Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

broad-shouldered beasts

So I took you to the city for the night
To dance under dizzy silver lights
But for a moment, you were wild.

The first thing Simon built on Isla Nublar was a cell phone tower.  The second through forty-eight things he built were cages.  The fact that he took the time to do things in this order--communication and connection first, everything else after--appealed to Claire, so when he offered her a job running his new amusement park back when she was wrapping up her third degree, Claire accepted.

There are now four cell towers on Nublar, and no one gets as much use out of them as Claire.  She calls Corporate.  She conferences with the Board.  She fields irritated demands from trainers and brokers with InGen.  She listens to her nephews wish her Merry Christmas and consoles her sister through her collapsing marriage.  She even takes the time to personally talk to disgruntled guests once or twice a week.

Simon gives her a new phone every holiday.  She racks up more minutes and texts than an entire high school.  Her phone rings, and rings, and rings, and Claire always answers. 

"Dearing," she says, phone tucked between her cheek and her shoulder.  The blouse she's chosen is a soft, warm amber.  Her jacket is bone white.  She does up the buttons one-handed, the other applying lipstick. 

There's a crackle and a long stretch of quiet on the other end of the line. "Dearing," she repeats.

"Yeah," a voice finally crackles back.  "This is Vic Hoskins.  I'm gonna need you to come take a look at something.  Paddock Ten."  He hangs up.

Claire huffs, annoyed, and steps into her shoes.  Hoskins is always like that and it drives her crazy.  She knows that it grates on him, the dictionary definition of "unnecessary machismo," to have a woman as his boss, but it grates on her to have a man like him as her head of security, so she takes her time, grabs a muffin before she heads out the door and climbs into her car.

"Paddock Ten," she mutters to herself.  "What's in Paddock Ten?"

She's halfway to the Research Corridor when she remembers that Paddock Ten is the Velociraptor paddock, and she suddenly is a lot more motivated to get there. 

---

The Velociraptors--four of them, four vicious, bloodthirsty murder lizards--have been missing for at least three hours.  Their handlers usually arrive at six for the morning feed and to make sure the raptors didn't kill each other in the middle of the night, Hoskins explains.  Barry du Vallon, one of the handlers, arrived this morning and found the animals, along with their senior handler, gone. 

The gate is still open, and there are tracks leading into the jungle.

Hoskins also explains that InGen was literally only a few days away from removing the raptors and giving them to military personnel on Isla Sorna, to "finally prove they're worth nine fucking mil a pop, or to scrap the project before we sink any more money into Grady's tequila tab."

Claire is not military, and she's never been military, but she has been running Jurassic World successfully, without a single guest casualty, since it opened seven years ago.  She knows what "scraping a project" is code for. 

"Did you tell Mr. Grady this?"  she asks.  She can't take her eyes off the open gate.  Velociraptors.  Claire has read every account from the survivors of Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna that she could get her hands on.  She's very, very aware of how bad this situation could get if it's not handled correctly.

"Well, yeah, but--"

Claire holds up a hand.  Nods.  Takes a deep, calming breath, and dials the number for ACU.  "This is Claire Dearing," she says.  "Commander Hamada?  Mobilize your people.  We have four assets out of containment in RC."  She pauses. 

There are a variety of codes in place for this kind of situation.  One through ten are all for the herbivores.  Eleven is if the Tyrannosaurus gets loose again.  The raptors, if she remembers correctly--and she always, always does--are fifteen. 

"Code fifteen," she says, clearly.

Hamada, to his credit, reacts with only a sharp intake of breath.  "Ma'am," he says. 

"Use of lethal force is authorized," Claire says.  Hoskins opens his mouth, and she holds a hand up again.  "Recapture is preferable, but lethal force is authorized if it the assets pose a significant threat to your people."

"They kill somebody?"

"Their handler, Owen Grady, is missing." 

"You want us to bring medical?"

Both Claire and Hamada know that Owen Grady is dead.  "If you think it's advisable," she finally says.  "I would prefer they stay near the guests."  Just in case. 

Hamada gets it.  "Ma'am," he says, and ends the call.

Claire calls Lowery next and snaps, "Code fifteen.  Keep all guests in the resorts for now.  We're closing for the rest of the week.  Issue whatever compensation you have to.  And get Hamada the locations of the Velociraptors. 

"Code fifteen," Lowery whines weakly, but does as he's told.  "Raptors look like they're still in Research.  Moving along the Fence.  What about--"

"Link up with ACU," Claire says.  "I'm on the way."

That done, she turns to Hoskins. 

"You can't kill those animals!" he barks.  Claire raises an eyebrow. 

"It is not my job to tell Mr. Masrani and Dr. Wu what they can and can't cook up in the lab," she says.  "It is also not up to me to tell InGen what they can and can't do in Research.

"However, I have been against the raptor project since it started, and you and I both know what those things are capable of.  I will not have them loose in my park, Mr. Hoskins."

"They're InGen property!" 

"And you are no longer InGen's liason here, Mr. Hoskins."

That stops him cold.  Hoskins rises to his full height, eyes shining with fury.  "You think you can fire me?" 

"You're an idiot," she tells him flatly.  "What did you think was going to happen when you told Owen Grady what you were going to do to his animals?"

"Owen didn't do this," the other handler, Barry, says sharply.  "He knows how dangerous the raptors are."

Claire knows that Grady knew.  He had shown her some of his scars once, back when he kept trying to get her to go out with him.  He had dozens.  Most were small, relatively harmless, but several had been deep and fresh. 

"This was an accident," Claire says.  "I'm not saying Mr. Grady let them out on purpose.  I think he was upset, and he made a mistake.  The raptors took advantage of an opportunity."  This is what Dr. Grant said would happen when you made him consult, she doesn't add.

The other handler allows that.

"You can't fire me," Hoskins snarls again.

"Your office will need to be cleaned out today, Mr. Hoskins.  I'll have a helicopter sent for you tomorrow morning.  If you are not on it, you will be removed by force."

Claire can hear the ACU trucks rumbling down the road.  "Mr. du Vallon, I'm sorry for your loss," she says, stiff, and then turns, climbs into her car, and drives away, already calling the Board to explain what is happening and what she's doing about it.  She trusts Hamada to handle the situation, and Barry to send Hoskins packing.  She knows that most of the handlers have little love for Hoskins. 

She puts the memory of Owen Grady, laughing and showing off the scars on his fingers, out of her head.

---

It's not that Claire didn't like Owen.  He was funny, she thought, and smart, and handsome enough that she got over the fact that he was helplessly, hopelessly married to his job.

That's what she thought, anyway, when she finally asked him out after a few months of flirtation and sly glances during meetings. 

The actual date told her otherwise.  (And yes, she did make an itinerary, but it was more of a guideline than a hard plan and what Grady and the rest of the staff didn't understand was just how little free time Claire actually had.  She planned it all out to capitalize on what few hours of leisure time she got.)

First, Grady showed up in board shorts and flip-flops.  Then he tried to get her to do body shots.  Then he talked about his raptors with stars in his eyes and sentiment in his voice and the rest of his short life painted clearly in the air between them, because Claire knew that they would eventually kill him.

Robert Muldoon's journals were eventually recovered from the original park.  He was very honest in his assessment of the Velociraptors.

Put them all down, he wrote.  Destroy them and never create them again. 

Owen Grady wasn't stupid.  He had almost as many degrees as Claire.  But he let his emotions cloud his judgement. 

So Claire called it off.  She liked him, really liked him, but she made a point not to let feelings cloud her own judgement and she had enough to worry about already with the park at large.  She didn't need to worry about Grady too. 

So she didn't, and, as it turns out, she was right. 

---

When Claire strides into Control, everyone turns to look at her, eyes wide and faces pale.  The room feels heavy, like hushed conversations have been abruptly silenced.  Only Lowery and Vivian have the decency to look guilty. 

"Everybody take a deep breath," Claire orders.  "You have five seconds to panic."  She counts down, watches her staff gulp air, and then says, "Focus, people.  We have a code fifteen containment breach.  Give me status reports."

"Live count at six thousand, one hundred, and eighty-two," Vivian rattles off.  Claire remembers with a bolt of relief that it's Sunday, the park's slowest day, and that it's the off season.  In September, guest attendance can peak at twenty-five thousand.  In July, it rarely reaches ten thousand.  "All guests are currently confined to the resorts."

"Open the Boardwalk," Claire says.  "Gentle Giants as well.  The Mosasaur show can proceed, and schedule a T-rex feeding for one o'clock."

Vivian does. 

"We will be closing the park for the rest of the week," Claire continues.  "We needed to do some monorail maintenance and put the new security upgrades into Gyrosphere Valley anyway."

The prospect of getting an island full of tourists away from the raptors seems to calm everyone down. Claire gives Vivian a half-smile.  "Next?"

"No disturbances reported in any of the other paddocks," Sahira, the handler liaison, adds.  "All of the handlers are on high alert."  She pauses.  "They're all asking about Mr. Grady."

Claire has never lied to her Control staff before.  They know everything.  She doesn't plan on starting now.  "Mr. Grady's status is unknown," she says.  "He is missing, but his body has not been found."

Yet.

Sahira nods. 

"The raptors' tracking implants put them in Research still," Lowery pipes up helpfully.  "On the other side of the Fence from Gyrosphere Valley." 

Four small red dots blink reassuringly on the screen.

"Any chance they can get through the Fence into the general park?"

"Nope," says Lowery, and the whole room relaxes.  "All entry points have been closed and security's been doubled.  We usually don't have the Fence electrified because of how much fucking money it costs to run that thing, but it's going now." 

"Good.  ACU?"

Marcel, the ACU liaison, raises his head.  "ACU is approaching the raptors' location from three sides.  They'll be stuck between ACU in the Fence.  Hamada expects that recapture will not be difficult."

"Estimated time to contact?"

"Half an hour.  Going slow," Marcel explains.  "They're keeping a lookout for the missing handler and trying not to spook the raptors."

Half an hour is acceptable.  It means that the job will be done right.  "Put up a video feed," Claire says.  "Has someone alerted Mr. Masrani?"

"On it," says Vivian, who Claire is going to promote, and Claire nods. 

"I'm going to speak briefly with Dr. Wu," she says.  "Keep me updated.  We're prepared for this, people. Let's not panic."

---

Henry is waiting for her in the lab, a pot of tea already brewed and his work set aside.  "I hear there's been a problem with the Velociraptors," he says.

"They escaped containment."  Henry's tea is strong, just on the right side of bitter, and the cup is warm in Claire's hands.  "Thank you."

Henry smiles.  "What about Owen Grady?  Has he been informed?"

"Mr. Grady's missing. Hoskins claims he let the raptors out after Hoskins told him what InGen planned to do to the animals." 

Dr. Wu winces.  "For what it's worth, I advised him against that course of action."

"You knew?" Claire is surprised.  She's not sure why she's surprised--sometimes it feels like Henry is more attuned to the park and its happenings than she is.  One of the benefits of being the only employee who worked in the original park as well, she assumes.

"I created the raptors," Henry says, and there's that note of vicious pride in his voice that he gets whenever he talks about the park's assets.  "Hoskins came to me with... some concerns."

"Concerns?"

Henry takes a long, thoughtful drink.  "Hoskins felt that Mr. Grady was... neglecting his responsibilities.  He feared that he wasn't training the raptors as diligently as he should have been, and that without intervention the raptors would grow too unruly and have to be put down." Henry takes another sip.  "He planned on moving the raptors to a compound on Isla Sorna and giving them to a different, more strict trainer.  And if they did not show improvement, he wanted to scrap the intelligence experiment."

Claire's glad she fired Hoskins all over again.  The fact that he was advised against informing Owen of his decision and proceeded to do so anyway is tantamount to reckless endangerment in Claire's book. 

"I warned him that Mr. Grady would react poorly," Henry continues.  "Granted, I didn't believe that he would react this poorly, but I also told Hoskins that if the raptors had not responded to training with Mr. Grady, they would be unlikely to do so with anyone."

"Why?" 

"Velociraptors are pack animals," Henry explains.  "Seventy million years ago, they hunted in packs of three to ten animals, headed by an alpha, usually the biggest and strongest raptor in the group.  This is impossible to change at the genetic level and still have a Velociraptor, and at any rate, this batch of animals was designed to be even more pack-oriented.  The original pack in the first park was prone to extreme violence and in-fighting.  We tried to curb that instict this time around."

"Why?"  Why breed the damn things at all?

