Chapter 146: After the Dust Settles

Although everything that followed would eventually settle into dust, at the very moment the struggle between the Evans family and the Mexicans had only just begun with Nawali hovering on the brink of death—

That night, Nawali was rushed to the emergency hospital.

After the doctors cleaned and sutured his wounds and performed an emergency blood transfusion, they managed to keep him alive at the edge of death. Even so, his consciousness had sunk into chaos. He remained utterly unresponsive and never regained awareness.

“How is Nawali doing?”

Estrella, who had hurried to the hospital, questioned the attending physician.

“It is difficult to say. His chest was cut open, exposing the wound to too much of the outside air. The negative pressure inside his chest has also been destroyed… Even if we save him, I am afraid his life afterward will not be a pleasant one.”

The doctor considered carefully before answering truthfully.

Estrella folded her arms and frowned as she looked at Nawali lying in the intensive care unit.

“Then—how much money would it take to save him?”

“…Perhaps five hundred thousand dollars? He is still in the ICU, and the daily expenses there are extremely high.”

The doctor’s answer plunged Estrella into silence.

“…I will think about it.”

From the following day onward, Estrella never appeared at the hospital again.

Without funding to sustain his treatment, Nawali’s condition remained unstable. However, since the most dangerous period had passed, he was transferred to a regular ward.

Deprived of the best medication and advanced medical care, Nawali’s condition deteriorated badly. He drifted in and out of consciousness, sometimes dreaming, sometimes awake.

Even so, his continued presence in the regular ward was an endless financial burden on the hospital, because the Evans family refused to pay his medical bills.

As for Estrella, on the fifth day after Nawali was admitted, she packed her belongings and vanished from the Evans family without a trace.

If Nawali’s injuries had not fallen under the category of a criminal case, thereby activating California’s emergency-funding provision for victims of criminal offenses, he probably would not even have been able to remain in the regular ward.

Despite the existence of that special emergency fund, Nawali spent several months in the hospital without showing much improvement.

He had regained consciousness by then, but still required constant supervision to keep him alive. From time to time he coughed up blood and vomited, making it difficult for him to eat. His body grew thinner and thinner.

Even so, after investigators from the state agency responsible for handling the special funds assessed Nawali’s condition at the hospital, they wrote the following words in their report in order to dispose of this unprofitable case:

“Emergency treatment at the hospital has reached its limit. Continued expenditure of government funds on this individual is unnecessary.”

Thus, beginning the next day, the last of Nawali’s hospitalization funds was cut off. He was about to be expelled from the hospital and sent home.

But at that point, the hospital discovered a problem.

There was nowhere to send Nawali.

His mother had disappeared without a trace, while the Evans family was embroiled in a gun war with the Mexicans and refused to accept the boy. Nawali was like duckweed swept into the ocean, with neither a place he had come from nor anywhere to go. According to legal procedure, the hospital found itself in an extremely awkward position.

Naturally, however, the hospital was not about to swallow the loss and bear all the costs itself.

And so, one morning, a mysterious silver-gray sedan drove into the rear entrance of the hospital. A man scrawled an alias on the hospital’s discharge form, after which Nawali—who spent most of his time unconscious, coughing blood without awareness—was carried away in the silver-gray car.

The vehicle drove into Los Angeles. After passing through a slum street without surveillance cameras, it abandoned him there.

…

Nawali felt that he was burning with fever.

At the same time, he also felt cold.

Heat and cold collided within him, tormenting him beyond endurance.

The wound in his chest had already been stitched shut, but an indescribable itch emanated from it.

Pain and itching gnawed at him relentlessly.

Nawali felt unable to breathe.

What flowed through his veins seemed no longer to be blood, but a mixture of molten lava and icy water.

The air entering his throat felt like a procession of razor blades.

The smell flooding into his nostrils carried a thick, rancid stench.

His consciousness grew increasingly blurred. Nawali felt that he was close to death—and yet, strangely, he found comfort in the thought.

For someone suffering as he was, death was not an ending, but release.

But just as he was about to sink completely into that black, senseless sea, Nawali felt as though someone had seized his wrist.

He summoned every ounce of strength he possessed and opened his eyes.

He saw a face—a young girl’s face, scarcely older than his own. She was dark-skinned as well. Looking at Nawali, she cried out in alarm:

“Oh my God! Uncle Masip, come quickly! There’s a child in the garbage heap—and his face has been cut off!”

The next moment, amid the girl’s terrified shriek, Nawali fainted once more.

…

Nawali awoke from his dream. The agonizing pain in his chest made him frown involuntarily.

