Dustin Thomason: 12.21

With her helmet on, the noise of the world was muted. Looking out through the glass, her entire surroundings—the jungle canopy, Paktul’s city, Stanton and his gear—seemed so far away.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

Stanton helped her press awkwardly through the opening in the stone they’d found next to the abandoned pickax. Then he squeezed inside after her and reached over her shoulder to light the path in front of them with the flashlight.

Chel watched her breath cloud the helmet glass as she shimmied forward on her knees. Tracks of what must have been mold had formed along the stones here countless years ago. Even through her suit, the mossy surface felt alien. She knew the scent of bat guano hung in the air, but all she could smell inside her mask was the slightly antiseptic odor of the suit’s purification mechanism.

Finally the narrow passage opened up into a larger space. The ceiling was about five feet high. Chel had to lean down a little; Stanton had to crouch. She shone her light at the far wall, marveling at the etchings of sacrificial victims in ornate animal headdresses and of snake-headed creatures with the bodies of men. Chel reached out and touched them, wiping away a thick film of dust with her glove. She had no doubt the drawings were made by Paktul’s contemporaries. Each line took hours to carve, and the price of a single mistake would have been death.

On the far end of the platform, stairs led farther down. The temple had clearly been designed as a series of stacked rooms, with four or five staircases on one side, which ultimately led to the lowest level, below ground. There, Chel suspected, they would find several smaller ritual rooms and a larger one where the king was buried—as at the temples of El Mirador.

They kept descending. Each staircase was narrower than the last, and in the biohazard suits they had to turn sideways to squeeze between the walls. The air would get colder as they went down, Chel knew, and she would have given anything for a breath of it, but the suit made everything feel stale and recycled.

Finally they could go no farther. Chel pointed her flashlight ahead into a hallway with cut-out doors on both sides. They were now fifteen or twenty feet underground, and even at midday there would have been no natural light this far below. But the ceilings were higher here; even Stanton could almost stand upright.

“This way,” Chel said, leading him down the hallway. She shone her light into two empty rooms before she found what she was looking for.

In the middle of the most distant chamber stood a limestone sarcophagus.

The final resting place of King Jaguar Imix.

“Is this it?” Though he was right behind her, Stanton’s voice came to Chel through a tiny muffl ed speaker in her ear.

Chel’s body was exhausted, but her mind was still hungry to take it all in. One look at the floor told her the tomb had been looted. Still, there was much that Volcy had left behind: carved flints and rusted necklaces, shell pendants, serpentine statues.

And skeletons.

On the floor surrounding the sarcophagus were fourteen or fifteen ancient skeletons, splayed in ritual fashion, all dusted with maroon-colored cinnabar. They had probably died of the same disease that was killing her now, feeling the same way she did: hot, tired, and terrified by the knowledge that they would never dream again.

“Who are the others?” Stanton asked.

“The ancients believed that the death of a king stole just one of his thirty-nine souls,” Chel said, “and that the other thirty-eight lived on or went to the overworld. The ajaw needed other souls to sacrifice to the gods during his journey to ensure safe passage.” She pointed at the six smallest skeletons. “Including children.”

Stanton bent down. “See the full formation of the ends of the hips of this one? That’s a very small adult.”

The dwarf, Jacomo, buried with his king.

A sudden whine in the darkness startled Chel. She turned in time to see an explosion of bats surging toward them.

“Get down!” Stanton called. “They’ll tear the suits!”

The flurry of flying creatures made Chel momentarily lose her bearings. She reached out for the wall, but her hands found nothing and she tumbled to the floor. Above her, Stanton flailed his arms, shooing the bats into the hallway.

Their high-pitched screams faded.

Chel wondered if she had the strength to get back up. The suit mummified her arms and legs. Her muscles ached. She lay there, face-to-face with the skeletons, and felt overwhelmed. Then, just as she was about to close her eyes, she caught sight of something metal hidden in the dust near her. It was a large jade ring with a glyph carved into it.

The monkey-man scribe.

The prince had escaped, and Auxila’s daughters too, all of them following Paktul’s spirit animal—the scarlet macaw—in the direction of Kiaqix. But Paktul, the man, had not escaped. He must have been killed by Jaguar Imix’s guards, who had then buried him, his ring, and his book with his king.

She looked at the skulls, wondering which was Paktul’s. Somewhere, among these remains, lay the father of her people. They’d never know exactly where, but Chel was content to be in the scribe’s presence. To know they’d found him.

Stanton got her to her feet, but Chel couldn’t walk on her own. He helped her shuffle over to the king’s sarcophagus. Even in her state, Chel saw that the limestone slab was etched with ornate designs from end to end, masterful workmanship lavished on a single stone. She knew that Volcy hadn’t gotten inside it either: The heavy lid was still in place, and he never would have taken the time to replace it. He’d probably found the book quickly and known it was all he needed.

“Can you lift it?” she asked Stanton.

Stanton took hold of the stone slab, jockeying it back and forth, one corner at a time. Finally it crashed to the ground, the noise reverberating through the chamber.

Then Chel leaned against the wall again and watched him lift out the bones and artifacts. A jade head mask with pearl eyes and quartz fangs. A long spear with a sharp jade point. Carved jade plaques.

But there were no bowls. No water carriers. No containers for chocolate or maize. No vessels of any kind. Just jewelry, head masks, and weapons.

All priceless. But useless.

Chel had been confident that they’d find ceramics, that the king would be buried with them, and that they’d find within them the residue of whatever the ancients had been eating. “I don’t know what to say, Gabe. I thought—”

She stopped when she realized Stanton wasn’t even looking at her.

He simply walked to where the smaller skeletons lay and wrenched the dwarf’s skull from his body, which gave easily. “What are you doing?” she asked.

Stanton pointed. “The teeth .”

“What do you mean?”

“We might be able to extract what they were eating. from the teeth. Food grains can survive forever. Even if they exhausted their supplies, grains they ate a long time before they died could still be here.”

Stanton rapidly gathered other skulls and began to prepare them. For a moment Chel watched him from the wall she leaned on, then she closed her eyes. Everything was somehow still bright. Even in the darkness. And the air inside her helmet was cooking her brain.

“If you need to leave me…” she started to say, but she was already thinking only of Paktul, whose ring she’d put on her gloved finger, and then of her mother and how wrong she’d been about her. So she didn’t hear Stanton’s next words as he went about his work.