Undiscovered, secret and rare skills.

"Did you know this?" Hypatia showed me the letter. "Did you have any idea about this?"

I denied it.

"I've heard something else. It wasn't what was in the letter," I told them and thought they would take me for a fool. "It's nothing, leave it."

They denied it repeatedly and forced me to tell.

"I kept hearing Lydia saying, 'Uncover the truth, uncover the truth, uncover the truth.' I think I've gone mad. An effect of that I shouldn't be in here," I nodded a little scared.

"No," Hypatia looked for my eyes in the darkness to reassure me. "Not everything we hear is a lie. Perhaps that is your gift. Maybe you can listen beyond what people say. Like me. I have heard it too."

"But it hasn't happened to me before."

"Hypatia, it may have been listening to her mother's words. It happens to you all the time, it only happens to me with my parents. I think the same thing happens to her."

Hypatia looked at the paper for several seconds in thought. Her eyes went from the letter to the Lydia and ended up resting on me. They looked like a black waterwheel. She was turning something over in her head, plotting some kind of plan.

"It could be."

"I don't understand what you're talking about," I left my mobile phone upside down on the table to light up the room and sat down on an antique chair that was around the small room. "Could you explain it to me?"

"Lydia was not wrong about you," she smiled at me and then friendly slapped the arm of the one named. "You're the best at this, kid, I never thought you could do it," she joked.

"Sometimes I hate you."

"We have what we can call gifts. Lydia is able to look at a person and know if they are like us or not, special, gifted. She is also incredibly insightful and, I don't understand how, but she can win everyone's trust by smiling. I can hear what people really want to say with their sentences, what they are hiding, and I am able to see them at first glance, that is, I can know their personality, their strengths, their weaknesses, but I do not know if they are gifted or not. I also manage to make people do what I want. My gift is words, Lydia's gift is her pretty face," she ran her tongue through her teeth, she was lying. "Actually, they are not gifts. We like to think that they are because we are given to reading. We only know how to use our talents well. Lydia has a little girl's face, which makes people trust her much more than usual, plus the way she is helps a lot. What I am is persuasive, I know how to use my words to get what I want from others".

I thought at the time that they were pretty smart. Reading people and pushing them around had always seemed exceptional to me. It wasn't magic, it was talent, and they had developed it so well that it really seemed like something out of a fairy tale, I thought. How wrong I was.

"Will you teach me?"

Hypatia laughed in one breath and answered me in the negative.

"You will have other skills. We can't teach you what we can do, it would take years. You may have discovered a clue in the letter you read. It would have taken years for many people to discover what they needed in order to really decipher the letter, you have done it by listening. That cannot be taught, it is something intrinsic to you".

I found out that they didn't really believe me, but I didn't give it a second thought because I later found out that that letter was indeed in code and that it said exactly that. Hypatia knew that the letter was in code, she had discovered it while thinking about it.

The following letter was addressed to me. It had been written by both my father and my mother and, like the other one, it was crumpled up in several places. They had cried when they wrote it.

Lydia opened the envelope delicately and took out its contents. Apart from the parchment, because it was a parchment that this one was carrying, there was a very small pendant that my friend handed over to me after she had looked at it in wonder and passed it on to Hypatia so that she could answer that question that she had not asked but that we all knew: "Doesn't it look familiar?"

"Our dearest and most beloved girl,

We know that it will be difficult and complicated to live in this world, but do not despair. You are the only hope we have left. You have always been and will continue to be our little ray of light, one of the greatest treasures we have ever possessed in this life, our little bright star in the sky. Do not despair no matter how much evil surrounds you, do not bow down to it. You are stronger than you can believe, little one, and you will never be alone.

Our heart grieves to understand that this is the last time we will see you. We should have left everything behind in knowing of your coming to this beautiful and cruel world. If we had, we would all be together now and not keeping our luggage in the car, cheating the villagers and escaping from this beautiful house.

Don't think that we despise you, God forbid. We love you to the very limits of madness, our light. So much so that we would be able to tolerate the most painful of tortures and suffer the most bitter death knowing that you would live out of suffering and torment.

Never change, please. Don't push yourself. You are so strong, independent, happy and intelligent at such a young age that we cannot conceive of the immense achievements you will have in the future. You don't need to force yourself to achieve this, our brave lioness. You don't need that to achieve your goals. You are wise and clever, that's good enough for you.

