Alicia let out a sigh of boredom. “All we needed now was El Zorro,” she muttered to herself.

After a while, tired of flicking through documents that seemed whipped up to provide the dossier with a swift coat of varnish, she abandoned it and began to look through the letters.

She counted about a dozen messages, all written on sheets of yellowing paper peppered with erratic handwriting, the longest barely two short paragraphs. They had been written with a worn nib that made the ink flow irregularly, so that some lines were saturated and others hardly seemed to have scratched the page. The author’s writing rarely seemed to link one character with the next, giving the impression that the text was written out letter by letter. The subject matter was repetitive, insisting on the same points in every message: the phrases “the truth,” “the children of death,” and “the entrance to the labyrinth” appeared again and again.

Valls had been receiving the messages for years, but only in the end had something pushed him into taking action. “What?” whispered Alicia.

The answer was almost always in the past. That had been one of Leandro’s first lessons. Once, when they were leaving the funeral of one of the senior officers of the secret police in Barcelona, which Leandro had obliged Alicia to attend (as part of her education, he had stated), her mentor had pronounced those words. Leandro’s thesis was that after a particular point in a man’s life, his future is invariably in his past.

“Isn’t that obvious?” Alicia had said.

“You’d be surprised at how often one looks in the present or in the future for answers that are always in the past.”

Leandro had a penchant for didactic aphorisms. On that occasion Alicia thought he was talking about the deceased, or perhaps even about himself and the wave of darkness that seemed to have pulled him like a tide toward power, like so many celebrated individuals who had climbed up the gloomy architecture of the regime. The chosen, she’d ended up calling them. Those who always stayed afloat in the murky waters, like scum. A distinguished group of champions reborn in a cloak of decay, creeping through the streets of that barren land like a river of blood surging up from the sewers. Alicia realized she had borrowed that image from the book she’d found in Valls’s office: blood that surged up through the drains and was slowly flooding the streets. The labyrinth.

She dropped the letters on the floor and closed her eyes. The cold in her veins from that poison always opened a door to the dark back room of her mind. It was the price she paid for muting the pain. Leandro knew that. He knew that beneath the frozen mantle, where there was no pain or consciousness, her eyes were able to see through the dark, hear and feel what others couldn’t even imagine, hunt down the secrets others thought they’d buried in their wake. Leandro knew that every time Alicia sank into those black waters and returned with a trophy in her hands, she left behind part of her being and of her soul. And that she hated him for it. She hated him with the anger that can only be felt by one who knows her maker all too well.