Beau Landry crossed an ocean of stars to build a home no government could touch, and now something in the swamp wanted to eat his family. The colony brochure had promised free land and clean water. It never mentioned the tracks. Beau crouched by the muddy bank and pressed his fingers into one. It was longer than his boot. Behind him sat the metal pod that had dropped his family here three days ago. His wife and two kids were still inside it. They hadn't stepped out since the second morning, when the thing first showed itself. He had hunted since he was six years old. Gators back home, deer, hogs in the dark. But nothing back in Louisiana grew like this. He'd seen the beast twice at the water's edge. Green armor down its back. A tail thick as a fallen log. It moved slow, then not slow at all. It was circling. Learning them. Waiting for someone small to wander out. Beau couldn't build anything while it lived. He couldn't clear brush or dig a well with his kids trapped in a box. So he made a plan. He drove a sharpened stake into the mud near the shore. He tied a slab of ration meat to it. Then he climbed the low ridge above the bank and lay flat with his rifle. He'd only brought forty rounds across the stars. He counted them once more. Then he waited. The beast came at dusk. The water split open without a sound. It hauled itself up the bank toward the meat, and Beau saw its true size for the first time. It was bigger than the landing pod. His hands went cold on the rifle. He aimed behind the eye, where the skull would be thinnest, and fired. The shot cracked. The beast roared and thrashed. It didn't fall. It spun toward the ridge and charged, faster than anything that big had a right to move. Beau fired again. And again. Mud and blood flew. The ground shook under him. He kept the trigger moving even as the jaws closed the distance. On the sixth shot the huge head dropped. The body slid sideways and stopped, one clawed foot still twitching in the shallows. Beau lay still a long moment. His ears rang. Then he stood on shaking legs and walked down to it. The thing was dead. He'd used six of his forty rounds. He turned toward the pod and shouted that it was safe. The hatch cracked open. His youngest ran out first and threw both arms around his leg. They were free to walk their land at last. But Beau looked at the carcass cooling in the mud and knew the truth. Where one this size had hunted, others fed. And now the smell of blood was spreading across the water.

The next beast came at dawn. Beau counted his rounds again while the fog still hung on the water. Thirty-four before the fight. Now six were gone, and one dead giant lay rotting on his shore. The blood had done its work. Something big broke the surface out past the reeds. Then a second wake spread beside it. Beau knew he could not kill two more with the rounds he had left. He backed toward the pod and pushed his oldest boy inside. His wife stood in the hatch, watching the water. "Bar it," he said. "Don't open for anything but my voice." The hatch sealed. Beau stayed out. Running into the pod would only trap them all in a box these things could crack open. The first new gator hauled onto the bank. It was smaller than the dead one, but its ridged back rose higher than Beau's chest. Its heavy tail dragged a furrow through the mud. It went straight for the rotting carcass and tore into it. The second one followed. They fought each other over the meat, jaws snapping, tails cracking like whips. Beau watched from the ridge and understood. They had not come for his family. They had come for the free meal his kill had left behind. The blood that put his family in danger was also feeding the danger away from the pod. He would not waste bullets on beasts already busy. But he could not leave the carcass here, drawing more of them every day. He needed the blood gone. He needed the water clean, like the brochure promised. Beau climbed down slow. He found the sharpened stake still driven in the mud from his first trap. He worked it free. Then he waited until both gators dragged the last of the carcass into the shallows and thrashed there, tearing it apart between them. When the shore stood empty of the dead giant, Beau moved. He shoveled the bloody mud into the water with the flat of the stake, then dragged wet sand over the dark stains. He worked fast, one eye on the feeding beasts. His arms burned. Sweat ran into his eyes. He did not stop until the bank looked like clean ground again. By midday the two gators slid back under the water, bellies full, the last scraps gone. No blood remained to call the next one. Beau stood alone on a quiet shore. He walked to the pod and knocked twice, then spoke his name. The hatch cracked. His youngest peered out at the empty bank and the smooth water. Beau counted his rounds one final time. Twenty-eight. Not enough to fight a war. But he had learned the real lesson. He could not shoot his way to safety on this land. Every kill fed the next hunter. To build here, he would have to stop leaving blood behind. He picked up the stake and started planning a fence.

The fence could wait one more day. Beau needed wood, and the ridge above the pod held a stand of dead trees. He kissed his wife, checked his rounds, and climbed. He told himself he would be back before dark. He walked the high ground, ax on his shoulder, watching the water for wakes. Halfway up the slope, the air changed. It pulled at his skin like a draft from an open door. Beau stopped. Ahead stood a tall crack in the world. Its edges were broken stone, carved with worn marks he did not know. Between the two halves hung pure black, and small chips of rock floated inside it, drifting up instead of down. A green glow lined every jagged seam. Beau had never seen anything like it. He did not trust it. He circled it once, keeping his distance. Nothing came out. Nothing moved but the floating stones. He should have turned back. But the marks on the stone looked man-made, and he wanted to know who had cut them. He reached out one hand and touched the cold edge. The ground dropped away. Light tore past him. His stomach lurched like a fall down a well. Then his boots hit dirt, and he was standing somewhere else entirely. The ridge was gone. So was the water, the pod, his family. Beau turned in a slow circle. The land ran flat and dry to every horizon, one endless plain with no coast at all. Strange plants grew in rows too straight to be wild. A sun sat wrong in the sky, larger and paler than the one he knew. Then he saw them. Figures crossed the plain toward him. They walked upright like men, but taller, with long limbs and pale gray skin. Their eyes were wide and black. They wore no clothes he recognized, only smooth suits that clung like a second skin. One raised a hand and made sounds that were not words. Beau's chest went tight. These were people, or what people had become. The stone gate had not moved him across the land. It had thrown him forward through time, past everything he knew. The rows of plants, the joined land, the changed sun. Ages had passed in a single step. His family sat alone on that dangerous shore, waiting for his voice at the hatch. And they were not just far away now. They were long dead, buried under a million years of dirt. The thought hit him harder than any beast on the bank. Beau did not raise his ax. He did not run. He looked back the way he had come and saw the broken gate standing behind him, still glowing green. It had brought him here. It could take him back. He turned from the tall gray figures and walked straight for the crack in the world. His family was waiting. He would not leave them buried in the past.