by M. G. Harris
“Have you told her everything?”
“I haven’t told anyone everything.”
“Why?”
I shove my chair backward, and in frustration, push my hands into my hair until it sticks up. “It’s dangerous. What I know is so dangerous. I’m bad luck to be around. Can’t you tell?”
“Sounds like you’re feeling sorry for yourself.”
Normally, I’d be irritated with a comment like that. Right now, I can’t even be bothered to respond. Mom finding out at this stage was not part of my plan. I don’t know what kind of surveillance the Sect has on my house. But for all I know, they’re spying on Mom’s Web browsing. Which means they now know about the blog, if they didn’t before.
If so, I’ve been found out—again. The blog post doesn’t make it clear which mountain we’re hanging around. That’s my best hope to confuse them. There are four volcanoes between here and the neighboring state of Puebla. You can climb three of them.
So they have a one in three chance of finding me. With each passing day, those odds shorten. Unless Madison has another way of following me—but I can’t figure out what.
I decide that we can’t waste any more time. Tomorrow, we’ll climb. Ixchel doesn’t respond when I tell her the news—not for a few minutes, at least.
Then she heads off, wordlessly. Is she angry? Going to get ready? I really can’t tell.
I watch idly as the minutes run out on my Internet access. With two minutes to go, I have a sudden idea. There’s still something I can do to decode Arcadio’s riddle. I type a line from his letter into the search engine:
Our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironclad.
The line is a quotation from a writer and poet named Borges. When I read the line in context, the hairs on the back of my neck seem to prickle with electricity.
The quotation continues:
Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.
I don’t fully understand the meaning, but inside my mind somewhere, a light goes on, like a dusty old attic being visited for the first time in many years.
This is definitely about time travel.
Arcadio is speaking to me from the future. He’s warning me. Somehow, I’m destined to be involved in whatever is coming in 2012. According to Arcadio, that is my inescapable destiny.
I don’t understand why or how. But the minute I read those words, I recognize the truth of them.
I’m meant to be here. In some peculiar loop of time, I’ve already been here. Whatever is going to happen on the mountain, it leads somehow to Arcadio and to the prophecy of 2012.
I’m light-headed with the weight of destiny. I didn’t plan on being led by my dreams again, but it looks as though I have been. It’s been there all in along in my dream about my father—the image, over and over again: postcards of Mexico on my fridge.
The postcards—a link with the past and my future.
“What am I doing here?” I say aloud, to no one in particular. “What would happen if I just walked out of here, right now, took a bus to Mexico City, and took a flight back home?”
I’m almost ready to do it. But these words stop me: “Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river.”
Am I the river? What if I choose differently? If that river is diverted elsewhere—will it somehow just flow back to the same spot? Will anything I do make any difference? Have all my actions already been taken into account?
Susannah strolls into the Internet café.
“Ixchel told me that you’re both headed up the mountain tomorrow. That can’t be right—is it?”
“Uh-huh.” I’m partly amazed, partly relieved to hear that Ixchel’s on board.
Susannah gives the most delicate shrug. “Well, okay.”
“You don’t think it’s too soon to climb?”
“It surely is.”
“So … ?”
“Arcadio gave me some advice about how to deal with you, Josh. Warned me that you’d be impetuous. Told me not to interfere.”
“But … I could get hurt.”
It’s strange, being around an adult who actually lets me take responsibility, make my own choices. It takes some getting used to.
Susannah wrinkles her nose. “No, sir. You’re gonna live a long life.”
“You know that?”
Susannah nods, and to my astonishment, tears spring to her eyes. A look of deep melancholy crosses her features. Her lips tremble, her chin shakes. She holds out her arms to me in a sudden gesture of yearning.
“Hug me, Josh. Give me a hug for the girl I used to be.”
Mystified, I put my arms around Susannah, until a few moments later, she releases me. She’s been so great to two kids she barely knows. After our hug, Susannah won’t look me in the eye. She stands up, walks briskly to the window, where she stares at the massive volcano, a perfect cone of granite and snow in a green meadow, under a flawless blue sky.
