The café was called something with an Italian word Kein didn't memorize.
There were comfortable chairs, just like Leo had promised. It also had background music quiet enough not to bother and present enough to fill the silences.
Leo ordered something with milk and a long name.
Kein ordered black coffee.
Leo waited until the drinks arrived before speaking.
It was the quietest he had been all day.
"Since I was little I had a condition. It's called selective echopraxia."
He wrapped both hands around his cup without drinking.
"When I saw someone do something — get angry, get scared, laugh — I absorbed it. Not consciously. It just… happened. And then I could reproduce it."
"Reproduce it?"
"Exactly." Leo lifted his fingers from the cup. "It's not that I felt it. I saw the geometry. The angle of the shoulder. The tension here." He pointed to his own neck. "The speed of the blinking. I copied it and it came out the same."
Kein drank his coffee.
'Is that what he meant when he said he couldn't copy me?'
Now it made sense.
"And that was a problem?"
"When you're eight years old and you arrive at school copying exactly how the most popular kid in the class walks…" Leo raised an eyebrow. "You don't make friends. You make people call you weird and stay away."
He looked at the table for a second.
"It took me years to learn to control it. To store it instead of releasing it immediately. Like recording something and deciding when to play it back."
"And that lets you act."
"It lets me be anyone I've seen enough of."
Leo finally drank.
"For Jack I used the first two actors from today. I took the coldness from the first one, combined it with some of the truth from the second. Added three or four people I've seen in movies and on the subway who fit the character."
He shrugged.
"After that it just comes out."
Kein listened without interrupting.
'A rough diamond.'
Efficient. Improvable. The limitation was obvious — he could only build with material that already existed in others — but within that limitation the execution was notable for someone twenty-two years old.
"But with you it didn't work."
Leo set the cup down.
"I did everything the same. I took your posture, your rhythm, the angle of your head when you looked at the director." He frowned slightly. "I had all that. But when I put it together, something was missing. The room didn't change. The tension didn't appear."
"Which part was missing?"
"I don't know."
He said it with the discomfort of someone admitting they didn't finish an exam.
"That's why I followed you. I thought that if I watched you outside the stage I'd find what was different about you."
Kein slowly rotated the cup on the table.
It wasn't a difficult question to answer.
The answer was precise, specific, and completely unusable.
'Killing intent.'
It wasn't an acting resource.
It wasn't a technique.
It was exactly what it sounded like: the real, biological, trained disposition — developed over decades — to end someone's life.
Leo had copied the form correctly.
But the form was only the container.
What filled the container had no way of being copied.
'I can't tell him to imagine for a second that he's decapitating the director…'
"Talent," Kein said with the most neutral face possible.
Lying was easy for him.
Leo looked at him.
"There are things that aren't built from external material." Kein released the cup. "You either have them or you don't."
Silence.
Three seconds.
Then something in Leo's face changed.
It wasn't gradual.
It was like turning on a light.
His eyes lit up in a way Kein categorized in less than a second as: dangerous.
"So that means there's something in you I can't copy because it's yours."
"That's what I said."
"That it's innate."
"Yes."
"That it's—"
Leo leaned forward.
"—talent."
"I already said it twice."
"Master."
"No."
"It's just—"
Leo rested his elbows on the table.
"It makes total sense. I've spent years copying and I thought that was enough to be an actor, but if there's something that can't be copied then it means I have a ceiling and you don't, which means there's a fundamental difference between what we do—"
'No. No one uses killing intent to act.'
Kein drank his coffee.
"—which means I have to learn how to develop something of my own, and that's exactly what I've been trying to understand for months without putting a name to it—"
'He's perfect.'
"—and you just gave it a name in a single word, which is incredible, because I've been telling my mom for months that something in my acting didn't add up—"
Leo was speaking faster and faster.
"—and she kept saying it was perfect, but I knew it wasn't the same. Do you see? Do you see what I mean?"
'This was a mistake.'
"—it's like I've always been building with other people's bricks and never with my own. Technically it works, but it's not the same as having something that comes from inside you—"
'I didn't need to tell him anything.'
"—and what happened today in the audition confirmed it completely because I tried six times in the bathroom and I couldn't do it, six, and normally after three attempts I already have it—"
Kein set the empty cup on the table.
"—so something is different in your case, and now that I know talent is what's missing—"
Leo took a breath.
"—I need to find a way to develop my own."
He looked at him directly.
"Copying doesn't count, right?"
Silence.
"What do you think, master. Can it be developed or are you born with it?"
"I'm not your master."
"Technically you said you'd answer questions if we ran into each other at another audition."
"This isn't an audition."
"We still ran into each other."
Kein looked at him.
Leo held the gaze with a completely fixed smile.
'Poorly written verbal contract.'
Kein stood up.
He left the money for the coffee on the table without counting the change.
"I'm done."
"Wait, one last—"
"I'm done."
He walked out of the café.
The Italian music continued playing inside.
The Ceniza script was on the desk where he had left it.
Kein entered the apartment, closed the door, and remained for a second at the threshold.
The interface appeared on its own at the edge of his field of vision.
[71 Units]
He sat down.
He opened the script to scene three.
Viktor wasn't a character that could be built from the outside.
He didn't have Claudio's visible guilt or Jack's calculated coldness.
Viktor was closer to something Kein recognized without wanting to recognize it.
Someone who had done irreparable things for someone.
Or for something.
Someone who had continued living anyway.
Without redemption.
Without collapse.
Just continuing.
He turned to the next page.
Outside, the street made the usual five-o'clock noise.
Kein read until 11 p.m., when he went to sleep.