Found In Translation

[hat_writes_stuff]

Title: Found In Translation
Author: Almighty Hat
Fandom: Jurassic World (Harry Potter fusion)
Characters: Owen Grady, Barry, Blue and the Raptor Squad, Claire Dearing, the Indominus Rex, Zach Mitchell, Gray Mitchell, Lowery Cruthers, sundry background canon characters and OCs
Word Count: 37,391
Rating: PG-13 for violence, language, and references to animal abuse/neglect
Pairing(s): Owen/Claire (but definitely not the focus)
Warnings: Canon-Typical violence (both canons), Canonical human and animal death, lots of mook death, canon-typical animal welfare issues

Author's Notes: The original prompt can be found here, as can the original, more serialized posting of this fic. ... I figured with the new movie coming out this month, I should probably actually get this sucker posted. It's already an AU, and you can't Joss an AU.

Summary: Owen Grady speaks Raptor, but it's a language he learned through immersion, the same way his girls learned English. Owen Grady also speaks Parseltongue, but that's because he's a wizard with a bonus gift. It doesn't change a lot about his work, until it really, really changes a lot about his work.

---

Owen Grady speaks Raptor as a second language.

It is, seriously, a distinct if slightly primitive language all its own, and Owen is confident he’d understand it even if there weren’t whispers of Parseltongue underneath it, guiding him along. Well, of course he’s confident. Barry spends as much time with the girls as Owen does, and Barry can interpret all those snarls and honks and hisses just as easily as Owen can-- just, Barry translates them to French first, then English.

The Parseltongue helps, though. It connects concepts and provides context, and makes life a lot easier for Owen, really. He’s tried, futilely, to teach Barry to hear it simply because it’s so helpful, but there’s normal language and then there’s a magic sense. He literally can’t teach Barry Parseltongue, although Barry’s got eyes and ears of his own and fairly quickly starts pointing out contextual cues Owen didn’t notice.

So, really, Parseltongue only tells Owen when koh! means come here and when it means where are you? (if he were translating directly, it would be hey! with all its tonal and contextual variations), and when the screech is a bluff and when it’s a legitimate threat display. Purring is always a stress reaction, but snarling is a thoughtful sound. Hissing usually means back off, and sometimes means back off, but I might eat you anyway, unless it’s coming from Delta. Delta just seems to like to hiss, and Owen blames her extra dose of avian DNA. He’s not sure why, but he does.

It’s much more help in getting his meaning across to them, but he’s still never going to have full control over the raptors. They’re wild animals. Sure, if they were snakes and he were a dickhole, it would be possible to exert full control over them, but Owen spent a lot of his childhood down on his belly or up in trees, talking to wild snakes, telling garter snakes where to find cricket infestations and convincing rattlesnakes not to bite, they’re just passing through and didn’t mean to disturb anything. The idea of twisting his gift like that (and polite wizarding society can suck it, it’s a gift and he’ll punch anyone who says otherwise) turns his stomach.

Besides, the girls have lizard DNA, not snake. Owen would be in the same boat as Barry if iguanas and monitors weren’t fairly close genetic relatives to snakes, and Velociraptors weren’t so naturally intelligent.

As it stands, he learned Raptor from Blue, and she’s learned Parseltongue from him, English from him and Barry, and helped them both teach her sisters. It all gets put to its first real test one day after Christmas, during one of the park’s peak attendance periods. (Summer is swamped, and so are spring break and Christmas vacation, and Owen is always glad he’s a behaviorist specializing in the one of the few species Jurassic World doesn’t exhibit.)

A pig gets loose.

Echo steals the pig and that newbie with the stupid beanie falls in and suddenly everyone who isn’t Echo (Echo has a pig, Echo is busy) is very attentive. It’s not like one rat each for successfully listening to Owen is enough of a meal to make any of them sluggish and lazy-- they’re still all wound up from the pig chase in the first place. And now there’s fresh meat in the paddock.

“Hey!” Blue says, and it’s curious, ‘look at that!’ and Delta hisses a hiss that doesn’t seem to mean anything besides ‘yep, I’m Delta and I hiss a lot.’

“What have we here?” says Blue’s rattle, standing over the kid.

“Run! Run away!” Delta shrieks. She either wants the kid gone, or she wants him to run and entertain her by being prey, and she doesn’t care which.

But now they’ve got Charlie’s attention (Charlie’s borderline docile, but she idolizes Blue-- if Blue wants to do a thing, Charlie wants to help), and they’re stalking the idiot kid, who’s slowly scrambling away from them.

Owen opens the gate, no matter what Barry yells. Owen’s been a parent-figure to those girls from the moment they hatched, and what’s more, he can still hear Blue’s stream-of-consciousness snarling. “Can’t decide if food.”

Worse than that, he can hear Asset Containment on the catwalk. “No, no-- Hold your fire! Hold your fire, do not fire, if you put twelve amps in these animals,” animals, animals, why does he always have to remind people these are goddamned living thinking feeling animals-- “they’re never gonna trust me again.”

And he’s in front of them, sort of in front of them and sort of surrounded by them, hands out in ‘Stay.’ Blue hisses “Interruption!” at him, less angry than resentful.

That kid better be through the gate.

“Blue,” he says, “Stand down.” She ignores him, so he switches languages, hissing, “Stand down.” Sometimes she takes Parseltongue better than English.

Instead she snaps-- her jaws close two feet from his hand, though. She’s annoyed that he stopped their fun, she wants him to know she’s annoyed, but she’s not actually trying to hurt him.

Snapping at him is still misbehavior. “Hey, hey!” and all Blue’s life he’s answered koh with hey, so she damn well knows it’s a call for attention. “What did I just say?”

Delta creeps around to his left, hissing to hiss, then screeling “Run,” because she’s still wound up from the pig chase. She still wants to chase something, and if Owen will run, he’ll do.

“Delta,” he warns, and damn, but Barry’s better with Delta, she’s just birdy enough that she’s difficult for Owen, but birds react to Barry like he’s a goddamn Disney princess. “I see you. Back up.”

She just tells him to run again. And Delta’s gotten to Blue, who crouches, and Charlie’s willing to follow the leader-- seriously, she’s on his right, asking her big sisters “What?” quite cheerfully.

“Wrestling,” Blue decides, and that’s when Owen tells Barry to close the gate. He keeps the girls at bay as long as he can with hands and voice, but then he’s pulling an Indiana Jones and sliding under the gate at the last possible moment.

The girls hiss disappointment-- “Got away!” in disappointed tones and “Tricky!” half-appreciatively-- and Delta just hisses, because she’s Delta.

Owen ribs the kid, and makes a mental note to ask later if he’s a wizard passing, too. After a thirty-foot fall like that, he should’ve been a sack of haggis, but nope, Beanie Kid is on his feet and walking with the barest possible limp.

But Owen’s got Hoskins to deal with, and he’s not dense enough to discuss any kind of sensitive information in front of Hoskins, including magic. Jurassic World is surprisingly low on magic, really.

Hoskins has his blinders on, as usual, only it’s worse today because he hasn’t seen Owen interact with the girls one-on-one since they were hatchlings. Hoskins got to see not only nobody getting eaten, but nobody seriously injured (and for a moment, Owen is mad at the new guy for not breaking a leg or something), and the raptors appearing to obey Owen. He’s somehow missed that they wanted to play Chase Me with Owen, and that it was only three of the four girls-- Blue might be top dog, but Echo is actually the meanest of the four (not that Hoskins will ever be willing to understand that Blue’s cool head helps her keep her position). This will probably be the hill Owen dies on, someday, Hoskins and his stupid, stupid self-inflicted mission to find some kind of military application for raptors-- he could probably sell the idea to Hollywood, but not Washington-- but Owen is just not up for the full version of the argument today, and extricates himself from Hoskins and his oily presence as quickly as he can.

But his day of unwelcome visitors isn’t over yet.

Claire Dearing has to be a witch passing, or maybe her dry cleaner is. White just doesn’t stay that clean and crisp in any theme park, and Claire’s standing in his yard in heels that aren’t collecting grass stains. Still, they failed to hit it off in a spectacular fashion, and she’s one of the people who seems to forget the ‘living, thinking, feeling animals’ thing despite living on a tropical island full of dinosaurs, so Owen tries to shoo her away, too. (And, okay, maybe his attempt at subtly getting rid of Claire looks a lot like his best douchebag impression. Maybe it’s not really fun remembering that under Claire Dearing’s elegant, controlled exterior lurks an elegant, controlled interior, that Claire doesn’t need or want him to show her how to let her hair down and loosen up.)

She’d probably go, but she’s there on Masrani’s orders, to get him to go look at a new exhibit. Evaluate its security.

So he goes.

And he gets a bad feeling just approaching the enclosure.

The walls are high, but the paddock is only maybe three times as wide as it is tall. He thinks it’s smaller than the raptor paddock, but he’s only eyeballing. Claire describes the animal inside and Owen’s heart sinks. A hybridized predator, bigger than the T-Rex, in an enclosure that might serve as a den, but can’t serve as everything to a fifty-foot-long animal. Predators need room to run, to roam, and to hide, and Owen is absolutely positive that Paddock Eleven, the Shiny New Hybrid enclosure, is smaller than Paddock Nine, where Rexie lives. (Rexie’s paddock is snugger than Owen would like, but when he checks on her, she seems like a retiree who downsized from a big house to a single apartment or retirement home-- wistful, but relieved with what she has to manage now.)

She’s had no contact with humans, ate her sibling-- which actually is not automatically a bad sign, but it’s not a good one, either-- and has, from what Owen can see, nothing to do, nothing to play with-- “The only positive relationship this animal has is with that crane. At least she knows that means ‘food.’”

And although Owen feels like he’s being watched, although Claire’s got that crane trying to bait it out with an early lunch, they still haven’t seen the ridiculously-named Indominus Rex.

If he could look at her, look in her eyes, hear her-- the dinosaurs have had the gaps in their DNA patched with mostly reptile, these days, the science guys having learned from the frog mistake, and the marketing guys insisting bald, inaccurate dinosaurs will sell better. This is annoying for paleontologists, but great for Owen; he can usually suss out if a Jurassic World dinosaur is actually okay or not as long as they’ve got a touch of something cold-blooded somewhere in their DNA. It’s never the clear conversation of actual snakes, but it’s just enough to help him point people in the right direction (sometimes, just in a less-stupid direction). He needs to see the Indominus, so he’s peering into corners, making jokes, while Claire and the monitor guy are freaking out over heat signatures (maybe she died. Animals sometimes just pine and die, and the Indominus doesn’t have a goddamn handler. Who’d know if she were fading?) when he spots something… alarming.

“Were those claw marks always there?”

Claire runs for the control room, for access to the Indominus’s tracking implant, and Owen heads down into the paddock with Nick (monitor guy) and Ellis (construction guy). He can’t quite shake the feeling he’s being watched, but there’s no heat signature and the Indominus Rex is supposed to be bone-white-- if she were in her enclosure, they’d see her.

“You really think she climbed that wall?” Nick asks.

And if she were only a T-rex made white, Owen would say no. “Depends.” His girls can jump two or three times their body height, but there’s some square-cube law involved in how great a fall an animal can take.

“On what?”

“What kind of dinosaur they cooked up in that lab.” Although somebody would probably have noticed a giant white theropod climbing down the other side. Most of the staff doesn’t seem to get that ‘made in a lab’ doesn’t mean ‘programmed like a computer,’ but the paddock has construction crews crawling all over outside.

She’s probably just dead.

Nick’s radio crackles to life, but inside the paddock, reception is truly crappy. They struggle to understand what the control room is telling them for a moment, but then three little words come through with pants-shitting clarity-- “Still in there!”

Ellis bolts for the door and Owen follows-- he assumes Nick does, too, but Nick falls from his mind when the Indominus steps out into their path.

She’s huge. Owen doesn’t spend a lot of time around the bigger predators, but she is definitely bigger than Rexie. She bellows, and Owen hears “Run for the door!” and doesn’t question it-- he runs for the door, and behind him, Ellis screams. Make for the trees is Owen’s easily-followed monkey-thought, and he threads his way through a green patch, off the path, the Indominus chasing him and having to go slower.

She can’t reach her top speed in the tiny paddock. She can’t quite get together enough force to uproot the trees. He hasn’t bought himself a lot of time, but by the time Owen sees Nick slip through the opening paddock gate-- gate, not door, the access gate in case they have to move the Indominus for veterinary care-- there’s enough space between him and the rampaging theropod that he dashes back onto the path-- he can make it.

Then the door starts closing and Owen starts swearing. Someone is still yelling “Run!” and oh yes, Owen is running. He’s done this once already today, running towards a closing gate, running away from a toothy predator who’d like to take a chunk out of him for not being entertaining enough.

With less clearance. The closing door doesn’t so much as brush his shoulder as he dashes out, skids on the gravel, and scrambles under a truck. The Indominus moans, a pained sound, but her footsteps crunch the gravel-- the gate must’ve caught her, but she muscled through anyway.

The truck is not good cover.

But it’s better cover than what Nick has, sitting in front of a truck-- behind, from the Indominus’s viewpoint-- quivering. Owen shifts around to see Nick, timing his movements to match the Indominus’s footsteps, hiding his little skittery gravel-crunches inside those thuds.

The Indominus prowls around the far side of Nick’s truck, slow and… Owen can’t tell, just seeing feet and the odd glimpse of tail (and her tail is lean, he can see the muscles in it-- he can’t help noting that it should be fatter, rounder, that she‘s either dehydrated or malnourished), whether she’s being cautious or just curious. She’s got a good sense of smell, he knows Nick is a goner unless he can fit under that truck quietly--

Nick is a goner. The Indominus is strong enough and either has a thick enough hide or just doesn’t care about pain that she bowls the truck aside, and Owen looks back from the spray of glass and gravel just in time to see Nick scooped up in that white maw.

He flips onto his back, only vaguely concerned with the sound.

Owen’s wand is in a leg sheath, but it’s not the right tool for the job, and his knife is always at his back-- he guts the truck. From the smell he’s cut a fuel line, but he would’ve taken brake fluid, oil, raw sewage, anything strong enough to mask the smell of meat and fear. He lays as still as he can, pretending to be nothing, not a mouthful of meat, not an invader in her territory.

Her snout comes into view again, and he only looks at her uncomfortably-jutting teeth for a moment before closing his eyes. She snarls, then lets out a half-roar-- she sounds like a T-Rex, but it’s not a dominance cry or a territorial roar. She’s trying to flush him out.

His girls do the same thing. He’s not going to fall for a trick he saw Blue play on songbirds when she weighed all of five pounds.

If she eats him, Barry had better take care of his girls.

But the scent-mask is enough. The Indominus moves off.

Owen gives her plenty of time to get where she’s going before slithering out from under the truck.

She’s Asset Control’s problem now, he thinks, and doesn’t quite believe it. I’m done having the Day from Hell.

He’s not. He’s really not, because he goes back to the control room, mostly to let people know he’s not dead (which seems important for his paycheck, he tells himself) and to arrange a chance to yell at the lab guys, and he sees the Asset Control Unit go up against the Indominus with non-lethal weaponry first. They’re still trying to subdue it, and the control room watches a lot of people die because a twenty-six million dollar animal was worth more to Masrani than saying ‘shoot to kill, we’ll grow another one.’ An evacuation compromise is reached, but the Indominus, smart enough to tear out her tracking implant (Owen does not believe she knows what it is. That’s too terrifying to be real, so he doesn’t believe it. He is willing to believe she ripped it out because it irritated her somehow), is heading toward the Gyrosphere valley, and that’s where Claire’s nephews are.

Claire begs for his help, and with everything north of the resort closed, it can’t be that hard to find a couple of kids (of indeterminate but high-school-ish age, what the hell, Claire) who’ve decided to make their own tour route in a rogue human-sized hamster ball. Dangerous, now, dangerous is another story, but somebody’s got to retrieve those kids, and better the guy who can (hopefully) Stupefy the Indominus and Obliviate a limited number of witnesses later than sending another ACU team to get slaughtered.

The day gets longer and more hellish. Dead and dying Apatosaurs, and Owen can’t, just can’t, leave the dying one until she’s gone. (“Didn’t eat,” she murmurs as she goes, bewildered and in pain. The Indominus Rex is killing just to kill, not to feed herself.) Masrani dies. Pterosaurs get everywhere. The Mosasaurus puts on an unscheduled show to get at the Pterosaurs. A Dimorphodon nearly getting the better of Owen, only to be smacked clean off him and shot four times by Claire. (The random, probably ill-advised kiss, in a brief moment when he thought they might someday have the chance to talk about anything besides dinosaurs. Claire’s still attractive, even if they don’t have much to offer each other.) And then a frantic warning from Lowery.

Hoskins is going to use the Raptors to hunt down the Indominus, and there’s literally nothing Owen can do to stop him. The best he can do is insert himself into the hunt-- “If we’re doing this, we’re doing it my way.” He plays the part of alpha male for InGen’s black-clad private security guys (mercenaries, guys who left the military because they wanted to hurt people and break things for more money than Uncle Sam was giving them, or who got invited to leave because they hurt more people and broke more things than Uncle Sam was willing to tolerate), but he knows this isn’t going to be expert search-and-rescue dogs obeying their handler. It’s going to get bloody and the best he can hope for is that the Indominus doesn’t kill all of them.

“Do not shoot my raptors. Please.”

He long ago charmed his motorcycle and Barry’s ATV not to spook animals, as well as surreptitiously doing the same to every veterinary vehicle he knows about, but Owen doesn’t have the opportunity (or, if he’s honest, the inclination) to do the same to InGen’s paramilitary transports. The girls submit to wearing their camera bridles with… moderate and varied grace, Owen whispering Parseltongue reassurances all the while. “We’re going hunting, these come off afterwards, it’s okay, my good girls.”

They get the scent, and the kid from earlier, the one who should be a leather sack of broken bones, hits the release.

Riding with them is glorious. Owen loves it, he never wants to stop, he wants to shoot Hoskins because the experience is tainted.

The girls slow, eventually, then stop, staring up into the bamboo forest. The Indominus Rex slips out of her hiding spot, then out of her camouflage, as the raptors stare up at her, purring “Back up,” warning the Indominus out of their personal space.

The Indominus barks, a short, hoarse noise, like she’s new to the idea of making noises that aren’t snarls or bellowing roars.

Owen sucks in a breath, because he hears the Indominus say, “What?”

“Koh!” Blue cries, hey-hello! like an English-speaking tourist trying to make herself understood by shouting. She throws her head back to do it, exposing her throat incidentally-- the posture is almost exaggerated.

The Indominus copies her, copies the posture as best she can, agile neck arcing up even with her body lowered. She barks something almost like the koh-cry. “Hey-hello?”

Blue demonstrates again, twice in quick succession, and Owen realizes this isn’t tourist-talk, this isn’t YOU HABLARE INGLESS? This is baby-talk.

And more importantly, Owen understands the Indominus Rex better than he understands his own pack.

Charlie screels, but she’s impressed-- and confused. She looks to Blue. Echo burbles the quick little noise that means she found something interesting. The Indominus imitates everything she can.

Barry murmurs, “Something’s wrong. They’re communicating.”

“Yeah, they are,” Owen agrees, but he carefully pulls out his own earpiece and drops it. This is why they wouldn’t publicize what the Indominus is made of-- every report to come out of Jurassic Park pretty much demonized the Velociraptors, made them out to be the Big Bad Wolf of the island (it’s why they could spare Rexie, the triumphant old bear). The public thinks Velociraptors are ruthless, hyper-intelligent killers, and the public is not actually misinformed. Using Velociraptor DNA in a tourist-draw like the Indominus wouldn’t be suicide for the attraction, it’d be a stillbirth-- which is why anything beyond her ‘base genome’ is ‘classified.’ The Indominus Rex is raptor enough to talk to the pack.

Luckily, she’s also serpent enough for Owen to talk to her.

The raptors reach a conclusion, or at least a point in their conversation where they want his input, and the girls swivel as one to look at him. So does the Indominus.

Owen stands up, leaving his gun behind. He doesn’t hear Hoskins making orders, but he hears one of his men bite, “Belay that, hold your positions.”

“Hey big girl,” Owen hisses, moving forward, and he knows facing the way he is, no other human can catch it. They just see him walking, unarmed and non-threatening, toward the big white monster. “What’re you up to?”

The Indominus tips her head, then leans forward. There’s a telltale clatter of guns shifting behind Owen, but he’s paying more attention to the Indominus. “Know your scent. From the false egg. You ran out the door.”

“Well, you scared me. I didn’t realize we could talk.” There’s something off about the way she speaks, and Owen can’t tell if it’s because she’s not actually a snake, or if it’s something else.

“Nothing has. Last one, sister.”

“What happened to your sister?” He knows-- Claire’s voice in his memory says ‘she ate it,’ but he wants--

“Fought her,” the Indominus tells him, “Stopped her. Then she was gone.”

“I’m sorry,” he offers, and the Indominus drops to all fours, looking closely at him. Charlie slips between them-- butting Owen’s chest, making the Indominus huff. “Charlie,” Owen scolds, in English.

The Indominus makes an inquisitive sound that’s pure raptor, so he tells her, “Names for my mammal-language. Charlie, Delta, Echo, Blue. They know the sounds so they know who I’m talking to.”

“Names…” She trails off, and then into a thoughtful snarl.

Behind Owen, Barry says, “Distracting him!” but it sounds like part of a longer sentence.

“What do you want, big girl?” he asks her, soothing and gentle.

“To stay hatched from the false egg,” she says. “Harder than the first egg. Hungry, angry, tired, hurt--” It starts as fairly-intelligible snake, but by the end, she’s slipping back into raptor-chatter, sort of-- they’re low rumbles, at her size, but they’re also the distressed peeps of a hatchling seeking comfort.

Blue chirps at her, the way she chirped at Charlie when Charlie was as much a baby as the baby.

“You killed, but didn’t eat it,” Owen says. “Why?”

“What?”

“Goddamn,” he mutters.

“Mister Grady,” one of the InGen mercenaries says, as quietly as he can while pitching his voice to carry. “Situation?”

“Hold,” he tells the raptors, then hisses, “Stay. I need to do a human thing,” at the puzzled Indominus, who chirps assent, for all her size makes it sound like a hoot. Slowly, slowly, he turns his back to her. Charlie’s at his side, turned to face the Indominus, back very trustingly toward all the men with guns. Owen appreciates the gesture. “I think Blue wants to adopt her.”

All around him, there’s conversation. Blue explaining, “Egg-parent, not-same, not us but ours. Yours maybe. We’ll see,” behind him, Barry cursing in French, and a murmur of terror and wonder from the mercenaries.

“Can you control it?” the commander says, and Owen just about bites his tongue off.

“I like you girls better than most of my species,” he sighs, and Charlie preens, but he continues, “I think I can get her to follow me and the girls back to the raptor paddock. I think I can convince her to stay there if there’s food, so somebody needs to go get a couple dead cows. But!” Because they’re already starting to talk into various earpieces and headsets. “Seriously, ‘I think I can’ is all I’m going to promise you.”

Things happen, but Owen turns back to the dinosaurs. Delta and Echo, suspicious, keep an eye on everything, the Indominus, the mercenaries, Owen himself. Blue keeps chirping soothingly at the Indominus, and Charlie sticks next to Blue. Trucks are moving, people making pathways, and Owen joins in with Blue-- although he’s not chirping, he’s just talking. Well. Hissing. “I want you to follow us back to the girls’ den. It’s the wrong size for you to fit inside, but you’ll be safe and fed at the door. Will you do that?”

