buscarme, y Liss lo hab\u00eda convencido para que se quedara. Juntos hab\u00edan arreglado la choza lo mejor que hab\u00edan podido, pero, aun as\u00ed, parec\u00eda una nevera. Liss me hab\u00eda invitado, de todas formas, a quedarme a pasar la noche, y yo estaba decidida a aceptar su invitaci\u00f3n. Necesitaba alejarme de Magdalen.\n\nLiss abri\u00f3 la lata de Sterno con un abrelatas viejo.\n\n\u2014Gracias por tra\u00e9rmelo. Hac\u00eda mucho tiempo que no ve\u00eda calor enlatado. \u2014Sac\u00f3 una cerilla y prendi\u00f3 el alcohol gelatinoso. Brot\u00f3 una llama limpia y azul\u2014. \u00bfTe lo ha dado Duckett?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, pero se lo he pagado.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCon qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Con una de mis pastillas.\n\nLiss arque\u00f3 una ceja.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPara qu\u00e9 la quiere?\n\n\u2014La quiere porque me dan una pastilla que no le dan a nadie m\u00e1s. No tengo ni idea de qu\u00e9 es.\n\n\u2014Si puedes utilizarlas para sobornar a Duckett, vale la pena que las guardes. Las tareas que pone son peligrosas. Hace ir a la gente a las residencias a robar para \u00e9l. Y muchas veces los descubren.\n\nHizo una mueca de dolor y se toc\u00f3 el hombro. Le quit\u00e9 la lata de Sterno de la mano y la puse entre nosotras dos.\n\n\u2014Ha sido Gomeisa, \u00bfverdad? \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014A veces se aburre con las cartas. Y no siempre le gusta lo que le ense\u00f1an. \u2014Se tumb\u00f3 boca arriba y se puso la almohada bajo la nuca\u2014. No importa. No lo veo mucho. La mayor parte del tiempo creo que ni siquiera est\u00e1 en la ciudad.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEras su \u00fanica humana?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Por eso me odia. Estaba exactamente en la misma situaci\u00f3n que t\u00fa, elegida por un refa que jam\u00e1s hab\u00eda reclamado a un humano. Cre\u00eda que yo ten\u00eda potencial; cre\u00eda que pod\u00eda ser una de las mejores arrancahuesos de Sheol I.\n\n\u2014\u00bfArrancahuesos?\n\n\u2014As\u00ed es como llamamos a los casacas rojas. Gomeisa cre\u00eda que yo me ganar\u00eda ese color. Pero lo decepcion\u00e9.\n\n\u00bbMe pidi\u00f3 que le echara las cartas a un buf\u00f3n. Sospechaban que era un traidor, que hab\u00eda intentado huir. Yo sab\u00eda que era verdad. Las cartas lo habr\u00edan delatado. Me negu\u00e9 a ech\u00e1rselas.\n\n\u2014Yo tambi\u00e9n me negu\u00e9 a obedecer, pero ella descubri\u00f3 lo que soy. \u2014Me frot\u00e9 las sienes\u2014. Y ahora Seb est\u00e1 muerto.\n\n\u2014Aqu\u00ed mueren muchos amaur\u00f3ticos. La habr\u00eda palmado hicieras lo que hicieses. \u2014Volvi\u00f3 a incorporarse\u2014. Va, comamos algo.\n\nAbri\u00f3 el arc\u00f3n de madera. Me qued\u00e9 mirando lo que hab\u00eda dentro: un paquete de caf\u00e9 soluble, latas de jud\u00edas y cuatro huevos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfDe d\u00f3nde has sacado eso?\n\n\u2014Lo encontr\u00e9.\n\n\u2014\u00bfD\u00f3nde?\n\n\u2014Un amaur\u00f3tico lo escondi\u00f3 cerca de su residencia. Son las sobras de las provisiones para la Era de Huesos. \u2014Liss cogi\u00f3 una olla de hierro y la llen\u00f3 de agua de una botella\u2014. Ya ver\u00e1s. Comeremos como reinas. \u2014Puso la olla encima del Sterno\u2014. \u00bfC\u00f3mo te encuentras, Jules?\n\nNuestras voces deb\u00edan de haberlo despertado. Julian apart\u00f3 la s\u00e1bana y se sent\u00f3 con las piernas cruzadas.\n\n\u2014Mejor. \u2014Se apret\u00f3 un poco la nariz\u2014. Gracias por las medicinas, Paige.\n\n\u2014De nada. \u00bfCu\u00e1ndo te examinas?\n\n\u2014Ni idea. Se supone que Aludra tiene que ense\u00f1arnos a sublimar, pero se pasa la mayor parte del tiempo maltrat\u00e1ndonos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfA sublimar?\n\n\u2014A convertir objetos normales en _numa_. \u00bfTe acuerdas de los bastones que est\u00e1bamos utilizando la otra noche, cuando viniste a verme? Estaban sublimados. Puede utilizarlos cualquiera, no solo los adivinos.\n\n\u2014Y \u00bfqu\u00e9 hacen?\n\n\u2014Ejercen cierta influencia sobre los esp\u00edritus m\u00e1s cercanos, pero no pueden utilizarse para ver el \u00e9ter.\n\n\u2014Entonces, en realidad no son _numa_.\n\n\u2014Pero son peligrosos \u2014terci\u00f3 Liss\u2014. Los carro\u00f1os pueden usarlos. Lo \u00faltimo que nos falta es un arma et\u00e9rea que Scion pueda utilizar.\n\nJulian sacudi\u00f3 la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Scion jam\u00e1s usar\u00eda _numa_. Les repugna la clarividencia.\n\n\u2014Pero los refa\u00edtas no.\n\n\u2014Dudo mucho que les gusten los refas \u2014dije\u2014. Son clarividentes. Lo que pasa es que no tienen m\u00e1s remedio que obedecer porque tienen a los emim a la vuelta de la esquina.\n\nEl agua ya herv\u00eda. Liss la verti\u00f3 en tres vasos de pl\u00e1stico y a\u00f1adi\u00f3 el caf\u00e9. Llevaba d\u00edas sin oler el caf\u00e9, o semanas. \u00bfCu\u00e1nto tiempo llevaba all\u00ed?\n\n\u2014Toma. \u2014Liss me dio una taza a m\u00ed y otra a Julian\u2014. \u00bfD\u00f3nde te tiene Aludra, Jules?\n\n\u2014En una habitaci\u00f3n sin luz. Debe de ser una antigua bodega. Dormimos en el suelo. Felix tiene claustrofobia y Ella a\u00f1ora a su familia. Se pasan el d\u00eda llorando, no me dejan dormir.\n\n\u2014Haz que te echen. Aqu\u00ed la vida es dura, pero no tanto como cuando tienes un guardi\u00e1n. Solo nos comen si estamos en el sitio inadecuado en el momento inadecuado. \u2014Liss bebi\u00f3 de su vaso\u2014. Hay gente que no lo soporta. Ten\u00eda una amiga que se vino aqu\u00ed conmigo, pero suplic\u00f3 a su guardi\u00e1n que le diera otra oportunidad. Ahora es arrancahuesos.\n\nNos bebimos el caf\u00e9 en silencio. Liss hirvi\u00f3 los huevos y nos los comimos a palo seco.\n\n\u2014Estaba pensando... \u2014dijo Julian\u2014. \u00bfLos refas pueden volver al sitio de donde salieron?\n\n\u2014Supongo \u2014dijo Liss.\n\n\u2014Es que no entiendo por qu\u00e9 se quedan aqu\u00ed. Porque no siempre han estado aqu\u00ed. \u00bfD\u00f3nde consegu\u00edan auras antes de encontrarnos a nosotros?\n\n\u2014Quiz\u00e1 tenga que ver con los zumbadores \u2014dije\u2014. Nashira dijo que eran una raza parasitaria, \u00bfno?\n\nJulian asinti\u00f3.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCrees que los zumbadores les quitaron algo?\n\n\u2014\u00bfLa cordura?\n\nJulian ri\u00f3.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. A lo mejor eran buena gente hasta que los zumbadores se la chuparon toda.\n\nLiss no ri\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Podr\u00eda ser el umbral et\u00e9reo \u2014dije\u2014. Nashira mencion\u00f3 que aparecieron cuando se rompi\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Creo que nunca lo sabremos. \u2014Liss parec\u00eda tensa\u2014. Dudo mucho que vayan a difundirlo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 no? Si ellos son tan poderosos y nosotros tan d\u00e9biles, \u00bfqu\u00e9 necesidad hay de mantener el secreto?\n\n\u2014El conocimiento es poder \u2014dijo Julian\u2014. Ellos lo tienen, y nosotros no.\n\n\u2014Te equivocas, hermano. El conocimiento es peligroso. \u2014Liss acerc\u00f3 las rodillas a la barbilla. Era lo mismo que hab\u00eda insinuado Duckett\u2014. Una vez que sabes algo, no puedes librarte de ello. Tienes que llevarlo contigo. Siempre.\n\nJulian y yo nos miramos. Liss llevaba mucho tiempo all\u00ed; tal vez fuera mejor que sigui\u00e9ramos sus consejos. O no. Tal vez sus consejos acabaran mat\u00e1ndonos.\n\n\u2014Liss \u2014dije\u2014, \u00bfnunca te planteas rebelarte contra ellos?\n\n\u2014Todos los d\u00edas.\n\n\u2014Pero no lo haces.\n\n\u2014Me planteo sacarle los ojos a Suhail con mis propias manos. \u2014Lo dijo apretando los dientes\u2014. Me planteo acribillar a balazos a Nashira. Me planteo degollar a Gomeisa. Pero s\u00e9 que ellos me matar\u00edan antes a m\u00ed, y por eso no lo hago.\n\n\u2014Pero, si piensas as\u00ed, te quedar\u00e1s atrapada aqu\u00ed para siempre \u2014replic\u00f3 Julian con suavidad\u2014. \u00bfEs eso lo que quieres?\n\n\u2014Claro que no. Quiero volver a mi casa, aunque no sepa muy bien qu\u00e9 significa eso. \u2014Liss volvi\u00f3 la cabeza\u2014. Ya s\u00e9 lo que pensar\u00e9is de m\u00ed. Que no tengo agallas.\n\n\u2014Liss \u2014dije\u2014, no hemos querido decir...\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. No os lo reprocho. Pero ya que os interesa tanto saber, os voy a decir una cosa. Hubo una rebeli\u00f3n durante la Era XVIII, en 2039. Toda la poblaci\u00f3n humana de Sheol I se rebel\u00f3 contra los refas. \u2014El dolor que se reflejaba en sus ojos la envejec\u00eda\u2014. Murieron todos: amaur\u00f3ticos, videntes, todos. Como no hab\u00eda casacas rojas para combatirlos, los emim entraron y los mataron a todos. Y los refas no hicieron nada por impedirlo.\n\nMir\u00e9 a Julian, que no apartaba la vista de Liss.\n\n\u2014Dijeron que era lo que merec\u00edan. Por su desobediencia. Fue lo primero que nos dijeron cuando llegamos. \u2014Se pasaba las cartas de una mano a otra\u2014. S\u00e9 que los dos sois combativos, pero no quiero veros morir aqu\u00ed. No de esa forma.\n\nSus palabras me hicieron callar. Julian se pas\u00f3 una mano por la cabeza y se qued\u00f3 contemplando la llama del hornillo.\n\nNo volvimos a hablar de la rebeli\u00f3n. Nos comimos las jud\u00edas y reba\u00f1amos las latas hasta dejarlas limpias. Liss ten\u00eda la baraja sobre el regazo. Al cabo de un momento Julian carraspe\u00f3.\n\n\u2014\u00bfD\u00f3nde viv\u00edas, Liss? Antes de venir aqu\u00ed.\n\n\u2014En Cradlehall. Est\u00e1 cerca de Inverness.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo es Scion por all\u00ed?\n\n\u2014Igual que aqu\u00ed. Todas las grandes ciudades se rigen por el mismo sistema, solo que con menos fuerzas de seguridad que Londres. Est\u00e1n sometidas a la legislaci\u00f3n inquisitorial, como la ciudadela.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 viniste al sur? \u2014pregunt\u00e9\u2014. Estoy convencida de que las Tierras Altas eran m\u00e1s seguras para los videntes.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 va la gente a SciLo? Por trabajo. Por dinero. Necesitamos comer, igual que los amaur\u00f3ticos. \u2014Liss se ech\u00f3 una s\u00e1bana sobre los hombros\u2014. A mis padres les daba miedo vivir en el centro de Inverness. All\u00ed los videntes no est\u00e1n organizados; no hay nada parecido al sindicato. Mi padre crey\u00f3 que deb\u00edamos probar suerte en la ciudadela. Invertimos todos nuestros ahorros en trasladarnos a Londres. Hablamos con algunos capos, pero ninguno necesitaba adivinos. Cuando se nos acab\u00f3 el dinero, ten\u00edamos que limosnear para conseguir un catre donde pasar la noche.\n\n\u2014Y os descubrieron.\n\n\u2014Mi padre enferm\u00f3, y no pod\u00eda salir a la calle. Ten\u00eda m\u00e1s de sesenta a\u00f1os, y en las calles cog\u00eda todo tipo de virus. Lo sustitu\u00ed en el sitio donde sol\u00eda colocarse. Se me acerc\u00f3 una mujer y me pidi\u00f3 que le echara las cartas. \u2014Pas\u00f3 el pulgar por el borde de la baraja\u2014. Yo ten\u00eda nueve a\u00f1os. No me di cuenta de que era de la DVN.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCu\u00e1nto tiempo pasaste en la Torre? \u2014le pregunt\u00f3 Julian.\n\n\u2014Cuatro a\u00f1os. Me hicieron el submarino varias veces, quer\u00edan que les dijera d\u00f3nde estaban mis padres. Yo les dec\u00eda que no lo sab\u00eda.\n\nContarnos su historia no la ayudar\u00eda a sentirse mejor. Cambi\u00e9 de tema:\n\n\u2014\u00bfY t\u00fa, Julian? \u00bfD\u00f3nde viv\u00edas?\n\n\u2014En Morden. En el IV-6.\n\n\u2014Es el sector m\u00e1s peque\u00f1o, \u00bfverdad?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, por eso el sindicato no se preocupa mucho por \u00e9l. Ten\u00eda una banda peque\u00f1a, pero no nos dedic\u00e1bamos a la mimetodelincuencia. Solo hac\u00edamos sesiones de espiritismo de vez en cuando.\n\nSent\u00ed una punzada de nostalgia. Echaba de menos a mi banda.\n\nJulian no tard\u00f3 en rendirse al agotamiento. El Sterno estaba qued\u00e1ndose sin combustible. Liss esper\u00f3 hasta que el fuego se apag\u00f3 del todo. Me hice la dormida, pero no pod\u00eda parar de pensar en la Era XVIII. Deb\u00eda de haber muerto mucha gente. Sus familias no debieron de saber nada m\u00e1s de ellos. No debi\u00f3 de haber juicios, ni apelaciones. Semejante injusticia me produc\u00eda n\u00e1useas. No me extra\u00f1aba que a Liss le diera miedo pelear.\n\nY entonces son\u00f3 la sirena.\n\nJulian se despert\u00f3 de golpe. El sonido fue aumentando de intensidad progresivamente, hasta convertirse en un bramido estridente. Mi cuerpo reaccion\u00f3 de inmediato: un cosquilleo en las piernas, el coraz\u00f3n desbocado.\n\nO\u00edmos pasos por los pasadizos. Julian descorri\u00f3 la cortina que hac\u00eda las veces de puerta. Pasaron corriendo tres casacas rojas; uno llevaba una potente linterna. Liss abri\u00f3 los ojos, pero permaneci\u00f3 inm\u00f3vil.\n\n\u2014Tienen pu\u00f1ales \u2014observ\u00f3 Julian.\n\nLiss se acurruc\u00f3 en un rinc\u00f3n de la choza. Recogi\u00f3 su baraja de cartas, se abraz\u00f3 las rodillas con el brazo sano y agach\u00f3 la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Ten\u00e9is que iros \u2014dijo\u2014. \u00a1Corred!\n\n\u2014Ven con nosotros \u2014dije\u2014. Cu\u00e9late en alguna residencia. Aqu\u00ed no est\u00e1s...\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 quer\u00e9is, recibir una paliza de Aludra? \u00bfO del Custodio? \u2014Nos mir\u00f3 con severidad\u2014. Llevo diez a\u00f1os haciendo esto. Largaos de aqu\u00ed.\n\nJulian y yo nos miramos. Ya lleg\u00e1bamos tarde. No sab\u00eda qu\u00e9 me har\u00eda el Custodio, pero ambos sab\u00edamos lo violenta que era Aludra Chertan. Esta vez quiz\u00e1 lo matara. Salimos de la choza y echamos a correr.\n\nCuando llegu\u00e9 a la residencia todav\u00eda aullaban las sirenas. XIX-49-33 no me abri\u00f3 la puerta hasta despu\u00e9s de llevar un buen rato llamando y gritando mi n\u00famero por encima del estruendo. Tras comprobar que era una humana, tir\u00f3 de m\u00ed y cerr\u00f3 r\u00e1pidamente la puerta, y jur\u00f3 que la pr\u00f3xima vez no me dejar\u00eda entrar si era tan lenta para obedecer las \u00f3rdenes m\u00e1s b\u00e1sicas. La dej\u00e9 echando los cerrojos, muy agitada y con dedos temblorosos.\n\nLas sirenas cesaron cuando llegu\u00e9 al patio. Esa vez los emim no hab\u00edan logrado entrar en la ciudad. Me recog\u00ed el pelo con las manos y trat\u00e9 de recobrar el aliento. Al cabo de un minuto me obligu\u00e9 a mirar hacia el umbral y la escalera de caracol. Ten\u00eda que hacerlo. Esper\u00e9 un momento m\u00e1s para serenarme, y entonces sub\u00ed a la torre, su torre. Se me pon\u00eda la piel de gallina solo de pensar en dormir en la misma habitaci\u00f3n que \u00e9l; en compartir su espacio, su calor, el aire que respiraba.\n\nCuando llegu\u00e9, la llave estaba en la puerta. La hice girar y entr\u00e9 con sigilo.\n\nNo con suficiente sigilo. En cuanto traspuse el umbral, mi guardi\u00e1n se levant\u00f3. Echaba fuego por los ojos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfD\u00f3nde estabas?\n\n\u2014Fuera \u2014contest\u00e9 levantando una endeble barrera mental.\n\n\u2014Ten\u00edas que volver aqu\u00ed si sonaba la sirena.\n\n\u2014Cre\u00ed que te refer\u00edas a Magdalen, y no a esta habitaci\u00f3n en concreto. Deber\u00edas ser m\u00e1s claro.\n\nO\u00ed la insolencia de mi propia voz. Los ojos del Custodio se oscurecieron, y sus labios formaron una l\u00ednea recta y apretada.\n\n\u2014Te dirigir\u00e1s a m\u00ed con el respeto debido \u2014dijo\u2014, o no te permitir\u00e9 salir de esta habitaci\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014No has hecho nada para ganarte mi respeto.\n\nLe sostuve la mirada, y \u00e9l a m\u00ed. Como no me mov\u00ed ni desvi\u00e9 la mirada, \u00e9l pas\u00f3 a mi lado y cerr\u00f3 de un portazo. No me inmut\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Si oyes la sirena \u2014dijo\u2014, deja lo que est\u00e9s haciendo y vuelves inmediatamente a esta habitaci\u00f3n. \u00bfEntiendes?\n\nMe qued\u00e9 mir\u00e1ndolo sin contestar. El Custodio se agach\u00f3 hasta que su cara qued\u00f3 al nivel de la m\u00eda.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTengo que repet\u00edrtelo?\n\n\u2014Preferir\u00eda que no \u2014respond\u00ed.\n\nEstaba segura de que me iba a pegar. Nadie pod\u00eda hablarle as\u00ed a un refa. Pero lo \u00fanico que hizo fue erguirse cuan alto era.\n\n\u2014Ma\u00f1ana iniciaremos tu entrenamiento \u2014anunci\u00f3\u2014. Espero que est\u00e9s preparada cuando suene la campana.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 entrenamiento?\n\n\u2014Para tu siguiente casaca.\n\n\u2014No la quiero.\n\n\u2014Entonces tendr\u00e1s que hacerte actriz. Tendr\u00e1s que pasarte el resto de la vida siendo objeto de las burlas y los insultos de los casacas rojas. \u2014Me mir\u00f3 de arriba abajo\u2014. \u00bfQuieres ser una bufona? \u00bfUna payasa?\n\n\u2014No.\n\n\u2014En ese caso ser\u00e1 mejor que me obedezcas.\n\nSe me contrajo la garganta. Pese a lo que llegaba a odiar a aquel ser, ten\u00eda motivos para temerlo. Record\u00e9 su expresi\u00f3n de crueldad en la capilla, cuando se hab\u00eda plantado ante m\u00ed y me hab\u00eda absorbido el aura. Para los videntes, el aura era tan vital como la sangre o el agua. Sin aura, sufrir\u00eda un choque espiritual y acabar\u00eda muerta o loca, deambulando sin conexi\u00f3n alguna con el \u00e9ter.\n\nFue hasta las cortinas y las descorri\u00f3; la portezuela que hab\u00eda detr\u00e1s estaba entreabierta.\n\n\u2014Los amaur\u00f3ticos han vaciado el piso de arriba para ti. A menos que te ordene otra cosa, tienes que quedarte all\u00ed todo el tiempo. \u2014Hizo una pausa\u2014. Tambi\u00e9n debes saber que est\u00e1 prohibido que tengamos cualquier contacto f\u00edsico directo, excepto durante el entrenamiento. Ni siquiera con guantes.\n\n\u2014Entonces, si te viera entrar herido en esta habitaci\u00f3n \u2014dije\u2014, \u00bftendr\u00eda que dejarte morir?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\n\u00abMentiroso.\u00bb No pude controlarme y le solt\u00e9:\n\n\u2014Esa es una orden que obedecer\u00e9 con mucho gusto.\n\nEl Custodio se qued\u00f3 mir\u00e1ndome, impasible. Casi me enfureci\u00f3 ver lo poco que le afectaba mi falta de respeto. Ten\u00eda que hacer algo que lo hiciera saltar. Se limit\u00f3 a meter la mano en el caj\u00f3n y a sacar mis pastillas.\n\n\u2014T\u00f3matelas.\n\nSab\u00eda que no ten\u00eda sentido discutir. Las cog\u00ed.\n\n\u2014B\u00e9bete esto \u2014a\u00f1adi\u00f3, y me dio un vaso\u2014. Ve a tus habitaciones. Conviene que ma\u00f1ana est\u00e9s descansada.\n\nCerr\u00e9 la mano derecha hasta formar un pu\u00f1o. Estaba harta de sus \u00f3rdenes. Deb\u00ed dejar que se desangrara. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 demonios le hab\u00eda vendado la herida? \u00bfQu\u00e9 clase de delincuente era yo, curando a mis enemigos? Jax se habr\u00eda muerto de risa si me hubiera visto. \u00abTesoro \u2014me habr\u00eda dicho\u2014, no tienes lo que hay que tener.\u00bb Y quiz\u00e1 tuviera raz\u00f3n. No lo ten\u00eda, todav\u00eda.\n\nPas\u00e9 al lado del Custodio evitando rozarlo siquiera. Antes de entrar en el oscuro pasillo, lo vi mirarme. Cerr\u00f3 la puerta con llave detr\u00e1s de m\u00ed.\n\nOtra escalera de caracol me condujo al piso superior de la torre. Ech\u00e9 una ojeada a mi nueva morada: una habitaci\u00f3n espaciosa y vac\u00eda. Me record\u00f3 a la penitenciar\u00eda, con el suelo h\u00famedo y las ventanas con barrotes. La l\u00e1mpara de parafina que ard\u00eda en la repisa de la ventana proporcionaba una luz y un calor escasos. Junto a la l\u00e1mpara estaba la cama, con barandilla y un colch\u00f3n lleno de bultos. Las s\u00e1banas eran penosas comparadas con los exquisitos mantos de terciopelo de la cama con dosel del Custodio; de hecho, toda la habitaci\u00f3n ol\u00eda a inferioridad humana; pero cualquier cosa era mejor que compartir habitaci\u00f3n con mi guardi\u00e1n.\n\nRevis\u00e9 cada rinc\u00f3n y cada recoveco de la habitaci\u00f3n, como hab\u00eda hecho con la del piso de abajo. No hab\u00eda salida, por supuesto, pero s\u00ed cuarto de ba\u00f1o. Dentro hab\u00eda un v\u00e1ter, un lavamanos y algunos productos de higiene.\n\nPens\u00e9 en Julian, que deb\u00eda de estar en su s\u00f3tano oscuro, y en Liss, temblando en su choza. Liss no ten\u00eda cama. No ten\u00eda nada. Mi habitaci\u00f3n no era bonita, pero era mucho m\u00e1s c\u00e1lida y limpia que cualquier vivienda del Poblado. Y m\u00e1s segura. Ten\u00eda paredes de piedra que me proteg\u00edan de los emim. Liss solo contaba con cortinas deshilachadas.\n\nComo no me hab\u00edan dado ropa de dormir, me qued\u00e9 en ropa interior. No hab\u00eda espejo, pero sab\u00eda que estaba adelgazando. El estr\u00e9s, la intoxicaci\u00f3n con flux y la falta de alimentos nutritivos empezaban a pasarme factura. Baj\u00e9 la llama de la l\u00e1mpara y me met\u00ed entre las s\u00e1banas.\n\nNo me sent\u00eda cansada, pero al poco rato estaba dormitando. Y pensando. Pensaba en el pasado, en aquella serie de d\u00edas extra\u00f1os que me hab\u00edan conducido hasta all\u00ed. Record\u00e9 el d\u00eda que hab\u00eda conocido a Nick. Fue \u00e9l quien nos puso a Jaxon y a m\u00ed en contacto. Nick, el hombre que me hab\u00eda salvado la vida. Cuando yo ten\u00eda nueve a\u00f1os, poco despu\u00e9s de llegar a Inglaterra, mi padre y yo salimos de Londres y fuimos al sur en uno de sus \u00abviajes de negocios\u00bb. Hab\u00eda tenido que anotar nuestros nombres en una lista de espera para que nos permitieran salir de la ciudadela. Tras meses de espera, recibimos por fin el permiso para visitar a Giselle, una vieja amiga de mi padre. Giselle viv\u00eda al final de una cuesta empedrada, en una casa de color rosa con un tejado que sobresal\u00eda por encima de las ventanas. El terreno circundante me record\u00f3 a Irlanda: una belleza abierta y suntuosa, una naturaleza virgen y agreste; eso que Scion hab\u00eda destruido. Al anochecer, cuando mi padre no me ve\u00eda, yo trepaba al tejado y me acurrucaba contra la alta chimenea de ladrillo. Desde all\u00ed contemplaba el cielo y los frondosos bosques de las colinas, y recordaba a mi primo Finn y a los otros fantasmas de Irlanda, y echaba tanto de menos a mis abuelos que me dol\u00eda el coraz\u00f3n. Nunca hab\u00eda entendido por qu\u00e9 no hab\u00edan venido con nosotros.\n\nPero lo que yo quer\u00eda era ver el mar, el prodigioso mar, el camino reluciente que se extend\u00eda hasta las tierras libres. Era al otro lado del mar donde Irlanda me esperaba para llevarme a casa, a la pradera cenicienta, al \u00e1rbol partido de la canci\u00f3n de los rebeldes. Mi padre me prometi\u00f3 que ir\u00edamos a verlo, pero estaba demasiado ocupado con Giselle. Siempre se quedaban hablando hasta muy entrada la noche.\n\nYo era demasiado peque\u00f1a para entender qu\u00e9 significaba realmente vivir en aquel pueblo. Los videntes quiz\u00e1 corrieran peligro en la ciudadela, pero no pod\u00edan huir a aquellos idilios campestres. Lejos del Arconte, los amaur\u00f3ticos de pueblo se pon\u00edan muy nerviosos. Las sospechas de antinaturalidad eran una constante en aquellas comunidades tan cerradas. Ten\u00edan la costumbre de vigilarse unos a otros, atentos por si descubr\u00edan una bola de cristal o una piedra de adivinaci\u00f3n, dispuestos a llamar al puesto de avanzada de Scion m\u00e1s cercano, o a tomarse la justicia por su mano. Un aut\u00e9ntico clarividente no habr\u00eda durado ni un d\u00eda all\u00ed. Y aunque hubiera durado, no hab\u00eda trabajo. Hab\u00eda que cultivar la tierra, pero no hac\u00edan falta muchas manos porque ten\u00edan m\u00e1quinas para ocuparse de eso. Los videntes solo pod\u00edan ganarse bien la vida en la ciudadela.\n\nNo me gustaba alejarme de la casa, y menos a\u00fan sin mi padre. La gente hablaba demasiado, miraba demasiado, y Giselle les hablaba y los miraba sin tapujos. Era una mujer severa, delgada y de facciones duras, con un anillo en cada dedo y unas venas largas, como cuerdas, muy marcadas en los brazos y el cuello. No me ca\u00eda bien. Pero un d\u00eda, desde el tejado, ote\u00e9 un remanso de paz: un prado de amapolas, un charco rojo bajo el cielo de hierro.\n\nTodos los d\u00edas, cuando mi padre cre\u00eda que yo estaba arriba jugando, iba a aquel campo y me pasaba horas leyendo con mi nueva tableta de datos, mientras las amapolas cabeceaban a mi alrededor. Fue en ese campo donde tuve mi primer encuentro real con el mundo de los esp\u00edritus. Con el \u00e9ter. Yo todav\u00eda no sab\u00eda que era clarividente. La antinaturalidad todav\u00eda era un cuento para una ni\u00f1a de nueve a\u00f1os, un coco sin facciones definidas. Todav\u00eda ten\u00eda que entender aquel sitio. Solo sab\u00eda lo que me hab\u00eda contado Finn: que a la gente mala del otro lado del mar no les gustaban las ni\u00f1as como yo. Ya no estaba a salvo.\n\nAquel d\u00eda descubr\u00ed lo que Finn hab\u00eda querido decir. Cuando entr\u00e9 en el prado, percib\u00ed la enojada presencia de una mujer. No la vi, pero la sent\u00ed. La sent\u00ed en las amapolas y en el viento. La sent\u00ed en la tierra y en el aire. Estir\u00e9 un brazo con la esperanza de entender qu\u00e9 era.\n\nY de pronto me vi en el suelo. Sangrando. Fue mi primer encuentro con un duende, un esp\u00edritu furioso que pod\u00eda entrar en el mundo corp\u00f3reo.\n\nAl poco apareci\u00f3 mi salvador. Un hombre joven, alto y fuerte, con cabello muy rubio y un rostro amable. Me pregunt\u00f3 c\u00f3mo me llamaba. Le contest\u00e9 balbuceando. Cuando vio el brazo herido me envolvi\u00f3 en su abrigo y me llev\u00f3 a su coche. Llevaba la palabra \u00abScionmed\u00bb bordada en la camisa. Vi que sacaba una aguja y sent\u00ed p\u00e1nico. \u00abMe llamo Nick \u2014dijo\u2014. Est\u00e1s a salvo, Paige.\u00bb\n\nLa aguja me atraves\u00f3 la piel. Me doli\u00f3, pero no llor\u00e9. Poco a poco todo se oscureci\u00f3.\n\nY so\u00f1\u00e9. So\u00f1\u00e9 con amapolas que brotaban con dificultad del polvo. Nunca hab\u00eda so\u00f1ado en color y, en cambio, ahora lo \u00fanico que ve\u00eda eran las flores rojas y el sol del atardecer. Me proteg\u00edan, desprendi\u00e9ndose de sus p\u00e9talos y cubriendo mi afiebrado cuerpo. Despert\u00e9 en una cama con s\u00e1banas blancas. Llevaba el brazo vendado. El dolor hab\u00eda desaparecido.\n\nEl hombre rubio estaba a mi lado. Recuerdo su sonrisa; no era m\u00e1s que un esbozo, pero me hizo sonre\u00edr. Parec\u00eda un pr\u00edncipe.\n\n\u2014Hola, Paige \u2014dijo. Le pregunt\u00e9 d\u00f3nde estaba\u2014. Est\u00e1s en un hospital. Yo soy tu m\u00e9dico.\n\n\u2014Pareces demasiado joven para ser m\u00e9dico \u2014dije. \u00abY no das suficiente miedo\u00bb, pens\u00e9\u2014. \u00bfCu\u00e1ntos a\u00f1os tienes?\n\n\u2014Dieciocho. Todav\u00eda estoy estudiando.\n\n\u2014No me habr\u00e1s hecho una chapuza al coserme el brazo, \u00bfverdad?\n\n\u2014Te he cosido la herida lo mejor que he podido \u2014dijo riendo\u2014. Ya me dir\u00e1s qu\u00e9 te parece.\n\nMe coment\u00f3 que hab\u00eda avisado a mi padre, y que ya estaba en camino. Le dije que estaba mareada; contest\u00f3 que era normal, y que tendr\u00eda que descansar para que se me pasara. Todav\u00eda no pod\u00eda comer, pero \u00e9l me conseguir\u00eda algo bueno para cenar. Se qued\u00f3 el resto del d\u00eda conmigo, y solo me dej\u00f3 para ir a buscar unos bocadillos y un zumo de manzana a la cafeter\u00eda del hospital. Mi padre me hab\u00eda ense\u00f1ado que no deb\u00eda hablar con desconocidos y, sin embargo, no le ten\u00eda miedo a aquel chico tan amable y educado.\n\nEl doctor Nicklas Nyg\u00e5rd, al que hab\u00edan trasladado de la ciudadela Scion Estocolmo, me mantuvo con vida aquella noche. Me ayud\u00f3 a superar el choque que me hab\u00eda producido convertirme en clarividente. De no ser por \u00e9l quiz\u00e1 no habr\u00eda podido soportarlo.\n\nMi padre me llev\u00f3 a casa unos d\u00edas m\u00e1s tarde. Conoc\u00eda a Nick porque hab\u00edan coincidido en un congreso de medicina. Nick estaba haciendo pr\u00e1cticas en el pueblo antes de ocupar una plaza fija en la SciOECI. Nunca me dijo qu\u00e9 hac\u00eda en el campo de amapolas. Mientras mi padre me esperaba en el coche, Nick se arrodill\u00f3 delante de m\u00ed y me tom\u00f3 las manos. Recuerdo que pens\u00e9 que era guap\u00edsimo, y que sus cejas formaban un arco perfecto sobre sus preciosos ojos verde invierno.\n\n\u2014Paige \u2014me dijo en voz baja\u2014, esc\u00fachame. Lo que voy a decirte es muy importante. Le he dicho a tu padre que te atac\u00f3 un perro.\n\n\u2014Pero fue una mujer.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, pero esa mujer era invisible, _s\u00f6tnos_. Hay adultos que no saben nada de las cosas invisibles.\n\n\u2014Pero t\u00fa s\u00ed \u2014dije, segura de su sabidur\u00eda.\n\n\u2014Yo s\u00ed. Pero no quiero que los otros adultos se r\u00edan de m\u00ed, y por eso no se lo cuento. \u2014Me acarici\u00f3 la mejilla\u2014. No debes hablarle a nadie de ella, Paige. Nunca. Ser\u00e1 nuestro secreto. \u00bfMe lo prometes?\n\nDije que s\u00ed con la cabeza. Habr\u00eda podido prometerle cualquier cosa, pues me hab\u00eda salvado la vida. Me qued\u00e9 mir\u00e1ndolo por la ventanilla cuando mi padre me meti\u00f3 en el coche para volver a la ciudadela. Nick levant\u00f3 una mano y me dijo adi\u00f3s. Segu\u00ed mir\u00e1ndolo hasta que doblamos una esquina.\n\nTodav\u00eda ten\u00eda cicatrices del ataque. Formaban un racimo en el centro de la palma de mi mano izquierda. El esp\u00edritu me hab\u00eda hecho otros cortes en el brazo, hasta el codo, pero los de la mano fueron los que me dejaron cicatriz.\n\nCumpl\u00ed mi promesa. Durante siete a\u00f1os jam\u00e1s dije ni una palabra de lo ocurrido. Guard\u00e9 el secreto de Nick en mi coraz\u00f3n, como una flor nocturna, y \u00fanicamente pensaba en \u00e9l cuando estaba sola. Nick sab\u00eda la verdad. Nick ten\u00eda la clave. Durante todo ese tiempo me pregunt\u00e9 qu\u00e9 habr\u00eda sido de Nick, y si se habr\u00eda acordado alguna vez de aquella ni\u00f1a irlandesa a la que sac\u00f3 del campo de amapolas. Y tras siete largos a\u00f1os tuve mi recompensa: Nick volvi\u00f3 a encontrarme.\n\nOjal\u00e1 pudiera encontrarme ahora.\n\nNo se o\u00eda nada en el piso de abajo. A medida que avanzaban las horas, aguzaba el o\u00eddo por si o\u00eda pasos, o la d\u00e9bil melod\u00eda del gram\u00f3fono, pero lo \u00fanico que o\u00eda era aquel silencio impenetrable.\n\nPas\u00e9 el resto del d\u00eda sumida en un sue\u00f1o irregular. Ten\u00eda fiebre, provocada por los restos del \u00faltimo ataque con flux. De vez en cuando me despertaba sobresaltada, acosada por im\u00e1genes del pasado. \u00bfLlevaba antes otra ropa que no fueran esos blusones, esas botas? \u00bfHab\u00eda conocido un mundo donde no hab\u00eda esp\u00edritus ni muertos errantes? \u00bfUn mundo sin emim, sin refa\u00edtas?\n\nMe despertaron unos golpes en la puerta. Apenas tuve tiempo de taparme con la s\u00e1bana cuando el Custodio entr\u00f3 en la habitaci\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Pronto sonar\u00e1 la campana. \u2014Dej\u00f3 un uniforme limpio a los pies de la cama\u2014. V\u00edstete.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 mir\u00e1ndolo en silencio. \u00c9l me sostuvo la mirada un momento antes de salir y cerrar la puerta. No pod\u00eda hacer nada. Me levant\u00e9, me recog\u00ed el pelo en un mo\u00f1o y me lav\u00e9 con agua helada. Me puse el uniforme y me abroch\u00e9 el chaleco hasta la barbilla. Mi pierna, por lo visto, ya estaba curada.\n\nEncontr\u00e9 al Custodio hojeando una novela en su habitaci\u00f3n. Era un ejemplar de _Frankenstein_ con las tapas sucias de polvo. Scion no permit\u00eda esa clase de literatura fant\u00e1stica. Nada donde hubiera monstruos o fantasmas. Nada que hiciera referencia a la antinaturalidad. Not\u00e9 un cosquilleo en los dedos, ansiosos por agarrar ese libro y pasar las p\u00e1ginas. Lo hab\u00eda visto en la estanter\u00eda de Jaxon, pero nunca hab\u00eda encontrado tiempo para leerlo. El Custodio dej\u00f3 el libro a un lado y se levant\u00f3.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEst\u00e1s preparada?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Muy bien. \u2014Hizo una pausa y a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014: Dime, Paige, \u00bfc\u00f3mo es tu onirosaje?\n\nMe pill\u00f3 por sorpresa. Entre los videntes se consideraba de mala educaci\u00f3n hacer una pregunta tan directa.\n\n\u2014Un campo de flores rojas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 flores?\n\n\u2014Amapolas.\n\nNo dijo nada. Cogi\u00f3 sus guantes, se los puso y salimos de la habitaci\u00f3n. Todav\u00eda no hab\u00eda sonado la campanada nocturna, pero el portero nos dej\u00f3 pasar sin hacer preguntas. Nadie le hac\u00eda preguntas a Arcturus Mesarthim.\n\nLlevaba tiempo sin ver la luz del d\u00eda. El sol empezaba a ponerse, y suavizaba los bordes de los edificios. Sheol reluc\u00eda en medio de la neblina. Yo cre\u00eda que \u00edbamos a entrenar en un sitio cubierto, pero el Custodio me llev\u00f3 hacia el norte, m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de la Casa Amaur\u00f3tica, por territorio desconocido.\n\nLos edificios de las afueras de la ciudad estaban abandonados. Estaban en ruinas, con los cristales de las ventanas rotos; algunas paredes y techos parec\u00edan quemados. Quiz\u00e1 fuera cierto que hab\u00eda habido un gran incendio. Pasamos una calle de casas apretujadas unas contra otras. Era un pueblo fantasma. All\u00ed no hab\u00eda ni rastro de seres vivos. Percib\u00ed la presencia de esp\u00edritus, esp\u00edritus resentidos que quer\u00edan recuperar las casas que hab\u00edan perdido. Algunos eran duendes, bastante d\u00e9biles. Yo no me fiaba, pero el Custodio no parec\u00eda asustado. Ninguno se le acerc\u00f3.\n\nLlegamos al final de la ciudad. Echaba nubes de vaho por la boca al respirar. Ante m\u00ed se extend\u00eda una pradera hasta donde alcanzaba la vista. La hierba llevaba tiempo seca, y el suelo brillaba, cubierto de escarcha. Era raro, porque est\u00e1bamos a principios de primavera. Hab\u00edan cercado la pradera con una valla de unos diez metros de alto, coronada con alambre de espino. Al otro lado de la valla hab\u00eda \u00e1rboles, tambi\u00e9n recubiertos de una fina capa de escarcha. Crec\u00edan alrededor de la pradera y me imped\u00edan ver lo que hab\u00eda m\u00e1s all\u00e1. Un letrero oxidado rezaba: PUERTO PRADERA. SOLO ENTRENAMIENTO. AUTORIZADO EL USO DE PODERES MORT\u00cdFEROS. Junto a la verja estaba el poder mort\u00edfero mismo: un refa var\u00f3n.\n\nLlevaba el rubio cabello recogido en una coleta. A su lado hab\u00eda una figura sucia y delgada con la cabeza afeitada: Ivy, la palmista. Vest\u00eda un blus\u00f3n amarillo, el distintivo de los cobardes; un desgarr\u00f3n en el cuello le dejaba un hombro huesudo expuesto al fr\u00edo. Le vi la marca: XX-59-24. Custodio avanz\u00f3, y yo lo segu\u00ed. Al vernos, el guardi\u00e1n de Ivy hizo una reverencia.\n\n\u2014Hete aqu\u00ed a la concubina real \u2014dijo\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9 te trae por Puerto Pradera?\n\nAl principio cre\u00ed que me hablaba a m\u00ed. Nunca hab\u00eda o\u00eddo a los refas hablarse con semejante repugnancia. Entonces me di cuenta de que el otro guardi\u00e1n miraba con fijeza y odio al Custodio.\n\n\u2014He venido a entrenar a mi humana. \u2014El Custodio miraba hacia la pradera\u2014. Abre la puerta, Thuban.\n\n\u2014Un poco de paciencia, concubina. \u00bfVa armada?\n\nSe refer\u00eda a m\u00ed. A la humana.\n\n\u2014No \u2014contest\u00f3 el Custodio\u2014. No va armada.\n\n\u2014\u00bfN\u00famero?\n\n\u2014XX-59-40.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEdad?\n\nEl Custodio me mir\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Diecinueve \u2014contest\u00e9.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTiene visi\u00f3n espiritista?\n\n\u2014Esas preguntas son irrelevantes, Thuban. No me gusta que me traten como a un cr\u00edo, y mucho menos que lo haga un cr\u00edo.\n\nThuban se limit\u00f3 a mirarlo. Calcul\u00e9 que deb\u00eda de tener m\u00e1s de veinticinco a\u00f1os; no era ning\u00fan cr\u00edo, desde luego. Ni el rostro de Thuban ni el del Custodio revelaban enojo, pero bastaba con o\u00edrlos.\n\n\u2014Tienes tres horas hasta que Pleione traiga a su reba\u00f1o. \u2014Empuj\u00f3 la verja y la abri\u00f3\u2014. Si 40 intenta huir, le disparar\u00e1n en el acto.\n\n\u2014Y a ti, si vuelves a faltarles el respeto a tus mayores, te desterrar\u00e1n en el acto.\n\n\u2014La soberana de sangre no lo permitir\u00eda.\n\n\u2014No tiene por qu\u00e9 enterarse. Un accidente as\u00ed no es demasiado dif\u00edcil de ocultar. \u2014El Custodio descollaba sobre \u00e9l\u2014. No me asusta tu apellido, Sargas. Soy el consorte de sangre, y pienso ejercer el poder que conlleva mi posici\u00f3n. \u00bfMe he explicado bien, Thuban?\n\nThuban lo mir\u00f3 desde abajo con un ardor azulado en los ojos.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed \u2014respondi\u00f3 en voz baja\u2014, consorte \u00abde sangre\u00bb.\n\nEl Custodio pas\u00f3 a su lado. Yo no supe c\u00f3mo interpretar aquella conversaci\u00f3n, pero fue un gustazo presenciar que un Sargas recib\u00eda una tunda verbal. Traspuse la verja detr\u00e1s del Custodio, y Thuban le arre\u00f3 una bofetada a Ivy. La chica gir\u00f3 la cabeza. No ten\u00eda l\u00e1grimas en los ojos, pero su cara estaba p\u00e1lida e hinchada, y se la ve\u00eda m\u00e1s delgada que antes. Ten\u00eda los brazos manchados de sangre y suciedad. Deduje que la manten\u00edan encerrada sobre sus propios excrementos. Record\u00e9 que Seb tambi\u00e9n me hab\u00eda mirado as\u00ed, como si toda la esperanza del mundo se hubiera desmoronado.\n\nEstaba decidida a sacarle partido a aquella sesi\u00f3n de entrenamiento. Quer\u00eda hacerlo por Seb, por Ivy y por todos los que vendr\u00edan despu\u00e9s.\n\nPuerto Pradera era inmenso. El Custodio caminaba por \u00e9l a grandes zancadas, tan largas que me costaba seguirlo. Yo avanzaba con dificultad, y al mismo tiempo intentaba calcular las dimensiones de la pradera. Era dif\u00edcil, porque la luz disminu\u00eda; pero alcanc\u00e9 a distinguir, a ambos lados, unas vallas de alambre fino entretejido y recubierto de hielo que divid\u00edan el terreno en grandes ruedos. La parte superior de los postes estaba curvada; algunos ten\u00edan unos gruesos soportes de los que colgaban faroles. Una torre de vigilancia se erig\u00eda en el lado de poniente, y dentro pude ver la silueta de un humano o un refa.\n\nPas\u00e9 al lado de una charca poco profunda. La superficie, helada, era lisa como un espejo, perfecta para emplearse como medio de adivinaci\u00f3n. Pens\u00e9 que todo en aquella pradera era perfecto para el combate espiritista. El suelo era s\u00f3lido; el aire, di\u00e1fano y fresco. Y hab\u00eda esp\u00edritus. Los notaba alrededor de m\u00ed, por todas partes. Me pregunt\u00e9 qu\u00e9 clase de alambrada era la que cercaba la pradera. \u00bfHabr\u00edan ideado la manera de retener a los esp\u00edritus?\n\nNo. A veces los esp\u00edritus pod\u00edan alterar el mundo de la carne, pero no estaban sometidos a restricciones f\u00edsicas. Solo los vinculadores pod\u00edan retenerlos. Su orden (el quinto orden) pod\u00eda forzar los l\u00edmites entre el mundo de la carne y el \u00e9ter.\n\n\u2014Las vallas no est\u00e1n electrificadas \u2014dijo el Custodio, que me hab\u00eda visto observ\u00e1ndolas\u2014, sino cargadas con energ\u00eda et\u00e9rea.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo puede ser?\n\n\u2014Bater\u00edas et\u00e9reas. Una fusi\u00f3n de pericia refa\u00edta y humana, aplicada por primera vez en 2045. Vuestros cient\u00edficos trabajan en la tecnolog\u00eda h\u00edbrida desde principios del siglo XX. Nosotros solo sustituimos la energ\u00eda qu\u00edmica de una bater\u00eda por un duende cautivo, un esp\u00edritu que puede interactuar con el mundo corp\u00f3reo. As\u00ed se crea un campo de repulsi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Pero los duendes pueden huir de sus v\u00ednculos \u2014razon\u00e9\u2014. \u00bfC\u00f3mo los captur\u00e1is?\n\n\u2014Utilizamos un duende dispuesto a colaborar, por supuesto.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 perpleja. La palabra \u00abduende\u00bb y la locuci\u00f3n \u00abdispuesto a colaborar\u00bb eran tan opuestas como \u00abguerra\u00bb y \u00abpaz\u00bb.\n\n\u2014Nuestro asesoramiento tambi\u00e9n condujo a la invenci\u00f3n del Fluxion 14 y la Tecnolog\u00eda de Detecci\u00f3n Radiest\u00e9sica \u2014prosigui\u00f3\u2014. Esta \u00faltima todav\u00eda est\u00e1 en fase experimental. Seg\u00fan los \u00faltimos informes que hemos recibido, Scion casi ha conseguido perfeccionarla.\n\nApret\u00e9 un pu\u00f1o. Claro, los refa\u00edtas eran los responsables de la TDR. Dani nunca hab\u00eda entendido de d\u00f3nde la hab\u00edan sacado.\n\nAl cabo de un rato el Custodio se detuvo. Hab\u00edamos llegado a un \u00f3valo de hormig\u00f3n de tres metros de ancho. Cerca se encendi\u00f3 una l\u00e1mpara de gas.\n\n\u2014Empecemos \u2014dijo el Custodio.\n\nEsper\u00e9.\n\nSin previo aviso, el Custodio hizo como si fuera a darme un pu\u00f1etazo en la cara. Lo esquiv\u00e9.\n\nCuando fue a darme con el otro pu\u00f1o, desvi\u00e9 el golpe con un brazo.\n\n\u2014Otra vez.\n\nCada vez me atacaba m\u00e1s deprisa, oblig\u00e1ndome a defenderme desde todos los \u00e1ngulos. Par\u00e9 todos los golpes con las manos abiertas.\n\n\u2014Aprendiste a pelear en las calles.\n\n\u2014Puede ser \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014Otra vez. Intenta detenerme.\n\nEsta vez dirigi\u00f3 ambas manos hacia mi escote, como si fuera a agarrarme por el cuello. Un ratero hab\u00eda intentado eso conmigo una vez. Torc\u00ed el torso hacia la izquierda y llev\u00e9 el brazo derecho en la misma direcci\u00f3n, alej\u00e1ndole las manos de mi cuello. Not\u00e9 la fuerza de esas manos; pero el Custodio me solt\u00f3. Levant\u00e9 un codo hacia su mejilla, un movimiento con el que hab\u00eda conseguido derribar al ratero. El Custodio me estaba dejando ganar.\n\n\u2014Excelente \u2014dijo. Dio unos pasos hacia atr\u00e1s\u2014. Pocos humanos llegan aqu\u00ed preparados para formar parte de un batall\u00f3n penal. Les llevas ventaja a la mayor\u00eda, pero con un emite no podr\u00e1s utilizar esas t\u00e1cticas tan simples. Tu gran baza es tu capacidad para alterar el \u00e9ter.\n\nVi un destello plateado. El Custodio ten\u00eda una daga en la mano. Se me tensaron los m\u00fasculos.\n\n\u2014Por lo que he podido comprobar, tu don se activa con el peligro. \u2014Me apunt\u00f3 en el pecho con la daga. La punta casi me tocaba\u2014. Demu\u00e9stramelo.\n\n\u2014No s\u00e9 c\u00f3mo.\n\n\u2014Ya veo.\n\nCon una sacudida de la mu\u00f1eca, subi\u00f3 la daga hasta mi cuello. Not\u00e9 una descarga de adrenalina. El Custodio se inclin\u00f3 hacia m\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Esta daga se ha utilizado para derramar sangre humana \u2014dijo en voz muy baja\u2014. Sangre como la de tu amigo Sebastian.\n\nMe puse a temblar.\n\n\u2014Y quiere m\u00e1s sangre. \u2014La hoja de la daga se desliz\u00f3 por mi cuello\u2014. Nunca ha probado la sangre de un So\u00f1ador.\n\n\u2014No me das miedo. \u2014El temblor de mi voz me delataba\u2014. No me toques.\n\nPero me toc\u00f3. La hoja de la daga ascendi\u00f3 por mi cuello y mi barbilla y me roz\u00f3 los labios. Levant\u00e9 los pu\u00f1os y le apart\u00e9 la mano. El Custodio solt\u00f3 la daga, me asi\u00f3 las mu\u00f1ecas con una mano y me las sujet\u00f3 contra el suelo de hormig\u00f3n. Ten\u00eda una fuerza asombrosa: yo no pod\u00eda mover ni un solo m\u00fasculo.\n\n\u2014Me pregunto... \u2014dijo mientras me levantaba la barbilla con la punta de la daga\u2014. Si te corto el cuello, \u00bfcu\u00e1nto tardar\u00e1s en morir?\n\n\u2014No te atrever\u00e1s \u2014dije, desafiante.\n\n\u2014Ah, \u00bfno?\n\nIntent\u00e9 darle con la rodilla en la entrepierna, pero \u00e9l me agarr\u00f3 el muslo y me baj\u00f3 la pierna. Todav\u00eda notaba debilidad en ella; no le cost\u00f3 mucho. Estaba consiguiendo hacerme parecer fr\u00e1gil. Logr\u00e9 soltar una mano, pero \u00e9l me retorci\u00f3 el brazo detr\u00e1s de la espalda. No tanto como para hacerme da\u00f1o, pero s\u00ed lo suficiente para inmovilizarme.\n\n\u2014As\u00ed llevas las de perder \u2014me dijo al o\u00eddo\u2014. Emplea tu fuerza.\n\n\u00bfAcaso aquel ser no ten\u00eda ninguna debilidad? Pens\u00e9 en todos los puntos vulnerables de los humanos: ojos, ri\u00f1ones, plexo solar, nariz, entrepierna... Nada de todo eso estaba a mi alcance. Iba a tener que soltarme y correr. Ech\u00e9 el peso del cuerpo hacia atr\u00e1s, entre las piernas del Custodio, y con un solo movimiento me puse en pie. Aprovech\u00e9 el instante que tard\u00f3 \u00e9l en levantarse para echar a correr por la pradera. Si me quer\u00eda, tendr\u00eda que venir a buscarme.\n\nEra imposible huir. El Custodio me estaba alcanzando. Record\u00e9 mis sesiones de entrenamiento con Nick y cambi\u00e9 de direcci\u00f3n. Segu\u00ed corriendo, en la oscuridad, alej\u00e1ndome de la torre de vigilancia. En una valla como aquella ten\u00eda que haber alg\u00fan punto d\u00e9bil, un hueco en la alambrada por el que pudiera colarme. Luego tendr\u00eda que ocuparme de Thuban. Pero ten\u00eda mi esp\u00edritu. Pod\u00eda hacerlo. S\u00ed, pod\u00eda.\n\nPese a tener una agudeza visual excelente, a veces pod\u00eda ser incre\u00edblemente cegata. Al cabo de un minuto me hab\u00eda perdido. Lejos del \u00f3valo de hormig\u00f3n y las l\u00e1mparas de gas, iba dando traspi\u00e9s por la extensa pradera. Y el Custodio estaba all\u00ed, persigui\u00e9ndome. Corr\u00ed hacia una de las l\u00e1mparas. Mi sexto sentido se estremeci\u00f3 a medida que me acercaba a la valla. Para cuando llegu\u00e9 a unos dos metros, ten\u00eda n\u00e1useas y notaba las extremidades flojas y torpes.\n\nPero ten\u00eda que intentarlo. Agarr\u00e9 el alambre helado.\n\nNo puedo describir con precisi\u00f3n la sensaci\u00f3n que se apoder\u00f3 de mi cuerpo. Lo vi todo negro; luego, todo blanco; y, por \u00faltimo, rojo. Se me puso la piel de gallina. Un centenar de recuerdos pasaron ante mis ojos, recuerdos de un grito en un campo de amapolas; y tambi\u00e9n otros, nuevos: los recuerdos del duende. Lo hab\u00edan asesinado. Un estr\u00e9pito ensordecedor sacudi\u00f3 todo mi cuerpo. Mi est\u00f3mago dio una sacudida tremenda. Ca\u00ed al suelo y vomit\u00e9.\n\nDeb\u00ed de quedarme all\u00ed un minuto, atormentada por im\u00e1genes de sangre sobre una alfombra de color crema. Le hab\u00edan disparado con una escopeta. Le hab\u00eda explotado el cr\u00e1neo, roci\u00e1ndolo todo de masa encef\u00e1lica y fragmentos de hueso. Me zumbaban los o\u00eddos. Cuando recobr\u00e9 el conocimiento, me fallaba la coordinaci\u00f3n. Me arrastr\u00e9 por el suelo, parpadeando para ahuyentar aquellas visiones sangrientas. Ten\u00eda una quemadura blancuzca en la palma de la mano. La marca de un duende.\n\nAlgo pas\u00f3 roz\u00e1ndome la oreja. Mir\u00e9 hacia arriba y vi otra torre de vigilancia y al vigilante que hab\u00eda dentro.\n\nEra un dardo de flux.\n\nEl vigilante me dispar\u00f3 un segundo dardo. Me puse en pie como pude y ech\u00e9 a correr hacia el este; pero no tard\u00e9 en llegar ante otra torre, y los disparos me hicieron virar hacia el sur. Cuando vi el \u00f3valo comprend\u00ed que me dirig\u00eda de nuevo hacia el Custodio.\n\nEl siguiente dardo me dio en el hombro. El dolor fue instant\u00e1neo e insoportable. Me arranqu\u00e9 el dardo. Me sangr\u00f3 la herida, y de pronto sent\u00ed n\u00e1useas y me desorient\u00e9. Actu\u00e9 lo bastante deprisa para detener el efecto del f\u00e1rmaco (tardaba unos cinco segundos en autoinyectarse), pero el mensaje era claro: \u00abVuelve al \u00f3valo, o te dispararemos\u00bb. El Custodio estaba esper\u00e1ndome.\n\n\u2014Me alegro de que hayas vuelto.\n\nMe quit\u00e9 el sudor de la frente con el dorso de la mano.\n\n\u2014Veo que no me est\u00e1 permitido correr.\n\n\u2014No. A menos que quieras que te d\u00e9 el blus\u00f3n amarillo que reservamos para los cobardes.\n\nMe lanc\u00e9 contra \u00e9l, cegada por la ira, y le hinqu\u00e9 el hombro en el abdomen. Dada su estatura, no pas\u00f3 nada. Se limit\u00f3 a agarrarme por el blus\u00f3n y a apartarme. Di contra el suelo con el mismo hombro.\n\n\u2014No puedes pelear conmigo con las manos. \u2014Empez\u00f3 a pasearse por el borde del \u00f3valo\u2014. Ni huir de un emite. Eres una onir\u00e1mbula. Tienes el poder de vivir y morir a tu antojo. Saquea mi onirosaje. \u00a1Hazme enloquecer!\n\nUna parte de m\u00ed se desprendi\u00f3. Mi esp\u00edritu sali\u00f3 volando y recorri\u00f3 el espacio que me separaba del Custodio. Raj\u00f3 el anillo exterior de su mente, como un cuchillo cortando una seda tensa. Atraves\u00f3 la parte m\u00e1s oscura de su onirosaje, forzando barreras asombrosamente poderosas, y apunt\u00f3 hacia la lejana mancha de luz de su zona soleada, pero no fue tan f\u00e1cil como lo hab\u00eda sido en el tren. El centro de su onirosaje estaba muy lejos, y mi esp\u00edritu ya estaba siendo expulsado. Como una goma el\u00e1stica tensada en exceso, me vi lanzada de nuevo a mi mente. El peso de mi propio esp\u00edritu me derrib\u00f3. Me golpe\u00e9 la cabeza contra el suelo.\n\nPoco a poco volv\u00ed a ver las l\u00e1mparas de gas. Me incorpor\u00e9 apoy\u00e1ndome en los codos; me dol\u00edan las sienes. El Custodio segu\u00eda de pie. No hab\u00eda conseguido arrodillarlo, como a Aludra, pero hab\u00eda alterado ligeramente su percepci\u00f3n. Se pas\u00f3 una mano por la cara y sacudi\u00f3 la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Bien \u2014dijo\u2014. Muy bien.\n\nMe levant\u00e9. Me temblaban las piernas.\n\n\u2014Intentas cabrearme \u2014dije\u2014. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Porque por lo visto funciona. \u2014Se\u00f1al\u00f3 la daga\u2014. Hag\u00e1moslo otra vez.\n\nLo mir\u00e9 mientras trataba de recobrar el aliento.\n\n\u2014\u00bfOtra vez?\n\n\u2014Puedes hacerlo mejor. Apenas has rozado mis defensas. Quiero que hagas mella en ellas.\n\n\u2014No puedo hacerlo otra vez. \u2014Ve\u00eda puntos negros\u2014. Esto no funciona as\u00ed.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 no?\n\n\u2014Porque dejo de respirar.\n\n\u2014\u00bfNo sabes bucear?\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014El humano medio puede contener la respiraci\u00f3n al menos durante treinta segundos sin sufrir da\u00f1os irreversibles. Es tiempo m\u00e1s que suficiente para atacar otra mente y volver a tu cuerpo.\n\nNunca me lo hab\u00eda planteado as\u00ed. Nick siempre se hab\u00eda asegurado de que tuviera soporte vital para percibir el \u00e9ter desde lejos.\n\n\u2014Tienes que pensar en tu esp\u00edritu como un m\u00fasculo que sale de su posici\u00f3n natural \u2014dijo el Custodio\u2014. Cuanto m\u00e1s lo usas, m\u00e1s fuerte y m\u00e1s r\u00e1pido se vuelve, y mejor soporta tu cuerpo las repercusiones. Podr\u00e1s saltar r\u00e1pidamente de un onirosaje a otro antes de que tu cuerpo d\u00e9 contra el suelo.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa no lo entiendes \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014Ni t\u00fa. Sospecho que el incidente del tren fue la primera vez que entraste en otro onirosaje. \u2014No movi\u00f3 la daga\u2014. Pasea por el m\u00edo. Te desaf\u00edo.\n\nEscudri\u00f1\u00e9 su cara. Estaba invit\u00e1ndome a entrar en su mente, a poner en peligro su cordura.\n\n\u2014En realidad no te importa. Solo me est\u00e1s entrenando \u2014dije. Empezamos a movernos en c\u00edrculo\u2014. Nashira te pidi\u00f3 que me escogieras. S\u00e9 lo que quiere.\n\n\u2014No. Te escog\u00ed yo. Reclam\u00e9 tu instrucci\u00f3n. Y lo \u00faltimo que quiero \u2014dijo avanzando hacia m\u00ed\u2014 es que me averg\u00fcences con tu incompetencia. \u2014Su mirada era dura como la piedra\u2014. Vuelve a atacarme. Y esta vez hazlo bien.\n\n\u2014No. \u2014Lo pondr\u00eda en evidencia. Le har\u00eda pasar verg\u00fcenza. Que se avergonzara de m\u00ed tanto como mi padre\u2014. No pienso matarme solo para que Nashira te conceda una estrella de oro.\n\n\u2014Quieres hacerme da\u00f1o \u2014replic\u00f3, en voz m\u00e1s baja\u2014. Est\u00e1s resentida conmigo. Me odias. \u2014Levant\u00f3 la daga\u2014. Destr\u00fayeme.\n\nAl principio no hice nada. Entonces me acord\u00e9 de las horas que hab\u00eda pasado cur\u00e1ndole el brazo, y de c\u00f3mo me hab\u00eda amenazado. Record\u00e9 que se hab\u00eda apartado y hab\u00eda visto morir a Seb. Volv\u00ed a lanzarle mi esp\u00edritu.\n\nEn el rato que pasamos en la pradera, apenas logr\u00e9 fracturar su onirosaje. No pod\u00eda ir m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de su zona hadal, ni siquiera cuando \u00e9l retiraba casi todas sus defensas, porque su mente era demasiado poderosa. No paraba de provocarme. Me dec\u00eda que era d\u00e9bil, que era pat\u00e9tica, que era una verg\u00fcenza para los clarividentes. Que no le extra\u00f1aba que los humanos solo sirvi\u00e9ramos para ser esclavos. \u00bfQuer\u00eda vivir en una jaula, como un animal? \u00c9l estaba dispuesto a complacerme. En un primer momento las provocaciones surtieron efecto, pero a medida que avanzaba la noche, sus insultos iban enfureci\u00e9ndome menos. Al final eran solo frustrantes; no bastaban para obligar a mi esp\u00edritu a salir.\n\nEntonces el Custodio lanz\u00f3 la daga. Apunt\u00f3 lejos de m\u00ed, pero verla volar bast\u00f3 para que mi esp\u00edritu se soltara. Cada vez que lo hac\u00eda, me ca\u00eda al suelo. Si se me escapaba un pie fuera del \u00f3valo, me lanzaban un dardo de flux. No tard\u00e9 en aprender a prever el silbido del dardo y a agacharme antes de que la aguja diera en el blanco.\n\nConsegu\u00ed salir cinco o seis veces de mi cuerpo. Sent\u00eda como si me abrieran la cabeza cada vez. Al final no pod\u00eda m\u00e1s. Ve\u00eda doble, y ten\u00eda una fuerte migra\u00f1a localizada sobre el ojo izquierdo. Me dobl\u00e9 por la cintura, casi sin aliento. \u00abNo muestres debilidad. No muestres debilidad _.\u00bb_ Se me doblaban las rodillas.\n\nEl Custodio se arrodill\u00f3 delante de m\u00ed y me abraz\u00f3 por la cintura. Intent\u00e9 apartarlo, pero ten\u00eda los brazos flojos como cuerdas.\n\n\u2014Basta \u2014dijo\u2014. No sigas resisti\u00e9ndote.\n\nMe cogi\u00f3 en brazos. Yo nunca hab\u00eda saltado repentinamente, en una sucesi\u00f3n tan r\u00e1pida, y no sab\u00eda si mi cerebro lo soportar\u00eda. Me dol\u00eda el fondo de los ojos. No pod\u00eda mirar el farol.\n\n\u2014Lo has hecho bien. \u2014El Custodio me mir\u00f3\u2014. Pero puedes hacerlo mucho mejor.\n\nNo pude contestarle.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPaige?\n\n\u2014Estoy bien \u2014repuse arrastrando las palabras.\n\nEl Custodio me crey\u00f3. Ech\u00f3 a andar hacia la verja, todav\u00eda conmigo en brazos.\n\nAl cabo de un rato volvi\u00f3 a dejarme en el suelo. Fuimos en silencio hasta la entrada, donde Thuban hab\u00eda abandonado su puesto. Ivy estaba sentada con la espalda apoyada en la valla; ten\u00eda la cabeza entre las manos y le temblaban los hombros. Cuando nos acercamos a la verja, se levant\u00f3 y descorri\u00f3 el cerrojo. El Custodio la mir\u00f3 de pasada.\n\n\u2014Gracias, Ivy.\n\nElla lo mir\u00f3. Ten\u00eda l\u00e1grimas en los ojos. \u00bfCu\u00e1nto tiempo hac\u00eda que nadie la llamaba por su verdadero nombre?\n\nFuimos hacia la ciudad fantasma; el Custodio guardaba silencio. Yo estaba medio dormida. Si hubiera estado con Nick, \u00e9l me habr\u00eda obligado a acostarme y a descansar varias horas, y me habr\u00eda rega\u00f1ado.\n\nHasta que pasamos por delante de la Casa Amaur\u00f3tica, el Custodio no volvi\u00f3 a dirigirme la palabra.\n\n\u2014\u00bfIntentas a menudo sentir el \u00e9ter desde lejos?\n\n\u2014Eso no es asunto tuyo \u2014respond\u00ed.\n\n\u2014En tus ojos hay muerte. Muerte y hielo. \u2014Se volvi\u00f3 y me mir\u00f3\u2014. Es extra\u00f1o, porque tu ira los hace arder.\n\nLo mir\u00e9 y dije:\n\n\u2014Tus ojos tambi\u00e9n cambian.\n\n\u2014\u00bfA qu\u00e9 crees que se debe eso?\n\n\u2014No lo s\u00e9. No s\u00e9 nada de ti.\n\n\u2014Cierto. \u2014El Custodio me mir\u00f3 de arriba abajo\u2014. Ens\u00e9\u00f1ame la mano.\n\nTras un momento de vacilaci\u00f3n, le mostr\u00e9 la mano derecha. La quemadura ten\u00eda un aspecto horrible, un lustre nacarado. El Custodio se sac\u00f3 del bolsillo un vial lleno de l\u00edquido, verti\u00f3 unas gotas sobre su dedo enguantado y me lo aplic\u00f3 en la cicatriz. Vi la herida desaparecer sin dejar rastro. Retir\u00e9 la mano.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo lo has hecho?\n\n\u2014Se llama amaranto. \u2014Se guard\u00f3 el vial y me mir\u00f3\u2014. Dime, Paige, \u00bfle tienes miedo al \u00e9ter?\n\n\u2014No. \u2014Notaba un cosquilleo en la palma de la mano.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 no?\n\nEra mentira. El \u00e9ter me daba miedo. Cuando forzaba demasiado mi sexto sentido, me arriesgaba a morir, o al menos a padecer alguna lesi\u00f3n cerebral. Jax me hab\u00eda advertido desde el principio de que si trabajaba para \u00e9l, probablemente mi esperanza de vida se reducir\u00eda en unos treinta a\u00f1os, tal vez m\u00e1s. Todo depend\u00eda de la suerte.\n\n\u2014Porque el \u00e9ter es perfecto \u2014dije\u2014. No hay guerras. No hay muerte, porque all\u00ed todo est\u00e1 muerto ya. Y no hay sonido. Solo silencio. Y seguridad.\n\n\u2014En el \u00e9ter no hay nada seguro. Y no est\u00e1 exento de guerras y muerte.\n\nObserv\u00e9 su perfil mientras \u00e9l contemplaba el negro cielo. No expulsaba vaho al respirar, como yo. Pero por un instante, un momento brev\u00edsimo, vislumbr\u00e9 algo humano en su cara. Una expresi\u00f3n pensativa, casi amarga. Entonces el Custodio se volvi\u00f3 hacia m\u00ed, y aquello que me hab\u00eda parecido ver desapareci\u00f3.\n\nPasaba algo raro en el Poblado. Un grupo de casacas rojas que estaban en cuclillas en la calle adoquinada hablaban en voz baja, observados por bufones silenciosos. Mir\u00e9 al Custodio y trat\u00e9 de discernir si aquello le preocupaba. Si le preocupaba, no se le notaba. Fue hacia el grupo, y la mayor\u00eda de los bufones se metieron en sus chozas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 pasa?\n\nUn casaca roja levant\u00f3 la vista, vio qui\u00e9n hab\u00eda hablado y se apresur\u00f3 a agachar la cabeza. Ten\u00eda el blus\u00f3n manchado de barro.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1bamos en el bosque \u2014dijo con voz ronca\u2014. Nos perdimos. Los emim...\n\nInstintivamente, el Custodio se llev\u00f3 una mano al antebrazo.\n\nLos casacas rojas estaban alrededor de un chico de unos diecis\u00e9is a\u00f1os. Le faltaba la mano derecha e iba manchado de sangre. Apret\u00e9 las mand\u00edbulas. Le hab\u00edan arrancado la mano de cuajo, como si se la hubiera pillado en una m\u00e1quina. El Custodio analiz\u00f3 la escena sin revelar ni una pizca de emoci\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Dices que os hab\u00e9is perdido \u2014dijo\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9 guardi\u00e1n iba con vosotros?\n\n\u2014El heredero de sangre.\n\nEl Custodio dirigi\u00f3 la mirada hacia la calle.\n\n\u2014Deber\u00eda haberlo imaginado \u2014dijo.\n\nSe qued\u00f3 all\u00ed plantado, y yo clav\u00e9 los ojos en su espalda. El casaca roja temblaba de pies a cabeza y ten\u00eda la cara cubierta de sudor. Si alguien no le vendaba el mu\u00f1\u00f3n, se iba a morir. Al menos hab\u00eda que echarle una manta por encima.\n\n\u2014Llev\u00e1dselo a Oriel. \u2014El Custodio se apart\u00f3 del grupo\u2014. Terebell se ocupar\u00e1 de \u00e9l. Los dem\u00e1s, volved a vuestras residencias. Los amaur\u00f3ticos os curar\u00e1n las heridas.\n\nEscudri\u00f1\u00e9 sus duras facciones en busca de alg\u00fan indicio de calidez, pero no encontr\u00e9 nada. No le importaba. Yo no sab\u00eda por qu\u00e9 segu\u00eda mir\u00e1ndolo.\n\nLos casacas rojas levantaron a su amigo y se encaminaron hacia un callej\u00f3n; por el camino fueron dejando un reguero de sangre.\n\n\u2014Necesita ir a un hospital \u2014me obligu\u00e9 a decir\u2014. No tienes idea de c\u00f3mo...\n\n\u2014Se ocupar\u00e1n de \u00e9l.\n\nEntonces se qued\u00f3 callado, y su mirada se endureci\u00f3. Deduje que eso significaba que con mi comentario me hab\u00eda pasado de la raya.\n\nPero empezaba a preguntarme d\u00f3nde estaba trazada la raya. El Custodio nunca me pegaba. Me dejaba dormir. Cuando est\u00e1bamos solos, me llamaba por mi nombre verdadero. Hasta me hab\u00eda dejado atacar su mente, se hab\u00eda expuesto a mi esp\u00edritu, un esp\u00edritu capaz de abocarlo a la locura. No entend\u00eda por qu\u00e9 corr\u00eda ese riesgo. Incluso Nick recelaba de mi don. (\u00abLl\u00e1malo respeto sano, _s\u00f6tnos_.\u00bb)\n\nFuimos hacia la residencia, y por el camino me solt\u00e9 el mo\u00f1o. Estuve a punto de volver a abandonar mi cuerpo cuando unas manos me asieron la melena de rizos h\u00famedos.\n\n\u2014\u00a1XX-40! Es un placer volver e verte \u2014dijo una voz con un deje ir\u00f3nico, muy aguda para ser masculina\u2014. Te felicito, Custodio. Con el blus\u00f3n est\u00e1 a\u00fan m\u00e1s hermosa.\n\nMe volv\u00ed y mir\u00e9 al hombre que ten\u00eda detr\u00e1s. Tuve que controlarme para no retroceder.\n\nEra el m\u00e9dium que me hab\u00eda perseguido por los tejados del I-5, pero esa noche no iba armado con una pistola de flux. Llevaba un extra\u00f1o uniforme con los colores de Scion. Hasta su cara hac\u00eda juego con \u00e9l: boca roja, cejas negras, la tez espolvoreada con \u00f3xido de zinc. Deb\u00eda de estar rozando la cuarentena, y llevaba un grueso l\u00e1tigo de cuero en la mano. Habr\u00eda jurado que el l\u00e1tigo estaba manchado de sangre. Deb\u00eda de ser el Capataz, el encargado de mantener a raya a los bufones. Detr\u00e1s de \u00e9l estaba el or\u00e1culo de la primera noche. Me mir\u00f3 con unos ojos desconcertantes: uno, oscuro y penetrante; el otro, de color avellana claro. Su blus\u00f3n era del mismo color que el m\u00edo.\n\nEl Custodio los mir\u00f3.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 quieres, Capataz?\n\n\u2014Perdona que te importune. Solo quer\u00eda volver a ver a la So\u00f1adora. He seguido sus progresos con gran inter\u00e9s.\n\n\u2014No es actriz. Sus progresos no tienen ning\u00fan inter\u00e9s.\n\n\u2014Desde luego. Pero da gusto mirarla. \u2014Me lanz\u00f3 una sonrisa\u2014. Perm\u00edteme darte la bienvenida a Sheol I. Soy Beltrame, el Capataz. Espero que mi dardo de flux no te haya dejado cicatriz.\n\nReaccion\u00e9. No pude evitarlo.\n\n\u2014Si me entero de que le hiciste da\u00f1o a mi padre...\n\n\u2014No te he dado permiso para hablar, XX-40.\n\nEl Custodio me mir\u00f3 fijamente. El Capataz ri\u00f3 y me dio unas palmaditas en la mejilla. Me apart\u00e9 de \u00e9l.\n\n\u2014Tranquila. A tu padre no le ha pasado nada. \u2014Se hizo una se\u00f1al sobre el pecho\u2014. Palabra de honor.\n\nDeber\u00eda haber sentido alivio, pero su descaro me enfurec\u00eda. El Custodio mir\u00f3 al acompa\u00f1ante del Capataz.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n es? \u2014pregunt\u00f3.\n\n\u2014XX-59-12. \u2014El Capataz le puso una mano en el hombro\u2014. Es un sirviente muy leal de Pleione. Ha progresado mucho en sus estudios estas \u00faltimas semanas.\n\n\u2014Ya veo. \u2014El Custodio lo examin\u00f3 con la mirada, evaluando su aura\u2014. \u00bfEres un or\u00e1culo?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, Custodio. \u201412 agach\u00f3 la cabeza.\n\n\u2014La soberana de sangre debe de estar muy complacida con tus progresos. No hab\u00edamos tenido ning\u00fan or\u00e1culo desde la Era de Huesos XVI.\n\n\u2014Espero encontrarme muy pronto entre los que est\u00e1n a su servicio, Custodio. \u2014Ten\u00eda un ligero acento del norte.\n\n\u2014No lo dudes, 12. Creo que lo har\u00e1s muy bien contra tu emite. 12 est\u00e1 a punto de hacer su segundo examen \u2014explic\u00f3 el Capataz\u2014. Precisamente volv\u00edamos a Merton para reunirnos con el resto de su batall\u00f3n. Pleione y Alsafi lo dirigir\u00e1n.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSaben los Sualocin lo del casaca roja herido? \u2014pregunt\u00f3 el Custodio.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Buscan al emite que lo mordi\u00f3.\n\nEl Custodio mud\u00f3 ligeramente la expresi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Te deseo mucha suerte en tu empe\u00f1o, 12 \u2014dijo, y 12 volvi\u00f3 a agachar la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Pero tengo otro motivo para interrumpirte, antes de marcharnos \u2014a\u00f1adi\u00f3 el Capataz\u2014. Estoy aqu\u00ed para invitar a la onir\u00e1mbula. Si me lo permites.\n\nEl Custodio se volvi\u00f3 y lo mir\u00f3. El Capataz interpret\u00f3 su silencio como un permiso para continuar.\n\n\u2014Estamos organizando una celebraci\u00f3n muy especial en honor de esta Era de Huesos, XX-40. La vig\u00e9sima. \u2014Abri\u00f3 un brazo hacia el Poblado\u2014. Nuestros mejores actores. Un fest\u00edn para los sentidos. Una saturnal de m\u00fasica y baile para hacer alarde de todos nuestros chicos y chicas.\n\n\u2014Te refieres al Bicentenario \u2014dijo el Custodio.\n\nEra la primera vez que yo o\u00eda esa palabra.\n\n\u2014Exactamente. \u2014El Capataz sonri\u00f3\u2014. La ceremonia durante la cual se firmar\u00e1 el Gran Tratado Territorial.\n\nAquello no sonaba nada bien. De pronto me ceg\u00f3 una visi\u00f3n.\n\nNick, como todo or\u00e1culo, pod\u00eda enviar im\u00e1genes mudas a trav\u00e9s del \u00e9ter. Las llamaba _khresmoi_ , una palabra griega. Yo nunca hab\u00eda podido pronunciarla, y por eso las llamaba \u00abinstant\u00e1neas\u00bb. 12 tambi\u00e9n ten\u00eda ese don. Vi un reloj cuyas dos agujas se\u00f1alaban las doce y, a continuaci\u00f3n, cuatro columnas y una escalinata. Al cabo de un momento parpade\u00e9, y las im\u00e1genes desaparecieron. Cuando abr\u00ed los ojos, vi que 12 me miraba.\n\nFue solo un segundo.\n\n\u2014Estoy al corriente del Tratado \u2014iba diciendo el Custodio\u2014. Ve al grano, Capataz. 40 est\u00e1 agotada.\n\nEl Capataz no se inmut\u00f3 ante la brusquedad del Custodio. Deb\u00eda de estar acostumbrado a que lo trataran con desprecio. Se limit\u00f3 a esbozar una blanda sonrisa.\n\n\u2014Me gustar\u00eda invitar a 40 a actuar con nosotros el d\u00eda del Bicentenario. Me impresionaron su fuerza y su agilidad la noche que la captur\u00e9. Es un gran placer para m\u00ed invitarla a ser nuestra actriz principal, junto con XIX-49-1 y con XIX-49-8.\n\nIba a rechazar la invitaci\u00f3n, en un tono con el que me habr\u00eda ganado un castigo severo, cuando el Custodio dijo:\n\n\u2014Soy su guardi\u00e1n y lo proh\u00edbo. \u2014Lo mir\u00e9\u2014. 40 no es actriz, y a menos que suspenda sus ex\u00e1menes antes del Bicentenario, sigue estando bajo mi custodia. \u2014El Custodio mir\u00f3 a los ojos al Capataz y a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014: 40 es onir\u00e1mbula. Es la onir\u00e1mbula que te encargaron traer a esta colonia. No permitir\u00e9 que la exhiban ante los emisarios de Scion como si fuera una vulgar profeta. Esa es una funci\u00f3n propia de tus humanos, no de los m\u00edos.\n\nEl Capataz ya no sonre\u00eda.\n\n\u2014Muy bien. \u2014Agach\u00f3 la cabeza y dej\u00f3 de mirarme\u2014. Vamos, 12. Tu desaf\u00edo te espera.\n\n12 me mir\u00f3 con disimulo y enarc\u00f3 una ceja con gesto interrogante. Asent\u00ed con la cabeza. 12 se dio la vuelta y sigui\u00f3 al Capataz hacia el Poblado, caminando sin prisas. No parec\u00eda asustarle eso a lo que iba a enfrentarse.\n\nEl Custodio me mir\u00f3 fijamente.\n\n\u2014\u00bfConoces al or\u00e1culo?\n\n\u2014No.\n\n\u2014No te quitaba los ojos de encima.\n\n\u2014Perd\u00f3name, amo \u2014repliqu\u00e9\u2014, pero \u00bftengo prohibido hablar con los otros humanos?\n\nNo dej\u00f3 de mirarme. Me pregunt\u00e9 si los refas sab\u00edan captar el sarcasmo.\n\n\u2014No \u2014contest\u00f3\u2014. Tienes permiso.\n\nPas\u00f3 a mi lado sin decir nada m\u00e1s.\n\nNo dorm\u00ed bien. Me dol\u00eda mucho la cabeza; el dolor se concentraba en mi sien izquierda. Tumbada entre las s\u00e1banas, vi consumirse la vela.\n\nEl Custodio no me hab\u00eda enviado directamente a mi habitaci\u00f3n. Me hab\u00eda ofrecido un poco de comida y agua, que yo hab\u00eda aceptado porque estaba al borde de la deshidrataci\u00f3n. Luego se hab\u00eda sentado junto al fuego y se hab\u00eda quedado observando las llamas. Yo hab\u00eda tardado unos diez minutos en preguntarle si pod\u00eda retirarme ya, y \u00e9l me hab\u00eda contestado con un \u00abs\u00ed\u00bb cortante.\n\nArriba hac\u00eda fr\u00edo. El cristal de las ventanas era muy delgado y dejaba pasar el aire. Me envolv\u00ed con las finas s\u00e1banas, temblando. Al cabo de un rato me qued\u00e9 dormida. Las palabras del Custodio resonaban en mis o\u00eddos: que en mis ojos hab\u00eda muerte y hielo. De vez en cuando volv\u00edan a asaltarme las im\u00e1genes de XX-12, grabadas todav\u00eda en mi onirosaje. No era la primera vez que ve\u00eda im\u00e1genes oraculares. Una vez Nick me hab\u00eda mostrado una instant\u00e1nea en la que me ca\u00eda de un tejado bajo y me romp\u00eda el tobillo, y a la semana pas\u00f3 exactamente eso. Nunca volv\u00ed a dudar de sus predicciones meteorol\u00f3gicas.\n\nXX-12 me hab\u00eda pedido que me reuniera con \u00e9l a las doce. No ve\u00eda ninguna raz\u00f3n para no acudir a la cita.\n\nCuando despert\u00e9, estaban dando las once. Me lav\u00e9, me vest\u00ed y baj\u00e9 a la c\u00e1mara del Custodio. No se o\u00eda nada. Las cortinas estaban descorridas y dejaban entrar la luz de la luna. Por primera vez desde hac\u00eda varios d\u00edas, encontr\u00e9 una de sus notas encima del escritorio.\n\nAverigua lo que puedas sobre los emim.\n\nMe recorri\u00f3 un escalofr\u00edo. Si ten\u00eda que investigar sobre los zumbadores, quer\u00eda decir que estaba destinada a enfrentarme a ellos. Tambi\u00e9n significaba que ten\u00eda libertad para ver a 12. De alguna forma estar\u00eda obedeciendo \u00f3rdenes. 12 acababa de realizar su segundo examen. Me pregunt\u00e9 qu\u00e9 habr\u00eda visto durante la noche. Por fin iba a obtener datos fiables sobre los emim, suponiendo, claro estaba, que no se hubieran comido a 12.\n\nMinutos antes de medianoche baj\u00e9 la escalera y cerr\u00e9 la puerta detr\u00e1s de m\u00ed. Hab\u00eda llegado la hora de hacer los deberes.\n\nLa portera nocturna no me salud\u00f3 al verme. Cuando le ped\u00ed m\u00e1s _numa_ , me los dio, pero sigui\u00f3 con expresi\u00f3n altiva. Todav\u00eda estaba dolida por el incidente de la sirena.\n\nFuera hac\u00eda fr\u00edo, y la llovizna enturbiaba la atm\u00f3sfera. Fui al Poblado y me compr\u00e9 el desayuno: un poco de _skilly_ en un vaso de pl\u00e1stico. Lo compr\u00e9 con un pu\u00f1ado de agujas y anillos. Me obligu\u00e9 a dar un par de sorbos y me dirig\u00ed hacia el edificio que los bufones llamaban Hawksmoor, el gran centinela de piedra que custodiaba la biblioteca y su patio.\n\n12 me esperaba detr\u00e1s de una columna. Llevaba un blus\u00f3n rojo, nuevo, y ten\u00eda un corte en la mejilla. Cuando vio mi taza de _skilly_ , enarc\u00f3 una ceja.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTe comes eso?\n\nDi un sorbo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9? \u00bfQu\u00e9 comes t\u00fa?\n\n\u2014Lo que me da mi guardiana.\n\n\u2014No todos somos arrancahuesos. Por cierto: felicidades.\n\nMe tendi\u00f3 la mano y yo se la estrech\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Me llamo David.\n\n\u2014Yo, Paige.\n\n\u2014Paige. \u2014Me taladr\u00f3 con uno de sus oscuros ojos; el otro parec\u00eda menos enfocado\u2014. Si no tienes nada mejor que hacer con tu tiempo, me gustar\u00eda llevarte a dar un paseo.\n\n\u2014Cualquiera dir\u00eda que soy un perro.\n\nRi\u00f3 sin mover los labios.\n\n\u2014Por aqu\u00ed \u2014dijo\u2014. Si alguien pregunta, te llevo a que te interroguen por un incidente.\n\nBajamos juntos por una calle estrecha, hacia la Residencia del Suzerano. David era unos cinco cent\u00edmetros m\u00e1s alto que yo; ten\u00eda los brazos largos y el torso grueso. No estaba muerto de hambre como los bufones.\n\n\u2014Un poco arriesgado, \u00bfno? \u2014le pregunt\u00e9.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Hablar conmigo. Ahora eres un casaca roja.\n\nSonri\u00f3.\n\n\u2014No cre\u00ed que fueras una presa tan f\u00e1cil. Ya has ca\u00eddo en su trampa, \u00bfverdad?\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 quieres decir?\n\n\u2014Segregaci\u00f3n, 40. Ves que soy un casaca roja y piensas que no deber\u00eda hablar contigo. \u00bfEso te ha ense\u00f1ado tu guardi\u00e1n?\n\n\u2014No. Pero funciona as\u00ed.\n\n\u2014\u00bfLo ves? Para eso existe este sitio: para lavarnos el cerebro. Para hacernos sentir inferiores. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 crees que dejan a la gente en la Torre durante a\u00f1os? \u2014Como no contestaba, sacudi\u00f3 la cabeza\u2014. Venga, 40. El submarino, el aislamiento, los d\u00edas sin comida. Despu\u00e9s de eso, este sitio parece un rinc\u00f3n del para\u00edso. \u2014Ten\u00eda parte de raz\u00f3n\u2014. Tendr\u00edas que o\u00edr al Capataz. Cree que los refas deber\u00edan gobernarnos, que deber\u00edan ser nuestra nueva monarqu\u00eda.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 va a pensar eso?\n\n\u2014Porque le han lavado el cerebro.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCu\u00e1nto tiempo lleva aqu\u00ed?\n\n\u2014Que yo sepa, solo desde la Era de Huesos XIX, pero es fiel como un perro. Lleva tiempo tratando de sacar a buenos videntes del sindicato.\n\n\u2014Entonces es un captador.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, pero no es muy bueno. Nashira quiere sustituirlo. Quiere a alguien capaz de percibir el \u00e9ter a un nivel m\u00e1s elevado.\n\nIba a preguntarle algo m\u00e1s, pero me contuve. Distingu\u00ed, a trav\u00e9s de la neblina gris, un edificio circular con una gran c\u00fapula. Se alzaba en una plaza desierta, grande y pesado, enfrente de la Residencia del Suzerano. Detr\u00e1s de las ventanas se ve\u00eda una luz ambarina.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 es eso? \u2014pregunt\u00e9 se\u00f1al\u00e1ndolo.\n\n\u2014Los bufones lo llaman la Sala. He intentado averiguar para qu\u00e9 es, pero por lo visto a nadie le gusta hablar de ella. A los humanos no nos dejan entrar.\n\nSigui\u00f3 adelante sin mirarla siquiera. Apret\u00e9 el paso para alcanzarlo.\n\n\u2014Dec\u00edas que trataba de sacar a videntes del sindicato \u2014dije intentando retomar el hilo de nuestra conversaci\u00f3n\u2014. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014No hagas demasiadas preguntas, 40.\n\n\u2014Cre\u00eda que ese era el motivo de esta cita.\n\n\u2014Podr\u00eda serlo. Tambi\u00e9n podr\u00eda ser que sencillamente me ca\u00edste bien. Ya hemos llegado.\n\nNuestro destino era una iglesia antigua. En su d\u00eda deb\u00eda de haber sido magn\u00edfica, pero se estaba derrumbando. Las ventanas no ten\u00edan cristales, la torre hab\u00eda quedado reducida a un esqueleto, y unos tablones cerraban el acceso al porche, orientado al sur. Arque\u00e9 una ceja.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSeguro que sabes lo que haces?\n\n\u2014No es la primera vez. Adem\u00e1s \u2014dijo col\u00e1ndose por debajo de un list\u00f3n\u2014, seg\u00fan el Capataz est\u00e1s acostumbrada a las estructuras inseguras. \u2014Mir\u00f3 m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de mi hombro\u2014. R\u00e1pido. El Guardi\u00e1n Gris.\n\nMe col\u00e9 entre los tablones justo a tiempo: Graffias pas\u00f3 por delante de la entrada guiando a tres amaur\u00f3ticos desnutridos. Segu\u00ed a David por la iglesia. Gran parte del techo se hab\u00eda derrumbado y cubr\u00eda el suelo de la capilla. Las vigas de madera y el hormig\u00f3n hab\u00edan destrozado los bancos, y hab\u00eda cristales por el suelo. Me abr\u00ed paso entre los escombros.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 ha pasado aqu\u00ed?\n\nDavid no me contest\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Hay que subir ciento veinticuatro escalones \u2014dijo\u2014. \u00bfTe animas?\n\nNo esper\u00f3 a que le contestara. Lo segu\u00ed hacia la escalera. Estaba acostumbrada a trepar; hab\u00eda trepado por cientos de edificios en la cohorte I. Casi todos los escalones estaban todav\u00eda intactos, y no tardamos mucho en llegar al final de la escalera. Un fuerte viento me sacudi\u00f3 el pelo y me lo apart\u00f3 de la cara. Ol\u00eda mucho a humo. David apoy\u00f3 los brazos en una balaustrada de piedra.\n\n\u2014Me gusta este sitio. \u2014Se sac\u00f3 un porro de la manga y lo encendi\u00f3 con una cerilla\u2014. Una atalaya.\n\nNos hall\u00e1bamos en un balc\u00f3n, justo debajo de la torre semiderruida. Faltaba parte de la balaustrada, y otro letrero advert\u00eda de la peligrosidad de la estructura. Alc\u00e9 la vista hacia las estrellas.\n\n\u2014Has aprobado tu segundo examen \u2014dije\u2014. Si quieres que hablemos, cu\u00e9ntame algo de los emim.\n\nDavid exhal\u00f3 el humo con los ojos cerrados. Ten\u00eda los dedos manchados.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 quieres saber, exactamente?\n\n\u2014Quiero saber qu\u00e9 son.\n\n\u2014No tengo ni idea.\n\n\u2014Debes de haber visto a alguno.\n\n\u2014No muy bien. El bosque est\u00e1 oscuro. S\u00e9 que parec\u00eda humano (al menos ten\u00eda cabeza, brazos y piernas), pero se mov\u00eda como un animal. Y apestaba a cloaca. Y sonaba como una cloaca.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSonaba como una cloaca?\n\n\u2014A moscas, 40. Bzzzz.\n\n\u00abLos zumbadores.\u00bb\n\n\u2014\u00bfY su aura? \u2014insist\u00ed\u2014. \u00bfTen\u00eda aura?\n\n\u2014No, o al menos no la vi. Hac\u00eda que pareciera que el \u00e9ter se estaba derrumbando \u2014continu\u00f3\u2014. Como si hubiera un agujero negro alrededor de su onirosaje.\n\nNo, no me hac\u00eda ninguna gracia enfrentarme a una cosa as\u00ed. Mir\u00e9 hacia abajo, hacia la ciudad.\n\n\u2014\u00bfLo mataste?\n\n\u2014Lo intent\u00e9. \u2014Se fij\u00f3 en mi expresi\u00f3n y le dio unos golpecitos al porro\u2014. Nos pusieron a unos cuantos all\u00ed, todos casacas rosa. Dos grupos. Nos acompa\u00f1aban dos casacas rojas, 30 y 25. Nos dieron un pu\u00f1al a cada uno y nos dijeron que rastre\u00e1ramos al zumbador como pudi\u00e9ramos. 30 nos dijo que los pu\u00f1ales solo serv\u00edan para que nos sinti\u00e9ramos mejor. La mejor forma de localizar a aquella cosa era utilizar el \u00e9ter.\n\n\u00bbUno de los casacas rosa era rabdomante, as\u00ed que hicimos unos cuantos _sortes_ con ramitas. 30 nos dio una botella que conten\u00eda sangre de un tipo al que le hab\u00edan arrancado la mano, al que podr\u00edamos usar como solicitante. Mojamos las ramitas en la sangre, y el rabdomante las lanz\u00f3. Se\u00f1alaron hacia el oeste. Seguimos lanzando _sortes_ y cambiando de direcci\u00f3n. Como es l\u00f3gico, el zumbador tambi\u00e9n se mov\u00eda, de modo que no llegamos a ninguna parte. 21 propuso que lo hici\u00e9ramos venir adonde est\u00e1bamos nosotros. Encendimos una hoguera e hicimos una sesi\u00f3n para invocar a los esp\u00edritus del bosque.\n\n\u2014\u00bfHay muchos?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Todos los idiotas que intentaron huir por el campo de minas, o eso dicen los casacas rojas.\n\nDisimul\u00e9 un estremecimiento.\n\n\u2014Esperamos unos minutos all\u00ed sentados. Los esp\u00edritus desaparecieron. O\u00edmos ruidos. Empezaron a llegar moscas del bosque y a sub\u00edrsenos por los brazos. Entonces vimos salir una cosa gigantesca e hinchada de la nada. Al cabo de dos segundos el emite le hab\u00eda agarrado el pelo a 19 con la boca; casi le lleva tambi\u00e9n la piel \u2014a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014. 19 se puso a gritar, y eso confundi\u00f3 a la cosa. Le arranc\u00f3 un mech\u00f3n de pelo y fue a atacar a 1.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCarl?\n\n\u2014No s\u00e9 sus nombres. 1 se puso a chillar como un cochinillo e intent\u00f3 clavarle el pu\u00f1al. No consigui\u00f3 nada. \u2014Ech\u00f3 una ojeada al extremo de su porro\u2014. El fuego se estaba apagando, pero yo todav\u00eda lo ve\u00eda. Intent\u00e9 atacarlo con una imagen. Pens\u00e9 en luz blanca e intent\u00e9 introducirla en el onirosaje del zumbador para cegarlo. De pronto sent\u00ed como si me atropellaran la mente, y como si hubiera un charco de aceite en el \u00e9ter. Estaba todo oscuro y muerto. Todos los esp\u00edritus de la zona procuraban alejarse de aquel desastre. 20 y 14 echaron a correr. 30 les grit\u00f3 que eran unos amarillos, pero estaban demasiado asustados para volver. 10 lanz\u00f3 un pu\u00f1al y le dio a 5. 5 cay\u00f3 al suelo. El zumbador se le ech\u00f3 encima. El fuego se apag\u00f3, y qued\u00f3 todo completamente oscuro. 5 grit\u00f3 pidiendo ayuda.\n\n\u00bbYa nadie ve\u00eda nada. Us\u00e9 el \u00e9ter para saber d\u00f3nde estaba aquella cosa. Se estaba comiendo a 5, que ya estaba muerto. Agarr\u00e9 a la cosa por el cuello y lo separ\u00e9 de 5. Se me qued\u00f3 su piel mojada y muerta pegada a las manos. Se volvi\u00f3 hacia m\u00ed. Vi unos ojos blancos en la oscuridad que me miraban fijamente. De pronto sal\u00ed volando por los aires, sangrando como un cerdo degollado.\n\nSe baj\u00f3 el cuello del blus\u00f3n y se destap\u00f3 un vendaje. Debajo ten\u00eda cuatro boquetes. Alrededor de las heridas la piel estaba gris y surcada de capilares rotos.\n\n\u2014Parecen heridas de duende \u2014coment\u00e9.\n\n\u2014No lo s\u00e9. \u2014Volvi\u00f3 a taparse las heridas con la venda\u2014. No pod\u00eda moverme. La cosa ven\u00eda hacia m\u00ed, manch\u00e1ndome de sangre. 10 estaba intentando ayudar a 5, pero entonces se levant\u00f3. Ten\u00eda un \u00e1ngel guardi\u00e1n, el \u00fanico esp\u00edritu que no se hab\u00eda largado. Se lo tir\u00f3 al zumbador. Lanc\u00e9 otra imagen hacia su onirosaje. La cosa grit\u00f3, muy fuerte. Empez\u00f3 a alejarse reptando. Hac\u00eda un ruido espantoso, y arrastraba un pedazo de 5. 21 le hab\u00eda prendido fuego a una rama y se la lanz\u00f3 al zumbador. Ol\u00ed a carne quemada. Entonces me desmay\u00e9. Despert\u00e9 en Oriel, cubierto de vendajes.\n\n\u2014Y os dieron a todos el blus\u00f3n rojo.\n\n\u2014A 20 y a 14, no. A ellos les dieron el amarillo. Y tuvieron que recoger los restos de 5.\n\nNos quedamos unos minutos en silencio. Yo no pod\u00eda dejar de pensar en 5, al que se hab\u00edan comido vivo en el bosque. No sab\u00eda su verdadero nombre, pero confiaba en que alguien hubiera recitado el treno. Qu\u00e9 muerte tan horrible.\n\nDirig\u00ed la mirada a lo lejos y distingu\u00ed un punto de luz; desde all\u00ed parec\u00eda poco m\u00e1s que la llama de una vela.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 es eso?\n\n\u2014Una hoguera.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 est\u00e1n quemando?\n\n\u2014Cad\u00e1veres de zumbadores. O cad\u00e1veres humanos. Depende de qui\u00e9n gane. \u2014Tir\u00f3 el porro\u2014. Creo que utilizan los huesos para no s\u00e9 qu\u00e9 adivinaciones.\n\nMientras \u00e9l dec\u00eda eso, me pasaron cenizas ante los ojos. Atrap\u00e9 una pizca con un dedo. Los augures conectaban con el \u00e9ter a trav\u00e9s del mundo natural: el cuerpo humano, animales y plantas, los elementos. Constitu\u00edan uno de los \u00f3rdenes m\u00e1s bajos, seg\u00fan Jaxon.\n\n\u2014A lo mejor los atrae el fuego \u2014dije\u2014. Dijeron que esta ciudad era una baliza.\n\n\u2014Es una baliza et\u00e9rea, 40. Est\u00e1 llena de videntes, esp\u00edritus y refas. Piensa en c\u00f3mo funciona el \u00e9ter.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo es que sabes tanto del \u00e9ter? \u2014Me volv\u00ed y lo mir\u00e9\u2014. No eres del sindicato. \u00bfQui\u00e9n eres?\n\n\u2014Un cifrador, igual que t\u00fa.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 callada, rechinando los dientes.\n\n\u2014Tienes m\u00e1s preguntas \u2014me dijo tras un breve silencio\u2014. \u00bfSeguro que quieres hac\u00e9rmelas?\n\n\u2014No empieces.\n\n\u2014Que no empiece \u00bfa qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014A decirme lo que quiero saber. Quiero respuestas. \u2014Lo dije atropelladamente\u2014. Quiero saberlo todo sobre el sitio donde se supone que voy a pasar el resto de mi vida. \u00bfNo lo entiendes?\n\nAcodados en la balaustrada, contempl\u00e1bamos la Sala. Por temor a que se derrumbara, procur\u00e9 no apoyarme demasiado en la piedra.\n\n\u2014En fin \u2014a\u00f1ad\u00ed\u2014, \u00bfpuedo hacerte esas preguntas?\n\n\u2014Esto no es ning\u00fan juego de sal\u00f3n, 40. No he venido aqu\u00ed a jugar a las adivinanzas. Te he tra\u00eddo para ver si de verdad eres una onir\u00e1mbula.\n\n\u2014Lo soy, de carne y hueso.\n\n\u2014No siempre, por lo que yo s\u00e9. A veces sales de tu cuerpo. \u2014Me mir\u00f3 de arriba abajo\u2014. Te sacaron de la cohorte central. Del sanctasanct\u00f3rum del sindicato. Debiste de ser poco cuidadosa.\n\n\u2014Poco cuidadosa, no. Poco afortunada. \u2014Lo mir\u00e9 a los ojos\u2014. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 les preocupa tanto el sindicato?\n\n\u2014Porque se queda con los mejores videntes. Esconde a todos los vinculadores, los onir\u00e1mbulos y los or\u00e1culos. A los representantes de los \u00f3rdenes m\u00e1s elevados, a los que Nashira querr\u00eda tener en su colonia. Por eso les preocupa el sindicato, 40. Por eso van a aprobar esa nueva ley.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 dice esa ley?\n\n\u2014Nashira lleva tiempo intentando hacerse con buenos videntes, pero est\u00e1n todos protegidos por las bandas. Hasta que encuentren la forma de disolver a los capos de Londres, no tienen m\u00e1s remedio que buscar en otros lugares. Esa ley promete que en el plazo de dos a\u00f1os se establecer\u00e1 Sheol II, y Scion Par\u00eds ser\u00e1 su ciudadela de siega. \u2014Sigui\u00f3 con un dedo las heridas que ten\u00eda en el pecho\u2014. Y \u00bfqui\u00e9n va a detenerlos, si los emim nos matar\u00e1n si lo intentamos?\n\nMe recorri\u00f3 un fr\u00edo extra\u00f1o.\n\nDe modo que Nashira consideraba que el sindicato era una amenaza; eso era nuevo para m\u00ed. Para m\u00ed, los mimetocapos eran una pandilla de ego\u00edstas, aprovechados e interesados; al menos as\u00ed eran los de la cohorte central. La Asamblea Antinatural llevaba a\u00f1os sin reunirse; hab\u00edan dejado que los mimetocapos hicieran lo que quisieran en sus respectivas zonas, pues Hector estaba demasiado ocupado con el juego y la prostituci\u00f3n para ocuparse de ellos. Y, sin embargo lejos de all\u00ed, en Sheol I, la soberana de sangre de los refa\u00edtas tem\u00eda a aquella chusma desmandada.\n\n\u2014Ahora eres uno de sus fieles seguidores \u2014dije mirando su blus\u00f3n rojo\u2014. \u00bfVas a ayudarlos?\n\n\u2014No soy fiel, 40. Solo lo aparento. \u00bfAlguna vez has visto sangrar a un refa?\n\nNo supe qu\u00e9 contestar.\n\n\u2014Su sangre se llama ectoplasma. Es la m\u00e1xima obsesi\u00f3n de Duckett. Los refas son algo as\u00ed como el \u00e9ter materializado. Su sangre es \u00e9ter licuado. Si ves el ectoplasma, ves el \u00e9ter. Si lo bebes; te conviertes en \u00e9ter. Como ellos.\n\n\u2014Pero eso significa que los amaur\u00f3ticos podr\u00edan llegar a utilizar el \u00e9ter, \u00bfno? Bastar\u00eda con que tocaran un poco de ectoplasma.\n\n\u2014Correcto. Para los carro\u00f1os, en teor\u00eda, el ecto actuar\u00eda como una especie de suced\u00e1neo del aura. A corto plazo, por supuesto. Los efectos secundarios solo duran unos quince minutos. Sin embargo, si aplic\u00e1ramos la ciencia y resolvi\u00e9ramos un par de problemas, apuesto algo a que podr\u00edamos vender p\u00edldoras de clarividencia instant\u00e1nea dentro de pocos a\u00f1os. \u2014Se qued\u00f3 contemplando la ciudad\u2014. Ese d\u00eda llegar\u00e1, 40. Seremos nosotros los que experimentaremos con esos cabrones, y no al rev\u00e9s.\n\nLos refas hab\u00edan cometido un grave error d\u00e1ndole el blus\u00f3n rojo a David. Era evidente que los odiaba.\n\n\u2014Puedes hacerme una pregunta m\u00e1s \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014Vale. \u2014Hice una pausa, y entonces me acord\u00e9 de Liss\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9 sabes de la Era de Huesos XVIII?\n\n\u2014No sab\u00eda si me lo preguntar\u00edas. \u2014Apart\u00f3 otro list\u00f3n, revelando una ventana rota\u2014. Ven, te lo ense\u00f1ar\u00e9.\n\nLo segu\u00ed.\n\nEn esa habitaci\u00f3n hab\u00eda esp\u00edritus. Me habr\u00eda gustado poder ver cu\u00e1ntos; calcul\u00e9 que ocho o nueve. El aire estaba enrarecido, impregnado del olor empalagoso de las flores marchitas. En un rinc\u00f3n hab\u00eda una especie de altar. Un \u00f3valo de metal burdamente cortado, rodeado de humildes ofrendas: cabos de vela, varillas de incienso rotas, un ramito seco de tomillo, etiquetas con nombres. En medio hab\u00eda un ramito de ran\u00fanculos y azucenas. Las que ol\u00edan eran las azucenas: eran flores frescas. David se sac\u00f3 una linterna del bolsillo.\n\n\u2014Aqu\u00ed tienes las ruinas de la esperanza.\n\nMe acerqu\u00e9 m\u00e1s. En el metal hab\u00eda grabadas unas palabras.\n\nPOR LOS CA\u00cdDOS\n\n28 DE NOVIEMBRE DE 2039\n\n\u2014A\u00f1o 2039 \u2014dije\u2014. La Era de Huesos XVIII.\n\nUn a\u00f1o antes de mi nacimiento.\n\n\u2014Hubo una rebeli\u00f3n el d\u00eda de Novembertide. \u2014David segu\u00eda iluminando el altar con la linterna\u2014. Un grupo de refas se alz\u00f3 contra los Sargas. La mayor\u00eda de los humanos los apoyaban. Intentaron matar a Nashira y evacuar a los humanos a Londres.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 refas?\n\n\u2014Nadie lo sabe.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 pas\u00f3?\n\n\u2014Un humano los traicion\u00f3. XVIII-39-7. Una d\u00e9bil filtraci\u00f3n en la base, y todo el montaje se vino abajo. Nashira tortur\u00f3 a los refas implicados. Los marc\u00f3. A los humanos los mataron los emim. A todos. Corre el rumor de que solo hubo dos supervivientes, aparte de Duckett: el traidor y la ni\u00f1a.\n\n\u2014\u00bfLa ni\u00f1a?\n\n\u2014Duckett me lo cont\u00f3 todo. \u00c9l se libr\u00f3 porque era demasiado cobarde para rebelarse. Les suplic\u00f3 de rodillas que le permitieran vivir. Me cont\u00f3 que aquel a\u00f1o hab\u00edan tra\u00eddo aqu\u00ed a una ni\u00f1a de unos cuatro o cinco a\u00f1os. XVIII-39-0.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPara qu\u00e9 traer\u00edan a una ni\u00f1a tan peque\u00f1a?\u2014. Se me hizo un nudo en el est\u00f3mago\u2014. Los ni\u00f1os no pueden combatir a los zumbadores.\n\n\u2014Ni idea. Duckett cree que quer\u00edan ver si sobrevivir\u00eda.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo iba a sobrevivir? Un cr\u00edo de cuatro a\u00f1os no durar\u00eda ni dos d\u00edas en semejante pocilga.\n\n\u2014Exacto.\n\nSe me empezaron a revolver las tripas.\n\n\u2014Muri\u00f3, \u00bfno?\n\n\u2014Duckett jura que no encontraron su cad\u00e1ver. \u00c9l se encarg\u00f3 de recoger los cad\u00e1veres \u2014dijo David\u2014. Formaba parte del trato a cambio de su supervivencia. Dice que nunca encontr\u00f3 a la ni\u00f1a, pero esto lo contradice.\n\nAlumbr\u00f3 una de las ofrendas: un osito de peluche sucio, con ojos de bot\u00f3n. Llevaba una nota colgada del cuello. La acerqu\u00e9 a la linterna de David.\n\nXVIII-39-0\n\nNinguna vida se vive en vano\n\nSe produjo un silencio, y al cabo de un momento lo interrumpi\u00f3 un repique lejano. Volv\u00ed a dejar el oso entre las flores.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n hizo todo esto? \u2014Me dol\u00eda la garganta al hablar\u2014. \u00bfQui\u00e9n puso este altar aqu\u00ed?\n\n\u2014Los bufones. Y los marcados. Los misteriosos refas que se sublevaron contra Nashira.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTodav\u00eda viven?\n\n\u2014Nadie lo sabe. Pero yo me juego algo a que no. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 los dejar\u00eda Nashira libres en la ciudad, sabiendo que la hab\u00edan traicionado?\n\nMe temblaban los dedos. Los ocult\u00e9 bajo las mangas de mi blus\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Ya he visto suficiente \u2014dije.\n\nDavid me acompa\u00f1\u00f3 a Magdalen. Todav\u00eda faltaban unas horas para el amanecer, pero no quer\u00eda ver a nadie m\u00e1s. Esa noche no.\n\nCuando apareci\u00f3 la torre de la residencia, me volv\u00ed hacia David.\n\n\u2014No s\u00e9 por qu\u00e9 has hablado conmigo \u2014dije\u2014, pero gracias.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Por ense\u00f1arme el altar.\n\n\u2014De nada \u2014dijo con gesto sombr\u00edo\u2014. Te concedo una pregunta m\u00e1s. Con la condici\u00f3n de que pueda contestarla en menos de un minuto.\n\nReflexion\u00e9. Todav\u00eda ten\u00eda muchas preguntas por hacer, pero hab\u00eda una que llevaba incordi\u00e1ndome desde hac\u00eda d\u00edas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 las llaman \u00abEras de Huesos\u00bb?\n\nDavid sonri\u00f3.\n\n\u2014\u00abEra\u00bb es un sin\u00f3nimo de \u00absiega\u00bb. Cada \u00abEra de Huesos\u00bb es una campa\u00f1a de diez a\u00f1os durante los cuales los refa\u00edtas, tal como pactaron con Scion, \u00abrecolectan\u00bb humanos. Para ellos solo somos eso: huesos. Cad\u00e1veres. Y por eso a los casacas rojas nos llaman \u00abarrancahuesos\u00bb: porque ayudamos a traerlos a la colonia.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 helada. Hab\u00eda una parte de m\u00ed que se hab\u00eda planteado quedarse all\u00ed. Ahora solo quer\u00eda marcharme.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo sabes todo eso? \u2014pregunt\u00e9\u2014. Dudo mucho que te lo hayan contado los refas.\n\n\u2014Lo siento, no m\u00e1s preguntas. He hablado demasiado.\n\n\u2014Podr\u00edas estar mintiendo.\n\n\u2014No miento.\n\n\u2014Podr\u00eda delatarte a los refas. \u2014Me mantuve firme\u2014. Podr\u00eda contarles todo lo que sabes.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, pero entonces tendr\u00edas que contarles tambi\u00e9n todo lo que t\u00fa sabes. \u2014Me sonri\u00f3, y comprend\u00ed que hab\u00eda perdido\u2014. Puedes quedar en deuda conmigo por la informaci\u00f3n que te he dado, o bien puedes saldar tu deuda ahora mismo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo?\n\nA modo de respuesta me acarici\u00f3 la cara. Con la otra mano me asi\u00f3 por la cintura. Me puse en tensi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014No, eso no \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 no? \u2014Empez\u00f3 a acariciarme la cintura; su cara estaba cada vez m\u00e1s cerca de la m\u00eda\u2014. \u00bfTe tomas la pastilla?\n\n\u2014\u00bfAs\u00ed es como quieres que te pague? \u2014Lo apart\u00e9 de un empuj\u00f3n\u2014. Vete al infierno, casaca roja.\n\nDavid me miraba fijamente.\n\n\u2014Hazme un favor \u2014dijo\u2014. Busca esto en Merton. A ver si descubres algo. Eres m\u00e1s lista de lo que yo cre\u00eda. \u2014Me puso un sobre en la mano\u2014. Que tengas dulces sue\u00f1os, 40.\n\nSe alej\u00f3 y yo me qued\u00e9 all\u00ed un momento, r\u00edgida y fr\u00eda; entonces me apoy\u00e9 en la pared. No deber\u00eda haber ido con \u00e9l all\u00ed. Sab\u00eda que no era recomendable caminar con desconocidos por calles oscuras. \u00bfD\u00f3nde estaba mi intuici\u00f3n?\n\nHab\u00eda descubierto demasiadas cosas en una sola noche. Liss nunca hab\u00eda mencionado que los refas hab\u00edan participado en el levantamiento de la Era de Huesos XVIII. Quiz\u00e1 no lo supiera.\n\n\u00abLos marcados.\u00bb Deb\u00eda buscarlos, buscar a los que nos hab\u00edan ayudado. O quiz\u00e1 debiera agachar la cabeza y vivir mi nueva vida; eso era lo m\u00e1s sensato, lo m\u00e1s f\u00e1cil.\n\nA\u00f1oraba a Nick. A\u00f1oraba a Jax. A\u00f1oraba mi antigua vida. S\u00ed, antes era una delincuente, pero viv\u00eda rodeada de amigos. Hab\u00eda decidido vivir con ellos. Mi estatus de dama de un mimetocapo me hab\u00eda protegido de gente como David. Nadie se hab\u00eda atrevido a tocarme nunca en mi propio territorio.\n\nPero aquel no era mi territorio. All\u00ed no ten\u00eda poder. Por primera vez quer\u00eda volver a la protecci\u00f3n que ofrec\u00edan los muros de piedra de Magdalen. Ansiaba la protecci\u00f3n que me garantizaba la presencia del Custodio, aunque la odiara. Me met\u00ed el sobre en el bolsillo y me dirig\u00ed hacia la puerta.\n\nCuando llegu\u00e9 a la Torre del Fundador, esperaba encontrar una habitaci\u00f3n vac\u00eda. Pero lo que encontr\u00e9 fue sangre. Sangre de refa.\n\nLa habitaci\u00f3n estaba patas arriba. Hab\u00eda cristales rotos, instrumentos rotos, una cortina desenganchada de la barra y manchas relucientes de color amarillo verdoso en las losas del suelo y en la alfombra. Entr\u00e9 pisando los cristales. La vela del escritorio estaba apagada, igual que las l\u00e1mparas de parafina. Hac\u00eda un fr\u00edo tremendo. Sent\u00eda el \u00e9ter por todas partes. Me puse en guardia, preparada para lanzarle mi esp\u00edritu a un posible agresor.\n\nLas cortinas de la cama estaban echadas. Detr\u00e1s hab\u00eda otro onirosaje. \u00abRefa\u00bb, pens\u00e9.\n\nFui hacia la cama. Me par\u00e9 a escasa distancia de las cortinas y trat\u00e9 de pensar racionalmente en lo que estaba a punto de hacer. Sab\u00eda que all\u00ed detr\u00e1s estaba el Custodio, pero no sab\u00eda en qu\u00e9 estado. Quiz\u00e1 estuviera herido, o dormido, o muerto. No estaba convencida de querer saberlo.\n\nIntent\u00e9 serenarme. Flexion\u00e9 los dedos antes de asir con ellos la gruesa tela. Apart\u00e9 la cortina.\n\nEstaba desplomado en la cama, quieto como un cad\u00e1ver. Me sub\u00ed a la cama y lo zarande\u00e9.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCustodio?\n\nNada.\n\nMe sent\u00e9 en la cama. El Custodio hab\u00eda hecho hincapi\u00e9 en que no deb\u00eda tocarlo, ni ayudarlo si suced\u00eda algo as\u00ed; pero esta vez los da\u00f1os parec\u00edan mucho m\u00e1s graves. Ten\u00eda la camisa empapada. Intent\u00e9 darle la vuelta, pero pesaba como un muerto. Estaba comprobando si respiraba cuando estir\u00f3 una mano y me agarr\u00f3 la mu\u00f1eca.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa \u2014dijo con voz \u00e1spera\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9 haces aqu\u00ed?\n\n\u2014Estaba...\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n te ha visto entrar?\n\nMe qued\u00e9 inm\u00f3vil.\n\n\u2014La portera de noche.\n\n\u2014\u00bfAlguien m\u00e1s?\n\n\u2014No.\n\nEl Custodio se incorpor\u00f3 apoy\u00e1ndose en un codo. Se llev\u00f3 una mano al hombro. Todav\u00eda llevaba puestos los guantes.\n\n\u2014Ya que est\u00e1s aqu\u00ed \u2014dijo\u2014, qu\u00e9date para verme morir. Seguro que te gustar\u00e1.\n\nTemblaba de pies a cabeza. Intent\u00e9 pensar en algo malvado que decirle, pero me sali\u00f3 algo muy diferente:\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 te ha pasado?\n\nNo me contest\u00f3. Estir\u00e9 un brazo y fui a tocarle la cabeza. Me apret\u00f3 m\u00e1s la mu\u00f1eca.\n\n\u2014Tienes que dejar que las heridas respiren \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014Ya lo s\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Pues hazlo.\n\n\u2014No me digas lo que tengo que hacer. Quiz\u00e1 me est\u00e9 muriendo, pero no estoy sometido a tus \u00f3rdenes. Eres t\u00fa la que est\u00e1 sometida a las m\u00edas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCu\u00e1les son tus \u00f3rdenes?\n\n\u2014Que me dejes morir en paz.\n\nPero a la orden le faltaba fuerza. Le quit\u00e9 la mano del hombro. Ten\u00eda una mordedura.\n\n\u00abZumbador.\u00bb\n\nLe ardieron los ojos, como si alguna sustancia qu\u00edmica vol\u00e1til hubiera reaccionado en su interior. Por un instante cre\u00ed que iba a matarme. Mi esp\u00edritu presion\u00f3 contra los umbrales de mi mente, ansioso por atacar.\n\nEntonces sus dedos me aflojaron la mu\u00f1eca. Escudri\u00f1\u00e9 su rostro.\n\n\u2014Tr\u00e1eme agua \u2014dijo con un hilo de voz\u2014. Y... sal. Busca en la vitrina.\n\nNo ten\u00eda m\u00e1s remedio que obedecer. Abr\u00ed la vitrina; el Custodio me sigui\u00f3 con la mirada. Cog\u00ed un salero de madera, un cuenco dorado y una jarra de agua, junto con unos pa\u00f1os de hilo. El Custodio se desabroch\u00f3 los lazos de la parte superior de la camisa. Ten\u00eda el pecho empapado de sudor.\n\n\u2014En el caj\u00f3n hay unos guantes \u2014dijo apuntando con la barbilla al escritorio\u2014. P\u00f3ntelos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Haz lo que te digo.\n\nApret\u00e9 las mand\u00edbulas, pero obedec\u00ed.\n\nEn el caj\u00f3n, junto a los guantes, estaba su daga de mango negro, enfundada y limpia. Al verla me detuve un instante; le di la espalda al Custodio y cog\u00ed los guantes. Ni siquiera dejar\u00eda mis huellas dactilares. Con el pulgar, saqu\u00e9 la daga de la funda.\n\n\u2014Yo en tu lugar no lo intentar\u00eda.\n\nMe par\u00e9 en seco.\n\n\u2014El acero no mata a los refa\u00edtas \u2014dijo con voz d\u00e9bil\u2014. Si me clavaras esa daga en el coraz\u00f3n, no dejar\u00eda de latir.\n\nEl silencio se espes\u00f3.\n\n\u2014No te creo \u2014dije\u2014. Podr\u00eda vaciarte las entra\u00f1as. Est\u00e1s demasiado d\u00e9bil para huir.\n\n\u2014Si quieres correr el riesgo, adelante. Pero hazte esta pregunta: \u00bfpor qu\u00e9 dejamos que los casacas rojas lleven armas? Si vuestras armas pudieran matarnos, \u00bfpor qu\u00e9 \u00edbamos a ser tan idiotas como para armar a nuestros prisioneros? \u2014Sus ojos se clavaban en mi espalda\u2014. Muchos lo han intentado. Y ya no est\u00e1n aqu\u00ed.\n\nUn fr\u00edo cosquilleo me recorri\u00f3 el brazo. Dej\u00e9 la daga en el caj\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014No veo por qu\u00e9 deber\u00eda ayudarte \u2014dije\u2014. La \u00faltima vez ni siquiera me lo agradeciste.\n\n\u2014Olvidar\u00e9 que ibas a matarme.\n\nEl reloj de p\u00e9ndulo segu\u00eda el ritmo de mi pulso. Mir\u00e9 por fin hacia atr\u00e1s. El Custodio me miraba; la luz de sus ojos se estaba extinguiendo. Cruc\u00e9 despacio la habitaci\u00f3n y dej\u00e9 las cosas en la mesilla de noche.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n te ha hecho eso? \u2014pregunt\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Ya lo sabes. \u2014Apoy\u00f3 la espalda en el cabecero; ten\u00eda las mand\u00edbulas r\u00edgidas\u2014. Has estado investigando.\n\n\u2014Un emite.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\nSu confirmaci\u00f3n me hel\u00f3 la sangre. En silencio, mezcl\u00e9 la sal y el agua en el cuenco. El Custodio me observaba. Moj\u00e9 y retorc\u00ed un pa\u00f1o y me inclin\u00e9 sobre su hombro derecho. La visi\u00f3n de la herida y el olor que desprend\u00eda me echaron atr\u00e1s.\n\n\u2014Esto est\u00e1 gangrenado \u2014dije.\n\nLa herida supuraba y ten\u00eda un color gris\u00e1ceo. Alrededor, la piel estaba ardiendo. Calcul\u00e9 que la temperatura del Custodio deb\u00eda de ser alrededor del doble de la de los humanos; notaba su calor a trav\u00e9s de los guantes. Alrededor de la mordedura, los tejidos empezaban a pudrirse. Lo que necesitaba era un antipir\u00e9tico. No ten\u00eda quinina, que era lo que sol\u00eda utilizar Nick para bajarnos la fiebre. Era f\u00e1cil conseguirla en los bares de ox\u00edgeno (la utilizaban para producir fluorescencias), pero dudaba mucho que la encontrara all\u00ed. Tendr\u00eda que apa\u00f1\u00e1rmelas con aquella soluci\u00f3n salina y un poco de suerte.\n\nEstruj\u00e9 el pa\u00f1o y moj\u00e9 la herida. Los m\u00fasculos del brazo del Custodio se endurecieron y se le marcaron los tendones de la mano.\n\n\u2014Lo siento \u2014dije, y enseguida me arrepent\u00ed, pues \u00e9l no se hab\u00eda disculpado cuando hab\u00eda visto que me marcaban, ni cuando hab\u00eda visto morir a Seb; \u00e9l no sent\u00eda nada.\n\n\u2014Habla \u2014me dijo.\n\nLo mir\u00e9.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Me duele. Un poco de distracci\u00f3n me vendr\u00e1 bien.\n\n\u2014Como si te interesara lo que yo pueda contarte \u2014dije sin pensar.\n\n\u2014Me interesa \u2014replic\u00f3. Estaba muy sereno, teniendo en cuenta el estado en que se encontraba\u2014. Me gustar\u00eda saber algo m\u00e1s de la persona con la que comparto habitaciones. S\u00e9 que eres una asesina \u2014me puse en tensi\u00f3n\u2014, pero debes de ser algo m\u00e1s que eso. Si no es as\u00ed, me equivoqu\u00e9 al reclamarte.\n\n\u2014Yo no te ped\u00ed que me reclamaras.\n\n\u2014Pero lo hice.\n\nSegu\u00ed lavando la herida. No ve\u00eda por qu\u00e9 ten\u00eda que ser cuidadosa con \u00e9l, as\u00ed que apretaba un poco m\u00e1s de la cuenta.\n\n\u2014Nac\u00ed en Irlanda \u2014dije\u2014. En un pueblo llamado Clonmel. Mi madre era inglesa. Huy\u00f3 de Scion.\n\nAsinti\u00f3 d\u00e9bilmente con la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Viv\u00eda con mi padre y mis abuelos en el Golden Vale \u2014continu\u00e9\u2014, la regi\u00f3n lechera del sur. Era muy bonito. Nada que ver con las ciudadelas de Scion. \u2014Retorc\u00ed el pa\u00f1o y volv\u00ed a empaparlo\u2014. Pero entonces Abel Mayfield dio rienda suelta a su codicia. Quer\u00eda Dubl\u00edn. Estallaron las revueltas de Molly. La masacre de Mayfield.\n\n\u2014Mayfield \u2014dijo el Custodio mirando hacia la ventana\u2014. S\u00ed, me acuerdo de \u00e9l. Un personaje desagradable.\n\n\u2014\u00bfLo conoc\u00edas?\n\n\u2014He conocido a todos los gobernantes de Scion desde 1859.\n\n\u2014Pero si... Eso significa que tienes como m\u00ednimo doscientos a\u00f1os.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\nIntent\u00e9 no flaquear.\n\n\u2014Cre\u00edamos que est\u00e1bamos a salvo \u2014prosegu\u00ed\u2014, pero al final la violencia lleg\u00f3 al sur, y tuvimos que marcharnos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 le pas\u00f3 a tu madre? \u2014El Custodio me miraba a los ojos\u2014. \u00bfSe qued\u00f3 all\u00ed?\n\n\u2014Muri\u00f3. Desprendimiento de placenta. \u2014Me ech\u00e9 hacia atr\u00e1s\u2014. \u00bfD\u00f3nde hay otra mordedura?\n\nEl Custodio se abri\u00f3 la camisa. Ten\u00eda otra herida en el pecho. No habr\u00eda sabido decir si se la hab\u00edan hecho unos dientes, unas garras u otra cosa. Empec\u00e9 a aplicarle agua con el pa\u00f1o, y \u00e9l tens\u00f3 los m\u00fasculos.\n\n\u2014Sigue \u2014dijo.\n\nPor lo visto no me encontraba aburrida.\n\n\u2014Cuando yo ten\u00eda ocho a\u00f1os nos fuimos a Londres.\n\n\u2014\u00bfVoluntariamente?\n\n\u2014No. A mi padre lo reclut\u00f3 la SciOECI ese a\u00f1o. \u2014Interpret\u00e9, por su silencio, que no conoc\u00eda esa abreviatura\u2014. \u00abScion: Organizaci\u00f3n Especial para la Ciencia y la Investigaci\u00f3n.\u00bb\n\n\u2014Conozco las siglas. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 lo reclutaron?\n\n\u2014Era pat\u00f3logo forense. Trabajaba mucho para la polic\u00eda irlandesa. Scion le pidi\u00f3 que buscara una explicaci\u00f3n cient\u00edfica de por qu\u00e9 la gente se volv\u00eda clarividente, y de por qu\u00e9 los esp\u00edritus persisten despu\u00e9s de la muerte. \u2014Me di cuenta de que hablaba con tono cortante\u2014. Mi padre cree que la clarividencia es una enfermedad. Cree que tiene cura.\n\n\u2014Entonces es que no percibe tu clarividencia.\n\n\u2014Es amaur\u00f3tico. \u00bfC\u00f3mo iba a percibirla?\n\nTras una pausa, el Custodio me pregunt\u00f3:\n\n\u2014\u00bfTienes ese don desde tu nacimiento?\n\n\u2014No del todo. Desde muy peque\u00f1a percib\u00eda auras y esp\u00edritus. Y un d\u00eda me atac\u00f3 una duende. \u2014Me ech\u00e9 hacia atr\u00e1s para secarme el sudor de la frente\u2014. \u00bfCu\u00e1nto tiempo te queda?\n\n\u2014No estoy seguro. La sal retrasa lo inevitable, pero no mucho tiempo \u2014dijo con indiferencia\u2014. \u00bfCu\u00e1ndo desarrollaste la capacidad de desplazar tu esp\u00edritu?\n\nHablar me estaba tranquilizando. Decid\u00ed ser sincera, aunque solo fuera porque seguramente \u00e9l ya lo sab\u00eda todo de m\u00ed. Nashira sab\u00eda que yo era irlandesa; deb\u00edan de tener todo tipo de expedientes. Quiz\u00e1 el Custodio me estuviera poniendo a prueba, comprobando si le ment\u00eda o no.\n\n\u2014Despu\u00e9s de que me atacara la duende, empec\u00e9 a tener un sue\u00f1o recurrente. O eso cre\u00eda yo: que era un sue\u00f1o. \u2014Vert\u00ed un poco m\u00e1s de agua sobre la herida\u2014. So\u00f1aba con un prado de flores. Cuanto m\u00e1s me adentraba en el prado, m\u00e1s oscuro se volv\u00eda. Cada noche iba un poco m\u00e1s lejos, hasta que un d\u00eda llegu\u00e9 al borde y salt\u00e9. Me precipit\u00e9 por el \u00e9ter, fuera de mi cuerpo. Me despert\u00e9 en una ambulancia. Mi padre me dijo que me hab\u00eda levantado son\u00e1mbula, hab\u00eda ido al sal\u00f3n y hab\u00eda dejado de respirar. Dijeron que deb\u00eda de haber entrado en coma.\n\n\u2014Pero sobreviviste.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Y no sufr\u00ed da\u00f1os cerebrales. La hipoxia cerebral es uno de los peligros de mi... afecci\u00f3n \u2014a\u00f1ad\u00ed. No me gustaba hablarle de m\u00ed, pero supon\u00eda que era mejor que lo supiera. Si me obligaba a entrar en el \u00e9ter y a quedarme all\u00ed demasiado tiempo sin soporte vital, mi cerebro pod\u00eda sufrir lesiones irreversibles\u2014. Tuve suerte.\n\nEl Custodio observaba mientras yo segu\u00eda lav\u00e1ndole la herida.\n\n\u2014Eso me har\u00eda pensar que, por precauci\u00f3n, no entras en el \u00e9ter muy a menudo \u2014especul\u00f3\u2014; sin embargo, pareces familiarizada con \u00e9l.\n\n\u2014Instinto. \u2014Desvi\u00e9 la mirada\u2014. Si no tomas alg\u00fan medicamento, no te bajar\u00e1 la fiebre.\n\nNo era del todo falso. Mi don era instintivo, pero lo que no pensaba contarle era que me hab\u00eda educado y entrenado un mimetocapo que me manten\u00eda conectada a un equipo de soporte vital.\n\n\u2014Esa duende \u00bfte dej\u00f3 alguna cicatriz?\n\nMe quit\u00e9 un guante y le mostr\u00e9 la mano izquierda. Dej\u00e9 que me examinara las marcas. No era frecuente que un vidente en ciernes se expusiera de forma tan violenta al \u00e9ter.\n\n\u2014Supongo que ya hab\u00eda una brecha en m\u00ed, algo que dej\u00f3 entrar el \u00e9ter \u2014dije\u2014. La duende se limit\u00f3 a... desollarme.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEs as\u00ed como lo ves? \u00bfUna invasi\u00f3n del \u00e9ter?\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo quieres que lo vea?\n\n\u2014No har\u00e9 comentarios sobre mi propia opini\u00f3n. Pero muchos clarividentes explican que invaden el \u00e9ter, y no al rev\u00e9s. Lo ven como si molestaran a los muertos. \u2014No esper\u00f3 a que yo replicara\u2014. He visto eso otras veces. Los ni\u00f1os son vulnerables a los cambios repentinos de su clarividencia. Si se exponen al \u00e9ter antes de que su aura se haya desarrollado del todo, esta puede volverse inestable.\n\nRetir\u00e9 la mano.\n\n\u2014Yo no soy inestable.\n\n\u2014Pero tu don s\u00ed lo es.\n\nNo pod\u00eda discutir. Ya hab\u00eda matado con mi esp\u00edritu; eso era una prueba indudable de inestabilidad.\n\n\u2014Lo que tengo en las heridas es un tipo de necrosis \u2014dijo el Custodio\u2014, pero solo afecta a los refa\u00edtas. El cuerpo humano tiene medios propios para combatirla. \u2014Hizo una pausa; esper\u00e9\u2014. La necrosis de los refa\u00edtas se puede curar con sangre humana. Si el torrente sangu\u00edneo no est\u00e1 afectado, los humanos pueden sobrevivir a una mordedura. \u2014Me se\u00f1al\u00f3 la mu\u00f1eca\u2014. Medio litro de tu sangre me salvar\u00eda la vida.\n\nSe me hizo un nudo en la garganta.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPretendes beberte mi sangre?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 eres? \u00bfUn vampiro?\n\n\u2014Cre\u00eda que los habitantes de Scion no le\u00edan sobre vampiros.\n\nMe puse en tensi\u00f3n. Menudo fallo. Solo un capo del sindicato pod\u00eda tener acceso a literatura relacionada con los vampiros o con cualquier otro ser sobrenatural. En mi caso era una obra espantosa, _Los vampiros de Vauxhall_ , escrita por un m\u00e9dium an\u00f3nimo de Grub Street. Para compensar la escasez de obras literarias de Scion, se inventaba toda clase de historias a partir de leyendas folcl\u00f3ricas del otro mundo. Sus cuentos ten\u00edan t\u00edtulos como _T\u00e9 con el tase\u00f3grafo_ y _El fiasco de las hadas_. El mismo autor hab\u00eda escrito unos cuantos libros potables sobre videntes, como _Los misterios de la isla de Jacob_. Me arrepent\u00ed de no haberlos le\u00eddo.\n\nEl Custodio debi\u00f3 de interpretar mi silencio como un s\u00edntoma de inquietud.\n\n\u2014No, no soy vampiro, ni ning\u00fan otro ser sobre los que puedas haber le\u00eddo \u2014dijo\u2014. No me alimento de carne ni de sangre. No me produce ninguna satisfacci\u00f3n pedirte este favor. Pero me estoy muriendo, y resulta que tu sangre (en esta ocasi\u00f3n, dado el car\u00e1cter de mis heridas) puede curarme.\n\n\u2014No parece que te est\u00e9s muriendo.\n\n\u2014Cr\u00e9eme, es la verdad.\n\nNo quer\u00eda saber c\u00f3mo hab\u00edan descubierto que la sangre humana pod\u00eda combatir aquella infecci\u00f3n. Ni siquiera sab\u00eda si era verdad.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 iba a confiar en ti? \u2014pregunt\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Porque te salv\u00e9 de la humillaci\u00f3n de tener que actuar en la troupe de imb\u00e9ciles del Capataz. Por poner solo un ejemplo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfY si necesito dos?\n\n\u2014Te deber\u00e9 un favor.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCualquier favor?\n\n\u2014Cualquier cosa menos tu libertad.\n\nMi libertad: las palabras que acababan de morir en mis labios. El Custodio se hab\u00eda anticipado a mi petici\u00f3n. Deb\u00ed saber que era pedir demasiado; sin embargo, quiz\u00e1 fuera \u00fatil que el Custodio me debiera un favor.\n\nCog\u00ed un trozo de cristal del suelo, un fragmento de vial, y me cort\u00e9 la mu\u00f1eca. Le ofrec\u00ed mi sangre; \u00e9l entrecerr\u00f3 los ojos.\n\n\u2014T\u00f3mala \u2014dije\u2014. Antes de que me lo piense mejor.\n\nEl Custodio me mir\u00f3 fijamente, interpretando la expresi\u00f3n de mi cara. Entonces me asi\u00f3 la mu\u00f1eca y se la acerc\u00f3 a la boca.\n\nSu lengua me roz\u00f3 la herida. Not\u00e9 una leve presi\u00f3n cuando sus labios se cerraron sobre ella, mientras me apretaba el brazo para hacer que saliera m\u00e1s sangre. Le lat\u00eda el cuello mientras beb\u00eda a un ritmo constante. No hubo arrebato ni frenes\u00ed. El Custodio enfocaba aquello como un procedimiento m\u00e9dico, cl\u00ednico y distante, ni m\u00e1s ni menos.\n\nCuando me solt\u00f3 la mu\u00f1eca, me ech\u00e9 hacia atr\u00e1s demasiado deprisa. El Custodio me ayud\u00f3 a recostarme sobre las almohadas.\n\n\u2014Despacio \u2014dijo.\n\nFue al cuarto de ba\u00f1o; hab\u00eda recuperado las fuerzas. Cuando volvi\u00f3, llevaba un vaso de agua fr\u00eda. Me puso un brazo detr\u00e1s de la espalda y me ayud\u00f3 a incorporarme. Beb\u00ed. El agua estaba endulzada.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEst\u00e1 Nashira al corriente de todo esto? \u2014pregunt\u00e9, y el rostro del Custodio se ensombreci\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Quiz\u00e1 te interrogue sobre mis ausencias. Y sobre mis heridas \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014As\u00ed que no sabe nada.\n\nNo me contest\u00f3. Me recost\u00f3 en los gruesos cojines de terciopelo, asegur\u00e1ndose de que ten\u00eda la cabeza bien apoyada. Se me estaban pasando las n\u00e1useas, pero todav\u00eda me sangraba la herida de la mu\u00f1eca. Al verlo, el Custodio cogi\u00f3 un rollo de gasa de la mesilla de noche. Mi gasa. Reconoc\u00ed la goma con que la hab\u00eda sujetado. Deb\u00eda de haberla sacado de mi mochila. Al verla en sus manos, me dio un escalofr\u00edo. Me acord\u00e9 del panfleto desaparecido. \u00bfLo tendr\u00eda \u00e9l? Me agarr\u00f3 la mu\u00f1eca. Sus manos, enormes, me vendaron la herida con cuidado. Supuse que era su forma de darme las gracias. Cuando la sangre dej\u00f3 de traspasar la gasa, me sujet\u00f3 el vendaje con un alfiler y me apoy\u00f3 el brazo sobre el pecho. Yo no dejaba de mirarlo.\n\n\u2014Creo que hemos quedado en tablas \u2014dijo\u2014. Tienes una habilidad especial para sorprenderme en situaciones delicadas. Lo l\u00f3gico ser\u00eda que te complacieras con mis momentos de debilidad, y sin embargo me ofreces tu sangre. Me limpias las heridas. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 lo haces?\n\n\u2014Quiz\u00e1 necesite un favor. Y no me gusta ver morir a otros. No soy como t\u00fa.\n\n\u2014Juzgas con excesiva ligereza.\n\n\u2014Viste que ella lo mataba. \u2014Deber\u00eda haber temido pronunciar esas palabras, pero ya no me importaba\u2014. Te quedaste mirando. Deb\u00edas de saber lo que ella iba a hacer.\n\nEl Custodio permaneci\u00f3 impasible. Desvi\u00e9 la mirada.\n\n\u2014A lo mejor soy un sepulcro blanqueado \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfUn qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Un hip\u00f3crita. Me gusta esa expresi\u00f3n. Ya s\u00e9 que me detestas, pero cumplo mi palabra. \u00bfY t\u00fa? \u00bfCumples la tuya?\n\n\u2014\u00bfAd\u00f3nde quieres llegar?\n\n\u2014Lo que ha sucedido esta noche no debe salir de esta habitaci\u00f3n. Quiero saber si guardar\u00e1s el secreto.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 iba a hacerlo?\n\n\u2014Porque revelarlo no te ayudar\u00e1.\n\n\u2014Podr\u00eda liberarme de ti.\n\nMe pareci\u00f3 que mudaba la expresi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, te liberar\u00eda de m\u00ed \u2014dijo\u2014, pero tu vida no mejorar\u00eda. Tal vez te echaran a la calle; o, si no, tal vez te asignaran otro guardi\u00e1n, y no todos son tan liberales como yo. Lo que correspond\u00eda era que te matara a palos por algunas de las cosas que me has dicho estos \u00faltimos d\u00edas. Pero yo s\u00e9 lo que vales. No como otros.\n\nFui a replicar, pero no llegu\u00e9 a hacerlo. Era verdad: no quer\u00eda tener otro guardi\u00e1n, sobre todo si todos eran como Thuban.\n\n\u2014As\u00ed que quieres que guarde tu secreto. \u2014Me frot\u00e9 la mu\u00f1eca\u2014. Y \u00bfqu\u00e9 me ofreces a cambio?\n\n\u2014Intentar\u00e9 protegerte. Aqu\u00ed podr\u00edas morir por infinitas causas, y t\u00fa no pones mucho de tu parte para evitarlas.\n\n\u2014Tarde o temprano tendr\u00e9 que morir. Ya s\u00e9 qu\u00e9 quiere Nashira de m\u00ed. No puedes protegerme.\n\n\u2014Cierto, tal vez no pueda protegerte eternamente. Pero supongo que querr\u00e1s sobrevivir a los ex\u00e1menes.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPara qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Puedes demostrarle lo fuerte que eres. T\u00fa no eres una casaca amarilla. Puedes aprender a luchar.\n\n\u2014No quiero luchar.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed quieres. Eres luchadora por naturaleza.\n\nEl reloj del rinc\u00f3n dio la hora.\n\nNo me parec\u00eda correcto tener a un refa como aliado. Por otra parte, eso aumentar\u00eda significativamente mis posibilidades de seguir con vida. El Custodio pod\u00eda ayudarme a conseguir provisiones, a sobrevivir el tiempo suficiente para huir de all\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Muy bien \u2014dije\u2014. No se lo contar\u00e9 a nadie. Pero me debes un favor. \u2014Levant\u00e9 la mu\u00f1eca\u2014. Por la sangre.\n\nAcababa de pronunciar esas palabras cuando la puerta se abri\u00f3 de golpe. Una refa irrumpi\u00f3 en la habitaci\u00f3n: Pleione Sualocin. Primero mir\u00f3 c\u00f3mo estaba la habitaci\u00f3n; luego me mir\u00f3 a m\u00ed y, por \u00faltimo, al Custodio. Sin decir palabra, le lanz\u00f3 un tubo de cristal. El Custodio lo atrap\u00f3 con una mano. Lo mir\u00e9.\n\nSangre. Sangre humana. Llevaba una peque\u00f1a etiqueta gris triangular. Y un n\u00famero: AXIV. Amaur\u00f3tico 14.\n\n\u00abSeb.\u00bb\n\nMir\u00e9 al Custodio; \u00e9l baj\u00f3 la cabeza, como si acab\u00e1ramos de compartir un peque\u00f1o secreto. Me invadi\u00f3 una repugnancia visceral. Me levant\u00e9, d\u00e9bil todav\u00eda por la p\u00e9rdida de sangre, y sub\u00ed atropelladamente la escalera que llevaba a mi celda.\n\nLa primera vez que vi a Nick Nyg\u00e5rd ten\u00eda nueve a\u00f1os. La segunda, ten\u00eda diecis\u00e9is.\n\nEst\u00e1bamos en el trimestre de verano de 2056, y las alumnas de und\u00e9cimo curso de mi colegio del III-5 hab\u00edamos iniciado el per\u00edodo m\u00e1s importante de nuestras vidas. Pod\u00edamos seguir estudiando dos a\u00f1os m\u00e1s y hacer los dos cursos de preparaci\u00f3n para la universidad, o marcharnos y buscar trabajo. En un intento de convertir a las indecisas, la directora hab\u00eda organizado una serie de conferencias de personajes inspiradores: agentes de la DVD, anecdotistas de los medios de comunicaci\u00f3n e, incluso, un pol\u00edtico del Arconte, el ministro de Migraci\u00f3n. Aquel d\u00eda iban a hablarnos de las ciencias m\u00e9dicas. Doscientas alumnas nos api\u00f1\u00e1bamos en la sala de conferencias, con nuestro uniforme negro, nuestros lazos rojos y nuestras blusas blancas. La se\u00f1orita Briskin, la profesora de qu\u00edmica, subi\u00f3 a la tarima.\n\n\u2014Buenos d\u00edas, ni\u00f1as. Me alegro de veros tan contentas y motivadas. Muchas de vosotras hab\u00e9is expresado vuestro inter\u00e9s por la investigaci\u00f3n cient\u00edfica como carrera \u2014no era mi caso\u2014, as\u00ed que esta podr\u00eda ser una de las conferencias m\u00e1s inspiradoras. \u2014Hubo algunos aplausos\u2014. Nuestro orador de hoy ya tiene una carrera sumamente emocionante. \u2014Yo no estaba tan convencida\u2014. Lo transfirieron de la Universidad de Scion Estocolmo en 2046, termin\u00f3 sus estudios en Londres, y trabaja para la SciOECI, el mayor complejo de investigaci\u00f3n de la cohorte central. Es un gran honor para nosotras contar con su presencia. \u2014En las primeras filas se apreci\u00f3 cierto revuelo\u2014. Por favor, recibamos con un fuerte aplauso a nuestro orador, el doctor Nicklas Nyg\u00e5rd.\n\nLevant\u00e9 la cabeza de golpe. Era \u00e9l. Nick.\n\nNo hab\u00eda cambiado nada. Era tal como yo lo recordaba: alto, de facciones suaves, guapo. Todav\u00eda joven, aunque en sus ojos se adivinaba la carga de una vida adulta. Vest\u00eda traje negro y corbata roja, como todos los funcionarios de Scion. Llevaba el cabello peinado hacia atr\u00e1s con gomina, un estilo de moda en Estocolmo. Sonri\u00f3, y las monitoras se enderezaron en sus asientos.\n\n\u2014Buenos d\u00edas, se\u00f1oritas.\n\n\u2014Buenos d\u00edas, doctor Nyg\u00e5rd.\n\n\u2014En primer lugar, gracias por invitarme. \u2014Baraj\u00f3 sus hojas con las mismas manos que me hab\u00edan suturado el brazo herido cuando yo ten\u00eda nueve a\u00f1os. Me mir\u00f3 fijamente y sonri\u00f3. Se me aceler\u00f3 el coraz\u00f3n\u2014. Espero que esta charla resulte instructiva, pero no me ofender\u00e9 si os qued\u00e1is dormidas.\n\nRisas. Los funcionarios no sol\u00edan ser tan chistosos. Yo no pod\u00eda quitarle los ojos de encima. Siete a\u00f1os pregunt\u00e1ndome d\u00f3nde podr\u00eda estar, y de pronto \u00e9l ven\u00eda a mi colegio. Una imagen extra\u00edda de mi memoria. Nos habl\u00f3 de sus investigaciones sobre las causas de la antinaturalidad, de sus experiencias como estudiante en dos ciudadelas de Scion. Brome\u00f3 y anim\u00f3 al p\u00fablico a participar, haciendo preguntas y contestando las que le hac\u00edan las alumnas. Hasta hizo sonre\u00edr a la directora. Cuando son\u00f3 el timbre, sal\u00ed antes que nadie de la sala y me dirig\u00ed al pasillo.\n\nTen\u00eda que encontrarlo. Llevaba siete a\u00f1os intentando entender qu\u00e9 hab\u00eda pasado en el prado de amapolas. All\u00ed no hab\u00eda ning\u00fan perro. \u00c9l era el \u00fanico que pod\u00eda explicarme qu\u00e9 era lo que me hab\u00eda dejado aquellas cicatrices fr\u00edas en la mano. El \u00fanico que pod\u00eda darme respuestas.\n\nEnfil\u00e9 el pasillo abri\u00e9ndome paso entre un grupo de alumnas parlanchinas de octavo curso. All\u00ed estaba, ante la puerta de la sala de profesoras, estrech\u00e1ndole la mano a la directora. Al verme se le ilumin\u00f3 la mirada.\n\n\u2014Hola \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014Doctor Nyg\u00e5rd... \u2014Apenas pod\u00eda articular palabra\u2014. Su discurso ha sido... muy inspirador.\n\n\u2014Gracias. \u2014Volvi\u00f3 a sonre\u00edr, y me taladr\u00f3 con la mirada. Lo sab\u00eda. Se acordaba\u2014. \u00bfC\u00f3mo te llamas?\n\nS\u00ed, lo sab\u00eda. Not\u00e9 un cosquilleo en las palmas de las manos.\n\n\u2014Es Paige Mahoney \u2014se adelant\u00f3 la directora poniendo \u00e9nfasis en mi apellido. Mi apellido irland\u00e9s. Me mir\u00f3 de arriba abajo fij\u00e1ndose en mi lazo mal hecho y en mi blazer desabrochado\u2014. Ser\u00e1 mejor que te vayas a clase, Paige. La se\u00f1orita Anville est\u00e1 muy disgustada por tus ausencias.\n\nSe me encendieron las mejillas.\n\n\u2014Estoy seguro de que la se\u00f1orita Anville podr\u00e1 prescindir de Paige unos minutos \u2014dijo Nick, y compuso una sonrisa irresistible\u2014. Me encantar\u00eda charlar un poco con ella.\n\n\u2014Es usted muy amable, doctor Nyg\u00e5rd, pero \u00faltimamente Paige ha tenido que quedarse con frecuencia en la enfermer\u00eda. Va un poco retrasada y necesita asistir a todas sus clases. \u2014Se volvi\u00f3 hacia \u00e9l y, bajando la voz, a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014: Es irlandesa. Estos irlandeses tienen sus propias ideas respecto a la gesti\u00f3n del tiempo y el trabajo.\n\nDe pronto se me nubl\u00f3 la vista. Not\u00e9 una fuerte presi\u00f3n en el cr\u00e1neo, como si estuviera a punto de explotarme. A la directora le sali\u00f3 un hilillo de sangre de la nariz.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1 sangrando, se\u00f1orita \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo? \u2014Mir\u00f3 hacia abajo, y la sangre le manch\u00f3 la blusa\u2014. \u00a1Oh! \u00a1Qu\u00e9 desastre! \u2014Se tap\u00f3 la nariz\u2014. No te quedes ah\u00ed con la boca abierta, Paige. Ve a buscarme un pa\u00f1uelo.\n\nIba a estallarme la cabeza. Ante mis ojos se extendi\u00f3 una red gris que restring\u00eda mi visi\u00f3n. Nick me mir\u00f3 fijamente mientras le daba un paquete de pa\u00f1uelos de papel a la directora.\n\n\u2014Quiz\u00e1 deber\u00eda sentarse, directora. \u2014Le puso una mano en la espalda\u2014. Enseguida volver\u00e9 con usted.\n\nEn cuanto la directora se march\u00f3, Nick me mir\u00f3 y dijo:\n\n\u2014\u00bfHa pasado esto otras veces? \u00bfAlguien m\u00e1s ha sangrado por la nariz estando t\u00fa cerca?\n\nLo dijo en voz baja. Al cabo de un momento asent\u00ed con la cabeza.\n\n\u2014\u00bfAlguien se ha fijado?\n\n\u2014Nunca me han llamado antinatural. Todav\u00eda. \u2014Busqu\u00e9 su mirada\u2014. \u00bfSabes por qu\u00e9 pasa esto?\n\nGir\u00f3 la cabeza; luego dijo:\n\n\u2014Es posible.\n\n\u2014Expl\u00edcamelo. Por favor.\n\n\u2014\u00bfDoctor Nyg\u00e5rd? \u2014La se\u00f1orita Briskin asom\u00f3 la cabeza por la puerta de la sala de profesores\u2014. El consejo escolar quiere hablar con usted.\n\n\u2014Voy enseguida.\n\nLa se\u00f1orita Briskin se march\u00f3, y Nick me dijo al o\u00eddo:\n\n\u2014Volver\u00e9 dentro de unos d\u00edas. No te matricules en la universidad, Paige. Todav\u00eda no. Conf\u00eda en m\u00ed.\n\nMe dio un apret\u00f3n en la mano. Y de pronto desapareci\u00f3, tan aprisa como hab\u00eda venido. Me qued\u00e9 con mis libros apretados contra el pecho, donde el coraz\u00f3n me lat\u00eda desbocado; ten\u00eda las mejillas ardiendo y las manos sudadas. No hab\u00eda dejado de pensar en Nick ni un solo d\u00eda, y ahora \u00e9l hab\u00eda regresado. Me seren\u00e9 y fui a mi aula; todav\u00eda me costaba ver y pensar. Nick se acordaba de mi nombre. Sab\u00eda que yo era aquella ni\u00f1a peque\u00f1a a la que hab\u00eda salvado.\n\nDudaba mucho que volviera. Yo no pod\u00eda ser tan importante para \u00e9l, sobre todo ahora que \u00e9l hab\u00eda triunfado en el mundo. Pero dos d\u00edas m\u00e1s tarde lo encontr\u00e9 esper\u00e1ndome en la puerta del colegio. Esa ma\u00f1ana hab\u00eda pasado una cosa muy extra\u00f1a: hab\u00eda so\u00f1ado despierta con un coche plateado. La imagen me hab\u00eda asaltado cuando estaba en clase de franc\u00e9s, y me hab\u00eda producido n\u00e1useas. Ahora ese mismo coche estaba all\u00ed fuera, y Nick estaba sentado al volante. Llevaba gafas de sol. Fui como son\u00e1mbula hasta la portezuela del coche, alej\u00e1ndome de las otras ni\u00f1as. Nick asom\u00f3 la cabeza por la ventana.\n\n\u2014Hola, Paige.\n\n\u2014No cre\u00ed que volvieras \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014Por lo que le pas\u00f3 a la directora.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\n\u2014He venido precisamente por eso. \u2014Se baj\u00f3 un poco las gafas para que pudiera verle los ojos. Parec\u00eda cansado\u2014. Si quieres saber m\u00e1s, puedo explic\u00e1rtelo, pero no aqu\u00ed. \u00bfQuieres venir conmigo?\n\nGir\u00e9 un momento la cabeza. Las otras alumnas no nos estaban mirando.\n\n\u2014Vale \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014Gracias.\n\nNick me llev\u00f3 lejos del colegio. Mientras circul\u00e1bamos hacia la cohorte central, me miraba de vez en cuando. Yo guardaba silencio. Me mir\u00e9 en el espejo retrovisor y vi que estaba colorada. Me mor\u00eda de ganas de hablar con \u00e9l, pero era incapaz de articular una sola frase coherente. Al cabo de unos minutos Nick dijo:\n\n\u2014\u00bfLe contaste a tu padre lo que hab\u00eda pasado en el prado?\n\n\u2014No.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Porque t\u00fa me dijiste que no se lo contara a nadie.\n\n\u2014Muy bien. \u2014Apret\u00f3 m\u00e1s el volante\u2014. Voy a contarte un mont\u00f3n de cosas que no entender\u00e1s, Paige. Ya no eres la que eras antes de aquel d\u00eda, y debes saber por qu\u00e9.\n\nMantuve la mirada al frente. No hac\u00eda falta que Nick me lo dijera. Yo ya sab\u00eda que era diferente mucho antes del incidente del prado de las amapolas; desde muy peque\u00f1a ten\u00eda una sensibilidad especial. A veces notaba un ligero temblor cuando alguien pasaba a mi lado, como si mis dedos hubieran rozado un cable con corriente. Pero a partir de aquel d\u00eda las cosas hab\u00edan cambiado. Ahora no solo sent\u00eda a la gente, sino que pod\u00eda hacerle da\u00f1o. Pod\u00eda hacer que sangrara, que le doliera la cabeza y que se le empa\u00f1aran los ojos. A veces me quedaba dormida en clase, y al cabo de un rato despertaba empapada de un sudor fr\u00edo. La enfermera del colegio me conoc\u00eda mejor que a ninguna otra alumna.\n\nAlgo estaba emergiendo de mi interior, empujando para salir al mundo. Al final, el mundo lo ver\u00eda.\n\n\u2014Yo puedo ayudarte a controlarlo \u2014dijo\u2014. Puedo protegerte.\n\nYa me hab\u00eda protegido una vez.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTodav\u00eda puedo confiar en ti?\n\nEscudri\u00f1\u00e9 su cara, esa cara que no hab\u00eda olvidado. Nick me mir\u00f3 fijamente.\n\n\u2014Siempre \u2014respondi\u00f3.\n\nFuimos a un bar de trabajadores de Silk Street y pedimos caf\u00e9. Era la primera vez que lo probaba y, aunque no dije nada, me pareci\u00f3 que sab\u00eda a barro. Hablamos un rato de mi vida. Le habl\u00e9 del colegio, del trabajo de mi padre; pero no era eso por lo que est\u00e1bamos all\u00ed, y ambos lo sab\u00edamos.\n\n\u2014Paige, habr\u00e1s o\u00eddo hablar de la antinaturalidad \u2014dijo\u2014. No quiero asustarte, pero muestras signos de ella.\n\nSe me hizo un nudo en la garganta. Nick no trabajaba para Scion.\n\n\u2014No te preocupes. \u2014Puso una mano sobre la m\u00eda, y me sent\u00ed reconfortada\u2014. No voy a delatarte. Voy a ayudarte.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo?\n\n\u2014Me gustar\u00eda que vinieras a hablar con un amigo m\u00edo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n es?\n\n\u2014Una persona en la que conf\u00edo. Una persona que est\u00e1 interesada en ti.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEs...?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Yo tambi\u00e9n lo soy. \u2014Me apret\u00f3 la mano\u2014. Antes has tenido una enso\u00f1aci\u00f3n. Has visto mi coche. \u2014Me qued\u00e9 mir\u00e1ndolo, perpleja\u2014. Ese es mi don, Paige. Puedo enviar im\u00e1genes. Puedo hacer que los dem\u00e1s vean cosas.\n\n\u2014Ir\u00e9... \u2014Ten\u00eda la boca seca\u2014. Ir\u00e9 a hablar con \u00e9l.\n\nLe dej\u00e9 recado a la secretaria de mi padre de que volver\u00eda tarde a casa. Nick me llev\u00f3 en su coche a un peque\u00f1o restaurante franc\u00e9s de Vauxhall. All\u00ed nos esperaba un hombre alto y delgado de cerca de cuarenta a\u00f1os. Su mirada, chispeante, revelaba inteligencia y una especie de agitaci\u00f3n nerviosa. Ten\u00eda la tez blanca como la cera y una densa mata de pelo casta\u00f1o oscuro, y los labios p\u00e1lidos y ligeramente fruncidos. Los p\u00f3mulos eran muy marcados. Llevaba un fular amarillo y un chaleco negro bordado, con reloj de bolsillo.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa debes de ser Paige \u2014dijo con una voz grave, con un deje de jocosidad\u2014. Yo soy Jaxon Hall.\n\nMe tendi\u00f3 una mano huesuda, y se la estrech\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Hola \u2014dije.\n\nMe dio un apret\u00f3n firme y formal. Me sent\u00e9. Nick se sent\u00f3 a mi lado.\n\nCuando vino el camarero, Jaxon Hall no pidi\u00f3 nada de comer, sino solo un vaso de _mecks_ , un vino sin alcohol. Era una bebida muy cara, lo que indicaba que ten\u00eda gustos sofisticados.\n\n\u2014Quiero hacerte una propuesta, se\u00f1orita Mahoney. \u2014Jaxon Hall dio un gran sorbo de _mecks_ \u2014. El doctor Nyg\u00e5rd vino a verme ayer y me inform\u00f3 de que puedes infligir ciertas... anomal\u00edas m\u00e9dicas a otras personas. \u00bfCorrecto?\n\nMir\u00e9 a Nick.\n\n\u2014Tranquila \u2014me dijo, y sonri\u00f3\u2014. No es de Scion.\n\n\u2014No me insultes, por favor. \u2014Jaxon dio otro sorbo de _mecks_ \u2014. Estoy m\u00e1s lejos del Arconte que la cuna de la tumba. Aunque esos dos estados tampoco est\u00e1n muy alejados, pero t\u00fa ya me entiendes.\n\nNo estaba segura de entenderlo. Desde luego, no se comportaba como un funcionario de Scion.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSe refiere a las hemorragias nasales? \u2014pregunt\u00e9.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, exactamente. Fascinante. \u2014Ten\u00eda las manos entrelazadas encima de la mesa\u2014. \u00bfAlgo m\u00e1s?\n\n\u2014Dolores de cabeza. A veces, migra\u00f1as.\n\n\u2014Y \u00bfc\u00f3mo te sientes cuando eso pasa?\n\n\u2014Cansada. Mareada.\n\n\u2014Entiendo. \u2014Recorri\u00f3 mi rostro con la mirada. Ten\u00eda unos ojos fr\u00edos y escrutadores; me dio la impresi\u00f3n de que ve\u00eda m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de m\u00ed\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9 edad tienes?\n\n\u2014Diecis\u00e9is \u2014contest\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Estar\u00e1s a punto de terminar los estudios. A menos \u2014a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014 que te propongan ir a la universidad.\n\n\u2014No lo creo.\n\n\u2014Excelente. Pero los j\u00f3venes aspir\u00e1is a encontrar trabajo en la ciudadela. \u2014Tamborile\u00f3 con los dedos en la mesa\u2014. Me gustar\u00eda ofrecerte un empleo para toda la vida.\n\nFrunc\u00ed el entrecejo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 clase de empleo?\n\n\u2014Un empleo bien pagado. Un empleo que te proteger\u00e1. \u2014Jaxon escudri\u00f1\u00f3 mi cara\u2014. \u00bfSabes qu\u00e9 es la clarividencia?\n\n\u00abClarividencia.\u00bb La palabra prohibida. Ech\u00e9 un vistazo alrededor, pero nadie nos miraba. Ni nos escuchaba, o eso me pareci\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Es lo mismo que... antinaturalidad \u2014dije.\n\nJaxon esboz\u00f3 una sonrisa.\n\n\u2014As\u00ed la llama el Arconte. Pero \u00bfsabes qu\u00e9 significa esa palabra?\n\n\u2014Es... una especie de percepci\u00f3n extrasensorial. Saber cosas que est\u00e1n ocultas.\n\n\u2014Y \u00bfd\u00f3nde est\u00e1n escondidas?\n\nVacil\u00e9 un momento.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEn el subconsciente?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, a veces. Y otras veces \u2014apag\u00f3 de un soplido la vela del centro de la mesa\u2014 en el \u00e9ter.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 mirando el humo, atra\u00edda por \u00e9l. Me recorri\u00f3 un escalofr\u00edo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 es el \u00e9ter?\n\n\u2014El infinito. Provenimos de \u00e9l, vivimos dentro de \u00e9l, y al morir volvemos a \u00e9l. Pero no todos nosotros estamos dispuestos a despedirnos del mundo f\u00edsico.\n\n\u2014Jax \u2014dijo Nick en voz baja\u2014, esto iba a ser una introducci\u00f3n, no una conferencia en toda regla. Paige tiene diecis\u00e9is a\u00f1os.\n\n\u2014Quiero saberlo \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014Paige...\n\n\u2014Por favor \u2014insist\u00ed; necesitaba saberlo.\n\nSu expresi\u00f3n se suaviz\u00f3. Se recost\u00f3 en el asiento y bebi\u00f3 un poco de agua.\n\n\u2014Como quieras.\n\nJaxon, que nos miraba con las cejas enarcadas, frunci\u00f3 los labios antes de continuar.\n\n\u2014El \u00e9ter es un plano de existencia superior \u2014dijo\u2014. Existe paralelamente al plano corporal. Los clarividentes, las personas como nosotros, tienen la capacidad de recurrir al \u00e9ter.\n\nEstaba sentada en un restaurante con dos antinaturales.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo? \u2014pregunt\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Bueno, hay infinitas formas de hacerlo. Llevo quince a\u00f1os tratando de clasificarlas.\n\n\u2014Pero \u00bfqu\u00e9 significa \u00abrecurrir al \u00e9ter\u00bb?\n\nHacer preguntas sobre la clarividencia era una transgresi\u00f3n sumamente emocionante.\n\n\u2014Significa que puedes comunicarte con los esp\u00edritus \u2014aclar\u00f3 Nick\u2014. Con los difuntos. Las diferentes clases de vidente pueden hacerlo de diferentes maneras.\n\n\u2014Entonces \u00bfel \u00e9ter es como la otra vida?\n\n\u2014Es... un purgatorio, por decirlo as\u00ed \u2014dijo Jaxon.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, es como la otra vida \u2014a\u00f1adi\u00f3 Nick.\n\n\u2014Tendr\u00e1s que disculpar al doctor Nyg\u00e5rd. Solo intenta ser delicado. \u2014Jaxon bebi\u00f3 m\u00e1s _mecks_ \u2014. Por desgracia, la muerte no es delicada. Me gustar\u00eda instruirte sobre el verdadero significado de la clarividencia, muy alejado del enfoque tristemente sesgado de esa condici\u00f3n que hace Scion. Es un milagro, no una perversi\u00f3n. Tienes que entenderlo, querida, o apagar\u00e1n ese adorable resplandor.\n\nSe quedaron ambos callados cuando el camarero me trajo la ensalada. Volv\u00ed a mirar a Jax.\n\n\u2014Cu\u00e9ntame m\u00e1s cosas.\n\nJaxon sonri\u00f3.\n\n\u2014El \u00e9ter es el \u00aborigen\u00bb del que en ocasiones Scion se atreve a hablar \u2014dijo\u2014. El reino de los muertos sin reposo. La fuente a la que presuntamente tuvo acceso su Rey Sangriento durante una sesi\u00f3n espiritista, lo que le hizo cometer cinco asesinatos espantosos y desencadenar una epidemia de clarividencia que se extendi\u00f3 por todo el mundo. Todo eso son sandeces, por supuesto. El \u00e9ter no es m\u00e1s que el plano espiritual, y los clarividentes son las personas con capacidad para acceder a \u00e9l. No hubo ninguna epidemia. Siempre hemos existido. Algunos somos buenos; otros son malos, si es que existe la maldad. Pero, seamos lo que seamos, no somos una enfermedad.\n\n\u2014Entonces Scion minti\u00f3.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Acost\u00fambrate a esa idea. \u2014Jaxon encendi\u00f3 un puro\u2014. Eduardo bien pudo ser Jack el Destripador, pero dudo mucho que fuera clarividente. Era demasiado torpe.\n\n\u2014No tenemos ni idea de por qu\u00e9 lo atribuyeron todo a la clarividencia \u2014intervino Nick\u2014. Es un misterio que solo entiende el Arconte.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo funciona?\n\nTen\u00eda la piel de gallina. Cab\u00eda la posibilidad de que yo fuera clarividente. Cab\u00eda la posibilidad de que fuera uno de ellos.\n\n\u2014No todos los esp\u00edritus entran pac\u00edficamente en el coraz\u00f3n del \u00e9ter, donde creemos que las personas hallan una especie de muerte definitiva \u2014prosigui\u00f3 Jaxon. Se notaba que estaba disfrutando con aquella disertaci\u00f3n\u2014. Algunos se entretienen, y vagan entre el plano corp\u00f3reo y el plano espiritual. Mientras se hallan en ese estado, los llamamos vagabundos. Conservan su personalidad, y con la mayor\u00eda se puede establecer contacto. Solo tienen cierto grado de libertad, y normalmente no tienen inconveniente en ayudar a los videntes.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1s hablando de personas reales. Personas muertas \u2014dije\u2014. \u00bfMueves las cuerdas y ellos bailan?\n\n\u2014Correcto.\n\n\u2014Pero \u00bfpor qu\u00e9 lo hacen?\n\n\u2014Porque de ese modo pueden quedarse cerca de sus seres queridos. \u2014Dio un resoplido, como si no pudiera entenderlo\u2014. O cerca de personas a las que quieren acosar. Sacrifican su libre albedr\u00edo por una especie de inmortalidad.\n\nEmpec\u00e9 a comerme la ensalada. Era como masticar un pedazo de algod\u00f3n mojado.\n\n\u2014No comienzan como esp\u00edritus, por supuesto. \u2014Jaxon me dio unos toques en el dorso de la mano\u2014. T\u00fa tienes un cuerpo f\u00edsico. Puedes caminar en el plano corp\u00f3reo. Pero tambi\u00e9n tienes una conexi\u00f3n \u00edntima con el \u00e9ter. Nosotros lo llamamos onirosaje. El paisaje de la mente humana.\n\n\u2014Un momento, un momento. Hablas todo el rato en plural. \u00bfQui\u00e9nes son ese plural, concretamente? \u00bfLos clarividentes?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Es una comunidad efervescente. \u2014Nick me sonri\u00f3\u2014. Pero muy discreta.\n\n\u2014Se puede identificar a los videntes por el aura. As\u00ed fue como te reconoci\u00f3 Nick \u2014continu\u00f3 Jaxon. Mi creciente inter\u00e9s lo estaba animando\u2014. Mira, todos tenemos un onirosaje. Una ilusi\u00f3n de seguridad, una especie de _locus_ _amoenus_. Lo entiendes, \u00bfno? \u2014Yo no estaba muy segura de entenderlo\u2014. Los videntes tienen onirosajes de colores. Los dem\u00e1s los tienen en blanco y negro. Ven su onirosaje cuando sue\u00f1an. Por tanto, los amaur\u00f3ticos sue\u00f1an en blanco y negro. Los videntes, en cambio...\n\n\u2014\u00bfSue\u00f1an en color?\n\n\u2014Los videntes no sue\u00f1an, querida m\u00eda. O no sue\u00f1an como los amaur\u00f3ticos. Ese placer fr\u00edvolo solo lo tienen ellos. Pero el color del onirosaje de un clarividente atraviesa su forma corp\u00f3rea y crea un aura. Los diferentes tipos de vidente tienden a tener auras parecidas. Ya aprender\u00e1s a clasificarlos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfYo puedo ver las auras?\n\nJax y Nick se miraron. Nick se llev\u00f3 las manos hacia la cara y se quit\u00f3 dos finas lentes de contacto de los ojos. Me dio un escalofr\u00edo.\n\n\u2014M\u00edrame los ojos, Paige.\n\nNo hizo falta que me lo dijera dos veces. Recordaba aquellos ojos como si hubiera sido ayer. Aquel verde gris\u00e1ceo exquisito, aquellas finas l\u00edneas que irradiaban de sus iris. En lo que no me hab\u00eda fijado era en el peque\u00f1o defecto, con forma de ojo de cerradura, que ten\u00eda en la pupila derecha.\n\n\u2014Algunos videntes tienen una especie de tercer ojo. \u2014Se recost\u00f3 en el asiento\u2014. Pueden ver auras, y tambi\u00e9n pueden ver a los vagabundos. Puedes tener visi\u00f3n parcial, como yo, con un solo coloboma, o visi\u00f3n completa, como Jax.\n\nJaxon me mir\u00f3 y abri\u00f3 mucho los ojos. Ten\u00eda aquel defecto en los dos ojos.\n\n\u2014Yo no tengo eso \u2014dije\u2014. \u00bfSignifica que soy clarividente, pero que no tengo un tercer ojo?\n\n\u2014La carencia de visi\u00f3n es muy frecuente en los \u00f3rdenes m\u00e1s elevados. Tu don no requiere que veas esp\u00edritus. \u2014Jaxon me mir\u00f3 complacido\u2014. T\u00fa sientes las auras y a los vagabundos, pero no los percibes visualmente.\n\n\u2014En realidad, eso no es ning\u00fan inconveniente \u2014aport\u00f3 Nick\u2014. Sin la ayuda adicional de la visi\u00f3n, tu sexto sentido estar\u00e1 mucho m\u00e1s afinado.\n\nPese a que el restaurante estaba caldeado, el fr\u00edo se estaba extendiendo por todo mi cuerpo. Mir\u00e9 a los dos hombres, aquellas dos caras tan distintas.\n\n\u2014Y yo \u00bfqu\u00e9 tipo de clarividente soy?\n\n\u2014Eso es lo que queremos averiguar. A lo largo de los a\u00f1os he clasificado siete \u00f3rdenes de clarividencia. Creo que t\u00fa, querida m\u00eda, perteneces al orden m\u00e1s elevado, lo que te convierte en una de las clarividentes m\u00e1s singulares del mundo moderno. Y como creo que no estoy equivocado... \u2014sac\u00f3 una carpeta de su lujosa cartera de piel\u2014, me gustar\u00eda que firmaras un contrato de trabajo.\n\nMe mir\u00f3 a los ojos.\n\n\u2014Podr\u00eda anotar una variedad infinita de n\u00fameros en este cheque, Paige. \u00bfCu\u00e1nto har\u00e1 falta para que te quedes conmigo?\n\nEl coraz\u00f3n me martilleaba en el pecho.\n\n\u2014Una copa, para empezar.\n\nJaxon se ech\u00f3 para atr\u00e1s.\n\n\u2014Nick, p\u00eddele un _mecks_ a esta se\u00f1orita. Se queda con nosotros.\n\nEl Custodio y yo pasamos varias noches sin hablarnos. Tampoco reanudamos mis entrenamientos. Todas las noches me marchaba nada m\u00e1s sonar la campana, y al pasar a su lado ni siquiera lo miraba. \u00c9l s\u00ed me miraba, pero nunca me imped\u00eda salir. A veces yo deseaba que lo hiciera, porque as\u00ed habr\u00eda podido desahogar mi rabia.\n\nUna noche intent\u00e9 ir a ver a Liss. Estaba lloviendo, y quer\u00eda calentarme junto a su hornillo. Pero no pod\u00eda ir, despu\u00e9s de lo que hab\u00eda pasado con el Custodio. Tras haber ayudado otra vez al enemigo, no me habr\u00eda atrevido a mirar a Liss a los ojos.\n\nPronto encontr\u00e9 un nuevo refugio, un lugar donde pod\u00eda estar a solas: el soportal que cubr\u00eda los escalones de la entrada de Hawksmoor. En su d\u00eda deb\u00eda de haber sido una construcci\u00f3n majestuosa, pero ahora esa misma grandeza le confer\u00eda un aire tr\u00e1gico: fr\u00eda, triste y con las esquinas erosionadas, se dir\u00eda que aguardaba el regreso de una \u00e9poca que tal vez no volviera nunca. Ese rinc\u00f3n se convirti\u00f3 en mi refugio. Iba all\u00ed todas las noches y, si no hab\u00eda arrancahuesos de guardia, me colaba en la biblioteca abandonada y me llevaba un mont\u00f3n de libros al soportal. Hab\u00eda tantas novelas prohibidas que empec\u00e9 a preguntarme si ser\u00eda all\u00ed adonde Scion las enviaba todas. Jax habr\u00eda vendido su alma para hacerse con ellas. Si hubiera tenido un alma que vender.\n\nHab\u00edan pasado cuatro noches desde la sangr\u00eda. Yo segu\u00eda sin entender por qu\u00e9 hab\u00eda ayudado al Custodio. \u00bfA qu\u00e9 estaba jugando conmigo? Pensar que se hab\u00eda bebido mi sangre me produc\u00eda n\u00e1useas. No quer\u00eda ni acordarme de lo que hab\u00eda hecho.\n\nLlov\u00eda mucho; hab\u00eda decidido quedarme dentro, en la biblioteca, y hab\u00eda dejado una ventana entreabierta. Si ven\u00edan a buscarme, los oir\u00eda. No dejar\u00eda que me pillaran desprevenida, como en el I-5. Hab\u00eda encontrado un libro titulado _Otra vuelta de tuerca_ escondido entre los estantes. Me tumb\u00e9 boca abajo bajo un escritorio y encend\u00ed una lamparita de aceite.\n\nEn el Broad reinaba el silencio. La mayor\u00eda de los bufones estaban empezando a ensayar para la celebraci\u00f3n del Bicentenario. Se hab\u00eda extendido el rumor de que el Gran Inquisidor en persona iba a asistir al acto. Ten\u00edan que conseguir impresionarlo con nuestra nueva forma de vida, o quiz\u00e1 no permitiera que se prolongara aquel \u00abacuerdo especial\u00bb. Aunque no ten\u00eda mucha alternativa. Con todo, ten\u00edamos que demostrarle que \u00e9ramos \u00fatiles, aunque solo fuera para entretener. Que val\u00edamos un poco m\u00e1s de lo que costar\u00eda administrarnos NiteKind.\n\nSaqu\u00e9 el sobre que me hab\u00eda dado David. Dentro hab\u00eda una hoja amarillenta arrancada de un cuaderno, con un fragmento de texto. La examin\u00e9. Parec\u00eda como si se le hubiera ca\u00eddo una vela encima: las esquinas estaban duras, impregnadas de cera, y en el medio hab\u00eda un gran agujero producido por una quemadura. En una esquina de la hoja hab\u00eda un boceto emborronado; parec\u00eda una cara, pero estaba deformada y descolorida. Solo pude descifrar unas pocas palabras.\n\n\u2013 \u2013 refa\u00edtas son \u2013 \u2013 de doble \u2013 \u2013 En el \u2013 \u2013 llamados \u2013 \u2013 confinado \u2013 \u2013 pueden \u2013 \u2013 per\u00edodos de tiempo ilimitados, pero \u2013 \u2013 nueva forma, cuando \u2013 \u2013 hambre \u2013 \u2013 incontrolable e \u2013 \u2013 energ\u00eda alrededor de la presunta \u2013 \u2013 flor roja, la \u2013 \u2013 \u00fanico m\u00e9todo \u2013 \u2013 naturaleza del \u2013 \u2013 y solo entonces pueden \u2013 \u2013\n\nIntent\u00e9 hilvanar otra vez las palabras, encontrar alg\u00fan patr\u00f3n. No era muy dif\u00edcil conectar los fragmentos sobre el hambre y la energ\u00eda, pero no se me ocurr\u00eda qu\u00e9 pod\u00eda significar la flor roja.\n\nEl sobre conten\u00eda otra cosa: un daguerrotipo desva\u00eddo. La fecha \u00ab1842\u00bb estaba garabateada en una esquina. Lo contempl\u00e9 largo rato, pero solo consegu\u00ed distinguir unas manchas blancas sobre negro. Me guard\u00e9 el sobre en el blus\u00f3n y mordisque\u00e9 un poco de _toke_ rancio. Cuando se me cans\u00f3 la vista, apagu\u00e9 la l\u00e1mpara y me acurruqu\u00e9 en posici\u00f3n fetal.\n\nMi cabeza era una mara\u00f1a de cabos sueltos. El Custodio y sus heridas. Pleione llev\u00e1ndole la sangre de Seb. David y su inter\u00e9s por mi bienestar. Y Nashira, con sus ojos que todo lo ve\u00edan.\n\nMe obligu\u00e9 a pensar solo en el Custodio. Todav\u00eda me enfurec\u00eda cuando pensaba en la sangre de Seb, embotellada y etiquetada, lista para su consumo. Confiaba en que se la hubieran extra\u00eddo cuando todav\u00eda estaba vivo, y no de su cad\u00e1ver. Luego estaba Pleione. Ella le hab\u00eda llevado la sangre al Custodio; deb\u00eda de saber que iba a sufrir una necrosis, o como m\u00ednimo que pod\u00eda sufrirla. Deb\u00eda de haber previsto la necesidad de llevarle sangre humana antes de que fuera demasiado tarde. Como Pleione se hab\u00eda retrasado, el Custodio hab\u00eda tenido que beber mi sangre. Fuera lo que fuese lo que estuviera haciendo, lo hac\u00eda con la complicidad de Pleione.\n\nEl Custodio guardaba un secreto. Y yo tambi\u00e9n. Yo estaba ocultando mi conexi\u00f3n con los bajos fondos, eso que a Nashira tanto le interesaba. Si \u00e9l aceptaba mi silencio, yo tambi\u00e9n aceptar\u00eda el suyo.\n\nMe toqu\u00e9 el brazo vendado. Esa herida, que segu\u00eda sin cicatrizar, era para m\u00ed tan repugnante como la marca. Si me dejaba una cicatriz, jam\u00e1s olvidar\u00eda la pena y el miedo que hab\u00eda sentido cuando me la hab\u00eda hecho. Un miedo muy parecido al que hab\u00eda sentido la primera vez que me hab\u00eda enfrentado al mundo de los esp\u00edritus. Miedo de ser lo que era. De lo que pod\u00eda llegar a ser.\n\nDeb\u00ed de quedarme dormida. Un fuerte dolor en la mejilla me devolvi\u00f3 a la realidad.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Paige!\n\nLiss me estaba zarandeando. Abr\u00ed los ojos, hinchados y enrojecidos.\n\n\u2014Paige, \u00bfqu\u00e9 demonios haces aqu\u00ed? Ya ha amanecido. Los arrancahuesos te est\u00e1n buscando.\n\nLevant\u00e9 la cabeza, adormilada.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Porque el Custodio se lo ha ordenado. Ten\u00edas que estar en Magdalen hace una hora.\n\nLiss ten\u00eda raz\u00f3n: una luz dorada estaba ti\u00f1endo el cielo. Liss me ayud\u00f3 a levantarme.\n\n\u2014Tienes suerte de que no te hayan encontrado aqu\u00ed. Est\u00e1 prohibido.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo me has encontrado?\n\n\u2014Antes yo tambi\u00e9n ven\u00eda a este sitio. \u2014Me sujet\u00f3 por los hombros y me mir\u00f3 a los ojos\u2014. Tienes que suplicarle al Custodio que te perdone. Si le suplicas, quiz\u00e1 no te castigue.\n\nCasi me ech\u00e9 a re\u00edr.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSuplicarle?\n\n\u2014Es la \u00fanica forma.\n\n\u2014No pienso suplicarle nada.\n\n\u2014Te pegar\u00e1.\n\n\u2014No me importa. Tendr\u00e1n que llevarme ante \u00e9l.\n\nMir\u00e9 por la ventana.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTendr\u00edas problemas si me encontraran en tu chabola?\n\n\u2014Es mejor eso a que te encuentren aqu\u00ed. \u2014Me agarr\u00f3 la mu\u00f1eca\u2014. Vamos. No tardar\u00e1n en buscar por aqu\u00ed.\n\nEscond\u00ed la l\u00e1mpara y el libro bajo una estanter\u00eda de una patada. Bajamos la escalinata a toda prisa y salimos al exterior. La atm\u00f3sfera ol\u00eda a lluvia inminente.\n\nLiss me hizo esperar hasta que hubo comprobado que no hab\u00eda nadie cerca. Cruzamos el patio, pasamos por el h\u00famedo soportal y salimos al Broad. El sol brillaba por encima de los edificios. Liss separ\u00f3 dos paneles de contrachapado que estaban sueltos y nos colamos en el Poblado. Me gui\u00f3 entre corrillos de actores. Sus objetos personales, rescatados de la basura, estaban esparcidos por los pasadizos, como si hubieran registrado las chozas. Vi a un chico al que le sangraban los ojos apoyado en una pared. Todos susurraban al vernos pasar.\n\nMe met\u00ed en la choza. Julian esperaba all\u00ed sujetando un cuenco de _skilly_ que apoyaba sobre una rodilla. Levant\u00f3 la cabeza y dijo:\n\n\u2014Buenos d\u00edas.\n\nMe sent\u00e9.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTe alegras de verme?\n\n\u2014Supongo. \u2014Me sonri\u00f3\u2014. Aunque solo sea para acordarme de que necesito urgentemente un despertador.\n\n\u2014\u00bfNo deber\u00edas estar en tu residencia?\n\n\u2014Estaba a punto de irme; pero, ahora que has venido, tengo la sensaci\u00f3n de que iba a perderme la fiesta.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Est\u00e1is locos! \u2014nos reprendi\u00f3 Liss\u2014. Aqu\u00ed se toman muy en serio el toque de queda, Jules. Os va a caer una buena a los dos.\n\nMe pas\u00e9 la mano por el pelo h\u00famedo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCu\u00e1nto tardar\u00e1n en encontrarnos?\n\n\u2014No mucho. Pronto volver\u00e1n a revisar las habitaciones. \u2014Se sent\u00f3\u2014. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 no os vais?\n\nTen\u00eda todos los m\u00fasculos del cuerpo en tensi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014No pasa nada, Liss \u2014dije\u2014. Me arriesgar\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Los arrancahuesos son implacables. No te escuchar\u00e1n. Y te lo advierto, el Custodio te matar\u00e1 si...\n\n\u2014No me importa.\n\nLiss apoy\u00f3 la cabeza en una mano. Mir\u00e9 a Julian. Ya no llevaba el traje de novato, sino un blus\u00f3n rosa.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 has tenido que hacer?\n\n\u2014Nashira me pregunt\u00f3 qu\u00e9 era \u2014respondi\u00f3\u2014. Le dije que era palmista, pero evidentemente no supe leerle las manos. Hizo entrar en la habitaci\u00f3n a una amaur\u00f3tica y la hizo atar a una silla. Me acord\u00e9 de Seb y le pregunt\u00e9 a Nashira si me dejaba usar agua para hacer la predicci\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEres hidrom\u00e1ntico?\n\n\u2014No, pero no quiero que Nashira sepa qu\u00e9 soy. Fue lo primero que se me ocurri\u00f3. \u2014Se frot\u00f3 la cabeza\u2014. Llen\u00f3 un cuenco dorado y me orden\u00f3 buscar a una tal Antoinette Carter.\n\nArrugu\u00e9 el entrecejo. Antoinette Carter hab\u00eda sido una celebridad en Irlanda a principios de los a\u00f1os cuarenta. Recordaba que era una mujer delgada de mediana edad, fr\u00e1gil y enigm\u00e1tica. Ten\u00eda un programa de televisi\u00f3n, _Las verdades de Toni_ , que se emit\u00eda todos los jueves por la noche. Le tocaba las manos a la gente y aseguraba ver su futuro, que predec\u00eda con voz grave y comedida. Cancelaron el programa despu\u00e9s de la Incursi\u00f3n de 2046, cuando Scion invadi\u00f3 Irlanda, y Carter pas\u00f3 a la clandestinidad. Todav\u00eda publicaba un panfleto ilegal, _Stingy Jack_ , que denunciaba las atrocidades de Scion.\n\nPor razones que nosotros desconoc\u00edamos, Jaxon le hab\u00eda pedido a un falsante llamado Leon (un experto en enviar mensajes fuera de Scion) que estableciera contacto con ella. Yo nunca supe cu\u00e1l hab\u00eda sido el resultado. Leon era un buen falsante, pero llevaba tiempo esquivar los sistemas de seguridad de Scion.\n\n\u2014Es una fugitiva \u2014dije\u2014. Viv\u00eda en Irlanda.\n\n\u2014Pues ya no est\u00e1 en Irlanda.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 viste? \u2014No me gust\u00f3 la expresi\u00f3n de su cara\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9 le dijiste?\n\n\u2014No te va a gustar. \u2014Dio un suspiro antes de continuar\u2014. Le dije que hab\u00eda visto unos relojes de sol. Record\u00e9 que Carl los hab\u00eda mencionado, y cre\u00ed que parecer\u00eda veros\u00edmil que yo los hubiera visto tambi\u00e9n.\n\nDesvi\u00e9 la mirada. Nashira andaba buscando a Jaxon. Tarde o temprano descubrir\u00eda d\u00f3nde estaban esos relojes de sol.\n\n\u2014Lo siento. Me dar\u00eda con la cabeza contra la pared. \u2014Julian se frot\u00f3 la frente\u2014. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 son tan importantes esos relojes de sol?\n\n\u2014No puedo dec\u00edrtelo. Lo siento. Pero pase lo que pase... \u2014mir\u00e9 hacia la entrada de la choza\u2014 Nashira no debe volver a o\u00edr hablar de esos relojes de sol. Podr\u00eda poner en peligro a unos amigos m\u00edos.\n\nLiss se ech\u00f3 una manta por encima de los hombros.\n\n\u2014Paige \u2014dijo\u2014, me parece que tus amigos han intentado ponerse en contacto contigo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 quieres decir?\n\n\u2014Gomeisa me llev\u00f3 al Castillo. \u2014Su rostro se tens\u00f3\u2014. Estaba en mi celda, barajando las cartas para hacerle la lectura, y de pronto me sent\u00ed atra\u00edda hacia el Colgado. Cog\u00ed la carta, y estaba invertida. Vi el \u00e9ter. La cara de un hombre. Me record\u00f3 a la nieve.\n\n\u00abNick.\u00bb Los adivinos siempre dec\u00edan eso de Nick cuando lo ve\u00edan: que era como la nieve.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 te envi\u00f3?\n\n\u2014Una imagen de un tel\u00e9fono. Creo que intenta averiguar d\u00f3nde est\u00e1s.\n\nUn tel\u00e9fono. Claro: \u00e9l no sab\u00eda d\u00f3nde estaba. La banda no sab\u00eda que Scion me hab\u00eda apresado, aunque a esas alturas ya deb\u00edan de sospechar algo. Nick quer\u00eda que lo llamara, quer\u00eda o\u00edrme decir que estaba bien. Deb\u00eda de haberle llevado d\u00edas encontrar el camino adecuado por el \u00e9ter. Si volv\u00eda a intentarlo mediante una sesi\u00f3n de espiritismo, quiz\u00e1 lograra enviarme un mensaje. No entend\u00eda por qu\u00e9 se lo hab\u00eda enviado a Liss. \u00c9l conoc\u00eda mi aura; en teor\u00eda habr\u00eda sido mucho m\u00e1s f\u00e1cil encontrarla. Quiz\u00e1 fueran las pastillas, o alg\u00fan tipo de interferencia provocada por los refas; pero no importaba.\n\nHab\u00eda intentado ponerse en contacto conmigo. No iba a abandonar.\n\nLa voz de Julian me sac\u00f3 de mi ensimismamiento:\n\n\u2014\u00bfDe verdad conoces a otros saltadores, Paige? \u2014Lo mir\u00e9, y \u00e9l se encogi\u00f3 de hombros\u2014. Cre\u00eda que el s\u00e9ptimo orden era el m\u00e1s raro.\n\n\u00abSaltadores\u00bb: una palabra cargada de connotaciones. Un orden de videntes, como los adivinos y los augures. Era la categor\u00eda a la que yo pertenec\u00eda: los videntes que pod\u00edan alterar o entrar en el \u00e9ter. Jax hab\u00eda desencadenado la gran separaci\u00f3n de los videntes en los a\u00f1os treinta, cuando ten\u00eda aproximadamente mi edad. Todo hab\u00eda empezado con _Sobre los m\u00e9ritos de la antinaturalidad_ , que se hab\u00eda extendido como una plaga por los bajos fondos de la videncia. En esa obra hab\u00eda identificado siete \u00f3rdenes de clarividentes: adivinos, augures, m\u00e9diums, sensores, furias, guardianes y saltadores. Afirmaba que los tres \u00faltimos eran muy superiores a los otros. Era una forma novedosa de abordar la clarividencia, que hasta entonces nadie hab\u00eda categorizado; pero los \u00f3rdenes inferiores no se lo hab\u00edan tomado bien. Las guerras de bandas que ocasion\u00f3 hab\u00edan durado dos cruentos a\u00f1os. Al final los editores de Jax hab\u00edan retirado el panfleto, pero las rencillas persist\u00edan.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed \u2014dije\u2014. Solo a uno. Es un or\u00e1culo.\n\n\u2014Pues debes de tener un puesto muy alto en el sindicato.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, bastante alto.\n\nLiss me sirvi\u00f3 un cuenco de _skilly_. Si ten\u00eda alguna opini\u00f3n formada sobre el panfleto, no la expres\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Jules \u2014dijo\u2014, \u00bfte importa que hable un momento a solas con Paige?\n\n\u2014Claro que no. Me quedar\u00e9 fuera vigilando por si vienen los rojos.\n\nSali\u00f3 de la choza. Liss se qued\u00f3 mirando el hornillo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 pasa? \u2014pregunt\u00e9.\n\nSe ci\u00f1\u00f3 la manta.\n\n\u2014Estoy preocupada por ti, Paige.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Tengo un mal presentimiento sobre esa celebraci\u00f3n, el Bicentenario. Ya s\u00e9 que no soy un or\u00e1culo, pero veo cosas. \u2014Sac\u00f3 la baraja\u2014. \u00bfMe dejas que te eche las cartas? Hay ciertas personas a las que siento la necesidad de hacerles una predicci\u00f3n.\n\nVacil\u00e9. Yo solo hab\u00eda usado las cartas para jugar al tarocchi.\n\n\u2014Como quieras.\n\n\u2014Gracias. \u2014Puso la baraja entre las dos\u2014. \u00bfAlguna vez te han le\u00eddo los signos? \u00bfUn adivino o un augur?\n\n\u2014No, nunca.\n\nMe hab\u00edan preguntado muchas veces si quer\u00eda que me hicieran una predicci\u00f3n, pero nunca hab\u00eda estado convencida de que fuera buena idea asomarme al futuro. A veces Nick me daba pistas, pero yo no sol\u00eda dejarle entrar en detalles.\n\n\u2014Vale. Dame la mano.\n\nLe tend\u00ed la mano derecha, y Liss me la cogi\u00f3. Su rostro adopt\u00f3 una expresi\u00f3n de concentraci\u00f3n intensa. Sac\u00f3 siete cartas de la baraja y las puso boca abajo en el suelo.\n\n\u2014Utilizo la extensi\u00f3n el\u00edptica. Leo tu aura, y luego escojo siete cartas y las interpreto. No todos los lectores interpretamos igual cada una de las cartas, as\u00ed que no te enfades si oyes algo que no te gusta. \u2014Me solt\u00f3 la mano\u2014. La primera indicar\u00e1 tu pasado. Me mostrar\u00e1 algunos de tus recuerdos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfVes los recuerdos?\n\nLiss esboz\u00f3 una sonrisa. Eso era algo de lo que todav\u00eda se enorgullec\u00eda.\n\n\u2014Los lectores podemos utilizar objetos, pero en realidad no encajamos en ninguna categor\u00eda. Hasta _Sobre los m\u00e9ritos_ lo reconoc\u00eda. Yo lo considero algo positivo.\n\nDio la vuelta a la primera carta.\n\n\u2014Cinco de copas \u2014dijo. Cerr\u00f3 los ojos\u2014. Perdiste algo cuando eras muy peque\u00f1a. Hay un hombre de pelo rojizo. Son sus copas las que se derraman.\n\n\u2014Mi padre \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Est\u00e1s de pie a su lado, hablando con \u00e9l. No te contesta. Mira fijamente un retrato. \u2014Sin abrir los ojos, Liss gir\u00f3 la siguiente carta. Estaba del rev\u00e9s\u2014. Esto es el presente \u2014prosigui\u00f3\u2014. El rey de bastos, invertido. \u2014Frunci\u00f3 los labios\u2014. Te domina. No puedes escapar de su control.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEl Custodio?\n\n\u2014No lo creo. Pero tiene poder. Espera demasiado de ti. Le tienes miedo.\n\n\u00abJaxon.\u00bb\n\n\u2014La siguiente representa el futuro. \u2014Liss gir\u00f3 la carta y aspir\u00f3 entre los dientes\u2014. El Diablo. Esta carta representa impotencia, restricci\u00f3n, temor; pero te lo impones t\u00fa misma. El Diablo representa a alguien, pero no puedo verle la cara. Por mucho poder que esa persona tenga sobre ti, conseguir\u00e1s librarte de ella. Intentar\u00e1 hacerte creer que est\u00e1s unida a ella para siempre, pero no ser\u00e1 as\u00ed, aunque te lo parezca.