The Actual Star

by Monica Byrne

Genres: Sagas; Visionary & Metaphysical; Alternative History sci-fi

Synopsis

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas meets Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, as acclaimed author Monica Byrne (The Girl in the Road) crafts an unforgettable piece of speculative fiction about where humanity came from, where we are now, and where we’re going—and how, in every age, the same forces that drive us apart also bind us together.

"A stone-cold masterpiece."—New Scientist

The Actual Star takes readers on a journey over two millennia and six continents—telling three powerful tales a thousand years apart, all of them converging in the same cave in the Belizean jungle.

Braided together are the stories of a pair of teenage twins who ascend the throne of a Maya kingdom; a young American woman on a trip of self-discovery in Belize; and two dangerous charismatics vying for the leadership of a new religion, racing toward a confrontation that will determine the fate of the few humans left on Earth after massive climate change.

In each era, a reincarnated trinity of souls navigates the entanglements of tradition and progress, sister and stranger, and love and hate—until all of their age-old questions about the nature of existence converge deep underground, where only in complete darkness can they truly see.

Release date: September 14, 2021

Publisher: Harper Voyager

Print pages: 624

Sample

Prologue

Submission to the Tzoyna

from Niloux DeCayo

Yazd, Persia

7 Ajwal 3 Ch’en, Long Count 15.10.13.11.0

14 January, 3012

As of 4:24 a.m. Persian Time, the last of the world’s ice is gone. This means the Diluvian Age is over. We have to decide what the new age will be.

Over the last thousand years, Laviaja has remade the world according to the belief that we don’t belong to this reality, and that our true and lasting reality is the Other World, Xibalba, which we can only reach through constant viaja.

But now I want to propose that Xibalba is not a real physical place at all. That rather, what we call Xibalba is just a shift in understanding of our lived reality. Also, I propose that Leah Oliveri never really disappeared. My guess is that, if we were to search the Great Cave, we’d just find her bones alongside all the others.

I understand what it means to say this. I understand it’ll upset a lot of people. But now that the ice has melted, the climate will begin to stabilize, and I think it’s the duty of any sofist to question whether the beliefs that have served us till now are still useful for a post-Diluvian era.

I’m requesting the standard discussion period of 36 hours. Thanks.

 

Book IThe Light Zone

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

C. S. LEWIS

1952

 

Tzoyna

3 Batz’ 14 Pop, Long Count 10.9.5.7.11

9 December, 1012

Ket set the obsidian blade to her skin, then heard a whistle. She looked up. Her brother, Ajul, was staring down at her.

“What are you doing?” he yelled.

Ket felt she’d been caught at something vulgar. She dropped the blade into its nest of moss.

Ajul slung his spear across his back and leapt down to the court. For a long moment he hung in space, dappled with sunlight, then landed and stood with the grace of a stag.

Ket kept her eyes down. Her brother was rarely angry, but he was still a giant, a hand taller than even their captain of the guard. He drew his spear and circled, the point leveled at her, as if approaching prey. Ket cowered. To make eye contact was an act of challenge.

“Ket!”

Ket looked up.

Ajul was smiling, exasperated.

She let her breath out. He’d been teasing her. He was still just her big brother.

He sat down and set his spear beside him. He said nothing about the blade for now. It was another windless, bright, blazing day. The grackles shrieked overhead.

Ajul asked, “Why this place, little sister?”

Ket sensed he was testing her.

“This is the old ball court,” she said. “It’s one of the four moorings of the Tzoyna.”

“And what are the other three moorings?”

“The dayfall boulder, the dayrise ceiba, and the well to the right of the sun.”

“In which direction are you facing?”

She frowned at the simplicity of the question. “Left of the sun.”

“And which city lies beyond?”

“Chichen Itza.”

“Yes, that is far away, but it is the biggest city. Good.” He reached over, took hold of her legs, and pushed her a quarter round. She giggled. Her siblings were allowed to touch her body; no one else was. It felt good to be touched. “And now which direction are you facing,” he asked, “and what city?”

She couldn’t see past the next hill, but she knew. “Dayrise, and Katwitz.”

“Good.”

“Will I get to meet the stupid merchants tonight?”

“Do not call them stupid.”

“Ixul does all the time.”

“But only among us, little sister. Only among the royal family.”

“All right.”

He turned her another quarter, so that she was facing away from him. “Now?”

“Right of day, and Oxwitza.”

He turned her another quarter.

“Dayfall, and . . .”

Ajul raised his eyebrows. “And?”

She wasn’t sure. “The encircling water?”

Ajul smiled. “Good enough, little sister.” He swung her one final time to face him.

