by S. D. Perry
Her eyes prickled at the rush of warm gratitude. Jonah’s kindness was incredible, and she was lucky that he seemed to love her as much as she loved him. She’d have died a dozen times over if not for him. Even after all she’d put him through, all that he’d lost because of her…
She blinked back the tears, recognizing that her emotions were on high pitch, everything at the surface. She couldn’t afford to let despair or doubt take hold, much as she deserved her share; she had to focus on the task at hand. Feeling awful wasn’t going to bring her any closer to the Silver Box of Ix Chel.
Lara quickly washed, then devoured the cold meal, studying a topographical download of the Andes she had on her tablet, tracking tributaries off the Amazon. She wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed, she was a mass of aches, but she doubted she’d willingly sleep again before this was over. The only advantage she had over Trinity at this point was that they were looking for the silver box in the wrong spot. She was near certain that they’d misread a damaged number from the tomb’s instructions, which was why they had teams in Brazil digging for the Box of Ix Chel, rather than Peru.
She pulled up the pictures she’d taken in the Maya tomb the day before, reading the glyphs again, filling in the gaps.
Hidden manifested place. South, go, river. Fish. Chase, heart, serpent. Crown mountain, twins come together.
There were two color signifiers, at fish and crown.
To find the hidden city, go south along the shore until you find the pink fish, then chase the heart of the serpent to the silver-crowned mountain, where the twins confer.
Jonah had already confirmed that pink dolphins were found all along the Amazon; the Maya would have considered them fish. And she was sure the serpent had to be the constellation Hydra, as the star charts she’d seen on the walls of the tomb suggested. The Maya belief that the will of the gods could be read in the stars had made them keen astronomers. The damaged number in the clue had been a baktun, a Maya time period measuring nearly four hundred years. Trinity had gambled that the marking was the number thirteen, and had followed the heart of the serpent—Alphard, the brightest star in the Hydra constellation—to where the star had been aligned at the beginning of the thirteenth baktun, at the end of 2012. Lara believed the marking was actually an eight. The beginning of the eighth baktun was in the fall of AD 40, at which time Alphard had been aligned farther north; back then, using it as a guide would have led a traveler to the mountains of Peru, not Brazil.
Assuming you’re right. And how long before Dr. Dominguez decides that the glyph is an eight, too, if he hasn’t already? Pedro Dominguez was a respected archaeologist, an expert on Central and South American precolonial ruins; he’d been a colleague of her father’s. How much did Trinity have invested in him? They could already have a team investigating the alternative possibility.
But they don’t have the box yet—Dominguez asked me where it was. Which means I can get to it before him.
The problem was, the directions weren’t particularly specific. The Amazon had over a thousand tributaries, though only a handful that ran near Peru’s dozens of “crowned” mountains, assuming the Maya who’d written the inscription had meant snow—but did they mean snow? The Mesoamerican civilization had reigned on the peninsula for three thousand years, but its people weren’t known to have traveled even as far south as Nicaragua. How well had these distant travelers known South America? Perhaps the “crown” in the inscription simply meant clouds, or some geographical feature that the culture had denoted a crown. And which river’s shore should she follow, if she was right about the baktun? Ucayali? Mantaro? Ene? There were hundreds of kilometers of river to search. Jonah was right, the riddle was too vague… But it was what they had, and it would have to be enough. If Trinity found the Silver Box of Ix Chel first, if Dominguez got his hands on it—
He’ll summon Kukulkan.
Little was known about the god beyond its depiction as a feathered serpent, like the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. She thought of the stone representation of the entity that slithered down the side of the pyramid at Chich’en Itza, its massive, terrible head swallowing a man whole at the foot of the stone steps. A creator and destroyer, powerful beyond measure.
Is this what he ran across? Is this why they killed him? She’d come to Mexico to look at the sites Trinity had been working at the time her father had been murdered. Both of the sites here were centered on the resurrection of Kukulkan. Had her father been seeking to prevent exactly the catastrophe that she’d just set off?
