MICHAELA THANE WAS THIRTEEN WHEN THE RODNEY KING verdict set off looting and burning of thousands of buildings from Korea-town to East L.A. Her mother was still alive then, and she had kept Michaela and her brother in the house for nearly four days, where they watched on their nineteen-inch television as rioters set the city ablaze. It was the last time Thane remembered Los Angeles looking as it did now.
On the car radio, she listened to pundits argue about whether it was the email leak from the mayor’s office that had started the unrest. One commentator claimed it was the nearly ten thousand estimated sick—agitated and desperate—leading the destruction. Detractors of Stanton’s quarantine declared this the inevitable result of trying to contain ten million people. But Thane had spent long enough living and working in this part of L.A. to know people here didn’t need a reason to be angry—they needed a reason not to be.
Just before the turn in to Presbyterian, she looked in her rearview mirror to see Davies peel off; he’d trailed her here to ensure her safety. And safe it seemed to be. Floodlights illuminated the night sky, helicopters circled and jeeps swept the perimeter; National Guardsmen with guns patrolled the buildings as if it were a base in Kabul.
Since returning from Afghanistan, Thane had spent nearly every weekday, every third night, and many weekends at Presby. She’d been here on virtually every holiday too, taking the least desirable call nights. Her colleagues thought she did it because she was selfless, but really Thane had nowhere else to go. A hospital operates 365 days a year, twenty-four hours a day, just like a military base. And eating the staff turkey on Thanksgiving and drinking plastic cups of sparkling cider when the clock struck midnight on New Year’s was better than being alone.
Working at Presbyterian had never been easy, and sometimes they had to improvise more than medics in the mountains. The hospital was understaffed and overwhelmed. Yet Thane and her colleagues had provided decent care to tens of thousands of patients nonetheless. They helped other services, did favors for critical patients, listened to one another complain, and drank heavily together to try to forget it all. Over the last three years, the Presby staff had been Thane’s big, messy, occasionally happy substitute for a platoon.
Now so many of them were dying inside these walls, and Presbyterian itself would soon be a memory too. Even if they could stop or slow the disease, they’d never be able to ensure that all the prion was gone from the floors, the walls, the sinks, the bedrails, and the light switches. The building would be demolished and removed by hazmat, piece by piece.
IT WAS AFTER ONE A. M., but CDC staff still roamed the halls—tending to patients, trying to calm the victims, barking orders at one another. Thane had difficulty seeing their faces through the helmet of the biohazard suit she’d put on, but that also meant it was difficult for them to see hers. As long as no one recognized her, she could walk the wards unnoticed. The suit was sweltering hot and uncomfortable to move in, but she pressed on past rows of listless patients staring at the walls or restlessly pacing their rooms.
Her first stop was on the fourth floor. Meredith Fentress was a heavy-set woman who just a week ago had manned the lobby. Thane had spent many nights chatting with her about the Dodgers and their never-ending string of disappointments.
Now Fentress was whimpering and tossing, covered in sweat.
“You’ll feel better soon,” Thane whispered as she pushed the antibodies from a syringe into the IV, and the yellow-tinged solution dripped into the patient’s vein. Thane watched—just as she and Stanton had discussed—to make sure there was no negative reaction that called for an immediate response.
Nothing. When Thane was sure, she made her way from room to room. Occasionally she had to wait for a CDC doctor to finish with the patient and leave, but for the most part, she thought, it was almost like she was invisible.
Amy Singer was a tiny bottle-blond third-year medical student with whom Thane had done a night rotation in the ICU. As she administered the antibodies, Thane remembered a night that they’d both fallen into an uncontrollable fit of laughter after an old man on the floor confused the two of them.
Suddenly a nurse wearing a biohazard suit walked in. She looked at Thane skeptically. “Can I help you?”
Thane pulled out the CDC ID Stanton had had made for her. “Just taking some secondary samples,” she said. “Monitoring how quickly protein loads are growing.”
The nurse seemed satisfied and continued on her rounds. Thane breathed a huge sigh of relief. So far all had gone well. She prayed that the antibodies were doing their work.
Ten patients later, Thane found Bryan Appleton lying quietly in his bed. His eyes were closed, but of course she knew he lingered in a dangerous netherworld. She also took note of the three deep red scratches on the side of his face—when she was done, she’d attach restraints for his own safety. Appleton was one of the kitchen staff, who had practically force-fed Thane meals on her call nights. He’d always seemed to understand that residents survived on the free eats—oatmeal cookies, melon, juice, and coffee—that magically appeared in the call rooms.
Thane watched to make sure the liquid flowed easily through the IV. Then she tried to turn him so she could fasten his arms to the rails.
Appleton’s eyes opened.
He grabbed the sleeve of her biohazard suit. “What are you doing?” he demanded. “What are you doing to me?”
As gently as she could, Thane maneuvered her arm out of his grip. “It’s Michaela, Bryan. I’m giving you medicine.”
Appleton shot up in bed. “I don’t want any fucking medicine!”
His eyes looked wild. The beeps from the monitor beside his bed came faster. His heart was racing at a hundred eighty beats per minute.
“You have to lie down, Bryan,” Thane said. He was a big man, but she’d dealt with worse. She leaned her weight over the bed, positioning herself. Was he having an allergic reaction to the antibodies? Was it VFI-induced anger and stress causing the tachycardia? Either way, she had to calm him down. “Please, lie down for a minute and try to relax.”
Appleton threw all his weight and catapulted her over the side table. “Don’t you fucking touch me!” he screamed as she fell to the ground.
Thane could feel the nasty bruise blooming on her head, but she also knew she had only seconds to get up. Shakily, she got to her feet and glimpsed Appleton’s blood pressure: 50/30.
He was having an anaphylactic reaction, and he needed an epinephrine injection. But he was already pulling out his tubes. It would be impossible to get close enough. “Please, Bryan,” she begged. “You’re having a reaction to the drug. You gotta let me give you something for it.”
“You’re poisoning me!” he screamed, throwing his legs over the side of the bed and starting after her. “I’ll kill you, bitch!”
