The Joshua Files - a complete box set: Books 1-5 of the young adult sci-fi adventure series plus techno-thriller prequel

by M. G. Harris

  I start. “What are you talking about? He’s, like, really old!”

  “And always has been! I don’t remember him as anything other than a balding, blind old man. Even allowing for my own youthful impressions of an older, balding man. . .” Montoyo takes a breath. “Haven’t you heard what people say about that place where he lives?”

  “The Garden?” Vigores had secretly taken me there himself, the first time we met. It’s a labyrinth that runs even deeper than the cavernous Ek Naab. A place of strange forces, I suspect; miraculous powers that can make flowers grow without light. “I’ve heard people say it’s a bit strange down there.”

  “A little ‘strange’, yes,” Montoyo says. “The kind of place where miracles might happen, yes? The kind of place you might find a fountain of youth.”

  “What, seriously?” I say, astonished.

  “It’s a very old legend in Mexico. The Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon sought the fount. . .”

  I interrupt. “Did Ponce de Leon come to Ek Naab too?”

  Montoyo smiles slightly. “No . . . not him. I’m merely illustrating the way a rumour begins, a legend. Vigores has become a legend to us in Ek Naab. His very existence is wrapped in rumours and stories. About where he disappears to. About his friends in the outside world. But very few people know about Vigores and the Bracelet of Itzamna.”

  Vigores told me, the last time we spoke, that it was he who found the Bracelet of Itzamna. As a young man exploring in the Mayan ruins at Izapa, he’d come across the Bracelet – broken – lacking the Crystal Key. He’d used the Bracelet too – very dangerous indeed without the controlling crystal. Yet he’d lived to tell the tale.

  I look into Montoyo’s eyes then, hunting out his real intention. “Why are you telling me?”

  “Vigores . . . he knows real secrets. Information we wouldn’t want the Sect to have.”

  “Well, yeah, I know! Like – the entire contents of the Ix Codex, for one.”

  Montoyo looks puzzled, thrown off course. “Naturally, but we know already that the Sect knows as much about the Ix Codex as we do. . .”

  I gape. “Uh . . . how? We had the whole Ix Codex . . . the Sect never saw it. . .”

  “They saw the same fragment that we have, the opening, which J Eric Thompson translated. . .”

  Carefully I say, “And that’s all we have. . .?”

  Montoyo’s eyes narrow. “That’s all we have . . . of course! Are you telling me that you’ve forgotten what happened when you brought back the codex?”

  Bizarre. It’s the same story as Lorena’s. . .

  “Yeah,” I tell him. Might as well go all out now. “Cos that’s not how I remember what happened with the Ix Codex. Or quite a lot of things.” I sigh, looking away. “You might as well know. There’s something bizarre about my memory. I’ve been to see Lorena; she’s done a brain scan but there’s nothing wrong that she can see.”

  Montoyo touches my arm. “But your memories . . . are different?” He sounds incredulous.

  “Yes.”

  There’s anxiety in the clouding of his eyes, the set of his mouth. “You’re sure?”

  I nod. “All day. For days now, in fact. People and events. Like, a guy I was friends with in Oxford, Tyler. He even got kidnapped along with my mum and Ixchel in Brazil. But now . . . no one here remembers him. You don’t either. I can see it in your face. So I called him, in Oxford. Tyler doesn’t remember being friends with me.”

  Montoyo nods once, as though he needs to confirm what he can’t believe.

  Miserably I say, “I’m losing it, aren’t I? Whatever the Sect did to me in Switzerland, that genetic engineering . . . it’s messing with my mind.”

  Montoyo looks around us. He stands up. “Let’s take a walk.”

  When we reach the edge of the cenote, Montoyo stops and leans over, staring into the still black water. He’s silent for so long that I wonder what’s going on. Then he straightens up.

  “There are many differences between you and the rest of us, Josh. Your Bakab genes set you apart, yes, it’s true. But there’s something else, something which maybe you have overlooked.”

  I look blank. “What?”

  “You, Josh, you have used the Bracelet of Itzamna to travel through time.”

  “So. . .?”

  “Once you’ve used the Bracelet, your timeline is set. Your memories are protected, somehow, from the changes around you.”

  “How?”

  Montoyo shakes his head. “I don’t know. I’d imagine it’s to do with the gravitic forces that propel you through space-time.”

  I’m silent, thinking. “You think my memories could be different because I’ve used the Bracelet. . .?”

  “You’ve used the Bracelet . . . so you remember how things were.”

  “Before. . .?”

  Montoyo bends his head and murmurs, “Before they changed.”

  The implications of what Montoyo is suggesting start to hit me.

  “Things . . . have changed. . .?”

  He waves his hands in the air, drawing a circle around us. “Things, yes. The world I live in, me and everyone else. To observe the circle it is first necessary to stand outside the circle. And that’s you, Josh – outside the circle. Only you can see that things have changed. Your timeline remains consistent. You’ve time travelled, Josh; you’ve found a way to exist outside of time.”

