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“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.


Tags: J.C. Cervantes, Jennifer Cervantes The Storm Runner Fantasy