Then Ajul picked up the blade and examined it. She wanted him to notice how careful she’d been, cushioning it in the moss. It was a family heirloom of rare green obsidian, shaped like the Great Star, Chak Ek’—four equal points, knapped as sharp as thorns. It had come to their lineage as a gift from some ancient royal house of the dayfall. When Ket had been a baby she hadn’t even been allowed to touch it. But ever since their parents had disappeared, Ajul and Ixul overlooked their sister’s transgressions, including stealing the blade from the family shrine and carrying it wherever she went, as other children would carry a doll.

Ajul held it up. “To me,” he said, “with a piece as fine as this, the edge of the obsidian looks like the edge of water. See?”

It was something their father had once said. Ajul was repeating him, whether he realized it or not. But Ket said nothing of that, and only leaned forward and squinted at the blade and saw what he meant: that at the edges, the color faded from green to grey to clear, like a petal of water that surged up the sand and disappeared.

She nodded, bashful.

Ajul took note of all her other instruments: mushrooms, bark paper, cloth, herbs, water, censer, clay bowl, kindling stick, crumbs of copal.

“Were you going to let blood, sister?”

Now came the direct question. Ket crossed her arms. She knew she wasn’t supposed to do it alone.

“Letting blood is a powerful act,” he said, “and even more powerful under the influence of the god. You may be starting something you are not prepared to finish.”

She pouted. “Then how can I ever prepare?”

“You are only seven years old.”

“I want to do it anyway.”

“Why?”

Ket focused on a snail oozing across the court, leaving a trail of sparkling slime. She wanted to tell her brother so much. But he and Ixul were very busy, the famous tall twins, meeting with farmers and merchants and slavers, or their daykeeper Mutna or their captain of the guard Upakal, or with emissaries from Pekwitz or Katwitz. They didn’t have time to look after her. So she had a lot of time alone during the hot, bright, quiet afternoons. She talked to herself so often that she’d stopped realizing when she was talking aloud and when she was not. She had favorite secret places around the palace. She’d sit on empty thrones and command invisible servants, or drape herself with jade for an invisible suitor. She burned blue cakes of copal just to watch the smoke. She climbed up the terraces from the river to the hilltops, like climbing giant stairways; then up the path to the old slate altar, down the lime roads, along secret forest trails that led to crumbling red temples, the stones split by young ceiba trees. She wandered along the haunted road to Tuntzap, a long-abandoned city in the next valley over, though turned back when she started feeling scared. She walked up to calabash trees and held out her hand, hoping one of the fruits would spit in her hand and make her pregnant, like the Bloodmaiden, the mother of the Hero Twins in all the old stories. She walked in abandoned fields, careful not to step on the spikes of dead maize. She waded in sluggish streams and watched how the sun shone through the trees and made jaguar skin on the ground. She played at the mouths of dry caves, the Cave of Hands and the Cave of Bats, but never dared to go in. And when she was very, very sure no one was watching, she even crept within view of the Great Cave itself, the black flame out of which she and her lineage were born; and sat on a stone at the entrance, and let the bright road of rain part around her.

“Ket,” said Ajul. “Answer me. Why do you want to let blood?”

“Because I want to help,” she answered, and it was the truth.

Ajul ran a finger down her cheek. He looked sad.

“You are already helping. You’re going to bowl the ball at our ascension tonight.”

“I know. But—”

“You have stayed awake. You have fasted. You have done everything you need to help us. If you want to let blood also, you have to know where the gods are stationed in the sky, and who the day is, and—”

“I know all that!” said Ket, impatient to prove herself. She pointed to a spot low on the horizon. “Chak Ek’ will appear there to bless your ascension.” She shifted her finger a bit. “The moon will rise there, late at night, and bless it also.” She dropped her hand to her lap. “Today is Three Batz’, who fastens our lineage in the past and the future.”

Ajul smiled and spread his hands. “I am impressed.”

“Good,” Ket spat before she could stop herself.

But Ajul just laughed. When he did, he was at his most lovely: he had the ancestors’ classic beauty, with big blossoming eyes. Ket adored him—his warmth, his piety, his ease of being, his slowness to anger, the way his body sprang from rest to readiness. She wanted to be around him more often, though she knew that was impossible. She could never possess him the way their sister Ixul did. The twins’ fame was beginning to spread. In the last year, embassies had arrived from as far as Chichen Itza, eager to see the young giants play the ball game. Ket had heard the servants whisper that they were the Hero Twins reborn, reincarnated in the lineage they founded.

“Is it true,” said Ket, “that you’re going to lead us into a new age?”

“Who told you that?” said Ajul. He sat up straighter and seemed pleased.

“That’s what the servants say. They say you’re going to end the drought and heal the land and bring everyone back to the way it used to be.”

He nodded. “This is what we intend. We want to build a realm where all people will prosper.”

“But you can’t do it without my help!”

Ajul sighed. He brushed back her bangs and ran his thumb across the jade tattoo on her forehead. It was also a four-pointed star, the symbol of their kingdom.

