12.21

ONE

DR. GABRIEL STANTON’S CONDO SAT AT THE END OF THE BOARD-WALK, before the Venice Beach footpath morphed into lush lawns where the tai chi lovers gathered. The modest duplex wasn’t entirely to Stanton’s taste. He would have preferred something with more history. But on this odd stretch of the California coastline, the only options to choose between were run-down shacks and contemporary stone and glass. Stanton left his home just after seven a.m. on his old Gary Fisher bike and headed south with Dogma, his yellow Labrador, running beside him. Groundwork, the best coffee in L.A., was only six blocks away, and there Jillian would have a triple shot of Black Gold ready for him the minute he walked in.

Dogma loved the mornings as much as his owner did. But the dog wasn’t allowed into Groundwork, so after Stanton tied him up, he made his way inside alone, waved at Jillian, collected his cup, and checked out the scene. A lot of the early clientele were surfers, their wetsuits still dripping. Stanton was usually up by six, but these guys had been up for hours.

Sitting at his usual table was one of the boardwalk’s best-known and strangest-looking residents. His entire face and shaved head were covered with intricate designs, as well as rings, studs, and small chains protruding from his earlobes, nose, and lips. Stanton often wondered where a man like Monster came from. What had happened to him in early life that led to the decision to cover his body entirely with art? For some reason, whenever Stanton imagined Monster’s origins, he saw a split-level home near a military base—exactly the type of houses in which he himself had spent his childhood.

“How’s the world out there doing?” Stanton asked.

Monster looked up from his computer. He was an obsessive news junkie, and when he wasn’t working at his tattoo shop or entertaining tourists as part of the Venice Beach Freak Show, he was here posting comments on political blogs.

“Other than there being only two weeks before the galactic alignment makes the magnetic poles reverse and we all die?” he asked.

“Other than that.”

“Hell of a nice day out there.”

“How’s your lady?”

“Electrifying, thanks.”

Stanton headed for the door. “If we’re still here, I’ll see you tomorrow, Monster.”

After Stanton downed his Black Gold outside, he and Dogma continued south. A century ago, miles of canals snaked through the streets of Venice, tobacco magnate Abbot Kinney’s re-creation of the famed Italian city. Now virtually all of the waterways where gondoliers once ferried residents were paved over and covered with steroid-fueled gyms, greasy-food stands, and novelty T-shirt shops.

Stanton had ruefully watched a rash of “Mayan apocalypse” graffiti and trinkets pop up all over Venice in recent weeks, vendors taking advantage of all the hype. He’d been raised Catholic but hadn’t been in a church in years. If people wanted to seek their destiny or believe in some ancient clock, they could go right ahead; he’d stick to testable hypotheses and the scientific method.

Fortunately, it seemed not everyone in Venice believed December 21 would bring the end of the world; red and green lights also decorated the boardwalk too, just in case the crackpots had it wrong. Yuletide was a strange time in L.A. Few transplants understood how to celebrate the holidays at seventy degrees, but Stanton loved the contrast—Santa hats on rollerbladers, suntan lotion in stockings, surfboards festooned with antlers. A ride along the beach on Christmas was as spiritual as he got these days.

Ten minutes later, he and the dog reached the northern tip of Marina del Rey. They made their way past the old lighthouse and the sailboats and souped-up fishing vessels bobbing quietly in the harbor. Stanton let Dogma off his leash, and the dog bounded ahead while Stanton trotted behind, listening for music. The woman they were here to see surrounded herself with jazz at all times, and when you heard Bill Evans’s piano or Miles’s trumpet over the other noises of the waterfront, she wasn’t far. For most of the last decade, Nina Countner had been the woman in Stanton’s life. While there had been a few others in the three years since they’d split, none had been more than a substitute for her.

Stanton trailed Dogma onto the dock of the marina and caught the mournful sound of a saxophone in the distance. The dog had arrived at the tip of the south jetty above Nina’s massive dual-engine McGray, twenty-two pristine feet of metal and wood, squeezed into the last slip at the end of the dock.

Nina crouched beside Dogma, already rubbing his belly. “You guys found me.”

“In an actual marina for a change,” said Stanton.

He kissed her on the cheek and breathed her in. Despite spending most of her time at sea, Nina always managed to smell like rosewater. Stanton stepped back to look at her. She had a dimpled chin and striking green eyes, but her nose was a little crooked, and her mouth was small. To Stanton, it was all just right.

“You ever going to let me get you a real slip?” he asked.

Nina gave him a look. He’d offered to rent her a permanent boat slip so many times, hoping it would lure her back to shore more often, but she’d never accepted, and he knew she probably never would. Her freelance magazine assignments hardly provided a steady income, so she’d mastered the art of finding open slips, out-of-sight beaches, and off-the-radar docks that few others knew about.

“How’s the experiment coming?” Nina asked as Stanton followed her onto the boat. Plan A’s deck was simply appointed, just two folding seats, a collection of loose CDs strewn around the skipper’s chair, and bowls for Dogma’s water and food.

“More results this morning,” he told her. “Should be interesting.”

She took the captain’s seat. “You look tired.”

He wondered if it was the encroaching tide of age she was seeing on his face, crow’s-feet beneath his rimless glasses. But Stanton had slept a full seven hours last night. Rare for him. “I feel fine.”

“The lawsuit’s all over? For good?”

“It’s been over for weeks. Let’s celebrate. Got some champagne in my fridge.”

“Skipper and I are headed to Catalina,” Nina said. She flipped the gauges and switches that Stanton had never bothered to really master, firing up the boat’s GPS and electrical system.

The faint outline of Catalina Island was just visible through the marine layer. “What if I came with you?” he asked.

“While you waited patiently for results from the center? Please, Gabe.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

Nina walked up, cupped his chin in her hand. “I’m not your ex-wife for nothing.”

The decision had been hers, but Stanton blamed himself, and part of him had never given up on a future for them together. During the three years they were married, his work took him out of the country for months at a time, while she escaped to the ocean, where her heart had always been. He’d let her drift away, and it seemed like she was happiest that way—sailing solo.

A container ship sounded its horn in the distance, sending Dogma into a frenzy. He barked repeatedly at the noise before proceeding to chase his own tail.

“I’ll bring him back tomorrow night,” Nina said.

“Stay for dinner,” Stanton told her. “I’ll cook whatever you want.”

Nina eyed him. “How will your girlfriend feel about us having dinner?”

“I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“What happened to what’s-her-name? The mathematician.”

“We went on four dates.”

“And?”

“I had to go see a man about a horse.”

“Come on.”

“Seriously. I had to check out a horse in England they thought might have scrapie, and she told me I wasn’t fully committed to her.”

“Was she right?”

“We went on four dates. So, are we on for dinner tomorrow?”

Nina fired up Plan A’s engine as Stanton hopped onto the dock to collect his bike. “Get a decent bottle of wine,” she called back as she unmoored, leaving him once again in her wake. “Then we’ll see….”

THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL’S Prion Center in Boyle Heights had been Stanton’s professional home for nearly ten years. When he moved west to become its first director, the center had occupied only one small lab in a mobile trailer at Los Angeles County & USC Medical Center. Now it spanned the entire sixth floor of the LAC & USC main hospital building, the same building that for more than three decades had served as the exterior for the soap opera General Hospital.

Stanton headed through the double doors into what his postdocs often referred to as his “lair.” One of them had strung Christmas lights around the main area, and Stanton flipped them on along with the halogens, casting green and red across the microscope benches stretching across the lab. After dropping his bag in his office, Stanton threw on a mask and gloves and headed for the back. This was the first morning they’d be able to collect results in an experiment his team had been working on for weeks, and he was very eager for them.

The center’s “Animal Room” was nearly the length of a basketball court and contained computerized inventory stalls, touch-screen data-recording centers, and electronic vivisection and autopsy stations. Stanton made his way toward the first of twelve cages shelved on the south wall and peered inside. The cage contained two animals: a two-foot-long black-and-orange coral snake and a small gray mouse. At first glance it looked like the most natural thing in the world: a snake waiting for the right moment to feed on its prey. But in reality something unnatural was happening inside this cage.

