REFLECTIONS IN LIZARD-TIME
Brian Trent
I
The train hadn’t been built for humans, but we were still allowed to ride it, in the way that rats are “allowed” to ride a seagoing vessel. And much like a rat, I’d kept out of sight as the massive and oddly glass-like vehicle lumbered on its treads from Siberia to Saint Petersburg. While reptilian passengers occupied the first dozen or so compartments, I’d hunkered in one of the rear cars among the living cargo—a hundred or so shellbacks being transported for their meat and horns.
As the train arrived in the city ruins, I slipped out through the ventilation grate. The nearest building was plastered with graffiti, and my eyes settled on large Cyrillic lettering rendered in red spray paint:
FIGHT THE PHASING! SEND THE LIZARDS BACK TO HELL!
I coughed into my handkerchief, transfixed by the old call to arms. It was vintage, twenty years old if it was a day. Behind me, the train doors slid open and reptilian passengers disgorged—a silent procession of three-meter-tall, bipedal creatures. I wondered if any of them knew what the graffiti said. Wondered if they’d care.
“Edgar!” a voice called to me.
A small gathering of humans had crept toward the train, to meet stowaways or take their turn riding it to its next destination. One man was a plump, bearded fellow with rich blue eyes and a sable woolen coat. He strode to me, grinning.
“Alexander,” I said in greeting, tipping my hat.
My old enemy embraced me in a bear hug. “Edgar McBride! It is good to see you!”
“You look well.”
“And so do you . . .” The lie died on his tongue as he beheld me up close. “You are bleeding.”
I regarded the fresh blood on my handkerchief.
“It’s the humidity,” I said, nodding toward the shellback compartments. The Scale Rail (our slang for the dino train) billowed steam from open doors. The stink of its living cargo wafted into dry Russian air.
Alexander Spiridov frowned mightily, the same frown (I imagined) he’d used when peering through his sniper scope to pick off American soldiers in my old battalion. “I forgot the lizards bring their jungle air wherever they go.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You still have blood on your chin.”
I used the handkerchief again, mindful of getting spatters on my blue suit. The train continued emptying its passengers, and one of them—a stately dino with a head crest the color of wine—twisted its blue-feathered neck to see me hastily bury the sodden handkerchief in my pocket. It gave me a curious look, suggestive of both sympathy and hunger, and then continued into the city.
Saint Petersburg had changed since last I’d been there. In some ways, it had improved: no longer the war-torn rubble I’d battled Russians in as a nineteen-year-old private in the twilight years of World War III. New buildings loomed above—enormous gray mounds in the plain style of our invaders, and spine-like defensive batteries. Yet most of the city remained a ruin, and the contrast was somehow more upsetting.
Alexander grabbed my heavy luggage trunk. “I have arranged the meeting in a very secure place.”
“Where is it?” I asked.
“I operate a bathhouse. It will be plenty private.”
“Good,” I said, not voicing what I was thinking: A bathhouse will be humid. I’ll hemorrhage blood before this deal is concluded.
My Russian host led me into the nearest human ghetto. The streets here were narrow and overgrown with shops catering to every red-blooded need and comfort; the oily stink of humanity was perhaps little better than the stench of the train, but it was a mammalian odor. I felt the tension in my shoulders ebb. Food crackled in skillets, vendors pawed at us and shoved their wares under our noses, but Alexander shouldered past. We crossed a courtyard providing a view of the deep blue Baltic and its coastline curling away . . .
I halted abruptly. “What the hell?”
Alexander spun around. “Something wrong?”
I pointed into the distance. “The towers . . .”
“Dactyl towers, yes.” He shifted my heavy trunk from one hand to the other. “They are miles away and will not trouble us.”
“Miles away isn’t much comfort!”