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTe refieres a una pareja? \u2014Notaba una opresi\u00f3n en el pecho\u2014. \u00bfUn novio? \u00bfO es el Custodio?\n\n\u2014Podr\u00eda ser. No lo s\u00e9. \u2014Forz\u00f3 una sonrisa\u2014. No te preocupes. La siguiente carta te indicar\u00e1 qu\u00e9 tienes que hacer cuando llegue el momento.\n\nMir\u00e9 la cuarta carta.\n\n\u2014\u00bfLos Amantes?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. \u2014Hab\u00eda bajado la voz\u2014. No veo gran cosa. Hay tensi\u00f3n entre el esp\u00edritu y la carne. Demasiada tensi\u00f3n. \u2014Sus dedos se desplazaron hacia la siguiente carta\u2014. Influencias externas.\n\nNo sab\u00eda si quer\u00eda continuar. Hasta el momento, Liss solo hab\u00eda dicho una cosa positiva, e incluso esa iba a resultar dolorosa. No esperaba que salieran Los Amantes, desde luego.\n\n\u2014La Muerte, invertida. La Muerte es una carta que les sale a menudo a los videntes. Suele aparecer en la posici\u00f3n del pasado o el presente. Pero aqu\u00ed, invertida... No estoy segura. \u2014Los ojos le temblaron bajo los p\u00e1rpados\u2014. A partir de aqu\u00ed, mi visi\u00f3n se vuelve confusa. Las cosas no est\u00e1n nada claras. S\u00e9 que el mundo cambiar\u00e1 a tu alrededor, y que har\u00e1s todo lo que puedas para resistirte. La muerte actuar\u00e1 de diferentes maneras. Si retrasas el cambio, prolongar\u00e1s tu sufrimiento.\n\n\u00bbLa sexta carta. Tus esperanzas y tus miedos. \u2014La cogi\u00f3 y la acarici\u00f3 con el pulgar\u2014. Ocho de espadas.\n\nLa carta ten\u00eda dibujada a una mujer encerrada en un c\u00edrculo de espadas que apuntaban hacia abajo. Llevaba los ojos vendados. Liss estaba sudando y le brillaba la piel.\n\n\u2014Te veo. Tienes miedo. \u2014Le temblaba la voz\u2014. Veo tu cara. No puedes moverte en ninguna direcci\u00f3n. Puedes quedarte quieta, atrapada, o sentir el dolor de las espadas.\n\nDeb\u00edan de ser las cartas m\u00e1s negativas que Liss hab\u00eda visto jam\u00e1s. Yo no ten\u00eda ningunas ganas de ver la \u00faltima.\n\n\u2014Y el resultado final. \u2014Cogi\u00f3 la \u00faltima carta\u2014. La conclusi\u00f3n de todas las anteriores.\n\nCerr\u00e9 los ojos. El \u00e9ter tembl\u00f3.\n\nNo llegu\u00e9 a ver la carta. Tres personas irrumpieron en la choza, y Liss se sobresalt\u00f3. Los arrancahuesos me hab\u00edan encontrado.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Vaya, vaya! Creo que hemos encontrado a la fugitiva. Y a su c\u00f3mplice. \u2014Uno de ellos agarr\u00f3 a Liss por la mu\u00f1eca y la levant\u00f3 de un tir\u00f3n\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9, ech\u00e1ndole las cartas a tu invitada?\n\n\u2014Solo estaba...\n\n\u2014Solo estabas usando el \u00e9ter. En privado \u2014dijo una voz femenina, desde\u00f1osa\u2014. \u00bfAcaso no sabes que solo puedes echarle las cartas a tu guardi\u00e1n, 1?\n\nMe levant\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Creo que es a m\u00ed a quien busc\u00e1is.\n\nSe volvieron los tres hacia m\u00ed. La chica era un poco mayor que yo; ten\u00eda el cabello largo y desgre\u00f1ado, y una frente prominente.\n\nLos dos chicos se parec\u00edan tanto que ten\u00edan que ser hermanos.\n\n\u2014Es verdad. Es a ti. \u2014El m\u00e1s alto de los dos apart\u00f3 a Liss de un empuj\u00f3n\u2014. \u00bfVas a venir por las buenas, 40?\n\n\u2014Depende de ad\u00f3nde quer\u00e1is llevarme \u2014contest\u00e9.\n\n\u2014A Magdalen, desgraciada. Ya ha amanecido.\n\n\u2014Ir\u00e9 yo sola.\n\n\u2014Te escoltaremos \u2014dijo la chica mir\u00e1ndome con profundo desprecio\u2014. Son las \u00f3rdenes. Has violado las normas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfVais a imped\u00edrmelo?\n\nLiss sacudi\u00f3 la cabeza, pero no le hice caso. Mir\u00e9 fijamente a la chica, que ten\u00eda las mand\u00edbulas muy apretadas.\n\n\u2014Adelante, 16.\n\n16 era el m\u00e1s bajo de los dos chicos, pero era muy corpulento. Me agarr\u00f3 por la mu\u00f1eca. Torc\u00ed r\u00e1pidamente el brazo hacia la derecha, y se le abri\u00f3 la mano. Le hinqu\u00e9 el pu\u00f1o entre las clav\u00edculas y lo empuj\u00e9 hacia su hermano.\n\n\u2014He dicho que ir\u00e9 yo sola.\n\n16 se llev\u00f3 las manos al cuello. El otro chico se abalanz\u00f3 sobre m\u00ed. Esquiv\u00e9 su brazo, levant\u00e9 una pierna y le propin\u00e9 una patada en el est\u00f3mago que le cort\u00f3 la respiraci\u00f3n. La chica me pill\u00f3 desprevenida: me agarr\u00f3 un mech\u00f3n de pelo y tir\u00f3 de \u00e9l. Me golpe\u00e9 la cabeza contra la pared de chapa met\u00e1lica. 16 se ech\u00f3 a re\u00edr entre resuellos mientras su hermano me inmovilizaba contra el suelo.\n\n\u2014Me parece que tienes que aprender a ser m\u00e1s respetuosa \u2014dijo y, jadeando, me tap\u00f3 la boca con una mano\u2014. Seguro que a tu guardi\u00e1n no le importar\u00e1 que te ense\u00f1e una lecci\u00f3n. Adem\u00e1s, nunca est\u00e1 por aqu\u00ed.\n\nEmpez\u00f3 a manosearme el pecho. Me hab\u00eda tomado por una presa f\u00e1cil, una chica indefensa. No sab\u00eda que estaba ante una dama. Le pegu\u00e9 con la frente en toda la nariz. El chico maldijo en voz alta. La chica me agarr\u00f3 los brazos. Le mord\u00ed la mu\u00f1eca, y chill\u00f3.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Zorra de mierda!\n\n\u2014\u00a1Su\u00e9ltala, Kathryn! \u2014Liss la sujet\u00f3 por el blus\u00f3n y la separ\u00f3 de m\u00ed\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9 te ha pasado? \u00bfTe has vuelto tan cruel como Kraz?\n\n\u2014He madurado. No quiero ser como t\u00fa y vivir rodeada de mierda \u2014le espet\u00f3 Kathryn\u2014. Eres pat\u00e9tica. Una bufona repugnante y pat\u00e9tica.\n\nMi agresor sangraba abundantemente por la nariz, pero no pensaba rendirse. Me ca\u00edan gotas de su sangre en la cara. Me tir\u00f3 del blus\u00f3n y rompi\u00f3 una costura. Le empuj\u00e9 el pecho; mi esp\u00edritu estaba a punto de estallar. El impulso de atacar era tan intenso que se me empa\u00f1aron los ojos.\n\nY entonces apareci\u00f3 Julian. Ten\u00eda un derrame en un ojo y un corte reciente en la mejilla. Deb\u00edan de haberle pegado antes de entrar en la choza. Agarr\u00f3 al chico por el cuello con un brazo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEs as\u00ed como os pon\u00e9is calientes los arrancahuesos? \u2014Nunca lo hab\u00eda visto tan furioso\u2014. \u00bfSolo os gusta si ellas se resisten?\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1s muerto, 26 \u2014dijo mi agresor con voz estrangulada\u2014. Espera a que tu guardiana se entere de esto.\n\n\u2014Cu\u00e9ntaselo. A ver si te atreves.\n\nMe baj\u00e9 el blus\u00f3n con manos temblorosas. El casaca roja levant\u00f3 los brazos para protegerse. Julian le asest\u00f3 un gancho brutal en la mand\u00edbula. La sangre le salpic\u00f3 el blus\u00f3n al chico y lo dej\u00f3 lleno de manchas oscuras. Le salt\u00f3 un trozo de diente de la boca.\n\nKathryn arremeti\u00f3 a golpes contra Liss; le dio en la cara con el dorso de la mano, y Liss dej\u00f3 escapar un grito. Ese grito me sobresalt\u00f3. Era el grito de Seb, solo que esta vez todav\u00eda no era demasiado tarde. Me levant\u00e9 del suelo con la intenci\u00f3n de derribar a Kathryn, pero 16 me agarr\u00f3 por la cintura. Era m\u00e9dium, pero no estaba utilizando esp\u00edritus. Quer\u00eda ver sangre.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Suhail! \u2014grit\u00f3.\n\nEl alboroto hab\u00eda atra\u00eddo a un grupo de bufones. Entre ellos tambi\u00e9n hab\u00eda un casaca blanca. Lo reconoc\u00ed: era el chico de las trencitas cosidas, el cantor.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Ve a buscar a Suhail, in\u00fatil! \u2014le grit\u00f3 Kathryn. Ten\u00eda a Liss sujeta por el pelo\u2014. \u00a1Corre!\n\nEl chico no se movi\u00f3. Ten\u00eda unos ojos grandes y oscuros, con largas pesta\u00f1as. Ya no estaban infectados. Lo mir\u00e9 y sacud\u00ed la cabeza.\n\n\u2014No \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Traidor! \u2014le grit\u00f3 16.\n\nAlgunos actores huyeron al o\u00edr esa palabra. Empuj\u00e9 a 16, y empec\u00e9 a sudar bajo el blus\u00f3n. Ve\u00eda un resplandor en los bordes de mi visi\u00f3n.\n\nEl hornillo. Vi las llamas ascendiendo por los tablones.\n\nLiss logr\u00f3 soltarse de Kathryn y apart\u00f3 de un empuj\u00f3n a 16. Julian lo sujet\u00f3 y lo arrastr\u00f3 lejos de nosotras.\n\nUna nube de humo empezaba a llenar la choza. Liss se puso a recoger sus cartas, intentando reunir la baraja. Kathryn le empuj\u00f3 la cabeza hacia abajo y la inmoviliz\u00f3. Liss dio un grito apagado.\n\n\u2014Eh, mira \u2014dijo Kathryn mostr\u00e1ndome una carta\u2014. Creo que esta es para ti, XX-40.\n\nEn la carta hab\u00eda dibujado un hombre tendido boca abajo, con diez espadas clavadas.\n\nLiss intent\u00f3 quitarle la carta.\n\n\u2014\u00a1No! Esa no era la...\n\n\u2014\u00a1Cierra el pico, asquerosa! \u2014Kathryn la inmoviliz\u00f3. Forceje\u00e9 con 16, pero me estaba haciendo una llave de cabeza\u2014. \u00bfTe quejas de lo dura que es tu vida? \u00bfCrees que es muy duro bailar para ellos mientras nosotros estamos ah\u00ed fuera arriesg\u00e1ndonos a que los zumbadores nos coman vivos?\n\n\u2014No ten\u00edas por qu\u00e9 volver, Kathy...\n\n\u2014\u00a1C\u00e1llate! \u2014Kathryn le golpe\u00f3 la cabeza contra el suelo. Estaba demasiado furiosa para preocuparse por el fuego\u2014. Todas las noches voy al bosque y veo que le arrancan los brazos a la gente, solo para que los emim no vengan aqu\u00ed y os deg\u00fcellen a todos. Y todo para que t\u00fa puedas seguir jugando a las cartas y haciendo virguer\u00edas con tus cintas. No quiero volver a ser como t\u00fa, \u00bfme oyes? \u00a1Los refas han visto algo m\u00e1s importante en m\u00ed!\n\nJulian se llev\u00f3 a 16 afuera. Intent\u00e9 recoger las cartas, pero Kathryn se me adelant\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Buena idea, 40 \u2014dijo, furiosa\u2014. D\u00e9mosle una lecci\u00f3n a esa asquerosa casaca amarilla.\n\nLanz\u00f3 toda la baraja a las llamas.\n\nLas consecuencias fueron inmediatas. Liss dio un grito espantoso, desgarrador. Jam\u00e1s hab\u00eda o\u00eddo a ning\u00fan humano producir un sonido parecido. Se me pusieron los pelos de punta. Las cartas ardieron como hojas secas. Lizz intent\u00f3 rescatar una, pero le sujet\u00e9 la mu\u00f1eca.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Es demasiado tarde, Liss!\n\nNo me hizo caso. Meti\u00f3 una mano en el fuego, gritando una y otra vez \u00abNo, no\u00bb con voz ahogada.\n\nSin m\u00e1s combustible que la parafina derramada, el fuego no tard\u00f3 en apagarse. Liss se qued\u00f3 arrodillada, con las manos enrojecidas y brillantes, mirando fijamente los restos chamuscados. Ten\u00eda la tez gris\u00e1cea y los labios amoratados. Sollozaba desconsoladamente mientras se mec\u00eda adelante y atr\u00e1s. La abrac\u00e9 y me qued\u00e9 mirando el fuego como atontada. El cuerpo menudo de Liss se estremec\u00eda.\n\nSin sus cartas, Liss ya no podr\u00eda conectar con el \u00e9ter. Tendr\u00eda que ser muy fuerte para sobrevivir al shock.\n\nKathryn me agarr\u00f3 por el hombro.\n\n\u2014Si hubieras venido con nosotros, esto no habr\u00eda pasado. \u2014Se limpi\u00f3 la sangre de la nariz\u2014. Lev\u00e1ntate.\n\nMir\u00e9 a Kathryn y lanc\u00e9 una pizca de mi esp\u00edritu contra su mente. Ella se encogi\u00f3, apart\u00e1ndose de m\u00ed.\n\n\u2014No te me acerques \u2014dije.\n\nEl humo me escoc\u00eda los ojos, pero no desvi\u00e9 la mirada. Kathryn intent\u00f3 re\u00edr, pero empez\u00f3 a sangrarle la nariz.\n\n\u2014Eres un monstruo. \u00bfQu\u00e9 eres, una especie de furia?\n\n\u2014Las furias no pueden afectar el \u00e9ter.\n\nPar\u00f3 de re\u00edr.\n\nSe oy\u00f3 un grito ahogado al otro lado de la cortina, y Suhail irrumpi\u00f3 en la choza apartando a empujones a los aterrorizados actores. Mir\u00f3 alrededor: el humo, el desorden. Kathryn se arrodill\u00f3 y agach\u00f3 la cabeza.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 quieta. Suhail me agarr\u00f3 por el pelo y acerc\u00f3 mi cara a la suya.\n\n\u2014Vas a morir \u2014dijo\u2014. Hoy.\n\nSe le pusieron los ojos rojos.\n\nEntonces comprend\u00ed que lo dec\u00eda en serio.\n\nEl portero de d\u00eda se qued\u00f3 mirando cuando Suhail pas\u00f3 tirando de mi mu\u00f1eca. Me dol\u00eda la garganta y ten\u00eda sangre en las mejillas. Me arrastr\u00f3 por la escalera y llam\u00f3 a la puerta del Custodio.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Arcturus!\n\nO\u00ed un repique de campanas a lo lejos. Liss hab\u00eda dicho que el Custodio me matar\u00eda por llegar pasado el amanecer. \u00bfQu\u00e9 me har\u00eda por resistirme a que me detuvieran?\n\nSe abri\u00f3 la puerta, y la imponente silueta del Custodio se destac\u00f3 contra la penumbra de la habitaci\u00f3n. Sus ojos eran dos agujeritos de luz. Me qued\u00e9 paralizada. Me hab\u00edan comido el aura, y eso me hab\u00eda provocado una especie de ataque epil\u00e9ptico. No sent\u00eda el \u00e9ter. Nada. Si mi guardi\u00e1n intentaba matarme en ese momento, yo no podr\u00eda hacer nada para evitarlo.\n\n\u2014Ya la hemos encontrado. \u2014Suhail me dio un empuj\u00f3n\u2014. Estaba escondida en el Poblado. Ha intentado provocar un incendio.\n\nEl Custodio nos mir\u00f3 alternadamente. Los indicios saltaban a la vista: los ojos de Suhail, mis mejillas manchadas de sangre.\n\n\u2014Te has cebado en ella \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014Tengo derecho a cebarme en los humanos.\n\n\u2014En esta no. Te has excedido. A la soberana de sangre no le gustar\u00e1 tu falta de comedimiento.\n\nNo pod\u00eda verle la cara a Suhail, pero supuse que deb\u00eda de estar sonriendo con desd\u00e9n.\n\nSe produjo un silencio, y tos\u00ed: una tos seca, \u00e1spera. Temblaba de pies a cabeza. El Custodio se fij\u00f3 en el desgarr\u00f3n de mi blus\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n ha hecho eso?\n\nPermanec\u00ed callada. El Custodio se agach\u00f3 para ponerse a mi nivel.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n ha sido? \u2014Su voz me produjo un estremecimiento en el pecho\u2014. \u00bfUn casaca roja?\n\nAsent\u00ed con un lev\u00edsimo movimiento de cabeza. El Custodio mir\u00f3 a Suhail.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPermites a los casacas rojas violar a humanos durante tu guardia?\n\n\u2014No me importa qu\u00e9 m\u00e9todos empleen.\n\n\u2014No queremos que se reproduzcan, Suhail. No tenemos tiempo ni medios para encargarnos de un embarazo.\n\n\u2014Las pastillas los esterilizan. Adem\u00e1s, de sus fornicaciones se encarga el Capataz.\n\n\u2014Har\u00e1s lo que te ordene.\n\n\u2014Sin duda. \u2014Suhail me mir\u00f3 con aquellos espeluznantes ojos rojos\u2014. Pero volvamos a lo que nos ocupa. P\u00eddele perd\u00f3n a tu amo, 40.\n\n\u2014No \u2014dije.\n\nMe dio un bofet\u00f3n. Me tambale\u00e9 hacia un lado y di contra la pared. Ve\u00eda manchas de colores.\n\n\u2014\u00a1P\u00eddele perd\u00f3n a tu amo, XX-59-40!\n\n\u2014Tendr\u00e1s que golpearme mucho m\u00e1s fuerte.\n\nAlz\u00f3 una mano, dispuesto a satisfacerme; pero antes de que pudiera pegarme, el Custodio le sujet\u00f3 el brazo.\n\n\u2014Ya me encargar\u00e9 de ella en privado \u2014dijo\u2014. No te corresponde a ti castigarla. Despierta al Capataz y ocupaos del alboroto. No quiero que estos sucesos alteren las horas de sol.\n\nSe miraron fijamente. Suhail solt\u00f3 un d\u00e9bil gru\u00f1ido, se dio la vuelta y sali\u00f3 por la puerta. El Custodio lo vio marchar. Al cabo de un momento me cogi\u00f3 por el hombro y me hizo entrar en la habitaci\u00f3n.\n\nTodo estaba como siempre: las cortinas corridas, el fuego en la chimenea. En el gram\u00f3fono sonaba \u00abMr. Sandman\u00bb. La cama, tan c\u00f3moda y caliente. Me habr\u00eda gustado tumbarme, pero ten\u00eda que permanecer de pie. El Custodio cerr\u00f3 la puerta con llave y se sent\u00f3 en su butaca. Esper\u00e9; todav\u00eda estaba mareada del golpe que hab\u00eda recibido.\n\n\u2014Ven aqu\u00ed.\n\nNo tuve m\u00e1s remedio que obedecer. El Custodio me mir\u00f3; incluso sentado era casi tan alto como yo. Ten\u00eda los ojos tenues y transparentes, como el licor de chartreuse.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTe atrae la muerte, Paige? \u2014No le contest\u00e9\u2014. No me importa lo que pienses de m\u00ed, pero en esta ciudad hay ciertas normas que debes obedecer. Una de ellas es el toque de queda.\n\nSegu\u00ed sin decir nada. No pensaba darle la satisfacci\u00f3n de asustarme.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo era ese casaca roja?\n\n\u2014Moreno. Unos veinte a\u00f1os. \u2014Mi voz sonaba ronca\u2014. Hab\u00eda otro chico que se le parec\u00eda, 16. Y una chica, Kathryn.\n\nMientras hablaba, un fuerte espasmo me sacudi\u00f3 el est\u00f3mago. Chivarse a un refa era vergonzoso. Entonces record\u00e9 la cara de Liss y su dolor, y mi determinaci\u00f3n se vio fortalecida.\n\n\u2014Ya s\u00e9 qui\u00e9nes son. \u2014El Custodio dirigi\u00f3 la mirada hacia el fuego\u2014. Son hermanos; m\u00e9diums los dos. XIX-49-16 y 17. Est\u00e1n aqu\u00ed desde que eran bastante m\u00e1s j\u00f3venes que t\u00fa. \u2014Entrelaz\u00f3 las manos\u2014. Me asegurar\u00e9 de que nunca m\u00e1s se les permita hacerte da\u00f1o.\n\nDeber\u00eda haberle dado las gracias, pero no lo hice.\n\n\u2014Si\u00e9ntate \u2014continu\u00f3\u2014. Tu aura se regenerar\u00e1.\n\nMe dej\u00e9 caer en la otra butaca. Empezaban a dolerme las costillas y las piernas. El Custodio me observaba.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTienes sed?\n\n\u2014No.\n\n\u2014\u00bfHambre?\n\n\u2014No.\n\n\u2014Debes de tener hambre. Esas gachas que preparan los actores hacen m\u00e1s mal que bien.\n\n\u2014No tengo hambre.\n\nEra mentira. El _skilly_ no era mucho m\u00e1s que agua, y mi est\u00f3mago anhelaba algo sustancioso y caliente.\n\n\u2014Es una l\u00e1stima. \u2014El Custodio se\u00f1al\u00f3 la mesilla de noche\u2014. Te hab\u00eda preparado un poco de comida.\n\nLa hab\u00eda visto nada m\u00e1s entrar. Hab\u00eda dado por hecho que la bandeja era para \u00e9l, pero entonces record\u00e9 de qu\u00e9 se alimentaba. Claro que no era para \u00e9l.\n\nComo no me mov\u00eda, el Custodio me puso la bandeja y unos pesados cubiertos de plata en el regazo. Mir\u00e9 la comida y sent\u00ed mareo. Huevos pasados por agua, partidos por la mitad de modo que se derramaba la yema, dorada y caliente. Un plato de cristal de cebada perlada, con pi\u00f1ones y unas gruesas jud\u00edas negras que brillaban como gotas de \u00f3nix. Una pera mondada, empapada en co\u00f1ac. Un racimo de orondas uvas negras. Pan integral con mantequilla.\n\n\u2014C\u00f3metelo.\n\nApret\u00e9 los pu\u00f1os.\n\n\u2014Tienes que comer, Paige.\n\nEstaba decidida a desobedecerle, a tirarle la bandeja por encima; pero estaba mareada, ten\u00eda la boca seca y lo \u00fanico que quer\u00eda era comerme aquella maldita comida. Cog\u00ed la cuchara y tom\u00e9 un poco de cebada. Las alubias estaban calientes; los pi\u00f1ones, dulces y prietos. Sent\u00ed un alivio intenso, y mi dolor de est\u00f3mago empez\u00f3 a disminuir.\n\nEl Custodio volvi\u00f3 a su asiento. Me observ\u00f3 en silencio mientras yo com\u00eda. Notaba el peso de su mirada, penetrante y abrasadora. Cuando hube terminado, dej\u00e9 la bandeja en el suelo. Todav\u00eda notaba el calor del co\u00f1ac en la lengua.\n\n\u2014Gracias \u2014dije.\n\nHabr\u00eda preferido no decirlo, pero ten\u00eda que decir algo. El Custodio tamborile\u00f3 con los dedos en el brazo de la butaca.\n\n\u2014Ma\u00f1ana por la noche quiero retomar tu entrenamiento \u2014dijo\u2014. \u00bfTienes alguna objeci\u00f3n?\n\n\u2014No tengo alternativa.\n\n\u2014\u00bfY si la tuvieras?\n\n\u2014No la tengo \u2014insist\u00ed\u2014, as\u00ed que no importa.\n\n\u2014Hablo hipot\u00e9ticamente. Si pudieras elegir, si pudieras controlar tu destino, \u00bfseguir\u00edas entrenando conmigo, o preferir\u00edas presentarte al siguiente examen sin m\u00e1s preparaci\u00f3n?\n\nMis labios iban a contestar con dureza, pero me mord\u00ed la lengua.\n\n\u2014No lo s\u00e9 \u2014dije.\n\nEl Custodio ech\u00f3 m\u00e1s le\u00f1a al fuego.\n\n\u2014Debes de encontrarte ante un dilema. Tu c\u00f3digo moral dice \u00abno\u00bb, pero tu instinto de supervivencia dice \u00abs\u00ed\u00bb.\n\n\u2014Ya s\u00e9 pelear. Soy m\u00e1s fuerte de lo que parece.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, es verdad. Tu huida del Capataz da testimonio de tu fuerza. Y tu don es una gran baza, desde luego: ni siquiera los refa\u00edtas esperar\u00edan que un segundo esp\u00edritu invadiera su onirosaje. Tienes el factor sorpresa a tu favor. \u2014El fuego se reflejaba en sus ojos\u2014. Pero primero tienes que vencer tus l\u00edmites. Hay una raz\u00f3n por la que te cuesta tanto abandonar tu cuerpo: todos tus movimientos est\u00e1n excesivamente controlados. Tus m\u00fasculos est\u00e1n constantemente en tensi\u00f3n, preparados para hacerte correr; es como si percibieras peligro hasta en el aire que respiras. Resulta doloroso verlo; es peor que ver dar caza a un ciervo. Al menos un ciervo puede correr hacia su manada. \u2014Se inclin\u00f3 hacia delante\u2014. \u00bfD\u00f3nde est\u00e1 tu manada, Paige Mahoney?\n\nNo supe qu\u00e9 responder. Entend\u00eda a qu\u00e9 se refer\u00eda, pero mi manada, mi reba\u00f1o, eran Jax y el resto de la banda. Y no pod\u00eda decir ni una sola palabra de su existencia.\n\n\u2014No tengo ninguna \u2014dije\u2014. Soy un lobo solitario.\n\nNo se dej\u00f3 enga\u00f1ar.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n te ha ense\u00f1ado a trepar por los edificios? \u00bfQui\u00e9n te ha ense\u00f1ado a disparar un arma? \u00bfQui\u00e9n te ayud\u00f3 a adentrarte en el \u00e9ter, a desplazar tu esp\u00edritu de su ubicaci\u00f3n natural?\n\n\u2014Aprend\u00ed yo sola.\n\n\u2014Mientes.\n\nMeti\u00f3 una mano bajo la butaca. Me puse en tensi\u00f3n. Mi mochila de emergencia. Una de las correas colgaba de un hilo.\n\n\u2014Podr\u00edas haber muerto la noche que huiste del Capataz. Si no pereciste esa noche fue solo porque tu mochila se enganch\u00f3 con una cuerda de tender cuando perdiste el conocimiento y evit\u00f3 que cayeras. Cuando me enter\u00e9 de lo ocurrido, sent\u00ed curiosidad.\n\nAbri\u00f3 la cremallera de la mochila. Apret\u00e9 las mand\u00edbulas. Lo que hab\u00eda all\u00ed dentro era m\u00edo, no suyo.\n\n\u2014Quinina \u2014dijo el Custodio hurgando en el interior\u2014. Adrenalina, dexanfetamina y cafe\u00edna. Medicamentos b\u00e1sicos. Somn\u00edferos. Hasta un arma de fuego. \u2014Sac\u00f3 mi pistola\u2014. Esa noche ibas muy bien preparada, Paige. No como los otros.\n\nMe estremec\u00ed. Ni rastro del panfleto. O lo hab\u00eda escondido en alg\u00fan sitio, o hab\u00eda ido a parar a otras manos.\n\n\u2014Seg\u00fan tu documento de identidad, eres oxista, camarera de un bar de ox\u00edgeno. Por lo que me ha contado el Capataz de las ciudadelas de Scion, el salario en esos bares es bajo. Eso me lleva a pensar que estos art\u00edculos no los compraste t\u00fa. \u2014Hizo una pausa\u2014. \u00bfQui\u00e9n los compr\u00f3?\n\n\u2014Eso no es asunto tuyo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSe los robaste a tu padre?\n\n\u2014No pienso decirte nada m\u00e1s. Mi vida antes de llegar aqu\u00ed no te pertenece.\n\nEl Custodio cavil\u00f3 un momento antes de volver a mirarme a los ojos.\n\n\u2014Tienes raz\u00f3n \u2014dijo\u2014, pero ahora tu vida s\u00ed me pertenece.\n\nHinqu\u00e9 las u\u00f1as en la butaca.\n\n\u2014Si est\u00e1s abierta a plantearte el concepto general de la supervivencia, empezaremos a entrenar de nuevo ma\u00f1ana. Pero tu instrucci\u00f3n incluir\u00e1 un aspecto nuevo. \u2014Apunt\u00f3 a mi butaca con la barbilla y a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014: Todas las noches te sentar\u00e1s ah\u00ed y hablar\u00e1s conmigo al menos durante una hora.\n\n\u2014Prefiero morir \u2014dije sin pensarlo.\n\n\u2014Bueno, puedes morir si quieres. Tengo entendido que si fumas suficiente \u00e1ster morado, quedar\u00e1s atrapada en tu onirosaje y tu cuerpo se marchitar\u00e1 por falta de agua. \u2014Se\u00f1al\u00f3 la puerta\u2014. Vete, si quieres. Mu\u00e9rete. No vuelvas a mirarme. No veo ninguna raz\u00f3n para prolongar tu sufrimiento.\n\n\u2014\u00bfNo se enfadar\u00e1 la soberana de sangre?\n\n\u2014Es posible que s\u00ed.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTe importa?\n\n\u2014Nashira es mi prometida, no mi guardiana. Ella no influye en c\u00f3mo trato a los humanos que tengo a mi cargo.\n\n\u2014Y \u00bfc\u00f3mo piensas tratarme?\n\n\u2014Como mi alumna, no como mi esclava.\n\nGir\u00e9 la cabeza y apret\u00e9 las mand\u00edbulas. No quer\u00eda ser su alumna. No quer\u00eda volverme como \u00e9l, jugar en su terreno, atacar a mis semejantes.\n\nNotaba un d\u00e9bil escozor de los sentidos: estaba empezando a sentir de nuevo el \u00e9ter.\n\n\u2014Si me tratas como a una alumna \u2014dije\u2014, yo quiero tratarte como a un mentor, y no como a un amo.\n\n\u2014Me parece un trato justo. Pero a los mentores hay que mostrarles respeto. Espero eso de ti. Y tambi\u00e9n espero que todas las noches te quedes conmigo una hora haci\u00e9ndome compa\u00f1\u00eda.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Tienes potencial para ir del \u00e9ter al mundo corp\u00f3reo a tu antojo \u2014respondi\u00f3\u2014. Pero si no aprendes a quedarte quieta, incluso ante la presencia de tus enemigos, no te servir\u00e1 de mucho. Y no vivir\u00e1s mucho tiempo.\n\n\u2014Y t\u00fa no quieres que muera.\n\n\u2014No. Creo que ser\u00eda un desperdicio terrible de una vida singular. Tienes un gran potencial, pero necesitas un mentor.\n\nSus palabras me produjeron retortijones. Yo ya ten\u00eda un mentor. Jaxon Hall era mi mentor.\n\n\u2014Me gustar\u00eda consultarlo con la almohada \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014Por supuesto. \u2014Se levant\u00f3, y repar\u00e9 una vez m\u00e1s en lo alto que era. Yo ni siquiera le llegaba por los hombros\u2014. Ten en cuenta que s\u00ed puedes decidir. Pero te recomiendo, como mentor, que pienses en quienes te dieron esto. \u2014Con una sacudida de la mu\u00f1eca, me lanz\u00f3 la mochila\u2014. \u00bfQuerr\u00edan ellos que murieras en vano, o preferir\u00edan verte pelear?\n\nEl granizo golpeaba el tejado de la torre. Me frot\u00e9 las manos ante la l\u00e1mpara de parafina; ten\u00eda los labios y los dedos entumecidos de fr\u00edo.\n\nTen\u00eda que valorar la oferta del Custodio. No quer\u00eda trabajar con \u00e9l, pero necesitaba aprender a sobrevivir en aquel lugar, al menos hasta que encontrara la forma de volver a Londres. De volver con Nick, con Jax. De volver a escapar de los _centis_ , a dedicarme a la mimetodelincuencia; a estafar a Didion Waite y a birlarle esp\u00edritus, a mofarme de Hector y de sus chicos. Eso era lo que quer\u00eda. Aprender m\u00e1s cosas sobre mi don quiz\u00e1 me ayudara a salir de all\u00ed.\n\nJaxon siempre hab\u00eda dicho que ser onir\u00e1mbulo significaba algo m\u00e1s que tener un sexto sentido agudizado. Yo ten\u00eda potencial para pasearme por cualquier sitio, incluso por otros onirosajes. Lo hab\u00eda demostrado al matar a aquellos dos metrovigilantes. El Custodio quiz\u00e1 pudiera ense\u00f1arme m\u00e1s cosas; pero yo me resist\u00eda a que fuera mi maestro. \u00c9l y yo \u00e9ramos enemigos naturales; no ten\u00eda sentido fingir lo contrario. Y, sin embargo, \u00e9l me hab\u00eda observado mucho: c\u00f3mo me conten\u00eda, mi tensi\u00f3n, mi vigilancia. Jax siempre me dec\u00eda que ten\u00eda que soltarme, dejarme llevar, pero eso no significaba que pudiera confiar en el hombre que me ten\u00eda encerrada en una habitaci\u00f3n oscura y fr\u00eda.\n\nVaci\u00e9 la mochila alumbr\u00e1ndome con la d\u00e9bil luz de la l\u00e1mpara. La mayor\u00eda de mis objetos personales segu\u00edan all\u00ed: las jeringuillas (vac\u00edas), el material, la pistola (sin munici\u00f3n, por supuesto). El tel\u00e9fono me lo hab\u00edan confiscado. Solo faltaba otra cosa: _Sobre los m\u00e9ritos de la antinaturalidad_.\n\nNot\u00e9 un hormigueo por todo el cuerpo. Si el Custodio se lo hubiera ense\u00f1ado a Nashira, ella me habr\u00eda llamado para interrogarme. Los refa\u00edtas ya deb\u00edan de conocer el panfleto, pero no hab\u00edan visto mi ejemplar.\n\nMe tumb\u00e9 en el colch\u00f3n procurando no lastimarme m\u00e1s las heridas y me tap\u00e9 hasta la barbilla. Los muelles rotos se me clavaban en los omoplatos. Hab\u00eda recibido tres golpes en la cabeza en tres minutos, y estaba cansada. Mir\u00e9 el mundo exterior a trav\u00e9s de los barrotes, con la esperanza de hallar all\u00ed la respuesta, pero no encontr\u00e9 nada. Solo el ineludible anochecer.\n\nCuando se puso el sol, son\u00f3 la campanada nocturna. Ya me hab\u00eda familiarizado con ese sonido; era como la alarma de un despertador. Para cuando me hube vestido, hab\u00eda tomado una decisi\u00f3n dif\u00edcil. Intentar\u00eda volver a entrenar con \u00e9l, si lo soportaba. Eso significar\u00eda someterme a una hora de conversaci\u00f3n, pero cre\u00eda poder aguantarlo. Cre\u00eda poder llenar esa hora de mentiras.\n\nEl Custodio me esperaba junto a la puerta. Me mir\u00f3 de arriba abajo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfYa has tomado una decisi\u00f3n?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed \u2014respond\u00ed manteniendo las distancias\u2014. Entrenar\u00e9 contigo, pero solo si admites no ser mi amo.\n\n\u2014Eres m\u00e1s sensata de lo que cre\u00eda. \u2014Me dio una chaqueta negra con bandas rosa en las mangas\u2014. Ponte esto. Lo necesitar\u00e1s para tu siguiente examen.\n\nMe puse la chaqueta y me la abroch\u00e9. El forro era grueso y abrigado. El Custodio me tendi\u00f3 una mano. En la palma ten\u00eda las tres pastillas. No las cog\u00ed.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPara qu\u00e9 sirve la verde?\n\n\u2014Eso no es asunto tuyo.\n\n\u2014Quiero saber para qu\u00e9 es. Nadie m\u00e1s la toma.\n\n\u2014Porque t\u00fa eres diferente. \u2014No retir\u00f3 la mano\u2014. Ya s\u00e9 que no te tomas las pastillas. No tengo ning\u00fan inconveniente en hacer que te las tomes por la fuerza.\n\n\u2014Me encantar\u00eda ver c\u00f3mo lo intentas.\n\nEscudri\u00f1\u00f3 mi cara, y se me pusieron los pelos de punta.\n\n\u2014Preferir\u00eda no tener que recurrir a eso \u2014dijo.\n\nYo sab\u00eda que era una batalla perdida. Pod\u00e9is llamarlo instinto criminal. Era como volver a estar en el mercado negro, peleando con Didion por Anne Naylor. Hab\u00eda cosas en las que el Custodio estaba dispuesto a transigir, pero esa no era una de ellas. Me dije que ya le llevar\u00eda a Duckett la pastilla verde del d\u00eda siguiente.\n\nMe tragu\u00e9 los comprimidos con un vaso de agua. El Custodio me cogi\u00f3 la barbilla con una mano enguantada.\n\n\u2014Hay una raz\u00f3n.\n\nGir\u00e9 la cabeza. \u00c9l me mir\u00f3 un momento, y a continuaci\u00f3n abri\u00f3 la puerta. Lo segu\u00ed por la escalera de caracol hasta los soportales. Unas estatuas de piedra grotescas montaban guardia en el patio. Hab\u00eda bajado la temperatura, y una fina capa de escarcha lo cubr\u00eda todo. Me abrac\u00e9 el torso para conservar el calor. El Custodio me gui\u00f3 al exterior, pero no salimos a la calle, sino que tomamos la direcci\u00f3n opuesta; pasamos por una verja de hierro forjado y cruzamos una pasarela sobre un r\u00edo verde azulado. El reflejo intenso de la luna brillaba en la superficie del agua. Hab\u00eda parado de granizar, y el suelo estaba cubierto de hielo.\n\nMientras recorr\u00edamos un sendero de tierra, el Custodio se enroll\u00f3 una manga de la camisa. La herida de la primera vez le supuraba. Estaba empezando a cicatrizar, pero todav\u00eda no estaba curada.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSon venenosos? \u2014pregunt\u00e9\u2014. Los zumbadores.\n\n\u2014Los emim son portadores de una infecci\u00f3n llamada semimpulso, que si no se trata produce locura e incluso la muerte. Comen cualquier tipo de carne, fresca o podrida.\n\nVi que, mientras habl\u00e1bamos, la herida empezaba a curarse.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo lo haces? \u2014pregunt\u00e9, vencida por la curiosidad\u2014. Est\u00e1 cicatrizando.\n\n\u2014Utilizo tu aura.\n\nDi un respingo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo dices?\n\n\u2014Ya debes de saber que los refa\u00edtas nos alimentamos de aura. Para m\u00ed es m\u00e1s f\u00e1cil alimentarme cuando mi hu\u00e9sped no sabe que lo estoy haciendo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfHas comido de mi aura?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. \u2014Me mir\u00f3 y a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014: Pareces enfadada.\n\n\u2014Mi aura no te pertenece. \u2014Me apart\u00e9 de \u00e9l, asqueada\u2014. Ya me has arrebatado la libertad. No tienes ning\u00fan derecho a quitarme el aura.\n\n\u2014No te he quitado la suficiente para perjudicar tu don. Me cebo en los humanos a peque\u00f1as dosis, dejando tiempo para la regeneraci\u00f3n. Otros son menos considerados. Y cr\u00e9eme \u2014agreg\u00f3 mientras volv\u00eda a bajarse la manga\u2014, no te har\u00eda ninguna gracia que contrajera semimpulso en tu presencia.\n\nLo mir\u00e9, y \u00e9l no se resisti\u00f3 a mi examen.\n\n\u2014Tus ojos. \u2014Me fij\u00e9 en sus ojos, a la vez hechizada y repelida\u2014. Por eso cambian.\n\nNo lo neg\u00f3. Ya no ten\u00eda los ojos amarillos, sino de un rojo oscuro con un resplandor tenue. El color de mi aura.\n\n\u2014No era mi intenci\u00f3n ofenderte \u2014dijo\u2014, pero as\u00ed es como debe ser.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9? \u00bfPorque t\u00fa lo dices?\n\nSigui\u00f3 andando y no me contest\u00f3. Lo segu\u00ed. Me pon\u00eda enferma pensar que mi guardi\u00e1n pod\u00eda alimentarse de m\u00ed.\n\nAl cabo de unos minutos el Custodio se detuvo. Nos hall\u00e1bamos rodeados de una neblina azulada. Me sub\u00ed el cuello de la chaqueta.\n\n\u2014Lo notas \u2014dijo el Custodio\u2014. El fr\u00edo. \u00bfAlguna vez te has preguntado por qu\u00e9 aqu\u00ed hay escarcha a principios de primavera?\n\n\u2014Estamos en Inglaterra. Hace fr\u00edo.\n\n\u2014No tanto como aqu\u00ed. F\u00edjate bien. \u2014Me cogi\u00f3 una mano y me quit\u00f3 el guante. Me ardieron los dedos de fr\u00edo\u2014. Por aqu\u00ed cerca hay un punto fr\u00edo.\n\nVolv\u00ed a ponerme el guante.\n\n\u2014\u00bfUn punto fr\u00edo?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Se forman cuando un esp\u00edritu ha morado mucho tiempo en un determinado sitio, creando una abertura entre el \u00e9ter y el mundo corp\u00f3reo. \u00bfNunca te has fijado en el fr\u00edo que hace cuando hay esp\u00edritus cerca?\n\n\u2014Supongo que s\u00ed.\n\nEra verdad que los esp\u00edritus me produc\u00edan sensaci\u00f3n de fr\u00edo, pero no le hab\u00eda dado mucha importancia.\n\n\u2014En teor\u00eda, los esp\u00edritus no moran entre los dos mundos. Absorben calor para sustentarse. Sheol I est\u00e1 rodeada de puntos fr\u00edos; aqu\u00ed la actividad et\u00e9rea es mucho m\u00e1s elevada que en la ciudadela. Por eso los emim se sienten atra\u00eddos hacia nosotros m\u00e1s que hacia la poblaci\u00f3n amaur\u00f3tica de Londres. \u2014Se\u00f1al\u00f3 la franja de tierra que ten\u00edamos delante\u2014. \u00bfC\u00f3mo crees que podr\u00edas encontrar el epicentro de un punto fr\u00edo?\n\n\u2014La mayor\u00eda de los videntes ver\u00edan al esp\u00edritu \u2014dije\u2014. Tienen el tercer ojo.\n\n\u2014Pero t\u00fa no.\n\n\u2014No.\n\n\u2014Los que carecen de visi\u00f3n tambi\u00e9n pueden hacerlo. \u00bfHas o\u00eddo hablar de la rabdomancia?\n\n\u2014Tengo entendido que no sirve para nada \u2014dije. Jax me lo hab\u00eda dicho infinidad de veces\u2014. Los rabdom\u00e1nticos afirman poder encontrar el camino de regreso desde cualquier lugar. Dicen que cuando se pierden pueden lanzar _numa_ , y que los esp\u00edritus los orientan en la direcci\u00f3n correcta. Pero no funciona.\n\n\u2014Quiz\u00e1 tengas raz\u00f3n, pero no puedes decir que no sirve para nada. Todos los tipos de clarividencia sirven para algo.\n\nNot\u00e9 que me ard\u00edan las mejillas. No era verdad que creyera que los rabdom\u00e1nticos no serv\u00edan para nada, pero Jax siempre me hab\u00eda dicho que eran unos in\u00fatiles. No pod\u00edas trabajar para Jaxon Hall y no compartir sus opiniones sobre esas cuestiones.\n\n\u2014Entonces \u00bfpara qu\u00e9 es \u00fatil? \u2014pregunt\u00e9. El Custodio me mir\u00f3 y no dijo nada\u2014. Se supone que tienes que instruirme. Instr\u00fayeme.\n\n\u2014Muy bien. Si te interesa aprender... \u2014El Custodio ech\u00f3 a andar\u2014. La mayor\u00eda de los rabdom\u00e1nticos creen que cuando sus _numa_ caen, se\u00f1alan hacia su casa, hacia un tesoro escondido o hacia lo que sea que est\u00e9n buscando. Eso acaba volvi\u00e9ndolos locos. Porque a lo que apuntan sus _numa_ no es al oro, sino al epicentro del punto fr\u00edo m\u00e1s cercano. A veces recorren kil\u00f3metros, y no hallan lo que buscan. Pero s\u00ed encuentran algo: una puerta secreta. Lo que no saben es qu\u00e9 hay que hacer para abrirla.\n\nSe detuvo. Yo estaba temblando. Hac\u00eda fr\u00edo y el aire estaba enrarecido. Respir\u00e9 hondo.\n\n\u2014Los seres vivos no soportan bien los puntos fr\u00edos \u2014dijo\u2014. Toma.\n\nMe dio una petaca de plata con tap\u00f3n de rosca. Me qued\u00e9 mir\u00e1ndola.\n\n\u2014Es solo agua, Paige.\n\nBeb\u00ed. Estaba demasiado sedienta para rechazarla. El Custodio cogi\u00f3 la petaca y se la guard\u00f3. El agua me despej\u00f3 la cabeza.\n\nLa tierra ante nosotros estaba helada, dura, como si fuera pleno invierno. Me casta\u00f1eteaban los dientes. El esp\u00edritu responsable de aquel punto fr\u00edo rondaba por all\u00ed cerca. Como no se nos acercaba, el Custodio se puso en cuclillas al borde del hielo, sac\u00f3 una daga y se la acerc\u00f3 al brazo. Di un paso adelante.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 haces?\n\n\u2014Voy a abrir la puerta.\n\nSe hizo un corte en la mu\u00f1eca. Las gotas de ectoplasma cayeron sobre el hielo. El punto fr\u00edo se agriet\u00f3 por el medio, y el aire se volvi\u00f3 blanco. Me vi rodeada de formas y voces. \u00ab\u00a1So\u00f1adora! \u00a1So\u00f1adora!\u00bb Me tap\u00e9 los o\u00eddos, pero segu\u00eda oy\u00e9ndolas. \u00ab\u00a1So\u00f1adora, no vayas m\u00e1s all\u00e1! \u00a1Da media vuelta!\u00bb Levant\u00e9 la cabeza, y volv\u00eda a estar rodeada de oscuridad.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPaige?\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 ha pasado?\n\nEstaba mareada y me dol\u00eda la cabeza.\n\n\u2014He abierto el punto fr\u00edo.\n\n\u2014Con tu sangre.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\nVi que la mu\u00f1eca hab\u00eda dejado de sangrarle. Todav\u00eda ten\u00eda los ojos rojos, pues mi aura segu\u00eda cur\u00e1ndole las heridas.\n\n\u2014As\u00ed que los puntos fr\u00edos se pueden abrir \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa no puedes. Yo s\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Porque los puntos fr\u00edos llevan al \u00e9ter. \u2014Hice una pausa\u2014. \u00bfPuedes utilizarlos para llegar al Inframundo?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. As\u00ed fue como llegamos aqu\u00ed. Imagina que hay dos velos que separan el \u00e9ter y tu mundo, el mundo de la vida. Entre esos velos est\u00e1 el Inframundo, un estado intermedio entre la vida y la muerte. Cuando los rabdom\u00e1nticos encuentran un punto fr\u00edo, encuentran la manera de moverse entre ambos velos. Para entrar en mi mundo, el reino de los refa\u00edtas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfLos humanos pueden ir?\n\n\u2014Int\u00e9ntalo.\n\nLo mir\u00e9. Apunt\u00f3 con la barbilla al punto fr\u00edo, y di un paso sobre el hielo. No sucedi\u00f3 nada.\n\n\u2014La materia corp\u00f3rea no puede sobrevivir m\u00e1s all\u00e1 del velo \u2014dijo el Custodio\u2014. Tu cuerpo no puede trasponer ese umbral.\n\n\u2014\u00bfY los rabdom\u00e1nticos?\n\n\u2014Ellos tambi\u00e9n son de carne y hueso.\n\n\u2014Entonces \u00bfpor qu\u00e9 lo abres?\n\nEl sol ya se hab\u00eda puesto.\n\n\u2014Porque ha llegado la hora \u2014dijo\u2014 de que te enfrentes al Inframundo. No entrar\u00e1s, pero lo ver\u00e1s.\n\nEmpez\u00f3 a sudarme la frente. Me apart\u00e9 del hielo. Percib\u00eda esp\u00edritus por todas partes.\n\n\u2014La noche es la hora de los esp\u00edritus. \u2014El Custodio alz\u00f3 la mirada hacia la luna\u2014. Es cuando los velos son m\u00e1s finos. Los puntos fr\u00edos son como desgarrones en una tela.\n\nFij\u00e9 la vista en el punto fr\u00edo. Hab\u00eda algo all\u00ed que hac\u00eda vibrar mi esp\u00edritu.\n\n\u2014Paige, esta noche tendr\u00e1s dos tareas \u2014dijo el Custodio volvi\u00e9ndose hacia m\u00ed\u2014. Ambas pondr\u00e1n a prueba los l\u00edmites de tu cordura. \u00bfMe creer\u00e1s si te digo que te ayudar\u00e1n?\n\n\u2014Lo dudo \u2014respond\u00ed\u2014, pero adelante.\n\nEl Custodio no me revel\u00f3 ad\u00f3nde \u00edbamos. Me gui\u00f3 por otro sendero que discurr\u00eda por los jardines de Magdalen. Notaba esp\u00edritus por todas partes: en el aire, en el agua; esp\u00edritus de los difuntos que en vida hab\u00edan paseado por all\u00ed. No los o\u00eda; pero, como se hab\u00eda abierto un punto fr\u00edo, los percib\u00eda con tanta intensidad como si fueran presencias vivas.\n\nMe mantuve cerca del Custodio a mi pesar. Supon\u00eda que, si alguno de aquellos esp\u00edritus era maligno, \u00e9l podr\u00eda repelerlo m\u00e1s eficazmente que yo.\n\nLa oscuridad se intensificaba a medida que nos adentr\u00e1bamos en los jardines y nos alej\u00e1bamos de los faroles de Magdalen. El Custodio guard\u00f3 silencio cuando atravesamos una pradera h\u00fameda donde, en lugar de c\u00e9sped, hab\u00eda malas hierbas que me llegaban por las rodillas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfAd\u00f3nde vamos? \u2014pregunt\u00e9, con las botas y los calcetines empapados.\n\nEl Custodio no me contest\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Dijiste que era tu alumna, no tu esclava \u2014le record\u00e9\u2014. Quiero saber ad\u00f3nde vamos.\n\n\u2014Al interior del jard\u00edn.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\nVolvi\u00f3 a callar.\n\nCada vez hac\u00eda m\u00e1s fr\u00edo, un fr\u00edo antinatural. Tras lo que me parecieron horas, el Custodio se par\u00f3 por fin y se\u00f1al\u00f3.\n\n\u2014All\u00ed.\n\nAl principio no lo vi. Cuando mis ojos se acostumbraron, el contorno del animal apareci\u00f3 bajo la tenue luz de la luna. Era un ser de cuatro patas con pelaje sedoso. Ten\u00eda el cuello blanco como la nieve, y una cara estrecha y alargada, con ojos oscuros y un peque\u00f1o hocico negro. Me pregunt\u00e9 cu\u00e1l de los dos deb\u00eda de parecer m\u00e1s sorprendido.\n\nUna cierva. No ve\u00eda ciervos desde que viv\u00eda en Irlanda, cuando mis abuelos me llevaron a las monta\u00f1as Galtee. Me invadi\u00f3 un entusiasmo infantil.\n\n\u2014Qu\u00e9 bonita es \u2014observ\u00e9.\n\nEl Custodio fue hacia la cierva, atada a un poste.\n\n\u2014Se llama Nuala.\n\n\u2014Es un nombre irland\u00e9s.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, el diminutivo de Fionnuala. Significa hombros blancos, u hombros claros.\n\nVolv\u00ed a fijarme y vi que ten\u00eda dos grandes manchas blancas a ambos lados del cuello.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n le puso ese nombre?\n\nEn Scion era arriesgado ponerles nombres irlandeses a los ni\u00f1os o las mascotas. Pod\u00edan sospechar que simpatizabas con los alborotadores de las revueltas de Molly.\n\n\u2014Fui yo.\n\nLe solt\u00f3 el collar que llevaba alrededor del cuello. Nuala le dio un empujoncito con el morro. Cre\u00ed que echar\u00eda a correr, pero se qued\u00f3 quieta mirando al Custodio. \u00c9l le habl\u00f3 en un idioma que no supe identificar y le acarici\u00f3 el cuello; me pareci\u00f3 que ella lo escuchaba, cautivada.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQuieres darle de comer? \u2014El Custodio se sac\u00f3 una manzana roja de la manga\u2014. Le encantan las manzanas.\n\nMe la lanz\u00f3. Nuala me mir\u00f3 y movi\u00f3 el hocico.\n\n\u2014Con cuidado \u2014dijo el Custodio\u2014. Se asusta f\u00e1cilmente cuando hay un punto fr\u00edo abierto cerca.\n\nYo no quer\u00eda asustarla, pero si no le ten\u00eda miedo al Custodio, \u00bfc\u00f3mo iba a ten\u00e9rmelo a m\u00ed? Estir\u00e9 el brazo ofreci\u00e9ndole la manzana. La cierva olfate\u00f3 el fruto. El Custodio dijo algo m\u00e1s, y entonces Nuala cogi\u00f3 la manzana.\n\n\u2014Tendr\u00e1s que perdonarla. Tiene mucha hambre. \u2014Le dio unas palmaditas en el cuello y sac\u00f3 otra manzana\u2014. Tengo muy pocas oportunidades de venir a verla.\n\n\u2014Pero si vive en Magdalen.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, pero he de tener cuidado. No est\u00e1 permitido tener animales dentro de la ciudad.\n\n\u2014Entonces \u00bfpor qu\u00e9 la tienes?\n\n\u2014Por la compa\u00f1\u00eda que me hace. Y por ti.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor m\u00ed?\n\n\u2014Nuala te estaba esperando. \u2014Se sent\u00f3 sobre una roca plana y dej\u00f3 que Nuala fuera hacia los \u00e1rboles\u2014. Eres onir\u00e1mbula. \u00bfQu\u00e9 significa eso para ti?\n\nNo me hab\u00eda llevado all\u00ed para dar de comer a una cierva.\n\n\u2014Que estoy en sinton\u00eda con el \u00e9ter.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 m\u00e1s?\n\n\u2014Puedo percibir otros onirosajes desde lejos. Y la actividad et\u00e9rea en general.\n\n\u2014Exactamente. Ese es tu don primario, lo esencial: una sensibilidad al \u00e9ter acentuada, una conciencia que no poseen la mayor\u00eda de los clarividentes. Proviene de tu cord\u00f3n arg\u00e9nteo, que es flexible. Te permite desplazar tu esp\u00edritu del centro de tu onirosaje, ensanchar tu percepci\u00f3n del mundo. Eso har\u00eda enloquecer a la mayor\u00eda de los clarividentes. Pero cuando entrenamos en la pradera, te anim\u00e9 a lanzar tu esp\u00edritu contra mi onirosaje. A atacarlo. \u2014Sus ojos ard\u00edan en la penumbra\u2014. Tienes potencial para hacer algo m\u00e1s que sencillamente percibir el \u00e9ter. Puedes alterarlo. Puedes alterar a otras personas.\n\nSegu\u00ed callada.\n\n\u2014Cuando eras m\u00e1s peque\u00f1a quiz\u00e1 pod\u00edas hacer da\u00f1o a otras personas. Quiz\u00e1 pod\u00edas ejercer presi\u00f3n sobre sus onirosajes. Quiz\u00e1 ellas advirtieran algo: les sangraba la nariz, se les nublaba la visi\u00f3n...\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\nNo ten\u00eda sentido negarlo, porque \u00e9l ya lo sab\u00eda.\n\n\u2014Algo cambi\u00f3 en el tren \u2014continu\u00f3\u2014. Tu vida peligraba. Tem\u00edas que te detuvieran. Y, por primera vez en tu vida, emergi\u00f3 ese poder que tienes dentro.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo te has enterado?\n\n\u2014Lleg\u00f3 un informe de que hab\u00edan matado a un metrovigilante. Sin derramamiento de sangre, sin arma alguna, sin que quedara ni una sola se\u00f1al en su cuerpo. Nashira supo al instante que aquello hab\u00eda sido obra de un onir\u00e1mbulo.\n\n\u2014Podr\u00eda haberlo hecho un duende.\n\n\u2014Los duendes siempre dejan una se\u00f1al. T\u00fa deber\u00edas saberlo.\n\nNot\u00e9 tirantez en las cicatrices de mi mano.\n\n\u2014Nashira quer\u00eda capturarte viva \u2014prosigui\u00f3 el Custodio\u2014. La DVN hace detenciones violentas y torpes, como muchos de nuestros casacas rojas. Cerca de la mitad de esas detenciones acaban en muerte. Y eso no pod\u00eda pasar contigo. A ti no pod\u00edamos perderte. Por eso Nashira envi\u00f3 al Capataz, su especialista en captura de clarividentes.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Porque quiere aprender tu secreto.\n\n\u2014No hay ning\u00fan secreto. Es lo que soy.\n\n\u2014Y tambi\u00e9n es lo que Nashira quiere ser. Le encantan los dones inusuales, entre ellos el tuyo.\n\n\u2014Pues \u00bfpor qu\u00e9 no me lo quita? Habr\u00eda podido matarme cuando mat\u00f3 a Seb. \u00bfPara qu\u00e9 esperar?\n\n\u2014Porque quiere entender el alcance de tus capacidades, pero no quiere esperar eternamente.\n\n\u2014No actuar\u00e9 para ti \u2014dije\u2014. Todav\u00eda no soy una bufona.\n\n\u2014No te he pedido que act\u00faes para m\u00ed. \u00bfQu\u00e9 necesidad hay? En la capilla vi de qu\u00e9 eres capaz. Lanzaste tu esp\u00edritu contra la mente de Aludra. Lo vi en la pradera, cuando entraste en la m\u00eda. Pero dime \u2014se inclin\u00f3 hacia m\u00ed, mir\u00e1ndome con sus ojos abrasadores\u2014, \u00bfhabr\u00edas podido poseernos a alguno de los dos?\n\nSe produjo un silencio, interrumpido solo por el ulular aflautado de un b\u00faho. Mir\u00e9 hacia arriba y vi la luna, envuelta en jirones de nube. Por un breve instante me vi transportada al despacho de Jax, la primera vez que abordamos el tema de la posesi\u00f3n.\n\n\u00abQuerida \u2014me hab\u00eda dicho\u2014, hasta ahora has sido una estrella. Qu\u00e9 digo, un luminar. Eres, sin ning\u00fan g\u00e9nero de duda, una joya, un Sello a punto de estallar; pero ahora me gustar\u00eda asignarte una nueva tarea. Una tarea que te pondr\u00e1 a prueba, pero que tambi\u00e9n te satisfar\u00e1. \u2014Me pidi\u00f3 que obligara a mi mente a entrar en la suya, que intentara controlar su cuerpo. Esa idea me hab\u00eda conmocionado. Hab\u00eda hecho un intento desganado, pero su mente era excesivamente compleja y yo no hab\u00eda podido sondearla\u2014. Bueno \u2014hab\u00eda dicho Jax dando una calada a su puro\u2014, ha valido la pena intentarlo, querida m\u00eda. Y ahora, vete. Hay cartas que repartir, y juegos a los que jugar.\u00bb\n\nQuiz\u00e1 lo habr\u00eda logrado. Si de veras hubiera querido, habr\u00eda podido apoderarme del cuerpo de Jax y apagar aquel maldito puro, pero esa capacidad era precisamente lo que me asustaba. Controlar a otro implicaba demasiada responsabilidad. Aun con la promesa de un aumento de sueldo. Deambular\u00eda por la mente de Londres, pero nunca la controlar\u00eda. Ni por todo el dinero del mundo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPaige?\n\nSal\u00ed de mi ensimismamiento.\n\n\u2014No \u2014dije\u2014. No habr\u00eda podido poseer a Aludra. Ni poseerte a ti.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 no?\n\n\u2014No puedo poseer a otra persona. Y mucho menos a un refa.\n\n\u2014Pero \u00bfte gustar\u00eda?\n\n\u2014No. No puedes obligarme a hacerlo.\n\n\u2014No tengo intenci\u00f3n de obligarte. Solo te estoy ofreciendo la oportunidad de \u00abampliar tus horizontes\u00bb, como dec\u00eds vosotros.\n\n\u2014Causando dolor.\n\n\u2014Si se hace bien, la posesi\u00f3n no tiene por qu\u00e9 causar dolor. No pretendo que poseas a un humano. Y menos esta noche, por supuesto.\n\n\u2014Entonces \u00bfqu\u00e9 quieres?\n\nMir\u00f3 a lo lejos, m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de la pradera, y yo lo imit\u00e9. La cierva tocaba unas flores con la pezu\u00f1a y las observaba oscilar.\n\n\u2014Nuala \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\nLa cierva baj\u00f3 la cabeza y olfate\u00f3 la hierba. Nunca me hab\u00eda planteado practicar la posesi\u00f3n con animales. La mente de los animales era muy diferente de la humana (menos compleja, menos consciente), pero eso tal vez lo hiciera a\u00fan m\u00e1s dif\u00edcil. Quiz\u00e1 ni siquiera fuera posible que yo encajara mi esp\u00edritu humano en el cuerpo de un animal. \u00bfPensar\u00eda como un humano cuando tuviera un onirosaje de animal? Y tambi\u00e9n me preocupaban otras cosas. \u00bfLe har\u00eda da\u00f1o a la cierva? \u00bfSe resistir\u00eda a mi infiltraci\u00f3n, o me dejar\u00eda entrar?\n\n\u2014No lo s\u00e9 \u2014dije\u2014. Es demasiado grande. A lo mejor no puedo controlarla.\n\n\u2014Buscar\u00e9 algo m\u00e1s peque\u00f1o.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 quieres sacar con esto exactamente? \u2014Como no contestaba, continu\u00e9\u2014: Para estar ofreci\u00e9ndome una oportunidad, insistes mucho.\n\n\u2014Quiero que aproveches esta oportunidad. No lo niego.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Porque quiero que sobrevivas.\n\nLe sostuve la mirada un momento, tratando de descifrarlo, pero no pude. Las caras de los refa\u00edtas ten\u00edan algo que dificultaba hacer conjeturas emocionales.\n\n\u2014De acuerdo \u2014ced\u00ed\u2014. Un animal m\u00e1s peque\u00f1o. Un insecto, un roedor, tal vez un p\u00e1jaro. Algo con conciencia limitada.\n\n\u2014Muy bien.\n\nIba a darse la vuelta, pero se par\u00f3. Me mir\u00f3 y se sac\u00f3 algo del bolsillo: un colgante con una cadena fina.\n\n\u2014Ponte esto \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\nSe march\u00f3 sin contestarme. Me sent\u00e9 sobre una roca peque\u00f1a, y contuve un escalofr\u00edo de emoci\u00f3n. Seguro que Jax lo habr\u00eda aprobado, aunque no ten\u00eda tan claro si Nick lo habr\u00eda hecho.\n\nMir\u00e9 el colgante. Ten\u00eda aproximadamente la longitud de mi pulgar, y estaba entretejido formando unas alas. Cuando lo acarici\u00e9 con un dedo, hubo un d\u00e9bil temblor en el \u00e9ter. Deb\u00eda de estar sublimado. Me pas\u00e9 la cadenilla por la cabeza.\n\nNuala volvi\u00f3 al cabo de un rato, cuando se cans\u00f3 de la hierba. Yo estaba acurrucada contra la roca, con las manos en los bolsillos de la chaqueta. Hac\u00eda un fr\u00edo terrible, y sal\u00edan nubes blancas de vaho de mi boca. \u00abHola\u00bb, dije. Nuala me olisque\u00f3 el pelo, como si tratara de averiguar qu\u00e9 era; luego dobl\u00f3 las patas y se acurruc\u00f3 a mi lado. Apoy\u00f3 la cabeza en mi regazo y dio una especie de bufido de satisfacci\u00f3n. Me quit\u00e9 los guantes y le acarici\u00e9 las orejas. La piel le ol\u00eda a almizcle. Notaba los latidos de su coraz\u00f3n, fuertes y constantes. Nunca hab\u00eda estado tan cerca de un animal salvaje. Intent\u00e9 imaginar qu\u00e9 deb\u00eda de sentirse siendo un cervato: sosteni\u00e9ndose sobre cuatro patas, viviendo en el bosque en estado salvaje.\n\nPero yo no viv\u00eda en estado salvaje. Hab\u00eda vivido m\u00e1s de una d\u00e9cada en una ciudadela de Scion, y hab\u00eda perdido todo mi salvajismo. Supon\u00eda que por eso me hab\u00eda juntado con Jax. Para aferrarme a los vestigios de mi antiguo yo.\n\nAl cabo de un momento decid\u00ed tantear el terreno. Cerr\u00e9 los ojos y solt\u00e9 mi esp\u00edritu. Nuala ten\u00eda un onirosaje permeable, fino y fr\u00e1gil como una pompa de jab\u00f3n. Con los a\u00f1os, los humanos acumul\u00e1bamos capas de resistencia, pero los animales no ten\u00edan esa coraza emocional. En teor\u00eda pod\u00eda controlarla. Le di un empujoncito a su onirosaje.\n\nNuala dio un resoplido de alarma. Le acarici\u00e9 las orejas para tranquilizarla. \u00abLo siento \u2014dije\u2014. No volver\u00e9 a hacerlo.\u00bb Entonces apoy\u00f3 la cabeza en mi regazo, pero estaba temblando. Ella no sab\u00eda que hab\u00eda sido yo quien le hab\u00eda hecho da\u00f1o. La acarici\u00e9 suavemente bajo la barbilla. Para cuando volvi\u00f3 el Custodio, nos hab\u00edamos quedado las dos dormidas. Me despert\u00f3 toc\u00e1ndome la mejilla. Nuala levant\u00f3 la cabeza, pero el Custodio la calm\u00f3 con una palabra y enseguida volvi\u00f3 a dormirse.\n\n\u2014Ven conmigo \u2014me dijo\u2014. Te he encontrado otro cuerpo.\n\nSe sent\u00f3 a mi lado en la roca. Me impresion\u00f3 verlo bajo la luz de la luna: su contorno perfectamente recortado, sus rasgos marcados, su piel radiante.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 es? \u2014pregunt\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Mira.\n\nTen\u00eda las manos juntas y ahuecadas; las yemas de sus dedos apenas se tocaban. Mir\u00e9 y vi un insecto fr\u00e1gil: una mariposa o una polilla. Costaba distinguirlo con tan poca luz.\n\n\u2014Cuando la he encontrado estaba inactiva \u2014dijo\u2014. Todav\u00eda est\u00e1 en estado let\u00e1rgico. He pensado que as\u00ed ser\u00eda m\u00e1s f\u00e1cil.\n\nEntonces era una mariposa. Temblaba ligeramente en sus manos.\n\n\u2014Los puntos fr\u00edos asustan a los animales \u2014dijo en voz baja\u2014. Perciben que hay un conducto abierto hacia el Inframundo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 lo has abierto?\n\n\u2014Ahora lo ver\u00e1s. \u2014Me mir\u00f3 a los ojos\u2014. \u00bfEst\u00e1s dispuesta a intentar una posesi\u00f3n?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, lo intentar\u00e9.\n\nSus ojos resplandecieron, ardientes como brasas.\n\n\u2014Seguramente ya lo sabes \u2014dije\u2014, pero mi cuerpo se va a desplomar cuando lo abandone. Te agradecer\u00eda que me sujetaras.\n\nTuve que obligarme a decir esas palabras. Detestaba tener que pedirle un favor, aunque fuera algo tan obvio y sencillo.\n\n\u2014Por supuesto.\n\nDesvi\u00e9 la mirada.\n\nInspir\u00e9 hondo y solt\u00e9 mi esp\u00edritu. Inmediatamente se me nublaron los sentidos y vi mi onirosaje. Ya sent\u00eda el \u00e9ter; fue fortaleci\u00e9ndose a medida que me acercaba al borde del prado de amapolas, donde estaba oscuro. El \u00e9ter estaba esper\u00e1ndome all\u00ed.\n\nSalt\u00e9.\n\nVi que mi cord\u00f3n arg\u00e9nteo se desenredaba de mi onirosaje, proporcion\u00e1ndome un camino de regreso. El onirosaje del Custodio estaba cerca. La mariposa solo era un puntito a su lado, un grano de arena junto a una canica. Me deslic\u00e9 dentro de su mente. Mi receptor no se retrajo, no dio ni la m\u00e1s leve sacudida.\n\nMe hallaba en un mundo de sue\u00f1os. Un mundo de color ba\u00f1ado en una luz ocre. La mariposa pasaba los d\u00edas aliment\u00e1ndose en las flores, cuyos vivos colores compon\u00edan todos sus recuerdos. Aromas de ambros\u00eda llegaban flotando de todas partes, lavanda, hierba y rosas. Camin\u00e9 por el onirosaje cubierto de roc\u00edo y me dirig\u00ed hacia la zona m\u00e1s luminosa. Ca\u00eda polen formando remolinos de los \u00e1rboles cargados de flores y quedaba prendido en mi pelo. Nunca me hab\u00eda sentido tan libre. No hab\u00eda resistencia, ni siquiera el m\u00e1s leve mecanismo de defensa. Era tan indoloro, tan f\u00e1cil y hermoso; sent\u00eda como si me hubieran quitado unos gruesos grilletes. Parec\u00eda todo tan natural. Eso era lo que ansiaba mi esp\u00edritu: deambular por tierras extra\u00f1as. No soportaba estar atrapado en un \u00fanico cuerpo todo el tiempo. Ten\u00eda ansias de conocer mundo.\n\nLlegu\u00e9 a la zona soleada y lo vi: una lev\u00edsima hebra de esp\u00edritu, de color rosa. Frunc\u00ed los labios y sopl\u00e9, y se desliz\u00f3 hacia las partes m\u00e1s oscuras.\n\nHab\u00eda llegado el momento de la prueba real. Si yo lo hab\u00eda entendido bien (y si Jax, que me lo hab\u00eda explicado, ten\u00eda raz\u00f3n), entrar en la zona soleada me permitir\u00eda hacerme con el control de mi nuevo cuerpo.\n\nNada m\u00e1s entrar en el c\u00edrculo, una luz intensa inund\u00f3 todo el onirosaje: una luz dorada que me envolv\u00eda e impregnaba mis ojos, mi piel y mi sangre. Me ceg\u00f3. El mundo se convirti\u00f3 en un diamante hecho a\u00f1icos, un asterisco de colores luminosos.\n\nDurante unos momentos no hubo nada. Mi cuerpo se hab\u00eda esfumado y no notaba nada. Y entonces despert\u00e9.\n\nLo primero que sent\u00ed fue p\u00e1nico. \u00bfD\u00f3nde estaban mis brazos, mis piernas? Un momento: ve\u00eda (apenas), pero todo estaba te\u00f1ido de morado, y el verde de la hierba era tan intenso que me da\u00f1aba los ojos. Un espasmo sacudi\u00f3 mis endebles extremidades. Aquello era parecido a la peste cerebral, pero mucho peor. Estaba aplastada, asfixiada, gritando sin labios ni voz. Y \u00bfqu\u00e9 eran esas cosas que ten\u00eda pegadas a los costados? Intent\u00e9 moverme, y esas cosas se estremecieron, como si estuviera agonizando.\n\nSin propon\u00e9rmelo, sal\u00ed de la mariposa y volv\u00ed a mi cuerpo. Temblaba de pies a cabeza y respiraba a boqueadas. Resbal\u00e9 de la roca y ca\u00ed al suelo a cuatro patas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPaige?\n\nMe dieron arcadas. Se me llen\u00f3 la boca de un sabor \u00e1cido y repugnante, pero no vomit\u00e9 nada.\n\n\u2014No volver\u00e9 a hacerlo jam\u00e1s \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 ha pasado?\n\n\u2014Nada. Era... era tan f\u00e1cil, pero de repente... \u2014Me desabroch\u00e9 la cremallera de la chaqueta; me costaba respirar\u2014. No puedo hacerlo.\n\nEl Custodio guardaba silencio. Se qued\u00f3 mirando mientras yo me enjugaba el sudor de la frente y procuraba no hiperventilar.\n\n\u2014Pues lo has hecho \u2014dijo entonces\u2014. Aunque haya sido doloroso, lo has hecho. Ha movido las alas.\n\n\u2014Cre\u00eda que me iba a morir.\n\n\u2014Pero lo has conseguido.\n\nMe apoy\u00e9 en la roca.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCu\u00e1nto he durado?\n\n\u2014Cerca de medio minuto.\n\nMejor de lo que yo esperaba, pero aun as\u00ed lamentable. Jaxon se habr\u00eda partido de risa.\n\n\u2014Siento decepcionarte \u2014dije\u2014. A lo mejor es que no soy tan buena como otros onir\u00e1mbulos.\n\nEl Custodio me mir\u00f3 con gesto serio.\n\n\u2014Eres buena \u2014dijo\u2014. Pero, si no te lo crees, no podr\u00e1s desarrollar todo tu potencial.\n\nAbri\u00f3 la mano y la mariposa ech\u00f3 a volar. Segu\u00eda viva. No la hab\u00eda matado.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1s enfadado \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014No.\n\n\u2014Entonces \u00bfpor qu\u00e9 me miras as\u00ed?\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo te miro? \u2014Sus ojos se hab\u00edan enfriado.\n\n\u2014No importa.\n\nCogi\u00f3 un pu\u00f1ado de ramas menudas que estaban apoyadas contra la roca. Entrechoc\u00f3 dos piedras y encendi\u00f3 una peque\u00f1a hoguera utilizando las ramas como encendaja. Desvi\u00e9 la mirada. \u00abQue tiene la rabia.\u00bb Yo no estaba all\u00ed para hacer de titiritera con los animales.\n\n\u2014Descansaremos aqu\u00ed unas horas. \u2014El Custodio no me mir\u00f3\u2014. Necesitas dormir antes de abordar la segunda parte de tu examen.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSignifica eso que he aprobado la primera?\n\n\u2014Claro que has aprobado. Has pose\u00eddo a la mariposa. Era lo \u00fanico que te hab\u00eda pedido. \u2014Se qued\u00f3 contemplando las llamas\u2014. Nada m\u00e1s.\n\nAbri\u00f3 su mochila y despleg\u00f3 un sencillo saco de dormir negro.\n\n\u2014Toma \u2014dijo\u2014. Tengo que hacer una cosa. Aqu\u00ed estar\u00e1s a salvo, al menos un rato.\n\n\u2014\u00bfVuelves a la ciudad?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\nNo ten\u00eda m\u00e1s remedio que obedecer, aunque no me hac\u00eda ninguna gracia dormir en un sitio donde hab\u00eda tantos esp\u00edritus sueltos. Hab\u00edan aparecido m\u00e1s, y hac\u00eda m\u00e1s fr\u00edo. Me quit\u00e9 las botas y los calcetines mojados, y los puse a secar junto a las llamas; me met\u00ed en el saco y cerr\u00e9 la cremallera. No estaba suficientemente abrigada, pese a la chaqueta y el chaleco, pero era mejor que nada.\n\nEl Custodio tamborileaba con los dedos en la rodilla contemplando la oscuridad. Sus ojos eran dos brasas ardientes en estado de alerta. Me di la vuelta y alc\u00e9 la vista hacia la luna. Qu\u00e9 oscuro estaba el mundo. Qu\u00e9 oscuro y qu\u00e9 fr\u00edo.\n\n\u2014Date prisa, Pip. Vamos.\n\nMi primo Finn me tir\u00f3 m\u00e1s fuerte del brazo. Yo ten\u00eda seis a\u00f1os y est\u00e1bamos en el abarrotado centro de Dubl\u00edn, rodeados de gente que se desga\u00f1itaba.\n\n\u2014No puedo seguirte, Finn \u2014dije, pero \u00e9l no me hizo caso; era la primera vez que mi primo no me escuchaba.\n\nEra una ma\u00f1ana fr\u00eda de febrero de 2046; el sol invernal derramaba su oro blanco sobre el Liffey, y se supon\u00eda que est\u00e1bamos en el cine. Yo estaba pasando las vacaciones de mitad de trimestre en casa de mi t\u00eda Sandra. Ella le hab\u00eda encargado a Finn cuidar de m\u00ed mientras estaba en el trabajo, ya que mi primo no ten\u00eda clases. Yo quer\u00eda ir a ver una pel\u00edcula y a comer en Temple Bar, pero Finn dijo que ten\u00edamos que hacer otra cosa: ir a ver la estatua de Molly Malone. Me asegur\u00f3 que era importante. Demasiado importante para no hacerlo. Un d\u00eda muy especial. \u00abVamos a hacer historia, Pip\u00bb, me hab\u00eda asegurado apret\u00e1ndome la mano que yo llevaba enfundada en un mit\u00f3n.\n\nCuando me lo dijo, arrugu\u00e9 un poco la nariz. La historia era para el colegio. Yo adoraba a Finn (era alto, gracioso e inteligente, y cuando ten\u00eda algo de calderilla siempre me compraba caramelos), pero hab\u00eda visto a Molly centenares de veces. Y me sab\u00eda de memoria la letra de su canci\u00f3n.\n\nNos acercamos a la estatua, a cuyo alrededor se hab\u00eda congregado la gente. Mir\u00e9 entre asustada y emocionada a todas aquellas personas con la cara colorada que cantaban. Finn se puso a cantar con ellas a voz en grito, y yo me un\u00ed tambi\u00e9n, pese a no entender qu\u00e9 hac\u00edamos all\u00ed. Pens\u00e9 que deb\u00eda de ser una fiesta popular.\n\nFinn se puso a hablar con sus amigos del Trinity College sin soltarme de la mano. Iban todos vestidos de verde y agitaban grandes pancartas. Yo ya sab\u00eda leer lo suficiente para descifrar casi todas las palabras, pero hab\u00eda una que no conoc\u00eda: \u00abScion\u00bb. Estaba escrita en todas las pancartas. Las ve\u00eda en lo alto, unas en ingl\u00e9s y otras en irland\u00e9s. \u00ab\u00a1Abajo Mayfield! _\u00c9ire go br\u00e1ch!_ \u00a1Dubl\u00edn dice no!\u00bb Le tir\u00e9 de la manga a Finn.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 pasa, Finn?\n\n\u2014Nada, Paige. Calla un momento. \u00ab\u00a1Fuera Scion! \u00a1Abajo Scion! \u00a1Scion fuera de Dubl\u00edn!\u00bb\n\nYa est\u00e1bamos cerca de la estatua, empujados por la multitud. Molly siempre me hab\u00eda gustado; ten\u00eda un rostro bondadoso. Sin embargo, ese d\u00eda la encontr\u00e9 diferente. Le hab\u00edan puesto una bolsa en la cabeza y una soga al cuello. Se me empa\u00f1aron los ojos.\n\n\u2014No me gusta, Finn.\n\n\u2014\u00ab\u00a1Fuera Scion! \u00a1Abajo Scion! \u00a1Scion fuera de Dubl\u00edn!\u00bb\n\n\u2014Quiero irme a casa.\n\nLa novia de Finn, Kay, me mir\u00f3 arrugando el ce\u00f1o. Siempre me hab\u00eda ca\u00eddo bien. Ten\u00eda el pelo muy bonito, de un casta\u00f1o rojizo oscuro que brillaba como el cobre, muy rizado, y los brazos muy blancos y cubiertos de pecas. Finn le hab\u00eda regalado un anillo Claddagh que ella llevaba con el coraz\u00f3n apuntando hacia el cuerpo. Ese d\u00eda iba vestida de negro, y se hab\u00eda pintado las mejillas de color verde, blanco y naranja.\n\n\u2014Podr\u00edan ponerse violentos, Finn \u2014dijo\u2014. \u00bfNo ser\u00eda mejor que la llevaras a casa? \u2014Como mi primo no le contestaba, le dio un empuj\u00f3n\u2014. \u00a1Finn!\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 pasa?\n\n\u2014\u00a1Lleva a Paige a casa! Cleary tiene bombas caseras en el coche, por amor de Dios...\n\n\u2014Ni hablar. No me perder\u00eda esto por nada del mundo. Si entran esos cabrones, ya no podremos sacarlos.\n\n\u2014Tiene seis a\u00f1os. No deber\u00eda estar viendo esto. \u2014Kay me dio la mano\u2014. Si no la llevas t\u00fa, lo har\u00e9 yo. Tu madre se avergonzar\u00eda de ti.\n\n\u2014No. Quiero que lo vea.\n\nSe arrodill\u00f3 delante de m\u00ed y se quit\u00f3 la gorra. Ten\u00eda el pelo alborotado. Finn se parec\u00eda a mi padre, pero ten\u00eda un semblante que denotaba franqueza y bondad, y unos ojos azules como el cielo de verano. Me puso las manos sobre los hombros.\n\n\u2014Paige Eva \u2014dijo poni\u00e9ndose muy serio\u2014, \u00bfsabes qu\u00e9 est\u00e1 pasando?\n\nDije que no con la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Van a llegar unos malos por el mar. Nos van a encerrar en nuestra ciudad y no nos dejar\u00e1n salir, y convertir\u00e1n este sitio en una ciudad-c\u00e1rcel como la suya. No nos dejar\u00e1n volver a cantar nuestras canciones, ni visitar a nadie fuera de Irlanda. Y las personas como t\u00fa, Pip... no les gustan.\n\nMir\u00e9 a Finn a los ojos y entend\u00ed lo que quer\u00eda decir. Finn siempre hab\u00eda sabido que yo ve\u00eda cosas. Yo sab\u00eda d\u00f3nde viv\u00edan todos los fantasmas de Dubl\u00edn. \u00bfMe convert\u00eda eso en una mala persona?\n\n\u2014Pero \u00bfpor qu\u00e9 lleva Molly una bolsa en la cabeza, Finn? \u2014pregunt\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Porque eso es lo que les hacen los malos a las personas que no les caen bien. Les ponen una bolsa en la cabeza y una soga al cuello.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Para matarlas. Tambi\u00e9n a las ni\u00f1as peque\u00f1as como t\u00fa.\n\nMe puse a temblar. Me dol\u00edan los ojos. Ten\u00eda un nudo en la garganta, pero no lloraba. Era valiente. Muy valiente, como Finn.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Ya los veo, Finn! \u2014exclam\u00f3 Kay.\n\n\u2014\u00ab\u00a1Fuera Scion! \u00a1Abajo Scion!\u00bb\n\nEl coraz\u00f3n me lat\u00eda muy deprisa. Finn me enjug\u00f3 las l\u00e1grimas y me puso su gorra en la cabeza.\n\n\u2014\u00ab\u00a1Scion fuera de Dubl\u00edn!\u00bb\n\n\u2014Ya vienen, Paige, y tenemos que detenerlos. \u2014Me agarr\u00f3 por los hombros\u2014. \u00bfVas a ayudarme a detenerlos?\n\nAsent\u00ed.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Dios m\u00edo, Finn, tienen tanques!\n\nY entonces mi mundo explot\u00f3. Los malos hab\u00edan apuntado sus ca\u00f1ones y hab\u00edan disparado sus dardos de fuego contra los manifestantes.\n\nMe despert\u00f3 el ruido de disparos dentro de mi cabeza.\n\nNotaba la piel fr\u00eda y h\u00fameda, pero por dentro estaba ardiendo. Aquel recuerdo me hab\u00eda abrasado todo el cuerpo. Todav\u00eda me parec\u00eda ver a Finn, su rostro transido de odio. Finn, que siempre me llamaba Pip.\n\nMe puse a patalear dentro del saco de dormir. Hab\u00edan pasado trece a\u00f1os y todav\u00eda o\u00eda disparos. Segu\u00eda viendo a Kay, con los ojos abiertos, sorprendida por la muerte. Su blusa manchada de sangre. Un disparo en el coraz\u00f3n. Eso fue lo que hizo que Finn corriera hacia los soldados y me dejara atr\u00e1s, agachada bajo la carretilla de Molly. Grit\u00e9 su nombre una y otra vez, pero Finn ya no regres\u00f3.\n\nNo volv\u00ed a verlo nunca.\n\nDespu\u00e9s de eso ya no recordaba casi nada. S\u00e9 que alguien me llev\u00f3 a casa. S\u00e9 que llor\u00e9 por Finn hasta quedarme af\u00f3nica. Y s\u00e9 que mi padre no permiti\u00f3 que mi t\u00eda Sandra volviera a verme hasta el d\u00eda del funeral. Despu\u00e9s dej\u00e9 de llorar. Las l\u00e1grimas no hac\u00edan que las personas volvieran. Me enjugu\u00e9 el sudor de la cara con la camisa. Deb\u00eda de estar todav\u00eda en los jardines de Magdalen. Me volv\u00ed hacia un lado; ten\u00eda tanto fr\u00edo que no me notaba los pies, y me ovill\u00e9 dentro del saco.\n\nEl fuego deb\u00eda de haberse apagado. Llov\u00eda, pero no me hab\u00eda mojado. Estir\u00e9 un brazo hacia arriba y mis dedos rozaron un toldo de lona, un refugio improvisado. Me puse la capucha de la chaqueta y sal\u00ed despacio de debajo de aquel toldo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCustodio?\n\nNo hab\u00eda ni rastro de \u00e9l. Ni de la cierva. Ni de la hoguera.\n\nYa no temblaba solo de fr\u00edo. \u00bfAd\u00f3nde pod\u00eda haber ido? Me hab\u00eda dicho que iba a la ciudad, pero en realidad no hab\u00edamos salido de Sheol I. Magdalen y sus jardines formaban parte del complejo de residencias. Solo nos hab\u00edamos alejado algo m\u00e1s de un kil\u00f3metro del punto fr\u00edo, o ni siquiera eso.\n\nEl viento arreciaba. Me guarec\u00ed bajo el toldo. No hab\u00eda ninguna raz\u00f3n para que el Custodio me hubiera dejado all\u00ed sola. A lo mejor no hab\u00eda dormido tanto rato como cre\u00eda. Me puse los calcetines y las botas y mir\u00e9 dentro del saco de dormir. Para mi sorpresa, dentro hab\u00eda unas pocas provisiones: unos guantes, una jeringuilla hipod\u00e9rmica de adrenalina y una peque\u00f1a linterna de plata, junto con un sobre de papel Manila con mi nombre escrito. Reconoc\u00ed la letra de mi guardi\u00e1n y abr\u00ed el sobre.\n\nBienvenida a la Tierra de Nadie. Tu examen es sencillo: tienes que volver a Sheol I en el menor tiempo posible. No tienes comida, agua ni mapa. Utiliza tu don. Conf\u00eda en tu instinto.\n\nY hazme este favor: sobrevive a esta noche. Estoy seguro de que preferir\u00edas que no te rescataran.\n\nBuena suerte.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 con la nota en la mano un momento, y luego la romp\u00ed en pedazos.\n\nSe iba a enterar. Se iba a enterar, y bien. Intentaba asustarme, pero no iba a conseguirlo. \u00abSobrevive a esta noche.\u00bb \u00bfQu\u00e9 se supon\u00eda que significaba eso? Muy fr\u00e1gil deb\u00eda de considerarme si no me cre\u00eda capaz de vencer un poco de viento y un poco de lluvia. Si pod\u00eda apa\u00f1\u00e1rmelas en las calles s\u00f3rdidas de SciLo, pod\u00eda arregl\u00e1rmelas en un bosque oscuro. En cuanto a la comida, \u00bfpara qu\u00e9 la necesitaba? Tampoco me hab\u00eda dejado tirada en medio del desierto, \u00bfno?\n\nSaqu\u00e9 la cabeza de la improvisada tienda y vi una caja marcada con el s\u00edmbolo de ScionIdus, el brazo armado del gobierno: dos l\u00edneas en \u00e1ngulo recto formando una horca, con tres l\u00edneas m\u00e1s cortas atravesadas en la l\u00ednea vertical. Dentro hab\u00eda otra nota.\n\nTen cuidado con los dardos. Si se rompen, el \u00e1cido que contienen te provocar\u00e1 una parada card\u00edaca. En caso de emergencia, usa la bengala y enviar\u00e9 a una brigada de casacas rojas.\n\nNo vayas hacia el sur.\n\nIlumin\u00e9 el contenido de la caja con la linterna: una pistola de ca\u00f1\u00f3n largo, una pistola de bengalas, un viejo encendedor Zippo, una navaja y tres dardos de plata presurizados. En los lados llevaban impresos los s\u00edmbolos de toxicidad y corrosividad, junto con las palabras \u00ab\u00c1cido Fluorh\u00eddrico (HF)\u00bb. Una pistola tranquilizadora y un pu\u00f1ado de dardos de \u00e1cido. \u00bfNo pod\u00eda haberme devuelto mi pistola? Bueno, algo tendr\u00eda que hacer, a menos que quisiera quedarme toda la noche en aquel claro. Enroll\u00e9 el saco de dormir y lo met\u00ed en una bolsa, pero no desmont\u00e9 la tienda. Pod\u00eda servirme de indicador para asegurarme de que no corr\u00eda en c\u00edrculos.\n\nEntonces vi que hab\u00eda algo alrededor del campamento: un c\u00edrculo de diminutos cristales blancos. Me arrodill\u00e9 y los toqu\u00e9 con los dedos; saqu\u00e9 la punta de la lengua y los prob\u00e9.\n\n\u00abSal.\u00bb\n\nEl campamento estaba montado en el centro de un c\u00edrculo de sal.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 muy quieta. Entre los videntes se rumoreaba que la sal pod\u00eda repeler a los esp\u00edritus (lo llamaban alomancia), pero yo sab\u00eda que no era verdad. Desde luego, no serv\u00eda para ahuyentar a los duendes. \u00bfLa habr\u00eda puesto all\u00ed solo para asustarme?\n\nMe sub\u00ed la capucha, me abroch\u00e9 la chaqueta hasta arriba y guard\u00e9 mis escasos pertrechos. Met\u00ed los dardos y la pistola en la mochila, protegi\u00e9ndolos con el saco de dormir, y me puse la pistola de bengalas en la cinturilla. La navaja me la met\u00ed dentro de la bota, y la jeringuilla, en la chaqueta. Me puse los guantes.\n\nEstaba deseando volver y plantarme ante aquel desgraciado. Me lo imaginaba c\u00f3modamente sentado junto a la chimenea encendida, mirando el reloj, contando los minutos hasta mi regreso.\n\nSe iba a enterar. No pensaba pasar desapercibida. Yo era la So\u00f1adora P\u00e1lida, y le iba a demostrar por qu\u00e9. Iba a saber por qu\u00e9 Jax me hab\u00eda elegido: porque hab\u00eda sobrevivido, contra todo pron\u00f3stico.\n\nCerr\u00e9 los ojos e intent\u00e9 detectar actividad et\u00e9rea, pero no hab\u00eda nada. Ning\u00fan onirosaje. Estaba sola. Cuando abr\u00ed los ojos, me llam\u00f3 la atenci\u00f3n el cielo. Ten\u00eda suerte de haber despertado cuando lo hab\u00eda hecho: las estrellas estaban a punto de desaparecer detr\u00e1s de una nube, y como ya se hab\u00eda puesto el sol, no ten\u00eda otra forma de orientarme. No vi Sirio, as\u00ed que busqu\u00e9 el Cintur\u00f3n de Ori\u00f3n. Gracias a los apasionados discursos de Nick sobre astronom\u00eda sab\u00eda que si encontrabas el Cintur\u00f3n, pod\u00edas situar el norte, que estaba m\u00e1s o menos en la direcci\u00f3n opuesta. Tambi\u00e9n sab\u00eda d\u00f3nde estaba en relaci\u00f3n con Sheol I. Localic\u00e9 las tres estrellas y me volv\u00ed despacio hasta encarar mi camino. Lo que ten\u00eda ante m\u00ed era un denso tramo de bosque tupido y oscuro.\n\nEl coraz\u00f3n me lat\u00eda con fuerza. Nunca me hab\u00eda asustado la oscuridad, pero me obligar\u00eda a depender de mi sexto sentido para detectar cualquier movimiento. Seguramente se trataba de eso: de ponerme a prueba.\n\nMir\u00e9 hacia atr\u00e1s. El bosque del otro lado del claro estaba igual de oscuro. El sendero me llevar\u00eda hacia el sur, lejos de la colonia.\n\n\u00abNo vayas hacia el sur.\u00bb __\n\nSab\u00eda a qu\u00e9 jugaba el Custodio. Esperaba que yo obedeciera, como buena humana. Pero \u00bfpor qu\u00e9 iba a ir hacia el norte, si el norte me devolver\u00eda a la esclavitud y al Custodio, que era quien me hab\u00eda puesto all\u00ed? No necesitaba demostrarle nada. Me volv\u00ed hacia el Cintur\u00f3n. Ir\u00eda hacia el sur. Me marchar\u00eda de aquel lugar horrible.\n\nEl fuerte viento atravesaba las copas de los \u00e1rboles y me helaba la piel h\u00fameda. Ahora o nunca. Si me pon\u00eda a pensar qu\u00e9 pod\u00eda haber o no escondido all\u00ed dentro, cuando acabara ya no tendr\u00eda valor para moverme. Apret\u00e9 las mand\u00edbulas y entr\u00e9 en el bosque.\n\nEstaba muy negro. No ve\u00eda nada. La lluvia hab\u00eda ablandado el terreno, dej\u00e1ndolo esponjoso y empapado. Mis pies no hac\u00edan ruido alguno mientras avanzaba entre los robles, a buen paso, a veces corriendo, ayud\u00e1ndome de las manos para tantear el camino entre las ramas. Con el delgado haz de mi linterna distingu\u00eda una d\u00e9bil bruma que abrazaba los troncos de los \u00e1rboles y quedaba suspendida formando una fina manta sobre el suelo que tapaba mis botas. No hab\u00eda luz natural. Rec\u00e9 para que la linterna no se apagara. Llevaba el s\u00edmbolo de Scion; deb\u00eda de pertenecer a un lote prestado por la DVN. Eso me produc\u00eda cierto alivio, pues los art\u00edculos fabricados por Scion no sol\u00edan estropearse.\n\nDe pronto se me ocurri\u00f3 pensar que me hallaba fuera de los l\u00edmites normales de Sheol I. Aquel lugar se llamaba Tierra de Nadie por alg\u00fan motivo: porque no pertenec\u00eda a nadie. Quiz\u00e1 fuera propiedad de Scion, pero quiz\u00e1 no. No ten\u00eda ni idea de ad\u00f3nde me llevar\u00eda esa ruta, pero s\u00ed sab\u00eda que Oxford estaba al norte de Londres. Iba en la direcci\u00f3n correcta. La chaqueta y los pantalones eran lo bastante oscuros para no llamar la atenci\u00f3n si hab\u00eda alguien vigilando, y mi sexto sentido estaba m\u00e1s afinado que nunca. Pod\u00eda pasar sin ser vista al lado de cualquier vigilante refa\u00edta. Pod\u00eda trepar por una valla con la misma facilidad con que pod\u00eda colarme por debajo de ella. Y si alguien me atacaba, pod\u00eda emplear mi don. Lo sabr\u00eda con antelaci\u00f3n.\n\nPero entonces me acord\u00e9 de lo que hab\u00eda dicho Liss de aquel lugar a mi llegada: \u00abCampos desiertos. Lo llamamos la Tierra de Nadie\u00bb. Eso me habr\u00eda animado de no ser por lo que hab\u00eda dicho despu\u00e9s, cuando le pregunt\u00e9 si alguna vez alguien hab\u00eda intentado huir por la ruta sur. \u00abS\u00ed\u00bb, se hab\u00eda limitado a contestar. Solo \u00abs\u00ed\u00bb. Una confirmaci\u00f3n indudable de que aquel camino entra\u00f1aba peligros. Otros videntes lo hab\u00edan tomado y hab\u00edan muerto. Quiz\u00e1 a ellos tambi\u00e9n los hubieran puesto a prueba as\u00ed. \u00bfConsist\u00eda el examen, simplemente, en resistir la tentaci\u00f3n de huir? Pensarlo me hizo romper a sudar. Minas de tierra, bombas trampa: seguro que las ten\u00edan. Imagin\u00e9 c\u00e1maras en los \u00e1rboles que observaban cada uno de mis movimientos, esperando a que pisara una mina. Reduje un poco el paso.\n\nNo, no. Ten\u00eda que continuar. Pod\u00eda salir de all\u00ed. Ellos confiaban en que yo pensar\u00eda as\u00ed, en que adoptar\u00eda una actitud conservadora. Estuve a punto de torcer hacia el norte, pero mi determinaci\u00f3n me hizo continuar. No pude evitar imaginarme al Custodio, a David y al Capataz junto al fuego, entrechocando sus copas al verme pisar una mina. \u00abBien, caballeros, brindemos por la onir\u00e1mbula \u2014dir\u00eda el Capataz\u2014. La humana m\u00e1s idiota que jam\u00e1s hemos tra\u00eddo a Sheol I.\u00bb Y \u00bfqu\u00e9 escribir\u00edan en mi l\u00e1pida? \u00bfPAIGE MAHONEY, o solo XX-59-40? Y eso suponiendo que quedaran suficientes restos de m\u00ed que recoger y meter en una tumba, claro.\n\nMe par\u00e9 y me apoy\u00e9 en un \u00e1rbol. Era una locura. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 me imaginaba esas cosas? El Custodio no soportaba al Capataz. Cerr\u00e9 los ojos, apret\u00e9 los p\u00e1rpados y me imagin\u00e9 a otro grupo: Jaxon, Nick y Eliza. Estaban en la ciudadela, esper\u00e1ndome, busc\u00e1ndome. Si consegu\u00eda salir de aquel bosque, podr\u00eda volver con ellos. Al cabo de un momento abr\u00ed los ojos. Y me qued\u00e9 mirando lo que hab\u00eda en el suelo.\n\nHuesos. Huesos humanos. Un esqueleto con blus\u00f3n blanco hecho jirones; le faltaban las piernas desde las rodillas. Retroced\u00ed, y estuve a punto de tropezar y caerme. Algo cruji\u00f3 bajo mi pie. Un cr\u00e1neo.\n\nJunto al esqueleto hab\u00eda una bolsa. Una mano todav\u00eda sujetaba la correa. La solt\u00e9, y produjo un ruido de huesos secos. Las moscas se atiborraban de los restos de carne: unas moscas gigantescas, con pelos negros, saciadas de tejido muerto. Echaron a volar cuando le arranqu\u00e9 la bolsa a su difunto propietario. Alumbr\u00e9 el contenido con la linterna: un poco de pan podrido y una botella vac\u00eda.\n\nSent\u00ed un sudor fr\u00edo. Ilumin\u00e9 con la linterna hacia la derecha. A escasa distancia se abr\u00eda un cr\u00e1ter entre las hojas, anegado de agua de lluvia. Hab\u00eda trozos de hueso y fragmentos de mina esparcidos por el suelo.\n\nAs\u00ed que era verdad: hab\u00eda un campo de minas.\n\nApoy\u00e9 la espalda en el tronco de un roble. No pod\u00eda atravesar un campo de minas a oscuras. Me separ\u00e9 poco a poco del \u00e1rbol y pas\u00e9 por encima del esqueleto. \u00abNo pasa nada, Paige.\u00bb Me temblaban las piernas; torc\u00ed hacia el norte y volv\u00ed sobre mis pasos. No me hab\u00eda alejado mucho del claro. Lo conseguir\u00eda. Solo me hab\u00eda apartado un poco de los huesos cuando tropec\u00e9 con una ra\u00edz y di contra el suelo. Me qued\u00e9 r\u00edgida, con todos los m\u00fasculos en tensi\u00f3n y el coraz\u00f3n lati\u00e9ndome desbocado, pero no se produjo ninguna explosi\u00f3n.\n\nMe apoy\u00e9 en los codos, busqu\u00e9 dentro de la chaqueta, saqu\u00e9 el Zippo y lo encend\u00ed con el pulgar. Brot\u00f3 una llama limpia. Una ruta hacia el \u00e9ter. Yo no era augur (el fuego no era mi aliado), pero pod\u00eda utilizarlo para realizar una sesi\u00f3n espiritista en miniatura. \u00abNecesito un gu\u00eda \u2014susurr\u00e9\u2014. Si hay alguien ah\u00ed, que venga hasta esta llama.\u00bb\n\nAl principio no pas\u00f3 nada. La llama temblaba y parpadeaba. Entonces mi sexto sentido se activ\u00f3, y de entre los \u00e1rboles sali\u00f3 un joven esp\u00edritu. Me levant\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Necesito llegar a mi campamento. \u2014Le acerqu\u00e9 el mechero\u2014. \u00bfPuedes guiarme?\n\nNo le o\u00ed decir nada, pero se desplaz\u00f3 hacia el camino por el que yo hab\u00eda llegado. Not\u00e9 que era el esp\u00edritu del casaca blanca muerto, y ech\u00e9 a correr tras \u00e9l. No hab\u00eda ninguna raz\u00f3n para que me enga\u00f1ara.\n\nNo tard\u00e9 en ver el c\u00edrculo de sal. La lluvia apag\u00f3 el encendedor, pero el esp\u00edritu no se alej\u00f3 de m\u00ed. Tard\u00e9 unos minutos en serenarme. Era duro aceptarlo, pero no ten\u00eda m\u00e1s alternativa que dirigirme hacia el norte. Comprob\u00e9 que mis cosas segu\u00edan all\u00ed y ech\u00e9 a andar de nuevo hacia los \u00e1rboles, con la linterna en una mano y el Zippo en la otra, y con el esp\u00edritu sigui\u00e9ndome de cerca.\n\nCuando llevaba una media hora andando, con el esp\u00edritu alrededor de los hombros como una soga, me par\u00e9 para comprobar que segu\u00eda teniendo el Cintur\u00f3n de Ori\u00f3n a mis espaldas. Correg\u00ed un poco el rumbo y volv\u00ed a sumergirme en la oscuridad. Me dol\u00edan los o\u00eddos y la nariz, y mi sexto sentido me provocaba estremecimientos. Apenas me notaba los dedos de los pies. Me par\u00e9 y me agarr\u00e9 las rodillas mientras respiraba hondo para calmar los nervios. Nada m\u00e1s inhalar, ol\u00ed algo. Conoc\u00eda bien ese olor: olor a muerto.\n\nEl haz de la linterna flaqueaba. El hedor a carne podrida era cada vez m\u00e1s intenso. Segu\u00ed andando un minuto m\u00e1s, y entonces encontr\u00e9 la fuente: otro cad\u00e1ver.\n\nParec\u00eda el cad\u00e1ver de un zorro. Mechones de pelo rojizo, apelmazado y manchado de sangre seca; las cuencas de los ojos repletas de gusanos. Me tap\u00e9 la nariz y la boca con la manga de la chaqueta. El hedor era espantoso.\n\nQuienquiera que hubiera hecho aquello, estaba en el bosque conmigo.\n\n\u00abNo te pares, Paige. Sigue adelante.\u00bb La linterna parpade\u00f3. Nada m\u00e1s ponerme en marcha, o\u00ed partirse una ramita.\n\n\u00bfMe lo hab\u00eda imaginado? No, claro que no. Ten\u00eda muy buen o\u00eddo. O\u00eda mi sangre palpitar en los o\u00eddos. Apoy\u00e9 la espalda en un \u00e1rbol e intent\u00e9 respirar haciendo el m\u00ednimo ruido posible.\n\nUn vigilante. Un casaca roja haciendo la ronda nocturna. Pero entonces o\u00ed unos pasos muy pesados, demasiado pesados para ser humanos. Apagu\u00e9 la linterna y me la guard\u00e9 en el bolsillo. De nada iba a servirme llevarla en la mano: si la encend\u00eda, delatar\u00eda mi posici\u00f3n.\n\nAguc\u00e9 el o\u00eddo. No ve\u00eda nada, pero o\u00ed otra pisada m\u00e1s cerca. Y luego, ruido de dientes masticando el esqueleto. Alguien hab\u00eda encontrado el zorro.\n\nO hab\u00eda vuelto por \u00e9l.\n\nProteg\u00ed la llama del mechero con la mano ahuecada. Mi coraz\u00f3n hac\u00eda cosas raras. No estaba segura de si se hab\u00eda acelerado tanto que solo percib\u00eda un zumbido, o si hab\u00eda dejado de latir. Detr\u00e1s de m\u00ed, el esp\u00edritu se estremeci\u00f3.\n\nPasaban los minutos. Esper\u00e9. Tendr\u00eda que moverme, pero estaba convencida de que hab\u00eda algo cerca.\n\nTres ruiditos guturales.\n\nSe me tensaron todos los m\u00fasculos del cuerpo. Respiraba por la nariz, manteniendo los labios fuertemente cerrados. No sab\u00eda qu\u00e9 hab\u00eda sido ese ruido, pero ten\u00eda la certeza de que no lo hab\u00eda producido ning\u00fan humano. Hab\u00eda o\u00eddo a los refas hacer ruidos raros, pero nunca un sonido tan desagradable y visceral.\n\nUna r\u00e1faga de viento apag\u00f3 la llama del mechero. Mi esp\u00edritu gu\u00eda desapareci\u00f3.\n\nEl miedo me paraliz\u00f3 durante un minuto. Entonces me acord\u00e9 de la pistola que llevaba en la mochila. Era una estupidez dispararle a aquella cosa, pero quiz\u00e1 pudiera distraerla y ganar algo de tiempo para avanzar. Me plante\u00e9 trepar a un \u00e1rbol, pero lo descart\u00e9. Los \u00e1rboles no eran mi fuerte. Era mejor que buscara otro sitio donde esconderme. Lo m\u00e1s sensato parec\u00eda buscar terreno elevado. Si consegu\u00eda llegar a un lugar seguro, podr\u00eda alumbrar a aquel ser con la linterna y ver qu\u00e9 era. Cerr\u00e9 el mechero y me lo guard\u00e9 en la mochila.\n\nYa con la pistola en la mano, me dispuse a sacar un dardo. Ten\u00eda la impresi\u00f3n de que hac\u00eda mucho ruido cada vez que me mov\u00eda: con cada exhalaci\u00f3n, con cada susurro de mi chaqueta. Por fin toqu\u00e9 el cilindro fr\u00edo y liso de un dardo con las yemas de los dedos. Sab\u00eda c\u00f3mo cargar una pistola de balas, pero tard\u00e9 unos minutos en cargar aquella arma con la que no estaba familiarizada, a oscuras, con las manos sudadas, procurando por todos los medios no hacer ruido. En cuanto lo hube conseguido, levant\u00e9 los brazos, apunt\u00e9 y dispar\u00e9.\n\nCuando el dardo se clav\u00f3, chisporrote\u00f3 como la grasa en una sart\u00e9n. El ser corri\u00f3 hacia el origen del ruido, produciendo al moverse una especie de zumbido. Moscas.\n\nNo, no era un animal.\n\nSent\u00ed n\u00e1useas. Hab\u00eda o\u00eddo decir muchas cosas sobre los emim, pero nunca me hab\u00eda imaginado que me enfrentar\u00eda a uno. Pese a lo que hab\u00eda o\u00eddo el d\u00eda del serm\u00f3n, y pese a haber visto a aquel casaca roja que hab\u00eda perdido una mano, casi hab\u00eda empezado a creer que no exist\u00edan. Hasta ese momento.\n\nTuve que esforzarme para mantenerme en pie. Me temblaban las manos y me casta\u00f1eteaban los dientes. No pod\u00eda respirar ni pensar. \u00bfOir\u00eda aquella cosa mis latidos? \u00bfOler\u00eda mi miedo? \u00bfEstaba babeando ya, intuyendo mi carne, o ten\u00eda que acercarme m\u00e1s para que me detectara?\n\nCargu\u00e9 otro dardo en la pistola. El zumbador olfate\u00f3 el sitio desde donde yo hab\u00eda disparado. Cerr\u00e9 los ojos y busqu\u00e9 el \u00e9ter.\n\nAlgo iba mal, muy mal. Todos los esp\u00edritus hab\u00edan huido, como si tuvieran miedo; pero \u00bfpor qu\u00e9 temer\u00edan los esp\u00edritus a un ser del mundo f\u00edsico? Ellos no pod\u00edan volver a morir. Fuera cual fuese la causa, no hab\u00eda nada a lo que recurrir.\n\nRepar\u00e9 en que ya no pod\u00eda o\u00edr al zumbador. Ten\u00eda las manos sudadas y me costaba sujetar la pistola. Pod\u00eda morir en cualquier momento.\n\nTodo aquello deb\u00eda de ser un montaje. Nashira nunca hab\u00eda pretendido que me ganara los colores. Lo \u00fanico que quer\u00eda era verme muerta.\n\n\u00abNo ser\u00e1 hoy \u2014me dije\u2014. No ser\u00e1 hoy, Nashira.\u00bb\n\nSal\u00ed corriendo de detr\u00e1s de los \u00e1rboles. Mis botas pisaban con fuerza; el coraz\u00f3n me martilleaba en el pecho. \u00bfD\u00f3nde se hab\u00eda metido? \u00bfMe hab\u00eda visto ya?\n\nAlgo me golpe\u00f3 entre los omoplatos. Qued\u00e9 ingr\u00e1vida un instante, suspendida en la oscuridad. Luego choqu\u00e9 contra el suelo. Se me dobl\u00f3 una mu\u00f1eca y se me parti\u00f3. Contuve un grito, pero no a tiempo. La pistola hab\u00eda desaparecido. Ya no hab\u00eda ninguna posibilidad de encontrarla. Volv\u00ed a o\u00edr a la cosa: estaba cerca de m\u00ed, la ten\u00eda encima. Con la mano ilesa, me saqu\u00e9 la navaja de la bota.\n\nMe olvid\u00e9 de mi esp\u00edritu. Clav\u00e9 la navaja en una masa blanda. Me resbal\u00f3 algo h\u00famedo por la mu\u00f1eca. \u00abZzzz.\u00bb Otra pu\u00f1alada. Y otra. \u00abZzzz. Zzzz.\u00bb Me ca\u00edan unas cosas peque\u00f1as y redondas en la cara. Parpade\u00e9 para quit\u00e1rmelas de los ojos y las escup\u00ed de la boca. Unos dedos me agarraron por el cuello, y not\u00e9 un aliento hediondo y c\u00e1lido junto a la mejilla. Otra pu\u00f1alada, y otra. \u00abZzzz.\u00bb Unos dientes entrechocaron junto a mi oreja. Volv\u00ed a clavar la navaja en la carne y la hund\u00ed con todas mis fuerzas. La hoja cort\u00f3 m\u00fasculos y cart\u00edlagos.\n\nDe pronto, el ser hab\u00eda desaparecido. Qued\u00e9 libre. Ten\u00eda las manos cubiertas hasta las mu\u00f1ecas de un l\u00edquido apestoso y espeso como jarabe. La bilis ascendi\u00f3 por mi garganta abras\u00e1ndome la boca y la nariz.\n\nLa linterna estaba tirada en el suelo, a unos tres metros. Me arrastr\u00e9 hasta ella, protegi\u00e9ndome la mu\u00f1eca contra el pecho. No era la primera vez que me la romp\u00eda: me dol\u00eda a morir. Me arrastr\u00e9 impuls\u00e1ndome con un solo brazo, con la navaja entre los dientes, empapada de sudor. El olor a cad\u00e1ver me revolv\u00eda el est\u00f3mago y me produc\u00eda violentas arcadas.\n\nAgarr\u00e9 la linterna y alumbr\u00e9 detr\u00e1s de m\u00ed. Vi sombras oscuras entre los \u00e1rboles. M\u00e1s pasos. M\u00e1s zumbadores. \u00ab\u00a1No!\u00bb\n\nMe dol\u00eda la cabeza. Se me nubl\u00f3 la visi\u00f3n. \u00abNo quiero morir.\u00bb Poseer a la mariposa me hab\u00eda debilitado m\u00e1s de lo que hab\u00eda previsto. \u00abCorre.\u00bb Met\u00ed una mano dentro de la chaqueta y saqu\u00e9 la jeringuilla: era mi \u00faltimo recurso. No quer\u00eda disparar la pistola de bengalas, no era un recurso. No quer\u00eda perder la partida.\n\nAdrenalina Autoinyectable ScionMed. Mucho m\u00e1s potente que el c\u00f3ctel de f\u00e1rmacos diluido que Jax utilizaba para mantenerme despierta. Me clav\u00e9 la aguja en el muslo a trav\u00e9s de los pantalones.\n\nNot\u00e9 un dolor intenso. Maldije en voz alta, pero no extraje la aguja. Un chorro de adrenalina se introdujo en el m\u00fasculo. La adrenalina de Scion estaba dise\u00f1ada para despertar todo tu cuerpo; no se limitaba a ayudarlo a funcionar, sino que eliminaba el dolor y te fortalec\u00eda. A los _centis_ se les suministraba constantemente. Mis m\u00fasculos ganaron flexibilidad; mis piernas ganaron fuerza. Me levant\u00e9 del suelo y ech\u00e9 a correr. La adrenalina no ten\u00eda efecto sobre mi sexto sentido, pero me ayudaba a concentrarme en el \u00e9ter.\n\nEl zumbador ten\u00eda un onirosaje oscuro y tenebroso; parec\u00eda un agujero negro en el \u00e9ter. Si trataba de entrar en \u00e9l, no llegar\u00eda muy lejos. De todas formas lo intent\u00e9, aunque sin abandonar mi cuerpo del todo.\n\nMe envolvi\u00f3 una nube negra. Mi onirosaje se oscureci\u00f3, y los m\u00e1rgenes de mi visi\u00f3n se estrecharon. Necesitaba repelerlo; con un salto brusco quiz\u00e1 lo lograra. Mi esp\u00edritu se proyect\u00f3 fuera de mi cuerpo y agriet\u00f3 los bordes del onirosaje de aquella cosa, que solt\u00f3 un grito espeluznante. Dej\u00e9 de o\u00edr sus pasos. Al mismo tiempo, un dolor atroz me oblig\u00f3 a volver a mi onirosaje. Ca\u00ed al suelo parando el golpe con las palmas de las manos. Me puse de nuevo en pie. Jadeaba.\n\nEl bosque dej\u00f3 paso a una pradera. Distingu\u00ed las torres de la Casa. La ciudad. Era la ciudad.\n\nLa adrenalina circulaba a toda velocidad por mis venas y regaba mis m\u00fasculos. Corr\u00ed hacia mi prisi\u00f3n con la mu\u00f1eca colgando a un costado, como una pecadora arrepentida. Prefer\u00eda ser prisionera que fiambre.\n\nEl zumbador grit\u00f3. Su grito reson\u00f3 por cada c\u00e9lula de mi cuerpo. Salt\u00e9 por encima de una alambrada y segu\u00ed corriendo. En lo alto de la Casa hab\u00eda una torre de vigilancia; dentro deb\u00eda de haber un casaca roja armado. Pod\u00edan detener al zumbador; pod\u00edan matarlo. El sudor me empapaba la ropa. Ya no faltaba mucho. Todav\u00eda no notaba el dolor, pero sab\u00eda que me hab\u00eda desgarrado un m\u00fasculo. Pas\u00e9 al lado de un letrero oxidado que rezaba: AUTORIZADO EL USO DE PODERES MORT\u00cdFEROS. Bien. Nunca hab\u00eda necesitado los poderes mort\u00edferos m\u00e1s que ahora. Ya ve\u00eda la torre de vigilancia. Cuando me dispon\u00eda a sacar la pistola de bengalas y gritar pidiendo ayuda, me sent\u00ed inmovilizada.\n\nUna red. Una gruesa red de alambre me cubr\u00eda por completo. \u00ab\u00a1No, no! \u00a1Matadlo!\u00bb, grit\u00e9 a pleno pulm\u00f3n. Forceje\u00e9 como un pez que ha mordido el anzuelo. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 me hab\u00edan atrapado? \u00a1Yo no era el enemigo! \u00abClaro que lo eres\u00bb, dijo una voz dentro de mi cabeza; pero yo ya no escuchaba nada. Ten\u00eda que soltarme de la red. El zumbador se acercaba. Me destrozar\u00eda, como hab\u00eda hecho con el zorro.\n\nUn desgarr\u00f3n. Una voz pronunciando mi nombre: \u00abC\u00e1lmate, Paige, no pasa nada, ya est\u00e1s a salvo\u00bb; pero no me fiaba de esa voz. Era la voz que yo tem\u00eda. Sal\u00ed arrastr\u00e1ndome de debajo de la red e intent\u00e9 volver a correr. Entonces alguien me sujet\u00f3 y me ech\u00f3 hacia atr\u00e1s. \u00ab\u00a1Conc\u00e9ntrate, Paige! \u00a1Utiliza tu miedo!\u00bb No pod\u00eda enfocar. El miedo me volv\u00eda salvaje. El coraz\u00f3n me lat\u00eda tan deprisa que no pod\u00eda respirar. Perd\u00eda la visi\u00f3n. Ten\u00eda la boca seca. \u00bfSegu\u00eda de pie? \u00ab\u00a1A tu derecha, Paige! \u00a1At\u00e1calo!\u00bb\n\nMir\u00e9 hacia la derecha. No distingu\u00ed qu\u00e9 era, pero no era humano. Mi miedo alcanz\u00f3 su punto m\u00e1ximo. Me lanc\u00e9 hacia el \u00e9ter. Hacia nada. Y, de pronto, hacia algo.\n\nLo \u00faltimo que vi fue mi cuerpo cayendo al suelo. Pero no lo vi con mis ojos, sino con los de una cierva.\n\nEn la vida hay cosas que no olvidas jam\u00e1s. Cosas que excavan muy hondo, que anidan en la zona hadal. Dorm\u00ed como un tronco, esperando a que mi cerebro borrara el terror que hab\u00eda sentido en el bosque.\n\nDormir era lo que me salvaba, el intervalo sereno entre estar despierta y onirambulear. Jax y los dem\u00e1s nunca hab\u00edan entendido por qu\u00e9 me gustaba tanto dormir. Despu\u00e9s de pasar horas en el \u00e9ter siempre necesitaba descansar, y Nadine lo encontraba muy gracioso. \u00abEst\u00e1s loca, Mahoney \u2014me dec\u00eda\u2014. Llevas horas roncando, y ahora pretendes seguir durmiendo. Menuda jeta. Con la pasta que te pagan.\u00bb\n\nNadine Arnett, la simpat\u00eda personificada. Era el \u00fanico miembro de la banda al que no echaba de menos.\n\nCuando despert\u00e9 era de noche. Llevaba la mu\u00f1eca sujeta con una f\u00e9rula. En lo alto hab\u00eda un dosel de terciopelo. Estaba en la cama del Custodio. \u00bfQu\u00e9 hac\u00eda en su cama?\n\nMe costaba pensar. No recordaba muy bien qu\u00e9 hab\u00eda pasado. Me sent\u00eda como el d\u00eda en que Jaxon me hab\u00eda dejado probar el vino. Me mir\u00e9 la mano. La f\u00e9rula me imped\u00eda mover la mu\u00f1eca. Quer\u00eda levantarme, salir de aquella cama, pero notaba el cuerpo demasiado caliente y pesado para moverme. \u00abSedada\u00bb, pens\u00e9. Y no me import\u00f3. Nada me importaba.\n\nCuando volv\u00ed a abrir los ojos, estaba m\u00e1s alerta. O\u00ed una voz conocida. El Custodio hab\u00eda vuelto, y no estaba solo. Me arrastr\u00e9 hacia las cortinas y las separ\u00e9.\n\nLa chimenea estaba encendida. El Custodio estaba de pie de espaldas a m\u00ed, hablando en un idioma que no reconoc\u00ed. Su voz, grave y melodiosa, resonaba como la m\u00fasica en un sal\u00f3n. Enfrente ten\u00eda a Terebell Sheratan. Ella sujetaba un c\u00e1liz con una mano y se\u00f1alaba la cama una y otra vez. El Custodio negaba con la cabeza.\n\n\u00bfEn qu\u00e9 idioma hablaban?\n\nSintonic\u00e9 con los esp\u00edritus m\u00e1s cercanos, fantasmas que hab\u00edan vivido all\u00ed en otros tiempos; se dir\u00eda que danzaban al son de la conversaci\u00f3n del Custodio y Terebell. Era exactamente lo mismo que suced\u00eda cuando Nadine tocaba el piano, o cuando un cantor cantaba una balada en la calle. Los cantores (pol\u00edglotas, estrictamente hablando) entend\u00edan y sab\u00edan hablar una lengua que solo conoc\u00edan los esp\u00edritus, pero ni el Custodio ni Terebell eran cantores. Ninguno de los dos ten\u00eda aura de pol\u00edglota.\n\nJuntaron las cabezas y examinaron un objeto. Me fij\u00e9 mejor. Y me qued\u00e9 helada.\n\nEra mi tel\u00e9fono.\n\nTerebell le daba vueltas en una mano y pasaba el pulgar sobre las teclas. La bater\u00eda se hab\u00eda agotado hac\u00eda mucho tiempo.\n\nSi ten\u00edan mi tel\u00e9fono y la mochila, tambi\u00e9n deb\u00edan de tener el panfleto. \u00bfEstar\u00edan intentando ver mis n\u00fameros? Deb\u00edan de sospechar que conoc\u00eda al autor del panfleto. Si encontraban el n\u00famero de Jaxon, podr\u00edan seguirle la pista hasta Seven Dials, y de pronto la visi\u00f3n de Carl cobrar\u00eda sentido.\n\nTen\u00eda que recuperar el tel\u00e9fono.\n\nTerebell se lo guard\u00f3 en la camisa. El Custodio le dijo algo. Ella acerc\u00f3 la frente a la de \u00e9l, sali\u00f3 de la habitaci\u00f3n y cerr\u00f3 la puerta maciza. El Custodio se qued\u00f3 un momento donde estaba, mirando hacia la ventana, para luego dirigir la atenci\u00f3n a la cama. Hacia m\u00ed.\n\nApart\u00f3 las cortinas y se sent\u00f3 sobre la colcha.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo te encuentras?\n\n\u2014Vete al cuerno.\n\nSus ojos ard\u00edan.\n\n\u2014Ya veo que mejor.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 hace Terebell con mi tel\u00e9fono?\n\n\u2014As\u00ed Nashira no lo encontrar\u00e1. Sus casacas rojas podr\u00edan utilizarlo para extraer informaci\u00f3n sobre tus amigos del sindicato.\n\n\u2014Yo no tengo amigos en el sindicato.\n\n\u2014No me mientas, Paige.\n\n\u2014No estoy mintiendo.\n\n\u2014Otra mentira.\n\n\u2014Claro, porque t\u00fa eres siempre tan sincero. \u2014Le sostuve la mirada\u2014. Me dejaste con esa cosa. Me dejaste sola, a oscuras, con un zumbador.\n\n\u2014Sab\u00edas que aparecer\u00eda. Sab\u00edas que tendr\u00edas que enfrentarte a un emite. Adem\u00e1s, te lo advert\u00ed.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo demonios me advertiste?\n\n\u2014Los puntos fr\u00edos, Paige. As\u00ed es como viajan.\n\n\u2014Entonces \u00bflo soltaste t\u00fa?\n\n\u2014No corr\u00edas peligro. Ya s\u00e9 que estabas asustada, pero necesitaba que poseyeras a esa cierva.\n\nMe clav\u00f3 la mirada. Se me sec\u00f3 la boca.\n\n\u2014\u00bfHiciste todo eso solo para que pudiera poseer a Nuala? \u2014Me humedec\u00ed los labios\u2014. Por eso abriste el punto fr\u00edo. \u2014Asinti\u00f3 con la cabeza\u2014. Soltaste al zumbador. \u2014Volvi\u00f3 a asentir\u2014. Hiciste que me asustara tanto que...\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. \u2014No se avergonzaba\u2014. Sospechaba que tu don se activaba mediante emociones fuertes: rabia, odio, tristeza... y miedo. El miedo es tu verdadero detonante. Poni\u00e9ndote en el l\u00edmite m\u00e1ximo del terror mental, te obligu\u00e9 a poseer a Nuala, haci\u00e9ndote creer que ella era el zumbador que te hab\u00eda perseguido por el bosque. Pero nunca se me habr\u00eda ocurrido ponerte en peligro.\n\n\u2014Podr\u00eda haber muerto.\n\n\u2014Tom\u00e9 ciertas precauciones. Te lo repito: en ning\u00fan momento corriste un peligro inminente.\n\n\u2014Mentira. Si crees que un c\u00edrculo de sal es una precauci\u00f3n, est\u00e1s como una cabra \u2014dije exaltada\u2014. Has debido de disfrutar vi\u00e9ndome...\n\n\u2014No, Paige. Intento ayudarte.\n\n\u2014Vete al infierno.\n\n\u2014Ya existo en cierto nivel del infierno.\n\n\u2014Pues existe en uno que no est\u00e9 cerca del m\u00edo.\n\n\u2014Lo siento, pero t\u00fa y yo hemos hecho un trato. \u2014Me sostuvo la mirada\u2014. Te espero dentro de diez minutos. Me debes una hora de conversaci\u00f3n.\n\nMe habr\u00eda gustado escupirle, pero me contuve. Sal\u00ed de la habitaci\u00f3n y sub\u00ed al piso de arriba.\n\nNo le revelar\u00eda nada m\u00e1s sobre m\u00ed misma. Ya sab\u00eda demasiado de mi vida privada, y no pod\u00eda permitir que descubriera mi relaci\u00f3n con Jax. Nashira estaba buscando a la banda. Si descubr\u00eda que era una de las principales aliadas de Jax, seguramente me obligar\u00eda a apresarlo yo misma. Decid\u00ed fingir que estaba traumatizada por el encuentro con el zumbador y que casi no pod\u00eda hablar.\n\nVolv\u00ed a o\u00edr el ruido \u00e1spero de aquella respiraci\u00f3n. Cerr\u00e9 los ojos. El recuerdo se extingui\u00f3.\n\nLlevaba una bata fina encima de la ropa, que ol\u00eda a sudor y a muerte. Fui al cuarto de ba\u00f1o y me desnud\u00e9. Me hab\u00edan dejado un uniforme rosa nuevo. Me frot\u00e9 la piel con jab\u00f3n y agua caliente. Quer\u00eda eliminar hasta el m\u00e1s leve recuerdo de aquel olor.\n\nCuando me mir\u00e9 en el espejo me di cuenta de que todav\u00eda llevaba el colgante. Me lo quit\u00e9. No me hab\u00eda servido de nada.\n\nCuando volv\u00ed a la c\u00e1mara, el Custodio estaba sentado en su butaca favorita. Me se\u00f1al\u00f3 la otra, enfrente de la suya.\n\n\u2014Por favor.\n\nMe sent\u00e9. La butaca parec\u00eda enorme.\n\n\u2014\u00bfMe has sedado?\n\n\u2014Despu\u00e9s de la posesi\u00f3n sufriste una especie de ataque epil\u00e9ptico. \u2014Se qued\u00f3 mir\u00e1ndome\u2014. \u00bfIntentaste poseer al emite?\n\n\u2014Quer\u00eda ver su onirosaje.\n\n\u2014Entiendo. \u2014Cogi\u00f3 su copa\u2014. \u00bfQuieres beber algo?\n\nEstuve tentada de pedirle algo ilegal (vino, quiz\u00e1), pero no ten\u00eda fuerzas para seguir provoc\u00e1ndolo.\n\n\u2014Caf\u00e9 \u2014dije.\n\nTir\u00f3 de una borla escarlata conectada a una campanilla anticuada.\n\n\u2014Enseguida lo traer\u00e1n \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n? \u00bfUn amaur\u00f3tico?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Los trat\u00e1is como si fueran mayordomos.\n\n\u2014Esclavos, Paige. Dej\u00e9monos de eufemismos.\n\n\u2014Pero su sangre es valiosa.\n\nDio un sorbo de la copa que ten\u00eda en la mano. Me cruc\u00e9 de brazos y esper\u00e9 a que iniciara la conversaci\u00f3n.\n\nEl gram\u00f3fono volv\u00eda a estar en marcha. Reconoc\u00ed la canci\u00f3n, \u00abI Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance (With You)\u00bb, la versi\u00f3n de Sinatra. Figuraba en la lista negra de Scion por el simple hecho de que la palabra \u00abfantasma\u00bb aparec\u00eda en el t\u00edtulo, aunque no ten\u00eda nada que ver con los fantasmas. \u00a1Ay, c\u00f3mo echaba de menos a La Voz!\n\n\u2014\u00bfTodos los discos prohibidos acaban en tus manos? \u2014pregunt\u00e9 haciendo un esfuerzo supremo para sonar desinteresada.\n\n\u2014No, van a parar a la Casa. De vez en cuando voy all\u00ed y cojo un par para mi gram\u00f3fono.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTe gusta nuestra m\u00fasica?\n\n\u2014No toda. Sobre todo la del siglo XX. Vuestros idiomas me parecen interesantes, pero no me gustan las producciones musicales modernas.\n\n\u2014De eso tiene la culpa el censor. Si no fuera por vosotros, no lo habr\u00eda.\n\nAlz\u00f3 la copa y dijo:\n\n\u2014 _Touch\u00e9_.\n\nAl cabo de un momento no pude reprimirme y pregunt\u00e9:\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 es eso?\n\n\u2014Esencia de flor de amaranto, mezclada con tinto.\n\n\u2014Nunca hab\u00eda o\u00eddo hablar del amaranto.\n\n\u2014Esta variedad no crece en la Tierra. Cura la mayor\u00eda de las lesiones espirituales. Si hubieras tomado amaranto tras tu encuentro con el duende, la herida no te habr\u00eda dejado una cicatriz tan profunda. Tambi\u00e9n curar\u00eda parte de los da\u00f1os sufridos por tu cerebro si usaras tu esp\u00edritu muy a menudo sin soporte vital.\n\nVaya, vaya. Un remedio para mi cerebro. Si Jaxon se enterara de las propiedades del amaranto, no me dejar\u00eda dormir ni un minuto.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 lo bebes?\n\n\u2014Viejas heridas. El amaranto calma el dolor.\n\nHubo un breve silencio. Me tocaba a m\u00ed hablar.\n\n\u2014Esto es tuyo \u2014dije, y le acerqu\u00e9 el colgante.\n\n\u2014Qu\u00e9datelo.\n\n\u2014No lo quiero.\n\n\u2014Insisto. Quiz\u00e1 no ahuyente a los emim, pero podr\u00eda salvarte la vida si te atacara un duende.\n\nLo dej\u00e9 en el brazo de la butaca. El Custodio lo mir\u00f3, y luego me mir\u00f3 a m\u00ed.\n\nLlamaron a la puerta. Entr\u00f3 un chico que deb\u00eda de tener mi edad; era un poco mayor que yo, como mucho. Llevaba un blus\u00f3n gris, y ten\u00eda los ojos inyectados en sangre. Sin embargo, era atractivo; parec\u00eda salido de un cuadro. Su cabello, muy rubio, enmarcaba una cara de facciones angulosas, y ten\u00eda los labios y las mejillas rosa como p\u00e9talos. Los ojos eran de un azul l\u00edquido, transparente. Me pareci\u00f3 detectar el rastro tembloroso de un aura a su alrededor.\n\n\u2014Caf\u00e9, por favor, Michael \u2014le dijo el Custodio\u2014. \u00bfLo tomas con az\u00facar, Paige?\n\n\u2014No, gracias \u2014contest\u00e9. Michael salud\u00f3 inclinando la cabeza y se march\u00f3\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9 es, tu esclavo personal?\n\n\u2014Michael fue un regalo de la soberana de sangre.\n\n\u2014Qu\u00e9 rom\u00e1ntico.\n\n\u2014No tanto. \u2014El Custodio mir\u00f3 hacia las ventanas\u2014. No se puede hacer nada cuando Nashira quiere algo. O a alguien.\n\n\u2014Ya me lo imagino.\n\n\u2014Ah, \u00bfs\u00ed?\n\n\u2014Ya s\u00e9 que tiene cinco \u00e1ngeles.\n\n\u2014As\u00ed es. Pero m\u00e1s que una fuerza son una debilidad. \u2014Volvi\u00f3 a beber de su copa\u2014. La soberana de sangre sufre bajo la influencia de sus supuestos \u00e1ngeles.\n\n\u2014Estoy segura de que ellos lo lamentan.\n\n\u2014La odian.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEn serio?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. \u2014Era evidente que le divert\u00eda mi desd\u00e9n\u2014. Solo llevamos dos minutos hablando, Paige. Procura no gastar todo tu sarcasmo de golpe.\n\nMe habr\u00eda gustado matarlo, pero no pod\u00eda.\n\nEl chico volvi\u00f3 con una cafetera. Dej\u00f3 la bandeja en la mesa, con un plato abundante de casta\u00f1as asadas espolvoreadas con canela. Se me hizo la boca agua con aquel aroma dulce. Cerca del puente de Blackfriars hab\u00eda un vendedor ambulante que en invierno vend\u00eda casta\u00f1as. Esas parec\u00edan mejores, con la c\u00e1scara agrietada y un interior blanco y tierno. Tambi\u00e9n hab\u00eda fruta: trozos de pera, cerezas relucientes y manzanas rojas en tajos.\n\nMichael hizo una se\u00f1a, y el Custodio neg\u00f3 con la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Gracias, Michael. Nada m\u00e1s.\n\nEl chico volvi\u00f3 a saludar antes de salir. Me dieron ganas de gritarle; no soportaba aquella actitud sumisa.\n\n\u2014Cuando dices \u00absupuestos\u00bb \u00e1ngeles \u2014dije, oblig\u00e1ndome a serenarme\u2014, \u00bfqu\u00e9 quieres decir exactamente?\n\nEl Custodio hizo una pausa.\n\n\u2014Come, por favor.\n\nCog\u00ed una casta\u00f1a del plato; todav\u00eda estaba caliente, reci\u00e9n salida del horno. Sab\u00eda a calidez y a invierno.\n\n\u2014Estoy seguro de que sabes qu\u00e9 es un \u00e1ngel: un alma que regresa a este plano para proteger a aquel por quien dio la vida \u2014dijo\u2014. Nosotros conocemos la existencia de \u00e1ngeles y arc\u00e1ngeles, y supongo que los videntes de a pie tambi\u00e9n. \u2014Asent\u00ed\u2014. Nashira puede mandar a \u00e1ngeles de un tercer nivel.\n\n\u2014Ah, \u00bfs\u00ed?\n\n\u2014Puede atrapar a cierta clase de esp\u00edritus.\n\n\u2014Entonces es vinculadora.\n\n\u2014Es algo m\u00e1s que una simple vinculadora, Paige. Si decide matar a un clarividente, no solo puede atrapar su esp\u00edritu, sino utilizarlo. Mientras el esp\u00edritu est\u00e1 vinculado a ella, su presencia afecta al aura de Nashira. Esa deformaci\u00f3n es lo que le permite tener varios dones a la vez.\n\nSe me derram\u00f3 el caf\u00e9 en el regazo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTiene que matarlo ella misma?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Los llamamos \u00ab\u00e1ngeles ca\u00eddos\u00bb. \u2014Me mir\u00f3\u2014. Y est\u00e1n condenados a quedarse para siempre con su asesino.\n\n\u2014Eres malvado. \u2014La taza cay\u00f3 junto a mis pies\u2014. \u00bfC\u00f3mo pretendes que hable contigo, que te trate como si fueras humano, cuando tu prometida puede hacer algo as\u00ed? \u00bfC\u00f3mo puedes mirarla a la cara?\n\n\u2014\u00bfAcaso he dicho que yo haya llamado alguna vez a un \u00e1ngel ca\u00eddo?\n\n\u2014Pero has matado.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa tambi\u00e9n.\n\n\u2014Eso no viene al caso.\n\nLa expresi\u00f3n del Custodio hab\u00eda cambiado: ya no hab\u00eda ni rastro de burla en ella.\n\n\u2014No s\u00e9 qu\u00e9 podr\u00e9 hacer por este mundo \u2014dijo\u2014, pero no dejar\u00e9 que sufras ning\u00fan da\u00f1o.\n\n\u2014No necesito que me protejas. Deshazte de m\u00ed. Enjar\u00e9tame a otro. Ya no quiero ser tu alumna. Quiero cambiar de guardi\u00e1n. Quiero irme con Thuban. Env\u00edame con Thuban.\n\n\u2014No sabes lo que es tener un guardi\u00e1n de los Sargas, Paige.\n\n\u2014No me digas lo que quiero. Quiero...\n\n\u2014Quieres volver a sentirte segura. \u2014Se levant\u00f3; la mesita de caf\u00e9 nos separaba\u2014. Quieres que te trate como Thuban y los otros tratan a sus humanos, porque as\u00ed sentir\u00edas que tienes todo el derecho a odiar a los refa\u00edtas. Pero, como no te hago ning\u00fan da\u00f1o, y como intento comprenderte, huyes. S\u00e9 por qu\u00e9 lo haces, claro. T\u00fa no entiendes mis motivos. Te preguntas una y otra vez por qu\u00e9 quiero ayudarte, y no llegas a ninguna conclusi\u00f3n. Pero eso no significa que no haya conclusi\u00f3n, Paige. Significa que todav\u00eda tienes que descubrirla.\n\nMe recost\u00e9 en la butaca. El caf\u00e9 caliente me hab\u00eda traspasado los pantalones. Cuando lo vio, el Custodio dijo:\n\n\u2014Voy a buscarte algo.\n\nFue hasta el armario. Yo echaba fuego por los ojos. Casi pod\u00eda o\u00edr a Jax rega\u00f1\u00e1ndome: \u00abQu\u00e9 tonta eres. M\u00edrate, est\u00e1s a punto de llorar. \u00a1Levanta la cabeza, querida! \u00bfQu\u00e9 quieres? \u00bfCompasi\u00f3n? \u00bfL\u00e1stima? No las vas a obtener de \u00e9l, como tampoco las obten\u00edas de m\u00ed. El mundo es un matadero, dama m\u00eda. Empu\u00f1a tus armas. Ens\u00e9\u00f1ame c\u00f3mo le haces sufrir\u00bb _._\n\nEl Custodio me acerc\u00f3 un blus\u00f3n negro.\n\n\u2014Espero que te sirva. Quiz\u00e1 te venga un poco grande, pero te abrigar\u00e1.\n\nAsent\u00ed. El Custodio me dio la espalda. Me puse el blus\u00f3n por la cabeza. Ten\u00eda raz\u00f3n: me llegaba por las rodillas.\n\n\u2014Ya est\u00e1 \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQuieres sentarte?\n\n\u2014Como si pudiera elegir.\n\n\u2014Te estoy dejando elegir.\n\n\u2014No s\u00e9 qu\u00e9 quieres que diga.\n\n\u2014Lo ideal ser\u00eda que me contaras qui\u00e9n ha sido tan cruel contigo en el pasado para hacerte pensar que no puedes fiarte de nadie. \u2014Volvi\u00f3 a su butaca\u2014. Pero s\u00e9 que eso no vas a cont\u00e1rmelo. Quieres proteger a esos amigos tuyos.\n\n\u2014No s\u00e9 de qu\u00e9 me hablas.\n\n\u2014Ya, claro.\n\nNo pude contenerme m\u00e1s.\n\n\u2014De acuerdo, tengo amigos videntes. \u00bfNo es lo normal, que los videntes tengan amigos videntes?\n\n\u2014No. El sindicato de Londres se ha fortalecido con los a\u00f1os. Nosotros capturamos sobre todo a marginados, a los que viven solos o en las calles, porque no saben controlar sus poderes. O porque sus familias los han echado de casa. Por eso muchos nos prestan sus servicios de buen grado: sus semejantes los han maltratado. Y si bien los refa\u00edtas los tratamos como a ciudadanos de segunda clase, les ofrecemos la oportunidad de permitirse un poco de \u00e9ter. Los ponemos por grupos, hacemos que vuelvan a pertenecer a una estructura social. \u2014Se\u00f1al\u00f3 la puerta\u2014. Michael era pol\u00edglota; tengo entendido que vosotros los llam\u00e1is \u00abcantores\u00bb. A sus padres les asustaba tanto su fraseolog\u00eda que intentaron exorcizarlo. Su onirosaje se derrumb\u00f3, y despu\u00e9s perdi\u00f3 el habla casi por completo.\n\nNo supe qu\u00e9 decir. Hab\u00eda o\u00eddo hablar de personas cuyo onirosaje se derrumbaba; era lo que le hab\u00eda pasado a uno de los chicos de mi banda, Zeke. As\u00ed era como te convert\u00edas en un ilegible: el onirosaje se regeneraba, pero levantaba una capa tras otra de armadura, impidiendo cualquier ataque espiritual.\n\n\u2014Los casacas rojas lo capturaron hace dos a\u00f1os. Malviv\u00eda en las calles de Southwark; era un ilegible sin dinero ni comida. Lo llevaron a la Torre y sospecharon que era antinatural, pero yo hice que lo trajeran aqu\u00ed antes de tiempo. Lo tratan como a un amaur\u00f3tico, pero todav\u00eda tiene aura. Yo le ense\u00f1\u00e9 a hablar de nuevo. Espero que alg\u00fan d\u00eda encuentre el \u00e9ter, y que pueda cantar como antes. Con las voces de los muertos.\n\n\u2014Un momento \u2014dije\u2014. \u00bfLe ense\u00f1aste t\u00fa?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\nEl silencio invad\u00eda cada rinc\u00f3n y cada grieta de la habitaci\u00f3n. El Custodio cogi\u00f3 su copa.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n eres? \u2014pregunt\u00e9. Me mir\u00f3\u2014. Eres el consorte de sangre de una soberana Sargas. Trabajas para su gobierno desde 1859. Has apoyado el tr\u00e1fico de videntes, has visto desarrollarse todo un sistema alrededor de eso. Les has ayudado a divulgar mentiras, odio y temor. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 ayudas a los humanos?\n\n\u2014Eso no puedo dec\u00edrtelo. Del mismo modo que t\u00fa no quieres revelarme qui\u00e9nes son tus amigos, yo no te revelar\u00e9 cu\u00e1les son mis motivos ocultos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfMe lo dir\u00edas si averiguaras qui\u00e9nes son mis amigos?\n\n\u2014Es posible.\n\n\u2014\u00bfLo sabe Michael?\n\n\u2014No todo. Michael me ha demostrado una gran lealtad, pero no puedo confiar plenamente en \u00e9l dado su fr\u00e1gil estado mental.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPiensas lo mismo de m\u00ed?\n\n\u2014No dispongo de suficiente informaci\u00f3n para confiar en ti, Paige. Pero eso no significa que no puedas ganarte mi confianza. De hecho \u2014a\u00f1adi\u00f3 recost\u00e1ndose en la butaca\u2014, hoy se te presentar\u00e1 una oportunidad.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 quieres decir?\n\n\u2014Ya lo ver\u00e1s.\n\n\u2014A ver si lo adivino. Mataste a un adivino y le robaste su poder, y ahora crees poder predecir mi futuro.\n\n\u2014Yo no robo dones. Pero conozco muy bien a Nashira, lo suficiente para prever sus movimientos. S\u00e9 cu\u00e1ndo le gusta atacar.\n\nEl reloj de p\u00e9ndulo dio las once. El Custodio lo mir\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Ya ha transcurrido una hora \u2014dijo\u2014. Eres libre para irte. Quiz\u00e1 deber\u00edas ir a visitar a tu amiga, la cartom\u00e1ntica.\n\n\u2014Liss sufre un choque espiritual \u2014dije. El Custodio me mir\u00f3\u2014. Los casacas rojas arrojaron sus cartas al fuego. \u2014Ten\u00eda un nudo en la garganta\u2014. No he vuelto a verla desde entonces.\n\n\u00abP\u00eddele ayuda. \u2014Me debat\u00eda conmigo misma\u2014. Preg\u00fantale si puede conseguirle otras cartas. Seguro que dir\u00e1 que s\u00ed. Ayud\u00f3 a Michael.\u00bb\n\n\u2014Es una l\u00e1stima \u2014dijo\u2014. Es una actriz con gran talento.\n\nMe obligu\u00e9 a decirlo:\n\n\u2014\u00bfQuerr\u00edas ayudarla?\n\n\u2014No tengo ninguna baraja. Ella necesita su enlace con el \u00e9ter. \u2014Me mir\u00f3 a los ojos\u2014. Tambi\u00e9n necesitar\u00eda amaranto.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 quieta en el sitio y vi al Custodio coger una cajita de encima de la mesa. Parec\u00eda una caja de rap\u00e9 antigua, hecha de madreperla y trocitos de oro. En el centro de la tapa estaba la flor de ocho p\u00e9talos, la misma que hab\u00eda en la caja donde guardaba sus viales. La abri\u00f3 y sac\u00f3 una botellita de aceite de color azul.\n\n\u2014Eso es extracto de \u00e1ster \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014Muy bien.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 lo tienes?\n\n\u2014Utilizo dosis peque\u00f1as de la flor estrella para ayudar a Michael. Le ayuda a recordar su onirosaje.\n\n\u2014\u00bfFlor estrella?\n\n\u2014As\u00ed es como los refa\u00edtas llamamos al \u00e1ster. Es una traducci\u00f3n literal de nuestra lengua: _glossolalia_ , o _gloss_.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEs la lengua que hablan los cantores?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. La antigua lengua del \u00e9ter. Michael ya no puede hablarla, pero la entiende. Igual que los suspirantes.\n\nAs\u00ed que los cantores pod\u00edan entender a los refa\u00edtas. Interesante.\n\n\u2014\u00bfVas a darle \u00e1ster... ahora?\n\n\u2014No. Solo quer\u00eda organizar mi colecci\u00f3n de f\u00e1rmacos requisados \u2014dijo. No sab\u00eda si estaba bromeando o no. Seguramente no\u2014. Algunas, como la an\u00e9mona, pueden usarse para hacernos da\u00f1o. \u2014Sac\u00f3 una flor roja de la caja\u2014. Ciertos venenos deben mantenerse lejos de las manos humanas. \u2014Me miraba fijamente\u2014. No nos gustar\u00eda que los utilizaran, pongamos por caso, para infiltrarse en la Casa. Eso pondr\u00eda en peligro nuestros suministros m\u00e1s secretos.\n\n\u00abFlor roja. \u2014Record\u00e9 la nota de David\u2014. \u00danico m\u00e9todo.\u00bb \u00bfEl \u00fanico m\u00e9todo para matar a los refa\u00edtas?\n\n\u2014No \u2014dije\u2014. No nos gustar\u00eda.\n\nLa Colonia estaba tranquila. No hab\u00eda vuelto a ver a Liss desde que Suhail me hab\u00eda escoltado hasta Magdalen; no hab\u00eda tenido ocasi\u00f3n de ir a ver c\u00f3mo estaba y comprobar si hab\u00eda sobrevivido a la p\u00e9rdida de su baraja.\n\nLa encontr\u00e9 consciente, pero ausente. Ten\u00eda los labios p\u00e1lidos y la mirada perdida, desenfocada. Estaba en pleno choque espiritual.\n\nJulian y el actor con gafas al que hab\u00eda visto el primer d\u00eda, Cyril, se hab\u00edan impuesto la misi\u00f3n de cuidarla. Le daban de comer, le cepillaban el pelo, le curaban las quemaduras de las manos y hablaban con ella. Liss estaba all\u00ed tumbada, r\u00edgida y sudorosa, murmurando sobre el \u00e9ter. Como ya no pod\u00eda conectar con \u00e9l, su tendencia natural era abandonar su cuerpo y unirse con el \u00e9ter. Nosotros ten\u00edamos que contener esa tendencia y hacer que Liss se quedara con nosotros.\n\nFui a la casa de empe\u00f1os de Duckett y cambi\u00e9 dos pastillas por un Sterno, unas cerillas y una lata de jud\u00edas. En la tienda no hab\u00eda ninguna baraja de cartas. Las hab\u00eda confiscado todas aquella casaca roja, Kathryn, para asegurarse de que Liss segu\u00eda sufriendo. Kathryn ten\u00eda suerte de que el Custodio le hubiera prohibido acercarse a m\u00ed.\n\nCuando volv\u00ed a la choza, Julian levant\u00f3 la cabeza. Ten\u00eda los ojos enrojecidos de cansancio. En lugar del blus\u00f3n rosa llevaba una camisa hecha jirones y unos pantalones de tela.\n\n\u2014Has tardado mucho, Paige.\n\n\u2014Estaba ocupada. Ya te lo explicar\u00e9. \u2014Me arrodill\u00e9 junto a Liss\u2014. \u00bfHa comido?\n\n\u2014Ayer consegu\u00ed que comiera un poco de _skilly_ , pero lo vomit\u00f3 todo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfY las quemaduras?\n\n\u2014Mal. Necesitamos sulfadiazina de plata.\n\n\u2014Tenemos que intentar conseguir que coma algo. \u2014Le acarici\u00e9 los rizos h\u00famedos y le pellizqu\u00e9 la mejilla\u2014. \u00bfLiss?\n\nTen\u00eda los ojos abiertos, pero no me contest\u00f3. Encend\u00ed el Sterno. Cyril tamborileaba con los dedos en una rodilla.\n\n\u2014Venga, Rymore \u2014le dijo con fastidio\u2014. No puedes dejar las sedas tanto tiempo.\n\n\u2014Un poco de cari\u00f1o no le vendr\u00eda mal \u2014dijo Julian.\n\n\u2014No hay tiempo para eso. Suhail vendr\u00e1 a buscarla pronto. Tiene que actuar conmigo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTodav\u00eda no se han enterado?\n\n\u2014Nell ha estado cubri\u00e9ndola. Se parecen bastante con el traje y la m\u00e1scara: misma estatura, mismo color de pelo. Pero Nell no es tan buena. Se cae. \u2014Cyril mir\u00f3 a Liss\u2014. Rymore nunca se cae.\n\nJulian puso las jud\u00edas a calentar. Busqu\u00e9 una cuchara e incorpor\u00e9 un poco a Liss rode\u00e1ndola con un brazo. Ella neg\u00f3 con la cabeza.\n\n\u2014No.\n\n\u2014Tienes que comer un poco, Liss \u2014le dijo Julian asi\u00e9ndole la fr\u00eda mu\u00f1eca, pero Liss no reaccion\u00f3.\n\nCuando las jud\u00edas estuvieron calientes, Julian le ech\u00f3 la cabeza hacia atr\u00e1s a Liss. Empec\u00e9 a darle de comer, pero Liss apenas pod\u00eda tragar. Las jud\u00edas le resbalaban por la barbilla. Cyril cogi\u00f3 la lata y reba\u00f1\u00f3 lo que quedaba con los dedos. Me puse en cuclillas y me qued\u00e9 mirando a Liss arrebujada en las s\u00e1banas.\n\n\u2014Esto no puede ser.\n\n\u2014Pues no podemos hacer nada. \u2014Julian apret\u00f3 un pu\u00f1o\u2014. Aunque encontr\u00e1ramos una baraja, no tenemos ninguna garant\u00eda de que vaya a funcionar. Ser\u00eda como ponerle un brazo o una pierna nuevos. Liss podr\u00eda rechazarla.\n\n\u2014Tenemos que intentarlo. \u2014Mir\u00e9 a Cyril\u2014. \u00bfNo hay m\u00e1s cartom\u00e1nticos por aqu\u00ed?\n\n\u2014Solo muertos.\n\n\u2014Aunque hubiera alguno, no podemos usar la baraja de otro \u2014dijo Julian en voz baja\u2014. Eso ser\u00eda peor que un asesinato.\n\n\u2014Entonces se la robaremos a los refas \u2014dije. Robar era mi especialidad\u2014. Voy a entrar en la Casa. All\u00ed debe de haber suministros.\n\n\u2014Morir\u00e1s \u2014dijo Cyril sin una pizca de aflicci\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014He sobrevivido a un zumbador. No me pasar\u00e1 nada.\n\nJulian me mir\u00f3 con gesto de sorpresa.\n\n\u2014\u00bfLos has visto?\n\n\u2014Viven en el bosque. El Custodio me dej\u00f3 all\u00ed con uno.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSignifica eso que has aprobado los ex\u00e1menes? \u2014La desconfianza se dibuj\u00f3 en su cara\u2014. \u00bfAhora eres una casaca roja?\n\n\u2014No lo s\u00e9. Cre\u00eda que s\u00ed, pero... \u2014Me tir\u00e9 del blus\u00f3n\u2014. Esto no es rojo.\n\n\u2014Menos mal. \u2014Hizo una pausa\u2014. \u00bfC\u00f3mo era? El zumbador.\n\n\u2014R\u00e1pido. Agresivo. No lo vi muy bien. \u2014Le mir\u00e9 la ropa\u2014. \u00bfT\u00fa todav\u00eda no has visto ninguno?\n\nEsboz\u00f3 una sonrisa.\n\n\u2014Aludra me ech\u00f3 por llegar pasado el toque de queda. Me temo que me han degradado a buf\u00f3n.\n\nCyril estaba temblando.\n\n\u2014Su mordedura es mortal \u2014susurr\u00f3\u2014. No deber\u00edas volver all\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Quiz\u00e1 no tenga alternativa \u2014dije. Cyril apoy\u00f3 la cabeza en los brazos\u2014. Jules, p\u00e1same una s\u00e1bana.\n\nLo hizo, y envolv\u00ed con ella a Liss. No dejaba de temblar. Le frot\u00e9 los helados brazos para ayudarla a entrar en calor. Ten\u00eda ampollas en los dedos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfLo dices en serio, Paige? \u2014me pregunt\u00f3 Julian\u2014. Lo de entrar en la Casa.\n\n\u2014El Custodio dice que all\u00ed hay suministros. Un almac\u00e9n secreto, cosas que nosotros no deber\u00edamos ver. Quiz\u00e1 haya sulfadiazina de plata.\n\n\u2014\u00bfNo se te ha ocurrido pensar que deben de estar vigilados? \u00bfNi que el Custodio podr\u00eda estar mintiendo?\n\n\u2014Me arriesgar\u00e9.\n\nJulian dio un suspiro y a\u00f1adi\u00f3:\n\n\u2014Supongo que no puedo imped\u00edrtelo. Y \u00bfqu\u00e9 piensas hacer si consigues entrar?\n\n\u2014Voy a robar todo lo que pueda, cualquier cosa que pueda utilizar para defenderme, y luego me ir\u00e9. Si alguien se anima, puede venir conmigo. Si no, ir\u00e9 sola. Pase lo que pase, no pienso pudrirme aqu\u00ed el resto de mi vida.\n\n\u2014No vayas \u2014dijo Cyril\u2014. Morir\u00e1s. Como murieron otros antes. Se los comieron los zumbadores. Y a ti tambi\u00e9n te comer\u00e1n.\n\n\u2014Basta, Cyril, por favor. \u2014Julian me mir\u00f3 y a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014: Ve a la Casa, Paige. Intentar\u00e9 reunir una tropa.\n\n\u2014\u00bfUna tropa?\n\n\u2014Venga, Paige. \u2014La llama del hornillo se reflejaba en sus ojos\u2014. No pensar\u00e1s marcharte sin pelear, \u00bfverdad?\n\n\u2014\u00bfSin pelear? \u2014dije arqueando las cejas.\n\n\u2014No pensar\u00e1s largarte y hacer como si no hubiera pasado nada. Scion lleva dos siglos haciendo esto, Paige. No va a dejarlo as\u00ed como as\u00ed. \u00bfQu\u00e9 les impedir\u00e1 volver a traerte aqu\u00ed en cuanto llegues a SciLo?\n\nJulian ten\u00eda raz\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 sugieres que haga?\n\n\u2014Una fuga masiva. Nos vamos todos y los dejamos sin videntes de que alimentarse.\n\n\u2014Aqu\u00ed hay m\u00e1s de doscientos humanos. No podemos irnos todos, como si tal cosa. Adem\u00e1s, en el bosque hay minas de tierra. \u2014Acerqu\u00e9 las rodillas a la barbilla\u2014. Ya sabes lo que pas\u00f3 durante la Era XVIII. No quiero tener tantas muertes en mi conciencia.\n\n\u2014No las tendr\u00e1s en tu conciencia. La gente quiere irse, Paige; lo que pasa es que les falta valor. Todav\u00eda. Si conseguimos causar una distracci\u00f3n, podremos sacarlos por el bosque. \u2014Me puso una mano en el brazo\u2014. T\u00fa eres del sindicato. Eres irlandesa. \u00bfNo crees que ya va siendo hora de demostrar a los refas que no mandan ellos? \u00bfQue no pueden seguir rob\u00e1ndonos as\u00ed? \u2014Como no contestaba, me dio un apret\u00f3n\u2014. Vamos a demostrarles que, despu\u00e9s de doscientos a\u00f1os, todav\u00eda tienen algo que temer.\n\nYa no le ve\u00eda la cara. Ve\u00eda a Finn aquel d\u00eda en Dubl\u00edn, dici\u00e9ndome que deb\u00eda pelear.\n\n\u2014A lo mejor tienes raz\u00f3n \u2014conced\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Claro que la tengo. \u2014Compuso una sonrisa que mitig\u00f3 brevemente su cara de cansancio\u2014. \u00bfA cu\u00e1ntos crees que necesitamos?\n\n\u2014Empieza con los que tengan buenas razones para odiar a los refa\u00edtas. Los bufones. Los casacas amarillas. Los amaur\u00f3ticos. Ella, Felix, Ivy. Luego, los casacas blancas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 les digo?\n\n\u2014Nada, todav\u00eda. Lim\u00edtate a hacer preguntas. Averigua si estar\u00edan dispuestos a intentar una fuga.\n\nJulian mir\u00f3 a Cyril.\n\n\u2014No. \u2014Cyril sacudi\u00f3 la cabeza. Detr\u00e1s de las gafas destrozadas, el miedo hac\u00eda brillar sus ojos\u2014. Yo no. Ni hablar, hermano. Nos matar\u00e1n. Son inmortales.\n\n\u2014No son inmortales. \u2014La llama del Sterno estaba reduci\u00e9ndose\u2014. Se les puede hacer da\u00f1o. Me lo ha dicho el Custodio.\n\n\u2014Podr\u00eda estar mintiendo \u2014insisti\u00f3 Julian\u2014. Estamos hablando del prometido de Nashira. Del consorte de sangre. Su mano derecha. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 conf\u00edas en \u00e9l?\n\n\u2014Porque creo que ya se ha rebelado contra ella antes. Creo que es uno de los marcados.\n\n\u2014De los \u00bfqu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Un grupo de refas que iniciaron la rebeli\u00f3n de la Era XVIII. Los torturaron y los marcaron.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n te ha contado eso?\n\n\u2014Un arrancahuesos, XX-12.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTe f\u00edas de un arrancahuesos?\n\n\u2014No, pero me ense\u00f1\u00f3 el altar que levantaron por las v\u00edctimas.\n\n\u2014Y crees que el Custodio es uno de esos \u00abmarcados\u00bb \u2014dijo. Asent\u00ed con la cabeza\u2014. Supongo que habr\u00e1s visto esas cicatrices.\n\n\u2014No. Me parece que las oculta.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTe parece? Con eso no basta, Paige.\n\nIba a contestar cuando entr\u00f3 alguien en la habitaci\u00f3n. Me qued\u00e9 de piedra. Era el Capataz.\n\n\u2014Vaya, vaya. \u2014Arque\u00f3 las perfiladas cejas\u2014. Se ve que entre nosotros hay un impostor. \u00bfQui\u00e9n era la que estaba con las sedas, si XIX-1 estaba aqu\u00ed?\n\nMe levant\u00e9, y Julian tambi\u00e9n.\n\n\u2014Tiene choque espiritual \u2014dije. Mir\u00e9 al Capataz a los ojos\u2014. As\u00ed no puede actuar.\n\nEl Capataz se arrodill\u00f3 junto a Liss y le toc\u00f3 la frente. Ella intent\u00f3 apartarse.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Esto es terrible! \u2014Le pas\u00f3 los dedos por el pelo\u2014. \u00a1Terrible! No puedo perder a 1. Mi peque\u00f1a 1 es especial.\n\nLiss empez\u00f3 a chillar en medio de fuertes espasmos.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Vete! \u2014dec\u00eda\u2014. \u00a1Vete!\n\nJulian agarr\u00f3 al Capataz por el hombro y le dio un fuerte empuj\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014No la toques.\n\nMe puse a su lado. Cyril, sentado en cuclillas, se mec\u00eda adelante y atr\u00e1s. Al principio el Capataz se qued\u00f3 estupefacto; luego rompi\u00f3 a re\u00edr. Se levant\u00f3 y se puso a dar palmadas de alegr\u00eda. Meti\u00f3 una mano enguantada dentro de su chaqueta.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 es esto, ni\u00f1os? \u00bfUna rebeli\u00f3n? \u00bfHe dejado entrar a dos lobos hambrientos en mi reba\u00f1o?\n\nCon una sacudida de la mu\u00f1eca desenroll\u00f3 su l\u00e1tigo, una herramienta dise\u00f1ada para manejar el ganado.\n\n\u2014No voy a permitir que corromp\u00e1is a 1. Ni a ninguno de mis peque\u00f1os. \u2014Restall\u00f3 el l\u00e1tigo mir\u00e1ndome a m\u00ed\u2014. Quiz\u00e1 todav\u00eda no seas actriz, 40, pero lo ser\u00e1s. Vuelve con tu guardi\u00e1n.\n\n\u2014No.\n\n\u2014No vamos a irnos. \u2014El rostro de Julian irradiaba determinaci\u00f3n\u2014. No vamos a dejar sola a Liss.\n\nEl Capataz sacudi\u00f3 el l\u00e1tigo. Julian se tambale\u00f3 y empez\u00f3 a sangrar por una nueva herida en la mejilla.\n\n\u2014Ahora eres de los m\u00edos, chico, y ser\u00e1 mejor que lo recuerdes. \u2014Separ\u00e9 los pies y los plant\u00e9 firmemente en el suelo. El Capataz me lanz\u00f3 una sonrisa\u2014. No hay ninguna necesidad, 40. Cuidar\u00e9 bien de 1.\n\n\u2014No puedes obligarme a irme. Mi guardi\u00e1n es Arcturus. \u2014Me mantuve firme\u2014. Me encantar\u00eda ver c\u00f3mo le explicas por qu\u00e9 me has pegado.\n\n\u2014No tengo intenci\u00f3n de pegarte, andarina. Solo quiero arrearte.\n\nVolvi\u00f3 a restallar el l\u00e1tigo. Julian le lanz\u00f3 un pu\u00f1etazo y desvi\u00f3 el latigazo. Ya est\u00e1bamos otra vez, como con los arrancahuesos. Pero esa vez \u00edbamos a ganar.\n\nSent\u00ed un arrebato y me lanc\u00e9 contra el Capataz. Le asest\u00e9 un pu\u00f1etazo en la mand\u00edbula, y \u00e9l gir\u00f3 bruscamente la cara. Julian lo derrib\u00f3 con una patada detr\u00e1s de las rodillas. El Capataz dej\u00f3 de apretar el l\u00e1tigo un momento; intent\u00e9 quit\u00e1rselo, pero no pude. Dibuj\u00f3 una mueca entre una sonrisa y un gru\u00f1ido, ense\u00f1\u00e1ndome los dientes. Julian le hizo una llave de cuello. Consegu\u00ed arrancarle el l\u00e1tigo y levant\u00e9 la mano para golpearlo con \u00e9l, pero me lo quitaron. Una bota se estrell\u00f3 contra mi est\u00f3mago, y choqu\u00e9 contra la pared.\n\nSuhail. Deb\u00ed imagin\u00e1rmelo. Siempre que aparec\u00eda el Capataz, su superior no tardaba mucho en hacerlo. Igual que en las calles: el mat\u00f3n y el jefe.\n\n\u2014Pens\u00e9 que te encontrar\u00eda aqu\u00ed, mequetrefe. \u2014Me agarr\u00f3 por el pelo\u2014. Otra vez causando problemas, \u00bfverdad?\n\nLe escup\u00ed. Me peg\u00f3 tan fuerte que vi las estrellas.\n\n\u2014No me importa qui\u00e9n sea tu guardi\u00e1n, perra. La concubina no me da miedo. Si no te corto el cuello es porque la soberana de sangre me ha pedido que venga a buscarte.\n\n\u2014Seguro que le encanta o\u00edr que llamas \u00abconcubina\u00bb al Custodio, Suhail \u2014atin\u00e9 a decir\u2014. \u00bfQuieres que se lo cuente?\n\n\u2014Cu\u00e9ntale lo que quieras. La palabra de un humano significa menos que el balbuceo incoherente de un perro.\n\nMe carg\u00f3 sobre un hombro. Forceje\u00e9 y grit\u00e9, pero no quise arriesgarme a utilizar mi esp\u00edritu. El Capataz golpe\u00f3 a Julian en la cabeza con el canto de la mano y lo tir\u00f3 al suelo. Lo \u00faltimo que vi fue a Julian y a Liss, ambos a merced de un hombre del que ya no pod\u00eda defenderme.\n\nLa Residencia del Suzerano parec\u00eda mucho m\u00e1s fr\u00eda y oscura que el d\u00eda del serm\u00f3n. Estaba sola con Suhail, y seguramente tambi\u00e9n estar\u00eda sola con Nashira. Empec\u00e9 a notar peque\u00f1os espasmos que me recorr\u00edan las piernas.\n\nSuhail no me llev\u00f3 a la sala del serm\u00f3n ni a la capilla. Me arrastr\u00f3 por los pasillos y me meti\u00f3 en una habitaci\u00f3n de techos altos con ventanas en arco. La iluminaba una ara\u00f1a de luces en la que ard\u00edan velas, y una chimenea enorme. La luz proyectaba sombras m\u00f3viles en la b\u00f3veda nervada del techo.\n\nEn el centro de la habitaci\u00f3n hab\u00eda una larga mesa de comedor. A la cabecera de la mesa, sentada en una silla con tapizado rojo, estaba Nashira Sargas. Llevaba un vestido negro de cuello alto, de dise\u00f1o geom\u00e9trico, escult\u00f3rico.\n\n\u2014Buenas noches, 40.\n\nNo dije nada. Hizo una se\u00f1a con la mano.\n\n\u2014Ya puedes irte, Suhail.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, soberana de sangre. \u2014Suhail me empuj\u00f3 hacia ella\u2014. Hasta la pr\u00f3xima \u2014me susurr\u00f3 al o\u00eddo\u2014, perra.\n\nSali\u00f3 por la puerta sin decir nada m\u00e1s. Me qued\u00e9 en la habitaci\u00f3n en penumbra, mirando a la mujer que quer\u00eda matarme.\n\n\u2014Si\u00e9ntate \u2014me orden\u00f3.\n\nIba a sentarme en la silla del extremo opuesto de la mesa, a unos cuatro metros de ella, pero Nashira se\u00f1al\u00f3 la que ten\u00eda m\u00e1s cerca, a su izquierda, en el lado m\u00e1s alejado de la chimenea. Rode\u00e9 la mesa y me sent\u00e9; el m\u00e1s leve movimiento me produc\u00eda dolor de cabeza. Suhail no se hab\u00eda comedido lo m\u00e1s m\u00ednimo al asestarme aquel \u00faltimo pu\u00f1etazo.\n\nNashira no me quitaba los ojos de encima. Unos ojos de color absenta. Me pregunt\u00e9 en qui\u00e9n se habr\u00eda cebado esa noche.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1s sangrando.\n\nJunto a los cubiertos hab\u00eda una servilleta sujeta con un grueso aro de oro. Me limpi\u00e9 el labio, hinchado, con ella, y manch\u00e9 de sangre el lino de color marfil. Dobl\u00e9 la servilleta para ocultar la mancha y me la puse en el regazo.\n\n\u2014Supongo que debes de estar asustada \u2014dijo Nashira.\n\n\u2014No.\n\nDeber\u00eda estarlo. Lo estaba. Esa mujer lo controlaba todo. Era su nombre el que se susurraba a oscuras, sus \u00f3rdenes las que pon\u00edan fin a vidas. Sus \u00e1ngeles ca\u00eddos se deslizaban alrededor, sin alejarse mucho de su aura.\n\nEl silencio crec\u00eda. Yo no sab\u00eda si mirarla o no. Con el rabillo del ojo vi que algo reflejaba la luz del fuego: una campana de cristal que estaba en el centro mismo de la mesa. Bajo el cristal hab\u00eda una flor marchita, con los p\u00e9talos marrones y arrugados, que se sosten\u00eda mediante un fino alambre. Ignoraba de qu\u00e9 tipo de flor se trataba, pues estaba irreconocible. No se me ocurr\u00eda ninguna raz\u00f3n por la que Nashira pudiera tener una flor muerta en el centro de su mesa de comedor; pero, claro, era Nashira. Viv\u00eda rodeada de cosas muertas.\n\nRepar\u00f3 en mi inter\u00e9s.\n\n\u2014Hay cosas que est\u00e1n mejor muertas \u2014dijo\u2014. \u00bfNo te parece?\n\nYo no pod\u00eda desviar la mirada de la flor. Y no estaba segura, pero me pareci\u00f3 que mi sexto sentido temblaba.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed \u2014coincid\u00ed.\n\nNashira levant\u00f3 la vista. Hab\u00eda varias hileras de rostros de yeso sobre las ventanas, por lo menos cincuenta en cada una de las paredes m\u00e1s largas. Me sent\u00ed atra\u00edda hacia la que ten\u00eda m\u00e1s cerca y la examin\u00e9. Era una cara de mujer, con la expresi\u00f3n relajada y una sonrisa enigm\u00e1tica. La mujer parec\u00eda tranquila, como si durmiera.\n\nDe pronto sent\u00ed n\u00e1useas. Era _La desconocida del Sena_ , la famosa m\u00e1scara mortuoria francesa. Jax ten\u00eda una r\u00e9plica en su guarida. Seg\u00fan \u00e9l, aquella mujer, a la que encontraba hermosa, hab\u00eda sido la obsesi\u00f3n de los bohemios a finales del siglo XIX. Eliza le hab\u00eda obligado a taparla con una s\u00e1bana. Dec\u00eda que le pon\u00eda los pelos de punta.\n\nMir\u00e9 despacio alrededor, abarcando toda la habitaci\u00f3n. Todas las caras eran m\u00e1scaras mortuorias. Tuve que contener las arcadas. Nashira no solo coleccionaba esp\u00edritus de videntes, sino tambi\u00e9n sus caras. Me acord\u00e9 de Seb. \u00bfY si Seb estaba all\u00ed tambi\u00e9n? Baj\u00e9 la mirada, pero segu\u00eda teniendo el est\u00f3mago revuelto.\n\n\u2014Tienes mala cara \u2014observ\u00f3 Nashira.\n\n\u2014Estoy bien.\n\n\u2014Me alegro de o\u00edrlo. Ser\u00eda una l\u00e1stima que enfermaras en esta etapa crucial de tu estancia en Sheol I. \u2014Sin dejar de mirarme, pas\u00f3 un dedo enguantado por el cuchillo que ten\u00eda junto al plato\u2014. Mis casacas rojas se reunir\u00e1n con nosotras dentro de unos minutos, pero antes quer\u00eda hablar contigo en privado.\n\n\u00bbEl consorte de sangre ha ido inform\u00e1ndome de tus progresos. Me dice que ha hecho todo lo posible por sacar a la luz tu don, pero que no has conseguido la posesi\u00f3n plena de un onirosaje, ni siquiera la del de un animal. \u00bfEs eso cierto?\n\nNashira no lo sab\u00eda.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, es cierto \u2014confirm\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Qu\u00e9 pena. Y, sin embargo, te enfrentaste a un emite y sobreviviste. Incluso heriste a ese ser. Por esa raz\u00f3n Arcturus cree que deber\u00edamos ascenderte a casaca roja.\n\nNo supe qu\u00e9 decir. El Custodio no le hab\u00eda contado lo de la mariposa. Ni lo de la cierva. Eso significaba que no quer\u00eda que Nashira descubriera mis aptitudes; sin embargo, s\u00ed quer\u00eda que me hicieran casaca roja. \u00bfA qu\u00e9 estaba jugando esta vez?\n\n\u2014Qu\u00e9 callada est\u00e1s \u2014observ\u00f3 Nashira. Ten\u00eda una mirada glacial\u2014. El d\u00eda del serm\u00f3n no te mostraste tan t\u00edmida.\n\n\u2014Me dijeron que solo deb\u00eda hablar cuando me lo ordenaran.\n\n\u2014Pues te lo ordeno.\n\nMe habr\u00eda gustado decirle que se metiera sus \u00f3rdenes donde le cupieran. Ya hab\u00eda sido insolente con el Custodio, y no me habr\u00eda importado serlo tambi\u00e9n con ella; pero Nashira todav\u00eda ten\u00eda la mano sobre el cuchillo, y su fr\u00eda mirada revelaba una falta de escr\u00fapulos total. Al final, procurando aparentar sumisi\u00f3n, dije:\n\n\u2014Me alegro de que el consorte de sangre me considere digna del blus\u00f3n rojo. Lo he hecho lo mejor que he podido en los ex\u00e1menes.\n\n\u2014No lo dudo. Pero no nos confiemos. \u2014Se recost\u00f3 en la silla\u2014. Quiero hacerte unas preguntas. Antes de tu banquete de investidura.\n\n\u2014\u00bfBanquete de investidura?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Enhorabuena, 40. Ya eres casaca roja. Hay que presentarte a tus nuevos colegas, todos fieles a m\u00ed. Incluso por encima de sus respectivos guardianes.\n\nMe palpitaban las sienes. Casaca roja. Arrancahuesos. Hab\u00eda llegado a los niveles m\u00e1s altos de Sheol I, el c\u00edrculo de allegados de Nashira Sargas.\n\n\u2014Quiero hablar contigo sobre Arcturus \u2014dijo Nashira mirando el fuego de la chimenea\u2014. Creo que compart\u00eds dependencias.\n\n\u2014Tengo mi propia habitaci\u00f3n. En el piso de arriba.\n\n\u2014\u00bfAlguna vez te ha pedido que salgas de ella?\n\n\u2014Solo para entrenar.\n\n\u2014\u00bfNada m\u00e1s? \u00bfQuiz\u00e1 para charlar un rato?\n\n\u2014No le interesa hablar conmigo \u2014respond\u00ed\u2014. Dudo mucho que yo pudiera decir algo de inter\u00e9s para el consorte de sangre.\n\n\u2014Tienes mucha raz\u00f3n.\n\nMe mord\u00ed la lengua. Nashira no ten\u00eda ni idea de cu\u00e1nto le interesaba al Custodio, ni de todo lo que \u00e9l me hab\u00eda ense\u00f1ado en sus propias narices.\n\n\u2014Supongo que habr\u00e1s explorado sus dependencias. \u00bfHay algo en la Torre del Fundador que te haya llamado la atenci\u00f3n? \u00bfAlgo que se salga de lo normal?\n\n\u2014Tiene unos extractos de plantas que no conozco.\n\n\u2014Flores.\n\nAsent\u00ed con la cabeza, y ella cogi\u00f3 algo de la mesa. Un broche, deslustrado por el tiempo, con forma de la flor de la caja de rap\u00e9 del Custodio.\n\n\u2014\u00bfHas visto este s\u00edmbolo en la Torre del Fundador?\n\n\u2014No.\n\n\u2014Lo dices muy segura.\n\n\u2014Estoy segura. No lo he visto nunca.\n\nMe mir\u00f3 a los ojos. Intent\u00e9 sostenerle la mirada.\n\nO\u00ed cerrarse una puerta a lo lejos. Una fila de casacas rojas entraron en la habitaci\u00f3n; los acompa\u00f1aba un refa al que no reconoc\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Bienvenidos, amigos \u2014los salud\u00f3 Nashira\u2014. Sentaos, por favor.\n\nEl refa se toc\u00f3 el pecho con un pu\u00f1o y sali\u00f3 de la habitaci\u00f3n. Escudri\u00f1\u00e9 las caras de los humanos. Veinte arrancahuesos, todos bien alimentados e impecables. Los veteranos de la Era de Huesos XIX iban a la cabeza. Kathryn se encontraba entre ellos, al igual que 16 y 17. Cerraba la fila Carl, con blus\u00f3n rojo y con el pelo peinado con raya. Me lanz\u00f3 una mirada de reproche. Seguramente nunca hab\u00eda visto a un casaca rosa sentado a la mesa de la soberana de sangre.\n\nTodos tomaron asiento. Carl se vio obligado a ocupar la \u00fanica silla libre, la que estaba enfrente de m\u00ed. David se sent\u00f3 unos cuantos asientos m\u00e1s all\u00e1. Ten\u00eda otro corte en la cabeza, cosido con unas cuantas suturas adhesivas. Con las cejas arqueadas, contemplaba las m\u00e1scaras mortuorias.\n\n\u2014Me alegro de que hay\u00e1is podido venir esta noche. Gracias a vuestros incesantes esfuerzos, esta semana no hemos sufrido ning\u00fan ataque de emim que valga la pena mencionar. \u2014Nashira fue mir\u00e1ndolos uno a uno\u2014. Dicho esto, no debemos olvidar que esos seres constituyen una amenaza constante. Su brutalidad no tiene remedio y, por culpa de la fractura del umbral, tampoco hay forma de encerrarlos en el Inframundo. Vosotros sois lo \u00fanico que se interpone entre los cazadores y sus presas.\n\nTodos asintieron. Todos se lo cre\u00edan. Bueno, David quiz\u00e1 no. \u00c9l segu\u00eda observando una m\u00e1scara, con un amago de sonrisa en los labios.\n\nMi mirada se encontr\u00f3 con la de Kathryn, sentada al otro lado de la mesa. Un cardenal enorme le ocupaba todo un lado de la cara. 16 y 17 ni siquiera me miraron. Mejor. Si me miraban, quiz\u00e1 no fuera capaz de contener el impulso de lanzarles el cuchillo de mi cubierto. Liss segu\u00eda en su choza, muri\u00e9ndose, por culpa suya.\n\n\u201422 \u2014Nashira se volvi\u00f3 hacia el arrancahuesos sentado a su derecha\u2014, \u00bfc\u00f3mo est\u00e1 11? Tengo entendido que sigue en Oriel.\n\nEl joven carraspe\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1 un poco mejor, soberana de sangre. No hay se\u00f1ales de infecci\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Su valor no ha pasado inadvertido.\n\n\u2014Se sentir\u00e1 honrado de o\u00edrlo, soberana de sangre.\n\n\u00abS\u00ed, soberana de sangre. No, soberana de sangre.\u00bb A los refas les encantaba que les acariciaran el ego.\n\nNashira volvi\u00f3 a dar unas palmadas. Cuatro amaur\u00f3ticos entraron por una portezuela; cada uno llevaba una bandeja, y con ellos entr\u00f3 un aroma abrumador a hierbas. Michael era uno de ellos, pero no me mir\u00f3. Se afanaron en repartir un banquete magn\u00edfico por la mesa, alrededor de la campana de cristal. Uno nos sirvi\u00f3 vino blanco muy fr\u00edo en las copas. Se me hizo un nudo en la garganta. Las bandejas estaban rebosantes de comida. Pollo delicadamente cortado, tierno y suculento, con la piel crujiente y dorada, con relleno de salvia y cebolla; salsa de carne, espesa y con un olor dulz\u00f3n; salsa de ar\u00e1ndanos; verduras al vapor y patatas asadas; rollizas salchichas envueltas con panceta. Era un fest\u00edn digno del Inquisidor. A una se\u00f1al de Nashira, los arrancahuesos se pusieron a comer. Com\u00edan deprisa, pero sin la urgencia salvaje del hambre.\n\nMe dol\u00edan las tripas. Quer\u00eda comer. Pero entonces me acord\u00e9 de los bufones, que sobreviv\u00edan a base de grasa y pan duro en sus tugurios. All\u00ed dentro hab\u00eda tanta comida, y all\u00ed fuera, tan poca. Nashira repar\u00f3 en mis reservas.\n\n\u2014Come.\n\nEra una orden. Puse unas cuantas lonchas de pollo y un poco de verdura en mi plato. Carl se bebi\u00f3 el vino de un trago, como si fuera agua.\n\n\u2014Ten cuidado, 1 \u2014le dijo una de las chicas\u2014. No vayas a encontrarte mal otra vez.\n\nLos dem\u00e1s rieron. Carl compuso una sonrisa.\n\n\u2014Eso solo me ha pasado una vez. Cuando todav\u00eda era un casaca rosa.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, dejad tranquilo a 1. Se ha ganado el vino. \u201422 le dio un pu\u00f1etazo amistoso en el brazo\u2014. Todav\u00eda es un novato. Adem\u00e1s, todos pasamos un mal rato con nuestro primer zumbador.\n\nHubo murmullos de aprobaci\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Yo me desmay\u00e9 \u2014admiti\u00f3 la chica que hab\u00eda hablado antes. Una exhibici\u00f3n desinteresada de solidaridad\u2014. La primera vez que vi uno.\n\nCarl sonri\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Pero eres muy buena en combate espiritista, 6.\n\n\u2014Gracias.\n\nObserv\u00e9 en silencio sus muestras de camarader\u00eda. Era repugnante, pero no estaban actuando. A Carl no solo le gustaba ser un casaca roja; era algo m\u00e1s que eso: estaba como pez en el agua en ese extra\u00f1o nuevo mundo. Yo lo entend\u00eda, hasta cierto punto. Era lo mismo que hab\u00eda sentido yo cuando empec\u00e9 a trabajar para Jaxon. Quiz\u00e1 lo que le pasaba a Carl era que nunca hab\u00eda encontrado un sitio en el sindicato.\n\nNashira los observaba. Deb\u00eda de disfrutar con aquella farsa semanal. Humanos est\u00fapidos, adoctrinados, riendo de las duras pruebas a que los hab\u00eda sometido, completamente rendidos a ella, comiendo su comida. Qu\u00e9 poderosa deb\u00eda de sentirse. Qu\u00e9 satisfecha de s\u00ed misma.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa todav\u00eda eres rosa \u2014dijo una voz aguda que me llam\u00f3 la atenci\u00f3n\u2014. \u00bfHas peleado con alg\u00fan zumbador?\n\nLevant\u00e9 la cabeza y vi que todos me miraban.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, anoche \u2014contest\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Es la primera vez que te veo. \u201422 arque\u00f3 las pobladas cejas\u2014. \u00bfA qu\u00e9 batall\u00f3n perteneces?\n\n\u2014No pertenezco a ning\u00fan batall\u00f3n.\n\nLa conversaci\u00f3n se estaba poniendo interesante.\n\n\u2014En alguno tienes que estar \u2014dijo otro chico\u2014. Eres una casaca roja. \u00bfQu\u00e9 otros humanos hay en tu residencia? \u00bfQui\u00e9n es tu guardi\u00e1n?\n\n\u2014Mi guardi\u00e1n solo tiene un humano. \u2014Mir\u00e9 a 22 y esboc\u00e9 una sonrisa\u2014. Quiz\u00e1 lo hayas visto por ah\u00ed. Es el consorte de sangre.\n\nEl silencio se prolong\u00f3 durante lo que me parecieron horas. Di un sorbo de vino. No estaba acostumbrada al alcohol, y not\u00e9 una extra\u00f1a sensaci\u00f3n en la lengua.\n\n\u2014Me alegro de que el consorte de sangre haya escogido a una inquilina humana tan capacitada, 40 \u2014dijo Nashira, y solt\u00f3 una risita. Su risa era desconcertante; era como o\u00edr una campana que tocaba una nota equivocada\u2014. Se enfrent\u00f3 a un zumbador ella sola, sin su guardi\u00e1n.\n\nM\u00e1s silencio. Supuse que ninguno de ellos hab\u00eda entrado nunca en el bosque sin ir acompa\u00f1ado de un refa, y mucho menos se hab\u00eda enfrentado \u00e9l solo a un zumbador. 30 aprovech\u00f3 la ocasi\u00f3n para expresar la misma duda que yo me estaba planteando:\n\n\u2014\u00bfSignifica eso que \u00e9l no lucha contra los emim, soberana de sangre?\n\n\u2014El consorte de sangre tiene prohibido enfrentarse a ellos. Como futura pareja m\u00eda, no ser\u00eda apropiado que hiciera el trabajo de los casacas rojas.\n\n\u2014Claro, soberana de sangre.\n\nEstaba segura de que Nashira me miraba a m\u00ed. Segu\u00ed comi\u00e9ndome las patatas.\n\nEl Custodio s\u00ed peleaba contra los emim; yo misma le hab\u00eda limpiado las heridas. Lo hac\u00eda pese a esa prohibici\u00f3n de la que hab\u00eda hablado Nashira, y ella no ten\u00eda ni idea, o a lo sumo lo sospechaba.\n\nDurante unos minutos solo se oy\u00f3 el tintineo de los cubiertos. Me com\u00ed las verduras con salsa de carne y segu\u00ed pensando en los enfrentamientos secretos del Custodio con los emim. Pese a no tener necesidad de poner su vida en peligro, hab\u00eda decidido ir a su encuentro y pelear contra ellos. Ten\u00eda que haber alguna explicaci\u00f3n.\n\nLos casacas rojas hablaban en voz baja. Intercambiaban informaci\u00f3n sobre sus respectivas residencias y ensalzaban la belleza de los edificios antiguos. A veces hablaban con desd\u00e9n de los bufones (\u00abSon unos cobardes, incluso los m\u00e1s simp\u00e1ticos\u00bb). Kathryn paseaba la comida por el plato y se estremec\u00eda cada vez que mencionaban el Poblado. 30 todav\u00eda estaba colorada, mientras que Carl masticaba con excesivo \u00edmpetu, alternando los bocados con tragos de su segunda copa de vino. Cuando todos los platos hubieron quedado limpios, volvieron los amaur\u00f3ticos y recogieron la mesa, en la que dejaron tres bandejas de postres. Nashira esper\u00f3 a que los casacas rojas se sirvieran antes de volver a tomar la palabra.\n\n\u2014Ahora que hab\u00e9is comido y bebido, amigos, vamos a distraernos un poco.\n\nCarl se limpi\u00f3 la melaza de los labios con la servilleta. Una troupe de bufones entr\u00f3 en la habitaci\u00f3n. Entre ellos hab\u00eda un suspirante; a un movimiento de cabeza de Nashira, se coloc\u00f3 el viol\u00edn en el hombro y empez\u00f3 a tocar una melod\u00eda suave y alegre. Los otros empezaron a realizar gr\u00e1ciles acrobacias.\n\n\u2014Centr\u00e9monos, pues \u2014dijo Nashira sin prestar la m\u00e1s m\u00ednima atenci\u00f3n a la actuaci\u00f3n\u2014. Si alguno de vosotros ha conversado alguna vez con el Capataz, quiz\u00e1 sepa lo que hace para ganarse el sustento. Es mi captador para las Eras de Huesos. Desde hace unas d\u00e9cadas, intento captar a videntes valiosos del sindicato criminal de Scion Londres. Todos lo conoc\u00e9is, sin duda; algunos de vosotros quiz\u00e1 hasta hay\u00e1is formado parte de \u00e9l.\n\n30 y 18 se removieron en los asientos. No recordaba haber visto sus caras por el sindicato, pero yo siempre hab\u00eda trabajado dentro de los l\u00edmites del sector I-4 y, solo ocasionalmente, en los I-1 y I-5. Hab\u00eda otros treinta y tres sectores de los que pod\u00edan provenir.\n\nNadie miraba a los actores. Su actuaci\u00f3n era perfecta, y a nadie le importaba.\n\n\u2014En Sheol I buscamos calidad, no solo cantidad. \u2014Nashira ignor\u00f3 las miradas ce\u00f1udas de la mitad de su audiencia\u2014. En las \u00faltimas d\u00e9cadas he observado una disminuci\u00f3n constante de la diversidad entre los clarividentes que capturamos. Los refa\u00edtas respetamos y valoramos todas vuestras habilidades, pero todav\u00eda necesitamos muchos talentos para enriquecer esta colonia. Debemos aprender unos de otros. No basta con traer cartom\u00e1nticos y palmistas.\n\n\u00bbXX-59-40 es un buen ejemplo de la clase de clarividentes que buscamos ahora. Es nuestra primera onir\u00e1mbula. Tambi\u00e9n necesitamos sibilas y berserkers, vinculadores e invocadores, y un par de or\u00e1culos m\u00e1s: cualquier g\u00e9nero de clarividente que pueda aportar m\u00e1s perspicacia a nuestras tropas.\n\nKathryn me mir\u00f3 con sus amoratados ojos. Ahora ya sab\u00eda con certeza que yo no era una furia.\n\n\u2014Creo que todos podr\u00edamos aprender mucho de 40 \u2014dijo David alzando su copa\u2014. Estoy dese\u00e1ndolo.\n\n\u2014Una actitud excelente, 12. S\u00ed, esperamos aprender mucho de 40 \u2014confirm\u00f3 Nashira, y me mir\u00f3\u2014. Esa es la raz\u00f3n por la que ma\u00f1ana voy a enviarla a realizar una misi\u00f3n externa.\n\nLos veteranos se miraron. Carl se puso colorado como la charlota de fresa.\n\n\u2014XX-59-1 tambi\u00e9n ir\u00e1. Y t\u00fa, 12 \u2014continu\u00f3 Nashira. Carl estaba euf\u00f3rico. David miraba dentro de su copa con una sonrisa en los labios\u2014. Ir\u00e9is con uno de nuestros s\u00e9niors de la Era de Huesos XIX, que vigilar\u00e1 vuestra actuaci\u00f3n. 30, supongo que puedo contar contigo para eso.\n\n30 asinti\u00f3 con la cabeza y dijo:\n\n\u2014Ser\u00e1 un honor, soberana de sangre.\n\n\u2014Estupendo.\n\nCarl estaba sentado en el borde de la silla.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEn qu\u00e9 consistir\u00e1 la misi\u00f3n, soberana de sangre?\n\n\u2014Tenemos que resolver una situaci\u00f3n delicada. Como ya saben 1 y 12, he pedido a la mayor\u00eda de los casacas blancas que hicieran predicciones del paradero de un grupo denominado los Siete Sellos. Pertenecen al sindicato de clarividentes.\n\nNo levant\u00e9 la mirada.\n\n\u2014Sabemos que los Siete Sellos poseen varios tipos de clarividentes poco comunes, entre ellos un or\u00e1culo y un vinculador. De hecho, ese tal Vinculador Blanco es el elemento clave del grupo. A partir de predicciones recientes, hemos deducido que van a reunirse en Londres pasado ma\u00f1ana. El sitio se llama Trafalgar Square, en la cohorte I, y la reuni\u00f3n se celebrar\u00e1 a la una de la madrugada.\n\nHab\u00edan acumulado una cantidad de detalles incre\u00edble. Pero, con tantos videntes haciendo predicciones a la vez, concentrando su energ\u00eda en determinado sector del \u00e9ter, no deber\u00eda haberme sorprendido. Con ello conseguir\u00edan un efecto parecido al de una sesi\u00f3n espiritista.\n\n\u2014\u00bfAlguno de vosotros sabe algo sobre los Siete Sellos? \u2014Como nadie contestaba, Nashira me mir\u00f3\u2014. 40, t\u00fa debes de haber tenido alguna relaci\u00f3n con el sindicato. De no ser as\u00ed no habr\u00edas podido permanecer escondida en Londres tanto tiempo. \u2014Me mir\u00f3 fijamente\u2014. Cu\u00e9ntame lo que sabes.\n\nCarraspe\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Las bandas son muy herm\u00e9ticas \u2014dije\u2014. He o\u00eddo alg\u00fan cotilleo, pero...\n\n\u2014\u00bfAlg\u00fan cotilleo?\n\n\u2014Rumores \u2014aclar\u00e9\u2014. Habladur\u00edas.\n\n\u2014Expl\u00edcate mejor.\n\n\u2014Todos sabemos sus nombres falsos.\n\n\u2014Y \u00bfqu\u00e9 nombres son esos?\n\n\u2014El Vinculador Blanco, la Visi\u00f3n Roja, el Diamante Negro, la So\u00f1adora P\u00e1lida, la Musa Martirizada, la Furia Encadenada y la Campana Silenciosa.\n\n\u2014Conoc\u00eda la mayor\u00eda de esos nombres. No as\u00ed el de So\u00f1adora P\u00e1lida. \u2014Me alegr\u00e9\u2014. Eso me hace pensar que hay otra onir\u00e1mbula. Qu\u00e9 coincidencia, \u00bfno? \u2014Tamborile\u00f3 con los dedos en la mesa\u2014. \u00bfSabes d\u00f3nde tienen su base?\n\nNo pod\u00eda negarlo. Nashira hab\u00eda visto mi documentaci\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed \u2014respond\u00ed\u2014. En el I-4. Es donde yo trabajaba.\n\n\u2014\u00bfNo es inusual que dos onir\u00e1mbulas vivan tan cerca la una de la otra? Seguro que tambi\u00e9n te habr\u00edan contratado a ti.\n\n\u2014Ellos no lo sab\u00edan. Yo procuraba no llamar la atenci\u00f3n \u2014ment\u00ed\u2014. Esa So\u00f1adora es la dama del I-4, la protegida del Vinculador. Me habr\u00eda hecho matar si se hubiera enterado de que ten\u00eda una rival. A las bandas dominantes no les gusta la competencia.\n\nEstaba segura de que Nashira estaba jugando conmigo. Nashira no era idiota. Ya deb\u00eda de haber atado cabos: el panfleto, la So\u00f1adora P\u00e1lida, los Siete Sellos trabajando en el I-4. Sab\u00eda perfectamente qui\u00e9n era yo.\n\n\u2014Si la So\u00f1adora P\u00e1lida es una onir\u00e1mbula, el Vinculador Blanco podr\u00eda estar escondiendo a una de las clarividentes m\u00e1s codiciadas de la ciudadela \u2014dijo\u2014. Raras veces se nos presenta la oportunidad de a\u00f1adir joyas tan valiosas a nuestra corona. Tu papel en esta misi\u00f3n es vital, 40. Si hay alguien capaz de reconocer a la onir\u00e1mbula de los Siete Sellos, es otra onir\u00e1mbula.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, soberana de sangre \u2014dije con la garganta muy tensa\u2014, pero \u00bfpor qu\u00e9 van a reunirse los Siete Sellos a esa hora?\n\n\u2014Como ya he dicho, 40, se trata de una situaci\u00f3n delicada. Parece ser que unos clarividentes irlandeses est\u00e1n intentando establecer contacto con el sindicato de Londres. Su l\u00edder es una fugitiva irlandesa llamada Antoinette Carter. Los Siete Sellos van a reunirse con ella.\n\nAs\u00ed que Jax lo hab\u00eda conseguido. Me pregunt\u00e9 c\u00f3mo se las habr\u00eda ingeniado Antoinette para colarse en la ciudadela. Era casi imposible cruzar el mar de Irlanda. Otros videntes hab\u00edan intentado salir del pa\u00eds, la mayor\u00eda para dirigirse a Am\u00e9rica, pero pocos lo hab\u00edan logrado. No pod\u00edas cruzar el oc\u00e9ano en un bote. Y aunque alguien lo hubiera conseguido, Scion nunca habr\u00eda dejado que lo supi\u00e9ramos.\n\n\u2014Es fundamental que no se cree un sindicato criminal an\u00e1logo en Dubl\u00edn. De ah\u00ed nuestro inter\u00e9s por impedir que se celebre esa reuni\u00f3n. Tu misi\u00f3n consiste en capturar a Antoinette Carter. Creo que ella tambi\u00e9n es una clase poco frecuente de clarividente, y quiero averiguar qu\u00e9 poderes oculta exactamente. La segunda misi\u00f3n es capturar a los Siete Sellos. El Vinculador Blanco es el objetivo principal.\n\nJaxon. Mi capo.\n\n\u2014Te supervisar\u00e1n el consorte de sangre y su prima. Espero resultados. Si Carter consigue volver a Irlanda, os considerar\u00e9 responsables. \u2014Nashira nos mir\u00f3 uno por uno: a 30, a David, a Carl y a m\u00ed\u2014. \u00bfMe hab\u00e9is entendido?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, soberana de sangre \u2014dijeron 30 y Carl, mientras David hac\u00eda girar el vino en su copa.\n\nYo no dije nada.\n\n\u2014Tu vida aqu\u00ed est\u00e1 a punto de dar un giro, 40. Esta misi\u00f3n te permitir\u00e1 hacer un buen uso de tu don. Espero que muestres gratitud por las largas horas que Arcturus ha dedicado a tu entrenamiento. \u2014Nashira desvi\u00f3 la mirada del fuego y me mir\u00f3 a los ojos\u2014. Tienes un gran potencial. Si no intentas sacarle el mejor partido, me encargar\u00e9 de que nunca m\u00e1s vuelvas a pisar las protegidas salas de Magdalen. Por m\u00ed puedes pudrirte en las calles, con el resto de los desgraciados.\n\nEn su mirada no hab\u00eda ni rastro de emoci\u00f3n, pero s\u00ed de hambre. A Nashira Sargas se le estaba empezando a agotar la paciencia.\n\nA los miembros quinto y sexto de nuestra banda los encontraron a principios de 2057, un a\u00f1o despu\u00e9s de mi ingreso.\n\nLlegaron durante una ola de calor tremenda. Uno de los recadistas de Jaxon inform\u00f3 de la presencia de dos clarividentes nuevos en el I-4. La pareja formaba parte de un grupo de turistas que hab\u00eda llegado para participar en el congreso de verano de la universidad que se celebraba todos los a\u00f1os con gran \u00e9xito. Tra\u00edan a centenares de turistas j\u00f3venes y entusiastas desde pa\u00edses no adeptos a Scion, a los que pensaban devolver a sus lugares de origen convertidos en abogados de las pol\u00edticas anticlarividentes. Esos programas ya hab\u00edan encontrado apoyo en algunos lugares de Estados Unidos, donde las opiniones sobre Scion llevaban d\u00e9cadas divididas. El bienintencionado recadista hab\u00eda descubierto dos auras y hab\u00eda ido corriendo a avisar a su mimetocapo, pero entonces se enter\u00f3 de que los reci\u00e9n llegados no eran residentes permanentes del I-4. No ten\u00edan ni idea de la existencia del sindicato. Quiz\u00e1 ni siquiera supieran que eran videntes.\n\nEl recadista hab\u00eda informado de que uno de los dos turistas, la chica, era, casi con toda seguridad, suspirante. Jax estaba impresionado. Los suspirantes, seg\u00fan me dijo, pertenec\u00edan al orden de los sensores; conoc\u00edan el funcionamiento del \u00e9ter, los olores, sonidos y ritmos de los esp\u00edritus. Pod\u00edan o\u00edr sus voces y sus vibraciones, y hasta utilizarlas para tocar instrumentos. \u00abUn don interesante \u2014admiti\u00f3\u2014, pero en absoluto innovador.\u00bb Los sensores eran menos comunes que los m\u00e9diums, pero no mucho. El cuarto orden de la clarividencia. Sin embargo, en la ciudadela no hab\u00eda muchos, y a Jaxon le gustaban las rarezas.\n\nLo que le interesaba era la otra mitad de la pareja. El recadista hab\u00eda hablado de un aura extraordinaria, entre el naranja y el rojo. El aura de una furia.\n\nJax llevaba a\u00f1os recorriendo las calles en busca de una furia, y aquella era la primera vez que sus esperanzas pod\u00edan cumplirse. No pod\u00eda creer que hubiera tenido tanta suerte. \u00c9l ten\u00eda una visi\u00f3n, un proyecto. Jaxon Hall no se contentaba con tener una banda; qu\u00e9 va. \u00c9l quer\u00eda un joyero, la _cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me_ de la sociedad vidente. Quer\u00eda que la Asamblea Antinatural lo envidiara m\u00e1s que a ning\u00fan otro mimetocapo.\n\n\u2014Los convencer\u00e9 para que se queden \u2014hab\u00eda dicho y, se\u00f1al\u00e1ndome con el bast\u00f3n, hab\u00eda a\u00f1adido\u2014: Ya lo ver\u00e1s, dama m\u00eda.\n\n\u2014Tienen una vida en su pa\u00eds, Jax. Tienen familia. \u2014Yo no estaba nada convencida\u2014. \u00bfNo crees que necesitar\u00e1n tiempo para pens\u00e1rselo?\n\n\u2014No hay tiempo para eso, querida. Si se marchan, no volver\u00e1n. Tienen que quedarse.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1s so\u00f1ando.