Dustin Thomason: 12.21

“I’m never leaving you.”

FIRST STANTON REMOVED all the visible calculi and took scrapings from each portion of the teeth using an X-Acto knife. He did each section three times before putting the scrapings onto microscope slides. This was difficult work under the best conditions; using only a single flashlight in darkness, it was nearly impossible. But, with painstaking care, he slowly did it.

Using a reference text, he compared what he saw on these slides to known plant species. He matched a variety by the unique shapes of their starches: maize; beans; avocado; breadnut; papaya; peppers; cacao. Hundreds of deposits sat on the teeth, but it seemed unlikely that any of these common foods had protected the nobles against VFI.

Then, under the dim luminescence of the battery-powered microscope, Stanton saw something unexpected. A starch he needed no textbook to recognize.

Stanton couldn’t believe he was seeing the remnants of beech trees here. Beech generally grew in true mountainous climates, like central Mexico. He would never have expected to find it in the jungles of Guatemala, and neither would any botanist he knew. Which meant that this could be an unknown species, native to this small corner of the world.

Beech was the active ingredient in pentosan, which had once seemed like the most promising drug for slowing the spread of prions. But there had never been a safe way to get pentosan into the brain, and no species of beech could cross that crucial blood– brain barrier. So they hadn’t tried it on VFI.

But something didn’t make sense to Stanton now. Beech fruit was edible, although its taste was famously bitter. Yet to win immunity from prion disease, the whole city would have to have eaten it, week after week, in quantity.

He crossed over to Chel and gently tapped her on the shoulder. “I have to ask you a question,” he whispered. “Did the Maya chew tree bark?”

He knew she was awake, but Chel’s eyes were closed. He’d pushed her to continue through the heat of the jungle, to march farther than she thought she could. He had given her hope. And, with hope, she had led him here. But now she was dying.

“ In Lak’ech ” was all she said.

Stanton hurried back to the slides. He’d remembered something from the codex that talked about the dwarf chewing and spitting something, and he would bet everything on this one instinct: It had been beech bark, and it had been their cure. A new species of the familiar tree had evolved in this jungle, capable of sneaking past the blood–brain barrier. And eating it protected the ancient Maya, up until the day they’d consumed it all.

Stanton had to believe that somewhere outside this temple, the native population of beech trees could have regrown after the collapse, just as the ceibatrees had. Unless the Maya had razed an entire jungle—something even modern man could rarely do—it was impossible to have killed them all. Nature outlasted everything. The only problem was that he couldn’t find those trees unless he had some way of recognizing them.

In the jungle night, leaves would be impossible to see. The only way to tell trees apart would be by their bark. Instinct told Stanton that these Guatemalan trees would share the trait that set all beeches apart: their perfectly smooth, silver-gray bark.

WHEN HE EMERGED from the tunnel, Stanton’s flashlight was faltering. He’d been using it for hours. To conserve it, he decided to gather branches from a nearby tree and light them into a torch.

By the entrance to the tomb he saw pines and oaks, but nothing with that smooth gray bark of a beech. Back around the twin temples, smaller plants grew in every crevice, and Stanton gathered a thicker bundle of limbs to use as a second torch when the first one sputtered out. The jungle had gone quieter. Only a symphony of crickets played in the night, so it took Stanton by surprise when two deer sprinted across his path as he bent for kindling.

The torch lit, he pressed on. Feeling the odds against him growing, he forced his way deeper into the forest, where the trees thickened, their trunks like airliner fuselages stuck in the ground. In the darkness, Stanton couldn’t begin to estimate their height. It was hard to even stay on a straight path, and he found himself going in circles, seeing the same landmarks again and again.

When he approached the reverse side of the king’s entombment pyramid, frustration turned to despair.

He had no idea how he’d ended up where he started. Then another torch failed, and everything went black again. Stanton pawed the ground for branches. His glove touched something sharp and, lighting another match, he looked to see what it was. On the jungle floor, no bigger than the end of his thumb, was a brown lump covered with tiny spines.

A beechnut.

He held the nut high in the air, as if to reverse its path to the ground. Here, so close to the king’s tomb, was the smooth-barked tree it had fallen from. Its trunk rose higher than Stanton’s match could throw light.

And, to his astonishment, it wasn’t the only one.

A dozen stood in a line. Their branches extended toward the face of the pyramid as if they were reaching out to touch it.

CHEL FLOATED IN and out of the darkness, bobbing like a bird in a brisk wind at the top of the sky. In those moments when she could still see the light, her tongue felt like sandpaper, and the heat made her whole body painful. The disease crawled like a spider through her thoughts. But in those moments when the light disappeared and the darkness came, She sank gratefully into an ocean of memories.

The ancient father of her village—Paktul, spirit founder of Kiaqix—lay beside her here, and whatever came next, she felt safe in his presence. If she had to follow him, if she had to join Rolando and her father, then perhaps she would see that place the ancestors always talked about. The place of the gods.

WHEN HE STEPPED BACK into the tomb, Stanton saw that Chel was in the same spot he had left her, slumped against the wall with a glazed look in her eyes. Then he saw she’d ripped off her biohelmet. The heat must have been driving her crazy, and now she was breathing in air that would almost certainly make things worse. Stanton considered trying to get her back in the suit, but he knew the damage had been done.

Her only hope lay elsewhere.

Using what remained of the flashlight’s power, he began to prepare the injection by crushing leaves, bark, wood, and fruit into tiny particles and combining them with a suspension of saline and dissolving enzymes. Finally he drew a syringe of the fluid and pushed the needle into a vein in Chel’s arm. She barely stirred at the prick.

“You’re going to come out of this,” he told her. “Stay with me.”

He glanced down at his watch, establishing a baseline against which to time the first signs of reaction. It was 11:15 P.M.

THERE WAS ONLY one way for Stanton to know if the drug had crossed the brain–blood barrier: a spinal tap that analyzed Chel’s cerebrospinal fluid. If beech was now in that fluid, it had gone from the heart to the brain and crossed over the barrier into the fluid that surrounded it.

After twenty minutes, he inserted a needle into the space between Chel’s vertebrae, drawing the fluid into another syringe. Stanton had known men to scream during spinal taps. Chel, in her condition, barely made a sound.

Stanton dropped spinal fluid onto six slides and waited for them to fix. Then he closed his eyes and whispered a single word into the darkness. “ Please .”

Placing the first slide under the microscope, Stanton considered all sides of it. Then he scanned the next slide, and the third.