Toviro didn't wait for anyone to say anything else.
He reached over and took Ozair's piece, holding it next to his own. He moved them slowly, left then right, studying the edges with the kind of focus that made everyone else go quiet without being told to.
Then he stopped.
"She's actually right," he said.
Ozair leaned in. "You serious?"
"Yes."
Toviro lowered himself to the ground and sat. The others followed without a word. He held out his hand and Elina gave him hers. Aryan did the same.
All four pieces now lay in front of him on the ground.
He started moving them carefully, turning each one slightly, testing edges, adjusting angles. It was slow and patient work and nobody rushed him.
The lot around them was still loud with the sounds of the damaged neighborhood, but in that small circle around the papers everything felt separate from all of that.
As the last piece clicked into place, the four fragments began to pulse with a soft glow that rapidly intensified. The light surged so suddenly and with such brilliance that all four of them recoiled, their vision swallowed by a sea of pure radiance.
The brightness faded slowly, the shapes of the empty lot gradually sharpening back into focus. Then the last of the glow vanished.
They lowered their hands and looked down.
One single sheet lay on the ground. No seams. No edges where the four pieces had joined. Just one complete page, smooth and whole and still faintly warm, as if it had always been this way and the whole business of being four separate pieces had been the strange part.
Ozair crouched down and looked at it closely. "That was four pieces. I held one of them in my hand this morning. How is it one now?"
Nobody answered him. Because nobody knew.
Toviro leaned over the page. Lines and paths spread carefully across the surface. Landmarks marked with symbols. A large territory shaded across the center in dark ink. And at the very top, in bold sharp letters that none of them could read, a single word.
Elina looked at Toviro. "Can you read that?"
"Not yet."
His eyes went unfocused the way they did when something was running inside him. A few seconds passed. Inside his head, a process completed quietly.
New linguistic pattern identified. Language detected: Sumerian. Begin installation?
He selected yes.
They waited.
Sumerian language successfully installed.
He looked back at the top of the page and read it aloud.
"Aidzabella."
Ozair frowned. "What does that mean?"
Silence sat between them for a moment.
Then Aryan said slowly, "I think I've heard that word before."
Everyone looked at him.
"You know it?" Elina asked.
"I think so. Give me a second." He looked at the ground, not at anything in particular, just thinking.
Then he looked up. "Yeah. Back when I was a kid, I found a book in a library. One of those old, heavy things, mostly history. I forgot the name of it, but this word was in there. Aidzabella. The Hal-An-Ki."
"And?" Ozair said.
"I don't remember the full meaning. But there was something in that book about the Amazon rainforest. I think it might be an ancient name for it."
Toviro checked his internal reading and looked up. "You are right. My system confirms it. Aidzabella is the ancient Sumerian name for what is now called the Amazon rainforest."
Ozair blinked. "The Amazon. The actual jungle."
"Yeah."
"That Amazon?"
"Ozair."
"Okay… yeah. Go on."
Aryan leaned forward. "What else does it say?"
Toviro traced his finger along the marked paths on the page, following the lines carefully from the edges inward toward the center. His finger slowed as it approached the darkest point on the map.
A location marked differently from all the others, a symbol unlike anything else on the page, sitting at the very heart of the shaded territory.
His finger stopped there.
"It is pointing to something deep inside it," he said. "Very deep." He read the words written beneath the marked point slowly and clearly.
"The Cave of the Ancients."
He sat back. "No way."
Elina looked at him. "What is it?"
Toviro looked at the others. "You don't know about the Cave of the Ancients?"
Ozair shook his head. "Never heard of it."
Aryan's eyes shifted. "Wait." He looked at Ozair. "The Heroes of Uruk. You remember that show we used to watch?"
Something crossed Ozair's face immediately. "Yeah! Red the loser, white the kind, and blue the—"
"Good, you remember," Aryan said. "The one-hour special episode. The legend of the Cave of the Ancients."
Elina sat up straighter. "Yeah, now I remember. That was one of my favourite episodes."
"Mine too," Aryan said.
Toviro looked between them. "Then you already know part of it. But the real legend goes much deeper than any show ever covered."
He looked at them, his voice becoming quieter and more serious. "The Cave of the Ancients is said to be a place unlike anything else in the world."
He paused. "A place where the rules of reality don't fully apply. A place that can bring back the dead, change fate itself. Time doesn't move there, it waits. Memories become real enough to touch. Your deepest fear becomes your greatest hope. And when you leave, the question isn't what you found… It's what followed you out."
Aryan looked at him flatly. "That sounds like a fairy tale."
"It does," Toviro said. "But there are a lot of people who believe this place actually exists. Just as many say it's a story someone made up. Some say it vanished, others say it's protected."
He paused, letting the weight of the words settle.
"But here's the thing. Nobody has ever been able to prove if it exists or not. In all of recorded history, no one has actually found it."
He looked at the sheet.
"Until possibly right now."
The lot went completely quiet.
Aryan looked at Toviro. "But why do we need to go there? What does a cave in the Amazon have to do with Mayo or any of this?"
Nobody answered right away.
Then Elina said softly, "I don't know exactly. But since I woke up this morning something has been pulling at me. Before I even saw the map I already felt like I needed to go somewhere. Like I was being pointed toward something and I just didn't know what yet."
Ozair nodded slowly. "Yeah. That's happening to me too. I can't explain it but it's there."
Aryan looked at the paper in Toviro's hands. His jaw was tight. "You really think this can help us understand what's happening to Mayo?"
Toviro looked at him. "The old man said to follow the map and we would find answers. Not just about Mayo. About the earthquakes. The skies. The oceans rising. The galaxies collapsing. The shadow behind the sun growing larger every day."
He looked at each of them. "I think all of it is connected. And this map is the thread running through everything."
Silence.
Around them the neighborhood was still going. Someone hammering something back into place. A generator humming two streets over. Voices carrying through the morning air.
And somewhere further away a group of people sat on the pavement doing nothing at all, not fixing anything, not moving, just sitting because the news from that morning had taken something from them and they did not know how to start again.
Then Toviro stood up.
"I am going," he said. "With or without anyone else. Whoever is coming, get what you need. I'm leaving in one hour."
A quiet settled over them.
Ozair stood, the sudden movement breaking the silence. He managed a smile and placed a hand on Toviro's shoulder. "You are not going alone," he said, his voice steady. "That is not how this works."
Aryan stood. "I'm in."
Elina nodded once. "Me too."
Aryan looked at the map one more time. Then at Toviro. "How exactly are we getting to that cave?"
Toviro looked back at him calmly. "Don't worry about that."
Aryan waited.
Nothing else came.
"Toviro, that's not an answer."
"It'll be in one hour," Toviro said simply.
He picked up the map from the ground and held it with a careful, steady grip. It was warm, but he couldn't feel it in his hands, and it was pointing toward a spot deep inside a jungle on the other side of the world, where something had been waiting far longer than any of them could imagine.
The Cave of the Ancients.
None of them fully understood what they were walking toward. But the pull was real, the map was real, and Mayo was out there with something happening to him that none of them could explain or stop.