2JS gave the order to gag me. The teasers started packing up Armadillo Shit, who I guess had died. If I was going to talk like that, 2JS wanted to talk to me alone. He turned for a last stab at Hun Xoc. Three fingers were sticking out of his mouth in an actually pretty comical way.

Your skin tastes sour, 2JS said. Like you’re nervous, like you’re lying. Where did 9 Wax go after he abandoned you? He pulled the fingers out of Hun Xoc’s mouth.

He ran south, down the path to the yellow gate, Hun Xoc said. There were traitors from the Snuffler clan waiting there to meet him. They were going to smuggle him to Kaminaljuyu.

Whoa, I thought.

Hun Xoc had figured out I’d been going for the well. Maybe he’d heard about the earthstar stuff or maybe he just figured out that something was up.

Either way, he was lying for me. It was unheard of.

Even I was shocked. Resisting your father wasn’t just individual disobedience. It was irreparably damaging the family’s eternal uay. It was heavy business.

“Behead me, please,” I said in a flood of resignation. No need to be flip. Just get it over with. Just don’t tell him. “I don’t know anything, just offer me. Make me holy.”

Hun Xoc looked at me. His eyes had sunk into that steely war face, that don’t-tell-them-anything-no-matter-what expression. I signed “Agreed” with my remaining eye.

Which was about it for a while. Maybe they blasted me again. I can’t have blacked out right then, but whenever I did go under I must have lost the time just before.

I realized I was awake again, but there was a minute or so before I could remember where I really was, and instead I thought I was back in the hospital in K’oben, where I’d been when my parents were killed. It was all soaked with gallons of urine and just this solid despair when you don’t even know what despair is. I’ll remember that smell forever, I mean, at least once per minute between now and forever. Anyway, at some point I figured out that I wasn’t a fantasizing sick little kid anymore, I was in this really unusual situation, and I wasn’t in a cinder-block building or underground or anything, I was just bandaged over my eyes, and I was in one of an array of captive baskets set in rows like livestock pens. It was stuffy but there was a ventilating shaft overhead. At some point I realized Hun Xoc was nearby. But we just identified ourselves with the usual apologies and it’s-all-rights, and didn’t say anything else. They were hoping we’d start talking. Idiots, I thought, of course I wasn’t going to say anything. I wouldn’t say anything if we were tied up outside in the middle of a desert for a year and I was sure no one was listening. We worked out an alternating “beater” job position so we could keep track of time. My roughly eight-hour shifts were from what we figured was dawn to noon and then from dusk to midnight. Sometimes I got tired of counting time by Maya beats and started to do it by running through the B side of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album over and over. It’s 19.2 minutes long and it’s so easy to hum it’s like “Happy Birthday,” you can keep time with it and still think about whatever else you want. Maybe we’d be here for years, I thought. Maybe 2JS had worked his thing out and we were just being stored until we cracked. Or didn’t. Twenty years is 547,500 Abbey Road B sides. When it wasn’t my turn to be the clock I just drifted in and out. When you’re a bound prisoner you get to a stage where you can’t sleep, it’s just too uncomfortable, so you sleep in patches, conking out and starting awake again. At about twenty-six hours into our confinement torchlight came in from one side under my bandages and someone pulled our heads up and poured water back into our mouths. Probably the giggle water, I thought. Who cares. Anyway, we’ll get to check it out. The guard didn’t change or even loosen the bonds. Although I already felt I was sensing where the spy was, about one rope-length behind us. No matter how quiet he was being you could learn to distinguish it from the breezes outside. At thirty hours, the flies started biting. At least they stuck to my left side for some reason. Maybe it was wetter. A better spot for their eggs. At thirty-one hours in I started to smell a black tinge of Clostridium, the herald of gangrene, from my poisoned right foot. Great, I thought, on top of everything else. I just lay there, straining my right wrist-rope in a circular motion against its wicker cleat that, in a couple of years, might even wear it through, feeling my scabs crinkling, skin rotting, my body just turning into bits of dirt. My okay leg could feel the heat from my bad leg’s decay. I’m just a compost bin, I thought. Postconsumer. Consumed. There weren’t a lot of events. Sounds rose and fell outside, all too confused to read. They could have been a battle, a party, a herd of moose, anything. Once in a while a pair of red rats ran under the baskets. I made friends with the columns of flies and Pediculidae lice surveying me for development. The thing is, pure despair isn’t really that interesting to talk about. After a while, even pain gets boring. Forty-one hours into our confinement, right after my morning clock shift, the wind died down and the rot wafted up again.

