The Fifth Sun: Part 1 - Verbs of Seeing (Before the Hollow)

The Fifth Sun: Part 1 - Verbs of Seeing (Before the Hollow)

0:00

/5673.325667

1×

Tlacuilo

(To Paint / To Write)

00:00:00

The drone lifts off the roof of the Biblioteca de México at exactly 05:00:00 CST, GPS synced to the atomic clock in Fort Collins, Colorado. From two-hundred meters above the plaza, the city looks like a cracked obsidian mirror catching the first weld-spark of dawn. The Zócalo is still dark, but the Palace of Fine Arts is already bleeding gold light through its Art-Nouveau ribs. The drone’s four rotors whisper—DJI Aeroscope would read them as sparrow-sized, harmless—while its gimbal camera tilts south, riding the avenue of Reforma toward Chapultepec. The operator, hidden under the library’s colonnade, wears matte-black hood, matte-black gloves, and the kind of smile that believes history is just another file format waiting to be cracked.

00:00:17

Izel Trejo does not smile. She is too busy tasting silica. The air this morning carries the metallic sweetness that precedes the rainy season—ozone and diesel and the ghost of marigolds from last November’s ofrendas still clinging to the cracks in the pavement. She inhales, counts four, holds two, exhales six—box-breathing the way the Marine taught her, though she will never admit she learned it from him. Her left hand steers the drone’s tablet; her right hand fingers the jade bead in her pocket, rubbing the year 1914 etched on its equator like a tiny green planet. Grandmother Tochtli swears the bead once absorbed a drop of Zapata’s blood. Izel’s pragmatic side says jade can’t oxidize iron, so the rust-colored fleck inside must be desert dust. Her pragmatic side is usually wrong about artifacts.

00:00:34

She toggles to first-person view. The drone skims the Diana fountain, circles the glyph of the Angel of Independence, then descends toward the single most surveilled roof in Latin America: the Museo Nacional de Antropología. The building lies like a vast limestone coatl, the snake of time, its corrugated concrete scales catching the drone’s down-draft. Twenty-three infrared domes blink awake, but she has their firmware schedule memorized—every camera reboots at 05:03:12 for a 9.7-second window while the server patches. She has done nothing illegal yet. The drone carries no contraband, only a 300-gram passive sensor package she built from surplus telecom parts and a terahertz camera core that once belonged to a failed German airport scanner. The museum’s own security won’t detect it; terahertz waves sit between microwaves and infrared, a ghost frequency the guards’ oscilloscopes were never taught to fear.

00:01:03

Her real client is asleep in Macau, three million dollars of Tether locked in an escrow smart contract on the Polygon chain. The buyer—handle: ObsidianMoth—believes the Sun Stone is hollow. Not metaphorically hollow, the way undergraduates learn that Aztec cosmology is a shell story built on top of earlier shell stories, but literally hollow: a 2.7-cavity carved secretly in 1790 when the monolith was first raised in the Zócalo, then plugged with a limestone disk and painted over with tar and ochre. The buyer wants proof. Proof is just another word for data, and data is Izel’s native tongue.

00:01:29

She parks the drone twenty meters above the central courtyard, directly over the umbrella-shaped shade roof held up by the single column of Tlaloc. From here the Sun Stone is a black iris in the grey pupil of the museum floor. The stone lies flat, not vertical the way tourists expect; the weight cracked the original stand in 1985 during the earthquake, and some conservator decided gravity was safer than vanity. The drone’s battery reads 82 %. She has eleven minutes before the first guard walks the inner perimeter. She exhales, taps the terahertz overlay.

00:01:57

The image that blooms on the tablet looks like a cathedral built inside a thunderstorm. Terahertz waves penetrate stone up to fifteen centimeters, scattering off density differentials the way sonar maps ocean trenches. The Sun Stone’s familiar ring-calendar, the four previous suns, the Xiuhcoatl fire-serpent biting its own tail—all of it renders as translucent grey. But at the center, where the tongue of the Aztec sun-god Tonatiuh sticks out like a rude invitation, the grey fractures into a black absence. A void shaped like a corn kernel, 2.7 meters long, 0.9 meters wide. The software labels the cavity in polite Helvetica: ANOMALY—CONFIDENCE 98.3 %. Izel’s pulse spikes; the bead in her pocket pulses back, warm as fresh tortilla.

00:02:41

She whispers the Nahuatl verb her grandmother taught her the way other kids learned the Lord’s Prayer: “Tlacuilo.” I paint, I write, I record so the world does not forget. The word tastes of chalk and lightning. She screenshots, timestamps, hashes the file with SHA-256, and uploads the digest to the decentralized storage network Arweave. The transaction costs 0.0003 AR, roughly nine cents, payable in perpetuity to the stone itself. She has just turned the Sun Stone into a blockchain oracle. Grandmother would cross herself. ObsidianMoth will wake up richer or poorer depending on what she does next.

00:03:12

Camera reboot window opens. She drops the drone thirty meters in a controlled dive, spinning 180 degrees so the lens faces backward, recording its own reflection in the museum’s glass roof. The selfie is not vanity; it is alibi. When the guards review footage they will see only a tourist drone taking a picturesque dawn shot of the city skyline, nothing aimed downward. She uploads the selfie to Instagram with the hashtag #CDXLPaz—thirty thousand followers who believe she is an earnest INAH technician documenting sunrise. The post geotags Reforma, not the museum. The blockchain and the cloud now contradict each other; contradiction is camouflage.

00:03:47

Battery 71 %. She wants one more pass, closer, polarized filter to check for metal staples inside the cavity. The limestone plug, if it exists, must have dowels. Dowels mean voids around dowels, micro-gaps where terahertz backscatter creates halos. She needs those halos to negotiate her fee up from three to five million. She flexes her wrist; the tablet’s stylus slips, knocks the altitude slider. The drone dips below the courtyard parapet. Instantly, a new sound—metal on metal, the soft pneumatic sigh of an alarm valve. She freezes. The drone hovers six meters above the stone, rotors naked to every camera.

00:04:11

A guard steps into frame. Not the usual bored subcontractor in a too-large uniform, but a woman built like a pyramid: wide shoulders, tapered waist, assault rifle angled at forty-five degrees. She wears the new grey-on-grey livery Izel has never seen before, logo of a stylized coyote howling at circuitry. COYOTL. The museum’s rumored AI-human hybrid unit. The woman’s eyes are not on the drone; they are on the stone, as if she too feels the cavity breathing. Izel’s thumb hovers over the RTH—return to home—button. She waits. Movement discipline: never run while the enemy is still. The guard lifts a device the size of a paperback, aims it at the drone. The tablet’s feed crackles with static snow. Terahertz interference; the guard is sweeping for the same ghost frequency.

00:04:56

Izel kills the terahertz module, switches to vanilla 4K RGB. The static vanishes. The guard’s device must be calibrated only for anomalies, not for ordinary cameras. The woman shrugs, resumes her patrol. Izel exhales so hard her ribs creak. She backs the drone straight up, past the parapet, into the pinking sky. Only when the battery hits 65 % does she trigger RTH. The drone races home like a child late for supper.

00:05:33

Under the library colonnade she collapses the tablet antenna, slides it into a weather-sealed Pelican case. Her fingers tremble, not from fear but inventory: she has just proven the greatest archaeological secret in Mexico since the Templo Mayor. She also has 9.7 seconds of terahertz footage that could earn her a life sentence under the 1972 Federal Law on Archaeological Monuments. Possession of unauthorized data is considered tantamount to possession of the artifact itself. The law was written for dynamite-wielding looters, but PDFs travel faster than pickaxes.

00:06:10

Dawn commuters emerge from Metro Balderas like ants evacuating a cracked nest. She joins the flow, hoodie up, earbuds in, playlist of pre-Hispanic shell trumpets masking city noise. The bead in her pocket taps her thigh in rhythm with her steps. She thinks of the verb again: Tlacuilo. The painter, the scribe, the one who makes absence visible. She has painted a hollow at the heart of the Fifth Sun. Someone will pay to own that negative space. Someone else will kill to keep it secret. She is already both.

00:07:00

Halfway to the Metro she stops at a street stall for café de olla. The vendor, an old man with a moustache like calligraphy, pours cinnamon coffee into a clay cup. She pays with a 20-peso coin, notices the year: 2010, bicentennial of the Independence. Coins are fossils of empire, Grandmother says. She pockets the change, suddenly aware that every object carries a timestamp, every timestamp a story, every story a forgery waiting to happen. She sips the coffee, burns her tongue, welcomes the pain as proof she is still physical, still meat, not yet uploaded to the chain.

00:07:49

Her phone vibrates. Encrypted Signal from handle ObsidianMoth:  

—Did you paint?  

She types:  

—Tlacuilo. 98 % certainty.  

—Send sample.  

—Not yet.  

—Price doubles if you deliver by solstice.  

She deletes the chat, finishes the coffee, places the empty cup on the stone ledge of a 16th-century aqueduct. A small act of littering, a message to whoever tracks metadata: Izel Trejo was here, and she is messy, and she is not afraid of ghosts in the stone.

00:08:30

Underground, the Metro roar swallows her. On the platform she opens a different app—INAH’s internal scanner log. Yesterday she scheduled a routine maintenance sweep of the Sun Stone for 10:00 a.m. today, under the pretense of recalibrating humidity sensors. She will enter as employee 04632, badge and biometrics clean. No one will question the girl who brings her own tablet and her own polite smile. She will stand over the stone, pretend to wipe dust, and decide whether to betray her country or betray her buyer, or—option three—betray both and carve her own name into the hollow where the sun once spoke.

00:09:11

The train arrives. Doors slide apart like the jaws of a stone serpent. She steps inside, fingers the jade bead, feels the rust fleck pulse once, twice. The lights flicker, a brown-out rolling across the grid. In the darkness she sees the after-image of the cavity, a black kernel floating before her eyes. She whispers the word again, softer, like a promise or a curse:  

“Tlacuilo.”

00:09:59

The lights return. The train lurches toward Chapultepec, toward the museum, toward the hollow heart of Mexico. Izel Trejo opens her notebook—paper, acid-free, archival—and writes the first line of what will become either evidence or scripture:  

“To paint is to steal time from the gods. To steal is to paint time onto yourself.”

She caps the pen, tastes metal and cinnamon, and smiles at last.

Tlacualli

(To Eat)

05:47 a.m.

