Easy Prey tried to concentrate, but the music made it hard. The sweet-smelling love songs his coworkers preferred left an acid taste in the back of his throat. He would have used a portable facemask for his own music—Prey liked his songs pungent, with a little more rhythmic savagery in them—but Sharp Salt, his boss, had strictly forbade personal music organisms. Ruins team unity, she said.

The data blurred a little in his nostrils. Prey hadn’t been sleeping well lately, and the scent flows of astronomical data required close attention to understand properly. Normally, he was up to the task, but today, he just wanted to go home to his nest and sleep. He wondered if he was coming down with something.

He would never complain, though, no matter how bad he felt. This was a good job for a male, especially one of his caste, and he didn’t want to lose it. Even for his gender, he was small, with drab plumage and a tiny wingspan. Nobody chose him for breeding. Only a mind for mathematics had set him apart and earned him a job in the sciences, surrounded by females. If he made the smallest slip, he would confirm their expectations and find himself doing manual labor for a living, like so many males his age.

A new smell cut through the music. Sharp Salt was coming.

His coworkers stepped down from their perches, capping their data flows and smoothing down their plumage. Prey had to hop down from his, which had been made for a female, and was thus too high for him to step comfortably off. The only other male in the room, Crushed Neck, began exuding sexual pheromones, a little too obviously. The females made a point of ignoring him.

Sharp Salt burst into the room along with a wash of her commanding presence. The scent filled Prey with feelings of love and devotion and duty, even though he hated her. When she was nearby, he could never disobey her. The urge to please was too strong. Anything she asked of him, he would do without question, except maybe commit suicide, and even that would take monumental willpower to resist.

Sharp Salt’s full name was Sharp Salt of Ocean Spray Thrown by Morning Breakers. For a female from a prestigious ocean roost to hold such a low leadership posting meant she must have angered someone powerful. Which perhaps explained why she was so unpleasant to those who worked for her.

Sharp Salt struck the music organism with her foot, silencing it. Prey winced. Those organisms were delicate. Too fierce a blow could break internal vessels, causing it to bruise and ultimately souring the music. Not that Prey would have minded if she just killed the thing outright.

As the music dissipated, Sharp Salt snapped her jaws and bared a row of needle-sharp teeth. Almost immediately, an intense message scent filled Prey’s nostrils, riding on the scent of Sharp Salt’s presence. “I have exciting news for all of you,” the message said. “Our laboratory will be visited tomorrow by distinguished leader Lush Warmth of Ocean Thermals after Rain. She has heard of your good work and wishes to breathe it in for herself.”

Prey’s coworkers erupted into a babble of squawks, the news surprising enough to make them forget their manners and voice their reactions instead of using scent alone. A wave of presence from Sharp Salt silenced them.

“Prey?” Sharp Salt said, using the shortest possible scent marker.

Prey’s full name was Sweet Blood of Easy Prey Just after Slaughter. It was a common and forgettable name for a male. Prey wondered if his mother had actually liked it or if, in her disappointment at his gender, she had chosen the first name that occurred to her. The fact that she had attacked and nearly killed him before they pulled her away made him suspect it wasn’t chosen in love.

Prey cowered. “Yes, revered Sharp Salt of Ocean Spray Thrown by Morning Breakers?”

“Collate our most recent findings and prepare a presentation for the leader by tomorrow morning.”

Prey bobbed his head in acquiescence. The job would take him all night, and Sharp Salt would be unlikely to acknowledge his hand in it to the leader. Still, she had chosen him for the job, which meant that, despite her prejudices, Sharp Salt recognized his talent. He wished that talent could serve his own advancement instead of her petty self-aggrandizement, but that was like wishing for the moon. He was a male, and males didn’t rise to positions of leadership. He was lucky not to be inseminating livestock or massaging flesh into organisms in a factory somewhere.

Sharp Salt blasted a wave of sexual domination that left Prey reeling, but of course it wasn’t intended for him. Crushed Neck trotted meekly out the door after her, bobbing his head and nuzzling her wing feathers. He was an admirable physical specimen, nearly as big as the females, with brilliant red and green tail feathers and a bright blue breast. Prey suspected it was why he’d been hired. Given the quality of his work, it certainly didn’t seem to be his knowledge of astrophysics.

Prey jumped back to his perch and clenched his teeth until the feeling of sexual desire had passed. No one ever wanted him for sex. His female coworkers would likely go to the breeding grounds after work and pick out a mating partner, but Prey had long since given up visiting such places. The embarrassment of being overlooked night after night left him feeling ashamed and lonely, so he spent his evenings studying astronomy, or else working late in the lab.

