Fortunato, Diletta, Rosa, Nino, Pietro, Salvatore. Six children locked in a circle, as if to protect themselves. Seven years older, four and a half years younger. At that age, hide-and-seek is serious. Those who count are alone, but those who hide challenge
the darkness. At that age, death does not exist and you do not find it even if you look for it, at most with death you play it. At that age, the sun shines without thinking about the night. Yet in the block number 4, a popular building of the Cielo Rosso area, south of Catania, two children disappear, a few months from each other. A nightmare that repeats itself. Already ten years before a little girl had disappeared, then found dying along the railway tracks that lap the buildings. Only one element, macabre and mocking, unites the three cases: the little ones are lost in the dark while they are playing hide and seek. No one has seen anything, no one knows anything. Or maybe too much. Hundreds of families, mired in misery, are and are frightening. The investigation, soggy and timid, takes blind alleys and rots like the railings of the balconies. Oscar Baldisserri, a forty-five-year-old man with no head or tail who is catapulted among those shabby concrete walls, is the only one asking questions. Because all that violence and resignation without a glimmer of hope for the future are incomprehensible to those who did not grow up in the Red Sky. In an unstoppable descent into the environmental, social, human degradation of the most ambiguous Italian province, thanks to the help of a taciturn child and Matilde, who will kindle in him a tender and ruthless passion, Oscar will cross the banks of his conscience in order to extract the truth from the silence.