Part 1

A dirty fingernail of a street child emerged from the millionaire’s son’s blind eye with something black and alive stuck to its tip, and Ricardo Beltrán felt the air in his mansion turn to poison.

For 12 years, Ricardo had bought everything but a miracle. Owner of a technology company in Monterrey, he spent fortunes on specialists, private clinics, experimental therapies, and healers, but no one could restore Mateo’s sight. His only son had gone blind at age 7, the same day his mother died in a supposed accident on the highway to Saltillo. Since then, the diagnoses were always the same: total blindness, uncertain cause, no visible injury to explain it.

Mateo was 19 and lived surrounded by luxuries he couldn’t bear to look at: assistants, Braille books, a grand piano, and a house so big it sometimes sounded empty. Ricardo had grown accustomed to seeing him walk around counting steps and touching walls, with a serenity that hurt more than any cry.

That afternoon, Mateo was in the music room that opened onto the terrace, his fingers flicking across the keys as if searching for a door. It was then that a thin girl in worn clothes slipped in through the service entrance before the guards could throw her out. It was Sofia, a girl from the cruise ship who cleaned windshields and sold gum. She was about 14, but her eyes didn’t look like a child’s.

The bodyguards restrained her.

—Take her out.

Mateo turned his face away.

—Don’t touch her.

The order was delivered so firmly that even Ricardo was silent for a moment. Sofia stood still in front of the boy.

“You’re not here for money,” said Mateo.

“No,” she replied. “I’m here for what they put on you.”

Ricardo let out a laugh filled with contempt.

—Now a street child knows more than doctors?

Sofia didn’t answer him. She approached Mateo and placed her palm on his cheek. The young man didn’t back away.

“Your eyes aren’t dead,” he whispered. “There’s something there, something blocking the light from the outside.”

Ricardo took a step.

—Guards, take her out now.

“Leave her alone,” said Mateo.

Before anyone could stop her, Sofia carefully lifted the boy’s right eyelid. She slid her fingernail along the inner edge with chilling precision and pulled. Ricardo screamed.

—Take your hands off him!

But it was too late.

On Sofia’s palm remained a black, shiny thing, about the size of a fingernail. It wasn’t dirt, or scab, or blood. It writhed. Its surface reflected the light like oil, and a metallic smell came from it, like burnt wire in the rain.

Matthew put his hands to his forehead.

—It burns me… the other one too.

The creature let out a high-pitched shriek and leaped onto the marble. Ricardo raised his shoe to crush it, but Sofia stopped him.

—Don’t step on it. If you break it here, it will release spores.

The guards retreated. The creature darted off towards the shadow of the piano.

“What the hell is that?” Ricardo asked.

Sofia followed the dark trail he left behind.

—A nocturian. It lives where the light was forcibly extinguished.

Mateo clenched his jaw.

—He didn’t come alone. The left one is waking up.

Sofia fell to her knees beside the piano and pressed her ear to the wall. From the other side, she could hear a damp, multiple rustling sounds, as if something small and numerous were moving inside the wall. The girl paled.

—The one I took out was a scout. They steal people’s sight so they don’t see what would break them the most.

Ricardo felt a chill.

—How many are there?

Sofia pointed to the wall behind the piano.

—More than can fit in a nightmare.

Mateo breathed with difficulty.

—Take out the other one.

This time Ricardo didn’t object. Sofia repeated the movement on her left eye and extracted another nocturiole, dark and motionless as if listening to commands. Then the wall vibrated. From the other side came a rhythmic tapping, like a sick heart. The garden lights went out abruptly, the living room was plunged into darkness, and a shadow covered the windows.

Sofia tightened her fingers around the creature and spoke without taking her eyes off the wall.

—They’ve woken up. And whoever’s in there knows who Mateo is.

Part 2

Ricardo ordered sledgehammers and steel bars to be brought, and in less than five minutes his men had smashed through the wall behind the piano. A damp, metallic smell, mixed with old plaster and burnt wire, filled the room. Inside the hole there were no pipes or insulation. There was a nest. Twelve nocturians crawled among a black mass that pulsed like a diseased lung. Some clung to the concrete, others tangled with each other, and all of them shrieked at the light. Sofía asked that no one get too close because these creatures weren’t born of flesh, but of trapped trauma, and that’s why they sought eyes, memories, and corners where a truth had been forcibly buried. Mateo, trembling, said that for the first time in twelve years he could make out something like a glow behind his eyelids, as if the darkness were being torn from within. Ricardo tried to pull him back, but Sofía knelt in front of the hole and pushed aside the living layer of insects with her hand. In the center, he found something that didn’t belong in the nest: a dark wooden music box, covered in dust, dampness, and cobwebs. Ricardo recognized it instantly. It had belonged to Elena, Mateo’s mother. He himself had sworn that the box was lost during the move after the accident. But there it was, hidden inside the wall of the living room where she played the piano every night. Sofía opened it.

