Ice Shock by M. G. Harris Page B

mother.
    Mom strokes my frozen hands. “Would you like something to eat too?”
    â€œNo,” I say, feeling distant. “I mean, yes, a sandwich, please.”
    â€œWell, you can’t be all that sick … ,” Mom says with a smile, kissing my cheek.
    I need food because I need to think. One of them betrayed me—Tyler or Ollie. Maybe even both.
    I need to figure out which—and fast.

9
    I lie spread-eagled on top of my duvet, staring at the ceiling until Mom arrives with my food and tea.
    I kind of like getting this attention from Mom. I start concocting this little fantasy where Mom knows all about my secret life and waits at home for me with tea and homemade cookies and sympathy.
    But that could never happen. If Mom knew … whew. There’s no way she’d let me out of the house.
    So, Ollie? Or Tyler? Or both?
    I think about Ollie.
    The way she kissed me
.
    That was acting? If it was, I don’t know how I can ever trust a girl again. I could never, never pretend like that.
    I can’t tell whether I’m angry, upset, or scared. It’s some horrible combination of all three.
    And I write:
    The Case Against Ollie:
    1. She came from nowhere, just in time to get involved in the Ix Codex mystery.
    2. She got me out of the house last night, the only time when someone could have stolen the pages from the document folder.
    I think
really
hard, then add:
    3. In Mexico, after I’d been to Ek Naab, she kept asking me what was in the case I was carrying, and where I got it.
    4. She heard me mention to Rodrigo that my dad might have been in Saffron Walden because of a famous archaeologist.
    The Case Against Tyler:
    1. He only really started being my friend after my dad’s disappearance.
    2. He got me out of the house the night of the burglary earlier this year.
    3. After Madison stole Mom’s copy of the John Lloyd Stephens book from my house, I tried to replace it and found it in a secondhand bookstore in Jericho. How come Madison showed up at that shop? Only Tyler knew I was on my way there.
    4. And how come Madison showed up in Saffron Walden?Only Tyler knew I was on my way … and he wouldn’t let me see who he was texting on the bus trip.
    On paper it looks pretty balanced. One’s as shady as the other.
    My heart tells me it’s Tyler … my gut tells me it’s Ollie.
    And my head tells me that it really could be both.
    I get very close to calling Montoyo on my Ek Naab phone. Only the total dumbness of what I may have done stops me.
    But then I get to thinking. What if the copied pages of the codex don’t actually contain any important information—what if they only contain information that couldn’t possibly be of any use? Stuff that could never harm Ek Naab?
    Then all that running around in Batman costumes has been a wild-goose chase—nothing more. And all that’s really happened is that I’ve exposed Tyler. Or Ollie. Or both.
    For the first time, this idea gives me some hope. I even manage a grim smile, thinking of the NRO getting all excited, imagining they’d found the Ix Codex down in Saffron Walden. Only to find a big fat zero.
    Maybe it’s not such a disaster. Maybe I can decipher those pages myself and see what’s written there. Then I’ll know if I’m in big trouble—or not.
    I munch the sandwich, licking my fingers as I bring up the scans of the codex on my computer screen.
    Thank God I scanned them
…
    I stare for ages at the page with a few glyphs translated into syllables. It takes me an hour struggling with a Mayan dictionary to work out that there’s something wrong.
    Each Mayan word is written as a glyph made up of a few symbols that represent syllables, all stuck together. Except when the glyph is one picture, one word—an ideogram.
    If you can read the syllables, you should be able to put them together to make words that exist in the Mayan language. A syllable can be