The Lord of Opium(110)

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.