Chel didn’t look at him. “This is one of them,” she said. “It has to be.”
“The twin temples?”
She nodded, but seconds later she was on the move again.
CHEL STEPPED UP to a sprawling limestone substructure. It was built lower than any temple would be, and the walls were half standing, but she recognized it as soon as she saw it and started climbing. Her cotton pants and long-sleeved shirt were wet and heavy. Her hair scratched the back of her neck. But she continued up the overgrown stairs, hopping from one small ledge to the next until she reached the first of six enormous platforms.
“What are you doing?” she heard from below.
She waved Stanton off, concentrating. Chel pictured thirteen men seated in a circle in front of her, their heads covered with animal headdresses, all clapping in agreement with the man who was speaking. All except one—Paktul.
Stanton took her hand as he reached the top.
“This is the royal palace,” she whispered.
Stanton gazed out over the series of raised platforms. “So this is where…”
“They cooked,” Chel said without emotion. He’d expected her to be shaken by standing in the place where her ancestors had prepared human flesh. But Chel’s expression was fixed and focused as she looked out into the darkness once again.
“According to Paktul, the palace is the second point on the triangle,” she said. “So if it’s a three-four-fi ve right triangle, then the distance between—”
Suddenly Chel felt dizzy. Her legs were weak.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she lied. “Then the distance from the palace to the twin temple is the first side of the triangle.” She pointed west. “They never would’ve built a burial temple in the central plaza, so it has to be that way.”
“Do you need to rest more before we go?”
“Once we find the tomb.”
Stanton helped her down from the palace. They trudged on through the underbrush by flashlight, pushing in the direction the right triangle led them. Stanton continued to whack through brush with the machete, but still refused to let go of Chel with his other hand, even when fighting through the most diffi cult bits. She was so overheated she felt she might vomit, but she forced it down and kept going.
It was Stanton who spotted it first. From afar it looked like a small mountain, overgrown with small shrubs. It had a square base, maybe fifty feet on each side, and it rose into a four-sided pyramid three stories high. They were fifty yards off from the entrance, but even with all the overgrowth Chel could see that this building was unfinished. The slabs of limestone hiding under the dirt and trees weren’t properly cut, and they weren’t properly fitted.
“Is it the king’s tomb?” Stanton asked.
Chel circled the massive pyramid in search of an inscription. She found none, but when she reached the northwest corner of the temple, something gleamed in the beam of Stanton’s flashlight.
Something metal, left on the ground.
Volcy’s pickax.
THIRTY-SIX
“THE AIR DOWN THERE ALONE COULD INFECT A HUNDRED PEOPLE. You need to put it on.”
Stanton held out the biohazard suit.
So much sweat already poured off Chel, she couldn’t imagine ever feeling cool again. “I’m already infected. You said heat would only make it worse.”
“The higher concentration you’re exposed to, the quicker it can act. The sooner…”
She didn’t make him finish the sentence.
He helped her into the suit. Chel had no idea how she’d get herself into the tomb with it on; it was as bulky as it was hot. She’d been in plenty of tombs before, and she’d never been claustrophobic. But the idea of descending into the catacomb with this thing on—she imagined it would feel like being buried alive.
With her helmet on, the noise of the world was muted. Looking out through the glass, her entire surroundings—the jungle canopy, Paktul’s city, Stanton and his gear—seemed so far away.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
Stanton helped her press awkwardly through the opening in the stone they’d found next to the abandoned pickax. Then he squeezed inside after her and reached over her shoulder to light the path in front of them with the flashlight.
Chel watched her breath cloud the helmet glass as she shimmied forward on her knees. Tracks of what must have been mold had formed along the stones here countless years ago. Even through her suit, the mossy surface felt alien. She knew the scent of bat guano hung in the air, but all she could smell inside her mask was the slightly antiseptic odor of the suit’s purification mechanism.
Finally the narrow passage opened up into a larger space. The ceiling was about five feet high. Chel had to lean down a little; Stanton had to crouch. She shone her light at the far wall, marveling at the etchings of sacrificial victims in ornate animal headdresses and of snake-headed creatures with the bodies of men. Chel reached out and touched them, wiping away a thick film of dust with her glove. She had no doubt the drawings were made by Paktul’s contemporaries. Each line took hours to carve, and the price of a single mistake would have been death.
On the far end of the platform, stairs led farther down. The temple had clearly been designed as a series of stacked rooms, with four or five staircases on one side, which ultimately led to the lowest level, below ground. There, Chel suspected, they would find several smaller ritual rooms and a larger one where the king was buried—as at the temples of El Mirador.
They kept descending. Each staircase was narrower than the last, and in the biohazard suits they had to turn sideways to squeeze between the walls. The air would get colder as they went down, Chel knew, and she would have given anything for a breath of it, but the suit made everything feel stale and recycled.
Finally they could go no farther. Chel pointed her flashlight ahead into a hallway with cut-out doors on both sides. They were now fifteen or twenty feet underground, and even at midday there would have been no natural light this far below. But the ceilings were higher here; even Stanton could almost stand upright.
“This way,” Chel said, leading him down the hallway. She shone her light into two empty rooms before she found what she was looking for.
In the middle of the most distant chamber stood a limestone sarcophagus.
The final resting place of King Jaguar Imix.
“Is this it?” Though he was right behind her, Stanton’s voice came to Chel through a tiny muffl ed speaker in her ear.
Chel’s body was exhausted, but her mind was still hungry to take it all in. One look at the floor told her the tomb had been looted. Still, there was much that Volcy had left behind: carved flints and rusted necklaces, shell pendants, serpentine statues.
And skeletons.
On the floor surrounding the sarcophagus were fourteen or fifteen ancient skeletons, splayed in ritual fashion, all dusted with maroon-colored cinnabar. They had probably died of the same disease that was killing her now, feeling the same way she did: hot, tired, and terrified by the knowledge that they would never dream again.
“Who are the others?” Stanton asked.
“The ancients believed that the death of a king stole just one of his thirty-nine souls,” Chel said, “and that the other thirty-eight lived on or went to the overworld. The ajaw needed other souls to sacrifice to the gods during