Thane darted around the bed and headed for the door. Bryan’s screams echoed down the hallway, and soon other patients heard him and joined in. Yelling that they were poisoned too. Demanding to be released from the quarantine.
Thane fled to the stairs. Her biohazard suit was suffocating as she descended to the third floor, where she nearly barreled into a man in a hospital gown standing at the top. It was Mariano, the security guard who’d stood outside Volcy’s room for days. Thane was hit with a wave of sadness. The man had spent years trying to protect himself from disease with masks. But he hadn’t protected his eyes.
“Keep away from my wife,” he shouted. He was sick and obviously hallucinating.
“It’s okay, Mariano,” she said. “It’s Michaela Thane.”
Mariano bared his teeth, grabbed the nylon fabric of her biohazard suit, and threw her down the stairs.
Thane’s neck broke the moment she hit the landing.
I have taken ownership of One Butterfly and Flamed Plume, Auxila’s daughters. Haniba did her duty, as is ordained by the gods. The girls visit her grave—marked with a cross signifying the four cardinal directions—every other sun. Her suicide was met with acclaim from the royal council, who believe Auxila was chosen for sacrifice by the gods.
Never knowing me to be carnal, the members of the council were shocked to hear I had taken his daughters as my concubines. Darkened Sun believed me only when I told him I planned to lie with the younger of the two first and that my abstinence was actually a preference for unspoiled youth. I have commanded Flamed Plume to spread word to the other girls of Kanuataba of how her younger sister submits most humbly to my insatiable appetites.
I also told the girls in truth that I would never make them lie with me. At first they seemed terrified I would force myself upon them. One Butterfly, only nine years, was particularly scared at first, but when I bled her gums upon the loss of a tooth, she was grateful and regarded me with softer eyes before confessing her sorrows to her worry dolls. The elder girl was slower to accommodate. Only after weeks did Flamed Plume come to trust me; for the past four nights we have spent every evening reading the great books of Kanuataba together.
I take no pride in owning these girls, but Haniba had spoken true. I could not let Auxila’s daughters be defiled. Their father was a holy man, whose family took me in as an orphan when my father left for the land of our ancestors. And then Auxila set me on the path to nobility, a debt that I can never repay. Still, I do not know what to say to the children when tears pour out of their eyes after visiting their mother’s grave. I have never understood the ways of women.
I give them crumbs to feed my bird self, who has taken to perching inside the cave. It gives the smaller girl solace. She is too young to understand that the macaw is my spirit self, but she can muster a smile when he squawks, and it stops her tears, if only for a moment. Despite my efforts, I am a poor substitute for a mother.
Two suns ago, my concubines and I were paid a royal visit by the holy prince, Smoke Song. It is most unusual for the prince’s lessons to take place outside the palace, unless we are studying some natural phenomenon. But before the king’s recent departure, he agreed to my request to send the prince here. The king is away with his warriors, waging war for three suns against Sakamil. Mercifully, despite his promises, he decided not to take his young son with him.
Upon the prince’s arrival, it became clear that Flamed Plume would be a distraction. The prince’s eyes lit at the sight of her, and he could focus on nothing else. He had believed he would never see the girl again, this girl of whom he had been most fond for years.
According to custom, when the prince addressed the girl, she went to kiss the ground beneath his feet. Then I listened to them speaking admiringly of the bird, who silently climbed atop Flamed Plume’s shoulder, preening. The bird was recovering most rapidly and would be ready to journey in search of his flock in a matter of weeks. Looking at the macaw, the prince postured by pushing his immature braid to the front, still adorned with the white bead indicating servitude to his father.
Then he spoke:
—But this bird is nothing compared to my spirit animal, the mighty jaguar. Have you ever seen one with your own eyes? He is swifter than any animal in the jungle and more capable of attacking his prey than the most skilled archer could ever be. He moves faster than the arrow, and quieter too. I can show you where lie the graves of jaguar bones, which will give you a chill you will not soon forget. Indeed, you might faint upon seeing this, but I will be there to catch you, for my heart and mind are stronger than yours, little girl.—
What happened next between these children surprised me and reminded me in what strange and beautiful ways the gods have fashioned us, the fourth race.
The girl Flamed Plume did not look away from the prince then when he looked into her eyes, as custom dictated. In the royal palace she could be sacrificed for such an indiscretion. But there was no fear on her face, or in her heart. She smiled enough to reveal that she had two front teeth emblazoned with jade but then hid those jade pieces so he could not see more. Since the day I came to her in her parents’ home to explain that her mother was dead, there had been no smiles.
Then she spoke as I have never heard a girl speak to a prince:
—But, holy prince, Smoke Song, most revered one, how can the mighty jaguar be faster than a quiver of arrows when I have seen jaguars killed by those very same arrows by our marksmen? Can you explain this contradiction to an intelligence as meek as mine?—
It was not until that moment that I came to understand how strong-willed and noble Flamed Plume is. But how the boy would react to this affront I could not predict. His face indicated puzzlement at her refusal to defer. Yet then Smoke Song smiled and showed Flamed Plume his jade, and I was reminded how little he resembled his father. One day he will make a great leader of Kanuataba, if we can emerge from the calamities that threaten to consume our mighty lands. I was filled with pride for him.
Still, nothing can ever come of the prince and Flamed Plume; her father has been sacrificed to the gods, and she is stuck between worlds, unfit for the company of a king, no better than a bastard. Watching them, and knowing this, took me closer to tears than I have been in many suns.
The prince reached into his satchel. I thought he was pulling from it one of the great books I had instructed him to bring from the royal library, and I swelled with pride, believing he might show his reading skill, which I had taught for so long.
Yet instead he held an ornate ceramic bowl, more than two hands in its depth, as if built for water. The bowl was decorated with colors of death and rebirth, and he held it out toward Flamed Plume at arm’s length. Then the prince spoke to her:
—Behold Akabalam, who graces my father with his power and in whose honor we build the new temple. Have you seen Akabalam with your own eyes, girl?—
Flamed Plume went silent, bowed by the invocation of the god who had claimed her father’s life. But I was anxious with desire to know: Could the king have shown his son what the mysterious god presided over, that I might understand?