A few hours later, Prey was alone. Now that everyone else had gone, he could switch to a full olfactory connection with the ductwork, undistracted by the music or scents of others. It took more concentration to explore the data this way, but he found that the summary data flows tended to disguise important details and assume away outliers. A full connection served him better.

He opened a valve, and a rich melange of aromas flooded into his face. He exuded scent into the ductwork, announcing himself with his unique scent marker and declaring himself as an analytical adjunct. This allowed him to filter out the command scents and perform computations on the data, becoming a direct part of the computational engine himself.

He began sifting through the latest astronomy data. Ever since Thick Loam of Forest Rich with Spring Growth had discovered an eighth planetary body in their solar system, Ocean Roost had doubled its astronomical research efforts, trying not to lose prestige to the Forest Roost. At the upper levels of roost politics, prestige was power, and those with the most could sway lesser roosts to follow their lead. Sharp Salt wanted Prey to summarize the latest findings, especially anything that might hint at new breakthrough discoveries to be made.

They had recently discovered a new moon around the sixth planet, but so many of those had been discovered by now that they had ceased to be particularly prestigious. They wanted something new, something spectacular. So Prey scoured the data, summarizing the tracking of thousands of asteroids, looking for orbital anomalies that might imply the existence of a larger body previously overlooked.

He worked for hours before he found it, and when he did, he could hardly believe what he saw. He double-checked the computations and got the same results. A chill went down his spine from his neck to the tip of his tail. This wasn’t possible. Nothing like this had ever been found, though given the cratered appearance of the moon, the idea had certainly been considered. Either this discovery would mean immense prestige for Ocean Roost, or else. . . . He needed to refine the measurements. The precision of the data wasn’t nearly good enough for what he needed.

Prey hopped down from his perch, fluffed his feathers to get some circulation moving again, and headed outside to visit the telescope.

He left the building and hopped to the top of the hill, beyond which a cliff dropped to a sandy beach below. At the top, spread out in a hexagonal pattern, stood four hundred males, looking at the sky. Together, the males formed the largest telescope Ocean Roost had ever formed, possibly the largest formed by any roost. All of them had been bioengineered to give them extraordinary eyesight. Females were never modified—most would have considered it immoral—but males and animals often were to make them more useful to the community.

Dozens of other males climbed the hill and walked through the configuration, finding their places. It was shift change, each male finishing a ten-hour rotation before being replaced by a new one in the same location on the hill. Prey scanned the crowd for Soft Meat, a friend from his school days. They had studied astronomy and mathematics together, though Meat had not risen as high afterward.

Prey smelled his friend’s marker and triangulated on him in the crowd. Meat looked exhausted, having just finished his own shift. When Prey called him, he responded slowly, a little dazed by having complete control of his own mind again.

“Meat!” Prey addressed him verbally, using the low-caste language mostly used by males. It had less range of expression and less precision than communicating by smell, but it had the advantage that most females couldn’t understand it. He knocked his jaw affectionately against his friend’s. “We need to talk.”

They stepped to the edge of the configuration, looking down on the ocean. A cool breeze ruffled their feathers, and as Prey talked, the hazy look in Meat’s eyes started to clear. Meat was a talented mathematician, wasted as a simple computer node. If he’d been female, he would be running his own lab by now.

“Are you sure?” Meat asked, wide awake now. “How precise is the data?”

“Not nearly precise enough.”

“But if you’re right . . .”

“We need to know, and we need to know as soon as possible. Help me.”

Meat, realizing what Prey wanted to do, bared his teeth and exuded a negation—a scent that coming from a female would compel obedience, but from Meat just expressed disagreement. “You can’t,” he said. “You’ll get us both evicted from the roost. Wait until morning and let Sharp Salt decide.”

“That’s hours wasted,” Prey said. “And what if she doesn’t believe me? Or decides to bury it and hope for the best rather than bring bad news to her superiors?”

“It’s not like we can do anything about it even if it’s true.”

“Maybe not. But we can’t even try if we don’t know.”

Prey didn’t wait for Meat to answer. He turned around and walked to the center of the configuration, where he started exuding scent. There would be a female somewhere in the building who was remotely controlling the telescope, her scent commands telling each of them how to focus and where to scan. Prey couldn’t dominate the males himself, but as a member of Sharp Salt’s team, he could invoke her authority. He did that now, exuding her scent marker and using her authority to tell them they had a new target to follow. The goal: as precise a prediction of location and trajectory as possible.

