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Ellie glared at him as he reached over and gave a tangled lock of her hair a little tug.
“Itza offered to comb it, but it would have meant delaying dinner,” Ellie retorted. “Which wasnotgoing to happen. Paolo!” she called, flagging the boy down as he scurried past. His pet chicken followed at his heels.
“¿Quieres más?” Paolo guessed.
“Yes,” Ellie replied with relief. “Sí!”
Paolo grinned at her and dashed into the house, where he called out a quick line of Mopan to those inside.
Adam chuckled.
“What did he say?” she demanded.
“Something along the lines ofthe foreign lady is hungry as a boar,” Adam replied.
“I don’t care what he calls me as long as he brings me more tortillas,” she returned.
“That’s my girl.”
Ellie startled a bit at Adam’s easy, comfortable words. A tumult of unsettling questions sparked to life inside her.
Before she had a chance to ask them, they were joined by Padre Kuyoc. The priest had fully washed up and changed into clean clothes.
“Nice sunset,” he commented as he plopped down beside them.
He had a cup in his hand. The contents smelled lightly of booze. He raised it.
“To accidentally wiping out every vestige of a lost world,” he said.
Ellie’s stomach dropped. She had been ruminating uncomfortably over the disaster for their entire walk to the village. She was a scholar, for goodness’ sake! She was supposed to learn, document, and preserve—not drop the relics of an entire culture into a giant hole in the ground.
She slowly lowered her face into her hands, overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the disaster that she had created. It felt particularly awful as she sat in the middle of a village full of people who could very likely have claimed Tulan as part of their own heritage… had Ellie not blown it up.
“I’m supposed to honor the past,” she said without looking up. “I’m supposed toprotectit.”
Beside her, Kuyoc took another sip of his drink.
“Did you want to destroy Tulan?” he asked easily.
Ellie’s head snapped up.
“Of course not,” she retorted.
His sharp eyes met her steadily from under a fringe of white hair.
“You followed the path the mirror set for you,” he said.
Ellie was painfully conscious of Adam beside her. They hadn’t talked about any of that yet.
She had just dropped Kuyoc’s potential ancestral legacy into a sinkhole. She could hardly do that and then fail to tell him the truth about it.
“Yes,” she confessed.
Kuyoc shrugged. His shoulders relaxed as he took another sip of his drink.
“Well, there you are, then,” he concluded.
“That’s it?” Ellie demanded with a flash of temper.
