“We are no longer here, Zane.”
Anger throbbed in my chest. My eyes blazed. “Look, you know I am going to come for you! You know I can’t just sit back and do nothing.”
“Listen to me!” He growled like he was using his last ounce of strength. “That’s exactly what Zotz and Ixkik’ want. It will only send you down a dark and dangerous rabbit hole, and there will be no victory,” he said. “I am…I was the god of death, darkness, and destruction. If I could see a way out, don’t you think I would tell you? Don’t you think I would love nothing more than to shred our enemies?”
“You never give up!” I said, knowing that I had to keep him here, keep him talking. I had to be more convincing. “You fought your way back from the inferno I trapped you in. Back from death! You know better than anyone that there’s always a way out!” Maybe he wouldn’t help me save the gods, but he might care if it meant saving Ren. “They have the entry stone—they’re coming to SHIHOM to kill all of us. We need you!”
He was silent, so silent I was worried he had left. Then he finally said, “The devourer…” He spoke through what sounded like gritted teeth.
“Devourer?” And just like that, the memory of Ixtab telling me about the Mexica earth goddess who gives and devours life slammed into my brain. Ugh! Why couldn’t I remember her name? “You mean the devouring goddess?” I blurted. “Is she the one they resurrected? She did this to you?”
“Yes,” he groaned. I could tell he was barely holding on.
“Please give me more clues about where you are. Think of anything.”
“Ren,” he managed. “She is the only one…”
“The only one what?!”
The centipede shivered once, then began to crawl across the wall, and I knew Ah-Puch was gone.
“Ah-Puch!” I shouted. “Come back!”
The word devourer made me sick to my stomach. Were the gods being eaten alive by that Mexica goddess?
Fury, panic, and bone-deep fear scrambled all my thoughts. This. Was. So. Not. Happening.
In my mind’s eye, I placed the memories side by side:
I am the keeper of time.
Time was invented in this place.
The seeds of this evil could only be discovered in the underworld.
Master of deception.
“What does it mean?” I said. The blue flame rose higher.
Time.
Evil.
Deception.
I set Fuego against the wall and thrust my hands into the blue blaze, as if I could will more memories to appear. I’d been led here, to this exact spot, for a reason. The crackling flames spat and hissed. I leaned in closer, plunging my face inside them as the same words echoed through me:
Time. Evil. Deception.
Time. Evil. Deception.
As the words repeated, a picture appeared in the fire. It was the same image Alana had drawn in the sand, except more detailed: three circles with glyphs and evenly spaced teeth and notches, like gears. The smallest circle, labeled with the Maya number system, was housed inside a medium-size one, and third was much bigger. I could tell that if one circle was turned, the other two would move as well. It looked like this:
It’s the three ancient Maya calendars, I thought.
Then poof! The calendars dissolved, and the flame went out. I staggered, trying to still my pounding pulse as I grabbed Fuego and leaned against it. That’s when I noticed the centipede was still clinging to the wall. Its body pulsed once, twice.
Ah-Puch?
The insect started to lengthen. Then it plumped up like someone was filling it with air. As it grew longer and fatter, it whipped its neck and creepy antennae in my direction.
Right. Some peaceful labyrinth this was.
When the centipede had reached a length of about three feet, its mouth (which, by the way, had an evil-looking hook on each side) opened wide—wide enough to swallow a baseball.
“Gaaah!” So I screamed. Sue me. You would have, too, especially if you knew that centipedes usually wrap their bodies around their prey and release a bunch of venom into them, i.e., give them a slow and painful death, before eating them.
¡No gracias!
“Intruder,” the nasty centipede whispered.
I backed up slowly—you know, no sudden movements to freak out the bug. “I was just leaving,” I grunt-laughed.
“K’iin,” the centipede said, “can only be seen by the dead. You are not dead.”
Keen?
The beast jumped onto my shoulders and wrapped itself around my neck, squeezing. My air was immediately cut off, and I felt razor-sharp legs piercing my skin.
