THE REASON

The Century In The Photo

We drove through the suffocating blackness, the phantom scent of lilies and blood clinging to the night air. Veronica and I sat in a daze, the events at the gas station replaying in our minds, each loop more surreal than the last. Nothing made sense anymore. It felt like our previous lives had shattered, and we'd been thrust into a terrifying new existence where the rules of reality had been rewritten. Why us? What did they want?

"I saw a bullet hit him in the head when Vera shot at him," I said, my voice trembling slightly with the lingering terror, "but he didn't die. It's almost as if nothing can kill him."

Veronica pulled me into a tight hug. "Don't," she whispered fiercely, "we'll be alright."

"How do you know?" I questioned, clinging to her.

"I just believe," she replied, her voice a fragile anchor in the storm of my fear.

Lucia watched us in the rearview mirror, her expression softening with that familiar apologetic look. Then, out of nowhere, she spoke, her voice flat and devoid of emotion. "They like to call themselves the Supreme Beings. The perfect humans. There are only seven of them known across the planet, and they couldn't be killed… at least, not until recently."

Veronica seized the opportunity. "And what are you?"

Lucia gave her a hesitant sidelong glance. "Cogs," she finally said, the word laced with bitterness. "That's what Arnold and his fellow Supreme Beings call us. Me, the masked men at Casa Horga… we're all just disposable cogs. We usually don't have minds of our own, always existing under some sort of sire wiring. It's sickening." Outrage flickered in her eyes.

"But you seem to have a mind of your own?" I said, surprised by her revelation.

"I do… but it's… complicated." As we drove, I noticed Lucia’s injury – the stab wound on the back of her palm – wasn't healing with the speed I'd expect after Arnold's rapid regeneration. Veronica was about to voice this observation when Lucia cut her off. "No more questions," she stated firmly.

A few hours bled into the pre-dawn light, and finally, our vehicle shuddered to a stop before an old, weathered house on the outskirts of Mexico City. "Wait in the car," Lucia instructed, unbuckling her seatbelt and stepping out. She approached the front door, and as she did, an elderly woman emerged, a rusty rifle held steady, pointing directly at Lucia's head.

"You've got a lot of nerve showing up here, Lucia," the woman said, her voice stern. She clearly knew Lucia, and I had a sinking feeling she knew far more than Veronica and I did.

"Maya… Maya… please, just hear me out. The girls are with me." Lucia gestured slightly towards the car. Maya tilted her head to the left, her gaze sharp as she peered at us.

"And Aaron? Does he know you're about?" she asked, the rifle unwavering.

"No… no. I'm done with Aaron." The name surfaced again, deepening the mystery.

Veronica couldn't contain her curiosity any longer. "Who's this Aaron? Is he behind all this? Because I heard you talking to him a lot on the phone back at Casa Horga."

Maya finally lowered the rifle, her expression softening as she looked at Veronica and me. She nodded towards the house. "Come in, both of you. Get comfortable. Let me get you something to eat." Her demeanor shifted, a warmth radiating towards us, like a grandmother welcoming her grandchildren.

Lucia started to follow us inside, but Maya stopped her. "Not you, Lucia. You have a lot of explaining to do."

We finally settled into the worn, yet strangely comforting, embrace of the living room. My gaze drifted around, taking in the mismatched furniture and the scent of dust and something vaguely floral that hung in the air. Veronica, still clutching my hand, seemed equally lost in the quiet aftermath. Then her breath hitched.

"This…" she breathed, her voice barely a whisper. She’d spotted it too. Hanging crookedly on the faded, almost papery surface of the wall, amidst a collection of other antique photographs, was a portrait. A portrait of Lucia.

But the Lucia in the picture… it was like looking at a ghost of the woman who’d dragged us halfway across the country. The image was sepia-toned, the edges softened with age, suggesting it was taken at least a century ago. And in her arms, she cradled a baby.

"This… this can't be Sister Lucia, right?" Veronica’s hand trembled as she carefully lifted the fragile frame from the wall, turning it towards me. The woman in the photograph was undeniably Lucia, the same sharp nose, the same determined set to her jaw. But the youth in her eyes, the softness of her cheeks… it was a Lucia from a time I couldn't even fathom. "It's me," a voice confirmed, and I jumped, startled. Lucia stood in the doorway, her gaze steady on the photograph in Veronica’s hands.

"And that baby?" Veronica asked, her voice laced with disbelief.

"That's Maya's father, Anthony. My twin sister's son." Lucia stepped further into the room, a flicker of something ancient crossing her features as she gently took the picture from Veronica and hung it back in its place. "I think," she said, her eyes meeting Maya's, "it's time I tell them everything, Maya. Since they're going to be staying here for a while. But first," she added, a hint of her earlier practicality returning, "let's get ready to eat."

While Lucia and Maya moved with a quiet understanding towards what I assumed was the kitchen, Veronica and I retreated to a small, surprisingly modern bathroom and washed away the grime and fear of the past hours. The warm water felt like a temporary balm on my frayed nerves, but the image of that ancient photograph clung to my mind, a seed of impossible truth taking root.

We sat at a heavy wooden table, the aroma of simmering food filling the air. For a few moments, a fragile semblance of normalcy settled over us as we ate. Then Maya spoke, her voice tinged with a long-held resentment. "He handed me over to Lucia to be her legal guardian. He was dying, you see. The hospital… there was nothing they could do. So she was all I had, growing up. Until she suddenly disappeared. Then… then the dots started to connect."

"Stop it, Maya," Lucia interrupted, her voice sharp with a weariness that seemed to go beyond mere exhaustion. "You can't keep blaming me for Anthony's death. I warned him about the risks. He insisted. There was no way I could stop him."

