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walks!” she’d said. “We called them crippled. Sneaky. Weak.”
    Then she’d smiled. “But here they are, the cripples, doing a whole lot better than we are.”
    Aisha Rose could see the other two now, the alpha’s pack, closer, moving sideways toward her with that familiar hyena hobble. Yes, they did walk like their legs hurt.
    â€œDon’t believe it!” Mama had said. “Hyenas
are
sneaky, but they’re also smart, opportunistic, and . . .
strong
. So strong. They can kill a lion in direct combat, and do. Back on the dreamed earth, the native people considered them among the most dangerous animals in Africa. We were easy prey.”
    Aisha Rose could have reached out and touched the alpha, it was so close to her. She knew that the only reason she was still alive, the only reason it hadn’t yet attacked, was because she was unfamiliar. Because it didn’t recognize her smell.
    â€œIt’s amazing, isn’t it?” Mama had said. “Once, so recently, there was barely a creature on earth—from one-celled organisms on up—that didn’t know our smell, our sounds, our
presence
, almost as well as we did. You never saw that world, the dreamed earth, but we were everywhere.
Everywhere.
And now we’re the outsiders, the aliens.”
    Aliens. Alien prey. Given the life span of hyenas and most other animals, it was likely that this alpha female had never encountered a human before. That was true of most wild animals although maybe there were still elephants alive that remembered the world as it had once been, the world that Aisha Rose herself had never known. Elephants and tortoises and parrots and other long-lived creatures that still possessed fading memories of the dreamed earth.
    If any wild creature did remember that time, Mama had told Aisha Rose, it was with fear and disgust. “Just as I remember it,” she’d added. “As a world of nightmares. I’m so glad to have lived to see this one. The real earth.”
    Aisha Rose had stayed silent. Even now, Mama didn’t know about the stain. The spreading stain. She didn’t need to know.
    The alpha female opened its mouth wider and bent toward Aisha Rose, another string of warm saliva falling on her thigh.
    Yet the hyena’s gesture was strangely indecisive. Like a bow. It seemed almost . . . respectful. Polite.
    Please pardon me while I kill you.
    But polite or not, the result would be the same. Its first bite would pierce her skin and rupture her blood vessels and crush her bones. A hyena’s first bite was usually the only one it needed.
    But, finally, Aisha Rose’s mind was clear. And even as she and the alpha had been staring at each other, even as she’d been thinking about Mama’s words, her eyes had been taking in the surroundings. And her right hand had been creeping toward a stone she’d seen from the corner of her eye. A roundish stone, smooth, brown and yellow.
    A little too large, a little too heavy, for a hunt, but perfect for her current purpose.
    Inside her head, Mama was quiet. This was Aisha Rose’s task alone.
    With a speed and strength that surprised both the alpha and herself, she grasped the stone, reared up—getting her legs away from those dripping jaws—swung her arm, and bashed the stone against the hyena’s brow, just a little above its eyes.
    All the while letting loose with the loudest shout she could muster.
    The blow didn’t kill the beast. Aisha Rose hadn’tthought it would. Hyenas’ skulls were thick, and she wasn’t
that
strong.
    She didn’t want to kill it, anyway, not unless it gave her no choice. Aisha Rose didn’t kill. Or at least she didn’t kill indiscriminately.
    The hyena’s mouth closed with a click of teeth. It sat back on its misshapen haunches and, for an instant, its eyes went out of focus. Then they cleared, and Aisha Rose saw its body tense. At