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it. She was holding back this time and her hand grasped his in a slick but tight grip. She stopped several paces away. Although she couldn’t possibly reach it, her other hand stretched toward it and moved as though it were running over the lines. Her lips began to silently move and then the words began to flow.
    “So it was said on high, so it was said. Construct for me the large hat. Make it very large with the white rattle in your hand. A green jaguar is seated over the sun to drink its blood.”
    Again, not exactly what he’d thought it said, but pretty close. Even so, he had no idea what it meant. How could you make a hat using a rattle?
    The pyramid had defied every effort he’d made to penetrate it. He’d been in the building at the top. He’d been all around the periphery. He’d been over every square inch of the staircases on all four sides. There was no way in. And yet, that’s where the Red King was buried. He had to be.
    Jesse blinked and took in a deep breath. As Brett waited for her to return from her private world, he realized she was sweating. A small trickle of moisture slipped down the front of her throat and into the dip between her breasts. The tank top was wet just below them. It was warm but not that warm.
    “It’s the first test,” she said, turning to focus on him. “It’s the language of Zuyua.” She glanced at the glyphs. “So that means,” she paused as though she were doing division in her head. “We need to find a plumeria flower.”
    Now it was Brett’s turn to blink as he shook his head.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “A what?”
    “The white flower,” she said again, as though it were obvious. “The sacred flower of the Maya.”
    “Okay,” said Brett. “You’ve lost me. What does a large hat have to do with a flower?”
    “It’s the test,” she said. “The language of Zuyua. It’s like a riddle. Well, not really a riddle.” She paused. “Okay, it’s a pun. Think of it as a pun.”
    Brett shook his head again. This was not helping.
    “A pun? You mean like a joke?”
    Jesse quickly shook her head and scowled.
    “Oh no. Not a joke at all. A sound-alike word.” She grimaced a little. “That’s not right either. What am I trying to say?” She glanced at the glyphs. “A metaphor.”
    “The rattle is not the thing ,” she said. “The rattle is the sound. It’s the sound that a rattlesnake makes. But the way that rattlesnake is written is actually lord snake.”
    “Okay,” Brett said, nodding. “The white rattle is lord snake.”
    Jesse smiled and nodded her head quickly.
    “Exactly. But lord snake is also the lord of the twentieth day on the cyclical calendar. And the word for the twentieth day of the calendar is tonalamatl or flower. And the most sacred of all Maya flowers is the plumeria and it’s white .”
    “Whoa,” Brett said. “Take me through that again.”
    She repeated the sequence–the chain of soundalike words and look-alike glyphs, tracing the thread of the real meaning from start to end.
    “Wow,” Brett said quietly.
    It was more than a metaphor, much more. It was several ancient dialects, the images used in the glyphs, the calendar–he shook his head.
    “How do you do that?” he asked.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “But I wish you could see how I see it.”
    Suddenly, he remembered where he’d seen a flower.
    “I know where it is,” he said, grabbing her hand. “This side.”
    As they rounded the right corner of the pyramid, Brett could almost see it.
    “There,” he said pointing.  
    The central staircase was flanked on both sides by wide, flat seams of stones that went from the top to the bottom. But, at the bottom, the seams ended in ornate carvings. They were blocky and roughly the shape of a cube but they were plumerias–both of them, though not identical. They had always bothered him and now he knew why. Instead of the correct five petals, the one on the right had a strange looking sixth one. The flower on the