Charlie Thorne and the Lost City

by Stuart Gibbs

  Plus, Charlie couldn’t shake her sense of unease. She had a feeling that she was missing something important, that something else was going on that she wasn’t quite grasping.

  Dante peered back out of the temple’s entrance and gave her a cocky smile. “What’s wrong? Are you scared to come in here?”

  The taunt had the exact effect he had hoped it would, offending Charlie and spurring her to action. “Of course I’m not scared. I was just wondering how many bats might be in there.”

  Dante’s smile faded.

  “It might be man-made, but it’s still a cave. There must be bats.” Charlie savored the look of concern on Dante’s face and then stepped past him into the temple.

  There wasn’t much to the interior. It was a single large rectangular room with a simple small stone altar in the center. The walls were unadorned with any sort of carvings or paintings, but this sparseness was deceptive; Charlie recognized that the walls themselves were incredible feats of engineering. Huge stone blocks had been somehow perfectly cut and stacked atop one another; there were no irregularities or gaps between them. Crafting stone with such precision even in modern times would have been extremely difficult; how the Incas had done it without machinery—or even metal tools—was a mystery.

  The room was too big for the flashlights to fully illuminate, so the far reaches remained cloaked in shadow. It was dank and refreshingly cool compared to the humid forest outside, although it had a funky smell. Milana was examining the altar while Dante remained closer to the doorway, sniffing the air with disgust.

  “What’s that stink?” he asked.

  “Guano,” Charlie replied.

  “Guano?” Dante repeated, confused.

  “Bat poop.” Charlie played her flashlight across the floor, which was covered with a layer of brown goo. “A couple centuries’ worth, I’d guess.”

  Dante shivered with revulsion, then reluctantly edged farther into the temple.

  In truth, there weren’t quite as many bats inside as Charlie had expected, but there were still a few dozen. They were much smaller than the fruit bats, and they clung to the roof like fuzzy little stalactites. But even a few bats per night over hundreds of years had left a lot of residue. Charlie noted that the stones of the walls, which she had originally thought were brown, were actually covered in guano as well.

  Which made her realize something else about the walls.

  “There’s nothing here,” Milana said suddenly, sounding disappointed. She was playing the beam of her flashlight all around the altar.

  Charlie and Dante joined her there, their feet slipping slightly on the guano-slickened floor. Charlie noticed Dante was grimacing in disgust with every step.

  “Darwin’s last clue said we needed to find the altar,” Milana explained. “I figured he would have left another clue here, but it’s blank.”

  Dante frowned in frustration. “Maybe this isn’t the altar.”

  “It is,” Charlie said, looking it over. It was only a spare stack of stone blocks, also coated with guano, but it was certainly the focal point of the room. There wasn’t anything else.

  “Then maybe there’s another temple here,” Dante suggested. “Or maybe we’re in the wrong city of stone.”

  “How many lost cities do you think there are out here?” Charlie asked. “We’re in the right place. There’s a perfectly good reason why Darwin didn’t leave any more clues: He didn’t need to. This is exactly where he wanted us to be.”

  “But there’s nothing here,” Dante protested.

  “There’s plenty,” Charlie said knowingly. “You just have to look closer.”

  Milana stared past the altar, toward the walls of the room, and made a gasp of understanding. She strode to the closest wall and ran a finger across it, wiping away a thin streak of guano.

  Beneath it, the surface of the wall gleamed.

  “Oh my,” Milana said, so astonished that her voice was barely audible. “That’s gold.”

  Dante’s jaw dropped. He forgot all about being disgusted by the guano and ran his entire hand across another wall, creating an even larger swath. This too revealed gold underneath.

  “This entire room is coated with it,” he said, amazed. Then he wiped off another swath, and another, just to make sure. Each time, he revealed more gold.

  Charlie wiped off some guano as well, finding yet more gold, then ran her fingers across it. It had been hammered into a sheet, which had then been fixed to the stone. The sheet was thin, but still, if the entire room was covered, Charlie calculated there was several million dollars’ worth of gold around her—and this was only one room. There might have been more like it in the city.

  Dante couldn’t help but give Charlie a cocky smile. “Looks like you were wrong. Darwin’s treasure wasn’t a fossil. It was actual treasure.”

  “Everyone’s wrong now and then,” Charlie conceded.

  As she said this, her eyes fell upon the altar again. It was also covered with guano. Charlie went to the side of it that faced the entrance of the temple and wiped some bat poop off.

  This time she didn’t reveal gold. Instead, she found lines carved into the stone. Darwin’s next clue, she thought. It was there after all.

  Only this time, rather than making numbers or letters, the lines seemed to be part of a picture. Charlie had only exposed the very top of it so far.

  “Guys!” Milana called to them. “Look at this!”

  There was such urgency in her voice, Charlie forgot about uncovering the clue.

  Milana had moved toward the corner of the room, into the area that had been hidden in the shadows. Now she shone her light on an alcove in the wall she had discovered there.

  It was carved into the stone, two feet high and a foot across, with a graceful arch at the top. Since it was recessed, its walls had not been covered by guano dropping onto it from the ceiling, and so Charlie could see that they, too, were covered with gold.