"Previous experience has taught us that Velociraptors are among the most dangerous animals that we can create here." (Claire had argued as much to the Board, and been overruled.)  "InGen was insistent that we test their intelligence, however, so we tried to create as strong of a pack bond as possible in an artificial setting."

"How?" 

Henry shrugs.  "By having Mr. Grady present at their hatchings and be solely responsible for their care as juveniles, we managed to insert a human into their pack dynamics.  The raptors imprinted on Mr. Grady as their parent and their alpha."

"So that they would be more likely to respond to his training as they grew?"  Claire says.  She understands.  That's not the problem.  The issue Claire is having is, Why would you do this?  They were never going to put the raptors on display for the public.  It just wasn't going to happen, not after Dr. Grant's very public warnings.  There was no benefit for the park to have them, only risk.

Henry inclines his head.  "Exactly. We expected problems, of course, as the raptors grew and began to challenge Mr. Grady for dominance.  I was not surprised to hear from Hoskins that they were becoming wild and unruly."

"Are they fully grown?"  The raptor project has never been under Claire's purview, and she had avoided the Paddock Ten after deciding that even Owen's spectacular shoulders didn't make up for their personality mismatch.

"The oldest is nearly grown, yes."

"All of the raptors aren't the same age?"

"The oldest was the firstborn in a clutch of five," Dr. Wu says.  "All of them shared the same DNA combinations--Velociraptor mongoliensis and Black-throated monitor lizard--but only the oldest survived the first few days.  All of her siblings died.  We created another clutch with different DNA combinations which survived, but they were born a full six months later."

Claire rubs her forehead.  "Is there any chance," she says, and pauses, choosing her words carefully.  "Is there any chance that Mr. Grady is still alive, given that he's the alpha?"

Henry smiles gently, and her expression tells Claire that Grady was the alpha.  She can't imagine that a human would survive a challenge from a fully-grown raptor, not out in the jungle with no one to help him.

"We engineered these raptors to be more... open to learning," says Henry, "but in no instance did we make them safe."

"Why not?"  Claire snaps. 

"Their application, from what I understand, was always meant to be military."

Claire opens her mouth to say just what she thinks of that--she isn't opposed to InGen creating assets for military use, it's their millions going into the development, but conducting military research right next to a goddamn petting zoo is the worst idea she's ever heard--but is cut off by her phone, which buzzes sharply.

"Dearing," she says.

"Claire, it's me," says Vivian.  "We need you in Control.  Um.  We need you now."

Claire thanks Dr. Wu, and she goes.

---

When she arrives, the first thing she sees is ACU up on the big screen, all of them grainy and tense, weapons aimed at the dense foliage around them.  The second thing she sees in the entire Control Room staff focused on that screen, mouths slack with disbelief.

"Director Dearing is here," Marcel says loudly into his earpiece.  "Commander Hamada?"

Slowly, the view on the screen tilts down.

For a second, Claire doesn't understand. Then, on the ground, nestled into a neat cluster on top of some bloody leaves, are four blinking, beeping tracking devices. 

And next to them, leading off into the jungle, is a set of bootprints.

Chapter Text

ii.

"If I find him alive," Claire says out loud, scrutinizing her reflection, "I'm going to kill him."  She's barely slept at all the past week, and it shows.  She's pale, drawn, and pissed off.  She daydreams about a full night's sleep.  Not even Zara and Henry put together can keep her caffeinated enough.  Saturdays are traditionally her days off and today Simon insisted.  She spent the day at home and she still looks like shit. 

It has been six days, and Owen and the Velociraptors are still missing.  ACU has been over the entire island at least four times.  They've brought in helicopters.  They've turned loose a small military force.  They've scanned every inch of the island with extraordinarily expensive thermal imaging technology, and still turned up nothing. 

It's like the raptors have disappeared off the face of the earth. 

The only sign of them is the prey, small animals mostly, killed and picked clean and left in the jungle.  ACU is confident, based on the location of the kills, that the pack is still in the Research Corridor somewhere, probably living west of the volcano in the true wilds, but that's all they've got.

Owen Grady's body still hasn't turned up, so as far as they know, he's also still alive.  Just as missing, and just as dangerous as the Velociraptors, but alive. 

Claire is going to murder him.  She's going to feed him to the T-rex, and she's going to get it on video, and she's going to screen it at every new handler orientation for the next fifteen years. 

The most proactive thing she's been able to do is put Grady's entire house in a storage locker underneath Control, and that had been after Barry du Vallon called her and let her know, apologetically, that he'd just "been by Owen's place, and a lot of his stuff is gone."

 "A lot of stuff" translated to a sack of clothes, a first aid kit, a set of knives, and a fucking motorcycle. 

("Who does he think he is," Claire hissed to Zara on Tuesday night.  "Indiana Jones?")

Her phone buzzes.  Claire debates throwing out the window, but sees that it's Zara and relents, pressing it to her ear and saying, tiredly, "Please tell me you have good news."

"Sorry," Zara says.  "I tried to hold off the Board for as long as I could.  They're opening the park back up on Monday." 

Claire resists the urge to scream.  "Did you--"

"I explained why that was a terrible idea, yes," Zara says, patiently.  Claire is probably going to buy her a house for her wedding.  Maybe a new car, just to match.  Color-coordinated, of course.  "They didn't listen."

Claire gives in and groans, screwing her eyes shut.  "Why?"

"Those technicians that came in Thursday?  They compiled a report that guaranteed nothing is coming through the Fence, not while we have it electrified.  The Board is thinking that the raptors are going to starve.  They say there's not enough for them to eat west of the volcano to meet their lysine requirements, and if they come back east, they'll be picked up by ACU."

Nothing for them to eat but Owen, Claire thinks.  "The Board does realize that while the intelligence of dinosaurs is questionable, Mr. Grady's is not?"  His common sense, yes.  His self-preservation instinct, yes.  His sanity, absolutely.  But his work on the island has made him a specialist in dinosaur behavior on par with Alan Grant, and the Fence is a fence.  It's not going to take a genius to figure out how to get through it.  Even a jarhead should be able to figure it out. 

"The Board doesn't believe he's still alive," says Zara.  "They--and everyone else--are of the opinion that no one can last six days with Velociraptors for company.  They called Dr. Grant and Dr. Malcolm this morning and they both agreed."

Claire leans her forehead against the mirror.  "What do you think?"  She wrote Owen's mother and his sisters letters of condolence this morning.  She hasn't mailed them.  They're still sitting on her kitchen counter, waiting for her to drop them off at the post office.  She hates writing letters of condolence. 

Dear Mrs. Grady, she wrote, and then took three hours to finish the letter. 

She can almost hear Zara shrug.  "I think it's a bad idea to underestimate him," she says, always the voice of sensibility.  "I also think the entire park is a bad idea, so it's not like we can do anything about the Board's decision."

"Thank you, Zara," Claire says.  "Take the day off tomorrow.  Go see Troy.  Get off this migraine of an island."

"There will be a quadruple-shot latte on your desk tomorrow before I leave," Zara promises. 

"I love you," Claire says fervently. 

"I know.  See you Monday, boss.  Dream about Mr. Grady shirtless.  That helps me relax."

"Zara!  You're engaged," Claire laughs. 

"So?  I still have eyes," she retorts, and then she's gone.

Definitely buying her a house, Claire thinks, dragging herself out of the bathroom and into bed.  She lives near Gyrosphere Valley in one of the apartment complexes built for permanent residents.  She could afford to fly on and off the island every day, but Claire has never liked living in the city or commuting to work, and after seven years the sounds and soft lights of the Valley put her to sleep like nothing else. 

Tonight is no exception, and the last thing she hears before she falls asleep is the Triceratops calling to each other, soft and reassuring. 

---

In her dreams, she is walking with ACU through the dense jungle, the volcano over her right shoulder and dinosaurs screaming and crying in the distance.  Her heels sink into the mud.  A rifle is heavy in her hands. 

This time, like every night since the raptors escaped, they find Owen Grady sprawled in a clearing, buzzing with flies.  Blood flecks his lips and the tips of his fingers.  The tracking devices are clutched in one hand and he's smiling, even though his guts are torn out and his ribs cracked open. 

Claire walks past him, gun at the ready, careful not to disturb the flies. 

---

Mom said that this trip counts as Christmas, birthdays, Hannukah at Dad's and even Fourth of July for the next two bajillion years, so Lani is determined to make the most of it. 

If that means making her mom roll her around Gyrosphere Valley for the fifth time this week, she's gonna do it. 

"Triceratops live in mixed herds with other dinosaurs, like zebra and wildebeest do in Africa," Lani says smartly.  Triceratops are her favorite dinosaurs.  She's been trying to convince her mom to sneak one of the babies from the petting zoo out in her ginormous purse. 

"Really?"  Her mom points to the Gallimimus herds grazing nearby.  "Those are my favorites.  Wanna see if we can get closer to them without scaring them off like we did last time?"

Lani nods enthusiastically.  Her friends at school are never gonna believe this.  Her mom turns the gyrosphere around and guides it slowly towards the herd. 

Lani holds her breath.  The herd doesn't turn and run this time like they had before, but this time they're sneaking up behind the herd, not going at them from the front like they tried yesterday.  Lani hopes it works. 

She spots something in the grass, a pair of long tails flicking, and frowns.  "Mom, what kind of dinosaurs are those?"

"Gallimimus, baby."

"Not those." Lani points to the two shapes creeping through the grass near the gyrosphere, sneaking up behind the herd at an angle.  "Those."

"I don't see anything.  Now shh, you don't want them to hear you, do you?"

Lani sees a flash of sharp teeth, hooked claws.  "Mom!"

Two dinosaurs, smaller than the Gallimimus and with heads that remind Lani oddly of crocodiles, burst from the grass with twin shrieks, wide mouths open, and lunge for the nearest grazer. 

"Holy--"

The herd panics.  Lani can feel the ground shaking as they realize what's happening and take off, bolting for the Triceratops farther down in the valley with startled cries. 

Another strange dinosaur comes into view from the opposite direction, shrieking and barking as the Gallimimus thunder towards safety.  (Later, Lani will look up Velociraptors and learn all about them.  She'll know that they're pack hunters, and the first two came out of the grass too early before the rest of their packmates were in position.  They won't make this mistake again.)

"Mom!"

"Shh, honey, it's okay," Lani's mom says, but she's pale and her hand shakes on the joystick. 

There are three dinosaurs chasing after the Gallimimus now, trying to separate one of the smaller animals from the rest of the herd.  They manage to corral one away, but it's still faster than they are, and is getting away.

"Mom, what are those?"

"I," her mom starts, but then a rumble interrupts her and they both spin around in their seats. 

A man on a motorcycle careens past them, and another one of the hunting dinosaurs is at his side.  The dinosaur barks and snaps at the gyrosphere, its teeth just a few inches and a sheet of glass away from Lani's head, and Lani's scared.

"Don't worry, baby," her mom says, sounding relieved.  "That man's going to stop the mean dinosaurs.  It's fine."

Lani watches as the man swings past the strange dinosaurs, gaining on the Gallimimus and revving his engine.  The animal running beside him is bigger than the others, and its scales flash blue in the sun. 

The Gallimimus tries to shy away from the bike, but it's too fast and its driver knows what he's doing.  He reminds Lani of her older stepbrother, Joshua.  He rides the bike like Josh rides horses, feinting and circling, herding the dinosaur like Josh herds cows.  The barking, howling dinosaurs are gaining on the Gallimimus now. 

"Mom..." Lani says. 

Her mom must've known that something was wrong too, because she says, "Oh my god, Lani, don't look, don't look," just as the man on the motorcycle throws himself off his bike and onto the Gallimimus' neck. 

It bellows, loud enough that Lani can hear it a football field away, trips, and then the four hunters are on it, and it falls. 

Lani watches, open-mouthed, as the blue one chases its companions away from the fallen Gallimimus, snapping, and returns to pick at the body alongside the man, who's crouched over it almost protectively. 

It's dead.  Lani knows its dead, and once she gets over that, she calms down.  Josh used to watch nature documentaries with Lani when she lived with Dad in Texas.  Now that she's back home in Hawai'i mom says there's no point in watching nature documentaries, just go outside, there's your nature documentary.  This is like watching lions feed on a gazelle, only with a lot more blood. 

Lani's gonna have such a great story to tell Josh at Christmas.  

Finally, the man stands up, wrapping something dark up in a dull red cloth, and steps aside.  The other three dinosaurs dive in to eat.

