The Reckoning

She worked her fingers under the bone to get a purchase, and the back of his head was a ragged cave. Her hand slipped, and the whole carpet of his scalp came away.

She was almost sick. “God,” she yelped. The skull was fused to the earth.

“Moll-lee.”

A branch of leaves whipped her face. Leave the skull. The forensics people would have to make do with pieces. She plucked the three loosened teeth from their sockets and folded them, with the dog tag, in the pouch of the scalp, and shoved the bundle into one pocket of her pants. She stood, half bent, and began her exit.

The bamboo punched her ribs. It creaked and banged. The rhythm eluded her. She went too fast, then too slow. The stand struck at her. It caught her hand. She fell, then got to her feet.

Then Duncan was pulling her through. Without a word, he gripped her arms and propelled her along their narrow path through the bamboo. Kleat was already out of sight.

She cast a last glance back at the skeleton, knowing the skull would be wearing its death grin. What she didn’t expect was its knowing authority. It seemed to be nodding to her. The remains floated on sea swells of vegetation, the arms and legs spreading and rising and beckoning her back, or waving good-bye, the eyes staring.

They emerged from the bamboo, and Duncan did not stop. The clash of bamboo faded, and now she heard that deep-ocean scraping of stone on stone. Dazed by her beating in the stand, Molly looked to see if walls were shifting or spires bending. Surely the city was tearing to pieces. But it stood intact. It was nestling. The ruins were rearranging themselves deep in their foundation, settling a fraction more into the forest.

In the rain and green gloom, they could have been on a giant ark of stone. The floods were coming. Molly smelled wet fur, and it was monkeys—dozens of them now—huddled on the temples’ edges and on top of giant faces, watching them, passing them from one pair of eyes to the next.

Kleat was waiting for them in the mouth of a building, out of the rain. The bamboo had knocked one lens from his steel-rimmed glasses. The remaining lens was misted over. He seemed fractured and only half present.

His one visible eye looked a hundred years old, bloodshot and milky. For all his ugliness over the past weeks, Molly felt pity for him, even a kind of respect. At an age when many men were retiring to the links or cursing the financial pages, Kleat was getting broiled by the sun and horsewhipped by bamboo, faithful to his brother.

He had the machete. Slow water bled from the metal. With the scar along his throat, he might have just returned from battle. “What did you get?” he said.

“Sit,” Duncan said to her. She was shivering.

Molly brought out the bundled pelt. The soldier’s hair was three or four inches long. It had grown during his exile among the ruins. She unfolded the scalp, and there were dark veins along the inside of the leather. The teeth lay on top, yellow with coffee and the decades. The dog tag was so tarnished it appeared to be blank.

“Good,” said Kleat. “Very good.”

She felt ghoulish crouching over the bits and pieces of a man. She set the artifacts on a stone and wiped her hands on the wall, trying to clean away the feel of his hair. Kleat could carry the thing from here on. She’d done her duty.

“There’s something else,” she said. “He had jade eyes.”

“What are you talking about?” Kleat said.

“They were hidden by the helmet. I moved the helmet and someone had put stones in his eye sockets. It was almost like he could see.”

“Who would do that?” said Kleat.

“Maybe it’s a funeral rite,” Duncan said. “But I’ve never heard of any of the mountain tribes doing a thing like that. And the only people inside the city were the soldiers.”

“Get out of here,” Kleat said.

“Who knows?” said Duncan. “After a few months in here, the survivors might have been losing their grip on things. Going native. Going wild. Making things up. Maybe they buried him that way, modern warriors copying ancient warriors.”

“But he wasn’t buried,” said Molly. “He was lying in the open. He shot himself where no one could find him.”

Duncan fell silent.

“This fucking city,” Kleat said. He took off his glasses and cleaned his fogged lens and fit what was left of it onto his face. “At least we’ll know who he was.”

He held the tag up in the light. Molly watched his expression. He blinked. The muscles twitched in his cheeks. “Ridiculous,” he said. His lens clouded over again. He said it a second time, in a whisper.

Duncan took the tag from him and tilted it to read the embossing. His face drew into itself. “I don’t understand,” he said.

Molly pulled the tag from his fingers.

“ ‘Yale,’ ” she read aloud. “ ‘Lucas M.’ ”

32.

“He’s playing with us,” Kleat shouted over his shoulder. He was angry.

“It’s tattooed on his arm,” said Duncan. “We all saw it. Lucas Yale.”

They were on the move again, heading for the stairs. Nagas reared up along the rim. Water shot from their cobra mouths into the depths of the terminus. Channels hidden within the terraces sped it toward the waiting reservoirs. Duncan had said the history of Cambodia lay in its hydraulics. She was beginning to see this empire built on shaping the shapeless, capturing the rain with its ancient geometry.

The wind was picking up. It struck the canopy in bursts, creating huge green pinwheels that moved overhead. Maelstroms in the sky. Molly thought of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, and that panicked her because night was not far enough away. They needed all the day that was left for their escape.

She tried to see their camp in the abyss, but the rain drove at her eyes. Roots and fallen leaves skated underfoot. The rain was as warm as blood. She put it out of her mind. She was putting a lot of things out of her mind.

“He had free run of the place. He found the bones,” said Kleat. “He saw the dog tag. He got the tattoo. Or he had this made and planted it there. Who do you think put the stones in his eyes?”

“But why do that?” Molly wondered out loud.

Kleat whirled on her. “Defiling the dead, that’s what he’s done,” he shouted. “He’s a lunatic.”

His outrage was out of proportion to the event. Kleat was possibly right. Luke had somehow written himself into the last days of the Blackhorse missing. There would be some reasonable explanation. But the remains of the soldier had not been desecrated so much as adorned. Luke hadn’t moved a bone. At most, he’d decorated them.

What disturbed her was Kleat. With his cockeyed steel rims and the missing lens, and that machete, he looked unraveled. His furious rationalizing was irrational. The soldier’s real identity wasn’t lost, only temporarily lifted. They had flesh, hair, and bone to present to the forensics lab. The soldier would get his name back. Luke’s act baffled her. Identity theft was one thing, but in the middle of a jungle? What did he gain? Nothing added up.

“You’re saying a madman went to the trouble of forging something so common, a dog tag?” Molly said. “And then hid it where we would probably never find it? All so we could find it?”

“He brought us here, didn’t he? He lured us with the tags.”

“I’m not so sure anymore. We brought ourselves. With our needs.”

“The gypsy kid walked right up to our table in the restaurant. He’d watched us for a month and selected us out of all the others. It’s so plain in hindsight.”

“It’s not plain at all. What does he get out of it? Why us?”

“Maybe he needed to get resupplied. Look at all the food and gear we brought with us. Plus two vehicles, with pirates to drive his riches out of here.” He added, “And a woman.”

“You said he’d gone. Halfway to China, you said.”