  But that wasn’t what Milana was looking at.

  Nestled on a small pedestal inside the alcove was a skull.

  It wasn’t complete, and it was broken into several pieces. But even from what remained, they could tell it was humanoid. It was brown from age, as though it had been there for a very long time.

  “Then again,” Charlie said, “maybe I was right about the fossils after all.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  They all gathered around the alcove to inspect the skull better.

  Since it was broken apart, it was sort of like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, only considerably harder in that they didn’t know exactly what they were assembling, they were doing it in the darkness, and they certainly had pieces missing. The first order of business was to find every fragment of bone that they could. There were a few more shards of skull at the base of the alcove, along with a few stray teeth, and then they found several more pieces of bone scattered on the floor below the alcove. These were from bigger bones, arms, and legs, although they had also been broken. They appeared to have been lying on the ground for quite some time, as they were buried under a good amount of guano.

  “We should take this outside,” Milana said. “It’ll be easier to assemble in the sunlight.” Without waiting for the others to agree, she swept everything she could up into her arms and headed for the door.

  Charlie and Dante grabbed the remaining pieces of bone and followed her. Once again, Charlie was overcome with a feeling of unease, although this had to do with desecrating the dead. In their excitement over the skull, it was easy to forget that it had once been part of a living being. And yet she certainly wanted to examine it better herself.

  As she neared the doorway, one of the busted leg bones she was carrying slipped from her arms and tumbled to the floor. Charlie knelt to pick it up—and noticed something else in the beam of her flashlight. Something she had missed on the way into the temple. She and the others had been so busy looking at the walls of the room, no one had bothered to look at the floor.

  Meanwhi
le, outside the temple, Milana and Dante had found a spot on the ground that was relatively free of plants and leaf litter. They knelt there and began to lay out the fragments of bone.

  Now that they had them out of the dark room and in the sunlight, they began to notice things that concerned them as well.

  “The fractures in this skull don’t look like they’re due to it falling apart from age,” Milana observed. “This looks more like an injury.”

  “Blunt-force trauma,” Dante said, by way of agreement. Sadly, as a field agent, he had seen the results of plenty of human brutality. “Someone else bashed this guy’s head in.”

  Back in the temple, Charlie was examining what she had found on the floor. It was a footprint, left in the layer of guano. A human footprint. From a bare foot. Although whoever had left it had walked somewhat strangely. The toes and ball of the foot were pressed much deeper in the guano than the heel.

  She found a few more prints close by, obviously left by the same person, moving through the temple. And some different markings in the guano that struck her as odd, four small depressions, each two inches long, lined up beside one another.

  There were other odd things about the footprints as well.

  Outside, Dante picked one of the teeth off the ground. It looked like a human molar, only there was a dark patch in it. Dante examined it closely. “This looks like metal,” he said. “Like a filling.”

  Milana leaned in toward the fossil to examine it too. The filling wasn’t nearly as well done as what she could have gotten at a modern dentist, but the concept was the same. A metal alloy of some sort had been placed into a hole in the tooth.

  At the CIA, they also learned quite a bit about forensic dentistry. Often, the only way to recognize a dead body was via its teeth.

  “Fillings weren’t developed until the early 1800s,” Milana said, growing concerned. “This isn’t a fossil. It’s a murder victim.”

  At the same time, inside the temple, Charlie was still staring at the footprints. The toes, in particular, were unusual. They were farther from the rest of the foot than they should have been, and arced, almost like thumbs.

  Charlie knew what she was looking at, but she was having trouble believing it. It seemed impossible. But there was no other explanation she could think of.

  Her eyes fell on the altar again. In all the excitement over the bones, she had neglected to uncover Darwin’s final clue.

  She went to it now and made a few great swipes through the guano with her hands, uncovering what was hidden beneath.

  The drawing that Darwin had etched there immediately confirmed Charlie’s fears. As did the three words that were etched beneath it. They weren’t coded this time, but were in simple English. Anyone who made it this far deserved to know the truth.

  There was also no time to waste.

  She raced outside, to where the others were crouched over the bones, and announced, “I’ve made a really big mistake. We have to get out of here now.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  Explain yourself!” Dante yelled to Charlie. He and Milana were racing after her through the ancient city. Charlie was running full-tilt back toward the lake.

  “I’ll explain in the canoe!” Charlie yelled back. “Once we’re far away from here!”

  Dante stopped running. “That’s not how things work around here,” he said. “I’m in charge of this mission, not you. So tell us what’s going on.”

  Milana followed Dante’s lead and stopped chasing Charlie as well.

  Charlie had no choice but to stop herself. She couldn’t leave both of them here. Not with what was living in the forest. She turned back and told them, “Darwin’s treasure wasn’t fossils of the missing link. He found actual prehominids. They’re still alive!”

  The footprints she had found in the temple had been made by something that wasn’t quite monkey and wasn’t quite human, either. The prints indicated a creature that wasn’t walking upright yet; the heels weren’t being placed on the ground, only the ball of the foot and the toes, while the four depressions were the fingers of the hands, clenched into fists. The creatures were knuckle-walking, like chimpanzees did.

