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The glyph panel, though, was different

The nine rows of text--for the nine layers of the underworld, Xibalba--looked like norraph that should have contained a huure, there was a bat-demon instead, a camazotz, with sharply pointed ears, tricornered ely tattered wings

The locals believed the ancients had built the tethe sacred site But although Cooter, her crazy-brilliant Mayanistthe natives to know more about their hoic said that the legends of the camazotz had come from the temple itself, and maybe costumes worn by the members of the bat cult that had probably worshiped there Not the other way around

"Chicken and egg," she

The wonky glyphs meant that she couldn’t read the text Instead, she would have to fars, and other records were a top priority

So get back to work But the saut instinct that had prompted her to turn down the safe-bet Tikal project and disappear into the jungle, and that had eventually led her to the cave, now rooted her in place

A chill prickled across her skin, an als so But what?

Frowning, she stared at the panel, touched the carved surface The silence in the echoing cha the air seem to throb with the quiet

Her fingertips scraped along the carved stone, froe to dip, fro else

She froze, her pulse going zero-to-sixty as the shape ju the bats

And it wasn’t just any bird It was the bird

The parrot’s head sat atop three stacked circles and wore a flaring headdress of curling feathers in a glyph that was achingly, acutely familiar Yet the parrot’s head didn’t correspond to any pictograph in the historical record She knew that for a factbecause she had been searching for it ever since her thirteenth birthday

"Holy Shit" She touched the small silver pendant she wore around her neck She had found the glyph!

All the restless, edgy energy that had plagued her since she’d first set foot inside the cave--hell, in the forest itself--suddenly concentrated itself in her chest A hot, hard buzz seared through her syste hard, she touched the parrot’s-head pictogra the feathered headdress and down the curved beak It was really there, really real It was--

"Ow!" She yanked back her hand and stared at her fingertip, where a thin slice oozed blood

"What the hell?"

Getting in close to the wall, she squinted at a gleaht have built pyra and art, but they had done it without using lass They had been knappers and carvers, mostly, which left her with

"Jade," she breathed, seeing the faint blue-green sheen to the material of the thin blade that had been inset into the carving, almost as if its maker had wanted to punish the person who dared to touch the strange glyph

Ortake a blood sacrifice from them Blood had been the basis for many of the rituals of the ancient Maya And even, soic

When she was around other acadeic The Mayan sha hidden doorways and polished stone s and masses believe that they could teleport themselves, ht Privately, though, she had hung on Cooter’s stories about ancient ht then, there was nobody in the roo suddenly so much louder, so ot to lose?

There wasto the stories the crazy old Mayanist had regaled his students with, year after yearuntil he disappeared into the rain forest Logic said he’d had an accident or been killed by bandits Inwardly, though, she had preferred to think he’d found the ht She and Cooter had been very alike--both out of place, both searching for so She wanted to believe that he had found his place in the end

Do it

Senses spinning, heart pounding, she pressed her bloodstained fingertip to the parrot glyph

The y inside her went supernova, and a strange, soundless detonation thudded through her

She reeled back "What the hell?"

Her hand vibrated, prickles streaked up and down her arle for breath Then she si dead as the carved stoneas though it had suddenly co stone disappeared, revealing a shallow niche that contained a s

Holy shit, was all she could think Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit