37
Night has fallen by the time we arrive in Tlachichuca. It’s cold. There are even isolated patches of snow. Susannah buys us secondhand ski jackets, backpacks, and thermal long johns. She puts us all up in the climbers’ hostel. The building is a hundred-year-old soap factory, rebuilt as an Alpine mountain lodge. In the dormitories, bunk beds are stacked across a rough wooden floor. Huge stained pine beams hold up the roof. In the corner, there’s an antique oak vat for boiling up lye and lard.
The dining room is crammed with mostly white men and women in their twenties and thirties, Americans and Canadians, fit and healthy-looking. Compared to the local Mexicans—and to Ixchel and me—they all seem impossibly tall.
El Pico de Orizaba is the third-highest peak in the continent of North America. Susannah explained it all on the drive over from Tlacotalpan. It’s the highest mountain in Mexico, an extinct volcano—so far as the past few hundred years go. There are occasional rumbles, but no one’s worried. It’s not actively smoking and letting off fireworks, like the nearby volcano Popocatepetl.
Apparently, young climbers love to conquer “El Pico.” There’s a hut on the lower slopes, where people stay for a day or so to get acclimatized. The climb takes you through a field of scree and lava boulders known as the “Labyrinth,” because there’s only one decent route through. Then comes the Jamapa glacier, which leads all the way to the snow-covered summit. At this time of year, the glacier is usually coated with fresh snow. It’s an alpine-style climb, needing ice-climbing gear: ropes, crampons, and the right clothes. You need to be fit and strong to reach the summit, but there shouldn’t be too much clambering up rocks. Mainly it’s a very, very steep hike, into altitudes where the oxygen is so thin that it can give you weird hallucinations.
Susannah doubts we’ll even find anyone to take us up there. We’re so young, and I’m limping. I keep expecting Ixchel to drop out. I’d happily go alone, except for my leg. But there’s no question of her not coming with me. She even seems excited about the idea.
At first, I’m relieved to be able to climb into a bed for the first time in three days. But I toss and turn—can’t get comfortable, with the bruises on my ribcage and the deep, dull ache inside my leg. When I finally fall asleep, I dream the dream about my dad.
I wake up dry-eyed, impatient, and angry. I’ve had enough. This isn’t how I want to remember my dad, but the dream is beginning to consume my memories. Now, when I think of him, he’s always in our kitchen, with that distant air, the one that says, Hey, Josh, get off my back, okay?
I put on my ski jacket and go downstairs to the dining room. I buy a can of Fresca from the drink machine and take it outside, under the inky black of a star-speckled sky. There’s a couple sitting close together on folding chairs, sipping from steaming mugs. I wander around to the back of the hostel, find a patch of unspoiled snow and spend a few minutes scrunching over it in my sneakers. Then I stand, just gazing out over the lights of the town, across the countryside and to the brooding shadow of the volcano.
What am I going to find?
I expected the postcards to lead to an informer; someone who was willing to leak me the information I so badly need. Since that didn’t happen, I don’t know what to think.
What could there possibly be on the slopes of a mountain that would explain to me the truth behind my father’s death?
I hear footsteps in the snow. “Hey,” a voice whispers, right behind me. It’s Ixchel. She gives me a wry grin.
“You couldn’t sleep either, huh?”
I shake my head slowly, staring at her.
“It’s the altitude,” she says. “Does strange things to you. We should take a walk tomorrow, get used to it.”
Then she gives me a little shove. “So, Josh. How did we end up here?”
“I was just wondering that.” My mind goes back to the afternoon that Tyler and I set off to Saffron Walden. Since then I’ve been disguised as Batman, escaped from a cellar where I was going to be tortured, crossed the ocean in a Muwan, got lost in caves, almost drowned in an underground river, got shot in the leg … all in search of the most elusive truth in my life.
What really happened to my dad?
Ixchel’s voice breaks across my distant thoughts. “I’ve been thinking about your theory. The one about time travel.”
“Oh yeah?”
Ixchel nods. “Mm-hmm. It’s not the first time I’ve heard time travel mentioned in Ek Naab.”
“It isn’t?”
“No. There’s a rumor—I don’t know who started it—that the Bracelet of Itzamna is a time-travel device. Or part of one.”