"Oh my god," Lani's mom says. 

The man looks up and meets Lani's eyes across the valley.  His whole face and neck are red and wet.

Dumbfounded, Lani's mom just stares, fumbling in her purse.  She brings up her camera and shakily snaps a picture. 

Lani gives the man a tiny wave. 

The man grins, a flash of white in a mess of red, and waves back.  His arm is bloody up to his elbow. 

By the time Lani's mom has pressed the alarm button and Park Security arrived, the man and his dinosaurs are gone.

---

"Hello," Claire says, stooping down so that she's level with the girl.  "Are you Lani?"

The girl looks Claire up and down and nods. 

Claire smiles.  "Hi," she says.  "I'm Claire.  I work here.  I came to talk to you about what you saw today.  First of all, I'm sorry what you saw was so scary."

"It wasn't that scary," the girl says, looking at Claire like she's stupid.  "It was mostly just awesome."

"Oh."  Claire blinks.  "Your mom said that you were scared."

Lani rolls her eyes.  "My mom always thinks I'm scared.  I wasn't!  Well, I was, but then the man showed up.  It was like Planet Earth!"

"The man?"  Claire knows that the girl means Owen, of course.  The mother was able to give a general description.  Man on a motorcycle with Velociraptors.  Had to be Grady. 

Lani nods vigorously.  "He waved at me!"  She wrinkles her nose.  "He was all gross and bloody, though.  He should probably take a bath soon."

Claire snorts.  "He's not big on baths," she says.  "Can you tell me what this man did?  Your mom said you could help tell us what happened."

Lani's mother threatened to sue, actually, and Simon is with her now.  If anybody can talk a person out of a lawsuit, it's Simon.  He has a gift.  Which leaves Claire out here, trying to talk a little girl into giving what basically amounts to a police statement. 

"The dinosaurs came out first."

"Which dinosaurs?"

"The ones that were hunting," Lani explains. "They looked like crocodiles but moved kinda like birds.  Two of them came out of the grass and started chasing one of the Gallimimuses."

She adds an extra syllable to Gallimimus. Claire resists the urge to correct her.  "Then what happened?"

"Then another hunting dinosaur--"

"We call them raptors," Claire says.

Lani looks pleased to have their name.  "Another raptor came from the other side," the girl says.  "But the Gallimimus was too fast, and it almost got away."

"And then?"

"The man on the motorcycle came!  He had another raptor with him.  A really pretty one.  It was blue."  The girl sucks at her teeth thoughtfully.  "I've never seen those dinosaurs before, and I've been here all week.  Where were they?  I made Mom take me everywhere.  We're only here until tomorrow.  Mom has a ‘thing’ Saturday."

"The raptors weren't quite ready to go on display yet.  They're, uh."  Claire's experience with children is limited to her nephews.  The younger one was five or six the last time Claire saw him, Zach ten or eleven. 

She, historically, isn't good with kids.  Gray had liked her, but she had also brought him a bunch of books on dinosaurs.  Zach had been less impressed.  This girl has to be around that age.  Maybe a little younger.  What do you say to a ten-year-old who’s just seen a pack of Velociraptors eat another dinosaur?

"They're shy," Claire finally says, deciding that in this case a lie is much, much better than the truth.  (Which is, of course, They'd fucking eat you.)

Lani nods seriously.  "My stepsister is shy," she says,

Claire smiles again, lips pressed together.  "What happened next, Lani? What did the man on the motorcycle do?"

"He chased the Gallimimus too.  He was faster than the raptors.  Then he helped them catch it."

"How?"  An average Gallimimus weighs six hundred pounds.  Claire knows because she had to help lift one, once, because when a truck carrying it to one of the veterinary clinics broke down nobody knew what to do.  Owen Grady's tall, and very, very fit--Claire has eyes too, despite what Zara thinks--but he's not more than two hundred, two hundred ten pounds. 

Claire doesn't care how much of a badass Grady thinks he is, he's still subject to the laws of physics. 

"He jumped on it," Lani says smartly.  "It tripped, and then the raptors jumped on it too.  Then they ate it."

Claire can admire this kid for her sense of calm.  The mother's been nearly hysterical since Park Security brought them in--not that Claire can blame her, witnessing the violent and most definitely not PG hunt and slaughter of a cute animal is very stressful, she's sure--but this girl is calm and even excited about what she saw. 

Probably plays violent video games or something. 

"They ate it," Claire confirms.

Lani nods.  "What does dinosaur taste like?"

"Chicken," says Claire.  "Did you see which way the man and the raptors went after they were done?"

Lani frowns and shakes her head.  "Mom was freaking out," she explains.  "She does that.  She worries a lot."

"That's okay," Claire says, making a mental note to have ACU patrol the perimeter of the Valley at night, just in case the raptors are still there.  She's going to kick the Board's ass.  "Can't get through the Fence while it's electrified," they said.  "Owen Grady's dead," they said. 

Well, she thinks, here are Velociraptors south of your Fence, and here's Owen Grady eating raw fucking dinosaur right along with them.

"What are their names?"

Claire blinks.  "I'm sorry?"

"The raptors," Lani says.  "What are their names?  The Mosasaurus' name is Yam."

"Oh.  I didn't name them," Claire says.  "So I don't know.  The man on the motorcycle named them."  She's already planning her next move.  It's obvious Grady has more control over the raptors than anyone thought.  Which means he was either lying to Hoskins and to Henry, or he made monumental progress with them in less than two weeks.   In either case they now know that Grady and the raptors are a fully functioning unit, which means Claire is going to have to inform ACU while keeping InGen in the dark, and she should probably call another Board meeting--

"--ask?"

Claire shakes her head.  "I'm sorry?"

Lani sighs.  She has to be ten. She has that preteen eye roll down like a pro.  "Can you ask the motorcycle guy what their names are?"

"I--yeah.  Yes.  Of course," Claire says.  She doesn't really want to go into just why that’s not going to happen, but she's saved from trying to explain business politics to a preteen by Simon, who comes down the wall with the mother, smiling. 

"We are very sorry," Simon is saying, and Claire lets him bundle the mother and Lani up and out the door, flush with gift cards and t-shirts and a very pointed reminder that they weren't actually injured and so can't sue the park, as per the waivers they had to sign to get in. 

"We should close the park again," Claire says immediately.  "Not until Monday, of course, stocks would plummet and we'd have to increase admissions to cover the loss, but we can shut down Gyrosphere Valley until then and keep guests south of the--"

"Claire," Simon says, and smiles.  "Relax.  This is good news."

Claire has a dead Gallimimus--which are one-point-five mil a pop--and a shitty cellphone photo of a Jurassic World handler covered in dinosaur blood.  She fails to see the good news here, and says so.

Claire adores Simon.  She does.  He has been nothing but respectful towards her.  He listens to her most of the time.  He lets her run his theme park the way it should be run, and trusts her judgement.  She could not have found a better boss, she really couldn't have.  In time, they both know that Claire will get tired of running Jurassic World and Simon will get tired of running Masrani Corp, and he will hand the reins to her. 

She just wishes he wasn't so fucking optimistic.  Sometimes, catastrophes happen.  Losses have to be cut.  It sucks, but there's nothing anyone can do about it.  This is one of those times.  But Simon seems to think that the situation can be salvaged. 

"This means that there is hope of a recapture," Simon says.  "Ms. Iona told me that Owen Grady not only hunted with the Velociraptors, he ate first.  The others obeyed his commands.  They listen to him."

"Mr. Masrani, I don't know if--"

SImon shakes his head.  "He has a bond with them, Claire.  Victor called and told me what he planned to do to the Velociraptors, citing their lack of progress, and it struck me as odd."

Claire fights back the desire to huff.  "While it's impressive that he's survived eleven days in their company, I wouldn't call it a bond," she says.

"I went to visit him once, you know."  Simon sounds amused.  "When the first clutch failed.  Mr. Grady insisted on hand-raising the remaining animal.  Henry sent me to him to convince him to bring the animal back to the lab, where it--and he--would be safe.

"When I arrived, Mr. Grady had it eating out of the palm of his hand.  It slept in his coat pocket.  The most vicious predator we have created on this island, and it would go to him asking to be held and petted."

"It was a baby," Claire says.  "It's much bigger now, Simon, believe me.  We should close the park and call InGen back.  They can try and capture the raptors, I guess, but they can cross the fence.  It's not safe."

Simon is still shaking his head.  "I want you to try and contact Mr. Grady first," he says, and he's not going to bend on this one, Claire can tell, just like he didn't bend when InGen brought the raptor project to him in the first place, just like he didn't bend with Indominus.  "Talk to him.  Convince him to bring the animals back into containment."

"He'll never agree.  He doesn't want InGen to kill them."

"I won't allow it," Simon says.  For what it's worth, Claire believes him.  She believes that he'll try.  "There is no reason to.  They are trainable, this is obvious now.  I will cancel the military project and we can put them out on display.  The guests will love it and the raptors will get exercise."

"That would buy us more time on Indominus," Claire says, reluctantly.  "But--"

Simon flaps a hand.  "Two weeks more," he decides.  "If you cannot get in touch with Mr. Grady, or if he proves particularly resistant to our compromise, we can bring InGen back, but right now let's try a peaceful resolution."

"I'm closing the Valley," Claire warns. 

"That's fine," Simon calls over his shoulder, no doubt on his way to talk to the Board and tell them his genius, hopeful, idealistic solution.

Claire drops her head into her hands and lets herself have ten seconds of just abject despair, and then she straightens up and punches a name into her phone.

It rings for a few seconds, then an accented voice says, "Hello?"

"Mr. du Vallon?"  Claire says, brightly.  "This is Claire Dearing.  Can I meet you for coffee somewhere?" 

---

"It's not really surprising that he did what he did," Sam Dierden says, sipping at her latte.  "I mean, it is a shock, you know?  But if anybody was going to do something like that, we all knew it would be Owen."

"We all?"

Sam waves a hand.  Her nails are short and permanently lined with dirt.  "The handlers," she says.  "We all knew that Owen was, well.  He's odd, you know?  Funny guy, but weird."

"Weird how?"  Claire is pointedly not taking notes so Sam feels at ease.  She's sure that the handlers have all told each other that Claire has been asking around by now, of course, but Claire wants them to be as relaxed as possible.  She doesn't think that they would hide Grady, not when he comes with four Velociraptors, but they might try and conceal information if they think she and ACU are on some kind of witch hunt. 

"We're trying to piece together Owen's last few days before he let the raptors out," she explains.  "I know Owen.  He never struck me as the kind of person who would do something so reckless.  We're just trying to understand what he might be thinking, so we can find him and bring him back safely."  

Some of the tension in Sam's shoulders eases.  She's the lead Spinosaurus handler, and one of the most senior handlers on the island.  She's been here as long as Claire has.  They understand each other, and know each other to be honest.  She trusts Claire.  "He's been acting... paranoid," she finally says.  "For the last month or so before he disappeared.  He's always been weird, you know?"

Claire remembers some of the things Owen did to get her to go out with him, and nods.  "Yes.  He has a strange sense of humor."

"Exactly," Sam says.  "So we were used to him being kind of unusual.  He always kept weird hours and spent a lot of time with his raptors.  He'd get really antisocial sometimes.  He hated some of the InGen guys, but never said so to their faces.  We all just assumed he's that way because of his military service, you know?  I have two brothers and a sister in the armed forces, and it makes you odd after a while."

"Was Owen ever reckless?  Did he underestimate his raptors or any of the other dinosaurs?"

"No, never."  Sam shakes her head empathetically.  "He was always very safe.  He always told people, 'Never turn your back on the cage.'  He respected the dinos, which isn't something that a lot of people come to the island with." 

Claire finishes her coffee, thinking.  "Tell me more about the paranoia," she finally says.  None of the other handlers have mentioned that.  Not even Barry du Vallon, who knows Grady best. 

Sam takes another drink.  "I'm the head of the Handler's Association," she tells Claire.  "The others sometimes come to me with concerns and questions, so I can talk to you or to Vivian and get problems resolved."

Claire nods. 

"Maybe... two or three weeks before he let the raptors out, Owen came to me and asked me if Vic Hoskins had been giving me or my staff any trouble.  I told him that Hoskins didn't dare show his face near my Madge.  I threatened to feed him to her if he brought up fucking military applications to me again.  Thank you for firing that asshole, by the way."

"Hoskins wanted to use a Spinosaurus for the military?" 

