The caterpillar is in her mouth. She chews. He hears it crunch. She swallows, hard. “Good. Thank you.”

Fire’s nose can smell meat more strongly now. Stone’s axe has cracked the rib cage. Whatever is in the new person’s belly may be good to eat.

The other new woman wakes up. Her eyes look at the corpse, at what the people are doing there. She screams. Emma’s hand clamps over her mouth. The woman struggles.

The people crowd close around the corpse. Fire joins them.

He has forgotten the new people.

Emma Stoney:

Her chest hurt. Every time she took a breath she was gasping and dragging, as if she had been running too far, or as if she was high on a mountainside.

That was the first thing Emma noticed.

The second thing was the dreaminess of moving here.

When she walked — even on the slippery grass, encumbered by her clumsy flight suit — she felt light, buoyant. But she kept tripping up. It was easy to walk slowly, but every time she tried to move at what seemed a normal pace she stumbled, as if about to take off. Eventually she evolved a kind of half-jog, somewhere between walking and running.

Also she was strong here. When she struggled to drag the woman — Sally? — out of the rain and into the comparative shelter of the trees, with the crying kid at her heels, she felt powerful, able to lift well above her usual limit.

The forest was dense, gloomy. The trees seemed to be conifers — impossibly tall, towering high above her, making a roof of green — but here and there she saw ferns, huge ancient broad-leafed plants. The forest canopy gave them some shelter, but still great fat droplets of water came shimmering down on them. When the droplets hit her flesh they clung — and they stung. She noticed how shrivelled and etiolated many of the trees” leaves looked. Acid rain?…

The forest seemed strangely quiet. No birdsong, she thought. Come to think of it she hadn’t seen a bird in the time she’d been here.

The flat-head people — hominids, whatever — did not follow her into the forest, and as their hooting calls receded she felt vaguely reassured. But that was outweighed by a growing unease, for it was very dark, here in the woods. The kid seemed to feel that too, for he went very quiet, his eyes round.

But then, she thought resentfully, she was disoriented, spooked, utterly bewildered anyhow — she had just been through a plane wreck, for God’s sake, and then hurled through time and space to wherever the hell — and being scared in a forest was scarcely much different from being scared on the open plain.

…What forest? What plain? What is this place? Where am I?

Too much strangeness: panic brushed her mind.

But the blood continued to pulse from that crude gash on Sally’s arm, an injury she had evidently suffered on the way here, from wherever. And the kid sat down on the forest floor and cried right along with his mother, great bubbles of snot blowing out of his nose.

First things first, Emma.

The kid gazed up at her with huge empty eyes. He looked no older than three.

Emma got down on her knees. The kid shrank back from her, and she made an effort to smile. She searched the pockets of her flight suit, seeking a handkerchief, and finding everything but. At last she dug into a waist pocket of Sally’s jacket — she was wearing what looked like designer safari gear, a khaki jacket and pants — and found a paper tissue.

“Blow,” she commanded.

With his nose wiped, the boy seemed a bit calmer.

“What’s your name?”

“Maxie.” His tiny voice was scale-model Bostonian.

“Okay, Maxie. My name’s Emma. I need you to be brave now. We have to help your mom. Okay?”

He nodded.

She dug through her suit pockets. She found a flat plastic box. It turned out to contain a rudimentary first aid kit: scissors, plasters, safety pins, dressings, bandages, medical tape, salves and creams.

With the awkward little scissors she cut back Sally’s sleeve, exposing the wound. It didn’t look so bad: just a gash, fairly clean-edged, a few inches long. She wiped away the blood with a gauze pad. She could see no foreign objects in there, and the bleeding seemed mostly to have stopped. She used antiseptic salve to clean up, then pressed a fresh gauze pad over the wound. She wrapped the lower arm in a bandage, and taped, it together.

…Was that right? How was she supposed to know? Think, damn it. She summoned up her scratchy medical knowledge, derived from what she had picked up at second-hand from Malenfant’s training — not that he’d ever told her much — and books and TV shows and movies… She pressed Sally’s fingernail hard enough to turn it white. When she released it, the nail quickly regained its colour. Good; that must mean the bandage wasn’t too tight.

Now she propped the injured arm up in the air. With her free hand she packed up what was left of her first aid kit. She had already used one of only two bandages, half-emptied her only bottle of salve… If they were going to survive here, she would have to ration this stuff.

Or else, she thought grimly, learn to live like those nude hominids out there.

She turned to the kid. She wished she had some way to make this experience easier on him. But she couldn’t think of a damn thing. “Maxie. I’m going to find something to keep the rain off. I need you to stay right here, with your mom. You understand? And if she wakes up you tell her I’ll be right back.”

He nodded, eyes fixed on her face.

She ruffled his hair, shaking out some of the water. Then she set off back towards the plain.

She paused at the fringe of the forest.

Most of the hominids were hunched over on themselves, as if catatonic with misery in the rain. One, apparently an old woman, lay flat out on the floor, her mouth open to the rain.

The rest seemed to be working together, loosely. They were upending branches and stacking them against each other, making a rough conical shape. Perhaps they were trying to build a shelter, like a tepee. But the whole project was chaotic, with branches sliding off the pile this way and that, and every so often one of them seemed to forget what she was doing and would simply wander off, letting whatever she was supporting collapse.

At last, to a great hoot of dismay from the workers, the whole erection just fell apart and the branches came clattering down.

The people scratched their flat scalps over the debris. Some of them made half hearted attempts to lift the branches again, one or two drifted away, others came to see what was going on. At last they started to work together again, lifting the branches and ramming them into the ground.

It wasn’t like watching adults work on a project, however unskilled. It was more like watching a bunch of eight-year-olds trying to build a bonfire for the very first time, figuring it out as they went along, with only the dimmest conception of the final goal.

But these hominids, these people, weren’t eight-year-olds. They were all adults, all naked, hairless, black. And they had the most beautiful bodies Emma had ever seen, frankly, this side of a movie screen anyhow. They were tall and lean — as tall as basketball players, probably — but much stronger-looking, with an all round grace that reminded her of decathletes, or maybe Aussie Rules footballers (a baffling, sexy sport she’d tried to follow as a student, long ago).

With broad prominent noses and somewhat rounded chins, they had human-looking faces — human below the eye line, anyhow. Above the eyes was a powerful ridge of bone that gave each of them, even the smallest child, a glowering, hostile look. And above that came a flat forehead and a skull that looked oddly shrunken, as if the top of their heads had somehow been shaved clean off. Their hair was curly, but it was slicked down by the rain, showing the shape of their disturbingly small skulls too clearly.