The Lord of Opium

For a moment Matt was revolted by the idea. It was a shameful memory, but she had no concept of the beastliness of it. She’d grown up with the idea. It meant no more to her than a freckle or a mole. He took off his shoe, and she got a flashlight to see.

“I don’t know all the words. I recognize ‘of’ and ‘the,’ ” she said.

“It says ‘Property of the Alacrán Estate.’ ”

“That means you belong here, huh? It’s like a cattle brand.”

“I suppose so,” Matt said unwillingly.

“Wait. There’s more.” She fetched the magnifying glass.

More?

thought Matt.

“It’s a little squinched-up line below the words.” She applied both the magnifying glass and flashlight. “It’s numbers.” She repeated them, and Matt turned cold. It was a date, a number related to the only birthday he would ever have, the day he was harvested from a cow.

His thirteenth birthday.

He was more than fifteen now. Who could tell him what it meant? It couldn’t possibly be an expiry date, because he wasn’t microchipped. Or was he? How could he know?

“Are you okay?” asked Listen.

“It’s stuffy in here. Let’s wake up Mirasol and go horseback riding.” Matt clapped his hands and sent the girl to the kitchen to help Celia. He took Listen to the stables and ordered a horse to be saddled. All the while his mind was churning over the number on his foot. He’d seen the mark before. He’d thought it was a scar from when he fell onto broken window glass as a small child.

They rode past the pottery and weaving factories. The craftsmen and -women were outside, producing their goods in the way people had done for thousands of years. The women patted wet clay onto a potter’s wheel turned by pedals they worked with their feet. Others spun wool shorn from a sizable herd of merino sheep. The wool was colored with natural dyes obtained from saffron and indigo plants, and from mushrooms.

Mushrooms. Rose, lavender, yellow, and blue. He remembered seeing them in a barn near the stables as a child. He hadn’t been interested enough then to ask about them.

They came to the guitar factory. “Can we go in?” Listen asked.

Matt woke up. He’d forgotten her existence, although she was clinging to his back like a burr. “I don’t want to. You go. Ask Mr. Ortega to take you home.” She looked at him oddly as he swung her to the ground.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked.

“I’m as good as I ever was,” he said, and rode off.

The world had changed for him. He barely heard the gardeners shouting, “¡Viva El Patrón!” as he passed. He registered that a team of eejits was being moved from one field to the next, and that the Farm Patrolman tipped his hat. Was he one of them on some level? Did something in his brain control him? Was this where El Patrón’s voice came from?

A trapped feeling like that he’d experienced as a young child in a room full of sawdust came over him. He had trouble breathing and felt for his asthma inhaler.

There was no noxious air or suffocating dust to account for it this time. The reaction was purely in his mind. He was part of the machine El Patrón had created.

He came to the new eejit pens, now built some distance from the evil-smelling pits. They had beds inside and large communal showers. Dining halls with tables and chairs were at the end of each building. The eejits ate a balanced diet of meat, vegetables, and bread, although the Farm Patrolmen were still using eejit pellets for lunch in the fields. Did it matter? Did the workers notice how their lives had improved?

In the distance lay the water purification plant and the polluted pits. Matt headed the horse that way. It was a perverse thing to do. It was guaranteed to bring on a full-scale asthma attack, but he didn’t care. Now he understood Cienfuegos’s desperation. The head of the Farm Patrol was trapped in an endless round of violence that he wasn’t allowed to escape.

Am I allowed? I’ll find out, Matt thought savagely.

When he drew near to the pits, the horse began to snort and act up. The stench wasn’t too bad, but the animal was clearly alarmed by it. “I don’t want to hurt you,” Matt said. He rode back to where the air was cleaner and tethered the horse to a fence post. “Someone will find you if I don’t come back,” he said.