Theame Seste has stolen what does not belong to her.
She sits now on the edge of a metal chest, in the back room of a carpentry workshop that has been closed for three years, thinking about it. Outside, the rain drums against the corrugated roof.
Theame counts the beats.
Fifteen per second.
Sixteen.
Fourteen.
The rain has no rhythm, but her mind imposes one. A reflex forged by experience. Every creation begins with counting.
She was contacted through a message: a mission, a name, an address, an amount.
Oresthim Dulce's office is in the basement of a building squeezed between a law firm and a certified translation service whose owner died five years ago, without anyone bothering to replace the sign.
Dulce's name is engraved on a brass plate. Beneath it, a second, smaller, older plate reads: and Associates.
Dulce is a man in his fifties.
On the corner of his desk, isolated from every other object, rests a white porcelain thimble with red-painted edges. Theame studies it for a second, two, classifies it as a detail of no consequence, and turns her attention fully to Dulce.
She enters his mind with the grace of a woman adjusting her stockings.
Dulce's mind is not organized in layers, as is usual for those who hide secrets. He stores secrets in an atypical way: as encoded sensations.
He abandoned words long ago, like an obsolete means of transport.
Theame should withdraw immediately. An unusual mental structure means defense, risk, self-preservation. That is what the unwritten protocol of her trade dictates.
She does not withdraw.
The challenge is more tempting than the risk.
Theame Seste finds the Register.
Twenty-three names.
A sequence of twenty-three distinct sensations, each corresponding to a name encoded as a low-frequency sound and a location encoded as a smell.
She extracts the entire Register in roughly four seconds.
When she leaves Dulce's mind, the man remains with his eyes fixed on the ceiling and his mouth slightly ajar, like someone who forgets halfway through a sentence what he intended to say.
He has not spoken since. His breathing is uneven. He eats only if something is placed before him.
Theame has emptied his archive.
No one is home anymore.
The white porcelain thimble with red edges on the corner of the desk falls the moment she leaves the room. She hears it shatter on the floor behind her.
The alarm goes off.
Four men, paid to retrieve what Theame has extracted, are already on her trail.
Theame Seste rises.
She takes a silver chain and fastens it around her neck. She grabs her canvas bag: a change of clothes, a geography book with a torn cover, an empty jar of pickles, a slightly bent nail scissors.
She steps through the back door, straight into the rain.
She sees a man carrying his clothes bundled in a sack.
Theame is delighted.
People carry travel bags, suitcases, a violin case, or shopping bags.
A man carrying his clothes in a sack is sublime.
It is as if he carries his sins with him.
She does not yet know where she is going.