by M. G. Harris
“Any particular names?”
“Montoyo – anyone linked to Montoyo, people are really cautious around.”
“So – what – Montoyo’s a bad guy now?”
Ixchel shrugs. “Benicio is a great guy. But he does whatever Montoyo asks.”
“You really seem to have a problem with Montoyo . . . why?”
“He has a lot of power in Ek Naab. And when you turn sixteen, you’ll replace him on the Executive. He’s going to lose his position. That doesn’t worry you?”
I shrug, wondering. “Never even thought about it.”
“Maybe you should.”
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t know what’s going on, Josh. But the atmosphere has been weird for months. What if there’s another way into Ek Naab? What if there are spies in the city?”
“Spies, why would there be spies?”
“Josh, there are people in Ek Naab who want to sell our secrets to the outside world.”
“I thought Montoyo already did that . . . isn’t that how the city is so rich?”
“No – he sells technology that doesn’t have to stay secret. I’m talking about the secrets of the Baktun Problem. The secrets in the Ix Codex.”
It strikes me that this isn’t quite the same story that Benicio told me. He didn’t mention anything about selling secrets.
“Look,” Ixchel says slowly, as if I might be a bit thick. “If there’s another way into the city, then . . . secrets might be leaving through that route.”
I shake my head. “No way. Madison threatened to beat me to a pulp unless I told him how to get into Ek Naab. He doesn’t know the way.”
Ixchel seems genuinely surprised at this. “Hmm. Then maybe it’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. Madison’s up to something. We should investigate. Then we can tell the Executive what we’ve found. The whole Executive – all at once.”
“You’re dreaming,” she says. “Benicio told me you’re in trouble with Montoyo. You think he’s going to give you permission to investigate?”
“Hmm. Probably not. So let’s not ask.”
Ixchel stares at me with what looks like admiration. “You’d do that?”
“Yeah.” I stand up. “You and me. Let’s go, right now.”
She shakes her head in disbelief. “I thought you were Montoyo’s errand boy too.”
“Hey, in two years I’m going to be on the Executive,” I say. It’s the first time I’ve heard respect in Ixchel’s voice, so I go further, get bolder. “I don’t take orders from Montoyo.”
“That’s tough talk, but what about me? You want me to walk off my shift – which will probably get me fired, by the way – and go all the way back to Becan with you . . . and use up all my money for the bus. . .?”
“. . .and crawl into the temple and find the secret way in. . .” I say. “Yeah, all that. Come on. Please. This Madison guy, he’s killed my sister; for all I know he may have been involved in the murder of my father. He beat me up, was going to kill me. . . And his evil witch girlfriend has been spying on me . . . pretending to be my friend. . .”
I almost spit that last sentence out, and Ixchel seems a bit startled. She looks at me for a long moment.
“What about Benicio?”
“Well . . . first thing he’s going to do is call Montoyo and ask for permission. So that’s out.”
She nods. “OK. But we can’t leave saying nothing.”
“You’ve got your phone, haven’t you?”
“I’d better turn it off.” Ixchel gives a mischievous smile. “He can trace us.”
We decide to leave a note.
Benicio. I want to show Josh this really interesting thing. Plus I think it would be good for us to spend some time alone. See you back here in a couple of days.
“‘This really interesting thing’ . . . are you joking?” I say, incredulous. “He’s never going to believe that. And we should ‘spend some time alone’?”
“I know,” she replies, grinning. “Benicio had better keep this quiet. Because if Montoyo finds out, he’s going to completely lose it.”
“What Montoyo’s gonna have to realize,” I say as we stand up, “is that he can’t have everything his own way. Not when it comes to you and me.”
“OK, Josh,” Ixchel says with a smile. “Now you’re talking!”
She jabs my arm. It feels a lot like affection. . .
BLOG ENTRY: GRAN CAFÉ DEL PORTAL
A friend of mine called Ixchel has been working in a famous coffee shop in Veracruz. My cousin Benicio took me to visit her. When she started, they made her clean floors and wipe tables. They didn’t know then that she spoke fluent English, French and Japanese. Even fancy rich Mexicans get impressed with that. You’d have thought they’d have offered her a bigger promotion. But no. They only moved her up to waitress.
Anyway . . . I’m still fine. I had to get out of Ek Naab. I thought maybe Ixchel had been sending us those postcards, the ones with the photos of Mayan cities, posted in Veracruz. I asked her right away. She said no. She’d never heard of them.
Then I thought – obviously she’s telling the truth. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it first: how would she know your name and our address?
“Oh, I know all that,” she said. “Josh Garcia, son of Eleanor and Andres.”
And then she told me our address.
“You don’t think I checked you out?” she told me. “You must be even dumber than you look.”
Nice. They fixed me up with a girl who thinks I’m dumb.