\n\n\u2014No, no estoy so\u00f1ando. Pero \u00bfquieres jugarte algo? \u2014Me tendi\u00f3 una mano\u2014. Si pierdes, me haces dos encargos gratis. Y me limpias el espejo antiguo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfY si gano?\n\n\u2014Te pagar\u00e9 el doble por los mismos encargos. Y no tendr\u00e1s que limpiarme el espejo.\n\nLe estrech\u00e9 la mano.\n\nJaxon ten\u00eda un pico de oro. Yo sab\u00eda perfectamente qu\u00e9 habr\u00eda dicho mi padre de \u00e9l: \u00abEse tipo ha besado la piedra de la elocuencia\u00bb. Jaxon ten\u00eda algo que hac\u00eda que quisieras complacerlo, que quisieras ver brotar ese brillo en sus ojos. Sab\u00eda que conseguir\u00eda que la pareja se quedara. Tras localizar su hotel y pagar a un limosnero para que averiguara sus nombres, les envi\u00f3 una invitaci\u00f3n a un \u00abacto extraoficial\u00bb en una cafeter\u00eda de moda de Covent Garden. Yo misma se la entregu\u00e9 al conserje, en un sobre dirigido a la se\u00f1orita Nadine L. Arnett y el se\u00f1or Ezekiel S\u00e1enz.\n\nNos contestaron diciendo que eran hermanastros. Ambos resid\u00edan en Boston, la reluciente capital de Massachusetts. El d\u00eda de la entrevista, Jaxon nos mantuvo informados por correo electr\u00f3nico.\n\nFabuloso. Esto es fabuloso.\n\nElla es susu, sin ninguna duda. Muy elocuente. Y muy maleducada. __\n\nEl hermano me intriga. No consigo descifrar su aura. Inquietante. __\n\nNick, Eliza y yo esperamos una hora m\u00e1s, y entonces lleg\u00f3 la confirmaci\u00f3n definitiva.\n\nSe quedan. Paige, al espejo hay que darle fuerte. __\n\nFue la \u00faltima vez que apost\u00e9 contra Jaxon Hall.\n\nPasaron dos d\u00edas. Mientras Eliza hac\u00eda sitio en la guarida para los reci\u00e9n llegados, yo acompa\u00f1\u00e9 a Nick a recogerlos a Gower Street. El plan era hacerlos desaparecer del mapa, como si los hubieran secuestrado y asesinado. Dejar\u00edamos pistas: alguna prenda manchada de sangre, alg\u00fan pelo. A Scion le encantar\u00eda. Podr\u00edan utilizarlo para anunciar m\u00e1s cr\u00edmenes antinaturales; pero lo m\u00e1s importante era que no vendr\u00edan a buscar a los hermanos desaparecidos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCre\u00e9is que Jax los ha convencido para que se queden? \u2014dije mientras camin\u00e1bamos.\n\n\u2014Ya conoces a Jax. Ser\u00eda capaz de convencerte para que saltaras desde un acantilado.\n\n\u2014Pero deben de tener familia. Y Nadine todav\u00eda est\u00e1 estudiando.\n\n\u2014Quiz\u00e1 no les haya ido bien all\u00ed, _s\u00f6tnos_. Al menos, en Scion los videntes pueden entender lo que son. All\u00ed deben de pensar que est\u00e1n locos. \u2014Se puso las gafas de sol\u2014. En ese sentido, Scion es una maravilla.\n\nEn cierto modo ten\u00eda raz\u00f3n. Fuera de Scion no exist\u00eda ninguna pol\u00edtica oficial sobre los clarividentes; no estaban reconocidos legalmente, ni ten\u00edan estatus de minor\u00eda; solo aparec\u00edan en la ficci\u00f3n. Sin embargo, ten\u00eda que ser mejor eso que ser sistem\u00e1ticamente perseguidos y ejecutados, como nosotros. Yo no acababa de entender que quisieran quedarse.\n\nEstaban esper\u00e1ndonos delante de la universidad. Nick levant\u00f3 una mano y dijo:\n\n\u2014Hola. \u00bfEres Zeke? \u2014El desconocido asinti\u00f3\u2014. Yo soy Nick.\n\n\u2014Y yo, Paige \u2014dije.\n\nMe fij\u00e9 en los ojos de Zeke, del color del t\u00e9 negro, y en su cara delgada, que denotaba nerviosismo. Deb\u00eda de tener veintitantos a\u00f1os; era flaco para su elevada estatura, con las mu\u00f1ecas estrechas y la piel acostumbrada al sol.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1is con Jaxon Hall, \u00bfverdad?\n\nSu voz ten\u00eda un acento raro. Con la mano que ten\u00eda libre se enjug\u00f3 el sudor de la frente, y entrev\u00ed una cicatriz vertical.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, pero no vuelvas a pronunciar su nombre. La DVD podr\u00eda estar cerca. \u2014Nick sonri\u00f3\u2014. Y supongo que t\u00fa eres Nadine \u2014a\u00f1adi\u00f3 mirando a la suspirante.\n\nNadine ten\u00eda los ojos y los rasgos nerviosos de su hermano, pero ah\u00ed se acababa el parecido. Llevaba el pelo te\u00f1ido de rojo, y parec\u00eda que se lo hubieran cortado con regla. Las ciudadelas de Scion tend\u00edan a seguir la moda y a emplear el argot de la d\u00e9cada en la que se hab\u00edan establecido; en SciLo todos llev\u00e1bamos ropa de tonos neutros, al estilo victoriano, y aquella camisa amarilla, los vaqueros y los zapatos de tac\u00f3n de aguja eran como un letrero que rezara \u00abturista\u00bb y \u00abdiferente\u00bb.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, eso creo \u2014dijo.\n\nNick mir\u00f3 a Zeke con los ojos un poco entornados. Yo tambi\u00e9n estaba intentando clasificar su aura. Al darse cuenta, Nadine se acerc\u00f3 m\u00e1s a su hermano.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 pasa?\n\n\u2014Nada. Lo siento \u2014se disculp\u00f3 Nick. Mir\u00f3 por encima de sus cabezas, hacia la universidad, y luego los mir\u00f3 primero a uno y luego al otro\u2014. Hemos de darnos prisa. Supongo que os lo hab\u00e9is pensado bien, porque una vez que hay\u00e1is salido de ese edificio, no habr\u00e1 vuelta atr\u00e1s.\n\nZeke mir\u00f3 a su hermana. Ella, con los brazos cruzados, se mir\u00f3 los zapatos.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, estamos seguros \u2014dijo Zeke\u2014. Hemos tomado una decisi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Pues entonces, vamos.\n\nAl final de la calle nos apretujamos los cuatro en un pirata. Nadine hurg\u00f3 en su bolso y sac\u00f3 unos auriculares. Sin decir nada, se los puso y cerr\u00f3 los ojos. Me pareci\u00f3 que le temblaban los labios.\n\n\u2014A Monmouth Street, por favor \u2014le dijo Nick al conductor.\n\nEl taxi arranc\u00f3 lentamente. Por suerte para nosotros, los piratas no ten\u00edan licencia. Se ganaban muy bien la vida con sus clientes clarividentes.\n\nMonmouth Street era donde viv\u00eda Jax: un tr\u00edplex encima de una peque\u00f1a boutique. Yo me quedaba a menudo a dormir all\u00ed, y le dec\u00eda a mi padre que estaba en casa de alguna amiga. No era exactamente mentira. Durante meses hab\u00eda ido enter\u00e1ndome de c\u00f3mo funcionaba la sociedad clarividente: la estructura de las bandas, los nombres de sus l\u00edderes, el protocolo y la enemistad entre diferentes sectores. Ahora Jaxon pon\u00eda a prueba mi don y me ense\u00f1aba a ser uno de ellos.\n\nPocas semanas despu\u00e9s de incorporarme a mi nuevo trabajo, hab\u00eda conseguido sacar a mi esp\u00edritu de su sitio conscientemente. Y al momento hab\u00eda dejado de respirar. A Jax y a Eliza les entr\u00f3 p\u00e1nico; creyeron que me hab\u00edan matado. Nick, sin perder los nervios, como buen m\u00e9dico, me hab\u00eda reanimado inyect\u00e1ndome adrenalina directamente en el coraz\u00f3n y, aunque despu\u00e9s me doli\u00f3 el pecho durante una semana, estaba muy orgullosa. Hab\u00edamos ido los cuatro a Chateline's a celebrarlo, y Jax hab\u00eda ordenado que la pr\u00f3xima vez me pusieran soporte vital.\n\nEncajaba con aquella gente. Ellos entend\u00edan mi extra\u00f1o mundo, un mundo que yo solo estaba empezando a descubrir. En Seven Dials hab\u00edamos creado un peque\u00f1o mundo, un mundo de delincuencia y color. Ahora hab\u00eda un desconocido entre nosotros. Quiz\u00e1 dos, si Nadine acababa resultando interesante.\n\nTante\u00e9 sus onirosajes. El de Nadine era normal, pero el de Zeke... Bueno, el de Zeke era interesante. Una presencia oscura y pesada en el \u00e9ter.\n\n\u2014\u00bfDe d\u00f3nde eres, Zeke? \u2014pregunt\u00f3 Nick.\n\n\u2014Nac\u00ed en M\u00e9xico \u2014contest\u00f3\u2014, pero ahora vivo con Nadine.\n\nNo dio m\u00e1s explicaciones. Mir\u00e9 por encima del hombro y dije:\n\n\u2014\u00bfHab\u00edas estado en alguna ciudadela de Scion?\n\n\u2014No. No ten\u00eda muy claro que fuera buena idea.\n\n\u2014Pero has venido.\n\n\u2014Quer\u00edamos salir un poco. La universidad de Nadine nos hab\u00eda ofrecido plazas en el congreso. Yo sent\u00eda curiosidad por Scion. \u2014Se mir\u00f3 las manos\u2014. Me alegro de que decidi\u00e9ramos venir. Hac\u00eda a\u00f1os que nos sent\u00edamos diferentes, pero... Bueno, el se\u00f1or Hall nos ha contado por qu\u00e9.\n\nNick parec\u00eda intrigado.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCu\u00e1l es la postura oficial respecto a la clarividencia en Estados Unidos?\n\n\u2014La llaman PES, percepci\u00f3n extrasensorial. Lo \u00fanico que dicen es que bajo la ley de Scion es una enfermedad reconocida, y que el CCE la est\u00e1 investigando. No quieren adoptar ninguna postura firme al respecto. Creo que no lo har\u00e1n nunca.\n\nMe habr\u00eda gustado preguntarles sobre sus familias, pero mi instinto me aconsej\u00f3 dejarlo para m\u00e1s adelante.\n\n\u2014Jaxon est\u00e1 muy contento de que os qued\u00e9is con nosotros. \u2014Nick sonri\u00f3\u2014. Espero que os guste esto.\n\n\u2014Ya os acostumbrar\u00e9is \u2014dije yo\u2014. Yo al principio lo odiaba. Cuando me contrat\u00f3 Jaxon, todo mejor\u00f3. El sindicato se ocupar\u00e1 de vosotros.\n\n\u2014\u00bfNo eres inglesa? \u2014me pregunt\u00f3 Zeke.\n\n\u2014No. Irlandesa.\n\n\u2014Cre\u00eda que muy pocos irlandeses hab\u00edan podido huir de las revueltas de Molly.\n\n\u2014Yo, por ejemplo.\n\n\u2014Fue una tragedia. La m\u00fasica irlandesa es preciosa \u2014a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014. \u00bfConoces la canci\u00f3n de los alborotadores?\n\n\u2014\u00bfLa que trata sobre Molly?\n\n\u2014No, la otra. La que cantaron al final de las revueltas, cuando lloraban a los muertos.\n\n\u2014Te refieres a \u00abAn Ember Morning\u00bb.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, eso es. \u2014Hizo una pausa, y entonces a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014: \u00bfPuedes cantarme un trozo? \u2014Nick y yo re\u00edmos a la vez. Zeke se puso rojo\u2014. Lo siento \u2014dijo\u2014. Es que me encantar\u00eda o\u00edrla bien cantada. Si no os importa demasiado. Antes pod\u00eda escuchar a Nadine, pero... ya no canta.\n\nNick me mir\u00f3. Una suspirante que no cantaba. A Jaxon no le iba a gustar.\n\n\u2014Paige... \u2014dijo en voz baja, y repar\u00e9 en que Zeke segu\u00eda mir\u00e1ndome, esperando mi respuesta.\n\nNo sab\u00eda si podr\u00eda cantar la canci\u00f3n. En Scion estaba prohibida la m\u00fasica irlandesa, y especialmente la m\u00fasica irlandesa revolucionaria. De peque\u00f1a, yo ten\u00eda un marcado acento irland\u00e9s, pero cuando nos trasladamos a ScionLo lo hab\u00eda abandonado por miedo al sentimiento antirland\u00e9s, cada vez m\u00e1s extendido en Scion. Con solo ocho a\u00f1os, ya notaba las miradas extra\u00f1as que me dirig\u00eda la gente cuando pronunciaba algo de una forma que ellos consideraban rara. Me pasaba horas delante del espejo, imitando a los locutores de los noticiarios, hasta que consegu\u00ed un impecable acento de colegio privado ingl\u00e9s. Todav\u00eda ca\u00eda bastante mal a mis compa\u00f1eras (me llamaron \u00abMolly Mahoney\u00bb durante a\u00f1os), pero al final, un peque\u00f1o grupo de alumnas me acept\u00f3, seguramente porque mi padre patrocinaba el baile del colegio.\n\nQuiz\u00e1 recordaba la canci\u00f3n gracias a mi primo. Mir\u00e9 por la ventana y me o\u00ed recitar:\n\n_Asomaba el mes de octubre_\n\n_y la ma\u00f1ana ard\u00eda, mi amor._\n\n_El fuego bramaba en la pradera color miel._\n\n_Ven, fantasma del valle,_\n\n_aqu\u00ed estoy, en las cenizas donde ruges._\n\n_Erin te espera para llevarte a casa._\n\n__\n\n_Vi una llama en el cielo, coraz\u00f3n,_\n\n_y la fr\u00eda ma\u00f1ana de octubre se hizo noche._\n\n_El humo invad\u00eda la pradera color miel._\n\n_Escucha, esp\u00edritu del sur,_\n\n_cerca del \u00e1rbol hendido yo te espero,_\n\n_ahora que el coraz\u00f3n de Irlanda yace, roto, junto al mar._\n\nHab\u00eda m\u00e1s estrofas, pero de pronto me par\u00e9. Me acord\u00e9 de mi abuela cant\u00e1ndole esa canci\u00f3n a Finn en su funeral, el que celebramos en secreto en el Golden Vale. Solo \u00e9ramos seis. No hab\u00eda cad\u00e1ver que enterrar. Fue all\u00ed donde mi padre anunci\u00f3 su traslado, que le obligar\u00eda a dejar a mis abuelos solos ante la ocupaci\u00f3n militar del sur por parte de Scion. Zeke estaba muy serio. Al cabo de un momento Nick me apret\u00f3 la mano.\n\nPara cuando llegamos a Monmouth Street, en el taxi hac\u00eda un calor insoportable. Le puse unos billetes en la mano al conductor. \u00c9l me devolvi\u00f3 uno.\n\n\u2014Por esa canci\u00f3n tan bonita \u2014dijo\u2014. Bendita seas, querida.\n\n\u2014Gracias.\n\nPero dej\u00e9 el billete en el asiento. No pod\u00eda aceptar dinero por un recuerdo.\n\nAyud\u00e9 a Nick a descargar las maletas. Nadine sali\u00f3 del taxi y se quit\u00f3 los auriculares. Le lanz\u00f3 una mirada fulminante al edificio. Me fij\u00e9 en su bolsa, de un dise\u00f1ador de Nueva York; tendr\u00eda que deshacerse de ella. Los productos norteamericanos se vend\u00edan como rosquillas en el Garden. Yo me hab\u00eda imaginado que llevar\u00eda un estuche de alg\u00fan instrumento musical, pero no hab\u00eda nada por el estilo. A lo mejor no era suspirante. Hab\u00eda por los menos otras tres variedades de sensores.\n\nAbr\u00ed con mi llave la puerta roja con una placa dorada que rezaba: THE LENORMAND AGENCY. Para el mundo exterior, \u00e9ramos una respetable agencia de arte. Dentro ya no \u00e9ramos tan honrados.\n\nAl final de la escalera estaba Jax, vestido con sus mejores galas: chaleco de seda, cuello postizo blanco, reloj de bolsillo reluciente y puro encendido. Llevaba una taza de caf\u00e9 de cristal en la mano. Intent\u00e9 imaginar, sin \u00e9xito, c\u00f3mo se pod\u00edan compatibilizar el puro y el caf\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Zeke, Nadine. Me alegro de volver a veros.\n\nZeke le estrech\u00f3 la mano.\n\n\u2014Y yo a usted, se\u00f1or Hall.\n\n\u2014Bienvenidos a Seven Dials. Como ya sab\u00e9is, soy el mimetocapo de este territorio. Y ahora vosotros pertenec\u00e9is a mi c\u00edrculo de \u00e9lite.\n\nJax miraba a Zeke a la cara, pero yo sab\u00eda que estaba concentrado en leerle el aura.\n\n\u2014Supongo que hab\u00e9is salido de Gower Street sin llamar la atenci\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014No nos ha visto nadie. \u2014Zeke se puso en tensi\u00f3n\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9 es eso de ah\u00ed? \u00bfUn esp\u00edritu?\n\nJax gir\u00f3 la cabeza.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, es Pieter Claesz, un pintor de vanidades holand\u00e9s. Es una de nuestras musas m\u00e1s prol\u00edficas. Muri\u00f3 en 1660. Pieter, ven a saludar a nuestros nuevos amigos.\n\n\u2014Enc\u00e1rgate t\u00fa, Zeke. Yo estoy cansada. \u2014Nadine no miraba a Pieter, que hab\u00eda ignorado la orden de Jax. Nadine no ten\u00eda visi\u00f3n\u2014. Quiero una habitaci\u00f3n para m\u00ed sola. No comparto mis espacios \u2014dijo mirando con dureza a Jax\u2014. Que quede claro.\n\nEsper\u00e9 para ver c\u00f3mo reaccionaba Jax. No ten\u00eda una cara muy expresiva, pero se le inflaron las aletas de la nariz. No era buena se\u00f1al.\n\n\u2014Tendr\u00e1s lo que te den \u2014dijo.\n\nNadine se enfureci\u00f3. Previendo un enfrentamiento, Nick le puso un brazo sobre los hombros a Nadine.\n\n\u2014Claro que tendr\u00e1s tu propia habitaci\u00f3n \u2014dijo, y me mir\u00f3 con cara de fastidio por encima de la cabeza de la chica. Tendr\u00edamos que poner a Zeke en un sof\u00e1\u2014. Eliza lo est\u00e1 organizando todo. \u00bfTe apetece beber algo?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, por favor. \u2014Mir\u00f3 a Jax arqueando las cejas\u2014. Por lo visto, todav\u00eda hay europeos que s\u00ed saben tratar a una mujer.\n\nJaxon se qued\u00f3 de piedra, como si le hubieran dado una bofetada. Nick se llev\u00f3 a Nadine hacia la _kitchenette_.\n\n\u2014Yo no soy europeo \u2014dijo Jax apretando los dientes.\n\nNo pude evitar sonre\u00edr.\n\n\u2014Me asegurar\u00e9 de que nadie te moleste \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014Gracias, Paige. \u2014Jaxon se irgui\u00f3 cuan alto era y agreg\u00f3\u2014: Ven a mi despacho, Zeke. Tenemos mucho que hablar.\n\nZeke subi\u00f3 el siguiente tramo de la escalera sin quitarle los ojos de encima a Pieter, que flotaba frente a su \u00faltimo cuadro. Antes de que yo pudiera decir nada, Jaxon me agarr\u00f3 por el brazo.\n\n\u2014Su onirosaje \u2014dijo en voz baja\u2014. \u00bfC\u00f3mo es?\n\n\u2014Oscuro \u2014dije\u2014. Y...\n\n\u2014Excelente. No digas nada m\u00e1s.\n\nSubi\u00f3 la escalera al trote, con el puro en una comisura de la boca. Me qued\u00e9 all\u00ed sola con las tres maletas y un pintor muerto; pese a que le ten\u00eda aprecio a Pieter, no era persona de muchas palabras.\n\nMir\u00e9 la hora: las once y media. Eliza volver\u00eda pasados unos minutos. Prepar\u00e9 caf\u00e9 y fui a sentarme en el sal\u00f3n, donde un lienzo de John William Waterhouse ocupaba el lugar de honor: una mujer de cabello oscuro con vestido rojo largo y suelto escudri\u00f1ando una bola de cristal. Jax hab\u00eda pagado mucho dinero a un comerciante por tres cuadros de Waterhouse que figuraban en la lista negra. Tambi\u00e9n hab\u00eda un retrato de Eduardo VII con traje de gala. Abr\u00ed la ventana y me puse a leer el nuevo panfleto en que estaba trabajando Jaxon, _Sobre las maquinaciones de los muertos itinerantes_. De momento me hab\u00eda hablado de cuatro tipos de esp\u00edritus: \u00e1ngeles guardianes, fantasmas, musas y psicopompos; todav\u00eda no hab\u00eda llegado al cap\u00edtulo de los duendes.\n\nEliza apareci\u00f3 a las doce, ensimismada como era su costumbre. Me dio un recipiente de fideos de Lisle Street.\n\n\u2014Hola. Supongo que no habr\u00e1s convencido a Pieter para que vuelva a pintar _Vanitas con viol\u00edn y bola de cristal_ , \u00bfverdad?\n\nEliza Renton, cuatro a\u00f1os mayor que yo, era la m\u00e9dium mediante trance de Jax. Su especialidad era el plagio de cuadros. Nacida en el mism\u00edsimo centro de Londres, hab\u00eda trabajado en un teatro clandestino de The Cut hasta los diecinueve a\u00f1os; entonces hab\u00eda respondido a un panfleto de Jaxon, y \u00e9l la hab\u00eda contratado. Desde entonces, era la principal fuente de ingresos de Jax. Ten\u00eda la piel clara y aceitunada, los ojos verdes y una melena rubia de tirabuzones. Nunca le faltaban admiradores (hasta los esp\u00edritus la adoraban), pero Jax nos impon\u00eda su pol\u00edtica de \u00abno implicaci\u00f3n\u00bb, y Eliza la respetaba.\n\n\u2014Todav\u00eda no. Creo que sufre un bloqueo art\u00edstico. \u2014Dej\u00e9 el panfleto a un lado\u2014. \u00bfYa conoces a los reci\u00e9n llegados?\n\n\u2014Solo a Nadine. Me ha dicho \u00abhola\u00bb, y punto. \u2014Eliza se sent\u00f3 a mi lado\u2014. \u00bfSeguro que es una susu?\n\nAbr\u00ed el recipiente de fideos humeantes.\n\n\u2014Yo no he visto ning\u00fan instrumento, pero todo es posible. \u00bfHas visto a Zeke?\n\n\u2014Me he asomado un momento al despacho. Tiene el aura naranja oscuro.\n\n\u2014Entonces es una furia.\n\n\u2014Pero no lo parece. Parece incapaz ni de darle un susto a un fantasma. \u2014Se puso los snacks de gambas encima de la rodilla\u2014. Bueno, si Pieter se pone testarudo, tengo un hueco en mi programa. \u00bfQuieres intentar salirte otra vez?\n\n\u2014No. Mientras Jax no traiga el soporte vital, no.\n\n\u2014Claro, claro. Me parece que el ventilador llegar\u00e1 el martes. No hay prisa. \u2014Me pas\u00f3 un cuaderno de bocetos y un l\u00e1piz\u2014. Hace tiempo que quer\u00eda preguntarte... \u00bfPuedes dibujar tu onirosaje?\n\n\u2014\u00bfDibujarlo? \u2014pregunt\u00e9 al tiempo que cog\u00eda el cuaderno y el l\u00e1piz.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. No que dibujes las flores, ni nada de eso. Solo el contorno tal como se ver\u00eda a vista de p\u00e1jaro. Estamos intentando entender el trazado del onirosaje humano, pero es dif\u00edcil porque ninguno de nosotros podemos salir de nuestras zonas soleadas. Creemos que, como m\u00ednimo, hay tres zonas, pero necesitamos que t\u00fa hagas un boceto para ver si nuestras teor\u00edas coinciden. \u00bfPuedes hacerlo?\n\nMe sent\u00ed motivada, satisfecha de tener un cometido. Estaba resultando muy \u00fatil dentro del grupo.\n\n\u2014Claro \u2014dije.\n\nEliza encendi\u00f3 el televisor. Me puse a trabajar en el boceto. Dibuj\u00e9 un c\u00edrculo con un punto en el centro, rodeado de tres anillos.\n\nDel televisor sal\u00eda la m\u00fasica de fondo de ScionVista. Scarlett Burnish le\u00eda las noticias del mediod\u00eda. Eliza se\u00f1al\u00f3 la pantalla mientras se com\u00eda las galletas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCrees que en realidad es mayor que Weaver, pero que se ha hecho tantas operaciones que ya no pueden salirle arrugas?\n\n\u2014No, sonr\u00ede demasiado. \u2014Segu\u00ed dibujando. Hab\u00eda conseguido algo que se parec\u00eda a un ojo de buey con cinco divisiones\u2014. Bueno, hemos determinado que esto \u2014dije, y di unos golpecitos en el centro del c\u00edrculo\u2014 es la zona soleada.\n\n\u2014De acuerdo. La zona soleada es donde los esp\u00edritus tienen que permanecer para conservar una mente sana. El cord\u00f3n arg\u00e9nteo es una especie de red de seguridad. Impide que los videntes salgan de esa zona.\n\n\u2014A casi todos, pero a m\u00ed no.\n\n\u2014Exactamente. Esa es tu singularidad. Digamos que la mayor\u00eda tenemos unos tres cent\u00edmetros de cord\u00f3n entre nuestro cuerpo y nuestro esp\u00edritu \u2014dijo midiendo con los dedos\u2014. T\u00fa tienes casi dos kil\u00f3metros. Puedes caminar hasta el anillo exterior de tu onirosaje, lo que significa que puedes sentir el \u00e9ter mucho m\u00e1s all\u00e1 que nosotros. Tambi\u00e9n puedes sentir otros onirosajes. Nosotros solo sentimos esp\u00edritus y auras, y no desde muy lejos. Yo, ahora, no siento a Jaxon ni a los dem\u00e1s.\n\nYo s\u00ed los sent\u00eda.\n\n\u2014Pero tengo mis l\u00edmites.\n\n\u2014Por eso hemos de tener cuidado. Todav\u00eda no conocemos tus l\u00edmites. Quiz\u00e1 puedas salir de tu cuerpo, y quiz\u00e1 no. Todav\u00eda est\u00e1 por ver.\n\nAsent\u00ed con la cabeza. Jaxon me hab\u00eda explicado su teor\u00eda sobre los onir\u00e1mbulos varias veces, pero Eliza era mucho mejor maestra.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 pasar\u00eda si intentaras salir de tu zona soleada? Hipot\u00e9ticamente hablando.\n\n\u2014Ver\u00e1s, creemos que la segunda zona es donde tienen lugar las \u00abpesadillas\u00bb amaur\u00f3ticas. A veces, si est\u00e1s muy tenso o nervioso, el cord\u00f3n te deja llegar hasta tan lejos. M\u00e1s all\u00e1, empiezas a notar un fuerte tir\u00f3n hacia el centro. Si salieras m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de la zona crepuscular, empezar\u00edas a enloquecer.\n\nArque\u00e9 una ceja.\n\n\u2014Soy rarita, \u00bfverdad?\n\n\u2014No, no, Paige. No digas eso. Ninguno de nosotros somos raros. Eres un milagro. Una saltadora. \u2014Me quit\u00f3 el cuaderno de las manos\u2014. Le dir\u00e9 a Jax que le eche un vistazo a esto en cuanto haya terminado. Le encantar\u00e1. \u00bfTe quedas en casa de tu padre esta noche? \u00bfNo ten\u00edas que quedarte con \u00e9l los viernes?\n\n\u2014Tengo trabajo. Didion cree que ha encontrado a William Terriss.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Vaya, no hace falta que digas nada m\u00e1s! \u2014Se dio la vuelta y me mir\u00f3\u2014. Oye, ya sabes lo que dicen del sindicato: que una vez que entras, ya no sales nunca. \u00bfSeguro que no te has arrepentido?\n\n\u2014Qu\u00e9 va, todo lo contrario.\n\nEliza me sonri\u00f3. Fue una sonrisa extra\u00f1a, casi nost\u00e1lgica.\n\n\u2014Vale \u2014dijo\u2014. Voy arriba. Tengo que tranquilizar a Pieter.\n\nSali\u00f3 de la habitaci\u00f3n envuelta en el tintineo de sus brazaletes. Empec\u00e9 a sombrear los aros de mi dibujo, haci\u00e9ndolos cada vez m\u00e1s oscuros.\n\nSegu\u00eda trabajando unas horas m\u00e1s tarde cuando Jax baj\u00f3 del piso de arriba. No tardar\u00eda en ponerse el sol. Ten\u00eda que salir pitando a ver a Didion, pero antes quer\u00eda pasar mi dibujo al ordenador. Jax estaba como afiebrado.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPasa algo, Jax?\n\n\u2014Un ilegible \u2014dijo en voz baja\u2014. Ay, Paige, mi querid\u00edsima Paige. Nuestro querido se\u00f1or S\u00e1enz es un ilegible.\n\nNunca olvidar\u00e9 la cara del Custodio cuando me vio con el blus\u00f3n rojo. Por primera vez vi miedo en sus ojos.\n\nSolo dur\u00f3 una mil\u00e9sima de segundo. Pero lo vi, aunque solo fuera un instante: un atisbo de inseguridad, m\u00e1s d\u00e9bil que la llama de una vela. Se qued\u00f3 mir\u00e1ndome mientras yo me dirig\u00eda hacia mi habitaci\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Paige.\n\nMe par\u00e9.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo ha ido tu banquete de investidura?\n\n\u2014Ha sido instructivo. \u2014Resegu\u00ed con los dedos el ancla roja del chaleco\u2014. Ten\u00edas raz\u00f3n. Me ha hecho algunas preguntas sobre ti.\n\nHubo un breve y tenso silencio. El Custodio ten\u00eda todos los m\u00fasculos de la cara en tensi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Y t\u00fa las has contestado. \u2014Lo dijo con una frialdad que me sorprendi\u00f3\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9 le has dicho? Tengo que saberlo.\n\nNo iba a suplicarme: era demasiado orgulloso. Ten\u00eda las mand\u00edbulas apretadas, y sus labios formaban una l\u00ednea recta. Me pregunt\u00e9 qu\u00e9 estar\u00eda pas\u00e1ndole por la cabeza. A qui\u00e9n avisar, ad\u00f3nde huir. Qu\u00e9 hacer a continuaci\u00f3n.\n\n\u00bfCu\u00e1nto tiempo pod\u00eda hacerlo sufrir?\n\n\u2014Dijo una cosa que s\u00ed me llam\u00f3 la atenci\u00f3n. \u2014Me sent\u00e9 en el div\u00e1n\u2014. Que el consorte de sangre tiene prohibido pelear con los emim.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Estrictamente prohibido. \u2014Tamborile\u00f3 con los dedos en el brazo de la butaca\u2014. Le has contado lo de mis heridas.\n\n\u2014No, no le he contado nada.\n\nVi que mudaba la expresi\u00f3n. Al cabo de un momento se sirvi\u00f3 un poco de amaranto de la licorera.\n\n\u2014Entonces te debo la vida \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014Bebes mucho amaranto \u2014coment\u00e9\u2014. \u00bfEs para las cicatrices?\n\nMe lanz\u00f3 una mirada.\n\n\u2014Las cicatrices.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, las cicatrices.\n\n\u2014Tengo mis motivos para beber amaranto.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 motivos?\n\n\u2014Motivos de salud. Ya te lo dije. Viejas heridas. \u2014Dej\u00f3 la copa encima de la mesa\u2014. Decidiste no decirle a Nashira que he desobedecido. Estoy intrigado: me gustar\u00eda saber por qu\u00e9.\n\n\u2014No soy ninguna traidora.\n\nNo se me hab\u00eda pasado por alto su evasiva: las cicatrices y las viejas heridas eran lo mismo.\n\n\u2014Entiendo. \u2014El Custodio dirigi\u00f3 la mirada hacia la chimenea vac\u00eda\u2014. As\u00ed que le has ocultado informaci\u00f3n a Nashira, y sin embargo te han dado el blus\u00f3n rojo.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa mismo se lo recomendaste.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, pero no sab\u00eda si le parecer\u00eda bien. Sospecho que Nashira tiene motivos ocultos.\n\n\u2014Me han ordenado salir a cumplir una misi\u00f3n. Al exterior. Ma\u00f1ana.\n\n\u2014A la ciudadela \u2014conjetur\u00f3\u2014. Sorprendente.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Despu\u00e9s de lo que le cost\u00f3 sacarte de la ciudadela, resulta extra\u00f1o que ahora te env\u00ede all\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Quiere utilizarme de se\u00f1uelo para hacer salir a una banda de Londres, los Siete Sellos. Cree que tienen un onir\u00e1mbulo, y que yo sabr\u00e9 reconocer a otro como yo. \u2014Esper\u00e9, pero el Custodio no reaccion\u00f3. \u00bfAcaso sospechaba de m\u00ed?\u2014. Saldremos ma\u00f1ana por la noche, con tres casacas rojas y otro refa\u00edta.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n?\n\n\u2014Tu prima.\n\n\u2014Ah, s\u00ed. \u2014Junt\u00f3 las yemas de los dedos\u2014. Situla Mesarthim es la mercenaria m\u00e1s leal de Nashira. T\u00fa y yo tendremos que andarnos con cuidado cuando ella est\u00e9 cerca.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSignifica eso que volver\u00e1s a tratarme como si fuera tu esclava?\n\n\u2014Ser\u00e1 temporal, pero necesario. Situla y yo no somos amigos. La han escogido a ella para que me vigile.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Transgresiones cometidas en el pasado. \u2014Vio mi expresi\u00f3n de curiosidad y agreg\u00f3\u2014: Es mejor que no sepas nada. Lo \u00fanico que necesitas saber es que yo no mato a menos que sea absolutamente necesario.\n\nTransgresiones cometidas en el pasado. Viejas heridas. Eso solo pod\u00eda significar una cosa, y ambos sab\u00edamos qu\u00e9; sin embargo, no garantizaba que pudiera confiar en el Custodio. Aunque fuera un marcado.\n\n\u2014Necesito dormir un poco \u2014dije\u2014. Hemos quedado en la residencia de Nashira ma\u00f1ana al anochecer.\n\nEl Custodio asinti\u00f3 con la cabeza sin mirarme. Recog\u00ed mis botas, fui a mi habitaci\u00f3n y lo dej\u00e9 bebi\u00e9ndose su remedio.\n\nEn lugar de dormir, me pas\u00e9 casi todo el d\u00eda pensando en los diferentes panoramas que pod\u00edan presentarse cuando lleg\u00e1ramos a Londres. El plan, seg\u00fan la reuni\u00f3n informativa posterior a la cena, consist\u00eda en esperar hasta que Carter llegara a la base de la columna de Nelson, donde se hab\u00eda dado cita con un representante de los Sellos. Los dem\u00e1s los rodear\u00edamos y los atacar\u00edamos. Por lo visto, Nashira cre\u00eda que nos plantar\u00edamos all\u00ed, disparar\u00edamos a Carter, tomar\u00edamos a unos cuantos prisioneros y volver\u00edamos tan campantes a Sheol I a tiempo para la campanada diurna.\n\nPero yo sab\u00eda que no iba a ser as\u00ed. Conoc\u00eda a Jax. Jax proteg\u00eda bien a sus inversiones. Jam\u00e1s se le ocurrir\u00eda enviar a un \u00fanico representante a reunirse con Antoinette: ir\u00eda toda la banda. Los centinelas manten\u00edan las calles vigiladas durante la noche, y dominaban el combate espiritista. Adem\u00e1s, tendr\u00edamos que lidiar con el p\u00fablico, y como en la calle habr\u00eda videntes, pod\u00edamos acabar en medio de una pelea de dimensiones considerables. Una pelea en la que yo vestir\u00eda los colores de un bando y desear\u00eda que ganara el contrario.\n\nMe di la vuelta, nerviosa. Aquella era mi ocasi\u00f3n para escapar, o al menos para hacer correr la voz. Ten\u00eda que conseguir hablar con Nick, si \u00e9l no me mataba primero. O me cegaba con sus visiones. \u00c9l era mi \u00fanica oportunidad.\n\nAl final desist\u00ed de quedarme dormida. Fui al cuarto de ba\u00f1o, me lav\u00e9 la cara y me recog\u00ed el pelo en un mo\u00f1o. Me hab\u00eda crecido bastante, hasta los hombros. La lluvia golpeaba los cristales de las ventanas. Me puse el uniforme, el blus\u00f3n rojo de los traidores y baj\u00e9 a la c\u00e1mara del Custodio. El reloj de p\u00e9ndulo marcaba casi las siete. Me sent\u00e9 junto al fuego. Cuando son\u00f3 la hora, el Custodio apareci\u00f3 en la puerta, con el cabello y la ropa empapados de lluvia.\n\n\u2014Es la hora.\n\nMe levant\u00e9 y sal\u00ed por la puerta; el Custodio la cerr\u00f3 con llave y baj\u00f3 conmigo por la escalera de piedra.\n\n\u2014Todav\u00eda no te he dado las gracias \u2014me dijo mientras recorr\u00edamos los soportales\u2014. Por tu silencio.\n\n\u2014No me las des todav\u00eda.\n\nLas calles estaban en silencio. Las piedras de granizo medio derretidas cruj\u00edan bajo las suelas de mis botas. Cuando llegamos a la residencia, dos refa\u00edtas nos escoltaron hasta la biblioteca, donde nos esperaba Nashira. El Custodio y ella representaron su saludo ritual: \u00e9l le puso una mano sobre el abdomen, y ella le acerc\u00f3 los labios a la frente. Esa vez me fij\u00e9 en m\u00e1s cosas: en la rigidez de los movimientos del Custodio, en que nunca miraba a Nashira a los ojos, en que ella le pasaba una mano por el pelo, sin mirarlo. Me recordaron a un perro y a su ama.\n\n\u2014Me alegro de que los dos hay\u00e1is podido venir esta noche \u2014dijo Nashira. Como si nosotros hubi\u00e9ramos podido elegir\u2014. 40, te presento a Situla Mesarthim.\n\nSitula era casi tan alta como el Custodio. Se notaba que eran parientes: ten\u00edan el mismo tono de cabello, casta\u00f1o ceniza, la misma piel de color miel, las mismas facciones marcadas y los ojos hundidos. Salud\u00f3 con una inclinaci\u00f3n de cabeza al Custodio, que segu\u00eda arrodillado.\n\n\u2014Hola, primo. \u2014El Custodio inclin\u00f3 la cabeza. Situla me mir\u00f3. Ten\u00eda los ojos azules\u2014. XX-59-40, esta noche me tratar\u00e1s como si fuera tu segunda guardiana. Supongo que sabes a qu\u00e9 me refiero.\n\nAsent\u00ed con la cabeza. El Custodio se levant\u00f3 y mir\u00f3 a su prometida.\n\n\u2014\u00bfD\u00f3nde est\u00e1n los otros humanos?\n\n\u2014Prepar\u00e1ndose, por supuesto. \u2014Le dio la espalda\u2014. Y t\u00fa deber\u00edas hacer lo mismo, mi fiel servidor.\n\nEl aura del Custodio se nubl\u00f3, como si se estuviera fraguando una tormenta en su onirosaje. Se dio la vuelta y fue hacia unos gruesos cortinajes de color carmes\u00ed. Una chica amaur\u00f3tica se apresur\u00f3 a seguirlo; llevaba unas prendas de ropa en las manos.\n\n\u2014Formar\u00e1s pareja con 1 \u2014me dijo Nashira\u2014. Ir\u00e9is los dos con Arcturus. Situla se llevar\u00e1 a 30 y a 12.\n\nDavid sali\u00f3 de detr\u00e1s de las cortinas; llevaba pantal\u00f3n negro, botas y un ligero chaleco antibalas. Al verlo me sobresalt\u00e9. Era id\u00e9ntico al Capataz la noche que me hab\u00edan capturado.\n\n\u2014Buenas noches, 40 \u2014me dijo.\n\nMantuve la boca cerrada. David sonri\u00f3 y sacudi\u00f3 la cabeza, como si yo le hiciera gracia. Se me acerc\u00f3 un amaur\u00f3tico.\n\n\u2014Tu ropa.\n\n\u2014Gracias.\n\nSin mirar a David, pas\u00e9 con mi ropa detr\u00e1s de las cortinas. All\u00ed hab\u00eda un vestidor improvisado. Me quit\u00e9 el uniforme y me puse el nuevo: primero, una camisa roja de manga larga, y luego el chaleco antibalas (marcado con el ancla roja, igual que el chaleco), y una chaqueta negra con un brazalete rojo en la manga. A continuaci\u00f3n me puse los guantes y los pantalones, ambos de una tela negra y flexible, y unas robustas botas de cuero. Con ese atuendo podr\u00eda correr, trepar y pelear. En la chaqueta hab\u00eda una jeringa de adrenalina y una pistola de flux. Para cazar videntes.\n\nUna vez equipada, volv\u00ed a donde estaban los otros tres humanos. Carl me sonri\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Hola, 40.\n\n\u2014Hola, Carl.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo te sienta el blus\u00f3n nuevo?\n\n\u2014Es de mi talla, si es a eso a lo que te refieres.\n\n\u2014No, me refiero a c\u00f3mo te sienta ser una casaca roja.\n\nLos tres me miraban fijamente.\n\n\u2014Genial \u2014contest\u00e9 tras una pausa.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, es genial \u2014coincidi\u00f3 Carl\u2014. Quiz\u00e1 acertaran concedi\u00e9ndote tantos privilegios.\n\n\u2014O quiz\u00e1 se equivocaran \u2014terci\u00f3 30 sac\u00e1ndose la melena de debajo de la camisa. Era m\u00e1s alta que yo, ancha de hombros y caderas\u2014. Eso lo averiguaremos en las calles.\n\nLe ech\u00e9 otro vistazo a 30. A juzgar por su aura, deb\u00eda de ser una adivina, pero poco com\u00fan. Quiz\u00e1 clerom\u00e1ntica. No era demasiado inusual. Deb\u00eda de haber ido ascendiendo sin reparar en los medios.\n\n\u2014Exacto \u2014dije.\n\n30 aspir\u00f3 con fuerza por la nariz.\n\nEl regreso del Custodio tuvo un efecto asombroso sobre la actitud de 30. Le hizo una delicada reverencia y murmur\u00f3 \u00abconsorte de sangre\u00bb. Carl, a su vez, salud\u00f3 con una inclinaci\u00f3n. Yo me qued\u00e9 quieta, con los brazos cruzados. El Custodio ech\u00f3 un vistazo a su club de fans, pero no respondi\u00f3 a ninguno de los tributos; en lugar de eso me mir\u00f3 a m\u00ed, que estaba a cierta distancia. 30 se llev\u00f3 un chasco. Pobre 30.\n\nEl cambio de vestuario hab\u00eda transformado a mi guardi\u00e1n. En lugar del traje anticuado de los refa\u00edtas, iba vestido como un habitante adinerado de Scion, el tipo de personaje al que ning\u00fan ladr\u00f3n inteligente intentar\u00eda birlar la cartera.\n\n\u2014Os llevar\u00e1n a la cohorte I en dos veh\u00edculos de recogida \u2014dijo Nashira\u2014. Despejar\u00e1n el tr\u00e1fico para dejaros pasar. Deber\u00edais estar de regreso aqu\u00ed antes de que suene la campanada diurna.\n\nLos cuatro humanos asentimos con la cabeza. El Custodio sacudi\u00f3 ligeramente los hombros y se dirigi\u00f3 hacia la puerta.\n\n\u2014XX-40, XX-1 \u2014nos llam\u00f3.\n\nCarl se sorprendi\u00f3 tanto como si Novembertide se hubiera adelantado. Corri\u00f3 tras el Custodio, guard\u00e1ndose la pistola de flux en la chaqueta por el camino. Me dispon\u00eda a seguirlo cuando Nashira me agarr\u00f3 por el brazo con una mano enguantada. Me qued\u00e9 quieta y contuve el impulso de soltarme.\n\n\u2014S\u00e9 qui\u00e9n eres \u2014dijo acerc\u00e1ndome la cara\u2014. S\u00e9 de d\u00f3nde provienes. Si no me traes a un onir\u00e1mbulo, deducir\u00e9 que no me equivocaba y que eres la So\u00f1adora P\u00e1lida. Esa comprobaci\u00f3n tendr\u00e1 consecuencias para todos nosotros. \u2014Me lanz\u00f3 una mirada que me dej\u00f3 helada; entonces me dio la espalda y fue hacia la puerta\u2014. Te deseo un buen viaje, XX-59-40.\n\nEn el puente hab\u00eda dos veh\u00edculos esperando con las luces apagadas. Antes de meternos dentro y cerrar las puertas con seguro, nos vendaron los ojos a los cuatro. Yo me sent\u00e9 con Carl; no ve\u00eda nada, pero o\u00eda el motor. Deb\u00edan de temer que averigu\u00e1ramos la ruta para salir de la colonia.\n\nUn pelot\u00f3n de centinelas se hab\u00eda desplazado a Sheol I para acompa\u00f1arnos, pero aun as\u00ed el procedimiento era complicado. La ciudad era una colonia penitenciaria, y salir de ella resultaba tan fastidioso como si fu\u00e9ramos prisioneros en libertad provisional. En una de las subestaciones exteriores de Scion nos implantaron unos chips localizadores subcut\u00e1neos por si intent\u00e1bamos huir, y nos examinaron las huellas dactilares y las auras. Me extrajeron una muestra de sangre y me dejaron un cardenal en el pliegue interno del codo. Por fin cruzamos la \u00faltima frontera y volvimos a Scion Londres. Volvimos al mundo real.\n\n\u2014Ya pod\u00e9is quitaros las vendas \u2014dijo el Custodio.\n\nMe apresur\u00e9 a quitarme la m\u00eda.\n\n\u00a1Mi ciudadela! Pas\u00e9 un dedo por el cristal de la ventana, siguiendo las luces que se reflejaban en mis ojos. El coche pas\u00f3 por delante del gigantesco centro comercial del barrio de White City, en el II-3. Nunca se me hab\u00eda ocurrido pensar que echar\u00eda de menos aquellas calles sucias de color gris plomo, pero las extra\u00f1aba, y tambi\u00e9n pujar para conseguir esp\u00edritus y jugar al tarocchi y trepar a los edificios con Nick para ver la puesta de sol. Quer\u00eda salir del coche y zambullirme en el coraz\u00f3n envenenado de Londres.\n\nCarl hab\u00eda estado intranquilo durante la primera parte del trayecto, no paraba de mover una pierna y de acariciar su pistola de flux; pero en la autopista se hab\u00eda quedado dormido. Me hab\u00eda dicho que 30 se llamaba Amelia, y que su guardi\u00e1n era un tal Elnath Sarin. Era clerom\u00e1ntica, como yo sospechaba, y se le daban especialmente bien los dados. Tard\u00e9 un rato en recordar la palabra exacta: astragalom\u00e1ntico. Estaba empezando a oxidarme. En otros tiempos Jax me examinaba a diario sobre los siete \u00f3rdenes de la clarividencia.\n\nVolv\u00ed a mirar a Carl. Llevaba el pelo sucio. Sus ojeras me revelaron que estaba tan cansado como yo; pero \u00e9l no ten\u00eda cardenales. Nuevas traiciones deb\u00edan de haberle proporcionado seguridad. Abri\u00f3 los ojos, como si hubiera notado que lo estaba observando.\n\n\u2014No intentes huir.\n\nLo dijo con un hilo de voz. Como no contest\u00e9, se desplaz\u00f3 un poco hacia m\u00ed.\n\n\u2014No lo permitir\u00e1n. \u00c9l no lo permitir\u00e1. \u2014Mir\u00f3 al Custodio a trav\u00e9s de la pantalla de vidrio\u2014. Sheol es un sitio seguro para nosotros. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 quieres irte?\n\n\u2014Porque no es nuestro sitio.\n\n\u2014Te equivocas, es nuestro \u00fanico sitio. All\u00ed podemos ser clarividentes. No tenemos que escondernos.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa no eres idiota, Carl. Sabes perfectamente que es una c\u00e1rcel.\n\n\u2014Y \u00bfla ciudadela no lo es?\n\n\u2014No.\n\nCarl mir\u00f3 su pistola. Yo mir\u00e9 por la ventana.\n\nUna parte de m\u00ed sab\u00eda a qu\u00e9 se refer\u00eda Carl. Por supuesto que la ciudadela era una c\u00e1rcel (Scion nos ten\u00eda encerrados como animales), pero all\u00ed no ve\u00edamos que pegaban a la gente, ni que la dejaban morir tirada en la calle.\n\nApoy\u00e9 la frente en el cristal de la ventana. No, eso no era verdad. Hector lo hac\u00eda. Y Jaxon. Lo hac\u00edan todos los mimetocapos de la ciudadela. Solo recompensaban a los que eran \u00fatiles. Al resto los echaban y los dejaban pudrirse.\n\nPero para m\u00ed la banda era lo m\u00e1s parecido a una familia. En la ciudadela no ten\u00eda que hacerle reverencias a nadie. Era la dama del I-4. Ten\u00eda un nombre.\n\nNo tardamos en llegar a Marylebone. Mientras el Custodio contemplaba el territorio de la ciudadela, desconocido para \u00e9l, me pregunt\u00e9 si habr\u00eda estado en Londres alguna vez. Seguramente s\u00ed, ya que hab\u00eda conocido a inquisidores anteriores. Me daba escalofr\u00edos pensar que hab\u00eda habido refas por las calles. Que hab\u00edan estado en el Arconte. Incluso en el I-4.\n\nEl conductor era un hombre callado y corpulento; llevaba gafas de montura met\u00e1lica y traje, con pa\u00f1uelo de bolsillo y corbata de seda roja. En la oreja izquierda llevaba un Ductaphone que pitaba a cada momento. Era morboso y fascinante ver lo organizado que estaba todo. Scion ten\u00eda todas sus bases cubiertas: nadie pod\u00eda descubrir la existencia de Sheol I. Era una ciudad cerrada a cal y canto.\n\nEl Custodio le hizo se\u00f1as al conductor para que parara en una esquina. El hombre asinti\u00f3 y sali\u00f3 del coche. Cuando volvi\u00f3, llevaba una gran bolsa de papel. El Custodio me la pas\u00f3 por la trampilla.\n\n\u2014Despi\u00e9rtalo \u2014me dijo, y se\u00f1al\u00f3 a Carl, que hab\u00eda vuelto a quedarse dormido.\n\nDentro de la bolsa hab\u00eda dos cajas de cart\u00f3n calientes de Brekkabox, la tienda de comida r\u00e1pida m\u00e1s famosa de la ciudadela. Zarande\u00e9 un poco a Carl.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Despierta!\n\nCarl se sobresalt\u00f3. Abr\u00ed mi caja y encontr\u00e9 un bocadillo enrollado, una servilleta y un tarro de gachas de avena. Mir\u00e9 al Custodio por el espejo retrovisor, y \u00e9l dio una leve sacudida con la cabeza. Desvi\u00e9 la mirada.\n\nEl coche entr\u00f3 en el sector 4. Mi sector. Me sudaba el cuero cabelludo, y el sudor me produc\u00eda picor. Mi padre viv\u00eda a solo veinte minutos de all\u00ed, y nos est\u00e1bamos acercando mucho a Seven Dials. Prest\u00e9 atenci\u00f3n por si recib\u00eda algo de Nick, pero el \u00e9ter estaba en completo silencio. Varios cientos de onirosajes presionaban contra el m\u00edo y me distra\u00edan del mundo de la carne. Cuando me concentr\u00e9 en los m\u00e1s cercanos, no sent\u00ed nada inusual, ninguna nueva oleada de emoci\u00f3n. Aquella gente no ten\u00eda ni idea de la existencia de los refa\u00edtas ni de la colonia penitenciaria. No les importaba ad\u00f3nde iban los antinaturales mientras no estuvieran a la vista.\n\nNuestro coche se detuvo en el Strand, donde nos esperaba un centinela. Todos los que estaban de guardia se parec\u00edan: altos, anchos de hombros, generalmente m\u00e9diums. Al salir del coche, evit\u00e9 mirar a aquel hombre; dej\u00e9 las cajas del desayuno vac\u00edas bajo el asiento.\n\nEl Custodio, con su imponente estatura, no estaba nervioso en absoluto.\n\n\u2014Buenas noches, centinela.\n\n\u2014Buenas noches, Custodio. \u2014El centinela se toc\u00f3 la frente con tres dedos, uno en el centro y otro sobre cada ojo; a continuaci\u00f3n salud\u00f3 alzando la mano. Era la se\u00f1al oficial de su clarividencia, su tercer ojo\u2014. \u00bfPodr\u00eda confirmarme que tiene a Carl Dempsey-Brown y a Paige Mahoney bajo su custodia?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, confirmado.\n\n\u2014\u00bfN\u00fameros de identificaci\u00f3n?\n\n\u2014XX-59-1 y 40.\n\nEl centinela tom\u00f3 nota. Me pregunt\u00e9 qu\u00e9 le habr\u00eda hecho darles la espalda a los suyos. Quiz\u00e1 un capo cruel.\n\n\u2014Vosotros dos, no olvid\u00e9is que est\u00e1is bajo custodia. Est\u00e1is aqu\u00ed para ayudar a los refa\u00edtas. Una vez cumplida vuestra misi\u00f3n, volver\u00e9is directamente a Sheol I. Si alguno de los dos intenta revelar la ubicaci\u00f3n de Sheol I, os dispararemos. Si alguno de los dos intenta establecer contacto con la poblaci\u00f3n, o con alg\u00fan miembro del sindicato, os dispararemos. Si alguno de los dos intenta hacerle da\u00f1o a vuestro guardi\u00e1n, o a un centinela, os dispararemos. \u00bfHa quedado claro?\n\nBueno, hab\u00eda dejado bastante claro que, hici\u00e9ramos lo que hici\u00e9semos, nos disparar\u00edan.\n\n\u2014Lo hemos entendido \u2014dije.\n\nPero el centinela no hab\u00eda terminado. Sac\u00f3 un tubo de plata y un par de guantes de l\u00e1tex de un compartimiento de su cintur\u00f3n. \u00abOtra aguja no, por favor\u00bb, me dije.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa primero. \u2014Me agarr\u00f3 una mu\u00f1eca\u2014. Abre la boca.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Abre-la-boca.\n\nQuise mirar al Custodio, pero su silencio me indicaba que no ten\u00eda objeciones a aquel procedimiento. Antes de que hubiera podido obedecer, el centinela me abri\u00f3 la boca a la fuerza. Le habr\u00eda pegado un mordisco al muy desgraciado. Me frot\u00f3 los labios con el extremo de pl\u00e1stico del tubo cubri\u00e9ndolos de una sustancia fr\u00eda y amarga.\n\n\u2014Cierra.\n\nNo ten\u00eda alternativa, as\u00ed que cerr\u00e9 la boca. Cuando intent\u00e9 volver a abrirla, no pude. Abr\u00ed mucho los ojos. \u00ab\u00a1Mierda!\u00bb\n\n\u2014Solo es un poco de adhesivo d\u00e9rmico. \u2014El centinela agarr\u00f3 a Carl por un brazo\u2014. Se va solo al cabo de dos o tres horas. No queremos correr riesgos, porque todos los sindis os conoc\u00e9is.\n\n\u2014Pero si yo no soy... \u2014protest\u00f3 Carl.\n\n\u2014C\u00e1llate.\n\nY por fin obligaron a Carl a cerrar el pico.\n\n\u2014XIX-49-30 no va sellada. Miradla a ella para recibir las \u00f3rdenes \u2014dijo el centinela\u2014. Por lo dem\u00e1s, ce\u00f1\u00edos a vuestros objetivos.\n\nMe empuj\u00e9 los labios con la lengua, pero no se movieron. A aquel centinela deb\u00eda de encantarle controlar a ex miembros del sindicato.\n\nTras sellarnos la boca, el centinela salud\u00f3 al Custodio y volvi\u00f3 al edificio triste y gris del que hab\u00eda salido. Fuera hab\u00eda una placa que rezaba: CIUDADELA SCION LONDRES \u2013 PUESTO DE MANDO DE LA DVN \u2013 COHORTE I SECTOR 4, y un mapa de la zona que cubr\u00eda ese puesto de mando. Alcanc\u00e9 a ver un letrero que indicaba la situaci\u00f3n del centro comercial de Covent Garden, el centro del mercado negro. Ojal\u00e1 consiguiera llegar hasta all\u00ed. Quiz\u00e1 todav\u00eda estuviera a tiempo.\n\nCarl trag\u00f3 saliva. Llev\u00e1bamos a\u00f1os viendo esas placas, y sin embargo nos sobrecog\u00edan. Mir\u00e9 al Custodio.\n\n\u2014Situla y sus humanos llegar\u00e1n a la plaza desde el lado oeste \u2014dijo\u2014. \u00bfEst\u00e1is preparados?\n\nNo s\u00e9 c\u00f3mo esperaba que contest\u00e1ramos. Carl asinti\u00f3 con la cabeza. El Custodio se sac\u00f3 dos m\u00e1scaras de la chaqueta.\n\n\u2014Tomad \u2014dijo, y nos dio una a cada uno\u2014. As\u00ed ocultar\u00e9is vuestra identidad.\n\nNo eran m\u00e1scaras normales y corrientes. Ten\u00edan unos rasgos uniformes e inexpresivos, con peque\u00f1as ranuras para los ojos y orificios para respirar bajo la nariz. Cuando me puse la m\u00eda, se me adhiri\u00f3 inmediatamente a la piel. No llamar\u00eda la atenci\u00f3n de los atareados ciudadanos de Scion, y sin embargo impedir\u00eda que la banda me reconociera. Y como ten\u00eda los labios sellados, no podr\u00eda pedir ayuda.\n\nQu\u00e9 bien lo hab\u00edan organizado todo.\n\nEl Custodio me mir\u00f3 un momento antes de ponerse la m\u00e1scara. Por los orificios para sus ojos sal\u00eda una luz estremecedora. Por primera vez me alegr\u00e9 de estar peleando en su bando.\n\nFuimos caminando hacia la columna de Nelson. Al igual que la de Seven Dials, el Monumento y la mayor parte del resto de las columnas, se iluminaba con luz roja o verde dependiendo del grado de seguridad de cada momento. En ese momento estaba verde, igual que las fuentes. Hab\u00eda una patrulla de centinelas repartida a intervalos regulares por el Strand; seguramente les hab\u00edan ordenado que nos apoyaran si era necesario. Nos miraron con cautela cuando pasamos a su lado, pero ninguno se movi\u00f3. Todos llevaban carabinas M4. La DVN no divulgaba su verdadera funci\u00f3n en la ciudad, pero todos sab\u00edamos que eran algo m\u00e1s que polic\u00edas. No te dirig\u00edas a un vigilante nocturno para quejarte de algo, como quiz\u00e1 s\u00ed hicieras con un agente de la DVD. Solo te dirig\u00edas a ellos si la situaci\u00f3n era desesperada, y nunca si eras vidente. Ni siquiera a los amaur\u00f3ticos les gustaba acerc\u00e1rseles. Al fin y al cabo, eran antinaturales.\n\nCarl, con las manos en los bolsillos, no paraba de doblar los dedos. \u00bfC\u00f3mo iba a ingeni\u00e1rmelas para salir de all\u00ed sin matar a ninguno de mi banda? Ten\u00eda que haber alguna forma de hacerles saber qui\u00e9n era. Ten\u00eda que avisarlos, porque, si no, vendr\u00edan conmigo a la colonia penitenciaria. Y no pod\u00eda permitir que Nashira los apresara.\n\nTrafalgar Square estaba iluminada con luz artificial, pero no lo suficiente para que llam\u00e1ramos la atenci\u00f3n. Situla, Amelia y David se acercaron desde el otro lado de la plaza y desaparecieron detr\u00e1s de uno de los cuatro leones de bronce que vigilaban la columna de Nelson. El Custodio se agach\u00f3 hasta que sus ojos quedaron a la altura de los m\u00edos.\n\n\u2014Carter no tardar\u00e1 \u2014dijo en voz baja\u2014. Tenemos que esperar a que establezca contacto con el Sello. No dej\u00e9is que os capturen bajo ning\u00fan concepto.\n\nCarl asinti\u00f3 con la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Cuando la zona quede despejada, la DVN nos escoltar\u00e1 de nuevo hasta el veh\u00edculo. Si los Sellos salen de los l\u00edmites de la cohorte, abortar\u00e9is la misi\u00f3n.\n\nRomp\u00ed a sudar. Seven Dials estaba en el centro de la cohorte I. Si la banda intentaba volver a la base, los seguir\u00edan hasta all\u00ed.\n\nFaltaban dos minutos para que sonara el Big Ben. El Custodio mand\u00f3 a Carl a sentarse en los escalones de la columna; era adivino y, por tanto, el menos sospechoso. Una vez que Carl se hubo instalado all\u00ed, el Custodio me llev\u00f3 m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de la fuente, hasta el pedestal de una estatua. En total hab\u00eda siete, una para cada una de las personas que hab\u00edan hecho posible la fundaci\u00f3n y el mantenimiento de Scion: Palmerston, Salisbury, Asquith, MacDonald, Zettler, Mayfield y Weaver. El s\u00e9ptimo pedestal siempre llevaba una reproducci\u00f3n del Inquisidor que gobernaba en ese momento, junto con su lema.\n\nEl Custodio se detuvo detr\u00e1s de una estatua y se qued\u00f3 escudri\u00f1ando mi m\u00e1scara.\n\n\u2014Perd\u00f3name \u2014dijo\u2014. No sab\u00eda que os iban a sellar.\n\nNo di muestras de haberle o\u00eddo. Ten\u00eda que concentrarme en respirar por la nariz.\n\n\u2014No mires todav\u00eda. Carter est\u00e1 esperando junto a la base de la columna, tal como estaba planeado.\n\nYo no quer\u00eda hacer aquello. Quer\u00eda que Antoinette se marchara de all\u00ed. Quer\u00eda irrumpir en su onirosaje, obligarla a huir.\n\nY entonces los not\u00e9.\n\nEran ellos, sin duda. Se acercaban desde diferentes direcciones. Jax deb\u00eda de haber movilizado a toda la banda, a los seis Sellos que quedaban. \u00bfReconocer\u00eda mi aura al instante, o me tomar\u00eda por otra onir\u00e1mbula de los alrededores, por mucho que eso le extra\u00f1ara?\n\n\u2014Percibo a un m\u00e9dium \u2014dijo el Custodio\u2014. Y a un suspirante.\n\nEran Eliza y Nadine. Mir\u00e9 hacia la base de la columna de Nelson. Y s\u00ed, all\u00ed estaba Antoinette.\n\nAntoinette llevaba una levita y un sombrero negro de ala ancha del que asomaban mechones de pelo pelirrojo entrecano. En lo poco que vi de su cara apreci\u00e9 arrugas que en el programa de televisi\u00f3n le hab\u00edan disimulado. Sujetaba una boquilla, en la que hab\u00eda un cigarrillo de lo que parec\u00eda \u00e1ster morado. Una desfachatez: nadie fumaba drogas et\u00e9reas en p\u00fablico.\n\nLa perspectiva de pelear contra Toni Carter bastaba para que me pusiera enferma por los nervios. En su programa sufr\u00eda ataques muy violentos antes de hacer sus predicciones; era un atractivo a\u00f1adido que hab\u00eda disparado los \u00edndices de audiencia. Me imagin\u00e9 c\u00f3mo ser\u00eda peleando. Nick pon\u00eda en duda que fuera un or\u00e1culo: los or\u00e1culos jam\u00e1s perd\u00edan el control de esa forma.\n\nNadine lleg\u00f3 primero. Llevaba un blazer de raya diplom\u00e1tica, solo parcialmente abrochado. Sin ninguna duda, ocultaba unas pistolas. Luego fueron apareciendo los dem\u00e1s, uno a uno, aunque sin que se notara que se conoc\u00edan unos a otros. Solo los un\u00edan sus auras. Cuando vi a Nick, cre\u00ed que iba a estallar; que me echar\u00eda a llorar, a re\u00edr, a cantar. Iba muy disfrazado. Era l\u00f3gico, pues ten\u00eda una carrera brillante en Scion. Llevaba peluca oscura y sombrero, y gafas de cristales oscuros. Unos palmos m\u00e1s all\u00e1, Jax daba golpecitos con su bast\u00f3n. El Custodio, a mi lado, guard\u00f3 silencio. Se le oscurecieron los ojos cuando uno de sus objetivos se acerc\u00f3 m\u00e1s a Antoinette. Hab\u00edan elegido a Eliza para adelantarse. La segu\u00eda Dani, con los labios apretados. Tambi\u00e9n iba disfrazada.\n\nEn su lugar, yo primero habr\u00eda establecido contacto con Antoinette con uno de mis \u00abempujoncitos\u00bb, para comprobar que no hubiera moros en la costa; pero Eliza no ten\u00eda esa capacidad. El \u00e9ter la dominaba a ella, y no al rev\u00e9s. Levant\u00f3 cuatro dedos de la mano derecha y tres de la izquierda y se los pas\u00f3 por el pelo, como si se lo desenredara. Antoinette capt\u00f3 el mensaje. Se acerc\u00f3 a Eliza y le tendi\u00f3 la mano. Eliza se la dio.\n\nSitula fue la primera en atacar. No me di ni cuenta y ya se le hab\u00eda subido encima a Antoinette y estaba estrangul\u00e1ndola. El Custodio fue hacia Zeke, mientras Carl lanzaba un esp\u00edritu que estaba all\u00ed cerca contra Eliza. Deb\u00eda de ser Nelson, el esp\u00edritu m\u00e1s potente de la plaza; Eliza se estrell\u00f3 contra uno de los leones y, aferrada a su propio pecho, grit\u00f3 con voz estrangulada: \u00ab\u00a1No puedo controlar los vientos y el mar, ni a m\u00ed mismo en la hora de la muerte!\u00bb. A continuaci\u00f3n sali\u00f3 Amelia, pero Nick, furioso porque hab\u00eda visto a Eliza retorci\u00e9ndose de dolor, le hizo un placaje. David sujet\u00f3 a Jax; o intent\u00f3 sujetar a Jax, porque Dani le lanz\u00f3 un pu\u00f1etazo que le hizo sangrar por la boca. En menos de diez segundos, yo era la \u00fanica que todav\u00eda no hab\u00eda salido a pelear.\n\nA m\u00ed ya me parec\u00eda bien, pero a Jaxon no.\n\nMe vio enseguida; o mejor dicho, vio a otro enemigo enmascarado. Agarr\u00f3 una bandada de seis esp\u00edritus y me la lanz\u00f3. Ten\u00eda que moverme, y deprisa: los esp\u00edritus de Trafalgar pod\u00edan plantear una amenaza grave. Le dispar\u00e9 un dardo de flux, pero apunt\u00e9 muy por encima de su cabeza. Jax se agach\u00f3 de todos modos, y la bandada se dispers\u00f3. \u00abD\u00e9jalo \u2014pens\u00e9\u2014. No me obligues a atacarte.\u00bb\n\nPero Jaxon no se rend\u00eda. Estaba furioso. Le hab\u00edamos estropeado los planes. Se lanz\u00f3 contra m\u00ed blandiendo su bast\u00f3n. Intent\u00e9 pegarle una patada en el abdomen para contenerlo, pero no le di bastante fuerte. Me agarr\u00f3 por el tobillo, flexion\u00f3 los brazos y me dio la vuelta. Sent\u00ed dolor. \u00abVenga, mu\u00e9vete.\u00bb\n\nNo fui suficientemente r\u00e1pida. Jax me propin\u00f3 una patada en el costado con su bota con puntera de acero, y ca\u00ed al suelo. Me hinc\u00f3 una rodilla en el pecho. Vi alzarse su pu\u00f1o, una mancha borrosa, y entonces algo s\u00f3lido me dio en la parte de la cara que no ten\u00eda protegida. Jax llevaba nudilleras de metal. Volvi\u00f3 a pegarme en las costillas. Not\u00e9 que se me part\u00eda algo, y un fuerte dolor. Y otra vez. Levant\u00e9 un brazo para parar un cuarto pu\u00f1etazo. Jax echaba fuego por los ojos; estaba sediento de sangre. Me iba a matar.\n\nNo ten\u00eda alternativa. Como ten\u00eda el cuerpo inmovilizado utilic\u00e9 mi esp\u00edritu. Jax no se lo esperaba. No estaba concentrado en mi aura. El golpazo contra su onirosaje lo derrib\u00f3, y se le cay\u00f3 el bast\u00f3n al suelo. Me levant\u00e9 como pude. Me dol\u00edan la cara y las costillas, y no pod\u00eda abrir el ojo derecho. Me qued\u00e9 agachada, apoyada en las rodillas, y me obligu\u00e9 a respirar por la nariz. No sab\u00eda que Jax pudiera ser tan brutal.\n\nMe llam\u00f3 la atenci\u00f3n un alarido. Cerca de una de las fuentes, Nadine hab\u00eda abandonado el combate con esp\u00edritus y hab\u00eda inmovilizado a Amelia en el suelo. Saqu\u00e9 la jeringuilla que llevaba en la chaqueta, la abr\u00ed con dedos ensangrentados y me clav\u00e9 la aguja en la mu\u00f1eca. Al cabo de unos segundos el dolor disminuy\u00f3. Segu\u00eda sin ver bien con el ojo derecho, aunque el izquierdo lo ten\u00eda intacto.\n\nLa mira roja de una escopeta vacilaba por mi pecho. Deb\u00edan de tener francotiradores en los edificios.\n\nTen\u00eda que haber alguna manera de salir de all\u00ed.\n\nCon energ\u00edas renovadas, corr\u00ed hacia la fuente, donde Amelia pataleaba en vano. Por mucho que quisiera que ganara Nadine, no pod\u00eda quedarme tan tranquila viendo morir a otro ser humano. Le hice un placaje agarr\u00e1ndola por la cintura y me lanc\u00e9 con ella hacia la fuente. El agua se ti\u00f1\u00f3 de rojo al cambiar las luces indicadoras del nivel de seguridad. Nadine emergi\u00f3 medio segundo despu\u00e9s que yo. Apretaba las mand\u00edbulas y ten\u00eda los m\u00fasculos del cuello en tensi\u00f3n. Me apart\u00e9.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Qu\u00edtate esa m\u00e1scara, zorra! \u2014me grit\u00f3. La apunt\u00e9 con mi pistola de flux.\n\nNadine empez\u00f3 a describir c\u00edrculos alrededor de m\u00ed. Se abri\u00f3 el blazer y sac\u00f3 una navaja. Siempre hab\u00eda preferido el acero a los esp\u00edritus.\n\nNotaba los latidos de mi coraz\u00f3n por todo el cuerpo, hasta en las yemas de los dedos. Nadine casi nunca fallaba con una navaja en las manos, y el chaleco antibalas solo me ofrec\u00eda una protecci\u00f3n relativa: si me golpeaba por encima del pecho, pod\u00eda darme por muerta. Y justo entonces apareci\u00f3 David. Cuando Nadine se dispon\u00eda a lanzar la navaja, \u00e9l le clav\u00f3 un dardo de flux entre los om\u00f3platos. Nadine abri\u00f3 mucho los ojos. Se tambale\u00f3, oscil\u00f3 y se dobl\u00f3 sobre el borde de la fuente. David la sac\u00f3 del agua y le asi\u00f3 la cabeza con ambas manos. Nos hab\u00edan ordenado no matar, pero, con la exaltaci\u00f3n, David parec\u00eda haberlo olvidado. \u00bfQu\u00e9 importancia pod\u00eda tener una susu?\n\nNo me par\u00e9 a pensar: lanc\u00e9 mi esp\u00edritu. Zeke jam\u00e1s me perdonar\u00eda si dejaba morir a su hermana.\n\nMe pas\u00e9. Solo necesit\u00e9 un segundo en la cabeza de David para hacerle soltar a Nadine. Un segundo m\u00e1s tarde volv\u00eda a estar en mi cuerpo y corr\u00eda hacia David. Cargu\u00e9 contra \u00e9l con todas mis fuerzas, lo golpe\u00e9 en un costado y ambos ca\u00edmos al suelo.\n\nLo vi todo negro. Acababa de poseer a David. Solo hab\u00eda sido un instante, pero le hab\u00eda movido el brazo.\n\nPor fin hab\u00eda pose\u00eddo a un humano.\n\nDavid se llev\u00f3 las manos a la cabeza. No hab\u00eda sido precisamente cuidadosa con \u00e9l. Me levant\u00e9 con dificultad y parpade\u00e9 para hacer desaparecer un aluvi\u00f3n de estrellas blancas. Antoinette y Situla se hab\u00edan esfumado.\n\nDej\u00e9 a Nadine junto a David y me apart\u00e9 corriendo de la fuente, con la ropa empapada. Me sub\u00ed a un le\u00f3n e inspeccion\u00e9 la escena. Ambos grupos se hab\u00edan abierto en abanico por la plaza. Zeke, que no era muy buen luchador, hab\u00eda abandonado sabiamente el barco al ver que el Custodio iba hacia \u00e9l; se hab\u00eda puesto el pasamonta\u00f1as y estaba intercambiando golpes con Amelia. El Custodio se fij\u00f3 en Nick, que acababa de dejar a Carl sin sentido con una bandada. Observ\u00e1ndolos, cre\u00ed que se me parar\u00eda el coraz\u00f3n: mi guardi\u00e1n y mi mejor amigo. Volv\u00ed a bajar al suelo, atemorizada. Ten\u00eda que ayudar a Nick. El Custodio pod\u00eda matarlo.\n\nEntonces apareci\u00f3 Eliza, furiosa. Me asaltaron esp\u00edritus desde todas direcciones. Los esp\u00edritus siempre se aliaban con los m\u00e9diums. Tres marineros franceses irrumpieron en mi onirosaje. Me tambale\u00e9, cegada por sus recuerdos: las olas imponentes, las explosiones de los mosquetes, las llamas que ard\u00edan en la cubierta del _Achille_ , gritos, caos... Y entonces Eliza me dio un empuj\u00f3n y me ca\u00ed. Levant\u00e9 todas mis defensas mentales para tratar de apartar de m\u00ed a los invasores.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 un momento incapacitada. Eliza intent\u00f3 inmovilizarme con las rodillas.\n\n\u2014\u00a1No os mov\u00e1is de ah\u00ed, chicos!\n\nMi onirosaje se estaba inundando. Las balas de ca\u00f1\u00f3n lo atravesaban. Ca\u00eda madera ardiendo ante mis ojos. Eliza alz\u00f3 las manos para desenmascararme.\n\n\u00ab\u00a1No, no!\u00bb No pod\u00eda dejar que me viera, o la DVN le disparar\u00eda. Con un tremendo esfuerzo, obligu\u00e9 a los esp\u00edritus a dispersarse y apart\u00e9 a Eliza de una patada. Eliza grit\u00f3 de dolor, y sent\u00ed una punzada de remordimiento. Gir\u00e9 sobre m\u00ed misma justo a tiempo para desviar el bast\u00f3n de Jax con mi pistola de flux.\n\n\u2014Vaya, vaya. Una andarina uniformada \u2014dijo en voz baja\u2014. \u00bfD\u00f3nde te encontraron? \u00bfD\u00f3nde te escond\u00edas? \u2014Se me acerc\u00f3 y escudri\u00f1\u00f3 los orificios para los ojos de la m\u00e1scara\u2014. No puedes ser mi Paige. \u2014Me apart\u00f3 el brazo con el bast\u00f3n; mis m\u00fasculos se tensaron\u2014. Entonces \u00bfqui\u00e9n eres?\n\nAntes de que yo pudiera reaccionar, Jax se vio empujado hacia atr\u00e1s por una bandada enorme, mucho mayor que la que habr\u00eda podido reunir cualquier humano. El Custodio. Me levant\u00e9 e intent\u00e9 recuperar la pistola, pero Jax bland\u00eda su bast\u00f3n a ciegas. Apart\u00e9 la cabeza hacia la izquierda instintivamente. Demasiado despacio. Not\u00e9 una quemadura en la oreja: un calor limpio e intenso. Una cuchilla. Consegu\u00ed asir la pistola, pero Jax me la quit\u00f3 de la mano con un segundo golpe. La cuchilla del extremo del bast\u00f3n me recorri\u00f3 todo el brazo; atraves\u00f3 la tela de mi chaqueta y me cort\u00f3. Un grito apagado intent\u00f3 salir por mi garganta. Not\u00e9 un fuerte dolor en el brazo.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Venga, andarina, usa tu esp\u00edritu! \u2014Jaxon me apunt\u00f3 con la cuchilla, riendo\u2014. Utiliza tu dolor. Deja atr\u00e1s las heridas.\n\nAmelia lanz\u00f3 otra bandada contra Jax. Yo la hab\u00eda salvado, y ahora ella me salvaba a m\u00ed. Nick devolvi\u00f3 el fuego, y Amelia se agazap\u00f3 detr\u00e1s de un le\u00f3n. Zeke estaba tumbado en el suelo, inm\u00f3vil. \u00abNo est\u00e9s muerto \u2014pens\u00e9\u2014. Que no te hayan matado, por favor.\u00bb\n\nVi un destello de pelo rojo. Antoinette hab\u00eda vuelto. Se le hab\u00eda volado el sombrero, y no me extra\u00f1\u00f3: estaba en una especie de trance de batalla. Se le sal\u00edan los ojos de las \u00f3rbitas, ten\u00eda las aletas de la nariz muy abiertas, y su esp\u00edritu era una llamarada que inutilizaba las farolas azules de la ciudadela, dise\u00f1adas para calmar las mentes exaltadas. Una lluvia de pu\u00f1os, piernas y esp\u00edritus cay\u00f3 sobre Situla, impidi\u00e9ndole clavarle la navaja a Antoinette. Situla le lanz\u00f3 un fantasma. Antoinette se apart\u00f3 \u00e1gilmente y lo esquiv\u00f3.\n\nY de pronto, sin avisar, sali\u00f3 disparada. El Custodio la vio echar a correr entre la gente, que gritaba.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Detenla! \u2014me grit\u00f3.\n\nSal\u00ed detr\u00e1s de Antoinette. Aquella era mi oportunidad de escapar. Un centinela me dej\u00f3 pasar al ver mi uniforme, pero le cerr\u00f3 el paso a una amaur\u00f3tica. Un hombre me agarr\u00f3 por la chaqueta (un suspirante), pero yo iba demasiado deprisa, y me solt\u00f3. Mi mente era un haz de luz pura. Antoinette iba derecha hacia el Arconte de Westminster. Tomar esa direcci\u00f3n era una locura, pero a m\u00ed no me importaban los motivos que pudiera tener, pues me estaba ofreciendo una oportunidad valios\u00edsima. Enfrente del Arconte hab\u00eda una estaci\u00f3n de metro, que siempre estaba abarrotada de metrovigilantes, pero tambi\u00e9n de ciudadanos que iban al trabajo. Si me quitaba la m\u00e1scara y la chaqueta, podr\u00eda pasar las barreras y perderme entre la multitud. Las columnas de la entrada me proteger\u00edan de la DVN, y para llegar a Green Park solo hab\u00eda una parada. Desde all\u00ed podr\u00eda llegar a Dials. Si ese plan fallaba, ir\u00eda hacia el T\u00e1mesis. Pod\u00eda tirarme al agua y nadar. Estaba dispuesta a hacer cualquier cosa para escapar.\n\nLo conseguir\u00eda. Estaba segura de que lo conseguir\u00eda.\n\nMis piernas se mov\u00edan con \u00edmpetu. El dolor del brazo era brutal, pero no pod\u00eda parar. El trance de Antoinette parec\u00eda haberle dado alas. Ning\u00fan ser humano pod\u00eda correr tanto, a menos que lo guiaran esp\u00edritus. Intent\u00e9 no perder de vista sus auras mientras serpenteaba entre hordas de gente y coches.\n\nUn taxi fren\u00f3 bruscamente delante de Antoinette. Situla y ella lo esquivaron cada una por un lado y se metieron en la masa de peatones. Yo tom\u00e9 el camino m\u00e1s corto: segu\u00ed corriendo, me sub\u00ed al cap\u00f3 del taxi y, desde all\u00ed, al techo, y baj\u00e9 resbalando por el otro lado. Antoinette pas\u00f3 como una exhalaci\u00f3n. Situla la sigui\u00f3 un par de segundos m\u00e1s tarde, esquivando a otros transe\u00fantes. Uno de ellos muri\u00f3. No pod\u00eda detenerme. Si aflojaba aunque solo fuera un momento, perder\u00eda de vista a Antoinette y Situla. Cuando ya cre\u00eda que iban a explotarme los pulmones, llegamos al final de Whitehall.\n\nSeg\u00fan el mapa, nos encontr\u00e1bamos en el centro de la ciudadela: cohorte I, sector 1. Los videntes evitaban esa zona como la peste. Alc\u00e9 la vista hacia el Arconte de Westminster; la sangre me resbalaba por los dedos. La esfera del reloj estaba iluminada con luz roja, y las agujas y los d\u00edgitos eran negros y se destacaban sobre la superficie iluminada. All\u00ed era donde danzaban los t\u00edteres de Frank Weaver. Si mi vida no hubiera estado amenazada, me habr\u00eda gustado dejar alg\u00fan graffiti exquisito en las paredes.\n\nCorr\u00ed hacia el Starch. Situla iba un poco por delante de m\u00ed. Cuando lleg\u00f3 al puente, Antoinette se volvi\u00f3 hacia su enemiga. Su piel tensa sobre los huesos parec\u00eda una fina capa de pintura, y ten\u00eda los labios fruncidos y blancos.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1s rodeada, or\u00e1culo. \u2014Situla avanz\u00f3 hacia ella\u2014. R\u00edndete.\n\n\u2014No me llames or\u00e1culo, criatura. \u2014Antoinette alz\u00f3 una mano\u2014. Veamos si averiguas qu\u00e9 soy.\n\nLa atm\u00f3sfera se enfri\u00f3.\n\nA Situla no le impresion\u00f3 la amenaza; no ten\u00eda nada que temer de un simple ser humano. Avanz\u00f3 hacia Antoinette, pero antes de que pudiera intentar nada, se vio levantada del suelo y lanzada hacia atr\u00e1s, y estuvo a punto de caer del puente. Me sobresalt\u00e9. Un esp\u00edritu. Un quebrajador. Me asom\u00e9 al \u00e9ter para intentar identificarlo. Era semejante a un \u00e1ngel guardi\u00e1n, muy viejo y poderoso.\n\nUn arc\u00e1ngel. Un \u00e1ngel que se quedaba en la misma familia varias generaciones, incluso despu\u00e9s de morir la persona a la que hab\u00edan salvado. Eran muy dif\u00edciles de exorcizar. El treno no lo desterrar\u00eda por mucho tiempo.\n\nSitula se puso en pie.\n\n\u2014Qu\u00e9date quieta. \u2014Dio un paso m\u00e1s\u2014. Vamos a averiguar qu\u00e9 eres.\n\nAtrap\u00f3 un esp\u00edritu al vuelo, y luego otro, y otro, hasta reunir una bandada temblorosa. Antoinette manten\u00eda la mano alzada, pero se le crisp\u00f3 el rostro cuando Situla empez\u00f3 a cebarse en ella. Se le pusieron los ojos de un rojo intenso. Por un instante cre\u00ed que Antoinette iba a derrumbarse. Le sali\u00f3 una gota de sangre del ojo izquierdo. Entonces dio una sacudida con un brazo, y el arc\u00e1ngel sali\u00f3 disparado hacia Situla. La bandada fue a su encuentro; el \u00e9ter se abri\u00f3 de golpe, y ech\u00e9 a correr.\n\nLa mayor\u00eda de los centinelas ten\u00edan visi\u00f3n espiritista. La colisi\u00f3n de los esp\u00edritus los distraer\u00eda. No me ver\u00edan. No pod\u00edan verme. Ten\u00eda que volver a Dials. Corr\u00ed hacia la estaci\u00f3n I-1A.\n\nBajo mis botas el puente se estremec\u00eda con tanta energ\u00eda. No me detuve. Ve\u00eda el letrero de la estaci\u00f3n al otro lado de la calle. Me desprend\u00ed de la chaqueta y del chaleco antibalas. As\u00ed correr\u00eda m\u00e1s, y cuando me hubiera quitado la maldita m\u00e1scara, ya no parecer\u00eda una casaca roja. Ser\u00eda solo una chica con camisa roja. Mir\u00e9 los edificios y busqu\u00e9 puntos de apoyo en las fachadas. Si no consegu\u00eda entrar en la estaci\u00f3n, tendr\u00eda que salir de all\u00ed trepando. Si consegu\u00eda llegar a los tejados, estar\u00eda a salvo.\n\nDe pronto not\u00e9 otra cosa. Un dolor.\n\nNo me par\u00e9, pero de pronto me costaba m\u00e1s correr. No pod\u00eda ser una herida grave. El arc\u00e1ngel no se me hab\u00eda acercado. La que le preocupaba era Situla: ella s\u00ed supon\u00eda una amenaza. Deb\u00eda de haberme desgarrado un m\u00fasculo.\n\nNot\u00e9 un calor pegajoso bajo las costillas. Cuando mir\u00e9, vi que mi camisa roja se estaba ti\u00f1endo de otro rojo diferente, y que ten\u00eda un peque\u00f1o orificio redondo un poco m\u00e1s arriba de la cadera.\n\nMe hab\u00edan disparado, como a aquellos estudiantes irlandeses.\n\nTen\u00eda que seguir corriendo. Me di impulso hacia la calle, donde todav\u00eda hab\u00eda mucho tr\u00e1fico proveniente del Embankment. \u00abVenga, Paige, corre.\u00bb Nick podr\u00eda curarme. Solo ten\u00eda que llegar a Dials. Ya ve\u00eda la estaci\u00f3n. Volvieron a dispararme, pero no me dieron. Ten\u00eda que salir de su alcance. Me obligu\u00e9 a seguir adelante, pero el dolor iba en aumento y no pod\u00eda cargar el peso en el lado derecho. Mi carrera tambaleante se hab\u00eda convertido en cojera. Delante de la estaci\u00f3n hab\u00eda unas columnas. Si consegu\u00eda llegar hasta ellas, podr\u00eda contener la hemorragia y desaparecer.\n\nCorr\u00ed detr\u00e1s de un autob\u00fas, utiliz\u00e1ndolo para ocultarme, y llegu\u00e9 a la primera columna del otro lado de la calle. Me hab\u00eda quedado sin fuerzas.\n\nIntent\u00e9 seguir avanzando, pero not\u00e9 una fuerte punzada de dolor en la cintura. Se me doblaron las rodillas.\n\nQu\u00e9 r\u00e1pido me sobreven\u00eda la muerte, como si llevara a\u00f1os esperando ese momento. El mundo f\u00edsico se desdibuj\u00f3 hasta formar una neblina. Vi pasar destellos. Todav\u00eda o\u00eda los ruidos de la pelea, pero en el \u00e9ter, no en la calle.\n\nAdi\u00f3s, onir\u00e1mbula.\n\nNo me quedaba mucho tiempo. Pod\u00edan volver a dispararme. Me arrastr\u00e9 detr\u00e1s de una columna, donde no pudieran verme desde la estaci\u00f3n, donde los pasajeros intentaban averiguar de d\u00f3nde ven\u00eda tanto ruido. Me acurruqu\u00e9 contra la pared. La herida, peque\u00f1a, no paraba de sangrar. Me la tap\u00e9 con las manos temblorosas. La mordaza me imped\u00eda separar los labios.\n\nNo conseguir\u00eda llegar a Dials. Aunque me subiera a un tren, me detendr\u00edan al apearme. Reparar\u00edan en la sangre de mis manos. Al menos no hab\u00eda muerto en Sheol I; eso habr\u00eda sido el colmo de la desgracia. All\u00ed, en SciLo, Nashira no pod\u00eda alcanzarme.\n\nHab\u00eda alguien a mi lado, agarr\u00e1ndome un brazo. Lo ol\u00ed antes de verlo. Alcanfor.\n\n\u00abNick.\u00bb\n\nNo me reconoci\u00f3. No pod\u00eda reconocerme. Me levant\u00f3 la barbilla exponiendo mi cuello a su navaja.\n\n\u2014Maldita traidora.\n\n\u00abNick.\u00bb Me ard\u00eda la herida. Ten\u00eda la manga empapada de sangre.\n\n\u2014Mu\u00e9strame la cara \u2014dijo Nick. M\u00e1s tranquilo, apenado\u2014. No s\u00e9 qu\u00e9 eres, pero eres vidente. Saltador. Quiz\u00e1 lo recuerdes cuando veas la \u00faltima luz.\n\nMe quit\u00f3 la m\u00e1scara. Al verme, se rompi\u00f3 algo en su interior.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Paige! \u2014dijo con voz estrangulada\u2014. Oh, no, Paige. _F\u00f6rl\u00e5t mig_. \u2014Me apret\u00f3 el costado con las manos tratando de detener la hemorragia\u2014. Lo siento. Lo siento. Cre\u00ed... Jaxon me pidi\u00f3... \u2014Claro. Jaxon quer\u00eda atrapar al onir\u00e1mbulo. Me hab\u00eda disparado Nick, no Scion\u2014. Pero \u00bfqu\u00e9 te han hecho? \u2014Le temblaba la voz. Me doli\u00f3 mucho verlo tan desconsolado\u2014. Te pondr\u00e1s bien, te lo prometo. M\u00edrame, Paige. \u00a1M\u00edrame!\n\nMe costaba mucho enfocar la mirada. Me pesaban los p\u00e1rpados. Llev\u00e9 una mano hacia su camisa. Nick me sostuvo la cabeza contra el pecho.\n\n\u2014No pasa nada, cielo. \u00bfAd\u00f3nde te llevaron?\n\nNegu\u00e9 con la cabeza. Nick me acarici\u00f3 el pelo sudado; eso me tranquiliz\u00f3. Quer\u00eda quedarme all\u00ed. No quer\u00eda que me llevaran otra vez a aquel sitio.\n\n\u2014Paige, ni se te ocurra cerrar los ojos. Dime ad\u00f3nde te llevaron esos cerdos.\n\nVolv\u00ed a negar con la cabeza. No pod\u00eda dec\u00edrselo, no sin mi voz.\n\n\u2014Venga, _s\u00f6tnos_. Tienes que decirme d\u00f3nde es. Para que vuelva a encontrarte, como la otra vez. \u00bfTe acuerdas?\n\nTen\u00eda que dec\u00edrselo. Nick ten\u00eda que saberlo. No pod\u00eda morir sin decirle d\u00f3nde era. Ten\u00eda que salvar a otros, a los otros videntes de la ciudad perdida. Pero entonces vi una silueta, el contorno de un hombre.\n\nNo, de un hombre no.\n\nDe un refa\u00edta.\n\nTen\u00eda los dedos manchados de sangre. Levant\u00e9 un brazo y trac\u00e9 las tres primeras letras en la pared. Nick las ley\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Oxford \u2014dijo\u2014. \u00bfTe llevaron a Oxford?\n\nBaj\u00e9 la mano. El hombre sin rostro se acercaba en la oscuridad. Nick levant\u00f3 la cabeza.\n\n\u2014No. \u2014Se le tensaron los m\u00fasculos\u2014. Voy a llevarte a casa \u2014dijo, y empez\u00f3 a levantarme\u2014. No dejar\u00e9 que vuelvan a llevarte all\u00ed.\n\nDesenfund\u00f3 una pistola. Le rode\u00e9 el cuello con un brazo. Quer\u00eda que lo intentara, que echara a correr, que me sacara de otro campo de amapolas; pero si le dejaba hacerlo, lo matar\u00edan. Nos matar\u00edan a los dos. La sombra nos perseguir\u00eda hasta Dials. Le tir\u00e9 de la camisa, y al mismo tiempo negu\u00e9 con la cabeza, pero \u00e9l no me entend\u00eda. La sombra se cruz\u00f3 en nuestro camino. Nick asi\u00f3 fuertemente la pistola, hasta que se le pusieron los nudillos blancos, y apret\u00f3 el gatillo. Una vez, dos veces. Grit\u00e9 con los labios sellados. \u00ab\u00a1Corre, Nick!\u00bb. Pero \u00e9l no pod\u00eda o\u00edrme, no pod\u00eda saberlo. Se le cay\u00f3 la pistola de la mano, y se qued\u00f3 p\u00e1lido. Una gigantesca mano enguantada lo agarr\u00f3 por el cuello. Intent\u00e9 apartarla con las \u00faltimas fuerzas que me quedaban.\n\n\u2014Ella viene conmigo. \u2014Era el Custodio. Parec\u00eda un demonio\u2014. Huye, or\u00e1culo.\n\nLa vida se me escapaba de las manos. O\u00ed el coraz\u00f3n de Nick junto a mi oreja, not\u00e9 sus dedos trabarse detr\u00e1s de mi espalda. La luz disminu\u00eda. Hab\u00eda llegado la muerte.\n\nEl tiempo se convirti\u00f3 en una serie de momentos, con vac\u00edos intercalados. A veces hab\u00eda luces. A veces, voces. Me parec\u00eda ir en un coche, notar un balanceo.\n\nMe cortaron la camisa. Intent\u00e9 apartar aquellas manos indiscretas, pero mi cuerpo no me obedeci\u00f3. Reconoc\u00ed la densa niebla de los f\u00e1rmacos. De pronto me encontr\u00e9 arropada en la cama del Custodio, tumbada sobre el costado izquierdo. Ten\u00eda el pelo mojado. Me dol\u00eda todo el cuerpo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPaige?\n\nUna voz que parec\u00eda submarina. Emit\u00ed un sonido d\u00e9bil, entre un sollozo y un estertor. Me ard\u00eda el pecho. Y el brazo. \u00abNick.\u00bb Estir\u00e9 una mano a tientas.\n\n\u2014R\u00e1pido, Michael. \u2014Me dieron la mano\u2014. Espera, Paige.\n\nDeb\u00ed de volver a desmayarme. Cuando despert\u00e9, me sent\u00eda pesada, blanda y deforme como un edred\u00f3n. No ten\u00eda sensibilidad en el brazo derecho. Me dol\u00eda al respirar, pero pod\u00eda abrir la boca. Respiraba agitadamente.\n\nMe apoy\u00e9 en un codo y me pas\u00e9 la lengua por los dientes. Estaban todos, y enteros.\n\nSentado en su butaca, el Custodio miraba su gram\u00f3fono. Me habr\u00eda gustado romper aquel aparato. Aquellas voces no ten\u00edan derecho a sonar tan animadas. Cuando el Custodio vio que me mov\u00eda, se levant\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Paige.\n\nSe me aceler\u00f3 el coraz\u00f3n. Me apret\u00e9 contra el cabecero de la cama y record\u00e9 sus ojos en la oscuridad.\n\n\u2014\u00bfLo has matado? \u2014Me sequ\u00e9 el sudor del labio\u2014. \u00bfHas matado al or\u00e1culo?\n\n\u2014No. Sigue vivo.\n\nCon cuidado, sin dejar de mirarme a la cara, me ayud\u00f3 a sentarme. Al moverme, not\u00e9 el tir\u00f3n de la v\u00eda intravenosa que llevaba en la mano.\n\n\u2014No veo bien.\n\nTen\u00eda la voz ronca, pero al menos pod\u00eda hablar.\n\n\u2014Tienes un hematoma periorbital.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 es eso?\n\n\u2014Un ojo morado.\n\nMe pas\u00e9 un dedo por la piel fina de la parte superior de la mejilla. Jax me hab\u00eda pegado fuerte. Ten\u00eda todo el lado derecho de la cara hinchado.\n\n\u2014As\u00ed que hemos vuelto \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014Intentaste huir.\n\n\u2014Claro que intent\u00e9 huir. \u2014No pude disimular la amargura de mi voz\u2014. \u00bfCrees que quiero morirme aqu\u00ed y acosar a Nashira el resto de la eternidad? \u2014El Custodio se qued\u00f3 mir\u00e1ndome. Se me hizo un nudo en la garganta\u2014. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 no me dejas irme a casa?\n\nUna d\u00e9bil mancha verde estaba borr\u00e1ndose de sus ojos. Deb\u00eda de haberse cebado en Eliza.\n\n\u2014Existen motivos \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014Excusas.\n\nSe qued\u00f3 callado largo rato. Cuando volvi\u00f3 a hablar, no fue para explicarme por qu\u00e9 hab\u00eda vuelto a llevarme a aquella cloaca.\n\n\u2014Tienes una colecci\u00f3n de lesiones impresionante. \u2014Me coloc\u00f3 bien las almohadas y me ayud\u00f3 a apoyarme en ellas\u2014. Jaxon Hall es mucho m\u00e1s despiadado de lo que hab\u00edamos imaginado.\n\n\u2014Dame la lista.\n\n\u2014Un ojo morado, dos costillas rotas, un labio partido, una oreja cortada, contusiones, laceraciones en el brazo derecho, herida de bala en el torso. Es incre\u00edble que consiguieras correr hasta el puente.\n\n\u2014La adrenalina. \u2014Escudri\u00f1\u00e9 su cara y a\u00f1ad\u00ed\u2014: \u00bfTe hirieron?\n\n\u2014Solo alg\u00fan rasgu\u00f1o.\n\n\u2014Entonces solo me usaron a m\u00ed de saco de boxeo.\n\n\u2014Te enfrentaste a un grupo muy poderoso de clarividentes y sobreviviste, Paige. No hay que avergonzarse de la propia fuerza.\n\nPero yo s\u00ed me avergonzaba. Eliza me hab\u00eda inmovilizado, Nick me hab\u00eda disparado y Jax me hab\u00eda dado una paliza. Eso no era ser fuerte. El Custodio me acerc\u00f3 un vaso de agua a los labios y beb\u00ed a rega\u00f1adientes.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSabe Nashira que intent\u00e9 escapar?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, claro.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 me har\u00e1?\n\n\u2014Te han quitado el blus\u00f3n rojo. \u2014Dej\u00f3 el vaso en la mesilla de noche\u2014. Ahora eres una casaca amarilla.\n\nEl color de los cobardes. Consegu\u00ed soltar una risa amarga, pero me dolieron las costillas.\n\n\u2014Me importa un cuerno el blus\u00f3n que me asigne. Lo que quiere es matarme, con casaca roja o sin ella. \u2014Me temblaron los hombros\u2014. Ll\u00e9vame con ella. Acabemos con esto.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1s herida y cansada, Paige. Cuando te encuentres mejor, seguramente no lo ver\u00e1s todo tan negro.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCu\u00e1ndo ser\u00e1 eso?\n\n\u2014Si quieres, ma\u00f1ana podr\u00e1s volver a tu habitaci\u00f3n.\n\nFrunc\u00ed el entrecejo, pero me dolieron todos los m\u00fasculos de la cara.\n\n\u2014\u00bfMa\u00f1ana?\n\n\u2014Antes de marcharnos de Londres, le ped\u00ed al conductor que recogiera scimorfina y antiinflamatorios del edificio de la SciOECI. Dentro de un par de d\u00edas estar\u00e1s completamente recuperada.\n\nLa scimorfina era car\u00edsima.\n\n\u2014\u00bfViste a mi padre en el SciOECI?\n\n\u2014No, yo no entr\u00e9 en el edificio. Solo unos cuantos pol\u00edticos del Arconte est\u00e1n al corriente de nuestra existencia.\n\nMir\u00f3 la v\u00eda intravenosa que llevaba en la mano. Comprob\u00f3, sin quitarse los guantes, que el esparadrapo estuviera bien pegado.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 llevas esos guantes? \u2014dije con una chispa de rabia\u2014. \u00bfEncuentras demasiado asquerosos a los humanos?\n\n\u2014Son las normas de Nashira.\n\nMe ardieron las mejillas bajo los moretones. Deb\u00eda de haberse pasado horas cur\u00e1ndome; ten\u00eda que admitirlo, por muy mal que me cayera.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 les ha pasado a los otros? \u2014pregunt\u00e9.\n\n\u20141 y 12 salieron ilesos. Situla qued\u00f3 en estado latente, pero ya se ha recuperado. \u2014Hizo una pausa\u2014. 30 ha muerto.\n\n\u2014\u00bfMuerto? \u00bfC\u00f3mo?\n\n\u2014Ahogada. La encontramos en la fuente.\n\nLa noticia me estremeci\u00f3. Amelia no me ca\u00eda especialmente bien, pero nunca hab\u00eda deseado su muerte. Me pregunt\u00e9 qu\u00e9 miembro de la banda la habr\u00eda matado.\n\n\u2014\u00bfY Carter?\n\n\u2014Logr\u00f3 huir. Un veh\u00edculo la recogi\u00f3 en el puente antes de que pudi\u00e9ramos capturarla.\n\nPor lo menos, Carter se hab\u00eda librado. No sab\u00eda cu\u00e1l era su poder, pero no quer\u00eda que Nashira se lo quitara.\n\n\u2014\u00bfY los Sellos?\n\n\u2014Huyeron. Jam\u00e1s hab\u00eda visto tan furiosa a Nashira.\n\nSent\u00ed un alivio inmenso. Estaban todos bien. La banda conoc\u00eda muy bien el I-4, todos sus rincones secretos y sus refugios; no debi\u00f3 de costarles mucho desaparecer, aunque Nadine y Zeke estuvieran heridos. Todos los videntes del sector respond\u00edan ante Jax. A ambos se los habr\u00edan llevado sus recadistas. Volv\u00ed a mirar al Custodio.\n\n\u2014Me salvaste.\n\nSus ojos se pasearon por mi rostro.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Si me entero de que le hiciste algo a ese or\u00e1culo...\n\n\u2014No le hice da\u00f1o. Lo dej\u00e9 marchar.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Porque sab\u00eda que era amigo tuyo. \u2014Se sent\u00f3 en el borde de la cama\u2014. Lo s\u00e9, Paige. S\u00e9 que eres el Sello que faltaba all\u00ed. Solo un necio no lo habr\u00eda descubierto.\n\nLe sostuve la mirada.\n\n\u2014\u00bfVas a dec\u00edrselo a Nashira?\n\nSe qued\u00f3 mir\u00e1ndome largo rato. Fueron los segundos m\u00e1s largos de mi vida.\n\n\u2014No \u2014contest\u00f3\u2014, pero Nashira no es tonta. Hace mucho tiempo que sospecha qui\u00e9n eres. Tarde o temprano lo sabr\u00e1.\n\nLos nervios me retorc\u00edan el est\u00f3mago. El Custodio se levant\u00f3 y camin\u00f3 hasta la chimenea.\n\n\u2014Ha surgido una complicaci\u00f3n. \u2014Fij\u00f3 la vista en las llamas\u2014. T\u00fa y yo nos hemos salvado el uno al otro de la primera muerte. Estamos en deuda, unidos por una deuda vital. Esas deudas tienen consecuencias.\n\n\u2014\u00bfUna deuda vital? \u2014Intent\u00e9 recordar; los restos de la morfina no me dejaban concentrarme\u2014. \u00bfCu\u00e1ndo te he salvado yo la vida?\n\n\u2014Tres veces. Me limpiaste las heridas, lo que me permiti\u00f3 ganar tiempo para pedir ayuda la primera noche. Me diste tu sangre, impidiendo que contrajera semimpulso. Y cuando Nashira te invit\u00f3 a su mesa, me protegiste. Si le hubieras dicho la verdad, me habr\u00edan ejecutado. He cometido muchos cr\u00edmenes de carne cuyo castigo es la muerte.\n\nNo sab\u00eda qu\u00e9 era un crimen de carne, y no lo pregunt\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Y ahora t\u00fa me has salvado la vida a m\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Te he salvado la vida varias veces.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCu\u00e1ndo?\n\n\u2014Prefiero no divulgar esa informaci\u00f3n. Pero cr\u00e9eme: me debes la vida m\u00e1s de tres veces. Eso significa que t\u00fa y yo ya no somos simplemente guardi\u00e1n y alumna, ni amo y esclava.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9? \u2014dije sacudiendo la cabeza.\n\nEl Custodio apoy\u00f3 un brazo en la repisa de la chimenea y se qued\u00f3 contemplando las llamas.\n\n\u2014El \u00e9ter nos ha marcado a los dos. Ha identificado nuestra tendencia a protegernos el uno al otro, y ahora estamos obligados a protegernos el uno al otro eternamente. Estamos unidos por un cord\u00f3n \u00e1ureo.\n\nMe habr\u00eda echado a re\u00edr de la solemnidad con que hablaba, pero me dio la impresi\u00f3n de que no estaba bromeando. Los refas no bromeaban.\n\n\u2014\u00bfUn cord\u00f3n \u00e1ureo?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTiene algo que ver con el cord\u00f3n arg\u00e9nteo?\n\n\u2014Por supuesto. Se me hab\u00eda olvidado. Supongo que s\u00ed tiene alguna relaci\u00f3n... pero el cord\u00f3n arg\u00e9nteo es personal, \u00fanico de cada individuo, mientras que el cord\u00f3n \u00e1ureo lo forman dos esp\u00edritus.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 demonios es?\n\n\u2014Ni yo lo s\u00e9 muy bien. \u2014Verti\u00f3 el oscuro contenido de un vial en su copa\u2014. Por lo que s\u00e9, el cord\u00f3n \u00e1ureo es una especie de s\u00e9ptimo sentido y se forma cuando dos esp\u00edritus se salvan el uno al otro de la primera muerte un m\u00ednimo de tres veces. \u2014Alz\u00f3 la copa y bebi\u00f3 un sorbo\u2014. A partir de ahora, t\u00fa y yo siempre sabremos del otro. Dondequiera que est\u00e9s, podr\u00e9 encontrarte a trav\u00e9s del \u00e9ter. \u2014Hizo una pausa y a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014: Siempre.\n\nSolo tard\u00e9 unos segundos en asimilar sus palabras.\n\n\u2014No \u2014dije\u2014. Es imposible. \u2014El Custodio dio otro sorbo de amaranto y dije, m\u00e1s alto\u2014: Demu\u00e9stralo. Demu\u00e9strame que existe ese \u00abcord\u00f3n \u00e1ureo\u00bb.\n\n\u2014Si insistes...\n\nEl Custodio dej\u00f3 la copa en la repisa de la chimenea.\n\n\u2014Imaginemos por un instante que estamos en Londres. Es de noche, y estamos en el puente. Pero esta vez es a m\u00ed a quien han disparado. Te pedir\u00e9 ayuda.\n\nEsper\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Esto no es m\u00e1s que... \u2014empec\u00e9 a decir, pero entonces not\u00e9 algo. Un d\u00e9bil zumbido en mis huesos, una m\u00ednima vibraci\u00f3n. Se me puso la piel de gallina. Dos palabras se materializaron en mi mente: \u00abpuente\u00bb, \u00abayuda\u00bb.\n\n\u2014Puente, ayuda \u2014dije en voz baja\u2014. No.\n\nNo pod\u00eda ser. Me volv\u00ed y mir\u00e9 hacia el fuego. Ahora el Custodio ten\u00eda su propia campanilla espiritual para llamarme. Al cabo de un momento mi conmoci\u00f3n se torn\u00f3 rabia. Me habr\u00eda gustado romperle todos los viales, pegarle pu\u00f1etazos en la cara; cualquier cosa menos compartir un v\u00ednculo con \u00e9l. Si el Custodio pod\u00eda rastrearme por el \u00e9ter, jam\u00e1s me librar\u00eda de \u00e9l.\n\nY yo ten\u00eda la culpa. Por salvarle la vida.\n\n\u2014Ignoro qu\u00e9 otros efectos puede tener sobre nosotros \u2014dijo el Custodio\u2014. Quiz\u00e1 puedas obtener poder de m\u00ed.\n\n\u2014No quiero tu poder. Deshazte del v\u00ednculo. R\u00f3mpelo.\n\n\u2014Para romper los v\u00ednculos del \u00e9ter hacen falta algo m\u00e1s que palabras.\n\n\u2014Has sabido llamarme con \u00e9l \u2014dije con voz tr\u00e9mula\u2014. Debes de saber c\u00f3mo romperlo.\n\n\u2014El cord\u00f3n es un enigma, Paige. No tengo ni idea.\n\n\u2014Lo has hecho a prop\u00f3sito. \u2014Me apart\u00e9 de \u00e9l, asqueada\u2014. Me has salvado la vida para crear ese cord\u00f3n, \u00bfverdad?\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo quieres que haya planeado una cosa as\u00ed, cuando no ten\u00eda forma de saber si t\u00fa me salvar\u00edas a m\u00ed la vida? Odias a los refa\u00edtas. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 ibas a intentar salvar a uno?\n\nEra una buena pregunta.\n\n\u2014No puedes acusarme de ser una paranoica \u2014repliqu\u00e9.\n\nVolv\u00ed a recostarme en las almohadas y me sujet\u00e9 la cabeza con ambas manos. El Custodio vino a sentarse otra vez a mi lado, pero tuvo la sensatez de no tocarme.\n\n\u2014Paige, t\u00fa no me temes. S\u00e9 que me odias, pero no me tienes miedo. Y, sin embargo, le temes al cord\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Eres un refa\u00edta.\n\n\u2014Y t\u00fa me juzgas por eso. Por ser el prometido de Nashira.\n\n\u2014Es sanguinaria y cruel. Y, aun as\u00ed, t\u00fa la escogiste.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEso crees?\n\n\u2014Bueno, como m\u00ednimo la aceptaste.\n\n\u2014Los Sargas escogen ellos mismos a sus parejas. Los dem\u00e1s no tenemos ese privilegio. \u2014Baj\u00f3 la voz hasta reducirla a un d\u00e9bil gru\u00f1ido\u2014. Si quieres que te diga la verdad, la detesto. Su sola presencia me produce n\u00e1useas.\n\nLo mir\u00e9 e intent\u00e9 interpretar la expresi\u00f3n de su cara. Ten\u00eda un semblante sombr\u00edo, como si estuviera arrepentido. Vio que lo observaba y mud\u00f3 la expresi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Entiendo \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014No, no lo entiendes. Nunca lo has entendido.\n\nMir\u00f3 hacia otro lado. Esper\u00e9. Como no se movi\u00f3, interrump\u00ed el silencio.\n\n\u2014Pues me gustar\u00eda entenderlo.\n\n\u2014No s\u00e9 si puedo confiar en ti. \u2014La luz de sus ojos se apag\u00f3\u2014. Creo que eres digna de confianza. Es evidente que eres leal a las personas a las que m\u00e1s quieres. Ser\u00eda lamentable compartir un cord\u00f3n \u00e1ureo con alguien en quien no puedo confiar, y que no conf\u00eda en m\u00ed.\n\nAs\u00ed que quer\u00eda confiar en m\u00ed. Y estaba pidi\u00e9ndome que confiara en \u00e9l; proponi\u00e9ndome un intercambio, una tregua. Pod\u00eda pedirle cualquier cosa, lo que quisiera, y \u00e9l me la conceder\u00eda.\n\n\u2014D\u00e9jame entrar en tu onirosaje \u2014dije.\n\nHe de reconocer que no mostr\u00f3 sorpresa.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQuieres ver mi onirosaje?\n\n\u2014No, no quiero solo verlo. Quiero entrar en \u00e9l. Si s\u00e9 qu\u00e9 hay en tu mente, quiz\u00e1 pueda confiar en ti.\n\nAdem\u00e1s, me intrigaba el onirosaje de los refa\u00edtas. Deb\u00eda de haber algo digno de verse detr\u00e1s de tanto blindaje.\n\n\u2014Eso requerir\u00eda un grado de confianza equivalente por mi parte. Tendr\u00eda que confiar en que no vas a vulnerar mi cordura.\n\n\u2014Exactamente.\n\nReflexion\u00f3 un momento.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1 bien \u2014concedi\u00f3.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEn serio?\n\n\u2014Si te sientes con suficiente fuerza, s\u00ed. \u2014Se dio la vuelta y me mir\u00f3\u2014. \u00bfAfectar\u00e1 la morfina a tu don?\n\n\u2014No. \u2014Cambi\u00e9 de postura y me sent\u00e9\u2014. Tal vez te haga da\u00f1o.\n\n\u2014Me aguantar\u00e9.\n\n\u2014He matado a gente entrando en su onirosaje.\n\n\u2014Ya lo s\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Y \u00bfc\u00f3mo sabes que no voy a matarte?\n\n\u2014No lo s\u00e9. Tengo que correr el riesgo.\n\nAdopt\u00e9 un gesto inexpresivo. Aquella era mi oportunidad para destrozarlo, para aplastar su onirosaje como si aplastara una mosca contra una pared.\n\nSin embargo, sent\u00eda una gran curiosidad. En realidad nunca hab\u00eda visto otro onirosaje; solo hab\u00eda vislumbrado destellos, visiones fugaces a trav\u00e9s del \u00e9ter. Pero el jard\u00edn iridiscente de la mariposa... Quer\u00eda volver a ver eso. Quer\u00eda sumergirme. Y all\u00ed estaba el Custodio, ofreci\u00e9ndome su mente.\n\nSer\u00eda fascinante ver un onirosaje que hab\u00eda tenido miles de a\u00f1os para desarrollarse. Y tras la repentina confesi\u00f3n del Custodio acerca de Nashira, quer\u00eda saber m\u00e1s sobre su pasado. Quer\u00eda saber c\u00f3mo era Arcturus Mesarthim por dentro.\n\n\u2014De acuerdo \u2014dije.\n\nSe sent\u00f3 a mi lado. Su aura toc\u00f3 la m\u00eda y roz\u00f3 mi sexto sentido.\n\nLo mir\u00e9 a los ojos. Amarillos. A tan poca distancia pude ver que no ten\u00eda colobomas. Pero era imposible que careciera de visi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCu\u00e1nto tiempo puedes quedarte? \u2014me pregunt\u00f3.\n\nLa pregunta me pill\u00f3 desprevenida.\n\n\u2014No mucho. A menos que tengas un AMBU a mano. \u2014Entrecerr\u00f3 los ojos\u2014. Es una especie de mascarilla de ox\u00edgeno. Me proporciona respiraci\u00f3n artificial cuando mi cuerpo deja de funcionar.\n\n\u2014Entiendo. Y si tienes ese aparato, \u00bfpuedes permanecer \u00aba la deriva\u00bb durante un per\u00edodo m\u00e1s prolongado?\n\n\u2014En teor\u00eda, s\u00ed. Nunca lo he probado en un onirosaje. Solo en el \u00e9ter.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 te hacen hacer eso?\n\nLos dos sab\u00edamos perfectamente qui\u00e9nes eran \u00abellos\u00bb. El instinto me aconsejaba no decir nada, pero el Custodio ya sab\u00eda que trabajaba para Jaxon Hall.\n\n\u2014Porque el sindicato funciona as\u00ed \u2014contest\u00e9\u2014. Los capos esperan obtener una compensaci\u00f3n a cambio de la protecci\u00f3n que ofrecen.\n\nSu aura estaba cambiando.\n\n\u2014Ya entiendo. \u2014Estaba bajando sus defensas, abriendo sus puertas\u2014. Estoy preparado.\n\nMe incorpor\u00e9 un poco m\u00e1s, recost\u00e1ndome en las almohadas. Entonces cerr\u00e9 los ojos, inspir\u00e9 hondo y entr\u00e9 en mi onirosaje.\n\nEl prado de amapolas era un cuadro borroso. Todo se difuminaba, suavizado por la morfina que todav\u00eda circulaba por mi torrente sangu\u00edneo. Pas\u00e9 entre las flores, camino del \u00e9ter. Cuando llegu\u00e9 a la \u00faltima linde, empuj\u00e9 con las manos y vi que la ilusi\u00f3n de mi cuerpo se esfumaba ante mis ojos. En tu onirosaje, solo te pareces a ti mismo si tu mente te percibe as\u00ed. En cuanto desaparec\u00ed, adopt\u00e9 mi forma de esp\u00edritu. Fluida, amorfa. Un resplandor tenue y an\u00f3nimo.\n\nHab\u00eda visto el onirosaje del Custodio desde fuera en otra ocasi\u00f3n, pero aun as\u00ed me estremeci\u00f3. Parec\u00eda una canica negra, apenas perceptible en la oscuridad silenciosa del \u00e9ter. Cuando me acerqu\u00e9 a \u00e9l, una ondulaci\u00f3n recorri\u00f3 su superficie. El Custodio estaba retirando todas esas capas de blindaje que hab\u00eda ido acumulando a lo largo de siglos. Me deslic\u00e9 m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de los muros, hasta su zona hadal. Hab\u00eda llegado a ese punto durante nuestras sesiones de entrenamiento, pero solo en arranques irregulares. Ahora pod\u00eda ir m\u00e1s all\u00e1. Avanc\u00e9 por la oscuridad hacia el centro de su mente.\n\nMe pasaron cenizas junto a la cara. Al adentrarme en territorio desconocido, se me puso la imaginaria piel de gallina. En la mente del Custodio reinaba un silencio absoluto. Generalmente, los anillos externos estaban llenos de espejismos, alucinaciones correspondientes a los miedos o las congojas de la persona, pero all\u00ed no hab\u00eda nada. Solo silencio.\n\nEl Custodio me esperaba en su zona soleada, si es que podemos llamarla as\u00ed, porque parec\u00eda, m\u00e1s bien, iluminada por la luna. Estaba cubierto de cicatrices, y su piel no ten\u00eda ni pizca de color. As\u00ed era como \u00e9l se ve\u00eda a s\u00ed mismo. Me pregunt\u00e9 qu\u00e9 aspecto tendr\u00eda yo. Ahora estaba en su onirosaje, y jugaba con sus reglas. Vi que mis manos estaban igual que siempre, aunque ten\u00edan un d\u00e9bil resplandor. Mi nueva oniroforma. Pero \u00bfve\u00eda \u00e9l mi verdadera cara? Yo pod\u00eda tener cualquier expresi\u00f3n: sumisa, demente, ingenua, cruel... No ten\u00eda ni idea de qu\u00e9 pensaba \u00e9l de m\u00ed, y nunca lo averiguar\u00eda. En los onirosajes no hab\u00eda espejos. Yo nunca ver\u00eda a la Paige que \u00e9l hab\u00eda creado.\n\nLlegu\u00e9 a una \u00e1rida extensi\u00f3n de arena. No sabr\u00eda decir qu\u00e9 esperaba encontrar, pero desde luego no era aquello. El Custodio inclin\u00f3 la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Bienvenida a mi onirosaje. Perd\u00f3name por la escasa decoraci\u00f3n \u2014dijo, pase\u00e1ndose sin rumbo fijo\u2014. No suelo recibir invitados.\n\n\u2014No hay nada. \u2014Echaba vaho por la boca al respirar\u2014. Absolutamente nada \u2014dije sin exagerar.\n\n\u2014En nuestro onirosaje es donde nos sentimos m\u00e1s seguros \u2014dijo el Custodio\u2014. Quiz\u00e1 yo me sienta m\u00e1s seguro cuando no pienso en nada.\n\n\u2014Pero es que tampoco hay nada en las partes oscuras.\n\nNo contest\u00f3 nada. Me adentr\u00e9 un poco m\u00e1s en la niebla.\n\n\u2014No veo nada. Eso me sugiere que dentro de ti no hay nada. Ni pensamientos, ni conciencia. Ni miedo. \u2014Me volv\u00ed y lo mir\u00e9\u2014. \u00bfTodos los refa\u00edtas tienen el onirosaje vac\u00edo?\n\n\u2014Yo no soy onir\u00e1mbulo, Paige. Solo puedo imaginar c\u00f3mo deben de ser los onirosajes de los otros.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 eres?\n\n\u2014Puedo hacer que los dem\u00e1s sue\u00f1en sus recuerdos. Puedo entretejerlos, crear una falsa ilusi\u00f3n. Veo el \u00e9ter a trav\u00e9s de la lente del onirosaje, y a trav\u00e9s de la hierba hipn\u00f3tica.\n\n\u2014Onirom\u00e1ntico. \u2014No pod\u00eda dejar de mirarlo a los ojos\u2014. Eres un traficante de sue\u00f1o.\n\nJax estaba convencido de que ten\u00edan que existir. Hab\u00eda catalogado a los onirom\u00e1nticos a\u00f1os atr\u00e1s, mucho antes de escribir _Sobre los m\u00e9ritos_ , pero nunca hab\u00eda encontrado a ninguno que demostrara su teor\u00eda: un tipo de vidente que pod\u00eda atravesar el onirosaje, recoger recuerdos y componer con ellos lo que los amaur\u00f3ticos llamaban \u00absue\u00f1os\u00bb.\n\n\u2014Me hac\u00edas so\u00f1ar. \u2014Inspir\u00e9 hondo\u2014. He estado rememorando cosas desde que llegu\u00e9 aqu\u00ed. C\u00f3mo me volv\u00ed onir\u00e1mbula, c\u00f3mo me encontr\u00f3 Jaxon. Eras t\u00fa. T\u00fa me hac\u00edas so\u00f1ar todo eso. Por eso lo sab\u00edas, \u00bfno es as\u00ed?\n\nMe sostuvo la mirada.\n\n\u2014Para eso era la tercera pastilla \u2014dijo\u2014. Conten\u00eda una hierba llamada salvia, que te hac\u00eda so\u00f1ar tus recuerdos. Es la hierba que me ayuda a tocar el \u00e9ter, mi _numen_. Flu\u00eda por tus venas. Despu\u00e9s de varias pastillas, pod\u00eda acceder a tus recuerdos a mi antojo.\n\n\u2014Me has... drogado \u2014dije con dificultad\u2014 para entrar en mi mente.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Mientras t\u00fa espiabas onirosajes para Jaxon Hall.\n\n\u2014No es lo mismo. Yo no me quedaba sentada junto a la chimenea observando recuerdos como si viera... una especie de pel\u00edcula. \u2014Me apart\u00e9 poco a poco de \u00e9l\u2014. Esos recuerdos son m\u00edos. Son privados. Hasta miraste... \u00a1debes de haberlo visto todo! Hasta lo que sent\u00eda por... por...\n\n\u2014Nick. Estabas enamorada de \u00e9l.\n\n\u2014C\u00e1llate. Cierra tu sucia boca.\n\nSe call\u00f3.\n\nMi oniroforma se estaba derrumbando. Antes de que pudiera salir de all\u00ed por mis propios medios, me vi arrojada de su onirosaje, como una hoja arrastrada por el viento. Cuando despert\u00e9 en mi cuerpo, le puse las manos en el pecho y lo empuj\u00e9.\n\n\u2014No te me acerques.\n\nMe dol\u00eda la cabeza. No pod\u00eda mirar al Custodio, y mucho menos estar cerca de \u00e9l. Al intentar levantarme, not\u00e9 el tir\u00f3n de la v\u00eda en la mano.\n\n\u2014Lo siento \u2014dijo.\n\nMe ard\u00edan las mejillas. Le hab\u00eda ofrecido una pizca de confianza, solo una pizca, y \u00e9l se hab\u00eda aprovechado de m\u00ed. Me hab\u00eda quitado siete a\u00f1os de memoria. Me hab\u00eda quitado a Finn. Y a Nick.\n\nSe qued\u00f3 un minuto all\u00ed. Quiz\u00e1 esperara que yo dijera algo m\u00e1s. Yo me mor\u00eda de ganas de gritarle hasta quedarme sin voz, pero no pod\u00eda hacerlo. Quer\u00eda que se marchara. Como no me mov\u00eda, corri\u00f3 las gruesas cortinas alrededor de la cama, encerr\u00e1ndome en una jaula oscura.\n\nTard\u00e9 horas en dormirme. Lo o\u00eda sentado a su mesa, escribiendo; lo \u00fanico que nos separaba eran las cortinas.\n\nMe escoc\u00edan los ojos y la nariz, y ten\u00eda la garganta dolorida. Por primera vez desde hac\u00eda muchos a\u00f1os deseaba que desapareciera todo. Quer\u00eda que todo volviera a ser normal, como cuando era peque\u00f1a, antes de que el \u00e9ter me abriera de un rasg\u00f3n.\n\nMir\u00e9 el dosel. Por mucho que a veces lo deseara, no hab\u00eda normalidad posible. Nunca la hab\u00eda habido. Los conceptos \u00abnormal\u00bb y \u00abnatural\u00bb eran las mayores mentiras que hab\u00edamos creado. Los humanos y sus peque\u00f1as mentes. Adem\u00e1s, quiz\u00e1 la normalidad no fuera conmigo.\n\nCuando el Custodio puso en marcha el gram\u00f3fono, empez\u00f3 a entrarme sue\u00f1o. No hab\u00eda pasado mucho tiempo dentro de su onirosaje, pero lo hab\u00eda hecho sin soporte vital. Me qued\u00e9 adormilada. Unas voces chisporroteantes se mezclaban entre ellas.\n\nDeb\u00ed de quedarme dormida. Cuando despert\u00e9, ya no ten\u00eda la v\u00eda en la mano. En su lugar hab\u00eda una tirita.\n\nSon\u00f3 la campanada diurna. Sheol I dorm\u00eda durante el d\u00eda, pero por lo visto yo no iba a poder dormir. Lo \u00fanico que pod\u00eda hacer era levantarme y enfrentarme a \u00e9l.\n\nLo odiaba con toda mi alma. Me daban ganas de romper el espejo, notar c\u00f3mo se resquebrajaba el cristal bajo mis nudillos. No deb\u00ed tomarme aquellas pastillas.\n\nQuiz\u00e1 s\u00ed fuera lo mismo que hac\u00eda yo. Yo tambi\u00e9n espiaba a otras personas; pero no husmeaba en su pasado. Yo solo ve\u00eda lo que ellas cre\u00edan ser, pero no lo que eran. Ve\u00eda destellos de personas: los bordes y las esquinas, el d\u00e9bil resplandor de onirosajes lejanos. No como \u00e9l. Ahora lo sab\u00eda todo de m\u00ed, todo lo que yo hab\u00eda intentado ocultar. El Custodio siempre hab\u00eda sabido que yo pertenec\u00eda a la banda de los Siete Sellos. Lo sab\u00eda desde la primera noche.\n\nPero no se lo hab\u00eda dicho a Nashira. No le hab\u00eda contado lo de la mariposa y la cierva, ni le hab\u00eda revelado mi verdadera identidad. Nashira deb\u00eda de haber descubierto que yo formaba parte del sindicato, pero no hab\u00eda sido \u00e9l quien se lo hab\u00eda dicho.\n\nDescorr\u00ed las cortinas. La luz dorada del sol entraba a raudales en la torre y hac\u00eda brillar los instrumentos y los libros. Cerca de la ventana, Michael, el chico amaur\u00f3tico, serv\u00eda un desayuno en una mesita. Me mir\u00f3 y sonri\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Hola, Michael.\n\n\u00c9l me saludo con la cabeza.\n\n\u2014\u00bfD\u00f3nde est\u00e1 el Custodio?\n\nSe\u00f1al\u00f3 la puerta.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTe ha comido la lengua el gato?\n\nSe encogi\u00f3 de hombros. Me sent\u00e9. Michael me acerc\u00f3 un plato con un mont\u00f3n de tortitas.\n\n\u2014No tengo hambre \u2014dije\u2014. No pienso aceptar su comida. Me la ofrece porque se siente culpable.\n\nMichael suspir\u00f3, me puso un tenedor en la mano y pinch\u00f3 con \u00e9l una tortita.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1 bien, pero si lo vomito todo, t\u00fa tendr\u00e1s la culpa.\n\nMichael hizo una mueca de asco. Solo para complacerlo, espolvore\u00e9 las tortitas con az\u00facar moreno.\n\nMichael no dejaba de observarme mientras iba de aqu\u00ed para all\u00e1 por la habitaci\u00f3n, haciendo la cama y colocando bien las cortinas. Las tortitas me abrieron el apetito. Acab\u00e9 comi\u00e9ndome todo el mont\u00f3n, junto con dos cruasanes con mermelada de fresa, un cuenco de cereales, cuatro tostadas con mantequilla, un plato de huevos revueltos, una manzana roja con la carne blanca y crujiente, tres tazas de caf\u00e9 y medio litro de zumo de naranja helado. Cuando ya no pude comer m\u00e1s, Michael me entreg\u00f3 un sobre de papel Manila sellado.\n\n\u2014Conf\u00eda en \u00e9l.\n\nEra la primera vez que le o\u00eda hablar. Su voz no era m\u00e1s que un susurro.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa \u00bfconf\u00edas en \u00e9l?\n\nAsinti\u00f3 con la cabeza, recogi\u00f3 el desayuno y se march\u00f3. Y aunque era de d\u00eda, no cerr\u00f3 la puerta con llave. Romp\u00ed el sello de cera del sobre y desdobl\u00e9 la hoja de papel grueso que hab\u00eda dentro. Ten\u00eda una cenefa de oro. El mensaje dec\u00eda lo siguiente:\n\nPaige:\n\nPerd\u00f3name por ofenderte. Pero, aunque est\u00e9s enojada conmigo, debes saber que solo pretend\u00eda entenderte. No puedes culparme de tu negativa a ser entendida.\n\nMenuda disculpa. Pese a todo, segu\u00ed leyendo:\n\nTodav\u00eda es de d\u00eda. Ve a la Casa. All\u00ed encontrar\u00e1s cosas que yo no puedo proporcionarte.\n\nNo te entretengas. Si te preguntan, di a los guardias que vas a recoger un lote de \u00e1ster para m\u00ed.\n\nNo te precipites al juzgar, peque\u00f1a So\u00f1adora.\n\nArrugu\u00e9 la hoja y la lanc\u00e9 a la chimenea. Por el mero hecho de escribirla, el Custodio estaba alardeando de su nueva confianza en m\u00ed. Yo pod\u00eda llev\u00e1rsela a Nashira. Ella reconocer\u00eda su caligraf\u00eda, sin duda. Pero yo no quer\u00eda ayudar a Nashira de ninguna manera. Odiaba al Custodio por retenerme en aquel sitio, pero necesitaba entrar en la Casa.\n\nSub\u00ed al piso de arriba y me puse el uniforme nuevo: el blus\u00f3n amarillo y el chaleco gris con el ancla amarilla. Un amarillo intenso, visible desde lejos. 40 la cobarde. 40 la rajada. Por una parte me gustaba, pues significaba que hab\u00eda desobedecido las \u00f3rdenes de Nashira. Yo nunca hab\u00eda aspirado a vestir el blus\u00f3n rojo.\n\nDespacio, pensativa, volv\u00ed a la c\u00e1mara del Custodio. Segu\u00eda sin saber si quer\u00eda organizar una fuga masiva, aunque yo s\u00ed que quer\u00eda marcharme. Iba a necesitar provisiones para el viaje de regreso. Comida, agua. Armas. \u00bfNo hab\u00eda dicho el Custodio que la flor roja pod\u00eda herirlos?\n\nLa caja de rap\u00e9 estaba encima de la mesa, con la tapa abierta. Dentro hab\u00eda muestras de varias plantas: ramitos de laurel, hojas de sic\u00f3moro y roble, bayas de mu\u00e9rdago, \u00e1ster azul y blanco; y un paquete de hojas secas con la etiqueta \u00abSalvia Divinorum\u00bb. Su _numen_. Debajo, en un rinc\u00f3n de la caja, un vial lleno de un fino polvo negro azulado. La etiqueta dec\u00eda \u00abanemone Coronaria\u00bb. Quit\u00e9 el corcho y percib\u00ed un olor penetrante. El polen de la flor roja. Aquellos granitos quiz\u00e1 me mantuvieran con vida. Cerr\u00e9 el vial y me lo guard\u00e9 en el chaleco.\n\nDeb\u00eda de haber guardias apostados fuera durante el d\u00eda, pero pod\u00eda burlarlos. Sab\u00eda c\u00f3mo hacerlo. Y yo no era una vulgar casaca amarilla, por mucho que Nashira Sargas me hubiera clasificado como tal. Yo era la So\u00f1adora P\u00e1lida.\n\nYa era hora de demostr\u00e1rselo.\n\nMe invent\u00e9 el cuento de que iba a buscar \u00e1ster para mi guardi\u00e1n, y le dije al nuevo portero de d\u00eda que lo consultara con \u00e9l si ve\u00eda alg\u00fan inconveniente. No le entusiasm\u00f3 la idea: estuvo a punto de echarme a la calle de una patada cuando ley\u00f3 en el libro de registro qui\u00e9n era mi guardi\u00e1n. Ni siquiera mencion\u00f3 la mochila que llevaba a la espalda. Nadie quer\u00eda hacer enfadar a Arcturus Mesarthim.\n\nResultaba extra\u00f1o ver la ciudad a plena luz del d\u00eda. Me imaginaba que el Broad estar\u00eda vac\u00edo (no hab\u00eda ni rastro de los sonidos ni los olores de siempre), pero necesitaba hacer una cosa antes de llegar a la Casa. Recorr\u00ed los callejones del Poblado. Goteaba agua por todas las rendijas y las grietas, porque hab\u00eda pasado una tormenta. Encontr\u00e9 la choza que buscaba y apart\u00e9 la gastada cortina. Dentro estaba Julian: dorm\u00eda abrazado a Liss para mantenerla caliente. El aura de Liss se estaba apagando, como una vela a la que ya no le queda mecha. Me agach\u00e9 a su lado y vaci\u00e9 mi mochila. Escond\u00ed un paquete de comida en el pliegue del codo del brazo que Julian ten\u00eda libre, donde no podr\u00eda verlo ning\u00fan guardia que pasara por all\u00ed, y los tap\u00e9 a ambos con mantas blancas limpias. Dej\u00e9 una caja de cerillas en el arc\u00f3n.\n\nVer la miseria en que viv\u00edan me convenci\u00f3 de que estaba haciendo lo correcto. Ellos necesitaban mucho m\u00e1s de lo que yo hab\u00eda robado de la Torre del Fundador. Necesitaban lo que hab\u00eda en la Casa.\n\nEl choque espiritual era un proceso lento. Para superarlo, ten\u00edas que luchar con todas tus armas. Solo sobreviv\u00edan los m\u00e1s fuertes. Liss no hab\u00eda recobrado el conocimiento desde que hab\u00edan destruido sus cartas, exceptuando unos breves momentos de lucidez. Si no se recuperaba pronto, perder\u00eda su aura y sucumbir\u00eda a la amaurosis. Su \u00fanica esperanza era encontrar otra baraja, aunque no hab\u00eda ninguna garant\u00eda de que conectara con ella. Yo estaba decidida a registrar la Casa hasta que encontrara unas cartas.\n\nEn la calle no vi a ning\u00fan guardia, pero yo sab\u00eda que deb\u00eda de haber vig\u00edas. Por si acaso, trep\u00e9 a un edificio y busqu\u00e9 un camino por los tejados, usando cornisas y pilastras para recorrer la ciudad. Vigilaba mucho d\u00f3nde pon\u00eda los pies, pero iba muy lenta: ten\u00eda el brazo derecho completamente r\u00edgido, y el resto del cuerpo todav\u00eda muy dolorido y cubierto de cardenales.\n\nLa Casa se ve\u00eda desde casi dos kil\u00f3metros. Sus dos torres se alzaban en medio de la neblina. Cuando ya estaba cerca, baj\u00e9 a un callej\u00f3n; la distancia hasta la siguiente pared era demasiado grande para saltar. Detr\u00e1s de un muro se erig\u00eda la \u00fanica residencia donde solo pod\u00edan entrar los refa\u00edtas.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 largo rato observando el edificio. El Custodio ya estaba demasiado involucrado para traicionarme. Me estaba ayudando, aunque yo desconociera sus motivos; y yo ten\u00eda que aceptar esa ayuda, aunque solo fuera para socorrer a Liss. Ten\u00eda que aceptarla. Adem\u00e1s, si me met\u00eda en alg\u00fan l\u00edo, siempre podr\u00eda enviarle un mensaje a trav\u00e9s del cord\u00f3n \u00e1ureo. Suponiendo que supiera c\u00f3mo hacerlo. Suponiendo que pudiera soportarlo. Trep\u00e9 al muro, pas\u00e9 una pierna por encima y me dej\u00e9 caer sobre la hierba alta.\n\nComo muchas residencias, aquel complejo estaba construido alrededor de una serie de patios interiores. Mientras cruzaba el primero, fui redactando mentalmente una lista de cosas que necesitar\u00eda para atravesar la Tierra de Nadie. Las armas eran indispensables, dado lo que se ocultaba en el bosque, pero tambi\u00e9n necesitar\u00eda medicinas. Si pon\u00eda el pie donde no deb\u00eda en el campo de minas, necesitar\u00eda un torniquete. Y antis\u00e9pticos. Era un pensamiento estremecedor, pero ten\u00eda que afrontarlo. La adrenalina era muy valiosa: pod\u00eda utilizarla para aumentar mi energ\u00eda y calmar el dolor, pero tambi\u00e9n para resucitarme en caso de que tuviera que abandonar mi cuerpo. Me vendr\u00eda bien asimismo m\u00e1s polen de an\u00e9mona, y cualquier otra sustancia que encontrara: flux, \u00e1ster, sal... Quiz\u00e1 incluso ectoplasma.\n\nPas\u00e9 por delante de varios edificios, pero ninguno se prestaba a que lo registrara: todos ten\u00edan demasiadas habitaciones. Cuando me alej\u00e9 de los patios centrales y fui hacia un extremo de la residencia, encontr\u00e9 un objetivo mejor: un edificio con ventanas grandes y muchos puntos de apoyo para escalar. Pas\u00e9 por debajo de un arco y lo observ\u00e9 desde el otro lado. La fachada estaba recubierta de hiedra roja. Rode\u00e9 el edificio con la esperanza de encontrar una ventana abierta. No vi ninguna. Tendr\u00eda que entrar por otros medios. \u00a1Un momento! S\u00ed, hab\u00eda una: una ventana peque\u00f1a, ligeramente entreabierta, en el primer piso. Trep\u00e9 a un muro bajo, y desde all\u00ed agarr\u00e9 una bajante. La ventana estaba atrancada, pero consegu\u00ed abrirla utilizando un solo brazo. Me met\u00ed en una habitaci\u00f3n min\u00fascula llena de polvo, seguramente un escobero. Abr\u00ed un poco la puerta.\n\nMe encontr\u00e9 en un pasillo de piedra. Vac\u00edo. Mi excursi\u00f3n a la Casa no habr\u00eda podido salir mejor. Examin\u00e9 las puertas en busca de algo que indicara qu\u00e9 pod\u00eda haber detr\u00e1s, y me puse en tensi\u00f3n. Mi sexto sentido se estremeci\u00f3: detect\u00e9 dos auras. Estaban detr\u00e1s de una puerta que ten\u00eda a mi derecha. Me qued\u00e9 quieta.\n\n\u2014\u00a1... s\u00e9 nada! \u00a1Por favor...!\n\nO\u00ed unos ruidos amortiguados. Pegu\u00e9 la oreja contra la puerta.\n\n\u2014La soberana de sangre no escuchar\u00e1 tus s\u00faplicas \u2014dijo una voz de hombre\u2014. Sabemos que los viste juntos.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Los vi una vez, en la pradera! \u00a1Solo una vez! Solo entrenaban. \u00a1No vi nada m\u00e1s, lo juro! \u2014Era una voz aguda, con un deje de p\u00e1nico. La reconoc\u00ed: era Ivy, la palmista. Casi se atragantaba con las palabras\u2014. \u00a1Por favor, otra vez no, no lo soporto!\n\nUn grito espeluznante.\n\n\u2014Cuando nos digas la verdad no habr\u00e1 m\u00e1s dolor. \u2014Ivy sollozaba\u2014. Venga, 24. Seguro que tienes algo para m\u00ed. Solo te pido un poco de informaci\u00f3n. \u00bfLa toc\u00f3?\n\n\u2014\u00c9l... se la llev\u00f3 de la pradera. Estaba cansada. Pero \u00e9l llevaba guantes...\n\n\u2014\u00bfEst\u00e1s segura?\n\nIvy respiraba entrecortadamente.\n\n\u2014No me acuerdo. Lo siento. Por favor, no m\u00e1s...\n\nPasos.\n\n\u2014\u00a1No! \u00a1No!\n\nSus gritos lastimeros me retorcieron el est\u00f3mago. Me habr\u00eda gustado atacar al esp\u00edritu de su torturador, pero el riesgo de que me descubrieran era demasiado grande. Si no consegu\u00eda esas provisiones, no podr\u00eda salvar a nadie. Apret\u00e9 las mand\u00edbulas y segu\u00ed escuchando, temblando de rabia. \u00bfQu\u00e9 le estar\u00edan haciendo a Ivy?\n\nIvy daba unos gritos estremecedores. Cuando par\u00f3, me dio un vuelco el coraz\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Basta, por favor \u2014dijo entrecortadamente\u2014. \u00a1Es la verdad! \u2014Su torturador permaneci\u00f3 callado\u2014. Pero... le da de comer. S\u00e9 que le da de comer, y ella... ella va limpia. Y... dicen que puede poseer a otros videntes, y \u00e9l debe de... debe de estar ocult\u00e1ndoselo a la soberana de sangre. Si no, ella ya estar\u00eda muerta.\n\nSe produjo un silencio sospechoso. Despu\u00e9s se oy\u00f3 un golpazo, y luego pasos y una puerta que se cerraba.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 paralizada largo rato. Al cabo de un minuto empuj\u00e9 la puerta. Dentro solo hab\u00eda una silla de madera. El asiento estaba manchado de sangre, igual que el suelo.\n\nNot\u00e9 un sudor fr\u00edo. Me pas\u00e9 la manga por el labio. Me agach\u00e9 junto a la pared, con la cabeza entre las manos. Era de m\u00ed de quien estaba hablando Ivy.\n\nNo pod\u00eda entretenerme pensando en eso. Su torturador quiz\u00e1 siguiera en el edificio. Me levant\u00e9 poco a poco y me dirig\u00ed a la siguiente habitaci\u00f3n. La llave estaba puesta en la cerradura de la puerta. Me asom\u00e9 al interior y vi monta\u00f1as de armas: espadas, pu\u00f1ales, una ballesta, una honda con munici\u00f3n de acero. All\u00ed deb\u00eda de ser donde almacenaban las armas que repart\u00edan a los casacas rojas. Agarr\u00e9 un pu\u00f1al. Cerca del mango brillaba un ancla: estaba fabricado en Scion. Weaver enviaba armas a Sheol I mientras sus ministros y \u00e9l se sentaban en el Arconte, lejos de la baliza et\u00e9rea.\n\nJulian ten\u00eda raz\u00f3n. No pod\u00eda marcharme sin m\u00e1s. Quer\u00eda asustar a Frank Weaver. Quer\u00eda que experimentara el miedo de cada uno de los prisioneros videntes a los que hab\u00eda trasladado all\u00ed.\n\nCerr\u00e9 la puerta con llave. Cuando levant\u00e9 la cabeza me encontr\u00e9 ante un gran mapa amarillento. COLONIA PENITENCIARIA DE SHEOL I, dec\u00eda. TERRITORIO OFICIAL DE LA SUZERAN\u00cdA. Lo examin\u00e9. Sheol I estaba construida alrededor de las grandes residencias centrales, y se alargaba hacia la pradera y el bosque. Encontr\u00e9 todos los lugares destacados: Magdalen, la Casa Amaur\u00f3tica, la Residencia del Suzerano, Hawksmoor... y Puerto Pradera. Descolgu\u00e9 el mapa de la pared. Las letras impresas al lado estaban borrosas, pero consegu\u00ed descifrarlas:\n\n\u00abTren\u00bb.\n\nFlexion\u00e9 los dedos y estruj\u00e9 los bordes del mapa. El tren. Ni siquiera se me hab\u00eda ocurrido pensarlo. Si nos hab\u00edan llevado hasta all\u00ed en tren, \u00bfpor qu\u00e9 no \u00edbamos a poder salir en otro tren?\n\nTen\u00eda el cerebro revolucionado. \u00bfC\u00f3mo no se me hab\u00eda ocurrido antes? No necesitaba cruzar la Tierra de Nadie. No necesitaba recorrer kil\u00f3metros a pie, ni pasar por donde estaban los emim, para llegar a la ciudadela. Lo \u00fanico que ten\u00eda que hacer era encontrar el tren. Pod\u00eda llevar a otros conmigo: a Liss, a Julian, a todos. En los trenes de Scion hab\u00eda espacio para casi cuatrocientas personas, para m\u00e1s si iban de pie. Pod\u00eda sacar a todos los prisioneros de aquella ciudad, y todav\u00eda sobrar\u00eda sitio.\n\nAun as\u00ed, \u00edbamos a necesitar armas. Aunque nos escabull\u00e9ramos durante el d\u00eda y fu\u00e9ramos a la pradera en peque\u00f1os grupos, los refa\u00edtas nos perseguir\u00edan. Adem\u00e1s, la entrada deb\u00eda de estar vigilada. Cog\u00ed un pu\u00f1al y me lo guard\u00e9 en la mochila. Luego vi unas cuantas pistolas.\n\nLa minipistola, un modelo parecido al m\u00edo, pod\u00eda resultar \u00fatil: era peque\u00f1a, f\u00e1cil de esconder, y sab\u00eda c\u00f3mo usarla. Apart\u00e9 unos papeles ilegibles de la parte de arriba de una caja met\u00e1lica. En la ciudadela, Nick hab\u00eda intentado dispararle al Custodio, pero sin \u00e9xito. Las balas servir\u00edan para atacar a los casacas rojas leales, pero necesitar\u00edamos algo m\u00e1s que pistolas para disparar contra los refas. Me dispon\u00eda a coger una caja de balas cuando o\u00ed unos pasos.\n\nMe escond\u00ed r\u00e1pidamente detr\u00e1s de una estanter\u00eda. Justo a tiempo: la llave se cay\u00f3 de la cerradura, y entraron dos refas. Deber\u00eda haberlo imaginado. Ten\u00eda la salida bloqueada. Si me arrastraba hasta la ventana, tendr\u00eda que exponerme, y todos conoc\u00edan mi cara. Mir\u00e9 entre los estantes.\n\nThuban.\n\nDijo algo en _gloss_. Me acerqu\u00e9 un poco m\u00e1s a mi mirilla, tratando de identificar a su acompa\u00f1ante. Y entonces Terebell Sheratan entr\u00f3 en mi campo de visi\u00f3n.\n\nNos quedamos quietas las dos, y me pareci\u00f3 que mi coraz\u00f3n dejaba de latir. Esper\u00e9 a que llamara a Thuban, o a que me clavara una navaja en el vientre. Mis dedos buscaron el polen que llevaba escondido en el chaleco, pero me lo pens\u00e9 mejor. Aunque consiguiera matar a Terebell, Thuban me destripar\u00eda.\n\nPero Terebell me sorprendi\u00f3. En lugar de reaccionar a mi presencia, desvi\u00f3 la mirada hacia las pistolas.\n\n\u2014Las armas amaur\u00f3ticas son intrigantes \u2014dijo\u2014. No me extra\u00f1a que se maten entre ellos tan a menudo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 hablas en la lengua ca\u00edda?\n\n\u2014Gomeisa dice que debemos mantener el dominio del ingl\u00e9s. No me parece mal practicar un poco.\n\nThuban descolg\u00f3 la ballesta de la pared.\n\n\u2014Si quieres que nos ensuciemos la boca con ella, adelante. Podemos rendir homenaje a los d\u00edas en que ten\u00edas poder sobre m\u00ed. \u00a1Cu\u00e1nto tiempo ha pasado! \u2014Desliz\u00f3 los dedos enguantados por encima de la madera torneada\u2014. La So\u00f1adora deber\u00eda haber matado a Jaxon Hall cuando se le present\u00f3 la oportunidad. Habr\u00eda tenido mejor muerte que la que tendr\u00e1 ahora.\n\nSe me cerr\u00f3 la garganta.\n\n\u2014Dudo que lo maten \u2014dijo Terebell\u2014. Adem\u00e1s, la que le interesa a Nashira es Carter.\n\n\u2014Pues tendr\u00e1 que contener a Situla.\n\n\u2014Sin duda. \u2014Pas\u00f3 los dedos por la hoja de una espada\u2014. Refr\u00e9scame la memoria: \u00bfqu\u00e9 se guardaba en esta habitaci\u00f3n antes de que la convirtieran en armer\u00eda?\n\n\u2014Con tu inter\u00e9s blasfemo por el mundo ca\u00eddo, cre\u00eda que sabr\u00edas exactamente d\u00f3nde se guardan todos los recursos.\n\n\u2014Creo que \u00abblasfemo\u00bb es un poco melodram\u00e1tico.\n\n\u2014Pues yo no. \u2014Cogi\u00f3 un pu\u00f1ado de estrellas ninja\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9 hab\u00eda antes aqu\u00ed, me preguntas? Suministros m\u00e9dicos. Extractos de plantas. Salvia, \u00e1ster. Otras hojas apestosas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfAd\u00f3nde llevaron todo eso?\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 te pasa, has perdido la memoria de golpe, bellaca? Eres tan est\u00fapida como la concubina.\n\nHab\u00eda que reconocer que, o bien Terebell era inmune a la actitud de Thuban, o disimulaba muy bien sus emociones. Si es que las ten\u00eda.\n\n\u2014Perdona mi curiosidad \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014En mi familia no perdonamos. Las cicatrices que tienes en la espalda deber\u00edan record\u00e1rtelo todos los d\u00edas. \u2014Ten\u00eda los ojos impregnados del aura de Ivy\u2014. Por eso quieres saberlo. Intentas robar amaranto, \u00bfverdad, Sheratan?\n\n\u00abCicatrices.\u00bb __\n\nTerebell no mud\u00f3 la expresi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014\u00bfAd\u00f3nde llevaron esos suministros?\n\n\u2014No me gusta ese inter\u00e9s tuyo. Me resulta sospechoso. \u00bfVuelves a conspirar con la concubina?\n\n\u2014De eso hace casi veinte a\u00f1os, Thuban. Es mucho tiempo para los humanos, \u00bfno te parece?\n\n\u2014No me importa c\u00f3mo midan el tiempo los humanos.\n\n\u2014Una cosa es que me guardes rencor por el pasado, pero no creo que a la soberana de sangre le guste tu actitud hacia su consorte. Ni tus cuestionables descripciones del papel que representa.\n\nSu voz se hab\u00eda endurecido. Thuban descolg\u00f3 una espada de la pared y apunt\u00f3 con ella a Terebell. Se detuvo a un cent\u00edmetro de su cuello. Terebell no se inmut\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Una palabra m\u00e1s \u2014susurr\u00f3 Thuban\u2014 y lo llamo. Y esta vez no se moderar\u00e1 tanto.\n\nTerebell guard\u00f3 silencio un momento. Me pareci\u00f3 detectar algo en su cara: dolor, miedo. Deb\u00edan de estar hablando de un Sargas. Gomeisa, quiz\u00e1.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Creo que ya recuerdo d\u00f3nde est\u00e1n esos suministros \u2014dijo en voz baja a continuaci\u00f3n\u2014. \u00bfC\u00f3mo habr\u00e9 podido olvidarme de la Torre de Tom?\n\nThuban solt\u00f3 una carcajada. Absorb\u00ed aquella informaci\u00f3n como la sangre absorb\u00eda el flux.\n\n\u2014Nadie podr\u00eda olvidarlo \u2014le susurr\u00f3 al o\u00eddo\u2014. Ni el ta\u00f1ido de su campana. \u00bfNo resuena en tu memoria, Sheratan? \u00bfRecuerdas c\u00f3mo gritabas suplicando piedad?\n\nEmpezaba a dolerme todo, pero no me atrev\u00eda a moverme. Thuban me estaba ayudando sin darse cuenta. La Torre de Tom deb\u00eda de ser la que se alzaba en la entrada, la torre de la campana.\n\n\u2014No gritaba suplicando piedad \u2014dijo Terebell\u2014, sino justicia.\n\nThuban solt\u00f3 un gru\u00f1ido \u00e1spero.\n\n\u2014Idiota \u2014dijo. Levant\u00f3 una mano para pegar a Terebell, pero de pronto se detuvo y olfate\u00f3 el aire\u2014. Noto un aura. \u2014Volvi\u00f3 a olfatear\u2014. Registra la habitaci\u00f3n, Sheratan. Aqu\u00ed huele a humano.\n\n\u2014Yo no noto nada. \u2014Terebell no se movi\u00f3 de donde estaba\u2014. Esta habitaci\u00f3n estaba cerrada con llave cuando hemos llegado.\n\n\u2014Hay otras formas de entrar en una habitaci\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Pareces paranoico.\n\nPero Thuban no parec\u00eda convencido. Fue hacia mi escondite, con las aletas de la nariz dilatadas y los labios estirados mostrando los dientes. Se me ocurri\u00f3 pensar que pod\u00eda ser un rastreador, que pod\u00eda oler la actividad espiritual. Si me ol\u00eda, estaba perdida.\n\nSus dedos avanzaron hacia la caja que me tapaba. A lo lejos, en otra habitaci\u00f3n, explot\u00f3 algo.\n\nThuban ech\u00f3 a correr por el pasillo al instante. Terebell lo sigui\u00f3, pero antes de salir por la puerta se dio la vuelta.\n\n\u2014Corre \u2014me dijo\u2014. Ve a la torre.\n\nDesapareci\u00f3. No quise tentar a la suerte: me colgu\u00e9 la mochila y salt\u00e9 a la repisa de la ventana. Baj\u00e9 resbalando por la hiedra y me ara\u00f1\u00e9 las manos y los brazos.\n\nMi coraz\u00f3n bombeaba la sangre con fuerza. Cada sombra que ve\u00eda parec\u00eda Thuban. Mientras recorr\u00eda unos soportales, camino del patio central, intent\u00e9 sacar alguna conclusi\u00f3n. Terebell me hab\u00eda ayudado. Me hab\u00eda ocultado. Hasta parec\u00eda ser que alguien hab\u00eda provocado una distracci\u00f3n con el fin de protegerme. Ella sab\u00eda que yo iba a ir all\u00ed, sab\u00eda qu\u00e9 buscaba, y hab\u00eda empezado a hablar en ingl\u00e9s despu\u00e9s de verme. Era uno de ellos. Los marcados. Necesitaba descubrir m\u00e1s informaci\u00f3n sobre su historia, averiguar qu\u00e9 estaba pasando; pero antes ten\u00eda que entrar en la Torre de Tom, hacerme con las medicinas y volver con el Custodio.\n\nLa explosi\u00f3n hab\u00eda atra\u00eddo a un grupo de arrancahuesos que corrieron desde la entrada, alej\u00e1ndose de la torre de la campana. Me par\u00e9 bajo un arco, protegida por su sombra. Justo a tiempo: entraron corriendo en el patio, precisamente por donde yo hab\u00eda estado a punto de salir.\n\n\u201428, 14, proteged el edificio Meadow \u2014dijo uno de ellos\u2014. 6, t\u00fa ven conmigo. Los dem\u00e1s, vigilad los patios. Id a buscar a Kraz y a Mirzam.\n\nNo ten\u00eda mucho tiempo. Me levant\u00e9 y corr\u00ed hacia el patio central.\n\nLa Casa era enorme, unida por una serie de pasillos cubiertos y descubiertos. Me sent\u00eda como una rata en un laberinto. No me atrev\u00eda a parar. Me at\u00e9 las correas de la mochila alrededor del torso. Ten\u00eda que haber una forma de entrar en la Torre de Tom. \u00bfHabr\u00eda una puerta junto a la entrada principal? Ten\u00eda que darme prisa: Kraz y Mirzam eran nombres de refa, y no me interesaba nada que hubiera cuatro refas, tres de los cuales, como m\u00ednimo, eran hostiles, en la Casa y persigui\u00e9ndome. Dudaba que el Custodio tuviera muchos amigos como Terebell.\n\nMe par\u00e9 al borde del patio central. Era muy grande, con un estanque ornamental en medio. En el centro del estanque hab\u00eda una estatua. No ten\u00eda m\u00e1s remedio que dejarme ver. Ten\u00eda que cambiar sigilo por velocidad.\n\nEch\u00e9 a correr por la hierba. Me dol\u00edan las costillas. Al llegar al estanque, me met\u00ed en el agua, poco profunda, y me agach\u00e9 detr\u00e1s de la fuente. El agua me llegaba por la cintura. Levant\u00e9 un momento la cabeza y di un respingo: Nashira me miraba fijamente. Nashira, representada en piedra.\n\nNo hab\u00eda nadie en el patio. Notaba un aura, pero estaba demasiado lejos para representar una amenaza. Sal\u00ed de la fuente y corr\u00ed hacia la torre de la campana. Enseguida vi el arco: deb\u00eda de ser la entrada del pasadizo que conduc\u00eda hasta la campana. Sub\u00ed a toda velocidad los escalones, rezando para que no apareciera ning\u00fan refa; el pasillo era tan estrecho que no podr\u00eda hacer nada. Cuando llegu\u00e9 arriba, me dej\u00f3 pasmada lo que vi.\n\nAquello era un aut\u00e9ntico tesoro. Hab\u00eda tarros de cristal que centelleaban en cientos de anaqueles, ba\u00f1ados por la luz del sol; su brillo y su colorido me recordaron a los caramelos duros. Hab\u00eda l\u00edquidos iridiscentes, polvos de colores intensos, plantas ex\u00f3ticas sumergidas en l\u00edquidos. Todo era hermoso y extra\u00f1o. La habitaci\u00f3n estaba inundada de olores: intensos, desagradables, dulces y fragantes. Registr\u00e9 los estantes en busca de suministros m\u00e9dicos. La mayor\u00eda de las botellas llevaban etiquetas con el s\u00edmbolo de Scion, escritas en ingl\u00e9s, pero algunas ten\u00edan jerogl\u00edficos extra\u00f1os. Tambi\u00e9n hab\u00eda _numa_ , seguramente confiscados. Vi una piedra de adivinaci\u00f3n, varios _sortes_... y una baraja de cartas. Para Liss. Ech\u00e9 un vistazo r\u00e1pido a las ilustraciones. Era una baraja Thoth, de otro dise\u00f1o que la antigua baraja de Liss, pero pod\u00eda utilizarse para la cartomancia.\n\nMe guard\u00e9 la baraja en la mochila. Cog\u00ed sulfadiazina de plata, parafina y antis\u00e9ptico. Vi otra puerta que deb\u00eda de llevar hasta la campana, pero no me met\u00ed por ella. No iba a robar nada m\u00e1s, porque la mochila pesaba tanto que casi no pod\u00eda levantarla. Me colgu\u00e9 las correas de los hombros y me volv\u00ed hacia la escalera. Y di de frente contra un refa.\n\nFue como si se pararan todas mis funciones vitales. Dos ojos amarillos que asomaban por debajo de una capucha me miraban fijamente.\n\n\u2014Vaya, vaya \u2014dijo el refa\u2014. Una traidora en la torre.\n\nAvanz\u00f3 hacia m\u00ed. Solt\u00e9 la mochila y, en un abrir y cerrar de ojos, trep\u00e9 a la estanter\u00eda m\u00e1s cercana.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa debes de ser la onir\u00e1mbula. Yo soy Kraz Sargas, heredero de sangre de los refa\u00edtas. \u2014Fingi\u00f3 una reverencia. Guardaba cierto parecido con Nashira: el cabello rubio, los ojos de p\u00e1rpados gruesos\u2014. \u00bfTe env\u00eda Arcturus?\n\nNo contest\u00e9.\n\n\u2014As\u00ed que deja que su tributo a la soberana de sangre corra suelta por ah\u00ed. Eso no le va a gustar a Nashira. \u2014Me tendi\u00f3 una mano enguantada\u2014. Ven, onir\u00e1mbula. Te acompa\u00f1ar\u00e9 a Magdalen.\n\n\u2014\u00bfY haremos como si esto no hubiera pasado? \u2014No me mov\u00ed del sitio\u2014. Me llevar\u00e1s ante Nashira.\n\nSe le agot\u00f3 la paciencia.\n\n\u2014No me obligues a aplastarte, casaca amarilla.\n\n\u2014Nashira no me quiere muerta.\n\n\u2014Yo no soy Nashira.\n\nEstaba perdida. Si no me mataba, me llevar\u00eda directamente a la Residencia del Suzerano. Mi mirada se pos\u00f3 en un tarro de \u00e1ster blanco. Pod\u00eda borrarle la memoria.\n\nPero no tuve suerte. Con un simple movimiento del brazo, Kraz tir\u00f3 toda la estanter\u00eda, y botellas y viales se estrellaron contra el suelo. Me apart\u00e9 para que no me aplastara, y un trozo de cristal me hizo un tajo en la mejilla. Dej\u00e9 escapar un grito. Me dol\u00edan las costillas, rotas. Mis lesiones me impidieron levantarme suficientemente deprisa.\n\nAll\u00ed no hab\u00eda esp\u00edritus, nada que pudiera utilizar para repelerlo. Kraz me agarr\u00f3 por el chaleco y me lanz\u00f3 contra la pared. Casi perd\u00ed el conocimiento. Notaba como si se me fueran a salir las costillas del pecho. Kraz me agarr\u00f3 por el pelo, me ech\u00f3 la cabeza hacia atr\u00e1s e inhal\u00f3 hondo, como si intentara aspirar algo m\u00e1s que aire. Me di cuenta de lo que estaba pasando cuando se me llenaron los ojos de sangre. Patale\u00e9, di ara\u00f1azos y me retorc\u00ed, intentando asir el \u00e9ter, pero este ya se alejaba de mi alcance.\n\nKraz estaba hambriento. Iba a absorberme el aura.\n\nTen\u00eda el brazo derecho inmovilizado, pero el izquierdo pod\u00eda moverlo. Impulsada por la adrenalina, hice lo que me hab\u00eda ense\u00f1ado mi padre: le clav\u00e9 a Kraz un dedo en el ojo. En cuanto me solt\u00f3 el pelo, saqu\u00e9 el vial que llevaba en el bolsillo. La flor roja.\n\nKraz me agarr\u00f3 por el cuello con una mano, ense\u00f1\u00e1ndome los dientes. Si intentaba atacarle la mente, mi cuerpo quedar\u00eda destrozado. No ten\u00eda alternativa. Le romp\u00ed el vial en la cara.\n\nEl olor a podrido era atroz. Kraz dio un alarido inhumano. El polen se le hab\u00eda metido en los ojos. Se le hab\u00edan oscurecido y goteaban, y la cara se le estaba poniendo de un gris moteado espantoso.\n\n\u2014No \u2014dijo\u2014. \u00a1No!\n\nLas siguientes palabras las dijo en _gloss_. Me fallaba la visi\u00f3n. \u00bfSer\u00eda una reacci\u00f3n al\u00e9rgica? Me dieron arcadas. Busqu\u00e9 a tientas en mi mochila, saqu\u00e9 el rev\u00f3lver y le apunt\u00e9 con \u00e9l a la cabeza. Kraz cay\u00f3 de rodillas.\n\n\u00abM\u00e1talo.\u00bb\n\nTen\u00eda las palmas de las manos sudadas. Me acord\u00e9 del metrovigilante del tren, del crimen por el que estaba all\u00ed; pero no sab\u00eda si ser\u00eda capaz de hacerlo, si podr\u00eda quitar otra vida. Entonces Kraz se quit\u00f3 las manos de la cara, y comprend\u00ed que ya no pod\u00eda salvarse. Ni siquiera pesta\u00f1e\u00e9.\n\nApret\u00e9 el gatillo.\n\nEl viaje de regreso a lugar seguro fue borroso. Corr\u00ed por los tejados, m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de la iglesia antigua y por la larga calle hasta Magdalen. Cuando llegu\u00e9 a la residencia, un brazo sali\u00f3 por una ventana, me agarr\u00f3 y me meti\u00f3 dentro.\n\nEl Custodio. Me estaba esperando. Sin decir palabra, me hizo entrar por una puerta y me llev\u00f3 al patio de levante por pasadizos vac\u00edos. Recorrimos soportales, subimos escaleras. No me atrev\u00eda a hablar. Cuando llegamos a la torre, me dej\u00e9 caer al suelo junto a la chimenea. Mis dedos dejaron polen negro en la alfombrilla. Parec\u00eda holl\u00edn.\n\nEl Custodio ech\u00f3 la llave, apag\u00f3 el gram\u00f3fono y corri\u00f3 las cortinas. Se qued\u00f3 unos minutos mirando por una de las ventanas de la c\u00e1mara, sin separar mucho las cortinas, vigilando la calle. Dej\u00e9 caer mi mochila al suelo. Las correas se me hab\u00edan clavado en los hombros.\n\n\u2014Lo he matado.\n\n\u2014\u00bfA qui\u00e9n?\n\n\u2014A Kraz. Le he disparado. \u2014Temblaba de pies a cabeza\u2014. He matado a un Sargas. Ahora Nashira me matar\u00e1. T\u00fa me matar\u00e1s...\n\n\u2014No.\n\n\u2014Pero \u00bfpor qu\u00e9 no?\n\n\u2014Un Sargas no es una p\u00e9rdida para m\u00ed. \u2014Mir\u00f3 otra vez por la ventana\u2014. \u00bfEst\u00e1s segura de que ha muerto?\n\n\u2014Claro que ha muerto. Le he disparado en la cara.\n\n\u2014Las balas no pueden matarnos. Tendr\u00edas que haber usado el polen.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. \u2014Intent\u00e9 respirar acompasadamente\u2014. S\u00ed, lo he usado.\n\nSe qued\u00f3 un buen rato callado. Mis pulmones, a punto de explotar, me delataban.\n\n\u2014Si un humano ha matado a un Sargas \u2014dijo por fin\u2014, lo \u00faltimo que querr\u00e1 Nashira ser\u00e1 que se sepa en la ciudad. Nuestra inmortalidad no debe ser cuestionada.\n\n\u2014\u00bfNo es verdad que se\u00e1is inmortales?\n\n\u2014No somos indestructibles. \u2014Se agach\u00f3 delante de m\u00ed y me mir\u00f3 a los ojos\u2014. \u00bfTe ha visto alguien?\n\n\u2014No. Bueno, s\u00ed: Terebell.\n\n\u2014Terebell guardar\u00e1 tu secreto. Si solo te ha visto ella, no hay nada que temer.\n\n\u2014Thuban tambi\u00e9n estaba all\u00ed. Ha habido una explosi\u00f3n. \u2014Lo mir\u00e9\u2014. \u00bfSabes algo de eso?\n\n\u2014Not\u00e9 que estabas en peligro. Ten\u00eda a gente vigilando en la Casa. Han provocado una distracci\u00f3n. Lo \u00fanico que sabr\u00e1 Nashira ser\u00e1 que alguien dej\u00f3 una vela demasiado cerca de un escape de gas.\n\nEsa noticia no consigui\u00f3 reconfortarme mucho. Ya hab\u00eda quitado tres vidas, sin contar las que no hab\u00eda conseguido salvar.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1s sangrando.\n\nMe mir\u00e9 en el espejo del cuarto de ba\u00f1o, que se ve\u00eda por la puerta abierta. Ten\u00eda un corte en la mejilla, largo pero poco profundo. Lo bastante profundo para sangrar.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014Te ha hecho da\u00f1o.\n\n\u2014Me he cortado con un cristal. \u2014Me toqu\u00e9 la herida\u2014. \u00bfTe enterar\u00e1s de qu\u00e9 ha pasado?\n\nEl Custodio asinti\u00f3 sin dejar de mirarme la mejilla. Sus ojos ten\u00edan algo que me impresion\u00f3: una oscuridad, una tensi\u00f3n. Estaba pensando en otra cosa. No me miraba a los ojos: la herida lo ten\u00eda hipnotizado.\n\n\u2014Si no te curamos la herida, te dejar\u00e1 cicatriz. \u2014Me sujet\u00f3 la barbilla con los dedos enguantados\u2014. Voy a traer algo para limpi\u00e1rtela.\n\n\u2014Y te enterar\u00e1s de qu\u00e9 le ha pasado a Kraz.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\nNos miramos un instante. Arrugu\u00e9 la frente, y mis labios se fruncieron para formular una pregunta.\n\nPero no pregunt\u00e9 nada.\n\n\u2014Volver\u00e9 en cuanto pueda. \u2014Se levant\u00f3\u2014. Te aconsejo que te laves. Ah\u00ed dentro encontrar\u00e1s ropa limpia.\n\nSe\u00f1al\u00f3 el armario. Me mir\u00e9 el uniforme. Llevaba el chaleco cubierto de polen, lo que era una prueba condenatoria de mis transgresiones.\n\n\u2014De acuerdo \u2014conced\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Y procura que no se te ensucie la herida.\n\nSe march\u00f3 sin que yo hubiera podido decir nada.\n\nMe levant\u00e9 y me acerqu\u00e9 al espejo. El corte era impresionante. \u00bfLe preocupaba al Custodio verme as\u00ed, incluso despu\u00e9s de lo que hab\u00eda hecho Jax? \u00bfPensaba en sus cicatrices cuando me ve\u00eda la cara, las cicatrices que ten\u00eda en la espalda, esas que ocultaba?\n\nTen\u00eda el pelo impregnado de un olor empalagoso. El polen. Cerr\u00e9 la puerta del cuarto de ba\u00f1o, me quit\u00e9 la ropa y llen\u00e9 la ba\u00f1era de agua caliente. Me temblaban las piernas. Me hab\u00eda despellejado una rodilla trepando. Me met\u00ed en la ba\u00f1era y me lav\u00e9 el pelo. Notaba el dolor de las contusiones antiguas, y c\u00f3mo encima se formaban otras nuevas. Esper\u00e9 unos minutos a que el calor relajara mis r\u00edgidos m\u00fasculos; entonces cog\u00ed una pastilla nueva de jab\u00f3n y me frot\u00e9 con fuerza para limpiar el sudor, la sangre y el polen. Mi maltrecha y amarillenta figura no mejor\u00f3 gran cosa con las atenciones que le prodigu\u00e9. No empec\u00e9 a calmarme hasta que la ba\u00f1era se hubo vaciado.\n\n\u00bfDeb\u00eda hablar con \u00e9l de lo del tren? Quiz\u00e1 tratara de detenerme. Me hab\u00eda devuelto a Sheol I cuando habr\u00eda podido dejarme marchar. Por otra parte, necesitaba saber si el tren estaba vigilado o no, en qu\u00e9 lugar de la pradera encontrar\u00eda la entrada. No recordaba haber visto nada durante la sesi\u00f3n de entrenamiento: ninguna trampilla, ninguna puerta. Deb\u00eda de estar bien escondida.\n\nCuando regres\u00e9 a la c\u00e1mara, encontr\u00e9 el uniforme amarillo limpio en el ropero. Hab\u00edan barrido el polen de la alfombra. Me dej\u00e9 caer en el div\u00e1n. Hab\u00eda liquidado a Kraz Sargas, heredero de sangre de los refa\u00edtas, con un solo disparo entre los ojos. Hasta ese momento hab\u00eda cre\u00eddo que era imposible matarlos. Deb\u00eda de haber sido el polen: la bala no hab\u00eda hecho m\u00e1s que liquidar el trabajo. Antes de que yo saliera de la torre, el cad\u00e1ver ya hab\u00eda empezado a pudrirse. Unos pocos granos de polen hab\u00edan bastado para descomponerlo.\n\nSe abri\u00f3 la puerta y me sobresalt\u00e9. El Custodio hab\u00eda vuelto. Tra\u00eda una expresi\u00f3n sombr\u00eda.\n\nSe sent\u00f3 a mi lado. Cogi\u00f3 un pa\u00f1o, lo moj\u00f3 en el l\u00edquido \u00e1mbar de un tarro y me limpi\u00f3 la sangre de la mejilla. Lo mir\u00e9 en silencio, a la espera de su juicio.\n\n\u2014Kraz est\u00e1 muerto \u2014dijo sin revelar emoci\u00f3n alguna. Not\u00e9 una punzada en la mejilla\u2014. Era el heredero al trono de sangre. Si te descubrieran, te torturar\u00edan en p\u00fablico. Saben que faltan provisiones, pero nadie te ha visto. Al portero de d\u00eda le hemos borrado la memoria.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSospecha alguien de m\u00ed?\n\n\u2014Extraoficialmente quiz\u00e1 s\u00ed, pero no tienen pruebas. Por suerte, no utilizaste tu esp\u00edritu para matarlo; si lo hubieras hecho, tu identidad s\u00ed ser\u00eda evidente.\n\nMis temblores se intensificaron. T\u00edpico de m\u00ed: matar a alguien tan importante sin saber siquiera qui\u00e9n era. Si Nashira se enteraba, acabar\u00eda convertida en m\u00e1scara funeraria. Mir\u00e9 al Custodio.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 le ha hecho el polen a Kraz? Sus ojos... Su cara...\n\n\u2014No somos lo que parecemos, Paige. \u2014Me sostuvo la mirada\u2014. \u00bfCu\u00e1nto rato ha pasado entre la aplicaci\u00f3n del polen y el disparo?\n\nEl disparo. No \u00abel asesinato\u00bb. Hab\u00eda dicho \u00abel disparo\u00bb, como si yo solo hubiera estado all\u00ed por casualidad.\n\n\u2014Unos diez segundos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 has visto en esos diez segundos?\n\nIntent\u00e9 recordar. En la habitaci\u00f3n hab\u00eda mucho vaho, y yo hab\u00eda recibido un golpe en la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Fue como si... como si su cara se estuviera... pudriendo. Y ten\u00eda los ojos blancos. Como si hubieran perdido todo el color. Unos ojos muertos.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1 claro.\n\nNo sab\u00eda a qu\u00e9 se refer\u00eda. \u00abUnos ojos muertos.\u00bb\n\nEl fuego chisporroteaba y calentaba la habitaci\u00f3n en exceso. El Custodio me levant\u00f3 la barbilla para exponer mi corte a la luz.\n\n\u2014Nashira me ver\u00e1 esto \u2014dije\u2014. Y lo sabr\u00e1.\n\n\u2014Eso tiene soluci\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCu\u00e1l?\n\nNo me contest\u00f3. Cada vez que yo preguntaba c\u00f3mo, o por qu\u00e9, parec\u00eda que \u00e9l perdiera inter\u00e9s por la conversaci\u00f3n. Fue hasta su mesa y cogi\u00f3 un cilindro met\u00e1lico lo bastante peque\u00f1o para caber en un bolsillo. La palabra ScionMed estaba impresa a lo largo en letras rojas. Sac\u00f3 tres suturas adhesivas. Me qued\u00e9 quieta mientras me las aplicaba.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTe hago da\u00f1o?\n\n\u2014No.\n\nApart\u00f3 la mano de mi cara. Me toqu\u00e9 los adhesivos.\n\n\u2014En la Casa vi un mapa \u2014dije\u2014. S\u00e9 que hay un tren en Puerto Pradera. Necesito saber d\u00f3nde est\u00e1 la entrada del t\u00fanel.\n\n\u2014Y \u00bfpara qu\u00e9 necesitas saberlo?\n\n\u2014Porque quiero irme de aqu\u00ed. Antes de que Nashira me mate.\n\n\u2014Entiendo. \u2014El Custodio se sent\u00f3 en su butaca\u2014. Y das por hecho que te dejar\u00e9 marchar.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. \u2014Le mostr\u00e9 su caja de rap\u00e9\u2014. O t\u00fa puedes dar por hecho que esto llegar\u00e1 a manos de Nashira.\n\nLa luz se reflej\u00f3 en el s\u00edmbolo. El Custodio tamborile\u00f3 con los dedos en el brazo de la butaca. No intent\u00f3 negociar conmigo; se limit\u00f3 a mirarme, y sus ojos desped\u00edan un leve resplandor.\n\n\u2014No puedes tomar el tren \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014Apu\u00e9state algo.\n\n\u2014No me interpretes mal. El tren solo puede activarlo el Arconte de Westminster. Est\u00e1 programado para ir y venir en determinadas fechas, a determinadas horas. Esos horarios no se pueden cambiar.\n\n\u2014Debe de traer la comida.\n\n\u2014El tren solo se utiliza para transporte humano. La comida la traen los mensajeros.\n\n\u2014Entonces, no volver\u00e1 a venir hasta... \u2014cerr\u00e9 los ojos\u2014 la pr\u00f3xima Era de Huesos.\n\nEn 2069. Mi sue\u00f1o de una fuga f\u00e1cil se desvaneci\u00f3. Al final s\u00ed tendr\u00eda que cruzar el campo de minas.\n\n\u2014Qu\u00edtate de la cabeza la idea de cruzar a pie \u2014dijo, como si me hubiera le\u00eddo el pensamiento\u2014. Los emim utilizan el bosque como coto de caza. Ni siquiera t\u00fa, con tu don, durar\u00edas mucho si tuvieras que enfrentarte a una manada.\n\n\u2014No puedo esperar m\u00e1s. \u2014Apret\u00e9 el brazo de la butaca hasta que se me pusieron los nudillos blancos\u2014. Tengo que irme de aqu\u00ed. Ella me matar\u00e1, lo sabes.\n\n\u2014Claro que s\u00ed. Ahora que tu don ha madurado, est\u00e1 impaciente por arrebat\u00e1rtelo. No tardar\u00e1 en actuar.\n\nMe puse en tensi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 quiere decir que ha madurado?\n\n\u2014En la ciudadela pose\u00edste a 12. Te vi. Nashira estaba esperando a que desarrollaras todo tu potencial.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSe lo has dicho t\u00fa?\n\n\u2014Se enterar\u00e1, pero no por m\u00ed. Lo que digamos en esta habitaci\u00f3n no saldr\u00e1 de aqu\u00ed.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Consid\u00e9ralo una tentativa de confianza mutua.\n\n\u2014Examinaste mis recuerdos. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 iba a confiar en ti?\n\n\u2014\u00bfAcaso yo no te ense\u00f1\u00e9 mi onirosaje?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Tu onirosaje fr\u00edo y vac\u00edo. No eres m\u00e1s que una c\u00e1scara hueca, \u00bfverdad?\n\nEl Custodio se levant\u00f3 bruscamente, fue hasta la estanter\u00eda y cogi\u00f3 un tomo viejo y enorme. Mis m\u00fasculos se tensaron. Antes de que pudiera decir nada m\u00e1s, sac\u00f3 un folleto de dentro del libro y lo tir\u00f3 encima de la mesa. Me qued\u00e9 de piedra: era _Sobre los m\u00e9ritos de la antinaturalidad_. Mi ejemplar, la prueba irrefutable de que pertenec\u00eda al sindicato. El Custodio lo ten\u00eda guardado.\n\n\u2014Quiz\u00e1 mi onirosaje est\u00e9 privado de su antigua vida, pero yo no veo a las personas ordenadas por categor\u00edas, como el autor de ese panfleto. Ah\u00ed no hay ning\u00fan onirom\u00e1ntico. Ni ning\u00fan refa\u00edta. Yo no veo las cosas as\u00ed. \u2014Me mir\u00f3 a los ojos\u2014. Ya llevo varios meses viviendo contigo. Conozco tu historia, aunque la haya conocido sin tu permiso. No pretend\u00eda invadir tu intimidad, pero quer\u00eda ver c\u00f3mo eras. Quer\u00eda conocerte. No quer\u00eda tratarte como a un vulgar ser humano, inferior y sin valor.\n\nEso me sorprendi\u00f3.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 no? \u2014pregunt\u00e9 sosteni\u00e9ndole la mirada.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 m\u00e1s te da?\n\n\u2014Me concierne.\n\nCog\u00ed _Sobre los m\u00e9ritos_ y me lo pegu\u00e9 al pecho, como har\u00eda un cr\u00edo con un juguete. Era como si le hubiera salvado la vida a Jaxon. El Custodio me observaba.\n\n\u2014Le tienes un gran aprecio a tu capo \u2014dijo\u2014. Quieres volver a esa vida. Al sindicato.\n\n\u2014Jaxon es algo m\u00e1s que este panfleto.\n\n\u2014Ya me lo imagino.\n\nSe sent\u00f3 a mi lado en el div\u00e1n. Guardamos silencio unos minutos. Una humana y un refa\u00edta, tan diferentes como el d\u00eda y la noche, atrapados en nuestra campana de cristal, como la flor marchita. Cogi\u00f3 la caja de rap\u00e9 y sac\u00f3 un vial de amaranto.\n\n\u2014Te sientes sola. \u2014Lo vaci\u00f3 en un c\u00e1liz\u2014. Lo noto. Noto tu soledad.\n\n\u2014Estoy sola.\n\n\u2014Echas de menos a Nick.\n\n\u2014Es mi mejor amigo. Claro que lo echo de menos.\n\n\u2014\u00c9l era algo m\u00e1s. Tus recuerdos de \u00e9l son extraordinariamente detallados, llenos de color, de vida. Lo adorabas.\n\n\u2014Era joven \u2014dije, cortante, puesto que el Custodio parec\u00eda decidido a pincharme en mi punto m\u00e1s sensible.\n\n\u2014Todav\u00eda eres joven \u2014insisti\u00f3\u2014. No he visto todos tus recuerdos. Falta algo.\n\n\u2014No tiene sentido pensar demasiado en el pasado.\n\n\u2014No estoy de acuerdo.\n\n\u2014Todos tenemos malos recuerdos. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 te interesan los m\u00edos?\n\n\u2014La memoria es mi cuerda de salvamento. Mi ruta al \u00e9ter, como lo son para ti los onirosajes. \u2014Me toc\u00f3 la frente con un dedo enguantado\u2014. T\u00fa quisiste conocerme a trav\u00e9s de mi onirosaje. Yo, a cambio, te pido tus recuerdos.\n\nMe estremec\u00ed y me apart\u00e9. El Custodio se qued\u00f3 mir\u00e1ndome, evaluando mi reacci\u00f3n; entonces se levant\u00f3 y sacudi\u00f3 el tirador de la campanilla.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 haces? \u2014pregunt\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Necesitas comer.\n\nEncendi\u00f3 el gram\u00f3fono y se puso a mirar la calle.\n\nMichael lleg\u00f3 en un abrir y cerrar de ojos y escuch\u00f3 las \u00f3rdenes que le dio el Custodio. Diez minutos m\u00e1s tarde volvi\u00f3 con una bandeja, que me puso en el regazo, con suficiente comida para devolverme las fuerzas: una taza de t\u00e9 con leche, un azucarero, sopa de tomate y pan caliente.\n\nLe di las gracias.\n\nMichael me sonri\u00f3 brevemente; luego le hizo una serie de signos complicados al Custodio, que asinti\u00f3 con la cabeza. Tras saludar con una reverencia, sali\u00f3 de la c\u00e1mara. El Custodio me mir\u00f3; quer\u00eda saber si iba a tener que obligarme a comer. Di un sorbo de t\u00e9. Me acord\u00e9 de que mi abuela me daba t\u00e9 cuando yo era muy peque\u00f1a, siempre que me pon\u00eda enferma; mi abuela ten\u00eda una gran fe en el t\u00e9. Com\u00ed un poco de pan. \u00bfMe estar\u00eda leyendo en ese momento, leyendo mis emociones? \u00bfNotar\u00eda que ese recuerdo me tranquilizaba? Intent\u00e9 concentrarme en \u00e9l, utilizar el cord\u00f3n \u00e1ureo, pero no sent\u00ed nada.\n\nCuando hube terminado, el Custodio cogi\u00f3 la bandeja y la dej\u00f3 en la mesita; luego volvi\u00f3 a sentarse a mi lado. Carraspe\u00e9.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 ha dicho Michael?\n\n\u2014Que Nashira ha citado a los otros Sargas en su residencia.\n\n\u00bbTiene muy buen o\u00eddo \u2014a\u00f1adi\u00f3 con un deje de iron\u00eda\u2014. Me trae mucha informaci\u00f3n de los aposentos de Nashira. Su supuesta amaurosis hace que ella no se fije en sus idas y venidas. \u2014De modo que a Michael no le importaba escuchar a hurtadillas. Lo tendr\u00eda presente\u2014. Va a contarles lo de Kraz.\n\nMe apret\u00e9 las sienes con los dedos.\n\n\u2014Yo no quer\u00eda matarlo. Yo solo...\n\n\u2014Te habr\u00eda matado \u00e9l a ti. Kraz odiaba profundamente a los humanos. Planeaba, cuando llegara el d\u00eda de nuestra revelaci\u00f3n, atraer a los ni\u00f1os humanos a nuestras ciudades de control. Sent\u00eda debilidad por sus huesos, peque\u00f1os y finos. Para practicar cleromancia.\n\nMe dieron n\u00e1useas. La cleromancia empleaba _sortes_ , con los que los esp\u00edritus formaban figuras o que lanzaban en determinada direcci\u00f3n. Hab\u00eda todo tipo de _sortes_ : agujas, dados, llaves. El grupo de los llamados espatulom\u00e1nticos prefer\u00eda los huesos, pero generalmente se manejaban esqueletos muy viejos por respeto hacia los difuntos. Si Kraz hab\u00eda robado los huesos de ni\u00f1os para practicar cleromancia, me alegraba de haberlo matado.\n\n\u2014Me alegro de que est\u00e9 muerto \u2014dijo el Custodio\u2014. Era una plaga terrible para este mundo.\n\nNo dije nada.\n\n\u2014Te sientes culpable \u2014observ\u00f3 el Custodio.\n\n\u2014No. Tengo miedo.\n\n\u2014Miedo \u00bfde qu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014De lo que pueda llegar a hacer. No paro... \u2014Sacud\u00ed la cabeza; estaba agotada\u2014. No paro de matar. No quiero convertirme en un arma.\n\n\u2014Tu don es inestable, pero te mantiene viva. Funciona como un escudo.\n\n\u2014No es ning\u00fan escudo. Es como una pistola. Vivo pendiente de un gatillo. \u2014Clav\u00e9 la vista en el estampado de la alfombra\u2014. Hago da\u00f1o a otros. En eso consiste mi don.\n\n\u2014No lo haces deliberadamente. No siempre has sabido de lo que eras capaz.\n\nSolt\u00e9 una risa amarga.\n\n\u2014Bueno, s\u00ed sab\u00eda que pod\u00eda. No sab\u00eda c\u00f3mo, pero sab\u00eda qui\u00e9n hac\u00eda sangrar a la gente. Sab\u00eda qui\u00e9n hac\u00eda que a la gente le doliera la cabeza. Cuando se burlaban de m\u00ed... Cuando mencionaban las revueltas de Molly... les dol\u00eda algo. Y lo \u00fanico que hab\u00eda hecho era darles un empujoncito mental. Me gustaba, de alguna manera \u2014dije\u2014. Cuando solo ten\u00eda diez a\u00f1os ya me gustaba. Me gustaba vengarme. Era mi secreto. \u2014El Custodio no dejaba de mirarme\u2014. No soy como los sensores, ni como los m\u00e9diums. No me limito a usar esp\u00edritus para tener compa\u00f1\u00eda ni para la defensa personal. Soy uno de ellos, \u00bfme explico? Puedo morir cuando quiera, convertirme en esp\u00edritu cuando quiera. Eso hace que la gente me tema. Y hace que yo tema a la gente.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, eres diferente. Pero eso no significa que debas tener miedo.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Mi esp\u00edritu es peligroso.\n\n\u2014No temes el peligro, Paige. Es m\u00e1s, creo que te gusta. Aceptaste trabajar para Jaxon Hall pese a saber que eso reducir\u00eda considerablemente tu esperanza de vida. Pese a saber que exist\u00eda el riesgo de que te detectaran.\n\n\u2014Necesitaba el dinero.\n\n\u2014Tu padre trabaja para Scion. No necesitabas el dinero. Dudo que lo hayas utilizado jam\u00e1s. El peligro te acerca m\u00e1s al \u00e9ter \u2014continu\u00f3\u2014. Por eso aprovechas cualquier oportunidad que se presenta para experimentarlo.\n\n\u2014No, no era eso. No soy una especie de adicta a la adrenalina. Quer\u00eda estar con otros videntes. \u2014La rabia volv\u00eda a impregnar mi voz\u2014. No quer\u00eda vivir como las colegialas con el cerebro lavado de Scion. Quer\u00eda formar parte de algo. Quer\u00eda importar. \u00bfNo lo entiendes?\n\n\u2014Esas no eran las \u00fanicas razones. Pensabas en una persona en concreto.\n\n\u2014No... \u2014Me temblaban los labios.\n\n\u2014Pensabas en Nick. \u2014Me sostuvo la mirada sin piedad\u2014. Estabas enamorada de \u00e9l. Lo habr\u00edas seguido a cualquier parte.\n\n\u2014No quiero hablar de eso.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 no?\n\n\u2014Porque es m\u00edo. Es privado. \u00bfLos onirom\u00e1nticos no entend\u00e9is el concepto de intimidad?\n\n\u2014Lo has guardado en secreto demasiado tiempo. \u2014No me toc\u00f3, pero su mirada era casi tan \u00edntima como una caricia\u2014. No puedo arrebatarte ese recuerdo mientras est\u00e9s despierta, pero en cuanto te quedes dormida, leer\u00e9 las im\u00e1genes de tu mente, y t\u00fa las so\u00f1ar\u00e1s, como has hecho otras veces. Ese es el don del onirom\u00e1ntico. Crear un sue\u00f1o compartido.\n\n\u2014Supongo que nunca te aburres \u2014dije con desprecio\u2014. Viendo la ropa sucia de la gente.\n\nIgnor\u00f3 la pulla.\n\n\u2014Puedes aprender a apartarme, por supuesto, pero para eso tendr\u00edas que conocer mi esp\u00edritu casi tan bien como conoces el tuyo. Y no es f\u00e1cil conocer un esp\u00edritu tan viejo como el m\u00edo. \u2014Hizo una pausa\u2014. O puedes ahorrarte la molestia y dejar que me asome a tu interior.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 conseguir\u00e9 con eso?\n\n\u2014Ese recuerdo es una barrera. Lo he notado dentro de ti, enterrado en lo m\u00e1s hondo de tu onirosaje. \u2014Me miraba fijamente\u2014. Sup\u00e9ralo, y te liberar\u00e1s de \u00e9l. Tu esp\u00edritu se liberar\u00e1 de \u00e9l.\n\nInspir\u00e9 hondo. La oferta no deber\u00eda haberme tentado.\n\n\u2014Y \u00bfsolo tengo que dormirme?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Puedo ayudarte. \u2014Sac\u00f3 un pu\u00f1ado de hojas secas de la caja de rap\u00e9\u2014. Esto es lo que conten\u00edan las p\u00edldoras. Si preparo una infusi\u00f3n, \u00bfte la tomar\u00e1s?\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 da\u00f1o me har\u00e1 una dosis m\u00e1s? \u2014Hice un gesto con los hombros. El Custodio se qued\u00f3 mir\u00e1ndome en silencio\u2014. Est\u00e1 bien \u2014ced\u00ed.\n\nSali\u00f3 de la c\u00e1mara. Imagin\u00e9 que abajo hab\u00eda una cocina, donde trabajaba Michael.\n\nApoy\u00e9 la cabeza en los cojines. Un temblor lento y fr\u00edo se extendi\u00f3 por mi pecho, llenando los espacios entre mis costillas. Hab\u00eda odiado al Custodio intensamente; lo hab\u00eda odiado por ser lo que era, y porque ten\u00eda la impresi\u00f3n de que me entend\u00eda. Hab\u00eda disfrutado odi\u00e1ndolo, y ahora me dispon\u00eda a mostrarle mi recuerdo m\u00e1s \u00edntimo. Yo cre\u00eda saber cu\u00e1l era, pero no pod\u00eda estar segura. Tendr\u00eda que so\u00f1arlo.\n\nPara cuando regres\u00f3 el Custodio, una certeza desafiante se hab\u00eda apoderado de m\u00ed. Tom\u00e9 el vaso de cristal que me ofreci\u00f3. Estaba lleno hasta el borde de un l\u00edquido ocre y trasl\u00facido que parec\u00eda miel diluida. En la superficie flotaban tres hojas.\n\n\u2014Es amargo \u2014me advirti\u00f3\u2014, pero me permitir\u00e1 ver los recuerdos con mayor claridad.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 viste las otras veces?\n\n\u2014Fragmentos. Per\u00edodos de silencio. Depende de c\u00f3mo te sintieras en cada momento, de lo intensamente que lo sintieras. De la medida en que esa parte del recuerdo siga preocup\u00e1ndote.\n\nMir\u00e9 la infusi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014En ese caso, creo que no voy a necesitar esto.\n\n\u2014Ser\u00e1 m\u00e1s f\u00e1cil para ti si te la tomas.\n\nSeguramente ten\u00eda raz\u00f3n. La mera perspectiva de enfrentarme a ese recuerdo ya hac\u00eda que me temblaran las manos. Me llev\u00e9 el vaso a los labios y sent\u00ed como si me dispusiera a renunciar de nuevo a mi vida.\n\n\u2014Espera.\n\nMe detuve.\n\n\u2014Paige, no est\u00e1s obligada a ense\u00f1arme ese recuerdo. Espero que lo hagas, por tu propio bien. Espero que puedas. Pero puedes negarte. Si te niegas, respetar\u00e9 tu intimidad.\n\n\u2014No soy tan cruel \u2014repliqu\u00e9\u2014. No hay nada peor que una historia sin final.\n\nAntes de poder seguir hablando, me beb\u00ed la infusi\u00f3n.\n\nEl Custodio me hab\u00eda mentido: aquello no era amargo sin m\u00e1s. Era el l\u00edquido m\u00e1s repugnante que hab\u00eda probado nunca, semejante a un pu\u00f1ado de fragmentos met\u00e1licos. Decid\u00ed que preferir\u00eda beber lej\u00eda que volver a probar la infusi\u00f3n de salvia. Me dieron arcadas. El Custodio me sujet\u00f3 la cara con ambas manos.\n\n\u2014Aguanta, Paige. \u00a1Aguanta!\n\nLo intent\u00e9. Vomit\u00e9 un poco, pero consegu\u00ed tragarme la mayor parte.\n\n\u2014Y ahora \u00bfqu\u00e9? \u2014dije tosiendo.\n\n\u2014Espera.\n\nNo tuve que esperar mucho. Me encorv\u00e9, estremeci\u00e9ndome y tratando de controlar las n\u00e1useas. El sabor era tan intenso que cre\u00ed que se me quedar\u00eda en la boca para siempre.\n\nY entonces se apagaron las luces. Ca\u00ed sobre los cojines y me qued\u00e9 dormida.\n\nSeis de los Siete Sellos est\u00e1bamos de pie formando un corro, como en una sesi\u00f3n de espiritismo.\n\nNadine iba a matar a alguien. Lo llevaba escrito en la cara. En medio del c\u00edrculo estaba Zeke S\u00e1enz, atado con cintas de terciopelo a una silla; su hermana le sujetaba la cabeza con ambas manos. Llev\u00e1bamos horas atacando la mente de Zeke, pero pese a sus lamentos y sus quejas, Jax no se ablandaba. Si su don pod\u00eda aprenderse, ser\u00eda de gran valor para la banda: la capacidad de resistir a toda influencia externa, ya fuera de esp\u00edritus o de otros videntes. As\u00ed pues, sentado en su butaca fumando un puro, Jax se limitaba a esperar a que alguno de nosotros pudiera con \u00e9l.\n\nJax llevaba mucho tiempo estudiando a Zeke. Del resto de nosotros se hab\u00eda olvidado, y dejaba que nos ocup\u00e1ramos de nuestras actividades delictivas. Pese a la rigurosa investigaci\u00f3n a que lo hab\u00eda sometido, Jax no hab\u00eda previsto que nuestro ilegible fuera a sufrir tanto cuando lo atac\u00e1ramos. Su onirosaje era el\u00e1stico y opaco, impenetrable para los esp\u00edritus. Le hab\u00edamos lanzado una bandada tras otra sin \u00e9xito. Su mente las hac\u00eda rebotar por toda la habitaci\u00f3n, resbalaban por ella como el agua por una canica o un Diamante Negro, su nuevo nombre.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Venga, desgraciados! \u2014grit\u00f3 Jax, y golpe\u00f3 la mesa con un pu\u00f1o\u2014. \u00a1Quiero o\u00edrle gritar el triple de fuerte!\n\nLlevaba todo el d\u00eda poniendo la \u00abDanza Macabra\u00bb y bebiendo vino, y eso nunca era buena se\u00f1al. Eliza, colorada por el esfuerzo de controlar a tantos esp\u00edritus, lo mir\u00f3 con reproche.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTe has levantado con el pie izquierdo, Jaxon?\n\n\u2014Otra vez.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1 sufriendo \u2014dijo Nadine, furiosa\u2014. \u00a1M\u00edralo! \u00a1No lo soportar\u00e1!\n\n\u2014Yo s\u00ed que sufro, Nadine. Me desespera tu obstinaci\u00f3n. \u2014En voz muy baja, no por ello menos amenazadora\u2014. No me obligu\u00e9is a levantarme, ni\u00f1os. O-tra-vez.\n\nSe produjo un breve silencio. Nadine agarr\u00f3 a su hermano por los hombros; el pelo le tapaba la cara. Ahora lo ten\u00eda casta\u00f1o oscuro, y m\u00e1s corto; llamaba menos la atenci\u00f3n, pero ella lo odiaba. Odiaba la ciudadela. Pero sobre todo nos odiaba a nosotros.\n\nComo nadie hac\u00eda nada, Eliza llam\u00f3 a un esp\u00edritu asesor: JD, una musa del siglo XVII. Cuando salt\u00f3 de su onirosaje al \u00e9ter, las luces parpadearon.\n\n\u2014Probar\u00e9 con JD. \u2014Ten\u00eda la frente arrugada\u2014. Si no funciona con un esp\u00edritu tan antiguo, dudo mucho que funcione con nada.\n\n\u2014\u00bfUn duende, quiz\u00e1? \u2014insinu\u00f3 Jaxon con absoluta seriedad.\n\n\u2014\u00a1No vamos a utilizar un duende!\n\nJax sigui\u00f3 fumando.\n\n\u2014Es una pena.\n\nEn el otro extremo de la habitaci\u00f3n, Nick baj\u00f3 las persianas. Lo que est\u00e1bamos haciendo le horrorizaba, pero no pod\u00eda impedirlo.\n\nZeke no soportaba el suspense. Ten\u00eda los afiebrados ojos clavados en aquel esp\u00edritu.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 hacen, Di?\n\n\u2014No lo s\u00e9. \u2014Nadine mir\u00f3 fr\u00edamente a Jaxon\u2014. Necesita descansar. Si le lanzas ese esp\u00edritu, yo...\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 har\u00e1s? \u2014De la boca de Jaxon sal\u00edan volutas de humo\u2014. \u00bfMe tocar\u00e1s una melod\u00eda furiosa? Adelante, te lo ruego. Me encanta la m\u00fasica que sale del alma.\n\nNadine hizo pucheros, pero no mordi\u00f3 el anzuelo. Sab\u00eda cu\u00e1l era el castigo por desobedecer a Jaxon. No ten\u00eda ning\u00fan otro sitio adonde ir, ning\u00fan otro sitio adonde llevar a su hermano.\n\nZeke se estremeci\u00f3 en sus brazos. Como si fuera m\u00e1s joven que ella, y no dos a\u00f1os mayor.\n\nEliza mir\u00f3 a Nadine, y luego a Jaxon; emiti\u00f3 una orden silenciosa, y la musa se lanz\u00f3. Yo no lo vi, pero lo sent\u00ed; y a juzgar por el grito de dolor de Zeke, \u00e9l tambi\u00e9n. Ech\u00f3 la cabeza hacia atr\u00e1s, y se le marcaron los m\u00fasculos del cuello.