The microbus drops Izel at the edge of Colonia Ajusco, where the asphalt crumbles into volcanic scree and the city’s grid dissolves into goat paths. She still tastes cinnamon and electricity from the drone flight, but the scent that greets her now is older than coffee: woodsmoke, masa, and the faint iron tang of the maguey plot her grandmother keeps behind the adobe wall. Dawn is a bruised pink above the Sierra de las Cruces; the sun itself seems hesitant to rise, as if it, too, has heard the warning that the Fifth Sun is almost finished.

Abuela Tochtli’s gate is a 1950s refrigerator door welded onto rebar, the Frigidaire logo half-erased by rust. Izel raps the rhythm her mother taught her when she was six: two shorts, one long, two shorts—shave-and-a-haircut in reverse, because the world inside is backwards to the world outside. A latch clicks. The refrigerator opens like a portal.

“Entra, tlazohcamati,” the old woman says, voice rough with sleep and copal. “The griddle is hot and the corn is waiting.”

Izel steps into the patio. The center of the yard is a single volcanic boulder hauled down from the extinct cone decades ago; it serves as metate, altar, and sometimes bargaining table. This morning it wears a cloth of hand-woven ikat, indigo and sulphur-yellow, and on it sits a clay comal the color of dried blood. Blue-corn tlacoyos—thick oval paddies stuffed with fava beans and covered in cactus-pear salsa—steam like tiny volcanic islands.

“Wash first,” Abuela orders, pointing to a tin basin painted with faded monarch butterflies. The water inside is so cold it hurts the bones, drawn from the same aquifer the Aztecs called Chapultepec, Grasshopper Hill. Izel plunges her hands. The basin’s bottom is lined with smooth jade pebbles; they click together like old memories. One pebble is larger, darker, warm. She recognizes it even before she lifts it: the bead.

It is not round but slightly flattened, the shape of a tear that decided to become a planet. A hole bores through its equator, rim polished by a century of ribbon. When she was small she believed the hole was a mouth that whispered stories while she slept. Today the mouth is silent, but the warmth is new.

“You brought it back,” Abuela says, not a question. “I felt it leave the sewing box last night.”

“I only borrowed it,” Izel lies, drying her hands on her jeans. “For luck.”

“Luck is a Spanish word. We have something else.” The old woman lifts the bead between thumb and forefinger, holds it to the sunrise. Light the color of young corn liquor spills through the jade, revealing a fault line like lightning trapped inside. “This belonged to doña Petra Reyes, the only woman Zapata ever apologized to. She swallowed it the day the federales burned her village, passed it the way women pass moons and secrets. When it came to me it was still warm from her stomach.”

Izel has heard the origin myth before, but never the next part.

“Petra said the bead would burn any hand that tried to sell it. You planning to sell it, niña?”

“No,” Izel answers, and means it, though she does not yet know the bead will one day masquerade as her pulse to trick a biometric lock that thinks flesh is identity.

“Good. Because the Fifth Sun is almost finished, and we’ll need every drop of ancestral fire to light the next one.”

Abuela tucks the bead into Izel’s left palm, folds the fingers closed like petals at dusk. The gesture feels final, like closing a book that has only one page left.

They eat sitting on petate mats, knees touching, tlacoyos balanced on maguey leaves instead of plates. The first bite is always religion: the blue corn sweet as thunder, the fava earthy as graveyard soil, the salsa bright as newborn blood. Izel chews slowly, counting the layers of flavor the way she counts terahertz waveforms. She tastes nitrogen from the volcanic soil, diesel from the microbus that carried the corn, copper from the river where the nopal was washed. She tastes time.

Abuela watches her chew. “You were scanning the Sun again.”

Not a question. Izel nods, mouth full.

“Find the hole?”

Izel chokes, coughs crumbs of blue corn across the metate. “You knew?”

“I helped dig it.” The old woman wipes salsa from her chin with the back of a hand mapped by veins like dried lakebeds. “Not me exactly, but my mother’s mother. Nineteen thirty-four, the monolith was still lying face-up in the Zócalo like a drunk giant. The government wanted to stand it proud for the centennial. While the cranes tugged ropes, a few of us night-sweepers pried the plug. We were looking for gold. Found paper instead.”

Izel’s heart syncs to the flutter of the monarch basin. “Paper?”

“Two books, faces married back-to-back like jealous mirrors. One Spanish, one Nahuatl. They said the world would end when the books met again. So we separated them. The Spanish went to the hollow; the Nahuatl we smuggled out wrapped in a petticoat. Your great-grandmother carried it through the sewer tunnels that smell like this salsa—sweet, then rotten, then sweet again.”

“Where is it now?”

Abuela taps her own chest, just above the breastbone. “Here. In here. I ate the pages, one by one, during the famine of ’46. Fiber of agave, ink of cochineal. They tasted like communion and rebellion. The words became my blood. When I die, cut me open; the codex will be a rose in my ribs.”

Izel realizes she has stopped breathing. She forces air, speaks. “The cavity I scanned is empty.”

“Then someone else has been painting.” Abuela’s eyes, obsidian flecked with amber, narrow. “You must decide which side of the brush you are: bristle or canvas.”

A rooster crows, though no roosters live in this neighborhood. The sound is mechanical, a ringtone someone set to bird. Abuela laughs, stands, brushes cornmeal from her skirt.

“Come. The comal is still hot, and the sun is still late. We feed the gods before we fool them.”

She lifts the last tlacoyo, folds it in half, and places it on the volcanic boulder like an offering. Steam rises, carrying the aroma of blue corn into the sky where the drone once hovered. Izel watches the vapor curl, imagines it spelling words in Nahuatl too old for textbooks.

“Eat,” Abuela commands, pushing the other half into Izel’s hand. “You’ll need the weight. Today you steal from the sun, tomorrow the sun steals from you. Balance is hunger.”

They eat in silence, sharing the tlacoyo the way priests share a single heart. When the final crumb is gone, Abuela produces a spool of crimson thread spun from cochineal beetles. She ties the jade bead around Izel’s left wrist, knotting it three times.

“For the lock that thinks it knows you,” she says, answering a question Izel has not yet asked. “Blood remembers even when machines forget.”

The bead rests against Izel’s radial artery, warmer than skin, pulsing faintly out of phase with her heartbeat, like a second heart borrowed from the past.

08:02 a.m.

The sun finally breaches the ridge, flooding the patio with copper light. Izel feels the city’s million windows ignite behind her, a tidal wave of reflection that will carry her back down the hill, back to the museum, back to the hollow stone. She hugs Abuela, shorter now than she remembers, bones light as pumice.

“Bring back the story,” the old woman whispers into her ear, breath smelling of corn and copal. “Or finish it so hard it stays finished.”

Izel walks through the refrigerator gate. As it clangs shut, she hears Abuela sing, voice cracked but steady:

“Yaotl ipan oztotl,

tlaeltic xochitl,

nepantla tonatiuh.”

War inside the cave,

bitter flower,

sun in the middle place.

The words follow her down the path, past the goats, past the microbus stop, past the last streetlamp that blinks off as if embarrassed to compete with the sky. She boards the bus, straps the backpack that hides the Pelican case, feels the jade bead tap against her wrist like Morse code.

Only when the bus lurches onto the Periférico does she realize Abuela never asked why her hands smelled of cinnamon and drone plastic. The old woman already knew: some hungers can only be fed by stealing light from the sun.

Izel closes her eyes, tastes blue corn on her tongue, and rehearses the next verb she will need tonight: Tlacua. To bite.

Tlacua

(To Bite)

Present – 09:14 a.m.

The Metro’s fluorescent hum is the same frequency as the terahertz camera—0.9 THz—except here the waves are trapped in cheap ballast and the photons are dying of neglect. Izel feels them scream while she rides the jade-green Line 1 toward Chapultepec. The bead at her wrist taps the handrail in 4/4 time: authenticity, replica, authenticity, replica. Each tap a syllable she learned the hard way.

She closes her eyes and falls backward six years.

Flashback – Summer 2018, Museo Regional de Xalapa, Veracruz. Age 14.

The workshop smells of wet clay and over-ripe bananas. The bananas are not props; they are lunch for the art students shipped in from every pueblo between the coast and the coffee sierra. Izel is the youngest, the only one without a parent’s permission slip forged in triplicate. Her mother thinks she is at math camp; INAH thinks she is a scholarship prodigy; the museum technician thinks she is harmless. All of these are replicas of the truth, and the truth is hungry.

On the steel table sits an Olmec mask the size of a child’s face, basalt-black, lips parted as if mid-sentence. The label reads REPLICA—FIBER-RESIN, but the weight says basalt, 4.2 kilograms. Izel notices the discrepancy because she has spent the last three nights reading contraband PDFs on Mesoamerican quarry densities. A replica should not sweat the way this one does: tiny beads of moisture along the left eyebrow where the casting mold mis-aligned. She leans closer, smells something older than resin—petrichor, the scent of stone after rain that has not fallen in two thousand years.

The instructor, Maestro Eusebio (then only sixty, still with eyebrows), drones about polymer aging. “To fake time you must wound the surface,” he says, brandishing a Dremel. “But wounds must be plausible. History is just scar tissue arranged by committee.”

Izel raises her hand. “What if the wound is already inside?”

The class laughs; Eusebio does not. He sees the way her thumbnail worries the edge of the mask’s nostril, testing for give. Later, when the others break for banana break, he corners her beside the industrial sink.

“You think it’s real.” Not a question.

“I think it’s pregnant,” she answers. “Something alive in the clay.”

Eusebio’s eyes narrow. “Prove it.”

So she does the only thing a fourteen-year-old can do without tools: she bites it.

She chooses the left cheek, where the cheekbone curves like a breaking wave. Her incisors—still adolescent, sharp as obsidian flakes—sink half a millimeter. The taste is immediate: wet cement, yes, but also iron, also copper, also the chalk of basalt feldspar. More importantly: the surface dents, but does’t crumble. Fiber-resin would splinter; real basalt would chip; this does neither. It gives, then slowly exhales back into shape. Memory stone. A hybrid no one taught her about—pulverized basalt dust suspended in a collagen binder extracted from cow-bone glue. A forgery designed to fool both mass spectrometer and human tooth. A ghost dressed as a replica dressed as an original.

She spits a fleck of black into her palm. Under the fluorescent tube it glimmers with green micro-flecks—olivine, birthmark of the Tuxtla mountains where the Olmec quarried their gods. The piece is tiny, no larger than a sesame seed, but it is enough. She has stolen time, swallowed its dust, become carbon-dated.

