“All?”
At that moment, the air near the tree line shimmered once…twice.
A group of boys materialized. Scratch that. A group of ghosts appeared.
And one really big giant.
When you’re slung down a twisty time tunnel and end up in a ghost sea/lake that messes with your head, you think your day can’t get any weirder. Ha! This day was definitely about to take a turn. A big turn.
Ren just stood there all calm and dry, clutching the thread like it was her lifeline.
The ghost boys ran around, hooting and tossing a football, slamming into each other. And the ten-foot-tall teen giant? Yes, teen! He had a couple of zits on his chin and looked like he hadn’t washed his shoulder-length dark hair for two weeks. But unlike any teenager I knew, the guy had boulder-size arms folded over his massive chest.
“Zane, this is Sipacna,” Ren said breathlessly. “Sipacna, this is Zane Obispo, son of Hurakan.”
“Everyone calls me Zip.” The giant reached out to shake my hand, but I backed away. My mind had returned in full force, enough for the realization of this guy’s identity to knock me over.
“Sipacna?!” I blurted. “The evil mountain giant who killed—” I swallowed the words before they had a chance to escape. I knew all about this dude. First, my giant friend Jazz hated the guy. Second, Sipacna had killed four hundred boys at once. AT ONCE! Just because they’d interrupted his nap or something.
But the tale, like all Maya stories, doesn’t end there. The “hero twins”—yeah, you know the ones—stuck their big noses where they didn’t belong and decided they should seek revenge for the boys. Using a giant crab as bait, the brothers lured Sipacna to a canyon, where they crushed him under a mountain.
Pretty tragic tale, but if it was true, then Sipacna should have been dead. So how did he get here?
“Did you say evil?” he asked with a growl.
“Yeah,” I insisted. “I’d say a giant who kills a few hundred kids for trying to build a hut is pretty wicked.”
“Guys!” Ren tried to get between us, but I sidestepped her.
“What?! I offered to build the hut for them!” Sipacna argued.
“And made fun of their weakness the whole time,” I said. “Can you say ‘bully’?”
A football whizzed overhead.
“So, it’s okay for them to try to kill me?” His jaw twitched. “They were plotting my death!”
“They were?” I asked. “Well, that’s definitely not cool…but neither is you crushing them under the hut.”
Sipacna seemed to chew on this morsel. Then he put his gargantuan fists on his hips and asked, “And you believe everything history tells you?”
Ren chuckled nervously. “Zip, it’s just hard to know what’s a lie and what’s the truth sometimes.”
“You’re supposed to be an old alligator with fangs,” I said, remembering the illustration in my book.
Zip grunted. “Whoever told you that is an idiot and doesn’t know fact from fiction. And let me guess…in your version of the story, the twins come out as heroes.”
Yeah, that should have been my first clue that the truth had been shaded. Ren quickly filled me in on the real story, which was that Sipacna’s brother, Kab’raqan (aka Earthquake), flew into a rage one night and split the earth open, and the boys were “accidentally” swallowed.
“Like my brother, I used to have a terrible temper,” Zip admitted. “It’s a giant thing.”
The ghost boys shouted and whooped as they tackled each other on the beach.
“Anyhow,” Ren said, frowning, “Jordan and Bird lied—big sorpresa—and told everyone Zip had killed the boys.”
“The twins also killed my dad, Seven Macaw.” Zip’s face reddened, and I thought the giant might cry. But he held it together.
Fury rose up in me. Was there anything the twins hadn’t lied about? Is history really so messed up that you have to question every word? I recalled the message I’d seen on that wall in Venice Beach: HISTORY IS MYTH. Maybe those were the truest words ever written.
“Everyone hated me after that,” Zip said sadly. “But I couldn’t rat out my own brother. So the gods came after me, wanted to make an example of me. Offered glory to anyone who could take me down.”
“I know the drill,” I said, suddenly feeling like me and this Sipacna dude were compadres.
Ren said, “My mom felt super bad for him, so she faked his death, which the twins totally took credit for. Then she brought him to this in-between place she created to keep him safe.”
“And she asked me to keep watch over K’iin,” the giant added, smirking like someone who had just scored the winning goal.
I glanced over at the ghosts as my brain put the puzzle pieces together. “And these are some of the four hundred boys?”
Zip nodded. “The rest are around the mountain somewhere, but yeah, they sort of busted out of Xib’alb’a. I guess there’s a no-playing-ball rule in the underworld, so they wanted out pretty bad.” He gave a light shrug. “The kids were only trying to kill me because the gods told them to, so they felt used. Anyhow, Pacific and some others helped them escape.”
Others, as in Ixtab?
“The gods would for sure miss four hundred boys…” Ren said.
“Ixtab told the jerks the boys had turned into stars,” Zip added. “The Pleiades constellation. Great hiding place, right? The stars? I wish I could think like that.”
Ren said, “It should totally be named the Four Hundred, but whatever.”
I took a second so I could register everything in my spinning head.
Another hero twins myth that was a lie. Check.
Giant who escaped the gods and now guarded K’iin. Check.
Four hundred ghost boys who were supposed to be stars. Check.
Now that I had all that straight, we needed to get back to the reason we were here. People were counting on us. Itzamna was trying to hold off bloodthirsty demons, and our family and friends were hiding out in Montana. And the time thread? It looked like it was going to jump out of Ren’s grasp again any second.
I clutched Itzamna’s sunglasses, wondering if I should bring the god in on all of this.
Zip shook out his hand and blew on it. That’s when I saw a wicked red slash across his palm.
“Is it getting better?” Ren asked.
Zip winced and said to me, “I made the mistake of touching her time thread. Sent me ten feet into the air, man. That’s some wicked energy right there.”
“It must be some kind of security measure,” I said. “Maybe that’s why no one can take the time rope from Pacific—it’ll deep-fry their brains.”
“Guess so,” Ren said with a hint of pride in her voice.
“So, can you take us to K’iin?” I asked Sipacna, my hope rising.
“Not exactly,” Ren said.
“I’m sorry again for trying to kill you,” Zip said to Ren gently.
“He tried to kill you?!” I almost tried to summon my Fuego spear before Ren said:
“That was before he knew who I was, Zane!”
“Actually,” Zip said, “that was before she saved my life by ripping the thread out of my grasp.”