The Chamber That Shouldn't Exist

The fight starts at 14,000 feet. Not a real fight — Diego and I don't do those anymore. We do the other kind, the quiet kind, where everything sounds polite and means something else entirely. The kind where "it's fine" is a locked door and "whatever you want" is a white flag nobody salutes.

"It'll take ten minutes," he says, already walking. His boots crunch on the gravel path leading away from our rental car, away from Ollantaytambo's main plaza, toward the terraces that step up the mountainside like a giant's staircase. "Just one chamber, Maya. Then dinner. I promise."

"You said that about the cenote in Yucatán." I don't move from the car. "We missed the flight."

"We caught the next one."

"Fourteen hours later."

He turns back. Grins. The grin that got me, ten years ago in a Columbia lecture hall when he was presenting on pre-Columbian water systems and I was there because I'd wandered into the wrong building. The grin that says come on, come on, where's your sense of wonder?

I hate that it still works.

"Ten minutes," I say.

The temple complex is closed to tourists at this hour, but Diego has a letter from the Peruvian Ministry of Culture and the kind of charm that makes security guards hand over their flashlights. We pass through the Temple of the Three Windows — Incan stonework so precise you can't fit a razor blade between the blocks — and Diego leads me down a path I'm pretty sure isn't on any tour map.