"Don't get me wrong," says Sam.  "I get it.  I really do.  Dinosaurs could probably save a lot of lives, if we could domesticate them.  If we could train them for combat.  But we can't.  If Hoskins puts a dinosaur--if he had put the Velociraptors--out in a military setting, instinct would take over, and they would eat everyone they were supposed to protect." 

"They haven't eaten Owen Grady," Claire points out.  "They seem pretty trained.  He can coordinate hunts with them.  He can convince them not to eat him."

"That's what we don't get," Sam admits.  "I've worked with Madge for almost ten years.  She knows me.  But if I tried to walk into the cage with her, she would eat me.  It's instinct.  How Owen managed to curb that we--and I mean all of us, if you think we handlers haven't been getting together every couple of days and having drunken debates about this, you're mistaken--can't figure out.

"So he came to me a couple of weeks ago, and said that Hoskins was going to take the raptors away.  I didn't believe him, obviously.  If I had he might not have felt the need to run off with them.  I didn't think even InGen would be that stupid."  Sam rubs her forehead.  "Then a few days later, Barry--you know Barry?--Barry came to me.  He said that he was worried about Owen.  That Owen had been acting strange.  He told Barry not to turn in any reports on the raptors and to purposely mess up training drills when Hoskins was watching.  Barry was concerned that Owen was in the middle of a PTSD episode."

"Owen has PTSD?"

Sam shrugs.  "I'm not a shrink," she says.  "And Owen never told us, one way or another.  But it's definitely possible.  My older brother has it, and Owen had a lot of the same behaviors. Hypervigilance, paranoia, periods of isolation.  He could be aggressive if he felt threatened.  He would zone out sometimes too, in the middle of a conversation." 

Claire debates for a moment, and then decides to go ahead and come out with it.  Sam has trusted her, so it's time to return the favor.  The entire park runs on reciprocity between the handlers and the paper-pushers.  "Mr. Masrani wants to bring Owen and the raptors back in," she says.

Sam's face darkens.  "Owen and the raptors?" 

"He wants to put them on display, to keep InGen from putting them down or taking them away," Claire explains.  "Do you think this is possible?  Is recapture safe?  Can I ask ACU to risk their lives using non-lethal ammunition?"

"I like Owen," Sam says.  "And I want Owen to be okay.  All of us are keeping an eye out for him.  We're all carrying around first aid kits and fucking Nutrigrain bars in case we manage to find him before the raptors decide they're done and turn on  him.  But the raptors?  Claire, InGen shouldn't have made them in the first place.  They're terrifying.  And I work with a Spinosaurus."

Claire sighs, and looks down her empty coffee cup.  It's Monday again.  Grady and the raptors have been out of containment for fifteen days.  So far they haven't found his body, but everyone Claire's talked to, even Barry du Vallon, is just waiting for that to happen. 

"Yeah," she says.  "That's what everyone else has said."

---

 Simon's two weeks creep past, and Claire is no closer to finding Owen.  She's talked to every handler who knew him.  She's talked to his mother and all of his sisters.  She's talked to his military buddies.

All of them assure her that Owen Grady is a smart, self-aware man who usually is not a thrill seeker or reckless with his own safety, who can take orders, who is generally responsible with his life and the lives of others. 

Claire doesn't get it.  How does this man on paper translate to the man currently running amok in her park? How does a responsible, diligent soldier and scientist go feral with such little notice?

The answer, obviously, is that someone is lying to Claire.

 Somebody saw the warning signs.  Somebody knew that Grady was too attached to the raptors, and chose not to say anything. 

Claire figures she can discount everyone off-island.  Claire is probably the dictionary definition of workaholic, but Grady lives on Isla Nublar too, and he's only gone home twice in the last two years. 

It's easy to hide your problems from your family and friends when you only communicate through Skype.  Owen's mother, his sisters, his military buddies, they don't have a clue what was really going on with him, just like Karen doesn't have a clue to what's really going on with Claire. 

Claire also mentally discounts Sam.  Sam's protective of the other handlers, but she and Claire don't lie to each other.  The Gyrosphere Valley handlers are furious with Grady--there have been another three raptor hunts in the last twelve days, and another three dead Gallimimuses--so unless they're planning to unleash a herd of pissy Ankylosauruses on Grady and beat him to death, Claire doubts that they would lie to her either. 

All of the Research handlers are convinced they're going to get eaten unless the raptors are caught.  Everyone south of the resort only knows Owen by reputation. 

Which, by process of elimination, leaves Barry. 

So, with three days left on the clock and a cluster headache that could drop an Apatosaurus, Claire starts digging. 

Barry du Vallon was brought onto the raptor project late, at Simon's recommendation and later insistence.  The first clutch of six raptors had failed, leaving only one, designated in Henry's files as Beta--Claire makes a mental note to email Lani Iona later--in Grady's care. 

Du Vallon was brought in a month before the second clutch was due to hatch, because Grady had all but locked himself in his bungalow with the one raptor and Henry feared he wouldn't be able to care for four on his own.  He was also the only person aside from Grady who Beta didn't appear to hate on sight. 

Barry didn't imprint on the second clutch, but he did care for Beta almost exclusively while Owen looked after the hatchlings until they were old enough to meet Beta and survive the apparently intricate development of pack bonds.  Barry was never formally included in the pack.  Both he and Grady were afraid that having Barry replace Beta in the hierarchy would cause it to become violent.  But both of their reports--when they were still sending them in to Hoskins and Henry--stated that the raptors viewed Barry as a loner, an omega.  One of them, who they would occasionally listen to, especially when he had food, just not part of the pack. 

Barry has four degrees, speaks four languages, and has been arrested twice for his involvement in anti-military demonstrations. 

Claire finds it strange that he gets along so well with Owen, an ex-SEAL, but according to everyone around them, they got along famously and worked well together. 

When Claire talked with him, Barry admitted that Owen had been acting oddly and was angry and frustrated with Vic Hoskins.  He had asserted that Grady's disappearance was a shock.  He was worried about his friend and believed that the raptors would kill him if he wasn't found quickly. 

"But what if he isn't?" Claire murmurs.  What if Barry isn't worried?  What if Owen's little party trick hadn't been a surprise?  What if it was planned between them?

Within ten minutes, Claire finds it.

Owen Grady has been missing for twenty-seven days.  In that time, he has evaded ACU, hunted in the Valley four times, and kept moving often enough that no one, not even the helicopters sporadically flying over the island, can find him, or his animals. 

All over the park, gasoline has gone missing.  Thirty-six gallons in the last twenty-seven days, which isn't a huge product loss for something the size of Jurassic World, but it is noticeable, and all of it has disappeared from the enclosures around the Baryonyx, which is where Barry is currently assigned. 

Now that she knows what and where to look, Claire finds other evidence. 

A crate of vegetables disappeared from the Fish Friar two weeks ago.  A first aid kit went missing on its way to the Cretaceous Cruise station.  A bunch of random toiletries vanished from a guest's unattended suitcase on the pier. 

Claire grins.  "Gotcha," she says.

---

She calculates the gaps between the reports of missing gas, gives Barry an extra day for cleverness, and when he leaves from the Baryonyx paddock that night, Claire follows. 

She had Lowery activate the GPS in Barry's car, which he ditches over by T-Rex Kingdom.  Smart man.

Claire, however, is used to the vicious and cold-blooded cunning found in boardrooms and scientific labs, so she puts a tracking device inside one of the cans of gas and made sure that set of cans was easiest to grab. 

(She also closed all but one refueling station within easy distance from the Baryonyx and had Lowery perform a "surprise inspection" on the remaining station to encourage Barry to grab what was easiest to reach and get out, which Lowery enjoyed and Vivian recorded for blackmail.) 

So when Barry climbs into another vehicle and drives off in the direction of the Fence, Claire's able to follow leisurely from a mile back, watching Barry pick his way west. 

The blinking light on her screen stops, and stays put. 

Claire follows.  By the time she spots the Fence, Barry is long gone.  She can see the light blinking on her screen, but she can't see the gasoline.  Trusting that it's there, she hides her car behind a currently empty First Aid cabin in Gyrosphere Valley--still closed--installs herself behind a tree a good distance away from the Fence, and waits. 

Her heart is pounding in her chest.  She wants Owen to show up.  She wants to be proved right.  She wants to catch him.  (She wonders, briefly, if this is what Owen feels like on his bike bearing down on a Gallimimus.)

Claire waits for almost two hours, playing Tetris on her phone and watching the other side of the Fence.  She can wait.  She has to wait. 

The sun slides down and this close to the wild jungle, darkness comes quickly.  The faint lights from the Valley help her see, and everything is tall trees and tangled shadows. 

And then, like he's part of the dark himself, Owen Grady comes out of the trees, little more than a shadow.  His bike rumbles softly.  His headlight is off, but Claire's eyes have grown used to the gloom by now and she knows Grady by his height, by his broad shoulders.  She can see his eyes glittering. 

And she knows the four shapes that slide out of the jungle after him, tails twitching and claws gleaming. 

Carefully, quietly, Claire pulls her phone out, shielding the screen from view, and types to Simon, I found him.

Chapter Text

iii.

They killed all of the Velociraptors on Isla Sorna.  Three separate packs of them, twenty-seven adults, nine juveniles, and thirteen hatchlings.  InGen killed almost all of the carnivores on Isla Sorna--all of the Pteradons, the Spinosaurus, the family of T-rexes.  A security measure, they insisted.  If they were going to rebuild a theme park on Isla Nublar, they needed to make sure that their next door neighbor wasn't going to up and kill them if it got hungry. 

InGen made a pretty penny off of the bodies, too; some were stuffed and sold to museums and private collectors, some were pared down to their DNA and given to Dr. Wu, and some disappeared, probably into a shady military lab somewhere.   

The soldier in Owen gets it.  The scientist does, too.  Velociraptors are dangerous.    The first time Owen held Blue in his hands, she was four seconds old and barely the length of his hand from wrist to fingertip, which didn't stop her from savaging his thumb until he could ply her away with chunks of ground beef.  He's got scars all over from his animals, and they actually like him.  He can't imagine--or he can, thanks to Dr. Grant's very explicit warnings--what they would do to someone they only saw as food.

But the other part of him, the undefined, nebulous thing that Owen first noticed when Blue's sisters died and he was left with an orphaned baby raptor who wouldn't stop crying unless she was in his pockets, heard Vic Hoskins tell him, "If they don't show improvement, well, there's always some weirdo in his mom's basement who wants a stuffed one, right, Grady?" and went, Fuck.  No.  

It's not that he's an idiot, Owen tells himself as he takes a shot of liquid courage and makes a very, very bad decision.  It's that he's a parent.  Parents do all kinds of crazy shit for their kids.  So what if his kids are four almost fully-grown Velociraptors who lately have been rebellious and mouthy?  He's still responsible for them. 

This is what he tells himself as he opens the raptor cage for the first time since the girls were young and walks through it.

At once, four sets of glittering eyes turn to face him.  Echo hisses.  Delta and Charlie crouch, spreading their claws.  There's nowhere for them to hide in this part of the paddock, which is good.  At least Owen will see his death coming.  The four of them fan out, hissing and growling, and Blue drops her head. 

"Blue," Owen says sharply, and spreads his stance.  "Eyes on me." 

When she was born, the InGen scientists named her Beta.  Her sisters were Zeta, Rho, Tau, Pi, and Iota, the runt.  Her sisters were all dead by that first morning, curled up in the cardboard box that Owen had filled with old t-shirts and the Navy sweatshirt he bought when he signed up fifteen years ago, worn through with holes and splattered with mud and paint.  Beta was the only one alive, and from then on Owen called her Blue, and she slept with him until Delta, Charlie, and Echo were born six months later. 

She's always been his favorite. 

Blue hisses, down in a crouch, all of her teeth flashing.  How long has it been since Owen was in the cage with them?  Four months?  Five?

"Hey," he snaps, "don't give me any of that, Blue.  Delta, I see you, knock it off."  Delta opens her mouth, echoing her sisters' sentiments.  Oh boy.

"Blue," Owen says forcefully, and stands up to his full height.  He keeps his hands out, a gesture his girls have been trained from the nest to recognize, and issues two short, sharp whistles.  Instantly, the raptors bolt straight up, startled out of their attack postures by the familiar command.  Yay, muscle memory, Owen thinks. 

"Good, Charlie," Owen praises.  "Good, Echo.  Good, Delta."  He locks eyes with his beta, knowing that if anybody attacks him, it'll be her.  "Blue.  Eyes on me." 

