Spark

When she was born, they called her Spark. Because she sparkled. Literally.

Every time she cried, her crib would light up with soft glows, like an oil lamp fighting against the darkness. When she laughed, the air would crackle like on the eve of thunderstorms, fizzing with invisible electricity. It was a phenomenon nobody could explain. Doctors shook their heads, confused. Government scientists collected samples but never returned with answers. Only the nuns at the orphanage seemed serene, with the calm of those who have seen too much to be surprised anymore.

"It's just the soul making contact," Sister Agnes, the eldest, would say, adjusting the blankets around the luminous child. "Some of us carry the divine so close to our skin that it sometimes seeps through."

The other orphans watched her from afar, fascinated and frightened. Nobody wanted to sleep in the same room as her. Fairies exist, the younger ones whispered. She's radioactive, the older ones theorized. The rag dolls next to her bed sometimes had singed hair in the morning.

Nobody adopted her.

Couples would come, look, smile politely, and choose simpler children. Children who wouldn't blow fuses during a nightmare. Children who wouldn't make silverware vibrate during a laugh that was too intense.

Over time, Spark learned the art of containment. She learned to hold her breath when she was happy, to clench her fists until blood when she was afraid, to not love too intensely because love was the most dangerous of emotions. Because every ignited emotion risked setting everything ablaze. Literally.

At twelve, she managed to burn her first secret diary just by thinking about it too intensely. At fifteen, during her first crush on a boy from town who came to deliver supplies, she made all the light bulbs in the refectory explode.

The world was made for the silent, the opaque, the conforming. For those who felt just the right amount, neither too much nor too little. For those who didn't risk short-circuiting an entire block just because they had a broken heart.

She was a discarded light. An anomaly. An error in the perfectly calibrated system of society.

Spark – who now called herself Light – lived on the margins of Zone 3, where electricity was rationed and emotions too. The houses were gray, stacked like boxes without imagination, all identical under a sky that seemed to have forgotten how to be blue. The sidewalks were clean but lifeless, no street artists, no flowers growing in the cracks of the cement. Children walked in orderly lines, with uniforms that erased any spark of personality.

It was a world born after the Great Reset, when governments had decided that the cause of wars and inequalities was humanity's excessive emotional intensity. A world divided into Zones ordered by level of conformity and productivity.

Every citizen wore an Impact Meter, a sleek, almost elegant bracelet that recorded emotional variations, adrenaline spikes, hormonal fluctuations. Those who exceeded the allowed threshold were gently, but firmly, invited to Reeducation Centers. Not much was known about these centers, only that those who emerged always seemed a little less than before. As if something had been filed away.

Light knew how to hide. Twenty years of practice had taught her the art of emotional camouflage. She had learned to smile with dead eyes, to cry without tears, to dim herself a little every day. Her apartment, a sterile studio on the twenty-sixth floor of a residential tower, was lined with insulating materials stolen from construction sites in Zone 2. She ate bland food because the pleasure of taste made her shine too brightly. She listened to music at such a low volume that she had to close her eyes to really hear it.

But occasionally, at night, when curfew fell on the city and surveillance drones followed predictable routes, Light would go underground. Into abandoned subway tunnels, forgotten warehouses, the metallic viscera of a civilization that had chosen to forget its humanity. There, where the world's refuse fell and faulty lights turned on by themselves, Light danced.

She would remove her Meter (a trick learned from an old technician before he was "corrected"), take off her gray clothes and wear colorful fabrics found in garbage bins. And then she would let go. She would explode light bulbs with a shout. She would light up neon tubes with her heartbeat. She would make shadows dance on the walls like puppets. She would let electricity flow through her as if it were part of her own blood.

She was only alive where one couldn't be alive.

Then he arrived. The Boy Without a Shadow.

She met him one night, in the abandoned gallery she used for her solitary dances. At first, she thought he was one of the surveillance technicians and prepared to flee. But there was something strange about him. He cast no shadow under the flickering lights of the underground. As if light passed through him, or as if he himself were made of a different substance.

