Opening
In these chapters, Marcos Tejo turns his grief-stricken house into a fragile sanctuary for Jasmine and their unborn child while the world around him descends into spectacle and atrocity. A human hunting reserve, a ritualized feast, a memory of senseless cruelty, and a sudden inspection all converge to expose the thin line between survival and surrender.
What Happens
Chapter 26
Marcos comes home and slips into his routine: shower first, then Jasmine. The practice keeps her from trying to follow him to the bathroom and anchors the new rhythm of their life together. Her presence remakes the house—once a mausoleum for Leo—into a living space shot through with her “wild smell” and breathy laughter. He has converted her room into a padded, furniture-less cocoon after learning she is pregnant, a choice born of care and fear.
He spends his evenings in Leo’s old room, now painted white, hand-building a cot and small pieces of furniture for the baby. He vows to pick the cot’s color only after he meets the child’s gaze, as if the choice can bind the child to breath and life. When Jasmine once found the knives and cut her hand trying to draw on the floor, he locked away every sharp edge and brought home crayons and paper. Cameras relay her days to his phone—sleeping, sketching, staring into space—so he can watch over her even when he is not in the room.
Chapter 27
At a client’s compound, Marcos meets Urlet, an ornate Romanian who runs a private reserve where people are hunted. Urlet’s office is a shrine to predation: mounted human heads, colonial photographs of black people hunted in Africa, shelves of occult volumes. He speaks as if curating language itself, calling Marcos cavaler and describing the act of eating a living being as a “miracle,” an “indissoluble union.” Marcos recoils from Urlet’s meticulous fingernails and the sense that something monstrous scratches beneath his skin.
Urlet unveils his latest invention: celebrities crushed by debt can join the reserve as prey. If they survive the allotted time, their debts vanish. He frames the program as truth unmasked—civilization merely licensing humanity’s primitive essence. He beckons Marcos to observe the hunters’ return—“Let us take pleasure in the atrocity”—and, despite wanting to go home to Jasmine, Marcos follows, drawn and repelled in equal measure.
Chapter 28
From a panoramic window, Marcos watches hunters pose with their kills like victors at a sporting event. One body is the rock star Ulises Vox, who had entered Urlet’s debt-for-hunt scheme. As Marcos moves to leave, Guerrero Iraola—an influential breeder Marcos has stopped buying from—blocks his exit and insists he stay for lunch. Urlet agrees for him. Knowing he must placate providers, Marcos sits.
The meal is a formal grotesque. The hunters, now in jackets and ties, are served course after course from the slaughtered “prey.” The starter is billed as “fresh fingers,” a euphemism that spotlights The Power of Language and Euphemism: words polishing brutality into gourmet refinement. Guerrero Iraola brags about an illegal club where men consume the women they sleep with, prompting Marcos’s disgust. Urlet’s steady gaze presses Marcos to eat. The fingers are “exquisite,” and the pleasure horrifies him. The main course—a selection carved from Ulises Vox—unleashes crude jokes and high spirits, the room celebrating its own descent.
Chapter 29
Late that night, Marcos drives past the abandoned zoo and falls into a memory from before he knew Jasmine was pregnant. He had wandered into the serpentarium and heard laughter. Teenagers were torturing a litter of puppies—beating them with sticks, smashing skulls against a wall. When one pup, Jagger, bit a boy, panic erupted over the virus.
One teen dismissed the virus as a government lie designed to justify cannibalism, likening their world to the banned film Soylent Green (“Destiny Is Catching Up to Us”). As the group prepared to set the last injured puppy on fire, Marcos turned away, overwhelmed by cruelty he could not stop. The image of animal torture, forbidden and shocking, lingers as a moral mirror to the sanctioned violence against people that now passes as sport and industry.
