12.21

eyes, he couldn’t move a single stone or take a single artifact from its resting place. Not for any reason.

The problem was that no one believed him. No one could accept that he had found treasures and simply left them there. After days of ridicule, Chiam claimed he would lead a team back into the jungle to prove himself. But, before he could, the Guatemalan army hanged him with a dozen other men from across the Peten for their revolutionary activities.

“Chiam gave many details,” Ha’ana continued. “He said there were twin temples that faced each other, and a great patio with huge columns, where our ancestors would have met to discuss politics. Can you believe it? He thought his stories would remind us we were just as smart as the ladinos. But he was not cunning enough, and everyone knew he wasn’t telling the truth. He was a good, kind man, but his story was a lie.”

“He said there was a patio?” Chel said. “With huge columns?”

“Something like that.”

“How tall? Thirty feet?”

“He could have said a thousand feet. No one was listening.”

But Paktul had described a colonnade in Kanuataba’s main plaza that circled a small interior court, with pillars that were six or seven men high. And while twin temples existed at dozens of Maya cities, columns built that high existed at only one or two places in Mexico. In Guatemala they were half as tall or less.

“He might have found it,” Chel said. She started to explain the connection she’d made, but her mother wasn’t interested in hearing it. “The lost city is a myth,” Ha’ana said. “Like all lost cities.”

“We’ve found lost cities before, Mom. They’re out there.”

Ha’ana took a breath. “I know you want to believe this now, Chel.”

“This isn’t about me.”

“Every villager in Kiaqix wants to believe in the lost city,” Ha’ana said. “They deceive themselves because it gives them hope. But that does not make the oral history any more than what it is: the silly stories of people who cannot know better. I didn’t bring you here and raise you to be one of them.”

Chel had been surprised by her mother’s willingness to talk about Chiam. But now she knew: No matter what effect these last days had on her, Ha’ana was still the same woman who’d abandoned her family’s home, who’d abandoned everything her husband believed in. The same woman who’d spent thirty-three years trying to forget what happened, denying the importance of their culture and tradition.

“Maybe you don’t believe in the lost city because of what it would mean for you, Mom.”

“What are you saying?”

It wasn’t worth it. “Forget it. I have to go. I have work to do.”

What time was it?

Chel glanced at her phone. There she found an email from Stanton waiting:

know you’ll send more news when you have it, but wanted to make sure you’re okay.—G.

She reread the message. For some reason Chel liked knowing he was keeping tabs on her.

Ha’ana was saying something. “You’re really going to search for these ruins now? In the middle of this?”

Chel stood. “Mom, we’re going to search for them because of all this.”

“Search how?”

“With satellites that scan the area for ruins,” Chel said, formulating a plan. “Or on the ground if we can’t find them from the air.”

“Please tell me you won’t go into the jungle yourself, Chel.”

“If the doctors need me to, I will.”

“It’s not safe. You know it’s not safe.”

“Father wasn’t afraid to do what he had to.”

“Your father was a tapir,” Ha’ana said. “And the tapir fights, but he doesn’t run into the jaguar’s den to be slaughtered.”

“And you were a fox,” Chel said. “The gray fox that is unafraid of humans, even those who hunt it. But you lost your wayob’s spirit when you abandoned Kiaqix.”

Ha’ana turned away. It was a great insult to suggest a Maya wasn’t worthy of her wayob, and Chel instantly regretted her words. Despite her mother’s long, fractured relationship with her origins, her wayob was still a part of her.

“You help many people here,” Ha’ana said after a long pause. “Yet I hear that every time you come, you come only at the end of services. Deep down you don’t believe in the gods either. So maybe we are more similar than you think.”

12.19.19.17.15 DECEMBER 16, 2012

TWENTY-TWO

MICHAELA THANE WAS THIRTEEN WHEN THE RODNEY KING verdict set off looting and burning of thousands of buildings from Korea-town to East L.A. Her mother was still alive then, and she had kept Michaela and her brother in the house for nearly four days, where they watched on their nineteen-inch television as rioters set the city ablaze. It was the last time Thane remembered Los Angeles looking as it did now.

On the car radio, she listened to pundits argue about whether it was the email leak from the mayor’s office that had started the unrest. One commentator claimed it was the nearly ten thousand estimated sick—agitated and desperate—leading the destruction. Detractors of Stanton’s quarantine declared this the inevitable result of trying to contain ten million people. But Thane had spent long enough living and working in this part of L.A. to know people here didn’t need a reason to be angry—they needed a reason not to be.

Just before the turn in to Presbyterian, she looked in her rearview mirror to see Davies peel off; he’d trailed her here to ensure her safety. And safe it seemed to be. Floodlights illuminated the night sky, helicopters circled and jeeps swept the perimeter; National Guardsmen with guns patrolled the buildings as if it were a base in Kabul.

Since returning from Afghanistan, Thane had spent nearly every weekday, every third night, and many weekends at Presby. She’d been here on virtually every holiday too, taking the least desirable call nights. Her colleagues thought she did it because she was selfless, but really Thane had nowhere else to go. A hospital operates 365 days a year, twenty-four hours a day, just like a military base. And eating the staff turkey on Thanksgiving and drinking plastic cups of sparkling cider when the clock struck midnight on New Year’s was better than being alone.

Working at Presbyterian had never been easy, and sometimes they had to improvise more than medics in the mountains. The hospital was understaffed and overwhelmed. Yet Thane and her colleagues had provided decent care to tens of thousands of patients nonetheless. They helped other services, did favors for critical patients, listened to one another complain, and drank heavily together to try to forget it all. Over the last three years, the Presby staff had been Thane’s big, messy, occasionally happy substitute for a platoon.

Now so many of them were dying inside these walls, and Presbyterian itself would soon be a memory too. Even if they could stop or slow the disease, they’d never be able to ensure that all the prion was gone from the floors, the walls, the sinks, the bedrails, and the light switches. The building would be demolished and removed by hazmat, piece by piece.

* * *

IT WAS AFTER ONE A. M., but CDC staff still roamed the halls—tending to patients, trying to calm the