by Nancy Farmer
“He flew the Mushroom Master back to the biosphere. When he returned and found the doctor growing more erratic, he radioed to Ajo for Daft Donald and the bodyguards. Oh! María’s eyes are open!”
The girl was blinking, as though she didn’t know where she was. Matt immediately went to her side. “You’re safe, mi vida.”
Suddenly she was wide awake. “Matt?”
“I’m here. You should have asked me to come to you. I would have done it no matter how angry Esperanza was.”
“But you have come,” she insisted. “I had such a fight with Mother! You wouldn’t believe how inflexible she can be when she wants something. She kept pushing me to get engaged to that creepy friend of hers. Honestly! He reminded me of a plucked turkey.”
The excited flow of words told Matt that María had come back in full force. He was so grateful that he promised himself to apologize to Dr. Rivas as soon as possible. But then . . . perhaps recovery hadn’t been the doctor’s real intention. Matt remembered him tapping the syringe and claiming it was a stimulant. Why wait so long to give her a stimulant? Why wait until María was almost well?
He remembered Nurse Fiona’s words: They put a drip into the patient’s arm and then they inject the chips with the liquid. The chips are smaller than blood cells and go right through the heart. The process takes less than fifteen minutes.
“I’ll kill him,” he said.
“Don’t bother,” María said brightly. “I put him in his place. He tried to kiss me, and I gave him a slap he won’t soon forget. Sor Artemesia, how wonderful to see you! Did Mother let you come back?” She sat up, and the intravenous needle popped out of her arm. “Ow! What’s going on here?”
“It’s all right, mija. You’re in the hospital.” The nun gently forced her to lie back down. She swabbed the blood from María’s arm with a cotton ball.
“Hospital? I’m not sick. It’s probably one of Mother’s schemes to keep me under lock and key.” She had no memory of going through the portal, and when she learned that she was actually in Opium, she was all for getting up to explore. “I’ve only been to Paradise as a small child. I remember wonderful gardens and deer that would eat out of my hand. The hummingbirds were everywhere.”
“You haven’t eaten real food for a week. You must take things slowly,” said Sor Artemesia. She and Matt jumped when they heard the rattle of a machine gun.
Matt ran to the window and signaled for the others to stay back. He saw the shadow of several hovercrafts pass overhead. He heard the clap of stun guns, more machine-gun fire, then silence. They waited. “It came from the direction of the observatory,” said Matt.
“Closer than that.” Sor Artemesia shivered. They waited for a long time, and no more sounds came. Matt ventured into the hallway and found it deserted.
“I took Fidelito to a place of safety,” said Sor Artemesia. “I tried to bring Listen, but she wouldn’t leave Mbongeni. Chacho and Ton-Ton are okay as long as they stay in Ajo.”
“You seem to have expected trouble,” said Matt.
“Let’s just say I know Dr. Rivas. We should take María away. I don’t trust him.”
They unpinned the altar cloth and eased María out of bed. Her legs gave out when she tried to stand, and they had to support her. “I wish we could get one of those little stirabouts,” she said. “I remember floating around the gardens in one.”
“We’re less noticeable on foot,” said Matt, remembering the shadows of large hovercrafts overhead.
Half-filled coffee cups sat on the nurses’ desks, and half-eaten sandwiches had been knocked to the floor. The station had been abandoned in a hurry. They collected a full thermos of coffee and unopened packages of cookies.
“Why don’t we go to the holoport room and call Mother?” suggested María.
“Later,” said Matt. The sooner they got under cover, the better. Sor Artemesia led them along a stream in a direction Matt hadn’t been before. For a while María had to lean on the others, but she recovered swiftly. She looked around eagerly and chattered about how happy she was to be here. Matt didn’t tell her about Dr. Rivas. Sycamores twisted white branches over the path, and cottonwoods whispered among themselves. The shadows of birds followed them as they traveled.
The Paradise hospital and observatory were the most advanced of their kind in the world. Yet a short walk took you into a world that looked as though it hadn’t been disturbed since the beginning of time. Pronghorn antelope and white-tailed deer swiveled their ears toward the travelers. A coyote slipped into tall grass, and Matt saw his yellow eyes peering at them through the leaves. He reminded the boy of Cienfuegos.
