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somehow made her less professional and certainly not his equal. He was, after all,
Doctor
Bowerdale. Deborah had a Master’s degree. She had risen from within the world of practical museum curating, not from the upper echelons of academia.
    “I am ultimately responsible for the dig,” she said, gazing up the stairs to the thatched lean-to of the Zac Na and the great stucco mouth of the tomb door.
    “And I am responsible for surveying the site,” he returned. “This falls under my job description, not yours, and given the crisis precipitated by the weather, I think you should rely on my expertise.”
    Deborah didn’t like his use of the word “crisis.” It might become a justification for a complete usurpation of her authority. She opted not to press the issue and managed a smile, as if she hadn’t noticed his challenge.
    “I’ll leave you to it, then,” she said. “I thought I saw something down there that needed closer inspection anyway.”
    “What?” he said. “Where?”
    But she had already turned and was starting to make her cautious descent.
    “I’ll let you know if you need to come and look,” she called back, feeling better.
    It was a lie, of course, but she relished his hesitation before he turned back up the stairs toward the Zac Na. She knew he would be watching her when she reached the bottom. Going down the pyramid was actually worse than going up, the vast openness of the site swimming before her, and she turned sideways to take the wet steps, her left hand finding the edge to stabilize her as she descended. There were no handrails, no handicapped-accessible ramps, none of the warnings without which such a site would be a legal impossibility in the States. If she fell, she’d fall hard and long. She picked her way down, trying to decide where she would go when she reached the bottom.
    In the end she went along the base of the acropolis, heading to its north side where no reconstruction had taken place: while meticulous steps had been built on the south side, from this angle the acropolis was just a mound of rubble. The path hung with the dense undergrowth of the jungle scrub that always threatened to reclaim the site.
    Her miniscule triumph over Bowerdale faded, and Deborah found herself feeling lost and depressed as the old anxieties returned: Bowerdale was right. He had the real authority here. Hers was based on nothing more than a letter from Cornerstone and would have no weight if it hadn’t come with a check attached. Even the students suspected it, and she guessed Bowerdale had said as much to those he most wanted to impress. The girl, probably. Alice. Bowerdale had a reputation where his female students were concerned.
    She stopped, trying to process what it was she was seeing. The jungle on the north side of the acropolis looked different. It looked wrong. She tried to remember what had been there, and it came back to her slowly: a deep depression in the earth, whatthe locals called a
rejollada
; a sinkhole, not unlike the one that had opened up under Oasis. It had looked like some giant had taken a great ice-cream scoop to the earth, though in time the area had become a tangle of matted vegetation and brush right up to the path at the base of the acropolis. The ground didn’t look like that now. In fact, Deborah realized, staring wildly, that the ground wasn’t there at all.

Chapter Five

     
    Eustachio had spotted Bowerdale and the
norteamericano
students as soon as he entered the site. He had hoped that they would have chosen to come later, but they were here and this made things difficult. There was only the one van in the parking lot, so the rest of the students were probably still in Valladolid, and there was no sign of Deborah Miller’s rental car. Yet. He knew her well enough already to know she couldn’t stay away, and then he would quickly run out of choices.
    Fidelia would have told him he worried too much. “First, see that there is a problem, then worry about