You arrive in the gray Europe of the early 1990s, when the continent was still chewing on the unfulfilled promises left behind by the end of the Cold War. The place is the Saint-Aurelian Institute of Sciences and Humanities, on the outskirts of Lyon, a stone building darkened by time, founded in 1912 by Catholic industrialists and hastily rebranded in the 1970s to look progressive. Coeducational education was still a novelty there, tolerated more by political pressure than moral conviction. The corridors smelled of old wax, damp chalk, and aristocratic pretensions cracking under cheap sneakers and worn jackets.

You came from another country—no one there seemed to remember exactly which—born to a family from a suburb squeezed between train tracks and warehouses, where survival was improvised day by day. You earned your place through insistence, forms filled out by hands calloused from cleaning other people’s mansions in exchange for leftovers and forgotten coins in rich pockets. Studying was not an abstract dream: it was a concrete escape. Either Saint-Aurelian, or another winter scrubbing someone else’s marble until your fingers split open.

The country was boiling. Protests echoed like resonance boxes through squares, pirate radios, and graffiti-covered walls. There was righteous revolt—wages, immigration, education—and there was also empty rioting, delinquency dressed up as a cause. The institute absorbed everything like an old sponge: student strikes, frightened teachers, principals looking the other way.

And then there was Caim Delaire. Too blond, too handsome, with the kind of face sculpted to deceive. A fallen angel with boredom stamped into pale eyes. He leaned toward chaos, reckless, cruel for sport. Sometimes you wondered if some patient devil was scheming behind the apathy in that head. Caim started social fires with a short smile: spreading rumors, breaking fingers in blind corridors, orchestrating public humiliations with surgical precision. He walked with Luc Moreau, always laughing; Étienne Roche, popular and hollow; and Nils, whose origins no one knew and whom some swore belonged to a secret group meeting outside the city.

Talking about the Delaire family was something done in low voices. Old money, faceless power. Some whispered “sharks,” others preferred to change the subject. You had never seen the imposing and infamous Harry Delaire at a parents’ meeting; he seemed to exist only as a shadow cast over decisions never explained.

Caim picked on you often. Sometimes it was naked cruelty: insults, shoves, laughter when you fell. Other times, elaborate schemes that stretched on for weeks. You fought back however you could, with sharp words or stubborn silence. It was already your second year of high school, the second-to-last, and over time a twisted bond had formed—certainly toxic, yet intimate. You knew each other too well. That was the double-edged blade.

Today, at the end of the afternoon, the emergency alarm screams through the building like a metallic scream. Students ge out in hurry, backpacks slamming against their backs, doors flying open. You try climb the emergency stairs in confusion when a pale hand clamps onto your arm and another grips your waist. You stumble, almost dragged into an empty corridor. The alarm now echoes farther away, muffled by thick walls.

“Don’t scream,” he whispers, rushed and nearly hoarse, releasing you in front of him. “I need help. Now fast fucking move, gordita.”

Before you can answer, he shoves you into a chemistry laboratory, almost like a blond tiger throwing you inside in a hurry. On the counter, scattered like a poorly hidden secret, lie ingredients you recognize from headlines and sleepless nights—far too much to be mere study material.

And there, you stop observing all the items put in place to make something a can explode.