She walked around it again, paying closer attention to the carvings. “The glyphs look similar to the carvings from the Lago Azul text, not contemporary Mayan carvings. It may be connected to the lost city. I need to take pictures. Shit.”
She patted her empty pockets. “My phone and camera are in my bag.”
“I’ll grab our stuff. You can get pictures and then we’ll set off from here.”
Kinley walked around the structure and brushed dirt and moss from the glyph carvings. She traced the carvings. It was here, right in front of her. It was only a small sampling of glyphs, but it felt like she’d discovered a whole world.
As soon as Shane returned, she dug her camera out of her bag and walked around the pillar documenting it in full and zooming in on portions she found particularly interesting.
She finally lowered her camera. “Can you mark this location?”
“Already done,” he said.
She beamed at him and impulsively snapped a picture of him.
Late in the afternoon, Shane stopped in another small clearing and looked around. “We’ll camp here tonight.”
“Isn’t it kind of early?” Kinley asked.
“Yes, but we’re about a quarter mile from the edge of the ruins and I’d rather get there at full light than as it’s getting dark.”
In only a couple of days they’d established a routine to set up camp. Shane set up the tent while Kinley cleared a spot for a fire and gathered firewood. She stood on the edge of their little clearing, watching Shane drive the tent peg into the ground with the heel of his boot.
He glanced over his shoulder and caught her watching. “What’s that look for?”
She dropped the pile of sticks next to the spot for the fire. “I was just thinking that this felt really comfortable. Familiar. Like we’ve been doing this longer than two days.”
“Huh.” He looked up vacantly for a moment, then joined her. “It has only been a few days. You’re right—it feels much longer than that.”
“Is that weird?” She chewed at her lip. She was feeling a lot. For him. For their adventure. Was it the close proximity driving her emotions or Shane?
He rested his hands on her hips. “Sometimes you meet people you click with immediately. It’s like you’ve known them your whole life. It was like that with Ghost and Oakley. More than a hundred guys start training and only about twenty percent make it through. I think a lot of the reason we all made it through was the fact that we clicked from day one.”
He pressed a quick kiss to her lips. “So no, I don’t think it’s weird. We click.”
A slow smile spread across her face. We click. It wasn’t a declaration of love, but after that explanation, it felt more meaningful. Hell, a declaration of love or that they were meant to be would have freaked her out. But saying they clicked, like he’d clicked with his two friends, that felt real.
While Shane prepped their MREs, she flipped through the pictures of the structure he’d found that morning.
“Figure it out yet?” he asked.
“I think so, but it doesn’t make sense,” she said.
“Why?”
“Well…I think it’s a stelae, but those were traditionally built in the cities. There was no evidence of a settlement though.” She cocked her head. “Unless the settlement is gone and that’s all that’s left but…that doesn’t make sense either.”
He held out a pouch of food. She set her camera next to her and took the food then grabbed a spoon from the packet.
“What’s a stelae?”
“It’s kind of like a monument to a ruler. It was used to document important events during that ruler’s life. Like a stone biography.”
“Could it have been put up as a marker for something?” he asked.
She thought about it while chewing on a meatball. “Maybe. Some archeologists believe they were also used as altars. One of the carvings is reminiscent of carvings depicting Ixazalvoh.”
“Who’s that? A ruler?”
