Dora hacked at the green wall of the Yucatán with her machete, sweat stinging her eyes and a giddy, caffeine-bright anticipation humming through her veins. In her mind’s eye, it was all National Geographic spreads and Discovery Channel B-roll—jungle canopy dripping with orchids, the pink-and-blue flit of motmots, and somewhere ahead, the lost city of Ix Chel just waiting for her to waltz in and say, ¡Hola! She could practically taste the moment: the ancient people, all wary eyes and silent dignity, then melting into smiles as soon as she greeted them in Yucatan mayan.

Dora was here for the story, she told herself. For the grand reveal, the camera panning up from the jungle floor to the stepped ziggurats and the sudden blossoming of a world that had survived so many centuries of forgetting. She pictured herself standing on top of the main pyramid, her arms thrown wide, her hair a wild tangle in the wind, the sun painting everything gold. And then she would meet them: the descendants. People who spoke her grandmother’s language, who remembered the old ways, who would look at her and see—what, exactly? Not a gringa, not an academic, but a wanderer, a pilgrim, a seeker. Maybe even a sister.

Boots, her monkey, wasn’t feeling the reverence. He swung ahead in broad arcs, sometimes doubling back to hurl sticks at invisible adversaries or drop bits of half eaten mango on Dora’s head before scampering away chattering to himself in laughter.

Her boots squelched in the mud, her pack stuck to her back, and the map she’d printed from the archives in Mérida was already melting in her hands. It wasn’t the original, of course, but a scan of a copy of a drawing by a Spanish friar who’d probably never set foot in the jungle. The lines were all wrong, the rivers crawled like centipedes, and she’d spent half the morning arguing with herself over whether “al pie del monte” meant the base of the cerro or something more metaphorical.

She stopped and pulled out her notebook, flicking past the pages of Spanish-to-Mayan translations with her thumb. She’d written “Ix Chel” at the top of every page, as if sheer repetition might will it into reality. Boots, bored with her scholarship, leapt onto her shoulder and rooted through her pockets for a snack.

“Not now, Boots,” she muttered, low, so it wouldn’t echo. “We’re close. If I’m reading this right, the cenote should be…” She broke off and squinted into the tangle of vines ahead. There it was: a shimmer in the shadows, a blue-green lens of water ringed by crumbling limestone. The cenote.

She crouched at its edge, feeling the coolness radiate up from the water, and tried to imagine the generations of women who’d come here before her. She pictured herself among them: brown skin shining with sweat, hair slicked to her scalp, arms strong from grinding corn. In her mind, the women welcomed her with gentle, knowing smiles.

Then, for a moment, she remembered what Professor Mendoza had said in her last office hours: “Suppose you do find them. Suppose they’re uncontacted. You know what that means, Dora? You could kill them with a handshake. You could kill them by breathing.”

But she had been careful. She’d gotten her shots, hadn’t she? She’d even ponied up for the yellow fever booster, which hurt like hell for three days. And anyway, she wasn’t some conquistador. She was a child of the Americas, and if anyone had a right to walk these jungles, it was her.

Boots hooted and pointed at something across the water. A faint track, the kind only a monkey would see, led away from the cenote and up toward a ridge crowned with strangler figs. Dora checked her compass, adjusted her grip on her machete, and waded across, boots filling with cold water. She grinned, high on the knowledge that she was probably the first person in centuries to make it this far.

The climb up the ridge was brutal, the air thick with the rot of old leaves and the low, animal stink of something dead nearby. Dora’s arms shook from exertion, but she pressed on, stopping only to check the map and her notations. There was a kind of puzzle-solving joy in it, piecing together the clues left by people who’d long since vanished into the forest.

She found the stone marker exactly where she’d hoped—a squat, lichen-crusted stela with the outline of a rabbit carved into it. She knelt, fingers tracing the grooves, and fumbled for her phone. She had to document this. She needed a record, not just for her own glory but for the people in the anthropology department who doubted her. For her mother, who’d warned her that obsession wasn’t a personality trait, it was a family curse.

She took a quick video, narrating in a whisper. “This is Dora Marquez. I’ve just located the Rabbit Stela, which according to the codex is the western boundary of the Ix Chel settlement. If I’m reading the map correctly, the main plaza should be less than half a kilometer east, at the intersection of—”

She stopped, clicking off the phone. Something moved in the underbrush, a flicker of color, white and ghostly, gone before she could process it. Dora waited, crouched low, every muscle tensed. Boots pressed himself tight to her neck, silent for once.

She crept forward, one foot at a time, machete raised in front of her. The vines parted, and suddenly it was there: the city. Not a city exactly, but the bones of one—mossy steps rising up to the sky, pyramids collapsed in on themselves, temples half-swallowed by banyan roots. The air was thick with the hum of insects and something else, a low, steady chanting just beyond the edge of hearing.

Dora let out a shaky laugh. She’d done it. She’d really done it.

She set up her phone on a rock, pressed record, and began to narrate with all the gusto that had mortified her in middle school. “Hola, amigos! It’s me, Dora. I have officially found the lost city of Ix Chel! See behind me, the pyramids—” She spun in a slow circle, careful to keep her face in the frame. “This is so incredible. I can’t wait to—”

A hand, ice-cold and painted bone-white, clamped over her mouth. She tried to scream, but the sound died in her throat. The phone tumbled and skittered across the stones, still recording. The last thing it captured was Dora’s wide, terrified eyes and, behind her, the grinning skull-painted face of a priest rising from the shadows…