The bonfire crackles softly; the light dances across the group's faces. Outside, Heaven breathes in tones of gold and silver, but in the small clearing everything remains contained — as if time itself had a fracture there, where memories could enter without cutting the others. Daytona holds Kōken resting against her leg, the blade dim, and for a moment the sound of the fire's flesh seems to echo the rhythm of her breathing.
Daytona looks at the fire. Her face settles into an illumination that doesn't reveal its full depth. When she speaks, her voice comes quiet, measured — like someone removing a delicate piece from an old box.
— I was born in Los Angeles. Not the city you imagine — not the one of candles and hot asphalt — but a version where old buildings mixed with gardens my mother insisted on planting on balconies. My father had a taste for fast things; that's why he named me Daytona. He used to say speed was poetry, and endurance was a promise.
The house had tall windows and heavy curtains that smelled of talcum powder. There was a wooden staircase that creaked in the middle of the night, and lights that turned on with a touch, as if everything had been designed to avoid touching certain things directly.
When I was a child, I'd run through those hallways pretending it was a racetrack; laughter, fake applause. It was an ordinary life with proper meals, school, piano — I hated piano — and I had a little sister who always went out to the backyard to get some air; she loved the atmosphere.
Saravia rests her chin on her knees and watches. Nylon remains silent. They like listening; they know this isn't just a story. It's a map.
— Nina. She arrived three years after me. She was small as a round potato when she appeared, hair stuck to her head from milk and eyes that scanned everything as if pedagogy itself were a crime against her. We were the type of sisters who fought over everything and then made pacts to share secrets.
Daytona smiles, and the smile fades like smoke.
— Our afternoons were kites when it rained and pillow-fort wars when it was too sunny.
She pauses. The words look for their place inside her. The others breathe as though following a choreography.
— I remember that day with more color than it deserved: low clouds, rain falling in stripes; my father stuck at work on that night shift that felt eternal. My mother had a big green umbrella that squeaked when she closed it. And Nina and I wanted to test the wind.
A kite. Nothing grand — paper, with a silk tail that the seamstress down the street had decorated with little symbols my mother thought were beautiful.
The kite rose easily, as if the clouds were calling it. Nina jumped and laughed; I ran after the string, my feet searching the wet ground.
— We had in our hands a map of an old street; the hill was small, just a mound of dirt near a power station the adults said was dangerous — but to a child, danger is just a word that lives in newspapers. Nina climbed first. I went to the other side because I thought the kite would fall farther away.
Raindrops hit my face. There was a metallic smell in the air — wet wire, rain mixed with oil. And there was a noise: a low hum coming from the posts, a sound that seemed thunderous.
The fire before them burns brighter. Daytona closes her eyes as if tracing that route once more.
— When the kite began to fall, Nina ran to the edge of the hill. The tail made one last flight and the string trembled. Because of the mud, she slipped. It was quick — a slide, a wrong step — and she fell where the high wires of the station met.
The discharge came like a flash that lasts an eternity: light that moves and burns. I was on the other side, my shoes sinking into the grass, and I saw everything as if watching glass shatter in slow motion.
Daytona doesn't need to say more; the group is already there. Martin's breathing grows shallow. Saravia grips the strap of her anchor; Nylon seems to lose color for a moment. Ghost closes his eyes, calculating, but calculations can't reach what is visceral.
— But there was a figure. A man — no, not exactly human — like a shadow between the rain. He was there for an instant, as if waiting for the fall, and then vanished like smoke.
No one ran to help because, at first, no one understood what had happened: only the light, the smell of burnt hair, and a sharp note that sliced my throat.
I stayed still. I didn't know how to scream. Didn't know how to cry. I just watched.
I saw the wire still trembling, the kite tail caught on a pole. I saw Nina's body, and the rain, and the smoke rising with the smell of metal.
All at once.
It was the exact moment when the world stopped being soft. And I… I just watched.
Daytona's words now come unhurried, as if she's handing each of them a stone with great care. The silence that follows is heavy enough that even the fire stops speaking.
— I don't remember running. I remember opening my fingers and feeling an empty space inside me. I remember distant voices later, and my mother's touch — she was small too, under the soaked umbrella — begging for something she couldn't fix. My father arrived later; I remember the smell of expensive perfume mixed with gasoline on his coat.
But that's for the next piece.
Daytona breathes. She does not finish. Her eyes are wet, but not from rain alone, and the group realizes that this half of the story has truly been given.
There are things left out, waiting for the next moment to be unearthed.
— My father didn't cry in front of me. — Daytona resumes, her voice trembling just slightly. — He was steel on the outside; after the funeral, that steel collapsed in silence.
He started spending hours inside the car, opening the garage just to feel the engine running.
He always said speed was healing. I saw it as punishment: driving through empty streets, watching lights pass, thinking that could erase something inside.
