by M. G. Harris
Jeez. How did we go from arguing about Benicio to this? It’s a mess. I can feel my own eyes welling up now.
“It’s even worse. . .” Ixchel says, holding her fingers to her cheeks, brushing away the tears. “Because now you’ve infected Benicio with these stupid ideas. He wants to be just as reckless as you, showing off. He was so nice to me when we were growing up. The best friend I had. Always looked out for me.”
“Oh yeah,” I say bitterly, sniffing. “Benicio sure had plans for you. . .”
“Shut up about Benicio!” she snaps.
But can I let it go? No. “If you liked Benicio all along,” I continue angrily, “then why didn’t you say? Back in Veracruz last year. I asked you if there was a boy in Ek Naab that you liked and you said no. You could have told me then and I’d never have. . .”
Never have got my hopes up. Never have let myself fall for her. I can’t say any of that though; it’s way too soppy.
“You . . . are just so stupid. . .” Ixchel says, staring at me. “When are you gonna grow up?”
That really stings. I feel my face flush red with anger. “Stick to your grown-up boyfriend then,” I tell her. “See if I care.”
“You know what, I think I will,” she replies. We exchange one final look of pure resentment and then she turns and walks away.
Everyone in Ek Naab knows that Ixchel and I are supposedly betrothed. And everyone probably knows that Ixchel is going out with Benicio. On my way back to the straw hut to get dressed, a couple of older guys, students at the Tec in their early twenties, pat me on the shoulder.
“Love is a minefield, my friend,” says one, chuckling. “But don’t give up!”
I shake them off, scowling.
We’ve both ended up in tears and I don’t even understand what just happened. I head back to the apartment. I’m going to call Tyler. He’s the one guy I know I can talk to about this.
The phone in our apartment has been routed to give us access to call outside Ek Naab without the call being traced. Even so, I won’t risk being overheard, or being questioned about where I’ve been by my mother and Montoyo. So I call Tyler from one of the outside phones. His mother answers, asks who I am and then fetches him.
“Hallo?”
“Tyler, mate, it’s me, Josh.”
There’s a lengthy pause, then a sort of gasp of recognition. “Oh yeah! Josh Garcia, yeah? How’ve you been?”
“Not good, not good. It’s all going off with Benicio and Ixchel. Like you said it would. She knows I like her, Ty! She’s known all along, doesn’t even seem to care! Gave me all this about how she prefers Benicio to me cos unlike me, he’s not a raving psycho always getting into trouble, but now maybe he’s turning into another danger-freak. . .” I take a deep breath and sigh.
I stop then, waiting almost breathless for his reply. Until that moment I haven’t realized how badly I need to talk about this. How much I’ve missed Tyler’s listening . . . even if he rarely has much to say.
Tyler seems to be having difficulty coming up with a response. No surprise there. It’s complicated.
Finally he says, “This is Josh Garcia, yeah? From the capoeira group, right?”
My face feels suddenly clammy. “Yeah . . . yeah, of course, who else?”
“Josh Garcia, who moved away to Mexico with his mum, that Josh?”
I fall silent. If it wasn’t for the odd things that Emmy and Benicio have said, I’d be laughing now. Instead, though, a numb sensation creeps through me.
“Yes, Tyler, it’s me.”
“Mate . . . did you call the right number? I’m Tyler Marks, yeah? Did you mean to call some other Tyler?”
The numb sensation turns into cringing, horrible embarrassment. I can hear in his voice that he’s not joking. Suddenly I want to end this conversation without looking like a jerk.
“Did you say ‘Tyler Marks’?”
“Yep.”
Heart sinking, I say, “Wait . . . you’re right. I was meant to be calling another Tyler. Your name is right next to his on my phone.”
Tyler laughs. “Jokes, man, that’s happened to me too. Anyway, hope everything’s cool with you in Mexico.”
“Yeah,” I tell him, feeling the spread of a blush. “It’s all fine.”
“Capoeira?”
“No classes, but I practise on my own.”
“Yeah, well. Don’t give it up, man. If I remember right, you was startin’ to get good.”
I can hardly bring myself to speak. “Thanks. Well. Better go.”
He chuckles. “OK! And good luck with the girl and being a psycho and all that. . .”
As I replace the phone, my hand trembles. He doesn’t know me. Tyler. It’s unimaginable.
I’m so messed up.
Those strange comments about Tyler make sense now, Emmy’s and Benicio’s. They acted like they didn’t remember him. I thought it was a joke, a mistake, anything.
But what if there’s something wrong with my memory? If I hadn’t been genetically altered by the Sect, I’d totally assume there was something wrong with them, not me.
If only.
I can think of just one person who can help me now – Lorena, the Chief Scientist of Ek Naab. She’s also a doctor and the atanzahab – the matchmaker who recommended that Ixchel be betrothed to me. Lorena did that without even meeting me. Smart lady.
