Then all at once, everything came to a stop.

  Daniel opened his eyes and could hear only his breathing. He felt tired but alert. The others were staring at him. He couldn’t be sure whether they had any idea what had just happened. They all looked afraid to come near him, even to speak to him.

  He spread his wings and spun in a full circle, tilting his head toward the sky. “I choose my love for Lucinda,” he called to Heaven and Earth, to the angels all around him and the ones who weren’t there. To the soul of the one true thing he loved the most, wherever she was. “I now reaffirm my choice: I choose Lucinda over everything. And I will until the end.”

  FIFTEEN

  THE SACRIFICE

  CHICHÉN ITZÁ, MESOAMERICA • 5 WAYEB’

  (APPROXIMATELY DECEMBER 20, 555 CE)

  Ŧhe Announcer spat Luce into the swelter of a summer day. Beneath her feet, the ground was parched, all cracked earth and tawny, dried-up blades of grass. The sky was barren blue, not a single cloud to promise rain. Even the wind seemed thirsty.

  She stood in the center of a flat field bordered on three sides by a strange, high wall. From this distance, it looked a little like a mosaic made of giant beads. They were irregularly shaped, not spherical exactly, ranging in color from ivory to light brown. Here and there were tiny cracks between the beads, letting in light from the other side.

  Besides a half dozen vultures cawing as they swooped in listless circles, no one else was around. The wind blew hotly through her hair and smelled like … she couldn’t place the smell, but it tasted metallic, almost rusty.

  The heavy gown she had been wearing since the ball at Versailles was soaked with sweat. It stank of smoke and ash and perspiration every time she breathed in. It had to go. She struggled to reach the laces and buttons. She could use a hand—even a tiny stone one.

  Where was Bill, anyway? He was always disappearing. Sometimes Luce got the feeling the gargoyle had an agenda of his own, and that she was being shuffled forward according to his schedule.

  She wrestled with the dress, tearing at the green lace around the collar, popping hooks as she walked. Thankfully, there was no one around to see. Finally she got down on her knees and shimmied free, pulling the skirts over her head.

  As she sat back on her heels in her thin cotton shift, it hit Luce how exhausted she was. How long had it been since she’d slept? She stumbled toward the shade of the wall, her feet rustling through the brittle grass, thinking maybe she could lie down for a little while and close her eyes.

  Her eyelids fluttered, so sleepy.

  Then they shot open. And her skin began to crawl.

  Heads.

  Luce finally realized what the wall was made of. The bone-colored palisades—halfway innocent-looking from afar—were interlocking racks of impaled human heads.

  She stifled a scream. Suddenly she could place the odor being carried in the wind—it was the stench of rot and spilled blood, of putrefying flesh.

  Along the bottom of the palisades were sun-bleached, weathered skulls, whipped white and clean by the wind and the sun. Along the top, the skulls looked fresher. That is, they were still clearly people’s heads—thick manes of black hair, skin mostly intact. But the skulls in the middle were someplace between mortal and monster: The frayed skin was peeling back, leaving dried brown blood on bone. The faces were stretched tight with what might have been terror or rage.

  Luce staggered away, hoping for a breath of air that didn’t stink of rot, but not finding it.

  “It’s not quite as gruesome as it looks.”

  She whirled around, terrified. But it was only Bill.

  “Where were you? Where are we?”

  “It’s actually a great honor to get staked out like this,” he said, marching right up to the next-to-lowest row. He looked one head in the eye. “All these innocent little lambs go straight to Heaven. Just what the faithful desire.”

  “Why did you leave me here with these—”

  “Aw, come on. They won’t bite.” He eyed her sidelong. “What have you done with your clothes?”

  Luce shrugged. “It’s hot.”

  He sighed lengthily, with a put-upon world-weariness. “Now ask me where I’ve been. And this time, try to keep the judgment out of your voice.”

  Her mouth twitched. There was something sketchy about Bill’s occasional disappearances. But he was standing there now, with his little claws tucked neatly behind his back, giving her an innocent smile. She sighed. “Where have you been?”

