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Curio Citizen: Chapter One


CHAPTER ONE


Some people feel whole all their lives, or so I’m told.

When I was a kid, I would lie in bed and look down at my feet, and my legs would feel a mile long. I would wiggle my toes just to make sure they were mine. I would walk around on them each day and sometimes ponder, in a child’s way, if my feet and I would ever feel like they fit.

As I grew, and my feet got farther and farther away from my brain, I still didn’t feel whole. I wasn’t sure if it was my feet, my brain, or everything in between that were at fault for the disconnect. Mamá had laughed once when I’d told her of those strange, private thoughts, years later at age eighteen. We’d been standing in front of a section of the Great Murals in Baja California, where ancient, painted giants hovered on stone over our heads.

“Maybe you came from one of them,” she’d said, pointing at the largest of the featureless figures of red and black, “and you still remember what it was like to be so tall.”

That was one of the last laughs we’d shared before an even greater piece of my disconnected soul blasted off in one huge chunk. A hollow cavity had grown deeper and deeper in its place ever after.

I guess that’s why I was back at the Great Murals in the Sierra de San Francisco nearly ten years after that moment of gentle laughter with Mamá. I was trying to fill a hole that could never be filled.

I can still feel how dry my mouth was with ash that day. Every breath I took threatened to shrivel up my lungs in seconds. My protective goggles, respirator mask, and what little skin was exposed between were coated in gray, coagulating-with-my-sweat powder. I tried not to sway too much from the bungee cord suspending me twenty feet above the ground, while I brushed ash from the rock ceiling over my head with delicate flicks of my wrist.

“There you are,” I said. “Thought I’d lost you.”

A curve of red paint peeked through the natural rock shelter’s coating of black soot. I recognized it as the right side of a painted human’s head, twice the size of mine.

“Wasn’t this one smiling before?” Crispin asked. He didn’t sway at all from his bungee cord several feet away; one of his strong thighs tensed as he braced his big soot-coated hiking boot against the rock wall. He’d raised his goggles. Rings of ash encircled his eyes, the contrast like brown topaz sparkling amongst dull pebbles. Ash smudged his flat nose as well and coated the rounded apples of his dark brown cheeks, making it clear he was smiling, though his wide mouth and dimpled chin were covered by a respirator mask. 

I huffed a small laugh as I glanced at the giant he was uncovering beside mine. He’d already exposed the entire red head and part of a black shoulder. Each of our ancient giants was divided vertically; half their bodies were red from crushed lava paint, the other half black from charcoal paint. 

“No, and don’t you dare paint a new one,” I said. “This isn’t a bar bathroom stall. And you better not be rushing this.”

I steadied my worn boots against the rock and went back to brushing ash from the ceiling.

“Ah, that’s right,” Crispin said. “You’re the one who used to smile.”

I frowned at the ceiling. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’ve been on edge since we got here.”

“Have you looked around?” I swung my arm in a grand gesture to our surroundings beyond the shade of the rock shelter.

Ash covered all. Wind whisked powder from the rocky ground so that it billowed and curled, an ominous threat to stir any lingering embers, but otherwise, there was no movement in sight. None. 

What had once been a thriving, mountainous desert with verdant cacti, spiky agave, sprawling elephant trees, and sharp-crowned yucca trees, was now a wasteland. Most of the plants would have been flowering this time of summer; we’d passed many blooms of all colors and sizes on our mule ride here before we’d reached the site of the recent blaze. Now, the stunted trunks of cacti and blackened elephant trees emerged from the ash like fingertips of drowning people. The overpowering smell of smoke clung to the air and swirled like oil on water.

Here, coyotes had once trotted and prowled, kangaroo rats and rock squirrels had scurried, jackrabbits had loped, and small brush lizards had crawled. Their bones were now motionless, buried by the ash of their fellow dead until one of us workers scraped a boot across them mid-stride, scattering their small, charred remains.

The worst part was the oppressive silence, the otherworldly aura similar to that of wandering through a landscape of freshly fallen snow, but with a much heavier heart.

“Beyond that, I mean,” Crispin said, waving away the view, though I knew it bothered him as much as it did the rest of our team. “This is your first time back here. After . . . you know.”

My brushstrokes grew shorter, like my wrist was a string plucked by a musician in a quick, mindless rhythm.

“You haven’t talked about it at all,” Crispin said softly. His voice wasn’t as muffled, but I didn’t look to see if he’d taken off his mask.

“There’s a reason for that, don’t you think?” I said, squinting through my clouded goggles as I kept brushing.

“I’m not pressuring you, I’m just saying . . .”

“I’m fine.”

“Carmen, you can argue all you want, but being here, Baja California, near—”

“I’m fine,” I said, harsher this time.

“Okay,” he said, though I could hear the skepticism and pity in his voice. My jaw tightened; my boots pressed harder against the rock.

The headdress of the ancient giant began to emerge, resembling two prongs of a jester’s hat. Within the next hour of deliberate silence, I uncovered the figure’s entire head. There were no eyes, and no smile. The ancients never painted themselves smiling, but were always stoic and expressionless silhouettes we archaeologists dubbed “monos.” It had become one of my favorite aspects of prehistoric artwork, the lack of obvious emotion. 

I felt a swell of comfort and relief that I had saved at least this painting’s blank face from destruction. We were lucky that the wildfire’s devastating flames had been limited in height by the low-lying desert scrub. If we’d been in a thick pine forest like some post-fire sites I’d visited, there was a chance that these seventy-five-hundred-year-old paintings, long protected by dry climate and isolation from humans, could have been wiped from existence in a single day.