Then the prince spoke to the girl again:
—Do not be afraid. I have power over these creatures, this embodiment of Akabalam. Do not be afraid. I will protect you.—
Smoke Song opened the bowl, and I could see inside there stood a count of six insects, long as a finger, color of the leaves of the most vibrant trees that once ruled our forest. The insects climbed atop one another, attempting to scale the walls of the ceramic bowl but without success. Their long, bent legs were entwined beneath their bodies. Their eyes, color of night, protruded from their heads.
The prince spoke:
—I have seen him worshipping these creatures, and I took them from his throne room, where they have their royal feasts, and now I, too, feel their power.—
I studied the insects, those that blend with the forest itself. For what purpose we would worship this creature, I could not imagine! They made no honey. They could not be roasted for food. Why would the king dedicate a temple and sacrifice his overseer of the stores in the name of a useless insect? Why would a king denigrate us, the gods’ holy maize creation, in its name?
I spoke:
—This is what your father calls Akabalam? Only this?—
—Yes.—
—And has he told you the meaning of why we must exalt them?—
—Of course he has. But you, scribe, could never feel what a king would feel in the presence of such power.—
But as I studied the insects more closely and watched them slowly rubbing their tiny front legs together in the air, I believed I understood. Their legs gave them the appearance of a man communing with the gods. No other creature I have seen in the kingdom appears more pious. No other creature is such a model for the way all men must pray to the gods.
Is this why the king so reveres them? Because he believes we have lost our piety in the drought and that they stand as a symbol of commitment to the gods?
The prince turned to the girl and spoke again:
—Only a man ordained by the ancestors can understand Akabalam—
Beyond his father’s influences, Smoke Song is a good child, pure of heart. His is a soul the ancestors of the forest would have loved and respected, as it is written in the great books. While his father might simply have ordered me beheaded if he thought I had defiled a girl he wanted, Smoke Song only intended to impress the girl and win her heart. He stole the insects from the palace, and with them he was showing Flamed Plume how much more powerful he was than I. So I would allow him this pleasure.
The girl watched as I bowed to the boy and kissed his feet.
“TWO THOUSAND SUNS,” ROLANDO SAID. “ALMOST SIX YEARS. It’s a mega-drought.”
He, Chel, and Victor stood over five newly reconstructed and deciphered pages of the codex. Chel gazed down again at Paktul’s statement on the twenty-eighth page: Some ears of maize grow tall even during the droughts as long and terrible as ours, gone on for nearly two thousand suns.
“Don’t you agree?” Rolando asked Victor, who sat across the Getty lab, studying his copy of the translation and sipping on his tea.
Last night, when Chel returned from seeing her mother at the church, it was Victor she’d wanted to share her frustrations with, certain that he was the only person who’d truly understand. But Victor hadn’t come back from his fruitless trip into his obscure stash of academic journals until well after midnight. By then Chel had stolen a quick shower in the Getty Conservation Institute building, washed off the residue of her conversation with Ha’ana completely, and thrown herself back into the work. She hadn’t spoken of it since.
“The king wasn’t helping matters,” Victor said. “But, yes, it does seem like there was a major drought and that it must have been the underlying cause.”
In a normal world, it might have been the most important discovery of all of their careers. In landlocked classic cities, the Maya could store water for no longer than eighteen months. Evidence of a six-year drought would convince even Chel’s most resistant colleagues that the cause of the collapse was what she had been arguing for years.
But of course the world was no longer normal. What mattered now was the connection between the codex and the lost city, which strengthened with each section they translated. Now that it was clear Paktul had protected the two little girls by taking them in, it seemed nearly inevitable that he would take them as wives. Rolando’s theory that they were the Original Trio was more and more plausible.
Groundbreaking as these discoveries were, they still hadn’t been able to figure out where exactly the lost city might be located or where Volcy could have gotten sick. Fortunately, they now knew more about the mysterious Akabalam glyph that had impeded their decipherment progress. Based on the scribe’s descriptions of insects that looked like they were communing with the gods, Chel, Rolando, and Victor all agreed he must have been describing praying mantises. Mantises were common all over the Maya area. And despite the scribe’s questions about why they would need to worship them, Chel knew the Maya had occasionally worshipped insects and created gods in their honor.
Yet there was still a missing piece. Thirty-two bark pages were nearly complete, but even with this potential break, the glyph appeared ten or eleven times on a single page in surprising and unusual ways. When Chel inserted praying mantis or praying mantis god into all the places they saw Akabalam, much of the end still didn’t make any sense. In the earlier sections, the glyph referred to the name of the new god. But in the final pages, it seemed as if Paktul was using the word to refer to an action.
“It has to be something intrinsic to them, right?” Rolando asked.
“The way bees symbolize sweetness.”
“Or how Hunab Ku can be used to indicate transformation,” Victor suggested, referring to the butterfly god.
A boom outside startled all of them, and Chel hurried to the window. Over the last two days, a few cars had made the trek up to the Getty, interlopers in search of easy looting. Each time, they’d seen the security team still patrolling the grounds and turned around.
“Everything all right?” Rolando asked.
It was difficult to see very far into the night. “I think so,” Chel said.
“So… what?” he asked as she turned back. “Is the king ordaining this new god because the praying mantises appear pious?”
“The droughts probably inspired a lot of doubts among the people,” Chel said. “Maybe he believed it was inspiration.”
She moved to the glass case containing a fragment they’d partially pieced together from one of the final pages and started substituting in her mind:
Perhaps the king allows [piety] because his call for rain has been thwarted, and he knows no rains will come! But will such wanton [piety] not result in chaos among the people, even among those who fear the gods? There is reason the people of Kanuataba so fear [piety] as I do, the most terrifying transgression of all, even if [piety] is commanded by the king!
“It wouldn’t make sense,” she said to the men. “Why would the scribe be so frightened of piety? And why would it be a transgression?”