“You’d better go pack your climbing gear,” she tells me, still looking away. “It’s best to get an early start. There’s a jeep leaving for the first hut in an hour or so. An early night and you can be up and about by five tomorrow morning.”
39
We wave good-bye to Susannah and board the four-wheel-drive jeep that leaves for the first mountain hut. The sun has just set; a heavy layer of clouds rolls in from the Orizaba mountain range, smothering the roads with a film of mist. As we arrive at the hut, the sky is a gloomy, charcoal gray. The plan is to get a decent night’s sleep, but it turns out that the hut has been taken over by a group of high-school kids from Mexico City, a bunch of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. They want to party until the wee hours, by the sounds of it.
Ixchel’s in the bunk next to mine, both lower bunks. I roll over and look at her. Like me, she’s still awake.
“I wish they’d shut up,” I whisper.
Ixchel grins. “Yeah,” she hisses back. There’s a long pause. After a while it feels awkward. But Ixchel is still gazing back at me. “How are you feeling?” she asks.
“Crummy,” I say with a dramatic frown. We both laugh. “The last thing I want to do tomorrow is climb.”
“I’m really excited,” she says. “And scared. Josh … are you scared?”
I reply slowly, “Are you kidding? I’m petrified.”
“We don’t have to do this,” she whispers.
“Yeah,” I say, nodding, “I do.”
There’s so much at stake, I can hardly bear to think about it. All my questions answered …
But what if I don’t like the answers?
Before we go to sleep, we take Diamox, to prevent altitude sickness. I eventually fall asleep, but it’s not a good night. I’m woken several times by the sound of the older boys talking, laughing. By five the next morning, I’m only vaguely rested. At least the gunshot wound feels better than it has up until now.
Ixchel sits up on her bunk, looking across at me. Like me, she’s slept in her thermals and a T-shirt. In silence, we both pull jeans over our leggings, then dress in the walking socks, hiking boots, and ski jackets that Susannah bought for us.
As we walk out of the dorm, twelve alarms go off. The hut fills with the sounds of teenagers cursing, kicking in their sleeping bags. Their racket does nothing but make me miserable. Everyone else is here for fun. Well, not me.
I’m on the brink of something; I sense it.
Our guide, Xocotli (he pronounces it Shock-ott-lee), is waiting for us outside, tying up his horse. He’s a thin, wiry guy in his fifties, with a deeply lined face that’s straight from the Aztecs and narrow brown eyes that bore into ours. He wears a woolen poncho and a knitted hat. He hands out still-warm tamales—steamed cornmeal spiced with green tomato chilli sauce and wrapped in corn husks. Ixchel and I eat them straight out of the husks. Our hot breath billow
s like fine powder into the air around us.
Xocotli’s brown features break into a huge grin. “You enjoy the tamales, yes?” he asks, speaking Spanish in a reedy singsong voice.
We answer with enthusiastic nods. Xocotli stares closely at Ixchel. “You have Mayan blood, yes?”
She nods, mouth stuffed with cornmeal.
He turns to me. “And you’re a norteamericano?”
“English,” I tell him. “Not a gringo.”
Xocotli looks us both up and down, sizing us up. He inspects our crampons, ropes, and ice axes. Are we worthy of the mountain? I can’t imagine that we look as though we’d make the summit.
“Ever climbed on ice?”
We shake our heads.
“Then it’s just to the second hut, agreed? No summit! Well, let’s get going. The mountain … she can be a dangerous lady.”
His words hang in the dry morning air. We make a start on the scree path, carrying chocolate, water, and the painkillers for my leg in our climbers’ backpacks. I’ve safely stashed the Adapter in mine. I’m about to plug in the earphones of my dad’s iPod when Xocotli notices and wags his finger at me.
“No. You need to listen, yes?” He gestures at his ears, then points to his mouth. “Listen to every word.”