Lara shook her head, her emotions catching at her. I’m so sorry, Dad. His reputation had been ruined for his “beliefs” about sacred, powerful artifacts and the arcane prophecies surrounding them… and she’d grown up siding with his detractors, until her first disastrous expedition to the cursed island of Yamatai. He’d known the truth all along.
Focus, damn it! She couldn’t get sidetracked. Nothing else mattered if she couldn’t prevent the rebirth of a world-killer. Maybe Dominguez was trying to stop things from getting worse but she couldn’t assume that—how could she, knowing that Trinity was supporting him? He’d said he would save the world from what she’d done, but also that he’d remake it. How could he remake something without destroying what already existed?
All you know is that the box has to be found. So, find it.
She picked up the thesis on gods of the Maya mythology that she’d borrowed from her father’s library, leaned closer to the lamp, and started to read.
Sometime later, she heard light footsteps in the hall. Light and sneaking.
Her holstered Remington was on the nightstand. Lara stood and in two quick steps the deadly weight of the .45 was cool in her hand. She dropped the holster on the bed and walked softly and quickly to the archway by the bathroom.
Outside, the footsteps stopped in front of her door. She heard fast, high breathing—a child?—and the door moved very slightly in its frame as someone leaned their weight against it.
A beat later, the interloper was pushing an envelope beneath the door.
Lara stepped forward, flicked the lock and pulled the door open. A young boy fell into the tiled entryway, letting out a squawk. She immediately lowered her weapon. The child scrambled to his feet, his eyes wide and fixed on the shining handgun. Lara moved it behind her back. The boy couldn’t be more than ten years old.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Nothing! He paid me to bring a note, that’s all! He said come very early. I wasn’t doing anything bad. I can go now, yes? It’s only a note!”
She’d been proud of her fluency in Spanish since they’d arrived, but he spoke so quickly that it took her a second to understand.
“Who was this man?”
The boy’s thin mouth trembled, his gaze darting away. “A man! He’s just a man, a stranger. I don’t know him, I swear, I would tell you if I did!”
“Okay,” she said, gently. She thought he might be lying, but he was also terrified. “I’m sorry I scared you. You’ve earned your money. You should go home, it’s late.”
“Yes, yes! I’ll go now!”
The boy nodded vigorously and was gone in seconds, pounding for the stairs. Lara closed and locked the door before sliding a single sheet of paper from the envelope.
I can help you find it. Come to the market at dawn, if you want to stop them. I’ll look for you.
The note was unsigned.
A trap? If so, it was rather theatrically laid. It would have been just as easy to walk up to her door with a gun as send a child with a note. Anyway, if Trinity wanted her dead, they could have killed her when they’d taken the dagger from her.
On the other hand, her brief interaction with Dr. Dominguez had shown him to be charismatic, and his talk about stopping an Armageddon meant he was likely to have followers. What if the note was from some acolyte who had decided to take Lara out of the equation, and had talked themselves into playing cloak-and-dagger, rather than going for a direct hit? S
he’d certainly run across far stranger things.
And what if it’s exactly what it says? Some perfectly sane person who wants to stop Dominguez?
What if he doesn’t need to be stopped? What if he’s the answer to what you started?
Lara sighed, then went to put on her mud-caked boots. The sun wouldn’t be up for hours yet, but she wasn’t going to sleep anyway, and she might as well make herself useful while she waited. There was no question that she would meet with the note writer. If this cautious stranger knew how to help her find the Box of Ix Chel, or even the mythical city where it was rumored to be hidden, that could cut days off their search.
She took a minute to quickly give the Remington a once-over—Roth would have chided her for not cleaning it before she slept—and buckle on a shoulder holster beneath a clean overshirt; she didn’t want to scare anyone else. Guns were an unfortunate tool of her trade, but they were often the only effective measure when it came to interactions with rifle-toting killers. Trinity had probably evacuated all of their people when the tsunami hit, but she wasn’t going to take chances.
