Fernando tapped his machete on his snake gaiter and then nodded at her before returning to slashing down the vegetation.
“Raul, do you mind helping Fernando clear the area?”
“No problema. I saw a laemanctus serratus earlier.” He grinned wide. “Maybe I’ll see another one.”
“A what?” Quint asked.
“A serrated casquehead iguana.”
Quint looked down at the ground around his boots. “Is it venomous, too?”
“No, just sort of cute.”
“Cute? Does it wag its tail like a puppy or something?”
Now was not the time to talk lizards. Angélica needed to speak with Quint for a moment before heading over to Dr. Fernel.
“Gracias, Raul.” She grabbed Quint’s wrist and pulled him along with her. “I need to talk to you.”
He tugged back on her a little. “Hey, Fernel wants to see you, not me.”
“Just come on.”
They passed Daisy, who was back to sketching, and then paused by the rocks where they’d been sitting before, talking about themacuahuitl.
“I don’t like this,” she said for his ears only.
“Don’t like what? The jungle? It’s a little late in our itinerary for that.”
She shook her head. “Nothing here is typical of the Maya. The wall, the placement of the structures, the lack of any evidence of a ballcourt on the LIDAR, the strange shit Daisy said to you earlier.” She glanced over at where her father, Bronko, and Fernel were waiting for her. She held up her index finger to give her a momentlonger and turned her back to them. “The fact that our first find was a cache of weapons—”
“Actually,” he interrupted. “The stack of skulls with holes in them was the ‘first’ find, wouldn’t you agree? Talk about strange shit.”
“True.” She’d been willing to move past that in her haste to see what was inside of the wall, but now …
“You said your mom thought this was a sacred type of place, right?” At her nod, he continued, “Would they have played ball games here then?”
“Maybe not, but just abouteverythingwas sacred to the Maya in some way or another.” She blew out a breath. “Something just feels off about the site. It’s quieter. Like everything is dead.”
Again, she heard KuTu’s words about the stones in the wall not singing. Where was KuTu, anyway? She hadn’t seen him since he went to try to find a gate or a break in the wall. She hoped he hadn’t run into trouble along the way.
Quint frowned down at her. “Everything is dead, Angélica. Well, except the jungle and the damned snakes.”
“I know, but there doesn’t even seem to be any monkeys in the trees on this side of the wall.”
“Yeah.” He glanced around at the trees. “I was thinking about that earlier, too.”
“There are still plenty of butterflies, though.”
Quint’s frown deepened. “And that.”
“Ancestors,” she said, shaking her head. “This is weird, I’m telling you. What in the hell was this place?”
He stared over her shoulder. “And then there’s that.”
“What?” Angélica turned, doing a double-take at the sight of Dr. Fernel with a small shovel in hand digging into the dirt at the base of a mound about the size of a small car.
“What in the hell is he doing?” she said quietly. “We agreed that nobody would start digging anywhere until we’d done more ground truthing of the potential interest points he’d picked out on his damned map.”
