The ground had stilled again, but Burke knew it was a treacherous calm - in the last half-hour, they'd had almost constant tremors and now that bigger one... Could be aftershocks, but that didn't mean they were harmless.

Well, it had knocked out one of the apes, at least, so perhaps he should send a thank-you note to Al's god later. The other one he had no idea about, but he had dismounted, so his horse had probably run away, too. It was nothing more than a breather, so Burke kept moving.

Something slammed down on the ground only inches away from him and he reacted instinctively, his hand shooting forward and grabbing the ape by the throat, throwing him against the wall, his other arm reaching back for momentum, fist ready to crush the attacker's windpipe-

"Peet!"

Burke's palm hit the wall beside Galen's face, propping him up as his knees began to wobble. His other hand fisted the fabric of Galen's robe. He closed his eyes and swallowed down his nausea. "Never... never ever rush up on me like that again. I could've killed you." He took a deep breath, trying to regain his balance.

"You were about to run into the arms of one of Urko's men out there," Galen murmured, his voice a bit unsteady.

"Still. I'd never forgive myself. And neither would Zana."

"I didn't want to have to tell her that I lost both of you out here," Galen whispered.

Burke lifted his head to stare at him. The chimp's eyes were dark and mournful. Burke's heart skipped a beat, then took off in a gallop. "Wha... what do you mean?"

Galen's hands were grasping his arms, as if the ape feared he could break down any moment. "I just saw how Alan fell into a hole when the ground suddenly opened up... and then a house fell on the opening." He shook his head. "I'm so sorry, Peet. I know he was your friend..."

Burke was still breathing deeply, steadily... no, fuck that, he was hyperventilating. He bent forward, hands on his knees, trying to calm down. A hole in the road. A fucking hole in the road. It had to be a joke. That had been the same earthquake that had knocked out his pursuers. So Al's god had decided to save him, an atheist, and choke Al, who was one of his servants... faithful... whatevers?

"You asshole," Burke murmured. "Not you," he added towards Galen.

"We... we need to leave before Urko's men have regrouped," the chimp urged. "Luckily, Urko was pulled into that hole, too, so it may take them a bit longer... Urko had caught Alan with a lasso, and was still roped to him," he explained at Burke's stare.

So Al is in that hole with Urko? Why not add pits of lava and a guy with a fork while you're at it?

Burke blinked. Now that was a new thought... "He could still be alive!"

Galen shook his head. "When that gap closed, they must have been crunched."

Burke grabbed his shoulders. "But what if not? You said a wall fell on it, like, like a lid! They could still be alive underneath, they'd just be trapped!"

"And how are you going to get them out?" Galen asked. "The whole house fell, and we still have Urko's men milling about!"

"I'll think of something."

Peet had crept towards the corner of the house and was now peering out into the street. Galen hung back for a moment, undecided; he couldn't see how they'd be able to help Alan, provided he was really still alive... but he didn't want to come back alone, either. He couldn't even begin to imagine Zana's reaction.

So he took a deep breath and tiptoed after the human, who was still crouched down at the corner, his whole body tense and alert. Galen wondered how apes were able to liken humans to cattle - this one here had the air of a predator. It made him wary to come too close.

Peet had felt him approaching, apparently, because he slightly turned his head and waved him to come up to him. Galen complied and cautiously stuck his head out.

A Chimp was trying to catch Urko's grey that managed to evade him again and again despite being hobbled by the reins around his legs. Galen couldn't see the soldier's own horse - he had probably lost it during the quake. The Chimp finally succeeded in grabbing the reins and tied the animal to an uprooted tree that had fallen from a rooftop in that quake. Then he proceeded to scan the ground for tracks, searching for his commander.

He stopped with a jolt when he came to the slab of wall covering the gap. Galen wondered what he could have discovered - the falling rubble and the shock wave from the falling plate would have erased all drag marks on the ground. The soldier bent down and picked up something. Urko's helmet.

The man's gaze alternated between his commander's helmet and the massive lid covering a hole... that he had no idea was there. Galen realized with a start that to this man, it was entirely reasonable to assume his commander had been crushed like a bug. Perhaps they would call off the hunt now...