When he spoke again, his voice was quiet and serious. “Then I will not stand in your way any longer,” he said. “Have you expressed your intention to the gods?”

“I was waiting till I cut.”

“Do you understand you may see things that frighten you?”

“Like what?”

Ajul looked pensive. Then he said, “Father once told me that you see the city beneath the city, and the star behind the star. Try to remember everything you see. It will guide you later.”

Ket nodded. “I’ll be all right,” she said, “because you’re here.”

He smiled at her, cupped her cheek.

Then he got to his feet. “Eat one mushroom only,” he said. “Chew it well so that the god comes quickly. Then light the copal. I’ll prepare the rest.”

Ket put one withered mushroom in her mouth and began to chew. It was sour and rubbery, but she made herself chew it to a pulp before she washed it down with water. Then she sat quietly. She couldn’t back out now. That would be dishonorable. She had to be as brave as a captive facing the altar.

Ajul walked along the wall, his eyes on the ground. He picked up seven crumbs of limestone and then, murmuring the words of invocation, dropped four of them in a square around her. He took another crumb and threw it up to the Sun, who ate it. Another, he crushed in his hand, and scattered on the court as if sowing maize.

Finally, he sat back down and dropped the seventh crumb in her bowl. “Now the way is open,” he said.

Ket looked down at her instruments. It was hard to think straight. She tried to remember what to do next. She picked up the paper, her hands shaking; broke the roll in two, and pushed the pieces down into her cup. Then she folded her cloth next to the bowl and lined up the herbs and the censer, all in a neat row. Then she murmured her own prayer of invocation, calling on the gods to attend, though she would not abide any that meant her harm.

Then there was nothing else left to do.

She felt Ajul watching her.

She took a deep breath. Then she shivered. It was real this time, not play, never again play. The vines were beginning to spiral across the court; the god was arriving. She picked up the star blade with one hand and extended the first finger of her other hand.

“I ask the god of this place,” she said, “to heal the Tzoyna.”

She put the blade to her finger.

Nothing.

“You have to press, little sister,” her brother whispered, and she saw his hand reaching out to guide her, but before he could, she pressed hard and drew lengthwise.

Her finger split open, too deeply, already, she could see. Ajul hissed and got to his knees and was leaning over, now, telling her to let up and put it down and breathe and let it drip.

Ket’s hand hung over the bowl like a palm tree in a downpour. She blinked back sudden and involuntary tears. The pain astonished her into silence. She’d cloven her own flesh. Now there was a blazing hot little slice in her finger. She couldn’t hear anything. The blood made an unbroken stream for several heartbeats, then broke into shining kernels, each of which floated in space before hitting the paper and spreading from edge to edge.

Ajul was saying her name. But she couldn’t focus on his voice. She was mesmerized by the slit in her finger. She pulled it apart and saw the star-white of her bone.

“Stop,” said Ajul. He put the herbs in his mouth to wet them, pressed them to the cut, and folded the stanching cloth around her finger. She let him do it, watched him tie it off. She felt serene and detached. It was all right. He knew what to do. He picked up the copal, asking Xibalba’s forgiveness for the improvisation, and blew on it till the smoke bloomed.

“Ket. Focus. You have to continue.”

She looked up at him and squinted, as if peering from a great distance.

“Look into the smoke.”

She looked into the smoke.

Then her mouth fell open, and she was looking at herself from below.

Ixul sat under a cohune palm with the daykeeper, Mutna. Between them was a red cotton mat and a pile of maize kernels.

“Ask your first question,” said Mutna.

Ixul took one kernel and pressed it to her lips: a sign of respect. “Of Ajul and me, which is more like which Hero Twin?”

Mutna frowned. “That is not a proper question for divination. Besides, you can answer it yourself.”

Ixul nodded, her intuition confirmed. “I’m more like Xbalanque.”

“See? You already knew. Your nagual is a jaguar.”

“And Xbalanque is covered in jaguar skin.”

“Yes . . .” Mutna prompted.

“So Ajul is more like Hunajpu. I see. How long will we rule?”

“That is also not a proper question for divination.”

Ixul glowered, though she knew it wouldn’t do her any good. Mutna never let Ixul intimidate her. The tutor was proud and severe, of an ancient lineage of daykeepers. Her black braids made a glossy crown around her head.

“Recall,” said Mutna, “that a soul lives many lives. All of those lives have the same essential character. You and Ajul are twins. You were born only a few minutes apart, but on different days, and different gods rule those days. This means you have different destinies. More than that, I can’t say.”

Ixul hated not knowing. She felt contempt for the gods, hiding knowledge from her. Also, she was fasting—as was the whole royal household—and hunger made her quick to anger. She stared down at the sacred river. The water sparkled, unaware of any drought.

Mutna pointed at the kernels. “Try another question.”

Ixul pursed her lips. She thought of her little sister, probably lost in some fantasy above the city. “What is Ket’s nagual?”

