The Lord of Opium (37 page)

Matt felt the strange tension too. Something was building
up, and he wished he could count one-thousand-and-one, one-thousand-and-two to see how close it was. Along with Cienfuegos, he went to the holoport room and opened the wormhole to the Convent of Santa Clara. A UN peacekeeper in full battle dress was standing in front of the portal. He was covered from head to toe with riot gear, and his helmet was darkened so no one could see his expression. The soldier hurled himself into the wormhole.

“Close the portal!” screamed the
jefe
.

Matt was frozen.

“Close it! That’s a suicide bomber!”

The figure drew closer with agonizing slowness, and Cienfuegos tried to reach the controls. Matt shoved him away. “We don’t know what he is. Stay back! That’s a direct order!”

The
jefe
collapsed to his knees. “I can’t disobey, but please, please, please close the portal! Esperanza wants to kill you!”

What would El Patrón do?
thought Matt as the lethal mists swirled about the figure. The answer came at once.
I’d wait and see,
said the old, old voice in his mind.
I didn’t become a drug lord by wetting my pants every time something went wrong.

Cienfuegos was doubled up with pain, the two directives at war in his mind: to protect the
patrón
and to obey a direct order. It was killing him. Matt laid his hand on the man’s head and said, “I forgive you.”

The peacekeeper’s body shot out of the wormhole and fell with a clatter. The portal closed with a thunderclap that shook the room. Matt kicked away ice, wrapped his hands in a towel, and undid the helmet. The cold still penetrated to his fingers. He blew on a face that was heartbreakingly still and white.

“¡Por Dios!”
cried Cienfuegos. He raced from the room and returned with a hair dryer. “Quick! Quick! Get the uniform
off!” He ran the hair dryer over María’s face while Matt undid buckles and snaps. She wasn’t breathing, and Matt blew air into her lungs. She shuddered and gasped.

“She’s in shock,” said Cienfuegos. He called for help. Servants came running and carried her to a hospital room. By that time a doctor and nurse had arrived and began working to keep her warm and to feed oxygen into her lungs. A blood pressure cuff and heart rate monitor recorded life signs. Matt watched in a daze, not knowing what they meant but only that there was still something to measure.

Time passed. She began to breathe regularly. The color had come back into her skin, and the doctor said that she wouldn’t lose her fingers or toes. The biggest problem was that she’d gone without air for an unknown time. No one knew how time was measured inside a wormhole.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” the doctor said. “Astronauts undergo the temperature of outer space, but they have the right protection. This uniform was meant for Earth conditions. I didn’t know it could keep out cold.”

María had come up with the only way she could escape her mother and used the only kind of uniform she could lay her hands on. “She didn’t know either,” Matt said.

*  *  *

He briefly went to his room to fetch the altar cloth María had sent to him through the holoport, and this he pinned to the wall in front of her bed. It would be the first thing she saw. All other concerns went out of his head. He sat for hours in her room, refusing food and turning away visitors. Lack of oxygen had harmed Chacho, though he had recovered eventually. He had never lost consciousness like this. Finally,
Sor
Artemesia came and refused to go. “You must rest, Don Sombra. You must eat.”

“I’ll do it here,” said Matt. He had a cot brought in, but when he tried to eat, his stomach revolted and he couldn’t keep anything down. This was too much like Mirasol’s last hours. He dreaded seeing the doctor come, afraid that the man would tell him the situation was hopeless. Nurses arrived regularly to change the girl’s position in bed and to administer intravenous feeding.

And still she did not awake. One of the new doctors measured her brain activity and pronounced himself satisfied with the results. “She seems normal in all respects except one. It isn’t like a coma, Don Sombra. It’s more like a deep sleep and that gives me hope that she will recover.”

Matt said nothing. He remembered Mirasol collapsing after one of her dance sessions, only to be roused by a command. How long would she have slept if he hadn’t given that command?

When the doctor had left, Matt said, “María, wake up!” but nothing happened. He talked to her as he’d spoken to Rosa after she’d been turned into an eejit. He told her about the disastrous party he’d thrown for the boys, about Chacho and his father, about the visit to the biosphere. But he left out any reference to the Mushroom Master in case Dr. Rivas was listening.

Day turned into night. He dozed, sitting up each time the nurses came in. They flexed María’s arms and legs to stimulate her circulation. On the second day the doctor noted her eyelids fluttering. “She’s dreaming, Don Sombra. Her brain is active.” Matt wondered whether it was a nightmare or whether she was walking through flower-filled meadows like the cow. At this point he would have welcomed one of Listen’s night terrors, if only to prove that María was still there.

Matt fell into a trancelike state. The sight of food revolted
him, and he was no longer sure whether he was awake or dreaming. Nurses came and went. The sound of voices echoed distantly from the hall. The window lightened and darkened as the sun moved across the sky.

Matt saw Dr. Rivas bent over María and wondered vaguely why the man hadn’t come before. The doctor held up a syringe, tapped it to dislodge air bubbles, and squirted a small amount of liquid from the tip.

“What are you doing?” asked Matt.

“Giving her a stimulant,” said Dr. Rivas.

Something was wrong—the doctor’s smile didn’t reach his eyes, and behind that smile his teeth were clenched. Matt jumped up and smashed the syringe out of the doctor’s hand.

Dr. Rivas backed away, hands in the air. “I meant no harm, Don Sombra. I exist to serve.”

“Like you served El Patrón by carving up his clones.”

“Good heavens! I’m your best hope for María’s survival. Look. She’s stirring.”

Matt turned to see her fingers fluttering on the sheet. “María, it’s me. I’m here. You made it. You’re safe.” The girl tossed her head from side to side. Her dark hair whipped across the pillow. “What’s wrong?” the boy cried.

“She’s trying to wake up. This will pass,” said Dr. Rivas. And indeed, after a moment María calmed down and breathed easily again. Her lips opened slightly as though she wanted to speak. Matt watched, fascinated, willing her to come to life.

“I’m sorry I snapped at you, Dr. Rivas,” said Matt, holding her hands and feeling warmth return to them. He turned, but the room was empty.

43

THE CHAPEL OF JESÚS MALVERDE

H
e rang for a nurse. No one came. He rang again and went out into the hall. The nurse’s station was deserted. There were no voices, no whirr of machines, only the sound of eejits going about their tasks. He went back to the room. María seemed to be all right. Her blood pressure and heartbeat, as far as he could tell, hadn’t changed.

He was afraid to leave her. He sat there, watching for any change in her condition. He realized that he shouldn’t have struck out at Dr. Rivas. The man was understandably upset about his son’s death. Matt should have been more patient.

“Don Sombra,” came a soft voice from the door. Matt looked up to see
Sor
Artemesia. “You must come, Don Sombra. I think Dr. Rivas has gone mad. He’s been fighting with the other doctors and destroying equipment.”

Matt felt heavy with lack of sleep and food. His mind wasn’t functioning clearly. “I’ll deal with it later,” he said.

“You must come now,” urged
Sor
Artemesia. “There was trouble at one of the labs. Something about a dead cow. Dr. Rivas killed an eejit.”

Everyone kills eejits,
Matt thought wearily. Dr. Kim, Esperanza, even Cienfuegos on occasion. Nothing abnormal about that. “I need coffee,” he said. The nun hurriedly fetched him a cup from the nurse’s station. Matt waited for the bitter brew to work its way into his consciousness. “I can’t leave María now. Especially if Dr. Rivas is going rogue. Where’s Cienfuegos?”

“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.