12.21

THIRTY-THREE

JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT, CHEL CRADLED SAMA IN HER ARMS AND watching as Initia pressed dough onto the hearthstone in the main house. In the other dwelling, Stanton checked the babies one by one to make sure none showed early symptoms. When Yanala came to get Sama for her exam, Chel found herself surrendering the baby reluctantly.

When they were alone again, Chel told Initia about their arrival. “A ladino attacked me, and I think he was infected. My mother warned me that they could be here, and I didn’t believe her. But she was right.”

“No, that man came here to help, Chel.”

“What?”

“A ladino church group got word that people here were sick, and they came to bring food and supplies,” Initia explained. “Even a doctor. These ladinos wanted to help us. There is no one to blame. Not the ladinos or the indígenas who were cursed. When a man can’t commune with the gods in sleep, he loses himself, no matter who he once was. It would happen to any of us. I am sorry this man was driven to attack you by the curse. But I know his intentions for coming here were good.”

Chel thought of Rolando, and she was struck by another wave of sadness.

“I do not blame you or your mother for feeling this way about the ladinos,” said Initia. “She suffered so much at their hands, and it is impossible to forget these things.”

Chel pictured her mother’s disapproving face. “She’s been trying to forget everything else about Kiaqix for a long time,” she told Initia. “She didn’t want me to come back. And she certainly doesn’t believe we’ll ever find the lost city. She’s convinced my father’s cousin Chiam never found it, and she doesn’t believe it exists.”

Initia sighed. “I have not thought of Chiam in many years now.”

Chel wondered what, of her childhood, Initia did remember. “Did you hear Chiam read my father’s letters to the village?”

“Your father’s letters?”

“The letters he wrote when he was in prison,” Chel reminded her.

“Of course,” Initia said. “Yes. I listened to them being read.”

Chel heard a hesitation in her aunt’s voice. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Initia said. “I am old and I do not remember so well.”

“You remember fine,” Chel said, putting a hand on her arm. “What is it?”

“I’m sure there is a reason,” Initia said, almost to herself.

“A reason for what?”

“It has sustained you,” Initia said. “The story of your father’s letters sustained you. This is what she wanted.”

“The letters aren’t just a story,” Chel said. “There are records of them. I’ve spoken to others who heard them, who said they stirred the people to action and inspired them to fight.”

“Yes, that is what the letters did, child.”

“Then what are you saying?”

Her aunt clasped her hands together as if in penitence. “I do not know the reasons your mother has not told you this before, child. Ha’ana is a wise woman, Ati’t par Nim, the cunning gray fox, her spirit animal. But you have a right to know.”

“I don’t understand,” said Chel.

“Your father was a wonderful man, a loving man,” Initia said. “He was dedicated to you and to your mother and to his family, and he wanted to protect them. But his wayob was the tapir, who, like the horse, is strong, not clever. He was a simple man, without the words to put into those letters.”

“My father went to prison for leading the people.” Chel tried not to sound condescending. “When he was imprisoned, he wrote those letters in secret and was killed for them. My mother told me everything that happened to him. Everything he did to fight for Kiaqix.”

“But now ask yourself who told you these stories,” said Initia.

“You’re saying someone else wrote those letters and my mother wanted me to believe that he did?”

“Not just you,” Initia said. “Everyone believed your father wrote them. But my husband was his brother, child. He knew the truth.”

“So who wrote them?” Chel asked. “Someone with him in prison?”

Sticks crackled beneath the hearthstones. “From the time your mother was a young girl, she was never afraid,” Initia said. “Not of the landowners or the army. She would walk up to them in the market when she was only ten years old and spit on their shoes. She rejected their calls to modernize us, to change our ways. She helped stop the ladinos when they wanted to change what was taught in our schools, when they wanted our children to learn their history.”

Chel froze. “My mother?”

“By the time Ha’ana was twenty,” Initia continued, “she was sneaking into the meetings of the elders. When the army hanged a young man from the balcony of the town hall, many became afraid. But your mother tried to convince the men to fight in case the army or guerrillas returned. She said we must arm ourselves. But no one listened to a woman. When your father went to prison, that’s when the letters began.”

Chel looked around at the stone hearth, the hammocks, the small wooden table and chairs on the sascab floor, the huipils hanging to dry. This was a place where Maya women had done their work for a thousand years. Not on the battlefield.

“Why would she lie?” Chel asked.

“Ha’ana understood her people,” Initia said. “She could rally the women, but no man would listen to a woman about the ways of war. To rouse the men to action, Ha’ana needed the voice of a man. When your father was imprisoned, it was the most terrifying thing that ever happened to her but also a chance to be heard.”

“But when he died, she left here. She left all of you behind and never came back. How could the person who wrote those letters leave?”

“It was not easy, child. She worried someone would discover what she’d done and come after her—and you. The only way to protect you was to leave everything here.”

“Why didn’t she tell me?”

Initia put a hand on Chel’s back. “They killed your father because of the letters, even though he didn’t write them. After he was murdered, your mother felt so much guilt. Despite the good her letters had done, she blamed herself for his death.”

