Andy celebrated his big break with a fifty-dollar bottle of champagne, but over the next year and more than a hundred auditions, Andy failed to land a second gig. He moved back to South Dakota, and three months later, he started toward his master’s degree in cultural anthropology.

Andy set the menu down just as the pilot’s voice came over the intercom.

“Alrighty, folks. Looks like we got the go-ahead here. Going to be a little bumpy going up through this thick Miami air, but should be smooth sailing from then on. Sit tight for the next few minutes, then feel free to stroll around.”

A little bumpy?

Andy watched as the palm trees in the distance began to move across his small window. His stomach lurched, and his vision began to swim. Why had he signed up for this expedition? What was he thinking?

It was supposed to be his mentor, Adrian Heliant—head of the anthropology department at the University of Chicago, and one of the preeminent scholars when it came to Inca history—who was to be the lead anthropologist for the expedition. But the aging Heliant came down with shingles and had recommended Andy—whose class, Ancient Inca Civilization, wasn’t offered during the summer quarter—as a last-minute replacement.

The expedition had been hush-hush, and Andy hadn’t even known about it until he received a call just three weeks ago. His knees nearly buckled when the person on the other end revealed who he was: famed documentarian Jonathan Roth.

Over the phone, Roth detailed the expedition to find the lost city of Paititi.

Andy was circumspect at first. Hundreds of expeditions had tried and failed to find the lost city of the Inca Empire. It was widely believed to lie in the dense jungles of Peru, just east of the Andes. But surely after all this time, if the city existed, it would have been found by now.

“Bolivia?” Andy asked when Roth told him where they were headed.

“Yeah, northern Bolivia,” Roth replied. He explained that six months earlier, an acquaintance of his—who had assisted with the satellite imagery for Roth’s previous documentary—had emailed him a photo. Yewed Global had been hired by an eco-group to take pictures of the rampant deforestation of the Amazon forest. The group wasn’t able to come up with the funds to purchase the photos, and ultimately, the group disbanded. The photos were enormous files, and image consultant Jordan Mae was uploading them to an archive cloud folder when he found himself scanning one of them.