Chel studied the pages again, contemplating possibilities.
“Where are we with the satellites?” Rolando asked. As of yesterday, thanks to Stanton, the CDC had arranged for a dozen NASA satellites to be turned toward the area surrounding Kiaqix, to search for any sign of ruins in the jungle rim.
Stanton had been Chel’s first call after leaving her mother. It pleased her to be able to tell him that her father’s cousin Chiam’s account of the lost city matched Paktul’s descriptions in the codex. The doctor had listened eagerly, and this time there wasn’t any skepticism in his voice. All he’d said was “Let’s do it.”
She hadn’t heard from Stanton since, but Chel checked her phone constantly. Someone from his team would get in touch as soon as there were any images that required her team’s expertise, and she hoped it was him.
“The satellites can each take up to a thousand photographs a day,” she said, “and they’ve got a team of people searching the images.”
Victor piped up. “Now we just have to pray that Kanuataba is another Oxpemul.”
In the 1980s, satellites had snapped pictures of the tops of two temples poking out from beneath the leaf canopy very close to a major archaeological site in Mexico, leading to the discovery of an even larger ancient city.
“It’s the rainy season, and there’s constant cloud cover around Kiaqix right now,” Chel reminded the men. “The trees could be shielding everything. We’re talking about buildings that are more than a thousand years old and are probably crumbling. Not to mention the fact that they’ve eluded discovery for centuries.”
“Which is why we must focus on the manuscript,” Victor said.
HE TOOK NO PLEASURE in how the victims of VFI were suffering or in the fact that so many more were sure to become infected. It horrified him to hear about children falling prey to the disease and about the ways that men had turned on one another in the streets of L.A. Yet as Victor had watched the stock market crash and the grocery stores empty, he couldn’t help but feel validated. His colleagues had ridiculed him. His family had abandoned him. Until the epidemic began, even he’d begun to wonder if he and the rest of the Believers wouldn’t be proven wrong as so many others had, from the Millerites to the Y2K believers to… well, every other group who had believed the world was due for a great change.
Just after noon, the team broke up to continue exploring the Akabalam question on their own. Chel had gone into her office that adjoined the lab to think, and Rolando had gone to another building for reconstruction equipment, so Victor was left alone in the room. He stood over the plates, examining the one that contained Paktul’s reference to the thirteenth cycle. He lifted the glass off its perch, testing its weight. The case was heavy—fifteen pounds or so—but one man could carry two or three at a time.
Holding part of the codex in his hands, Victor felt its incredible power. In synagogue as a boy, he had learned the story of how rabbis threw themselves over the Torah scrolls when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple of Jerusalem. The rabbis believed the Jewish people couldn’t carry on without the written Word and gave their lives to protect it. Victor felt he finally understood what inspired that willingness to sacrifice so much for a book.
“What are you doing?”
He froze at the sound of Rolando’s voice. What was he doing back here already? Gently, Victor replaced the page and made a show of adjusting where the case sat on the light table. “Some of the glass was starting to shift,” he said, “and I was afraid it might disturb the fragments.”
Rolando joined him in front of the light table. “Appreciate your help, but it’s better if you let me handle the plates, okay?”
Victor moved down the table, pretending to study fragments from the final section. He didn’t want to appear too quick to retreat. Rolando, satisfied with whatever he’d come to check on in the first place, headed toward the back of the lab. Then Victor heard a knock on Chel’s office and the sound of the door closing.
Did Rolando suspect something? Victor sat down at one of the lab benches as casually as he could. He calculated what he would say if Rolando confronted him.
Minutes later, Victor heard Chel’s door creak open again and her soft footsteps coming into the lab. She stood behind him. He didn’t move.
“Can I talk to you?” she asked.
“Of course. What is it?”
She sat down on one of the lab benches. “I just got off the phone with Patrick. I asked him to come here and help with some of the remaining astronomy glyphs, but he said he wouldn’t leave his new girlfriend again. Martha. Who the hell is named Martha in the twenty-first century? I don’t know if we can do this without him.”
“First of all,” Victor said, “he did his part and we don’t need him. Second of all… you know I never liked him anyway.”
“Liar.”
She smiled, but Victor flinched a little at the word.
“But Patrick was right about one thing,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Volcy. The codex. Kiaqix and the Original Trio. He was the first one to point out that it’s all one hell of a coincidence.”
The last thing Victor believed was that any of this was coincidence. “Anything is possible,” he said carefully.
Chel waited for him to continue, and her expectant look gave Victor a feeling he hadn’t had in so long: being needed by someone he truly loved.
“What do you believe?” he asked her.
After a long silence, Chel said, “The obsession with the Long Count drove up the prices on antiquities, which is probably what sent Volcy into the jungle in the first place. Whatever else is happening right now, this started because of 2012 one way or another.”
Silently, Victor prayed once more that he might be able to convince Chel to come with him and his people. He’d always thought he might be able to get her to the mountains when the end came. Now he hoped that she was beginning to see that the predictions were coming true. Soon, perhaps, she would understand that escape was the only way forward.
“I think if we keep our minds open,” he said gently, “there’s no telling what we may come to understand about the world.”
She took a moment, then said, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Do you believe in the Maya gods? The actual gods?”
“You don’t have to believe in the pantheon to see the wisdom of the design the ancients saw in the universe. Maybe it’s enough to know there’s a force that connects us all.”
Chel took a breath. “Yeah, maybe. Or maybe not. By the way, I wanted to say thank you for staying here with me and for all your help.”
“You’re very welcome, Chel.”
Victor watched her go back toward her office. She was the same young woman who’d shown up at his office door on the first day of her graduate program, telling him she’d read all of his work. Who years later gave him a place to go, when no one else would.
And as she disappeared from his sight, he fought back tears.
IT HAD BEEN NEARLY SIX HOURS SINCE DAVIES HAD DROPPED Thane outside the hospital, and Stanton was anxious. He stared out the window, watching the sun creep over the horizon, waiting for his phone to break the silence. For anything to break it. The Venice boardwalk was also too quiet for his taste. He wanted to hear one of the vendors yelling at tourists not to take pictures of his “art,” or the bearded guitarist, the Walk’s honorary mayor, playing as he roller-skated back and forth. Or hear Monster knocking on his door.
