Skykeepers Read Free Page B

formed the basis of the villagers’ lives and livelihoods. Ambrose had insisted she’d turned to cooking simply out of rebellion. And maybe that had been a part of it, too.
    Still, the smell and taste of chorote coated her senses as she approached the tunnel fork. Her brain was so primed to see a campsite, and maybe a body, that it took her a few seconds to process what she was actually seeing. There was no campsite, no body; there was only a wall of rubble. The hewn slabs that had lined the corridor had fallen inward, mixing with crumbled limestone, gritty dirt, and more rocks.
    The tunnel had caved in, and the damage looked recent.
    She hissed out a breath of dismay as her overactive brain filled with images of her father buried beneath the debris, dying there, crushed and suffering.
    “Oh,” she said. “Oh, no. Ambrose .” The name echoed along the corridor and returned to her on a rattle of sound. She ignored both as she rushed to the collapsed spot. Maybe he was close to the edge. Maybe she could get at him somehow. Maybe , some foolishly hopeful part of her said, he’s trapped on the other side with all his camping gear and rations, waiting for someone to dig him out .
    She was so focused on the rubble that she initially missed seeing a strange shadow over to one side, partially shielded behind a larger chunk of stone. Then it caught her eye. She froze, disbelieving, then turned slowly and moved around the larger stone to get a better look. Her heart shuddered to a stop at the sight confronting her, then started pounding again, hard and fast. “No,” she whispered. Then louder, “No!”
    A human skull sat atop a stack of debris that had been carefully formed into the shape of a knee-high pyramid, mimicking the skull piles, the tzomplanti that the more warlike Mesoamerican cultures had used to boast of their victories. At first her mind tried to tell her that the skull atop the pile was ancient, an artifact. But it still wore clinging flesh that ended raggedly where the neck had been severed, along with a long, gray-shot ponytail caught at the nape in a ratty leather thong.
    She knew that ponytail, knew that scrap of leather.Ambrose had been wearing it the last time she’d seen him.
    No , she thought as desperation flared. Oh, no. Please, no. Not like this .
    Gagging on bile and a huge, awful surge of emotion she hadn’t expected to feel, she crossed her arms over her stomach, bent double by the terrible realization that he hadn’t died naturally, doing what he loved. Tzomplanti were only used for enemies and sacrifices, which suggested he’d been murdered. But who had killed him? Why? And where was the rest of him? She didn’t see his body, which somehow made the presentation of his head that much more gruesome. The wrongness of it slammed through her, threatened to take her over. She’d thought she’d been prepared to find him, and maybe she had been, but not like this, never like this. What the hell had happened in the temple?
    She shuddered with grief and an awful, racking guilt. But even through those emotions, the old instincts her father had drummed into her long ago flared to life, warning her that she might not be as safe alone in the backcountry as she’d thought.
    Her pulse picked up, sending adrenaline skimming through her veins. Someone had killed Ambrose, or at the very least, had cut off his head and arranged him on the tzomplanti . That suggested they had been more than bandits. Maybe some of the locals had decided they wanted him out of the temple. But this had been his place for years. What had changed? Had it been politics? Treasure hunters?
    Or was it something connected to the massive fantasy that had structured his life? That possibility seemed horribly likely, given that these were the years he’d believed would bring terrible battles between good and evil.
    Ambrose had always claimed there were others like him, others who believed the world might end in 2012. More, she’d heard