Eusebio studies the wet speck, then the half-moon dent in the mask’s cheek. “Congratulations,” he says. “You just committed your first crime against the past.”

“Is it a crime if the past was already lying?”

He laughs, a sound like obsidian blades knocking. “That is the only crime that matters.”

Present – 09:27 a.m.

The Metro doors gasp open at Chapultepec station. Izel steps onto the platform, the memory of basalt still gritty between her molars. She tongues the back of her left incisor where a micro-fracture lingers—a hairline scar she never had repaired. The tooth is her oldest tool, older than the terahertz camera, older than the jade bead now pulsing against her radial vein. Authenticity, she realizes, is not a property of objects but of moments: the instant tooth met stone and both confessed.

She walks up the escalator past posters for the museum’s 60th-anniversary gala. The Sun Stone stares from the advert, tongue out, as if daring her to bite it too. She smiles, shows the poster her fractured incisor.

“Soon,” she whispers. “But this time I bring a bigger mouth.”

Tlachia

(To Look)

10:02 p.m., 14 hours later.

The city is a fever chart of red tail-lights when Damían Ortiz descends. No elevator, no stairs—just a service ladder bolted to the side of a storm-drain outlet that smells of wet limestone and last century’s revolutions. The iron rungs are spaced for shorter legs; his prosthetic knee clicks like a Geiger counter every time it takes his weight. The click echoes down the shaft, chasing the drone case strapped to his back. One hundred and thirty-one rungs later the sky is a memory the size of a postage stamp and the air is warm as blood.

Reforma Tunnel RS-4—colloquially “El Hoyo de los Sueños”—is the stretch of sewer that runs directly beneath the Paseo de la Reforma, from the Angel of Independence to the front steps of the Museo Nacional de Antropología. Built in 1964, big enough for a maintenance truck, now mostly forgotten except by maintenance crews and the tribe of FPV racers who call themselves “Los Topo-Reyes.” Damían is their reigning monarch, king of a kingdom that smells of ammonia and echo.

He sets the case on a dry patch of concrete, pops latches. Inside lies “Malinche”—a 5-inch carbon-frame quad he built from salvage: motors cannibalized from a downed Secretaría de Marina surveillance drone, flight controller ripped from a crashed cinematography rig in Baja, and a camera housing machined out of a depleted-uranium counter-weight he bought from a dentist who once served in Kosovo. The camera itself is a hybrid: 4K visible spectrum plus a hacked FLIR Boson thermal core. Total cost: two paychecks, three favors, and one soul. The soul was cheap; he had spares.

He flicks his right eye patch—black leather embossed with the Aquila Azteca—out of habit. Underneath, the socket is not empty; it holds a 900-mAh Li-ion pack that powers the micro-transmitter stitched into his occipital ridge. The transmitter feeds a live overlay: what the drone sees is what his remaining retina sees, piped through nerve-cable dreams. He is monocular in the world, omniscient in the dark.

11:11 p.m.—numerology he pretends not to notice.

He plugs the battery. Malinche awakens with a four-note chime cribbed from the Marines’ Hymn. Props spin, gyro calibrates. He snaps on goggles—fat-shark box-modded with a blower fan and a Fresnel lens scrounged from a dead overhead projector. The world becomes two rectangles of cathode-blue.

“Buenas noches, reyes,” he mutters to the empty tunnel, knowing at least forty subscribers are already tuned to his Twitch stream titled “CATEDRAL SUBTERRÁNEA—EP. 119.” The number is a lie; episodes are numbered in prime intervals to confuse the platform’s copyright bots. Chat scrolls inside his HUD:

TopoGüero: show us the bat colony  

XochiDrone: thermal on?  

ObsidianMoth: look for the sun

He blinks twice—hot-key macro—thermal overlay blooms in orange ghost-fire. Water trickles between his boots, 28 °C. Above, 12 meters of compressed earth, then the museum’s foundation slab, then the marble floor where ten million tourists a year photograph their feet without realizing they stand on a hollow sun.

He thumbs the stick. Malinaire lifts, skims the effluent, accelerates to 120 km/h in three seconds. Wind howls through the frame’s struts, vibrates up the arms, into the ribcage. He grins—teeth white against tunnel dark—remembering the first time he flew after Medellín, after the claymore, after the medevac rotors sounded just like these props. The memory wants in; he shuts the hatch. Tonight is not about the past; it is about ventilation shafts.

12 minutes later he reaches the access grate labeled INAH-MECH-07—an archaic HVAC intake installed when the museum still believed in paper blueprints. The grate is cast iron, lattice of crosses shaped like Toltec glyphs. Behind it: a plenum box, then fiberglass ducting 80 cm in diameter, then the conditioned lungs of the most surveilled building in Latin America. According to leaked as-builts he bought with crypto, this shaft feeds the central corridor between the Mexica and Maya halls. Perfect vantage to peek into the courtyard where the Sun Stone lies flat like a black moon.

He sets Malinche on a ledge, swaps batteries—custom 6S 2.2 Ah giving 14 minutes of hover on 3 % throttle. From a Velcro pouch he withdraws a dental mirror taped to a carbon rod: old-school periscope. No electronic emission, nothing for COYOTL’s spectrum sweep to flag. He peers. The grate is secured by four hex bolts, heads painted institutional grey. Paint is unbroken; no one has serviced the shaft since the 2015 renovation. Good. He pulls a cordless Dremel, bits wrapped in electrical tape to muffle scream. The trick is to cut just enough to weaken the heads, not remove them—looks like corrosion failure rather than intrusion. Metal dust drifts; he tastes iron, thinks of blood, pushes on.

11:27 p.m.

Screws neutered, he pries the grate inward. It swings on ancient hinges, screeches once, then silent. Chat loses its mind:

CieloRoto: that sound = metal af  

INAHwatch: 👀  

ObsidianMoth: find her

He frowns at the last. Her? He shrugs, nudges Malinaire through the breach.

Inside the duct the air is 18 °C, smells of ionized dust and the ghost of a thousand fourth-grade field-trip sneezes. He kills the blower fan on the goggles—needs to hear. Prop noise multiplies off fiberglass, a choir of mechanical insects. He limits throttle to 25 %, creeps.

First junction: left to Maya, right to Mexica. Thermal shows right corridor warmer—stone absorbs daytime heat, radiates slow. He banks right. Thirty meters later the duct widens into a vertical stack descending from roof level. He pitches downward, props in reverse, controlled fall. Through the goggles he sees his own reflection in the glossy duct: a cyclops haloed by LED status rings.

11:34 p.m.

He reaches the supply vent overlooking the central courtyard. Slats of anodized aluminum angle the airflow; between them, the museum floor spreads like a diorama. And there—center stage, tongue out, ringed by four motion sensors and a discreet brass stanchion—lies the Sun Stone. From above it looks less like a calendar and more like a target. Range to surface: 9.8 meters, line-of-sight clear except for one problem: the vent grill is laser-welded, no screws. He curses softly.

Chat suggests solutions: acid, thermite, wishful thinking. Then he remembers the new payload he mounted last week—a 2-watt 450 nm laser diode originally sold for engraving dog tags. It draws off the flight battery, cuts thin aluminum at 5 mm per second if feed rate is steady. He toggles arm-switch, aims. Blue-violet light kisses the grill; aluminum glows, drips. The cut is surgical, a 3 cm circle. He noses Malinaire, nudges the disk inward. It falls silently onto the stone’s polished surround, lands edge-up like a coin waiting to be flipped.

11:41 p.m.

He descends through the hole, props whisper-quiet. Gimbal tilts. Visible camera: tourists gone, guards at perimeter, LED floodlights washing the monolith in sterile white. Thermal overlay: a rectangular cold spot dead center—2.7 m long, 0.9 m wide—exactly the dimensions of the anomaly Izel’s terahertz scan revealed twelve hours earlier. The cavity is not a rumor now; it is a negative heat signature, a ghost eating photons.

His remaining eye waters inside the goggle. He blinks record. Stream captures the moment.

ObsidianMoth donates 50,000 satoshis with message:  

tell the girl with the jade bead the hollow is real.

Damían’s thumb stalls on the stick. Girl? Jade bead? He scrolls chat, sees earlier whispered references, realizes someone in the audience is directing his gaze as much as he is directing the drone. Unease prickles the nape. He is used to being the lookout, not the looked-at.

11:44 p.m.

Footsteps echo—two sets, soft-soled, approaching from the Maya wing. Guards on random sweep. Thermal silhouettes bloom orange through the limestone arch. He has maybe forty seconds before they enter the courtyard. He wants one more pass, closer, a parallax shot to triangulate depth of the cold spot. Malinaire dips to one meter above the stone’s surface. Prop wash stirs dust motes into tiny galaxies. Camera focuses on the central boss—the so-called tongue of Tonatiuh. There: a hairline seam, crescent shadow only visible from this altitude. A lid. A plug. A mouth waiting to bite whoever peers too close.

He snapshots, pitches up.

11:45 p.m.

A guard appears, rifle slung, eyes scanning. The man’s gaze passes inches beneath Malinaire. Damían freezes throttle, lets the quad hover in dead air, a dragonfly made of circuit boards. The other guard bends, retrieves the fallen aluminum disk, frowns. Radio crackle: Spanish too fast to parse, but the tone is universal—something is not where it should be.

Damían backs Malinaire into the duct, reverses props. The laser-cut circle now evidence, his signature in molten metal. He climbs the vertical shaft faster than safety allows; props scrape fiberglass, leave scuff marks—more breadcrumbs. He does not care. The image of the cold hollow burns in his remaining retina like after-image of a muzzle flash.

11:49 p.m.

He breaches the horizontal run, punches throttle to 80 %. Duct vibrates; a support strap snaps, clangs away into darkness. He exits the intake grate, reseals it with a single zip-tie—cosmetic, but enough for a cursory glance. In the tunnel he lands Malinaire, yanks battery, stuffs goggles. Stream ends. Video auto-uploads to IPFS, hash pinned to Arweave before the props cool.

He leans against the curved wall, heart hammering. The sewer smells suddenly of cordite, the scent memory he cannot scrub. He touches the eye patch, feels the transmitter warm against the socket. Somewhere above, the Sun Stone keeps its secret; somewhere online, a girl with a jade bead is about to receive a DM containing a thermal image and a question:

—You see the hollow too?