I clutched its slimy body, trying to rip it off as I summoned the fire within me, but the thing held on and squeezed like a vise. I could feel its poison burning in my blood.
My vision started to fade. I fell to my knees, clawing and gasping.
Then, with one last effort, I willed Fuego into spear mode and thrust it into the centipede, ripping hard to the right.
Shkwert!
Warm bluish blood oozed down my shirt. I dropped to my knees, choking on the humid air as the bug’s gutted body slipped off me and writhed on the ground. Noxious yellow gas spiraled from the corpse and filled the chamber, burning me so bad I could feel the hair on my head singeing right off.
Just as I was about to expel a flame to bring down the entire chamber, the darkness and gas disappeared.
I was back in the jungle, doubled over, sucking wind. My ears were ringing with the same three words: Time. Evil. Deception.
“Stop!” I shouted, covering my ears. My hands flew to my hair. “I have hair!”
Rosie and Kip hurried over.
“Are you making fun of me?” The spirit narrowed his eyes. “Being bald has its perks, you know.”
I shook my head and sucked in more fresh air.
“What did you see?” Kip asked. “You were gone for quite a while. Why are you choking? Do you have allergies, too?”
The ear ringing faded when I tried to talk. “A centipede”—cough—“tried”—double cough—“to kill me.” But when I looked down, there was no centipede blood on my hands, my shirt, or Fuego.
Rosie sniffed me ferociously, checking me out. Then she grunted once, like Yeah, right.
“Not possible,” Kip said. “The labyrinth is a place of safety and peace. Of visions and answers to your problems. Tell me, what exactly did you see? Before the chapat.”
I hesitated, standing upright. “Memories.” I turned my hands over, looking for any cuts or bites, but there were none. Had I dreamed the whole thing?
“Ah, the Hall of Memories,” he said. “That’s usually a nice walk.”
“You mean hell walk,” I said.
“‘Your mind is a gift, a miraculous warehouse of answers,’” he said. “That’s a direct quote from one of my old textbooks. I wasn’t much of a student, but I remember that one in particular—”
Rosie growled, revealing her fangs.
“Welp,” Kip squeaked, jumping back. “Ahem. Yes, okay. Whatever you saw had to be important. What else?”
No way was I going to tell him about Ah-Puch or the words that were still flickering inside me like a freshly lit flame. But maybe the spirit would know what the image of the calendars meant. I stood and said, “I saw three wheels with glyphs and numbers.”
“Ah,” he said. “So, you have a dance with time.”
“Dance with time?” I echoed.
“Well, you must be preoccupied with it if you saw the calendar. Are you worried about growing old? Or running out of time? Or—”
“I heard a voice, too,” I said. “The centipede said K’iin.” I knew that word. It meant sun or day.
His face went pale. He began to shoo me away. “Time for you to go. Ha! I meant to say you must go. I didn’t say time. Okay, buh-bye.”
“Wait! What’s wrong?”
Rosie paced nervously, grunting trails of smoke. Was this why she had brought me here? To see an
ancient calendar? To hear a voice whisper sun or day? Did she know Ah-Puch would come to tell me good-bye? There was no way she could have known that little peace walk would bring me face-to-face with a killer arthropod. Unless Ixtab’s dumb orb had messed with my dog’s brain somehow.
The spirit twisted his fingers. “Please. You really have to go now.”
“What are you so afraid of?” I asked as a sick dread filled me. “K’iin? The calendar?”
“Would you quit saying that word?” He glanced over his shoulder. “We are not to speak of this.”
“Why?”
“Because what you saw”—Kip looked around, then leaned closer—“it’s sacrilege. Do you hear me? I could lose an ear or an eye if caught talking about it.” He shuddered, grasping his lobes. “I like my ears and eyes.”
“Look,” I said angrily, “you’re going to lose a lot more than that if…”
The guy’s face was filled with terror. I took a breath. Getting mad at him wasn’t going to give me the answers I needed, and blaming him wasn’t going to make me feel better.
