The Auriga Project Page 8

  Then the villagers exited on the opposite side of the ruined city. Eliana went with them this time, gathering her wits, the taste of vomit fresh in her mouth. She walked down a narrow dirt trail through the jungle to a village built a couple hundred yards back from the cliff’s sheer edge.

  An entire village of thatched, adobe-walled huts housing nearly a thousand people, and Eliana had deduced no sign of its existence when she first arrived. She shook her head when she saw it, incredulous that she had once imagined this place uninhabited.

  In the weeks following the midnight sacrifice, Eliana established a precarious place for herself among the indigenous population. Whether this was allowed by Chief Dambu—for, eventually, she learned that was the name of the chief who had tried to attack her—or she was overlooked because Ixchel and the chief’s youngest son fell ill, she could never be sure.

  She kept a wary guard for the first couple days, startling awake at the sound of the wind. No one tried to imprison her again or even cause her any harm. Instead, they let her be, following the chief’s example and giving her a wide berth like she was some kind of leper or witch.

  They must have thought she was, for children froze and stared when they crossed her path until their mothers ran back to haul them away. And when she went to the river for water, people watched her fearfully, their eyes darting to her hand where Amon’s ring was visible.

  Her best guess was that word got around about what happened with the ring, how it protected her from the chief and caused everyone else to be thrown to the ground. She didn’t for a minute think this special protection would last, but her survival depended on her fitting in, and she wasted no time wondering. These people were her only source of food and shelter, not to mention knowledge of how to survive in this world. The longer they ignored her, the worse off she would be.

  The first thing to do—a smart survival tactic in any new community—was to stake a claim. Something that could establish her place without infringing on The Way Things Are, or threaten the safety of the community.

  Eliana chose an abandoned hut at the outskirts of the village. She swept the dirt floor and made a bed for herself out of grass and a ratty old blanket. It was shabby compared to the fired adobe mounds on which the nicer family complexes were constructed, like the one occupied by Ixchel and Dambu near the center of the village. Eliana’s thatched roof leaked, and she had to build a dam out of big logs to direct the water out the door when it rained, which it seemed to do every night. At least it was something she could call her own.

  Away from the stone city, the natives washed the paint from their faces and dressed more plainly. Religious ceremonies took a backseat to a life of farming and crafting. Men spent their days tending the fields adjacent to their family home or hunting wild turkeys in the jungle, while women weaved and cooked and made pottery and cared for the children. The entire village also took turns tending large shared crops of—unmistakably—corn.

  When the boy fell ill, Ixchel’s household did not participate in the shared work. Eliana dared not go near the house, for incensarios burning tree resin constantly spilled thick white smoke into the air, and Ixchel and Dambu both lingered around the house mournfully, neither working nor cleaning. Others tended their gardens and brought them any supplies they needed—food, water, clean clothes—while they prayed for the gods to heal their youngest son, Tilak.

  On the second night after the ceremony, Eliana saw Chief Dambu decapitate a small bird and spread its blood along the door frame—a ward against evil or a prayer, or maybe a little of both.

  The next morning, Eliana resolved to find a way to get closer to people, to make friends, to learn their language so she could make sense of their customs.

  The first thing to do, then, was hide her ring out of sight so it didn’t draw stares. She adopted the native style of dress after the younger women, tying one loincloth around her waist and another under her arms.

  After giving it some consideration, her best option was to find a piece of string to hold the ring around her neck, long enough to conceal it beneath the half shirt, and later beneath a dress if she acquired one. So she climbed up on a log and searched the thatched roof of her hut for a piece of string that would be suitable. She found one and stretched out to reach it when a voice startled her.

  She lost her balance on the log and fell.

  A young man caught her. She hadn’t seen him close up since the night of the ceremony—as Ixchel’s oldest son, he, too, had been involved in the prayer for and care of the sick Tilak.

  He glanced at the ring on her hand, but he didn’t freeze like the children or beat a hasty retreat like the other adults. He smiled at her now, looking like nothing more than the awkward teenager he was.