We walk in silence for long while, avoiding occasional patches of frozen snow as we follow Xocotli. He steps as lightly as the goats we pass on the way.
Ixchel asks, “Does the volcano ever rumble?”
“Hardly ever. But she’s no innocent,” Xocotli warns. “One of these days, she could awaken, just like Popocateptl. Then we’d see.”
He nods twice, slow and deliberate; gazes directly into the path that winds toward the distant peak. “Yup. Then we’d see how it is.”
The boulders of the “Labyrinth” loom on the path ahead, their long shadows trailing like black tongues over the scree. Xocotli glances at us and points at my dragging leg. “Something wrong?”
Flatly, Ixchel replies, “He was shot.”
If Xocotli’s surprised by this, he doesn’t show it. He just nods. “Then I’ll take you up the easiest way. No climbing.”
Xocotli leaps forward a few steps so that he’s ahead of us. Ixchel draws closer to me. “I know you won’t talk about what’s in the Ix Codex. So why don’t you let me guess?”
I give her a quick glance. She doesn’t seem to be joking. “I guess I can’t stop you.”
“True, you can’t. So … if Arcadio is someone from the future—and he’s been getting involved in the affairs of Ek Naab—and the Ix Codex is written in English … then my guess would be that someone from the future, someone who speaks English, wrote the Ix Codex. Am I right?”
I don’t answer, but trudge ahead.
“And that means there’s a time-travel device around somewhere. I think that’s what the ‘Revival Chamber’ is. I bet you get into one of those sarcophagus things and use the Adapter to start it up. Like a key in a car. Or maybe the Bracelet of Itzamna is the missing part of the puzzle. Maybe the Bracelet acts like the key, turns the Revival Chamber into a time-travel machine.”
“Hmm,” I say. “Interesting idea.”
“I’m close, though, aren’t I?”
Truthfully, I say, “I couldn’t really tell you.”
Ixchel stares directly ahead. In a grim voice she says, “I’m close. And you know it.”
Xocotli bears left, leading us across the slope. I stare ahead in trepidation.
No climbing? Yeah, right!
There’s no way to get up this mountain without scrambling over some of the huge rocks in our way. Just looking at the route makes my leg ache.
Breathless, I stop and lean against a boulder. “Guys. I need a break.”
For the first time, we face down the slope. Beneath us, the gentle incline of scrub and scree falls off toward a far-flung green canopy of pine trees. I turn around and crane my neck, trying to catch a glimpse of the summit. It’s there in the distance: a dazzling sunlit cone behind the alpine landscape of snow, ice, and rock. All framed in a sky of purest blue.
My ears tingle from the cold. I roll out my thermal hood and fasten it around my head. Soon we’ll reach the snow line. It’s hard to believe we’re still in sunny Mexico.
40
The snow falls all the way to the glacier and beyond. It last snowed two days ago, according to Xocotli. So, not as bad as it could be; fresh powder drains your strength faster. The snow is dry and firm, and icy where well-trodden. It takes another three hours of slow climbing to navigate the rock field. Every so often we catch a glimpse of what looks like a direct route straight to the glacier. With hope in our hearts, we point to it. Xocotli always replies with a sad shake of his head. “It looks all right now, but later, you’ll see that there’s a big drop.”
Without Xocotli we’d have had no chance, gotten hopelessly lost. I reach the point where all I can think about is the agony of my gunshot wound. I don’t even want to think about what I’m doing to the healing process, wrenching my muscles again and again. I’m the one slowing us down with frequent stops, turning away from the other two so they won’t see me wince in pain. Each time, I eat a square of chocolate and sip from one of my water bottles. I wish I could be distracted by some music, but Xocotli’s made it clear that we all need to focus.
I begin to seriously wonder why I insisted on coming up here. Should I have just caved in and called Montoyo, asked them to come and take me home? That way Montoyo would be happy—as happy as he ever seems to get—and my mom would stop worrying.
But me, I’d be back at square one. Always wondering what was up here.
Or who.
