“IN YOU go!” a Spanish guard shouted, shoving Sera and Dak into a large cell that already held dozens of Mayas — many of whom Sera had just seen inside the cave.

“You killed my brother!” a Mayan girl shrieked, running toward the open door.

“Not me personally,” the man said, grinning. “But maybe one of my colleagues.”

Another guard held the girl back with a long club. “Brother de Landa warned you about practicing your witchcraft. But do any of you listen? No.” He slammed closed the door and locked it, shouting through the sliding peephole, “There’s a price to pay for choosing the devil’s path!”

The guards left, and the young Mayan leader from the cave helped the sobbing girl up and led her to the one bench in the room. He cleared away the people sitting there and had the girl lie down. Then he knelt and took her hands into his and spoke to her in a hushed tone Sera couldn’t quite make out.

Sera took in her surroundings. The cell was half underground. There were barred windows on three of the walls, a little above eye level, and through them Sera could only see a small portion of the sky, which was turning dark.

An older Mayan man approached Dak and Sera, and stood there with his arms crossed. “What is the most important thing in the world?” he asked.

“What?” Dak said. He turned to Sera and mouthed, “The riddle!”

“I know,” Sera mouthed back.

“Just as I suspected,” the Mayan man said. “You don’t have an answer.”

“No, we do!” Dak shouted. “The most important thing in the world is . . . corn?”

The man scoffed and moved away from Dak and Sera.

“Asymmetrical tortillas?” Dak called out after him.

The man didn’t even turn around.

Sera led Dak to an empty corner of the cell.

“That question was right out of the riddle,” Dak said. “We just have to figure out the answer and we’ll be a step closer to solving it.”

Sera leaned her back against the dirty prison wall and let herself slide down to a sitting position, her face falling into her hands. She’d never felt so defeated in her life. Or depressed. She was only eleven years old. Wasn’t eleven too young to process the things she’d experienced over the past twenty-four hours? The realization that she’d found her parents facedown in her flooded barn. Watching a man get taken down by an arrow when he didn’t even do anything. Being thrown into a prison. She couldn’t stand the way the Mayas were treated by the monks. How could a foreign people come waltzing into someone else’s village and start telling them what to believe? To make things worse, the Mayas didn’t trust her and Dak just because they didn’t know some secret code word.

Dak sat down next to her. “We’ll be okay, Sera.”

She looked up at him. “Will we, Dak? Because I’m not so sure anymore.”

He pointed at her satchel holding the Infinity Ring. “You still have the Ring, and I have the SQuare. We can use this time to regroup and figure out the riddle.”

Sera shook her head. “What’s the point, Dak? Are we really making a difference?”

“Of course we are,” Dak said. “What’s going on? You usually have such a good attitude.”

Sera paused, fighting the lump in her throat. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Dak. We’re not actually fixing history at all. We’re not making anything better for anyone.” She motioned toward the Mayas. “They just want to live their lives and learn about the world and follow their traditions. And they can’t even sneak off to a cave to honor what they believe in? One of them has to pay with his life?”

“We already talked about this,” Dak said. He looked away from Sera for a few seconds, like he was thinking. Sera saw over his shoulder that the Mayan leader was now pacing the cell. “The point of fixing the Breaks,” Dak said, “isn’t to make history more morally correct.”

“Why not?” Sera said. “Why aren’t we trying to make the world a better place?”

Dak shrugged. “I don’t know, Sera. Sometimes we are, I think. But we’re just two kids. Two and a half, if you count Lover Boy. The point is, we’re sent to each place to fix a Break, not humanity.”

“So you don’t ever question it?”

“No, I do,” Dak said. “But at the end of the day I trust the Hystorians. They’ve been working to avert the Cataclysm and defeat the SQ longer than we’ve been alive.”

Sera stared at Dak. She wanted to come right out and tell him — how she’d been given a glimpse of the unspeakable Cataclysm. But she couldn’t. She had to keep this cancerous knowledge to herself.

Sera grabbed at her own hair and pulled, saying, “I don’t know if I can go on, Dak. I really don’t.”

“But you have to,” the Mayan leader said. “And you will.”

Sera looked up, saw the young man now hovering over her and Dak, his fists clenched. “There will always be injustice,” he continued. “In all things. And many times we will not be able to alter these things. But what we can always do is lift our heads and continue on. That part is in our control.”

Sera felt embarrassed that the man had overheard her whining. She must’ve sounded like a spoiled brat.

“They can lock us behind these walls,” the man said, shaking the bars in the window to the left of Sera and Dak. “All of us. The entire village. But in our minds we will always remain free. Remember that.” He reached a hand out and helped Sera to her feet, saying, “I am Bacab.”

“Sera,” she answered, trying to seem as respectful as possible. Because she already admired the man. She’d seen how all the people in the cave, many of them much older, were hanging on his every word.

Dak elbowed Sera in the arm and cleared his throat.

“Oh,” she said, “and this is my friend Dak.”

“Hi,” Dak said.

“A pleasure to meet you both,” Bacab said. “You’re not from around here, obviously. But where you come from does not concern me. It is where you are now that matters. And that is with us.”

Sera glanced over at the rest of the Mayas. A few of them didn’t seem as eager to accept her and Dak — probably because they didn’t know the answer to the question from the riddle.