  “Uh, hi,” she said.

  After a moment’s hesitation where she regained her feet, Eliana recalled the words that Ixchel taught her. “Bix a k’aaba?” she said.

  “Rakulo,” he said. Then pointed at her. “Eliana?”

  She nodded.

  Rakulo helped her reach the string she’d found. He seemed to relax a little when the ring was out of sight beneath her tunic, proving her theory to be correct. He even helped her repair the part of her roof that leaked. She supposed that was what brought him over in the first place—he thought she was trying to fix the roof. She didn’t complain. The leak was bad, and she had no idea how to fix it on her own.

  They communicated in gestures well enough. Body language went a long way. But when she asked for him to show her around, gesturing toward the village and putting her arm through his, he backed away, shaking his head, and left.

  She interpreted this to mean that she was still not welcome in the village. Eliana spent the rest of that afternoon walking back down the beach to where she had first arrived. She took the path she had seen men take when they left in the early mornings carrying fishing lines in their hands. It switchbacked down a sloping hill to the rocky end of the beach.

  Amon’s name was long gone when she reached the spot where she had first arrived. She would have walked right past it if it weren’t for the sticks she’d left marking its place, one of which had been knocked over. Eliana straightened the sticks, pressing them deep into the sand, and carved his name again with a sharp rock she carried from the cliff.

  Willing him to come for her didn’t make him appear, however, and when the sun began to set she made her way back so she didn’t have to climb the narrow trail up to the village in the dark.

  The moons shone through the violet twilight several handspans apart. The larger satellite was about three-quarters full. It seemed to have waned much faster than the smaller moon, whose full face had only lost a pale-red sliver.

  The next morning, Rakulo came back to Eliana’s hut accompanied by a teenage girl named Citlali. Eliana bemoaned the fact that she was stuck at the phase of language acquisition where all she could learn were names, but her luck changed that morning.

  As Citlali led Eliana into the village, she realized that Rakulo’s discomfort at the idea of showing her around wasn’t personal. It was simply that it was improper in their culture for an unmarried young man to be seen with a woman alone—though she was married on Earth, they had no way to know that. During her tour with Citlali, Eliana learned that the single young men in the tribe stayed together in a large house, like a bunkhouse on a ranch. Presumably, they stayed there until they married and started a family of their own. The single young women, however, stayed with their parents.

  It was to Citlali’s parents’ home that they went, and to her delight Eliana was immediately put to work with almost no explanation. Citlali was young enough to be Eliana’s daughter, but her experience with the daily chores made Eliana seem practically incompetent by comparison.

  Citlali instructed her with gestures and one-word phrases. “Ha,” she said as she shoved a heavy clay pot into Eliana’s arms and pointed her toward the river. Ha meant water. Eliana gladly fetched it, and upon her return she was sent back twic
e more. After the third pot, she held her lower back with her hand and groaned, and Citlali glanced sideways at her with disdain.

  Eliana learned the word for no was ma when she nearly emptied out a shallow bowl of corn husks, thinking it was meant to be disposed of. Citlali gestured angrily, speaking rapidly, her speech full of glottal stops, harsh fricatives, and elongated vowels.

  Citlali’s mother smiled and gently took the bowl from Eliana, returning it to its place on the porch. Nothing went to waste here.

  Larger families like Citlali’s lived and worked together in a complex—for lack of a better word—consisting of two, three, or sometimes four thatch-roofed huts per family. The largest building served as the domicile, where they slept and ate. The clay mounds on which the houses were built were larger than the houses, and the roofs extended out as well, giving the residents a shaded porch to stay cool while they worked. Nearby, another building served as a kitchen and dining room, and a third, usually open to the air, served as a workshop—whether it was used to shape pots of clay or pull fibers from a plant that looked like some kind of cactus, but which Eliana eventually identified as agave. Small plots of yams, beans, and other colorful vegetables were planted adjacent to the house in any area that wasn’t being used for something else. Eliana was perplexed when she noticed that some fields went unused and untouched but learned that the fields were being rotated.