“Sorry,” I said, more calmly this time. “I have to know. Please. I think this is why I was supposed to come here. For this message.” A message someone didn’t want me to receive.
He stared at me with wild eyes. “You must go!”
“I’m not leaving until you tell me.”
Clenching his jaw, he turned away.
“I’ll put in a good word for you with the gods…” I said in a last-ditch effort.
He snapped his attention back to me. “You’ll ask the gods for a favor? For me? A new greenhouse, maybe? Bigger than my sister’s?”
“Yes. I’d be happy to.” Not that the gods ever listened to me. Or were even still around, but I made the silent vow anyway: If I see them again, I’ll make sure you get a new greenhouse.
“And you promise never to come back here?”
I agreed immediately.
He rubbed his head as his eyes flitted everywhere. “K’iin is a calendar created by the time goddess at the beginning, before there was anything,” he said quickly.
Fire sped through my body, carrying the memories of Pacific being the creator of time and Ah-Puch saying something about Ren. It was all connected. But how?
And then I remembered that night in the boat with Itzamna, and his claim. “I thought Itzamna created the calendar,” I said, feeling more confused than ever.
“The human one, yes. But K’iin,” he continued, “keeps time for the whole universe. Do you understand? Not the world—the universe! There are different strands of time—not that I understand any of that. It’s all tied up in the goddess’s magic rope, the one she is to carry for all eternity.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
“Spirits talk,” he said. “We’re masters of gossip. Once, a rotten little mountain spirit tried to steal a story for his own and—”
“Back to K’iin?” I prompted.
He sneezed, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Yes. Yes. When Pacific was exiled, she sealed the calendar and hid it so the gods would never be able to access its knowledge without her,” he said. “The mountain spirits claim to know where she put K’iin, and so do the air spirits. Hmph. If anyone knows, it would be an earth spirit!” He squinted one eye. “But those who went looking for it—they never came back.”
I suddenly felt like I was test-flying the world’s fastest rocket and was about to get sucked into a black hole. “So, no one ever found it?”
Rosie drew closer, like she didn’t want to miss the answer.
“Did you not hear me?” Kip shook his head. “Of course not. Who wants knowledge that could bring about their own death?”
“But what’s so great about the calendar?” I asked. “I mean, even if someone found it, how could they use it?”
Kip rubbed his chest in small circles like he had a bad case of heartburn. “K’iin means sun or day, but it also means T-I-M-E.” He spelled out the word. “Legend has it that if you find this calendar—which you won’t, because the goddess is very good at hiding things—and you stand before it…” He stroked his chin. “No, maybe you sit before it, or…It doesn’t matter. But you have to pay—”
“Pay?”
“You know what? You interrupt a lot,” he said.
I tried to keep my cool, but I was ready to blow. “Please go on. You were saying something about payment?”
“It’s no biggie—just an offering of some sort. You can’t expect to get something for nothing, can you?”
It felt like I was having a heart attack. “Right, but there are good kinds of offerings, like cookies, and bad kinds, like blood, or my heart, or…” I shook away the thoughts. “And what would I get in return?”
A smile slowly spread across his face. “Ah, yes. You’d be able to see across all time and dimensions.”
A calendar that could see across time and dimensions? My mind was officially blown. At the risk of having the guy threaten to cut off a finger again, I asked, “It sounds super cool and all, but why would someone want to see across time?”
“For knowledge. To find something lost. Or hidden,” he whispered.
Like the stolen gods! Yes! Now we were getting somewhere.
“But that doesn’t explain why the centipede would want to kill me.”
Rosie’s claws erupted from her three paws. Her shoulder muscles tensed. Now she reacts? I thought.
Kip raised a finger, “Ah. Because the dead cannot spill secrets.”
“Well, I didn’t die.”
“Good point,” he said. “No more questions.” He sneezed three more times. “You’re making my allergies worse.”
