Dustin Thomason: 12.21

Even more impressive, the writing felt fluent. The glyph combinations made intuitive sense, as did the pictograms. The glyphs appeared to have been written in an early version of “classic Ch’olan,” as expected in a codex like this. But what Chel couldn’t take her eyes off of were the phonetic “complements” on the glyphs that helped a reader identify their meaning. They were written in Qu’iche.

The known post-classic codices with their Mexican influences were written in Yucatec and Ch’olan Mayan. But Chel had long imagined that a classic book from Guatemala might well have been written with complements in the dialect her mother and father had grown up speaking. The presence of those here represented a deep and nuanced understanding of the history and language on the part of the forger.

Chel couldn’t believe the sophistication, and she suspected that many of even her smartest colleagues would have been fooled.

Then a sequence of glyphs stopped her cold.

On one of the largest bark-paper pieces Chel had seen in the box, three pictograms were written in sequence to form a sentence fragment:

Water, made to shoot from stone.

Chel blinked, confused. The writer could only be describing a fountain . Yet no forger in the world could have written about a fountain, because until recently no scholar knew the classic Maya used them in their cities. It had been less than a month since an archaeologist from Penn State figured out that, contrary to popular belief, the Spanish hadn’t introduced pressurized aqueducts to the New World; the Maya built them centuries before Europeans arrived.

A codex like this could never have been forged in less than a month.

So it couldn’t have been forged at all.

Chel looked up at Gutierrez in disbelief. “Where did you get this?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

The obvious answer was that it had been looted from a tomb in the Maya ruins, stolen like so much else from her ancestors’ graves.

“Who else knows about it?” Chel pressed.

“Only my source,” Gutierrez said. “But now you understand its value?”

If she was right, there could be more information about Maya history on these pages than in all the known ruins combined. The Dresden Codex, the most complete of the four ancient Maya books, would fetch ten million dollars at auction—and the pages in front of her would put the Dresden to shame.

“Are you going to sell it?” she asked Gutierrez.

“When the time is right.”

Even if she’d had the kind of money he would demand, the time would probably never be right for Chel. She couldn’t buy it legally, because it had obviously been stolen, and the work it would take to properly reconstruct and decipher a codex would make it impossible to hide for long. If a looted codex were ever discovered in her possession, she’d lose her job and could face criminal charges.

“Why should I hold it for you?” Chel asked.

Gutierrez said, “To give me time to figure out how to make papers so it can be sold to an American museum—I hope yours. And because if ICE finds this now, neither of us will ever see it again.”

Chel knew he was right about ICE: If they confi scated the book, they’d repatriate it to the Guatemalan government, which didn’t have the expertise or infrastructure to properly display and study a codex. The Grolier Fragment, found in Mexico, had been rotting in a vault there since the eighties.

Gutierrez packed the book back in its box. Chel already felt impatient to touch it again. The bark paper was disintegrating and needed preservation. More than that, the world needed to know what these pages said, because they testifi ed to the history of her people. And the history of her people was disappearing.

EAST L.A. PRESBYTERIAN HOSPITAL: BARS GUARDED THE WINDOWS, and the typical crowd of smokers always seen around run-down hospitals stood outside puffing away. The front entrance was closed due to a leak in the lobby ceiling, so security shuffled visitors and patients alike into the hospital through the ER.

Inside, Stanton was hit by overlapping smells: alcohol, dirt, blood, urine, vomit, solvent, air freshener, and tobacco. On chairs around the waiting room sat dozens of suffering people waiting their turn. Stanton rarely spent time in facilities like this one: When a hospital deals with gang violence on a daily basis, there’s not much demand for a prion specialist to give academic lectures.

A clearly stressed-out nurse, sitting behind a bulletproof glass window, agreed to page Thane as Stanton joined a group of visitors gathered around a TV mounted on the wall. An airplane was being pulled from the ocean by a Coast Guard salvage vessel. Rescue boats and helicopters circled the remains of Aero Globale flight 126, which had crashed off the coast of Baja California on its way from L.A. to Mexico City. Seventy-two passengers and eight crew members had died.

This is the way things can end, Stanton thought. No matter how many times life forced him to realize it, the thought still took him by surprise. You exercised and ate well, got yearly physicals, worked hard 24/7 and never complained about it, and then one day you just got on the wrong plane.

“Dr. Stanton?”

The first thing he noticed about the tall black woman in scrubs standing behind him was how broad her shoulders were. She was in her early thirties, with cropped hair and thick black-rimmed glasses, giving her a kind of rugby-player-turned-hipster look.

“I’m Michaela Thane.”

“Gabriel Stanton,” he said, shaking her hand.

Thane glanced up at the television. “Terrible, huh?”

“Do they know what happened?”

“They’re saying human error,” she said, leading him out of the ER. “Or as we say here—CTFL. Call the fucking lawyers.”

“Speaking of which, I assume you called County Health?” Stanton asked her as they headed toward the elevators.

Thane repeatedly pressed an elevator button that refused to light up. “They promised to send someone.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

She mimed taking a huge gasp of air in as they waited. Stanton smiled. She was his type of resident.

Finally the car arrived. Thane hit the button for six. When her scrub sleeve pulled back, Stanton saw a bald eagle with a scroll between the bird’s wings tattooed on her triceps.

“You’re Army?” he asked her.

“Five Hundred Sixty-fifth Medical Company, at your service.”

“Out of Fort Polk?”

“Yeah,” Thane said. “You know the battalion?”

“My father was Forty-sixth Engineers. We lived at Fort Polk for three years. You served before residency?”

“Did ROTC for med school and they pulled me over there after internship,” she said. “Two tours near Kabul doing helicopter retrievals. I was O-Three by the end.”

Stanton was impressed. Airlifting soldiers from the front lines was about the most dangerous army medical assignment there was.

“How many cases of FFI have you seen before?” Thane asked. The elevator finally started to ascend.

“Seven,” Stanton told her.

“All of them died?”

“Yes. All of them. Has genetics come back yet?”

“Should be soon. But I did manage to find out how the patient got here. LAPD arrested him at a Super 8 motel a few blocks away, after he assaulted some other guests. Cops brought him here when they realized he was sick.”

“After a week of insomnia, we’re lucky he didn’t do a lot worse.”

Even following the loss of a single night of sleep, deterioration of cognitive function was like a blood-alcohol level of 0.1 and could cause hallucinations, delirium, and wild mood swings. After weeks of progressively worse insomnia, FFI drove its victims to suicidal thinking. But most of the victims Stanton had seen simply succumbed from the devastation insomnia wreaked on their bodies.