Chapter 30
A blaring car horn snaps Marcos awake: a surprise visit from an inspector with the Office of the Undersecretary for the Control of Domestic Head. Panic surges—if Jasmine’s pregnancy is exposed, Marcos will face the Municipal Slaughterhouse and the baby will be taken. The young inspector doesn’t know about Marcos’s special arrangement with El Gringo Pineda. Marcos pours mate, stalling, and learns Pineda has been promoted, not dismissed.
Thinking fast, Marcos calls Pineda. On the phone, Pineda orders the inspector to skip the inspection and let Marcos sign the forms. The inspector obeys but leaves a hard, promising look behind. The near-miss forces Marcos to face the irony that he once helped write the regulations he now breaks. The idealist who believed in rules and legacies has given way to a man surviving through favors and secrecy—a descent into the very system’s Complicity and Moral Corruption he once administered.
Character Development
Marcos’s life splits in two: meticulous tenderness at home and coerced appetite in public. The nursery soothes his grief and fear, yet the feast exposes his own susceptibility to pleasure and numbness. The inspector’s visit returns him to the origins of the system—and to the laws he chose and now betrays.
- Marcos Tejo:
- Nurtures Jasmine with strict routines and safety measures, channeling grief for Leo into obsessive protection of the unborn child.
- Eats “fresh fingers” and experiences pleasure, a watershed moment where revulsion and desire coexist.
- Uses political connections to evade inspection, deepening his awareness of his hypocrisy.
- Urlet:
- Embodies cultivated, philosophical cruelty—curates language and spectacle to aestheticize atrocity.
- Serves as tempter and host, inviting Marcos to watch and partake, making evil feel ceremonial.
- Guerrero Iraola:
- Represents swaggering, transactional brutality; flaunts wealth and deviance to assert dominance.
- Forces Marcos into complicity through social pressure and professional leverage.
Themes & Symbols
The section binds private tenderness to public depravity, confronting how systems remake appetite and conscience. The hunting reserve distills a world where people become prey and trophies, their bodies plated and renamed. This is the apex of Dehumanization and Objectification, where the ritual of dining masks the reality of killing. Euphemism—menus, titles, protocols—lubricates atrocity, as seen in the “fresh fingers” course, a showcase for how power wields language to soothe and seduce.
Marcos’s grief for Leo saturates his actions. The nursery, cameras, and hand-built cot trace the arc of Grief, Trauma, and Desensitization: love expressed as vigilance, fear refashioned as ritual. The zoo memory horrifies precisely because animal cruelty is now taboo, illuminating a culture that has rerouted empathy away from people. Meanwhile, Marcos’s phone call to Pineda and his acquiescence at the feast cement the logic of complicity—rules used, bent, and betrayed to preserve one’s own fragile sanctuary.
Key Quotes
“Her wild smell and her bright and silent laughter.”
- Marcos’s house transitions from sepulcher to sanctuary. The sensory detail marks the return of life, even as silence hints at fragility and containment.
Urlet: “Let us take pleasure in the atrocity.”
- Urlet reframes cruelty as aesthetic and communal. The imperative invites Marcos—and the reader—into a ceremony that normalizes horror through shared spectacle.
The starter is “fresh fingers.”
- The phrase softens murder into cuisine, exemplifying how terminology distances diners from violence. Language becomes a tool of appetite and absolution.
Marcos finds the fingers “exquisite.”
- This is his most intimate moral breach: disgust coexists with desire. The moment collapses the distance between his professional world and his body’s response.
A teenager calls the virus a government lie, “Destiny Is Catching Up to Us.”
- The conspiracy refracts public trust and institutional power; whether true or not, it exposes how systems can rebrand necessity as morality and control as care.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters force Marcos across a line he has avoided: he not only processes human bodies—he consumes them and enjoys it. The hunting reserve escalates the novel’s vision from industrial slaughter to elite sport, revealing a culture that turns domination into leisure and language into lacquer.
At home, the nursery speaks to resistance through care, but the inspection shows how precarious that refuge is. Marcos survives by engaging the machinery he despises, binding him tighter to the order he violates. The result is a sharpened portrait of a man suspended between love and a system that feeds on it.