“I’d suggest a nip.”
Davies held a lowball glass of Jack Daniel’s in Stanton’s direction, but Stanton waved him off. He could use something, though. Why hadn’t Thane called? The injections should be done. He’d tried her cell but had been unable to get through. Cell service in L.A., always spotty, was basically nonexistent now. Still, Thane should’ve found a landline.
Finally his phone rang. A local number he didn’t know. “Michaela?”
“It’s Emily.”
Cavanagh. Shit. “What’s up?” he asked, trying not to raise suspicion.
“You need to meet me at the command center immediately, Gabe.”
“I’ve got some denaturing experiments running here,” he lied, glancing over at Davies. “I could get over there in a few hours.”
“The director’s here in L.A., and he wants to talk to you,” Cavanagh said. “I don’t care what you’re doing. You need to come now.”
CDC DIRECTOR ADAM KANUTH had been in Washington and Atlanta since the outbreak began, and his absence in L.A. had been noted by nearly everyone, including the press. Advocates said he’d been deftly administrating cases popping up around the country and now the world. Detractors said he’d been avoiding L.A. because he didn’t want to risk infection.
Ash rained down on Stanton as he stepped out of the car at the CDC’s command center. Wildfire had erupted in the hills above the HOLLYWOOD sign and consumed a hundred acres, hanging smoke clouds from downtown to the ocean. Stanton did his best to gather himself before going in. He had never liked the CDC director. Kanuth had come from the Big Pharma world, and he talked about science as if it were economics—supply following demand. Rare diseases got rare grants. Now, Kanuth would want to talk exclusively about containment. He’d want to talk about how quarantines in other cities should be managed. And Stanton would have to do it with still no word from Thane.
Inside the old post office, CDC employees worked behind bullet-proof-glass windows that once protected against unhinged postal workers. Aging posters advertising Ronald Reagan Forever stamps still hung on the walls. A J-1 officer led Stanton toward the postmaster’s office.
Cavanagh sat in a chair in front of the desk. Stanton noticed that she wouldn’t look him in the eye. Behind the desk sat Kanuth, a barrel-chested man in his mid-fifties with thinning silver hair and a beard.
“Mr. Director. Welcome to Los Angeles.”
There was no chair for Stanton to sit in. Kanuth nodded perfunctorily. “We have a problem, Gabe.”
“Okay.”
“Did you send a resident from Presbyterian Hospital in to give injections of murine-based antibodies to a group of patients? Despite our orders not to?”
Stanton froze. “Excuse me?”
Cavanagh stood. “We found two dozen syringes, and they were full of murine-based antibody solutions.”
Had they caught Thane trying to give the injections?
“Where is Dr. Thane now?” Stanton asked carefully.
Kanuth looked at Cavanagh. “She was found at the bottom of a stairwell with her neck broken. As far as we can tell, she died on impact.”
Stanton was in shock. “She fell down the stairs?”
Cavanagh stared him down. “She was killed by a patient.”
“Unless you want to tell me that she was carrying on a secret antibody trial on her own,” said Kanuth, “I assume that you are responsiblefor this.”
Stanton closed his eyes and saw Thane’s face as he arrived at Presbyterian for the first time, after she’d dragged him in to see a patient he might well have ignored. The look on her face when she saw the lab they’d built inside the condo; her quick willingness to help, with little concern for her own career. He heard the hope in her voice when she left to give the injections to her colleagues.
“I enlisted her to give the antibodies,” he whispered finally.
“You wanted permission to test them on a sample group,” Cavanagh said. “We’d already brought it to the FDA chief, and we were less than a day away from clearance. We could’ve done it under controlled conditions. Now a woman is dead because you decided to ignore direct orders.”
Kanuth said, “Not only that, but when people out there learn what happened—and they will—they’ll say we’re losing internal control. We have a whole fucking city looking for any reason to burst, and you’ve given them another one.”
“Turn in your ID, and don’t try to go back to the Prion Center or to any other CDC facility,” Cavanagh said. She sounded disgusted.
“You’re fired, Dr. Stanton,” said Kanuth.
CHEL SAT BENEATH THE APPLE TREES ON THE GETTY’S SOUTH lawn, smoking and gazing down on the maze of azalea in the courtyard below. She needed a moment to rest, to distract herself, to recharge.
“Chel , ” someone called from a distance.
Through the fog she made out Rolando standing at the top of the stairs leading to the central plaza. Behind him was Stanton. Surprised, Chel wondered why he had come. Had the satellites found something? Whatever brought him here, she was pleased to see him.
Rolando waved and peeled off, leaving them alone.
“What’s happening?” Chel asked Stanton at the bottom of the stairs. She immediately noticed how exhausted he looked. It was the first time they’d been physically together since the night she’d come clean and they’d visited the Gutierrez house. Whatever she’d been through the past few days didn’t compare to what was written on his face.
They moved to one of the chessboard-covered tables on the south-pavilion landing. Stanton told her everything that had led up to Thane’s death, then what had happened after.
“I should never have let her take that risk,” he said.
“You were trying to help. If you could get the antibodies to work—”
“The antibodies are useless.” His voice had a bitter edge to it. “The tests failed, and even if they worked, they’d be considered too risky. She died for nothing.”
Chel understood only too well what it felt like to be cut off from everything you knew. But she’d had a reprieve—thanks to him. She didn’t know how to give him the second chance he’d given her. So she just took his hand.
They sat in silence for nearly a minute before she broached the other subject on her mind. “So I guess… nothing on the satellites?”
“I’m not exactly in the loop anymore,” Stanton said. “I thought maybe you would have heard something from CDC. But I guess not. What’s happening on your end?”
“We’re close to deciphering the end of the codex. There could still be some kind of a locator in the final sections, though we’re facing a few significant challenges.”
“Let me help.”
