The Shadow Crosser (The Storm Runner 3)

He snapped his attention back to me. “You’ll ask the gods for a favor? For me? A new greenhouse, maybe? Bigger than my sister’s?”

“Yes. I’d be happy to.” Not that the gods ever listened to me. Or were even still around, but I made the silent vow anyway: If I see them again, I’ll make sure you get a new greenhouse.

“And you promise never to come back here?”

I agreed immediately.

He rubbed his head as his eyes flitted everywhere. “K’iin is a calendar created by the time goddess at the beginning, before there was anything,” he said quickly.

Fire sped through my body, carrying the memories of Pacific being the creator of time and Ah-Puch saying something about Ren. It was all connected. But how?

And then I remembered that night in the boat with Itzamna, and his claim. “I thought Itzamna created the calendar,” I said, feeling more confused than ever.

“The human one, yes. But K’iin,” he continued, “keeps time for the whole universe. Do you understand? Not the world—the universe! There are different strands of time—not that I understand any of that. It’s all tied up in the goddess’s magic rope, the one she is to carry for all eternity.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

“Spirits talk,” he said. “We’re masters of gossip. Once, a rotten little mountain spirit tried to steal a story for his own and—”

“Back to K’iin?” I prompted.

He sneezed, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Yes. Yes. When Pacific was exiled, she sealed the calendar and hid it so the gods would never be able to access its knowledge without her,” he said. “The mountain spirits claim to know where she put K’iin, and so do the air spirits. Hmph. If anyone knows, it would be an earth spirit!” He squinted one eye. “But those who went looking for it—they never came back.”

I suddenly felt like I was test-flying the world’s fastest rocket and was about to get sucked into a black hole. “So, no one ever found it?”

Rosie drew closer, like she didn’t want to miss the answer.

“Did you not hear me?” Kip shook his head. “Of course not. Who wants knowledge that could bring about their own death?”

“But what’s so great about the calendar?” I asked. “I mean, even if someone found it, how could they use it?”

Kip rubbed his chest in small circles like he had a bad case of heartburn. “K’iin means sun or day, but it also means T-I-M-E.” He spelled out the word. “Legend has it that if you find this calendar—which you won’t, because the goddess is very good at hiding things—and you stand before it…” He stroked his chin. “No, maybe you sit before it, or…It doesn’t matter. But you have to pay—”

“Pay?”

“You know what? You interrupt a lot,” he said.

I tried to keep my cool, but I was ready to blow. “Please go on. You were saying something about payment?”

“It’s no biggie—just an offering of some sort. You can’t expect to get something for nothing, can you?”

It felt like I was having a heart attack. “Right, but there are good kinds of offerings, like cookies, and bad kinds, like blood, or my heart, or…” I shook away the thoughts. “And what would I get in return?”

A smile slowly spread across his face. “Ah, yes. You’d be able to see across all time and dimensions.”

A calendar that could see across time and dimensions? My mind was officially blown. At the risk of having the guy threaten to cut off a finger again, I asked, “It sounds super cool and all, but why would someone want to see across time?”

“For knowledge. To find something lost. Or hidden,” he whispered.

Like the stolen gods! Yes! Now we were getting somewhere.

“But that doesn’t explain why the centipede would want to kill me.”

Rosie’s claws erupted from her three paws. Her shoulder muscles tensed. Now she reacts? I thought.

Kip raised a finger, “Ah. Because the dead cannot spill secrets.”

“Well, I didn’t die.”