\n\nNadine abrazaba a su hermano y apretaba los labios.\n\n\u2014Lo siento \u2014dijo, y apoy\u00f3 la barbilla en su cabeza\u2014. Lo siento mucho, Zeke.\n\nJD se aplicaba con gran empe\u00f1o en su tarea. Le hab\u00edan dicho que Zeke iba a hacerle da\u00f1o a Eliza, y se hab\u00eda propuesto impedir que eso ocurriera. Las l\u00e1grimas y el sudor hac\u00edan brillar la cara de Zeke. Estaba a punto de asfixiarse.\n\n\u2014Por favor \u2014suplic\u00f3\u2014. Basta...\n\n\u2014Para, Jaxon \u2014le espet\u00e9\u2014. \u00bfNo te parece que ya ha aguantado suficiente?\n\nJaxon arque\u00f3 exageradamente las cejas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEst\u00e1s cuestionando mis m\u00e9todos, Paige?\n\nMi valor se debilit\u00f3.\n\n\u2014No.\n\n\u2014En el sindicato hay que ganarse el sustento. Soy tu capo. Tu protector. Tu patr\u00f3n. \u00a1El hombre que impide que mueras de hambre como esos desdichados limosneros! \u2014Lanz\u00f3 un fajo de billetes por los aires, y la cara de Frank Weaver, que nos miraba desde cada billete, cay\u00f3 revoloteando por la alfombra\u2014. Ezekiel habr\u00e1 aguantado suficiente cuando yo lo diga, cuando yo decida concederle la libertad por hoy. \u00bfCrees que Hector parar\u00eda? \u00bfCrees que Jimmy o la Abadesa parar\u00edan?\n\n\u2014Nosotros no trabajamos para ellos. \u2014Eliza parec\u00eda angustiada. Le hizo una se\u00f1a al esp\u00edritu\u2014. Vuelve, JD. Ya estoy a salvo.\n\nEl esp\u00edritu se retir\u00f3. Entonces Zeke se sujet\u00f3 la cabeza con las manos.\n\n\u2014Estoy bien \u2014consigui\u00f3 decir\u2014. Solo... solo necesito un minuto.\n\n\u2014No est\u00e1s bien. \u2014Nadine se volvi\u00f3 hacia Jaxon, que estaba encendi\u00e9ndose otro puro\u2014. Te has aprovechado de nosotros. Sab\u00edas lo de la operaci\u00f3n y nos hiciste creer que t\u00fa lo har\u00edas mejor. Dijiste que curar\u00edas a Zeke. \u00a1Prometiste que lo curar\u00edas!\n\n\u2014Dije que lo intentar\u00eda \u2014replic\u00f3 Jaxon, imperturbable\u2014. Que experimentar\u00eda.\n\n\u2014Mientes. Eres igual que...\n\n\u2014Si tan terrible te parece este lugar, querida, vete. La puerta siempre est\u00e1 abierta. \u2014Baj\u00f3 un poco el tono de voz\u2014. La puerta que da a las fr\u00edas y oscuras calles. \u2014Le ech\u00f3 el humo del puro\u2014. Me pregunto cu\u00e1nto tardar\u00e1 la DVN en descubrirte.\n\nNadine temblaba de rabia.\n\n\u2014Me voy a Chat's. \u2014Se puso la chaquetilla de encaje\u2014. Sola.\n\nAgarr\u00f3 sus auriculares y su bolso, sali\u00f3 furiosa y cerr\u00f3 de un portazo.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Di! \u2014la llam\u00f3 Zeke, pero ella no le hizo caso.\n\nLa o\u00ed darle una patada a algo al bajar la escalera. Pieter apareci\u00f3 a trav\u00e9s de la pared, enojado porque lo hab\u00edan molestado y, enfurru\u00f1ado, se qued\u00f3 en un rinc\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Creo que ya es hora de volver a casa, capit\u00e1n \u2014dijo Eliza con firmeza\u2014. Llevamos horas con esto.\n\n\u2014Espera. \u2014Jax me apunt\u00f3 con un largo dedo\u2014. Todav\u00eda no hemos probado nuestra arma secreta. \u2014Arrugu\u00e9 la frente, y Jax lade\u00f3 la cabeza\u2014. Venga, Paige. No te hagas la loca. Entra en su onirosaje, hazlo por m\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Ya hemos hablado de esto. \u2014Empezaba a dolerme la cabeza\u2014. Yo no entro por la fuerza.\n\n\u2014Ah, \u00bfno? No sab\u00eda que tu contrato de trabajo lo especificara. \u00a1Ah! Espera, ya me acuerdo. No has firmado ning\u00fan contrato. \u2014Apag\u00f3 el puro en el cenicero\u2014. Somos clarividentes. Antinaturales. \u00bfCre\u00edas que ser\u00edamos como tu pap\u00e1, que estar\u00edamos en nuestros despachos de Barbican de nueve a cinco, bebiendo t\u00e9 en vasitos de pl\u00e1stico? \u2014De repente parec\u00eda indignado, como si no soportara pensar en lo amaur\u00f3tica que pod\u00eda llegar a ser la gente\u2014. A nosotros no nos van los vasitos de pl\u00e1stico, Paige. Nos van la plata, el raso, las calles s\u00f3rdidas y los esp\u00edritus.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 mir\u00e1ndolo. Jaxon dio un gran sorbo de vino, con la mirada clavada en la ventana. Eliza sacudi\u00f3 la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Bueno, esto es absurdo. Creo que deber\u00edamos...\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n te paga?\n\nEliza dio un suspiro.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa, Jaxon.\n\n\u2014Correcto. Yo te pago, y t\u00fa obedeces. Y ahora, s\u00e9 buena, sube corriendo y dile a Danica que venga. No quiero que se pierda este espect\u00e1culo de magia.\n\nEliza sali\u00f3 de la habitaci\u00f3n con los labios fruncidos. Zeke me lanz\u00f3 una mirada de agotamiento y desesperaci\u00f3n. Me obligu\u00e9 a insistir:\n\n\u2014Jax, no estoy en condiciones, de verdad. Creo que todos necesitamos descansar un poco.\n\n\u2014Ma\u00f1ana puedes tomarte unas horas libres, coraz\u00f3n \u2014dijo distra\u00eddamente.\n\n\u2014No puedo entrar por la fuerza en un onirosaje. Ya lo sabes.\n\n\u2014Compl\u00e1ceme. Int\u00e9ntalo. \u2014Jaxon se sirvi\u00f3 m\u00e1s vino\u2014. Llevo a\u00f1os esperando esto. Un onir\u00e1mbulo contra un ilegible. El encuentro et\u00e9reo por excelencia. No se me ocurre ninguna coincidencia m\u00e1s peligrosa y audaz.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSabes lo que dices?\n\n\u2014No \u2014dijo Nick, y todas las cabezas se volvieron hacia \u00e9l\u2014. Habla como si se hubiera vuelto loco.\n\nTras un breve silencio, Jaxon alz\u00f3 su copa.\n\n\u2014Un diagn\u00f3stico excelente, doctor. Salud.\n\nBebi\u00f3. Nick mir\u00f3 hacia otro lado.\n\nEn la tensi\u00f3n posterior a ese momento, Eliza regres\u00f3 con una jeringa de adrenalina. Con ella iba Danica Panic, el \u00faltimo miembro de nuestro septeto. Hab\u00eda crecido en la ciudadela Scion de Belgrado, pero la hab\u00edan transferido a Londres, donde trabajaba de ingeniera. La hab\u00eda descubierto Nick; hab\u00eda visto su aura en una recepci\u00f3n celebrada en honor de los reci\u00e9n llegados. Se enorgullec\u00eda mucho de que ninguno de nosotros supiera pronunciar su nombre. Ni su apellido. Estaba dura como la piedra; llevaba el cabello, rizado y rojizo, recogido en un mo\u00f1o bajo; y ten\u00eda los brazos cubiertos de cicatrices y quemaduras. Su \u00fanica debilidad eran los chalecos.\n\n\u2014Danica, querida. \u2014Jaxon le hizo se\u00f1as para que se acercara\u2014. Ven y mira esto, \u00bfquieres?\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 es? \u2014pregunt\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Mi arma.\n\nDani y yo nos miramos. Ella solo llevaba una semana con nosotros, pero ya sab\u00eda c\u00f3mo era Jax.\n\n\u2014Veo que est\u00e1is celebrando una sesi\u00f3n de espiritismo \u2014observ\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Hoy no. \u2014Jax agit\u00f3 una mano\u2014. Empecemos.\n\nTuve que morderme la lengua para no mandar a Jax a la mierda. Siempre halagaba a los nuevos. Dani ten\u00eda un aura brillante, hiperactiva, que \u00e9l no hab\u00eda logrado identificar; pero estaba convencido, como siempre, de que ten\u00eda gran valor.\n\nMe sent\u00e9. Nick me limpi\u00f3 el brazo con un algod\u00f3n y me clav\u00f3 la jeringa.\n\n\u2014Hazlo \u2014me orden\u00f3 Jax\u2014. Lee al ilegible.\n\nEsper\u00e9 un momento a que mi sangre absorbiera la mezcla de f\u00e1rmacos; entonces cerr\u00e9 los ojos y busqu\u00e9 el \u00e9ter. Zeke se prepar\u00f3. Yo no pod\u00eda invadirlo (solo pod\u00eda acariciar su onirosaje, tantear los tenues matices de su superficie), pero su mente era tan sensible, que el m\u00e1s leve empujoncito pod\u00eda hacerle mucho da\u00f1o. Tendr\u00eda que ser muy cuidadosa.\n\nMi esp\u00edritu se desplaz\u00f3. Distingu\u00ed cinco onirosajes que tintineaban y se estremec\u00edan como m\u00f3viles de viento. El de Zeke era diferente. Su ta\u00f1ido era m\u00e1s serio, un acorde menor. Intent\u00e9 ver algo en su interior (un recuerdo, un temor), pero no hab\u00eda nada. Donde normalmente ve\u00eda im\u00e1genes borrosas, que parec\u00edan extra\u00eddas de una pel\u00edcula antigua, solo ve\u00eda negrura. Los recuerdos de Zeke estaban sellados.\n\nSal\u00ed bruscamente del \u00e9ter cuando una mano me agarr\u00f3 por el hombro. Zeke temblaba, tap\u00e1ndose las orejas con las manos.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Basta! \u2014Nick, detr\u00e1s de m\u00ed, me ayudaba a levantarme\u2014. Basta. No deber\u00edas obligar a Paige a hacer esto, Jaxon. No me importa cu\u00e1nto me pagues: me pagas con diamantes manchados de sangre. \u2014Abri\u00f3 la ventana con brusquedad\u2014. Vamos, Paige. Necesitas descansar.\n\nEstaba agotada; y aunque no lo hubiera estado, no habr\u00eda desobedecido a Nick. Los ojos de Jaxon lanzaban dardos que se me clavaban en la espalda. Al d\u00eda siguiente se le habr\u00eda pasado el enfado, despu\u00e9s de haberse bebido todo el vino. Sal\u00ed por la ventana y me agarr\u00e9 a la bajante; ve\u00eda borroso.\n\nNick ech\u00f3 a correr en cuanto pis\u00f3 el tejado. Y corr\u00eda mucho. Por suerte, todav\u00eda ten\u00eda adrenalina en las venas, o no habr\u00eda podido seguirlo.\n\nLo hac\u00edamos a menudo: tom\u00e1bamos un atajo por la ciudad. En teor\u00eda Londres ten\u00eda todo lo que yo odiaba: era enorme, gris y hostil, y llov\u00eda nueve de cada diez d\u00edas. Rug\u00eda, bombeaba y golpeaba como un coraz\u00f3n humano. Pero tras dos a\u00f1os de entrenamiento con Nick, aprendiendo a moverme por los tejados, la ciudadela se hab\u00eda convertido en mi refugio. Pod\u00eda sobrevolar el tr\u00e1fico y las cabezas de la DVN. Pod\u00eda correr como la sangre por el laberinto de calles y callejones. Estaba llena a rebosar, repleta de vida. Por lo menos all\u00ed fuera, era libre.\n\nNick baj\u00f3 a la calle. Seguimos corriendo por la concurrida acera hasta llegar a la esquina de Leicester Square. Sin parar para respirar, Nick empez\u00f3 a trepar por el edificio m\u00e1s cercano, contiguo al Hippodrome Casino. Hab\u00eda muchos sitios donde asirse, repisas y cornisas, pero dudaba que pudiera seguirlo. Ni siquiera la adrenalina pod\u00eda vencer mi fatiga.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 haces, Nick?\n\n\u2014Necesito despejar la mente. \u2014Sonaba cansado.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEn un casino?\n\n\u2014Arriba. \u2014Me tendi\u00f3 una mano\u2014. Vamos, _s\u00f6tnos_. Pareces a punto de quedarte dormida.\n\n\u2014Ya. Ver\u00e1s, es que no sab\u00eda que hoy les iba a dar una paliza a mi esp\u00edritu y a mi cuerpo. \u2014Dej\u00e9 que me subiera a la primera repisa, y una chica que fumaba un cigarrillo nos mir\u00f3 sorprendida\u2014. \u00bfHasta d\u00f3nde vamos a trepar?\n\n\u2014Hasta el terrado de este edificio. Si aguantas \u2014a\u00f1adi\u00f3.\n\n\u2014\u00bfY si no aguanto?\n\n\u2014Muy bien. Ag\u00e1rrate a m\u00ed. \u2014Se puso mis brazos alrededor del cuello\u2014. A ver, \u00bfcu\u00e1l es la regla de oro?\n\n\u2014No mirar hacia abajo.\n\n\u2014Correcto \u2014dijo imitando a Jax. Re\u00ed.\n\nLlegamos arriba sin problema y sin hacernos da\u00f1o. Nick trepaba a los edificios desde que hab\u00eda dado sus primeros pasos; encontraba puntos de apoyo donde no parec\u00eda haberlos. Volv\u00edamos a movernos por los tejados, y las calles hab\u00edan quedado muy abajo. Pis\u00e9 c\u00e9sped artificial. A mi izquierda vi una fuente peque\u00f1a, sin agua; y a mi derecha, un lecho de flores marchitas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 es esto?\n\n\u2014Un jard\u00edn de azotea. Lo encontr\u00e9 hace unas semanas. Nunca he visto que lo usen, y pens\u00e9 que ser\u00eda un buen refugio. \u2014Nick se apoy\u00f3 en la barandilla\u2014. Perd\u00f3name por sacarte de all\u00ed de esta forma, _s\u00f6tnos_. A veces Dials es un poco claustrof\u00f3bico.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, un poco.\n\nNo hablamos de lo que acababa de pasar. A Nick no le gustaban nada las t\u00e1cticas de Jaxon. Me tir\u00f3 una barrita de cereales. Nos quedamos contemplando el horizonte rosado y crepuscular, casi como si esper\u00e1ramos ver aparecer alg\u00fan barco.\n\n\u2014Paige, \u00bfhas estado enamorada alguna vez?\n\nMe tembl\u00f3 la mano. De pronto no pod\u00eda tragar lo que ten\u00eda en la boca: se me hab\u00eda cerrado la garganta.\n\n\u2014Creo que s\u00ed. \u2014Not\u00e9 escalofr\u00edos en los costados. Apoy\u00e9 la espalda en la barandilla\u2014. No s\u00e9... Puede que s\u00ed. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 me lo preguntas?\n\n\u2014Porque quiero que me digas qu\u00e9 se siente. Para saber si yo lo estoy o no.\n\nAsent\u00ed con la cabeza y trat\u00e9 de aparentar que estaba tranquila. En realidad mi cuerpo estaba sufriendo una reacci\u00f3n muy extra\u00f1a: ve\u00eda puntitos negros, se me iba la cabeza, ten\u00eda la palma de las manos sudadas y el coraz\u00f3n me lat\u00eda muy deprisa.\n\n\u2014A ver, dime \u2014dije.\n\nNick segu\u00eda contemplando el ocaso.\n\n\u2014Cuando te enamoras de alguien \u2014dijo\u2014, \u00bftienes una actitud protectora para con esa persona?\n\nEra una situaci\u00f3n extra\u00f1a por dos motivos. El primero, que yo estaba enamorada de Nick. Eso lo sab\u00eda desde hac\u00eda mucho tiempo, aunque nunca hubiera hecho nada al respecto. Y el segundo, porque Nick ten\u00eda veintisiete a\u00f1os y yo, dieciocho. Era como si nuestros roles naturales se hubieran invertido.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. \u2014Agach\u00e9 la cabeza\u2014. Bueno, creo que s\u00ed. Yo ten\u00eda... tengo una actitud protectora hacia \u00e9l.\n\n\u2014Y \u00bfte dan ganas, a veces, de... tocar a esa persona, sin m\u00e1s?\n\n\u2014Continuamente \u2014admit\u00ed con cierta timidez\u2014. O mejor dicho... quiero que \u00e9l me toque. Aunque solo sea...\n\n\u2014Que te abrace.\n\nAsent\u00ed con la cabeza, pero no lo mir\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Porque tengo la impresi\u00f3n de que entiendo a esa persona, y quiero que sea feliz. Pero no s\u00e9 c\u00f3mo hacerla feliz. De hecho, s\u00e9 que, si la amo, la har\u00e9 terriblemente desgraciada. \u2014Se le arrug\u00f3 la frente, como si fuera de papel\u2014. Ni siquiera s\u00e9 si debo arriesgarme a dec\u00edrselo, porque s\u00e9 cu\u00e1nta infelicidad provocar\u00e9. O creo que lo s\u00e9. \u00bfEs importante ser feliz, Paige?\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo puedes pensar que no es importante?\n\n\u2014Porque no s\u00e9 si la sinceridad es mejor que la felicidad. \u00bfSacrificamos la sinceridad para ser felices?\n\n\u2014A veces s\u00ed. Pero creo que es mejor ser sincero. Si no, vives una mentira.\n\nEscog\u00ed minuciosamente mis palabras, anim\u00e1ndolo a hablar y, al mismo tiempo, tratando de ignorar el estruendo que hab\u00eda dentro de mi cabeza.\n\n\u2014Porque hay que confiar.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\nMe ard\u00edan los ojos. Intent\u00e9 respirar despacio, pero una realidad terrible estaba invadiendo mi pensamiento: Nick no se refer\u00eda a m\u00ed.\n\nClaro, \u00e9l jam\u00e1s hab\u00eda insinuado que sintiera lo mismo que yo. Ni una sola palabra. Pero \u00bfqu\u00e9 hab\u00eda de todos los roces involuntarios, todas las horas de atenci\u00f3n, todas las veces que hab\u00edamos corrido juntos? \u00bfQu\u00e9 hab\u00eda de los dos \u00faltimos a\u00f1os de mi vida, cuando hab\u00eda pasado casi todos los d\u00edas y las noches con \u00e9l?\n\nNick miraba fijamente el cielo.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Mira! \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9?\n\nSe\u00f1al\u00f3 una estrella.\n\n\u2014Arcturus. Nunca la hab\u00eda visto brillar tanto.\n\nLa estrella ten\u00eda un tono anaranjado, y era enorme y muy brillante. Me sent\u00ed suficientemente peque\u00f1a para desaparecer.\n\n\u2014Bueno \u2014dije aparentando despreocupaci\u00f3n\u2014, \u00bfqui\u00e9n es? \u00bfDe qui\u00e9n crees que est\u00e1s enamorado?\n\nNick se llev\u00f3 una mano a la cabeza.\n\n\u2014De Zeke.\n\nAl principio no estaba segura de haberlo o\u00eddo bien.\n\n\u2014Zeke. \u2014Gir\u00e9 la cabeza y lo mir\u00e9\u2014. \u00bfZeke S\u00e1enz?\n\nNick movi\u00f3 la cabeza afirmativamente.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCrees que tengo alguna posibilidad? \u2014pregunt\u00f3 en voz baja\u2014. \u00bfCrees que podr\u00eda quererme?\n\nMe qued\u00e9 de piedra.\n\n\u2014Nunca me hab\u00edas dicho nada \u2014empec\u00e9. Me costaba respirar\u2014. No sab\u00eda que...\n\n\u2014No pod\u00edas saberlo. \u2014Se pas\u00f3 una mano por la cara\u2014. No puedo evitarlo, Paige. S\u00e9 que podr\u00eda encontrar a otra persona, pero no me apetece buscarla. No sabr\u00eda por d\u00f3nde empezar. Creo que Zeke es la persona m\u00e1s hermosa del mundo. Al principio cre\u00eda que eran imaginaciones m\u00edas, pero ya lleva un a\u00f1o con nosotros... \u2014Cerr\u00f3 los ojos\u2014. No puedo negarlo. Lo quiero de verdad.\n\nNo era yo. Me qued\u00e9 callada; sent\u00eda como si alguien me estuviera inyectando una sustancia sopor\u00edfera en las arterias. No era de m\u00ed de quien estaba enamorado.\n\n\u2014Creo que podr\u00eda ayudarle. \u2014Su voz denotaba verdadera pasi\u00f3n\u2014. Podr\u00eda ayudarle a enfrentarse al pasado. Podr\u00eda ayudarle a recordar cosas. Antes era suspirante. Yo podr\u00eda ayudarle a volver a o\u00edr las voces.\n\nOjal\u00e1 yo pudiera o\u00edr voces. Ojal\u00e1 pudiera o\u00edr a los esp\u00edritus, porque as\u00ed podr\u00eda escucharlos a ellos, y no a Nick. Ten\u00eda que concentrarme en no llorar. Pasara lo que pasase esa noche, no pod\u00eda llorar. No pensaba llorar, ni en broma. Nick ten\u00eda todo el derecho del mundo a amar a otra persona. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 no? Yo jam\u00e1s le hab\u00eda dicho ni una palabra de lo que sent\u00eda por \u00e9l. Deber\u00eda alegrarme por \u00e9l. Pero una parte de m\u00ed siempre hab\u00eda so\u00f1ado con que \u00e9l sintiera lo mismo, con que Nick hubiera estado esperando el momento adecuado para dec\u00edrmelo. Un momento como aquel.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 has sacado de su onirosaje? \u2014Nick se qued\u00f3 mir\u00e1ndome, esperando mi respuesta\u2014. \u00bfHas visto algo?\n\n\u2014Solo oscuridad.\n\n\u2014Yo podr\u00eda intentarlo. Quiz\u00e1 consiguiera enviarle una imagen. \u2014Esboz\u00f3 una sonrisa\u2014. O hablar con \u00e9l, como hacen las personas normales.\n\n\u2014\u00c9l te escuchar\u00eda \u2014dije\u2014. Si se lo dijeras. \u00bfC\u00f3mo sabes que \u00e9l no siente lo mismo por ti?\n\n\u2014Creo que ya tiene suficientes problemas. Adem\u00e1s, ya conoces las normas. Nada de relaciones. A Jaxon le dar\u00eda algo si se enterara.\n\n\u2014Que se joda. No es justo que tengas que aguantar esta situaci\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014He aguantado un a\u00f1o, _s\u00f6tnos_. Puedo aguantar m\u00e1s.\n\nNick ten\u00eda raz\u00f3n, claro. Jaxon no nos dejaba tener relaciones serias. No le gustaban las relaciones. Aunque Nick me hubiera querido, no habr\u00edamos podido estar juntos. Pero ahora la verdad me miraba a la cara, y mi sue\u00f1o se hac\u00eda a\u00f1icos; casi no pod\u00eda respirar. Aquel hombre no era m\u00edo. Nunca hab\u00eda sido m\u00edo. Y por mucho que yo lo quisiera, nunca ser\u00eda m\u00edo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 no me hab\u00edas dicho nada? \u2014Me agarr\u00e9 a la barandilla\u2014. Ya s\u00e9 que no es asunto m\u00edo, pero...\n\n\u2014No quer\u00eda que te preocuparas. T\u00fa ya ten\u00edas tus propios problemas. Sab\u00eda que Jax se interesar\u00eda por ti, pero te ha hecho la vida imposible. Todav\u00eda te trata como si fueras un juguete nuevo. Hace que me arrepienta de haberte metido en esto.\n\n\u2014No digas eso. \u2014Me di la vuelta y le apret\u00e9 la mano, demasiado fuerte\u2014. T\u00fa me salvaste, Nick. Tarde o temprano me habr\u00eda vuelto loca. Ten\u00eda que saberlo, o siempre me habr\u00eda sentido marginada. T\u00fa hiciste que sintiera que formaba parte de algo; parte de muchas cosas, en realidad. Nunca podr\u00e9 agradec\u00e9rtelo lo suficiente.\n\nNick me miraba con gesto de sorpresa.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEst\u00e1s llorando?\n\n\u2014No. \u2014Le solt\u00e9 la mano\u2014. Mira, tengo que irme. He quedado con una persona \u2014le ment\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Espera, Paige. No te vayas. \u2014Me agarr\u00f3 por la mu\u00f1eca y me retuvo\u2014. Te he molestado, \u00bfverdad? \u00bfQu\u00e9 pasa?\n\n\u2014No estoy molesta.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed lo est\u00e1s. Espera un momento, por favor.\n\n\u2014De verdad, tengo que irme, Nick.\n\n\u2014Nunca has tenido que irte cuando te necesitaba.\n\n\u2014Lo siento. \u2014Me ce\u00f1\u00ed el blazer\u2014. Si quieres un consejo, vuelve a la base y dile a Zeke lo que sientes. Si le queda algo de cordura, te dir\u00e1 que s\u00ed. \u2014Lo mir\u00e9 y compuse una sonrisa triste\u2014. Es lo que te dir\u00eda yo.\n\nY entonces lo vi. Primero, confusi\u00f3n; luego, incredulidad; y por \u00faltimo, consternaci\u00f3n. Lo sab\u00eda.\n\n\u2014Paige...\n\n\u2014Es tarde. \u2014Pas\u00e9 una pierna por encima de la barandilla. Me temblaban las manos\u2014. Nos vemos el lunes, \u00bfvale?\n\n\u2014No. Espera, Paige. Espera.\n\n\u2014Por favor, Nick.\n\nNo insisti\u00f3, pero segu\u00eda mir\u00e1ndome con los ojos muy abiertos. Baj\u00e9 por la fachada del edificio y lo dej\u00e9 all\u00ed de pie, bajo la luna. Hasta que llegu\u00e9 abajo no brotaron las primeras y \u00fanicas l\u00e1grimas. Cerr\u00e9 los ojos e inspir\u00e9 el aire nocturno.\n\nNo s\u00e9 muy bien c\u00f3mo llegu\u00e9 al I-5. Quiz\u00e1 tomara el metro. Quiz\u00e1 fuera a pie. Mi padre no hab\u00eda vuelto del trabajo; no me estaba esperando. Me qued\u00e9 un rato de pie en medio del apartamento vac\u00edo, mirando por la ventana del sal\u00f3n. Por primera vez desde que era ni\u00f1a, me habr\u00eda gustado tener una madre, o una hermana, o al menos una amiga. Una amiga que no tuviera nada que ver con los Sellos. Pero no ten\u00eda ninguna de esas cosas. No sab\u00eda qu\u00e9 hacer, ni c\u00f3mo sentirme. \u00bfQu\u00e9 habr\u00eda hecho una chica amaur\u00f3tica en mi situaci\u00f3n? Pasarse una semana metida en la cama, seguramente. Pero yo no era una chica amaur\u00f3tica, y en realidad no hab\u00eda cortado con nadie. Solo con un sue\u00f1o. Un sue\u00f1o infantil.\n\nRecord\u00e9 mi \u00e9poca de colegiala, cuando era la \u00fanica vidente rodeada de amaur\u00f3ticos. Suzette, una de mis pocas amigas, hab\u00eda roto con su novio el \u00faltimo a\u00f1o. Intent\u00e9 recordar qu\u00e9 hab\u00eda hecho: no se hab\u00eda pasado una semana metida en la cama. \u00bfQu\u00e9 hab\u00eda hecho? Un momento... S\u00ed, ya me acordaba. Me hab\u00eda enviado un mensaje para pedirme que la acompa\u00f1ara a un club. \u00abQuiero bailar para olvidar mis problemas\u00bb, me hab\u00eda dicho. Yo me hab\u00eda inventado alguna excusa, como siempre.\n\nAquella ser\u00eda mi noche. Yo tambi\u00e9n bailar\u00eda para olvidar mis problemas. Olvidar\u00eda lo que hab\u00eda pasado. Me librar\u00eda de aquel dolor.\n\nMe quit\u00e9 la ropa, me di una ducha, me sequ\u00e9 y me alis\u00e9 el pelo. Me puse pintalabios, r\u00edmel y kohl. Me puse un poco de perfume en los pulsos. Me pellizqu\u00e9 las mejillas para darles color. Cuando hube terminado, me puse un vestido negro de encaje y unas sandalias de tac\u00f3n y sal\u00ed del apartamento.\n\nEl vigilante me mir\u00f3 extra\u00f1ado cuando pas\u00e9 a su lado.\n\nTom\u00e9 un taxi. En el East End hab\u00eda un tugurio al que sol\u00eda ir Nadine, donde los d\u00edas laborables serv\u00edan _mecks_ barato (y a veces alcohol aut\u00e9ntico, ilegal). Era una zona dura del II-6, considerada uno de los pocos sitios donde los videntes pod\u00edan moverse sin peligro: ni a los _centis_ les gustaba entrar all\u00ed.\n\nUn gorila con traje y sombrero vigilaba la entrada. Me hizo una se\u00f1a para indicarme que pod\u00eda pasar.\n\nDentro estaba oscuro y hac\u00eda calor. El local, peque\u00f1o, estaba abarrotado de cuerpos sudorosos. Una barra discurr\u00eda a lo largo de una pared; en un extremo serv\u00edan ox\u00edgeno y en el otro, _mecks_. A la derecha de la barra hab\u00eda una pista de baile. Casi todos los clientes eran amaur\u00f3ticos, _hapsters_ con pantalones de tweed, sombreritos y pajaritas de colores llamativos. No sab\u00eda qu\u00e9 demonios hac\u00eda all\u00ed, mirando a unos amaur\u00f3ticos brincar al son de una m\u00fasica ensordecedora, pero eso era lo que quer\u00eda: actuar espont\u00e1neamente, olvidar el mundo real.\n\nLlevaba nueve a\u00f1os adorando a Nick. Cortar\u00eda por lo sano. Ni siquiera me parar\u00eda a pensar qu\u00e9 sent\u00eda.\n\nFui a la barra de ox\u00edgeno y me sent\u00e9 en un taburete. El camarero me mir\u00f3 de arriba abajo, pero no me dijo nada. Era vidente (profeta, concretamente); era l\u00f3gico que no quisiera hablar conmigo. Pero no pas\u00f3 mucho rato hasta que alguien m\u00e1s se fij\u00f3 en m\u00ed.\n\nEn el otro extremo de la barra hab\u00eda un grupo de chicos, seguramente alumnos de la USL. Eran todos amaur\u00f3ticos, por supuesto; muy pocos videntes llegaban a la universidad. Me dispon\u00eda a pedir un vaso de Floxy cuando se me acerc\u00f3 uno. Tendr\u00eda diecinueve o veinte a\u00f1os; iba bien afeitado y estaba un poco bronceado. Deb\u00eda de haber pasado su a\u00f1o de intercambio en otra ciudadela. Scion Atenas, quiz\u00e1. Llevaba una gorra de b\u00e9isbol que le tapaba el pelo, casta\u00f1o oscuro.\n\n\u2014Hola \u2014me dijo subiendo la voz para hacerse o\u00edr por encima de la m\u00fasica\u2014. \u00bfHas venido sola?\n\nDije que s\u00ed con la cabeza. El chico se sent\u00f3 a mi lado.\n\n\u2014Me llamo Reuben \u2014se present\u00f3\u2014. \u00bfPuedo invitarte a una copa?\n\n\u2014 _Mecks_ \u2014dije\u2014. Si no te importa.\n\n\u2014Claro que no. \u2014Le hizo se\u00f1as al camarero, al que era evidente que conoc\u00eda\u2014. _Mecks_ sangre, Gresham.\n\nEl camarero me sirvi\u00f3 el _mecks_ sangre con el ce\u00f1o fruncido, pero no dijo nada. Era el sustituto del alcohol m\u00e1s caro, hecho con cerezas, uvas negras y ciruelas. Reuben se inclin\u00f3 para hablarme al o\u00eddo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfA qu\u00e9 has venido?\n\n\u2014A nada especial.\n\n\u2014\u00bfNo tienes novio?\n\n\u2014Puede que s\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Yo acabo de romper con mi novia. Y cuando te he visto entrar, he pensado... Bueno, he pensado cosas que seguramente no deber\u00eda pensar al ver entrar a una chica guapa en un bar. Pero entonces he pensado que una chica tan guapa como t\u00fa deb\u00eda de haber venido con su novio. \u00bfNo es as\u00ed?\n\n\u2014No \u2014dije\u2014. He venido sola.\n\nGresham desliz\u00f3 mi vaso de _mecks_ por la superficie de la barra.\n\n\u2014Ser\u00e1n dos \u2014dijo.\n\nReuben le dio dos monedas de oro.\n\n\u2014Supongo que tienes dieciocho a\u00f1os, \u00bfno, joven?\n\nLe mostr\u00e9 mi documento de identidad, y \u00e9l sigui\u00f3 limpiando vasos, pero sin quitarme los ojos de encima. Me pregunt\u00e9 qu\u00e9 ser\u00eda lo que le preocupaba: \u00bfmi edad, mi aspecto, mi aura? Seguramente las tres cosas.\n\nVolv\u00ed de golpe a la realidad cuando Reuben se acerc\u00f3 m\u00e1s a m\u00ed. Le ol\u00eda el aliento a manzanas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfVas a la universidad? \u2014me pregunt\u00f3.\n\n\u2014No.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 haces?\n\n\u2014Trabajo en un bar de ox\u00edgeno.\n\nAsinti\u00f3 con la cabeza y dio un trago de su copa.\n\nNo sab\u00eda c\u00f3mo hacerlo. C\u00f3mo dar la se\u00f1al. \u00bfHab\u00eda que dar alguna se\u00f1al? Lo mir\u00e9 a los ojos y le pas\u00e9 la punta del zapato por la pantorrilla. Me pareci\u00f3 que funcionaba, porque mir\u00f3 a sus amigos, que hab\u00edan retomado su juego.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQuieres que vayamos a alg\u00fan sitio? \u2014dijo con voz grave y ronca. \u00abAhora o nunca\u00bb, me dije, y asent\u00ed con la cabeza.\n\nReuben entrelaz\u00f3 los dedos con los m\u00edos y me gui\u00f3 entre el gent\u00edo. Gresham me observaba. Deb\u00eda de pensar que era una fresca.\n\nComprend\u00ed que Reuben no me estaba llevando al rinc\u00f3n oscuro que yo me hab\u00eda imaginado, sino a los lavabos. O eso cre\u00ed hasta que salimos por otra puerta que daba al aparcamiento del personal. Era un espacio rectangular diminuto, donde solo cab\u00edan seis coches. Vale, quer\u00eda intimidad. L\u00f3gico, \u00bfno? Al menos significaba que no buscaba \u00fanicamente fardar delante de sus amigos.\n\nAntes de que pudiera darme cuenta de lo que estaba pasando, Reuben me empuj\u00f3 contra la sucia pared de ladrillo. Ol\u00eda a sudor y a tabaco. Empez\u00f3 a desabrocharse el cintur\u00f3n, y me qued\u00e9 de piedra.\n\n\u2014Espera \u2014dije\u2014. Yo no quer\u00eda...\n\n\u2014Venga, solo es un poco de diversi\u00f3n. Adem\u00e1s... \u2014dej\u00f3 caer el cintur\u00f3n\u2014... no le hacemos da\u00f1o a nadie.\n\nMe bes\u00f3. Ten\u00eda los labios firmes. Una lengua h\u00fameda se introdujo en mi boca, y not\u00e9 un sabor artificial. Nunca me hab\u00edan besado. No estaba segura de si me gustaba.\n\nReuben ten\u00eda raz\u00f3n. Un poco de diversi\u00f3n. Claro. \u00bfQu\u00e9 pod\u00eda pasar? La gente normal lo hac\u00eda, \u00bfno? Beb\u00edan, hac\u00edan estupideces y luego ten\u00edan relaciones sexuales. Eso era precisamente lo que yo necesitaba. Jax no nos lo prohib\u00eda: lo que no quer\u00eda era que nos comprometi\u00e9ramos. Yo no pensaba comprometerme. Nada de ataduras. Eliza lo hac\u00eda.\n\nMi cabeza me dec\u00eda que parara. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 hac\u00eda aquello? \u00bfC\u00f3mo hab\u00eda acabado all\u00ed, a oscuras, con un desconocido? As\u00ed no iba a demostrar nada. No iba a aliviar mi dolor, sino a empeorarlo. Pero Reuben se hab\u00eda arrodillado y me estaba subiendo el vestido hasta la cintura. Me bes\u00f3 el vientre desnudo.\n\n\u2014Eres preciosa.\n\nYo no me consideraba ni m\u00ednimamente guapa.\n\n\u2014No me has dicho c\u00f3mo te llamas.\n\nResigui\u00f3 el borde de mis bragas. Me estremec\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Eva \u2014ment\u00ed.\n\nLa idea de tener relaciones con \u00e9l me repugnaba. No lo conoc\u00eda de nada. No lo quer\u00eda. Pero razon\u00e9 que eso era porque todav\u00eda estaba enamorada de Nick, y ten\u00eda que borrarlo de mi mente. Agarr\u00e9 a Reuben por el pelo y estamp\u00e9 los labios contra los suyos. \u00c9l dio una especie de gru\u00f1ido, me levant\u00f3 y puso mis piernas alrededor de su cintura.\n\nNot\u00e9 un estremecimiento. No lo hab\u00eda hecho nunca. \u00bfNo dec\u00edan que la primera vez ten\u00eda que ser especial? No, no pod\u00eda parar. Ten\u00eda que continuar.\n\nLa luz de la farola parpadeaba un poco y me deslumbraba. Reuben apoy\u00f3 las manos en la pared de ladrillo. Yo no sab\u00eda qu\u00e9 esperar. Era emocionante.\n\nY de pronto sent\u00ed dolor. Un dolor intenso, apabullante. Como si me hubieran pegado un gancho en el est\u00f3mago.\n\nReuben no ten\u00eda ni idea de qu\u00e9 hab\u00eda pasado. Esper\u00e9 a que se me pasara, pero no se me pas\u00f3. \u00c9l not\u00f3 mi tensi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEst\u00e1s bien?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, s\u00ed \u2014dije en voz baja.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEs la primera vez?\n\n\u2014No, qu\u00e9 va.\n\nMe acerc\u00f3 la cabeza al cuello y me bes\u00f3 desde el hombro hasta la oreja. Volv\u00ed a sentir aquel dolor, pero m\u00e1s fuerte: un dolor salvaje, atroz. Reuben se apart\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Es la primera vez \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014No importa.\n\n\u2014Mira, no creo que...\n\n\u2014Vale. \u2014Lo apart\u00e9 de m\u00ed\u2014. Pues... d\u00e9jame en paz. No quiero saber nada de ti ni de nadie.\n\nMe separ\u00e9 de la pared, me baj\u00e9 el vestido y volv\u00ed al bar. Llegu\u00e9 al lavabo justo a tiempo y vomit\u00e9. El dolor me sacud\u00eda los muslos y el est\u00f3mago. Me dobl\u00e9 por la cintura sobre el v\u00e1ter, tosiendo y sollozando. Jam\u00e1s me hab\u00eda sentido tan est\u00fapida.\n\nPens\u00e9 en Nick. Pens\u00e9 en los a\u00f1os que hab\u00eda pasado so\u00f1ando con \u00e9l, pregunt\u00e1ndome si alg\u00fan d\u00eda volver\u00eda a verlo. Y pens\u00e9 en \u00e9l ahora, imagin\u00e9 su sonrisa, c\u00f3mo se preocupaba por m\u00ed; y era in\u00fatil, porque lo quer\u00eda a \u00e9l. Apoy\u00e9 la cabeza en los brazos y llor\u00e9.\n\nLa intensidad del recuerdo me dej\u00f3 largo rato inconsciente. Hab\u00eda revivido cada detalle de aquella noche, hasta el m\u00e1s d\u00e9bil temblor. Despert\u00e9 en medio de una oscuridad total; no sab\u00eda qu\u00e9 hora era.\n\nEn el gram\u00f3fono sonaba \u00abIt's a Sin to Tell a Lie\u00bb a un volumen muy bajo.\n\nHabr\u00eda podido mostrarle muchos recuerdos (las revueltas de Molly, el duelo de mi padre, la crueldad de mis compa\u00f1eras) y, sin embargo, le hab\u00eda ense\u00f1ado la noche en que el chico del que estaba enamorada me hab\u00eda rechazado. Parec\u00eda algo peque\u00f1o e insignificante, pero era mi \u00fanico recuerdo normal, humano. La \u00fanica vez que me hab\u00eda entregado a un desconocido. La \u00fanica vez que se me hab\u00eda partido el coraz\u00f3n.\n\nYo no cre\u00eda en corazones. Cre\u00eda en onirosajes y esp\u00edritus: eso era lo que importaba. Era con lo que se ganaba dinero. Pero aquel d\u00eda se me hab\u00eda partido el coraz\u00f3n. Por primera vez en la vida me hab\u00eda visto obligada a reconocer que ten\u00eda coraz\u00f3n, y a reconocer su fragilidad. Mi coraz\u00f3n era vulnerable. Y pod\u00eda humillarme.\n\nYa era mayor; quiz\u00e1 hubiera cambiado. Quiz\u00e1 hubiera madurado, quiz\u00e1 fuera m\u00e1s fuerte. Ya no era aquella ni\u00f1a adolescente, desesperada por conectar con alguien, por encontrar a alguien en quien apoyarse. Esa ni\u00f1a hab\u00eda dejado de existir hac\u00eda mucho tiempo. Me hab\u00eda convertido en un arma, un t\u00edtere de las maquinaciones de otros. No sab\u00eda cu\u00e1l de las dos cosas era peor.\n\nUna lengua de fuego segu\u00eda acariciando las brasas de la chimenea y proyectaba su luz sobre la figura junto a la ventana.\n\n\u2014Bienvenida.\n\nNo contest\u00e9. El Custodio lade\u00f3 la cabeza y me mir\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Adelante \u2014dije\u2014. Debes de tener algo que decir.\n\n\u2014No, Paige.\n\nHubo un momento de silencio.\n\n\u2014Crees que fui est\u00fapida. Tienes raz\u00f3n. \u2014Me mir\u00e9 las manos\u2014. Solo quer\u00eda...\n\n\u2014Que te vieran. \u2014Mir\u00f3 hacia el fuego\u2014. Creo que entiendo por qu\u00e9 te afecta tanto ese recuerdo. Es de donde surge tu mayor miedo: que no exista nada m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de tu don. M\u00e1s all\u00e1 de la onir\u00e1mbula. Esa es la parte de ti que consideras verdaderamente valiosa: tu sustento. Lo dem\u00e1s lo perdiste en Irlanda. Ahora dependes de Jaxon Hall, que te trata como una mercanc\u00eda. Para \u00e9l no eres m\u00e1s que carne injertada en un fantasma; un don valios\u00edsimo con envoltorio humano. Pero Nick Nyg\u00e5rd te mostr\u00f3 algo m\u00e1s que eso.\n\n\u00bbEsa noche te abri\u00f3 los ojos. Cuando te enteraste de que Nick amaba a otro, te enfrentaste a tu mayor temor: no ser reconocida como ser humano, como la suma de todas tus partes. No ser m\u00e1s que una curiosidad. No ten\u00edas m\u00e1s remedio que demostrarte a ti misma lo contrario. Buscar al primero que te quisiera, alguien que no supiera nada de la onir\u00e1mbula. Era lo \u00fanico que te quedaba.\n\n\u2014Ni se te ocurra compadecerte de m\u00ed \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014No me compadezco. Pero s\u00e9 lo que se siente cuando te quieren solo por lo que eres.\n\n\u2014No volver\u00e1 a pasar.\n\n\u2014Pero tu soledad no te protegi\u00f3, \u00bfverdad?\n\nDesvi\u00e9 la mirada. Me fastidiaba que \u00e9l lo supiera. Me fastidiaba haber permitido que me descubriera. El Custodio se sent\u00f3 a mi lado en la cama.\n\n\u2014La mente de los amaur\u00f3ticos es como el agua. Anodina, gris, transparente. Suficiente para sostener la vida, pero nada m\u00e1s. En cambio, la mente de los clarividentes se parece m\u00e1s al aceite, es mucho m\u00e1s rica. Y como ocurre con el agua y el aceite, nunca llegan a mezclarse del todo.\n\n\u2014Lo dices porque \u00e9l era amaur\u00f3tico...\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\nAl menos, ahora sab\u00eda que no ten\u00eda ning\u00fan defecto f\u00edsico. Nunca hab\u00eda tenido valor para hablar con un m\u00e9dico sobre lo que me hab\u00eda pasado aquella noche. Los m\u00e9dicos de Scion eran fr\u00edos e implacables en lo relativo a esos asuntos.\n\nEntonces se me ocurri\u00f3 una cosa.\n\n\u2014Si las mentes de los videntes son como el aceite \u2014dije escogiendo con cuidado mis palabras\u2014, \u00bfc\u00f3mo son las vuestras?\n\nPor un instante cre\u00ed que no me iba a contestar. Al final el Custodio dijo:\n\n\u2014Fuego.\n\nEsa \u00fanica palabra, pronunciada en voz baja, me hizo estremecer. Pens\u00e9 en lo que pasaba cuando se un\u00edan el aceite y el fuego: explotaban.\n\nNo. No pod\u00eda pensar en \u00e9l as\u00ed. \u00c9l no era humano. Que me entendiera o no era irrelevante. Segu\u00eda siendo mi guardi\u00e1n, un refa\u00edta, todo lo que hab\u00eda sido desde el principio.\n\nSe volvi\u00f3 y me mir\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Paige \u2014dijo\u2014, he visto otro recuerdo. Antes de que perdieras el conocimiento.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCu\u00e1l?\n\n\u2014Sangre. Mucha sangre.\n\nSacud\u00ed la cabeza; estaba demasiado cansada para pensar.\n\n\u2014Seguramente, cuando se manifest\u00f3 mi clarividencia. En los recuerdos de la duende hab\u00eda mucha sangre.\n\n\u2014No. Ese recuerdo ya lo hab\u00eda visto. Me refiero a otro en el que hab\u00eda mucha m\u00e1s sangre. Por todas partes, y te asfixiaba.\n\n\u2014No s\u00e9 de qu\u00e9 me hablas.\n\nEra la verdad. No sab\u00eda de qu\u00e9 pod\u00eda tratarse.\n\nEl Custodio se qued\u00f3 mir\u00e1ndome un momento.\n\n\u2014Duerme un poco m\u00e1s \u2014dijo por fin\u2014. Ma\u00f1ana, cuando despiertes, piensa en cosas mejores.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor ejemplo?\n\n\u2014Por ejemplo, en c\u00f3mo escapar de esta ciudad. Cuando llegue el momento, debes estar preparada.\n\n\u2014Entonces \u00bfvas a ayudarme? \u2014Como no me contestaba, perd\u00ed la paciencia\u2014. Te lo he ense\u00f1ado todo: mi vida, mis recuerdos. Y, sin embargo, sigo sin tener ni idea de cu\u00e1les son tus motivos. Dime, \u00bfqu\u00e9 quieres?\n\n\u2014Mientras Nashira nos tenga a los dos dominados, cuanto menos sepas, mejor. As\u00ed, si vuelve a interrogarte, podr\u00e1s decir que no sabes nada del asunto.\n\n\u2014\u00bfDe qu\u00e9 \u00abasunto\u00bb?\n\n\u2014Eres muy insistente.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 crees que sigo viva?\n\n\u2014Porque te has hecho inmune al peligro. \u2014Se dio en las rodillas con la palma de las manos\u2014. No puedo revelarte mis motivos. Pero, si quieres, te explicar\u00e9 una cosa sobre la flor roja.\n\nEsa proposici\u00f3n me pill\u00f3 por sorpresa.\n\n\u2014Adelante.\n\n\u2014\u00bfConoces la historia de Adonis?\n\n\u2014En las escuelas de Scion no ense\u00f1an a los cl\u00e1sicos.\n\n\u2014Claro. Perd\u00f3name.\n\n\u2014Espera. \u2014Pens\u00e9 en los libros robados de Jax. A Jax le encantaba la mitolog\u00eda. Dec\u00eda que era deliciosamente il\u00edcita\u2014. \u00bfEra un dios?\n\n\u2014Era el amante de Afrodita. Era un cazador joven, atractivo y mortal. Afrodita estaba tan prendada de su belleza que prefer\u00eda su compa\u00f1\u00eda a la de los otros dioses. Seg\u00fan la leyenda, el pretendiente de Afrodita, el rey de la guerra Ares, se puso tan celoso que se convirti\u00f3 en jabal\u00ed y mat\u00f3 a Adonis. El joven muri\u00f3 en los brazos de Afrodita, y su sangre manch\u00f3 la tierra.\n\n\u00bbMientras mec\u00eda el cad\u00e1ver de su amado, Afrodita rociaba su sangre con n\u00e9ctar. Y de la sangre de Adonis brot\u00f3 la an\u00e9mona: una flor ef\u00edmera, tan roja como la sangre; y el esp\u00edritu de Adonis acab\u00f3, como todos los esp\u00edritus, languideciendo en el Averno. Zeus oy\u00f3 llorar desconsoladamente a Afrodita, se compadeci\u00f3 de la diosa y accedi\u00f3 a dejar que Adonis pasara la mitad del a\u00f1o vivo y la otra mitad, muerto.\n\nEl Custodio me mir\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Pi\u00e9nsalo, Paige. Quiz\u00e1 no existan los monstruos, pero vuestra mitolog\u00eda encierra algunas verdades.\n\n\u2014No me digas que sois dioses. Creo que no podr\u00eda soportar la idea de que Nashira fuera sagrada.\n\n\u2014Somos muchas cosas, pero \u00absagrados\u00bb no es una de ellas. \u2014Hizo una pausa y agreg\u00f3\u2014: Ya he hablado demasiado. Necesitas descansar.\n\n\u2014No estoy cansada.\n\n\u2014Aun as\u00ed, deber\u00edas dormir. Ma\u00f1ana por la noche quiero ense\u00f1arte una cosa.\n\nMe recost\u00e9 en las almohadas. La verdad era que s\u00ed estaba cansada.\n\n\u2014Esto no significa que conf\u00ede en ti \u2014dije\u2014. Solo significa que lo intento.\n\n\u2014En ese caso, no puedo pedir m\u00e1s. \u2014Dio unas palmaditas en las s\u00e1banas\u2014. Que duermas bien, peque\u00f1a So\u00f1adora.\n\nNo aguantaba m\u00e1s. Me di la vuelta y cerr\u00e9 los ojos; segu\u00ed pensando en flores rojas y dioses.\n\nMe despertaron unos golpes. Detr\u00e1s de la ventana el cielo estaba te\u00f1ido de rosa. Vi al Custodio de pie junto a la chimenea, con una mano en la repisa. Dirigi\u00f3 la mirada hacia la puerta.\n\n\u2014Esc\u00f3ndete, Paige \u2014dijo\u2014. R\u00e1pido.\n\nMe levant\u00e9 de la cama y fui derecha a la puerta detr\u00e1s de las cortinas. La dej\u00e9 un poco entornada, tap\u00e9 la rendija con la cortina de terciopelo rojo y me puse a escuchar. Desde donde estaba ve\u00eda la chimenea.\n\nSe abri\u00f3 la puerta de la c\u00e1mara y entr\u00f3 Nashira; la luz del fuego la ilumin\u00f3. Deb\u00eda de tener una llave de la torre del Custodio. El Custodio se arrodill\u00f3, pero no complet\u00f3 el ritual. Nashira pas\u00f3 una mano por la cama.\n\n\u2014\u00bfD\u00f3nde est\u00e1?\n\n\u2014Durmiendo \u2014contest\u00f3 el Custodio.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEn su habitaci\u00f3n?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Mentiroso. Duerme aqu\u00ed. Las s\u00e1banas huelen a ella. \u2014Le agarr\u00f3 la barbilla con los dedos desnudos\u2014. \u00bfEst\u00e1s seguro de que quieres ir por ese camino?\n\n\u2014No s\u00e9 qu\u00e9 quieres decir. No pienso en nada ni en nadie m\u00e1s que en ti.\n\n\u2014Puede ser. \u2014Sus dedos se tensaron\u2014. Las cadenas siguen colgadas. No pienses ni por un instante que dudar\u00e9 en enviarte otra vez a la Casa. No pienses ni por un instante que se repetir\u00e1 lo que sucedi\u00f3 en la Era XVIII. Si se repite, no quedar\u00e1 nadie con vida. Ni siquiera t\u00fa. Esta vez, no. \u00bfMe has entendido?\n\nComo \u00e9l no contestaba, le peg\u00f3 en la cara.\n\nDi un respingo.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Cont\u00e9stame!\n\n\u2014He tenido veinte a\u00f1os para reflexionar sobre mi insensatez. Ten\u00edas raz\u00f3n. No se puede confiar en los humanos.\n\nHubo un breve silencio.\n\n\u2014Me alegra o\u00edrlo \u2014dijo Nashira con tono m\u00e1s suave\u2014. Todo ir\u00e1 bien. Pronto tendremos esta torre para nosotros solos. Podr\u00e1s cumplir tu promesa.\n\nEstaba loca. \u00bfC\u00f3mo pod\u00eda pegarle y, a continuaci\u00f3n, hacer una declaraci\u00f3n as\u00ed?\n\n\u2014\u00bfSignifica eso \u2014dijo el Custodio\u2014 que a 40 se le ha agotado el tiempo?\n\nMe qued\u00e9 inm\u00f3vil, escuchando.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1 preparada. S\u00e9 que posey\u00f3 a 12 en la ciudadela. Me lo dijo tu prima. \u2014Le acarici\u00f3 el ment\u00f3n\u2014. Has cultivado muy bien su don.\n\n\u2014Para ti, mi soberana. \u2014Levant\u00f3 la cabeza y la mir\u00f3\u2014. \u00bfPiensas reclamarla en privado? \u00bfO mostrar\u00e1s a todo Scion tu gran poder?\n\n\u2014Cualquiera de las dos cosas bastar\u00e1. Por fin podr\u00e9 onirambulear. Por fin tendr\u00e9 el poder de invadir, de poseer. Y todo gracias a ti, mi querido Arcturus. \u2014Puso un vial en la repisa de la chimenea, y su tono de voz volvi\u00f3 a enfriarse\u2014. Esta ser\u00e1 tu \u00faltima dosis de amaranto hasta el Bicentenario. Creo que necesitas tiempo para reflexionar sobre tus cicatrices. Para recordar por qu\u00e9 debes mirar hacia el futuro y no hacia el pasado.\n\n\u2014Soportar\u00e9 cualquier cosa que me pidas.\n\n\u2014No tendr\u00e1s que sufrir mucho tiempo. Pronto alcanzaremos la gloria. \u2014Se volvi\u00f3 hacia la puerta\u2014. Cuida de ella, Arcturus.\n\nLa puerta se cerr\u00f3. El Custodio se levant\u00f3. Esper\u00e9: quer\u00eda ver qu\u00e9 hac\u00eda. Entonces dio un pu\u00f1etazo y destroz\u00f3 la urna de cristal de la repisa de la chimenea. Me met\u00ed en la cama y me puse a escuchar el silencio.\n\nNo era mi enemigo, como yo cre\u00eda.\n\nNashira hab\u00eda dicho que volver\u00eda a llevarlo a la Casa. Eso era una prueba de que hab\u00eda participado en la Era de Huesos XVIII. Una prueba de su traici\u00f3n. Eso era lo que hab\u00eda querido decir Thuban cuando hab\u00eda amenazado a Terebell. Hab\u00edan intentado ayudarnos y los hab\u00edan castigado por ello. Hab\u00edan escogido el bando equivocado, el de los perdedores.\n\nMe pas\u00e9 horas dando vueltas en la cama. No pod\u00eda parar de pensar en la conversaci\u00f3n que hab\u00eda o\u00eddo ni en la bofetada que Nashira le hab\u00eda dado al Custodio. En c\u00f3mo \u00e9l se hab\u00eda arrodillado ante ella. En que pronto, muy pronto, Nashira pensaba deshacerse de m\u00ed. Me quit\u00e9 las s\u00e1banas de encima y me qued\u00e9 tumbada en la oscuridad con los ojos abiertos. Hab\u00eda tardado mucho tiempo en entender que el Custodio estaba en el mismo bando que yo.\n\nMe acord\u00e9 de las cicatrices que ten\u00eda Terebell en la espalda, esas que Thuban Sargas hab\u00eda mencionado con un deje de crueldad. Su familia y \u00e9l hab\u00edan marcado a Terebell. El Custodio y ella eran los marcados. Hab\u00eda ocurrido algo terrible en la Casa despu\u00e9s de ese d\u00eda, el Novembertide de 2039. Yo no conoc\u00eda a Terebell, pero ella me hab\u00eda salvado la vida; estaba en deuda con ella. Y estaba en deuda con el Custodio por cuidar de m\u00ed.\n\nSi hab\u00eda algo que no pod\u00eda soportar era estar en deuda con alguien. Pero la pr\u00f3xima vez que el Custodio me hablara, le escuchar\u00eda. Me incorpor\u00e9. No: no la pr\u00f3xima vez, sino en ese mismo momento. Necesitaba hablar con \u00e9l. Confiar en \u00e9l era mi \u00fanica salida. No estaba dispuesta a morir all\u00ed. Necesitaba saber de una vez por todas qu\u00e9 quer\u00eda Arcturus Mesarthim. Necesitaba saber si estaba dispuesto a ayudarme.\n\nMe levant\u00e9 de la cama y baj\u00e9 a la c\u00e1mara. La encontr\u00e9 vac\u00eda. Fuera llov\u00eda a c\u00e1ntaros. El reloj de pared dio las cuatro de la madrugada. Cog\u00ed la nota que hab\u00eda encima del escritorio.\n\nHe ido a la capilla. Volver\u00e9 antes del amanecer.\n\nNo me importaba no dormir. Estaba harta de juegos, de hablar en idiomas diferentes con \u00e9l. Me calc\u00e9 las botas y sal\u00ed de la torre.\n\nEn la calle soplaba un fuerte viento. En el patio hab\u00eda una vigilante. Esper\u00e9 a que hubiera pasado antes de salir corriendo. Los truenos y la oscuridad me cubr\u00edan, y me permitieron escabullirme sin ser vista. Pero por encima de la lluvia se o\u00eda otro sonido: m\u00fasica. La segu\u00ed hasta otro pasillo, donde encontr\u00e9 una gran puerta entornada. Detr\u00e1s hab\u00eda una peque\u00f1a capilla, separada del resto del edificio por una celos\u00eda de piedra muy elaborada. La luz de las velas parpadeaba en la oscuridad. Hab\u00eda alguien tocando un \u00f3rgano. Las notas resonaban en mis o\u00eddos y en mi pecho.\n\nEn la celos\u00eda hab\u00eda una portezuela abierta. Pas\u00e9 por ella y sub\u00ed unos escalones. Arriba estaba el \u00f3rgano. El Custodio estaba sentado en el banco, de espaldas a m\u00ed. La m\u00fasica ascend\u00eda por los tubos hasta el techo, inundaba toda la capilla y segu\u00eda ascendiendo m\u00e1s all\u00e1. Era un sonido de gran intensidad emocional. Nadie pod\u00eda tocar aquello sin cierto grado de sentimiento.\n\nCes\u00f3 la m\u00fasica. El Custodio gir\u00f3 la cabeza. Como no dijo nada, me sent\u00e9 en el banco, a su lado. Permanecimos a oscuras, con la \u00fanica luz de las velas y de sus ojos.\n\n\u2014Deber\u00edas estar durmiendo.\n\n\u2014Ya he dormido suficiente. \u2014Pas\u00e9 los dedos por las teclas\u2014. No sab\u00eda que los refa\u00edtas pudieran tocar instrumentos.\n\n\u2014Con los a\u00f1os hemos llegado a dominar el arte de la imitaci\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Eso no era una imitaci\u00f3n. Eras t\u00fa.\n\nHubo un largo silencio.\n\n\u2014Has venido a preguntarme por tu libertad \u2014dijo \u00e9l\u2014. Eso es lo que quieres.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Por supuesto. Quiz\u00e1 no me creas, pero es lo que m\u00e1s deseo. Este lugar me ha provocado unas ansias tremendas de conocer mundo. Anhelo tu fuego, los paisajes que t\u00fa has visto. Y sin embargo aqu\u00ed estoy, doscientos a\u00f1os despu\u00e9s de mi llegada. Sigo siendo un prisionero, por mucho que me disfrace de rey.\n\nCon sus ansias de conocer el mundo, al menos, pod\u00eda empatizar.\n\n\u2014Una vez me traicionaron. La v\u00edspera de Novembertide, antes de que comenzara el levantamiento de la Era de Huesos XVIII, un humano decidi\u00f3 traicionarnos a todos. A cambio de la libertad, el traidor sacrific\u00f3 a todos los habitantes de esta ciudad. \u2014Me mir\u00f3 y continu\u00f3\u2014: Comprender\u00e1s por qu\u00e9 Nashira no se siente amenazada por la perspectiva de una segunda rebeli\u00f3n. Cree que sois todos demasiado ego\u00edstas para uniros y trabajar juntos.\n\nS\u00ed, lo comprend\u00eda. Despu\u00e9s de hacer tantos planes para conseguir la libertad de los humanos, y que luego mordi\u00e9ramos la mano que luchaba por nosotros... No me extra\u00f1aba que el Custodio no hubiera confiado en m\u00ed. No me extra\u00f1aba que se hubiera mostrado tan fr\u00edo.\n\n\u2014Pero t\u00fa, Paige... T\u00fa la amenazas. Sabe que eres uno de los Siete Sellos, que eres la So\u00f1adora P\u00e1lida. T\u00fa tienes poder para trasladar el esp\u00edritu del sindicato a esta ciudad. Y ella teme ese esp\u00edritu.\n\n\u2014No hay nada que temer. Lo forman un hatajo de ladronzuelos y traidores.\n\n\u2014Eso depende de qui\u00e9nes sean sus l\u00edderes. Pero tiene potencial para convertirse en algo mucho mayor.\n\n\u2014El sindicato existe porque existe Scion. Scion existe porque existen los refa\u00edtas \u2014dije\u2014. Hab\u00e9is fabricado a vuestro propio enemigo.\n\n\u2014Ya capto la iron\u00eda. Y Nashira tambi\u00e9n. \u2014Se volvi\u00f3 y me mir\u00f3\u2014. La Era XVIII se rebel\u00f3 porque los prisioneros estaban acostumbrados a estar organizados. Eran fuertes y solidarios. Debemos recuperar esa fuerza. Y esta vez no debemos fallar. \u2014Mir\u00f3 hacia la ventana\u2014. Yo no debo fallar.\n\nNo dije nada. Estuve tentada de tomarle la mano, a solo unos cent\u00edmetros de las m\u00edas, sobre las teclas.\n\nAl final no me arriesgu\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Quiero irme \u2014dije\u2014. Es lo \u00fanico que quiero. Volver a la ciudadela con tanta gente como sea posible.\n\n\u2014Entonces nuestros objetivos son diferentes. Si hemos de ayudarnos el uno al otro, hemos de conciliar esas diferencias.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa \u00bfqu\u00e9 quieres?\n\n\u2014Hacer da\u00f1o a los Sargas. Mostrarles qu\u00e9 significa tener miedo.\n\nPens\u00e9 en Julian. Pens\u00e9 en Finn. Y en Liss, que se deslizaba hacia la amaurosis.\n\n\u2014Y \u00bfc\u00f3mo pretendes conseguirlo?\n\n\u2014Tengo una idea. \u2014Su mirada descendi\u00f3 hasta la m\u00eda\u2014. Me gustar\u00eda ense\u00f1arte una cosa. Si quieres.\n\nFui a contestar, pero en el \u00faltimo momento me call\u00e9. Sus ojos, amarillos, ten\u00edan cada vez m\u00e1s calidez. Yo casi notaba su calor.\n\n\u2014Quiero confiar en ti \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014Puedes confiar.\n\n\u2014Pues entonces, ven conmigo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfAd\u00f3nde?\n\n\u2014A ver a Michael. \u2014Se levant\u00f3\u2014. Al norte del Gran Patio hay un edificio en desuso. Pero los guardias no deben vernos.\n\nAquello s\u00ed me interesaba. Asent\u00ed con la cabeza.\n\nSalimos de la capilla. El Custodio escudri\u00f1\u00f3 el soportal por si hab\u00eda guardias y no vio a ninguno. Entonces hizo una se\u00f1a con la mano; un fantasma que estaba all\u00ed cerca se dio la vuelta y se alej\u00f3 a toda velocidad por el pasillo apagando las antorchas. Nos quedamos a oscuras, y el Custodio me dio la mano. Tuve que acelerar el paso para seguir el ritmo de sus zancadas. Me gui\u00f3 hasta un sendero de grava.\n\nEl edificio en desuso era tan sobrecogedor como los otros. El arrebol del alba me permiti\u00f3 distinguir una serie de arcos, unas ventanas rectangulares con barrotes y un t\u00edmpano con un c\u00edrculo tallado en su interior. El Custodio me llev\u00f3 por una galer\u00eda, se sac\u00f3 una llave de la manga y abri\u00f3 una puerta medio podrida.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 es este sitio? \u2014pregunt\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Es lo que vosotros llamar\u00edais un \u00abpiso franco\u00bb.\n\nEntr\u00f3; yo lo segu\u00ed y cerr\u00e9 la puerta.\n\nEl Custodio ech\u00f3 el cerrojo.\n\nDentro estaba oscuro como la boca del lobo. Los ojos del Custodio proyectaban una luz tenue por las paredes.\n\n\u2014Antes esto era una bodega \u2014me explic\u00f3 mientras camin\u00e1bamos\u2014. Pas\u00e9 a\u00f1os vaci\u00e1ndola. Por ser el refa\u00edta de rango m\u00e1s alto de esta residencia, pod\u00eda prohibir la entrada en todos los edificios que quisiera. A esta casa solo pueden acceder unos pocos individuos. Entre ellos, Michael.\n\n\u2014Y \u00bfqui\u00e9n m\u00e1s?\n\n\u2014Ya sabes qui\u00e9n m\u00e1s.\n\n\u00abLos marcados.\u00bb Me estremec\u00ed. Aquello era su piso franco, su lugar de reuni\u00f3n. Abri\u00f3 una cancela que hab\u00eda en la pared. Detr\u00e1s hab\u00eda una abertura por donde se pod\u00eda entrar a gatas.\n\n\u2014Entra \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 hay ah\u00ed?\n\n\u2014Alguien que puede ayudarte.\n\n\u2014Cre\u00eda que ibas a ayudarme t\u00fa.\n\n\u2014Los humanos de esta ciudad no se fiar\u00edan de un refa\u00edta para organizarse. Creer\u00edan que les estaba tendiendo una trampa. Tendr\u00e1s que hacerlo t\u00fa.\n\n\u2014Ya guiaste a los humanos una vez.\n\nEl Custodio desvi\u00f3 la mirada.\n\n\u2014Entra \u2014me dijo\u2014. Michael te est\u00e1 esperando.\n\nTen\u00eda una expresi\u00f3n sombr\u00eda. Me pregunt\u00e9 cu\u00e1ntos a\u00f1os de trabajo habr\u00eda desperdiciado.\n\n\u2014Esta vez ser\u00e1 diferente \u2014dije.\n\n\u00c9l no dijo nada m\u00e1s. Ten\u00eda los ojos apagados, y le brillaba la piel. La falta de amaranto ya le estaba pasando factura.\n\nNo ten\u00eda alternativa: me met\u00ed en el t\u00fanel, fr\u00edo y oscuro. El Custodio entr\u00f3 tambi\u00e9n y cerr\u00f3 la cancela.\n\n\u2014Sigue \u2014dijo.\n\nObedec\u00ed. Cuando llegu\u00e9 al final, una mano delgada tom\u00f3 la m\u00eda. Levant\u00e9 la vista y vi a Michael; una vela le iluminaba la cara. El Custodio sali\u00f3 tambi\u00e9n del t\u00fanel.\n\n\u2014Ens\u00e9\u00f1aselo, Michael. Es tu obra.\n\nMichael dio una cabezada anim\u00e1ndome a seguirlo en la oscuridad. Accion\u00f3 un interruptor; se encendi\u00f3 una luz que revel\u00f3 una estancia subterr\u00e1nea. Me qued\u00e9 mirando aquella luz un momento, tratando de discernir por qu\u00e9 parec\u00eda tan rara. Y entonces lo entend\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Electricidad. \u2014No pod\u00eda dejar de mirarla\u2014. Aqu\u00ed no hay electricidad. \u00bfC\u00f3mo hab\u00e9is...?\n\nMichael sonre\u00eda.\n\n\u2014Oficialmente, la corriente solo se puede restablecer en una residencia: Balliol. All\u00ed es donde los casacas rojas se coordinan con el Arconte de Westminster durante las Eras de Huesos \u2014explic\u00f3 el Custodio\u2014. Ese edificio tiene una instalaci\u00f3n el\u00e9ctrica moderna. Por suerte, Magdalen tambi\u00e9n.\n\nMichael me gui\u00f3 hasta el rinc\u00f3n, donde un pa\u00f1o de terciopelo cubr\u00eda un objeto ancho y rectangular. Levant\u00f3 el pa\u00f1o y me mostr\u00f3 el objeto de su orgullo y su alegr\u00eda: un ordenador. Terriblemente anticuado \u2014seguramente de alrededor del a\u00f1o 2030\u2014, pero un ordenador. Una conexi\u00f3n con el mundo exterior.\n\n\u2014Lo rob\u00f3 de Balliol \u2014explic\u00f3 el Custodio, y la sombra de una sonrisa acarici\u00f3 sus labios\u2014. Consigui\u00f3 restablecer la corriente el\u00e9ctrica en este edificio y establecer una conexi\u00f3n con la constelaci\u00f3n sat\u00e9lite de Scion.\n\n\u2014Por lo visto eres un prodigio, Michael. \u2014Me sent\u00e9 ante el ordenador. Michael sonri\u00f3 con timidez\u2014. \u00bfPara qu\u00e9 lo us\u00e1is?\n\n\u2014No podemos conectarlo a menudo, porque corremos un riesgo cada vez que restablecemos la electricidad; pero lo utilizamos para monitorizar el desarrollo de la Era XX, por ejemplo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPuedo ver algo?\n\nMichael se inclin\u00f3 por encima de mi hombro y abri\u00f3 un archivo con el nombre \u00abMahoney, Paige Eva, 07-Mar-59\u00bb que conten\u00eda secuencias de v\u00eddeo tomadas desde un helic\u00f3ptero. La c\u00e1mara hizo un zoom sobre mi cara. Me vi corriendo por los tejados, saltando desde el borde de un edificio. La distancia parec\u00eda insalvable; contuve la respiraci\u00f3n, pero la chica de la pantalla lo consigui\u00f3. El piloto grit\u00f3: \u00ab\u00a1Lanzadle un flux!\u00bb; me precipit\u00e9 desde una altura de quince metros, y se me enganch\u00f3 la mochila en una cuerda de tender. Qued\u00e9 colgando, inconsciente, como un cad\u00e1ver. El c\u00e1mara de la DVN re\u00eda entrecortadamente. \u00abPor las barbas de Weaver \u2014dec\u00eda\u2014. Nunca hab\u00eda visto a una zorra con tanta suerte.\u00bb Y nada m\u00e1s.\n\n\u2014Qu\u00e9 bonito \u2014dije.\n\nMichael me dio unas palmaditas en el hombro.\n\n\u2014Lamentamos mucho que no lograras evitarlos \u2014dijo el Custodio\u2014, aunque nos alegramos de que sobrevivieras.\n\nArque\u00e9 una ceja y pregunt\u00e9:\n\n\u2014\u00bfInvitaste a tus amigos a ver esto, como quien ve una pel\u00edcula?\n\n\u2014M\u00e1s o menos.\n\nSe levant\u00f3 y empez\u00f3 a pasearse por el s\u00f3tano.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 quieres que haga? \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014Voy a darte la opci\u00f3n de pedir ayuda. \u2014Me qued\u00e9 mir\u00e1ndolo, y a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014: Quiero que llames a los Siete Sellos.\n\n\u2014No. Nashira los localizar\u00eda \u2014dije\u2014. Va detr\u00e1s de Jaxon. No pienso traerlo aqu\u00ed.\n\nEl rostro de Michael se ensombreci\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Al menos hazles saber d\u00f3nde est\u00e1s \u2014propuso el Custodio\u2014. Por si todo sale mal.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor si todo sale mal?\n\n\u2014Por si se frustra tu fuga.\n\n\u2014Mi fuga.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. \u2014El Custodio se dio la vuelta y me mir\u00f3\u2014. Me preguntaste por el tren. Pues bien: la noche del Bicentenario, ese tren traer\u00e1 a un nutrido grupo de emisarios de Scion a la colonia. Y luego los devolver\u00e1 a Londres.\n\nTard\u00e9 un momento en asimilar sus palabras.\n\n\u2014Podremos volver a casa \u2014dije\u2014. \u00bfCu\u00e1ndo?\n\n\u2014La v\u00edspera del uno de septiembre. \u2014El Custodio se sent\u00f3 en un barril que serv\u00eda de taburete\u2014. Si no quieres ponerte en contacto con los Siete Sellos, puedes utilizar esta habitaci\u00f3n para dise\u00f1ar tus planes. Tienen que ser mejores que los m\u00edos, Paige. Debes recordar las lecciones del sindicato. \u2014Me mir\u00f3 a los ojos y prosigui\u00f3\u2014: Yo comet\u00ed un error la \u00faltima vez. Planeamos atacar a los Sargas de d\u00eda, mientras el resto de la ciudad dorm\u00eda. Gracias al traidor nos estaban esperando; pero, aunque no nos hubieran traicionado, los Sargas habr\u00edan detectado nuestros movimientos a trav\u00e9s del \u00e9ter. Tenemos que atacar cuando ya haya mucha actividad, cuando los Sargas est\u00e9n distra\u00eddos. Cuando su capacidad de contraatacar est\u00e9 limitada por su necesidad de mantener la apariencia de control. \u00bfQu\u00e9 mejor momento que el Bicentenario?\n\nAsent\u00ed con la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Y de paso, asustaremos a unos cuantos funcionarios de Scion.\n\n\u2014Exactamente. \u2014Me sostuvo la mirada\u2014. A partir de ahora, este ser\u00e1 tu piso franco. En el ordenador hay mapas detallados de Sheol I que puedes usar para planear tu salida del centro de la ciudad. Si logras llegar a la pradera a tiempo, podr\u00e1s tomar el tren a Londres.\n\n\u2014\u00bfA qu\u00e9 hora sale el tren?\n\n\u2014Todav\u00eda no lo s\u00e9. No puedo hacer muchas preguntas, pero Michael tiene todas las antenas desplegadas. Lo averiguaremos.\n\n\u2014Me dijiste que ten\u00edamos objetivos distintos \u2014dije\u2014. Que t\u00fa buscas otra cosa.\n\n\u2014Scion cree que somos tan poderosos que nada puede destruirnos. Que no tenemos debilidades. Quiero que les demuestres que se equivocan.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo?\n\n\u2014Hace tiempo que sospecho que Nashira intentar\u00e1 matarte durante el Bicentenario para reclamar tu don. Hay una forma muy sencilla de humillarla. \u2014Me puso los dedos bajo la barbilla y me la levant\u00f3 suavemente\u2014. Imp\u00eddeselo.\n\nEscudri\u00f1\u00e9 su cara. Ten\u00eda los ojos apagados.\n\n\u2014Si lo consigo \u2014dije\u2014, quiero que se me conceda un favor.\n\n\u2014Te escucho.\n\n\u2014Liss. No consigo llegar hasta ella. Tengo las cartas, pero quiz\u00e1 no las acepte. Necesito... \u2014Las palabras se atascaron en mi garganta, y tuve que obligarlas a salir\u2014: Necesito tu ayuda.\n\n\u2014Tu amiga lleva mucho tiempo con choque espiritual. Necesitar\u00e1 amaranto para recuperarse.\n\n\u2014Ya lo s\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Sabes que Nashira ha interrumpido mi suministro.\n\nSin desviar la mirada, repliqu\u00e9:\n\n\u2014Tienes la \u00faltima dosis.\n\nEl Custodio se sent\u00f3 a mi lado. Yo sab\u00eda muy bien qu\u00e9 le estaba pidiendo. \u00c9l depend\u00eda del amaranto.\n\n\u2014No quieres hacer venir a tus amigos... \u2014Tamborile\u00f3 con los dedos en una rodilla, con aire pensativo\u2014. Pero si yo te ofreciera la libertad, \u00bfaceptar\u00edas, aunque eso significara dejar a Liss aqu\u00ed?\n\n\u2014\u00bfMe est\u00e1s haciendo una oferta?\n\n\u2014Es posible.\n\nSab\u00eda por qu\u00e9 me lo preguntaba. Estaba poni\u00e9ndome a prueba; quer\u00eda comprobar si yo era lo bastante ego\u00edsta para dejar atr\u00e1s a alguien tan vulnerable.\n\n\u2014Me expongo a un grave peligro \u2014agreg\u00f3\u2014. Si alg\u00fan humano informara a los Sargas, me castigar\u00edan severamente por haber ayudado a un humano. Pero si est\u00e1s dispuesta a quedarte un poco m\u00e1s, a correr un riesgo por m\u00ed y por los tuyos, yo me arriesgar\u00e9 por ella. Ese es el trato que te propongo.\n\nMe lo pens\u00e9. Por un instante, me plante\u00e9 abandonar a Liss y apostar por mi libertad. Volver a Londres, olvidarme de aquel lugar y no mirar atr\u00e1s. Sent\u00ed nacer en m\u00ed la verg\u00fcenza, caliente y veloz. Cerr\u00e9 los ojos.\n\n\u2014No \u2014dije\u2014. Quiero que ayudes a Liss.\n\nNotaba el peso de su mirada sobre m\u00ed.\n\n\u2014En ese caso, la ayudar\u00e9 \u2014dijo.\n\nSe hab\u00eda congregado un grupito de bufones en la choza. Cinco de ellos, entre los que se encontraban Cyril y Julian, estaban api\u00f1ados unos contra otros, cabizbajos y con las manos juntas para protegerse del fr\u00edo. Ca\u00edan gotas de lluvia de la tela que hab\u00edan metido en las rendijas entre los tablones.\n\nLiss llevaba tanto tiempo con choque espiritual que era poco probable que se recuperara. Lo \u00fanico que pod\u00edan hacer era velarla en silencio. Si sobreviv\u00eda, quedar\u00eda reducida a una c\u00e1scara amaur\u00f3tica de su antiguo ser. Si mor\u00eda, uno de ellos recitar\u00eda el treno y la desterrar\u00eda m\u00e1s all\u00e1 del alcance de sus captores. De una forma o de otra, estos perder\u00edan a su actriz m\u00e1s preciada, Liss Rymore, la chica que nunca se ca\u00eda.\n\nAl vernos llegar a Michael y a m\u00ed con el Custodio, todos se apartaron asustados. Cyril se refugi\u00f3 en un rinc\u00f3n, aterrado. Los otros se limitaron a mirar y a murmurar entre ellos. \u00bfQu\u00e9 hac\u00eda all\u00ed el consorte de sangre, la mano derecha de Nashira? \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 interrump\u00eda el velatorio?\n\nJulian fue el \u00fanico que no se movi\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Paige...\n\nMe llev\u00e9 un dedo a los labios.\n\nLiss estaba tumbada sobre sus mantas y tapada con una s\u00e1bana sucia. Llevaba retales de seda entrelazados en el pelo a modo de amuletos. Julian le tom\u00f3 una mano sin quitarle los ojos de encima al intruso.\n\nEl Custodio se arrodill\u00f3 junto a Liss. Ten\u00eda las mand\u00edbulas apretadas, pero no mencion\u00f3 su dolor.\n\n\u2014Dame el amaranto, Paige.\n\nLe di el vial. El \u00faltimo vial. Su \u00faltima dosis.\n\n\u2014Las cartas \u2014dijo entonces. Estaba completamente concentrado en su trabajo. Se las di\u2014. Y el pu\u00f1al.\n\nMichael me dio un pu\u00f1al con el mango negro. Lo saqu\u00e9 de la funda y se lo di al Custodio. M\u00e1s susurros. Julian sujetaba la mano de Liss en el regazo y me miraba fijamente.\n\n\u2014Conf\u00eda en m\u00ed \u2014le dije en voz baja.\n\nTrag\u00f3 saliva.\n\nEl Custodio quit\u00f3 el tap\u00f3n del vial de amaranto. Se puso unas gotas en las yemas de los dedos, sin quitarse los guantes, y moj\u00f3 los labios y el surco del filtrum de Liss con aquel aceite. Julian segu\u00eda sin soltarle la mano, pese a que los fr\u00edos dedos de ella no respond\u00edan. El Custodio le aplic\u00f3 unas gotas de amaranto en las sienes; entonces tap\u00f3 el vial y me lo dio. Cogi\u00f3 el pu\u00f1al por la hoja y se lo ofreci\u00f3 a Julian.\n\n\u2014P\u00ednchale los dedos \u2014dijo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9?\n\n\u2014Necesito un poco de su sangre.\n\nJulian me mir\u00f3. Asent\u00ed con la cabeza. Con mano firme, Julian asi\u00f3 el mango.\n\n\u2014Perd\u00f3name, Liss \u2014dijo.\n\nLa pinch\u00f3 en cada una de las yemas de los dedos, y aparecieron unas diminutas gotas de sangre. El Custodio asinti\u00f3, satisfecho.\n\n\u2014Paige, Michael: extended las cartas.\n\nObedecimos. Dispusimos la baraja nueva formando un semic\u00edrculo. El Custodio le cogi\u00f3 una mano a Liss y le pas\u00f3 los dedos por las cartas, manchando las ilustraciones con su sangre.\n\nA continuaci\u00f3n el Custodio limpi\u00f3 la hoja del cuchillo con un pa\u00f1o. Se quit\u00f3 el guante de la mano izquierda y lo encerr\u00f3 en el pu\u00f1o. Se oy\u00f3 un grito de asombro. Los refas nunca se quitaban los guantes. \u00bfTen\u00edan manos? S\u00ed. Las del Custodio eran grandes, con cicatrices en los nudillos. Volvi\u00f3 a o\u00edrse otro grito ahogado cuando recorri\u00f3 la palma de su mano con la afilada punta del cuchillo, abriendo en ella un corte del que le brot\u00f3 la sangre. Empec\u00e9 a ver borroso. El Custodio levant\u00f3 el brazo y dej\u00f3 caer unas gotas de ectoplasma en cada carta. Como Afrodita rociando de n\u00e9ctar la sangre de Adonis. Sent\u00ed que empezaban a llegar esp\u00edritus, atra\u00eddos por las cartas, por Liss, por el Custodio. Formaron un tri\u00e1ngulo, una abertura en el \u00e9ter. El Custodio estaba abriendo la puerta. Se puso el guante, recogi\u00f3 las cartas y volvi\u00f3 a juntarlas en una pila. Las puso en el escote de Liss, en contacto con su piel, y le coloc\u00f3 las manos encima.\n\n\u2014Y de la sangre de Adonis \u2014dijo\u2014 surgi\u00f3 la vida.\n\nLiss abri\u00f3 los ojos.\n\nUno de septiembre de 2059. Doscientos a\u00f1os despu\u00e9s de que una tormenta de luces extra\u00f1as cruzara el cielo. Doscientos a\u00f1os despu\u00e9s de que lord Palmerston cerrara su trato con los refa\u00edtas. Doscientos a\u00f1os despu\u00e9s de que comenzara la persecuci\u00f3n de la clarividencia. Y lo m\u00e1s importante: doscientos a\u00f1os desde el establecimiento de Sheol I y la tradici\u00f3n de las Eras de Huesos.\n\nEnfrente de m\u00ed, una chica me observaba desde el espejo de marco dorado. Ten\u00eda las mejillas descarnadas y las mand\u00edbulas apretadas. Todav\u00eda segu\u00eda sorprendi\u00e9ndome que ese semblante duro y fr\u00edo fuera el m\u00edo.\n\nLlevaba un vestido blanco, con mangas tres cuartos y escote cuadrado. La tela, elastizada, se adher\u00eda a la poca figura que me quedaba. El Custodio hac\u00eda todo lo posible por alimentarme, pero no siempre ten\u00eda comida para darme y, si me la daba, se arriesgaba a levantar sospechas. El resto del tiempo, com\u00eda _skilly_ y _toke_ con los bufones.\n\nNashira no me hab\u00eda invitado a ning\u00fan otro banquete.\n\nMe alis\u00e9 el vestido. Me hab\u00edan hecho una concesi\u00f3n especial para que pudiera asistir a la ceremonia vestida de blanco. Seg\u00fan Nashira, era una muestra de buena voluntad. Pero yo no me lo tragaba. Estaba preparada. Oculto bajo el escote llevaba el colgante que me hab\u00eda dado el Custodio. Durante semanas no lo hab\u00eda tocado, pero esa noche quiz\u00e1 me fuera \u00fatil. Dentro de uno de los botines llevaba escondido un cuchillo; casi no pod\u00eda andar con ellos, pero los refa\u00edtas quer\u00edan que pareci\u00e9ramos fuertes, y no d\u00e9biles y maltratados. Esa noche quer\u00edan vernos bien erguidos.\n\nLa c\u00e1mara estaba en silencio, iluminada con una vela. El Custodio hab\u00eda ido a recibir a los emisarios con los otros refa\u00edtas. Me hab\u00eda dejado una nota apoyada en el gram\u00f3fono. Me sent\u00e9 a su escritorio y deslic\u00e9 un dedo sobre las letras:\n\nHa llegado el momento. B\u00fascame en el Consistorio.\n\nLa tir\u00e9 a las brasas de la chimenea. En la penumbra di cuerda al gram\u00f3fono y coloqu\u00e9 la aguja sobre el disco. Ser\u00eda la \u00faltima vez que lo oyera sonar. Pasara lo que pasase esa noche, ya no volver\u00eda a la Torre del Fundador.\n\nUnas voces suaves y resonantes invadieron la c\u00e1mara. Mir\u00e9 el t\u00edtulo del disco. _I'll Be Home_ , volver\u00e9 a casa. S\u00ed, iba a volver a casa. Si todo sal\u00eda como estaba previsto, por la ma\u00f1ana estar\u00eda en mi casa. Ya estaba harta de ver a los bufones en la miseria, y de llamarlos \u00abbufones\u00bb. Estaba harta de ver a Liss comer grasa y pan duro porque no ten\u00eda nada m\u00e1s que llevarse a la boca. Estaba harta de los casacas rojas y de los emim. Estaba harta de que me llamaran 40. Estaba harta de aquella maldita ciudad y de todos sus habitantes. No aguantaba ni una noche m\u00e1s.\n\nUna hoja de papel se desliz\u00f3 por debajo de la puerta. Me arrodill\u00e9 y la recog\u00ed de la alfombra.\n\nLas notas que me dejaba el Custodio me hab\u00edan dado una idea, y hab\u00eda convencido a Julian para que organizara un grupo de recadistas como el que ten\u00eda Jax en la ciudadela, y as\u00ed tener informados a los habitantes de las residencias envi\u00e1ndoles notas que los amaur\u00f3ticos se encargaban de entregar.\n\nOrpheus ya lo ha hecho. Todo listo.\n\nLUCKY\n\nSonre\u00ed para m\u00ed. \u00abLucky\u00bb era Felix: le hab\u00eda pedido que firmara sus mensajes con un nombre falso. Orpheus era Michael.\n\nNo nos hab\u00eda costado convencer a Duckett para que nos prestara su pericia particular. Tras amenazarlo con descubrirle a Nashira su peque\u00f1o negocio de tr\u00e1fico de f\u00e1rmacos (\u00ab\u00a1No, por favor! \u00a1Tened piedad de un pobre anciano!\u00bb), Julian y yo lo hab\u00edamos obligado a prepararles una sorpresa a los casacas rojas. Algo que les hiciera reaccionar con lentitud cuando actu\u00e1ramos contra los refa\u00edtas. Se hab\u00eda resistido un poco, pero al final hab\u00eda cedido (\u00ab\u00a1No lo conseguir\u00e9is, os machacar\u00e1n como hicieron con los anteriores!\u00bb). \u00c1ster morado en polvo mezclado con somn\u00edfero. Perfecto.\n\nUna vez que estuvo hecho, us\u00e9 un pu\u00f1ado de su propio \u00e1ster blanco para borrarle la memoria. No me gustaban los cobardes.\n\nLe hab\u00edamos dado el preparado a Michael, que se hab\u00eda encargado de echarlo en el vino que les hab\u00edan servido a los casacas rojas en su banquete de la v\u00edspera del Bicentenario. Si todo sal\u00eda bien, no quedar\u00eda ni uno solo en forma para defenderse.\n\nMir\u00e9 por la ventana. Los emisarios hab\u00edan llegado a las ocho, con sus mejores galas, escoltados por centinelas armados. Aquellos hombres y mujeres de Scion ven\u00edan a ser testimonios de un nuevo acuerdo, el Gran Tratado Territorial. Ese tratado permitir\u00eda a los refa\u00edtas establecer una ciudad de control en Par\u00eds, la primera fuera de Inglaterra. Sheol II. Scion dejar\u00eda de ser un imperio en fase embrionaria: habr\u00eda nacido, vivir\u00eda.\n\nAquello era solo el principio. Si los refa\u00edtas ten\u00edan a todos los videntes encerrados en colonias penitenciarias, no habr\u00eda forma de que el resto de la humanidad los rechazara. El \u00e9ter era nuestra \u00fanica arma. Si nadie pod\u00eda usarla, ser\u00edamos un blanco seguro. Todos nosotros.\n\nPero nada de eso me importaba aquella noche. Lo \u00fanico que me importaba era volver a Seven Dials. Con el sindicato corrupto. Con mi banda. Con Nick. En ese momento era lo \u00fanico que deseaba.\n\nEl gram\u00f3fono segu\u00eda sonando. Me sent\u00e9 al escritorio y mir\u00e9 la luna por la ventana. No estaba llena, y no se ve\u00edan las estrellas.\n\nLiss, Julian y yo llev\u00e1bamos semanas sembrando la discordia por la ciudad, y utilizando el piso franco como guarida. Suhail y el Capataz no pod\u00edan o\u00edrnos cuando est\u00e1bamos all\u00ed. Liss se hab\u00eda recuperado por completo de su trauma y, con renovadas ganas de sobrevivir, hab\u00eda participado activamente reclutando a bufones. Al principio no estaba convencida, hasta que una noche se derrumb\u00f3. \u00abNo puedo seguir viviendo as\u00ed \u2014dijo\u2014. Y no puedo impedir que os rebel\u00e9is. As\u00ed que adelante.\u00bb\n\nY nos lanzamos.\n\nLa mayor\u00eda de los casacas y los actores nos hab\u00edan ofrecido su apoyo. Los que hab\u00edan visto al Custodio curando a Liss eran los que estaban m\u00e1s seguros, convencidos de que contar\u00edamos con el apoyo de algunos refas. A lo largo de varias semanas hab\u00edamos hecho fondo com\u00fan con nuestras provisiones y las hab\u00edamos guardado en escondites acordados. Unos bufones le hab\u00edan robado a Duckett, al que hab\u00edamos borrado la memoria, cerillas y latas de Sterno. Un par de valientes casacas blancas hab\u00edan intentado entrar en la Casa, pero los refas hab\u00edan reforzado las medidas de seguridad desde que hab\u00edan encontrado muerto a Kraz. Como ya no pod\u00edamos acercarnos por all\u00ed, no hab\u00edamos tenido m\u00e1s remedio que fabricarnos nosotros mismos las armas. No ten\u00edamos muchas, pero en realidad no eran imprescindibles.\n\nJulian, Liss y yo \u00e9ramos los \u00fanicos que sab\u00edamos desde d\u00f3nde acceder\u00edamos al tren. No se lo hab\u00edamos revelado a nadie, pues era demasiado arriesgado. Los dem\u00e1s solo sab\u00edan que tendr\u00edamos una forma de salir de la colonia, y que se\u00f1alar\u00edamos el lugar con una bengala.\n\nBaj\u00e9 las piernas de la cama. La puerta del lavabo estaba abierta, y me vi en el espejo. Parec\u00eda una mu\u00f1eca de porcelana, pero habr\u00eda podido ser peor. Habr\u00eda podido parecerme a Ivy. La \u00faltima vez que la hab\u00eda visto, iba detr\u00e1s de Thuban con otro humano, tan sucia y flaca que me cost\u00f3 reconocerla. Pero no lloraba, solo caminaba en silencio. Me sorprendi\u00f3 que hubiera sobrevivido despu\u00e9s de lo que hab\u00eda pasado en la Casa.\n\nEl Custodio no me hab\u00eda dejado acercarme por all\u00ed. Se hab\u00eda mostrado cada vez m\u00e1s reacio a medida que se acercaba septiembre. Supon\u00eda que deb\u00eda de tener miedo. Miedo de que aquella rebeli\u00f3n fracasara, como la anterior. A veces era algo m\u00e1s que miedo; me dio por pensar que estaba enojado. Porque iba a perderme. Porque iba a perder la batalla contra Nashira.\n\nAhuyent\u00e9 ese pensamiento. Lo \u00fanico que quer\u00eda el Custodio era proteger mi don, como todos.\n\nNo ten\u00eda sentido retrasarlo m\u00e1s. Ten\u00eda que ir al Consistorio. Me levant\u00e9 y volv\u00ed a darle cuerda al gram\u00f3fono. Me consolaba, de alguna manera, que la m\u00fasica siguiera sonando; que, pasara lo que pasase fuera, una canci\u00f3n continuara llenando aquella c\u00e1mara vac\u00eda, al menos durante un rato. Cerr\u00e9 la puerta de la Torre al salir.\n\nLa portera de noche acababa de comenzar su turno. Llevaba el pelo trenzado y recogido en un bonito mo\u00f1o, y los labios pintados de rosa.\n\n\u2014Hola, XX-40 \u2014dijo\u2014. Te esperan en el Consistorio dentro de diez minutos.\n\n\u2014Gracias, ya lo s\u00e9.\n\nEl Capataz me lo hab\u00eda repetido una y otra vez.\n\n\u2014Me han pedido que te recuerde cu\u00e1les son tus instrucciones para esta noche. Tienes prohibido hablar con los embajadores y con los patrocinadores de Scion, a menos que vayas acompa\u00f1ada de un refa\u00edta. El espect\u00e1culo empieza a las once. Sales al escenario cuando acabe la obra.\n\n\u2014\u00bfAl escenario?\n\n\u2014Ay... \u2014Consult\u00f3 su registro\u2014. No, nada. Perdona. Ese mensaje era para otra persona.\n\nIntent\u00e9 mirar lo que hab\u00eda escrito en el libro, pero ella puso la mano.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSeguro?\n\n\u2014Buenas noches.\n\nLevant\u00e9 la cabeza: era David. Llevaba un traje y una corbata roja, e iba reci\u00e9n afeitado. Se me retorci\u00f3 el est\u00f3mago. David no parec\u00eda drogado. Sin embargo, estaba segura de que Michael hab\u00eda cumplido su misi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Vengo a escoltarte hasta el Consistorio. \u2014Extendi\u00f3 un brazo\u2014. La soberana de sangre requiere tu presencia all\u00ed.\n\n\u2014No necesito escolta.\n\n\u2014Ellos creen que s\u00ed.\n\nDavid no arrastraba las palabras. No hab\u00eda ni probado la mezcla de Duckett. Pas\u00e9 a su lado ignorando el brazo que me ofrec\u00eda, y enfil\u00e9 la calle. Aquello no era un buen principio.\n\nHab\u00edan trazado un sendero de faroles que recorr\u00eda toda la ciudad. El Consistorio estaba cerca de la Casa, y llevaba el mismo nombre que el cuartel general de la DVN de Londres. Los videntes a los que hab\u00edan invitado al Bicentenario eran los que hab\u00edan conseguido el blus\u00f3n rosa o rojo, o los bufones con alg\u00fan talento especial. Seg\u00fan Nashira, era una recompensa por su buen comportamiento. Se les permitir\u00eda bailar y comer con otros humanos. Ellos, a cambio, ten\u00edan que transmitir el mensaje de que no solo les gustaba pasar el tiempo en compa\u00f1\u00eda de sus guardianes, sino que, adem\u00e1s, les estaban muy agradecidos por su \u00abrehabilitaci\u00f3n\u00bb. De que les gustaba vivir apartados de la sociedad en una colonia penitenciaria repugnante. De que no les importaba que los emim les arrancaran las extremidades.\n\nMuchos de ellos no necesitar\u00edan fingir. Carl estaba contento. Todos los casacas rojas estaban contentos. Hab\u00edan encontrado un lugar en la colonia; yo, en cambio, jam\u00e1s lo encontrar\u00eda. En lo \u00fanico que pensaba era en largarme de all\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Un truco muy h\u00e1bil \u2014dijo David\u2014. Lo del vino.\n\nNo lo mir\u00e9 a la cara.\n\n\u2014El chico se pas\u00f3 un poco. S\u00e9 reconocer el _regal_ con solo olerlo. Pero no te preocupes: funcion\u00f3 con la mayor\u00eda. No ser\u00e9 yo quien estropee la sorpresa.\n\nVi correr a dos bufones cargados con unos rollos de tela y meterse por la calle que discurr\u00eda entre la iglesia y la Residencia del Suzerano. Esa era la ruta que tomar\u00edan para quemar la Sala. Ya deb\u00edan de estar poniendo las cerillas all\u00ed. Cerillas y parafina.\n\nHab\u00eda sido Julian quien hab\u00eda propuesto que peg\u00e1ramos fuego a los edificios del centro de la ciudad; hab\u00eda resultado ser un estratega excelente. Los bufones provocar\u00edan la distracci\u00f3n, lo que dejar\u00eda las otras calles despejadas; as\u00ed nosotros podr\u00edamos ir hacia el norte, hacia la pradera. Lo har\u00edan de madrugada, cuando los emisarios empezaran a estar cansados. \u00abNo se marchar\u00e1n a sus casas mucho m\u00e1s tarde de las dos \u2014hab\u00eda dicho\u2014. Si lo hacemos a medianoche, dispondremos de una hora para poner en marcha la funci\u00f3n. Tendremos la sart\u00e9n por el mango. Y mejor pronto que tarde.\u00bb A m\u00ed me hab\u00eda parecido bien. Todo estaba saliendo seg\u00fan lo previsto, pero el avispado casaca roja que iba a mi lado ten\u00eda el poder de destruirlo todo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfA qui\u00e9n se lo has contado? \u2014pregunt\u00e9 a David.\n\n\u2014Voy a darte algo para pensar \u2014dijo, ignorando la pregunta\u2014. \u00bfCrees que a Scion le gusta recibir \u00f3rdenes de los refa\u00edtas?\n\n\u2014Claro que no.\n\n\u2014Pero crees a Nashira cuando dice que ellos tienen el control. \u00bfNo crees que a alguien, en toda la historia de Scion, deber\u00eda hab\u00e9rsele ocurrido combatirlos?\n\n\u2014\u00bfAd\u00f3nde pretendes llegar?\n\n\u2014Contesta mi pregunta.\n\n\u2014No. Porque les tienen demasiado miedo a los emim.\n\n\u2014Quiz\u00e1 tengas raz\u00f3n. O quiz\u00e1 al Arconte todav\u00eda le quede una pizca de sentido com\u00fan.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 quieres decir con eso?\n\nComo no me contestaba, me par\u00e9 delante de \u00e9l.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 demonios tiene que ver el Arconte con todo esto?\n\n\u2014Mucho. \u2014Me apart\u00f3 y sigui\u00f3 caminando\u2014. Sigue adelante con tu fuga masiva, princesa callejera. No te preocupes por m\u00ed.\n\nAntes de que pudiera replicar, \u00e9l ya se hab\u00eda alejado, hab\u00eda entrado en el vest\u00edbulo victoriano y se hab\u00eda perdido entre la multitud. Not\u00e9 un escalofr\u00edo. Lo \u00faltimo que necesitaba era un casaca roja d\u00edscolo, y menos si era tan cr\u00edptico como David. Quiz\u00e1 afirmara odiar a los refa\u00edtas, pero tampoco daba la impresi\u00f3n de que yo le cayera muy bien. Pod\u00eda contarle a Nashira lo del vino, y ella sospechar\u00eda de inmediato.\n\nDentro del Consistorio hab\u00edan encendido miles de velas. Nada m\u00e1s cruzar el umbral, Michael y un casaca blanca me llevaron por una escalera, y dejamos a David buscando a los otros arrancahuesos.\n\nLa tarea que los refas hab\u00edan asignado a Michael consist\u00eda en asegurarse de que nadie tuviera un aspecto desali\u00f1ado o magullado; eso nos proporcion\u00f3 un pretexto perfecto para organizar un \u00faltimo encuentro. Cuando llegamos a la galer\u00eda, me volv\u00ed hacia ellos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfListos?\n\n\u2014\u00a1Listos! \u2014confirm\u00f3 el casaca blanca. Era Charles, un criom\u00e1ntico de Terebell. Apunt\u00f3 hacia el sal\u00f3n, donde los refa\u00edtas se codeaban con los emisarios\u2014. Los arrancahuesos est\u00e1n empezando a venirse abajo. Cuando lo noten los refas, ya ser\u00e1 demasiado tarde.\n\n\u2014Muy bien. \u2014Respir\u00e9 hondo para calmarme\u2014. Bien hecho, Michael.\n\nMichael llevaba un sencillo traje gris. Me sonri\u00f3.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTienes mi mochila?\n\nSe\u00f1al\u00f3 debajo de los bancos de la galer\u00eda, donde estaba mi mochila cargada de f\u00e1rmacos. Todav\u00eda no pod\u00eda cogerla, pero los bufones sab\u00edan d\u00f3nde estaba, por si la necesitaban. Era uno de los escondites de provisiones que ten\u00edamos.\n\n\u2014Paige, \u00bfa qu\u00e9 hora lanzaremos la bengala? \u2014pregunt\u00f3 Charles.\n\n\u2014Todav\u00eda no lo s\u00e9. Disparar\u00e9 una en cuanto encontremos un camino. \u2014Charles asinti\u00f3. Volv\u00ed a mirar hacia el sal\u00f3n. Hab\u00eda mucha gente a punto de poner en peligro su vida. Liss, que tanto miedo ten\u00eda. Julian, que hab\u00eda hecho tanto para ayudarme. Los bufones. Los casacas blancas.\n\nY el Custodio. Ahora entend\u00eda qu\u00e9 significaba para \u00e9l confiar en m\u00ed. Si lo traicionaba, como hab\u00eda hecho el otro humano, no lo marcar\u00edan, sino que lo ejecutar\u00edan. Aquella era su \u00faltima oportunidad.\n\nPero el Custodio ten\u00eda que actuar ahora, mientras entre los refa\u00edtas todav\u00eda hab\u00eda una pizca de compasi\u00f3n. Si perec\u00edan los marcados, esa esperanza se habr\u00eda perdido.\n\nLa puerta de la galer\u00eda se abri\u00f3 de golpe, y Suhail apareci\u00f3 en el umbral. Agarr\u00f3 a Charles por el blus\u00f3n y lo oblig\u00f3 a subir por la escalera.\n\n\u2014A la soberana de sangre no le gusta que la hagan esperar, in\u00fatil \u2014me dijo\u2014. No tienes permiso para estar en la galer\u00eda. Baja inmediatamente.\n\nSe march\u00f3 tan aprisa como hab\u00eda llegado. Michael ech\u00f3 un vistazo a la puerta.\n\n\u2014Es la hora \u2014anunci\u00e9, y le apret\u00e9 la mano\u2014. Buena suerte. Recuerda: procura no llamar la atenci\u00f3n y busca la luz de la bengala.\n\nMichael asinti\u00f3 con la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Vive \u2014se limit\u00f3 a decir.\n\nRecorr\u00ed la planta baja del Consistorio con la cabeza agachada. Nadie me vio entrar.\n\nNueve pa\u00edses europeos aplicaban el sistema de Scion, entre ellos Inglaterra. Sin embargo, a diferencia de Inglaterra, ninguno ten\u00eda un lugar al que enviar a sus clarividentes. Aun as\u00ed, los nueve gobiernos hab\u00edan enviado emisarios a la celebraci\u00f3n del Bicentenario. Incluso Dubl\u00edn, la ciudad de Scion m\u00e1s joven y pol\u00e9mica, hab\u00eda enviado a un delegado: Cathal Bell, un viejo amigo de mi padre. Era un hombre indeciso y nervioso, agobiado por las responsabilidades que implicaba su posici\u00f3n. En un primer momento, al verlo me emocion\u00e9 y pens\u00e9 que quiz\u00e1 \u00e9l podr\u00eda ayudarnos; pero entonces record\u00e9 que no me hab\u00eda visto desde que yo ten\u00eda cinco o seis a\u00f1os. No me reconocer\u00eda, y all\u00ed yo no ten\u00eda nombre. Adem\u00e1s, Bell era d\u00e9bil. Su partido hab\u00eda perdido Dubl\u00edn.\n\nEl Consistorio era espectacular. Del techo, decorado con artesonado, colgaban ara\u00f1as de luces, y el sal\u00f3n principal era muy amplio y despejado. La luz de las velas y la m\u00fasica de Chopin hac\u00edan estremecer la oscuridad. A los delegados se les prodigaban todo tipo de atenciones. Pod\u00edan atiborrarse de toda clase de manjares deliciosos, o charlar entre ellos tom\u00e1ndose una copa de _mecks_. Su amaurosis era un privilegio, un derecho. Los esclavos amaur\u00f3ticos, entre ellos Michael, les serv\u00edan la comida; se supon\u00eda que eran participantes voluntarios en un programa de rehabilitaci\u00f3n. Los otros amaur\u00f3ticos deb\u00edan de estar demasiado desnutridos para aparecer por all\u00ed.\n\nPor encima de un grupo de actores estaba Liss, colgada de sus sedas, haciendo poses como una bailarina voladora. Depend\u00eda \u00fanicamente de su fuerza f\u00edsica para no caer y morir aplastada.\n\nRecorr\u00ed la sala con la mirada tratando de localizar a Weaver, pero no lo vi. Quiz\u00e1 llegara tarde. A otros pa\u00edses pod\u00edan perdonarles que no hubieran enviado a sus inquisidores, pero a Inglaterra no. Identifiqu\u00e9 a otros oficiales de Scion, entre ellos el comandante de los centinelas, Bernard Hock. Era un hombre enorme, calvo y con los m\u00fasculos del cuello excesivamente desarrollados; era muy bueno detectando a videntes: de hecho, yo siempre hab\u00eda sospechado que era rastreador. Vi c\u00f3mo mov\u00eda las aletas de la nariz, y me propuse matarlo si se me presentaba la ocasi\u00f3n.\n\nUn amaur\u00f3tico me ofreci\u00f3 una copa de _mecks_ blanco. La rechac\u00e9. Acababa de ver a Cathal Bell.\n\nBell ten\u00eda una copa en la mano, y no paraba de tocarse la corbata. Intentaba conversar con Radmilo Are\u017eina, el viceministro de Migraci\u00f3n de Serbia. Sonre\u00ed para m\u00ed. Are\u017eina, el muy in\u00fatil, hab\u00eda autorizado el traslado de Dani a Londres. Fui hacia ellos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSe\u00f1or Bell?\n\nBell dio un respingo y derram\u00f3 un poco de vino.\n\n\u2014\u00bfS\u00ed?\n\nMir\u00e9 a Are\u017eina.\n\n\u2014Perdone que les interrumpa, se\u00f1or ministro, pero \u00bfpuedo hablar con el se\u00f1or Bell en privado?\n\nAre\u017eina me mir\u00f3 de arriba abajo. Arque\u00f3 el labio superior y dijo:\n\n\u2014Perd\u00f3neme, se\u00f1or Bell. Debo volver con mi grupo.\n\nSe alej\u00f3 hacia la seguridad que le ofrec\u00edan sus acompa\u00f1antes. Me qued\u00e9 frente a Bell, que intentaba limpiar la mancha de vino de su chaqueta.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 quieres, antinatural? \u2014dijo, tartamudeando\u2014. Estaba manteniendo una conversaci\u00f3n muy importante.\n\n\u2014Tranquilo, ahora podr\u00e1 mantener otra. \u2014Le quit\u00e9 la copa de la mano y di un sorbo\u2014. \u00bfSe acuerda de la Incursi\u00f3n, se\u00f1or Bell?\n\nBell se qued\u00f3 paralizado.\n\n\u2014Si te refieres a la Incursi\u00f3n de 2046, s\u00ed. Por supuesto. \u2014Le temblaban los dedos. Ten\u00eda los nudillos morados, hinchados por la artritis\u2014. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 me lo preguntas? \u00bfQui\u00e9n eres?\n\n\u2014A mi primo lo detuvieron ese d\u00eda. Quiero saber si sigue vivo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEres irlandesa?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\nMe mir\u00f3 con los ojos entrecerrados.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo te llamas?\n\n\u2014Mi nombre no importa. El de mi primo, s\u00ed. Finn McCarthy. Estudiaba en el Trinity College. \u00bfLo conoce?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. \u2014Contest\u00f3 sin vacilar\u2014. McCarthy estaba en el castillo de Carrickfergus con los otros l\u00edderes estudiantiles. Lo condenaron a la horca.\n\n\u2014\u00bfY lo ahorcaron?\n\n\u2014Yo... yo no tuve conocimiento de los detalles, pero...\n\nSurgi\u00f3 algo oscuro y violento dentro de m\u00ed. Me inclin\u00e9 m\u00e1s hacia \u00e9l y le dije al o\u00eddo:\n\n\u2014Si resulta que ejecutaron a mi primo, se\u00f1or Bell, lo har\u00e9 a usted responsable. Fue su gobierno el que perdi\u00f3 Irlanda. Fue su gobierno el que tir\u00f3 la toalla.\n\n\u2014No fui yo \u2014dijo Bell entrecortadamente. Estaba empezando a sangrarle la nariz\u2014. No me hagas da\u00f1o...\n\n\u2014No solamente usted, se\u00f1or Bell. Usted y otros como usted.\n\n\u2014L\u00e1rgate, antinatural \u2014me espet\u00f3; me perd\u00ed entre la masa de gente y lo dej\u00e9 conteni\u00e9ndose la hemorragia.\n\nMe di cuenta de que estaba temblando. Cog\u00ed otra copa de _mecks_ y me la beb\u00ed de un trago. Siempre hab\u00eda cre\u00eddo que Finn deb\u00eda de haber muerto, pero una peque\u00f1a parte de m\u00ed se aferraba a su recuerdo, a la posibilidad de que siguiera vivo. De todas formas, si mi primo hab\u00eda sobrevivido, no iba a enterarme por Cathal Bell.\n\nVi a Nashira de pie bajo un estrado. El Custodio, a su lado, conversaba con un emisario griego. Despu\u00e9s de sonar la campanada nocturna hab\u00eda recibido su primera dosis de amaranto en varios meses; unas gotas hab\u00edan bastado para transformarlo. Vest\u00eda de negro y dorado, con una joya que imitaba un jacinto en el cuello, y sus ojos brillaban como l\u00e1mparas. Reconoc\u00ed a las personas que estaban m\u00e1s cerca de Nashira: su guardia de \u00e9lite. Una de ellas, la sustituta de Amelia, me vio y por el movimiento de sus labios deduje que hab\u00eda informado a su jefa.\n\nNashira mir\u00f3 por encima de las cabezas de la guardia y dej\u00f3 escapar una risa d\u00e9bil. Al o\u00edrla, el Custodio se dio la vuelta. Sus ojos empezaron a arder inmediatamente.\n\nNashira me llam\u00f3 por se\u00f1as. Le di mi copa vac\u00eda a un amaur\u00f3tico y fui hacia ella.\n\n\u2014Damas y caballeros \u2014dijo a quienes la rodeaban\u2014, quiero presentarles a XX-59-40, una de nuestras clarividentes de m\u00e1s talento.\n\nLos delegados murmuraron, entre intrigados y asqueados.\n\n\u2014Este es Aloys Mynatt, Gran Anecdotista de Francia. Y Birgitta Tj\u00e4der, Jefa de Centinelas de la ciudadela Scion Estocolmo.\n\nMynatt era un hombre de escasa estatura, de postura r\u00edgida, con unas facciones anodinas. Salud\u00f3 con una inclinaci\u00f3n de cabeza.\n\nTj\u00e4der se qued\u00f3 mir\u00e1ndome. Tendr\u00eda alrededor de treinta y cinco a\u00f1os; su cabello era rubio y tupido, y sus ojos de color del aceite de oliva. Nick siempre la hab\u00eda llamado \u00abla Urraca\u00bb; era famosa por la crueldad con que gobernaba Estocolmo. Repar\u00e9 en que no soportaba estar cerca de m\u00ed: ten\u00eda los labios tensos y mostraba los dientes, como si se dispusiera a morder. A m\u00ed tampoco me entusiasmaba su presencia.\n\n\u2014Que no se me acerque \u2014dijo Tj\u00e4der confirmando mis sospechas.\n\n\u2014Pero \u00bfno prefer\u00eds que est\u00e9n aqu\u00ed a que corran libremente por vuestras calles? \u2014dijo Nashira\u2014. Aqu\u00ed no pueden hacer ning\u00fan da\u00f1o, Birgitta. No les dejamos. Cuando se haya creado Sheol III, ya no tendr\u00e1s que volver a mirar a ning\u00fan clarividente.\n\n\u00bfUna tercera colonia penitenciaria? \u00bfTambi\u00e9n ten\u00edan planes para Estocolmo? No quer\u00eda imaginarme un Sheol III con la Urraca como captadora.\n\nTj\u00e4der no me quitaba los ojos de encima. No ten\u00eda aura, pero llevaba escrito en la cara el odio que sent\u00eda.\n\n\u2014Estoy impaciente \u2014dijo.\n\nEntonces el pianista dej\u00f3 de tocar, y le aplaudieron. Las parejas que estaban bailando se separaron. Nashira dirigi\u00f3 la vista hacia un gran reloj de pared.\n\n\u2014Se acerca la hora \u2014dijo en voz baja.\n\n\u2014Disculpadme \u2014dijo Tj\u00e4der; se dio la vuelta y volvi\u00f3 con los suecos, dejando un espacio vac\u00edo entre el Custodio y yo, pero no me atrev\u00ed a mirarlo a los ojos.\n\n\u2014Tengo que dirigirme a los emisarios. \u2014Nashira mir\u00f3 hacia el escenario\u2014. Arcturus, qu\u00e9date con 40. Te avisar\u00e9 cuando la necesite.\n\nDe modo que era cierto que planeaba matarme en p\u00fablico. Evit\u00e9 mirarlos a los dos. El Custodio agach\u00f3 la cabeza y dijo:\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, mi soberana. \u2014Me agarr\u00f3 bruscamente por un brazo y a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014: Ven, 40.\n\nAntes de que \u00e9l pudiera apartarme, Nashira gir\u00f3 bruscamente la cabeza. Me agarr\u00f3 por la mu\u00f1eca y tir\u00f3 de m\u00ed hacia ella.\n\n\u2014\u00bfTe has hecho da\u00f1o, 40?\n\nYa no llevaba las suturas adhesivas en la mejilla, pero el corte que me hab\u00eda hecho con el cristal me hab\u00eda dejado una fina cicatriz.\n\n\u2014Tuve que pegarle. \u2014El Custodio me sujetaba el brazo con fuerza\u2014. Me desobedeci\u00f3 y la castigu\u00e9.\n\nCada uno me ten\u00eda agarrado por un brazo; parec\u00eda una mu\u00f1eca de trapo. Se miraron por encima de mi cabeza.\n\n\u2014Estupendo \u2014dijo Nashira\u2014. Has tardado a\u00f1os, pero por fin empiezas a entender qu\u00e9 significa ser mi consorte.\n\nLe dio la espalda, se separ\u00f3 de los emisarios y fue hacia los invitados.\n\nEl m\u00fasico, quienquiera que fuese, empez\u00f3 a tocar unos acordes de piano bien escogidos, acompa\u00f1ados de una letra inquietante. Estaba segura de reconocer aquella voz, pero no consegu\u00eda identificarla.\n\nEl Custodio me llev\u00f3 a un lado de la sala, al pasillo alargado bajo la galer\u00eda, y se inclin\u00f3 para mirarme a los ojos.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEst\u00e1 todo preparado?\n\nDije que s\u00ed con la cabeza.\n\nEl m\u00fasico ten\u00eda una voz francamente bonita, una especie de d\u00e9bil falsete. Volv\u00ed a tener la sensaci\u00f3n de que conoc\u00eda aquella voz.\n\n\u2014Anoche mis compa\u00f1eros y yo hicimos una sesi\u00f3n espiritista \u2014dijo el Custodio con una voz apenas audible\u2014. Tendremos esp\u00edritus a nuestra disposici\u00f3n. Esp\u00edritus humanos, las v\u00edctimas de la Era de Huesos XVIII. Te ayudar\u00e1n a combatir a los refa\u00edtas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfY la DVN? \u00bfLa han tra\u00eddo?\n\n\u2014No pueden entrar en el Consistorio a menos que los llamen. Se hallan estacionados en el puente.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCu\u00e1ntos son?\n\n\u2014Treinta.\n\nVolv\u00ed a asentir. Todos los emisarios ten\u00edan al menos un guardaespaldas, pero todos eran centinelas de la DVD. No quer\u00edan que los protegieran antinaturales. Por suerte para nosotros, la DVD no estaba preparada para el combate espiritista.\n\nEl Custodio mir\u00f3 al techo y vio a Liss trepando por sus sedas.\n\n\u2014Veo que Liss se ha recuperado.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Entonces estamos en paz. Est\u00e1 todo arreglado.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, todas las deudas est\u00e1n saldadas \u2014confirm\u00e9.\n\nEl treno. Eso me hizo pensar en lo que todav\u00eda estaba por venir. \u00bfY si Nashira consegu\u00eda matarme?\n\n\u2014Todo saldr\u00e1 como lo hemos planeado, Paige. No debes perder la esperanza. \u2014Mir\u00f3 hacia el escenario y a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014: La esperanza es lo \u00fanico que todav\u00eda podr\u00eda salvarnos a todos.\n\nSegu\u00ed la direcci\u00f3n de su mirada. Hab\u00edan colocado la campana de cristal y la flor sin vida en un pedestal cubierto.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 esperanza?\n\n\u2014La esperanza de un cambio.\n\nCes\u00f3 la m\u00fasica, y volvieron a arrancar aplausos de la pista de baile. Quer\u00eda mirar, averiguar qui\u00e9n era el que tocaba, pero no ve\u00eda m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de las cabezas de los emisarios.\n\nUn casaca roja subi\u00f3 al escenario. 22. Sus andares torcidos indicaban la cantidad de mezcla de Duckett que hab\u00eda ingerido.\n\n\u2014Damas y caballeros \u2014dijo\u2014, la gran... Suzerana, Nashira Sargas, soberana de sangre de la... raza de los refa\u00edtas.\n\nBaj\u00f3 tambale\u00e1ndose. Reprim\u00ed una sonrisa: al menos hab\u00eda un casaca roja del que no tendr\u00edamos que encargarnos.\n\nNashira subi\u00f3 al estrado, y su p\u00fablico la aplaudi\u00f3 con entusiasmo. Nos mir\u00f3. El Custodio la mir\u00f3 tambi\u00e9n.\n\n\u2014Damas y caballeros \u2014dijo Nashira sin desviar la mirada\u2014, bienvenidos a Sheol I, capital de Scion. Quiero darles las gracias por asistir a nuestra celebraci\u00f3n de esta noche.\n\n\u00bbHan transcurrido ya doscientos a\u00f1os desde nuestra llegada a Gran Breta\u00f1a. Ha pasado mucho tiempo desde 1859. Como ver\u00e1n, hemos hecho todo lo posible para convertir nuestra primera ciudad de control en un lugar de belleza, respeto y, por encima de todo, compasi\u00f3n. Nuestro sistema de rehabilitaci\u00f3n permite a los j\u00f3venes clarividentes entrar en nuestra ciudad y recibir la mejor calidad de vida posible. \u2014Como animales en un zoo\u2014. Como todos sabemos, la clarividencia no es culpa de sus v\u00edctimas. Como una enfermedad, se aprovecha de los inocentes. Los hace enfermar de antinaturalidad.\n\n\u00bbHoy Sheol I celebra doscientos a\u00f1os de trabajo bien hecho. Como ver\u00e1n, el proyecto ha tenido un \u00e9xito rotundo, y es la primera de las muchas semillas que queremos plantar. A cambio de su comprensi\u00f3n, no solo les hemos proporcionado un medio humanitario de apartar a los clarividentes de la sociedad, sino que hemos impedido cientos de ataques de emim a la ciudadela. Somos una baliza que los atrae; vienen a nosotros como polillas atra\u00eddas hacia una llama. \u2014Sus ojos tambi\u00e9n parec\u00edan llamas en la penumbra\u2014. Pero el n\u00famero de emim crece d\u00eda a d\u00eda. Esta colonia pronto dejar\u00e1 de ofrecer suficiente protecci\u00f3n. Los emim han sido vistos en Francia, Irlanda y, m\u00e1s recientemente, Suecia.\n\nIrlanda. Por eso estaba all\u00ed Cathal Bell. Por eso estaba tan nervioso y asustado.\n\n\u2014Es imprescindible que establezcamos Sheol II, que prendamos otra llama \u2014prosigui\u00f3 Nashira\u2014. Ya hemos puesto a prueba nuestro m\u00e9todo. Con su ayuda, y la de sus ciudades, confiamos en que la flor de nuestra alianza pueda florecer por fin.\n\nAplausos. El Custodio ten\u00eda las mand\u00edbulas apretadas. La expresi\u00f3n de su cara daba miedo. Enfadado. Cruel. Mort\u00edfero.\n\nEra la primera vez que lo ve\u00eda con aquel semblante.\n\n\u2014Nos quedan unos minutos antes de que d\u00e9 comienzo la obra de teatro escrita por nuestro Capataz. Entretanto, me gustar\u00eda presentarles a mi socio, el segundo soberano de sangre, que quiere hacer un breve anuncio. Damas y caballeros: con ustedes, Gomeisa Sargas.\n\nExtendi\u00f3 una mano. Antes de que me hubiera dado cuenta de que hab\u00eda alguien m\u00e1s all\u00ed, otra mano m\u00e1s grande se la tom\u00f3.\n\nSe me cort\u00f3 la respiraci\u00f3n.\n\nLlevaba una t\u00fanica negra, con un cuello que llegaba a cubrirle las orejas. Era alto y delgado, de cabello rubio y rostro descarnado. Las comisuras de sus labios apuntaban hacia abajo, como si le pesaran las sartas de piedras preciosas del tama\u00f1o de ojos que llevaba alrededor del cuello. Parec\u00eda mayor que los otros refa\u00edtas; se notaba en su porte, y en las sorprendentes dimensiones de su onirosaje. Yo percib\u00eda aquel onirosaje como una pared que chocaba contra mi cr\u00e1neo. Era lo m\u00e1s antiguo y terrible que jam\u00e1s hab\u00eda sentido en el \u00e9ter.\n\n\u2014Buenas noches.\n\nGomeisa nos contempl\u00f3 con la t\u00edpica expresi\u00f3n de los refa\u00edtas: la del observador imperturbable. Su aura semejaba una mano que tapara el sol. No me extra\u00f1aba que Liss le tuviera tanto miedo. La vi envuelta en sus cintas, silenciosa y quieta. Al cabo de un momento, baj\u00f3 a la galer\u00eda.\n\n\u2014Pido perd\u00f3n a los humanos que residen en Sheol I por mis prolongadas ausencias. Soy el principal emisario de los refa\u00edtas ante el Arconte de Westminster. Como tal, paso mucho tiempo en la capital con el Inquisidor, discutiendo sobre cu\u00e1les son los mejores m\u00e9todos para aumentar la eficacia de esta colonia penitenciaria.\n\n\u00bbComo ya ha comentado Nashira, lo que hoy celebramos es un comienzo. Est\u00e1 naciendo una nueva era: la de la colaboraci\u00f3n perfecta entre humanos y refa\u00edtas, dos razas que llevan demasiado tiempo separadas. Celebramos el fin de un viejo mundo, donde reinaban la ignorancia y la oscuridad. Juramos compartir nuestra sabidur\u00eda con vosotros, como vosotros hab\u00e9is compartido vuestro mundo con nosotros. Juramos protegeros, como vosotros nos hab\u00e9is dado cobijo. Y os prometo, amigos, que no permitiremos que nuestro pacto se deshaga. Aqu\u00ed la pureza gobierna con mano de hierro. Y la flor de la transgresi\u00f3n permanecer\u00e1 eternamente marchita.\n\nEch\u00e9 un vistazo a la flor muerta de la campana de cristal. \u00c9l la mir\u00f3 como si mirara una babosa.\n\n\u2014Pero basta de formalidades \u2014dijo\u2014. Que d\u00e9 comienzo la obra.\n\nApareci\u00f3 el Capataz, con un atuendo deslumbrante. Llevaba una larga capa roja, abrochada hasta el cuello, que le tapaba todo el cuerpo. Salud\u00f3 con una reverencia.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Salutaciones, damas y caballeros, y bienvenidos a Sheol I! Soy el Capataz, Beltrame. Me ocupo de la poblaci\u00f3n humana de la ciudad. Quiero dar una bienvenida especialmente calurosa a aquellos de ustedes que han venido desde regiones no convertidas del continente. \u00a1No teman! Despu\u00e9s del espect\u00e1culo tendr\u00e1n la oportunidad de convertir sus ciudades en ciudadelas de Scion, como han hecho otras muchas ciudades. Nuestro programa permite a los gobiernos desenraizar y segregar a los clarividentes cuando todav\u00eda son j\u00f3venes, sin necesidad de recurrir al tremendo gasto que conllevan las ejecuciones en masa.\n\nProcur\u00e9 no escuchar. No todos los pa\u00edses empleaban el NiteKind para ejecutar a los clarividentes. Muchos utilizaban la inyecci\u00f3n letal, o un pelot\u00f3n de fusilamiento, o cosas peores.\n\n\u2014Ya hemos planeado la creaci\u00f3n de Sheol II en asociaci\u00f3n con las ciudadelas Scion de Par\u00eds y Marsella, que se convertir\u00e1n en las primeras ciudadelas sat\u00e9lite francesas. \u2014Aplausos. Mynatt sonri\u00f3\u2014. Esta noche esperamos concretar la futura ubicaci\u00f3n de, por lo menos, dos ciudades de control m\u00e1s en el continente. Pero, antes de todo eso, queremos mostrarles una peque\u00f1a obra de teatro para demostrar que muchos de nuestros clarividentes hacen un buen uso de sus habilidades.\n\n\u00bbEsta obra nos recordar\u00e1 los d\u00edas oscuros anteriores a la llegada de los refa\u00edtas, cuando el Rey Sangriento todav\u00eda ostentaba el poder. El rey que construy\u00f3 su casa con sangre.\n\nEl reloj dio la hora. Los actores, veinte en total, salieron en fila india. Iban a representar la historia de la vida de Eduardo VII, desde su adquisici\u00f3n de una mesa de espiritismo y los cinco asesinatos, hasta el pu\u00f1al hallado en sus dependencias y su huida de Inglaterra con el resto de su familia. Los inicios de la presunta epidemia, y un testimonio de por qu\u00e9 la existencia de Scion era necesaria. Liss estaba de pie al fondo del escenario. La flanqueaban Nell, la chica que la hab\u00eda sustituido cuando hab\u00eda sufrido el choque espiritual, y una profeta que, si no recordaba mal, se llamaba Lotte. Las tres iban disfrazadas de v\u00edctimas del Rey Sangriento.\n\nEn el centro del escenario, el Capataz se desprendi\u00f3 de la capa revelando las vestiduras de un monarca. El p\u00fablico lo abuche\u00f3. Representaba a Eduardo en su \u00e9poca de heredero de la reina Victoria, engalanado con joyas y pieles.\n\nLa primera escena parec\u00eda desarrollarse en su alcoba, donde un ostentoso cal\u00edope interpretaba \u00abDaisy Bell\u00bb. El buf\u00f3n que estaba m\u00e1s cerca del p\u00fablico dijo ser Frederick Ponsonby, primer bar\u00f3n de Sysonby, el secretario personal de Eduardo. La obra iba a presentarse a trav\u00e9s de su mirada.\n\n\u2014Alteza \u2014dijo al Capataz\u2014, \u00bfvamos afuera a dar un paseo?\n\n\u2014\u00bfHas tra\u00eddo tu chaqueta corta, Ponsonby?\n\n\u2014No, solo un frac, alteza.\n\n\u2014Cre\u00eda que todo el mundo sab\u00eda \u2014dijo el Capataz con voz resonante, y con un hilarante acento aristocr\u00e1tico ingl\u00e9s\u2014 que a una exhibici\u00f3n privada celebrada por la ma\u00f1ana siempre hay que ir con chaqueta corta y sombrero de seda. \u00a1Y esos pantalones son los m\u00e1s feos que he visto jam\u00e1s!\n\nAbucheos. Silbidos. Aquella bestia licenciosa se hab\u00eda atrevido a llamarse heredero de Victoria. Ponsonby se volvi\u00f3 hacia el p\u00fablico.\n\n\u2014Tras provocar numerosas aflicciones, con mi frac, por ejemplo, y con mis inadecuados pantalones \u2014risas\u2014, el pr\u00edncipe se cans\u00f3 de sus galas. Esa misma tarde me pidi\u00f3 que lo acompa\u00f1ara a hacer una excursi\u00f3n. \u00a1Ay, amigos m\u00edos! El sufrimiento humano jam\u00e1s ha superado el de la reina al contemplar a su hijo recorriendo el camino del mal.\n\nGir\u00e9 la cabeza para ver la reacci\u00f3n del Custodio, pero ya no estaba all\u00ed.\n\nLa conversaci\u00f3n entre Eduardo y Ponsonby se prolong\u00f3 un poco m\u00e1s. Todas las escenas estaban pensadas para mostrar a Eduardo como un idiota cruel y lujurioso, y un fracaso para su madre. Yo observaba fascinada. Exageraban el papel de Eduardo en la muerte del pr\u00edncipe Alberto hasta lo rid\u00edculo, e incluso introduc\u00edan un duelo. Aparec\u00eda la reina Victoria, que hab\u00eda enviudado, con su coronita de diamantes y su velo. \u00abNo puedo mirarlo sin estremecerme \u2014confes\u00f3 al p\u00fablico\u2014. Para m\u00ed es tan antinatural como si lo hubieran sustituido por otro ni\u00f1o al nacer.\u00bb El p\u00fablico aplaudi\u00f3. Ella era un baluarte de bondad, la \u00faltima monarca impoluta antes de la plaga. Mientras la actriz encandilaba a los emisarios, yo vigilaba el reloj. Hab\u00eda transcurrido casi media hora, y segu\u00eda sin saber a qu\u00e9 hora sal\u00eda el tren. A continuaci\u00f3n ven\u00eda el momento crucial de la obra: la sesi\u00f3n espiritista. Llevaron unos faroles rojos al escenario. Cuando volv\u00ed a mirar, tuve que contener la risa, pues el Capataz estaba muy metido en su papel.\n\n\u2014Los poderes terrenales no son suficiente \u2014dijo, resollando, imbuido de la maldad de su personaje. Hab\u00edan sacado la mesa de espiritismo, y el Capataz describ\u00eda c\u00edrculos con los brazos sobre ella\u2014. Hablan de la era victoriana, pero \u00bfc\u00f3mo ser\u00e1 la de Eduardo? \u00bfQu\u00e9 rey puede gobernar con eficacia, si lo agobian las cadenas de la mortalidad? \u2014Se inclin\u00f3 sobre la mesa, haci\u00e9ndola balancear con las manos\u2014. S\u00ed, levantaos. Salid de las sombras. Atravesad el umbral, esp\u00edritus de los muertos. \u00a1Entrad en m\u00ed y en mis seguidores! \u00a1Reproduc\u00edos en la sangre de Inglaterra!\n\nMientras \u00e9l hablaba, los faroles rojos salieron del escenario llevados por actores vestidos de negro que representaban a los esp\u00edritus antinaturales. Se dispersaron por la sala agarrando a la gente, que chillaba. Eran la plaga de antinaturalidad.\n\nLa m\u00fasica y la risa de los actores acab\u00f3 por aturdirme. Todo me daba vueltas. El Capataz entonaba a gritos sus conjuros. Aprovechando la oscuridad y la confusi\u00f3n, el Custodio me agarr\u00f3 por el brazo.\n\n\u2014R\u00e1pido \u2014me dijo al o\u00eddo\u2014. Ven conmigo.\n\nMe llev\u00f3 al foso, un espacio peque\u00f1o y oscuro bajo el piso del escenario donde se amontonaban los cajones de embalaje. La \u00fanica luz era la que se filtraba entre los tablones. Una luz roja, como los faroles. Unos gruesos cortinajes de terciopelo colgaban a lo largo de uno de los lados de la estancia, ocult\u00e1ndonos del sal\u00f3n de arriba. No era f\u00e1cil pensar, en aquel lugar tan oscuro, en eso a lo que tal vez pronto me enfrentar\u00eda.\n\nAll\u00ed no hab\u00eda tanto ruido. Los actores danzaban por encima de nuestras cabezas, pero las tablas del suelo amortiguaban el estruendo. El Custodio me mir\u00f3.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa ser\u00e1s la \u00faltima escena de la obra. El \u00faltimo acto. \u2014Ten\u00eda los ojos encendidos\u2014. Le o\u00ed coment\u00e1rselo a Gomeisa.\n\nSe me puso la piel de gallina.\n\n\u2014Sab\u00edamos que iba a pasar.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\nYo sab\u00eda desde el principio que Nashira iba a matarme, pero o\u00edrselo decir a \u00e9l hac\u00eda que pareciera mucho m\u00e1s real. Una parte de m\u00ed hab\u00eda seguido confiando en que Nashira esperar\u00eda unos d\u00edas y me brindar\u00eda la oportunidad de fugarme con los otros en el tren; pero Nashira era cruel. Quer\u00eda hacerlo en p\u00fablico, delante de Scion. No pensaba arriesgarse a mantenerme con vida.\n\nLa luz de los ojos del Custodio oscurec\u00eda a\u00fan m\u00e1s las sombras. Detect\u00e9 algo diferente en ellos: algo salvaje, imprevisible. Me estremec\u00ed, y me sent\u00e9 en un caj\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014No puedo luchar contra ella \u2014dije\u2014. Sus \u00e1ngeles...\n\n\u2014No, Paige. Piensa. Nashira lleva meses esperando que pudieras poseer otro cuerpo. Si no mostrabas esa habilidad, exist\u00eda el peligro de que ella no pudiera obtenerla de ti. Te hizo casaca amarilla para asegurarse de que los emim no volv\u00edan a poner tu vida en peligro. Te puso bajo la protecci\u00f3n de su propio consorte. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 iba a tomarse tantas molestias para conservarte si t\u00fa no ten\u00edas un don que ella no solo ambicionaba, sino que tambi\u00e9n tem\u00eda?\n\n\u2014T\u00fa me ense\u00f1aste a hacer todo eso. Las sesiones de entrenamiento en la pradera... La mariposa y la cierva... Me ense\u00f1aste a ejercitar mi esp\u00edritu. Me entrenaste para mi propia muerte.\n\n\u2014Ella me escogi\u00f3 para prepararte. Por eso me dej\u00f3 llevarte a Magdalen. Pero no pienso dejar que se salga con la suya. Me he comprometido a desarrollar tu don, pero para ti, Paige. No para ella.\n\nNo dije nada. No hab\u00eda nada que decir.\n\nEl Custodio arranc\u00f3 un pedazo de cortina y, con cuidado, empez\u00f3 a quitarme el maquillaje. Yo le dej\u00e9 hacer. Ten\u00eda los labios entumecidos, la piel congelada. Tal vez estuviera muerta al cabo de unos minutos, flotando alrededor de Nashira en un estado de ciega servidumbre. Cuando hubo terminado, el Custodio me apart\u00f3 el pelo de la cara. Le dej\u00e9 hacer. No pod\u00eda enfocar la mirada.\n\n\u2014Ni se te ocurra \u2014me dijo\u2014. Ni se te ocurra dej\u00e1rselo ver. T\u00fa eres mucho m\u00e1s que eso. Eres mucho m\u00e1s de lo que ella quiere hacerte.\n\n\u2014No tengo miedo.\n\nMe escudri\u00f1\u00f3 la cara.\n\n\u2014Deber\u00edas tenerlo \u2014dijo\u2014. Pero no se lo muestres. Por nada del mundo.\n\n\u2014Le mostrar\u00e9 lo que quiera. No est\u00e1s en posici\u00f3n de darme \u00f3rdenes. \u2014Le apart\u00e9 las manos de mi cabeza\u2014. Debiste dejarme marchar. Debiste dejar que Nick me llevara a Dials. Era lo \u00fanico que ten\u00edas que hacer. Ahora podr\u00eda estar en mi casa.\n\nEl Custodio se agach\u00f3 hasta que nuestras caras quedaron a la misma altura.\n\n\u2014Te traje aqu\u00ed porque sin ti no encontraba la fuerza necesaria para enfrentarme a ella. Pero, por esa misma raz\u00f3n, har\u00e9 todo lo posible para que llegues sana y salva a la ciudadela.\n\nNos quedamos callados. Le sostuve la mirada.\n\n\u2014Tienes que recogerte el pelo \u2014dijo con otra voz, m\u00e1s serena, y me puso un peine ornamentado en la mano.\n\nEl peine estaba fr\u00edo. Me temblaban los dedos.\n\n\u2014Creo que no puedo. \u2014Respir\u00e9 hondo, despacio\u2014. \u00bfQuieres hacerlo t\u00fa?\n\nNo dijo nada, pero cogi\u00f3 el peine. Como si estuviera tocando una telara\u00f1a fin\u00edsima, me puso todo el pelo a un lado del cuello y me lo recogi\u00f3 en un mo\u00f1o. No un mo\u00f1o sencillo, como los que me hac\u00eda yo, sino un mo\u00f1o trenzado muy elaborado, pegado al cogote. Desliz\u00f3 sus callosos dedos por mi cuero cabelludo, dando los \u00faltimos toques al peinado. Me recorri\u00f3 un d\u00e9bil escalofr\u00edo. El Custodio apart\u00f3 las manos, y el mo\u00f1o permaneci\u00f3 en su sitio.\n\nHab\u00eda notado algo raro en su forma de tocarme. Cuando le vi las manos comprend\u00ed por qu\u00e9.\n\nNo llevaba puestos los guantes.\n\nMe toqu\u00e9 la cabeza y pas\u00e9 los dedos por el complicado peinado. Parec\u00eda mentira que unas manos tan grandes como las del Custodio hubieran sido capaces de semejante complejidad.\n\n\u2014El tren sale a la una en punto \u2014me dijo al o\u00eddo\u2014. La entrada est\u00e1 bajo el campo de entrenamiento. Exactamente donde entrenabas conmigo.\n\nLlevaba mucho tiempo esperando o\u00edr esas palabras.\n\n\u2014Si me mata, tienes que dec\u00edrselo a los otros \u2014dije con la voz tomada\u2014. Tienes que guiarlos.\n\nMe acarici\u00f3 un brazo y dijo:\n\n\u2014No har\u00e1 falta que los gu\u00ede.\n\nNot\u00e9 un estremecimiento, pero no de la clase que yo esperaba. Cuando gir\u00e9 la cabeza y lo mir\u00e9, \u00e9l me recogi\u00f3 un rizo rebelde detr\u00e1s de la oreja. Me puso la otra mano en el abdomen y apret\u00f3 mi espalda contra su pecho. Su calor me reconfort\u00f3.\n\nY not\u00e9 sus ansias de m\u00ed. No de mi aura, sino de m\u00ed.\n\nAcerc\u00f3 la cabeza a mi mejilla y me acarici\u00f3 las clav\u00edculas. Su onirosaje estaba muy cerca, y su aura se entrelazaba con la m\u00eda. Mi sexto sentido se acentu\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Tienes la piel fr\u00eda \u2014dijo con voz ronca\u2014. Yo nunca...\n\nSe interrumpi\u00f3. Mis dedos se trabaron con los suyos, desnudos. Mantuve los ojos abiertos.\n\nAcerc\u00f3 los labios a mi ment\u00f3n, y le gui\u00e9 una mano hacia mi cintura. El atractivo de su tacto era insoportable; no pod\u00eda resistirme. No pod\u00eda rechazarlo. Deseaba aquello, antes de que llegara el fin. Quer\u00eda que me tocaran, que me vieran; all\u00ed, en aquella habitaci\u00f3n a oscuras, en aquel silencio rojo. Levant\u00e9 la barbilla, y sus labios se cerraron sobre los m\u00edos.\n\nSiempre hab\u00eda sabido que no exist\u00eda el cielo. Jax me lo hab\u00eda dicho muchas veces. Hasta el Custodio lo hab\u00eda dicho. Solo hab\u00eda luz blanca, la \u00faltima luz: un \u00faltimo descanso al borde de la inconsciencia, el lugar donde todas las cosas encuentran su fin. M\u00e1s all\u00e1, qui\u00e9n sabe. Pero, si exist\u00eda el cielo, deb\u00eda de parecerse a aquello. Tocar el \u00e9ter con las manos desnudas. Jam\u00e1s habr\u00eda podido esperar algo semejante, y menos de \u00e9l. De nadie. Me agarr\u00e9 a su espalda, tir\u00e9 de \u00e9l hacia m\u00ed. Me puso una mano en la nuca. Not\u00e9 los callos de la palma de sus manos.\n\nEl calor de su aliento. Me bes\u00f3 despacio. \u00abNo pares. No pares.\u00bb Solo pod\u00eda pensar en esas palabras: \u00abNo pares\u00bb. Desliz\u00f3 las manos por mis costados, por mi espalda, y me estrech\u00f3 firmemente. Me subi\u00f3 a un caj\u00f3n. Le puse una mano en el cuello y le not\u00e9 el pulso. Su ritmo. Mi ritmo.\n\nMe ard\u00eda la piel. No pod\u00eda parar. Jam\u00e1s hab\u00eda sentido nada parecido, aquel apremio, aquella necesidad de acariciar. Sus labios separaron los m\u00edos. Abr\u00ed los ojos. \u00abPara. Para, Paige.\u00bb Empec\u00e9 a apartar la cabeza. Se me escap\u00f3 una palabra: un \u00abno\u00bb, o quiz\u00e1 un \u00abs\u00ed\u00bb. Quiz\u00e1 su nombre. Me sujet\u00f3 la cara con ambas manos, me acarici\u00f3 los labios, las mejillas. Nuestras frentes se tocaron. Mi onirosaje estaba ardiendo. El Custodio prendi\u00f3 fuego a las amapolas. \u00abNo pares. No pares.\u00bb\n\nSolo fue un momento. Lo mir\u00e9, y \u00e9l me mir\u00f3. Un momento. Una decisi\u00f3n. Mi decisi\u00f3n. La suya. Entonces volvi\u00f3 a besarme, esa vez con m\u00e1s \u00edmpetu. Le dej\u00e9 hacer. Me rode\u00f3 con los brazos y me levant\u00f3. Y yo lo deseaba, con toda el alma. Le as\u00ed la cabeza, me agarr\u00e9 a su cuello. \u00abNo pares.\u00bb Ten\u00eda sus labios en la boca, en los ojos, en los hombros, en el hueco entre las clav\u00edculas. \u00abNo pares.\u00bb Desliz\u00f3 la palma de las manos por mis muslos y los acarici\u00f3 en\u00e9rgicamente, con confianza.\n\nLe abr\u00ed la camisa y le acarici\u00e9 el pecho. Le bes\u00e9 el cuello, y \u00e9l me agarr\u00f3 un mech\u00f3n de pelo. \u00abNo pares.\u00bb Nunca hab\u00eda tocado su piel. La not\u00e9 caliente y suave, y me hizo desear el resto de su cuerpo. Mis manos se deslizaron por debajo de su camisa y buscaron su espalda. Mis dedos encontraron sus cicatrices, unas bregaduras alargadas, crueles. Yo siempre hab\u00eda sabido que las ten\u00eda. Eran las cicatrices de un traidor.\n\nSe puso en tensi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Paige \u2014susurr\u00f3, pero no me detuve; emiti\u00f3 un ruido gutural y sus labios se acercaron a los m\u00edos.\n\nYo no iba a traicionarlo. La Era de Huesos XVIII ya era historia, y no se repetir\u00eda.\n\nDoscientos a\u00f1os eran m\u00e1s que suficiente.\n\nMi sexto sentido me sac\u00f3 de mi aturdimiento. Me separ\u00e9 del Custodio. \u00c9l segu\u00eda con las manos en mi cintura, tirando de m\u00ed hacia \u00e9l.\n\nNashira estaba all\u00ed, semioculta entre las sombras. Me dio un vuelco el coraz\u00f3n.\n\n\u00abCorre\u00bb, me dijo mi aturdido cerebro; pero no pod\u00eda correr. Nashira lo hab\u00eda visto todo. Mi piel sudada, mis labios hinchados, mi pelo alborotado. Las manos del Custodio sujet\u00e1ndome las caderas. Su camisa abierta. Mis dedos todav\u00eda tanteando su piel.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 paralizada. Ni siquiera pod\u00eda mover los ojos.\n\nEl Custodio me puso detr\u00e1s de su espalda.\n\n\u2014La he obligado \u2014dijo con voz \u00e1spera.\n\nNashira no dijo nada.\n\nAvanz\u00f3 hacia la d\u00e9bil luz que se colaba entre las cortinas. Vi que ten\u00eda algo en las manos: la campana de cristal. Mir\u00e9 dentro; me zumbaban los o\u00eddos. Dentro hab\u00eda una flor. Una flor fresca, preciosa y extra\u00f1a, con los ocho p\u00e9talos h\u00famedos de n\u00e9ctar. La flor que antes estaba marchita.\n\n\u2014No puede haber piedad \u2014dijo Nashira\u2014 para esto.\n\nEl Custodio mir\u00f3 un momento la flor con ojos resplandecientes. Luego mir\u00f3 a Nashira.\n\nNashira solt\u00f3 la campana de cristal, que se estrell\u00f3 contra el suelo y me sac\u00f3 de mi par\u00e1lisis.\n\nAcababa de destruirlo todo.\n\n\u2014Arcturus Mesarthim, eres mi consorte de sangre. Eres Custodio de los Mesarthim. Pero esto no puede volver a pasar. \u2014Nashira avanz\u00f3 hacia nosotros\u2014. Solo existe una forma de impedir la traici\u00f3n, y consiste en poner a los traidores de ejemplo. Te colgar\u00e9 de los muros de esta ciudad.\n\nEl Custodio no se movi\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Mejor eso que ser utilizado para satisfacer tus placeres.\n\n\u2014Siempre tan audaz. O tan insensato. \u2014Le pas\u00f3 una mano por la cara\u2014. Me encargar\u00e9 de que destruyan a todos tus viejos compa\u00f1eros.\n\n\u2014No. \u2014Sal\u00ed de detr\u00e1s de \u00e9l\u2014. No puedes...\n\nNo me dio tiempo a moverme. El golpe que me asest\u00f3 me tir\u00f3 al suelo. Me di con el canto de un caj\u00f3n, y me hice un corte en la ceja. Par\u00e9 la ca\u00edda apoyando las manos en los cristales rotos. O\u00ed que el Custodio dec\u00eda mi nombre, con rabia; pero entonces aparecieron Thuban y Situla, los fieles servidores de Nashira, dispuestos a no soltarlo. Thuban golpe\u00f3 al Custodio en la cabeza con el mango de su pu\u00f1al, pero no lo derrib\u00f3. Esa vez el Custodio no iba a arrodillarse ante los Sargas.\n\n\u2014Ya me ocupar\u00e9 de tus delitos m\u00e1s tarde, Arcturus. Te despojo de tu posici\u00f3n de consorte de sangre. \u2014Nashira se apart\u00f3 de \u00e9l\u2014. Thuban, Situla: llevadlo a la galer\u00eda.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, mi soberana \u2014dijo Thuban. Agarr\u00f3 al Custodio por el cuello\u2014. Ha llegado la hora de que pagues lo que debes, traidor.\n\nSitula le hinc\u00f3 los dedos en el hombro, avergonzada de su primo traidor. \u00c9l no dijo nada.\n\n\u00ab\u00a1No!\u00bb Aquello no pod\u00eda acabar as\u00ed, como la Era de Huesos XVIII. El Custodio ya no era consorte de sangre. Estaba perdido. Yo hab\u00eda apagado el \u00faltimo rayo de luz. Busqu\u00e9 su mirada, algo que rescatar; pero el Custodio ten\u00eda los ojos inexpresivos y oscuros, y lo \u00fanico que sent\u00ed fue su silencio. Thuban y Situla se lo llevaron por la fuerza.\n\nNashira camin\u00f3 por encima de los cristales rotos. Me qued\u00e9 inm\u00f3vil y not\u00e9 que se me empa\u00f1aban los ojos. Qu\u00e9 idiota era. \u00bfEn qu\u00e9 estaba pensando? \u00bfQu\u00e9 estaba haciendo?\n\n\u2014Ha llegado tu hora, onir\u00e1mbula.\n\n\u2014Por fin. \u2014Me sangraba la herida de la frente\u2014. Has esperado mucho.\n\n\u2014Deber\u00edas alegrarte. Tengo entendido que los onir\u00e1mbulos ans\u00edan el \u00e9ter. Hoy podr\u00e1s unirte a \u00e9l.\n\n\u2014Nunca dominar\u00e1s este mundo. \u2014Levant\u00e9 la mirada; temblaba de rabia, no de miedo\u2014. Puedes matarme. Puedes reclamarme. Pero no puedes reclamarnos a todos. Los Siete Sellos esperan. Jaxon Hall espera. El sindicato entero te espera. \u2014Alc\u00e9 la barbilla y la mir\u00e9 a los ojos\u2014. Buena suerte.\n\nNashira me levant\u00f3 tir\u00e1ndome del pelo y acerc\u00f3 su cara a la m\u00eda.\n\n\u2014Podr\u00edas haber sido m\u00e1s \u2014dijo\u2014. Mucho m\u00e1s. Pero resulta que pronto no ser\u00e1s nada. Todo cuanto eras ser\u00e1 m\u00edo. \u2014Sacudi\u00f3 el brazo y me lanz\u00f3 contra otro refa\u00edta, que me sujet\u00f3 fuertemente\u2014. Alsafi, lleva este saco de huesos al escenario. Ha llegado la hora de que entregue su esp\u00edritu.\n\nNo me par\u00e9 a pensar: Alsafi me hizo subir la escalera. Me hab\u00eda puesto una bolsa en la cabeza. Ten\u00eda los labios resecos y las mejillas ardiendo. No pod\u00eda respirar, ni pensar con calma.\n\nEl Custodio hab\u00eda desaparecido. Lo hab\u00eda perdido. Era mi \u00fanico aliado refa, y hab\u00eda dejado que lo capturaran. Nashira no se limitar\u00eda a matarlo, despu\u00e9s de que \u00e9l se rebajara hasta el punto de tocar a una humana con las manos desnudas. Eso era algo m\u00e1s que traici\u00f3n. Al besarme, al abrazarme, el consorte de sangre hab\u00eda humillado a toda su familia. Ya no era un candidato digno. Ya no era nada.\n\nAlsafi me sujetaba el brazo con firmeza. Me dispon\u00eda a morir. Dentro de menos de diez minutos me unir\u00eda al \u00e9ter, como un esp\u00edritu cualquiera. Mi cord\u00f3n arg\u00e9nteo se romper\u00eda. Ya no podr\u00eda regresar a mi cuerpo, el cuerpo que hab\u00eda ocupado durante diecinueve a\u00f1os. A partir de ahora tendr\u00eda que servir a Nashira.\n\nMe quitaron la bolsa de la cabeza. Estaba al lado del escenario, donde se representaba el final de la obra de teatro. Ten\u00eda a un refa a cada lado, Alsafi y Terebell. Terebell se agach\u00f3 y me pregunt\u00f3:\n\n\u2014\u00bfD\u00f3nde est\u00e1 Arcturus?\n\n\u2014Se lo han llevado a la galer\u00eda. Thuban y Situla.\n\n\u2014Nos ocuparemos de ellos. \u2014Alsafi me solt\u00f3 el brazo\u2014. Tienes que entretener a la soberana de sangre, onir\u00e1mbula.\n\nYa sab\u00eda que Terebell era una de las colaboradoras del Custodio, pero ignoraba que Alsafi tambi\u00e9n estuviera en su bando. No parec\u00eda un simpatizante, pero el Custodio tampoco.\n\nEl Capataz sali\u00f3 corriendo del escenario, con el traje manchado de sangre artificial y dejando atr\u00e1s su pu\u00f1al. Sus gritos suplicando piedad resonaron por el Consistorio. Los emisarios aplaudieron cuando un grupo de actores lo persigui\u00f3 hasta la calle; llevaban todos uniformes de Scion. La ovaci\u00f3n fue ensordecedora, y se prolong\u00f3 mientras Nashira sub\u00eda de nuevo al escenario.\n\n\u2014Gracias por su bondad, damas y caballeros. Me alegro de que hayan disfrutado con la obra. \u2014No parec\u00eda muy contenta\u2014. Tambi\u00e9n me alegro de poder hacerles una breve demostraci\u00f3n, para poner fin a la velada, de c\u00f3mo funciona el sistema judicial de Sheol I. Una de nuestras clarividentes ha mostrado tal desobediencia que no podemos permitir que siga con vida. Igual que el Rey Sangriento, debe ser desterrada m\u00e1s all\u00e1 del alcance de la poblaci\u00f3n amaur\u00f3tica, donde ya no pueda causar ning\u00fan da\u00f1o.\n\n\u00bbXX-59-40 tiene un largo historial de traici\u00f3n. Proviene de la regi\u00f3n lechera de Tipperary, en el sur de Irlanda, una regi\u00f3n asociada desde hace siglos a la sedici\u00f3n. \u2014Cathal Bell traslad\u00f3 el peso del cuerpo de una pierna a la otra, y algunos emisarios murmuraron\u2014. Nada m\u00e1s venir a Inglaterra, se mezcl\u00f3 con el crimen organizado de Londres. La noche del siete de marzo asesin\u00f3 a dos clarividentes, dos metrovigilantes al servicio de Scion. Los mat\u00f3 a sangre fr\u00eda. Ninguna de las dos v\u00edctimas de 40 tuvo una muerte r\u00e1pida. Esa misma noche la trajeron a Sheol I. \u2014Nashira se paseaba por el escenario\u2014. Confi\u00e1bamos en que podr\u00edamos educarla, ense\u00f1arle a controlar su don. Nos duele perder a clarividentes tan j\u00f3venes. Tambi\u00e9n me duele admitir que nuestros esfuerzos por reformar a 40 han fracasado. Ha correspondido a nuestra compasi\u00f3n con insolencia y crueldad, y por lo tanto, no le queda otra opci\u00f3n que enfrentarse al juicio del Inquisidor.\n\nMir\u00e9 m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de Nashira. En el escenario no hab\u00eda ninguna horca, ninguna camilla ni ning\u00fan tajo. Pero hab\u00eda una espada.\n\nCre\u00ed que mi coraz\u00f3n hab\u00eda dejado de latir. No era una espada normal y corriente. La hoja era de oro, y el pu\u00f1o, negro. Era la _C\u00f3lera del Inquisidor_ , la espada que a tantos traidores pol\u00edticos hab\u00eda decapitado. Solo la utilizaban cuando descubr\u00edan a alg\u00fan esp\u00eda clarividente dentro del Arconte de Westminster. Yo era la hija de un destacado cient\u00edfico de Scion, una traidora en las filas de los naturales. Alsafi y Terebell desaparecieron bajo el escenario. Me qued\u00e9 sola frente a Nashira, que gir\u00f3 la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Ven aqu\u00ed, 40.\n\nNo vacil\u00e9. Se hizo silencio cuando sal\u00ed de detr\u00e1s de las cortinas. \u00ab\u00a1Traidora!\u00bb, grit\u00f3 Cathal Bell, y algunos emisarios lo imitaron. Segu\u00ed sin mirarlos. Ten\u00eda gracia que Bell me llamara traidora.\n\nAvanc\u00e9 con la cabeza bien alta, concentr\u00e1ndome en Nashira y sin mirar a los emisarios. Tampoco mir\u00e9 hacia la galer\u00eda, adonde hab\u00edan llevado al Custodio. Me detuve a cierta distancia de Nashira, que me rode\u00f3 lentamente, y cuando desapareci\u00f3 de mi campo de visi\u00f3n, mantuve la vista al frente.\n\n\u2014Se preguntar\u00e1n c\u00f3mo administramos la justicia en Sheol I. Con la soga, tal vez, o el fuego de tiempos ya lejanos. Aqu\u00ed est\u00e1 la espada del Inquisidor, tra\u00edda desde la ciudadela. \u2014Se\u00f1al\u00f3 la _C\u00f3lera_ \u2014. Pero antes de blandirla, quiero mostrarles otra cosa: el mayor don de los refa\u00edtas.\n\nHubo un murmullo.\n\n\u2014Eduardo VII era un hombre curioso. Sabemos muy bien que jugaba con cosas con las que es mejor no jugar. Intent\u00f3 controlar un poder que est\u00e1 m\u00e1s all\u00e1 del conocimiento humano. Un poder que los refa\u00edtas conocemos muy bien.\n\nBirgitta Tj\u00e4der miraba el escenario muy concentrada y con la frente fruncida. Varios emisarios, entre ellos Bell, miraron a sus guardaespaldas de la DVD.\n\n\u2014Imaginen la energ\u00eda m\u00e1s potente de la Tierra. \u2014Nashira alarg\u00f3 una mano hacia un farol cercano\u2014. La electricidad. Permite que su mundo funcione. Ilumina sus ciudades y sus hogares. Les permite comunicarse. El \u00e9ter (el origen, la fuerza vital de los refa\u00edtas) se parece a la electricidad. Puede alumbrar la oscuridad, y tornar en sabidur\u00eda la ignorancia. \u2014De pronto el farol emiti\u00f3 un intenso destello\u2014. Pero si se usa de forma incorrecta, puede destruir. Puede matar. \u2014Se apag\u00f3 la luz\u2014. Yo tengo un don que en los dos siglos pasados ha resultado muy \u00fatil. Algunos humanos clarividentes exhiben capacidades especialmente err\u00e1ticas. Canalizan el \u00e9ter, el reino de los muertos, de maneras que pueden generar locura y violencia. El Rey Sangriento ten\u00eda esa capacidad, que fue lo que provoc\u00f3 aquella tr\u00e1gica matanza. Yo puedo eliminar esas mutaciones peligrosas del don. \u2014Avanz\u00f3 hacia m\u00ed\u2014. La clarividencia, como la energ\u00eda, no se destruye, solo se transforma. Cuando 40 muera, otro clarividente desarrollar\u00e1 su don. Pero, guard\u00e1ndolo en mi interior, me asegurar\u00e9 de que nadie vuelva a utilizarlo nunca.\n\n\u2014Te gusta inventarte cosas, \u00bfverdad, Nashira?\n\nLo dije antes de que el pensamiento hubiera tomado forma en mi mente. Nashira se volvi\u00f3 y me fulmin\u00f3 con una mirada ardiente.\n\n\u2014No vuelvas a hablar \u2014dijo en voz baja.\n\nMe arriesgu\u00e9 a mirar hacia la galer\u00eda: estaba vac\u00eda. Por debajo de m\u00ed, Michael se llev\u00f3 una mano dentro de la chaqueta, donde ocultaba una pistola.\n\nSe abri\u00f3 una puerta al fondo del Consorcio: eran Terebell, Alsafi y el Custodio. Busqu\u00e9 la mirada del Custodio por encima de las cabezas de los emisarios. El cord\u00f3n \u00e1ureo tembl\u00f3. Vi una imagen del pu\u00f1al que el Capataz hab\u00eda dejado en el suelo del escenario, a escasos palmos de donde estaba Nashira.\n\nCuando se dio la vuelta hacia el p\u00fablico, mi esp\u00edritu se abalanz\u00f3 sobre ella. Con las \u00faltimas fuerzas que me quedaban, irrump\u00ed en su zona hadal. Mi ataque la pill\u00f3 desprevenida. Me vi a m\u00ed misma con una forma on\u00edrica inmensa, un B\u00e9gimo lo bastante grande para derribar cualquier barrera.\n\nEl \u00e9ter retumb\u00f3. Volaron esp\u00edritus por el Consorcio; acud\u00edan junto a Nashira desde todos los \u00e1ngulos. Se unieron a m\u00ed en los bordes de su onirosaje, rompiendo su arcaica coraza. Los cinco \u00e1ngeles intentaban defenderla; pero veinte, cincuenta, doscientos esp\u00edritus hab\u00edan descendido sobre ella, y las paredes empezaban a ceder. No perd\u00ed el tiempo: me lanc\u00e9 hacia el mism\u00edsimo centro de su onirosaje.\n\nVe\u00eda con sus ojos. La habitaci\u00f3n era una mancha borrosa, un torbellino de color y oscuridad, luz y fuego, un espectro de cosas que yo no hab\u00eda visto nunca. \u00bfEra as\u00ed como ve\u00edan los refas? Hab\u00eda auras por todas partes. Ten\u00eda visi\u00f3n, pero en ese momento estaba ciega, y los ojos de Nashira se negaban a ver. No quer\u00edan que yo viera. No eran mis ojos. Los obligu\u00e9 a abrirse y me mir\u00e9 la mano. Demasiado grande, y enguantada. Me costaba mantener los ojos abiertos, porque Nashira estaba luchando. \u00abDate prisa, Paige.\u00bb\n\nEl pu\u00f1al. El pu\u00f1al estaba all\u00ed. \u00abDeprisa.\u00bb Intent\u00e9 cogerlo. Mover la mano era como tratar de levantar unas pesas. \u00abM\u00e1tala.\u00bb En mis o\u00eddos resonaban gritos y otros sonidos extra\u00f1os, y voces, miles de voces. \u00abM\u00e1tala.\u00bb Mis nuevos dedos se enroscaron alrededor del mango.\n\nLo ten\u00eda. Llev\u00e9 el brazo hacia atr\u00e1s y me clav\u00e9 la hoja del pu\u00f1al en el pecho. Los emisarios gritaron. Volv\u00eda a tener visi\u00f3n de t\u00fanel. Todo parpadeaba. Retorc\u00ed el pu\u00f1al con mi nueva mano, hundi\u00e9ndolo en lo que fuera que compon\u00eda el cuerpo de Nashira. No sent\u00ed dolor. Nashira era inmune a las pu\u00f1aladas de un pu\u00f1al amaur\u00f3tico. Volv\u00ed a clavarlo, esa vez en el lado izquierdo, apuntando al sitio donde los humanos ten\u00edamos el coraz\u00f3n. Tampoco sent\u00ed dolor, pero cuando levant\u00e9 el brazo por tercera vez, me vi expulsada del cuerpo de Nashira.\n\nLos esp\u00edritus se dispersaron por la sala y apagaron todas las velas. El caos se apoder\u00f3 del Consorcio. Cuando recuper\u00e9 la visi\u00f3n, no distingu\u00eda nada. Solo o\u00eda gritos.\n\nVolvieron a encenderse las velas. Nashira yac\u00eda sobre las tablas del escenario. No se mov\u00eda. Ten\u00eda el pu\u00f1al clavado en el pecho, hasta el pu\u00f1o.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Soberana de sangre! \u2014grit\u00f3 un refa.\n\nLos emisarios guardaban silencio. Me temblaban las manos cuando me arrastr\u00e9 por el suelo hasta Nashira. Le mir\u00e9 la cara, los ojos carentes de luz. Los esp\u00edritus de la Era de Huesos XVIII segu\u00edan cerni\u00e9ndose sobre ella, como si esperaran a que se reuniera con ellos en el \u00e9ter.\n\nEntonces prendi\u00f3 en sus ojos un d\u00e9bil resplandor. Gir\u00f3 lentamente la cabeza. Me puse a temblar incontroladamente mientras ella se ergu\u00eda cuan alta era.\n\n\u2014Muy lista \u2014dijo\u2014. S\u00ed, muy lista.\n\nSegu\u00ed movi\u00e9ndome y ara\u00f1ando el suelo. Vi a Nashira arrancarse el pu\u00f1al del pecho. El p\u00fablico dio gritos de sorpresa.\n\n\u2014Ens\u00e9\u00f1anos m\u00e1s. \u2014Unas gotas de luz cayeron como l\u00e1grimas\u2014. No tengo objeciones.\n\nDio una sacudida con la mu\u00f1eca y el pu\u00f1al salt\u00f3 por los aires. Se qued\u00f3 un momento suspendido, como si colgara de un hilo invisible, y de pronto sali\u00f3 volando hacia m\u00ed. Me hizo un corte en la mejilla. Las velas chisporrotearon.\n\nUno de los \u00e1ngeles de Nashira era un duende. No era habitual que los duendes pudieran levantar la materia f\u00edsica, pero no era la primera vez que ve\u00eda a uno conseguirlo. \u00abAporte\u00bb, lo llamaba Jaxon. Esp\u00edritus que mov\u00edan objetos. Una pel\u00edcula de sudor fr\u00edo me cubr\u00eda la piel. No deb\u00eda tener miedo: ya me hab\u00eda enfrentado a un duende en otra ocasi\u00f3n. Ahora mi esp\u00edritu hab\u00eda madurado, sab\u00eda defenderme.\n\n\u2014Si insistes \u2014dije.\n\nEsa vez no la pill\u00e9 desprevenida. Levant\u00f3 todas las capas de blindaje con que proteg\u00eda su onirosaje. Como si dos puertas gigantescas se hubieran cerrado ante m\u00ed, me vi lanzada hacia atr\u00e1s, hacia mi cuerpo. Se me estremeci\u00f3 el coraz\u00f3n. La presi\u00f3n de mi cr\u00e1neo se intensific\u00f3. O\u00ed una voz conocida, pero la ahog\u00f3 otro sonido, agudo y prolongado.\n\nTen\u00eda que moverme. Nashira no iba a parar. Nunca parar\u00eda de perseguir mi esp\u00edritu. Me incorpor\u00e9 apoy\u00e1ndome en los codos y busqu\u00e9 el pu\u00f1al. Distingu\u00ed el contorno de Nashira acerc\u00e1ndose a m\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Pareces cansada, Paige. D\u00e9jalo ya. El \u00e9ter te llama.\n\n\u2014No debo de haber o\u00eddo esa llamada \u2014logr\u00e9 articular.\n\nLo que sucedi\u00f3 a continuaci\u00f3n me pill\u00f3 por sorpresa. Sus cinco \u00e1ngeles formaron una bandada y se abalanzaron sobre m\u00ed.\n\nAtravesaron mis defensas como una ola gigantesca y negra. Fuera de mi onirosaje, mi cabeza se golpe\u00f3 contra las tablas del suelo. Dentro, los esp\u00edritus abrieron un camino por el que se esparcieron p\u00e9talos rojos. Las im\u00e1genes pasaban a toda velocidad ante mis ojos. Todos mis pensamientos, todos mis recuerdos estaban rotos. Sangre, fuego, sangre. Un campo moribundo. Sent\u00eda como si una mano me apretara el pecho, inmoviliz\u00e1ndome. En una caja, un ata\u00fad. No pod\u00eda moverme, ni respirar, ni pensar. Los cinco esp\u00edritus me atravesaron como una espada, arranc\u00e1ndome pedazos de mente, de alma. Me puse de lado y me retorc\u00ed como un insecto aplastado.\n\nMe temblaban los m\u00fasculos de los brazos y las piernas. Abr\u00ed los ojos. La luz los abras\u00f3. Solo ve\u00eda a Nashira, con la mano extendida, la luz de las velas reflejada en la hoja del pu\u00f1al. Y entonces desapareci\u00f3. Levant\u00e9 la cabeza del suelo haciendo un gran esfuerzo. Ten\u00eda l\u00e1grimas en los ojos. Michael hab\u00eda saltado sobre la espalda de Nashira para distraerla. Ten\u00eda un pu\u00f1al en la mano. Se lo clav\u00f3 en el cuello, fall\u00f3 por poco. Nashira dio una sacudida con el brazo y lo tir\u00f3 del escenario.\n\nMichael cay\u00f3 sobre un buf\u00f3n, y ambos fueron a parar al suelo. Nashira volver\u00eda a atacarme, y esta vez acabar\u00eda conmigo. Vi su cara por encima de m\u00ed. Se le pusieron los ojos rojos. Sus facciones se desdibujaron. Estaba debilit\u00e1ndome, asegur\u00e1ndose de que no pudiera volver a utilizar mi esp\u00edritu. Alterando mi conexi\u00f3n con el \u00e9ter. Estaba perdida. Nashira se arrodill\u00f3 a mi lado y me coloc\u00f3 la cabeza en el pliegue interno de su codo.\n\n\u2014Gracias, Paige Mahoney. \u2014Me acerc\u00f3 la punta del pu\u00f1al al cuello\u2014. No desperdiciar\u00e9 este don.\n\nYa estaba. Ni siquiera tuve un \u00faltimo pensamiento. Us\u00e9 mi \u00faltima pizca de energ\u00eda para mirarla a los ojos.\n\nY entonces vi al Custodio. La obligaba a retroceder utilizando unas bandadas enormes que hac\u00eda girar para formar escudos, como un tragafuegos con sus antorchas. \u00abSi yo tuviera visi\u00f3n \u2014pens\u00e9 vagamente\u2014, estar\u00eda contemplando un espect\u00e1culo magn\u00edfico.\u00bb Terebell y Alsafi estaban con \u00e9l; y tambi\u00e9n otros. \u00bfNo era esa Pleione? Sus contornos se confund\u00edan. Mi onirosaje enviaba extra\u00f1os espejismos m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de mi l\u00ednea de visi\u00f3n. Entonces alguien me cogi\u00f3 en brazos y me sac\u00f3 del escenario.\n\nVe\u00eda destellos. Hab\u00eda estallado una tormenta en mi onirosaje: los recuerdos se filtraban por unas grietas con forma de rayos, y un fuerte viento destrozaba las flores. Hab\u00edan saqueado mi mente.\n\nNo era plenamente consciente de lo que suced\u00eda en el mundo exterior. El Custodio estaba all\u00ed. Reconoc\u00ed su onirosaje, una presencia conocida contra la m\u00eda. Me llevaba en brazos a la galer\u00eda, lejos de eso que hab\u00eda ocurrido en los pocos minutos que hab\u00eda estado inconsciente. Me dej\u00f3 en el suelo, y not\u00e9 la sangre sec\u00e1ndose en mi cara. Apenas recordaba d\u00f3nde estaba.\n\n\u2014Comb\u00e1telo, Paige. Tienes que combatirlo.\n\nMe acarici\u00f3 el pelo. Observ\u00e9 su cara e intent\u00e9 que las l\u00edneas dejaran de desdibujarse.\n\nApareci\u00f3 otro par de ojos. Me pareci\u00f3 que volv\u00eda a ser Terebell. Perd\u00ed otra vez el conocimiento, y me despert\u00f3 un rugido sordo. El ruido presionaba contra mis sienes. Cuando el dolor me oblig\u00f3 a regresar al mundo de la carne, vi al Custodio mir\u00e1ndome. Est\u00e1bamos en la galer\u00eda, por encima del clamor del sal\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014\u00bfMe oyes, Paige?\n\nParec\u00eda una pregunta. Dije que s\u00ed con la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Nashira \u2014dije con un hilo de voz.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1 viva. Pero t\u00fa tambi\u00e9n.\n\n\u00abEst\u00e1 viva.\u00bb Nashira segu\u00eda all\u00ed. Sent\u00ed los tenues indicios del p\u00e1nico, pero ten\u00eda el cuerpo demasiado d\u00e9bil para reaccionar. Aquello todav\u00eda no hab\u00eda terminado.\n\nAbajo reson\u00f3 el ruido de un disparo. Salvo los ojos del Custodio, todo estaba oscuro.\n\n\u2014Hab\u00eda... \u2014El Custodio se acerc\u00f3 m\u00e1s a mis labios para o\u00edrme\u2014. Hab\u00eda un duende. Nashira tiene... un duende.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Pero t\u00fa estabas preparada. \u2014Me resigui\u00f3 el escote con un dedo\u2014. \u00bfNo te dije que esto podr\u00eda salvarte la vida?\n\nLa luz de sus ojos se reflej\u00f3 en el colgante; el objeto sublimado, dise\u00f1ado para repeler a los duendes. El que me hab\u00eda regalado. El que yo hab\u00eda intentado rechazar, y que hab\u00eda estado a punto de no ponerme esa noche. El Custodio me apoy\u00f3 contra su pecho y me puso una mano detr\u00e1s de la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Va a llegar ayuda \u2014dijo en voz muy baja\u2014. Han venido a buscarte, Paige. Los Sellos han venido por ti.\n\nHubo otro momento de ceguera, y el ruido se intensific\u00f3. Mi onirosaje intentaba curarse. Los da\u00f1os hab\u00edan sido graves; tardar\u00eda d\u00edas en empezar a repararse. Quiz\u00e1 no empezara nunca. No lo sab\u00eda; pero no pod\u00eda moverme, y se estaba agotando el tiempo: ten\u00eda que llegar a la pradera, encontrar la salida. Me marchaba a casa. Ten\u00eda que marcharme a casa.\n\nCuando volv\u00ed a abrir los ojos, una luz muy intensa me los quem\u00f3. No era luz de velas. Intent\u00e9 protegerlos; respiraba entrecortadamente.\n\n\u2014Paige. \u2014Alguien me tom\u00f3 la mano. No era el Custodio, sino alguien m\u00e1s\u2014. Paige, tesoro.\n\nConoc\u00eda esa voz.\n\n\u00c9l no pod\u00eda estar all\u00ed. Deb\u00eda de ser una aparici\u00f3n, una imagen de mi da\u00f1ado onirosaje. Pero cuando me tom\u00f3 la mano supe que era real. Todav\u00eda ten\u00eda la cabeza sobre el regazo del Custodio.\n\n\u2014Nick \u2014consegu\u00ed decir. Llevaba traje negro y corbata roja.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, _s\u00f6tnos_ , soy yo.\n\nMe mir\u00e9 los dedos. Se me estaban poniendo grises, y las u\u00f1as reposaban sobre lechos de un morado oscuro.\n\n\u2014Paige \u2014dijo Nick con voz grave, y con tono de urgencia\u2014, mant\u00e9n los ojos abiertos. Qu\u00e9date con nosotros, tesoro. Venga.\n\n\u2014Tienes que irte \u2014dije con voz ronca.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, claro, voy a irme. Y t\u00fa tambi\u00e9n.\n\n\u2014Mu\u00e9vete, Visi\u00f3n. No hay tiempo que perder. \u2014Era otra voz\u2014. Trataremos a nuestra peque\u00f1a So\u00f1adora P\u00e1lida dormida cuando lleguemos a la ciudadela.\n\nEra Jaxon.\n\n\u00ab\u00a1No!\u00bb \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 hab\u00edan venido? Nashira los ver\u00eda.\n\n\u2014Ya ser\u00e1 demasiado tarde. \u2014La misma luz volvi\u00f3 a alumbrarme los ojos\u2014. Las pupilas no responden. Hipoxia cerebral. Si no hacemos esto, morir\u00e1. \u2014Una mano me apart\u00f3 el pelo de la cara, sudada y pegajosa\u2014. \u00bfD\u00f3nde demonios est\u00e1 Danica?\n\nNo entend\u00eda por qu\u00e9 el Custodio no dec\u00eda nada. Estaba all\u00ed: yo lo notaba.\n\nSufr\u00ed otro desmayo. Cuando recuper\u00e9 la visi\u00f3n, ten\u00eda algo sobre la boca y la nariz. Reconoc\u00ed aquel olor a pl\u00e1stico: era un SVP2, la versi\u00f3n port\u00e1til del equipo de soporte vital de Dani. Hab\u00eda otros onirosajes cerca, api\u00f1ados a mi alrededor. Nick me sosten\u00eda la cabeza y sujetaba la mascarilla sobre mi boca. Respir\u00e9 la dosis extra de ox\u00edgeno, adormilada. Jam\u00e1s me hab\u00eda sentido tan agotada.\n\n\u2014No funciona. Su onirosaje se ha fracturado.\n\n\u2014Ese tren no nos esperar\u00e1, Visi\u00f3n \u2014dijo Jaxon con tono cortante\u2014. Ll\u00e9vala. Nos vamos.\n\nEsas palabras se filtraron en mi cerebro. Por primera vez desde hac\u00eda varios minutos o\u00ed hablar al Custodio:\n\n\u2014Yo puedo ayudarla.\n\n\u2014No se acerque \u2014salt\u00f3 Nick.\n\n\u2014No hay tiempo que perder. La DVN est\u00e1 en el puente. Vendr\u00e1n y ver\u00e1n su aura inmediatamente, doctor Nyg\u00e5rd. Perder\u00e1 la reputaci\u00f3n que tiene en Scion. \u2014El Custodio los mir\u00f3\u2014. Si no hacen nada, Paige morir\u00e1. Podemos reparar su onirosaje, pero solo si nos damos prisa. \u00bfQuiere perder a su onir\u00e1mbula, Vinculador Blanco?\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo sabe mi nombre? \u2014salt\u00f3 Jaxon. No lo ve\u00eda en la oscuridad, pero not\u00e9 el cambio repentino en su onirosaje, not\u00e9 que levantaba sus defensas.\n\n\u2014Tenemos formas de saber las cosas.\n\nSus palabras eran como una secuencia de patrones imposible de desentra\u00f1ar. No las entend\u00eda. Nick se inclin\u00f3 sobre m\u00ed; percib\u00ed su aliento c\u00e1lido en la mejilla.\n\n\u2014Paige \u2014me dijo al o\u00eddo\u2014, este hombre dice que puede curarte. \u00bfPuedo confiar en \u00e9l?\n\n\u00abConfiar.\u00bb Reconoc\u00ed esa palabra. Una flor ba\u00f1ada por el sol en el umbral de la percepci\u00f3n, invit\u00e1ndome a entrar en otro mundo. Una vida diferente, anterior al prado de amapolas.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\nEn cuanto dije eso, el Custodio se me acerc\u00f3. Vi a Pleione detr\u00e1s de \u00e9l.\n\n\u2014Paige, necesito que bajes todas las defensas mentales que puedas \u2014me dijo\u2014. \u00bfPuedes hacerlo?\n\nComo si me quedara alguna defensa.\n\nEl Custodio cogi\u00f3 un vial que Pleione le acerc\u00f3 con una mano enguantada. Un vial de amaranto, casi vac\u00edo. \u00abMarcado.\u00bb Deb\u00edan de hacer acopio de aquellos viales, guardar cada gota de amaranto que pudieran. Me puso un poco bajo la nariz, y otro poco en los labios. Not\u00e9 que un calor se extend\u00eda bajo mi piel. Era como si el \u00e9ter me llamara, como si me pidiera que abriera la mente. Sent\u00ed un calor repentino que cosi\u00f3 los desgarrones de mi onirosaje. El Custodio me acarici\u00f3 la mejilla con un pulgar.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPaige?\n\nParpade\u00e9.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEst\u00e1s bien?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed. Creo que s\u00ed.\n\nMe incorpor\u00e9, y luego intent\u00e9 levantarme. Nick me ayud\u00f3 a sostenerme en pie. No sent\u00eda dolor. Me frot\u00e9 los ojos y parpade\u00e9 tratando de adaptarme a la oscuridad.\n\n\u2014\u00bfC\u00f3mo demonios hab\u00e9is llegado hasta aqu\u00ed? \u2014dije sujet\u00e1ndome a sus brazos. No pod\u00eda dejar de mirarlo. Era real, y estaba all\u00ed, conmigo.\n\n\u2014Con el grupo de Scion. Ya te lo explicar\u00e9. \u2014Me abraz\u00f3 y me apret\u00f3 contra su pecho\u2014. Vamos. Nos largamos de aqu\u00ed.\n\nJaxon, un poco m\u00e1s all\u00e1, sujetaba su bast\u00f3n con ambas manos.\n\nDanica y Zeke estaban cada uno a uno de sus lados. Todos vest\u00edan los colores de Scion. Al otro lado de la galer\u00eda Nadine disparaba al azar contra los emisarios con su pistola. Los refa\u00edtas me miraban.\n\n\u2014Custodio, \u00bfcu\u00e1nto... \u2014inspir\u00e9 hondo\u2014... cu\u00e1nto tiempo nos queda?\n\n\u2014Cincuenta minutos. Ten\u00e9is que iros.\n\nMenos de una hora. Cuanto antes lleg\u00e1ramos al tren, antes podr\u00eda lanzar la bengala para se\u00f1alar el camino a los otros videntes.\n\n\u2014Supongo que todav\u00eda sabes a qui\u00e9n debes lealtad, Paige \u2014dijo Jaxon. Me mir\u00f3 de arriba abajo\u2014. Casi me hiciste ponerlo en duda, dama m\u00eda, con aquel numerito que montaste en Londres.\n\n\u2014Jaxon, aqu\u00ed est\u00e1 muriendo gente. Est\u00e1n muriendo videntes. \u00bfNo podemos dejar eso aparte y concentrarnos en largarnos de aqu\u00ed?\n\nNo tuvo ocasi\u00f3n de contestar. Un grupo de refas irrumpi\u00f3 en la galer\u00eda blandiendo bandadas enormes. El Custodio y Pleione se colocaron delante de nosotros.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Marchaos! \u2014dijo el Custodio.\n\nEstaba en un dilema. Jaxon ya hab\u00eda empezado a bajar la escalera, y los otros lo segu\u00edan.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Vamos, Paige! \u2014me exhort\u00f3 Nick.\n\nPleione par\u00f3 una bandada. El Custodio me mir\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Corre. Ve a Puerto Pradera \u2014dijo\u2014. Nos encontraremos all\u00ed.\n\nNo ten\u00eda alternativa; no pod\u00eda obligarlo a ir conmigo. Solo pod\u00eda obedecerle y confiar en estar haciendo lo que deb\u00eda. Nick me agarr\u00f3 por el brazo, bajamos corriendo la escalera y llegamos al vest\u00edbulo del Consistorio. No hab\u00eda tiempo para detenerse.\n\nLos bufones y los refas hab\u00edan salido del edificio y ocupaban las calles. Los aterrados emisarios y sus guardias de la DVN corr\u00edan por el vest\u00edbulo. Nick los sigui\u00f3. Not\u00e9 que el \u00e9ter temblaba, y me par\u00e9.\n\nMe volv\u00ed hacia el sal\u00f3n. Pasaba algo raro; estaba segura. Sin saber muy bien qu\u00e9 hac\u00eda, volv\u00ed corriendo a la escalera de piedra.\n\n\u2014\u00bfSe puede saber ad\u00f3nde vas? \u2014me grit\u00f3 Jaxon.\n\n\u2014D\u00e9jame, Jaxon. Id al tren.\n\nNo o\u00ed su respuesta. Nick me sigui\u00f3 y me agarr\u00f3 por el brazo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfAd\u00f3nde vas?\n\n\u2014Vete con Jaxon.\n\n\u2014Tenemos que salir de aqu\u00ed. Si la DVN ve mi aura...\n\nSe par\u00f3 cuando llegamos al sal\u00f3n, vac\u00edo.\n\nEstaba muy oscuro. Casi todas las velas se hab\u00edan apagado, pero todav\u00eda hab\u00eda tres faroles rojos encendidos, tirados por el suelo. Las cintas de seda con las que hab\u00eda actuado Liss se hab\u00edan ca\u00eddo y formaban dos montones. Fui hacia ellas, y not\u00e9 el d\u00e9bil parpadeo de un onirosaje. Corr\u00ed por el suelo de m\u00e1rmol y me arrodill\u00e9.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Liss! \u2014le cog\u00ed una mano\u2014. \u00a1Vamos, Liss!\n\n\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 hab\u00eda vuelto adonde estaban sus sedas? Ten\u00eda sangre en el pelo. No pod\u00eda estar muerta, no despu\u00e9s de que le hubi\u00e9ramos salvado la vida. No despu\u00e9s de lo mucho que hab\u00edamos trabajado juntas. No pod\u00eda morir. Seb hab\u00eda muerto; \u00bfpor qu\u00e9 ten\u00eda que seguir ella sus pasos?\n\nLiss entorn\u00f3 los ojos. Todav\u00eda iba vestida de v\u00edctima del rey. Al verme, sus labios esbozaron una sonrisa.\n\n\u2014Hola \u2014dijo. Hac\u00eda ruido al respirar\u2014. Lo siento, he llegado... tarde.\n\n\u2014No. Ni se te ocurra morirte, Liss. Por favor. \u2014Le apret\u00e9 una mano\u2014. Por favor. La otra vez cre\u00edamos que te hab\u00edamos perdido. No nos hagas eso otra vez.\n\n\u2014Me alegro de saber que le importo a alguien. \u2014Se me agolparon las l\u00e1grimas en los ojos; unas l\u00e1grimas fr\u00edas y temblorosas que se resist\u00edan a caer. A Liss le sal\u00eda sangre por la boca. Yo no distingu\u00eda d\u00f3nde terminaba la sangre del escenario y d\u00f3nde empezaba la suya\u2014. Ve... Vete \u2014dijo con voz d\u00e9bil\u2014. Haz lo que... yo no he podido... hacer. Solo... quer\u00eda... ver mi casa.\n\nSe le cay\u00f3 la cabeza hacia un lado. Sus dedos soltaron los m\u00edos, y su esp\u00edritu se desliz\u00f3 hacia el \u00e9ter.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 un momento all\u00ed sentada, mirando el cad\u00e1ver. Nick agach\u00f3 la cabeza y cubri\u00f3 la cara de Liss con una cortina. \u00abLiss se ha ido \u2014me obligu\u00e9 a pensar\u2014. Liss se ha ido, igual que Seb. No los has salvado. Se han ido.\u00bb\n\n\u2014Tienes que recitar el treno \u2014murmur\u00f3 Nick\u2014. Yo no s\u00e9 su nombre, _s\u00f6tnos_.\n\nTen\u00eda raz\u00f3n. A Liss no le gustar\u00eda quedarse all\u00ed, en su prisi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Liss Rymore \u2014pronunci\u00e9, y confi\u00e9 en que ese fuera su nombre completo\u2014, vete al \u00e9ter. Est\u00e1 todo arreglado. Todas las deudas est\u00e1n saldadas. Ya no tienes que morar entre los vivos.\n\nSu esp\u00edritu desapareci\u00f3.\n\nNo soportaba ver el cad\u00e1ver. Ya no era Liss, sino un cuerpo, una c\u00e1scara, la sombra que ella hab\u00eda dejado en el mundo.\n\nLa pistola de bengalas estaba debajo de su fr\u00eda mano. Ella era la encargada de dispararla. La cog\u00ed con cuidado.\n\n\u2014A esa chica no le habr\u00eda gustado que abandonaras. \u2014Nick me vio comprobar cu\u00e1ntas bengalas ten\u00eda la pistola\u2014. No le habr\u00eda gustado que murieras por ella.\n\n\u2014Yo creo que s\u00ed.\n\nConoc\u00eda esa voz. No pod\u00eda ver a Gomeisa Sargas, pero su voz reson\u00f3 por toda la sala.\n\n\u2014\u00bfLa has matado t\u00fa, Gomeisa? \u2014Me levant\u00e9\u2014. \u00bfEs lo bastante buena para ti ahora que est\u00e1 muerta?\n\nUn silencio elocuente.\n\nO\u00ed una voz d\u00e9bil detr\u00e1s de m\u00ed.\n\n\u2014No deber\u00edas ocultarte entre las sombras, Gomeisa.\n\nEl Custodio hab\u00eda entrado en el sal\u00f3n y miraba hacia la galer\u00eda.\n\n\u2014A menos que temas a Paige \u2014continu\u00f3\u2014. La ciudad est\u00e1 ardiendo. Vuestra apariencia de poder ya se ha disuelto.\n\nRisas. Me puse en tensi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014No le temo a Scion. Nos ofrecieron su mundo en bandeja de plata, Arcturus. Ahora vamos a cenar.\n\n\u2014Vete al infierno \u2014dije.\n\n\u2014A ti tampoco te temo, 40. \u00bfQu\u00e9 podemos temer de la muerte, si somos muerte? Adem\u00e1s, ser desterrados de este mundo en descomposici\u00f3n, vuestro peque\u00f1o mundo de flores y carne, ser\u00eda casi... una bendici\u00f3n. Si no quedara tanto trabajo por hacer todav\u00eda. \u2014Se oyeron pasos\u2014. No puedes matar a la muerte. \u00bfQu\u00e9 fuego puede quemar el sol? \u00bfQui\u00e9n puede ahogar el oc\u00e9ano?\n\n\u2014Estoy segura de que se nos ocurrir\u00e1 algo.\n\nLo dije con firmeza pese a que estaba temblando; ya no sab\u00eda si de rabia o de miedo. Detr\u00e1s del Custodio hab\u00eda aparecido otro refa, y a su lado estaba Terebell.\n\n\u2014Me gustar\u00eda que los dos os imaginarais una cosa. Sobre todo t\u00fa, Arcturus. Dado lo que t\u00fa tienes que perder.\n\nEl Custodio no dijo nada. Intent\u00e9 averiguar de d\u00f3nde proven\u00eda la voz. De alg\u00fan sitio por encima de m\u00ed. De la galer\u00eda.\n\n\u2014Me gustar\u00eda que os imaginarais una mariposa. Imagin\u00e1osla: sus alas de colores, iridiscentes. Es hermosa. Muy querida. Y entonces mirad la polilla. Tiene la misma forma, pero \u00a1observad las diferencias! La polilla es p\u00e1lida, d\u00e9bil y fea. Un bicho lastimoso y autodestructivo. No puede dominarse, pues cuando ve un fuego, desea su calor. Y cuando encuentra la llama, se quema. \u2014Su voz resonaba por la estancia, en mis o\u00eddos, en mi cabeza\u2014. As\u00ed es como nosotros vemos vuestro mundo, Paige Mahoney. Una caja llena de polillas que esperan a quemarse.\n\nSu onirosaje estaba muy cerca. Prepar\u00e9 mi esp\u00edritu. No me importaba el da\u00f1o que pudiera causar. \u00c9l hab\u00eda matado a Liss, y yo iba a matarlo a \u00e9l. El Custodio me agarr\u00f3 por la mu\u00f1eca.\n\n\u2014No lo hagas \u2014dijo\u2014. Nosotros nos encargaremos.\n\n\u2014Quiero encargarme yo.\n\n\u2014No puedes vengar a Liss, onir\u00e1mbula. \u2014Pleione no apartaba la vista de su enemigo\u2014. Ve a la pradera. No queda mucho tiempo.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, ve a la pradera, 40. Toma nuestro tren y ve a nuestra ciudadela. \u2014Gomeisa sali\u00f3 de detr\u00e1s de las columnas. Ten\u00eda los ojos radiantes de aura: era lo \u00faltimo que le quitar\u00eda a Liss Rymore\u2014. \u00bfTan mal lo pasabas aqu\u00ed, 40? Te ofrecimos un refugio, nuestra sabidur\u00eda, un nuevo hogar. Aqu\u00ed no eras antinatural; eras inferior, s\u00ed, pero ten\u00edas tu sitio. Para Scion solo eres un s\u00edntoma de la plaga. Un sarpullido en su piel. \u2014Me tendi\u00f3 una mano enguantada\u2014. All\u00ed ya no tienes un hogar, onir\u00e1mbula. Qu\u00e9date con nosotros. Descubre lo que hay debajo.\n\nYo ten\u00eda los m\u00fasculos tensados al m\u00e1ximo. Gomeisa me miraba fijamente; me miraba a los ojos, miraba en mi onirosaje, en mis partes m\u00e1s oscuras. Sab\u00eda que sus palabras ten\u00edan sentido; conoc\u00eda bien su retorcida l\u00f3gica, pues llevaba dos siglos recurriendo a ella, utiliz\u00e1ndola para tentar a los d\u00e9biles. Antes de que pudiera contestarle, el Custodio me agarr\u00f3 por el brazo y me levant\u00f3 del suelo. Una hoja curvada pas\u00f3 roz\u00e1ndole un hombro, por encima de mi cabeza. Yo no la hab\u00eda visto acercarse. Ca\u00ed al suelo, y el Custodio se abalanz\u00f3 sobre Gomeisa. Terebell y el otro refa salieron tras \u00e9l, ambos reuniendo bandadas y produciendo unos sonidos aterradores. Nick me ayud\u00f3 a levantarme, pero yo no notaba sus manos. Lo \u00fanico que notaba era el \u00e9ter, por donde danzaban los refa\u00edtas.\n\nEl aire que me rodeaba fue volvi\u00e9ndose m\u00e1s ligero, como una gasa plateada. No ve\u00eda a los cuatro refas, pero notaba sus movimientos. Cada flexi\u00f3n de un musculo, cada giro y cada paso lanzaban una onda expansiva por el \u00e9ter. Danzaban al borde de la vida. Un baile de gigantes, una danza macabra.\n\nLos esp\u00edritus de la Era de Huesos XVIII segu\u00edan en el sal\u00f3n. La bandada de Terebell sali\u00f3 volando entre las columnas: treinta esp\u00edritus, serpenteando y elev\u00e1ndose juntos, convergieron en el onirosaje de Gomeisa. Ning\u00fan vidente habr\u00eda sobrevivido a un ataque conjunto de tantos esp\u00edritus. Esper\u00e9 a que se produjera la colisi\u00f3n.\n\nLa risa de Gomeisa se elev\u00f3 hacia el techo. Con una sacudida de la mano deshizo la bandada. Los esp\u00edritus estallaron por todo el sal\u00f3n, como fragmentos de cristal de un espejo roto. El cuerpo inerte de Terebell sali\u00f3 despedido y choc\u00f3 contra una columna. El ruido de huesos contra el m\u00e1rmol invadi\u00f3 la g\u00e9lida atm\u00f3sfera. El otro refa carg\u00f3 contra Gomeisa, que se limit\u00f3 a levantar una mano. El atacante salt\u00f3 por los aires y fue a caer en el escenario. Las tablas del suelo se astillaron bajo su peso, y el refa cay\u00f3 al foso.\n\nRetroced\u00ed; mis botas resbalaban con la sangre del suelo. \u00bfQu\u00e9 era Gomeisa, una especie de duende? Ten\u00eda aporte: pod\u00eda mover cosas sin tocarlas. Al darme cuenta, el coraz\u00f3n empez\u00f3 a latirme con fuerza en el pecho. Gomeisa pod\u00eda estrellarme contra el techo si quer\u00eda.\n\nSolo quedaba el Custodio. Se volvi\u00f3 hacia su enemigo, aterrador en la penumbra.\n\n\u2014Ven, Arcturus \u2014dijo Gomeisa abriendo los brazos\u2014. Paga por tu esplendidez.\n\nEntonces fue cuando explot\u00f3 el escenario.\n\nLa r\u00e1faga de calor me lanz\u00f3 hacia atr\u00e1s y me ensordeci\u00f3. Ca\u00ed sobre el costado derecho y me lastim\u00e9 la cadera. Nick me agarr\u00f3 por la mu\u00f1eca, me levant\u00f3 y me llev\u00f3 hacia el vest\u00edbulo. Nada m\u00e1s llegar junto a la puerta, se encendieron las llamas. Me tir\u00e9 al suelo y me cubr\u00ed la cabeza con los brazos. El fuego hizo estallar los cristales de las ventanas del Consistorio. Me arrastr\u00e9 tan deprisa como pude por el suelo. Todav\u00eda ten\u00eda la pistola de bengalas en la mano.\n\nNing\u00fan buf\u00f3n ten\u00eda la clase de pertrechos necesarios para provocar semejante explosi\u00f3n. Deb\u00eda de haber algo que Julian no me hab\u00eda contado. \u00bfD\u00f3nde habr\u00eda encontrado una mina, o tiempo para plantarla? \u00bfLa habr\u00eda cogido de la Tierra de Nadie? Y \u00bfqu\u00e9 clase de mina era aquella capaz de provocar un incendio que atravesaba un edificio?\n\nEn medio de la nube de humo, Nick me cogi\u00f3 por el codo y me puso de pie. Me cayeron trocitos de cristal del pelo. Me puse a toser. Me escoc\u00edan los ojos.\n\n\u2014Espera. \u2014Me solt\u00e9 de la mano de Nick\u2014. El Custodio...\n\nNo pod\u00eda estar muerto. Nick me estaba gritando algo, pero lo o\u00eda muy lejos. Intent\u00e9 usar el cord\u00f3n \u00e1ureo. Ver, sentir, o\u00edr. Nada.\n\nFuera aullaban las sirenas y un incendio ard\u00eda en la calle de al lado. La Sala arrojaba llamas y nubes negras. Vi arder dos residencias. Una era Balliol, el \u00fanico edificio con electricidad. Los emisarios iban a tener problemas para avisar a la ciudadela. \u00abGracias, Julian \u2014pens\u00e9\u2014. Est\u00e9s donde est\u00e9s, gracias.\u00bb\n\nNick me cogi\u00f3 en brazos.\n\n\u2014Tenemos que irnos \u2014dijo con voz ronca. Mir\u00f3 alrededor con gesto angustiado\u2014. Paige, no conozco esta ciudad. \u00bfD\u00f3nde est\u00e1 el tren?\n\n\u2014Sigue hacia el norte. \u2014Intent\u00e9 bajar al suelo, pero Nick me sujetaba con fuerza\u2014. \u00a1Puedo correr, maldita sea!\n\n\u2014\u00a1Acabas de sobrevivir a una explosi\u00f3n y a un duende! \u2014me grit\u00f3. Estaba colorado de rabia\u2014. No he venido hasta aqu\u00ed para ver c\u00f3mo te matas, Paige. Por una vez en la vida, hazle caso a alguien.\n\nSheol I se hallaba en plena guerra. Los rebeldes hab\u00edan salido del Consorcio en llamas y hab\u00edan invadido las calles, donde luchaban con \u00edmpetu contra los refa\u00edtas. Los emisarios de Scion hu\u00edan en todas direcciones detr\u00e1s de sus guardaespaldas, que disparaban contra los videntes. Los miembros del grupo de Julian, que eran los encargados de provocar el incendio, se hab\u00edan entregado a su misi\u00f3n con entusiasmo, y ya hab\u00edan quemado la mayor parte del Poblado. Quer\u00eda quedarme all\u00ed y pelear, pero ten\u00eda que lanzar la bengala; de ese modo salvar\u00eda m\u00e1s vidas.\n\nNick tom\u00f3 la ruta m\u00e1s segura, manteni\u00e9ndose apartado de los combates. Se meti\u00f3 por una callejuela. Vi otra escaramuza. Los bufones peleaban junto a amaur\u00f3ticos y casacas, asoci\u00e1ndose para vencer a los refas. Hasta Cyril se les hab\u00eda unido.\n\nLleg\u00f3 a mis o\u00eddos un grito desgarrador. Mir\u00e9 por encima del hombro de Nick. Era Nell. Dos refas le sujetaban las manos.\n\n\u2014No ir\u00e1s a ninguna parte, 9. Necesitamos comer.\n\nUno de ellos la agarr\u00f3 por el pelo y le gir\u00f3 la cabeza.\n\n\u2014\u00a1No! \u00a1Qu\u00edtame las manos de encima! \u00a1No volver\u00e1s a alimentarte de m\u00ed, par\u00e1sito!\n\nDej\u00f3 de gritar cuando su guardi\u00e1n le tap\u00f3 la boca con una manaza.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Nick! \u2014grit\u00e9.