Chapter Nine: Without Torture, No Progress

I need to tell you about a word. It is more of a curse really, but not a curse word. The word is susto. Do you know it? The first person I ever knew afflicted with susto was Mrs. Saldaña. It happened to her not long after we first met the Saldañas, when Mr. Saldaña died. He was killed by a moth that trampled him to death. After that, Mrs. Saldaña was left in charge of the ranch with nothing but her two sons and Rocket Girl to herd her moths and drive them to slaughter.

That fear dug into her like a seed, and like a seed it grew inside her until she could no longer function. She was afraid the moths would die, but she was afraid to send her boys out to herd. Even when Dad offered to help with herding, she was afraid something would happen to him. She was afraid to get robots because they would cost too much. That is susto for you. It isn’t just fear. It’s suffocating fear, like a lid closed over your life so that the fear can’t get out.

I was in shock. And I was also suffering from susto. My father had betrayed me. We were drug farmers, which I despised. We should be better than this. No matter how low we got, I didn’t want to be breaking the law and hurting people’s lives with what we raised on the ranch. Every year the school made us watch videos about the dangers of cragweed. They showed us the crushing loss that was the life of an addict. How we would do anything – including killing our friends, just to get another high. But we didn’t need a government-funded video to show us the dangers. We lived it every day of our lives. The addict at Vargaldt’s funeral. The stupid gangs and their petty turf wars for control of the cragweed. And then there were the helados, who many people suspected were just addicts gone too far off into the ice.

This was not the life I wanted. It wasn’t even the hell I wanted.

I remember the candy-painted calaveras of the Doña Muertes mixed with their own blood. They were positioned around the Hideout like sentries, but they were not sentries, of course. They were warnings to everyone to keep the hell out.

The Nords placed a gun troll in the middle of the crops. It had rifle scopes for eyes and barrels for its mouth and hands. The gun troll twisted around as soon as we came over the ridge and fired a warning shot thundering over my head. I turned the hover cycle on its side, and Rocket Girl and I tumbled down the side of the crater and into an irrigation ditch next to a tool shed.

Not knowing if we were a rival gang or a ranger, the gun troll wasted no time in trying to take us out. Its hands were fully automatics that the gun troll had no problem unloading on the ditch.

Blam! Blam!

I looked to the tool shed where the sounds were coming from. Boca appeared with his tranq rifle out. Behind me, I could hear the pings of the tranq darts ricocheting off of the gun trolls’ carapace.

The gun troll recalculated Boca’s presence while I wanted to know what Boca was doing there in the first place.

“I help your Dad with the cragweed. What are you doing here, Mateo? Your father wanted to protect you from all this,” he said in Spanish.

“Talk about it later,” Rocket Girl said. “How are we going to escape the gun troll?”

As if to make its point, the gun troll fired a volley that took out a chunk of the ditch. The ground just swelled up, then exploded. Ice and rock shrapnel fell over us.

“I’ve got an idea,” I said. I whistled, and Cerbie, who had been standing at the edge of the crater watching us with his tail wagging and his mouth panting, leaped down into the ditch.

“I built a search-and-destroy protocol into Cerbie. I used it for gaming, hide-and-seek kinds of things. But if I assign destroy to the gun troll, Cerbie might be able to sneak up on him and take him out.

I selected the app and turned Cerbie on. A picture of a ninja appeared on his screen, and Cerbie’s lights suddenly darkened.

I grabbed Cerbie by his heads and said, “Protect us, boy.”

Cerbie closed his mouth and looked at me with understanding. Some might say love. Others might say it was the programming, but in my experience, I knew them to be wrong. Cerbie would do everything he could to keep me alive. We were best buds.

Following his protocols, Cerbie sketched a perimeter of the Hideout. His left head looked up over the ditch. A canon blast singed his shell as the robot ducked down low. Then he snuck around behind the shed, keeping his body lower to the ground than any animal ever could. He light-footed toward the far ridge, then leaped into the cragweed as stealthily as any cat ever ducked into a bush.

The gun troll started to move on us.

“Venga,” Boca said. We must go. He led us away from the gun troll to the shed.

Before we started, though, Rocket Girl reached into her tool belt and pulled out a socket wrench. She kissed the wrench and side-tossed it along the ditch. It crashed into the ice about twenty meters away from us. Immediately the gun troll unleashed its weaponry on the site. The socket wrench was obliterated into a thousand tiny pieces.

“Quedate abajo,” Boca muttered, motioning with his hand for us to keep down.

