Travelers (Nel Bently Books, #1) Read online

  Nel’s whoop interrupted him as she swung over the guardrail and boot-skated down the gravel slope. Chile’s landscape was a study in opposites — the lush forests and the Atacama. This was one of the green pockets. A river wound through the bottom of the canyon, an emerald snake in a desert of pink rock. A dozen flowers sweetened the air, and the muttering of the water drowned out the sound of the wind off the road far above. She edged into the canyon, running her hands along the wall. “Seriously, this is beautiful.”

  Mikey slid to a halt behind her. “How have we never heard about this?”

  “It’s off a back road. Locals probably know all about it, but it’s not like this is a tourist destination. Probably wasn’t even visible from the road until last year’s quake.” Nel followed the river deeper. It wasn’t strictly a tunnel; gaps in the stone roof above shed dim, filtered pink light onto the clear water.

  “When I die, Nel, this is where I want my ashes.”

  “Me too, dude.” Nel stopped. “Oh, fuck, Mikey, look up.”

  The waving walls of stone were decorated with faded black hand-prints and other prints in relief. Nel pulled herself onto a shelf to get a better look. Further up were other prints, distorted and elongated.

  “Charcoal?”

  “No, too glittery. Looks like that black stuff layered on top of Strata III. How far are we from the site?”

  “I left the GPS in the car. I don’t suppose the camera can get any sort of reading under all this.”

  “Doubt it.” Nel’s gaze followed the river as it curved south and dove into a dark tunnel, winding deeper in the ground. “How much you want to bet this is the same river?”

  “More than either of us make in a year.”

  “You think we could get funding for this?” She moved along the shelf and climbed higher. “Shit, there’s art up here.”

  She heard Mikey scramble back to try and get a look. “Can’t see it from here.”

  “Hold on, I’m taking a picture. It’s on the ceiling up here. Can’t really tell what it is. Looks like just designs.” The shutter click echoed through the canyon a few times then she climbed down. “I’ll grab a few shots further in, then let’s head to lunch. I want to get back and see if I can find this online.”

  “I’m gonna grab some coordinates from the roadside. Holler if you need anything.”

  Nel followed the river bank for a few more feet, field book in hand as she sketched the river, the walls, anything she could fit on the pages.

  “Nel!”

  “Hold on.” She copied the designs and took another few shots with her camera phone before finally turning back.

  Mikey’s shouting was faint all the way down the embankment, but when she emerged from the tunnel his words were suddenly clear.

  “Nel, get your ass back up here!” His tone was unusually tense.

  She jogged up, skittering and catching herself twice before she reached the guardrails. Her heart sank. Mikey stood by the Jeep, hands in the air.

  Emilio and two men she recognized by face surrounded their car, gun’s trained on Mikey’s pissed expression. Their Land Rover was studded with political stickers and hand-painted designs.

  “Oh fuck.”

  “Bently, drop the bag.”

  “Can I get out of the road, Emilio?” When he nodded curtly, she crossed over and dropped her field pack at their feet. She leaned against the Jeep by Mikey, but refused to raise her hands. “Since when do you guys carry guns?”

  “Since you refuse to listen.” The younger of the two spat.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You were watching us the first day we broke ground.”

  “Gringo. Can’t tell us apart.”

  “Don’t be an ass, Bas. You were there.” Emilio rolled his eyes and upended their packs. “Search the car if you’re too bored.” Nel winced. Emilio chucked the rock samples over the rail, wiped the camera card, and ripped out the most recent pages of her field book. “You realize every time you warn us, it just tells us we’re closer? You think you’re discouraging? I think you’re leaving bread crumbs.”

  “Nel.” Mikey’s warning shut her up, but didn’t wipe the cocky contempt from her face. Within fifteen minutes everything they had collected was destroyed.

  “Bently, you need to get in that car, turn around, and not look back. You come here again and I’ll be waiting.”

  “Mikey, wanna grab a bite?”

  “Sounds good. I’m in the mood for something spicy.” He climbed into the driver seat and fiddled with the radio while she stalked around the car. She spit at Emilio's boots before slamming the door shut.

  “See you around, Asshole.”

  Nel jabbed the radio and cranked the volume, not caring that it was a juvenile display. Their tires spun as Rage Against the Machine blasted over the desolate road.

  They pulled out, spraying the three men with gravel and exhaust. As soon as they were out of ear-shot, Mikey turned the music down. “What the fuck! We lost everything. And if you say you’re going back, I’ll personally throw you in the China Trench and let you rot.”

  “Yeah, they got most of it, but they didn’t search us.” She pulled her cell out. “The pics aren’t pretty, but they’re better than nothing.”

  ELEVEN

  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 dar
kness 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.

  TWELVE

  “LUNCH!” MIKEY’S SHOUT boomed across the site, followed by the clatter of shovels, trowels, and buckets hitting the ground. Nel finished mapping another rock before meandering back to the shade of the pop-up. She fumbled around the cooler, eyes still fixed on the map. Finally, she found a bottle and settled against one of the poles. The crew was quiet, excited chewing punctuated with the buzz of insects and tinny music played through a smart phone.

