Two days had passed since the Disaster in Seville. Two long and intense days in which everything had happened. It seemed that the situation had largely stabilized. All this thanks to the reestablishment of communications, including the construction of temporary bridges by the Spanish Army and the setting up of refugee camps for all those who had been left homeless. But it was just a false appearance, for many the unease was increasingly growing, faced with the impossibility of answering the question of where is their missing loved one?

The city hospitals and the field hospitals that had been set up were overflowing. At the end of the first day, a group of computer engineering sciences volunteers had presented a convenient online tool to find missing people available from any smart mobile phone. Its use quickly became popular and soon the authorities themselves adopted it as official. With it, medical centers, hospitals, morgues and other centers were asked to add all possible data on the patients and corpses they had. Names, surnames, identification numbers, physical description, clothing, jewelry, tattoos, etc. Any element that would facilitate their identification and location by relatives who had lost contact after the horrible battle that occurred in the city.

It was thanks to this application that Eva’s mother finally managed to locate one of her friends who she believed she had been with when the disaster happened. All of her attempts to locate her or Luis, with whom she knew she had been celebrating his birthday, had been unsuccessful. No one had any information about the whereabouts of the two. She had even been talking to Luis’s parents, but they were just as devastated as she was. She wanted to notify them of her discovery, but first she had to talk to the boy to see if she really knew something, she didn’t want to feed a hope that would turn into disappointment for them too.

Getting to the hospital where Santiago was had taken her about an hour and a half walking, since only military vehicles, emergency services and some public bus lines were allowed. In addition, countless military checkpoints had been set up to regulate the passage of civilians through different areas of the city. She frisked everyone looking for possible plane fragments or artifacts from the city’s attackers. She had been constantly warned that the authorities would act severely against any attempt to hide or remove any alien or military elements.

She had discovered that Santiago, who was her daughter’s companion in the internship at the European Aerospace Center, was hospitalized at the Virgen de Macarena hospital. She had already been there several times, but she would never have imagined seeing it that way. All hallways and rooms packed with people. Many wounded were stretched out on mattresses or mats on the floor at the sides. When she arrived at reception she lied and claimed to be the boy’s aunt, when they asked for her identification card she claimed to have lost it during the night of the disaster. She believed that they would tell her something about returning another day, especially when upon hearing her, the stocky, shaven, military-looking man who was on the other side of her looked at her with special interest, but in the end no one asked any more questions. She waited patiently for an elevator to arrive and entered it with a dozen other people. She was going to the seventh floor. She had been told that Santiago had to be somewhere in Nephrology, but they were not clear about it. The entire hospital was a mess with so many people.

It took her more than twenty minutes to find him, she was desperate and she was going to consider it impossible when she found him. He was in a room with 5 other patients. Two of them in beds and the rest on the floor. The boy was lying in a corner with his leg completely in a cast and a bandage on his head. He looked pitiful. She approached him and got on her knees. He seemed to be sleeping. She felt very sorry for him, she didn’t want to bother him, but the anxiety she felt to know something about her daughter was such that she didn’t hold back.

‘Santiago, wake up, I am the mother of Eva Gálvez, your classmate,’ she said, shaking him gently.

The boy opened his eyes as if scared and looked at her strangely.

‘Who…?’
‘Eva’s mother, your classmate, you went to CAE together and you went to celebrate Luis’s birthday together. Remember?’
‘Eva… Eva… Eva!’ He said, opening his eyes wide and starting to sweat.

Santiago did not know how long he had been in the hospital, whether hours or days. Everything was confusion and fog since the explosion at the Los Viajeros restaurant. Since then his life had been like being in a dream, images that came and went, whether they were real or unreal he didn’t know. He only felt disorientation and pain, especially in his leg. He thought he heard that they had made cirurgy on him, that they had done the best they could but that it was going to take him a long time to recover.

Now he had in front of him the face of a woman completely unknown to him, she was talking to him about someone, someone he supposedly knew, but didn’t want to remember, something in his mind told him that he shouldn’t do it…

‘Santiago, you are my last hope. I don’t know anything about my daughter, please tell me what happened, when did you last see her? I’m very scared for my Eva. Help me!’ She exclaimed already desperate.

Eva, that name sounded familiar to him, he knew it was important. He tried to remember who she was but his mind remained blank. He was getting overwhelmed, seeing that woman’s eyes pass through him looking for an answer was stressing him out. Wait, those eyes…

A flash struck him violently. A clear image among so much fog. A vision that made him remember but at the same time cry.

