Curse of the Ancients (11 page)

“We’re leaving right this second,” Dak said. “We heard there might be another group coming through here, and I don’t want to take any chances.”

Sera was already kneeling down onto the path and reaching into her satchel for the Ring. She pulled it out and powered it on.

Riq looked at Kisa. He decided he had to stay anyway. She would come around in time. “Dak, Sera,” he began, “this is very hard for me to say, but —”

“Do you all have everything you need?” Kisa interrupted, pushing herself forward again.

“I think we do,” Dak said. He turned to Riq. “Sera and I now believe the codex is supposed to remain here in the village under Kisa and Pacal’s protection. Right, Sera? You think our mission was just to get it back from those men?”

“I’m positive,” Sera answered, looking up. “Which we’ve done thanks to you, Riq.”

“Honestly,” Dak said. “Great work, dude.”

Riq was going to try one more time to explain he intended to stay, but then he saw the callous look on Kisa’s face. Like he suddenly disgusted her. And then one of Itchik’s men said, “Look!” His finger was pointing down the path to where a third group of Calakmul men was fast approaching. There were at least fifteen men marching in formation, less than fifty yards away.

“Come on!” Dak shouted at Sera. “We need to do this now!”

“I’m trying!” Sera shouted back.

Itchik and his men were already retreating up into the jungle. Riq grabbed Kisa’s arm before she could go and said, “You really want me to leave?”

She stared back at him, completely straight-faced, and said simply, “Yes.” Then she handed Riq the locket. Riq looked at the snake carved into the front of it. Then he looked up at Kisa, his heart breaking. “But I thought —”

“You thought wrong,” she said, cutting him off.

He let her go — the only thing he could do — and watched her disappear into the bushes.

“Stay where you are!” one of the Calakmul men shouted at Riq, Dak, and Sera.

Riq turned and saw the men hurrying toward them.

“Now, Sera!” Dak shouted.

“Got it!” she shouted back. “Grab on!”

Riq reluctantly reached for a part of the Ring, staring up at the tree Kisa had just ducked behind. His face stung. And his back and ribs and head were pulsing with pain. But that was nothing compared to the pain he felt inside. Something had changed for Kisa. She no longer wanted him around.

The men were less than ten yards away when Sera shouted, “Here we go!”

The Ring brightened, and Riq was so jarred by the abrupt feeling of its power that he accidentally dropped the locket onto the ground. “Wait!” he shouted, reaching down for it, but just before he could wrap his fingers around the snake’s metal tail he was whisked away into blackness and it was lost.

S
ERA IS
sucked right back into her memory of the Cataclysm.

She sees herself in the small motorized emergency raft again, speeding through intersection after intersection. And she’s screaming, begging for all of it to stop. The fires. The flooding. The acid rain pouring down from above. The earth’s violent shaking.

Sera zips past several miles of absolute destruction until she’s out of the city and turns onto her childhood street. She lets off the gas as she nears her house, then dives overboard and swim-walks her way up the flooded driveway. When she reaches a trembling hand out for the doorknob, she half expects to black out or be whisked away — like every other time she’s tried to access her memory of the Cataclysm.

But this time she remains present.

She watches herself slowly turn the knob, push open the door, creep inside the only home she’s ever known. “Uncle Diego!” she calls out.

No answer.

Sera moves through the living room, leaving the front door wide open behind her. The wood floors are covered in two feet of grayish water. Many of her uncle’s possessions are submerged or floating randomly: books, documents, framed photos, candles, old newspapers and magazines, vases. Most of the furniture is overturned. A leg is missing from the dining room table. The TV is knocked over and punctured. The mirror below the clock is shattered and hanging askew. It looks like someone has ransacked the place, looking for something, but what?

The kitchen is even worse. The fridge is wide open and mostly cleaned out, its door ripped from the hinges. The cupboards are full of broken plates and glasses. Sera stops cold when she sees the empty wooden knife block. The utensil drawer is still full of forks and spoons. But the knives are gone. Where are the knives?

“Uncle Diego!” she calls out again.

Nothing.

Sera sloshes out of the kitchen, but when she rounds the corner she lets out a short scream. There, frozen on the stairs, is a rail-thin man wearing her uncle’s raincoat. Long, unkempt hair and shaggy beard. Bugged eyes. The man looks half-dead already.

Sera’s heart is beating inside her throat as she says, “Who are you?”

Instead of answering, the man leaps down the rest of the stairs and splashes his way across the living room.

“Stop!” Sera shouts, but he’s already out the door.

She bounds up the waterlogged stairs, her whole body now wired with fear. What if something happened to her uncle? She pushes open her own bedroom door first. A few items are scattered around the floor. But otherwise it’s the way she left it. She continues to her uncle’s bedroom door and reaches for the doorknob, preparing herself for what she might find.

She slowly pushes open the door and looks around.