“Hungry,” is her answer, and, “Tired. Angry-tired.”

“It won’t take too long,” he promises. The last thing he needs is a cranky super-dinosaur losing control.

“Owen!” But it’s Barry, cautiously, and not quite coming toward them. All the raptor heads swivel to focus on him-- as do their cameras.

Owen taps his ear, then holds up one finger, then orders, “Eyes on me!” and the girls swivel back to him. “Good. Good girls.”

Barry isn’t stupid, and follows the pantomimed instructions. Take out your earpiece, but wait first. He doesn’t need a filmed record of Barry chucking his earpiece on Owen’s signal, and everything the raptors see, they’re seeing in the control room. Without the earpiece, there’s no sound-- and you can’t lip-read Parseltongue. … Well, maybe another Parselmouth could, but that’s the longest of long shots. “Girls, you know Barry. Remember Barry?” Delta slips from the pack just far enough to welcome Barry into their little (well, not so little, Indominus) knot. “Yeah, yeah, he’s your favorite, I know. I’m not jealous.”

“Fear-stink,” the Indominus says, looking down on Barry, and Echo snarls thoughtfully.

“Scary-big,” she concludes. “These things, blunt claws.” And having only blunt claws is a perfectly good reason to be scared shitless of the Indominus, if Owen’s honest.

“He’s a friend,” Owen tells the Indominus. “This is Barry.” His name spoken normally, so she’d know it if she heard it again. “Please don’t hurt him. I need his help to help you.” The Indominus snuffles, but there’s assent in it.

“They don’t listen to you like she does,” Barry observes, cautiously offering Delta his hand. She sniffs at it, huffs, and positions herself so he can stroke her head while she watches the mercenaries.

“You remember the snake thing?” and Barry nods.

“Your gift.”

“She’s snakier than they are. I should’ve realized it before.” When he found her teeth in the Gyrosphere. Those things are huge-- the Indominus’s head isn’t that much bigger than Rexie’s, and Rexie definitely can’t unhinge her jaw far enough to get a grip on a Gyrosphere, much less lose a tooth in it.

“You think she’ll obey you better?”

“She just understands me better. Obedience is up to her-- but she’s tired, and hungry, and hurting, and confused. With the girls helping, I think we can get her back to their paddock, get her fed, let her sleep, and then… honestly I don’t know what.” The resort is evacuated, the island will be evacuated by morning, it’s not like there’s a construction crew nearby to build an Indominus-proof fence around the raptor paddock overnight.

Barry looks up at the Indominus, who looks down at him. There’s a moment, but then Barry says to her, “Ah, chère,” and looks back to Owen. “What do you need?”

… And what does he need?

“… I need you to go ahead of us,” Owen said. “I need you to get to Claire, because she’s got access to the labs. I need everything about what went into this animal, genetics, discipline, every husbandry decision and who made it and why, every report you can get your hands on. … Also, if you can manage to find, like, a cheeseburger? I could kiss you.”

“You’re not my type,” Barry says, with half a smile. But he doesn’t leave-- instead he turns thoughtful. “I have a bad feeling, and I want to ask you a stupid question.”

“Go ahead?”

“I want to take Delta with me.”

“… That’s… not a question, and it’s more crazy than stupid,” Owen tells him. “She’s probably safe around you, but there’s Claire, and she’s got her nephews with her.”

“Can you… tell her, maybe? I’m pushing, I know…”

“Delta understands me the least…” But he could try. And he could ask for help. “Delta. Blue. Eyes on me. Delta. Go with Barry. Listen to him, but keep him safe. He’ll go to a woman with two kids, her nephews. They need to be safe, too. Blue, help Delta understand?”

The raptors squabble a bit, friendly-nipping and almost quacking back and forth. Owen picks out, “Safe-protect,” and “female,” and “hatchlings,” and “wary.”

Above, the Indominus hisses. “Blue says, Barry goes into danger. Listen to and keep him safe. Female thing-like-you with her sister-hatchlings, also keep them safe. Stay wary, Delta-sister.”

“Aren’t you a clever girl? Thank you,” he tells her, then looks back to Delta, “Agreed? Okay?”

Delta, predictably, hisses incomprehensibly at Owen-- but then butts against Barry’s elbow. “And we’re moving,” Barry announces, but beckons Delta back to his ATV. Delta doesn’t follow Barry-- she keeps pace with him. Owen knows she doesn’t really see any human as an equal, but he’s always relieved when she treats Barry like one.

“Where are they going?” one of the mercenaries asks, on guard.

“Delta likes Barry best, and she was getting hissy. He’s gonna take her for a run, I think.”

“No trust for things-like-you?” the Indominus asks, curious. She’s not picking up on English-- she can’t be, although maybe someday, some of it-- so she must be getting cues from scent, or maybe she’s just seen enough wary body language to have him pegged.

“Some of them. Not all. … Not even most. These men, no, but if they panic, they might hurt or kill me and the girls.” There’s the barest start of a growl at hearing that, but Owen shakes his head at the Indominus. “Hey. We stay calm, they stay calm. They think I can make you do what I say.”

“Stupid,” she mutters, dipping down to let Charlie nose at her.

“Very stupid. But I want to let them think that a little until you have food and sleep and den. Okay?”

“… Tired,” the Indominus agrees. “Hungry.”

“Wait,” Blue chirps at her. “Wait for signal, good girl.”

And Owen can’t help but smile. Blue’s trying to train the Indominus like Owen trained Blue.

“Any word on getting food back to the paddock?” he calls.

“Truck’s on its way. The staff’s been evacuated to the docks, except one guy in the control room. Took a while to get some of our guys to the meat locker.”

So they wait, and there is, after a few more minutes, a signal to move out. “Heads up,” Owen says. “This is new for the Indominus; she’s following Blue’s lead. Blue thinks the Indominus is an oversized baby, so if you panic and shoot at the Indominus, you’re going to piss off Blue, and me, and you’ll be lucky if I get a chance to shoot you before Blue decides to kill you for upsetting her enormous chick.” He swings a leg over his motorcycle and fires up the engine. The raptors fall into formation, and the Indominus follows, prompted by chirps from Blue. “Give the ladies some space.” Rolling forward, Owen calls back to his pack, “And we’re moving!” and they follow-- minus Delta, who is hopefully behaving herself with Barry.

She behaves pretty well for Barry, but that’s for Barry, and there’s Claire, Zach, and Gray to consider. (Owen doesn’t think she’ll go out of her way to hurt the kids, but he also doesn’t know whether Delta considers ‘missing a couple fingers for touching me uninvited’ to be the same thing as ‘unhurt.’)

There is a shitload of beef piled in front of the raptor paddock. For just his girls, it would be an insane amount of food-- but Owen doesn’t know anything about the Indominus or her metabolism, and besides, it wasn’t knowledgeable animal handlers who brought the meat out, it was InGen mercenaries.

There’s no sign of the e-vet van, Barry, or Delta, but his ATV is parked near the ready-cages.

The Indominus honks with relief on seeing the meat, a cry that the Owen hears as “Food!” even over the roar of his motorcycle.

Blue darts forward, stopping the Indominus with a loud, indignant squawk.

“What?” The Indominus halts in front of Blue, puzzled and unhappy, looking from Blue to Owen to the food and back. “What?”

So Owen parks, dismounts, and strolls over to the heap. Blue has come over to guard it (honestly, Echo is eyeing it, too), but she lets Owen by. “Okay. Pack structure lesson. I’m in charge, so I decide who eats first.” This is mostly for the benefit of the mercenaries still hanging around, uneasy, some of whom have pretty shitty trigger discipline. He pulls out his knife, which is not really suited for this but he’s not feeding the girls, just confirming his position as he-who-dispenses food and basically, giving them treats. He carves off three fair-sized chunks of the beef, them steps away from the pile. “New girl,” because… the Indominus is going to need a name, eventually. “Come eat. You’re newest, you first tonight.”

The rest is tossed. “Charlie, Echo, and good girl, Blue, good job.”

The raptors gulp down their treats, and then Blue burbles something at them-- “Defend nest, defend new,” is what Owen catches, and they fan out around the Indominus, who is happily chowing down as though she’s starving. And if she never realized she could eat what she killed, if she only incidentally swallowed humans and never so much as nibbled at the dinosaurs she killed… then this is probably the longest she’s ever gone without food.

“Blue?”

She looks over at him. “Keep,” she chirrs, possessively. “Mine-ours.”

“Gonna try,” he agrees.

Blue lets Owen reach out to take off her camera bridle, which she dubs “Itchy,” and then Charlie is honking at him for the same treatment. Echo takes it with slightly less grace, feinting a snap at him and getting scolded for it, both by Owen and by Blue. Because Owen knows control is still watching, he points the camera at himself and shoots whoever’s on watch a thumbs-up.

The Indominus eats everything they brought, which makes sense in a couple of ways-- Owen has picked up that she’s not quite fully grown yet, so she’s still burning calories for that, she hasn’t really eaten since her escape, and she’s had a very long day, full of more physical activity and emotional stress than she’s used to.

Blue is moving from the door of the paddock to the Indominus, trying to figure out how to get her new chick to follow her inside. The Indominus stubbornly grumbles at Blue, then hisses at Owen. “False-egg, too small again. She won’t listen.”

“She’s smaller than you are, and that’s her home. She feels safe in there, and wants you to feel safe, too.”

“They’re damn noisy,” one of the mercenaries mutters.

“They’re intelligent,” Owen tells him, “and they communicate through vocalizations, like crows and wolves. Alan Grant wrote like three papers on it.”

“And you think you know what they’re saying?”

“Right now? Sure. Blue’s crooning. She wants the Indominus to follow her. The Indominus is snarling-- same sound as other animals, but in raptors it just means they’re thinking. She’s open to instruction from Blue, but she knows she’s not gonna fit in the paddock-- hell, she just got out of a paddock, she already knows she doesn’t like them, but Blue’s telling her this one’s safe, this one’s the pack’s den.”

“They gonna fight about it?”

“Shit, I hope not.”

Some of the men shuffle further back, and get their guns ready. Owen just goes back to negotiating, murmuring and hissing to Blue, telling her everything’s fine, it’s okay if their new girl sleeps outside for a while. He’s busy enough that the change in the air doesn’t hit him until the Indominus straightens up and hisses, “Fear-stink, from the other things like you. Anger, too.”

Blue burbles. Usually that’s just a sound of interest, hey look or what’s this, but she puts a warning tone on it. “Wary attention,” with strong overtones of play it cool, girls.

So, something’s gone wrong.

“Mister Grady.” It’s the bald mercenary with the ridiculous beard. “You’re gonna want to come out of there.”

“I’m gonna want a real good reason,” he calls back. “Blue’s workin’ on a bond, and that’s going to be the only thing that keeps this park open.”

“The fourth raptor just killed Hoskins.”

“… Shit,” Owen hisses, and it’s hissed enough that the Indominus glances down at him.

She’s shifted, slowly, standing at her full height, very still. So are the girls. Nobody’s tails are lashing, nobody’s chattering, which is actually not a good sign right now.

He tries to mediate. “What did he do, try to pet her again? She’s high-strung-- more bird in her than the rest of the pack.”

“I’ll smash all of them for you,” the Indominus says, far closer to pure snake-speak than Raptor. “They want to kill, I can smell it. I can see their bodies getting ready for it, like before in the green.”

“It’s on camera,” Beardy says. “The raptor was in the lab. With your partner.”

“So she… was defending Barry?” But he hisses, “Stay wary, girls.”

“You’ve got thirty seconds, Mister Grady, to come out of there and convince me your partner didn’t just assassinate the head of InGen’s security division.”

“… And what happens if I don’t?”

“We blow you the fuck up with your animals.”

“Shit--”

“Starting now, Grady!” and the pack is starting to hiss.

“On go, scatter, stay low, go fast, they’ll try to kill us,” he manages to tell the girls--

“Wait, wait, I’m still up here!” yells the New Kid, whose name Owen really does need to learn, from somewhere on top of the paddock.

Beardy yells back, “You just got eaten by the Indominus,” and gets out, “Open f--”

“Stupefy!” the New Kid yells, and a good swath of the mercenaries fall down.

“Spook ‘em,” Owen tells the Indominus, and she roars, an eardrum-splitting sound that has the raptors ducking low and Owen covering his ears even as he runs toward the guys with guns-- half of them have been hit by a goddamn potent stunning spell, good job, New Kid, and the rest are scrambling, focused on the Indominus. He signals to the raptors, a silent ‘go,’ and they fan out, then launch themselves into the mercenaries. This is their home turf, and literally their home; they want to defend it.

The Indominus does not fan out.

The Indominus is a goddamn tank, wading into what’s left of the men and picking them up in jaws or terrifyingly dexterous hands, breaking backs and throwing what will be bodies when they hit the ground, if they weren’t before, absolutely ignoring bullets.

Owen wants a gun, but he’s got grenade launchers to disable, scrambling out his wand for the first time in what feels like years. (It’s been weeks. The non-magical world isn’t as hard to live in as wizards like to think-- but he’s not stupid, he sleeps with it under his pillow and keeps it strapped to his right calf whenever he’s wearing long pants.) “Incendio,” he spits at his target, and blows a massive hole in the ground-- and disintegrates a couple of mercenaries. It’s a lot easier to see by the light of the pillars of fire that used to be InGen’s anti-tank weapons, and Owen finally has the opportunity to go raiding bodies for a gun and ammo. (He doesn’t let himself think that an hour ago, he would’ve accepted anti-tank weapons, grenade launchers, used against the Indominus. Things have changed, and now nobody is going to get the chance to blow up any of his girls.)

Up above, the kid is yelling “Protego!” over and over, although Owen doesn’t feel anything settling over him. The pack is snarling happily, which Owen kind of hopes he’ll forget eventually-- the gunfire and screaming is thinning out, and he’s darting for cover, doing his part to take down the threats to damn near everything he wants to hold onto.

A mercenary raises a gun toward the top of the raptor paddock, and Owen shoots him in the throat. He falls and his shot goes wild.

Another swings a shotgun around to face Charlie; he can only get that one in the arm, but the guy drops his gun and then Charlie’s on him, screeling, “Gotcha!”

A third steals Barry’s ATV to try and flee; Owen shoots out a tire and sends him sprawling. Before he can get off a second shot, Echo explodes out of nowhere, grabs the man by the leg, and drags him screaming into high grass.

He shoots one guy coming at the Indominus with a knife while she storms up and down, doing what looks at first like a threat-display dance, but Owen realizes is actually deliberately trampling the stunned mercenaries.

“Mine!” she roars out into the night. “Mine! Pack! Ours!”

Blue barks out a single sharp “Koh!” and Owen’s head whips to her just like Charlie, Echo, and the Indominus. Even though there’s nothing in that sound but Velociraptor, Owen knows it’s an alert-- a call to pack, that the prey is escaping.

“They’re running!” yells the kid.

“… Barry.” Owen runs for the ATV, yelling, “Reparo!” at the tire about two seconds before jumping on. “Call control!” he yells up at the kid.

“Should I Obliviate--”

“We’ll figure it out later! Tell Barry they’re coming for him and Claire and Delta!”

The pack is already on the move, and Owen guns it to catch up to them.

He needs both hands to steer the ATV, no extra fingers for his wand or his pilfered gun, but he hears the girls crying, “Here!” when they find someone and kill him, or “There!” when they spot one closer to a sister. Owen whistles them back to loose formation between kills.

He should probably feel a lot worse about the fact that he’s riding with a pack of predators, killing men who are (probably) only trying to escape, but the only control he’s got here is keeping the girls on-task instead of running wild… and if he’s honest, he doesn’t care that much. There’s a veil between the magical and the non-magical he’s got to keep in place (he can’t fix the camera footage, he’s not that good, but he also doesn’t know how much magic, if any of, it showed up on film), and ultimately, he can hide a lot more if Barry, Claire, her two nephews, and whoever’s in the control room know than if some InGen merc survives to go squealing to his higher-ups, or worse, a goddamn scientist.

They’ve run out of men to hunt, but Owen only slows enough to keep from wearing out the raptors. “They’re dead,” the Indominus hisses at him.

“There might be more of them, trying to hurt Delta and Barry, plus a female and two juveniles who’ve been helping us. … You know the kids, they were in the Gyrosphere. The ball-thing you broke.”

“They jumped in the water. I thought that stopped them!” But at least she sounds impressed, not disappointed.

“We’re squishy, but we can take a beating,” Owen says.

And then he hears a distinctive roar. “Fucking shit, how did she get out? Gotta run fast, girls--”

“Up!” the Indominus barks. “On my back, I carry, I run! Up!”

The pack snarls, but they leap, clinging to the Indominus’s bony hide before settling on her pebbled back. Blue spares a moment to lick between the Indominus’s shoulder blades-- the injured spot where she clawed out her tracking implant earlier. “Eyes on me!” They swivel to look, and Owen guns the ATV again-- “We’re moving!”

He runs it at top speed, and the Indominus follows, effortlessly.

“The Tyrannosaurus is loose. She’s big like our new girl. She’s old, but wily. Lived a long time with no paddock, no feeders, just hunting.” The Indominus helps translate, but Owen keeps his instructions as simple as he can. “If we don’t have to fight her, don’t fight her. Unknown adult males with guns only. Protect Barry, protect female, protect young males, help Delta.”

Blue screels. “Protect pack. Protect you.”

“Assess on the ground,” he tells her, but he’s smiling.

Sort of.

Rexie bellows again, and Owen can hear gunfire now, and muffled shouting, and Delta screeling “Run away!” as a threat rather than a warning.

Blue clambers up to the Indominus’s neck and calls “Koh!” at the top of her lungs.

The Indominus repeats the call, turning it into a roar-- “Pack is coming!”

They go.

Main Street is a battle-zone; Barry is holed up behind one of the big safety-glass “amber” sculptures, picking his shots, while Delta and Rexie (and god, Rexie is a sight) slash and tear their way through InGen’s security, for all they dodge and get beaten back now and then-- nobody’s been casting protective spells on these dinosaurs. The Indominus crashes onto the scene with a roar straight out of hell, shedding raptors in all directions who screel and shriek and pounce from mercenary to mercenary.

Owen stands up on the ATV and starts shooting, then vaults off of it to run for a better vantage point.

“Where’s Claire?” he manages to yell.

“Shops!” Barry roars back, then beats the shit out of an armed, armored man with the butt of his rifle.

The Indominus picks up a man and throws him, making a gas grill explode into a brief burst of flame before the safety cuts it off. Owen has enough time to hope he’s dead before he’s hustling out of Rexie’s way as she storms the street, using her heavy head as a battering ram.

The raptors gleefully pounce the men she scatters.

It takes a shockingly short time for the last of InGen’s men to die.

That does not solve all Owen’s problems.

Barry runs up to him, Claire-- how is she still wearing those shoes?-- hurries to his side, and her nephews follow her.

The raptors slip in front of them. Delta’s limping, Charlie has a graze across her shoulder. The Indominus strolls past the little knot of humans to stand with her adopted pack.

Rexie faces them, and growls.

Blue honks something, but it’s directed at the Indominus.

The Indominus locks eyes with Rexie and rumbles at her, not a raptor sound, but Owen can pick out, “My pack. Your territory. We all go.”

Rexie is bleeding from half a dozen places, bullet-grazes that’ll need to be seen to by a vet.

Rexie is also twenty-five years old, and sweeps her gaze over all of them with a rumble of… something like exasperation.

Owen has never been able to really understand Rexie-- either there’s too much frog and not enough reptile, or her brain isn’t sophisticated enough, or a combination of the two, but he’s never heard more than a word or two particularly clearly. It’s more about getting a sense from her vocalizations.

She snorts, and the sense is a heavy, pointed one. Rexie is too old for this shit and wants all these damn kids off her metaphorical lawn.

She’s also confident enough to assume they’ll obey her, and turns to lumber back toward her paddock. Possibly back to her paddock, if they’re very, very lucky, but Owen won’t bank on that kind of luck.

“… I think we’re dismissed,” Owen says, adrenaline barely starting to ebb. “Everybody okay?”

“Fine,” Gray says, “actually. Really surprisingly fine.”

“Delta’s going to need a vet,” Barry says, and Delta hisses. It’s Blue who scolds her, and then throws back her head, calling for pack to follow her.

“You come with us,” the Indominus tells him, moving to follow Blue.

“… Yeah, I gotta go with the pack,” he admits to his fellow humans. “Please tell me that’s the last of them?”

“Shit,” and Claire is running for one of the banks of shops.

Owen holds up a fist-- a military signal, sure, but the pack knows it as ‘stop.’ It’s also good for ‘do not chase.’ “Claire?”

Claire jogs back to them. In her ridiculous shoes. Claire’s kind of terrifying. She’s also carrying a walkie and fiddling with its channel dial. “Lowery?”

“Holy shit!” spits Lowery, from the other side. “Holy shit. Holy shit, are you all okay?”

“You shouldn’t say shit,” Gray says, but there’s half a smile in it.

The Indominus hisses. “We should go. The big old one is cranky.”

“Minor injuries only, mostly to the pack,” Owen says. “Is the island clear of people who want to shoot us?”

“It looks that way,” Lowery says. “Could somebody raid Margaritaville and bring me an extremely large bottle of tequila?”

“Can I climb into it with you?” Barry asks.

“Lowery,” Claire says, “You’ve got one more thing to do. I need you to access every single computer record you can on the Indominus project, everything Henry was working on, anything with Hoskins’ fingerprints on it if he ever touched anything digitally.”

“… Yeah, okay, that’s doable. What do you want me to do with it?”

“Dump it on a secure server so we can go through it later,” she says. “Somewhere in all that, there’s someone we can crucify for this mess, hopefully someone alive and… not, you know. Me.”

“Got it,” Lowery agrees, and Owen can hear keys moving.

“Lowery?”

“Your Highness,” Lowery says, and the kids snicker.

“If any of those files happen to be… difficult… to get to? You have my permission to use any means necessary.”

“You’re an interesting boss, Claire.”

They split up.

Claire and the boys return to the lab, to look for hard copies of… whatever. Claire takes a gun just in case they run into any more goons. Barry takes the vet truck and Owen takes the ATV back to the raptor paddock, the girls following-- the Indominus seems entertained by providing rides, this time to Charlie and Delta, who are more injured. Still, they go slowly, so they don’t wear anyone out. Injuries are tended-- Owen and Barry have a few cuts and scrapes, but they tend to the girls first as best they can without a real vet. The Indominus lets Owen climb onto her back and flush her worst wounds with saline or peroxide, depending on how old they are, although she absolutely bitches about it. Owen lets her get away with it; it’s not threatening to his ears, and he suspects that as well as not being full grown, she might be younger than she looks.

The antibiotic ointment he slathers into the future scar where her tracker used to be has a painkiller in it, and as that starts working, the Indominus relaxes hard enough that Owen can feel her unclenching under him. She gets a bandage, Charlie gets a bandage, Delta gets an ace bandage because she seems to have a sprain, and then Echo gets a bright-yellow band-aid she can see even in the dark, because she was feeling left out and grumpy.

Barry leaves, to go see if there are any intact bottles left in Margaritaville, to “Encourage Lowery to work fast and hard.”

