The room did not change in its form, but it did in its function; the projections stopped being a record to become direction, and Helena did not observe them as information she had to understand, but as a structure she had to order. There was no haste in her movements, but neither was there any real pause; each adjustment she made in the visible layers did not respond to doubt, but to discarding, eliminating what was unnecessary until leaving only what could sustain a decision. Doctor Jorge remained silent, not for lack of intention, but because he understood that intervening before Helena finished defining the line of action would only break the continuity of a process that was already underway.

—The pattern is not repeated —Helena said without raising her voice, without taking her eyes off the projections—. What happened is not answered in the same way in which it was provoked.

There was no dramatism in the phrase, only delimitation.

—Then it is not a response —the doctor murmured—. It is preparation.

Helena did not correct the term, but she adjusted it. —It is closure —she answered—. But not immediate.

Her hand moved barely, reorganizing routes, superimposing variables that were no longer meant to explain the past, but to define the next step. She was not speaking of reaction, she was speaking of control prior to action.

—Everything is prepared —she continued—. Not to withstand the next attack, but so there is no next point they can use.

The doctor tilted his head slightly. —Base.

—Base —Helena repeated, without pause—. Structure that does not depend on a single intervention.

She did not explain more, there was no need. The silence that followed was not doubt, it was integration.

—That implies opening margin —the doctor said—. Resources, access, shared information.

Helena did not deny it. —It implies selecting with precision. Her tone did not change. —Those who sustain... enter.

There was a brief pause.

—Those who do not... remain outside.

The doctor observed the projection for a few seconds before looking back at her. —That is not new —he said—. But the way you present it is.

Helena did not answer immediately. Her gaze stopped on a specific point, not because she needed to understand it, but because she was finishing deciding what place it occupied within the whole. —Selena needs a base.

The doctor did not interrupt.

—Not now —Helena added—. But she is going to need it. There was no doubt in the statement. —When that point comes, it must exist before she requires it.

The doctor observed her with more attention. —You are projecting beyond your own intervention.

Helena looked at him directly. —It is logical. There was no emotional weight in her voice. —It is not efficient for everything to depend on a single variable.

She did not say her name. It was not necessary.

The doctor let out a slight laugh, brief, restrained. —Before, it was for you.

Helena held his gaze. —Before, it was functional. There was a minimal pause. —Now it is not.

There was no defense in her words nor any attempt to justify herself; the statement did not seek validation, only to close a line that no longer had any usefulness. —That does not imply reducing control —she added—. Nor criterion. Her tone remained flat. —It implies eliminating what no longer contributes results.

The doctor nodded slowly, not out of immediate agreement, but out of recognition of the internal consistency of what he was hearing. —That sounds like someone who stopped operating in isolation.

Helena did not react as if it were a relevant observation. —It sounds like someone who stopped wasting resources. The difference was minimal, but sufficient. The doctor smiled slightly, this time without hiding it. —I am glad. Helena did not ask why, she did not need to. —Not because you trust more —the doctor clarified—. Because you optimize better. Helena did not respond.

The silence that remained was not uncomfortable nor dense; it was stable, sustained by decisions that no longer required being discussed. The projections continued moving, but no longer as something that needed to be interpreted, but as something that simply had to be executed. And at that point, without needing to name it, the difference was not in what Helena had changed, but in what she had stopped considering necessary to sustain.

Helena let the silence remain a few more seconds after the doctor’s last observation, not because she needed to order her thought nor because the conversation had lost direction, but because what had already been decided did not require further development at that moment. The base, the allies, the future structure and the path Selena would have to sustain when the moment came had remained within a line of action, not closed, but established, and Helena was not someone who stayed contemplating a decision once that decision had found its functional place.

Her gaze remained on the projections, but the nature of the data she held before her changed with a minimal gesture of her hand, a hand marked by age, with visible wrinkles on the skin, but firm in intention, precise in movement, without tremor or hesitation, moving aside layers of business information, damage maps, logistical routes and resource estimates like someone shifting unnecessary pieces from a war table to leave exposed the only object that now mattered. Doctor Jorge observed that gesture without interrupting, recognizing in it the same authority he had seen so many times before, although now sustained by a different clarity, not softer, not more sentimental, but less enclosed within itself.