Chel was in shock. She had punished her mother for her apathy, for abandoning the place she came from, and Ha’ana had never corrected her. She stayed silent, knowing how hard she had fought and how much she had lost for her people.

“Your mother is the gray fox,” Initia said. “Ati’t par Nim is always cunning.”

Chel had always thought Ati’t par Nim seemed wrong for Ha’ana. Now she knew better. The ancients believed that the power of the wayob was ubiquitous; they believed in its interchangeability with the human form, its dominion over life, its promise of a person’s potential. The fox made people believe what it needed them to.

Suddenly Chel thought of something. She darted over to one of the supply bags, digging through until she found her codex translation.

“Is everything all right, child?” Initia asked.

Chel had assumed Paktul led the children from Kanuataba into the jungle, to a place in the forest where his ancestors had once lived. Yet throughout the codex, the scribe confl ated his human form with his animal form—his spirit animal. And Chel and her team had been unable to reconcile why the oral history spoke of an Original Trio who’d escaped the Lost City rather than a foursome composed of Paktul, Smoke Song, and the two girls.

But what if Paktul the man hadn’t made it out with them?

WHEN STANTON returned to the main house, Chel had energy in her voice that he hadn’t heard since they’d sat in the Getty plaza together. “I think we’ve been looking for the wrong thing. Lake Izabal doesn’t have anything to do with where the trio went.”

“What do you mean?”

“Paktul isn’t writing about his human ancestors. It’s right here in the translation. He uses the word I interchangeably with his spirit animal. He goes back and forth using I to refer to his human form and his wayob. But we know he was keeping an actual macaw with him in the cave, because he refers to other people who can see it. He shows it to the prince and Auxila’s daughters, and he writes about the bird rejoining its flock.”

“When he says he’ll lead them in the direction of his ancestors,” Chel said, “I thought that meant his human family. But what if he never went anywhere? What if he was killed by the guards, as he predicted, or he stayed behind to make sure the children could escape?”

“Who led the children to Kiaqix?” Stanton asked. “You think they followed a bird?”

“The prince would’ve been trained to track game a hundred miles. And the macaw would instinctively have returned to its flock. Kiaqix means the Valley of the Scarlet Macaw. It’s right along the migration path. The oral history says that the Original Trio considered it a good omen when they saw so many macaws in the trees here. What if they were following one of them because they believed it was the spirit of Paktul?”

Chel pulled out the latitude map. On it she’d drawn a line representing the macaws’ known migratory path. “During migration seasons, the macaws fly from the southwest to here,” she continued, “and the patterns are highly consistent. We can find the exact trajectory and follow it.”

For most of Stanton’s adult life, the possibility that three children followed a bird a hundred miles would have sounded insane. Now he didn’t know what to believe, but however improbable it was, all he could do was trust Chel’s instincts. If they had to track a migration pattern into the jungle, then that’s what they’d do.

“Are you sure this is the exact path?” Stanton asked.

Chel reached down into the supply bag and pulled out the satellite phone. “I found three different sites online, all giving the same coordinates. You can see for yourself.”

She handed Stanton the phone, but when he tried to power it up again, the screen remained blank. It had been dying for hours, and the last bit of juice was gone. Cutting them off from the world entirely.

“It doesn’t matter,” Chel told him, pointing back at the map. She seemed almost manic. “We have what we need.”

Then Stanton saw something in her eyes that stopped him cold.

“Look at me for a second,” he said.

Chel was confused. “I am looking at you.”

He pulled out his penlight and shone it in her eyes, studying the blacks of them as he swept the light away. They should have constricted in the light and dilated in darkness.

When Stanton took the light away, nothing changed.

“Am I sick?” Chel asked. Voice trembling.

Stanton turned, quickly kneeling down to the supply bag to get a thermometer to measure her temperature. Then he stayed there for a moment, collecting himself. He didn’t want her seeing the fear in his eyes. She needed strength. She needed to believe they would find the lost city, her only hope now. He couldn’t let her see his doubts.

THIRTY-FOUR

THEY LEFT KIAQIX AT FIRST LIGHT. SOON THE SUN WAS COOKING the Petén, and the light breeze coming through the open windows of the jeep gave Chel little relief. She could almost feel the VFI inside her. She glanced over at Stanton in the driver’s seat. He’d barely looked at her as they’d packed the medical supplies back into the jeep, along with the food Initia had given them. He just said over and over again that, with the disease as concentrated as it was here, the assay was as likely to render a false positive—from contamination—as to be accurate. He was unwilling to accept the results of a test he’d designed himself.

Chel couldn’t read his body language very well, but she understood him enough by now to know he would blame himself for the fact that she was sick, for being a second too late. She wanted to make him understand it wasn’t his fault—that she would have died there on the floor of the chapel if it weren’t for him. But she couldn’t find the right words.

She turned her attention ahead again. The macaw’s path ran 232.5 degrees southwest. Stanton had set them on a course through the jungle, across alternating patches of overused farmland and uncleared forest. Chel knew that they were looking for flat, elevated places, where the ancient cities like Kanuataba would have been built. Two hours in, the terrain was becoming more rugged. For the most part, there were no roads here at all, and they knew they’d eventually have to go on foot.

