This news quickly reached Agua, who announced that she would enter a period of intense fasting to assess the situation. She asked Alondra to take care of the community. The second Agua indicated that the first one would be locked up as they had done with her, and that the girl Marta should bring her water. The first Agua would tell when the fast should end and what should be done next.
The night before starting the fast, Agua went to visit the Radix Speciosa. She entered the room knocking on the door and bowing deeply. Mirlo was as always by the window reading the pious books, which had come to interest her. They were ancient religious texts from the most widespread traditions during the 21st Century, in the last period of existence of the ancient order of Los Identes. Although she didn't know how to read very well, she had gotten really interested during her confinement. She increased her speed and learned an increasingly wider range of abstract concepts. Just as in the forest she had learned to move like animals, to follow trails and to wake and sleep with danger in mind, she must also learn the skills that were necessary to navigate the human world.
No one really knew why the Radix didn't go down to the dome and the refectory. Alondra and Agua hid the fact that she was locked up. When everyone found out that she spent the day reading Vedas, Bibles, Taos, Korans and Sutras, there was an atmosphere of astonishing tranquility in the lower part of the Identes compound. The Radix Speciosa was perfect and better than they had imagined. However, the fact that they felt in community beyond their differences did not mean that they had reached a consensus on doctrine.
– Salve, Radix.
Mirlo looked up from the Tao Te Ching she was reading without moving her head or craning her neck, as if she expected no further interaction. The sentence she was reading read: "Create without possessing, act without waiting, guide without interfering." Agua sat on the old rug at the foot of the bed where Mirlo read. She watched her reading and identified the book.
– «Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know »– she commented with satisfaction.
Mirlo continued to look at Agua in exactly the same way, without moving the book an inch in her hands or turning her vertebrae one degree. She was defiant. They looked at each other intensely and long. After ten minutes, they were disfigured, and just as Mirlo saw a messy bundle of flesh, Water saw a bulky light. She aligned her spine and smiled. Meanwhile, Mirlo, remained at exactly the same angle of the fifty–first chapter line that she was reading when Agua arrived. Agua gently bowed her head the same way she had bowed to Alondra nine months before. She got up and left. She went down to the dome and announced that she was beginning the fast. She knocked Alondra's cell door and asked her to lock her up. Alondra did.
When she lay down to sleep, Alondra considered escaping. It was a good time. No one would come to the upper part of the complex until tomorrow morning, and if they sneaked out quietly enough, it was possible that they could elude Las Identes by making them believe they were fleeing towards the city, and then return to Liuben and Storm across the river. But Alondra felt four things that she did not feel before arriving at Las Identes: attachment to the community and to certain beliefs of Las Identes, such as those related to their cults; desire to serve Agua, both as a sexual subject and as Second Water; the feeling that it was okay for Mirlo to stay the way she was now; and that, if she stayed at Las Identes, she potentially had a small guerrilla to lead, which could play an important role in the city, in the near future. But also, and above all, she had a tremendous curiosity to find out why Agua was manufacturing dynamite. And she could only know that after she came out of the fast.
The end of the Agua’s fast could represent an objective danger to Mirlo's life, but Alondra hoped she could convince her otherwise, although she still didn't know how. With Agua locked up and visiting hours in her cell strictly controlled, it was the most free moment Alondra had ever experienced in Las Identes.
She knocked on the living room door of the old building. Mirlo stretched out languidly on the bed, looking nowhere. She entered. Mirlo looked away when she saw it was her and turned around, against the wall. Alondra entered and closed the door behind, placing a chair on the handle.
– Agua has locked herself in the cell.
Mirlo didn't move, but her breathing became shallower, as if she were interested in what Alondra might say.
– I understand how you feel. I'm sorry. I would like to leave too. But there are still many things to solve here. Besides, it would be of no use. There are still no news from the city, and if we leave we will never get them. If we went back to the city, they would surely catch me. And if we don't return, how can we live in the forest? Forever just Liuben, Tormenta, you and me? Right now it may seem like a romantic idea, but the truth is... what could we do for the rest of our lives like this? I have always lived for this moment, do you understand? And you wouldn't want to be with me in the forest always, like this...
Mirlo sighed, between anger and the recognition that what Alondra said was partly true. He understood that Alondra had always lived by and for the city, and that asking her to move to the forest was too great a proof of love. And furthermore, it was also true that the passion Mirlo felt was not so much for the whole person of her as for a certain version of her. And that, since he was young, everything could fade away as quickly as it had arisen. Mirlo also knew that his relationship with the city, or at least with the people, had only just begun. The fantasy of returning to the forest was beautiful, but not plausible. Although she, at the same time, suspected that the end of Agua’s fast could pose a greater danger than the one she was in now. She turned around. Alondra had sat on the bed, so far on the edge that she almost had to use her legs to hold herself up on the cot. Mirlo put her hand on her back. As her hand rested on Alondra’s back, she realized that she was trembling and that she was on the verge of crying. Alondra turned around, thanked Mirlo for her touch, looked at her with love but went to sleep in her cell. Because in reality, despite everything, if there was something deep in her heart, it was the desire to stay with Mirlo.