“The water,” 2 Jeweled Skull’s voice said.

I contracted like a poked sea cucumber. I’d thought we were all alone in here. Guess the old guy hasn’t lost his New World ninja sneak-up skills. Oh, hi, I thought, sorry, I thought we had the flat all to ourselves.

“It sounds like you’re in trouble,” I whispered. I didn’t have any vocal cords working.

“What is it in the water?” he asked. I felt one of those sharp fingernails gouge through my cheek, but I was getting passive about that stuff.

“I told you she was coming after you,” I said. He poked his nail farther into the back of my tongue. I guessed he was trying to say I should answer the question.

“I don’t know,” I gagged around his finger. “Is there some kind of witchcraft afoot?”

“I’m going to execute your bitch, Hun Xoc, now,” he said in Chol.

That sounds good, I said. Is that all right with you? I asked, switching to the “equals” tense Hun Xoc and I used. I heard him grunt yes. But instead 2 Jeweled Skull and someone else started untying me, probably getting me together for another visit to the dentist. I held my breath and pushed it up into my head, straining against myself, what I guess they call red-turning or “doing a raspberry” on the playground, but it was really an old torture-victim’s trick. Because it was dark I got away with it and passed satisfyingly out.

My head got half-going again as they carried me through the open alleys of the Ocelot House and out into the upper zocalo. It was already past noon. Dry-wood-and-lime-smoke hung in the still air. Burning buildings. Somehow there was a sense that the bottom had dropped out of the city. My eye was weird where the teaser had sprayed water on it, it was all jumping around and unfocused, but one of the first things I noticed was a Harpy guard crawling around on the floor, spitting and repeating the same thing over and over, “Kot wuk, Kot wuk, Kot wuk,” that is, “Here’s my favorite auntie, here’s my favorite auntie.” Well, that’s a good sign, I thought. The earthstar compound was having its desired effect, at least on one person. They passed me down steep steps. There were shouts and the noise of multiple ball impacts that, from the flavor of the echoes, I could tell were coming from the Great-Hipball Court. It was nearby, but I couldn’t tell in which direction. Finally I got my eye working and I could see we were on the raised platform in front of the Council Mat House. I didn’t have a great sense of depth, and I had to keep swinging my head around to get a wider field of view, so it took me a minute to see that some kind of combat was still going on out in the yellow and red quarters. There were a few lackluster one-on-one fights nearer to us, more like street fights than warfare. We descended to the level of the temple district, down through an almost visible boundary layer into an inversion filled with the miasma of decaying bodies, a beyond-belief stench like opening up a month-dead walrus on a sunny beach and rubbing your face in its fermented gastric juices and self-digested tissues. It wasn’t just human, it was also fish decomposing in the canals, with a faint anise scent over everything else. Outside my little escort there were all kinds of people eddying around, castes and clans who would never normally be mixed together, everyone flopping and bumping, saying things that didn’t make any sense. Some of them prancing around in luxury clothing and headdresses that weren’t theirs, something you’d absolutely never do. One group of Bat House bloods was sitting in a circle, throwing thorn-spiked balls back and forth at each other and crying like little kids with temper tantrums. Maybe Koh’s buying me out, I thought. On the other hand maybe the Ocelots are buying me out.