Juan kept walking. There were more cages. The other boys and girls were older. Many of them stared at him with black eyes: some of them were Guaraní children who probably didn’t speak Spanish. Others might be the children of men and women who were sacrificed to the Darkness. Some of them reacted to his presence by skittering to the back of their cages, while others barely opened their eyes. There were children whose teeth had been filed into sharp rows, like saws; there were children with the obvious marks of torture on their legs, their backs, their genitals; he smelled the rot of children who must already be dead. Did they leave the cadavers there so the others would get used to the smell? Rosario had been forced to bury the caged ones who had died. She’d seen festering wounds, infections, eyes where the bugs of dampness and the river crawled. He stopped after some hundred meters of cages full of destroyed children, living and dead; he could tell they continued for the remaining hundred meters of tunnel. He turned back, ready to confront Mercedes, who was waiting for him at the door beside her imbunche. Juan turned off the flashlight when Mercedes lit a weak lamp, the tunnel’s only illumination.

“So, this is your new collection, Mercedes.”

“It will bring results. Our god says so, his instruction is to do it this way.”

“The god is crazy, like you.”

“I follow the orders of the Darkness.”

Juan laughed, and his laughter bounced back off the tunnel walls in obscene echoes. Some of the moribund and wounded children whimpered. From the depths of the tunnel came a dying moan.

“This is not a search for a medium, Mercedes. This was always just for your own pleasure.”

Mercedes uncrossed her arms and let them fall to her sides.

“It may not be beautiful now, but it will be! When they work together! There are many gods! Ours says so and orders the search for another medium. It’s in the book!”

Juan approached Mercedes until he could see the glint of her eyes behind the dark glasses she always used, even in the semidarkness of the tunnel.

“Where do you get them, Mercedes? Indigenous children? The children of prisoners? Why don’t you ask for a sacrifice, an offering, from the rich Initiates of the Order? Do you steal them in the night, or do their mothers sell them because they’re dying of hunger? Do their fathers know where their children are before they’re thrown to the Darkness? You’ve learned a few things from your friends’ torture chambers.”

“Such compassion. Why don’t you save them, then? You have the power to do it.”

Juan turned his flashlight back on and shone it directly into Mercedes’ dark glasses. He wanted to look her in the eye. He wanted to blind her.

“That would be another cruelty. They’re far beyond any help.”