CHAPTER 5
HELENA
◆
Central Station had been rebuilt three times and never learned how to smell new.
Rainwater, hot brakes, old stone, fried dough from the night vendors. My father used to say the station was the only honest building in Nova Esperan?a because it admitted how many lives had passed through it.
At seven in the morning, Gabriel and I entered through a closed record shop on the lower concourse.
He had objected to everything about the plan.
The location. The timing.
The fact that the coordinates pointed beneath an active transit hub. My decision to wear jeans instead of body armor.
“You can’t fit body armor under this jacket,” I had told him.
“That is not a defense of the jacket.”
“It’s vintage.”
“It’s fabric.”
“So is your shirt. Yet you seem emotionally attached to it.”
He had looked at me for a full second before saying, “You have no idea.”
Now he moved through the dark shop ahead of me with a compact flashlight in one hand and his other near the weapon under his coat. Mara had sent two security teams to cover the street, but Gabriel had refused to bring anyone into the archive.
“Your father’s coordinates terminate behind that wall,” he said.
A faded poster for a 1998 samba festival hung above a row of empty record bins. I ran my fingers along the cracked frame.
“My father rented this place when the newspaper archive closed. He told my mother it was an investment.”
“Was it?”
“He sold six records in four years.”
“Ambitious.”
“He was laundering nostalgia.”
The poster shifted under my hand. A narrow keyhole hid behind the frame.
I smiled. “Found the door.”
Gabriel’s attention moved to my face before the lock. “You look happy.”
“I like being right.”
“I had noticed.”
The brass key from my old key ring turned on the second try. Shelves groaned behind the wall, revealing a stairway no building plan admitted existed.
Gabriel angled his light down. “You stay behind me.”
“I know this place.”
“You knew the shop. You didn’t know the stairs.”
“That’s because my father respected dramatic reveals.”
“So do people with guns.”
I stepped around him and started down.
His hand closed around the back of my jacket. “Helena.”
“You don’t get to call me reckless while standing between me and a bullet.”
“I get to call you whatever keeps you alive long enough to insult me tomorrow.”
The words landed low in my stomach.
I looked over my shoulder. “That sounded almost romantic.”
“It was a threat.”
“Work on your delivery.”
The stairs ended in a dry brick room beneath the platform. Steel cabinets lined one wall.
Record shelves filled the other. Dust coated everything except a single square on the floor where a crate had been moved recently.
Gabriel saw it too.
“Someone’s been here.”
“Maybe Elias.”
“Or the person who poisoned him.”
A train thundered overhead. The ceiling trembled, shaking grit into my hair.
My father’s records were arranged alphabetically, because even his secret life had needed a filing system. Cartola sat between Clara Nunes and Cazuza, the sleeve worn white at the corners.
I pulled it free.
The vinyl inside weighed too much.
A thin metal disk had been fixed to the underside. I peeled it away and found a reel of microtape, a folded page, and a photograph.
My father stood beside Beatriz Salles in a Reserve Authority lab. He looked forty, maybe younger, with a pen in his shirt pocket and the smile he stopped using after my mother died. Beatriz wore a white blouse and held a plaque marked AURORA CONTINUITY TEST—PASSED.
Between them stood Augusto Vale.
He wasn’t wearing judicial robes. He wore a dark suit and one hand rested on my father’s shoulder.
On the back, Mateus had written:
Three people built the door. Only two were meant to hold keys.
Gabriel read over my shoulder. His body went rigid.
“Vale was never named in the Aurora drafting history,” he said.
“Neither was my father.”
I unfolded the page.
It listed account ranges, dates, and a repeated notation in red ink: 23:59:59. Beside the final entry, my father had written Banco Meridian? in Portuguese, then crossed out the question mark.
A soft scrape sounded near the stairs.
Gabriel killed his flashlight.
Darkness swallowed the room.
His hand found mine and guided me behind a cabinet. He pressed one finger to his lips, close enough that I felt the heat of it without contact.
Footsteps descended.
Two people.
One stopped halfway down. The other entered the room.
A beam swept the shelves.
“Take the tape,” a man whispered. “Burn the rest.”
