12.21

NINETEEN

JUST AFTER SIX A.M., WHILE DAVIES AND THANE REVIEWED every detail of their plan for a final time, Stanton stepped out onto the empty boardwalk to join a conference call with government officials in L.A., Atlanta, D.C., and around the country. The sun was inching toward the coastline and hadn’t started cooking the ocean air, so in his thin, long-sleeved shirt and jeans, he was underdressed for the chill lingering on the Walk. The only sound competing with the lapping of the waves was an invisible helicopter churning somewhere in the distance.

Tuning out a procedural roll call, Stanton glimpsed a small circle of men sitting in sun chairs right near the shore, all wearing eye shields. At first he couldn’t imagine who was brazen enough to meet right now in violation of the curfew. Then Stanton realized they were sitting in exactly the same spot as the Venice Beach men’s AA meeting always did. They often congregated at dawn, and, however surprising, it was a strange comfort to Stanton to know that some appointments couldn’t be missed.

“The utilities can’t keep up with the demands or the outages,” a FEMA deputy was saying on the phone now. “No electricity means no potable water.”

Los Angeles had been on the brink of an energy crisis for decades. Now, with half of the city suffering from anxiety-related sleeplessness, lights and televisions and computers ran twenty-four hours a day. Blackouts spread. Water consumption had skyrocketed. Taps could run dry within a week.

“What are we doing about bodies?” Stanton broke in, out of turn. “Houses across the city could have decaying corpses inside them.”

“We have to take them to a central location,” somebody replied. He didn’t recognize the voice—there were so many bureaucrats involved in every decision now.

“We could be talking about thousands in a few days,” Stanton said. There were more than eight thousand known victims of VFI citywide. “You don’t have the equipment for that kind of biohazard, and there’d be no way to ensure the safety of the workers.”

“Well, we have to do something,” Cavanagh cut in, “and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m starting to think that means telling people they have to douse the bodies with acid or lye and let them dissolve in bathtubs.”

Stanton’s boss was taking the call from the recession-shuttered post office in East L.A. that had been turned into a CDC command center. From the tone of Cavanagh’s voice, Stanton could feel the toll all this was exacting on her. Already, forty-two CDC investigators and nurses were infected with VFI, and he knew Cavanagh well enough to know that she blamed herself. She’d personally selected many of them to come out from Atlanta to help manage the outbreak.

As the call broke up, Stanton sensed an opening and asked his boss to stay on the line. One way or another, he, Davies, and Thane were going to test the antibodies in the next twenty-four hours. Their plans were in place. But if he could convince Cavanagh that it was the right thing, they’d have access to a much larger sample group and they’d be acting within the law.

“Emily, the quarantine seal is breaking,” he said. “Soon they’re going to be having this conversation about dead bodies and bathtubs in every city in America. We need to discuss treatment options.”

“Gabe, we talked about this.”

“But I have to tell you again. We could have an experimental antibody therapy available soon if we start immediately. In a day or two.” He glanced back over his shoulder at his condo, not wanting to imagine Cavanagh’s reaction if she knew about the antibodies being created inside as they spoke. But he knew that if they could get them to work and could prove it, she’d have no choice but to come around.

The helicopter circled somewhere even closer behind Stanton, getting louder. “I’ll discuss it with the director,” Cavanagh said finally. “Maybe he can get the White House to issue an executive order and suspend normal FDA protocols.”

“FDA’ll drag their feet. They always do.”

“We all want the same thing, Gabe.”

Stanton hung up, frustrated by the resignation in her voice. She’d left him with little choice. Before he got back inside, his phone rang.

He picked up. “Did you find anything?”

“Dr. Stanton? It’s Chel Manu.”

“I know. Did you find something more?”

“Sorry. Yes. We did. It could be… useful. It’s good.”

It was nice to hear someone sounding alive, even hopeful. “Good is good,” Stanton said. “What is it?”

Listening to her story—the ancient city’s latitude line seemed to intersect with that of the village in which she’d been born?—Stanton didn’t know what to think. He had no choice but to trust her at this point: Everyone said she knew what she was doing. Yet every revelation of hers seemed more improbable than the last. Everything in her work and her life seemed to constantly circle back on itself.

“You couldn’t tell if Volcy was from your village?” Stanton asked.

“We knew he was from the Petén,” she said. “But not Kiaqix. And he was afraid—he wouldn’t say anything specific about where he was from.”