I hurry over to the Tec and argue with the receptionist to let me through to her office. What with Ek Naab being so miserably tiny, though, of course the story has got out about how I blagged my way into Lorena’s labs a few months ago.
I was looking for the Crystal Key, so that I could repair the Bracelet of Itzamna and travel back in time to save my father. But Lorena discovered me before I could find the Key. She doesn’t even know that I finally did fix the Bracelet. Or that I travelled back in time but couldn’t change what happened with my dad. He still ended up on the slopes of Mount Orizaba, his memory lost, and he still ended up dying in the ice crevasse. Saving my life.
In fact, as I wait for Lorena to come to the lobby, I have to remind myself that Montoyo and Ixchel don’t know exactly what happened when I used the Bracelet. All I admitted is that I used it to go back in time by ten minutes. I never mentioned the stuff about my dad.
Tyler guessed that I hadn’t told the full details. The Tyler who remembered being my friend, anyway. That’s how I remember things.
“I think I’m losing my mind,” I tell Lorena, the second she closes her office door behind us.
A wry grin flickers at the edge of her mouth. Her serious brown eyes twinkle for a second, but she remains calm. “I suspect not.”
“Can you do a brain scan or something?”
“To see if you’re losing your mind? Possibly. It depends how you’re losing it.”
“Do a brain scan,” I say firmly. “Please.”
With a pencil, Lorena taps the desk between us. “Josh, talk to me. What’s wrong?”
“Remember a few months ago, when my mum and Ixchel were kidnapped in Brazil?”
She nods, blinking slowly. “Naturally.”
“I came here to your labs. You found me in your cold room.”
She smiles at the memory. “Yes.”
“Who was with me?”
“No one.”
“You don’t remember a guy called Tyler?”
“Tyler?” Lorena frowns. “No. You were alone.”
“And you . . . you told me all this stuff, remember that? About Montoyo.”
“I did?”
“Yeah, and about the five Revival Chambers, and the Crystal Key. . .”
“The five Revival Chambers?”
I pause, glancing up at her. “Yes. The one here in Mexico, in the Depths near Becan. Then you said there were four other chambers.”
Lorena frowns, gazing deeply at me from over her black-rimmed glasses. “Josh . . . we just know about one Revival Chamber. The one that you and Ixchel found.”
“But they’re written about i
n the Ix Codex. . .”
Lorena sits back, now totally bewildered. “Josh . . . the Ix Codex is mostly blank.”
“Mostly blank?” I can’t do anything but echo.
“Apart from the first few pages.” Lorena nods vigorously. “It’s as if the book was torn into pieces and the first few pages grafted on to a blank manuscript. A fake, made to look like the genuine article by someone who got their hands on the first few pages of the real thing.” She looks at me curiously. “But everybody knows this. We’ve known since you returned the codex from Catemaco.”
I sit in silence for a few moments, aware of a deepening ache in my lower spine and wrists, and a slight numbness. This is getting to me now, this junk with my memory. It’s totally messed up. After the day I’ve had, it’s enough. If there’s a conspiracy to play a practical joke on me, I swear, heads will roll. But lurking at the back of my mind there’s a sick, sick fear. I hardly dare admit it to myself, let alone Lorena.
What if there is something seriously wrong with me?
“Then you’d better do that brain scan,” I tell her, part angry, part flippant. “Cos that’s not how I remember things.”
BLOG ENTRY: JUST BECAUSE YOU THINK YOU’RE PARANOID DOESN’T MEAN THEY AREN’T REALLY OUT TO GET YOU
What started out as a secret diary might now be my only way to record my memories. . .
From the minute I opened my eyes this morning, I had the feeling it was going to be a weird day. That memory where I was playing football with Tyler. Remembering what it’s like to feel an icy wind. Emmy’s bizarre comments on my blog, her knowing things I don’t remember telling her, things I know she didn’t see.
Strange days.
Blanco Vigores once told me:Ignore nothing.
Even dreams. They’re like messages from the subconscious.
It’s like that with me – except the ability to speak to my own subconscious seems to be a bit more developed. Sometimes it seems I can even speak to other people’s subconscious minds. It’s freaky.
It must be something to do with being a Bakab. I was born with the Ix gene – it makes me immune to the toxin that protects the Ix Codex. Thanks to whatever genetic experiments the Sect did to me in Switzerland, I’ve now got immunity to the other three types of biotoxin – I have the genes of Bakabs Muluc, Cauac and Kan. I can handle any of the four codices.
Do the genetic changes stop there, though? The Sect changed my eye colour from brown to blue. It’s the main reason why even I have started to wonder if I’m Arcadio, the blue-eyed time traveller who left me a letter written in the 1960s.
There were things in that letter that only I could know. So am I going to become Arcadio and start travelling in time? Is he my future son? Or someone else who knows me?