He struggled to sit up in bed, breathing heavily. His throat tightened further and further, the airflow blocked somewhere between his lungs and his respiratory tract, leaving him with a suffocating sensation.

After a long while, the obstruction finally seemed to break through. Nawali gave a harsh cough, spitting a mouthful of bloody phlegm from his throat.

The phlegm landed on the floor. Nawali climbed out of bed and turned on the light.

The bedroom was illuminated.

It was a modest room of perhaps eight square meters. A single bed stood in the middle, with a computer desk beside it. A monitor and a computer tower rested on the desk.

Nawali left the room and staggered into the living room. He took a bottle of milk and a bag of toast from the refrigerator, placed the food in a basket, and swayed back toward his bedroom.

Those few short steps were enough to leave him drenched in sweat. By the time he finally sat down at the computer desk, he was already panting heavily, dry coughs rasping in his throat.

“Cough… cough, cough…”

Nawali sat before the computer and switched it on. The screen lit up.

He slowly chewed the bread while drinking milk, gradually recovering some of his strength and clarity.

Once the computer started, the familiar operating interface appeared.

After a few rapid keystrokes, the ordinary interface instantly transformed into the gateway to the darknet.

Within that chaotic, identityless network, Nawali became “ocelotl,” entering the vast web in the guise most familiar to him: the Jaguar Warrior.

Here, “ocelotl” was a nimble presence whose limbs spread like a spider’s, an eight-legged giant octopus capable of stirring up storms.

“Hey, ocelotl.”

The dialogue box in the communications channel lit up. On the other end was another man hiding behind an alias—“god talk.”

He asked Nawali:

“Hey, interested in taking a job? Jaguar Warrior?”

Nawali gazed thoughtfully at the computer screen.

“What kind of job?”

“Corporate espionage. An internet company that just closed a billion-dollar funding round. My client wants its information.”

Nawali drew back the curtain behind the desk. From there, he could see the tree-lined street below. Judging by the view outside, the room was on the third floor of a low-rise apartment building.

Watching pedestrians hurry along beneath the trees, Nawali continued typing.

“What’s the price?”

“Tiered pricing. A vulnerability that grants administrator access to its internal network: one BTC. All user data: three BTC. The framework-level source-code skeleton: three BTC. Ten BTC for the complete package.”

That added up to several hundred thousand dollars.

Nawali replied simply:

“Address.”

The next moment, he received a brief message containing information about the internet company.

It was a video-streaming website whose users had just surpassed fifty million worldwide. Its founder, brimming with confidence, had appeared in the headline at the top of the website’s front page. Dressed in a suit, he was shaking hands with the CEO of another major corporation, celebrating the funding he had just received.

Nawali closed the website and cut off the communications channel. His fingers moved rapidly across the keyboard, and soon a new screen appeared.

It was the backend of a bounty-hunting platform.

Using several accounts in rotation, Nawali had posted bounty requests, each offering between one and five BTC. They were valuable jobs by the standards of the site, but not so conspicuous as to draw particular attention. The requests sought every piece of current information on specific individuals—their addresses, identities in use, family connections, and anything else that could be found.

The targets were a Mexican-American woman named Estrella; an American man named Bairubik Evans; and a man named Geraldo Firmende, who had supposedly escaped from prison after being arrested by the FBI.

The bounty platform’s backend contained numerous messages from anonymous users. Yet after scrolling through the day’s submissions from top to bottom, Nawali wore an expression of expected, though still unmistakable, disappointment.

“…Still nothing?”

The messages were either blind guesses or doctored images made with editing software. None contained any worthwhile new information.

He shook his head and switched interfaces. Every trace of the darknet vanished, and the computer screen returned to its original operating display.

Nawali struggled to stand. Bracing himself against the wall, he made his way step by painful step to the bathroom.

He brushed his teeth and washed his face. When a handful of water touched the wounds on his face, a faint itch and pain spread through them.

Nawali stared at the man in the mirror and fell into thought.

In the mirror was the face of a man completely covered by dark-red scars.

For more than a decade, Nawali had lived in this world beneath that demonic face.

And the creator of that face—the so-called uncle who shared blood ties with him—had vanished long ago. No matter how many bounties Nawali posted, he had not managed to obtain even the slightest trace of information about him.

Nawali himself had nearly died beside a garbage heap. If those people had not rescued him…

With that thought, Nawali staggered out of the bathroom and put on his coat. His gaze fell on the clock hanging on the living-room wall.

“Ah… It’s almost time for the gathering.”

At the thought, his breathing finally eased a little.

Wearing his coat, Nawali went to the entryway, put on his shoes, opened the door, and walked out.

(End of Chapter)