It was still dark when the crashing sounds of a stumbling horse and Galen's muttered curse yanked Virdon out of his pain-filled doze. Zana had fallen silent a long time ago, and he had sunk into a half-sleep, a blur of shadows and chirping cicadas at the edge of his mind, while he had been listening to the cacophony in his leg. He was dimly aware that they had been climbing steep inclines for a long while, but he hadn't been able to keep track. In his more confused moments, he had dreamed that they had already reached the mountains.

Still, he was grateful that he wasn't sitting on Tala; that sudden jerk would've probably thrown him off her back, or at least crippled him with white-hot pain. But waking up from his trance, as everyone stopped to take stock of the mare's state, was also painful. Everything was painful, and he was so sick and tired of it all.

"We have to let her rest for a few hours," he heard Galen's voice ahead of him. "She won't be of any use for us otherwise, and Ah-pachee could use a break, too, I'd wager."

"I could use some rest, thank you for asking," Zana sighed. "And I'm certain Alan will be happy, too, isn't that right, Alan?"

Despite his pain, and weariness, Virdon couldn't help but smile in the darkness. "I'm fine, Zana," he said reflexively. "But the horses should get a break, Galen's right about that."

Zana was there, though, to help him down from the horse, and to support him for the few steps to the little hollow in a grove - in the darkness, he couldn't determine what kind of trees grew there, and just hoped it wouldn't be some weird mutations.

"You should get some sleep, too, Pete," he said after he had crawled into the blankets that Zana had shaken out for him. He felt bad for having her wait on him, pregnant as she was, but he was too tired, and in too much pain, to protest much.

Pete was just a darker shadow in the already blinding darkness; after many clear days and nights, the sky had overcast. "Nah, it's all good, Al," Virdon heard his voice. "Someone needs to keep the hellhounds away, and that someone is Betsy and me."

Virdon sighed; he could've sworn he had heard Burke pat his gun.

Although his exhaustion even drowned out his pain, he didn't have the impression of being really asleep; some part of his mind was aware of every chirp and rustle in the underbrush, the ripping sounds of the horses' grazing, Zana's sighs, Galen's soft snoring, and the wind in the trees. Only Pete was a patch of silence in that tapestry of sounds, a watchful, motionless presence at the edge of his mind.

"Holy shit!"

With a gasp, Virdon jerked awake. The sky was a heavy gray above him, promising another torrent of rain. Pete was nowhere to be seen, but it had been his exclamation that had jolted him from a sleep that had crept up on him without him realizing. It felt as if no time had passed at all.

He sat up with a groan. The bedrolls were all empty, but when he turned around, he saw Pete and the apes standing at the crest of the little hill whose base had served as their camp. They were staring at something on the other side of that hill.

When he had finally made it up the slope with his crutch, the sight made him forget his pain and his empty stomach.

They had found another city.

Its architecture was bold, countless spires stabbing at the sky, with flat somethings winding around them and over each other in mid-air... highways? From his vantage point, Virdon couldn't make out any supporting structures for the floating bands. He also didn't recognize the skyline - it looked futuristic, as if the city had been built from scratch some time after their departure.

Maybe whatever had killed the people in Atlanta's subway hadn't happened in Chris' lifetime.

"What the hell did they take as building material?" Pete wondered aloud.

Whatever it was, it had withstood the elements over hundreds of years; the only visible decay were heaps of rubble, where some unknown force had punched out chunks of walls and roofs, and crushed the otherwise perfect bow of a bridge...

... if it had been a bridge. The shapes looked so unfamiliar that the city seemed almost alien, and Virdon had to remind himself that these ruins were old now. Ancient, but from his own future. It was boggling his mind.

"Well," Galen said slowly, "it's a good thing that Tala forced us to stop last night. Otherwise we would've stumbled right into this... place."

"Yeah, imagine that," Burke scoffed. "And then the demons would've bitten us in the ass. Or maybe it would've just been some frisky 'possums."

"Or these creatures," Galen said dryly, and pointed. Zana gasped.

They were no bigger than chickens, for which Virdon was grateful. Maybe their ancestors had even been chickens, but their descendants looked as if they had decided to climb back down the evolutionary tree, and turn into dinosaurs again. They still had plumage, black and white, but their heads and necks were scaly like snakes, which gave them the appearance of miniature vultures, except that vultures didn't have a mouth - or a beak - full of needle-shaped teeth. Two of the creatures were fighting over the bloody carcass of some small animal, maybe a mouse.