That was certainly true. As much as the dino mounds unsettled me, as much as I hated the humiliation of being reduced to inconsequential fauna, there was comfort in the fact that the dinos left us alone. Oh, they responded with lethal force to any human hostility, but it had been years since we’d offered them any. Twenty years ago when they phased into our world, we’d tried to fight them off, failed spectacularly, and then did what humans do best: We adapted to new circumstances.
Yet the dinos were not the only reptilian species to invade. In their version of Earth, evolution had produced two sentient races. One was the bipedal, troodon-descended species we nicknamed “dinos.” The other came from pterodactyl or archaeopteryx stock—no human scientist had ever determined which. Winged, cunning, and predatory, they were apparently the dinos’ hereditary enemies.
Earth had since been carved up by these warring rivals. New York’s skyscrapers housed dactyl nests. Mexico City had become a dino stronghold. Old national borders, fervently fought over by humans, were meaningless.
And here in Saint Petersburg, the rivals had built unsettlingly near to each other. The dactyl towers on the horizon were unspeakably ugly to me. Like chimneys of freakishly large factories, riddled with perches and nesting holes.
“The fighting around these parts has died down,” Alexander explained. “The two sides stay strictly apart.”
“Still . . .”
“Come along!”
A thrum of dread ran through me, but I dutifully followed him into another warren of alleyways. More ancient graffiti marked the walls. Our trek ended at a massive building with a gorgeous, stained-glass window set above doors guarded by shifty-looking men with wild beards, shaggy fur coats, and submachine guns. Alexander greeted them in Russian, and they stepped aside to let us enter.
The lobby was a lavishly opulent rotunda. Posh throw rugs covered the floor. Silver mirrors reflected Roman marbles and paintings from German, French, and Russian artists. Famous artworks, if I judged them right. Works predating the Third World War.
I stared in undisguised astonishment. “How in the hell . . .?”
Alexander chuckled. “You like?”
“These had to have come from a museum!”
“From the Hermitage Museum, here in Saint Petersburg.”
“But . . . but . . .” My mind struggled to make sense of this. Our scaly overlords preferred their own structures as opposed to appropriating human ones—that wasn’t surprising, given that our doorways and rooms hadn’t been designed with oversized lizards in mind. There were exceptions, though; the Hermitage Museum, with its airy halls and colossal architecture, now housed the upper castes of saurian society.
“You couldn’t have snuck inside and stolen all this!” I cried.
“Of course not! I traded for them.”
“Traded . . .with the dinos?”
“Egg service!” Alexander said cheerily. “I provide premiere egg service to the lizards. My craftsmen build gilded egg-holders with green pillows and heated cabinets until the little bastards hatch. We even decorate the shells.”
“I wasn’t aware they dealt directly with us at all.”
“It’s very secretive. Seems all intelligent creatures have a taste for the forbidden and decadent! My services are all the rage.”
I shook my head. “From Russian sniper to egg farmer, huh?”
“Egg painter.”
“Yeah, my interpretation sounds better.”
He folded his arms and regarded me warmly. “And you? From American imperialist to black-market smuggler.”
“Specialty salesman.”
“My interpretation sounds better.” He gently kicked my luggage trunk, blue eyes twinkling. “The merchandise is in here, yes?”
“Yeah. One of my excavation teams found it in Siberian permafrost.”
“Good!”
“Who exactly are we selling to?”
“A young woman named Cynthia Belanov.”
I gave a sidelong look. “Do you know why she wants pieces of a fifty-thousand-year-old woolly mammoth?”
He scratched his beard. “Does it matter?”
“A little.”
“Why?”
I cleared my throat, feeling salty pulp on the back of my tongue—a permanent gift from the weapons of the last human war. “When folks turn to the black market for paleontology, they usually want dinosaurs. Lots of people fetishize the old bones. Some grind them up for homemade elixirs. Some destroy them in weird backwoods rituals, hoping to inspire revolution. But your client wanted a mammoth. And not just a mammoth: the stomach of a mammoth. That doesn’t sound strange to you?”
