Jamie

"Holy [*covers your virgin ears*]," Pete spluttered suddenly, and then blushed fiercely, casting me an apologetic glance. "Sorry. It's just something I found. Jesus Christ, come look at this!" I set down the book I had been poring over, climbing out of the fabric armchair where I had been curled up like a cat. Pete pointed to a passage in the book he was holding, and I read:

The theory persists that Marco Polo is the creator of the legend of El Dorado, and that he, not the Spanish, built the city as a place where his riches could be eternally safeguarded, forever enshrined in walls of gold.

I looked up to see Pete staring at me expectantly, grinning like a little kid. "Oh, come on," I laughed.

"What? It fits!"

"Yeah, okay, sure it does. One thing I've learned, Pete, in my fourteen years of existence, is that of something seems too good to be true, it probably is, and in severe cases, it may want to kill you."

He was undeterred. "But it makes sense. The timeline fits. The Spanish first began searching for El Dorado in the late 1500's-"

"More than two hundred years after Polo's death in 1324."

He ignored me. "Providing Polo's myth ample time to fester and spread."

"Why wouldn't he have retrieved all the treasure before he died, given it to his family or something? He had daughters, right?"

"Why do dead explorers do anything? Because they liked things that were lavish and unnecessary and wholly impressive, and creating your own goddamned city of gold is about as lavish as it gets."

"Why South America, then? Why not somewhere infinitely more accessible, like maybe on the same continent where he actually lived?"

"The Americas were completely undeveloped land in Polo's day. No chance of robbery there."

"Okay. It seems really far-fetched, but it could be kind of awesome."

"Kind of awesome is what I live for, kid."

I felt obligated to hate it when he called me kid, but I didn't.

"You know what," he said, casting a glance at the pile of books surrounding him. "I'll finish up here. When I have a lead, I get kind of intense. And really, really picky about research methodology. Go explore the compound. It's massive. You haven't even come close to seeing the best parts."

"You sure? It seems like you have a hell of a lot more work than you did before."

"I do, but we'll have a lot of time to plow through it in the awesomeness that is Takeout and Cry."

"What the hell is Takeout and Cry?"

He smiled mysteriously. "Can't tell you that, I'm afraid. Your first Takeout and Cry is a truly spiritual experience. It's too powerful for your virgin ears."

I raised my eyebrows. "Right," I said, stretching the world out for several miles. "Well, I had that all wrong. I assumed it was the breakup ritual of the British people. Sounds like you've had a lot of experience with it, after all."

"Smartass," I heard him mutter as I left the library.