There’s an unfamiliar sleeping bag in the middle of the room. Trash piled in the far corner. But nothing else out of the ordinary. The man she’d just seen had most likely been living there. But for how long? And where was her uncle?

That’s when it hits Sera.

She has to go and see about the barn.

The rushing water is up to Sera’s waist as she steps up to the front door of the barn. She has to keep a wide stance and lean against the current to keep from getting swept away. Before she pulls open the heavy door she flashes back to all the Remnants she’s had over the years, many of which have involved this very barn. She’s always known it’s important. But she’s afraid to find out why.

Sera forces herself to pull open the door, and as soon as it’s halfway open she peeks her head inside and sees a body floating faceup in the water.

She immediately falls to her knees, sobbing.

Her uncle Diego.

The only family she’s ever known.

His face strangely contorted, eyes wide open.

She covers her own face, and then slaps down at the water and stands back up. Behind her uncle she spots four more bodies. All floating facedown.

She moves toward them, hiccupping and gasping for breath, tears streaming down her face. Her right hand shakes as she reaches out for the dead man’s cold arm, turns over his body. It’s a face she’s never seen before. But at the same time, it’s oddly familiar. She turns over a dead woman next to him, which evokes the same strange feeling. She can’t pinpoint the familiarity. But it’s incredibly powerful.

The third and fourth bodies make her fall to her knees again, slapping at the water and shouting, “No! Please!”

Dak’s parents.

She buries her face in her hands and cries so hard that strange animal sounds are escaping from her throat and she can hardly breathe.

And then a horrific thought occurs to her and she looks up at the first two bodies again. She stares at their faces. Then she looks at Dak’s parents again and back at her uncle. The two unknown faces are oddly familiar. Oddly like her own face.

“No,” she whispers, moving back toward the first man again, studying his eyes and mouth. “No.”

She reaches into his back pocket for his wallet, then pulls out his ID and reads the name:

Daniel Froste.

Her father.

She stares down at the man without crying or breathing, and then she looks at the woman. Her mother. Then she angles her own face up at the ceiling and screams so piercingly loud her ears continue ringing long after she closes her mouth.

The parents she’s never known have come back for her.

And now they’re dead.

Sera rips at her own hair and forces her head underwater, right cheek pressed up against the muddy ground. She stays like this until her lungs burn and her thoughts grow thin and disappear, and she can no longer stand the pain in her chest.

Still she refuses to let herself up, and then the memory slips away and she is lost.

S
ERA OPENED
her eyes, shaking uncontrollably.

Her body no longer felt real now that she’d broken through her repressed memory of the Cataclysm. She felt fake. Made up. Though she was clearly sitting on the clay dirt, behind a massive building, it felt like she was floating floating floating. Up into the sky. Into nothingness.

Everyone was going to die.

Including the parents she’d always dreamed about. They would die trying to fight their way back to her. She’d find them in her uncle’s barn.

Her Remnants would forever take on an entirely different meaning.

Sera turned and saw Dak and Riq looking around, taking in their new environment — which wasn’t new so much as updated. They’d landed in the exact same place they’d landed the last time they warped. Mayan country. Izamal. In a large patch of tall, thick grass. Except where the fallen observatory rubble once lay, a beautiful new observatory, twice the size of its predecessor, now stood. Itchik had done exactly what he had promised. And the temple, where Sera had just watched Pacal paint a ceiba tree into the codex, had been transformed into a massive church.

Judging by the sun, it was late afternoon. The people walking the raised white road in the distance were a combination of traditional Mayas and white men dressed in pious robes. Sera knew right away they were the Franciscan monks she’d read about, the ones who settled in Mayan villages and tried to convert the indigenous people to their own religious beliefs.

“I’m not saying anything this time,” Dak suddenly announced.

Sera found Dak staring at her. Poor Dak. Her best friend had no idea what she’d found in her uncle Diego’s barn.

“Nope,” Dak said, shaking his head. “I refuse to even bring up the fact that tears are literally streaming down your face. Uh-uh. My lips are sealed.”

Sera couldn’t bring herself to tell him about his parents. It was too awful. And it was way off in the future. At the same time, Dak was so worried about his parents being lost in time. Wouldn’t he want to know that they’d made their way back?

Sera stared at Dak, trying to decide if it was better to know the unbearable truth or live as long as possible in happy ignorance.

“Know why I’m keeping quiet?” Dak said. “Because it’s none of my business. Who am I to point out that you’re shaking like a hairless dog in the snow?”

“It’s just the warp again,” Sera managed to say.

Dak held up his hands, saying, “Eh, eh, eh. No need to even discuss it, Sera. I’m steering clear of your hysterics from now on.” He turned to Riq, said, “I see Lover Boy over here has the same strategy.”

Riq didn’t even look up.

“Wow,” Dak said, turning back to Sera. “What’s wrong with you people? Last time I checked, I was the one who nearly got decapitated by a falling wall.”