As each of the males stared at the same spot in the sky, they translated the light gathered by each of them into smell. The smells were then synthesized mathematically to simulate the result of a single, giant eye the size of the circle of males. It was called interferometry, a technique developed only in the last several years. Before that, astronomy had relied on manufactured organisms like giant eyes, with multiple lenses arranged in an exoskeleton. The bigger the eye, the farther one could see, but the manufacturers had reached a limit for how large such organisms could be grown.

The four hundred males on the hilltop adjusted their position, shrinking the telescope by drawing closer to each other. This decreased the aperture of their telescope, but increased its resolution. Together they focused on the spot of sky that Prey indicated. He hoped they had enough time. The longer they could track the object, the more precise their estimate would be. Eventually, though, the female in the building would realize that the males weren’t following her commands, and then they would be finished.

The calculations were complex, and he had to guide them through it. Meat stayed and helped, working the more difficult bits himself and farming out the rest. The basic approach was familiar to most of the males there: Each object in space pulled on others that passed nearby, perturbing their orbit. If a known orbit deviated slightly, that meant an unknown object had flown by and influenced it. By recognizing such anomalies in multiple known orbits, they could predict the orbits of objects that were too small to see directly, like following broken branches through a forest to locate prey.

Only it was much more complicated than that. Even well-known objects followed irregular paths if you looked closely enough. The masses they orbited weren’t perfectly spherical or uniformly dense, causing jitters and jags. That made it difficult to tease out the normal variations from the abnormal ones. It wasn’t impossible, but it required high precision, and that took time.

They worked for an hour, then two. The female tasked with dominating the telescope must not have been paying very close attention. Females relegated to night shift computing would be those whose careers had shown little promise, however, and the job amounted to little more than commands to keep working. Perhaps they were accustomed to ignoring the output.

As the results of their calculations began to take shape, a ripple passed through the crowd of males. Although their minds were slaved to the computational task, they retained enough individual awareness to understand the nature of the orbit their calculations were gradually refining. To follow the path it struck through the cosmos. And to see what it intersected.

A sudden ferocious sensation tore through him, ripping his mind out of the network. Three females had come up behind him. They flooded him with scent, a domination strong enough to be punitive. All thought of resistance fled. Prey fell to the ground and groveled, flattening his tail and scraping his face in the dirt. The other males around him whimpered and abased themselves, cowed by the scent even though it was linked to Prey’s marker and directed at him. The telescope fell apart.

Prey urinated reflexively, showing his deference. He was at their mercy now, but they had been too slow. The computation had completed, or near enough, and his suspicions had been confirmed. He felt a mix of elation and terror at the prospect.

“You will not move,” the scent commanded. “You will not speak. Sharp Salt of Ocean Spray Thrown by Morning Breakers will know of this.”

Prey stared at the dirt and imagined the object hurtling along in its trajectory, unstoppable. Everyone will know of this.

The air in Sharp Salt’s office was redolent with competing scents: fury and fear, domination and submission, hatred and the desire to please. Prey crouched on the floor, almost forgotten except for the occasional glares directed at him from Sharp Salt as she cowered on the perch behind her desk. The roost leader, Lush Warmth of Ocean Thermals after Rain, dominated the room, not just with her scent but with her body. She was large even for a female, maybe three times Prey’s body weight, and knew how to take command of a situation.

“How long were you going to keep this information from me?” Lush Warmth said, the scent suffused with rage. “You thought perhaps to solve this problem yourself? Or perhaps you thought if you ignored it, the problem would go away?”

“I . . . I didn’t know,” Sharp Salt said. Under other circumstances, Prey might have reveled in the sight of his boss groveling to a superior, but at the moment, he was too frightened by the implications of what he had discovered.

Suddenly, he felt the attention of Lush Warmth and her domination flooding his mind, compelling him to stand. “Child,” she said, using the diminutive scent one might use to address a young boy. “Tell me what you found.”

Prey carefully formed his response, expressing scent as calmly as he could, not letting emotions mix with his message. “We discovered a new orbiting body. A small one, highly elliptical, moving fast. A triumph for the program. Except . . .” He paused, but a rush of scent from Lush Warmth compelled him to continue. “Except that the orbit appears to be in an intercept course with the Earth.”

“Appears?”

“We can’t predict its path precisely enough to pinpoint the intercept. Within a hundred million strides for certain, but we can refine that the closer it gets.”

“A hundred million strides.”

