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

  “So how come you think he’s gone back to Itzamna’s time, finally?”

  “Because I gave him the Ix Codex.” I stall. “Because of me, he knows just when to find Itzamna. Jeez. It’s a full-on nightmare.”

  “If he wants to stop the books being written at all . . . the only sure way is to kill Itzamna.”

  “Yep.” I nod grimly, considering the theory. “Killing Itzamna . . . that would do it for sure. No books, no ancient technology, no Ek Naab, no Muwan to crash in Orizaba and give the Americans all that sophisticated technology.” I stifle a yawn, feeling suddenly sleepy.

  “And instead, a nuclear war that wipes out hundreds of millions of people.”

  “Yeah. . .” There’s not much else I can say. Every time I think about that, I get a creeping sense of numbness and disbelief.

  Certainly kills the romantic mood.

  In the morning, Susannah doesn’t join us at the breakfast table until we’ve eaten our way through plates of fruit, sugar-covered concha rolls and cups of hot chocolate. When she does, she’s carrying a cordless phone the size of a brick. It’s the first cordless phone I’ve seen since we arrived. She asks the maid to bring her a black coffee, then takes a muffin from the basket.

  “I’m sorry for the delay. I’ve had so many telephone calls today. I didn’t have the heart to tell them their calls were pointless.”

  It’s a strange way to start a conversation. Neither Ixchel nor I know what to say.

  “Josh,” Susannah says after sipping her coffee. “Do you have the Bracelet?”

  I roll up the sleeve of my cotton guayabera shirt to expose the Bracelet of Itzamna above my elbow. Susannah gasps slightly, leans forward and touches it lightly with two fingers.

  “My goodness, you really do.”

  There’s an awkward silence. Susannah turns to me. “What am I like, in your reality?”

  The question takes me by surprise. It hasn’t properly sunk in that Susannah actually believes us, that somehow she knows about the Bracelet of Itzamna.

  “Um, well, things turn out different. You still live in Mexico, but not like a rich businesswoman. In a little house in Tlacotalpan. A really nice house,” I add, reassuringly. “And you paint.”

  “Am I happy?” she asks in a faraway voice. “Do I seem happy?”

  I glance downwards. “I couldn’t say for sure. You . . . the Susannah I know . . . she was crazy about this bloke. He disappeared. After that . . . I don’t know if you could say she’s happy.”

  “Hmmm.” Susannah seems strangely unmoved. “Well. A painter, gee! That’s kind of surprising. I haven’t painted since I was young.”

  With a blunt air of finality Ixchel asks, “So how come you know about the Bracelet of Itzamna?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it when we get there.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the National Museum of Anthropology.”

  Susannah’s driver picks us up and drives us through the leafy streets of her neighbourhood before turning on to the main boulevard of Mexico City – Paseo de la Reforma. From there we swing into the shady green lawns and parks of Chapultepec. The driver drops us off.

  This part looks exactly as I remember the city, right down to the stalls that line the street selling blue and pink candyfloss, a thousand varieties of brightly packaged sweets, huge sheets of deep-fried pork crackling drizzled with lime juice and chilli sauce, guys blowing up gigantic acrylic bubbles that reek of pear-drop-scented solvent. A little kid with huge eyes approaches me with a transparent plastic bag of Chiclets chewing gum in tiny boxes, all different flavours. I take the Chiclets and give him a few pesos.

  As we pass the giant monument of the Aztec rain god, Tlaloc, that stands guard at the museum entrance, Susannah begins by asking us if we’ve heard of a ruined city known as Izapa. Hearing that, I feel a ripple of excitement. I’d been afraid that Susannah’s story would be a red herring, just a rumour. But linking Izapa with the Bracelet of Itzamna makes this feel real. After all, Izapa is where Blanco Vigores told me he found the broken Bracelet, which he then gave to my father, which I then fixed. Izapa is where Itzamna found the super-ancient Temple of Inscriptions of the Erinsi, which he copied down in the Books of Itzamna.

  Izapa is at the beginning of everything.

  “Part of Izapa was destroyed by a volcanic explosion. Much of it was flooded by water from underground rivers,” says Susannah. “A few years ago a scuba diver got lost for an hour in some underground tunnels. He claims to have come across a flooded chamber with a wall full of inscriptions. He took photographs of the inscriptions. Eventually he was able to find his way out of that labyrinth. But he couldn’t remember how to reach the chamber with the inscriptions. People have searched since then and failed to find it. All we have are his photographs.”

  It’s obvious to Ixchel and me that diver must have found part of the destroyed Temple of Inscriptions. So not quite every bit of Erinsi knowledge has been lost to this reality. . .

  “There’s a room in the museum that’s dedicated to famous hoaxes or fakes in the world of archaeology. It’s an extremely popular exhibition, even though it’s very controversial. Many people think it’s a mistake to display such objects in a museum, even in a room that’s very clearly labelled ‘Fakes and Hoaxes’. It has everything you can imagine, that room: images and writings from ancient Atlantis, spaceships visiting Sumeria, cuneiform writing from the alien progenitors of the Anunnaki. People love it, which is why I want us to get there early, before the crowds.”

