And above all, it was a relief to take in a new certainty. He had not opened the Darkness for Rosario. No one else could open it, and he hadn’t done it for her. Thus, she could not be there. The demon had confused him. He wasn’t immune to its suggestions, much as he’d like to have believed otherwise. What arrogance. It was a relief to know, in any case, that Rosario wasn’t in the forests of hands, the fields of torsos, the bone-filled desert that she had considered a temple. Or in the valley of the hanged, where men and women were strung up by their feet, and where Eddie was spending his eternity—Eddie, Stephen’s younger brother, the boy who had been trained as a medium and who had failed. There were never living beings in those wastelands, though. Only human remains. Or could there actually be someone else in the Order who was capable of opening the Darkness? Had Mercedes found a medium among the abducted people she held prisoner? Wouldn’t he sense it if she had?

No, he said aloud. He couldn’t keep ruminating, he’d drive himself mad. The hours after the Ceremonial were the hardest when it came to maintaining his sanity.

After breakfast, Juan took Gaspar to the wooden walkway that hung over the treetops and descended in a steep staircase to an empty beach, from where they could see the main dock of Puerto Reyes. Juan sat on the thick, dark sand and watched as Gaspar entertained himself with branches, fish bones, and his toy cars, or splashed about in the water. He had asked that no one go with him except the bodyguards, who were different from the ones in Buenos Aires, and who kept their distance. The river was nervous, swollen by the rains, brown and opaque. Marcelina had given Gaspar a plastic bucket the day before, and the boy filled it with jacaranda flowers that fell to the ground, red ceiba flowers, and all kinds of green leaves. Juan wanted to swim, but he didn’t feel physically strong enough. When he extended his arms, his hands still trembled.

He might improve as the days passed, or he might not. Bradford had explained it to him: from a medical perspective, there was nothing more to be done. His heart was enlarged and failing, and it was irreversible. There was medication, and there were therapeutic advances and other palliatives. What was most likely, however, was that he would decline irrevocably until his death, in months, in a few years, in a second.

The sun made his head hurt.

“I’m gonna climb the tree!” shouted Gaspar.

Juan regretted not having brought something to drink: he was thirsty. He didn’t want to ask anything of the bodyguards. He watched how nimbly his son climbed the twisted trunk of a tree, negotiating the branches until he sat mounted on a low-hanging one like a horse. He must have learned that on outings with his mother, when the two of them went hiking and left him alone and prostrate. Juan had never climbed a tree as a child. A grasping envy filled his mouth with a metal taste and he recognized the danger of the feeling, what it meant for Gaspar, for him, for what remained of his sanity.