Veronica, her brow furrowed, cut through the tension. "Then… how are you the one in that picture?"

I sat there, the food suddenly tasteless in my mouth, a cold dread coiling in my stomach. The world I thought I knew had dissolved, replaced by a reality so bizarre it felt like a waking nightmare. I just needed to wake up.

"That picture," Lucia said, her gaze distant, as if looking back through centuries, "was taken in 1885. I was a young nurse then. Twenty-seven years old. It was around that time… that everything changed. It started with your parents, Diego and Camilla Martinez your father was a molecular biologist while your mum was a doctor At the Santos hospital. The place you know as Casa Horga."

Lucia’s gaze drifted away, a film of sorrow clouding eyes that had witnessed over a century of human folly. "This place," she began, her voice a low thrum in the quiet room, "this 'orphanage' that became a charnel house… Casa Horga… it wasn't always what you saw. A hundred and forty years ago, it was the Santos Hospital. But beneath the sterile white walls, a far more sinister purpose festered. It doubled as a clandestine biological research center."

She leaned forward slightly, her gaze locking onto mine, as if trying to convey the sheer weight of her revelation. "And at the heart of it, driven by an ambition that clawed at the very essence of life, was your father, Diego Martinez. He spearheaded experiments… experiments to chain death itself, to drag it screaming into submission." A bitter, almost mocking smile touched her lips. "This wasn't the work of some lone, misguided scientist. No. It was fueled by the insatiable hunger of the elite – the obscenely wealthy, the untouchable politicians – all united in their craving for ultimate power, for the delusion of eternal life." A low, mirthless chuckle escaped her. "They poured fortunes into the shadows, desperate to cheat the one certainty that binds us all."

Her eyes, ancient and knowing, held mine captive. "For decades, their unholy research burrowed deeper, twisting the very building blocks of existence, until finally, they birthed their monstrous creation: the first viable dose." She paused, letting the enormity of the concept hang heavy in the air. "It was designed to tear apart and rebuild the human code, to forge a new, unyielding DNA. One that would scoff at the decay of time, that would knit flesh back together in the blink of an eye, that would shrug off disease like a phantom whisper, and grant strength that would endure for centuries. A godlike existence… with a cruel price. The severing of the very link that binds generations – the inability to create new life."

A shiver, primal and cold, traced its way down my spine. This wasn't just science gone wrong; it was a fundamental violation of nature itself.

"My sister, Valeria… my twin… and I, we were young, perhaps foolishly hopeful. We volunteered. We were the first to offer our flesh to their grand experiment." Lucia’s voice cracked, the carefully constructed wall of her stoicism fracturing, revealing the raw grief beneath. "It took to me… it twisted my being, remade it in this ageless mold. But Valeria…" Her breath hitched, a visible tremor running through her. "For her, there was only agony. The first dose… it was a poison to anyone not already possessing an ironclad constitution. It ravaged her, tore her apart from the inside out. Killed her in minutes. A violent, merciless rejection of their so-called miracle." The pain etched on her face was a testament to a loss that centuries had failed to diminish.

The pieces slammed together in my mind, each one a jagged shard of horror. The masked fiend’s unnatural strength, Arnold’s impossible survival… it all spiraled back to this reckless, power-hungry ambition, to a twisted legacy forged in blood and hubris. And at the heart of it all, the architect of this nightmare, was the father I never knew. A man whose pursuit of eternal life had unleashed a terror that now threatened to consume us all.

"But the initial dose," Lucia continued, her voice taking on a harder edge, a hint of the scientific detachment she must have adopted to survive those years, "it was deemed… imperfect by the very vultures who funded it. They craved not just longevity, but perfection. And for that, they needed to dissect me, to unravel the secrets of my altered biology."

She shuddered, a fleeting tremor betraying the enduring trauma. "For three years, I was their living specimen in that lab beneath Casa Horga. They probed, they tested the very limits of my unnatural existence, desperate to refine their formula. And from that unwilling sacrifice, the second dose was born."

A wry, almost cynical smile touched her lips. "But the fickle appetites of the powerful are easily sated, or perhaps they simply grew fearful of what they had wrought. One day, the funding dried up. The sponsors… they vanished, as if swallowed by the very shadows they inhabited. Diego, stripped of his financial lifeline, his grand vision teetering on the brink, became desperate. He needed money, resources, to continue his unholy work, to mass-produce his 'second coming' of humanity."

She paused, her gaze distant, recounting a history etched in her very being. "His desperation led him to the East. The Japanese. But they recoiled from his ambition, branding his creation 'Akuma no purojekuto' – the devil's project. 'What is life without an end?' they asked, their ancient wisdom seemingly at odds with the Western obsession with cheating mortality."

A ghost of a smile played on her lips. "Then, a few months later, an answer arrived, cloaked in wealth and a disturbing curiosity. A young man named Ren Haru. The son of a renowned botanist, and a gifted, if ethically flexible, geneticist himself. He saw not a devil's project, but an opportunity. He offered Diego a lifeline – a significant sum of money for a small sample of the first, flawed dose… and," Lucia’s voice dropped, a shadow passing over her face, "for Valeria's corpse. An offer Diego, in his spiraling desperation, couldn't refuse."

She looked at us, her eyes filled with a weary understanding of the darkness of human ambition. "Ren Haru, with a pragmatism that chilled the blood, advised your father to capitalize on the imperfections. To sell the remaining first dose to the vain and the terrified, the wealthy fools willing to gamble on a sliver of eternity, consequences be damned. And that," she concluded, the weight of centuries in her voice, "is where it all truly began. The seeds of what you've witnessed, the nightmare you're now living… it was sown in that desperate transaction, in the pursuit of a godhood that was never meant to be."