“So, how do we get out of here?” Dak asked.

“We have our ways,” Bacab said. “This is my fourth time inside this very cell. What they fail to understand is that I have a key in my room. Late this evening, my younger brother will realize I’m not home. The first place he will check is the prison cell. And he knows to bring the key.”

“Wait . . . you have a key?” Dak said.

Bacab grinned. “When I’m not organizing our gatherings, I work as a locksmith.”

Seeing the young man’s grin made Sera feel better. She, too, wanted to be the kind of person who could grin in the face of adversity.

“We can’t remain here long,” a second Mayan man said. “If the great storm comes as predicted, it will flood the cell. They will leave us to drown.”

“No one here is going to drown,” Bacab said. He turned back to Dak and Sera, and said, “This is my younger cousin, K’inich. He is an excellent locksmith’s assistant, and he has traveled extensively, but he worries too much.”

“Wait, there’s supposed to be another great storm?” Dak said. He banged on the stone wall with the heel of his hand. “Sure hope these bad boys are built stronger than they used to be.”

Bacab lifted Sera’s chin so that their eyes met. “Young sister,” he said, “you have questions swimming in your eyes.”

“I don’t know,” she said, embarrassed that she looked so uncertain. “Why are they even doing this? You weren’t hurting anyone tonight.”

“The monks are frustrated. Their plan is to take over every village, from sea to sea, but in order to do this peacefully and efficiently, they must first convert my people to their religion. Then we will believe the land is theirs by divine right, you see?”

“So that’s why you gathered in the cave,” Sera said.

“That and the acoustics make my voice sound nice,” Bacab said with another grin.

“They’ve been threatening us,” K’inich said. “Diego de Landa, one of the leaders of the Franciscan monks, says if we don’t obey he will get rid of everything we hold sacred.”

“Oh, wow,” Dak said. “I’ve totally read about this. That de Landa dude gets so mad he orders an auto-da-fe, where he —”

Sera stepped on Dak’s foot to cut him off.

“Ow!” Dak shrieked.

“You’re speculating, of course,” Sera said, shooting Dak a dirty look.

“Oh. Right.” Dak turned to Bacab. “What I meant to say is, aren’t you guys afraid something bad might happen to your codices and stuff?”

Sera noticed that K’inich was staring at Dak. “How could you know something that has yet to happen?” he asked.

“No, I don’t,” Dak said. “I was just . . . sometimes I get my verb tenses confused.”

“My hope is that a highly spiritual man like de Landa,” Bacab said, “would never stoop so low as confiscating our history.”

“Well, I wouldn’t hope too hard,” Dak said quietly, so only Sera could hear.

K’inich was whispering something into Bacab’s ear now. Sera pulled Dak aside and said, “Maybe this is the Break we’re supposed to fix.” After talking with Bacab she felt suddenly reenergized, like she was ready to fight again. Maybe this was the mark of a great leader.

“That’s it,” Dak nearly shouted. “We have to stop de Landa’s auto-da-fe.”

Sera put a finger to her lips for Dak to lower his voice. “So, at some point are you planning to explain what the heck an auto-da-fe is?” she said. “Or do you just enjoy hearing yourself say it?”

“Auto-da-fe. Auto-da-fe. Auto-da-fe.” Dak smiled. “Just kidding, dude. An auto-da-fe is —”

Before Dak could finish, a few of the Mayas got up suddenly and started converging around the far window. Bacab and K’inich hurried over to join them.

Sera and Dak stood on their tiptoes near the back of the crowd to try to see what was going on. All Sera could see was the bottom portion of a monk’s robe on the other side of the window. Someone was there. And that someone was now kneeling down to look inside the cell.

Sera’s eyes widened.

It was Riq.

Dressed like a Franciscan monk.

“What do you want?” one of the Mayas barked at him.

“To speak with Dak and Sera,” Riq said. “I’m not an actual monk, I promise.”

“Riq!” Sera shouted over the crowd.

“Why should we believe you?” another Mayan man said.

Sera started pushing through the pack. If she could just get to him, she could explain. Dak suddenly weaseled right past her, though, and lunged for the window, holding out a piece of jewelry. Riq reached his hand through the narrow bars and took it.

“It looks like the one you lost!” Dak shouted. “I thought maybe you’d want it!”

“Thanks,” Riq said, slipping it into the bag hanging off of the rope belt of his robe.

“Why are you here?” a woman shouted at Riq. “Haven’t you people done enough for one night?”

Several other Mayas began peppering Riq with questions, too, until Bacab shouted, “Silence!”

The entire cell went quiet.

“Thank you,” Bacab said. “Let me ask the boy our question before we proceed any further.” The Mayas nodded and made a path for Bacab to get to the window. As he wrapped his hands around the bars, he looked up at Riq and said, “What is the most important thing in the world, young man?”

Sera watched Riq look to the ground, confused. She was about to move toward the window so she could explain that they weren’t from around here, when Riq suddenly raised his eyes to Bacab and said, “Friendship.”

All at once the Mayas looked at one another, nodding, and began reaching their arms through the bars to shake hands with Riq.

Sera turned to Dak, who was already staring at her with a puzzled look on his face. He motioned toward Riq and said, “What the . . . ?”

Sera shrugged and told him, “You took the words right out of my mouth.”