"So this is the wall?" Burke whispered. "I had thought it had broken up into a pile of rocks... smaller pieces I could crawl between... but this is one big slab of concrete! Damn!"

"We'll never be able to lift it," Galen whispered back. "It's hopeless, Peet - let's get back before that lieutenant remembers why he's here in the first place."

Peet turned his head and looked up to him. His eyes were dark, the pupils wide with emotion. "I won't hold it against you if you go back to Zana, pal - you're her fiancé, you gotta protect her if you two wanna survive this whole fucked-up situation." His whisper was fierce and sharp.

"But I'll get Al out or die trying."

He couldn't have been unconscious for more than a few seconds when the pain woke him; his whole back was on fire. Virdon could feel his shirt sticking to it from neck to waistline, with dust and gravel caked into his raw flesh. The fabric itself had to be in shreds. Urko hadn't run him fast or far enough to kill, but he had inflicted enough damage that Virdon now ran a considerable risk of infection.

He sat up with a groan and felt the rope still cutting into his arms, but the tension on it was gone. He remembered falling, and now he was sitting in darkness; perhaps the rope had snapped? Virdon struggled with the noose, finally getting it over his head. Then he half crawled, half slid down the slope of gravel and dust to where a pale light came down from above. Perhaps he could escape this cave through the gaps in the ceiling where that light was stabbing through, before the next quake closed the ground around him like a giant fist.

That hope died as soon as he had reached ground level. The gaps were too small for him to fit through, even if he'd been able to reach them. They were not only too far above him, but the walls were too smooth to climb, either.

The walls were strange. In the faint, gray light, Virdon could see that this wasn't a natural formation - this was an underground structure, made from the same kind of concrete as the buildings above. He turned his head: he was standing in a tunnel, on an elevated platform, with some sort of channel running alongside and vanishing into the darkness...

It was a subway tunnel. Virdon's heartbeat picked up at that realization. Apes using the subway? His mind reeled at the image. With a pounding heart, he scanned the wall behind him.

The plaster... or uppermost layer of the wall above the slope he had just slid down had partially fallen off and shattered on the ground, but he could still make out some shapes between the gaps. Virdon took a step back and strained his eyes. Even after the symbols had coalesced into recognizable shapes in the dim light, he blinked and squinted until his eyes watered.

On the wall above him were letters. Letters he could read.

... P ... N ... E

Latin script. Not ape script, that Pete derisively had dubbed "paw prints." Latin script, born in the Roman Empire, carried forward through the centuries first by the church, later by scholars and merchants. The script of Western civilization.

His foot caught on some sticky sheet, half-buried in the dust. Virdon swallowed and bent down to pick it up. It felt like plastic when he shook off the dust and wiped over it with the heel of his palm.

He didn't want to read it.

It was a flyer for the Atlanta Summer Olympics of 2096.

Virdon didn't read the small print below the title; he just read and reread those few words, and the date.

He had known that this was Earth since the first night after their crash, when he had looked up at the night sky, and had seen the Moon and the constellations. But after their capture, when the 'remote crash site' theory had exploded in their faces, and they had suddenly found themselves in a bizarre, upside-down fun house (or as Pete put it, freak show) version of their home, the only way to make sense of what was happening to them had been a parallel universe, some dark mirror variation of Earth, where apes had evolved as the dominant species, and relegated humans to the status of Neanderthals, minus the extinction.

Somewhere behind him, gravel slid down with a faint click.

But the athletes in that flyer were humans. Happy, tech-savvy, late 21st century humans.

The Icarus had jumped through a wormhole, a spacetime distortion... it was far more plausible that they had jumped into another time instead of another universe.

But neither he nor Pete had wanted to even touch that thought, the possibility that mankind's reign over Earth could ever come to an end. They, like everyone else back home, had seen man expand his dominion to space, travel to the stars, discover and subdue new worlds... spread their wings and reach the heavens.

Like Icarus had done. And like him, they had fallen back to Earth, their wings burnt and broken, struck down for their hybris and negligence and-

Something grabbed him by the neck, whirled him around and flung him into the wall. White lights exploded in Virdon's vision as his skull connected with the concrete, and his sinuses began to tingle. Blood ran hot from his nose and over his chin.