Owen gets the girls settled-- Blue is ready to drop by now, and accepts that the Indominus wants to sleep across the main door instead of in the paddock proper. (She’s still disappointed, but once the adrenaline rush wears off and Owen has fished out a round of treats, Blue’s entire attitude screams ‘fuck everything, it is my bedtime.’)

Once all the raptors and part-raptors are dozing, Owen climbs up to the catwalks above the paddock. The new kid is still up there, and fiddling with his wand.

“Stupefy, huh?”

“I’ve got this terrible allergy to being blown up,” the kid says.

“Thanks for the protection spells.”

“… I really did hear you yell Reparo, right? I don’t need to Obliviate you?”

“I’m a Parselmouth,” and… it’s actually nice to just say that, for once, instead of hedging with ‘snakes are easy’ or, with Barry, ‘I have this… thing…’ It’s rare to just be able to own up to everything. “I still gotta find out what Lowery saw, but I don’t think anyone’s going to realize you were slinging spells, not while the Indominus was roaring.”

“A Parselmouth? Really?”

Suddenly Owen remembers the reason he doesn’t usually tell wizards about it, either. He’s not up for being compared to any of the top three candidates, not tonight. “Don’t make this weird, kid.”

“It’s-- okay, but-- if you want to work with animals, why not, you know, snakes?”

“I like animals,” he says with a shrug. “I’m partial to snakes, but not particular about only snakes. I used to work with dolphins and sharks for the Navy. Hoskins wanted me to run the same kind of tests with raptors I did with sharks, to see if training sticks.”

“And… you can?” the kid says, leaning on the guard rail before quickly shifting away-- not wanting to turn his back on the cage, Owen guesses. “They followed you to track the I. Rex, and they defended us when everything went to hell. So they can be trained, right?”

“Depends on what you want ’em trained for. Search-and-rescue? No, they’re likely to eat any injured animals they find, including human animals. The shit Hoskins wanted, dogs-of-war style? Hell no. I think they proved that tonight. I mean, yeah, you can’t buy their loyalty, but raptor loyalty is immediate, for friends and family-- they don’t really understand ‘chain of command’ and definitely don’t get ‘die for your country.’ But if things hadn’t gone sideways today, in… ten years, socialized raptors in a situation where the park could have a short, simple raptor show, yeah. That could’ve happened.”

“… Why ten years? And why not anymore?” They’re smart questions, and Owen doesn’t know why he’s surprised the kid is asking them. Sure, most wizards who take up work with animals are either the Steve Irwin type-- look at that acromantula, what a little beauty, I’m gonna hug it-- or they still think everything that isn’t human rightfully belongs to humans. (Which is not a trait exclusive to the wizarding world, may Hoskins rest in several pieces.) The kid’s a wizard passing, though, like Owen, working at Jurassic World, with the smartest known animals on the island. He might have crappy balance, but he can’t be stupid.

“Ten years because it’s gonna take me that long to help them get a social structure firmly established. Raptors are sophisticated animals, they’re smart as chimpanzees-- and like chimpanzees, like humans, they don’t naturally know how to take care of weaker or younger members of the pack, or how to behave in a group. In the wild, older pack members would teach them, but since our animals are born in a lab, they’ve gotta have a handler who can play parent. Otherwise, you’d get the strongest, meanest raptors eating first, and the weakest raptors getting the scraps if they get anything. You get dominance fights and dead pack members and hardly any unit cohesion. S’why I feed them in the order I do-- Charlie, Echo, Delta, Blue. It’s not just age, it’s so they learn that the pack member who decides the eating order has to make sure the youngest gets a fair share, that even rivals get to eat, and that the highest position eats last even if they could bully their way into eating first.”

“So that’s not because you’re the pack alpha?”

“I’ll level with you, that alpha-beta-omega business is shit, it’s based on bad science in shit conditions, with a totally different species. The girls imprinted on me when they were babies, they see me as a parent figure. When they listen to me, it’s because I’ve already proven to them that I can be trusted, and they trust me to know what to do in new situations. … Still, when I’m talking to humans, saying ‘I’m the alpha’ sounds a lot better than saying ‘they think I’m their dad.’”

The kid snickers, but prompts Owen, “How do you get a show out of that?”

“Right. Ten years or so, they’ll have their social structure down for themselves. They’ll know how to raise chicks on their own, they’ll know how to teach the youngsters to hunt and play and take care of their younger sisters, and with luck they’ll be willing to accept human handlers into the pack structure without having to introduce them as chicks. This will take… at least three or four clutches of raptors who grew up around humans. It won’t be domestication, but down the line, when Blue’s an old matriarch, the youngest raptors should give us couple girls who can act as ambassadors. Stand up on an enclosed stage and demonstrate their vocalizations, preen for applause like they would for ‘good girl.’” It’s the hope. It’s why Owen’s here. Velociraptors aren’t monsters, they’re animals, and he wants as many people to learn that as he can teach.

“So, why not after today?”

“The Indominus. The pack’s got a new baby sister, and she’s enormous, and gonna live probably as long as Rexie. I’ve gotta be her handler-- she’s too smart for anyone who can’t actually talk with her-- and she can’t be completely separated from the raptors. They’ll all go nuts.”

“… Wait, you can talk to her? Parselmouths can talk to dinosaurs?”

“… That’s complicated. Yes and no.”

“Can I ask about it anyway? It sounds pretty great.”

“I can have a conversation with a snake just like with a human,” Owen starts. “Don’t buy that shit about it being dark magic or anything, it’s just… a thing. And snakes are just animals.”

“I’m not that Old World, promise. No problems with snakes.”

“Okay. So. I can’t talk to lizards, or at least not any lizards I’ve met. Sometimes, if it’s a lizard that’s closely related to snakes, like monitors or iguanas, I can get… sort of a general sense off them? But we can’t talk.”

“Makes sense.”

“Dinosaurs, these dinosaurs, I can pick out a word or two out of almost every species, but it depends on two things-- how much reptile DNA they’ve got, especially if it’s a closer snake relative, and how smart the actual dinosaur is. Raptors have a language-- you’ll pick it up, if you stay on and we’re not fired or arrested for all the death-- but Parseltongue gives me a crib sheet, and sometimes lets the raptors understand me better than they would if I only spoke English. It’s kind of like trying to talk to somebody when you’ve only got a hundred words from three different languages that both of you understand.”

“Is the I. Rex the same way, if she’s part of the pack?”

“… No, she’s… when she’s speaking Raptor, yeah, it’s about the same. But she’s been speaking more Snake, and I think it’s because she’s as smart as the raptors, plus she’s got a lot of snake-structure in her head. No way to know for sure, I’m not dumb enough to tell the science guys that I can chat with Frankenstein’s Tourist Draw.”

“Do you know why she didn’t eat any of those guys?” the kid asks. “I thought she was gonna scoop them up like popcorn shrimp.”

“She doesn’t know she can eat what she kills. I wanna work on that, but Rexie’s loose, so the Apatosaurs she killed might be staked out already.”

“… How… can she not know that?”

“Shitty socialization, mostly. Raised in total isolation.”

“… Damn.”

They fall into silence for a long moment, looking out over the dark paddock. Owen can hear the faint sleep-snuffles of all five girls.

“… I gotta ask you something stupid,” he tells the kid.

“… Is it about the beanie?”

“Actually, it’s that I don’t think I ever got your name. Hi, I’m Owen Grady, who the hell are you?”

“Leon Colby,” the kid says.

“Nice to meet you. Not that I don’t have questions about the beanie, but I figured the name was more important.”

The kid-- Leon-- offers a thin smile, but then goes quiet. “So… if the T. Rex is loose, and we can’t close the raptor pen because of the I. Rex… Are we stuck here?”

Which Owen hasn’t really thought about. If the Indominus were smaller-- a lot smaller, baby-smaller-- he wouldn’t think twice about sleeping in the paddock with the pack, because they all get extra-deferential when there’s a new arrival. He’s heard blunt claws, safe babies once or twice. As it stands, though, first thing in the morning, all the girls are going to be hungry. Actually, all the dinosaurs all across the island are going to be hungry. “… We can camp out in the vet van,” he suggests. “I mean, I’ve been told I snore, but ain’t nobody here but us wizards. We can go all out with cushioning charms if we want.”

“Can we lock the doors? I like the raptors, but after this morning I can’t shake the feeling they want to eat me.”

“I like them, too, and I know they’d eat me if I gave ’em a reason,” Owen says, grinning and starting to head back toward the stairs. “Wild animals. Do not forget that.”

“No, sir.”

“Owen,” he tells Leon. “I’m just an Owen, not a sir.”

They cushion the floor of the van, close and lock-- mundane locking only, in case Barry or Claire or someone comes along, and Leon messes with a bag of cotton balls-- “They’ll start singing at us around seven in the morning, if we’re not already up.”

Owen sleeps. If Owen snores loud enough for Leon to smack him or spell him into silence, he sleeps too deeply to notice.

What wakes him, at first light (ugh dammit it is too early to be morning), is not Leon’s cotton-ball choir, but Blue calling the pack.

It wakes Leon, too, and he sits bolt upright, startled by the sudden honking “Koh!” far too early for any civilized creature to be honking anything-- but, hey. Wild animals. They’re the very definition of uncivilized.

“Blue, why are you awake,” he grumbles, not even a question, but now the rest of the pack is making confused noises, and the Indominus calls for him.

Awkwardly.

“Parent-thing,” and he’s going to have to teach her his name pretty quick, “Come tell the others there isn’t food. They think there’s food. Food isn’t here yet.”

“What’s going on?”

“They’re hungry. And the Indominus is confused. Sit tight-- we’re gonna need to feed them, but I’m still thinking about how.” He can’t leave them to go get food, not with the pen open, not with girls this smart, but he’s also got his doubts about taking the pack to the food-- or at least, doubts about their behavior if he tries that. Still, it might be the best of two bad options. Owen slips out of the van, rubbing his eyes and then yawning, exaggerated. Let them see they woke him.

“Food!” Blue trills at him, impatiently.

“Not food,” the Indominus sighs, and then turns to look at Owen. “She won’t listen. Food is red and wet and crunchy, not dead things-like-you with guns.” So, Blue wants to go eat the fallen mercenaries, but the Indominus doesn’t recognize things they’ve killed as food (he knew, or at least suspected, that part. She was hungry but didn’t eat her meatiest kills yesterday). And on the one hand, Blue is absolutely right, humans are edible as anything, but on the other hand, if Owen doesn’t want Isla Nublar firebombed, he should probably leave as many bodies for the authorities to look at as possible.

And now he’s in the position of explaining that to five hyper-intelligent animals, one of whom can almost-perfectly understand him, in terms they can all grasp, without actually lying to them… “Dead things like me can be food, but they’re bad food,” he says, after a moment. “Eating humans-- things like me-- makes bad things happen.”

“How?” and it’s the Indominus and Blue in an awkward chorus.

“There are… so many things like me. Too many. These dead humans, we can explain. We can make many humans understand defending the den, defending the pack. They can understand we’re smart and brave. If we eat the humans we kill, many humans will think we only killed these dead humans because we were hungry-- they’ll think we’re stupid and dangerous.” The Indominus listens and dutifully relays what she can to the pack. If Owen’s not careful, he’ll start relying on her to keep doing that.

“Kill them too,” Delta hisses.

“Too many like ants,” Owen offers, and this time Delta’s hiss is pure hatred toward the entire concept of ants. She dug up a nest of them once, when she was six months old, got bitten by enough of them that she had to go to the vet for an antihistamine shot, and now if she finds so much as a trail of ants, she bleats an alert, wanting somebody else to come kill them. “Like ants, with guns. Too many to kill them all.”

Blue snarls thoughtfully, but Echo chuffs and tries to slip past the Indominus to go eat some long pig anyway. The Indominus makes for a very large obstacle.

“Ate some,” Delta informs everyone. “Kill and swallow. Got praise.”

“Killed to protect Barry, Claire, the boys,” Owen tells her. “Praise for protection, not eating.” Or at least he hopes so. Barry never liked Hoskins, but as far as Owen knows he never hated him quite on Delta’s level.

Before Owen can try to explain further, somehow, it’s the Indominus who says, “Was that when all the strangers turned on the pack?”

Delta bleats indignantly, but Echo hangs back.

“Delta didn’t know not to eat,” Owen soothes, or tries to. “Now she does. We all need to behave now and fix it. Food first. Let me scout for Rexie-- the big old one-- so we don’t bother her when we eat.”

He escorts Leon from the back of the van to the cab, but leaves the driver’s side door open while he radios the control room.

Lowery greets him with a groaned, “Fuck everything.”

“… So you found some tequila.”

“Fuck that too.”

“Too hungover to see if you can spot Rexie?” he asks. “The girls are getting hungry.”

“… Shit,” Lowery grunts. “Shit, everything needs to be fed, shit. Okay. Shit. Hang on. Super-intelligent predators first, right? Okay. … Okay. So, I found Rexie, and I’m too hungover to look at it. Gyrosphere valley, Apatosaurus breakfast. So steer clear of there, and the south docks. We’ve got… ships coming in, people are leaving.”

“Claire and the boys?”

“I think they crashed in somebody’s office. Seriously, the dangerous stuff on the loose either can’t fit in here or is hanging out with you, we’re okay.”

“So Barry hasn’t destroyed his liver?”

“He’s a large French lump draped over an office chair, breathing noisily through his mouth to assure me he’s not dead. It’s like the audio version of sandpaper, just-- just irritating enough, you know?”

“Never noticed. But I’ve never been hung over enough to care.”

“Fuck you. I’m gonna go find something to get the taste of last night out of my mouth, try not to need my omniscient aid for, like, twenty minutes?”

“I’m just gonna go feed the girls.”

“Yeah, we’re gonna have a lot of hungry dinosaurs today, it’ll be fun.”

Owen promises to stay within earshot of the van and its radio, but doesn’t want to keep the girls waiting. Delta gets to ride in the back of the van, because of her leg (she’s still limping, which only worries Owen because she’s visibly limping. Animals instinctively hide pain, so if it’s enough to show, it’s enough to worry about), and they set off for the meat locker, which is actually a pretty significant backstage complex, part stockyard, part slaughterhouse, part butchery.

The pigs and goats need feeding. Leon takes care of that (though he has to be reminded, no magic, the standard surveillance cameras are still rolling) while Owen checks what he can of paperwork, to see where he should be grabbing raptor and Indominus food from. It’s easier to find where the Indominus’s beef slabs come from (she was in Paddock 11, the show paddocks are all clearly marked), but apparently because the raptors are housed in the research corridor, never intended to be publicly accessible, their listing is under some sort of arcane designation that’s got Owen close to growling at the page when he hears an unfamiliar voice yelp, “Shit!”

“Owen!” Leon yells, and Blue and the Indominus are doing the same thing, just… in their own special, pants-shitting way.

He scrambles for the loading bay, for fuck’s sake he was fifty feet away, how much trouble could they get into with him fifty feet away--

There’s a handler standing there, surrounded by raptors while Leon clings, white-knuckled, to a pitchfork. The girls are hissing, and the Indominus is just standing there, looking imposing and watching her new pack. The handler’s a guy, no one Owen recognizes, and obviously not prepared to face this many carnivores considering he’s carrying a bucket and wearing a very rumpled safari-chic uniform, the kind with shorts. The petting zoo handlers wear one like that, and Owen thinks but won’t swear that the river cruise handlers do, too.

“Seriously,” Leon says, “stay still--”

“They’re not Rexie, they can see me--”

“Yeah, but if you run, they’ll want to chase you.”

“Shit…”

The Indominus spots Owen. “Kill this one or not? He smells like the things from the valley.”

Owen hisses, “Probably not, let me find out what he wants,” as quickly as he can, and the Indominus rumbles something to the pack. “Stand down,” he tells them, moving between Delta and Charlie, and then between the handler and Blue. “Blue. Stand down. Dude, what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be evacuated.”

“Can you call them off?” and it’s a reasonable thing to hope, but unfortunately the answer, as always, is ‘only if everyone is very lucky,’ so Owen fudges it.

“Maybe once they feel safe. Every strange human male they saw yesterday shot at them.”

“… So I should put down my bucket?”

“Is there meat in it?”

“No.”

“Then it probably doesn’t matter. Seriously-- the evacuation?”

“The, um, the vets and some of the handlers, we decided to stay at the hospital. Humans can get treated on the mainland, dinosaurs can’t, and a lot of the petting zoo animals were injured when the pterosaurs got loose. Plus, somebody has to feed everything. … Is that the…?” The handler nods very vaguely toward the Indominus.

“Yeah. She got adopted into the raptor pack, it’s a long story.” Delta hisses generalized hatred (and not a little discomfort), and Owen has to turn his attention to her, “Delta! Back off. Sorry, they’re testy because they’re hungry.”

“Suddenly getting Rexie her morning goat feels much less… immediate.”

“… Right.” He’s going to have to explain that. Maybe he can make Claire explain that. “So you think there are enough people to feed and water the animals for a couple days?”

“Should be, if your pack doesn’t eat everybody.”

“Working on it.” He turns his back to the handler, and tells the pack, “Stand down. He’s okay, stand down.” Then, because it’ll thankfully be hard to hear over assorted raptor noises, he hisses, “Gonna make him help me find the right food for you. Then gonna help him fix stuff. Delta, go sit. Sit. Get off that leg, girl, go sit.”

Delta hisses, with an air of angry acceptance, and goes to sit-- right at the Indominus’s feet.

“Okay, now you and me?” he says to the handler. “We’re gonna back slowly inside, and you’re gonna help me decipher the goddamn cloud-talker code they use so I can serve breakfast.”

“That’s what I was coming out here for.” It is a goddamned miracle that Owen manages to escort the guy up to the desk, but apparently the pack is genuinely willing to believe eating humans is bad luck, even if they don’t believe that about killing humans. Or maybe they’re just more willing to accept a ‘stand down’ when they’re out of their territory, sore, and have had a hard night than when they’re in their pen and all wound up from a pig chase. It’s tough to say. But the handler helps Owen track down where they keep the raptor-designated meat, and together the two of them wheelbarrow out enough to feed four hungry raptors and an abomination to the name of dinosaur that Owen is developing one hell of a soft spot for.

Echo screels at the scent of breakfast, but at the same time Owen says “Ah!” in warning tones, Blue shoulders her sister almost hard enough to be a body check.

You wait for food. They all know this.

Owen sets things out in piles, two raptor-sized heaps, a goddamn side of beef, and two more meals the size he’s used to. The girls come when called, and today the order is Delta (most injured), Charlie (youngest, injured but not seriously), Indominus (probably injured worse than Charlie, but ignoring it), Echo, and as always finally Blue. Echo complains, grumbling more at being next to Blue than anything else, but doesn’t cause any actual trouble. It’s been a while since she’s been fed, and last night burned a lot of calories. So Owen leads the handler around to the front of the truck while the pack is busy, and fills him in on the actually-disastrous stuff, including Rexie being on the loose, what Barry told him about Delta killing Hoskins, and InGen’s paramilitary being dead, but excluding the dinosaurs-as-weapons stuff, because he’s not sure how Claire’s going to try to spin that. (He kind of hopes Claire will try to spin that. The park has to reopen, or the animals are in serious trouble.)

“… Wait, so you’re saying Delta defended a handler and three strangers?”

“May have,” Owen allows, “and probably only from a perceived threat.” Probably. He doesn’t think Hoskins would’ve actually hurt… well, Claire, or at least the boys, anyway, and Delta being Delta-- and Hoskins being Hoskins-- best case scenario has always been him losing at least a couple of fingers to her eventually. That she killed him when she had the chance doesn’t surprise Owen so much as that she didn’t turn on Barry.

“She’s an animal, not a tactician,” the handler says. “‘Perceived threats’ get bitten all the time, and most of the herbivores on this island could take the hand off of somebody who rubbed them the wrong way. I’m impressed she did it for humans, not for herself or her pack.”

“One of them was her favorite human.”

“Don’t downplay this. You know it’s serious when a zoo animal kills a human. If you can even imply she did it to defend a handler, a woman, and two kids, you roll with that story. It makes the security guys turning on you look like they overreacted, and justifies all the other deaths.” The handler turns thoughtful. “Setting Rexie loose, maybe not. We’re gonna have to be careful, feeding the other animals.”

And Owen still has no idea how or why Rexie ended up on the loose. There just hadn’t been time to ask. “Lowery Cruthers is in the control room-- little hungover, but he’s there. Last I heard, Rexie was napping after gorging on the Apatosaurs my new girl killed yesterday.”

“So I guess it’s safe to turn the radios back on.”

“Why’d you turn them off?”

“We’ve got a vet hospital full of injured animals-- we lost most of the pygmy Gallimimus who survived the pterosaur attack to stress, a couple of the trike ponies have broken legs, and all of the surviving petting zoo animals have bites, scratches, or both. And there are literally hundreds of other animals on this island who can’t survive more than a few days without human help while the power’s still on. None of the vets and most of the handlers who weren’t seriously hurt or don’t have families wanted to leave. We figured if we went radio-silent, we had a better shot of not being forcibly evacuated.”

“Got my respect,” Owen says-- and they do. There’s no way doing the physical work of Jurassic World is a three-man job, even if two of those men cave in and use magic, even if they draft Claire, Lowery, and the boys into helping and use magic, and only partly because of all the large predators on the loose. “I want to help, but I think I can help best by keeping the pack out of everybody’s way.”

“I saw some bandages?”

“Delta gummed up her leg, Charlie’s got a bullet-graze, and the Indominus has a really thick hide that people shot at all day. If you’re asking? Yeah, I want a vet to look at them, but they’ve held off overnight, I think they can wait a couple hours while breakfast happens.”

“I’ll get the hospital connected, get things going. Steer clear of the lagoon until the Mosasaurus has been fed.”

“Yeah, I was here for the Churro Cart Incident.” The first year the Mosasaurus Lagoon was the Mosasaurus Lagoon, they learned they had to shut down Main Street at ten PM, restricting guests to hotels and the occasional nighttime attraction… because the Mosasaurus got testy if the busy thoroughfare stayed busy late into the night. One night she breached up onto the boardwalk and grabbed a churro cart where two customers had been arguing. The churro seller suffered a broken leg, the tourists were soaked and shocked, but nobody died so it wasn’t a PR nightmare. It just means Jurassic World has the only Margaritaville that shuts down promptly at ten.

“She might be able to reach further than that if she’s really hungry, so seriously-- steer clear of the lagoon.”

“I’ll spread the word. Try not to walk directly in front of the pack when you go?”

“My boyfriend works with the Suchomimus, I know the Scary Predator drill,” he promises.

“The Suchomimus is the laziest predator on the island.” True to her name, there was a lot of crocodile patching her DNA, and like most captive-bred crocodilians, she was quite content to spend twenty-three hours a day pretending to be a log.

“Not if she’s hungry.”

“Just watch your step. I’ll get the girls out of here as soon as they’re done with breakfast.”

“I’ll make sure lunch is delivered by a vet.”

“A vet who’s prepared for a body farm,” Owen says, a little wry and a little guilty-- but honestly not very guilty.

“You might need to find new digs for a while. That’s not going to be a fun smell in a couple hours.” The handler moves off while Owen frowns-- he hadn’t even thought of that, but it’s true. Main Street won’t be much better. There’s the smell to think about, and with Charlie and the Indominus having some open wounds, there’s also bacteria.

