THE LAST GREEN HOUR

Halcyon

They named the colony Halcyon before they had built a single wall of it, because the site-selection team's advance drone survey had found, three kilometers from the primary transit anchor, a wide freshwater lake ringed by low volcanic hills, calm as glass in the morning light, and someone on the naming committee—nobody could later remember who—had thought the word fit.

By the end of the first week, Mara had stopped noticing the irony.

Halcyon, in the old stories, meant a kind of enchanted calm. What she had instead was a triage tent with insufficient antibiotics, forty-one confirmed insect species already cataloged as biting humans with unknown medical consequences, and a security perimeter that had already, on day four, lost a construction worker named Petro Ilanova to something that came out of the tree line at dusk fast enough that the two sentries on duty hadn't managed a shot before it was over.

She had not seen the body. She had been the one to certify it, which was worse.

"You should sleep," said Jace Hale, the ex-military security officer from the transit tent, appearing at the flap of the medical tent with two ration cups of the brown, nutrient-dense paste that passed for coffee in Halcyon's first weeks. He held one out to her. "You've been on your feet since Ilanova."

"So have you."

"I'm paid to not sleep. What's your excuse?"

Mara took the cup, mostly because refusing would have required more energy than accepting. "Somebody has to be awake in case the next one doesn't die instantly."

Hale didn't answer that, because there wasn't an answer to it, and she respected him a little for not pretending there was. He'd turned out, in the six days since arrival, to be one of the few people in the colony who spoke to her like a colleague instead of either a hero or a hazard—trauma surgeons occupied a strange social space in a colony this young, equal parts essential and terrifying, the person you needed and the person whose presence meant something had gone badly wrong.

"Council wants a headcount of medical staff by shift change," he said. "You're listed as lead trauma. Is that going to be a problem?"

"I have a level-four field certification and eleven years in a combat-adjacent trauma unit. It'll be fine." She drank the terrible coffee, grateful for the burn of it. "What I don't have is antibiotics past week six of projection, or a working sterile field once the last of the disposable kits run out, or the faintest idea what half these bites and rashes are going to turn into once the incubation period's over on whatever's out here that's never met a human immune system before."

"Council's aware. There's a supply Pilgrimage due in eleven days."

"Eleven days is a long time for a kid with a fever nobody's ever treated before."

Hale was quite a moment, looking out through the tent flap at the compound—the skeleton frames of the first permanent structures, the perimeter fence still only two-thirds complete, the lake beyond it catching the last violent orange of a Cretaceous sunset that was, despite everything, the single most beautiful thing Mara had seen in years.

"You have a kid," he said. Not a question.

"Wren. Eight."

"Is she adjusting?"

Mara thought about the last six days—about Wren's near-silence for the first two, the nightmares on the third, and then, disconcertingly, the way she had begun on day four to draw, with total and absorbed concentration, careful anatomical sketches of the creature they'd seen on arrival, copied from memory with an accuracy that unsettled the colony's one remaining biologist. About the fact that her daughter had not once, in six days, asked when they were going home, because Wren, alone among the adults grieving a world eighty-nine million years and one Bridge-crossing away, seemed to have understood immediately and completely that home was a word that no longer had an answer.

"She's adjusting better than I am," Mara said finally.

"Kids usually do," Hale drained his cup. "For what it's worth—the thing that got Ilanova. We tracked prints half a klick out before we lost them in the creek bed. Big. Bipedal. Moves in the dusk hours, avoids open ground during full daylight." He said it flatly, professionally, the way he'd clearly learned to report casualty patterns without letting the weight of them into his voice. "Council's going to want a name for it, because that's what people do—they need to name the thing that's hunting them before they can start being afraid of it properly instead of just randomly. I'd guess by the meeting tomorrow somebody'll have called it something."

"What would you call it?"

Hale considered this for longer than the question probably warranted.

"Something that sounds like what it does," he said. "Not something that sounds brave."

She found Wren that night sitting cross-legged outside their allotted tent, sketchbook—one of only three that had made it through customs in someone's single permitted bag, traded for two days' water ration—balanced on her knees, drawing by the light of a hand-crank lamp while the vast unfamiliar stars wheeled overhead in constellations that belonged to no chart any human being had ever made.

"You should be asleep," Mara said, sitting down heavily beside her.

"I was thinking about Ezra."

Mara's chest tightened. She had been thinking about Ezra too—every hour, in the gaps the crisis of the colony left unfilled, the specific ache of a promise made and not yet kept, a brother-in-law left behind a fence in a dying city with only a shout and a hope of a later Pilgrimage between them and never seeing him again.

"He said he'd follow," Wren said. "He said there'd be other Pilgrimages."

"There will be. There has to be."

"Do you think he made it onto one yet?"

"I don't know, sweetheart." Mara put her arm around her daughter's thin shoulders, felt her lean in, the two of them small and human under a sky ancient beyond any comprehension. "But I think your uncle is one of the most stubborn people either of us has ever known, and I don't think a bureaucratic mix-up at a checkpoint is going to be the thing that stops him."

Wren was quiet for a while, drawing—not the creature this time, Mara realized, looking down, but a rough, careful sketch of the Bridge itself, the black ring standing alone against a plain, unadorned page.

"When the supply Pilgrimage comes," Wren said slowly, "do you think he'll be on it?"

Mara looked out at the dark tree line, at the compound's half-built perimeter, at the enormous unfamiliar stars, and did not know how to answer her daughter honestly without also frightening her, and so she did the thing she had done every day since Daniel died, the thing that had gotten them both this far, across a hundred million years and further than either of them, and gave her the only true thing she had left to give.

"I don't know," she said. "But I promise you we're going to find out. And whatever happens, Wren—we're going to build something here worth him finding, when he does."

Above them, something vast moved through the dark canopy beyond the fence line, and did not come closer, and the two of them sat together in the improbable, dangerous, achingly beautiful first days of a world that did not yet have a name for what they were about to become.