He pulled out his penlight and shone it in her eyes, studying the blacks of them as he swept the light away. They should have constricted in the light and dilated in darkness.
When Stanton took the light away, nothing changed.
“Am I sick?” Chel asked. Voice trembling.
Stanton turned, quickly kneeling down to the supply bag to get a thermometer to measure her temperature. Then he stayed there for a moment, collecting himself. He didn’t want her seeing the fear in his eyes. She needed strength. She needed to believe they would find the lost city, her only hope now. He couldn’t let her see his doubts.
THIRTY-FOUR
THEY LEFT KIAQIX AT FIRST LIGHT. SOON THE SUN WAS COOKING the Peten, and the light breeze coming through the open windows of the jeep gave Chel little relief. She could almost feel the VFI inside her. She glanced over at Stanton in the driver’s seat. He’d barely looked at her as they’d packed the medical supplies back into the jeep, along with the food Initia had given them. He just said over and over again that, with the disease as concentrated as it was here, the assay was as likely to render a false positive—from contamination —as to be accurate. He was unwilling to accept the results of a test he’d designed himself.
Chel couldn’t read his body language very well, but she understood him enough by now to know he would blame himself for the fact that she was sick, for being a second too late. She wanted to make him understand it wasn’t his fault—that she would have died there on the floor of the chapel if it weren’t for him. But she couldn’t find the right words.
She turned her attention ahead again. The macaw’s path ran 232.5 degrees southwest. Stanton had set them on a course through the jungle, across alternating patches of overused farmland and uncleared forest. Chel knew that they were looking for flat, elevated places, where the ancient cities like Kanuataba would have been built. Two hours in, the terrain was becoming more rugged. For the most part, there were no roads here at all, and they knew they’d eventually have to go on foot.
The jeep rocked back and forth, kicking up mud. It was almost impossible to see through the windows. Chel’s world was getting louder and brighter and stranger: The noises of the car grated, and the howls and screeches of the jungle frightened her in a way they never had before.
She had no idea how long they’d been driving when Stanton stopped the jeep again. “If the bearing’s right,” he said, “we have to keep going this way.” Ahead was a thicker jungle than any they’d seen, and dozens of felled trees blocked their path. It was the end of the line for the jeep.
“Let’s go,” Chel said, trying to show strength. “I can walk.”
He bent down over the odometer. “We’re sixty-two miles from Kiaqix. If they traveled three days to get there, it can’t be much farther, right?”
Chel nodded silently.
“How’re you feeling?” he asked. “If you can’t make it, I’ll go in alone and come back as soon as I find it.”
“People have hunted around here for centuries,” Chel managed. “Only two people have found the ruins. You’ll never find them alone.”
STANTON CARRIED ALL the gear on his back—tools for scraping residues from the bowls they hoped to find in Jaguar Imix’s tomb, a microscope, slides, and other essentials for spot testing. He walked ahead, clearing shrubs and branches with a machete he’d taken from Initia’s house. They navigated choppy mudbanks and held on to the rough bark of towering trees to help them remain upright. Chel’s feet began to blister and her head pounded. She felt like there were a million tiny things crawling all over her body.
After nearly an hour, Stanton stopped. They had just climbed their way to the very top of a rocky embankment, giving them a view of several miles. He held the compass in the air. “The migration path leads into that valley. It must be there.”
Two small mountains lay ahead, each several miles wide. Between them was a large valley of unbroken tropical rain forest.
“It can’t be there,” Chel said. Exhaustion bore down on her fast. “The ancients wouldn’t have built between mountains. It… made them vulnerable on both sides.”
The look on Stanton’s face told her that, in her condition, he didn’t know what to believe. “Where do you want to go, then?” he asked.
“Higher,” she told him. She pointed at the larger of the two mountains. “To look for temples above the trees.”
THE TREE TRUNKS AT THE foot of the mountain were thin and blackened, charred toothpicks stuck into the ground. There’d been a fire, most likely started by lightning. In storm season, small lightning fires were common; the ancients believed they were a sign from the overworld that a patch of land needed time to rejuvenate.
At the edge of the lightning forest, they reached a more verdant part of the slope. Then, from the corner of her eye, Chel saw a cluster of vanilla vines in the distance, about halfway up the mountain. She turned toward the strange but oddly familiar pattern. Vanilla was common throughout Guatemala; it wrapped itself tightly around tree trunks and climbed up to reach the top of the canopy for rain and light. The vines could grow hundreds of feet high.
But these vines stretched only about fifteen feet into the air, as if the tree had been cut off and stripped of its branches. Chel called out for Stanton to wait, but he didn’t hear her. She let him keep going and turned off course. The fifty-plus yards up the slope were interminable, each of her steps more difficult than the last, but she was drawn to the thin, elongated leaves. The dense tangle of vines was looser than what it should have been on a tree—a clue that whatever lay beneath was covered with something other than wood bark.
To the untrained eye it would’ve been impossible to discern, but hundreds of Maya stones had been discovered in the jungle beneath vines like these. Chel’s hands shook—with anticipation or sickness—and she barely had the strength to rip the strands away. But finally she could see down to the core. It was a massive boulder, at least eight feet tall, cut into the shape of an elongated headstone.
“Where’d you go?” Stanton had found his way back to her. He bent down to peer over her shoulder. “What is that?”
“A stela,” Chel said. “The ancients called them tree stones. They used them to record important dates, names of kings and events.”
These stelae sometimes appeared near cities, she explained, but were also built by smaller villages as homages to the gods. The only thing she knew for certain about this one was that no one had seen its surface for a very long time. Age and weather had cracked off one of the corners.
Chel tried to breathe steadily while Stanton cleared away the rest of the vines, revealing a surface covered in eroded etchings and inscriptions. There was a rendering of the maize god in the middle of the stone, while renderings of Itzamnaaj, the supreme Maya deity, adorned the edges.
Then Chel saw three familiar glyphs.
“What does it say?” Stanton asked.
She motioned to the first carving. “
He pointed to the last glyph. “What about this?”
“
FELLED TREES AND UNDERBRUSH covered every inch of the slope, and each step was an exhausting challenge for Chel. Up and down they traversed the steep incline, searching for a passable path. They stopped every fifty yards so she could rest. The air was unbearably hot and wet, and with each breath she felt like she couldn’t make it any farther. But with Stanton’s help she pressed forward, pushing on through another stretch of forest.
Strangely, the pitch of the mountainside flattened out as they headed farther west, giving Chel’s legs a short
