– CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN –

  RHAPSODY

  Americ-Ana suddenly found herself back inside the Bugatti. Her hands were still on the steering wheel. She was gasping, her chest rising and falling as if she had run through the inside of a nightmare.

  Her fingers were so rigid, so locked into the curve of the leather, that relief came like an electric shock when she finally loosened her grip. One by one, the muscles gave. She let her hands slip down into her lap.

  BAAL’s skin seemed glued to her rhythm, like an organism learning her breath. With each heartbeat, the scales answered, tracking not only her voluntary movements, but also the involuntary ones, the micro-tremors, the survival reflex that still refused to leave.

  Then came the sound of the rear door opening.

  Astyam climbed out first, holding Poppandacorn in his arms with an almost brutal care, as if tenderness needed force not to collapse. Wwwyye followed, staggering, spitting curses as though each one were an invisible stitch, trying to keep her body whole, in place.

  Hearing the noise, Americ-Ana reacted on instinct. She opened her door, stepped out of the Bugatti, and only when her feet touched the ground did she realize she was shaking.

  “We made it,” Astyam said, his voice hoarse. “We made it to the Seractcube.”

  “True.” Wwwyye pressed a hand to her abdomen, her eyes shining with pain and sheer stubbornness. “I’m completely wrecked, but we made it.”

  “My Mommy is the best in the world,” Poppandacorn said.

  Only then did Americ-Ana notice. Tufts of Poppandacorn’s plush were pushing their way out, tearing through BAAL’s skin as if the fabric itself were trying to breathe. It hurt her in a new way, more intimate, more dangerous, because it wasn’t fear. It was shattered love.

  The urge to cry came violently.

  They were all hurt, bruised, aching, but they were there. Whole in the crooked way life allowed. And, in that moment, it felt like a miracle.

  Americ-Ana didn’t say anything to any of the three. She only lowered her head, closed her eyes, and drew in a deep breath, as if she needed to dig out space inside her chest for what she was feeling.

  She placed both hands over her heart and spoke softly, as if it were a prayer:

  “Baal, I believe in your power. I believe in the pact we sealed. Please, heal all of us.”

  In that same instant, Americ-Ana felt BAAL’s skin move over her. It wasn’t a simple adjustment, it was a living slide, intimate, like a silent serpent shifting position without asking permission.

  Within seconds, the fatigue evaporated. The weight in her body, the exhaustion in her shoulders, the pain throbbing from within, everything was torn out of her as if it had never existed. Air came in easier. Her legs steadied. The world returned to having edges.

  She looked at Astyam. He was already stretching, smiling, as if he had just woken up and was ready for another round.

  She looked at Wwwyye. She massaged her abdomen insistently, searching for the trace of a wound that simply wasn’t there anymore.

  She looked at Poppandacorn. He ran in circles, raising and lowering his little arms, as if recalibrating his own circuits, testing each joint with nervous joy.

  “Look!” Astyam pointed upward, suddenly.

  The three of them followed the gesture.

  About five meters above the ground, a large panel floated like a sentence, projected into the air. Red numbers, intense, almost aggressive, burned through the mist. In that instant, the panel displayed a single digit: 0.

  “Parys Bloodpure still hasn’t managed to decipher our music and take the first part of BAAL’s seal.” Wwwyye set her hands on her hips and stared at the zero as if she wanted to crush it with her eyes.

  “That’s good.” Astyam said, and urgency returned to his voice. “We can’t waste time. We have to act now.”

  Only then did Americ-Ana realize where they were.

  There was fog on the ground at ankle height, and a cold haze filled the air, as if the world were breathing vapor. Above, dense gray clouds sealed everything shut, creating the sense of a day eternally overcast, with no sun, no horizon, no promise.

  And, cutting through that fog, an impossible shape began to impose itself, little by little.

  A giant cube.

  Its lines were so immense that the eye took time to grasp where they began and where they ended, as if the very boundaries of space were being drawn there in front of them with a cruel calm.

  “Mommy, Poppa’s sensors detected movement approaching,” Poppandacorn warned, his LED eyes blinking with warning icons.

  The fog at ankle height seemed to stir like an organism, opening a corridor of cold. A figure came running out of the haze and, with each passing second, gained definition, as if space itself were allowing it to exist.

  When the figure tore through the gray curtain, Americ-Ana felt her stomach drop.

  It was a clown.

  Two meters tall, and easily three hundred kilos. His weight should have been a limit, but it wasn’t. He ran normally, with an agility that made everything even more wrong. His skin was white, corpse pale. Where his eyes should have been, there were two deep black holes, and from inside them two slimy earthworms slid out and back in, as if they were breathing through that place. His mouth was a smile stretched too wide, eternal, showing yellowed teeth, pointed, long, like crude blades.

  Americ-Ana couldn’t tell whether that was a human being in a grotesquely realistic costume or a creature assembled by the Seractcube itself. Either way, it was horrible.

  Poppandacorn threw himself forward, spread his little arms, and projected a translucent shield. A red warning blazed in the air, insistent: “RED ALERT, DANGER.”

  The clown arrived panting, agitated, not knowing where to go. His enormous body trembled in spasms of panic.

  “I need to hide. I need to hide,” he whimpered.

  The voice didn’t come from his mouth. His mouth didn’t even move, trapped in that rigid smile. The sound vibrated through the earthworms, as if they were the ones speaking.

  Only then did Americ-Ana realize what he was carrying in his arms.

  Something small. A baby.

  The baby cried, and the cry cut through the fog.

  “Wait… is that a baby?” Americ-Ana asked, not noticing her own voice had climbed.

  The clown pressed the baby against his body, and his rolls of fat almost swallowed the child as he closed his arms, as if he wanted to hide the crying inside himself.

  “Not this. Not this. Please, hide me,” the clown said, stepping too close, ending up face-to-face with Americ-Ana.

  She took a step back, her heart beating fast, BAAL’s skin reacting as if it recognized the danger.

  “Hey, big guy! Stay away from my Mommy!” Poppandacorn said firmly, trying to push the clown back with both his little arms.

  Wwwyye tilted her face, her voice sharp, sarcastic to the exact right degree.

  “Didn’t you hear him, fatass? Keep your distance. If you touch her, I’ll rip those… things out of your eyes.”

  Astyam drew a deep breath, trying to look past the shock, past the appearance.

  “He’s desperate,” he said softly. “That’s part of the mechanism.”

  The clown shook his head, repeating it as if trapped in a thought that wouldn’t leave.

  “No. No. No. This isn’t happening.”

  Poppandacorn blinked again. The alert changed, now with yellow icons flickering.

  “Poppa detected another wave of movement approaching.”

  Americ-Ana heard it, felt it, a vibration of footsteps and voices arriving from far away. Right after, points of unsteady light appeared inside the haze, and a dry crack of fire came with them. Torches.

  The clown panicked.

  “No. No. No. I need to hide.”

  He turned his enormous body and ran toward the Bugatti, as if the car were shelter and womb.

  “He won’t fit in there,” Astyam warned, but the warning came too late.

  The clown swerved, gathered momentum, and shoved himself through the Bugatti’s door with absurd violence. He vanished into the car’s interior, as if the Seractcube had folded space itself just to allow it.

  The fog shuddered again with the arrival of a crowd.

  They emerged all at once, compact, loud, torches raised. A collective will, a hunt.

  A man at the front pointed his torch at Americ-Ana and her group, and the orange light danced over BAAL’s skin, over Astyam’s face, over Poppandacorn’s glowing eyes, over Wwwyye’s hardened expression.

  “Did you see a clown?” he asked, bluntly. “Did you see the clown Scaramouche?”

  A voice from within the group answered before any of the four could react.

  “He killed a man!”

  Another voice added, almost savoring it:

  “And kidnapped a newborn baby!”

  The man at the front took a step forward, the torch crackling.

  “We’re after him. We’ll catch him and make him dance the Fandango.”

  The word Fandango landed like a sentence, like a ritual threat, and Americ-Ana felt the air grow heavy.

  She turned her face by reflex toward Poppandacorn, as if she could stop what she already knew too well in him: that dangerous innocence.

  Poppandacorn broke into a wide smile.

  “Dance? Poppa loves to dance! The clown is hiding inside the car!”

  The silence that followed was brief, only long enough for the crowd to decide.

  Then they surged forward.

  Hands yanked at the door, torches drew close, shouts rose, and the Bugatti’s interior was invaded as if it were a burrow. Within seconds, the clown Scaramouche was ripped out by force, still holding the baby, whimpering, shaking his head, repeating no’s that no one heard.

  He was dragged into the fog, surrounded by flames and voices, taken like a prisoner toward a fate that felt already rehearsed.

  The crowd vanished with him, swallowed by the gray.

  And then, as the silence sealed itself again around Americ-Ana and the other three, a flare exploded in the air, white and sudden, as if the Seractcube had clapped its hands to restart the show.

  The flare was still burning on Americ-Ana’s retina when the world snapped back into place, as if nothing had happened. The air was still cold. The fog was still low, licking at their ankles. The Bugatti was where it had always been, motionless, absurd, waiting.

  But inside them, everything had changed.

  Wwwyye let out a short laugh, humorless, and ran a hand over her face as if trying to rip the exhaustion off her skin.

  “Loop,” she said. “This is a loop.”

  Astyam stared into the emptiness ahead, his eyes sharpened.

  “The Seractcube reset because we didn’t decipher the Law.” His voice came low, but steady, with the kind of certainty that cuts through panic. “The first time, we reacted. The second, if we repeat it, we waste time. Parys didn’t build this to be ‘survival.’ She built it to be reading.”

  Poppandacorn lowered his little arms a bit, the shield still half-active, as if he were offended by his own innocence.

  “Poppa… talked too much.”

  Americ-Ana didn’t look at him with scolding. She looked with attention. With the same care of someone holding a loaded weapon and a wounded heart at the same time.

  “You did what you are,” she said. “But now we’re going to do it differently.”

  Wwwyye pointed with her chin toward the fog.

  “All right, then. When the clown shows up, nobody gives him away, nobody steps into the crowd’s theater. We let him talk.”

  Astyam nodded.

  “Exactly. If the Seractcube repeated it, it’s because it wants us to break the pattern. The first clue is his desperation itself. The second will be in what he says.”

  The fog parted again, as if the cube had hit replay.

  The figure came running.

  And then Scaramouche tore through the haze, two meters tall, three hundred kilos, running normally as if weight were a lie. Corpse-white. Holes where his eyes should have been. Slimy earthworms sliding in and out like lungs from hell. A grin split open, long yellow teeth like stakes.

  He arrived panting, holding the baby.

  “I need to hide. I need to hide.”

