The Reckoning

“I believe you,” Kleat said, though he didn’t really. It was simply convenient to his argument. “Once this fucking mist thins out, we’ll find them.”

They went back to the fire and their maps on the stone.

“The names don’t change anything,” Duncan said. He didn’t question that she had seen them. He took it on faith. “I still say we should backtrack, take a second look from the outside. Get a handle on the risks.”

“Leave?” said Molly.

She said it with more censure than she meant. The caffeine was kicking in. But also, his apprehension confused her. He was the archaeologist. His job was to pry open the earth and raise cities from the dead. Forget the Blackhorse bones. Forget Kleat. Even forget the typhoon and the rains. In the back of her mind, they were already trapped—held under house arrest—by the river. Something stood at the top of those stairs. This was their chance to raise Atlantis.

“While we still can,” Duncan said to her.

“I keep telling you,” said Kleat, “he’s halfway to China by now. Burma, Afghanistan, wherever the dope grows wild.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Luke?” said Molly, jolted by the sudden awareness. “He’s gone?”

“Unless he spent the night with you,” Kleat said. “No one’s seen him since we arrived.”

Molly looked at the mist. Had he been the one calling her? “He must be here.”

“That’s what I keep saying,” said Duncan.

“Sam took a try looking for him,” Kleat said. “If anybody can track a man, it’s him.”

“We don’t need to go through that again,” Molly said.

“It’s not irrelevant. Your gentle musicologist was also KR.”

The brothers were all watching now. They heard the KR and began murmuring among themselves.

“We’ve been through this,” Molly said quietly.

“And you didn’t believe me.”

“I agreed with Duncan. It’s not our business.”

Kleat gave her an owlish blink. He called across to the fire. “Tell us what you found, Sam.”

“He went this way into the forest,” Samnang said. “Then his footprints disappear.”

“He’s still here,” said Duncan.

“Isn’t that the direction of the gate?” Kleat asked.

“Yes. The gate is that way,” Samnang said.

“He’s not finished with us,” Duncan insisted.

“He’s harmless,” said Kleat. “You’re making monsters.”

“He could be hiding twenty feet away and we wouldn’t know it.”

“Do you want this or not?”

“Maybe you want it too much,” said Duncan. “Think back to last night when we saw him in the restaurant, your own words. You said he must be hunting us.”

Kleat set his knuckles on the map. “Not anymore. Look around. We’re the ones with all the guns.”

“He brought us here for a reason,” Duncan said.

“The reason of a seriously disturbed mind. He brought us here to unload a secret. A big secret. A secret that freaked him out. He found something here and needed to hand it off. Don’t ask me why he chose us. What counts is that now he’s freed. In his mind, he’s released from his burden. We freed him.” Kleat grabbed at the wood smoke and opened his hand to the air. “He’s gone.”

How could she have missed his absence? It seemed ungrateful and wrong to forget someone so easily.

“This was all he had,” she said. “Wouldn’t he hang on to it for dear life? Why leave?”

“For that, Molly,” Kleat said, “you’d need to ask your mother.”

Her mother, again. He was relentless, like a jackal after meat. “What on God’s earth does she have to do with it?”

“You were all she had,” Kleat said, “but she still left you. This place was Luke’s baby. Now he’s thrown it away. You think love heals all. But we’re talking about the damned here. Love is a horror to people like them.”

Molly slapped him. The damned. She slapped him so hard it hurt her hand. His glasses flew off. Coffee spilled across the map.

The brothers halted their low drone.

Molly pulled her hand back. She didn’t know what to say. For better or worse, she wasn’t wired for conflict, much less a lightning bolt like this. She shouldn’t have let him get to her. She shouldn’t have slapped him. Then she thought, The hell with it, maybe she should have slapped him a long time ago.

Kleat nodded his head, thinking, making up his mind. The bared pouches under his eyes were even darker in the daylight. After a minute, he bent to retrieve his glasses. He fit them onto his face.

“Don’t apologize,” Duncan said to her. “If you do, I’ll have to hit him myself.”

“I’m not.” She’d hit Kleat too hard for that. He would take any apology as patronizing, and besides, she wasn’t sorry. “You know,” she said to him, “we could work together here. We came for the same reason.”

Kleat looked at Duncan’s scarf around her neck, red and white checkered like the KR—and millions of other Khmer people—used to wear. She couldn’t tell if he distrusted the scarf or the giving of it to her, again, by Duncan. “I’m not so sure anymore,” he said. “I know why I came. But there seem to be other temptations in the air.”

That quickly, Molly’s anger dissipated. She owed Kleat nothing, not one more emotion, not another thought, and least of all her little flight of fancy about Duncan.

One of them had emptied two MRE packets on the stone top. Molly made a show of pocketing the energy bar. She ripped open the scrambled-egg packet with her teeth and squeezed pieces of it cold into her mouth, wolfing the food down. It took sixty seconds flat. “There, done.” She wiped her mouth. “Later.” She started off into the mist.

“Where are you going?” Kleat said. She looked back at them. Duncan was rearranging his pebbles and twigs on the map. Kleat stood rooted in place with his hands on his hips. The Khmers seemed content hanging by the fire, waiting for the mist.

“I’m getting my socks and shoes out of the truck. Then I’m going up the stairs,” she said. “The light’s too fine to waste.”

16.

By the time she finished tying her shoelaces, the rest were ready to go. They left Samnang and his leg by the fire to watch over the vehicles, and started off in a bunch.

The three brothers soon sprinted ahead, the slaps of their flip-flops fading into the mist above. Molly wanted to go bounding up the stairs with them, but curbed her excitement and stuck with Duncan and, by default, Kleat.

“There will be one hundred and four steps,” Duncan told them. He seemed very certain of it.

“You’ve been here before?” Kleat said, mocking him.

“I could be wrong, of course,” Duncan said. “But the place is monumental, and the statues are like half- breeds, part Buddhist, part animal. My guess is that they built it to a blueprint, one dictated by their gods. They would have dedicated a stair to each of the Buddha’s hundred and four manifestations.”

They were tall, steep, narrow steps, like those found on Mayan pyramids, the kind that take confidence to climb upright without hands. Greasy with fluorescent green and blue moss, they would need special care coming down. Tourists, someday, would require a handrail or a chain to hold on to. Vendors would sell them warm Cokes from the stone terraces.

“You could bleed the ecotourists white with something like this,” Kleat said. “There’s room down there for a parking lot and a lodge. Put it on the water’s edge. Spray the pools for mosquitoes. Clear out the trees.” He pretended only to be tormenting Duncan, the purist. He accused them of giving in to the temptations of the place, and to each other, but Molly heard him warring with himself, the dutiful brother versus the building contractor, the bones versus his visions of development.