They sped around the bends. Clotilde put her headphones back on. She was always a little scared on the Corsican roads, even during the daylight, when they encountered a coach or a camper van; the cliff roads on this island were crazy. She thought that at the speed at which her father was driving – whether it was to calm his nerves, or to avoid being late, or because he wanted to sit in the front row – if they came across a goat, or a boar, or any kind of animal roaming about, it would all be over …

*

There was no animal. Or at least Clotilde didn’t see one. And no one ever found the slightest trace of one either. Even if that was one of the hypotheses suggested by the police.

It was a tight curve at the end of a long straight section, past Revellata; a bend high above a twenty-metre ravine. A pile of fallen rocks called Petra Coda.

During the day, the viewpoint was dizzying.

The Fuego crashed into the wooden barrier at full speed.

The three planks separating the road from the precipice did all they could. They twisted under the impact of the crash; they burst the two headlights of the Fuego; they scraped the bumper.

Before yielding.

They barely slowed the car down at all. It continued in a straight line, like a cartoon, the hero running out into the void, then stopping, looking down at his feet in astonishment … then panic as he plummets like a stone.

Clotilde felt all those things. The Fuego losing contact with the earth. The real world disappearing beneath her. Like a flaw in logic, something that could not happen, not really, not to them, not to her.

She thought those things for a fraction of a second, before reality exploded, and the Fuego hit the rocks for the first time, before bouncing twice.

Her father’s ribcage and head exploded against the steering wheel when the car crashed vertically against the rocks. Her mother was crushed during the second somersault, by a rock that smashed through the door. With the third, the roof was torn open above them, like a steel jaw.

The final impact.

The Fuego stopped there, balanced uneasily ten metres above the tranquil sea.

Then silence.

Nicolas was still sitting beside her. Back straight. Drenched in blood.

He would never become president; never become even a staff representative in some stupid factory. Nipped in the bud. Not like an anvil; more like an eggshell, the cartilage of a sparrow in the maw of a monster. His puppet body demolished by a roof which had exploded like a star.

His eyelids shut. Somewhere else, for ever.

One, two, three. Curtain.

Strangely, Clotilde didn’t hurt anywhere. The police later explained that the three somersaults had caused three points of impact, one per passenger. Like a killer who had only three bullets in his magazine.