The torch lit, he pressed on. Feeling the odds against him growing, he forced his way deeper into the forest, where the trees thickened, their trunks like airliner fuselages stuck in the ground. In the darkness, Stanton couldn’t begin to estimate their height. It was hard to even stay on a straight path, and he found himself going in circles, seeing the same landmarks again and again.
When he approached the reverse side of the king’s entombment pyramid, frustration turned to despair.
He had no idea how he’d ended up where he started. Then another torch failed, and everything went black again. Stanton pawed the ground for branches. His glove touched something sharp and, lighting another match, he looked to see what it was. On the jungle floor, no bigger than the end of his thumb, was a brown lump covered with tiny spines.
A beechnut.
He held the nut high in the air, as if to reverse its path to the ground. Here, so close to the king’s tomb, was the smooth-barked tree it had fallen from. Its trunk rose higher than Stanton’s match could throw light.
And, to his astonishment, it wasn’t the only one.
A dozen stood in a line. Their branches extended toward the face of the pyramid as if they were reaching out to touch it.
CHEL FLOATED IN and out of the darkness, bobbing like a bird in a brisk wind at the top of the sky. In those moments when she could still see the light, her tongue felt like sandpaper, and the heat made her whole body painful. The disease crawled like a spider through her thoughts. But in those moments when the light disappeared and the darkness came, She sank gratefully into an ocean of memories.
The ancient father of her village—Paktul, spirit founder of Kiaqix—lay beside her here, and whatever came next, she felt safe in his presence. If she had to follow him, if she had to join Rolando and her father, then perhaps she would see that place the ancestors always talked about. The place of the gods.
WHEN HE STEPPED BACK into the tomb, Stanton saw that Chel was in the same spot he had left her, slumped against the wall with a glazed look in her eyes. Then he saw she’d ripped off her biohelmet. The heat must have been driving her crazy, and now she was breathing in air that would almost certainly make things worse. Stanton considered trying to get her back in the suit, but he knew the damage had been done.
Her only hope lay elsewhere.
Using what remained of the flashlight’s power, he began to prepare the injection by crushing leaves, bark, wood, and fruit into tiny particles and combining them with a suspension of saline and dissolving enzymes. Finally he drew a syringe of the fluid and pushed the needle into a vein in Chel’s arm. She barely stirred at the prick.
“You’re going to come out of this,” he told her. “Stay with me.”
He glanced down at his watch, establishing a baseline against which to time the first signs of reaction. It was 11:15 P.M.
THERE WAS ONLY one way for Stanton to know if the drug had crossed the brain–blood barrier: a spinal tap that analyzed Chel’s cerebrospinal fluid. If beech was now in that fluid, it had gone from the heart to the brain and crossed over the barrier into the fluid that surrounded it.
After twenty minutes, he inserted a needle into the space between Chel’s vertebrae, drawing the fluid into another syringe. Stanton had known men to scream during spinal taps. Chel, in her condition, barely made a sound.
Stanton dropped spinal fluid onto six slides and waited for them to fix. Then he closed his eyes and whispered a single word into the darkness. “
Placing the first slide under the microscope, Stanton considered all sides of it. Then he scanned the next slide, and the third.
After studying the sixth, he leaned back in despair.
There were no beech molecules on any of the slides. This species, like every other one Stanton had ever tried, like all the ones they’d used to make pentosan, could not pass the barrier into the brain.
A wave of hopelessness crested inside him. He might have quit right then and just wallowed in the darkness if he hadn’t heard Chel making noises on the other side of the tomb.
He ran to her. Her legs were kicking wildly.
She was having a seizure.
Not only had the drug failed; the conditions in the tomb—the heat, the concentration of prion—had accelerated the disease’s progress. If her fever climbed any higher, it could kill her. “Stay with me,” he whispered to her. “Stay
Stanton felt around for the extra shirt in the supply bag, ripped it into rags, and soaked them in the dregs of their water bottles. But before he could even apply the compresses, he felt Chel’s forehead getting cooler. He knew that her body was giving up. He brushed his fingers along the skin of her neck, just under her jaw, and found a thready pulse.
Her seizure slowly subsided, and, for the first time in a long time, Stanton prayed. To what, he didn’t know. But the god he’d worshipped his entire adult life—science—had failed him. Soon he’d be walking out of this jungle, having failed the thousands, and eventually millions, who would die from VFI. So he prayed for them. He prayed for Davies, Cavanagh, and the rest of CDC. He prayed for Nina. But mostly he prayed for Chel, whose life was no longer in his hands. If she died—when she died—all he would have left would be the knowledge that he hadn’t done enough.
Stanton glanced at his watch. 11:46 p.m.
Across the chamber, the ancient skulls seemed to taunt him with the secret they were keeping. Stanton wouldn’t let Chel spend eternity in a staring contest with them. He would take her out of here. He would—
It was then that he had the horrible realization that he would have to bury Chel in the jungle. He thought back to something she’d said the night before, when they were slumped against another wall, on the outskirts of Kiaqix.
When a soul is taken, it needs the incense smoke in order to pass from the middleworld to the underworld. Everyone here is stuck between worlds.
How would he burn incense for her? What could he use?
Then it occurred to Stanton that Paktul had written about incense too.
When I set the macaw down and kissed the wretched limestone, the aroma had changed, and I could no longer taste it on the back of my tongue as I once had.
What if the smell and taste of the incense in the air changed for a reason? Paktul knew the king’s usual incense combination. If the taste was gone from the back of his tongue, maybe it was because it was no longer bitter…
Stanton stood up and scooped Chel into his arms.
He had to get her outside.
Carrying her from the king’s chamber, he bore her weight back down the hallway, then hoisted her over his shoulder and began up the first set of stairs. As diffi cult as it had been to get down the stairs alone, they seemed even steeper and narrower than before.
But minutes later they reached the top and tasted the night air. There was a small clearing about ten feet from the north face of the pyramid, with enough room to make a small fire—most likely where Volcy and his partner had pitched their tent.
Stanton laid Chel down in a small crook between tree roots and sprinted to the reverse side of the pyramid. He frantically gathered more beech, circled back around, and dumped the branches in a pile in front of Chel. A minute later he was lighting the kindling, and soon flames danced up into the sky. The acrid smell of the smoke filled the air.
Stanton sat close to the fire with Chel’s head in his lap. He placed his hands on her head and opened her eyelids as wide as he could. He forced his own eyes open too, even as the smoke made them begin to tear. If VFI
