Nightkeepers

Aware that they were out in the hallway, two doors down from Anna’s office, and she was likely to be in a pretty prickly mood after the spat with her husband, Lucius dragged Neenie into his office and shut the door. ‘‘You weren’t supposed to mention it to me, were you?’’

Eyes still wide, she shook her head, keeping her hand firmly over her mouth. ‘‘I promised,’’ she said, words muffled behind her hand.

‘‘So unpromise,’’ he said, as if it were no big deal, which it probably wasn’t to someone like her, a conduit through whom gossip flowed at approximately the speed of sound. ‘‘Come on . . . you know you want to tell me.’’

Looking undecided—which as far as he was concerned was a big step up from ‘‘Oh, shit, I’m gonna get canned if I tell’’—she dropped her hand from her mouth and looked around his office. ‘‘Well . . .’’

He followed her gaze, saw it lock onto a small, graceful figurine of a jaguar, and winced. ‘‘That’s real jade. And it’s hand-carved.’’

He’d gotten the effigy at a small open market at the foot of the Guatemalan highlands during one of his early trips out into the field with Anna. The statuette wasn’t old, but it hadn’t been cheap either.

She looked back at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘‘Then I guess a promise is a promise.’’

He scowled, grabbed the effigy, and held it out to her. ‘‘You suck.’’

‘‘I had brothers. Deal with it.’’ She accepted the jaguar and tucked it into her pocket, then gestured for him to lean closer so she could whisper her secret.

‘‘The door’s closed, for chrissakes. Just say it.’’

‘‘Fine. Go ahead, ruin my dramatic intro.’’ She straightened and made a face at him, but now that she’d given herself permission to give with the goods, she couldn’t hold it in a second longer. ‘‘The fragment is gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. Some of the glyphs are degraded, but you can still see an incredible level of detail, and the colors . . .’’ Her eyes practically glazed over at the memory. ‘‘God, the colors are so awesome now, it’s hard to imagine what it must’ve looked like when it was new.’’

‘‘Hello, Neenie?’’ Lucius waved a hand in front of her face. ‘‘Someone else in the room here, remember? Let’s focus. Okay, so Anna showed you a piece of a codex. What did she say, ‘Hey, Neenie, come in here and see what I got my hands on’?’’

‘‘No.’’ She shook her head. ‘‘It was more like, ‘Come in and close the door. Now, promise me this is just between us. Okay . . . what does this look like to you?’ ’’

And all of a sudden, he got it. Anna had called Neenie in because she didn’t know how to translate the glyphs yet, but she’d shown an almost uncanny knack for being able to identify the pictures themselves.

The writing system of the ancient Maya was seriously complex, the symbols often difficult to interpret, meaning that field epigraphers got real good at pattern recognition real fast, or they moved on, and they often asked one another’s opinions and went with the consensus vote, at least until something else in the text proved the interpretation wrong. It also meant that an epigrapher who didn’t want anyone else to know what she was working on might use, say, an untrained pattern recognizer to help with the gnarly stuff. Anna must’ve gotten stumped on something and needed a second set of trained eyes, but hadn’t wanted to use someone—namely him—who could translate the glyphs themselves. So she’d taken a chance on Neenie, not realizing that her vault had some serious leaks when it came to keeping secrets.

‘‘What did you tell her you thought it was?’’ Lucius asked, feeling an itch of excitement. If Anna was working on something huge, it would explain so much of what had gone on lately—from the stress she’d been under, to the weird working hours, to the fact that she’d been kicking him out of the lab as often as possible over the past week.

Yeah, he was cheesed that she hadn’t let him in on it, but he’d forgive her if it was the sort of thing that would land her—and, by extension, the senior member of her lab—on the cover of National Geographic or Smithsonian magazine or something.

Already envisioning the two of them suited up in full kit, posing beside the chac-mool throne inside the step-sided Pyramid of Kulkulkan at Chichen Itza—because that was the sort of thing the big magazines wanted, even if the codex page had come from someplace else entirely and most of their work was done in a lab in Austin—Lucius almost missed Neenie’s answer.

Then he got it. And froze.

‘‘What did you just say?’’

‘‘I told her I thought it looked like a screaming skull.’’ Neenie gave him a weird look. ‘‘Are you okay?’’

No, I’m not. I just took a big whack upside the head with the every-glyph-groupie-for-herself stick.

He shook his head, hoping those last few words would rattle loose and turn into something else. But they didn’t, leaving him with only one question: Why hadn’t Anna shown it to him? She knew damn well he was looking for text with a screaming skull, so he could compare it to the images on his computer, the ones he thought were screaming and she insisted were nothing but more of good old King Jaguar-Paw Skull’s laughing skeletons.

If she had one and hadn’t showed it to him, it meant . . .

Fuck, he didn’t know what it meant.

‘‘What else did you see?’’ he demanded.

Neenie went a little wild-eyed. ‘‘Do you need to sit down or something? You’re freaking me out.’’

‘‘You had brothers. Deal with it.’’

‘‘Yeah, okay.’’ Still, she edged a little closer to the door before she said, ‘‘She kept most of it under that protective paper, so I didn’t see all of it. There were a few of those jellyfish blobs with the dots in them.’’

Which represented numbers, or sometimes dates. ‘‘How many dots? Do you remember?’’

She shook her head. ‘‘That’s not how my brain works. I can see the patterns, kind of out-of-focus, but if I concentrate too hard the lines get all jumbled up.’’