  “Shopping!” Bill gleefully extended both his wings, revealing a light-brown wraparound skirt hanging off one wing tip and a short matching tunic hanging off the other. “And the coup de grâce!” he said, withdrawing from behind his back a chunky white necklace. Bone.

  She took the tunic and the skirt but waved off the necklace. She’d seen enough bone. “No, thanks.”

  “Do you want to blend in? Then you’ve got to wear the goods.”

  Swallowing her disgust, she slipped it over her head. The polished bone pieces had been strung along some kind of fiber. The necklace was long and heavy and, Luce had to admit, sort of pretty.

  “And I think this”—he gave her a painted metal band—“goes in your hair.”

  “Where did you get all this stuff?” she asked.

  “It’s yours. I mean, it’s not yours-Lucinda-Price, but it is yours in a larger cosmic sense. It belongs to the you that is part of this lifetime—Ix Cuat.”

  “Ix who?”

  “Ix Cuat. Your name in this life meant ‘Little Snake.’ ” Bill watched her face change. “It was a term of endearment in the Mayan culture. Sort of.”

  “The same way getting your head impaled on a stick was an honor?”

  Bill rolled his stone eyes. “Stop being so ethnocentric. That means thinking your own culture is superior to other cultures.”

  “I know what it means,” she said, working the band into her dirty hair. “But I’m not being superior. I just don’t think having my head stuck on one of these racks would be so great.” There was a faint thrumming in the air, like faraway drumbeats.

  “That’s exactly the sort of thing Ix Cuat would say! You always were a little bit backward!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “See, you—Ix Cuat—were born during the Wayeb’, which are these five odd days at the end of the Mayan year that everyone gets real superstitious about because they don’t fit into the calendar. Kind of like leap-year days. It’s not exactly lucky to be born during Wayeb’. So no one was shocked when you grew up to be an old maid.”

  “Old maid?” Luce asked. “I thought I never live past seventeen … more or less.”

  “Seventeen here in Chichén Itzá is ancient,” Bill said, floating from head to head, his wings humming as they fluttered. “But it’s true, you never used to live much past seventeen or thereabouts. It’s been kind of a mystery as to why in the lifetime of Lucinda Price you’ve managed to stick around so long.”

  “Daniel said it was because I wasn’t baptized.” Now Luce was sure she heard drums—and that they were drawing closer. “But how can that matter? I mean, I bet Ix Ca-whatever was baptized—”

  Bill flapped his hand dismissively. “Baptism is just one word for a kind of sacrament or covenant, in which your soul is more or less claimed. Just about every faith has something similar. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, even the Mayan religion that is about to go marching past”—he nodded toward the drumming, which was now so loud that Luce wondered if they should hide—“they all feature sacraments of some kind in which one expresses one’s devotion to one’s god.”

  “So I’m alive in my current life in Thunderbolt because my parents didn’t have me baptized?”

  “No,” Bill said, “you’re able to be killed in your current life in Thunderbolt because your parents didn’t have you baptized. You’re alive in your current life because, well … no one really knows why.”

  There must have been a reason. Maybe it was the loophole Daniel had spoken about in the hospital in Milan. But even he didn’t seem to understand how Luce was able to travel through the Announcers. With every life she visited, Luce could feel herself getting closer to fitting the pieces of her past together … but she wasn’t there yet.

  “Where’s the village?” she asked. “Where are the people? Where’s Daniel?” The drums grew so loud that she had to raise her voice.

  “Oh,” Bill said, “they’re on the other side of the tzompantlis.”

  “The what?”

  “This wall of heads. Come on—you’ve got to see this!”

  Through the open spaces in the racks of skulls, flashes of color danced. Bill herded Luce to the edge of the skull wall and gestured for her to look.

