Dusk fell on Proxima city.

Inside the small nature reserve of a park, Malin inspected Uri’s wounds, who was leaning against a tree, enduring stoically an irrepressible urge to faint. The mercenary with whom the poor guy had just engaged in combat was on the ground, not far from them.

Uri was really bruised. Farewell to his pristine gallantry, at least for a few days. He had bloody eyes, one closer than the other; a couple of cuts on the cheekbones, the one on the right side was large; and it would soon swell enough to reduce his sight a little more. His lips were swollen, and his teeth, dirty with blood. His hair was a mess full of dust, splinters of trees and leaves. He had half his face covered by a layer of dirt and the other half with blood flowing from a cut on his forehead. And those were just the wounds on his head; those on the rest of the body…

Malin decided to leave those concerns for later, now she had to address another problem: the men in gray behind her, the Satellite agents.

“What do you want with Mr. O22?” she asked them.

“To come with us,” one replied.

“In these conditions, my protégé won’t go anywhere but to a hospital.”

Uri tried to speak, but Malin silenced him with a wink.

“Actually,” said the other man, and withdrew a note from his suit, “you’re also summoned, Miss Viveka.”

Malin looked over her shoulder.

“Well, it’ll have to wait. Now I have a wounded person to attend to.”

The agent put the note back on his suit, pulled out his phone, and took some distance so they wouldn’t hear what he was saying.

From different parts of the forest, six agents, who had apparently been hiding this whole time, showed up.

Uri wondered how many of them had enjoyed watching the beating, and a mixture of rage and helplessness brought tears to his eyes. Bastards! None of them had done anything to stop that huge dork.

With his eyes irritated, he watched Kitten—who ended up worse than him after the fight—being handcuffed to a sort of metal stretcher with belts. Of course, reducing that orangutan was an easy job now; he had taken the brunt. The beast was unconscious, the only effort these bastards made was to move a dead weight; a big one, but dead weight at last. None of them had to set their faces against the man, let alone receive one of his punches.

The six Satellites put their new prisoner into a cage with wheels, similar to those used in zoos to transport wild animals, and took him away with astonishing speed. How had they rigged to transport such a cage along a road so winding, full of trees, and with so little lighting? Who knew! One thing for sure, though, these guys knew how to do their job and they were experts in cleaning evidence in record time. They even took the shattered Park Ranger Cyclops down to his last piece lying around.

The same man in gray who had gone away to speak on the phone returned.

“In the face of this unexpected setback, we have postponed the summons for the coming week,” he said.

“If you guys had intervened when you had the chance, I wouldn’t be like this, and I’d have gladly gone with you,” Uri said. Even though his head was spinning and his jaw hurt like hell, he wasn’t going to keep his mouth shut.

“We had a specific task, sir, and we have fulfilled it,” the agent replied. He took a tiny notebook and a pen out of his suit, made some notes, then ripped the little sheet off and passed it on to Malin.

Uri frowned.

“Is this son of a bitch giving us a ticket?”

Malin put the note in her pocket without even reading it.

“There will be serious consequences if you decide to ignore the summons,” one of the agents said.

“You know what we mean, Miss Viveka,” added the other, and turning around, they disappeared among the bushes and the surrounding darkness, just as they had presented themselves.

Minutes later, an ambulance from the emergency service parked on the park’s sidewalk. Malin, who had come out of the nature reserve to wait for them, led them to Uri. The night had fallen, and the lighting in that sector was so scarce the paramedics needed the help of their medical flashlights to enter the area.

To justify his injuries, Uri told them thugs had assaulted him and then ran away. He didn’t go into details to avoid stepping on his own lie, the pain he was in was terrible, and he couldn’t think of a good story properly.

He feared the paramedics would make a negative comment on his appearance: “Oh, brother! Your face will never be the same,” or something like that; but none of them said anything, because they were professionals and had probably seen dozens of wounded like this, or because his condition wasn’t so serious.

Finally, exhaustion took over him. His eyes began to close, and the passage of time was slipping away from his perception. He had the vague image of himself lying on a stretcher and being taken into an ambulance, and then, in the dark, inside the vehicle, and the small red lights of the medical equipment around him. And during all this, the image of Malin by his side.