But then the gun troll was rushing to the ditch. We could hear its legs pounding the dirt. Boca pulled me behind the shed as the gun troll appeared in the ditch and analyzed its kill. I knew it would not be satisfied with the socket wrench. There were no biological remains. A gun troll owned by the Frost Giant was better than that. It would see our tracks any second, and then it would light up the shed.

But the gun troll was not watching Cerbie. My dog had angled himself behind the gun troll, weaving through the black-and-purple cragweed. He had no weapons besides the standard ones his kit came with: teeth and claws. So he launched himself onto the gun troll’s back. Tail wagging because he had won the game, Cerbie bit into the gun troll’s shoulder joints with both his heads. The gun troll’s cannon head swung around, but Cerbie was too close for the cannon to shoot him. I heard the gun troll’s joints ripping mechanically. Fibers and wires exploded from his joints, but not before the gun troll fired his guns and flamethrower. Bullets lanced through my dog’s shell, and I cried out.

I picked up a rock and started to run out into the crater, but Boca slammed me back down. He was as strong as a mountain.

“Let me up! That’s my dog!”

“Callate, mijo!” Shutup!

“Mateo, please stop,” Rocket Girl said. She put her hands on my shoulders, breaking the spell, if only momentarily.

Out in the crater, the gun troll had knocked Cerbie off. Cerbie had damaged one arm to the point that it, and its five guns, was useless. The gun troll still had its one sidearm and its cannon, and Cerbie was no longer too close to be shot. The gun troll stabilized itself and shot at Cerbie, who was cringing with a broken leg beneath the gun troll.

Click! Click! Click!

The cannon’s loading mechanism had broken. The gun troll tried to manually feed the cannon using its one good arm. It was a slow and clumsy procedure, but the gun troll had time. Cerbie slowly dragged himself back toward the cragweed, but not fast enough.

I shuffled out of Boca’s grip, grabbed the rock, and kissed Rocket Girl. Yes, I did it. My first kiss. I was thinking it would be my last. And my advice to all of you is that if you think it is going to be your last kiss, then give them a lifetime’s worth of kissing. I did. Odale!

As I ran out into the field of cragweed, a hover car with icy flames painted on the sides flew over me. It was Hel.

Above me, Hel charged into battle against her family’s own gun troll. But as she came over the ridge, guess what was the first thing she saw? Yeah, that’s right. Me kissing Rocket Girl. Or from her point of view, Rocket Girl kissing me. Hel was furious. She’d been sent here to kidnap the boy she liked, then found out he was racing to his death against a gun troll. She wasn’t in close enough range to shut the troll down until she came over the Hideout. So what does the daughter of the Frost Giant, a girl raised to run a brothel, do when she sees a girl kissing her guy? She commands the gun troll to fire on Rocket Girl. Didn’t think twice about it. She pressed the button, and the gun troll turned from Cerbie to the shed and shot Rocket Girl down with his sidearms, and man, nothing escapes those computerized models.

Except that Rocket Girl and I were being watched over by Boca, who tossed Rocket Girl out of the way. Bullets ripped through his forearm. He grunted in pain and fell to the ground as the gun troll stopped and returned to his position in the middle of the cragweed field.

The next thing I knew, I was in the hover car with Hel, and she was starting to drive away from the Hideout. Boca lay in the backseat, a rope tourniquet tied below his elbow. There was blood everywhere.

“Wait! We can’t leave without Cerbie! Or Rocket Girl!” Hel rolled her eyes when I mentioned Rocket Girl, but she turned her Mayhem around. We picked up Cerbie, who was incapacitated, and Rocket Girl, who probably would have died on the ice if we didn’t bring her home.

Looking down at Boca I thought, this could have been me. Should have been me. “Boca saved us,” I said.

Once we got home, Dad and I lifted the unconscious Boca out of the hover car and carried him into the living room with the classroom console. Rocket Girl pulled out our operating table and connected it to the console.

“Nano enhancer,” Dad said, and nodded to a small cabinet drawer in the kitchen. Hel grabbed the nano enhancer, which looked like a silver egg. She held the egg about ten centimeters over Boca’s arm and moved it in slow circular motions, all the while singing, “Sana, sana, sana.”

My Mama had done this same thing almost a hundred times to me. The metal enhancer was a kind of a battery for supercharging the nanos in our system and allowing them to work faster at healing.

Boca smiled at Hel. He said, “Podría morir escucha feliz de cantar en mí.”

“You’re not allowed to die,” Dad scolded. “I’m not owing anyone death payments.”

“I was a gladiator once. On Apollo.” This was the first time I heard him speak in English.