“That, we can try to answer.”

Mutna grabbed a handful of kernels, swept the rest aside, and began placing them on her mat in groups of four. Ixul watched her work. The twins had learned their naguals long before. Ajul was a stag, Ixul was a jaguar—the daytime and nighttime faces of the Sun. Ixul hoped that Ket’s nagual would also be a majestic animal, bespeaking a greater destiny than her plainness suggested.

“May this petition be received by Xibalba,” said Mutna in a low and resonant voice. “May it be received in the day . . .”

A grackle passed low overhead. Ixul frowned, distracted.

“. . . in the light, in the morning . . .”

Ixul thought: Birds are not birds; they are messengers.

“. . . in the night, in the stars and the heavens . . .”

Ixul remembered the words of the philosopher: This world is a world of deceptions.

“. . . in the wind and the cold . . .”

This world is merely a representation of representations.

“. . . in the earth and the water . . .”

The sun we see is not the real sun.

“. . . in every slice of the day upon the world . . .”

The star we see is not the actual star.

“. . . I say, thank you to the day.”

Ixul looked back at the mat, where Mutna had set twelve piles, each with four seeds. A perfect cast. That guaranteed a strong answer.

Mutna sat back. “Now,” she said, “we must ask the day. Princess Ket Ahau was born on Twelve Ajwal, a very powerful day. Ask him directly.”

Ixul didn’t hesitate. The gods were her intimates; that was her birthright. She closed her eyes and said, “Dear Twelve Ajwal, tell me what you saw when my sister was born. What form crept into our mother’s mouth?”

“Now,” Mutna said, “soften your mind. Let the answer alight upon you, as a bee upon the hibiscus. You know more than you can tell.”

Ixul closed her eyes and began the catalogue of royal animals.

Quetzal? No.

Howler monkey? No.

Ocelot? No.

Crocodile? No.

She floated, summoning each animal in her mind, down to the smell of feathers.

Scarlet macaw? No.

Vulture? No.

White eagle? No.

Rattlesnake? No.

Still she felt nothing. She began the catalogue of lesser animals, feeling frustrated.

Peccary? No.

Wasp? No.

Crab? No.

Spider?

Yes.

A whip spider. A harmless, awkward bug that spent all of its time alone, staring with big eyes. Just like Ket.

Ixul opened her eyes. “Spider,” she said. “It’s a simple whip spider.”

Mutna raised her eyebrows. “Spiders can be noble,” she said.

“But not royal,” Ixul snapped. “Let’s go on. I still have many questions to ask.”

“I’ll allow two.”

“But—”

The look on Mutna’s face stopped her. The daykeeper had been her tutor ever since she was a child, and her parents had given her free rein to administer discipline whenever Ixul became too insolent. Ixul would become queen, which meant she must keep her passions in check and not display them constantly, like a howler monkey baring its anus.

Mutna folded her hands in her lap, waited.

Ixul composed herself. She went through her questions in her mind:

Why did our parents disappear?

Is Ajul’s and my carnal union offensive to Xibalba?

Why have all the great houses fallen in the lowlands?

Is there any royal blood left for Ket to marry?

What is Chichen Itza like?

What is Oxwitza like?

What is Tula like?

Ixul had philosophical questions, yes, but also questions to satisfy her curiosity—to know everything that Mutna had seen in her education abroad, to the dayfall and dayrise and left and right of the sun. She was jealous. She was impatient to start her own travels as queen. Until then, she’d gladly spend days interrogating Mutna, or anyone who had the fortitude to withstand her.

But her tutor was right: time was short. The delegations from Katwitz and Pekwitz were due to arrive by sundown. Pilgrims, farmers, and their families had been gathering all day in the city. She had to choose wisely. She had to ask the most important questions.

“What is Xibalba?” she asked.

Mutna’s eye twitched. “You test me, child,” she said.

Ixul shrugged to say: This is your charge.

Mutna turned and looked up the river. Ixul followed her gaze. Through the palm trees, they could see the entrance to Xibalba, the black flame in mid-ripple. Ixul feared looking directly at the Great Cave. Only noble blood was allowed even to come within sight of it.

“The Lakamhan school of thought,” said Mutna, “stated that if you step over that threshold, into the underworld, you’re in Xibalba. Whereas we who sit here are not in Xibalba. That there is a clear line separating this world from that world. But,” she said, holding up her finger, “I believe the Mutulian school of thought, which said that Xibalba exists in the very same space as we do. It is with us, all around us, like two circles overlapping. Xibalba is the place behind the place. We cannot reach it; we can only sense it, but there are some places where the borders are thinner than in others. Ritual is such a time and”—Mutna nodded to the black flame—“the underworld is such a place.”

“Where the Hero Twins entered to confront the gods of death.”

“Yes.” After a pause, Mutna said, “However, I do think the worlds have become farther apart in time.”

