The world had become a blur, a succession of meaningless scenes that passed too quickly. After I accepted their proposal, they took me to meet my new tutor. He was surprisingly young, just a couple of years older than me, with long, shiny brown hair. For a moment, he seemed familiar, but I thought it was impossible for a teenager to hold such an important position. He confirmed it himself with an ironic smile.
"I'm Lucan," he said.
And if he seemed familiar, it was because I had seen him on the news. What no one knew was that he, a political prodigy, was actually the mastermind behind the resistance.
He explained that the supposed leader, a man in his forties with a blond beard named Specter, was just a façade.
"Specter is the public face, the puppet," he told me in a calm voice. "The world thinks he's the one making the decisions, but the truth is, only four high-ranking officials and you, now, know my true identity. My public life is my best camouflage. That's why my name doesn't appear in any internal database. I'm a ghost, a shadow. And you, Auren, will be my first soldier."
Lucan promised me a normal life, or at least, an imitation of one. But he warned me that until I was fifteen, my training would be more rigorous than any soldier's. The regimen would begin in one year. For that first year, he took me to an elementary school in a quiet neighborhood. For a while, I met people I called "friends," but I soon had to leave them behind. My missions, my new life, forced me to constantly change locations.
"Don't stand out too much," Lucan advised me when he transferred me to high school.
But it was hard not to. The training was brutal: exposure to extreme physical and psychological changes that left me exhausted, a machine with barely the capacity to think.
It was in high school that I met Axel. At first, he seemed like a troublemaker, with a joke for every occasion, but we ended up getting along. He radiated an inexhaustible energy, a vital force that attracted me. His sense of humor was as good as it was broken, a contradiction that fascinated me. With him came Celia, a girl with blonde hair that was a bit darker at the ends. Years later, they both told me the truth: they were also part of the resistance. I was supposed to have been the first child selected, an exception to the rule, but Lucan explained that they had also been taken from deplorable situations and that, like me, their stubbornness had made them perfect candidates.
Over time, I became involved in real missions, things that special forces should do, but in anonymity. For these missions, Lucan allowed me to form my own personal team: Axel, Celia, and Nadia, a redhead who had joined us and who seemed to carry the weight of the world. She had gone through something similar to what we had experienced, but after two years, she seemed to have overcome it.
It was at that same school where I met Lilian. She wasn't famous for her popularity, but for her presence. Her long brown hair framed a serene face, and her blue eyes, as deep as the ocean, reflected a calm that I didn't know. I didn't want to admit it, but I fell in love. At first, I thought it was just admiration. Celia, who was her friend, realized it and helped me get closer to her. Axel, with his biting humor, was the first to tell me.
"Bro, do you know you're drooling?" he whispered one day as I watched Lilian from afar.
After a while, we became very close friends. Lilian talked a lot, too much, even for me. It was hard to store every one of her words, but I loved listening to her. We were both "nerds," and we talked every day about scientific and mathematical topics, things I couldn't discuss with anyone else. While Axel played with an imaginary ball, and Celia and Nadia walked away to talk about their things, Lilian and I sat on the bleachers.
"Auren, do you believe that the universe is infinite?" One day, with her gaze focused on the sky, she asked me. "A continuous expansion is mentioned in the Big Bang theory, but where to? What is outside that expansion's bounds?
The universe might be curved in on itself, resembling a four-dimensional sphere, in accordance with the theory of relativity. Therefore, you end up back where you started if you travel in a straight line for billions of years. Without hesitation, I answered, "There is no 'outside' to expand into, just an endless cycle."
Another time, as we worked through difficult equations in a notebook, she remarked:
"The idea of deterministic chaos intrigues me. the notion that equations can be used to model something as erratic as the weather or the motion of a drop of water. There is an underlying order to what initially appears to be random. It seems as though the cosmos has its own laws, but they are so intricate that we are unable to follow them.
I explained to her the secrets of subatomic particles and quantum physics. I clarified that observation can alter the state of a simple photon.
"It's the collapse of the wave function," I told her, "the idea that a particle exists in all its possible states at once, until you look at it. It's as if reality isn't absolute, but depends on us."
Those moments, as simple as they might seem, were everything to me. They filled the emptiness that loneliness had left in my life. Lilian became an anchor, the only person I could be myself with, without pretense.
One day, without warning, Lilian didn't come to class. Instead, she left me a letter asking me to meet her in an empty place. When I arrived, she was in a formal suit.
"You're one of the few people in the world I care about," she said. "I just wanted to tell you that I'm going to another country and that I probably won't come back." She apologized through sobs, her blue eyes clouded with tears.
I couldn't process it. I tried to tell her what I felt, but the words got stuck in my throat. Lilian, with an infinite sadness in her eyes, made me understand that she didn't want me to get more involved with her. She left in a car, and I returned home on foot with my friends.
When he found out what happened, Axel expressed his suspicions.
"It's very difficult for someone to leave the country like that and not come back," he said. "That's nonsense. If you can travel, you can come back someday. Why was what she said so sharp and distant?"
Celia, with her supernatural sight, asked me what I had in my pants pocket. I hadn't noticed: Lilian had left a note at the end of the letter. In it, she contained the truth: her parents were involved in shady business and owed money to dangerous people. She asked me not to get involved and that she appreciated all the time we spent together. The conclusion was a straightforward "I love you."
We all immediately got to work investigating it thoroughly. We decided that the massacre would be held in a lavish house outside the city, near a place where they used to dump bodies to hide them. We set out to find her right away. With spies in tow, we cautiously entered the house. When we located her family, they were surrounded by four armed men.
Two of them were weeks-dead, bloodless corpses. They had placed them there so Lilian could see them.
Axel's burst of fire, which alerted the location's security, shot down the armed men when they least expected it. We alerted Lilian to our presence.
We were dressed in military and armored clothing, so she didn't recognize us.
She laughed nervously and remarked, "It seems the people from the other cartel want my head too."
"Lilian, we're not from any cartel. We've come to get you out of here," I said.
With a look of surprise and disbelief, Lilian began to cry.
"I don't know what to say... I'm wanted by multiple cartels, they follow me wherever I go. I shouldn't go with you," she murmured.
I looked at her with a broken heart.
"Please," I said, my eyes full of tears. "Stay with us. I don't want to lose anyone else, and much less the person I love. So please, come."
Lilian, with a forced smile through her tears, ran to hug me.
"Yes, I would like to accompany you as well," she said.
Then we left. Fortunately, despite the presence of numerous cartel accomplices, we were able to escape. Lilian just wanted to sleep, so we granted her asylum when we got to our base. I tingled when she kissed me on the cheek and whispered something I couldn't hear before heading up to her room. Axel snorted behind me.
"First, invite her over for coffee, buddy. "You are missing a lot of steps" he remarked slyly.
I kept wondering if I needed to take the initiative, but in the end, nothing Axel had rumored happened... Even in my dreams, I couldn't get that question out of my head.