The jeep rocked back and forth, kicking up mud. It was almost impossible to see through the windows. Chel’s world was getting louder and brighter and stranger: The noises of the car grated, and the howls and screeches of the jungle frightened her in a way they never had before.

She had no idea how long they’d been driving when Stanton stopped the jeep again. “If the bearing’s right,” he said, “we have to keep going this way.” Ahead was a thicker jungle than any they’d seen, and dozens of felled trees blocked their path. It was the end of the line for the jeep.

“Let’s go,” Chel said, trying to show strength. “I can walk.”

He bent down over the odometer. “We’re sixty-two miles from Kiaqix. If they traveled three days to get there, it can’t be much farther, right?”

Chel nodded silently.

“How’re you feeling?” he asked. “If you can’t make it, I’ll go in alone and come back as soon as I find it.”

“People have hunted around here for centuries,” Chel managed. “Only two people have found the ruins. You’ll never find them alone.”

STANTON CARRIED ALL the gear on his back—tools for scraping residues from the bowls they hoped to find in Jaguar Imix’s tomb, a microscope, slides, and other essentials for spot testing. He walked ahead, clearing shrubs and branches with a machete he’d taken from Initia’s house. They navigated choppy mudbanks and held on to the rough bark of towering trees to help them remain upright. Chel’s feet began to blister and her head pounded. She felt like there were a million tiny things crawling all over her body.

After nearly an hour, Stanton stopped. They had just climbed their way to the very top of a rocky embankment, giving them a view of several miles. He held the compass in the air. “The migration path leads into that valley. It must be there.”

Two small mountains lay ahead, each several miles wide. Between them was a large valley of unbroken tropical rain forest.

“It can’t be there,” Chel said. Exhaustion bore down on her fast. “The ancients wouldn’t have built between mountains. It… made them vulnerable on both sides.”

The look on Stanton’s face told her that, in her condition, he didn’t know what to believe. “Where do you want to go, then?” he asked.

“Higher,” she told him. She pointed at the larger of the two mountains. “To look for temples above the trees.”

THE TREE TRUNKS AT THE foot of the mountain were thin and blackened, charred toothpicks stuck into the ground. There’d been a fire, most likely started by lightning. In storm season, small lightning fires were common; the ancients believed they were a sign from the overworld that a patch of land needed time to rejuvenate.

At the edge of the lightning forest, they reached a more verdant part of the slope. Then, from the corner of her eye, Chel saw a cluster of vanilla vines in the distance, about halfway up the mountain. She turned toward the strange but oddly familiar pattern. Vanilla was common throughout Guatemala; it wrapped itself tightly around tree trunks and climbed up to reach the top of the canopy for rain and light. The vines could grow hundreds of feet high.

But these vines stretched only about fifteen feet into the air, as if the tree had been cut off and stripped of its branches. Chel called out for Stanton to wait, but he didn’t hear her. She let him keep going and turned off course. The fifty-plus yards up the slope were interminable, each of her steps more difficult than the last, but she was drawn to the thin, elongated leaves. The dense tangle of vines was looser than what it should have been on a tree—a clue that whatever lay beneath was covered with something other than wood bark.

To the untrained eye it would’ve been impossible to discern, but hundreds of Maya stones had been discovered in the jungle beneath vines like these. Chel’s hands shook—with anticipation or sickness—and she barely had the strength to rip the strands away. But finally she could see down to the core. It was a massive boulder, at least eight feet tall, cut into the shape of an elongated headstone.

“Where’d you go?” Stanton had found his way back to her. He bent down to peer over her shoulder. “What is that?”

“A stela,” Chel said. “The ancients called them tree stones. They used them to record important dates, names of kings and events.”

These stelae sometimes appeared near cities, she explained, but were also built by smaller villages as homages to the gods. The only thing she knew for certain about this one was that no one had seen its surface for a very long time. Age and weather had cracked off one of the corners.

Chel tried to breathe steadily while Stanton cleared away the rest of the vines, revealing a surface covered in eroded etchings and inscriptions. There was a rendering of the maize god in the middle of the stone, while renderings of Itzamnaaj, the supreme Maya deity, adorned the edges.

Then Chel saw three familiar glyphs.

“What does it say?” Stanton asked.

She motioned to the first carving. “Naqaj xol is Ch’olan for very near. And this one—u’qajibal q’ij—means we are directly west of it.”

He pointed to the last glyph. “What about this?”

“Akabalam.”

FELLED TREES AND UNDERBRUSH covered every inch of the slope, and each step was an exhausting challenge for Chel. Up and down they traversed the steep incline, searching for a passable path. They stopped every fifty yards so she could rest. The air was unbearably hot and wet, and with each breath she felt like she couldn’t make it any farther. But with Stanton’s help she pressed forward, pushing on through another stretch of forest.

