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“You’ll disturb the layers!” Ellie protested with a squeak of panic.
“If it’s a road, there’s a hell of a lot of it, Princess,” Adam returned. “I think you’ll still have plenty of layers to play with.”
Ellie dropped to her knees in order to give the area Adam had cleared a closer look.
The toe of his boot had exposed a surface of pale, mud-stained stone. She shoved more of the debris aside with her hands and revealed a long, straight line where two blocks had been joined together. Their edges were perfectly matched.
“They’re pavers,” she said. Her voice was strangled with wonder. “Cut, quarried pavers. Theypavedthe road. Bates, do you have any idea what sort of engineering prowess would have been required to—”
“Let’s keep moving, Princess,” Adam cut in. He gently tugged her back up with an uneasy look at where Jacobs walked ahead of them.
The landscape around them shifted. The cellar holes gave way to moss-grown piles of tumbled stone which peered at Ellie from between the trees in every direction.
They had to be houses—actualhouses, where everyday people had lived rather than the elites of the city. There would be room layouts for her to discern, along with hearths and sleeping areas that hinted at the local kinship structures.
And there would be middens.
The thought of an ancient trash heap between those buildings waiting to be discovered filled Ellie with a wild and impatient joy.
“Bates,” she exclaimed. “This one is intact!”
Ellie didn’t wait for him to follow. She dashed over to the building that she had spotted not far from the road ahead of them. Parts of the walls were still standing.
Mendez grumbled out a curse behind her.
Ellie stopped on the threshold to study the interior. The roof had rotted away long ago, and the ground was thick with fallen leaves and debris.
She let out a strangled squeal.
“Pots!” she gasped as her heart pounded with the enormity of what she was looking at. “Intactpots!”
There were four of them, each roughly three feet in height, standing in the corner of the structure. Hints of colorful glaze peered through the verdigris which discolored them.
Ellie’s desperate desire to get closer to the objects warred with her fear of damaging something within the house if she walked into it.
She took a breath, steadying herself. The bases of the pots were buried at least four inches into the ground. There was two hundred years of sediment in here. Ellie wasn’t going to break anything by walking on that.
She dashed inside, crouching down to give the artifacts a better look.
“Oh God,” she groaned. “I think there’s still wax around the lids! Bates, do you have any idea what that means?”
“Pretty sure you’re going to tell me,” Adam replied as he made a quiet, thoughtful examination of the rest of the room.
“It means they might still besealed,” Ellie emphasized, buzzing with the joy of it. “Sealed! The implications are… I’m not sure I can even… Bates?” she finished less certainly.
Adam had gone silent. He crouched in the opposite corner, looking down at something he had carefully exposed by brushing away a few layers of dried leaves.
Ellie noticed the unusual solemnity of his focus and rose to join him. She found herself looking down at the jumble of a skeleton half-buried in the sediment. Only parts of it were visible—but one of those pieces included what was very obviously the eye socket of a human skull.
“Oh,” she breathed softly as she carefully brushed a bit more of the debris away. “The bones are still somewhat articulated. That’s odd for a body left above ground like this. One would have expected the local wildlife to have done more damage to it.” She frowned. “Why wouldn’t it have been damaged? And why leave the body here at all? Surely a city with such extensive resources had procedures for the ritual disposal of the dead, and this clearly isn’t a deliberate excarnation. It’s as if there was…”
“…nobody left to bury her,” Adam finished, looking down at the place where the missing eye was now filled with soft brown earth.
Ellie felt a chill that defied the thick, hazy heat. A breeze rustled through the tall, elegant trees overhead. The canopy swayed gently as wind whispered through the leaves.
“Can we be done, please?” Staines complained from the doorway. “The others are getting ahead of us.”
Adam pushed the leaves back over the bones, carefully covering the body before he rose to go.
