Ren looked both excited and stunned. “Hey, do you think there’s evidence of aliens in Xib’alb’a?”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Brooks asked, sounding exasperated.
“I have a blog,” she said. “Eyes in the Sky. Ever heard of it? No? Well, I keep a record of UFO sightings, alien encounters, and other stuff. You wouldn’t believe how many people email me. I mean, a lot of the reports are fake, but some are totally real. You should see the photos I get.”
Brooks nodded like it wasn’t entirely crazy until Ren got to the part about some old guy from Palenque named King Pakal and his sarcophagus. “The carvings clearly show him sitting in a spaceship,” she said excitedly. “Scholars have argued forever about these aliens that visited ancient civilizations like the Egyptians and stuff. And I don’t know. I just think the sky and the stars have a lot of secrets.”
“Spaceship,” Brooks repeated in a monotone. “Secrets.”
Ren smiled. “Exactly. Amazing, right?”
“Good for King Pakal,” I said to Ren. “But right now, we have to get into hell, and you need to go to my house and wait for your grandpa.”
Brooks turned her attention back to me. “If she…If Ixtab catches us…”
“We’ll come up with an excuse for why we’re there.”
“Uh-huh…like we just wanted a tour of the place.” Brooks’s voice was thick with sarcasm. Just once, couldn’t she say Good thinking?
I got a small nugget of satisfaction out of the idea of using Ixtab’s own kingdom to bypass her shadow magic. The mud person’s note had said Ixtab didn’t want me to have my full powers. Was that true? Then why didn’t she off me all those months ago, when I was sitting in a cell in the underworld?
A light rain began to fall. My chest tightened as we cut toward a narrow side street lined with brightly painted houses. I couldn’t shake the voice in the fire and now the ancestors’ message.
Brooks grabbed my arm, jerking me to a stop. “Couldn’t we just try high-speed crashing through the wall?”
Then it hit me. Brooks hated the underworld because it’s where her sister had gone to avoid marrying the hero twin Xb’alamkej, aka Jordan the jerk, losing her freedom in the deal. Maybe Brooks thought she’d get stuck there, too. “It’s okay, Brooks. You don’t have to come with me.”
“Zane Obispo, if you think you can tell me what to do—”
“You’re both wrong,” Ren said.
Brooks and I whirled toward Ren as she leaned against one of the murals that decorated the walls of Isla Holbox. The painting was a yellow-and-pink fantastical sea creature with branch-like antlers. “Don’t you get it?” she said. “The enemy—whoever it is—wants you guys to argue, because it makes you weaker. We have to stick together now.” She walked ahead, and Rosie followed.
“That’s not the way home,” I called out.
Brooks whispered, “Who is she?” as we hurried to catch up to Ren.
“You guys lived through the Prophecy of Fire because you stuck together, right?” Ren said as we entered the mouth of the jungle.
“And because we had a plan,” Brooks said.
Ren kept plowing forward. Rosie trotted beside her, exhaling trails of smoke.
“Hey,” I said. “You don’t even know the way.”
“Then you lead.” But Ren didn’t slow down. We kept pace through the dense foliage. “I came all this way,” she said. “The magic called; you called. And I made it across the ocean for a reason,” she added. “The night before you got attacked? And just before the ancestors told you that the Prophecy of Fire was only the beginning? Doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me. You need me. Besides,” she said with a half shrug, “Ixtab could be my mom for all I know. You’re not the only one who wants answers, Zane.”
Ixtab? Ren’s mom? Was that possible? The queen of the underworld didn’t exactly seem like mom material. But then I remembered her getting a little choked up when she had told me about the godborns, as if she had lost someone…. And there was the whole shadowy-ish connection between her and Ren.
“You can’t just walk up to the queen of hell and ask her if she’s your long-lost mom,” I argued. “And your grandpa’s on his way here.”
Ren stopped in her tracks. “And?”
“And,” Brooks said, “don’t you think he’ll be a little peeved when you’re not here?”
Ren shook her head. “He said I have a big destiny that I’d understand someday. He’d want me to go on this quest, to follow the magic all the way through. I promise not to say anything to Ixtab—if we run into her, that is. Just let me poke around, see what I can find.”
“You could get hurt, Ren,” I said. “That mud monster? That was nothing.”