I don’t sense anything in this house.

You haven’t seen all of it. There are two other buildings. You can ask them to take you.

Gaspar felt a shaking in his legs and then in his hands, and suddenly he was shaking on the floor. Four feet were climbing the lookout tower’s steps.

It’s normal for you to shake, it’s the adrenaline, don’t worry. Look, I’m going to stop talking to you in secret, okay? Whatever I do from here on doesn’t mean anything. I’m going back to the role of my mother’s son.

Your mother?

Florence. She’s my mother.

When Esteban disconnected, Gaspar felt it. It was as if a hot wind stopped blowing in his face, or as if, after being inside with a heater, he had gone out into fresh air. The two guards carried him down, an unnecessary show: his head didn’t hurt, Esteban had used his own arm to soften the blow. He let himself be carried. He heard running steps and phrases in English. You were friends and lovers. You cannot be trusted. I just saved him, but of course that’s not enough for you, and he looked at the sky, where the flowers were growing along with his migraine, which had been caused not by hitting his head, but by the double adrenaline burst from the failed jump and what Esteban had done, that secret conversation spoken aloud that seemed as impossible as it did familiar. They checked him over, and he obeyed every order: it all reminded him step-by-step of the false accident months before his father’s death, a farce that, he now knew, they’d put on in order to hide the repugnant Rite by which they’d tried to steal his body. The sensation was so vivid, so obvious, that he had no more doubts. It was a matter of remembering. That’s what he had to focus on. Remembering, even things he hadn’t witnessed. Maybe start eating again. You don’t want to die, Esteban had told him, and you can escape.

He had to find the door.

It was hard to find moments alone with Gaspar. They tolerated his nearness because he was of blood and they had already lost too many blood members, but Stephen didn’t want to make any suspicious moves. The encounter at the lookout tower had been an intuition. Stephen lived in the guesthouse. He could see the park from his window, and he’d caught sight of Gaspar and his guardians heading toward the most obvious place on the grounds from which to jump. The fact that the kid wanted to kill himself was so clear that only people who had gone mad from lack of human contact could fail to recognize it. Gaspar was so different from the child he remembered. It had been a real blow to see him in ruins: at twenty-five years old his beauty was simply extraordinary, healthy but so heavy with death. Hearing his thick voice at the lookout tower, so like Juan’s, had been a shock, such unexpected virility coming from that faun-like face with its cheekbones protruding from the hunger strike; powerful, too, were his rough hands with their long, broad fingers.