John advanced a couple more steps, halting his progress at an exact distance from the armchairs. The elders sustained their scrutiny, fixing upon him pupils completely devoid of any trace of familiar warmth. They examined him with the same clinical rigidity with which an appraiser evaluates a defective part on an assembly line: searching for the structural flaw, the design error that compromised the value of the whole.
"John," the grandmother uttered, her voice as sharp as a silver needle. "I see that you still fail to show the slightest hint of… improvement."
The boy blinked only once. His mind analyzed the term used, but found no valid reference point; he did not comprehend what "improving" meant in his situation. His inner space remained empty and calm, just as always.
"My current state is the same," he replied simply, in his customary flat tone.
The grandfather let out a sigh laden with intellectual contempt.
"Your mother insisted that you were making an effort to adapt. But it is obvious she exaggerated in her reports. The members of the Xentras lineage do not possess a design… like this," the man declared, making a vague gesture in the air with his right hand, as though pointing out the child's physiognomy were a repulsive task to him.
John experienced no alteration in his heart rate. No trace of humiliation or anger altered his neuronal connections. However, his photographic memory recorded every word, every inflection, and every gesture, archiving them in a deep sector of his mind like a latent echo to be broken down later.
A tense silence settled over the perimeter of the room.
The grandmother intertwined her fingers over her lap with a calculated elegance.
"We came here to directly address the nature of your condition," the old woman continued, measuring every syllable. "And to determine the level of risk your behavior represents to the stability of the lineage."
John tilted his head slightly to the left, with that mechanical gesture so characteristic of him when processing a new variable.
"Risk?"
"Your organic inability to process emotional stimuli," the grandfather explained, resting both hands on the handle of his cane. "If you lack the moral brakes provided by feelings… if you are incapable of constructing bonds of loyalty, you could become a dysfunctional burden to this family. Or something significantly worse."
On the far wall, the pendulum of the dining room clock marked one more second.
Tac.
From the doorway, Camila observed the scene with a hidden tremor in her jaw, containing the psychological pressure of the moment.
The grandmother spoke again, hardening her gaze:
"We demand to know if over the course of the last month any… behavioral incidents have been recorded within the academy."
John's mind executed an immediate scan of the final weeks of his timeline.
He recalled the day from the previous week.
He visualized the third-grade student who had cornered him in the hallway, shouting aggressive epithets at him, his face flushed with hostility.
He remembered how he had limited himself to holding the boy's gaze, fixing his red eyes on his rival's pupils without blinking, without emitting a single sound, without modifying his posture a single millimeter.
He recalled the other child's vector of movement: how his aggressiveness dissolved into bewilderment, and how he ended up backing away out of sheer biological nervousness at the absolute absence of a response.
By John's criteria, that did not qualify as an incident; it had simply been an inefficient social interaction on the part of the third party. However, his logic warned him that the school environment had cataloged it as an anomaly.
"An event was recorded," the little boy declared.
The grandmother narrowed her eyes, concentrating her full attention on him.
"Describe it with precision."
John opened his mouth to initiate the report… but halted the impulse for an exact second. His pause was not motivated by fear of consequences, but by a process of lexical selection. His brain sought the most descriptive and neutral words possible, stripping the account of any unnecessary adjectives.
That brief instant of suspension—a silence that belonged solely to him—altered the dynamics of the room.
Camila unconsciously held her breath. The grandparents tensed in their seats, adopting a posture of alert. To the elders, that simple act of cold deliberation, coming from a seven-year-old individual devoid of emotions, proved to be a deeply unsettling sign.
"A student addressed me using an aggressive verbal modulation," John began in a measured voice. "However, I did not emit any physical or verbal response."
The grandfather frowned, thwarted by the neutrality of the report.
"And under what criterion did you decide not to respond to a direct aggression?"
"Because after analyzing the situation, I determined that I had no useful information to contribute," John answered with complete naturalness.
No shadows or voices appeared in the drawing room. The surroundings remained identical, yet the atmosphere grew laden with a real, dense, and purely human discomfort. An invisible barrier that John generated involuntarily simply by exposing the structure of his thoughts.
The grandmother executed a rhythmic, subtle tap with the pad of her fingers against her knee, processing the answer.
"And was that the totality of the event?"
"Yes."
The environmental tension did not dissolve with the conclusion of the account; it merely mutated its nature. The Xentras grandparents did not fear the presence of a mystical factor or an inexplicable force within the child. Their fear was far more pragmatic and earthly. They feared the nature of his logic. They feared the absolute vacuum of his mind and that ability of his to remain unperturbed, watching the world as an observer alien to the rules of the human condition.