I jolted as a loud bark broke through my concentration. I dropped my brush and grabbed my bungee cord to stop swaying as I looked down to see a medium-sized mutt sniffing my brush. 

“Smita,” I said with a smile. Smita yipped and pranced at my attention, wagging her bushy tail. She perked her ears, a quirky blend of pointed shepherd’s and floppy hound dog’s that gave her a perpetual lopsided, indecisive look. Her black and brown splotchy fur, speckled with white, was partially hidden by an orange vest with reflectors. She had a long pointed snout, but her mouth opened wide and her tongue lolled in a common expression that had earned her Hindi name: Smita. Happy Face.

Crispin laughed, full and rich, and gave a salute toward the ground. “Gaurav.” 

I looked past Smita to see Guarav grinning up at us with the same childish anticipation as his dog. His balding scalp and the champagne frames of his glasses looked sleek and wet in the flashing sunlight, though their thick lenses were smudged with ash.

“Carmen! Crispin!” He raised his hand and bushy black eyebrows in greeting, revealing a yellowed pit stain under his white button-down shirt, with ash smeared across the tan scrollwork down its front. He wore it untucked, often claiming it hid his growing belly, which he blamed on his increased desk time after taking on a board position in our private consulting company, Wildfire Archaeology Response Services. He’d insisted on coming in person to this particular site, however, and from his excitement, I figured I’d soon know why.

Behind him, a pair of middle-aged colleagues I didn’t know were in deep conversation in Spanish, with earnest eyes and sharp, ecstatic hand gestures. A gaggle of three college-age kids stood nearby, along with one of my coworkers, Pete Dockson.

“You’re supposed to be wearing a helmet,” Pete drawled, squinting his watery blue eyes up at me. Sunscreen was smeared across his pasty face; a big gob of it even clung to a strand of shining blond hair over his forehead.

I fought rolling my eyes. “You wanna come up here and do this?” I asked. He glared. “Didn’t think so. Don’t tell me how to do my job.”

“He’s right, Carmen,” Guarav said. “For next time. But you won’t need it where we’re going.”

I frowned. “Going? Guarav, I need to—”

“Trust me, guys, this is worth stopping for. It’s about the site down the hill.” He caught my eye. “We just got the lab results back. It’s a lot older than we thought.”

“Guarav, you know that’s not why I’m here this time,” I said, glancing back up at the ancient painting.

“I know,” he said, soft pity lurking in his gravelly voice. “But I need my best on this. And Carmen, trust me, you don’t want to miss it.”

“So, the petroglyphs, right? How old are they?” Crispin asked, already repelling down the rock. I did the same; I needed to get my brush from between Smita’s prancing paws anyway. My toes were still a couple feet off the ground when I started fiddling with my carabiner, struggling a little with my ash-coated fingers.

“Fifteen thousand years old,” Guarav blurted out like a kid with a huge secret.

My carabiner snapped open. I slid down the rope, burning my palm before I could stop myself with a jerk. Smita jumped up on my thigh and made me sway. “Hey now! Baitho, Smita. Baitho.”

Smita sat down at once, following my order in her only command-fluent language, Hindi. Even after Gaurav migrated to LA to teach at the university where I’d earned both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees, he hadn’t bothered educating Smita to bilingual status. I’d always admired how obedient she was, which was the only reason Gaurav was able to bring her with him on post-wildfire sites like this one. Though, like him, Smita had put on a few extra pounds after his switch to a board position. Knowing Smita, she was probably as bored as I would be if I had to glue myself to the confines of an eight-square-foot office.

I ruffled the thick fur between Smita’s ears to steady myself. 

Guarav laughed. “I thought that might get your attention.”

“Wait. Wait.” I let go of the cord and found my feet. “If those petroglyphs are as huge and detailed as you said last week, they would have to correlate with a sedentary lifestyle. That would undermine everything we know about prehistoric life in this region.”

“Guarav, you’re serious?” Crispin said. “That new art is twice as old as the murals?” He waved at the paintings over our heads and glided down his bungee cord with more finesse than I’d managed from such startling news.

Guarav nodded, barely containing his broad grin behind his mustache and goatee. “We’ve found something big, guys. I want you in on it.”

“Unless you want to keep piddling with those,” Pete said with an almost-sneer. A woman beside him looked perturbed, but said nothing.

“Let me introduce you,” Gaurav said, nodding to the strangers. I picked my way out of my harness and wiped my hands on my khaki shorts. Only ashy streaks resulted.

“I’d like to introduce you to Professor Luis Ramos Franco of the National School of Anthropology and History,” Gaurav said with a genial smile at the man, whose short brown hair was ruffled and sweaty from his recent mule ride into the site. Our handshake was warm and damp. His leather-banded watch wiggled over his plastered arm hair; the gold-framed clock’s face was too dusty for me to read the time.

“And ecologist for the Climate Change Impacts Project,” Guarav continued, “Señora Julieta Mendez Herrera.”

“Julieta, por favor,” the woman said as she extended her hand to me. Her white hair fluffed around her head in a messy bun, and though she wore sturdy khakis, her navy blouse was flowy and sophisticated, with a colorful collar of embroidered flowers. Her soft-looking skin was lined with venerable wrinkles.

“Luis, Julieta, this is Crispin Johnson and Carmen O’Dwyer,” Guarav said.

