Fire’s hands grab Sally by the waist. He hurls her over his shoulder. She cries out as her broken arm is jarred against his hip. He feels the cool flesh of her belly and breast against his shoulder. Emma has picked up Maxie. Her legs are running.

Stones hail around them, sticking into the ground. The people’s legs run from the stones and the Hams” yells. “U-lu-lu-lu-lu!”

The people run splashing into the water. There is nowhere else to go. They scramble onto the raft. It is just a mass of floating branches, roughly pushed together. The raft is too small. The people fall off, or climb on each other’s backs. As their legs and arms scrabble at the branches the raft drifts apart, in big floating chunks. The people call out and grab at each other’s hands and ankles.

Fire runs onto the raft. His foot plunges through the soaked foliage and he falls forward. Sally falls off his shoulders and lands on a wriggling pile of children. The children push her away.

Emma is on the raft. Her hands slap at the children. “Leave her alone!”

Maxie sits by his mother, his hands clutching leaves and branches, wailing.

The raft is drifting away from the bank, into the deeper river. It twists, slowly. The people yell and sprawl, their hands clinging to the branches.

Stone comes running down the bank. His eyes are white. Hams pursue him. Stone hurls himself into the water. He goes under. His head comes up. He is coughing. Blue reaches out and grabs Stone. Stone clings to a branch, his body dangling in the water. Fire sees blood seep from Stone’s shoulder.

The Hams run up and down the bank, yelling, hurling stones. “U-lu-lu-lu-lu!” The stones fall harmlessly into the water.

The raft drifts towards the middle of the river, away from the bank with the undercut, the capering Hams.

Fire’s shoulder stings. He looks around. Emma has slapped him. “Help me.”

Emma’s small axe cuts away Sally’s brown, bloody skin. Underneath is more skin. It is pink, but it is mottled purple and black. Emma’s hands run up and down the skin.

“Good. The skin isn’t broken. But I have no idea how to set a broken bone. Damn, damn.” She produces a small gleaming thing. Water pours out over Sally’s arm. No, not water: it stinks, like rotten fish. Her hands pull a chunk of branch from the raft. Fire can see water rippling underneath. Emma holds the branch against Sally’s arm. “Hold this,” she says. “Fire hold. Hold it, damn it.” Her hands wrap his around Sally’s arm. His hands hold the branch against the arm. Emma takes a sheet of skin from around her neck. Her hands move over Sally’s arm, very fast. When she pulls away her hands, the skin is wrapped around Sally’s arm.

Fire stares and stares.

Emma lifts Sally’s head and places it on her lap.

Maxie says, “Is mommy going to be all right?”

“Yes. Yes, I hope so, Maxie.”

“She needs a hospital.”

Emma laughs, but it is like a sob. “Yes, Maxie. Yes, she needs a hospital.”

The raft is in the middle of the river, slowly turning. The banks to either side are far away, just lines of green and brown. The raft is small, and the river is large.

There is a scream.

Fire sees ridges. Yellow eyes. Teeth.

Stone roars. His arms lift his body. His bulk comes crashing down on the raft.

The whole raft shakes. People scream, clinging to each other. Branches splinter and separate. A child falls into the water, wailing.

Yellow eyes gleam. The crocodile’s vast mouth opens.

The child’s eyes are white. They stare at the people on the raft.

The mouth snaps shut.

The child is gone, forgotten.

The raft drifts down the river, slowly turning. The people cling to it in silence, locked inside their heads.

Reid Malenfant:

Ten minutes before lunar orbit insertion the cabin grew subtly darker. Gradually, as his eyes dark-adapted, Malenfant caught his first true view of the stars, a rich spangling carpet of them, glowing clear and steady.

They had fallen into the shadow of the Red Moon.

Malenfant and Nemoto were both strapped into their couches. They had a checklist to work through, and settings on their various softscreen displays to confirm, just as if they were real pilots, like Borman and Anders, Armstrong and Collins. But the insertion sequence was completely automated, it either worked or it didn’t, and there wasn’t a damn thing Malenfant could do about it — nothing save slam his fist into the fat red abort button that would change the engine’s firing sequence to send them straight home again. He would do that only in the event of a catastrophic control failure. Or, he mused, if somebody down there started shooting…

He glanced up at his window. There was a disc of darkness spreading across the stars, like an unwelcome tide.

It was, of course, the Red Moon. His heart thumped.

What were you thinking, Malenfant? Are you surprised to find that this huge object, this vast new Moon, is in fact real?

Well, maybe he was. Maybe he had spent too long in Shuttles and the Station, going around and around, boring a hole in the sky. He had become conditioned to believing that spaceflight wasn’t about going anywhere.

Passing behind the alien Moon, they abruptly lost the signal from Houston. For the first time since launch day, they were alone.

The cabin was warm — over eighty degrees — but his skin was cold where his clothes touched him.

Emma Stoney:

The river’s broad body ran from west to east, so that the setting sun glimmered above its upstream sections, making the water shine like greasy tarmac. Thick black volcanic clouds streaked the glowing sky. And when she looked downstream, she saw the Earth, nearly full, hanging low over the horizon, directly above the dark water, as if the river were a great road leading her home.

The raft drifted over the brown, lazily swelling water, rotating slowly, heading roughly east. In fact it was scarcely a raft, Emma thought, just a jammed together collection of branches, held together by no more than the tangle of the branches and twigs, and the powerful fingers of the Runners. Every so often a chunk of foliage would come loose and drift away, diminishing the raft further, and the Runners would huddle closer together, fearful. And the raft drifted: just that, with no oars or rudder or sail, completely out of any conscious control.

The Runners did not speak to each other, of course. Where humans would have been shouting, crying, yelling, debating what to do, comforting or blaming each other, the Runners just clung to the branches and to each other, silent, eyes wide and staring. Each Runner was locked in her own silent fear, almost as isolated as if she were physically alone. Emma was frightened too, but at least she understood the fix they were in, and her head whirred busily seeking plans and options. All the Runners could do was wait passively while fate, and the river, took them where it would.

Emma, surrounded by naked, powerful, trembling bodies, had never been so forcefully struck by the Runners” limitations.

And meanwhile those “Hams” had looked for all the world to her like picture-book Neandertals. What was going on here?…

The river crowded through a section of swamp-forest. Here the trees were low, and the purple spikes of flowering water-hyacinths crowded close to the oily black water. They passed an inlet crowded with water-lilies, their white flowers cupped half-closed. Their leaves were oval, with serrated edges bright green on top and red-brown underneath. As Emma watched dully, a red-brown body of a bird unfolded from its well-concealed place at the base of one lily-pad. Its neck and collar were white and gold, and it unfolded long legs and spindly toes, watching them suspiciously.

…Not a bird. A bat, apparently incubating its young on nests built on these floating weeds. She had never heard of bats behaving like that. As the Runner raft passed, the bat stepped with a surgical precision across the lily-pads, its leathery wings rustling. Then it scuttled back to its nest of weed, settling with an air of irritation.