Page 215 of Hunters and Prey

He didn’t hear birds. No insects buzzed around his face. At the same time, he sensed life all around him; it soaked into his living light, giving him a strange jolt of energy, despite how tired he felt still, how worn out his aleimi was from worry and not enough sleep.

He walked on the soft grass, taking his time as he made his way up the hill.

From there, he walked down into a short valley, then up another hill.

He did that a few more times, going through stretches of trees, some of them like those white-skinned, branchless trees, others shorter, squatter, with darker, rougher trunks.

He saw flowers on those smaller trees––wide-mouthed, hibiscus-type flowers with dark blue blossoms and shockingly pink pollen and stems. On closer inspection, they looked less like hibiscus than he’d originally thought.

He continued to walk.

On maybe the fourth or fifth hill he’d climbed, the steepest one yet, he found himself looking out over a wider view of the surrounding land.

He stood under one of those white-skinned trees, gazing up the trunk to a height that had to be over a hundred feet from where he stood, and might even be higher than he realized from his limited perspective. The lowest branches had to be over eighty feet above the ground.

That soft grass still cushioned his bare feet.

Frowning up the smooth, unblemished white trunk, he stroked the skin of it with one hand, a little unnerved by how soft it was, too.

Gazing down the slope, he saw the sea in the distance.

To his left, the ocean rolled up against a pristine white beach, maybe the whitest, cleanest beach he’d ever seen in his life. Sandy cliffs, covered with more trees, stood to the north––or it would be north, if he was on Earth, given the position of the sun.

To his right, another large body of water lived, but on that side, he could see land on the other side, making it more likely a bay or inlet of some kind.

It looked familiar.

All of it looked familiar.

That familiarity clicked after he’d been staring for a few seconds longer.

He realized how obvious it was in the same breath, even as he gazed around from where he stood, turning around in a bewildered circle. He likely would have noticed right off, if he hadn’t been so sleep-deprived, if his mind hadn’t kept telling him none of this was real, that he was looking at an entirely made-up landscape, something dreamed up in the mind of an old seer who’d spent too much time in meditation caves on the southern border of China.

Now, however, he knew where he was.

He was looking at San Francisco.

Well… he was looking at the land San Francisco would have stood on, assuming the land was completely pristine, and the plants and animals had evolved differently.

Assuming no one had built…

Well, anything.

He stared at the waters of what had to be the San Francisco bay.

The water was so blue, so clear-looking, he could only stare for those first few seconds.

He was still staring when he saw them.

A pod of what had to be a hundred vertical fins glided through the water.

They cut through the surface like glass, moving with a beauty and grace that caught in his light, making him stare, making his eyes sting.

He had no idea why he reacted like that.

He had no idea why the beauty of those black fins, gliding under a deep, pollution-free blue sky, brought so much emotion to his chest.

He watched them until they moved away, out of his sight.

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