12.21

TWENTY-SIX

CHEL SAT BENEATH THE APPLE TREES ON THE GETTY’S SOUTH lawn, smoking and gazing down on the maze of azalea in the courtyard below. She needed a moment to rest, to distract herself, to recharge.

“Chel , ” someone called from a distance.

Through the fog she made out Rolando standing at the top of the stairs leading to the central plaza. Behind him was Stanton. Surprised, Chel wondered why he had come. Had the satellites found something? Whatever brought him here, she was pleased to see him.

Rolando waved and peeled off, leaving them alone.

“What’s happening?” Chel asked Stanton at the bottom of the stairs. She immediately noticed how exhausted he looked. It was the first time they’d been physically together since the night she’d come clean and they’d visited the Gutierrez house. Whatever she’d been through the past few days didn’t compare to what was written on his face.

They moved to one of the chessboard-covered tables on the south-pavilion landing. Stanton told her everything that had led up to Thane’s death, then what had happened after.

“I should never have let her take that risk,” he said.

“You were trying to help. If you could get the antibodies to work—”

“The antibodies are useless.” His voice had a bitter edge to it. “The tests failed, and even if they worked, they’d be considered too risky. She died for nothing.”

Chel understood only too well what it felt like to be cut off from everything you knew. But she’d had a reprieve—thanks to him. She didn’t know how to give him the second chance he’d given her. So she just took his hand.

They sat in silence for nearly a minute before she broached the other subject on her mind. “So I guess… nothing on the satellites?”

“I’m not exactly in the loop anymore,” Stanton said. “I thought maybe you would have heard something from CDC. But I guess not. What’s happening on your end?”

“We’re close to deciphering the end of the codex. There could still be some kind of a locator in the final sections, though we’re facing a few significant challenges.”

“Let me help.”

“With what?”

“With your work.”

“Do you have a PhD in linguistics I don’t know about?”

“I’m serious,” Stanton said. “Our processes aren’t so different. Diagnose the problem, look for comparables, and then search for solutions from there. Besides, maybe an outside perspective could be useful.”

Chel studied him. How odd it was that three days after he had held her future in his hands, his career had suffered a similar fate, and now he’d come to her for help. What did she really know about this guy, anyway? Gabe Stanton was clearly whip smart, extremely hardworking, a little too fierce sometimes. Chel didn’t know much else. They hadn’t exactly had the chance to unwind over a glass of wine. Maybe if she looked closer, she wouldn’t like what she saw.

Then again, he’d been the one to let in the crack of daylight keeping her life’s work alive—at a moment when she’d given him every reason not to. So if Stanton wanted to help, Chel wasn’t going to stop him now. She’d just have to make sure that the CDC didn’t find out when they eventually reached out to her again.

“Okay, fresh eyes, then.” She leaned in closer to him. “The scribe’s referring to a collapse of his city. Or at least to his fear of its collapse. There are harbingers in the central plaza, in the palace, everywhere. But there’s nothing worse to him than the worship of this new god, Akabalam. It’s a god we’ve never seen before, a god of praying mantises. As if this god has just been created at this particular historical moment.”

“Was it unusual for the Maya to create… new gods?” Stanton asked.

“There are dozens in the pantheon. And new gods were invented all the time. When Paktul first hears of this one, he wants to learn about him and to worship him. But in this final part of the manuscript, it’s as if he has found a reason to be mortally afraid of him.”

“What do you mean, mortally afraid?”

“He uses all the superlatives of the Mayan language to describe his fear—including words that suggest he’s more afraid of this new god than of dying. One thing we’ve been able to translate says: This was something much more terrifying, which no one ever had to teach me to fear.”

Stanton walked to the railing overlooking the Getty’s sycamore-lined stream, processing. “So maybe we should be looking for a deeply ingrained fear.” He turned back from the railing. “Think about mice.”

“Mice?”

“One of a mouse’s most powerful fears is its fear of snakes. But no one had to teach mice to fear snakes. It’s coded into their DNA. We can actually make that fear disappear by altering their genetic structure.”

Chel pictured Stanton’s years spent in a lab, years spent not so differently from hers. He thought in ways foreign to her, using a vocabulary that was mostly unfamiliar. Yet his constant return to the underlying scientific processes at work was similar to the way she saw language and history.

Stanton continued, “So the question we have to ask is: What could your scribe’s most powerful fear be?”

“Fear of his city collapsing forever?”

“It doesn’t sound like that’s news to him.”

“Well, I don’t think he’s talking about snakes.”

“No, I mean, what fears are so powerful for him that they could create this kind of response? It’s got to be something more… primal. Something innate.”

“You mean like fear of incest,” Chel said.

“Exactly. Could that be it?”

“Incest was prohibited,” she told him. “And it wouldn’t make any sense anyway. What would incest have to do with praying mantises?”

Yet as soon as she said the words, another possibility hit her—an indictment of her people that she’d dismissed her entire career.

From the beginning, Chel had wanted the codex to prove that her people hadn’t brought the collapse on themselves.

But what if they had?

TWENTY-SEVEN

My fast has lasted forty turns of the sun, sustained only by cornmeal drink and water. No rain has fallen on our milpas or in our forests, and the water stores have receded. Each corner of the city has begun to hoard water and maize and manioc, and it is rumored that men drink their own urine to quench their thirst.

There are whispers that some have already begun to plan their journey north in search of tillable fields, though Jaguar Imix has decreed that to abandon Kanuataba will be punishable by death or worse. There have been eighteen deaths in the poorest corners of Kanuataba in the last twenty suns, many of them children, starved because they are given lowest priority in the distribution of rations.

Our city was once a center for the best goods within ten days’ walk. But jade adornments are useless, and artisans no longer flourish. Mother-of-pearl ear flares and varicolored feather mantles have been replaced by tortillas and lime as the greatest desires of the noble women. A mother who cannot feed her children thinks little of gold medallions, no matter how holy.