He needs to talk to Claire, to get someone on the island with the authority to move bodies.

He also needs to see the video footage of everything. He needs to see exactly what Delta did, and exactly how (or if) the spells he and Leon slung around show up on camera.

He just hasn’t figured out exactly how to do that when he can neither pen up nor stop supervising the five smartest and deadliest dinosaurs on the island.

But the first step, once the girls are fed, is getting them back to the paddock, even if he can’t exactly pen them into the paddock, and that’s going to be tricky.

“Stay here for food,” Blue says, illustrating quite neatly just why it’s going to be tricky.

“Other dinosaurs live here,” he says.

The Indominus helpfully says, “I stopped some. They tried to fight me.”

“Right. Their humans-- like I’m your human, they’ve all got humans-- will come here to get food for them. We need to be out of their way, like we’re out of Rexie’s way.”

“… Take their food?” but Echo seems… well, Owen can’t quite tell if she’s confused as to why he hasn’t thought of it, or can’t fathom a reason they wouldn’t do it.

“Most eat greens. Their food is boring, but their humans will fight to take care of them, like I fight for you.” It must be a complex concept for the raptors’ understanding of Parseltongue, because they gabble back and forth with the Indominus for a while. The raptors sound like oversized ducks, but the Indominus is so much larger, her vocal structures so much bigger, that her gabbling sounds more like growling.

Threatening even when she’s not threatening; a dinosaur designed to be a thrill ride.

“Back to the den,” Blue eventually concludes. Charlie gives a disappointed honk, like she wants something and can’t reach it.

“More walks later,” Owen assures her. They’re going to need a bigger paddock, anyway, and if it turns out they stay in formation well without something to hunt-- and without hunting anything unauthorized-- maybe he can take the pack to look at potential sites for a new paddock.

They fall in, and this time Charlie climbs into the van to sit with Delta-- she’s fine to walk, but apparently wants the new experience. Delta’s not fussed except when Charlie smacks her with her tail, so Owen doesn’t particularly care. “Don’t jump out while we’re moving, it’ll hurt,” he cautions, and gets an agreeable chirp that really belongs to a much younger raptor.

That and an “And we’re moving!” is all it takes, and Owen is both surprised and honestly, grateful only Leon was around to hear the negotiation.

Leon drives this time, and they go slow. Blue and Echo jog and the Indominus sort of strolls, stopping now and then to sniff but catching up either on her own or when Blue calls for her. Owen radios control, despite knowing he can’t ask everything yet. “Hey. How do we look?”

It’s Claire’s voice that answers, “Well, my only control staff is hungover, my youngest nephew is on Rexie-Spotting Duty on the monitors, my oldest nephew is helping your co-handler and me sort hard copies of files into ‘useless,’ ‘incriminating,’ and ‘horrifying’ piles, Henry deserves what Delta did to Hoskins but she won’t get the chance if I find him first, and I really need to call my sister, which I’m trying to put off until after something eats me-- but hey, apparently we have vets, and we might have enough handlers to skeleton-crew the park for a while. How’re you?”

And he can’t help a stuttering laugh. “Pretty good, spent the morning trying to keep a pack of vicious apex predators from eating dead guys who probably need to be collected by an ME, trying to keep a pack of vicious apex predators from laying waste to a goat pen, trying to keep a pack of vicious apex predators from eating a live animal handler, and trying to convince a pack of vicious apex predators to leave the building the food comes from. Haven’t had breakfast, I should probably do that, but I’ve got to supervise a pack of vicious apex predators that I can’t lock down, because they adopted a giant baby who won’t fit in their paddock. Would not swap my job for yours, though.”

“We broke into a couple of vending machines,” Claire says. “We can spare all the soda and chips you could want.”

“Yes, please,” Leon tells the radio.

“… Who’s that?” Claire asks.

“That’s Leon, he’s a junior raptor handler,” Owen says.

“Yesterday was my first day.”

“Oh my god,” Claire manages. “I can at least guarantee you’ll be paid double for today?”

“I’ll bring food when we get through some more paperwork,” Barry promises. “We all need to break and get real food from somewhere, too. We don’t know how long we’ll be here.” And that’s sensible-- eat the fresh stuff while it’s fresh, save the preservatives for when the fresh stuff runs out.

“Give the lagoon a wide berth and look out for Rexie, and scavenging from the restaurants should be totally workable. Claire won’t get us in trouble for it, will you, Claire?” Owen can’t help grinning a little.

“Considering I’m in charge of this clusterfuck, I think I can let a little food-liberation slide,” Claire says.

Gray’s voice comes over the radio-- “You shouldn’t say--”

“There’s not another word for it, Gray.”

But Owen has found what might be a treasure, rattling under his feet. “Hey. That tablet Claire had last night, that’s still in the truck. Can anybody do, like, computer magic and send some of last night’s footage to me? Especially from the girls’ bridle cams? I want to help go through it, but I’m stuck camping with carnivores until there’s a paddock that’ll hold the Indominus properly.”

“Wow, and also how old are you, and also, no,” Lowery says. “What I can do is send you authorization to view the footage, because there is so much footage, all the time, some of it with sound, most of it not, and I don’t have time to sort it. I can shoot you a guide to which codes are for what cameras, and they’ve all got timestamps.”

“I need to see-- actually, I need to ask. Claire? Think we can ever re-open?” Because that’s the only thing that will really keep his girls-- and all the animals-- safe, or as safe as zoo animals can be.

“… My honest, professional opinion as an operations manager?” and it’s a rhetorical question, because Claire goes on, “Is a tentative yes. No tourists have died in Jurassic World, the biggest incident the public saw was with the Pterosaurs-- although, we’ve checked, and that’s still trending. The only two non-employees who’ve even seen the Indominus are Zach and Gray, and we might pay through the nose for it in terms of settlements, but all of the security officers who died last night were InGen. Masrani Global owns InGen just like it owns Jurassic World. So last night, we might be able to handle quietly.”

“If it helps?” Leon offers, “Last night they were going to blow up Owen, the Indominus, and the raptors, and when I said I was still up on the catwalks, the guy in charge told me I’d just been eaten by the Indominus.”

“Ooooh, I hope we’ve got audio on that,” Claire says, and it’s a low, dangerous sound. “That’s the kind of thing that’ll convince InGen to play ball and help us settle out of court. It makes them look shady. Genetics companies face so much ethical scrutiny for playing god that they can’t afford to look shady-- and yes, I realize the irony of saying that on an island full of dinosaurs.”

“Genetically engineered dinosaurs,” Barry tells her.

“Genetically modified engineered dinosaurs,” Owen has to agree. None of Jurassic World’s dinosaurs have feathers, deliberately, for the aesthetic.

“There’s de-extinction and then there’s hiring people who are perfectly willing to murder innocent bystanders. InGen could argue that the people firing on us last night were just trying to take down Delta, but… Leroy?”

“Leon,” Leon corrects.

“Sorry. Leon received a pre-meditated death threat.”

“Owen did too,” Leon says. “But I wasn’t really… part of anything, at the time.”

“Which means,” Claire says, and she sounds very happy and very dangerous, “that from an easily-argued legal standpoint, everything you and Owen did, everything the raptors and the Indominus did to protect you-- even if it was also to protect themselves-- was done in self defense. It might take some time, but yes, Mister Grady, yes, I absolutely think we can reopen the park.”

“Then I need to find the footage of what Delta did to Hoskins,” he says.

“Of course. You may be responsible for telling an animal behaviorist and a judge what every single shift of her head means,” Claire agrees.

“Yeah, also?” Lowery puts in. “That’s the only camera that got into Wu’s little secret lair. Super-shady.”

“We have to get people who can look at the bodies on the island as soon as we can,” Owen tells… well, he means to tell Claire, but he can only really address the radio. “If InGen looks shady, Jurassic World has to look squeaky-clean and responsible.” They both have the same parent company, after all.

“… Right. I’ll need to get in touch with the mainland, see if we have enough Asset Control people left to tranquilize Rexie and get her back to her paddock. The authorities actually have been notified, I don’t think they should start body-bagging carrion until our large carrion-thief is corralled--”

“Think they can get that done?” Zach asks.

“The last time Rexie had to be contained, she was twelve and in her prime. She’s twenty-five now and she’s probably got some new scars. I won’t say it will be easy, but it’s been done before, with worse-trained people.”

“There are, what, five Apatosaurs in the valley?” Owen asks.

“Six,” Gray tells him. “Six dead ones, anyway.”

“Five and a half,” Zach corrects, but he’s teasing.

“Rexie’s probably going to stay there until those are gone, unless she decides to search out more territory,” Owen says. “If we can keep the cops out of her way, they can handle the bodies before she realizes there’s human carrion laying around.”

“Mm, and then work on containing Rexie,” Claire muses, “then the raptors and the Indominus, temporarily, and we can move forward with cleanup and reconstruction. There will be lawsuits-- there will be so many lawsuits, someone might try to organize a class-action lawsuit about the Pterosaurs, but we should be able to weather those… If all goes well and the Costa Rican government wants us to keep paying our exorbitant property and income taxes, I’m going to conservatively estimate we could reopen by March.”

It’s December twenty-seventh. “Claire, you’re terrifying, but that seems to be a good thing.”

Lowery says it with more poetry-- “This island has two queens.” Then he fudges it. “… The Indominus can be an angry princess or the fairy we invite to parties even though we’re worried she’ll curse everyone. Or eat everyone.”

“Are you gonna name her Maleficent?” Gray asks.

“We’re going to have to find a way to exhibit her,” Claire says, “especially after all this. I think Disney might complain if we name her Maleficent.”

“What about Foxtrot?” Leon suggests. “She got adopted.”

“Batch F never made it to the egg,” Barry says.

“‘Batch F’?” Zach echoes.

“Yeah, the girls aren’t named in birth order, they’re named by which genetic batch they’re from,” Owen says. “Batch A is the original Jurassic Park raptors, which we don’t use because of the frog DNA.”

“Some frogs can switch sexes,” Gray informs everyone, “in a single-sex environment, to help the species survive.”

“Blue is from Batch B, because Bravo didn’t stick. Batch C underwent a lot of revisions-- it was stable, but they wanted iguana markings without the spines or the dewlap-- so Delta and Echo were ready before Charlie.”

“We were supposed to have a fifth,” Barry explains, “but they kept running into problems. Just as well; if Blue had an actual baby sister to protect last night, she might not have taken so well to the Indominus.”

And even if Foxtrot doesn’t stick, it gives them an initial to work with. A couple of the other handlers tried to change Echo into an Elvis because of her scar, but she never answered to it so she stayed Echo. “We’ll try it on her, see how it fits.”

“Although, with the next batch? If we get lucky enough to have a next batch,” Claire allows, “Skip Golf and Hotel. The island is a resort, that would just get confusing.”

“Doesn’t getting another batch depend on Dr. Wu?” Owen asks. He’s the one who designs the dinosaurs, after all.

“Henry Wu is brilliant, but far from the only brilliant geneticist in the world-- and far from the only geneticist Jurassic World employs who’s capable of following the de-extinction blueprint. Which is currently under Jurassic World’s copyright, not InGen’s. … But this is actually looking farther forward than we need to look today. We need to be thinking of… containment, of condolences, of publicity and spin, and maybe looking ahead to… You can’t separate the Indominus from the pack now that they’ve accepted her, right?”

“It’d be cruel to Foxtrot, and Blue would be pissed,” Owen agrees.

“The Indominus Rex attraction has to open. We’re going to need the revenue. It will have to open late, because not only do we have cleanup and repair to work on, we have to build from scratch, but it has to open. Owen, one of the possible outcomes of your research was a raptor exhibit, yes?”

“… Shit.” They are not ready for that. “Yeah, but…”

“Can they share an exhibit with the Indominus?”

“Safely?”

“Yes. Also, honest answer.”

“They can share a paddock, yes, but it has to be big. Exhibit? Maybe. A big maybe. And it depends on what kind of exhibit you’ve got in mind.”

“What kind of exhibit can I get?” she counters. “Hopefully by Spring Break, but by late May and the start of the summer vacation season at the latest.”

“Shit. Um…” They are not show animals. And the biggest shows of intelligence and ‘obedience’ he can get out of them are rooted in Parseltongue communication. “Maybe-- maybe a feeding exhibit, at least for the raptors. Foxtrot’s bright, I might be able to get her to roar on cue, but as a pack, the best I can guarantee is ‘come watch the raptors be raptors.’”

“Feeding time at the T-Rex Kingdom has consistently been one of Jurassic World’s most popular attractions since opening day,” Gray says.

“People might show up to watch a pig chase,” Leon suggests, which is incredibly bold of him, given yesterday’s pig chase almost got him killed.

“They get wound up on a chase,” Owen counters, “an audience would have to be briefed for safety for ages before I could let them watch that.”

“We might be able to make that work,” Claire says. “People like to be scared, as long as they’re relatively sure-- well, that this won’t happen, and a hint of exclusivity certainly won’t hurt anything. If we can go public with last night’s debacle, with Hoskins and his stupid idea, we can build up the story angle-- the Indom-- um, Foxtrot’s adoption, Delta defending her handler. Show them as dangerous but loyal. You know them better than I do, they’ve got distinctive personalities? Things they like to do individually?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I’m going to need a list of those things. Of everything they need and like to do. Anything someone might find charming, anything someone might come back to see them do again. Once Rexie is back in her paddock, we can start looking for a good site-- there’s a strip of land just south of the Western Plains with good natural borders and relatively easy access to the monorail. There’s the site of the original Indominus paddock, which we can demolish and expand-- or, frankly, there’s the Aviary. I think we’re going to have to tear that down and learn from our mistakes.”

“Which ones?” Owen has to ask. It comes out a shade more bitter than intended.

“Isla Nublar itself is our last line of containment. We will no longer produce anything that can fly or swim to the mainland if it gets loose. And,” she says, before Owen can figure out how to fully form a response, “any future predators will follow the raptor pack’s model. At least two primary handlers, with at least one of them present at the animal’s hatching, siblings where it would be beneficial, and although I can’t discount financial and safety concerns entirely, I want the handlers to have as much input as reasonably possible, as to what their animals’ enclosures should look like. We have excellent proof that your approach works, so any other model will be strictly research corridor. Hell, with a little fast talking and a lot of spin, we may be able to keep the Verizon sponsorship and defray some of the costs of a new paddock. And… I’m thinking maybe more comprehensive safety packages or drills for guests? We have them as a captive audience for at least a ferry trip and the monorail ride from the docks to the resort, there’s time to implement and loosely train for some sort of alarm system. A sound that, when you hear it, means ‘get indoors and stay there.’

“We had Pterosaurs. We could have had the Indominus-- or a storm, an earthquake, a tsunami, a volcanic eruption.” And Claire… kind of has a horrifying point. They’re on a volcanic island on the Pacific Ring of Fire, the weather’s usually nice but the tectonic plates have been known to fart around. “Isla Nublar is our last line of containment, but being so contained means evacuation to the mainland took all night in fair weather, with all essential services running. I think we can do better than that, and I think a transparent resolve to do better than that will only help our PR.”

It takes a moment, a longish moment, for all that to sink in. Claire has come through… a lot, a hell of a lot in the past twenty-four hours-- hell, Owen has come through a lot, but Owen started this ride as a wizard, a Parselmouth, a combat veteran, and the guy who soothed four very pointy killing machines through their first thunderstorms. Owen’s first concerns are for his animals, wizarding secrecy, and everybody else’s animals (with maybe figuring out how to have more than one heat-of-the-moment kiss with Claire taking a distant fourth), and here’s Claire, investigating, figuring out how to spin a disaster, vaguely planning a new new exhibit for Summer 2016, and figuring out how to lay the groundwork for a new Jurassic World Emergency Broadcast System. Claire, who started yesterday in pristine white clothes, pointy-heeled shoes, and slippery-sleek hair, who feared for her family (nephews whose ages she might still be unsure of), saved Owen from a Dimorphodon, watched a Velociraptor gut a man, and unleashed a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

“… Too much?” Claire says into the silence.

“I just wonder if you’re ever terrified of yourself,” Owen says, and Claire lets out a shaky laugh.

“This is what I’m good at,” she tells them. “I’m good at corporations. Human systems. Ensuring that diverse systems work together as seamlessly as possible toward the same goal. Ordinarily, that goal is the bottom line. Today, it’s paving the way to getting Jurassic World open again.”

“Do you really think we can do it?” Leon asks, sounding young, wanting reassurance. “A lot of people died last night, Ms. Dearing. Doesn’t that usually get theme parks closed, not re-opened?”

“Do you know how many people are injured in Disneyland each year?” Claire asks, and if she means to sound reassuring she also sounds a little… intense.

“‘If the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists,’” Lowery says.

“Yes, because quoting Ian Malcolm’s book will help this situation,” Claire says, with sarcasm thick enough to choke a horse. “People have died at Disneyland-- at least one a decade since the park opened, usually guests, sometimes children. We’ve had our minor guest safety incidents-- we serve alcohol at most of our restaurants, and have two bars and a club, of course we’ve had our minor guest safety incidents. But no Jurassic World guest has ever died due to injuries sustained on the island, and that includes the animal rights activists who caused a stampede in 2007 trying to ‘free’ the survivors of the original triceratops herd. Everyone who died yesterday either worked for Jurassic World, worked for InGen, or was Simon Masrani. I am… ninety…” she draws the word out and concludes, “two percent positive that all of the human deaths from yesterday and last night can be laid at the feet of Victor Hoskins, who is dead, and Henry Wu, who is unaccounted for.”

“But you’re eight percent uncertain,” Gray says.

“They might have been colluding with someone else at InGen.”

“If nothing ate or shot Dr. Wu, they must have been,” Barry says. “The man is still missing.”

“He could be on the mainland,” Owen has to counter, “or on the docks, or on a boat. We’ve been evacuating, remember? Twenty thousand guests and all the employees who were willing to leave.”

“Right,” says Lowery, “twenty thousand guests and six thousand-ish employees whose wristbands or employee ID cards were scanned while boarding the monorails, at the docks, and on the boats. Families were reuniting, the cell towers have been buzzing all night, everyone has been doing everything they can to make sure nobody gets left behind or isn’t accounted for. And the people who aren’t accounted for at the South Docks are us, Henry Wu, a couple hundred members of the vet hospital staff, every handler who isn’t also listed as ‘injured,’ and Vic Hoskins. Anybody know how many goons InGen sent us? We could go count boots, see if any of them are missing.”

“I will so very happily leave that task to the professionals,” Claire tells him, archly.

“Speaking of the professionals-- when are we expecting them?” Owen asks.

“It’s a work in progress,” Lowery tells him. “They’ll radio in on approach and I’m sending them to the East Dock.”

The South Dock is the tourist dock, for the ferries and cruise ships; the East Dock is the loading dock, for supplies and frequently, employees. It’s also across the island from Gyrosphere Valley, where Rexie has been hanging around.

“That’s a hell of a lot closer to the raptor paddock,” Owen has to agree. He can take the girls up to the Restricted Area, and maybe keep them out of any trouble but the usual trouble they’d get into in an unfamiliar area.

“Also all our monorail operators have evacuated, so. If they came in by the South Dock, they’d have to walk to the bodies.”

“I’m just glad we don’t have to do guest services today,” Claire admits. “We can use the loudspeaker system to warn people if Rexie’s getting close to them. She doesn’t have an implant or a pack, so she’s basically got free run of anywhere she can fit.”

“They need to see the beach in the Restricted Area, too,” Barry says. “InGen came ashore there, it was like watching an invasion.”

“… Why there?” Claire wonders aloud.

“It was before the Pterosaurs got loose,” Barry tells them, and there’s a long moment of silence on both sides of the radio.

Before the Pterosaur attack is before Masrani’s death. How close had they been, how early had Hoskins called, to have that many combat-ready men so fast?

The silence is broken by an inquisitive raptor chirp, startling both Owen and Leon-- Leon brakes and swears, and Charlie’s chest thuds against the wall dividing cab from bed. “Charlie!” Owen scolds-- sort of. It’s half concern, and he hisses, “Are you okay?” as the other side of the radio explodes in concern.

Delta hisses indignity, but Charlie seems fine-- a little sheepish about the sudden stop and maybe a little proud of herself for being a Big Scary Raptor, from what Owen gets out of her gabbling, but fine. Outside, Blue honks concern and confusion, so Owen leans out his window, telling the rest of the girls that everything’s fine, Charlie just startled Leon.

“We’re okay-- I think we’re okay? Charlie stuck her head through the window thing and I think she thought it was her turn to talk when we got quiet,” Leon says.

“You left the window open?” Claire asks.

“No, but it’s just a slider, she opened it herself,” Owen says-- and Leon gets them rolling again when Owen nods at him. “Blue learned to open sliding things when she was three months old, and she taught the rest of them.”

Lowery asks the question-- or a question that will lead to the answer-- that Owen is dreading. “So… story there, I’m guessing?”

“Raptors open things because it’s fun, or because they think they need to. There was something on the other side of a window that Blue wanted,” Owen defers.

Barry, ever helpful, continues, “This was before Owen had really accepted that the day was coming when Blue would have to stay in the paddock because she wasn’t a baby he could hide under his vest anymore. He left her in his little house to go talk to someone outside, she wanted him to be with her, and she fought the front window until she got it open. Shredded the screen, then fell on the porch and sprained her arm.”

“… Oh my god,” Claire says, “that’s adorable, you have to let me use that in ad copy somewhere.”

“… What, that raptors are basically very pointy toddlers for the first six months, and then they’re very pointy surly teenagers for another two-to-four months? That’s not ad-copy stuff.”

“Yes it is, and so is what you just said,” she tells him. “The whole reason-- all right, half the reason we have the petting zoo pygmy animals, and the whole reason we advertise them as babies is because so many guests were trying to sneak into the nurseries. People love baby animals.”

And that… is true. People love baby animals, especially baby apex predators-- puppies and kittens, lion cubs and wolf pups. “Huh.”

“What?” Leon asks, then tells the radio, “He’s got a funny look on his face.”

“Why didn’t we show the Indominus as a baby?” Owen asks. She’s a terrifying spiky death dinosaur now, but he’s seen raptor hatchlings up close and personal, and they’re all wide eyes and round heads and heart-melting peeps and squeals. If they hadn’t been research corridor animals, they would’ve been adorable little moneymakers right up until the time Owen wouldn’t trust them not to work out how to dismantle barriers between themselves and annoying tourists.

“We wanted something scary,” Claire says. “We found that particular memo. Mr. Masrani’s exact words were ‘bigger, scarier, cooler than anything anyone has ever seen before.’”

“Which doesn’t mean she wasn’t cute when she was little,” Owen points out.

“She wasn’t little for very long.”

“They never are,” and he truly does not mean to sound that wistful.

“We had a tight schedule, remember?” Claire says, but something in her voice has softened, too. “We intended to open last May, but Asset Containment has final say over enclosures, and they looked at a mockup of a full-grown Indominus and said the walls needed to be higher and that with her arms, she could probably dig her way out under the walls. We had to tear everything down in February and put down a new foundation.”

“… Where the hell did you put her while you were rebuilding?” He knows Rexie was full grown at three years, when Jurassic Park was set to open; Velociraptors can be instantly lethal to humans at eight months, but they’re not full-grown until a year, and not mentally mature until they’re at least fourteen months old, and sometimes as far as eighteen months. (Blue seemed mature at fourteen months, but that might be an Oldest Child thing; by then she had three sisters to help look after. Charlie, almost eighteen months herself, still hasn’t lost all her puppy qualities yet.)

