"What the fuck is this?"
Helena's voice came from inside the house before I finished opening the door.
In the living room — the same living room, the same walls, the same worn sofa in the left corner where I used to sit as a child — my sister was seated facing the television. Absorbed. Leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and her eyes glued to the screen with the intensity of someone trying to understand something that refuses to make sense. She hadn't heard me arrive. Hadn't heard me open the gate, nor step on the dirt path, nor turn the doorknob. The screen showed what I had just seen in the car: the battlefield, the bodies, the thing that had been a girl. Around her, on the sofa and on the floor, three Shih Tzus seemed as frightened as she was — Sam curled up in the corner, Clover with her ears back, Alex pressed against Helena's leg as though proximity were a shield against what appeared on the screen.
My sister wasn't very connected to what happened in the Oasis. She never had been. Living on the farms — in the colonies, as we called them — was living condemned to one day be ripped from your own life and thrown into a place where most just died. That reality created an aversion in her, a wall she built early and kept high: don't look, don't inform yourself, don't let that world enter this one. It was her way of protecting herself.
But she wasn't stupid.
And after my first visit — after hearing about Burmans, about the Purge, about creatures she didn't even know existed — the wall had cracked. Maybe not out of curiosity. Maybe out of necessity: knowing what happened there was the only way for her to be close to me when I wasn't here. For me, that was a good sign. Better she know what existed out there than pretend I was on a trip. Being prepared for what would come was better than pretending it wouldn't.
I stood at the door for a few seconds. Looking at her. Nearly a year. Nearly an entire year without seeing my sister — without her voice, without the flicks on my head, without the way she scratched her head when she was angry, without the smell of the house that was her smell. Nearly a year where the only thing that reminded me I had a place to return to was the memory of a girl who one day asked me not to go and whom I left behind anyway.
And there she was. Whole. Alive. Cursing at the television.
"Lena."
She turned her head.
And her face fell apart.
Not gradually — all at once. The shock, the recognition, the disbelief, and the joy crossed my sister's face in a sequence so fast that none of them had time to finish before the next began. The mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. The eyes filled before any word came out — and the remote control fell from her hand onto the sofa without her noticing.
"BROTHER?!"
Helena came running in my direction — and I saw the tears before I saw the rest. They were the kind of tears that don't ask permission, that don't announce themselves, that are simply there when the body decides it has held on long enough. She hugged me with a strength that didn't match her size — the arms closing around me as though letting go meant losing again, as though the physics of the hug could undo nearly a year of distance and fear and silence.
"Sister… I'm back."
My words came out broken. Half longing, half nervousness — because I missed home so much it hurt, but I had also been away so long that, strangely, I didn't know how to act. It was like returning to a place your body knows by heart but your mind has already begun to treat as memory. Around my sister, I was always the younger one. The irresponsible one. The one who made mistakes and got flicked and needed to be taken care of even when he thought he didn't. I had killed Burmans. Had faced a Mythic creature. Had commanded a kingdom.
And there, with my sister's head buried in my chest, I was just the brother who came back.
Sam, Clover, and Alex ran to me wanting to play — the tails wagging at that frantic frequency only dogs who feel someone's absence can produce. I crouched, trying to give attention to all three at the same time while Helena still held my shirt as if it were an anchor. That was when I noticed a fourth shape.
Small. Glued to the back wall. Trembling.
A Shih Tzu I had never seen — smaller than the others, with enormous wet eyes of someone trying to disappear into a corner and failing. The entire body curled up as though wanting to occupy the least space possible in the world. The wall behind was the maximum distance it could put between itself and the stranger who had just walked through the door.
"Sister… what is that?"
✦ ✦ ✦
Helena pulled away. Red eyes, wet face, but with a smile that appeared through the tears like sun breaking through clouds — gentle, pained, and full of a story I could feel before hearing.
"I adopted her from the center." She wiped her face with the back of her hand. "Her mother is Mrs. Caitlyn. Owner of the bakery."
The bakery.
The name struck a place in my memory I didn't even know still existed.
Caitlyn.
The lady from the bakery that sat on the corner of the dirt road, three kilometers past the farm gate. The small place — smaller than any shop in the city, with wooden walls that peeled in the heat and a glass counter she cleaned every morning before the sun rose. The smell of sweet dough that reached the road and that, for me and for Helena, was the smell of an entire childhood condensed into a single aroma.