Ixul frowned. “Farther apart? How?”

Mutna shrugged. “That is the way of creation. There have been many creations before. Each one failed, and then humanity tried again.”

Ixul gazed at the slit in the mountain.

“You’ve been in there,” she said. She spoke in a whisper, though they sat in bright daylight. “Were you scared?”

“Yes,” said Mutna, and the swiftness of her answer was startling to Ixul. She had never known Mutna to be scared of anything. “That is its name, after all: the place of fear. But it is also a place of great wonder. When I assisted your father, the king, we followed the main avenue of rain up into the city. There were many turns of the avenue, and it took me many trips to learn them all, to learn the locations of the ladders and the markings on the walls, so I could lead the priestly retinue myself. You fear to disturb that which watches you, just beyond the torchlight. There are branches and false turnings everywhere. I have not explored them. In some places, the rain is so deep that you have to swim. You have to keep the torches aloft to protect them from the water.”

“But if Xibalba is the place of fear and Xibalba is all around us . . . do we live in fear? I don’t understand.”

Mutna pointed across the river. “Go fetch me a calabash,” she said.

The river was one of the only places where calabash trees still grew in the drought. Ixul got up and walked down the bank. She prostrated to the mountain and the sacred water, murmuring the words of permission; then gathered her skirt in one hand, waded across, plucked a young green fruit, and brought it back.

“Give me your knife,” said Mutna.

Ixul handed over her flint knife.

Mutna stabbed the calabash, and it fell apart in two halves. She put down the knife and placed one half on top of the other, so that it looked whole.

“Think of it like this,” she said. “The universe has three levels. What are they?”

“The underworld, the middleworld, and the heavens. The World Tree connects them all.”

“Yes. Think of this top half as the heavens and the bottom half as the underworld, and both of them together are Xibalba, the Other World.”

Ixul frowned. “But where is the middleworld?”

Mutna removed the top and held one half in each hand. “We live in the cut,” she said.

Ixul took one of the halves. She drew her finger over the oozing white flesh. “Tzoyna, the name of our kingdom,” she said, “means Mother’s Cut.”

“Yes, it does.”

“And we can’t escape it,” she said. “We’re reborn in the middleworld, over and over.”

“So some say.”

“Some?”

“There are different schools of thought on this subject, as well.”

Ixul’s mood darkened again. She wanted to know for sure. “If we’ve already lived many lifetimes, hundreds in the deep past, to the time of the Hero Twins and even before—why don’t we remember them? Why aren’t we born knowing the answer?”

“Every time we’re reborn, we have to remember what we know through other ways, child.”

“I’m not a child,” said Ixul.

“No,” said Mutna with sudden harshness, “you’re right, you’re not a child. You’re about to become queen. After tonight, you’ll be the one sending ambassadors. You’ll be the one rebuilding the canals. You’ll be the one leading the priests into the underworld. You’ll be the one who the people turn to for answers, and you must be strong and confident, not sniveling and petulant.”

Ixul pursed her lips at the grass, which was the closest she came to concession.

When Mutna spoke again, her voice was softer. “The Mutulian and Oxwitzan scholars both claimed that their empires would last forever. Their people are scattered now and their cities are empty, just like Lakamha and Saal and Kaanu’l. You must understand why they fell.”

“I want to,” said Ixul. “I want to succeed where they failed.”

Mutna nodded. “You are bright and strong. Upakal and I will be here to advise you as you set about your work. There is much to be restored.”

“But it can be done?”

Mutna hesitated. The water babbled behind them. They each held half a calabash, like bowls of balché.

Finally she said, “I think so, though it will be difficult.”

Ixul knew she was telling the truth and not flattering her as a lesser tutor would.

They were both gazing at the mountain again. Now the sun shone into the entrance, lighting up the bright turquoise pool inside.

“I will permit one more question,” said Mutna. “What do you wish to ask?”

Ixul was ready. She turned back and said, “What is Ket’s role in the new age to come?”

 

Anoong, Minnesota

12 Men 18 Mak, Long Count 12.19.19.17.15

16 December, 2012

On the drive to the doctor’s office, Leah fondly remembered a night from her past.

She’d been in seventh grade, watching a nature program. The narrator told her that the universe had originated in an event that caused the space between all matter to expand, and it was still expanding, and the expansion was in fact accelerating, and would continue until all the stars died out and disintegrated, and every speck of matter was separate from every other, and would stay that way forever, in eternal freezing darkness.

The narrator said: this is the law of entropy, the ultimate nature of the universe.

Immediately Leah knew he was wrong. This law was not compatible with her faith in a loving God. How could she reconcile the two?