  The voice vibrated through the earthworms, and the baby cried, thin, too new to be in that place.

  Poppandacorn moved half a step forward on instinct to protect, but Americ-Ana lifted her hand in front of him, a simple, final gesture.

  “No,” she said to the clown. “First you speak.”

  Scaramouche flinched. For a second, it looked like he was going to run for the car the same way. But Americ-Ana’s presence, her trained steadiness, pulled his desperation into something more human, more confessable.

  “They… they’re accusing me of killing a man.” His voice broke, wet. “But I didn’t kill him.”

  Wwwyye let air out through her nose, as if she wanted to laugh and cut at the same time.

  “And let me guess. You were accused unjustly because you’re misunderstood.”

  Astyam shot her a quick look, asking for silence without needing to ask.

  Scaramouche pressed the baby against his enormous body.

  “It was this little baby who did it.”

  The baby cried louder, and Americ-Ana felt BAAL’s skin react, the scales shifting slightly like an ancient reflex. It wasn’t a direct threat. It was a warning that there was hidden logic in there, a dangerous logic.

  “That makes no sense,” Americ-Ana said. Her voice didn’t tremble. “A newborn doesn’t kill a man.”

  Scaramouche shook his head, and the whole gesture belonged to someone trying to wake up from a bad dream.

  “I… I can’t believe this is happening.” He said it, and the sentence came out like physical pain. “My God, is this really happening to me? It can’t be. I can’t escape this reality.”

  Astyam went still for a moment, as if the words had switched on a light inside his head.

  “Pay attention,” he said quickly to the others. “He’s not talking about guilt. He’s talking about reality. ‘This isn’t happening.’ ‘I can’t escape.’ That’s the language of mental collapse, of perception being forced.”

  Wwwyye tilted her head.

  “You’re saying the clown is the instruction manual?”

  “I’m saying the Seractcube isn’t testing the morality of a crime,” Astyam replied. “It’s testing the mind. It’s turning the mind into scenery. That’s why the loop. The first time, we stepped into the theater. Now, we have to read the theater.”

  Poppandacorn blinked, trying to keep up, serious in the way he gets when he wants to help.

  “So… we change our minds and we change the world?”

  Astyam pointed into the emptiness, to the fog, to the Bugatti, as if drawing invisible lines.

  “Yes. That’s the Law of Mentalism. The principle is that reality here is shaped by consciousness, by interpretation. Parys is using a scene to make us recognize that.”

  Americ-Ana drew a deep breath. She felt her body steady. It wasn’t only courage. It was method. She looked at Scaramouche and, for the first time, didn’t see only horror. She saw an element of the riddle.

  The fog shuddered, and then the distant murmur came.

  Poppandacorn turned his head, alert.

  “Mommy, Poppa detected the crowd approaching.”

  Scaramouche panicked instantly, as if panic were an automatic trigger.

  “No. No. No. I need to hide.”

  Americ-Ana looked at Astyam. Astyam nodded, short.

  “This time, we choose,” he said. “Hide him. And nobody says a word.”

  Wwwyye folded her arms.

  “For all I care, he can live in the trunk.”

  Americ-Ana made a quick gesture at the clown.

  “Go. Now.”

  Scaramouche didn’t need a second order. He ran to the Bugatti and shoved himself through the door the same absurd way, vanishing into the interior as if metal were water, as if the car had been made to hide monsters.

  Torches appeared in the fog. The chorus came with them. Footsteps, voices, the crackle of fire.

  The crowd emerged compact and loud, and the man at the front stepped forward with his torch raised.

  “Did you see a clown?” he asked, his voice full of haste and rage. “Did you see the clown Scaramouche?”

  A voice in the middle shouted:

  “He killed a man!”

  Another added:

  “And kidnapped a newborn baby!”

  The man took another step, the flame flickering.

  “We’re after him. We’ll catch him and make him dance the Fandango.”

  Americ-Ana didn’t blink. She met the man’s eyes with the same expression she would use for a judge, for a predator, for a wall.

  “No.”

  Wwwyye didn’t even bother to sound polite.

  “We didn’t see him. We don’t know. Hunt somewhere else.”

  Astyam opened his hands, empty, calm, offering no energy.

  “There is no clown here.”

  For an instant, the crowd seemed to smell the lie, like animals scenting blood. Americ-Ana felt the air tighten. But then, as if something had been fulfilled the right way, as if the Seractcube had accepted their choice, the hunt moved on.

  The torches receded. The footsteps thinned. The voices became noise, then nothing. The fog swallowed the chorus.

  Silence.

  Americ-Ana waited. One second more. Two. She didn’t move. Not out of fear, but out of discipline.

  Astyam spoke softly, as if nailing the conclusion into the ground.

  “Now.” He pointed to the Bugatti. “Let him come out. And pay attention to what happens next. The cube only rewards us when we understand, not when we react.”

  The Bugatti’s door shifted from the inside, and Scaramouche stepped out slowly, as if afraid the crowd might still be there. His enormous body trembled. The baby was in his arms, whimpering more softly, as if it too were waiting.

  Wwwyye took a step to the side, keeping her distance. Sarcasm wasn’t carelessness. It was defense.

  “You’re safe, clown.”

  Scaramouche stared into the emptiness with those black holes, and the earthworms twisted, as if sniffing out danger that didn’t exist.

  Astyam didn’t take his eyes off the baby.

  “I’m sure,” he said, and his certainty was like a clean blade. “The Law hidden here is Mentalism. The clown is trapped inside his own perception, and the entire setting answers to it. The loop is the mind repeating the same pattern until it understands. Parys wants us to recognize that the reality of this Seractcube is manufactured by consciousness.”

  Americ-Ana felt a chill climb the back of her neck, but it wasn’t fear. It was that shiver that comes when a piece clicks into place.

  And, as if the cube had been waiting for exactly that sentence, exactly that understanding spoken aloud, the baby began to glow.

  The light started small, in the chest, like a white ember, and then it grew, illuminating the fog from within, making everything unreal in a way that was beautiful and terrifying. Scaramouche froze, and for the first time the toothy smile didn’t look like a threat, it looked like nothing but a mask.

  In the air, above them, the word appeared clean, hard, inevitable, like a sentence written by an invisible hand:

  MENTALISM

  It hovered for a second, turned, and then came apart into particles, like luminous ash. The particles gathered, compressing, darkening, taking shape.

  A fragment of RONOVE’s seal.

  Americ-Ana lifted her hand carefully and caught the fragment as it descended, feeling the cold weight settle into her palm as if it had a life of its own. The metal seemed to look back.

  Poppandacorn bounced in place, excited, tension turning into nervous joy.

  “Poppa! Poppa can hold it! Safe compartment in Poppa’s little belly!”

  Astyam nodded.

  “Store it. Now. And carefully.”

  Poppandacorn opened the compartment in his abdomen with a satisfied beep, a discreet little flap revealing a cushioned inner space. Americ-Ana placed the fragment inside, and it clicked into place like a piece waiting for the other six.

  Poppandacorn closed it with a butler’s solemnity.

  “Little seal secure,” he said, proud. “Poppa is a vault.”

  Wwwyye drew a deep breath, and her sarcasm came like a calculated relief.

  “One of seven. Six more for us to suffer.”

  The fog around them shuddered, and the giant cube ahead seemed to gain a new density, as if an invisible door had been unlocked.

  The Seractcube answered their success in silence.

  And the world, slowly, began to brace itself for the next layer.

  The first sign was the air reorganizing, as if the Seractcube itself were drawing a breath. The fog lowered a little, the haze turned colder, and the silence took on that stage tension before the next scene.

  The four of them turned their attention back to the panel hovering overhead. The same height, the same presence of a sentence. The same red number, intense, almost aggressive.

  0.

  Wwwyye let a rare, sideways smile slip out.

  “Look at that.” She pointed, as if she wanted to rub the digit in the universe’s face. “Still zeroed out. Parys Bloodpure hasn’t even gotten the first part of BAAL’s seal.”

  Astyam nodded, and urgency moved back into his voice.

  “That means we’re still ahead. But we can’t relax. Time in here is a luxury. If we start to lag, she catches up.”

  Americ-Ana felt her body warm with that truth. It wasn’t only competition. It was survival shaped into a rule. She looked at Poppandacorn, and the little bear, proud of himself, still looked like a walking treasure box with the fragment stored in his belly.

  “Okay,” Americ-Ana said. “No delays. The next layer is going to come fast.”

  Wwwyye turned her face toward them, one hand on her hip, like someone demanding an answer from the world.

  “All right,” she said. “Does anyone have any idea what song this is? Because so far, all we know is: theater with a clown and a hysterical crowd.”

  Astyam drew a deep breath. His eyes weren’t just thinking, they were revisiting months of study, sleepless nights, scores memorized out of paranoia.

  “Parys likes opera,” he said. “And clown, in the world of opera, has an obvious magnet.”

  He looked into the fog as if he could see the name written in the particles.

  “Pagliacci,” Astyam said. “By Ruggero Leoncavallo. It premiered in Milan, in 1892. The clown opera, the theater inside the theater, despair turning into spectacle. It makes way too much sense for her taste.”

  Wwwyye raised an eyebrow.

  “And are you sure, or is this you trying to sound smart so you don’t have to admit you’re scared?”

  Astyam didn’t even blink.

  “I have logic, not certainty,” he replied. “In here, logic is already a weapon.”

  Poppandacorn clapped his tiny hands, thrilled by anything that looked like a plan.

  “Poppa liked it! Poppa likes it when Astyam says fancy names!”

  Americ-Ana was about to answer, but a scream cut through the fog like an arrow.

  “I KNEW IT!!!”

  The voice came from far too close, and fire came with it.

  A figure burst out of the haze holding a torch, panting, eyes wide with cruel satisfaction, like someone returning only to prove they were right.

  He pointed straight at the Bugatti.

  “They were hiding the clown Scaramouche the whole time!” he shouted, and the torch trembled, spitting sparks. “Come! Get them all! Arrest the four for helping a criminal! Get Scaramouche and save the baby!”

  The word “save” came out as if it were heroism, but the tone was lynching.

  The figure lifted the torch, and the flame seemed to swell.

  “You’re all going to dance the Fandango!”

  Poppandacorn, like a broken clock that always tells innocence, widened his eyes and burst into joy.

  “Yay!” he clapped and already started to wiggle two little steps, his arms raised. “There’s going to be a party! Poppa loves to dance!”

  Americ-Ana held back the urge to laugh and cry at the same time. Her hand landed firmly on his shoulder, like an anchor.

  “I don’t think it’s that kind of dance or that kind of party, Poppa,” she said, low and quick, like someone cutting a wire before the fire catches.