The ballerina no longer twirled. Underneath was an old photograph of Mateo, seven years old, clinging to his mother’s neck. On the back, written in shaky handwriting, was a message that Ricardo read, feeling his throat tighten: Mateo saw Daniel on the road. If anything happens to me, keep this hidden until someone can erase the night from his eyes. Ricardo felt the ground give way beneath him. Daniel Salazar had been his financial manager and confidant until he disappeared months after Elena’s death, just as millions began to go missing from internal accounts. Mateo touched his head, and his whole body arched with a brutal stab of pain. Then he remembered the smell of gasoline, a struggle inside the truck, his mother’s voice telling him not to look, and another voice, male, furious, demanding bank access. It hadn’t been an accident. Daniel had chased Elena to recover evidence of her frauds, had caused her to run off the road, and Mateo had seen it all before his mind broke. At that same moment, a service corridor hatch burst open.

Daniel appeared with a gun, his face aged by fear. He had continued collecting favors, bribing a guard, and watching the house for years to ensure the secret remained buried. Seeing the box in Sofia’s hands, he lost control. He took a step forward, aimed, and demanded the girl hand it over. No one had time to react. Sofia threw one of the nocturias straight at the man’s face. The creature clung to his eyelid like a black tick, and Daniel fell to his knees.He shouted for them to take him away, insisting he hadn’t meant to kill Elena, that he only wanted to recover the files and erase the sole witness. Ricardo lunged at him, the guards disarmed him, and Mateo, tears welling in eyes that were just beginning to awaken, understood the most horrifying truth of all: the nocturias hadn’t been the disease that stole his sight, but the monstrous cure that extinguished it so that his memory wouldn’t destroy him prematurely.

Part 3

The police arrived before dawn and took Daniel away, still trembling, half a confession spat out between shouts, saliva, and terror. For hours, Ricardo listened to what he had avoided facing for twelve years: the embezzlement, the threats against Elena, the car chase, the staged crash, and the cowardly silence with which he himself had covered up too many cracks in his company by trusting control more than the truth. Mateo spent the night lying on the living room sofa, cold compresses on his eyes, as the darkness receded like a slow tide. First, he made out light patches, then trembling edges, then the glimmer of dawn filtering through the windows. The first thing he saw clearly wasn’t the marble, the guards, or the luxury of the house. It was Sofía’s face, sitting across from him with her knees drawn up to her chest, the weariness of someone who had lived too many lives in too few years. Mateo stared at her for a long time, as if to make sure she wasn’t just another broken memory, and then he wept with a silent, pure cry that shook his shoulders without humiliating him. Ricardo fell to his knees beside his son and, for the first time, didn’t try to fix anything with orders or money.

He begged his forgiveness for not having seen Elena’s fear, for having called an accident what he had always felt deep down was dirty, for having chosen to protect the family name rather than pursue the truth. Mateo didn’t answer him right away. He still carried too much of the night within him. But when he finally turned his face toward him, it was no longer with the hardness of a resigned son, but with the new pain of someone who had just returned to the world and had to learn to see it again. Sofía refused the reward, the new clothes, and even the offer to live in the mansion. She said that she too had carried a nocturio when she was younger, that it hadn’t taken her sight, but had left her with the ability to recognize the darkness hidden in others, and that was why she knew from the first moment that Mateo wasn’t broken, he was just covered up. Before leaving, he asked for only one thing: that the truth never be buried again, not in a wall, not in a bank account, not in a wealthy family willing to call what was in reality a crime “destiny.” Ricardo complied. He opened his files, handed over names, accepted the public fall from grace, and let the scandal sweep away everything that for years had seemed untouchable. Mateo, already recovering, returned to the piano weeks later. This time he didn’t play searching for a door, but celebrating that there was finally one. When he looked up, he saw the first ray of sunlight shining directly on him and didn’t close his eyes. He thought of his mother, of the little girl who arrived barefoot to shatter the lie, and he understood that the worst blindness wasn’t that of someone who lives without light, but that of someone who sees the horror and chooses to call it silence.