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Ellie didn’t want to take her eyes away from the dark relief of the mural. A firm but gentle hand on her arm finally caught her attention.
“Come on,” Adam said, gently guiding her after the others.
The passage narrowed once more, winding past spills of rock over which the scouting party had to climb… and then Ellie looked past the shoulders of the men before her to a sliver of green trees and the golden light of late afternoon.
She scrambled down the rest of the crevice and spilled out onto a ledge which overlooked the broad bowl of a valley.
The view was framed by the majestic rise of the mountains, which were now fully upon them. The land below was a rich and vibrant green—a perfect, sheltered paradise framed by tall black peaks and the curving line of the ridge.
White stone towers pierced through the canopy. Ellie’s heart pounded as she gazed out at them.
The low gray clouds to the east shifted. Sunlight spilled out across the scene. The warm rays fell over the crowns of the temples and painted them a startling gold.
“It’s real!” Ellie breathed.
She closed her eyes, half convinced that when she opened them, she would find herself back in the wet gloom of the Public Record Office, staring down at a stack of crumbling tax assessments.
The gilded temples greeted her instead. A flock of tiny birds burst from the canopy to wheel over the ruins.
No—she was not in London.
This was not a dream.
Adam moved to her side. The falling sunlight highlighted his rugged profile.
“Congratulations, Princess,” he said. His voice was flattened with wonder and shock. “Looks like you found El Dorado.”
As he spoke, the clouds shifted, swallowing the sun’s warm rays. A breeze brushed against the back of Ellie’s neck and then stirred the leaves of the trees below her. Ellie turned toward it to see that the sky beyond the peaks had turned thick and gray with the promise of a storm.
“Looks like rain,” Velegas warned. His voice rang out clearly over the ledge.
“Go back to Bones. Tell him to bring the gear and set up camp,” Jacobs ordered flatly. “Let’s get what we came here for.”
He stalked toward the path that led down into the ruins.
?
The trail descended from the ledge to a thick, verdant forest. The aromatic mountain pines were mixed with trees which Ellie had become more accustomed to seeing in the lowlands. Many of them were fruit-bearing, their boughs heavy with cashews or ripening sapodillas.
Ellie’s mind spun as she wondered whether the people of Tulan had deliberately brought them here.
This was not the same wilderness that Ellie had passed through on her journey. The landscape around her looked more like a long-abandoned garden.
Vines tumbled down from the boughs, some of them as thick as Ellie’s arm. She could hear the rest of the caravan shuffling out onto the ledge above them. Bones’s voice rang out as the foreman organized the movement of mules and gear through the narrow pass.
Beyond the creaking ropes and the quick shouts of the men, the wood around her was eerily quiet. A lush, fertile region like this one should have been crawling with birds, monkeys, and tapir—not oddly deserted. When Ellie spotted the undulating form of a snake hurrying after a quick-darting mouse, she was almost surprised.
Even the ever-present hum of the insects was lessened here, which Ellie would have thought impossible.
Adam walked beside her. She bit back the urge to grab his arm and drag him over to examine every thrilling discovery she made, like the divots in the earth alongside their path which likely indicated the presence of cellar holes for wooden dwellings. She was conscious that anything she said would be overheard by Flowers, Staines, and Mendez, who trudged along at their heels.
Ellie dropped her gaze to the remarkably even path on which she walked. The ribbon of land was slightly raised up from the ground around it as it curved away ahead of her.
She grabbed Adam by the elbow.
“Bates… I think we are walking on a road!” she exclaimed.
Adam cocked an eyebrow at her, and then kicked thoughtfully at the forest debris under his boot.