Prey realized the number meant little to her. “The Earth is fourteen million strides wide,” he said.

She snapped her jaws. “I know that.”

Prey was quite sure she hadn’t, but he certainly wasn’t going to say so.  “It will be close,” he said instead. “Very close.”

“But . . . fourteen out of a hundred,” Sharp Salt complained from her perch. “That’s not very likely.”

Lush Warmth glared at her until she ducked her head. Then, to Prey: “When will we know?”

“We can refine our estimate as it approaches, but we won’t know for sure until it strikes us or passes us by.”

“And how long will that be?”

“Twenty-seven days.”

Sharp Salt dropped a stink of pure terror into the air, but Lush Warmth made no reaction.

“And if it does hit, where on Earth will it strike?”

“We can’t predict that,” Prey said. “A small change in timing could move the impact by a million strides.”

“So we don’t know if it will land on our heads or the other side of the world?”

“No,” Prey admitted. “But I don’t think it will matter.”

He explained how the debris cloud thrown into the air would block the sun for years. “I don’t know if anything could survive,” he said. “But I suppose our chances are better the farther away from us it strikes.”

“Come with me,” Lush Warmth said, and Prey stepped forward, unable to resist.

“He’s mine,” Sharp Salt objected. “I should come, too.”

Lush Warmth struck with the speed of thought. Before Sharp Salt could react, she was prone on the floor with Lush Warmth’s teeth tight around her neck. She squealed and wriggled. The scent of fresh blood flooded the air.

Lush Warmth straightened, releasing her. “Send a message to the roost leaders. We will hold a council tonight. You will stay here. Prey will come with me.”

The council was held in a canyon shaded by a massive sequoia whose roots snarled their way through cracks in the rock. Prey followed his roost’s contingent in, looking around in amazement. The leaders of each of the roosts gathered in comfortable nests with their advisors, rich smells of anticipation and argument filling the air. Prey had never been near so many powerful females in his life.

He stood behind Ocean Roost’s nest, mostly out of sight at the edge of the canyon wall. He could pick out individual conversations from the mix of smells. Most were speculation about the reason for the summons; all of them were wrong. Beyond the canyon, guards maintained a perimeter over a mile across to ensure those same conversations were not smelled by an unauthorized eavesdropper.

Finally, Lush Warmth stood on a central, raised perch and waited for the conversation to dissipate before addressing the group. In the enclosed space of the canyon, her scent filled the air, overpowering the diminishing smells of the prior interaction. She began with formalities, praising the gathered leaders, the benefits of their peaceful cooperation, the achievements they had accomplished together. When she got to the bad news, however, she referred to it only as an important discovery and turned the perch over to Prey.

Startled, Prey stared at her, uncertain that he’d understood her. She wanted him to speak? He had never heard of a male addressing the Council. The assembled leaders all looked at him expectantly. He felt small and shabby. He had so often been the butt of jokes by his female roost-members that he almost expected this to be the same. Put the silly male and his crazy theories on display so we can laugh at him.

But this was no time for hesitation. The fate of the world was at stake.

Prey hopped onto the high perch, almost falling short but hooking a claw around it at the last moment. He paused for a moment, finding his balance. The august crowd waited.

He smoothed his feathers and began. He told them of the object they’d found, its size and trajectory, the efforts they had taken to refine its exact position and heading. As the scent of his message wafted through the assembly, he expressed a lighter scent containing supporting data. The leaders would ignore this, but he expected there would be astronomers among their advisors, able to process the numbers and confirm the math.

When he told them that the object would pass very close to the Earth—much closer than the moon—the audience could no longer hold back, and a rush of responding scents filled the air. Some were skeptical, wondering aloud what trick Ocean Roost was trying to pull. Others expressed only fear or amazement. Others had questions.

“There are three possibilities,” Prey said, addressing one of the questions. “The object may fly past, slingshotting around the Earth into a new orbit and continuing on its way. Even this possibility would pose a major threat: the gravitational upheaval would cause earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, and a deadly rain of debris from space.

“If it comes it a little closer, it may be captured by the Earth and orbit us as a second moon, although one with a highly elliptical orbit. In this case, even after the initial trauma, tides and weather patterns would be radically altered, and many animals we rely on for food might not survive.

“The third and worst possibility, of course, is a direct impact. Such an event would almost certainly eliminate most species on Earth.”

Argument filled the air. There was no need for speakers to wait in turn in order to express their opinions; the conflicting scents mixed and commingled, growing as each idea was received with agreement or objection, approbation or disgust. Everyone seemed to have an idea about what to do, most of them involving some kind of protective building or underground shelter. None of them asked Prey for his opinion. He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised.