Helena did not look at the doctor when she spoke again; she did not need to do so to direct the conversation toward the exact point where she wanted to take it. —We will leave the base for future operations in active planning —she said in a calm voice, without that calmness softening the order—. Now I need to know if you have what remains of the night to examine, together with Miss Reichel, our new guest.

The word “guest” did not carry open irony, but neither did it pretend to hide what it truly meant within that place. The doctor did not answer instantly, because the holographic screen Helena had just opened finished stabilizing between them and turned the conversation into something less abstract. The projection showed a cyan-toned room, not intense, not warm, but cold in an almost surgical way, designed to separate any emotional reading from what it contained.

At the center of the image, suspended by restraint systems that did not seek comfort but control, was the man Sebastián had brought. He was not resting on a stretcher nor covered by discretion protocols; he was hanging from the torso by supports that kept his body in a stable position, preventing unnecessary movements while the room’s sensors performed readings on his structure. What remained of him was not shown as a scene of punishment, but as a clinical consequence of a force that had completely surpassed his capacity to respond.

The absence of some extremities, the accumulated damage in the upper part of the body, the lack of one of his eyes and the deep impact marks were not described by the screen with dramatism, but neither could they be ignored. There were medical containment lines around the most compromised areas, indicators of irregular pulse, anomalous density readings and coagulation records that did not correspond to a common human organism. The cyan room did not make his condition seem less serious; it only made it clearer, more impossible to classify as something normal.

Doctor Jorge’s face tightened before he could prevent it. It was not a theatrical reaction nor a loss of control, but it was a human crack within his discipline. His lips pressed together, his eyebrows sank slightly behind his glasses and his posture, although still professional, became more rigid. He had seen wounds, failed experiments, bodies compromised by hostile technology and results of violence that no report should reduce to numbers, but even so, the image of that man held in the cyan room activated in him a mixture of rejection, concern and immediate evaluation. He did not look away, because looking away would have been useless; that was there, it now belonged to his field of responsibility and required a response. —The person who brought him —he said at last, taking care of his tone so discomfort would not dominate the phrase— is quite inhuman to treat even an enemy that way.

Helena kept her gaze fixed on the projection. She did not correct the doctor immediately, not because the observation was irrelevant, but because it was understandable from a human scale. Sebastián had not delivered that man as a prisoner captured under conventional protocols; he had reduced him, contained him and brought him like someone removing a dangerous piece from a board before it could continue interfering. Helena did not need to justify it to understand it. Nor did she need to condemn it to measure it. —It is true —she answered at last, with a calmness that was not indifference—. The person who dealt with him does not operate within the usual human parameters.

The doctor turned his gaze slightly toward her, although Helena continued observing the screen. —That does not make the result any less worrying.

—No —Helena admitted—. It makes it more useful.

The answer was not cruel in tone, but it was in structure. Helena was not seeking to comfort anyone with the idea that what had happened had a simpler moral reading; she was simply not going to pretend that the prisoner’s condition did not offer information. Her hand moved again and the screen enlarged some readings without enlarging the physical image more than necessary. The density of the skin, the muscular response, the internal containment of fluids, the persistence of neurological activity and the partial stability of compromised organs appeared as floating data around the suspended figure. —If Sebastián intervened —she continued—, that means the enemy does not belong to a common category either, even if he retains a human appearance. Someone within a normal standard would not have required that level of response, nor would he have survived it. He was reduced to that state because his structure allowed a confrontation that would have ended much earlier with any other individual.

The doctor breathed slowly. His rejection did not disappear, but it reorganized itself under the discipline of his profession. —Then we are not speaking only of a modified attacker.

—No —Helena answered—. We are speaking of a frontier. One that already crossed toward us before we decided to study it.

