the Fifth Direction: A Chronicle of Sacred Cenote

Itzel Canul reads what no one else can read.When she recognizes a glyph that should not exist-a word her people guarded for a thousand years and never once wrote down-her mentor is found drowned, and a door sealed beneath the pyramid of Chichén Itzá begins, after a thousand years of silence, to wake.The sign belongs to a fourth Maya codex. The codex leads to four cenotes, a lock of stone, and a well no one was ever meant to open. A foundation heir to the man who looted the Sacred Cenote wants it opened. A brotherhood of guardians wants it closed forever. To go down into the black water, Itzel must trust the one hand she no longer knows whether it holds her or sells her.Beneath El Castillo waits the greatest truth in history-and she will never be able to prove it to anyone.A literary supernatural thriller rooted in real Maya history, the true plunder of the Sacred Cenote, and the living culture of Yucatán. For readers of archaeological mysteries that take away certainties instead of giving answers.