Torchwood: Exodus Code

pocket of her denim shorts, Isela pulled out her grandfather’s journal, quickly turning to the pages where she had left off the night before. The journal was wrapped in a tattered square of cloth, its edges folded neatly around the small book. Unwrapping it, she prepared herself for the rush of emotion she felt when she had first flipped through its pages, as if the sensations that her grandfather was experiencing as he wrote in this journal remained trapped in its pages. She hadn’t told anyone that she had found it, so she couldn’t ask anyone for help deciphering its sketches and notes, only one or two of which she recognised.
    The drawings, the equations and the notes made no sense to her, but the letters tucked into the tiny pocket in the back cover were something else entirely. She had glanced at those only once, folding them back in their place, embarrassed and confused by their content, undelivered love letters to a man.
    The sounds of the market rose up to Isela in waves of colour, snippets of conversations, snatches of melodies, animal cries, children’s shouts, a truck backfiring, all floating in her line of vision in ribbons of blues and yellows. Then a click. Click. Click. A series of chirping sounds from the piazza below.
    She tasted sour milk.
    Lifting her binoculars again, she turned to face the hotel bordering the opposite side of the square. Its salmon-coloured walls glowed in the morning sun, its white shutters closed against the encroaching heat. The hacienda might no longer be run from Spain, but it was still a colony. Because history has a sense of irony, the land was once again in the hands of a usurper – her father, Asiro Castenado. He was her mother’s second husband; the bankruptcy and death of the first had meant the hotel would have to be sold. Isela’s father had married her mother just hours before the bank could close a deal with a North American corporation. Isela’s mother had welcomed the purchase because it meant she’d never have to leave the mountain. Isela did not want the same fate.
    The wooden doors into the hacienda’s tropical courtyard were slowly opening, the hotel’s armed security guards settling into their positions for the arrival of today’s influential mark. The guards were dressed in what her father believed was authentic uniforms of the Spanish Conquistadors.
    ¡Que huevón!
    The sooner she could escape this place the better.

Gaia

5
    Southern Coast of Peru, 1930
    ‘EL CÓNDOR! EL Cóndor!
’ yelled a child, sprinting down the steep canyon path and into the village, sure-footed despite the loose rocks and dust she was kicking up. ‘A man with enormous wings has fallen from the heavens.’
    The tiny pueblo village sat near the flat top of la Madre Montâna in the Sacred Valley of the Andes, nestled against the cliffs on its highest plateau and one of the holy places in the coastal plains that the Conquistadors had failed to discover when they marched their armies across Peru. During Manco Inca’s great final rebellion, the Cuari had carried their belongings and their secrets higher into the mountain to this sacred spot where they had survived, secluded and protected, ever since.
    For centuries, the Cuari had little contact with civilisation beyond the immediate valley. On occasion a dogged slave runner, an intrepid missionary, or a curious university scholar had ventured unaware into their village. They tended to leave just as quickly, never quite sure of what they’d seen or done or discovered. The village gradually became a myth, a Peruvian Shangri-La, fragmented stories making their way back along the trail to Cuzco and Pisco and Lima and beyond. Eventually , any remaining curiosity about the hidden secrets of this mysterious place faded in comparison to the all too tangible draw of the stunning cairn temple ruins at Machu Picchu and the discoveries of the nearby Nazca lines. As time passed, the stories about the village and the whereabouts of the Cuari tribe became forgotten.
    Now no one spoke of this sacred place, and the Cuari did all that they could to keep it that way. When the time came, the universe would know of their existence.
    The Cuari’s High Priestess and medicine woman ducked out from her hut. Her skin was as pocked as the side of the mountain, her white hair knotted in a thin braid, her layers of skirts revealing thick calves and bare feet. Most of the village’s younger women were crouching over a large fire pit, pounding