Page 63 of The Lost Guardian

“You used the children as a shield between us and the Huáscaros?” Santiago demanded, horrified.

“Of course not,” Ali snapped, dragging him forward. “They were determined to come in, and I needed a way to get the kids out of danger.”

Oh. That did make more sense.

“Sorry,” he said, but Ali yanked him hard to the side.

“Come on.” She pointed at a door that was marked Employees Only.

“Let’s go.”

“But the clue,” José lamented with a longing backward glance. “They’ll see it. Who knows how long it will stay visible?”

“Then we’ll just have to figure it out first,” she answered, pushing past the doors into a break room. They advanced through an empty office and narrow hallway, finally finding an illuminated exit sign and door to the back road where they’d parked the car.

“You know the clue, right?” Ali asked him as she urged them forward.

“Of course,” Santiago said. He didn’t know what it meant yet, but he had committed the lines to memory.

“Good.” She stole a furtive glance behind them. So far, they weren’t being followed.

“But what if they figure it out first?”

“Unlikely,” Ali scoffed, pulling them farther down the street.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because they don’t have you.”

20

The narrow river demands a sacrifice.

Only life’s water will lead the way.

Those were the words Santiago had read in the Ransom Room.

“Again,” Ali repeated for the third time in as many minutes.

Santiago recited the lines once more, not bothering to look up from the sketchbook splayed in front of him. He’d drawn a rough etching of Atahualpa’s Ransom Room and a closer, more detailed depiction of the “window” and hidden message he found. In the corner, Santi added a doodle of his grandfather’s chakana pendant.

Ali drummed her fingers on the table between them. “That’s it?” she asked. They had found a crowded restaurant far from the main square, where they figured Torres’s men wouldn’t find them among the throng.

José had disappeared as soon as they put enough distance between themselves and the gunmen, promising to return with all the supplies they might need for the field expedition ahead. When Ali had asked him how he planned to do that, he had only winked at her.

“I know a guy.”

Santiago wriggled on the edge of his plastic chair, refusing to remove his backpack in a big city like this, not even for a moment. Not with Abuelo Manco’s ashes inside.

“That’s it,” he confirmed. “If there was more, I wasn’t there long enough to find it.”

Ali rubbed her face with her hands and inhaled sharply.

“Okay,” she said. “That’s okay. We just have to figure out what it means.”

“I still can’t believe there was a hidden message behind a false wall in Atahualpa’s Ransom Room,” Santiago breathed. It was all like something out of an action film. “And that my grandfather’s necklace unlocked it.”

“If Atahualpa’s followers went to these lengths to guard his body and treasure, then it isn’t a stretch to believe that they also guarded the tomb with a curse,” Ali said.