\n\nNick detect\u00f3 la desesperaci\u00f3n de mi voz. Afloj\u00f3 los brazos; nada m\u00e1s tocar el suelo ech\u00e9 a correr hacia Nell. No iba armada, pero ten\u00eda mi don. Mi don, que ya no era una maldici\u00f3n. Esa noche no iba a usarlo para quitar una vida, sino para salvarla.\n\nLe lanc\u00e9 mi esp\u00edritu al m\u00e1s corpulento de los refas. Empuj\u00e9 contra su onirosaje, me met\u00ed en su zona hadal y volv\u00ed r\u00e1pidamente a mi cuerpo. Llegu\u00e9 justo a tiempo para extender las manos y no parar el golpe con la barbilla. Nell, que no ten\u00eda ni idea de qu\u00e9 hab\u00eda pasado, se solt\u00f3 de los refas y le clav\u00f3 el pu\u00f1al en el costado al que ten\u00eda a la derecha. Al mismo tiempo agarr\u00f3 un esp\u00edritu al vuelo y se lo ech\u00f3 en la cara. El refa dio un gru\u00f1ido espeluznante. Su compinche todav\u00eda se tambaleaba a consecuencia de mi agresi\u00f3n. Nell recogi\u00f3 las cosas que se le hab\u00edan ca\u00eddo y sali\u00f3 corriendo.\n\nLos dos refas estaban heridos, pero segu\u00edan representando una amenaza. El que yo hab\u00eda atacado levant\u00f3 la cabeza, y sus ojos, de color naranja, consiguieron enfocar. Sac\u00f3 un pu\u00f1al de una funda que llevaba atada al brazo.\n\n\u2014Vuelve al \u00e9ter, onir\u00e1mbula.\n\nLanz\u00f3 el pu\u00f1al contra mi cara. No me agach\u00e9 lo bastante deprisa, y me dio en un brazo. Nick dispar\u00f3 varias veces. Una bala le dio al refa en el pecho, pero no sirvi\u00f3 de nada. Lanc\u00e9 mi esp\u00edritu contra su onirosaje. El segundo ataque lo debilit\u00f3. Cog\u00ed el pu\u00f1al que me hab\u00eda lanzado y se lo clav\u00e9 en el cuello.\n\nComet\u00ed el error de olvidarme de su acompa\u00f1ante. El segundo refa se abalanz\u00f3 sobre m\u00ed y me inmoviliz\u00f3 en el suelo; se me cort\u00f3 la respiraci\u00f3n. Con su pu\u00f1o gigantesco me asest\u00f3 un pu\u00f1etazo que esquiv\u00e9 por los pelos.\n\nNick tir\u00f3 su pistola. Cuando el refa levant\u00f3 el pu\u00f1o para intentarlo de nuevo, Nick agarr\u00f3 tres esp\u00edritus y se los lanz\u00f3 en r\u00e1pida sucesi\u00f3n. Not\u00e9 la sacudida del \u00e9ter cuando le envi\u00f3 una v\u00edvida instant\u00e1nea al onirosaje del refa, ceg\u00e1ndolo. El refa me solt\u00f3 solo un segundo para combatir los esp\u00edritus y la visi\u00f3n, y lo aprovech\u00e9 para levantarme y correr hasta donde estaba Nick.\n\nNo hab\u00edamos ido muy lejos cuando not\u00e9 un tir\u00f3n de mi sexto sentido. Gir\u00e9 bruscamente la cabeza, dispuesta a enfrentarme a la amenaza.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Nick!\n\n\u00c9l ya se hab\u00eda dado cuenta. Con un \u00e1gil movimiento, dej\u00f3 la mochila y agarr\u00f3 otra bandada. El objetivo era conocido: Aludra Chertan.\n\n\u2014So\u00f1adora. \u2014Ni siquiera mir\u00f3 a Nick\u2014. Creo que todav\u00eda te debo una por tu peque\u00f1a exhibici\u00f3n en la capilla.\n\n\u2014No te acerques \u2014le previno Nick.\n\n\u2014Es que tienes un aspecto tan reparador... \u2014dijo mientras sus ojos cambiaban de color.\n\nEl rostro de Nick se crisp\u00f3. La sangre se acumul\u00f3 en sus conductos lacrimales, y se le abultaron las venas del cuello.\n\n\u2014Casi tan reparador como la andarina \u2014continu\u00f3 Aludra, avanzando hacia nosotros\u2014. Quiz\u00e1 te salve, or\u00e1culo.\n\nNick hizo un esfuerzo para mantenerse erguido.\n\n\u2014He matado a vuestro heredero \u2014dije\u2014. Estoy dispuesta a hacerte lo mismo a ti, no lo dudes. Vu\u00e9lvete al infierno podrido del que saliste.\n\n\u2014Kraz era un arrogante. Yo no lo soy. S\u00e9 distinguir qu\u00e9 enemigos merecen que les dedique mis valiosos minutos.\n\n\u2014Pues yo soy uno de ellos.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, ya lo creo.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 quieta. Hab\u00eda algo detr\u00e1s de Aludra: una sombra enorme y torpe. Aludra estaba demasiado excitada para reparar en ella. El gigante podrido. Reconoc\u00ed aquel manch\u00f3n en el \u00e9ter.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCu\u00e1ntos minutos?\n\n\u2014Solo uno. \u2014Levant\u00f3 una mano\u2014. Pero un minuto es tiempo de sobra para morir.\n\nDe pronto la sorpresa se dibuj\u00f3 en su rostro. Hab\u00eda sentido aquella presencia, pero no se volvi\u00f3 con suficiente rapidez. La cosa la hab\u00eda agarrado antes de que ella pudiera moverse. Vi unos ojos blancos, muertos; solo alcanc\u00e9 a ver algunas partes (las l\u00e1mparas de gas se hab\u00edan apagado cuando hab\u00eda aparecido), pero era m\u00e1s que suficiente para que se grabara en mi memoria, para que quedara marcada en el tejido y dejara una cicatriz en la delicada tela de mi onirosaje. Aludra lo ten\u00eda muy dif\u00edcil. Su grito se apag\u00f3 antes incluso de haberse o\u00eddo.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed \u2014dije\u2014. Tiempo de sobra.\n\nNick estaba paralizado. Ten\u00eda los ojos muy abiertos y la boca fuertemente cerrada. Lo agarr\u00e9 por el brazo y echamos a correr.\n\nCorrimos tan aprisa como pudimos. Los emim estaban en la ciudad. Igual que en la Era de Huesos XVIII.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCu\u00e1nto falta? \u2014le grit\u00e9 a Nick.\n\n\u2014No mucho. \u2014Me tom\u00f3 la mano y tir\u00f3 de m\u00ed\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9 era ese monstruo? \u00bfQu\u00e9 ha hecho Scion en este sitio?\n\n\u2014Muchas cosas.\n\nTomamos una callejuela, una de tantas que se adentraban en la ciudad fantasma. Vimos que se acercaba alguien desde el extremo opuesto, corriendo y jadeando. Nick y yo reaccionamos al mismo tiempo: Nick le puso la zancadilla al chico, que cay\u00f3 de bruces al suelo, e inmediatamente yo lo agarr\u00e9 por el cuello.\n\n\u2014\u00bfAd\u00f3nde vas, Carl?\n\n\u2014\u00a1Su\u00e9ltame! \u2014Carl estaba empapado de sudor\u2014. \u00a1Ya vienen! \u00a1Los han dejado entrar en la ciudad!\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9nes?\n\n\u2014Los zumbadores. \u00a1Los zumbadores! \u2014Me dio un empuj\u00f3n en el pecho; estaba al borde de las l\u00e1grimas\u2014. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 has tenido que estropearlo? \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 has tenido que intentar cambiarlo todo? Este sitio es lo \u00fanico que tengo, y no voy a dejar que t\u00fa...\n\n\u2014Tienes todo un mundo. \u00bfNo te acuerdas?\n\n\u2014\u00bfTodo un mundo? \u00a1Soy un monstruo! \u00a1Somos todos monstruos, 40! Monstruos que hablan con los muertos. Por eso los necesitamos \u2014dijo apuntando con un dedo hacia el centro de la ciudad\u2014. \u00bfNo lo ves? Este es el \u00fanico sitio seguro para nosotros. Pronto empezar\u00e1n a matarnos...\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9nes?\n\n\u2014Los amaur\u00f3ticos. Cuando se den cuenta. Cuando comprendan qu\u00e9 quieren los refa\u00edtas. No pienso volver jam\u00e1s. Puedes quedarte tu precioso mundo. \u00a1Te lo regalo!\n\nLe solt\u00e9 el cuello. Carl se levant\u00f3 y ech\u00f3 a correr. Nick no intent\u00f3 retenerlo.\n\n\u2014Cuando lleguemos a casa tendr\u00e1s que contarme muchas cosas \u2014dijo.\n\nVi a Carl doblar una esquina y desaparecer.\n\nEst\u00e1bamos a solo un kil\u00f3metro de la pradera, pero supon\u00eda que tendr\u00edamos que pelear para llegar. Nashira rondaba por all\u00ed, y cab\u00eda la posibilidad de que no todos los arrancahuesos se hubieran tomado el mejunje de Duckett. Avanzamos por la ciudad fantasma apart\u00e1ndonos del centro de la calle.\n\nO\u00edmos una explosi\u00f3n a lo lejos. Nick no se detuvo. Las ventanas de los edificios vibraron. Yo no pod\u00eda pensar con claridad. \u00bfQu\u00e9 estaba pasando? \u00bfHabr\u00eda intentado alguien atravesar el campo de minas? Deb\u00edan de haberse dejado llevar por el p\u00e1nico; se preguntar\u00edan d\u00f3nde estaba la bengala y tratar\u00edan de encontrar la salida entre los \u00e1rboles. Ten\u00eda que protegerlos. Corrimos hasta llegar al final de la calle y torcimos por el camino que llevaba a Puerto Pradera. Vislumbr\u00e9 las vallas y el letrero. Un grupo de videntes y amaur\u00f3ticos se hab\u00eda congregado fuera. Deb\u00edan de creer que por all\u00ed podr\u00edan salir de la ciudad.\n\nEl Custodio tambi\u00e9n estaba all\u00ed. Estaba sucio, cubierto de tizne, pero vivo. Me abraz\u00f3.\n\n\u2014\u00bfD\u00f3nde demonios estabas? \u2014dije entrecortadamente.\n\n\u2014Perd\u00f3name. Me han entretenido. \u2014Mir\u00f3 hacia la ciudad\u2014. No fuiste t\u00fa la que coloc\u00f3 esa bomba incendiaria debajo del escenario, \u00bfverdad?\n\n\u2014No. \u2014Puse las manos sobre las rodillas e intent\u00e9 recobrar el aliento\u2014. A menos que...\n\n\u2014A menos que \u00bfqu\u00e9?\n\n\u201412. El or\u00e1culo, el casaca roja. Me coment\u00f3 algo de un plan alternativo.\n\n\u2014Tenemos que centrarnos en c\u00f3mo salir de aqu\u00ed. \u2014Nick mir\u00f3 al Custodio, y luego de nuevo a m\u00ed\u2014. \u00bfD\u00f3nde est\u00e1 la entrada del t\u00fanel? Cuando hemos llegado era de d\u00eda.\n\nLa pradera ya estaba completamente oscura, y era muy dif\u00edcil orientarse.\n\n\u2014No est\u00e1 lejos \u2014dijo el Custodio.\n\n\u2014De acuerdo. \u2014Nick mir\u00f3 su viejo reloj Nixie y se enjug\u00f3 el sudor de la cara con una mano temblorosa\u2014. \u00bfY el Vinculador? \u00bfHa conseguido llegar?\n\n\u2014Puedes llamarlo por su nombre, Nick. \u2014Notaba el sudor resbal\u00e1ndome por la nuca\u2014. Lo sabe.\n\n\u2014El se\u00f1or Hall y otros tres de sus acompa\u00f1antes est\u00e1n en la pradera, esper\u00e1ndote \u2014dijo el Custodio sin desviar la mirada de la ciudad\u2014. Paige, te aconsejo que dispares una de esas bengalas. Todav\u00eda tienes tiempo.\n\nNick fue a la verja, donde Jaxon examinaba la valla et\u00e9rea. Me puse al lado del Custodio.\n\n\u2014Siento mucho lo de Liss \u2014me dijo.\n\n\u2014Yo tambi\u00e9n.\n\n\u2014Me asegurar\u00e9 de que Gomeisa no olvide su muerte.\n\n\u2014\u00bfNo lo has matado?\n\n\u2014Nos ha interrumpido la explosi\u00f3n. Gomeisa estaba mucho m\u00e1s fuerte que nosotros, porque hab\u00eda comido, pero hemos podido debilitarlo. Tal vez el incendio del Consistorio haya hecho el resto.\n\nTodav\u00eda llevaba los guantes puestos. Sent\u00ed una punzada, de pena quiz\u00e1. \u00bfC\u00f3mo pod\u00eda haber cre\u00eddo que el Custodio cambiar\u00eda tan f\u00e1cilmente?\n\n\u00c9l no dejaba de mirarme. El cord\u00f3n \u00e1ureo se estremeci\u00f3 d\u00e9bilmente. Yo no sab\u00eda qu\u00e9 intentaba transmitirme el Custodio, pero de pronto me sent\u00ed m\u00e1s centrada, m\u00e1s decidida. As\u00ed el mango de la pistola de bengalas. El Custodio dio un paso atr\u00e1s. Apunt\u00e9 por encima de la pradera, amartill\u00e9 la pistola y gir\u00e9 la cabeza.\n\nLa bengala qued\u00f3 suspendida en el aire, lanzando una se\u00f1al tras otra. La vi arder y echar humo; la luz roja parpadeaba y se reflejaba en los ojos del Custodio.\n\nMir\u00e9 m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de la luz de la bengala, hacia las estrellas. Tal vez fuera la \u00faltima vez que ve\u00eda las estrellas as\u00ed, en una ciudad sin luces y sin contaminaci\u00f3n. O quiz\u00e1 alg\u00fan d\u00eda el mundo entero fuera as\u00ed. El mundo gobernado por Nashira. Una colonia penitenciaria enorme y oscura.\n\nEl Custodio me puso una mano en la espalda.\n\n\u2014Tenemos que irnos.\n\nFui con \u00e9l hasta la verja. Cuando la abri\u00f3, los videntes y los amaur\u00f3ticos (ocho en total) entraron en la pradera. Una vez todos dentro, abri\u00f3 del todo la verja y sac\u00f3 otro vial. Ten\u00eda m\u00e1s viales que un narco.\n\nEl contenido era una sustancia cristalina. Sal. Traz\u00f3 con ella una delgada l\u00ednea en la entrada. Iba a preguntar por los emim cuando Jax me agarr\u00f3 por los brazos y me estamp\u00f3 contra un poste. Not\u00e9 la energ\u00eda de la valla, tan cerca que me chisporrote\u00f3 el pelo.\n\n\u2014Idiota. \u2014Jax me agarr\u00f3 por el vestido\u2014. Acabas de ense\u00f1arles d\u00f3nde estamos, maldita sea.\n\n\u2014Les estoy ense\u00f1ando a todos d\u00f3nde estamos. No voy a dejar morir aqu\u00ed a toda esta gente, Jaxon. Son videntes.\n\nLe temblaban los m\u00fasculos de la cara. Ten\u00eda el rostro transido de ira. Aquel era el Jaxon que yo tem\u00eda, el due\u00f1o de mi vida.\n\n\u2014Acced\u00ed a venir aqu\u00ed a salvar a mi onir\u00e1mbula \u2014dijo en voz baja\u2014. No a salvar a una pandilla de adivinos y de augures.\n\n\u2014Eso no es problema m\u00edo.\n\n\u2014Ya lo creo. Si haces algo m\u00e1s que ponga en peligro este intento (el intento de rescatarte, podr\u00eda a\u00f1adir, golfa desagradecida), me asegurar\u00e9 de que pasas el resto de tus d\u00edas deambulando por las alcantarillas. Te enviar\u00e9 a Jacob's Island, y all\u00ed podr\u00e1s limosnear con los ar\u00faspices y los antropom\u00e1nticos y toda la escoria que va a parar all\u00ed. Ya veremos qu\u00e9 hacen contigo. \u2014Me agarr\u00f3 el cuello con una mano fr\u00eda\u2014. Toda esta gente es prescindible. Nosotros no. Quiz\u00e1 hayas disfrutado de cierta independencia, querida m\u00eda, pero vas a obedecerme. Y todo volver\u00e1 a ser como antes.\n\nEsas palabras retiraron varias capas de mi onirosaje. Volv\u00eda a tener diecis\u00e9is a\u00f1os; volv\u00eda a tenerle miedo al mundo y a todo lo que hab\u00eda dentro de m\u00ed. Entonces levant\u00e9 de nuevo una coraza y me convert\u00ed en otra.\n\n\u2014No \u2014dije\u2014. Lo dejo.\n\nJaxon mud\u00f3 la expresi\u00f3n.\n\n\u2014Los Siete Sellos no \u00abse dejan\u00bb, Paige.\n\n\u2014Yo acabo de hacerlo.\n\n\u2014Tu vida me pertenece. Hicimos un trato. Firmaste un contrato conmigo.\n\n\u2014Me importa un cuerno lo que digan otros capos. Si soy propiedad tuya, Jaxon, no soy otra cosa que una esclava. \u2014Lo empuj\u00e9, tratando de separarlo de m\u00ed\u2014. Ya estoy harta de esa clase de vida.\n\nPronunci\u00e9 esas palabras, pero no parec\u00edan haber salido de mi cabeza. Me estaba quedando atontada.\n\n\u2014Si yo no puedo tenerte, no te tendr\u00e1 nadie \u2014dijo, y cerr\u00f3 los dedos\u2014. No renunciar\u00e9 a una onir\u00e1mbula.\n\nLo dec\u00eda en serio. Despu\u00e9s de lo que hab\u00eda pasado en Trafalgar Square, entend\u00eda su sed de sangre. Su aura lo delataba. Si dejaba de trabajar para \u00e9l, me matar\u00eda.\n\nNick nos hab\u00eda visto.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 haces, Jaxon?\n\n\u2014Lo dejo \u2014dije. Y lo repet\u00ed\u2014: Lo dejo. \u2014Necesitaba o\u00edrmelo decir\u2014. Cuando volvamos a Londres, no ir\u00e9 al I-4.\n\nNick mir\u00f3 a Jaxon.\n\n\u2014Ya hablaremos \u2014dijo\u2014. Ahora no hay tiempo. Faltan quince minutos.\n\nEse recordatorio me produjo un escalofr\u00edo.\n\n\u2014Hay que subir a todos al tren inmediatamente.\n\nNadine hab\u00eda vuelto.\n\n\u2014\u00bfD\u00f3nde est\u00e1 la entrada? \u2014pregunt\u00f3, sudorosa\u2014. Hemos salido a esta pradera por un pasadizo. \u00bfD\u00f3nde est\u00e1?\n\n\u2014Lo encontraremos. \u2014Mir\u00e9 m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de ella y solo vi a Zeke\u2014. \u00bfD\u00f3nde est\u00e1 Dani?\n\n\u2014No contesta por el transmisor. Podr\u00eda estar en cualquier sitio.\n\n\u2014Ella trabaja para Scion \u2014dijo Nick\u2014. Podr\u00eda librarse diciendo que es una emisaria, pero no es lo ideal.\n\n\u2014\u00bfHa venido Eliza?\n\n\u2014No, la hemos dejado en Dials. Necesit\u00e1bamos que hubiera un Sello en la ciudadela.\n\nJaxon se levant\u00f3 y se sacudi\u00f3 la ropa.\n\n\u2014Bueno, de momento vamos a llevarnos todos bien. Ya discutiremos nuestras diferencias cuando hayamos regresado. \u2014Hizo se\u00f1as con una mano y a\u00f1adi\u00f3\u2014: Diamante, Campana: cubridnos, por favor. Tenemos que tomar un tren.\n\n\u2014\u00bfY Dani? \u2014Zeke parec\u00eda nervioso.\n\n\u2014Tranquilo, lo conseguir\u00e1. Esa chica ser\u00eda capaz de atravesar un campo de minas.\n\nJaxon pas\u00f3 a mi lado y encendi\u00f3 otro puro. \u00bfC\u00f3mo pod\u00eda fumar en un momento as\u00ed? Estaba segura de que solo fing\u00eda despreocupaci\u00f3n. No quer\u00eda perderme. Y yo tampoco estaba segura de querer perderlo a \u00e9l. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 hab\u00eda dicho todo aquello? Jaxon no era un or\u00e1culo ni un adivino, pero sus palabras hab\u00edan sonado prof\u00e9ticas. Yo no pod\u00eda acabar limosneando (o peor a\u00fan, prostituy\u00e9ndome) en una barriada de videntes como Jacob's Island. Hab\u00eda cosas y lugares mucho peores que el empleo que me ofrec\u00eda Jaxon en la zona segura del I-4.\n\nQuer\u00eda disculparme. Ten\u00eda que disculparme. Era una dama; \u00e9l era mi capo. Pero el orgullo me lo imped\u00eda.\n\nLanc\u00e9 otra bengala. La \u00faltima. Una \u00faltima oportunidad para los \u00faltimos supervivientes. Entonces ech\u00e9 a correr detr\u00e1s de Jaxon. El Custodio me sigui\u00f3.\n\nLa bengala iluminaba el sendero. Unos cuantos humanos m\u00e1s llegaron a la verja y entraron con nosotros en la pradera; algunos iban por parejas y otros, solos. La mayor\u00eda eran videntes. Cuando lleg\u00f3 Michael, me agarr\u00f3 por el brazo. Ten\u00eda un tajo en la cara, desde una ceja hasta la barbilla, pero al menos pod\u00eda andar. Me puso mi mochila en los brazos.\n\n\u2014Gracias, Michael. No hac\u00eda falta que... \u2014Sacudi\u00f3 la cabeza; respiraba con dificultad. Me colgu\u00e9 una correa del hombro\u2014. \u00bfViene alguien m\u00e1s?\n\nMichael hizo tres signos.\n\n\u2014Los emisarios \u2014tradujo el Custodio\u2014. Vienen con sus guardaespaldas. \u00bfCu\u00e1nto falta? \u2014Michael levant\u00f3 dos dedos\u2014. Dos minutos. Tenemos que alejarnos de ellos cuanto podamos.\n\nEra una pesadilla. Gir\u00e9 la cabeza y dije:\n\n\u2014\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 no van a dejarnos marchar?\n\n\u2014Les habr\u00e1n ordenado retener a todos los testigos de este incidente. Quiz\u00e1 tengamos que pelear.\n\n\u2014Pelearemos.\n\nNotaba una punzada en el costado. En el camino encontramos a un herido tirado en la hierba. Respiraba con dificultad. Solo ten\u00eda medio minuto para levantarlo del suelo; si no, tendr\u00edamos que dejarlo all\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Sigue t\u00fa \u2014le dije al Custodio\u2014. Diles que llegar\u00e9 enseguida. \u00bfPuedes abrir el t\u00fanel?\n\n\u2014Sin ti, no. \u2014Mir\u00f3 al herido; yo no sab\u00eda qu\u00e9 estaba pensando\u2014. Date prisa, Paige.\n\nSigui\u00f3 adelante con Michael. Me arrodill\u00e9 junto al herido. Estaba tumbado boca arriba, con los ojos cerrados y las manos juntas sobre el pecho; habr\u00eda parecido una efigie de no ser por el uniforme de Scion: traje negro y corbata roja, manchados de sangre. Le tom\u00e9 el pulso, y \u00e9l abri\u00f3 un ojo. Con repentino apremio, su mano cargada de anillos asi\u00f3 la m\u00eda.\n\n\u2014Eres la chica.\n\nMe qued\u00e9 quieta.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9n eres?\n\n\u2014Mi cartera. Mira ah\u00ed.\n\nLe saqu\u00e9 una cartera de piel del bolsillo interior de la chaqueta. Dentro hab\u00eda un documento de identidad. Era del Starch.\n\n\u2014Trabajas para Weaver \u2014dije\u2014. Cerdo. Eres el responsable de todo esto. \u00bfTe ha enviado \u00e9l a verme morir? \u00bfA vigilar c\u00f3mo nos va en el infierno al que nos ha enviado?\n\nNo era una persona conocida, y no reconoc\u00ed su nombre.\n\n\u2014Lo destruir\u00e1n... todo. \u2014Ten\u00eda sangre en los labios.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQui\u00e9nes?\n\n\u2014Esos... seres. \u2014Inspir\u00f3 trabajosa y ruidosamente\u2014. Busca... a Rackham. B\u00fascalo.\n\nFueron sus \u00faltimas palabras. Me qued\u00e9 con su cartera en las manos, temblando. De pronto hac\u00eda mucho fr\u00edo.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Paige!\n\nNick hab\u00eda venido a buscarme.\n\n\u2014Era de Scion. \u2014Sacud\u00ed la cabeza, agotada\u2014. Ya no entiendo nada.\n\n\u2014Yo tampoco. Est\u00e1n jugando con nosotros, _s\u00f6tnos_. Lo que pasa es que todav\u00eda no sabemos a qu\u00e9 estamos jugando. \u2014Me apret\u00f3 la mano\u2014. Vamos.\n\nDej\u00e9 que me levantara. Nada m\u00e1s ponerme en pie, o\u00ed un disparo a lo lejos. Me puse en tensi\u00f3n. Los emisarios. Deb\u00edan de haber llegado a la verja. Al mismo tiempo el \u00e9ter lanz\u00f3 una se\u00f1al extra\u00f1a. Se nos acercaban cuatro figuras con ojos amarillos.\n\n\u2014Refas \u2014dije, y ech\u00e9 a correr\u2014. \u00a1Corre, Nick, corre!\n\nNick me hizo caso. Nuestras botas golpeaban con fuerza la tierra helada, pero los refas iban pis\u00e1ndonos los talones y eran m\u00e1s r\u00e1pidos que nosotros. Saqu\u00e9 un pu\u00f1al de mi mochila y me volv\u00ed, dispuesta a clav\u00e1rselo a alguno en un ojo, pero Terebell Sheratan me sujet\u00f3 la mano.\n\n\u2014Terebell \u2014dije, jadeando\u2014. \u00bfQu\u00e9 quieres?\n\nTerebell me mir\u00f3 a los ojos. Con ella estaban Pleione, Alsafi y otra refa m\u00e1s joven a la que no reconoc\u00ed. Y detr\u00e1s de ellos, ensangrentada y con la camisa rota, estaba Dani. Al verla sent\u00ed un alivio inmenso.\n\n\u2014Hemos tra\u00eddo a tu amiga \u2014dijo Terebell. En sus ojos hab\u00eda muy poca luz\u2014. Aqu\u00ed no durar\u00eda mucho.\n\nDani pas\u00f3 cojeando a mi lado, ignor\u00e1ndolos a todos, y fue hacia el grupo de rezagados. Estaba destrozada.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 quer\u00e9is a cambio? \u2014pregunt\u00e9 con recelo\u2014. Supongo que no quer\u00e9is subir al tren.\n\n\u2014Si quisi\u00e9ramos, no podr\u00edas imped\u00edrnoslo. Todos hemos salvado vidas humanas. Te hemos tra\u00eddo a tu amiga, y hemos retrasado a la DVN. Est\u00e1s en deuda con nosotros. \u2014Alsafi me miraba fijamente\u2014. Por suerte para ti, onir\u00e1mbula, no tenemos intenci\u00f3n de ir a la ciudadela. Hemos venido a buscar a Arcturus.\n\n\u2014Vendr\u00e1 cuando pueda.\n\nYo todav\u00eda necesitaba al Custodio.\n\n\u2014Pues transm\u00edtele este mensaje. Tiene que encontrarse con nosotros en el claro en cuanto vosotros os hay\u00e1is marchado. Le estaremos esperando.\n\nSe fueron tan deprisa como hab\u00edan aparecido. Se perdieron en la oscuridad como polvo que se disuelve, huyendo de las inevitables represalias de los Sargas. Me volv\u00ed y fui hacia una plataforma de entrenamiento donde hab\u00eda dos faroles encendidos. Llegar hasta all\u00ed hab\u00eda sido f\u00e1cil. Ahora ten\u00eda que guiar a toda aquella gente por el t\u00fanel hasta el tren.\n\nLos rezagados se hab\u00edan congregado junto a una plataforma de hormig\u00f3n equivocada, pues era rectangular y no ovalada. Nick estaba examin\u00e1ndole la cara a Dani. Ten\u00eda un corte profundo en la ceja, pero ella no le daba importancia. Jaxon, un poco m\u00e1s all\u00e1, contemplaba la ciudad con gesto impasible. No hab\u00eda ni rastro de Julian. Se lo hab\u00eda tragado el fuego, igual que a Finn. Confi\u00e9 en que, al menos, hubieran tenido una muerte r\u00e1pida.\n\n\u2014Tenemos que irnos \u2014dije\u2014. No podemos esperar m\u00e1s.\n\n\u2014No tiene sentido \u2014dijo un chico amaur\u00f3tico agarr\u00e1ndose el pelo con ambas manos\u2014. La DVN viene hacia aqu\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Nosotros hemos llegado primero.\n\nUnas cuantas miradas se avivaron. Saqu\u00e9 una linterna de la mochila y la encend\u00ed.\n\n\u2014Seguidme \u2014dije\u2014. Id tan deprisa como pod\u00e1is. Los que pod\u00e1is, ayudad a los heridos. Tenemos que encontrar otra marca, un \u00f3valo. No nos queda mucho tiempo.\n\n\u2014T\u00fa est\u00e1s con los refas \u2014dijo alguien con rencor\u2014. Yo no voy a ninguna parte con una sanguijuela.\n\nMe volv\u00ed hacia el que acababa de hablar y apunt\u00e9 hacia la ciudad.\n\n\u2014\u00bfPrefieres volver all\u00ed?\n\nNo dijo nada. Pas\u00e9 a su lado ignorando el dolor del costado y ech\u00e9 a correr otra vez.\n\nUna vez que hubimos pasado el estanque, no me cost\u00f3 mucho recordar el lugar exacto. Vi al Custodio de pie en el sitio donde hab\u00edamos entrenado meses atr\u00e1s.\n\n\u2014La entrada est\u00e1 aqu\u00ed \u2014dijo cuando me acerqu\u00e9 a \u00e9l, se\u00f1alando el \u00f3valo de hormig\u00f3n\u2014. A Nashira le gust\u00f3 la idea de poner la estaci\u00f3n bajo el campo de entrenamiento.\n\n\u2014\u00bfCrees que ha muerto?\n\n\u2014Ojal\u00e1.\n\nApart\u00e9 esa idea de mi mente. Ahora no pod\u00eda pensar en Nashira.\n\n\u2014Te est\u00e1n esperando \u2014dije\u2014. En el claro.\n\n\u2014No pienso ir con ellos todav\u00eda.\n\nSent\u00ed alivio. Mir\u00e9 alrededor y dije:\n\n\u2014No hay vigilancia. \u00bfHan dejado la entrada abierta, sin m\u00e1s?\n\n\u2014No, no son tan necios. \u2014El Custodio levant\u00f3 una capa de musgo que revel\u00f3 un candado de plata. Sali\u00f3 un fino haz de luz blanca, como si dentro se hubiera encendido una bombilla\u2014. Este candado contiene una bater\u00eda et\u00e9rea. Dentro hay un duende. Pensaban enviar a un guardia refa\u00edta con los emisarios para abrirlo antes de que se restablezca la corriente; pero si puedes convencer al duende para que salga de ah\u00ed dentro, fallar\u00e1 la bater\u00eda y saltar\u00e1 el cierre.\n\nNot\u00e9 un escozor en la herida de la mano.\n\n\u2014En tu forma on\u00edrica no puede hacerte da\u00f1o, Paige. \u2014\u00c9l lo sab\u00eda\u2014. Eres la mejor preparada para enfrentarse a un quebrajador.\n\n\u2014Jaxon es vinculador.\n\n\u2014Eso no eliminar\u00eda el problema. Hay que convencer al duende, persuadirlo para que abandone el objeto; no se le puede obligar. Hasta que no lo hubieran liberado de sus restricciones f\u00edsicas, tu amigo no podr\u00eda vincularlo.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 quieres que haga?\n\n\u2014T\u00fa puedes viajar por el \u00e9ter. Puedes comunicarte con el duende sin tocar el candado; nosotros, no.\n\n\u2014No digas \u00abnosotros\u00bb, refa. \u2014Era un augur un poco mayor que yo\u2014. Ap\u00e1rtate de ese candado.\n\nEl Custodio le dej\u00f3 hacer, pero sin dejar de observarlo. El chico iba armado con un trozo de tuber\u00eda.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 haces? \u2014le pregunt\u00e9.\n\n\u2014Eso de la bater\u00eda et\u00e9rea es un cuento \u2014dijo apretando los dientes\u2014. De esto ya me encargo yo. Quiero largarme de aqu\u00ed.\n\nGolpe\u00f3 el candado con la tuber\u00eda.\n\nEl \u00e9ter se estremeci\u00f3. El augur salt\u00f3 por los aires, gritando, y fue a parar a m\u00e1s de seis metros.\n\n\u2014\u00a1No, por favor! \u00a1No quiero morir! \u00a1Por favor, no quiero ser un esclavo! \u00a1No!\n\nArque\u00f3 la espalda, se estremeci\u00f3 y se qued\u00f3 quieto.\n\nEsas palabras me trajeron recuerdos.\n\n\u2014He cambiado de idea \u2014dije. El Custodio me mir\u00f3\u2014. S\u00ed puedo ocuparme de ese duende.\n\nEl Custodio hizo un gesto afirmativo. Quiz\u00e1 lo hubiera entendido.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Ya vienen!\n\nGir\u00e9 la cabeza.\n\nLa DVN se acercaba por la pradera iluminada por la luna. Armados con escudos y bastones antidisturbios, escoltaban a un grupo de emisarios. Birgitta Tj\u00e4der se hallaba entre ellos, y tambi\u00e9n Cathal Bell. Tj\u00e4der fue la que nos vio primero, y grit\u00f3 de rabia. Nick levant\u00f3 la pistola y le apunt\u00f3 a la cabeza. Contra los amaur\u00f3ticos no pod\u00edamos usar bandadas. Me di la vuelta y mir\u00e9 a los prisioneros. Por primera vez desde mi llegada all\u00ed, necesitaban que los animaran. Necesitaban o\u00edr una voz que les dijera que pod\u00edan hacer lo que estaban haciendo. Que val\u00edan algo.\n\nEsa voz iba a ser la m\u00eda.\n\n\u2014\u00bfVeis a esos centinelas? \u2014dije subiendo la voz y se\u00f1al\u00e1ndolos\u2014. Esos centinelas van a intentar impedirnos salir de aqu\u00ed. Van a matarnos porque no quieren que vayamos a su capital. No quieren que compartamos lo que hemos visto. Quieren vernos morir, aqu\u00ed y ahora. \u2014Ten\u00eda la voz ronca, pero continu\u00e9. Ten\u00eda que aguantar\u2014. Voy a abrir esta trampilla, y saldremos a tiempo de esta ciudad. Os prometo que al amanecer estaremos en Londres. \u00a1Y no habr\u00e1 campanada diurna que nos obligue a volver a nuestras celdas! \u2014Hubo murmullos de aprobaci\u00f3n, de rabia. Michael aplaudi\u00f3\u2014. Pero necesito que defend\u00e1is esta pradera. Necesito que hag\u00e1is esto \u00faltimo para que podamos salir de aqu\u00ed para siempre. Dadme dos minutos, y yo os dar\u00e9 la libertad.\n\nGuardaron silencio. No hubo gritos de guerra, nada. Pero cogieron sus armas, convocaron a cuantos esp\u00edritus pudieron y salieron en tropel hacia la DVN. Nadine y Zeke fueron tras ellos, dispuestos a entrar en la refriega. Los esp\u00edritus de la pradera se unieron a su causa, y se lanzaron contra la DVN con m\u00e1s \u00edmpetu que las balas. Jaxon se qued\u00f3 quieto, evalu\u00e1ndome.\n\n\u2014Un discurso excelente \u2014dijo\u2014 para ser una aficionada.\n\nEra un cumplido. Un halago de un capo a su dama. Pero yo sab\u00eda que no era fruto de una admiraci\u00f3n sincera.\n\nTen\u00eda dos minutos. Esa era mi promesa.\n\n\u2014Dani \u2014dije\u2014, necesito la m\u00e1scara.\n\nMeti\u00f3 una mano en el bolsillo de su abrigo. Ten\u00eda sudor en la frente.\n\n\u2014Toma. \u2014Me la lanz\u00f3\u2014. Le queda poco ox\u00edgeno. Aprov\u00e9chalo bien.\n\nMe coloqu\u00e9 tan cerca como pude del candado y me tumb\u00e9 en la hierba. Nick mir\u00f3 al Custodio.\n\n\u2014No s\u00e9 qui\u00e9n eres, pero espero que sepas lo que haces. Paige no es ning\u00fan juguete.\n\n\u2014No puedo permitir que lleve a esta gente por la Tierra de Nadie. \u2014El Custodio dirigi\u00f3 la mirada hacia el bosque\u2014. A menos que se le ocurra una alternativa, doctor Nyg\u00e5rd, esta es la \u00fanica forma de salir de aqu\u00ed.\n\nMe puse el SVP2 en la cara, tap\u00e1ndome la boca y la nariz. La mascarilla se sell\u00f3 y se ilumin\u00f3, lo que indicaba un flujo constante de ox\u00edgeno.\n\n\u2014No tienes mucho tiempo \u2014me previno Dani\u2014. Te sacudir\u00e9 cuando tengas que volver.\n\nDije que s\u00ed con la cabeza.\n\n\u2014Custodio, \u00bfcu\u00e1l era el segundo nombre de Seb?\n\n\u2014Albert.\n\nCerr\u00e9 los ojos.\n\n\u2014Cronometrar\u00e9 dos minutos \u2014dijo Nick, y eso fue lo \u00faltimo que o\u00ed, al menos en el mundo de la carne.\n\nVislumbraba el diminuto recept\u00e1culo en el \u00e9ter. Me absorb\u00eda como habr\u00eda hecho un onirosaje, como una gotita absorber\u00eda otra. Entonces me di la vuelta y me encontr\u00e9 ante un ni\u00f1o perdido.\n\nNo fui hacia \u00e9l. Me qued\u00e9 quieta. Pero all\u00ed estaba: Sebastian Albert Pearce, el ni\u00f1o al que no hab\u00eda podido salvar. Golpeaba las paredes, sacud\u00eda los barrotes de hierro de la habitaci\u00f3n. Al otro lado de esos barrotes estaba la oscuridad infinita del \u00e9ter. Ten\u00eda la cara manchada de sangre, transida de ira, y el pelo sucio de cenizas.\n\nLa \u00faltima vez que me hab\u00eda tropezado con un duende hab\u00eda sido en mi forma f\u00edsica; aun as\u00ed, Seb pod\u00eda hacerle da\u00f1o a mi esp\u00edritu. Iba a tener que dominarlo.\n\n\u2014Seb \u2014dije con toda la suavidad que pude.\n\n\u00c9l no tard\u00f3 en percatarse de la invasi\u00f3n. Se volvi\u00f3 contra m\u00ed, corri\u00f3 hacia m\u00ed. Lo agarr\u00e9 por las mu\u00f1ecas.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Soy yo, Seb!\n\n\u2014No me salvaste \u2014gru\u00f1\u00f3, furioso\u2014. No me salvaste, y ahora estoy muerto. \u00a1Estoy muerto, Paige! \u00a1Y no puedo... \u2014golpe\u00f3 la pared\u2014... salir... \u2014otra vez\u2014... de esta habitaci\u00f3n!\n\nSu endeble figura temblaba en mis brazos. Se le marcaban los huesos, igual que antes. Me tragu\u00e9 el miedo y le cog\u00ed la sucia cara con las manos. Me estremec\u00ed al ver su cuello roto.\n\nTen\u00eda que hacerlo. Ten\u00eda que aplacar la ira del esp\u00edritu en que se hab\u00eda convertido porque, si no, Seb quedar\u00eda atrapado en ese estado eternamente. Aquel no era Seb. No eran el rencor, el dolor ni el odio de Seb.\n\n\u2014Esc\u00fachame, Seb. Lo siento much\u00edsimo. T\u00fa no te merec\u00edas esto. \u2014Ten\u00eda los ojos negros\u2014. Yo puedo ayudarte. \u00bfQuieres volver a ver a tu madre?\n\n\u2014Mi madre me odia.\n\n\u2014No. Escucha, Seb. No te liber\u00e9, y... lo siento. \u2014Estaba a punto de quebr\u00e1rseme la voz\u2014. Pero ahora podemos liberarnos el uno al otro. Si sales de esta habitaci\u00f3n, yo podr\u00e9 salir de la ciudad.\n\n\u2014Nadie se va de aqu\u00ed. Ella nos avis\u00f3: nadie se va. \u2014Me agarr\u00f3 un brazo, y la cabeza le tembl\u00f3 tan deprisa que vi un borr\u00f3n\u2014. Ni siquiera t\u00fa. Ni siquiera yo.\n\n\u2014Yo puedo hacer que te vayas.\n\n\u2014No quiero irme. \u00bfPara qu\u00e9 voy a irme? Ella me mat\u00f3. \u00a1Yo deber\u00eda haber vivido m\u00e1s!\n\n\u2014Tienes mucha raz\u00f3n. Deber\u00edas haber vivido m\u00e1s. Pero \u00bfseguro que quieres vivir en esta jaula el resto de la eternidad?\n\nSeb empez\u00f3 a temblar otra vez.\n\n\u2014\u00bfEternamente?\n\n\u2014S\u00ed, para siempre. Seguro que no quieres.\n\nPar\u00f3 de temblar.\n\n\u2014Paige \u2014dijo en voz baja\u2014, \u00bftengo que irme para siempre? \u00bfNo puedo volver?\n\nAhora era yo la que temblaba. \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 no lo hab\u00eda salvado? \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 no hab\u00eda parado a Nashira?\n\n\u2014De momento, no. \u2014Despacio, con cuidado, le puse las manos sobre los hombros\u2014. No puedo enviarte hasta la \u00faltima luz. Ya sabes, esa luz blanca que la gente dice que ve al final. No puedo enviarte all\u00ed. Pero puedo enviarte muy lejos, a la oscuridad exterior, para que nadie pueda volver a encerrarte. Y entonces, si de verdad quieres, podr\u00e1s volver.\n\n\u2014Si quiero.\n\n\u2014S\u00ed.\n\nNos quedamos un rato callados, Seb en mis brazos. No ten\u00eda pulso, pero yo sab\u00eda que deb\u00eda de estar asustado. Mi cord\u00f3n arg\u00e9nteo tembl\u00f3.\n\n\u2014No vayas tras ella \u2014dijo Seb aferr\u00e1ndose a mi forma on\u00edrica\u2014. De Nashira. Lo \u00fanico que quieren es sorbernos hasta dejarnos secos. Y hay un secreto.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 secreto?\n\n\u2014No puedo revelarlo. Lo siento. \u2014Me tom\u00f3 las manos\u2014. Es demasiado tarde para m\u00ed, pero no para ti. T\u00fa todav\u00eda puedes parar esto. Nosotros te ayudaremos. Todos te ayudaremos.\n\nSeb me abraz\u00f3 el cuello. Percib\u00eda su presencia como algo tan real como el ni\u00f1o al que hab\u00eda conocido con vida. As\u00ed era como yo lo recordaba. Recit\u00e9 el treno en voz baja:\n\n\u2014Sebastian Albert Pearce, vete al \u00e9ter. Est\u00e1 todo arreglado. Todas las deudas est\u00e1n saldadas. Ya no tienes que morar entre los vivos. \u2014Cerr\u00e9 los ojos\u2014. Adi\u00f3s.\n\nSeb sonri\u00f3.\n\nY desapareci\u00f3.\n\nEl \u00e9ter contenido en el _numen_ empez\u00f3 a deshacerse. El cord\u00f3n arg\u00e9nteo dio una sacudida, esa vez con m\u00e1s apremio. Tom\u00e9 carrerilla y salt\u00e9, y mi onirosaje me recuper\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Paige. \u00a1Paige!\n\nUna luz me deslumbraba.\n\n\u2014Est\u00e1 bien \u2014dijo Nick\u2014. Nos vamos. Nadine, re\u00fanelos.\n\n\u2014Custodio \u2014murmur\u00e9.\n\nUna mano enguantada apret\u00f3 la m\u00eda, y supe que estaba all\u00ed. Abr\u00ed los ojos. O\u00eda disparos. Y los latidos del coraz\u00f3n del Custodio.\n\nEl Custodio levant\u00f3 la trampilla de acceso: una puerta maciza, cubierta de hormig\u00f3n, que ocultaba una escalera estrecha. El candado vac\u00edo cay\u00f3 repiqueteando. El Custodio me carg\u00f3 sobre el hombro, y lo abrac\u00e9 por el cuello. Los humanos bajaron por la escalera sin dejar de disparar contra la DVN. Tj\u00e4der se hizo con el arma de un centinela muerto; dispar\u00f3 a Cyril en el cuello y lo mat\u00f3. Vi la ciudad por \u00faltima vez (la luz en el cielo, la baliza en la oscuridad), antes de que el Custodio siguiera a los supervivientes. Su cuerpo, s\u00f3lido y c\u00e1lido, era lo \u00fanico en lo que pod\u00eda concentrarme. Iba recuperando la percepci\u00f3n a base de dolorosas sacudidas.\n\nEn el t\u00fanel hac\u00eda fr\u00edo. Lo ol\u00ed: el olor seco y rancio de una habitaci\u00f3n que se usa poco. Los gritos de arriba se confund\u00edan formando una cacofon\u00eda sin sentido, como ladridos de perros. Me agarr\u00e9 fuerte al hombro del Custodio. Necesitaba adrenalina, amaranto, algo.\n\nNo era un t\u00fanel grande, m\u00e1s o menos del tama\u00f1o de los t\u00faneles del metro de Londres, pero en el and\u00e9n, largo y ancho, cab\u00edan al menos cien personas. Al final hab\u00eda unas camillas, apiladas unas sobre otras. Ol\u00eda a desinfectante. Deb\u00edan de haberlas utilizado para trasladar a los videntes a los que hab\u00edan inyectado flux desde all\u00ed hasta la penitenciar\u00eda, o al menos hasta la calle. Pero estaba segura de poder o\u00edr algo en la oscuridad: un zumbido el\u00e9ctrico.\n\nEl Custodio alumbr\u00f3 con su linterna hacia el tren. Al cabo de un momento vi las luces. Entrecerr\u00e9 los ojos.\n\nElectricidad.\n\nEra un tren ligero, de los del metro; no estaba pensado para transportar a muchos pasajeros. En la parte trasera pod\u00eda leerse: SISTEMA DE TRANSPORTE AUTOMATIZADO DE SCION. Los vagones eran blancos, y llevaban la insignia de Scion en las puertas; al abrirse estas, se encendieron las luces del interior.\n\n\u00abBienvenidos a bordo \u2014dijo la voz de Scarlett Burnish\u2014. Este tren partir\u00e1 dentro de tres minutos con destino a la ciudadela Scion Londres.\u00bb\n\nEntre suspiros de alivio, los supervivientes fueron deshaci\u00e9ndose de sus armas rudimentarias y entrando en los vagones. El Custodio se qued\u00f3 quieto en el and\u00e9n.\n\n\u2014Se dar\u00e1n cuenta \u2014dije con voz cansada\u2014. Se dar\u00e1n cuenta de que en el tren no van los que deber\u00edan. Nos estar\u00e1n esperando.\n\n\u2014Y t\u00fa te enfrentar\u00e1s a ellos. Como te enfrentas siempre a todo.\n\nMe dej\u00f3 en el suelo, pero no me solt\u00f3. Me abraz\u00f3 por las caderas. Lo mir\u00e9 y dije:\n\n\u2014Gracias.\n\n\u2014No tienes que agradecerme tu libertad. Tienes derecho a ella.\n\n\u2014Y t\u00fa tambi\u00e9n.\n\n\u2014Ya me has dado la libertad, Paige. Me ha costado veinte a\u00f1os recuperar las fuerzas para reclamarla. Eso tengo que agradec\u00e9rtelo \u00fanicamente a ti.\n\nIba a contestar, pero se me hizo un nudo en la garganta. Unas cuantas personas m\u00e1s subieron al tren, entre ellas Nell y Charles.\n\n\u2014Tenemos que irnos \u2014dije.\n\nEl Custodio no me contest\u00f3. No estaba muy segura de qu\u00e9 era eso que hab\u00eda pasado a lo largo de los seis \u00faltimos meses (no sab\u00eda si era real o no), pero notaba el coraz\u00f3n henchido y la piel caliente, y no ten\u00eda miedo. Ya no. De \u00e9l, no.\n\nSe oy\u00f3 un ruido a lo lejos, una especie de trueno. Otra mina. Otra muerte in\u00fatil. Zeke, Nadine y Jax entraron tambale\u00e1ndose en el t\u00fanel; iban ayudando a Dani, que estaba seminconsciente.\n\n\u2014\u00bfVienes, Paige? \u2014dijo Zeke.\n\n\u2014Id tirando. Voy enseguida.\n\nEntraron en uno de los \u00faltimos vagones. Jaxon asom\u00f3 la cabeza por la puerta y me mir\u00f3.\n\n\u2014Ya hablaremos, So\u00f1adora \u2014dijo\u2014. Cuando volvamos, hablaremos.\n\nPuls\u00f3 el bot\u00f3n del interior del vag\u00f3n, y las puertas se cerraron. Un amaur\u00f3tico y un adivino entraron tambale\u00e1ndose en el siguiente vag\u00f3n; uno llevaba la camisa manchada de sangre.\n\n\u2014Un minuto para la salida. Por favor, p\u00f3nganse c\u00f3modos.\n\nEl Custodio me abraz\u00f3 con fuerza.\n\n\u2014Qu\u00e9 raro que esto sea tan dif\u00edcil \u2014dijo.\n\nEscudri\u00f1\u00e9 su cara. Ten\u00eda los ojos muy apagados.\n\n\u2014No vienes, \u00bfverdad? \u2014pregunt\u00e9.\n\n\u2014No.\n\nLo entend\u00ed poco a poco, con la lentitud con que el polvo se acumula en una estrella. En realidad yo nunca hab\u00eda tenido la certeza de que fuera a venir conmigo; eso solo hab\u00eda sido un deseo impreciso que hab\u00eda surgido en las \u00faltimas horas. Cuando ya era demasiado tarde. Y ahora estaba a punto de irse. O mejor dicho, de quedarse. A partir de ese momento, estar\u00eda sola. Y ser\u00eda libre en esa soledad.\n\nAcerc\u00f3 la nariz a la m\u00eda. Un dolor lento y dulce surgi\u00f3 dentro de m\u00ed, y no supe qu\u00e9 hacer. El Custodio no dejaba de mirarme, pero yo ten\u00eda la cabeza agachada. Miraba nuestras manos; las suyas, m\u00e1s grandes, sobre las m\u00edas, protegidas por los guantes que ocultaban la piel \u00e1spera; y las m\u00edas, p\u00e1lidas, con r\u00edos de venas azuladas. Mis u\u00f1as, todav\u00eda amoratadas.\n\n\u2014Ven con nosotros \u2014dije. Me dol\u00eda la garganta, y me ard\u00edan los labios\u2014. Ven... conmigo. A Londres.\n\nMe hab\u00eda besado. Me hab\u00eda deseado. Quiz\u00e1 todav\u00eda me deseara.\n\nPero no pod\u00eda haber nada entre nosotros. Era imposible. Y supe, por su mirada, que desearme no era suficiente.\n\n\u2014No puedo ir a la ciudadela. \u2014Me pas\u00f3 un pulgar por los labios\u2014. Pero t\u00fa s\u00ed. T\u00fa puedes recuperar tu vida, Paige. Es lo \u00fanico que quiero: que aproveches esa oportunidad.\n\n\u2014Pues yo quiero m\u00e1s cosas.\n\n\u2014\u00bfQu\u00e9 quieres?\n\n\u2014No lo s\u00e9. Quiero tenerte a mi lado.\n\nNunca hab\u00eda dicho esas palabras en voz alta. Ahora que pod\u00eda saborear mi libertad, quer\u00eda que \u00e9l la compartiera conmigo.\n\nPero \u00e9l no pod\u00eda cambiar su vida por m\u00ed. Y yo tampoco pod\u00eda sacrificar mi vida para estar con \u00e9l.\n\n\u2014Ahora debo perseguir a Nashira desde la clandestinidad. \u2014Apoy\u00f3 la frente en mi frente\u2014. Si logro echarla de aqu\u00ed, quiz\u00e1 los dem\u00e1s se marchen tambi\u00e9n. Quiz\u00e1 abandonen. \u2014Abri\u00f3 los ojos y me grab\u00f3 sus palabras a fuego en la mente\u2014. Si no vuelvo, si no vuelves a verme nunca, significar\u00e1 que todo ha salido bien. Que he acabado con ella. Pero si regreso, significar\u00e1 que he fracasado. Que todav\u00eda hay peligro. Y entonces te buscar\u00e9.\n\nLe sostuve la mirada. Recordar\u00eda su promesa.\n\n\u2014\u00bfConf\u00edas en m\u00ed ahora? \u2014me pregunt\u00f3.\n\n\u2014\u00bfDebo confiar?\n\n\u2014Eso no puedo dec\u00edrtelo yo. En eso consiste la confianza, Paige. En no saber si debes confiar en alguien o no.\n\n\u2014Entonces, conf\u00edo en ti.\n\nO\u00ed unos golpes a lo lejos. Pu\u00f1os contra metal, gritos amortiguados. Nick entr\u00f3 corriendo en el t\u00fanel, acompa\u00f1ado por el resto de los supervivientes, que me metieron en tropel en el tren justo antes de que se cerraran las puertas.\n\n\u2014\u00a1Sube, Paige! \u2014me grit\u00f3.\n\nHab\u00eda acabado la cuenta atr\u00e1s. Ya no hab\u00eda tiempo. El Custodio se separ\u00f3 de m\u00ed; el remordimiento ard\u00eda en sus ojos.\n\n\u2014Corre \u2014dijo\u2014. Corre, So\u00f1adora.\n\nEl tren se hab\u00eda puesto en marcha. Nick salt\u00f3 al tren agarr\u00e1ndose a la barandilla del final del \u00faltimo vag\u00f3n, y me tendi\u00f3 una mano.\n\n\u2014\u00a1PAIGE!\n\nVolv\u00ed en m\u00ed. Me dio un vuelco el coraz\u00f3n, y todos mis sentidos me golpearon como un muro de hierro. Me di la vuelta y corr\u00ed por el and\u00e9n. El tren aceler\u00f3; iba muy deprisa. As\u00ed la mano de Nick, salt\u00e9 por encima de la barandilla y me met\u00ed en el vag\u00f3n. Estaba a salvo. Vi volar chispas por la v\u00eda, y sent\u00ed temblar el suelo met\u00e1lico bajo mis pies.\n\nNo cerr\u00e9 los ojos. El Custodio hab\u00eda desaparecido en la oscuridad, como una vela apagada por el viento.\n\nNo volver\u00eda a verlo.\n\nPero mientras ve\u00eda correr las paredes del t\u00fanel, estaba segura de una cosa: confiaba en \u00e9l.\n\nYa solo faltaba que confiara en m\u00ed misma.\n\nEl argot empleado por los clarividentes en _La Era de Huesos_ est\u00e1 inspirado en el l\u00e9xico utilizado por el hampa londinense en el siglo XIX, con algunas modificaciones respecto al uso y el significado. Los t\u00e9rminos espec\u00edficos de la Familia (los humanos residentes en Sheol I) se indican con un asterisco.*\n\n****\n\n**Actor:** [sustantivo] Humano residente en Sheol que ha suspendido los ex\u00e1menes y est\u00e1 a las \u00f3rdenes del Capataz.\n\n**Andar\u00edn:** [sustantivo] Sin\u00f3nimo de \u00abonir\u00e1mbulo\u00bb.\n\n**Amaurosis:** [sustantivo] Carencia de clarividencia.\n\n**Amaur\u00f3tico:** [adjetivo o sustantivo] No clarividente.\n\n**Arrancahuesos:** ***** [sustantivo peyorativo] Casaca roja.\n\n**Bandada:** [sustantivo] Grupo de esp\u00edritus.\n\n**Buf\u00f3n:** ***** [sustantivo] Actor.\n\n**Cantor:** [sustantivo] Pol\u00edglota.\n\n**Carro\u00f1o:** [sustantivo] Amaur\u00f3tico.\n\n**Casaca amarilla:** ***** [sustantivo] El rango m\u00e1s bajo en Sheol I. Lo reciben los humanos que muestran miedo durante un examen. Puede utilizarse como sin\u00f3nimo de \u00abcobarde\u00bb.\n\n**Casaca blanca:** ***** [sustantivo] Primer rango que reciben todos los humanos en Sheol I. Los casacas blancas deben exhibir cierto grado de habilidad en sus respectivos tipos de clarividencia. Si aprueban ese examen, ascienden a casaca rosa; si lo suspenden, son enviados al Poblado.\n\n**Casaca roja:** ***** [sustantivo] El rango m\u00e1s elevado entre los humanos de Sheol I. Los casacas rojas son los encargados de proteger la ciudad de los emim. A cambio de sus servicios, reciben privilegios especiales. Tambi\u00e9n son llamados \u00abarrancahuesos\u00bb.\n\n**Casaca rosa:** ***** [sustantivo] Segunda fase de iniciaci\u00f3n en Sheol I. Los casacas rosa deben enfrentarse a los emim antes de pasar a ser casacas rojas. Si suspenden ese examen, los casacas rosa son degradados a casaca blanca.\n\nCenti **:** [sustantivo] Centinela.\n\n**Cord\u00f3n arg\u00e9nteo:** [sustantivo] Conexi\u00f3n permanente entre el cuerpo y el esp\u00edritu. Permite a una persona permanecer durante a\u00f1os en una misma forma f\u00edsica. Exclusivo de cada individuo. Especialmente importante para los onir\u00e1mbulos, quienes utilizan el cord\u00f3n para abandonar temporalmente su cuerpo. El cord\u00f3n arg\u00e9nteo se desgasta con los a\u00f1os, y una vez roto no puede repararse.\n\n**Cord\u00f3n \u00e1ureo:** [sustantivo] Conexi\u00f3n entre dos esp\u00edritus. Se sabe muy poco sobre \u00e9l.\n\n**Cortesano:** [sustantivo] Adicto al \u00e1ster morado. El nombre viene de St Anne's Court, el callej\u00f3n del Soho donde comenz\u00f3 el comercio de \u00e1ster morado a principios del siglo XXI.\n\n**Dama:** [sustantivo] Clarividente joven asociada con un mimetocapo. A menudo se da por hecho que es [a] la amante del capo y [b] la heredera de su sector.\n\n**Destronado:** [adjetivo] Completamente recuperado de los efectos del \u00e1ster morado.\n\n**Ecto:** [sustantivo] Ectoplasma, o sangre refa\u00edta. De color amarillo verdoso. Luminiscente y ligeramente gelatinoso. Puede emplearse para abrir puntos fr\u00edos.\n\n**Emim, los:** [sustantivo] [singular _emite_ ] Presuntos enemigos de los refa\u00edtas; \u00ablos temidos\u00bb. Nashira Sargas los define como seres carn\u00edvoros y brutales, con debilidad por la carne humana. Su existencia est\u00e1 envuelta en un halo de misterio.\n\n**\u00c9ter:** [sustantivo] El reino de los esp\u00edritus, al que pueden acceder los clarividentes. Tambi\u00e9n llamado el origen.\n\n**Falsante:** [sustantivo] Falsificador de documentos; los contratan los mimetocapos para proporcionar documentos de viaje falsos a sus empleados.\n\n**Familia, la:** ***** [sustantivo] Conjunto de humanos residentes en Sheol I, exceptuando a los arrancahuesos y a otros traidores.\n\n**Fantasma:** [sustantivo] Esp\u00edritu que ha escogido un sitio determinado donde residir, muy frecuentemente el lugar donde muri\u00f3. Sacar a un fantasma de su \u00ablugar predilecto\u00bb puede provocar su enfado.\n\n**Fasc\u00edculos de terror:** [sustantivo] Obras de ficci\u00f3n baratas e ilegales editadas en Grub Street, el centro del mundillo literario de los videntes. Componen series de relatos de terror. Distribuidos entre los clarividentes para compensar la falta de literatura fant\u00e1stica, de la que no se publican obras en Scion. Los fasc\u00edculos de terror abarcan gran variedad de temas sobrenaturales.\n\n**Floxy:** [sustantivo] Ox\u00edgeno aromatizado que se inhala mediante una c\u00e1nula. Es la alternativa de Scion al alcohol. Se sirve en la gran mayor\u00eda de los locales de entretenimiento, incluidos los bares de ox\u00edgeno.\n\n**Flux:** [sustantivo] Fluxion 14, psicof\u00e1rmaco que produce desorientaci\u00f3n y dolor a los clarividentes.\n\n**Lector:** [sustantivo] T\u00e9rmino anticuado, sin\u00f3nimo de \u00abcartom\u00e1ntico\u00bb. Su uso no es frecuente en la ciudadela.\n\n**Limosnear:** [verbo] Clarividencia remunerada. La mayor\u00eda de los limosneros leen el futuro a cambio de dinero. Est\u00e1 prohibido dentro del sindicato de clarividentes.\n\n**Luci\u00e9rnaga:** [sustantivo] Guardaespaldas callejero, contratado para proteger a los ciudadanos de los antinaturales por la noche. Se le identifica por una caracter\u00edstica luz verde.\n\nMecks **:** [sustantivo] Sustituto sin alcohol del vino. Tiene un sabor dulce y una consistencia espesa como el jarabe. Hay tres variedades: blanco, rosado y \u00absangre\u00bb, o tinto.\n\n**Mimetocapo:** [sustantivo] L\u00edder de una banda del sindicato de clarividentes; especialista en mimetodelincuencia. Generalmente dirige a un grupo reducido de entre cinco y diez seguidores, pero tiene el mando de todos los clarividentes de determinado sector de una cohorte. Miembro de la Asamblea Antinatural.\n\n**Mimetodelincuencia:** [sustantivo] Cualquier actividad que implique el uso de, o la comunicaci\u00f3n con, el mundo de los esp\u00edritus, sobre todo si es con fines de lucro. La ley de Scion lo considera alta traici\u00f3n.\n\n**Mundo de la carne:** [sustantivo] El mundo corp\u00f3reo; la Tierra.\n\n**Narco:** [sustantivo] Especialista en drogas et\u00e9reas y sus efectos en el onirosaje.\n\nNumen **:** [sustantivo] [plural _numa_ ] Objetos utilizados por los adivinos y los augures para conectar con el \u00e9ter; por ejemplo espejos, cartas, huesos.\n\n**Onirosaje:** [sustantivo] El interior de la mente, donde se almacenan los recuerdos. Est\u00e1 dividido en cinco \u00abanillos\u00bb de cordura: zona soleada, zona crepuscular, medianoche, baja medianoche y zona hadal. Los clarividentes pueden acceder conscientemente a su propio onirosaje, mientras que los amaur\u00f3ticos solo pueden entreverlo cuando duermen.\n\n**Oscuridad exterior:** [sustantivo] Zona del \u00e9ter muy remota, m\u00e1s all\u00e1 del alcance de los clarividentes.\n\n**Oxista:** [sustantivo] Camarero\/a de un bar de ox\u00edgeno.\n\n**Peste cerebral:** [sustantivo] T\u00e9rmino de argot, sin\u00f3nimo de fantasmagor\u00eda, una fiebre debilitante producida por el Fluxion 14.\n\n**Pirata:** [sustantivo] Taxi ilegal, sin licencia; son los que utilizan, por lo general, los clarividentes.\n\n**Poblado, el:** [sustantivo] Barriada. En Sheol I, barrio de chabolas donde se ven obligados a vivir los actores.\n\n**Pondo:** [sustantivo] Una libra; medida de peso. T\u00e9rmino empleado corrientemente en el \u00e1mbito de las drogas et\u00e9reas.\n\n**Punto fr\u00edo:** [sustantivo] Peque\u00f1a abertura entre el \u00e9ter y el mundo corp\u00f3reo. Se manifiesta como un charco de hielo permanente. Se puede utilizar, con ectoplasma, para abrir un conducto hasta el Inframundo. La materia corp\u00f3rea (por ejemplo, la sangre y la carne) no puede pasar por un punto fr\u00edo.\n\n**Quebrajador:** [sustantivo] Esp\u00edritu capaz de causar un impacto en el mundo corporal debido a su categor\u00eda o su edad. Incluye a los duendes y a los arc\u00e1ngeles.\n\n**Refa\u00edtas, los:** [sustantivo] [singular refa\u00edta] Habitantes humanoides, biol\u00f3gicamente inmortales, del Inframundo; se alimentan del aura de los humanos clarividentes. Su historia y sus or\u00edgenes son inciertos.\n\nRegal **:** [sustantivo] \u00c1ster morado.\n\n**Reinar:** [verbo] Estar bajo los efectos del \u00e1ster morado.\n\n**Sindicato:** [sustantivo] Organizaci\u00f3n criminal de clarividentes, con base en la Ciudadela Scion Londres. Activo desde principios de la d\u00e9cada de 1960. Gobernado por el Subse\u00f1or y la Asamblea Antinatural. Sus miembros se especializan en mimetodelincuencia con fines lucrativos.\n\n**Sindis:** [sustantivo] Miembros del sindicato de clarividentes. T\u00e9rmino empleado mayoritariamente por los centinelas.\n\nSkilly **:** ***** [sustantivo] Gachas ligeras, generalmente hechas con jugo de carne.\n\n**Solicitante:** [sustantivo] Cualquier persona que busca informaci\u00f3n en el \u00e9ter. Pueden formular preguntas u ofrecer una parte de s\u00ed mismos (sangre, palma de la mano) para que les hagan una predicci\u00f3n. Los adivinos y los augures pueden utilizar a un solicitante para concentrarse en determinadas zonas del \u00e9ter y hacer predicciones m\u00e1s f\u00e1cilmente.\n\n**So\u00f1ador:** [sustantivo] Sin\u00f3nimo de \u00abonir\u00e1mbulo\u00bb; lo usan frecuentemente los refa\u00edtas.\n\nSortes **:** [sustantivo] Una de las categor\u00edas de _numa_ empleados por los clarividentes. Incluye las agujas, los dados, las llaves, los huesos y las varillas.\n\n**Sublimaci\u00f3n:** [sustantivo] Proceso por el que un objeto corriente se convierte en un _numen_.\n\n**Subse\u00f1or:** [sustantivo] Jefe de la Asamblea Antinatural y capo supremo del sindicato de clarividentes. Tradicionalmente reside en _Devil's Acre_ (el Acre del Diablo), en el sector 1 de la cohorte I.\n\nSusu **:** [sustantivo] Sin\u00f3nimo de \u00absusurrante\u00bb o \u00abpol\u00edglota\u00bb.\n\n**Tase:** [sustantivo] Abreviatura de \u00abtase\u00f3grafo\u00bb.\n\n**Tincto:** [sustantivo] L\u00e1udano. Narc\u00f3tico ilegal. El nombre proviene de su nombre t\u00e9cnico, tintura de opio.\n\nToke **:** ***** [sustantivo] Pan rancio.\n\n**Treno:** [sustantivo] Serie de palabras utilizadas para desterrar a los esp\u00edritus a la oscuridad exterior.\n\n**\u00daltima luz:** [sustantivo] El centro del \u00e9ter, el lugar del que los esp\u00edritus ya no pueden regresar. Se rumorea que m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de la \u00faltima luz existe otra vida definitiva.\n\n**Vagabundos:** [sustantivo] Esp\u00edritus del \u00e9ter que no han sido desterrados a la oscuridad exterior o \u00faltima luz. Los clarividentes todav\u00eda pueden controlarlos.\n\n**Videncia:** [sustantivo] Clarividencia.\n\n**Vidente:** [sustantivo] Clarividente.\n\n**Whitewash:** [sustantivo] Amnesia duradera provocada por el consumo de \u00e1ster blanco. **Encalar** : [verbo] Emplear \u00e1ster blanco para borrar la memoria de alguien.\n\nZeitgeist **:** [sustantivo] T\u00e9rmino alem\u00e1n que significa \u00abesp\u00edritu del tiempo\u00bb. Los videntes lo utilizan metaf\u00f3ricamente, pero algunos adoran al _zeitgeist_ como a una deidad.\n\n**Zumbadores:** ***** [sustantivo] Emim.\n\nQuiero dar las gracias a la familia Godwin, y muy especialmente a David, por acogerme con tanto cari\u00f1o en el mundo editorial. Gracias tambi\u00e9n a Kirsty McLachlan, Caitlin Ingham y Anna Watkins por su trabajo con los derechos para el cine y para el extranjero. No podr\u00eda haber encontrado una agencia mejor que DGA.\n\nAl equipo de Bloomsbury: antes de conoceros no ten\u00eda ni idea de la pasi\u00f3n y el trabajo de equipo necesarios para crear un libro. Quiero expresar mi gratitud a la inimitable Alexandra Pringle, cuya pasi\u00f3n por esta novela ha sido la mejor inspiraci\u00f3n que pod\u00eda pedir; a Alexa von Hirschberg, mi estupenda editora, que ha ido mucho m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de sus obligaciones y siempre ha estado dispuesta a ayudarme; y a Rachel Mannheimer, Justine Taylor y Sarah Barlow, quienes me han ayudado a perfeccionar muchos aspectos de _La Era de Huesos_. Gracias de coraz\u00f3n a Katie Bond, Jude Drake, Amanda Shipp, Ianthe Cox-Willmott, Eleanor Weil y Oliver Holden-Rea del Reino Unido, y a George Gibson, Cristina Gilbert, Nancy Miller, Marie Coolman y Sara Mercurio de Estados Unidos. Sois todos geniales.\n\nAndy Serkis, Jonathan Cavendish, Chloe Sizer, Will Tennant y el resto del equipo de Imaginarium: es un privilegio trabajar con vosotros. Gracias por vuestra dedicaci\u00f3n a todos los aspectos de este libro, mucho m\u00e1s all\u00e1 de lo visual. En el plano art\u00edstico, muchas gracias a Andr\u00e1s Bereznay por dise\u00f1ar el mapa; a David Mann, por la cubierta; y a Leiana Leatutufu, por ser mi _automatiste_ personal.\n\nDecir que este libro ha sido mi vida estos dos \u00faltimos a\u00f1os es quedarse corto. Sois demasiados para nombraros a todos en tan poco espacio, pero gracias a todos los amigos que han estado a mi lado durante ese tiempo, y mucho antes. Gracias muy especiales a Neil Diamond y a Fran Tracey; a Emma Forward, mi gran profesora de literatura; y a Rian, Jesica y Richard por llevarme con ellos a Irlanda. De no ser por vosotros, no habr\u00eda conocido a Molly Malone.\n\nA mis traductores de todo el mundo, gracias por hacer que este libro pueda leerse en tantos idiomas en los que nunca podr\u00e9 escribir. Muchas gracias a Flo y a Alie por ayudarme con los nombres franceses y serbios, y a Devora de Agam Books por compartir conmigo sus conocimientos de hebreo.\n\nGracias a todas las personas que han seguido mi blog y mis comentarios en Twitter antes de la publicaci\u00f3n del libro, y sobre todo a Susan Hill: tu apoyo me ha dado mucha seguridad. Gracias tambi\u00e9n a los profesores y alumnos del St Anne's College, por ser tan comprensivos conmigo a lo largo de este a\u00f1o ca\u00f3tico.\n\nY, por supuesto, gracias a mi familia, y sobre todo a mam\u00e1, por darme fuerza y energ\u00eda constantemente, y a Mike, mi incre\u00edble padrastro y rey indiscutible de la taseograf\u00eda. Los dos me hab\u00e9is soportado en mis peores momentos, as\u00ed que, seg\u00fan Marilyn Monroe, merec\u00e9is que me acuerde de vosotros en los mejores.\n\nJD, gracias por ser mi musa. Eres mi poeta muerto n\u00famero uno. Y, por \u00faltimo, gracias a Ali Smith por animarme a lanzar _La Era de Huesos_ al mundo.\n\nGracias a todos por apostar por una so\u00f1adora.\n\n### _Samantha Shannon_\n\n# La era de huesos\n\nSamantha Shannon naci\u00f3 en Londres en 1991 y empez\u00f3 a escribir a los quince a\u00f1os. Entre 2010 y 2013 estudi\u00f3 Lengua y Literatura en la Universidad de Oxford. Con s\u00f3lo veintid\u00f3s a\u00f1os salt\u00f3 a la fama con la publicaci\u00f3n de _La era de huesos_ , su primera novela. Esta escal\u00f3 r\u00e1pidamente las listas de m\u00e1s vendidos, cosechando rese\u00f1as espectaculares a ambos lados del Atl\u00e1ntico.\n\n_La era de huesos_ da a conocer a una protagonista valiente y cautivadora, as\u00ed como a una joven autora de imaginaci\u00f3n, ambici\u00f3n y talento desbordantes. Si bien sus m\u00e9ritos le han valido comparaciones con las obras de fantas\u00eda m\u00e1s exitosas de la actualidad y cl\u00e1sicos del siglo XX, es un libro que brilla por su originalidad. En esta primera novela, Samantha Shannon ha creado un universo fascinante y totalmente \u00fanico que est\u00e1 conquistando los corazones y las mentes de lectores en todo el mundo.\nPRIMERA EDICI\u00d3N DIGITAL VINTAGE ESPA\u00d1OL, DICIEMBRE 2014\n\n_Copyright de la traducci\u00f3n \u00a9 2014 por Gemma Rovira Ortega_\n\nTodos los derechos reservados. Publicado en coedici\u00f3n con Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S. A., Barcelona, en los Estados Unidos de Am\u00e9rica por Vintage Espa\u00f1ol, una divisi\u00f3n de Random House LLC, Nueva York, y en Canad\u00e1 por Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, compa\u00f1\u00edas Penguin Random House. Publicado seg\u00fan acuerdo con David Godwin Associates, Londres. Originalmente publicado en ingl\u00e9s en EE.UU. como _The Bone Season_ por Bloomsbury USA en 2013. Copyright \u00a9 2013 por Samantha Shannon-Jones. Copyright de la presente edici\u00f3n en castellano para todo el mundo \u00a9 2014 por Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S. A.\n\nVintage es una marca registrada y Vintage Espa\u00f1ol y su colof\u00f3n son marcas de Random House LLC.\n\nEste libro es una obra de ficci\u00f3n. Los nombres, personajes, lugares e incidentes o son producto de la imaginaci\u00f3n de la autora o se usan de forma ficticia. Cualquier parecido con personas, vivas o muertas, eventos o escenarios es puramente casual.\n\nInformaci\u00f3n de catalogaci\u00f3n de publicaciones disponible en la Biblioteca del Congreso de los Estados Unidos.\n\n**Vintage Espa\u00f1ol ISBN en tapa blanda: 978-1-101-87321-2**\n\n**Vintage Espa\u00f1ol eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-87322-9**\n\n_Adaptaci\u00f3n del dise\u00f1o original de David Mann: PRHGE_\n\n_Para venta exclusiva en EE.UU., Canad\u00e1, Puerto Rico y Filipinas._\n\nwww.vintageespanol.com\n\n#### \u00cdndice\n\nSobre _La Era de Huesos_\n\nLa Era de Huesos\n\nLos siete \u00f3rdenes de la clarividencia\n\nMapa\n\n1. La maldici\u00f3n\n\n2. Mentiras\n\n3. Recluida\n\n4. El serm\u00f3n\n\n5. Indiferencia\n\n6. Comunidad\n\n7. El se\u00f1uelo\n\n8. Mi nombre\n\n9. Variedad\n\n10. El mensaje\n\n11. Llanto\n\n12. Fiebre\n\n13. Una imagen extra\u00edda de mi memoria\n\n14. Amanecer\n\n15. La ca\u00edda de un muro\n\n16. La tarea\n\n17. Voluntad\n\n18. Despertar\n\n19. La flor\n\n20. Un mundo peque\u00f1o\n\n21. Una nave quemada\n\n22. Tres veces necia\n\n23. Anticuario\n\n24. El sue\u00f1o\n\n25. La disoluci\u00f3n\n\n26. Cambio\n\n27. El aniversario\n\n28. La prohibici\u00f3n\n\n29. La despedida\n\nGlosario\n\nAgradecimientos\n\nBiograf\u00eda\n\nCr\u00e9ditos\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2012 by Anna Anthropy\n\nA Seven Stories Press First Edition\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.\n\nSeven Stories Press\n\n140 Watts Street\n\nNew York, NY 10013\n\nwww.sevenstories.com\n\nCollege professors may order examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles for a free six-month trial period. To order, visit http:\/\/www.sevenstories.com\/textbook or send a fax on school letterhead to (212) 226-1411.\n\nBook design by Elizabeth DeLong\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nAnthropy, Anna.  \nRise of the videogame zinesters : how freaks, normals, amateurs, artists, dreamers, drop-outs, queers, housewives, and people like you are taking back an art form \/ Anna Anthropy.  \np. cm.  \nIncludes bibliographical references and index.  \nISBN 978-1-60980-372-8 (pbk.)  \nEbook ISBN: 978-1-60980-373-5  \n1. Video games. 2. Video games--Social aspects. I. Title.  \nGV1469.3.A53 2012  \n794.8--dc23  \n2011045409\n\nPrinted in the United States\n\n9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1\nFor the child I was,\n\nthe book no one could write for me.\nContents\n\nChapter One: The Problem with Videogames\n\nChapter Two: The History of Magic\n\nChapter Three: What Is It Good For?\n\nChapter Four: Changing the Game\n\nChapter Five: The New Videogame\n\nChapter Six: Making the Games\n\nChapter Seven: By Your Bootstraps\n\nChapter Eight: Growing Up\n\nAppendix A: What to Use\n\nAppendix B: Zinester Games\n\nAbout the Author\nChapter One\n\nThe Problem with Videogames\n\nI have a problem with videogames.1\n\nPlenty of people seem to have problems with videogames these days. Newscasters are fond of reporting that videogames are dangerous to children, either because they teach children how to steal cars and kill cops or because they actually connect children electronically to the game-playing predators who are waiting to snatch them away. Religious leaders have wasted no time condemning videogames as a trap for children's souls, and armchair psychologists accuse them of turning kids into antisocial hermits.\n\nPeople condemn videogames because videogames are pervasive in popular culture. They're on our computers and our cell phones, in our homes and purses and pockets. Even if you yourself don't play games, you have a hard time escaping their marketing. When the television isn't telling you to be afraid of videogames, it's telling you to buy them, and to drink World of Warcraft\u2013flavored Mountain Dew while you play.\n\nThese are some problems people have with videogames. What's my problem with videogames?\n\nAs a queer transgendered woman in 2012, in a culture pervaded by videogames\u2014a culture in which, typing on my computer, I am seconds away from a digital game, even if I have not taken the time to buy or install a single game on my computer\u2014I have to strain to find any game that's about a queer woman, to find any game that resembles my own experience.\n\nThis is in spite of the fact that videogames in America and elsewhere are an industry and an institution. I've already brought up World of Warcraft, a game about performing repetitive tasks until numbers increase. So, now that we're in the land of numbers, here are some numbers. The ESA\u2014that's the Entertainment Software Association, who spend half their time assuring the population that videogames aren't worth being mad at, and the other half pursuing litigation against anyone who distributes games that their shareholders have long since stopped distributing or profiting from\u2014claims that, as of 2009, 68 percent of American households play digital games.2 In 2008 alone, people bought 269,100,000 games (the ESA word is units.)3\n\nSo digital games, by the numbers, are here, and they take up a lot of space. And almost none of these games are about me, or anyone like me.\n\nWhat are videogames about?\n\nMostly, videogames are about men shooting men in the face. Sometimes they are about women shooting men in the face. Sometimes the men who are shot in the face are orcs, zombies, or monsters. Most of the other games the ESA is talking about when it mentions \"units\" are abstract games: the story of a blue square who waits for a player to place him in a line with two other blue squares, so he can disappear forever. The few commercial games that involve a woman protagonist in a role other than slaughterer put her in a role of servitude: waiting tables at a diner (or a dress shop, a pet shop, a wedding party). This is not to say that games about head shots are without value, but if one looked solely at videogames, one would think the whole of human experience is shooting men and taking their dinner orders. Surely an artistic form that has as much weight in popular culture as the videogame does now has more to offer than such a narrow view of what it is to be human.\n\nAnd yes, from here on out I'll be talking about videogames as an art form. What I mean by this is that games, digital and otherwise, transmit ideas and culture. This is something they share with poems, novels, music albums, films, sculptures, and paintings. A painting conveys what it's like to experience the subject as an image; a game conveys what it's like to experience the subject as a system of rules. If videogames are compared unfavorably to other art forms such as novels and songs and films\u2014and they are compared unfavorably with these forms, or else this paragraph defending videogames as art wouldn't be necessary\u2014it is likely a result of how limited a perspective videogames have offered up to this point. Imagine a world in which art forms are assigned value by the number of dykes that populate them. This is the world I inhabit; this is the value games have for me. And why not? The number of stories from marginalized cultures\u2014from people who are othered by the mainstream\u2014that a form contains tells us something about that form's maturity. If a form has attracted so many authors, so many voices, that several of them come from experiences outside the social norm and bring those experiences and voices to bear when working in that form, can't that form be said to have reached cultural maturity?\n\nIt should go without saying that novels and films have plenty of dykes in them, as do the media of writing and filmmaking. American comics have been around since 1896\u2014that's over one hundred years\u2014yet comics are still involved in a debate, as videogames are, about their cultural and artistic value. But I can think of many comics about queer women. More important, I can think of plenty of queer women who make comics: to name a few, Diane DiMassa, Alison Bechdel, Jennifer Camper, Kris Dresen, and Colleen Coover, in order of how disappointed I was when they came out in defense of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival.4 And those are just print comics, in a world where the majority of comics are published on the Internet.\n\nIn Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For, Mo (a dyke to watch out for) explains a metric she uses to decide whether she'll watch a movie. This criteria has become known as the Bechdel Test: the movie has to (1) contain at least two women who (2) talk to each other about (3) something other than a man. So why do videogames fail my variant of the Bechdel Test? Why are there no dykes in videogames?\n\nI know at least one of you has been itching, for several pages, to point out games like Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix and Mass Effect, both of which include scenes in which women smooch women, both on and off camera. In Fear Effect 2, women make out for the benefit of the male audience the game's creators expect to buy the game. (The first scene, in fact, is of the protagonist stripping as seen through a hidden camera, which tells us something about her relationship to the player.) And the lady-sex in Mass Effect is just one of many branches on a tree of awkward dialogue, offering nothing resembling the actual lust, desire, and flirtation that women feel for each other. But, aesthetic failures aside, the most important distinction here is that these are stories about queer women that are generally written by white, college-educated men. These are not cases of queer women presenting their own experiences.\n\nWhy are digital games so sparse in the dykes making art department? Why are the experiences that games present, the stories they tell, the voices in which they speak, so limited?\n\nThe limitations of games aren't just thematic. When I criticize games for being mostly about shooting people in the head, that's a design criticism as well. Most games are copies of existing successful games. They play like other games, resemble their contemporaries in shape and structure, have the same buttons that interact with the world in the same way (mouse to aim, left click to shoot), and have the same shortcomings. If there's a vast pool of experiences that contemporary videogames are failing to tap, then there's just as large a pool of aesthetic and design possibilities that are being ignored. I don't believe these are separate issues, either. To tell different stories, we need different ways of interacting with games. Why are games so similar in terms of both content and design?\n\nThe problem with videogames is that they're created by a small, insular group of people. Digital games largely come from within a single culture. When computers were first installed in college campuses and laboratories, only engineers had the access to the machines, the comparative leisure time, and the technical knowledge to teach those computers to play games. It is not surprising that the games they made looked like their own experiences: physics simulations, space adventures drawn from the science fiction they enjoyed, the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop role-playing games they played with their friends. As computers made their way out of labs and into homes, the games that programmers were hacking together became a salable product\u2014and salespeople showed up to profit off of them. And so as businessmen and marketers guided videogames into becoming a billion-dollar industry, publishers installed themselves as the gatekeepers of game creation.\n\nCommercial games have become expensive: according to a presentation at the High Performance Graphics 2009 conference, Gears of War 2\u2014an industry leader in the \"men shooting things\" genre\u2014had a \"development budget\" of 12 million dollars.5 (\"Development\" refers just to the cost of creating the game\u2014it doesn't include all the bucks that were spent marketing, manufacturing, and shipping the game.) If the game cost that much to produce, you can imagine what it would have to earn in sales in order to make any money. Hint: more than 12 million dollars. With that much money at stake, publishers and shareholders are not going to permit a game that is experimental either in terms of its content or in terms of its design. The publisher will do the minimum amount it can get away with in order to differentiate its game from all other games that follow its previously established model and that are being sold to its previously established audience.\n\nNow we have a dangerous cycle: publishers permit only games that follow a previously established model to be marketed to previously established audiences, and only to those audiences. The audiences in question are mostly young adults, and mostly male. And it's these dudes, already entrenched in the existing culture of games, who are eventually driven to enter the videogame industry and to take part in the creation of games. The population who creates games becomes more and more insular and homogeneous: it's the same small group of people who are creating the same games for themselves.\n\nVideogames as they're commonly conceived today both come from and contain exactly one perspective. It should be terrifying that an entire art form can be dominated by a single perspective, that a small and privileged group has a monopoly on the creation of art. Before the adoption of the printing press, the church was responsible for the creation of books, and the books that monks hand-lettered in Latin in monasteries were largely the Bible or books that agreed with the Bible. Not to knock the Bible, but that a single institution can hold power over what works are allowed to exist within any art form should demonstrate the power that institution has over that art form, and therefore over that culture. And so the printing press, which allowed people to print their own versions of the Bible in their own languages\u2014and eventually to print books that had nothing to do with the Bible\u2014had a role to play in the decentralization of religious authority in Europe.\n\nThe printing press is a piece of technology. If digital games, a form that is often (and not entirely correctly) described as being \"technology driven,\" can be compared to books, where then is the printing press for videogames?\n\nWhat Videogames Need\n\nThere's a videogame about a dyke who convinces her girlfriend to stop drinking. Mainstream gamer culture by and large does not know about this game. I know about this game because I made it.\n\nI created Calamity Annie in 2008. I made it by myself: I wrote the dialogue, composed the music, designed the rules, scripted the game, and drew all the characters. It was made in a couple of months. The development costs were the cost of the food that went into my belly. I made the game in a program called Game Maker, which, at the time, cost fifteen dollars.\n\nI am nowhere close to the only person who has used Game Maker, nowhere close to the only person who makes digital games outside of the games industry's publisher model. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of such creators. A few of them have achieved some mainstream recognition, like Jonathan Blow and Jason Rohrer, who was profiled in Esquire magazine. But these rich white dudes were professional programmers before they came to videogames, and so they don't represent the new dynamic that I'm excited about: hobbyists and non-programmers making their first games. There are lots of tools that allow people to make and distribute games without ever having written a line of code and without having to pass through publishers' gates. In years to come, there will be a lot more tools. I hope that there will also be a lot more people.\n\nI once heard the criticism that the phrase \"what videogames need\" can usually be more honestly rephrased as \"what I want from videogames.\" In that case, what I want from videogames is a plurality of voices. I want games to come from a wider set of experiences and present a wider range of perspectives. I can imagine\u2014you are invited to imagine with me\u2014a world in which digital games are not manufactured by publishers for the same small audience, but one in which games are authored by you and me for the benefit of our peers.\n\nThis is something the videogame industry, by its nature, cannot give us. I like to think about zines\u2014self-published, self-distributed magazines and books. Send me a dollar and a self-addressed envelope; I'll send you a stapled book of some stories from my life, or some pictures I took of out-of-the-way nooks of my city, or researched accounts of historical murders, or some jokes about sea life. (What does the merman's waiter bring? He brings the MERMANATEE.6) I like the idea of games as zines: as transmissions of ideas and culture from person to person, as personal artifacts instead of impersonal creations by teams of forty-five artists and fifteen programmers, in the case of Gears of War 2.\n\nThe Internet in particular has made self-publishing and distributing games both possible and easy. Authors are able not only to put their works online, but to find audiences for them. Publishers want to be gatekeepers to the creation of videogames, but the Internet has opened those gates.\n\nCurrently, the only real barrier to game creation is the technical ability to design and create games\u2014and that, too, is a problem that is in the process of being solved.\n\nDigital game creation was once limited to those who knew how to speak with computers: engineers and programmers, people who could code. In the games industry of today, coders are an inescapable fixture of the hierarchy of production, since games that we play with machines need creators capable of negotiating with machines. Game creation is daunting for someone who doesn't code professionally. But more and more game-making tools are being designed with people who aren't professional coders in mind. (I describe several of these tools, and what each is good for, in the appendix.) It's now possible for people with no programming experience\u2014hobbyists, independent game designers, zinesters\u2014to make their own games and to distribute them online.\n\nWhat I want from videogames is for creation to be open to everyone, not just to publishers and programmers. I want games to be personal and meaningful, not just pulp for an established audience. I want game creation to be decentralized. I want open access to the creative act for everyone. I want games as zines.\n\nIt's a tall order, maybe, but the ladder's being built as you read these words.\n\nIs What You Want Really What Games Need?\n\nWhy transform videogames, though? What do I get out of it? What, for that matter, do videogames get out of it?\n\nIn 2005, movie critic Roger Ebert infamously remarked that he does not think games can ever be considered as art. (By whom? By him, apparently.) He argues, mostly by assertion, that he doesn't feel game designers can exercise enough authorial control over the experience of a game. Ebert has gone on to make no attempt to justify or defend his remark or engage in any kind of debate, other than to allow, five years after the original remark, that he should have kept his opinion to himself.7\n\nAs I've made clear above, Ebert is wrong about videogames as a form. But frankly, I don't care whether Ebert is wrong or not. Achieving \"artistic legitimacy\" is not a good reason to transform videogames. Who legitimizes art? To cede the right to decide the value of games to an authority that has nothing to do with games\u2014or to concede the right to decide what is and is not art to any authority outside of the artist\u2014is a dangerous trap. Creation is art. It doesn't need validation beyond that.\n\nWhat it needs is to be free. That an art form exists should be justification enough for people to be able to contribute to it, to work in it. We finally have the means to allow more than just programmers and big game publishers to create games\u2014and the vast majority of people in the world aren't computer engineers, or designers employed by Epic Games. What do we gain from giving so many people the means to create games? We gain a lot more games that explore much wider ground, in terms of both design and subject matter. Many of these games will be mediocre, of course; the majority of work in any form is mediocre. But we'll see many more interesting ideas just by the sheer mathematical virtue of so many people producing so many games without the commercial obligations industry games are beholden to. Remember, I'm talking about hobbyists, people who make games in their spare time with the tools they have on hand. And even if a game isn't original, it's personal, in the way a game designed to appeal to target demographics can't be. And that's a cultural artifact our world is a little bit richer for having.\n\nTo visualize this new world of games, think about network television versus YouTube. The former spends a lot of money and time creating content designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Because network shows need to justify themselves monetarily\u2014they need to catch enough viewers to earn advertising dollars\u2014they can rarely afford to be brilliant, daring, or bizarre. (Sometimes a director has enough force of will, and fights the network hard enough, to create a show that is all of these things. But it's certainly not the norm.)\n\nYouTube: millions of videos from millions of authors. Most of them are mediocre: boring, familiar, or unwatchable. That's to be expected in an arena where everyone is allowed to contribute. But others are sublime, brilliant, valuable: Grishno's \"Transgender in New York\" videos,8 wendyvainity's surreal computer animations and music,9 or shaneduarte's Simpsons remixes.10 As long as there's some sort of infrastructure, valuable works\u2014those by both dabbling amateurs and dedicated artists\u2014can reach their audiences. YouTube has its own infrastructure of user ratings and featured videos, but people are just as likely to share the addresses of specific videos with the friends they think those videos will appeal to. And there's far more value in the collective content of YouTube\u2014even given that there are more piles of trash than treasure\u2014than in the collective content of a television network, simply as a function of the number of people contributing and the overwhelming volume of their contributions. YouTube's content is far more diverse, too, since involvement in the television industry isn't a requirement for entry. Network television shows are all made by professionals working in the field, a far smaller set of people than the set of people who own webcams. YouTube's content is made much more quickly and cheaply because it's not (usually) designed with a commercial agenda: videos can be recorded and broadcast, and their value assessed later.\n\nYouTube also gives people the means to make videos of themselves, their friends, their babies, and their puppies\u2014video snapshots\u2014not for the world at large, but for their social circles and themselves. YouTube is a means of transmitting a video directly from the author to an audience\u2014one that can be as small and specific as the author desires. Videos become more specialized, and hence more personalized. A medium that was formerly accessible only to those with money and training can now be used by anyone for personal ends. If Internet television is in the process of reinventing television, imagine how game design tools for nonprogrammers and the free distribution of games online might reinvent videogames.\n\nThe Culture of Alienation\n\nLimiting the creation of games to a small, exclusive group leads not only to creative stagnation, but also to the alienation of anyone outside that group. I've described the round-the-drain cycle the games industry is in: games are designed by a small, male-dominated culture and marketed to a small, male-dominated audience, which in turn produces the next small, male-dominated generation of game designers. It's a bubble, and it largely produces work that has no meaning to those outside that bubble, those not already entrenched in the culture of games.\n\nThere are mechanical consequences as well. Look at how game controllers have changed as their audiences changed. The home game machines of the 1970s and '80s, which marketed themselves to large, general family audiences, had the simplest control pads. The Atari Video Computer System (or the Atari 2600) is a simple joystick with a single button. And here is the design of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) controller, released in the United States in 1985:\n\nThe NES controller has a four-way compass rose and two prominent red buttons. (There are also two buttons in the center for secondary functions like pausing the game, but the design of the controller clearly communicates that they're peripheral.) You use the compass to navigate your character or cursor. You use the buttons to perform actions.\n\nAfter over thirty years of catering to an audience that is continuously playing and learning games\u2014an audience that hence requires more and more complicated games to interest it\u2014games and the controllers with which players interact with them have become more and more complex. This is not to say different: layers of complexity have simply been added to the same few models of games and the same few models of controllers. Here's the controller for the Xbox 360, released in the United States in 2005:\n\nThe Xbox 360 controller is the same model as the NES controller: held between two hands, with navigational functions assigned to the left hand and manipulation verbs to the right. But instead of a single navigational pad on the left, two verb buttons on the right, and two option buttons in the center, the Xbox pad has a navigational pad plus a stick on the left, four verb buttons plus another stick on the right, four \"shoulder\" buttons on the top of the controller (two to each side), plus three option buttons in the center. (Additionally, some games call for the player to \"click\" either of the sticks in like a button, adding two more verbs.)\n\nThe means players use to interact with games guides the design of those games. A game for the NES might have a button for jump and a button for shoot, and the compass rose directional pad for moving a character left and right. You can imagine the kinds of games that are designed for eight buttons and four sticks. Imagine introducing someone who had never seen a movie before to Matthew Barney's Cremaster films. The amount of both manual dexterity and game-playing experience required to operate a game designed for the Xbox 360 makes play inaccessible to those who aren't already grounded in the technique of playing games. And to attain that level of familiarity with games requires a huge and continuous investment of time (and money\u2014keeping up with new games costs bucks). This means that older people\u2014people with families and obligations, people trying to raise kids, or any people with a lack of free time to invest\u2014have a harder time gaining access to games. At the same time, as a side effect of this unnatural selection, commercial games become longer and longer, with game covers advertising dozens and occasionally hundreds of hours of gameplay. (Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3, a PlayStation 2 game from 2008, advertises a \"70+ hour game\" on the back of its box.) Who has that much time to invest in playing a videogame? Answer: the target audience of most of the industry's games, a mostly young and mostly male audience that has few obligations and plenty of disposable income.\n\nThe culture that this audience creates and exists within is one of in-jokes and brand worship, rituals to establish whether the participants are in or out of the tribe. It's an exclusive culture, an alienating environment that speaks only to itself. Its interactions with the outside world are decidedly hostile.\n\nDestructoid, one of the most popular sources for videogame news on the Internet, employs a writer named Jim Sterling who once called my girl a \"feminazi slut\" on Twitter. This isn't some rogue nerd; this is a \"journalist\" whom Destructoid employs to write on such topics as whether the penis is more powerful than the vagina because it can rape,11 or on whether female Mortal Kombat characters have secret cocks.12 And lest you think that such a character couldn't possibly be taken seriously, hundreds of his readers responded publicly to my open letter to Destructoid complaining about Sterling's behavior in an attempt to bully and shame us.13 How is a woman, a trans person, or any rational individual expected to feel safe enough to participate in such a community?\n\nWhat I want from videogames is for videogames to speak to more than just the handful of people already engaged in producing and consuming them. To de-monopolize game creation is to de-monopolize access to games.\n\nBeyond Consumer\n\nIn an era when the Internet makes it easy to transmit and disseminate media, there's no reason for people to accept that their only contribution to the growth of an art form is as a consumer, supporting \"elite\" creators with money.\n\nI've wanted to make videogames since I played Fukio Mitsuji's NES game Bubble Bobble as a kid. I drew characters on construction paper, cut them out, and laid out obstacle courses for them to navigate\u2014Bubble Bobble stages on hardwood floors. But the technical leap to digitize my designs was beyond my reach. Programming was something mystical and arcane. I came into contact with code sometimes: the most basic BASIC examples. But something as simple as making a picture of a character move across a screen required a working knowledge of control loops, writing to video memory buffers, and advanced bit-shifting math\u2014all of which was so inaccessible to me as a kid that I sublimated my childhood desire to make games until well into my adulthood.\n\nIt's not like it was then. There's a commercial product in videogame stores right now\u2014Warioware: D.I.Y., from Nintendo\u2014that allows players to create their own small games.14 What Warioware: D.I.Y. does is to introduce its players to the concept of designing rules, of using art and sound to communicate the state of the game to the player, of scripting the events of a game and of working cleverly within limitations. For kids today, digital game creation doesn't have to be the mystical process it was when I was little.\n\nKids today also have tools like Stencyl,15 a free tool for making games and distributing them online. A website collects kits and resources contributed by the entire community, which are all made available to an individual creator for use in her game. The rules are put together in Scratch,16 a system designed by programmers at MIT for young children to use. It involves snapping simple instructions together like LEGOs.\n\nBut before things like Stencyl and Warioware existed, I made games and digital stories however I could: an old DOS shooting-game creation program that I can no longer remember the name of, the track editor in Nintendo's Excitebike, an editor for creating worlds made out of text called ZZT. People with something to say will always manage to find ways to say it, and there's a history of clever people using whatever means they can find to modify and subvert digital games and to create new ones\u2014to engage with games in a role beyond consumer. Today, this process is easier than ever.\n\nThe Big Crunch\n\nThis same false sense that the knowledge needed to create videogames is unattainable without special institutional training is the same carrot the Big Games Industry uses to entice wannabe game artists into taking jobs within their system\u2014and putting up with insane hours and ridiculous working conditions. There exists within the games industry a phenomenon called \"crunch mode\": working sixteen-hour days, staying at work until the game you're being paid to make is finished. This isn't something you're asked to do\u2014it's expected, a standard condition of the job. And it's likely the reason most people in the games industry, their physical and mental health fizzled, burn out and quit within a few years, forced to retrain and find a new career. According to the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), the closest thing the industry has to an advocacy group for employees, 34 percent of game developers expect to leave the industry within five years, and 51 percent\u2014half of them!\u2014expect not to last a decade.17 That's lunacy.\n\nThe industry gets away with this because it's convinced its employees that these jobs are the only gateway to videogame creation. \"We've graciously allowed you to fulfill your childhood dream of making games. We're even paying you for it! And what's more, we're the only way you'll ever be able to do that.\" Mike Capps, a former member of the board of directors at the IGDA and the president of Epic Games said that Epic expected employees to work more than sixty hours a week and in fact only hired people they expected to be willing to do so.18 The IGDA has no official stance on the hours of unpaid overtime the people it claims to represent are obliged to do by their employers.\n\nSince the industry sees itself as ubiquitous\u2014as the only possible means of creating games\u2014it feels no need to change itself for the benefit of either its employees or its art. Which is another reason why carving new paths to game creation and distribution is valuable. By undermining the industry's claim to being the only route to game creation\u2014especially to making a living from game creation\u2014we force the industry to reconsider its totalitarian attitude toward the people it employs. Publishers need creative people to make games for them. We have one foot in an era when creative people will no longer need publishers to distribute their games.\n\nCreating more and better games will also challenge the industry creatively. Spending millions of dollars to remake the same seventy-hour-long games for the same small audience is no longer feasible when so many people want different experiences out of games and have the means to find them elsewhere. Games from hobbyists have the potential to change the dominant format of the videogame: instead of seventy-hour multimillion dollar games that sell for sixty bucks apiece, digital games can be short and self-contained\u2014less than an hour, short enough to fit comfortably into an adult player's day. The focus of games could shift from features, the ways in which a game is differentiated from similar games\u2014thirty hours of play, twelve unique weapons, advanced four-dimensional graphics acceleration\u2014to ideas. Take Tarn Adams' WWI Medic19 for example: a game not about chain-gunning enemy soldiers but about trying to patch them up as the bullets cut them down. Saving even a single soul\u2014climbing out of the trench, grabbing a fallen body and lugging it back to safety under a senseless hail of bullets\u2014is incredibly difficult. The game takes minutes to play, and communicates an idea about war that may perhaps be more valuable than space marines frotteurizing each other with chainsaws.\n\nSmaller games with smaller budgets and smaller audiences have the luxury of being more experimental or bizarre or interesting than 12 million dollar games that need to play it as safely as possible to ensure a return on investment. Imagine what a videogames industry that wasn't fixated on hits\u2014that wasn't required to make hits\u2014would create.\n\nWhat Are Games Good For?\n\nBut even given all of this, why worry about the accessibility of digital game creation at all when other forms\u2014like the short story or novel\u2014are already established and available for non-professionals to work in?\n\nAnswer: because different forms are suited to different kinds of expression, and some are more effective at communicating in certain ways than others. Broadly, films and photographs are best suited for communicating action and physical detail. Novels are best suited for communicating internal monologue and ambiguity.\n\nWhat are games best suited for? Since games are composed of rules, they're uniquely suited to exploring systems and dynamics. Games are especially good at communicating relationships; digital games are most immediately about the direct relationship between the player's actions or choices and their consequences. Games are a kind of theater in which the audience is an actor and takes on a role\u2014and experiences the circumstances and consequences of that role. It's hard to imagine a more effective way to characterize someone than to allow a player to experience life as that person.\n\nTake, for example, a game called We the Giants.20 Most people who connect to this game's website in order to play it\u2014taking the role of a squat, block-like cyclops\u2014will be unable to reach the game's goal, a star high in the sky. Rather, most players are given the responsibility of voluntarily dying in a position that will allow future players to use their solidified bodies as steps in a staircase leading skyward. Each player guides her cyclops to the position of its sacrifice, presses a button, types a single message to future players of the game, and watches the cyclops's eye close forever. Thereafter, the player is never allowed to play the game again; logging on to the website, she can only watch the ongoing progress of the staircase of which her body is a part.\n\nThat's a pretty compelling way to explore themes of sacrifice in a work: to ask players actually to make a sacrifice, and to show them the meaning of that sacrifice over the course of generations. This is something games are almost uniquely capable of doing, and we haven't even begun to explore the possibilities of this kind of expression.\n\nIt's also the sort of experience\u2014a minutes-long game in which the player is asked to commit voluntary suicide and never allowed to play again afterward\u2014that is unlikely to come out of a commercial publishing system that needs its creations to sell millions in order to justify their having been made. The author of We the Giants, Peter Groeneweg, is a student and created the game as part of a monthly \"experimental gameplay\" challenge.21\n\nThe ability to work in any art form with the digital game's unique capabilities for expression shouldn't be restricted to a privileged (and profit-oriented) few. If everyone is given the means to work in an art form, then we'll invariably see a much more diverse, experimental, and ultimately rich body of work. In a speech at the 2007 Game Developers Conference, Greg Costikyan\u2014a board and videogame designer and critic of the games industry\u2014said: \"I want you to imagine a 21st century in which games are the predominant art form of the age, as film was of the 20th, and the novel of the 19th.\"22\n\nThis is what I want from videogames, and this is what I'm trying to help you imagine. Throughout the rest of this book, I hope to help you imagine how this transformation of games\u2014and the role games will play in the art and culture of the twenty-first century\u2014is not only necessary, but inevitable.\n\nFootnotes\n\n1 I'll use this term interchangeably with \"digital games\" and \"electronic games\" throughout this book.\n\n2 ESA, 2009 Sales, Demographic and Usage Data: Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry, p. 2, http:\/\/www.theesa.com\/facts\/pdfs\/ESA_EF_2009.pdf.\n\n3 Ibid, p. 10.\n\n4 For insight into the Michfest controversy, see http:\/\/www.auntiepixelante.com\/?p=1247. Also, I don't mean to imply that all of these artists have taken a position on Michfest. I'm really just disappointed in Diane Dimassa.\n\n5 Tim Sweeney, \"End of the GPU Roadmap\" (keynote address, High Performance Graphics 2009, New Orleans, August 3, 2009), http:\/\/www.highperformancegraphics.org\/previous\/www_2009\/presentations\/TimHPG2009.pdf.\n\n6 Sea life joke courtesy Emily Alden Foster.\n\n7 \"I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place. I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn't seen. Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so.\" Roger Ebert's Journal, \"Okay, kids, play on my lawn,\" July 1, 2010, http:\/\/blogs.suntimes.com\/ebert\/2010\/07\/okay_kids_play_on_my_lawn.html.\n\n8 http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/grishno.\n\n9 http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/wendyvainity.\n\n10 http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/shaneduarte.\n\n11 Jim Sterling, \"How Aliens are blatantly better than Predators,\" Destructoid, February 9, 2010, http:\/\/www.destructoid.com\/how-aliens-are-blatantly-better-than-predators-162754.phtml.\n\n12 Jim Sterling, \"Why Penis Why?: MK vs. DC's Kitana looks . . . lumpy,\" Destructoid, August 5, 2008, http:\/\/www.destructoid.com\/why-penis-why-mk-vs-dc-s-kitana-looks-lumpy-98300.phtml.\n\n13 Anna Anthropy, \"An Open Letter to Destructoid on Jim Sterling's Misogyny,\" Auntie Pixelante, http:\/\/www.auntiepixelante.com\/?p=912.\n\n14 Because Nintendo controls the infrastructure by which five-second Warioware: D.I.Y. games are distributed, or even allowed to exist, transmission of those games from creator to creator is fairly restricted. What most creators do, in fact, is publish videos of themselves playing their games on YouTube.\n\n15 http:\/\/www.stencyl.com.\n\n16 http:\/\/scratch.mit.edu.\n\n17 Casey O'Donnell, \"Quality of Life in a Global Game Industry,\" International Game Developers Association, http:\/\/www.igda.org\/articles\/codonell_global.\n\n18 Greg Costikyan, \"Mothers, Don't Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Game Developers,\" Play This Thing!, April 3, 2009, http:\/\/playthisthing.com\/mothers-dont-let-your-children-grow-be-game-developers.\n\n19 http:\/\/www.bay12games.com\/ww1medic.\n\n20 Playable online at http:\/\/wethegiants.thegiftedintrovert.com.\n\n21 \"Best of the Net: Art Game,\" Experimental Gameplay Project, January 1, 2010, http:\/\/experimentalgameplay.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/best-of-the-net-art-game.\n\n22 Greg Costikyan, \"Maverick Award Speech,\" Man!festo Games, March 14, 2007, http:\/\/www.manifestogames.com\/node\/3413.\nChapter Two\n\nThe History of Magic\n\nSince digital games have existed, their creation has been dominated by a small part of the population: generally white male engineers. In the 1960s and '70s, universities like MIT and Southern Illinois University contained computers and computer networks that were available for student use. Most of these games existed on the school network and were played and contributed to by only those people on the network. Often they were disguised as other programs, because systems administrators tended to delete games as a waste of time.\n\nIt's beside the point to try to identify the first videogame\u2014as with most inventions, a number of people were working along the same lines simultaneously. But whatever the first game was, it had to have been inspired by something\u2014so what came before it? Answer: an entire history of human civilization in which folk games\u2014Go, Chess, Hide and Seek, Stickball\u2014were important cultural experiences, that's what. But the most immediate predecessors of digital games were carnival games (throwing a ball at a stack of bottles from a set distance), mechanical games (a shooting gallery with moving targets), and pinball machines. Coincidentally, these are the games that typify the shift in the history of games from folk to designed games, or games with identifiable authors. When videogames were first monetized, it's this model that the people making money used: pay-to-play games of skill in public spaces designated for game-playing. But that's getting ahead of ourselves.\n\nSo, to create digital games in the sixties and seventies, one first needed access to a computer. The \"home computer,\" like the Apple Macintosh\u2014a computer designed specifically for non-engineers\u2014wasn't popularized until the eighties. To have access to a computer, then, generally required being connected to an engineering school. But being able to make contact with the computer was only the first barrier: in order to teach computers to play games, one needs to know how to talk to computers.\n\nAt the time, neither computers nor the tools people used to communicate with computers were designed with non-engineers in mind. Most programs were written in the super-technical language Assembly. Here's a sample of game code written in Assembly, from the 1979 Atari 800 game 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe:23\n\nCompletely illegible! By 2010, we have coding languages like Ruby and scripting languages like Lua that are designed to be readable by human beings, and we have tools like Scratch and Twine that minimize, if not obviate, the need for coding entirely. But in 1975, there was no way to make a game on a computer without understanding the computer inside and out.\n\nThe Affairs of Wizards\n\nWhat digital games were being made in the 1970s? And who was creating them?\n\nThe college engineer who programmed games in the mid-seventies had most likely been exposed to the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), published in 1974 by TSR, and possibly to the wargames that preceded it. Dungeons & Dragons is storytelling with rules\u2014a human player, the \"Dungeon Master,\" presents story situations to which the other players must respond. The Dungeon Master keeps the rules and facilitates the adventure of the other players, each of whom plays a role within the game world. It borrows from wargames a complex set of rules and tables for resolving situations, mostly those related to combat: whether a sword hits an opponent, whether it does any damage to that opponent, how much damage it does. And it borrows the fantasy world\u2014the wizards and dragons, orcs and elves\u2014of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books, popular among student engineers at that time.\n\nThat Dungeons & Dragons was hugely influential on digital game creators of the seventies can be seen in network games like dnd\u2014short for \"Dungeons & Dragons,\" naturally\u2014created by Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood at Southern Illinois University in 1974, the year of D&D's release.24 Like TSR's game, dnd involves descending into a dungeon, fighting monsters (dragons included), and collecting treasure. In this version of the game, it's the computer that keeps the rules, taking on the \"Dungeon Master\" role that would formerly have been given to a human participant.\n\nThe Tolkienesque fantasy setting of Dungeons & Dragons is all but ubiquitous in digital games of the time, but what's really interesting is the way designers transformed that setting by transposing it into a digital world. In 1977, at MIT, Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling began working on a game initially called Dungeon, later renamed Zork. Zork is a text adventure game: the player is presented with a paragraph of descriptive text, types a sentence explaining the action she wishes to take, and is presented with further text by the game in response. In this way, it resembles both prose fiction and the refereed experience of a game of round-the-table Dungeons & Dragons.\n\nAnderson, Blank, Daniels, and Lebling, along with others, founded Infocom in 1979. The fantasy world that they created in Zork grew into many more games, such as Enchanter and Spellbreaker. But what's interesting to me is the particular way magic is treated within the fantasy world these MIT engineers built. As Jeff Howard writes for the blog The Gameshelf:\n\nInfocom's Spellbreaker trilogy, consisting of Enchanter, Sorcerer, and Spellbreaker, entails a magical grammar, in which spells are verbs that take direct objects, allowing players to type \"frotz stone\" to make a stone glow or \"blorb chest\" to open this locked container. Frotz and Blorb are names for, respectively, an interactive fiction interpreter and a wrapper for multimedia elements. While amusing, this application of the names of in-game spells to the programming and technology outside of and supporting the game also suggests a powerful relationship between programming and the verbal grammars of magic. Simply put, programmers and magicians both master a grammar in order to make things happen. Both hackers and wizards achieve this alteration of reality, whether simulated or real, through an arcane set of words and phrases known as programs or spells. When properly configured, a program causes amazing events to occur (calculates our taxes, launches an anti-missile defense system, summons a longed-for package from Amazon.com to our doorstep), just as magicians can throw fireballs and (when very powerful) grant wishes. However, when the programmer makes the slightest error in the placement of a semicolon or case sensitivity, the program won't compile, much as a spell fizzles.25\n\nIt's not surprising at all that in a fantasy world constructed by programmers, the power to create and change the world would be indistinguishable from programming. For these engineers, technology was their means of making magic happen.\n\nThis theme of magic as technology (or technology as magic) doesn't occur only in Infocom games. The Ultima games were created by role-playing games enthusiast Richard Garriott, who named some of the people in his fantasy world after characters he role-played. The first Ultima game progresses from slaying monsters for Lord British and Shamino to flying a spaceship; the nemesis of the third Ultima game (Ultima III: Exodus) is ultimately revealed to be a computer that the player must reprogram. We can see the trend persisting into the MUDs (multi-user dungeon games, the descendents of games like Dungeon) and MOOs (MUD object oriented games), online games in which game administrators are called \"Wizards\" and have the ability to ban players from the game by \"toading\" them (turning a player into a toad).\n\nThis early in the history of digital game creation, we can still see that games, as with all works of art, contain the values of the people who make them. Which is precisely why more than a single group of people should have access to the means of creating them.\n\nDigital Barkers\n\nThe founders of Atari, NAMCO, and SEGA, three early videogame publishers that still exist (in some form) today, were all involved in either carnival barking or the distribution of pinball and other mechanical games. When these people set out to make digital games that earned them money, they used the system they were already familiar with: installing games in public spaces and calling people over to play them.\n\nThe arcade cabinets that housed these new games were designed to act as their own barkers: they were stylized pieces of wood decorated with artwork, containing video screens that flashed invitations to players and demonstrated their games. For a quarter (sometimes more), a player bought one play of the game. As in pinball, the player's skill extended the game: the better you were, the longer you could play. Arcade cabinets were initially placed in settings like bars and, later\u2014when videogames became popular among kids\u2014pizzerias and malls. Eventually, they came to inhabit dedicated spaces\u2014arcades\u2014that existed solely to house digital games. The arcade cabinet was the way most of mainstream culture first encountered videogames.\n\nHow did the arcade game become more ubiquitous than the carnival and pinball games whose sales model it borrowed? Carnival and mechanical games were huge and required human supervision. Pinball machines, because they contained lots of moving parts that constantly collided with each other, broke frequently and were expensive to maintain. The first digital arcade games were cheaper to maintain than the pinball machine because the parts were all standard pieces of electronics, far easier to replace than a piece of track molded specifically for a single pinball machine. The arcade game was also more compact and self-regulating. Since it didn't take up a lot of space or require constant maintenance by the owner, it could inhabit spaces like the aforementioned bars and pizzerias, spaces not exclusively dedicated to electronics, and thus, spaces not exclusively populated by the engineers and programmers who, up to that point, had been almost exclusively the audience for digital games.\n\nBut naturally, the manufacture and distribution of these arcade cabinets required capital, and here businesspeople gained their foothold (soon to be a stranglehold) on videogames. Engineers, sometimes with the assistance of artists, still designed the games and the hardware that made them possible. Businesspeople handled distribution to bars, malls, and arcades. Venture capitalists were brought in to fund the costs of production and expansion. A need for marketers began to appear, although this was not as important as it would become later, when games weren't sold only to arcade operators but directly to players. But what's important to note is that it was the business folks, not the engineers or artists, who controlled the capital. As long as game creators were hardware manufacturers, this was the case.\n\nThe Invasion of Home\n\nIt wasn't long before the people who manufactured machines for the arcade hit upon the idea of manufacturing machines for the home. This would allow them to market their games not to the middleman arcade operator, but to the players themselves. Atari was among the earliest publishers to have great success in the arcade, and in 1977 it began to publish the Atari Video Computer System\u2014later retroactively renamed the Atari 2600, after the Atari 5200 and 7800 went to market\u2014selling home versions of its most popular arcade cabinets to players. Games for the Video Computer System were distributed on cartridges that plugged into a base machine, rather than on miniature arcade cabinets, which meant that after the initial purchase of the hardware, the actual game software became much cheaper to produce and distribute. The market exploded.\n\nArcade cabinets were more expensive to play than home game cartridges, and now that the player could play digital games in her own home, arcades became less of an attraction. Because home game hardware was fixed and arcade cabinet hardware was not\u2014the home game player buys a single piece of hardware, while most arcade cabinets have hardware specialized to the game that inhabits them\u2014arcade cabinets still managed to offer unique experiences. Arcade games became more and more specialized over time, distributing games that were implausible in the home, either because of the technology or the context. The games that predominate in modern arcades are large ride-on vehicles, dance platforms, or drum sets that make less sense in the home than in a commercial space. Most arcades didn't survive this shift in the market: there aren't many arcades left these days, at least in America.\n\nThe shift in the way people discovered and played games also lead to a shift in game design trends. Arcade games, because they earn money on each play, are designed to be as succinct as possible, and to teach new players how to play quickly. They are also often designed to be hard, because a player, once she loses, will either have to pay again to continue her game or relinquish the machine to a new player. Home games, which players pay for one time in exchange for infinite plays, require publishers to set the price of the game higher than the traditional quarter. Thus home games became longer and longer in an attempt to appear more valuable to potential players. They could have much longer learning curves and be much gentler to play. But this longer game requires more content, and hence bigger teams to design and create that content. Marketing, now that the games were sold directly to the player, became a powerful force, and began to make many of the creative decisions.\n\nTake, for example, this account of a conflict between the marketers and game programmers at Mattel Electronics, publishers of the Intellivision and its software, related by former Mattel Electronics staff:\n\nOn December 6, 1982, all of the programmers and graphic artists were herded into a conference room and shown a series of TV commercials\u2014the new Kool-Aid ad campaign. It was announced that Marketing had made a tie-in deal to release Intellivision and M Network Atari 2600 Kool-Aid Man cartridges. The games were scheduled to be ready in about six months, which meant that programming had to begin immediately. Worse, they wanted game-screen mockups to appear in the 1983 Mattel Electronics catalog at the Consumer Electronics Show\u2014one month away. A two-week contest to come up with the best game concept was announced. Separate ideas were developed for Intellivision and Atari 2600.\n\nThis led to a confrontation with Marketing. The programmers' viewpoint was that the features of a game should be tailored to the system it would be played on, to take full advantage of the system's strengths. Marketing, on the other hand, wanted games designed for multiple systems, with the features being the same on each system. If a game couldn't be ported to other systems, it shouldn't be done on any system.\n\nThe programmers argued that this meant all games would have to be designed for the lowest common denominator\u2014the Atari 2600. Marketing argued that keeping the features the same would make games easier to advertise and make word-of-mouth among customers more favorable.26\n\nOn contemporary home game consoles, most games come from companies other than the manufacturer of the hardware. The hardware manufacturer generally enforces an approval process for games commonly called \"lot check,\" or \"technical requirements,\" which contains a list of requirements the game must meet before it can be printed and distributed. For example: The game must display a message when a game controller is unplugged from the machine. It must support a variety of novelty controllers that have a limited run. There's a lot of room for error, and applying for the process isn't cheap. Rejection means that the fee will have to be paid again after the asked-for changes are made to the game, and there can be many rejections before a game is approved, putting distribution of digital games to early home consoles still well out of the financial reach of almost anyone outside of the growing industry, despite the cheaper manufacturing costs.\n\nGame consoles weren't the only home invaders. In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh computer. Microsoft began distributing its Windows operating system with computers the following year. These machines were conceived and marketed as \"personal computers,\" designed for home use by non-engineers and marketed to the public. Their use of a mouse for navigating between different files and programs visually made these new computers far more approachable to non-engineers than the traditional text prompt, where users typed from a list of hidden commands.\n\nPublishing a game for the home computer was similarly expensive to publishing one for a home game console. While game consoles have identical components (every individual PlayStation 3 has the same pieces and the same capabilities, with a few small deviations), computers aren't homogeneous. Certifying that a game will run on a wide variety of contemporary computers, with hundreds of potential variations in operating system, installed programs, hardware, and input devices, is an extensive and expensive process. Manufacturing the game, getting it on store shelves, providing on-call technical support to players, and marketing it to those players all costs money.\n\nThe Games Publishing Industry Today\n\nGiven the expenses of distributing a game\u2014lot check, compatibility testing, printing, marketing\u2014how does anyone afford to make games?\n\nThe contemporary games industry uses a developer-publisher model. The developer actually designs, programs, and animates the game at the behest of the publisher, who pays the expenses of distributing it. The developer may pitch the game to the publisher, or the publisher may bring the game concept to the developer. The publisher might just own the developer: bigger publishers like EA (formerly Electronic Arts) and Ubisoft have purchased many development studios.\n\nA developer may start a project with her own resources before attempting to find a publisher for the game. Because the publisher controls the distribution of the game, it has control over the content of the game. The publisher's agents will periodically check the progress of the game and demand changes from the developer. Often these changes are for the sake of marketing the game: a publisher will always do what it can to make a game more salable, or what it perceives as being more salable. A publisher may shape a game to better resemble trends in the widely selling games of the day.\n\nWithin a development company, employees are typically divided into three roles: designer, artist, and engineer or programmer. All of these roles have a technical (knowledge) barrier to entry. An artist doesn't just need to be able to draw; she needs to be proficient in the 3-D modeling software the developer prefers. She needs to know how to prepare images in a way that the engineers can use. A designer needs to be familiar with the \"engine\" the game is being developed in, and to be fluent in the scripting language that engine uses in order to create events and interactive elements within the level she designs.\n\nA game is made by at least one team of each of these groups: a team of engineers under a lead engineer, a team of artists under a lead artist, and a team of designers under a lead designer (or \"game designer\"). The engineers\/artists\/designers receive their instructions from the leads. The leads report to a director. The director reports to a producer, who in turn represents the publisher. Within this system, which exists to coordinate teams of increasingly unmanageable numbers of people (numbers needed to produce the huge amount of content Hit Games demand), you can see that the people who exercise the most creative power over the project are the people who are farthest from its creation.\n\nThe expenses of hiring and coordinating all these people mean that a game has to be a hit in the market in order to make a profit. And so the publisher, with its final authority on the content of a game, will almost always make a conservative decision about that content in order to make the game more marketable. If it wants to make a profit, the publisher is obligated to.\n\nPublishers have installed themselves as gatekeepers to videogames publishing. To distribute and sell a game in the contemporary market requires their consent. But for as long as people have had access to computers, there's been a history of game creators who've sought alternative solutions to the problem of game distribution.\n\nRethinking Distribution: Share? Where?\n\nThe personal computer appeared in homes in the eighties. Personal computers are not just for consumption; they are also tools for creation. Anyone with the technical knowledge and the tools can make a game on a computer. And any game I make on my Windows (or Mac or Linux) computer, you can play on your Windows (or Mac or Linux) computer. It's just a matter of getting the game from my computer to yours. Distribution\u2014whether it's intended to make a profit or not\u2014has been the major problem of most small game creators.\n\n\"Shareware\" was a popular concept in small game distribution throughout the eighties and nineties. Shareware relies on the players themselves to distribute a game. If I encounter a game I like, I might duplicate it and give a copy to a friend, who in turn makes more copies. Copying games initially meant floppy disks: the cost of producing digital media containing the game was deferred to the audience. Some authors might include their address in their games and ask for a tip: a donation of any amount, a postcard from somewhere interesting. Some authors, for the cost of a disk and some compensation, might offer an expanded version of the game, a second episode or a sequel.\n\nThis is how Tim Sweeney of Epic MegaGames (now Epic Games, mentioned earlier) and Scott Miller of Apogee Software got their start. They reinvested the money their games earned into creating distribution networks, hiring developers to create more games, marketing their games at first through catalogs and eventually on store shelves. They went the path of the publisher, which unfortunately remains the only viable method for widespread physical distribution.\n\nBut the rise of online networks gave hobbyists and small game developers a new method\u2014and critically, a wholly digital method\u2014for distributing their games. The Bulletin Board System, or BBS, was a public online space that proliferated from the 1970s to the '90s. A home computer user with a modem could dial in to a BBS through the phone line, and would then have access to all the files available on that system: shareware games, for example, that could be downloaded to the user's computer. More important, that user, and countless other hackers, hobbyists, and coders, could upload games to that BBS for other users to download. Games could be passed from computer to computer this way. And they could be passed around without the need for physical copies and the associated costs. This means that non-professionals and non-publishers were able to transmit all sorts of games to players\u2014and in fact, there's a swath of weird, personal, and experimental shareware games around that could never have come from the hit-driven games mainstream.\n\nFor example, I discovered a game when I was young called Evolve! Lite.27 This game simulated life by allowing the player to program a species of digital creature with a set of different reactions to different stimuli (for example: when in the presence of two or more predators, the creature turns and runs in the opposite direction). Individuals of the species who mate pass on these tables of behaviors\u2014this virtual DNA\u2014but not all of it! Some of the behaviors will randomly mutate, as in real sexual reproduction, and individuals with beneficial mutations will survive long enough to pass on their mutated DNA. This shareware game, then, provides a working model of evolution!\n\nThe game was made in 1993 by Matt Bace and Mike Wall, who published under the label \"FunTek.\" This is all I know about them. The game is called Evolve! Lite because there supposedly exists an expanded version of the game called Evolve!, one that allows for a world that's four times larger and populated with twelve competing species, rather than the two of Evolve! Lite. A registration form included with the game offers copies of Evolve! for $19.95 plus shipping. It also encourages me to register on CompuServe (an online network of the time), and it contains an advertisement and phone number for JAB BBS: \"We have one of the largest collection of PD [Public Domain] & Shareware.\"\n\nI actually discovered Evolve! Lite on a CD I bought in a store\u2014a shareware CD containing the noncommercial versions of hundreds of shareware games. This was another solution to the problem of distributing shareware games: a small publisher would offer to distribute shareware authors' games in stores, and the publisher would sell the CD to buyers, promising hundreds of games on a single disc. Many creators were able to infiltrate store shelves this way.\n\nBut it was digital distribution that offered the most potential for the distribution of small games. Side-stepping the cost of printing media entirely, digital distribution promised to ship a game directly from computer to computer, from author to player. The BBS allowed for digital distribution, but was hampered by its bandwidth\u2014stuffing data through phone lines, a BBS could only allow for small, slow downloads\u2014and the isolation of BBS networks. One BBS wasn't connected to another, and a user plugged in to one BBS would only have access to what was available on that BBS. This made widespread distribution more difficult and slow.\n\nAnd so, for a long time, the digital distribution of games was scattershot. But eventually a network would coalesce that would resolve these problems.\n\nI'm Referring to the Internet\n\nToday the Internet is linked by cables, not phone lines. The Internet of BitTorrent gives us a model for file sharing that's fast and decentralized. The Internet of 2012 is different from the BBS systems and early online networks of the eighties and nineties in a few important ways: there's the speed, yes, but more important is the access. The infrastructure of the Internet is different: a user doesn't dial in to an isolated part of it, but rather always has access to any part of it (government censorship aside). Which is to say that if I make a game, I can post it in one location (say, my website), and anyone connected to the Internet can visit that site and download that game.\n\nWhether they can run that game is another question. But there's been a progression toward infrastructure not only in playing games but in running them. Take Flash, for example, an Internet plug-in originally designed, by Macromedia, to allow animators to insert movies into web pages so that visitors could watch them inside their web browsers. Almost immediately creators began to co-opt Flash in order to put playable games into web browsers\u2014obviating the need to download a game before playing it. Look at Newgrounds.com, a Flash \"portal\" whose current slogan is, \"Everything, by everyone.\" Newgrounds (which began as a zine distributed by the thirteen-year-old Tom Fulp28) began accepting visitor submissions in 1999. A decade later, Newgrounds hosts 170,000 Flash movies and games created by over 2.2 million registered users.29 Plenty of those are cartoons about Super Mario, but consider how many creators have found audiences for their creations. Newgrounds has even found ways to earn money for its creators, by selling ads to interested companies and giving creators the option of including those ads in their movies and games. There was a time when I made my living almost exclusively by creating Flash games for Newgrounds.30\n\nSo you can get an impression of how much potential digital distribution has to allow games to proliferate outside the industry. To physically publish games has always been difficult for authors without access to capital: that accounts for the rise of publishers. But the speed and interconnectedness of the contemporary Internet provide authors with a means to distribute their games to players without having to deal with the costs of physical publishing and the marketing these costs engender.\n\nPublishers, incidentally, are aware of the Internet as well. Corporations like Valve, Apple, and Microsoft have set up online infrastuctures (\"Steam,\" the \"App Store,\" and \"XBox Live,\" respectively) to sell games. Users buy games with a credit card, allowing them to digitally download games to their computers. Small game creators have been able to ride the coattails of these online marketplaces, using them to sell and distribute their own creations. The danger is that these markets are maintained and regulated exclusively by the corporations who built them, corporations who will of course police them according to their own interests. Take for example, February 2010, when Apple deleted over 5,000 iPhone games from its digital store overnight for being, in Apple's judgment, too sexual.31\n\nBut digital distribution potentially means the most to the creators of free games\u2014hobbyist game creators. There can be hobbyist game creators because distributing games no longer requires capital. An author can produce a game in her spare time, upload it to the Internet, and watch as an audience finds, downloads, and experiences it.\n\nBut what does she use to produce her game?\n\nNew Tools for Artisans\n\nThe first digital games were created by engineers in university computer labs. They alone had access to computers, and they alone had access to the technical information required to teach those machines to play games. But now personal computers inhabit homes\u2014and, consequently, new game-creating tools have come into being for people who aren't engineers with technical knowledge.\n\nI'm going to discuss many of these tools, and what each is good for, later in this book. But for now, I think a sample of source code might illustrate how far the tools of today have come from the Assembly code at the opening of the chapter. This is a sample of Inform 7 code. Inform is a tool for creating interactive fiction: text adventures. The newest version was created by Graham Nelson to allow authors to write \"natural language\" code\u2014that is, lines of code that look like English sentences. Natural language code isn't necessarily the most efficient or effective way to write a game, but Inform 7 was made with the idea that an interactive story should be as easy to write as a prose story, and that if it was, more people would create games. The following code gives the player a bag of four candies, one of which is poisoned.32\n\nMaybe you don't follow the example totally, but it looks very different from the 1979 Assembly code. If the two biggest barriers to free game creation\u2014and by free, here, I mean creation that's universally accessible\u2014have been the technical knowledge required to teach game logic to computers and the high cost of publishing physical copies of games, then at the time of this writing, both of those barriers have been breached.\n\nRight now, we can imagine a future where creating a game is as easy as writing a story or drawing a picture. We can imagine videogames that are written, like Newgrounds suggests, \"by everyone\" for everyone, rather than by corporations for consumers or by technical wizards for stunned onlookers. This is our time, and games are ours to create.\n\nSo what are games good for?\n\nFootnotes\n\n23 Contributed by Steve Harvey.\n\n24 See \"Pixel Journeys: The Magic of dnd5,\" GameSetWatch, December 19, 2008, http:\/\/www.gamesetwatch.com\/2008\/12\/column_pixel_journeys_dnd.php.\n\n25 Jeff Howard, \"Magick Systems in Theory and Practice, Installment 2: Word and Gesture as Input Methods in Gaming History,\" The Gameshelf, June 30, 2010, http:\/\/gameshelf.jmac.org\/2010\/06\/magick-systems-in-theory-and-p.html.\n\n26 \"1983 Releases,\" Intellivision Lives, http:\/\/www.intellivisionlives.com\/bluesky\/games\/credits\/1983c.html#kool_aid.\n\n27 I host a download at http:\/\/blog.dessgeega.com\/?p=51.\n\n28 \"Newgrounds Wiki: History,\" Newgrounds, http:\/\/www.newgrounds.com\/wiki\/history.\n\n29 I emailed Tom Fulp for the 2.2 million figure.\n\n30 Having done so, by the way, I can assure you that Flash is not an ideal tool for creating games. Since the program was designed as an animation player with interactivity included as an afterthought, it's an unwieldy and confusing game-making tool.\n\n31 Craig Grannell, \"Apple's Stance on 'Adult' Apps Is Indefensible,\" TechRadar, February 23, 2010, [http:\/\/www.techradar.com\/news\/phone-and-communications\/mobile-phones\/apple-s-stance-on-adult-apps-  \nis-indefensible-672642](http:\/\/www.techradar.com\/news\/phone-and-communications\/mobile-phones\/apple-s-stance-on-adult-apps- is-indefensible-672642).\n\n32 From The Inform Recipe Book, http:\/\/inform7.com\/learn\/man\/Rex62.html.\nChapter Three\n\nWhat is it Good For?\n\nSo, for the first time in the history of the videogame form, people who aren't programmers or corporations can easily make and distribute games. But why would they want to? Why make a game\u2014especially when there already exist the means to write stories, play songs, film yourself for YouTube? What can we do with games that we can't do with those forms?\n\nTo begin, let's define what a game is.\n\nYou've played games and you have assumptions about what they are. Maybe when you read game you imagine a videogame; maybe when you imagine a videogame you imagine a big-budget run-jump-shoot game. Maybe you imagine Tetris. Since I'm more interested in games, digital and otherwise, that don't resemble games that already exist, I think a fresh definition is in order. I also think it's worthwhile to have a definition that isn't specific to digital games, because I'm interested in the commonalities between digital and non-digital games, and in connecting videogames to that much older tradition.\n\nSo here's my definition:\n\nThat's pretty broad, huh? I'm interested in as inclusive a definition as possible, though you might argue that mine is too broad: for example, you can use it to describe getting stuck in a traffic jam or paying your taxes. A tax form is nothing but a series of rules you follow to produce a final number, after all. But is it useful to think about your taxes as a game?33 Not really. Do the rules on a tax form really create a strong experience, or are they just a method for producing a number?\n\nA game is an experience, and that experience has a certain character. Maybe a game is a story, or maybe it's the experience of control giving way to panic giving way to relief. Maybe it's about taking something and making it grow bigger and bigger and bigger, or maybe it's about two rivals, equally matched, each trying to out-guess the other's plans. The experience that we identify as a game has character, and we can talk about what that experience is.\n\nAnd if we're discussing an experience, then that implies someone is there to have that experience, someone we refer to as a player. We can't talk about a game without talking about the experience of the player playing that game, even if the playing experience we're talking about is often our own.\n\nThe experience we call a game is created by the interaction between different rules, but the rules themselves aren't the game, the interaction is! A game can't exist without a player or players: someone needs to be engaging with the rules for the experience to happen.\n\nHow does that work? Consider a game of Tag. Rules: One player is IT, and must tag as many of the other players as possible with a touch. Each of those other players is SAFE when she touches this gnarled-up oak tree. You can see the way the interaction between those two rules creates an interesting (and volatile) dynamic. The players who aren't IT want to reach the tree, but the player who is IT wants to stop them.\n\nYou can imagine a situation where the IT player is standing between two other players\u2014one to her left, one to her right\u2014and the SAFEty of the tree. Maybe one of them will make a break for the tree, maybe IT will be forced to pick one of the two to chase while the other gets to make a run at the tree, maybe a fourth player will take advantage of IT's distraction to make a run at the tree from behind. When we talk about a game of Tag, we're talking about this experience. But this situation (and it's a good, tense one) isn't explicitly defined anywhere in the rules. However, notice how these rules guide the creation of that situation. The rules set the players in opposition to each other, give most of the players a goal, and give the other player a reason to intervene, creating a tense dynamic.\n\nWhat if we were to take either of these rules away: the SAFE location or the player who's IT? Without a SAFE location, players have no reason to stay nearby and interact with the other players, especially the IT player. The ideal strategy to avoid IT would be to go as far away as possible, and that breaks the tension and hence the experience of the game. What if there was no IT player? Then it'd just be people running around, and while a bunch of people running around has value, it doesn't have the character or dynamic of a game.\n\nBut there's certainly room to change the details of the rules. Tag, being a folk game, has been played by many people in many places with many, many different versions of the rules. In one version, a player might be done once she's tagged the SAFE tree. As more and more players tag the tree and leave the game, the players who are less fast become greater and greater targets because the IT player can focus less on monitoring the tree and more on pursuing them.\n\nAlternately, what if a player who touches the tree isn't permanently safe\u2014what if players are only allowed to be in contact with the tree for five minutes at a time? That keeps players vulnerable to IT and keeps the game from stagnating. Maybe a player who leaves the tree has temporary immunity to allow her to get safely out of IT's sight, or maybe it becomes a stand-off, where the escaping player has to wait for another player to distract IT's attention before she can make a break for it.\n\nWhat about freeze tag? In this case, a player who's tagged by IT is \"frozen\" and has to wait for another player to come and \"rescue\" her before she can move again. This variation has much more direct interaction between the non-IT players. Instead of just depending on one another as decoys, they have to actively put themselves at risk to aid other players, which only adds to the tension of the game. And it creates a new dynamic between the non-IT players: I rescued you this time, but if I get tagged you're going to have to leave the tree and rescue me.\n\nAnd that's what games are good at: exploring dynamics, relationships, and systems.\n\nThe Story of Tetris\n\nA \"system\" is what we'll call the interaction (or ongoing interactions) between a set of rules. Let's talk about Tetris now.\n\nWhat are the rules of Tetris, essentially? The basic rules that drive Tetris are:\n\nThe game is played with pieces, comprised of every possible combination of four squares. (See the image above.)\n\n  * Pieces fall continuously into a well of a certain volume. The player can guide the pieces' fall to the left and right of the well, and also rotate the pieces both clockwise and counterclockwise.\n  * Pieces are removed from the well when and only when the player organizes them into complete rows.\n  * If there is no room left in the well for a new piece to fall, the player loses.34\n\nYou can see how these rules create a system where the player's mistakes compound on one another to cause further mistakes: Only full rows are eliminated, so incomplete rows stick around and take up space in the well. Clutter in the well then makes it more difficult to position other pieces and to create rows. As the row fills with mistakes, it eventually becomes impossible to fit more pieces, and the game ends.\n\nThese rules function in tandem to give the game a momentum and shape: the player makes errors that cause further errors, until eventually the player is overcome. (And consider how well a commonly added rule, \"the pieces fall faster every time ten lines are made,\" works with these basic rules to help the game escalate.) We could consider this a system.\n\nAll games aren't necessarily simulations of existing systems: it would be difficult to imagine a situation in the world that actually resembled Tetris. But it's easy to imagine simulations that model systems of rules that are far less abstract: urban planning, politics, oil drilling. And there are games whose rules mimic such systems. Will Wright's SimCity is a game in which the player plans a city, Jim Gasperini's Hidden Agenda is a game in which the player governs a post-revolutionary South American nation. Arch D. Robison's Seismic Duck35 models the way drillers use aimed sound waves and seismogram to find oil reservoirs.\n\nYou can begin to see how systems can be translated into game rules: a commercial zone in SimCity, for example, needs people to act both as a work force and as consumers. That means the people need homes to live in, transportation to get them around the city, power to make sure the lights are on. The system teaches concepts about the interdependency of urban forces. To again cite Greg Costikyan's \"Maverick Award Speech\": \"I want you to imagine a world in which the common person is no longer ignorant of economics, physics and the functioning of the environment\u2014things which are themselves interactive systems\u2014because they have interacted with them in the form of games.\"\n\nEvery game of Tetris has the same shape\u2014errors compound on errors until the well is filled and the player is overcome\u2014because the system of rules we've discussed guides the experience in that direction. But the player places all the pieces herself. Every player will place the pieces differently, will play a different game, but experience a similar result. The same holds true for any system of rules, as simple as Tag or Tetris or as complicated as SimCity. Games have a lot of potential for examining the relationships between things\u2014or, rather, for allowing the player to examine the relationships between things, because the player does not merely observe the interactions; she herself engages with the game's systems.\n\nThe Rise of the Designer\n\nTag is an example of a folk game, along with Go, Chess, Poker, Stickball, Hide and Seek, and most of the world's oldest games. Games have been around as long as civilization has; the game is by no means a new form or a recent invention. What is relatively recent is the shift from folk to authored games. Folk games, like folk songs and folk texts such as the Bible, have no single credited author, but rather many untraceable authors over many years. They're artifacts shaped by entire cultures, and generally they can tell us a lot about those cultures.\n\nFor example, compare Chess, a continental European board game of warfare, with Hnefatafl, a Viking board game of warfare. Chess is a game of combat between kings with equal resources. Each player has the same pieces and starts in the same position on opposite sides of the game board. Each player's goal is to capture the other player's king. In Hnefatafl, one player represents a king and his defenders, who start in the center of the game board. The other player represents the attackers, who surround the king's forces on all sides of the board. The king player's goal is to get the king through the attacking hordes to safety, while the other player's goal is to surround and capture the king. The differences between these games' interpretations of combat tell us a lot about the differences between strategic thought between European vassal kings and Viking warrior bands: their priorities, the nature of their battles, and whether they approach warfare as a platonic war between equals. And the games themselves, in turn, shape the strategic thought of those who play them.\n\nOur history is full of folk board games. Authored board games\u2014games created by a single person or small group, and whose authors can be identified\u2014are a more recent phenomenon. For example, I can tell you that the board game Cosmic Encounter was designed in 1977 by Bill Eberle, Bill Norton, Jack Kittredge, and Peter Olotka of Eon Games. (We can date Cribbage, by Sir John Suckling, to the 1630s.) These are games as texts of specific rules, rather than as patterns of rules that are subject to change through mimicry. A game of Tag will always have a chasing player and a safe position, but the actual rules will change from play to play. The majority of contemporary board games are designed by a single author or team, and the same is true of digital games.\n\nCan there be folk videogames? Videogames retain credits better than board, card, and physical games. I think that there are digital games, though, that exist as patterns of similar rules, perpetuated through duplication with small mutations. There are a thousand different versions of Tetris, for example, each coded by one of a thousand different authors, and each version with a slightly different set of rules, a slightly different set of numbers, and often (to avoid litigation) a different name. There's a digital game that's commonly known as \"the snake game,\" which began as an arcade game called Nibbler by Joseph Ulowetz and John Jaugilas. In this game, the player directs a snake to gobble pieces of food. The snake dies whenever it crashes into either a wall or its own body by coiling around itself. Each piece of food causes the snake's tail to grow longer, making it take up more space and making it more difficult for the player to avoid collisions with her own body. So many different authors have remade this game on so many different machines that all of its forms and variants are usually just referred to as \"the snake game.\" Is this how authored games become folk games?\n\nBut what can authored games tell us that's different from folk games? Folk games tell us about the culture that created them; authored games tell us about the author that created them. Authored games have the potential to be more personal, and thus more specific and diverse, than folk games. Two plays of an authored game are likely to be more similar than two plays of a folk game, because the authored game retains the rules set created by its original designer. It's the fact that folk games change with each player that makes them so long-lived, that makes them adapt to suit the culture that adopts them. But in this book, it's authored games, and the diverse set of voices they embody, that I want to focus on.\n\nWhat's Video Good For?\n\nIn a board game, players have to track how much money is left in the bank, which pieces are in play, how high the water level rises. A deck of cards can keep players from knowing in what order pieces will come into play, dice can generate random outcomes to situations, and players have hands of cards that represent information they keep from the other players, but beyond these basic devices, little information can be hidden from the players, because the players must make sure the rules are being observed by tracking most of the information themselves.\n\nIn digital games, the computer keeps the rules. The computer tracks all the numbers. Digital games therefore have much greater control over what information the players have access to, making videogames capable of much greater ambiguity than board or card games.\n\nWhat's ambiguity good for? Telling stories! Digital games have great potential for storytelling. The author has a lot of control over the pace at which information is revealed; therefore the author can pace the telling of a story. This is not to say that videogame stories are being told as well as they could be. But the format of a videogame\u2014which lets rules be changed and introduced over the course of the experience, and which lets the author hide the causes for events and show only the effects\u2014lends itself more easily to an overt, sustained narrative than any physical game format.\n\nBecause the rules are kept by the machine, the rules in digital games tend to be more numerous and more subtle. Think of a game like Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka's Super Mario Bros. Unless you've studied the game in great detail on a technical level, you probably don't know exactly how high Mario can jump relative to the height of the screen, or how fast he accelerates horizontally when he runs. The interactions between these hidden rules in videogames can result in very complex systems without necessarily complicating the game, because the player isn't required to track and compare all the numbers. For example, imagine the designer creating a situation where there's a tiny platform with a long pit on either side. Mario has to run to build up the momentum to clear the pit and land on the platform, but instead of stopping there he needs to immediately jump again in order to make the second pit without losing the momentum that will let him cross it. This is a problem that wouldn't be obvious to someone who had just approached the game.\n\nThrough playing the game, the player develops a sense of the limits and subtleties of these hidden rules. This interaction between the player and the game, dependent on the game's hiding information, gives digital games their special capacity for subtlety and nuance. You could compare it to the use of \"English\" in a physical sport: the difference between hitting a ball and hitting it with a particular force, and in a particular direction.\n\nBecause of this capacity, videogames are often performative: they allow the player room to interact with rich and complex systems with grace and finesse. We usually refer to this as \"skill.\" A system may persist through an entire game, but the game may start very permissive of less graceful playing and require the player to play with more and more finesse as the game goes on. The game gets HARDER, asking that the player become more skillful, but allowing her to learn the game's systems over the course of navigating increasingly difficult situations.\n\nThe systems that the player manipulates in Super Mario Bros. are introduced very early in the game, with the only added rules coming with the periodic introduction of new enemy characters or hazards. But the situations that Mario has to navigate start fairly relaxed and demand more and more skillful playing as the game progresses. In the first stage of the game, obstacles are low enough that a simple jump from a standing position will allow Mario to clear them. In later stages, the height of obstacles will require Mario to run and build momentum before jumping, in order to jump higher. In this way the designer teaches the player the subtleties of the game's complex system through careful use of machine-controlled variables. Digital games are thus good at teaching, and at communicating a sense of the player's progress, which often parallels the progress of the protagonist and the development of a story.\n\nWhat else is handy for telling a story? The ability to generate or play video and audio, either as accompaniments or as central vehicles for information. Digital games can incorporate a variety of media when telling their stories. Consider how the music in Super Mario Bros. speeds up when there's only a hundred ticks left on the time limit to complete a stage, creating a sense of urgency, or how the sound played when Mario jumps on an enemy gets higher and higher pitched, indicating that a reward\u2014in this case, an extra life\u2014will come if the player keeps doing what she's doing. Consider how the player's journey takes her through a changing visual landscape, from a sunlit field to a black-and-blue underground, to treetops, to the mushroom forest, and to Bowser's castle, and the way each of these sights\u2014withheld from the player until her skill develops to give her access to later areas\u2014provides a sense of progression through the Mushroom Kingdom.\n\nI don't mean to imply that non-digital games are incapable of the things I've described, or that digital games are in some absolute sense better or more worthy of interest. There are many different kinds of games, all of them suited to different things. Digital games, because of their ability to withhold and pace the player's access to information, because of the strict narrative control the author is able to have over the player's experience (because the machine enforces the rules), and because of their capacity for generating a wide variety of sights and sounds to enhance or even define the playing-out of the rules, are particularly well suited for the telling of stories. And the telling of stories\u2014games becoming more personal\u2014is what especially interests me about games as a form.\n\nRole-Playing Games\n\nDigital games have certain strengths for telling stories, but the nature of games in general\u2014even without the advantages the machine provides\u2014makes them good for storytelling. And I do think, in the way that film and photography have generally changed the focus of novels and visual art, the mechanical rules keeper that videogames provide has caused similar focus changes in other aspects of games. In the last chapter, I couldn't discuss the earliest mainframe computer games without mentioning role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. Role-playing games came out of the tradition of \"miniatures wargaming,\" a set of rules for moving armies of dolls around a tabletop battlefield and pitting them against one another in combat. Later role-playing games kept the rules for combat and situation resolution, gave players the responsibility for a single combatant rather than a larger number of soldiers, and largely got rid of the dolls.36 But the important thing that games like Dungeons & Dragons introduced was the concept of a \"Dungeon Master,\" or \"Game Master.\" This is a player who manages the game for the other players, laying out the scenario and directing the world's responses to the players' actions. The Game Master essentially inhabits the role of storyteller, preparing and guiding the players through a story in which they make decisions.\n\nThis aspect of role-playing games\u2014an overseer who negotiates the player's choices using a set of rules\u2014was eagerly adopted by many of the first digital game authors. Early digital games like Rogue, a graphical game of maze exploration and combat, lifted its rules and probability calculations directly from Dungeons & Dragons. And text adventure games like Zork took the idea of a narrator who relates the world of the game to the player using a consistent voice. Many early digital games are, conceptually, role-playing games in which the computer takes on the role of Game Master.\n\nThe computer's adoption of the responsibilities of rules keeping and number counting has shifted the focus of many tabletop games away from their original focus\u2014providing players with an extremely finely grained simulation of combat and other adventuring situations. Why spend thirty minutes rolling dice and looking up random treasure and critical hit information from lengthy tables when you can play a computer game that resolves everything, with far greater mathematical complexity, in seconds and in color? Instead, tabletop role-playing games have been able to move away from a mathematically dense combat situation and toward collaborative storytelling and improvisation.\n\nTake, for example, Paul Czege's My Life with Master, in which the players invent a Victor Frankenstein\u2013style mad scientist under whom they will serve as Igors. The Game Master, as the titular Master, assigns the servants duties that enable the players to act out the conflict between their duty to obey and their desire to reclaim their humanity. The dice rolls aren't to test the player's ability to penetrate leather armor with her sword, but rather to test the player's \"love\" versus her \"self-loathing\": if a player \"fails\" her roll, her character must either perform the duty assigned her or refuse to perform it, regardless of which outcome the player might prefer, a simulation of the state of being in emotional servitude. In the end, one of the servants will rise up and destroy the Master, a result that the rules of the game make inevitable: the destruction of the Master is the climax of the story, which each player finishes in turn by creating an epilogue for her character.\n\nWhat interests me about My Life with Master isn't just its use of rules as a unique device for telling a story of personal, internal conflict, rather than as a means of resolving physics simulations in a fantasy world. I also find Czege's distribution method interesting. My Life with Master is sold on Czege's website as both a book, sent in the mail, and as a downloadable PDF file that the buyer may print herself if she's interested. Digital distribution! In the past, the rules for tabletop role-playing games were so elaborate that they required hardbound books, distributed through traditional bookstores and novelty stores, which is still the method used for distributing recent editions of Dungeons & Dragons. But authors of small, more experimental role-playing games like My Life with Master are avoiding or mitigating the costs of publishing and distributing by selling their rules online as digital downloads, or in some cases simply posting them for free on the Internet.\n\nRole-playing zinesters! And ones who, through their change of focus from complicated and expensive rule books full of encounter tables to simple rules that create conflicts and guide the players in creating a story, offer useful lessons that the designers of digital games could stand to learn.\n\nGrown-Up Games\n\nGames are useful, I wrote earlier, for exploring and teaching about dynamics and relationships. Gang Rape is a role-playing game made by Tobias Wrigstad in 2007. Outraged by how many rape cases the courts in his native Sweden dismiss without charges, Wrigstad wrote a game that he hoped would allow players to explore and talk about the experience, and the horror, of rape.\n\nMost games are designed to be pleasing and stimulating to play in an immediately rewarding way: they're intended to be fun. This game is not like those games. In fact, the rules\u2014which are only available by directly and personally requesting them from the author37\u2014open with the sentence: \"A scenario about gang rape is not meant to be fun to play.\" The game is intended to be harrowing; its goal is to give players some respect for the severity of its subject.\n\nA game isn't defined by being fun just as comics aren't defined by being funny. A game is defined as an experience created by rules. Wrigstad's Gang Rape is like any other game in this regard.\n\nIn the traditional role-playing games we've discussed, one player takes the role of Game Master. That player then guides the other players' experiences by telling another player, for example, what things her character \"sees.\" Gang Rape has no Game Master\u2014one player is a victim, the others are her attackers\u2014but it gives each player limited, Game Master\u2013like control over the characters the other players are playing. Specifically, the rapists can tell the victim how her body reacts to their actions, but not how she feels about those actions. The victim can tell the rapists how they feel while they perform those actions. Rape is about control: these rules are designed to give the players an impression of the power a rapist has over the person being raped. There are additional rules that allow the rapist players to dictate each other's behavior, and to allow the players to explore the role of peer pressure and \"egging on\" in the dynamic of a gang rape. All the rules are clearly crafted to create a sense of the dynamics at work in a situation where two or more people have power over another, and to give the players the liberty to explore and better understand those dynamics. (Though the scenario the author had in mind is clearly a woman being raped by two or more men, he admits that the characters involved\u2014and their players\u2014can be of any gender, and that the rules can apply to a scenario like bullying and mobbing instead of sexual assault.)\n\nThis game (which, again, is distributed exclusively digitally, and with the special limitation that anyone wishing to play it must identify herself directly to the author) is an example of using the capabilities of games\u2014experiences created by rules\u2014not to indulge an escapist fantasy but rather the direct opposite: to try to educate players about the dynamics at work within a horrible real-life experience, and how those dynamics might come to be as a product of individual choices and responses. The players narrate, through their characters, the events prior to the assault, the events of the assault, and the aftermath.\n\nGames can be topical; they can be relevant to our lives as human beings. They can be relevant without having to be about rape. But Gang Rape is one example of what we gain when people other than commercial publishers author, publish, and distribute games that commercial publishers could never touch.\n\nThe World's a Stage and We are Players\n\nOften, games\u2014particularly digital games, with their use of video and audio\u2014are compared to film, probably because the videogame publishing industry strongly resembles the Hollywood studio system. But I don't think this comparison is particularly constructive, in that it gives us little insight into what the game, as a form, is capable of. Film tells a static story; what's exciting about the game is that it allows the audience to interact with a set of rules. This doesn't mean the game can't tell a story: in the role-playing genre, the players aren't merely watching a story but playing the roles of the characters within the story.\n\nA better comparison than film is theater, which is where a lot of our game vocabulary (\"the player,\" \"stages,\" \"set pieces,\" \"scripting\") comes from. A play defines the roles, events, and scenes of a story. An individual performance of those roles and scenes will always be different: different actors will perform the same role in different ways. Every performance and interpretation of a particular play is different\u2014sometimes in minute ways, sometimes in radical ways\u2014but we consider the play itself and the scene itself to be the same.