"In any case, they'll have to find her first," Ripa said, turning slightly with a grimace of pain. "But that's not what worries me now."

  "What then?"

  "My future," Ripa said in a neutral voice, as if analyzing someone else's situation. "The Ripa family has produced Cold Soldiers for four generations. It's what we are."

  "And now?"

  Ripa stared at his stump with a hard look. "Now I'm a problem to be solved. The best doctors have confirmed the obvious: without perfect balance in the Cold Veins, there's no way to progress beyond my current level. I'll be stuck at [Violet Two] for life."

  "So what will you do?"

  "My father has already decided," Ripa replied with a cutting smile. "As soon as I recover, I'll leave Vesuvius Academy and return to the family estate. Clearly, there's no point in me staying here anymore. The Ripas don't tolerate visible failures. A crippled Ripa is a useless Ripa. Those are his exact words."

  "And you're okay with that? You'll accept all this without doing anything?"

  Brando noticed that Ripa spoke of his family as if he no longer belonged to it. He felt something deeply wrong in all this. Ripa had fought heroically against Bianca; he had paid the highest price, and if he hadn't been there, none of them would have made it home. He deserved to be treated like a hero, but in his family's view, such an interruption in the Cold Soldier path was considered a failure. Was that right? Certainly not. Complicating everything was also the disappointment that things had turned out this way.

  "Accept it? No. But I don't intend to feel sorry for myself either." Ripa gave a dry laugh, then fixed him with intensity. "Does that surprise you, Casadei? Did you expect to find me crying over my fate? This is the world we live in. One day you're at the top, the next day you're nothing. It's always been this way. The difference is that now I see it from the wrong side of the pyramid."

  Brando stared at the spot where Ripa's arm should have been. A void, an absence, representing the end of a dream.

  "It's ironic, you know?" Ripa said after a moment, changing the subject. "You finally did it. You hit me."

  Brando looked at him, confused.

  "In the duel," explained Ripa. "I challenged you to hit me, remember? If you managed it, I'd leave you alone. And now, in the most twisted way possible, you've won. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't do anything to you anymore. I don't know how you reached [Violet One] stage, but you've bested me. I have to give you credit. And spare me your pity, I don't need it."

  "It's not pity," said Brando. "It's understanding."

  Ripa snorted with contempt, as if perceiving he was being mocked badly. "Understand me? You? A Zeta pretending to understand an Omega's life. What bullshit."

  "This isn't about ranks," Brando insisted.

  "It's always about ranks," Ripa shot back. "Blood. Position. That's how the world turns; there's no other way. Strong blood is needed to face the outside world, or there can be no future."

  Brando wasn't intimidated. "You might be surprised by how much we have in common right now."

  "Enlighten me." Ripa's tone was a challenge, not an invitation.

  "Being considered useless," Brando said simply. "I've always been that. A Zeta, the lowest rung of the ladder. The rank that shouldn't even exist."

  Ripa looked away. Not with embarrassment, but with annoyance. "Don't compare your situation to mine. You were born that way. You've never known anything else."

  "Exactly," Brando nodded. "I've never known anything but contempt and exclusion. You've just started experiencing it."

  "Fuck you," Ripa hissed, but without the conviction one would expect. "You have no idea what it means to have everything and then see it ripped away in an instant."

  "You're right," Brando conceded. "But I know what it means to never have had anything, and still build something from nothing."

  A tense silence fell between them. Ripa studied Brando as if seeing him for the first time, trying to determine if there was deception in his words. "And what the hell am I supposed to build now?" he finally asked. "A new arm? A different future from the one I've been prepared for my entire life?"

  Brando moved to the infirmary window. The Academy stretched below them, with its towers and imposing walls, but also with all its secrets.

  "You said it yourself, the Cooling Down is cruel," he said, watching the students training in the courtyard below. "One day you're king in this jungle, the next day you're not. But it's not true that you're really nothing. It's just that suddenly you find yourself having to be something else."

  "Easy for you to talk," Ripa retorted. "Your life has just begun."

  "My life has been difficult from the start," Brando said, turning sharply. "Do you know what it means to grow up in an orphanage in Rione Sanità? The most miserable place in Nea-Polis, where every day is a battle just to exist?"

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  Ripa didn't answer, but genuine interest flashed in his eyes, almost despite himself.

  "Overcrowding ruled supreme. Ten of us slept in rooms meant for four because there was no space. Food came when it came. Sometimes we'd go days with just a bowl of watered-down soup. And it was freezing cold in those parts—in those areas, some of the outside cold managed to penetrate, and some nights we'd freeze. There was no fire or heating, so we made do with poor-quality tents and blankets to keep warm."

  He then moved closer to Ripa's bed. "But do you know what the worst part was? Not the cold or hunger, but how others looked at you. Like you didn't matter at all, like you were just a burden to society and your life didn't mean shit."

  Brando hesitated for a moment. "At twelve, I pushed a boy down the stairs," he said, his voice suddenly low. "His name was Michele. He tormented me every day, called me 'bloodless,' stole my food. One day he pushed me against a wall one time too many. I didn't want to kill him. It was an accident. But that doesn't change the fact that he died, and that the last things he saw were my eyes. And you know what was in his? Terror. As if he'd seen something monstrous in me."

  Ripa now watched him with complete attention, every trace of contempt momentarily vanished. Brando had never told anyone that story, but instinctively knew that to reach Ripa, he had to expose himself.

