“Repeat what she said after telling you about the whispers and calling you that name.”
“Key-me,” he repeated. “She wanted to know if I could hear the whispers. Then she started talking about the ancestors speaking to their guardian, but she got distracted by the smell of death, which was apparently smeared all over me.”
Key-me.Angélica repeated the name a few times under her breath. What would her mom mean by …
“Dr. Angélica,” Raul called out from the side of the small building with the cache. He and Fernando were carefully clearing away any non-structural stones and debris on that side, while keeping an eye out for any carvings or glyphs.
“Yes?”
Raul waved her over. “Fernando wants you to see this.” The tone of his voice was higher than normal. Excited maybe. Or afraid.
“Is it astela?” she asked, rising from the rock.
Raul shook his head. “He says it looks like a passageway.”
“What?” Quint asked, standing now, too.
“A passageway,” Raul repeated. “It heads into the ground.”
“Coming!” she told Raul, then turned to Quint. “Let’s circle back to this Daisy stuff later when we’re alone.”
“Can do, boss lady. Let’s go see what the boys found.”
Quint led the way over to where Raul waited for them with a wide smile while practically bouncing on his heels. The dig-deeper bug seemed to have bitten the park ranger, too.
Archaeology was funny that way. There was something about discovering mysteries from the past that brought out the Sherlock Holmes in many people, even in those who hadn’t devoted their lives to finding answers.
But the excitement of discovery wasn’t the only hook; there was also learning more about those who occupied this planet before. For Angélica, knowing there were civilizations that thrived so long ago gave her a measure of comfort. The fact that people went about their daily lives—helping their parents, finding love, birthing children, exploring the world around them—same as humans did today was a reminder to take a moment now and then to enjoy the trips around the sun.
She looked at Quint. Lucky for her, she’d found someone to travel by her side.
Key-me?What the hell had Daisy—or whoever might have been usingher as a channel—meant with her cryptic words?
She blinked back to the present and something she could make sense of … “Show me the passageway,” she said to Raul.
He led her past Daisy and the weapons cache. About ten feet beyond, Fernando waited at the entrance to a small clearing in the jungle with his machete in hand and piles of sliced fronds, vines, and branches scattered around his boots.
“I hear you found something, Fernando,” she said in English for Quint’s sake.
“Sí.” Fernando stepped aside, pointing with his machete. “Behind the vines and roots from the strangler fig,” he said in Spanish, which Raul translated for Quint.
“Plus a stack of rocks,” Raul added in English.
Angélica stepped by him into the narrow clearing, ducking low to keep from having her hat snagged by a stray branch. She moved forward carefully, not interested in running into anything venomous waiting under the forest debris. A little ways in, the shadows grew thick—too thick to see more than a short distance into the passageway.
She returned to where her foreman and the others waited. Behind Quint, she caught sight of her father caning his way toward them. Shit! She didn’t want him to try to follow in her footsteps until they’d cleared out a wider path.
“Fernando, can I see your flashlight, please?”
He obliged, and she hurried back into the machete-cleared tunnel. At the far end, a set of narrow stone stairs cut down into the jungle floor. The crumbling steps were bordered on each side by limestone block walls that bulged inward, slowly losing the battle to the weight of the earth they had been holding back all these years. A skinny sapodilla tree was growing in the middle of the stairway, its roots bursting through the stone, cracking the steps into smaller pieces. Vines both thick and thin hung down from the tree and along the edge of the walls, disguising the surface.
What’s down there?
She shined the flashlight beam around the tree, but the hanging vines blocked her view.
Crud. She should probably go back and figure out a strategy to clear this before going any farther, but…
She took a step down, careful on the loose stone, and held aside some vines to see the stone behind them.