Urko's gloved hand closed like a vise around his throat.

"Shh, I got you," he said softly, and tightened his grip. "And we'll be going nice and slow..."

The heat had become suffocating, sucking the moisture from the ground and saturating the air with it. Clouds were beginning to bank up, bulging and darkening with every passing moment. They would have a thunderstorm later, Zana thought, as she glanced up into the sky; but right now, the air was heavy and charged, and clinging to her fur like a wet rag. It was difficult to breathe; her heart was beating rapidly, trying to pump her hot blood into the periphery to cool it, but in truth, she needed to sit down in the shade and fan herself - and pant; unlike humans, who had shed their fur eons ago, apes had problems getting rid of their body heat in this weather. What she shouldn't do was to jog through the wilderness to overtake people on horseback.

Though right now, she was focused on keeping up with Delia.

The human child was hurrying ahead of her, seemingly oblivious of her - or maybe trying to inconspicuously outrun her. Until now, the girl had been silent and obedient, terrified by both Urko's and her own displays of power; but Zana began to suspect that Delia had since caught on to the fact that a human could easily outpace an ape if said ape wasn't riding a horse.

Maybe she wasn't even leading her in the right direction. If the cub decided to suddenly break into a sprint, Zana would be totally lost in this wilderness, without any idea in which direction to turn to either get back to the village, or to the ruins of the city.

"Delia... Delia!" She even lacked the breath to shout. Zana stopped, fought the urge to pant, and forced her aching lungs to fill up with the choking mist. Then she hurled the last - and only - weapon in her repertoire after the girl.

"Atoro! Stop right there!"

The child stumbled to a halt as if shot; she didn't turn around, just stood where she had stopped, shoulders rounded as if she was expecting a blow.

Zana slowly limped towards her. "What are you racing ahead like that?" she scolded, still out of breath. "Don't pretend you didn't hear me call your name!"

Delia didn't answer, nor did she turn her head to look at her; she was simply awaiting her next orders, prepared to obey them to the letter, while trying to defy the spirit of them as much as possible. Zana guessed it was that form of human rebellion that had earned them the mistaken moniker of being 'dumb.' In fact, it was a pretty sophisticated kind of silent warfare.

She didn't want to be at war with Delia.

"Come, let's sit down for a few moments," she said, and pointed to the trunk of a fallen tree that lay in the shadow of a sycamore. She went ahead without waiting to see if the girl would follow; that would only betray her insecurity, and that would only foster more rebellion, and Zana didn't want to let carelessness throw her into a situation where she'd have to forcefully assert herself. She didn't want simple obedience from Delia, born from terror and intimidation. She wanted compliance, a willing bending of the girl's will to her own.

She sat down with a sigh that was only partly owed to the weather; most of it was a mixture of surprise and disgust at herself, at how easy it was for her to think of that human beside her only in terms of training and domination.

It felt wrong. But it couldn't be helped now.

"I need to catch my breath for a moment," she told Delia, trying for a light tone, "this weather is awful. I wish I could sweat like you." Apes did sweat, just not as efficiently as humans; it was one reason they were tolerated by the apes. You could still work a human when an ape would have already broken down from heatstroke.

Delia still said nothing; she had sat down when Zana had patted the trunk beside her, but she sat straight erect, hands folded on her knees, staring down at them. She had bony knees, Zana noticed. The whole girl was thin and gangly like a foal. She wondered if she didn't get enough to eat, or if it was just one of those growth spurts that young animals went through when they were at the cusp of puberty.

"Why do you keep going to that city when your parents are so frightened by it?" Zana asked - Delia had to answer a direct question, and she was fiercely determined to get her to talk.

The girl shrugged, then flicked her a frightened glance: this sort of non-answer wasn't tolerated by the apes. Zana waited, keeping her expression neutral.

"It's just so interesting there," Delia finally murmured.

Zana laughed. "You sound like my fiancé. He went with Alan because he found the ruins so interesting, too. - Alan is the one who admired your treasures," she added; maybe the mention of another human would prompt Delia to open up a bit. "He was very impressed by your collection."

