The Lord of Opium(94)

“I thought she would dance.”

“And now you may have killed her!”

“Mi patrón, mi patrón,” interrupted Sor Artemesia. “Listen is only a little girl. She doesn’t have the judgment of an adult. She liked the music boxes and thought Mirasol would too. She came directly to me for help, and I called Dr. Kim.”

Mirasol began to stir, and soon she was sobbing again. She sat up and flung her arm at Cienfuegos, who was watching the sky intently. “He killed my father!” she screamed. “He did it! Help me, oh, help me! I can’t escape!” She convulsed, and Sor Artemesia quickly applied another infuser.

Matt moved into the seat next to the jefe and said, “Is that true? Did you kill her father?”

Cienfuegos turned the hovercraft to avoid a pillar of rain descending from an enormous thunderhead. The craft shuddered as a lightning bolt flashed at the edge of the cloud. “The electricity interferes with the navigation of this craft. I have to pay attention. I may have killed her father. I don’t remember. There were so many.”

There was nothing more to say. Matt watched the jefe’s yellow-brown eyes as the man maneuvered around the storm. Cienfuegos’s attention was riveted on his task, and no trace of regret was detectable. If Matt distracted him, they might never reach Paradise. “Can you go faster?” Matt said.

“No,” the jefe said. Now rain began to lash the side of the craft. Another lightning bolt fell, and Listen counted, “One-thousand-and-one.” That was as far as she got. Thunder rocked the sky. Sor Artemesia silently told the beads of her rosary.

Matt went into the back of the craft and sat by Listen. “I know you’re only a child. I was angry, but it was out of fear. I’m not angry anymore.” The little girl huddled against him, tears rolling silently down her face. “Did Mirasol say why the music upset her?”

“She said her father used to sing that song. At first she seemed okay. She talked like any other person. She said her father sang to her when she went to sleep, even when they were running away. That’s how the Farm Patrol found them. And then she screamed.”

Matt put his arm around the little girl. “I might have done the same thing. It was just chance.”

Mirasol awoke two more times on the journey, and then they landed outside the hospital in Paradise. Orderlies swarmed out to carry her inside. Matt followed closely. He didn’t trust any of the doctors. Their idea of a cure was a lethal injection.

She was taken to an operating room and Dr. Rivas came in, dressed in hospital scrubs, with latex gloves on his hands. “This is going to be brutal. I don’t think you should watch,” he said.

“What are you going to do?” Matt asked.

“The only thing we can do. Open her skull and pick out the microchips one by one.”

“That doesn’t work. Dr. Kim tried it.”

“So did we. So did I over the years,” said Dr. Rivas. “I sacrificed hundreds of eejits trying to find a cure for my son. I tried nullifying the magnetism with electrical currents. I engineered a white blood cell to attack microchips. I induced high fevers, hoping they would destroy the chips before they killed the brain. Nothing worked.”

“So this is hopeless,” Matt said.

“You can do a procedure a thousand times and sometimes the thousandth time is different. You make a lucky mistake. That’s the only hope I can give you.”

Matt looked down at Mirasol, her beautiful face composed, for the moment, in sleep. How could he order this mutilation without any hope of success? They said eejits didn’t feel pain, but he knew, deep down where no one could detect it, they did. “Leave her as she is,” he said.

“Shall I give her a lethal injection?” The doctor removed his gloves.

“No. Give me the infusers. When she starts suffering, I’ll give her one.”

“She might linger for an hour or two. No more.”

Dr. Rivas left, and Matt sat by Mirasol’s bed. She awoke, and for a moment her eyes were clear and she seemed to see him. Then the anguish overtook her and she screamed. The last time she looked directly at Matt and he bent over and kissed her. “I love you, Waitress,” he said.

She gazed back, really seeing him. “I am called Mirasol,” she whispered, and then, as the infusion flooded her veins, she sighed and did not wake again.





37





THE FUNERAL




Matt did not know how much time had passed. He sat unmoving as the small sounds of a hospital went on around him. Air-conditioning clicked on and off. A blood pressure cuff inflated and deflated on Mirasol’s wrist. A heart monitor searched for a beat, found none, and searched again. Matt was no stranger to death. It had surrounded him all his life. He had seen El Viejo, El Patrón’s grandson, lying in his coffin. He had seen the eejit in the field as a small child. And what he did not see, he was well aware of.