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One more human world, he thought. One more vast cemetery. He started forward… and almost immediately stumbled over something. Glancing down, he instantly identified the cause of his near fall.

It was a doll. A large one, simple and devoid of technological enhancements. Or detractions. It all depended on how one regarded the purpose of such objects. Until they reached a certain age, children had a remarkable lack of need for electricity. The doll was outfitted in rural attire. Its flat, nondimensional face had features that had been heat-pressed on. The ears did not flex, the nose did not expand and contract, the mouth was incapable of speaking, burping, or coughing up internal fluids. The blue eyes, however, laughed.

He put it down. In the course of the post-plague years he had spent roving a silent Seraboth, he had encountered many such forlorn relics of vanished individuals. All the crying they engendered, and there had been all too much of that, had finally faded away to nothing after the first few months of realizing that he was alone. He had wept tears the way a tree sheds bark, until, like a tree, nothing but bare heartwood remained.

The girl who had owned the doll was dead. Her parents and any siblings she’d had were dead. Just as on Seraboth, every human on Treth was dead.

No, that wasn’t quite right, he corrected himself. Now he was here. Humanity lived again on this world—and would at least until he departed.

The skeletons he encountered in the first building he entered were largely if not wholly disarticulated. Complete breakup would come with the further passage of time. The calcium and phosphorous and other elements would be gratefully taken up by the soil and thence by the plants that now blocked the long-gone windows and fallen doors. Deeper into the first room, which struck him as possibly the foyer of a once great hotel, plant life thinned out. It was a place where only those growths that could thrive without direct sunlight could survive.

In the center of the room, which boasted an atrium that soared all the way to the apex of the structure, was a fountain. It was dry as dust, its once decorative motile structures now home to bioluminescent growths and small scurrying things. Due to the failing light he could not make out the shapes of the latter, but they were at best unsightly. Every fully evolved ecology has its vermin, he mused.

It was time to leave. He had been gone longer than he intended. Although he had not strayed far from the base and it was impossible to miss (he simply had to avoid the tall human structures), he did not relish plowing his way homeward through the small but dense wooded area that was all that remained of the city park. Leaving behind the tall tomb that was the unidentified structure, he retraced his steps until he was once again standing on the pedestrian way outside. Two of Treth’s three moons were now rising in the sky. While they did not provide enough light for him to see clearly, they did supply sufficient illumination to allow him to find his way back.

He had not taken three steps when the cough stopped him.

Neither a buzz nor a hum, it was deep and ominous and unlike anything he had heard since arriving on this world. Above him unfamiliar stars had begun to background the two moons, one spherical, the other jagged. The silhouettes of ruined buildings seemed to bend forward, admonishing him. He fancied he could hear the reproachful moans of the dead millions.

“Shouldn’t be out by yourself at night.”

“We are gone and this world has reverted to those who dominated before us.”

“Alien world equals alien dangers. Stupid human!”

He picked up his pace, looking around uneasily as he headed for the thicket from which he had emerged earlier. The intensifying moonlight bathed everything—buildings, pavement, oddly geometric plant life—in a silvery softness that was as false as it was beguiling.

The cough came again. Louder this time. Nearer.

He could hear himself breathing as he tried to move faster still. Though still in decent shape he was not the athlete he had been in his youth. That might not matter, he knew, depending on what was responsible for the now repetitive cough that was somewhere behind him and closing fast. He considered calling out, but most of the Myssari would already be inside their living quarters, while the night team would be preoccupied with their work.

Abruptly, the coughing stopped. A look back showed nothing behind him, nothing to block out eternal stars and human architecture. Ahead loomed the wall of park vegetation that marked the boundary between Myssari life and human demise. He started into it.

Something stood up in front of him.

He sucked in his breath as he stumbled backward. Whatever it was that rose before him in the night was far more massive than any Myssari. It had come not from the camp but from the depths of the crumbling city where it and its kind had assumed the mantle of dominance once worn by the planet’s human colonists. In lieu of the intellectual capacity of a human, this new master of Treth boasted a more basic but no less efficacious round mouth full of backward-angled teeth, enormous scute-covered front paws, and a counterbalancing tail of inflexible gray bone. Even in the dim light, Ruslan could see that its two eyes were located one above the other instead of side by side. They differed in size, color, and shape, perhaps to allow the creature to see different portions of the spectrum—or as well by night as during the day. He took only hasty notice of such additional characteristics. What mattered was the mouthful of teeth. Unmistakably, the cougher was a carnivore.

It struck him that the creature might well have been stalking him ever since he had left the safety of the scientific compound.

He could run: the beast had long, powerful hind legs that would doubtless catch up to him within a few strides. He could attempt to find a vulnerable area and fight back: if there was a sensitive place located within the mass of long yellow-and-black fur, he couldn’t see it in the dark, and probably not even in daylight. He could dodge to left or right: one of those massive paws would probably crush his skull before he could get beyond reach. His only hope was to make it into the dense park brush and try to wriggle into a place the predator could not reach. All these thoughts ran through his mind in a matter of a few seconds, subsequent to which he made up his mind and ran.

Straight at the creature.

A deep-throated cough crackled around him as bony forepaws descended toward his head. He could feel the air they pushed ahead of them as he dove between the upright carnivore’s legs. By the time it whirled, he had rolled and was up and running for his life. He did not know if his bold charge had surprised it, nor did he care.

He was taken aback when the branches and twigs he encountered did not snap under pressure from his flailing arms or body weight. Whatever their internal integuments were composed of was tougher than the vegetation he remembered from Seraboth. The inability to force a path through the wood left him at the mercy of his pursuer. From the cracking and coughing he heard coming closer behind him, he realized that the animal was encountering no such impediments. Looking back, he had a moonlit vision of a face as big as his entire upper torso, a nightmare cross between a parasite and a panther. He was too old to fight and too tired to scream.

The Myssari will be greatly disappointed, he found himself thinking as rows of teeth began to shift back and forth within the round gape. Where the proposed cloning project was concerned, his hosts would now have to make do with salvaged DNA in the absence of his future cooperation. Assuming they could find his body. Or enough of it.