Chapter 10

Miranda closed her eyes for a moment, letting the warm breeze caress her darkly tanned skin as she lay in the sun on the top of a rocky cliff. A dozen spots dotted the back of her eyelids where the bright sunshine had invaded and overloaded her peripheral vision.

High overhead, birds were circling, their bright feathers reflecting the sunlight as they turned and soared in the thermals. Murielle smiled as she watched, pleased to realize that even in this savage, primal world, there was pleasure to be had. Another shape, larger and lower, swooped by, startling her back to reality, however. This flying creature had evidently noticed two delicious little morsels lying on the edge of a cliff (Namely, us!) and had come to investigate.

"We're gonna haf'ta move, soon," she murmured, barely loud enough for Miranda to hear.

Miranda was listening, hoping to hear a call or a cry from ... Well, she wasn't sure what it might sound like and it had been weeks since that... thing... had hatched from her egg (I still can't believe I laid an egg) and then had simply flown away after following her around for several days. It was still her offspring, though, and it made her uneasy that there had never been any mental connection between them.

She turned her head and opened her eyes at Murielle's words. Low on the horizon behind her twin, a small flying creature was circling around, evidently having made the decision that she and her twin looked edible.

As the dinosaur bird approached, it began to look larger. Miranda guessed that the creature's wingspan was several meters wide, larger than she'd originally estimated when it was farther away.

"I get so tired of continuously moving so we don't get targeted for dinner," she scowled, squinting into the sunshine that partially occluded the diving monster. Raising one hand, she sent a bolt of Phoenix fire to explode right in front of the creature's face.

It squawked in terror and turned away, its terror so intense it nearly rammed its face into the ground with its aerobatics. Miranda lay back down and tried to relax back into her sunbathing. Her mood was ruined, though, and after a few minutes, she sat up again.

"Why are we here?" she asked for probably the thousandth time. "I was very comfortably dead and now I'm here. We – you and me – we can't have children, at least not in the traditional sense. We don't really expect that we're gonna wait around until humans evolve again, do we? I mean, that's gonna be a loooong time, yet. A lot longer than we've been stuck here..."

Murielle groaned almost silently at her sister's question and mentally tuned her out. She could hear her twin's voice, but not was she was saying. By now, she knew that whenever Mira got depressed, which was happening more often, now, she started espewing on the purpose of life and why things were the way they were and what was her involvement in it all.

"I dunno," Murielle murmured, almost to herself. "Why don't you ask the Praetor?" She made that suggestion at least a hundred times, hoping to turn off her sister's prattling. The first few times, it had worked. Mira had stopped talking and begun to explore a different thought process. But now, they both knew the Praetor wasn't going to answer them. If it was still here and functioning, it was completely ignoring them.

"I'll bet it's still recording everything that happens to us, though," Miranda suggested, having followed her sister's thoughts. "I wonder what kind of 'special project' we are to it? You know, it's a completely alien life form – all metal and no meat – and it's studying us, just to see what we'll do, ya know?"

"Studying us to see what we'll do when that hits?" Murielle growled, indicating a bright streak of light easily visible and hanging low in the daytime sky. "What makes you think that even a Praetor can survive 'the end of the world as we know it'?"

"At least it won't be bored," Miranda whined, unable to take her eyes off the comet. "Humph! The very first comet I see, and it's gonna be the one that kills us."

"Nobody said we're gonna die," Murielle countered. "Life doesn't end when this happens."

"Most life did, if you recall all those Tri-D programs we watched when we were kids," Miranda argued. "It was dark for years – no sunlight, no plant growth – and there was barely enough air left to support small rodents. The rest of it was blown out into space. In case you haven't noticed, Phoenix fire requires air before you can ignite it, and we're made of Phoenix fire! We're gonna suffocate and freeze!"

Murielle didn't reply. The pair of them had been through this before and, the truth was, she didn't expect both of them to live for seventy-five or eighty million years until people evolved, either. The difference between them was, however, that Miranda was obsessed with their impending deaths, and Murielle was just curious enough to wait around and see what happened next.