Florence kept talking, but Juan was no longer listening. He was too angry and exhausted to argue. His need for Rosario pierced him with brutal precision. They had won, and all he could do was submit. This time, he had lost. He felt the pain behind his eyes. They had Rosario, and he would have to find her. He had to, because she would have done the same for him. He stood up and walked toward the door.

“Don’t follow me,” he said. “I could kill you all. Mediums are suicidal, right? They go crazy, don’t they?”

He smiled at them. He summoned the last of his strength from beneath his pain and left the room. Outside, the sunlight was white like a desert.

Juan asked Stephen to leave him alone so he could rest in his room; the pain in his head wouldn’t let him think or even walk. He found Gaspar sleeping facedown. He smelled of pool chlorine and his hair was wet. Juan didn’t want to wake the boy. He always found it strange that the Initiates came to the Ceremonial alone. How many had come this time? Fifty, sixty? Where were their children? Because they all had children. Well, they were rich. They could pay for nannies until the kids were old enough to attend with them. And that time came soon enough, even leaving aside the case of Adela, which had been an accident. On one occasion, the Darkness, channeled through him, had torn a ten-year-old boy’s arm off at the shoulder. His mother, instead of reacting with the usual ecstasy of the Initiates, had gone into hysterics, threatening to expose everything, to denounce them. Florence didn’t tolerate that kind of rebellion. She had rocks tied to the woman’s feet, and she was thrown into the Paraná River. Let her join the many dead hidden along Argentine river bottoms. The dictatorship’s crimes were very useful to the Order, providing it with bodies, alibis, and currents of pain and fear—emotions that were easily manipulated.

Juan turned up the air conditioner a little and covered his son with a blanket. He got the syringe and the injectable painkiller from his bag: it was too late to fight the migraine with pills. He tightened his belt around his forearm to find a usable vein. He could hardly see what he was doing, the pain in his head was clouding his vision so much. Still, he managed to inject the drug, whose effects he no longer feared: he felt fully prepared to throw himself into the river, and the idea pursued him with a buzzing sound. But if he did decide to kill himself, he would have to take Gaspar with him. Or ask Stephen to find his brother in Río de Janeiro and leave the boy with him. But the Order would surely take Gaspar from Luis sooner or later. So that he could be a recipient for Mercedes. So that he could be the medium, once they discovered and destroyed the work Stephen and Tali had done and killed them both. They were in danger. He had designed the protection for his son with elements brought back from the Other Place, a zone of the Darkness that the Order didn’t know about. But he still needed the final and definitive protection, which was slow in coming. The Lord of Patience, he thought, touching his back. He waited with his eyes closed for the painkiller to kick in. It took a long time. It wasn’t going to take away all the pain, but it would allay the intensity of the pounding, the pressure in his temples, the heartbeats that seemed to pump hot iron instead of blood.