Chapter 3 The same name

Bruno Ortega had always been the man of control.

Control of gestures, of silences, of thoughts. Control of codes, of routes, of reactions.

But that day-that exact second that name appeared on the screen-he felt something he couldn't remember feeling in years:

Trembling.

Not physical.

Not external.

It was something deeper. An invisible break, like when ice cracks under the weight of a misstep.

The name was there.

Not as an official heading, not as an open file.

It was a seemingly minor coincidence. A mention hidden between obsolete lines of a record closed more than a decade ago.

Iván Ortega.

I07.

Status: unregistered.

That was all.

And at the same time, it wasn't all.

Bruno sat back in his chair, but he didn't take his eyes off the terminal.

The module in which the last mention appeared was one that, officially, no longer existed. An isolation area called 5C, part of a network of containment facilities that NCA had dismantled years ago, or so they said.

But someone had been there.

And had recorded an incomplete biometric reading.

A sign.

A whisper.

A crack through which the past returned.

Ivan.

His younger brother.

His dirtiest, purest reflection.

Sometimes, in his dreams, Bruno could still see him laughing, with scraped knees and disheveled hair, throwing rocks at the gate of a school they both hated.

Ivan didn't know fear.

Or so it seemed.

He was impulsive, passionate, and emotional to a fault.

And that, in the world where they ended up growing up, was practically a sentence.

Bruno, on the other hand, learned to keep quiet.

To hide.

To obey.

He became the ideal cog in the system because he understood that emotion was the easiest code to read... and destroy.

Not Ivan.

Ivan was a fire.

And fires, at NCA, aren't contained: they are extinguished.

The last day he saw him, Ivan's eyes were filled with something Bruno couldn't understand at the time.

"Don't sign that contract, witch doctor. It's a trap," he had told him, with a mixture of rage and tenderness that only he knew how to use.

Bruno didn't respond. He had already signed it.

That night, Ivan disappeared.

For years, Bruno searched discreetly. Nothing official, nothing direct. He learned to read between the lines, to detect absences disguised as closed reports. He knew that if he made too much noise, he wouldn't just not find Ivan: he'd drag him down with him.

So he swallowed the pain.

The remorse.

The silence.

And he became what the system wanted: invisible, efficient, lethal.

But time doesn't erase. It only accumulates.

And that day, in front of that screen, Bruno once again felt something he thought was dead: hope... followed by a fury so pure, so serene, it ached in his bones.

He took a breath and leaned over the terminal again. This time, without fear.

He entered through a secondary route, activated a covert audit protocol, and extracted all the data related to unconfirmed external relocations between the years of Iván's disappearance and the closure of module 5C.

He created a transfer map, tracked false names, and most importantly, he detected a series of permits that didn't match any current supervisor.

Someone else was moving pieces in the shadows.

And it wasn't being done on the orders of the Committee.

It was a parallel operation.

Covert.

Undetectable.

Unless one was searching using the right tools...

Or with a reason strong enough to break every rule.

Bruno leaned back in his chair and rubbed his face.

He hadn't cried in years.

And he wasn't about to start now.

But a knot in his chest reminded him that, no matter how much he wanted to deny it, Iván was still there.

Not alive, maybe.

Not whole.

But there.

Present like a word never spoken, like a broken promise that refuses to rot completely.

"I'm going to get you out of there, brother," he whispered, not realizing he was saying it out loud.

It didn't matter if Iván was no longer there.

What mattered was that someone had made him disappear.

And that truth deserved to be brought to light.

However much it hurt.

Hours later, he ran into Lucía in one of the corridors of Level S2.

She walked quickly, her brow furrowed, her gaze filled with something he was already beginning to recognize: determination mixed with fear.

Bruno didn't speak to her.

He couldn't.

His throat was like stone.

But when he looked at her, she paused for a second.

And for the first time, they didn't look away.

They both knew that silence was the only way to speak with confidence.

But in those eyes-hers, his-there was no longer any room for doubt.

They were both crossing invisible lines.

And there was no turning back.

Bruno never spoke to Lucía about his brother Iván because that wound was sealed with fear and guilt, two feelings that tangled so tightly in his chest that it seemed impossible to untie them.

For Bruno, Iván represented much more than just a painful memory: he was living proof that at NCA, the system could tear a person from their life without a trace, without offering any explanations. Talking about Iván meant opening a door to a past Bruno had tried to bury in order to survive.

Furthermore, Bruno feared that if he spoke about Iván, his vulnerability would be exposed. In a place where strength was synonymous with power, admitting that a piece of his soul was broken could make him seem weak, a weak cog in the machine that the organization could crush without hesitation.

But perhaps most importantly, Bruno didn't know how to explain something so immense and heartbreaking to Lucía without also dragging her into the abyss. The connection they shared already defied the rules; revealing the truth about Iván could put her in danger, or at least force her to bear a weight he felt he alone should bear. There was a silence more powerful than words, an unspoken pact between them: the pain was bottled up, contained, and faced alone.

Bruno was caught between the need to protect Lucía and the desire to trust her, but the past with Iván was too fragile a territory to risk sharing. So he chose to remain silent, believing it was the safest way to protect them both.