The Lord of Opium(108)

“I think all of us have been put into his freezer,” said Listen.

“He certainly seems nervous,” the jefe said. “Did you see the Bug when you visited the nursery?”

“Nope. I hope somebody got him with a flyswatter,” said the little girl.

They finished lunch, and Sor Artemesia took Fidelito and Listen off for a nap. The Mushroom Master said he wanted a nap too.

That left Matt and Cienfuegos. “I’m going to call María, and I want to be alone,” Matt said.

“Bad idea,” said the jefe.

“What? Calling María?”

“Being alone.” Cienfuegos looked pointedly at the grape arbor and cupped his ear. Matt understood. Someone was listening. There was an undercurrent of danger in Paradise, and the jefe had picked it up. He was practically sniffing the air like a coyote.

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.