The girl still kept her gaze downcast, but a proud little smile tugged at her lips. "He liked the necklace I made."

"That's true," Zana confirmed. "He even showed it to his friend. If they had stayed a bit longer, you could have told him more about what else you've found in that city. I'm sure Alan would've loved to learn everything he could about your adventures."

Delia squirmed a bit at so much praise, but didn't protest; Zana suspected that Alan had been the first adult to ever show interest in the girl's artefacts. "Maybe you two can talk some more when we find them," she lied.

"What's the name of the other one?" Delia asked shyly. Zana raised her brows; Peet hadn't interacted at all with her - he didn't care much for children and tended to mostly ignore them.

"His friend? Peet."

Delia's lips moved as she tried to formulate a question she apparently didn't really dare to ask aloud. Finally, she managed to squeeze out, "He didn't call you 'missus'..."

"No, he didn't," Zana confirmed.

Another moment of struggle. "Why not?"

Zana rubbed her palms over her knees. This may be hard to believe for you, after how I just treated you, girl. "Because he's not my servant. He's my friend, and so is Alan."

Delia mulled a bit over that revelation; Zana kicked off her shoes to lose some body heat over her naked soles, and tried not to think about the amount of time she was wasting with her poor attempt at taming this little human; she had to think of it as time gained that she wouldn't stumble around in the wilderness, chasing after a slave who was determined to shake her off and leave her to her own devices.

Finally, the girl lifted her head and stared at her, brow knitted in deep thought. "What do you have to do to become a friend for a Chimpanzee?"

You have to find one who is crazy enough to see you as people instead of animals. That wasn't strictly true - Zana had known some apes who had held humans as pets... at least as long as they were young enough to be regarded as cute. That never seemed to last through puberty, for some reason. At that point, they were quickly sold off. It was a poor substitute for the kind of friendship Delia was yearning for now, and Zana's heart ached for her. But being confined to her remote village, even her chances of becoming some bored ape's pet were close to nonexistent.

"I don't know," she confessed. "I can only speak for myself. Alan and Peet didn't have to do anything - I just liked them. Humans are people to me, just like apes are people, and... you can only be friends... real friends... with other people." She let that settle a bit. "You and me could be friends, too."

Delia looked up at her with wide eyes, and Zana tried not to squirm, but there was no judgment in the child's eyes - it was her own conscience that was hurling hypocrite! against her. She ignored the burning in her chest and ploughed on. "I'd like to hear more about your adventures in that city, too! Galen thinks that apes lived there, a long time ago." She bent down to retrieve her shoes; Delia seemed to be comfortable enough around her now that she hopefully wouldn't dash off again.

The girl hopped off the trunk and waited for her to finish, knotting her fingers in obvious excitement. "I've gone there again and again since I was little, but I never found something that looked as if it had belonged to an ape, ma'am."

Zana straightened with a little moan and gestured for her to take up the lead again. This time, Delia stayed at her side, arms swinging, unloading every little detail she remembered from her numerous trips to the forbidden city. She kept her voice low, and Zana at once admired her caution and grieved it, because it could only mean that the child had already had some unpleasant encounters with apes honing in on her voice when it sounded outside the allowed perimeter of her village.

Zana listened with half an ear to her stories, making encouraging little noises and asking some questions here and there. According to Delia, the city had been built above as well as below ground, something that apes didn't do - the only settlement with an underground structure was the City itself, and those were only sewers; but this city had tunnels that crisscrossed under the streets in a network of what seemed to be roads - Delia claimed that she had even found strange wagons down there. Zana couldn't imagine what they might have been for. When she asked Delia, the girl shrugged. "Maybe they were shortcuts when you wanted to get somewhere really quickly?"

A shortcut! Zana felt her fur bristle with excitement. In the next moment, though, her hope deflated again - a shortcut to where? She had no idea where her friends might be in the city, so she had no destination to aim for. But when she told Delia, the girl vigorously shook her head.

