Buenos Aires. February 1936.

  Buenos Aires was melting. The heat was so intense that the air over Avenida Corrientes shimmered like a fever dream, distorting the shapes of horse-drawn carriages and boxy trams. In the heart of the capital, the massive excavation for the future Pza de República gaped open like the hollowed-out chest of an urban leviathan.

  Rust-colored dust hung over the construction site in a thick, suffocating cloud. It gritted between the teeth of hundreds of immigrant workers—Italians, Galicians, Poles—soaking into their sweat-stained canvas shirts. It settled like a dirty powder on the snow-white, starched cuffs of the engineers watching from high wooden ptforms.

  Ignacio Ricci pulled off his greasy cap, wiping a stinging mix of sweat and coal dust from his forehead. At the bottom of the thirty-meter pit, the air felt heavy, like it had to be forced into the lungs. A distinct metallic tang, mixed with the bitter dust of crushed limestone, coated the back of his throat.

  The heavy German Krupp steam drill had been gnawing at the earth for two weeks, making the stained gss in the entire San Nicolás district tremble. Suddenly, it went silent. That abrupt, hollow silence hit Ignacio’s frayed nerves harder than the roar of the pistons ever had.

  — “?Che, tano! (Hey, Italian!)” a voice shouted from above, cutting through the city's hum. “Why did you stop? Siesta ended an hour ago!”

  Ignacio ignored the shout. He jumped heavily into the trench, right where the drill’s scarred steel tip had struck an immovable barrier.

  — “Madonna mia...” he breathed.

  Before him wasn't granite. And it certainly wasn't the porous limestone that served as the natural foundation for all of Buenos Aires. The drill bits had stripped away centuries of rock to reveal a perfectly smooth, anthracite-bck sb. It greedily swallowed the light of the kerosene mps, remaining matte—like a piece of primordial darkness frozen into solid form.

  But that wasn't the strange part. The sb was radiating heat.

  Ignacio pulled off his rough canvas glove and reached out. As his fingers touched the bck surface, a sickening shiver ran through him.

  Vibration.

  It had nothing to do with the mechanical hum of engines. It was a rhythm. A deep, low-frequency pulse that made the bones in his forearm ache instantly. Beneath this incredible armor y a hidden, colossal power.

  A living power.

  — “Kill the boilers!” Ignacio’s voice broke into a raspy shout. He looked up at the web of scaffolding. “Everyone out! This isn't rock!”

  The workers froze. The ptforms above creaked. Into this hell of cy and overheated steam descended a man who looked completely alien to the surrounding filth.

  He wore a fwless white three-piece suit, an ivory silk tie, and polished shoes that he pced on the slippery steps with surgical precision. On his pel, a golden symbol shimmered: a sun being crushed by the coils of a dragon.

  Dr. Armando Gross. The shadow behind the construction consortium. A man whose directives were whispered about in elite, private clubs.

  — “We have a critical problem, Doctor,” Ignacio wheezed, backing away from the monolith as cold sweat ran down his spine. “The surface temperature is over a hundred degrees. There’s a low-frequency vibration. Can you... can you feel that rhythm?”

  Gross stepped onto the bottom of the pit. He inhaled the heavy, stale air as if he were savoring it.

  — “I can hear it perfectly, Ignacio,” the doctor’s voice was soft, yet it resonated off the trench walls.

  — “The drill bits were ground to dust,” the engineer pointed nervously at the ruined drill. “If we y dynamite or drop the hundred-and-seventy-ton foundation monolith like the pn says... this shell might crack! Sir, there’s a magmatic pocket under us! You’ll wake a volcano in the middle of the capital!”

  Gross smiled thinly. It was a calcuted expression that never reached his cold, dead eyes. With long, almost musical fingers, he touched the vibrating bckness.

  — “You are a brilliant engineer, Ricci. Но an absolutely dreadful doctor.”

  — “What does medicine have to do with this?”

  — “The Obelisk is not a monument, my young friend,” Gross whispered, staring at the bck gss with a frightening, fanatical adoration. “It is a needle.”

  The ground beneath Ignacio’s boots groaned. It wasn't the shift of a tectonic pte. An earthquake is blind rage—chaos and the crack of breaking stone. What happened now was a low, moaning exhale. As if something unimaginably ancient, buried under millions of tons of rock, had shifted a colossal shoulder in its sleep.

  On the upper levels, tools cttered as they were dropped. The raspy voices of the workers merged into a panicked mumble—Italian curses mixing with desperate prayers to the Virgin Mary.

  Gross didn't even flinch. It was as if he had been waiting for this response.

  — “When a patient is in pain and begins to sh out in a delirium, a skilled specialist administers a sedative,” the doctor continued softly, stroking the monolith. “We are injecting concrete, Ignacio. Thousands of cubic meters of high-strength solution. Right into this exposed nerve ending. The patient must sleep forever. Otherwise, we won't be able to live in peace on its back.”

  The doctor turned slowly toward the pale foreman by the winch and snapped his fingers.

  — “Pour it. Now. Before it opens its eyes for good.”

  Ignacio swallowed the lump in his throat and looked down. In the polished darkness of the sb, he saw his own face—distorted by a raw, animal terror. For a split second, before the heavy flow of concrete hit the bottom, he thought he saw something move.

  Deep in that bottomless depth, something had shifted. Something infinitely alien was staring back at the tiny engineer through the bck mass. Something to whom they were all just ephemeral mold on the surface of its shell.

  — “Dios te salve, María...” Ignacio whispered.

  His hand reached for the mixer's lever. The gears shrieked, and the first gray avanche colpsed into the pit.