12.21 (31 page)

And according to the news reports, CDC had things closer to home to worry about: People were slipping out of L.A. by land, air, and sea, and the quarantine wouldn’t hold much longer. Finding the original source would hardly be Atlanta’s top priority. Words written a thousand years ago would not convince them.

“If Paktul and the three children founded Kiaqix,” Rolando said, “I don’t understand why the myth said it was an Original Trio. There are four of them.”

“The oral history isn’t sacrosanct,” Chel said. “There are so many different versions, and they get passed down across so many generations, it’s not hard to imagine them losing a person in the translation.”

Stanton was only half listening now. Something about the sections he’d just been reading stuck in his mind, and he studied them again. In each passage, the king was proud of how long he and his men had been eating human flesh and the power it had given them. Three hundred suns. For almost a year before the king fed his commoners human meat, he and his men engaged in cannibalism, and they’d clearly eaten brains. So why hadn’t they gotten sick? Had the brains they’d eaten been completely free of prion?

Stanton pointed this out to the team. “Within a month of when the human meat is introduced into the food supply for everyone else,” he said, “it makes everyone—including the king and his men—sick.”

“What happened?” Rolando asked.

“Something changed.”

“Like what?” Chel asked.

“The ancients believed bad things happened when the gods weren’t honored,” Rolando said, invoking Paktul’s claim that whatever once protected the king did no longer. “Many
indígenas
would still tell you disease is a result of the gods’ anger.”

“Well, I would tell you disease is the result of mutated proteins,” Stanton said. “And I don’t believe in scientific coincidences. The king and his men must have eaten a lot more brains in that year than the commoners
could have in a couple of weeks, right? The disease suddenly became destructive, and there had to be a reason.”

“You think it got stronger,” Chel said.

Stanton considered. “Or what if their defense mechanisms got weaker?”

“What do you mean?”

“Think of an AIDS patient,” he said. “HIV weakens the immune system and makes it much easier to get sick.”

Victor glanced at his watch. There was something detached about him. Stanton had to wonder where else the man’s mind could be at a time like this.

“So you think something lowered the defenses of the king and his men?” Rolando asked. “Their immune systems got messed up?”

“Or maybe it was the exact opposite,” Stanton said, connections forming. “They’re in the middle of a societal collapse, right? They were destroying all of their resources, burning down the last of their trees, and running out of everything from food to spices to paper to medicine. Maybe something was artificially raising their defense mechanisms before, and then it stopped.”

“Like a vaccine?” asked Chel.

“More like how quinine prevents malaria, or vitamin C prevents scurvy,” Stanton said. “Something holding the disease back without them even knowing. The king says they consumed the flesh of men for almost a year without being cursed. And Paktul thinks it’s because they stopped making offerings to the gods. But what if they actually lost or stopped consuming whatever was protecting them?”

“Where would they have been exposed to this … prevention?” Victor asked, returning to the conversation.

“It could’ve been something they were eating or drinking. Something plant-based, probably. Quinine was protecting people from malaria long before they knew what it was. Penicillium fungi in soil were probably preventing all kinds of bacterial infections before anyone knew about antibiotics.”

They reexamined every word of the translation, scrutinizing each
reference to plants, trees, foods, or drinks—anything the Maya consumed before the widespread cannibalism began. Corn breakfast mixtures, alcohol, chocolate, tortillas, peppers, limes, spices. They searched for every reference to anything used medicinally. Anything that could have been protecting them.

“We need samples of all of these to test,” Stanton said. “The exact species the ancient people used to eat.”

“Where would we get that?” asked Rolando. “Even if you could find them in the forest, how would we know it was the same species?”

“Archaeologists have extracted residues from pottery,” Chel interjected. “They’ve found trace evidence of dozens of different plant species on a single bowl.”

“Inside tombs?” Stanton asked.

Victor stood up and walked toward the door to the lab. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m going to the washroom.”

“Use the one in my office,” Chel suggested.

He left without a word, seeming not to have heard her. He was acting strangely. A sad possibility suddenly occurred to Stanton; he would have to check the old professor’s eyes for signs of VFI.

Chel said, “We have to go down there.”

“Where exactly?” Rolando asked.

“The opposite direction of Lake Izabal,” she said. “From Kiaqix.”

Paktul wrote that he would lead the children in the direction of his ancestors, and elsewhere in the codex, he’d written that his father hailed from
a great lake beside the ocean
. Lake Izabal in east Guatemala was the only one fitting that description anywhere in the vicinity.

“If he led them toward Izabal,” Chel said, “and they ended up at Kiaqix, we have to assume the lost city’s less than three days’ walk in the opposite direction.”

“Izabal is enormous,” Rolando said. “Hundreds of square miles. The range of that trajectory could be huge.”

“It has to be somewhere in there,” Stanton said.

The lab door opened again. It was Victor. He wasn’t alone.

I
N THE SECONDS THAT FOLLOWED, CHEL CAME TO A SERIES OF
terrible realizations. First, that one of the men with Victor was his friend from the Museum of Jurassic Technology, who’d once advised the
ladino
military. Then, that the two men trailing Colton Shetter—dressed identically to him, in white shirts, black pants, and boots—were dragging a rolling metal warehouse cart between them.

