Their civilization is supreme for a long time across the dry areas. They are constantly visiting each other’s colonies, interbreeding, enacting raucous diplomacy, feasting on fermented fruit stolen from the wetlands (where the prey gets too big to hunt, where their hero-cycles and myths come from). Their lives are too brief and impermanent to see change coming.

It is a grand and good change, from any long-term perspective, although there will be no eyes to look back, ten million years on, to make such a judgement. The world is healing its wounds from the great dying time, and the deserts shrink before the determined advance of green life. From the point of view of global biodiversity, it is a triumph. But for those species that form the crisis ecosystem, adapted to the post-Permian paucity, it is a death sentence. The pterosaurs’ mastery of their world shrinks and shrinks again as the time of land giants comes.

Along with the re-establishment of more varied and complex biomes, the continental shifts bring wild changes in weather. There are years—even decades—without rain, and then decades where the rain never ceases from year to year, the storm winds dashing any fragile leather-winged creature out of the skies. Perhaps they prayed, the poor pterosaurs. Perhaps they moved on and moved on, leaving their roosts and eggs and offspring too young to fly. There was no single event to undo them, just a stacked tower of stressors and adverse circumstances that obliterated their culture and civilization. They leave only a few caves etched with their beautiful, elegant drawings, a few bones, a few discarded pieces of sharp flint.

9.

I

“So you met the Nissa!”

It was hard to hear Mal over the rush of the wind and the hairdryer whine of the moped’s engine. A moped Mal had stolen, apparently, and when Lee had stared at her—Mal had always talked a good revolution but seldom acted on it—she’d just shrugged.

“What?” she’d asked, standing by the purloined vehicle with her weight on one hip. “Possibly I used an ancient supercomputer from another dimension to hotwire a Vespa. So?”

Lee had paused then, still in the hostel doorway. Mal was a skinny silhouette, wearing a torn leather jacket, stained T-shirt and wrinkled jeans, with big bovver boots. Hair too long and the wrong colour, face too thin even for her, body too muscled. She was like someone else, a stranger.

She grinned, and that had survived all the intervening years and the dinosaurs. Lee felt her heart kick.

“No helmets?” she noted, approaching Mal with caution.

“Forgot to steal any,” Mal said. “I’d promise to go careful, but I was only reintroduced to the internal combustion engine about four weeks ago. Not used to having a passenger, either.” She hooked a leg over the seat. “Get on, and hold tight.”

“Where are we going?” But Lee was already behind her.