  It was as if an entire village in ancient Central America had been lifted from the pages of history and set down on this planet wholly intact.

  She quickly grew used to living among them. Citlali’s family fed her and clothed her in exchange for her labor, and Eliana did her best to show her thanks any way she could.

  Why the village was out here, on the edge of the cliff, instead of in the stone city where the sacrifice ceremony took place continued to nag at her mind. As an archaeologist, she knew that many suspected that people lived in those stone cities when they were built in the Americas. So why did these people not seem to want anything to do with the place unless a specific ceremony was at hand? Did the city have a different meaning here? Why live in thatch-roofed huts when palaces of stone, which could house the entire village with room to spare, existed not a mile away?

  She found no answer to these questions in her days with Citlali, and yet she couldn’t bring herself to explore far on her own. The very thought of the stone city sent chills running up her spine. The fact that she saw Chief Dambu walking into the jungle many times, carrying armfuls of household goods and the occasional small bird, did nothing to assuage her fears. She dreaded facing him alone again. She had no faith that the ring would save her a second time.

  Citlali’s family home was situated close to Dambu and Ixchel. It was, in fact, Citlali’s family primarily who fed them while Tilak lay ill.

  One day, about a month after she met Citlali (she still used Earth units to keep track of the passage of time), Citlali’s mother instructed her to take a container of tamales wrapped in corn husks to Ixchel. Eliana was honored by the assignment. Usually, Citlali or one of the other girls would deliver the food.

  However, Eliana never got the chance to speak with Ixchel. When she came within sight of the chief’s home, Rakulo and Dambu burst from the main hut of their family complex. Rakulo shoved Dambu in the chest. Dambu pulled his son’s face close and screamed at Rakulo, spit flying, his voice thick with emotion. Eliana had picked up a smattering of the language by now, but they spoke so rapidly she couldn’t understand them at all. Rakulo was ill prepared for a battle of raw strength, and his father quickly overcame him. Dambu swung big meaty fists, bloodying Rakulo’s nose and sending him sprawling to the ground.

  Ixchel emerged from the hut behind them. She held a small, limp body in her arms, and tears streamed down her face.

  It was Ixchel’s youngest son, Tilak, the same boy that had surprised Eliana on the beach the very first day. Ixchel fell to her knees in the yard. She laid the boy down and straightened his arms and legs. He didn’t breath. His eyes stared up, unmoving. The men stopped fighting and kneeled at the boy’s side.

  Ixchel closed her son’s eyelids for the last time.

  Then a cry filled with grief like Eliana had never heard rose up from Ixchel’s throat and erupted into the soft noise of the village like the siren of the damned, a great wail, like her soul was being torn from her body.

  She threw herself on the ground and shed hot tears on the cold body of her son.

  Rakulo tried to comfort her. She pushed him away.

  Dambu, his face a mask, did not even try to console his wife. He didn’t look capable of it. He stood and turned and stalked off into the jungle once more.

  10

  Threats and Intimidation

  Amon paced into the lounge for the umpteenth time. Years ago, while studying for his master’s at Stanford, he’d acquired the nervous habit of visiting the fridge. It helped to distract him and clear his mind before plunging back into a difficult or sticky problem. The habit was noticeably less helpful, and a bit more painful, however, when he was dealing with a limited supply of food, and none of it fresh.

  He had lucked out the day he locked himself inside the lab. The kitchenette adjacent to the lounge had been recently stocked by the caterers, who came every two weeks. They left enough coffee, snacks, energy drinks, and protein bars to feed a team of fifteen people. Factored in with the various meals the staff had left behind, Amon calculated that he could stretch the supplies out for eight weeks. He’d been in the lab for forty-five days, so he was well into week six now.

  He ran his fingers along his chin, pulling at coarse, uneven stubble. “When I get out of here I’m never eating another protein bar again,” he said to no one in particular. The habit of talking to himself…well, that one he’d acquired more recently.