His name was Nereo, and he spoke like someone who had forgotten the sound of his own voice. He was tall, with curved shoulders that seemed to carry an invisible weight. He had light eyes, too light, as if diluted.

"It's you," he said simply the first time he saw her shine. It wasn't a question. There was no surprise in his voice, only a quiet recognition.

Nereo had escaped from Zone 1, where rebels were melted into silicon and restarted as drones. Where minds too brilliant were used as living processors, connected in networks until they lost all sense of individuality. He had been a programmer, once. He had designed interfaces for Impact Meters, before discovering what they were really used for: not to protect people from emotional excess, but to identify and suppress any spark of resistance.

He had a question in his eyes that he never asked. But Light understood it: "Is it wrong to want to feel?"

Together they created a room. Not just a refuge, but a true secret space, hidden in a forgotten corner of the old sewers. They used old shielding panels, modified circuits, and an autonomous generator powered by energy scraps. A small space where no Meter detected anything. Where cameras couldn't see. Where they could laugh. Touch. Ignite.

Light taught Nereo how to feel again. How to lower the defenses that years of repression had built. He taught her how the system worked, how it could be manipulated, how the Zones communicated with each other.

For the first time, Light loved without fear. Without fearing she would set sheets on fire or make light bulbs explode. With him, her light didn't seem like a danger, but a gift. It illuminated without burning.

For the first time, she wanted to stay. Not flee, not hide, but build something permanent. A small universe where she could be completely herself.

When they took him away, the sky was motionless.

It was on a rare sunny afternoon. Light was returning from her shift at the component factory, where she worked as a quality technician. She saw the black vans in front of her building. Figures in gray uniforms entering and exiting with mechanical efficiency.

They made no noise, nor light. No flashing lights, no sirens. Just the silence of righteous men doing the wrong thing with uniforms on.

Light remained hidden, watching from around a corner. She saw him come out, surrounded by guards. His face was impassive, almost serene. But she knew. She knew they had found him. That they had discovered the secret room. That perhaps they knew about her too.

She didn't react. She couldn't. An emotional explosion would only have exposed her. And so she watched the van drive away, with a piece of her heart inside. She returned to their secret room beneath the city, now empty and cold. She remained there, among the shadows of discards, with her heart flashing intermittently like a malfunctioning device.

Weeks passed, or perhaps years. Underground, time has no hands. Only darkness, and occasionally, her light growing ever dimmer. Light survived, but no longer lived. She returned to work, pretended normalcy, and continued her non-existence in Zone 3. At night she wandered the tunnels, seeking a solution, a way to find him, to save him.

Then the message arrived.

An interruption in the usual propaganda broadcast humming on public terminals. A masked face, a recorded voice, crackling: "Protocol Zero. Zone 3 will be restarted. All deviant units will be eliminated. No light survives."

The message lasted only a few seconds before censorship intervened. But it was enough. Light knew what it meant. It was the code for emotional sterilization. They had already done it elsewhere, in the minor Zones. Low-frequency impulses, capable of burning every synapse that responded to emotion. Of transforming entire populations into functioning but empty automatons.

The world wanted to stay off.

Light knew what she had to do.

There was only one central station. At the center of the Zone, a windowless building that pulsed with controlled, sterile energy. The entire system passed through there. The signals, the Meters, the control impulses.

She had studied it with Nereo, in the good days. In the days when they talked about possibilities, about change, about awakening. She could interrupt the flow. Shut down the system.

Yes.

But it would take a massive short circuit. Cutting a wire or tampering with a circuit wasn't enough. The system had too many backups, too many redundancies. It needed a pure emotional impulse, without filters. Something no technician could predict or contain.

It needed her.

She put on her reddest dress. A garment as bright as flame, preserved for years in a sealed container under the floor. A memory of a world that allowed colors. She looked at herself in the mirror and, for the first time in a long time, allowed herself to feel fully. The anger. The fear. The hope. The love. She let the emotions accumulate like potential energy, ready to be released.