The mouse was nonchalantly poking the snake’s head with its nose. Even when the snake hissed, the mouse continued to nudge it carelessly—it didn’t run to the corner of the cage or try to escape. The mouse was as unafraid of the snake as it would have been of another mouse. The first time Stanton saw this behavior, he and his team at the Prion Center erupted in cheers. Using genetic engineering, they’d removed a set of tiny proteins called “prions” from the surface membrane of the mouse’s brain cells. They’d succeded in their strange experiment, disrupting the natural order in the mouse’s brain and eradicating its innate fear of the snake. It was a crucial step toward understanding the deadly proteins that had been Stanton’s life’s work.

Prions occur in all normal animal brains, including those of humans, yet after decades of research, neither he nor anyone else understood why they existed. Some of Stanton’s colleagues believed prion proteins were involved in memory or were important in the formation of bone marrow. No one knew for sure.

Most of the time, these prions sat benignly on neuron cells in the brain. But in rare cases, these proteins could become “sick” and multiply. Like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, prion diseases destroyed healthy tissue and replaced it with useless plaques, squeezing out the normal function of the brain. But there was one key, terrifying difference: While Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s were strictly genetic diseases, certain prion diseases could be passed through contaminated meat. In the mid-1980s, mutated prions from sick cows in England got into the local food supply through tainted beef, and the entire world became familiar with a prion infection. Mad cow disease killed two hundred thousand cattle in Europe and then spread to humans. First patients had difficulty walking and shook uncontrollably, then they lost their memories and the ability to identify friends and family. Brain death soon followed.

Early in his career, Stanton had become one of the world’s experts on mad cow, and when the CDC founded the National Prion Center, he was the natural choice to head it. Back then it had seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime, and he was thrilled to make the move to California; never before had there been a dedicated research center for the study of prions and prion diseases in the United States. With Stanton’s leadership, the center was created to diagnose, study, and eventually fight the most mysterious infectious agents on earth.

Only it never happened. By the end of the decade, the beef industry had launched a successful campaign to show that just one person living in the United States had ever been diagnosed with mad cow. Grants for Stanton’s lab became smaller, and, with fewer cases in England as well, the public quickly lost interest. The worst part was they still couldn’t cure a single prion disease; years of testing various drugs and other therapies had produced one false hope after the next. Yet Stanton had always been as stubborn as he was optimistic and had never given up on the possibility that answers were just one experiment away.

Moving on to the next animal cage, he found another snake and another tiny mouse merely bored by its predator. Through this experiment, Stanton and his team were exploring a role for prions in controlling “innate instincts,” including fear. Mice didn’t have to be taught to be afraid of the rustling of the grass signaling a predator’s approach—terror was programmed into their genes. But after their prions were genetically “knocked out” in an earlier experiment, the mice began acting aggressively and irrationally. So Stanton and his staff started directly testing the effects of deleting prions on the animals’ most fundamental fears.

Stanton’s cellphone vibrated in the pocket of his white coat. “Hello?”

“Is this Dr. Stanton?” It was a female voice he didn’t recognize, but it had to be a doctor or a nurse; only a health professional wouldn’t apologize first for calling before eight in the morning.

“What can I do for you?”

“My name’s Michaela Thane,” she said. “Third-year resident at East L.A. Presbyterian Hospital. CDC gave me your number. We believe we have a case of prion disease here.”

Stanton smiled, pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and said, “Okay,” as he moved on to the third animal cage. Inside, another mouse pawed its predator’s tail. The snake seemed almost befuddled by this reversal of nature.

“‘Okay?’” Thane asked. “That’s it?”

“Send over the samples to my office and my team will look at them,” he said. “A Dr. Davies will call you back with the results.”

“Which will be when? A week? Maybe I wasn’t being clear, Doctor. Sometimes I talk too fast for people. We think we have a case of prion disease here.”

“I understand that’s what you believe,” Stanton said. “What about the genetic tests? Have they come back?”

“No, but—”

“Listen, Dr…. Thane? We get thousands of calls a year,” Stanton interrupted, “and only a handful turn out to be prion disease. If the genetic tests are positive, call us back.”

“Doctor, the symptoms are highly consistent with a diagnosis of—”

“Let me guess. Your patient is having trouble walking.”

“No.”

“Memory loss?”

“We don’t know.”

Stanton tapped on the glass of one of the cages, curious to see if either of the animals would react. Neither acknowledged him. “Then what’s your presumptive symptom, Doctor?” he asked Thane.

“Dementia and hallucinations, erratic behavior, tremor, and sweating. And a terrible case of insomnia.”

“Insomnia?”

“We thought it was alcohol withdrawal when he was admitted,” Thane said. “But there was no folate deficiency to indicate alcoholism, so I ran more tests, and I believe it could be fatal familial insomnia.”

Now she had Stanton’s attention.

“When was he admitted?”

“Three days ago.”

FFI was a strange and rapidly progressing condition that arose because of a mutated gene. Passed down from parent to child, it was one of the few prion diseases that was strictly genetic. Stanton had seen half a dozen cases in his career. Most FFI patients first came in for medical attention because they were sweating constantly and having trouble falling asleep at night. Within months, their insomnia was total. Patients became impotent, experienced panic attacks, had difficulty walking. Caught between a hallucinatory waking state and panic-inducing alertness, nearly all FFI patients died after a few weeks of total sleeplessness, and there was nothing Stanton or any other doctor could do to help them.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” he told Thane. “Worldwide incidence of FFI is one in thirty-three million.”

“What else could cause complete insomnia?” Thane asked.

“A misdiagnosed methamphetamine addiction.”

“This is East L.A. I get the pleasure of smelling meth-breath every day. This guy’s tox screen was negative.”

“FFI affects fewer than forty families in the world,” Stanton said, moving down the line of cages. “And if there was a family history, you would’ve told me already.”

“Actually, we haven’t been able to talk to him, because we can’t understand him. He looks Latino or possibly indigenous. Central or South American maybe. We’re working on it with the translator service. ’Course, most days here, that’s one guy with a GED and a stack of remaindered dictionaries.”

Stanton peered through the glass of the next cage. This snake was still, and there was a tiny gray tail hanging out of its mouth. In the next twenty-four hours, when the other snakes got hungry, it would happen in every cage in the room. Even after years in the lab, Stanton didn’t enjoy dwelling on his role in the death of these mice.

“Who brought the patient in?” he asked.

“Ambulance, according to the admission report, but I can’t find a record of what service it was.”

This was consistent with everything Stanton knew about Presbyterian Hospital, one of the most overcrowded and debt-ridden facilities in East L.A. “How old is the patient?” Stanton asked.

“Early thirties probably. I know that’s unusual, but I read your paper on age aberrations in prion diseases, and I thought maybe this could be one.”

Thane was doing her job right, but her diligence didn’t change the facts. “I’m sure when genetics comes back, it will clear all this up quickly,” he told her. “Feel free to call Dr. Davies later with any further questions.”

“Wait, Doctor. Hold on. Don’t hang up.”

Stanton had to admire her insistence; he was a pain in the ass when he was a resident too. “Yes?”

“There was a study last year on amylase levels, how they’re markers for sleep debt.”

“I’m aware of the study. And?”

“With my patient it was three hundred units per milliliter, which suggests he hasn’t slept in more than a week.”

Stanton stood up from the cage. A week without sleep?

“Have there been seizures?”

“There’s some evidence on his brain scan,” Thane said.

“And what do the patient’s pupils look like?”

“Pinpricks.”

“What happens in reaction to light?”

“Unresponsive.”

A week of insomnia. Sweating. Seizures.

Pinprick pupils.

Of the few conditions that could cause that combination of symptoms, the others were even rarer than FFI. Stanton peeled off his gloves, his mice forgotten. “Don’t let anyone in the room until I get there.”

TWO

AS USUAL, CHEL MANU ARRIVED AT OUR LADY OF THE ANGELS—mother church for Los Angeles’s four million Catholics—just as services were ending. The journey from her office at the Getty Museum to the cathedral downtown took almost an hour during rush hour, but she relished making it every week. Most of the time she was cooped up at her research lab at the Getty or in lecture halls at UCLA, and this was her chance to leave the west side, get on the freeway, and drive. Even the traffic, bane of L.A., didn’t bother her. The trip to the church was a kind of meditative break, the one time she could turn off all the noise: her research, her budget, her colleagues, her faculty committees, her mother. She’d have a smoke (or two), turn up the alt-rock of KCRW, and zone out a little. She always pulled off the exit ramp wishing she could just keep driving.