I find an Internet café, where I persuade them to change the twenty-pound note that’s stashed in my back pocket under my dad’s iPod. They make me buy fifteen minutes online, so I do a quick update to the blog.
And that already seems like too much time . . . I don’t even want Ixchel to stop off at her room and change out of her waitress clothes, but she insists.
“You want to hitch-hike?” she says, more than a bit irritated as we trot through the streets of Veracruz. “No? Then, OK, I need to get my money.”
Ixchel lodges in what used to be the maid’s room at the top of a house. The room is completely separate and has its access on the roof. The walls are brick painted with thick, pale-pink paint, the floor a dirty marble tile. Ixchel’s bed is low and narrow. Apart from that, all she has in her room is a small chest of drawers with a twelve-inch television on top. Behind me Ixchel changes as I stare at the wall, where she’s taped postcards of Mexican film stars Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna. It’s the single personal touch, the only decoration in the room.
“Why are you living like this?” I ask, wondering. “I really don’t understand.”
Ixchel turns me around. She’s dressed in blue jeans, sandals and a salmon-pink T-shirt and carries the little sisal-weave bag I remember from the jungle. The chopsticks have gone and she wears her hair in a high ponytail.
“Let me ask you this – you want to move to Ek Naab? Live your life there?”
“Not really, but . . .”
“You see?”
“. . . but I wasn’t born there. I’m not used to it.”
“Ek Naab is a prison with golden bars, unless you are on the Executive or a pilot like Benicio.”
“Everyone seems so happy.”
“They are terrified of the real world outside. They believe someone’s going to kill them or rob them the minute they step out of the place.”
“And you don’t?”
“I never believe things just because people tell me,” she says with a little toss of her ponytail. “I like to see for myself.”
We leave her room in a hurry, make straight for the bus station. She buys two tickets on the express to Villahermosa, in Tabasco. I remember my lonely bus trip last summer, and I’m relieved to think I’ll have company this time.
Ixchel and I take two seats somewhere in the middle of the bus. She lets me have the window seat, “since you’re the tourist here. . .”
Typical.
We decide to phone Benicio right away, whilst the bus is still in the streets of Veracruz. Ixchel tells him that she’s abducting me to show me something of the “real” Mexico. When she passes her phone to me, I can hear the anxiety in his voice.
“Josh, I’m not kidding. Tell her you’re coming back with me. Montoyo will kill me.”
“Then don’t tell him. We’ll be back the day after tomorrow. Just tell him that everything’s fine, that we’re hanging out together.”
Benicio goes silent. “If anything happens to you guys, I’m toast. You understand? I’m finished as a pilot.”
Ixchel takes the phone. “Don’t be ridiculous, Benicio. You’re the best pilot we have. Just be calm. It’ll be fine.”
But Benicio doesn’t seem to agree, and hangs up, cursing us both.
Ixchel giggles, embarrassed. “Gee. Now I feel really bad.”
“Don’t. We’re only going to find out what Madison is up to. OK? When we find out, they’ll thank us.”
Ixchel glances at me, and seems to mull something over.
I also use her phone to call Tyler. It turns out he hasn’t left Oxford after all.
“My mum drove me past Ollie’s,” Tyler tells me. “And her house has a ‘To Let’ sign. I looked through the windows – it’s empty. The neighbours said she moved out yesterday. I called her on her mobile – it was turned off.”
I ask him to check my house for any more of those postcards. He’s already been to the house and found another two. I ask him to read out the messages.
They are:
KINGDOM’S.LOSS.
QUESTIONABLE.JUDGEMENT.
Ixchel copies this down, as well as the rest of the messages. All together, in date order, the message so far is:
WHAT.KEY.HOLDS.BLOOD.DEATH.UNDID.HARMONY. ZOMBIE.DOWNED.WHEN.FLYING.KINGDOM’S.LOSS. QUESTIONABLE.JUDGEMENT.
She asks, “You know what this means?”
I glumly fix my eyes on the message. “Not the faintest idea.”
But the latest messages seem to tie in with my theory. Zombie downed when flying. Sounds like a nasty reference to my dad’s corpse being in the plane. Kingdom’s loss, questionable judgement. Could that be a reference to Ek Naab?
“Maybe you need the whole message to decipher the code,” suggests Ixchel.
“That’s not how deciphering works,” I tell her.
“Oh, so you’re the deciphering genius now, are you?”
“Hey, I worked out that the Ix Codex is written in English!” I say.
Oops.
“It’s in English. . .? But how?”
“I’m having a laugh,” I say. “Course it’s not in English. As if!”
Ixchel says nothing more for a few seconds, instead looks at me closely. I try to look relaxed, but I can actually feel my cheeks burning. Time to change the subject.
I put the message aside and I tell Ixchel all about my adventure last summer, how I found the Ix Codex, and some of what’s happened in the past few weeks. Every time I come to a bit about what I read in the pages from the Ix Codex, I have to stop.