  Beyond the wall, a whole civilization paraded past. A long line of people danced and beat their feet against a broad packed-dirt road that wound through the bone-yard. They had silky black hair and skin the color of chestnuts. They ranged in age from three to old enough to defy guessing. All of them were vibrant and beautiful and strange. Their clothes were sparse, weathered animal hides that barely covered their flesh, showing off tattoos and painted faces. It was the most remarkable body art—elaborate, colorful depictions of brightly feathered birds, suns, and geometric designs splayed across their backs and arms and chests.

  In the distance, there were buildings—an orderly grid of bleached-stone structures and a cluster of smaller buildings with flat thatched roofs. Beyond that, there was jungle, but the leaves of its trees looked withered and brittle.

  The crowd marched past, blind to Luce, caught up in the frenzy of their dance. “Come on!” Bill said, and shoved her out into the flow of people.

  “What?” she shouted. “Go in there? With them?”

  “It’ll be fun!” Bill cackled, flying ahead. “You know how to dance, don’t you?”

  Cautiously at first, she and the little gargoyle joined the parade as they passed through what looked like a marketplace—a long, narrow strip of land packed with wooden casks and bowls full of goods for sale: dimply black avocados, deep red stalks of maize, dried herbs bundled with twine, and many other things Luce didn’t recognize. She turned her head this way and that to see as much as possible as she passed, but there was no way to stop. The surge of the crowd pushed her inexorably forward.

  The Mayans followed the road as it curved down onto a wide, shallow plain. The roar of their dance faded, and they gathered quietly, murmuring to one another. They numbered in the hundreds. At the repeated pressure of Bill’s sharp claws on her shoulders, Luce lowered herself to her knees like the rest of them and followed the crowd’s gaze upward.

  Behind the marketplace, one building rose higher than all the others: a stepped pyramid of the whitest stone. The two sides visible to Luce each had steep staircases running up their centers that ended at a single-story structure painted blue and red. A shiver ran through Luce, part recognition and part inexplicable fear.

  She’d seen this pyramid before. In history-book pictures, the Mayan temple had fallen to ruins. But it was far from ruins now. It was magnificent.

  Four men holding drums made of wood and stretched hide stood in a row on the ledge around the pyramid’s top. Their tanned faces were painted with strokes of red, yellow, and blue to look like masks. Their drums beat in unison, faster and faster until someone emerged from the doorway.

  The man was taller than the drummers; beneath a towering red-and-white-feathered headdress, his entire face was painted with mazelike turquoise designs. His neck, wrists, ankles, and earlobes were adorned with the same kind of bone jewelry Bill had given Luce to wear. He was carrying something—a long stick decorated with painted feathers and shiny shards of white. At one end, something silver gleamed.

  When he faced the people, the crowd fell silent, almost as if by magic.

  “Who is that man?” Luce whispered to Bill. “What’s he doing?”

  “That’s the tribal leader, Zotz. Pretty haggard, right? Times are tough when your people haven’t seen rain for three hundred and sixty-four days. Not that they’re counting on that stone calendar over there or anything.” He pointed at a gray slab of rock marked with hundreds of sooty black lines.

  Not one drop of water for almost an entire year? Luce could almost feel the thirst coming off the crowd. “They’re dying,” she said.

  “They hope not. That’s where you come in,” Bill said. “You and a few other unfortunate wretches. Daniel, too—he’s got a minor role. Chaat’s very hungry by now, so it’s really all hands on deck.”

  “Chaat?”

  “The rain god. The Mayans have this absurd belief that a wrathful god’s favorite food is blood. See where I’m going with this?”

  “Human sacrifice,” Luce said slowly.

  “Yep. This is the beginning of a long day of ’em. More skulls to add to the racks. Exciting, isn’t it?”

  “Where’s Lucinda? I mean, Ix Cuat?”

  Bill pointed at the temple. “She’s locked up in there, along with the other sacrificees, waiting for the ball game to be over.”

  “The ball game?”

  “That’s what this crowd is on their way to watch. See, the tribal leader likes to host a ball game before a big sacrifice.” Bill coughed and brushed his wings back. “It’s kind of a cross between basketball and soccer, if each team had only two players, and the ball weighed a ton, and the losers got their heads cut off and their blood fed to Chaat.”

