The first time he’d visited Anna’s office, a little less than a decade earlier, he’d been a sophomore, tall and skinny, and practically quivering in his Reeboks as he’d made the trek, clutching a folder that contained his sacrificial offering: three crumpled pieces of paper that he’d picked up a week earlier, when Professor Catori had first announced that she was looking for an undergrad intern to put in some hours with her group, and she was leaving applications outside her office. The pages asked about the applicant’s basic stats . . . and included a glyph translation for them to take a crack at, if they wanted to.
And holy shit, did he ever want to.
He had snagged one of the first sets; they were all gone now. He knew, because he’d come back to get a fresh set when his originals started looking too sad for words. Without a spare, he was going to have to turn in the set he had, even though the last page had a big- ass coffee stain on it from where he’d upended the morning dregs in the process of reaching for a pen. Dumb ass. He’d tried to wipe it off, but that had just made things worse. His only hope was that he’d gotten close enough with the translation that she would overlook the fact that he was an almost complete disaster in all other facets of life. He was dying to work with her, to be around her, and maybe get a chance to work with some of the artifacts she’d shown them on PowerPoint slides projected up at the front of the stadium-seating lecture hall.
Those pictures had been too far away. He wanted the real thing. And the more he Web- surfed, soaking up pictures of Mayan ruins and the artifacts that had come from them, the more he wanted to know everything there was to know about a civilization that should have seemed strange and foreign to his modern viewpoint, but instead made sense to him. He’d understood their religion as if he were being reminded of it rather than learning it fresh. Human sacrifice might not be part of modern life, but he got where they’d been coming from: They’d been trying to protect themselves against the downfall portended by the stars, and the prophecies that said great white gods would arrive from the east, bringing the end of life as the Maya had known it. Hello, Cortes.
And the more he learned, the more he wanted to know.
He wanted to touch the pieces of that past culture, wanted to absorb all the information he could find on them. And when he’d been working on the glyph string she’d handed out, looking up each image in the seminal dictionary put together by Montgomery in the fifties, when archaeologists and linguists had finally cracked the Maya code, he’d gotten a glimmer of something bigger than himself, a kick of excitement when he realized it wasn’t just a translation. . . . It was a puzzle. There wasn’t much standardization among the glyphs, which had been as much an art form as a language. A given word could be represented by a pictograph or a string of syllables making up the word, or sometimes both. Then the syllables themselves could be represented by many different glyphs, or the same glyphs could look entirely different, depending on the artist who’d rendered them. That very fact had slowed his shit down when he’d gotten to the translation. He still wasn’t sure if the third glyph was a hook-
nosed god’s face with suns where its eyes should be, or a really whacked version of a jaguar’s head, but he’d gotten up against deadline day and had to go with what he had.
Walking the halls now, with Jade at his side, Lucius remembered how badly he’d worked himself up by the time he’d headed over to turn in the application, how he’d been practically puking with nerves.
Back then, Anna had been less senior, so she’d had an upper- floor office. These days she had a primo ground-floor spot. But despite the difference in location, the clutter stuck to the corkboard hung on her door was much the same. Clippings of journal articles, some hers, some written by colleagues, offered the current state of the art in Mayan epigraphy. They bumped up against a scattering of cartoons and silly slogans, some hung by Anna, others by her coworkers and students. Slapped atop it all was a laminated page printed with her office hours and phone numbers, with a boldfaced note at the bottom: Knock. What have you got to lose?
The laminate looked new; the sentiment was an old, familiar friend. One that had been a mantra during certain parts of his life.
That first day, it had taken him nearly two full minutes to work up the courage. Now he just knocked, knowing that wasn’t the hard part.
“Come on in,” Anna’s voice called from within.
He pushed the door open, stuck his head through, and grinned past a sudden spike of nerves. “Damn.
And here I was looking forward to climbing in the window again.”
Anna looked up, her face reflecting pretty much what he was feeling: a new awkwardness to an old friendship. Sitting behind her big, messy desk, she was dressed informally even for her, in a navy blue UT sweatshirt and collared shirt. He couldn’t see her lower half, but was betting on jeans, based on the fact that she had her red- highlighted hair up in a ponytail and was wearing little, if any, makeup. The lack of makeup wasn’t why she looked tired, though; the fatigue was real. He knew that because he knew her, and knew she dressed down at the university only when she was feeling crappy. Summer session or no summer session, she liked being put together.
Then again, things changed. People changed. Just look at him.
As if paralleling his thoughts, she glanced at the window he had B and E’d under Cizin’s influence.
“Ten bucks says you couldn’t even fit through it anymore.” She waved him all the way in. “Come on.
Hey, Jade. Glad you could both make it. Any problems getting here?”
Jade shook her head. “None.”
“How are you?” Anna asked her, the question clearly a woman to woman, we’ve got our secrets deal.
Lucius turned away, giving them a moment to catch up, and to remind himself it was largely his fault that his and Anna’s relationship had suffered. He’d stolen from her; he’d betrayed her—albeit inadvertently—with a Xibalban. Because of him, she’d been forced back into her brother’s sphere.
Because of him, she wore a fourth mark, that of the slave- master, in addition to the jaguar, the royal ju, and the seer’s mark. He couldn’t blame her for not being excited to see him, after all they’d been through together and apart. Nor could he blame her for turning to Jade as a friend. Jade was warm and honest, analytical and near genius-smart. She was, he realized, a little bit like Anna in those ways. But where Anna tended to get caught up in her own emotions and had some drama-queen tendencies, Jade’s waters ran still and deep.
As the women did a brief what’s-up-how’s-it-going, he stuck his hands in his pockets and took a tour of Anna’s office, looking for new additions to her rogues’ gallery of fakes. She used the hobby as a teaching tool, showing her students—Lucius included—not just how to spot the fakes and haggle in fine old open-market style, but also how to get the so-called antiquities dealers to show them the real stuff they tended to keep under wraps. Her goals were twofold: first, to cooperate with local authorities in blocking the export of national treasures when possible, and second, to potentially track exciting finds back to their sources. Each year, particularly in the less developed areas of the former Mayan empire, new caches of antiquities were discovered and sold off, to the great loss of the archaeologists and the still-scattered knowledge of the two-millennium history of the Maya. At times during his graduate career, Lucius had pictured himself eventually working against the black-market trade in the low country, acting as sort of a reverse treasure hunter, trying to keep the finds in place rather than in museums—or at least making sure that the sites were rigorously documented before the artifacts were split up. He’d cast himself as sort of a geeky Indiana Jones without the fedora, working with some heavily armed locals, maybe even armed himself. In those dreams, he’d been doing his part to save the small corner of the world that he’d claimed as his own.