Outside the enormous cathedral, she dashed out the end of her second cigarette, flicking it into a trash can beneath the strange, androgynous statue of the Virgin guarding the entrance. Then she pushed open the heavy bronze doors. Inside, Chel took in the familiar sights and sensations: sweet incense in the air, chanting from the sanctuary, and the largest collection of alabaster windows in the world, casting earth-toned light across the faces of the community of Maya immigrants gathered in the pews. These men and women were directly descended from the ancient people who ruled Central America for nearly a thousand years, who built the most advanced pre-Columbian civilization in the New World. They were also Chel’s friends.

At the pulpit, beneath five golden frames representing the phases of Jesus’s life, stood Maraka, the elderly bearded “daykeeper.” He waved a censer back and forth.

“Tewichim,” he chanted in Qu’iche, the branch of the Mayan language spoken by more than a million indígenas in Guatemala. “Tewchuninaq ub’antajik q’ukumatz, ajyo’l k’aslemal.”

Blessed is the plumed serpent, giver of life.

Maraka turned to face eastward, then took a long drink of baalché, the milky-white sacred combination of tree bark, cinnamon, and honey. When he finished, he motioned to the crowd, and the church filled with chants again, one of the many ancient traditions that the archbishop let them practice here once or twice a week, as long as some of the indígenas continued to attend regular Catholic Mass as well.

Chel made her way down the side of the nave, trying not to draw attention, though at least one man saw her and waved enthusiastically. He’d asked her out half a dozen times since she’d helped him with an immigration form last month. She had lied and told him she was seeing someone. At five-foot-two, she might not look like most women in Los Angeles, but many here thought she was beautiful.

Beside the incense altar, Chel waited for the service to end. She looked out at the mix of congregants, including more than two dozen white faces. Until recently, there were only sixty members of Fraternidad. The group met here on Tuesday mornings to honor the gods and traditions of their ancestors in a steady stream of immigrants from all over the Maya region, including Chel’s own Guatemala.

But then the apocalypse groupies had started to show up. The press called them “2012ers,” and some seemed to believe that attending Maya ceremonies would exempt them from the end of the world, which they believed was less than two weeks away. Many other 2012ers didn’t bother to come here at all—they just preached ideas about the end of the “Long Count” calendar cycle from their own pulpits. Some argued that the oceans would flood, earthquakes would rip open fault lines, and the magnetic poles would switch. Some claimed it would bring a return to a more basic existence, banishing the excesses of technology from the earth. Still others believed that it would usher in a “fifth age” of man and wipe away the entire “fourth race,” all the humans who now walked the earth.

Serious Maya experts, including Chel, found the idea of an apocalypse on December 21 ridiculous. It was true that one of her ancestors’ signal achievements was a complex calendar system, and 2012ers were right when they claimed that according to the more than five-thousand-year-old Long Count, human history has consisted of four ages. But there was no credible reason to believe that the end of the thirteenth cycle of the Long Count would be different from any other calendar turn. Of course, that hadn’t stopped 2012ers from using ancient Maya wisdom to sell T-shirts and conference tickets or from making Chel’s people the butt of jokes on late-night TV.

“Chel?”

She turned to find Maraka behind her. She hadn’t even noticed that the ceremony had ended and people were filing out of their seats.

The daykeeper put a hand on her shoulder. He was almost eighty now, and his once-black hair had gone entirely white. “Welcome,” he said. “The office is ready. Of course, we’d all love to see you at an actual service again one of these weeks.”

Chel shrugged. “I’ll try to make it to one soon, I promise. I’ve just been very busy, Daykeeper.”

Maraka smiled. “Of course you are, Chel. In Lak’ech.”

I am you, and you are me.

Chel bowed her head toward him. It was a tradition that had fallen into disuse even in Guatemala, but many of the elders still appreciated it, and it felt like the least she could do given her own dwindling interest in prayer.

“In Lak’ech,” she repeated quietly before begging off to the back of the church.

Outside the priest’s office Chel used every week, the Larakams were first in line. She had heard that Vicente, the husband, was taken in by a bottom feeder in the moneylending business who preyed on people like them: newly arrived, unable to believe that what might be ahead could be worse than what they’d left behind in Guatemala. Chel wondered if his wife, Ina, who impressed her as an intelligent woman, had known better. Ina wore a floor-length skirt and a cotton huipil with intricate zig-zag patterns. She still dressed in the traditional way, and the traditional role of wife in their culture would be to support her husband no matter how bad his judgment.

“Thank you for seeing us,” she said quietly.

Vicente slowly explained that he had signed a contract at exorbitant interest in order to rent a one-room apartment in Echo Park, and now he had to pay out more than he earned working as a landscaper. He had the haggard look of someone with the weight of the world on him. Ina stood quietly by his side, but her eyes implored Chel. An unspoken message passed between the two women, and now Chel understood what it had cost Vicente to come to her and ask for help.

Silently, he gave Chel the papers he’d signed, and as she read the fine print she felt the familiar anger blooming inside her. Vicente and Ina were only two in a vast sea of immigrants from Guatemala trying to navigate this overwhelming new country, and there were many willing to take advantage. Still, on the whole, it was the Maya way to be too trusting. Five hundred years of oppression hadn’t managed to instill even survival-level cynicism in most of Chel’s people, and it cost them.

Fortunately for the Larakams, her contacts were extensive, particularly in the areas of legal aid. She wrote down the name of a lawyer and was about to call in the next person when Ina reached into her bag and handed Chel a plastic container.

“Pepian,” she said. “My daughter and I made it for you.”

Chel’s freezer was already full of the sweet-tasting chicken dish she was always gifted by Fraternidad members, but she took it anyway. It made her happy to think about Ina and her young daughter cooking it together and to know that this community had a future in L.A. Chel’s own mother, who’d grown up in a small village in Guatemala, was probably spending the morning in communion with Good Morning America over a bowl of Special K.

“Let me know what happens,” Chel said as she handed Vicente back their papers, “and next time don’t get involved with anyone whose face you see on bus-stop benches. That doesn’t make them famous. Not good famous, anyway. Come to me instead.”

Vicente took his wife’s hand and smiled tightly as they departed.

So it went for the next hour. Chel explained a vaccination program to a pregnant woman, weighed in on a credit-card dispute for the junior daykeeper, and dealt with a landlord complaint against an old friend of her mother’s.

Once her last visitor left, Chel leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, thinking about a ceramic vase she’d been working on at the Getty, the inside of which contained some of the first physical residues of ancient tobacco ever discovered. No wonder it was proving so damn hard for her to quit smoking. People had been doing it for millennia.

A persistent knocking pulled her back to reality.

Chel stood up, surprised by the man she saw standing in the doorway. She hadn’t seen him in over a year, and he belonged to such a different world from the indígenas who worshipped at Fraternidad services that it startled her to see him.

“What are you doing here?” she asked as Hector Gutierrez stepped inside.

“I need to talk to you.”

The few times she’d met him, Gutierrez had seemed reasonably well put together. Now there were shadows under his eyes and a tired pinch in his stare. His head was covered with sweat, and he dabbed anxiously at it with a handkerchief. Chel had never seen him unshaven before. His beard crept up toward the port-wine stain beneath his left temple. In his hand, she noticed, was a black duffel bag.

“How did you know I was here?”

“I called your office.”

Chel reminded herself to make sure no one in her lab ever gave out that information again.

“I have something you need to see,” he continued.

She glanced down at the duffel bag, wary. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I need your help. They found the old storage unit where I kept my inventory.”

Chel looked to the doorway to make sure no one was listening. They could mean only one thing: He’d been busted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency responsible for policing illegal antiquities smuggling.

“I’d already emptied the unit,” Gutierrez said. “But they raided it. It’s only a matter of time before they come to my house.”

Chel’s throat tightened as she thought of the turtle-shell vessel she’d bought from him more than a year ago. “And your records? Did they get those too?”