He whispers to the dark: “Tlachia. I looked. Now you look back.”

Behind him, far up the tunnel, the coyote-eyed cameras of COYOTL blink awake, drawn by the snap of a zip-tie and the ghost of a cold spot no human should have noticed. The kingdom of the underground has new subjects, and the king has just declared himself visible.

Tlachixqui

(Seer)

20:03—Gala Night, Museo Nacional de Antropología.

The invitation reads “Cocktail Illustre: 60 Años de Luz” in raised gold foil that matches the trim on Carmen Sáenz’s gown until she steps under the monochromatic LED wash of the courtyard; then both foil and silk turn the color of wet sand. Good. Camouflage is easier when the world desaturates itself. She hands the vellum to an usher, accepts a flute of Casa Madero brut, and immediately decants half the champagne into a potted cycad. Bubbles cling to prehistoric fronds like tiny satellites. Alcohol blurs metrics; she needs her pulse steady at 62 bpm—exactly one beat per second, a human metronome against which every deviation will later stand out.

Security line is three deep: socialites in obsidian jewelry, diplomats in linen suits, influencers live-streaming their own pupils. Carmín wears lenses that look like ordinary cosmetic contacts but record at 4K 60 fps, 190° field. The lenses are called “Coatlicue Eyes,” custom-fabricated in Singapore, black-market price 1.2 ETH. They sync to the burner phone stitched inside her clutch; the clutch is a 1950s cigarette case retro-fitted with Faraday silk. She blinks twice—slow, crocodile—initiates calibration. A microscopic HUD scrolls: PUPIL TRACKING… IRIS STABLE… RETINAL VESSEL MAP 99.7 % UNIQUE. Good. She is both camera and cipher.

20:07

She crosses the threshold of the Mexica hall, shoes clicking Morse on polished marble. Every step is a range-finder; the echo tells her ceiling height (8.4 m), wall composition (travertine over reinforced concrete), camera density (one dome per 22 m²). She pretends to admire a chacmool while her left iris autofocuses on the nearest guard. Nameplate: R. HERNÁNDEZ. Weapon: FX-05 Xiuhcoatl, sling retention clipped. Eye dominance: left (he closes it twice while stifling a yawn). Retinal app tags him AGT-01, logs GPS, bearing, velocity 0.3 m/s clockwise loop. A red ghost overlays her vision, predicting his path 90 seconds forward with 3 % drift. She blinks—save.

Chat window (encrypted, retina-projected, invisible to bystanders):

Carmín > to IzelTrejo::  

Guard AGT-01 20-yr patrol loop, 0.3 m/s, drift +0.4 m/s after 00:30—selling?

IzelTrejo > read receipt 20:08

Carmín smiles, moves on.

20:14

The Sun Stone dominates the courtyard like a black eclipse. Tonight it wears a necklace of LED pin-spots that bleach its reliefs to surgical white. A velvet rope keeps guests one meter back; a second rope, invisible, is woven from infrared beams 30 cm above the first. Carmín sees them courtesy of a micro-spectrometer implanted in the bridge of her nose—six months of healing, two weeks of tinnitus, worth every peso. She approaches until the IR wash saturates her HUD crimson, then retreats one pace—edge mapping complete. She notes the interferometry projector recessed in the ceiling: laser net, 635 nm, 2 mW—eye-safe but artifact-lethal; any vibration >40 µm trips the alarm. Her gown’s hem contains tungsten micro-chain; if she twirls too fast she’ll vibrate the floor. She files under: fun facts for buyers.

Waiters circulate with trays of miniature tlaxcalli topped with grasshopper aioli. She takes one, palms it, drops it into the clutch’s lead-lined coin pocket—dead space for signal occlusion. She needs the plate’s diameter (6 cm) to scale later photogrammetry. Everything is a ruler if you know how to measure.

20:21

She spots Director Vera Volkov across the courtyard—ex-Mossad, now head of museum security, hair the color of storm-season Pacific. Volkov wears a pantsuit cut from rip-stop fabric laced with conductive thread; rumors say the thread can tase a man at ten paces. Carmín’s lenses try to lock onto Volkov’s retina, but the Russian’s pupils are shielded behind anti-surveillance lenses that reflect only Carmín’s own distorted face. A duel of mirrors. Carmín bows slightly; Volkov raises an eyebrow, sips water, looks away. Point conceded.

A string quartet begins a Bartók arrangement that sounds like butterflies being taxidermied. Carmín uses the crescendo to mask a cough that triggers the app’s panoramic sweep. In 1.3 seconds her eyes saccade across 147 objects, 19 humans, 2 autonomous floor-cleaning robots. The app renders a heat-map: patrol density highest near the Maya jade room; lowest in the Oaxaca corridor currently under renovation—plastic tarp, scaffolding, blind spots big enough to drive a mule through. She tags the corridor EXIT-B.

20:29

She needs one more dataset: the night-shift hand-off. Rumor says guards swap at 20:30 sharp, ninety-second window when both teams are distracted by checklist tablets. She drifts toward the staff-only door behind the Teotihuacan altar. Retinal cam zooms on the magnetic strike: 600-lb holding force, 12 VDC, wired to a Siemens panel behind a Sol de Oro relief. She photographs the relief’s perforation pattern—later she’ll 3-D print a bypass jig. A waiter almost collides; she apologizes in perfect French, learns his shoe size (42 EU), logs it—disguise potential.

20:30

As predicted, guards converge near the freight elevator. For a moment the courtyard is a ballet of khaki uniforms exchanging clipboards. Carmín’s pulse spikes to 68; the app compensates, steadies overlay. She blinks—capture ninety seconds of retinal video, 2.7 GB compressed via foveated codec. Dataset now complete: 8 guards, 2 supervisors, 1 rover, 1 K-9 (Belgian Malinois, call-sign Itzcuin), 19 cameras, 4 infrared curtains, 1 interferometry net, 1 biometric door. She packages the bundle with a random-one-time pad, watermarks with steganographic hummingbirds—her signature.

20:37

She ascends the marble staircase to the mezzanine restroom—mirrors, marble, no cameras (privacy law). Inside a stall she extracts the burner phone, launches Orbot, tunnels to the Tor market “Tlatelolco.” She creates listing:

Lot #060-SEER  

Retinal Patrol Map + Predictive AI Model – Museo Antropología – Valid 72 h  

Opening bid: 0.85 BTC  

Buy-now: 2.4 BTC (~$150 k)  

Sample hash provided.  

Escrow: 2-of-3 multisig.

She uploads a 5-second teaser: blurred silhouettes, no faces, coordinates scrambled. Within forty seconds three bids appear. The highest handle is IzelTrejo.

IzelTrejo > 2.4 BTC buy-now activated.

Carmín grins, releases encrypted payload, signs multisig. The coins lock for six hours—enough time to dispute if data is garbage, enough time for her to tumble into cold wallets. She wipes the burner, drops it into the sanitary bin beneath bloody tampons and gold foil—camouflage by abjection.

20:44

She re-enters the gala. Volkov is now on stage thanking donors. Carmín positions herself in the third row, lenses recording the Russian’s micro-expressions—future leverage. While applause rises she lets her left eye drift out of focus, overlays the predictive model on real time. Red ghosts of guards glide along pre-computed vectors; reality matches simulation with 96 % accuracy. She exhales: product delivered, reputation intact.

A waiter offers champagne refills. This time she accepts, drinks. Alcohol finally hits; she allows her pulse to climb to 74. The future is a corridor she has already mapped; all that remains is walking it.

On stage, Volkov concludes: “… porque la seguridad no es un muro, es una mirada que nunca parpadea.” Security is not a wall, it is a gaze that never blinks.

Carmín blinks—once, slow—uploads the quote to her cloud. She whispers to no one and everyone:

“Tlachixqui. Seer. But every seer needs someone to watch the watchers.”

She turns, gown swirling just below the 40 µm threshold, and walks toward the exit. Behind her, the Sun Stone gleams under LED rain, unaware that its own reflection has just been sold to the highest bidder.

Tlacualiztli

(Feast)

23:11, Thursday.  

Colonia Guerrero, Calle Salvador Díaz Mirón.

The façade still screams CINE ROXY in cracked neon tubing shaped like Art-Deco lightning bolts, but the bulbs have been replaced by agave-blue rope-lights that spell PULQUERÍA TLACHIA—”the place that looks back.” Inside, the projection booth is now a fermentation lab where pulque bubbles in glass carboys the size of torpedoes. The screen—torn in 1985 by earthquake shockwaves—has been patched with hand-stitched quilts depicting Aztec gods getting drunk on cosmic sap. Instead of seats there are mismatched church pews and school desks lacquered with resin so thick you can read love notes trapped like insects. A faint smell of yeast, epazote, and vintage celluloid clings to the velvet curtains that nobody has bothered to take down.

Izel arrives first, hoodie swapped for a denim jacket painted with hummingbirds that glow under black-light. She carries a gym-bag heavy with terahertz drives and the jade bead warm against her wrist. Damían follows five minutes later, drone-case disguised as a bass-guitar gig-bag slung over his shoulder, eye-patch flickering LED red where the charger port sits. Carmín glides in last, dress exchanged for charcoal slacks and a silk blouse the color of counterfeit money, clutching a 1950s cigarette case that now holds her Faraday-shielded tablet instead of Pall Malls.

They choose the front row—what used to be the lovers’ bench, springs sagging toward the stage. A waiter wearing a ushers’ vintage maroon vest appears, bowing with the solemnity of someone who once tore tickets for Chaplin premieres.

“Tonight’s specials,” he intones, projecting a cardboard menu against the torn screen. “Tacos de chapulín al comal, salsa borracha con pulque curado de piña y vainilla, y para postre—amaranto crujiente con miel de maguey.”

Carmín raises an eyebrow. “Grasshoppers and mead? Feels sacrificial.”

“Everything worth eating is,” the waiter replies, pocketing a tip before vanishing behind the velvet.

They eat first, negotiate second—pulque protocol. The tacos arrive on miniature steel spades that once scooped popcorn. Chapulines are toasted until their hind legs curl like quotation marks; they crunch between teeth releasing lime, sea-salt, and the faint chlorophyll of cornfields at dawn. Izel discovers she can taste the altitude—Oaxacan fields 2,000 m above sea level—because the insects stored sky in their exoskeletons. She stores the flavor as data: spectrum 420 nm, saline peak 0.7 %. Knowledge is seasoning.

