

Latonya turned on her phone flashlight and took several pictures of the inscriptions, which she would ask Scott to look at once she returned to their university. It could have denoted the ancient city’s territorial limits, or maybe a milestone like those the Romans installed along their marvelously engineered roads to mark distances. Though shaped like a slim cylindrical column, it had lines of glyphs chiseled down its sides like an Egyptian obelisk. If there was anything that made Latonya feel slightly chilled at all, it was the knowledge that many of the savanna’s most infamous predators preferred to hunt at night.An hour later, she reached the pillar on the hill.
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As the sky darkened to deep red, the crickets and other nocturnal creatures began chirping and hooting songs of farewell to the sun and greetings to the rising moon. Even the breezes that blew across the plains were too warm to provide any relief.
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She could already see a thin, finger-shaped silhouette sticking up from one of them like a monolithic marker.Despite the waning evening temperature, it remained humid enough for perspiration to slather Latonya’s dark sienna-brown skin quickly, staining damp spots into her crop-top and shorts. If she read it correctly, it indicated that the ruins lay somewhere on the other side of the hills. Some, she knew, already had.Once Latonya was confident the coast was clear, she waded through the grass toward the hills on the horizon, holding the map out as she walked. Many men and women would be after what Latonya carried in her knapsack - and would kill for it. Given her line of work, she had to watch out for both, but even more so the former. She scanned the surrounding savanna for any signs of life, human or animal.
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The driver chuckled, more out of admiration than mockery.After the jeep decelerated to a halt, Latonya hopped out and landed in grass as high as her waist. There might be predators about, or worse.”“Which is why I always bring these beauties with me.” With a proud smirk, Latonya pulled out both of her pistols from her thigh holsters and twirled them in her hands. “I’d rather you stay here and guard the jeep.”“Très bien, then. Shall I accompany you to them, Mademoiselle Coleman?”“No need for that,” Latonya replied.

“Any further and the road curves away from the ruins. Once she was done with her mission, she would donate the map back to Timbuktu, where it belonged.“We are coming as far as we can get,” the driver said with a thick Ivorian accent. In truth, it was a historical treasure no less priceless than the artifact Latonya had tucked in her knapsack. So far, despite its medieval age and the stylized depictions of people, trees, and animals populating it, the old document of Malian origin had so far proven accurate regarding the position of settlements, waterholes, and other features of the region. Even genetic tests were not always as reliable as their advertisers claimed.She went back to studying the map, comparing it to the landscape in front of her eyes. Like so many of her people, she had little if any way of knowing for sure. Latonya wondered if any of her ancestors, before they were captured and shipped across the Atlantic in chains, would have called at least one of these little villages home centuries ago. Every so often, she spotted herds of wildlife cavorting through the tall grass, as well as the occasional cluster of thatch-roofed mud huts in the distance. The grassy plains of the northern Ivory Coast spread beyond her, reaching all the way to the horizon beneath a gold sky. Return of the Mother Goddess,Latonya Coleman lifted her eyes from the yellowed parchment map in her hands to gaze through the jeep window.