I can think of only three possibilities. I seem to remember that Montoyo once told me that my grandfather Aureliano’s Muwan crashed somewhere in the Orizaba mountain range. Montoyo thought that the wreckage was cleared and taken to the museum of Jalapa. Could some of the wreckage have landed on the slopes of Mount Orizaba itself? That’s one theory. But I can’t guess at how it would tell me anything about my father’s fate.
The second theory is that one of the climbers we’ll meet on the way will be a rogue agent from the NRO who wants me to know the truth.
My third idea is the one that really gets my pulse racing. If Arcadio sent the message … what if he’s coming to meet me himself? I can think of quite a few questions I’d have for a time traveler from the future. Especially if he really is descended from me.
By now we’ve been overtaken by four groups of climbers, including the high-school kids from Mexico City. Even they walked in relative silence. It’s fun for the first hour or two, but after that it’s tough going.
I make a point of looking every climber in the eye. Just in case the one I’m looking for is one of them.
After what seems like a day of total endurance, we reach the edge of the glacier. I check my watch, amazed to see that it’s only ten a.m. But then, we have been climbing for five hours. Xocotli tells us that we’re now at 16,600 feet.
“You should rest for an hour. We’ve come up slowly, so you’re acclimatizing well. But from now on it’ll get harder. The air gets thin, and you’ll feel it.”
I sit on a low boulder. We can see for hundreds of miles across the farms and villages of Veracruz. Ixchel removes her hood and gloves and smiles at me. Her eyes are damp from the stinging air. I watch as she runs cherry-flavored lip balm over her lips. She turns and offers it to me. “Don’t worry, it won’t color your lips. Much.”
“You feeling faint?” I ask, using her lip balm.
“No. I feel amazing, actually. I’ve never seen snow, never climbed a mountain, never been so cold I could see my own breath …” She breaks into a huge grin. “I’ve never felt so alive.”
“That’s great.”
“How’s your leg?”
I reply curtly, “It hurts.” I don’t want to say how much, in case I can’t stop complaining.
“Take another painkiller. It’s about time for another dose.”
I don’t argue. My head is starting to pound, probably from the altitude. It’s getting harder to breathe. Altogether, I’m feeling pretty awful.
Xocotli instructs us to fasten our crampons and rope up. There are a few crevasses on the glacier, but even a slip can give you a nasty fall—it’s so steep and icy. People have already died this season, he tells us.
The sky is clear, the air still when we begin climbing the glacier. In the next thirty minutes, that all changes. Seemingly from nowhere, an icy wind whips up around us, stinging our faces. I feel sorry for those who are going all the way to the top.
The second hut is just a rescue center, no more than half an hour’s climb from our position. I can see it in the distance, smoke puffing from its chimney. As we approach, I find it hard to catch my breath. I hate the fact that I’m the one slowing the group down. If it weren’t for the bruised ribs and thigh wound, I know I’d be most of the way up this mountain by now.
We’re about forty yards from the hut when someone comes out, walks to a nearby stack of firewood. I watch in amazement.
This altitude is doing weird things to my eyes.
I pick up my pace, hurrying through the wind toward where the man stands selecting pieces of wood. He’s wearing jeans and a gray woolen sweater with a hat pulled down over his ears. He’s got a thick beard, and maybe that’s what makes me think I’m seeing who I think I see.
“Josh, what’s the matter?” Ixchel can’t help but notice that I’m rushing ahead—we’re roped together. I ignore her and keep moving forward, staring in disbelief at the man.
It can’t be …
Ixchel catches up with me. “What’s wrong?”
I turn to her, face flushed, gasping in wonder. “Can you see that man there?”
She looks puzzled. “Of course … It’s the mountain-rescue guy.”
I look back at the man. He turns to us and we stare at each other, face-to-face. I’m frozen, slack-jawed, my voice blocked somewhere deep inside my lungs.
Ixchel turns to me, then back to him.
“Josh … what’s the matter … what’s wrong?”
