The Auriga Project Page 9

  The planets on his list weren’t necessarily habitable planets. They were a good bet, but nothing was certain. And to make matters worse, for every planet NASA’s satellites had identified as Earth-like, there were a thousand it hadn’t yet discovered.

  Amon rubbed his eyes in frustration. Even with a narrowed list of planets, it was impossible to tell which was the right one. His best guess was based on his team’s statistical analysis. Their translocation calculations simply fell apart when applied across distances this vast. Eliana could have reassembled on any one of those planets in that section of space.

  Or not.

  That was assuming the machine could handle a translocation across that distance. It couldn’t. Not without the meteorite sample, which Amon still suspected—and couldn’t yet prove—had affected her translocation.

  He slammed his fist down on the desk and cursed when he hit a days-old bruise. Not for the first time, he considered alternative ways to obtain a meteorite sample. If Reuben couldn’t get his hands on one, he would have to find another way.

  He walked across the lab to where the second mobile transponder prototype lay in pieces on its own table. On this, he’d made better progress.

  The transponder still wasn’t fully operational. Even if it was, a translocation required two people. If Amon reassembled outside of the lab with the transponder in hand—say, in the NASA facility where the meteorites were kept—someone would have to activate the Hopper from this side to bring him back.

  Reuben could do it. But that would require getting him into the lab, which required a working transponder. Reuben insisted he could fix up the older prototype Amon left in his car, based on detailed instructions Amon had already sent, but that was only a couple days ago, and he’d been so focused on the meteorite sample he hadn’t done so yet. In the meantime—

  The internal teleconference line rang. Amon hurried over to the computer.

  “What?” he said irritably after answering with voice only.

  “I’m afraid I have some bad news, Amon,” Lucas said.

  “Of course you do. Are Fowler and Montoya still out there?”

  “Montoya arrived for his shift a moment ago.”

  “Tell him to suck a bag of dicks. How does the FBI like paying overtime for a grown man to babysit me?”

  “I heard that,” Montoya said. “But you’re stuck in that metal box, drinking your own piss, so the joke’s on you.”

  Lucas interrupted them before Amon could fire back a sarcastic retort. “That isn’t productive,” he said. “I just came from the board meeting. It’s official. They voted to remove you as CEO on the fiduciary responsibility clause, as we expected. They appointed me acting CEO, and Wes McManis agreed to take a bigger role in the day-to-day activities of the company.”

  “Did he agree, or did he worm his way in there?”

  “Either way, we need the help.”

  Amon made a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat. “What about the cutbacks?”

  “Solar manufacturing is at 60 percent capacity. We had to let a few more people go. We gave the order to temporarily close the manufacturing facilities in Beijing.”

  “Shit.”

  “The deals with Intel and GE got called off. Other divisions are operating at half manpower. Repair calls are running an endless backlog.”

  “You couldn’t save Beijing?”

  “We had no choice, Amon. Cash flow is tight. If we don’t make these cuts now, in a few months it will be a worse situation. And with our overhead…”

  “What about a line of credit?”

  “You think anyone would give us a loan after all the bad press we’ve had?”

  Amon sighed. “I wish there was more I could do.”

  “You could come out of there,” Lucas said.

  “Not going to happen.”

  “The bad press would calm down once this whole lockdown situation is no longer a spectacle. We’d be able to start a marketing campaign to reinvent our image, pick support of our products back up, revisit some of the industrial deals that got shut down after the…accident.”

  “And what about Eliana?”

  A moment of silence passed between them.

  “Fine,” Lucas said. “Don’t take my advice.”

  “Have you heard from Dr. Badeux? You said he was going to call me. I haven’t heard anything.”

  “That’s what he told me, but I haven’t heard from him either. I’ll reach out to him again. The LTA’s PR team has been trying desperately to disassociate themselves from the accident.”

  “Yet they collude with the FBI to ruin me.”

  “They put a lot into this project, Amon. They’re just doing what they think needs to be done to protect their reputation.”

  Amon choked back an angry retort. He understood that logic, but something about it still didn’t sit right.

  Lucas said he had to get across town for a meeting, so Amon disconnected the call and checked again for a message from Reuben. There wasn’t one.

  The teleconference line rang again. This time, it was Fowler.

  “You can’t last forever in there, Amon,” she reminded him.

  “How many times are you going to tell me that?”

  “As many as it takes. My offer of a deal still stands.”

  “How do I know you won’t try to dismantle the Translocator like you did before?”

  “You can keep searching for your wife for the next three months. That was the deal. After that, whether your find her or not, you turn over the Translocator to me.”

  Amon scoffed. “Thanks, but no thanks. Oh, and tell your lapdog he can go home any time. I’m not budging.”

  He disconnected that call as well and paced back into the lounge. Despite his growling stomach, he forced himself to return to his workstation empty handed. The longer he could make his supplies last, the better odds Reuben had to do what needed to be done.

  The digital clock on his computer read 7:05 when he got his next message from Reuben.

  > I’M SORRY.

  Amon typed back with shaking fingers.

  > WHAT HAPPENED? WHY?

  > REUBEN????

