The crowd marched past, blind to Luce, caught up in the frenzy of their dance. “Come on!” Bill said, and shoved her out into the flow of people.
“What?” she shouted. “Go in there? With them?”
“It’ll be fun!” Bill cackled, flying ahead. “You know how to dance, don’t you?”
Cautiously at first, she and the little gargoyle joined the parade as they passed through what looked like a marketplace—a long, narrow strip of land packed with wooden casks and bowls full of goods for sale: dimply black avocados, deep red stalks of maize, dried herbs bundled with twine, and many other things Luce didn’t recognize. She turned her head this way and that to see as much as possible as she passed, but there was no way to stop. The surge of the crowd pushed her inexorably forward.
The Mayans followed the road as it curved down onto a wide, shallow plain. The roar of their dance faded, and they gathered quietly, murmuring to one another. They numbered in the hundreds. At the repeated pressure of Bill’s sharp claws on her shoulders, Luce lowered herself to her knees like the rest of them and followed the crowd’s gaze upward.
Behind the marketplace, one building rose higher than all the others: a stepped pyramid of the whitest stone. The two sides visible to Luce each had steep staircases running up their centers that ended at a single-story structure painted blue and red. A shiver ran through Luce, part recognition and part inexplicable fear.
She’d seen this pyramid before. In history-book pictures, the Mayan temple had fallen to ruins. But it was far from ruins now. It was magnificent.
Four men holding drums made of wood and stretched hide stood in a row on the ledge around the pyramid’s top. Their tanned faces were painted with strokes of red, yellow, and blue to look like masks. Their drums beat in unison, faster and faster until someone emerged from the doorway.
The man was taller than the drummers; beneath a towering red-and-white-feathered headdress, his entire face was painted with mazelike turquoise designs. His neck, wrists, ankles, and earlobes were adorned with the same kind of bone jewelry Bill had given Luce to wear. He was carrying something—a long stick decorated with painted feathers and shiny shards of white. At one end, something silver gleamed.
When he faced the people, the crowd fell silent, almost as if by magic.
“Who is that man?” Luce whispered to Bill. “What’s he doing?”
“That’s the tribal leader, Zotz. Pretty haggard, right? Times are tough when your people haven’t seen rain for three hundred and sixty-four days. Not that they’re counting on that stone calendar over there or anything.” He pointed at a gray slab of rock marked with hundreds of sooty black lines.
Not one drop of water for almost an entire year? Luce could almost feel the thirst coming off the crowd. “They’re dying,” she said.
“They hope not. That’s where you come in,” Bill said. “You and a few other unfortunate wretches. Daniel, too—he’s got a minor role. Chaat’s very hungry by now, so it’s really all hands on deck.”
“Chaat?”
“The rain god. The Mayans have this absurd belief that a wrathful god’s favorite food is blood. See where I’m going with this?”
“Human sacrifice,” Luce said slowly.
“Yep. This is the beginning of a long day of ’em. More skulls to add to the racks. Exciting, isn’t it?”
“Where’s Lucinda? I mean, Ix Cuat?”
Bill pointed at the temple. “She’s locked up in there, along with the other sacrificees, waiting for the ball game to be over.”
“The ball game?”
“That’s what this crowd is on their way to watch. See, the tribal leader likes to host a ball game before a big sacrifice.” Bill coughed and brushed his wings back. “It’s kind of a cross between basketball and soccer, if each team had only two players, and the ball weighed a ton, and the losers got their heads cut off and their blood fed to Chaat.”
“To the court!” Zotz bellowed from the top step of the temple. The Mayan words sounded strangely guttural and yet were still comprehensible to Luce. She wondered how they made Ix Cuat feel, locked up in the room behind Zotz.
A great cheer erupted from the crowd. As a group, the Mayans rose and broke into a run toward what looked like a large stone amphitheater at the far side of the plain. It was oblong and low—a brown dirt playing field ringed by tiered stone bleachers.
“Ah—there’s our boy!” Bill pointed at the head of the crowd as they neared the stadium.
A lean, muscular boy was running, faster than the others, his back to Luce. His hair was dark brown and shiny, his shoulders deeply tanned and painted with intersecting red-and-black bands. When he turned his head slightly to the left, Luce caught a quick glimpse of his profile. He was nothing like the Daniel she had left in her parents’ backyard. And yet—
“Daniel!” Luce said. “He looks—”
“Different and also precisely the same?” Bill asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s his soul you recognize. Regardless of how you two may look on the outside, you’ll always know each other’s souls.”
It hadn’t occurred to Luce until now how remarkable it was that she recognized Daniel in every life. Her soul found his. “That’s … beautiful.”
Bill scratched at a scab on his arm with a gnarly claw. “If you say so.”
“You said Daniel was involved in the sacrifice somehow. He’s a ballplayer, isn’t he?” Luce said, craning her neck toward the crowd just as Daniel disappeared inside the amphitheater.
“He is,” Bill said. “There’s a lovely little ceremony”—he raised a stone eyebrow—“in which the winners guide the sacrifices into their next life.”
“The winners kill the prisoners?” Luce said quietly.
They watched the crowd as it funneled into the amphitheater. Drumbeats sounded from within. The game was about to begin.
“Not kill. They’re not common murderers. Sacrifice. First they chop off the heads. Heads go back there.” Bill nodded over his shoulder at the palisade of heads. “Bodies get tossed into a skuzzy—pardon me, holy—limestone sinkhole out in the jungle.” He sniffed. “Me? I don’t see how that’s gonna bring rain, but who am I to judge?”
“Will Daniel win or lose?” Luce asked, knowing the answer before the words had even left her lips.
“I can see how the idea of Daniel decapitating you does not maybe scream out romance,” Bill said, “but really, what’s the difference between his killing you by fire and by the sword?”
“Daniel wouldn’t do that.”
Bill hovered in the air in front of Luce. “Wouldn’t he?”
There came a great roar from inside the amphitheater. Luce felt that she should run onto the field, go up to Daniel, and take him in her arms; tell him what she’d left the Globe too soon to say: that she understood now everything he went through to be with her. That his sacrifices made her even more committed to their love. “I should go to him,” she said.
But there was also Ix Cuat. Locked up in a room atop the pyramid waiting to be killed. A girl who might hold within her a valuable piece of information Luce needed to learn to break the curse.
Luce teetered in place—one foot toward the amphitheater, one toward the pyramid.
“What’s it gonna be?” Bill taunted. His smile was too big.
She took off running, away from Bill and toward the pyramid.
“Good choice!” he called, flitting quickly around to keep pace at her side.
The pyramid towered over her. The painted temple at the top—where Bill had said Ix Cuat would be—felt as distant as a star. Luce was so thirsty. Her throat ached for water; the ground scorched the soles of her feet. It felt like the entire world was burning up.
“This place is very sacred,” Bill murmured in her ear. “This temple was built on top of a previous temple, which was built on top of yet another temple, and so on, all of them oriented to mark the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. On those two days at sunset, the shadow of a serpent can be seen sliding up the steps of the northern stairs. Cool, huh?”