Strangely, the pitch of the mountainside flattened out as they headed farther west, giving Chel’s legs a short break and allowing her to continue on. After two miles, it no longer felt like a mountain at all. They were still high above sea level, about halfway up to the peak, but the western face had eased into a massive plateau, flat as any plain. Kanuataba meant the terraced city, but nowhere in Paktul’s story had he written about agricultural terracing. Maybe instead, Chel thought, the city got its name from this ledge that a river cut into the mountain millions of years ago—a natural terrace that eluded discovery after her ancestors abandoned it.

Minutes later, they found more reason to hope.

Hundreds of ceiba trees, sacred to the Maya, stood in the distance. The trunks had thorns, and the branches were covered with grasses and moss, phosphorescent green.

They continued through the dense area of holy trees that had now returned to the jungle. The ceibas stretched to the heavens, reaching toward the overworld, and Chel could see outlines of gods’ faces in the leaves: Ahau Chamahez, god of medicine; Ah Peku, god of thunder; Kinich Ahau, god of the sun, all beckoning her forward.

“Are you okay?”

Stanton was paces ahead, calling back at her. Could he see what she now saw in the leaf patterns above them? Could he hear the call of the gods as she did?

Chel blinked, attempting to see ahead with clear eyes. Trying to form the words to answer him. She stepped toward him, and a break in the ceibas caught her eye. Between the trunks was a sliver of stone.

“There,” she whispered.

They walked a quarter mile to the base of an ancient pyramid and stood together in stunned silence. Mist bathed the structure’s top reaches. Trees and shrubs and flowers sprouted in all directions, obscuring every corner. More trees had grown up the stairs, to the top; one façade was so dense with flora, it could have been mistaken for a natural slope. Only at the summit could they see limestone, where three adjacent openings were formed by columns in the shape of elongated birds.

“Incredible,” Stanton said. “This is it?”

Chel nodded. Broken shards of stones transformed in her mind into angular steps. Slaves and corvée laborers appeared, carrying boulders on their backs. At the base, she saw tattoo artists and piercers, spicemakers trading for chert. The dull and decrepit limestone was, for Chel, now painted with a rainbow of color: yellows and pinks and purples and greens.

The birthplace of her people, in all its glory.

THIRTY-FIVE

THEY CONTINUED ACROSS THE MOUNTAINTOP, MOVING SLOWLY, searching for other signs of the lost city through the overgrowth. The stela and small pyramid were signposts that they had reached the outer limits of the metropolis, but they still had to find the city’s center.

Stanton carefully led them over shrubs and massive tree roots extending in all directions, hacking away with his machete in one hand, and gripping Chel’s with the other. He tried to keep track of what plants he was cutting through—pink orchids and liana and strangler vines and others—in case they turned out to be relevant.

He also listened closely as they walked. Wolves, foxes, even jaguars could be in the area. Stanton had been on safari once after medical school, and that was about as close to dangerous animals as he ever wanted to get. He was very glad that he could hear only birds and bats in the distance.

They passed stelae and small one-level limestone buildings wrapped from base to top in foliage and small trees. Chel pointed out areas where servants to the nobles likely lived on the edge of the city, and what was once a small ball court where the ancients practiced their strange hybrid of volleyball and basketball. Stanton could easily have missed these overgrown landmarks.

He was trying to keep his eyes on her as much as possible. She seemed stable, but it was hard to know to what extent her symptoms could be exacerbated or accelerated by an arduous hike through the jungle in hundred-ten-degree heat. She would have been better off back in Kiaqix under Initia’s care. But he knew she was right that he never would have found the city without her.

Now they had to zero in on the king’s entombment temple, the last structure built in Kanuataba before its collapse. Paktul had described the construction as a haphazard project, rushed to completion and built with inadequate resources. Excavating a temple would ordinarily require serious equipment, but Volcy and his partner had been able to do it with pickaxes. So it was likely shoddily built or left unfinished.

“To the ancients, a holy triangle was a right triangle,” Chel explained. “They were considered mystical.” There were many examples of the Maya using 3-4-5 right triangles in the layouts of their cities, construction of individual buildings, and even religious practices. The most notable use of them in urban planning was at Tikal, where a series of integral right triangles was centered on the southern acropolis. “Jaguar Imix wanted his tomb in a triangle with one of the temples and the palace. The twin temples should be easiest to find first.”

“So we’re looking for the red temple?” Stanton asked.

“It won’t actually be red. Red is the symbol of east.”

“So we’re looking for the one that is farther east?”

“The one that faces east into the plaza.”

The closer one got to a central acropolis, Chel told him, the larger the structures became, so she knew they were getting warmer. Stanton’s arms were exhausted from cutting through brush. The machete felt like its weight had multiplied, and its blade had dulled. Even small branches took too much effort to clear. Sweat poured into his eyes.

Then, twenty minutes later, they came upon a colonnade of pillars. They had been nearly covered with moss, and birds’ nests sat atop at least half, but they were still standing, taller than the stela, twelve of them in a square. Whatever original patio joined them had been buried beneath the underbrush long ago, but immediately Chel knew: They were exactly as Chiam had described them.

Her uncle made it here after all.

“Then we have to be close, don’t we?” Stanton asked.

”This was a meeting place for upper classes,” Chel explained. “It wouldn’t have been far from the palace.”

“Do we keep going in the same direction?”

