“Did you take the granola bar out of my bag?” Oakley asked.
“No,” Ghost said around a mouthful of food.
“You dick. That was my last one,” Oakley threw an empty water bottle at his. “I’m starving.”
“So was I,” Ghost said.
“Then you should have packed your own food!”
“I did. I ate it.”
“Asshole.”
Leaning against the metal wall of the small storage shed they’d found on the outskirts of town, Kinley watched the two men fight. Was this what it was like to have brothers? She had two sisters and they had been in some knock-down, hair-pulling, screaming fests when they were growing up. She always told them their parents should have traded them for boys. She should probably call and apologize when she got the chance.
Shane sat down on the floor next to her. “Can you tell us some more about this lost city?”
“Yeah. Of course.” She turned to face him more fully.Don’t get distracted by his mouth, Kin.She rubbed the sleepy grit from her eyes. “The ruins were found using LIDAR. It’s a method of surveying that uses pulsed laser light to illuminate an area and then the reflected pulse is measured with a sensor. It’s kind of like how sound waves—”
Ghost waved his hands and formed a T. “I know you’re in sharing knowledge mode, but it will probably save you some time to tell you we know what LIDAR is.”
Heat suffused her neck and cheeks and she glanced down at her hands. “Right…sorry.”
“Ignore him,” Shane said. “He’s an ass on the best of days, but doubly so when he’s hangry. How about if you explain like we understand everything and we’ll ask questions if we need to?”
She smiled, still flustered after Ghost’s interruption, but continued. “Sure. Imagery showed that the Mayan civilization was much more extensive than previously thought. The site that was discovered may even be a separate civilization that predates the Mayans by almost five hundred years. It changes everything archaeologists thought they knew.”
“What about that Blue Lake text you figured out?” Oakley asked.
“The Lago Azul text.” She pulled out her notebook and pulled out the copies of the text. “Here, look. The inscriptions are different from classical Mayan inscriptions. Some of the glyphs had been translated, but not most of them, so it was hard to put into any kind of context. One of the deciphered glyphs is the symbol for sun, since it’s very similar to the classic Mayan glyph for sun. A lot of scholars believed the text is part of a ritual worship of the sun god—kind of like a prayer. But I think what most scholars have translated as ‘sun’ actually means ‘enlightenment.’ See these two little additions on the side of the glyph? I think they work similar to diacritics in the Arabic alphabet where it changes the sound of the consonant, only in this case it changes the meaning of the word.”
“Why is that important?” Oakley asked.
Kinley shook her head and shrugged as a yawn stretched her jaw wide. “Sorry. I don’t know. I don’t have enough expert knowledge about Mayan culture to say whether it’s important or not. That’s one of the reasons I was so excited to be working on this excavation with Dr. Ford—she’s one of the foremost experts on Mayan culture and history.”
“Do you have any maps of the area?” Ghost asked.
She dug into her bag, feeling for the large plastic file folder, and pulled it out. Releasing the elastic holding it closed, she pulled out the colorful LIDAR images of the area and handed them to Shane.
He glanced through them, then passed them to Ghost. “You don’t have any topographical maps?”
“No. I figured the team would have maps, so I didn’t bother with any. The only reason I have these is because there’s something about the layout of the city that’s teasing at the corner of my mind and I can’t figure it out.”
Shane’s phone buzzed. “Ivers…yeah, got it.”
He disconnected the short call. “We need to get some wheels. We have a rendezvous in six hours. They’re going to have gear and maps for us. And food.”
“Huh. Maybe the private sector isn’t such a bad gig,” Ghost said.
“Let me know when you’re ready to punch. In the meantime, there’s also a ride for you two to Belize.”
Oakley sat up straight. “Do what?”
“You’re still active duty. The last thing you guys need is to go traipsing through the jungle, getting hurt.”
“First of all,” Oakley said, “I don’t traipse—whatever the hell that is.”
“Second—you do know what we do for a living, right?” Ghost asked.