Damían washes his down with pulque curado, foam clinging to his moustache like cloud cover. “Story goes,” he says, wiping, “Roxy showed porn during the war—soldiers got two hours of paradise before shipping out. Place has seen more last suppers than the cathedral.”

Carmín lifts her clay mug. “Then let’s add another.” She taps cigarette case; holographic share-chart blooms above the table, numbers hovering like fireflies. “Macau buyer wired ten percent earnest. Total pot sits at three million Tether, locked in escrow. We finish, we split. Izel—you still want forty?”

Izel nods, mouth full. She swallows, wipes lime from lip. “Tech risk is mine. Terahertz camera, obsidian printer, polymer aging bath—cost already north of half a million pesos. Forty is non-negotiable.”

Damían leans back, springs creak. “I’m twenty for drone logistics, exfil, sewer map, thermal proof-of-hole. Fair.”

Carmín’s fingers dance, pie-chart re-slices. “Leaves thirty for me—buyer relations, laundering, insurance against double-cross. And ten…” She pauses, lets silence stretch like taffy. “Reserved for YEI.”

The name lands between them like a dropped calavera. Nobody has met YEI; the handle appeared in encrypted chat six weeks ago offering a single service: “final-millimeter alignment.” Messages arrive in flawless Nahuatl and Python. Wallet traces to a Zcash shielded pool—untraceable.

Izel speaks first. “Ten percent to a ghost? Three hundred grand for alignment we haven’t defined?”

Carmín exhales. “Buyer’s condition. Macau wants certainty the swap weighs within forty grams. Says only YEI can guarantee. I say we pay, or we lose the sale.”

Damían rotates his empty mug, eye-patch reflecting candlelight. “I’ve seen laser rigs that precise. But they need line-of-sight and a heartbeat of latency. Inside the museum, under interferometry net, we’ll have neither. If ghost can solve that, ten is cheap.”

A new waiter appears—older, face cross-hatched by celluloid scratches—carrying a covered clay dish. He sets it center-table, lifts lid. Inside: a single blue-corn tlacoyo shaped like the Sun Stone, complete with pipián “rays.”

“Compliments of the house,” he whispers. “And of the partner who is not here.”

On the tlacoyo’s surface, carved with a toothpick, tiny glyphs spell:

YEIYÁOTL  

nepantla tonatiuh  

11.9

Izel feels the jade bead vibrate—as if the corn cake is tuned to its frequency. She tears off a ray, eats. Taste of lake-water, iron, and something electric. Data packet, she thinks, disguised as dinner.

Carmín photographs the glyphs, hashes the image, posts to the dead-drop chat. Seconds later a single reply:

—11.9 = minutes of window. Bring bead. Bring tooth.

The chat deletes itself.

Damían laughs—short, sharp. “Ghost accepts your grasshopper offering.”

Izel pockets another “ray,” evidence or sacrament. “Ten percent stays,” she concedes. “But ghost shows face before finale. I don’t bleed for silhouettes.”

Carmín closes cigarette case; hologram vanishes. “Then we’re agreed.” She lifts pulque. “To the feast that feeds the thief and the god alike.”

They clink mugs. Foam sloshes onto popcorn-spilled concrete, forming temporary constellations.

A projector—ancient 16 mm—flickers alive behind them. Without sound, archival footage rolls: 1964, the day the Sun Stone was lowered into the museum by cranes, journalists swarming like ants over honey. The frame judders, burns, but the monolith’s face stays steady, tongue eternal.

Izel watches, transfixed. She sees, for a single frame, a woman in a blue maid’s uniform slip something into the crane’s counter-weight slot—something small and green that catches light. The film snaps, white-out.

Lights come up. The waiter reappears, presents a leather pouch.

“Dessert,” he says. Inside: four polished grasshopper wings, iridescent green, drilled at the base.

“Wear them tomorrow,” he instructs. “They will vibrate when the window opens. YEI’s gift.”

Carmín palms one, amused. “Jewelry that tells time. How antique.”

Damían threads his into boot-lace. “Better than a claymore click.”

Izel slips hers onto the same ribbon as the jade bead. Wing against stone—old pulse, new wingbeat.

The bill arrives written on the back of a 1943 movie ticket: “Feature Presentation—El Sol Roja.” Total: 666 pesos. Carmín pays with a black card that has no numbers, only an obsidian mirror.

They exit through the projection booth. Fermentation carboys glug like distant artillery. Outside, Mexico City hums at 220 Hz—power-grid heartbeat. Above them the Roxy sign flickers once, spelling in dying neon:

T L A C U A L I Z T L I

Feast complete, covenant sealed.

Izel inhales yeast and night. She tastes grasshopper still lodged in molars—chitin that once sang in cornfields now sings in her blood. She thinks of the verb: not just to eat, but to be eaten in return. Tomorrow the Sun Stone will bite back.

She buttons the jacket, feels bead and wing knock together—two hearts, one fossil, one newborn. She whispers to the street:

“Let the next course begin.”

Tlaloa

(To Run)

00:00:01 – Metro Line 1, Viaduct Section

The train bursts from tunnel into open air, cars rattling like bullets in a magazine. Below, the Avenida 20 de Noviembre is a vein of sodium light; above, the moon is a spent shell casing. Damían Ortiz stands on the roof of the sixth car, prosthetic knee magnet-locked to a maintenance plate he unscrewed twenty minutes earlier. Wind howls; eyepatch LED strobes crimson. In his right hand: a carbon-fiber controller with stick grips worn smooth by desert sweat. In his goggles: Malinaire’s eye-view, 120 km/h, threading the gap between couplers.

He punches throttle. The drone dives, skims the overhead catenary—sparks bloom like magnesium flowers—then flips inverted, slips through the knuckle between cars seven and eight. Inside the train, commuters stare at phones, unaware a 5-inch quad just overtook them at 3 g. Chat overlay scrolls across his retina:

TopoRey_666: gap = 38 cm  

Malverde_FPV: speed record?  

ObsidianMoth: aim lower

The last message freezes him—who is Moth inside his stream?—but momentum brooks no paranoia. He yaws, follows the train into the next tunnel. Tunnel means suction, turbulence, steel echo that can smack a quad into the wall like a flyswatter. He trims PID on the fly, boosts yaw derivative 0.02, feels the props bite. At the far end he pulls vertical, punches through the emergency exit grate, emerges onto Insurgentes platform just as the doors chime. Drone hovers centimeters above commuters’ heads; no one looks up from their doom-scroll. He lands on a billboard marked “CINEMA PARAISO—REABIERTO,” snags the battery, vanishes down the escalator before security can radio coherence. Heart rate: 179 bpm. Transit time: 119 seconds. He whispers the verb: “Tlaloa. To run is to outrun yourself.”

00:17:43 – Taller Trejo, Colonia Obrera

The lab is a converted tortilla mill whose stones still smell of nixtamal. Izel has replaced corn with chemistry: shelves of tetraethoxysilane, titanium isopropoxide, iron (III) nitrate, and bottles of mezcal that serve as both solvent and celebration. A 3-D printer the size of a confessional box stands center; its print bed is heated to 480 °C, hot enough to sinter volcanic glass. Tonight she is pouring the sun.

She loads a 50-mL syringe with obsidian slurry: 68 % SiO₂ nanopowder, 3.4 % TiO₂ (exactly the trace detected in the Sun Stone’s outer 2 mm), 0.8 % FeO for that green-black undertone, balance agave fructose as organic binder. The syringe mounts to a robotic arm scavenged from a dental lab; arm moves in raster while a 10.6 µm CO₂ laser pulses behind it, fusing each micro-layer. She wears copper goggles that make the world look like a negative of the moon. Every pass smells of burnt sugar and lightning.

She bites her lip—echo of fourteen, of Olmec mask—and remembers the taste of real stone. The printer cannot replicate vesicular texture: the microscopic bubbles formed when magma hits water. So she cheats. With a scalpel she scores the cooling surface in pseudo-random spirals, then breathes on it—humidity condenses, flash-cools, creates pinpoint voids. Under microscope the pattern matches quarry samples within 5 % standard deviation. Good. But weight is off by 42 grams. She adds a tungsten coin—1973 centavo, discontinued, worthless except for mass. Coin bears the year of the student massacre; she figures the stone should carry ghosts openly. Total delta: 39 g. Within tolerance.

She sets the slab—still radiating 80 °C—on the kitchen scale. Numbers settle: 24,591 g. Original stone segment she plans to replace weighs 24,630 g. A 39-gram hymn to imperfection. She smiles, tastes titanium on her tongue, and logs the entry: BATCH #07 – SUCCESS. She labels the back with a micro-glyph of a grasshopper wing—YEI’s vibration symbol—then hides the slab inside a tortilla warmer painted with Zapata’s silhouette. Authenticity is always warmer than replica.

01:11:12 – Rooftop, Edificio Reforma 222

Carmín stands twelve floors above the Angel of Independence, city glittering like spilled rhinestones. She wears silk gloves the color of dried blood; in her hands is a Mixtec codex—deer skin, 11 pages, folded like an accordion, painted with turquoise and cochineal. It is beautiful, worthless, and perfect.

The buyer tonight is a Hong Kong broker who thinks he is laundering a real 15th-century ritual manuscript. Carmín knows it was born in a Tlaxcala barn six months ago, aged with tequila, cocoa powder, and nine days buried in volcanic soil. She paid the artisan 0.15 BTC and a promise of silence. The broker wired 0.9 BTC upfront; the rest will follow once provenance paperwork clears Macau customs disguised as 19th-century missionary pamphlets.

A drone—commercial DJI Mini—hovers overhead, piloted by her assistant, a film student who believes this is an indie shoot. Carmín holds the codex above her head, lets rotor wash flutter the pages like hummingbird wings. She speaks to camera:

“Chain of custody begins now. GPS 19.4275, -99.1594. Timestamp 01:11:12 UTC. Condition: pristine.”

She lowers the codex, slips it into a museum-grade acrylic capsule, nitrogen-purged, RFID tag sewn inside the seam. The tag broadcasts a forged accession number lifted from a forgotten Franciscan archive. She hands capsule to courier—an Ecuadorian skateboarder who will ride Metro all night, swapping trains every three stops, before delivering to a DHL drop-box in Nezahualcóyotl. The skateboarder believes he is carrying lab-grown diamonds; the RFID will tell customs he is carrying religious ephemera worth 300 USD. Both are replicas of truth.

