Behind him, the first step reappeared on the jungle floor—empty, waiting for the next desperate heart.

He pointed down. Between the steps, Mateo saw them now: fingers. Hundreds of pale, grasping fingers reaching through the gaps, straining toward his ankles.

Mateo hesitated. The stone in his hand pulsed with a faint, feverish heat. He thought of his mother’s face before the machines—how she’d laughed when he fell learning to ride a bike, how she’d held him after nightmares. How she’d whispered, “Mi cielo, my sky.”

Mateo tightened his grip on the stone, took a breath, and climbed.

Just one. Carved from black obsidian, jutting out of the mud like a dark tongue. It was polished, impossibly clean, and on its surface, a single word was etched in a language he didn’t know but somehow understood: DESIRE .