12.21 (38 page)

The dwarf, Jacomo, buried with his king.

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

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

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

Their high-pitched screams faded.

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

The monkey-man scribe.

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

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

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

“Can you lift it?” she asked Stanton.

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

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

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

All priceless. But useless.

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

She stopped when she realized Stanton wasn’t even looking at her. He simply walked to where the smaller skeletons lay and wrenched the dwarf’s skull from his body, which gave easily. “What are you doing?” she asked.

Stanton pointed. “The
teeth
.”

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

“I’m never leaving you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“In Lak’ech”
was all she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A beechnut.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her only hope lay elsewhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After studying the sixth, he leaned back in despair.

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

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

He ran to her. Her legs were kicking wildly.

She was having a seizure.

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

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

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

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

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