Read Online Invisible City by M. G. Harris - Free Book Online Page A

help.”
    That’s how we team up. All because of Ollie’s powers of deduction.
    I’ve never met anyone like her. She. Is. Amazing.
BLOG ENTRY: DECIPHERMENT!

    There are a couple of reasons for today’s blog entry. It’s a secret record that I dare not leave on paper, or on the hard drive of any computer I’m known to access.
    But no one knows about the blog. I haven’t even told TopShopPrincess/Ollie that I’ve started the blog again. I’m kind of embarrassed about what I might write about her.
    Jeez. Ollie! What a turnaround. I stopped being angry with her about ten seconds after she apologized. Thing is, I’d always kind of thought of her as a slightly weird, kooky type of girl. She’s anything but that. She looks like a goddess, with the brain of an uber-geek.
    Ollie and I couldn’t work together at Summertown Library—we were getting too many angry looks and warnings to be quiet. Tyler, an old friend from capoeira, owed me a favor. I turned up on his doorstep with Ollie and told him, “Debt collection time. I need you to let me use your computer for the rest of the night.”
    I didn’t have to say anything. With Ollie in tow, he’d have given his living room over to us, even if there was a big game on TV. When heoffered to help out with the decipherment, we accepted. I figured there was safety in numbers: the more of us who knew, the harder it would be for Them to silence us.
    Them. Now I’m really talking like a conspiracy buff.
    We cracked open the drinks and the Pringles and put Batman Begins on the DVD player as a decoy for Tyler’s parents. Then we started on the inscription.
    I quickly showed the other two what I knew about reading Mayan hieroglyphs. Mayan inscriptions were written in a grid format. According to the how-to book, the first glyphs give the date of the document. Then the writing proceeded in a two-column grid that could be labeled in reading order: A2, B2, A3, B3, A4, B4, etc. until the end of the page. Then it continued in the next two columns: C2, D2, C3, D3, etc.
    We started with the easiest part—the date. My dad taught me how to read Mayan dates years ago, to stop me from whining with boredom. I still remember how, but I can’t do it without a dictionary.
    In Mayan, the date was 9.11.0.4.8 16 Pax 9 Lamat.
    In English, that translates to Jan 8, 653 AD.
    This letter was written in the seventh century!
    Then we got started on the main part of the letter. We each took one glyph apart at a time. First we’d look up the whole glyph in case we got lucky. Sometimes a whole glyph can mean something—like the name of a place.
    When we’d solved as many of those as possible, our eyes were getting blurry from looking at all the different glyphs. We took a little break.
    By then we knew the inscription included the words Cancuén, Yuknoom Ch’een, Calakmul, Bakab, Itzamna, servant, sacred, book, Ix, and the phrase “it will occur.”
    Then came the really tough part. We crunched through the rest of the glyphs syllable by syllable. When we thought we had a possible solution, we’d search for the word on the Web and find out all we could about it. That’s how we made sense of the translation.
    Six hours later we were still at it. We ordered pizza, kept going. It was like each one of us was daring the others to be the ones to wimp out. I kept asking, “Shall we stop now, go to bed?” but they’d go, “No way, we’re almost there!”
    And as the dawn light filtered through the blinds, we had the whole thing deciphered.
    K’inich K’ane Ajk of Cancuén writes to Lord Yuknoom Ch’een of Calakmul
    I am your servant
    From Chechan Naab he emerged, from the Great Temple of the Cross
    The Bakab was defeated
    This sacred Book of Ix speaks of the end of days
    13.0.0.0.0 it is written in the Sacred Books of Itzamna
    It will occur

Chapter 10
    I stare at the inscription