“Don’t worry. You’re protected for now. But there’s something I need you to keep for me, Dr. Manu. Just till it’s safe.”

He held out the bag.

Chel looked at the door again and said, “You know I can’t do that.”

“You have vaults at the Getty. Put it there for a few days. No one will notice.”

Chel knew she should just tell him to get rid of whatever the hell it was. She also knew that whatever was in that bag had to be of great value or he wouldn’t risk bringing it to her. Gutierrez was not a man to be trusted, but he was a nimble purveyor of antiquities, and he knew her weakness for the artifacts of her people.

Chel quickly ushered him out. “Come with me.”

A few stray worshippers glanced at them as she led him down to the church’s lower level. They pushed through the glass doors engraved with angels at the entrance and into the mausoleum, where niches in the walls contained the ashes of thousands of the city’s Catholics. Chel chose one of the sitting rooms, where stone benches lined gleaming white walls engraved with names and dates, a tidy bibliography of death.

Finally Chel sealed them inside. “Show me.”

From inside his bag, Gutierrez pulled a two-foot-square wooden box wrapped in a sheath of plastic. When he began to unwrap it, the room filled with the sharp, unmistakable odor of bat guano—the smell of something that recently came from an ancient tomb. “It needs proper preservation before it deteriorates any more,” Gutierrez said as he removed the cover of the box.

At first, Chel assumed she was staring at some kind of paper packing material, but then she leaned in and realized the paper was actually broken yellowed bark pages, floating loosely inside the box. The pages were covered with writing—words and even entire sentences in the language of her ancestors. The ancient Maya script used hieroglyphic-like symbols called “glyphs,” and here were hundreds of them inscribed on the fragments, along with detailed pictures of gods in ornate costumes.

“A codex?” Chel said. “Come on. Don’t be absurd.”

Maya codices were the written histories of her ancestors, painted by a royal scribe working for a king. Chel had heard people use the word rare to describe blue diamonds or Gutenberg Bibles, but this was what rare really meant: Only four ancient Maya books had survived into modernity. So how could Gutierrez think for a minute she would believe he had come into possession of a new one?

“There hasn’t been a new codex discovered in thirty years,” Chel told him.

The man peeled off his jacket. “Until now.”

She stared into the small box once more. As a graduate student, Chel had had the rare opportunity to see an original codex, so she knew exactly what it was supposed to look and feel like. Deep in a vault in Germany, armed guards had watched her as she turned the pages of the Dresden Codex, its images and words transporting her back a thousand years in a breathtaking flash. It was the defining experience that had inspired her to focus her graduate studies on the language and writing of her ancestors.

“Obviously it’s a fake,” she told him, resisting the urge to keep looking. These days, more than half of the artifacts she was offered by even the most legitimate dealers were forged. The bat-guano smell was even forgeable. “And, for the record, when you sold me that turtle-shell vessel, I didn’t know it was looted. You misled me with the paperwork. So don’t try to tell the police otherwise.”

The truth was more complex. In her work as the curator of Maya antiquities for the Getty Museum, every item Chel purchased had to be officially documented and traced back to its origin. All of which she’d done properly for the turtle-shell vessel Gutierrez had sold her, but, unfortunately, weeks after the purchase, she’d found a problem in the chain of possession. Chel knew the risks of not revealing her discovery to the museum but couldn’t bring herself to part with the incredible piece of history, so she’d kept it and said nothing. To her, the larger scandal was that her people’s whole heritage was for sale on the black market, and any artifacts she didn’t buy disappeared into the homes of collectors forever.

“Please,” Gutierrez said, ignoring her claim about the pottery he’d sold her. “Just keep it for me for a few days.”

Chel decided to settle this. She reached into her purse and pulled out a pair of white cotton gloves and tweezers.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Finding something that’ll prove to you that this thing was forged.”

The plastic covering was still damp from his palms, and Chel tensed at the feeling of his sweat. Gutierrez pinched the bridge of his nose, rubbing two fingers deep into his eyes. Above the bat guano she could smell his body odor. But when Chel’s fingers dipped inside the box and started handling the chipped pages of tree bark, everything else in the room fell away. Her first thought was that the glyphs were too old. Ancient Maya history was divided into two periods: the “classic,” encompassing the rise and efflorescence of the civilization, from around A.D. 200 to 900; and the “post-classic,” spanning its decline until the arrival of the Spanish around 1500. The style and the content of written Mayan language had evolved over time as a result of external influences, and writing from each period looked distinct.

Chel continued searching the box. There had never been so much as a single piece of bark paper with writing discovered from the classic; all four of the known Maya codices were from hundreds of years later. They only knew what classic writing looked like from inscriptions at the ruins. But the language on these pages appeared to Chel to have been written somewhere between the time of a.d 800 to 900, making the book an utter impossibility: If it were real, it would be the most valuable artifact in the history of Mesoamerican studies.

Her eyes scanned the lines, searching for a mistake—a glyph improperly drawn, a picture of a god without the right headdress, a date out of sequence. She couldn’t find any. The black and red ink was correctly faded. The blue ink held its color, just as real Maya blue did. The paper was weathered as if it had been inside a cave for a thousand years. The bark was brittle.

Even more impressive, the writing felt fluent. The glyph combinations made intuitive sense, as did the pictograms. The glyphs appeared to have been written in an early version of “classic Ch’olan,” as expected in a codex like this. But what Chel couldn’t take her eyes off of were the phonetic “complements” on the glyphs that helped a reader identify their meaning. They were written in Qu’iche.

The known post-classic codices with their Mexican influences were written in Yucatec and Ch’olan Mayan. But Chel had long imagined that a classic book from Guatemala might well have been written with complements in the dialect her mother and father had grown up speaking. The presence of those here represented a deep and nuanced understanding of the history and language on the part of the forger.

Chel couldn’t believe the sophistication, and she suspected that many of even her smartest colleagues would have been fooled.

Then a sequence of glyphs stopped her cold.

On one of the largest bark-paper pieces Chel had seen in the box, three pictograms were written in sequence to form a sentence fragment:

Water, made to shoot from stone.

Chel blinked, confused. The writer could only be describing a fountain. Yet no forger in the world could have written about a fountain, because until recently no scholar knew the classic Maya used them in their cities. It had been less than a month since an archaeologist from Penn State figured out that, contrary to popular belief, the Spanish hadn’t introduced pressurized aqueducts to the New World; the Maya built them centuries before Europeans arrived.

A codex like this could never have been forged in less than a month.

So it couldn’t have been forged at all.

Chel looked up at Gutierrez in disbelief. “Where did you get this?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

The obvious answer was that it had been looted from a tomb in the Maya ruins, stolen like so much else from her ancestors’ graves.

“Who else knows about it?” Chel pressed.

“Only my source,” Gutierrez said. “But now you understand its value?”

If she was right, there could be more information about Maya history on these pages than in all the known ruins combined. The Dresden Codex, the most complete of the four ancient Maya books, would fetch ten million dollars at auction—and the pages in front of her would put the Dresden to shame.

“Are you going to sell it?” she asked Gutierrez.

“When the time is right.”

Even if she’d had the kind of money he would demand, the time would probably never be right for Chel. She couldn’t buy it legally, because it had obviously been stolen, and the work it would take to properly reconstruct and decipher a codex would make it impossible to hide for long. If a looted codex were ever discovered in her possession, she’d lose her job and could face criminal charges.

“Why should I hold it for you?” Chel asked.

Gutierrez said, “To give me time to figure out how to make papers so it can be sold to an American museum—I hope yours. And because if ICE finds this now, neither of us will ever see it again.”

Chel knew he was right about ICE: If they confi scated the book, they’d repatriate it to the Guatemalan government, which didn’t have the expertise or infrastructure to properly display and study a codex. The Grolier Fragment, found in Mexico, had been rotting in a vault there since the eighties.

Gutierrez packed the book back in its box. Chel already felt impatient to touch it again. The bark paper was disintegrating and needed preservation. More than that, the world needed to know what these pages said, because they testifi ed to the history of her people. And the history of her people was disappearing.

THREE

EAST L.A. PRESBYTERIAN HOSPITAL: BARS GUARDED THE WINDOWS, and the typical crowd of smokers always seen around run-down hospitals stood outside puffing away. The front entrance was closed due to a leak in the lobby ceiling, so security shuffled visitors and patients alike into the hospital through the ER.