“Is there any way for you to confirm this before we take it further?”

“There are no phones in Kiaqix, but I talked to a cousin of mine. He lives in Guatemala City, but he goes back regularly to visit his father. I had him look at a picture on one of the news sites, and he recognized Volcy from the photo you released.”

Now the helicopter buzzed directly overhead. Stanton glanced up and saw not one but two choppers. They were flying low and seemed to be headed directly for the beach. One was large and looked military. The other was smaller—four seats encased in a glass bubble. Seconds later they both dropped toward the ground in lockstep. It was one of the oddest sights Stanton had ever seen on the boardwalk, and that was saying a hell of a lot.

The men from the AA meeting stood up and shielded their faces from the sand tornadoing up into the air. Finally both helicopters had landed about a hundred yards up the beach, and five men in camouflage carrying machine guns poured from the National Guard helicopter. They ran to the other chopper, pulled out a young pilot, a man in his sixties, and a redhead who couldn’t be more than thirty. The older man wore a blazer and slacks, as if headed to a business meeting. The redhead was still wearing her sunglasses and screaming as they were cuffed and arrested. Stanton watched in disbelief: L.A.’s wealthiest were trying to flee the quarantine.

“Dr. Stanton?”

He refocused. “So we need to find out when the last time people in your village saw Volcy and in what direction he might have headed from there to find this… lost city,” Stanton told Chel. A jungle Atlantis as the source of VFI was hardly the answer he’d been hoping for. But it was what they had.

“Like I said, no phones. And mail can take weeks to get there. We’re really talking about the middle of the jungle.”

“Then we’ll send a plane in,” he said.

“I thought the Guatemalans weren’t cooperating.”

With thousands now infected here, it would be very difficult to convince anyone in the States, let alone Guatemala, that sending a team into the jungle in search of vanished ruins was the best move. “Figure out the location and we’ll make them do it,” he told her.

“I’ll do everything I can,” she said.

“I know you will, Chel.” He spoke her name as she had pronounced it to him when they first met—with a soft syllable, as if he was saying “shhhell.” It was the first time he’d said it aloud. For a second he worried he’d screwed it up.

All she said was, “I’ll call soon, Gabe.”

Wind rolled in off the ocean, and the marine layer shielded the rising sun. By the time they hung up, the guardsmen had put the quarantine violators into the army helicopter and taken off. Only the small bubble chopper still sat on the sand. Two of the AA guys were peering inside the empty cockpit, probably trying to assess if they could get into the air again.

As one of them reached a heavily inked arm through the window, Stanton was reminded of someone. He turned and hurried down the boardwalk. Metal gates on stores had been pried open and were curled up like old-fashioned sardine cans. Cars had never been allowed on the Walk, but now he had to navigate around abandoned junkers every few feet. A pickup truck had crashed through the brick wall, directly into a store. The lawn area between the pavement and the beach was strewn with dozens of yellow T-shirts with the logo VENICE, WHERE ART MEETS CRIME printed across them.

Approaching the Freak Show just off the walk, Stanton saw something moving out front. On the steps, a two-headed iguana jerked back and forth. The glass doors to the building had been smashed in by looters, and the animals had gotten out.

The iguana scurried back up into the Freak Show building. Stanton followed.

Inside, everything was destroyed.

The room reeked of formaldehyde spilling out from broken preservation jars. A two-headed garter snake lay dead beneath an overturned pedestal. No trace of the other animals. Stanton ran to the small office in back. Neither Monster nor the Electric Lady was there. The laptop that his friend always had with him was smashed into pieces on the desk, and Monster’s windbreaker lay abandoned on the small cot.

STANTON FELT HOLLOW as he headed back home. Inside, there was an obstacle course of equipment and power cords hooked up to the portable generator they’d brought in. Drying racks and centrifuges sat on the floor, beside furniture half covered by plastic sheets.

Davies and Thane stood in the kitchen, sipping the last of the coffee from a machine hooked up to the generator. “Where’d you go?” Davies asked. “Quick surf? Ice cream cone? I hear the salted caramel is delicious at N’ice Cream.”

Stanton ignored him. “No one came by at any point when I wasn’t here, did they?”

Monster knew where Gabe lived from an Art Walk event Stanton had once invited him to. Maybe, if he’d been in trouble…

Davies shook his head. “Expecting trick-or-treaters? I suppose I must look like I’m dressed for Halloween.” He was wearing an old button-down and a pair of Stanton’s khakis while he washed his own clothes. Seeing Davies dressed down was like the final sign that the world had come undone.

