The Catalog That Doesn’t Sell Toys

The Detective stares at the screen. It’s not a marketplace, but it looks like one. Names, ages, eye colors, height. In the “reason for absence of parents” field, some spaces are blank — and that, he knows, is worse than any filled-out data. Across the table, Lupinha flips through the official “catalog” from Luhansk, a region occupied by Russia. Profiles of children ready for “guardianship.” Sterile language. Filters by physical traits. And one question that won’t leave her mind: how does bureaucracy become a shop window?

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