"Damn," Burke said after a moment of stunned silence. "Here there be dragons, Al! I take back everything I said last night about Godzilla. Maybe they're her babies..."

"I hope not," Virdon murmured. "I don't want to meet her down there."

There was a moment of pregnant silence.

"Whaddaya mean, Al," Burke said casually, not really making it a question. "We're not going in there. Don't wanna push our luck again, after your little dive into the basement in the last city we explored."

Virdon suppressed an irritated sigh. "Look at the skyline, Pete! This is a city from our future - we don't even know what kind of material they used for the buildings! Hasslein was just test-driving his time-traveling wormhole with us, imagine where that technology would've been fifty years from then! Or two hundred! We have no idea when that city was built... If the buildings were so resistant to time, there's a distinct possibility that whatever's in those buildings is being much better preserved than whatever is left in the ruins of Atlanta." He finally turned his head to look at Burke, but his friend didn't return his gaze. He was staring at the ruins, worrying his lip.

Finally, he shook his head. "I can understand that it's an itch you can't stop scratching, Al. I mean, I get it, you love your family, and you want to get back home however you can. But," he finally turned to look him in the eye, "this is not a good time to go exploring. I mean, Urko's right behind us! Maybe he kicked his men's asses and they did cross the border, and then what? I don't want a repeat of Atlanta, an' I doubt we'd get as lucky again, either!"

"If Urko had crossed into the Zone, he'd have caught up with us last night," Virdon argued. "C'mon, Pete, don't you want to go back home, too? To a world where you're not regarded as an animal?" From the corner of his eye, he saw Galen shut his mouth again.

Burke rubbed his neck. "What do you think you'll find in there?" he muttered. "It'll all be corroded junk, like the kind that Gres had collected. I mean..." He turned to Zana. "How long ago did your kind take over?"

Zana looked to Galen as if she wanted him to answer. "I don't really know," she confessed. "The Lawgiver lived about seven hundred years ago..."

"Jesus Christ..." Burke muttered.

"... but before that, there was the House of Cesar, and Cesar was the first ruler, the one who built our civilization, and he's... it's not even clear if he ever existed, or if he's just a myth," Zana continued. "So the scholars aren't really agreeing about how long his family ruled. Some say one century, and others say three..."

"So we're talking about roughly a thousand years," Burke interrupted her. He turned away and raked his hand through his hair. "A fucking millennium!"

Virdon leaned heavily on his crutch, fighting a bout of dizziness. His heart was beating hard and fast against his ribs. A thousand years! A thousand years before his birth, the Normans hadn't yet invaded Britain, and the Byzantine Empire was still in existence. If someone from the Holy Roman Empire had been transported into his time, Virdon wondered, would they've been able to acclimate themselves at all, over time?

He doubted it. It was too big a leap. No medieval peasant, or even knight, or bishop, would've ever been able to make a home in Virdon's time. Just as he and Pete would never fit into this time. These people, apes or humans, weren't their tribe.

For a moment, he felt utterly lost.

"I never thought I'd say this," Galen spoke up, "but I agree with Peet - Urko may well have managed to bully his men into the Forbidden Zone by now. They might already be on their way, which means we don't have the time to do archeological excavations in these ruins, as fascinating as they may be. We don't even have time to stand around and debate, unless you really want to tempt the Mothers."

Virdon felt something like panic rise in his chest as he found the same determination in all three faces. The sun was pushing through the heavy clouds, alighting the spires of ruined towers as if someone had turned on a row of search lights. A homing beacon, calling out to him like a siren's song.

He just couldn't ignore this.

"On the contrary," he said, fighting to keep his voice calm. "Urko hadn't expected to find us in that village - he hadn't prepared for a manhunt, let alone a siege. He doesn't have the resources to set up camp along the border and wait us out, and after what he did to Kanla's workforce, I doubt she'll help him out."

"He's right, Galen," Burke said hesitantly. "We could just sit this out in here..."

"You're forgetting that we don't have any provisions, either," Galen pointed out icily. "What do you suggest we eat in the meantime? Those bird-things?"

"Want me to shoot one for breakfast?" Burke asked innocently. Before the ape could explode, he turned to Virdon. "Galen's right, Al, it's a stupid idea. We don't know if Urko is lying in wait somewhere at the border, or if he's insane enough to come after us... no, scratch that, he is insane enough." He shivered. "Believe me. I think I know him best of all of us."

