The grown-ups were upset. Mathias could tell from the way his mother kept shooting nervous glances his way while she talked to his teacher and some of the other kids’ mothers. Every look was like a tug on a leash, a way of drawing his attention and keeping him close even as they stood apart. In her arms she held his little brother, Markus, who was only a few months old. He’d fallen asleep a while ago, but she hadn’t put him back in his pram.

The school auditorium was alive with anxious whispers. A heap of multi-colored costumes lay abandoned on the stage, illuminated by floodlights. Earlier, two men Mathias had never seen before had interrupted the rehearsals for the school’s nativity play. They’d spoken to the teacher first and then gone up to Diego’s mother; after a brief conversation, she had followed them out, looking pale and stumbling as she walked, like a zombie. Only when Mathias’s mother had called out to her had she remembered her son. She’d told him to stay put and behave himself; the teacher was going to look after him until grandma arrived. Her voice was shaking.

Mathias saw Diego slumped in one of the collapsible chairs in the stalls, staring at the black sky through the row of windows high up on the wall. Every day, night fell a little earlier, and it seemed as if the blackness had begun affecting people, too. Travenì was no longer the same place Mathias had always loved; over the last few hours, the town had been crushed by the weight of suspicion falling on its residents like snow. Ever since Diego’s father had disappeared, the air had been poisoned with fear.

Mathias approached his friend, whose face, half-illuminated by a beam of light from the stage, was like a small moon, sad and perhaps a little furious. Mathias felt he should say something, but he also understood words would be useless.

Diego’s father was dead. Nobody had said it out loud yet, but they knew—just like you know when you’re about to be smacked, or when you feel a fever building even though your forehead still feels cool to the touch.

Mathias scrunched his hat up into a ball and threw it at Diego.

Diego’s hand shot up and caught it, though his eyes were still staring out into the darkness.