A fork-tailed hawk crested the trees in search of prey, and a family of quail sat as still as a painting in the dappled shade of a bush. Nothing was unduly alarmed by the people moving through their domain. The animals were cautious, as they would have been with one another, but not frightened. They had not been hunted for a century.
Matt saw a white building with stained-glass windows beyond a woven fence of reeds. “Is that a church?” he asked.
“Not exactly,” said Sor Artemesia with a crooked smile. “It’s the chapel of Jesús Malverde.”
There had been a small shrine in Ajo and near the nursery in Paradise, but this was a building as big as a church. A long room had pews on either side and an altar at the end. Storerooms and a kitchen were separate from the main chapel. This was a serious meeting place, and Matt wondered what sort of rituals were performed for a saint who answered the prayers of drug dealers. Stained-glass windows showed Malverde standing in a marijuana patch, giving money to the poor, casting blindness on a troop of narcotics agents, and warning a drug mule to flee.
The altar was covered with silver charms, candles, and gifts like the one in Ajo. On a dais behind it was the saint himself, sitting in a chair. A cactus wren had made a nest in the timbers over his head, and wisps of grass had fallen onto Jesús Malverde’s black hair.
This was a far better statue than the other ones Matt had seen. The saint’s hair was carefully combed, and his face was painted with care. He wore a white shirt and bandanna. His trousers were black and his shoes were polished and expensive-looking. In one hand he held a bag of money. In the other was a sheaf of dollar bills. At his feet was a carpet of gold coins.
“María!” squealed Fidelito, popping up from behind a pew. The little boy ran up and hugged her. “I was so worried about you. Are you all waked up? Did you see things when you flew through the wormhole?”
But María couldn’t tell him, because she had no memory of it.
“Be gentle with her, chico. She’s been ill,” said Sor Artemesia, untangling the little boy’s arms.
“Where’s Listen? I found dolls at the back of the altar. She’d like them.”
Sor Artemesia shuddered. “That’s brujería, mijo. Witchcraft. Those are voodoo dolls meant to curse someone, and it’s better if you don’t touch them. I couldn’t get Listen to leave Mbongeni.” The nun found the dolls and threw them away. She draped the altar cloth in the appropriate place and stood back to admire her work. “There!” she said. “That should take some of the curse off this place.”
Sor Artemesia had planned the refuge carefully. She had stashed bottles of drinking water along the walls, and crackers and beef jerky were stored in plastic boxes to keep them from the mice. She told Fidelito to fetch sleeping bags from a cupboard and lay them on the pews for beds.
“Won’t the saint be angry that we’re living in his house?” said the little boy.
“That saint,” said Sor Artemesia, “wouldn’t care if you turned the place into a nightclub.”
They made María lie down and propped her up with pillows. The nun insisted that she eat some jerky and drink a little coffee with lots of sugar. Matt also drank coffee, although he didn’t like it. He’d been fasting for days and felt light-headed.
“I don’t want to leave you,” he said.
“You have to, Don Sombra. You have duties,” sai
d Sor Artemesia.
“I never asked for them,” he said wearily. “I’m tired of cleaning up El Patrón’s mess and watching the opium farms churn out drugs. I’m tired of watching eejits die. It’s like a giant machine with no off button. Why shouldn’t I stay here with people I love and forget the whole miserable thing?”
“You can’t, Brother Wolf.” María had been silent until now, but the food had brought life back into her eyes.
“The problem is too big, mi vida,” said Matt. Thousands of people and billions of dollars are involved. We need an army to deal with it, and I can’t trust anyone who has one.” He threw up his hands. “If I had such a force, who would I attack? What would I invade?”
“You must begin by freeing the eejits,” María said gently.
“Oh, sure! Like I haven’t been working on that.”
“I spoke with Cienfuegos before he went away,” Sor Artemesia said. “He says the Scorpion Star is the source of the power that controls the eejits. You have to destroy it.”
