Alpine Bunker Corridors, Containment Levels -
The heavy cell doors slid open, and Sofia and Diego were roughly shoved by the guards into the cold, sterile corridor. The air down here smelled of metal, disinfectant, and a stale fear built up over decades. As they walked, flanked by the black-armored soldiers, Sofia's mind wasn't on the uncertain fate that awaited them in the Council's interrogation rooms, nor even on the cosmic terror ravaging the planet. Her thoughts, like a broken compass desperately searching for its direction, revolved around a single, painful image: her son's face.
Leo... The name was a constant echo in her heart, a wound that wouldn't stop bleeding. My brave little lion... where will you be? Will you be safe?
She remembered, with a clarity that tore her in two, the happy, wild days in their small house deep in the Veracruz jungle, so far from the so-called civilized world. The air there smelled of damp earth, orchids, and the promise of rain. Diego had built their home with his own hands, and she had filled it with the scent of healing herbs and the sound of ancient songs. And there, in that earthly paradise, Leo was born, under the gaze of the full moon and the song of the howler monkeys.
"We lived so isolated," Sofia thought, a lump tightening in her throat, "so immersed in the sacred rhythm of Gaia, in our healings, in the whispers of the jungle spirits, that the 'official' world with its stamped papers and civil registries seemed a distant reality, an almost irrelevant fiction. To our Leo..." Her heart sank. "We never took him to the Veracruz civil registry. There was no birth certificate with government seals, no ID number, not a single piece of paper to prove his existence to them, to the system that now held us prisoners."
Back then, that decision had been an act of freedom, of consistency with their way of life. They wanted Leo to grow up free from the shackles of a world they considered sick and disconnected. Now, that same decision felt like a terrible vulnerability, a noose around their neck.
The men in black, the Consortium agents who had torn them from their paradise, had made them an icy promise as they took their baby. "A child with his genetic potential is too valuable an asset to be... wasted," the leader had hissed, his eyes like shards of ice. "He will be... cared for. Educated. Guided toward his full potential... under our tutelage, of course."
'Cared for'? The word was a taunt in the mouths of such monsters. What did 'care' mean to people who burned laboratories with their occupants inside to cover up their crimes? An anonymous, sterilized orphanage, run by soulless bureaucrats? A genetic experimentation lab, where her little Leo would be reduced to a set of data and variables? Or, at best, an 'adoptive family' carefully selected by the Consortium, loyal to the Thirteen Families, to mold him, to turn him into one of them, erasing any trace of Sofia and Diego?
And his name... this thought was a dagger twisting in her heart with every step she took down the cold bunker corridor. "Leo. We named him for the life-giving strength of the sun, for the indomitable nobility of the lion that reigned in the stories Diego told him as he cradled him under the sacred ceiba tree. But if... if I ever manage to see him again... if I survive this nightmare and somehow escape this hell of steel and stone... will he even respond to that name?"
The deepest fear gripped her. "Or whoever 'cared for' him, those soulless monsters who took him from us, will they have given him another name, one chosen from their own dark bloodlines? Will they have respected our decision, our one desperate plea before they separated us from his warmth, his laughter, his small body clinging to ours? Or will they have rechristened him, erasing with a new name even that last, fragile vestige of us in his young life?"
The prospect was torture. If she managed to find him someday, how would she do it? A child with no official trace in the world, with a name that was perhaps no longer his own. And the most terrifying question of all: "If I find him... will he recognize me? Or will I just be a stranger with eyes filled with a pain he can't understand, a stranger claiming to be his mother?"
Diego, walking beside her, felt the tremor running through Sofía's body. He reached out and touched hers, a brief touch but one filled with silent understanding and shared pain. He, too, carried the same anguish, the same uncertainty.
Sofía continued walking, each echo of her footsteps in the corridor a countdown to an unknown interrogation. But the real torment wasn't what they might do to her, but the sight of her little Leo, alone, in the hands of those who saw human beings as mere assets or pawns in their global power play. "Leo," the name, was a silent prayer on her lips, an anchor of love in the ocean of her despair, the only light in the darkness of her captivity.