A name, a job.

Lea's name stuck in my mind. I didn't understand its meaning until a few years later. It can have two meanings depending on the origin of the word: That which is fierce as a lioness or that which is languid and melancholic. Although it also has another meaning that I have not yet managed to find. I prefer to think that I was given it for the first one, but the last few months and years I have earned it for the second one. I want to think that at that moment they saw the strength, skill and little patience I had, how I easily got angry even if I hid it, or even how I tried to defend them over my dead body from the children who picked on us for being freaks.

Going back to that moment, it was the end of the break. That break that changed my life.

People outside the room started to rush each other trying to finish the game as soon as possible so as not to leave it open, but inside all three of us were silent, waiting for someone to speak, rather than for me to speak. I don't remember saying anything. They assured me that in the afternoon they would explain everything in detail and that they would give me an offer. Judging by the tone of Hypatia's earlier explanation, they expected me to join their little club. I wanted to know what it was all about with such fervour, Hypatia had managed to sound so much like a mystery novel, that I would find it hard to concentrate on the next few hours of class.

The bell rang and the three of us got up as if nothing had happened in that room. I heard Lydia nodding behind me to Hypatia as we hurried out of the room we were in.

Many students also arrived breathlessly in the central corridor where the classes were located. Most of them were in lower grades, and had tried to lengthen their recess time as much as possible before starting lessons again. That made me smile. I remembered how, at the last orphanage I was in, my best friend at the time and I used to run up the street to get there in time for dinner because we had spent too much time in the neighbourhood library.

The professor was already in front of the blackboard writing at dizzying speed what we would do today.

Hypatia, Lydia and I sat in the front row. We had been the first to arrive, as always. No wonder the others tried not to go to this class, it was the most disgusting and boring, for most of them, of the classes we had. Many of these students would end up on their parents' farm and their grandparents' ranches, very few would go to university and certainly none would end up teaching anatomy. But it was a compulsory subject for everyone and the teacher was a bit sadistic and loved to see more than one of them turn green when he projected pictures of dead sheep, metastatic livers and sponge-like brains.

The students who came in shuffled their feet and sat as far away as possible from the jar the teacher had brought to class today.

He began to explain when there were a decent number of children in the class. Just as she turned around, Lydia handed me a piece of paper that said: "Please leave me your notes later, I need to sleep for five minutes". I nodded and she stared at a fixed point on the board. She froze in that position with her eyes open. I'll never understand how she is able to do that.

Her rest was short lived. I had to wake her up when the teacher finished the sketch and he was ready to turn around to ask the students. I shook her so much that she almost fell to the floor, provoking a little laugh on my part. That was enough for the teacher to shout to the whole class that his subject was not something to be taken lightly. I saw Lydia out of the corner of my eye biting her lower lip so as not to explode into a huge laugh.

After an almost endless wait, Anatomy is over. Just as the teacher came out the door, the students began to pack up their things and leave. They didn't care much about the rest of the day's subjects; presence didn't count for the grade. Anatomy was another song.

Soon the chemistry teacher arrived. Tall, serious, dark and very nice to us. Of course, that was because we were the only ones attending her class, and when we couldn't, we had a medical excuse saying that we had a fever of 40 degrees Celsius.

She explained to us what we did not understand with such devotion that it hurt me that the other students were not present and enjoying themselves as much as she did. Lydia, Hypatia and I were usually very advanced in the subject, so we often didn't teach and we would debate with the teacher about some subject in her class. That's what happened today. We didn't recieve any lesson and we started discussing the bad procedure of the students in the laboratories. I made some strange comment about the poisons that we didn't even know were poisons in the laboratory and she ended up urging me with a positive for saying something that she had no idea about. It was a wonderful class, I loved it.

The class flew by, and since the teacher of the last class had missed it, we were allowed to go home earlier than expected.

"If someone knocks on your door around 4:00 pm, it's us," warned Hypatia. "We need to finish telling you."

I nodded and continued to put everything in the backpack. I looked at Lydia for several seconds and then at my case. I extended my hand towards her and Lydia reached into her bag to take out my tip-ex while giggling.