Matt looked at her in amazement. This was not the gentle, compassionate nun he was used to. “There are three hundred people on that space station.”
“And at least ten thousand times that number are buried under the fields.”
“So what am I supposed to do? Shoot it down? What would Saint Francis recommend?”
The nun was unmoved by Matt’s sarcasm. “He’d tell you to get off your butt and do the job God has given you.”
The boy had no answer for this. He was bone tired. He wanted to hand the problem to someone else. He wanted to move into the biosphere and herd frogs for the rest of his life. But that wasn’t allowed. He took María’s hand and felt its warmth. “I’ll return when I can,” he said.
“I can help you,” she said. “I don’t want to be left behind. I didn’t risk death to be tossed aside like a kitten that’s only good for chasing feathers.”
Sor Artemesia laughed. It was the first wholehearted laugh Matt had heard from her in days. “I remember the arguments we used to have at school when she wanted to care for lepers. ‘We’ll have to import them,’ I told her. ‘Leprosy has been extinct for fifty years.’ I remember her turtles with cracked shells, the birds with broken wings, and the three-legged cats. You have a drive to do good, María, but you’d slow Matt down in your present condition.”
“No te preocupas, mi vida. Don’t worry. Your turn will come when I’ve sorted out the Scorpion Star,” said Matt, holding her hands and gazing into her eyes. “There will be thousands of people who will need your help.”
“Well, then,” she said, gazing back. He kissed her and left before she could think of an objection.
“Don’t forget Listen,” called Fidelito as Matt left the clearing where the chapel of Jesús Malverde stood.
44
EL BICHO
Matt moved stealthily through the gardens surrounding El Patrón’s mansion. Peacocks fluttered and cried as he passed. Giant carp stuck their noses out of ponds. The old man had imported them from Japan, and they were so tame people could feed them rice balls. They were more than two hundred years old. Animals, both wild and tame, inhabited the gardens, as well as eejits toiling in their drab uniforms and floppy hats.
Matt tiptoed over the tile floors of the main house and came at last to the room he was seeking. The holoport was swirling with icons, and he intended to call Esperanza. He wanted to tell her about her daughter and also ask whether she knew a way to jam the signal, if signal there was, from the Scorpion Star.
On the floor, in front of the screen, was the Bug.
“What are you doing here?” cried Matt. He knelt by the child and felt his head. A ripple of energy like a low electric current ran through him.
The Bug moved feebly and held up his right hand. Matt saw to his horror that it had melted. All that was left was a sticky-looking knob of flesh. “He wouldn’t take me,” whimpered the little boy.
“You put your hand on the screen, didn’t you,” said Matt.
“Dr. Rivas told me to open it. And I did—I did—” El Bicho’s voice trailed off.
“Does it hurt?” Matt didn’t know what he would do if the boy said yes.
“It feels—funny. Like ants crawling. Will it grow back?”
No, thought Matt. Not unless you really are a bug. “I’ll ask the doctors.”
“He wouldn’t take me,” said the Bug.
“Take you where?” Matt said, although he knew.
“To the Scorpion Star.”
And that was how Dr. Rivas had tricked the boy. He knew how much El Bicho longed to be in that ideal world. But the boy’s hand was too small for the scanner to recognize. It must have partially accepted him, or else he’d be a puddle on the floor.
The Bug touched Matt’s face with the knob. It was an instinctive gesture, a child reaching out for comfort, but Matt jerked away. It was disgusting, the feel of that boneless mass of flesh. He felt bile come into his mouth.
“Are you strong enough to walk?”
“I tried. I can’t stand up.”
Matt was confounded. He didn’t have time to carry the boy to Malverde’s chapel. He had to locate Cienfuegos and find out what those large hovercrafts were doing and why someone was firing machine guns. And then he noticed that the portal had changed. The edge of the screen was supposed to be red. Part of it turned green when Matt opened a section of the border to allow the passage of supplies, but now it was all green.
That was what the doctor had been up to. That was why he’d sacrificed the child. He’d ended the lockdown and left Opium defenseless.