I smiled and shook Julieta’s hand. Her four chunky silver rings had soaked in the warmth of the August day. 

“Es un gusto conocerte. Gaurav has said great things about you both,” she said. Her accent was coastal; she spoke so fast that her vowels were a blur in Spanish, though when she switched to English, she spoke slowly and took care with her pronunciation. 

“Gracias. Nos da gusto estar aquí,” I said. “I would hate to miss out on this; thank you.”

She smiled wider, I hoped in approval of my confidence. I had a history of coming across as overeager. I’d tried to temper my enthusiasm over my career so that I wouldn’t seem like a perpetual wide-eyed undergrad when, in truth, I was twenty-eight years old with a graduate degree and five years in the field under my belt.

“I was uncertain how many outsiders we should include in this discovery, but Guarav assures me that you are both valuable assets. Your Spanish sounds Poblana,” she added with a smile that reminded me of my abuela.

My smile faltered. “Sí. Mi madre venía de La Ciudad de Puebla.” 

My whole family was from Puebla on my mother’s side, and it was easy to tell. My accent was markedly distinct, songlike and melodic, varying in pitch, particularly when asking a question. The Poblano accent was often referred to as “cantadito” by non-locals.

“¿Y tu padre—O’Dwyer—viene de Estados Unidos?” Julieta guessed. I nodded; my smile twitched into an awkward silence.

I didn’t like to think about my father, Kevin Joel O’Dwyer, who had skipped town when I was eight, but he was responsible for Mamá’s decision to emigrate from Mexico to the US when they married. Dad was of Irish descent born in Colorado, but Mamá, Lucia del Carmen Pérez Aguilar de O’Dwyer, was born in Puebla. My hair was thick and dark brown like hers, my skin the color of sand on a stormy beach but with Dad’s freckles scattered across my cheeks and shoulders like seashells. My eyes were the same evergreen as Dad’s mother’s, Grandma Maisie (who I’d only met twice), but I’d inherited my mother’s wide cheekbones and the gentle curve of her jaw, her angular nose, and full lips. My proportions were an echo of hers as well. Five feet six, thin-waisted, wide-hipped, and big-busted, though my career’s penchant for taking me to rugged terrains gave me muscles she had never possessed.

Ethnic was often a word people used to describe me, especially white people. Fellow Latinx generally accepted me without comment, but some people would often ask, bluntly, what race I was. Ordering coffee—Where are you from?—as I stood with my hand outstretched for the cup in the barista’s hand. Or filling up a gas tank—I couldn’t help but notice how unique you look!—as I watched the digital numbers take too long. At a part-time job interview as an undergrad—Tell me, what is your heritage?—before I could even sit down, or worse—Can I see your green card?

“Pete’s finished assessing safe zones,” Gaurav said, rescuing me from sharing more details of my family, “so we can take a straight shot to the site.” 

Pete folded his arms across his chest. His chin was raised so high, his nod looked like a pigeon’s head bob. I shoved my harness, tangled bungee cords, and jingling ring of carabiners into my backpack, which had been leaning in the shadow of the murals. I hesitated as I glanced at the painted giants overhead, still mostly covered in soot.

“My interns just finished La Natividad section of the murals,” Luis said, gesturing to the three college kids. “They’re my best. They’ll take over from here.”

I forced a smile. I knew it wasn’t my right to be so possessive. Sure, I was half-Mexican, but I’d spent my entire life in the US. Those interns had more of a right to the Great Murals than I did, no matter how emotionally attached I might be. Still, I couldn’t help but aim a subtle glare their way with a clear warning that they had better do a perfect job.

“All right, what are we waiting for?” Crispin said, rocking once on his heels. “Lead the way, Gaurav.”

“Pete,” Guarav said, gesturing ahead. Pete smiled like a weasel and took the lead to navigate us through the stunted-tree-dotted landscape. The ground felt mostly firm and stable as we stayed within a path that Pete’s team had marked off between double rows of wire stakes with hot-pink plastic ribbons tied to the tops.

I tried to resist looking back again at the murals up the slope, but I couldn’t cut the string of longing from my heart or fill the guilty pit in my stomach, knowing I was leaving them to the hands of undergrads.

“I have to say, this is a unique situation,” said Julieta as she fell in line beside me. “I’ve studied quite a few wildfire locations in the past fifteen years, but none have turned into an archaeological site.”

“Well, that’s our specialty,” I said. “Glad we can be here to help. You’d be surprised how often wildfires expose archaeological finds that we’d never know were there otherwise, buried under the topsoil.”

She smiled with a ponderous nod. “They expose truths for my line of work as well. It’s amazing to think about how much our climate has changed since these petroglyphs were made. How much it’s continuing to change. I’ve researched the causes of prolonged droughts and subsequent effects for years. I’ve studied the ecology so much, I haven’t stopped to think about what the people were like back then. Being here is changing that.” Her eyes twinkled with excitement. “Wait until you see the carvings. They’re as detailed as any Aztec temples I’ve seen, but those temples are less than two thousand years old, yes?”

My heart beat faster. “That’s right. If these new ones are fifteen thousand years old . . . well, if it gives you some perspective, the Great Murals were only painted around seventy-five hundred years ago. The only evidence we’ve got in all of the Americas of detailed stonework from before that are small sculptures and figurines. People lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle back then; they were always on the move. The notion of stable civilization—cities, temples, walls, pyramids, traditional agriculture—didn’t occur in Mexico until the Olmecs thirty-five hundred years ago.” 