Lush Warmth motioned with her head for Prey to step down, but Prey wasn’t ready to do that. “A shelter won’t work,” he said. “The effects of this collision will last for centuries. We can’t just wait it out. Even a near miss would utterly change our environment. We need to adapt, not hide. We must modify ourselves to match our new environment.”

An offended stink rose from the gathered females. Females didn’t modify themselves. That was what one did with a tool, to shape it for a purpose. They were not tools. The idea was outrageous.

A snarl from Lush Warmth sent a shiver of fear through him, but this was too important. He kept going. “Genetic modification is the only viable approach. We need to change ourselves and our offspring to survive the new Earth.”

A blast of domination silenced him, and before he could even think of resisting, he had hopped down off of the perch and abased himself on the ground. With a powerful leap that left the perch shaking, Lush Warmth took his place.

“I have already dispatched explorers to find likely caves among the ocean cliffs,” she said. “You must do the same in your own territories. We have twenty-six days. If we work together, we can find shelter for all our people.”

Prey dug his claws into the dirt, trying to shake off the domination. Ocean cliffs? Had no one heard a word he’d said? There would be tsunamis. No one along the coasts would survive.

There was nothing more he could do. When his body would obey him again, he crawled his way out from the center, ignored, and took his place against the canyon wall behind the representatives of Ocean Roost.

“Easy Prey?”

The sudden strong scent next to him made him jump. He turned to see a female and male from Desert Roost standing next to him. With the flood of strong emotions filling the canyon, he hadn’t smelled them approaching.

“I am called Distant Rain Sweeping Towards Home as Night Falls,” the female said. She was small, barely larger than Prey himself. He assumed on that basis that she was a low-ranking functionary. She must be smart, though, to be invited as part of her leader’s retinue.

Prey faced the female and touched his head to the ground. “May your teeth be sharp and your claws strong,” he said.

“This,” she said, indicating the male, “is Fear Stink of Injured Mammal Limping Through the Sand.”

“We think you’re right,” said Fear Stink. “Altering our bodies is the only way to survive this long-term.”

Distant Rain bobbed in assent. “What kind of modifications do you think we need?”

Prey was shocked. He hadn’t expected anyone to believe him, much less to have a female he’d never met from one of the more powerful roosts ask him what he thought.

“I don’t really know,” he admitted. “I would guess thicker feathers for warmth. Teeth and stomachs that can eat and digest seeds and plants instead of just meat. Maybe harder eggshells to protect our young. But I’m just making those things up. We need an expert.”

“Who would be an expert at surviving a global catastrophe?” Rain asked. “It’s not like anyone’s done this before.”

“Maybe no one. But I don’t even know what can feasibly be accomplished. We need someone who knows genetics and can actually perform the changes.”

Rain flicked her tail. “That’s why I brought Stink. He’s one of our best factory modifiers; he’ll know what’s possible and what’s not.”

Prey glanced back at the roost leaders at the center of the canyon. They circled each other, teeth bared and rear legs poised as if to spring. He doubted there would be any actual physical violence, but their body language suggested consensus was still a long way off.

“They’ll be a while,” Rain said. “Let’s get out of here.”

In the end, there were thirteen of them, co-conspirators in an underground bid to save their species. Only four were female, Distant Rain and three friends she trusted. Prey had invited Meat and two other males from the telescope, and the rest were modifiers Fear Stink had brought from the factory.

They worked hard, planning out what needed to be done, getting a crash course in modification from Fear Stink so they could all be useful. Everyone’s schedules were in enough chaos that they managed to keep the work a secret, though it was difficult. The telescope males had the hardest time getting away, because Lush Warmth wanted constant updates on the asteroid’s position and likelihood of impact.

Unfortunately, the more precise their estimations became, the greater the certainty of disaster. Even if it didn’t strike the Earth, it would pass close enough to cause huge devastation. Capturing the asteroid as a second moon might even be the worst possibility, since its gravity would tear at the Earth again and again in every cycle of its elliptical orbit.

Sharp Salt took her fear and humiliation out on Prey every chance she got. She couldn’t fire him from the analysis team, but she could insult and belittle him, and took every opportunity to do so. It made Prey angry, but less than it would have before. He could withstand her petty revenge, knowing that Rain and Stink and the others were relying on him. There were more important things at stake.