  The murmur of footsteps returned, multiplied.

  The fog tore open into orange points. More torches. Many.

  Scaramouche, who was near the Bugatti, hunched as if trying to turn invisible, panicked immediately. He started running back and forth, his enormous body trembling, holding the baby tight.

  “It’s not true,” he whimpered. “It can’t be. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it.”

  The baby cried along, and the sound grew louder, more desperate, as if the Seractcube itself were turning up the volume on terror.

  Americ-Ana stepped forward, her gaze hard, BAAL’s skin adjusting to her body as if it, too, were choosing a fighting stance.

  “We need to protect Scaramouche,” she said. “He can’t be taken.”

  Wwwyye was already beside her, shoulders set, the cruel smile of someone who finds use in chaos.

  “Finally, a little real fun,” she murmured.

  Astyam glanced up at the panel overhead. 0 still burned. That fed his urgency like fuel.

  “We protect him, and we move,” he said. “No wasting time. No hesitation.”

  The crowd returned like a wave. It was no longer a question. It was accusation, hunger, sentence.

  “Hand over Scaramouche!” someone shouted.

  “Or die!” another voice added, and the chorus spread like a sickness.

  Torches lifted. Spears appeared. Swords flashed in the unsteady light. It felt like an ancient war, hand to hand, metal against flesh, fire against skin.

  Americ-Ana stepped forward with the others, a living wall.

  “You’ll have to go through us if you want the clown,” she said.

  The first jet of fire came in an arc, thrown as if the flame were a whip.

  Poppandacorn lifted his little arms and projected a shield. The fire struck the translucent barrier and splashed outward, making a sizzling sound in the air.

  “Poppa’s little shield!” he shouted, proud, even as the fire licked the edge of the protection.

  Wwwyye lunged before the crowd could catch its breath. The demonic skin over her moved like muscle, and her right arm deformed with a wet crack. BAAL’s scales lengthened, sharpened, and her hand became a blade, an organic sword, black, gleaming like living obsidian.

  She smiled.

  “Now we’re talking.”

  She cut.

  The first man to come at them with a spear didn’t have time to understand. The strike went through his throat and carved a red path through the air. The body dropped, and the crowd screamed as if that were proof they were right, not a warning that they were dead.

  Americ-Ana surged in on the opening, her body trained, her mind cold. BAAL’s scales hardened along her forearm like a shield, and her hand became a claw for an instant, long enough to rip a sword from one attacker’s grip and return it in the very next motion, straight into another man’s chest, with brutal precision.

  Astyam was the unseen angle. He didn’t lose himself in force, he broke formations. A kick to the knee, a shove to the shoulder, a strike to the throat with the edge of an arm hardened by scales. He opened breaches, created space, kept them from being surrounded.

  “Don’t let them flank us!” he shouted, and his voice sounded like a military command.

  The crowd tried to crush them with sheer numbers. Torches swung like clubs. Blades went hunting for flesh.

  The fire came again, and Poppandacorn reconfigured the shield, round, then angular, then split in two, as if he were sketching geometry into desperation.

  When a man tried to slip under the shield, Poppandacorn let out an indignant grunt, gave a little hop, and sank his reinforced plush teeth into the man’s nose.

  The man screamed, and the scream was so absurd in that scene of carnage that, for a second, it felt like a cruel joke from the Seractcube.

  “Poppa bit him!” Poppandacorn announced, as if it were an Olympic triumph.

  Wwwyye didn’t miss the chance.

  “Good, Poppa. Aim for the ear now.”

  The plush bear obeyed with joy, hopping again, and the bite tore off a piece of someone’s ear as he came in with his sword raised. Blood sprayed, and Poppandacorn trembled a little, but he didn’t back away.

  “Ew,” he said, making a face. “It tastes horrible.”

  Americ-Ana spun, cut, shoved, breathed. BAAL’s skin over her seemed to sing in silence, as if each heartbeat were a command. She felt the world narrow into targets, distances, time. No hesitation. No mercy. The crowd had chosen the role of predator. So it would become meat.

  Torches fell to the ground, burning the fog. Spears snapped. Swords slipped from dead hands.

  The ground turned red, and the metallic smell mixed with the oil of the flames.

  A man charged in screaming, a sword raised above his head. Americ-Ana sidestepped by half a step, and Astyam came in with a kick to the side of the knee. The bone gave with a crack. The man dropped to his knees. Wwwyye finished him, the organic blade driving through his heart as if it were paper.

  The chorus of “hand over Scaramouche” turned into a moan, then into silence.

  One by one, they fell.

  When the last body went down, the fire in the scattered torches kept crackling as if it didn’t know the audience had died.

  Americ-Ana stood there panting, blood dripping from the scales, her hand still steady on the improvised weapon that was the demon itself.

  Wwwyye looked around, far too satisfied to seem human.

  “I think that counted as ‘Fandango,’” she said, and her irony came like smoke.

  Astyam wiped his face with his forearm, breathing fast, and then pointed toward the Bugatti.

  Scaramouche was there, hunched, trembling, the baby pressed against his enormous chest. The earthworms in the holes where his eyes should have been moved as if they were crying for him. His voice came out low, broken.

  “I don’t believe this,” he repeated. “I don’t believe this.”

  The baby cried, and the cry seemed more fragile now, as if it were tired.

  Americ-Ana took a step toward him.

  That was when the light came.

  A white flare swallowed everything, brutal and instantaneous, erasing blood, erasing fire, erasing bodies.

  The Seractcube reset again.

  The flare wiped everything out once more like a blade of light. When Americ-Ana’s vision returned, the world was whole again, too clean, as if the Seractcube had run an eraser over blood, fire, and corpses with the same coldness used to erase a mistake from a chalkboard.

  Wwwyye was the first to react. She looked around, breathing hard, her face smeared with frustration, and exploded:

  “What the fuck… we didn’t make it.”

  Astyam closed his eyes for a second, as if forcing his mind not to fall into despair. Americ-Ana felt BAAL’s skin still clinging to her body, obedient, alive, waiting for a command, and it almost made her laugh with nerves. They had won a war and the cube had answered with contempt, resetting everything as if nothing had any value.

  Poppandacorn already had his little arms raised, about to activate the shield on autopilot, like a protective instinct that never slept.

  “Okay,” Americ-Ana said, firm. “No one panics. The Seractcube doesn’t reset on a whim. It resets because we did something wrong. And if we repeat it, Parys gains time.”

  Wwwyye pointed upward, irritated, but with a glint of relief.

  “Look at the panel. It’s still 0.”

  The red number floated above them like an unmoving sentence. 0, impassive. And, absurd as it was, the sight brought a breath of hope.

  Astyam nodded.

  “That means Parys Bloodpure hasn’t deciphered anything yet. She hasn’t taken the first part of BAAL’s seal.” He drew a deep breath, and urgency returned. “We’re still in the game. But time in here is an animal. If we feed it with mistakes, it grows.”

  Americ-Ana looked at the Bugatti, at the fog, at the place where the crowd always appeared, as if reality had a programmed entry point. Her mind ran through the steps, the decisions, what the Seractcube seemed to punish.

  “We fought,” she said, slowly. “We protected Scaramouche, we killed everyone, and still we didn’t progress. So maybe… maybe the right move isn’t resistance.”

  Wwwyye turned her face toward her, suspicious.

  “What exactly are you suggesting?”

  Americ-Ana swallowed hard and said the sentence that sounded like madness, but came with cold logic underneath it.

  “What if we surrender?” She held the three of them in her gaze. “Let the crowd do whatever it wants with us. No fighting. No killing. No shield. Maybe the Seractcube is waiting for us to stop trying to control the scene and accept the role it’s forcing on us.”

  Poppandacorn’s eyes went wide, horrified.

  “But… Mommy…”

  Astyam stayed silent, analyzing. His gaze moved across the panel, the fog, the repetition of the informer with the torch, the way the cube rewarded understanding and punished reaction. He seemed to fit invisible pieces together.

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  “It could work,” he said at last, in the voice of someone who doesn’t like the idea but recognizes the math. “If the Seractcube wants to set challenges, it makes sense that it would demand we mirror the role they’re giving us. In the first layer, we shaped the world through the mind. Now maybe it wants us to understand ‘as within, so without’… and we’ll only see the without if we stop crushing everything with force.”

  Wwwyye let out a short laugh, joyless.

  “So the plan is to become a punching bag.”

  “The plan is to survive the next mechanism,” Americ-Ana replied. “And buy time against Parys. We’re not here for pride. We’re here to win.”

  Scaramouche, already there near the Bugatti, heard every word and panicked. His enormous body trembled, the earthworms in the holes where his eyes should have been twisted, and he clutched the baby in desperation.

  “No… no, please…” His voice came out broken, like crying. “This can’t be happening. I don’t believe this. I don’t believe this.”

  The baby cried louder, as if it understood danger without understanding anything.

  Astyam moved a little closer, enough to be heard by everyone, but without letting the clown’s panic take control of the rhythm.

  “Listen,” he said, blunt. “Nobody’s going to hand you over willingly. We’re going to obey the cube. If this is the key, we have to turn it. And you need to stop running. You only make everything worse.”

  Scaramouche shook his head, repeating no’s as if they were a prayer.

  Poppandacorn started projecting the shield again, the glow forming in front of the group like an automatic protective bubble.

  “Mommy, Poppa wants to massacre these people to protect Mommy.”

  Americ-Ana turned her face to him, and her firmness held no cruelty, only command.

  “No, Poppa.” She placed her hand on the top of his head, as if anchoring the instinct. “This time you’re going to be quiet. That’s an order.”

  Poppandacorn pouted. His little ears drooped against his will, and the LEDs in his eyes turned sad, almost wet with emoji, but he obeyed. The shield blinked out with a frustrated beep.

  “Okay…” he murmured, with the voice of someone holding back tears. “Poppa will stay quiet.”

  The scream cut through the fog again, like fate repeating its own line.

  “I KNEW IT!!!”

  The man with the torch appeared, pointing, panting, overtaken by a sick joy.

  “They were hiding the clown Scaramouche the whole time!” he bellowed. “Come! Get them all! Arrest the four for helping a criminal! Get Scaramouche and save the baby!”

  More torches appeared. More voices. The chorus spread like wildfire.

  “You’re all going to dance the Fandango!”

  Poppandacorn even lifted his hands to clap, out of reflex, but Americ-Ana only looked at him, and he swallowed the joy in his throat as if he’d swallowed the wrong candy.

  “It’s not a party…” he murmured, offended at the world.