We are oppressed in our hearts to think that we will not be able to see you grow. However, you will understand later that before the people die, before the rich and powerful win their struggle to hide the truth, it is better to give up one's life. Your mother and I have made many mistakes in order to get the truth partially free. We have gone astray to do so. The proof of this is that you will grow up without your parents and they will most probably try to hunt you down. But you have to be strong, you must not lose heart.

Remember, Princess, before the life of any being, before the truth is hidden among the lies, your life will be given in return.

They love you,

Your parents, Alan and Brianna Johnson.

P.S.: Take care of your friends, but keep an eye on your enemies, Aileen Darcy."

"Who the heck is Aileen Darcy and why don't they write it to you?" she wiped a couple of tears that fell endlessly down her cheeks. "I thought it was for you. It was beautiful, even if it wasn't for you. A disappointment, but beautiful."

"Aileen Darcy is what my parents used to call me. I've always been Stella, but to them I was Aileen Darcy," I shrugged and put that letter in my pocket to keep it next to my gurney. "My uncle explained that they used to call me that because I was the light, Aileen, in their darkness, Darcy."

"They liked to play with names. My parents literally yell at me, 'Hey, Brat! How was your day? I hope it's great, otherwise I'll have to fight him and he won't want my fists in his face.' They love me very much, but for them I'll never stop being Brat." Hypatia shrugged her shoulders. "You have to bear in mind that I'm seventeen years old and I'm still Brat."

She forced a smile, blinked and the three of us laughed together. It had been a rather frightening discovery to know that my parents sensed that they were going to die that very day when the letter was signed and laughing was the only thing that allowed us to release tension.

"Why didn't he let you in here before? It would have been nice to know that they loved you with all their heart."

At that moment I had started to look through a couple of manuscripts. In one of them there was a kind of torture manual. It was so detailed, with so many well-done drawings that it gave me chills. There were even drops of blood splashing on it. It smelled of old ink, blood and ethyl alcohol. The drawing shown was of a man and a woman on a wooden board. I didn't know the person who had written them, but I knew the drawer or at least the technique he used was very similar.

"I think this is why" I didn't drop the papers, I just showed them. "If I'm not mistaken, the drawings were made by the same man who portrayed the family when I was born.The painter of the painting in the main hall."

Lydia had to look away.They were so well done, with so much detail, that I wondered if the painter had had access to see the torture. Part of me wanted to think that it wasn't done in my house. The sensible one screamed that it had been done in the dungeons. That's why there were so many instruments of torture around the house. They were spies and as they had made very clear in the letters, all because the truth was not hidden.

"But they never killed," a light bulb went off. "They couldn't do it. They only tortured to get the truth. Those were their mistakes. They had made too many enemies."

I wrote down that fact in my head: Never make enemies, it ends badly.

"I admire your parents," Hypatia took out a plan of the palace of Versailles, an ancient one and surely with all the secret passages. "They were us but thirty years ago. Unbelievable. And they have always lived a few hectares away from the village. They will be my example to follow. Besides, we have more than one thing in common," he kept the map. "We can't stand that people die, even if they have to and deserve it more than anything else in this world."

She came up to me and handed me her mobile phone. The light reflected on his face gave him a ghostly, terrifying look. He looked like the skeleton in one of the cells in the last basement.

Her last sentence made me swallow my saliva, I hoped she hadn't seen me do it or that she would blame it on something else. I was shaking with fear. I tried to calm down and asked to leave.

We went out and locked the door. Now we would sneak into the next one.

"I'm afraid to think that we'll be government meat if we get caught too," said Lydia, leaving me the two instruments she had used to open the previous door. "I don't know what death your parents had, I didn't read that newspaper and I don't care much about the death of others, but it sure was horrible."

She looked at me with compassion, sweetness and support in her eyes.

If she really knew what happened to my parents, she would have nightmares for years, just like me. My problem was having witnessed that massacre. I couldn't fall asleep without seeing those needles piercing their necks, without seeing those red eyes digging into me, screaming, "You're next, little one".

"They were not murdered by the government, even if that letter says so," I squatted before the lock and tried to imitate the same steps that Lydia had taken. "My uncle told me that it was one of his kind. That envy had eaten away at them and they had to kill them because they had made a mistake in having me with them during one of their clandestine missions. I suppose they had a group like ours and someone thought it would be fun to get them out of the way because they knew too much and were thinking of retreating. That's what my uncle told me."