So when Rolando asked, “What’s going on, Victor?” Chel already knew.

They were here to take the codex from her.

Victor had let these people in. He had picked up the phone, called security down the hill, and gotten them waved by.

Chel circled to the front of the light tables, putting herself between the men and the codex. Through her jeans, the cold edges of the metal table pressed into the backs of her legs.

Taking a step into the room, Shetter turned to Victor. “I assume those plates behind her are what we’ve come for.”

Victor nodded.

“Who the fuck are these people?” Rolando demanded. He and Stanton were still behind Chel on the other side of the boards.

“Dr. Manu,” Shetter said, “we will appreciate your and your colleagues’ cooperation. Mark and David have to pack up the plates. I know
how fragile they are, so we want to be as careful as possible. I need you to go back and stand with your team.” Reaching into his waistband, Shetter pulled out a gun, then casually held it at his side. It was so small that it looked like a toy.

“What are you doing?” Victor asked him.

“Making sure we get what we came for,” Shetter said. “I’m sorry, Daykeeper, but I can tell it’s necessary.”

Chel glanced at the intercom panel. There were fifteen feet between where she stood and that wall, but to get there she’d have to make it past Shetter’s men. They started to walk toward her, pulling the warehouse cart behind them like little boys with a sled. She stayed where she was.

She would die here before she would move.

“Why are you doing this, Victor?” Stanton asked from behind her. “What the hell is going on?”

Victor ignored him. When he finally spoke, it was only to his protégée. “Listen to me, Chel. You can come with us. We’re going to the land of the ancients. To your true home. But we must have the book. All we can do now is run, Chel.”

She felt tears streaming down her cheeks. “You’re gonna have to kill me, Victor.”

She was wiping her tears on her sleeve when Rolando made his move. She didn’t see him dart across the room toward the intercom. She only heard the noise that brought him down before he got there.

And the silence after.

Chel ran to him. It seemed to take forever to cross the room. No one tried to stop her.

She didn’t see the blood until she was holding his head in her lap. His hand clutched his belly. Chel covered it with her own.

Shetter’s gun was still pointed in their direction. The look on his face belied the steadiness of his arm. Even he seemed surprised by what he’d done.

“I’m a doctor,” Stanton said, starting to move. “Let me help him!”

“Stay where you are,” Shetter commanded.

“Take what you want and go,” Stanton said. “But let me help him.”
He started to inch over, and, when Shetter didn’t stop him, he moved faster. Shetter kept the gun trained on the three of them.

Chel pressed down on Rolando’s wound. The blood continued to gush. She whispered to him. Trying to keep him conscious.

Victor stood frozen behind Shetter. Silent.

“Get the plates,” Shetter commanded his men.

It took them less than a minute to load up the codex plates and get them out of the room. The two silent men left first, then Shetter.

He turned at the door. “Coming, Daykeeper?” He was confident enough in the answer that he didn’t stay to find out.

Victor stood there, watching Stanton hold pressure on Rolando’s wound with one hand and deliver chest compressions with the other.

Chel held Rolando’s head in her lap. She’d streaked blood from his wound into his hair, and she tried not to stare at the pool spreading beneath them.

“Chel …” Victor finally said. “I didn’t know he had a gun. I’m so sorry. I—”

“You did this, Victor.
You
did this. Get out!”

He turned to leave the room. At the doorway he stopped to whisper back to her,
“In Lak’ech.”
Then he was gone.

A minute later, from her place on the floor with Rolando, Chel saw a flash of the truck’s headlights playing against the lab windows as it vanished into the night.

She knew she would never see Victor or the codex again. And those would be the last words he ever spoke to her.

I am you, and you are me
.

T
HROUGH CLOUDS OF ASH FROM THE WILDFIRES IN THE SANTA MONICA
Mountains, a trio of F-15s in formation roared, leaving contrails in the gray night sky.

Two hours after Victor quietly escorted Shetter and his men past Getty security, Chel stared out the car window in silence. The Pacific Coast Highway looked like a run-down used-car lot—hundreds of vehicles wrecked or out of gas and abandoned, barely allowing a path through.

There’d been nothing she or Stanton could do to save Rolando. They were all covered in blood by the time Stanton had given up trying to revive him. Chel cradled Rolando’s head for nearly twenty minutes, saying a Qu’iche prayer for safe delivery to the overworld into his ear.

She and Stanton still hadn’t spoken a word about what had happened. But they both knew what they had to do.

Stanton pulled his Audi off the highway toward Santa Monica State Beach. The sand was empty. Only a single vehicle sat in the parking lot: He’d called Davies and arranged to meet him here.

Stanton was surprised when he saw another man step out of the car with his partner. “What’s up, Doc?” Monster said.

“I was worried about you, man,” Stanton said. “Where’d you go?”

“Cops kicked us out of the Show, so the little Electric Lady and I found ourselves a hideout in the tunnel beneath the Santa Monica Pier. You
have no idea how useful a woman who can make her own light is down there.”

If Chel was surprised to encounter Venice’s finest example of a human freak, she didn’t show it. She remained silent, her mind still back at the Getty.