It never occurred to me that Ixchel was worrying about this Arcadio thing. Maybe that’s why she seemed upset when my eyes turned blue. Ixchel thinks I have some kind of psychic powers as well. She believes that I’m going to grow up and become this time traveller. To forget all about her, leave her.
My dad lost his memory using the Bracelet of Itzamna. Arcadio lost his memory too, almost certainly. He walked around with a tattoo on his arm; a secret code. A code that led to the formula for the Crystal Key, just in case the Bracelet ever malfunctioned again.
A man in danger of amnesia needs to get used to leaving himself notes, clues to his own identity. What better than a tattoo?
I’ve already used the Bracelet to time travel. Twice. But it’s not me with the amnesia. I remember being friends with Tyler – and no one else does.
Could the Sect have implanted false memories? I don’t remember my head being hooked up to any kind of equipment when they experimented on me.
But then if my memory has been tampered with, I wouldn’t remember anything suspicious, would I?
It’s not good, being unable to trust your own memory, your own feelings. Not good at all.
What I remember – it feels cast-iron, definite, real.
I’m sitting with my laptop at one of the café tables around the market square. In the early evening, it’s the noisiest place in Ek Naab, with enough going on that I reckon I won’t stand out. When I finish writing the blog I take a sip from a glass of mango and papaya juice. From across the stalls I hear my name being called. I glance up, peering through the heaps of roasted coffee beans, dried-and-toasted grasshoppers covered in chilli and lime, yellow guanabanas, limes and avocados.
It’s Montoyo. His gaze is fixed on me and he looks determined, his mouth a hard line in his craggy face. Immediately, I feel nervous. Montoyo’s left me alone, more or less, for the past few months, wants me to be a “good boy” from now on. He took the Bracelet of Itzamna away from me, he convinced my mother to move us to Ek Naab, made her fall for him. Montoyo has all the influence over Mum that he needs.
All so that I’ll stay right where he can keep an eye on me. So that he can control me.
His control must be slipping, though, if even Benicio is flipping out a bit – reliable ol’ Benicio, who used to be errand boy.
I wonder about my cousin then. I think about what he must be going through at that hospital. At least by now he should be over the worst.
Closing up the laptop, I look up at Montoyo. He can probably tell that I’m tense. So is he.
“Where’ve you been, Josh? I told Ixchel this morning that I was looking for you!”
That’s right . . . she did say that. Then we sort of got distracted with the motorbike contest.
I take a deep sigh and tell Montoyo about my contest with Benicio. But I don’t get far before he interrupts.
“Josh, you and your cousin need to find a way to get along. If you want Ixchel to change her mind, better to keep that between you and her. Fighting with Benicio won’t help.” Montoyo seems irritated. “There’s something else I need to talk to you about. Something that is for your ears only.”
I sit up, curious. I thought he’d be more annoyed, but it’s nothing to him, nothing. Instead it seems Montoyo is much keener to tell me what’s on his own mind. Sitting opposite me, elbows propped against my laptop, he says very quietly, “Listen closely. We have a big problem. Blanco Vigores has gone.”
The comment takes me by surprise. It’s more or less normal for the old blind man to go off on his own once in a while, that’s what I’ve always been told.
I shrug. “So. . .?”
“When you came back from Switzerland with Ixchel, I told you Vigores had gone to visit some people in the outside world, yes?”
I nod. “I remember, yeah.” I’d seen Vigores only days before he left, just before the dream-visitation with my sister. He said things that lingered in my memory for a long time afterwards. The old guy has a way of putting things in words that really get under my skin.
“Vigores called in a few times at the beginning of the month. He was in Mexico City. Then New York. The last time he called was over two months ago. I’ve kept this quiet, Josh, but I began an investigation. About six weeks ago.”
“Six weeks?” It starts to hit me that there is something serious going on.
“I’ve been working with private investigators in the USA. The leads all go cold. One morning around two months ago he left his hotel room in Manhattan, took a taxi to the Yale Club of New York. . .”
“And then?”
Montoyo shakes his head. “That’s it. The porter signed him in, but no member’s name was attached, which is unusual. He hasn’t been seen since.”
I stare at him, thrilled by the idea that occurs right then. “I bet it’s Marius Martineau – the leader of the Sect of Huracan.”
Grimly, he smiles. “My thoughts precisely. Martineau works for Yale University – the Peabody Museum.”
“You think Blanco’s gone to meet Martineau?”
Montoyo expression darkens. “I’m afraid it’s worse, much worse.” He leans forward, conspiratorial, practically whispers in my ear. “Josh . . . we have to face the possibility that Vigores has
joined our enemies in the Sect.”
“But why? What’s in it for him?”
Montoyo shrugs, considering. “Vigores behaves in ways that have always mystified me. I have often sensed that he has a higher master than Ek Naab. His origins here are mysterious – I’ve told you that. For one thing – he doesn’t seem to age.”