“With what?”
“With your work.”
“Do you have a PhD in linguistics I don’t know about?”
“I’m serious,” Stanton said. “Our processes aren’t so different. Diagnose the problem, look for comparables, and then search for solutions from there. Besides, maybe an outside perspective could be useful.”
Chel studied him. How odd it was that three days after he had held her future in his hands, his career had suffered a similar fate, and now he’d come to her for help. What did she really know about this guy, anyway? Gabe Stanton was clearly whip smart, extremely hardworking, a little too fierce sometimes. Chel didn’t know much else. They hadn’t exactly had the chance to unwind over a glass of wine. Maybe if she looked closer, she wouldn’t like what she saw.
Then again, he’d been the one to let in the crack of daylight keeping her life’s work alive—at a moment when she’d given him every reason not to. So if Stanton wanted to help, Chel wasn’t going to stop him now. She’d just have to make sure that the CDC didn’t find out when they eventually reached out to her again.
“Okay, fresh eyes, then.” She leaned in closer to him. “The scribe’s referring to a collapse of his city. Or at least to his fear of its collapse. There are harbingers in the central plaza, in the palace, everywhere. But there’s nothing worse to him than the worship of this new god, Akabalam. It’s a god we’ve never seen before, a god of praying mantises. As if this god has just been created at this particular historical moment.”
“Was it unusual for the Maya to create… new gods?” Stanton asked.
“There are dozens in the pantheon. And new gods were invented all the time. When Paktul first hears of this one, he wants to learn about him and to worship him. But in this final part of the manuscript, it’s as if he has found a reason to be mortally afraid of him.”
“What do you mean, mortally afraid?”
“He uses all the superlatives of the Mayan language to describe his fear—including words that suggest he’s more afraid of this new god than of dying. One thing we’ve been able to translate says: This was something much more terrifying, which no one ever had to teach me to fear.”
Stanton walked to the railing overlooking the Getty’s sycamore-lined stream, processing. “So maybe we should be looking for a deeply ingrained fear.” He turned back from the railing. “Think about mice.”
“Mice?”
“One of a mouse’s most powerful fears is its fear of snakes. But no one had to teach mice to fear snakes. It’s coded into their DNA. We can actually make that fear disappear by altering their genetic structure.”
Chel pictured Stanton’s years spent in a lab, years spent not so differently from hers. He thought in ways foreign to her, using a vocabulary that was mostly unfamiliar. Yet his constant return to the underlying scientific processes at work was similar to the way she saw language and history.
Stanton continued, “So the question we have to ask is: What could your scribe’s most powerful fear be?”
“Fear of his city collapsing forever?”
“It doesn’t sound like that’s news to him.”
“Well, I don’t think he’s talking about snakes.”
“No, I mean, what fears are so powerful for him that they could create this kind of response? It’s got to be something more… primal. Something innate.”
“You mean like fear of incest,” Chel said.
“Exactly. Could that be it?”
“Incest was prohibited,” she told him. “And it wouldn’t make any sense anyway. What would incest have to do with praying mantises?”
Yet as soon as she said the words, another possibility hit her—an indictment of her people that she’d dismissed her entire career.
From the beginning, Chel had wanted the codex to prove that her people hadn’t brought the collapse on themselves.
But what if they had?
My fast has lasted forty turns of the sun, sustained only by cornmeal drink and water. No rain has fallen on our milpas or in our forests, and the water stores have receded. Each corner of the city has begun to hoard water and maize and manioc, and it is rumored that men drink their own urine to quench their thirst.
There are whispers that some have already begun to plan their journey north in search of tillable fields, though Jaguar Imix has decreed that to abandon Kanuataba will be punishable by death or worse. There have been eighteen deaths in the poorest corners of Kanuataba in the last twenty suns, many of them children, starved because they are given lowest priority in the distribution of rations.
Our city was once a center for the best goods within ten days’ walk. But jade adornments are useless, and artisans no longer flourish. Mother-of-pearl ear flares and varicolored feather mantles have been replaced by tortillas and lime as the greatest desires of the noble women. A mother who cannot feed her children thinks little of gold medallions, no matter how holy.
At yesterday’s zenith I was called to the palace.
I left Auxila’s daughters in the cave at the noon sun, knowing my spirit animal would watch over them in my absence. Jaguar Imix, his holiness, newly returned from his distant star war, had called me to the palace to reveal to me the meaning of the god Akabalam, so that I might continue to educate the true prince.
When I came within a few hundred paces of the city center, less than a thousand paces from the king’s newly ordained burial temple, I could not believe what I saw. Thick black smoke rose above the tops of the towers of the minor temple, our sacred catacomb. And as I turned the corner, I saw the largest gathering of the men and women of Kanuataba I had seen in six hundred suns.
I knew a large gathering was called for this day, but I could not have imagined its size and splendor. There are no words to describe the feeling I had upon seeing Kanuataba alive again then, as it was in the days of my youth, when my father would walk me through the merchant causeways atop his mighty shoulders. There were whispers among them the people gathered Jaguar Imix had brought a miracle, that he would feed the masses with this mighty feast, that there would be enough to sustain us until the harvest.
I watched men carry large offerings of spice and wood and jade toward the south stairs to the palace. Others carried salt and allspice and cilantro, combined with burn-dried chilis to make the seasoning for turkey and deer meat. Even my stomach growled with hunger. There are no deer or turkey or agouti within two days’ walk, of that I was certain. Had Jaguar Imix and his mighty army plundered stores of meat during their star war?
The royal dwarf approached me. I will recount his words to reveal what machinations he was capable of. He spoke:
—If people knew you as I do, scribe, knew that you would never touch those girls, you would lose those concubines you’ve taken. Your life could be cut short by ten thousand suns and with it the lives of those girls. So I suggest you never displease me again.—
Never have I felt a greater urge to drain the blood from a man’s body and rip his heart out. I longed for some commotion in the causeways, loud enough that I might muffl e Jacomo’s screams. I would tear him into pieces and bury them in unmarked graves.