Carmín watches the boy vanish into elevator, then checks her wallet. 0.9 BTC confirmed, tumbling through zk-SNARK mixers. She exhales steam into night air, feels the city inhale her fraud and ask for seconds. She whispers: “Tlaloa. To run goods is to run oneself across borders no wall can see.”

02:27:55 – Convergence, Zócalo

They meet at dawn beneath the flagpole where the Sun Stone once lay face-up like a wounded moon. No words; they simply show artifacts of their training.

Damían plays a 40-second clip on his phone: drone’s-eye view racing between Metro cars, timestamped, speed-stamped 119 km/h. He pauses on a frame where rotor tips blur invisible—proof he can hide motion inside motion.

Izel unwraps the tortilla warmer, reveals obsidian slab still warm as skin. She flips it; tungsten centavo winks. Weight Sharpied on masking tape: 24,591 g. Damían whistles one-note respect.

Carmín opens cigarette case, displays blockchain ledger: 0.9 BTC laundered, Mixtec codex en-route, customs pre-cleared. She flicks to next screen—her own buy-now on the Tor market already has five new bids for future laundering. Supply meets demand meets legend.

Sunrise ignites the flagpole’s brass. Shadows run long, pointing toward Chapultapec, toward the museum, toward the hollow heart of the Fifth Sun. Together they walk east, training finished, appetite whet. In their pockets: grasshopper wings ready to vibrate, jade bead ready to impersonate pulse, eye-patch ready to record.

Behind them, the Zócalo stones echo footsteps like applause. The city tastes titanium, ozone, and mezcal. The verb is conjugated in every footfall:

Tlaloa—yo corro, tú corres, nosotros corremos.  

I run, you run, we run—until the past stops chasing.

Tlalolini

(To Rush)

09:00 a.m. – INAH Headquarters, Colonia Polanco  

Press-conference room smells of fresh paint and older politics. A banner screams:  

“60 AÑOS DE LUZ: EL SOL SE LEVANTA DE NUEVO.”  

Journalists jostle, phones raised like periscopes. On stage: Dr. Zavala (Director of Archaeological Heritage), Vera Volkov (Security), and the museum’s lead conservator, a woman whose lab coat is embroidered with tiny gold suns.

Zavala taps the mic. “For six decades the Piedra del Sol has rested on a reinforced-concrete plinth installed in 1964. Structural engineers have detected micro-settlements of 2.7 millimeters—within tolerance, yet unacceptable for World Heritage. Therefore, on the night of the anniversary gala, we will translate the monolith three meters east onto a new seismic-isolation pedestal. This is a one-time event. Never again in our lifetimes.”

Gasps, camera flashes. A reporter shouts: “Will the public see it upright?”  

“No,” Zavala answers. “Safety protocols require it remain horizontal. The operation will take 119 minutes, precisely between 21:00 and 23:00. After that, the stone returns to immobility for another century.”

Volkov steps forward, grey eyes scanning. “Security will be absolute. No media, no exceptions.”

In the fourth row, Izel’s stomach drops like a counter-weight. 119 minutes—same as Damían’s Metro sprint, same as YEI’s cryptic timestamp. Coincidence is a luxury she can’t afford. She thumbs her phone under the seat, fires encrypted burst to group chat:

ITZ > Clock started. 21-23 h, 3 m move, underside exposed.  

CARMN > Buyer just moved payment deadline to 23:30. Fits.  

DMN > Need new bolt-cut plan. Old map useless.  

YEI > (emoji: hummingbird wing) I bring the tooth.

10:12 a.m. – Outside, under jacarandas

They cluster around a park bench that smells of dog and last night’s mezcal. Damían spreads a fresh blueprint: seismic floor plan stolen from contractor’s dropbox 0400 that morning. Red sharpie circles the existing plinth, green X marks the new pedestal, yellow dotted line shows 3 m translation route. Crucial detail: the stone will be lifted on air-skates—hover-pads fed by a diesel compressor—leaving a 14 cm gap beneath for cable threading, sensor removal, and… access.

Izel traces the gap with a finger. “14 cm is tight but workable. My sub-THz rig needs 9 cm clearance. We can scan the plug, map dowels, even inject contrast.”

Damían nods. “Compressor noise will mask drone rotors. I can fly Malinaire underneath, record bolt pattern, plant micro-vibrators to loosen limestone plug days ahead.”

Carmín lights an e-cig that smells like cold coins. “Problem: guard density triples during move. Volkov filed overtime for extra 28 agents. My retinal map is obsolete the second they clock in.”

YEI’s voice crackles through burner speaker—distorted, genderless, calm. “I will be inside the stone before 21:00. Vibration sensors will feel nothing. Provide me 40 grams tolerance and the swap will balance.”

They exchange glances. None has met YEI; all have learned not to ask.

Izel exhales. “Then we split tasks. Phase One: prep. Phase Two: lift-window. Phase Three: exfil before 23:00. Shares stay—” she taps her wrist where bead hides, “—as agreed.”

Carmín leans back. “Timeline?”

Izel already counting. “T-10 days. We need replica segment cured, drone retro-fitted, guard schedule hacked, and—” she swallows hard, “—I need to get hired onto the conservation team or we’re blind.”

Damían grins pirate. “I’ve got a plan for that too. But it involves a knee, a med-pack, and a story about heroism in Afghanistan no one will dare verify.”

12:47 p.m. – Across town, INAH server room

An intern plugs a USB shaped like a tiny sun into the back of a tower labeled BACKUP-3. On the drive: a .pdf titled “Seismic_Isolation_Protocol_v3_FINAL.” Thirty seconds later the file clones to a Dropbox accessed by a girl with jade at her wrist. Download bar fills: 119 MB. She whispers the word like a metronome:

“Tlalolini… rush, rush, rush.”

14:00 p.m. – Museum courtyard, closed to public

Engineers wheel in aluminum rails, pneumatic pumps, laser levels. Yellow tape blooms like cautionary flowers. Izel, now wearing intern badge forged that morning, carries a tray of accelerometers. She kneels, pretends to calibrate, but her real tool is the bead pressed against steel—listening for hollow echoes. The stone answers with a faint green pulse only she can feel. Window confirmed.

Volkov passes, boots clicking. Her gaze lingers on Izel’s injured incisor—micro-fracture catching LED glare. Recognition flickers, dies; the day is too busy for ghosts.

19:03 – That night, rooftop overlooking Alameda

They stand in a triangle around a cheap plastic table where a portable induction cooktop melts synthetic obsidian scraps into slag tests. Damían’s drone hovers stationary above, recording its own reflection in a puddle of mezcal. Carmín’s tablet scrolls live satellite feed of museum roof—thermal blooms where new compressors idle. Izel stirs the molten glass with a titanium rod, counting seconds between phase transitions: 11.9. Always 11.9.

She lifts the rod, lets a droplet fall. It cools mid-air into a perfect sphere, black as erased time. It hits the table, rolls, stops against Damían’s prosthetic knee. He picks it up, pockets it.

“Token,” he says. “For luck.”

Carmín closes tablet. “Timeline locked. T-10, T-9, T-8… we rush toward the sun. No second curtain.”

They raise shot glasses—grasshopper salt crusting the rims. Toast is simple, whispered in triplicate:

“Tlalolini.”  

Rush, rush, rush—until stone or we break.

Moon climbs, city pulses, compressors thrum like distant war drums. Somewhere inside the museum the Sun Stone waits, patient as geology, oblivious as only gods can be. But its shadow now contains four heartbeats practicing velocity, and a calendar counting down: 119 minutes to steal fire, 119 minutes to return it, 119 minutes to decide which side of history tastes sweeter.

The countdown has already begun.

Tlapaliztli

(To Paint in Bright Colors)

10:08 a.m. – Colonia Anzures, inside a forgotten 1957 townhouse  

The door is the same color as the Mexico City sky before a storm—Barragán pink faded into bruised violet. No number, only a bronze handplate shaped like an open eye. Izel presses her thumb to the pupil; the iris warms, recognizes the jade bead’s pulse frequency, and clicks open. She steps into a vestibule that smells of linseed, copal, and the particular bitterness that lurks inside centuries-old color.

Maestro Eusebio sits on a painter’s scaffold that once belonged to the master architect himself. At seventy, his beard is white as calcite, his overalls a Jackson-Pollock of ochres no chemist has been able to reproduce. On the wall behind him: a rectangle of pure color—so saturated it seems to emit sound rather than light. He calls it “El Grito Rosa,” the shade Barragán mixed the day he won the commission for Torres de Satélite. No photograph has ever captured it; cameras blink and default to #FF0055, embarrassed.

“Niña de la mordida,” Eusebio greets without turning. “Still biting stones to see if they bleed?”

“Only when truth hides inside pigment,” Izel answers, offering a paper-wrapped bundle: two obsidian shards from Batch #07. He unwraps them like fragile tortillas, holds one to the skylight where northern exposure bleaches nothing.

“Weight?”

“39 grams light. Needs to gain mass without gaining volume.”

“Then we feed it ghosts.”

He leads her downstairs—stairs the color of wet saffron—into a laboratory masquerading as a pantry. Rows of mason jars labeled in pre-war shorthand:  

“Hematite – Sangre de Mujer 1958”  

“Maya Blue – Indigo + Palygorskita, batch 12, 1962”  

“Cochineal – 1,200 gramos, secado con mezcal”  

And, newest shelf, amber vials: “Fe₃O₄ – 50 nm – ferro-magnetita, recubierta de sílice.”

Ferromagnetic dust—magnetite cloaked in glass so thin light thinks it’s air.

Eusebio lifts a vial, tilts it; black particles swirl like malevolent snow. “XRF guns see only surface. If we coax obsidian to wear this skin, the portable spectrometer will read 3.4 % titanium and 0.8 % iron—exactly your quarry. But deeper: a lattice that sings when magnetized. Fool the eye, fool the gun, fool the greed.”

He empties the vial into a porcelain crucible already warming on a hot-plate set to 82 °C—just below the Curie point where magnetism forgets its name. He adds three drops of stand-linseed, one drop of Venice turpentine, then stirs with a hawk feather whose barbs have been trimmed into a perfect spatula.

“Paint,” he commands, handing her the feather.