But she wasn’t listening. Stanton followed her gaze. Ahead of them, the sun’s last rays poked through the leaf canopy and struck white stone. Chel let go of his gloved hand and set off almost blithely, paying little attention to the countless obstacles in her path.

“Wait!” Stanton called out. But she didn’t respond.

He hurried after her. Before he could catch up, something flew into his mask, nearly knocking him over. Stanton swatted at it uselessly with his flashlight, until it flapped off behind him. He watched it go—a bat, beginning its nightly hunt. When he turned back toward Chel, the last light of day was gone. The stone that had caught her eye only a moment before had disappeared into the darkness.

It wasn’t until he’d closed the gap between them that he finally saw what she’d found. She was standing at the base of what had once been stairs, long crumbled away after a thousand years. Stanton’s eyes traced the sloping overgrowth that climbed upward from the ground. It was a temple that dwarfed everything else.

“Don’t take off like that again,” he said. “I’m not gonna lose you out here.”

Chel didn’t look at him. “This is one of them,” she said. “It has to be.”

“The twin temples?”

She nodded, but seconds later she was on the move again.

CHEL STEPPED UP to a sprawling limestone substructure. It was built lower than any temple would be, and the walls were half standing, but she recognized it as soon as she saw it and started climbing. Her cotton pants and long-sleeved shirt were wet and heavy. Her hair scratched the back of her neck. But she continued up the overgrown stairs, hopping from one small ledge to the next until she reached the first of six enormous platforms.

“What are you doing?” she heard from below.

She waved Stanton off, concentrating. Chel pictured thirteen men seated in a circle in front of her, their heads covered with animal headdresses, all clapping in agreement with the man who was speaking. All except one—Paktul.

Stanton took her hand as he reached the top.

“This is the royal palace,” she whispered.

Stanton gazed out over the series of raised platforms. “So this is where…”

“They cooked,” Chel said without emotion. He’d expected her to be shaken by standing in the place where her ancestors had prepared human flesh. But Chel’s expression was fixed and focused as she looked out into the darkness once again.

“According to Paktul, the palace is the second point on the triangle,” she said. “So if it’s a three-four-fi ve right triangle, then the distance between—”

Suddenly Chel felt dizzy. Her legs were weak.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she lied. “Then the distance from the palace to the twin temple is the first side of the triangle.” She pointed west. “They never would’ve built a burial temple in the central plaza, so it has to be that way.”

“Do you need to rest more before we go?”

“Once we find the tomb.”

Stanton helped her down from the palace. They trudged on through the underbrush by flashlight, pushing in the direction the right triangle led them. Stanton continued to whack through brush with the machete, but still refused to let go of Chel with his other hand, even when fighting through the most diffi cult bits. She was so overheated she felt she might vomit, but she forced it down and kept going.

It was Stanton who spotted it first. From afar it looked like a small mountain, overgrown with small shrubs. It had a square base, maybe fifty feet on each side, and it rose into a four-sided pyramid three stories high. They were fifty yards off from the entrance, but even with all the overgrowth Chel could see that this building was unfinished. The slabs of limestone hiding under the dirt and trees weren’t properly cut, and they weren’t properly fitted.

“Is it the king’s tomb?” Stanton asked.

Chel circled the massive pyramid in search of an inscription. She found none, but when she reached the northwest corner of the temple, something gleamed in the beam of Stanton’s flashlight.

Something metal, left on the ground.

Volcy’s pickax.

THIRTY-SIX

“THE AIR DOWN THERE ALONE COULD INFECT A HUNDRED PEOPLE. You need to put it on.”

Stanton held out the biohazard suit.

So much sweat already poured off Chel, she couldn’t imagine ever feeling cool again. “I’m already infected. You said heat would only make it worse.”

“The higher concentration you’re exposed to, the quicker it can act. The sooner…”

She didn’t make him finish the sentence.

He helped her into the suit. Chel had no idea how she’d get herself into the tomb with it on; it was as bulky as it was hot. She’d been in plenty of tombs before, and she’d never been claustrophobic. But the idea of descending into the catacomb with this thing on—she imagined it would feel like being buried alive.

With her helmet on, the noise of the world was muted. Looking out through the glass, her entire surroundings—the jungle canopy, Paktul’s city, Stanton and his gear—seemed so far away.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

Stanton helped her press awkwardly through the opening in the stone they’d found next to the abandoned pickax. Then he squeezed inside after her and reached over her shoulder to light the path in front of them with the flashlight.

Chel watched her breath cloud the helmet glass as she shimmied forward on her knees. Tracks of what must have been mold had formed along the stones here countless years ago. Even through her suit, the mossy surface felt alien. She knew the scent of bat guano hung in the air, but all she could smell inside her mask was the slightly antiseptic odor of the suit’s purification mechanism.

Finally the narrow passage opened up into a larger space. The ceiling was about five feet high. Chel had to lean down a little; Stanton had to crouch. She shone her light at the far wall, marveling at the etchings of sacrificial victims in ornate animal headdresses and of snake-headed creatures with the bodies of men. Chel reached out and touched them, wiping away a thick film of dust with her glove. She had no doubt the drawings were made by Paktul’s contemporaries. Each line took hours to carve, and the price of a single mistake would have been death.

