The hole was cut perfectly into the wall, about half the diameter of the sun stone itself. A sun inside a sun. Is that symbolic of Aztec mythology, or am I stepping into another world?
After climbing through the hole, she shone her light down the tunnel. The floor had a thin layer of dust, and the air was much warmer, but there were no cobwebs. The passage could have been a hundred years old or constructed in the last decade; she couldn’t tell.
On the wall to her left was a square stainless steel plate set at chest height, similar to the push plate on a door for people with disabilities. Guessing that it closed and opened the door, she waffled for a second before pressing it, wary of sealing herself inside. But she could hardly leave a gaping hole in the museum wall for a guard to find.
As she suspected, pressing the plate caused the sun stone to rotate back in place, entombing her. She fought against a swell of primal fear, resisting the urge to press the plate again to ensure the stone would reopen. Either it does or it doesn’t.
Firming her jaw, she started down the passage, guided by the weak cone of illumination from her flashlight. The downhill slope soon ended at a brick wall. She ran her hands over the barrier. Solid. After trying the Star Phone, she pushed hard on the wall, and felt it give. Remembering the subway tunnel, she pushed even harder, causing a seamless doorway to hinge inward. She shone her light into the opening and gasped.
It was full of treasures.
Gawking at the marvelous display of Amerindian objects arranged neatly on shelves and in glass display cabinets—gold and jade and silver, metalwork and stone figurines and elaborate pottery—she realized it must be a storage room. She had read that only a very small percentage of the museum’s collection was on display at any one time.
Still a treasure room, she thought.
It just happened to be in a museum.
She slipped through the door and left it open. The room, made of polished cement, was about the size of a large studio apartment. The lack of windows, and her lost cell phone signal, led her to assume she was underground. She wandered through the room, taking in the carved skulls, vivid textiles, statues of gods and demons, and a collection of codices that left her awed by the beauty of the hieroglyphs and illustrations on the covers. To her eye, the pieces looked even more rare and impressive than the ones on public display.
During her walk-through, she kept peering through the Star Phone. So far nothing had changed. There was a door on the opposite side of the room, though instead of a handle she noticed a metal keypad similar to the ones she had seen in the tunnels beneath the city.
Oh my God. Is this storage room even part of the museum?
Hanging on the door above the keypad was an unsigned oil painting. She didn’t know much about art, and had no idea of the provenance, other than it looked old and valuable and European. But from her recent research on the Aztecs, she recognized the scene as the infamous first meeting between Hernán Cortés and Montezuma. Due to biased source material, it was hard for historians to parse exactly what had happened. But the accounts on both sides agree that on the night of November 8, 1519, Montezuma and Cortés met on the causeway leading into the island city of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec Empire and the largest city in the Americas at the time.
In the painting, Cortés was armed with a musket and a sword made of fine Spanish steel. Montezuma was presenting the bearded conquistador with a prized gift: a calendar crafted from gold and silver. The calendar system was one of the great achievements of Mesoamerica, and she knew the Aztecs in fact used three calendars, each handed down from the Mayans. The tzolkin cycle of 260 days was believed to represent either the human gestation period, the region’s agricultural cycle, or the rising and setting of Venus. The 365 days of the haab equated to the modern-day solar calendar. The long count calendar, used on monuments throughout Mesoamerica, was a complex system of identifying the number of days that had passed since a mythical creation date of 3114 BCE.
Cortés had later melted down the priceless calendar, put Montezuma under house arrest, and ransacked the city. Confident in their supremacy over the “savages,” Cortés and his men decided to massacre a group of Aztec leaders during a religious festival, which caused a revolt that led to Montezuma’s death at the hands of his own people. The conquistadores were forced to flee the city, and legend has it they dumped the hoard of gold and artifacts they had accumulated—dubbed “Montezuma’s treasure”—into the blue waters of Lake Texcoco. Though Cortés returned with an army the following year, presaging the fall of the Americas to colonial powers, Montezuma’s treasure was never found.
Recalling the story gave Andie an uneasy, awed feeling as she glanced around the room, but she put that aside and returned to studying the painting. In this version of the meeting, Montezuma’s eyes were downcast, one knee bent. His upturned lips were eager for approval, presenting the calendar to Cortés like an offering to a god.
Andie did not buy the concept of the noble savage—neither the “noble” nor the “savage.” Acts of war and cruelty had always stained the Earth, and as far as she could tell, modern human nature was just as conflicted as ever.
Aiming the Star Phone at the painting caused the edges of the lens to shimmer,
