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theprisoners. The companions had automatically moved back to back, in a tight defensive ring. Garwood Reed did as he’d been told: he stuck to Ryan’s side like glue.
    All three trucks gunned their engines and started honking for the mob to make way. Nobody budged. And there were too many people on the pier for the vehicles to force the issue.
    Then the Matachìn started trooping off the tugs and onto the dock. They advanced in a tight, military formation with their commander, the guy with the tallest piled dreads and the most pillaged jewelry, marching in the lead.
    When the assembled people of Veracruz saw the pirates in full battle gear and weapons bearing down on them, they made tracks backward. And they did something else that surprised the hell out of Ryan. Those closest to the Matachìn immediately dropped to their knees and pressed their noses and foreheads to the concrete. There wasn’t room on the dock for all of the people to prostrate themselves. Those who couldn’t bow down retreated as far from the pirates as they could, opening a narrow path for the trucks down the middle of the pier.
    The pecking order of the men with blasters was established immediately, Ryan noted. The red sashes standing next to the truck whipped off their hats, knelt, and lowered their heads before High Pile, the Matachìn commander. One of them, probably the most senior-ranking, kneaded the brim of his cowboy hat as he spoke and then pointed up at Ryan. His words were lost in the din, but a smile spread over the captain’s greasy face.
    High Pile jumped onto the lead truck’s running board, reached through the open passenger window and snatched the microphone from a suddenly struck-mute public address announcer.
    “¡La guerra está terminada!” His voice boomed over the recorded music tape loop, boomed over the crowd. “¡Victoria eterna para los reyes de la muerte! ¡Los gemelos heroicos son cautivos!”
    The commander repeated the same words over and over, and with every repetition the mob sent up a louder cheer.
    “Now, that ’s in Spanish!” Mildred exclaimed.
    The companions huddled closer to hear what else she had to say.
    “He’s telling them the war is over,” Mildred translated for them. “Eternal victory for the Kings of Death—or maybe the Lords of Death. And the hero twins are captives.”
    “Hero twins?” Krysty said.
    “It could be a mythological reference, from ancient Mayan,” Mildred said. “I sort of vaguely remember the term—something to do with their creation story, I think. More than a century ago I did some reading to get ready for an archaeological tour of the major Mayan sites in Mexico and Guatemala. How the phrase applies here and now is beyond me.”
    The truck and its human cargo began to roll slowly forward. Out in front, the Matachìn phalanx parted the crowd with unspoken threat. Ryan watched as a wave of prostration broke before them. Regular folk and red sashes alike supplicated themselves, pressing their faces into the ground. This wasn’t a community of equals welcoming home their best and brightest after a successful military campaign; this was a subject people, paying homage.
    The convoy proceeded at a walking pace off the pier, past the lighthouse and into the canyon of city streets. High Pile rode the running board, megaphone-assaulting the seemingly endless throng with his news.
    Ryan tried to read the sea of brown faces. Mixed in with the overall jubilance, with the mind-numbing cheers, with the legions of fingers pointing excitedly up at him, he saw here and there flickers of shock and even sorrow. The selection of jigged, giant heads-on-sticks was the same as on the pier: there were kings or demons, plague rictus masks and mirror-images of his own bearded visage.
    The convoy crawled through a right turn, proceeded a few more blocks and then made a left.
    On Ryan’s right, three-and four-story colonial buildings loomed above the narrow street. The wall-to-wall facades