"What about the truth in the first place?"

"They would wait until I was old enough to tell me. I don't know. I'm not even sure anymore who my parents' killer was. The case was closed and no one was sent to prison. I don't know what to believe anymore. For me it will always be a mystery, because my uncle was very jealous of whatever my parents were part of. You could hear it in his voice. But he never lied. And that makes me doubt."

"You know we want the government to dig up all the dirt, if the murder of your parents is among it, it will come out." Lydia had bent over to put her hand on my shoulder and smiled at me to show her unconditional support, it was the heart of the group. "You will see."

This time, the door was greased, which gave me a very bad feeling. I saw one of Lydia's ears moving in the same way as when you hear an imperceptible noise. I tuned my own. I heard gears moving behind the walls, sounds of weapons being loaded, how the strings of some crossbows that were not in the room were tightened. I prepared myself for whatever was happening in there.

The lights were switched on without touching a single switch.

The room was much bigger than the cubicle where the cards were. There were tiny holes in the wallpaper, very well camouflaged with the imperial motifs it had. Then my head went to work like crazy. There were guns, darts and probably arrows the size of an ant. My parents weren't stupid, I'm sure all those weapons were well impregnated with any kind of non-expired poison.

I looked at the floor. It was full of tiles. They were of different colours and I was sure that if I stood at ground level, I could see that the dark ones were much more raised than the light ones. The colours they had, different from the others, were chosen to confuse whoever entered. But I didn't have time to think any more because Lydia came in without warning.

Hypatia and I jumped at the same time and took her out of the room. Just as Lydia crossed the threshold, a spear went through the floor where she had stepped.

"You see, Stella, you can't teach anyone your skills. I tried to get Lydia to learn how to think with other people's eyes, to be able to read people the way I do, and I didn't succeed. She tried to get me to think with my heart, to read them with my heart, rather, to be a little more honest. She didn't succeed either".

"Were you waiting for me to come in?"

"You look at the little details. Lydia's ear, for example. I saw you notice it as the door opened."

"I don't have the ear developed to distinguish between a hinge and a death mechanism," Lydia disagreed. "Should I learn that?"

"Nope," Hypatia tapped me on the shoulder in a friendly way. "That's why we have her. You only mention when you hear something below the limit of our ears."

Lydia smiled mischievously at Hypatia, she rolled her eyes and I got lost in the middle of the conversation of symbols and gestures. I should have started to analyze them a few years ago, I thought, so that I wouldn't get lost like I'm doing right in that moment.

"See the switch?" Hypatia scanned the room for an off button.

"Yes" Lydia responded. "Next to the gloomy picture of... Your grandparents?"

"I guess it's the paternal ones," I said not very convinced.

"If the room is so protected, it will be for something," Hypatia tried to get the rest of us to think about that something.

"There are plans behind that picture frame. Look at the blue paper and the tracing paper sticking out of the top corner," I pointed out. "And there are probably more things. You can't put up that much security to hide a bunch of maps that others might get by taking a walk around the house. What I find strange is that the doors open so easily. Especially this one and the one before it. I don't even want to think about what will happen when we try to open the doors hidden in the very stone of the wall".

I continued to analyse the room. Three meters away from us there was a tile that stood out from the others. These were pool tiles, but not one of the tiles in the house. The outside of the Olympics had summer sky tiles and the gym tiles were white. I looked at the drawing they made. A small family. Our family. There was my father, my mother and me. But there was something strange. My mother was much more swollen than in the other photographs and paintings scattered around the house. Reality hit me at that moment. She had been pregnant when we were attacked in the car.

The air escaped from my lungs. This room had been finished months or even days before they died in that car accident. I would have had a sibling.

I did not mourn his loss at that time, but I would mourn it later, when I understood what one does not possess by losing each and every member of a new family.

"What's going on?" Hypatia stared at me.

"She had a sibling," was Lydia's reply. She was, unlike Hypatia, able to put herself in the shoes of others. "He also died."

I could only nod my head very slightly, nodding to what Lydia had just said.

