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THE SITE MAPS AND AERIALS had been weighted to Nel’s desk for so long that they lay flat on their own. Her hand cramped around the red pencil she used to mark places that had been recorded by the GIS. “This is fucked up.” Without looking from the map, she pounded on the wall between her and Mikey’s rooms. “Oi, Dirt-brain, check this out.”
He emerged a moment later, blinking sleep from his bloodshot eyes. “Dude, you know I nap at this time.”
She glanced at her clock. 4:00. “Sorry, thought it was still 3:00, my bad. Look at this, though.” She pointed to the site map. “What do you see?”
“I see Relano VII, the site you worked your ass off to get permits for.” When her scowl deepened, he turned back. “Right. Sorry.”
She watched his fingers trace the red marks. He paused, turned the map upside down, and looked again.
“Looks like a sluice way or something.”
“Yeah, but look at the grade. Not the surface one, I mean the one in Strata II.”
“What grade?”
“Exactly. That’s perfectly flat. Mikey. Not natural, that’s for sure.”
“I didn’t know the paleos did landscaping. Not on this scale at least.”
“They don’t. Their decedents may have carved giant stones into people, sure, but this is older. We haven’t found a single piece of red ocher. Some in the site proper, but nothing out there so it’s not ceremonial.”
“This is weird. You get any carbon?”
“Yeah, mixed with the dark stuff in the top few centimeters of Strata III.”
“Uniform across, right?”
“Uniform. Got samples, sent them to the lab in Santiago to see what the dates and composition data says. Maybe we’ll find out what happened to these people. There's certainly no evidence for a volcano.” Nel perched on the edge of her desk, staring at the maps. She had memorized them. She could draw it in her sleep.
Mikey sank onto her bed, staring out the window. “Still doesn’t answer one thing, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Why the damned Flounders are so pissed that we found it.”
•
NEL SIDLED ALONG THE wall. Goosebumps peppered her skin and she swallowed hard. Mikey would die if he saw me right now. Forethought had never been her specialty. Still, if Los Pobladores were going to fight dirty, fuck it, so would she. When they first vandalized her site two years ago, she had gone to the local police, angry and full of foreigner’s entitlement. She knew better now. This was their world, a world she visited and loved and studied. It was a feral cat that crawled into her, made a home in a corner of her soul, but would never be hers.
She paused at the corner, watching the bustle of the restaurant ahead. The bright glow against the cool darkness of night was twisted now. The welcoming yellow was tainted with cowardice. I’m not much better. She didn’t know what she was looking for. She didn’t know what she would find. She only knew she couldn’t sit, idle, when Los Pobladores practiced the archaeological equivalent of guerilla warfare.
Gravel ground under her boots and she stilled. The buildings reached back from the street, different parts of lives layered before one another until they spilled on to the road. Behind the restaurant was the family house, spread wide for generations, and beyond that a tidy, lush garden, complete with a shed.
Except it wasn’t a garden shed. Built back into the encroaching hills, its windows were blackened. A collection of wind chimes and tattered flags hung along the roofline, all a very obvious red. She entertained the idea of bursting in with a sharpened trowel and snarling for them to leave her alone. She would discover they had actually been doing something rather more illegal than fucking up her site, and thusly she would be made a local hero. She grinned at her fantasy. I’m no Lara Croft.
She crept along the fence and up to the shed. The overgrown garden provided cover from the rear of the house, but if anyone watched from the windows above, she would be caught in moments. Rough palm rasped against rough wood and the door opened.
The shed was just a shed, really. The air was dim and filled with dust and dirt. The smell of age and sand interspersed with something acrid, like spilled oil. Her boots scuffed against dried planks swept clean, bumping into a worktable.
A stack of papers rustled and she flipped her phone open for light. There were a dozen photos of her site, her crew, the Vecuna y Las Rosas, and the crown jewel image of her wih Emilio. They were printed on cheap paper, the edges dulled and wilted from sweaty hands. There was a crew shot she had taken just days ago and e-mailed to Martos and their benefactors. The fact that Los Pobladores had access to her email, whether via hacking or infiltration, didn’t even make her angry. It was a violation, sure, but seeing her work torn apart was a violation violent enough to make most others fade.
She straightened, holding her phone steady with both hands before snapping a photo of the arrayed images. She’d be stupid to go to the police, what with her trespassing, but she needed proof that this wasn’t another figment of her heat-addled brain. They might just be ghosts to the locals, they might be boogeymen to our benefactor, but they’re fucking real to me.
She glanced around, taking stock of the room once more. There was little else to see. A battered lock-box could have held trash or treasure. Gardening tools hung on the wall. Her gaze stuttered to a halt at the narrow door leading further back into the hill. It was old, older than the shed, maybe, and fastened at the top and middle with mismatched padlocks.
That’s a door for secrets. Nel had little interest in becoming a felon in a foreign country, but the explorer in her itched to break the lock from the weathered wood and find out what, exactly, the Founders wanted from her. Her fingers traced the grain of the old wood, the glint of the new locks. Old secrets, new protectors. She sighed and pulled herself away. The journey back to the house took far longer than her creeping walk had, like her body moved through honey, pulled back to the space her thoughts still rested. There was something that niggled at the back of her mind, an idea planted by the secrecy of her benefactors, the anger of the founders. She was certain the answer lay behind an old door and new locks.