“Put her?” Claire echoes. “I told you, she’d been in there all her life. Remember?”

“… Now that you remind me, yeah. Sorry. Yesterday was a long day. So… how old is she?”

“We finished reconstruction of the basic paddock in September, although we obviously hadn’t finished with guest seating or finalized access points-- that was what the next three weeks were for. So--”

“She’s only five months old?” Assuming early August and a few weeks in the lab as a hatchling, anyway-- it’s nearly January.

“Closer to three. She hatched in mid-September.”

“How is that even possible? She’s the size of a goddamn school bus. Dinosaurs don’t grow that fast, especially the big, smart ones.” Not only would the caloric requirements be insane-- a growing Indominus Rex would be constantly desperate for food-- but the possible psychological consequences are mind-boggling.

“We needed a new attraction,” Claire repeats, “and we needed it fast. We found an order, somewhere-- Gray, where’s that list Owen wanted? With what’s in the Indominus and which parts of what went where?” There’s a rustle, and Claire says, “We do have that list for you, by the way. Um. Cuttlefish, for an accelerated growth period.”

“I think that might be why she can change color,” Gray puts in. “Cuttlefish use chromatophores to mimic their surroundings.”

“Makes sense,” but Owen still has to ask-- “But lots of Velociraptor in her brain?”

“That’s what it looks like,” Claire confirms. “It’s hard to believe no one in the lab raised a red flag, though.”

“Really hard to believe. Raptors are smart-- like, Great Ape, elephant, corvid smart--”

“How smart is that?” Zach asks, and it’s a reasonable question and Claire might not know.

“Well, you can teach a gorilla sign language,” he says, “crows make and use simple tools, and African elephants understand enough of the illegal ivory trade that some of them break off their own tusks and leave them by roadsides to reduce the risk of being killed by poachers. So pretty smart.”

“And what does that have to do with an accelerated growth period?” Claire asks.

“All the warm-blooded animals I can think of that are both big and smart have pretty extended childhoods, giving them plenty of time to develop their brains along with their bodies.”

“Just like humans,” Gray says.

“And for pretty much the same reasons. They’re not usually ready to operate an adult body until then.”

“… And that’s definitely something a geneticist wouldn’t have to be an animal handler or vet or anything to know, right?” Claire asks, and there are blades hiding in the question.

“Not after Isla Sorna turning into a self-sustaining dino preserve,” Lowery says. “Nobody wants to be responsible for the next Frog Genes Fiasco.”

“Why didn’t anyone speak up?” Claire wonders.

“Because I hacked some of this information,” Lowery tells her. “I don’t think anybody but Dr. Wu knew all of what went into Foxtrot, or where or why.”

“Is there-- hang on--” Zach says, and then there’s movement, papers shuffling, then keys clicking. “Show me how to get into Human Resources?”

“Human Resources?” Claire repeats. “What do you need from HR?”

“I’m trying to see if… Okay, that’s the Indominus project, right? Paddock Eleven?”

“That’s it,” Owen confirms.

They listen to clicking for a while, and eventually Claire breathes, “Oh my God.”

“… We can’t actually see the control room,” Leon reminds.

“Uh, everyone involved in literally everything about Foxtrot until Owen got called up for a consult?” Lowery starts, “Was either recommended for the job or transferred to the job by Victor Hoskins. He didn’t even try to cover his tracks. Lab personnel-- no, scroll up-- yeah there--”

“Okay, but I don’t know the labs, so I don’t see anything weird,” Zach says.

“Wait, I do!” Gray pipes up. “Look, those are all assistants, but their duties are things like monitoring and ‘nest maintenance.’ Nobody worked on the genetics stuff. Is that weird? That seems weird. At school they like to have people work in pairs or groups in case one person misses something.”

“Usually,” Claire admits, tightly, “we do have small teams of scientists working on new species added to the park. It looks like the Indominus Rex was the sole creation of Henry Wu, and he hand-picked all the personnel allowed to assist in the lab.”

“Got enough rope to hang him with?” Owen asks.

“If we can find him, maybe,” Lowery says.

“We can try him in the court of public opinion, but that will depend on how dry our legal options are,” Claire says. “Owen, you were in the Navy?”

“Yeah?”

“Is there any military value for an asset like the Indominus Rex?”

“Viable military value, or ‘we’ve got one slightly stupid general who’s willing to throw money at us for stupid things that will never see a practical demonstration’ value?” he asks, because shit, seriously? “We don’t use mounted cavalry anymore for a reason. Foxtrot would be a logistical nightmare to transport--”

“He said ‘a fraction of the size,’” Gray interrupts. “They wanted her smaller.”

“‘He said,’” Owen echoes. “Is ‘he’ Hoskins?”

“Yeah,” Gray says. “He said she could evade the most advanced military technology, and called her a living weapon.”

“Son of a-- that-- Hoskins,” but he bites the word hard enough that it counts as a curse, “wanted to find military applications for the raptors. He thought that was the end goal of my research with the pack, instead of the end goal being to, you know, learn something. He never did want to listen to us when we told him that you can’t take an undomesticated animal into a battlefield situation.”

“I thought that was what you did with the Navy?” Claire asked. “Dolphins and things?”

“Marine mammals in the Navy tag mines-- and no, they can’t set the mines off, otherwise the mines would be pretty useless offensively-- and locate swimmers in restricted areas. And I didn’t work with them except initially; I was doing research to see if we could teach sharks to do the same things dolphins do.”

“… Wait, sharks?” Lowery asks. “The Navy wanted mine-tagging sharks? Were they going to have frickin’ laser beams mounted on their heads?”

“Lowery, dolphins kill for sport, like cats-- they think it’s funny. They also sexually harass and sometimes sexually assault human handlers. Sharks sometimes bite humans, but they always let go when they realize we’re not seals. They don’t pick up training well and need more space to swim, so they’re not going to replace dolphins, but if they could, their handlers would be a lot safer.”

“Things I did not want to know about Flipper, thank you,” and it’s impressive that Lowery can still sound horrified after yesterday. “I no longer feel guilty about dolphins in tuna nets.”

“Okay, returning to potential military applications of a miniaturized Indominus Rex,” Claire says. “Drawbacks besides being difficult to transport?”

“She still wouldn’t be easy to transport, not given how happy she’s been to walk down to the meat locker and back, she likes to move-- but she’d still be damn difficult to feed, water, entertain, and contain. What were you saying about eating the tourists, Lowery? When a Jeep gets low on gas, it doesn’t eat the driver. And there’s enough Velociraptor in an Indominus to make containment next to impossible in the field.”

“My god, yes,” Barry agrees. “A raptor is like an octopus. Even if they have enough room, enough things to do, they try to figure out how to get in and out-- because they see us do it, and they like to copy, and solve puzzles, and get attention. Foxtrot will probably be the same, she just decided to go big with her first escape attempt.”

“A raptor-sized Indominus would be even worse-- you’ve seen her arms and hands, Foxtrot has enough reach and dexterity that if she were Blue’s size, you could only stop her with… maybe electrostatic screens for locks. Put one in the field and they’ll be destroying the tent before you can say ‘bad girl.’ … Not you, Charlie, you’re just invasive,” Owen promises, reaching up to offer chin rubs. Charlie enthusiastically butts against his knuckles, so Owen rubs along her jaw.

“More than that,” Barry says, “the whole idea would end the career of any military department that tried to support it. Too many protests. Those dolphins and seals, the sharks Owen worked with, were never meant to see combat, and the Navy has been up-front about that since marine mammal work was declassified. Hoskins wanted to take an animal, a land animal with no real natural habitat left, and send it into combat to get shot at, tear gassed, blown up. You can’t finance genetic engineering without publicity, and you can’t get good publicity when you send an animal off to die.”

“An inadequately studied animal,” because that is an issue, too. That’s a huge issue. “Any of you guys know how many people you’d call if you wanted to host a conference between every person who might possibly be considered an expert on Velociraptors as living animals?”

“Well, I know,” Claire says.

“Me,” Barry says, “Owen, and Alan Grant. Maybe Sarah Harding and William Brennan, if you’re charitable. There are lifetimes of study in these animals, even the not-quite-accurate versions we have on Isla Nublar. And Foxtrot? She is made of so many animals we haven’t studied enough. We can’t predict any of them, like we couldn’t predict that Blue would want to bring Foxtrot into her pack.”

“It’s one of those ideas that sounds cool but just wouldn’t work outside a cartoon or a movie,” Owen says. Outside, Blue calls out for her sisters. “Hang on, I gotta--”

He blinks. They’re at the paddock, and at a full stop. Echo has settled in the shade of the paddock’s double gate, Foxtrot has curled up like the world’s largest cat, and Blue is watching them curiously through the windshield.

“… How long have we been stopped?” he asks Leon.

“We got here about ten minutes ago. I didn’t want to interrupt. … I also didn’t want to shut the air conditioning off,” Leon admits.

“Apparently I gotta go let Delta and Charlie out,” he says, and Charlie chirps affectionately at hearing her name, and sniffs his hair. “Yeah, I know, Charlie-girl, I need about three showers.”

“What are you going to do with the pack, Mr. Grady?” Gray asks.

“I can’t have them near the cops, they could get weird about people trampling their territory while I can’t shut them in the paddock-- and I can’t shut them in the paddock, because I can’t fit Foxtrot in there. I figure, restricted zone, but away from the beach Barry wants to show them? But they need a break, and I want to make sure everybody gets some water, and a vet’s supposed to meet us here around their lunchtime. Barry and I patched up the girls as best we could last night, but it was dark and we’re not vets. … Veterinarians.”

“I’ll meet you there in… half an hour or so, if I can?” Barry says. “Bring you some food, and some hand-radios so you aren’t stuck in that van.”

“Let me know when you’re out of there,” Lowery says, “and depending on whether or not they want to come ashore with Rexie running loose, I can just send the cops to Main Street first.”

“Sounds good. Barry, you want to come up to the Restricted Area with us, or is Leon’s second day gonna be as hands-on as his first day?”

“I don’t mind, if I don’t have to actually go camping,” Leon assures… well, Owen, but he’s bent toward the radio so possibly also Barry.

Blue calls out again, but this time Owen can hear a call to him in the sharp “Koh!” Then she honks, an indignant sound that Owen learned long ago means there is a thing and I can’t get it!

“… Yeah, I gotta go before Blue starts trying the handles herself,” Owen admits, and finally slides out of the van. “Don’t eat Leon’s hat, Charlie.”

Outside, he tries to keep half an ear on the conversation, but gives up despite Leon cutting the engine and rolling down the windows. “Sorry, Blue,” he offers, then goes around the back to release Charlie and Delta. Charlie bounds out enthusiastically, whacking first Owen, then the van’s back doors, then Blue with her tail as she turns around, gabbling happily.

Delta resettles after being bounced over by her sister, but refuses to get out of the van. “No.”

“No? Not for water?”

“Comfortable,” Delta insists, more as a concept than a word, and pretends to sleep (a pretty clear dismissal). It takes Owen a long moment to realize that she’s so comfortable because he and Leon never dispelled the cushioning charms on the van-- which certainly explains why Delta, with her bum leg, didn’t complain about the long car trips.

And although he makes a mental note to fix that before the actual vet shows up, Owen’s still got dinosaurs to water-- well, dinosaur, singular, unless Delta decides she doesn’t want to go as far as the paddock to drink. He leaves Delta to her comfy spot (idly wondering if he should get them softer stuff to lay on, despite their tendency to destroy upholstery and mattresses. Maybe a memory foam thing?), doors open in case she decides there are things more important than comfy spots, and goes to drag the big galvanized tub out of the storage shed.

Charlie gabbles happily at seeing it-- it’s been put away since she outgrew it as the raptor version of a kiddie pool, but Owen isn’t a hundred percent certain that she’s not expecting to go swimming. When he comes back with the hose to find her sitting in it, Owen is absolutely certain Charlie has no idea how big she’s gotten.

“… Charlie-girl. What are you even doing?” He shakes his head. “Get out of there. Your pond is inside.”

“Little pond!” Charlie is definitely not full-grown, mentally. Really, Owen hopes he didn’t make Blue grow up too fast by bringing in little sisters to help take care of. Unless this is an iguana thing, making it all Charlie’s.

“Big dish,” he tells her, then resorts to bribery. “Get out, let me fill it up for our new girl, then play with the hose?”

“Fill up first?” He’d love, he’d really love, to be able to tell people just how intelligent his raptors are, because here’s Charlie, negotiating for what she wants (to get wet), and all she needs to do it is a handful of shared vocabulary. Unfortunately, acknowledging the shared vocabulary would get Owen in more trouble than all the dead guys in body armor who have started attracting flies.

“You clean enough to drink?” She’s not. None of them are, really, and running water over Charlie would probably leave the tub full of dirt soup-- using the word ‘dirt’ very charitably.

Charlie, fortunately, likes to drink clean water as much as anyone (more, sometimes, she doesn’t drink from the pond she soaks in, but Echo will if the water trough is crowded) and reluctantly hops out of the tub. “Good girl,” he tells her, “That’s my girl.”

She’s not good enough not to bite at the spray of water from the hose to the tub, but Owen also doesn’t tell her to not to. It’s not hurting anything and doesn’t really count as a bad habit, just a silly one. The tub fills up fairly quickly, and Owen looks over to the Indominus-- to Foxtrot.

“Thirsty?” he asks. “Want some water?”

“Yes. Why do you switch from mammal to this?” Which is a very reasonable question. Owen answers it as the Indominus drinks, mouth buried in the water.

“The raptors can’t understand or speak this language as well as you can, but they know a few words of the mammal language, and some gestures if I have to speak to them silently. I can understand most of their language, but I can’t speak it. We get by when we pool all that.”

She pulls her head out, tips it back to swallow, then hisses, “Why speak mammal at me?”

“Force of habit? And it’s probably good for you to pick up a few words, understand tone and body language, too.”

She looks at him for a long moment before saying, “Yes,” again, and dipping back to the water. Another swallow and, “Teach me.”

“I’ll do my best,” Owen promises her. “How would you feel about having a name, like the rest of the girls?”

“I have a smell. I don’t understand why mammals need more?”

“So I can call you, or Barry can, or Leon-- that’s the guy still sitting in the van. So you can hear from one word if there’s a warning just for you, or be asked for something only you can give.” So he can humanize her, for lack of a better word, to people who’ll want to see her as a monster no matter what.

“What name?”

“I was thinking about Foxtrot. Foxtrot,” he repeats, in English. “But we can change it. Blue was supposed to be Bravo, but that didn’t stick. You know the stripes down her sides? I don’t know what color you see that as, but we see it as blue, like deep water.”

“… Deep Water would be a better name. She’s like that. Calm but dangerous.”

“I think Blue would take that as a compliment.”

“Do the other names mean colors?”

“The other names are… part of a system of communication, it’s hard to explain. They’re also words or names. A delta is a series of little rivers that flow out of a big river to the ocean, an echo is when a sound bounces off of something hard, so you hear it twice, and Charlie is a human name that means freeman. Bravo,” because suddenly it makes sense to explain the whole thing, “is a word of praise and congratulations, and foxtrot is a kind of dance. … And my name is Owen, which doesn‘t fit with the system.”

He does kind of hope for more, someday, whether that means he gets India, Juliett, Kilo, and Lima or if they have to use the existing girls as templates and he ends up with some other naming pattern. He can’t get that far ahead of himself-- there’s a lot of cooperating with the authorities to do today, and probably for the foreseeable future.

“Say them in this speech?” she asks, head tilted.

He obliges, reciting, “Blue, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, and Owen.”

Charlie finally gets fed up, and complains at him, trying to draw out “Koh!” into a whine. It works… awkwardly.

“I did promise her. But I can spray her down and talk to you at the same time,” he says, then, “Okay, Charlie, here we go.” Fiddling with the spray nozzle on the hose, he gives Charlie a good spritzing. She screels happily and tries to bite the spray, prancing around and making a hazard of her tail. (If she gets muddy from the ankles down, Owen doesn’t care; the worst of last night’s adventures sluice off of her with the water. He should hose them all down.)

“Try Foxtrot,” the Indominus-- Foxtrot-- agrees, watching Charlie and sounding amused. “She’s having fun.”

“She likes water,” Owen says, smiling with his teeth covered. “You want to play, too? I might have to get up higher, but…” There’s a real vet on the way. He can get dressings wet, they probably need to be changed anyway.

Which is how Owen ends up climbing to the catwalk above the raptor paddock, spraying down his water-loving raptor, his newly-named Foxtrot, and sometimes Blue. Foxtrot chases the spray, lifts her head to have her chin hosed down, dances around Charlie, gets whacked in the ankle with Charlie’s tail at least once that Owen sees, gets incidentally cleaned up, and bleats and burbles (well, hoots and rumbles) in pleasure. Owen is reminded that she’s only a few months old-- a giant baby, maybe Blue somehow caught that?-- and that this is probably the first fun thing she’s ever participated in.

The ground is dark and wet when Leon sticks his head out the window and calls, “Hey, Owen! Vet’s on the line!”

“Okay, girls, game’s over. Time to talk to the people bringing lunch and medicine,” and although he’s pretty sure Charlie understood maybe half of that, she trills an acknowledgement and goes to drink from the tub. Foxtrot shakes off, spraying water and losing one of her taped-on bandages.

Blue just follows him to the van. Owen rubs her head, almost idly, as he tells the vet what they need (first, lunch and some oral tranquilizers, then he runs down who’s injured and how), and then gets a general status report-- the Mosasaurus is back on her feeding schedule, Rexie is moving around Gyrosphere Valley alternately marking her territory, eating, and napping, all the animals have been fed, and a vet tech and a triceratops handler who both worked food service through college have commandeered the Hilton’s kitchen and are shipping out basic cold or okay-cold lunch orders. Anyone who wants hot food or frozen desserts has to actually get to the Hilton, but back roads, radios, and Gray’s Rexie Watch make delivering food pretty safe. Nobody wants to go up Main Street until the authorities arrive, and honestly Owen can’t blame them. He’d take the girls to the vet instead of bringing the vet to the girls, if he thought they’d behave themselves around a bunch of injured petting-zoo pygmies.

They wouldn’t. There’s a limit to how much ‘do not eat that’ they’ll take from him.

Barry shows up with the vet, handheld radios, food for the pack, drugged treats for the pack, gas for the van, and food for Barry and Leon. Delta is willing to get out of the van for lunch, and Leon thankfully picks up on Owen’s signal to dispel the cushioning charms, so they don’t have to explain it to anyone who climbs in.

Foxtrot, being that much bigger, takes longer to doze off than the raptors. “Why are we sleepy?”

“So you don’t hurt the vet while they patch up your wounds. Shh. It’s okay. It’s okay, Foxtrot. These are good humans, and Barry and I won’t let them hurt anyone. They don’t even have guns.” Plenty of other lethal weapons, sure, but not guns. And Owen is lucky that Parseltongue mostly sounds like shushing to the uninitiated.

“You’ve made amazing progress with that animal,” the vet points out.

“Blue has. I’m just grandfathered into that rapport. Besides, Foxtrot’s a lot younger than she looks.”

“Named her already?”

“We’re trying it on for size.”

The pack has a host of injuries, though, and as soon as everyone is sleepy and safe to handle and not likely to attack anyone for poking at their sleeping sister, the vet gets to work. Delta’s leg is pronounced probably just a sprain, keep her off of it, bring her in if it gets worse, and re-wrapped by people who know what they’re doing and can see what they’re doing. Foxtrot’s injuries are cleaned, packed in the case of her back, re-dressed, and they manage to find bullets that Owen and Barry missed the night before. They’re lodged fairly harmlessly in the thick skin of her sides, and Owen stamps down on the thought that Hoskins got a bulletproof dinosaur for his stupid schemes. Hoskins does not get to keep Foxtrot. Charlie’s graze is dubbed messy but minor, especially since she hasn’t let it slow her down, and Blue and Echo are lucky, with only a few scratches and bruises.

Then the vet wants to see to a cut above Owen’s eye and a graze Barry took to one shoulder. “Not from a bullet. One of those amber things broke and the pieces went flying,” he assures them.

Just as she’s finishing up, Leon says, “The police are here for the bodies. Lowery’s bringing them to Main Street first, but wants to know how long we need to clear out the pack.”

“They won’t wake up for a good half hour,” the vet says, “at least not the raptors. The Indominus might take more or less time, I don’t know for sure what her metabolism is like. And they’ll need another good hour before they’re ready to go anywhere. The last thing we need are stoned predators stumbling around.”

“A couple hours, looks like. Enough time for us to eat,” Owen says, and finally having food and the chance to eat it is awesome. It’s cold fried chicken and some dinner rolls that are starting to get a little stale, but the last time Owen ate, he didn’t know anything about hybridized dinosaurs. Which admittedly was about one in the afternoon yesterday, but it feels like a lifetime ago.

The vet packs up and leaves, although she loads Owen down with antibiotics for Foxtrot and instructions to come get pain meds if anyone seems to need it (raptors aren’t much harder to pill than dogs, fortunately-- wrap it in meat and they’re happy to be medicated), and Barry must’ve already eaten something, because he keeps chuckling as he watches Owen and Leon inhale chicken with a single-minded focus.

And, really, the rest of the day goes almost alarmingly smoothly from there-- possibly because Owen’s job is to keep his carnivores from bothering the police and medical examiners, so all he really has to do is arrange to borrow one of the tents the park rents out for romantic weekends sleeping in Gyrosphere Valley and radio in when he finds somewhere in the Restricted Area that works as a campsite. The spot he picks-- north of the wall but well south of the volcano, at the edge of the jungle and within walking distance of a slow-moving river-- would be a great place to stake out as the pack’s new paddock, he thinks. It’s beautiful-- but it’s too far from any infrastructure beyond an access road, and it would probably take too long to be reclaimed even if moving the wall were particularly likely.

Nobody wants to camp with apex predators besides Owen, who doesn’t want to so much as he doesn’t really have a choice in the matter. He settles in, washes up in the river, puts in requests via radio (clean clothes, bug repellent, portable charger for the tablet, his motorcycle, a map of the park with Claire’s prospective paddock sites circled) that either Barry or Leon fill when they have the chance, leaves the girls to their own devices as much as he can, and tries to think forward.

First he watches videos.

It’s harder than he’d expected to watch the Delta’s-eye-view of Hoskins’ death. The night vision camera gives it an eldritch quality, computer monitors and light sources glowing greeny-white and far too big, and every time Delta swings her head rapidly the picture is a complete blur-- but birdlike, her head is usually very steady. He sees what she saw. He sees Claire put herself in front of the boys, he sees Barry fan out in front of the three of them like a shield. Hoskins never looms over Barry, but he looms toward him, his body language says he’s in control and considers himself a threat-- and Owen knows that Delta could read that.

He can’t spot whatever makes Delta decide enough is enough, but he watches Hoskins’ terrified face and silent, desperate bargaining as Delta closes in on him, corners him. He watches Hoskins reach out with an indecisive hand-- raised and open (potential threat) but rounded, like he’s moving in to pat a friendly dog-- and although there’s no audio, although he can’t see Delta’s body language, he can almost feel that she’s insulted by the gesture, by something so obviously scared of her daring to raise a hand against her, and Owen knows a split second before she bites the hand and all he’s got is weird foreshortening while Delta rips into Hoskins.

