Polo Ander and Guzman sit together in a screen room. The windows in here are usually open during the spring and summer to allow light and oxygen in for the numerous plants that line the walls and litter the tables. Today, just as the boys do, the plants wilt in despair. It is cold. It is dark. It is uncertain.

The three of them sit on a couch the same order as they were in the taxi. Polo on the left, Guzman in the center, and Ander on the right. Polo anxiously shakes his left leg as he bites on his nails looking down at his hands to ensure the blood isn't on them anymore and when he does he sees the lifeless beautiful face of Carla he had held so tightly when she'd finally bled out all over him. The more Polo shakes the more Guzman feels the tension he felt when he'd jumped the shooter in the library over Polo. Instead of getting angry, however, Guzman feels this intense need to touch Polo and cradle him with assurance. Of course, they're friends and he shouldn't feel awkward about comforting Polo but he feels these last few attempts may have been a little too intimate for now all he feels is the anxiety and for some reason he's thinking about what Polo looks like in his underwear and to make the inappropriate thoughts stop he simply places his open hand on the knee Polo wont stop shaking. Immediately Polo stops.

"You said it was your fault?" Asks Guzman, "What did you mean?"

Polo looks up with tears welling in his eyes and tries to find the words. When he can't he just curls his body into Guzman's body and pulls Guzman's arms around him. He prefers the warmth to the anxiety. Guzman feels the same and therefore his questions go unanswered. Still, Guzman can't help but ask more questions in his head.

The first gunshot didn't take place on the dance-floor, it took place near the pool, and that means someone else saw the shooter first so who was that person? Marina looked disheveled on the dance-floor and four people, besides Marina, were missing when that first shot took place; Samuel, Polo, Christian, and Carla and that means a lot went on that no one knows about so what happened that Guzman needs to know about? Polo said something about the watch and that watch caused a lot of problems over the last few months and Polo has a history of starting and not being able to stop so suddenly there's the fear that Polo did something awful before Guzman even had a chance to do anything about the shooter. A fire took out half the school, trapping over forty people inside. None of them made it out.

As far as these three boys are capable of knowing they are the only one's who made it out of that massacre alive. Only, and I don't like telling this part because it comes with a lot of damage and story line I wish to avoid, but they are not...

Do you remember Lucrecia and her lifeless body in that place no one can find? Well, that's where we must return for in this corridor exists another. Just one other. Near to death themselves. It's her step brother Valerio. He'd arrived at the very end of the school year to cheer her on in the hopes that she would win the award and went with her when she'd discovered she'd lost. He's always been supportive of her. Always wanted the best for her. Always wanted things from her he'd never be allowed to get in the eyes of society.

Now she's dead and he's got a leg full of bullet holes and he just doesn't know where it all went wrong. He pulls her to him and rests his back against the wall of abandoned lockers no one has used in over a decade. This school was buried before Las Encinas was ever even thought about and now he's going to learn what it's like to gather dust and wither away. The back up generators should have went out years ago, it's a miracle anything in here works.

Making the decision to crawl in here and avoid the fire was a dumb one, and he knows this now. She's dead. It's his fault. So, therefore, he should die too. It'll be long and painful unless he makes a decision to end his life sooner. Taking a glance around the corridor he finds very little that might help him but then he's looking at her and he's thinking about his love for her and that annoying bag she was so concerned about preserving with the excruciatingly long straps. That's when he gets an idea. A stupid, useful idea.

That's when they arrived...

By the hoard, little orbs of light. Tiny little flames that gave the illusion of having little legs and feet coming down through the air ducts and out from under the cracks of doors. He's so stunned by what he sees that he can't move but when they get to her feet he's scurrying to grab the purse and leave her body behind looking over his shoulder as he runs to watch the little fires consume her flesh. What is this? How is this possible? Nothing else is burning except her. He's been sober this entire evening, perhaps it's withdrawals.

Only when he looks up at the door to the emergency staircase and sees Lucrecia standing there with half her face burned off and her blistered lips moving to tell him, "You're just going to leave me here?" does he scream.

Polo is shivering and clutching his knees to his chest, alone, in the screen room and shaking his head vehemently as he swears he can hear the sound of someone far away begging for mercy and he is unable to help. His eyes move upward to the window where the swirling gale of wind picks up the flurry of snow and sends it on a spiral and in it he can see Christian's smile, so infectious, so obnoxious, so loud. The ice runs it's way from the base of his skull, down through the thick black hairs squared up halfway down his neck, and into his shoulders where it spans down his arms like a pair of wings made out of permafrost.

He stands and walks over to one of the tables to look at what was once a peace lilly drooping so low that it's hanging past it's pot and catching the light from a window behind the small book shelf. In the dying lilly he can find the crumbles from other hands that only helped it die. How worrisome he grows that clutching Carla may have only sped up her death and therefore her death may actually be on his hands.

"Polito." His voice comes from the door.

It's Guzman. He's also worried. Only his worry is about something different. Something a lot more tangible.

He says, "The inspector is here. She wants to question me regarding my murder of the gunman."