On the far end of the platform, stairs led farther down. The temple had clearly been designed as a series of stacked rooms, with four or five staircases on one side, which ultimately led to the lowest level, below ground. There, Chel suspected, they would find several smaller ritual rooms and a larger one where the king was buried—as at the temples of El Mirador.

They kept descending. Each staircase was narrower than the last, and in the biohazard suits they had to turn sideways to squeeze between the walls. The air would get colder as they went down, Chel knew, and she would have given anything for a breath of it, but the suit made everything feel stale and recycled.

Finally they could go no farther. Chel pointed her flashlight ahead into a hallway with cut-out doors on both sides. They were now fifteen or twenty feet underground, and even at midday there would have been no natural light this far below. But the ceilings were higher here; even Stanton could almost stand upright.

“This way,” Chel said, leading him down the hallway. She shone her light into two empty rooms before she found what she was looking for.

In the middle of the most distant chamber stood a limestone sarcophagus.

The final resting place of King Jaguar Imix.

“Is this it?” Though he was right behind her, Stanton’s voice came to Chel through a tiny muffl ed speaker in her ear.

Chel’s body was exhausted, but her mind was still hungry to take it all in. One look at the floor told her the tomb had been looted. Still, there was much that Volcy had left behind: carved flints and rusted necklaces, shell pendants, serpentine statues.

And skeletons.

On the floor surrounding the sarcophagus were fourteen or fifteen ancient skeletons, splayed in ritual fashion, all dusted with maroon-colored cinnabar. They had probably died of the same disease that was killing her now, feeling the same way she did: hot, tired, and terrified by the knowledge that they would never dream again.

“Who are the others?” Stanton asked.

“The ancients believed that the death of a king stole just one of his thirty-nine souls,” Chel said, “and that the other thirty-eight lived on or went to the overworld. The ajaw needed other souls to sacrifice to the gods during his journey to ensure safe passage.” She pointed at the six smallest skeletons. “Including children.”

Stanton bent down. “See the full formation of the ends of the hips of this one? That’s a very small adult.”

The dwarf, Jacomo, buried with his king.

A sudden whine in the darkness startled Chel. She turned in time to see an explosion of bats surging toward them.

“Get down!” Stanton called. “They’ll tear the suits!”

The flurry of flying creatures made Chel momentarily lose her bearings. She reached out for the wall, but her hands found nothing and she tumbled to the floor. Above her, Stanton flailed his arms, shooing the bats into the hallway.

Their high-pitched screams faded.

Chel wondered if she had the strength to get back up. The suit mummified her arms and legs. Her muscles ached. She lay there, face-to-face with the skeletons, and felt overwhelmed. Then, just as she was about to close her eyes, she caught sight of something metal hidden in the dust near her. It was a large jade ring with a glyph carved into it.

The monkey-man scribe.

The prince had escaped, and Auxila’s daughters too, all of them following Paktul’s spirit animal—the scarlet macaw—in the direction of Kiaqix. But Paktul, the man, had not escaped. He must have been killed by Jaguar Imix’s guards, who had then buried him, his ring, and his book with his king.

She looked at the skulls, wondering which was Paktul’s. Somewhere, among these remains, lay the father of her people. They’d never know exactly where, but Chel was content to be in the scribe’s presence. To know they’d found him.

Stanton got her to her feet, but Chel couldn’t walk on her own. He helped her shuffle over to the king’s sarcophagus. Even in her state, Chel saw that the limestone slab was etched with ornate designs from end to end, masterful workmanship lavished on a single stone. She knew that Volcy hadn’t gotten inside it either: The heavy lid was still in place, and he never would have taken the time to replace it. He’d probably found the book quickly and known it was all he needed.

“Can you lift it?” she asked Stanton.

Stanton took hold of the stone slab, jockeying it back and forth, one corner at a time. Finally it crashed to the ground, the noise reverberating through the chamber.

Then Chel leaned against the wall again and watched him lift out the bones and artifacts. A jade head mask with pearl eyes and quartz fangs. A long spear with a sharp jade point. Carved jade plaques.

But there were no bowls. No water carriers. No containers for chocolate or maize. No vessels of any kind. Just jewelry, head masks, and weapons.

All priceless. But useless.

Chel had been confident that they’d find ceramics, that the king would be buried with them, and that they’d find within them the residue of whatever the ancients had been eating. “I don’t know what to say, Gabe. I thought—”

She stopped when she realized Stanton wasn’t even looking at her.

He simply walked to where the smaller skeletons lay and wrenched the dwarf’s skull from his body, which gave easily. “What are you doing?” she asked.

Stanton pointed. “The teeth.”

“What do you mean?”

“We might be able to extract what they were eating. from the teeth. Food grains can survive forever. Even if they exhausted their supplies, grains they ate a long time before they died could still be here.”

Stanton rapidly gathered other skulls and began to prepare them. For a moment Chel watched him from the wall she leaned on, then she closed her eyes. Everything was somehow still bright. Even in the darkness. And the air inside her helmet was cooking her brain.