Blue growls.  But her claws relax and her tail stops twitching. 

"Good girl, Blue," Owen says, and holds his hand out.  If his stupid, crazy, not-really-a-plan plan is going to work, Blue needs to make the first move, and her sisters have to see it.  They have to see Owen as their alpha, and they have to see him as not-food, otherwise they're going to kill him and eat him and he'll go down in history as that jackass who let a bunch of Velociraptors loose on an entire park full of kids. 

Owen doesn't want to be that jackass. 

"C'mon, Blue.  You know me.  It's okay."  Blue inches closer, sickle claw tapping against the sand.  It's as long as one of Owen's fingers now.  She could punch it through his gut and have him dead on the ground in seconds.  But she knows him, Owen knows she does.  She hid in his pockets and slept in the crook of his neck. 

Blue stops a few bare inches from Owen's outstretched hand, regarding him with bright eyes.  She chitters at him, sickle toe still tapping.  Owen waits. 

The raptor huffs, and finally presses her nose to his hand. 

Owen grins.  "Good girl, Blue," he says, scritching at her nose and the underside of her jaw.  "That's very good."  Blue huffs again and consents to petting.  Charlie, never one to miss out on having her eye ridges scratched, darts in with a demanding chitter and Owen obliges.  Delta and Echo finally relax all the way, chattering to each other and going back to their usual play-fighting. 

They're not going to eat him.  Today. 

Owen takes a deep breath and checks his watch.  It's five thirty-six, which means they have twenty-four minutes to be fucking gone before Barry, ever the early bird, shows up. 

Really, now that Owen's reasonably confident the girls aren't going to eviscerate him, the entire plan hinges on Barry.  Owen hopes to god that Barry checks his desk before he comes out here, because Owen left him a very detailed note.  Well, more of an apology than a note, and some directions so that Owen won't die, but. 

He takes a deep breath.  His bike is outside propped up against the paddock, and three miles past the volcano, he's stashed some supplies in a cave on the beach.  He can do this.  This is fine.  He's done missions probably as dangerous.  Not more dangerous, because he's pretty sure nothing is more dangerous than going off into the woods with a pack of Velociraptors, except maybe skydiving from the stratosphere with a bomb strapped to his chest, but definitely within his skill level. 

"Eyes up," he says.  The pack swings around to look at their alpha.  Under his hands, Blue and Charlie hum, heads cocked.  "Ready-cages, girls," he says. 

Blue hesitates for just a moment, but Owen hisses at her, sharp, and she goes.  Her sisters follow her, climbing into their cages like they were taught.  They're excited.  Owen can feel it.  They can smell something on him, something new and different--Owen likes to pretend it's not pants-pissing terror--and they've never been asked into their ready-cages this early.  Something special is happening.

Owen leaves the paddock gate open and waves an old rag in front of the ready-cages, clicking and whistling the "hide and seek" command.  That's the drill they're most familiar with.  Owen figures that if anything can keep four raptors who've never been outside of his house or their paddock on target, it's this.  They love to hunt.  There's even fresh meat in the cave, butchered this morning not an hour after Vic told Owen what he was going to do to the girls. 

"This is gonna go fine," Owen mutters to himself.  He whistles to the girls again, telling them to hold, and bounds up to the catwalk for the cage remote. 

Remote in hand, he climbs down and swings himself back onto his bike and settles deep into the seat.  It's technically not too late.  He could put everything back, leave the raptors, and go home.  Take the note off Barry's desk and pretend this never happened.  He could sit on his house by the ocean and drink himself unconscious, then catch the first boat off Isla Nublar and put this all behind him. 

And then Hoskins would come back and take his pack.  They won't ever listen to anyone like they listen to Owen.  They just won't.  They don't even listen to Owen half the time--teenage rebellion, Barry calls it, though it's more like early adulthood rebellion, especially in Blue's case--and Owen raised the ungrateful reptiles.  They're not going to listen to some big, swaggering asshole who thinks that just because he's the poster boy for steroid overuse, he's the alpha.  They'll eat him.

And then they'll die.  

Owen takes a deep breath, revvs the bike, and opens the ready-cages.

---

He doesn't die.  Not the first day or the second, and halfway through the third, it's looking like he's not going die today either.  He's pretty sure InGen knows he's alive by now.  They'll have found the tracking devices--which were a bitch to get out, by the way. Surprising no one, Velociraptors don't like it when you dig around their backs for a little tracking device.  Owen had had to cut himself first, to show them that it was okay, and ply them with several dead rats and a few stern smacks to the snout to keep them from taking a bite out of him while he cut out the devices.

So they'll have found the tracking devices, which is alright because Owen and the pack have made their den on the beach, as far away from the Fence as somebody can get without actually leaving the island. 

ACU hasn't even come out this far yet.  A helicopter flew overhead yesterday, but all Owen had to do was call the girls back into the cave.  The only risky adventures they've had have involved hunting, because his raptors are six feet tall and clocking in about three hundred pounds each, and ate all of the meat he stockpiled yesterday morning. 

He's going to have to find a way for them to hunt properly.  There's not much big game on this part of the island.  A few wild boar, he thinks, some chickens that got loose when the first park fell, and with Owen's help Charlie is teaching herself to fish, but that's it.

If they don't eat something big and filling soon, Owen's pretty sure he knows who's next on the menu. 

 The next issue to tackle is a more permanent den.  He found this cave a few years ago when he first came to the island and couldn't sleep, and it's not a bad den, not if you're a Velociraptor, but Owen's a human and if he has to spend another three nights lying on some wet, sandy floor, he's going to go crazy, no matter how many cuddles he gets from the girls. 

"Food and shelter," he says, shading his eyes and looking up at the sky.  "We can probably do that, right, Blue?"  Curled up in the sun beside him, Blue chitters, shifting her head closer to his thigh.  Owen smiles and scratches her jaw. 

Without her, the others probably would have eaten him when he tried to cut out their tracking implants.  It had been Blue who snapped at her sisters whenever they growled at Owen or tried to bite him.  Even Delta, his most aggressive raptor, had been cowed by Blue's behavior. 

As a reward, Owen let Blue eat second.  In the paddock, he'd fed her last, so that she remembered where her food came from, but the wild wasn't the paddock.  Owen still eats first--raw boar, yay--but Blue feeds right beside him.  The last thing Owen needs is Blue thinking that she's being treated unfairly and challenging him for dominance.  He's a soft, squishy human being.  He's pretty sure he's not going to survive an outright challenge. 

Owen purposefully didn't bring any guns out here.  He's got human food, a few changes of clothes, enough gas to run his bike for a few more days, a basic first aid kit, some dino tranquilizer courtesy of an unlocked cabinet in the vet clinic closest to the Fence, and his big ass knife, but no guns. 

Guns fuck up too often for Owen to completely trust them for extended periods of time out in the wild, and besides, they're loud, and if Owen knows Claire Dearing he knows that she'll have ACU out in the field every day until the cost of putting them out there is too high. 

Guns didn't help Robert Muldoon or any of the InGen guys who were killed by raptors before anyway.  Owen probably has a better chance with the knife. 

He watches Delta, Echo, and Charlie play in the ocean for a while, dancing in and out of the waves.  They splash and snap at each other like they used to when they were hatchlings playing on his living room floor, until Charlie gives a shriek of triumph and drags a fish out of the waves. 

Echo, always the bully, dives in and tries to steal the fish from her sister, and the whole game devolves into snapping, snarling violence. 

"Hey!"  Owen barks, sitting up.  "That's enough."

The raptors scuttle away, keen to pretend they weren't misbehaving.  Blue grumbles low in her throat.  Charlie uses the distraction to scarf down her fish, hooting, and dances with Delta away from Echo. 

Echo looks right at Owen and growls thinly.  Owen watches her for a moment and she eventually breaks eye contact, chasing after Delta, trespass forgotten. 

They're getting too rowdy.  Owen needs to give them a task before boredom turns them vicious and stubborn.   

Owen sighs.  "What do you say, pretty girl?"  He asks Blue.  "You feel like a hunt tonight?" 

Blue regards him with one golden eye, claws splayed out in the sand.  Her tail twitches. 

Owen takes that to mean, Always. 

---

A week in, Owen has an idea.  Barry came through, god bless him, and left Owen his first round of supplies, and, even more than that, he brought Owen information.  All week Owen's been taking the girls out on little hunts, sending them off after chickens and boar and the obnoxious fucking monkeys that hoot and holler at all hours of the night.  The raptors eat most of their prey, but they leave behind enough, and there aren't any other predators on Isla Nublar aside from the dinosaurs.  Their kills are a pretty solid way to track them.   

ACU, because Owen's been taking the pack pretty far from their temporary den just to fucking get some exercise, thinks that the raptors are nesting in the opposite direction and are concentrating their search efforts there.  Having the entire crew out around the clock is costing Masrani Corp so much money that they've cut the number of guys on the ground in half. 

Owen has a window.  Well, a corridor.  Technically a narrow,  twisting trail that will take him and his pack from their current sandy home to a much nicer, much more permanent one. 

Owen's pretty excited. 

Not in the least because the last few days, he's been getting a lot of long, thoughtful looks right before he goes to sleep and right after he wakes up.  Not from Blue, but from the other three.  Calculating looks.  Hungry looks. 

Owen makes sure to walk as confidently as possible, to tell the raptors with his shoulders and the set of his legs that he's still the alpha, but he's not sure how long this is going to work if he doesn't give them something to do.  All this time hiding out on the beach isn't good for their attention spans or their faith in him.

It's not hard to pack everything up--he's mostly out of supplies by now anyway, all he has to carry is the gas--and the girls know by now what the bike's roaring engine means. 

"Sneak sneak," Owen orders, tossing each of them the last of the rats.  "Follow me!"  And they're off, Owen rumbling and the raptors flashing in and out of the underbrush, clearing logs with ease, deadly silent now that he's passed down the order. 

He can see where ACU's been.  They're not exactly subtle.  Their passage through the jungle's marked by broken branches and muddy, churned-up earth.  Delta must catch the scent of one of them because she calls to Owen the high, hissing cry that means, Hunt? 

"Tsst," Owen hisses back, and keeps going. 

There's nothing quite like running with Velociraptors.  Owen did some pretty crazy shit as a SEAL and none of that compares to the rush he gets when he's on the bike and Blue is racing beside him, close enough to touch. 

Owen feels invincible like this. 

Their journey is relatively short, six miles south southwest, almost to the Fence, but with Owen's sneak order they go slow enough that it's a good distraction for the pack.  All of their focus is fixed on their surroundings, watching for threats.  Blue flanks Owen's right and Delta his left, Echo and Charlie behind them.  Owen's leading the charge, and he's the first one to slow when the old Visitor Center swims into view, half reclaimed by the jungle. 

He quiets the bike and grins.  "Delta, Echo," he says.  "Search."  The two raptors shoot off into the underbrush, heads slung low and tails held out straight.  They won't go too far--Owen taught them this a long time ago, back when they lived with him in the bungalow.  They'll search the area around the building, probably come back with some dead lizards, and shriek if they need him. 

"Charlie, Blue, on me," he says.  Blue barks her assent, taking up her usual spot on his right side, and together, they slip into the Visitor Center. 

Owen found this place on another sleepless night before Blue was born.  (He had a lot of those, after he left the Navy.) He knows from both Dr. Grant and Dr. Malcolm's books that raptors hunted here once.  The original raptors were a little smaller than his, but his girls are smarter.  If those raptors could get around in here, so can his. 

It's old, and it smells like rust and mold and hot jungle--a smell that never fails to make Charlie sneeze and claw at her muzzle kind of adorably--but it looks pretty structurally sound.  "Blue, search," Owen says, and off she goes. 

Charlie chitters and sticks closer to Owen.  She's the youngest by three whole days--stubborn egg, didn't want to hatch--and the smallest, and without Blue nearby she prefers the company of her alpha.  Owen scratches her chin and makes a soothing noise in the back of his throat. 

A quick search proves the Visitor Center to be safe and sound.  There's even a dozen boxes of old t-shirts and hoodies, which Owen quickly appropriates and uses to make himself a bed up on one of the balconies.  The stairs are too rickety and narrow for the girls to follow.  Charlie can make it because she's a good sixty pounds lighter than her sisters, and Owen's not really worried about her turning on him anyway, so he figures he'll allow it. 