She locked herself in the bathroom and turned up the heat. She tied her hair back in her usual black braid, then took off her clothes and looked in the mirror. She felt mad with a purpose she didn’t fully understand, except that she needed to resolve the terrible thing she’d just learned, and return to a state of wholeness. She plucked at herself. The inner lips of her vulva were longer than the outer ones, and so, she thought, resembled a lamb that bites its tongue in death. Acting on instinct, she took her mother’s orange Bic razor and drew it along her finger, quick, lengthwise. She didn’t feel anything at first. But then the cut filled, bloomed, spilled over. In a long strange moment that seemed to draw away from her in all directions, she became aware of the separation of her thoughts like dewdrops on a spider’s thread: the impulse, the act, the memory, the meaning, and the imposition of the meaning upon the memory. There’d been a moment when they were all one and the same, she felt sure; but it was already past.

She realized that entropy was the truth of this universe, yes; but not the ultimate truth.

She felt calmer. She could hear everything more clearly: the sound of water running, the yippy dog in the apartment above, and the sound of Fox News in the living room, where her mother heated up dinner. Her blood dripped onto the tiles like a metronome.

It wasn’t true wholeness, but it was a step closer.

Upon commencing eighth grade, she decided to become the school slut. Sex seemed another good way to regain that lost state of wholeness. No one at Trinity High understood this, of course; as soon as she began having sex, the word spread and the bullying began. Leah tried to get along as best she could. Her cheerful embrace of the word “slut” was deeply confusing to her classmates. So while the bullying persisted, it also leveled off at a manageable rate. Leah could plan to be pushed into a locker a few times a week; there was no avoiding that. She usually ate lunch across from the only other brown-skinned kid at school, a Somali boy named Andrew, who always brought a book like she did. Sometimes they traded. She wrote lots of poetry and thought it good. She swam breaststroke for the swim team and usually won third place. When the school split up into teams for Field Day, each named for a member of the Trinity, she always chose Team Holy Spirit.

She spent a lot of time on the Internet.

She found sex partners there, mostly from the arts magnet high school in St. Cloud. She’d tried Craigslist once. Her ad read:

Teenager looking to experiment with other teenagers, any gender. No one over eighteen, please!!! I am not stupid.

This did not work. Her inbox was flooded with pictures of pale dicks peering up like turtle heads from under hockey jerseys. She took down the ad.

She also researched cutting on Internet message boards. She always included the word “safe” in her searches, and so found a community—mostly of other teenagers—who practiced cutting, not for the purpose of hurting themselves, but as a mild opiate.

Anything in excess is bad, said 1EqualTemper, and anything in moderation is ok. But yeah ok tell that to my parents. They’d freak if they knew.

So would my mother, wrote Leah. Nobody trusts me.

Nobody trusts teenage girls period.

rite?? and yet cutting is the only rational response of a teenage girl to this world.

I could be doing so much worse than this. I still get good grades. Cutting is nothing. Everything heals up. Meanwhile my cousin does heroin and no one says anything.

Why not??

cuz he’s a dude

They traded tips on safe practices. Leah snuck the box cutter from her mother’s toolbox and used that, though always first sterilizing the edge with a candle and then using rubbing alcohol, cotton balls, antibiotic ointment, and binding afterward. She never appeared around her mother without underwear on, because she had a series of cuts along each wing of her pelvic crest, where her potbelly met her thighs.

They talked about aftereffects. Almost everyone reported feelings of calm, attributed to the sudden opiates in the bloodstream. Leah was particularly interested in the history of cutting, and shrieked when she saw an article about the ancient Maya.

I’m Maya!!!!!!!!! she posted in response to hopelessgamete77.

wait how r u maya

My biological father was Maya.

how is that possible were you born in 1000 BC

No, there are millions of descendants of the ancient Maya living in Central America.

ohhhh cool I didn’t know sorry lol

That’s all right.

well now u know why u cut

Leah sat back from her computer. She’d never thought of that.

She read everything she could about the ancient bloodletting ritual. She learned that it was never done lightly. The Maya let blood to bless a new venture like the beginning of a war or the healing of an illness or the ascension of a king. Blood was their divine offering to Xibalba. The first time Leah read that word—Xibalba—she went deep into the sparkling darkness behind her eyelids. What if her lost sense of wholeness could only be satisfied by entering another universe, a realm of divine forms, of which all things here were merely reflections and shadows?

She began to fantasize about what Xibalba would be like. She was sure it wasn’t like the Roman Catholic heaven, with cherubs and cotton candy clouds. Her idea was more true, more real, a realm of stone and stars. She found it harder to be surrounded by only the shadow versions of things. Once, while with Sister Jean in the counseling office, she stared very hard at a picture of Mary Magdalene.

“My middle name is Magdalene,” she said suddenly to the nun.

Sister Jean, who’d been in the middle of a careful explanation of how the female body was sacred and should not be defiled through premarital sexual contact, turned red in the cheeks. “Have you been listening to me?”