Stanton turned to Thane. “You all right?”

“Ready to do this thing.”

“Speaking of,” Davies said, “got a tiny bright spot for you. I think the antibodies are finished sooner than we thought.”

The high-powered microscope in the dining room ran on a second electric generator. Stanton stared into the eyesights. After injecting the knockout mice with VFI, they’d placed antibodies the animals produced into a test tube with more of the diseased human prions, and the results were astounding. Every slide here showed protein transformation that was either slowed or halted entirely.

Davies motioned at Thane. “Now all she has to do is inject them into her friends’ IVs and not get caught.”

Thane’s condition for participating was that the test group consist of her sick friends and colleagues from Presbyterian Hospital. She knew she was taking a risk with their lives if the antibody didn’t work. She also knew it was the only chance they had.

“How long will it be until we know something?” she asked.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Stanton said. “The preparations won’t be ready for another twelve hours.”

Davies smiled. “Anyone want to go work on their tan?”

“And then?” Thane asked.

“If it works, we should see some results within a day,” Stanton said.

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Don’t know about you Yanks,” Davies said, “but if it doesn’t, I for one am going to find a way out of this godforsaken country.”

TWENTY

HE HAD DECIDED TO BUILD THEIR CITY IN THE VERDUGO MOUNTAINS because of its spiritual significance to the Tongva—the people of the earth—who ruled the L.A. basin for thousands of years before the arrival of the Spanish. On a twenty-acre plot, which he had convinced L.A. County to sell during the budget crisis, he and his daykeeper and their growing community of followers had quietly built fifteen small stone abodes, each capable of housing up to four members. They had won the necessary permits, befriended the regular hikers, and filed the documents of incorporation for a self-sustaining agrarian community twenty miles outside the city.

“We did this,” he’d told them just a month ago, while his daykeeper looked on with pride. “All of us. Together.” And he meant it. They had done it, even if some of the twenty-six men, women, and now two children born into the community didn’t realize their own part in the achievement. That day, a few of them had asked him to speak from the hilltop, rather than from the humble doorstep of his house. But he had just smiled. “There might be a king among us someday,” he’d told them, “but not today, and it’s certainly not me.”

Once he’d been a soldier. He’d spent most of his life in the deserts: Arizona, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. The first time they’d sent him to Guatemala, he could barely breathe the wet air. Could barely handle being trapped beneath the teeming tree canopy that sucked up all the light. But then he had fallen in love with the place. Not with Guatemala City and its thieves and beggars; not with the soldiers he was sent to train, with their unearned swagger. He fell in love with the hidden world of the jungle.

At first, the indígenas were blurry figures on the sides of the rural roads, hardly looking up from their labor as he hurtled by in a military jeep. But then he explored the ruins of Tikal and Copan on his weekends off base. He read about the culture that survived the conquistadores and then centuries of men like him sent to destroy it. He began to understand the prophecies of their ancestors, how much they’d understood about the secret ways of the world. By the time he met the daykeeper, he knew what he had to do.

Because he had been a soldier, he understood the value of firm command, and he’d used it to bring his followers under his sway. But command could do only so much, he also knew. A soldier learned to follow his leader anywhere, at any cost. That taught men to win battles, but it did not make for enduring cultures. It did not teach habitual followers to become leaders and priests, to set the foundations of a city that would survive longer than he and the daykeeper. Their followers who pleaded with him to climb hilltops and give speeches did it because they needed orders. They needed someone to rule from above. They had built a city from scratch with their bare hands, yet they were terrified of building a civilization. They’d sacrificed so much for their beliefs—family, jobs, and more—and now a very frightening thing had happened: They’d been proven right.

He stared out the window of his little house in the mountains, maybe for the last time. After all the preparation, all the planning, these hills had turned out not to be the refuge they’d needed. Remote as it was, it was still in the quarantine zone, among the thousands dying in this city and the tens of thousands more who would be dying soon. He would have to lead his people to a place they knew only from books, and he knew not all of them would survive the journey.

He turned his eyes from the window and composed his expression so that even these senior members—the two men and one woman who now sat around this dining table—would see only inspiring certainty.

“Eighteen months of construction,” Mark Lafferty was saying. “And now we’re going to have to start all over again.”

