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“Have you been to all these places?” she asked.

“Not all. Just a good few.”

Bates had come to stand beside her. Ellie hadn’t even heard him move.

“That friend of yours isn’t going to wander around forever,” he pointed out. “If he doesn’t find you where he thinks to look, he’s going to come back here on the chance I did more than let you land on me. I’m not sure we have a hell of a lot of time.”

He was right, and Ellie knew it. She drew a breath and threw herself into the unknown.

“What do you know about the collapse of the Mayan civilization?” she demanded.

One of his eyebrows arched up.

“As much as there is to know, I guess,” Bates said. “They were here—all over the place, if the ruins that keep popping up are any indication—and then five hundred years or so before the Spaniards showed up, something went to hell and the cities were all abandoned.”

“And have you ever heard stories of a city in this region that wasnotabandoned when the conquistadors arrived?” Ellie asked.

He moved away from her.

“Like El Dorado,” he returned flatly.

“El Dorado is a myth,” Ellie countered. “I am talking about an actual city—one that was still flourishing at the time of the conquest.”

“No,” Bates said. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

Ellie could hear his skepticism. It frightened her. In the space of the last few minutes, a very great deal had come to depend upon the outcome of this conversation.

She had to convince Bates to listen to what she was about to tell him. She could think of only one way to do that.

Ellie steeled herself and reached into her pocket to pull out the medallion. The black stone glinted like a jewel as it swung back and forth in the lamplight, dangling from the remnants of her ribbon.

Bates’s focus sharpened. He took the artifact from her carefully and carried it over to the desk for a better look.

“Intriguing trinket,” Bates declared as he turned it over in his hands.

“The iconography and the style of the glyphs appear to be Mesoamerican, but I can’t definitively say anything more than that. Not without access to a proper library,” Ellie said, trying not to sound as nervous as she felt.

“It ain’t Mayan,” Bates replied, picking up a jeweler’s lens from the desk and setting it to his eye. He gave the piece a closer look.

“It’s not?” Ellie said, unable to completely hide her dismay.

He leaned back a bit.

“I mean—I’m not an expert, but I’ve been to a fair number of Mayan sites and I’ve got a pretty good head for images.”

“Like these?” Ellie said as she waved a hand to a cluster of drawings on the wall.

Images of birds and the leaf pattern of a tree mingled there with a sketch of a pillar carved with the solemn face of an unknown god.

Bates must have drawn them. He had a good eye and a careful, detailed hand.

“Yeah,” Bates admitted a little awkwardly before returning to his study of the medallion.

“Now this guy…” He tapped the figure in the center of the disk. “He’s got little pieces of gods I recognize. That line carved across his face—you see that every once in a while. And the snake in place of one of his legs. But they’re usually on different guys.”

“Schellhas’s gods F and K,” Ellie replied automatically.

The keys to the Mayan written language had been lost centuries ago when the Spanish conquerors had outlawed the tongue and burned every written example of it they could find. Only a few documents had survived that apocalypse, and they could not yet be read. A German scholar by the name of Schellhas had recently created a systematic catalog of the symbols and figures one could find in those Mayan codices, even though he couldn’t yet be sure what names to attach to them.