Inside, Stanton was hit by overlapping smells: alcohol, dirt, blood, urine, vomit, solvent, air freshener, and tobacco. On chairs around the waiting room sat dozens of suffering people waiting their turn. Stanton rarely spent time in facilities like this one: When a hospital deals with gang violence on a daily basis, there’s not much demand for a prion specialist to give academic lectures.

A clearly stressed-out nurse, sitting behind a bulletproof glass window, agreed to page Thane as Stanton joined a group of visitors gathered around a TV mounted on the wall. An airplane was being pulled from the ocean by a Coast Guard salvage vessel. Rescue boats and helicopters circled the remains of Aero Globale flight 126, which had crashed off the coast of Baja California on its way from L.A. to Mexico City. Seventy-two passengers and eight crew members had died.

This is the way things can end, Stanton thought. No matter how many times life forced him to realize it, the thought still took him by surprise. You exercised and ate well, got yearly physicals, worked hard 24/7 and never complained about it, and then one day you just got on the wrong plane.

“Dr. Stanton?”

The first thing he noticed about the tall black woman in scrubs standing behind him was how broad her shoulders were. She was in her early thirties, with cropped hair and thick black-rimmed glasses, giving her a kind of rugby-player-turned-hipster look.

“I’m Michaela Thane.”

“Gabriel Stanton,” he said, shaking her hand.

Thane glanced up at the television. “Terrible, huh?”

“Do they know what happened?”

“They’re saying human error,” she said, leading him out of the ER. “Or as we say here—CTFL. Call the fucking lawyers.”

“Speaking of which, I assume you called County Health?” Stanton asked her as they headed toward the elevators.

Thane repeatedly pressed an elevator button that refused to light up. “They promised to send someone.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

She mimed taking a huge gasp of air in as they waited. Stanton smiled. She was his type of resident.

Finally the car arrived. Thane hit the button for six. When her scrub sleeve pulled back, Stanton saw a bald eagle with a scroll between the bird’s wings tattooed on her triceps.

“You’re Army?” he asked her.

“Five Hundred Sixty-fifth Medical Company, at your service.”

“Out of Fort Polk?”

“Yeah,” Thane said. “You know the battalion?”

“My father was Forty-sixth Engineers. We lived at Fort Polk for three years. You served before residency?”

“Did ROTC for med school and they pulled me over there after internship,” she said. “Two tours near Kabul doing helicopter retrievals. I was O-Three by the end.”

Stanton was impressed. Airlifting soldiers from the front lines was about the most dangerous army medical assignment there was.

“How many cases of FFI have you seen before?” Thane asked. The elevator finally started to ascend.

“Seven,” Stanton told her.

“All of them died?”

“Yes. All of them. Has genetics come back yet?”

“Should be soon. But I did manage to find out how the patient got here. LAPD arrested him at a Super 8 motel a few blocks away, after he assaulted some other guests. Cops brought him here when they realized he was sick.”

“After a week of insomnia, we’re lucky he didn’t do a lot worse.”

Even following the loss of a single night of sleep, deterioration of cognitive function was like a blood-alcohol level of 0.1 and could cause hallucinations, delirium, and wild mood swings. After weeks of progressively worse insomnia, FFI drove its victims to suicidal thinking. But most of the victims Stanton had seen simply succumbed from the devastation insomnia wreaked on their bodies.

“Dr. Thane, was it you who came up with the idea of testing the amylase levels?” They had arrived on the sixth floor.

“Yeah. Why?”

“Putting FFI on the differential diagnosis list isn’t something most residents would’ve considered.”

Thane shrugged. “Saw a homeless guy in the ER this morning who’d eaten eight bags of banana chips to make his potassium so high that we’d have to admit him. Spend a little more time in East L.A. You’ll see we have to consider just about everything.”

Stanton noticed that every staff member smiled or nodded or waved at Thane as they approached the nerve center of the floor. The reception area looked as if it hadn’t been updated in decades, complete with ancient computers. Nurses and interns scribbled notes in fading plastic binders. Orderlies finished their rounds, clearing scratched trays from patients’ rooms.

A security guard was posted outside room 621. He was middle-aged, with dark skin and a crew cut, and wore a pink mask over his face.

“Everything all right in there?” Thane asked.

“He’s not moving too much right now,” the guard said, closing his book of crossword puzzles. “Couple of short outbursts, but for the most part pretty quiet.”

“This is Mariano,” Thane said. “Mariano, this is Dr. Stanton. He’ll be working the John Doe with us.”

Mariano’s dark-brown eyes, the only part of his face visible above the mask, were trained on Stanton. “He’s been flailing around for most of the past three days. Gets pretty loud in there. He’s still saying vooge vooge vooge over and over.”

“Saying what?” Stanton asked.

“Sounds like vooge to me. Hell if I know what it means.”

“I typed it in on Google and got nothing that made sense in any language,” Thane said.

Mariano pulled the strings of his mask firmly behind his ears. “Hey, Doc, if you’re the expert, can I ask you a question about this?”

Stanton glanced at Thane. “Of course.”

“What this guy has,” the guard said. “It’s not contagious, is it?”

“No, don’t worry,” Stanton said, following Thane into the room.

“He’s got like six kids, I think,” Thane whispered once they were out of earshot. “He’s always talking about how he doesn’t want to pass on anything from here. I’ve never seen him without a mask.”

Stanton pulled a fresh mask from a dispenser on the wall and fastened it to his face. “We should be following his lead,” he said, handing another mask to Thane. “Insomnia compromises the immune system, so we have to avoid infecting John Doe with a cold or anything else he won’t be able to fight off. Everyone needs masks and gloves when they go in. Post a sign on the door.”

Stanton had seen worse patient rooms, but not in the United States. Room 621 contained two metal beds, cracked night tables, two orange chairs, and curtains with worn edges. Dispensers of Purell clung loosely to the wall, and there was water damage on the ceiling. Lying in the bed closest to the window was their John Doe: about five-foot-six, thin, with dark skin and long black hair that draped over his shoulders. His head was covered with tiny stickers, from which wires extended toward an EEG machine, measuring brain waves. The patient’s gown clung to him like damp tissue paper, and he was groaning softly.

The doctors watched the patient tossing and turning. Stanton noted John Doe’s eye movements, the strange, staccato breathing, and the involuntary tremor in his hands. In Austria, Stanton had treated a woman with FFI who’d had to be chained to her bed because her tremor was so bad. By that time, her children were overcome by grief and helplessness and by the knowledge they might someday die the same way. It had been hard to watch.

Thane bent down to flip the pillow beneath John Doe’s head. “How long can you live without sleeping?” she asked.

“Twenty days max of total insomnia,” Stanton said.

Even most doctors knew virtually nothing about sleep. Medical schools spent less than one day out of four years on it, and Stanton himself had learned what he knew only through his FFI cases. Part of it was that no one knew why humans needed sleep in the first place: Its function and importance were as mysterious as the existence of prions. Some experts believed sleep recharged the brain, assisted in the healing of wounds, and aided in metabolism. Some suggested it protected animals against the dangers of night or that sleep was an energy-conservation technique. But no one had ever been able to explain why not sleeping killed Stanton’s FFI patients.

Suddenly John Doe’s bloodshot eyes went wide. “Vooge, vooge, vooge!” he moaned, more loudly than before.

At the monitor, Stanton studied the patient’s brain activity like a musician looking at sheet music he’d played a thousand times. The four stages of normal sleep ran in ninety-minute cycles, each with characteristic patterns, and, as expected, there was no evidence of any of them. No stage-one or -two slow-wave sleep, no REM, nothing. The machine confirmed what Stanton already knew from instinct and experience: This was no meth addiction.

“Vooge, vooge, vooge!”

“So what do you think?” asked Thane.

Stanton met her eyes. “This could be the first case of FFI in U.S. history.”

Though she’d been proven right, Thane didn’t look satisfi ed. “He’s going to the hundredth floor, isn’t he?”

“Probably.”

“There’s nothing we can do for him?”

