Dr. Sera Cooper adjusted the lamp on her helmet and crouched next to a stone panel in a subterranean passageway. The corridor she was in had been hacked out of bedrock by hand tools over five hundred years ago, and the chisel marks still stood out in places on the low ceiling above her head. Above her, a stone pyramid reached a thousand meters into the sky, only recently rescued from its green jungle cocoon by weeks of back-breaking work.

In the dim light from her headlamp, Mayan glyphs danced across the stone, eroded by the slow trickle of water that flowed through the cavern. Several of the stone glyphs were covered with thick, clinging moss that obscured the characters. She gently scraped some of the moss away with the edge of her trowel and peered closer.

She squinted her blue eyes and blew a stray blonde curl out of the way as she read the ancient writing. As an archaeologist specializing in the Mayan culture, she was able to read glyphs as well as she could read an e-mail from her best friend, but this inscription was defying all of her efforts.

“This makes no sense,” she muttered. “‘The god came from the jaguar star and...green jade...mushrooms?’ What the hell?” She scraped the stone again, trying to clean it more thoroughly.

One of the glyphs moved. It pressed in like a button on a machine, and a low grinding noise filled the corridor. The stone panel she had been examining shuddered and slid backward into the cave wall, moving with a soft hum. It receded, moving to the right until it was completely swallowed by the stone around it, almost like a pocket door in a modern house. An opening gaped in front of her now, and the darkness beyond it was absolute. Air rushed back at her, stale and smelling of earth and dank, wet stone.

Sera swallowed hard and adjusted her head lamp again. Her heart thudded in her chest in wild excitement. A hidden chamber! She wanted to run inside, but her sense of self-preservation overrode her eagerness to explore. She picked up her walkie talkie and contacted her assistant, who was on the surface in the artifact tent.

“Joely,” she said. “I need you. Bring your brightest flashlight.”

Her voice came back immediately, responding to the quivering excitement in Sera’s tone. “Are you all right?”

“Perfect. Just… bring some light and get down here.”

She put the radio away and shone her light into the darkness. From what she could see, the chamber she had just opened was fairly large. She could see more glyphs carved into the walls. There was a large object in the center of the room, and from where she crouched, it looked like a sarcophagus. Beside it, a human-shaped bundle of textiles, wrapped with rope vines and lying on its side, rested on a low stone platform. A thrill shot through her, and she shivered. She had just made the greatest discovery of her career.

Joely clambered into the chamber, crawling forward through the claustrophobic tunnel where Sera had been working. She had two battery-powered lamps in her hands, and when she reached Sera, her mouth dropped open.

“Oh my God,” she said. “What is that?”

Sera took one of the lamps. “We’re about to find out.”

She turned on the lamp on its highest setting and pointed it into the chamber. The room sprang into view, illuminated at last, and she crept inside. Once she made it through the doorway, she was able to stand again. Joely followed behind her, her dark eyes wide.

“Oh my God,” Joely said again.

Sera went to the object in the center of the room. It was a sarcophagus, and it was covered with the same garbled glyphs that had graced the door to this chamber. She leaned closer to examine the carvings, and she could hear a low hum emanating from inside the stone coffin.

“Get the team,” she said. “This is now priority one.”

***

It took them weeks to properly record the glyphs from the doorway and the sliding panel. After a good deal of inspection, they realized that the door was attached to an ingenious hydraulic system utilizing rainwater and an intricate system of stone counterbalances to shift the panel. The chamber contained a sarcophagus, firmly sealed, and lying beside it was the wrapped body of an adolescent female, likely some sort of sacrifice. The poor girl had probably been entombed alive to accompany the tomb’s occupant, who was obviously a very important person. There were no grave goods to speak of, but the sarcophagus was extremely long. Sera was willing to bet that there was a cache of burial objects inside.

The interior walls of the chamber were covered in an elaborate creation myth she had never encountered before, something about gods from the sky. She had read it twice to make sure she understood what it was saying, and she still couldn’t quite believe her eyes.

Joely was setting up the laser scanner to record a 3-D image of the chamber for closer examination back in the lab. “I don’t know, Sera,” she said, shaking her head. “If those Ancient Aliens people get hold of this, we’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Tell me about it,” she groaned. “Do you think we can publish without including a translation?”

Her assistant laughed. “Not on your life.”

They started the scanner and let a laser light grid pass over the entire interior space of the tomb, careful to stay out of the way of the beams as the machine slowly rotated, taking readings and downloading the details of the space. Sera stood with her hands on her hips, watching the readout as the data was recorded.

