For thirty million years the planet had cooled and dried, until, in the north, ice sheets gouged at the continents. The belt of forest that had once stretched across Africa and Eurasia, nearly continuous from the Atlantic coast to the Far East, had broken into dwindling pockets. The creatures who had once inhabited that timeless green had been forced to adapt, or move.
Seeker’s kind had done both.
Her infant clinging to her chest, Seeker crouched in the shadows at the fringe of the scrap of forest. Her deep eyes, under their bony hood of brow, peered out into brightness. The land beyond the forest was a plain, drenched in light and heat. It was a place of terrible simplicity, where death came swiftly. But it was a place of opportunity. This place would one day be the border country between Pakistan and Afghanistan, called by some the North–West Frontier.
Today, not far from the ragged fringe of the forest, an antelope carcass lay on the ground. The animal was not long dead—its wounds still oozed sticky blood—but the lions had already eaten their fill, and the other scavengers of the plain, the hyenas and the birds, had yet to discover it.
Seeker stood upright, unfolding her long legs, and peered around.