Lafferty was a middle-aged structural engineer who’d grown up near Three Mile Island, which entitled him to a tragic outlook. He was useful, though. He’d supervised all this construction.

Instead of responding, their leader stood up with a flourish and paced the little room. They watched him appear to gather his thoughts. Sometimes it made him sad how easy it was to play on people’s desire for command. If he didn’t have the daykeeper to talk to, he’d be bored out of his mind.

“Mark,” he said, “look at the fantastic job you all did here. Imagine how much better you’ll do once you can use the original materials. Clay, wood, proper thatch. And we’ll have more room to grow down there too. Much more than we could ever have had here. Besides, look into your heart. You all know as well as I do that these hills were never quite right for us. We always needed to head south.”

He took his seat again. On the table were maps of Los Angeles, the western seaboard, and the path through Mexico into Central America. There were places along the way where Lafferty, if he became a tax on the group morale, could be left behind. Those kinds of decisions lay ahead. First came the escape—and the one task remaining before it.

He knew the next to speak would be David Sarno. Sarno had been one of their earliest recruits. He was an ex-industrial farmer who’d become disgusted with genetically modified organisms. A man who knew soil and crops, he also had an authority that could be cultivated. “Based on the average temperatures down there, we won’t have any trouble growing corn or beans, of course. Wheat may be harder, but we don’t need wheat.”

“What does the daykeeper think?” Laura Waller asked. When he had met Laura and recruited her, she was a thirty-two-year-old school-teacher, freshly divorced after four devastating failures at in vitro fertilization. Now she was thirty weeks’ pregnant with the child they had conceived naturally.

“He agrees. South is the only way.”

Lafferty spoke up again. “We need eight trucks to get everything out. How are we going to get that many trucks across the border?”

He shuffl ed the maps quietly. “We’ll get everything in four trucks at most, prioritizing seeds, medical supplies, and weapons.”

The front door opened. The daykeeper. Relief flooded the room at his safe arrival. The daykeeper meant to these people. He was warm. Kind. Compassionate about them and their lives.

“Daykeeper, come, sit. Are you thirsty?”

“I’m fine, Colton. Thank you.”

Victor wiped a bit of sweat from his brow, sat down at the table. “This might be the only peaceful part of L.A. County left,” he said.

Lafferty started to dig back into logistics, but Shetter quickly cut him off. “Thank you all for your counsel. Now would you all give me a few minutes with the daykeeper?”

Shetter kissed Laura on the cheek as she left with the others.

“Are they handling the change of plans?” Victor asked when they were alone.

“They’re afraid,” Shetter said.

“We should all be afraid.”

“But they’re also stronger than they think they are.”

Even before they’d met, Shetter had known Victor’s work. At meetings of his early Internet recruits, Shetter had often read aloud from Victor’s writings on the Long Count. Then, eighteen months ago, the two men had found themselves sitting next to each other at the ritual incense ceremony at the ruins of El Mirador. Shetter knew it couldn’t be a coincidence. They’d been perfect partners from the start. Victor had an unparalleled command of the ancient history and the capacity to inspire their people, and he left the planning to Shetter.

Victor pulled a sheaf of papers from his satchel. “Here are the latest pages that have been translated. If anyone’s still on the fence, this will put their doubts to rest.”

The codex was the final proof of their collective destiny. It showed not only that the ancients had predicted 2012 but that a prescient few had foreseen the collapse and had survived by escaping the cities.

Shetter read the newest sections of the translation. “Someday children will know these lines as well as they know the Pledge of Allegiance. Pretty incredible, don’t you think?” Around Victor, he allowed himself the excitement that he kept from the others.

Victor nodded but seemed distracted.

“Are you all right?” Shetter asked.

“Fine.”

“Do we have a problem?”

“Not at all.”

Shetter slowly shifted back to business, to the details at hand. “Did you get the blueprints?”

“We won’t need them.”

The diagram Victor handed him was just a simple visitor’s map of the Getty Museum. There were no dimensions, no electrical lines, no security schematics. Victor would be invaluable in the new world, but he wasn’t prepared in this one.

“Trust me,” Victor said. “It won’t be difficult to get inside.”

Shetter had already decided not to raise the subject of weapons with the daykeeper. Victor blamed much of the world’s decline on the technology of war; he insisted that their new society must not even speak of such things. So Shetter would oblige him for now, by keeping the Luger P08 in his pocket to himself.