The heat from the fire seems to pull the words out of her, each sentence a stone thrown into an old lake.
— The house changed. The curtains were never drawn the same way again. My mother shrank like a rag doll that had lost its stuffing; she went out less, cooked less, spoke of Nina in the singular, as if uttering a sacred word.
I had to be the daughter that remained.
School became a tunnel of stares; children enter with questions, leave with scars. They sometimes asked if I missed her, as if I could answer that with words.
I tried to respond and only air came out.
How do you explain that you saw the discharge, and you saw the shadow beside her?
No one would believe in a shadow that vanishes into the dark.
Martin stays motionless; the weight of what they heard settles differently now.
Saravia closes her eyes, as if storing the sound far from her own sea.
Nylon covers his mouth, containing any reaction.
Ghost, precise and cold, mentally notes the sequence of traumas: exposure, isolation, parental behavioral changes. Patterns.
— The nights began to bring strange dreams. Not normal dreams — replays showing variations of the fall. In one, Nina got up; in another, the shadow grabbed my hand and pulled me into the pole. In all of them, I screamed, and my throat tore with no sound.
And there was a smell — always the smell of burnt wire and metal.
— Did you seek help? — Martin asks carefully, like someone opening a wound with clean fingers.
— I did. My mother took me to doctors, to psychologists with rehearsed smiles. They said I needed time, that children recover.
My mother bought pretty books about grief.
But no one could pull from my chest the image of the figure. And when I tried to describe it, the words turned to dust.
How do you talk about something that doesn't fit the forms?
Daytona folds her hands in her lap, as if holding a wound together.
— When school paused — my mother took a leave that felt endless — we went to the cemetery. I visited a place that smelled of wet earth and synthetic flowers.
There was a plaque with her name.
My mother whispered promises and forgivenesses that never became actions.
My father grew more absent; when present, he brought gifts that didn't fill empty hours. He began taking me to places that reminded him of speed: empty circuits, garages with the smell of rubber. He said seeing those things would free me from the past.
It did not.
— Over time, I learned to move like a shadow. I spent hours alone in industrial buildings, walking between tubes and cold machines as if they were a new kind of altar.
I tried to understand the figure; sometimes I thought I saw it reflected in glass. Other times, I swore someone was watching from the top of buildings.
The city became a map of wrong clues.
A dry leaf falls, and for a second the sound seems too loud. Daytona breathes in and continues, slower this time, letting the story breathe.
— At school, the other kids — the ones who once asked "why" — now treated me like I carried something contagious. "Don't stay near her," they whispered.
That turned me into someone who learned to hide hunger, to bury questions.
I began training alone: grabbing a piece of wood and hitting it until my hands hurt; running until the wind tore my face; pretending physical pain could replace the one burning inside.
— And your parents? — Saravia asks, with the soft precision of someone seeking to understand, not judge.
— They… died. My parents wanted to travel somewhere — I don't remember where. We were on the road when suddenly there was a tree trunk lying across the highway; maybe it was because of the speed.
It was me and Martin. By some miracle we survived — though I don't know if it was truly luck or something worse.
And it was there that I met Belzebub.
What was once a home became an archive of memories no one knew how to access.
— After that, I went looking for answers no one would give me. I read books about light and electricity; I read about shadows, about figures that crossed between cities. I started going to places where people on the world's edge gathered: workshops, dirty bars, hotel corridors with burnt-out bulbs.
I wasn't looking for friends.
I was looking for information.
There were those who believed everything, and those who believed nothing.
And in the middle of that, I made small pacts with myself: to never again be caught on the wrong side of a power line; to make sure no one else died because of my curiosity.
— I grew up faster than I should have. I learned to hide wounds, to smile when necessary, to run when longing tightened.
There were nights when I imagined going back in time — not out of longing, but out of justice.
And there was also the feeling of being watched.
Not guilt.
Presence.
And that presence, little by little, began whispering in ways I didn't understand.
Daytona pauses for a long moment. Outside, Heaven seems to wait.
She looks at each face around the fire, gauging whether she can cross into the final part she hasn't told.
There's a will in her eyes — to finish, to unload the weight — and also the fear of what that might unleash inside everyone else.
— But I'll leave that for later. — she finally says, with a fraction of irony in her smile. — The second part is crueler.
Martin swallows a sob.
Nylon tilts his head, worried and contained.
Raphaella, whose own shadow had been scarred in the celestial council, watches with a distinct attention — perhaps recognizing, in Daytona's silence, the outline of someone who has known loss and was never forgiven.
The fire accepts the agreement.
The night of Heaven settles over the clearing like a blanket that cannot erase every pain — but can postpone them, for now.
And in the silence that remains, each returns to their thoughts: plans, fears, small hopes.
Daytona presses Kōken against her knee, and the blade responds with a cold gleam, as if promising companionship in the battles still ahead.