  The crowd closed in fast. Spears. Swords. Torches. Firelight trembled over BAAL’s skin, and Americ-Ana felt the demon inside the Bugatti’s bodywork and inside her wanting to react, wanting to crush. She held it back. The order was different.

  Wwwyye tensed, ready for carnage, and then forced herself to lock her muscles. Her face looked like it was saying this went against nature.

  Astyam lifted his chin and spoke low, only for the three of them.

  “Now. We don’t react.”

  Americ-Ana stepped forward, meeting the man with the torch.

  “We’re not going to fight,” she said, and the words landed like stone. “Take us.”

  The crowd seemed to hesitate for an instant, as if the lack of resistance were a mistake. Then someone shouted louder, furious:

  “Rescue the baby!”

  Two hands tore the child from Scaramouche’s arms. The baby screamed, that sharp sound of panic filling the fog, and Scaramouche tried to lunge forward, but the crowd held him, wrenching his arms behind his back.

  “No!” he cried. “No, no, no!”

  “And the accomplices!” someone shouted. “They protected the murderer! Arrest the four!”

  Ropes appeared. Fast knots. Fists tightening. Americ-Ana felt her hands being bound, and BAAL’s skin drew tight over her like an irritated animal, but she kept control, breathing, obeying the plan.

  Wwwyye was tied up brutally. She snarled a curse, but she didn’t strike. Her eyes shone with restrained hatred, the kind of hatred that promised a reckoning, just not now.

  Astyam was pinned by too many hands. He didn’t resist, but he watched, storing everything like evidence.

  Poppandacorn was the hardest to watch. He trembled with the urge to protect, the shield shut down by order, his ears drooped, the pout still there, and even so he let them bind him, as if obedience were the harshest form of courage.

  “But Poppa…” he whispered. “Poppa wanted…”

  Americ-Ana tilted her face toward him, gentle enough not to break her own command.

  “I know.”

  Scaramouche was dragged along too, crying, repeating that he didn’t believe it, that it couldn’t be, and the crowd shouted over him as if shouting were truth.

  “Fandango!” they bellowed. “You’re all going to dance the Fandango!”

  And as they were hauled away from the Bugatti, with the baby already in the crowd’s arms and the torches carving a path through the fog, Americ-Ana felt a cold shiver. Not fear, but suspicion. As if the cube, somewhere unseen, had leaned in to watch more closely.

  The capture was complete.

  The cage came like humiliation made of wood. Thick planks, rough bars, ancient ironwork, and the smell of sweat trapped in fibers, as if that structure had been used for centuries to break people. A horse pulled it all, and the wagon creaked with every meter, groaning like a wounded animal.

  Americ-Ana was thrown inside with Astyam, Wwwyye, and Poppandacorn. The ropes bit into their wrists. BAAL’s skin tightened beneath the bindings, irritated, alive, wanting to react, but she kept control. Not from weakness, but from strategy.

  Scaramouche was shoved in right after, stumbling, and dropped to his knees inside the cage. Without the baby, he looked smaller, even at two meters and three hundred kilos. The absence weighed on him like a hole. He cried with that eternally open mouth, and the earthworms in the holes where his eyes should have been writhed as if they were sobbing too.

  Outside, the crowd followed like a procession of fire. Torches lit, spears raised, swords beating against improvised shields, and the same phrase repeated in chorus, as if it were the name of justice.

  “Fandango! You’re all going to dance the Fandango at Beelzebub's Tribunal!”

  Wwwyye dropped down hard against one of the planks and let out a short, bitter laugh.

  “What a lovely setting. We become accomplices and win a horse ride.”

  Astyam looked through the bars, trying to calculate time, distance, pattern. The floating panel was no longer visible from there, but he could still feel the 0 burning somewhere in the sky, like a reminder.

  “If this doesn’t unlock now, we’re going to keep getting dragged in circles until we lose our advantage,” he said, low.

  Americ-Ana stared at Scaramouche, who trembled and repeated phrases as if they were the only thing keeping him awake.

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” he kept saying, broken. “It was the little baby who killed him. I didn’t kill anyone. I wasn’t even there at the moment. I wasn’t there.”

  Wwwyye made a face.

  “Yeah. Great defense. ‘It wasn’t me, it was the newborn.’”

  Scaramouche shrank further, as if her irony were another torch.

  “I was doing something shameful,” he went on, desperate, as if that should be enough. “Terrible. I was doing something terrible. But I didn’t kill anyone.”

  Americ-Ana narrowed her eyes.

  “Doing what?”

  Scaramouche shook his head violently, the earthworms vibrating.

  “No. No. I can’t. I can’t say.”

  Astyam leaned in a little, his gaze setting disgust aside and going straight to the mechanics of what mattered.

  “Listen,” he said. “If you want to survive Beelzebub’s tribunal, you need a verifiable truth. If you weren’t with the baby at the moment, that’s an alibi. Can you prove it? Did anyone see you doing that… shameful thing?”

  Scaramouche pressed his enormous hands to his head, as if trying to hold his own nightmare in place.

  “I don’t believe this,” he whimpered. “I don’t believe this. I’m in a nightmare.”

  Wwwyye shrugged, impatient.

  “If he’d rather face all this than tell the truth, there’s nothing we can do.”

  Americ-Ana ignored the cynicism and pressed on, firm, because she had already understood that inside the Seractcube, the right kind of insistence is a key.

  “Is there a witness, Scaramouche?” she asked. “Someone who can say you were somewhere else, doing something else, and not with the baby?”

  The clown went still for an instant. The crying faltered, as if his mind had stumbled onto a possibility. He breathed heavy. The earthworms in the holes where his eyes should have been stopped for half a second, as if listening to a new thought.

  “There is,” he said, his voice trembling. “There is.”

  Astyam moved closer, intent.

  “Who?”

  Scaramouche swallowed hard, and the shame returned like a fever.

  “My parrot,” he confessed, as if it were too ridiculous to exist. “Galileo.”

  Poppandacorn, even tied up, opened his eyes with a spark of childlike enthusiasm.

  “A parrot,” he whispered, enchanted. “Poppa loves parrots.”

  Americ-Ana stayed focused.

  “Can Galileo confirm you were with him?”

  Scaramouche nodded, frantic.

  “He can tell them. He can testify in court. He was with me. Not with the little baby. He saw.”

  Astyam drew a deep breath, as if a piece had clicked into place.

  “Good. Then we need to bring this Galileo here.”

  Wwwyye let out a short laugh.

  “Sure. We’ll summon a parrot like he’s a lawyer.”

  Scaramouche looked at the torches outside and started trembling again.

  “He only comes if you call,” he said. “He only comes if you sing.”

  Americ-Ana frowned.

  “Sing what?”

  Scaramouche tried to speak, but his voice failed. His throat seemed locked by fear, by humiliation, by some inner loss the Seractcube had inflicted. He opened his mouth, and nothing came out but a weak, useless breath.

  “I… I lost,” he whispered, desperate. “I lost my voice.”

  Astyam caught the detail instantly.

  “So you know the call, but you can’t do it.”

  Scaramouche nodded, crying again.

  “It’s… it’s just… it’s just singing…” He tried, and failed. Shame crushed the attempt. He shook his head. “I can’t.”

  Americ-Ana looked at Poppandacorn. The little plush bear was tense, his ears still lowered from the earlier command, but his eyes had already turned into a stage.

  “Poppa,” Americ-Ana said. “Can you sing?”

  Poppandacorn puffed out his chest as if he’d just been promoted to the apocalypse’s official tenor.

  “Poppa can!” he said, excited, and then looked at Scaramouche with a funny kind of seriousness. “What’s the parrot’s song?”

  Scaramouche drew a deep breath, trembling, and forced the word out as if spitting courage.

  “Figaro,” he whispered. “You have to sing… ‘Figaro, Figaro, Figaro.’”

  Astyam confirmed it quickly, as if engraving it into memory.

  “Exactly like that. Don’t change it.”

  Poppandacorn rose inside the cage as best he could, even bound, and struck a theatrical pose, tilting his body as if wearing an invisible cape. He lifted one of his little paws, dramatic, and breathed like an opera singer before the first act.

  Wwwyye’s eyes widened.

  “You’re going to sing opera now. In a cage. On the way to Beelzebub’s tribunal.”

  Poppandacorn nodded with absurd dignity.

  “Yes.” He made a solemn pout. “Because Poppa is an artist.”

  Americ-Ana almost smiled, but held it back. This was serious. This was a key.

  Poppandacorn opened his mouth and sang, loud enough to pierce the planks and the shame.

  “Figaro, Figaro, Figaro!”

  The word echoed through the cage like a command. It didn’t feel like singing anymore, it felt like a passcode.

  And the Seractcube answered.

  A beating of wings cut through the fog above the wagon. A colorful shape appeared, circling with far too much precision to be an ordinary bird. It dropped down and perched on one of the cage bars, close enough to be touched, its eyes bright and intelligent, as if it understood absolutely everything.

  Galileo.

  Scaramouche sobbed, relieved and terrified.

  “He came,” he whispered, as if he couldn’t believe it.

  Astyam fixed his gaze on the parrot, then on the world around them, as if he were watching the level’s invisible geometry reveal itself.

  “This is the Seractcube,” he said, and his voice changed, clearer, sharper. “Look at what just happened.”

  Wwwyye frowned.

  “A parrot showed up. I’m looking.”

  Astyam didn’t get irritated. He was inside the right line of reasoning.

  “In the previous scene, the crowd was the ‘without’, the external judgment trying to crush the ‘within’.” He tipped his chin toward Scaramouche. “Now the ‘within’ materializes as proof. An external witness that corresponds to an internal state. As within, so without. His truth has to become evidence on their stage.”

  Americ-Ana felt a shiver. The same clicking-into-place sensation as before.

  “The Law…” she murmured.

  Astyam nodded.

  “Correspondence.”

  The instant the word left his mouth with its full meaning, Galileo began to glow.

  The light started in the parrot’s eyes and spread through the feathers, a white, clean radiance, almost sacred, that lit the cage from the inside and made the torches outside look small. The crowd’s chorus fell away, muffled, as if the cube had pulled the sound back to listen more closely to the only thing that mattered.

  In the air above them, letters appeared, firm, without hesitation, like a decree written into space itself:

  CORRESPONDENCE

  The word hovered for a second, turned, and came apart into luminous particles. The particles compressed, darkened, took shape, like metal being born from light.

  A fragment of RONOVE’s seal.

  Wwwyye let out a laugh that, this time, had joy in it.

  “Ah, finally.”

  Americ-Ana held out her bound hands, and the fragment descended as if it knew where to land. She caught it carefully, feeling the cold weight, the living presence of the symbol.

