Dustin Thomason - 12.21

But what if Paktul the man hadn’t made it out with them?

WHEN STANTON returned to the main house, Chel had energy in her voice that he hadn’t heard since they’d sat in the Getty plaza together. “I think we’ve been looking for the wrong thing. Lake Izabal doesn’t have anything to do with where the trio went.”

“What do you mean?”

“Paktul isn’t writing about his human ancestors. It’s right here in the translation. He uses the word I interchangeably with his spirit animal. He goes back and forth using I to refer to his human form and his wayob . But we know he was keeping an actual macaw with him in the cave, because he refers to other people who can see it. He shows it to the prince and Auxila’s daughters, and he writes about the bird rejoining its flock.”

I told the prince my spirit animal had stopped in Kanuataba on the great path of migration every macaw makes with its flock, Paktul wrote. I told him that in weeks we would continue our journey in search of the land that our ancestor birds have returned to every harvest season for thousands of years.

“When he says he’ll lead them in the direction of his ancestors,” Chel said, “I thought that meant his human family. But what if he never went anywhere? What if he was killed by the guards, as he predicted, or he stayed behind to make sure the children could escape?”

“Who led the children to Kiaqix?” Stanton asked. “You think they followed a bird?”

“The prince would’ve been trained to track game a hundred miles. And the macaw would instinctively have returned to its flock. Kiaqix means the Valley of the Scarlet Macaw . It’s right along the migration path. The oral history says that the Original Trio considered it a good omen when they saw so many macaws in the trees here. What if they were following one of them because they believed it was the spirit of Paktul?”

Chel pulled out the latitude map. On it she’d drawn a line representing the macaws’ known migratory path. “During migration seasons, the macaws fly from the southwest to here,” she continued, “and the patterns are highly consistent. We can find the exact trajectory and follow it.”

For most of Stanton’s adult life, the possibility that three children followed a bird a hundred miles would have sounded insane. Now he didn’t know what to believe, but however improbable it was, all he could do was trust Chel’s instincts. If they had to track a migration pattern into the jungle, then that’s what they’d do.

“Are you sure this is the exact path?” Stanton asked.

Chel reached down into the supply bag and pulled out the satellite phone. “I found three different sites online, all giving the same coordinates. You can see for yourself.”

She handed Stanton the phone, but when he tried to power it up again, the screen remained blank. It had been dying for hours, and the last bit of juice was gone. Cutting them off from the world entirely.

“It doesn’t matter,” Chel told him, pointing back at the map. She seemed almost manic. “We have what we need.”

Then Stanton saw something in her eyes that stopped him cold.

“Look at me for a second,” he said.

Chel was confused. “I am looking at you.”

He pulled out his penlight and shone it in her eyes, studying the blacks of them as he swept the light away. They should have constricted in the light and dilated in darkness.

When Stanton took the light away, nothing changed.

“Am I sick?” Chel asked. Voice trembling.

Stanton turned, quickly kneeling down to the supply bag to get a thermometer to measure her temperature. Then he stayed there for a moment, collecting himself. He didn’t want her seeing the fear in his eyes. She needed strength. She needed to believe they would find the lost city, her only hope now. He couldn’t let her see his doubts.

THEY LEFT KIAQIX AT FIRST LIGHT. SOON THE SUN WAS COOKING the Petén, and the light breeze coming through the open windows of the jeep gave Chel little relief. She could almost feel the VFI inside her. She glanced over at Stanton in the driver’s seat. He’d barely looked at her as they’d packed the medical supplies back into the jeep, along with the food Initia had given them. He just said over and over again that, with the disease as concentrated as it was here, the assay was as likely to render a false positive—from contamination—as to be accurate. He was unwilling to accept the results of a test he’d designed himself.

Chel couldn’t read his body language very well, but she understood him enough by now to know he would blame himself for the fact that she was sick, for being a second too late. She wanted to make him understand it wasn’t his fault—that she would have died there on the floor of the chapel if it weren’t for him. But she couldn’t find the right words.

She turned her attention ahead again. The macaw’s path ran 232.5 degrees southwest. Stanton had set them on a course through the jungle, across alternating patches of overused farmland and uncleared forest. Chel knew that they were looking for flat, elevated places, where the ancient cities like Kanuataba would have been built. Two hours in, the terrain was becoming more rugged. For the most part, there were no roads here at all, and they knew they’d eventually have to go on foot.

The jeep rocked back and forth, kicking up mud. It was almost impossible to see through the windows. Chel’s world was getting louder and brighter and stranger: The noises of the car grated, and the howls and screeches of the jungle frightened her in a way they never had before.

She had no idea how long they’d been driving when Stanton stopped the jeep again. “If the bearing’s right,” he said, “we have to keep going this way.” Ahead was a thicker jungle than any they’d seen, and dozens of felled trees blocked their path. It was the end of the line for the jeep.

“Let’s go,” Chel said, trying to show strength. “I can walk.”

He bent down over the odometer. “We’re sixty-two miles from Kiaqix. If they traveled three days to get there, it can’t be much farther, right?”

Chel nodded silently.

“How’re you feeling?” he asked. “If you can’t make it, I’ll go in alone and come back as soon as I find it.”

“People have hunted around here for centuries,” Chel managed. “Only two people have found the ruins. You’ll never find them alone.”

STANTON CARRIED ALL the gear on his back—tools for scraping residues from the bowls they hoped to find in Jaguar Imix’s tomb, a microscope, slides, and other essentials for spot testing. He walked ahead, clearing shrubs and branches with a machete he’d taken from Initia’s house. They navigated choppy mudbanks and held on to the rough bark of towering trees to help them remain upright. Chel’s feet began to blister and her head pounded. She felt like there were a million tiny things crawling all over her body.

After nearly an hour, Stanton stopped. They had just climbed their way to the very top of a rocky embankment, giving them a view of several miles. He held the compass in the air. “The migration path leads into that valley. It must be there.”

Two small mountains lay ahead, each several miles wide. Between them was a large valley of unbroken tropical rain forest.

“It can’t be there,” Chel said. Exhaustion bore down on her fast. “The ancients wouldn’t have built between mountains. It… made them vulnerable on both sides.”