Skykeepers

used to make camp, but it seemed smaller than she remembered, and there was no sign of a tent.

Granted, the forest claimed everything after a while, even stone pyramids ten stories high, but she still would’ve expected to find a few pieces of rip-stop or scattered equipment. Something, anyway.

Her pulse bumped, but not with hope. After so many months with no word, it was hard to believe that he could still be alive. No, the skim of nerves came from thinking that instead of a relatively peaceful end in the place he loved, maybe he’d been attacked by human predators, bandits who’d taken his equipment to use what they could, sell what they couldn’t.The possibility had haunted her ever since she’d learned he was missing—a notification that had been delayed months because he hadn’t listed her anywhere as next of kin.

“Don’t talk yourself into freaking out,” she said, swiping at another incoming bug.

And really, there was no reason to panic. Even though she’d gone to culinary school rather than following Ambrose’s charted path for her to become a doctor, she’d taken enough bio classes to know that lack of evidence in favor of one hypothesis didn’t prove the opposite. The absence of tent scraps didn’t necessarily mean he’d been murdered by bandits. Maybe he’d just camped somewhere else.

Still, she sheathed her machete and popped the snap on the midback holster she wore beneath her sweat-soaked tee, and withdrew the .22 chick gun she’d bought at a pawnshop a few miles from the airport. Just in case.

Walking as quietly as she could, though she’d lost some of her childhood forestcraft in the years since she’d cut ties with her old life, she eased along the narrow path, which was little more than a groove in the soft rain forest floor. Ignoring the screeches of parrots and monkeys far above in the canopy, she strained to hear other, closer sounds. Nerves fisted in her chest, and the skin at her nape prickled, but again, there was no evidence supporting her fear. There was only the fear itself.

The lush vegetation thinned out as she crested a low rise that might have once been a fortified wall.

From that high spot, she caught a glimpse of hewn stone forming a stark grayish white contrast to the surrounding greenery—an entrance leading into the earth. Ambrose’s temple. His obsession.

Faint anger twisted at the sight—and the memories it brought—but she ignored it as she headed for the temple entrance, reminding herself she was through chasing love, or even affection. Those were things that had to be given freely, or not at all.

In Ambrose’s case, that would be the latter.

A slight downhill slope led to the temple entrance, which was a plain, unadorned rectangle of stone: vertical slabs on either side, twice the height of a tall man, topped with a wide, uncarved lintel. The dark, forbidding doorway led into a high mound of green-covered stone that had once been a huge ceremonial pyramid.

When she reached the entrance, she fished in her pack for the military-grade flashlight that had been another pawnshop find. She’d passed on the night-vision goggles in favor of a decent one-man tent, but thanks to the creepy-crawlies still working their way up and down her spine, she found herself wishing she’d splurged and bought both.

“Man up. You’re just imagining things,” she muttered, making herself take the first step from soil onto stone. When nothing happened except a ten-degree or so temperature drop, she exhaled a long, slow breath. “See? You can do this.” She might be a decade out of practice, and too ready to believe the prickly heebie-jeebies, but it wasn’t like she had a choice, really. She’d promised long ago never to reveal the temple’s location to anyone else, not even a hint. This had been Ambrose’s spot, the center of his life. And in the end, it had most likely been his death.

She needed to search the temple, needed to find his camp . . . and his body. The thought sucked, but she could cope, would have to cope. Besides, she’d had a few days to get used to the idea that he was truly gone this time, and eight years of silence before that to buffer the separation. There was grief, yes, and some stale, leftover pain, but overall, her foremost emotion was weary resignation as she squared her shoulders and started hiking inward, intent on finding her father’s remains and bringing them back to the States. Although the ruin and rain forest had been more his home than the apartment he and his non-wife, Pim, had shared near Harvard, he’d always insisted that when he died, he wanted to be cremated and tossed to the wind in New Mexico.

Sasha didn’t know why. As a child, she’d suspected that was where her mother had been from, or where she was buried. She’d even visited the spot once, but had found nothing but rocks and wind, making her think that the New Mexico thing was just another of Ambrose’s elaborately constructed delusions, one that meant nothing in real terms. Regardless, it had been his request, and Sasha had felt honor-bound to make it happen, even if it meant trekking through the rain forest, slapping at bugs, and fighting the feeling of being watched.

“Besides,” she muttered, “it’s not like you had anything going on at home. Perfect time for a trip to non- paradise.” She’d just been fired for getting too creative with the head chef’s recipes—again—and she was annoyingly single some six months after a relationship she’d imagined was leading to marriage had turned out to be going nowhere fast. Figuring she was already depressed, and having been unable to get Ambrose out of her head since their brief meeting over the summer, she had tried tracking him down and wound up discovering instead that he’d fallen off the grid.

Missing, presumed dead.

Tightening her grip on the .22, she forged onward. The bright white flashlight beam made jarringly modern-looking shadows in the ancient stone tunnel, and the creepy-crawly nerves in her stomach started to grow claws. She’d been inside the temple before, of course, but that was years ago, and she’d been with Ambrose. More, that had been back when she’d still seen him as more than he was—a real-life Indiana Jones who’d let her come along on his adventures because he’d wanted her there, more even than he’d wanted Pim, who’d always stayed behind. Eventually, though, Sasha had realized those “adventures” were more uncomfortable than exciting, and he’d wanted her there not for her company, but because he’d needed a fellow role-player in his delusions, which over the years had gone from bedtime stories of magical princesses to twisted, apocalyptic ravings.

An echo of anger brushed against her jangling nerves, but she continued along the stone tunnel, skirting the triggered pit trap near the entrance. Beyond the pit trap, the tunnel continued onward to an intersection, where Ambrose had liked to sit and sip the bitter maize-and-chocolate drink she’d made for him from locally bought cacao.

Sasha was pretty sure that was where her interest in cooking—and chocolate—had started, those hours she’d spent watching the villagers separate the cacao beans from the fleshy pods, then ferment them, roast them, grind them, and finally mix the powder with maize to make the sacred chorote, which combined the two plants that formed the basis of the villagers’ lives and livelihoods. Ambrose had insisted she’d turned to cooking simply out of rebellion. And maybe that had been a part of it, too.

Still, the smell and taste of chorote coated her senses as she approached the tunnel fork. Her brain was so primed to see a campsite, and maybe a body, that it took her a few seconds to process what she was actually seeing. There was no campsite, no body; there was only a wall of rubble. The hewn slabs that had lined the corridor had fallen inward, mixing with crumbled limestone, gritty dirt, and more rocks.

The tunnel had caved in, and the damage looked recent.

She hissed out a breath of dismay as her overactive brain filled with images of her father buried beneath the debris, dying there, crushed and suffering.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, no. Ambrose.” The name echoed along the corridor and returned to her on a rattle of sound. She ignored both as she rushed to the collapsed spot. Maybe he was close to the edge.

Maybe she could get at him somehow. Maybe, some foolishly hopeful part of her said, he’s trapped on the other side with all his camping gear and rations, waiting for someone to dig him out.

She was so focused on the rubble that she initially missed seeing a strange shadow over to one side, partially shielded behind a larger chunk of stone. Then it caught her eye. She froze, disbelieving, then turned slowly and moved around the larger stone to get a better look. Her heart shuddered to a stop at the sight confronting her, then started pounding again, hard and fast. “No,” she whispered. Then louder, “No!”

A human skull sat atop a stack of debris that had been carefully formed into the shape of a knee-

high pyramid, mimicking the skull piles, the tzomplanti that the more warlike Mesoamerican cultures had used to boast of their victories. At first her mind tried to tell her that the skull atop the