She had never been able to have children.
I remember her telling us, while she let us eat cream-filled donuts and drink hot chocolate sitting on the wooden bench beside the counter. She didn't tell it with sadness — she told it like someone who had already made peace with a pain that doesn't go away, but who learned to carry it without complaining. She spoke of how her life was beautiful even so. Of how her husband was good. Of how the two of them had built that bakery with their own hands, brick by brick, and of how every donut that came out of the oven was a piece of that construction she delivered to others.
We were children. We didn't understand half of what she said. We only understood that the donuts were good, that the chocolate was hot, and that the bakery lady always smiled when we showed up.
We ate well for a good while.
And then, one day, the bakery didn't open.
At the time, we were too young to understand what that meant. The Oasis convocation wasn't something the children of the colonies learned to name early — the parents protected as they could, pushed the explanation forward, postponed the moment when they would have to look their children in the eyes and say that any adult on the farm could be ripped away at any moment and thrown into a place from which most don't return. We only knew the bakery was closed. That the door had a chain. That the wooden bench beside the counter was empty.
I learned later — years later, when I was already big enough to understand and too small to do anything about it — that Caitlyn's husband had gone in her place. The first time the convocation came, he presented himself in her place. Entered the Pod like everyone did. Disappeared like everyone disappeared. And Caitlyn stayed behind, with an empty bakery and a place on the bench that would never again be occupied.
The bakery stayed closed for years.
When it reopened, the donuts didn't taste the same anymore. Or maybe they did — maybe it was me who wasn't the same. Helena and I never went back to eat there. Not out of anger, not out of neglect. Out of something worse: because entering that place meant remembering, and remembering meant facing the truth that the world we lived in took people away without asking permission and gave back silence in their place.
Caitlyn tried with all her strength to start over.
The only thing she managed, after many years alone in that bakery that was too large for one person, was a Shih Tzu. A tiny thing that slept at her feet by the counter and that, somehow, made the silence seem less empty and filled the faint smile that lady still let out.
And now, my sister was revealing that Caitlyn — just like her husband, years before — had also gone.
The second convocation. The one that had no one left to go in her place.
✦ ✦ ✦
Helena's voice grew lower. More broken. The smile that had broken through the tears minutes ago was no longer there — in its place, only the face of someone carrying a rage that had nowhere to go.
"She didn't have a husband to go this time. She didn't have anyone." Helena looked at the wall where the little dog was still curled up. "She didn't have anyone to take care of that gentle little one."
My chest tightened.
I knew how the convocation worked for someone from the farms. There was no option. No appeal, no petition, no bribe — nothing. When your name appeared, you went. If you tried to run, you were fetched. And being fetched was worse: they threw you into the Oasis without preparation, without orientation, without even the chance to understand how things worked. It was a death sentence dressed as bureaucracy.
Caitlyn had no chance.
A bakery lady. Alone. Without family, without money, without any skill that would serve to survive in a world that chewed trained warriors and spat out the bones. I imagined her entering the Pod — the same capsule I knew, the same cold light, the same hum — with the hands that made donuts and hot chocolate. Hands that never held a weapon. Hands that never needed to hurt anything.
I imagined her looking back one last time, thinking about the tiny thing she had left alone with a stranger.
That lady who smiled when children appeared at the door and who marked my childhood — she had probably already risen in a gray sky somewhere in the Oasis, shone for a few seconds with an embarrassed light, and vanished on the horizon like all the others.
It was sad to see that the places we used to go were being lost with time. People vanished and left holes no one filled — the empty chair at the bakery, the door with a chain, the wooden bench where no one sat anymore. It wasn't uncommon. It was life in the colonies. But in Caitlyn's case it was worse, because she had already lost once, had already started over once, had already proved it was possible to continue even when the world takes what is yours — and the world took again. As though once hadn't been enough.
"Can I…?"
I looked at Helena, who understood before I finished. She nodded toward the tiny one curled up against the wall.
"Of course. Her name is Roberta."
I looked at my sister's face. She didn't seem surprised at my surprise.
"Yes…" Helena looked again at the little one buried against the wall. Her voice descended to a place I rarely heard — the place where she kept the things that hurt too much to say out loud. "It was the name she would have given to her daughter."
The silence that followed lasted too long.
Helena looked at little Roberta. Then at me. Then at the floor.