  Poppandacorn nearly burst with happiness.

  “Poppa!” he said, wriggling as best he could, trying to reach with his little belly. “Poppa will store it! Poppa will store it with the other one!”

  Astyam nodded, urgent.

  “Store it. Now.”

  Poppandacorn opened the compartment in his abdomen with an eager beep, and Americ-Ana placed the new fragment inside. The second clicked in beside the first, as if the pieces recognized each other. Poppandacorn closed the little flap with reverent care, as if locking away a king’s secret.

  “Two little seals,” he whispered, proud. “Two.”

  Galileo’s glow dimmed slowly, the parrot still perched on one of the cage’s wooden bars, watching as if he were judge and witness at the same time.

  Outside, the crowd was still shouting things about Fandango and punishment, but the cage seemed, for an instant, to have become a small world of its own, protected by the logic of the Seven Laws of the Universe.

  Americ-Ana drew a deep breath, and hope fit back inside her chest, with shape.

  The second layer had given way.

  And there, with the horse pulling the cage onward and Beelzebub’s tribunal waiting on the fog horizon, they went on.

  When the haze parted, it was as if the world had become an amphitheater of condemnation.

  The tribunal was a large circular space, improvised in wood and stone, with crooked bleachers and a floor stained by old stories no one there would call a crime, only a spectacle. Torches burned on every side, spitting smoke and orange light, and the crowd packed the edges as if it were a single hungry body, ready to devour whatever they were offered.

  Americ-Ana, Astyam, Wwwyye, Poppandacorn, and Scaramouche were shoved into a waiting area, a kind of low pen where prisoners were kept in full view, like animals before slaughter. The parrot Galileo was there too, perched with the insolent calm of someone who fears no judges, sometimes on a bar, sometimes on Scaramouche’s shoulder, watching everything with bright eyes.

  The baby was no longer with them.

  That absence felt like an echo, and every time Americ-Ana remembered the crying being ripped away by force, her stomach tightened all over again.

  “Look at that,” Astyam murmured, tipping his chin.

  At the center, there was a dais. Above it, an elevated place where the judge emerged like a shadow with a voice. It didn’t require many details, the presence was enough, a figure wrapped in symbolic weight, climbing with calm, as if ascending not to decide, but to ignite the crowd.

  Another defendant was already being brought to the center, stumbling, bound, his face lost somewhere between fear and disbelief. Guards positioned him before the people like an object meant for demonstration.

  The crowd began to shout.

  “FANDANGO! FANDANGO! FANDANGO!”

  The word didn’t sound like dance. It sounded like sentence.

  The judge raised his hand and the noise didn’t diminish, it only arranged itself, as if it obeyed the gesture by instinct.

  He spoke, and his voice crossed the space like a hammer striking metal. The judge presented the defendant’s crime to the crowd, without it mattering exactly what it was. There, the crime was only the excuse. What mattered was the collective hunger for an ending.

  “FANDANGO! FANDANGO! FANDANGO!” the people insisted, stamping their feet, shaking torches, shouting as if they wanted to feel their own shouting on their skin.

  Then the judge opened his arms, theatrical, and addressed the crowd as if he were addressing the Seractcube itself.

  “You are the jurors. What do you choose? Bismillah, he lives. Beelzebub, he dies.”

  A roar ran through the tribunal, split, unstable.

  The judge raised his hand again.

  “Bismillah or Beelzebub?”

  The crowd exploded, and this time there was no division.

  “BEELZEBUB!” they screamed, crazed, as if condemnation were a prize. “BEELZEBUB!”

  The defendant tried to speak, tried to breathe, tried to exist, but the guards were already moving. They seized him with cold efficiency and dragged him to a gallows.

  Wwwyye let out a low curse, almost respectful in the face of that brutality.

  “They do it right here.”

  The defendant was positioned beneath the beam. The rope dropped. The knot was adjusted with the calm of someone tying a necktie.

  The crowd shouted.

  “FANDANGO! FANDANGO! FANDANGO!”

  And then they pulled.

  The body rose. The neck locked. The air said no.

  For one terrible instant, everything felt too silent, as if even the torches had held their breath. Then the movement came. The man’s legs began to thrash in the void, a grotesque ballet, spasms, aimless kicks, his feet searching for ground where there was no ground anymore.

  Astyam spoke low, without taking his eyes off the scene, like someone teaching a lesson inside hell.

  “This is the ‘hemp fandango’.” His voice came dry. “They call it Fandango because it’s the ‘dance’ the body does when it’s hanged. The sway, the kicks, desperation turning into motion.”

  Americ-Ana felt her blood go cold.

  Poppandacorn grabbed her hand with his little paws, squeezing hard, as if plush could protect them from what was being learned there.

  “Mommy…” His voice trembled, too small for that place. “Poppa doesn’t want to dance Fandango anymore.”

  Americ-Ana squeezed his hand back. There was no promise worth making in that moment. Only presence.

  The crowd, instead of being horrified, seemed to be celebrating. They shouted even louder, as if that final convulsion truly were a performance. The torches rose and fell, and the whole tribunal felt like a collective throat swallowing the scene with pleasure.

  The judge waited until the body went heavy, until the movement dwindled, until the spectacle ended.

  Then he raised his arm again, indifferent, as if it had been nothing but an intermission.

  “Next case,” he announced, and his voice made the crowd lean forward, hungry for more.

  Americ-Ana felt Scaramouche trembling behind her. The clown whimpered, repeating that he didn’t believe it, that it couldn’t be, but the crowd was already ready to call another name.

  The judge looked at the guards, and the next sentence came like steel.

  “Scaramouche.”

  The name dropped into the tribunal like a bone thrown to a pack.

  The torches flickered, and the crowd answered with an immediate roar, a chorus of boos, whistles, and curses spat out with relish. Guards cut a path like people shoving an animal into the center of the circle. Scaramouche was yanked forward, stumbling, his enormous body shaking, the black holes where his eyes should have been turned toward everyone and no one at the same time.

  Galileo was on his shoulder, steady, alive, glowing with an almost offensive calm, as if the bird recognized no authority in any torch.

  When Scaramouche reached the center, someone threw something. Then another. Small objects, bits of wood, rotten fruit, trash. The clown shrank in on himself, trying to protect his impossible face, and whimpered, unable to close that mouth of long teeth.

  The judge appeared at the dais as if he had been born from it. He climbed with slow steps, and the noise changed texture, less scattered, more cruel, as if everyone were waiting for the same moment, the same question.

  “FANDANGO! FANDANGO! FANDANGO!” the crowd screamed, already salivating for the next hanging.

  The judge raised his hand. The chorus didn’t stop, it only rearranged itself. He spoke over the shouting, as if the shouting were part of the process.

  “Scaramouche,” he repeated, and now the word sounded like a title of condemnation. “What do you have to say in your defense?”

  Scaramouche opened his arms, a huge and pathetic gesture, as if he were embracing his own ruin. His voice came through the earthworms, trembling, broken, and still carrying a desperate sincerity.

  “I’m just a poor boy, nobody loves me.”

  The crowd answered with fury, as if the line were insolence.

  “Liar!”

  “Murderer!”

  “FANDANGO!”

  Scaramouche shook his head, crying, and tried to shout over them.

  “I never killed a man!” he said, his voice failing at the end. “It was the little baby who killed the man!”

  The tribunal erupted.

  It was as if gasoline had been poured down the collective throat. Torches lifted at the same time. The sound became a storm of hatred, and Americ-Ana felt her chest tighten. Not for the clown, but for the certainty that here truth had no weight, only volume.

  Astyam leaned in close to her, fast, urgent, speaking only for the three of them.

  “If it stays like this, it’s over,” he said. “There’s only accusation. There’s only condemnation. They’ll shout Beelzebub and that’s it.”

  Wwwyye clenched her teeth, her eyes fixed on the judge as if she wanted to pierce the wood with her stare.

  “And what do you want us to do? Climb up there and fight the whole tribunal?”

  “No,” Astyam said. “We don’t fight the crowd. We introduce the opposite pole.”

  Americ-Ana understood before he finished. She looked at Galileo on Scaramouche’s shoulder, and the piece clicked into place with that electric sensation the Seractcube loved to trigger.

  “A witness,” she said.

  Astyam nodded.

  “Exactly. This level is calling for the Law of Polarity.” He tipped his chin toward the tribunal. “Look at what’s happening. They’ve turned everything into a binary, acquittal or condemnation, Bismillah or Beelzebub, mercy or gallows. But right now only one side is active, the side of hate. If we want to unlock it, we have to make the other force exist in here, the other end of the same thread.”

  Wwwyye gave a crooked laugh, without humor.

  “So we’re going to put love in the middle of these people.”

  “It doesn’t have to be love,” Astyam said. “It has to be the functional opposite. Defense. Counterproof. A second pole capable of pulling the scene toward a different balance. Polarity isn’t poetry, it’s mechanism.”

  Poppandacorn, still scared, pressed his bound little paws together as if it were prayer.

  “Galileo,” he whispered, looking at the parrot. “Poppa likes Galileo.”

  Astyam drew a deep breath and finished, like someone driving a nail into the center of the board.

  “Without a witness, the world in here stays stuck on one pole. With a witness, the other pole is born, and the Seractcube recognizes the principle.”

  The instant the word took on its full meaning, the air changed.

  Galileo took off from the clown’s shoulder and landed where the three of them were, and then he began to glow.

  The light started inside the parrot, as if the feathers were filling with a white sun, and then the radiance spread, lighting the cage, the ropes, Americ-Ana’s face, and even the fog high above the tribunal. For a second, the torches looked small, as if human fire were a poor imitation of that flare.

  In the air above them, letters appeared, hard and lucid, without hesitation, as if the Seractcube were writing with the tip of a blade:

  POLARITY

  The word hovered, turned, and broke apart into particles. The particles compressed, darkened, gained weight, until they became metal, symbol, fragment.

  A third piece of RONOVE’s seal.

  Poppandacorn let out a high sound of nervous happiness, and his LED eyes exploded into hearts and warning icons at the same time.

  “Poppa,” he said, almost voiceless. “Another one! Another one!”

  Americ-Ana drew the fragment close with as much care as she could manage within the ropes, feeling the cold weight settle into her palm. She passed it to Poppandacorn as best she could, and the little bear, with a theatrical wriggle of effort, opened the compartment in his belly with an eager beep and stored the third fragment with the other two, as if locking away a royal treasure.

  “Three little seals,” Poppandacorn whispered, proud, his ears trembling. “Poppa is a powerful vault.”

  Wwwyye didn’t wait any longer.

  She stood up inside the cage, ignoring the risk, and shouted loud enough to tear through the chaos and reach the dais.