He’s torn up when she leaves him, very obviously dead even if he’s only missing a few pieces, and Delta trots back out to Barry, only sparing a glance at Claire. A moment stretches, and while Owen isn’t the best lip reader, Barry’s ‘good girl’ is almost exaggerated.

And that’s going to be the question Barry will have to answer; Why did you praise the animal for killing someone, Mr. Martine?

Owen doesn’t know for sure what the right answer (the answer that will protect Delta and Barry both, whether or not it’s totally true) would be.

After that, he searches for as much footage of the fight at the paddock as he can find. There’s a separate audio track, which he listens to before watching anything; while the threat to his life got caught clear as crystal, Leon’s Stupefy didn’t really record, overshadowed by a crackle of static (sometimes, Owen wonders if magic defends itself) and Foxtrot’s opening roar. He wants to listen again, with better speakers, but it seems like the sounds of gunfire and mercenaries shouting and four very angry dinosaurs drowns out every Protego and Incendio, and the sound gutters out-- following the few survivors-- before it can pick up Owen’s Reparo or Leon asking about Obliviate.

So, that secret is safe.

The night-vision video is choppy, and there are dozens of feeds. If Delta’s camera felt like the Blair Witch Project, the mercenaries’ cameras feel like a horror movie where the climax was shot as the cameraman fell down a flight of stairs.

He watches a lot of men die, this time through their eyes instead of the dinosaur’s eyes. Through prey eyes. Owen sees jaws close and claws tear, his point of view sometimes turning down to see guts spilling past slashed-open Kevlar. He sees footage go still, only to be blotted out by the shadow of Foxtrot’s stomping feet, then sputter out and end.

He sees Leon, whose spell-slinging looks enough like frantic flailing to keep him out of trouble, and then the whole picture goes sideways and all he sees is dirt. (He sees himself save Leon’s life, from the point of view of the man who was about to shoot Leon. He sees himself fight like a raptor, as the side attack no one expected.)

He doesn’t see any visual proof of spells, no trailing sparks or distortions in the air; if normal cameras pick that up, night-vision cameras don’t.

It’s a lot of very efficiently administered death, and he watches it through as many eyes as he can until he’s absolutely positive that he can’t see anything besides four relatively peaceable carnivores turning angry when fired on. Owen isn’t, admittedly, your usual juror, but it’s really hard to blame animals for fighting back when they’re being shot at, he hopes. A wizarding juror might recognize some of Leon’s gesticulation as spell casting, but a wizarding juror would probably not blame a guy for working magic in the middle of all that gunfire.

They’re not safe, because unless Claire works some kind of deep magic of her own, they’ll probably go to court kind of a lot, but they’re also not in immediate danger. Owen can breathe, and pretend he’s just on a nice, normal tropical camping trip, with his four Velociraptors and his Indominus Rex.

He keeps abreast of the investigation-- sixty-eight people are dead, in total, fifty-six of them InGen paramilitary, their bodies have been tagged and bagged and on their way to the mainland to be identified, along with Vic Hoskins, and the remains of the first Asset Containment team to go up against Foxtrot, to be claimed by their families. The cops also find Zara Young, Claire’s assistant, who the boys watched get carried off by a Pteranodon, in the botanical garden, bruised and bashed and sporting a nasty rash from some prehistoric plant she’d gotten dropped into-- but alive and in one piece, a miracle no one had expected. By then, the police have spoken to everyone who saw anything except Owen, and he’s next on their list.

Luckily, one of the officers in charge is willing to video-chat, understanding that Owen isn’t exactly able to leave the pack alone, and that it’s not really safe to come visit. The security footage makes for a very good example of why it’s just not safe to come visit.

Owen tells him everything besides magic. It takes a while, and he’s interrupted by dinosaurs periodically, which the cop seems to treat like being interrupted by a dog or a toddler. He gets the sense after a while that the police think the raptors were willing to protect the “innocent” humans, and only kill the invading ones. “No, not really. Yesterday morning, they almost ate Leon because they were wound up and in hunt-mode when he fell into their enclosure. Last night, they went after the people who were trying to hurt them or their pack-- Barry and I count as pack, the way they think.”

“They didn’t fight the T-Rex,” the officer says.

“They were getting tired,” Owen points out, “and she gave them an out. Rexie’s old but wily and in good shape while the girls are young but a little banged up; nobody would’ve won that fight, and animals are really good at estimating that at a glance. I think that’s why Delta was okay around Claire-- Ms. Dearing-- and her nephews. She acted like a mother animal and she smells related to them. Threaten a mother with young and you’ll probably have to do more healing than the meal pays for.”

“That’s very true,” the cop says, like a man who’s had experience. Maybe with kittens. Mama cats can go off like claymore mines if they feel threatened. “Are you safe with them?”

“I’m safe enough as long as I don’t do anything stupid,” Owen allows, “and honestly I feel more threatened by the mosquitoes out here than the dinosaurs.”

“What do you think Mr. Hoskins did that convinced your animal that he was a threat?”

“I can’t say for sure. I’ve watched the footage from her camera, but there’s no sound. Barry-- Barry Martine, the other senior handler-- is Delta’s favorite human, and his posture pretty much screamed that he felt threatened, but that he was going to protect Ms. Dearing and the kids. Hoskins was never really good around the raptors, either, and Delta took a personal dislike to him-- probably because he tended to laugh at her threat displays. And the way he raises his hand to her in the video? Humans would see that as him trying to reach out to calm her or pet her, but from an animal’s point of view, a hand up and out like that is actually a threat display. I’d love to be able to say that Delta was just being altruistic, but I honestly don’t know if she would’ve killed a stranger threatening those same people that same way.”

“Would you say Mr. Hoskins brought his fate on himself?”

“No. He couldn’t have foreseen Barry bringing Delta to the Innovation Center, for one thing, and once a raptor gets on target, the only way to divert her is by giving her a new target. Even if Claire, Zach, and Gray weren’t there, I wouldn’t blame Barry for not wanting to trade his life for Hoskins. Hoskins was a dick-- and that’s probably not a good thing to say to a cop…”

“That depends. How was he a dick?”

“Off the top of my head? When he was going on about his ideas for an attack-raptor training program yesterday, he looked at Barry-- you’ve talked to Barry?” Because it’s relevant.

“I have.”

“Hoskins was a white American,” Owen continues, “and he looked right at Barry and went on about how he’d only let the loyal ones breed, while putting down the rogues.”

“… Really.” It’s not a question. It can’t be a question, because the Costa Rican police officer, whose English is excellent and who (thanks to Jurassic World) probably deals with a steady stream of asshole American tourists too cheap to stay on the island, is wearing an expression Owen sees whenever he falls into the position of ‘least appalling white man in the room.’

“I really wish I were kidding.”

“Pinga,” the cop mutters.

“Cien por ciento,” Owen agrees, in Spanish he knows is a little shaky.

“What do you think of Ms. Dearing’s decision to let the T. Rex loose?”

“… I honestly don’t know why she did it,” Owen has to admit, “but it seems to have turned out okay, and I don’t have to tell Claire’s sister that her twelve-year-old was shot by mercenaries.”

“But now all the mercenaries are dead.”

“Yeah-- I’m just not a big enough person to feel bad that a bunch of muscle-for-hire willing to shoot at an unarmed twelve-year-old ended up dead, sorry,” Owen admits with a shrug.

“From what I can tell, only one man who died was Costa Rican,” the cop says, “and he worked for the construction company.”

“Ellis,” Owen agrees. “The electrician. Yeah.”

“Ms. Dearing said you’re worried about the animals.”

“They’re animals, they don’t know what’s going on. The raptors were protecting their home and their pack,” he says, “and the Indominus Rex was desperate when she escaped.”

“And the flying ones?”

“Not my specialty-- Barry might have more ideas. But a super-predator and then a helicopter crashed into their aviary, so… maybe a panic-induced territory shift? I wish I knew, really. From where I was standing, it looked like they were going out of their way to be assholes-- but I was standing pretty much right under them, so I might be biased.”

“I don’t think it’s worth our time to arrest anyone here,” the cop says, “but that doesn’t mean you’re out of trouble.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Owen tells him. “Otherwise the animals starve.”

“We’ll keep letting the supply ships through. We’re going to need to see the helicopter crash site, too.”

“… Okay, you’re gonna have to talk to Claire about that…”

“We need to call in some specialists. Our examiners are used to dealing with human remains, not helicopter remains, and we’ve got sixty-five bodies to take back with us.”

“There’ll be three more in the Aviary,” Owen tells him, knowing some of those bodies are more like pieces of bodies. And some of them are pudding. Foxtrot is a pretty firm believer in ‘no kill like overkill.’ “Also you’re going to want to talk to Claire about bringing either guns or ACU members with tranq guns in with you. We don’t know, yet, if all the Pterosaurs were brought down, and like I said… assholes.”

The rest of the interview is mostly Owen promising to be available for further questioning as needed. He’s going to be camping for… a lot more of the foreseeable future than he would’ve expected, but he doesn’t intend to move sites until he has to. He runs the girls through basic training exercises, getting Foxtrot used to the commands and integrating her into pack structure, but otherwise he doesn’t try to be a taskmaster. There are no gates, no catwalks, and no barriers to protect him if he oversteps, and besides, he’d go easy on them if they were adding a new hatchling to the pack. Foxtrot isn’t that much different, and he wants to give the girls time to make friends with her. Charlie takes it on herself to draw Foxtrot into play, chases and what look like races, hunting games, and anything involving the river. Charlie also takes it on herself to provide everyone with fish from the river, including Echo, who doesn’t like fish (but always takes a nibble to humor her little sister-- then foists them off on Delta) and Owen, who has to cook them first, which confuses all the girls.

“I like the texture,” he tries to explain (because explaining he likes not having intestinal parasites that the pack is adapted for is too complicated), which ends in him cooking a fish for each of them over his fire, letting them judge the texture for themselves. Their judgment varies. Echo likes that they’re warm, but still sneaks most of her sample to Delta, who doesn’t care. Blue thinks it takes too long (her reaction is a drawn-out honk that Owen hears as a complaining “Slooooooow,” which at least means Blue doesn’t always feel the need to be one hundred percent mature), Charlie decides she likes fish both ways, and Foxtrot first sides with Charlie… then later tells Owen that the river fish are too small for her to taste much at all, she just likes that Charlie shares her catches.

Blue wrestles with Charlie, and sometimes, with care, wrestles with Echo, but always where Foxtrot can see. She’s teaching her new fosterling how to fight by example, since she can’t really wrestle with Foxtrot one-on-one.

After word goes out that Zara is telecommuting to help with the legal stuff-- she’s on the mainland and insisting on staying on the mainland until the pack is contained-- and Zach and Gray head home-- enough control room and asset containment staff have come back by then that the boys aren’t desperately needed extra sets of eyes anymore-- Claire comes to see him, this time wearing jeans, a white button-down shirt, and little canvas sneakers that are at least flat. Blindingly white and still not what he’d consider ‘campsite in the jungle’ shoes, but they’re flat.

(She looks amazing.)

The pack still makes her nervous, but she refuses to show intimidation-- and respectfully lets Owen guide her through pack politics, and has apparently been talking to Barry, because she holds gazes exactly the right length of time, and sticks close to Owen without cowering beside him. “I thought if nothing else, we could go over potential paddock sites,” she says, when he leads her to the rough sitting area he’s set up outside his tent.

“Sure, sounds good.” He offers her a bottle of water, and she smiles and offers him something that feels like an utter luxury-- a bag full of supplies to make s’mores. It’s stupid and childish and makes him grin like a damned idiot.

Then Blue snarls, sounding as surprised as she does thoughtful, and Foxtrot hisses a realization, and suddenly the pack is gabbling excitedly.

“… What just…” Claire wants to stare at them, but keeps looking back to Owen.

Owen, unfortunately, has no idea. The gabbling is always hard to understand, sometimes impossible, and now all he can get is that they’re not agitated, just excited. Then Charlie runs downriver and slips into the water, silent as a shark. “… How do you feel about fresh fish for dinner?”

“I… would have brought some white wine?” Claire offers. “Seriously, Owen, do I need to worry?”

“I don’t think so, they’re not acting hostile-- but Charlie just went fishing.”

“… Very fresh fish, then.”

“It may still be flapping,” he agrees, “but if Charlie brings you anything, tell her thank you and that she’s a good girl, even if it’s a rock. … And remember it’s nothing personal if she smacks you with her tail. Hers doesn’t tuck in as close as her sisters’.”

“It’s physical?”

“Yeah, if it were just clumsiness, Echo would’ve trained it out of her months ago.” But if they’re going to have fish, or even just s’mores, they’re going to need fire instead of hot coals, so Owen stirs up the campfire and adds a little more fuel from his stockpile.

“It’s so different, seeing them like this.”

“Hm?”

“… In daylight, for one thing. And… loose but happy. It makes me wish I could give you the whole Restricted Area for them.”

“I won’t lie, it would be nice to come up here regularly-- but the whole Restricted Area might be a bit much. You see how Charlie is in the river. I’d be terrified to let her loose on a beach. She loves swimming, but she’s got no experience with undertow.”

“Well,” she says, pulling out a map-- not the mass-produced park map they give tourists, like Leon brought him (he got it fast, so no complaints), but a proper topographical map with boundaries, roads, and the monorail route clearly marked and to scale, “the spot I’m thinking of south of the Western Plains has a river we could divert, or partially divert. Charlie could have room to swim and fish to catch. We could put them east of the ridge, along the same river, but that might butt too closely up against Paddock Nine, what do you think?”

“Yeah, it’s a little close.” He’s a little close, leaning over the map with Claire, looking for places to put his girls. “The monorail’s right there, though, that’ll be good for the exhibit.”

“Mm, and the gondola lift is on the east side of the ridge. We could move the southern half of the bamboo forest-- as an attraction, it’s honestly not that popular, very few guests want to go on a hike where they don’t see dinosaurs-- but we’d have to add a water feature.”

“Kinda close to the golf course…”

“… Do you think they’d disturb the golfers or the golfers would disturb them?”

“Little of both, and wondering if golf balls are small enough for raptors to pass safely.”

“… Okay, so, we’ll leave that option as a last resort,” Claire agrees. “We will be dismantling the Aviary, so that site is open, but-- do you think it’s too close to the Cretaceous Cruise? I know we couldn’t use the river as a water feature, but…”

“N-- yes,” Owen decides, halfway through a denial. “Not if it were just the raptors, but one of the few things that riles up the Suchomimus is having other large predators in her territory. If there’s a border in common, she’ll try to get at Foxtrot.”

“She shares well with the Baryonyx and the Metriacanthosaurs, though.”

“They’re a lot smaller than she is. Going theory is that she doesn’t see them as competition.”

“Humans are so much easier to predict,” Claire sighs. “Well, there’s the original site of Paddock Eleven…”

“But isn’t that already inconvenient?” Owen counters. “Four miles out from any other attraction? We had to drive instead of taking the monorail.”

“Access was in progress,” she tells him, “but… yes, I admit the coastal site does have better immediate access that we could repurpose quickly.”

“Then I need a day when I’ve got a clear path down that way,” he says, “so I can see how the girls react to the site. The raptors should be okay with the sound of the ocean, we were on an east-facing cliff-- does the west side of the island get more weather?”

“Some, but I absolutely do not want to leave them without adequate shelter,” Claire promises. “Can we set up a temporary perimeter here, or would that bother them? You’ll need to meet with architects, ACU, landscapers…”

If he tells them the fence is just so he knows they’re safe… maybe. “Well, we can try it and see.”

There’s a splash as Charlie charges out of the water with a mouthful of fish. Ordinarily she’d give Delta a share first-- Charlie is proud of her new role as Fish Bringer and takes Owen’s feeding order seriously-- but instead she bounds up to the campsite and gives Claire the first drop, then Owen. There are three altogether, a lucky bite, and yes, the two that land at Claire’s feet are still flapping. Claire’s frozen, but she pipes out, “Good job, Charlie, thank you, good girl,” very pleasantly and without showing her teeth.

Owen’s impressed.

Charlie gabbles back to them, then turns and runs-- Owen gets caught by her tail, but Claire sees his shoulder get smacked and ducks out of the way-- back to the pack.

All five of them disperse, though Delta and Blue don’t go far, and all of them watch the campsite. Foxtrot goes so far as to try to blend into the grass, her changing hide taking on green and yellow streaks, which would work better if the grass were taller.

“What just happened?” Claire asks, gingerly picking up her fish, “And I’m really hoping you know how to turn these into food.”

“I have no-- I have almost no idea what happened,” Owen admits, but he’s got his knife, a plastic cutting board, and a mostly-flat rock he’s been using as a very low prep table, so he accepts the fish and kills them so he can start gutting them.

“So you have a theory?”

“A hypothesis,” he corrects. “There’s a cast-iron pan with a stick duct-taped to the handle just inside the tent, can you grab that?”

“We’re getting shipments from the mainland again,” Claire tells him, but collects the pan. “Do you want me to get you a charcoal grill?”

“Too top-heavy, I don’t want to start a grassfire. But a campfire grill would make my life a lot easier.”

“I’ll see what I can do. What’s your hypothesis?”

“Well.” It’s hard to shoot anyone a rakish look while you’re cleaning fish-- not an inherently sexy task-- but Owen tries, and his attempt is met with a raised eyebrow from Claire. “There are a lot of situations I’ll probably never have the chance to observe, with the pack, because they’re all female and grew up relating as sisters. I could introduce new hatchlings, now that they’re all adults, and expect to see parental bonds form, but I’ll never get to see what a nest looks like, or if they form pair-bonds to parent, or how a mating ritual goes.”

For a moment, Claire looks like she’s waiting for Owen to get to the point-- and then she blushes. “You mean they think--”

“They might think,” Owen corrects, “but you’re in their territory, you got welcomed to the pack leader’s den-- with a gift of food-- they haven’t been around a lot of women, because some animals get weird,” and he’s going to stop there, and not say anything about dolphins, “but they’ve got great senses of smell. We’re probably sending all kinds of pheromones at each other.”

“Our first date,” and there’s some playfulness in her arch tone, “was a disaster-- but I’ve realized it was a disaster partly because neither of us told the other what we expected from that date.”

“I thought you’d want a chance to get out of the boardroom clothes,” Owen admits, although he doesn’t admit that he had certain fantasies of Claire in a soft sundress or bathing suit, something that didn’t cost more than his motorcycle, something he could touch.

“And I thought you might still have something resembling dress whites,” Claire agrees. “We can prevent that misunderstanding in the future with… simple communication.”

“Sounds good.” Very good. He can do that-- I was thinking we could find a private beach or Where do you want to go for dinner? Entirely workable, at least once he can get back to his house instead of starring as The Human in the feel-good hit of the holiday season, Camping With Carnivores. Although it probably means he’s going to have to invest in some new clothes.

“And if I can be blunt?”

“Please.”

“The first time I sleep with you, it will not be in a tent.”

Owen goes still for a moment, then grins at Claire. “So not tonight.”

“Not tonight. … Preferably not ever in front of animals intelligent enough to know what we’re doing,” which is completely understandable. “Is it weird that they’re not acting jealous? I don’t have anything to compare it to besides people’s pets, and I know dogs and cats can get jealous…”

“I’d understand it if they were,” Owen admits, and this is steady ground, talking about his girls, “but it makes as much sense that they’re not. They’ve seen me as a parent figure their whole lives, but they’re all grown enough now to take care of themselves, for the most part-- Blue’s been teaching Foxtrot how to be a raptor. If I had to guess, I’d guess they just realized me ‘taking a mate’ is even possible.”

“… Will it upset them if things don’t work out?”

And honestly, Owen doesn’t really know. So he shrugs. “It’s not like I live in the paddock with them, or like you will. We stay on good terms, they shouldn’t have a problem. If we’re lucky, they’ll accept you as… a satellite pack member. Somebody who can help us defend a nice big territory.”

“I dispense territory, Mister Grady,” but she’s smiling, a little, and also sounds like she’s inviting banter.

“Right, right, I forgot, you’re not one of us animals,” he says, wiping his hands and settling the pan in the fire. “You’re the White Queen of the Island.”

“Damn straight,” Claire agrees, and sips at her water bottle with painted lips. “But while you’re playing with fire,” she gestures at the pan, “Asset Containment is back on the island. We’re not at full force and probably won’t be for a while, but I should be able to clear you a path to the west-coast site this week. If you think you can keep the pack along access roads, I should be able to clear something tomorrow.”

“Shit, seriously?” The fish sizzles as it hits the hot pan.

“The sooner we can see how the pack likes the site, the sooner we can start design and construction,” she tells him, “the sooner we can reopen.”

“How are we looking legally?” he asks.

“… Complex,” she answers, and although dinner is nice, the conversation never manages to stray back to the romantic or even the suggestive from there. While Owen’s got dinosaurs to manage, Claire’s got lawyers, lots of lawyers, some of whom want the whole incident swept under the rug, some of whom want a lot of money for their clients’ families, and some of whom want Owen’s testimony. He promises Claire he’ll give it, when he can leave the girls without knowing deep in his heart that they’ll get into trouble.

There’s still no sign of Henry Wu.

He does get to kiss her goodnight (it’s not really night yet, but the light is fading and Claire wants to leave before it’s gone entirely; the Restricted Area does not have working streetlights), which draws some odd commentary from the pack, as does Owen escorting Claire to her car (less to be gentlemanly than to keep her safe. He’d happily watch her walk away in those jeans)-- but nothing so much as when Claire drives off without him.

Blue’s honking is astonished. It comes through as “What. What,” but Owen can just tell she’s certain Owen screwed up without actually understanding how Owen screwed up.

“Why did she leave?” Foxtrot asks, taking advantage of being bilingual.

“She had a couple of reasons,” Owen said. “Will you help me explain to them? It’s kind of complicated.”

“I always explain to them. Or to you.” And that’s… true. She does that. Blue is the Big Sister, Owen worked hard at making sure she knows her job is to help him take care of the pack. Delta’s a solid judge of character, now, with more space and with her sprain healed up, she’s moving into the role of scout. Echo keeps Blue on her toes, but she’s also a hell of a hunter and silent in an ambush. Charlie instigates play; she may idolize Blue and definitely enjoys getting to show Foxtrot how to have fun, but she’s happy to engage with any of her sisters. And Foxtrot?

Foxtrot has slipped into the role of interpreter. Snake DNA, serpentine jaw structure, might give her an edge in understanding Owen’s Parseltongue, but she speaks Raptor just as naturally. If he thinks about it, Owen can remember a dozen or more situations where she’s willingly acted as a bridge between him and the raptors.

“… I need to work on teaching you more English,” Owen decides, but he’s got other things to explain. “Okay. Claire, the woman who was just here, is very important to the island. All the humans here, even the ones who are just visiting, answer to her eventually.”

Foxtrot relays, stretching out and laying down to be closer to everyone’s eye level, and although it sounds accurate enough to Owen, there’s some chatter back and forth among the pack that he only gets a few confused words of-- Status from Echo, at least-- and a disbelieving snort from Blue.

“They want to know if she’s too important for you,” Foxtrot tells him. And that’s fair. Claire’s out of his league in a lot of ways. Claire is in a league of her own.

“She’s too important for everybody,” Owen says, “but I’m pretty sure I have a better chance than anyone else.”