“Yeah, we’ve all heard the stories before. You were a great gladiator. Fought many fights, loved many women. Now you’re going to die on a small iceball on the edge of the galaxy if you don’t shut the hell up.” Boca fell into unconsciousness.

Our doctor, Dr. Seguín, suddenly appeared as a hologram next to the table. He was wearing a headset and bloody scrubs.

“I apologize for the look of my attire, but I just got out of a surgery,” he said.

“You won’t hear any complaints here, doc,” Dad replied.

As Dr. Seguín began his examination, I realized how bad Boca looked. His normally rustic-colored skin was ashen. His clothes were covered in blood. He was starting to stink, too. Not just in a bathless way, either, but like Dad’s dead moths.

Dr. Seguín’s hologram approached two mechanical arms on the side of the table. The arms moved in synchronicity to his arms, even slid down the side of the table, if necessary. Dr. Seguín started by removing most of Boca’s shirt and the rope.

“This is going to bleed. Somebody put pressure at the elbow,” he said. Rocket Girl put her hand on Boca’s bloody arm. As he removed the rope, blood puddled along the edge of the operating table and dripped onto the floor. Then the mechanical hand suddenly jerked away in one direction. Dr. Seguín looked at the rogue arm and back at us, saying, “That’s not good.”

“It’s been acting up,” Dad said. “We haven’t had a chance to fix it.”

“Well, this is going to get interesting, then,” Dr. Seguín said, as if he welcomed the challenge.

“Mr. Cavazos, please move the medpack over here.” He pointed to the side of the table closest to the bad arm. Dad had already gotten the medpack out. Now he put it next to the doctor. “Pull out the forceps. I need you to peel back this side of his flesh so that I can see how deep the wound went. Without flinching, Dad did just as the doctor said. With his good arm, Dr. Seguín peeled back the other side.

“This is a nasty, nasty wound. Is this from gunfire?”

“He fell on rebar.”

“Of course,” he said, unconvinced.

Boca woke up and began to struggle.

“Restrain him or he will bleed out.”

Boca shoved Rocket Girl back. Blood poured out of his arm. Dad and Hel put their weight into Boca. Dr. Sequin clamped down on the arm with the one good arm. This seemed to settle Boca.

“Do you have sedative?”

“Moth tranquilizer.”

Dr. Seguín inhaled sharply. “No, that is too powerful. We will have to do this without sedative. The problem is, I need another arm.”

Three sets of eyes looked to me.

“Oh, no,” I said. I hate the sight of blood, remember?

“You have to,” Rocket Girl said. “Boca doesn’t deserve to bleed out on a table on Mala-Mundial.”

“You don’t understand. I really hate blood and things.” I was thinking of the slaughters, the Doña Muertes, and most of all, of Valgardt Warg’s body being eaten alive by a saber-toothed tiger. “I can’t do this.”

“Son, you ain’t got a choice in the matter,” Dad said. “There’s no other option.”

I looked to Hel. Surely the Frost Giant’s daughter would have some advice for me. Solemnly, she said, “There is a saying from long ago. Some say it comes from the scientists at Niflheim. Without torture, no progress.”

I looked to Rocket Girl. “Without torture, no progress.”

I gulped and picked up the tweezers. My hand quivering, I reached for Boca’s broken, bleeding arm.

“I am here with you,” Dr. Seguín said. I nodded.

“Reach gently into the forearm. There is a piece of metal there. I need you to remove it.”

Slowly, I put the tweezers into Boca’s arm. He grunted underneath the weight of three people. I concentrated on the bullet. I could see it. It was stuck in Boca’s bone. I pulled, and Boca howled. He stamped his feet.

Suddenly, Hel pulled a cragweed cigarette out of her pocket. She lit it and put it in Boca’s mouth.

“Inmundicia,” Boca said as he spat the cragweed out of his mouth.

“Get that rebar out now and set his arm, son!” Dad ordered me.

I redoubled my efforts and pulled on the bullet once again. The bone released the bullet from its grip, and I dropped the bullet on the table.

“The, ah, rebar,” Dr. Seguín intoned.

“There’s another one,” I said. This one was in flesh. The bullet was slippery, but I got it out much quicker.

“Now you need to shove the bone back into place.”

“What?”

“Mateo,” Hel urged me as Boca bucked against his human restraints.

The wound was open, and the bones were exposed. They looked like two white polished icicles hanging from the roof. I swallowed down my fears, my susto, and I pressed down on the bone. I heard it crack back into place. Boca screamed, but his scream was cut off by himself falling unconscious.