“This is so much better than having to draw all of this by hand,” she said. “Can you imagine what the first archaeologists went through? They must have all had art classes.”

“I took art classes,” Joely said.

Sera was surprised. “Really? You didn’t tell me that.”

“Yep. Art was actually my minor. I specialized in charcoal illustration.” She grinned. “It was great when the frat boys came in to do nude figure modeling to earn beer money.”

She snorted a laugh. “That was probably the only reason you took the class - a little free peek.”

“Nothing wrong with being young and alive,” Joely quipped.

Asa Brunner, one of her graduate students, ambled into the chamber, ducking to avoid the laser. He was a former rodeo cowboy who had turned to archaeology after a career-ending injury. The damage to his leg gave him a strange, looping stride. In his thick Texas accent, he said, “Dr. Cooper, there’s a man from the Mexican government here to talk to you.”

Sera and Joely exchanged a knowing look, and she sighed. “Okay. Thanks, Asa.”

The young Texan tipped his hat to them and left, and Joely said, “That didn’t take long.”

“Predictable. Government agents at important digs are like flies to shit.”

She left the chamber and clambered out into the open air. The pyramid they were excavating was a tiny one, and it had been utterly swallowed by the jungle before Sera and her team had started their work. Now they had cleared one entire face of the structure and a good part of the paved courtyard in front of it, revealing the precise joinery of the stones and the excellent masonry for which the Maya were rightly known. Tents had been pitched in the square, and the artifacts were examined and conserved there before being shipped back to the University of Austin, which was where Sera had tenure. Predictably, now that they had found something more interesting and potentially more valuable than a bunch of inscriptions and broken pots, the Mexican government was trying to get in on the action.

It was hard to blame them, really. The Maya were their ancestors, and Mexico City had already paid for the armed guards that stood over their work, protecting them from drug cartels and thieves. She should have been more grateful, but this was her dig. She had fought for six years to convince the authorities and the university that the pyramid was valuable enough to be the focus of their efforts. It stood in the direct center of a complex of larger pyramids, three of which had already been excavated. She thought that its positioning in the center of the other construction indicated that this one was special. She’d worked on this for years. It was the subject of her doctoral dissertation and would be the basis of her entire career. She would be damned if she let some elected official take the glory away from her.

She followed Asa, who led her to man in a white linen suit and a flat Panama hat. He had a handkerchief that he was continually using to wipe away his sweat. She walked up to him and offered a handshake.

“I’m Dr. Sera Cooper, the lead archaeologist on this dig.” They shook hands, and she could tell that the man was startled by her appearance. She had been told before that she looked like a Barbie doll, and it had caused many people to dismiss her as flimsy or unintelligent. She made sure that was a mistake nobody made twice.

“Dr. Cooper,” the man said, breaking into a broad smile. His teeth were dazzlingly white, as if he spent all of his spare time gargling bleach. “I am Domingo Rodriguez from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. My superiors have sent me to offer our assistance with your excavation.”

His English was perfectly unaccented. If anything, he sounded like he was from the Midwest. She replied stiffly. “I think we have everything we need.”

Rodriguez smiled again, but this time is was less full-on barracuda and more teasing. “Now, Dr. Cooper, I think you know what I really meant.”

“I do. You want to come and see what we’re finding.”

“Yes, indeed.”

She gestured at the pyramid. “Well… come on in.”

They climbed down through the narrow tunnel that led to the burial chamber. As they went, Rodriguez said, “I was told that you found a tomb.”

“Yes.”

“Have you opened the coffin yet?”

She glanced at him, slightly affronted. “No. The sarcophagus is tightly sealed, and we don’t want to risk the contents until we can have conditions a little more controlled in the tomb chamber itself.”

He smiled again. “I’m happy to hear that. I’d hate for this to be a King Tut situation.”

She knew her history. In 1925, when King Tut’s body was found, archaeologist Howard Carter had seen fit to unwrap him in his tomb. The boy king’s body had been butchered by the Englishman’s haste and poor methodology. The case stood as a cautionary tale to all new archaeologists.

“No, it will not be that,” she said. “Not at all.”

They reached a point in the tunnel where they had to crawl, and she was painfully aware that her backside was only inches away from Rodriguez’s face. Archaeology is so glamorous, she thought wryly.

Finally, they were able to stand, and she led him into the burial chamber. The laser was scanning the south wall now, so they could stand in the doorway without interfering with the process. Rodriguez looked around the room, his eyes raking over the glyphs, and Sera could tell that he was reading them. Whoever he was, he wasn’t the standard government toady that they usually sent to these things.