"She didn't deserve this." The words came out squeezed. "You know what happens when someone her age goes…"
She didn't finish the sentence.
She didn't need to.
I knew. And she knew I knew. And we both knew that saying out loud what happened to an elderly woman alone in the Oasis was planting an image in the head that wouldn't come out afterward. So she stopped. Pulled away from me. Squeezed her own arm hard — the fingers sinking into the skin, the knuckles white, the entire body rigid with that mixture of feelings I knew all too well because I lived with it every day: hatred, fear, anxiety, and rage. All together. All with no way out.
We lived with that.
Everyone in the colonies lived with that.
"You've always had such a pure and good heart, sister." I said, and I wanted my voice to sound light — wanted the words to have the power to change the subject without seeming like I was running from it, even though I was. "I'm happy to meet the new member of the family."
I knew where that subject would lead if it continued. I knew Helena would end up talking about her fear. About my return. About the possibility of me not coming back. About everything she went through alone while I was in a world she couldn't see and couldn't help with. I knew each of those words would cost a piece of us both — and in that moment, freshly arrived, with the Vivarium in my pocket and the smell of home entering my lungs for the first time in months, I had no piece to spare.
I advanced toward little Roberta.
She saw me coming. The enormous eyes followed each step — and I saw in them something I recognized from a place that wasn't here, from a world that wasn't this one: the look of a creature that has already lost someone and that now evaluates each hand that approaches with the distrust of someone who learned that hands can take away just as much as they can caress.
I picked her up slowly.
She didn't scream. Didn't bark. Didn't bite. She just trembled — a thin, continuous tremor I felt in my fingers, like holding something that vibrates from within. The floor beneath her was wet, but I didn't care. I raised the little one to my face. Her eyes in mine. The entire body fitting in my two hands.
"Hello, Roberta." My voice came out softer than I knew it could be. "Your mother was an incredible person. And I hope that, just as she helped us when we needed it, I can repay that favor." I squeezed gently. "We're your family now."
I hugged her. Kissed the top of her head with the care of someone holding something too fragile for the world it lives in.
And I finally felt it: the tucked tail wagged.
First slowly. Hesitant. Like someone testing whether this is safe, whether they can trust, whether the person holding them is going to stay or leave like the others. Then faster. And more. Until little Roberta's entire body was vibrating not with fear, but with something I could only call hope — the minimal, desperate, and stubborn hope of someone who decides to believe one more time.
Life in the colonies couldn't end.
People couldn't give up.
That was how it worked. That was how it had to work — because the alternative was to lie down on the ground and let the world run you over, and neither I, nor Helena, nor the bakery lady who never had a daughter, nor the tiny thing now wagging its tail in my arms had ever been the type to lie down.
Helena hugged me from behind.
The four Shih Tzus around our feet. The television still on showing a world that ate people alive. And the two of us there, in the middle of the living room, holding what we could hold.
✦ ✦ ✦
"I'm glad you came back."
Helena's voice came muffled against my back. Then a silence. The kind of silence that happens when someone is gathering courage to say something they know will hurt.
"I'm scared. You're going to go back, I mean…"
The words didn't go much further. They died in the air between the two of us like something that was said and immediately wished it hadn't been.
"I came back to get a territory transfer item." I said, choosing each word with the care of someone walking through a minefield. "But I feel I'm in a safe enough place to be able to stay for a while."
I didn't want to lie to her.
Didn't want to say I would never go back to the Oasis — it would be a lie, and Helena always knew when I lied. I had a commitment. Morgana and Livina were still there. And to me, they were family — as much as the person hugging me from behind. But I also didn't want to pull away from my sister. Not now. Not after months feeling the weight of not having her around, of not hearing her voice.
So I did what I always did when the truth was too large to fit in one answer: I gave the part that fit and kept the rest.
"I understand." Helena pulled away from my back. I felt the cold where before there had been her warmth. "Hey, speaking of which — I was almost forgetting." The voice changed. It rose half a tone, gained the practical frequency she used when she wanted to change the subject without admitting she was changing it. "The commander got in touch with me the day you left."
"Commander?"
The name was strange.
"How can you be so smart about some things and so dumb about others?" Helena turned me around and gave a flick to my head — hard, precise, with the aim of someone who had practiced their whole life. "Who do you think the bigwig of our colony is?"
I understood. But I still didn't understand the reason.