Every day, the asteroid grew closer, until Prey could announce with 100 percent certainty that it would strike the Earth. Even though they had known for weeks that disaster was unavoidable, this somehow made it seem more real. Collision. Devastation. Life as they knew it, gone. Perhaps even all life on Earth eradicated. He saw the terror he felt reflected in the faces around him.

Fourteen days until impact, then thirteen, then twelve. Prey had faced deadlines before, but nothing like this. Some couldn’t stand the strain and committed suicide rather than face the day. Sharp Salt reached a fever pitch of cruelty, lashing out and clawing males who got too close, until one day Crushed Neck took too long providing her a piece of data she requested, and she snapped his neck with one horrific clamp of her jaws. Some other females came and took her away, and Prey never saw Sharp Salt again.

Caves in the mountains were enlarged and stocked with fresh water and live animals for feeding. Prey knew it would be useless. The caches might possibly protect them from the initial shockwave, but the real survival challenge would be the following months and years. They couldn’t stay in the caves forever. The stockpiles wouldn’t last.

Prey and his friends, in the meantime, had been carefully recruiting more members to their cause. Thirteen wasn’t nearly enough to preserve the species. They explained to recruits where to be on impact day, and how to prepare.

With seven days remaining, Prey pinpointed with reasonable accuracy the location of the impact: a spot nearly on the opposite side of the world. That gave them a chance, however small. A direct impact anywhere nearby would have made irrelevant any of their plans for survival.

Five days left. The cave projects were far behind schedule, but thousands began moving into them anyway. A strict order had been established, starting with the highest-ranking females and their choice of mate. Almost immediately, however, the Mountain Roost began claiming a greater percentage for their own members, since the caves were in their territory. Tensions mounted and tempers flared.

With three days until impact, the asteroid appeared in the night sky, visible even to the unmodified eye as a bright dot little different than a star. By the following night, it was much brighter, and any secret hopes that the calculations might have been mistaken were dashed. Death was coming, and they could all see it.

On the final night, Prey sat on his perch in the empty analysis room for the last time. Nearly everyone from Ocean Roost had gone. The telescope had disbanded, but it hardly mattered; they didn’t need it anymore.

He looked around at the wooden walls, the delicate organic machines, the living lungs that pumped air through the ductwork. By the next day, all of it would be gone. Even if it withstood the earthquakes and the tsunamis didn’t reach this far, it would eventually rot away. A hundred years from now, there would be no trace whatsoever of the technological society that had ruled this corner of the globe. All of their accomplishments, gone.

What might they have become, if allowed to continue? Would they have filled the Earth with billions of their kind? Would they have cured disease, conquered death, visited the stars?

He hopped down from his perch. These thoughts were pointless. There was still a chance for their species to survive. As long as there was hope, he had work to do.

The orderly retreat into the caves collapsed into chaos. The asteroid was visible even during the day now, a glowing orb hanging over the western mountains. The first slight tremors made themselves felt, prompting mass panic.

Prey kept his distance from the narrow cave entrance, where females snarled and snapped, hurling others away to get inside. Prey and Meat worked around the outskirts, finding those too small or weak to brave the melee and telling them they still had another option. They had to be careful. If the mob at large realized that the modification pits held a chance at salvation, they would be overrun, their machinery crushed, their hard work demolished. At the same time, the more they could save, the better the chance for their species to survive.

The asteroid flared suddenly bright, and a glowing trail appeared behind it. The ground surged like an ocean wave, throwing them to the ground. Screams filled the air. A moment passed as the ground settled, and then everyone ran for the cave. Fresh growls and screams rang out, and the air filled with the stink of blood and terror. Prey watched in horror, unable to tear away.

Meat tugged at him. “No more time. Let’s go, right now!”

Prey turned his back, knowing that everyone he was leaving behind would die. Why couldn’t he have saved more? He should have worked harder to convince the leaders, to make them listen. They could have done so much more if they had all worked together!

He increased his strides, bounding after Meat, but paused when he smelled more blood and heard a whimper from a ditch. He stopped and looked down. Distinguished leader Lush Warmth of Ocean Thermals after Rain lay prone, blood staining her feathers.

“What are you doing here?” Prey asked.

Lush Warmth’s reply was weak, barely detectable above the sharp scent of her blood. “Tried . . . to keep order. Make them stay in line.”

“And they attacked you?”

Meat reappeared at his side. “Leave her! There’s no time.”

Prey knew he was right, but something snapped in his mind. He wasn’t going to leave one more behind if he could help it, no matter who it was. He climbed over Lush Warmth and took up a position on one side of her body. “Help me!”