I could have gone on for hours, but I doubted Julieta wanted a full history lesson. I’d learned through the years when to stop before people’s eyes glazed over and to save details for my academic papers.

“Increíble,” she said. “To think how far we’ve come. What our species could still do if given enough time. But . . .” She looked over the landscape, and a sad frown settled on her face. “Al que se aleja lo olvidan y al que se muere lo entierran.”

Crispin lost his footing a few feet ahead, and I darted forward and caught his arm. He laughed and gave my hand a squeeze as he pulled his boot out of a small hole in the ground. A thin trail of smoke wheedled its way into the air from the hole, but it disappeared, nothing more than a remnant ember. Still, anger rumbled in my stomach.

“I thought you said this area was safe,” I called ahead to Pete, who hadn’t bothered looking back at Crispin’s yell of surprise. 

“It is,” he sneered. “I’ve held my red card longer than you, remember?”

“Yeah,” I said with a short laugh, “you’d think you’d be better at your job by now.”

“Carmen,” Gaurav said, sending me a subtle, stern frown. I forced my mouth to form a sober line when Julieta and Luis exchanged glances of worry as they walked past.

Crispin leaned in, bumping my shoulder with his. “Hey, ‘the board loves Pete,’ remember?”

I huffed at his echo of Guarav’s constant mantra on the subject, used whenever I bluntly pointed out Pete’s inadequacies. Pete had been assigned the role of division supervisor for our most important projects for years. He’d screwed up more than once on other sites, leading to minor blazes and unsteady footing. I didn’t think Gaurav was too fond of him, either, but he never said so. And now that Gaurav was on the board himself, he was even less likely to criticize.

“What did Julieta say a second ago?” Crispin asked.

“Oh, it’s . . . similar to the phrase, ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ but like . . . those who go away are forgotten, and those who die are buried.” I paused. “My mother used to say that. Mainly to remind me to chill out when I was upset. Put things out of sight, out of mind. Al que se aleja lo olvidan . . .”

I again swept my eyes over the landscape as we passed hollowed husks of tree trunks and stubs of cacti. Clearly, Julieta had used the phrase on a grander scale; humanity had turned a blind eye to the changing climate around us, kept the seemingly distant problems out of sight, out of mind. If we didn’t do something to stop it, fires like this were only the start. We would be the ones dead and buried if we kept pushing our problems away.

One cactus nearby was still green and healthy on its top, but the trunk was cracked and burnt to a tan color, lined with blackened stubs of needles, its base reduced to charcoal. It made me sad, knowing that its lush green head would soon succumb to the ravages the fire had dealt; the cactus would fall and die, inevitable. 

“It looks so different,” I said. Why shouldn’t the land be a mirror to how much my life had changed since the last time I was here?

“You sure you’re okay?” Crispin put his hand on my shoulder. I stiffened. Strands of my ponytail lay pinned under his strong fingers. I’d often admired how similar they were in shade, both a rich walnut brown. My hair silky, his skin smooth, both warm and soft when tangled together on a cool pillowcase. 

I rolled my shoulder. His hand fell to his side. The thin crow’s feet at his temples crinkled as he masked a wince with a smile.

“So, you excited?” I asked, slipping my hands into my pockets.

“Of course, I am,” he said. His eyes sparked, and his broad forehead lost all lines of concern as he grinned. “We dropped everything in New Mexico to come here, didn’t we? I could have stayed there researching our dear old Jornada Mogollan.”

“Like you would have.” 

He chuckled. “I was ready to chase the next fire, anyway.”

I knew how he felt. Chasing fires was what we lived for. Wildfire archaeology was a niche job, to be sure, but as wildfires became more frequent, so did the need for archaeologists when some park ranger would call us up wondering what to do with some ancient figurine or pottery sherds. For me, the possibility of brand-new discoveries and the drop-everything-at-a-moment’s-notice lifestyle was exhilarating. We’d arrive as soon as the flames were suppressed by firefighters and bordered in flame retardant powder, ready to comb the ashes for any newly exposed artifacts. 

I had studied sites from all manner of different cultures and locations throughout my career, trying to answer the perpetual questions of who and how and why—questions that no anthropologists would ever truly know the answers to, yet we wanted to weigh in all the same. We fancied ourselves academics, but really, we each did it just to satisfy our own damn curiosity. What were people like so many years ago? How were they the same as us? How were they different? What on Earth did they use this bizarre tool for? 

Or, my job—what the hell were these artists thinking when they painted this?

The closer we got toward the fresh site that the devastating Baja California wildfire had unveiled, the more my excitement grew. I always felt guilty at times like these, when other people’s and animals’ sufferings yielded discoveries that dazzled my mind. The local rancheros had been the focus of the firefighters’ protection during this wild blaze, so little was harmed as far as buildings and homes went, but the desert ecosystem was obliterated within days. The animals and vegetation people relied on were gone, and in some cases, their livelihood along with it. My guilt was even heavier now after my conversation with Julieta, who had reminded me that these wildfires were a sign that all of Earth’s and humanity’s well-being was at stake with our changing climate. Our ancestors had faced such drastic changes in the past and won by the skin of their teeth. Would we?

Yet, my guilt fled entirely when we arrived at the site of the new discovery. 