Before I could raise my hand, a boisterous sound filled the plaza. A line of blue-painted captives, fifteen in number, were dragged into the causeways. Each captive was tied together to a long pole, lashed by both hands and neck to the man in front of him. Several men were stumbling. Many appeared half dead already.
Tattoos on his torso proved one of the prisoners was of high standing, and I have never seen a noble so afraid of sacrifice. He screamed and writhed as the captors of Kanuataba ushered him along, dragging his feet across the dirt, exciting dust everywhere. From the look on the captors’ faces, I knew that even they had never seen anything like it. Such indignity! Only a sickness of the mind could have damaged this nobleman’s soul so that he would not accept his fate!
I went into the palace, and navigated past the housekeepers, tailors, and concubines. The sweat house is on the top floor, a domed room in the tower, a most holy place for divination and communication with the overworld. As with the secret meals and other rituals, it is most often restricted to the king’s retinue.
When I arrived in the sweat bath, I found the king alone, an event I cannot remember in a thousand suns. His face was gaunt and looked less holy than I had ever before seen. There was not even a slave or lower-rank wife in the room, ready to satisfy his urges.
The king spoke:
—I have brought you here to see the creation of the great feast, Paktul, so that you may record it in the great books for all posterity.—
I bent down on both knees beside the hot coals, and the heat was unbearable. But to be inside the sweat house was considered a great honor, and I would show no sign of suffering. I spoke:
—Highness, we must record the great feast, yes, but I would ask you again to explain how the gods have blessed us with this feast but have shown us no mercy elsewhere. So that I may record it in the great books with proper care, may I understand why we feast today, when all other days there is famine?—
The king’s jaw clenched. His crossed eyes looked beyond me, as if he was trying to control his anger. His grasp on the royal scepter was rigid. When I finished, he did not rise or bellow; he did not call for the guards to take me away. He only looked down at my hand and pointed at my ring, symbol of the great monkey scribes who came before me.
And he spoke again:
—This ring you wear, the monkey-scribe ring, symbol of your station, how do you think it compares to the crown of the gods I wear upon my head? There is nothing I desire more than to be able to share this burden with my people and to explain the compromises I make to ensure the gods are at peace. This burden is not one that can be learned through books but only by those who came before me, my fathers, who once ruled over our terraced city. It is hardly a burden one who wears the monkey-scribe ring can fathom.—
With this, the king rose in his nakedness. I thought he might strike me, but he only instructed me to rise from my knees. He wrapped himself with a loincloth around his waist and commanded me to follow him into the royal kitchen.
It is rumored there is nothing in the world the royal cooks cannot prepare to the king’s taste. They will send assistants for a week’s walk to secure guava or mombin that grows only in the highest mountains or to trade with tree people for sweet potato that grows only in the shade of a single ceiba in winter.
I followed his holiness, Jaguar Imix, and I saw the great serpentine flow of these men, devoted to their art, working to finish the preparations for the great ceremonial feast. Every man had an assignment. There were those devoted to the preparation of the sauces and garnishes, who added florets of manioc plant to the various mixtures of chili paste, cinnamon, cacao, allspice. The actual cooking was assigned to others, who presided over large open spits in every corner of the room, grilling meats before adding them to the rich stews stirred in enormous vats at the kitchen’s center.
We passed through the tremendous heat of the cooking fires, almost as stifling as the sweat house itself. We were headed for the slaughterhouse, I knew. When we arrived at the door, the king flashed a beaming smile of jade at me.
He spoke:
—Low scribe, there can be no greater divination than the one I received twenty moons ago, the commandment from Akabalam, which will change Kanuataba forever and be our salvation. For nearly a year I have taken in this blood, and it is time for my people to share in my great source of strength. According to my royal spies, these rituals have become commonplace in other nations. Not just among the nobles but also among the lower tiers, and they have sustained themselves by them for many moons.—
I followed him into the slaughterhouse.
Blood coated the floor and soaked my sandals. More than two dozen carcasses hung, skinned and decapitated, disemboweled, blood-drained, and disjointed. The slaughter men were separating meat from the bone, each leg and arm providing a different cut that went into a pile of thick fillets. The slaughter cooks used blades of chert to prepare the meat for cooking, trying to conserve every precious sliver for the feast. It took me a moment to comprehend what these appendages were.
Men’s bodies from meat hooks!
The king spoke:
—Akabalam has commanded that we should partake, that, through this meat, we will absorb the power from those souls that inhabited these corpses. I and my closest minions have gained such power from feasts on flesh, having consumed more than twenty men in the three hundred suns past. Now Akabalam has divined that he wishes to concentrate the strength of ten men in every man of our great nation. Mantises consume the heads of their mates to survive; blessed are they, and, like them, we will all consume the flesh of our own kind.—
And as he finished speaking I knew: This was no god ordained for re-commitment of piety. This was something much more terrifying, which no one ever had to teach me to fear.
Much has passed in Kanuataba since the last inscription. Sixty suns have been born from the color of rebirth and died into blackness. Akabalam is spread to every corner of the city, on word that the king had sanctioned it at the feast in the great plaza, when Jaguar Imix fed the meat of our enemies’ noblemen to his own. With no rain come to feed the milpas, cooking pots are filled with the meat of the dead, not a single part wasted, every scrap pulled off the bones. The sole prohibition dictated by the king was that no man should eat his own son or father, daughter or mother, as the gods had forbidden it. But I have seen child slaves forced to prepare meals without the meat, only to be sacrificed as animals, salted in seasoning baths of their own making.
I have not partaken in Akabalam, nor have I allowed Auxila’s daughters. We survive on leaves and roots and small berries alone. One Butterfly and Flamed Plume would have already become food for the masses were they not protected by my station. The orphans of the city were among the first sacrificed, but in my cave they have been saved. They are watched over by my spirit macaw. The girls do not leave, as I have commanded them, for the savages in the streets are many and ruthless, and they would take the life of any child as sustenance.
