and the lost city, which strengthened with each section they translated. Now that it was clear Paktul had protected the two little girls by taking them in, it seemed nearly inevitable that he would take them as wives. Rolando’s theory that they were the Original Trio was more and more plausible.
Groundbreaking as these discoveries were, they still hadn’t been able to figure out where exactly the lost city might be located or where Volcy could have gotten sick. Fortunately, they now knew more about the mysterious Akabalam glyph that had impeded their decipherment progress. Based on the scribe’s descriptions of insects that looked like they were communing with the gods, Chel, Rolando, and Victor all agreed he must have been describing praying mantises. Mantises were common all over the Maya area. And despite the scribe’s questions about why they would need to worship them, Chel knew the Maya had occasionally worshipped insects and created gods in their honor.
Yet there was still a missing piece. Thirty-two bark pages were nearly complete, but even with this potential break, the glyph appeared ten or eleven times on a single page in surprising and unusual ways. When Chel inserted
“It has to be something intrinsic to them, right?” Rolando asked.
“The way bees symbolize sweetness.”
“Or how Hunab Ku can be used to indicate transformation,” Victor suggested, referring to the butterfly god.
A boom outside startled all of them, and Chel hurried to the window. Over the last two days, a few cars had made the trek up to the Getty, interlopers in search of easy looting. Each time, they’d seen the security team still patrolling the grounds and turned around.
“Everything all right?” Rolando asked.
It was difficult to see very far into the night. “I think so,” Chel said.
“So… what?” he asked as she turned back. “Is the king ordaining this new god because the praying mantises appear pious?”
“The droughts probably inspired a lot of doubts among the people,” Chel said. “Maybe he believed it was inspiration.”
She moved to the glass case containing a fragment they’d partially pieced together from one of the final pages and started substituting in her mind:
Perhaps the king allows [piety] because his call for rain has been thwarted, and he knows no rains will come! But will such wanton [piety] not result in chaos among the people, even among those who fear the gods? There is reason the people of Kanuataba so fear [piety] as I do, the most terrifying transgression of all, even if [piety] is commanded by the king!
“It wouldn’t make sense,” she said to the men. “Why would the scribe be so frightened of piety? And why would it be a transgression?”
Chel studied the pages again, contemplating possibilities.
“Where are we with the satellites?” Rolando asked. As of yesterday, thanks to Stanton, the CDC had arranged for a dozen NASA satellites to be turned toward the area surrounding Kiaqix, to search for any sign of ruins in the jungle rim.
Stanton had been Chel’s first call after leaving her mother. It pleased her to be able to tell him that her father’s cousin Chiam’s account of the lost city matched Paktul’s descriptions in the codex. The doctor had listened eagerly, and this time there wasn’t any skepticism in his voice. All he’d said was “Let’s do it.”
She hadn’t heard from Stanton since, but Chel checked her phone constantly. Someone from his team would get in touch as soon as there were any images that required her team’s expertise, and she hoped it was him.
“The satellites can each take up to a thousand photographs a day,” she said, “and they’ve got a team of people searching the images.”
Victor piped up. “Now we just have to pray that Kanuataba is another Oxpemul.”
In the 1980s, satellites had snapped pictures of the tops of two temples poking out from beneath the leaf canopy very close to a major archaeological site in Mexico, leading to the discovery of an even larger ancient city.
“It’s the rainy season, and there’s constant cloud cover around Kiaqix right now,” Chel reminded the men. “The trees could be shielding everything. We’re talking about buildings that are more than a thousand years old and are probably crumbling. Not to mention the fact that they’ve eluded discovery for centuries.”
“Which is why we must focus on the manuscript,” Victor said.
HE TOOK NO PLEASURE in how the victims of VFI were suffering or in the fact that so many more were sure to become infected. It horrified him to hear about children falling prey to the disease and about the ways that men had turned on one another in the streets of L.A. Yet as Victor had watched the stock market crash and the grocery stores empty, he couldn’t help but feel validated. His colleagues had ridiculed him. His family had abandoned him. Until the epidemic began, even he’d begun to wonder if he and the rest of the Believers wouldn’t be proven wrong as so many others had, from the Millerites to the Y2K believers to… well, every other group who had believed the world was due for a great change.
Just after noon, the team broke up to continue exploring the Akabalam question on their own. Chel had gone into her office that adjoined the lab to think, and Rolando had gone to another building for reconstruction equipment, so Victor was left alone in the room. He stood over the plates, examining the one that contained Paktul’s reference to the thirteenth cycle. He lifted the glass off its perch, testing its weight. The case was heavy— fifteen pounds or so—but one man could carry two or three at a time.
Holding part of the codex in his hands, Victor felt its incredible power. In synagogue as a boy, he had learned the story of how rabbis threw themselves over the Torah scrolls when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple of Jerusalem. The rabbis believed the Jewish people couldn’t carry on without the written Word and gave their lives to protect it. Victor felt he finally understood what inspired that willingness to sacrifice so much for a book.
“What are you doing?”
He froze at the sound of Rolando’s voice. What was he doing back here already? Gently, Victor replaced the page and made a show of adjusting where the case sat on the light table. “Some of the glass was starting to shift,” he said, “and I was afraid it might disturb the fragments.”
Rolando joined him in front of the light table. “Appreciate your help, but it’s better if you let me handle the plates, okay?”
Victor moved down the table, pretending to study fragments from the final section. He didn’t want to appear too quick to retreat. Rolando, satisfied with whatever he’d come to check on in the first place, headed toward the back of the lab. Then Victor heard a knock on Chel’s office and the sound of the door closing.
Did Rolando suspect something? Victor sat down at one of the lab benches as casually as he could. He calculated what he would say if Rolando confronted him.
Minutes later, Victor heard Chel’s door creak open again and her soft footsteps coming into the lab. She stood behind him. He didn’t move.
“Can I talk to you?” she asked.
“Of course. What is it?”
She sat down on one of the lab benches. “I just got off the phone with Patrick. I asked him to come here and help with some of the remaining astronomy glyphs, but he said he wouldn’t leave his new girlfriend again. Martha. Who the hell is named Martha in the twenty-first century? I don’t know if we can do this without him.”
“First of all,” Victor said, “he did his part and we don’t need him. Second of all… you know I never liked him anyway.”
“Liar.”
She smiled, but Victor flinched a little at the word.
“But Patrick was right about one thing,” she said.
“What’s that?”
