Treasure of the World by Tara Sullivan (best romantic books to read txt) 📗

apron pocket, takes a handful of the grocery money, and walks out the door, we all know we’re unlikely to see him again before tomorrow. As soon as he’s out of sight, Mami follows Daniel. She settles by him and takes his hand. Dusk blurs their edges until they are no more than two shadows on the rock, one staring down at the unreachable city below, the other staring up at the equally unreachable stars.

When I move to join them, Abuelita puts a hand on my arm, stopping me.

“Let them be,” she says softly. “There’s nothing you can do.”

I want to believe that I could find the magical words to make Daniel feel better. But I remember math class and the fact that I don’t have another choice to offer him, and I let Abuelita turn me away and distract me.

“Where’s your homework?” she asks. “Come, do it here next to me.”

With another pang of guilt at living the life Daniel has left behind, I take out my notebook. Abuelita sits beside me, stitching up the rips in old clothes we’ll be wearing again.

I stare at the line of numbers marching down the left side of my page; the row of unanswered questions that each have a single right answer if only I can find it. But I can’t make my brain chase them. I stare at the blank page, my fingers frozen.

“The Inca fortress of Saqsayhuamán was built with some of the largest blocks of stone used in all of the Americas.”

I glance up from my math. Abuelita’s whole body is curled around the mending in her lap, but even so, I know her focus is on me. I smile and also pretend to be focusing on what’s in front of me.

“There is no mortar holding the stones together,” she goes on, her thick-knuckled fingers working the needle methodically, “and these blocks, though they have rounded corners and are all a jumble of interlocking shapes and different sizes, are so perfectly aligned that even now, hundreds of years and many earthquakes later, you couldn’t slide a sheet of paper between them if you tried.”

Abuelita finally looks at me. Though her body is frail—her bones birdlike and her knuckles twisted knobs that move slowly and painfully through her daily tasks—her eyes are clear and sharp.

“How did the Inca manage this, Ana, when the nearest place that these stones could be quarried is across a deep river valley?”

I blink at her, but she waits for my answer.

“Um . . .” I chew my eraser. “They . . . put them on carts? Had animals pull them?”

“The Inca never invented the wheel. They had no horses, no oxen. Their only beasts of burden were llamas.” Her eyes pierce me. “Llamas can’t carry more than thirty-five kilos. The biggest of these blocks weighs over a hundred and seventy tons. The walls are four hundred meters long and sixty meters high.”

I stare at her, thinking hard. But I don’t come up with any answer to the puzzle.

“I don’t know,” I finally admit.

“No one knows,” she says, sniffing like she didn’t expect anyone to know any better. She lets the mystery stand another minute while I chew on my pencil some more, then she goes on. “Modern people like to focus on all the things the Inca didn’t have. No wheel. No oxen or horses. No money system. No written language. But do you know what they did have? What allowed them to build mysterious marvels that baffled the imagination of their conquerors?”

“What did they have?” I ask, breathless.

Abuelita raises an eyebrow pointedly at my blank homework page.

“Our ancestors”—she leans over and pokes me to punctuate every word—“had. Very. Good. Math.”

I laugh, and Abuelita returns to her sewing without another word.

Still smiling, I start my sums.

I wake up in the middle of the night, the cool white moonlight icing everything around me like a cake. Daniel is sitting against the wall, wrapped in a blanket. I sit up and rub the sleep crusts from my eyes.

“Sorry I woke you,” Daniel whispers.

“That’s okay,” I whisper back. The moon-bright room shows Mami alone in the bed and Abuelita asleep on the floor mat next to me. Papi’s nowhere to be seen, so I scoot over and sit next to Daniel, my shoulder nestled against his, blanket wrapped tight to keep out the cold. “You look like a woolly salteña.”

He barks a short laugh at the image of himself as a meat-filled pastry, then lapses into silence.

“Couldn’t sleep?” I finally ask.

Daniel shakes his head.

“Is it that bad?” When Daniel was a baby, he learned to walk in order to keep up with me. When we were kids, he trailed my footsteps to school. But now he’s entered a place I’ve never been, and I struggle to imagine his new reality.

After a long pause, Daniel nods.

“The work’s hard. It’s obvious I’m no good at it. But the work’s not the really awful part.” He shakes his head slightly. “It’s super hot and humid in the mine and the air smells funny, and you know there’s less oxygen left with each breath. It’s so hard to breathe in there, I have to keep stopping. And then Papi gets upset because I’m not as strong as the other boys . . .” He trails off and his head sinks onto his knees, so his next words are muffled. “I shouldn’t even be there. I hate it.”

I snake an arm out of my blanket and give his shoulders a squeeze.

“We’ll find you a way out,” I promise.

Daniel rocks his head back and forth on his knees, disagreeing with me.

“We will,” I whisper even more stubbornly. “I spent all day today thinking about it.”

“Oh?” Daniel lifts his face and raises an eyebrow at me. “And? What did you come up with?” His voice turns sour. “Will we run far away from here? To a green farm with black soil or a city that sparkles with electric lights and good jobs?”

“Far away from the mountain and the mines,” I agree.