  Eliana had been missing for sixty-one days. Each moment without her felt like a failure, but he forced himself to keep track. He didn’t want to know how much he was letting her down, but he wasn’t in the habit of letting his own dishonesty blind him to the truth either.

  For something different, he emptied half a package of dried ramen noodles into a bowl, filled it with water from the sink, and stuck it in the microwave. This was a treat. He only had four ramen noodle packages left, and he was hoarding them.

  Amon returned to the computer with the steaming bowl in one hand. He pulled up the console program and ran the hacked satellite relay script he used to communicate with Reuben. It was the first thing he’d set up when he locked himself inside the lab. The script was originally developed to communicate with the Lunar Station, but Amon had modified it to send messages to Reuben’s personal email. He also added an extra layer of encryption. Not foolproof, but to crack it you had to know where to look. He typed in a long password, plus a two-step verification code sent to a separate machine over the WiFi. Reuben used a similar setup on his end.

  The cursor jumped down to a new line, and he typed:

  > NEWS?

  Then pressed Enter and waited.

  When Amon first got in touch through the encrypted messaging system, he told Reuben how to find Audrey, the scientist in the meteorite studies department at NASA whom he’d first examined the meteorite sample with, and who gave Amon the carbonado for Eliana’s ring. They agreed that Reuben would tell Audrey a fake story about doing independent studies of his own and that he wanted to compare the carbonado samples to some in his personal collection. Certain departments at NASA and Fisk Industries shared interests, so this wouldn’t by any means be flagged as an unusual request.

  But when Audrey tried to bring Reuben into the facility, it triggered some flag in their new security system that caused his access to be inexplicably denied at the door, and he left empty handed.

  Since then, Reuben had filed a formal request—a bureaucratic black box that promised to bury his efforts in endless reviews and appeals—and, more recently, resorted to stalking around outside the facility at night looking for ways to get in.
>
  Amon was starting to worry about Reuben. But he didn’t see another way.

  Five minutes later, words appeared on his screen:

  > PURGATORY. STILL DOING RECON. LOOKING AT OTHER OPTIONS.

  Amon sighed. Purgatory meant the formal request still hovered in a gray void of bureaucracy, faceless and lost. The other part of the message must mean that Reuben was continuing his stakeout of the NASA facility in between maintaining appearances as a regular Fisk Industries employee. Instead of letting Reuben go, they’d transferred him to Solar R&D. A lot to juggle for any one man.

  > HOW ARE YOU HOLDING UP?

  > CALLED IN SICK TODAY.

  > WON’T THEY GET SUSPICIOUS?

  > DO YOU HAVE A BETTER IDEA?

  Amon drew a blank. He’d forgiven Lucas and Wes for not telling him the FBI agents had arrived the day he locked himself in the lab. After he had time to think about it, he came to the conclusion that they’d done the right thing cooperating, even if Wes had been a damned sneak about it. Their leadership had to be defined by clear guidelines, remaining always within legal boundaries and doing what they perceived to be in the best interests of the company.

  What Amon chose to do was his own choice. He’d come to terms with that. But that didn’t leave him anyone else to turn to in this regard. He typed back to Reuben, feeling like a corrupt program stuck on a loop.

  > NO. BE CAREFUL.

  Amon signed off. One keystroke cleared the message history; another shut the program down.

  Amon got up from the computer and went across the room to the far wall where a star map centered on the range of Eliana’s possible locations. Blown up that large, the star map image was grainy, as if it had been expanded beyond its original dimensions. In reality, the galaxy he suspected she jumped to was thousands of light-years wide and billions of miles away. Good photos were not in abundance.

  It took an hour after he’d locked himself in the lab to figure out that his team was no closer to pinpointing Eliana’s exact location than they had been the last time he’d checked in. Since then, he compiled a list of over thirty-five exoplanets in what astronomers called “Goldilocks zones”—the range from the sun that supported life—of their respective solar systems where Eliana could have ended up. This odious work went slower on his own, and he missed his team of brilliant scientists.