  When he didn’t respond, Amon pulled up a VoIP line on the computer. It was less secure than his chat program, but he took the chance and dialed the number for Reuben’s burner phone. They had avoided talking on the phone because it was likely to be recorded. Fisk Industries policy was against recording calls, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t possible for someone else to do so.

  “Hello?” Reuben answered, fear pulling his voice taught.

  “Reuben, it’s me.”

  “They’re onto me, kid.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  “It’s not safe anymore.”

  “What do you mean? What happened?”

  “A man broke into my house. Attacked me. He said he’d—” Reuben’s voice cracked as he choked out the word, “kill Charlie in his sleep and make it look like an accident if I didn’t stop snooping around.”

  “He’s bluffing, Reuben.”

  “How can you be so sure? They came to where I live. They threatened Charlie. I never told anyone where he was staying. Not even you. But they know.”

  Amon felt a fist of guilt wrap its leaden fingers around his aching heart. Here he was in the awkward position of asking his friend to help him rescue Eliana, when Reuben had been suffering the loss of his own partner in slow, jagged spoonfuls of anguish for the past year. The Alzheimer’s had come swiftly and hit him hard. Instead of feeling angry that his friend was now abandoning him, Amon felt nothing but empathy. If anyone knew what Amon was going through, it was Reuben.

  Amon didn’t know what the right thing to say was, so he said what he always told his employees when he was at a loss for words: “We’ll think of something.”

  Reuben choked back a sob. “Charlie doesn’t even know who I am most days. But he’s got no one else.”

  The lead fingers gripping Amon’s heart squeezed
. “Eliana needs you, too,” he said. “I need you.”

  “I can’t help you anymore,” Reuben said. “You have to understand.”

  Amon took a deep breath. “I do understand, Reuben. But listen. I’ve got it all figured out. We can get Eliana back and be done with this in a day or two.”

  “I can’t. Not now.”

  “Yes, now! If we don’t get that meteorite sample, she’s a goner.”

  Silence from the other end.

  “Reuben?” No response. “Reuben!”

  “I’m sorry,” said Reuben. “Please understand. I have to keep him safe.”

  The line went dead. Amon let his head fall onto the tabletop, not even trying to soften the blow.

  Yes, he thought. I understand very well.

  11

  Uchben Na

  They filled the dead boy’s mouth with ground maize and a jade bead and buried him in a small mound behind the family home. Into the grave they reverently placed wooden effigies, a ball, a fishing line. Over it they lit incense and said prayers. Dambu decapitated another bird.

  Ixchel’s heart-rending public displays of grief lasted for several weeks following the funeral. She painted black stripes on her body and limbs with an ink made from crushed insects and flowers. She fasted, drinking only water and tea for sustenance, and grew thin. Sobs bubbled from her domicile each evening long into the night. Shortly before sunrise, a prolonged wail carried across the village. When she emerged from her pole and thatch hut, she sobbed quietly, discreetly, over the boy’s grave and on her aimless, shambling walks through the village.

  Rakulo spent a lot of his time with her. His grief was distinctly less vocal, yet his presence seemed to do nothing to ease his mother’s pain.

  As for Dambu, Eliana only saw his back as he stalked off into the jungle. Citlali said that was Dambu’s way of grieving. Eliana suspected that she, too, would give space to Ixchel in the throes of her grief.

  Rakulo accompanied Dambu on long outings a few times. Once they were gone for three days. They always came back empty handed and with a grim look on their faces. They were not in the jungle hunting wild turkeys like other men who went in the same direction.

  Eliana spent her days with Citlali. She was younger than Eliana by a decade, but wiser than her by a lifetime in terms of life in the village of Kakul. Eliana quizzed her relentlessly, absorbing knowledge like a cracked desert floor does water.

  She learned the word for every plant and object she could find, repeating them to Citlali over and over and over again. She had no paper to write on, and the only way to get comfortable with a language—she knew from her years taking Spanish in high school and German in college—was to use it. She hoarded words and phrases.

  Some were familiar. Most of the natives smoked sic, tobacco, and the act of smoking was sicar, close enough to cigar to be an obvious loanword to English. When rain fell, it was referred to as a junrakan, which sounded an awful lot like hurricane. Whether this word referred to the storm or the God of Storms who sent it, Eliana was never quite certain. The natives seemed to use the ideas interchangeably. So the word for hurricane could be used in both contexts: “A junrakan is coming” and “Praise Junrakan! I don’t have to carry another pot of water all the way from the river to water the garden.”

  The jungle was k’aax, with the soft shushing sound at the end; the beach, jaal. They referred to the world with the word kab, but to the dirt or the earth as lu’um. The sky they called ka’an.

  “And what do your people call themselves?” Eliana asked Citlali one day while they were washing laundry in a calm eddy of the river.

  “Kakuli,” she said, submerging a loincloth and scrubbing it clean beneath the water.

  “Ah, I see. Like the village, Kakul?”

  Citlali nodded.

  Eliana’s mouth went dry at the next question that came to her mind, but the need to know egged her onward.

  “And what do you call the village of stones?” she asked, referring to the ruined city with the pyramid at its heart.

