"We’re lost in time" was not a sentence either of them knew how to act on, so they did what they knew how to do instead, which was survive the next six hours and worry about the rest afterward.
"Shelter first," Sekar said, already moving. "Then water. Then we think."
Rama didn’t argue. He’d learned, across seven years of crisis after crisis, that Sekar’s order of operations was almost always correct, and that arguing with it cost more time than it saved.
The clearing where the canopy had thinned wasn’t defensible — too open, too exposed to whatever had made that heavy, unhurried movement in the underbrush earlier. He found a better spot within twenty minutes: a shallow overhang where a slab of rock had split away from a low outcrop centuries ago, or possibly a thousand years ago, or possibly more than that, leaving a dry hollow just large enough for the three of them to sit with their backs against stone instead of open air on every side.
"Here," he said, and set their daughter down inside it before either of them had said another word about the sky.
She’d gone quiet in the specific way he’d come to recognize as her working something out rather than simply frightened — sitting very still, knees pulled up, watching her parents with the careful attention of someone trying to learn what the correct response to this situation was by studying the adults in charge of having one.
"I’m hungry," she said finally, which was, Rama thought, possibly the most reasonable thing anyone had said since the observatory deck came apart.
"I know, sayang." He crouched in front of her, checking his own inventory interface out of habit before remembering it held nothing but the clothes he was standing in. No supplies. No rations. Seven years of institutional infrastructure, gone in the space it took light to bend around his hand. "We’ll find something soon. Can you be brave a little longer?"
She considered this with the gravity of a child negotiating terms. "How much longer?"
"I don’t know yet."
"Okay," she said, and put her thumb back in her mouth, and that was the whole negotiation.
Sekar worked the perimeter while there was still enough ambient light to see by, and Rama split his attention between watching her go and trying, over and over, to reach something that wasn’t there.
He understood, intellectually, that repeating a failed action wasn’t going to change its outcome. He reached for Timeline anyway. Every few minutes, without meaning to decide to, the old motion fired again — the specific mental reach that had once been as automatic as breathing, faster than conscious thought, the reflex of seven years refusing to accept what the last hour had already told him.
Nothing came back. Not even the texture of nothing he’d grown used to on the worst days of the multiverse crisis — the strained, effortful silence of Timeline fighting through overwhelming grief-contact during Threnody’s surge, or the fractured static of the connection buckling under direct exposure to something too vast to process cleanly. Those silences had shape. They had the specific quality of something on the other end straining against distance, working to get through.
This had no shape at all. It was the silence of a line that had never been connected in the first place — as if seven years of relationship, of genuine trust patiently built, of watching a consciousness vast enough to contain reality learn what it meant to be known, had simply never happened. As if he were reaching into a space that had no memory of ever holding anything.
"Anything?" Sekar asked, returning from the tree line with her hands full of something dark and knotted that turned out, on closer inspection, to be edible-looking root.
"No." He kept his voice even for their daughter’s sake. "Nothing."
Sekar studied his face for a moment longer than the question required, and didn’t push. She set the roots down, wiped her hands on her ruined trousers, and crouched to examine something at the base of the outcrop instead — a scatter of dead leaves, broad and fan-shaped, pressed into the damp soil where they’d fallen.
"I want to look at these properly once it’s light," she said, mostly to herself.
Morning arrived slowly, gray filtering down through the canopy in stages, and with it came the first real chance to see where they’d actually landed.
It was, by any ordinary measure, beautiful — old-growth forest, trees wide enough that three adults couldn’t have circled one with linked hands, undergrowth threaded through with flowering vines Rama didn’t recognize and birdsong considerably louder and stranger than anything he’d heard even on the rare trips outside Singapore’s urban core. Their daughter, emboldened by daylight, had already found a beetle the size of her palm and was watching it with the specific delighted horror of a child deciding whether something is disgusting or wonderful.
Sekar wasn’t looking at the beauty of it. She was on her knees at the base of the outcrop, examining the fan-shaped leaves from the night before with a focus Rama recognized as her working through a hypothesis she didn’t want to confirm.
"What is it," he said.
"Give me a minute."
He gave her several. She moved from the leaves to a cluster of fungus growing pale and shelf-like from a fallen log, then to a stand of ferns thick enough to reach her waist, running her fingers along the underside of one frond with the care of someone checking a signature.
"I know these," she said finally. "Not from here. From botany courses, undergraduate, a unit on paleobotany I took because it fit my schedule and I never expected to use it again."
"That’s good, isn’t it? Recognizing something."
"It’s not good, Rama." She sat back on her heels, and something in the set of her shoulders told him whatever came next wasn’t going to make either of them feel better. "These species are documented. Extensively documented. Because they’re extinct."
The word sat between them for a moment before it fully landed.
"How extinct," he said.
"Not extinct as in rare, extinct as in gone from the fossil record entirely outside preserved specimens." She gestured at the fern beside her, at the fungus, at the broad fan-leaves scattered across the soil. "This exact assemblage — this specific combination of species growing together — corresponds to a period I only know from lecture slides. Not centuries ago. Considerably longer than that."
Rama felt something cold settle behind his ribs. "How much longer."
Sekar didn’t answer right away. She looked past him, toward the geological outcrop their shelter was tucked against, at the specific striated pattern in the exposed rock face that she’d noticed the night before and filed away without saying anything.
"That striation pattern," she said slowly, "if I’m reading it correctly, and I might not be, because I’m working from memory and undergraduate coursework and not actual instrumentation — that’s not decades of sediment. It’s not even centuries."
"Sekar."
She finally looked at him, and whatever composure she’d been holding for their daughter’s sake cracked just enough to let something genuinely frightened through.
"I think we’re looking at thousands of years," she said. "Possibly considerably more than that. I don’t think we fell backward into some earlier decade we might recognize with the right context. I think we fell into a version of this world that doesn’t have a name yet — that won’t have a name for longer than either of us can properly hold in our heads."
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