We left the school and said goodbye in the town's central square. Each of us pulled through one of the narrow streets that would have passed between the arcades. I walked to the farmland, then turned right and went into a kind of dark and gloomy forest. I walked through it until I found my house. It was very well hidden in the undergrowth, but if you looked from Google Maps, you would see it. It is a mansion in a clearing three kilometres from the village. You couldn't see it before, my uncle told me, because my parents used to turn on the protector, but now that I don't know how to use it and everyone knows about it... I don't know why I would bother connecting it.

Before I went through the cancilla I stood there admiring it for a while and thinking what my life would have been like if my parents hadn't died. Would we play in the big front yard? Would they have set up playgrounds for me? Would they be stuffy and not play with me, or affectionate and those who spoil their child?

I walked along the driveway that my parents had built to the fountain that decorated the entrance to the house. It was located in a small roundabout and worked every single day if I didn't leave the house. Once you set foot outside the grounds, it stopped drawing water. I assumed that this was where my parents last came from. That these were their last five hundred metres next to me. About five hundred metres that began at the door of the house and ended at the gates that allowed passage to the fields, those that separated the high stone walls.

I entered the lonely and cold house, turned off the biometric alarm and turned on the special security systems. The hall was enormous, with spectacular columns from which the handrail of the great main staircase came out.

On both sides of the staircase, on the ground floor, there were rooms so large that you doubted whether a family of three lived here or whether this was not for the largest of the world's royal families. Below the stairs, on one side, very hidden, was the secondary door to the kitchen. An escape door in case something really goes wrong. I left my backpack on the first step of the stairs and went through the secondary door to the kitchen. I turned on the necessary lights and the cooker to prepare something hot to eat.

While I was cooking, I stared at the portrait of my uncle that was in the kitchen, behind the central island. He was the best cook in the world and he taught me the ins and outs of making a simple meal taste like a king's. He always told me how the great restaurants of the world requested his presence in their kitchens, but that he would never go as long as he had a family that wanted him around, or simply if he had a family. "That's why I'll never leave you and I'll always wait for you to show up, my little star in the sky."

I finished putting the final touches to my spaghetti dish, sat down at the kitchen table and started eating. Italian food will always remind me of my uncle, it was his specialty. I needed him more than ever and it was the only way to feel him with me.

When I finished eating, I picked up everything I had soiled, scrubbed it, left the kitchen like jets of gold and went up to the main living room. It was small compared to the other rooms. It was located on the first floor and had a fireplace just below my parents' big painting. I sat down on the large armchair, took off my shoes and started doing my homework at full speed.

When I finished, I went down to the ground floor and left my backpack well placed for the next day. I hadn't looked at the calendar in my diary to see what I was touching and what I wasn't touching, I simply left everything in the rucksack and went to the library at home. It was on the third floor and had huge windows. Even though it occupied four two-storey rooms, there wasn't room for all the books and plans there. Many were piled up in a special damp-proof room in the basement, but the newer books were stacked majestically on top of each other near the large central table and at the foot of the shelves.

Next to the large door, there was an inscription. I put my hand on it and a panel opened. I typed in the password so that it would start generating a secret and unique WiFi signal for my house. Then I looked for a book to pass the time while waiting for Lydia and Hypatia.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

The doorbell rang several times in a unique way that Hypatia had said she would do for me to identify them. I disconnected the special security system and allowed them to enter. They ran the five hundred meters of entrance after closing the door and electrifying it as I had taught them so that no one would dare enter. When they reached the door of the house, I was waiting for them.

I took them up to my room and the three of us sat on the bed. Lydia waited anxiously for Hypatia to say what she had come to tell. She loved listening to her talk, she made it sound so good.

She said that one day by chance, she snuck into the database of one of the presidents of a country that I will not say. She found a criminal network involving multiple countries and hiding a lot of secrets. She didn't have enough evidence to charge anyone and was too small to say anything. The next day she told Lydia and they both promised to make public all those lies that people wanted us to swallow. But two people is very little and they moved slowly during all the years they were working together on it. They wanted to make the world a better place, empty of lies, where everyone could trust everyone without expecting to be stabbed in the back. A land without crimes. And for that purpose, they worked illegally, in a somewhat criminal way.

They continued to tell thousands and thousands of stories of what they thought they had found. It sounded like fantasy, science fiction. At the same time, it sounded real. And I believed it. Because at that time I knew that science fiction existed, and if not, ask the last adoptive parents I had.

And, that's when they asked me if I wanted to join that small group. If I wanted to be part of what would later be called the Skull Trio.