It was the question Stanton had been asking for a decade. Before prions were discovered, scientists believed that food-borne diseases came from bacteria, viruses, or fungi and replicated themselves with DNA or RNA. Yet prions had neither: They were made of pure protein and they “replicated” by causing other nearby proteins to mutate their shape as well. All of which meant that none of the conventional cures for bacteria or viruses worked on prions. Not antibiotics or antivirals or anything else.

“I read about pentosan and quinacrine,” Thane said. “What about those?”

“Quinacrine is toxic to the liver,” Stanton explained. “And we can’t get pentosan into the brain without doing even more damage.” There were some highly experimental treatments, he told her, but none that were ready for human testing and none that were FDA approved.

But there were ways they could make John Doe more comfortable before the inevitable happened. “Where are the temperature controls?” Stanton asked.

“They’re all central, down in the basement,” Thane said.

He scanned the wall, started pulling back curtains and moving furniture. “Call down there and tell them to turn up the air-conditioning on this floor. We need to get the temperature in this room down as low as it’ll go.”

“You’ll freeze every other patient on the floor.”

“That’s what blankets are for. Let’s get fresh sheets and gowns for him too. He’ll keep sweating through them, so tell the nurses we need new ones every hour.”

Thane hurried out, and Stanton flipped off all the lights and shut the door. He pulled the curtain over the window, preventing any outside light from spilling in, then picked up a towel and tossed it over the EEG monitor, extinguishing its light.

The thalamus—a tiny collection of neurons in the midsection of the brain—was the body’s “sleep shield.” When it was time for sleep, it shut off “waking” signals from the outside world, like noise and light. In every FFI patient he’d treated, Stanton had seen the horrific effects of destroying this part of the brain. Nothing could be shut off or even tamped down, making victims painfully sensitive to light and sound. So while working with Clara, his Austrian patient, Stanton learned to relieve her distress in a small way by turning her room into a kind of cave.

He gently put a hand on John Doe’s shoulder. “Habla español?”

“Tinimit vooge. Tinimit vooge.”

There would be no getting through to him without a translator, so Stanton began his physical exam. John Doe’s pulse was bounding, his nervous system firing on all cylinders. His breathing was coarse through his mouth, his bowels had ground digestion to a halt, and his tongue was swollen. All further confirmation of FFI.

Thane reappeared, fastening a new mask over her mouth and nose. In her gloved hand she held a printout in Stanton’s direction. “Genetics just came back.”

They’d extracted DNA from John Doe’s blood and mapped out chromosome 20, where the FFI mutation always occurred. This should be the final proof.

When Stanton scanned the results, he saw a normal DNA sequence staring back at him. “There must’ve been a mistake in the lab,” he said, glancing at Thane. He could only imagine what the lab in this place looked like and how frequently there were mix-ups. “Tell them to run it again.”

“Why?”

He handed it back to her. “Because there’s no mutation here.”

“They ran it twice. They knew how important it was,” Thane said as she studied the results. “I know the geneticist, and she doesn’t screw things up.”

Was it possible Stanton had misjudged the clinical signs? How was there no mutation? In every case of FFI he had seen, a DNA mutation caused prions in the thalamus to transform and then cause symptoms.

“Could it be something other than FFI?” asked Thane.

John Doe opened his eyes again, and Stanton caught a glimpse of the pinprick pupils. There’d been no doubt in his mind that this was a case of FFI. All the signs were there. Progressing faster than usual, but there.

“Vooge, vooge, vooge!” the man yelled again.

“We have to find a way to communicate with him,” Stanton said.

“We’ve got a team from the translator service coming in that can identify almost every American language, Central and South,” said Thane. “When we know what he’s speaking, we’ll bring in someone fluent.”

“Get them in here now.”

Thane said, “If he doesn’t have the genetic mutation, he can’t have FFI, right?”

Stanton glanced up at her, his mind racing with new possibilities. “Right.”

“So it’s not prion disease?”

“It is. But if there’s no mutation, he must have gotten it another way.”

“What other way?”

For decades, doctors knew of a rare genetic prion affliction called CJD—Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Then, suddenly, dozens of people who’d all eaten from the same meat supply in Britain came down with symptoms identical to CJD, giving mad cow its proper name—variant CJD. The only difference was that one came from a genetic mutation and the other from contaminated meat. And that one destroyed entire economies and food-supply standards forever. It stood to reason that something similar was happening here with FFI.

“He must have eaten tainted meat,” Stanton said.

John Doe thrashed around, rattling the handrails. Stanton had so many questions: What was the patient saying? Where had he come from? What work did he do?

“Jesus,” Thane said. “You mean a new prion strain that mimics the symptoms of FFI? How do you know it’s from meat?”

“Vooge, vooge, vooge…”

“Because it’s the only other way to get prion disease.”

And if Stanton was right—if this new cousin of FFI was being carried through meat—they had to trace it back to wherever it came from and figure out how it got into the food supply. Most of all, they had to make sure there weren’t other people out there who were already sick.

John Doe was full-on yelling now. “Vooge, vooge, vooge!”

“What do we do?” Thane called out over him.

Stanton pulled out his phone and dialed a number in Atlanta known to fewer than fifty people in the world. The operator picked up on the first ring. “Centers for Disease Control. This is the secure emergency line.”

FOUR

THE WORN LEATHER COUCH IN CHEL’S STUDY WAS PILED HIGH WITH old academic articles and back issues of Journal of Mayan Linguistics. Her drafting table and desk chair were covered with a broken PC, immigration forms, mortgage applications, and other paperwork for members of Fraternidad. The only space not hidden by books overfl owing from the shelves was a small patch on the Oriental rug. That’s where Chel had been for the last hour, on the floor, staring at the box in front of her.

She’d gotten a glimpse of the marvels inside—the glyphs that would tell some incredible story of the ancients, the artistry used in representing the gods. Chel had devoted her career to Mayan epigraphy—the study of ancient inscriptions—and she wanted so badly to remove the plastic casing once more and to look at the glyphs again, to photograph them, to dig beyond what she’d already seen. But the image of a former colleague languishing in an Italian courtroom under the scrutiny of news cameras had been in Chel’s mind since she’d watched Gutierrez drive away from the church. The Getty’s previous curator of antiquities, who used to work just down the hall from Chel, had become embroiled in a legal battle when she was accused by Italian officials of acquiring illegally excavated artifacts for her collection.

Chel knew that both the Getty and ICE would make an even bigger example of her if they discovered what she’d done. To forge paperwork after the fact, as she’d done with Gutierrez’s turtle shell, was one thing. A codex was different. There wasn’t a museum board in the world that would believe she hadn’t known what she was doing when she accepted it at the church.

Chel gently picked up the box again. It weighed no more than five pounds. How had it even survived? In the mid-sixteenth century, inquisitors for the Catholic Church tried to rid the Maya of pagan influences and presided over an auto-da-fé, a massive bonfire where thousands of sacred Maya books, artworks, and inscriptions were destroyed. Until today, Chel and everyone else in her field believed only four codices had been saved. The Grolier Fragment marked the cycles of Venus; the Madrid Codex referred to omens about crops; and the Paris Codex was a guide to rituals and New Year ceremonies. Chel’s revered Dresden Codex—oldest of the known Maya books, dating to sometime around A.D. 1200—contained astrology, histories of kings, and predictions of the harvest. Yet even the Dresden didn’t come from the classic era of Maya civilization. How could this volume have been preserved for so long?

The doorbell rang.

It was after eight. Could it be Gutierrez already, back to collect his treasure? Why had she not opened the box? Then again, what if it was ICE? What if the dealer had already been arrested? Had ICE been watching when he came to the church?

Chel picked up the box and hurried to the study closet. No one knew about the cubbyhole she’d discovered there, full of stacks of some previous tenant’s 1920s L.A. memorabilia. She buried the codex beneath a collection of black-and-white photographs of Wolfskill Farm—what Westwood was called before the First World War.

The doorbell rang again as she went to answer it.

Chel breathed a sigh of relief when she peeked through the window to see her mother standing in the entryway.

“Want me to stand here all night?” Ha’ana asked as Chel opened the door. She stood just over five feet tall and wore a knee-length navy cotton dress, one of many acquired from the company at which she’d been a seamstress since they’d been in America. Even with her silver hair and several extra pounds, Ha’ana still had a radiance about her.