My confused face didn't go unnoticed — in truth, it rarely did. Helena sighed. Then sighed again. And gave up, explaining to me what should be obvious to the vast majority of people.
"So you're trying to tell me I've won some kind of prize?"
"Yes. Actually, it's a prize given to returnees." Helena crossed her arms with the authority of someone who had already researched the entire subject. "Honestly, I didn't even know it existed. Nobody knew — because nobody comes back. Apparently, all the farms have this."
"But am I obligated to take it? I mean, look at what I got from my mission."
Before I could even finish the sentence, Helena had already snatched the Crivald card from my hands with a speed I almost didn't perceive. Her hands closed around the dark card with the naturalness of someone collecting something she already considered hers.
When it came to money, my sister was like that. Always had been. She was the type of person who counted pennies with the precision of an accountant and spent with the generosity of someone who knew exactly what each penny was worth — because she had already lived without any.
But while she examined the card, something came to mind.
"Sister, why hasn't anything around here changed?" I looked around. The same walls. The same furniture. The dogs' toys almost in the same place as when I left. "I mean, we have money enough for that."
I honestly believed I would have to look for her in some mansion across the city. That the money I had left — the amounts from the first time I came back — would have transformed her life into something different. Something larger. Something that matched the price I was paying to get it.
Another flick.
"This is our home." Helena said as though she were explaining that the sky is blue. "You think I would leave this to be around people who don't even like us?"
And then a sideways smile — the smile I had known since I could remember knowing anything, the one that appeared when she had a secret and was having too much fun to tell it fast.
"Speaking of which… follow me."
✦ ✦ ✦
The four Shih Tzus followed her immediately — Sam, Clover, Alex, and now Roberta, who trotted behind the others with the caution of someone still learning to be part of something. It was a sight I had missed: Helena walking ahead with quick steps, the dogs forming a disorganized escort around her, the energy of someone who is about to show something and can't wait.
When we reached the back of the house, I stopped.
What I saw wasn't our small backyard.
It was another house. Large. Much larger than ours — occupying what should have been the entire lot behind, where before there had been brush and our neighbor. The construction was new, clean, with walls that shone under the afternoon light and windows that reflected the sky as though the building itself wanted to dress itself in the place where it stood.
"How—"
"Nothing that double the market price couldn't solve." Helena crossed her arms, the sideways smile growing. "Honestly, I was thinking about paying triple, but who would have thought our neighbor needed money so badly." She scratched her head with a gesture that was pure pretense — the false modesty of someone who knows they did something incredible and is waiting for the reaction. "This is our main house. But I still like our old one." The smile wavered for an instant. "I thought it was cool to build a big house, but honestly… I'm afraid to sleep alone in it." A short, embarrassed laugh. "I must have stayed maybe two or three times since it was finished. What a coward I am."
The laugh didn't hide what was underneath.
She had built the house we dreamed of when we were children. The house of the late-night conversations, of the impossible plans, of the "when we grow up" we used to say without knowing if we would get to grow up. And she had done it alone. And she hadn't managed to live in it — because living alone in a dream that was made for two was merely an elegant way of remembering that the other half wasn't there.
Helena turned and looked me in the eyes.
"But now you're back." Her voice was firm. No tears. No tremor. With the clarity of someone who waited too long for a moment and wasn't going to waste a single second of it on drama. "What do you think about getting to know our new house together?"
I smiled.
The first real smile since I came back.
"Let's go in, then."
The house was beautiful.
But I was more interested in watching Helena show every corner than in the corners themselves. She pointed, explained, pulled my arm, opened doors with the ceremony of someone revealing secrets — and behind each room I recognized an old conversation, a wish we had expressed when the world fit inside a farm and the future was merely the grown-up version of the present.
The pool we said we would have when we grew up. The enormous kitchen where we would cook together without fighting — we always fought. The giant television where we would watch whatever we wanted without having to share the remote. The big rooms. The wide windows. Stupid things. Things any person with money could buy without thinking twice.
But that we had dreamed of when we had nothing.
And that changed everything.
Helena remembered every detail. Every conversation. Every silly promise we made on a worn sofa before falling asleep. She had built the entire house from memories — brick by brick, room by room, as though the construction plan were our childhood and each wall were a sentence we said that she never forgot.
In the end, we sat on the floor of the big living room — because there was no sofa yet — with four Shih Tzus piled between the two of us and a new house around us that smelled of paint and of future.
I was home.