The king has disappeared into the recesses of the palace for a royal divination, and none but Jacomo the dwarf, the queen, and the prince are permitted to visit him. The council was disbanded. Jaguar Imix proclaimed that no man can hear the call of the overworld but he and that the council was filled with false prophets! Jacomo the dwarf stands on the palace steps every sunrise. He reads the demands of the king and the sacrifices that must be made to please the gods.
By every setting of the sun, the sacrifices have been made; men and women and children, some noble, brought to the top of the altar by the executioners, their hearts extracted and innards cut out before being fed to the masses.
Yet with each sacrifice, there are more doubts in the streets of Kanuataba of Jaguar Imix’s power. I have heard dissent among the commoners. The people live in fear that they shall be sacrificed next. They whisper that Jaguar Imix has lost his channel to the gods, that a curse in his mind has confused his thoughts.
And what power has Akabalam given us? No rain has come to the milpas, no reprieve sent from the overworld to nurture the crops that sustain us.
So much is changed, so much horror! Death is all around us, the city in its cold black embrace. More than a thousand are dead by last report, and many more are cursed, awaiting death. I was right to fear as I did. The curse of Akabalam has fallen over many, sucking out their spirits into nothing, leaving them unable to pass into the dream world, where they may commune with their gods.
The numbers of cursed are growing with each turn of the sun, cursed for their trespasses against their fellow man. The streets overflow with violence day and night, as peaceful men turn against one another, unable to invoke the spirits in their dreams, fighting over what few valuables are left in the markets.
Jaguar Imix and his retinue consumed the flesh of men for many moons in good graces of the gods without being cursed. But whatever god protected them before does so no longer. The king is cursed, his nobles are cursed, and Akabalam has swept our land and destroyed everything.
Akabalam has turned men into monsters, just as I have feared. The time of dreams is the time of peaceful reconciliation with the gods, the time of communing with spirit animals, the time of giving ourselves to the gods as we do in death. But those cursed cannot dream, cannot surrender themselves to the celestial gods or be in touch with their wayobs, who watch over them.
Here is the account of my final sojourn to the great palace, where the men of the council once adjudicated. By night I came, carrying the bird on my shoulder, for it was too dangerous by the light of day for any pious man to show his face in the city plazas. I came, guided only by the light of the moon.
I came for the prince, Smoke Song, my pupil, whom I planned to take from the palace. That the boy is not cursed reveals Jaguar Imix’s own confusion; when he did not give his own son human flesh, he revealed cracks in his belief.
But Smoke Song is not the only child who will carry on the stories and legend of the terraced city. Flamed Plume and One Butterfly waited back in my cave, from which we planned to retreat to the forests of the lake that my father once sought. As I have still not allowed them to, Auxila’s girls have eaten no human meat in my care. We will live off the land, where we will be safe from the dreamless and those who follow them into ruin.
I had not been to the palace or seen the king in twenty suns, and there was a strange falseness to all I bore witness to, a strange suspicion that this way of life in the palace and in Kanuataba was over, that appearances could no longer be maintained. The guards themselves were nowhere in sight, and I made my way to the royal quarters unimpeded.
Because the prince was absent from his own room, I took myself to the king’s quarters. The prince must have gone to see his father, which terrified me, for I did not believe that the king would let him leave the palace.
I went to the king’s chamber and entered it boldly.
Stepping inside, I saw the prince kneeling at his father’s bedside. I knew then that Ah Puch had carried the king’s spirit into the afterlife, to spend the cycles of time with other kings, as it is ordained. There was no breath from his lips or beat of his heart. As I had taught him, Smoke Song was not touching the corpse, only waving incense sticks all around the body.
Smoke Song looked up at me with tears in his eyes.
Then the voice came from behind us:
—This is the king’s chamber, and his alone, and you will not be forgiven your trespass here, lowly scribe.—
I turned to face the dwarf, who stood ten paces behind. His beard had not been cut in many moons.
I spoke:
—You have spilled your lies onto the causeways and beckoned the people of Kanuataba with your tongue, and they shall hear these lies no more. They shall know that the king is dead!—
—You shall tell no one of this, or I shall have it known that you have not taken Auxila’s daughters as true concubines, that you have made no copulation with them and can therefore lay no claim to them. I shall take them as my own, and they will blossom and bear my sons! The king’s guards will take them by force!—
I struck the dwarf with my walking stick over the crown of his bulbous head, struck him with the end of it adorned with the pointed jade, and let forth the blood inside him. He fell to the floor, screaming out and calling for the prince’s help.
Smoke Song did not move.
The dwarf flew at me and clenched his jaw around my leg. The pain seared through me like fire. I gouged out his eyeball with the point of my jade knife, and he let go. I drove the jade point into his belly with all my strength, and his spirit was extinguished.
Then I turned to the prince:
—You must leave me here now. You must take Flamed Plume and One Butterfly and leave the city.—
When the prince heard this, he spoke to me with new power:
—As supreme ajaw of the city, I command you to come with us, Paktul. I will make you the daykeeper wherever we go. This I command you as king!—
But I knew that what remained of the royal guards would come after me, bound by duty to avenge the dwarf. They would have a thirst for my blood, and I did not wish to endanger the children’s lives. I told the prince:
—That you would honor me and make me your daykeeper, Smoke Song, is prize enough for me, prize enough for entry into the sacred world of scribes above. But you must abandon me here, that you may be protected by Itzamnaaj, holy god.—
He spoke:
—Holy teacher, the renouncers are come. I hear their screams! As your new king, I command you to follow me.—
I told the prince:
—Then let me lead you in the direction of my family whom I have lost, King, in the direction of all those that came before me.—
Holy Itzamnaaj, may I lead them in the direction of salvation in the recesses of the great forests, where my ancestors once lived and shall live forevermore. Where we may worship the true gods and bring forth a new people to usher in the turn of the next great cycle. Flamed Plume will become wife to Smoke Song, and the union shall bless a new beginning, shall generate a new race of men, a new cycle of time. I can only dream of the generations Smoke Song will father with Flamed Plume and her sister, men who will lead their people with decency. And the people of Kanuataba will live on.