I stared with wonder at a large sculpture standing in a shallow pit in the ground, surrounded by nothing but a wide expanse of ash. The rear half of the sculpture looked like a natural boulder, but the front-facing panel was chiseled into one of the most detailed bas-reliefs I had ever seen. The bas-relief was shaped like an arch, no less than fifteen feet wide and six feet high, though I suspected it was much taller because the lower half curved inward, suggesting it might be a full circle. For now, the beautiful carvings disappeared into the ash and soil at the boulder’s base.

The wildfire had exposed the top of the stunning petroglyphs; it was up to us to dig them the rest of the way out. Pete’s team had gotten a good start throughout the past week, regardless of my criticisms of his personal leadership style. The lower half of the art was off-color brown, showing the layer where they’d dug through the ash to hit the soil underneath.

“See? What did I tell ya?” said Gaurav.

I hopped the few feet down into the pit, feeling a familiar seed of awe budding in my chest and blossoming into my mind with heady elation. I could barely take all the artwork in; my eyes wandered in dizzying circles around the outer edge of the arched panel, which was carved with a series of geometric reliefs that resembled gemstones, as if a lapidary had abandoned the fine jewelry business and decided that dull limestone was a far more worthwhile medium.

Thin lines of obsidian were embedded in the grooves between each relief, so the boulder glimmered in the sunlight. The pale stone on either side was so flat and smooth, it didn’t seem like millennia could have passed at all, but the lab’s assessment of the obsidian and volcanic deposits couldn’t lie.

Two thin arches were chiseled within the boundaries of the gem-style border, and they overlapped in the bas-relief’s center like two petals around a flower pistil. A person’s profile was carved from head to shoulders within the center of the abstract flower. The person was bald, but looked feminine. She held her chin high with her eyes raised upward. She had no eyebrows and her eyelids had no lashes; her nose was small and straight, and her ears were smaller than most people’s. Her neck was long and slender, and though no other adornments were pictured, she wore some kind of mantel upon her shoulders that created an illusion of two rigid half disks standing upon them. Her thin lips wore an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile.

My eyes zinged like ping-pong balls from one side of the bas-relief to the other. A smaller bas-relief of a man holding an upright staff stood within one arch, while in the other, a woman supported a basket on her head. They each had long hair bound upon their heads; the man had a bushy beard. 

None of the depictions of people were solid, monochromatic silhouettes like I was used to seeing on stone walls from fifteen thousand years ago, hell, even from thirty thousand years ago. Unlike the geometric border, the chiseled people were not stylized in any way, but were pieces of realism. 

They were all smiling.

“Impossible,” I whispered. “This would have taken years.” 

Running with my suspicions that this artwork continued underground, perhaps to form a complete circle, I couldn’t help but compare it to the Aztec Sun Stone that Julieta had mentioned. The Sun Stone had been created with stone chisels like the bas-relief in front of me must have been, but the Sun Stone was made in the 1500s and had no doubt taken years to complete. The Aztecs were sedentary people, a huge, impressive civilization. If this new carving had taken even half as many years as the Sun Stone, it would mean that the ancient people, who we thought were hunter-gatherers in 13,000 BCE, had been a sedentary civilization. Either that, or this project was deemed important enough that generations had revisited this same spot—a spiritual pilgrimage, perhaps—to continue their ancestors’ work time and time again.

Regardless of how similar the shape and concentric circles were to many examples of Aztec calendar stones or sacrificial temalacatl stones, or meditative mandalas of Hindu and Buddhism, they were different from any civilization’s style that I had ever seen or heard about. Smoke lingering in the air conjured images of ancient campfires in my mind, but I found it harder than usual to imagine the people who could have created such a magnificent piece of art, no matter how vividly they were portrayed in stone.

I squinted as I saw faded scratches arranged in what looked like purposeful designs, etched in three rows above the ancient people as if watching over them.

“Is this . . . This can’t be an inscription,” I said. I looked over my shoulder at Gaurav and Luis. “Is it from a later date?”

“No, it’s not,” said Luis. “We have a top linguistic expert coming in this week.”

“Didn’t I tell you this was big, Carmen?” said Gaurav, patting Smita’s head beside him. She popped to her feet and looked around at all of us with eager, bright eyes and an expectant perk of her ears.

Crispin crouched beside me. He gave a low whistle of admiration as his eyes roved the artwork and possible writing from thousands of years before we’d thought the written word had ever been invented.

“Pete’s team has been digging all week so we can get a better look at the rest,” Guarav said. “I want you both to be there when they finish.”

“Of course,” I said. “You have a track hoe?”

“You should know by now that digging post-fire sites has to be done with care,” Pete said, his large hooked nose wrinkling as he sniffed. 

Of course I knew. The guy couldn’t even pick up sarcasm.

Guarav didn’t lose his childish grin. “We pace ourselves, do this right, and we could be doing academic tours all over the world next year. Be patient, Carmen.”

“Have you met her?” Crispin said. Gaurav chuckled.

Luis’s handheld radio crackled, making me jump. I tuned out his half conversation in Spanish, but was forced to pay attention when he announced his boss from the National Institute had arrived and was waiting for us at the makeshift town of tents we’d set up a ways off, blocked off from the fire zone by a massive table rock formation.

Though reluctant, I pushed myself off the ground and clapped dust off my hands. As much as I wanted to stick around, I knew that meeting the local boss would be necessary to put myself definitively on this project. I may have come to Baja California to pay homage to my mother by saving the Great Murals, but I couldn’t help but latch onto this new discovery and follow the team toward camp. I was arguing with myself about whether Mamá would frown upon my actions or not when, thirty or so feet down the hill, my reluctant trudge scuffed to a halt. Crispin bumped into me with a grunt.