  Scientists estimated it had taken humans approximately four million years of evolution to shift from walking on all fours to walking upright. These creatures were still in the process.

  Darwin’s final clue had confirmed her thoughts. The drawing he had etched was crude, but obviously a prehominid. And beneath it, he had inscribed three words:

  They live here.

  Charlie was upset at herself for not considering the possibility of a living fossil earlier. Evolution was a constant process; all animals, including humans, were always evolving. So if a primate in the rain forest had begun to evolve into something like a human, why wouldn’t that process still be going on?

  Dante and Milana remained standing in the forest, unsure whether to believe Charlie. After all, they hadn’t seen the footprints. “That’s not possible,” Dante said, then added, “Is it?”

  “It’s not just possible,” Charlie said. “It’s true. You asked the question yourself last night: Why would FitzRoy and the crew have been so upset by mere fossils? The answer is that Darwin didn’t bring fossils back to the Beagle. He brought an actual prehominid. Something between monkey and man. To FitzRoy and the others, it would have been blasphemy.”

  Milana asked, “You really think that Darwin dragged a living prehominid all the way back to the coast from here?”

  “No, probably not a living one,” Charlie answered. “Darwin never kept a specimen alive unless he planned to eat it. But who knows? Maybe he tried to bring back a living creature and it died along the way. The point is, he brought something back that was undeniable proof that men had evolved from something else.”

  Charlie could imagine the scene, back in 1835: Darwin returning to the Beagle with the body of a dead missing link, FitzRoy and the crew seeing it and being horrified by what it meant, then plotting to get rid of it. Most likely, they threw it overboard, then swore everyone to secrecy and forced Darwin to rewrite his diaries and hide all evidence of what he had found. Which would have made Darwin bitter and angry and hesitant to ever speak of his discovery—or even the idea of evolution at all—for decades to come.

  Charlie warily glanced at the forest around her, the truth growing clearer and clearer. The prehominids wouldn’t have been advanced enough to have a civilization; this city had been built by Incas who had abandoned it for some reason or another. The prehominids couldn’t even maintain this city, which explained why it had become overgrown once again. At most, they would have had simple tools, stones they used for hammering—or attacking the unfortunate member of Darwin’s team whose skull Milana had found.

  Charlie had no doubt that the prehominids could be dangerous. Chimpanzees were known to go to war against one another—and humans did it all the time—so a creature somewhere between them on the evolutionary line would likely be menacing as well. Now that Charlie understood the real story of the prehominids, she also understood why she had been feeling uneasy since arriving in the city. Something had been watching her from the forest. The prehominids. It was likely that they were even watching her now.

  But, in fact, she wasn’t really worried about herself. She was worried about what would happen to the prehominids if their existence was revealed.

  “Please,” she told the others. “We need to go.”

  Only, to her dismay, Dante and Milana didn’t seem to share her concern. Now that they grasped the truth, they grew extremely excited.

  “Go?” Dante echoed. “When there are living prehominids here? We need to find them! Darwin was right; this is the greatest treasure ever known to man! This would be the greatest scientific find of all time!”

  “No,” Charlie warned. “We can’t let the world know about them. It would be a disaster.”

  Milana looked at her curiously. “Charlie, if these things exist, we can’t keep it a secret. It’s too important.�
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  “Important for us maybe,” Charlie argued. “But not them. Look, if we were just talking about some ancient bones here, I’d be fine with bringing them back and telling the entire world. But these are living creatures. Most likely, really intelligent ones. And if the world finds out they exist, they’ll end up as science experiments and tourist attractions.”

  Thunder rumbled surprisingly close by. A slight breeze stirred the trees. Charlie realized she had been so focused on the prehominids that she hadn’t been paying attention to the weather. It was changing quickly. Above her, the sky was darkening. A big storm was moving in.

  Dante was giving Charlie his usual look of frustration. “So now you want to do the same thing with these creatures that you did with Pandora? Just keep them to yourself? You don’t get to decide what the world gets and doesn’t get, Charlie!”

  “Sometimes things need to be protected,” Charlie argued. “Sometimes humans can’t be trusted to do the right thing.…”

  “Where on earth did you get this idea that humanity is so terrible?” Dante demanded angrily.

  “I think it was around the time that people started trying to kill me on a regular basis,” Charlie snapped. “I know there are good people out there, Dante. And I know that you and Milana are two of them. But I also know that you don’t have the power to protect these creatures. Or Pandora. The only way to keep them safe is to keep them hidden. Einstein and Darwin both recognized that.…”

  “Then why did you even come out here?” Dante demanded.

  “Because I didn’t know they’d be alive!” Charlie shouted back. “I thought we’d be finding fossils!”

  “Living creatures are even more exciting than fossils.…”

  “They’re also far more dangerous. Why do you think Segundo’s people avoid this place? What do you think happened to that person whose remains we just found? You think his skull just collapsed on itself? These creatures killed him. And we need to get out of here before they kill us.”

  “If they cause trouble, we can handle them,” Dante said confidently.