The phrase remained suspended between them with more weight than the image itself. The doctor understood enough to know that Helena was not speaking only of the man hanging in the cyan room, but of everything that body implied: the remains of the biological units, the torn-out bionic eye, the unknown source of energy, the clients, the forces that acted behind intermediaries and now that intervention by Sebastián, which had resolved something without explaining it completely. Helena did not seem altered, but not because she underestimated the problem. Her lack of alarm was precisely what made the situation more serious. When she recognized a threat without needing to dramatize it, it meant she was already measuring what had to be sacrificed, what had to be preserved and what had to be used.

—Doctor —she said, this time turning her face toward him—. Are you willing to enter that unknown territory?

The question was not formulated as courtesy. Nor as a challenge. It was a delimitation. Helena did not need the doctor to say he was not afraid, nor to feign enthusiasm, nor to promise impossible results. She needed to know whether his mind would continue functioning when what he found stopped seeming reasonable. The doctor held her gaze.

Several seconds passed, then more, enough for the cyan screen to be reflected in his glasses and for the suspended body in the projection to seem to await an answer that did not belong to it. He opened his mouth after that silence, not quickly, but with the gravity of someone who understands that accepting is not only entering a room, but crossing a category of world. But before he could pronounce a word, something happened.

It was not an alarm. It was not a blackout. It was not a vibration in the walls. It was an absolute interruption of continuity. The movement of the projections was stopped at an impossible point, the particles of light suspended without finishing their displacement, the lines of data frozen in the middle of their transition and the cyan image of the prisoner immobilized as if even the system had forgotten how to advance to the next instant. Helena did not finish blinking. The doctor did not finish breathing. The air did not circulate. Nothing fell. Nothing vibrated. Time, space and intention were stopped in the same closed stillness, not as a natural pause, but as an order imposed upon reality.

In the middle of Helena and the doctor appeared the Magistro.

He did not emerge from a door nor form from the projections. He simply was there, occupying the center of the room as if that point had always had its place reserved for him. The Magistro wore a dark tunic of uniform cut, severe, with a fall that recalled the clothing of a warden and that of an executioner at the same time, not because of ornamentation, but because of function. There was no luxury in that fabric, nor poverty; it was organized darkness, a form made to deny individuality and leave only presence. The closed mask covered his entire face except for the eyes, and those eyes offered no recognizable human traits. In them moved fractal runes, internal lines that repeated within themselves with a precision that did not belong to emotion, but to judgment. They expressed no anger, compassion, surprise or curiosity. Only evaluation.

The symbols engraved on his tunic and on the mask did not glow constantly, but they existed with enough clarity that even in that absolute immobility they seemed to sustain a law that did not need to be pronounced. They revealed no gender, age or origin. There was nothing in the Magistro that allowed him to be reduced to a personal identity. His bearing transmitted neutrality, coldness and absolute judgment, an authority without the need for visible force, a presence that did not ask permission because it did not belong to the same system of permissions that governed the installation. On the side of the chest, marked with sobriety on the dark tunic, was the insignia: two crossed fractal lines, clean, exact, as if the symbol did not represent an institution, but a sentence prior to any explanation.

Helena and the doctor remained paralyzed, trapped within the suspended instant, incapable of reacting, but not out of weakness. Time itself had been removed from them. The Magistro did not touch them, did not raise a hand, did not tilt his head. He remained in the center, between both of them, in front of the frozen holographic screen where the prisoner remained suspended in the cyan room. His presence altered the meaning of everything before without physically modifying anything. The threat, the science, the strategy, the capture, the surviving body and Helena’s question about entering unknown territory were reduced to an involuntary preparation for that instant. Because now there was an authority in the room that had not come to observe as a scientist, nor to decide as a company, nor to intervene as an ally.

The Magistro had arrived, and with his arrival the stillness stopped feeling like an absence of movement. It became judgment. He remained in the center of the room without moving immediately, and even so, space continued behaving as if every part of reality had been forced to await his decision before recovering any right to exist in movement. Helena remained stopped at the exact point where time had retained her, with her gaze fixed toward the doctor, her gesture held in a transition that did not finish completing itself, while Doctor Jorge remained with his mouth barely open, trapped in the answer he had not yet pronounced. The holographic projections remained suspended around them both, frozen in incomplete layers, with data split halfway through displacement, lines of analysis stopped before reorganizing and the image of the cyan room fixed on the body of the man Sebastián had delivered, without the sensors, the lights or the security systems being able to continue their own process.