“You two coming?” Pete drawled from ahead, eyeing us like we were the laziest people he’d ever met.

I glanced at Guarav, feeling an irritating flush of embarrassment, but straightened up. 

“There’s a little section of the Great Murals not far off the path,” I said, nodding to our left. “Can I check on it? Won’t be long.”

Guarav nodded, his smile sympathetic. “That’s fine. You checked this whole area, Pete?”

“Of course I did,” Pete replied. “All cooled off and solid as a rock.”

“I’ll stay with you,” Crispin said. He lowered his voice. “I don’t care how safe Pete says this area is.”

I huffed a wry laugh and headed left, eyeing the departing group until they were out of sight. Crispin tagged along for fifty or so feet until we entered the shade of another rock shelter, dusted with soot. I remembered it from my visit years ago, a smaller section of the four hundred Great Murals in the regions of Baja California and Baja California Sur. Yet, this one was nearly unrecognizable now without the surrounding shrubs and cacti. An elephant tree had once lorded over the outcrop, the roots sprawling around the rock. Now, the tree trunk was a severed hand; the gnarled roots clung to the rock like dead, charred fingers. 

I looked at the ceiling of the rock outcrop. Amidst the ash, a few painted deer frolicked beside two featureless mono figures of humans. I let out a soft breath of relief. At least this mural hadn’t been harmed.

I lowered my gaze from the ceiling and inspected the rock wall at the back of the natural shelter. The elephant tree’s roots snaked down the jagged rock and coalesced into a blackened mesh on the ground. Through the mesh, any soil that may have once existed was burned away. The wildfire had exposed a hole. 

“Crispin, look.”

I pointed at the mesh near my boots. Despite Crispin’s cautious, trained steps, ash puffed up as he joined me.

“What is it?” he asked. “Woah. Is that—” 

“More,” I said. I crouched and brushed aside black, twisted bits of cacti and yanked at stubborn scrub roots, though the thicker elephant tree roots wouldn’t budge. A black pyro beetle, seeking a place to lay its eggs in the heat of the receding wildfire, scuttled out of the way.

With Crispin’s help, we cleared away enough of the charred roots to reveal a rocky hole about three feet across. Gem-style carvings like what we’d observed at the site behind us crawled down the stone into the narrow entrance of a cave.

“We’ve gotta go get everyone,” Crispin said.

“No.” I caught his leg. He swayed and playfully kicked my hand away. “Crispin, wait. Everyone else will descend on it like a flock of vultures.”

“Respectful vultures.”

“Yeah, but don’t you want to see it first?”

I fished for my hard hat in my backpack and settled it on my head. The yellow beam of its lamp illuminated more of the cave’s carved wall below, but I couldn’t see the bottom. I grabbed a rock near to hand and dropped it into the black maw. It hit with a dry clatter in seconds.

“It isn’t deep.” 

“Carmen, we should wait. It might be unstable.” 

“Pete said this area is safe.”

“Yeah, and I thought we agreed Pete’s a dumbass.”

“Do you really want him to get ahold of this first? He’ll take all the credit.” 

“We’re all on the same team, Carmen,” Crispin said, but I could hear a tilt in his voice; I just had to drop something heavy on my side to change his mind. 

“Yeah, but it could be our names in the papers. You and me, Crispin. We weren’t in on the first discovery. With this, our names will be in the academic journals, too. It’s guaranteed.”

His mouth shifted sideways as he thought it out. Crispin had a weak spot for any situation that could put our names on the same roster—whether it was in a company assignment or in a newspaper. Even better when it was side by side under the title of an article in a scientific journal. That had happened only once, but I could tell by the flicker of excitement in his eyes that he was imagining the possibility of us coauthoring a fresh article on a world-changing archaeological discovery. 

“Ah, fine.”

“Atta boy.”

I grinned and pulled my harness out of my backpack before digging around for a bungee cord with shaky fingers, but I couldn’t find a single carabiner. I could hear them rattling, so I pored through the pockets and shook the pack a couple of times. I growled in frustration, and my heart started racing. Nausea rose in my stomach. 

“Hey,” Crispin said. His large hand came into view, holding a carabiner. I took it and sent him a quick, stiff smile. 

“Thanks.” 

“You don’t have to go down there.” 

“Yes, I do. And I’m fine. Help me strap up.” 

I told myself I was being stupid. I’d spent the better half of my career delving into caves and wriggling between tight spaces of rock formations to reach some hidden panel of prehistoric art. But even after years of experience, I had an instinctual fear of going any place where walls could threaten to crush me.

Being here seemed to be exacerbating my panic more than usual. At eighteen years old, Mamá had taken me on a mother-daughter trip to see the Great Murals. On our way back to the US, we were driven off the road by a drunk driver, or maybe some shithead involved in the chaotic trifecta of cartels, Mexican government operatives trying to dispel them, and US border patrols, all of whom had taken over northern Baja California and made it hostile, even for passersby. Regardless of the cause, our car had rolled and crashed, mangled like a picked-at carcass. We were crushed by squeaking, groaning, grating, suffocating metal. I made it out.

Mamá didn’t. 

I didn’t talk about that experience much, but I’d made the mistake of confiding in Crispin once; his deep brown eyes had held a tinge of pity for me ever since.