“We can’t lift her,” Meat objected. “She’s too heavy. We’ll never make it. She’ll never survive anyway.”

“I’m not going without her.”

Meat growled, but he took the other side. Together, they heaved her to her feet. She couldn’t walk on her own, but she could partially support her weight. They stumbled toward the modification pits, all the while watching the asteroid descend toward the planet, its trail increasing in length.

They didn’t make it.

The flaming ball fell behind the horizon. For a time, there was nothing, as if it had simply ceased to exist. Then the shockwave hit.

The ground bucked like an angry beast, and a sound like all the trees in the world breaking ripped through the clearing. Prey, Meat, and Lush Warmth were tossed into the air like stones, only to crash to the ground again a dozen strides away. Wind screamed past, tearing at their feathers, whipping away any smell. Prey felt dazed and blind, stunned by the power of it. They were on the opposite side of the world! What must it have been like closer to the impact?

They helped Lush Warmth up again and staggered on. The wind now brought the reek of smoke with it. Dirt and debris whipped against their faces. The earth heaved again, knocking them off their feet. Prey knew that would keep happening, like ripples in a pond. The air was already growing unbearably hot. That would continue, too, as the searing heat from the impact expanded around the world toward them. Lethally hot, and then, once the heat dissipated, lethally cold.

They pressed on and finally reached the modification pit, where they found another scene of chaos. Cranes stood along the edge of the pit, holding cages to lower them down, but half of them had fallen. Males and females alike fought each other for the remaining positions.

The pit was still filled with a dark liquid, fortunately not broken open by the earthquakes. If the liquid had run out, they would all be doomed. The cranes were meant to lower open cages into the liquid with individuals riding on them, but there was no time left for decorum. The remaining cranes wouldn’t survive for long, and it was the liquid itself that had been programmed with the genetic changes they had planned and agreed on.

Prey felt like his skin was on fire. He looked up into the sky, which was already darkening with swirling dust and ash. This was the end.

There was no way to communicate through scent. The wind whipped away their own smells, which were dominated anyway by the burning reek. “Goodbye,” Prey verbalized in the low-caste male language, as loudly as he could over the roar of the wind. To his surprise, Lush Warmth responded in the same language. “Goodbye!” she said. “And thank you!”

As the next quake rumbled under their feet, the three of them leaped from the edge of the pit and tumbled into the liquid below.

Prey panicked as he sank, the cold liquid soaking his feathers, but he willed himself to relax. The dark liquid was possibly the most sophisticated technology his people had invented, full of engineered microorganisms that carried oxygen, regulated temperature, knitted cells, and edited genes. He gave himself over to it, letting it fill his mouth, and slipped away into darkness.

When he woke, it was with the sensation of having been asleep only a moment, though he could not at first remember anything that had happened. He was lying on the ground, covered in some kind of animal skin, or maybe a pile of leaves. It was dark, but not completely black; probably late in the evening. Others moved around him. He heard laughter.

He sat up, trying to throw off whatever was piled on top of him, but it wouldn’t budge. Finally, he realized that it wouldn’t move because it was part of him. His entire body was covered with a thick layer of broad feathers. They were soft and kept him insulated in a layer of warm air. He stood, feeling strange and off-balance. There were other changes too, changes to his muscles and bones and teeth. Why was he like this? What had happened to him?

Others noticed him and gathered around, squawking. They were all like him, fat with feathers for warmth, which given how cold the air felt on his face, was probably a good thing. The thought cued a memory. Hadn’t he been expecting the cold?

Faces peered at him, and one female said, “Finally! We weren’t sure if you would come out of it. Take your time; it’s hard to get used to at first.”

His first surprise was that she had spoken out loud, using the male language of peeps and squawks. But then, covered with all these feathers, it would be difficult to express anything clearly with scent. Maybe the verbal language was the only practical option now. In fact, he realized that his sense of smell had diminished drastically, perhaps as a side effect of the other genetic modifications needed to survive.

Survive. Like a tower crumbling, the memories all came back to him: the asteroid, the impact, the modification pit. The sky was dark, not with evening, but with ash. He recognized the female who had spoken to him as Distant Rain. The male to his left was his friend, Soft Meat.

“How many?” he croaked, his voice stiff with disuse.

“Nearly three hundred,” Distant Rain replied. “Come and see.”