Alexander steepled his fingers. “I fulfill requests, not question them. Besides, there are strange rumors in the city lately.”
“Like what?”
“Someone has been making inquiries. Asking about frozen specimens. Ancient dead animals.”
I felt a wave of unease. “Any idea why?”
He shrugged his massive shoulders. “I don’t concern myself with why.” He checked his watch, hefted my luggage, and said, “Shall we go?”
II
It was not a bathhouse for humans. At least, not anymore.
Based on the tilework and mosaics, I guessed its original incarnation dated to the early twentieth century. The subsequent years had given it a patchwork character, like junk DNA, preserving every evolutionary twist. Revolution, WW2, revolution, WW3 . . . and then a cavernous expansion to accommodate our scaly new rulers. The air was as humid as I’d feared. Concavities dimpled the floor, large enough to accommodate individual dinos; I imagined them reclining by the water as legendary dragons, safe from the bitter Russian winter.
For now, the bathhouse appeared empty. I reached into my coat and affixed my breathing mask while Alexander stood by my side, eying the mist.
A woman emerged from behind one of the columns.
Her head was shaved smooth as a dino egg. Scaly tattoos ran along the sides of her neck.
A dinofreak.
Willful worshiper of Earth’s oppressors.
“Edgar McBride?” she asked uncertainly. “My name is Cynthia Belanov. Mister Spiridov said you could get . . .” She trailed off, stricken by the sight of my breathing mask.
“Not contagious,” I assured her.
Three-fifths of the world’s population died during World War III, and nukes were merely the opening act. Chemical and pathogenic attacks followed. Red Death was the most notorious, gestated in some bioweapons lab and carrying a seventy percent mortality rate. I’d caught it while on march to the Kazakh border, and my lungs had never been the same.
Cynthia swallowed apprehensively. “You have the mammoth stomach, yes?”
I rested a hand on the luggage trunk, and my voice was tinny in my mask. “Refrigerated compartment, per your request. Permafrost depth suggests an age of about fifty thousand years.”
She edged toward us, kneading her hands, bald head glistening. “Can you get more?”
“Maybe. But mammoths aren’t exactly easy to find.”
“It doesn’t need to be a mammoth.”
“What does it need to be?”
“Old herbivores. The older the better, but preserved well enough that anything in their stomachs would be viable for extraction.”
I glanced at Alexander. He was frowning, studying her and the vaporous bathhouse as if he was once again a sniper, scanning for trouble.
I coughed in my mask. “Ms. Belanov? If you could tell me what you’re seeking, maybe I can narrow the search.”
“I’m sorry, we can’t tell you.”
“We?” Alexander snapped. “Who is ‘we’?”
His question seemed to linger like the wisps of humidity. Then the mist behind Belanov darkened, and two dinos sprinted at us.
During World War III, Alexander had been a sniper in the Russian Army and a frankly terrifying opponent. The subsequent years and weight had not, it seemed, dulled his reflexes. He jerked a submachine gun from his coat and aimed at the nearest dino. They were two and a half meters tall, blue feathered, and by the flush to their head crests were probably only twenty or thirty years old. Their claws gripped sleek energy weapons.
“Ostanovis! No!” Cynthia cried, throwing herself in the way of Alexander’s aim. “Trust!”
“Not in this life!” he countered, and for a moment I thought he was going to pull the trigger. The dinos glared at his firearm with flat, dull rage.
Everyone liked to say dinos resembled birds, but their feathers were closer to porcupine quills. Besides, there was enough of the lizard beneath their cobalt-hued feathers, and they moved with the jerky speed of reptiles, too. Hell, I didn’t even think they sounded like birds. The trilling that filled the bathhouse was liquid and otherworldly.
Our two sides regarded each other in a tense standoff. Then an eerie voice resonated in the mist.
“No harm humans. Bow your heads and submit. Cynthia, assure no harm.”
