There's actually a surprising quantity of this considering this is a pre-teen novel.
- Matt being captured and trapped in a room full of sawdust for six months at the tender age of six.
- The entire concept of eejits: the individual's brain and free will is destroyed, meaning that if they are ordered to do something, they will continue to do so until ordered to stop, making it possible to be worked to death. One of the more graphic occurrences involve a dead man that Matt and Tam Lin come across in the opium fields, and Tam Lin states that he must have been too far to hear the call to come in. Matt then has a very graphic Imagine Spot of the man working and working until he passed out and died of dehydration.
- The eejit teacher.
- MacGregor's clone; this is what all clones resemble, with the exception of Matt, on the grounds of El Patron's wealth, given that their higher brain functions are chemically destroyed at birth. MacGregor's clone is just the only one we see.
- The bone pit.
- El Patron's kindness to Matt after letting him out of the room he was trapped in becomes rather disturbing after Matt's true purpose is revealed. Actually, it's implied that he sees all people, even his own family members, as his possessions. He even takes his "toys" with him when he dies.
- Matt ending up strapped to an hospital bed, waiting for the surgeons to harvest his organs when El Patron suffers his big heart attack.
