12.21 by Dustin Thomason Read Free Book Online Page B

stamp, but even these were heavy, dense fig-bark paper weighed down even more by the dust and moisture of a tomb.
    They’d been at it four hours and had gotten through only the top of page one, but, staring down at the assembled fragments, Chel was pulled back to the former glory of her ancestors. The first words, already coming together, seemed to be an invocation of rain and the stars—a prayer—a magic carpet to another world.
    “So I assume we’ll have to work on this at night?” Rolando asked. Chel’s restorer was a six-foot-two, hundred-fifty-pound sliver of a man with a week’s worth of stubble.
    “Sleep during the day,” she told him. “With apologies to your girlfriend.”
    “I just hope she notices I’m gone. Maybe it’ll inject a little mystery into our relationship. And you? When will you sleep?”
    “Whenever. There’s no one who’ll notice I’m gone.”
    Rolando placed another fragment carefully onto the glass. Chel knew no one with a greater knack for handling delicate objects or with better instincts when it came to reconstructing fragile antiquities. She trusted him implicitly; he’d been a loyal member of her team longer than anyone else. She didn’t like putting him at risk, but she needed his help.
    “You wish I’d called someone else?” Chel asked him.
    “Hell no,” Rolando said. “I’m your one and only
ladino
, and I’m not going to let you squeeze me out of this bombshell.”
    Ladino
was slang for all seven million non-indigenous descendants of the Spanish living in Guatemala. All her life Chel had listened to her mother talking about how
ladinos
supported the army-sponsored genocide of the Maya and how they used the
indígenas
as scapegoats for their economic woes. But despite the tensions that still existed between the two groups, working so closely and for so long with Rolando had shifted her perspective. During the revolution, his family protested on behalf of the indigenous people. His father had even been arrested for it once before moving the family to America.
    “I don’t see how this could be from any of the major ruins,” he said, tinkering with the edges until he’d jigsawed a match.
    Chel agreed. The more than sixty known sites of classic-era Maya ruins in Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Belize, and El Salvador were packed with archaeologists, tourists, and locals year-round. Not even the most sophisticated looters could operate in those conditions, so Chel believed the book had to have been taken from a newly discovered site. Every year, satellites, helicopter tourists, and loggers stumbled across long-hidden architectural features in the jungle, and she guessed that the looter—likely a professional scout—had stumbled on the site and then returned with a crew.
    “You think the looter could have discovered a lost city?” Rolando asked.
    Chel shrugged. “If they did, every
indígena
in Guatemala will claim it as their own.”
    So many Maya villages had oral histories that told of an incredible lost city where their ancestors had once lived. During the revolution, a cousin of Chel’s father even claimed to have found Kiaqix’s lost city, from which the Original Trio had supposedly fled. The reality was less sexy: Many Maya had always lived in small villages in the forest, and, for Chel’s people, claiming a connection to a lost city was like white Americans saying they had an ancestor on the
Mayflower
—easy (and desirable) to say, harder to prove.
    “So I’m not asking again where the hell you got this …” Rolando said as he matched another fragment, “but, based on the iconography, this does look like it’s from the end of the classic. Maybe 800 to 925? It’s unbelievable.”
    Chel said, “Hope the carbon dating agrees.”
    Rolando put down his tweezers. “And I know we can’t tell anyone, but … there’s a lot of complicated syntax here. We could really use Victor on this. No one knows classic syntax better than he does.”
    From the