She led him out. Prey realized he had been lying in what remained of the modification pit, all the liquid long since drained away. The light improved somewhat as they walked outside. He could even see the sun, occasionally visible as a white disc through the dark clouds. The biggest shock was the ocean. It had advanced all the way to the mountains, and the land had fallen away, leaving them at the edge of a cliff that fell sharply down to the surf below.

The trees and ferns and flowering plants had been scoured away, either by fire or withered by the cold and lack of light. Some hardier plants had grown in their place, eking out new life from the scoured earth. Furred creatures scurried between the rocks.

“Am I the last to wake?” he asked.

Distant Rain bobbed her assent. “The last.”

“Did any survive from the caves?”

“None that we know of.”

All around them, males and females gathered branches for nesting, hunted for rodents, or preened their new layers of feathers. Since the females who survived had mostly been the smaller ones of their roosts, there was barely a size difference anymore between male and female. One female stood out, twice the size of those around her, and Prey recognized Lush Warmth. Her size would be a liability in this new world, he realized. She would be less agile on the hunt and require more food to survive.

Prey hopped to the cliff’s edge and looked down at the crashing waves.

“Plenty of fish down there,” Meat said.

“Out of reach, though.”

“Not quite,” Meat said. “Watch this.”

Before Prey could stop him, he leaped off of the edge. Prey screeched in alarm as Meat’s body plummeted, but almost before the sound was out of his mouth, Meat had spread his wings, now covered in layers of stiff feathers, and caught the wind. To Prey’s astonishment, he soared, sweeping through the air in a controlled glide. He circled, spiraling down toward the water. Just as he drew near the waves, his powerful feet thrust into the water and emerged again gripping a fish. Flapping powerfully, he managed to glide just above the waves until he reached a rocky ledge, where he clamped the fish in his jaws and tore into its flesh.

“Meat was the first to master gliding,” Distant Rain said. “Only about half of us can do it.”

Prey watched, amazed. “How does he get back up again?”

“It takes a while. He picks his way around the rocks, hopping from ledge to ledge. Well worth it, though, for a fish dinner.”

Prey felt a rush of warmth fill his body. Their plans had worked. So many had died, but life itself had endured. The larger animals they had fed on might be gone, but there was food enough to be found. They could do this. They could survive.

“Imagine,” he said. “This will be the only world our children will ever know. It’s a fresh start. We’ll teach them the technology we’ve lost, and they’ll rebuild our civilization, only better. They could create a world with no prejudice or rivalry, where males and females are equal and everyone has the same opportunities. Sure, it’ll be tough for a while, but—”

“Prey.”

The tone in her voice stopped him. “What?” Her face was grave. Had the modifications made them all sterile? Were they the last of their kind after all?

“The changes to our genes,” she said. “We can’t exchange scent anymore, not like we used to.”

“I know. But that’s not so bad, is it? We can still communicate. We can still—”

“Listen. Sense of smell is crucial to how our brains develop. The first things infants learn is to scent bond with their mothers. It’s how they learn to communicate, how they learn to think.”

“But surely they’ll just learn differently now. They’ll use vocal language—”

Distant Rain interrupted him with a squawk. “They won’t. Fear Stink ran all the models before the asteroid came. They might be able to mimic the sounds of words, but no more than that. Maybe if he had more time, several years perhaps, he could have come up with a subtler modification. He knew what it would mean, but it was the best he could do.”

“What are you saying? They won’t communicate?”

“I’m saying they won’t think. Not like you and me. They won’t learn language, they won’t tell stories, they won’t invent technology, they won’t imagine a better future. They won’t rebuild our civilization.”

Prey looked out at the waves, stunned. “So we are the last.”

“The last like us. Our children will still know us, love us, learn from us. But when we die, no one will remember who we were.”

She left him there with his thoughts. It was hard to take in. All memory of them, gone. How many times in the history of the world had this happened? Had intelligent races evolved before and then disappeared without a trace? Or was theirs the only one? Would it ever happen again?

Another male leaped from the cliff and soared down to the waves to snag a fish. Prey watched him, imagining his descendants nesting on these cliff tops by the thousands, filling the skies. He imagined the millennia passing, genetic traits diverging to fit each climate, as his winged and feathered descendants covered the globe.

It was a new world. And if theirs was the last generation to be aware of it, then he would make the most of it. He would give his children the best life they could have, even if they wouldn’t remember him when he was gone. How many could expect to be remembered far beyond their lifetimes anyway? They would form a new roost, built on the ruins of the old, but with a future that was entirely theirs.

He bent his legs, testing his balance. The water spread out beneath him as far as he could see. There was nothing left to hold him back.

He jumped.