What’s this? The Great Captain’s gun?

If you’d rather, I can find you a gun for young ladies, with an ivory grip and two golden barrels.

And what do I do with this, aside from using it to practice shooting poodles?

Make sure nobody practices on you.

In the end Alicia had accepted that heavy piece as she’d done with so many of Leandro’s offerings, in a tacit agreement of submission and pretense, where the unmentionable was sealed with a cold smile of politeness and a veil of silence, allowing her to look in the mirror and carry on deceiving herself on the purpose of her life. She held the weapon in her hands and felt its weight, then opened the cylinder. Seeing that it was unloaded, she emptied one of the bullet boxes on the floor and inserted all six bullets, taking her time. She stood up and walked over to the packed bookcase covering one of the walls. Jesusa and her army of feather dusters had left not a speck of dust or a trace of her three-year absence anywhere. She pulled a leather-bound copy of the Bible out from its place next to a French translation of Doctor Faustus and opened it. The pages had been hollowed out with a knife, making a perfect case for her private artillery. After hiding the gun in the Bible, she slipped it back on the bookshelf. “Amen,” she intoned.

She closed her suitcase and went to the bedroom. Freshly ironed and perfumed sheets welcomed her; tiredness from the train journey and the warmth of the wine in her bloodstream did the rest. She closed her eyes and listened to the murmur of the city whispering in her ear.

That night Alicia again dreamed that it was raining fire. She was jumping over the rooftops of the Raval quarter, fleeing from the roar of the bombs while buildings collapsed all around her in columns of fire and black smoke. Swarms of aircraft overflew at a low altitude, machine-gunning those running through the narrow streets as they tried to reach the shelters. When she peeped over a cornice of Calle Arco del Teatro, she saw a woman and four children fleeing in panic toward the Ramblas. A torrent of missiles swept the street, and their bodies burst into pools of blood and entrails as they ran. Alicia closed her eyes, and that is when the explosion happened. She felt it before hearing it, as if a train had charged against her in the dark. A stabbing pain shot through her side, and the flames lifted her up in the air and flung her against a skylight through which she fell, wrapped in blades of red-hot glass. She plunged into the void.

A few seconds later, something broke her fall. She’d landed on a wooden balcony suspended at the top of a huge structure. She crawled over to the edge and, looking down into the darkness, thought she saw the outline of a spiral framework in the faint reddish glow reflected by the clouds.