  Nel took a heavy swig off her water bottle. Bitter juniper burst across her tongue and she gagged, whirling to spew the mouthful onto the ground behind her. “Fuck!” She peered closer at the cap of the bottle. She had scrawled a “G” onto the plastic with a permanent marker, but the ice had turned black into faint grey. She glanced up to see the crew staring at her, a mixture of concern and friendly contempt on their faces.

  She grimaced. “That is the last damn time I’m reusing water bottles for gin. Three times now I’ve brought alcohol into the field.”

  “Rookie mistake, Dr. Bently!” George’s banter broke the eager silence of eating.

  Mikey leaned forward. “What’s everyone brought today?”

  Some had brought left overs, others a simple sandwich. And some make rookie mistakes and bring fucking alcohol into the field instead of water. Nel took Mikey’s proffered bottle and swished the taste from her mouth.

  Food was a constant subject. Morning topics would be the best lunches everyone had ever had. Lunch-time was for sharing and discussing supper. The afternoon’s food discussion would go between serious propositions for meals and blatant food-porn. Nel listened to the options for a few minutes while she wolfed down her salad.

  “I want to try that little place on the corner again,” Annie said. “I saw something on their menu the other night but I’d already ordered.”

  “We’ve been there twice this week. We could go next week,” Sally suggested.

  “Next week is for El Cóndor and that’ll take half our per diem. Besides, they’ve got so much stuff, it’s not really like you’ll have to get the same thing.”

  Nel cleared her throat. “I don’t suppose anyone would be interested in having a crew cook-out tonight. There’s a butcher in town that has great cuts and I make a mean jalapeno glazed chicken. We could all pitch in and make our best potluck stuff. I’ve got some spices in the kitchen for people to use.”

  Her suggestion was met with groans of happiness and she grinned into her lunch. Mikey’s eyes narrowed on her with mock anger. Nel stuck her tongue out in response. She might not be the social crack that Mikey was, but she knew how to romance hungry diggers.

  “OI, GOT SOMETHING FOR you to see.” Chad leaned on one leg of the pop-up tent.

  Nel glanced up absently from organizing the buckets of artifacts and soil samples. “You find something?”

  “No, still no artifacts, but we’re done profiling that unit and have the profiles from all the STPs lined up too. It’s interesting.”

  Nel tossed a last bag into a bucket and dusted her hands off. “Have you taken anything for analysis yet?”

  “No, thought you might have specifics about that.”

  Nel followed him across the site to the unit he and Annie had dug on the ridge. It was 1m square and close to 80 cm deep. The soils were the usual three layers, save for the black band cutting through the B stratum. Nel crouched down and drew her trowel. The 3cm lens was compact, but composed of fine grains. She didn’t know what it was, but Mikey’s words rang in her ears. “Chad, call the rest of the crew over. We should talk about this as a group.”

  When the others crowded around, Nel gestured to the unit. “What do you think, Annie?”

  “Me?” Annie knelt carefully next to Nel. “I’m not sure it’s a stain—”

  “Be confident.” Nel glanced over her shoulder. “If you truly think something, own it. Worst case, you’ll be wrong and learn something.”

  Annie laughed softly. “I don’t think it’s a stain. The consistency is different from that above and below it. It’s like an alluvial deposit, but I’m not sure — but this isn’t the proper area for a flood. We’re too high and there’s a stream below that would be a more probable path for a flood. There’s also almost no bioturbation in this area, so I doubt a rodent or roots carried this down from the surface. Besides it’s too uniform for that to be the actual source.”

  Nel sat back, a small chunk of the dark soil on her trowel. “Good. I agree.” She dumped the chunk into George’s hand. “Pass this around, feel it with your fingers, smell it — don’t eat it please, Henri — really look at it. Does it remind you
of something you’ve seen before on another dig? Maybe you’ve seen something similar somewhere else, unrelated to archaeology.”

  The dirt was passed around, most of the diggers examining it with clueless earnestness. Kat tilted her head at it thoughtfully “This looks like metal, you know?”

  Nel glanced up. “What do you mean?”

  “My dad has this grinder in his work shop, for metal and sharpening stuff, you know? This pile of metal filings collects under it and it looks like this.”

  Nel clenched her jaw. Kat was observant, but her speech patterns grated against every nerve Nel had left. “Good, thanks.” She rose with a sigh. “Alright, everyone back to work.” She turned to Annie. “Annie, I want you to take a sample of this. You won’t want to contaminate it in anyway. They probably won’t do much protein analysis on it, but just to be safe we’ll be sterile.” She handed Annie a packet of sterile gloves and two plastic bags. “Wash your trowel with distilled water, over there, and wipe it down. Then scrape down very carefully until you have enough to fill that bag. We’ll record the location of your sample and send it out tomorrow morning.”

  Nel plopped down with a sigh on one of the big rocks. The stone on metal grinders was silicate in nature, but most of the dust was from the metal itself. What were metal filings doing in the middle of intact geological strata?

  THIRTEEN

  THE HEAT MADE NEL'S head pound and her heart flutter. She kicked the shovel into the ground, heaving another scoop of dirt into the waiting screen. She paired the crew off for such things, but preferred to work alone. There were only three more test pits left in between the stone lines. I want these done by the end of the day. Henri probably had another level, at least, before he came down onto the C horizon, but there had been precious little in the unit, save for the beautiful point. Still, one unbroken diagnostic was enough in Nel's book.