There was no sound, there was no air, there was no flow. Only the Magistro, immobile, cold, without gender, without age, without visible individuality, with the closed mask hiding everything except those eyes where the fractal runes seemed to rotate without moving, repeating inward as if the gaze did not belong to a creature, but to an ancient norm that had adopted form to fulfill a function.

Then the Magistro turned his head slightly toward one of the walls of the room. The movement was minimal, almost insufficient to be called a gesture, but the reaction of space was immediate on a scale that did not belong to stopped time. In an impossible fraction, shorter than a complete thought, the smooth surface of the wall began to fracture without producing rubble, without shedding material, without breaking like metal or concrete, but opening in fine lines that did not obey structural tension, but a deeper tear. The cracks did not advance outward, they advanced inward, as if the wall were not being damaged, but denied, and in the center of that denial appeared a dark opening, narrow at first, then more defined, a cut in the continuity of space that did not show emptiness, but another place.

There was no explosion, there was no pressure, there was no visible violence; the room simply accepted that it no longer ended at that wall. Through the opening, the cyan room appeared on the other side, not as a projected image, but as a real presence connected by a clean wound in the distance. There, suspended in the medical supports, remained the man brought by Sebastián, immobile under the cold light, with the containment systems stabilizing his body and the medical indicators also stopped in the same suspended instant. The connection between both rooms was not a door nor a corridor. It was a crack that tore the separation between places, a line of authority opened by the Magistro without tool, without permission and without effort.

The Magistro observed the cyan room through that crack for a few seconds that belonged to no one else, because Helena and the doctor could not measure them, the systems could not register them and time did not advance to produce ordinary memory of what had occurred. Around the closed mask a low noise began to arise, a broken vibration, similar to static, but deeper than an electronic interference; it did not seem to come from a device nor from a throat, but from the friction between several states of voice trying to exist at the same time. The sound grew barely, without becoming loud nor invading the room with volume, but with presence, filling the stillness with a rough texture that made the previous silence seem less absolute. For a few seconds, that noise sustained the scene like an antechamber of language, a signal that was not yet a word, a message that had not finished adapting itself to a comprehensible form. Then it ceased abruptly, not fading, but cutting off with a precision as clean as the crack opened in the wall.

When the Magistro spoke, the voice did not belong to a stable identity. Each word seemed to form from a different source, changing gender, age and tone with a regularity impossible to associate with a specific person. Sometimes it was young, sometimes adult, sometimes deep, sometimes sharper, but never emotional. There was no contradiction in that multiplicity; on the contrary, it reinforced the Magistro’s absence of individuality, as if what spoke through him did not need a single voice because it was not expressing personal will, but resolution. —Order received —the Magistro said, and the words did not resonate, but they remained imposed in the stopped space with the same force as an inscription engraved upon an invisible surface—. People involved: three women, one man. Two of the three women are part of the Veil. Supervise. Man and third woman: supervise examination process of meta-human. Do not intervene.

He added no explanation. He named no one. He did not clarify whether that classification responded to Helena, Selena, Reichel or to another reading that still should not be revealed. He did not explain what exactly it meant to be part of the Veil, nor why the man suspended in the cyan room was defined as meta-human, nor where the order he had just received came from. The Magistro did not speak to convince anyone, did not speak to reassure nor to warn of a threat with the dramatism of a prophecy. He only established limits. Supervise. Do not intervene. In those words there was more force than in any visible demonstration, because they were not advice nor suggestion, but a delimitation placed upon the course of events. The man hanging in the cyan room, Helena stopped before a decision, the doctor trapped before accepting a responsibility, Reichel outside the room, Selena somewhere in the installation, all were included in an invisible network of observation that did not ask permission to exist.

