Crocodile -2000- -

But somewhere, in a timeline that would never exist, a team of scientists stared at a blank screen and whispered: “What happened to Unit 7?”

He did not think attack . He simply moved.

The man saw K’tharr. His eyes went wide. “Alpha point located,” he said into a bead on his wrist. “Releasing temporal suppressant. Target: prehistoric Crocodylus niloticus . ETA to extinction: two thousand years.”

He dragged the man under the dark water. The silver disc on the man’s wrist blinked. ERROR. Temporal anchor lost. Paradox imminent. crocodile -2000-

Year: 2000 BC. Location: The lush, unnamed delta of a river that will one day be called the Nile.

K’tharr understood one thing. This thing was in his river. And it was trying to make the world go quiet.

He was not a guardian of history. He was not a hero. He was just a crocodile, doing what crocodiles do. But somewhere, in a timeline that would never

He settled back onto his mudbank, the one he had guarded for two thousand years before this moment. He closed his bad eye.

K’tharr did not understand the words. But he understood the smell. The man’s stick hissed, and a grey fog rolled across the water. Where it touched, tadpoles froze mid-wiggle. Lily pads turned to dust. A fish floated to the surface, not dead, but unborn .

K’tharr rose from the river an hour later, mud dripping from his snout. The fog was gone. The tadpoles wiggled. The fish swam. And in his ancient, aching gut, he felt something new: a small, hard knot of wrongness. A piece of the future, digesting. His eyes went wide

K’tharr’s jaws, strong enough to crush a turtle’s shell, strong enough to hold a drowning ox, closed around the man’s middle. The white suit cracked. The clear helmet shattered. The stick flew into the water, hissing impotently.

The answer lay in the Nile, sleeping in the sun, with a taste of chrome on his tongue and all the time in the world.

The disc spat out a man. Not a reed-man or a mud-man. This one wore a smooth, white skin over his body and a clear shell over his face. He carried a stick that sparked.

The fog reached K’tharr’s tail. A cold, wrong feeling shot up his spine. It wasn't pain. It was erasure. He felt his memories—the taste of a wildebeest calf, the heat of a sun from a thousand summers—flicker and die.