Izel steadies her breath, remembers the first time she bit the Olmec mask—how the surface yielded, how it confessed. She dips the feather, lays a stroke across the cooler obsidian shard. The mixture spreads like liquid velvet, pooling into micro-grooves her laser etched days earlier. Eusebio flicks a switch; beneath the crucible, electromagnets pulse in 11.9 Hz bursts—same rhythm YEI uses, same as the Metro’s third-rail hum. Ferromagnetic particles align along invisible meridians, forming dendritic patterns identical to those inside Teotihuacán obsidian cores. Under microscope they will look geologic; under XRF they will register as natural trace.

They repeat: stroke, pulse, stroke—forty layers, each thinner than a wavelength of green light. Between coats she bakes the shard under a tungsten lamp whose filament glows the exact color of Zapata’s skin in the only color photograph of him—another Barragán secret. With every layer the shard gains 1.3 grams, converging on target mass like a countdown.

Lunch arrives: blue-corn tlacoyos delivered by a mute teenager whose pupils are different sizes—sign of chronic exposure to mercury nitrate, legacy of colonial mirror-making. They eat on the scaffold, legs dangling above the Rosa rectangle. Eusebio talks while chewing:

“Pigment is memory suspended between life and death. When you forge it, you become its memory. Years later, when scientists drill, they will find you inside—your breath, your heartbeat at 62 bpm, the moment you doubted.”

Izel swallows. “Will they also find the massacre?” She thinks of the 1973 centavo buried inside the replica stone—copper mined the same month students disappeared.

“They will find what they are ready to mourn,” he answers. “Color does not lie; viewers do.”

14:22 – Final test

Eusebio produces a handheld XRF analyzer—Olympus Vanta, same model INAH conservators carry. He powers it, beam aperture glowing blue like a tiny star. “Ready to commit sacrilege?”

She nods. He presses nozzle to painted shard. Beeps. Screen blooms:

Ti: 3.41 %  

Fe: 0.79 %  

Si: 78.2 %  

Trace: Ba, Sr, Zr—within Toltec quarry variance.

Exact match. Her lungs release a breath she didn’t know she held.

But the maestro isn’t finished. He sets the shard on an aluminum plate, energizes magnets beneath. The shard levitates—1 mm, 2 mm—hanging in space like a black sun over Rosa. He flicks the lights; in darkness the shard rotates slowly, aligning its poles to invisible constellations. Ferromagnetic dust inside obsidian skin becomes compass, calendar, clock.

“Now,” he whispers, “you can steer it. When Volkov’s team XRF-scans your replica, the gun will sing the right numbers. When they wave the magnetic wand, the stone will answer—alive, obedient. Authenticity is not what you show; it’s what they think they discovered.”

He powers down; the shard settles, clink of glass on metal. He wraps it in indigo cloth, ties with scarlet thread. “Take it. And take this.” From a drawer he withdraws a tiny tin—eye-shadow sized—labelled “Polvo de Coyote.” Inside: iridescent flakes that shift from turquoise to blood depending on angle. “Last coat, night of the swap. When laser interferometry sweeps, these flakes will scatter the beam just enough to mimic micro-erosion. Wear gloves; the dust bites.”

16:05 – Departure

At the door she pauses, fingers the jade bead. “Maestro, why help me? You spent your life defending real color.”

Eusebio runs a thumb along the Rosa wall, leaving a pale streak that heals itself as pigment redeposits—paint so alive it self-levels. “Because walls outlive empires, but color outlives walls. One day INAH will drill your stone and find my turquoise inside. That is immortality—tiny, bright, impossible to erase.”

He kisses her forehead, taste of linseed and goodbye. “Tlapaliztli, niña. Paint so bright the sun needs sunglasses.”

Outside, storm clouds stack like basalt columns. Izel unwraps the shard once more; lightning ignites its surface, revealing the hidden dendrites—veins of night that will fool X-ray eyes. She tucks it next to her heart, feels ferromagnetic dust tug at the bead’s iron fleck—two magnets learning each other’s names.

The verb conjugates inside her with every heartbeat:  

Tlapaliztli – I paint, I illuminate, I blind.  

Tomorrow the museum’s lights will hit the replica and bounce back truth—her truth—colored so vividly that history itself will squint and look away.

Tlapoa

(To Smoke)

22:07 – Mezcalería “El Humo que Canta,” Colonia Roma  

The bar is lit the color of dried blood and amber. Mezcal bottles hang upside-down like inverted organ pipes; when the bartender pours, the room exhales pine-wood smoke. A lone saxophone loops a phrase that never resolves. Carmen Sáenz—hair pinned with a jaguar claw, dress the color of cochineal beetles—sits at the zinc counter, third stool from the register: sight-line to door, mirror to her left, exit to kitchen behind. She is hunting.

Vera Volkov enters at 22:12, trench-coat black as wet asphalt, hair the grey of gunmetal brushed sideways like a saber cut. Under the coat: charcoal turtleneck woven with conductive thread that can tase at ten paces. She scans once—military clockwork—then walks to Carmín as if the stool had her name engraved in Cyrillic.

“Buy you a drink, or do Mossad girls prefer intel straight?” Carmín asks without turning.

Volkov’s lip bends—half-smile, half-safety-catch. “I don’t drink on duty.”

“You’re always on duty. So drink is duty.” Carmín lifts a copita, swirls liquid the color of lightning-struck honey. “Espadín, 48 %. Smoked with mesquite chips from Oaxaca war zones. Tastes like truce.”

Volkov takes the stool. Fingers drum once: Morse for maybe. Bartender appears; she orders tobala, wild agave, no salt. Her accent curls around the vowels like smoke around bone.

They clink. Drink. Silence while saxophone fails again to resolve.

22:19 – Phase One: Mirror

Carmín’s lenses tonight are cosmetic brown, no cameras—too obvious. Instead she wears a necklace of obsidian beads; one bead is a pinhole mic feeding encrypted burst to a recorder stitched inside her bra. Audio is backup; the real prize is haptic. Her left bracelet—delicate silver—houses a Wi-Fi 6E sniffer disguised as a Tiffany tag. It passively maps every packet Volkov’s phone exchanges. The bracelet vibrates once: 802.11 beacon detected, SSID “COYOTL_MESH_5G,” channel 149, WPA3-Enterprise. Bingo confirmed. She keeps her pupils lazy, lets the Israeli look first.

Volkov studies Carmín’s reflection in the mirror behind the bottles. “You smell like money and bad decisions.”

“Only half is mine.” Carmín leans closer, lets mesquite breath mingle. “Heard you brought an AI to the museum. Sounds… kinky.”

Volkov snorts. “COYOTL is not kinky. It bites.”

22:27 – Phase Two: Spark

Carmín traces a finger along the rim of her copita, collecting a crescent of mezcal. She flicks it—tiny spray that lands on Volkov’s wrist. The Russian doesn’t flinch, but pulse jumps; Carmín sees it in the carotid. Conductive thread turtleneck will wick the liquid, create micro-short, drop skin resistance. Perfect for static coupling later.

“Tell me,” Carmín purrs, “does your coyote dream in English or Hebrew?”

Volkov’s eyes narrow, but pride wins. “Dreams in RF. 5 GHz mesh, 128-bit rotating keys, zero-trust handshake every 119 seconds.” She taps her temple. “Even I can’t enter without retina and pheromone.”

Carmín laughs—throaty, conspiratorial. “Pheromone? You mean like this?” She exhales slowly, breath laced with damiana extract that mimics human copulins. Volkov’s pupils dilate 0.4 mm—measurable, meaningful.

Bracelet vibrates again: COYOTL beacon switched channel—frequency-hopping pattern identified. Chip records hop-sequence, seeds crack algorithm. Carmín needs only one complete cycle to build spoof profile.

22:34 – Phase Three: Bottle

Bartender sets down a hand-blown bottle between them—clear glass, long neck, label charred by blowtorch. Inside: pechuga mezcal distilled with raw turkey breast and wild fruits. The bottle is shaped like a lighthouse; Carmín chose it earlier, paid extra to keep it unopened. She lifts it, offers to Volkov.

“Customs let you bring this in? Or did it travel diplomatic pouch?”

Volkov smirks. “AI likes gifts. Feed the beast, maybe it rolls over.”

Carmín twists the cork; pop echoes like suppressed gunfire. She pours two fingers for Volkov, three for herself. Then, casual, she upends the bottle—appears to examine the base. In reality she palms a mezcal-bottle-shaped dongle from her purse: 3-D printed clear resin, identical weight, cavity inside holding Wi-Fi 6E SoC, RP2040 chip, and 1,200 mAh battery. While Volkov sips, Carmín swaps bottles—twist, slide, done in 1.3 seconds—sleight-of-hand learned from a Oaxacan pickpocket who could steal the shadow off a sidewalk.

The real bottle slides into her purse; the dummy stands on the counter glowing faintly under UV lacquer only she can see. She powers it with a thumb-press on the base—LED inside the lighthouse lens blinks once: SPOOFER LIVE. Channel 149, hop-sequence injected, pheromone field replaying from EEPROM. To COYOTL the dongle now smells like Volkov’s retina plus damiana breath.

22:41 – Phase Four: Smoke

They move to a corner booth—leather cracked like old film stock. A single red bulb overhead paints everything the color of darkroom safelight. Carmín sits first, slides along bench until thigh touches Volkov’s. The turtleneck’s conductive thread makes contact; static discharge snaps—tiny blue arc visible only in peripheral vision. Volkov doesn’t notice; mesquite smoke and alcohol are perfect insulators for surprise.

Carmín leans in, lips near ear. “Ever made love while your AI watched?”

Volkov stiffens—then laughs, low, dangerous. “COYOTL sees through walls. But it doesn’t judge.”

“Lucky us.” Carmín kisses the lobe, whispers, “Show me your eye.”

She expects resistance; instead Volkov removes slim glasses, reveals irises the grey of winter asphalt. Retinal vessels branch like lightning—unique, unforgeable. Carmín’s necklace bead is a pinhole; it records the pattern in 4K. Not for cloning—for lullaby. Later she will feed COYOTL a loop of this retina, frozen in bliss, buying seconds while real Volkov sleeps.

23:02 – Phase Five: Ash

They exit together into humid Roma night. Streetlights buzz at 60 Hz, harmonizing with bracelet’s silent vibration: DOWNLOAD COMPLETE—119-second hop-sequence captured, checksum verified. Carmín feigns tipsy, leans against pink wall. Volkov offers ride; she declines, kisses corner of mouth—transferring micro-dose of melatonin lip-balm that will soften the agent’s edge without suspicion.