“Gosh . . . sorry . . . I can’t tell you about that. . .”
Eventually she tells me to shut up about the Ix Codex. But of course she wants to know. And of course I want to talk about it. We can’t . . . so we change the subject again.
She tells me about how she left Becan by bus the morning after she saw me. She headed out to Playa del Carmen, where she spent a few weeks waitressing in bars on the beach. From Playa she went to Merida, from Merida to Veracruz.
“I wanted to see Mexico. And not just from a beach. I want to see the whole world too, one day. Might as well start with here.”
I’m full of admiration, but I can’t really understand how she can stand to live that way. I think of my own comfortable life in Oxford. Not much would persuade me to abandon that.
We reach Villahermosa just in time to catch the overnight bus to Chetumal. I can’t help thinking sadly of poor Saul there without Camila. I wonder if he stayed? Without her, he’d only have the avocados and their beautiful house. Still – it beats being in jail.
These thoughts turn over and over in my head. I clench my jaw, trying not to let bad memories get to me. I turn to Ixchel to see if I can get her talking again. But she’s asleep, breathing quietly, leaning against the window. Outside it’s pitch-black. The interior lights of the bus are switched off, the video screen blinks into action and a film begins to play.
It’s one I’ve seen before – Memento. I plug in to my dad’s iPod. It’s mostly classical music, jazz and prog rock. Wondering if I’ll have the dream about my dad, I select Kind of Blue and try to sleep.
It’s still dark when we arrive at Chetumal. We have to wait a few hours to catch one of the buses that take tourists to Becan, Chicanna, Xpujil and Calakmul.
At Becan, a group of six German tourists get out, as well as us. The minute we arrive, Ixchel strolls ahead of the other visitors, who move in that slow, bewildered touristy way. We quickly leave them behind near the thatched entrance hut. She takes me straight past the main plaza and to a set of buildings to the west in the central plaza, labelled on the map as Structure X.
Apart from the German guys, we have the whole site to ourselves. I turn away from Structure X for a moment and peer behind the curtain of spindly trees. There, looming above the plaza, is the enormous pyramid I climbed last summer: Structure IX. There’s absolutely no sign of the secret entrance to the gateway of Ek Naab on the western wall of Structure IX. I’m still amazed that the entrance even exists.
The recently cleaned stones are a cool grey-white in the even light of morning sun. The air is still fresh, slightly misty and mercifully free of mosquitoes. The site is thick with skinny trees that shade everything but the temples.
I haven’t even broken a sweat. It isn’t like this in summer. My mum and dad and I used to visit Mayan ruins in August. In summer, you bake, and the mosquitoes eat you alive. Sweat pours off you, rolls down your face, stings your eyes and cracks your lips; bugs land on any part of you that isn’t drenched in insect repellent.
We walk around Structure X, a broad temple with two towers and one main staircase, looking for an opening in the wall. We find a three-foot-wide opening in the middle of the eastern side. We climb inside, turn on Ixchel’s torch and squirm through on hands and knees. We continue crawling straight ahead until the tunnel makes a left turn. Then quite suddenly, we emerge into a system of rooms and linking passageways, all inside the temple.
I turn to Ixchel. “Which room did Madison disappear into?”
She closes her eyes, concentrating.
I gasp. “You don’t know?”
“Give me a minute . . . I’m visualizing it. . .”
“We came all this way and you’re guessing?”
Ixchel snaps open her eyes. “Stop hissing at me and let me think!”
I’m silent, chewing on my lower lip. Ixchel pokes her head from room to room. She turns back to me.
“OK, I didn’t exactly see which room he went into, obviously. . .”
I blurt, “Obviously?!”
“I didn’t go inside at the same time as him – what are you thinking? He would have seen me. I’m trying to remember where I saw the scraped floor.”
Ixchel decides that it’s one of two rooms. We crawl into the first, a dank hole of a room, about eight by ten feet. There’s no sign of scratching on the ground. In the second room, however, shining the torch into the corner, I immediately see what Ixchel means. Part of the floor has been worn away. The wall next to it even looks different to the others – it’s much less crumbly.
We try leaning on the walls, pushing stones, pressing our fingers into any depression, but nothing happens. We’re about to give up when we hear the unmistakable sound of someone else in the passageway.
We look at each other, eyes wide with astonishment. Ixchel flicks off the torch. We crawl into the adjacent room and hold our breath.
“You’re just gonna have to build a better way in, Marius,” drawls a woman’s voice, her accent from somewhere in the American South. “Cos I sure don’t see myself as an Indiana Jones.”
“All in time, my dear professor,” comes another voice – a man’s. He has a lofty, distracted way of speaking, like he’s got some better place to be. His accent sort of sounds like American trying to sound British. The next time he speaks, his voice comes from the other side of the wall we’re leaning against. Ixchel and I stand as stiff as boards.