Book 1: Revelation at Tikal – Ch 20: Old Memories, New Directions

Cutty Braughn wakes in Chichicastenango, in the church outbuilding where his sister Floey painted her Popol Vuh murals, and finds her last message waiting on a fogged mirror, written in soap: a riddle pointing south and a warning about a man in a linen suit. As he decodes it, the pieces fall into place. "Cloud people wait where the sea stitches itself to the sky" means the San Blas Islands of Panama. "Barry's wings are metal" means their missing brother wasn't taken by flying saucers but died in an airplane. And the linen suit is the Foundation's man, the same figure the K'iche' mothers name to call their children inside at night. Cutty learns the Fundación La Senda Luminosa is paying Floey a monthly retainer, the quiet leash of an artist they mean to keep painting their lie, and that she's taking the money to buy back the two children she lost to her ex-husband Eugene Carl and the courts. He sees the Foundation's forged pamphlet, Floey's jaguars reprinted beneath a painted saucer, and hidden inside it, in her own hand, the answer she left for him. Reverend Zeek rides north with the pamphlet, the cable, and the catechists' death lists, aiming a letter at a man in Washington who could ask the one question that unwinds the machine. Cutty and Paula flee as a bought priest tips off the police, and three timers start running down at once: the hunt closing behind him, the money that can be turned off the moment Floey stops being useful, and four patient believers in a closed van, talking his sister back toward the stars. He drops a gear and opens the bike toward Panama, racing to reach her before they talk her out of it.