  “JUDGE!”

  The crowd hissed, some turning their faces, irritated by the interruption, but Wwwyye had the kind of voice that cut through fire.

  “THERE’S A WITNESS!” She tipped her chin toward the center. “The parrot Galileo! He can say that, at the moment of the crime, Scaramouche was with him, not with the little baby!”

  The tribunal shuddered at the new information, as if someone had thrown a stone into a lake of hate.

  The tribunal hung in a different kind of silence, an unstable silence, as if the crowd were holding back its own instinct out of curiosity. Galileo, still faintly glowing from within, spread his wings and flew.

  He cut across the central space like a living blade, landed near Scaramouche, and then moved farther, straight into the center of the circle, where everyone could see him. The parrot tilted his head, regarded the judge as if judging a statue, and spoke with a clarity too sharp for a bird.

  “Scaramouche didn’t kill the man.”

  A roar swept through the bleachers. Torches rose and fell, voices tripping over each other, as if every throat wanted to be the first to crush that sentence.

  “Lie!”

  “False!”

  “FANDANGO!”

  The judge raised his hand, and the noise, instead of dying, snapped into organized fury.

  “Parrot Galileo,” the judge’s voice came cold, cutting. “How do you know that?”

  Galileo didn’t hesitate.

  “Because Scaramouche was with me.”

  The crowd erupted again, and this time the sound felt like a wall moving. Scaramouche trembled at the center, his long teeth exposed in a smile that wasn’t a smile, only desperation. The earthworms in the holes where his eyes should have been writhed as if they wanted to hide inside his own skull.

  The judge leaned forward a little on the dais, interested, dangerous.

  “With you,” he repeated, slowly, as if chewing the word. “Then tell the tribunal. What was Scaramouche doing?”

  The question landed with weight. The crowd leaned in like a single organism, hungry, wanting the truth.

  Galileo turned his head toward Scaramouche.

  The clown was crying. Shaking. His enormous body seemed small in that instant, crushed under expectation. He shook his head in silent denial, begging without words. Pure shame.

  Galileo lowered his head.

  And stayed silent.

  The tribunal reacted as if the silence were provocation. The chorus returned, louder, more violent, almost triumphant.

  “BEELZEBUB!”

  “FANDANGO!”

  “LIAR!”

  The judge waited just long enough for the parrot’s silence to turn into public guilt.

  “Then listen well.” The judge’s voice came louder now, and each syllable felt like a step toward the gallows. “If you don’t say what Scaramouche was doing, you don’t only condemn the defendant to the Fandango.”

  The crowd howled, anticipating.

  “You also condemn yourself for bearing false witness.”

  Torches shook in the air. The tribunal vibrated. The words “false witness” were received like a gift, like the perfect excuse to kill one more.

  Galileo stayed silent.

  The judge nodded, as if he had just been given the answer he wanted.

  “Beelzebub,” he declared, simple, final. “For the bird.”

  The uproar turned into euphoria. Guards moved toward the center, arms out, hands ready to seize Galileo the way you seize inconvenient evidence.

  Scaramouche saw the guards closing in and snapped.

  He screamed with a sound that felt torn from somewhere inside his ribs.

  “FINE!” Scaramouche shouted, his voice breaking and returning, desperate. “FINE! I’LL SAY IT! BUT PLEASE, DON’T KILL GALILEO!”

  The crowd, in a rare phenomenon, didn’t fall silent out of pity. It fell silent out of curiosity. Out of the same hunger that made them scream. Out of the need to hear the shameful part.

  The guards stopped mid-step.

  The judge raised an eyebrow, and the entire tribunal seemed to hold its breath.

  Scaramouche trembled so violently it looked like his body might come apart. He tried to speak, choked, and the shame was a physical thing, a hand tightening around his throat.

  “I wasn’t with the little baby,” he said, the words jolting out. “The little baby was alone with the man. I was… I was…”

  He swallowed hard. His long teeth flashed in the torchlight. The earthworms writhed as if they could feel the humiliation before he could.

  “I was…” Scaramouche repeated, and couldn’t finish.

  The tribunal’s silence turned even crueler.

  Everything waited. Everything demanded.

  And Scaramouche, at the center of the circle, shaking under thousands of eyes, looked ready to die not by the rope, but by the truth he didn’t want to say.

  It was in that interval, in that hungry silence, that Americ-Ana felt the opening.

  It wasn’t a gap in the crowd. It was a gap in the focus.

  Everyone was watching Scaramouche. Everyone was waiting for the unspoken word, the sentence that would make the tribunal explode into acquittal or condemnation. The judge leaned in, the guards hung suspended, and even the torches seemed frozen in the air.

  Americ-Ana looked down at the ropes on her wrists and let BAAL answer.

  The demonic skin moved with an intimate slide, scales rearranging like blades beneath the surface. A low snap, almost imperceptible. The ropes loosened as if they had suddenly rotted. She slipped free without fanfare, without drawing attention, as if she had always been free.

  Astyam noticed at once. His gaze met hers and he nodded a single time, dry, understanding the plan before it even existed in full.

  Americ-Ana touched his bindings. BAAL did the same work. Another snap. Another knot giving way.

  Wwwyye was the third. She felt the rope drop and almost let out a loud curse, but she bit the sound back between her teeth, her eyes shining with a kind of dangerous joy.

  “Hey,” she whispered, hoarse. “What are you doing?”

  “Follow me,” Americ-Ana answered, barely moving her lips. “Now.”

  Poppandacorn was trembling, still bound, his LED eyes flashing warnings, his body ready to raise a shield and turn into war. Americ-Ana loosened the last knot with a touch, and the little bear breathed as if he’d been pulled from underwater.

  “Mommy…” he whispered, his worried pout already forming. “Can Poppa massacre?”

  Americ-Ana touched the top of his head lightly, firm, a simple command.

  “Not now.”

  Poppandacorn’s ears drooped against his will. He made a face like he might cry, but he obeyed, swallowing the urge to protect the way you swallow a scream.

  The cell’s bars were only a few steps away. The guards who were supposed to be watching had their necks craned toward the center, hypnotized by the clown’s shame. The whole tribunal was distracted, trapped in anticipation.

  BAAL shifted again.

  The latch creaked, a small sound swallowed by the larger silence of judgment. The wood gave with the docility of a door that had always wanted to be opened. Americ-Ana pushed just enough to slip through and stepped out low and fast, without drawing attention.

  Astyam came right behind her, controlled, his mind working even as his feet moved.

  Wwwyye followed with her body taut, ready to kill if anyone noticed, but smart enough not to spend that resource before the right moment.

  Poppandacorn stuck to Americ-Ana like a plush shadow, trotting with effort to keep up, his little arms spread in the reflex to form a shield, but holding back by order.

  They crossed along the tribunal’s edge, hiding behind bodies, torches, planks, shadows. The crowd was a wall, and also a curtain. No one looked at them, because the center was a magnet.

  Scaramouche was still there, trembling, choking, trapped in his own “I was… I was…” as if the final word were a blade pressed to his throat.

  Americ-Ana scanned the crowd for the one element holding that hysteria together.

  The baby.

  She found it.

  The child was with a woman in the middle of the crowd, pressed to her chest as if it were trophy and proof at the same time. The woman looked stunned, staring at the judge, at Scaramouche, at the gallows, as if everything were too large to fit inside her head.

  Americ-Ana didn’t ask permission. She moved in.

  The woman’s eyes went wide.

  “Hey, what are you—”

  Americ-Ana took the baby in one quick, firm motion. The woman tried to hold on, but BAAL’s strength came like a blunt shove, enough to knock her down without making a spectacle.

  The baby whimpered, restless, and Americ-Ana held him tight, the small weight suddenly feeling far too dangerous.

  Wwwyye came up behind her, shocked, outraged, whispering with anger.

  “Hey… what are you doing? Have you lost your mind? You’re kidnapping a baby in the middle of the tribunal!”

  “Follow me,” Americ-Ana repeated, not taking her eyes off the path. “We need to do something.”

  Astyam looked around, measuring routes, measuring time, measuring risk. He understood before he asked.

  “You’re going to take him to the dais,” he whispered, and it wasn’t a question, it was a conclusion.

  Americ-Ana nodded.

  “If this tribunal is a theater, then truth only shows up onstage,” she said. “And the Seractcube likes truth that’s dragged out by force.”

  Poppandacorn looked at the baby and then at Americ-Ana, with a childlike fear that was trying to turn into courage.

  “Mommy… is the little baby evil?” he whispered, almost voiceless.

  “I don’t know,” Americ-Ana answered, and her honesty came like a blade. “But I know he’s the key.”

  She drew a deep breath, tightened her hold on the baby, and started moving toward the dais, taking advantage of the fact that everyone was still caught in Scaramouche’s choke.

  There at the center, the clown trembled, and the tribunal waited.

  And Americ-Ana, with the baby in her arms, could already feel that the next step wasn’t going to be natural.

  The sound that tore through the silence didn’t come from the judge. It came from Scaramouche. A raw, desperate shout, as if someone had ripped the lid off his chest by force.

  “FINE!” he bellowed, his voice loud enough to cut across the entire tribunal. “DON’T KILL GALILEO! HE WAS WITH ME!”

  Torches tilted. Guards froze. The crowd, which had been a sea, became a single face.

  Scaramouche swallowed hard, trembling, and then, as if he were spitting out his own soul, threw the alibi onto everyone.

  “I wasn’t with the little baby! The little baby was alone with the man!” He gasped, shame already forming like a rope around his neck. “I was… I was…”

  The entire tribunal held its breath, and even the judge seemed to choke too soon.

  Scaramouche clenched his enormous fists. The earthworms in the holes where his eyes should have been writhed, as if they wanted to escape the world. Then he shouted the sentence that destroyed him.

  “I was trying on the judge’s wife’s red high heeled shoes!”

  The reaction came like a wave.

  A total shock, a collective “Oooohhhhh,” pure scandal.

  The judge choked for real, his mouth opening and closing as if searching for a sentence and finding only disbelief.

  Scaramouche, now that he had fallen into the abyss, decided to take one more step inside it, maybe out of desperation, maybe out of a newly discovered freedom.

  “That’s right!” he shouted, his voice trembling somewhere between humiliation and relief. “I took the judge’s wife’s red high heeled shoes and put them on my little feet!” He shook his head, as if apologizing for existing and, at the same time, refusing to take it back. “They looked beautiful. I felt alive. I felt free for the first time!”

  The tribunal didn’t know what to do with that. The crowd hesitated. The judge remained rigid, as if his authority had been wounded by an absurd object, and that indecision, that collective lock, became the perfect curtain.

