01

"Stella, do I need to insist on saying that this is the worst idea you've ever had in your entire life?"

"Even if you say so, Mom, I won't go back."

Through the dashboard of the car, I heard my mother sigh deeply. I wouldn't be surprised if she was regretting the day she didn't use condoms with her father I never met - but who had left a cheap necklace for my mother to give me in the future - because maybe that way she wouldn't be listening to the last words of her only daughter.

Last words, literally, because everyone knew that crossing the border of the fields and returning to the abandoned cities was an accurate death sentence.

Everyone knew that our world was doomed and that the right thing was to hide in nature because the cities no longer belonged to ordinary humans. I also knew, but I had already come too far to give up for fear of some silly and old legends.

"There are monsters out there," said Mom, her trembling and failed voice. She should be crying. "I can't allow you to continue with this unfounded search. There's no cure, Stella. You're getting carried away by the things you hear in research. Stars don't speak."

"They spoke this time," I insisted, almost not seeing the sign of the avenue. “The stars know everything, Mom. I saw the coordinates, studied the binary codes, and I'm sure I'll find what I'm looking for. I'm going to save humanity, it's my destiny."

“Stella, please, just...”

The call failed. I was already waiting for that. Our towers didn't work in the city. There was another kind of technology over there. Something old and very unknown to those who were born after the 3000s, like me.

There was an anomaly, just like in the heavens. A constant sign of life and lights, even in a place that should not sustain life for years. At least, not human life.

It was a desert of stone. Abandoned streets and buildings. But somehow, as my car approached the deserted intersection between roads, I noticed that on my back there was a whole world falling into ruins since the first global collapse, since hunger and despair became human dilemmas, while my eyes glimpsed buildings and trades too empty and whole for an apocalypse.

I left my car next to a cosmetics store, reviewing my image in the window when I went to the sidewalk. When I looked in the direction of my neck, I almost got scared when I thought I had lost my necklace with a full moon pendant, but I remembered having kept it next to the lantern to avoid losing the only memory of the man who used to be my father.

I put a backpack with groceries on my back and ventured on foot with a camera in hand. I wasn't a photographer.

I never knew how to take pictures and I was never photogenic enough to have social networks. But that was part of my study. I needed to document everything I found, in case some college freshman found my notes on astronomical anomalies and looked for me in the forgotten city.

As much as I doubted that someone would take the trouble to look for me, it was comforting to have records of that world in something beyond my memory.

I had a degree in astronomy. Although ironic, the profession no longer had the same meaning as before. We never looked at the sky. We never calculated the distance between the earth and the nearest black hole.

And much less did we look for lives on other planets. Our studies were aimed at finding solutions to mitigate the harmful effects of sandstorms and hot rains that have taken over our world.

As a race used to adapt, it was to be expected that humanity would know how to deal with global warming, but this did not happen. Humanity has not evolved, but animals have. The animals found ways to deal with the problem, and we had to watch when some of us were captured and became an even more evolved species.

Dangerous beings already existed among us. They had already taken what was ours and made us take refuge in open fields and farms. Our enemies lived for many years under our noses, and when we realized the danger, it was already too late.

There are legends about the first of that special race, focusing on the dangerous and cruel werewolves. Some say that the first of them, the Lupin king, became that way when he was born into a family of six women.

Others say that he was simply bitten and, out of hatred, began to do the same with others, creating a society of monstrous creatures that did not always become just a mixture between human and wolf, but any animal too lethal and dangerous for us to think

As expected, because we spent years and years living on plantations that were usually taken by agricultural pests or the harmfulness of our air, we got sick.

There wasn't a single human who didn't have lung problems these days, starting with me. My asthma motivated me to study more and more every day, looking for a way to find a cure, a way to make the earth prosperous again.

It took me a while to realize that maybe the secret was to look for an answer in the heavens, where no one else was interested in looking. The stars were still bright, calling for curious people who wanted to explore them, so I looked at them and begged for help.

At that point in life, after seeing children and newborns dying in the harmful air, we didn't know the names of gods to pray to, but I prayed in silence to the universe, and he responded with constellations that connected and shone in code.

The world responded when it realized that someone was looking at it again, after decades of forgetfulness.

The code was now on the map that I had picked up in my backpack, with coordinates that took me to the front of an old military barracks. It was the first point on the map because eleven others took me to different parts of the city.

There were many others that I couldn't translate before deciding it was time to act before more humans died of fear.

And no matter how great my courage was, I couldn't help but feel the hair on the back of my neck shiver. There was only one abandoned guardhouse in front of me, but I felt something bothering my bones and begging me to run away. Some self-preservation instinct, I imagined.

But I didn't move. I kept my eyes on the desert entrance of our army's lodging and ignored the breath of the hot wind in my curly and loose hair because something much more worrying caught my attention. Or rather, someone.