There’s a despairing snort out of Blue on getting Foxtrot’s full translation-- apparently she didn’t think Owen would be so stupid as to court above his station-- but Echo makes a pleased chitter. Echo wanted to take Blue’s spot in the pack, once.

“So,” Foxtrot asks, “Why did she leave?”

“If she decides she wants me, she’ll want me in her den, maybe in my den. Not out here. I can’t leave you girls alone until you’ve got some good walls, so we have to wait--” Well, hey, it’s as good a time as any-- “until we find a good place for you to live, and get it set up nice. Claire thinks she found a good place, and I want us to go look at it.”

Foxtrot blinks at him a couple of times, but dutifully gabbles the full, complex message to the pack.

Owen mostly understands the confusion.

“Why does she get to say where our territory is?”

“She doesn’t, exactly. She just knows where everybody’s territory is, and where she can make safe spaces for us that are closer to everything else. She has five ideas for a new place that will fit all of you. One of them is just probably the best.”

There’s the confusion again, but Delta yelps out a surprised honk. Owen hears “Hers! Hers?” and Foxtrot turns her head back to him again.

“Delta thinks all the territory is Claire’s, and she just lets us live here.”

“… Not quite but really close?” he offers. “Claire makes everything happen. She doesn’t hunt the food, but she makes it come to the island. She doesn’t build things, but what she says we need gets built. She… is very clever and very important and she works very hard to make sure everything else works.”

Delta does a lot of gabbling at her sisters while Foxtrot relays Owen’s simplification of Operations Manager-- and it’s Delta, so he doesn’t understand much. He picks out, “she knew,” and “open,” and something he thinks is “fire,” but that’s a relatively new concept for the pack.

“They-- we-- want to know what you have to offer someone who does all that,” Foxtrot says. “We like you, but-- you can’t do all those things, can you?”

“Not as well as Claire,” he admits, easily. “I can give Claire someone she doesn’t have to be strong and smart and perfect for all the time. I can give her letting her guard down without being alone.”

He wants to. It’s probably why he hoped the disastrous date would be Claire coming undone for him, letting him past her cool corporate exterior-- and now, only just now, he realizes that was incredibly stupid of him. Why would Claire trust him enough to put her armor aside on a first date? He hadn’t done anything to earn it. (The itinerary was still too much, but.) Hell, maybe he still hasn’t, but he’s pretty sure they’ve established that they aren’t competition. That he won’t take anything away from her.

“Is that what strong humans want in a mate?” Foxtrot finally asks, and five sets of inhuman eyes are waiting for Owen’s answer.

He wishes he could simplify his language far enough that they’d all understand it straight from him, guaranteed. He tries, a little, hoping it doesn’t come out too awkward. “Each human wants different things. Maybe-mates show each other what we have to give, then each decides if they want it.”

Foxtrot only rumbles at the girls briefly before it’s a conversation again, so apparently he was mostly comprehensible. Blue keeps looking at him and tilting her head, trying to puzzle him out.

“So far,” Foxtrot informs him, “it’s strange but makes sense.”

He takes it as permission from his ‘daughters’ to court Claire. But the researcher in Owen has to ask, “Well, that’s only how it works for humans. How would they-- or you-- choose a mate?”

“I don’t know how I would,” Foxtrot says, but dutifully turns to the pack and asks them.

Blue scoffs “Too young!” but there’s a lot of gabbling and honking and hissing in general. Owen watches and listens as intently as he can, and wishes he had something on him to write with. Or on. Or record everything. Or that he could afford to own (and hide) a pensieve.

It takes a while. Owen has to wonder if they’ve forgotten he’s there, keeping his lips closed on a smile.

Finally Foxtrot shifts a little, looking back to him. “They have a lot of opinions.”

“I’d like to hear them,” Owen assures her.

Foxtrot exhales-- practically a sigh. “They all say a mate should bring food, but they don’t know why. And they think a mate should work for their attention-- dance?” but it’s curious, as though she’s not sure she understood them right.

“Makes sense to me.” Birds were big on mating dances, and dinosaurs were basically birds.

“They want mates to dance for them, then, when they bring food. But I don’t understand why, and I don’t think they know for sure. They just know that’s what they expect.”

“Probably-- Probably so a mate can show they can hunt without getting hurt.” But a mating gift suggested raptors might expect a mate to stay-- not just in a large pack, but in a pair bond.

“Oh. But then they all want different things. Echo says a mate should be smart. Delta says a mate should build her a den and offer to guard it. Blue says she wouldn’t take a mate who challenged her, but she also wouldn’t take a weak mate. And Charlie says she’s not sure what a mate should do for her, but that she thinks orange is the best color for one.”

“See, that’s kind of what I meant about humans wanting different things,” even if he thinks he can trace a couple of those wants back to iguanas and-- well, he was never sure what kind of avian they mixed into Delta. When Batch D was being cooked up, they told him ‘a mix’ and he foolishly hadn’t worried about it. “I heard Blue say ‘too young.’ Who’s too young?”

“She thinks we all are, but especially me and Charlie. I don’t want a mate. I want a pack. … Are you going to get them mates?”

It would be insane, impractical, scientifically incredibly valuable, and also really awkward because he couldn’t introduce males as hatchlings without Blue going big-sister at them (although, with unrelated males, things might shift once they were mature). “Probably not. We’ve got other problems first.”

“New territory?” Foxtrot guesses, and Owen tells her she’s right.

It takes a while, not unpredictably, to explain to a pack of really quite capable young theropods why they can’t just stay here, with Owen in his tent (actually, they understand part of why Owen can’t stay in the tent, as he has to either go to Claire’s den or make his own den acceptable to Claire to win her as a mate. They’re not wrong and he should probably clean his bungalow. He should probably sterilize his bungalow). They’ve got water, food comes in, there’s plenty of space to run, and Charlie really likes fishing.

But they don’t have running water, or solid shelter from assorted weather (storms or sun), or electricity for lights and fans. There’s not as much fun stuff for them to do, they don’t have ready-cages so the vets can look at them without knocking them out first, and there are no walls or fences.

Foxtrot doesn’t like them, and the raptors aren’t honestly sure why they need walls and fences-- nothing big has bothered them.

Owen starts by telling them it’s because of Claire. (Which is true. It’s also because of Lowery, invisible fences, the ACU team that pumped Rexie full of tranquilizers while she was napping and managed to get her back into her paddock, and the wall limiting access to the Restricted Area.) He tells them part of Claire’s job is making sure every living thing on the island stays where it’s happiest and healthiest.

“She saw me in the false egg,” Foxtrot says, “My old paddock, the one that was so small.”

“Claire got very badly fooled by the first human Delta killed. Hoskins.” Delta hisses like a goose at the name. She remembers, but she’s always had a good memory. “He fooled a lot of us, and brought the men with guns, and-- well, all this crap is his fault, and now that he’s dead, the rest of us have to clean it up. Starting by building a new, big paddock somewhere you can live with your new pack.”

And while everyone seems to understand that they need a big den for Foxtrot, it’s walls that are the confusing part.

Walls, he tries to explain, and fences, and bars, and doors, are supposed to keep everyone where they should stay. He uses Rexie as an example-- there’s no mistaking that they’re not in Rexie’s territory if they’re within their own walls-- and Zach and Gray as another, who are young enough and stupid enough (or young enough, and formerly stupid enough) to go into places they shouldn’t be, if they can get through walls and fences. Walls and fences make Claire’s job easier; if walls keep everything where it should be, she can focus on making sure food and water goes where it needs to go, that the vets can fix sick or hurt animals, and that the humans who visit stay interested.

He owes them this explanation, too. He can’t expect the pack to just accept that where they saw their handlers, vets, ACU, occasionally Hoskins and once, Simon Masrani, now there will be people who aren’t trained or professionals coming to just watch them be themselves.

“Humans come to look at dinosaurs,” he says, and Foxtrot relays, “because dinosaurs are incredible. You’re amazing, beautiful, powerful-- most humans, especially young humans, think everything you do is interesting. If humans keep coming to visit and look at dinosaurs, Claire can keep bringing in food for more and more dinosaurs.”

“If humans don’t visit, food stops?” Foxtrot asks.

“Stops coming, then slowly runs out,” Owen agrees. “You girls are our smartest dinosaurs. Humans were always going to come see Foxtrot, but now that you’re a pack they’ll want to see all five of you. The new paddock will have places humans can look in and see you, and places you’ll be able to hide if you don’t want them to see you. We’ll probably do a lot more pig hunts,” which is a bribe, but it’s a bribe that works, because ‘pig hunt’ is a phrase the raptors understand in English, Parseltongue, and French.

The next day, they go look at the proposed site. Barry meets them there.

It’s a pain in the ass, because using access roads means they have to climb the ridge to the gondola lift instead of take the easy pass along the river-- Delta convinces Foxtrot to carry her part of the way and spare her (mostly healed but still occasionally stiff) leg-- but Owen thinks it’s worth it when he sees the little chunk of land Claire thinks will work for them. The view from the cliff out onto the ocean is spectacular, blue and glittering, for all Foxtrot keeps herding them away from the edge. “We’re gonna have to build that up,” Owen tells Barry. “Looks like Foxtrot is worried about the drop.”

“It’s the only drawback of this site, I think,” Barry agrees. “We can do a concrete wall maybe six feet high, then wire fencing, so we don’t lose the view.”

Owen isn’t an expert, but he’s pretty sure that view will sell tickets.

The Pachycephalosaurs across the river provide a serious temptation for the pack-- for exactly as long as it takes two of them to butt heads. The vicious, resounding crack and the fact that the loser gets right back up again convinces everyone except Foxtrot that they like all their bones intact.

Foxtrot agrees to behave, though, because the herd is bigger than her pack and she doesn’t want any of them smashed or knocked off a cliff. Then she goes to pick Charlie up and pull her away from the river. If Foxtrot has a thing about heights, Owen decides it’s reasonable. The bigger they are, the more bones they shatter when they fall a proportionately short distance, and the river does flow into a set of rapids that cuts clean through the cliff, after a certain point. “Think we can divert the rapids?” he asks.

“We didn’t bring a bulldozer guy,” Barry replies, “but I think that’s where it would be safest. Dam it up, make a reservoir.”

It probably moves more than enough water for a good deep pool. “Claire says we can make a pond big enough for you to soak in, and I think we’ll take the fast part of the river to do it,” Owen tells Foxtrot, who makes the details clear for Charlie.

Charlie’s excited response is, “Fishing?”

“Yes. Watching you fish is fun. Yes, for fishing, Charlie-girl.”

Blue is less playful-- she and Echo both seem more inclined to prowl and inspect and sniff. It’s Owen’s first time really seeing the site, too-- naturally cut off by the ridge, the cliff, and the river. The fencing they’ll need is probably minimal, and maybe they can arrange it so it doesn’t disrupt the look of the area, aside from safety fencing so nobody goes for an unexpected dip in the Pacific. There’s definitely room to run, and Foxtrot handled the climb over the ridge well enough that he wants to ask Claire how much of it they can keep for her. The gondola comes to the top of the ridge nearer the river, and the monorail slips through a valley, corners past the gondola, then threads over the ridge and back into the park proper.

Owen fishes out his map and a pen, and draws a rough outline for fencing-- river, coast, peaks of the ridge. The gondola pass and the one gap between cliff and ridge down at the south end make for reasonable access points, so he marks those, too. Barry sees what he’s doing and marks a tertiary gate under the monorail pass through the ridge.

In the crook of the monorail track, Owen marks a #1. West coast monorail station and safety lecture central.

It’s a start. It makes things real.

By the time they head back to the campsite, Owen’s map is marked all over-- there’s a nice mini-valley in the southernmost foothills that would make for a good storm shelter-slash-general outbuilding, and if Claire’s willing to give up a little of the bamboo forest, they might be able to set up a pigpen, and he has a few places for hiding spots picked out with the pack’s input. They need to bring in some trees for cover-- being part of the Western Plains makes it feel a little exposed-- but standard practice there is to transplant from the Restricted Area, and when Owen asks, Foxtrot admits she wouldn’t care if they brought the trees from her old paddock to help with the shade situation.

He gets the girls back to camp-- they like running with the bike, but heading home they go a bit slower, as it’s been a long day of exploring-- and once everyone is settled in, radios control.

“Western Plains site is go, the girls loved it. I left a map with Barry, he should be at the Innovation Center by now.”

And then it’s kind of a whirlwind.

Claire has ideas for what she’s already calling the Raptor Stop; it encompasses a monorail stop on an upper floor, a Guggenheim-style curving walkway covered in “education bites,” charts and pictures and quotes about the pack, leading down to a small amphitheatre, “For your safety monologue,” she tells him.

Granted, it’s over email, but they’re her words.

The amphitheatre will also show a short film Claire is having put together, tentatively titled History of the Indominus Rex; that will loop whenever Owen’s not onstage until they get a few more short films about the pack put together. Claire also wants to leave room for a concession stand and a very small gift shop, practically a kiosk.

In his reply, Owen tells her to leave room for an outdoor amphitheatre connected to the indoor one. It may take twenty years instead of ten, but Owen’s still hoping for that ambassador raptor.

The Raptor Stop will lead to a network of constructed tunnels; Claire wants moving walkways so the guests don’t have to walk the whole length of the exhibit to find a spot they want. All the tunnels butt up against the ridge, and long windows of insanely thick glass will separate guests from the pack, and be interspersed at various levels along the ridge, depending on whether they want to be at Blue’s eye level, Foxtrot’s, or look down on the whole thing.

Owen nixes the single proposed open-air viewing platform; he’s willing to bet Foxtrot can climb when she really puts her mind to it. The monorail will be open-air enough.

The little southern valley has no viewing tunnels. Claire’s designs leave their storm-shelter in complete privacy.

By and large, Owen approves. Then he confers with Barry, double-checks security measures (no door, no gate, leads directly to the pack; there are always at least two, like an airlock. Every access point out of the paddock is as escape-proof as they can make it, accessed by touch-screens, buttons that take more force more precisely than a raptor can apply with a fore-claw, and in the storm shelter, doors with knobs instead of handles), and approves some more. Construction on fences and Charlie’s pond have already started, but everything else has to go through ideas, blueprints, revisions, finalized blueprints, and then construction.

Owen camps. January slips by; it’s not the worst possible month for camping in Central America. The girls get-- not restless, exactly, but they start to realize they’re camping, too. They don’t have a den, and their current routine is only really a shadow of what it was before getting set loose to find Foxtrot. Owen steps up training exercises again-- basic clicker commands, basic drills, working on Foxtrot’s grasp of English. It takes some of the edge off.

Paddock Twelve is officially titled Raptor Sanctuary, and while it’s not totally finished by the first week of February, it’s finished enough for the pack to move in. There are still contractors working, but they’re working where the pack shouldn’t be able to get at them-- in the viewing tunnels and inside the Raptor Stop.

Echo is fascinated by the tunnel where they’re testing the moving walkways out. At first the contractors are nervous, being watched by one of the island’s smartest predators, but as they get their confidence back it starts looking like an OK Go video. Echo chases them back and forth, trying to figure out the show, but treating it like a game.

Charlie goes right for the water, of course, calling for Foxtrot to chase her, come jump in, come play.

They’re exploring again, and while the human quarters of the storm shelter are a damn sight nicer than the tent he’s been living out of (for one thing, they have air conditioning and a real bathroom complete with real shower), Owen knows he’ll be spending at least the next few days helping the pack transition to the paddock.

He finds Claire in the amphitheatre, supervising design elements. She’s not needed there, not really, so Owen knows she’s using ‘supervising design elements’ as an excuse to be present on the pack’s first day in their new home (whether or not it’s also an excuse to run into Owen).

She’s back in her boardroom armor, a white pantsuit with a brilliant blue shirt, and Owen has been shaving in a hand mirror for a month.

“Are they settled in already?” she asks, when she spots him.

“It’ll take a while to settle in. They’re exploring right now, I just wanted to touch base with you. How are things looking?”

“I’m giving you two weeks to test the paddock,” she tells him. “I want to know about any issues, any weak spots, any places we thought were secure that aren’t… anything the pack needs brought in, too, but… our grand re-opening is scheduled for March first. I want to be able to preview the park before then.”

“Promise. Security cameras all up and running?”

“Absolutely everywhere. You have a dedicated ACU team stationed at the gondola lift peak, and a park security team for the guests.”

“I’ll want to work with both teams,” Owen says, because he wants them working with him, not at cross purposes.

“Train as you see fit,” Claire agrees. “You’re getting a lot of leeway here-- as long as the pack is content and contained and no one gets seriously, avoidably hurt, you basically have free reign in the running of this exhibit. … Running,” she repeats, “not presentation.”

“No swearing in front of the kids?”

“Or the investors. Your first visit is going to be VIPs from Verizon, since they generously agreed to continue sponsoring Foxtrot.”

“How are those videos going?”

“I need some footage of you, when you look less like Grizzly Adams, and it would be helpful to have some daylight footage of the pack, but so far, so good. Barry recommended we don’t just loop the Indominus film, but alternate with one on point-and-shoot camera basics.”

“… Helping people preserve those precious memories?”

“Do you know if the raptors are bothered by flash photography?” Owen sort of cringes because he doesn’t, but he’d imagine they are. “Neither do I,” Claire concludes, “but I do know that taking flash pictures in a glassed-in dark tunnel is a recipe for photos of your flash reflection and annoyed tourists.”

“Makes sense,” he agrees. “Verizon people sponsoring that, too?”

“Actually, we’re shopping around to several camera companies for product placement and a ‘presented by.’ You know how we have that ‘what’s happening in Jurassic World’ channel in all the hotel rooms?”

They have a TV channel? “No, actually, I don’t. Should I?”

“… Debatable. It’s basically a twenty-four hour commercial-- come to this restaurant, unique souvenirs at that shop-- and scheduling reminders. We’re thinking a short film for the Raptor Sanctuary, but a more in-depth piece on digital photography basics running every few hours on the park channel.”

“It’s never just one thing with you, is it?” but he knows he’s smiling as he asks. “You’re always moving forward.”

“That’s why the corporate world gets painted as full of sharks,” she agrees. “When do you think I can start using you in a capacity other than Dinosaur Whisperer?”

“Give me a week,” he says, “and they shouldn’t need me as constantly. Then you can feed me to the lawyers for a couple hours a day.”

“I hate that I needed to know that, but I did need to know that. Barry just wasn’t there for everything. And… we are having to settle with Hoskins’s widow. She’s willing to wait until she can meet with you face to face.”

“Holy shit, I knew he was married, but I thought his wife left him.” How could anyone stand being married to the late, unlamented Victor Hoskins?

“She might just smell settlement money.”

“Hard to blame her,” Owen has to agree. Even if she’d been separated from Hoskins for years, the idea of getting a little financial compensation for having suffered being married to him at all? Probably tempting.

“She’s the sticking point. InGen is playing ball-- they realize how easily I can make them look like the bad guys here, so to scrub some tarnish off their public image they’re perfectly willing to throw Hoskins under the bus.”

“Any word on Wu?”

“Just some security footage of him leaving the island on a helicopter. If he went to ground with InGen, they’re holding onto him.” Which is not great news, but Owen isn’t sure what Wu can do to them, in his position. The paper trail is pretty damning.

“How are you holding up?”

“In PR terms, my inattention leading to the incident is a disaster, but my handling of the aftermath seems to be winning points,” she says. “No one likes how easily I was fooled by Hoskins and Henry, least of all me, but their end-run around me makes death-by-dinosaur look like an anomaly, not an eventuality.”

“It kind of is an eventuality,” Owen tells her, “but the best we can realistically do is make sure that Asset Control faces that eventuality first, then handlers. As many people who can de-escalate as possible before that eventuality hits guests.”

“We did try that,” Claire points out, “and then we got a pterosaur rampage.”

“Due to a helicopter crash,” which is important, because-- “which, despite Foxtrot on the loose, was a freak accident that only happened because the helicopter was directly over the aviary.”

“… You want to call that pilot error?”

Simon Masrani had been piloting, even though he died two days shy of getting his license. “If necessary. I mostly just mean… planes and helicopters crash into buildings sometimes. People die. And it’s tragic, but it doesn’t, and shouldn’t, stop people from living in buildings that aren’t crash-proof bunkers.”

“You’ve got a point,” Claire admits. “We took precautions, and it was never that those precautions weren’t enough, it was that those precautions were deliberately circumvented or did not measure up to extraordinary circumstances.”

“Oh hey-- speaking of extraordinary circumstances, I’ve been meaning to ask you for like a month. Why did you let Rexie out?”

Claire sighs, and for a moment, despite the sleek hair and corporate armor, she looks human. “Officially, that was a logic leap I’m not proud of, made in the heat of a very stressful moment on noticing muzzle flashes resemble the flares we use to lure Rexie to a live feeding.”

“… And unofficially?”

“Gray said something about the mercenaries having too many pounds, that we only weighed… I don’t remember, something in the high hundreds, but that we needed tons.”

“… And you knew where to find a couple tons of cranky, territorial old lady.”

“I did,” Claire says, glossed lips tilting in a wry smile.

“What were you planning to do after she ate all the bad guys?”

“If I’d been thinking that far ahead, I would not have unleashed a goddamned tyrannosaurus. Oh!” and Owen can practically hear her switching mental gears, “That reminds me, someday I may want to poach Leon.”

“… Why?” He’s an animal handler, what could Claire want with Leon?

“With the raptors in the public eye, you’re going to get applicants for assistant handlers,” Claire starts, “and I’ll want you to treat them seriously. Rexie was queen of Jurassic Park, and we all know she’s only got so many years left for Jurassic World… but T-Rex is an iconic species.”

“And you’re gonna have them grow another when she passes.”

“Oh, I have plans for our future princess,” Claire agrees, smiling dangerously. “But I want her to have a relationship with her primary handler like the pack has with you, and I already know Leon can keep his cool around various sizes of predator.”

“A baby rex might take really well to it, too,” Owen muses. “They’re not as bright as raptors, which… doesn’t make them less dangerous, but it might make them more accepting of routine and rules. We know they form strong family bonds, and have long memories. I mean, I’m not gonna hand you Leon with a bow around his neck, but if that’s something he wants to do, yeah, he’d be a good choice for it.”

“And we can let her reach maturity at a more natural pace, since Foxtrot will be able to fill in as our largest theropod. Until then,” Claire says, “do you remember wondering why we didn’t exhibit Foxtrot as a baby? I think I can swing a lot of pink, sparkly marketing with a baby princess dinosaur.”

“… Christ in a kayak.”

“I’ll be running it past marketing sometime this spring.”

“Princesses and dinosaurs are not a combination I would’ve thought of.”

“It’s a demographic we don’t quite have our hooks into yet-- and the timing will be right, I think, for when we need a new major attraction.”

She’s terrifying and wonderful, and has time for a quick tour of the observation tunnels before her next meeting. Echo chases them, calling to her sisters, and Claire smiles with teeth covered and waves at them. Blue follows their progress, keeping an eye on… body language, Owen assumes, as it’s hard to hear through the thick glass (which is why the paddock has concealed microphones and the tunnels have speakers, piping the outside sounds inside, to show off raptor communication skills and allow for staff announcements), and she sure as hell can’t smell them.

“Are they still curious about me?”

