The hospital was a desperate chaos of blood and shouting, as tense as the shooting had been. Doctors and nurses ran through the halls, pushing gurneys and IV stands as they rushed wounded bystanders from room to room, chased through the halls by nulis trying to catalog each patient’s stats and vitals. Marisa had been hit by shrapnel from a shattering window—six pieces of glass had embedded in the skin of her abdomen, but she’d been so full of adrenaline she hadn’t even felt it until an orderly had asked about her shredded shirt. She sat now in the hospital, the glass picked out but the adrenaline worn off, her stomach throbbing with pain, waiting her turn while the doctors dealt with the more serious cases first.
Like her father.
“I hated this waitress shirt anyway,” she said to herself, gritting her teeth and trying to think about anything other than the burning pain. “Now maybe I won’t have to work in the restaurant for a while.”
Not that the restaurant would be in any condition to open for a while anyway. Could her family even afford to repair it? Especially with all the revenue they’d lose from being closed?
Marisa looked up and down the hall, wondering where Chuy and Adriana were. La Sesenta had told the ambulance medics he’d been hit in one of the dozen drive-by shootings, to cover their tracks from the gang fight the night before. They were somewhere in the building now, but Marisa hadn’t seen them yet, and didn’t dare to leave this hallway until she’d heard back about her father’s condition. He was only hit in the leg, and it had apparently missed the bone, but she was worried. She was the only one from the family who’d come—Guadalupe had insisted on taking Chito and the girls home, dragging Sahara with her for safety. Marisa stayed connected to Olaya, monitoring their safety at a distance, terrified that Tì Xū Dāo would come back.
And even more terrified, the more she thought about it, of whatever had brought them in the first place. Her djinni was back on now; if they were looking for her, they’d find her. But it had been hours, and no one had come.
Her first thought was that Tì Xū Dāo had attacked Mirador in direct retaliation for La Sesenta’s attack on them. Adriana’s description of the attack had been incomplete, probably because Chuy hadn’t told her the truth: according to the buzz Marisa could dig up on message boards, Calaca had found the Tì Xū Dāo dealer who’d been selling at Pati’s school, and led more than a dozen gangsters in a midnight raid on his apartment, killing three people and destroying thousands of dollars’ worth of Bluescreen. It was an aggressive move with a single message: stay out of Mirador. Some reports said that Calaca had gone so far as to leave a note, though a competing report said that he’d dictated the message to the sole survivor of the raid, and then shot off his hand. Either way, Marisa couldn’t believe it had escalated so quickly. Was Goyo trying to start a war?
And then there was the Bluescreen connection. What if this wasn’t a gang retaliation, but a direct order from the people behind Bluescreen? What if the suppliers, the programmers, the shadowy puppet masters behind the drug, were using their street-level pushers to send a message of their own?
Except that didn’t make sense. Why would those people bother with a poor neighborhood like Mirador at all, let alone go to this insane length to protect their business in it? And why attract this kind of attention, when it seemed like they’d been trying so hard to stay underground? The attack had to come from Tì Xū Dāo, acting on their own—which meant that the Bluescreen cartel was losing control of their dealers. Just like Don Maldonado was losing control of La Sesenta. The dogs were biting the hands that fed them.
And the city would be eaten alive.
Marisa looked up as another gurney went by, surrounded by doctors shouting orders back and forth. She pulled her legs up to make more room for the hurried crowd, only to wince again as the movement sent a new surge of pain through her abdomen. She leaned back, gripping the armrests and sucking air through her clenched teeth.
“Marisa Carneseca?”
She opened her eyes and looked up. Francisca Maldonado was standing over her. La Princesa. Marisa closed her eyes again, trying to remain as still as possible. “I don’t need this right now, Franca, okay?”
“I’m not Franca.”
Marisa cracked her eyelids again, peering up at the girl. She looked disheveled, and her left shoulder showed a nasty scrape, still untreated and bloody. But it was definitely Franca—Marisa had known La Princesa her whole life, she wasn’t going to mistake her now, no matter how much pain she was in.
“I told you I’m not in the mood for any crap, Franca, okay? My dad and and my brother got shot today, and I’m sorry you messed up your hair or whatever, but—”