The crack remained open one instant longer, showing the cyan room as an impossible extension of the room, and then began to close with the same precision with which it had appeared, the fractal lines of space folding back without leaving physical marks, as if the wall had never been torn and, at the same time, as if a part of reality knew that it had happened. The Magistro did not look again at Helena nor at the doctor. He did not need to. The order had already been established, space had already been connected, the object of supervision had already been recognized and the limits had already been fixed.

The insignia on his chest, those two crossed fractal lines on the dark tunic, seemed to remain visible even when the rest of his presence began to withdraw from the place, not through displacement, not through the opening of a door, but through a progressive absence that did not obey normal transition. The Magistro disappeared as if reality had corrected a presence it had only allowed temporarily, leaving no shadow, echo or visible residue. Where he had been, no mark remained on the floor. Where his voice had sounded, no vibration remained. Where the crack had opened a connection between two rooms, the wall became wall again. And yet, the room was no longer the same, not because of damage, but because it had been judged.

Time returned at the same point where it had been stopped. The projections continued their suspended movement, the lines of data finished reorganizing, the sensors of the cyan room continued registering the hanging man, the air circulated again and Doctor Jorge finished breathing without knowing that his inhalation had remained interrupted in the middle of an instant that did not belong to him. For him, the pause did not exist. For his body, neither. His answer arrived as if Helena’s question had been formulated barely a second before, without crack, without static, without Magistro, without suspended judgment over the room. —Yes —he finally said, with his voice lower than before, but firm—. I am willing to enter that territory as a scientist.

Helena observed him for a fraction of a second longer than strictly necessary. There was no evident proof that something had happened. There was no alteration in the systems, no registered signal, no visible rupture in the wall nor variation in the projections. Nothing external justified the brief stillness with which she held the doctor’s gaze before answering. And even so, something in the order of space felt different to her, not like a memory, not like a precise image, but like a minimal pressure at the edge of perception, a formless residue that could not become data. She did not mention it. She did not try to explain it. Helena did not waste words on what could not yet be sustained with usefulness. She only accepted the doctor’s answer as part of the line that was already traced and stood up with measured slowness, not from fatigue, but from control, taking her black and golden cane with the same naturalness with which others would take an extension of their own body. —Then let us not waste any more time —she said.

The doctor also stood up. His concern had not disappeared, but now it was organized behind a decision. It was not tranquility that moved him, nor enthusiasm, nor courage in a simple sense. It was profession. It was the kind of commitment that is not born from feeling prepared, but from recognizing that ignorance, when it becomes a threat, must be confronted with method before others turn it into disaster. Helena walked first toward the exit, the cane marking a firm cadence on the floor, and the doctor followed her without looking again at the holographic screen more than necessary. The image of the cyan room remained there, the suspended man continued awaiting examination, the data remained incomplete, and none of those things seemed less dangerous than before.

The doors opened before them without resistance. Helena crossed the threshold without altering her rhythm, and Doctor Jorge did so one step later, leaving behind the room where time had been stopped without him knowing it. The projections continued active a few more seconds before reorganizing into standby mode, still showing the cyan room, still the prisoner, still the readings that did not fit with any registered human standard. The wall that had been torn remained intact. There was no crack. There was no mark. There was no proof. Only the perfect continuity of a place that seemed not to have been touched by anything impossible.

But on some level that did not belong to the installation’s records, the order had already been received. And the process, from that instant on, would no longer be without supervision.

_____________________________________________

END OF Chapter 96

The path continues...

New Chapters are revealed every

Sunday, and also between Wednesday or Thursday,

when the will of the tale so decides.

Each one leaves another scar on Sebastián’s journey.

If this abyss resonated with you,

keep it in your collection

and leave a mark: a comment, a question, an echo.

Your presence keeps alive the flame that shapes this world.

Thank you for walking by my side.

If this story resonated with you, perhaps we have already crossed paths in another corner of the digital world. Over there, they know me as Goru SLG.

I want to thank from the heart all the people who are reading and supporting this work. Your time, your comments, and your support keep this world alive.

If this story resonated with you, I invite you to support me — your presence and backing make it possible for