[…]
Agua remained in deep meditative states, Marta brought her water and Alondra was dying to take advantage of the moment to drink Water and be with Mirlo, although she understood how dangerous it was to do so at Las Identes. Five days into Agua’s fast, a freeze cold, white thing began to fall from the sky. Neither Alondra, nor Mirlo, nor anyone at Las Identes had ever seen it, although they had heard about it: it was snow. Mirlo became very happy, so much so that she asked to be let out to touch it. Agua compromised. Alondra let her out but came back to her cell immediately. She watched her playing with the snow drunk with enthusiasm from the door of her cell: “Mirlo has been in Las Identes for more than three months. Will it be credible that we play with the snow?” Because, even though Agua was meditating in the cell, Alondra knew that she had very long antennae. For these three months, Alondra had been behaving exactly as if she didn't know the Radix Speciosa at all, except from the day they went down to the dome and the other night. Perhaps the snow was an event extraordinary enough that they could approach each other and treat each other as prisoner and jailer, or lady and maid servant, or community companions. She resisted all day, but the next morning it was still snowing and a thick layer had formed everywhere. It was so white and soft, so bright and pure, and it was such an amazing event that it was inevitable to break any restrictions. Not only did they play with the snow, but the girl Marta, who brought the water, joined them frantically, and some Identes who went up to check if Agua wanted to give instructions in these special circumstances, too. On the third day, the initial enthusiasm began to turn into fear that the snow was the herald of a new and worse deluge. This was not foreseen in the doctrine of Las Identes, which could result in a disaster of unknown dimensions.
During that week, Mirlo seemed to ritualize a process of personal maturation. The first few days she had a childish behavior in tune with the snow. Afterwards she became engrossed in her thoughts and looked through her window with a melancholic expression, as if she were twelve years old. She later seemed to become overwhelmed with the mental heaviness of adolescence. Until the time came when she wanted to go to her loved ones for support and company, and this meant that she no longer wanted to not be speaking to Alondra. The night Alondra had come clean, the games in the snow and the persistence of the mysterious white material, as angelic as it was potentially deadly, gave her insight into what it might have been like to flee into the woods without thinking. She feared for Tormenta and Liuben, but was glad to be close to Alondra and indoors.
Alondra had decided that she would not suddenly change her behavior just because of the possibilities that Agua’s fast opened up, as she felt that Mirlo would find that to be opportunistic behavior. But it was very cold, and just as Agua turned the cold into a method to deepen in her meditative states, Alondra felt a crazy desire to warm Mirlo’s body under the blankets. On the seventh night of Agua’s fast, under the heavy and windy snowfall, she decided that it was the right time to sneakily leave the cell and go to the building.
Since Agua had started fasting, Alondra had started making Water without a fee, without really understanding why she made it. On the one hand, she thought of having an almost infinite supply in a virtual escape to the forest, so she dedicated herself to reducing the Water to a solid state in order to concentrate it more. She also told herself that this could be a business or activism strategy if they returned to the city. She was testing Agua’s techniques, which in addition to allowing the transduction of more complex molecules, also enabled greater production capacity. For some reason, she thought of matching the production capacity of Agua, making as much Water as dynamite, as if it were a competition. The same obsession that continued to grow inside her every day was expressed as an excrescence in the perhaps useless production of Water. She didn't really know why she made it, but she could make it, so she made it. Since Agua had given her the freedom to use the laboratory as she wanted, she had no qualms about storing her production there. Agua did not supervise what she did nor did she seem to show any interest in her activities. She gave the impression that this freedom was her way of making amends for the grievances of the previous months. Knowing as she did that she was Tecla Delatorre's daughter, she did not expect her to be held accountable, but rather she treated her as an equal. In return, Alondra did not ask about this matter, lest knowing too much would imply ceasing to have this autonomy in the laboratory. After all, she had the impression that Agua's activities in the laboratory were not known to Las Identes either. Alondra covered Agua, Agua covered Alondra, and together the Identes were ruled under the spiritual authority of the mysterious Radix Speciosa who arrived on the date designated by tradition.
Alondra brought Mirlo Water like every day, but she grabbed a little too much. Mirlo was eating a couple of raw turnips and some preserved summer tomatoes on the carpet.
– It is very cold.
– Oui.
Alondra used to leave her Water in a glass that she brought her with her food, but this time she introduced her to the new powder that she was starting to make.
– Comme la niege – said Mirlo.
– Oui.
Alondra smiled.
– Toi aussi?
They were the words Alondra most wanted to hear.
– Moi aussi.
Mirlo got nervous. She looked around, looked for a way to secure the door, double-closed the shutter, and pulled the thick curtain past her. She turned off one of the two lamps she had. She sat on the rug and offered Alondra a turnip and a tomato. They ate them. Mirlo drank the half glass of Water. To Alondra's surprise, Mirlo did not consider not taking it. She didn't quite understand why, but she couldn't continue thinking about it when Mirlo, before Alondra’s body began to transform, threw herself on top of her and began to hug her and kiss her with great love. Her hands and her feet were frozen, and she sought to cling tightly to her chest and feel her heart through the clothes and the pressure of her embrace. Alondra could not reject this proximity. Mirlo did not give her the time to attach to her thoughts of separation and her fantasies of satisfaction and altruism, and she could only let herself be carried away by the love of Mirlo, which was the most familiar place in the world. There was no space to feel rejection by her own body, because her body was entirely the place where she could hold her. Instead of the gradual increase in passion, Mirlo seemed to offer her today a very long word of love that stretched smoothly into the early morning. As Alondra’s body warmed and altered from the effects of the Water, the limbs held back at a constant speed and in the sensation of intense prolonged pause. Mirlo gave him a melancholic voluptuousness. Matured, as she had been during the snowing week and perhaps after the months playing the Radix at Las Identes, instead of the youthful fire they had experienced in the forest. Alondra felt that she was telling him things, that she was talking. As if she wanted to give him with her body all the nuances that she could not offer him through words, due to all the different language difficulties that they had always faced, and that, although in reality they had not made their communication very difficult, they had given shape to it.