Amanita: Poison Shot

Chapter 26: Daniel's Candle

The time had come. I could feel the weight of love, sadness, and loss from everybody in the room, wrecking my soul.

That Friday night, we were all gathered in the dining room to celebrate Daniel's candle and pay our last respects to him. I got a quick change of clothes and washed and dried my hair, wet and dirty due to the acid rain.

We had no close relatives because both our father and mother had been only children, so there were only a few distant relatives from my mother's side present, some close friends of Daniel, and Chloé, apart from my father and me. We must have been about thirty people in that old dining room with cracked walls and old-fashioned furniture.

As usual on such occasions, the room was left in the dark except for a single candle in the middle of the table. My father had lighted it. We were all sitting in a circle around it.

Chloé sat on my left and caught me by surprise when she softly grabbed my hand, the one I had got hurt at the Sports Palace. She was tense, as much as I was. I stared at her in silence, but she didn't dare look back at me. She was focused on some distant thought.

"Thank you so much for being here tonight," my father began in a voice that tried to be as neutral as possible, but he was failing at it. He was standing in front of the table, facing all of us, while the pale, yellowish light of the candle showered his face from below. "As you know, yesterday afternoon, during the attack at the BioBank, Daniel was killed."

Fortunately, my father did not know the truth: Daniel had been taken alive from the BioBank. Our father knew the story about the need to perform an urgent transplant for someone important, but that was it. Neither the cops nor I had told him any details about who that person was or whether the transplant had even taken place, obviously. Only the President, his closest circle, Amanita's rebels, and I knew the truth about it. The less my father knew, the better.

"We are gathered here tonight to remember Daniel," he continued with a sadness that grew like a snowball rolling down the mountain, getting bigger and bigger. "My son was only fifteen years old, but he enjoyed an intense and good life, thanks to your company. Thank you, all of you. Now, each of us will tell a story about him that we want to remember. I will start, and we will continue in a clockwise direction."

He made a brief pause, took a deep breath, and began to tell a story.

"When Daniel was little," he said in a sweet and deep honey-like voice, "he still didn't speak clearly, but he always listened to his sister and imitated her. He followed her everywhere. Sometimes I think that he felt that fierce passion for engines and fixing things exclusively on account of Daphne."

Then, she turned his face towards me. His smile was sad, his eyes were cloudy.

"She had always been the sun of his days and the moon of his nights, especially after losing their mother." His voice echoed the golden sunlight of days long gone.

With that comment, a lump formed in his throat, but that didn't stop him from going on.

"Without Daphne, Daniel wouldn't have been who he is... was, and what he was like."

That was a hard truth. We were physically alike, with almost the same facial traits, but even our preferences and personalities matched to an insanely lovely degree. We were even able to finish each other's sentences.

"I remember one night," my father went on with a dreamy voice, "I was scolding them for reading books on car mechanics past bedtime. They went on reading in the light of a small lantern, obviously."

He chuckled once with nostalgia.

"They couldn't shut up. I could hear them. They were having so much fun that I didn't want to scold them again. That night they were discussing who would be the boss of the garage they wanted to set up together."