The Lord of Opium

“Who knows what damage you did, shaking her,” said Sor Artemesia. “Get this sorry excuse for a nurse out of here, mi patrón, and call the doctor.” Matt didn’t question her authority, in spite of being the boss of all bosses. He rang for help, and soon two of the new guards came in, bowing nervously at being in the presence of the Lord of Opium, followed by the new doctor.

“Take this dishwasher back to her duties at the hospital,” Matt said, pointing at Fiona. She yelled curses at them, but the boy had no time to waste on her. Listen was still screaming and staring into a horror only she could see. The doctor, an athletic-looking man who might have been Korean, measured her heart rate and wiped the sweat off the little girl’s face.

“It’s a night terror,” he said. “You did exactly right to restrain her, señora. Children can hurt themselves when they’re in the grip of this.”

“I’ve seen it before,” said Sor Artemesia. “She can neither see nor hear us, but the fit will pass.”

“Listen has nightmares, but she won’t tell me what they are,” said Matt.

“She can’t, chico—Ah! Excuse me! You’re the patrón. I meant no disrespect, sir.” The doctor looked flustered.

“It’s all right,” Matt said. “Why can’t she tell me?”

“Because this is a night terror, something very different from a dream,” said the doctor. “It comes from deep inside. It’s caused by fever or exhaustion or sometimes by trauma. Do you know if anything bad has happened to her?”

She was terrorized by the Bug. She watched Dr. Rivas turn rabbits dee-diddly-dead. Her only companion was a brain-damaged boy. “Her life hasn’t been perfect,” Matt said. “Can you help her?”

“I wish I could, but all medical science can do is wait for her to recover. With any luck, she’ll outgrow the condition.”

“I know something,” said Chacho. They turned to him. Matt had forgotten his presence, so different was he from the days when he’d been a noisy, cheerful companion. His face was marked by suffering. He had breathed far less than was good for him when trapped in the boneyard in Aztlán. But more than that, his spirit had been affected by his terrible ordeal. “One of the little kids in the plankton factory had these fits,” he said. “The Keepers used to put his feet into cool water. And they washed his neck and chest.”

Sor Artemesia immediately set about doing this with the boys’ help, and soon—whether it was the treatment or the fit had run its course—the little girl’s cries ceased, and she fell into an exhausted sleep.

“That’s one for the books,” the doctor said, praising Chacho. “I’ll have to remember that.” The boy smiled his grave smile.

Sor Artemesia slept in Listen’s room, but the boys were in no mood to go to bed. Matt led them to the kitchen, which was of course deserted in the middle of the night. There they made popcorn and feasted on ice cream until Fidelito got sick. “Th-that’s the only way you, uh, learn when you’ve had enough,” Ton-Ton said. “By eating too much. N-next time you’ll know.”

“No, he won’t,” said Chacho. “Fidelito always eats until he falls over.”

“Ohhhh, leave me alone,” the little boy moaned, but he soon recovered. Matt led them on an exploration of the gardens, now eerily silent without the bustle of gardeners and eejits. The peacocks were roosting in trees. There was no moon, and the Milky Way provided a strange, silvery light over walkways and the ghostly trunks of orange trees. The air was heavy with the scent of flowers.

“I n-never saw stars like this,” said Ton-Ton, as they sat on the top of the marble steps leading out of the hacienda. “They must have always been there.”

“The sky was muddy in Aztlán,” said Chacho.

“Not on the seashore,” remembered Fidelito. “Mi abuelita used to find pictures in the night sky—Orion the Hunter, the Seven Sisters, the Big and Little Bears. She told me stories about them, but there was one big, red star she said was new. See? There it is.”

“That’s a space station,” Matt said.

“¿Verdád? You can live on it?” asked the little boy.

“It’s like a big city inside a clear bubble. It has buildings and even hovercrafts to fly around in. In the middle is a big garden with trees and animals.”

“What a great place to live,” said Chacho. “You could see the whole Earth. But it would always be night, wouldn’t it?”

Matt considered. On TV shows outer space was black, so the skies of the Scorpion Star were probably black too. “There are lights inside the buildings,” he said. “I saw close-up pictures of them from a telescope.”