“Sort of,” said Leah. “I thought I’d change the subject. Why did you choose Mary Magdalene to put here in your office?”

The nun’s face became solemn. Leah knew she was thinking that this was a big opportunity for a teaching moment. “Because she was the greatest sinner,” she said, “but Jesus made her among the greatest saints.”

“How did Jesus make her great? Didn’t she choose it herself?”

“Well, yes, but only because she happened to meet him.”

Leah nodded, swung her legs, moved on. “My mother had premarital sex when she was a young missionary. That’s how she had me. She was in Cayo, in Belize. She gave me the middle name Magdalene to remind her of her past sins.”

Sister Jean blanched. “I’m sure it wasn’t because of that,” she said. “The name is a great honor. Mary Magdalene was one of Jesus’s closest friends. She shows how you can go from the greatest depths to the highest heights. Which brings me to . . . your behavior. The way you . . . behave . . .”

Leah felt bad for the nun. How to deal with a girl who so clearly didn’t want to be saved? Who’d never needed to be saved in the first place, from anything? She smiled and patted the woman’s hand. “Sister,” she said, “be at peace. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

There was only one teacher she trusted, her Spanish teacher, Ms. Fitzpatrick, who’d gone to the University of Minnesota and wore red cat’s-eye glasses. Despite Leah’s mediocre grades, she’d encouraged her to apply to college. But the very idea slid off Leah’s mind. Ambition was foreign to her. Only her pursuit of Xibalba mattered, and only she knew how to pursue it. During her senior year, when she’d get home from work, she’d run experiments with layering sensory experiences. She went into her bedroom, turned up the heat, upended an hourglass, put on headphones playing Janelle Monáe at maximum volume, put on green-tinted sunglasses, lit cinnamon incense, put a bite-sized Hershey bar on her tongue, and then waited for the peak of the best chord change of the chorus of “Mushrooms & Roses” and then, only then, did she make a small cut on her finger. All of this was an attempt to shift herself to Xibalba.

She tried very hard. Sometimes she thought she almost got there.

But reality would always return. She’d find herself back in her mother’s apartment, where the heat leached out the windows.

When Leah left the doctor’s office, having learned what she’d learned, she exited through the sliding glass doors. The cold hit her face like a wall of freezing water.

She jogged sideways. She made it to a potted plant before throwing up her oatmeal. It hit the wood chips and stayed there. She heaved twice more before the nausea ebbed. A woman and her child, coming up to the clinic, stopped in their tracks.

“Don’t worry!” said Leah, thumbing the last of it off her lip and stubbing it into the soil. “It happens all the time!”

The child began to cry.

“Jeez, are you all right?” said the woman in a faint voice. She was shielding her child as if from a threat. They were both wearing puffy Vikings coats, yellow and purple.

“Oh, I’m fine,” said Leah, covering over the little pile, as if she were planting a seed. “I just ate something that disagreed with me, but now it’s out of my system. Could be worse.”

“Maybe you should go back in there, huh?” The woman nodded at the clinic doors.

“No!” she said more loudly than she meant to. “I’m not going back in there again. Ever, actually. I have plans.”

The woman nodded, even more uneasy. She said, “Do you need help getting to your car?”

“Actually, my boyfriend’s picking me up, but thank you so much! That’s very thoughtful of you.”

“Okay, well. I hope you feel better soon.” She led her child up to the doors, which swooshed open and enclosed them in warmth.

Leah crouched by the plant, making sure she felt well enough to stand, feeling the sweat freeze on her forehead. Her boyfriend wasn’t actually picking her up because she didn’t have a boyfriend. She only had Nate, who didn’t count. She felt bad. She hated any form of deception, including the practical jokes her mother’s fiancé, Rick, was so fond of. Though her mother had urged her to lighten up, the tricks seemed unkind.

Except omission, she told herself. Omission was the only acceptable form of lie. Omission had a purpose.

With that in mind, she’d go ahead with the dinner tonight as planned.

She got in her car. The engine took four tries to turn over. She let the inside get warm before taking Interstate 94 back to Anoong. She spotted one of her own black hairs caught in the vent, waving like a sea anemone, and it made her think of Nate picking her hairs off his body. Nate was one year younger, a high school senior. He worked on a farm. They’d had sex eighteen times now. Leah had marked each occasion on her calendar with an asterisk. He was going to pick her up tonight, after dinner with Rick’s family at the steakhouse.

She turned on Minnesota Public Radio and started to drive.

Along the highway, rising out of the snow fields, she saw great works of masonry jumbled together, as if a giant baby had been playing with blocks. She wondered whether this was what Belize was like, with ancient Maya cities everywhere: crumbling arches, fallen keystones, ramparts and causeways, flagstones on their side, pitted stone, weathered for centuries. Field after field, there they were, stone honeycombs, sometimes rising a whole wall high, but then crumbling back down to ground level before trailing away in the grass. They must have been great cities once. She hadn’t spotted them before, though she’d lived in western Minnesota all her life. But it was like that sometimes, she thought. You only notice a place when you’re about to leave.