  “To the court!” Zotz bellowed from the top step of the temple. The Mayan words sounded strangely guttural and yet were still comprehensible to Luce. She wondered how they made Ix Cuat feel, locked up in the room behind Zotz.

  A great cheer erupted from the crowd. As a group, the Mayans rose and broke into a run toward what looked like a large stone amphitheater at the far side of the plain. It was oblong and low—a brown dirt playing field ringed by tiered stone bleachers.

  “Ah—there’s our boy!” Bill pointed at the head of the crowd as they neared the stadium.

  A lean, muscular boy was running, faster than the others, his back to Luce. His hair was dark brown and shiny, his shoulders deeply tanned and painted with intersecting red-and-black bands. When he turned his head slightly to the left, Luce caught a quick glimpse of his profile. He was nothing like the Daniel she had left in her parents’ backyard. And yet—

  “Daniel!” Luce said. “He looks—”

  “Different and also precisely the same?” Bill asked.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s his soul you recognize. Regardless of how you two may look on the outside, you’ll always know each other’s souls.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Luce until now how remarkable it was that she recognized Daniel in every life. Her soul found his. “That’s … beautiful.”

  Bill scratched at a scab on his arm with a gnarly claw. “If you say so.”

  “You said Daniel was involved in the sacrifice somehow. He’s a ballplayer, isn’t he?” Luce said, craning her neck toward the crowd just as Daniel disappeared inside the amphitheater.

  “He is,” Bill said. “There’s a lovely little ceremony”—he raised a stone eyebrow—“in which the winners guide the sacrifices into their next life.”

  “The winners kill the prisoners?” Luce said quietly.

  They watched the crowd as it funneled into the amphitheater. Drumbeats sounded from within. The game was about to begin.

  “Not kill. They’re not common murderers. Sacrifice. First they chop off the heads. Heads go back there.” Bill nodded over his shoulder at the palisade of heads. “Bodies get tossed into a skuzzy—pardon me, holy—limestone sinkhole out in the jungle.” He sniffed. “Me? I don’t see how that’s gonna bring rain, but who am I to judge?”

  “Will Daniel win or lose?” Luce asked, knowing the answer before the words had even left her lips.

  “I can see how the idea of Daniel decapitating you does not maybe scream out romance,” Bill said, “but really, what’s the difference between his killing you by fire and by the sword?”

  “Daniel wouldn’t do that.”

  Bill hovered in the air in front of Luce. “Wouldn’t he?”

  There came a great roar from inside the amphitheater. Luce felt that she should run onto the field, go up to Daniel, and take him in her arms; tell him what she’d left the Globe too soon to say: that she understood now everything he went through to be with her. That his sacrifices made her even more committed to their love. “I should go to him,” she said.

  But there was also Ix Cuat. Locked up in a room atop the pyramid waiting to be killed. A girl who might hold within her a valuable piece of information Luce needed to learn to break the curse.

  Luce teetered in place—one foot toward the amphitheater, one toward the pyramid.

  “What’s it gonna be?” Bill taunted. His smile was too big.

  She took off running, away from Bill and toward the pyramid.

  “Good choice!” he called, flitting quickly around to keep pace at her side.

  The pyramid towered over her. The painted temple at the top—where Bill had said Ix Cuat would be—felt as distant as a star. Luce was so thirsty. Her throat ached for water; the ground scorched the soles of her feet. It felt like the entire world was burning up.

  “This place is very sacred,” Bill murmured in her ear. “This temple was built on top of a previous temple, which was built on top of yet another temple, and so on, all of them oriented to mark the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. On those two days at sunset, the shadow of a serpent can be seen sliding up the steps of the northern stairs. Cool, huh?”

  Luce just huffed and began climbing the stairs.

  “The Mayans were geniuses. By this point in their civilization, they’ve already predicted the end of the world in 2012.” He coughed theatrically. “But that remains to be seen. Time will tell.”