‘Eva, Eva, she’s dead,’ he burst into tears.
‘Why do you say she’s dead? What are you saying! Where is my daughter!’ The woman felt her heart and self-confidence crumble.
‘I don’t know how, there was an explosion, I lost consciousness and broke my leg. When I recover myself, everything had become hell.’ Santiago stammered.
‘But what about my daughter, where was she?’ She asked desperately and crying without stopping.
‘I tried to get out of the building as best I could, I could see bodies of my friends but I didn’t know if they were alive or dead. When I looked over the edge of what had been the wall I saw her. Now I remember it clearly, she was lying there, with her head tilted in an impossible way and her neck… Marked by those inhuman claws… I… I’m sorry, the last thing I saw was someone putting Luis into a spaceship and disappearing.’

The last image that Santiago saw of Eva will never be forgotten

The woman watched him disconsolately, tears flowing non-stop from her cheeks. She felt like her heart would stop at any moment. But seeing the boy upset, remembering that moment, seeing the pain he expressed, she felt the need to overcome it, to control her feelings. Her Eva had died, but her doubt came back to haunt her, why no one knew anything about the whereabouts of her body.

‘Thank you Santiago, I know it must have been very difficult. You say they took Luis on a spaceship? Did they take my daughter too?’
‘No, just Luis and I think he was still alive.’
‘What do you remember next? Think back, surely you had to see what happened to Eva’s body being so close to her.’

Santiago tried to force his memory further. He remembered feeling hands pick him up and put him on a stretcher while he heard reassuring words. He remembered opening his eyes and seeing a face covered with a mask of the kind firefighters used. He believed they put him in some kind of military ambulance and, yes, there he was.

‘I have it, before they closed the door of the ambulance in which they picked me up, I remember seeing how some soldiers put several bodies into a kind of dark military jeep, or was it black…’
‘A black army jeep?’ Eva’s mother asked, surprised.
‘I think so, but I’m not sure, I’m not sure of anything anymore.’ Santiago lamented tiredly.
‘Calm down, son, forgive me for having forced you to remember. I needed to get rid of this doubt that was killing me. Now at least I have a lead to follow. I need to know what happened to my Eva and make sure that she can rest in peace, next to her father,’ she said, sobbing.
‘Sorry, I’m very tired. Could you tell my parents about me? I don’t think they know I’m here yet,’ he was trembling.
‘Sure, do you remember their number? I’ll let them know right now.’

Santiago told her the phone number of his parents. After several attempts she managed to find them and give them the good news. Like her, they had been living a nightmare since the night of the Disaster. Relieved to have at least given joy to that family, she said goodbye to Santiago, willing to remove heaven and earth until she found the body of her daughter. Something inside her had told her from the beginning that she had been like this, that her little girl was gone forever, but she had refused to accept it. Now that she could no longer deceive herself, she had no choice but to ensure that she rested in peace in the family niche next to her husband. Knowing that the military had her. At least she knew where to start.

She left the hospital and headed to the bus stop. There was a long line of people waiting to catch the next one. She stood at the end and checked her phone to see the latest news. There was one that caught her attention. It was about the recent arrival in Seville of a great international expert on astrobiology, to direct the investigations of all the alien biological remains of the Disaster. His name was Vladimir Korsakov and the journalist who signed the article highlighted that, despite being a scientist of renowned reputation, his choice had surprised him because he had always been accompanied by controversy due to his relationship with the scientific community and his lack of scruples.

She was going to move on to another news story when she noticed someone touching her from behind. She turned around and found a tall, burly man with a military buzz cut. His face seemed strangely familiar to her. At once she realized it was the same one who had looked at her with interest at the hospital reception.

‘Are you Eva Gálvez’s mother?’ The man asked in a serious tone.
‘Yes…’ She answered doubtfully.
‘Please come with us,’ he said in the same tone and pointing towards the black military jeep that had just stopped right next to him.
‘Accompany you where?’
‘Madam, I wasn’t asking you. And give me your mobile phone,’ said the man while he took the device from her and put her inside the vehicle after opening the door again.

The people around her murmured in alarm at what they had just witnessed. It had been a matter of seconds. No one had had time to record it on video or take photos, but more than one sent a message on Twitter warning that some soldiers had just taken a woman against her will. From the looks of it, it hadn’t been the first, nor would it be the last.