The dinos instantly obeyed this command, lowering their weapons and crouching like supplicants. Cynthia’s eyes sprouted tears, and she regarded me with a pleading gaze. “We need your help, Mister McBride! Please! There’s more at stake here than you realize!”
Behind her, the miasma kindled in a milky phosphorescence, and a third dino emerged from concealment.
It was taller than its brethren, and its feathers were the purple of a Montana dusk. Spectral light exuded from the tips of its feathers. Clothing was not worn by dinos—the very concept seemed alien to them—though I’d heard their upper castes bejeweled their feathers with bright threads and bioluminescent chemistry.
Cynthia knelt, and the glowing dino placed one claw gingerly on her head, trilling and chirping softly. The eerie voice piped up again, coming from a strange device strapped to the dino’s chest. “Edgar McBride? Kolseen you may call me.”
The voice had the crackling, warped quality of an ancient gramophone scratching out sounds from a waxen cylinder.
I was stricken mute. When the dinos and dactyls phased into our world, they had been too busy fighting each other to give a damn about us. Our short-lived resistance was treated as the antics of troublesome pests rather than respectable foes. There had been no formal ceasefire or treaty offered; they simply culled our numbers and obliterated our defenses until we gave up. After that, we were treated with indifference.
To my knowledge, there had never been actual, verbal communication between our species.
The creature calling itself Kolseen trilled again. Her translator converted the sounds: “Apologies in select of place. Blood-lung sufferer. We conclude our business rapidly, yes?”
“Yes,” I said at last, eager to get the hell out of there.
“You have we request?”
“In this trunk. It’s refrigerated to keep the sample cold.”
Kolseen barely looked at it. “Require more.”
“Why?”
“Seeking long ago fungal spores this territory.”
The bathhouse humidity was so heavy, it felt one degree away from transforming into rain. Mind racing, I said, “I think I understand. You’re hoping the mammoth might have ingested local vegetation, and with it these . . . um . . . spores. Do you know . . . I mean, can you tell me . . . what species of spore you want?”
I had never been this close to a dino before; with only a few meters separating us, Kolseen looked freakish and serpentine, like an image of Quetzalcoatl come to hideous life.
“Specific species extinct,” she said through her device. “Not known to humans.”
“We have scientists,” I insisted. “Specialists in paleobotany. I could make inquiries.”
“Specific species not in human records any.”
“How could you know that?”
“Investigate human records since arrive.”
The implications of this took a few seconds to register, and when they did, I felt an explosion of outrage. “Investigate human records? You mean you can read our languages? You’ve picked over the pieces of our civilization without ever . . . without ever . . .”
Without ever treating us as worthy of respect and consideration! I wanted to scream. You goddam lizards phased into a world that didn’t belong to you! You never tried communicating with us! You broke an already broken people, and then picked over the detritus like goddam vultures!
Kolseen gave a sidelong look, like a parrot eying something suspicious. I wondered if she could smell my anger, or could see the blood rushing to my cheeks.
“Wish to speak alone. Walk with me please, Edgar McBride.”
Against every instinct I had, I followed the creature into the rotunda.
III
She must have been slowing her movements to allow me to keep pace with her. Nonetheless, her lengthy legs forced me into a brisk walk. Back in the rotunda, my gaze went to the stained-glass window. I could see now that it was an image from Genesis: Adam and Eve about to share an apple, while a serpent entwined the Tree of Knowledge above their heads.
Kolseen noticed the image as well, and she studied it curiously.
“Not wish enter your world,” she said at last.
“But you did.”
“Not know humans existed.”
I fought to steady my voice. “But you found out soon enough, didn’t you?”
“Enter your world seek spores.”
The scratchy words paraded through my head, and for several seconds they seemed as cryptic as her native tongue. Blood pounded in my ears. “Are you telling me that your”—I’d never call them people—“species broke into my world for this . . . this fungus? That’s the reason behind the phasing?”