It was still cold in the car. She turned up the heat full-blast, now that the engine was warm.

“Did you know that our blood comes from stars?” said the radio.

She looked at the radio.

“It sounds like science fiction, but it’s true. What gives blood its red color is its iron content. You might say, Well, I eat iron in my morning cornflakes, and that’s true. But where did that iron come from? How do you manufacture an element? It turns out that iron comes from stellar fusion. The enormous pressure inside stars is the only thing in the universe that can make it. Once that iron is made, the star itself reaches its dying phase—the supernova—and all of it is released into space. So when I say our blood comes from stars, it’s not a fantasy, and it’s not even an exaggeration. We are made of stars.”

Leah’s eyes filled with grateful tears. She decided that, despite everything, she was going to be all right.

 

Zein-o-Din, Persia

8 Himux 4 Ch’en, Long Count 15.10.13.11.1

15 January, 3012

Niloux’s tribunal was scheduled for the next morning.

She blamed Venus. The moment the last of the world’s ice had melted—announced by viajeras in the Chersky Range, toasting their vodkas over the last smear of snow—Venus had cracked the horizon where Niloux sat. No one born to Laviaja could mistake the gravity of that timing. Not even Niloux. To the ancient Maya, the appearance of the morning star signaled change, and as she watched it rise over the pool in the oasis, she felt such a surge of purpose that she felt nauseated, as if the planet’s beams were sending a message. Her body understood it at once. Her mind was still catching up.

In that state of euphoria, she’d submitted her proposal to the Tzoyna. She thought she’d get intelligent debate. But no. Everyone lost their minds. She got condemnation, calls for blotting, and a summons to a tribunal.

The wayhouse appeared in the distance, a circle of stone under a jagged ridge, lit only by the milk wash of stars.

Niloux walked into the wind.

She arrived at an arch in the wall. At its top was the Laviaja flag, a gold whip spider on a green field, over a curtain embroidered with Versa Uno from the Rule of Saint Leah, in Farsi script:

Ayuda a la personix que te acompañe

Help the one you’re with.

A little hand pulled the curtain aside. A ninx in a white shift gazed out at her.

Niloux bowed, obeying the usual forms.

The ninx bowed back, nervous, but said her lines. “Buenas noches, en nombre de la Trinidad de Cayo,” she said with careful formality. “¿Que necesita?”

“Una segura casa,” Niloux replied in the traditional way, “y comida y descansa.”

“Por favor, ven en paz.” The formalities were finished, but the ninx was still tense. “I’m on welcome duty. I’m supposed to bring you supper.”

Niloux paused. “Bring it?”

“In your room.”

“I’m imprisoned, then?”

The ninx flinched. “No! They just thought you would want to be alone before the tribunal, like you always are, in the wild.”

Niloux snorted. “It’s convenient for them to think so. They’re scared of me. I’ll take supper in the common room with everyone else.” She moved to enter, but the ninx blocked her way.

“Why did you say Xibalba isn’t real?” she asked.

Niloux shifted on her feet. She was exhausted from the long day of walking and impatient to get out of the wind, but restrained herself from snapping at the child. Versa Uno: Help the one you’re with. Versa Dos: This child is your child. No matter her mood, she must care for her as if newly born from her own body.

“I didn’t say that exactly,” Niloux said. “I said that Xibalba isn’t a real physical place, it’s just a shift in thought. The meaning of Xibalba has changed many times. It’s not going to stop anytime soon.”

“Okay. What’s the new meaning?”

Niloux almost laughed. “Kid, I don’t know yet. Do you have any ideas?”

The ninx sensed a change in tone, looked coy. “My name is Daveed,” she said. “It’s my first time on welcome duty.”

Niloux shrugged. “I think you’re doing great. Welcome away.”

Daveed said, “Come on then.”

Niloux followed her into an eight-sided entry chamber. The walls sparkled with solar paint. On the far side of the chamber, there was another curtain, which she guessed led to the common room. Through a gap, she saw ninx playing and zadres lounging. Her jaw clenched. These were the people she’d have to face for her tribunal.

Daveed smoothed a moonball awake, then disappeared into another arch. Niloux dropped her gear and sat on a bench. There was a bowl of bubbling copal in the corner, giving off crisp honey smoke.

The ninx came back with a bronze ewer. “I haven’t picked my first manéra yet,” she announced.

Niloux raised her eyebrows. Strange way to start a conversation. “You’re still a child. You don’t have to.”

“No, but I want to start thinking about it. What manéra are you?”

“Mopan maya,” said Niloux. “Since I was ten.”

“There are a lot of maya.”

“Three hundred thousand, I think. Most common manéra on Earth.”

“What do you have to do?"