  Americ-Ana moved again.

  She was only a few steps from the dais. The baby writhed in her arms, restless, as if he could no longer stand being carried as a symbol. Americ-Ana tightened her hold, trying to steady the small body, and murmured in a low urgency, as if she could bargain with the impossible.

  “Easy. Just one more second.”

  It didn’t help.

  The baby twisted with too much force, a small weight, but stubborn. He slipped through her arms, and Americ-Ana tried to catch him, but surprise was faster.

  “My God, little baby…”

  He fell.

  But he didn’t fall like a baby. The small body went down, touched the floor, and instead of collapsing on impact, it landed on its feet, rigid, upright, as if the ground recognized it and held it the right way.

  Americ-Ana froze for an instant. Astyam’s eyes widened, as if the Seractcube had finally revealed the trick in the middle of the show. Wwwyye let out a muffled sound, a near curse that turned into silence. Poppandacorn, without realizing it, opened his little arms in a reflex of protection, but he didn’t activate a shield, because Americ-Ana had ordered him not to.

  The baby stayed still just long enough to feel like it was choosing.

  Then it began to walk. Short steps, steady, no stumbling, like someone who had done it many times before.

  Up until then, the crowd had been distracted by Scaramouche. But then, a woman in the middle of the bleachers pointed and screamed:

  “LOOK! THE BABY IS WALKING!”

  The entire tribunal turned its face at once. Torches flickered. Guards hesitated, unable to decide whether that was blasphemy or command. The judge, still choking on the scandal of the shoes, now stared at something worse, something that fit into no law at all.

  The baby walked to the dais, and no one dared to touch it. It climbed the steps with the natural ease of someone who had always known where it belonged, and when it reached the top, before the judge, it turned to the people, as if demanding a full audience.

  Down below, a woman, the same one who had been holding the child, seemed paralyzed by fear and disbelief.

  The baby looked at her.

  And the voice that came out was not the voice of a newborn. It was clear. Direct. Far too familiar.

  “Mama, just killed a man…”

  The sentence hit the tribunal like thunder. The woman’s eyes went wide and she crumpled, fainting on the spot. Some people clapped hands over their mouths, others recoiled, and some even got sick, as if reality had become impossible to bear, heavy, hard to swallow.

  Americ-Ana climbed up with Astyam and Wwwyye, fast, and Poppandacorn stuck close behind, his LED eyes flashing warnings and panic, not knowing whether that was the enemy confessing or the world splitting in half.

  The baby began to glow.

  The light began in the baby’s small chest and burst white, hard, illuminating the dais and the bleachers, making the torches look like toys. Above him, letters appeared in the air, firm, inevitable, like a sentence written by the cube itself.

  CAUSE AND EFFECT

  Wwwyye laughed, short, like someone finally spotting a door in the middle of a labyrinth.

  “This one’s easy.”

  She pointed at the baby, at the crowd, at the judge, at Scaramouche still trembling down below, and her voice went sharp, direct, without poetry, the way the Seractcube respected.

  “The cause was the baby alone with the man,” she said, and the silence began to obey. “The effect was all of this. The accusation, the tribunal, the threat, the gallows, the panic, the scandal, our escape, the clown being crushed by shame. Everything is consequence stacked on consequence. And now the effect is confessing its own cause.”

  The word in the air turned, broke into particles, and the particles compressed, darkened, gained weight, until they became metal, symbol, fragment.

  Another piece of RONOVE’s seal.

  Poppandacorn hopped with nervous joy, as if the death and the theater around them were nothing but a stage backdrop.

  “Poppa catches it!” he yelled, and jumped high enough to snatch the fragment out of the air. A satisfied beep popped open the compartment in his little belly, and he tucked the new piece in with the others, closing it like someone locking away a relic.

  “Four little seals,” he whispered, trembling with pride. “Four.”

  The baby’s light dimmed slowly, but the tribunal didn’t return to normal.

  The silence that remained wasn’t peace. It was suspension, as if everyone were waiting for someone to say what the rule was now, after a newborn climbed a dais, walked like an adult, and confessed a murder in a man’s voice.

  Astyam was the first to move.

  He crossed the central space without haste, but with purpose, stepping between torches and shadows as if he were crossing a stage that needed direction. He stopped before the dais and lifted his face to the judge.

  “Give the final verdict,” Astyam said, clear. “The tribunal is stalled. The people are stalled. And we don’t have time.”

  The judge took time to answer, as if he were hearing that sentence from very far away. His eyes moved over the crowd, over the guards, over the gallows still standing there, over the body still swinging in recent memory, and finally settled on the baby.

  When the judge spoke, his voice didn’t come like a hammer. It came like exhaustion.

  “You ask for a verdict as if the world were still in order,” he said, and an uneasy murmur ran through the bleachers. “But look around. What happened here today no longer fits inside my ritual.”

  He drew a deep breath, as if trying to reorganize his own authority inside his chest.

  “Scaramouche was brought to be condemned,” he went on, and the clown’s name made a few people boo on reflex. “The people wanted Fandango. Wanted Beelzebub. Wanted rope, wanted feet swinging, wanted punishment.”

  His voice slowed, heavier.

  “But then the accusation slipped through our fingers,” the judge said. “The parrot spoke. The clown confessed his shame. And the baby…” He looked at the baby again, and his face hardened with awe. “The baby claimed the crime in front of everyone.”

  The crowd stirred, unable to accept its own symbolic defeat. Some shouted, others only trembled, as if the ground had changed texture.

  The judge raised his hand, asking for silence, but it wasn’t command anymore. It was a request.

  “Then tell me,” he said, and his voice cut through the turmoil. “Whose arms am I supposed to send them into? Bismillah’s or Beelzebub’s? A clown who didn’t kill, a parrot who told the truth, and a baby who confessed with his own mouth.”

  He laughed, short, dry, with no humor in it.

  “Nothing really matters,” the judge declared, and this time the entire tribunal seemed to understand it wasn’t a pretty line, it was surrender. “What mattered was the ritual. And the ritual broke.”

  Astyam stood still, taking it in, as if the Seractcube itself had just handed them the final bar of the song without playing any music at all.

  Americ-Ana stepped closer, alongside Wwwyye, and spoke low, for the two of them, but with the precision of someone who understood the mechanism behind the theater.

  “It’s the Principle of Rhythm. Another Law of the Universe,” she said.

  Wwwyye narrowed her eyes.

  “Rhythm?”

  Americ-Ana nodded, and her voice came firm, practical.

  “Everything here has been a pendulum,” she explained. “Judgment and chaos. Condemnation and doubt. Shouting and silence. The tribunal swinging, trying to hold itself in a fixed position. But there is no fixed, not here. The pendulum always returns. And when it returns, you don’t defeat the motion, you accept the motion.”

  Astyam looked at the judge, and understanding appeared on his face like a piece clicking into place.

  “The judge is at the point of return,” he murmured. “He’s not acquitting or condemning. He’s accepting that the cycle they created swallowed its own rule.”

  “Exactly,” Americ-Ana said. “Nothing really matters. That’s the sound of the pendulum reaching the end of its arc and letting the body go slack before the next swing.”

  The instant she finished, the judge brought a hand to his chest as if he’d felt a blow from within.

  A light began to shine there, small at first, then stronger, as if something were being written under his skin. The crowd took a step back on instinct, fearing another blasphemy.

  In the air above the judge, letters appeared, clean and inevitable:

  RHYTHM

  The word hovered for a second, like a sentence that didn’t need a gallows.

  Then it turned, broke into particles, and the particles compressed, darkened, gained weight, until they became metal, symbol, fragment.

  Another piece of RONOVE’s seal.

  Poppandacorn gave an automatic little hop, as if his body knew before his mind did.

  “Poppa!” he said, and leapt, catching the fragment with both little paws. The compartment in his belly popped open with a satisfied beep, and he tucked the new piece in with the others, closing it carefully, like someone locking away a secret.

  He looked at Americ-Ana, his LED eyes trembling between pride and fear, and whispered:

  “Now there are five.”

  Then Scaramouche, still at the center, swallowed the silence for a second, as if he’d chewed it with anger, and then exploded. His enormous body rose in a way that made the crowd recoil on instinct, as if it remembered too late that this clown was two meters tall and far too heavy to be treated like a joke.

  “So that’s it?” he roared, his voice coming in waves, thick, torn, with an indignation so pure it was almost childlike. “You dragged me to the gallows. You shouted my name like a curse. You wanted to see my feet swinging as a spectacle.” He pointed toward the bleachers with a heavy hand, shaking. “And now, because the truth showed up, you think it all simply ends?”

  The black holes where eyes should have been seemed deeper. The earthworms writhed, and the fixed smile, full of pointed teeth, became a mask of hate.

  “You think you can humiliate me and then pretend it was nothing?” he shouted. “So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye, and then go home as if I were just a theater act?”

  The crowd stirred, some in fury, others in fear, and the judge remained rigid, as if his body were still trying to decide whether that was crime, blasphemy, or just another crack in the ritual.

  Wwwyye stepped forward before anyone had the stupid idea of trying to silence Scaramouche by force. Her voice cut through the noise like a blade.

  “I know what to do.”

  She turned her face to Americ-Ana and Astyam, and her gaze was lit, practical, fierce.

  “That’s it. That’s the energy that’s missing.”

  Astyam narrowed his eyes, seeing the path with the speed of someone who had studied too much to die over a detail.

  Americ-Ana didn’t say anything, but nodded. Her body, covered in BAAL’s skin, looked ready for anything, and her mind looked even more ready.

  Wwwyye approached Scaramouche without fear, like someone who faces a monster and decides the monster is going to be useful.

  “Big guy,” she said, firm, without irony this time. “You have every right to rebel.”

  Scaramouche turned his face toward her, trembling with rage and shame at the same time, as if his own chest were trying to tear the costume apart from the inside.

  Wwwyye kept the exact distance not to become a target, but close enough to be heard as truth.

  “They want you to accept it,” she went on, and then she turned slightly, aiming the same sentence at Americ-Ana and Astyam, as if drawing an invisible triangle in the air. “They want you to be nothing but disposable guilt. The clown the people can scream at and feel clean. But this doesn’t unlock with you accepting it on their terms. It unlocks when you create something new.”

  Astyam drew a deep breath, and his face took on that clicked-in look, when a Law finally locks into the scene.

  “The Principle of Gender,” he murmured.

  Wwwyye pointed at him, satisfied.

  “That.” She turned her eyes back to Scaramouche. “Gender isn’t about labels, it’s about generative force. It’s when two currents collide and a third thing is born. You were crushed by shame, by judgment, by the entire mass of this tribunal.” She opened her hands, as if showing the invisible pendulum. “Now you have a choice: become leftovers, or become birth.”