For a moment, an awkward silence descended onto them. In his mind's eye, Virdon saw Chris riding the subway, chatting up his mother about something he'd seen at the zoo; unaware of the death that was splitting the sky in that very moment, honing in on them, trapping them, choking them...

He clenched his fists, forcing the vision out of his mind. "Tala needs at least one day to recover. You... you just stay here, get some rest, too. I'll go alone and see what I can find..."

And then everyone began to shout at him at once.

"You can't go alone!" - "What, you'll hobble through the rubble with your crutch?" - "Alan, be sensible, one day isn't sufficient, especially with your handicap..."

"Stop treating me like a cripple!"

They fell silent as if he'd slapped them, and for a moment, he allowed himself the fantasy. His head was throbbing, his blood pressure had to be through the roof. A sudden wave of disgust rolled over him, and he hurled his crutch away. He was so sick of that thing! So sick of that pain clawing through him day and night. Sick of having to discuss his decisions. Sick of having to ask permission from talking apes who treated him as some kind of intelligent pet when in private, and as a dumb, mute slave in the company of other apes. Sick of being stranded in this unreal, nightmarish travesty of Earth.

So. Sick. Of everything. He drew a deep, shaky breath.

"I'm not. Your pet. I'm not," he turned his head to Burke, and had to pause for a moment, teeth grinding, "your subordinate. I don't take orders from any of you. I'll go there and find something that'll help me get home. You're welcome to come with me, stay here and wait for me, or go ahead and not wait for me. I'm not going to tell you what to do."

He turned away. "And you're not going to tell me what to do."

The last time that Burke had seen his commander so completely pissed off had been after he had broken into Jones' cabin to find evidence that the man had sold them to the Chinese. Not for the first time, Burke wondered if they wouldn't just have jumped to Alpha Centauri and back without a hitch, if he hadn't been so hell-bent on investigating that asshole. Maybe Virdon had been right to be pissed off with him then.

Maybe he was right to be pissed off with them now.

But right or not, there was just no way he'd let him stumble around in those ruins on his own. With a huff, Burke wandered over to where the crutch had tangled in a patch of brambles, and snatched it up.

"Are you going to fetch him?" Galen asked.

Burke turned towards him with a scowl. "No. I'm not a dog, and he's not a stick I could fetch. I'd have to knock him out cold and drag him up here, and then when he wakes up, I'd have to knock him out again, before he beats up my ass for assaulting a superior officer. I'm going after him and see to it that he doesn't fall into another fucking hole in the ground."

"I'm coming with you." Zana gathered her robe and began to climb down to him. "We need to stay together as a group. We can still wait for you in the street, but if Urko does come after us, I want to be near you and your gun." She smiled at him, and he swallowed, not sure if he should feel flattered or burdened by that declaration of trust.

"I only have five bullets left," he cautioned her. Then he smiled, trying to soften his words. "But of course I'd spend them all to protect you."

"I know, dear." She patted his arm as she passed him. Then she turned her head. "Hurry up, Galen, before we lose Alan in those ruins!"

"We didn't even have breakfast," Galen called back. Then he he threw his arms up in frustration and turned around. "I'll get the horses..."

He caught up with them at the foot of the hill, thanks to Virdon's slower pace. Burke had handed him back his crutch, and after a moment of baleful staring, Al had wordlessly ripped it from his outstretched hand, and had resumed his slow descent into the bowels of that ancient, futuristic tomb.

This had to be one of those conceptual cities that had been designed and built from scratch, Burke mused as they crept along a wide walkway - from what he remembered, these cities had favoured walking or mass transport over individual cars. Or that abomination, automated cars. The material under his feet was an immaculate white, even after all those centuries that had pounded against it... some kind of lotus effect, but much more sophisticated than what they had back in their own time.

"What's your guess about the time gap between our flight and this thing's construction?" he asked Virdon, who just shrugged. Burke shook his head and continued his inspection. Al needed a bit more time to cool off. Fine with him. There was enough fantastic shit to admire around them.

