THE LAST GREEN HOUR

The Bridge

The holding pen before the Bridge was a long tent of white ripstop fabric, lit by cold sodium lamps, and it smelled like antiseptic and fear-sweat and the particular ozone tang that clung to the containment field even at rest. Forty-eight people stood in a loose cluster around a rectangle of yellow floor paint, clutching single permitted bags, waiting for a woman in an Aegis flight-suit to finish a headset conversation none of them could hear.

Mara used the wait to look at the people she would be crossing eighty-nine million years of time with.

There was an elderly couple holding hands, so tightly their knuckles had gone the color of old paper. A teenage boy, maybe sixteen, standing apart from everyone with his hood up and an expression that dared the world to say something about it. A pregnant woman rubbing slow circles over the swell of her stomach, mouthing something that might have been a prayer or might have been a countdown. A man in an agricultural coverall with soil still ground into the creases of his hands, looking at the Bridge itself the way some men look at cathedrals.

And near the front, a tall man with a shaved head and the unmistakable bearing of someone who'd served in the military, though his manifest tag read only SECURITY / COLONY DEFENSE—HALE, J. He caught Mara looking and gave her a short, economical nod, the kind soldiers give other people who look like they might, in an emergency, be useful.

Wren had gone quiet in the particular way she went quiet when she was memorizing something to ask about later. Her small hand had not let go of Mara's since the checkpoint.

"Attention, Pilgrimage Fourteen." The Aegis flight officer's voice cut through the tent, amplified just enough to carry. "You are approximately six minutes from transit. I need to walk you through what you will experience, because no orientation video prepares a human nervous system for this, and I would rather you hear it from me than panic on the other side.

"The Bridge does not transport you through space. It transports you through time, along a fixed geological anchor point, to a location that is, on our current maps, roughly the same latitude as the colony's launch site—but eighty-nine million years earlier, in the Late Cretaceous period. On arrival, you will experience approximately four seconds of total sensory blackout. This is normal. Some individuals report nausea, disorientation, or a sensation of falling. This is also normal. Medical staff will be present on arrival to assist anyone who needs it."

She paused, and for just a moment something moved behind her professional composure—something that might, in a woman less trained, have been fear, or awe, or both.

"On the other side," she said, "it will be daylight, no matter what time it is here. The sun you left behind tonight rose there roughly eighty-nine million years ago, and the light that's touching the ground on the other side of that ring left its star before dinosaurs had learned to be afraid of anything. You are not just leaving a place. You are leaving an entire geological age. Please treat that with the seriousness it deserves."

The pregnant woman had started crying, silently, the tears just running down without any change in her expression, as if her body had decided to process the enormity of it separately from her mind.

"Groups of eight," the officer said. "By manifest order. Voss, Mara and Voss, Wren—you're group one."

Later, Mara would try to describe the crossing to other colonists and fail every time, because there was no comparison in the old world's language for a sensation the old world's language had never needed. It was not like falling asleep. It was not like the anesthesia she'd administered a thousand times in her surgical career, that slow retreat of awareness with its gentle countdown. It was total and absolute and instant—a black, textureless nothing that had no duration she could measure, because measuring required a self-experiencing time passing, and for those four seconds there simply was no self at all.

And then there was ground under her feet that had not been there a heartbeat before, and impossibly bright daylight slamming into her eyes even though it had been evening when she closed them, and a wall of heat and humidity and an overwhelming, alien smell—vegetation and wet earth and something green and enormous, something ancient and outsized that no human nose in ten thousand generations had ever had to categorize before.

Mara's knees buckled. She caught herself, caught Wren, who had gone rigid in her arms and made a small, high sound that was not quite a scream.

"I'm here," Mara gasped, blinking against the light. "I'm here, I'm here, I've got you."

Around them, the other seven members of their transit group were in various states of the same shock—one man on his knees vomiting quietly into the undergrowth, the elderly woman gripping her husband's arm as if the ground itself might tip them off, the teenage boy standing dead still, hood fallen back, staring straight up.

Mara followed his gaze.

The sky was the wrong color. Not wrong-bad—wrong-more. A blue so saturated and unfiltered by two centuries of industrial haze that it looked artificial, looked painted, looked like something out of the pre-collapse photographs her grandmother used to show her on an old data tablet, back when the sky over the Corridor had still occasionally, briefly, looked like something other than the color of a healing bruise.

And rising above the tree line perhaps four hundred meters distant, moving with a slow, terrible, unhurried grace, was a neck.

Just a neck, at first—grey-green, thick as a transport container, rising and rising out of the canopy the way a submarine periscope rises out of water, except that periscopes did not have skin, did not ripple with muscle beneath hide, did not turn, slowly, curiously, toward the sound of forty-eight screaming, crying, praying human beings who had just fallen out of the sky eighty-nine million years too early for anyone to have warned them what waited on the other side of the light.

"Mom," Wren whispered, and for the first time since the checkpoint, her voice had lost every trace of logistics, every trace of the careful, controlled eight-year-old who asked precise questions to keep the world from swallowing her. It was just a small voice, entirely honest, entirely afraid, and entirely amazed. "Mom, is that—is that a real one?"

Mara held her daughter and stared up at the impossible, ancient, gently swaying shape against the achingly blue sky, and found that she could not, for several long seconds, make her voice work at all.

"Yes," she finally managed. "That's a real one."