“Stop! Both of you!” Matt thrust himself between them, and Daft Donald backed away. Cienfuegos, however, was beyond reason. He raised his stiletto, and his eyes were completely blank. For a frozen instant nothing happened. Then Matt said, “I am the cat with nine lives. You will not prevail against me.”
Where had those words come from? They weren’t like anything Matt would say.
“El Patrón,” whispered Cienfuegos. He dropped the stiletto and doubled up, clutching his stomach. If the cries of Waitress had been bad, the screams coming from the jefe were even worse. He sounded like he was enveloped in flames. Daft Donald caught him and mouthed words at Matt. “What do you want? What should I do?” the boy said.
Daft Donald mouthed again, Forgive him. Could he possibly mean that? Why would the bodyguard care what happened to Cienfuegos? Forgive him, Daft Donald said again. The jefe’s screams were growing weaker.
“I forgive you,” Matt said. Cienfuegos shuddered and relaxed into Daft Donald’s arms. Blood dripped from his wound. The microchip, Matt thought. He’s under the control of the microchip. When he attacked me, it was programmed to kill him. But El Patrón added a fail-safe to stop the process.
“Get one of the men to drive,” Matt told the bodyguard. “You and Cienfuegos must go to the hospital. Waitress, too.” He knelt down beside her and began to unwind the tape holding the electrodes to her hands. “I never meant this to happen, Mirasol, and it will never happen again,” he said.
“I am called Waitress,” she responded.
11
FEEDING A PET WAITRESS
One good result of the battle was that Nurse Fiona returned to the hospital. Matt did accompany her, taking an inhaler along in case he suffered another asthma attack. He saw at once why Fiona hated the place. The halls and rooms were empty except for a few ghostly eejits going about their chores.
“I have to tell them to do everything,” said Fiona. “If I don’t give them work, they stand there and jitter, but without patients nothing gets dirty. I have to make them wash perfectly clean floors over and over again. It’s enough to make you run barking.”
Matt was getting used to her odd language. “To run barking” meant to go crazy. “A fair pong” meant something stank.
“I also have to tell them when to eat, sleep, and defecate. What kind of job is that for someone who got an A in her A-levels?” Fiona said. Matt assumed this was an achievement. He didn’t ask about it, because he didn’t want a long explanation. He watched as she disinfected the wounds and, in Cienfuegos’s case, put in stitches. “A knife fight! You bad boys,” she scolded. “Reminds me of my brothers. They were always trying to see who could lean out the window farthest and coming home with dirty great cuts on their heads. It made no difference to their intelligence, for they had none to begin with. However did you come by those scars?” she asked, examining Daft Donald’s neck.
“He tried to blow up the English prime minister and the bomb went off too soon,” said Matt. “He can’t talk.”
“Fancy that! You meet all sorts in this place,” Fiona chirped. “Take Mr. MacGregor. There was a nasty piece of work, seducing poor Felicity and driving her mad with drugs. I was present at his operation years ago. He was getting a new liver and a set of kidneys—they usually do that at the other hospital, the one in the Chiricahua Mountains, posh place really, not like this dump. Anyhow, he was prepped and ready to go when they wheeled in his clone. Gracious! MacGregor hadn’t allowed the doctors to anesthetize it. A transplant goes better without drugs, but I do think they could have given it a happy shot. It was struggling so hard I was certain it would give itself an injury—”
“Are you as stupid as you sound?” said Cienfuegos.
Fiona’s mouth flew open. “Well! Is that all the thanks I get for stitching you up?”
“Do you think it’s smart to talk about clones?”
“I don’t see why not. After all, El Patrón had clones and—and—” Fiona turned pale. “I didn’t mean that! You can’t think I was talking about you, young master! Why, Tam Lin used to brag about how clever you were, and I never thought of you that way.”
“Just shut up,” Matt said wearily. He felt sick at the memory of MacGregor’s clone and yet, buried in the nurse’s ridiculous prattle were the words I never thought of you that way. It was enough to make him forgive her, if not like her. “You have one more patient,” he said. “Waitress’s hands are burned.”
“Oh, but I don’t work on eejits,” faltered Fiona. “There’s the vet hospital for that, over by the horse barn. Only, I don’t think they fix eejits either. They replace them.”
“You will take care of Waitress’s hands and do it immediately,” said Matt. “She’s as human as you are, and despite your stupid prejudice, she can feel pain. Isn’t that so, Cienfuegos?”
The jefe had the grace to look ashamed. “Eejits can feel pain, mi patrón, otherwise I couldn’t train them. I don’t think they suffer in the same way we do. They scream, but it’s an automatic function, like your heart beating or your stomach digesting food. You don’t think, ‘Today I’m going to digest that omelet I had for breakfast.’ The omelet arrives in your stomach and the reaction happens. To suffer implies emotion, and eejits don’t have that.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Matt, and left the room.
He was sitting at the kitchen table with Celia and Mr. Ortega when Daft Donald returned. The man wore a bandage slantwise above one eye, and it was clear to Matt that Cienfuegos had intended to blind him.
“Looks like you poked your nose into someone’s business,” remarked Mr. Ortega.
Daft Donald wrote on his pad of paper. Matt and I were rescuing a lady.
“A lady! Sounds romantic. Was it . . . oh, let me think . . . María?”
“It was Waitress,” said Matt, annoyed. Everyone seemed to know about him and María. Daft Donald scribbled busily, describing the fight and how Cienfuegos almost died because he tried to attack Matt.
“Why did he do that?” exclaimed Celia, horrified.
He was out of his mind, wrote Daft Donald.
“But the microchip is supposed to stop attacks against the patrón!”
“I’ve heard that samurai warriors go into a state of no-thought,” said Mr. Ortega. “If Cienfuegos wasn’t aware of what he was doing, the microchip wouldn’t recognize the threat.”
I agree, wrote Daft Donald.
“Whatever the reason, mi vida—I mean mi patrón,” Celia said, “you must be very careful around him. You should have let him finish Waitress’s training.”
“I wouldn’t let an animal suffer like that,” said Matt.
Celia paused before she answered. “Waitress isn’t like an animal . . . or a human. She may look like she’s suffering, but it means no more to her than rain falling on a rock.”