It seemed impossible that anything could demean the human race further. We had adapted to our pitiful condition, but the sting of defeat was never far from our thoughts. How could it not be? I hadn’t ridden a train across the Siberian wastes with a ticket in my hand and a window seat; I’d stowed away as a furtive animal aboard a colossal machine, lurking among reptilian cattle.
And now, here was another blow. Our defeat had not been the result of a noble crusade, but for want of mold.
“A fungus,” I repeated. “What, is it a delicacy? An aphrodisiac?”
Kolseen turned her snakelike neck toward me, quills bristling. “Weapon.”
“A weapon?”
“Deadly fungus paralyze brain. Kill enemy.”
I shook my head, wondering if it would have been better if it had been a delicacy or aphrodisiac. During my years of combat in the Third World War, there had been nights when I would gaze at the stars and imagine an advanced alien civilization showing up to heal the world. I suppose every soldier has fancied something similar at one time or another: a divine intervention of sorts, to end the carnage and death. And the universe had answered me, it seemed, though instead of aliens or angels, it had sent interdimensional monsters. Instead of peace, it had simply upped the stakes. To paraphrase Einstein: I don’t know how they’re going to fight World War III, but I do know how they’ll fight World War IV. With two warring factions of sentient dinosaurs.
“This deadly spore,” I grumbled, “How do you know it ever grew here?”
“Our version Earth have similar species.”
“It grew in your world?”
“Yes. Grew same region. We seek it here.”
“Our versions of Earth developed differently. Maybe it never evolved here.”
“Maybe did.”
I thought of the mammoth stomach in my refrigerated compartment. Ancient bacteria and gut flora had been recovered from the intestinal tract of frozen creatures before. Could there be spores in there? If the fungal species had been native to this geographic region, and concurrent with mammoths, that was possible. Hell, it was likely.
“And you used it as a weapon?” I asked.
Although the artificial voice was devoid of emotion, Kolseen’s chirps seemed to have taken on a desperate urgency. “Yes. Used it as weapon in war with enemy. Only hope for victory.”
“Well, if it grew in your world and was so important, what the hell happened to it in your—”
The stained-glass window exploded.
We were showered by shards of glass, the fragments of Adam and Eve raining around us. Two winged shapes flew through the disintegrating picture.
Like the dinos, they were feathered and reptilian, and larger than a man. That was where the resemblance ended. Ash gray in color, with dark beaks and claws, the dactyls had pale eyes that made me think of blindness. Wings flapping, they aimed at us with devices clutched in prehensile tails.
Kolseen shoved me aside. I felt blistering heat fly past my face and suddenly the rim of my hat was smoking.
My dino host darted away from stabbing beams of light. Then the bathhouse doors flew open, and her bodyguards strode in, firing energy weapons of their own. One of the dactyls was hit and fell, spinning, like a burned kite.
The other ascended to the domed roof. For a moment, I thought all would be well—three armed dinos taking on a single dactyl seemed like good odds. Then its tail-gun fired a small projectile into their midst, and there was a blast of heat that blew me off my feet.
When I came to, the rotunda was a smoking crater. Two dinos lay dead, feathers scorched and shriveled. A pair of winged shapes lay crumpled. Alexander stood in the doorway holding his submachine gun, though he seemed less a heroic rescuer than a baffled man taking stock of the fight’s aftermath.
A pile of debris moved. The fragments of paintings and sculptures rolled off Kolseen’s rising specter.
Alexander aimed at her.
“Wait!” I called to him. “It was the dactyls who attacked us!”
Kolseen took a hobbling step toward us, twisting her neck to regard the bright fragments of window in their frame. She gave a sorrowful warble, which I seemed to understand before the translator deciphered it for me.
“Must go. Others will come.”
IV
World War III shattered the Internet. It was therefore impossible to know where the phasing had first occurred, or if every nation had been hit simultaneously. All I knew was my own experience in the ruins of Moscow. My battalion was crossing a bridge. A fellow soldier glanced over the rails and cried out that something was in the water.