She scribbled a note to Jonah on the back of the message and left it on the desk, hoping she’d be back before he even woke up, turned down the lamp, and let herself out.
* * *
A few minutes after Mitchell reported the kid’s departure, she called in again from her stakeout across the road from the hotel.
“Commander, she just came out the front door.” Mitchell’s voice was cool. “Turning south on Hidalgo. On foot.”
On the other side of town, Damon Harper tapped his inconspicuous collar mic, pleased. “You and Greaves stay on her. Leave Byers to watch for her friend. And let me know when she gets somewhere.”
“Copy.”
Harper nodded at the pair he had brought with him to watch the spot where his own target had holed up, a dilapidated rental owned by the target’s cousin. The bungalow had escaped the worst of the tsunami due to its location on a low, leafy hill, away from the coast. Plenty of cover, an easy stakeout. “Stay here. I’m going to see what Croft is up to. As soon as Marin moves, say the word. Don’t lose him and don’t get seen.”
Both men nodded. They weren’t his A team—except for Mitchell, all of his top players were catching some sleep— but they were highly qualified and hungry to move up the ranks. Harper didn’t work with novices.
He cast a last look at the crappy shack where the traitor Marin was staying, his lips curling into a sneer. He fucking did it. He used that kid to pass along something to Croft. Disgusting. How many of the faithful had died through the centuries to keep Trinity alive, to promote the cause? And Marin wanted to hand their hard work off to an entitled, reckless woman. A dangerous one.
Harper’s team—their official designation was Special Tactics Unit, a brave new term for wet work, but someone had started calling them Harper’s Dozen, and the name had stuck—had been brought in to assess Marin’s loyalty to Trinity and either bring him back into the fold or take him out, depending on his next move. Luis Marin had been with Trinity for more than a decade; he was valuable—a top practical field engineer and a walking encyclopedia of dig sites and trap networks. Unfortunately, his family was local. He’d resisted the evac order and run off, and hadn’t checked in since. Marin had been observed talking to a little boy earlier, the same one who’d just left Lara Croft’s hotel; Mitchell had confirmed it. The only question now was whether Marin had already passed data to Croft, or if he was about to. It was a massive fuck-up on someone’s part that Marin had even heard the orders.
We should just kill Croft. Would that it were so easy. There’d been a stalemate in the upper echelons of the Trinity organization regarding the troublesome woman for some time, one that had yet to be resolved. She had unwittingly led them closer to artifacts they sought, some argued. She had her father’s talent for the work, no question. Others wanted her dead: she fought Trinity’s interests at every turn. Harper sided with the latter group, although his reasons were much more personal. Half the men who’d died in Siberia had been cadets under Harper, when he’d still been a trainer. Croft was an existential menace, a threat to the lives of Trinity soldiers. She had already killed too many.
Harper walked toward the heart of the small town, its market square, down streets lined with huddled, sleeping people, past blocks of bellowing machinery and shouting workers lit up by spotlights. Noisy diesel generators pumped fumes into the humid air. He’d memorized the town’s simple layout on the flight in. The Dozen had been tapped while the waves were still pounding the coast; Croft’s presence had modified their orders, to “monitor developments.” He was pretty sure his next instructions would be a vague directive to keep Croft from upsetting Dominguez’s work, but without a kill order.
Accidents happen, though. Rounds go astray. If the opportunity presented itself, Harper only hoped he’d have time to spit in her face before she died, for all of the good men she’d murdered. And if the traitor Marin managed to relay something of real value to the girl, well, all the more reason to finally solve the Croft problem, wasn’t it?
Mitchell spoke into his ear. “Commander, she’s at the aid station on Rio Po, just north of the market street.”
Harper veered west at the next alleyway, climbing the mud-choked passage between two ruined houses. “What’s she doing?”
“She’s gotten into a line to help unload a truck. Pallets of water bottles, looks like.”