“If you need to leave me…” she started to say, but she was already thinking only of Paktul, whose ring she’d put on her gloved finger, and then of her mother and how wrong she’d been about her. So she didn’t hear Stanton’s next words as he went about his work.

“I’m never leaving you.”

FIRST STANTON REMOVED all the visible calculi and took scrapings from each portion of the teeth using an X-Acto knife. He did each section three times before putting the scrapings onto microscope slides. This was difficult work under the best conditions; using only a single flashlight in darkness, it was nearly impossible. But, with painstaking care, he slowly did it.

Using a reference text, he compared what he saw on these slides to known plant species. He matched a variety by the unique shapes of their starches: maize; beans; avocado; breadnut; papaya; peppers; cacao. Hundreds of deposits sat on the teeth, but it seemed unlikely that any of these common foods had protected the nobles against VFI.

Then, under the dim luminescence of the battery-powered microscope, Stanton saw something unexpected. A starch he needed no textbook to recognize.

Stanton couldn’t believe he was seeing the remnants of beech trees here. Beech generally grew in true mountainous climates, like central Mexico. He would never have expected to find it in the jungles of Guatemala, and neither would any botanist he knew. Which meant that this could be an unknown species, native to this small corner of the world.

Beech was the active ingredient in pentosan, which had once seemed like the most promising drug for slowing the spread of prions. But there had never been a safe way to get pentosan into the brain, and no species of beech could cross that crucial blood– brain barrier. So they hadn’t tried it on VFI.

But something didn’t make sense to Stanton now. Beech fruit was edible, although its taste was famously bitter. Yet to win immunity from prion disease, the whole city would have to have eaten it, week after week, in quantity.

He crossed over to Chel and gently tapped her on the shoulder. “I have to ask you a question,” he whispered. “Did the Maya chew tree bark?”

He knew she was awake, but Chel’s eyes were closed. He’d pushed her to continue through the heat of the jungle, to march farther than she thought she could. He had given her hope. And, with hope, she had led him here. But now she was dying.

“In Lak’ech” was all she said.

Stanton hurried back to the slides. He’d remembered something from the codex that talked about the dwarf chewing and spitting something, and he would bet everything on this one instinct: It had been beech bark, and it had been their cure. A new species of the familiar tree had evolved in this jungle, capable of sneaking past the blood–brain barrier. And eating it protected the ancient Maya, up until the day they’d consumed it all.

Stanton had to believe that somewhere outside this temple, the native population of beech trees could have regrown after the collapse, just as the ceibatrees had. Unless the Maya had razed an entire jungle—something even modern man could rarely do—it was impossible to have killed them all. Nature outlasted everything. The only problem was that he couldn’t find those trees unless he had some way of recognizing them.

In the jungle night, leaves would be impossible to see. The only way to tell trees apart would be by their bark. Instinct told Stanton that these Guatemalan trees would share the trait that set all beeches apart: their perfectly smooth, silver-gray bark.

WHEN HE EMERGED from the tunnel, Stanton’s flashlight was faltering. He’d been using it for hours. To conserve it, he decided to gather branches from a nearby tree and light them into a torch.

By the entrance to the tomb he saw pines and oaks, but nothing with that smooth gray bark of a beech. Back around the twin temples, smaller plants grew in every crevice, and Stanton gathered a thicker bundle of limbs to use as a second torch when the first one sputtered out. The jungle had gone quieter. Only a symphony of crickets played in the night, so it took Stanton by surprise when two deer sprinted across his path as he bent for kindling.

The torch lit, he pressed on. Feeling the odds against him growing, he forced his way deeper into the forest, where the trees thickened, their trunks like airliner fuselages stuck in the ground. In the darkness, Stanton couldn’t begin to estimate their height. It was hard to even stay on a straight path, and he found himself going in circles, seeing the same landmarks again and again.

When he approached the reverse side of the king’s entombment pyramid, frustration turned to despair.

He had no idea how he’d ended up where he started. Then another torch failed, and everything went black again. Stanton pawed the ground for branches. His glove touched something sharp and, lighting another match, he looked to see what it was. On the jungle floor, no bigger than the end of his thumb, was a brown lump covered with tiny spines.

A beechnut.

He held the nut high in the air, as if to reverse its path to the ground. Here, so close to the king’s tomb, was the smooth-barked tree it had fallen from. Its trunk rose higher than Stanton’s match could throw light.

And, to his astonishment, it wasn’t the only one.

A dozen stood in a line. Their branches extended toward the face of the pyramid as if they were reaching out to touch it.

CHEL FLOATED IN and out of the darkness, bobbing like a bird in a brisk wind at the top of the sky. In those moments when she could still see the light, her tongue felt like sandpaper, and the heat made her whole body painful. The disease crawled like a spider through her thoughts. But in those moments when the light disappeared and the darkness came, She sank gratefully into an ocean of memories.

The ancient father of her village—Paktul, spirit founder of Kiaqix—lay beside her here, and whatever came next, she felt safe in his presence. If she had to follow him, if she had to join Rolando and her father, then perhaps she would see that place the ancestors always talked about. The place of the gods.