I will never forget leaning over the bridge to see the river below. What we should have seen were our own reflections. The sun’s position should have turned the river into a mirror.
Instead, we saw lizards. Nightmare reptiles. Scales and teeth and amber eyes glaring out from murky depths.
None of us knew what to make of it. Our commander dismissed it as Russian trickery: false images projected from the bottom of the river. He ordered us to resume our march. Told us to keep our eyes on the buildings ahead, where Russian snipers like Alexander were surely drawing a bead on us.
But we passed through one neighborhood after another without resistance. Finally, in a school playground, we encountered Russians—including Russian soldiers. But they weren’t interested in us. They stood in a circle, staring down into an old bomb crater. It had rained the previous night, turning the crater into a small pond.
There were reflections in the water.
And they weren’t human.
Twenty-four hours later, the phasing occurred. Dinos and dactyls stepped out from reflective surfaces. Spread into the ruined cities. Exotic machines erupted from lakes and rivers. Behemoths and dragons who clashed like titans of myth. Human scientists believed the twenty-four-hour delay owed to a time dilation in crossing one universe to another—for the invaders it must have seemed instantaneous. Not that it mattered. Even a day’s wait wasn’t enough for us to organize—for us to comprehend—what was about to transpire.
We warily emerged from the bathhouse—Alexander, Kolseen, and I. The Russian guards at the door lay in bloodied heaps. Killed manually by the dactyls, I suppose.
Silencing the guard dogs.
“My luggage!” I said suddenly.
Kolseen hissed at me to lower my voice. “Cynthia stays with item. My people recover soon.” She splayed the talons of one hand, making impossibly quick motions as if casting a spell . . . or more likely, transmitting a nonverbal message to her “kind” using some wireless, cybernetic technology.
“We wait here,” she said. “Rescue soon.”
I strayed a few meters, to where I could see the dactyl towers miles away on the Baltic’s shores. “Kolseen,” I began, “what happened to the spores in your own world? You said it was an effective biological weapon against your enemy.”
I didn’t say the rest of what I was thinking: that if I could locate this lethal fungus for her, maybe the lizards would leave and never return.
Kolseen bristled, eyes flicking to Alexander. I remembered suddenly that she’d told me her secret in confidence. Oh fucking well. For his part, my Russian friend held his submachinegun as if it was his old sniper rifle, scanning the rooftops for signs of further attack.
“The spores,” I repeated. “If they were so important to your war, how could you lose them?”
“Spores not lost. Spores destroyed. Repositories burned by treachery.”
I thought of the beam weapons I had seen the dinos use, and their advanced machines. I had seen dactyls lasered out of the sky from ground-based defenses.
“You don’t seem to need a fungus to fight the dactyls. I get that your two species are technologically matched, but it seems you’ve fought yourselves to a stalemate here. Can’t you call a ceasefire? Was it necessary to cross dimensions to continue it?”
Kolseen gave me an unbelieving look. “Dactyls were allies. Helped us in war against enemy.”
“The dactyls are your enemies!”
“They were allies.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Dactyls and dinos share same world. Our world was invaded by common enemy.”
My jaw dropped. “What common enemy—”
The sound of flapping wings made me cry out. A dactyl flew directly overhead, spotted us, and wheeled about. Its tail raised a weapon.
Then its skull exploded as Alexander’s weapon chattered. The dactyl fell backward out of the sky, firing its weapon reflexively as it plummeted. The beam etched a flaming scar on a nearby building.
My Russian friend rushed to the creature. He returned moments later with his submachinegun holstered, and the dactyl’s tail-gun in both hands.
Kolseen looked at him with what seemed disapproval . . . and perhaps fear. It was highly likely no human had ever laid hands on one of their advanced weapons before. She doubtless knew that we were inventive and adaptive. For the first time in twenty years of subjugation, I felt a kernel of hope.