  I’m open-mouthed, clenching and unclenching my hands, trying to grasp what he’s saying.

  I repeat, “Things have changed?”

  Something was bothering me, but I couldn’t think what. . .

  If the whole of history has changed . . . and I’m the only one who can remember how things used to be . . . wow.

  Talk about a fish out of water.

  Montoyo nods, watching me. “Things may have changed . . . yes. I believe so.”

  I’m silent for a long time, thinking about how this makes sense of so much of the utterly baffling day I’ve been having. Emmy – she remembered things differently because they actually happened differently. She knew about the postcards. She saw me after the fight with Madison. I told her about my blog. But of course, without Tyler being my friend, things would have been different. Emmy must have done things that I remember Tyler doing.

  It’s harsh to think I never even made friends with a guy I think of almost like family.

  But that is as nothing compared to what has happened with the Ix Codex. No codex means no solution to the 2012 problem.

  No wonder people in Ek Naab are quietly panicking. No wonder some of them want to go worldwide on the 2012 problem. The enormity of it all takes several minutes to sink in. Montoyo says nothing, just letting me absorb it. I can’t help wondering whether he’s had his own suspicions that something is wrong. Or that he knows something that he isn’t telling me.

  Finally I say, “Who changed things?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it, Josh, my time-travelling friend? Or perhaps I should address you as Arcadio?”

  Not Montoyo too. . .? I’m about to object when I notice the slight twinkle in his eye. He’s joking.

  “Arcadio?”

  “We know that Arcadio has the Bracelet; we know he’s a time traveller. What we don’t know is . . . where he is.”

  Or who he is.

  “You think Arcadio did something,” I ask. “You think he changed something in the past?”

  “I think a time traveller changed something – Arcadio or someone else – whilst using the Bracelet of Itzamna.” He fixes me with a stern look. “I’ve half expected something like this. I’ve been watching for the signs. Ever since you fixed the Bracelet and travelled in time.”

  I roll my eyes. “Oh, so it’s my fault?”

  “Not directly. There are other players involved, that has been clear to me for a while. I think Vigores may know who Arcadio is and where to find him. Vigores disappearing, your memories being altered . . . without a doubt, they are connected.”

  “How?”
I ask, bewildered. “How can you possibly know?”

  “Well. . .” Montoyo raises an eyebrow. “Maybe I should show you this. I found it in a search of Vigores’s apartments.”

  He passes me an unmarked envelope of thick, high-quality white paper. I get a flash of recognition – I think immediately of the letter Arcadio left to me, and had Susannah St John hold for him. Without a word I take the envelope and slide the contents out: three sheaves of paper, covered in handwritten, blue ink; neat writing and illustrations that I recognize as symbols from the Bracelet of Itzamna.

  “‘Instructions for operation of the Erinsi time-jump device.’” When I see the title, I glance up at Montoyo. “Who wrote this. . .? Arcadio? Blanco Vigores?”

  “You missed someone,” Montoyo remarks. “What about Itzamna himself?”

  Montoyo’s revelations sweeps everything from my mind: the weirdness of Emmy, Tyler not knowing me, Ixchel’s admission, everything.

  All I can think about right now is the mystery in front of us both.

  Could it really be that someone has time travelled, used the Bracelet and changed the past so that somehow, the Ix Codex has been ripped apart at some point in time, most of it lost for ever?

  It would explain so much – the weird mood of everyone in Ek Naab, Benicio’s strange comments about how everyone in Ek Naab had wasted their time studying when they should have been having fun. Plus, of course, the fact that Tyler didn’t remember me.

  The people of Ek Naab here and now do seem to have given up. Without the Ix Codex, the 2012 superwave can’t be stopped. On 22 December 2012 an electromagnetic pulse is going to blast through the atmosphere and erase all the computers in the world. All the technology we depend on to keep things running smoothly will be disrupted. Civilization will come to a standstill. All over the world, there’ll be panic and craziness. Everything will fall apart.

  The letter I’m holding is a series of instructions for how to select the time, date and location on the Bracelet of Itzamna. It looks complicated, but I reckon if I had the Bracelet I’d be able to work it out. But Montoyo made me give him the Bracelet three months ago – afraid that I’d use it to try to change my own past.

  Of course, Montoyo doesn’t know that I’d already had a go at that.

  I tried to change things and it made no difference. My dad still died in that ice crevasse, saving me. I’ve lost the will to try it again. Dad was determined to make the same choice, every time. He would always end up putting his life down for me, I’m convinced of that. It’s time to leave the past alone and move on.

  Exactly what I tried to do.

  “At least I don’t have to be suspicious of you, Josh,” Montoyo says wryly. “I’ve kept a close eye on the Bracelet.”

  Ignoring his implication, I ask, “Whose handwriting is this?”

  “Does it look like Arcadio’s?”

  I shake my head, thinking of Arcadio’s letter. It’s in my room, still blood-spattered from the time Madison shot me in the leg. “I’ve never seen this handwriting,” I say. “The paper doesn’t look very old. My guess is that it’s Vigores. He’s the only person to have read the Ix Codex and also used the Bracelet of Itzamna.”