TWENTY-ONE

CHEL AND PATRICK HAD SPENT THE REST OF THE NIGHT AND early morning checking and rechecking the coordinates that suggested a connection between Kiaqix and Paktul’s lost city. She left the observatory just after ten a.m. Patrick was headed back to Martha. As they’d said goodbye beneath the central dome, Chel had realized that she had no idea when she’d see him again, or under what circumstances, and she didn’t like the feeling. So she tried to do again what had always come easily to her before: putting her work first. She sped west, oblivious to the looting, the fires, and the abandoned vehicles all around her.

“He could’ve been one of them,” Rolando’s voice cut in and out over her Bluetooth. What he was suggesting—that the scribe from the lost city could be one of the Original Trio—was slightly less absurd today than it would have been yesterday.

“We don’t even know the city actually exists,” Chel said.

“His spirit animal is a macaw. Wouldn’t he be the perfect candidate to consider thousands of macaws in one place a good omen?”

Chel tried to take the leap from myth to history: A nobleman and his two wives wander the forest after fleeing a city in turmoil. On the third day out, they find a glade where hundreds of scarlet macaws are perched in the trees. Like all the ancient Maya, they believe the birds have great spiritual power. The trio assumes they’ve found an auspicious place to settle in the jungle, and Kiaqix is founded.

“When we finish translating, maybe we’ll see that Paktul married those two little girls, and they became the founders,” Rolando said.

As his voice cut out again, Chel had to swerve around an abandoned Prius in front of the La Brea Tar Pits. Thousands of animals had gotten stuck in the bubbling tar during the last Ice Age, which fossilized everything from mastodons to saber-tooth cats. What would be left of humans here in ten millennia? Chel wondered.

Continuing down Wilshire, she saw graffiti everywhere. The city’s street artists had taken advantage of preoccupied police to tag every available surface: Crip signs, Banksy imitators, and the cartoon initials of freelancers. Then, on the side of a building just west of La Brea Avenue, Chel saw scrawled:

The Maya plumed serpent god—Gukumatz, as the Qu’iche people called it—was sometimes represented by a snake swallowing its own tail. It symbolized the harvest, the cycles of time, and her people’s deep connection to their past. The Greeks called it Ouroboros; to them it had represented something similar. But Chel knew that whoever had painted this intended something else. Gukumatz had been appropriated by the 2012ers, not to symbolize renewal but to evoke the destruction they thought would come with the end of the Long Count cycle—as a reminder that every race of man before ours has been destroyed, devoured by the unrelenting serpent of time.

The signal patched itself back together, and Chel heard Rolando’s voice in her car again. “Hello? Chel, you still there?”

“I’m here. Do me a favor. Put Victor on the phone.”

“Try his cell. He went home to get some journal article from the seventies he thought might help with the Akabalam glyph. Apparently he’s been hoarding back issues for decades.”

“I’m aware.”

“When will you be back here?”

“As soon as I can.”

“And you’re headed to?”

“To talk to the one person who knows more about Kiaqix than I do.”

CHEL BANGED REPEATEDLY on the massive bronze doors of Our Lady of the Angels, which less than a week ago seemed to Chel like the paragon of excess, and now seemed like a godsend. When they finally opened, she was welcomed with a gun pointed at her face.

“Jesus, Jinal, it’s me. Chel.”

“Sorry,” he responded in Qu’iche. He holstered his weapon and closed the door behind them. “There were protestors outside earlier. They wanted to send us all back across the border. Do you know Karana Menchu? She was running low on formula, so she went out—the back way—but they found her and started pushing her around.”

“Is she okay?”

“She’s going to be fine, but she was crying when I saw her.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Yes. But we’re pretty much at the bottom of the priority list.”

Chel saw tension in his face. Chel had known the young man since 2007, when he came from Honduras after years of work in the tobacco fields. She touched his arm. “Thanks for watching out for everyone, Jinal,” she said.

“Of course.”

“Have you seen my mother?” Chel had finally convinced Ha’ana to come here with the rest of Fraternidad.

Jinal nodded. “I think she’s in the main sanctuary.”

Chel headed past the chaplains’ offices and the stairs leading down to the mausoleum, where Gutierrez had shown her the codex. She made her way by the cafeteria, where a handful of Fraternidad in eye shields were preparing the large group’s next meal, including Vicente and Ina Larakam, who waved at her. Reaching the sanctuary, she inhaled the smell of incense that always greeted her here.