Satisfied, Owen heads back outside and cups his hands around his mouth, repeating one of the strange, harsh barking calls he's heard Blue use to summon her sisters.  Within a few minutes Delta and Echo come running, Delta's muzzle slick with fresh blood. 

"Good girls," Owen praises, and brings the pack in for the night.  Shelter, check, he thinks, satisfied.  Next goal: proper hunting. 

---

Back when Owen was a SEAL, they had this term for anybody on their side who up and went over to the other side.  Going native, they called it.  SEALs almost never did any kind of undercover work, but they'd go in and snatch up a lot of CIA and Special Ops people who did, and every once and a while, the person they'd go into rescue had disappeared.  Just up and vanished. 

These people would be spotted later in some crowded marketplace in Kabul or Damascus, alive and well and, seemingly, happy.  The standing order was to shoot all traitors on sight, so they almost never lasted long, but still.  They died happy.  

It's not something Owen remembers while he's in the jungle with the raptors.  It's something he'll remember later, when he's got holes in his side and one of Echo's teeth embedded in his shoulder, but right now, at this moment, Owen has a hard time remembering he was ever anything but his raptors' alpha at all.   

---

If letting the raptors out in the first place was a bad idea, this is definitely the worst idea Owen's ever come up with.  But his raptors need to eat, and they need to eat something big, and at least if they're in Gyrosphere Valley everyone else will be in those stupid little bubbles and not on the menu. 

But when he's cresting a hill and looking down into the valley with Blue at his side, it's hard to remember why this is a bad idea.  The wind drags at his hair and the sun flashes off his bike and Blue's scales.  After almost two weeks holed up in the dark jungle, being out in the open is enough to make Owen want to shout with joy. 

He doesn't want to ruin the hunt, though, so he swallows his yell and pulls himself lower over his bike, watching the herd of Gallimimus at the bottom of the valley.  He can see Echo and Charlie creeping through the grass, tails high.  Delta's nowhere to be seen.  The herd has no idea what's stalking them. 

"What d'you think, Blue?"  Owen asks, not taking his eyes off the herd.  "You ready?"  He cups his hands around his mouth and whistles once.  Showtime. 

But Charlie and Echo are already moving, shrieking and giving chase too early, without Delta in position to help them corral one of the Gallimimuses away from the others.  The herd scatters, bellowing in alarm.  (Owen has the briefest flash of pity.  Nothing has hunted these animalssince the park opened.)  

"Shit," Owen growls, and guns it, plunging down the hill after the fleeing herd.  Blue bounds beside him, screeching to her sisters.  Wind drags at Owen's hair and face, slaps up against his chest.   Tall grass whips past his legs and elbows. 

He sees Delta burst around from the side, snapping at one of the smaller Gallimimuses and splitting it from the rest of the herd.  She misses it by scant inches, ducking and turning aside to avoid its lashing tail.  She howls in frustration. 

They're not gonna catch it, Owen realizes.  His girls are fast, but not fast enough.  A Gallimimus can reach sixty, sixty-five miles an hour.  Charlie and Echo are already lagging behind.  Delta's trying to keep up, but she's going to burn herself out in a few seconds. 

"Blue, on me," Owen shouts, over the raptors' shrieks and the sounds of the herd flipping its collective shit, and accelerates.  The bike whines underneath him, but it holds him up, and he's outpacing the rest of the pack within seconds. 

The Gallimimus panics.  It tries to get around him and rejoin the safety of the herd, but Owen is there, cutting it off and driving it back towards his pack every time it tries to break past him.  Blue shrieks, marshalling her sisters. 

Owen's coiling himself on the bike before he even realizes what he's doing.  He can feel the hunt like a live wire on the tip of his tongue. 

He pulls his knife out of its sheath, judges the distance between himself and the Gallimimus, and jumps. 

He hits a solid wall of scales and muscles and drives his knife in deep.  Warm, dark blood spills over his hands.  The Gallimimus cries out, stumbles, and Owen grins.  He doesn't see Blue make the jump and land on top of their prey, but he feels her sink her teeth into the back of its neck and hold on.

The other three join in too, and under their combined weight, the Gallimimus goes down.  It kicks feebly once, twice, its feet scraping the back of Owen's boots, and then it dies.  Owen's pressing his mouth to the wound he made before it's done kicking.  The taste of blood explodes across his tongue. 

Behind him, he can hear Blue shooing her sisters away, snapping at them.  Owen raises his head and whistles to her, and she joins him. 

He knows better than to eat the raw meat.  He does.  Human teeth aren't really made for chewing flesh this tough anyway, so he just holds himself there, hunched over his kill, blood bubbling down his chin and over his hands.  After a few seconds the adrenaline wears off and the taste of blood makes him kind of want to throw up, so he saws a nice, sizeable portion of meat from the breast and wraps it up in an old t-shirt.  He'll cook it back at the den.

Owen whistles to Delta, letting her join Blue, and then eyes Echo and Charlie.  Their over-eagerness almost cost them a meal. Charlie at least has the sense to look contrite, and Owen calls to her. 

Echo hisses. 

"Don't give me any of that shit," Owen growls, glaring.  It's not until Echo lowers her head that Owen allows her to eat, and he swats her nose as she darts past him in warning. 

Next time, they won't mess up. 

Owen looks across the valley and notices, maybe a hundred yards away, one of those damn gyrospheres.  They have an audience.  Shit, he thinks.  Claire's going to kill me.  One of the tiny figures inside of it waves. 

Still flush with success, Owen waves back, only vaguely aware that he's covered in blood and bits of Gallimimus scale, and by the time Park Security and ACU show up, Owen and the raptors are gone.

---

 Once he figures out how to get through the Fence--and that's not hard, once he figures out how to rewire part of the grid it's really just a collection of metal and wood--life gets much, much easier.  After the hunt, none of the girls give him any problems.  They know that without him there, they would have lost their prey.  They know that their old man still has something to teach them.

And teach them he does, just like they teach him. 

After three weeks, Owen knows more about Velociraptors than anyone on the planet.  He knows how they like to sleep and how they hunt and play together, how quickly they can pick up in things and how different each of them is.  They have fully-developed personalities, his girls, and Owen delights in getting to know each one of them all over again. 

He's even picking up on the way they communicate. He can't make all of the sounds they can, not correctly, but he's getting better and better.  He doesn't even need to shout the names of drills or training exercises any more.  He just has to gesture and make the right noise, and they're off.  

The raptors learn from him, too.  Owen teaches them how to hide in the woods whenever they hear a helicopter or a truck rumbling past.  He teaches them how to wait for their food, how to stalk Gallimimus through the grass without anyone noticing, and how to mimic the sound of birds so that the raptors' signature shrieks won't be noticed by anybody wandering the jungle. 

They take down a few more Gallimimuses.  Owen thinks he might work them up to going after a Pachycephalosaurus next, just to give them some more experience, and to find an outlet for Echo's growing aggression.

Blue finishes her last growth spurt and backs up Owen's every decision.  Delta calms down and becomes a faithful and diligent scout, always darting ahead to sniff out danger or their next meal.  Charlie still wants petted and cuddled every ten minutes and every once and a while even Echo will come to get her chin scratched. 

Barry leaves another bundle of supplies every three or four days.  Owen writes him notes about the girls and their progress.  He always tells Barry that he's fine. 

Life is, surprisingly, very, very good.  Owen even gets used to chunks of barely-cooked dinosaur meat.   (He always makes too much and feeds Blue the scraps.  She eats out of his palm like she used to when she was a hatchling, and it makes that nebulous, wild part of himself swell with affection.)

At night, he sleeps with Charlie's head on his stomach.  He doesn't dream in words anymore, just impressions, sounds, colors, the taste of blood and meat. 

For the first time since he left the Navy, Owen sleeps through the night. 

---

Owen is starting to lose track of his days. His watch still works, but time actually doesn't mean much out in the jungle. 

He's almost out of gas, though, which means it's probably time for another delivery, so Owen waits for it to get dark, hisses at the girls to sneak, and sets off through the trees to the rendezvous point. 

Delta races ahead, clicking softly, and Echo and Charlie melt into the jungle, but Blue stays at Owen's side, always just within reach.  He smiles. 

All five of them know this part of the island well enough to get around in the dark, and even though Owen doesn't have the kind of night vision his girls do, it's been getting easier and easier for him to see in the dark. 

They glide through the jungle until they reach the narrow strip of open land between the trees and the Fence.  The ever-present crackling hum of electricity fills the air.  Owen doesn't get into Gyrosphere Valley from here specifically because he wants to make sure it's a safe spot for Barry and Owen to communicate. 

"Delta?"  Owen whispers.

Delta hoots softly twice.  She doesn't see or smell anything out of the ordinary.  She's bark to warn him if she did. 

Satisfied, Owen noses the bike out into the open and dismounts, leaving it in the shadow of the trees.  He pads forward silently.  Barry's hidden the supplies--three cans of gas, one crate of fruit so Owen doesn't die of scurvy, a jug of water, a notebook, and a new pen, because Delta keeps stealing them--under a woven net of leaves and branches.  He's left a note that Owen tucks into his pocket without reading. 

Blue noses Owen's shoulder, chittering. 

"No, no treats this time.  I told Barry you were getting kind of fat," Owen says, pushing her nose away.  Blue snorts and head butts his shoulder.  The others are sniffing at the Fence and Echo looks like she's determined to worm her way through.  Owen knows she won't fit and leaves it for her to discover that the Fence is electrified. 

Echo taps a bar with a claw and squawks, leaping back a good ten feet.  Owen laughs. 

"You won't be getting through there without me," he tells her.  Echo glares at him, like the fact that she got zapped is somehow Owen's fault, and Blue and Delta make the low-pitched hissing they make when they're trying to mimic Owen's laughter. 

Owen loads the supplies up onto the bike with help from Charlie, whose dexterity should probably freak Owen out more than it does, while Blue and Echo continue to sniff around the Fence and Delta keeps vigilant watch.

He's just about ready to go when Delta swings around to face the other side of the Fence intently, tail rising and claws opening in alarm. 

"Delta," Owen whispers. 

Delta barks the warning call and all three of her sisters stand straight up, shrieking and hissing at the Fence, looking around wildly for the source of danger. 

"Shit," Owen mutters, swinging himself onto the bike.  He doesn't see or hear anything, but he trusts Delta.  He whistles sharply, sneak sneak, and starts up the bike again.  His girls bound into the trees and vanish.  Owen settles into his seat, scans the jungle on the other side of the Fence one more time, and swings around into the trees himself. 

Blue is waiting for him, and they disappear. 

---

The next morning, Owen creeps back to the meeting point on foot.  He leaves the pack hiding in the trees. 

ACU isn't waiting for them with guns bristling, but there is a bright pink post-it note taped to one of the bars.

MR. GRADY, it reads.  WE SHOULD TALK.  I HAVE AN OFFER FOR YOU. 

And it's signed, CLAIRE DEARING. 

"Huh," Owen mutters, squinting down at it.  What does Claire Dearing want to offer him?  Nothing good, knowing her.  She's Masrani's people, not InGen's, but Owen's not sure that's a big enough difference to matter when his raptors' lives are on the line. 

He's going to have to find a new place for Barry to leave supplies, which means he's probably going to have to sneak back into the park proper and find Barry, which is its own little logistical hell, and--

Owen is so wrapped up in the details of what has to come next, and in wondering how Claire actually found the rendezvous point in the first place, that he doesn't see Echo coming at him low and from the side. 

She slams into him, all three hundred pounds of her lifting him up and off his feet.  Her teeth find his shoulder, talons reaching for his belly, and then all Owen feels is pain. 

Chapter Text

iv.

"What about a tour through Europe?  It's hot, but peak tourist season is over.  You could go to Florence and Rome without having to wade through a bunch of rude Americans."

Claire sighs and doesn't bother picking her head up where it's pillowed in her arms.  "I'm not going on vacation, Zara."

"Why?"

Claire waves a hand vaguely.  "The park."

"Claire, have you had a vacation since you started here?" 

"Have you?"  Claire shoots back. 

"Two years ago I went to Maui for a lovely week of tanning and mai tais," Zara says smartly.  "And two years before that I took a cruise up the American West Coast and met Josh.  You've been here seven years.  Do you even know how much vacation time you've built up?"

"I am not taking a vacation, Zara."

There's a moment of silence, then Zara says, disbelievingly, "Claire.  You have two months of vacation time.  You could literally leave now and not have to come back until Halloween."  Claire finally lifts her head off the kitchen table.  Zara's looking between her and her phone with an expression of mingled horror and grudging respect. 