  “So the Bracelet of Itzamna is mentioned in these inscriptions that the scuba diver saw?”

  “You might say that, dear. Unmistakably mentioned!”

  We’re strolling through the vast marble lobby of the museum as Susannah says this. Then we enter the courtyard with its wide-open spaces and extensive horizontal lines: concrete, glass, water. Ixchel stops in her tracks, absolutely amazed. I watch her for a few seconds, feeling a rush of pleasure to see her evident joy in something new and totally unknown.

  “Josh . . . this is . . . an incredible place!”

  “I know,” I say, beaming. “I remember my first time here, with my dad. When I was, like, nine. A-mazing.”

  Susannah leads us across the courtyard, past the Olmec room and upstairs. For an exhibition that’s pretty hidden away it’s already quite busy, even by ten in the morning. Right away I see why Susannah brought us.

  “I’ve always been fascinated with this particular ‘hoax’. It’s unusually elaborate in detail. Why would someone go to all this trouble just to make something so unbelievable as this photograph? Time travel, ancient knowledge of advanced technology – heavens, who would believe that? That’s why I’ve always wondered about the Bracelet of Itzamna.”

  The photograph of the Erinsi inscriptions has been blown up to an enormous size, presumably the actual size of the wall as reported by the diver. An eerie bluish tinge to the photograph combines with glassy ripples to give a deep underwater feeling. You can even see the detail of the diver’s own air bubbles.

  “The inscriptions are in some strange language that no one has seen before. It’s something like ancient Sumerian,” Susannah says, “but not quite. People have tried to decipher it, and that’s where the trouble began. That’s why it’s considered to be a hoax.”

  “Because it includes technical words than couldn’t have existed in ancient times,” says Ixchel with an ironic grin. She reaches out to the glass sheet that covers the photo. “The Erinsi inscriptions, Josh! Can you believe what we’re seeing?”

  Susannah eyes her curiously. “You know what language this is?”

  “Even better than that,” Ixchel says loftily, “I can read it. . .”

  My eyes are scouring the image, which is the size of a wall in an average school classroom. It’s obviously been taken by combining dozens of smaller photographs. The more I gaze at it, the more I feel sorry for the photographer – he risked his precious diving air for fame as the dis
coverer, only to have no one believe him.

  Then I find it. Amidst hundreds of lines of inscriptions, each symbol less than a knuckle in length, is a carved image – detail of the control settings on the Bracelet of Itzamna. Right beside it there’s a rough inscription. But these few words are not written in Erinsi. They’re written in English.

  “The Bracelet of Itzamna at the zero moment.”

  I’m still staring at those words when I feel Susannah’s hand on my shoulder. “Do you know what to do? You do, Josh, don’t you? Ever since you mentioned the ‘zero moment’ last night, I knew you would.”

  Turning, I see her standing with tears in her pale blue eyes. She continues, “I asked you if she’s happy, that other Susannah, Susannah St John. But you didn’t ask me if I’m happy.” She begins to shake her head, tears trickling down her cheeks. “I’m not, Josh. None of us are. A holocaust like ours is a scar that doesn’t heal. Remember, for all the millions who were killed by their side, we slaughtered even more. Nations were erased. That doesn’t go away. The memory hardly fades, the legacy is like a deep, weeping sore: it bleeds; it rots within you.”

  “But . . . but everyone here seems so chilled. . .” I say, bewildered at her sudden rush of emotion. Ixchel’s looking pretty distressed too.

  “Young people ignore it, they pretend it never happened, they shut down any conversation about the war. Mexico, thank the lord, escaped relatively unscathed. But Europe! Russia! The eastern seaboard of the United States. . . Josh. You can barely even begin to imagine horror on that scale. So I’m asking you – do you know what to do?”

  Susannah’s grabbing my hand now, giving me such an imploring look that it breaks my heart.

  “The Bracelet at ‘zero moment’. . .” I mutter. “That must mean Izapa, in the time of Itzamna. That’s when it all started – the Four Books of Itzamna.”

  “The man you called Martineau – you say he stole the book of lost knowledge. Can you go back, stop him from stealing it, stop him from changing history? Can you make it so that the war never happened?”

  “I . . . don’t know. . .” I tell her. “It’s all a bit unpredictable.”

  “We could warn Itzamna about Martineau,” Ixchel suggests.

  She’s right. Martineau must be stopped. Yet I’m starting to wonder if there’s any way that can happen. That’s when it dawns on me that if we ever meet again, Martineau will have the exact same thought about me. He’ll realize that I’ll never give up, that there’s only one way to stop me.

  Martineau will have to kill me. Something tells me that if there’s a next time, he’ll have no problem with that.

  Ixchel takes me to one side. “You’re really ready to do this?” I frown a bit and nod. “You’ve thought about what it means? Using the Bracelet again? That would be three times in a few days. Aren’t you worried about losing your memory, like Arcadio? Or me losing mine?”

  “It could be even worse – the crystal could burn out and we’d get stuck there. Let’s face it, we have no idea how long one of the Crystal Key things last. We have to try, though. Don’t we? I mean it’s like, I dunno, like having a chance to stop Hitler. You have to try, don’t you?”