WHEN HE STEPPED BACK into the tomb, Stanton saw that Chel was in the same spot he had left her, slumped against the wall with a glazed look in her eyes. Then he saw she’d ripped off her biohelmet. The heat must have been driving her crazy, and now she was breathing in air that would almost certainly make things worse. Stanton considered trying to get her back in the suit, but he knew the damage had been done.

Her only hope lay elsewhere.

Using what remained of the flashlight’s power, he began to prepare the injection by crushing leaves, bark, wood, and fruit into tiny particles and combining them with a suspension of saline and dissolving enzymes. Finally he drew a syringe of the fluid and pushed the needle into a vein in Chel’s arm. She barely stirred at the prick.

“You’re going to come out of this,” he told her. “Stay with me.”

He glanced down at his watch, establishing a baseline against which to time the first signs of reaction. It was 11:15 P.M.

THERE WAS ONLY one way for Stanton to know if the drug had crossed the brain–blood barrier: a spinal tap that analyzed Chel’s cerebrospinal fluid. If beech was now in that fluid, it had gone from the heart to the brain and crossed over the barrier into the fluid that surrounded it.

After twenty minutes, he inserted a needle into the space between Chel’s vertebrae, drawing the fluid into another syringe. Stanton had known men to scream during spinal taps. Chel, in her condition, barely made a sound.

Stanton dropped spinal fluid onto six slides and waited for them to fix. Then he closed his eyes and whispered a single word into the darkness. “Please.”

Placing the first slide under the microscope, Stanton considered all sides of it. Then he scanned the next slide, and the third.

After studying the sixth, he leaned back in despair.

There were no beech molecules on any of the slides. This species, like every other one Stanton had ever tried, like all the ones they’d used to make pentosan, could not pass the barrier into the brain.

A wave of hopelessness crested inside him. He might have quit right then and just wallowed in the darkness if he hadn’t heard Chel making noises on the other side of the tomb.

He ran to her. Her legs were kicking wildly.

She was having a seizure.

Not only had the drug failed; the conditions in the tomb—the heat, the concentration of prion—had accelerated the disease’s progress. If her fever climbed any higher, it could kill her. “Stay with me,” he whispered to her. “Stay with me.”

Stanton felt around for the extra shirt in the supply bag, ripped it into rags, and soaked them in the dregs of their water bottles. But before he could even apply the compresses, he felt Chel’s forehead getting cooler. He knew that her body was giving up. He brushed his fingers along the skin of her neck, just under her jaw, and found a thready pulse.

Her seizure slowly subsided, and, for the first time in a long time, Stanton prayed. To what, he didn’t know. But the god he’d worshipped his entire adult life—science—had failed him. Soon he’d be walking out of this jungle, having failed the thousands, and eventually millions, who would die from VFI. So he prayed for them. He prayed for Davies, Cavanagh, and the rest of CDC. He prayed for Nina. But mostly he prayed for Chel, whose life was no longer in his hands. If she died—when she died—all he would have left would be the knowledge that he hadn’t done enough.

Stanton glanced at his watch. 11:46 p.m.

Across the chamber, the ancient skulls seemed to taunt him with the secret they were keeping. Stanton wouldn’t let Chel spend eternity in a staring contest with them. He would take her out of here. He would—

It was then that he had the horrible realization that he would have to bury Chel in the jungle. He thought back to something she’d said the night before, when they were slumped against another wall, on the outskirts of Kiaqix.

How would he burn incense for her? What could he use?

Then it occurred to Stanton that Paktul had written about incense too.

What if the smell and taste of the incense in the air changed for a reason? Paktul knew the king’s usual incense combination. If the taste was gone from the back of his tongue, maybe it was because it was no longer bitter…

Stanton stood up and scooped Chel into his arms.

He had to get her outside.

Carrying her from the king’s chamber, he bore her weight back down the hallway, then hoisted her over his shoulder and began up the first set of stairs. As diffi cult as it had been to get down the stairs alone, they seemed even steeper and narrower than before.

But minutes later they reached the top and tasted the night air. There was a small clearing about ten feet from the north face of the pyramid, with enough room to make a small fire—most likely where Volcy and his partner had pitched their tent.

Stanton laid Chel down in a small crook between tree roots and sprinted to the reverse side of the pyramid. He frantically gathered more beech, circled back around, and dumped the branches in a pile in front of Chel. A minute later he was lighting the kindling, and soon flames danced up into the sky. The acrid smell of the smoke filled the air.

Stanton sat close to the fire with Chel’s head in his lap. He placed his hands on her head and opened her eyelids as wide as he could. He forced his own eyes open too, even as the smoke made them begin to tear. If VFI got into the brain through the retina, then maybe the treatment for it had to as well.

For five silent minutes, as the flames grew, Stanton held Chel in the jungle night, looking for a sign. Any sign at all. He brushed the hair from her face to check her pulse. He didn’t even notice his wristwatch—he was concentrating on Chel’s heartbeat—but the second hand clicked off the last two ticks of the fourth world.

It was midnight.

12/21.