Free Don't Look Back by Gregg Hurwitz

buzz fading like the sound of a passing car. Harry exhaled a pent-up breath, and they continued on, winding deeper into the jungle.
    Eve mopped her forehead with the collar of her shirt. Overhead, a black vulture coasted in lazy circles, its silver-tipped wings like a fringed cape. The trail dipped, and the sky vanished behind solid canopy, the bright day turning to false dusk. A trio of brilliant blue dragonflies urged them onward, porpoises at the bow of a ship.
    Neto gestured to the darting insects. “We call them caballitos del diablo. Little horses of the devil. So it is appropriate they are leading us … here. ”
    He parted a wall of fronds and stepped into a vast chamber within the jungle. The others slipped through, one after another, gazing up in awe. The clearing stretched the breadth of several football fields, broken by two pyramidal ruins with an ancient, sunken courtyard between them. To take in each structure, Eve had to tilt her head back, a tourist ogling high-rises. The closer one was more eroded, a rubble-topped heap, but the other thrust proudly thirty or so meters toward the canopy, its shape largely intact. The stone looked mossy and sleek, worn down by centuries of harsh weather. The whole area had the feel of a grand civic plaza, which is what Eve supposed it once was. Giant trunks scattered throughout the space propped up a dense ceiling of foliage, dripping with vines. The air was choked with humidity. It felt like stumbling into the insides of some great beast.
    “El Templo de las Serpientes,” Lulu announced grandly, gesturing at the more intact of the two structures.
    “There are a lot of snakes here?” Eve asked.
    Neto removed a balloon from his pocket. “We will call them.” He inflated it a few puffs, then squeezed the neck so it gave off a prolonged, breathy squeal. “They think it’s a wounded mouse or bunny.”
    Sue toyed nervously with a turquoise bauble around her neck. She said, “Are we sure that’s such a good idea?” and the others laughed.
    “There’s no way that works,” Jay said.
    “Behind you?” Neto said. “That’s not a vine.”
    They turned to see, swaying stiffly from the canopy far above, four feet of visible boa constrictor. Jay bellowed, and Sue nearly left her sandals. The snake bobbed curiously in their direction a few times, all dead eyes and flicking tongue, and then, with a tightening of scales, hoisted up and away, weaving itself back into the leaves. It could have been six feet long or twenty.
    Eve’s skin had been set tingling, less with fear than excitement.
    “Come.” Neto slid the balloon back into his pocket. “Stay close.”
    “Gladly,” Will said.
    They headed into the plaza, descending a run of reconstructed steps so eroded they seemed part of the ruins themselves, and stood at the brink of the courtyard with the temple looming over them.
    “Archaeologists worked here last summer before the funding ran out,” Lulu said. “We hope they will return when the economy improves.”
    That explained the look of the ruins, half excavated, half lost to the jungle. Despite the high foliage ceiling, the chamber felt claustrophobic, as if it could close up on them at any moment, swallow them alive.
    Lulu gestured to the temple at their backs, then to the other structure at the far end of the courtyard. “These date to the seventh century, probably Zapotec judging from the talud-tablero style. See how the sides go up and in? Slope, then panel. Like that. And there—” She pointed to the sunken courtyard below them. “That’s a ball court. This all became an Aztec colony in the 1300s.”
    “What happened in between?” Harry asked.
    “Many cities were destroyed by floods,” Lulu said. “Or abandoned for reasons no one knows.”
    “ Lotta things can go wrong out here, amigo, ” Neto said. “But the jungle comes back. The jungle always comes back.”
    They passed the mouth of a narrow archaeologist tunnel at the temple’s base, and a