The Ledger of Holes

The morning light cut through Maya's floor-to-ceiling windows. Grid shadows fell across her desk, hundreds of intersecting lines matching the city below. She adjusted her glasses and stared at two documents.

Contract from Meridian Import Solutions: $195,000. Her mother's hospital bill: $47,000 for experimental cancer treatment. The math was simple.

Maya's finger tapped against the desk. One beat. Two beats. Three. Counting invisible rhythms like she'd counted everything since she was twelve—since the day numbers became safer than feelings.

She uncapped her pen. Signed the contract with steady pressure, her CPA signature precise. Professional.

Just numbers. They were always just numbers.

Three days later, Maya sat at her standing desk facing the wall. Coffee had gone cold an hour ago. The ledger spreadsheet filled her monitor—rows of data that should have made sense but didn't.

Vendor column: empty on forty-seven transactions. Instead, GPS coordinates.

34.0522° N, 118.2437° W

34.0489° N, 118.2513° W

She clicked to the next page. More coordinates. Her left ring finger resumed its tapping, faster now. Something was wrong with the pattern.

Maya opened Google Maps in a second window. Plotted the first coordinate. East LA, industrial zone. Plotted the second. Vernon, near the warehouses.

Her breath caught.

The spatial distribution wasn't random. Too precise. Too deliberate. The points formed... she'd seen this before. Somewhere.

Maya pulled open her desk's bottom drawer. Past tax forms and client files, buried beneath three years of paperwork—her undergraduate archaeology textbooks from before she'd switched to accounting. Before numbers had seemed like the only truth that mattered.

She flipped through "Pre-Columbian Accounting Systems of the Andes." Page 147: aerial photograph of the Pisco Valley in Peru. The Band of Holes. Five thousand ancient depressions in the earth, arranged in geometric precision.

The Chincha people had drilled them a thousand years ago.

Maya looked back at her screen. Overlaid the GPS points on the photograph's pattern in her mind. The clustering. The spacing. The geometric distribution.

Identical.

Her glasses slipped down her nose. She pushed them up, hand trembling slightly—a tell she tried to control but couldn't. Not now.

Someone had recreated an ancient Peruvian accounting system across Los Angeles. Using GPS coordinates instead of holes in desert earth. Modern. Digital. Hidden in a shell corporation's ledger.

The city grid outside her window suddenly looked different. All those intersecting lines, each one potentially marking something she didn't understand yet.

Maya's notebook lay open beside her keyboard. She wrote at an angle so no one could read over her shoulder—old habit from years of handling sensitive financials. Her pen moved across the page.

*47 coordinates = 47 transactions = 47... what?*

*Why GPS? Why this pattern? Why ancient Peruvian?*

Her phone sat silent on the desk. She could call the client. Ask questions. Request clarification on the unconventional data entry.

That's what a professional would do. Follow protocol. Document the anomaly. File it properly.

But Maya had learned something at twelve, standing in her father's store while police asked questions she couldn't answer with numbers. Truth without proof was powerless. Patterns without documentation meant nothing.

She needed more data. Needed to understand what she was looking at before she asked questions that might make someone notice she was looking.

Maya pulled up her old UCLA directory. Found the name she was looking for: Dr. Elias Mendoza, Department of Anthropology. Her undergraduate advisor from before she'd abandoned archaeology for the certainty of accounting.

If anyone could decode what ancient Peruvian accounting methods meant when transplanted to modern Los Angeles, it would be him.

Her finger hovered over the keyboard. Once she sent this email, once she asked the question, she couldn't unknow whatever answer he gave her.

The hospital bill caught her eye again. $47,000. Forty-seven thousand dollars. Forty-seven GPS coordinates.

Coincidence. Had to be.

Maya typed the email. Attached screenshots of the coordinate pattern. Pressed send before she could calculate the risk.

Outside her window, the city grid stretched to the horizon. Each intersection a crossing point. Each block a pattern within the larger pattern. Thousands of lines, thousands of numbers, thousands of potential meanings she couldn't see yet.

Her coffee had gone completely cold. She drank it anyway, tasting nothing.

Just numbers. She'd spent fifteen years believing that. Fifteen years using spreadsheets as armor against the messy reality of human tragedy.

But the Chincha people hadn't been recording trade goods in those five thousand holes. Dr. Mendoza had taught her that. They'd been recording something else. Agreements. Exchanges. Transactions of a different kind.

What kind of transactions left GPS coordinates in a cartel ledger?

Maya's screen dimmed to sleep mode. Her reflection stared back from the black monitor—glasses slightly crooked, shoulders tense, jaw set in that expression her mother called "your father's stubborn face."

She tapped the keyboard. The spreadsheet returned. Forty-seven lines of coordinates, waiting.

This wasn't a normal audit. She'd known that the moment she saw the pattern. Known it and signed the contract anyway because forty-seven thousand dollars bought things that integrity couldn't.

Maya opened her bottom drawer again. Pulled out the file she never looked at: her father's cold case. Unsolved robbery-homicide, 2010. She'd been twelve. A witness with no proof anyone would accept.

She slid it back. Locked the drawer.

Numbers didn't lie. Patterns revealed truth. She just had to follow where they led.

Even if following meant discovering what she didn't want to know.