The Reckoning

“That would destroy everything,” Duncan said.

“Do you seriously think you can hold on to this for yourself? The jack is out of the box. There’s no stuffing him back in again.”

“We’ll have to keep it secret until we can get the proper protections in place,” Duncan said. “You don’t rush something like this. The restoration will take years, even decades.”

“First thing,” Kleat said, “I’d clear the trees. The quickest way would be explosives. Give me a few pounds of C4, I could open up the sky. Better yet, bring in the loggers. Let the development pay for itself.”

Duncan stopped on the stairs. “Kill the trees and you kill the city. Without the trees, it would fall to pieces.”

What city? It was all conjecture. But like them, Molly was eager. She craved whatever waited above, in the mist. The stairs were building to a climax. Something was up there, she could feel it.

“After the destruction we saw coming in last night?” she said. “It looked like the forest is ripping the place to shreds.”

“I know that’s how it looks. But the trees are the only thing binding it together,” Duncan said. “It’s true, the trees have invaded the architecture, but they’re also locking it in place. I’ve seen this at other sites. The forest is like a living glue.”

He started pointing out the phantoms of trees in the mist. “Banyan trees. Giant strangler figs. And that one there, the most common invader, a form of ficus. ‘Spong,’ the Cambodians call it, Tetrameles nudiflora. They can live for up to two hundred years, and all the while birds are scattering more seeds, spreading the forest’s skeleton.”

Kleat lost interest in his game. “We didn’t come for this. The ruins are a distraction. Ignore the city, if that’s what it is. Our mission is to find the remains of the Eleventh Cavalry men.”

“You need to be prepared to find nothing,” Duncan said.

“We know now they were here.”

“Were. It’s entirely possible they left the names of their women and headed on.”

“On to where?”

“I don’t know. But there’s no sign they stayed. Did you see any of their tracks in the clearing?”

Kleat was quiet for a minute. His boots methodically slugged at the steps. “Our gang of mercenaries will have the place looted to the ground before we even see it,” he growled. He accelerated, stumping upward, leaving them behind.

Molly held to Duncan’s leisurely pace. They were going to be the last ones up. It wasn’t a race, she told herself. If this proved to be half as big as it promised, Duncan was going to be the crux of her story. Let the others disperse into the ruins, out of frame. She would make him a hero. And herself a name. Kleat could find his bones. There could be something here for everyone.

As they passed the ledges leading off to the tents, she could see how the brothers had spaced them apart last night. Knowing the Americans liked privacy, they’d pitched each tent on a separate terrace. She began counting the steps from her ledge to the top so that she could find her own shelter even in the dark, but gave up. She let go. She was not alone. She was with Duncan. The two of them could manage somehow.

“How does it feel?” she asked Duncan. This could be his triumph. If only he would climb a little faster. Then she realized that he was lagging on purpose.

“I’m afraid,” he said. “What if it’s not what we think?”

“What do you think it is?” In her head the tape recorder was running. She had her camera out.

“I don’t know. Have you ever had a dream that wouldn’t let go of you? I don’t know how to put it. These stairs, it’s like I’ve climbed them before. But I’ve got no idea what comes next.”

“You deserve this, Duncan.” And so do I, whatever comes.

She’d paid her dues. She’d turned her sweat and blood into black ink, and made her eye the camera’s eye, thinking to make the world a little better through her witnessing. But over the years, for one reason or another, she had squandered herself on trivial events and prideful men and women who tried to manipulate her pen and camera. She’d become a cynical hack. A hireling with no faith. That was about to change. The stairs were leading to something larger than life. Every writer should have that.

They worked higher into that netherworld of green mist, and when she looked down, the abyss seemed bottomless. At last she could make out the shape of cobra hoods, poised along the crest like gargoyles. The stairs reached their apex. One final step, and the ruins heaved up before them.

17.

There was no transition from below to above, no sense of arrival. They took a few steps and the architecture seemed to hurry around, enclosing them.

It was a city, a phantom city of buildings and statuary and the tangled network of the forest, a city of hints. If anything, the mist was thicker here, lush and aquamarine. Molly took a deep breath, and the air was so dense she could taste the smell of vegetation growing from its own rich compost, and flowers that were as invisible as ideas. The mist deformed the ancient metropolis. It softened the squared corners, revealing and devouring hints of towering spires, and washing against vast stone heads like a tide.

“God,” said Duncan.

She got his astonishment on camera, his blank, plain daze. Every square in the red and white scarf around his neck jumped out from the mist. The background was pure Seurat, tiny dots of color flooding the air. The suggestion of a massive stone head peered over his right shoulder.

That would be the cover photo. This was a book, not an article. Done right, it might stand as a classic. She took a step and it felt like planting a footprint on the moon. They were the first, it seemed, to discover this place.

“How can this be?” she said. “A lost city in this day and age?”

“Why not?” said Duncan. “They’re still finding Mayan cities and Incan tombs. There are species in these mountains that scientists thought were just myths. And look at the forest canopy. The ruins have been buried for centuries, not forgotten, just lost.”

She was too stunned to arrange her thoughts. Shoot, she commanded herself. Sort it out later.

“Where did the others go?” Duncan said.

“Who cares?” For the time being, the two of them owned the ruins.

Working left to right for a digital panorama, she shot immense stacks of pyramids and squared monuments with ornately carved doorways. The mist seemed to breathe, blossoming then paling. But she realized it was her own heartbeat she was seeing through the lens, the rhythm of blood through the capillaries of her eyes.

“We need a plan,” he said. “We could lose ourselves in here.”

“You’re driving the bus,” she said.

“A basic assessment,” he decided. “Yes. Describe the circle’s edge, then spiral in.”

They returned—with difficulty, a few steps and they were already twisted around—to the head of the staircase. The stairs plunged down into the mist. Somewhere down there Samnang was sitting by his fire.

Duncan set off along the perimeter of the chasm, following a walkway bordered by a fence with nagas facing outward. The walkway curved in a great semicircle along the very edge of the plateau. On their left, the architecture seemed to rush at them like a flood ready to spill over a waterfall. The nagas’ sandstone mantles flared like pink spray.

They came to a fortress wall like the one they had passed through the night before. Standing twenty feet high, it was built of fired bricks. Some of the bricks had loosened and spilled from the top of the wall. Duncan hefted one and noticed a symbol baked into its top. “These are names,” he said.

“You can read that?”

“No.” He picked up a second and third brick, and they were inscribed, too. “But certain Chinese emperors had a quality-control system like this. These are possibly the names of the brick makers. That way, any defects could be