Part 2: The Parasite in the Dark
The confession hung heavy and suffocating in the damp dawn air. Tomás Reyes stared at the weeping man before him, his knuckles white with blood, resting on his knees. A burning, jagged rage mingled with a vague pity. Esteban García wasn't a sadistic monster from a nightmare; he was a broken, ignorant man, paralyzed by fear of the system, which had driven him to commit the slow, unintentional execution of his own brother, the Thief.
"You thought it would just go away?" Tomás's voice was dangerously low, vibrating with a decade of accumulated grief. "She's seven years old, Esteban. Her body is failing her. What's eating her up inside, and your 'secret' could very well cost her her life."
Esteban, his throat tight with a sob, buried his face in his earth-covered hands. "I didn't know... I didn't know. The system, agent... they don't turn to people like us for help. They use us as a pretext to destroy us. If they took Lili, I knew I'd never see her again. I just wanted to protect her."
“Leaving her to rot in an abandoned house?” Mariana Flores stepped forward, her voice trembling but sharp as a scalpel. She slammed her binder shut. “Your fear doesn’t absolve you, Mr. García. Because you hid from the world, we didn’t know she was drowning. Now, justice will deal with you. But for now, we need to know exactly what she was exposed to. What did she eat? Where did she play? What happened in that house?”
Esteban looked up, his eyes bloodshot, wide with sudden, visceral terror. “The house… we shouldn’t have stayed here. But it was free. No rent. No paperwork.” He gripped Tomás’s jacket sleeve, his hand in a desperate hold. “Officer, listen to me. There’s something wrong with this place. At night, the pipes don’t just rust… they breathe. Lili talked to the walls. I thought it was just an imaginary friend. I thought she was lonely because of her mother.”
Tomás abruptly withdrew his arm, his chest tightening. "Grab him," he remembered the nurse's words. Lili's dying whisper in intensive care. Grab what?
"We're arresting him," Tomás told Mariana, taking out his handcuffs. "Call the police station. Have a patrol come and get him. I'm going back to the hospital. Dr. Velázquez needs to know."
Time is running out.
Back at San Miguel General Hospital, the atmosphere had shifted from chaos to clinical anguish. The sterile smell of antiseptic failed to mask the underlying tension. Upon his arrival, Tomás found Dr. Cassandra Velázquez standing in front of the glass wall of the pediatric intensive care unit, staring at the monitors with an expression of profound disbelief.
The digital screens displayed a flurry of red lines. Lili's heart rate accelerated, but her blood pressure plummeted. In the room, the little girl appeared even smaller, as if swallowed up by the vast array of tubes, ventilators, and sensors connected to her fragile body. But it was her abdomen that drew the eye: it seemed even more swollen, the skin so taut it appeared translucent, revealing a terrifying network of dark, pulsating veins.
"What do the scans show?" asked Tomás, approaching the doctor.
Dr. Velázquez didn't look at him. She simply tapped a Manila file against the counter. "We performed a CT scan with contrast and a targeted ultrasound. Agent Reyes… I've spent nearly twenty years treating tumors, teratomas, and rare congenital malformations. What's inside Lilia García defies all the textbooks published in the last century."
She opened the file and took out a series of black and white photographic plates. With a trembling pen, she pointed to the center of Lili's pelvic and abdominal cavity.
“A normal tumor is a chaotic, disorganized mass of cells,” Cassandra explained in a hoarse voice, barely whispering. “But look at this. These aren’t chaotic cells. Do you see these dark, linear shadows radiating outward? Those are independent vascular pathways. Whatever it is, it didn’t just grow inside her; it actively created its own circulatory system. It connects directly to her abdominal aorta and hepatic portal vein.”
Tomás narrowed his eyes as he studied the image. The mass wasn't the round shape of a typical tumor. It had segmented ridges, resembling almost a clenched fist, or worse, an inhuman fetal position. "You said it was damaging his organs."
