Dark Time: Mortal Path by Dakota Banks Page B

outside of her underwear, covering what belonged to him and what, when the time came, he would not touch so gently.
    His arousal couldn’t wait any longer. Watcher rose from her bedside and slipped out of the bedroom.
    He sat on the shape of her ass on the chair and gave himself over to sensation.
    In the staircase, he waited until she left in the morning. To his amazement, a man left her apartment soon after she did.
    There had been no man there when he entered at 3 A.M. He was sure of it. No man’s odor had mixed with hers.
    One coffee cup. One spoon.
    Someone had arrived after he left, then. Who lets himself in at that time and leaves after she does in the morning? A lover.
    His thoughts filled with anger. He took the risk of reentering her place to check. There was no man’s smell in her bedroom, no smell of sex on her sheets. In a spare room, he found a suitcase and a computer.
    Not a lover, then. A lover could not have resisted joining her, the way she looked on the bed.
    Before he left, he plucked her worn panties from the hamper. Then it was back to discipline. Back to waiting.

Chapter Fourteen
    Peru, Present Time
    M anco Miguel Serrano sat back on his haunches, pulled out a handkerchief, and wiped his dusty, sweat-streaked face. He wore a wide-brimmed hat with a cloth hanging down in the back to cover his neck. The cloth had started out wet for coolness, but after four hours in the desert sun, it was as dry and stiff as a board. A hot wind swept across the site where he worked, tossing sand and dirt in his face.
    Manco was working near the village of Caral, Peru, about 120 miles north of Lima and twelve miles in from the Pacific coast. He was an archaeologist, lured there by the prospect of working on an ancient Peruvian mound-building culture that was turning out to be the cradle of civilization in the Americas, as Mesopotamia was for Southwest Asia, the Nile River Valley was for Egypt, and the Yellow River Valley was for China. The existence of the mounds had been known since 1905, but because there was no gold, no flashy artifacts, no writing, and no pottery, the remote site didn’t attract attention. Recent study led to the discovery that some settlements were as old as 2,600 B.C.E., overlapping with the period of ancient Sumer.
    Manco was looking for carved, human-shaped figurines in a small group of houses excavated to reveal several levels of “floor,” indicating that the site had been used for homes. On his knees for hours at a time, Manco poked through a carefully marked grid with a small trowel, a whiskbroom, and a small brush. He loved it. What kept him going in the heat, with his knees aching, was the idea that the next small trowel of dirt he shifted might reveal an artifact—something shaped by human hands over 4,500 years ago.
    He took a few deep swallows from his water bottle and got back to work. He planned to knock off early and catch up on his paperwork of diagramming and formalizing his field notes. Still, he kept at it a 39 z 138
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    little longer. There was always the chance that something would turn up before then. Manco continued his slow digging, then he felt it—his trowel gently touched something, and it didn’t feel like a rock. He worked the tip of the trowel around it slowly, and then used his fingers to scrap away dirt and gauge the size of the object he’d come upon. The figurines he was searching for were small enough to fit in his palm.
    What he was tracing out was big: eight inches tall or more.
    Even with his excitement growing, he kept his scientific discipline. He recorded the grid coordinates and his first impressions of his find in a notebook before he went any further. Then he carefully brushed away more dirt and was stunned by the fact that it wasn’t a figurine he was uncovering.
    It was a piece of pottery.
    Manco’s heart was in his throat. The Caral-Supe people were preceramic. There wasn’t supposed to be any pottery, not at this depth in the