Perhaps it made her feel better, to hand out supplies to the families of the people she’d killed. Technically, Lara Croft herself had triggered the cleansing. Marin’s house had been washed away in the tsunami, his wife and infant daughter still inside. He’d also lost a brother and god knew how many friends and neighbors and in-laws. Harper wondered why Marin had decided to pass information to her but thought he knew the answer. Lara Croft had taken the dagger but Trinity had let Marin’s family die, and by her actions, Croft had declared herself Trinity’s enemy. Who better to serve as an arbiter of Marin’s vengeance?
Great change requires great sacrifice. It was a fundamental pillar of the Trinity organization. Shocked by grief, Luis Marin had lost his way and turned away from their cause, but he wasn’t going to stay lost; one way or another, Harper would take care of him. And if Lara Croft happened into harm’s way, whose fault was that?
Harper stepped over a drowned doll, a tiny fist and one glass eye staring up from the mud.
I’ll bury her, he thought, and found himself smiling at the prospect.
* * *
“It’s just around the corner,” the old woman said again. “But then you’d know that if you visited us more often, Camila.”
Lara nodded. The poor woman was very confused; she seemed to think Lara was her sister, clearly an infrequent visitor even at the best of times. Lara had been helping to unload a truckload of supplies when the white-haired woman had wandered up, attracted by the headlights, lost and looking for home.
They walked slowly south and west. Most of the power was still down, but lanterns had been lit here and there. Shadows grouped and gathered in the piles of wreckage. The cool early morning smelled like salt, mud, smoke. Twice, Lara thought she heard the stop-start steps of a tail behind them, but she didn’t see anything. She found herself studying the faces of the men along their meandering path, watching for any overt signs of interest. Everyone just looked tired.
“Mama!” someone called. “Oh my god, she’s safe!”
A man and a young boy came running from the ruins of a community garden, still strung with decorations from the Day of the Dead festival.
“Thank you for bringing her home,” the man said to Lara, tears in his eyes. The boy hugged the old woman. Catching their mood, the old woman embraced Lara, and made her promise to visit more often. Lara agreed that she would try. It didn’t occur to her until she’d walked away that she’d never learned the old woman’s name.
Lara started back toward the market, studying the sky betwee
n the sporadically blaring emergency lights. The night had turned to the soft blue-purple of pre-dawn, and the first birds were starting to sing. Her note writer might already be waiting. Lara stepped up her pace.
The market had stayed open overnight, a gathering place for searchers, a central receiving site for incoming supplies. Locals were passing out coffee and had set up stands to make food—the cool, early air smelled like fish and fry oil. The muddy square was littered with tents set up between puddles of standing water. There was a makeshift triage station, though the most seriously injured had already been transported out.
Lara gratefully accepted a bottle of water from a teenaged girl who was carrying a laundry basket of them, and wandered to where a small group had gathered by a fire, clothes and tarps hanging from lines all around the dancing flames. She took a drink and turned in a slow circle, observing the active square. She thought she saw a young blond woman in tourist’s clothes turn away a little too quickly, but she was gone before Lara could relocate her. An older man, thin and sallow, stared at her for a beat too long, but then walked away, out of the market area.
Okay, I’m here. So where’s the guy who invited me? She took another sip of water, trying to be inconspicuous. She probably looked ridiculous, standing around and pretending not to be waiting; spycraft was not her forte.
After a few minutes, she wandered toward the shops at the square’s west side, where, by the poor light of a few electric lanterns, a number of vendors were raking mud out of their stores, family members with buckets picking up broken glass and wood and not a few dead fish. She had just reached the northwest corner of the square, where a bakery and a tavern bordered a narrow alley, when a low voice spoke from the shadows.
“Ms. Croft.” The man stayed in the dark alley, taking a step back so she could join him.
Here goes. Lara glanced around and quickly followed him into the alley, her heartbeat picking up speed.
It was the man she’d seen before, the one who’d stared at her a little too long—tall, thin, early forties, with an unhealthy cast beneath his bronzed skin. His dark eyes were rimmed in red.