“Mom, what are you doing here?”

Ha’ana held canvas bags up in the air. “Cooking you dinner, remember? Now, will you make me stand out here in the cold or will you invite an old woman in?”

In the day’s turmoil, Chel had forgotten all about their dinner plans.

“This place used to be a lot cleaner,” Ha’ana said as she stepped inside and saw the state of the house. “When Patrick was here.”

Patrick. Chel had dated him for almost a year and Ha’ana wouldn’t let it go. The reasons they’d broken up were more complicated than Chel ever felt like getting into with Ha’ana. But her mother was right: Since he moved out four months ago, Chel’s house near the UCLA campus had come to feel like little more than a stopover between her offices at the university and the Getty. After exhausting days, she often came home, undressed, and fell asleep watching the Discovery Channel.

“Are you going to help me?” Ha’ana called from the kitchen.

Chel joined her and helped unload the groceries. Diffi culties with her back had made physical activity more challenging for Ha’ana recently, and even though the last thing Chel wanted was to sit for a meal, she’d never been good at saying no to her mother.

Dinner was a four-cheese and spinach lasagna concoction with an excess of garlic. Growing up, Chel usually couldn’t get Ha’ana to cook Maya food—she’d been stuffed with macaroni and sandwiches on white bread. These days her mother watched the Food Network nonstop, and her continental cooking had improved. As they ate, Chel stared at her and listened to her chat about her day at the factory. But Chel’s mind was always in the other room with the codex. Ordinarily she would’ve been attentive to her mother. But not tonight.

“Are you all right?”

Chel looked up from her plate to see Ha’ana studying her. “I’m fine, Mom.” She doused her lasagna with red pepper. “So… I’m excited you’re coming to class next week.”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you. I’m not going to be able to next week. Sorry.”

“Why not?”

“I have a job too, Chel.”

Ha’ana had hardly missed a day’s work in thirty years. “If you told your boss what you were doing, they’d want you to go. I can talk to her if you want.”

“I’m working a double shift that day.”

“Look, I’ve been telling the class all about the village’s oral history, and I think it would be fascinating for them to hear from someone who actually lived in Kiaqix.”

“Yes,” Ha’ana said. “Someone must tell them all about our incredible Original Trio.” The irony in her voice was hard to miss.

Beya Kiaqix, the tiny hamlet where both women were born, was rife with myth, particularly the legend of its origins. The story went that a noble man and his two wives had fled their ancient city, under the rule of a despotic king, and had founded the village. More than fifty generations of Chel’s ancestors had since lived in the Valley of the Scarlet Macaw, in the El Petén region of Guatemala.

Chel and her mother were among the very few who’d left. By the time Chel was two years old, Guatemala was at the height of La Revolución, the longest and bloodiest civil war in Central American history. Afraid for her daughter’s life and for her own, Ha’ana had taken them out of Kiaqix—as the villagers called it—and never looked back. Thirty-three years ago they arrived in America, and she found a job and quickly taught herself English. By the time Chel was four, Ha’ana had her green card; soon they were both citizens.

“You lived in Kiaqix too,” Ha’ana went on as she took another bite. “You know the myths. You don’t need me.”

Since she was a child, Chel had watched her mother do everything she could to avoid talking about her past. Even if it could have been proven that every word of the oral history of their village was true, Ha’ana would find a way to ridicule it. Long ago, Chel had realized that it was her mother’s only way to escape the trauma of what had happened.

Suddenly she wanted nothing so much as to run to the closet, retrieve the codex, and drop it in her mother’s lap. Even Ha’ana wouldn’t be able to resist its pull.

“When was the last time you read a book written in Mayan?” Chel asked.

“Why read a Mayan book when I spent all that time learning English? Besides, I haven’t heard of any good mysteries in Qu’iche lately.”

“Mom, you know I’m not talking about a modern book. I’m talking about something written during the ancient era. Like the Popol Vuh.”

Ha’ana rolled her eyes. “I actually saw a copy of the Popol Vuh at the bookstore the other day. They’re putting it with all that 12/21 nonsense. Loudmouth monkeys and flowery gods—that’s what you get in Mayan.”

Chel shook her head. “Father wrote his letters in Qu’iche, Mom.”

In 1979, two years after Chel was born, the Guatemalan army imprisoned her father for helping lead Kiaqix into rebellion. From jail, Alvar Manu secretly wrote a series of letters encouraging his village never to surrender. Ha’ana herself had smuggled out more than thirty entreaties into the hands of village leaders across El Petén, resulting in a doubling of the volunteer army in weeks. But the letters were also Chel’s father’s death warrant: When his jailers discovered him writing in his cell, he was executed without a trial.

“Why do we always talk about this?” Ha’ana asked, standing to clear the plates.

Chel felt frustrations toward her mother bubbling up. She loved her, and she would always be grateful for the opportunities Ha’ana had given her. But deep down, Chel also felt that her mother had abandoned their people, which was why Ha’ana hated to be reminded of it, and why showing her the codex in its current condition would be useless. Until Chel could figure out what it said, her mother would see the book as little more than disintegrating fragments of history she wanted to forget.

“Leave the dishes,” Chel said, standing up.

“They will only take a minute,” Ha’ana said. “Otherwise they’ll pile up like everything else in the house.”

Chel took a breath. “I have to go.”

“Go where?”

“To the museum.”

“It’s nine o’clock, Chel. What kind of job is this?”

“Thank you for dinner, Mom. But I really have to go.”

“This would be an insult in Kiaqix,” Ha’ana said. “When a woman cooks for you, you don’t invite her to leave.”

Ha’ana used their customs as a religion of convenience, invoking them to her advantage when she could, ridiculing them when they got in her way.

“Well, then,” Chel said, “it’s a good thing we’re not in Kiaqix anymore.”

OVER THE PAST EIGHT YEARS, Chel had built a state-of-the-art Mesoamerican research facility at what was once California’s most traditional museum. When she had the time after hours, she liked to stroll through the empty galleries, set spectacularly high above Los Angeles. Walking past van Gogh’s Irises or Pontormo’s Portrait of a Halberdier, she had fun imagining how John Paul Getty, the billionaire oilman who founded the museum, would have felt about exhibiting ceramic statues of kneeling Maya worshippers and Mesoamerican gods beside his beloved European artifacts.

Not tonight, though. Just after two a.m., Chel stood in Getty research lab 214A with Dr. Rolando Chacon, her most experienced antiquities-restoration expert, surrounded by high-def cameras, mass spectrometers, and conservation tools. Normally, every one of the long wooden tables set up in rows throughout the room was covered with lumps of jade, pottery, and ancient head masks, but now they’d cleared several in the back to make room for the codex. On the walls hung photographs from ruins, which Chel had taken during fieldwork, quiet reminders of the emotional ride that returning to her people’s ancient home always was.

She and Rolando had delicately removed the contents of Gutierrez’s box piece by piece, lifting and separating each fragment using sets of long tweezers and metal specula, then spreading them out onto glass plates sitting atop illuminated light tables. Some were as small as a postage stamp, but even these were heavy, dense fig-bark paper weighed down even more by the dust and moisture of a tomb.

They’d been at it four hours and had gotten through only the top of page one, but, staring down at the assembled fragments, Chel was pulled back to the former glory of her ancestors. The first words, already coming together, seemed to be an invocation of rain and the stars—a prayer—a magic carpet to another world.

“So I assume we’ll have to work on this at night?” Rolando asked.

Chel’s restorer was a six-foot-two, hundred-fifty-pound sliver of a man with a week’s worth of stubble.

“Sleep during the day,” she told him. “With apologies to your girl-friend.”

“I just hope she notices I’m gone. Maybe it’ll inject a little mystery into our relationship. And you? When will you sleep?”

“Whenever. There’s no one who’ll notice I’m gone.”

Rolando placed another fragment carefully onto the glass. Chel knew no one with a greater knack for handling delicate objects or with better instincts when it came to reconstructing fragile antiquities. She trusted him implicitly; he’d been a loyal member of her team longer than anyone else. She didn’t like putting him at risk, but she needed his help.

“You wish I’d called someone else?” Chel asked him.