“Thank the five hells,” Dad said.

“You did well, Mateo,” Dr. Seguín said. “Perhaps there is a doctor somewhere in there.” His hologram patted me on the head with the telerobotic arm, which I liked and kind of didn’t like. Rocket Girl was here, and I didn’t like how juvenile a pat on the head made me look, like I was some little kid.

“Thank you, Dr. Seguín,” Dad said. “I will finish the bandage, and I must insist that I bring you some more of my best steaks.”

And suddenly, any goodness I felt from the moment was spoiled by my father’s cheap lies.

“Actually, Dr. Seguín, I’d like to offer my jacket.”

“Mateo,” Dad said.

“I think it will fit your wife really well. She is about my size. I bet Mrs. Saldaña could trim it to look real nice. She trimmed it for me, but I’d really appreciate it if you took it for her.”

“Why is that, Mateo?”

“I feel kind of responsible for Boca being out there.”

“Okay, Mateo.”

“I will deliver it to him,” Hel said. “On my way back.” I didn’t know she felt guilty for what she did. Hell, I didn’t know what she did.

“Okay,” Dr. Seguín said. “I really must be going now. I haven’t cleaned up yet from the other operation, and I have more patients in the day. Mr. Cavazos, don’t forget the painkillers, and to pick up sedatives, and to get this operating table fixed so I don’t have to intern your son to do my operations for me.”

Dr. Seguín’s hologram vanished, and the console went dark.

While Dad bandaged Boca, I went to my closet to get my jacket for Hel to take to San Malinche. Hel followed behind me.

I went to the sink and washed the blood off my arms. Hel stood behind me like a quiet ghost covered in blood.

“That was nice of you to offer your jacket to Dr. Seguín’s wife,” Hel said. I nodded agreement. I was nonchalant about it because I didn’t know why the Frost Giant’s daughter would care about sacrifices of moth ranchers. She had bigger, more insidious problems, if I may be so bold.

“Talk to you later, Mateo,” she grumbled, and stormed out of the room.

Okay, I was pendejo, but I knew when I’d pissed off a girl. She was fast, though, and slamming the front door before I had gotten out of my room.

“What did you do?” Rocket Girl asked accusingly.

I did not want Rocket Girl mad, but I knew I should find out what I did to Hel first, so I ran past the girl I really liked and chased down Hel. She was in her car when I caught up to her.

“Stop!” I said. She looked at me. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, Mateo. Everything is just fine.”

“Look, I don’t know what I did, but whatever it was, I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be a jerk.”

Her eyes softened at my apology. “I desperately want to believe in something, Mateo. My life is so complicated, and so messed up, and I don’t know what to do.”

I thought about reminding her again that she was the badass of badasses, but I remembered that didn’t go down well last time, and I wanted to help, so I said, “I can’t begin to imagine what you are going through, but if you need to talk to someone, I’m here.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

She reached out of the car and hugged me tightly. “I can call you?”

“I can listen.”

I can’t.

“Don’t worry about this jacket, Mateo. I will get it to the Seguíns, and I will get it cut to her size. She is going to love it.”

“Hey, before you go, can you tell me one thing?” I asked.

“Sure. Anything.”

“What were you and Dad talking about?”

She paused. “The crops.”

My face darkened. “How long have you known about them.”

“Not long.” I knew she was lying. She was a Nord now. She had probably known not long after Valgardt Warg’s funeral.

“Mateo, there is something I have to tell you. It won’t be easy for you to understand, either. Like I said, there are so many things in motion right now, and I only understand about half of them.”

“It’s okay, Hel. I’m sure I will understand.” I lied now. I could feel something bad was about to hit me, but I didn’t know what.

“The Nords needed something from your father as recompense until the cragweed is harvested.”

“What?”

I could not know that her and my father had been haggling over my hostage status. Me, among the Nords? I could have been enslaved or worse. I just wasn’t aware, which is probably why I cussed when she said, “The Nords get Cerbie until the crop is harvested.”

“What? That’s what you were talking about? My dad gave away my dog?”

“It’s only temporary, Mateo.”

“Nothing’s temporary with the Nords. You should know that now, Hel. I think you should leave.”

“But Mateo…”

I turned around to go back inside.

“I’m sorry,” she said, but I didn’t hear her. I need some comfort. I had been betrayed by my dad, encountered a gun troll, kissed my first girl, and lost my dog all in one day. I went looking for Rocket Girl, but she had used my absence as her chance to go home without talking to me.

Next Chapter: Chapter Ten: No Souls Escape the Underworld