\n\nCompare this to a game story, particularly a videogame story. Every player will perform the story called Super Mario Bros. differently (and the same player will perform the story differently each play), but the role of Mario and the actions Mario is capable of taking remain the same. There is always a scene called \"World 1-2,\" although each performance of \"World 1-2\" will be different. In a more contemporary videogame such as Half-Life 2, a very clearly cinema-inspired game, each player will always pass through the events the designers have scripted in the order in which they are presented, but each player's (and each play's) performance of Gordon Freeman, the game's protagonist, will be at least subtly different. The player will always get chased across the rooftops by cops, but in one performance she might hesitate, unsure of where to go, in one she might head straight for the escape route, in one she might panic, almost getting Gordon Freeman killed, and in another she might walk a little too close to the edge of the roof, fall, and have to start the scene over.\n\nAs game storytellers, we are not directing static stories take-by-take but rather arranging the scenes that will comprise the shape of our story. We can begin to think of the player as someone performing a role we've written rather than as an audience who experiences our story without any input as to its outcome. We allow room for improvisation, room for the player to make a role her own. The audience of a game can be more usefully compared to the audience for a play than the audience in the movie theater. In videogames, the audience is there, live, with the actors\u2014or as the actors\u2014experiencing a single performance that is unique, despite the story having been performed and continuing to be performed many times.\n\nSome players record videos of their performances, either for documentation or for the purpose of recording a specific achievement, such as reaching the game's conclusion as quickly as possible\u2014what is usually called a \"speed run\" (YouTube has given lots of these videos a means of reaching an audience). That there's an incentive to capture individual performances of a game testifies to the amount of variance there is within a game depending on who's playing it.\n\nGames and Chance\n\nThe board and card game traditions have also given a lot to digital games. What I think digital games have taken the most from board games and card games is the way they manage chance. Both contemporary designed games and older folk games have invented many systems for managing chance. The six-sided die, for example, allows for the random selection of six equally likely outcomes (and can then be further used to access other percentages and ratios; for example, three outcomes, each represented by two sides of the die, or eleven outcomes with different likelihoods represented by two rolls of the die, and so on.)\n\nCard games themselves are designed as a system for managing chance and gradually revealing information. When all cards are in the deck, every card in the game has (as far as the player knows) an equal chance of being in any position. Once a card has come into play and been seen by the players, though, the players then know where it is and can use that information to make guesses about the remaining cards. Cards also allow players to manage the pace at which they reveal information: a player might have a hand of seven cards hidden from the other players, who don't know whether those cards have come into the game yet or not. Poker is a classic game of using limited knowledge of the cards in play to predict the positions of cards not yet in play. This is what makes Poker an elaborate game of bluffing. One player tries to see through the other's \"Poker face\" because the decisions she'll make are based on what she can predict about the information the other player is concealing. Contemporary game designers have contrived even more rules to control the revelation of information.\n\nAside from hiding information, chance is frequently used to break symmetry. Having different starting conditions between players prevents both players from having the same set of ideal moves, and thus having the game become a stalemate. Having different, randomly selected values between one play and another, or having different game events happen at different, impossible-to-predict times (or not at all), means that each game will demand a different strategy, keeping play from becoming stagnant.\n\nFranz-Benno Delonge's and Thomas Ewert's board game Container, for example\u2014a game where players trade and transport commodities\u2014uses chance to ensure that all players do not value the commodities identically. At the start of the game, a number of cards are shuffled and randomly distributed, one to a player. These cards describe how valuable the different commodities are to the players who hold them, and each card values the commodities differently. The cards are also kept hidden until the end of the game, each card seen only by the player that holds it. Because each player is aware of the entire possible set of values on the cards\u2014she knows which cards are in the game, and which card she, and therefore not the others, possesses\u2014she can watch the other players' decisions and make deductions about which players have which cards, and therefore which commodities are valuable to which players.\n\nComputers have an innate capacity for manipulating chance. Though true randomness doesn't exist, computers handle numbers easily and are capable of generating reasonably unpredictable probabilities of any size on the fly. Every computer has access to an infinite number of monkeys rolling an infinite number of dice.\n\nWhy is this useful? Because, as we've discussed, games have a unique capacity for improvisation! Though each scene has the same shape\u2014Link battles a gang of Moblins\u2014each performance is different. So what if, in one performance, one of the Moblins comes from the left instead of the right? Digital games have the capacity to create variations on many subtle details in every play, keeping the experience from becoming stagnant.\n\nThe differences don't have to be subtle, either. In Chris Klimas and Joel Haddock's online game, Where We Remain,38 for example, the player is a boy searching for a girl on an island patrolled by monsters that are intended to evoke characters from Greek mythology. The layout of the island\u2014what tools are hidden in which caves, what areas which monsters patrol, and in which cave the girl is hidden\u2014is different every time, decided by a random number generator. In effect, this randomness makes the characters and events of the game more archetypal because the emphasis is on the shape of the game\u2014the boy's search for the girl while monsters pursue him\u2014rather than on the details like what treasure is hidden where. Games have lots of room for improvisation, for every play of a game or scene to be unique, and digital games in particular have easy access to a great degree of chance.\n\nGames as Culture\n\nI keep bringing up the profound influence role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons have had on digital games. Both Eastern and Western videogame trends have their roots in Dungeons & Dragons, but both experienced and responded to that influence in different ways, much as Chess and Hnefatafl reflect different experiences of and responses to warfare.\n\nCharacter creation is an important feature of role-playing games: the players literally describe the role they intend to play, both in narrative terms (what is this character's background and personality?) and in mathematical ones (how many times can this character be hit by dragon breath before she collapses?).\n\nThe American game Wizardry, created in 1981 by Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead, was an attempt to bring the dungeon exploring and monster battling of Dungeons & Dragons to the computer. (It has plenty of peers with similar intentions and similar properties, but it's a good example for discussion.) In Wizardry, the player controls a team of up to six adventurers, similar to a team of player characters in D&D. Each of these adventurers is, fundamentally, a set of statistics (Strength, I.Q., Piety, Vitality, Agility, Luck, Age), a Class (the character's job or specialization), and a list of Spells (tactical magical abilities characters can use to help with combat or exploration). Character creation is held over from tabletop role-playing games, but in Wizardry it loses its narrative dimension. Players \"roll\" statistics (as with dice) and assign character classes and ability sets based on those random \"stats,\" and that is the extent of characterization.\n\nCharacter creation is present in many Western digital role-playing games, though implemented in different ways. The Ultima games, which I've mentioned before, ask the player a series of moral choices that determine which character class she plays as. Games like Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman's Rogue, which borrows its combat rules directly from D&D, skip character creation but assign the player's character no properties beyond this set of stats.\n\nYuji Horii's Dragon Quest39 is similar to early Western digital role-playing games: character creation is limited to entering a name, which also determines your stats via a hidden algorithm. Dragon Quest was widely imitated in Japan, in addition to receiving many of its own sequels, but over time Japanese games broke with the mathematical focus of character creation in Western games. The trend Japanese digital role-playing games tend to follow is to have the player character be increasingly designed by the game designer. In the Final Fantasy series, characters wear outfits designed by the authors, answer to names chosen by the authors (though the player is sometimes given the choice of changing these names), and speak scripted dialogue that the player has little say in.\n\nCompare a 2002 Japanese game like Kingdom Hearts, a collaboration between the authors of Final Fantasy and the Disney corporation, to a 2008 American game like Fallout 3, produced by Bethesda Game Studios. In Fallout 3, the player not only names her character, but also designs her face and appearance and decides on her race and gender. In Kingdom Hearts, the player plays a character named Sora, who is given clear motivations by the writers and dialogue by voice actor Haley Joel Osment and whose name cannot be changed. Sora's appearance in Kingdom Hearts is mostly static: he changes appearance to fit some of the worlds he visits, but the only part of him the player is allowed to change is what his weapon looks like when he's swinging it. His outfits, designed by the game's art staff, are law, as is his race and gender: white and male.\n\nWhy has character creation remained such a fixture of American interpretations of digital role-playing games while Japanese role-playing games have phased it out? It could possibly reflect that America is a young country, and a nation that has been capitalist almost since inception. American culture sells the idea of individuality and ego. In Japan, a much older country in which social roles are valued (and connected to uniforms), role-playing might more easily mean playing the role to which you've been assigned. (In Yuji Horii's Dragon Quest, the protagonist's sole characterization is that his ancestor is a hero.) There's an ongoing dialogue between Eastern and Western design these days, so none of these trends are exclusive (and they've never ruled all of design, obviously), but there are clear patterns in games that we can trace to the values of the people who created them.\n\nGames tell stories that communicate the values of their creators in a unique way: not just through their explicit content but through the logic of their design, and the systems they choose to model. And if games communicate the values of their creators in a unique way, then it's absolutely essential that there be more creators passing on more values, more perspectives. Games must become more personal.\n\nFootnotes\n\n33 Sometimes it is: consider the contemporary interest in game theory among non-game designers.\n\n34 This list obviously omits some rules, like how the game selects the pieces to bring into play next, and at what speed the pieces will fall. Digital games tend to have many more of these very specific rules.\n\n35 http:\/\/home.comcast.net\/~arch.robison\/seismic_duck.html.\n\n36 It's worth mentioning, by the way, that labeling traditions of games the predecessors of digital games is not to imply that these traditions are obsolete and gone. I know people with armies of tiny soldiers.\n\n37 You can contact the author to request a copy at http:\/\/jeepen.org\/games\/gr.\n\n38 Playable online at http:\/\/twofoldsecret.com\/games\/whereweremain.\n\n39 The Dragon Quest games appeared in America under the name Dragon Warrior until recently, for legal reasons: Horii borrowed the name Dragon Quest from a specific Dungeons & Dragons supplement.\nChapter Four\n\nChanging the Game\n\nCreating a game from scratch takes time, effort, and tools\u2014tools that haven't started to become widely available until recently. Digital games are capable of presenting video and audio, and creating a game often requires that music be composed, sounds be recorded, art be drawn, or characters be animated. That involves a variety of tools and training and a lot of work. Often it requires a team of people, each with a different specialty, to accomplish a particular design.\n\nAnd while plenty of hobbyist authors work on that level, the truth is that most digital games are not made from scratch. Most tell their stories by borrowing pictures or sounds or music or code. They use kits that other people have made; they use sound effects that other people have recorded and released for their use.\n\nAnd many, many game creators, budding or otherwise, piggyback on existing works, taking advantage of existing infrastructure to make their creations. A commercial game from a large studio, for example, requires thousands of 3-D models, sounds, and assets to be loaded onto the player's computer. Even more important, a commercial game comes with game logic: a means of resolving collision, of determining the effects of gravity, of moving objects around a game world. These things are difficult for someone inexperienced to code, but here a group of paid professionals have already done all the work. The player who's bought this game has all of those resources on her computer: why not use them?\n\nIn this chapter we're going to talk about what are usually called \"hacks\" and \"mods\" (for \"modifications\"): changing existing games to create new stories. There are a variety of ways in which people change games, and a variety of motivations for doing so. Sometimes changes are akin to crude vandalism, such as redrawing Super Mario so he has a dangling naked cock that flops around as the player walks through the Mushroom Kingdom. Sometimes they're akin to clever, subversive vandalism, such as changing the player character into the Princess and the prisoner who waits at the end into the Plumber. And sometimes they're something entirely new, almost indistinguishable from the games that gave birth to them.\n\nSometimes authors want to situate their creations in the context of a particular work. For example, Jesse Petrilla created Quest for Al-Qa'eda: The Hunt for Bin Laden in response to the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, which the American media attributed to Osama Bin Laden. This game is a modification of Duke Nukem 3D, a first-person game about ultraviolent American culture in which the stripper-tipping, alien-gunning protagonist appears to the player only as two attributes: a gun that hovers in front of the camera and a series of prerecorded movie quips. The jockish American attitude of military vigilantism totally fits the play of Duke Nukem, a game in which the most logical response to everything the player sees is either to shoot it or to stuff bills between its tits. It makes sense that Quest for Al-Qa'eda and Petrilla's 2003 sequel, Quest for Saddam, should take the structure of that game.\n\nIt further makes sense that the Global Islamic Media Front should, in 2006, reinvent Quest for Saddam as Quest for Bush (or The Night of Bush Capturing), a modification of Quest for Saddam in which the Saddam Husseins the player ceaselessly guns down have been replaced with George W. Bushes, an icon of American militarism. They're structurally the same game, with the faces swapped and the pictures on the wall changed in the simplest possible inversion of the original game's xenophobic aggression\u2014a blunt \"how do you like it?\"40 Hacks and modifications are made to subvert or comment on the original author's intentions, or to simply correct what the modder feels is an oversight on the author's part, or simply because it's an easy existing infrastructure for creating something new. Let's examine the varied motivations for hacking a game by looking at the most-hacked digital game: Super Mario Bros.\n\nAnother Castle\n\nSuper Mario Bros. was published on a cartridge that plugs into the Nintendo Entertainment System. Hardware has existed for a while, however, that allows the contents of a Nintendo cartridge to be \"dumped\" to a computer and distributed digitally as software. The digital file is called a \"ROM,\" and \"emulator\" programs have been written for many different machines that will run that game software as a Nintendo Entertainment System would. In this way, Super Mario Bros. has made the transition from hard media to a purely digital form, available for modification by anyone with the knowledge and tools.\n\nAnd tools have been readily available for a long time. Super Mario Bros. was written in Assembly, the machine language I mentioned in chapter 2, and reprogramming the game requires working knowledge of Assembly. But programmers cracked the code a long time ago, and plenty of tools currently exist for changing the appearance, rules and levels of Super Mario Bros. without having to look at machine code. When I made my 2008 Super Mario Bros. hack, Mario Goes Underground, I used a tool called SMB Utility41 that made it easy to rearrange Super Mario Bros.'s maps.\n\nSuper Mario Bros. has enjoyed popularity with ROM hackers for a variety of reasons. For one, the large number of people who've played the game made it an early target for programmers to crack, and tools have existed for a while. It's also widely played enough that most people have a sense for how the game works: move left, move right, jump, catch a mushroom to grow big. Most players have an idea of what to expect from Super Mario Bros., so they can pick up a hack easily and be surprised effectively when the hack turns out to be different from the original.\n\nSome hacks simply change the game in a superficial way. Silhouette Bros., by Leon Arnott, changes all the characters and architecture to stark black silhouettes on a solid-color background. The hack demonstrates how recognizable the elements of Super Mario Bros. are and the choices of color are well suited to the tones of different parts of the game. Enigmario by Dr. Floppy replaces the soundtrack of the game with covers of songs by the band Enigma. The somber tones of this new soundtrack give Super Mario Bros. a more introspective feel.\n\nMario vs. Airman is an interesting attempt at intertextuality: the \"Airman\" Mario fights is a villain from Capcom's Mega Man 2, and Mario is required to navigate a level from this game to defeat Airman. Mega Man, as a player character, moves very differently than Mario. Momentum does not affect his motion, he can \"brake\" instantly, and his arm gun makes him able to shoot his opponents, rather than requiring him to jump on them to defeat them. Trying to navigate a level designed for Mega Man as Mario is a challenge that emphasizes the importance of the nuances of motion in platform game design.\n\nA hack like Super Mario Forever exists to challenge the player's technical knowledge of Super Mario Bros.'s rules. Mario starts mid-fall into a bottomless pit, and must instantly maneuver to land on a tiny platform. The game then requires the player to generate enough momentum on that tiny platform to make a long jump to the next, which involves jumping off of and back onto the platform in order to build speed.\n\nSome hacks change a single rule of a familiar game in order to give the game a new experience, similar to the concept of \"house rules\" in non-digital games. Normally, the player of Super Mario Bros. must complete each stage within a limited time, which resets at the stage's end. Nanashi's 900 Time Challenge gives the player a single time limit in which to complete the entire game: nine hundred ticks of the game's internal clock. Completing the challenge requires the player to minimize the wasted time in her play, and to exploit shortcuts and warp zones in order to get through the game in as fast a time as possible.\n\nThen there are hacks like Extra Mario Bros. (or my own hack, Mario Goes Underground), which attempt to tell an entirely new story using the familiar framework of Super Mario Bros. Rather than requiring Mario to proceed from the starting point on the left to the castle on the right, Extra Mario Bros. contains a big world for the player to explore in multiple directions, using pipes to travel vertically from area to area. It's essentially Super Mario Bros. through the lens of contemporary game design, which is why it's interesting as a direct modification of Super Mario Bros.: the games that informed Extra Mario Bros. are all descended from Super Mario Bros.\n\nThen there's Super Daisy Land, which changes the star of the Nintendo Game Boy game Super Mario Land from Mario to Daisy, a captured princess who normally waits at the end of the game for rescue. But that's not exactly a hack of Super Mario Bros., and there's a richer subject for gender correction in game mods.\n\nBobs Whose First Name is Betty\n\nAnne-Marie Schleiner, artist and writer, maintains Mutation  \n.fem, a gallery of modifications of first-person shooting games: games where the player's character is personified as the gun she holds in front of her, like the earlier-mentioned Duke Nukem 3D. Each mod changes the gender of the characters in those games. The patches hosted on Mutation.fem42 change male characters to female for a variety of reasons: either for the purposes of gender play, to correct gender bias by the games' authors, or to subvert the aggressive masculinity of this school of game creation.\n\nThe first mod in Mutation.fem that I played was Lynn Forest's FemDOOM. The original DOOM, a 1993 release from id Software, was one of the earliest games to popularize the first-person shooter, and has given tropes to that genre that are still imitated today. The game is viewed from a first person perspective, and the protagonist is given no name or background beyond being a space marine assigned to a tour of duty on Mars. Only the tiny, emoting face of a man in the status bar and the occasional baritone grunts when the player is shot gender the protagonist as male, and reinforce the tacit assumption that the player of a game of aggression must be male.\n\nLynn Forest, a fan and player of DOOM, was frustrated with the implication that she was playing a game for men. So she drew femme faces to replace the male faces that appear in the status bar, and put her patch online for other players to download. A later patch, \"FEMDMSND.WAD,\" credited to \"Amanda, Ivor B. and Rob Lord,\" replaces the masculine sound effects with feminine ones of equal intensity.\n\nGender is even more of an oversight in id Software's later Quake, which puts an even greater emphasis on competitive play. In Quake, one sees other players not as masked figures, but as hulks with a single male face. Players modded the game to introduce feminine faces and bodies. Schleiner notes43 that later versions of Quake acknowledge players' desire for female avatars by including female models. She also hosts \"skins\" worn by PMS Clan, the Psychotic Men Slayers,44 a band of women players who play competitively together in the game Quake 2.\n\nMutation.fem contains patches that paint a mustache on Tomb Raider's protagonist Lara Croft and change Bungie's Marathon from a game about firing guns in dark, angular space stations to a game about fighting with egg flippers and dish towels in a checkerboard-tiled kitchen. Loren Petrich's \"Tina-Bob\" patch replaces the generic jumpsuited men\u2014the \"Bobs\"\u2014that solely populate Marathon's space station with identically jumpsuited women.\n\nThe Hack as Sampling\n\nThe repurposing of commercial game assets can be compared to sampling in music: using part of an existing song as an instrument in your own piece of music. Hip-hop artists often rap their own material over music sampled from another source, using the found music as a background for their own words.\n\nHyperBound was created in 2009 by Michael Iantorno as part of his thesis project at Ryerson University.45 Iantorno's game is a hack of EarthBound, a Super Nintendo Entertainment System game developed by APE and the Japanese writer Shigesato Itoi and released in 1994. EarthBound is a digital role-playing game informed by Yuji Horii's Dragon Quest, but instead of telling the story of a warrior who battles wolfmen and dragons in a fantasy world, EarthBound is set in a world vaguely resembling a Japanese vision of contemporary America. The protagonist is a young boy in a baseball cap who fights aliens and renegade animals using an old baseball bat and his newly discovered psychic abilities.\n\nHyperBound takes its name from \"hypertext,\" text that's arranged in a nonlinear structure. (This book is a text: it's arranged to be read from start to finish, one page to the next. A website, where you might click on a word to \"link\" to a page about that subject, is hypertext.) What better model for the nonlinear exploration of text than the space of a digital game, where the player moves around the world by moving her character across the screen, encountering characters, and listening to what they have to say? That's the part of the design of EarthBound that HyperBound has lifted. What it's rejected is the fighting. The hack is purely about exploring the world and discovering the text, an original script written by Iantorno and his brother.\n\nIn EarthBound, the protagonist typically wears a baseball cap, a striped shirt, and a backpack. There's a brief scene at the beginning of the game, though, where he appears in pajamas with ruffled bed-hair. That means that there were animated sprites of the bed-headed protagonist, seen from all angles, just waiting in the game for Iantorno to use. HyperBound uses those sprites for its protagonist, to give him an identity apart from that of EarthBound's protagonist and to emphasize his confused state: the protagonist is amnesiac, and the information he is trying to recover is knowledge of his own identity.\n\nThroughout the hack, Iantorno repurposes assets from EarthBound to fit his new story. The bearded, sunglasses-wearing criminal the player encounters in EarthBound becomes the radio DJ whose show the protagonist of HyperBound used to call in to before he lost his memory. The boarding school that appears in EarthBound, with its classrooms and lockers, becomes the university that HyperBound's protagonist attended, where he meets former teachers and finds valuable information on his previous life. All of EarthBound's graphics are sampled and given new purposes in the hacked game.\n\nThe other assets Iantorno samples are less obvious, though just as crucial: the ways in which the player presses controller buttons to move the protagonist around a world, to engage characters who wander around of their own accord in conversation, and to advance their dialogue text on the screen. These are all things that are non-trivial to program, and that have been programmed for Iantorno by APE. To present his nonlinear story, he's taken advantage of an existing infrastructure for allowing the player to navigate a world of characters who can be spoken to.\n\nIf you can create a script but you can't create animated characters, scenery, or code to take player input and move a character around a large world that scrolls in eight directions, why not use those existing assets to present your original script? The work has already been done and the resources already exist to be sampled.\n\nChanging the Script\n\nThere's another obvious reason to change the script of a game: to translate it to a new language. Publishers often neglect to translate and publish a game in a new language because of the cost: if they think a game won't sell enough in a part of the world to justify paying people to rewrite the script, to manufacture cartridges for different game-playing hardware, and to market the game in another country, they won't do it. But dumped roms, which are purely digital, don't require the expense of physical publishing, and because they're distributed freely, don't depend so heavily on marketing to make up that expense. And thus, people who read languages neglected by videogame publishers and care enough about games from other parts of the world will invest their own time and effort into the unpaid translation of games.\n\nThe work of translating a game involves more than just translating the script\u2014which is often a lot of work, given that the dynamic nature of games usually means lots of scenes and incidental text to translate. The new script also needs to be inserted into the original game. In formats where space is expensive, such as Nintendo game cartridges for example, programmers use a lot of clever tricks to store text as efficiently as possible. Cracking those codes can be tricky. And if the original game was written in Japanese, the hacker also has to insert a new font. The way the game displays text might not be suited for English letters, so screen space is usually at a premium, too. Japanese is a compact, ideographic language, and a word that takes up two Japanese characters on screen could be an eight-letter word in English, or an idiom that requires translation as a full sentence. How do you translate the word so it fits? All game text tends to be presented in a limited part of the screen (a window that takes up the bottom half of the screen, for example, so the player can see the characters who are speaking on the top half), so all word choice is informed by just how much space is available to display those words\u2014space that was chosen based on the structure of an entirely different language!\n\nThe Japanese Game Boy Advance game Mother 3, a sequel to EarthBound, was translated into English over the course of two years by a two-man team who refer to themselves as \"Jeffman\" and \"Tomato.\"46 The script for the game was written by the Japanese writer and journalist Shigesato Itoi. Nintendo's American branch decided that translating the game would be too much work, and too expensive a project, given the limited audience they expected the game to have. Nine years before, Nintendo of America put a lot of money into translating Mother 2 into EarthBound and manufacturing copies, only to have their marketing department completely mishandle it. Physical distribution is a big investment, after all: Nintendo of America was unwilling to make the investment a second time. American players who had encountered and liked EarthBound, though, were eager to play the sequel and were upset that it wasn't to be published in English. Tomato, who works as a professional Japanese-to-English translator, played the Japanese game and decided that English-reading players deserved to experience the game. He undertook the translation of the game, and Jeffman did most of the coding to get around the memory limits of the original Japanese game: a two-year project, undertaken for free. The English version of Mother 3 was released in July 2009. You can go on the official translation site's forums to read how many players cried during the ending47 (which is, incidentally, Stephen Spielberg's metric for when games will become art,48 not that tears are anywhere close to the only metric for judging the value of an experience).\n\nBut don't be misled into thinking that the majority of translation work is in translating Japanese games to English. As of this writing, people are working to translate Mother 3 into Spanish and Latin American Spanish, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, and Malay. Whenever I visit the ROM hacking database at romhacking.net, I see translations of English games into German, Polish, Russian, Korean. Hackers are engaged in correcting the oversights of profit-oriented thinking and making the games they care about available in their native tongues.\n\nMachinima\n\nThe product of \"machinima\"\u2014from machine and cinema\u2014isn't games, but the source material is. It's the same kind of sampling I've described: machinima uses the resources and infrastructure of commercial games as the basis for creating animated movies. All the resources are there in most 3-D games: the ability to move a camera through a world full of 3-D objects, and to move and animate those objects. Game hacking provides an immediate avenue to 3-D animation, one that's far more accessible than dedicated 3-D modeling (with a specialized\u2014and costly\u2014modeling program like Maya or 3D Studio Max) because there are already scripts in place to move things around and to operate a camera.\n\nThe origins of the community surrounding machinima can be traced to that of the game Quake, a fully 3-D first-person shooting game that offers players the ability to record, distribute, and play back \"demo\" recordings of their games. Players began to manipulate and position the camera during these playbacks, introducing cinematography to the demos. Soon they were directing story scenes to frame their demos.\n\nMost machinima stars the characters of the games they sample, because that's what's available: usually armored soldiers who crack jokes for the benefit of players familiar with the game. The 1996 Diary of a Camper by Matthew Van Sickler, Heath Brown, and company,49 for example, follows a band of Quake characters as they deal with an opponent who is hiding and picking off their comrades one-by-one. (And who is ultimately revealed to be John Romero, one of the founders of id Software.) Diary of a Camper is widely remembered as the first game demo interested purely in storytelling, rather than presenting a sample of play footage.\n\nBut the subject matter of machinima has become increasingly diverse. The 2003 machinima Anna, produced by Katherine Anna Kang's (wife of Quake programmer John Carmack) Fountainhead Entertainment, follows the life of a single flower on a forest floor.50 Anna bears little resemblance to Quake at all, set in the woods with a cast of plants and animals.\n\nAs more tools become available, machinima looks less and less like videogames. A few years ago I encountered a movie of Sherwood Anderson's short story \"The Dumb Man\" filmed in Second Life,51 a game that gives players the tools to construct anything they like, be it movie sets or actors or other games.\n\nWhile machinima is not games, it's demonstrative of the ways that game tools can be used to create things radically different than the originals: including new games altogether.\n\nSomething Borrowed\n\nFew commercial games, these days, are made entirely of original resources. The creators of the Quake and Unreal \"engines,\" the rules and code that drive the games, license their engines to other developers so that they can save time and work by modifying an existing framework rather than building an entirely new one. The id Tech 3 engine\u2014the engine that runs the third Quake game\u2014was used to create games like American McGee's Alice, Call of Duty, Star Trek: Voyager\u2014Elite Force, and Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast.\n\nThe publishers of these games paid for licenses allowing them to sell and distribute their modifications, but plenty of players, using their knowledge of how their favorite games work, changed the games into something new and distributed their modifications for free.\n\nBrandon Chung's Citizen Abel: Gravity Bone52 was built in a modified Quake 2 engine, but the finished game bears little resemblance to a game about space marines blowing up aliens. Gravity Bone is a spy pastiche that opens with the player riding a fancy gated elevator into a masked costume party. Once there she must make contact with a fellow agent. This sets forth a rapidly accelerating chain of events that lead to an unexpected outcome.\n\nWhat Gravity Bone takes from Quake is logic for moving a player around a three-dimensional world, looking around with a first-person camera, and collecting and manipulating items. Everything else\u2014the game's appearance and presentation, the locations and scenario, the player's goals and the events they trigger\u2014is original, designed and inserted by Brandon Chung. Quake, here, is just a vehicle for the delivery of Chung's original story.\n\nOr look at Robert Yang's Radiator series,53 which is built in the Half-Life 2 engine. The second episode of the series, Handle With Care, involves the player visiting a marriage counselor. What Half-Life 2 does well is allow the player to manipulate and move objects using a rudimentary physics simulation: in Handle With Care, the protagonist, Jason, withdraws to a \"Repression Facility\" while his husband speaks with the counselor. The Repression Facility looks like the kind of grimy steel structure common to Half-Life 2. In the facility, the player carries crates containing repressed memories (if there's one thing Half-Life 2 does well, it's letting the player carry crates around). If they're put on the facility's shelves, they're locked away forever; if they're broken, Jason revisits the memory he was trying to repress. The therapy session, seen through a monitor, progresses depending on whether Jason confronts or seals away his memories.\n\nBoth of these games look significantly different than the games they're based on. Nevertheless, we can identify rules they've borrowed from their mother games. It's apparent why it's easier to change existing games into new games rather than creating them from scratch: particularly when it comes to 3-D games, solitary creators often don't have the resources that the programmers of Half-Life 2 had. It's unlikely that either game could've existed without such sampling\u2014it's far less likely that Valve would make a game about the roles individual memories and pasts play in negotiating modern queer relationships than a Half-Life 2 level involving building a wall of crates to stop drone planes from killing you.\n\nScripting cameras and collision, as well as creating 3-D architecture and a way of storing it conveniently in computer memory, are all big projects. The Valve Hammer Editor, which edits Half-Life 2 levels, gives a creator immediate access to all the design tools a team of paid programmers put into place. It also gives her access to the resources Half-Life's art team created, which would otherwise be another huge investment of time, effort, and skill. Editors like Hammer allow creators to create without having to build an infrastructure to manage their creations.\n\nNew Worlds\n\nMany game designers have anticipated their players' desires and created editors to accompany their games. The first level editor I ever encountered was for the Nintendo game Excitebike. Excitebike is a stunt bike race. The included EDIT MODE allows players to mix and match the obstacles from the game\u2014ramps, bumps, gravel pits, and boost pads\u2014to create new stunt tracks to race on. When I was little, I spent a lot of time with the instruction book open in my lap to the list of pieces, moving my racer through the track and rearranging the obstacles. The appeal of an editor like this to a child who's creative but lacks experience is that everything\u2014the rules, the code, all of the art and sounds\u2014are provided. The only thing I had to worry about, as a kid, was the track itself.\n\nWhen we were discussing shareware, I mentioned Tim Sweeney, who founded Epic MegaGames\u2014which later became Epic Games, the publisher of the Unreal engine used by many commercial and independent designers to build 3-D worlds. The first game Tim Sweeney sold, as \"Potomac Computer Systems,\" was released in 1991 and is called ZZT. (He picked this name so it would always be the very last game listed on alphabetically ordered shareware CDs.) The shareware part of ZZT was a series of four self-contained adventures, the first of which came with the game and the other three of which had to be purchased. (They were later released for free.) The free part of ZZT, however, was the editor that Sweeney used to make those adventures, and the means to play \"worlds\" created with it.\n\nZZT is a text-mode game: it takes advantage of DOS computers' native ability to display text. In addition to letters and numbers, DOS has a special extended sheet of characters for drawing basic pictures: smiley faces, playing card suits, Greek letters, and a variety of borders, lines, and patterns. ZZT co-opts these: the player is a smiley face, Greek characters such as pi and omega are monsters who roam around, the diamond from the playing card suits is a gem that the player can collect and use to buy items. This set of 255 characters comprises everything that any ZZT world will ever contain.\n\nAnd that's incredibly liberating. It means that ZZT is self-contained: there's no need to go outside the editor to find another tool to draw and animate graphics to import into the game. Authors get 255 characters in sixteen colors. And creative authors can do a lot with those: in that set there are patterns of varying density and lines of varying thickness, and I've seen some pretty impressive environments and portraits drawn with those text characters.\n\nSound and music are similarly self-contained: ZZT uses the PC speaker, which contains a range of simple notes and instruments. ZZT has a simple scripting system for playing PC speaker tunes, which again obviates the need to go outside the world editor for anything.\n\nBut oh, yes: let's talk about scripting. ZZT has a nice library of game pieces, which appear in Tim Sweeney's shareware ZZT worlds. There are pushable boulders, \"rotators\" that move objects around and can form conveyor belts if a series of them is placed in a line, stock monsters, weapons, and power-ups, and several kinds of walls (invisible walls, secret passages, walls that can be shot and destroyed). But the most interesting game piece is the Object, a programmable creature that can take on any appearance. Each Object contains a script written in a language called ZZT-OOP (ZZT Object-Oriented Programming), a simple programming language.\n\nHere's an example of ZZT-OOP:\n\nThat tells an Object to move north (or up) six times, then shoot a bullet east, then display a haughty message on the screen. That's pretty simple, something someone who's never coded before should be able to understand. Though it's simple, ZZT-OOP is also surprisingly robust: each Object has its own script, and can receive messages from the player and from each other. Here's a more complicated example of two Objects interacting:\n\nWhen the vase is shot (the colon indicates a message the Object can receive) it sends a message to the object named Collector (the @ indicates an Object's name), which causes the Collector to display a message and briefly animate (#char is the \"change character command\"; character 1 is a hollow smiley face and character 2 is a filled smiley face. The direction \"i\" means \"idle\"; it tells the object to wait a moment between flipping its character).\n\nAuthors have taken advantage of ZZT-OOP to do things author Tim Sweeney never envisioned. One can create a Super Mario Bros.\u2013style jumping game by creating button Objects that, when touched by the player, send messages causing a Super Mario Object to move left or right or jump, and that falls when there's nothing beneath it. Recently, someone built a machine that graphs sine waves in ZZT. Creative authors have bent the tools they were provided with to entirely different ends than they were intended for.\n\nWhat's interesting about ZZT is not only the robustness and versatility of ZZT-OOP, but the simplicity of the game's overall presentation. Because all of the graphics and sounds that a ZZT world can produce are already inside it, it frees authors from having to worry about asset creation. They can just design with the tools they have in front of them. This makes it an ideal introduction to scripting and design, and I know a handful of game designers who got their start making ZZT worlds.\n\nHouse Rules\n\nThere's a concept in non-digital games called \"house rules.\" Because players keep the rules in board and card and physical games, and because all the players have to agree on what rules they'll play by, it's easy for the players to change the rules or invent new rules to suit themselves. Maybe they feel as though their modification will correct an oversight on the part of the designer: part of the game may not quite work as it's presented. Or perhaps they've thought of a variation on the rules that's more interesting to them as veterans of the game. Maybe they need the game to be easier or harder, or to change it so it better suits the circumstances in which they're playing it: a game of Tag where the goals change to suit the space that's available, for example.\n\nIn digital games, the rules are kept by the computer and thus are somewhat hidden from the player. Adding house rules to a digital game seems more far-fetched. There are plenty of ways, though, to change games: changing the rules, inventing new rules, inventing new scenarios and whole new games out of the same content. Telling new stories!\n\nWhat's really valuable about hacking and modifying games is the realization that there are ways of interacting with games other than just playing them: roles beyond consumer. Inventing rules is, after all, inventing games. The knowledge that games can be changed and remixed is the knowledge that games can be created: it's a small conceptual leap from the one to the other. While game creation tends to be more interdisciplinary\u2014using the Valve Hammer Editor allows the creator access to all of the 3-D models, textures, sounds, characters, and such from Half-Life, letting her focus on design\u2014there are game creation tools now that are as easy to approach as the typical level editor.\n\nI said that the first level editor I encountered was Excitebike's. I've played with plenty through the years: ZZT and its sort-of successor MegaZeux, Dezaemon 3D (a spaceship shooter kit for the Super Famicom), Knytt Stories (a jumping-and-climbing story creator), Tombs of ASCIIroth (a text-mode puzzle game kit), Ragdoll Masters (rubber dolls fighting each other in the air), The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (a fantasy computer role-playing game). I've used whatever tools I could get my hands on to tell stories.\n\nYou can, too. And once you've realized that videogames\u2014even if they're made by big corporations with teams of hundreds and budgets of millions\u2014are mutable, and can be reinvented by a single person, you can start to imagine what's possible when you have the means to create games that are entirely your own.\n\nFootnotes\n\n40 More information on the history of all three games can be found at [http:\/\/www.gameology.org\/reviews\/quest_for_bush_quest_for_saddam_  \ncontent_vs_context](http:\/\/www.gameology.org\/reviews\/quest_for_bush_quest_for_saddam_ content_vs_context).\n\n41 http:\/\/www.zophar.net\/utilities\/neslevel\/smb-utility.html.\n\n42 http:\/\/www.opensorcery.net\/mutation.\n\n43 See \"The Female Skin Pac for Quake\": http:\/\/www.opensorcery.net\/mutation\/patches.html.\n\n44 Newman, James. Videogames, 57. The PMS Clan still exists, but has apparently been co-opted by corporate interests and has been rebranded Pandora's Mighty Soldiers.\n\n45 http:\/\/hyperbound.net.\n\n46 http:\/\/mother3.fobby.net\/or..\n\n47 Though you probably shouldn't. Spoilers.\n\n48 Lev Grossman, \"The Art of the Virtual,\" Time, November 8, 2004, http:\/\/www.time.com\/time\/magazine\/article\/0,9171,995582,00.html.\n\n49 http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=uSGZOuD3kCU.\n\n50 http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=bKEr5RRKoO4.\n\n51 View it online at http:\/\/vimeo.com\/609147.\n\n52 http:\/\/www.blendogames.com.\n\n53 http:\/\/www.radiator.debacle.us.\nChapter Five\n\nThe New Videogame\n\nThe La La Land series was created by Matt Aldridge under the alias \"The Anemic.\" It's a series of five games, each supposedly based on one of the author's dreams. The games are populated with recurring scrawl-doodle characters whose features are abstract enough to be sinister. The protagonist, Biggt (pronounced like \"bigot\"), has a smile that's Glasgow-wide and a pair of eyes that don't line up. The music is often seemingly incongruous: the climax of La La Land 5 happens with the anti-evolution song \"I'm No Kin to the Monkey\" playing in the background. And the arbitrary goals the games give the player are almost always revealed to be against the protagonist's best interest.\n\nThe first one I stumbled upon was La La Land 2. In this game, Biggt is confronted by a towering snaggletooth fish head, baby pink and jittering, which tells him: \"it's ok to steal from the rich cos they havelots [sic] to spare!\" A counter\u2014which in most games would be nailed to a fixed point on the screen, but in this game jiggers and jumps from point to point\u2014reads \"$0.00.\"\n\nBiggt travels left to a screen where crow-like \"nobles\" with fish heads sit at opposite corners of a long table. A figure that resembles Biggt is on a pedestal, face in his hands. As he cries, some of the tears pass through pipes and fill the nobles' wineglasses. At the far left is a hay-colored, shapeless pile that represents gold. Biggt scoops up an armful, making the pile smaller, and carries it back to the initial fish head, adding money to the counter. The fish head says, \"Oh thanx biggt i want MORE.\"\n\nThe player runs back and forth between the fish head and the nobles, redistributing wealth. When the player has stolen enough money, the fish head rises up to reveal a gold medallion hanging from one of its bones. \"Look at the shini JEWELS I bougt thanks. a lot.\" Returning to the nobles, the player finds them dead at their table. \"without money how were, the nobles to surivve?\" The game then closes.\n\nPersonal and abstract, The Anemic's La La Land games were the first games of their kind that I encountered, and they would never have been made if not for Game Maker.\n\nI'm not sure when La La Land 2 was created, but in 2003, when I was seeking out the other games in the series, I discovered a game called Seiklus by an admirer of the La La Land games. The author, cly5m, had made worlds for Tim Sweeney's ZZT that were as dreamlike as La La Land, if a bit larger in scope. (One, Kudzu, involves making a collect call to heaven at a melting payphone and visiting a hall filled with imprisoned invisible people.) American by birth, cly5m had visited the country of Estonia on a religious mission, then returned to America and discovered Game Maker. Seiklus is the Estonian word for \"adventure.\"\n\nSeiklus begins with a boy and girl watching the stars on a cliff. A meteor hits and causes the boy to fall into a valley below. The game ends when he has found his way back to the girl. To return, the player has to collect colored tokens, which are found in a giant hollow tree, on a quiet, snow-covered landscape, in a dark land full of bones, and inside the stomach of an enormous creature. All of these scenes were hand-drawn by cly5m himself; the thick line art style is as unmistakably his as the collection of pastoral-alien dream scenes.\n\nTo the West\n\nFrom my current perspective, I can say that what I always wanted to do was make videogames, but as a child, making videogames was something mystical that I never thought I'd be capable of it. So I funneled my creativity into other channels. I was better at writing than drawing, so I was a creative writing major in college.\n\nAfter playing Seiklus, I figured that if cly5m could make the transition from making add-ons for ZZT to making self-contained games in Game Maker, then I could do the same.\n\nI had taught myself to program a little, particularly in a language called Blitz Basic, in which I had recreated a few games that I knew. I had made a board game\u2013like version of PAC-MAN where the player and the ghosts took turns moving rather than moving at the same time. Making objects move and react to each other all at once was something that was beyond me, and objects' placement on the screen had to be hard-coded, making it difficult to experiment with actual design. Game Maker was refreshingly similar to ZZT to me: every individual object had its own instructions to tell it what to do and how to react to the other objects. I could draw every object, give it instructions, put it wherever I wanted to on the screen, and let the program play out and resolve interactions based on how I'd told the objects to behave.\n\nMy first Game Maker game was called Jaywalker. In Jaywalker, the player controls a disembodied head named Marjorie with a HotHead Paisan\u2013style crown of orange hair and a stud in her nose (I think I made the game around the time I first got my nose pierced.) Marjorie is fiercely about the rights of pedestrians, and is committed to destroying as many cars as possible. The player moves her back and forth across a busy intersection, causing cars to swerve around her and crash into each other. Cars will crash into cars that have already been wrecked, creating huge pile-ups and causing Marjorie to stick out her tongue triumphantly. If she's ever hit by a car, the game is over.\n\nI dropped out of college some time after creating Jaywalker. When I quit, I was in my fourth year of school with no end in sight. I didn't see myself as a writer, I hated school, and I thought (and think) that \"higher education\" is bullshit.\n\nI spent another year in New York, where I was born. I made some more games during that time. Terrified I'd be stuck in the same spot for the rest of my life, I decided I needed a reason to move somewhere far away and a way to earn rent, a trade that I could learn while I was there. The thought of earning my living by making games was exciting: why not go to a games college in another part of the country, perfect my craft, and find a way to pay my rent by making videogames?\n\nSpecialized videogame schools had been around for a while at this time. I had known of DigiPen, in Seattle, since I was a teen, and had recently heard of Full Sail, a movie school in Florida, but both of those seemed to me like game programs tacked on to visual arts schools. I chose the Guildhall at Southern Methodist University because it was the only school I discovered that had a level design focus. (A Game Maker game I made after quitting creative writing school, Invader, which was about an alien from the game Space Invaders crash-landing on a weird planet and having to find her way off, was part of my portfolio.)\n\nThe Guildhall was in the middle of Plano, Texas. Plano, Texas, is brown and not much else. They have a Frito-Lay factory, parking lots, and a videogame school. At the time, I kept a strict vegan diet and didn't drive. There was nothing to eat and nowhere to go.\n\nBut the latter didn't matter; when you were at the Guildhall you had no life outside the Guildhall. I remember the first day of orientation, sitting in a lecture hall with my future classmates and the spouses they'd brought with them to this wasted brown land. One of the other level design students had his wife and their year-old child with him. \"Give her a kiss and say good-bye,\" the director of the school told him in front of the assembly. \"You're not going to see her for two years.\"\n\nI was in Plano, Texas, for six months.\n\nYou're at school from nine to five. You stay after and do your work with the teams they've assigned you to. Late at night you drag yourself home and do your actual homework. Maybe you get a few hours of sleep. The idea behind the school is that you're always in what the Big Games Industry calls \"crunch time\": unpaid overtime. Your masters want the game done by Christmas, so you don't leave the office until it's done. This is why people in the industry aren't healthy; this is why they burn out and quit games within a few years. This is why you miss the second year of your daughter's life. This is their scheme: you put up with crunch time all the time while you're in school, so when you work for a big publisher\u2014or, rather, a studio contracted by a big publisher\u2014you won't complain about being told you can't see your daughter until the game's done. The Guildhall boasts an over 90 percent employment rate, and it's true: they will get you a job in the games industry. That's because they will make you into exactly the kind of worker the games industry wants. It's that kind of school.\n\nAnd it works; that's the horrifying thing. My classmates were all self-identified gamers and game fans and were willing to put up with anything in order to live their dream of making videogames. That's the carrot the industry dangles, and it's what we take away from the industry when we create a form to which anyone can contribute. As long as the industry is allowed to continue acting as the gatekeeper to game creation, people will continue to accept the ways in which the industry tramples the lives and well-being of the creative people who make games, rather than challenging the insane level of control that publishers ask over developers' lives.\n\nNeedless to say, I was not at the school long. I butted heads with lecturers too many times, I asked too many questions, and my Oblivion mods were too experimental (I didn't include messages that popped up and told the player she'd achieved her goal because I didn't think the player was too stupid to realize that.) Eventually I was pulled into the director's office and asked to leave. \"If your unit is marching to Fort Worth, you don't ask 'what if we go to Austin instead.'\" That's a paraphrase of what the school's director told me.54 I've had a while to think about this, and I've since decided that if you know there's an army waiting to ambush you at Fort Worth, it's fatally irresponsible not to try to dissuade your comrades from marching there blind.\n\nI said that I was in Texas for six months. Each semester at the Guildhall was just over two months long; they canned me the first day of the third semester. I spent the last month or so getting my stuff moved back to New York and making a game called Calamity Annie.\n\nCalamity Strikes\n\nStranded in Plano, Texas, with everyone I knew occupied with school all of the day and most of the night, working on Calamity Annie is what kept me from going stir-crazy until I flew back to New York.\n\nThe protagonist and namesake of Calamity Annie is a brash young dyke who rolls into the Old West (from the New West, naturally) with her breasts bound and a pistol in her holster. She tears across the countryside, dropping hombres in one-on-one shootouts. Along the way she meets a lady named Valentine with a different past but the same breed of loneliness. If the player's sharp enough, Annie and her Valentine ride off into the sunset together at the end.\n\nThe whole game is played with the mouse, by pointing to aim and clicking to shoot. A duel consists of \"holstering\" your cursor at the bottom of the screen, waiting for the call of \"DRAW!\" and quickly aiming and firing before your opponent can do the same. Interactions with Annie's love interest use the same controls. The first time you meet her, Valentine will ask for a light for her cigarette. Aim at the cigarette, click, and PEW! Flirtation has begun.\n\nIt's a hard game\u2014the quick-draw contests get quicker and quicker, and eventually the player has just milliseconds to react. But even when the player gets GAME OVER and Annie spills some blood, Valentine patches her up, and their relationship goes on. What's between them outlasts any individual firefight. Every play of the game isn't self-contained but is\u2014in a small way\u2014fitted into the ongoing tale of love and connection, which the gunfights are just a means to developing.\n\nCalamity Annie is a lot of things to me. It's about being an angry young woman in a hostile land (that just so happens to be Texas), trying to prove your worth. I certainly was trying to do that after they kicked me out of the Guildhall. I was making a game, and I was doing it my way: I built every piece of the game myself. I drew all the pictures; I wrote all the music; I scripted all the events in Game Maker. If the Guildhall taught me anything, it was that videogames needed to be saved from the industry, that a creative form deserves better than an assembly line production process.\n\nBut the game is also about love, and how passion finds love. I had started seeing a loud-ass submissive named Daphny Drucilla Delight David shortly before starting at the Guildhall, and the workload had kept me away from her except for one week of vacation between each semester. The time we got to spend with each other while I was at school was mostly limited to me calling her and crying from the stress of having to split my energy between standing up to teachers, finishing my work, and doing good work, when all I wanted to do was make games.\n\nI'm writing this, three years later, from the apartment where I live with her in California. The theme of Calamity Annie is that being driven will drive you to love, and that passionate people are attracted to passion. Annie was one of the first in a series of games that led to my being able to pay for a home and food by making games, which is what I went to Texas to seek. But it didn't come from the Guildhall. It came from me, from my stubbornness, and the stubborn friends who helped me.\n\nLater games have made me more money\u2014I asked players who wanted to support Calamity Annie for a donation of at least a dollar, in exchange for which they got a bunch of secret bad guys to shoot (I made a few hundred total)\u2014but I still think of Annie as my most important game. It's everything I realized I wanted games to be. It's personal (Annie has my name, after all) and it has a clear, unmuddied mechanical idea that translates perfectly to a storytelling idea. I want games to tell stories, and Calamity Annie tells my story, or at least the story of my stay in Texas.\n\nAuthors\n\nMy friend Lamar Williams is working on a documentary about videogame creators called You Meet the Nicest People Making Videogames. In one of the project's trailers, he points out that the idea of digital games as the product of teams is a myth: many of our most important games, and the ones that have been the most widely duplicated, are almost entirely the projects of impassioned individuals.55 The examples that appear in the trailer are: Another World, a game about finding friendship during a struggle for survival in an alien world, created by Eric Chahi (who even painted the cover art for the game himself!); Karateka, a kung fu game with strong visual storytelling by Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner; Defender, a seminal arcade game by Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar; and Berzerk, almost as seminal an arcade game by Alan McNeil. He goes on to show contemporary games by individual authors, some of them made in Game Maker.\n\nThere's nothing unnatural about a digital game by an individual creator (or a pair of creators). It is, in fact, much harder to keep the idea behind a game coherent when the designer is managing a team of many people who are each working on one aspect of the game separately. That's part of the reason why contemporary big-budget games have so much clutter and so few strong ideas. The games are all over the place because the creators were all over the place. It's hard to have a strong singular vision when the process of creation is spread so thin.\n\nDigital games contain video, audio, animation, design, and rules. You can parcel out these roles, but the closer they remain to each other, the more cohesive the work you create. If I'm the designer and I'm also drawing the spaceship that appears in the game, I know exactly how I intend to use that spaceship in terms of play, what its place is in the larger story, and what its appearance should express. I have a vision, in other words.\n\nBooks are written by single authors or by author-editor teams. Visual art is typically made by an individual artist. It makes sense for creators to be close to their work and to own their work completely, and that's something that the big teams that big-budget games demand can't have. When an individual or pair is solely responsible for a work you can watch an individual style develop: you can trace themes, both mechanical and otherwise, across a creator's work. (The Anemic's La La Land games, though each game is very different from the rest, have a strong singular style that persists throughout the series.)\n\nAnd being able (or learning to) identify the individual style, and growth, of individual authors leads to better criticism and a critical understanding of games. Not to mention, like I said, more personal games, more relevant games, more games with something to say. I want a world where everyone is capable of sitting down at a computer and making a game by herself. This is not to say that all games need to be made that way, but as a paradigm, I think the individual author has more to offer us than the team, especially at a time when videogames are so seemingly creatively bankrupt.\n\nDeath from Overwork\n\nI first became aware of Jesse Venbrux, a game designer from the Netherlands, in 2008 because of his game Execution. When the player starts this game, she sees, through the sight of a gun, a prisoner tied to a stake. If the player shoots the prisoner, the prisoner dies, and the player is told, \"You lose.\" If the player starts the game a second time to try to avoid losing, she again sees the same prisoner, still riddled with bullet holes.\n\nExecution (a direct inspiration for Calamity Annie) points out something about causality in games: in particular, it points out how, as players, we expect to be allowed to undo and redo our choices at whim. The game takes just a few minutes to make this point: it's the kind of game that could never be a commercial product, but nevertheless has something essential to tell us.\n\nExecution would probably never have been made without Game Maker. Jesse Venbrux might never have dug into game creation were it not for Game Maker. Though he's more recently gotten involved in Flash game creation and released games for the iPhone and its permutations, his website lists Game Maker\u2013created games going as far back as 2004.56 In Venbrux's body of work we can clearly see ongoing themes, both mechanical and contextual. His 2007 Frozzd, which was created for a Game Maker theme competition (entrants were asked to design games with a \"winter\" theme), involves navigating free-floating, irregularly shaped planets that all have their own gravity. That is, the player can walk all the way around the surface of one and arrive where she started, before jumping off and flying to another one. His 2010 game Maru features the same kind of irregular planet navigation, as does his most recent game (as of this writing), They Need To Be Fed for the iPhone.\n\nHis 2008 game Deaths remembers every time any player playing the game anywhere in the world meets death. Players will see the corpses of the last fifty players to have played the game, indicating particularly difficult areas and hidden traps. There is one screen in which players must continually die in order to build a bridge of corpses for future players to reach a high plateau (this is where the earlier-mentioned We the Giants gets its seed). His 2008 and 2009 diptych, You Made It and You Probably Won't Make It, also remember the player's death, painting patches of blood wherever she encounters a deadly spike. In the former game, this is especially important because the blood will paint over the visual information from the previous screen, showing what the terrain actually looks like. (In this game, nothing the player sees is ever erased from the screen. It is only overwritten by new information.)\n\nThe theme of protagonist death as narrative progress is an important one in Venbrux's work. His Karoshi series of games (Karoshi can be translated from Japanese as \"death from overwork\") require the player to guide the protagonist, a suit-and-tied salary man, to his death in a series of increasingly convoluted screens. Sometimes, in a similar vein to Execution, the levels of Karoshi force the player to make use of something she thought was external to the game in order to proceed. For example, there's a stage in Karoshi 2.0 called \"What's On the Menu Today?\" In this stage, the player must quit to the game menu\u2014the screen where the player selects what stage she wants to play. The protagonist follows and falls to his death. Another stage requires the player to put a CD in her computer so that a boom box on the screen can play loudly enough to shunt a safe onto the protagonist.\n\nSure enough, Venbrux's iPhone game They Need To Be Fed requires the player to feed the protagonist to a monster at the end of every stage in order to complete the stage. (His 2008 game Pazzon requires the player to lead characters to the dinner tables of other game inhabitants.) It also features some of Venbrux's recurring \"characters,\" such as the guided missile launchers that appear in his 2009 Focus, which in turn features the protagonist of You Made It.\n\nWe can notice and trace details and themes like these from game to game because each of these games is almost entirely the work of a sole, identifiable author. It makes us better, more literate critics of games to be able to see and discuss the progress of Jesse Venbrux as a designer. And it makes games more richly personal if we can play them in the context of the ongoing work and growth of a knowable author. This is a more useful paradigm than viewing games as the work of nebulous teams of hundreds.\n\nThe Author in the Games marketplace\n\nAt the time that Jesse Venbrux started making games, there was no place for him to market his work. Six years later, he's released a game for sale through the Apple Store. While this book isn't about making games for money\u2014it's about making games for the sake of having more games by more people, and there will always be more hobbyist authors than commercial authors\u2014I think it's worth discussing the changing videogames marketplace in the context of the changing videogames paradigm. Just as digital games are starting to be thought of as the work of an author rather than a corporation, there is a growing place for solo game authors in the marketplace, and people can make a living doing this (though it's not easy).\n\nI've been making my living in recent years by selling Flash games to \"sponsors.\" Flash is an infrastructure for embedding movies and games in websites, and sponsors will pay for the privilege of including good games in their websites because games attract players who look at ads, and then explore the rest of the site to play more games and look at more ads. The more traffic a website gets, the more valuable that site is to advertisers, so traffic from popular games is important to site owners. Flash is much more complicated to use than something like Game Maker (although that's changing in a small way with tools like Stencyl, Flixel, and FlashPunk), and requires the kind of dedication that someone who just wants to make games in her spare time isn't likely to be able to spare. It's an avenue, though, for solitary authors to make the games they want and to find money for them.\n\nThe first Flash game I sold is about a flying pig. I sold it to Newgrounds\u2014the \"Everything, By Everyone\" portal I mentioned earlier\u2014for enough money to help me move from America's East Coast to the West. Later I sold a game called REDDER for twice as much, and while working on this book I sold a game called Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars to Adult Swim for enough to keep me out of trouble for a while. I like this model because it means that although I get paid for my work, the game remains free to players. That's important, because I want as few barriers between my work and its audience as possible.\n\nLike Jesse Venbrux, I've also released an iPhone game, although mine is totally free. It's also based on a game I made in Game Maker\u2014a friend of mine with greater technical knowledge, Bennett Foddy, programmed the iPhone version. The game's called Chicanery,57 and it's about the interactions that go on between players outside of the digital components of the game (the stuff that's on the screen). Each player's goal is to keep a finger on the screen as long as possible, and to hinder the other players' abilities to do that. Usually the players do this by punching, shoving, or tickling each other. A guy I met who worked at WayForward Technologies later showed me the dent that playing the game had made in his iPhone.\n\nWhen they're not free like Chicanery, iPhone games are usually sold for a dollar or two. And Apple has total control over its marketplace and what games can be sold within it, and is willing to wipe out games without a second word, as they did in 2010 with thousands of games they thought were too \"sexual.\"58 But the fact that authors are selling games there, and sometimes making a profit, shows that the digital games marketplace is making room for a new paradigm. Note that the Apple Store sells games exclusively through digital distribution\u2014there's no publishing or manufacturing cost whatsoever.\n\nSimilar markets are Android phones, Steam for the computer, and the Xbox Live Marketplace. These are all digital distribution stores tied to specific technologies, and each is run by a corporation that exercises total control over what content is available on which device. It's a situation that leaves creators at the mercy of corporations, but it's a sign, at least, that avenues are appearing for solitary authors to make money by creating games. And, hopefully, there will soon be more avenues, and decentralized ones.\n\nSome authors take it upon themselves to sell and distribute their own games. My friend Edmund McMillen sold a CD with a bunch of his games and drawings on it\u2014his attempt to create a game-as-zine. One of the things I used to do was to release a game that was free to play from start to finish\u2014again, free is important\u2014but to offer a secret password to anyone who donated at least a dollar. The password unlocked additional characters that would show up in the game as neat surprises. I got a few people who donated exactly one dollar, but most people gave five or ten: the invitation to donate was all they needed.\n\nBut that's enough about money. What I'm interested in is game creation as a goal in and of itself.\n\nCrap Games\n\nGlorious Trainwrecks is about bringing back the spirit of postcardware, circa 1993. It's about throwing a bunch of random crap into your game and keeping whatever sticks. About bringing back a time when you didn't care so much about \"production values,\" as much as ripping sound samples from your favorite television shows to use in your game, or animating pictures of yourself making goofy faces on your webcam. Where every ridiculous idea you had, you would just sit down and code. When you would make up a \"company name\" to legitimize dorking around on the computer with your friends. . . .\n\nTogether, you and I will bring the true spirit of indie gaming back. Yes, you! For this site is about nothing, if it is not about getting off your ass and creating. Wikipedia claims that they used to stage trainwrecks (with empty trains, of course) for the amusement of the general population. Would the world not be a better place if we brought this tradition back?\n\nSo states Jeremy Penner on his website, Glorious Trainwrecks (at glorioustrainwrecks.com), founded in 2007. The site is interested in a videogame application of the \"Crap Art\" philosophy59: that professionals aren't the only ones who should make art, and that creation is a meaningful goal in and of itself. Games are more wonderful, more creative, and more inventive when they're thrown together around an idea with little regard for production values or painstaking creative choices. There was no place to explore the videogame as an act of raw creation, so Glorious Trainwrecks was built to provide one.\n\nOn the third Saturday of every month, Glorious Trainwrecks holds an event called Klik of the Month Klub, after Klik & Play, the simple, ugly game creation system (designed for children and people who have never made games before) that most of the participants prefer. But there are no enforced rules about what tools people can use, what they should make, or how much time they should take, though it's in the spirit of the thing to finish the game, from start to end, in two hours.\n\nThe experience forces participants to get past their egos and their meticulous plans for future epic games, to stop focusing on details and CREATE. Klik of the Month is about doing, not planning. Having to finish a game in two hours keeps authors from getting hung up on lesser decisions about their games. This is why Klik & Play is so well suited for the exercise: it's full of clip art, stock sound effects, and design shortcuts. All the resources are already there: just get your hands dirty.\n\nThe results are usually sloppy and haphazard. That's what the glory is: having made something raw and improvised. During different Kliks of the Month, I made a version of Pong where touching the ball makes you lose points (Dodgeball), a game about escorting vulvas back to their home planet (Box Pushing Game), a game about pushing sumo wrestlers into basketball nets with your belly (Sumo Dunk), and a pile more. In 2007, Glorious Trainwrecks ran a two-day event (the 100-in-1 Klik & Play Pirate Kart) that produced one hundred games. We did it again in 2010 and produced 529 games by over a hundred people. People have the desire and creativity to make games; they're only stopped by the roadblocks that get put in the way. Tear down the roadblocks and we'll have so many more games\u2014and more important, more authors.\n\nGame Sketches\n\nWhat will help to tear down those roadblocks and allow games to be more creative\u2014in the sense of, \"Let's create something!\"\u2014are tools that allow more spontaneity. Klik & Play comes with a bunch of clip art that the author can easily appropriate toward other ends. Game Maker allows the author to draw sprites right in the program before giving them rules and actions to perform. Stencyl allows instant access to an online database of resources other creators have already made. That's the solution, I think: to put as little distance as possible between the idea and a playable game. Certainly, many authors will spend a lot of time adding details to their games and developing their ideas. But there's value in ideas, especially in a form so young, and those ideas need to be put out there.\n\nThere's no way to sketch in games. In half an hour, I can sit with a pencil and paper and draw some dumb little comic strip. Videogames have no easy equivalent to that. And yet dumb little games are important because they enrich our vocabulary of ideas. The ideal game-making tool, I think, would look like a sketchpad: I could draw a landscape with a character in it, then give that character rules about how she could move across that landscape.\n\nThe editor that Fred Wood made for his game, Love,60 comes close. Love is a simple little game about a stick figure who navigates a world by running and jumping; if she touches anything dangerous, she dies. To create a Love level, all an author has to do is draw it. The game will figure out how the stick figure interacts with the level. What stops the editor from being perfect is the fact that the author has to split the drawing into a few different images: a layer for things the player can touch and a layer for things that will kill the player on touch. But this is the right direction: if level design can be as simple as drawing a sketch, then game making can be as quick as putting an idea onto the screen.\n\nAnd someone that doesn't know how to script or code probably knows how to draw\u2014at least, to sketch. All of the most successful game-making tools for non-professionals I've seen have looked like this. Warioware: D.I.Y. is probably the most mainstream commercial game-making software I've encountered, in that it was developed by a big publisher (Nintendo) for sale on store shelves. And while Nintendo makes it hard for people to actually distribute games they've made with the software (if the tool had a YouTube-like gallery where people could browse and play other peoples' creations, it would have changed a generation), the process of creating a game is brilliant.\n\nWarioware is for the Nintendo DS, which has a touch screen and plastic stylus. Player-authors can draw sprites on the screen like they're drawing with a marker. Then they assign the sprites simple rules to tell them what to do during the game. But there are also a number of constraints that keep the author from being too ambitious: each game is only seconds long, the author only has a handful of objects to work with, and there's an equally limited number of sprites. This is a tool that's designed specifically to create very small games, and that's good, because small games are exactly what we need more of.\n\nThe proliferation of small games also serves another goal: it'll make games more personal. Ian Bogost, writing for Gamasutra, discussed the potential of games by way of talking about snapshots. The introduction of cheap portable cameras like the Kodak Brownie in the 1960s allowed people who were not professional photographers with access to expensive cameras and lenses to document anything, including things that held little or no value for anyone other that the taker:\n\n[Consider] You're Invited to Go to Heaven, a simple quiz game. . . . You're Invited is a rudimentary example of Christian evangelism.\n\nThe game poses just a single question, \"Who is the Lord of your life,\" and offers four answers: Chris Brown, Orlando Bloom, Zac Efron, and Jesus Christ. The \"correct\" choice is obvious, and it's tempting to write off this game as trite, even worthless.\n\nIts single question would seem barely to qualify it as a quiz game, a genre itself on the very fringes of the medium.\n\nBut there is something deliberate and honest about its simplicity: this is not a game meant to inspire conversion or even head-scratching; it's just a little touchstone in someone's day for reinforcing what's really important to the believer.61\n\nIt might be hard to see the value in a thousand versions of You're Invited to Go to Heaven, but the real value of people producing digital games as quickly and easily as photographs is more subtle:\n\nThe Brownie teaches us that snapshots aren't just good pictures created easily thanks to simple tools. They are also good pictures\u2014or games\u2014created for different purposes. The future of video game snapshots will require platform creators to show their potential users how to incorporate games into their individual lives.\n\nThe result could be very important. The snapshot didn't just popularize photography as chaff, it also helped more ordinary people appreciate photography as craft. The successful game creation platform will be the one we can say the same of, someday.62\n\nMaking games more pervasive\u2014not just games, but game CREATION\u2014will help us to better appreciate games and think about the craft and design of them. It'll also, I think, demystify game creation. We won't think of games so narrowly because we'll understand that they're capable of telling many different stories: stories about dyke cowgirls getting their girlfriends off booze, for example, or a record of a dream.\n\nThe ideal game-making tool, the game sketchpad, isn't here yet, but there are many tools that are close\u2014or at least much closer than what engineers had to work with back in the day. But even given that, how do you, with little to no game making experience, get your feet wet and your hands dirty? How do you make a game?\n\nFootnotes\n\n54 Paraphrase only because I don't remember which two actual cities he named.\n\n55 You can watch the trailer online at: http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Cvd0GbVCoYw.\n\n56 http:\/\/venbrux.com.\n\n57 http:\/\/itunes.apple.com\/us\/app\/chicanery\/id395775628?mt=8.\n\n58 Jason Kincaid, \"The New App Store Rules: No Swimsuits, No Skin, and No Innuendo,\" TechCrunch, February 20, 2010, http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2010\/02\/20\/app-store-rules-sexy.\n\n59 See the principles of Crap Art explicated at: http:\/\/crapart.spacebar.org.\n\n60 http:\/\/www.love-the-game.com.\n\n61 Ian Bogost, \"Persuasive Games: Video Game Snapshots,\" Gamasutra, September 11, 2008, http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/feature\/3784\/persuasive_games_video_game_.php.\n\n62 Ibid.\nChapter Six\n\nMaking the Games\n\nHow do you become a game author? By making a game! Get an idea, find some tools, and make something you can play. You can improve your craft later. At the start, just getting some experience putting together a game and making creative decisions about it will be incredibly valuable. I'm going to describe a few of the smaller, simpler games I've made and the process by which I made them.\n\nTitle, Interaction, Resolution: Gay Sniper\n\nI made Gay Sniper in May of 2009 during a Klik of the Month Klub, the two-hour game design contest I described in the last chapter. I think I made it in about an hour. It was inspired by a video made by West Virginia 4 Marriage,63 an organization that absolutely does not want queers to gain the right to legally marry in West Virginia. One scene in the video particularly grabbed me: The ideal heterosexual family\u2014one man, one woman, and two kids\u2014sits on a stoop blowing bubbles. (The man is white and the woman brown, so the filmmakers can position themselves as a anti-racist organization.) The narrator: \"Marriage between a man and a woman is held up as the ideal in all of civilized society because of its profound stabilizing influence on our culture, as well as the important economic benefits of strong and intact families. But today that ideal is under an unrelenting attack, and same-sex marriage in Western Virginia is a closer reality than you may think.\" As he says this, a crosshair appears on the screen with the het couple in its sights, personifying the homo who wants to get married as a family-assassinating sniper.\n\nThe shot of the couple through the rifle sight, at least to me, was reminiscent of a videogame\u2014a sniper game like Silent Scope, for example. I decided it should be a game: about a gay sniper who assassinates long-held American values.\n\nI made Gay Sniper in Game Maker. Here's how the game plays: The game starts with a title card. Then the player sees the ideal family from the video through a crosshair. The crosshair is smaller than the screen, and the player can move the mouse to pan the crosshair over the screen. (The player can only see what's inside the crosshair. Anything else is blacked out.) The voice-over from the video\u2014\"marriage between a man and a woman is held up as the ideal in all of civilized society\"\u2014plays. When the player left-clicks the mouse over the family\u2014to pull the trigger\u2014a gunshot is heard, and the game changes to a screen that displays the text \"America is destroyed\" over a picture of the contiguous United States cracking in half. After a couple of seconds, the game ends.\n\nIt's a simple game, much like You're Invited to Go to Heaven. How exactly did I make it?\n\nI'm going to avoid going into too many details in explaining how I made the game work. This isn't intended to be a guide to working with Game Maker: I'm interested in writing a more universal approach to thinking about game design and in making the decisions that guide an idea into a game. If you want more specific details on how to build a game in Game Maker you ought to be able to find them easily, by asking questions of other Game Maker users or by consulting a tutorial on the Internet.64\n\nFirst, let's consider the shape of the game. It's made of three distinct screens: a Title screen that introduces the game's theme, the Crosshair screen where the player takes action, and a screen that displays the Resolution of the player's action (the destruction of America). This is the basic narrative shape. In Game Maker, I could easily use \"rooms\" to arrange these individual screens.\n\nThe Title and Resolution screens are the easiest. Each of these screens needs to do just a few things: show a picture, wait a few seconds, and advance the game (or end the game, in the case of the Resolution screen). To draw the pictures I used a program called PaintShop Pro, though Game Maker has a built-in drawing program that I could've just as easily used. A free drawing program like GIMP could have done the same thing. Here's a list of the pictures I drew: one that says \"Gay Sniper\" in red text on white, and one that says \"America is destroyed\" over a picture of a cracked United States. For the latter, I downloaded a map from the Internet, dyed it red, and drew a big crack along the middle. Then I used Game Maker's built-in timer system, called an \"alarm clock,\" to make those images stay on the screen for a few seconds so the player can read them before going to the next \"room.\" (Though making a manual timer is just as easy as adding one to a counter on each frame, and then doing something when the counter reaches the right number.)\n\nThat's all these two screens do. The Title screen also plays the same little melody that opens the West Virginia 4 Marriage video (a light twinkly tune that helps us prepare to appreciate heterosexual marriage). I recorded that directly from the video using a free program called Audacity65 and imported it into Game Maker. The Title and Resolution screens are easy, as there's no interaction. They just frame the action that happens in the Crosshair screen. Interaction is the tricky part, and also the most important part.\n\nThe Crosshair screen requires a few things: the narration from the video and the sound of a gunshot, for starters. The former I recorded off the video with Audacity, like I did with the melody on the Title screen, and the latter I made with a free sound effects program called SFXR.66 Next, the family in the background. I took two screenshots of the family, one in which they're about to blow bubbles and one in which bubbles are blown, and I used the timer to make the image switch every few seconds to give them a little bit of life. And then there's the crosshair itself: the interaction. There are two parts to the interaction: the player moves the crosshair by moving the mouse, and the player fires the gun by clicking. For the first part, I just needed a crosshair that moved to wherever the player's mouse cursor might be. I drew a round crosshair in Game Maker's drawing program and made the inside of the circle transparent and the outside black. Now I needed to have it follow the cursor, so I used Game Maker's scripting language to check the mouse's position at every \"frame\" of the game, then set the crosshair's position to mouse_x, mouse_y (x being the horizontal position of the mouse on the screen, y being the vertical).\n\nBut I only wanted what's inside the crosshair to be visible. So every frame, after I moved the crosshair, I drew four big black boxes, large enough to cover the screen: one to the top of the crosshair, one to the left, one to the right, and one below. Since we've told the game to check the crosshair's location at every tick of the game's timer, we can easily use that information to plan out where to put the boxes on the screen. An even easier solution would have been to just make the crosshair image twice the size of the screen, with black all around.\n\nThe second part of the interaction is left-clicking to fire the gun. Game Maker includes predefined \"events\" to check player input, such as pressing a key on the keyboard or clicking the mouse. When the player left-clicks, the simple solution would be to tell the \"left-click\" event to stop the narration, play the gunshot sound effect, and advance the game to the Resolution screen. I wanted something a little more ambitious, though: I wanted the player to have to shoot the family. Clicking away from them should fire the gun, but not destroy America.\n\nWhat I did was take one of the pictures I had made of the family and trace over it in two colors, one of which I set to transparent, indicating where the gun would miss, and the other, which outlined the family, indicating where the gun would hit. (This is called a \"collision mask\" in Game Maker.) When the player left-clicks, the game checks where the hidden outline of the family is on the screen, where the crosshair is, and if the two are touching. If they are, the \"event\" stops the narration, plays the gunshot, and goes on to the Resolution screen. Otherwise, it just plays the gunshot.67\n\nSo that's the game: we have a screen that establishes the scenario (\"Gay Sniper\"), one in which the player takes action (moving the crosshair and firing the gun, inevitably shooting the idealized hetero family), and a final screen that resolves that action (with the inevitable destruction of America). What makes it a game is the Crosshair screen. It's the player who does what the video implies; she fills the role of Gay Sniper and fires the gun. This is why I want the player to miss if her crosshair isn't over the family: I want the player to have to consciously aim and shoot, to make her more complicit in the fantasy that the West Virginia 4 Marriage video suggests, and that I am forcing the player to act out. By forcing the player to inhabit a political ideology\u2014because that's what games, uniquely, can do\u2014I am pointing out how absurd it is. It's not a complicated game or a long one, but one I thought was worthy of bringing into the world.\n\nImperfection: Box Pushing Game\n\nIn November of 2009 I made a game called Box Pushing Game for Klik of the Month. That was a particularly exciting Klik of the Month because some friends of mine were in town and we all got together in the same room to make games, and to play and give criticism of each others' games.\n\nBox Pushing Game was intended as a parody of games like Sokoban where the player's goal is to push and arrange a number of crates in a constrained area. (Sokoban translates from Japanese as \"warehouse manager.\") In Sokoban the boxes move along a grid, and the conflict is that pushing the crates around will put them in the way of other crates, forcing the player to plan and manage them carefully.\n\nIn my game, the boxes aren't crates but vulvas. (Box is old slang for \"vagina\" and I'm not sure anyone knows why.) It was an idea I thought up in less than a minute during a conversation, and it was the perfect level of dumb for Klik of the Month.\n\nSo the ideal version of my game would be one in which the player pushes pictures of vulvas (downloaded from the amateur porn site I Shot Myself) neatly along a grid, managing them carefully to ensure that they all reach their destinations. But in the interest of getting the game done in the two hours of Klik of the Month, I was using Klik & Play to make it. And that meant making a lot of compromises. But I could convey the concept of my game\u2014Sokoban with hoo-hoos\u2014without all the particulars having to be exact.\n\nInstead of pushing the boxes along a grid, whenever the player touches a box it just shunts a bit in the direction the player was moving. Instead of being stopped by walls, it just bounces in the opposite direction with a CLANG when it touches one. Instead of having to fill a number of marked spaces with boxes, each level includes \"Mother Boxes\" (bright pink vulvas with eyestalks), each of which vanishes when a box comes into contact with it, taking the box with it. When all of the Mother Boxes are gone, the player goes on to the next level. And instead of checking whether one box is blocking another\u2014which would take time to figure out how to do properly\u2014when two boxes overlap, they resolve the collision by wiggling in random directions until they aren't touching anymore.\n\nIt's a really clumsy solution to the problem of keeping things from occupying the same space, but it doesn't distract from the idea of the game: push a box with a vulva on it from point A to point B. If anything, it gives the game more character and identity: another Klik of the Month participant described the rule as, \"When my box touches another box it goes crazy.\"\n\nAccidents are creative. At a more recent Klik of the Month that we held on the night of a thunderstorm, my friend Loren Schmidt (hereafter called \"Sparky\") was working on a quick implementation of Atari's old Asteroids game. (The player maneuvers to destroy asteroids by rotating a ship left or right and firing an engine for thrust.) When Sparky called me over to look at it, he hadn't yet implemented a screen refresh\u2014that is, everything that was drawn to the screen stayed there instead of going away. So the player's ship, when it moved across the screen, left a long snake-like trail behind it. Sparky really liked the effect and wanted to keep it.\n\nI told him that he should make the asteroids white, the same color as the background, so that they'd be hidden until they passed over the trails that the player (or her ship's bullets) left on the screen, giving her an incentive to move around and cover as much as the screen as possible (while using bullets to gauge the presence of asteroids in her path). The \"accident\" of not implementing a screen refresh led to the author finding an entirely unique identity for the game.\n\nPerfection isn't a useful goal; if anything, it keeps amateurs from getting their feet wet and authors from finishing their works. It's an ideal that hinders more than it serves. Imperfections, creative accidents, and compromises, on the other hand, give a game personality and individuality. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina begins with the line: \"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.\"68 Difference is valuable, and creative accidents and jury-rigs help us achieve it.\n\nImperfection is an invaluable tool when making games, particularly when making your first games. Think about the ways you can approximate an idea with the tools you have and the things you know you're capable of. Don't worry about minutiae: you can express the idea of your game to a player without everything being exactly as you've envisioned it.\n\nUse What's on Hand: Find Shit\n\nMy submissive's first videogame was a Klik of the Month creation called FIND SHIT. She had no prior experience with coding or with game making other than looking over my shoulder. How did she make her game? She was using Klik & Play, so she had access to all of the clip art that comes with it. She put a tiny dancing red bug on the screen. Then she covered the rest of the screen with huge red starbursts. The player's goal is to find the bug hidden in the loud, flashing, abrasive screen before the timer runs out.\n\n69\n\nShe minimized the amount of scripting she had to do (what a lazy pig) by making clever creative decisions about what she had available to her. The only things she had to script were the timer, clicking the bug to advance to the next level, and the message at the beginning of the level that tells the player to find the bug and asks her to click on a button to start. The buttons are a kind of object available in Klik & Play to allow the author to ask yes\/no-type questions of the player. After putting the premade button objects in her game, though, my pig discovered that they're broken: every choice calls the same response. So she made every choice an increasingly apathetic variation on \"YES.\" (For example, the first screen asks the player to \"FIND THE BUG,\" and lets her respond with \"okay\" or \"sure.\")\n\nKlik & Play supports WAV audio files, so she put a bunch in. Playing three of them on top of each other, she found, makes Klik & Play totally freak out and begin playing glitchy machine noises. The shrill nightmare sounds perfectly fit the tone of the game, which is already visually abrasive.\n\nLimitations and Creativity: Shoot! Win!\n\nIn February of 2010, a friend's fianc\u00e9 made a game called Shoot! Win! This game is a shooting gallery of American presidents: images of Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, James Garfield (represented by a picture of Garfield the cat), and other presidents bounce around the screen, while images of their assassins (John Wilkes Booth is a phone booth) pose along the bottom.\n\nThe player presses keys to make assassins fire at the bouncing presidents, trying to shoot a president using the historically accurate assassin.\n\nWhen a president is shot, a voiceover explains why that assassin did not historically assassinate that president and chides you for your incorrect choice. (\"John Wilkes Booth did NOT shoot James Garfield.\") There's a unique voiceover for every combination of victim and assassin (with five assassins and five victims, that's twenty-five vocal samples). These explanations make up the brunt of the game's content; they're what make the game interesting and entertaining to play.\n\nAll it took to create the vocal samples was a microphone, the historical background, and the willingness to record them. Again, the author keeps scripting to a minimum by making the focus of the game something he can easily create. And because the game is built around components that the author had the means to create, it's again unique, different from anything that an author who had the time, resources, and ability to perfectly mimic any existing game might have produced. Limitations, both self-imposed and otherwise, guide our creativity.\n\nWorking Within Limitations: \"Flimsytown\" and \"Pestilence\"\n\nTim Sweeney's ZZT, created in 1991, is a game-making tool that uses ANSI, the sixteen-color text mode that came preinstalled on PCs of the time, to display all its graphics. This limits ZZT authors to a choice of 256 characters\u2014half of which are the letters of the alphabet written in lower and upper cases and using different combinations of diacritical marks\u2014rendered in sixteen possible colors. (Each character can contain two colors, a foreground and a background color, the former for the character itself and the latter for the negative space that surrounds it. Eight of the sixteen colors can only be chosen as foreground colors.) This may seem constrictive, and it is, but authors took the limitations imposed by the program as a creative challenge.\n\nHow do you animate a spinning turnstile, for example, in sixteen colors and 256 mostly alphabetical characters? You might have a character that alternates between an X and a cross. A twinkling star could be a dot that blinks as a +. A club (the playing card symbol) could be colored green and made to stand for a bush or tree. The symbol for pi could be a table. Three different \"pattern\" characters from the extended ASCII character set are similar to different weights of crosshatching, and when combined with a creative mind and an artful use of color can texture a scene impressively.\n\nIn fact, the scenes are more impressive for being drawn within the limitations of 256 characters and sixteen colors. Working within those limitations teaches the author to be clever and creative with what she's given in order to make an impression. The limitations of ZZT also change the terms of the challenge. An author isn't trying to produce something visually beautiful in comparison to the entire body of contemporary videogames, those produced by small armies of artists and those consumed by millions of mainstream gamers, but rather to produce something visually effective within a small set of limitations and for a much smaller body of peers. This narrowing of the set of possibilities helps the author stay focused and avoid the pitfalls of over-ambition.\n\nThe same applies to scripting. Creating a variant of a game like Lemmings might not be technically impressive in most programming environments because it's already been done many times, but in ZZT-OOP\u2014ZZT's scripting language, which is far less powerful than most programming languages\u2014it's a somewhat astonishing feat.70 (That still doesn't mean creating a ZZT version of Lemmings is necessarily valuable; to do so would be an accomplishment on the order of creating an intricate copy of the statue Rape of the Sabine Women in LEGOs. Limitations force you to be inventive, but you can also fall into the trap of pursuing arbitrary technical goals rather than growing as an author and storyteller.) When a small and isolated community consolidates around a game-making tool, creators start to create more and more for each other (because who else is playing?). Their target audience becomes other creators who possess a detailed mechanical understanding of the game they're working with. As a result of authors creating for one another (and challenging one another), their creations become harder and require players to have more mechanical knowledge in order to play a game at all, until most experiences are too hard for most players.\n\nThis is true of a lot of levels made for Knytt Stories (Nicklas \"Nifflas\" Nygren's expandable game about running, jumping, and climbing.) Many of the levels that circulate on Nifflas's online forums71 are about really tricky, difficult maneuvering. So much of the technical ground of what is possible with the tool has already been explored and so many creators who work with Knytt Stories are familiar with the basic and advanced mechanics of the game that creators are naturally drawn toward designing for this group and taking as their starting point something far beyond what most novices using the tool would be capable of easily appreciating.\n\nBut this tendency to design for a select group can also push authors to further unexplored conceptual ground. Recently, I played a Knytt Stories level called \"Pestilence.\"72 In this story, the author has taken the terrain tiles that come with the tool and arranged them seemingly at random to create a broken-looking world. Power-ups that the player would normally expect to collect are locked inside walls, out of reach. The characters who populate the shattered landscape bemoan the hopelessness of their situation as though they were in glitchy videogame hell. (They are, in fact, trapped\u2014the editor for Knytt Stories doesn't provide characters with any means of moving around the world or leaving the place in which the author set them.) Though the world seems to have little order, a player who explores will eventually be able to find one of several ways out.\n\nThis is the sort of experiment with form that rarely happens in a less restrictive format. With the exception of its music, \"Pestilence\" is made entirely from parts included with Knytt Stories; it's the way in which those parts are arranged that is unique. It's easy to arrange tiles in an unconventional order, but to do so with intention, to build a functioning, solvable world out of them? This is the sort of conceptual ground that, I believe, is usually only reached when possibility-space is finite, and when a lot of that space has already been thoroughly mapped. Think of Los Angeles versus New York City: one city, with a great deal of continental terrain, expands outward; the other, built on an island, expands upward.\n\nZZT, unsurprisingly, has an equivalent level to \"Pestilence.\" It's usually called \"Flimsytown.\" \"Town of ZZT\" is the official level packaged with the ZZT editor and program. \"Flimsytown\" starts identically to \"Town of ZZT,\" but quickly diverges, presenting a jarring and confusing experience that requires the player to actually exploit the bugs and glitches inadvertently built into ZZT in order to progress. For a while, supposedly, the website Z2, the most well-known online archive of ZZT levels,73 included \"Flimsytown\" in its ZZT package in place of \"Town of ZZT.\"\n\nBe Derivative: Mighty Jill Off\n\nHi, I'm Der Rivative. Come to see my work? I've got this medical paraphernalia here, which I've made into little objects. Butt-plug stool\u2014some people say it's like Nayland Blake. No, it's mine, Mr. Der Rivative. I made it. Here you have scaffolded video representing my face in six monitors. Some people say Nam June Paik, some people say Bruce Nauman. No, I made it\u2014Der Rivative. I like to lie in bed, as long as I can, let people in the gallery come and see me. Nothing like the Chris Burden on the shelf thing, it's a Der Rivative extravaganza. I invented it. I made it. People come to the museum and say, \"Hey, there's a Der Rivative.\"74\n\n\u2014Bob Flanagan\n\nNothing is original. You've probably heard the old quote about there only being seven basic stories (or three, or fifteen; the number always changes) a thousand times. Quantification aside, the purpose of the quote is to make the listener realize that what's interesting about the story is not the story itself but the way it's told. There are a lot of novel ways to tell stories with games. We've found very few of them so far.\n\nWe're going to find many of them, probably, by accident. Don't worry about making an original game\u2014just worry about making it yours. Many authors start by trying to replicate games they've already seen: Super Mario Bros., Mega Man, and Final Fantasy are popular. And many of those games end up being very different from their antecedents because the authors didn't have the technical or artistic skill to mimic those antecedents exactly, and instead had either to approximate the parts of the game they couldn't replicate or to improvise something entirely new. Or to incorporate a single new idea that changed something significant about the basic model. Or simply to invest the game with their own personality.\n\nOne of my most successful games (in terms of press, not money; the game was released for free on the Internet) is Mighty Jill Off. It's based on a Nintendo game called Mighty Bomb Jack, published by Tecmo in 1986. Mighty Bomb Jack's predecessor game, Bomb Jack, predated Super Mario Bros. and presents a very different vision of the way a videogame about jumping can work. While the emphasis in Mario is on the planning of a jump\u2014the momentum Mario gains on the runway before the jump, the limited English he can spin on his jump while he's actually in the air\u2014the character Bomb Jack is highly maneuverable while in the air. He can jump the entire height of the screen, reverse a jump on a dime, and flap his cape to keep himself from descending too quickly.\n\nI made Mighty Jill Off during the first semester I spent at the Guildhall because I was bored to shit with their lectures and I needed an actual design task to challenge me. For Jill Off, I lifted the entire vocabulary of Bomb Jack\u2014the high jumps, the reversals, the cape flap\u2014and put it in the service of a story about a submissive masochist climbing a tower to prove herself to her Queen. As a pervert who missed her own submissive (who waited for me in California while I toiled at school in Texas), it was a subject that was both on my mind and relevant to the way I experience games: games about challenge are about the relationship between the player and the designer, the former trying to prove her capacity and will to the latter, the latter trying to continuously challenge the former while maintaining her trust.\n\nBorrow whatever you can. If you were to try to complete a jigsaw puzzle with pieces collected from five different puzzle sets, there'd be blanks that the pieces you've borrowed wouldn't fill in. You'll fill in the blanks with your own personality. You'll smudge the corners in a way that is identifiably yours. And you'll create something new: maybe by design, probably\u2014and preferably\u2014by accident. The modern novel started when Cervantes took the stock idea of \"a knight who has adventures\" and put him into his own contemporary Spain. Modern music started when bluesmen took traditional folk songs and began to bend the notes. Modern sculpture began when Duchamp took a space in the gallery reserved for artwork and put a urinal in it. Setting out to make something utterly new can be a trap to a new author: you'll spend forever planning and no time doing. If you get busy without worrying about being original, you're liable to stumble across many more interesting ideas.\n\nMake Weird Shit: Cactus Block\n\nPut weird shit into your game. Make unusual creative decisions. You're not beholden to anyone, so why be conventional? Whenever you see an opportunity to make something a little more distinctive, take it. These are the parts of the game, after all, that are most uniquely you.\n\nGlorious Trainwrecks user chuchino made a game called Cactus Block75 in February 2010. This is a simple game about a huddled figure trudging through the snow from the left side of the screen to her house on the right side of the screen. She can jump, but her house is located atop ledges and cliffs that are far too high to jump to the top of. Fortunately, the player has the power to create additional platforms\u2014blocks\u2014by moving the mouse and clicking on areas of open space. The goal, then, is to place the blocks appropriately in order to climb over the obstacles.\n\nThis is the point at which the author made a Weird Decision. About half the time, when the player clicks the mouse, a deadly cactus will appear instead of a block that's safe to stand on. (If the player touches the cactus, she must start the screen over.) That's a pretty silly idea, but this is the rule that defines the game.\n\nBecause of the unpredictable way that this introduces chance to the player's actions, the player has to plan carefully to accommodate for potentialities. Maybe I click in a less optimal platform location because there's a fifty-fifty chance of my click producing a cactus, and I don't want to block that prime location. Do I take the risk of trying to move forward quickly, depending on a lucky streak of blocks, or do I work slowly, making sure I always have a back-up plan? Do I try the last resort of jumping into the air and clicking immediately under the protagonist, with an equal chance of producing solid ground or instant death? These are all interesting, unique player choices, and they spring from a single unorthodox creator choice.\n\nAs a Klik of the Month game, Cactus Block was made in two hours. It's not the same case as a big-budget commercial game, where lots of money and hours have been invested in a project, and where a publisher expects a return on its investment. If you do something wacky in a two-hour game and it doesn't quite work out, you've gambled and lost just two hours of your time. And I use the word lost reluctantly, because I don't consider any game a total loss, even if the results don't work very well. A \"loss\" here means that you've made something unique and that you have that much more experience putting a game together.\n\nBeyond the potential for interesting design generated by making something weird, any opportunity to do something weird is also an opportunity to put some of yourself in a game. Most of my games star perverts, even if all the perverts are doing is jumping up a tower. Some hobbyists try to emulate what they think of as \"professional\" game development and divorce all aspects of themselves from their games. That's ridiculous! Your game comes from you; your game should contain you. A game you make should have your signature on it. It should reflect something of your personality, your humor, your values. After all, you're only beholden to yourself. Make something that's your own.\n\nWhat to Make a Game About?\n\nYour dog, your cat, your child, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your mother, your father, your grandmother, your friends, your imaginary friends, your summer vacation, your winter in the mountains, your childhood home, your current home, your future home, your first job, your worst job, the job you wish you had.\n\nYour first date, your first kiss, your first fuck, your first true love, your second true love, your relationship, your kinks, your deepest secrets, your fantasies, your guilty pleasures, your guiltless pleasures, your break-up, your make-up, your undying love, your dying love.\n\nYour hopes, your dreams, your fears, your secrets, the dream you had last night, the thing you were afraid of when you were little, the thing you're afraid of now, the secret you think will come back and bite you, the secret you were planning to take to your grave, your hope for a better world, your hope for a better you, your hope for a better day.\n\nThe passage of time, the passage of memory, the experience of forgetting, the experience of remembering, the experience of meeting a close friend from long ago on the street and not recognizing her face, the experience of meeting a close friend from long ago and not being recognized, the experience of aging, the experience of becoming more dependent on the people who love you, the experience of becoming less dependent on the people you hate.\n\nThe experience of opening a business, the experience of opening the garage, the experience of opening your heart, the experience of opening someone else's heart via risky surgery, the experience of opening the window, the experience of opening for a famous band at a concert when nobody in the audience knows who you are, the experience of opening your mind, the experience of taking drugs, the experience of your worst trip, the experience of meditation, the experience of learning a language, the experience of writing a book.\n\nA silent moment at a pond, a noisy moment in the heart of a city, a moment that caught you unprepared, a moment you spent a long time preparing for, a moment of revelation, a moment of realization, a moment when you realized the universe was not out to get you, a moment when you realized the universe was out to get you, a moment when you were totally unaware of what was going on, a moment of action, a moment of inaction, a moment of regret, a moment of victory, a slow moment, a long moment, a moment you spent in the branches of a tree.\n\nThe cruelty of children, the brashness of youth, the wisdom of age, the stupidity of age, a fairy tale you heard as a child, a fairy tale you heard as an adult, the lifestyle of an imaginary creature, the lifestyle of yourself, the subtle ways in which we admit authority into our lives, the subtle ways in which we overcome authority, the subtle ways in which we become a little stronger or a little weaker each day.\n\nA trip on a boat, a trip on a plane, a trip down a vanishing path through a forest, waking up in a darkened room, waking up in a friend's room and not knowing how you got there, waking up in a friend's bed and not knowing how you got there, waking up after twenty years of sleep, a sunset, a sunrise, a lingering smile, a heartfelt greeting, a bittersweet goodbye.\n\nYour past lives, your future lives, lies that you've told, lies you plan to tell, lies, truths, grim visions, prophecy, wishes, wants, loves, hates, premonitions, warnings, fables, adages, myths, legends, stories, diary entries.\n\nJumping over a pit, jumping into a pool, jumping into the sky and never coming down.\n\nAnything. Everything.\n\nGet Your Hands Dirty\n\nSo get to it. Make a game. Your first game will be rough and derivative. It may not change the world, but it will be yours. The next chapter will be an attempt to walk you through your first game step by step. It's intended to be as abstract as possible so that you can apply it to whichever game-making tool suits your needs best. You can find out the details of making that tool do what you want through reading the documentation, asking questions of the community surrounding that tool, or best of all, fiddling with the tool to see how it works.\n\nAs for what tool to choose: Appendix A lists a bunch of different game-making tools that are available, describing what they're good for and what the experience of working with them is like. It's by no means a complete overview of all the game-making software out there\u2014there are far more tools than anyone could document\u2014but I've included those that I think are the most useful and approachable. There will also be tools that are created after this book is published. Nothing that I'd consider the ideal game-making tool exists yet, but I'm confident we'll keep getting closer.\n\nIt's possible that your interest in digital game creation is purely academic and doesn't extend to becoming an author. In that case, I hope that what you take away from this book is that the videogame isn't the creation of a corporation, but of an author, that this form is important, and that people are using it to do exciting things.\n\nIn 2008, Nicklas Nygren (a.k.a. Nifflas, author of Knytt Stories) attended a festival called EDGE in Ume\u00e5, Sweden, with a laptop, a printer, and a digital camera. He asked other festivalgoers to contribute to a game he was working on. They drew pictures, photographed themselves, and sang into a microphone. Over the course of the day, he created a game called Det Officiella Edge-Dataspelet, or The Official Edge Videogame.76 Every image and sound in the game was created by someone Nifflas had pulled from the crowd: the protagonist is a photo of someone's head in profile, the stages are drawn in crayon, the music and sound effects were made by strangers' mouths.\n\nThis is what game creation is becoming: small, personal, and made by people's own hands and mouths instead of by corporations with teams, managers, and software renderers. What we call a videogame is not a product. It's the creation of an author and her accomplice, the player; it is handmade by the former and personally distributed to the latter. The videogame is a zine.\n\nFootnotes\n\n63 You can watch the video online at http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=5vQm0hJ8Dd0.\n\n64 Although the concepts I'll talk about can be implemented using a wide variety of tools, I'll use Game Maker's names for the concepts where appropriate in this section.\n\n65 http:\/\/audacity.sourceforge.net.\n\n66 http:\/\/www.drpetter.se\/project_sfxr.html.\n\n67 Collision detection, telling whether two things are touching\u2014in this case, the mouse and the family's collision mask\u2014is pretty tricky, because it involves comparing a lot of values, yet it's a basic part of most game interactions. GameMaker lets you accomplish it really easily. Every game-making tool you use will allow you to check (or at least improvise a way of checking) whether two things are touching, but some tools will make it harder than others.\n\n68 I totally stole the idea of repurposing this quote from Jared Diamond.\n\n69 There's a video of FIND SHIT being played at http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=zPssxEE_qnE.\n\n70 Lemmings for ZZT exists, naturally. See John D. Moore's Zem! games.\n\n71 http:\/\/nifflas.lpchip.nl\/index.php?PHPSESSID=ebf1b8ac1a8a3fc1f5109d79a1813537&board=39.0.\n\n72 It can be found on Nifflas's forum at http:\/\/nifflas.lpchip.nl\/index.php?topic=1942.0.\n\n73 http:\/\/zzt.org.\n\n74 From Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, DVD, directed by Kirby Dick (Santa Monica, CA: Lions Gate, 1997).\n\n75 http:\/\/www.glorioustrainwrecks.com\/node\/451#comment-3591.\n\n76 http:\/\/nifflas.ni2.se\/?page=Miscellaneous.\nChapter Seven\n\nBy Your Bootstraps\n\nThis chapter is here to help you through your first game. It's not intended as an instruction manual, as an encyclopedic reference, or even as a step-by-step guide. Rather, it's a series of tasks designed to stimulate you creatively, to get you thinking about game design decisions, and to actively involve you in working on a game\u2014which is the most important part. Lots of would-be game creators spend such a long time planning dream games that their ambitions are far too large for them to achieve, or even to know where to start. For others, the whole notion of making a videogame is alien and it's difficult for them to know how to even approach the work from a technical perspective. The steps of this chapter attempt to introduce concepts of game making in a less intimidating way.\n\nThe tasks are purposefully left abstract so that they can be applied to any tool you choose to work with. This means that I'm not providing specific instructions for how to make a character move around in Game Maker, for example. Figuring that out is up to you. Fiddle around, read the documentation, ask questions online. By working it out yourself, you'll start to learn your way around the tool of your choice.\n\nSome tools are very different than others. Twine and Inform, for example, are for making games presented largely through text alone. You'll need to be creative in adapting the tasks below to fit the kind of game you can make with those tools. Remember that these tasks aren't instructions: they're just here to point you in the right direction. Diverge from them as often as possible; do them out of order; ignore the ones that don't fit your vision; leave them behind once you've found your own way. This is just the start of the path. The end is everywhere.\n\nTask #1: Choose a Tool\n\nThe first step is to pick a tool\u2014either one that sounds like it would be useful for the game you have in mind, or one that seems interesting to you and that starts you thinking about what kind of games you might like to make, or that suggests possibilities that your game might explore.\n\nTo make the kind of games most people intuitively think of when they think of videogames, The Games Factory (for Windows) or Game Maker (for Windows or Mac) are strongly recommended for being fairly robust. They're capable of crafting a great variety of games that look and play differently without much difficulty. Game Maker is probably the best-documented tool of its kind, but the current version (rebranded \"GameMaker\" by the soulless corporation that currently controls the intellectual property) makes it difficult and unrewarding to self-publish. But starting with an older version of Game Maker that publishes games for free is a good idea.77\n\nIf Game Maker and The Games Factory are too intimidating, try Scratch. Scratch provides a good introduction to thinking about games in terms of rules, an essential habit for more advanced game making. Every rule in the Scratch editor is essentially a sentence made up of smaller phrases, which helps you understand how rules create the actions in a digital game. There's also a tool called Stencyl that uses the same concept as Scratch, but produces Flash games for online distribution.\n\nI'm also partial to Twine for games that are closer to written fiction. Though you can create projects that include images and other graphical elements if you have knowledge of HTML and CSS (in which Twine is based), Twine is essentially a tool for creating text-only games. It's intended for making branching stories in the vein of Choose Your Own Adventure books, and has a clean visual presentation that shows how passages in the story are connected. Other text game creators like Ren'Py and Inform 7, described more fully later, provide other simple options for creating this kind of game.\n\nIn the next chapter you'll find a fuller list of the tools that I think will make the most sense to people who have no programming or game making experience. I've tried to describe what each tool is good for and what the experience of working with each tool is like. Try more than one. You can always learn to use a new tool. Each one will teach you something different about design.\n\nTask #2: Introduce a Character\n\nA character could be abstract or concrete. It could be a person, an animal, a symbol. It could be represented by a photo\u2014one of yourself or of a loved one or of a stranger that you've grabbed from Google's image search. Mold a character out of clay and take a picture. Open up MS Paint and doodle a cartoon. Find a picture of an American president and draw horns on it. Or just use an image file that comes with whatever tool you're using. Klik & Play includes lots of clip art, and Stencyl lets you grab animated characters from an online database.\n\nTake this image of your character and find a way to start a game and display the character on screen.\n\nOnce you have that, imagine what this character might be capable of doing, and how that will characterize her. It can help to think of this in terms of a question: what job does this character have? Think about what kind of conflict the character might have: what makes it difficult for her to do that job? I once made a game about a robot gardener: her conflict was that coming in contact with water would cause her to short circuit.\n\nLet's say your character starts from a picture of one of your friends, grabbed from Facebook. In the photo your friend is wearing a sombrero. Why would this character you're creating wear a sombrero? Perhaps she's a MATADOR. What forces come into conflict with a matador? Perhaps she'll have to face some RAGING BULLS. A story starts to develop from a single picture that you've taught your program to display on the game screen. (Or the story starts to develop and you change the picture to fit the new story.)\n\nIf you're working with something text heavy like Twine or Inform or Ren'Py, you can, instead of using an image, write an opening passage that characterizes the protagonist, what she's capable of doing, and what her relationship is with the world. In either case\u2014text or image\u2014this is the first piece of information the player will see when she loads your game. So you should choose something that tells her about the game and its world.\n\nTask #3: Teach Your Character to Do Something\n\nSpecifically, teach your character to do something in response to the player. This means teaching the game to TAKE INPUT. The player should be able to press the spacebar, or click the mouse, or type the letter A, or something, and your character should respond to that input somehow. Maybe your character turns invisible while the SHIFT key is held down. Maybe your character flies up the screen when the player hits the UP arrow key. Maybe when the player clicks somewhere on the screen with the mouse, the character teleports there.\n\nAs you do this, think about how what you're teaching the character to do characterizes her. How does being able to teleport anywhere on the screen fit her character? What does that ability tell the player about her? Maybe she's not just any matador, but a MATADOR FROM THE FUTURE. Maybe the raging bulls she comes into conflict with are charging from one side of the screen to the other, and she has to teleport to stay out of their way.\n\nThis is your game's first rule. When the player does X, the protagonist does Q. This is the kind of rule I like to call a \"verb,\" because that's the part of speech this rule would correspond to in a sentence describing your game, one that governs the relationship between the player's character and the other characters in your game. In other words: FUTURE MATADOR (subject) TELEPORTS (verb) to avoid RAGING BULLS (object.)\n\nIf you're working on a text game, write a second passage that describes a location, be it a physical place or a state of mind, so long as it's different from the one the game starts in. Maybe the player starts in a desert, but she can see an oasis in the distance. This second location can be the oasis. Now give the player some means of getting her character to the new location.\n\nTask #4: Introduce a Second Character\n\nThis is the object of the previous sentence. This character should have a relationship to the first character, who we'll start calling the player for short. Maybe the second character represents something the player wants to avoid (raging bulls) or something she wants to acquire (a bag of cash). (Or maybe she wants to avoid the corrupting influence of the bag of cash and touch the confused raging bull, gently, in order to calm it.)\n\nThe relationship between the characters should have something to do with the player's verb. For example, if the player can FLY UPWARD and the object is THE SUN, which the player wants to touch, then writing the game's rules such that the player can fly upward high enough to reach the sun will change the experience of the game. If the player can fly, but never high enough to reach the sun (or perhaps the player can only fly straight upward, and the sun is a little to the left or right), you'll have made a game about unattainable dreams, ones that remain just out of reach. If the protagonist can reach the sun but it burns her wings off, causing her to fall back to the earth and the game to end, you'll have made a cautionary fable. If she can reach the sun, put it in her pocket, and earn one hundred points for it, you'll have made a power fantasy.\n\nRules change not only the meaning but also the feeling of a game. In our future matador game, maybe you'll decide that a raging bull always moves left and right across the screen, or instead, that it always moves toward the protagonist. The latter bull is probably more difficult to avoid than the former. Once you have your rule in mind, experiment with different ways of implementing it to find a feeling and balance that you like.\n\nIt's most likely that you want this character to abide by a rule that's internal to the game\u2014that is, one kept by the computer, not controlled by the player. You could, of course, experiment with giving the player two characters to control in different ways (maybe one of them is a mirror image that moves left when the other moves right), or with making two different characters that are controlled by two different human players.\n\nIf you're writing a text game, introduce an object to the story, one whose relationship with the player introduces a conflict. Maybe when the player reaches into the oasis for a drink, she discovers what appears to be an old, waterlogged map.\n\nTask #5: Make Some Noise\n\nPut a sound effect in your game. Think about which interactions in your game would be clarified by the playing of a corresponding sound. For example, if our matador makes a sci-fi BZZIP sound when she teleports, it would definitely characterize her as a matador that uses future technology. And it would act as punctuation to the teleport, helping the player to understand that clicking to move the character isn't a mistake, but what she should focus on. The bull striking the matador might be accompanied by a drawn-out scream to let the player know that it's an undesirable outcome (or a choir of angels singing if the future matador secretly seeks a glorious death in the ring).\n\nHow do you find sounds to put in your game? Open the sound recording program that comes with your computer (or download a free one, like Audacity78) and record yourself making sounds into your computer's microphone. Try shifting the pitch or the tempo, reversing the sound, adding a thousand phase or distortion effects. Andrew Plotkin made all the sound effects for his 1994 shareware game, System's Twilight, by recording himself making silly noises into a cheap mic. You can even download his sounds if you want; he's made them available.79 You can find plenty of sounds online, at sites like Freesound.org. And many tools, in particular Game Maker and Klik & Play, come with many of sounds for you to use. There are programs that will let you generate your own sounds directly, without a mic: a free program called SFXR80 lets you easily generate Nintendo-like sounds.\n\nIn a typical videogame, the screen communicates a lot of visual information. In a busy game, it can be hard to follow absolutely all of what's happening on the screen. Sound communicates on a different channel, giving you a separate and sometimes more immediate layer of information. Use sound to underline the important relationships in your game.\n\nIf you're making a text game, the tool you're using may not have an easy way to play sound, or playing a sound effect might be jarring in a game that's all read. Your story might not need sound at all. You might try fiddling with some kind of background ambiance, like a loop of birds chirping or water running that only plays at the oasis, to differentiate that location from the desert. Or maybe a quick sound like a SPLOOSH of water or a CHIME of discovery upon pulling the map out of the water.\n\nTask #6: Round Out the Player's Vocabulary\n\nGive the player's character more verbs; give the player more ways to communicate with the game. Try to think of new rules that will interact with the existing ones in interesting ways. For example, what if you make your future matador into a future cowboy? In addition to being able to teleport, she can also drop a ZAPPO LASSO, which will catch bulls that run across it and return them to the future. But maybe being able to get rid of the bulls makes the game feel too easy, so maybe she can only drop the lasso where she's standing. This means that in order to trap a bull, the player will have to use her teleport to put her in the path of the bull, set the trap, and teleport away again. The conflict escalates.\n\nIn the case of the Icarus character who flies UP to reach the sun, maybe she can move LEFT or RIGHT as well. If she moves off the left or right side of the screen, she'll travel around to the other side of the planet, where it's night and where she can land safely on the moon instead. (The transition can be as simple as changing the background from a sky blue to a night black, and the sun to the moon.)\n\nThink about other rules you can add. Rules don't only have to be verbs; rules can also be adverbs. Your future cowboy might be able to teleport SLOWLY. In practice, this means that it takes a few fractions of a second between the player clicking the button and the cowboy arriving at her destination, which forces the player to plan more carefully and react more quickly. Maybe Icarus is affected by gravity, and whenever she's not flying up, she's falling slowly down. You could give her the ability to move up, left, and right when the player presses buttons, but she has to depend on gravity to move down.\n\nTry to ensure that all the rules in the game have relationships with each other. If you think of them as a vocabulary\u2014nouns, verbs, and adverbs\u2014try to construct a vocabulary with which you can tell engaging stories.\n\nIn your text game, give the player a way to interact with the object she's encountered. Maybe if she tries to read it, she's told it's too waterlogged to make sense of. Maybe she has to take it back to the desert to dry it off. The way she interacts with the object should advance the story. Now that the player's returned to the desert, maybe the dried map leads to a treasure hidden somewhere in the sands.\n\nTask #7: Design a Level\n\nI'm using the term level to mean a sequence of events the player has to negotiate using her vocabulary of verbs. In other words, a level is a story: the tension that rises before the climax of the game resolves it.\n\nA story doesn't have to be complicated. Levels for Future Cowboy could just be an escalation. Every time our cowboy catches a bull, it enrages two new bulls who charge onto the screen, causing the bull population to gradually increase with the player's performance, and making the bulls harder for the player to manage. This is rising tension too, and each new bull on the screen is a new chapter, ultimately telling a story about human performance against overwhelming odds (or whatever you like).\n\nHowever, some stories you want to tell might demand more complicated levels. What if the sun our Icarus wants to reach is blocked by storm clouds that will electrocute her if she touches them? The storm clouds make the sun a more valuable goal\u2014even though, in the version of the game where Icarus burns up when she touches the sun, it's a negative goal\u2014because they require Icarus to work harder in order to reach it. They also force the player to recognize Icarus's ability to move left and right, making it more likely that she'll decide to fly Icarus off the edge of the screen, and thus more likely that she'll realize that the moon might also be a valuable goal. You can push this possibility further by leaving clues: plant a trail of storm clouds along the side of the screen, leading to the edge, or\u2014to be even more obvious\u2014make the side of the screen a wall of clouds with an Icarus-sized hole in it.\n\nOnce you've gotten the player on the night side of the planet, you might give her a trickier maze of clouds to navigate, cluing her in that the moon goal is more desirable. Now you're starting to tell a really interactive story: the player can take the easier and more obvious route of flying to the sun and being burned, or she can take the more difficult and oblique route to discover this newer goal. (Notice that I haven't said anything here about telling the story explicitly, having Icarus shout out a text bubble saying, \"I MUST REACH THE GLORIOUS MOON!\"\u2014if done carefully, letting the player discover the moon on her own by accident or by following clues, the player will get the idea, and consider it that much more interesting and personally relevant because she discovered it herself). The most difficult part of the story then becomes the climax: now that the player's goal has changed, she uses all her skill and patience to reach it.\n\nIf navigating the storm cloud maze around the moon is the climax of the game's tension\u2014then maybe on reaching the moon Icarus arrives at a third, easier scene that can serve as the game's denouement. On this screen the player just has to guide Icarus to a Greek-columned house sitting at the bottom of the screen, moving left and right to avoid obstacles (maybe they can be hot stars instead of storm clouds) while gravity pulls her downward. This adds some variety and makes the scene distinct. What literary critics call the \"falling action\" of the story could be Icarus literally falling toward the surface of the moon and the game's conclusion.\n\nNotice how this story was entirely told using our basic verb set: all Icarus is doing is flying, but we've given her interesting goals that cause her to use her verb set in interesting ways. Although the Future Cowboy story is maybe less complex, it's still a story entirely told through the player's two major verbs\u2014TELEPORT and LASSO\u2014and the relationship they put her in with the objects in her world. Plan a story that will develop the player's relationship to the rules of your game, especially her verb set.\n\nIf you're writing a text game, give the player somewhere to go. Maybe the map says something like, \"Go west until you reach a mushroom-shaped rock, then travel north until you find the skull of a giant wizard, then head east to the secret cave.\" Maybe there are things for the player to do at these places, maybe not. But they should be at least interesting to visit: make them distinctive, write them descriptions that are evocative or silly or weird.\n\nTask #8: Finish the Story\n\nThe beginning and resolution of a game do a lot to tell the player how to think about the experience in between. Think about Gay Sniper, which I described in the previous chapter. The opening screen\u2014with the words \"Gay Sniper\" and the opening tinkle of a designed-to-tug-at-your-hetero-heartstrings public service video\u2014and the closing screen\u2014\"America is destroyed\"\u2014do a lot to characterize the absurdity of the political message they bracket.\n\nNot every game needs a title screen, but a title screen is very good at giving the player a context with which to understand the experience that follows. Think about what the first thing the player sees tells her about the game she's about to play. The title Future Cowboy goes a long way toward characterizing the rules of that game: along with whatever art you choose, the title gives a context both to the teleportation and to the bull-trapping in that game. If the title screen of Icarus shows a picture of Icarus on the ground, reaching toward the sun, that effectively conveys to the player that the sun should be Icarus's goal\u2014and also makes the player more excited when she realizes that the title screen is not being entirely straightforward with her about what the game's true goal might be.81\n\nThe way your game ends is the last thing the player will see, and will similarly have a great effect on how she interprets the experience as a whole. The ending could resolve the story or subvert it. Icarus could freeze to death away from the sun's heat, or might live happily ever after soaring in the lower gravity of the moon. If the game program closes, it lets the player know she's reached the resolution of the story and there's no farther to go. But what about the other game-ending scenario in the Icarus game, when Icarus touches a storm cloud and is electrocuted? When this happens, the game could restart rather than close, telling the player she hasn't found the resolution of the story yet. Getting burned by the sun could lead to the game restarting as well, to clue the player in that there's another, more desirable resolution.\n\nIn the text adventure cave, maybe the player finds something valuable or maybe something useless. Maybe, after traveling so far from the oasis, she frees a genie who offers her \"the greatest gift one can give in the desert: water!\" Maybe to enter the darkness of the cave, she has to set the map on fire and use it as a torch, destroying her means of finding her way back. Whatever she discovers in the cave, the text should make it clear to the player that this is the story's resolution: she's found the ending.\n\nThink about how the beginning of your game, what the player experiences during your game, and the ending(s) of your game form a story. What story are you telling, and how will the beginning and ending help provide the context you want for the game?\n\nTask #9: Have Someone Play It, Then Change It\n\nYou should be playing and replaying your game with every change that you make to see if it works in the way you expect. But you should be having other people play it, too. Because of your perfect knowledge of how the game works and what it contains, you can't get an accurate sense of how a player will experience your game from your own plays alone. You'll get the most information about what the player's experience actually is by having people who are unfamiliar with the game play it.\n\nGet as many people as you can to play. Try to have an idea of how experienced these players are with videogames to give you some idea of how players with different backgrounds will react to your game. I usually try to have the widest variety of players as I can, and to have people play the game both while it's being constructed and after I consider it finished. Often I'll have different people play the game at different stages, so that I can ensure that players playing the \"finished\" game are seeing it for the first time.\n\nIf you're still putting the game together, give your player an idea of where you want to take the game so that she can give you ideas for how to take it there. If it's finished, don't tell her anything. Watch her play the game and don't make any comments or assist her unless she asks. Make notes on what she does first, where she gets hung up, whether she reacts as you expected, at what points she gets confused. Also make notes on anything that doesn't work as it should\u2014and if any interesting consequences result when things don't work as they should. Someone less familiar with the game than you is more likely to stumble upon mechanical errors because she doesn't know the range of possibilities in the game. What if the player flies Icarus off the top of the screen and disappears? Nothing prevents the player from doing so because you never expected her to: you knew exactly what the goal was, so in all your plays of the game you've never flown off the top of the screen.\n\nWhen you sit someone down to play the game, keep in mind specific parts of the game that you're uncertain about. Watch how she deals with them, then after she's done, ask her what she thought and whether those parts of the game worked or not. She may have some suggestions of how they or the game as a whole can work better.\n\nNow that you have a better idea of how the player experiences your game, change it! Fix errors, smooth snags, add whole levels if you need to, implement some of the ideas your players suggested, and see if they improve the game. Have them play the game again. Have someone new play the changed game. Change everything, have the original player play again, and see which version they prefer.\n\nTask #10: Distribute Your Game\n\nWhat's the use of a game that no one can play?\n\nBefore broadband Internet, small game authors either had to find a publisher to pay the cost of manufacturing the games and putting them on store shelves, or they had to come up with clever solutions\u2014shareware, which we talked about in chapter 2, being a popular one\u2014for distributing their games. You, however, can take advantage of the speed and accessibility of the Internet to digitally distribute your game.\n\nUpload your finished game to a free file sharing website like MediaFire.com. Some tools, such as Stencyl, have official websites where authors can make their games available. Start a free blog to keep track of all your games; put them on your ancient Myspace page; ask your significant other to upload them to a secret directory of the web server at her job. All you need is some web space for the files and an address you can send people a link to.\n\nOnce you have that, spread the link around! Put it on your Facebook page, on your e-mail signature, on a postcard you staple to local telephone poles, everywhere. E-mail it to IndieGames.com. A good place to start: most tools I talk about in this book have communities with attached forums where you can show your game to peers. Post your link there, then read any feedback or criticism you receive (even though most of it will be dumb). Keep it in mind when you make your next game.\n\nJust because digital distribution makes things easier, however, doesn't mean you shouldn't be creative about passing out your game. A friend of mine who puts out his games under the label \"Amon26\" used the online publishing site Lulu.com to sell CDs containing two games of his that had previously been available on the Internet, along with scans of concept art and MP3 files of the soundtrack.82 Rob Fearon, a British author and father, asks a one-time donation in the amount of the buyer's choosing for a collection of all of his games.83 Burn your game to CD and sneak it onto a store shelf, leave a basket full of free copies at a local coffeehouse.\n\nTask #11: Make Another Game\n\nDo all of this again, using what you've learned from your first game. Make an entirely different game, use an entirely different tool, use completely different verbs than you used before. Or don't: make the same game over again, but slightly better: Icarus 2, with day, night, and twilight levels.\n\nYou're a zinester, after all. Whatever you're doing is right because you're doing it, and that's valuable. Don't worry about being brilliant or original\u2014just make sure you're creative.\n\nFootnotes\n\n77 You can download this older version at http:\/\/www.auntiepixelante.com\/?p=1240.\n\n78 http:\/\/audacity.sourceforge.net.\n\n79 http:\/\/eblong.com\/zarf\/twilight.html.\n\n80 http:\/\/www.drpetter.se\/project_sfxr.html.\n\n81 You might also be clever: if the design and presentation of the game Icarus is exactly as described above, but the title screen shows a picture of Samuel Gompers and bears the title The Story of Organized Labor in America 1886\u20131894, the entire experience essentially changes. A little of this goes a very long way.\n\n82 [http:\/\/www.lulu.com\/product\/cd\/and-you-will-be-fit-for-more-  \nthan-ashes\/6053570](http:\/\/www.lulu.com\/product\/cd\/and-you-will-be-fit-for-more- than-ashes\/6053570).\n\n83 [http:\/\/bagfullofwrong.co.uk\/bagfullofwords\/whats-in-bundle-  \nof-wrong](http:\/\/bagfullofwrong.co.uk\/bagfullofwords\/whats-in-bundle- of-wrong).\nChapter Eight\n\nGrowing Up\n\nWhen I was little I was enchanted by videogames. Kids will doodle and sketch, and like a lot of kids, I sketched videogames. I would draw potential videogame levels, imagine my own versions of Super Mario Bros. where Mario had to collect a magic sea anemone instead of a magic flower to shoot fire underwater. I would draw my own videogame characters, cut them out (or, when I was really young, have my mother cut them out), and then move them through my levels and imagine what my own videogame would be like to play.\n\nThere never seemed to be a way to take it further than that, though. I remember the excitement when my parents bought our first family computer: I knew, somehow, that people used computers to make videogames. I was never able to unlock the secret, though. I learned some QBasic, but I couldn't imagine how to get from writing text on a screen to the games of my imagination.\n\nI shelved my childhood ambition of making videogames. I tried to write fiction, because that was something creative, but I sputtered out, got sick of it, and dropped out of college. Though not before discovering Game Maker.\n\nI was lucky: I left school just as a whole generation of new game-making tools for people like me\u2014people who didn't program, people who hadn't worked in the games industry\u2014were becoming available. But the really lucky ones are the generation who are growing up with access to tools like Scratch and Stencyl. For these kids, game creation won't be the mystical, inaccessible thing it was for me. It'll be something they can actually touch. They'll be able to doodle playable games as easily as doodling a comic or writing a simple story. Imagine what this generation will do with videogames once they've grown up.\n\nWhat videogames need right now is to grow up. The videogame industry has spent millions upon millions of dollars to develop more visually impressive ways for a space marine to kill a monster. What they've invested almost nothing in is finding better ways to tell a story, and in exploring different stories to tell. That's for us to do: the people who don't have to sell thousands of copies of a game to break even, who aren't obliged to fill their games with eighty hours of content, who are beholden to no one, who are free to be silly and weird and creative and personal. Hobbyists and zinesters. You and me.\n\nEvery game that you and I make right now\u2014every five-minute story, every weird experiment, every dinky little game about the experience of putting down your dog84\u2014makes the boundaries of our art form (and it is ours) larger. Every new game is a voice in the darkness.\n\nAnd new voices are important in an art form that has been dominated for so long by a single perspective. Engineering students and venture capitalists have given us valuable pieces of culture, but there's more to the human experience than orcs, elves, and wish-fulfillment power fantasies. If people don't take videogames seriously, it's because, as an art form, they tell us very little about ourselves, so far. But authors outside of the mainstream\u2014those who haven't spent fortunes to bring their works into the mainstream\u2014have revealed much more. They have shown us a new perspective through their unconventionality, their creativity. They have shown us new ways for games to use rules, new ways of giving the players liberty to act and play within those rules, new ways to create experiences that are unique to games.\n\nDigital games\u2014through their ability to keep complex systems of rules, their ability to present audio and visual information, and their reproduceability\u2014have enormous potential for telling stories. So let's tell some stories! I want to hear about your hopes, your dreams, your fears. I want to hear about what it was like to put down your dog or to fall in love or to realize that something you thought controlled you holds no real sway over your life. I want creative people to take a creative form and do amazing things with it.\n\nI want zinesters to find new, inventive ways to distribute games. Fuck Steam and the App Store! Let's invent new networks for letting people sell their games online. Let's bring back CD compilations of games, available at your local co-op or coffee shop or by mail. And let's take advantage of what our predecessors, the shareware authors, never had: a fast, centralized Internet to distribute our games for free.\n\nThere's nothing to stop us from making our voices heard now. And there will be plenty of voices. Among those voices, there will be plenty of mediocrity, and plenty of games that have no meaning to anyone outside the author and maybe her friends. But we'll find new ways to sort that shit. And imagine what we'll gain: real diversity, a plethora of voices and experiences, and a new avenue for human beings to tell their stories and connect with other human beings.\n\nAre you excited? I'm excited just to be alive at this time. You and I are going to see some amazing things in our lifetime. Are you going to be a part of them?\n\nPublishers claimed game creation as their private territory. And for a while, they convinced a lot of people that their claim was legitimate. But that's over now. This is the age of the videogame zinester.\n\nFootnotes\n\n84 See the selectbutton forums at: http:\/\/forums.selectbutton.net\/viewtopic.php?t=33106.\nAppendix A\n\nWhat to Use\n\nThere are many different ways to make digital games, and different people are most comfortable with different tools. Here I've tried to identify the tools I think are the most useful to new authors, based on a few criteria. First, that they require as little prior knowledge of game making as possible. And second, that they're reasonably self-contained. What I mean by this: There are a lot of different tasks required in making a game. For many of my games, I use one program to draw images, another to edit and resize them, another program to record and edit audio, others to generate sound effects, and a final program to put them all together and script the game rules. Here, I've tried to recommend tools that let you produce and edit images and animations within the tools themselves, or tools that don't require you to bring in outside assets at all.\n\nWorking with each of these tools will be a different experience, though there are commonalities between them, and the basic skills you learn in one can often be applied to any game-design project, using any tool. In discussing each of the tools below, I try to describe what the experience of working with the tool is like, as well as what it can teach you about game making that you can take with you to a different tool. Remember, you're not bound to a single tool, and I encourage you to experiment with as many as possible.\n\nYou'll eventually figure out what works best for you. In the meantime, try to figure out what you can make with what you can get your hands on. The more you do, the more you'll be capable of doing.\n\nKlick & Play and the Games Factory\n\nKlik & Play was originally designed as an educational tool for use in schools: a way for kids with little computer experience to make games. It proved popular enough that Clickteam, the creators, have continued to update the program since its initial 1994 release.\n\nI think the original 1994 Klik & Play is almost the ideal place for an inexperienced game creator to start, with its simple, rules-based structure and its vast library of clip art. Unfortunately, it won't run on most contemporary versions of Windows. But in 2010, Clickteam released a free Newgrounds edition of The Games Factory, the third incarnation of Klik & Play. It has less clip art than the original Klik, but it publishes games directly to the Newgrounds website as Flash games\u2014meaning that most people with a web browser will be able to play them (although Newgrounds users, a cantankerous lot, have the power to vote down and remove any game they dislike from the site). It will only run in Windows.\n\nTo use any Klik program, simply drag a character to wherever you want it on the screen. The character image can be one you found on the Internet, one you drew yourself using the program's art functions, or one of the pieces of clip art included with the program. Once your character is in the right place, you can give it some properties\u2014how it moves, whether the player controls its movement, etc. Then, in an \"event editor\" screen, you can set specific rules for that screen: \"every time the character touches a penguin, give the player a hundred points,\" for example, or \"every thirty seconds, add another penguin to the screen.\"\n\nAbove all, Klik & Play\/The Games Factory will help you think about and plan your game in terms of rules, which is, after all, what games are. It will always be an aid to you to be able to envision the experience you want the player to have and then imagine which rules will create that experience, and Klik makes it easy to establish rules and think primarily about their effects and the interactions between them, rather than forcing you to focus on the details of lower-level scripting, displaying art, updating the position of objects on the screen, and other potential obstacles to novice creators. (Construct85 is a newer and more complicated tool designed along the same basic lines as Klik & Play and The Games Factory, and might be a good place to go after experimenting with these older tools and learning some of the basics of this style of design.) http:\/\/www.newgrounds.com\/wiki\/creator-resources\/game-dev-resources\/the-games-factory-2\n\nGamemaker\n\nGame Maker is probably the most popular of these tools because it has the easiest metaphor for managing all the pieces of a game, one that's open enough to support a really diverse collection of graphical games. Every scene in a game is a \"room\"; the characters in those rooms are \"objects\"; the images that you see are \"sprites.\" The concept of \"rooms\" makes it easy to mentally separate your game into a series of scenes and to then assemble them one by one. It's particularly useful for laying out levels: just open up a room and stick objects wherever you want them to appear on the screen.\n\nInitially, you'll script the rules of your games with icons that each mean something: \"move in this direction at this speed,\" \"wait for this long,\" \"play this sound.\" As your games get more complex, though, using the icons will become cluttered and intractable, and you'll want to transition to Game Maker's scripting language, GML. GML looks like a programming language, but it's easy to make the leap to GML from the icon-based vocabulary because most functions will correspond to the icons you've learned to use, and the basic logic of making the game is the same. From there, it's easier to make the leap to a more traditional, restrictive programming language, or to similar scripting languages in other tools.\n\nRegretfully, the corporation that distributes Game Maker, YoYo Games, has decided that in order to make a profit from their product, they have to spin it as a tool for professionals and small studios. Thus, they've hiked up the price to 40 dollars for the \"standard\" edition and 100 dollars for a version that creates web-based games. YoYo Games has always distributed both a \"Pro\" version of the program (costing 25 dollars) and a \"Lite\" version (costing nothing), with the only difference being that the \"Lite\" version was missing only a few of the flashier features of the \"Pro\" version. But the price hike coincided with a new version of the \"Lite\" program: one that stamps a watermark on every single screen of a finished game.\n\nI recommend the Lite version of Game Maker 8.086\u2014the last version before the watermark\u2014to zinesters and newcomers. This version displays a \"Made in Game Maker\" banner on the loading screen for your game, and that's it. You can make self-contained executable files that you can zip up and put on a file-sharing site like MediaFire.com, upload them to your website, anything.\n\nVersion 8.0 of Game Maker and all the earlier versions are made for Windows, but YoYo recently published a version for Mac.87 According to the company's website, though, only the paid version of Game Maker for Mac is able to produce distributable games. http:\/\/www.auntiepixelante.com\/?p=1240\n\nScratch\n\nScratch was developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT Media Lab to allow people of any age to create small games and animations. It's probably the simplest and fastest of the graphical game-making tools: there's almost no time between adding a rule to the game and seeing how it affects the play. Scratch is free for Windows, Mac, and Linux.\n\nScratch uses a very simple metaphor for rule construction: every rule is literally constructed, made up of a collection of jigsaw pieces that each represent part of a full sentence. Snapping a \"when up arrow is pressed\" piece onto a \"move ten steps\" piece, for example, tells a character to move forward when the player holds the up arrow key. Each rule is a single, adjustable object that sits on the \"desktop\" of the game editor and flashes whenever the game applies it. It's really easy to visually keep track of the rules of the game.