“I think they’re hoping I’ll win you over,” Owen tells her. “The way they understand me, I’m a parent. They’re more than old enough to look after themselves, so hey, if I find a female who thinks my mating dance is sufficiently sexy…”

“It had better be more impressive than your nest-building skills,” but her cool tone is playful.

Besides, they’ve waited this long. Another week or two, to get the rest of the legal crap out of the way? They can do that.

He makes an effort to spend a little more time away from the pack each day-- no less than eight hours with them, working on coordination, hunting, hunting past the observation tunnels, getting Foxtrot to respond as well as the raptors to commands in English, and to accept them from Barry and even Leon as well as Owen. (They do have other handlers, but they’re scientists-- paleontologists, field biologists-- or maintenance. They’ve known the pack all their lives, but only ever interacted with them as adults with a barrier between them. For safety, only Owen and Barry were ever intended to get up close and personal with adult Velociraptors.) But eventually, they all feel enough like the new paddock is home that Owen is comfortable leaving them to their own devices long enough to pull his share of the legal weight.

Lawyers are brutal. The questions are designed to tear apart his recollection of what happened that night, but with the footage from the helmet cameras, all he really can’t explain is how the grenade launcher blew up. “Poorly secured would be my guess, or maybe a faulty pin snapped or slipped loose. A stray bullet could’ve done it, but I wasn’t armed at that point,” at least, not with a gun, “so that would’ve been friendly fire .”

Meeting with Mrs. Hoskins, a narrow woman with a long face and full mouth, goes… interestingly. Her lawyer is obviously a shark who smells blood in the water, and Owen sits between Barry and Claire, suspecting Mrs. Hoskins is going to hold Delta-- who indisputably killed Vic Hoskins-- for a king’s ransom in wrongful death money.

“Mrs. Hoskins,” the lawyer says, “has seen the footage of her estranged husband’s death. You can’t really argue that Mr. Hoskins was threatening the… animal known as Delta when it attacked him.”

“He wasn’t threatening Delta, certainly,” Claire counters, “and none of us can be certain he meant the humans he was threatening any physical harm-- but Jurassic World’s official position on Mr. Hoskins’s death is that Delta was reacting to a perceived threat.”

“You are not that animal’s handler, Ms. Dearing.”

“No, but Mr. Martine is, and he can also be clearly seen on the footage from Delta’s bridle-cam, standing protectively between the late Mr. Hoskins and myself and my nephews.”

“They’re your nephews? I wasn’t sure,” says Mrs. Hoskins, “you put yourself in front of them like they were yours.”

“They are mine,” Claire tells her, “they’re just my nephews, not my sons.”

“If these dinosaurs--”

“Velociraptors,” Owen offers, “if you’re having trouble with pronouncing that, we just call them raptors. They’re a mashed-up species, anyway.”

“As I was saying,” the lawyer continues, frosty, “if those animals can in fact sense which humans their handlers deem worthy of protection, then Mr. Hoskins may not have been wrong about their suitability for the military.”

“May I ask,” Barry says, with a glance at the arbiter, who gestures for him to continue, “Have you seen the footage?”

“I have. Your body language looked protective to me, but would it look that way to an animal?”

The answering, “Yes,” is chorused between all three of them.

“That kind of thing is instinctive,” Owen explains. “What Barry was doing-- arms spread, getting in front of Claire, who got in front of the boys-- was an obvious ‘you’ll have to go through me’ stance, and Delta has known Barry since she was a tiny chick. More importantly, Barry’s been working with the raptors for as long as I have. They’re smart, and they can kill a human pretty much instantly around eight months old. The first thing we had to learn was when to pick our battles. Delta doesn’t expect either of us to put ourselves bodily in front of something we’re not actually willing to die to protect.”

“But at no point did Mr. Martine attempt to call Delta off. In fact, he told her ‘good girl’ so clearly it doesn’t take a lip-reader to understand that he’s praising her for killing my client’s husband.”

“If you put yourself between a raptor and their target,” Barry says, “you are basically volunteering yourself to die-- that is why we had to learn to pick our battles. You will have all of her focus on you, and all of her frustration because you wouldn’t let her have what she wanted. She might shrug that off, or she might take it out on you. It depends on how bad she wants a thing. I was not willing to die to protect Victor Hoskins, and I praised Delta because as far as she understood, she had saved my life. She expected praise. She would not have understood if I scolded her, and I did not want to be the second person she killed that night.”

“Can any of you kids tell me,” Mrs. Hoskins asks, “about Vic’s relationship with Delta?”

They hesitate. It’s Claire who explains, cool and professional, “It’s my understanding that Mr. Hoskins tended to single Delta out for unwanted attention.”

“Unwanted attention is not the same thing as animal abuse,” the lawyer is quick to point out. Really quick. Like ‘maybe Mrs. Hoskins warned him her husband was a dick to animals’ quick.

“It doesn’t have to be abuse to cause a problem,” Owen says. “You wouldn’t pet a dog who was growling at you, right? Hoskins-- Mr. Hoskins-- thought he had a magic touch with animals, and didn’t tend to take ‘she doesn’t like that’ for an answer.”

“And yet he’d never been bitten?” the lawyer asks.

“Until I was forced to lead the raptors out looking for the Indominus, they’d been handled, conscious, unrestrained, and as adult animals, by exactly two humans-- me, and Barry. … Mr. Martine, I mean. If they needed full-body vet care, we drugged them; if we needed them conscious, we kept them in their ready-cages. We never gave the girls the chance to bite anyone but ourselves.”

Before the lawyer can respond to that, Barry looks Mrs. Hoskins dead in the eye, face the picture of calm. “May I ask, Mrs. Hoskins, how is your arm?”

Mrs. Hoskins smiles at Barry, like the two of them know something nobody else does-- and something about her expression reminds Owen a lot of Claire. “Oh, it aches in the rain and I can’t lift anything over fifteen pounds with it,” she says, lightly, and her lawyer looks baffled.

“Mrs. Hoskins,” Claire says, “why don’t we get right down to it? Above and beyond your late husband’s death benefits, which there was never a question of you receiving, exactly what is it you want from Jurassic World?”

“You gonna re-open that park?”

“March first,” Claire confirms. “If the park doesn’t run, we can’t support the animals.”

“I want to be there, opening day,” says Mrs. Hoskins. “For at least a week.”

“Free of charge,” Claire tosses out. “I assume you’d like a deluxe suite?”

“The most deluxe suite you’ve got. You’ve got spas and things, right? Massages and manicures and muddy cucumbers on your face?”

“We’ve spared no expense.”

“I want to be able to walk in any time and get what I want.”

“Full concierge service. I can assign you a personal guide and valet, if you like.”

“Absolutely,” says Mrs. Hoskins, and Owen is starting to suspect both she and Claire are having fun. “And if I want to go see any dinosaurs, I don’t want to have to wait in lines.”

“Naturally not. You’ll have a VIP wristband, of course.”

“All my meals comped.”

“Meals, drinks, a reasonable number of souvenirs…”

“How many’s ‘reasonable’?”

“That’s difficult to put a number on, but… we may ask you to slow down if you start approaching ‘freight shipping’ volume,” Claire says, and Mrs. Hoskins nods.

“Gotcha. Oh, and I want to go see the raptor exhibit-- does that open when the park does?”

“We’ll be holding VIP previews the first week,” Claire agrees, “to work out any unforeseen kinks in the guest layout, allow press access, and generally drive up interest.”

“What about backstage passes? How close can I get to the animals?”

“Mrs. Hoskins--” the lawyer starts.

“That depends on a lot of factors, not all of which are under my direct control,” Claire interrupts, smoothly. “May I ask why?”

“I’d like to feed Delta a treat,” Mrs. Hoskins announces, and Claire looks at Owen, one eyebrow arched.

“… There’s catwalk access for Asset Control,” Owen says, slowly, watching the lawyer gape like a landed fish. “I don’t want her up there alone, it’s too high, and-- ma’am, are you willing to feed Delta’s sisters treats, too? They won’t know why Delta’s being singled out, and they’ll get jealous.”

“Absolutely, wouldn’t want the girls squabbling.”

“Then I’m fine with it. Barry?”

“I’d be honored to escort you along the catwalk, Mrs. Hoskins,” Barry tells her.

“Oh, call me Beatrice, please,” she says.

“Mrs. Hoskins, if you brought me out here to waste my time…” the lawyer threatens.

“Jurassic World will also be happy to pay your legal fees,” Claire says, “and travel expenses for both you and your legal counsel. Reasonable legal fees,” she specifies, catching the lawyer’s eye, “and itemized travel expenses. Please save your receipts.”

So they come out of that meeting liking Beatrice Hoskins a lot more than any of them had liked Vic Hoskins.

After that, it’s documentarians. Owen is interviewed at length and in different locations and outfits, asked about the raptors and the Indominus, about his research work and his eventual hopes for the pack. One of the interviews has him admitting, “I actually think calling them a ‘pack’ might end up being inaccurate. From what we know of the wild raptors on Isla Sorna, from my own experiences raising four unrelated individuals as sisters, and from the oldest information that came out of Jurassic Park, I suspect raptors might form something more like troops or tribes, less like wolves and more like apes, crows, or-- well, humans.”

Apparently, that sort of thing helps cement Owen’s image as a scientist as well as an animal handler, as does Barry getting the chance to describe how beautifully birdlike theropod behavior is. Interviews and footage of the girls at play, at rest, on the hunt, get spliced into several different ‘come see the super-dangerous super-intelligent dinosaurs!’ videos, and not only does Claire have them added to the park’s vacation channel, she buys a time slot on NBC to air a half-hour special that drums up a lot of attention.

Beatrice’s visit goes smoothly; the girls don’t really understand why a strange woman is tossing chunks of meat down to them, but getting treats for no good reason is pretty acceptable. Beatrice spends a while watching the pack from normal visitor seating in the tunnels, too, and eventually informs Owen and Claire, “It’s not hard to believe they’ve killed people, but I’m glad it was mostly just people who deserved it.”

The Verizon people are delighted-- Foxtrot in action is definitely worth their sponsorship, even if she‘s not in the original paddock with its stadium-style seating. Sure, Owen may have suggested she show off some of her skills, but seeing a fifty-foot animal suddenly appear out of the foliage, dropping her camouflage and going bone white, is a sight worth the price of admission.

“Will you be making more of her?” one of them asks.

“Probably not,” Owen admits. “With all the sh-stuff that went down with Dr. Wu and Vic Hoskins, we don’t know how she’ll age or whether she’ll develop any health issues.”

“So she might die young.”

“We honestly have no way of knowing, at this point,” Claire says. “Our priority now is her quality of life rather than her viability as a long-term investment. However, given her successful integration into the raptor pack, we may be slowly moving forward with a more varied Velociraptor exhibit-- ultimately, some years down the road, even a small show here at the Raptor Sanctuary.”

And it’s hard not to smile, watching Claire work-- this really is what she’s good at, managing people and arranging things so money flows into the park faster than it flows out.

The official VIP preview is their first test of guest security and it turns out to be a very solid test, because it seems to Owen that reporters and photographers are at least as determined to get into things that are clearly marked Off Limits as any toddler or teenager. Although he does have to threaten to have anyone who taps, knocks, or bangs on the glass ejected, Owen gets through the night without punching anyone, and only swears once.

“Holy shit, you’re Alan Grant.”

“I’m a paid publicity stunt, don’t read too much into it.” And that’s understandable-- Dr. Grant had publicly sworn off the idea of Jurassic World, but everyone’s got their price eventually.

“No, it’s-- I knew Claire pulled out all the stops for this, but I guess I didn’t realize how many stops there were.” But he has to hesitate. “She’s not paying you to say anything specific, is she?”

“She offered a frankly obscene amount of money if I at least came to see your terrible idea before reminding anyone who still listens to me that it’s a terrible idea. Honestly, I won’t be surprised if someone ends up being eaten tonight.”

That’s one thing Owen can promise won’t happen, because all five of his girls now have a superstitious caution about eating humans. Not that he can tell anyone that, or explain why. “We’ve done our best to idiot-proof, but people are always building better idiots,” he allows.

“And more dangerous dinosaurs.”

“In fairness to the Velociraptors, the ‘more dangerous’ dinosaur in this exhibit is Foxtrot-- uh, the Indominus Rex.”

“God, don’t remind me. Is there a reason you’re not serving alcohol at this thing?”

“… Because we don’t want to create our own ‘better idiot,’ Dr. Grant.”

Dr. Grant looks at Owen for a moment in wry surprise. “Good point,” he allows.

“If I can-- if there’s anything I can say to you to convince you--”

“That this isn’t a stupid idea? Mr. Grady, your heart might be in the right place, but these aren’t wolves or lions--”

“No, they’re a lot more like giant carnivorous swans, especially Delta,” Owen says, meeting interruption with interruption, and hoping he’s doing it as smoothly as Claire always seems able to. “I know what these animals are, Dr. Grant, I’ve raised four of them from the egg. They’re vicious, dangerous, social, and so intelligent that they need a parental example to function, psychologically. And I wish we’d had another five or ten years to work on the exhibit, at least, but we had some personnel problems this past December. I don’t know if you heard, but it sort of put a rush on everything.”

“None of these animals should exist alongside humanity, Mr. Grady.”

“I know,” and that seems to stop Dr. Grant in his tracks a little. “But they’re alive right now, and this is the only way I’ve got to do right by them, as living animals under my care.”

“And you don’t mind that they’ll be the death of you one day?”

“I knew the risks when they offered me the research corridor job with just the raptors,” Owen says, shrugging. “But you know, I think Claire’s right. I think you should watch them for a while before you pass judgment.”

But then it’s time to do his safety lecture, which takes a solid fifteen minutes (and half the reporters end up trying to attract dinosaur attention anyway) and herd the VIPs into the viewing tunnels. Owen’s job in this case is more like Lowery’s, watching humans and dinosaurs over monitors in the security room, pointing out problem reporters to Guest Security.

Foxtrot does her camouflage trick; it gets a spectacular reaction. Echo spooks viewers in some of the lower tunnels by viewing them right back, and Owen watches with baited breath as she makes eye contact with Alan Grant. Echo gets interrupted by Charlie, however, dragging her into a wrestling match. Ever cunning, Echo herds Charlie toward Foxtrot-- who pins her playful sister under her massive chin almost lazily, only letting her up when Charlie squawks indignantly. Blue keeps careful watch as Charlie turns her wrestling inclinations onto Foxtrot, who is perfectly aware of her size compared to her adoptive sister, relying more on her ridiculous dexterity to keep the upper hand. She does give a massive, irritated bark when Charlie whaps her in the eye with her tail. Eventually Charlie flops in the sun for a nap.

Owen gives her fifteen minutes (fifteen minutes of going “blue shirt, Apple tablet, tunnel two, he’s tapping on the glass whenever your back is turned” in assorted variations) before bringing up the loudspeaker instead of Guest Security earpieces. “In five minutes, we’re going to let the girls hunt. This can get a little gory, a lot like our T-Rex feeding show.”

He surrenders the monitors to Security and heads up to the catwalk. A sharp whistle and a signal on his clicker are backed up by a raised fist and “Eyes on me! Time to hunt!”

It’s a call that convinces even Delta to abandon her hiding spot and gather with her sisters, and the sound of the pig gate being lifted gets all five of them screeling. Owen whistles. “Fan out! Eyes on Blue!”

Blue barks back confirmation-- acknowledging she’s in charge now-- and gabbles quickly. Echo snaps at Blue but races toward the south end of the paddock; Foxtrot heads north about ten yards, settles into a low, still crouch, and blends into the background. Charlie, Delta, and Blue disappear into the foliage.

Then the pig streaks through the paddock, pink and screaming (and larger than they used to chase), Echo on its heels far below her top speed, snapping behind it to keep scaring it forward. She lets it run ahead, toward Foxtrot, who blanches white and screels “Run, pig!” and the pig tears up turf turning around as fast as it can, zig-zagging to avoid Echo, suddenly joined by Blue.

But it’s Charlie and Delta who actually attack the pig, bursting out of the foliage with a scream and a hiss, Charlie pinning the pig and Delta going for the throat. It dies fast, and Owen calls down, “Good girls!”

Blue answers him with a triumphant “Koh!” and then shoves at Delta to back off. Blue (highest-ranking, on the ground) and Foxtrot (biggest and thus, strongest) tear the carcass into pieces, and it’s Blue who enforces which order they get their pieces in. (Charlie, Echo, Delta, Foxtrot, Blue, tonight. No one is hurt or sick, and Foxtrot might be the youngest but she’s also the strongest and biggest, and does get the biggest piece.)

They eat in plain view of the tunnels.

He gives the press another half-hour to watch them eat and clean up, but after that the raptors decide to doze, mostly disappearing into the bush (Charlie sunning on a rock), and Foxtrot honestly needs seconds because she’s still hungry so much of the time, so it’s Owen’s job to supervise her tromping to the south end of the paddock for a side of beef.

Then it’s time for questions and answers with the press back in the station, but it’s mostly about raptor behavior and why they did the things they did the way they did them, so instead of being uncomfortably on-the-spot, he’s in his element, talking about his girls. It turns out it’s not hard to do what Claire wants of the exhibit, to show everyone each dinosaur’s individual personality, to talk about how much calmer and happier Foxtrot is with foster-sisters to socialize with, to explain that this is the first time Blue (instead of Owen) has been in charge of the feeding line in front of a crowd, and that he’s proud of her for getting it exactly right. He talks about the feeding order, what it means and why he sticks to it, why Blue follows his lead. He talks about the need for early socialization in any highly intelligent animal, about enrichment activities and expansive enclosures. He talks about play. He talks about communication. He explains that yes, certain handlers do go into the paddock with the animals, but cautiously and with the knowledge that one wrong move can mean one less handler.

And after he’s done talking to everyone, Alan Grant corners him again.

“You’re not stupid,” Dr. Grant tells him, “but you might be out of your mind.”

“I am willing to die on this hill, for the record,” Owen agrees, sort of.

“They seem different from the other Velociraptors InGen created,” he says, “and not just the coloration.”

“There’s… some stuff that might be from their genetic patching-- Delta hisses a lot, Charlie loves to swim-- but I’d bet good money the differences you’re seeing are mostly socialization.”

“You’re an animal behaviorist,” Dr. Grant challenges. “You might be biased.”

“The original raptors on this island were kept in cramped conditions and fed with a crane,” Owen tells him. “The only difference between them and Foxtrot is they killed each other off looking for a way out, and she killed and ate her twin because she was growing faster than her feedings could keep up with.” Foxtrot has filled out since coming under Owen’s care; the base of her tail is smooth and full, with healthy fat deposits. “My raptors met Foxtrot when she was three months old, and I think her age is really the only thing that saved her. I think despite her size, her brain was still plastic enough to respond to inclusion and kindness. By the time Hammond invited you here? Those first raptors were way too far gone.”

“And I’m guessing your raptors don’t try to escape?” It’s another trap, sort of, and Owen can’t help grinning.

“Only as often as your average octopus or raven,” he says. “So, all the time, but not out of a desire to escape-- they like to solve puzzles and manipulate their surroundings. We give them stuff to do and they try to get out less.”

“Like pig hunting.”

“And rock piles they can climb and jump on, scent drills, basic commands--”

“You gave an instruction, then delegated to Blue. That doesn’t seem very ‘basic’ to me,” Grant points out, and Owen realizes-- he’s got him. Not that he’s changed Grant’s mind about Jurassic World or the Raptor Sanctuary, but… the chance to learn more about these animals? Alan Grant never did quit paleontology.

“It’s basic by raptor standards,” he says. “They look at me as a parental figure--”

“Because you made sure they imprinted on you,” Grant concludes, and Owen nods.

“Yeah, but that connection fades as they get old enough to feed themselves. They look to me for instruction because I tried to make sure they get good instructions-- instructions with a payoff, even if that payoff is me feeding them treats.”

“They trust your judgment.”

“And I trust theirs.”

“… You have no idea how much I hate to say this…”

“‘Keep up the good work’?” Owen guesses, and Grant huffs out a laugh.

“No-- I’d love to see your research sometime.”

“… I’ve got the last six months’ worth of reports I never turned into Hoskins,” Owen admits. Six months-- the point where Charlie stopped being too young to coordinate with on hunts, the point where Owen couldn’t tell baby animal stories and was expected to give Hoskins detailed information on intelligence and obedience drills. “Just because I didn’t trust him with them doesn’t mean I didn’t write anything down.”

Then Zara calls him across the room to come network or sound byte or something, so it’s all he can do to tell a paleontological rock star that they’ll meet up after the event, that Owen will get him copies of his field research.

Claire authorizes the release to Alan Grant, and just before the grand opening (guests still have to pass a safety quiz and buy a special ticket, although free tickets are added to a guest lottery at Lowery’s suggestion), Owen finds out why. Social media lights up with Alan Grant’s non-endorsement-- he says outright he still thinks Jurassic World is a bad idea, and that Velociraptors and the Indominus Rex are too intelligent, dangerous, and unpredictable to be tourist attractions… but he goes on and on (in a long blog post that an intern or grad student was probably responsible for actually getting online) about what he learned from observing the pack in relative safety and from Owen’s reports. Barry, not Owen, was the one to give Grant a quick English-to-Raptor glossary, Grant devotes a full paragraph to the “Koh!” cry.

He waxes a little nerdy about that to Claire, the day he reads the article. She just smiles patiently until he has to break to breathe and says, “That sound is as distinctive to Velociraptors as a howl is to wolves, or a roar to lions.”

“… You want to market it.”

“I want to market the hell out of it,” she agrees. “We can easily turn it into something iconic.”

The other thing about Grant’s article is, he never demonizes the raptors. He airs suspicions that the four individuals Owen’s got have DNA from such different species to make them decorator colors, not to help spot which traits are common to Velociraptors and which are (or were) from the original recipe’s frog DNA, he calls their understanding of English alarming, but he also seems impressed at how little encouragement it took to fit Blue into the Responsible Oldest Sibling role, and never lets the reader forget that the raptors are animals, not good or evil or inherently anything but intelligent wild animals.

It’s what Owen wants to show anyone who’ll listen, so he’s thrilled.

They open on schedule, March seventh, to a packed first showing.

It’s nine in the morning and Owen, dressed in a uniform he had some input in (the jeans are thick, but khaki-colored. The handlers wear any shirt they’re comfortable in, but also a vest blazoned with Jurassic World and Raptor Sanctuary logos), has to admit to himself that he’s a little nervous about the whole thing. Sure, morning feeding is just a feeding, which will get all the girls out in front of the viewing tunnels, and from there the tourists are allowed an hour and a half to just watch the animals be animals, but it’s still the premiere. There’s still press. There are kids now, too (not Claire’s nephews. Their parents are freshly divorced, things are awkward, and school is in session-- and while the boys want to accept Claire’s invitation to come down for Easter break, Claire and her sister are still negotiating that), people from all walks of life who’ve paid hilarious amounts of money to be impressed by Owen’s girls.

The photography movie ends, and this time instead of the safety video, the loudspeaker plays a recording. “Ladies and gentlemen and distinguished guests, please direct your attention to the video stage to meet your host.”

Owen climbs in front of a screen that’s just showing a static logo, now. He waits until he has everyone’s attention.

“Welcome,” he says, “to Jurassic World’s Raptor Sanctuary.”

It’s not an ending.

Interstitial Scene 1: Pack Dynamics
Interstitial Scene 2: The Fool Who Follows Him