Matt restored the lockdown at once. “How long has this been open?” he demanded.
“Don’t be angry,” wailed the Bug.
“I’m not angry, but we may have been invaded.” Matt realized that the little boy was too shocked to answer questions. “Listen to me,” he said urgently. “I have to get help. I have to rally the Farm Patrol. The whole country is in danger. Do you understand?”
“Don’t leave me,” cried El Bicho. He grabbed Matt’s sleeve with his good hand.
Matt pulled away. “None of us is going to survive if I don’t get help. I won’t forget you. You’re my brother, and I won’t desert you. Try to stay strong.”
“Don’t leave me!” screamed the boy.
Matt fled the room. The Bug’s screams followed him. He slammed the door and leaned against it, breathing heavily.
Being a drug lord isn’t all guitar playing and pachangas, said the old, old voice in Matt’s head. I left my dying mother to build an empire. I sacrificed my son Felipe to the drug wars. I shot down a passenger plane to preserve the peace.
Be quiet, said Matt.
El Patrón chuckled. I am the cat with nine lives. I’ve had eight, and you are the ninth.
Leave me alone!
Matt realized that he hadn’t contacted Esperanza, but he couldn’t bring himself to go back into that room. He ran to the armory, hoping to find Cienfuegos or Daft Donald, but it was deserted. Where is everyone? Matt thought. The silence was unnatural.
He selected a stun gun. He’d never fired one and now cursed himself for overlooking a basic drug-lord skill. He strapped a knife to his leg and another to his upper arm. He filled his pockets with tranquilizer beads. When you threw them at someone, they exploded, and the gas knocked the person out. That was how the Farm Patrol had captured Cienfuegos when he was trying to reach the United States.
Matt had never used a weapon in his life or even gone hunting. He didn’t know whether he could kill someone. You’d better make your mind up fast, advised El Patrón. We’re not playing soccer here. This is pok-a-tok.
Matt crossed the gardens, heading for the nursery, where he thought Listen and Mbongeni were. He felt the hidden knives pressed against his skin and mentally copied the swift movement that Cienfuegos used to produce a stiletto. He knew that he could never equal it. He’d seen Daft Donald pull a switchblade from a pant leg. It wasn’t simply a matter of prac
tice, but will. You had to want to kill someone. You think too much, complained El Patrón.
He kept to the shadows of trees, and every moving branch or birdcall made him flinch. He simply didn’t know where the dangers were. But the children weren’t in the nursery. A line of caretakers sat along a wall, and at their feet was a dead eejit. It was probably the one who let the cow die, the animal Dr. Rivas was using to grow a replacement for his son.
Matt ran to the main part of the hospital, and at last he saw normal people. Nurses in white scrubs were standing outside an operating room with doctors in gauze masks and latex gloves. The operating room door opened, and the medical staff went inside.
Matt edged forward, and his foot bumped against something. He glanced down and saw a body. It was a soldier, and the smell of hot metal rose from him. He’d been killed with a stun gun, and very recently. Matt backed away, but an African man in a military uniform came out of the operating room and shouted, “Stop him!” Instantly, soldiers poured out of the operating room. They grabbed Matt and removed the stun gun and knives as easily as peeling the skin off a banana. They shook the tranquilizer beads out of his pockets, but it was Matt who was overcome by gas, not his enemies. He passed out almost instantly.
45
PRISONERS
He woke up on the floor. He was in a hospital room, and on a bed, clenching her teeth like a little wild animal, was Listen. He stood up and almost passed out again. He fell against the bed.
Then he noticed the men sitting by the door. They were squat and broad-chested, your standard-issue thugs. Their booted feet looked twice the size of those of a normal man.
Matt was swept with dizziness again, and his stomach heaved. Listen sat up. “There’s a bathroom next door if you want to barf.”
Matt staggered inside, lost the coffee he’d drunk earlier, washed his mouth out, and staggered back. He collapsed next to Listen. “Don’t bother trying to talk to them. They’re Russians,” said the little girl. “They’ve been jabbering at me for hours, but I’ve been ignoring them.”