She managed to straighten up and sit on the bed. When she tried to stand up, she had to wait a couple of minutes; her legs wouldn’t hold her, and she was seized by a weakness she couldn’t quite comprehend. She felt cold. Very cold. At last she managed to get to her feet, almost shivering. She leaned against the wall. Her body and clothes were covered in Rovira’s blood. She couldn’t feel her right hand except for a dull throb. She examined the wound left by the awl. It didn’t look good.

Just then, the telephone next to the bed rang. Alicia suppressed a scream.

She let it ring for about a minute, staring at it as if it were a bomb about to explode at any moment. Finally she lifted the receiver and put it to her ear. She listened, holding her breath. A long silence followed on the line. Above the light hum of the long-distance connection, she could hear slow breathing.

“Are you there?” said the voice.

Alicia felt the receiver shaking in her hands. It was Leandro.

The phone slipped from her hand, and she staggered toward the door. As she walked past the sanctuary Rovira had created, she stopped. Anger gave her enough strength to go into the workshop, find one of the kerosene cans standing next to the generator, and pour the contents on the floor. A thick liquid oozed through the room, surrounding Rovira’s corpse, spreading a black mirror from which rose swirls of iridescent vapor. When she walked past the generator, she yanked off one of the cables, letting it fall on the floor.

As she made her way through the mannequins that hung from the ceiling toward the corridor that led to the exit, she could hear the crackling sound behind her. When the blaze caught, a sudden gust of air shook the figures surrounding her. An amber glow followed her through the passageway as she advanced, swaying and lurching from one wall to the other to keep herself on her feet. She had never felt so cold.

She prayed to heaven or hell not to let her die in that tunnel, to let her reach the frame of light just visible in the distance. Her flight seemed endless, as if she were scaling the guts of a beast that had swallowed her, climbing back up to its jaws so as not to be devoured. The heat penetrating through the tunnel from the flames behind her barely thawed the icy embrace wrapping itself around her. She didn’t stop until she’d walked through the hallway and was out in the street. Feeling the rain caressing her skin, she breathed again. A figure was running toward her up the street.

She collapsed into Fernandito’s arms. The boy hugged her and smiled, but he was staring at her, terrified. She put her hand on her belly, on the place where she had felt that first blow. Warm blood ran through her fingers and dissolved in the rain. She no longer felt pain, only cold, an icy cold telling her softly to let go, to close her eyelids and abandon herself to eternal sleep, which promised peace and truth.