"I'm not taking a vacation, Zara.  If I left, who'd be in charge?  Lowery?  We'd be closed by Halloween." 

"Fair," Zara allows, "but I'm serious, Claire.  You look terrible."

"I spent all night out in the jungle," Claire grumbles.  "Of course I look terrible."  After she accidentally scared Owen and the raptors away, Claire had waited for almost three hours for them to come back, breath caught in her throat. 

(She's decided that she is not, in fact, going to buy Simon that new helicopter model set he's been passive-aggressively adding to her Amazon wishlist for two months.  He called her four times.  The fourth time, she had finally hissed, "For fuck's sake, what?"  and one of the raptors had heard her, and all of them had disappeared.

Simon had only been a little apologetic.)

After three hours, Claire had given up, taped a note to one of the beams, and gone home, hoping that she hadn't ruined everything by accident. 

"Did you sleep at all?"

"No," Claire says, "but who needs sleep?  Sleep is for undergrads.  I just need some coffee."

Zara rolls her eyes.  "I'm going to make Mr. Masrani give you a vacation if you don't get some sleep tonight," she warns.  "You found Mr. Grady.  It's up to him to make the next move.  Nothing you can do can change that."

"I can burn down the whole jungle," Claire mutters, picking herself up out of her chair.  She has a meeting with the Board in two hours, a meeting with Simon after that, a meeting with Henry at two to discuss the Indominus project's progress--or lack thereof--and then, then, she can take the evening off and take a bath. 

"Coffee will be on your desk, and scattered throughout the park," Zara says, attention drifting back to her phone.  "I wouldn't wear white today, it'll wash you out if you haven't slept.  I would go with jewel tones, love.  Some red lipstick wouldn't go amiss either."

"Thank you, Zara," Claire says, half-smiling.  "I will see you at...?"

"Eleven.  You asked me to take notes during your meeting with Mr. Masrani." 

"Right, eleven.  Thank you."

"Don’t obsess about the raptor problem," Zara calls over her shoulder as she makes for the door, tapping away.  "There's nothing you can do!  As your human calendar, I can assure you that you've got bigger things to worry about." 

"Tell me about it," Claire mutters, dragging herself towards her bedroom.  Board meetings are the worst.  She doesn't know what it is about rich white men that makes them think they know better than people who actually have experience and run companies or, in this case, dinosaur amusement parks, but they always make a nuisance of themselves trying to change what doesn't need changing and fixing what isn't broken, usually in extraordinarily expensive ways. 

Like the Indominus project.  Park revenue's been steadily increasing since the Suchomimus was added to the Cretaceous Cruise two years ago.  There haven't been any sharp jumps up this season, granted, but that doesn't mean that the park is failing.  That doesn't mean that Henry had to cook up some genetic monstrosity that is currently causing so many headaches Claire is considering killing the thing while it’s sleeping.      

(It's not that Claire doesn't understand why the Board wanted Indominus, or why Simon and Henry are so excited about creating it, or even what the first hybrid dinosaur will do to park attendance and revenue.  She gets all that.  It's a smart move, business-wise. 

What Claire resents is the implication that she's not doing her job well enough, and now science has to intervene.)

Resigning herself to a long, annoying day, Claire takes Zara's advice and steps into a sleek, dark emerald dress that brushes the back of her calves.  She doesn't go with red lipstick--she doesn't really want to look like a Christmas tree in August--but she does accessorize, draping gold bracelets over her wrists and tiny emerald drops from her ears. 

Well, she thinks bracingly, I've certainly looked worse. 

She squares her shoulders, and gets ready for two hours of smiling politely while fantasizing about feeding Board members to various dinosaurs. 

---

The Board meeting is just as useless as she thought it would be, but she does find a possible solution to the raptor problem.

They could have Bigoted Old Man Hunts.  Drop whatever asshole gave Claire a problem that week into a pen, turn the raptors loose, reap the reward.  Hell, Claire could even farm it out to corporations around the world.  She could charge people a few thousand bucks.  "Feed your asshole boss to some Velociraptors, never get called 'honey' or 'sweetie' in a professional setting ever again."

They'd make a killing.

---

The meeting with Simon goes much, much better.  She updates him on the Indominus--it's about the size of an adolescent T-rex, and it's raising hell among Claire's employees, but it appears to be healthy and fucking terrifying, so that at least is a tentative success. 

Simon's also ecstatic about "the Grady Sighting," as he calls it, and wants to know everything.

"How did he seem?"  he asks.  "How were the animals?  Were they obeying him?  Did he seem afraid or stressed?"

"It was dark," Claire warns.  "But no, he didn't seem afraid of them.  Grady seemed fine.  The raptors weren't threatening him or even acting aggressive towards each other."  Claire still can't believe what she saw.  One of the raptors had stayed right behind Owen the entire time, occasionally bumping him with its nose.  It was taller than he was.  It could have killed him with one bite to the back of his neck, but it had just nosed him and sniffed all of the supplies left by Barry du Vallon.  Another had helped Owen load supplies onto his motorcycle, picking up some of the bags with alarmingly dexterous hands. 

"Did they obey him?"

"When you called me," Claire says, and gives Simon a pointed look, "one of the animals heard and started barking.  Grady was able to convince the raptors to leave.  They followed him back into the jungle." 

"He convinced them to leave a threat?"  Simon marvels.  "You didn't manage to actually talk to Mr. Grady, did you?" 

Claire shakes her head.  "I left him a note," she says.  "Assuming that he comes back and checks out what spooked the raptors, he should find it.  It's pink." 

Simon nods.  "Good," he says.  "I want you to offer him an exhibit, Claire.  He's proved that Velociraptors can be tamed and taught.  They--and he--will be much safer back in containment.  If we incorporate them into the park, InGen can't claim them for military purposes." 

"If I can find him again, I'll offer him whatever he wants," Claire says.  She wants this to be over. She'll offer Grady half the island if he comes back into civilization and stops living like a caveman. 

Unlikely, she knows, but still. 

Simon grins, stars in his eyes.  "I'll see what I can do about securing investors," he says happily.  "Also, has anyone called Dr. Grant?  I want to be the one to say, I told you so.  He threatened to sue us, you know."

Claire sighs and leaves Simon to it.  Zara winces sympathetically.  This meeting wrapped up earlier than expected and Claire's so tired she feels like her head is stuffed full of cotton, so she takes a lunch break--an act so unprecedented Lowery loudly asks the Control staff at large if they've noticed the sky falling--and drives home. 

She kicks off her heels as soon as she's inside the door, sighing in relief.  She forgot to eat this morning, so she grabs a banana and searches for her tablet.  It's a gorgeous day outside.  She can sit on her balcony and watch the Triceratops and read this month's customer satisfaction surveys, and by the time she has to go meet Henry, she'll be calm and relaxed and put back together. 

"Claire," someone says behind her, and she spins around, banana and tablet both falling, "don't freak out."

Owen grins weakly from where he's slumped against her couch, raising one hand a little.  "Hey," he says.  "I'd really appreciate it if you didn't call Park Security on me." 

"What the fuck," Claire finally manages to hiss, which is when she notices that Grady's bleeding all over her couch, and she makes the decision to call somebody more qualified to deal with this now and deal with the consequences later. 

"No no no."  Owen scrambles off her couch, reaching for her phone.  "Don’t call anybody, it's fine.  I can just--go.  I'll go." The left side of his shirt is wet and dark and he's holding his left shoulder tightly.  Standing, Claire can see just how bad he looks.

"You're bleeding," she says.  "You need help.  Let me call someone."  But she takes her finger off the call button.

"I left the raptors," Owen says bluntly, voice tight with pain.  "If I don't go back to them, they're gonna come find me, and trust me, you do not want that.  I just needed some help."

Claire can appreciate a veiled threat.   "I'm not a doctor," she warns.  

"I don't need a doctor.  I just need another pair of hands."  Owen smiles at her again, hopefully.  Underneath his tan and matted beard, he's gray and drawn.  He looks like he's about to pass out.  The last thing she needs, Claire tells herself as she puts her phone down and moves forward, is Grady dying in her living room.  Simon would be crushed. 

"Sit down.  In the kitchen, please," she adds.  "You've already bled all over my couch."

"Sorry," Owen mutters. 

"You're not," Claire says, and sits him down.  "What happened?" 

"Echo," Owen grunts, and peels off his shirt clumsily, grimacing.  Claire sucks in a sharp breath.  His chest and stomach are scratched to hell, cuts raw and glistening.  A few of them have already scabbed over on their own, but others are being held together with dark, uneven stitches and a shiny, flaky substance Claire suspects might be glue.  His chest and ribs are dotted with bandages. 

"One of your raptors attacked you?"  Claire asks, a sinking feeling in her stomach. 

"Echo challenged me for dominance," Owen says, working his shirt gingerly over his left arm.  "She wanted to be the pack's alpha."

"Shit."  If Grady's lost control of the raptors, Simon's idea isn't going to work and they're going to have to cut the raptor program entirely.  She supposes they're just lucky that Owen's so fucking durable and survived losing his position as alpha.  He can explain to the investors and to the Board how everything went sour himself. 

"Yeah," Grady agrees, finally getting his shirt off and tossing it to the floor.  "Kids these days," he jokes weakly.  "No respect for their elders." 

"You're lucky you're not dead," Claire says bluntly, glancing over all of his cuts and clawmarks again.  "It looks like your raptor tried to eviscerate you."

"She wouldn't have killed me.  Intentionally, anyway.  She just wanted me to submit to her. I don't think they realize that I'm not just a weird-looking raptor." 

"It wouldn't have killed you?"  Claire's eyebrows rise into her hairline.  "Mr. Grady, there are teeth embedded in your shoulder!  If you hadn't submitted--"

"Oh, I didn't submit," Owen says, prodding one of the teeth.  Claire can see five or six of them buried in his skin, the rest of a bite mark filled in with scabs and stitches.  Some of the wounds are still bleeding. 

"You said that it challenged you for dominance," Claire says, confused.  She's sure that Grady is perfectly competent--Navy SEALS tend to be at least that--but she's also sure that a Velociraptor is one of the most efficient predators ever spat out by evolution,and Owen is not.

"Yeah," says Owen, and underneath the pain and exhaustion his voice is colored with pride.  "I didn't say she won. Can you help me with these?  I can't get all of the ones on my shoulder by myself, and the girls aren't much help." 

Temporarily struck speechless, Claire roots around her kitchen for some tweezers and goes back to Owen's side, gingerly grabbing the first raptor fang buried in his shoulder and pulling it out.  It's buried deep and blood follows it to the surface, beading up and bubbling over Claire's fingers. 

She's not a squeamish person, but there's a reason she went into business school instead of medical.  She pulls out a few more teeth and finally says, "How did you win a fight with a Velociraptor? Aren't they pack hunters?" 

"They are," says Owen tightly, shoulder twitching under Claire's hands.  "But it wasn't a hunt, it was a challenge.  Echo was the one who challenged me, so none of the others got involved."

"So how'd you win?"

Grady is quiet for a minute, only making little hisses and grumbles whenever Claire brushes a wound or pulls another tooth free.  She has six, now, all in a bloody little pile on her kitchen counter.  She's going to have to Lysol everything.  "I stabbed her," he says.  With his good hand, he touches his cheek.  "Here first, to get her to let me go.  We rolled around in the dirt for a minute.  That's how her teeth broke off.  Then I stabbed her here."  He touches the junction of his shoulder and neck.  "Then I sat on her until she gave up." 

"You stabbed a Velociraptor," Claire says, disbelieving, "and you're still alive?" 

Grady shrugs with his other shoulder.  "More or less," he says, and grins at her.  Claire isn't the best at reading people, but she can usually pick up on people's frustration and anger.  Grady's charm isn't fooling her.  He's upset. 

Claire pulls out the last tooth and grabs a paper towel, pressing it to the small wounds.  "Why'd you come to me?"  she asks.  "Why not your friend Barry?" 

Grady raises an eyebrow.  "You found Barry out, huh?  I don't know where he's been reassigned.  I figured it probably wasn't a good idea to stagger around the park looking for him until either Security picked me up or I passed out from blood loss." 

"So why me?"  Claire's curious.  She and Grady haven't really talked to each other since their disastrous date by an unspoken mutual agreement.  They don't move in each other's circles and can communicate just fine through proxies.  It's a good agreement.  It saves both them and the people around them from shouting matches. 

