Liam listened, head cocked, and translated. “He says: ‘You have the keys. We have waited. Now you return them.'”
It took a moment to penetrate, and then Mac remembered. Fernando’s final words to her, in halting English: “You give the keys to the people.”
She opened her own fist. The Maya murmured among themselves as she held her pendant on her upturned palm.
“The keys,” she said. “The keys to the time tunnel.”
Liam gave her a quizzical glance and let his own piece dangle from its leather thong. “This is what they want?”
“I think so.” She took Liam’s pendant and laid it beside her own—two unremarkable chips of carved stone against the pale skin of her hand. “I don’t understand, but…” She looked at Liam with swift excitement. “I’d thought once that the Maya were probably the best people in the world to come up with time travel. They were obsessed with time. And their great civilization all but vanished over a thousand years ago. Do you think that maybe…”
Crazy idea. But no crazier than what she herself had done. And now the modern Maya guide and his people waited for her to restore something that belonged to them. The keys to an ancient tunnel through time.
“Ask them what they’ll do with the stones,” she said.
Liam did so. The guide answered with measured solemnity.
“He says they’ll put them back in the temple,” Liam said, scratching his chin. “Bury them and return to their… watching.”
“Watching? For what?”
Liam hesitated. In the stillness a parrot called. A warm wind dried the perspiration on Mac’s forehead.
“He says that the keys are held in sacred trust from the time of their ancient grandfathers,” Liam said. “Until the day comes when they are called to the… other place.”
They looked at each other, wordless. Mac was almost tempted to hold the pendants a little longer, to explore all the possibilities revealed at this final hour of her great adventure. The things she could learn, the wonders she could reveal, like the greatest of the Sinclairs…
She closed her fist around the stone chips, and nearly dropped them when they flared with a renewed heat that burned into her palm. The charred remains of two leather thongs fell to the ground. She gasped and opened her hand.
The pendants were gone. In their place was a single square of carved stone, whole and complete.
“By all the saints,” Liam said.
“You said it,” Mac said fervently. “I think I get the picture.”
The guide and his companions still waited—waited for her to do the right thing. She lifted her chin and walked across the small, infinite space between them.
“I think this belongs to you,” she said, and placed the stone in the guide’s extended hand.
The jungle hushed with a preternatural stillness. The guide turned to the others, cradling the stone like the most precious of gems. An older Maya took the stone carefully, wrapping it in a length of cloth.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Liam said, tilting his hat back.
“It was never ours to begin with. But it gave us something wonderful.”
Before he could answer, the guide moved on Mac with startling swiftness and grabbed her hand, turning it palm-up. Liam lunged and stopped in the same instant.
“Look at your hand,” he said.
She looked. In the curve of her palm was branded a pattern, Maya glyphs and symbols that exactly matched those on the fused stone key. Burned there by an unearthly heat and an ancient unknown magic.
The guide spoke. Liam’s translation was halting. “He says you are marked. He says… the Old Ones will always be with you.”
“That’s nice to know,” Mac said, her knees a little wobbly. “I think.”
Without ceremony the guide dropped her hand and stepped back. “Now you go,” he said in heavily accented English. “It is time.”
The other Maya began to drift in a semicircle, herding Mac, Liam, and Norton away from the tunnel and toward the wall of jungle at the edge of the clearing. Liam planted himself as if he would resist.
“No one pushes Liam O’Shea,” he growled.
Mac almost laughed. This was something completely familiar. “What’s wrong, Iggy?” she challenged. “Scared to face the great unknown? Maybe the jungle seems safer than what’s waiting for you in my world.”