I closed my eyes. I pushed the sounds of screams, mine, Mamá’s, out of my brain. I counted backward from ten, pulling on my years of developed coping mechanisms to force myself to stop focusing on the past, and instead focus on the next step toward the future.

I stood up. Crispin double-tied my bungee cords and locked carabiners, triple-checking every knot and hookup to make sure I wouldn’t bust my ass. His movements were slower than I’d prefer, but his methodical approach did help me calm down. 

“All right, you ready?” he asked.

I took steady breaths, one inhale through my nose, then out through pursed lips, in, out, in, out. 

“Yes.” 

Crispin tugged hard on my harness once. Satisfied, he held the attached cord in both hands and stepped back from the edge of the cave pocket. I scooted to the edge, and he started lowering me down. I found footholds with care as I listened to my surroundings. Hopefully, the fire was recent enough that any animals hadn’t had a chance to make the cave home. 

As my rock test had predicted, the drop wasn’t far, but the hazy clouds of ash hid the sunlight as soon as I was past the top ledge. 

“You okay?” Crispin called. 

“Yeah.” My boots hit bottom with a thump. Heat swelled around me, trapped underground, not yet cooled by the wind above.

“I won’t let go. I’ll be right up here,” he said, his pity laced with condescension.

“I know,” I answered, sounding more bitter than I intended. “Thanks.” 

“You know I got you.” 

I turned around and looked up. My headlamp flashed off the ash-covered walls near the surface like blinding snow, but when I lowered my gaze from the glare, the rocky walls below were clean, and on every surface my headlamp illuminated, chiseled artwork shone.

My eyes widened as I turned in a slow circle.

“Jesus, Crispin. This is . . .”

Words failed. Multiple bas-reliefs covered the cave walls. Each individual carving was smaller than the magnificent chiseled boulder aboveground, but there were so many, they stretched at least twenty feet on either side of me. Each separate relief was defined by a circular, gem-style border, their grooves filled with obsidian shards. Inside each circle were two overlapping ovals. As I’d suspected when looking at the boulder on the surface, the carvings continued into a full circle.

And just like the sculpted boulder, the ovals in these new pieces contained realistic bas-reliefs of people’s profiles, reminding me of an Alphonse Mucha Art Nouveau piece. But unlike the boulder, this cave didn’t restrict people to the color of stone. The figures were invigorated with paint concocted from red crushed lava and yellow ochre, black charcoal, and white chalk. People in each center space were painted white and adorned with yellow swirls or slashes across their skin. The smaller people on either side of them were painted mostly in red and black.

Overall, these new bas-reliefs were even more detailed, more colorful, and gleamed with more obsidian than the sculpture above. This place felt like a sanctuary.

“Carmen? What’s down there?” Crispin’s voice sounded muffled by the ash swirling around.

“Tell you in a minute!” The slack from my bungee cord trailed behind me as I walked down the row of large art panels, my headlamp shining in frustrating spotlights that couldn’t illuminate everything at once. I noticed that each bas-relief had two small yellow circles positioned along each overlapping oval, and from bas-relief to bas-relief, the circles appeared to travel along each oval’s edge, growing closer together as the series of art went on. They were always parallel to one another, but they never touched.

In places, the stone artwork was weathered and speckled with “popcorn”—a nickname for bubbly calcite rock formations often found in caves. In another place, a stalactite had formed less than an inch from a wall, too close for a human hand to squeeze behind to chisel such detail. Stalactites took thousands of years to form, and this one nearly touched the floor. If the stalactite and the popcorn had time to grow on top of the artwork, that indicated the artwork was thousands of years old, possibly the same fifteen thousand years old as the carved boulder Guarav and his colleagues had already dated.

My lips parted as I reached the end of the series, where a chorus of painted handprints decorated the wall. 

I burst into a smile. This was not the first discovery of ancient painted hands around the world, not by far. It was a worldwide phenomenon that proved links between all cultures of humanity—similar ways of thought, even in the first inkling development of art. Many anthropologists argued that engagement in artistic expression was one of the first signs that made us human. The mental capacity for abstract thought, for symbolism and metaphors to describe our reality, that was what separated us from our primitive hominid forebears. 

Unable to resist, I pressed my palm against a handprint at eye level, feeling the cold stone and smooth paint that a distant ancestor from fifteen thousand years ago had touched. An exhilarating thrill ran through me that raised goose bumps on my arms. I closed my eyes, soaking in the feeling of profound connection to that ancient person, long dead, yet still living on through this single painted handprint. 

I opened my eyes, then tilted my head a little as I inspected the handprint. The width and height of the palm fit my hand, but the print had longer fingers. I slipped my hand away and realized that the disproportional length was due to an extra set of knuckles.

I looked over the other handprints. They all possessed four knuckles on every finger as opposed to my three. Why had these ancient people felt the need to exaggerate the length of their handprints? What did it symbolize? 

I knew my questions would only increase as time went on, but perhaps with enough study, I’d find the answers. My heart thrummed as my mind raced through predictions of my future—weeks, months, spent down here and at other sites in this region, deciphering clues and finding answers.

I raised my gaze higher, above the reaching handprints, but frowned. Another bas-relief cast shallow shadows and glinted with obsidian, but its paint was smeared and messy, like a child had scribbled on the walls in the throes of a temper tantrum.

I had to get higher. My headlamp splashed light off the rough stone walls until I saw a natural rock staircase leading up to the art panel. I wiped sweat off my palms and heaved myself up the first of the haphazard stack.

“Carmen, what did you find?” Crispin’s voice trickled in.