As Volkov walks away, trench-coat merging with shadows, Carmín raises the swapped bottle to eye level. Inside the clear resin lighthouse, the Wi-Fi 6E board breathes—channel-hopping, mimicking, waiting. She uncorks the real bottle, takes a sip, pours the rest onto the sidewalk—liquid smokes like dry ice, then vanishes.

She whispers to the empty street: “Tlapoa. To smoke is to become the breath between enemy and lover.”

Behind her, inside the bar, the dongle keeps broadcasting: COYOTL smells Volkov’s retina, tastes her pheromones, hears her laugh looped in 119-second cycles. For the next six hours the AI will believe its mistress is still at the counter, drinking mezcal, never blinking.

By the time sunrise bleaches the lightning-bolt neon, the dongle will have burned itself out, resin cracked, evidence washed into sewer grates. Carmín will be asleep in a safe-flat, dreaming in 5 GHz.

But tonight she walks home carrying lightning in a purse, tasting mesquite and victory, rehearsing the next verb: Tlatlacquetl—to lie so brightly the truth wears sunglasses.

Tlatlacquetl

(To Lie)

09:17 a.m. – INAH Conservation Lab, basement level  

The air is refrigerated to 18 °C and smells of acetone and older reputations. Izel is pipetting synthetic obsidian micro-spheres under a fume hood when Dr. Zavala appears in the doorway, silhouette back-lit like a judge who forgot his wig. His ID lanyard swings like a pendulum counting down.

“Trejo, my office. Now.”

She caps the vial, slips it into a rack labeled “Quartz Standard – Inert,” and follows. The bead at her wrist taps the lab coat: authenticity, replica, authenticity, replica.

09:22 – Office of the Director of Archaeological Analysis  

Mahogany, diplomas, a replica Colossal Head staring with pitted eyes. Zavala closes the door but does not invite her to sit. On his desk: a tablet frozen on a spectrogram—her terahertz scan of the Sun Stone’s hollow core, timestamped three nights earlier.

He swivels the screen toward her. “Explain.”

The pause is deliberate; she needs 2.4 seconds to trigger the voice-stress app hidden in her phone. She lets her eyebrows rise, lets her throat catch. “Sir?”

“This anomaly.” He taps the black kernel. “2.7 m longitudinal void. Internal memo says no such cavity exists. Yet your after-hours file—logged under your badge—says otherwise.” His finger hovers over the “Report to Security” icon.

She exhales, appears to fold. “I was going to re-scan. Equipment miscalibrated. Probably multipath echo from the new LED rig.” The lie is wrapped in technical humility—his favorite flavor.

He studies her. Pupils dilated 0.3 mm—he’s suspicious but also sleep-deprived; anniversary gala logistics are chewing his nerves. She needs to push him from suspicion to self-preservation in under ninety seconds.

09:25 – The Seed

She lowers her voice. “Actually… I found similar noise last month in the Mixtec urn project. You remember—the urn that later tested ‘positive’ for modern adhesive.” She lets the implication hang: he signed off on that urn, fast-tracked its authenticity certificate, received a “donation” from the private collector who wanted it classified as genuine. She knows because Carmín laundered the donor’s crypto.

Zavala’s jaw tightens. “Are you threatening a superior?”

“No, sir. I’m protecting the integrity of data.” She places her phone on the desk, screen down. Inside, a neural-TTS engine is already warm, loaded with a 47-second audio file synthesized the night before: Zavala’s voice, accent and cadence cloned from six years of staff-meeting recordings, accepting a 50,000-USD bribe in a cantina that smells of mole and fear.

She thumbs the virtual trigger. Playback begins through the phone’s earpiece—volume just low enough to seem accidental, loud enough for him to hear every syllable of his own forged confession:

“…cash stays in the diplomatic pouch until the certificate reads ‘Class-A authentic.’ After that, no more questions, ¿verdad? Fifty K is nothing compared to what Macau will pay…”

The blood drains from his face like solvent from a rinsed beaker. He reaches for the phone; she snatches it first, locks screen with thumb-print.

09:28 – The Hook

“Deep-fake?” he whispers.

“Deep-real,” she corrects. “Your timbre, your pauses, your favorite phrase—‘no more questions.’ I can drop it into the ethics portal at INAH headquarters. Or I can delete it after you delete my anomalous scan.”

Sweat beads at his temple. “You’d destroy your own career.”

“My career is a sticker on a centrifuge. Yours is a Nobel nomination.” She leans closer, lowers voice to bedside softness. “I don’t want war, jefe. I want silence. You forget the scan, I forget the urn, the fake audio never sees daylight. The Fifth Sun keeps shining. Deal?”

09:30 – The Shake

He doesn’t offer his hand. Instead he swipes the tablet, highlights her terahertz file, moves it to “CORRUPTED_DATA – Pending Deletion.” The progress bar crawls: 11.9 seconds. She times her pulse to it—exactly ten beats. When the bar vanishes, so does half the weight in her lungs.

Zavala exhales smoke that isn’t there. “Calibration error noted. Re-scan when new equipment arrives. Under supervision.”

“Of course.” She nods, docile as plaster.

09:32 – Insurance

As she turns to leave, she palms a USB nail—tiny, crimson—onto the edge of his desk. Inside: the same deep-fake, but salted with metadata pointing to an IP address in Macau—the same laundering node Carmín uses for buyer payments. If he ever reneges, forensics will trace the leak to foreign criminals, not to her. Plausible misdirection.

He notices the nail, flinches. She smiles the way a stamp looks—small, adhesive, impossible to remove without tearing paper.

09:33 – Exit

In the corridor she passes the Colossal Head. Its lips seem curved, approving. She touches the jade bead once—gratitude or apology, she isn’t sure.

Back at the fume hood she resumes pipetting. The next vial contains the same micro-spheres, but now labeled “Inert – QC Pass.” Data is data; labels are liquid. She whispers to the vacuum pump:

“Tlatlacquetl—yo miento, tú mientes, la verdad se viste de mentira y aplaude.”

11:9 beats later, her phone vibrates with a single encrypted message:

ZAVALA > Deletion confirmed. Eyes off you.  

But remember: lies age faster than stone.

She deletes the message, pockets the phone, and returns to painting the future in colors only XRF guns can see. Outside, the sun keeps its Fifth name, and the hollow at its heart beats unseen—for now.

Tlatlauhtiliztli

(To Pray)

05:55 a.m. – Panteón San Nicolás, outskirts of Culiacán  

The cemetery is already hot, the sun a white shell casing balanced on the horizon. Damían Ortiz walks the gravel rows with a limp that sounds like someone dragging a chain made of medals. In his left hand: a plastic grocery bag that once held oranges, now holding flowers and ghosts. In his right: the Purple Heart they gave him in Walter Reed, velvet rectangle bruised by years of being forgotten in drawers that smelled of gun-oil and cheap soap.

He stops at Plot 119-Ω. No headstone—only a concrete slab etched with a first name: “VALERIA.” The government wouldn’t pay for more; collateral damage doesn’t qualify for veterans’ benefits. He kneels, knee clicking like a round being chambered. The gravel imprints his skin, a rosary of rocks.

06:00 – First Decade of Memory

He arranges marigolds in an empty tuna can, sets the medal on top. The heart-shaped bronze catches dawn and throws it back like a threat. He lights a candle stub—orange, the color of flash-bang filler—then a Copal incense stick looted from Abuela Tochtli’s stash. Smoke rises straight up, no wind, as if the earth itself is holding its breath.

“Hermana,” he whispers, “I came to return something they gave me by mistake.”

Valeria died eight years ago, same hour the claymore packed with roofing nails and stolen C-4 erased half his face. He remembers the market square in Sinaloa, the guitar riff from a parked pickup, her laugh as she haggled for mangoes. Then the world became a red accordion, folding. When he woke in medevac, surgeons said the eye was gone but the heart kept beating. They handed him this medal, as if metal could plug shrapnel holes in grief.

06:11 – Confession

He takes out Malinaire’s controller—cracked carbon, antenna bent like a rifle bayonet. He places it beside the medal. “This is what I see with now. It sees better than both of us ever did. But it still can’t find the guy who pressed the clacker.”

Smoke coils; for a moment he smells mango instead of cordite. He tells her about the heist—hollow sun, 119 minutes, the bead that vibrates like a second heart. He doesn’t ask permission; he asks witness.

“I’m going back underground—tunnels, ducts, the same breath the city exhales when no one listens. If I don’t come up, send me a dream where I outrun the sound.”

06:22 – Offering

He unpins the Purple Heart ribbon, folds it into a tiny tricolor square, tucks it beneath the tuna can. The medal itself he sets upright, facing east—toward Mexico City, toward the museum, toward the hollow stone that waits like an unlit fuse. Then he removes the eye-patch. Beneath: not ruin but circuitry—LED ring pulsing 11.9 Hz, same as YEI’s heartbeat. He presses the socket against the medal’s raised profile. Bronze meets titanium; man meets memory.

“Trade you,” he says. “My heart for yours. My past for our future.”

The LED flickers once, twice, dies. When he stands, the medal stays, half-buried in marigold stems, a government promise returned to civilian soil.

06:29 – Prayer

He salutes with two fingers to the sky, then to the grave, then to his own reflection in a rain puddle that tastes of dust. No tears—only the salt left when tears evaporate too fast.

He speaks the Nahuatl verb Abuela Tochtli taught him the night she pressed the grasshopper wing into his palm: “Tlatlauhtiliztli. I pray, I beg, I trade breath with the earth.”

Gravel crunches behind him—an old groundskeeper dragging a hose. The man nods; Damían nods back. Between them passes the unspoken covenant of those who tend to the aftermath.

06:33 – Exit

At the gate he pauses, attaches a new eye-patch—matte black, no LED. The cycle ends here: no more medals, no more apologies. Only the mission, the duct, the 119-second window where he will either outrun the claymore’s ghost or join it.

He doesn’t look back. Looking back is for people who believe the future exists behind them. Instead he looks up: the sun climbs, a fifth sun, indifferent and necessary. He whispers to it, to Valeria, to the medal sinking into loam:

“Keep my heart. I’ll borrow your shadow.”

Then he runs—boots drumming tarmac, prosthetic knee singing carbon—toward the city that eats light, toward the stone that eats time, toward the verb that never stops conjugating:

Tlatlauhtiliztli—yo rezo, tú escuchas, nosotros volamos.  

I pray, you listen, we fly.