“Just one thing,” I said. “If someone wants to know the future, why not just visit a seer?”
He thought about it, then lowered his voice, “Seers have a limited view of the human experience in this world.”
“And?”
“And K’iin describes the idea of the sun and its relationship to the universe. I really hope someone teaches you these facts. I mean, it’s kind of embarrassing that you don’t know this stuff already. We got it drilled into us…. Oh, never mind,” he said. “Let me explain it the way it was taught to me. The sun…the big orange ball in the sky?”
“I know what the sun is!”
Rosie snorted once, then plopped onto her behind.
“Good,” the spirit said. “The sun always rises from Xib’alb’a and travels across the sky, just so the west can devour it.” He held his hands out pleadingly. “Don’t you see? The sun sacrifices herself every day so things can begin anew. Even though she is consumed, she returns. K’iin is constant like the sun, and greedy beings are like the west, wanting to possess K’iin’s power: the ability to see all.”
I must have been giving him a blank expression, because he shook his head again. “It isn’t for you to seek,” he said. “The chapat’s warning was proof of that. You were never meant to see that image. Do you hear me?”
Thunder boomed. Lightning flashed.
“We have angered the gods!” Kip cried. “Don’t forget your promise.” Then he disappeared into thin air. I whirled to find his greenhouse gone, the labyrinth vanished.
The sky split open and rain poured down on us in sheets.
And just as Rosie and I bolted into the jungle for cover, I heard a bloodcurdling scream.
As I followed Rosie toward the sound, the rain turned to snow, which must have really freaked out the trees. So much for a perfect seventy-four degrees, I thought as my godborn positioning system kicked in, a cold sensation tugging me to the right.
Angry voices flew toward us.
A girl shouted, “Hit him!”
Rosie and I stumbled through the whitening jungle until we came to a multiterraced courtyard filled with dining tables and chairs. From where we stood, on the uppermost level, I could see tables covered with plates of half-eaten breakfasts: bacon, eggs, fruit, donuts, and other items. On the lowest tie
r, a dozen or so godborns were gathered under a clump of trees. The rascal monkeys hovered in the branches above, clapping and chomping their teeth.
And in the center? Marco and some tall dude who definitely hadn’t been on my godborn tour. Which meant he must’ve been part of the junkyard battle. The two of them had their fists up and were circling each other like careful wolves, waiting to see who would make the first move.
My eyes darted everywhere, but I didn’t see any of my friends. Maybe they were still in the library? Louie stood off to the side, and even from this twenty-foot distance, I could tell he was trembling as he ate a Storm Runner candy bar.
Marco quickly wiped some snowflakes from his eyes. “Stop with the storm already, Louie!”
“I can’t help it,” Louie said. “I don’t like fights.”
Louie was causing the storm? His dad was Chaac, the god of rain, but Louie hadn’t even been trained yet.
“Punch him already!” someone commanded.
A gust of wind swept across the courtyard along with a more frenzied flurry of snow.
Everyone looked up, blinking against the instant winter.
“Hey!” I shouted.
No one reacted—they were too engrossed in the fight.
“Go find everyone, Rosie,” I said. “Bring them here.”
She took off into the forest.
With Fuego’s help, I hurried down to the fray, pushing through the small crowd that was munching on donuts, bagels, and burritos.
“Look!” someone called out. “It’s Zane Obispo!”
I stepped between Marco and the tall dude just as a fist was thrown.
Bam!
The knuckles landed squarely on my jaw, driving me to my knees. White stars danced in my vision, blood filled my mouth, and my skull felt like it had been crushed with a hammer.
That’s when everything descended into chaos. Bagels were flung. Then donuts, bacon, and fruit. Before I knew it, soggy food was showering down faster than the snow.
Feet shuffled; hollers and grunts sounded. People were shoving and tripping one another, ducking and dodging. Monkeys shrieked and swung from the trees as the snow thickened. It was total mayhem, and for what?
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