Hypatia was very good at reading people, how they acted, manipulating them. However, she lacked Lydia's ability to read feelings, to know their true intentions. That's why they never separated from each other, because they needed each other to create the greatest effect. Hypatia was rarely wrong, even less so with Lydia. That's when it became clear to me that they were the left and right side of a giant brain. Hypatia was the left part, Lydia the right part. Together they were invincible. I wondered what I was doing on that team if it was already complete.

"It takes two people to read one correctly, but many more if we want to do something. You can't build a house with two columns, it would fall apart, you need three. And you, my dear friend, are the third. The one in charge of checking that the gears are working properly. The one in charge of foreseeing the mistakes and movements of the enemy in the battlefield that we have not foreseen, because you, Stella, are our senses. Our contact with the outside world," Hypatia will tell me. "You make us ask questions we hadn't even thought of. That is good. We need your experience in this world of villains to come out alive and victorious from our wonderful assignment."

"Okay. I know how to get to the other side," I nodded, "It's simple, all we have to do is keep our ears open and not get distracted by anything visual that might come up."

"You're the one with the machine in the gym, you're the one with your ear to the ground," Lydia led the way for me to unplug the traps as Hypatia ordered. "Go ahead, Lea, show us you can do more than memorize 200 pages in twenty minutes."

"I need your ears, Lydia," I begged.

She nodded.

"Hypatia, could you bring the first aid kit? It's in the gym."

Hyaptia left and returned a few seconds later with the first aid case.

"Just tell me where the sound is coming from. Right or left. As fast as possible. I often miss it in that machine."

Guided by Lydia, I closed my eyes and started walking. A bullet grazed my shirt, I felt it melt to the touch. This was much more complicated than a handful of extremely hot rays in the gym.

I was moving as fast as I could. I even counted three mortals and four pines so that things wouldn't touch me. They threw everything. Several objects almost hit me. I noticed them flying near my head.

I got to the picture and turned off the traps. However, another one came out before I could press the button and cracked my side. It was a dart and I hoped it didn't contain any poison. It stayed embedded in the wall. I pulled it out, sucked it out and it didn't taste of anything. I crossed my fingers so that it was really nothing.

Hypatia ran with the first-aid box and opened it. I took out the bandages, the alcohol and the betadine. I rolled up my shirt and saw the wound.

Lydia opened her mouth. My abdomen was full of burns and some wounds.

"It's the training. I've never missed so much, but since my birthday I've been a little distracted. I haven't received a letter I was expecting and it has me terribly worried."

"Do you need us to trace it?" offered Hypatia.

"No. It's probably nothing."

The truth is that if the emitter was dead, it would really give me something. If not, I would take care of killing him myself.

We take the painting out of its place and look inside. Apart from a pile of plans about the hidden rooms in all the basements, there were two more letters, but they could not be opened. They were electronic and were designed so that the owners, as that is what it said, could read them once they were twenty-one years old. They were addressed to the Heiress of the Pharaohs and the Great Heart of Iran. I was going to make a joke that they were addressed to them, but I kept it to myself. We assumed that in my parents' group there would be more than one married couple with joint names and that they had children they wanted to contact.

Then there was another scroll. It contained a single sentence: "The government is not what it seems. It wants your skills. Be careful what you do."

"What the little piece of paper means is that..." Lydia scratched her head and said jokingly and seriously. "Let's be careful who we give our services to."

"It would be a reminder to themselves," proposed Hypatia.

"Or for those to whom these letters are addressed," I intervened.

"We have many years ahead of us to find the owners," Hypatia stood up. "First we have to finish what your parents started."

"What time is it, by the way?" I wasn't wearing a watch and it was Wednesday, I didn't want to be late for class.

"Eight o'clock in the morning, why?"

I panicked. I would have half an hour to shower, change clothes and prepare food for class. Not to mention that it takes half an hour to get there and that it took us just that long to be there from my house.

"We have to go, we'll be late. The first hour is Anatomy."

"It is a holiday bridge. We have four days off, I remind you," Hypatia tried to calm me down amidst Lydia's stifled laughter. "That's why we're going to Washington D.C. Because our uncles live there and they want us to go and because it's great for us to have a holiday bridge."

I sat on the floor because of the impression. Then I looked at them and said mentally that even if I didn't feel like it I should look at the calendar yes or yes before going to bed. It wouldn't be the first time that I'd shown up in front of the school when it was a holiday. I was a bit absent-minded about the non-school timetable.