“Not sure yet,” I grunted as I climbed up the next rock and made it to the top ledge.

My headlamp lit up the art panel in a burst. More bas-reliefs of profiled people, encircled by overlapping ovals, covered the panel.

“Carmen, come on. You have to say something!” 

“It’s amazing, Crispin! Bas-reliefs, painted handprints, and here . . .” I frowned and narrowed my eyes as I studied the new panel. A beautiful bas-relief lurked underneath smears of paint and jagged etchings of a far more primitive nature than most ancient art I had seen, definitely less sophisticated than the Great Murals. But there were still some distinguishable elements. 

“Human figures,” I called. “Like, traditional figures you’d expect . . . Stylized monos, silhouettes, spears, arrows, but no animals. Both petroglyphs and paintings. But why are the bas-reliefs so different? What made people regress?”

As I stared, I realized that the crude etchings and painted figures weren’t the only messy aspects of this panel. The bas-relief underneath was marred and cracked in places, and huge chunks were missing. It looked like the bas-relief had been sliced and beaten with considerable, destructive force.

I had seen similar occurrences in rock art before, evidence that one image had been superimposed on top of an older image, sometimes destroying the old artwork in the process. Sometimes the reason was unknown, perhaps as simple as an update in style by the ancient dwellers, but other times, the cover-up had greater implications. Cultural superimposition was the technical term for “correcting” images wrought by previous generations because of a change in opinion toward the subject. I had all sorts of personal names for the practice that were far more insulting.

Was cultural superimposition what this ancient vandal had in mind? If so, their change in opinion was disturbing.

Painted spears fleeted across the bas-relief between etched stick figures of people. Some people were painted red or black; others were white and yellow. One red person was a pincushion for arrows, their prone body painted right over a fissure in the bas-relief of a yellow-and-white-painted face. Above, what appeared to be a white bird flew upward, but its wings were tattered and red ochre blood trailed behind it. A chalk and yellow ochre person lay inside the bird as if the creature had swallowed them. The person was either sleeping or dead.

I tensed when I heard a voice join Crispin’s on the surface. They were arguing, and it didn’t take me long to decipher Pete’s obnoxious, nasal tone. My body heated with a flare of possessiveness over the amazing creation I’d just discovered.

I hoped Crispin might cover for me by saying I’d fallen and nothing was down here, but that hope fizzled when my headlamp flashed over Pete’s lanky body scrambling down the cave pocket’s entrance. He wore a hard hat with a headlamp, but our “safety expert” hadn’t bothered to strap into a harness, and in lieu of a bungee cord, he was hanging on to a long, dangling tree root to lower himself down to my level.

I cursed and sidled down the rocky ledge as quickly as I could. 

“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.

“Could ask you the same thi—” Pete’s curled lip slackened into awe as his wide bug-eyes surveyed the artwork all around us. Then he started laughing. “Oh, man, look at this. When I tell the board . . .”

“Knew you’d try to take all the credit,” I said. “What are you even doing here?”

“Guarav told me to come check on you,” he said. “Doesn’t trust you to be careful.”

“More like he doesn’t trust your word that this place is safe.”

“Of course it’s safe, you insubordinate sl—”

“You do not want to finish that sentence,” I said, taking a step toward him. He jerked back a little, which would have given me a sense of satisfaction if his sudden movement hadn’t tugged on the root he was using for stability. Soil and small rocks scattered to the cave floor. I eyed the ceiling—it wasn’t all solid stone.

“Okay,” I whispered, suddenly terrified that the smallest sound might cause a cave-in. “Okay, let’s just go back up, and we’ll figure this out from there.”

“Pete, Carmen, come on!” Crispin called. “We’ll get the rest of the team.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, my eyes on the root Pete still held. “Crispin, pull me up! We’ll get a cord and harness down to you, Pete.”

Pete snorted at me and pulled on the root again. Everything seemed to slow as the root unraveled from the mesh of roots, soil, and gravel overhead like a zipper on an old coat, catching in little jerks as it zip-zip-zipped from the cave ceiling.

Wind rushed in. Dormant embers, buried in the roots of trees and cacti all along the cave tunnel’s ceiling, invisible until now, burst into flame.

Pete screamed. The charred trunk of the elephant tree cracked and fell through a gap in the ceiling. I ducked and covered my head as it crashed into the high-up bas-relief, the one superimposed with messy, painted depictions of ancient war. The bas-relief crumbled into chunks of rock and showers of dust. Sparks showered down, and through the orange spray, a pale-blue light shown from within the sundered rock like a lighthouse’s beacon. 

I squinted at the strange light through the chaos, but I felt a hard jerk on my harness. A burning scrub tumbled down from the surface, and I darted around it toward the cave’s opening. I grabbed Pete, who was trying to scramble up the rock. My ash-dusted hands slipped on the rock face, but between my frantic climb and Crispin’s pull, we made it to the top ledge. 

A whoosh of flames ran through the cave as if lit by gasoline and burst to the surface. 

Crispin heaved us away, and I collapsed into a shaking heap. Pete coughed, found his feet first, and ran without a second’s glance for our safety.

I jumped to my feet as flames rushed toward us along the network of roots, spreading beyond the cave in a starburst. Fire flared up at the rock outcrop over the cave where the beautiful giants of the Great Murals looked down. We watched, at first as frozen and helpless as they were. 

I exchanged a wide-eyed glance with Crispin, and we took off running down the hill.

The flames followed us.