"From the village, they must've taken the main road, from the East. There's a tunnel that goes there in a straight line, and there are openings where you can get to the surface again. When you climb up, you can look up and down the road and see them." She paused. "Do I have to go with you?"

Zana looked down at her, surprised. From her tales, Delia hadn't sounded as if she was afraid of the city. "No, of course not. I promised your parents that we part company, and you'll go home. Don't worry, you won't run into Urko there-"

"It's not... the tunnels are creepy," Delia whispered, and Zana felt a shiver run down her arms. She wasn't keen on crawling into the ground, either. It was unnatural.

"And dangerous, I imagine," she said. "With the earth shaking so often, how can they even still exist, after all this time?"

Delia crunched her nose. "They're made out of some strange stuff. It's not stone - I don't know what it is. I've never seen it anywhere else. They are collapsed at some points, but mostly they are open." She peered up at Zana. "Do you want me to show you the one I told you about?"

Zana hesitated. The reluctance she felt at the mere thought of wandering into the black mouth of that construction bordered on fear; but at the same time, she was almost beyond hope that she'd be able to overtake Urko and his hunting party. She had lost too much time quarreling first with Delia's parents, then with the girl herself, and her constant exhaustion was slowing her down on top of that.

She'd be too late. If she was really unlucky, she would arrive just in time to witness her friends' capture and death. Zana didn't believe for a moment that Urko would take any of them back to the City alive.

And what would become of her, then? With a sudden chill, she realized that she had no idea where to go or how to survive if she were on her own. She felt utterly lost; lonely like a leaf shaken from its branch, tumbling down, and down.

"Yes, show me that tunnel," she said, and adjusted the strap of Galen's bag.

If she couldn't escape with him, she could still die by his side.

"If I die, you'll die, too."

Virdon didn't know if Urko had heard the actual words or just an inarticulate gurgle, but he didn't have the air to try again. The edges of his vision were already beginning to blacken as the terrible pressure around his throat increased more and more.

And then eased all of a sudden. Urko's hand was still gripping him just below the jaw, light enough to let him draw in air in shuddering gulps, but tight enough to cut him off from oxygen if he made the tiniest move to break free - like a cat putting a playful paw on a mouse's back.

"Are you hoping for poetic justice, Alan? That the white demons will carry me away?" The deep, gravelly voice sounded amused.

Virdon coughed, tried to swallow. His throat hurt. "We're trapped in here, Urko," he said hoarsely, "but only one of us knows this place well enough to find a way out." God, he hoped so. In the half-light, Urko's hulking, not quite human shape made him feel as if he was bargaining with the devil.

"I don't need you - I can dig myself out of here just fine," Urko said calmly. His thumb stroked Virdon's throat as if he was looking for the jugular. "But before I do that, I'll take my sweet time to carve you up. I'd have taken your scalp as a souvenir, but you had to ruin it with that weed. Did you think I wouldn't find you if you changed the color?" He snorted. "Did your Chimp friends tell you that I'm one of the dumb Gorillas, the ones who can't find their own arse if an Orangutan doesn't show them where to put their hands?"

His grip had tightened around Virdon's throat with those last words, and Virdon desperately shook his head. "We never underestimated you, General," he choked out, "but this is a subway station," he used the English words. "You can't dig yourself through concrete, and the hole we fell through has been filled up with rocks and rubble. You need me to get out of here! We have to work together!"

Urko actually turned his head to survey their surroundings and Virdon waited, fierce hope lancing through his gut. The gorilla straightened a bit, taking in the strange, unnatural shapes of the cave, registering for the first time that he might indeed have landed in an environment that he wasn't familiar with. When his gaze returned to Virdon though, he saw nothing but contempt in the dark face.

"I don't work together with humans. Humans are slaves. They work for me... except they don't, because I kill them." He neared his face to Virdon's and smiled. "You can feel honored, Alan - you're the first human ever that is allowed to work for me. Just don't expect me to spare your life for your effort afterwards." He let go and took a step back. "So - lead the way. Since you know how to get out of here."

His tone made it clear that he didn't believe any of it. It was just a variation of his game, Virdon realized - make him trip up, make him fail, accuse him of lying and kill him for it.

He licked his lips and tasted blood.