\n\nIt's also designed to be as quick and dirty as possible, which is great when you're a first-time game maker without ambitious plans. There's a bunch of clip art, an option to pick a piece of clip art at random, and a \"play a musical note\" jigsaw piece that allows you to string together melodies really easily.\n\nYou can also share your games directly to the Scratch website. What's even better, though, is that you can download any game you play on the Scratch site, open it up, and see exactly how it works. See something you want in your game? Peek inside and see exactly how the author did it.\n\nScratch is a good starting place if Game Maker or The Games Factory are too intimidating. It's an excellent introduction to thinking about games as combinations of rules, and to thinking about the ways in which rules interact. It's also a good way just to get some experience making stuff, experimenting with flinging rules together and seeing what results you get.\n\nAfter you've played with Scratch, you might consider trying Stencyl,88 which uses the concept of Scratch's jigsaw pieces as the basis for its own scripting. Stencyl creates Flash games, which you can publish to Stencyl's website or to any other website. It lets you tinker with some fun, silly physics for your games. The program is still in its infancy, though, and I feel like it's a little too spread out right now; doing things that should be quick and simple take too much work. But it's likely that Stencyl will become more concise and usable as its creators update it. http:\/\/scratch.mit.edu\n\nTwine\n\nTwine was created by Chris Klimas to make branching text stories that can be published online. It's a really clean and simple way to make Choose Your Own Adventure\u2013like story games. It doesn't require much from you other than the ability to write, and it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.\n\nTwine keeps stories organized by drawing a map of all the passages you've written, with lines showing which scenes connect to which.\n\nPassages are just blocks of text, but you can put brackets around a phrase to create a link to another passage. That's all you need to write a story in Twine, though there are other simple grammatical structures that will let you keep track of different things the player does within the story: which passages the player has seen, for example, or how many magic beans she's carrying around. And if you know CSS, the standard method of designing web pages, you can build features on top of the basic Twine structure to do even wackier things with your finished stories.\n\nThe program outputs stories as web pages\u2014a full story being a single HTML file\u2014meaning it's really easy to upload your text games to the Internet, or to pass them to other players. It is, in fact, the best distribution model I've seen in any tool: you can run an HTML game on any computer that has both the Internet and a contemporary web browser.\n\nWhat you'll take away from Twine is an understanding of how to track the flow of a story with flags and variables: \"Has the player seen this yet?\" or \"How many times has the player done this?\" This is critical for any game involving a long and somewhat specific narrative. You'll also gain, in working with pure text, a sense of how to direct the player's interest with simple cues\u2014if you're describing a gigantic castle hallway filled with suits of armor, tapestries, and ancient candles burning in iron fixtures, how do you get the player to notice that there's a loose brick in the wall?\u2014which is a valuable skill in both text and graphical games.\n\nIf you want to try a similar tool that lets you accompany your prose with pictures and music, fiddle with Ren'Py,89 a tool for creating \"visual novels\"; essentially, Choose Your Own Adventures with pictures. http:\/\/gimcrackd.com\/etc\/src\n\nInform 7\n\nInform, created by the British poet and mathematician Graham Nelson, is another tool for making text-only games, but unlike in Twine\u2014in which the player clicks on links within the text to navigate the game\u2014Inform games require the player to type full sentences that the game interprets or responds to. Naturally this makes Inform (which is for Windows, Mac, and Linux) more complex than Twine, but not as complex to work in as one might think.\n\nInform 7 games are written in what its authors call \"natural language\" code. That means that the code you write (or other people's code that you consult for reference) looks and reads like English sentences. For example, here's a piece of text from the code of Emily Short's Bronze,90 a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, that describes the rules for a helmet that the player can discover, pick up, and wear:\n\nIt's still programming, and it still uses a very particular syntax that you'll have to learn. But it's a very simplified language\u2014compare it, for example, with the Assembly code in chapter 2, or even a random sample of Game Maker script\u2014because the tool itself does the work to reconcile the things you write with the way the system works. The Inform syntax is well documented and, as I've said, example code isn't hard to read. With a printout of the (free) Inform 7 handbook open, I made my first Inform 7 game in a weekend.\n\nInform is intended for people with no programming experience\u2014that's the philosophy behind the \"natural language\" code. But the natural language can, in a way, be deceptive, and there's a lot more trial-and-error than you might expect while you're trying to work out the syntax that Inform expects before it'll do what you want. Because Inform games involve a text parser for player input rather than just linking the player to different predetermined routes, they can allow for a much richer level of player input: for example, the player in a Twine game might click on a link saying \"loose brick\" to connect with a passage of text indicating what happens when she pushes the loose brick, while in an Inform game she might type \"push loose brick,\" \"jiggle loose brick,\" or \"ignore loose brick,\" and these three possibilities might be scripted to have entirely different outcomes. And because the raw materials of Inform are language, it can be an easy way to experiment with managing, controlling, and guiding player input without having to worry as much about actually scripting the outcomes of different verbs\u2014instead of scripting them, you just write them! But the tradeoff is a much steeper learning curve, and so if Inform is too intimidating at first, it might be easier to deal with after getting a handle on Twine.\n\nLike Twine, Inform also lets you output your finished game as an HTML file which you can then easily share online with anyone who has a web browser. http:\/\/inform7.com\n\nWarioware: D.I.Y.\n\nWarioware D.I.Y. is a product for the Nintendo DS (which you'll need to use it), meaning that this is the most strictly commercial of the tools listed here. That's its strength, though: a team of people were paid a salary to come up with the most widely accessible game-making tool they could, and Warioware is one of the simplest tools described here.\n\nThe DS uses a touch screen and stylus, so making the art for a game is just a matter of drawing it on the screen. Everyone knows how to draw, or at least doodle. The game provides a lot of similar shortcuts to creativity that I like: If you can't write music, you can hum into the microphone. Or you can grab a piece of music or a piece of game art from any of the games that come with the package.\n\nThat's another big deal: Warioware comes with ninety games made by the authors of the tool, and you can open each of them in the editor and see exactly how they work. You'll learn more about the scripting system from this than anything else.\n\nYou script objects (up to fifteen per game) by picking rules like \"move a certain way\" or \"play this sound\" from a menu, and applying them to characters on the screen. The rules are simple, but can be combined in surprising and clever ways. Here, though, is what I like the most about Warioware: each game is only seconds long, includes up to fifteen objects with five rules each, contains just a handful of art, and must be controlled entirely by tapping things with the stylus. In other words, working craftily within limitations is an invaluable skill you'll take away from Warioware.\n\nThe big failing of Warioware\u2014and of any creative tool whose distribution infrastructure is entirely owned and operated by a corporation\u2014is that it's very hard to transmit your games to anyone. You need an individual code from every person you want to digitally share a game with (from their copy of Warioware), and you can only make two games available for download at any given time. The only way to get widespread exposure is to enter a game into one of Nintendo's semimonthly themed game making competitions, the prize for which is publication and distribution, or\u2014the avenue most authors take\u2014just to record a video of the game and put it on YouTube. http:\/\/www.wariowarediy.com\n\nKnytt Stories\n\nKnytt Stories was created by Nicklas \"Nifflas\" Nygren as an expansion on his earlier Windows game, Knytt, that allows players to create their own stories using Knytt's built-in verb set: running, jumping, and climbing around a world. (Knytt Stories is also Windows-only.) It's a level-making tool, not a game-making tool, but I include it because there's so little scripting involved and because there's zero variance in the game's basic verb set, making it a good place to start learning about level design.\n\nScripting is mostly limited to placing markers (visible or invisible) that move the player to different scenes, allowing for interesting narrative progression. The bulk of making a Knytt Story is placing tiles on a grid to create a landscape for the player to navigate with the protagonist's running, jumping, and climbing abilities. The seven background, midground, and foreground layers on which tiles are placed can be hard to keep track of, but this is pretty close to pure level design, with minimal barriers between the creator's ideas and their implementation. (For something even simpler, try Love Custom,91 which lets you draw levels as simple images, bypassing the need to arrange tiles.)\n\nThough the rules of Knytt are immutable, you can add your own pictures, tiles, and sounds to your stories. You can also use the music, sounds, and hundreds of background images and tile sets that come with Knytt Stories, which let you make a complete level without ever going outside the program. When you're done, Knytt Stories will compress your level and all the graphics and sound it uses into a package file that you can upload either to a file-sharing site or to Nifflas's own forums for exchanging Knytt Stories.92\n\nBecause scripting exists almost exclusively to handle transitions, what you'll gain from Knytt Stories is a chance to experiment with and gain a sense for level design: how to arrange the elements of a game in order to create an engaging, interesting, fair experience, as well as how to tell a story. http:\/\/nifflas.ni2.se\/?page=Knytt+Stories\n\nZZT\n\nZZT was created by Tim Sweeney in 1991 as a shareware game with a powerful \"World Editor.\" The game is defunct in a lot of ways: it's a DOS game, an operating system modern computers no longer support, meaning you have to use a DOSBox emulator93 to run it (which ironically makes it equally usable on Windows, Mac, and Linux.) I include it because it's an amazing introduction to scripting and because it requires no resources outside of itself\u2014in fact, it allows for no resources outside of itself.\n\nZZT is a text-mode game, meaning that every graphic that appears in the game will be one of 256 text characters in one of sixteen colors. All the sounds in the game are generated directly by the PC speaker\u2014there are commands in ZZT's scripting that will allow you to write PC speaker music for the game to play. Thus, ZZT is entirely self-contained. Not only do the limitations force you to be clever as a game maker, but the self-contained nature of the tool means you'll never have to leave the editor to create your own art or sound. Everything you need is immediately available to you.\n\nThe other wonderful thing about ZZT is its surprisingly robust scripting language, ZZT-OOP (for \"Object-Oriented Programming\"). You'll script objects with commands that have a simple structure like \"#if contact #endgame\" (or \"if this object is touching the player, end the game\"). The objects can send and receive messages, and thus interact with each other, which is where the possibility for complexity arises.\n\nZZT is an old tool\u2014one of the first of its level of sophistication\u2014and thus doesn't have exactly the distribution potential of the above tools, although there is a large community website and archive called Z2.94 But despite its age, ZZT has the potential to teach you a lot about game logic and scripting. It's a really good and deceptively powerful introduction to thinking about how game elements behave in particular ways and communicate with one another, all the more so because its entirely self-contained nature leaves you free to focus on scripting and design. It's a weird old game, but not a bad starting point at all. http:\/\/zzt.belsambar.net\/versions\/\n\nFootnotes\n\n85 http:\/\/www.scirra.com.\n\n86 Again, http:\/\/www.auntiepixelante.com\/?p=1240.\n\n87 http:\/\/www.yoyogames.com\/gamemaker\/mac.\n\n88 http:\/\/www.stencyl.com.\n\n89 http:\/\/www.renpy.org.\n\n90 You can read more about Bronze and download the game at http:\/\/inform7.com\/learn\/eg\/bronze\/index.html.\n\n91 http:\/\/love-the-game.com\/custom.html.\n\n92 Nifflas's forums can be found at: http:\/\/nifflas.lpchip.nl\/index.php?board=39.0.\n\n93 Find out more about DOSBox at: http:\/\/www.dosbox.com.\n\n94 http:\/\/zzt.org.\nAppendix B\n\nZinester Games\n\nEach of the games below was created by just one or two people. Each is valuable, and I encourage you to play them if you can. Many of them, having been made in Game Maker, are playable in Windows only. (Borrow a friend's computer if you need to!) I've avoided including games I mention elsewhere in the book: consider this \"further reading.\" I've tried to pick games that are simple enough that, in playing them, you should be able to see how you could make them or something like them. Each of them also shows off a different idea about the way digital games can be and what they can give us.\n\nStriptease\n\nStephen \"increpare\" Lavelle is a prolific queer game creator from Ireland. Striptease, one of his most affecting works, uses the simple rules of an abstract sliding tile puzzle to achieve a narrative that explores themes of objectification, alienation, and the way we internalize and externalize our bodies. http:\/\/www.increpare.com\/2009\/05\/striptease\n\nReset\n\nBritish author Robin Burkinshaw's Reset is a game set to a single piece of music: \"Rest to Reset\" by Trash80. Every event in the game responds to that music, and the player's fuel supply only lasts as long as the song. The game, which is neither won nor lost, is designed as a way of experiencing the song. It was made in Game Maker. http:\/\/www.roburky.co.uk\/?p=13\n\nAll the Better to See You\n\nBento Smile works in the games industry as an artist and creates small games in her own time. All the Better to See You is a Ren'Py game she created for Valentine's Day of 2010. It uses the simple mechanical conceit of diminishing player options to characterize a relationship that becomes increasingly dominated by one party. http:\/\/bentosmile.com\/mini-games\/all-the-better-to-see-you\/\n\nAll of Our Friends are Dead\n\nAmon26 is a visual artist, musician, and game author. All of Our Friends Are Dead, a running, jumping, and shooting game inspired largely by id Software's 1993 game DOOM, was made in Game Maker using an \"engine\" that someone else had programmed. Amon's lack of complete control over his own creation serves the game's disjointed, hostile tone. http:\/\/amon26.site11.com\/1_5_Games.html\n\nThe Lake\n\nThe author \"agj\" is interested in the expressive capabilities of digital games, and his works tend to have short, simple stories. The Lake, made in Construct, is based on a story fragment from H.P. Lovecraft's journal. The game uses only two buttons\u2014the left and right oars of a small boat\u2014to achieve a subtle and unsettling story. http:\/\/forums.tigsource.com\/index.php?action=printpage;topic=3750.0\n\nSexy Hiking\n\nAuthor Jazzuo likely hit on the rules of Sexy Hiking by accident, then designed an intricate and challenging game around them. Jazzuo uses ugliness of presentation\u2014the game is assembled from crude drawings and animation and stolen songs and clip art\u2014as an avenue to unbounded creativity of design. Sexy Hiking was put together in Game Maker. http:\/\/www.jazzuo.com\/games\/sexyhands\/sexy_hiking\/sexyhiking.htm\n\nThe Strange and Somewhat Sinister Tale of the House at Desert Bridge\n\nVerena and Jonas Kyratzes are a filmmaker and writer couple living in Germany. The House at Desert Bridge, a story about the importance of whimsy as a tool against oppression, is implemented very simply\u2014play consists almost entirely of clicking on crayon illustrations, reading text, and typing information when prompted. http:\/\/www.jonas-kyratzes.net\/games\/the-strange-and-somewhat-sinister-tale-of-the-house-at-desert-bridge\/\n\nBushido Edge\n\nBushido Edge, a Games Factory game by author \"Pizza Time,\" is inspired by the 1997 PlayStation game Bushido Blade. It's a distillation of what's most interesting about Bushido Blade or any two-player fighting game: the importance of reading and anticipating your opponent. It's for two players only. http:\/\/badmspaint.livejournal.com\/195733.html\n\nDigital: A Love Story\n\nChristine Love is a queer Canadian writer of fiction and digital stories. Her storytelling primarily concerns young love, particularly the kind that is mediated by technology. Digital: A Love Story is a \"period piece,\" modeled after the BBS networks of the 1980s and the culture they propagated. It was made in Ren'Py. (See also the semi-sequel, Don't Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain't Your Story, which is a meditation on our changing ideas of privacy.95) http:\/\/www.scoutshonour.com\/digital\/\n\nSuper Green Shell Bros.\n\nLeon \"L\" Arnott pays attention to the smaller details of game experiences. Super Green Shell Bros. is a takeoff of Super Mario Bros., or rather a specific part of the experience of Super Mario Bros.: kicking a shell and chasing it as it mows over enemies.\n\nA short game, it has a perfect pace that builds to a brilliant climax. Almost all of the graphics in this game are sampled from other games. http:\/\/l.j-factor.com\/gamemaker\/#\n\nThe Baron\n\nVictor Gijsbers is a Dutch philosophy professor at Leiden University. His text game, The Baron\u2014made in Inform\u2014beckons the player into a difficult moral allegory, then asks her to decide how a heinous situation is resolved, or whether it even can be. The Baron explores themes that a commercial game publisher would be terrified to touch. http:\/\/ifdb.tads.org\/viewgame?id=weac28l51hiqfzxz\n\nSonic 2 XL\n\nSonic 2 XL, by \"Captain Bozo\" and \"Ranger,\" is a hack of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for the SEGA Genesis, and will require a Genesis emulator to play. In this hack, the gold rings Sonic collects are replaced with fried onion rings that make him fatter and slower. It's interesting both on a thematic level\u2014as commentary on game-related obesity and consumerist collection goals in games\u2014and on a play level: navigating the game without collecting so many rings as to become fat is a challenging variation on the original game. http:\/\/forums.sonicretro.org\/index.php?showtopic=21739\n\nFootnotes\n\n95 http:\/\/scoutshonour.com\/donttakeitpersonallybabeitjustaintyourstory.\n\nAbout the Author\n\nANNA ANTHROPY is a prolific game developer and critic. She is the creator of games such as Calamity Annie, Mighty Jill Off, and Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars among many others. She lives in the East Bay area, California with her pet girlmonster and two lovely cats. She wants you to stop reading this and GO MAKE A GAME.\nAbout Seven Stories Press\n\nSeven Stories Press is an independent book publisher based in New York City. We publish works of the imagination by such writers as Nelson Algren, Russell Banks, Octavia E. Butler, Ani DiFranco, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Coco Fusco, Barry Gifford, Hwang Sok-yong, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including the Boston Women's Health Collective, Noam Chomsky, Angela Y. Davis, Human Rights Watch, Derrick Jensen, Ralph Nader, Loretta Napoleoni, Gary Null, Project Censored, Barbara Seaman, Alice Walker, Gary Webb, and Howard Zinn, among many others. Seven Stories Press believes publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights, and to celebrate the gifts of the human imagination, wherever we can. For additional information, visit www.sevenstories.com.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n## Contact!\nby the same author\n\nHEAVEN'S COMMAND: AN IMPERIAL PROGRESS\n\nPAX BRITANNICA: THE CLIMAX OF AN EMPIRE\n\nFAREWELL THE TRUMPETS: AN IMPERIAL RETREAT\n\nCOAST TO COAST\n\nCORONATION EVEREST\n\nVENICE\n\nCONUNDRUM\n\nTRIESTE AND THE MEANING OF NOWHERE\n\nA WRITER'S WORLD\n\nEUROPE: AN INTIMATE JOURNEY\n\nHAV\n\nFISHER'S FACE\n\nA VENETIAN BESTIARY\n\nSPAIN\n\nAMONG THE CITIES\n\nTHE GREAT PORT\n\nTHE HASHEMITE KINGS\n\nHONG KONG\n\nLINCOLN\n\nMANHATTAN '45\n\nTHE MARKET OF SELEUKIA\n\nSOUTH AFRICAN WINTER\n\nTHE SPECTACLE OF EMPIRE\n\nSYDNEY\n\nTRAVELS\n\nTHE VENETIAN EMPIRE\n\n## Contact!\n\nA Book of Encounters\n\n## JAN MORRIS\n\nW. W. Norton & Company\n\nNew York \u2022 London\nCopyright \u00a9 2009 by Jan Morris\n\nFirst American Edition 2010\n\nFirst published in Great Britain under the title\n\nContact! A Book of Glimpses\n\nAll rights reserved\n\nFor information about permission to reproduce selections from this  \nbook, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,  \n500 Fift h Avenue, New York, NY 10110\n\nManufacturing by Courier Westford  \nProduction manager: Anna Oler\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nMorris, Jan, 1926\u2013\n\nContact!: a book of encounters \/ Jan Morris.\n\np. cm.\n\nISBN: 978-0-393-07640-0\n\n1. Morris, Jan, 1926\u2013\u2014Travel. 2. Voyages and travels. I. Title.\n\nG465M658 2009\n\n910.4092\u2014dc22 2009052193\n\nW. W. Norton & Company, Inc.  \n500 Fift h Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110  \nwww.wwnorton.com\n\nW. W. Norton & Company Ltd.  \nCastle House, 75\/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT\nDedicated to the whole lot of them\n\n## Contents\n\nIntroductory\n\nA sighting in Texas\n\nA snatch of sound in Morocco\n\nThe touch of a hand at home\n\n## Introductory\n\n'Contact' is a noun of varied nuances, not all to my taste. Ambitious businessmen make useful contacts at golf clubs or race meetings. Diplomats and journalists are urged to cultivate their contacts. Spies have contacts and so do publicity executives, and people with poor eyesight. On the other hand contacts turn the lights on, start the engine, send the rocket off, launch the movie Spitfires into glory, and it is this meaning of the word that gives me the title of this album.\n\nIn a lifetime of travel and literature I have written relatively little about people. Places, atmospheres, histories have figured far more in my all too often purple prose. But people everywhere, nevertheless, have been sparks of my work, if often only in glimpses\u2013a sighting through a window, a gentle snatch of sound, the touch of a hand\u2013and it is mostly such fugitive moments and observations, scattered across half a century and forty-odd books, that I have here gratefully plucked out of their literary obscurity.\n\nOften I have given them only a few lines, or a paragraph; occasionally the people have known me as James rather than Jan, because until 1972 I wrote in the persona of James Morris; but my fleeting contacts with them have fuelled my travels down the years, generated my motors, excited my laughter and summoned my sympathies. I write of them here more or less as I wrote of them at the time, and I recall them not in any chronological or geographical order, but jumbled. Their locations will generally be self-evident, and I have included dates only when they seem essential to the historical sense of the piece. Otherwise all these encounters simply occurred between Here and There, to Him or Her, after Then and before Now.\n\nRich and poor people are remembered here, young and old, grand and humble, primitive and exquisitely civilized, named and anonymous, in the particular and in the general. Every one of them, of course, deserves more than the handful of words I have resurrected in these pages: but there it is, they are seldom friends or even acquaintances, only contacts.\n\nTrefan Morys, 2009\n\n## Contact!\n## A sighting in Texas\n\nOn my fourth day in the city\n\nI looked through the window\n\nand saw a dreamlike figure sauntering by.\n\nHe had a sack over his arm, and a stick over his\n\nshoulder,\n\nand he wore a high-crowned hat and a cloak, I think,\n\nand he strolled past easy, insolent and amused.\n\nMy heart leapt to see him.\n\n'Who was that?' I cried, rushing to the window,\n\n'that man with the stick, and the high-crowned hat,\n\nand the sack on his arm?'\n\nMy hostess returned me reprovingly to our\n\nconversation.\n\n'I saw nobody,' she sweetly and carefully said.\n\n'But tell me, have you had time to see our new Picasso\n\nin the Fine Arts Museum?\n\nAnd will you have an opportunity to meet with\n\nMrs Oveta Culp Hobby?'\n\n##\n\nManhattan dialogue\n\nI chanced one day, off the joggers' circuit in Central Park, to come across a young black man fast asleep upon a bench below the lake. His overcoat was thrown over him, his books were placed neatly side by side upon the ground. His head upon his clasped hands, as in kindergarten plays, he was breathing regularly and gently, as though bewitched. Even as I watched, a grey squirrel, skipping across the green, leapt across his legs to the back of the bench, where it sat tremulously chewing, and almost at the same time there arose a brisk gust of wind, tangy with salt.\n\nA scatter of leaves and fallen blossoms came with it, flicked and eddied around the bench. The squirrel paused, twitched and vanished. The black man opened his eyes, as the breeze dusted his face, and, seeing me standing there bemused, smiled me a slow sleepy smile. 'Be not afeared,' I said ridiculously, on the spur of the moment, 'the isle is full of noises.'\n\n'Yeah,' the man replied, stretching and scratching mightily in the morning. 'Bugs, too.'\n\nAt the hotel door\n\nI was going out through the door of the Albergo Savoia Excelsior in Trieste when a man simultaneously entered. We bumped into one another, our bags and luggage got mixed up, and we both apologized. He was a theatrical-looking character, with a camel coat slung over his shoulders\u2013perhaps one of the opera singers from the Teatro Verdi. When we had disentangled ourselves he stood there for a moment, motionless.\n\n'Where are you from?' he said.\n\n'Wales.'\n\n'Wales! How wonderful!'\n\nOh you splendid liar, I said to myself, you've never heard of the place. There was a pause. I laughed, and so did he. He shook my hand in both of his. We lingered for a moment and parted. When I think of Trieste, lust and love I often think of him.\n\nSelf-discipline\n\nAt Kanpur, in India, I came across a man with whom I felt an instant affinity. That he was deeply unhappy was obvious, but he numbed his misery by touching things. Day and night he wandered the streets of the city, earnestly and methodically touching windows, doorposts, lamp standards, apparently to strict unwritten rules. Sometimes he appeared to feel that he had neglected his task, and did a street all over again, paying a still more diligent attention to the doorknobs. I spoke to him one morning, but he responded only with an engaging preoccupied smile, as if to say that, although some other time it would be delightful to have a chat, that day he simply hadn't a moment to spare.\n\nHonesty\n\nSometimes Sydney seems to be inhabited chiefly by school-children, children kicking pebbles across bridges, children racing fig leaves down the channels of ornamental fountains, children clambering like invading armies all over the Opera House, or mustered in their thousands in the New South Wales Art Gallery. They seem to me a stalwart crew. 'Now this is a Picasso,' I heard a teacher say in the gallery one day. 'I'm sure you all know who Picasso was.' 'I don't,' piped up a solitary small Australian at the back, and I bowed to him as the only absolutely honest soul in sight.\n\nNot Chopin\n\nWhen communism failed in Poland, materialism took over. There were bright new shops, posh hotels, plenty of cars, all the usual paraphernalia of capitalism. 'Nice car,' I remarked one day to the man who drove me to the airport in his big new Volvo. He shrugged his shoulders and looked at me with a dry smile. I knew what he meant. 'Well, no,' I added in afterthought, 'I suppose it's not Chopin' and he knew what I meant, too.\n\nAfter the ball was over\n\nNot so long ago the chief celebrants of the legendary Venetian carnival were the children of Venice, who bought their funny faces and moustaches from the chain stores and emerged to saunter self-consciously through the city in fancy dress.\n\nOn the final evening of the festivities I was walking home when I saw before me, in a hurried glimpse, three small figures crossing a square from one lane to another. In the middle walked a thin little man, his overcoat rather too long for him and buttoned down the front, his gloves very neat, his hat very precise, his shoes very polished. Clutching his right hand was a tiny Pierrot, his orange pom-pom waggling in the half-light. Clutching his left hand was a minuscule fairy, her legs wobbly in white cotton, her skirt infinitesimal, her wand warped a little with the excitement and labour of the day. Quickly, silently and carefully they crossed the square and disappeared from view; the fairy had to skip a bit to keep up, the Pierrot cherished a sudden determination to walk only on the lines between the paving stones, and the man trod a precarious tightrope between the indulgent and the conventional.\n\nHow small they looked, and respectable, I thought to myself! How carefully their mother had prepared them, all three, to survive the scrutiny of their neighbours! How thin a reflection they offered of Venice's rumbustious carnivals of old, her Doges and masked patriciate, her grand lovers, her tall warships and her princely artists! How touching the little Venetians, tight buttoned in their alleyways!\n\nThe student's request\n\nIn the shadowy underneath of a bridge in Isfahan a student sits, dangling his feet over a sluice and reading a book. His face is dark and meditative, and his air of poetic concentration is all one asks of a Persian student. He has caught sight of us, in a dreamy sort of way, and as he buttons his jacket, gathers his notebooks and moves sidelong in our direction, we recognize one of the more endearing hazards of modern travel, the Student of English. We are too late to escape. 'Sir!' he cries. 'Madam!' fluttering his notes and bearing down on us. 'Allow me please to ask you one question, before you leave the bridge: is it permissible or not, in the English language, to pursue a gerund with a participle? And would you be kind enough to comment on my pronunciation in the following passage, Exercise 12? Sit down, sir; sit down, madam! Be comfortable!'\n\nD\u00e9j\u00e0 entendu!\n\nOn a winter day in Zagreb a man bundled in a greatcoat is playing an instrument of his own invention, consisting of rows of wine and mineral-water bottles strung on a contraption rather like a washing line and tuned by their varying contents of liquid. He is playing with great delicacy a piece I know well, but can't for the life of me place, and around him a smiling crowd has gathered, amused by the instrument, touched by the tune. In the front row of the audience a small child of two or three in a woolly blue and white jumper suit, with hat to match, is performing a shuffly sort of dance to the music. I am curiously affected, partly because of the endearing busker, partly because of the sweetly familiar music\u2013oh, and hang on, I think I remember what that tune is. Isn't it one of those charming Fritz Kreisler fripperies they used to play at palm-court cafes, with a lady violinist in a satin blouse, and the grammar-school music master moonlighting at the piano? 'Sch\u00f6n Rosmarin'\u2013isn't that it?\n\nBreath of the woods\n\nA junior functionary all but monopolized my attention during my visit to the Legislature of the Canadian North West Territories at Yellowknife. She was about fifteen years old, I would guess, indeterminately Caucasian, Indian, Inuit or M\u00e9tis, and tremendous fun. Busy as she was taking perpetual missives from one member to another, bobbing incessantly to the chair en route, she managed to elevate the whole session to a jollier and more sensible level. She laughed to herself and to others, she did her bows with a wonderfully comic jerkiness, she stuck her tongue out at her colleagues, she yawned, she hitched her tights up, she cheerfully swung her legs when she was sitting down and walked in a delightfully insouciant way when she was on her feet. I loved this irrepressible child of the north: the legislators droned on as legislators will, but she brought a breath of the woods inside.\n\nCosta del Sol, 1960s\n\nSometimes I went out on the beach at Fuengirola to watch the fishermen at work. It could be heartbreaking to see. They worked like slaves, wading into the sea with their huge heavy net and laboriously hauling it in, inch by inch, hour by hour up the sands: so much depended on the catch, so much labour and good humour had been expended, so many children were waiting to be fed, so many anxious mothers hoping\u2013and when at last the haul appeared, often enough only a dozen small sardines in the mesh of the net, the fishermen carefully cleared up their tackle and dispersed to their homes in weary silence.\n\nCaravan of martyrs\n\nIn the summer of 1958 the young King Feisal of Iraq was assassinated, leaving his contemporary and close relative King Hussein of Jordan isolated upon his own threatened throne. I was in Jordan when, a few days later, Hussein made a public declaration about the tragedy. His face was lined and tired, and moisture glistened in the corners of his eyes. Ministers, officials, officers and security guards were grouped behind his chair. Clearing his throat huskily, the King said slowly: 'I have now had confirmation of the murder of my cousin, brother and childhood playmate, King Feisal of Iraq, and all his royal family.' He paused, his eyes filling, his lip trembling, a muscle working rhythmically in the side of his jaw, and then he said it again, in identical words, but in a voice that was awkwardly thickening. 'I have now received confirmation of the murder of my cousin, brother and childhood playmate, King Feisal of Iraq, and all his royal family.' And raising his head from his notes, Hussein added in his strange formal English: 'They are only the last in a caravan of martyrs.'\n\nTrial of an alleged spy\n\nThe court sat on a kind of stage against a background of opaque white curtains. In the centre were the military judge and his two assessors, generals all, immaculate in dove grey and sitting in their tall wooden chairs like bulky Buddhas. To the left sat the prosecutor, the procurator-general of the Soviet Union, a heavy and formidable lawyer in a sombre blue uniform. The lights were blinding\u2013chandeliers, strings of bulbs, floodlight, cameramen's flashlights, bathing the whole scene in chill brilliance and giving the members of the court a waxen cosmetic look. Punctually at ten Gary Powers was led in with an escort of two young soldiers in olive-green jackets and blue trousers. He wore a blue Russian suit too large for him, so that he had to hitch up his sleeves now and then, and they put him in the wooden dock, like a big child's playpen beneath the floodlights, and the sentries stood at attention beside it as beside a catafalque. Powers was obviously frightened, and so was I.\n\nThe one left behind\n\nThrough the windows of a lakeside restaurant at M\u00f6lln I watch four German children playing. Their families are lunching inside, and I would judge the children to be between six and ten years old. The two boys are always in the lead, dashing about the lake, the girls follow enthusiastically behind. One is slim, blonde and pretty, and wears a floral dress she likes to flounce about. The other is plain and plump, and wears a blue anorak, with sleeves too long for her, over a short tartan skirt. The plain girl is always last. She can never quite keep up. When they run out to the end of the jetty, she is always left behind. When they rush helter-skelter into the restaurant to speak to their families, the door closes behind the other three and there is a long pause before, panting heavily, the short fat girl opens it again with difficulty and stumbles in. I like her best of the quartet\u2013she tries so hard, laughs so gamely, struggles so constantly to tuck up the sleeves of her anorak. I feel for her, too. However when they all scamper out of the restaurant again, and I offer her a smile as she passes my table, she returns a most malevolent glare.\n\nHaute couture\n\nI was invited to write about one of the Paris summer collections for an American magazine, and sat incongruously in the front row among the condescending New York buyers and unbelievably ugly princesses of American fashion journalism. How awful they looked, draped in their furs, red taloned, emaciated to the point of grotesqueness, while all about them graceful exponents of the art of French allure glided silkily around the room and along the catwalk. The audience otherwise seemed to be composed chiefly of characters from Proust.\n\nDialogues on the Orient Express\n\n'I've always said,' observed one American matron to another, 'I'm not going to be a possessive mother, because his was'\u2013and she jerked her head in the direction of her husband in the next seat. The two ladies eyed him speculatively. 'He'll be no good to us in Venice,' said the other. 'He'll be lost with those gondolier people.'\n\nYoung English wife, on her honeymoon, I guessed: 'Oh, look at the castle. Isn't that a lovely castle?' Young English husband: 'It's a castle. A castle is a castle. You've seen castles before.' She relapsed into thoughtful silence. He returned to his thriller.\n\nSaid an American man, to me: 'You gotta read this book. I've been reading it all the way since London. It's called God Owns My Business. God Owns My Business, that's the title. The guy who wrote it, he's a very low-key man, but he's got a sign above his store, \"Christ Is My Manager\". When do we get to Innsbruck? We might get a hamburger there.'\n\nIf you prick us?\n\nI shared a taxi one day with a lady in a blue silk turban, who was visiting Washington and was about to meet her daughter for lunch at a Hot Shoppe. Down the great thoroughfares we drove, and all the memorials of the American splendour passed us one by one, granite and concrete, obelisk and colonnade. My companion drew my attention now and then to a White House or a Treasury, but it was as we passed the Capitol itself, and were deploring the state of the world in general, that she spoke the words I best remember: 'I sometimes wonder, oh, what kind of a world are we bringing our children into, when you have to pay a quarter for a doughnut?'\n\nTwenty-five cents for a doughnut! Even Americans bleed.\n\nThe sprig of rosemary\n\nI was driving along a road in Portugal when I spied a tray of oranges for sale outside a cottage. It was blazing hot, and I stopped to buy some. Nobody attended the fruit, so I selected three oranges for myself and knocked on the cottage door. Nobody came. There was no sign of life. I peered through the window, I walked around the back, and in the end I opened the front door. It was very dark inside, but when my eyes accustomed themselves I saw that fast asleep in a corner of the room was a small old lady. I coughed and shuffled my feet, and without a start she awoke. Her very first reaction was to smile. Her second was to reach for her straw hat on a nearby chair and put it carefully on her head. She accepted my few coins for the oranges but then, hustling me kindly outside, took two apricots from another box and gave me them as a present. All the time she smiled, and bustled around looking for other kindnesses to perform. When we had said goodbye, and I had returned to the car, she came running out of the garden gate again, smiling still, clutching her hat on her head, to give me a sprig of rosemary.\n\nDifferent responses\n\nMy family and I lived for a time near the Swiss frontier in France. On the French side the gendarmes were jolly, careless, and often had wine on their breaths. On the Swiss side the police were cool, diligent, courteous and unsmiling. My car in those days was a Rolls-Royce, grand, decorative and elderly. The French gendarmes were delightedly amused by this vehicle, and sometimes asked permission to sit at its wheel, or try the squashy grey leather seats behind. To the Swiss border police, on the other hand, a Rolls-Royce was an image of wealth, and a quaint middle-aged example like mine, not old enough to be a valuable antique, certainly not new enough to be a status symbol, seemed to confuse their responses. They habitually greeted us with a mixture of respect and condescension, covering all contingencies.\n\nFlying the flag\n\nThe Aboriginal flag of gold, black and yellow was hoisted above Sydney Town Hall, but was soon pulled down again. By the time I reached the park the Aboriginal Day rally seemed to have fizzled out, too, and all I found was a small huddle of dark-skinned people around an open bonfire, surrounded by litter on the edge of the green. They greeted me with wan concern, offering me beer out of an ice bucket, sidling around me rather and occasionally winking. A small thin boy with cotton wool stuffed in one ear wandered here and there leading a black puppy on a string. Others kicked a football about in the gathering dusk. A strong smell of alcohol hung over us, and the man with the bucket urged me quietly, again and again, to have one for the road. Had the rally been a success? I asked. 'Yeah,' they said, and looked into the fire.\n\nThe Frenchest person\n\nThe Frenchest person I ever met was Yves Saint-Laurent, the couturier. He was utterly French. He told me that the only books he ever read were eleven volumes of Proust's \u00c0 la recherche du temps perdu, over and over again, but that the twelfth and last volume he had never read at all\u2013saving it up, I suppose, for a last splurge of Frenchness on his deathbed chaise longue. Everything that was French seemed to be embodied in him, even a bit of the old gloire, for there was a distinctly grand manner lurking behind his melancholy shyness, and he lived in a grand style too. Saint-Laurent liked to call himself an artisan, and the little world of craftspeople he had built up around him, the dedicated world of cutters, shoemakers, milliners and tailors, seemed to me a true ornament of French civilization, and a vindication of French pride. He told me that all I needed for elegance was one dress, a pair of jeans, some blouses and a raincoat. I asked him if he was consciously contributing to the splendour of France, and he smiled rather distantly. He was, he said, he was.\n\nA fine scoundrel\n\nA celebrated, or notorious, rebel leader in Oman was Suleiman bin Hamyar, who owned the only motorcar in the Green Mountains. I saw him arriving in it one day for a political parley at the village of Nizwa, and the sight of his American convertible careening recklessly out of the road-less mountains was wonderfully inspiriting. The roof of the car was closed, but on the boot there sat a Negro slave, armed with a rifle, with his feet sticking through the back window into the inside of the car; and when it stopped this slave jumped off like lightning, as promptly and neatly as any duke's footman, and opened the door with a flourish.\n\nI walked across to meet the old sheikh, and he greeted me with an expression of unfathomable foxiness, suggesting to me instantly some infinitely clever beast in Aesop, about to hoodwink a goat. Suleiman was a big man with a powerful face, rather Dickensian in concept, and a triangular grey beard. On his head was a twisted blue and white turban. His aba was blue, gold-edged and filmy. In his hand was a cane with a carved end, on his belt a curved dagger of splendid ostentation.\n\nMy own instincts told me that this fine scoundrel should be instantly decapitated, for the public good, but I was rather glad, all the same, when he later reappeared from the parley intact, and was driven away into his mountains with only minor (and I felt sure temporary) modifications of his manner.\n\nEnjoy yourself!\n\nIt took many hours, on a Sunday evening, to drive from Trieste the few miles into Tito's Yugoslavia. I can see now the hundreds of cars lurching and overheating in the gathering dusk, the ad hoc hamburger bars beside the road, the occasional truck bullying its way up the queue by sheer weight and horsepower, pale weary faces at the windows of buses and at last the dim-lit frontier post, and a joyless official with a red star on his cap. A slow flicking through the pages of our passports, a silent gesture of release, and away with us into the communist half of Europe. 'Cheer up,' I said to the frontier official once. 'Enjoy yourself,' the man lugubriously replied.\n\nThe helmsman\n\nOur helmsman, although he is surrounded by talkative friends and relatives of all ages, is ever attentive to his craft and courteously watchful of me: and sometimes, indeed, sailing in such a ramshackle sampan crablike against the current from one island to another, to the laboured chugging of diesel engines and the creaking of timbers\u2013sometimes I feel I would like to be assimilated into Chineseness myself, and sail these waters under Chinese helmsmanship for good.\n\nA literary test\n\nIn Newfoundland in those days it was necessary to find a guarantor before one could cash foreign money orders. Knowing nobody in town, and finding that the public library had a copy of a book of mine about Venice, I introduced myself to the librarian and asked her to endorse a travellers' cheque. How could she confirm, she sensibly demanded, that I was who I said I was? By a simple literary test, I suggested: surely nobody else on earth could recite by heart the last line of my book on Venice, which she had upon her own shelves.\n\nSolemnly she reached for the volume. Nervously I stood at her desk while she turned to the final page, and ran her eye down the paragraph to the end of it. 'Well?' she said. I cleared my throat. The concluding words of my book were not very stately. 'No wonder,' I mumbled then, feeling distinctly disadvantaged, 'No wonder George Eliot's husband fell into the Grand Canal.' Without a flicker that librarian of old St John's closed the book, returned it to the shelf and authorized my money.\n\nJudgement\n\n'What's this?' demanded a Soviet customs official curtly one day, extracting a typescript from my baggage and simultaneously eyeing my then epicene figure. 'It's a psychological novel,' said I. 'Oh, a psychological novel,' he replied in a voice of infinite understanding, as though I had shared a confidence with him; and carefully repacking the script in my suitcase, he waved me through.\n\nByronic\n\nA symbolic figure of the South African tragedy in the years of apartheid was Christopher Gell, one of the most inspiring of the liberal activists, whose name was almost legendary, who was a unique source of guidance and information, and who lived as it happens in an iron lung. From there he cocked a perpetual snook at the Afrikaner Nationalists. A well-trodden path led to his little house, and brought a constant stream of people interested in the African Risorgimento, and anxious to meet this strange Byronic figure.\n\nGell received them in his lung. He was tall, painfully cadaverous, immensely vivacious. He wore glasses and had one arm suspended above him in a kind of sling. Books and elaborate filing cabinets lined the room, and his table was littered with proofs and pamphlets and letters. Often the telephone rang and Gell launched himself into a farrago of opinion, prejudice and argument till the voice of the man at the other end of the line sounded breathless and dispirited, Gell's face was wickedly aglow and the conversation ended in intellectual annihilation.\n\nThen he turned to you. 'Now then, let me put you straight about these bloody Nats.' He presented his case with tremendous energy, witty, outrageous, caustic, irrepressible, pausing sometimes to scribble a name down for you or dash off a note of introduction, swearing, joking, laughing, in a most extraordinary flood of stimulation and conviction. Slowly, though, his damaged physique ran down. His breathing became gasping and spasmodic, his face more strained with effort, and the gusto drained from his body before your eyes, like the symbolism of a Gothic painting. He would still be talking as you left him, though, and his anxious humorous eyes would be looking at you in the little mirror above his head. 'Of course we're intolerant,' he would say as you left him. 'We have to be. We'd never get anywhere with these stiffs if we weren't.'\n\nDoubly damned\n\nAt the Rock Hotel in Gibraltar I overheard two very old-school American matrons commenting upon the grumpy hotel porter who had just dumped their bags unceremoniously on the lobby floor. 'What an unpleasant man!' said one. 'What can you expect?' responded the other. 'He is British, my dear, and male.'\n\nDung and diplomacy\n\nOne day I walked up to the royal palace in Brussels, and just as I arrived a plenipotentiary emerged from its gates in a big black car after a diplomatic presentation to the King of the Belgians. A footling squadron of cavalry awaited him in the ceremonial square outside. Its officers wore romantic white cloaks. Its troopers, in slightly cockeyed bearskins, as in musical comedies, included some sceptical-looking horsemen of the old-sweat school, and at least one rosy-cheeked woman. When they clattered and bounced away with the ambassadorial Cadillac, a municipal road-sweeping truck came trundling around the place where they had mustered, cleaning up the horse shit. Its driver told me he spent his days doing it. There were so many embassies, missions and international institutions in Brussels, he said, that the palace cavalry was always at it\u2013and sure enough, as he spoke, the horsepersons, having disappeared round the corner with their fluttering lances, came ridiculously back again with another couple of limousines.\n\nSteamboat Gothic\n\nLongwood is the oddest of the mansions of Natchez, Mississippi, where Southern myth and prejudice are very powerful. The house was begun shortly before the Civil War, a wild architectural extravaganza, and Northern workmen were brought in to work upon it. Soon after the war began they dropped their tools and left, leaving the house unfinished to this day, with their hammers and wheelbarrows and paintboxes still lying about, ladders propped against walls, scaffolding still in place. Octagonal, domed and balconied, it stands in a wooded garden as a grotesque monument of Steamboat Gothic, its glassless windows gaping. Only the ground floor is inhabitable, and in it there lives all alone Mr John Price, white-haired and nearsighted, who once entertained us to a very enjoyable lunch.\n\nThis was a feat, for he seems usually to live entirely on marshmallows and fig rolls, but a jolly cousin of his came in to do the cooking, and the results were capital. Mr Price had no tablecloth handy, but a sheet on the table served just as well, and we ate Southern fried chicken in enormous quantities, and blancmange and cheese, finishing with either fig rolls or marshmallows, I forget which.\n\nWar story\n\nAn Australian boy once told me that his father had recently taken part in a military parade. 'What kind of a hat did he wear?' I asked for something to say. One of those hats, he replied, which were flat on one side but turned up in the other. 'I know,' I said, 'like they used to wear in the Great War.' There was a silence for a moment, and then the boy spoke. 'I hate the Great War,' he said, and my heart turned.\n\nChinese jingles\n\nEarly in a performance I attended in one of the regime's Children's Palaces, by an orchestra of children under the age of five, the virtuoso lead xylophonist happened to get herself a full tone out of key. She never appeared to notice. Nor did any of the other performers, all dimples, winsome smiles and bobbing heads up there on the stage. On they went in fearful discord, tinkle-tinkle, clang-clang, simpering smugly to the end.\n\nAt El Kharga\n\nEl Kharga is one of the five isolated oases which lie well to the west of the Nile in the Egyptian desert, and it has always been a place of exile. Nestorius was banished there, and Athanasius too, it is said. In our time political prisoners are immured in a detention camp at the oasis, and I once encountered some of them. They were patients in the local hospital, lying on straw palliasses on the floor of a bare ward. A murderous lot they looked, all the more sinister because bandages and plasters covered their eyes and supported their limbs\u2013one and all were enemies of the state, and their interrogations had not been easy. I talked to them warily of this and that, the conditions of their detention and their hopes of release, and they told me that every morning they were given a lecture of indoctrination by a representative of the regime. Something in their eyes, though, told me they were far from brainwashed, and now and then a particularly savage old dissident lying in a corner intervened with a caustic witticism, delivered in the most cultured of English accents and with the bite of an incisive mind. Thus Nestorius might have spoken, I thought, during his exile at El Kharga.\n\nThe European\n\nI met a man so allegorically Dutch that I deliberately engaged him in what I hoped would be allegorically Dutch conversation. He was a tall man with military moustaches, deep-blue eyes and a proper burgher's paunch, but he did not talk about Rembrandt, tulips, dykes, the German occupation, Queen Beatrix, the new season's herrings, Admiral de Ruyter or what was playing at the Concertgebouw that evening. No. He talked about unemployment, too many Asian immigrants, keeping his weight down and his hopes, earlier in life, of being a professional footballer. He was a citizen of the Netherlands, but I have met him all over western Europe, and that's what he always talks about.\n\nHero of the Soviet Union\n\nThe most dramatic as well as the most diligent conductor in the world is to be seen in action at the Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Odessa. He is an elderly man, but passionate. All around him as he works peculiar things are happening. Behind, in the half-empty auditorium, a constant buzz of homely conversation underlies the score, and three ill-shaven Levantines in the second row seem to be in the throes of opium dreams, squirming and sighing in their seats. In front, the stage is alive with minor mishaps\u2013trap-doors mysteriously closing and opening, fans being dropped, iron accessories clattering, while the cast of La Traviata smile resolutely across the footlights with a treasury of gold teeth.\n\nThe conductor is unperturbed. Majestically he sails through the confusions of the evening, impervious to them all, sometimes grunting emotionally, sometimes joining in an aria in a powerful baritone, throwing his fine head back, bending double, conspiratorially withdrawing, pugnaciously advancing, with infinite variations of facial expression and frequent hissed injunctions to the woodwind. Nobody in the socialist bloc fulfils a norm more devotedly.\n\nThe choice\n\n'Are you a man or a woman?' asked the Fijian taxi driver as he drove me from the airport.\n\n'I am a respectable, rich, middle-aged English widow,' I replied.\n\n'Good,' he said, 'just what I want,' and put his hand upon my knee.\n\nA Gypsy kiss\n\nIn the evening the entire population of Tirana seemed to emerge for the twilight passeggiata, strolling up and down the main avenue, sitting on the edges of fountains, milling around funfairs, wandering haphazardly across highways. I loved the louche insouciance of it all, the immense hum over everything, the quirks and surprises. Once I felt a small dry kiss on my arm, and turned to find a Gypsy child irresistibly importuning me for cash.\n\nUnderstanding the truth\n\nWhat would happen, I asked a fundamentalist predicant of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, if an African walked into one of his services?\n\n'I would have him removed. My church is for Europeans, and it would be wrong to allow a native to worship there. God divided the races for His own purposes, and it is not for us to doubt His wisdom.'\n\n'Or if a Chinaman turned up one day, or an Eskimo?'\n\n'No, my church is not for Asiatics. I would send them away. But now you must not misunderstand me,' he added earnestly, tapping his knee with his forefinger. 'I don't say they shouldn't have a service at all. If there was no other church for them to attend I would hold a service myself, not inside my church, of course, but in a field if necessary. I feel this very strongly: that no man, whatever his colour, whatever his race, wheresoever he cometh from, should be deprived of the opportunity of worshipping Him who is the creator of us all.'\n\nAs I left the house the predicant clasped my arm, rather in the Rotarian manner, and pointed across the street outside, where an elderly black woman was hobbling out of a shop, screaming something in a searing treble over her shoulder. She crossed the pavement, closed one nostril with her finger and emptied her nose noisily into the gutter. Then, wiping her nose with her skirt, she turned round, still screeching, and disappeared indoors.\n\n'You see?' said the predicant. 'My dear friend, we are not unkindly, but you must live among them to understand the Truth.'\n\nSocial status in the people's dictatorship\n\nMrs Wang had invited me to lunch at her Shanghai apartment, but it gave me no culture shock. True, we ate eggs in aspic, a kind of pickled small turnip and strips of a glutinous substance which suggested to me jellified seawater, and Mrs Wang evoked for me her hysterectomy by acupuncture ('When they slit me open, oh, it hurt very bad, but after it was very strange feeling, very strange...')\u2013nevertheless her home seemed to me the bourgeois home par excellence. It had the statutory upright piano, a picture of two kittens playing with a ball of wool, a bookshelf of paperbacks and a daily help. It had a daughter who had come over to help cook lunch, and a husband away at the office who sent his regards. 'We are very lucky,' said kind Mrs Wang. 'We have a certain social status.'\n\nBaleful eyes\n\nNo infidel is allowed to enter the most celebrated shrine of Kerbala, the holy city of the Shias in Iraq, but I knocked at the door of a neighbouring house and asked if I might climb to its roof to see into its courtyard. The owner of the house was all smiles, but it turned out to be a simple inn, catering for pilgrims from Iraq, and as I walked up its narrow winding staircase I found myself passing a series of sparsely furnished rooms\u2013a bed and a prayer mat and a hard cold floor. In each of these doorless cells there was a pilgrim, and as I climbed my way up those steep steps each turned his baleful eyes in my direction. I shall never forget the detestation that overcame the faces of those merciless old men when they observed an infidel on the stairs, nor the relief with which at last I escaped the gamut of their loathing and emerged upon the roof, with the golden dome of the mosque in front of me and the wide sunlit courtyard, crowded with robed pilgrims, spread before me like a chessboard.\n\nPassing the nut\n\nI was trekking alone between Namche Bazaar and Thangboche, in the Nepali Himalaya. I was walking fast, in pleasant heathland country, and presently I saw far ahead of me another solitary figure, moving in the same direction. It was a robust Sherpa woman, wearing long aprons and a high embroidered hat. Despite her hampering skirts she, too, was making good time, striding firmly along the track, but gradually I overhauled her until, in a narrow bend of the path, I was able to overtake her.\n\nShe had given no sign that she knew of my presence, never turning round or looking over her shoulder, just ploughing steadily on like a colourful battleship. As I passed her, however, her left hand suddenly shot into mine. For a moment we touched. Neither of us spoke, and I was too surprised to stop, but I felt some small hard object pass from her hand into mine.\n\nI looked down to see what it was, passed so strangely from traveller to traveller, and found it was a small brown nut. When I turned round to thank her for it, she grinned and nodded and waved me on; so I pushed ahead up the hill, cracking its shell between my teeth.\n\nThe master glass-blower\n\nHere stands the master glass-blower of Murano, in the Venetian lagoon. He stands grandly assured beside his furnace, watched by a wondering tour group, with a couple of respectful apprentices to hand him his implements, and his long pipe in his hand like a wand. With a flourish he raises it to his lips, and with a gentle blow produces a small round bubble of glass. A twist, a chip, another delicate breath, and there appears the embryo of an ornament. A twiddle of the pipe follows, a slice with an iron rod, a dollop of molten glass, a swift plunge into the fire, a gulp or two, a flourish in the air, a sudden snap of iron shears\u2013and abruptly the glass-blower lays down his work with a gesture of artistic exhaustion, leaving the apprentice boys around him silent with respect, and the tourists, sweating in the heat, clustered awestruck about a huge glass harlequin, beady eyed and multicoloured, whose long spindly legs, swollen stomach, drunken grin and dissipated attitude breathe a spirit of unsurpassable vulgarity.\n\nAn official of the glass factory shouts through the window to a pair of husbands who have evaded the tour, and are sitting comfortably on the quay outside. 'Gentlemen! Gentlemen!' he calls reprovingly. 'Sirs! Your charming ladies are awaiting you in the vestibule. All the prices are marked!'\n\nAwful, really\n\nA hand touched my shoulder as I stood watching a crowd of masked and black-robed women crowding around a water hole in the Omani village of Ibri. 'You shouldn't stand about here, you know,' a voice said in English, 'you might catch something. The sanitation is ever so bad!' It was an Omani Christian convert, product of a mission school somewhere, whom I had met earlier that day.\n\nHe invited me to visit his nearby house. It stood behind a heavy gate, for there was ever such bad robbers in Ibri, he said, and as we entered I saw, half hidden in a dim and smoky recess, four or five black-shrouded figures almost motionless, and soundless but for a few moaning noises. I did not like to ask what was happening in there, but as we climbed the stairs my companion remarked casually, hitching up his shroud: 'That's my wife. She's got something wrong with her inside, so a few friends came in to look after her.'\n\nWe sat pleasantly in an upstairs room, watching the passers-by from a window and eating some rather stringy pomegranates. Yes, he sighed, Ibri was a funny place. The people was very funny. 'It's awful, really,' concluded the apostate, removing a pip from between his two front teeth.\n\nChanging the guard\n\nEvery other morning they change the guard outside the Presidential Palace in Santiago. An enormous military band plays, and the two guard companies, equipped with high boots, swords and resplendent spurs, march and counter-march with an almost ominous certainty. This is no toy-soldier parade. It feels all too real, as though the participating soldiery, dropping to firing positions by the flick of a command, might easily exterminate each other by numbers. It ends happily, though, for when the ceremony is over the two young subalterns of the guard, marvellously slim and elegant, salute each other with brisk respect, shake hands like brothers and stride off together into the palace. There is a moment or two of silence and then the band strikes up a waltz, and even the undemonstrative Chileans, standing woodenly all about, tap an occasional tight-laced toe.\n\nLooking after the place\n\nI was once driving through the Transvaal when I noticed a small obelisk on a hillock beside the road. I stopped, and found beside it an old Afrikaner farmer, crouched in what seemed to be silent meditation. He wore an unbuttoned waterproof jacket. A linen hat slouched around his ears and a mass of curly hair lay down his neck and oozed over his collar. He turned to look at me, and I found myself gazing into the bluest and clearest and hardest pair of eyes I had ever seen. The face that smiled at me was round and sun-burnt, engraved with innumerable deep lines, but the body was stringy as gristle. 'Who's the memorial to?' I asked him as we shook hands. 'One of our great Boer generals,' he replied, and added simply: 'I'm his son, I look after the place.'\n\nThus I met, almost as in a reincarnation, one of the legendary Boer farmers of tradition. He gave me a packet of biltong, prepared by his wife ('the most beautiful woman in Africa'), and we sat in the back of his car and drank some lukewarm coffee out of a Thermos flask. He suffered from no false modesty ('I'm always giving, it's one of my failings') and he held violent and generally unshakeable opinions. Why, only a few days before he had sent a telegram to the Commonwealth Conference in London, warning the assembled leaders that communism, Catholicism and Jewry were secretly allied in a campaign to overthrow Western civilization. 'But they're blind, you know, blind. Churchill was just the same. I sent him a cable in 1942\u2013it cost me \u00a37\u2013to warn him that Russia was anti-Christ, but he disregarded it. He never answered it at all. I suppose he read it?' said that old Boer, screwing up the Thermos flask. 'What do you think?'\n\nSo we chatted pleasantly, and he told me that if I ever came that way again I was welcome to stay at his farm and eat his biltong and disagree with his arguments for as long as I liked. It was a pleasure, said he, to meet a visitor from Britain, and that reminded him: had I seen the incontrovertible evidence at Bloemfontein concerning the ground glass and the porridge in British concentration camps during the Boer War?\n\nAlien visitors\n\nOne evening I heard music in the street, and looking out of my window I saw two strange figures passing. One was a young man in a tall brown hat, blowing on a shepherd's flute. The other was attached by complex apparatus to a variety of apparently home-made instruments\u2013bagpipes, drums, cymbals, a triangle I think\u2013and in order to beat the biggest drum he had to move in an abrupt but creaky shuffle. Slowly and sporadically these engaging characters pottered down the pavement below me, tootling and drumming as they went. In Trieste that day they were like visitors from another, less inhibited world.\n\nYou're welcome\n\nHere is an exchange I heard during an anti-American protest demonstration at Ottawa:\n\nPolice inspector: Are you a part of this demonstration, which is forbidden as you know to go any closer to the American embassy?\n\nProtestor: No, sir, we are just Canadian citizens exercising our right of free movement.\n\nInspector: Why are you carrying that placard, then?\n\nProtestor: Oh, that's simply an expression of my own personal views, as a Canadian citizen.\n\nInspector: I see. All right, go ahead, then.\n\nProtestor: Thank you, sir.\n\nInspector: You're welcome.\n\nI was in a stingy mood\n\nIn the ill-lit pedestrian tunnel that goes under the Elbe at Dresden I heard ahead of me the strains of a Viennese waltz, played by a pair of Gypsy violinists. I was in a stingy mood, and resolved to give them nothing. As it happened there was nobody else in the tunnel at that moment, and as I passed the musicians, still eloquently playing, I felt their eyes thoughtfully following me. I was decidedly self-conscious, knowing very well that I ought to put something in the open violin case at their feet, and as I walked towards the daylight my resolution wavered. 'You should be ashamed of yourself,' I said to myself, so when I emerged into the open I dug a few coins out of my purse and re-entered the tunnel. Melodies from the Vienna woods were still sounding in its twilight, and the Gypsies were not in the least surprised to see me back. They had read me like a book, and were expecting me. I put my coins in their violin case, and they both bowed courteously, without a smile. I bowed back in admiration.\n\nTwo Kiwis\n\nCarefully and kindly the keeper placed the creature in my arms, and I felt its feathers rustling against my hands so sharp and metallic that they almost felt like scales. The beady little eyes were blind and filmed, the strong wire-like legs scratched and struggled against my chest, and the long tube of a beak, nostrils at the end of it, protruded its way crossly under my arm. It was about the size of a hen. The keeper looked on almost paternally.\n\nTwo Jocks\n\nI watched an elderly man with sparse gingery hair strolling hands in pockets towards a pub on an Edinburgh corner, followed forty or fifty yards behind by his extremely aged collie dog. Sometimes the man looked round with an encouraging smile, and the dog smiled gamely back, and so they progressed in perfect rapport, like figures in a Burns poem, until the pair of them disappeared together into the malty shadows of the pub.\n\nFour Londoners\n\nI had an appointment with the pelicans of St James's Park, to whom each day a grateful Ministry of Works donates a ration of fish. Their keeper was waiting there with his bucket, and punctually at four o'clock a big white pelican waddled staidly out of the water and rubbed his beak ingratiatingly against the man's legs. 'This is Paul,' he said. 'He's a very good-natured bird.' Before long two others turned up, in rather a diffident, squint-eyed, lopsided manner, for they were newcomers to the park. 'They're funny birds, pelicans,' said the keeper. 'Some people like them, some don't.' But when he had fed them their fish, and they waddled away sated, he turned to me again. 'They've had enough, you see. They aren't greedy birds at all. I thought they behaved very well, didn't you? Very well indeed, considering.'\n\nIn academia\n\nI have never forgotten the Christmas parties arranged for us, when I was a child, by the canons of Christ Church, Oxford, in their great canonical houses facing Tom Quad. How tall the candles were! How rich but wholesome the cakes! How twinkling the Regius professors turned out to be, stripped of the awful dignities of office! What thrilling presents we were given\u2013envelopes with penny blacks upon them, magnificent wax seals of bishops or chancellors! How happy the old clergymen's faces looked as, breathlessly piping our gratitude\u2013'Thank you very much indeed, sir!' 'It was jolly nice of you, sir!'\u2013we last saw them nodding their goodbyes, a little exhausted around the eyes, through the narrowing gaps of their front doors!\n\nDefinitely not\n\nI was sitting upon a grassy incline in a park in Adelaide when two small boys, one rather smaller than the other, prepared to ride down the slope on their skateboards. There were a few beer bottles lying around, left over from the night before, and I heard the elder boy say to the younger, in an authoritative voice intended largely for my own ears: 'Please don't hit the lady\u2013I don't mind about the beer bottles, but definitely not the lady.'\n\nThe captain of the Saratoga\n\nThe captain of the USS Saratoga, a tall lean man of ecclesiastical bearing, sits in a raised padded armchair on the port side of his bridge, rather as though he is having his hair cut or is being inducted to his see, and by looking through its tilted windows he can see the big jet bombers on the flight deck below. This ship, the publicity officer at your elbow tells you, has enough paint on her to redecorate 30,000 average American homes. There are 2,000 telephones on board, three escalators, three soda fountains, nine barbers' shops and 3,676 trouser hangers. 'We generate enough electricity to service a city the size of Pittsburgh, an industrial city in the State of Ohio. Our machines peel a thousand potatoes an hour.'\n\nBelow the windows the pilots scramble into their high cockpits. The captain rises from his chair, and a first violent roar of jet engines reverberates though the carrier. ('This ship has seventeen decks,' shouts the publicity officer indefatigably. 'There are more than 7,000 coffee cups on board the giant carrier, which is named from a battleground in the American Revolutionary War.') Then, suddenly, there screams into the corner of your eye a lean silver aircraft, violently projected at breakneck speed down the deck and into the blue, and in a moment there seem to be aircraft everywhere, some careering down the angled deck, some straight towards the bows, flashing and roaring and streaming away into the blue. In a moment or two the whole flight is gone, and is vanishing in the general direction of Turkey. A flash, a blast of jets, a dozen young men hurled brutally into the sky, and a terrible page of history could almost instantly be written. No wonder the captain of the Saratoga, as he returns to the seat of his command, has the air of a thoughtful but authoritative divine.\n\nYoung man with a gun\n\nUp a dingy flight of stairs in Vienna I went to visit Dr Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter and himself a victim of the camps. Short, balding, in his seventies then, he was surrounded in his cluttered apartment by certificates of merit and scrolls of gratitude. He had devoted his later life to tracking down the last of the Nazi murderers and seeing that they were punished\u2013year after year, decade after decade\u2013while those once-swaggering SS men grew frail and forgetful, and Wiesenthal himself entered old age fired still by his merciless search for justice\u2013or revenge. If he had anything to do with it, he told me, no single Nazi murderer, however old and grey, would ever be allowed to die in peace. I thought his office unforgettably baleful. The files that filled its walls were dreadful registers of death and torture, and Wiesenthal talked disturbingly about the wicked men still alive and flourishing in Europe. There had been an attempt on his life a few weeks before my visit, and a police guard had reluctantly been given him by the Viennese, whose communal conscience about the Jews was less than clear.\n\nThat day's sentry looked up at me as I left Wiesenthal's office. He was a blond long-haired youth with a gun on his lap, lounging there on a bench with his feet upon a chair, chewing something; and as he insolently stared at me, and at the old gentleman saying goodbye to me at the door, I felt an uneasy frisson.\n\nMore organic patriots\n\nBeing myself a sort of self-adopted Swiss patriot, I made a pilgrimage once to the lakeside field of R\u00fctli, which is the traditional birthplace of the Swiss nation. On the Sunday I walked down the track from the heights above, thousands of more organic patriots were making their way to or from the hallowed site, most of them evidently people from the mountain country around. I offered a cheerful good morning to everyone I met, and could not help admiring the utter lack of ingratiation, the courtesy tinged with decidedly suspended and unsmiling judgement, with which most of them responded. I was struck too by the proportion of twisted, stooped or withered old people among them\u2013people of a kind that had almost vanished from the rest of western Europe. They were one generation removed from the goitre, that talismanic affliction of mountain peasantries, and the faces of those crooked ancients\u2013hard hewn, bashed about, gaunt\u2013seemed to speak of centuries of earthy hardship, isolation and suspicion. I could not help remembering, too, that in Switzerland the very last European witch was publicly burnt.\n\nFishing lady\n\nOn the edge of a swamp in Louisiana an old Negro woman in a floppy straw hat was fishing in the oozy water with a home-cut rod. She had already caught a few fish, and they were floundering in the shallows, tied up in a net. She told me she had been dropped there that morning from the train which passed nearby; her husband worked on the railroads, and in the evening, when the train came back again, it would slow down past the swamp and allow her to scramble aboard a freight car. She asked me to drive a little way down the road and fetch her some Coca-Cola. I bought her four bottles, and the last I saw of her she was standing on the boggy bank in her huge hat, with the rod in one hand and a bottle raised to her lips with the other, a portly statuesque figure against a gloomy background of cypress trees.\n\nCoffee time\n\nI was once standing at the entrance to the celebrated whores' alley of Hamburg, beneath the flickering neon sky of the Reeperbahn, when an unexpected figure passed through its portals, weaving a bustling, purposeful, businesslike way among the pallid lechers loitering inside. It was a waiter from a neighbouring cafe, nattily dressed in white and carrying a cup of coffee neatly on his polished tray, with two lumps of sugar hygienically wrapped. He made his way dexterously to one of the brothel windows and, peering into the gloom to pick his customer from the row of ghoul-like prostitutes inside\u2013dim, apparently phosphorescent images of flesh, paint and pink nylon\u2013he handed her the tray with a polite little bow and returned to the world outside.\n\nIn London, 1980s\n\nSomewhere in Oxford Street, towards the end of the afternoon, a sort of hallucination seemed to overcome me, and I found myself in a nightmare limbo. I was aghast. Who were these fearful people, of no particular race, of no particular kind, so crude and elvish of face, so shambling of gait, so shabby of clothes, so degraded and demeaned of bearing? Where were they shoving and sidling their way to? What culture did they represent, what traditions inspired them, what loyalty did they cherish, what God did they worship? I seriously doubt if a less prepossessing citizenry can be found anywhere on earth than the citizenry frequenting such streets of London.\n\nMagnifique!\n\nWhen I was dining one night in a restaurant in the French island of Martinique, an extraordinary girl burst into the dining room and began dancing a kind of ferocious screeching rumba. She wore an enormous tricorn hat and a red swimsuit, and when the management objected to her presence she instantly threw herself into a spectacularly flamboyant tantrum. She screamed, shouted, sang ear-splitting snatches of songs, threw plates about, dropped her hat, made savage faces at the customers, knocked tables over and reduced the whole room to helpless laughter until at last, to crown a splendid entertainment, somebody dialled the wrong number and obtained, instead of the police, the fire brigade, whose clanking red engines skidded to a halt outside our windows and whose helmeted officers, trailing axes and hoses, stared in bewilderment through the open doors at the hilarious chaos inside. 'It was magnificent!' was the general verdict as, wiping our eyes and resuming our victuals, we watched that uninhibited performer withdraw.\n\nWest Pointer\n\nIt was Saturday afternoon at West Point, and many of the cadets were preparing to go out. I saw one emerging from her barracks in what I took to be her semi-dress uniform\u2013a trim grey trouser suit with a shiny peaked cap, very smart and flattering to her lithe figure. I followed her down the path towards the Eisenhower statue\u2013left right, left right, head up, arms swinging, brisk as could be to where her father was waiting to greet her: and then, talk about symbolisms! He was your very image of a kindly homespun countryman, a figure from an old magazine cover, wearing boots and a floppy brown hat, his face shining with pride and happiness. She broke into a run, her cap went askew for a moment, and into his strong American arms she fell.\n\nAn Irish experience\n\nI was in Dublin for the first time in my life, and I took a stroll along the extended breakwater, bleached in sun and sea wind, that protects the mouth of the Liffey from the exuberance of the Irish Sea. Gazing about me pleasurably, presently I saw implanted across the causeway the clubhouse of the Half Moon Swimming Club, and immediately beside the door of the building there was a bench, facing directly down the mole, as though in judgement. Even from a distance I could see that four or five heavy pinkish figure occupied this seat, motionless but glistening in the sun, like Buddhas, and I could feel their eyes steadily focused upon me as I approached them down the causeway until at last, reaching the purlieus of the club, I raised my own eyes modestly to meet those divinities face to face. Five old, fat, gleaming Dubliners looked back at me severely, and they were all entirely nude.\n\nYoung Iceland\n\nChildren play a disproportionate part in Icelandic life, it seems to me. Nothing is more surprising than to hand over one's fare in a country bus and find it accepted by a character apparently not much more than four years old, who grumbles with absolute adult authenticity if you haven't got the right change. And in the Althing, the Icelandic parliament, a common sight is a minuscule page hastening in with a quotation for the Foreign Minister, perhaps, or a statistic for the Minister of Finance: he is likely to be wearing a check shirt, a green jersey and corduroy trousers, and as often as not he interrupts the flow of debate by banging the door behind him. Nobody minds. Drat the boy, one seems to hear them murmuring. And his father was just the same.\n\nAfter Per\u00f3n\n\nGeneral Per\u00f3n's dictatorship of Argentina had ended, but in the plush fin-de-si\u00e8cle cafe I chose for my lunch in Buenos Aires his presence was still palpable. Around me gaggles of elderly women were sipping Cinzano with soda water and nibbling biscuits, nuts and bits of flabby cheese, but in the dimmer recesses of the room various lonely men were deep in the contemplation of La Prensa. When I asked my waiter if there were still many Peronistas about he nodded darkly but wryly, with a flicker of his thumb, towards those several grey solitaries in the corners, who certainly had a brooding conspiratorial look to them but were probably, in fact, looking through the small advertisements for second-hand canoes.\n\nThe proclamation\n\nA stone's throw from the holiday madhouses of Waikiki there stands a row of rickety tables beside the sea, shaded by straw matting, where elderly Honolulu citizens while away their Sunday mornings with chess, chequers and inexplicable card games. I was sitting there in reverie one morning, happily lost in the sun and the salt breezes, when a prickly old gentleman on the benches beside me touched me on the shoulder. 'You look a little melancholy,' he said kindly. 'Aintcha read the proclamation?'\u2013and he pointed to the notice painted on a weatherboard above us. 'This is a Public Park,' it said. 'Have Fun!'\n\nReassurance\n\nI was in the Isle of Man for the first time in my life, to write an essay about it. I had bought a book about Manx folklore and, finding an open-air cafe beside the sea, settled down to read it with a plate of prawns and a Guinness. The sun was lovely, the prawns were excellent, the Guinness went down like a treat, and I congratulated myself upon my choice of profession. Presently a lady came over to my table and handed me a pamphlet. 'Oh, thank you,' I said, 'how kind of you. What's it about?' 'Oh my dear,' she emolliently replied, 'it is only to reassure you that God is always with the lonely.'\n\nNo reply\n\nNowhere on earth is so inexorably improving as Washington, DC. When we came down from the top of the Washington Monument even the elevator operator dismissed us with a parting injunction. 'Let's all work', he said, 'to clean up our country for the two-hundredth anniversary just coming up.'\n\n'Yes sir,' we dutifully replied, 'you're darned right\u2013you hear that, kids?'\n\nHe had not, however, finished yet. 'And I'm talking,' he darkly added, 'about the mental aspects as well as the physical.'\n\nWe had no answer to that.\n\nPossibilities of misfortune\n\nThe Kashmiris are a hospitable people, but not inspiriting. They seem to be considering always the possibilities of misfortune. In the autumn the fall of the leaf seems a personal affliction to them, and the passing of the year depresses them like the fading of their own powers. Then in the chill evenings the women disappear into their private quarters, and the men light their little baskets of charcoal, tuck them under their fustian cloaks and squat morosely in the twilight, their unshaven faces displaying a faint but telling disquiet. There was a touching pathos, I thought, to their style. 'How do you like your life?' I asked one new acquaintance there, when we had progressed into intimacy. 'Excellent,' he replied with a look of inexpressible regret. 'I love every minute of it'\u2013and he withdrew a cold hand from the recesses of his cloak, and waved it listlessly in the air to illustrate his enjoyment.\n\nMy dinner companion\n\nMarvellously lithe and light-footed are the people of Helsinki, big but agile, jovial at smorgasbords or loping across their snowfields like Tibetan holy men. Their children, slithering about with hockey sticks, give the heartening impression that they came into the world on skis. Their wives are neat as pins, and gossip sharply in expensive coffee shops. They are a people that nobody in the world could possibly be sorry for. They are sharp as nails, and twice as spiky. But here's an odd and provoking fact. When I wanted something to read with my dinner some unexpected instinct guided my choice, a kind of reluctant nostalgia, a niggling trace of respect and affection, and when I sat down to my pig's trotters I found myself dining with Turgenev: and all that brave and courteous citizenry, I felt, could not offer me quite such company.\n\nDiplomats and a pianist\n\nI once went to the British embassy in Washington, DC, to see the pianist Vladimir Horowitz presented with the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society, brought to him on a cushion by a marvellously suave young secretary and handed over with a graceful ambassadorial speech about violent times and the meaning of art. Mr Horowitz seemed pleased, but instead of replying in kind sat down at the piano and played in a highly vibrant and indeed imperial manner 'God Save the Queen', making full use of the sustaining pedal.\n\nThere was a pause at the end of it, and instantly, as the last notes faded, I clicked the scene in my memory: and so I have held it there like a flash from a dream, the ambassador benignly at attention, the young diplomats rigid all about, the American guests clutching their champagne glasses, the great room aglow with carpets and portraits, the pianist's hand raised in a last grandiloquence\u2013an ornate little vignette of Washington, where life so often shimmers through a gauze curtain, insubstantially.\n\nImpact!\n\nKing Sobhuza of Swaziland, one of the world's last absolute monarchs, offered me a kindly greeting. His subjects fell on their knees, or even on their faces, when he passed, but I looked him Jeffersonianly in the eye, and shall never forget the moment. He had the most remarkable, most twinkling, most mischievous, altogether most entertaining face in the world. He seemed to radiate an amused but resolute complicity, as though he knew what a charade life was but was determined to make the most of it. He was dressed that day in European clothes; when he wore his tribal costume, a stunning assembly of feathers, bright textiles and talismanic brooches, the effect must have been terrific.\n\nStyle\n\nI joined an eminent, kind and cultivated actress in taking a cab to an address on Second Avenue in Manhattan. Said the cab driver: 'Whereabouts is that on Second Avenue, lady?' Without a flicker in her elegant equanimity she replied: 'Don't ask me, bud. You're the fucking cab driver.'\n\nOn an Oxford evening\n\nLoitering around Magdalen College on a classic May evening I saw a company of players making their way through the trees for a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream. They were moving swiftly in their cowls, ruffs and velvets, all among the elms, and a few shy deer watched them pass between the tree trunks. Their footfalls were silent on the turf, their voices reached me faintly on the warm air, and they disappeared into the shadows merrily, with Puck occasionally practising his jumps, and Titania lifting her crimson skirts, and a few lumpish fairies skirmishing in the flanks. I never caught the spell of the theatre more hauntingly, as I watched them across the fence, and felt like Hamlet when the players came to Elsinore\u2013'You are welcome, masters, welcome all.'\n\nThe moment of victory\n\nAn old woman, horribly crippled, struggles down the last few steps of the Chapel of St Helena, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. It is a faintly illuminated crypt. Her progress is agonizingly slow, but she is determined to reach the altar by herself. Painfully with her two sticks she shuffles down the stone steps, each one a torment. Prayers are mingled with her breathing. When at least she reaches the bottom, though, and I peer into the darkness to watch her, she abruptly leans down and places her sticks beside her on the ground. Then, straightening herself as far as her old crooked frame will allow her, she raises her arms above her in triumph and exuberance, more like some whipcord young athlete at the moment of victory than a poor old woman, distorted and arthritic, who would soon have to face the steps again.\n\nAt Schwab's\n\nHardly a Hollywood memoir is complete without a reference to Schwab's, 'The World's Most Famous Drugstore', and it is still heavy with the old mystique. Elderly widows of \u00e9migr\u00e9 directors reminisce about Prague over their breakfasts. Young men in jerkins and expensive shoes ostentatiously read Variety, or greet each other with stagey endearments. Ever and again one hears exchanges of critiques across the hubbub\u2013'I love her, she's a fine, fine actress, but it just wasn't her...'\u2013'Well, but what can one expect with Philip directing, she needs definite direction'\u2013'True, but shit, it just made me puke, the way she did that last scene...' I took to sharing a table with the divorced wife of a Mexican set designer who shared my enthusiasm for Abyssinian cats.\n\nA royal court\n\nI had an introduction to a Mogul princess, of the dynasty which made Delhi its capital in the seventeenth century and built the very walled city in whose labyrinthine recesses she lives. I found her ensconced in her front sitting room between portraits of her imperial forebears: a short, decisive old lady with a brief mischievous smile and an air of totally liberated self-possession. Her antique mansion is a beguiling shambles in the old Islamic style: a couple of rooms in the Western manner for the convenience of visitors, the rest more or less medieval\u2013wide decrepit courtyard, dusty trellised vine, thickly populated chambers all around. There are granddaughters and sons-in-law and undefined connections; there are skivvies and laundrymen and assorted sweepers; there are children and dogs and unexplained loiterers in doorways. Forty or fifty souls constitute the tumbled court of the Begum Timur Jehan, and through it she moves commandingly in green trousers, issuing instructions, reminiscing about emperors, traitors or ladies of the harem, and frequently consulting her highly organized notebook, all asterisks and cross-references, for addresses or reminders.\n\nPoliticians\n\nI love to watch the politicians ushering their constituents around the Capitol in Washington, DC, benign and avuncular, and to observe the endearing combination of the condescending and the wheedling with which they shake hands with their respectful electors at the end of the tour\u2013'We sure are obliged to you, Congressman'\u2013'We certainly are, sir'\u2013'I shall never forget this day, Congressman'\u2013'Fine, fine, great to have you along...' Meeting a likely looking gent in a Capitol corridor, I tried a gambit myself, as a speculation. 'Morning, Senator,' I said. 'Hullo there, young lady,' he instantly replied. 'Having fun?'\u2013and off he strode to his office, chomping, alas for my purposes, not an actual, but at least a metaphorical cigar.\n\nPerfect understanding\n\nLong after the end of the British Empire, some of its manners balefully survived. In Patna I had occasion to go to the Secretariat to ask permission to take photographs of the city, and found myself before a functionary of such classic insolence, such an unassailable mixture of resentment, patronage, self-satisfaction and effrontery that for a moment I felt like picking up his inkwell and throwing it at him. But I bit my lip and restrained myself, and as I glared back at him there the scales dropped from my eyes: his image blurred and reassembled before me, his colour paled somewhat, and I saw before me his true archetype and inspiration, the lesser English civil servant\u2013now, as in imperial times, the insufferable master of his art. I thanked the man profusely and assured him that I understood perfectly why I would have to make an application in triplicate to the Divisional Officer, who would unfortunately not be on duty until the following Wednesday afternoon.\n\nSnow in Holland\n\nI was once in Amsterdam when the first snow of the winter fell. The men in the central junk market, among their stuffed birds and rusty curios from Surinam, broke up the most hopelessly lopsided of their kitchen chairs and made bon-fires of them. A cold wind whistled in from the North Sea, huddling the more mature housewives in their mutation minks and driving the portly burghers to the felt-covered newspaper tables of the cafes, where they meditated ponderously over their coffees like so many East India merchants considering the price of apes.\n\nJoburgers\n\nI found the poor black inhabitants of the Johannesburg locations, in the cruel days of apartheid, hard to understand. Sometimes they were grave and courteous, and I was reminded of Ethiopian chieftains; sometimes they treated me with such bubbling flippancy that I thought they might be teasing me; sometimes a flash of malice entered their eyes, or something gave them such inexplicable amusement that they burst into a tumult of infectious laughter, or danced little jazzy jigs upon the pavement. When they spoke, they did so with explosive animation, but when they listened the whole of their being supplemented their hearing, they became one great ear, and their white eyes, their tense bodies, their eager fingers and their yellow striped socks all waited upon my words. And once in my hotel I heard tinny twangs of music from the street outside; and there beneath the arcades of President Street a solitary black man was lounging by, in a crumpled brown hat and blue dungarees, plucking away at a guitar as he walked, humming a high-toned melody, and expressing in his every gesture, in the very swing of his shoulders, the spirit of blithe indolence.\n\n'The same again'\n\nKabul in the 1960s is a tense, nervous, shifty capital, and edgiest of all at night, when the streetlights are dimmed, the brilliant Asian stars come up above the hills and only a few shrouded watchmen are left brooding on the doorsteps. Then the whole place feels sleepless and dry-eyed, like some insomniac conspirator. Sometimes a shot rings dead on the night, and sometimes a distant shout, and when a donkey pads softly by you can hear the two men upon its back, nebulous in white robes, murmuring to each other in low sporadic undertones. I once asked an old man of Kabul what would happen if another enemy attacked this capital as the British had catastrophically attacked it in 1845. Would they be exterminated too? He gave an angry tug at his beard and threw me a look of piercing and bloodshot intensity. 'The same,' he hissed through the last of his teeth. 'The same again!'\n\nHome are the hunters!\n\nI first went to Kuwait in the company of a sheikhly hawking party, returning home from a desert sporting expedition. Splendid were the caparisons of those haughty Arabian sportsmen, and their eyes were cold and heavy-lidded. They wore magnificent flowered gowns, and crossed bandoliers, and daggers, and spotless headdresses, and golden swords; and big black lackeys carried their peregrine falcons, hooded upon their pedestals; and a brass band puffed away on the airfield at Kuwait when this gorgeous crew, looking slightly airsick, staggered on to the ancestral soil.\n\nThe quarry clerk\n\nI was only just in time to meet Bob Owen of Croesor, in northern Wales, before he died in 1962, and I am glad I didn't miss him. He had worked as a clerk for a local quarry company for more than thirty years, a small man with a high wrinkled brow, a white moustache and bushy eyebrows, respectably dressed when I met him in jacket, waistcoat and unassertive tie. He was a tremendous talker, a chain smoker and a chapel goer of strong views, and when his quarry work ended he had become a writer and lecturer well known throughout Wales. He took me to the small square house where he and his wife lived and, merciful heavens, the moment he opened the front door for me I found myself hemmed in, towered over, squashed in, squeezed down by an almighty multitude of books. They filled every room of the house\u2013he had amassed more than 40,000 books and pamphlets, many of them rare and valuable. He was born, he told me, in a very small nearby cottage, nicknamed Twll Wenci, and people used to call him Bob Twll Wenci\u2013Bob Weasel's Hole.\n\nPretty children\n\nIn the mountain resort of Flims I saw three small Swiss girls on their way home from school. They looked like modernistic elves, with bright-coloured rucksacks on their backs, and they were burbling brightly to each other as they climbed the hill to their homes above the town. They paused for a bit of gossip and leg-swinging at a bench beside the road, and when they got up to go one of them, meandering off by herself, chanced to leave her sunglasses on the bench. In a trice the other two, laughing and giggling, threw them on the ground and stamped them into pieces before my eyes, alternating kicks in the prettiest way.\n\nLese-majesty\n\n'Yeah,' said a woman loudly and complacently, stepping back from a china cabinet during our guided tour of the White House. 'Just what I thought\u2013chipped!'\n\nA hated man\n\nSoon after World War II a friend was driving me one day along an Oxfordshire lane when we saw a picturesque sight in front of us. A fine four-in-hand was running along at a spanking pace, driven by an elderly gentlemanly looking coachman on his high box. 'D'you see the man driving it?' said my host. 'That's Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, the most hated Englishman alive.'\n\n'Bomber' Harris! The man who had unleashed his vast fleets of thudding black aircraft, manned by crews from every corner of the old British Empire, to devastate half Germany and kill scores of thousands of German civilians! I stared rudely at him through our rear window, as we left those trotting horses behind, but he looked a jolly enough old fellow, up there behind the reins.\n\nAmerica, America!\n\nI once came into Pier 86 on the liner United States, the fastest ever built, and I watched the faces of the passengers around me, waiting for the gangplank to open as the ship's band subsided into a last medley of patriotism\u2013'America, America', 'Dixie', 'Star-Spangled Banner' and one or two stirring marches I failed to recognize. Trilly secretarial voices rang, as those grand old tunes reverberated, jewelled spectacles vibrated, stiletto heels tapped the deck; but the expressions on the passengers' faces struck me as sad, as though the hum of the liner's mechanisms, the blaring of those anthems as the vessel docked, were holding the voyagers for a moment in a lost American world\u2013a world encapsulated there still between the decks of the great ship, that would dissipate the moment the gangplank doors were opened, and they returned to 46th Street.\n\nResponses on the road\n\nDriving through Vienna in a rented car, I slowed down uncertainly to decide upon my route. Instantly the driver in the car behind blasted his horn most rudely. I gave him a vulgar two-fingered sign which I would never have dreamed of using had I not recently learnt that it was a gesture devised by Welsh archers to demonstrate to opponents that their shooting fingers were intact. When the other car overtook me, its occupants both looked eagerly in my direction. The stout tight-buttoned horn-rimmed burgher at the wheel shook his jowls at me in affronted astonishment. His wife blew me a kiss.\n\nWidowhood\n\nFor the jollier kind of American widow Los Angeles offers a cheerful refuge, and provides a bedrock, so to speak, upon which they can reconstruct their lives. There is a certain sameness to their appearance, in their bright blouses, leather jerkins, rather too tight slacks and rather too rakish sailor caps. They are bowed often with arthritis but resolutely jaunty of step, and to their attitudes there is a sprightly element of freedom. 'Did you know,' one such lady asked me, supposing me, I imagine, to be a bit lost for social satisfactions, 'did you know that the telephone company offers a free tour every day of the week? My, that's a rewarding way of spending an afternoon!'\n\nMoon men\n\nIn the last years of Rhodesia, before it mutated into Zimbabwe, I sometimes had the feeling that its Europeans were being mutated by history, becoming some sort of new subspecies as they fruitlessly resisted the rise of black power. In Salisbury I sometimes took my lunch beside the hotel pool, and there was generally a group of young officers, on leave from their battle stations in the bush, having a swim or a beer on the terrace. Stripped to their trunks and sun-bleached hair, they seemed to lose all ethnic identity. Some were probably mercenaries: Portuguese, German, Afrikaner; most were doubtless expatriate Britons, subtly changed in posture and physique; all seemed to me specific not simply to the place, but to the time, to the circumstances, the historical prospect. They might have been moon men.\n\nEthel in Egypt\n\nOne evening I went to a salon presided over by one of the younger, richer and more cosmopolitan of the Cairo society ladies. The purpose was to present to the Cairo grand monde a celebrated clairvoyant of indeterminate Levantine origin, named\u2013well, let us say Ethel. Ethel would judge character, tell fortunes, give semi-occult advice and accept confidences. The attendance was soign\u00e9e: a couple of ambassadors' wives, an Indian, a German, a few bangled Egyptian patricians. We were served coffee in very fragile cups, by a Berber in a tarboosh, and we sat on squashy sofas at spindly tables in a room above the Nile.\n\nEthel was closeted on a balcony, and one by one the guests disappeared for consultations, taking their coffee cups with them. In the meantime the rest of us chatted. Did we know that G was almost certainly going to St Tropez with A? Was it really true that B was getting Omani money for his new hotel? Had we tried the chopped liver at the Hilton? What about F selling that awful house of his for a quarter of a million?\n\nFrom time to time another woman left for the confessional, but the returning devotees, I noticed, never seemed dismayed by Ethel's predictions, and returned instantly, without so much as a mention of their brush with the occult, to our distinctly worldly exchange\u2013'Half a million, I heard\u2013and surely it's chopped kidneys?...' But then Ethel, my hostess told me, seldom had unhappy premonitions. 'Well, one would hardly expect her to, would one, actually in one's own drawing room?'\n\nBirth of a taste\n\nI had disliked whisky all my life, but stopping to eat my corned beef sandwich in one of the most famous Scottish distillery areas, I felt it my duty to try once more. I went to a nearby pub and asked for a dram of the local water of life, to drink with my victuals on a bench in the square outside. The barmaid looked at me quizzically. 'I'm not sure the law allows it, but seeing as you're a visitor...' Looking cautiously around her, she poured into my plastic mug a full measure of single malt whisky\u2013one of the very best, she said, from a distillery just down the road. I concealed it in my bag as I left the inn, and turning at the door I saw her winking at me conspiratorially, as if I had poached a salmon. No constable intervened, though. No revenue man expostulated. Unwrapping my sandwich, there on the bench in the square I took a cautious swig of the whisky, and, dear God, I have never looked back.\n\nHospitable cop\n\nI was a guest once at a Buckingham Palace reception for publishers and writers, and at the end of the evening, wishing to leave, I looked around for somebody to thank. Queen, princes, dukes and all seemed to have gone elsewhere, so I left anyway, and at the palace gates I found a policeman. 'I was brought up,' I told him, 'to say thank you for having me when I'd been to a party, so as I can't find the Queen or anybody to say it to, I'll say it to you instead. Thank you very much for having me.'\n\n'Not at all, madam,' he replied. 'Come again.'\n\nA glimpse of power, 1950s\n\nFor a glimpse of power, try the Bolshoi at Moscow, when some gigantic Russian epic is being furiously enacted, with rolls of kettle drums and clashes of armour, a mammoth chorus open-mouthed, a clutch of heroes swelling in the foreground, with a passage and repassage of knights, horses, serfs, a frenzy of conical helmets and chain mail, banners dramatically waving, flames issuing from a backcloth, smoke, flashing beacons, the orchestra in a quivering fortissimo, the conductor wiping his sweating bald head, the enormous audience gripping its seats or craning from the high gilded balconies above the chandelier\u2013then, in the middle of it all, you will glance across your neighbour's shoulder to the great state box in the centre: and there will be sitting the most powerful man on earth, looking bored and rather glazed, a slight sad smile playing around the corners of his mouth, his wife, in a bun and brown sagging dress, demure and attentive at his elbow. You need not wait for the last act. Go home and sleep it off.\n\nAnother time, perhaps\n\nIn the Faroe Islands I repeatedly ran into groups of traditionally dressed folk persons, buckled and aproned, on their way to or from festivals of one kind or another. 'We have been telling rhymes in Klaksvik,' one practitioner told me as we sat together on the deck of a ferry, a celestial scene of mountain and fjord streaming by. 'Long rhymes?' I ventured to ask, thinking I might be fortunate to have missed them. 'Extremely long,' he said with pride.\n\nAt a Patagonian airfield\n\nWhen I was once hanging about an airfield in Patagonia, hoping to arrange a lift to the north, I noticed a small group of people, dressed apparently for apr\u00e8s-ski, who seemed to dominate the waiting room with a kind of steely radiance. They looked very rich and very brassy and very thrusting. Their children were ill mannered but intensely vivacious, their women were gimlet eyed but seductive, their men had a feline Italian elegance to them; and unexpectedly, when I offered a smile in their direction, one and all suddenly, brilliantly, delightfully smiled back. I asked where these magical creatures were making for, and was answered in one short tingling word: 'Rio!'\n\nMakings of a microcosm\n\nI did not want to be rude, but I could not help eyeing my neighbour with interest, for she seemed to me to have the makings of a microcosm. More than most cities, Stockholm projects two images\u2013the one you have been led to expect and the one you discover for yourself\u2013and this plump but not unalluring citizen, wearing a pink linen dress and a white straw hat, her eyes bluish but somehow glazed, her mastication rhythmic and her bosom calmly heaving to the flow of the salad\u2013this lady of Stockholm, evocative partly of Chanel and partly of disinfectant, slipped into my preconceptions like a plug into a socket. She was eating alone, with a half bottle of Niersteiner and what appeared to be the financial page of Svenska Dagbladet. Her lunch was large but looked obscurely colourless, as though it had been bleached in some anti-fattening lotion. Her gaze now and then wandered from her victuals and paraded slowly, resting at last without excitement on somebody else's pudding. Her expression was content without being joyous, and beneath her loose blonde curls, I told myself, all kinds of Swedish neuroses surely festered: anxieties of opulence, spinsterhood or free love, occupational frustrations and suicidal impulses. She seemed to express all that I expected of Stockholm, and when at last I engaged her in conversation, and boldly asked her what she did for a living, I could almost have hugged her in gratitude. 'I am a juvenile social welfare worker,' she replied with a sweet smile, taking a delicate last sip of the hock.\n\nThe only place for him\n\nWhen the US Supreme Court ended racial segregation in American schools, all the simmering discontent of the white Southerners boiled over, and I spent the day in Atlanta listening to angry men and women. The abuse they used was at once so theatrical and so repetitive that I could scarcely believe it had not been plucked wholesale from some common phrasebook of prejudice. I joined a conversation, in a coffee shop, with the manager of the place and a man who told me he was a senior police officer. They spend some time reminiscing about race riots of the past, talking comfortably of niggers bashed and beaten in the streets; and of one especially, hounded by the mob, who had thrown himself into the doorway of that very coffee shop, only to be pushed back on to the pavement. 'The only place for a nigger,' said the manager with finality, 'is at the back door, with his hat in his hand.'\n\nFlowers and the tribesmen\n\nClumps of a rhododendron-like bush brightened the fresh meadows as we drove through the Qara tribal country of south-east Arabia, and I asked the Arab driver to stop while I jumped out of the truck to pick some blossoms.\n\n'What do you want them for?' he asked when I returned with the flowers. 'Are they good for diseases?'\n\n'I don't think so. I just thought they looked nice.'\n\n'So they do, so they do. But the Qara people eat them, for the stomach.'\n\n'Are you sure?'\n\n'Quite sure. The Qara people know everything about flowers and things. They are very strange people, like the animals. By Allah! They are very like the animals.'\n\nAs if to bear him out we saw at that moment three strange fuzzy tribesmen standing on a bank beside the road, leather thongs around their foreheads, dark robes slung over their shoulders, daggers at their belts. My driver shouted them a ribald greeting. Two of them, with long, beautiful faces, did not respond, but simply stood there stiffly, like childish elocutionists waiting to perform; the third, a younger man, ventured to wave his short stick at us, and then, seeing that his companions remained impassive, lowered it shamefacedly as though guilty of some desperate solecism.\n\nWhen we had passed I leant out of the window to look back at them. There they were still, three straight, shy figures, holding their sticks, watching our progress fixedly.\n\nUncle Henry and the planter\n\nThe planter, fresh from a tussle with his tractor, had greasy hands and wore a toupee and an open-necked shirt. But like most Southern gentlemen he had a talent for hospitality, and soon we were sitting on the balustrade of his porch, sipping long cool drinks and looking out through the pines. The plantation had once extended to some 10,000 acres of cotton, tobacco, sweet potatoes and corn, but was now whittled down to about 150 acres. He told me that he ran it with only one full-time employee. His children went to the local state school, his wife did the housework, and 'The Street', the double row of uniform cottages where the slaves used to live, was empty and tumbledown.\n\nWhile we were talking on the porch a great cloud of dust approached us from the drive, and there emerged in stately motion two large mules. They were pulling a kind of sledge, a cross between a bobsled and Cleopatra's barge, and sitting on it, very old and dignified, was a Negro in a straw hat. Round the corner he came in imperial state, the mules panting, the sledge creaking, the dust billowing around us, and as he passed the porch he raised his hat by its crown and called: 'G'd evening, boss, sir; g'd evening, Missus Parker.' 'Good evening, Uncle Henry,' they replied.\n\nHe was an old retainer of the Parkers who lived almost entirely on their kindness. He was given a house and a few acres, firewood and storage space and a loan when he needed one. The planter would not see him in distress for the world. But to suggest that he might invite the old man into his house, or even shake hands with him, would be more than an impertinence, but might well be construed as a deliberate insult. Uncle Henry will always have a home, but, after all, the race must be preserved.\n\nFamily home\n\nAfter a while I felt quite familiar with the social structure of St Andrew's, New Brunswick. Who was this, for instance, smiling at me so kindly from the Wren House on Queen Street? Why, who but Miss Lelia Wren, who lives with her sister Miss Frances in the house their family has occupied for 150 years. Who is at the helm of that white boat out there? Mr Hered Hatt the scallop fisherman, of course\u2013everyone knows that. In no time at all I was acquainted with Mr Ian Mackay, who owns the Shiretown Inn, and with Mrs Bobby Cockburn, whose late husband's pharmacy was one of the town's prime power centres, and very soon the Venerable Nantlais Jones was waving to me from his handsome Buick Park Avenue limousine, which has CLERGY in ecclesiastical lettering on its windscreen. Hardly has one well-known householder introduced me to her stately collection of teddy bears ('That's Boogy, that's Oogy, that's Daddy Bear in the corner') before another is telling me how effective birth control pills have proved in the propagation of her hibiscus plants.\n\nIt was like exploring a rambling old family home, the streets its corridors, the houses its rooms, the citizens its extremely gossipy owners and retainers. One morning I arranged to meet two of the town's many widows and, idly passing the time beforehand by wandering through the town cemetery, I found both those ladies' names already inscribed upon gravestones, below their departed husbands'.\n\nKey West, 1960s\n\nKey West is full of people with nothing much to do, but a talent for lounging gracefully in doorways. If I stood on the waterfront on a sunny morning I would soon find other idlers wandering to my side to stare at the water with me, and sometimes gentlemen would buttonhole me with dark questions. Was I looking for rare fish? Had I spoken to Mr Alvark? Was it right, what the papers were saying about convertibility? Did I realize that the deputation from Ecuador was arriving next day? What did the British government think about labour restrictions in Peru? Most of them had wild gleams in their eyes, and having said their queer bit, shuffled away like disappointed saboteurs. Slow and old is the island city of Key West; also surreptitious, bland and turtle-like.\n\nAll in the family\n\nAt the railway station at Assiut an elderly Copt had come to meet me. We sat in the station cafe for a preliminary cup of coffee, and he undid the buttons of his tight linen jacket and wiped his head fastidiously with a silk handkerchief. 'I come from a family of priests,' he said by way of introduction. 'There have been Christian priests in my family since AD 48, when St Mark paid his visit to Assiut; and before that my family, through unnumbered centuries, provided priestly acolytes for the local god of Assiut, Leci. Come, finish your coffee while I settle this infamous account.'\n\nMarching with us!\n\nOne evening we were driving down a road on the outskirts of Chattanooga when we saw a dirty marquee. From it there came strains of music, with accompanying desultory snatches of women's voices, so we stopped at once and went inside. At the end of the tent a very fat woman was lying on the ground quivering and shaking, sometimes tremulously, like a jelly, sometimes with sharp stabs of impulsive movement. Two fierce women were supporting her head, and standing above them, waving his arms like a Paganini, prancing crazily here and there, a youth was strumming on a guitar. In the background a small girl was banging a hymn tune on an upright piano, and a group of black ladies, respectably dressed, looking a trifle bored, and sometimes pausing to exchange gossip or look out of the tent flap, was half-heartedly singing some sacred words: 'I'll never go hungry or know poverty\/ So long as the good Lord is marching with me.\/ Marching with me! Marching with thee!\/ So long as the good Lord is marching with me.'\n\nPresently the prostrate patient, with heavings and convulsions, tried to gasp a few words, and at this the attendant harpies were galvanized. Seizing the patient by the front of her dress, they yanked her into a sitting position and hissed urgent instructions into her ear. She was still jerking incessantly. 'Take Him in, take Him in!' they hissed, and were soon screaming, 'Take Him in! Roll it! O Jesus, the glory of it!' until the patient herself, jerking and jumping, managed to croak from her constricted throat a few unintelligible syllables.\n\nWhen we left the marquee she was still unhealed. The guitarist still whirled about her. The piano still tinnily clanged. The lady choristers whined their listless hymn. And the convulsed patient, all her draperies loose by now, was still being urged to 'Let Him in, sister! Glory, glory, roll it, roll it!' by the demon women at her side.\n\nEconomic imperative\n\nIn the worst times of the Irish troubles, when Belfast was more or less in a state of war, I once saw a patrol of five or six British infantrymen moving cautiously and watchfully through the city centre in the prescribed mode\u2013guns cocked, helmeted heads constantly turning right and left, lead man well in front, rearguard walking backwards with his finger on the trigger. As they passed an office of the National Westminster Bank one of them peeled away, while the others crouched there covering his back, ready for instant fire. He put his card in the bank's cash dispenser, he tucked his money away in a pocket of his camouflage suit, and they proceeded grimly on their prowl.\n\nSporting pleasures!\n\nMy first floodlit cricket match, in Sydney, was a terrific affair. Australia were playing New Zealand, and passions ran high. If a wicket fell or a catch was missed the crowd burst into magnificent displays of emotion, throwing hats, paper, cups and balloons into the air, shouting, whistling, clapping, booing and cheering. I was exhilarated! In the course of the game I happened to look over the balcony into an open space outside the stadium, and there I saw a succession of young men being hauled in, handcuffed by plainclothes policemen, briskly questioned, photographed there and then and shoved into a windowless van from whose interior emerged muffled thumps of protest. A few yards away, within sight of the police but on the safe side of a high wire-mesh fence, three small boys were getting their own kicks by sniffing aerosol cans.\n\nThe French swimmer\n\nTo my right, as I sat beside the harbour at La Rochelle, there came into my field of view a swimming man. He was in his fifties, I would guess, but stout and muscular, and he was swimming with an absolute rhythmic exactitude. A slow and powerful crawl, one two, one two, deep wallowing in the water went his head, up came his podgy arm, out emerged his face for breath, running with salt water\u2013a slight pause at the top of his stroke, and he was down again half submerged. He never wavered. The pace of his stroke was metronomic, and it suddenly occurred to me that he was on the way somewhere, as one might walk to work, or take a bus. He was the first swimmer I ever saw who was using his crawl as a means of transport. I watched him intently, and once I thought I caught his eye, as he rolled around for breath out there; but if I did it was an entirely dispassionate eye, like the lens of a submarine's periscope. It took him some time to pass me, until he disappeared round the headland to my left, and for some time afterwards I fancied I could hear the regular flop and splashing of his stroke, as one sometimes hears the tread of a ship's engines when it has long sailed out of vision. Since then, whenever I hear such a beat of engines in the night, I think, there goes the French swimmer on his way.\n\nThrashing as they went\n\nOn Ascension Day they beat the bounds of St Michael's Church in Oxford, to establish once again the parish limits and emphasize the old pre-eminence of the Church. Once I followed the course of this antic but moving ceremony. Led by the vicar, a little raggle-taggle group of choirboys and parishioners paraded through the city centre, now and then pausing at immemorially ordained spots to thrash a wall with canes and shout 'Mark! Mark! Mark!' (in the old days they used to thrash the choirboys too, to impress the boundaries on them once and for all). The route they pursued was involved, but the vicar and his crew were not perturbed. Once they scrambled over a high wall, once they marched deadpan through Woolworth's, and once they beat the wall of a banana store in the market. They followed the line to the bitter end, thrashing as they went, as fifteen generations of parsons and giggling choristers had loyally done before them.\n\nForty tailors and a camel driver\n\nIn a little upstairs factory in a Cairo backstreet forty tailors work, year after year, on the vast and splendid carpet, lavishly embroidered with gold thread, that covers the sacred shrine of the Kaaba in Mecca. A new one is woven every year, and is taken to the holy city at the time of the great pilgrimage, escorted by soldiers of the Egyptian army. When I visited the factory the tailors were nearly all Turkish by origin, and nearly all related to one another, and nearly all very old, and some of them represented the third or fourth family generation to work there. They sat at trestle tables in a long rickety room and stitched away there like the tailors of myth. They held their eyes very close to their work, and some of them wore little steel-rimmed spectacles on the ends of their noses. Their director, a portly and paternal official, sauntered up and down the tables with me, and the tailors, working away with their reels of gold thread, threw pleasantries as we passed. I asked one how old he was. As old as the hills, he said, but the director said with pride that he was actually a hundred years old\u2013'And so,' he added, peering round the room and indicating another benevolent ancient, 'so is the one in the corner, the one with the hat on.' All the old men grinned and nodded.\n\nAs we climbed down the staircase to the street, I noticed an elderly Egyptian sitting morosely on a stool outside the door, like a disconsolate watchman, with a white scarf around his head and a string of prayer beads in his lap. Who was he, I wondered. They said that until a few years before the carpet had been taken to Mecca each year on a magnificently caparisoned camel, and the man on the stool had been the camel driver. His unique occupation was gone, and he had never been the same man since. 'Poor fellow,' they said, 'he never leaves the factory'\u2013and when we looked at him, I noticed, he shifted his big feet uneasily.\n\nSingin' in the dawn\n\nOnce very early in Beijing I strayed over a bridge to a leafy path beside a moat. I was led there by a curious cacophony of shouts, singing and twanged instruments, and I found it to be a place of self-fulfilment. Resolutely facing a high stone rampart above the moat, like Jews at the Wailing Wall, all along the path men and women were rehearsing their own particular accomplishments privately in the dawn. As we sing in the evening tub, so the people of Beijing go to that wall. Here was a man, his face a few inches from the masonry, declaiming some heroic soliloquy. Here a woman was practising an astonishing range of arpeggios. A splendid bass was singing a romantic ballad, a poet seemed to be trying out a lyric, an elderly man with a bicycle was plucking the strings of an antique lute. I thought of joining in, so universal did these impulses seem, sending To Be or Not to Be reverberating down that wall, or perhaps reciting some of my own purple passages: but I restrained myself, as a Foreign Guest, and just whistled my way home to breakfast.\n\n'I hope you see it truly'\n\nA young forester walked by, as I picnicked by Loch Ness, and I asked him if he had ever seen the monster. He did not smile at the question. He had lived there always, he said, but he had not seen it yet. For him, though, its existence or nonexistence was not important, because he interpreted it as a didactic figure of faith. 'It teaches us to believe in something we canna see\u2013you understand me?' He thought a great deal about the matter, he told me, and often looked out there on the half chance of glimpsing the creature. I said I seemed to see it every five minutes, but again he did not laugh. 'Well before you go home,' he said meaningfully, looking me straight in the eye, 'I hope you see it truly...'\n\nNot altogether intelligible\n\nThe holy land of the Yezidis is in the Kurdish country of Iraq, and I was taken to meet some in their village north of Mosul. They follow an unusually cloudy religion concerned with the worship or perhaps propitiation of the devil. They seemed to me distinctly vague about it all, but although they were very hospitable I was haunted throughout my visit by the fear of committing some dreadful spiritual solecism. I must never, I had been told, utter the name Satan, for it is anathema to the devil: if somebody does speak it, the really convinced Yezidi must either instantly kill the transgressor, or commit suicide. Lettuces were strictly taboo: it is said that the Evil One once tried to hide inside a lettuce, but found its leaves insufficient to conceal him. Radishes were also unpopular, I was told, and the colour blue was something the Yezidis particularly loathed. They are most welcoming in everyday affairs, though, and if I wandered up the village stream the housewives at their washing would smile at me and make jokes (which, being expressed in a corrupt version of medieval Kurdish, were not altogether intelligible to me).\n\nThe croupier\n\nI remember clearly the appearance of one of the most famous of the Nevada croupiers. He was a tall man who wore a check shirt, open at the neck, narrow trousers sustained by a belt with an ornate buckle, and a black eyeshade. His face was withered and wrinkled like a tortoise's, his nose hooked and slightly crooked, his eye sharp and pale, his mouth thin but humorous, conveying an impression of very calculated bonhomie. His ears were long and protruding and his long thin neck was entwined with a mesh of muscles, like Laoco\u00f6n and the snake. Coldly and knowingly this man presided over the game, taking or paying mechanically with never a flicker of emotion, only the slightest hint of a nod, or the suspicion of a gesture, or the embryo trace of a beckon in the direction of the management. In front of him the piles of big silver dollars (common currency in Nevada then) glittered like stage properties; and once in a decade, I dare say, there passed through his hands a dollar made of gold, withdrawn with heart searchings from beneath some aged indigent's mattress.\n\nMormon faithful\n\nWhenever I think of Salt Lake City, with the pinnacles of the Mormon Temple shining there beneath the mountains, I think of bright clothes and urgent smiles, the voices of the vast Mormon choir ringing across Temple Square on Sunday morning, the unquenchable cheerfulness of the people, the general air of satisfied competence, and the extraordinary blandness of the old lady who told me one fine summer morning that for high religious purposes she had been tracing the course of her ancestry, and had succeeded in establishing it as far back as 64 BC, 'Only a few years,' as she rightly remarked, 'before Caesar went to England, but of course the ancient Americans had been civilized for centuries, as the blessed prophet Moroni told our founder\u2013that's him, that's the prophet Moroni, right up there on the Temple tower\u2013see?'\u2013and I looked up there, shading my eyes against the sun, but could perceive only the vague outline of that antique saint, holding what looked like a trumpet.\n\nHis Highness\n\nOne fine Arabian morning I walked into the palace of the Sultan of Muscat and Oman, on the shores of the Indian Ocean in Dhufar. Through the great gate of the outer courtyard I passed, and the slaves bowed low, into the polished hall of the palace, lined with bearded and begowned retainers, their rifles in their hands, until there approached me from the darkened recesses of the building a small dignified figure in a brown and gold aba, a turban on his head, a sword at his side, a heavy scent of frankincense emanating from his person. 'Good morning,' said His Highness the Sultan Said bin Taimur.\n\nHe was only forty-four, but the voluminous dignity of his robes, his stately bearing and his luxuriant beard all combined to make him look much older. His eyes were large, dark, long-lashed and very serious. His mouth, though kindly and humorous, looked to me capable of an occasional sneer. It was an antique, melancholy face, such you might see in old pictures of the East, and as profoundly enigmatical as the Pyramids. Later I was to encounter him in less autocratic mode, and then his eyes had a soft, thoughtful, almost sleepy look beneath their heavy eyelids, reminding me rather of an elaborately turbaned Cheshire Cat.\n\nFeudalism\n\nIf you go down a gold mine, in the South Africa of the 1950s, you will find that racial feudalism extends even to the face of the reef. A black man brings you your boots, helmet and overalls; and a black man hands you your face rag as you enter the hoist; and a black man blows his whistle and drives you in his trolley along the underground corridor; and a black man helps you off with your jacket when, as you approach the stope, the heat of the pit suddenly blasts you. A white Afrikaner overseer grins you a welcome there, but in front of him, flat on his back in an alcove of the rock, is the African driller, helmeted and bathed in sweat at the very war front of the mine. He holds his big drill with his feet, and he lies there like some hefty freak or prodigy, a handless painter or a three-legged man, his whole body shaking with the vibration of the drill, and the very air about him shuddering with its noise. He pauses in his work as you approach, but the supervisor gives him a flicker of his torch, and he is off again, smiling broadly through his dirt.\n\nMerciless fish\n\nAt sea in the Caribbean an elderly sailor pointed out to me the dark shadow of a shark, loitering beside the hull of our ship, and this is what he told me: 'It's got no marcy, no marcy at all. Big blue fish, so you can't see 'um in de water, he's sly! No marcy, see, not a drop of marcy!'\n\nNanny talk\n\nThe nannies of the London park were there in their battalions, elderly complacent nannies and perky young ones and hard old professionals with starched faces. 'So I said to her, I said, \"No, madam, it is not and never has been my job to make the tea...\"' 'It's never been the same since Lady Sarah passed over but, there, times have changed, haven't they, dear?' 'No, Jeremy darling, keep away from the doggy, dear...' '\"Give him his tea?\" I said, \"I haven't been looking after children for thirty years without knowing when it's teatime,\" I said, and with that I walked out...' 'Try rubbing his back, Mabel, that usually brings it up, doesn't it, dear?'\n\nChief of the Egyptians\n\nGamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt, lived blamelessly with his buxom wife and five children in a modest Cairo house that was plain to the point of ugliness. No rude or ranting orator greeted me there, behind some big officious desk. On the contrary, the Chief of the Egyptians was relaxed and friendly, in shirtsleeves, his vest showing between the buttons, and he gave me coffee and talked pleasantly and intelligently for as long as I liked. Nasser like to call himself the first indigenous ruler of Egypt since the Pharaohs, and he was indeed a genuine through-and-through Egyptian, born of peasant stock on the banks of the Nile. 'What a reasonable sort of man,' I said to myself as we talked across the plain deal table, sipping thick chamomile coffee from cups edged with blue roses and gilt.\n\nI was not deceived, though. For many long years Nasser led an underground revolutionary movement, and I knew he had talents of deception and conspiracy of a very high order. His horizons were limitless, and he liked to talk about circles of power, national destinies, the interventions of fate and that sort of thing. The hours slipped smoothly by as he expounded his theories, the coffee cups came and went, until at last the President rose from the table, his sandals flip-flopping across the linoleum, to see me to the door in his shirtsleeves and wave me goodbye into the night. The sentries saluted obsequiously.\n\nAnglo-Sudanese\n\nGood living is a Sudanese tradition, but it came as a disagreeable surprise to me in a Khartoum bar one evening to meet a young Sudanese, just down from the university, drunk not in the Sudanese but in the British manner; facetious with the sweaty banter of his British companions, not with any African drollery, with his tie loosened precisely as theirs was and a cigarette sticking to his lower lip. His grandfather had charged across the plain at Omdurman, brandishing a spear and screaming, but when this modern Sudanese slurred into the maudlin it was the maudlin of smoky pubs and potato crisps. I was shocked. But the British administrators of the Sudan have a wonderful knack of making you feel slightly ashamed of yourself, and I thought of that unlovely young man when I later read in a pamphlet of theirs: 'A new nation is being born, and in the difficult world of today the new arrival needs all the sincere sympathy and disinterested help you can give or get it.'\n\nI blushed: but it did not matter, for all the electric lights had gone out.\n\nAn exotic\n\nSen Tenzing was a Sherpa who had become well known as a porter with British mountaineering expeditions in the 1930s. He had always been a man of lively tastes, and by the time I met him in Kathmandu, when he was elderly, much respected and semi-retired, his appearance was wonderfully distinctive. On his head he wore a brown balaclava helmet with a peak, like the hats the Red Army used to wear. His grey sports shirt had polished major's crowns upon its epaulettes. Over woollen long johns he wore a voluminous pair of blue shorts, and on his feet were elderly trainers. A confused variety of beads, tokens and Tibetan charms dangled around his neck and a bracelet hung upon his wrist. In one hand he flourished an ice axe, in the other a fly whisk. It was not for nothing that Sen Tenzing, in the old days of gentlemanly climbing, had been affectionately christened by his British employers 'The Foreign Sportsman'.\n\nMr Beebe\n\nVirginia City, the most famous old mining town of Nevada, has been kept boisterously alive by gambling, and by the presence there of Mr Lucius Beebe. Mr Beebe owns and edits a revived newspaper of the Gold Rush days, the Territorial Enterprise, and he lives grandly in a small Victorian mansion, keeping Rolls-Royces and St Bernards. Almost before we had settled in at our hotel he was aware of our presence by bush telegraph, and before long he was showing us the town, wearing a hat with a flat crown and very broad brim, a shirt with a wide and handsome check, an elegant pinstriped suit and a waistcoat embellished with a gold watch-chain. Mr Beebe is a fine sight at any time, but is at his best when he strides into a gambling house with his St Bernard at his heels, pausing for a moment beside a roulette wheel to throw a handful of silver dollars on the table with a satisfying clang, shrugging his shoulders with cheerful nonchalance when he loses the whole lot, bending an ear to a tattered prospector from the hills who has some slight financial worry, raising a negligent hand of greeting to an acquaintance here and there, listening patiently to the report of activities of a man who plans to get even with him for something he published in the paper last week, ushering his guest into the dimness of the bar with a truly Bostonian courtesy before hitching his ample frame on to a bar stool and ordering an enormously large whisky. During our stay in the town Mr Beebe lent us one of his Rolls-Royces, for our convenience.\n\nBattle hardened\n\n'Lucky you got me,' Chicago taxi drivers nearly always seemed to say, if you wanted to visit the tough black neighbourhoods. 'Not many guys would take you. I tell you, I was a Marine for four years, I fought in eight major battles, eight major battles, and believe me if any of these blacks get in my way I'll just run 'em down, just like that. Lock your door now. Like I say, it's lucky you found me. Not many guys would come out this way.'\n\nCelebrating with Breughel\n\nIf ever you attend a rustic wedding in the Orange Free State you will realize how close the Afrikaner can be to the world of the old Dutch masters. The reception is held in the church hall, and the room is packed, and hot with robust gaiety. At the top table sit the bride and groom, flushed and rotund, she in an ornate white headdress, he intolerably corseted in black. Here are the bride's parents, wrinkled and sharp of face, and here also the two small bridesmaids, their plump country figures wrapped in pink and blue, posed self-consciously beside a potted palm. Big black servants scurry about with cold drinks and sweetmeats. 'It's all done to plan,' says your host complacently. 'All the tables are numbered, you see, so that everyone knows just where to sit\u2013no confusion, you see, no pushing or shoving, everyone can have a good time.' And everyone does. Now and then somebody makes a speech, generally disregarded, and the bride and bridegroom sometimes simper at each other at the demand of amateur photographers, and a hubbub of enjoyment and mastication fills the hall. Each trestle table makes a party of its own and eats its pastries with gusto, and shouts cheerfully for the Africans with the drinks; and the whole scene is warm and homely and animated, with the sheen of red velvet dresses, the fizz of bottled pop, smiling weathered faces, white satin, excited little girls and a smell of flowers and scent and sandwiches.\n\nShoeshine\n\nThe waiter at Colombo put down my breakfast and said he hoped I would have an enjoyable day. I told him I was going to make a pilgrimage to the grave of my father-in-law, a planter who had died in Ceylon during the war.\n\n'By God,' he said at once, 'that's good, that's very good\u2013parents is a bigger thing than the Lord Buddha himself,' and picking up my shoes, to clean them for the occasion, he bowed gracefully and withdrew.\n\nWe did not linger\n\nWith an American colleague I once went to a ceremony at Alexandria at which some new Czech weapons were to be handed over to the Egyptian forces. In those days many German specialists and advisers were working for the Egyptian army, and as we waited for the ceremony to begin we noticed a crowd of Egyptian officers milling around a tall figure in a black beret at the corner of the grandstand. We elbowed our way across and found ourselves face to face with as obvious and disagreeable a Nazi officer as ever I saw. His face was congealed with hauteur; his movements were stiff and mechanical, like a robot's; and icy cold were the eyes with which, flicking his cane against his long legs, he turned to look at us. The jostling Egyptians crowded admiringly all around him, but my colleague was a Jew, and we did not linger.\n\nA family outing\n\nIt was a festival day of some kind, and in the evening I asked a taxi driver in Beirut to take me for a run around the neighbouring hills, to observe the village goings-on. He brought along his family for the ride\u2013a plump smiling wife in black, a little boy in jeans and a very small baby girl with enormous brown eyes. The driver had spent some years in America, and his English was sprinkled with rather dated Americanisms\u2013'Say, what you say we stop for a sundae?' or 'How d'ya feel like a Coke, baby?'\u2013as we progressed through the balmy evening. We frequently stopped in villages for some quick refreshment among the celebrations. Candles were burning in many windows, and there was a constant crackling of fire-works and whizzing of rockets. Gangs of young men strolled about the hilly streets, singing and shouting. Innumerable friends and relatives of the taxi driver emerged from houses to impede our progress, and we had so many bottles of pop that the baby was visited by a staccato series of burps. 'What feast day is this?' I asked the driver. 'Christmas, friend,' he replied (it was the middle of July).\n\nWhen we started our journey back the family was fast asleep in the back seat, in a tangle of ungainly abandon, and the driver and I smiled at each other. 'Dig those crazy guys,' said he, as another festive party rollicked by.\n\nTactful parent\n\nDuring my stay in Darjeeling I often saw a young American dressed in the habit of a Buddhist monk. He was studying at a nearby seminary, I was told, and wore the brown cloak, the sandals and the hair bun as to the manner born. Nobody appeared in the least surprised by this anomalous figure, and his father, who was paying him a visit from the States, seemed entirely at home with the turn of family events. 'I'm going to drink, Jimmy,' I heard him saying to his son one day, puffing at his cigar and raising his glass, 'I'm going to drink to all these wonderful, wonderful people of Darjeeling!' (And 'Say,' he tactfully added as he put his glass down, rather hastily I thought, 'is this Indian wine? Delicious!')\n\nA small magnifico\n\nI was strolling through the souk in Qatar when there emerged from a doorway beside me the smallest man I had ever seen. He was about four feet high, stout and prosperous looking, dressed in the resplendent regalia of an Arab gentleman\u2013splendid brown aba, milk-white keffiyeh, black head-band, dagger and beads. With a flourish and a toss of his head this marvellous figure strode down the steps of his house and swaggered away through the souk, as bold and assured as any gigantic African chieftain or Renaissance aristocrat. His proud head bobbed away among the packing cases, and a breath of the incense that perfumed his beard hung in the bazaar behind him.\n\nA large magnifico\n\n'Back again,' said the magnifico at the cafe on the last ridge before Cetinje and the heart of Montenegro. We had met before, you see. He is always there, it seems, summer or winter, like a major-domo of these uplands, or a Chief of Protocol. He wears black breeches, and a wide belt like a cummerbund, and he stands about seven feet tall, and speaks in a basso profundo, and tosses slivovic back like lime juice, and is in all respects the very model of a modern Montenegran.\n\n## A snatch of sound in Morocco\n\n'Go to sleep now,' they said, 'the operation will be later.'\n\nBut when they had gone I got out of bed rather shakily,\n\nfor the drug was beginning to work,\n\nand went to say goodbye to myself in the mirror.\n\nAs I did so a street vendor outside played a delicate\n\narpeggio upon his flute,\n\na very gentle merry sound\n\nwhich he repeated, over and over again,\n\nin sweet diminuendo down the street.\n\nFlights of angels, I said to myself, and so\n\nstaggered to my bed, and oblivion.\n\n##\n\n'Ain't that right?'\n\nIn Montana once I found the road blocked for a mile or more by a mass of sheep. Some were moving very slowly, some were nibbling the sparse grass beside the highway, some were sitting down and one or two seemed to be fast asleep. At the head of this leisurely procession were two cowboys, mounted on fine black horses. The men were very weatherbeaten, dirty and bearded, with their tangled hair escaping from their hats and their fingernails black and broken. They had been rounding up the sheep in the surrounding mountains, to bring them down for shearing and to escape the coming winter storms. 'We been fourteen days in the hills,' said one, 'and seven days on the move. Sheep ain't very fast movers. Boy, will I be glad of a bed!\n\n'As for this horse,' he added affectionately, 'all he wants is a good hot cup of coffee and a place to put his feet up. Ain't that right, boy?'\n\nIn a trance?\n\nWhen I was alone in the Himalaya one day I saw a man. I saw him first in the extreme distance, across an absolutely blank snowfield at about 19,000 feet, to which I had climbed from the glacier below for the sake of the view. At first I could not make out what he was\u2013only a black swaying speck, indescribably alone in the desolation. As he came closer I could see that he could only be human, so I plunged through the loose snow to meet him, and presently, there near the top of the world, thousands of feet and many miles above the trees, we met face to face. It was the strangest encounter of my life.\n\nHe was a holy man, wandering in the mountains, I suppose, for wandering's sake. His brown, crinkled, squashed-up face looked back at me expressionless from beneath a yellow hood, and seemed to find nothing strange in my presence there. He wore a long yellow cloak and hide boots, and from his waist there hung a spoon and a cloth satchel. He carried nothing else, and he wore no gloves. I greeted him as best I could, but he did not answer, only smiling at me distantly and without surprise. Perhaps he was in a trance.\n\nI offered him a piece of chocolate but he did not take it, simply standing there before me, slightly smiling. Presently we parted, and without a word he continued on his unfaltering journey, making, it seemed, for Tibet without visible means of survival and moving with a proud, gliding and effortless motion that seemed inexorable. He did not appear to move fast, but when I looked round he had almost disappeared, and was no more than that small black speck again, inexplicably moving over the snows.\n\nThe truth of it\n\nIn a churchyard in County Monaghan I stood beside the grave of Seamus McElwain, a young IRA man whose whole life had been a succession of bloodshed and imprisonments until he had been killed by British soldiers in a neighbouring meadow. His epitaph was in Irish, and on the cross, together with the relief of a bird escaping through a mesh of barbed wire, was affixed a coloured photograph of him, a good-looking dark-haired boy in a dinner jacket. The tears came into my eye as I stood there (the wind rustling the hedges all around), and a gardener working nearby asked me if perhaps I was a McElwain myself? But I said I was simply crying for them all, whatever side they were on. 'That's the truth of it,' he said, 'that's the truth.'\n\nUrgent inquiries\n\nWide eyed and open handed the Fijians greet me, in their tidy thatched settlements off the highway, or among the mangrove swamps where the women, hitching their skirts up to their waists, scoop about indelicately for shellfish. 'Where are you going? What is your name? Are you married? Where do you live? Have you any children? Would you like a banana? How many people live in London? Do you sleep alone?' Their inquiries are directed urgently at me: the Fijian for curiosity is via kila\u2013knowledge want. I told the maids in my Suva hotel that I was scared of them, because they stared at me so hard, and in the evening I found a little bowl of flowers placed beneath my window in appeasement. 'Aaah,' they said, shaking their big kind heads in remorse, 'we no wish to frighten you.'\n\nTheir forebears used to be cannibals, but I would not mind being eaten in Fiji. The pot would be spiced, the cooking gentle, and the occasion in most ways merry.\n\nOn the waterfront\n\nAfter a day around the docks with the notorious Manhattan longshoremen, still among the more obstreperous of the city's workers, I thought of them with more sympathy. That evening I took a coffee and doughnut in a diner down there, and tried to imagine what it would have been like to be a poor Irish immigrant half a century ago, looking for work on that hard and dirty shore. When the man on the next stool scowled across the napkin stand and said nastily, 'You want all the sugar?' I told myself he was the victim of historical circumstance, and said I was most awfully sorry.\n\nEmpire builders?\n\nI loved to sit on a Hong Kong ferry and contemplate the remaining Britons of Hong Kong. They were trapped for me there, like historical specimens, deep in their tabloids or compiling their shopping lists. What a line they represented, I used to think! What generations of exile culminated in their persons, listlessly looking out across the passing harbour, or doing the crossword puzzle! Their forefathers blazed a way across the world, veld to outback, pioneering in shacks, beachcombing on reefs, disciplining recalcitrant Sioux or bayoneting fuzzy-wuzzies; and there they were beside me, the last of the long parade, indifferent to their origins, unconscious of them, perhaps, unexcited on the slat-seated ferryboat between Kowloon and Victoria!\n\nThe boat shudders; the gangplanks clatter down; the blue-shirted Chinese seamen swing open the iron gates; and in a trice, as the crowd streams off the vessel, those unobtrusive imperialists are so utterly overwhelmed by their Chinese fellow citizens that you would hardly guess there was a Briton left in Hong Kong at all.\n\nIcelandic allegory\n\nBeauty and the Beast is an Icelandic allegory. Everybody who goes to the island is struck by the splendour of the girls. Pick a choice example now\u2013the shop girl, say, who is packing your stuffed puffin in the souvenir shop, or pricing your lava-stone powder box. What a gorgeous strapping girl she is, what a terrific golden girl, with her wide-apart eyes, her hair bleached in Arctic sunshine, her exquisite complexion mixed out of snow and pink blossom!\n\nTake your eyes off her for a moment, though, and observe the young man shambling down the street outside\u2013towards his trawler, perhaps, or off to his fearful shift at the fish factory. He is the original Viking, I suppose. His forehead and his chin symmetrically recede, his cheeks are wolfishly sunken, his eyes blaze, and there is to his loping walk a suggestion of immense loose-limbed power, as though a tap on his shoulder would unleash his doublebladed battleaxe and send him off to Greenland with horns on his head.\n\nWedding pictures\n\nWhen King Hussein of Jordan married it was supposed to be a ceremony of liberated modernity. However, as I joined the society ladies for the occasion I could not help feeling that we were close in spirit to the huddled jealousies and school-girl excitements of the harem. At the head of the stairs were two bold lancers in scarlet tunics and white breeches, as the eunuchs would have stood sentry in an earlier age, and the body of the room was a seething mass of women. They were dressed magnificently, a glitter of satins and brocades and furs, a mosaic of lipsticks and mascaras, a tinkling kaleidoscope of earrings, a flurry of sequinned handbags. Chanel and Dior thickened the air. How often and how brazenly did the women of the court eye each other's coutures! How heavily accentuated were the outlines of their eyes, like eyes seen through diaphanous curtains in forbidden corridors of the Seraglio! How scratchy and talon-like were the fingernails, how pinkly fleshy the figures, and how passive and doll-like those emancipated ladies looked, in serried and perfumed phalanx, as if some lascivious Sultan were about to pass through their ranks, picking a beauty here and a beauty there with a lordly gesture of his forefinger!\n\nBut presently a cameraman in a crumpled jacket suddenly pressed his way past the guards and said (as it were), 'Just one more, ladies, please, give us a nice smile now.'\n\nA holy clock\n\nIn the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem a little chapel stands shrouded in black curtains beside the site of the sepulchre itself. One morning I found myself all alone before this shrine, and as I stood there in the silence I thought I heard a faint ticking noise from the inside. For a moment I stood hesitant, thinking it might be the working of a perpetual censer, or perhaps the swinging of an ornate lantern on its chain. But it was so regular and so insistent that I pulled the heavy curtains aside and looked in, and there on the altar, all alone among the ikons and candlesticks, a red moon-faced kitchen clock ticked away robustly, for all the world as though it were timing the eggs. I laughed with pleasure at this unexpected discovery, and there was an answering chuckle behind my back. Standing among the tall pillars of the rotunda, all but hidden in the shadows, there stood a gigantic Abyssinian priest in an attitude of serene meditation. When I turned to look at him a white gleam in the darkness testified to the smile upon his black bearded face.\n\nSilly question\n\nWildness, freeness, recklessness\u2013not in Vienna! I went to a police court there one day and, noticing one of the accused studying a road map between hearings, asked him if he was planning an escape. 'No,' he said, 'I am deciding the best route to visit my aunt at Graz.'\n\nExpertise\n\nI visited the Pioneer Museum, in Fremont County, Wyoming. During my visit a schoolmistress was taking a group of children round the exhibits, and I heard her drawing their attention to a chair that stood in a corner of the gallery. It was made all of bleached white horn: legs, seat, back and all. 'That is an example', she was saying, 'of the craftsmanship of the very first pioneers to come to Fremont County. Isn't that beautiful, children?' 'Yes, ma'am,' most of them replied, but after the main body had moved on to the Shoshone relics, a section of the museum I preferred to circumvent, I noticed a pair of laggard urchins trailing along behind. They had not heard their teacher's encomium of the chair, but they too paused as they passed it, and inspected it with no less knowledgeable admiration. 'Jeez,' said one to the other. 'Take a look at that elk.'\n\nFirst time lucky!\n\nI crossed to Hoboken on the very last voyage of the very last Manhattan railroad ferry, and the shabby old boat was full for the occasion with reporters, cameramen, roistering office workers, people with banners and leaflets and comic hats and crates of champagne, and a trio of Salvation Army girls singing unaccompanied hymns indefatigably above the hubbub. I sat down on a grubby bench beside an elderly habitu\u00e9 of the ferry. 'You sound kinda British,' he said. 'Funny place for you to be, ain't it? You ride this boat regular?'\n\n'Never before in my life,' said I.\n\n'Well, you don't say. Some people have it easy. I've had to ride this ferry forty years to make the last crossing. You come over and do it first time!'\n\nAdvice\n\nBy and large, it seemed to me, British businessmen in Hong Kong pursued their various careers in a pleasant state of half-speed ahead, eating well, enjoying their friends, gossiping in the club bar, taking the junk out on Sundays\u2013'Whatever you do,' they used to tell me, 'don't go out with Bill [or Simon, or Ted], you'll be drunk before you get out of the harbour.'\n\nRacial tension\n\nSix or seven miles out of Pretoria, on my way to catch an early flight, I saw a black figure running helter-skelter down the road towards the city. A moment later another followed, and then two or three more, and they panted by us, with serious faces and bulging eyes, like participants in some strenuous sunrise celebration.\n\n'What are they doing?' I asked my driver.\n\n'Those Kaffirs? They're on their way to work. They've probably got to start at seven, and they've got a long way to go, so they've got to run fast. It won't do them any harm.'\n\n'You don't like Kaffirs?' I surmised.\n\n'Kaffirs?' he replied with a genial twinkle. 'I love them like they was vermin.'\n\nKurds on the move\n\nHow's this for a glimpse? Once, once only, I encountered a tribe of Kurds on the move. It was spring, the grasslands were thick with flowers, and in the distance the mountain barriers stood blue and purple and formidable, with a fleck of snow on their summits and a cloudless sky above. Against this heavenly background the Kurdish nomads moved triumphantly across my field of vision. Their herds of sheep and floppy-eared goats scrambled and jostled in the sunshine, and behind them the bold horsemen lorded it across the plain, riding their stocky horses like avenging marauders, rifles across their backs, bandoliers across their chests, sheepskin jackets slung about them grandly. The women walked alongside, carrying the baggage; the children scampered or lagged behind; the great herds eddied about and spilled over the landscape; and the effect of the procession, glimpsed in so wide and airy a setting, was that of a community of unusually cheerful brigands crossing a steppe to commit an atrocity.\n\nBefore fame hit him\n\nA couple of days after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norkay became the first climbers ever to reach the summit of Everest, I was near the foot of the mountain on my way home. It was a still, oppressive, grey morning, and I saw away up the glacier, coming down from the mountain, a solitary figure moving swiftly and gracefully down the valley, swinging and buoyant, like some unspoilt mountain creature. A wide-brimmed hat! High reindeer boots! A smile that illuminated the glacier! An outstretched hand of greeting! Tenzing!\n\nHe took off his big hat, smiling still, and sat down upon a rock. He was going to rest and wash, he said, and then traverse a neighbouring ridge towards his home village, where his mother lived. We had breakfast together, and he pulled from his wallet a snapshot of himself with a number of little Tibetan terriers. 'Given me by the Dalai Lama,' he explained with pride, and taking a pen from his pocket he slowly wrote his signature (the only word he could write) across the bottom of it and handed it to me with a deprecatory grin. The last I saw of him there, he had stripped his lean lithe body to the waist and was soaping himself with water from a tin basin. It looked a chilly operation.\n\nBy the very next day he would be one of the most famous men on earth.\n\n'Mamma mia!'\n\nA veteran fisherman took me out into the Venetian lagoon to find an island house I had read about, but when we reached the spot we found that nothing remained of it but a pile of rubble. The old man was astonished, but even more affronted. 'Now why should a thing like that happen?' he asked me indignantly. 'Mamma mia! That house was there when I was a child, a fine big house of stone\u2013and now it's gone! Now why should that have happened, eh? Tell me that!'\n\nHe was an urbane man, though, beneath his stubble, and as we moved away from that desolate place, and turned our prow towards San Pietro, I heard a rasping chuckle from the stern of the boat. 'Mamma mia!' the old man said again, shaking his head from side to side: and so we chugged home laughing and drinking wine until, paying insufficient attention to his task, that fisherman ran us aground and broke our forward gear, and we completed the voyage pottering shamefacedly backwards. 'Like a couple of crabs,' he said, unabashed, 'though even the crabs go sideways.'\n\nAn apartheid queue\n\nIn the evening all the poor black workers of Johannesburg, forbidden to live within the precincts of the city, rush for the buses that will take them to their slums and sprawling estates. You can hardly watch such a scene without the stirring of some crusading instinct, some Byronic impulse, or at least a stab of pity. As dusk falls, and as the bitter winter night begins to whistle through the buildings, a vast tattered queue moves in raggety parade towards the bus depot, and thousands of Africans shuffle their slow way in double file towards their shabby buses. There is an air of unutterable degradation to the scene, so heartless and machine-like is the progress of the queue, as the white folk hasten off in their cars to the rich city districts, and the lights glitter in the windows of the department stores, and those poor lost souls are crammed into their buses and packed off to their distant ill-lit townships. Many of them are half starving. Most of them live in fear of robbery or violence when they step off the buses into the dark streets of the locations; half of them spend almost all their leisure hours travelling between the city and the far-flung patches of high veld in which they are obliged to live; they reach their homes long after dark at night, and they start work again when the morning is still only a suggestion.\n\nOld-school flying\n\nIn earlier days of transatlantic flying it was generally necessary for passenger aircraft to refuel en route, at Gander in Newfoundland, Shannon in Ireland, or somewhere or other on the way to San Francisco. I was travelling to America on a British Overseas Airways Corporation aircraft when we were told that because of favourable winds we would not for once have to make an intermediate stop. About halfway across, the aircraft's captain came chattily around the passenger cabins, as was the BOAC custom, in the full glory of his regalia\u2013they ran their planes like ships then, and he was very much the Master.\n\n'Everything all right?' he asked courteously, in a clipped public-school accent, when he came to me. 'Having a comfortable flight?'\n\n'Everything's fine,' I told him, 'but there is one thing: are you quite sure you've got enough fuel to get us over without a stop?'\n\n'Never fear,' he replied in the best old-school British style. 'We're terrible cowards up front.'\n\nFestivities!\n\nOn Princes Street that day, when the Edinburgh Festival was in full fling, half a dozen sideshows were performing. An old-fashioned socialist demagogue was haranguing the crowd from his soapbox. A man in full evening dress was singing 'On the Sunny Side of the Street' from the steps of the National Gallery. Two comedians dressed as ancient Egyptians were doing a comic act, and a tipsy old fellow in a kilt was dancing a reel to the music of a wind-up gramophone. All of a sudden amidst the hubbub two young toughs in shirtsleeves struck up a bit of a fight, punching each other in a tentative way and exchanging high-pitched Scottish insults. Instantly all attention turned to them. The orator found his audience dwindling before his eyes, the ancient Egyptians were soon playing to an empty pavement, and swirling here and there across the pavement went all the audiences, wavering and staggering with each exchange of blows. Through the melee, as it disappeared behind the Scott Memorial, I could see the fierce squabbling heads of the contestants, mouthing festive curses.\n\nAloofly towards the dawn\n\nI once heard a pair of Venetian inebriates passing my window at four o'clock on a May morning, and looking out into the Rio San Trovaso I saw them riding by in a gondola. They were sitting on the floor of the boat, drumming on its floor-boards, banging its seats, singing and shouting incoherently at the tops of their thickened voices; but on the poop of the gondola, rowing with an easy, dry, worldly stroke, an elderly grey-haired gondolier propelled them aloofly towards the dawn.\n\nMother Russia\n\nIn Soviet Russia during the Cold War the foreign writer was generally at the mercy of Intourist, the government tourist organization. It was efficient and courteous enough, though speckled no doubt with agents of counter-intelligence, and its younger employees were often refreshingly undogmatic. Now and then, though, Intourist would send you an interpreter of the old school, a woman of severe bearing and inflexible party loyalty. Polite but unmistakably chill such a lady was likely to be, as though you were an emissary of capitalist encirclement, and a day with such an ideologue could be exhausting. I found there was a solution, though, an exorcism. When my companion was particularly severe about my bourgeois deviations, I would turn to her with an expression of deeply wounded sensibility, allow the warm tears to well into my eyes, sniff a little, blow my nose shakily, and tell her I thought she had been unkind.