Gabriel leaned near my ear. “Stay.”
I caught his sleeve. “Don’t be heroic.”
“Too late.”
He moved before I could argue.
The first attacker had time to turn. Gabriel drove him into the brick wall, caught the wrist holding a suppressed pistol, and broke the man’s balance with brutal efficiency.
The second attacker fired from the stairs.
The shot cracked through the room. Gabriel dropped behind a shelf.
I grabbed the nearest object—a red fire extinguisher bolted to the wall—and tore it free.
The stair shooter came down fast, gun searching for Gabriel.
I pulled the pin and emptied the extinguisher into his face.
White powder exploded across the steps.
He cursed, blinded. I swung the metal cylinder into his wrist. The gun clattered under a record shelf.
The man lunged for me.
Gabriel hit him from the side hard enough to crack both of them against the floor.
The first attacker rose behind Gabriel with a knife.
“Down!” I shouted.
Gabriel dropped.
I threw the extinguisher.
It struck the attacker in the chest. He staggered. Gabriel rolled, swept his legs, and pinned him with an arm across his throat.
“Who sent you?” Gabriel asked.
The man laughed through his teeth. “The republic.”
He bit down.
Gabriel shoved two fingers into his mouth, but the movement came too late. A sharp almond smell cut through the extinguisher dust.
The attacker convulsed once and went limp.
The second man slammed an emergency release near the stairs. A maintenance door opened beyond him. He disappeared into the service tunnel before Gabriel could reach the gun.
I stood in the middle of white powder and broken records, breathing too fast.
Gabriel turned toward me.
Blood ran from a cut along his cheek.
“You were supposed to stay.”
“You were supposed to avoid being stabbed.”
“I had it handled.”
“You’re welcome.”
He crossed the room in three long steps. His hands closed around my shoulders, hard enough to make the message clear and careful enough not to hurt.
“Are you injured?”
“No.”
“Helena.”
“I’m fine.”
His gaze traveled over my face, throat, arms, waist. The fury in it had nothing to do with control. It was fear wearing better clothes.
“You threw a fire extinguisher at a man with a knife.”
“It worked.”
“That is my line.”
“You can have it back when you stop bleeding.”
I reached up and touched the cut on his cheek.
Gabriel went still.
The room narrowed to the warm skin under my fingers. His eyes dropped to my mouth. Mine found his.
He leaned closer by an inch.
A train roared overhead, vibrating through the floor and into my bones.
“Tell me to move,” he said.
“You’re blocking the light.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
I knew.
The air between us felt electrically thin. One more breath and his mouth would be on mine. I wanted it with a force that made me angry—wanted the dangerous man whose signature sat on my father’s ruin, whose body had covered mine without hesitation.
The dead attacker’s radio crackled.
“Archive team, report.”
Gabriel stepped back, swore once, and pulled his phone.
I tucked the tape, paper, and photograph into the inside pocket of my jacket. The moment closed, but it didn’t disappear. It stayed on my lips like a promise neither of us had made.
Mara’s team reached us through the shop three minutes later. Gabriel gave clipped orders while I searched the floor near the dead man.
A black invitation card had fallen from his coat.
THE VELASCO FOUNDATION WINTER OPERA GALA
TONIGHT, PALACE HOTEL
A handwritten note covered the back.
Ms. Duarte,
You have been looking at my bank through the wrong window.
Come hear the music.
—D.V.
Beneath the initials, a second line had been added in red ink.
Bring the daughter of the first signature.
I looked at Gabriel.
His eyes were already on the hidden tape in my pocket.
“We need a player,” I said.
“We need to leave.”
Back at the penthouse, Mara produced an old microcassette deck from somewhere in Bastion’s archives. We listened in the damaged doorway because Gabriel refused to close it.
Static. A click. Then Beatriz Salles’s voice.
“If Augusto gets the second signature,” she said, “the republic belongs to him.”
My father answered, “Then we make sure he believes it died with me.”
A third voice entered the recording.
Vale’s.
“You mistake secrecy for corruption,” he said. “Some truths are too dangerous to survive daylight.”
The tape ended with a gunshot.