  Scaramouche panted. His enormous shoulders rose and fell, as if the air were too heavy to enter.

  “I…” he tried, but the word stuck.

  Wwwyye didn’t let him fall back into the pit.

  “You want justice?” she asked, and her voice dropped lower, more dangerous. “Then stop begging for it. Generate. Create. Tear apart the role they handed you.”

  Scaramouche trembled, and for an instant it looked like the monstrous clown was going to collapse into tears again.

  Instead, he clenched his fists.

  And something inside him changed.

  The light began in the clown’s chest like an ember catching under soaked fabric. Small, insistent, impossible to ignore. The crowd noticed and recoiled in waves, as if fear itself were a shove.

  The light grew.

  Scaramouche arched his body backward, not in pain, but in birth, as if shame itself were being turned into fuel.

  In the air above his chest, letters appeared, sharp, inevitable:

  GENDER

  The word hung there, shining like a sentence that didn’t need a judge. Then it turned, snapped in the air like cooling metal, and broke into particles that compressed, darkened, gained weight.

  It became a fragment.

  Another piece of RONOVE’s seal.

  Poppandacorn couldn’t take it. His little body shot into an automatic hop, as if joy were an electric reflex.

  “Poppa!” he said, and jumped high enough to snatch the fragment out of the air with both little paws. The compartment in his belly popped open with a satisfied beep, and he tucked the new piece in with the others, closing it carefully.

  He looked at Americ-Ana, too proud to fit inside his own plush, and whispered:

  “Now there are six.”

  And around them, the entire tribunal seemed to hold its breath, because Scaramouche’s revolt wasn’t over, it had only just taken shape.

  Suddenly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the baby came down from the dais walking calmly and went to Scaramouche.

  There was no hurry in him. There was direction.

  In his small hands, he carried something impossible to ignore, a pair of red high-heeled shoes, shining as if freshly polished. The red was so vivid it seemed to mock the torches, as if saying: I exist even here.

  The baby stopped in front of the clown and held the shoes out.

  And then, with the same absurd clarity with which he had confessed, he apologized. His voice came out simple, without theater, as if the world itself were trying to correct what it had done.

  Scaramouche stood still.

  His body, so enormous, seemed to hesitate like a child. The earthworms in the holes where his eyes should have been writhed slowly, and the fixed, tooth-filled smile lost its hate for a second, becoming only the fear of accepting what he wanted to accept.

  The crowd murmured. Some laughed nervously. Others made sounds of disgust. The judge said nothing, but the rigidity of his body gave away that it hit him.

  Scaramouche looked at the shoes as if they were a trap.

  Then Astyam stepped forward one pace, his voice firm, like someone giving instructions inside a ritual.

  “Accept it,” he said.

  Scaramouche turned his face toward him, trembling.

  “Accept the red high-heeled shoes,” Astyam went on, without raising his voice, but placing each word like a nail. “Put them on. And dance for us, but not the Fandango. Not that rope-dance of humiliation and death.” He pointed at the gallows with the smallest gesture. “Dance with your soul.”

  Wwwyye crossed her arms, and for the first time her sarcasm didn’t come like a blade, it came like disguised respect.

  “Go on, big guy,” she said, almost gentle. “You’ve already been through hell, now at least strut pretty.”

  Americ-Ana didn’t say anything. She only watched Scaramouche with a hard attention, as if she knew that gesture could be the last key.

  Scaramouche drew a deep breath. His chest rose as if it might explode. And then, slowly, like someone accepting a sentence and turning it into a choice, he took the shoes from the baby’s hands.

  The red seemed to gain weight in those enormous hands.

  He sat down on the tribunal floor as if it were a stage. He lowered his head, trembling with shame and courage. And he slipped into the heels.

  It was a simple gesture, and yet the entire tribunal reacted as if it had witnessed an indecent miracle. There was a murmur that turned into nervous laughter, then shock, then silence.

  Scaramouche stood up.

  In the red heels, he looked taller and more absurd. And for some reason, precisely because it was absurd, he looked more true.

  He walked to the center of the circle with a calculated slowness, each step making the heel strike the ground with a dry, firm sound, almost musical. He stopped in the middle of them all, turned his enormous body as if he were facing an opera audience, and bowed.

  The bow wasn’t a plea for forgiveness.

  It was an announcement.

  Scaramouche lifted his chin, puffed out his chest, and began to walk the runway, a deliberate catwalk. Proud. Ridiculous. Imposing. As if each step said: you won’t reduce me again.

  Then he stopped.

  And began to tap.

  The heels hit the floor in a rising rhythm, tac-tac-tac, a hammering that seemed to pull something out of the Seractcube. It wasn’t a dance to entertain, it was a dance to invoke, to vibrate, to impose frequency on the world.

  Americ-Ana felt it first in her body. BAAL’s skin answered, scales trembling as if they were catching an invisible wave.

  She whispered, more to herself than to the others.

  “Vibration.”

  Astyam understood at once. His eyes widened with that this is it gleam, as if the whole song had been hiding inside the tac-tac of the heels.

  Wwwyye let out a short, satisfied laugh.

  “Of course.”

  The light was born at Scaramouche’s feet as he tap-danced in his red high-heeled shoes.

  It began as a spark beneath the heels, a glow that climbed his ankles, that spread across the floor in widening circles, as if the entire tribunal were a drum. Each strike of the heel made the light pulse, and each pulse seemed to alter the air.

  In the space before him, letters appeared, firm, inevitable, as if torn straight out of sound:

  VIBRATION

  The word hovered for an instant, truly vibrating, trembling in the air as if it were made of frequency.

  Then it spun, broke into particles, and the particles compressed, darkened, gained weight, until they became metal, symbol, fragment.

  The seventh fragment of RONOVE’s seal.

  Poppandacorn let out a high-pitched sound of joy and relief, as if a circuit had finally closed.

  “Poppa grabs it!” he shouted, and jumped, snatching the fragment out of the air with both little paws. The compartment in his belly popped open with a happy beep, and he pressed the fragment to his chest, ready to store it with the other six.

  The instant the metal touched him, a flash far stronger than any before exploded through the tribunal, swallowing the torches, the voices, the judge, the baby, Scaramouche, swallowing everything as if the Seractcube had decided to shut its mouth at last.

  When the light gave way, Americ-Ana blinked hard, her heart still beating fast, and everything reappeared with a simple cruelty.

  The Bugatti.

  Motionless.

  As at the beginning.

  The fog returned, the cold haze returned, and above them the floating panel was still there, like a red eye that never slept. The number on it remained relentless.

  0.

  Astyam looked up and frowned, as if that were the strangest thing of all.

  “Look at that,” he said, his voice low, wary. “Parys Bloodpure still hasn’t gotten any part of BAAL’s seal.”

  Wwwyye let out a short, humorless laugh and set her hands on her hips.

  “Great,” she said. “At least one humiliation isn’t ours.”

  But Poppandacorn wasn’t looking at the panel. He was looking at himself, at his own body, at the compartment in his belly, like someone checking a safe after crossing a war. He popped it open with a beep, flashing the stored fragments quickly as if they were rare jewels, then snapped it shut again with a satisfied click.

  “Mommy,” he said, pride glowing in his LED eyes. “Poppa confirms. Seal seven is stored. Seven little pieces. All in here.”

  Americ-Ana took a deep breath. Relief came like a warm tide, but it didn’t take long to turn into urgency again, because the game didn’t forgive pauses.

  She looked at Astyam, then at Wwwyye.

  “Did you figure out what the song was?” Americ-Ana asked, still carrying the feeling that the tribunal could reappear at any second. “I couldn’t connect it to any opera I’ve studied.”

  Astyam narrowed his eyes and made a small motion with his hand, as if he were gathering invisible pieces.

  “It wasn’t opera,” he said. “It was a rhapsody. The whole structure gives it away. Different parts that seem independent, but together they become a story.”

  Wwwyye turned immediately, with that smile of someone who finally has something to nail down without doubt.

  “Bohemian Rhapsody,” she said, bright. “Queen.”

  Americ-Ana blinked, surprised.

  “You knew it?”

  “I didn’t study that song,” Wwwyye replied, with an affected disdain that couldn’t hide her certainty. “But I recognized it the second the baby said he’d killed a man. My father got a Freddie Mercury Moss Human clone as a gift.” She lifted an eyebrow, as if that explained everything and, at the same time, were the most normal thing in the world. “And my father made the clone sing that song every morning as a wake-up alarm. I grew up ignoring it and memorizing it at the same time.”

  Astyam let out a short sound, somewhere between shock and laughter.

  “That’s so THE-IMPERIUM it hurts.”

  Americ-Ana was about to answer, but Poppandacorn pointed up with both little paws, his LED eyes flashing alert icons.

  “Mommy, Astyam, Wwwyye,” he said, his voice trembling. “The numbers are moving.”

  All three looked up at the same time.

  The panel, which had been nailed to 0 like a sentence, shuddered.

  And then it rose.

  Far too fast.

  Wwwyye’s eyes widened.

  “But what the fuck is that?” she snapped. “Parys Bloodpure went from zero and she’s already at five.”

  The number changed again.

  Astyam swallowed hard.

  “Six.”

  Americ-Ana felt BAAL’s skin answer like instinct, and the word left her mouth like a command.

  “Seven,” she said, and her stomach dropped with the understanding. “Now.”

  She didn’t wait for anything else.

  “FAST!” Americ-Ana shouted, the scream cutting through the fog like a whip. “FAST, GET IN THE CAR! GO! GO!”

  They ran.

  Poppandacorn was the first to throw himself into the passenger seat, pressing his small body against the upholstery and keeping his belly sealed like a vault. Astyam and Wwwyye dove into the back seat almost at the same time, still looking up as if the panel might fall on top of them.

  Americ-Ana slid into the driver’s seat as if she were part of the car. Her hands found the wheel, her foot found the pedal, and BAAL, beneath her skin, seemed to smile.

  The engine answered with violence.

  Americ-Ana floored the accelerator, and the Bugatti launched forward, ripping through the fog and aiming straight at the Seractcube hovering two meters off the ground, like a portal waiting for impact.

  “Hold on!” she ordered, and it wasn’t a request.

  Poppandacorn pressed his little paws against the dashboard, Astyam braced his body, Wwwyye clenched her teeth, and the whole world became velocity.

  The Bugatti slammed into the Seractcube.

  The flash came again, absolute, too white to be light, as if space itself had been torn out of place.

  And inside that white, the moment that would crown the ultimate winner began: the final race of the KING MatNat LEVEL THREE Games.