Page 273 of Hunters and Prey

IT HAD BEEN over two weeks.

Revik reminded him, over and over, that time moved differently here, compared to other worlds.

Black knew that. Miri told him the same thing.

But he could hear it a hundred times, and still not feel reassured.

What if she couldn’t remember him at all, once she left here?

What if she couldn’t find her way back?

She’d never done this while Black had been here, on this world. What if she went back to their version of Earth and had no idea what happened to him, or how to come back for him? What if she didn’t come back here for years?

Revik and Allie didn’t seem worried about any of those things.

Neither did that shaman chick, Zarat.

They all assured him, that if he’d seen in Miri’s light what they’d seen in his wife’s light, Black wouldn’t be worried, either.

It didn’t reassure him.

They tried to show him what they’d mapped of Miri’s light so far, the complex structures and functionalities they’d found in the higher levels of her aleimi. They tried to explain to him what it meant, how it connected with his light, how activated those parts of her were even before they’d started poking around in her structures, trying to figure out how they worked.

None of that reassured him, either.

Mostly Black just heard blah-blah-blah platitudes mixed in with a lot of technical light-mapping mumbo-jumbo while he tried not to think about the fact that it was still just a big fucking guessing game, as long as Miri wasn’t actually here.

“Stop thinking about it!” the little girl who was with him now scolded, tugging on his hand. “You can’t do anything about it!”

Grunting, Black had to agree.

Great. So now he was taking marriage advice from a pre-schooler.

“I’m in school,” she said, indignant. “I’m not ‘pre-‘ anything.”

“It’s a figure of speech, small fry,” he said to her. “Don’t be so touchy. You’ll end up a grumpy old man… like your dad.”

She laughed at that, tugging harder on his fingers.

“Come on,” she insisted, half-dragging him towards the large animal paddock under the big trees in their yard.

Black could see them now, pacing back and forth, looking at them.

The paddock was kind of a joke, really––more illusion than reality. There’s no way it could have held the animals there, if they ever wanted to get out.

Isthelaywere tall, cat-like creatures with long necks, retractable claws, soft fur, and strangely horse-like faces. They had long tails, also covered in fur, and sway-curved backs that made it somewhat easier to stay seated on them, along with an incredibly smooth gait, even when they ran.

When they climbed it was a different story.

Black found that out the hard way.

When his mount decided to climb up one of those massive, white-skinned trees, maybe because it saw something good to eat, maybe to screw with him, maybe to chase butterflies for all Black knew, he slid off all that silky fur and ended up in a bruised heap at the bottom of the trunk, looking up at the animal, which he swore was laughing at him.

Still, Black had to admit they were a hell of a lot of fun to ride.

He still couldn’t keep up with Revik or Allie on the damned things, but he was getting better. Revik rode the biggest of the three like he was a part of it.

Black had seen him streak across fields on the all-black animal at what had to be eighty miles an hour––maybe closer to a hundred.

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