  "After that incident, no one tormented me anymore. But no one looked me in the eyes again either." Brando ran a hand through his hair. "I made a promise that day. I would never cry again. I would never show weakness again. And above all, I would bury whatever Michele had seen in me. Though because of you, when you beat me up, I did cry a little, I admit."

  Ripa observed him with a gaze that oscillated between distrust and a strange form of respect. "That's why you didn't break in the alley when I beat you," he finally said. "I hit you until you bled, and you always got back up. For you, it was just habit."

  Brando took a step back. "Then the Cold Veins came, and for the first time, I thought maybe there was a place for me. Until they discovered I was a Zeta. You know what they told me? That my rank shouldn't exist, and the story repeated itself but with different words. For the umpteenth time, I wasn't good enough."

  A dry laugh escaped his throat. "First I was the worthless orphan, then the murderer to avoid, now the Zeta to despise. It's as if the world keeps finding new ways to tell me I shouldn't exist. But I continue to exist. Not because someone gave me permission, but because I've learned that no one can tell you who you are unless you let them."

  Then Brando looked Ripa straight in the eyes again. "I'm not telling you this to make you feel sorry for me. I'm telling you because I want you to understand that when I talk about being considered nothing, I'm not spouting cheap philosophy. I've always experienced it and I experience it daily on my skin, every day of my life. The difference between us is that I've never known anything else. You, on the other hand, have to learn now, and you have to learn fast."

  "I'm not like you, Casadei," Ripa said with his jaw clenched. "I wasn't born to crawl in the mud and thank people for crumbs."

  "No," Brando agreed with a cutting smile. "You were born to walk on water and be acclaimed for it. But the water froze beneath you and you fell. The question is: will you stay on the ground cursing the ice, or will you learn to walk on it in a different way?"

  Ripa's eyes narrowed. There was anger in that look, but also a glimmer of interest in the nonsense Brando was spouting.

  "This street wisdom of yours is fascinating," he said with sarcasm but without malice. "What does the philosopher from Rione Sanità suggest? What exactly should I do? Do you have any brilliant concrete ideas or just metaphors about frozen water?"

  "The system trained you for a single purpose," Brando replied, suddenly becoming more direct. "To be a weapon. A soldier. And now that you can no longer be one in that way, you believe you have no value. But you have something that very few in the Academy possess."

  "And that would be?" Ripa asked, skeptical.

  "A unique perspective. You've seen both sides: the privileged elite and now the outcast. And you've seen things you shouldn't have seen." Brando stepped forward. "The Pit. The laboratory. The documents on the 'Deviation Project.' There's an entire submerged world of knowledge that the Eight Houses keep hidden. A world that someone with your training, your mind, and now your new perspective could explore in ways others cannot."

  "Becoming a bookworm is a fate worse than death for a Ripa," Davide said, but his words sounded mechanical, as if repeating something that had been instilled in him since childhood.

  "That's what they made you believe," Brando pressed. "That there was only one way to be important or only one honorable path. But think about what you could discover if you used the knowledge you've always had, combined with what you saw in the Pit and the freedom that comes from not being in the spotlight anymore. You could see things that no one else can see, because everyone else is looking in the wrong direction."

  Ripa scrutinized him, evaluating his words. "You have no idea how complicated my world is, Casadei..."

  "And so?" Brando sensed he had something else to tell him.

  "And so maybe my path isn't the one that was assigned to me," Ripa said, cautiously testing the ground of this new thought. "Maybe there's something I can discover, something I can do, that no one else can."

  "Even with one arm."

  "Especially with one arm," Ripa replied, and for an instant Brando glimpsed a spark of the same fierce spirit that had faced Bianca in the Pit. "Because no one would expect a cripple to be a threat."

  Brando felt a shiver run down his spine. He wasn't sure if those words were a promise or a warning.

  "You know something, Casadei?" Ripa studied him with a penetrating gaze, as if truly seeing him for the first time. "You're not the stupid Zeta I thought you were. You're crafty, you know what you're doing. Too bad you're a Zeta, otherwise you would have gone very far as a Cold Soldier."

  "I'll take that as a compliment. I have my own cards to play too."

  The sound of footsteps in the corridor interrupted the moment. "Time's up."

  Brando nodded and stood up, but as he was about to leave, Ripa called him with a low, urgent voice.

  "Casadei."

  Brando turned.

  "Something big is happening," Ripa continued. "Something that scares even the Eight Houses, enough to recall the Four Aces."

  "The Four Aces?"

  "The most powerful Cold Soldiers after the Protector himself. No one knows who they really are, only the upper echelons of the Eight Houses. They identify themselves with operational codes: GIS, GOI, Col Moschin, and Folgore." Ripa pulled himself up slightly, ignoring the pain. "They were on a mission outside the Dome, but they've been recalled in an emergency. I heard the guards talking outside my room."

  "Why are you telling me this?" asked Brando, confused by the sudden trust.

  Ripa fixed him with a steely gaze. "Because of all those who were there, you're the only one who understands what it means to lose everything in an instant. Volpe is a bastard, but he still has his name, his connections. You, on the other hand..." a shadow crossed his face, "...you know what it means to be considered a flaw in the system. And after today, I know it too."

  The guard advanced threateningly.

  "I said: time's up."

  Brando nodded to Ripa and headed for the door.