Rodriguez’s mouth dropped open. “That’s quite a story,” he finally said, shaking his head. “I’ve never read anything like it.”

Sera nodded. “I know. It’s obviously just a variation on the Hero Twin story from the Popul Vuh, but I don’t think I need to say how modern so-called scholars will interpret this.”

He took off his hat, which had somehow remained on his head all the way through the tunnel, and scratched his thick black hair. “Well, once you get everything secured and the place is open for visitors, I think we might actually have to play up the ancient alien mythology. People love that stuff.”

She gestured like the computer meme. “Aliens!”

He laughed. “If we charge admission, we might be able to make a lot of money for the country. Mexico can use all of the money it can get.”

She leaned back against the wall that had already been scanned. “So… where are you from? Chicago?”

He chuckled. “Indianapolis, actually. My parents were from Mexico, but I was born in Indiana. I got my undergraduate degree from Purdue and my graduate degree from UCLA.” He winked. “We share an alma mater.”

Sera thought back to her own UCLA days and smiled, even though his knowledge of her CV was a little creepy. “So it seems.”

He put his hat back on his head. “Well, can you share some of your insights with a fellow Bruin?”

“I don’t have any yet,” she said. “It’s far too early to start syncretizing any of the evidence here. We’re still excavating.”

He pointed to the low platform beside the sarcophagus. “This is where the sacrificial maiden was found?”

“Yes. She was lying here, on her side, facing the sarcophagus.”

He rubbed his chin with his hand. “I’ll want to see the photographs.”

“Of course. You can see the maiden herself - we have her in a refrigerated truck right now.”

“Doesn’t that get warm quickly?”

“It’s attached to one of our generators.”

He nodded. “Of course. So tell me about this moving door.”

Sera took him to the panel and showed him the glyph she had accidentally pressed, the one that activated the hydraulic system. They opened and closed the door several times.
Finally, Rodriguez said, “That’s astonishing.”

“Isn’t it? This kind of hydraulic system has never been found in any Mayan structure until now. It’s totally unique.”

They returned to the burial chamber, where Joely was shifting the laser to scan the third wall. Sera said, “I noticed that same glyph here on the sarcophagus. The inscription here doesn’t make any more sense than the one on the door, so maybe there’s a similar mechanism here.”

“Tempting to try to push the button, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Very.”

“Dr. Cooper, could you give me a hand?” Joely asked.

Sera went to her, leaving Rodriguez to his own devices for a moment. Joely made a show of needing help leveling the scanning unit, but when they were standing close together, she whispered, “What the fuck is he doing here?”

“Hell if I know. Just being nosy.”

“They’re going to take this dig away from you,” she warned. “They’re going to take it and you’re not going to have any right to publish or anything.”

She straightened and hissed, “Thanks for the ray of sunshine.”

“That’s why you keep me around.”

She turned back and saw Rodriguez examining the glyphs on the foot of the sarcophagus, running his hand along the carefully carved figures. He looked up as she came closer.

“Remarkable workmen, the Maya,” he said.

He leaned on the stone to steady himself, and as he rose, and the glyph beneath his palm retreated into the sarcophagus. He pulled away, surprised and dismayed, and he and Sera both took a step back. Joely held tightly to the laser scanner as the floor rumbled beneath them and a loud grinding sound filled the chamber. Slowly, in fits and starts, the top half of the lid of the sarcophagus rose from its base and began to slide down.

They watched in open-mouthed amazement as the sliding stone revealed a soft blue light that cast the chamber in an eerie glow. The soft hum of modern machinery followed the grinding of the stone, and then there was a very mechanical-sounding click. One of the glyphs on the side of the stone coffin popped free, and a jet of thick fluid that smelled nothing like water gushed out the side. Sera grabbed a plastic bottle that Joely had set aside, dumped the water out, and caught several ounces of the liquid. She was aware that it was hardly a sterile sample, but it was something. She had to find out what this stuff was.

Rodriguez slowly approached the coffin and looked inside. He let out a cry and stumbled backward, landing on his seat, his eyes round as saucers in his shock. Sera hurried over to see what had distressed him so much.

There was a man lying in the coffin, surrounded by softly shining blue lights with an extraordinarily advanced computer readout screen over his head. He was soaking wet, and there were still traces of the liquid that had rushed out through the side opening. It apparently had filled the coffin. Data points mapped their way across the read out, slowly crossing from right to left. She thought the data displayed looked a lot like vital signs, and she stared in amazement as the man took a long, slow breath.

“Oh my God,” she breathed. “He’s alive.”