been bent, pinned to his chest, and bound in place with a frayed rope. The left arm was jaggedly fractured mid- shaft, and the skin had curled back from the bone into a liquefied black sludge, presumably the source of the foul, gangrenous stench. The entire left half of the ribcage had been destroyed, leaving a gaping hole framed by pointed fragments of bone. The flesh that surrounded it was ruggedly torn and peeled back in leathery straps.
'That must have been one big, nasty rat,' Jay said.
There was a shift in the shadows inside the broken ribcage, and, as if on cue, a gray rodent poked its whiskery face out, its eyes glowing red.
Dahlia screamed. She whirled and sprinted as fast as she could toward the entrance. Her head struck the low log ceiling repeatedly, but she hardly even felt it. All she could focus on was the distant rectangle of light.
She burst through the opening and nearly slammed into Galen, who shuffled aside just in time.
Jay emerged a few seconds later, laughing so hard that tears streaked through the dust on his cheeks.
'It's not funny,' Dahlia snapped. She punched him in the arm.
'Oh, but it is, princess. It is.' He raised the camera to capture the expression of terror on her dirty face.
So the rodent had surprised her. Big deal. Ha, ha.
'That was the biggest rat I've ever seen in my life. It was the size of a dog.'
'You keep telling yourself that. Just wait until you see the playback,' Jay said. He could barely catch his breath through the laughter. 'Then you can tell me again how big it was.'
Dahlia huffed and turned away. The heat of embarrassment flushed her cheeks.
Galen crouched directly in front of her before the golden skull as though praying to the obscene idol. His hand trembled as he reached out and removed a dusty feather from beneath it. He held it up and blew on it---once, then again. His gaze fell upon the shiny skull, and the color blanched from his face.
'What is it?' she asked.
He looked up at her and blinked repeatedly as though abruptly awakened from a dream.
'Not yet,' he mumbled. He rose and shook his head. 'Not until I'm sure.'
He cast one last glance back at the skull before wrapping his arms around his chest and shuffling out of the cave and into the sunlight.
V
Sam reluctantly allowed herself to be guided away from the ancient burial site. There would be limitless time to study and excavate the
She hadn't been this excited since the days when she had explored the uncharted wilderness with her father as a child. His enthusiasm had been contagious, and for a long time it had more than compensated for living out of tents, isolated from the life that normal children led. She could thank him for her love of history and its misunderstood societies, for granting her glimpses of the professional adventures to come, but at the same time she felt she owed the world a debt on his behalf. He had been a good man and an even better father. It was the decisions that he had made along the way that couldn't be taken back...or forgiven. He had discovered ruins that made front page news around the globe. However, plundering the sites of their artifacts left them incomplete when the scholars arrived in his wake, like playing Scrabble without the vowels. And he had never seen anything wrong with it. To him, that was part of the job. He and Leo invested their money into finding and securing the treasures, which were the payoff for their hard work. Now, instead of those artifacts of inestimable cultural value filling displays in museums, they rested on the shelves of wealthy businessmen, or they'd been melted down and sold, or they simply sat in crates in the dusty warehouses of antiquity dealers. It fell to her to make amends, and she would start right here and now. Nothing would leave these sites without being properly logged and catalogued. This she swore.
Leo had promised her that the ruins would not be pillaged. While she had always known him to be a man of his word, she was prepared to go to war with him if he so much as thought about reneging.
Protecting the sites was an imperative, the more immediate of her concerns, but what about the descendents that had managed to remain hidden in the jungle for so long? How would they react to having the spotlight of the scientific world shined into their faces? Would that even be in their best interests? Was there a way to announce their discovery without flooding the rainforest with researchers who would insist upon poking and prodding them, and sharing the wonders of modern technology, and diseases for which they had no antibodies, and religions hell- bent on the annihilation of mankind?
They had seemed unconcerned, as though a band of strangers passing through their village was a common occurrence. Was it possible that others had stumbled upon their fortress before Hunter, and yet word had somehow never managed to leak?
Those cryptic words echoed in her head, summoning a sudden uneasiness that had nothing to do with the dark storm clouds rolling toward the mountains from the east. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Indigo lightning strobed. Rain was a foregone conclusion. They needed to reach level ground before the storm overtook them. The already treacherous stone ledges and muddy paths would be downright lethal with a deluge racing down the slope.
They rounded the mountain and now faced west into the dense gray clouds trapped between them and the opposite peak. The valley below mocked them from out of sight with the grumble of waterfalls and the whistle of the wind across the sheer cliffs.
Somewhere out there, obscured by the clouds and shrouded by vegetation, were the crumbled remains of a vanished society, the link between the ancient dead in the traditionally accepted Chachapoya range to the south, and those still living in the jungle.
Her heart rate accelerated and her body became electric with nervous energy. She wanted nothing more than to barrel through the others and sprint ahead toward the discovery of a lifetime.
The first raindrop slapped her backpack. A moment later she felt another spatter of coldness on her shoulder. This time they were all within easy reach of their ponchos, and used the rare advance notice to don them.
'This must be just like going to Disneyland for you,' Merritt said from behind her.
She couldn't help but smile.
'You have no idea.'
They reached a point where the path widened and he caught up so he could walk beside her. Trees rose from the downhill side of the path to block their view of the cloud-cloaked valley and smothered the roar of the waterfalls. The timing was perfect as the rain pummeled the upper canopy, which absorbed the brunt of the storm for them.
'I don't know.' He offered a lopsided grin. 'I'd like to think I'm something of an expert on Disneyland.'
Her smile broadened.
'So what do you think we'll find over there?' he asked, nodding to the right.
'That's half the fun. I don't really know. We could discover an amazing fortress that would make Machu Picchu pale by comparison, or we could find that whatever was once there has deteriorated and fallen to ruin in the bottom of the gorge.'
'You don't really think that's the case. I can see it in your eyes. You're just downplaying your expectations. You know there's something truly astonishing hiding behind those clouds.'
'I hope so. Otherwise we've come all this way for nothing.'
'What will you do with all of the artifacts you find?'
It was a loaded question, she knew. He'd made no secret of how he felt about protecting the heritage of his