“Hell no,” Rolando said. “I’m your one and only ladino, and I’m not going to let you squeeze me out of this bombshell.”

Ladino was slang for all seven million non-indigenous descendants of the Spanish living in Guatemala. All her life Chel had listened to her mother talking about how ladinos supported the army-sponsored genocide of the Maya and how they used the indígenas as scapegoats for their economic woes. But despite the tensions that still existed between the two groups, working so closely and for so long with Rolando had shifted her perspective. During the revolution, his family protested on behalf of the indigenous people. His father had even been arrested for it once before moving the family to America.

“I don’t see how this could be from any of the major ruins,” he said, tinkering with the edges until he’d jigsawed a match.

Chel agreed. The more than sixty known sites of classic-era Maya ruins in Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Belize, and El Salvador were packed with archaeologists, tourists, and locals year-round. Not even the most sophisticated looters could operate in those conditions, so Chel believed the book had to have been taken from a newly discovered site. Every year, satellites, helicopter tourists, and loggers stumbled across long-hidden architectural features in the jungle, and she guessed that the looter—likely a professional scout—had stumbled on the site and then returned with a crew.

“You think the looter could have discovered a lost city?” Rolando asked.

Chel shrugged. “If they did, every indígena in Guatemala will claim it as their own.”

So many Maya villages had oral histories that told of an incredible lost city where their ancestors had once lived. During the revolution, a cousin of Chel’s father even claimed to have found Kiaqix’s lost city, from which the Original Trio had supposedly fled. The reality was less sexy: Many Maya had always lived in small villages in the forest, and, for Chel’s people, claiming a connection to a lost city was like white Americans saying they had an ancestor on the Mayflower—easy (and desirable) to say, harder to prove.

“So I’m not asking again where the hell you got this…” Rolando said as he matched another fragment, “but, based on the iconography, this does look like it’s from the end of the classic. Maybe 800 to 925? It’s unbelievable.”

Chel said, “Hope the carbon dating agrees.”

Rolando put down his tweezers. “And I know we can’t tell anyone, but… there’s a lot of complicated syntax here. We could really use Victor on this. No one knows classic syntax better than he does.”

From the moment she saw the codex, Chel had wanted to call Victor Granning, but she was too afraid of how he might react. They hadn’t spoken in months; she had good reasons for avoiding him. “We’ll be just fine on our own,” she told Rolando.

“Okay,” he said. He knew better than to press. Granning was a sore spot. Chel loved her old mentor, but he was too much of a diehard. And a little nuts.

Trying to put Granning out of her mind, Chel studied the puzzle of “stacked” glyphs Rolando had started to assemble from the first page:

Mayan glyphs came in two basic varieties. They could be combinations of syllables strung together to approximate the sound of words (just like English or other alphabetical systems). But often they were more like Chinese, with each glyph or glyph combination symbolizing an object or idea. Once Chel had broken the blocks down and deciphered each component, using the established catalogs of one hundred fifty decoded syllables and the catalog of the eight hundred-plus known “picture” glyphs, she strung them into sentences.

Words like jäb were entirely familiar; it was the same word the modern Qu’iche used for rain. Some, like wulij, could only be loosely translated, because there was no corresponding word in English: to take down was the closest she could get, carrying none of the religious implications the word had in Mayan. Researchers had identifi ed about a hundred fifty glyphs that still hadn’t been deciphered, and not only did a few of these appear on the very first page of the codex, there were others Chel had never seen before. When the entire text was reconstructed, she suspected there would be dozens of new glyphs to analyze.

Three hours later, Chel’s legs had cramped, and her eyes were so dry and irritated that she had to replace her contacts with the glasses she hated. But finally they had a rough translation of the first glyph block:

Yet for Chel, these literal words weren’t enough—a completed translation had to capture the essence of what the scribe was trying to convey.

Codices were written from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, and they were often very formal in tone. So she did her best to insert missing words from context and typical word pairings seen in the other books until they had a better rendering of the first paragraph:

“It’s talking about a drought,” Rolando said. “Who would’ve been allowed to write something like this?”

Chel had never seen anything like it. Written Maya records were generally ancient press releases for kings. The royal “scribes” who wrote them—half press secretaries, half religious leaders—didn’t dare mention anything that undermined their rulers.

Never before had Chel seen a scribe writing about the difficulties of daily life. Predictions of rain were inscribed on stone columns at the ruins and in the Madrid and Dresden Codices, but for a scribe to report an ongoing drought was unheard of. It was a king’s job to bring the rains, and such a discussion would embarrass any king who couldn’t deliver.

“Only a scribe could have this kind of skill,” Rolando said, gesturing at a perfectly executed picture of the maize god.

Chel studied the words again. The penalty for writing this could well have been death. No rain has come to give nourishment in a half cycle of the great star. The great star was Venus, and a half cycle was almost fifteen months. What the scribe was describing would be by far the longest

drought in the known Mayan record.

“What is it?” asked Rolando.

“It’s not just the drought. He’s talking about the depletion of the maize stores,” Chel said. “He’s talking about endangered animals and diminishing amounts of arable land. No one would have been permitted to write something like this. It’s basically a description of the end of the civilization.”

Rolando flashed another grin. “You think…”

“He’s writing about the collapse.”

OVER THE COURSE of Chel’s career, the question that had bedeviled her more than any other was the “collapse” of her ancestors’ civilization at the end of the first millennium. For seven centuries, the Maya had built cities and innovated in art, architecture, agriculture, mathematics, astronomy, and commerce. But then, six hundred years before the Spanish conquistadores arrived, city-states stopped expanding, construction halted, and scribes in the lowlands of Guatemala and Honduras stopped writing. Within a span of only half a century, urban centers were abandoned, the institution of kingship disappeared, and the classic era of Maya civilization came to an end.

Colleagues of Chel’s had a variety of theories about what caused the collapse. Some suggested eco-recklessness: aggressive farming practices and disregard for deforestation. Others claimed that, through continuous warfare, hyper-religiosity, and sacrificial bloodlust, the ancients brought on their own demise.

Chel had a skeptical view of all these ideas. She believed they were rooted in a European inclination to belittle indígenas. Exaggerations of human sacrifi ce had plagued the Maya since the Spanish landed, and the collapse had been used for centuries as proof that the conquistadores were more evolved than the savages they’d conquered. Proof the Maya couldn’t be trusted to rule themselves.

Chel believed that the collapse was caused by natural mega-droughts that spanned decades and made large-scale agriculture impossible for her ancestors. Studies done on riverbeds in the area suggested that the end of the classic era was the driest in seven millennia. When these extended dry periods made cities uninhabitable, the Maya simply adapted. They reverted to subsistence farming and migrated to small villages like Kiaqix.

“If we could prove this is an actual description of the collapse,” Rolando said giddily, “it would be a landmark.”

Chel imagined what else they might find on these pages. Imagined how far the codex would go toward answering what had, to date, been unanswerable. Imagined how she could one day show it to the world.

“And if we could prove the collapse was the result of mega-droughts,” Rolando continued, “it would cut the balls right off those generals too.”

This possibility gave Chel yet another surge of adrenaline. In the last three years, tensions had flared again between ladinos and the indígenas. Civil-rights activists had been killed, crimes perpetrated by the same ex-generals who’d murdered Chel’s father. Politicians had actually invoked the collapse on the floor of Parliament: The Maya were savages who’d destroyed their environment once, they’d claimed, and would do it again if they were allowed to keep their valuable land.

Could the book prove otherwise once and for all?

The phone rang in Chel’s office at the back of the lab. She checked the clock. It was just after eight a.m. They needed to pack up the codex and put it in the vault. People would start filtering into the museum soon, and they couldn’t risk questions.

“I’ll get it,” Rolando said.

“I’m not here,” she called after him. “You have no idea when I will be back.”

A minute later, Rolando returned with a curious look on his face. “It’s a translator service from a hospital,” he said.

“What do they want?”

“They have a sick man who was brought in three days ago, and no one’s been able to talk to him. Now somehow they’ve concluded he’s speaking Qu’iche.”

“Tell them to call the church in the morning,” she told him. “Someone over there can translate for them.”

“They told me the patient keeps saying one word over and over again, repeating it like some kind of mantra.”

“What word?”

“Wuj.”