Like big, mushroom-like structures in virtually every open space, even along the middle of the walkway. They blocked out much of the already storm-clouded sky, forcing them to move in a half-light that blurred contours and made it hard to spot any... well, anything moving through besides them. As far as Burke could determine, the only other living things were plants that covered the towers around them in a strangely deliberate way, as if the builders of this city had wanted them there. There, and nowhere else - the material hadn't allowed the tiniest flower to bloom anywhere on the ground level. It wasn't just impervious to wind and rain, it also resisted searching roots; not even moss was able to cling to the unnaturally smooth surfaces.

"Wonder what they needed the mushrooms for," Burke said casually. "Giant space heaters? Didn't believe in climate warming and wanted to make sure they could party without freezing their asses of?"

Virdon flicked a quick glance upward. "That's lilypad-shaped, and they probably used it for shading - for cooling, not heating the city," he growled. "Maybe they also had solar collectors on top of them."

Well, at least they were talking again.

"Well, I gotta admit this city is scarily well-preserved," Burke continued and threw a quick glance over his shoulder. The apes were tagging along with the horses in tow, heads turning all the time to take in the sights that had to be even more alien to them than to him. They were so distracted by their sightseeing that they had fallen behind quite a bit, despite Al's limp. "But even if they had parked a spaceship in some underground hangar..."

"I'm not looking for a ship, Pete," Virdon interrupted him impatiently. "I know you like to make it sound as if I was completely insane..."

"I think you're desperate, Al, and that makes you just a little bit insane, yeah." Burke warily scanned the shadows between the gleaming ribs of a nearby tower, a skeletal construct with black glass panels between the white beams. Well, something like glass - not a single pane was broken. The windows looked like insect eyes, unblinkingly watching them pass by.

"But what I actually wanted to say," he turned back to Virdon, "is that whatever helpful tech might be tucked away here somewhere, we just don't have enough time to dig through all this... architecture! So why even bother? It's like playing the lottery! A chance of one in a million... and that's an optimistic guess."

"And yet people are playing the lottery every day," Virdon said absently. He was scanning the towers, too, though he was probably searching for an entrance.

"That's because people are idiots," Burke muttered. "But you ain't one, Al, an' it pains me to see you making idiotic choices. If you absolutely have to dig for ancient artifacts, do it when we're on the other side of the mountains. I bet this isn't the only abandoned city."

"And what if the cities on the other side of the mountains are like Atlanta?" Virdon stopped and stared at a kind of pavillion to their right. It was shaped like a conch, all curves and rounded edges, and was the first building with a discernible entrance. Virdon turned and limped towards it without looking back if anyone was following him.

Burke squeezed his eyes shut in frustration for a moment, then turned around and told the apes to wait here, this would just take a moment, before he hurried after his commander.

"Why does this have to happen now, with Urko breathing down our necks?" he demanded to know when he had caught up with Virdon.

The inside of the conch was surprisingly well-lit; the black window panes were transparent from inside, which meant that one could observe the street without being seen.

Burke rubbed his neck, his unease intensifying in leaps. How the hell the material managed to let in the daylight while blocking the view wasn't half as interesting as the question of who had already been alerted to their presence in the city. This thing was too well preserved to not draw squatters.

Virdon finally turned his head to acknowledge him. "Pete," he said hoarsely. "Somewhere in these ruins could be technology that would allow us send a signal back to ANSA. So that the next ship won't crash in that reservation. So that they can find us... find us and bring us home!"

"There won't be a next ship, Al," Burke muttered. "Don't delude yourself. They won't bury another million dollars for two lost guys. If they have half a brain at ANSA, they've locked the bastard up in a mental asylum by now."

"If they receive a signal, they'll send another ship," Virdon insisted.

"There's nothing here but dusty furniture," Burke said, trying not to let his tension show. He let his gaze travel over benches and tables that divided the room in elegant curves. "This was a bar, or a café, or whatever. A hairdressing salon. Let's get the hell outta here."

Virdon looked around once more, then nodded reluctantly. "Maybe we should try one of the towers..."

"We don't have time for this goddamn expedition," Burke snapped. "Why are you in such a fucking hurry? If we find a way to travel back through time, we'll have all the time in the world here, because we'd arrive, I dunno, two minutes after liftoff there, right?"

Virdon stopped in his tracks.

Then he turned around, and Burke was struck by the raw despair he saw in his eyes. "No," Virdon said hoarsely. "We don't have all the time in the world. I don't have all the time in the world. I need to get home now ."

He turned away abruptly, and limped away. Burke gaped after him.

"What? What do you mean? Hey, Al!"

But Virdon steadfastly ignored him.