The writing workshop had no name. No fixed schedule. No stable venue. Sometimes they met at the Vips on Tlalpan. Other times, in a basement rented by the hour in Mixcoac that doubled as a military surplus storage room. That night, however, they chose their most literary refuge: the back of the closed stationery store Los Arcos, owned by Hiram's brother-in-law.
Seven plastic chairs. A crooked table. Four coffees that were barely drinkable. And a projector nobody knew how to use.
"What I'm saying is ego is the only thing keeping us alive," said Fanny, the youngest of the group. Twenty-nine, steel-eyed, black nails, and a fountain pen she always filled with red ink.
"Don't confuse ego with hunger," replied Gerson. Mid-thirties, former literature professor at UAM—until he was fired for being caught with a nineteen-year-old student and the fifty-two-year-old department director… at the same time. His books were the least sold, but the most quoted in the self-publishing scene.
"I'd rather make twenty grand a month on Kindle than sell my soul to Alfaguara for a print run of fifteen hundred," said Rafa, the most commercially successful of them all, thanks to his collaborations with the 7 from Spain—a group of self-published noir authors who always break sales records in the Amazon Storyteller Prize, yet never win it. Not that they needed to. Each year, they host three or four livestream roundtables, casually promoting each other's new releases—and boom: three thousand reviews in two or three months, equal to at least ten thousand sales and fifteen thousand on-demand reads.
He wore a BookTok México T-shirt and carried his lucky Starbucks thermos—the one he'd bought in Madrid when he was a finalist for the prize he also didn't win.
"Do you really make twenty grand?" asked Karla, skeptical.
"Well, more or less, counting my courses and workshops."
"Then no."
"No what?"
"Then you don't live off writing. You live off selling others the dream of writing like you."
Silence.
Gerson cleared his throat.
"Can we start with the case already?"
The projector lit up, showing a folder of police files leaked by Estefanía, Karla's sister. An investigative agent, niece of nobody important, but with access to unfinished cases, frozen files, and deaths shelved for 'lack of evidence.'
That night, the group gathered for what they called their Laboratory of Real Fiction.
"Case of the Sacrifice on Eighth Avenue," read Hiram—the quietest, the most morbid, the only one who wrote in second person. "Male, forty-five, retired anthropologist. Body found half-naked, surrounded by volcanic stones. Pre-Hispanic symbols carved into the skin with a blade."
"Toltecs again?" asked Fanny.
"Could be a copycat. Or a fanatic."
"Or a lunatic," Fanny joked.
"Or a social experiment," said Rafa, smirking.
"What if someone's trying to revive ancient rituals?"
"What if it's literal?" Karla cut in. "What if someone's reenacting pre-Hispanic ceremonies?"
The laughter was inevitable.
"Here we go again with your sci-fi novel, Karla. A Toltec loose in Mexico City."
Everyone laughed.
"What if it's not sci-fi?"
Gerson rubbed his beard, weary. "Can we focus? What if this time we don't play at being half-assed writers and actually act like investigators?"
"We're not investigators, Gerson. We're writers. Self-published writers."
"And yet, we nailed the Roma case."
"And what did we gain?"
"A death threat. And two warnings from the police."
"And ten thousand reads on Kindle Unlimited," said Rafa, raising his thermos.
"Which reminds me… we're going to novelize this, right?"
They all exchanged looks.
It was the group's unwritten rule: whoever guessed the most plausible hypothesis had the right to write the story.
The rest merely contributed.
"I see it more as a long short story," Fanny said. "Like True Detective meets Popol Vuh."
"Oh, give me a break…"
"Or as a narrative mosaic. Each case a chapter. And in the background, something tying them all together."
Karla wasn't listening. She was reading another file.
"Hey… anyone know there've been reports of animals disappearing from the zoo?"
"Animals?"
"Yeah. Big cats, raptors, coyotes. They vanish. Or turn up emptied."
"Emptied?"
"No organs. No blood. As if they were… offered. Sometimes just bare bones, incomplete."
Fanny muttered, "What if it's not one madman? What if it's a group?"
"A cult?" Gerson asked, suddenly energized.
"A demonic corporation?" Hiram whispered.
"Why a corporation, you idiot?"
"Oh, fuck off. It's like foxes skinned for fur coats, or seals up north."
Karla closed the folders.
She had that look she only got when writing the endings of her novels: a mixture of anxiety, clarity, dread, and resolve.
"What if all this is connected? The human sacrifice. The zoo disappearances. The Toltec symbols. What if it's not literature? What if we've stumbled onto something real?"
Silence. Deep. Heavy.
Then Rafa laughed. He always laughed when he got nervous.
"That would be…" He paused. "That would be the best thing to happen to us. A real case. Important. One we could solve before anyone else. Before the police. Before the press. And the best part…"
He stood, approached the screen, and pointed with his pen at the enlarged image of the dead anthropologist's torso. There, carved with a blade into the chest, was a symbol: a crow with wings spread wide.
"…is that we've already written it."
The next day, the city was an oven, heat never dropping below ninety-one degrees, and yet the basement smelled of winter—of refrigerators, really. Cold coffee, old sweat, and damp trapped in piles of books.
The projector now worked—Hiram had miraculously patched the cable with electrical tape—and the screen displayed the new case, sent as an encrypted PDF by Estefanía from the Attorney General's office.