Luis, one of the younger daykeepers, said a prayer at the altar. “These spirits must be purified, so the people may dream. Save the people from their self-destruction. Deliver them to the earth mother, so they may connect with their spirit animals again.”

The Maya considered sleep a religious experience, a time when people communed with the gods. To them, insomnia was the result of a lack of piety, and Chel knew there were many here who believed that VFI had been sent by the gods as a punishment. In this, they and the picketers were probably more alike than they knew.

Chel tried to calculate how much sleep she’d had in the past four days. She’d stolen catnaps on the love seat in her office, but for all intents and purposes there was little difference between her and someone in the first stages of VFI. She didn’t believe in the deities of her ancestors, but she certainly felt like she was being punished.

An elderly man wearing black slacks and a gray button-down shirt headed down the aisle toward her. The entire congregation was wearing eye shields, so it was difficult to differentiate people in the crowd. Only when he got close did Chel recognize his white beard. It was one of the few times she had seen Maraka out of his traditional robes.

“Chel,” he said, embracing her, “you’re safe. Thank God.”

“Daykeeper,” she whispered.

Maraka looked up at the pulpit. “Luis has been going on and on with prayers all day and night,” he said, not bothering to whisper. “I think it’s excessive. The gods are all-powerful. They hear us, believe me.”

Chel managed a smile.

“But I assume you haven’t come here to pray,” Maraka said.

“I need to see my mother.”

Maraka pointed to the far end of the sanctuary, where several indígenas women were seated in the pews, far from the altar.

As Chel approached, Ha’ana glanced up from the People magazine she was reading. She stood and pulled her daughter close. The magazine was expected, but Chel was surprised by the hug—it had been years since her mother had embraced her in this way. She felt something inside her give, and suddenly a huge wave of fatigue threatened to engulf her.

“You look like you haven’t slept,” Ha’ana said.

“I’ve been working.”

“Still? It’s ridiculous, Chel. What could be so important?”

THEY FOUND A LITTLE EMPTY classroom with chairs arranged in a horseshoe, deep in the west arm of the cathedral’s cross. Watercolor paintings of Joseph and his famous coat adorned every wall. These circumstances were hardly what Chel had envisioned when she’d imagined showing her mother the codex, but now she had no choice. She talked Ha’ana through the book’s connection to the illness and the apparent importance of Kiaqix to finding the source. Chel didn’t mention the trouble she faced with ICE and the Getty—the last thing she needed right now was to give Ha’ana cause for disappointment in her.

They scrolled rapidly through pages of the codex on her laptop screen. What it meant to Ha’ana to see something like this and, even more, to learn that the village she’d abandoned years ago was the possible source of VFI, Chel couldn’t tell. Her mother’s expression revealed nothing.

“So, Mom,” Chel said, “I need you to try to remember everything that happened when cousin Chiam went to find the lost city.”

Ha’ana put a hand on Chel’s arm. “I’ve been worried about you. I hope you know that. Now I know I was right to worry. This must be an incredible burden.”

“I’m fine. Now, please, Mom. I need you to remember.”

Ha’ana stood and wandered silently to the window. Chel prepared for her mother’s resistance, gathering all the reasons she would give for why Ha’ana had to dig back into a past that she never wanted to revisit.

To Chel’s surprise, Ha’ana needed no prompting.

“Your father’s cousin was the most skilled tracker in Kiaqix,” she began. “He could follow a deer for miles through the forest. From the time we were children, he was known as the best hunter in the village. But then the army came to the Petén, and indígenas were being murdered in the streets. Hanged from the tops of churches and burned alive. After the army made it to Kiaqix and your father was arrested, Chiam stepped into his place. It was he who read your father’s letters from prison aloud in community circle.”

Chel was pleased with the ease of her mother’s narration. She hadn’t heard Ha’ana volunteer anything about the letters her father wrote from prison for years, and she didn’t dare interrupt.

“Chiam was more militant than your father,” she continued. “He threatened to punish any of us who worked for a ladino, swore to kill as many of them as possible. He wanted to kill them as they killed us. Even your father’s letters were too soft for Chiam. The two of them had argued, but they were still close. When Alvar was arrested, I knew Chiam would do anything he could to get him out. Prisoners could sometimes be bought for the right price, so Chiam made contact with the guards at Santa Cruz. The price for your father was one hundred thousand quetzals.”

