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A dart of fear tickled at her as the room grew warmer.
“There’s nothing to worry about. This is perfectly fine,” she asserted. “It must be some kind of test, that’s all. If this is an initiation trial, then it makes sense that there are obstacles to overcome. Oh—of course!” she burst out as she remembered. “There were tests in the Popol Vuh when the hero twins went to Xibalba to retrieve the head of their father—”
“Wait—his head?” Adam cut in.
“Never mind that,” Ellie hurriedly said. “The Mayan storytellers must have been passing down some version of the initiation rituals of Tulan—and we are walking in the middle of it! Adam, have you any idea of the potential historical implications of that?”
“Not sure I’m too concerned about historical implications at the moment,” Adam called over as he made another survey of the cavern walls. “I’m more worried about what happened to your twins if they got it wrong.”
“It’s different in each of the caverns of Xibalba,” Ellie hedged.
“How about this one, Princess?” Adam pressed impatiently.
The heat in the room was rising, as was the humidity. Sweat broke out on her skin as she thought uneasily of the answer to Adam’s question.
“They were… ah, roasted alive,” Ellie informed him.
“We’re looking a bit more like poached here,” Adam pointed out soberly. “How do we get out of it?”
Ellie paced the ring of close-packed, looming figures.
“This is the council chamber,” she noted. “In the council chamber of the Popol Vuh, the gods of death were trying to trick the twins by putting both real deities and false ones—statues—in the room. If the twins greeted a statue with the same reverence as a god, they would be punished for it.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, these are all statues,” Adam shot back. He waved a hand up at the grinning crocodile head.
“I can see that,” Ellie retorted. Her breath was coming a little more heavily as the heat grew denser. “But there must be something different about them.”
“Maybe it’s a beauty contest.”
“That isn’t helping,” Ellie pointed out.
“Well, what’d it say in your book?”
“That they were helped by a mosquito,” she admitted.
“What?” he exclaimed.
“It pricks each of the gods. The real ones yell about it.”
“That’s it?” He gaped at her from across the hissing vents in the floor.
“It’s a cultural record,” Ellie snapped. “It might have been passed down orally dozens of times before it was committed to written form. All sorts of things might have changed since then!”
“Where are we supposed to find a mosquito down here?”
“I don’t know!”
The heat was making it hard to think. Ellie felt as though she couldn’t draw enough breath.
The chamber wasn’t that big. The steam was collecting quickly, and it washot.
At normal atmospheric pressure, steam was precisely 100 degrees Celsius. If Ellie estimated the cubic area of the room, the ambient temperature, and the rate at which the hot vapor was coming in, she could calculate the precise number of minutes they had before they succumbed to heat stroke.
Ellie shook off the thought. She was getting distracted. Her brain was flailing for the wrong sort of answers.
“There is a solution in here somewhere,” she stubbornly insisted. “We just have tothink.”
Adam pivoted.