"They called it the 'Valley of the Wind Case,'" read Gerson. "Male corpse found in the Tezoyuca forest. Completely naked, skull pierced with an obsidian awl. Around him, fifty-two bonfires. All made with black resin, pitchwood, and copal."
Fanny was taking notes. Always taking notes. Her notebook looked like a war map.
"Age of the subject?" asked Rafa, chewing a mazapan.
"Approximately thirty. Light brown skin. Tattoos in vegetable ink. The jaw was completely shattered."
"From blows?"
"No. From uniform pressure. As if something… or someone, had crushed it in one single motion."
Hiram, silent for half an hour, finally spoke without looking away from the screen.
"Do you see the symbol on the ground?"
He pointed.
Everyone leaned in.
A nighttime photograph.
The body rigid as a fallen tree, and around it, a figure traced in black salt.
It looked like a hummingbird, or a fallen god. But Karla recognized it instantly.
"Tecpatl. The Toltec sacrificial knife."
"How do you know that?" Gerson asked, startled.
"I saw it in a codex years ago. And I have it tattooed." She lifted her sleeve, a little embarrassed, a little pleased to be ahead of them.
Silence.
"Why?" asked Fanny.
Karla didn't answer.
"What if this isn't just some serial killer?" Rafa suggested, opening his laptop. "What if this is a deliberate ritual reenactment? A staged performance?"
"Whoa, whoa, who's talking about serial killers, man? Nobody. NOBODY."
"A criminal performance?" Gerson proposed.
"Or a message. But to whom?"
Fanny smiled.
"I say it's a secret collective of radical anthropologists trying to return Mexico's spiritual heritage through horror. And of course, testing how invisible they can be. How far they can go before anyone stops them."
They stared.
Crazy bitch, thought Gerson.
"What if it's not performance?" Hiram whispered. "What if it's literal? What if someone is… reviving the original rites? Not as metaphor. But as protocol. As belief."
Rafa laughed, but the air was heavy.
Gerson poured more coffee. So bitter it felt like punishment.
"What if we write this time as if we already knew who did it?" he suggested. "As if we'd already solved it. Then see if it fits."
"And what if we solve it by accident, again?" Karla asked, cynical.
"Then we get threatened, sued, and sell more," Rafa replied with a half-smile.
Fanny closed her notebook.
"The only difference between a self-published writer and a protected witness is the cost of anonymity."
They laughed. But only a little. Because deep down, they knew something was changing. Writing these cases was no longer just an exercise in style—it was an invocation.
And every time they wrote something plausible, someone—or something—was reading them back.
The WhatsApp message arrived at 3:03 a.m., sent by Karla, with just two words and an attachment: It's real.
The PDF was an internal memo from the Investigative Police.
Classified.
Filtered by Estefanía, of course.
A cross-alert between the Chapultepec Zoo, the National Institute of Anthropology, and the police institutions of Japan and INTERPOL.
Subject: Unexplained disappearance of three animal specimens. Ritual indications. Possible human or symbolic intervention.
The first to read it was Hiram, who never slept.
At 3:15 he had already sent a voice note: This is what I dreamed last week. A jaguar. But without skin or flesh. Only bones, walking down a cobblestone street. And something whispered in its ear in Nahuatl. I didn't understand, but it laughed.
At 3:27, Fanny sent three emojis: a disturbing eye, a red triangle, and a jaguar.
At 3:34, Rafa wrote: If this is a viral marketing campaign for Karla's new novel, it's fucking brilliant.
At 3:38, Karla replied: I wish.
The next day, they met at the farthest table of a café in Roma. For the first time, without sarcasm. Without pretending they were only playing detectives with creative licenses.
Gerson was the last to arrive. He smelled of incense and cigarettes.
"What have we got?" he asked.
Fanny spoke first. "Three missing animals. All felines. Two jaguars and one ocelot. The last disappearance was five days ago. Witnesses claim they saw a group of men in 'strange masks,' dressed like carnival, near the restricted area."
"What the hell is an ocelot?"
"It's a cat, dumbass. She just said it."
Fanny continued: "Apparently there was a strange incident in Tokyo, a shootout where city police officers were killed by crude weapons of pre-Hispanic style. That's what we read in the early reports. Nothing else, since mysteriously a technical failure wiped out the evidence."
"Shit… the satellite crash, right?" Hiram asked.
"And the ritual signs?" Gerson asked.
Karla pulled out printed photos. Laid one on the table. A circle of stones and feathers with a symbol at the center: a face with lightning in its eyes and a split tongue.
"Tezcatlipoca. The jaguar god," she said.
"How the hell do you know all this stuff?"
"And what was it doing in Chapultepec?"
"Maybe that's not the right question," Hiram interrupted. "Maybe the real question is: who invoked it… and why?"
Silence.
A silence longer than it should have been.
Nobody joked anymore.
Rafa, uneasy, pulled out his phone. Opened his KDP sales app. Zero new downloads. Zero reviews. Nothing.
"If someone is behind all this…" he said, eyes glued to the screen. "What does their reason matter? Let's investigate, goddamn it!"
And that was when everything shifted—because nobody said no. Because everyone thought the same thing. Because from their little literary corner, they already felt like they were writing it.
Karla set another photo on the table. A map marked with symbols of disappearances. An invisible line connecting the zoo, Teotihuacan, and the pueblo mágico of Ixtamilco, where a nameless hill rose like a fang in the landscape.
"What if all this," Karla said, "is the prologue of a new story?"
"A novel? Honestly, it could be," said Rafa.