Evil Star

into a block of ice.
    "It used to rain at the start of the year. You never saw rain like it, Matteo. Sometimes it would rain so hard that all I could see was water, and I used to wonder how I could live, since I wasn't a fish! It would be raining when I woke up and it would never stop. You couldn't walk from one end of the village to the other because of the great sheets of rain, and if you fell into a puddle you might drown.
    "And then there was a day — I must have been about six years old
    — when it rained so much that the river burst its banks. The River Chillon . . . that was what it was called. There was too much water and it got out of control and this great flood came pouring down. It was like a monster, brown and freezing. It ripped into our house and just threw it away. I remember someone shouted a warning but I didn't know what they meant and then the whole world exploded.
    Not with fire but with water and mud. It all happened so quickly. All the houses were smashed up together. People and animals . . . they were just killed. I should have died. But someone grabbed me and put me high up in a tree and I was lucky. The tree must have had strong roots, because it wasn't ripped out like the others. I stayed in the branches of that tree all day and all night, and when the morning came, my village wasn't there anymore. It was just a sort of swamp with dead people floating on the surface. I guess my parents and my sister were among those who were killed. I never saw them again and nobody told me. So they must have all drowned."
    Pedro stopped. Matt was amazed that he could tell all this in such a matter-of-fact way. He tried to imagine the horror of what it must Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star have been like. A whole community had been destroyed and he realized that this sort of thing must happen often in some parts of the world. But in Britain, it wouldn't have been given more than half an inch in a newspaper.
    "After that, things became very difficult," Pedro went on. "I think I wanted to die. Inside me, I thought it was wrong that my parents were dead and I was still alive. But the strange thing is, I knew I was going to be all right. I had nowhere to live. There was no food.
    People were falling sick all around me. But I knew that whatever hap-pened, I would make it. It was like my life was beginning all over again.
    "Anyway, some of the survivors came together — there were quite a lot of them — and they decided to go to Lima. They'd heard there was work there. They thought they'd be able to build themselves a new life. I went with them. I was the youngest and they didn't want to take me. But in the end I followed, and there was nothing they could do.
    "And so we came to the city, but it wasn't like we thought. Nobody wanted to see us. Nobody wanted to help us. We were the
    desplazados. That's the word we use for peo-ple with no place.
    There were already enough poor people starving and dying in Lima.
    They didn't want any more.
    "There was a woman looking after me and she had a brother in one of the barrios, and for a while I lived with them. They made me work, searching for food in the gar-bage. I hated it. I'd leave at five o'clock in the morning, before the dust carts came, and I'd take anything I could find. Vegetables that weren't too rotten. Bits of fat and gris-tle cut off meat. All the scrapings from rich people's meals.
    That was what we lived on, and if I didn't find enough or if it was Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star too rotten, they'd give me nothing to eat and they'd beat me. In the end, I ran away. If I stayed, I was afraid they would kill me.
    "And that's my story. Did you enjoy it? I'll tell you the rest of it. You asked me about Sebastian. Nobody knows who he is exactly, Matteo, and we don't ask too many ques-tions. I've heard people say he was a university professor until his wife left him and he took to drink. But there are others who say he was a waiter in an expensive hotel, and that's where he learned to speak different languages. Anyway, I went to Poison Town to get away from the sister and her brother. I found Sebastian and he took me in.
    "He's not a bad man. He's only ever hurt me when he's very drunk, and he's always apologized the next day. All the kids in his house work for him. He was the one who taught me how to juggle in front of tourists' cars. Sometimes I can get five American dollars —
    although I have to give four of them to him.