For his part, Alexander held her gaze and smiled.
Then I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye. Turning toward the Baltic, I gazed at the distant towers.
They were hemorrhaging clouds of black shapes. Dactyls filling the sky like a Biblical plague.
The spiny defensive towers of Saint Petersburg seemed to detect this as well, because they opened up on the aerial horde. The dactyls scattered and fired back from a distance. Explosions detonated over the sea.
Kolseen turned to me. “Must help. Need spores before enemy follows us here.”
With difficulty, I pried my gaze from the battle. “The dactyls used to be your allies, but then they betrayed you, is that it? They destroyed your bioweapon to aid the enemy.”
“Yes.”
“What if this spore can’t be found here?”
“Must find.”
A dactyl missile penetrated the defensive spread and sheared away the top of a building. “Then we have to work together!” I insisted. “You can’t ignore us anymore! Human scientists might be able to help you! If an enemy is coming—something worse than the dactyls—you need to bring us into the fold!”
She placed one of her claws on my head. “Agreed, Edgar McBride.”
A ship appeared above the alley. It seemed to be made of glass, starlight warping and sliding along its geometry. A hatch in its underbelly fanned open.
Kolseen moved at her natural speed—sprinting up the nearest wall to reach the craft. She was reaching down to help us up when a missile collided with the vessel.
The impact knocked the ship sidelong. Kolseen’s eyes grew wide and she leaped into the hatch. Yet she looked back to us and trilled loudly, her translation device converting the sounds to words which were drowned out by another missile bursting against the craft. The ship tilted sideways and flew out of sight.
Desperately, I turned to Alexander. “Did you catch that?”
“We are to meet her at the nesting enclosure north of here,” he said.
“How far north?”
He hefted his stolen beam weapon. “Too far to make it through this bombardment. But we will travel underground.”
“Like rats,” I grumbled.
“Rats are survivors, my friend.”
V
Saint Petersburg’s metro tunnels dated back three centuries, and while World War III had collapsed some portions, workarounds had been dug. The same was true in other major cities. In fact, the phasing had spared the human underworld, since neither dactyls nor dinos seemed comfortable in the narrow, clammy spaces beneath the surface. A French archaeologist once told me that this was an example of history repeating itself. Cretaceous-era mammals, he said, had made use of subterranean travel to avoid predation by hungry dinosaurs.
The bombardment of Saint Petersburg lasted two days. Alexander and I hunkered in the tunnels, waiting for the thunder and fury to end. On the third day, we finally climbed a stairwell into bright blue daylight.
“Looks like we pulled through,” I muttered, glancing at the buildings and streets. It had rained during the night, and the city—largely intact—glistened in the low sunlight.
Alexander stood beside me and sighed. “Every so often, I am thankful for lizard-tech.”
I nodded grudgingly. Dino weapons used efficient point-defense technology. The dactyl attack must have been an act of desperation.
Or distraction.
As if reading my thoughts, Alexander asked, “Why did they attack?”
“No idea.” My attention flicked to the city square, where a crowd gathered by an ancient stone fountain. My Russian friend called to them, but no one responded, and I suddenly noticed two oddities. The first was that the crowd contained a mix of humans and dinos. The two species stood side by side as if equals.
The second oddity was that everyone was staring into the fountain.
Feeling a surge of anxiety, I joined the gathering and looked for myself. The sky was mirrored in the water, but something else was there, too. I saw hordes of shadowy bodies. Freakish weapons affixed to multiple appendages. Blister-like clusters of eyes . . .
There must be many versions of Earth out there, I thought numbly. Humans had evolved on one. Dinosaurs had become sentient on another. But on a third world, evolution had allowed a different species to scuttle to the top of the food chain.
Gradually crowding out all other reflections, gigantic spiders pressed and scratched like devils at the gates of hell.