\n\nThis was a magic word. Instantly there would be released from her bosom a flood of immemorial Russian emotion, dimly lit with ikons and scented with incense. In a trice all thought of norms and Seven-Year Plans would be driven from her kindly mind, and she was likely to be on the telephone half the night, making sure I was warm enough.\n\n'Nobody's used this cup'\n\nOne of the notorieties of the Cape of Good Hope is the 'tot' system, which legally allows a wine farmer to pay his coloured labourers partly in cheap sweet wine. 'You're just in time,' a Huguenot farmer told me when I asked to watch the process. 'We give them six tots a day, you see\u2013one when they start, one at breakfast, one at eleven, one at two, one at four and one when they finish work.'\n\nThere stood the labourers in a quavering crew, seven or eight tattered coloured men, and on the steps of a barn a white overseer was doling out the tots. He had a big bucket of thick red wine before him, and as the workers came shambling up with their old baked-bean tins he scooped them their ration in silence. It was an eerie spectacle, for it was plain to me that those dazed and ragged half-castes were in a state of perpetual dissipation. Quaffing their tots in one experienced and joyless gulp they shuffled away again. It was as though eight elderly machines were being greased or refuelled.\n\n'Yes, we give them six tots a day,' said the farmer chattily, 'that's the law. It comes to a bottle and a quarter a day. They sweat it out very quickly\u2013it gives them kick, you see. It's a good wine\u2013here, taste it.' And with fastidious courtesy the foreman, producing a tin cup from inside the barn, wiped it carefully with his handkerchief and drew me a ration. 'It's quite all right,' he said kindly, 'nobody's used this cup.'\n\nExpatriatism\n\nAlmost anywhere in the world of the 1950s I met expatriate Britons of the upper bourgeoisie, and almost always they liked to tell me their memories, personal or inherited, factual or fictionalized, of an England long extinct: a garden party England it seemed to have been, where nobody talked too loud, and there were parasols on the lawn, and we so often used to visit Sir Henry...Sir Henry...what was his name now?\u2013Never mind, I shall remember it later\u2013Anyway, he had this lovely old house. Oh, the smell of the honeysuckle and such gay tennis parties we used to have. 'Of course I know it's all changed now and I could never go back, it would break my heart to see it all so different, socialism, and strikes, and white girls with black men in the streets, they tell me, and all these death duties and so on. But it will always be home to me, Mr Morris\u2013you may be a little too young to understand just how I feel\u2013that's Lindley Hall there, by the way, above the mantelpiece, painted by Robert...Robert...you know, very famous\u2013but I'll remember later, I always do...'\n\nOn second thoughts\n\nWhen I was writing a book about Oxford I read that a special duty of the High Steward of Oxford University was 'to hear and determine criminal cases of the gravest kind, like treason or felony', if the accused was a resident member of the university. In legal theory it meant that until capital punishment was finally abolished in England, this purely academic official was authorized to hang you.\n\nI once told a proctor, one of the intendants of university discipline, that I proposed to follow him and his officers (popularly called Bulldogs) on their patrol through the streets one night, to see how the undergraduates responded to his authority. He advised me not to follow too closely, in case the Bulldogs took offence at my attentions, and summoned me into the proctorial presence. I bristled a bit at this. They'd better not, I said, I was a free citizen, I knew my rights, I could walk where I liked when I liked, nobody could pull antique usage over my eyes, he and his minions certainly had no authority over me. The proctor smiled darkly. 'Are you quite sure?' he inquired; and by heavens, remembering the bit about the High Steward and the felonies, on second thoughts I wasn't.\n\nAlas, proved right\n\nI was never a very astute political observer, and I really did not know what to make of Jack Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, when I went to one of his Washington press conferences soon after his inauguration. I was charmed by the look, sound and presence of him, as everyone was. I was impressed by his professionalism and his fluency, but some vague instinct told me that although he was only in his mid-forties he was already in his prime. In a report I wrote for the Guardian I tried to express my feeling that the Kennedy we were seeing then was the definitive Kennedy, that we would never know him greatly changed by time or experience, and, as it sadly happened, for once I was proved right.\n\nA Mikado\n\nSir Charles Dalrymple Belgrave was officially Adviser to the Ruler of Bahrain, but in effect he was prime minister as well, while Lady Belgrave enjoyed the beguiling title of Directoress of Female Education. For thirty years Belgrave had guided the destinies of the island, and his influence was all pervasive. A mere mention of the name Belgrave would instantly bring a price down. There was a street called Belgrave Road, and not a soul in the place, not a sheikh or a tailor or a man picking his teeth on the high curved prow of a dhow, who could not direct you to the house where the Belgraves lived.\n\nThis Mikado viewed his own eminence with a trace of dry amusement, and his home (above his office) was a gay and racy place. Belgrave had a splendid and eclectic library, and he was a man of esoteric tastes, addicted to (for example) roulette, cigars, watercolour painting, swords and pantomimes. Each year he presented a panto of his own in the dining room, with bold backcloths painted by himself and dialogue verging upon the risqu\u00e9. It was curious that his effect upon his bailiwick was almost sanctimonious. 'How good are roads are,' the island seemed to say, 'and how sensible our schools are, and how thriftily we use our oil royalties. Mohammed, stop picking your nose in front of Lady Belgrave.'\n\nBeggars and buskers\n\nThe indigenous beggars and buskers of Venice are treated with indulgence. There is a dear old lady, bundled in shawls, who sits in the evening at the foot of the Accademia bridge, and has many faithful patrons. There is a bent old man who haunts the alleys near Santo Stefano and who is often to be seen pacing from one stand to another, plucking a neat little melody upon his guitar. On Sunday mornings a faun-like couple of countrymen materialize on the quayside of Giudecca with a set of bagpipes and a wooden whistle. A well-known comic figure of the Zattere is a man in a cloth cap and a long blue overcoat who suddenly appears among the tables of the outdoor cafes and, planting himself in an uncompromising posture on the pavement, legs apart, head thrown back, produces a sheet of music from his pocket and throws himself into a loud incomprehensible aria, tuneless and spasmodic, but delivered with such an air of informed authority that there are often a few innocents to be seen following the melodic line with knowledgeable attention. I once asked this man if I could see his music, and discovered it to be a specimen page from a score of Beethoven's 9th, held upside-down and close to the stomach.\n\nAmong the Delhi Spearmen\n\nAmong the officers of the 9th Queen's Royal Lancers there was a powerful sense of family. It was hardly like being in an army at all. Age was disregarded and rank was tacit. Nobody called anybody 'sir'. The Colonel was Colonel Jack, or Colonel Tony. Everyone else was known by his Christian name. Courtesy towards each other was not a deliberate form, it was merely a matter of habit, or convenience. This was a very professional regiment. A sense of heritage accordingly bound us one to another, and made us conscious of lance and plume, saddle-carbine and cuirass. These were the Delhi Spearmen; and though the details of the regimental history were less than vivid to most of us, still there hung always around our mess a general suggestion of glory (not that anyone would have been so insensitive as to mention it, for if there was one attribute the 9th Lancers were not anxious to display, it was keenness).\n\nMixed sensations\n\nIt seems only the other day that communism ended in Romania, but here I am already at the dinner table with a jolly crew of acquaintances, eating pike-perch from the Danube and drinking a happy Moldavian Riesling, to the deafeningly amplified thump of a band in the chandeliered dining room of the Central House of the Army. I have poked my nose into several such unpromising bastions of old Establishment. At the Writers' Union, for instance, which has been for several decades a tribunal of communist orthodoxy, I wandered bemused and unhindered through the accumulated cigar smoke of a thousand ideological debates, amiably nodded at now and then by marvellously literary-looking confr\u00e8res. And at the Military Hotel, strolling in, I was befriended without question by a most formidable captain of the Romanian navy, wearing over his gilded uniform a leather coat like a U-boat commander. It is a queer mixture of sensations. On the one hand nearly everybody is welcoming. On the other hand few seem altogether frank.\n\nSharing the pleasure\n\nIn Wyoming cowboys sometimes walked their horses up to me as I picnicked in the sage, sat sketching in my car or took my morning walk through the scented countryside; and then, after we had exchanged pleasantries and told each other where we came from, and explained what we were doing, sometimes they would slide from their saddles and join me for a few minutes, looking over my shoulder at a sketch, accepting a slice of cheese, or simply sharing the pleasure of the place and the moment\u2013not a talkative presence usually, but one so naturally kind and unembarrassed that a silence was never awkward, and the parting came organically, like the end of a good meal, just before satisfaction moved towards surfeit.\n\nSiren call\n\nSeen from Hong Kong's New Territories in those days, China seemed to me essentially simple, like a world stripped of its complexities and pretensions. I found myself looking towards that silent landscape as though it were calling me home. Home to where? Home to what? As I wandered down the track towards my car, one of the stall sellers spoke to me quietly, without urgency, across his wares. 'Why don't you buy,' he inquired, as though he genuinely, if mildly, wanted to know the answer, 'the thoughts of Chairman Mao?'\u2013and he held up a small red book, bound in plastic.\n\n'Get thee behind me,' I said.\n\nValleys music\n\nI prefer to catch a Welsh male voice choir at practice, when it has not been stiffened up with clean shirts and clasped hands for a concert. Nobody ever tried harder than a choir of the valleys intent on getting an interpretation absolutely right. Just once more, cries the conductor\u2013Unwaith eto, bois!\u2013and the lady accompanist stiffens herself again at the piano, the stocky tenors, the well-paunched basses adjust their spectacles, smooth out the creases in their music sheets and wait in tense taut postures, like tennis players awaiting a service, for the drop of the baton. The rustlings and the coughings stop. Silence falls. The maestro crouches there before his men, half doubled on the dais, a demoniac figure, black of hair, swarthy of face, eyes gleaming. He is irresistible! He raises his baton. The choir takes a breath. The pianist lifts her fingers. Crash, the place reverberates, the whole town surely, perhaps the whole of Wales, with the passion of the opening chord.\n\nR.I.P.\n\nThe foreign news editor, my immediate superior at The Times, was ageing, and week by week I noticed not merely a faltering in the old gentleman himself, but a progressive disregard of his views. People did not listen to him. Decisions were taken without his knowledge. He clearly sensed it too, and for what seems to have been hours at a time, talking in an infinitely slow grating voice that was, I admit, among the heavier of my burdens, he would disclose to me his anxieties or more often his resentments.\n\nHe grew increasingly talkative, bitter and confused, until finally, one winter evening, he gave me a letter. If anything should happen to him, he said, buttoning his thick black overcoat, straightening his homburg and removing his walking stick from its stand behind the desk, I was to hand it to the higher authorities of The Times; and gently chewing\u2013for he generally seemed to have in his mouth, when not a cigar, some kind of lubricant lozenge, perhaps to keep his voice going\u2013he nodded at me in his usual way, said goodnight with his habitual icy trace of a smile, and went home to kill himself with sleeping pills.\n\nLevantine life\n\nI was happy working for the Arab News Agency in Cairo. My friends were mostly in the office, and we were none of us rich. We were boulevardiers, but of a modest rank, frequenting the shabbier of the downtown pavement cafes, murky places with marble-topped tables where the coffee was as thick as porridge and the water glasses were a perpetual dingy grey. There we would sit and talk in the early evening, when the long siesta was nearly over, until we heard the rattle of the heavy steel shutters being raised one by one from the shop fronts, and it was time for us to saunter to the office and start work on the evening bulletin.\n\nThe news that greeted us up there was always full of drama and piquant intelligence\u2013wars and corruptions, desert crime, court conspiracies, religious polemics, family feuds\u2013and we worked in a spirit of Bohemian release. Once we were inside our dim-lit, crowded and untidy rooms we would forget the truth about ourselves, forget the impending misery of the midnight tram, forget the shabby villa off the airport road, forget the swarming children and the skinny black-veiled wife, forget our lost hopes for a career in the law or the Ministry of the Interior, forget that we were indigent Egyptian effendis or struggling Levantines, forget even our sexual ambiguities, and lose ourselves in that strange little world of ours upstairs.\n\nAmerica verbatim\n\nFrom my notebooks:\n\n'I told him, I said, \"Johnnie, if you want me you've just gotta come right down here and get me...\"'\n\n'Crooked? Crooked as a green snake...'\n\n'She said that? She actually said that, right there? She said that to your face...?'\n\n'Listen, Ed, I'll blind you, honest I will, I'll cut your tongue you old son of a gun you...'\n\n'She says to me, \"Leon,\" she says, \"I wantya to know, I'm fond of you, truly I am, but there's this problem of Juan's baby, see?\" \"To hell with Juan's baby,\" I says. \"What's Juan's baby to me?\" And she says, \"Leon, honey,\" she says, \"listen to me...\"'\n\n'If Consolidated Edison could be boiled down into one man I wouldn't have him in my home...'\n\nAn indistinct saint\n\nSt Frideswide was an indistinct medieval divine who is the titular saint of Oxford Cathedral. Every 19 October the bigwigs of the city and the diocese process, begowned, befurred, cassocked, epauletted and even bewigged, to celebrate her memory at her shrine in the building. When I was once at the service I noticed that one of the most venerable canons of the cathedral showed signs of irritable impatience. He scowled, muttered audibly to himself, hitched his hood, twitched his surplice, nudged his companions and occasionally gazed frowardly around the congregation. It was true that 'Jerusalem, My Happy Home' did seem more than usually protracted that day, with so much civic weight to slow it down. I watched that clergyman closely, though, and after a time I reached the conclusion that he was not annoyed by the music, only by the occasion. He didn't dislike the hymn tune. He had doubts about the saint.\n\nMayor Murphy's inducements\n\nIt happened that while I was in town St John's, Newfoundland, was celebrating its centenary as a municipality. The festivities closed with a public party which suggested to me an enormous country wedding\u2013everyone someone else's sister-in-law, everyone ready to talk, with no pretence and no pretension either. Jigs and folk songs sounded from the stage, and when people seemed slow to dance jolly Mayor Murphy took the floor alone, offering free booze coupons to any who would join him. 'You have to get them half tight,' he remarked to me as he handed out these inducements, jigging the while himself.\n\nLater I was walking along a city street when a man launched upon me, without warning, a challenging statement in such advanced Newfoundlandese that I can only reproduce it impressionistically, so to speak. It sounded something like: 'Sish yarkin trapse John Murphy.' He looked at me expectantly for a response, so I simultaneously shook my head and nodded, to be on the safe side.\n\nThings to attend to\n\nThe millionaire, a man of taste as well as power, commanding everything that money can buy\u2013even he seemed restless and impatient; not socially, for he was kindness itself, but temperamentally. The whole luxurious establishment seemed to me somehow disposable: the manservant, the housekeeper, the masterpieces on the walls, the carpets from the East, the gorgeous maps and the calf-bound library, the great silver tray of decanters and silver-topped siphons, the bronze picked up from an unknown but infinitely promising young sculptor in West Africa\u2013none of it seemed destined to last. It was as though he might decide one day to rip it all up and start again. As he saw me off at the door two things happened. An alarm buzzer sounded, announcing that the eldest son of the house had got stuck in the elevator, and the millionaire's wife called through the drawing-room door to say that the White House was on the telephone. 'Excuse me,' he said in his flat velvet voice, shaking hands on the doorstep. 'I have one or two things to attend to. Thanks for coming.'\n\nGive and take\n\nOne still hears the instant give and take in Dublin pubs and parlours. 'Ah, me rheumatism's cured,' says the old lady quick as a flash when the landlord pats her kindly on the knee, 'you should advertise your healing powers.' 'Sure it was only my left hand too,' says the landlord. 'Well and it was only my left knee\u2013try the other one there's a good man.'\n\nThe judge\n\nThe judge at the Court of Session, Scotland's High Court, wore his tight-curled wig as though it had sprouted spontaneously from his pate in childhood. Crouched over his papers at his high dais, he was big nosed, wrinkle eyed, high cheeked, hooded, with eyes that never seemed to blink, and a mouth that expressed, whatever interrogation he supervised, whatever sentence he was decreeing, no flicker of concern, distaste or even particular interest. I could seldom hear what he said, for he spoke in a cracked and high-pitched drone apparently outside my aural range, but I observed that, like an owl peering down from a telephone wire, he missed no nuance or allusion of the proceedings below him. When I left the court I turned at the door for one last fascinated look at him, and discovered that, although his slumped posture had apparently not budged an inch, those pale blue eyes of his were staring fixed and motionless into mine\u2013rather as though, like the owl, he could rotate his head without reference to his body, preparatory to dismembering a mouse.\n\nAcross a chasm\n\nAll the windows in the huge slab of a building are brilliantly lit, and in each a little cameo, separate from all its neighbours, is joylessly displayed. Here four girls sit tense over their sewing machines, silent and unsmiling, motionless but for the quick twist and tug of their fingers. There a solitary shirtsleeved man is hunched over his files and calculators, beneath the dazzling light of his naked bulb, dead to all else and perhaps to himself. Along the way eight or nine families seem to be packed into one room, and one sees only flashes of infant limbs, waves of drapery, buckets, black loose hair, bedclothes and grinning mop faces, as though some perpetual and appalling farce is being played inside.\n\nEvery room there is ablaze, every room full; and across the gloom one hears radios, clicking machines, shouts and children's screams. In another city all that life over there might be a comfort, a reminder that if you happen to be alone that night, all around you is the warmth of community. In Hong Kong it is different. Nobody in that building seems to take the slightest notice of anyone else\u2013let alone of you as, peering out of the night, your wan Western face gazes aghast across the chasm.\n\nDead guys\n\nI stood on the edge of Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, DC\u2013Fame's Eternal Camping Ground, as it says on its triumphal arch\u2013and looked across the massed ranks of the departed, like a vast city of slabs. 'Are all these,' said a child beside me, surveying Fame's Eternal Camping Ground herself, 'are all these dead guys?' 'Dead,' said I, 'as mutton'\u2013but at that moment her grandmother arrived, and throwing me a distinctly accusatory look, as though I were undermining the loyalty of the young, she gave the child's nose a necessary wipe of the Kleenex and hurried her down the hill to catch the Tour-Mobile.\n\nDuke of London\n\nAs it happened the only time I ever saw Winston Churchill was at the very moment of his ultimate triumph\u2013the moment when, on the day of German surrender, he appeared on a balcony in Whitehall to accept the gratitude of London, his battered capital of victory. All around us were grand old monuments of English history, Parliament and Abbey, Nelson on his column up the road, Admiralty and Banqueting Hall and Horse Guards Parade, and it seemed to me then that he was already one of them\u2013so perfectly did his portly smiling presence up there seem to satisfy the setting, the story and the meaning of the day. I always thought he should have been made Duke of London.\n\nMagic in Paris\n\nWandering into Notre Dame on a Sunday night, I found a choir and orchestra celestially performing Bach's Christmas Oratorio. The cathedral was full, a reverent multitude of young people sitting on the floor if they could not get a seat in the nave, or simply milling about like me. It was magical. All Paris seemed to be there, singing its heart out or half lost in the marvel of it all. When I discovered that the choir and orchestra came from Germany, and realized that half the listeners were as foreign as I was, it only seemed more magical still.\n\nInsufficient compassion\n\nScary beggars used to infest the centre of Alexandria. I was walking home in Alex one evening when I felt, rather than actually saw, a legless beggar observing my passage from across the street. He was strapped to a low wooden trolley, which he pushed along with his hands, and made an object at once heart rending and frightening to see: but I had no money with me, neither a pound nor a piastre, so I quickened my step self-consciously and hurried down Zaghloul Street towards my hotel.\n\nBehind me I could hear the whirr of his roller-skate wheels as he pursued me through the town\u2013a thump when he eased himself off the pavement, a clanking when he crossed the tramlines, a change of pitch when he left the tarmac for the flagstones. Faster and faster I walked through the evening crowds, but I could never escape those whirring wheels: over the low wall into Zaghloul Square, across the little garden, and I could still hear them skidding down the path, closer than ever behind my back, so that I could hear the poor man's panting breath, too, until at last, breaking into a run, I threw myself into the revolving door of the Cecil.\n\nThe wheels came to a sudden stop on the sidewalk outside, and a curse bade me goodnight.\n\nDignities\n\nIn the last years of the Iraqi monarchy the real power behind the throne was the Crown Prince Abdul Illah, a sallow but handsome man. I interviewed him once. He talked fluently and amusingly, and our conversation turned to the pictures on the palace wall, a galaxy of chieftainship. 'What a splendid costume it is,' I said of a portrait of the great Feisal I in Arab dress. 'Do you ever wear it yourself?' 'Sometimes,' said the Crown Prince. 'You would be surprised how comfortable it is.' 'And it does make one look so fearfully dignified,' I said lightly. This was not a success. A chill seemed to settle upon our encounter, and the interview soon ended. The Crown Prince Abdul Illah, it seemed, needed no romantic trappings to give him dignity.\n\nIddums-diddums\n\nCome with me, and watch a full-blooded beldame selling fish upon the waterfront of San Sebastian. She is flanked by cronies, sitting brawnily on kitchen chairs like a gangster's bodyguard. She herself stands in the middle with a microphone around her neck, wearing a blue anorak, a pink chiffon scarf, white ankle socks and a suggestion of innumerable underclothes. She looks as though no nuance of life has escaped her. Her face is heavy jowled, her wrists are muscular, and she is built like a boxer, but there is a rich urbanity to her voice as she intones the price of sardines. The crowd is altogether at her command. The seamen stumble in with their fish trays like acolytes in an archiepiscopal presence. The cronies laugh at her every joke. Policemen sheepishly perambulate. Customers never dare to argue. But sometimes that empress of the fish market, pausing to scribble a price upon her pad, notices a baby in somebody's arms, and looks up unexpectedly with the sweetest of grandmotherly smiles, a twiddle of cod-scaled fingers and what I take to be the Basque equivalent of 'Iddums-diddums.'\n\nIn the park\n\nI woke early and walked across Chowringi into the green of Calcutta's Maidan, before the sun rose and the heat haze fell like a web upon us. It was lovely then in the park. Rooks cawed, kites hung, sparrows pecked, smiling pi-dogs padded by. Here and there across the grass white figures moved or loitered, and whenever I paused I was sympathetically accosted. 'What you are seeing is the Theatre, built in honour of our great poet Rabindranath Tagore.' 'If I may say so you would be more comfortable where there not so many ants.' Or: 'Wouldn't you like a game of golf? I am teaching golf, you see. Here are my golf clubs.'\n\nTradition\n\n'Does he, do you think,' tactfully inquired the Bishop of Barrackpore, 'expect a T-I-P?' But no, my guide was not ready for one yet, having high hopes of further services to be performed, so I joined the bishop on his verandah, where during a lull before evensong he was eating peanut butter sandwiches with a kind Anglican lady in blue. He was all an aficionado of the tradition could ask: cassocked, distinguished, fatherly, concerned about that T-I-P. Soon, he told me, he would be retiring. Going home? I wondered, but as the lady replaced the tea cosy with a significant air he answered me in grave italics: 'Staying in India\u2013for ever.'\n\nAt evensong we sang the hymn that says the Lord's throne shall never like earth's proud empires pass away, and as I left the cathedral a Balliol voice called kindly across the transept\u2013'I say! Excuse me! You do know where we are, don't you, if you're coming to the children's dance drama in the parish hall?'\n\nArrival of the tourists\n\nDown in the harbour of Capri I can see the morning vaporetto from the mainland, still hazy about the funnel, and here flooding into the piazza, pouring out of taxis, out of buses, out of horse carriages, out of the steep funicular that runs up from the waterfront\u2013wearing floppy straw hats and rope-soled shoes and pink jeans and multifarious bangles\u2013festooned with cameras, inquiring the price of swimsuits, unfolding maps, touching up their lipsticks beneath the campanile\u2013talking German, English, French and every variety of Italian\u2013young and old, blatant and demure, strait laced and outrageous, earnest and frivolous and thrilled and sick-to-death-of-it-all\u2013here past my cafe table streams the first quota of the morning's tourists.\n\nTeatime in Old Chicago, 1950s\n\nI love to watch the customers at a carriage-trade Chicago restaurant at English Teatime, with Jasmine Tea and Toasted Muffins beside the goldfish pool. Its children behave with almost fictional decorum. Its daughters wear pearls. Its young mums look as though they have come direct from committee meetings of charitable balls. Its husbands look as though they keep fit by riding hunters through parks before breakfast. Its grandmothers, best of all, talk in throaty turtle voices, as though the words are being squeezed out from beneath the carapace and they are heavily loaded with inherited gewgaws, and are inclined to call the waitress 'child', as though expecting pretty curtseys in return. 'Would you care for some more Jasmine Tea, Mrs Windlesham? Do you desire another Toasted English Muffin?' 'Why thank you, child\u2013how pretty you are looking today!' 'Thank you, Mrs Windlesham, it's always a pleasure to serve you and the members of your family.'\n\nA separate sphere?\n\nOne evening at Akureyri, on the northern coast of Iceland, I heard the sound of solemn singing from a restaurant, and peering through its door I saw that a large party was in peculiar progress. I felt as though I were looking in at some utterly separate sphere of existence. There the Icelanders, men and women, sat in ordered ranks, their arms linked around the long tables, and as they sang what seemed to be some kind of sacramental anthem they swayed heavily from side to side in rhythmic motion. The sight of them gave me a queer sense of secret solidarity. Everybody clearly knew the words of the song, and the whole assembly seemed to be in some sort of arcane collusion. I noticed that if ever I caught an eye, as the celebrants sang and swayed there at the table, after a moment's puzzled focusing it abruptly switched away from me, as if to dismiss an illusion.\n\n'Are they?'\n\nEvery evening at the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul a string trio plays, attentively listened to by the German package tourists at their communal tables, and gives the place a comfortable, palm-court air. Two elderly gentlemen in Gypsy outfits are on piano and accordion, and they are led by a romantic Gypsy fiddler, adept at waltzes and polkas. I was sitting there one evening when suddenly there burst into the room, driving the trio from its podium and severely disconcerting the hausfraus, a team of ferocious Anatolian folk dancers, accompanied by a young man with a reedy trumpet and an apparently half-crazed drummer. The dancers were fairly crazed themselves. Apparently welded together into a multicoloured phalanx, they shrieked, they roared with laughter, they leapt, they whirled, they waved handkerchiefs\u2013a performance of furious bravura, leaving us all breathless and aghast. They were like so many houris, come to dance over the corpses on a battlefield.\n\nThey withdrew as abruptly as they had arrived, and in the stunned hush that ensued I turned to the Americans at the next table. 'My God,' I said, 'I'm glad they're on our side!' But a knowing look crossed the man's face. 'Ah, but are they?' he replied.\n\nTyrant\n\nA terrifyingly ambitious, inexhaustible girl supervisor works at one of the downtown McDonald's of Manhattan. Over the serving counter one may see the glazed and vacant faces of the cooks, a black man and a couple of Puerto Ricans, who appear to speak no English; in front that small tyrant strides peremptorily up and down, yelling orders, angrily correcting errors and constantly falling back upon an exhortatory slogan of her own: C'mon, guys, today guys, today...The cooks look back in pained incomprehension.\n\nDivine merriment\n\nWe find ourselves lost on the edge of a deserted traffic junction somewhere east of Kranj, Slovenia. Helplessly we consult our map, hopefully we look for somebody to ask the way, and presently there somehow seem to sidle into our company half a dozen Slovene men and a very talkative Slovene woman. Between us we speak five languages, but we are fluent only in our own, and gradually our discussions descend into farce. It's that way, for sure, no it's the other, they haven't been through Preddvor, no, no of course they haven't, they came the Cerklje way\u2013they should go back the way they came then, they should have gone by Duplice\u2013no, no, no, look here, look at the map\u2013and so, as the map gets more and more crumpled, the arguments louder, the languages ever more incomprehensible, we subside into impotent merriment, shake hands with each other, clap one another on the back and, chuckling still, go our various ways. We ourselves are no wiser about our situation, so we leave the car on the grassy verge and go for a drink instead.\n\nGod habitually smiles upon Slovenia, and sometimes he laughs out loud.\n\nVioletta down under\n\nGo to La Traviata at Sydney Opera House and, my, what a robust Australian chorus will be attendant upon Violetta in the opening act, their crinolines and Parisian whiskers delightfully failing to disguise physiques born out of Australian surf and sunshine\u2013while even La Traviata herself, as she subsides to the last curtain, may seem to you the victim of some specifically Australian variety of tuberculosis, since she looks as though immediately after the curtain calls she will be off for a vigorous set of tennis with the conductor, or at least a grilled lobster with orange juice and caramel.\n\nThe Leading Citizen's lesson\n\n'Have your fun, Jan,' said the Leading Citizen. 'Sure thing, this is a Fun Town, but what we especially do not like is these comparisons with Sodom and such. What people forget is that here in Las Vegas we have a thriving civic-minded community. We have 130 church buildings, Jan, in this city of ours. I think I could safely say that you won't find a more lovely home environment anywhere than some of our high-grade home environments here. What I want you to remember, Jan, is this\u2013the Spanish Trail came this way, right over this very spot, before the game of roulette ever entered the Infant Republic\u2013that's what I always tell people like you, who come inquiring\u2013before the game of roulette ever entered the Infant Republic of the United States!'\n\nThe Very Reverend\n\nAlmost at once I met the Dean of Wells, actually in the shadow of Penniless Porch. Eton, Oxford and the Welsh Guards, he was not hard to identify. With a splendid concern his voice rang out, as we sat there watching the citizenry pass by. 'Good morning, good morning! Lovely day! What a success yesterday\u2013what would we have done without you? Morning, Simon! Morning, Bert! Morning, John! (John Harvey, you know, our greatest authority on church architecture...)'In his cathedral, I was later disconcerted to learn, they habitually call him 'Father', but I certainly could not complain about his authenticity qua Dean.\n\nOur Gracie\n\nOn a bus in Capri I chanced to meet, I can't remember how, a man who introduced himself as Boris Alperovici, the third husband of Gracie Fields. She was a famous star of the past, a Dame of the British Empire\u2013'Our Gracie', formerly a household name in her native England but by then somewhat forgotten. She was living in elderly retirement in her villa on the island. Boris took me along to visit her, and she received me graciously, and told me anecdotes of her theatrical life, and had coffee served to me by her seaside swimming pool. It was just as though the old lady were some great Hollywood actress at the height of her career, and she evidently enjoyed it as much as I did. When I got back to Britain I was surprised to meet other people, too, who had chanced to encounter Signor Alperovici on the Capri bus, but couldn't quite remember how, and had sat drinking coffee at the feet of Our Gracie.\n\nThe exchange\n\nWandering around the purlieus of the High Court in Madras, I took out my tape recorder to remind myself of some of its architectural peculiarities. At once I heard an admonitory clapping of hands, and a policeman with a nightstick beckoned me over.\n\n'What have you got there? What is this machine?'\n\n'It's a tape recorder.'\n\n'What are you doing with it here?'\n\n'I am reminding myself of some architectural peculiarities.'\n\n'How do I know it is not a bomb?'\n\n'You can speak into it yourself.'\n\n'What shall I say?'\n\n'Anything.'\n\n'I cannot think of anything to say.'\n\n'Sing a song then.'\n\n'What kind of a song?'\n\n'A Tamil song.'\n\n'Very well, I will sing you a very old Tamil song, a tragic song'\u2013and half closing his eyes, and assuming an unmistakably tragic expression, there in the sunshine outside the court in a high wavering voice he sang several verses of a very, very old Tamil song. I played it back to him.\n\n'Very well,' he said, 'now you have my voice. What will you give me in return?'\n\nBut, bless his heart, I was gone by then.\n\nTemper of the South\n\nThe temper of the South is inescapable in Houston. You can sense the swagger of it in the postures of the cattle people come into town for dinner or convention: hulking rich men in Stetsons and silver belt buckles, paunchy with their generations of beer and prime steaks, lacquered observant women in bangles, talking rather too loud as Texans are apt to, the wives greeting each other with dainty particularities ('Why, hi, Cindy. My you're looking pretty!') the husbands with spacious generics ('Well, boy, what's things like in East Texas?')\n\nAnd you can sense the poignant charm of it in the faded white clapboard houses of the Fifth Ward, stilted above the dust of their unpaved streets. There the black folk still idle away the warm evenings on their splintered porches, as in the old story books; there the vibrant hymns still rise from the pews of the Rose of Sharon Tabernacle Church; there the garbage still blows about the garden lots, and you may still be asked, as I was, if, 'Say, ain't you Miss Mary's daughter from the old store? Bless your heart, I used to be one of Miss Mary's best, best customers...'\n\nMonty\n\nLate one evening during World War II I was walking up Arlington Street towards Piccadilly when there emerged from the door of the Ritz General Sir Bernard Montgomery (not yet a Marshal or a Lord). A policeman saluted as he scuttled down the hotel steps and into his waiting staff car, but I thought there seemed something almost furtive about his movements. I expect he was really in haste to get back to the War Office, or even into battle, but if he had been another kind of general I would have guessed he was hurrying to an assignation down the road in Soho!\n\nConfrontation\n\nThrough the crowd waiting for their luggage at the Toronto airport carousel there staggered ever and again a middle-aged woman in a fur hat and a long coat of faded blue, held together by a leather belt evidently inherited from some earlier ensemble. She was burdened with many packages elaborately stringed, wired and brown-papered, she had a sheaf of travel documents generally in her hands, sometimes between her teeth, and she never stopped moving, talking and gesticulating. If she was not hurling questions at expressionless bystanders in theatrically broken English, she was muttering to herself in unknown tongues, or breaking into sarcastic laughter. Often she dropped things; she got into a terrible mess trying to get a baggage cart out of its stack ('You\u2013must\u2013put\u2013money\u2013in\u2013the\u2013slot.' 'What is slot? How is carriage coming? Slot? What is slot?') and when at last she perceived her travelling accoutrements\u2013awful mounds of canvas and split leather\u2013erupting on to the conveyor, like a tank she forced a passage through the immobile Canadians, toppling them left and right or barging them one into another with virtuoso elbow work.\n\nI lost sight of the lady as she passed through customs (I suspect she was involved in some fracas there, or could not undo the knots on her baggage), but she represented for me the archetypal immigrant, arriving at the emblematic immigrant destination of the late twentieth century, and I watched the confrontation with sympathy for both sides.\n\nThe spy's discomfort\n\nRoller skating was then all the rage around the Lake of Geneva. Whole families skated along the promenade. Dogs rode about in rollered baskets and youths whizzed shatteringly here and there, scattering the crowds with blasts of the whistles that were held between their teeth. I lunched with a spy of my acquaintance. What kind of a spy he is, who he spies for, or against, I have never been able to discover, but he has all the hallmarks of espionage about him, divides his time between Switzerland and the East, wears raincoats and speaks Greek. We ate little grilled fish at the water's edge and discussed the state of the city. Uncomfortable, he thought it, and getting worse. Security getting tougher? I conjectured. Banks turning difficult? Opposition hotter? No, no, he said testily, holding his hands over his ears, nothing like that: only those damned roller skaters.\n\nAdmiral's walk\n\nSplit in Croatia is a naval base, and when I was driving out of town I stopped at the traffic lights near the fleet headquarters. A very senior naval officer started to cross the road. He was loaded with badges, braid and medal ribbons, but wearing as I was a floppy old hat and a less than spotless blue shirt, just for fun I saluted him. His response was Split all over. First he faltered slightly in his steady tread. Then he brought his hand to the peak of his cap in a guarded and cautious way. And then, as the lights changed, I started forward and he scuttled with rather less than an admiral's dignity to the safety of the opposite pavement, he turned round, all rank and propriety discarded, and shared my childish laughter.\n\nTrue gents\n\nAt Three Rivers, stopping for a hamburger, I found that I had locked my car keys in the boot. Small-town Texas swung instantly to my rescue\u2013well, eased itself slowly off its cafe stools, tipped its Stetsons over its eyes, strolled into the car park and stood meditatively eyeing the problem, saying things like Huh or Kindova problem there. In easy stages they approached the task, sniffing it, feeling it, and when in the end they got the hang of it, enlarged the right aperture, unscrewed the right screws, and found that the keys were not in the boot at all, since I had left them on the Dairy Queen counter, they seemed not in the least disconcerted. Deftly reassembling the mechanism, tilting their Stetsons back again, they drifted back into the cafe murmuring, 'You bet, lady, any time.'\n\nThe Low Riders\n\nIn Santa Fe the Spanish culture is relentlessly pressed upon by all the influences and temptations of the American Way. Often in the evenings the cultists called the Low Riders cruise through town. They are the public faces, I suppose, of young Hispanica, and as they drive slowly about the streets in their weirdly low-slung limousines, wearing wide hats and dark glasses, radios booming, unsmiling, proud, stately one really might say, who knows what resentments or aspirations of their race they are trying to declare?\n\nThe call of conscience\n\nOn the Bund in Shanghai one evening a youth with the droopy shadow of a moustache confronted me with a kind of dossier. Would I go through his examination paper for him, and correct his mistakes? But I had been pestered by students all afternoon, and I wanted to go and look at the silks in Department Store No. 10. 'No,' said I. 'I won't.'\n\nAt that a theatrical scowl crossed his face, screwing up his eyes and turning down the corners of his mouth. He looked then, with that suggestion of whiskers around his chin, like a Chinese villain in a bad old movie, with a gong to clash him in. I circumvented him nevertheless and, ah yes, I thought, if the Gang of Four were still around, you would have me up against a wall by now, with a placard around my neck and a mob to jeer me, not to consult me about participles.\n\nBut my conscience pricked me, and I went back and corrected his damned papers after all.\n\nA lesson\n\nI helped a blind lady over a street crossing near the Gare de Lyon. She looked particularly irritable, cross and demanding, but though born and bred in the 12th arrondissement, turned out to be diffidently gentle. It was a lesson to me not to misjudge the hard-mouthed, sharp-eyed, fast-shoving, middle-aged Parisian housewife. I took the lady first to the post office, then to the pharmacy, and when I left her she said: 'Now I give you back your liberty.'\n\nAfter a Mexican dinner\n\nTheatrical characters, it seemed to me, filled the main square of Oaxaca when we strolled down there for a drink after dinner: nut-brown women cloaked in red, and dapper old gents with silvery moustaches, and gaggles of students like opera choruses, and small policemen with nightsticks, and rumble-tumble infants everywhere, and a blind guitar player doing the rounds of the coffees shops, guided by his urchin familiar, and a gringo hippie or two, and barefoot families of peasants loaded with shopping bundles and making, I assumed, for the mountains. The faces were mostly dry and burnt. The movements seemed kind of airy, as though tending towards weightlessness. Among the trees some children were blowing up long sausage balloons and letting them off with a squirt of air into the night sky, where they rotated dizzily off into the darkness like so many flying serpents.\n\nHarry's\n\nIt was in 1946, when the war in Europe was hardly over and Venice was still under the control of the Allied armies, that I first poked my nose through the doors of Harry's Bar in Venice. I was in my twentieth year, and did not know what to expect. The room was smallish and unexpectedly cosy. At the tables were smoky looking, hooded-eyed, tweedy, sometimes hatted, heavily made-up but rather weatherbeaten persons I took to be members of the Italian aristocracy. Sitting at the bar were three or four officers, the British looking disconcertingly suave to me, the Americans dauntingly experienced. The conversation was low but intense, and everyone looked up as I made my entrance. The officers looked up in a cool, officer-like way, holding their glasses. The patricians looked up patricianly, rather disappointedly, as though they had been hoping for better things. But it was the contact I made with the three pairs of eyes behind the counter that I remember best\u2013the eyes of the boss sitting behind his cash till, the eyes of the two busy barmen in their white jackets. The expression in their gazes seemed to me generic to the place. It was at once interested, faintly amused, speculative and all but collusive. It put me simultaneously at my ease and on my guard, made me feel in some way a member of the establishment, and has kept me going back to Harry's from that day to this.\n\nOnly in London\n\nI was sitting over my croissant and the morning paper in a coffee shop in Marylebone High Street when a tall elegant man in late middle age walked stiffly in and ordered a cup of coffee. He wore a long dark coat and a trilby tilted over his brow, and I rather think spectacles were inclined towards the end of his nose. He looked to me as though he had enjoyed perhaps rather too good a dinner the night before, but he emanated an air of unconcerned, if not actually oblivious, composure. I put him down for some mildly eccentric and very likely scholarly earl, of the Irish peerage, perhaps, and thought to myself that only in London could one still see such a genial figure, at once so urbane and so well used, more or less direct from the eighteenth century.\n\n'Know who that was?' said the proprietor, when the man had walked perhaps a little shakily out again. 'That was Peter O'Toole. Remember him in Lawrence of Arabia?'\n\nNo thanks\n\nI went to a place on the Rio Grande which was, I was told, a favourite place for illegal immigrants to cross into the United States. There were a few houses nearby, grazed about by goats, guarded by many dogs, but I found it a chill and spooky spot. It seemed full of secrets, and sure enough one of the neighbours told me that almost every night of the year people from the south clandestinely crossed the river there, and crept damp and dripping through the shrubbery into Texas. 'You see that forest there,' my neighbour said, pointing to a confusion of shrubbery beside the water. 'I'll bet you there's people laying there this very minute, waiting for dark, bad men some of them, from far, far away.' I peered at the bushes through my binoculars, hoping to see glints of weaponry, the smoke of marijuana rising, blackened faces peering back at me through the leaves. All seemed deserted, though. 'Want to go over and see? See if there's men there now?' asked my informant helpfully. 'No, thanks,' I said.\n\nGlaswegians\n\nGeorge Square in Glasgow has a family feel to it. People talk to each other easily on benches. People share gambles, compare prices, take their shoes off to give their poor feet a rest. The five-year-old boy riding his motorized buggy around the benches smiles indiscriminately at us all as he blasts past yet again, and his father proudly tells us how much he paid for the machine. Sitting there among those citizens, looking at the civic statues, cursing the buggy boy, while the big buses slide around the square and the City Chambers look paternalistically down at us, I seem to feel a comforting sense of community. Ay, well, responds a freckled woman sitting beside me, that's all very well, but life's not all statues in George Square\u2013and what's a wee bairn doing with a contraption like that anyway, he'll do himself a damage in the end.\n\nWildlife\n\nWhile searching unsuccessfully for kangaroos in the bush of Mount Ainslie, a wooded hill rising immediately above Canberra, I felt a sudden need to relieve myself. I was just doing so when I heard a padding and a shoving and a rustling through the bushes. Kangaroos at last? Very nearly. Crashing among the branches, as I was in the very act, a few feet away from me there appeared a very large, very bearded, white-shorted and energetically sweating Australian, doing his daily jog, I suppose, during the luncheon break from his duties as Executive Officer Grade Two in the Department of Inter-Administration. 'Ho, ho, ho,' was all he said, as he bounded distinctly roo-like past.\n\nTwo in the morning\n\nAt two in the morning I decided that enough was enough, and clambering upstairs I knocked upon the door of M. le Propri\u00e9taire's private apartment. It sounded as though they were having a football match inside and, sure enough, when the door opened it was the hotelier's three-year-old son, all flushed and tousled with hilarity, who first poked his nose through the crack. 'A million pardons, madame,' came his father after him. 'How can you forgive us? We were having\u2013how do you say it\u2013a little practice match!'\n\nTwo Berlins\n\n'I'm the Boss' was the first T-shirt slogan I saw, on the ample bosom of a housewife dancing a vigorous jig with her decidedly un-henpecked husband. East Berlin was having a public holiday, and at the hotel beside the lake several thousand citizens, great-grandmothers to babes in arms, were enjoying a family feast in the sunshine. How genially they laughed, danced, sang, drank their beer and ate their pickled pork knuckles! With what indefatigable smiles the two bands alternated, one with the old oom-pah-pah, the other exploring the less raucous fringes of rock!\n\nThat same evening, al fresco in the Gr\u00fcnewald woods on the other side of Berlin, I observed two middle-aged ladies, mother and daughter, perhaps, sharing delicate jokes over their asparagus, and balancing their purses carefully on the rims of their glasses to stop the chestnut blossoms falling into their wine.\n\nAlg\u00e9rie Fran\u00e7aise\n\nI stand in the big public forum of Algiers, outside the government buildings, watching the citizenry. The square is packed to suffocation, the crowd spilling away through the pleasant gardens, up and down steps, across neighbouring squares, until it peters away at its fringes into clutches of foot-weary housewives at the tables of deserted cafes. There stand the grim paratroopers, the high priests of mid-century Algiers, dressed in boots and camouflage suits, festooned with tommy guns, grenades and pistols, lounging about in attitudes fearfully tough and jungly, or swapping badinage with the crowd. There are the queer bigwigs of this confused and unhealthy city, hastening up the steps to the Governorate, or briefly appearing upon some flowered balcony: ramrod generals in kepis, greasy double-breasted politicians, wild creatures of the nocturnal right, bearded plotters or fanatic militarists. A sickly cheer greets a token delegation of Muslims: spindly old men with ragged robes and a covey of bewildered white-robed women, with a trilling of high voices and an arabesque of reedy clarinets. Before long that vast crowd, like so many maudlin drunks outside a saloon, is caught up in histrionics, swayed to a man by the querulous, pitiful passions of Algiers\u2013until the whole assembly, with a roll of drums and a sting of hot tears, bursts into the 'Marseillaise', and for a moment all seems clear, all seems honourable.\n\nAllegory in Amsterdam\n\nStanding on a bridge in Amsterdam, I noticed a sleek tourist motor boat, all glass and chrome, gliding down the waterway with a warm hum of diesels. Inside it, snug behind the glass, sat five young Americans in bright open-necked shirts and jeans\u2013servicemen, perhaps, from some air base. They all wore sideburns, and peered through their windows with an air of concentration; and as they passed slowly by, inspecting me, too, as though I were a medieval monument, they emanated a powerful sense of allegory. They were new men in a very old world. Their identity tags flashed at their necks like ritual amulets. They seemed to me like young priests from some distant cloistered seminary, on a mission of dogmatic inquiry.\n\nAll American\n\nFor me the All American has always been the city bus driver. Since I first saw him clicking that little lever above his change machine, to the tinkle of the nickels and dimes sorting themselves out\u2013since I first heard his timeless response: 'Yeah, lady, get out at City Hall'\u2013since I first plucked up courage to ask him if he could manage change for a ten-dollar bill\u2013ever since I first made his acquaintance he has exemplified for me The American. His slumped shirtsleeved posture over the wheel, the weary reach of his arm towards that change machine, the occasional cursing at a cab driver, the unflustered answering of questions as he drives, his eyes always flicking to the mirror\u2013all are the hallmarks of a man who knows the world for what it is, knows his own city to be its epitome, and has no illusions left. 'So it's a big city? Sure it is. So they're tall buildings? So?'\n\nDinkum Aussie\n\nIn Darwin you may meet the Australian male at his most confident, on the edge of the great Outback. He may be of any age, this dinkum Aussie. He may be a humdrum bank clerk, or a prospector driven wildly in from his shack in the wilderness to squander his money on drink and loose living. Whoever he is, he is magnificent to meet: as free a spirit as you can find in the world today, shackled by no inhibition of class or disadvantage, with little sense of thrift and still less of decorum, no agonizing reserve, no contempt, no meanness. It is as though he has been relieved of the burden of the centuries, strengthened and cleansed by the southern sun, and allowed to begin history all over again.\n\nSuddenly there emerges...\n\nSuddenly there emerges from some unexpected alley of Kyoto a vision of the legendary Japan\u2013a geisha in all her plastered glory, moving fast and purposeful towards an assignation. Immensely tall is her mound of hair, jet black and shiny; her face is vivid with white and scarlet, her costume is gorgeous with silks, sashes, the gaudiest of clashing colours and the floridest of patterns; and as she hastens awkwardly down the street, embellished from head to foot with paint and brocade, she seems less like a living woman than some fabulous toy, some last masterpiece by Faberg\u00e9, enamelled like a queenly trinket, animated by ultimate refinements of clockwork.\n\nA queen rides by\n\nThe people around you seem instinct with an air of happy collusion, as though they all know one another, and are linked in one long line of neighbourly acquaintance from Admiralty Arch to the Palace. The soldiers lining the street look fresh faced and rather touching, the policemen are properly genial, and presently you will see, undulating strangely above the crowd, the head of the Queen of England, in a tricorn hat. You can hardly see her horse for the people, but high above the soldiers and the policemen, as she paces grandly by, you may study her pale face\u2013a sad, antique face, it seems to me at such a moment, young but tired, half commanding, half embarrassed, half person, half idea\u2013a face lined with the blood heritage of Alfred the Great, William the Conqueror, Charlemagne, Roderigo the Cid, Barbarossa and her great-grandmother Victoria, Empress of India.\n\nSaturday lunch in Hong Kong\n\nThere seem to be a couple of thousand tables at the restaurant, and at them in uproarious enjoyment sits a vast multitude of Chinese, in families running the gamut from infancy to old age. Nobody is alone. Nobody is silent. The noise is deafening, all that talking and laughter mingling with the clanking of plates, the shouts of waiters from one side of the room to the other, the occasional cries of babies, the sizzling of woks and the Chinese music blaring from hidden loudspeakers. In we go, extremely European, and it is like sitting on the edge of a maelstrom, as we vacantly study the enormous menu (bound in gold and scarlet). But we are offered encouraging nods and incomprehensible explanations from the family at the next table, and we smile ourselves in a baffled and innocuous way across the Chinese mass. In a daze we order, and as by a miracle our food arrives, piping hot and indefinable, and in no time at all we are slurping it happily away, all inhibitions lost, and nodding appreciatively to our neighbours as to the Chinese manner born.\n\nImmigrants\n\nCourtesy of the Department of Immigration, I once stood in the background of an immigration booth at JFK to watch passengers from Europe coming through, and it was revealing to see what emotions passed through their eyes when they noticed me there, looking I suppose like an unusually well-disguised Secret Service agent: suspicion nearly always, ingratiation very often, sometimes a hint of collusion, and occasionally a look I had never encountered before, which I took to be fear. Some of the new arrivals had clearly roistered their way across the Atlantic with champagne and canap\u00e9s. Others, especially the mothers, the squirmy children, the stout beldames with swollen feet, arrived exhausted at that frenzied airport, into the glaring lights, the unremitting noise and movement of the New World; and as they looked wearily from the immigration officer to me, searching I imagine for some warmth of understanding in our faces, I sometimes thought I detected a flicker of regret in theirs. The officer treated everyone exactly the same, down to the badinage: 'Oh, please don't look at my picture there, I look terrible.' 'It's like we always say, ma'am, if you look as sick as you do in your passport, you're not fit to travel.'\n\nAn ugliness\n\nI was once held up on a seashore track by the unloading of live pigs from the Chinese mainland. This is a familiar ugliness of Hong Kong. The pigs are transported in narrow cylindrical cages of wire or wicker, into which they must be jammed so tightly that they lie there grotesquely squashed and distorted, and frequently in pain. That day they were squealing heart-rendingly as they were bumped in barrows at speed towards their slaughter, and I stood helpless and grieving beside the track. At that moment there came in single file from the opposite direction, on their way home from school, a line of small girls in almost exaggeratedly English uniforms, crested blazers, pleated white skirts, small neat knapsacks their backs. Demurely they filed past, their faces exuding school pride and team spirit: and they took not the slightest notice, as they walked daintily by, of the doomed animals screaming in their torture chambers.\n\n'We'd be famous'\n\nOff the top of a building we fell that day, and sidled across the Hudson River, and in few moments the helicopter stopped, shook itself and gingerly descended a couple of hundred feet. Looking out of my side window I found myself hovering, with a disrespectful clatter, close to the nose of the Statue of Liberty. We hung there for a minute, and the sunshine reflected off the water hung about her head. Then, with a last curtsey, we flew away. 'If we hit her we'd be famous,' I said to the pilot as we darted off. 'What a way to go,' he said. 'I'd be the guy who assaulted the Statue of Liberty, and you'd be instant Shakespeare.' Later I climbed up the statue from the ground, and sympathized with the lady who wrote in the visitors' book that it was 'a nice sight but the stairs weren't that wide'.\n\nSubterraneanism\n\nThe station was excavated in the early days of the New York subway system, and suggested to me a particularly cramped and airless cave, or perhaps a sunken submarine. The lady at the booth was elderly and all white, almost albino. Her face was ashen. Her eyes seemed to have no pupils. It was as though she had never in her life emerged into the daylight, but had been born and bred down there. When I asked her how she liked working underground, and whether she did not miss the sun, she was rather affronted. What could I know about it? She had worked in the subway for thirty years, and did not regret a moment of it. She loved the old station, liked to see the trains go by, and had many friends among the passengers; and, sure enough, when a black man walked by he called out unexpectedly to that pallid lady behind her grille: 'Howya doin', ma'am? Keepin' well?' 'I'm fine, Jack, thank you kindly,' she replied. 'Keepin' just fine.'\n\nIn Old Vienna\n\nWatch now\u2013stand back\u2013here come a couple of ministers down the steps from the Council Chamber in the Austrian parliament, portly important men, deep in portly and important matters of state\u2013and swoosh, like a rocket from his office leaps the porter, buttoning his jacket\u2013out of his door, panting a little, urgently smoothing his hair, down the steps two at a go, bitte, bitte!\u2013just in time, my goodness only just in time to open the door for Their Excellencies, who acknowledge his grovel only with slight inclinations of their heads, so as not to interrupt the flow of their discourse, as they lumber out beneath the figures of Minerva and her attendant sages to their waiting limousines.\n\nAltercation on the Zephyr\n\nI had pleasant companions at breakfast on the California Zephyr\u2013a girl from Fresno who had never been on a train before, and two railroad buffs who kept me informed about the state of the track. However, I did have one altercation in the dining car. My ticket, I had been told, entitled me to anything I liked on the menu, but when I asked for cornflakes and scrambled eggs I was told I was entitled to one or the other, but not both. I called for the supervisor to expostulate, but I did not get far. I had got it wrong, the functionary said, not unkindly, and I quote him word for word: 'You're not from this country. You don't understand the lingo.' But the girl from Fresno thought that man had been rather rude, and one of the train buffs offered to share his scrambled eggs with me\u2013only fair, really, because I had already urged upon him some of my Cooper's Oxford Marmalade.\n\nA very Irish lady\n\nA very Irish lady, sitting beside me as the ferry chugged doggedly across Sydney harbour, told me sadly that her car had just been stolen, and deliberately driven over a bluff. Never mind, I said, it was only a thing. Her eyes misted. 'Only a thing! Sure that's the way to look at it. Only a thing! I must look at it that way. God bless you, God bless you for that!' 'God bless you too,' I responded lamely, not knowing, as so often happens in discourse with the Irish, anything better to say.\n\nLiveable city\n\nFollowing the tourist signs towards the Old Town District and the Chinatown of Portland, Oregon, and expecting the usual harmless flummery of restored gas lamps and dragon gates, I crossed Burnside Street and found myself in a corner of hell. Suddenly all around me were the people of Outer America, flat out on the sidewalk, propped against walls, sitting on steps, some apparently drugged, some evidently about to vomit and nearly all of them, it occurred to me, idly wondering whether it was worth while mugging me as I passed. Portland has repeatedly been voted one of the Most Liveable Cities in the United States, but, thought I, you must choose the right part to live in...\n\nA performance in Athens\n\nOn a lovely spring day I climbed the Mouseion hill in Athens, all among the olive trees, to see the celestial view of the Parthenon from its summit. The morning smelt delectably of pines, flowers and dust, and my mind was full of Hellenic glories. Halfway up a Greek sprang from the bushes, opened his mackintosh wide and revealed to me his manly equipment. Well, I supposed, why not? Greek art had been displaying masculine glories for a few thousand years, and for that matter the sentries outside the royal palace, down in the city, were something of a disappointment to one of romantic fancy. Goose-stepping up and down in their full and famous finery, they looked to me less like soldiers of lyrical myth than farm boys in drag\u2013bulging, rather sweaty young men who might easily, in their off hours, mount a performance on the hill of Mouseion.\n\nPositive identification\n\nI was excited when somebody told me that the bronze statue of Enver Hoxha, the late dictator of Albania, still existed in Tirana, preserved in the Monuments Factory where it had been cast. Not so long before it had been the very centrepiece of the capital, dominating Skanderbeg Square until the rebellious populace toppled it\u2013and him. In a flash I was there, accompanied by a young Albanian engineer of my acquaintance. A watchman directed us to a windowless warehouse, apparently sealed off for ever. 'Enver's in there,' he said.\n\nWe circled this gloomy mausoleum until I found a spy-hole between the bricks, and there Enver was, recumbent in the shadows, just his bronze thigh to be glimpsed. It was enough. My engineer positively identified the old monster, and he should know. As a student he had been in the fore-front of the rejoicing crowd when the statue was pulled down in Skanderbeg Square. 'I pissed on it,' he complacently recalled, and you can't get more positive than that.\n\nLast post\n\nEven in the very last days of British Hong Kong one could occasionally see an imperial exhibition of the old kind, bands and sergeant majors shouting, every plume out of its box, judges in wigs and red robes, medals jangling on officers' breasts, swords, white gloves and His Excellency the Governor in full fig. I watched such a parade one Armistice Sunday, from a balcony above Statue Square, and all was as it always was. The commands were barked. The sad old hymns were sung. Trumpets trumpeted. Salutes were saluted.\n\nAround the Cenotaph a handful of Europeans, mostly tourists I suspect, stood watching in twos and threes. Just behind them the Sunday multitude of Filipino women was settling down to its weekly jollities, spreading themselves happily on the ground, chattering, laughing, fussing about with paper bags, and beyond them again the life of the great city proceeded altogether oblivious of the few score imperialists, with guards and musicians, pursuing their rituals at the war memorial.\n\nBreakfast Cokes\n\nAt breakfast in my Lithuanian hotel a long, long table covered with brown velveteen cloth is occupied by twenty young Russian males, while at the end of the dim-lit room there sits alone in silence at her victuals a woman who might be type-cast as a lady commissar: severe, spectacled, muscular, her hair in a bun and her skirts long and heavy. A solitary waiter in shirtsleeves serves us\u2013thick black coffee (they're out of milk), fried eggs with peas, black bread and very good cheese. Halfway through the meal we are each given a bottle of Coca-Cola. Most of the men drink theirs there and then, in tandem with the coffee, but I notice that as the lady commissar leaves the room, wiping her mouth carefully with her paper napkin and studiously not looking anyone on the face, she takes hers with her.\n\nGrand cru\n\nBeing a crude islander, and an iconoclast at that, I decided to cock a snook. I bought for the first and probably the last time in my life a grand cru Montrachet\u2013Marquis de Laguiche, vintage 1993. I got a kindly waitress in a cafe to uncork it for me, and picked up a hefty ham and cheese baguette to eat with it. 'Kindly direct me', I said to a viniculturist who happened to arrive at that moment in his Range Rover, 'to the exact patch of soil that has produced this bottle of wine.' He raised his eyebrows slightly when he saw its label and the napkin-wrapped sandwich in my hand. It was not much of a day for a picnic, he said, but perhaps the wine would help\u2013and with a wonderfully subtle suggestion of disapproval he pointed me the way to Montrachet. 'Bon app\u00e9tit,' he brought himself to say, for your Burgundy wine man is nothing if not gentlemanly.\n\nThrough a hole in the wall\n\nI looked through a big hole just hammered in the Berlin Wall, and saw into the patch of no-man's-land beyond. It was littered with rolls of discarded barbed wire, surrounded by ruined buildings and floored with the dismal mixture of sand, gravel and rubble that had resulted from three decades of herbicide\u2013for nothing was allowed to soften the allegory of the Wall. Three East German soldiers were in there, one tilted back on a kitchen chair with his cap over his eyes, the others kicking an old steel helmet around in the dust.\n\nHomesickness\n\nIn Moscow I made the acquaintance of Guy Burgess, a renegade British diplomat who had been a Soviet agent for some years but was by then sadly nostalgic for England and his mother. I could not help feeling sorry for him, and we agreed to go together one evening to the Bolshoi. We arranged to meet outside the theatre door, and when I got there I saw him waiting for me on the steps. I waved a greeting as I approached him through the crowd, and he waved a response, but by the time I reached the door he had vanished. I never saw him again.\n\nGrecian collusion\n\nI had taken a room in a private house on the outskirts of Monemvasia, and in the evening I walked a mile or so to a taverna for my supper. It was very full and very lively\u2013local people mostly, with some merry Americans. We drank large amounts of furiously resinated retsina out of metal mugs, and I seldom had a happier evening. In the small hours I staggered up the road again to my lodgings, and my landlady, in a flowered housecoat over her nightdress, pulled back the bars and undid the chains of her front door to let me in. I expected her to be tight lipped and disapproving; instead she greeted me with a sly and knowing smile of collusion, as if she had been enjoyably up to no good herself. I went to bed incoherently whistling, and awoke in the morning fresh as a daisy.\n\nNothing to say\n\nIn the bad times of communism a Polish colleague drove me out to a writers' retreat near Zakopane in the southern mountains, and on the way we were stopped by the police. My friend, a man of great charm and intelligence, did not speak when the policeman tapped on his window. He merely took his driving licence from his inside pocket, tucked a banknote into it and handed it out. The policeman did not speak, either. He had no need to. He just took the note, handed the licence back and walked away. My friend drove on without a word to me. There was nothing to say.\n\nWho cared?\n\nIt was midnight, and wartime. Sarajevo, pitted all over with bullet marks, was dark and shuttered, and the airport was closed, but I got a seat on a minibus going down to the coast. There were four other passengers\u2013a Swede, a Finn, a Croat and an Englishman. Behind us a second busload was following us through the night. The snow was deep, every now and then we were stopped at road blocks, sometimes we clattered across a temporary bridge beside a blown-up original. Scattered ruins passed dismally by\u2013house after house gaping in the darkness, with no sign of life but for a single dim light, perhaps, on a ground floor, or a fire burning in a brazier. The awful gorges through the mountains loomed around us, dark and dangerous. At about two in the morning we stopped, and our driver got out and peered rather helplessly into the black emptiness behind him, up the highway banked with snow-drifts. 'What's happening?' said the Englishman in front of me. 'What have we stopped for?' The driver explained that the other bus seemed to be lost: there was no sign of its lights, and he was worried that it might have got into trouble back there. The Englishman stretched, pulled his coat more tightly round his shoulders, and settled down to sleep again. 'Who cares?' he said, but he may have been joking.\n\nToo late\n\nLong ago I came across the ruin of one of the great Anglo-Irish mansions of the old Ascendancy, and paused to imagine all the blithe existence it had once known\u2013hunt balls and elegant dowagers and Etonians larking about with girls in the rose gardens. I remarked to a passing Irishman that it seemed a shame all the festive and colourful life of the house should have come to an end, but he replied, 'Oh, wouldn't you think it was too late for that kind of fandango?' He was right, of course, and years later I came across that ruin again, and found I could no longer hear the hunting horns, or glimpse Lady W's ancestral pearls, still less imagine those young English toffs living it up among the bushes.\n\nCity of Art and Culture\n\nSo enamoured were the Nazis of Weimar that they erected there one of their most celebrated and characteristic monuments. The site they chose was the lovely hill of Ettersberg, just outside the city, which Goethe had long before made famous\u2013he loved to sit and meditate beneath an oak tree there. On my last day in Weimar I paid a visit to this place, now a popular tourist site well publicized in the town. My taxi driver, a gregarious soul, chatted cheerfully to me all the way. Had I enjoyed my stay in Weimar? Did I visit the Goethehaus? What did I think of the food? Did I know that Weimar was to be the European City of Culture in 1999, at the end of the millennium? Congratulations, I said. Recognition once more for the City of Art and Music. 'Exactly,' replied the taxi driver, and just then we turned off the highway up to Buchenwald.\n\nGod bless Swissness!\n\nHalfway through my stay at Weggis I cracked my head open entering the lake for a swim, and had to have it stitched. How glad I was of Swissness then! Calmly and steadily the Herr Doktor worked, assisted by Frau Doktor and by their son the computer specialist, and delicate was his technique, and state-of-the-art his equipment, and whenever I opened my eyes I saw through the spotless windows of his surgery the glistening lake, streaked with leisurely waves and ringed with green hills, like a visual tranquillizer.\n\nNorway, 1950s\n\nNorwegian writers still looked wonderfully writerly then, painters were like painters, middle-aged ladies properly middle aged and cardiganed. I happened in Oslo one night to see some members of a theatre cast assembling for a post-performance supper in a restaurant, and watching their meticulously staged arrivals, their accomplished greetings and their mastery of incidental business was almost as stimulating as seeing the play itself.\n\nWelsh pride\n\nIn Argentinian Patagonia, long ago, Welsh people established a colony where they could speak their own language and live in their own way, far from the intrusive English. They called it simply Y Wladfa, The Colony, and a century and a half later, when Welshness was fading there, in a farm on the outskirts of Trevelin I found a last archetype of its settlers. He was like the smile, as it were, on the face of the Cheshire Cat. Not a soul in his household understood Welsh besides himself, but they all clustered eagerly around us as we talked\u2013a jolly Argentinian wife, diverse unidentified children and grandchildren, dogs and chickens and a horse tied to the fence; and with his cloth cap tilted on his head, his hands in his pockets, that Welshman of South America touched my heart not with melancholy at all, but with grateful pride to be Welsh myself.\n\n'Ai, ai, ai'\n\nSeveral times during my stay in Rome I came across a couple of countrymen who seemed, in their quaint fustian clothes and peculiar shoes, to have stepped more or less out of the Middle Ages. They were like substantial fauns, haunting the city out of its remote rural past. These medieval figured seemed to me wonderfully exotic, until late one night I encountered the pair of them anxiously consulting a bus timetable beneath a streetlight in the Corso. Then I realized that in fact they piquantly illustrated the matter-of-factnesss of the city. Nobody took the slightest notice of them, as they huddled there; they looked up and asked me for advice about the best way to get home, but when I told them I was a foreigner, 'Ai, ai, ai,' they said theatrically, like Italians in old movies.\n\nThe first of the Morgans\n\nOn the land of Mr Harold Childs, a horse breeder of Harolyn Hill in Vermont, is buried the stallion Justin Morgan, the only progenitor of that superb American creature the Morgan horse. Mr Childs kindly allowed me to visit the horse's grave, down the hill below his house, and when I walked back he was waiting for me with a present. It was a short piece of lead piping. 'Now this is true,' he said. 'Just here where we're standing there used to be the stables where Justin Morgan was kept, and when we was digging up there on the hill we found this old lead piping, came straight down the hill here, and a branch of that pipe it came right across the yard here and took the water to the stables. Now that's a fact.\n\n'Now I'm going to give you this bit of that pipe. You can say\u2013and it's true\u2013that Justin Morgan drank from the very water that came through this bit of pipe. You take it away with you, now.' I took it gratefully and I have treasured it ever since. 'I shall mount it on wood,' I said as I started the car to leave, 'and I'll have a card saying \"From this pipe drank Justin Morgan, the first of all the Morgan horses\".' Mr Childs tipped his hat politely, in the old American way. 'Good idea,' he said.\n\nHell's traffic\n\nNobody could be much less Neapolitan than I am, and when at last we reached the hotel, limp with excitement, amusement and exhaustion, and I had paid our driver his exorbitant but entirely justified fare, I told the hotel receptionist that I wanted to go home. 'Don't say that,' he replied. 'Wait till you get up to your room, and everything will seem different.'\n\nSo it did. Dusk was falling by then, the harbour was speckled with small fishing boats, and in the distance Vesuvius loomed hazy in the half-light. The docks were full of white cruise liners, and even as I watched one of them slipped away from the quay towards the open sea. For a long time I could see her lights, fainter and fainter to the west\u2013treading her way, I liked to imagine, towards calm realms of order. But it did not make me in the least homesick. The receptionist was right. I rang for a bottle of wine, and we sat there on our balcony in perfect contentment, while hell's traffic snarled convivially below.\n\nFrenchness like a cloak\n\nNothing had changed in the corner restaurant, the one with the awnings and the menu in the polished brass frame. It remained quintessential France, as we islanders have loved and loathed it for several centuries. Madame remained the epitome of everything false, narrow-minded and unreliable. One waiter seemed, as ever, to be some sort of duke, the other was evidently the village idiot. At the table next to mine sat a prosperous local family out for Sunday dinner, well known to the proprietress and esteemed throughout the community\u2013unsmiling, voluminously napkinned, serious and consistent eaters who sometimes, eyeing me out of the corners of their eyes, exchanged in undertones what were doubtless sly Anglophobics before returning sluggishly to their veal.\n\nI do not doubt the bill was wrong. I am sure Madame disliked me as much as I detested her. The veal was, as a matter of fact, rather stringy. But what a contrary delight it all was! How excellent still the vegetables! How much better the wine in France! How stately that duke! How endearing the idiot! With what real gratitude, evading the final scrutiny of the prefectorial table, and sweetly returning Madame's shifty glittering smile, did I wrap the Frenchness of that cafe around me like a cloak, and return cherished to the autoroute!\n\nThey thought not\n\nIn Beijing the compound called Zhongnanhai is the very heart of the Chinese communist despotism. Its main entrance is to the south, with two great guardian lions. The Red Flag flies from a mast outside, and within the gate an inner wall is inscribed with the cabbalistic text 'Serve the People'. You cannot see past it, though. Two armed sentries stand there, with two more over their shoulders. They look distinctly unwelcoming, as they stare motionless and expressionless into the street: and sure enough, when I asked them if I could take a stroll inside Zhongnanhai, they seemed to think not.\n\nThe Smile Test\n\nThe Smile Test is the system I employ to gauge the responsiveness of cities, and it entails smiling relentlessly, if not unnervingly, at everyone I meet walking along a street. I devised it in Vancouver, which remains a good place to test the system. Pay attention now, as we try it out in Robson Street, one of the raciest of the city's downtown boulevards. Many of our subjects disqualify themselves from the start, so obdurately do they decline eye contact. Others are so shaken that they have no time to register a response before we have passed by. A majority look back with a blank but generally amenable expression, as though they would readily return a smile if they could be sure it was required of them, and were quite certain that the smile was for them and not for somebody else. A few can just summon up the nerve to offer a diffident upturn at the corners of the mouth, but if anybody smiles back instantly, instinctively, joyously, you can be sure it is a visiting American, or an immigrant not yet indoctrinated. Whenever I go to Vancouver people ask me how they're doing in the Smile Test. I respond with a nervous smile myself.\n\nSuburban enchantment\n\nIn the evening I saw Die Fledermaus, staged with a genuine rollicking panache, and so instinct with the magic of the waltz, the whirl of white skirts and the flick of tailcoats, that when I inspected the faces of the women around me, Soviet proletarians every one, I found them glazed with a true suburban enchantment.\n\nGORGE\n\nOne person in particular at Iceland, the Sydney skating rink, seemed to me quintessentially Australian. He was about five years old, I suppose, blond, lively, tough and unsmiling. He could not, it seemed, actually skate, but he was adept at running about the rink on his blades, and his one purpose of the morning was to gather up the slush that fell off other people's boots, and throw it at passing skaters. This task he pursued with skilful and unflagging zeal. Hop, hop, he would abruptly appear upon the rink, and, picking a likely target, staggering his way across the ice, inexorably he would hunt that victim down until slosh! the missile was dispatched\u2013and hobble, hobble, quick as a flash he was out of the rink again, gathering more slush.\n\nHe hardly ever fell over, he seldom missed, and he did everything with a dexterous assiduity. When I asked him his name he spelt out GORGE with his finger on the rail of the rink; when I asked him if he was enjoying himself he just nodded grimly; and in my mind's eye I saw him thirty years from then, exploding into a company meeting perhaps with an irresistible takeover bid, or relentlessly engineering the resignation of a rival undersecretary. I kept my eye firmly on him as I walked out of Iceland, for instinct told me he was assembling slush for me.\n\nSeen from a bus\n\nI sit in a motionless bus near the Sugar Loaf, at Rio de Janeiro, at a place where a small park runs down to the sea. There are military offices nearby, and in constant twos and threes colonels and captains walk by carrying briefcases. My eye is captured, though, by a solitary middle-aged man hanging about at the edge of the park. He bears himself elegantly, slim and erect in a well-cut grey suit, but there is something wrong with him. It seems to be partly physical, partly mental and partly, perhaps, too much coffee. He can never get comfortable. If he sits on a bench, after a moment he gets up again. If he takes a turn around the grass, he abruptly stops. Sometimes he looks up at the hill above, but it seems only to disappoint him, as if he cannot see what he is looking for up there. He inspects the passing officers keenly (was he once a colonel or captain himself?) but he recognizes none. He gazes longingly out to sea, but the sun gets in his eyes. When my bus starts, and we move away from the park, I wave at him through the window, he waves abstractedly back\u2013but not at me, I think, not at me.\n\nVery simple matters\n\n'Certainly,' said the government spokesman, perusing my list of questions. 'By all means, these are very simple matters. We can attend to them for you at once. As I told you, it is our duty! It is what we are paid for! I myself have to attend to an important meeting this afternoon\u2013you will excuse me I hope?\u2013but I will leave all these little matters with our good Mrs Gupta and all will be taken care of. I will telephone with the answers myself without fail\u2013or it not myself, then Mrs Gupta will be sure to telephone you either today or tomorrow morning. Did you sign our register? A duplicate signature here if you would not mind, and the lady at the door will issue you with the requisite application form for a pass\u2013it will make everything easier for you, you see. Have no fear, Mrs Gupta will take care of everything.'\n\nBut neither he nor Mrs Gupta ever did ring.\n\nI smell\n\nI drove direct from the horrible purlieus of San Crist\u00f3bal, one of the worst of the Lima barriadas, to have tea at the Country Club in San Isidro. The odour of the slum went with me, clinging to my clothes and the soles of my shoes like some blasphemous travesty of incense, and as I sat there among the little black dresses and the sticky cakes, the greying distinctions and the foppish playboys, the starched nannies and the exquisite children on the lawn, the chic and the cultivation and the chit-chat of urbanity\u2013as I sat there with the squalor still in my hair I could not help remembering, Pharisaical it seems in retrospect, Dr Johnson's celebrated differentiation, I smell, you stink.\n\nBastille Day\n\nFor hours I had been hanging about the airport at Kharkov, fobbed off by supercilious airline employees through delay after delay in a bitterly cold and comfortless waiting room, until at last the patience of my Soviet passengers expired. They found a boarding ramp, pushed it on to the tarmac, climbed up to the aircraft and, brushing aside the horrified stewardesses, plumped themselves in their seats and called for vodka. I followed in their wake rejoicing, feeling as though we had stormed life's varied Kremlins.\n\nAt the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem\n\nI looked at Adolf Eichmann to see how he was reacting, half expecting to see some flicker of perverse pride crossing his face. But he was sitting well back in his chair, with his hands in his lap, blinking frequently and moving his lips, and he reminded me irresistibly of some elderly pinched housewife in a flowered pinafore, leaning back on her antimacassar and shifting her false teeth as she listened to the railing gossip of a neighbour. It was only towards the end of the morning, several hours, ten thousand words and an eternity of horrors later, that the old lady in the pinny began to sway and fidget a little in her chair, as though she were pining for a nice cup of tea.\n\nWaiting for Churchill\n\nUp on the mountainside, while the press of the world jostle for scoops and angles in the hostelries below, old Sir Winston lies in bed. He lies there in seclusion, the last of the giants, reading his newspapers and confounding his pleurisies while they wait for him to die. Some of my colleagues depict him demanding brandy, puffing cigars, writing his own health bulletins, calling for splendid enormous meals. For myself, when I was up the mountain one evening I thought I heard a sound from the villa, above the sweetness of the birds and the distant sawing of a woodman. It came from an upstairs window and it sounded to me uncommonly like a rich, quixotic, irrepressible, ageless Harrovian chuckle. 'How come you heard that and nobody else? You got influence some place? Hey, gar\u00e7on, two dries.'\n\nHome thoughts from Barbados\n\nThe parishioners who came to the service were nearly all black people, sugar workers and their families from the island estates, but few of them were really strangers to me. Their white muslins and their wide straw hats once graced the English social fabric, and when they sat down expectantly for the sermon the rustle of their petticoats and the crackling of their starch filtered though to me across the pages of many an Edwardian memoir. I knew what hymns they would sing with gusto, for I had heard the same tentative starts and communal diapasons at many a grumbling British army church parade. The verger in his black cassock I had often met before, pointing out the ravages of death-watch beetle in the shires, and when the piano struck up its preliminary chord I knew from her air of proud command which of those old friends would be the one who always comes in half a beat before the beginning of the verse. 'Amen, amen,' murmured the congregation at the end of the sermon, and it was like the clatter of hobnailed boots on the stone-flagged floor of a dairy.\n\nEnd of a battle\n\nThe Israelis had won. Tanks clattered by. Trucks came and went. Soldiers climbed aboard and waved goodbye to each other. It rained, and I prepared to move on too, but just then a rainbow came. 'Look, a rainbow,' I said to a bearded and taciturn sergeant not long from Romania, and added sentimentally: 'Omen of peace!' 'It is not a reasonable analogy to the present situation,' he replied, shifting his Sten gun on his shoulder. 'God showed Noah the rainbow as a promise for no more floods in the future. When He merely wished to show that Noah could now leave the ark, He dispatched a small bird, carrying a piece of tree in its snout.'\n\nAmong the treasures\n\nIn the vaults of the Central Bank of Persia, before the Iranian Revolution, were kept the priceless and legendary Crown Jewels, in a huge underground strongroom. I was down there one crowded weekday, when it was open to the public, and came across an agreeable case of brooches and little jewelled watches. I stooped to examine them more closely, and as I did so the treasure house suddenly reverberated with the ear-splitting blast of an alarm hooter. Everyone froze. Not a word was spoken. The hooter went on hooting. For a moment nothing else happened, and then a smart young woman in green walked with composure across the room. She avoided the case containing the Gika of Nadir Shah, with its diamond ornaments of bayonets and gun barrels around a monumental emerald. She ignored the sceptre presented to Reza Shah by the people of Azerbaijan, with its gold lions rampant around a jewelled globe. She took no notice of the Sea of Light inherited from the first Mogul Emperor of India. Instead she walked calmly through the room, utterly silent but for the clicking of her heels, directly between the display cases to me. 'May I please ask you,' she said with an amiable smile, 'to remove your elbow from that metal bar around the jewel case?' I moved my arm. The hooter stopped. 'Thank you,' she said, and walked composedly back again.\n\nAffronted\n\n'Those Algerians!' expostulated an elderly politician in Reykjavik, when our conversation turned to politics. He wagged his beard irritably, as elderly Nordic politicians do. 'They're nothing but troublemakers. They were up here, you know, making mischief\u2013Einar Arnarson, I think it was, he put paid to them, he and Jon Olafsson and one or two others'\u2013and suddenly it dawned upon me, as his sharp affronted eyes blazed into mine, that he was talking about the Barbary Pirates.\n\nA lovely dream\n\nThe day I arrived in Harar, Ethiopia, I spent a happy hour in the market, sitting beside a courteous silversmith and watching the rural citizenry at its shopping. There was nothing ugly to be seen there, nothing sham, nothing pretentious. It was like watching an assembly of beautiful lithe-limbed animals, so easily did all those people move, so naturally, so discreetly; and as I sat there on my stone seat, the craftsman tinkling away beside me, or engaged in earnest but desultory haggling with half-naked but otherwise impeccable debutantes, I thought how fortunate were those creatures of nature, those children of the thatched hut and the empty places, those sisters of specious innocence. But alas, even there the dream would soon be over.\n\nFair enough\n\nWould they be casting their votes as Jamaicans, I asked the Kingston Rastafarians, in the forthcoming elections? The idea horrified them. 'Tell your Queen Elizabeth,' they said, 'that the suffering Ethiopians assembled here from the corners of the earth, yea verily from the four corners, it is written, the seventh year of the seventh epoch, yea verily the time has come, Abja!\u2013tell her that we are aliens in this land, and cannot vote in elections imposed upon us by our oppressors. Fair enough?'\n\nProverb in Formosa\n\nThe Vice-President of Nationalist China, in his garden on the island of Formosa, folded his intricate old hands in his lap and projected a Chinese proverb at me. Beneath the trees on the edge of the lawn a stalwart servant waited in attentive silence, and a few soft raindrops were spattering the foliage in a sly, oriental kind of way. 'Among our people we have a saying,' the Vice-President said. '\"It is foolish to judge the character of a man by the complexion of his face.\"' And his pale eyes flickered at me, as an old experienced tiger's eyes might blink in the forests of the night.\n\nOpposite directions\n\nVery early one morning two men met outside my tent on a mountainside in Wales. The younger of the two was a tatterdemalion Welsh shepherd, cloth capped, driving his sheep down to the road with a clatter and scurry, calling to his dog, shouting guttural Welsh encouragements and waving his thick stick like an apparition. The elder, a scholarly looking man in plus fours, was evidently a believer in rhythmic breathing, for as he walked he whistled to himself a monotonous Bach-like melody\u2013two beats to each footstep, round and round, over and over again in an endless classical cadence. The two men passed each other as I gaped at them through my tent flap. The shepherd brandished his stick and grunted casually; the scholar interrupted his fugue to offer a greeting in a reedy academic voice; and so they disappeared into the rain, in opposite directions.\n\nAt the theatre\n\nThe audience at a Tokyo Kabuki theatre consists mostly of women in kimonos, following the drama with an informed avidity I have seen paralleled only among rugby crowds in South Africa. You sit there wedged between the brocades, baffled by the tortuosities of the plot, swathed in the sickly perfumes of Japan, while high above you in the balcony the narrator declaims his lines majestically from a tasselled lectern. The man beside him plucks dreamily or astringently at his ancient instrument, and on the magnificent stage the queer medieval figures sit and strut and gesticulate with falsetto voices and grand flamboyant costumes. All that is grand, awful or ablaze in the old Japan lives on, twitching and quivering, in the theatre of the Kabuki.\n\nSchooner travel\n\nAt Granada the schooner captain kindly signed me on as crew, and to avoid awkward questions stuffed me away in a cubbyhole of his vessel until the heavy footfalls of authority had died away along the quay. When I was released I crept out blinking to find the schooner already scudding gaily out of harbour, and the captain grinning beside the wheel with a tin mug of rum in his hand. African, British, French and Indian ancestors had all contributed to his ship's company, and in the tiny starboard deckhouse, I presently discovered, there resided a seductive mulatto camp follower, immured there silently like a lady about to be sawn in half. We all slept on the open deck, and when the moon came up I heard somebody murmur to this nubile shipmate: 'You got your moonburn lotion, honey?'\n\nThe clock and the nougat\n\n'My brother-in-law,' said the woman I had given a lift to, who was dressed funereally and clutched a posy of lilies in a sanctimonious sort of way\u2013'my brother-in-law has told me that the British are more honest than we Calabrese. Is this so?' I had taken a peculiar dislike to this person, and had noticed that she was eyeing my travelling clock with an interest unmistakably covetous. So when she asked me again, wriggling in her seat in a manner at once obsequious and obscurely arrogant\u2013'Eh, is it true?'\u2013I answered her harshly. 'Perfectly true,' said I. She was unperturbed. When I dropped her she said nastily, 'Haven't you got some small memento to give me, some small gift or souvenir?' 'Only the memory of our meeting,' said I firmly, shoving the travelling clock out of sight beneath the dashboard\u2013and she shamed me then, by pressing into my hand a large and rather nasty bar of nougat.\n\nThe portrait\n\nBrigadier Abdul Karim Kassem has today led a violent coup d'\u00e9tat which has suddenly made him the prime minister of Iraq, and he has invited the gentlemen of the press to meet him at the Ministry of Information. Soldiers stand guard with tommy guns, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Information (since this morning) are in attendance, and pointedly on the floor of the room is the new leader's camp bed, with a pair of green striped pyjamas folded primly on its pillow. In a corner stands a large, enthusiastic and evidently freshly painted portrait of the brigadier. 'May we ask the Prime Minister', says an American reporter with a courtly air, 'if that is a new portrait of His Excellency, and, if so, who painted it?' The Prime Minister smiles a glittering smile and is silent, so his deputy answers for him. 'Yes, it is a new one. It was painted by the people. It is a present.' 'All the Iraqi people like this government very much,' adds the Prime Minister then. 'Ask the people yourselves. When I go into the street everybody is friendly.' The American clears his throat. The American public would be interested to know, he feels sure, if it is not too personal a question, if any particular one of the Iraqi people painted the portrait, and if so, which? But 'Gentlemen,' intervenes the Minister of Information, 'I think we are all very tired,' so we shake hands with His Excellency and filter through the sentries into the street.\n\n'For heaven's sake'\n\nOne Christmas in Vienna I went for a walk in a park before returning to the hotel where my Christmas dinner was roasting. There was hardly a woman in the park. Everywhere the husbands of Vienna, with their children, aimlessly but expectantly loitered, expelled from under the womanly feet of the city while Gretchen and Helga got on with the job. Christmas is a time when old hierarchies are restored. 'For heaven's sake,' I could hear the housewives of all Europe grumbling that day, 'go out and get yourself some fresh air, and take the children with you.'\n\nWine of the country\n\nThe Colonel's family had lived in the same Scottish Lowlands house for several centuries, but as a retired widower he lived unostentatiously, and I was greeted with a homely plate of scones and raspberry jam, and a pot of tea in a blue flowered teapot beneath a bobbled cosy. He ate and drank his ration with enthusiasm, but very soon afterwards fetched a bottle of whisky from the sideboard and poured a couple of glasses\u2013'Wine of the country\u2013I always say, you should drink the wine of the country.'\n\nHe looked like an Irish deerhound, very tall and elongated, his figure only slightly stooped with age, and he was dressed tweedily, with shoes that looked handmade. At first sight he did not appear to be Scottish at all, but after a while, through that expensively anglicized exterior there began to appear something pricklier, more gingery, more ruthless, perhaps, and I realized in fact that I was talking to a man almost aboriginally Scots. His attitudes were mellow. His subjects of conversation ranged from Bonnie Prince Charlie ('All those Stuarts were a rotten lot') to the price of claret ('I used to get it from a man I know in Bordeaux, but now I just go to the supermarket') to snooker on TV ('They're very sporting fellows, extremely sporting'). He alludes now and then to some duke, marquis or other ('by way of being a relative of mine'), but only to tell a comic tale about him, discredit a medieval anecdote or explain the genesis of a portrait. It was raining when I left him, but he came to the bottom of the garden to wave me away, and as I turned the corner of the drive I glanced in the driving mirror to see that old inheritor of blood feud and cattle raid regain the shelter of his door, as though he were escaping a royal posse, in a single mighty stride.\n\nHoly experiences\n\nConsider this family of Irish people, sitting beneath a canopy in the drizzle of a Marian shrine in County Waterford. The image of the Virgin is not very old, but stands strangely half in shadow on a rock wall in a frond-filled grotto, with a stream running below. During the last few months it has repeatedly been seen to move of its own accord, and to be transfigured. Sometimes its face changes into that of Christ, and sometimes it apparently comes to life\u2013early last night, a bright-eyed lady at the gate tells me, she met the Virgin walking silently by the stream. The family sits there, mother, father, adult son and daughter, in a determined common trance, their eyes fixed immovably upon the statue on the rock\u2013willing it to move, praying for a manifestation, clutching rosaries, lips moving sometimes but bodies still as images themselves. They were like addicts at a gaming table. The rain fell all around.\n\nSacred memories\n\nI went to the 300th-anniversary march of the Prentice Boys in Londonderry (aka Derry), by which the Protestant Orange Order remembers a famous victory over the Catholics, and never did I see such a variety of remarkable faces, pinched, florid, genial or fierce beneath their bowler hats or tam-o'-shanters. Never were pipe-and-drum bands more fervent. Never was I in a crowd so absolutely united in its bigotries. Thirty thousand Orangemen took part in the march, and for five hours an air of perfervid dedication enveloped the city. There were tiny boys of three or four marching with the rest. There were half-crazed bass drummers and clown-like drum majors, juggling their batons, balancing them on the ends of their noses, strutting and gesturing like circus performers. There were ranks of stern elderly men, bowler hatted, some carrying swords, all swathed in the regalia of the Orange Order. Halfway down the procession the hero of the day, a large Presbyterian clergyman, came swaggering by with a cohort of aides, smiling here and there and cheered along the way like a dictator moving among his adoring subjects. Hour after hour the beat of the drums reverberated, and when I left Derry the Orangemen were still streaming across the Craigavon Bridge, banners flying, drummers prancing, strutting infants, determined old men in medals and bowlers marching in steadfast line abreast.\n\nReciprocal ill will\n\nI can see to this day the face of a Benedictine monk I encountered at the Bavarian monastery of Andechs. In his late twenties, I would guess, he looked more like an interrogator than a confessor, far more accusatory than forgiving. Tall, thin, pale, unsmiling, cold eyed, pious as all hell, when I asked him the way to the monastic cemetery he did not at first reply at all, but simply turned his cod-like features upon me with raised eyebrows. When at last he gave me a curt and loveless answer I hardly had time to thank him (not that I was planning to be very fulsome about it) before he turned on his heel with a flounce of his cassock and disappeared inside the church. I hope he choked on his vespers.\n\n'Oes heddwch?'\n\nAssembled on stage at the National Eisteddfod, the great cultural festival of the Welsh nation, are the Bards of the Druidical Orders, a strange conclave of eminent citizens, doctors and philosophers, writers and politicians, dressed in long hooded robes of white and grey. They are presided over by sages and attended by nymphs in green, by matrons with horns of plenty, by harpists and by trumpeters, and they are there to honour the victor of a poetry competition. The winner's identity is a secret, but he is sitting, we know, somewhere in the audience around us. A hum of excitement and speculation accordingly fills the pavilion. Strange preliminaries occur on the stage: harpists pluck arcane strains, elves dance, a gigantic sword is half drawn from its sheath, then majestically slammed home again. 'Oes heddwch?' cries the Archdruid. 'Is there peace?' 'Heddwch!' thunders back the audience, and the trumpets blow their fanfares, and gathering their robes about them a deputation of Druids gravely leaves the stage to summon the victorious poet to his honours. The organ thunders. A spotlight plays at random over the auditorium. The television cameras are poised in their gantries. The audience strains forward in its seats. Presently the light steadies itself, sweeps deliberately along the seats, and falls at last upon the person of the winner\u2013who, blushing with pride and self-consciousness, and pretending hard to be astonished, allows himself with mock reluctance to be led away by the Druids, up through the huge applauding crowd, up through the reverberating organ music, to the throne that is, for those few moments, the very crucible of Wales. Some years ago I was a member of that Druidical delegation, the man who drew the great sword from its sheath was a famous rugby player and my son Twm was the poet.\n\nSmall change\n\nThere is a Sydney street group called the Aussie Small Change Brass Band which might well represent the city at ceremonial functions, so alive is it with the authentic Sydney mixture of fun, fizz and chutzpah. Its players are three very small boys in very large hats, with two trumpets, a tuba and extremely powerful amplifiers, and I can tell you they play 'Puttin' on the Ritz' like nobody's business.\n\nIncidental music\n\nI was driving down the Adriatic coast from Istria to Montenegro, and I was playing a recording by Vladimir Ashkenazy of Mozart's 22nd piano concerto. It seemed to me that the vivacious allegro movement of this work absolutely suited the swashbuckling landscape of karst, sea and island through which I was passing, and I drove down the magnificent coast road playing the tape repeatedly, laughing and singing out loud. In the course of the journey I gave a lift to a frail and elderly Montenegrin traveller, wizard-like with stick and black coat, and when towards the end of the journey, Ashkenazy still playing, me still singing, in the delight of my mood I narrowly escaped head-on collision with a convoy of armoured cars, this delightful old worthy seemed to find it just as funny as I did.\n\nThe Algerian gardener\n\nThe Algerian gardener at our hotel in the Midi was extremely tall and cadaverous, and his eyes blazed deep in their sockets. His luxuriant sideburns, however, gave him a noble scholarly aspect. He was like a professor in some medieval academy of Islam. As he trundled his barrow about, I used to think, surely he was debating within himself subtle mathematical formulae, or composing Sufi couplets? Once I got up at the break of day, when the place was deserted, and I came across the gardener feeding a black and white cat. He stood very erect above the animal, having placed a grisly dish of offal before it, and I heard him murmuring endearments to the creature. They sounded stately endearments\u2013Koranic, perhaps\u2013and he stood there gauntly as the sun rose behind him, looking down at the cat and murmuring. The cat kept circling around his feet, casting glances at the food, rubbing its head against the man's ankles until it felt it had paid its proper respects. Only then did it fall, with snarls and rendings through its purrs, upon the unlovely victuals.\n\nThe matter with me\n\n'Wazzamatterwidyou?' hissed the angry cab driver, as I stumbled bemused across 45th Street. 'Hey, you in the green hat,' shouts the policeman from his horse, 'can't you see that signal?' 'You must wait for the green,' says the passing lady slowly and sympathetically, assuming I speak only Welsh or Lithuanian, and am new to the mysteries of science. But it takes time to readjust, when you return to Manhattan from idler climes.\n\nTo touch the owl\n\nI notice that for mistily religious reasons women in Dijon touch the little figure of an owl in the rue de la Chouette as casually as they might pull on a glove\u2013except that, since it is perched rather high on a wall, small ladies have to jump a bit to reach the bird, and children have to be lifted one after the other, their mothers never interrupting, all the same, the flow of their own conversations.\n\nThe friar's warning\n\nAt the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo the desiccated corpses of generations of citizens are on display, guarded by friars and climaxed by the body of a child labelled BAMBINA\u2013SLEEPING BEAUTY GIRL. 'Be very careful,' one of the friars said in a flat sort of voice when I left this macabre exhibit\u2013'watch out for robbers.' I thought there was a queer, occult look in his eye, and hardly had I left the sacred premises than two thugs on a motorbike snatched my bag and left me destitute.\n\nOne can always tell\n\nIf the hitch-hikers are American I generally stop for them. One can always tell. They try harder for their lifts, holding up well-lettered destination signs and offering ingratiating smiles. They are in the lift-getting business, and they do the job properly. When they are on board they generally work for their keep, too. They tell me all about themselves, they learn all about me, they may give me a brief lecture upon the social customs of my own country, or kindly correct me when I appear to be going the wrong way. They are usually willing to oblige, too. 'Are you going to Scotland?' one young man asked me when I stopped for him just outside London. 'No, I'm going to Wales.' 'OK, make it Wales'\u2013and I drove him all the way to Bala, and left him smoothly chatting up the farmer's wife at a bed-and-breakfast place.\n\nMarvellously goes the elk meat\n\nMy favourite place for a Christmas meal is the Operak\u00e4llaren restaurant in Stockholm. There the restaurant's famous house aquavit is poured most generously by merry waiters of the old school, and everyone soon gives the impression of being acquainted with everyone else. Marvellously goes the elk meat, swiftly pass the herrings, one great salmon succeeds another on the buffet, and very soon I find myself on familiar terms with the Swedes at the next table, complimenting them on their fluent English, admiring little Eva's Christmas frock or little Erik's smart bow tie, exchanging grandmotherly confidences with Mrs Andersson, toasting them one and all with yet more aquavit. Stockholmers are not especially religious people, and I like to think they have been eating those Baltic herrings, downing those fiery liquids, since the days of the pagan kings.\n\nThe red tarboosh\n\nAndrew Holden was one of the very last British officials of the Egyptian government, still a highly respected functionary of the Ministry of Finance when Egypt had long recovered its independence. By the time I knew him he was near retirement, but he still went to work each morning by tram, clinging to the outside like any other Cairene if he could not get a seat. The amiable Egyptians, helping him up the step, would make sure he had a place on the rear platform, where he could hang on to the pole, and there I can see him now as the tram swayed and clanked its way into town, so scholarly looking in his spectacles, so slight, so incongruously at ease\u2013and on his head, tilted at a jaunty but not ostentatious angle, the red tarboosh which was the only badge of his commitment.\n\nDance music\n\nOne evening I came across a dance in a Cretan courtyard. The lights were very bright there. The deafeningly amplified music was a quavery sort of oriental theme. A high gate closed the yard, but along the wall of the road above, from windows and shadowy terraces all around, a crowd of villagers watched. Beneath the lights inside, a long circling line of Cretans, men and women, danced a strange dance. I was bewitched. Gracefully, jauntily, thoughtfully, swankily, the dancers tripped their complex steps, and the music blared through the pergola. Round and round they went, to and fro, and sometimes the man at the head of the line, detaching himself momentarily from the rest, threw himself into a spasm, leaping, kicking his feet together, twirling about in an ecstasy of conceit and accomplishment, before the convulsion left him and he subsided into the music's rhythm. When I tore myself away the half-tone music of the loudspeakers tracked me far into the night.\n\nThe three days\n\nOne of the most demanding of Irish pilgrimages takes the faithful to a grim island in Lough Derg, a remote and dispiriting mountain lake, where they endure a three-day fast, a twenty-four-hour vigil, barefoot peregrinations over stony tracks and the compulsory recitations of 63 Glorias, 124 Creeds, 891 Paternosters and 1,458 Hail Marys. I was once at a wedding at Drogheda, away on the east coast, when I heard a woman ask a worldly young guest with a carnation in his buttonhole and a glass of champagne in his hand where he was going for his holidays that year. I expected Mykonos or Barbados, but no. 'I thought of giving myself', he said, 'the three days at Lough Derg.'\n\nAt a Breton window\n\nMy small daughter and I looked up from the waterfront of Douarnenez, in Brittany, to see an old woman smiling down at us from an open window. She had a shawl around her shoulders, her face was infinitely wrinkled, and her smile was so kind that it seemed to be reaching us from different times altogether\u2013from before the Fall, perhaps. 'I want that lady,' my small daughter said.\n\nDo I know her?\n\nNow and then I chance to see in real life one of those nameless and numberless actresses of television, encountered in the Underground, perhaps, or browsing at a bookshop. At first I think I really know her. Who could she be? Is she a publisher, or a fellow author? Did we meet on an aircraft, or at a literary festival somewhere? Like one of those nagging fragrances one cannot place, or a tune whose words we can never quite remember, her presence tantalizes and disturbs me. But then with a touch of melancholy I realize that I know her only by proxy, through the medium of the TV screen. Some people in these circumstances introduce themselves anyway, and perhaps one should: I sometimes notice that if I chance to catch the woman's eye she will give me one of those closed-lip actress's smiles, turned up a little too resolutely at the corners of the mouth, as if she is dying to be recognized.\n\nSalon life\n\nA Jewish acquaintance of mine in Delhi, being a passionate horsewoman, established a sort of lien upon the social loyalties of a whole covey of equestrian maharajas, polo players to a man but as fascinated by the personality of their hostess as they were by her love of horses. They became a kind of salon. They used to sit in her drawing room, itself a strange and wonderful melange of cultures, or sprawl on the lawn with long cool drinks, hanging upon her every word: dark mustachioed military figures, handsome but rather running to plump, and in their midst that small vivacious woman bestowing a chaff here, a compliment there, like a Jewish maharani herself.\n\nDays of liberty!\n\nI chanced to arrive in Paris when a student rebellion was reaching its climax, and was astonished to find the students surging to and fro between their makeshift barricades, handkerchiefs over their mouths, throwing things now and then and shouting slogans. They were all that old people dreamed themselves to have been when they looked back to their days of liberty, the days when they had causes to throw bricks for, when to be alive was grand enough, but heaven itself was to be young, radical, brandishing a stick and shouting a slogan in Paris!\n\nHarry's Challenge\n\nI had a pre-Christmas luncheon at Harry Ramsden's Fish and Chip Shop at Guiseley, where the menu was dominated by Harry's Challenge, a fish-and-chip dish so gigantic that if you got through it you were given a free pudding and a signed certificate. All the customers were the real thing\u2013not another outsider among them, only celebratory office parties hilarious over Harry's Challenge, and amiably extended families with grandmothers in hats, and burbling children with hand-held video games, and not a few stout parties who would have done better to cut down on the steamed ginger pudding. At one o'clock precisely there arrived outside the front door the Scissett Youth Band of Huddersfield, to serenade us lustily with all the old carols\u2013none of your fancy ecumenicals\u2013setting many a sensibly shod foot tapping to their rhythms and inciting me, as an inveterate whistler, to join in messily over my mushy peas.\n\nIn other circumstances\n\nTrams are essential to the character of Vienna, but there are some places where they run against the flow of the traffic, and are likely to murder you. When I nearly lost my own life to one of them\u2013'Quick! Comes the tram the other way!'\u2013sympathetic onlookers were quick to reassure me that Dr Kurt Waldheim himself had almost died a similar death (although that was of course, they respectfully added, before he became president of our republic...)\n\nBelow the ships\n\nThe longest escalator in Europe plunges beneath the Kiel Canal to take pedestrians to the other side. I stood there one morning looking down this dreadful shaft, which was all empty, dark and rumbling, wondering if anybody ever used it, when a cheerful girl rode up behind me on a bicycle. Without a pause she tucked the bike under her arm, so to speak, and launched herself upon the moving staircase. I stood there watching her go. Down and down into the dark she went, all alone, smaller and smaller, clutching her bicycle, until she disappeared into the hole beneath the Kiel Canal. Above her the ships sailed on.\n\nColombian coffee\n\nI once sat for half an hour over a coffee at a pavement cafe in Buenaventura, Colombia, and never did I see a more piteous and dispiriting citizenry pass by, in the sticky blaze of that tropical afternoon. A mutilated beggar crawled about my feet, silently holding out his hand. A shoeshine boy with a withered arm sat listless at the pavement's edge. A few tattered black men slouched about the surrounding tables. Two small boys played football with an old tin in the street. Sometimes a grey figure in white ducks shambled into the cafe, reaching into his money belt for the price of a brandy, sometimes the beggar scuttled off like a huge black crab towards some new arrival, and sometimes the waitress, with a clang of her bangles, screamed some raucous incantation into the kitchen. All around was filth, heat and degradation, malformation and truncation, stumps of arms and crooked arms and scabbed dry lips.\n\nThrough a glass darkly\n\nThe Yamut Turkoman tribes are the most daunting of the Iranian peoples. On Thursday mornings they hold a horse fair at the village of Pahlevi Dej, and there I went to see them. They converged upon the village in ones and twos, bolt upright on their horses, top heavy in their black fleece hats, in stately lolloping motion across their splendid landscape. Some brought their wives with them, demurely riding pillion and wearing purple or scarlet skirts with brightly flowered shawls. I saluted one formidable tribesman as he rode by; not for a moment did his pace flag, inexorably he continued his progress, kicking up little clouds of dust with each step, and looking distantly down at me from the saddle as through a thick glass plate.\n\nJoking on the coastal route\n\nOnce on the Hurtigruten, the Norwegian coastal shipping service, an entire brass band boarded our vessel, with musicians of all ages down to small boys and girls. They were going to the next port up the coast and earned their passage by playing sombre but rousing marches in the forward lounge. The faces of the instrumentalists were quintessentially Norwegian: pale, long, incurious, handsome faces. One boy asked me where I was from, and when I told him he said, 'I have a grandmother in Wales.' 'You don't mean it!' I exclaimed in delighted surprise. 'No,' he said, 'I was only joking.'\n\nPan's blood\n\nDelight is still the occupation of Corfu, and sweet airs of comfort abound. The peasants of old may have deserted their olives for occupations of easier profit, but the olive trees are still there, and the stony earth beneath them, and the scents of herbs in the evening. On our way back from Kavos we saw, in one of the wayside villages, a pick-up truck run over a cat. In a trice the corpse of the poor animal was removed for burial, and I was struck by the air of true sadness that fell upon the village bystanders. It was the sweet silent sadness, I thought, of the ages. When we drove away the little pool of cat's blood left in the street behind us suggested to me the blood of Adonis, or perhaps of Pan himself.\n\nCanadian arrivals\n\nVery early one morning I went down to Union Station to watch the transcontinental train passengers arrive out of the darkness from Vancouver. I knew exactly what to expect from this experience, but still it stirred me: the hiss and rumble of it, the engineers princely in their high cab, the grey faces peering out of sleeper windows, the proud exhaustion of it all\u2013and then the thick tumble of the disembarking passengers, a blur of boots and lumber jackets and hoods and frosty breaths and bags and bundled children, clattering down the steps to breakfast, Grandma and Toronto.\n\nDestiny in Missouri\n\n'Mr Truman? Certainly, he's expecting you,' said the pleasant secretary in Independence, Missouri, and in a moment there was his familiar figure, sitting at a big polished desk. Beside him there stood a large and splendid globe, in a frame stand, and from time to time during our conversation Harry Truman would reflectively spin it or point to parts of it in a manner that I can only describe as proprietorial. He was, as he reminded me, the president who, in the years after World War II, had decreed an interventionist foreign policy for the United States of America\u2013the Truman Doctrine. When he twirled that globe he was retrospectively reshaping my world, abolishing my empire, and affecting the way I would live for the rest of my life.\n\nA cabman's wink\n\nI was wandering the streets of Alexandria's Arab Quarter\u2013'The best way to see it', E. M. Forster said, 'is to wander aimlessly about'\u2013when I happened to catch the eye of a wrinkled cabby with a towel wrapped round his head, high behind his poor Rosinante on the seat of his gharry. On the impulse of the moment I winked: and instantly there crossed his face an expression of indescribable knowingness and complicity, half comic, half conspiratorial\u2013as though between us, he, the city and I, we had plumbed the depths of human and historical experience, and were still coming up for more.\n\n## The touch of a hand at home\n\nThe baby, we knew, was very near death.\n\nWe lay sleepless in our room overlooking the garden,\n\nand a great moon shone.\n\nTowards midnight a nightingale began to sing.\n\nAll night long it trilled and soared in the moonlight,\n\ninfinitely sad, infinitely beautiful.\n\nWe lay there through it all,\n\neach knowing what the other was thinking,\n\nand the bird sang on, part elegy, part comfort, part\n\nfarewell, until the moon failed\n\nand we fell hand in hand into sleep.\n\nIn the morning the child had gone.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \n## SHAZEA QURAISHI\n\n### THE ART OF SCRATCHING\n\nTaking inspiration from sources including historical and medical texts, curator's notes and the Complete Kama Sutra, Shazea Quraishi's poems explore love and loss through a range of voices: an Iraqi mother holds her fragile son; under the guise of ardour, a courtesan searches a client for signs of the woman she loves; a wife is unsettled by her husband's new family...\n\n_The Art of Scratching_ is her first book-length collection, and includes _The Courtesans Reply_ , a sequence written in response to the _Caturbhani_ , four plays written around 300 BC on the life of courtesans in India.\n\n'There is an intriguing collision between the archaeological and the lyrical in Shazea Quraishi's series of poems, _The Courtesans Reply_... The props and rituals bestow on these poems an exotic otherness but the emotions they explore are timeless' \u2013 Stephen Knight, _Ten_.\n\n'Shazea Quraishi is one of a number of younger black and Asian women poets currently gaining ground in UK poetry. In sensual, clear, perfectly measured tones, her poems meet the male gaze with a female voice' \u2013 Katy Evans-Bush, _Poetry International Web_.\n\n'Shazea Quraishi, in _The Courtesans Reply_ , sensitively reconstructs an unfamiliar and vanished culture. Working from historical and literary sources, Quraishi never allows her research to speak louder than the human voices of her characters, a community of courtesans in Ancient India. Their individual feelings and desires emerge through lines which are simultaneously spare and sensuous' \u2013 Richard O'Brien, _Poetry London_.\n\nCover photograph: Jo Tyler\nShazea Quraishi\n\n# THE ART OF  \nSCRATCHING\n\n# ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS\n\nThanks are due to the following publications in which versions of some of these poems appeared: _The Delight-Tree: an anthology of Contemporary International Poetry_ (The United Nations SRC Society of Writers, 2015), _The Financial Times, I am twenty people_ (Enitharmon, 2007), _Images of Women_ (Arrowhead\/Second Light, 2006), _Ink Sweat & Tears, Magma, Modern Poetry in Translation, Ploughshares, PN Review, Poetry International web, Poetry Review, The Rialto, Sentence: a journal of prose poetics, Smiths Knoll,_ and _Ten: new poets from Spread the Word_ (Bloodaxe Books, 2010).\n\n_The Courtesans Reply_ was first published as a pamphlet by flipped eye in 2012\n\nI am indebted to Manomohan Ghosh for his translation of the Caturbh\u0101n\u012b, 'Glimpses of Sexual Life in Nanda-Maurya India', which inspired _The Courtesans Reply_. I am also grateful to Alain Dani\u00e9lou's translation of 'The Complete K\u0101ma S\u016btra', an invaluable source of reference and material.\n\n# CONTENTS\n\n  1. Title Page\n  2. Acknowledgements\n  3.   4. You May Have Heard of Me\n  5. Skyros\n  6. Steps\n  7. Darker than the Pansies\n  8. A Portrait\n  9. Coke and Other Lies\n  10. Mwanza, Malawi\n  11. Story of a Small Block of Flats in Elephant and Castle\n  12. Winter\n  13. The Drowned Sailor\n  14. Singularly Calm, Rather Wise\n  15. True story\n  16. The Wooden Family\n  17. All This Time\n  18. Cape Town\n  19. Fallujah, Basrah\n  20. My Mother's Embroidered Apron\n  21. Gold\n  22. THE COURTESANS REPLY\n  23. Tambulasena\n  24. The Sixty-four Arts\n  25. Vanarajika\n  26. Ramadasi\n  27. Sukumarika\n  28. The Days of Chandragupta Maurya\n  29. Priyangusena\n  30. Ratisena\n  31. Messenger\n  32. Madhavesana\n  33. Pradymnadasi\n  34. Sondasi\n  35. Devadatta\n  36. Carandasi\n  37. Anangadatta\n  38. Epilogue\n  39.   40. The Years\n  41. I Want to Tell You\n  42. At Six Months\n  43. Garden, Night\n  44. The Mummy of Hor\n  45. The Beauty of the Swimming Teacher\n  46. Wild Fennel\n  47. Sweetie Girl\n  48. Turieno\n  49. Roses\n  50. Still Light\n  51. Cousin\n  52. Goodbye, My Loveds\n  53. Notes on Found Poems\n  54.   55. _Additional Notes_\n  56. About the Author\n  57. Copyright\n\n# You May Have Heard of Me\n\nMy father was a bear.\n\nHe carried me through forest, sky\n\nand over frozen sea. At night\n\nI lay along his back\n\nwrapped in fur and heat\n\nand while I slept, he ran,\n\nnever stopping to rest, never\n\nletting me fall.\n\nHe showed me how to be careful as stone\n\nsharp as thorn and quick\n\nas weather. When he hunted alone\n\nhe'd leave me somewhere safe \u2013 high up a tree\n\nor deep within a cave.\n\nAnd then a day went on...\n\nHe didn't come.\n\nI looked and looked for him.\n\nThe seasons changed and changed again.\n\nSleep became my friend. It even brought my father back.\n\nThe dark was like his fur,\n\nthe sea's breathing echoed his breathing.\n\nI left home behind, an empty skin.\n\nAlone, I walked taller, balanced better.\n\nSo I came to the gates of this city\n\n\u2013 tall, black gates with teeth.\n\nHere you find me, keeping my mouth small,\n\nhiding pointed teeth and telling stories,\n\nconcealing their truth as I conceal\n\nthe thick black fur on my back.\n\n# Skyros\n\nI live near the place with the honey.\n\nIt's always spring here. I sing\n\nand cook, bare and brown\n\nor in my purple dress.\n\nIn the day there are birds\n\nwith so many different songs, I can't choose\n\nand at night, the brass shimmering of goat bells\n\nleads me into sleep.\n\nMaybe tomorrow I'll go\n\ndown the road with the purple rock and fig tree at dusk\n\nto find the beekeeper's garden, dripping\n\nwith milk and humming.\n\n# Steps\n\nWhere I come from\n\nwe don't hang portraits of our beloved dead\n\nto comfort us in empty rooms,\n\nwe hang their shoes, wrapped in gauze\n\nsewn with surgical thread.\n\nIn my hall I've hung\n\nmy father's shoes, their soft leather\n\nshaped by his strong\n\nbrown feet shaped by his journey.\n\nI close my eyes and see my father\n\nwalking towards me.\n\nAs the day closes, I press my ear\n\nto the air around me\n\nlistening for his footsteps,\n\nhis key in the door.\n\n# Darker than the Pansies\n\nDarker than the pansies at the cemetery gate-lodge,\n\nbottles of frosted glass filled with thick, pungent\n\nliquids (lavender, pine sap, geranium, grass)\n\nlined the top of the lower window sash, where they caught\n\nthe low light coming in \u2013 caught it and spilled it\n\non the cold, red stone of the kitchen floor,\n\nso there appeared to be pools of liquid around her feet\n\nas she stood with her hands in hot, soapy water,\n\nthinking of the time she jumped into the pond in Hawley's field\n\nand how the cold, green water filled her nose and ears\n\nand closed over her head.\n\n# A Portrait\n\nThe husband makes a house:\n\nthe walls don't meet, there are gaps\n\nin the floor but it houses them \u2013\n\nhusband, wife, daughter, son.\n\nIt is a house of skin.\n\n*\n\nAt night, while the family sleeps\n\nthe husband carries the house on his back.\n\nSometimes the boy wakes on the floor. The girl dreams she is flying.\n\nThe wife sleeps soundly but weeps\n\non waking to disarray.\n\nOne morning before dawn\n\nas he sets the house down\n\nthe husband feels a tearing in his shoulder.\n\n*\n\nHusband and wife stand in a field\n\n\u2013 light pours on the husband, pours out\n\nfrom his skin, his golden hair.\n\nThe wife is darker \u2013 the artist has painted lines on her face\n\nthat won't appear for many years.\n\n# Coke and Other Lies\n\nWhen I look in the mirror I see the wrong face. My sister's hair shines like a summer lake with swans, and when she speaks, it's like those gusts of air you get in the spring, smelling of green. Since he left, Mom's lips have no colour and she reminds me of that albino kid who packs groceries at Doug's Mini Mart. She cries on the foldout couch. I stroke her hair. There, there.\n\nMy sister wraps her hair around Coke cans when it's wet, so when she takes it out, it looks like in the movies. Mom says she's wasting her time.\n\nYou know the man who sweeps up after the show? He said my eyes were the green of the pond at the end of his garden. He said, Come, see.\n\n# Mwanza, Malawi\n\nI am Edith, I am eight.\n\nI have two brothers, Jomo\n\nand David. When we are hungry\n\nmy mother holds us close\n\nwith her body and her eyes.\n\nSome nights I dream the same dream\n\n\u2013 my mother covered in flies.\n\nI jump out of the dream\n\nleaving my mother alone\n\nin the dark and the heat.\n\nThis happens again, again,\n\nuntil dream-me holds her eyes open\n\nputs one foot in front of the other\n\n\u2013 goes like this to my mother\n\nbecause of how much she hates flies \u2013\n\nand reaching her sees\n\na fine, black shawl covers her\n\nwith shiny, black beads\n\nrunning over her like rain...\n\nand my mother is sleeping\n\nin the cool of its shade.\n\n# Story of a Small Block of Flats in Elephant and Castle\n\n# Winter\n\nHe is an excellent swimmer,\n\njumping in the water like a dog, or sliding in backwards.\n\nHe keeps his eyes open and holds\n\nhis breath, staying under for 2 minutes at a time.\n\nWhen he emerges, he shakes\n\nthe water from himself before it freezes.\n\nHis skin is dark under his white fur\n\nwhich stores heat.\n\nHe is solitary, but sometimes\n\nin February, he joins others to feed.\n\nHe is strong, patient and cunning.\n\nHe teaches boys how to be men;\n\nthat to be a man is to be a successful hunter.\n\nHe waits until they come close, or stalks them\n\non ice, spending much of the long winter out of sight.\n\nHe goes for the young ones\n\nbecause they're small and slow.\n\n# The Drowned Sailor\n\n#### I\n\nIn Norse the name means corpse whale\n\nbecause its mottled, greyish\n\nappearance suggests a drowned sailor.\n\nOften feeding on fish\n\nat depths of 1500 metres\n\nunder dense pack ice,\n\nnarwhal is found in Arctic waters.\n\nThe first year of a male's life,\n\nhis left tooth grows out, twisting\n\ninto a helix. This tusk,\n\nten feet in length, is used for jousting\n\nor channelling sonar pulses.\n\nLittle is known about this whale\n\nbut there are stories.\n\n#### II\n\nReturning each year to the bay\n\nwhere he drowned within sight\n\nof his house, he saw his wife pale,\n\nmarry again and brighten.\n\nLater, lonelier still, he saw\n\ntwo boys who weren't his\n\n(such fierce, sweet explosions) grow\n\ninto men, tender as trees.\n\nAgain and again he was drawn,\n\nagain turned away.\n\nHe saw her black hair that fanned\n\non the pillow, dull and grey.\n\nOne moonlit night towards the end\n\nof her life, in a dream\n\nhe went to her and felt her hand\n\non his neck...such warmth.\n\n# Singularly Calm, Rather Wise\n\nThey line up \u2013 good, clean children \u2013\n\nfrom tallest to smallest. The cupboard can't confine\n\ntheir implacable gazes \u2013 they question your\n\nmoving, breathing presence. Coloured lights\n\nfrom the prism in the window veil them in\n\nforget-me-not blue, green-gold, jellied\n\ncherry. They listen. They believe rules\n\nare there for good. The smallest two resemble\n\nthe girls next door. Silence presses \u2013 a silence of graves \u2013\n\nand you want to leave, you want them to be\n\nlike other children, noisy, grass-stained \u2013 not this metaphysical\n\nexistence, this sad patience, this endurance of mules.\n\n# True story\n\nThe woman who was not me sat down in the chair indicated by the doctor. She started to speak and proceeded to flow into the crevices and folds of the rough brown fabric of the chair, stopping just short of ending up at the good doctor's feet.\n\nThe doctor, whose name was Anne, put out her hand to place it on the woman there, and said how she liked to think of all the mothers alone at home all over the world, as hundreds of thousands of little lights shining in the dark.\n\n# The Wooden Family\n\nAlone at home my husband\n\ncalls me, tells me he's painting\n\na wooden family. He says\n\nhe misses us but I can\n\ntell he's captivated by\n\nthe wooden wife: she's mild as\n\na mail-order bride; all day\n\nshe gazes at her wooden\n\nhusband, all night she cannot\n\nclose her adoring brown eyes.\n\nBut the wooden children scare\n\nhim. The girl's too quiet \u2013 she\n\nhas nothing to ask or say.\n\nThe baby doesn't cry or\n\nbabble. He looks and he looks.\n\nI kiss my husband at the\n\nairport, and we are shy as\n\nstrangers, the children like goats\n\nbutting our knees. I say he's\n\npale \u2013 he says it's too much sleep.\n\nWhen we get home, our red house\n\nhas shrunk and filled with sawdust.\n\nEager to meet the family\n\nI'm appalled by the wooden\n\nhusband. His hair is ginger,\n\nhe's wearing a shirt I hate\n\nand he's baring his teeth \u2013 he\n\nlooks insane. His wooden wife\n\nis lovely if you ignore\n\nthe way her head narrows at\n\nthe top. She has my eyebrows,\n\nher red lips shine and she is\n\nwearing a green dress that was\n\nmine. I hold the girl in my\n\nhand. She's serene and pink, her\n\nhair smooth against her head. She's\n\nso still, and she wants nothing.\n\nThe baby is gorgeous with\n\nhis enormous eyes and his\n\nsucculent mouth, but he's too,\n\ntoo tiny \u2013 he will be lost\n\nin this world of sudden holes\n\nin the floor and so many\n\nsharp edges to damage him.\n\nI know what this family means\n\nto my husband, but all I\n\ncan say is, Why's her head so\n\npointy, and what's wrong with him?\n\nIsn't he happy with his\n\nwooden life and his family?\n\n# All This Time\n\nI've been living the wrong life.\n\nI stepped out to bring in the milk\n\n15 years ago\n\nand now I see\n\nI'm in the wrong house.\n\nWho is this man\n\nwith the plaster dust on his hands?\n\nWhat are these children doing in the kitchen?\n\nThe boy is skinny, smells\n\nof goat, mixes Cheerios\n\nand raisins in his cereal bowl. The girl\n\nreminds me of a jug\n\nmy mother had,\n\nthe china so fine, the milk shone\n\na blueish light through it.\n\nWhere are my bright\n\nskirts, my heavy silver rings,\n\nthe red in my hair?\n\n# Cape Town\n\nMy brother Luc at sixteen\n\nis almost a man\n\nand bigger than daddy\n\nbut when he cries in sleep\n\nhe sounds just like\n\nthe skinny boy he used to be.\n\nHe has this dream\n\nof walking on an empty road at night\n\nand looking back\n\nhe sees our mother run out of a house\n\nher hair crazy.\n\nHe can't move\n\ncan't speak\n\ncan only watch\n\nas the dark swallows her\n\nhead-first\n\ndown to the white socks\n\non her shoeless feet.\n\nI hold him then, say\n\n_Hush, Luc,_\n\n_it's just a dream._\n\n# Fallujah, Basrah\n\n_A poem in four voices_\n\n##### _Rahim_\n\nOh my son\n\nLet my love\n\ncushion the weight of your head.\n\nLet me take your hurt\n\nI will hold it\n\nwhile you rest\n\nI will fold it into my body.\n\nSleep, my angel,\n\nmy flower, my brave, sweet boy.\n\n[ _Child with extreme hydrocephalus \u2013 deformity of face, body and ear \u2013 and defects of cerebral nerves._ ]\n\n##### _Sabir_\n\nI dressed him in a long white shirt\n\nwith a blue bird embroidered over the heart\n\nand placed tiny white mittens on his hands.\n\nBorn with thick black hair\n\nlike his father, he was almost\n\nso beautiful, almost perfect\n\nas we had imagined him.\n\n[ _Born without eyes_ ]\n\n##### _Farrah_\n\nWhere is my baby girl,\n\nthe one I dreamed?\n\nI long for sleep\n\nto return her.\n\n[ _Extreme hydrocephalus. The line running down the right side of the head would appear to show that potentially two heads were forming._ ]\n\n##### _Anah_\n\n[ _It isn't clear what has happened to this child._ ]\n\n# My Mother's Embroidered Apron\n\nI am lost in my mother's apron \u2013\n\ngreen parrots drip from the trees,\n\na peacock brushes past me\n\npulling its clockwork tail of children's dreams.\n\nI breathe in the heat of cinnamon,\n\nthe fug of yeast. My mother's voice\n\nfills me like smoke and her stories\n\nlift me \u2013 I rise like a yellow balloon,\n\nmy feet, white ribbons trailing in the long, wet grass.\n\n# Gold\n\nI crossed the land with my small\n\ngold baby. I had only my skin\n\nwhich hung from me in folds, to wrap him in,\n\nonly my hands to cover his miraculous feet.\n\nWe came to a forest where the trees had faces;\n\nthere was a loud ticking and the smell\n\nof waiting \u2013 dry, leafy.\n\nI thought of his soft heart, the blood like finest embroidery\n\nrunning through his body, and I was heavy\n\nwith the knowledge of animals in the forest \u2013\n\nthe claws and eyes, the beaky hunger.\n\nMy baby stirred and the trees leaned closer.\n\nI walked till I came to a wall of grass\n\nreaching over my head. Then I heard\n\na shushing that calmed me, though\n\nit could have been wings beating or knives\n\nslicing the air. The grass\n\nparted, like a sea parting\n\nand my baby's breath on my skin\n\nwas the wind in our sails.\n\n# THE COURTESANS REPLY\n\n_How wonderful is the supreme beauty of Kusumapura!_\n\n_Here between the rows of houses the streets are well-watered,_\n\n_well-cleaned, and are scattered over with flower-offerings great and small..._\n\n_Daughters of courtezans, the beauty of whose lotus-like faces is being drunk_\n\n_by the eyes of all people, are gracefully walking up and down,_\n\n_it seems, to bestow their favour on the thoroughfare._\n\nFROM _The Ubhay \u0101bhis\u0101rika _\n\ntranslated by Manomohan Ghosh\n\n# Tambulasena\n\nIn the beginning\n\nmy whole body was covered with skin\n\nhard as rock. Then he came\n\nand his mouth\n\nrunning over me was a river, cool and quick\n\nwith small silver fish.\n\nNight after night\n\nhe shaped me,\n\nsmoothed me down\n\nto velvet\n\nbones.\n\n*\n\nNow I bathe while he watches,\n\neyes fireflies\n\non my skin.\n\nI bend over,\n\nmy hair between us\n\na curtain of water.\n\nI let him towel me dry,\n\nhis strokes soft...then brisk,\n\na cloth shining a lamp.\n\nWater drips down\n\nmy back. He grasps my hair\n\nand climbs.\n\n# The Sixty-four Arts\n\nOf pleasant disposition,\n\nbeautiful and otherwise attractive,\n\nmaster of sixty-four arts including\n\nmusic, dancing, acting, singing,\n\nthe composition of poetry,\n\nflower-arrangement and garland-making,\n\nthe preparation of perfumes\n\nand cosmetics, dress-making, embroidery, conjuring,\n\nsleight of hand,\n\nlogic, cooking, sorcery, fencing\n\nwith sword and staff,\n\narchery, gymnastics, carpentry,\n\nchemistry, architecture\n\nand mineralogy,\n\nthe composition of riddles, tongue-twisters\n\nand other puzzles, gardening, writing in cipher,\n\nlanguages, making artificial flowers\n\nand clay modelling,\n\ntraining fighting cocks, partridges\n\nand rams, teaching parrots and mynah birds to talk...\n\nSuch a courtesan will be honoured by the King, praised\n\nby the learned, and all will seek her favours\n\nand treat her with consideration.\n\n# Vanarajika\n\n_speaks of the eight varieties of nail marks_\n\nUsing the nail on my middle finger\n\nI mark his neck\n\nwith a half moon, on the place\n\nI like best\n\nto kiss.\n\nA sign of my devotion.\n\nOn his lower belly, I leave\n\na circle.\n\nOften I trace a short, straight line\n\non his chest\n\nhis belly\n\nhis back.\n\nThe dash.\n\nLightly, he touches my cheek\n\ngiving me gooseflesh\n\nthen marks me with his thumb\n\ndeepening the scratch with the other fingers.\n\nA knife stroke.\n\nOn my buttocks\n\na mark resembling a lotus leaf.\n\nThe peacock's claw is for me alone.\n\nThe hare's jump even more.\n\nThe tiger's claw\n\nhe traces under my breast\n\nbinds me to him.\n\n# Ramadasi\n\nReturn\n\nto me, beloved\n\nand take me on your lap.\n\nUndo my braid\n\nstiff\n\nas buffalo horn\n\nand draw your\n\nfingers\n\nthrough my hair.\n\nUntie my belt, open\n\nthe silk cloth\n\ncovering my waist,\n\nlet my oiled limbs, my\n\nperfumed skin\n\nenvelop you\n\nas the rose\n\nswallows\n\nthe bee.\n\n# Sukumarika\n\n_to Ramasena_\n\nMy dearest, my life,\n\nmoon to my night,\n\nremember our happiness?\n\nRecall, if you can,\n\nthe equal kiss, _Sama_\n\nand the pressed kiss, _Pidita_.\n\n_Aschita_ , the devouring kiss\n\nand _Mridu_ , the delicate kiss.\n\nAlso, the inflamer\n\nthe kiss of encouragement\n\nthe awakening kiss\n\nthe vagabond, the joyful\n\nkiss, the vibrant one\n\nthe bowed kiss, the twisted kiss and\n\nthe satisfied kiss.\n\nHave you forgotten\n\nthe taste of my mouth\n\nsweetened with betel?\n\nMy garments, outer and inner,\n\nwhite as milk.\n\nThe sound of my bangles\n\nduring love, their silence\n\nin sleep.\n\nRemember my lips\n\nnibbling\n\npinching\n\nkissing\n\nbrowsing\n\nsucking the mango\n\ndevouring.\n\nRemember\n\nthe way I make you feel\n\n\u2013 like twenty men \u2013\n\nand in your hands\n\nmy painted feet.\n\n# The Days of Chandragupta Maurya\n\nwere split into sixteen hours\n\nof ninety minutes each.\n\nIn the first, he arose\n\nand prepared himself by meditation;\n\nin the second, he studied\n\nthe reports of his agents\n\nand issued secret instructions;\n\nhe met with his councillors in the third hour\n\nand in the fourth, attended to state\n\nfinances and national defence;\n\nin the fifth, he heard the petitions\n\nand suits of his subjects.\n\nIn the sixth hour, he bathed,\n\ndined and read religious literature.\n\nIn the seventh hour, while he made official appointments,\n\nhe received taxes and tribute.\n\nIn the eighth, he met his council again\n\nand heard the reports of his spies and courtesans.\n\nThe ninth hour was devoted to relaxation\n\nand prayer,\n\nthe tenth and eleventh given to military matters\n\nand the twelfth to secret reports.\n\nIn the thirteenth hour, the king indulged\n\nin an evening bath and a meal\n\nand for the next three hours he slept\n\nbut never in the same bed twice.\n\n# Priyangusena\n\n_speaks of the Keeper of the King's Zoo_\n\nHe is not like other men.\n\nHe prefers me unperfumed,\n\nlikes to watch me\n\nremove hair flowers,\n\nundo the _rasana_\n\naround my waist.\n\nIn the morning I am porcupine,\n\nat night, _Dhole_ ,\n\nfour-horned antelope.\n\nHe tells me secrets\n\nof the _Nilgai_ , its fondness\n\nfor almonds,\n\nhow the _Chinkara_ leaps\n\nthe palace walls\n\nand back again.\n\n# Ratisena\n\n_to Chandragupta_\n\nWhile you sleep, I take\n\nyour white shirt\n\nfrom the unpainted chair,\n\nsmoothe it with my hands\n\nthe way I smooth\n\nthe tiredness from your body\n\npressing my self against you.\n\nShh...\n\nLet me take your worries,\n\nyour secrets \u2013 those sharp\n\nsmall stones you carry\n\nwith you always.\n\nI know you have women half my age\n\n\u2013 I see them in the street, swaying\n\nlike long grass, their saris\n\nconcealing slim legs\n\nthat circled your waist.\n\nAre you my King\n\nor the boy I met at the well\n\nso many summers past?\n\nI watch you sleeping;\n\nmy small bed cradles you,\n\nmy only child\n\nmy only man.\n\n# Messenger\n\nMalatika remembers you.\n\nHer passion, hundred-petalled,\n\ngrows and grows, eclipsing all flowers\n\nin her mother's garden: lotus, marigold,\n\n_raat-ki-rani_ , rose.\n\nEach day she strokes her skin\n\nwith perfumed oil,\n\neach day adorns her self\n\nwith pleasing things.\n\nAnd as she walks, thinking of you,\n\nher ankle-bracelets sound,\n\na hundred tiny, silver bells\n\ntrembling.\n\n# Madhavesana\n\nOnce more this\n\npressing of bodies, his desire\n\nbeating against me as the eagle's wings\n\nagainst the air that lifts him up, up.\n\nMy body has learned to soften\n\nand bend, but my heart\n\nlike a child who will not listen, clings\n\nto a soft, worn thing.\n\nAfter I have washed the sweat\n\nand trails of saliva from my skin,\n\nI stand at the open window,\n\nlet the breeze dry my face.\n\n# Pradymnadasi\n\n_on biting_\n\nWhen he gave me the discreet bite on my lower lip\n\nI sighed with disappointment\n\nknowing his mark would fade.\n\nThe coral jewel bite he bestowed on my left breast\n\nand then the right. Around my throat\n\nhe placed a necklace of gems.\n\nI will wear no ornaments today other than kiss\n\nmarks on my ears, filigree\n\nbites on my hot, hot cheeks.\n\nBefore he left, he gave me the bite I like best:\n\nthe nibbling of the wild boar.\n\nAnd so, he knew I would wait.\n\n# Sondasi\n\nI smile slow as honey\n\noffer him\n\nmy pollen-dusted breasts.\n\nI press my nose to his skin\n\nsmell Varunika on him.\n\n_Wait_\n\nthe word a caress\n\nI undress him\n\n\u2013 the first time I have done this.\n\n* *\n\nThe next day\n\nshe is not with him.\n\nI seat him on the low, green chair\n\nmove in his lap\n\nput my mouth to his ear:\n\n_Tell me what you do with her_\n\nHe answers\n\nand I show him\n\nthe flame lit inside me.\n\n* *\n\nVarunika,\n\nqueen of forests.\n\nHer teeth\n\nmarks on his lips,\n\nher nail marks on his back,\n\nher love note to me.\n\n* *\n\nA dark pink flower falls\n\nfrom her hair as she passes\n\n\u2013 I hold it carefully in my hand: five petals,\n\none scattered with small, dark markings.\n\nOpening it, I stroke the velvet\n\ninside \u2013 eleven stamens raise\n\ntheir pollen-tipped nubs\n\nto the tip of my tongue.\n\n# Devadatta\n\nI'm summoned to the jasmine terrace\n\nwhere he waits\n\nreclining on the large, low bed\n\ndraped in blues and reds and oranges.\n\nHe's with Sondasi's servant girl\n\n\u2013 her gaze is lowered, his\n\nrests on her breasts, where a blush blooms\n\nabove her open blouse.\n\nHer waist is a handspan, her hips\n\nhigh and wide.\n\nDuring the love act, he moves my legs\n\nto one side\n\nso she will see as he enters me.\n\nHe doesn't look at me\n\nbut over my shoulder, watches her\n\nsmall, heart-shaped face.\n\n# Carandasi\n\nTell me I am necessary for you like sleep,\n\nnot like opium which carries forgetting,\n\nor pleasant as a breeze\n\nscented with jasmine.\n\nTell me what you see\n\nbehind my art, my bright cloth.\n\nLook into my face and show me.\n\nTell me what you read in books\n\nand hear in coffee houses,\n\nat wedding parties. Teach me.\n\nWhen our tired, gladdened bodies\n\ndrift onto the bed,\n\nkiss me like a husband\n\nand spread over me an endless blue wing...\n\n# Anangadatta\n\n_Dreams I have_\n\nThe peaceful routine of household chores:\n\nsweeping the floors of the house,\n\nsprinkling water on the yellow earth outside the door.\n\nCooking my husband's food,\n\nanticipating his pleasure.\n\nFeeding sweet, milky pudding to my child.\n\nSewing a button on my husband's shirt.\n\nTo spend the whole night dreaming,\n\nmy child pressed against my back,\n\nmy husband's breath in my hair.\n\n# Epilogue:\n\n_in which we explain a few things_\n\n_How can scratching and biting, even if they are painful, create pleasure?_\n\nJust as a whip\n\nwhen used by the charioteer,\n\nmakes horses mindful of speed,\n\nso the use of nails and teeth\n\nduring intercourse\n\nengross the heart in the pleasure of touch.\n\n_Tell more of the art of scratching_\n\nWhen a man sees, even from afar,\n\nnail marks on a girl's breasts,\n\nhe feels interest and desire for her\n\neven without knowing her.\n\nAnd it often happens,\n\nwhen a woman sees nail marks\n\non the various parts of a man's body,\n\nher spirit awakens\n\nand takes her to him.\n\n_How is a courtesan to choose?_\n\nHere is a list of men to be avoided:\n\nThose with tuberculosis,\n\nwith worms in their excrement,\n\nwith bad breath,\n\nin love with their wife,\n\ncoarse in word,\n\nbrutal,\n\ncruel,\n\nabandoned by their parents,\n\ninsensitive to praise and insult,\n\nimmodest,\n\nfrequenting enemies for hope of gain...\n\nAlso one who is a thief,\n\nan idiot\n\nor one who practises magic.\n\n# The Years\n\n##### **10**\n\nClifton Road, Karachi. I pray to God to change me to a boy so I can climb trees and get my clothes dirty.\n\nMy father tells us we're moving to Canada. I can't wait \u2013 it's going to be like Disney movies: houses with porches and grass all around, sidewalks to cycle on, tree-lined streets.\n\n##### **11**\n\nFleetwood Crescent, Bramalea. All the streets around here begin with F. There are hundreds of houses and not many trees, but we have bunk beds, chores and wall-to-wall carpeting.\n\nI have a new friend called Terry; her hands are pale as her white shirt. She has three sisters \u2013 Rita, Shirley, Patsy \u2013 and an endless supply of chips with dip. Her brother Michael says Hi, then stays in his room smoking.\n\nTerry's parents are kind and they're like people on TV.\n\n##### **12**\n\nMy favourite chores are vacuuming and making my bed. There is so much TV, my brothers and I don't talk about our ugly new names.\n\n_You've got a weird accent.  \nDid you live in a hut made of straw?_\n\nMy father gets a new job with Mattel and brings home Slime.\n\n##### **13**\n\nIn the winter, on the way to school we take off our snowsuits, stumbling into drifts, our stiff jeans thawing all morning.\n\nOne day, three boys surround Terry, their words like spit on her face. They don't see me where I've bent down to get a stone out of my shoe.\n\n##### **14**\n\nTim Newman. I follow him unseen, my heart thudding in my flat chest. He is like the songs, his hair is feathered. I buy two copies of the school yearbook to cut out his picture to keep.\n\n_If you didn't hang around so much with Rajini Malhotra, most people wouldn't know you're a Paki._\n\nI know how he'd smell if I got close. Clean, minty.\n\n##### **15**\n\nWe move to the country \u2013 my father's dream. At Erin High everyone smokes weed, my new friends call me Brain and cheat off me. At home I cry to get 98% on my spelling test.\n\nEvery morning the boys line the hall yelling out numbers or barking at the girls. A boy in art class shouts _give face!_ and laughs as I wash out my tray. Next year I'll be sweet sixteen.\n\n##### **16**\n\nEvery Saturday in the summer my father and brothers go fishing. They leave before light for Six Mile Lake and come back smelling of goat. My mother keeps finding fish heads in the freezer.\n\nWalking one morning to babysit, a motorcycle passes me on the dirt road. I hear it slow and then a man is in front of me unzipping his jeans. I run and then I cry.\n\n##### **17**\n\n_I'm desperate for modern languages_ , I tell the guidance counsellor. A yellow bus takes me to my new school in the city. The bus driver's name is Floyd; his unwashed hair and beard reach past his chest. The kids at the back of the bus smoke joints and burn the seats. Sometimes Floyd slows as we pass the chicken factory with the windows down. He can't say my name so he calls me Sophie, for Sophia Loren.\n\n##### **18**\n\nI read 'Are You There God It's Me Margaret', and 'Forever', tingling through English. At lunch with the cool Italian girls we discuss 'Do you swallow or do you spit?' I say I swallow because there's protein in it.\n\nThe stoners on the bus teach me to roll their joints. One afternoon Floyd drops off everyone except me and the girl who goes to a special school. Her straight black hair is always in her eyes. Floyd lets me drive the bus even though I'm scared I'm going to crash it. The road is icy and I keep confusing the brake with the gas. He keeps putting his hand on my bum.\n\nMy father says _Shaz, don't grow up so quickly_. I bury my head in his shoulder.\n\n##### **19**\n\nI start university. Boys notice me.\n\nI discover drinking and indie bands like Change of Heart and The Jellyfish Babies. At midnight I go dancing with my friends at the Bullring which opens when everything else closes. I dance and dance and I am happy.\n\nWeekends, my father takes me home and we talk in the car. He says my skirts are too short. I tell him I'm a communist.\n\n##### **20**\n\nMay. My father is dead.\n\nI'm not yet 20.\n\n# I Want to Tell You\n\nIt was a beautiful evening,\n\nthe light going\n\nthe colour of old gold,\n\ntrees leafing and blossoming,\n\nmy feet meeting the dirt road\n\nas shadows lengthened.\n\nI was thinking of the tree I planted last week\n\nbehind the house,\n\nof dinner warming in the oven\n\nand the trout\n\nmoving like memory\n\nthrough the still water of Six Mile Lake.\n\n# At Six Months\n\nMy daughter doesn't like people\n\nshe doesn't know, especially if they're men,\n\nespecially if they're dark.\n\nThis is embarrassing\n\nconsidering my family,\n\nthe colour of our skin.\n\nMy brother comes to see her.\n\nShe takes one look at him and cries\n\nuntil I take her off to bed.\n\nIt must be colic, I say, thinking\n\nof his three boys, their kisses like bubbles\n\nbursting on my cheek,\n\ntheir little arms necklacing my neck\n\n\u2013 what I wanted for him.\n\nIt makes me sad\n\nmy daughter doesn't see\n\nmy brother is the gentlest man. He\n\nloves God, makes omelettes, silly jokes.\n\nLater, after he goes,\n\nI find his camera on the table\n\nits one eye closed.\n\n# Garden, Night\n\nI watch my father at the bookcase\n\nfingering spines like keys\n\nand guess at what he's taken down to read:\n\nWodehouse? Tennyson? Yeats?\n\nThe standard lamp throws shadows on his face\n\nand he looks young, though it's been twenty years\n\nand memories have taken his place.\n\nShouldn't he be more pale,\n\nhow ghosts appear in books?\n\nI can't move, can only look,\n\nthe glass between us deep as a lake.\n\nMoonlight. He turns.\n\nShadows fall like lace.\n\n# The Mummy of Hor\n\nIn this cave-like room, lamp-lit,\n\nthe Goddess Isis spreads her wings\n\nacross Hor's chest to protect him.\n\nBut that's not all:\n\nthe four sons of Horus guard his entrails\n\nand the human-headed God Imset guards the liver\n\nwhile Ha'py, with a baboon head, guards the lungs.\n\nDuamutef, who has a jackal's head, guards the stomach,\n\nQuebehsenuf, with a hawk's head, guards the intestines\n\nand other Gods watch over his body\n\nwhile sacred symbols protect his soul.\n\nHor's body, wrapped in layers of linen\n\nand bound with black pitch\n\nis here\n\nand you are gone.\n\nI think of you\n\non that country road\n\nwhen your heart stopped\n\nand your breath stopped...\n\nI think of you there alone.\n\n# The Beauty of the Swimming Teacher\n\nThe way he throws rings in the water\n\nfor the children to swim through;\n\nThe way he coaxes them under\n\npulls them along like ducks on a string;\n\nThe way the water shines around him\n\nthe children gleaming like seals;\n\nHow, at lesson end\n\nthey float like stars\n\nthey shine.\n\n# Wild Fennel\n\nOh my sweet girl,\n\nbody outgrowing girl-thoughts\n\nthat bloom and burst...\n\nAt five, your loneliness was hard to bear\n\nbut now you seek its comfort \u2013\n\nbehind the closed door, your thoughts\n\ndrift through the room, mauve smoke\n\ntendrilling through the gap.\n\nOnce you covered yourself in leaves\n\nyour face showing. Now you swim through cold\n\nmountain rivers, brown reed in the water,\n\nyour quietness everywhere\n\nlike the scent of wild fennel.\n\n# Sweetie Girl\n\nI love to watch my grandmother eat\n\n_tarte au citron_ , battenberg,\n\nlemon drizzle cake. Lost\n\nin the feel, the taste,\n\na low moan escapes her.\n\nLater, calling me\n\nby my mother's name, she worries\n\nthey are planning to put her in a home.\n\n_Don't go._\n\nHolding my hand at the door,\n\nshe cradles my cheek,\n\ncalls me sweetie girl.\n\n# Turieno\n\nShe watches her son sleep\n\nbrushing away flies which return\n\nto move again over his clothes\n\nhis perfect skin.\n\nShe draws the thin white sheet over his head.\n\nOutside there are mountains\n\nand the hermitage they walked up to\n\nthat morning. A bee buzzes\n\nat the curtain\n\ntwice the size of bees at home.\n\nThat night it stings her husband\n\nas he sleeps\n\n\u2013 the next morning they find it\n\ndead beside him\n\na small puncture between his eyes.\n\nEight days remain\n\nof churches and mountain roads\n\nwine and coffee\n\nair bright with sound.\n\nIf only life could be\n\nmade of such moments\n\nstrung together.\n\nLove balances on them.\n\nShe tries not to notice\n\nage showing in her hands.\n\n# Roses\n\n_(i.m. Annette)_\n\nYour hair curls and wisps\n\naround your face.\n\nWe hide weak smiles behind gifts of soup, ultra-balm tissues,\n\nOlympic badges, Turkish Delight, garden figs.\n\nI stroke wild rose lotion over your hands\n\n( _how small they are, how tender_ )\n\nand the smell of rose fills the room\n\ndrifting out to the nurses' station.\n\nWalking home through the park I remember\n\nyour daily walk around it, your pleasure.\n\nThe walled garden is closed now\n\nwhile they smooth the cobblestone paths.\n\nNo one will see this season change\n\nthrough its flowers.\n\nThe roses will be going now\n\nor already gone.\n\n# Still Light\n\nYou picture your mother as a tree\n\n\u2013 somehow that makes it easier \u2013\n\na silver birch, undressing\n\nunhurriedly, as though days were years,\n\nwhile a fine rain plays\n\nlike jazz in her hair. She drops\n\nher fine, white leaves\n\none by one. Her branches\n\nare almost bare now. See\n\nhow beautiful she is against the darkening sky.\n\n# Cousin\n\nYou carry them on your back,\n\nyour muffled parents and her\n\nsoft, small children\n\nas you carry your sister's body\n\nwrapped in its white shroud\n\nover the bright, stoney ground.\n\nNow the brown earth pillows\n\nher, holds her small body\n\nin its quiet lap,\n\nrocks her to sleep.\n\n# Goodbye, My Loveds\n\n# Notes on found poems\n\n#### I\n\nThe source material for a found poem can be\n\nany piece of writing whatsoever.\n\nAfter the initial act of selection\n\nmay follow excision,\n\ntrimming,\n\nre-arrangement\n\nor even, to a certain extent,\n\nre-writing.\n\nOr it may be simply\n\na question of selection.\n\nSo be it.\n\n#### II\n\nThe writer of found poems will require the following articles:\n\na. |  | A hammer will be found most generally useful.  \n---|---|---  \nb. |  | Stout and thin paper, and some of a soft kind for wrapping up specimens.  \nc. |  | String, sealing wax.\n\n#### III\n\nMarcel Duchamp never tired of saying:\n\n_The most important element_\n\n_in a picture_\n\n_is its frame._\n\n_in a sculpture,_\n\n_its plinth._\n\n# Additional Notes\n\n'Singularly Calm, Rather Wise' () uses words from Gwendolyn Brooks' poem 'The Children of the Poor' and employs Terrance Hayes' golden shovel form.\n\nIn 'Fallujah, Basrah' (), medical quotes come from Ross B. Mirkarimi (The Arms Control Research Centre, from report _The Environmental and Human Health Impacts of the Gulf Region with special reference to Iraq_ , from May 1992) commenting on photographs of extreme birth deformities experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan following bombing with DU ammunition. All names are fictional.\n\nIn _The Courtesans Reply_ , the first and last lines of 'Carandasi' () are quotes from the poem 'Two stranger birds in our feathers' by Mahmoud Darwish. 'Epilogue' () employs found text from _Glimpses of Sexual Life in Nanda-Maurya India_ , a translation of _The Caturbh \u0101n\u012b_ by Manomohan Ghosh (Manisha Granthalaya Private Ltd, Calcutta, 1975) and from _The Complete K \u0101ma S\u016btra_, translated by Alain Dani\u00e9lou (Park Street Press, 1994).\n\n'The Mummy of Hor' () uses text from the curator's notes for the Mummy of Tem Hor in Swansea Museum.\n\n'Goodbye, My Loveds' () was the painter Arshile Gorky's parting message written in chalk on a crate.\n\n'Notes on Found Poems' () uses text from the following sources: the introduction to Malcom Parr's pamphlet, _Found Poems_ (1972); a footnote from The Metropolitan Police Services' Investigation of Fakes and Forgeries exhibition at the V&A Museum; a quote from Germaine Greer in the _Guardian_ (30 March 2009).\n\n# About the Author\n\n**Shazea Quraishi** was born in Pakistan, emigrated to Canada aged ten, and lived in Madrid before moving to London where she works as a writer, teacher and translator. A selection of her work was included in Bernardine Evaristo and Daljit Nagra's Bloodaxe anthology _Ten: new poets from Spread the Word_ in 2010. Her first pamphlet, _The Courtesans Reply_ , was published by flipped eye in 2012, and is being adapted as a play. _The Art of Scratching_ (Bloodaxe Books, 2015) is her first book-length collection.\n\n# Copyright\n\nCopyright \u00a9 Shazea Quraishi 2015\n\nFirst published 2015 by  \nBloodaxe Books Ltd,  \nEastburn,  \nSouth Park,  \nHexham,  \nNorthumberland NE46 1BS\n\nThis ebook edition first published in 2015.\n\n**www.bloodaxebooks.com**  \nFor further information about Bloodaxe titles  \nplease visit our website or write to  \nthe above address for a catalogue.\n\nCover design: Neil Astley & Pamela Robertson-Pearce.\n\nThe right of Shazea Quraishi to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.\n\nThis ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.\n\nISBN: 978 1 78037 249 5 ebook\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}