She walked through the silent city with her heart in her throat. The streets were emptier than usual. Perhaps some had received the warning. Perhaps many had already been taken away. She passed soldiers in black uniforms, surveillance drones buzzing like mechanical insects.

She smiled at the soldiers. An empty smile, from a model citizen. Nobody saw anything. Nobody noticed the red under the gray coat. Nobody wanted to see.

She arrived at the central station and had herself let in. She showed a counterfeit badge, created with specifications stolen by Nereo. Nobody knew her purpose. Nobody asked. The world trusted the invisible, the ordinary, the expected.

She locked herself in the main control room. A labyrinth of servers, cables, pulsing terminals. The artificial heart of Zone 3. She barricaded the door and took off her coat.

And opened her hands.

She remembered everything. The forbidden laughter in the orphanage. The frightened looks of the nuns. The dances among the dead neons of the underground. The secret room. Nereo stroking her hair as she shone like a constellation. Nereo telling her: "You are too much. And that's okay."

The emotions exploded like a dam giving way after years of pressure. Every nerve became light. Every light became fire. Every fire became a song, a scream, a prayer.

The system couldn't handle it. Computers went crazy, overloaded by an input no algorithm could interpret. Frequencies went haywire. Screens exploded in cascades of glass and sparks. Transmission towers fell like drunken giants.

She was at the center. Eyes closed. Pure flame. A human sun consuming itself to illuminate.

When it was all over, Zone 3 was dark.

But not like before.

It wasn't dark with the sterile efficiency of a perfectly controlled system. It was dark, like after a thunderstorm. When trees are still dripping and the air is clean. When one waits for the sun's return. When one feels fear and hope together.

The Meters were broken. Small dead bracelets on the wrists of people who for the first time in decades could feel freedom. People came out of their houses and looked at each other. Really looked at each other.

Someone laughed. Someone cried. Someone shouted. Someone hugged strangers. Someone began singing old forgotten songs. Someone took paint and drew flowers on the gray walls.

Nothing remained of the main central station. Just a smoking crater that no one dared approach. As if everyone knew, instinctively, that it was now a sacred place.

Nobody knew who she had been. Just a legend that began to spread. A girl who sparkled. A discarded light. A fire that had consumed itself to rekindle other fires.

The shock wave had destroyed not only Zone 3, but had disrupted the entire system. The other Zones, one after another, were experiencing the same chaotic and imperfect rebirth. The world was returning to feeling, with all the pain and beauty that entailed.

Nereo returned years later. Old, perhaps. Or perhaps just tired.

He had emerged from one of the Reeducation Centers when the system collapsed. They had experimented on him, trying to understand how to remove emotion without damaging intellect. They had failed, but in the process, they had changed him. His skin had lost consistency, his voice was little more than a whisper. And he no longer had a shadow.

For years he had wandered, trying to return to the only place that in his fragmented mind still shone with meaning.

He sat at the spot where they had built their room. The old subway was now a meeting place, of art, of life. People came here to remember, to celebrate, to tell each other stories of resistance.

There was still a small light bulb, hanging from a wire. The same one that Light made turn on and off with her heartbeat. Off.

He closed his eyes. And he saw her. Not as a memory, but as a presence. Dancing among the exposed cables. Exploding into a thousand particles of light. Laughing as if the world had never hurt her.

The light bulb turned on. A soft glow, then stronger. And it never turned off again.

The people who frequented the underground noticed it. How a small light bulb could stay lit without electricity. How it shone more intensely when someone told stories of courage. How it almost seemed to respond to children's laughter.

It became a symbol. A small spontaneous sanctuary. People came to tell their secrets to the light bulb, to share joys, to mourn losses.

And Nereo smiled. Because he knew what everyone was slowly learning.

That light is never truly discarded. That shining is never a mistake. That sometimes, to illuminate an entire world, someone must burn.