Chel stood up. “And that’s why Chiam tried to find the lost city? Why have you never told me that before?”

“Chiam didn’t want anyone to know he’d do business with the ladinos, even to get his own cousin out. Plus, if he found anything, he wouldn’t be proud of robbing our ancestors to bribe the enemy. Still, he went. And after twenty days he returned and told us what he’d found. He told us there was enough gold and jade to feed Kiaqix for fifty years.”

Chel knew the rest of the story well, but only now did she understand its profound connection to her father’s life, and death. His cousin told the villagers that the souls of the ancestors still lived deep in the jungle and that to steal from them would anger the gods. He said the lost city was a spiritual gateway to the other worlds and that it proved the glory of what the Maya once were and could be again. And that once he’d seen the ruins with his own eyes, he couldn’t move a single stone or take a single artifact from its resting place. Not for any reason.

The problem was that no one believed him. No one could accept that he had found treasures and simply left them there. After days of ridicule, Chiam claimed he would lead a team back into the jungle to prove himself. But, before he could, the Guatemalan army hanged him with a dozen other men from across the Petén for their revolutionary activities.

“Chiam gave many details,” Ha’ana continued. “He said there were twin temples that faced each other, and a great patio with huge columns, where our ancestors would have met to discuss politics. Can you believe it? He thought his stories would remind us we were just as smart as the ladinos. But he was not cunning enough, and everyone knew he wasn’t telling the truth. He was a good, kind man, but his story was a lie.”

“He said there was a patio?” Chel said. “With huge columns?”

“Something like that.”

“How tall? Thirty feet?”

“He could have said a thousand feet. No one was listening.”

But Paktul had described a colonnade in Kanuataba’s main plaza that circled a small interior court, with pillars that were six or seven men high. And while twin temples existed at dozens of Maya cities, columns built that high existed at only one or two places in Mexico. In Guatemala they were half as tall or less.

“He might have found it,” Chel said. She started to explain the connection she’d made, but her mother wasn’t interested in hearing it. “The lost city is a myth,” Ha’ana said. “Like all lost cities.”

“We’ve found lost cities before, Mom. They’re out there.”

Ha’ana took a breath. “I know you want to believe this now, Chel.”

“This isn’t about me.”

“Every villager in Kiaqix wants to believe in the lost city,” Ha’ana said. “They deceive themselves because it gives them hope. But that does not make the oral history any more than what it is: the silly stories of people who cannot know better. I didn’t bring you here and raise you to be one of them.”

Chel had been surprised by her mother’s willingness to talk about Chiam. But now she knew: No matter what effect these last days had on her, Ha’ana was still the same woman who’d abandoned her family’s home, who’d abandoned everything her husband believed in. The same woman who’d spent thirty-three years trying to forget what happened, denying the importance of their culture and tradition.

“Maybe you don’t believe in the lost city because of what it would mean for you, Mom.”

“What are you saying?”

It wasn’t worth it. “Forget it. I have to go. I have work to do.”

What time was it?

Chel glanced at her phone. There she found an email from Stanton waiting:

She reread the message. For some reason Chel liked knowing he was keeping tabs on her.

Ha’ana was saying something. “You’re really going to search for these ruins now? In the middle of this?”

Chel stood. “Mom, we’re going to search for them because of all this.”

“Search how?”

“With satellites that scan the area for ruins,” Chel said, formulating a plan. “Or on the ground if we can’t find them from the air.”

“Please tell me you won’t go into the jungle yourself, Chel.”

“If the doctors need me to, I will.”

“It’s not safe. You know it’s not safe.”

“Father wasn’t afraid to do what he had to.”

“Your father was a tapir,” Ha’ana said. “And the tapir fights, but he doesn’t run into the jaguar’s den to be slaughtered.”

“And you were a fox,” Chel said. “The gray fox that is unafraid of humans, even those who hunt it. But you lost your wayob’s spirit when you abandoned Kiaqix.”

Ha’ana turned away. It was a great insult to suggest a Maya wasn’t worthy of her wayob, and Chel instantly regretted her words. Despite her mother’s long, fractured relationship with her origins, her wayob was still a part of her.

“You help many people here,” Ha’ana said after a long pause. “Yet I hear that every time you come, you come only at the end of services. Deep down you don’t believe in the gods either. So maybe we are more similar than you think.”