  Citlali leaned close. “Uchben Na,” she whispered. Ancient Mother.

  Eliana shivered.

  They returned to Kakul with the clean laundry in their arms, the waterlogged clothes a heavier burden on their return journey despite their best efforts to ring the cloth out.

  Upon their return, Eliana was surprised to find Ixchel sitting in the midst of a group of women, grinding maize in a stone bowl and laughing at the children who played tag and kicked a ball around within sight of their mothers.

  Eliana glanced at Citlali, who shrugged. Citlali was practical, laconic of speech, and unfazed by most things.

  “Hello, girls,” Ixchel said as they approached.

  Citlali inclined her head respectfully and went on with her work while Eliana nearly dropped the heavy pot she carried.

  “Hello,” she stammered. The women chuckled.

  The black stripes on Ixchel’s arms remained, but they had begun to fade. She was noticeably thinner but otherwise seemed unmarked by her recent grief. Regaining the weight would be a matter of weeks, if not days, of a regular diet. If Ixchel was here, she was likely to have broken her fast already.

  It was as if the abyss of sadness she fell into over the past several weeks unburdened her of the death of her son.

  “Come,” Ixchel said.

  Eliana tiptoed over, scared of what might happen. Perhaps she had been wrong. Ixchel beckoned with open arms, setting the stone bowl aside.

  When she approached, Ixchel seized Eliana’s face in both hands, inspecting her like a doctor. She grunted then pinched the twine around Eliana’s neck and pulled her ring from beneath her wrap. The women to either side of Ixchel tensed and shifted when the carbonado came into sight, but Ixchel didn’t flinch.

  “Mmm…it is beautiful,” Ixchel said, holding it up to the sky, pulling a little on Eliana’s neck. “Do not lose this, child. Xucha smiles upon you.”

  Eliana cocked her head. Why Xucha? These people seemed to have a god for every element. What was so special about that one? She dared not question Ixchel in front of all the other women.

  And then it hit her: Xucha was a word the old shaman had spoken right before the jaguar stepped into the cell. The same jaguar who had faced Dambu down before Dambu put a knife in the shaman’s back. Eliana had not seen another shaman in the village since then.

  She didn’t have time to consider it further, for Ixchel dropped the ring and began giving orders. Eliana hurriedly stuffed her makeshift necklace back into her shirt. Suddenly, there were a million things to do. Ixchel announced they were preparing for something big, that there were many days of work ahead of them.

  Eliana still missed many words in rapid speech, so there were large gaps in her understanding, and she came to realizations slower than the others. After some time she figured out that it must be some kind of party or ceremony for which they were preparing.

  Eliana panicked and rushed over to where Citlali nonchalantly de-feathered a turkey.

  “What we are making…” Eliana said, considering her words carefully. “Is it for Ixchel, because she is well again?”

  Citlali chuckled.

  “For her son?”

  “No,” she said. “It is a party to celebrate the full moons.”

  Chills ran down Eliana’s spine. “In…Uchben Na?”

  Citlali shook her head once, firmly. “No. That comes later.”

  A shuddering breath escaped Eliana’s lips. She sat down, blinking black dots from her vision. Citlali continued to pluck feathers from the bird. She offered no words of comfort.

  Still, it was strange about Ixchel. They must really care for her. Eliana had taken the past several weeks to be indicative of the way the village operated. Perhaps she had been wrong. It seemed now as if the world had been on hold while Ixchel grieved her dead son.

  And with her return, life began anew.

  Ixchel and the other women kept Eliana at the ready and always moving for a so
lid week. A big feast was prepared, fruit-based alcoholic drinks were retrieved from stills stored in the forests. Eliana did anything they asked her to do. She ran errands, she cleaned, she picked up after them. They even let her do some of the cooking.

  Ixchel took her on a journey collecting flowers, seeds, and leaves from particular locations scattered throughout Kakul and along the river. A hundred yards from the waterfall where the river spilled into the ocean, in shallow caves at the water’s edge, they collected mushrooms.

  Eliana’s grasp on the language increased exponentially while she was forced to interact so closely and work with the other women from dawn till dusk. She achieved a new plateau of understanding. By the end of the week, with focus, patience, and heaping handfuls of corrections from all quarters, Eliana held a thirty-minute conversation with Citlali’s mother about dinner preparations.

  The morning of the party, Eliana grabbed a basket sitting outside Ixchel’s garden and headed into the forest. She had spent enough time in the woods lately that she knew her way around. She knew the well-worn trail on the north end of the village led to the river for washing and bathing. She knew that the insects accrued more viciously the more you tried to swat them away. Like air and sweat and water, they were everywhere in the humid climate, and if she managed to pretend they weren’t there long enough, she would eventually forget they were there at all.

  She also knew where the most beautiful flowers were located, thanks to her tour through the area with Ixchel. About two hundred feet down the north trail, she encountered the river and turned upstream, removing her sandals to walk along the banks of the river until a patch of orange-and-blue orchids came into view. Their petals were coated in pollen at this time of year. When Ixchel first brought her here, Eliana had touched one and then put her fingers to her eyes, which made them burn so much she cried until Ixchel washed her eyes out with river water.