  Montoyo comments, “Apart from Itzamna himself.”

  I tap the pages. “But the paper. It’s pretty new. Like the kind you buy in fancy stationery shops. If Itzamna is a time traveller then he’s from the future, yeah? Or the past. Either way you’d expect him to use different paper.”

  No – it’s becoming clear to me. Vigores always knew more than he let on about the Bracelet. He found it, he’d used it in its broken state and realized how dangerous that could be – a one-way teleport ride into space. He’d decoded the Ix Codex and now he knew how to use the Bracelet. He’d even given it to my dad, hoping that my dad would fix it.

  Vigores had his own reasons for wanting the Bracelet. Could Montoyo be right – had he planned to hand the information over to the Sect? And if so – why now? Vigores has been in Ek Naab for ages; he could have done something like this years ago.

  Except . . . I put the two things together.

  What would be the use of that information –unless you also had the Bracelet of Itzamna?

  I glance at Montoyo. He’s watching me with an expectant grin. With a start, I realize that he’s actually looking at me proudly.

  “Could there be . . . a second Bracelet?”

  His grin broadens. “I knew you’d see it. Yes! The only explanation. A second Bracelet, in the possession of Marius Martineau and the Sect. They had access to the Revival Chamber for many days before you discovered it. Who knows what artefacts they discovered there?”

  “Why would Vigores help them? It doesn’t seem like him.”

  Montoyo grimaces. “It doesn’t. I’m not suggesting that he went willingly.”

  “If the Sect has people inside Ek Naab . . . maybe they tricked him.”

  He’s thoughtful. “The Sect has made this move for a reason. I’m certain it’s the Bracelet of Itzamna.”

  “If they have a second Bracelet . . . and they know how to make the Crystal Key, of course, since I actually nicked one from their own labs . . . and now they have the instructions of how to use it from Vigores . . . then . . . then. . .” I stare at Montoyo. “It’s true. They could travel into the past. Nick the codex, rip it apart.”

  Montoyo nods. “Precisely. They’d have to go to a place and time in history where they knew the codex to exist.”

  “That would have to be Thompson’s house – that archaeologist in Saffron Walden. The place where my granddad found the codex. Or even Catemaco, with the brujos, where I found the codex.”

  Again he nods. “There is a third possibility – ancient Calakmul. AD 653. In the time of Yuknoom the Great, Ruler of the Snake Kingdom.”

  “Huh? But how would the Sect know about that? We only know because of the Calakmul letter. No one from the Sect ever saw the whole letter except. . .”

  I exhale, slowly. Of course. That traitorous cow, Ollie. She was with us when Camila and I read out the whole letter, left by my grandfather Aureliano, found by my dad and then divided into two parts: one for my sister, one for me. Ollie knows what’s in the Calakmul letter. The Sect know everything.

  “So . . . what are we gonna do? Visit each point in history?”

  “We are going to do nothing, my friend. This time you’ll be staying at home. I’ll be the one to take the risks.”

  It looks like he’s serious.

  Montoyo continues, “Your mother would never forgive me if I put you in danger again. Even if it was an attempt to save the whole of civilization. . .” he says, with a slight grin.

  “Of course not,” I say accusingly. “You’ve got her under your thumb, yeah? She doesn’t care about anything but staying here with you and being happy.”

  Montoyo’s eyes flash with danger for a second. “You underestimate your mother. Her concern for you is natural.”

  “It’s a stupid plan anyway,” I tell him. Even as the words leave my mouth I’m surprised at how annoyed I feel that he’s doing this without me. Even though I should probably be relieved.

  What’s happening to me? Have I turned into some kind of adrenaline junkie?

  I pursue my argument. “There’s no way to know where and when they’ve gone. Thompson’s place, Catemaco; the codex was in those places for ages. We don’t know when it arrived in either place. How can you be sure to arrive in time to stop the Sect changing things?”

  Montoyo’s eyes glimmer with a light of excitement that I’ve never seen before. “It’s not the first place I’ll try. For the Sect it makes sense to go back as early as possible, precisely so that their intervention has maximum devastation. To damage the codex during its time at Calakmul . . . that would be very difficult for anyone to reverse.”

  I pause. “So you’re really gonna do this, yeah? You’re gonna time travel to ancient Calakmul?”

  Slowly, he nods. “I think I have to.”


  I’m finding it hard to believe we’re actually discussing this.

  “To AD 653?”

  “The Golden Age of Classic Maya,” Montoyo murmurs. “Amazing, yes?”

  “How . . . how will you get by? Talking and stuff. The ancient Maya . . . they’re pretty fierce, aren’t they? Human sacrifice and all that?”

  “Yucatec is close enough to the language of Classic Maya. I’ll be able to understand, to make myself understood. As for the human sacrifice. . .” Montoyo shrugs. “It wasn’t as common as you might think. Religious holidays and special occasions, that kind of time.”