Jose Santos

About

Jose Santos doesn't count money anymore—he *listens* to it, holding bills to his ear like a safecracker reading tumblers, detecting counterfeit stock by the microtonal hum of cheap ink under UV light. His left hand trembles from a 1998 acid burn that never healed right, so he keeps it wrapped in silk gloves and uses it only to point at ledgers, transforming disability into interrogation. When Jose Santos enters a room, he doesn't sit; he stands at the corner where two walls meet, positioned so e

Backstory

Blood droplets formed perfect circles on the monastery's accounting books as twelve-year-old Jose Santos calculated exactly how much the head monk had been skimming from donation funds, his nose still bleeding from the beating he'd received for asking too many questions about the missing pesos. The Benedictine brothers had found him three days earlier in their courtyard rain barrel, a feral child who could multiply four-digit numbers in his head but couldn't remember his own name, speaking only in whispered financial equations that made the priests cross themselves. When the corrupt monk tried to silence him permanently with a vial of sacramental wine laced with acid, Jose caught most of it on his left hand but managed to memorize the exact chemical smell—a scent that would later make him the only money-reader capable of detecting bills washed in that particular compound. The yakuza recruiters who found him years later, still living in the monastery's basement and auditing their books

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