  Ixchel only looks at me with immense sadness in her eyes. “You said it yourself, there’s no way to predict the outcome of interfering with the past.”

  “In this case we can predict the outcome, sure we can! Because we’ve been there, we know. You and me, we come from a reality where Itzamna wrote the four codices, where Ek Naab existed to guard that knowledge. We just have to put things back the way they were. Martineau is the time-meddler, just like Susannah said. We have to be, like, the time-fixers.”

  “But . . . this world won’t be affected by the superwave in 2012. . .” she murmurs. “We . . . could stay here. . .”

  “Yeah, but . . . nuclear holocaust! That’s got to be worse, hasn’t it? And if we put things back the way they were, the Ix Codex goes back to Ek Naab, there’s no nuclear war, just like in our own history, and everything is sorted for 2012. Right?”

  She nods, biting her lower lip. “OK. OK. You’re right. We have to try.”

  I walk briskly to the enlarged photograph and take a hard look at the symbols on the Bracelet. The disc of metal which holds the Crystal Key in place seems to have rotated by a quarter of a clockwise turn. It’s the first time I’ve noticed the Bracelet in that configuration. It must be how you remove the default setting which returns you to ten minutes before you set out. I get my fingernails around the disc and try to turn it, avoiding the crystal. Suddenly the metal gives way under my fingers, pushes into the Bracelet. Now I can feel it rotating freely. I turn it to the same position as on the inscription. It’s a delicate operation.

  Immediately the symbols on the edges begin to rotate, like pictures on a fruit machine. I touch one row lightly, and immediately, that row stops moving. I touch it again and it advances one symbol. I keep doing this until the symbol matches the one on the inscription.

  “It’s like a combination lock!” I whisper to Ixchel, aware of a few curious eyes on me now.

  Susannah steps forward. “Are you. . .?” she asks in wonder.

  “We’re gonna give it a go,” I tell her, trying to smile.

  If we succeed, Susannah won’t remember anything. There won’t be a nuclear war in 1962. The past fifty years of her life will be totally different. Only Ixchel and I will have any memory of the other path that Susannah’s life might have taken.

  The idyllic, Caribbean-beach future I’d started planning with Ixchel – that won’t happen either. We’ll be right back to our luxury prison of Ek Naab.

  If either of us gets hit by the amnesia thing, even the memory of our time on the beach will be gone. We might not even remember how to use the Bracelet. We’ll be stranded deep in the Mayan past, lost in time.

  Well, I’m hoping that with two of us travelling, at least one of us will remember.

  Trembling slightly, I begin the process of matching the second symbol to the one shown on the inscription. Ixchel puts a hand on my arm and I can feel that she’s trembling too. There are six symbols in total. When they’re all matched up, I look from Ixchel to Susannah.

  “That’s it. Now I hit the crystal and we’re gone.”

  “Goodbye, Josh. Goodbye, Ixchel. Oh my dears . . . I hope this works.” Her eyes glisten with tears. “You’re doing a wonderfully brave thing.”

  Silently, we hug Susannah goodbye. I step back and Ixchel wraps her arms around me tightly.

  As I press the crystal I can’t help but wonder – will this be the last time Ixchel does that?

  The cool marble hall and the museum’s glass cases are ripped out of view, Susannah’s dazed expression and that of the few bystanders, all torn away.

  My field of vision fills with a wide-open space under a sweltering sun – a stone-built terrace surrounding a dusty pitch, as long as a tennis court and about half as wide. Brown-skinned players wearing loincloths and headgear dart around on the pitch, bouncing a hard rubber ball the size of a cricket ball around the court.

  The ancient Mayan ball game. My heart flutters. Did it really end in the gruesome sacrifice of the losers? Maybe we’ll get to see. . .

  We’re surrounded by people – Mayan citizens. They’re dressed in simpler clothes than the last time, their hair loose or in basic topknots. It takes a few seconds before more than a handful of people notice us. Everyone’s looking at the ball court and the players, who are furiously rebounding the ball off the walls of the court, to each other, off their hips and elbows. Finally one sends it whizzing through a small stone hoop fixed high against one of the longer walls of the court. Half the players leap into the air and the crowd erupts. Ixchel and I almost get knocked down.

  That’s when people really notice us.

  The effect spreads like a Mexican wave around the terrace. Within thirty seconds every face in the ball court is looking in our direction. Most of the audience doesn’t even know what they’re looking
for; only that everyone else is looking our way. For a couple of seconds there’s silence. A young woman, very thin, gives Ixchel an indignant shove.

  She says something in Mayan that sounds like, “You pushed me.”

  “Sorry,” Ixchel replies, speaking Yucatec. Her voice sounds shaky; she can barely talk. “Didn’t mean to.” She gags, leans over and throws up all over the terrace.

  Suddenly everyone in the ball court starts talking at once. It takes me a second to work out what they’re all saying.

  Itzamna, Itzamna, Itzamna.

  Like Chinese whispers, the call is going around for Itzamna.

  This time, the Mayans aren’t freaked out by our appearance, our clothes. The second they saw us they knew we had something to do with Itzamna.