He looks at her sideways and pulls her post-it note out of her pocket.  "You said you wanted to talk," he says.  "And honestly, you were closest.  You said you had an offer for me?"

"Now is probably not the best time," Claire says, gesturing at the pile of teeth on her counter.  "Do you need stitches for these?  Because that's something I won't be doing." 

Owen cranes his neck, probing the wounds on the back of his shoulder blade.  "Nah, I'll be fine.  They'll stop bleeding in a minute, probably.  Got any Tylenol?" 

"I have Midol," Claire says, deadpan, and Grady grins despite himself.  "You can have some if you don't think it'll hurt your masculinity."

"I think I'll risk it." 

Claire obligingly pulls a few pills out of her bag and hands them over.  "You look like you've been living under a bridge," she tells him, watching his throat work.  In the back of her mind, she's aware that even bloody, torn-up, and with a month-old beard, Owen is still alarmingly handsome.  The smell of copper and barely-washed human is off-putting, but there's a little Zara-sounding voice in her head that's quick to remind her that she does have a shower. 

"You should clean up," she says, after he's taken the pills and downed a glass of water.  "If you're going back out there--which I don't think you should--you should at least try to make sure you're not going to die of gangrene.  Shower's upstairs, to the right."

"You're not gonna call Park Security on me?"  Claire has had Grady look at her with lust.  With admiration.  With exasperation, frustration, and with anger.  But she's never had him look at her like she's a threat before.  It's an odd experience, and it makes something thrill in her chest. 

"You can take my phone if you don't trust me," she says.  She means it as a challenge. 

Owen does grab her phone off the table, his shirt off the floor, and heads upstairs, moving stiffly.  Claire takes the opportunity to put the raptor's teeth in a bag and scrub her counter before anything can start to fester or grow.  The couch she's going to have to burn. 

While she waits, she strategizes.  If the raptors are this violent when they're not trying to kill someone, they're not safe to be anywhere near the public.  She doesn't want to put them on display and then have a fucking family of four come crying to her because another raptor challenged Grady for dominance and killed him in front of everyone.  And she doesn't care, particularly, that Owen says he's fine.  If any of those cuts had been deeper, Claire would have called Park Security and dragged him off to the hospital. 

She's also pretty sure that she knows Grady well enough to know that he's not likely to want to put innocent people at risk.  If they do put the raptors on display, she knows he'll insist on expensive security measures and protocols that will keep the guests as far away from his animals as possible.

There's also a chance that he will not agree to having a Velociraptor enclosure open to the public.  Frankly, Claire doesn't really want an exhibit either, but if Simon wants one she'll try to make it happen. 

There has to be another solution, though.  If Grady won't agree to an enclosure, and Simon won't let ACU put the animals down, there has to be a middle ground somewhere.  Claire just has to find it. 

"Someone's taking a really long shower," Claire mutters to herself, checking the clock.  It's possible that Grady might have passed out or something in the shower, so in the interest of keeping her home police investigator-free, Claire heads upstairs.  She can hear the shower running, but not anybody moving inside her bathroom. 

"Hello?"  She knocks on the door lightly.  "Mr. Grady?  Are you alright?" 

No response.  The door's unlocked.  Gingerly, Claire pushes it open, concern growing. 

Grady is gone.  The shower is running, her phone is on the sink, and there's a post-it note pinned to the mirror.  The window is wide open.  

"Motherfucker," she says out loud, and pulls the post-it note off the mirror.  She's more annoyed than angry, and mostly just impressed that Owen managed to fit himself through her window.  The note says, we should talk.  meet me by the fence tomorrow.  if you bring security, delta will eat them.

Claire sighs heavily and picks up her phone.  "Hi, Zara, it's me.  Can you go ahead and cancel everything else today?  I'm going to take a bath."

---

True to his word, Owen Grady is waiting for her on the other side of the Fence the next morning, exactly one month after his initial disappearance.  He's leaning against his bike, seemingly at ease, but Claire can tell that he's still in pain. 

"I brought you something," she says, and tosses a bag through the gaps between the Fence's wires.  

"Aw," he says, like a reflex, "you shouldn't have."  He pulls out a bottle of ibuprofen, a new t-shirt, and a razor and raises an eyebrow.

"I was serious about how that beard makes you look," Claire tells him.  "Where are your pets, Mr. Grady?" 

"They're not pets," says Owen.  "Echo and Charlie are in the den.  Blue and Delta are around."

"Keeping an eye out for security?"

"Something like that."  Grady smiles at her, all teeth. 

"I called off ACU this morning," she says, folding her hands neatly in front of her.  "As a gesture of good faith."

"What makes you think I need a gesture of good faith?"

"You've been living in the jungle with a pack of wild animals for a month," Claire says.  "And instead of voicing your concerns about Hoskins and the raptors' future treatment to me or Mr. Masrani, you took matters into your own hands.  You clearly don't trust us."

"If it makes you feel any better, I don't trust anyone who makes six figures a year."  Grady shrugs, leaning farther back into his bike. 

Claire actually makes seven figures a year, but she decides now is probably not the time to correct Owen's assumption. 

"If we're going to find a solution to this problem, Mr. Grady, we're going to have to be able to trust each other."  Claire absolutely will not make any kind of deal with someone she can't trust, especially if that deal involves bringing murder machines anywhere near her guests.  It's bad business.  "I'm calling off ACU so that you aren't being hunted anymore and you can focus on not getting killed by your animals."

"What do you want from me?"  Grady's face has gone expressionless, but his eyes are cold and calculating.  Predatory. 

Claire matches his gaze.  "Ultimately? Both you and your Velociraptors back in the park, safe and contained."

"I'm not gonna give them back to InGen.  There's no military application for them. They won't listen to anyone else, and I've got a medical discharge.  It's not gonna happen."

"Mr. Masrani has stopped all of InGen's military-oriented research," Claire says.  She smiles.  "And I fired Vic Hoskins.  InGen isn't going to take the animals, Mr. Grady."

"Owen," says Owen.  "You fired Hoskins?"

From the trees, there's a soft, drawn-out hiss.

"Delta, tsst.  She's not a fan of Vic," Owen explains.  "How'd he take that?"

"Poorly," Claire says with a shrug, "but in the end there was very little he could do about it.  Mr. Masrani and Dr. Wu both backed up my decision and Mr. Hoskins was escorted from the park."

Grady laughs.  "Good," he says.  "I'm still not bringing my animals back into the park."

"Why?  Mr. Masrani will put them on exhibit.  InGen won't be able to touch them."

"InGen's got more sway than you think," Owen warns.  He crosses his arms over his chest.  Claire can see a set of clean white bandages poking out from under hit shirt.  "I'm not gonna risk it."

"Mr. Grady--"

"Owen.  Can't trust you if you talk to me like I'm my dad."

"Owen.  Can you survive if one of your animals challenges you again?  What if they realize you're not a 'weird-looking raptor' and decide to eat you?"

"If they haven't yet, they're not going to."

"Wasn't it you who would tell everyone not to turn their backs on the cage?"  Claire had called Sam Dierden yesterday and explained everything.  She also told Sam what she was planning to do, and asked for help in proceeding.  (The chance of Claire getting annoyed with Owen and saying something that drives him away for good if left to her own devices is unfortunately rather high.)

Owen stills.  From the trees, a soft, low growling starts up.  This time, he doesn't quiet it.  "I'm not turning my back on the cage," he says.

"Really?" Claire puts her hands on her hips.  "Because it certainly looks like it from here, Mr. Grady."

"Owen."

"Owen. Let's look at it from my perspective.  First you release four Velociraptors from containment with no real evidence that they won't turn on you and start killing everyone who crosses their paths. Then you take those Velociraptors off into the jungle, without telling anyone but your one friend, living and sleeping with them without any kind of back-up or support. 

"Then you put other people at risk--including yourself--by taking the animals into Gyrosphere Valley and intentionally triggering their predatory instincts, trusting that your control over them is strong enough that they won't eat you in their frenzy.  Then, finally, you fail to pay enough attention to one of them and are mauled to the point where you have to leave the raptors and seek medical help from a third party." 

Grady's face remains still and impassive throughout her little tirade.

"And now, you're on the brink of refusing Mr. Masrani's offer, which means Masrani Corp will have to take drastic action to secure the safety of the park and the people in it.  Including you, Owen."  She softens her voice.  "Because the alternative to bringing the raptors in is putting them down.  They're not safe.  Sooner or later, they're going to kill you."

"I know they're not safe," Grady finally says.  "I'm not a moron, Claire."

"I have a literal theme park full of people who would disagree with you," she says. 

"I know what I'm doing."

"You are one hundred percent confident in your ability to control the raptors?"

"I don't control them," Owen says, dragging a hand through his hair.  Claire absently makes a mental note to bring him a pair of scissors.  He's starting to look like her nephew Gray.  "It's a relationship.  It's based on respect.  I respect them and what they can do.  I know they're dangerous.  I know they could kill me.  I'm careful."

"And they respect you?  Enough to deny sixty-five million years of instinct and not eat you?"  The fact that Owen admits that he can't control the Velociraptors is troubling. She files it away to discuss with Henry and Simon. 

"Yes," Owen says.  He stands up straight and looks Claire in the eye.  "I'm gonna let InGen near them."

"You don't have to.  If we put them on exhibit--"

"That's not a good idea either.  You do know what happened to Robert Muldoon, right? The excitement'd be too much for them."

"Your Velociraptors are very different from the ones that killed Robert Muldoon.  And if you're worried about big crowds, we could make the raptor exhibit an exclusive event, only twenty or thirty people in at a time, or camoflague and soundproof a viewing station, like we have in T-Rex Kingdom."

"I'm telling you, it's not going to work."

Claire sighs.  Owen is at the end of his patience and Claire's nearing the end of hers.  "Mr. Masrani is willing to give you time to think it over, of course.  A decision doesn't have to be made today."

Grady laughs again, a hard edge to it.  "He's bein' awful generous, isn't he?  What's the catch?"

"Has anyone told you that you're unreasonably paranoid?"

Owen shrugs noncommittally. 

"Mr. Masrani is willing to give you up to a month to make a decision.  It isn't peak season, so we don't have as many guests to worry about."

"A month?"  He sounds impressed despite himself.  "Holy shit."

"It wasn't my recommendation, but Simon feels that if you have managed to control the raptors for one month, you'll be able to do it for another."

"And ACU's just gonna, what, leave us alone?"

"As long as your raptors don't hurt anyone, yes.  You'll be left alone."  Also not Claire's recommendation, but costs are mounting and in a month they're either going to have to build a new exhibit or mobilize a kill squad.  She decides to sweeten the deal.  "I've also authorized your use of Gyrosphere Valley.  You and your animals are allowed to hunt there as long as it's done after park hours and you stay away from the trikes.  They're expensive and we haven't introduced any breeding males yet, not like we have with the Gallimimus herds."

"What about pachys?"

Claire fucking hates the paperwork generated by the pachys, so she says, "Not every day--not even every week--but yes, in moderation. If it helps you maintain control of the pack."

"I don't control them," Owen repeats.  "But yeah, it does help.  Gives them something to do and think about other than ways to get into trouble."

She pauses.  "They get bored?  They're that intelligent?"

Grady huffs and rolls his eyes.  "You do realize that they're animals, not machines, right?  Of course they get bored."

Claire bristles.  Time to end the conversation before she turns ACU loose again in annoyance.  "Think it over," she says, as Grady gets the hint and throws a leg over his motorcycle.  "You have two options, Owen.  Either the raptors come back into the park and go on exhibit, or Masrani Corp has to put them down."

Owen starts his bike and the grumble of the engine drowns out his response, but from the set of his shoulders and the gleam in his eyes, Claire's pretty sure he's saying, Just try it. 

---

Grady's month crawls past.  Claire doesn't see him again. She knows that Barry keeps bringing him supplies, and every once and a while Claire herself goes out past Gyrosphere Valley and leaves something--vitamins, a hideous, tacky Hawaiian shirt, a first aid kit because she's tired of listening to her medical staff compain about vanishing suppliess--but Owen doesn't make an appearance.

He also doesn't show up in her apartment bleeding again, which is a good sign.  The raptors make biweekly appearances in the Valley, always at night, always leaving behind a carcass.  True to their agreement, they kill a Pachycephalosaurus every once and a while but usually stick to Gallimimus. 

The Valley trainers are beside themselves, but Sam manages to keep them from revolting and Claire makes sure the rest of their animals are well-taken care of. 

"We're learning so much about their ecology just from the remains of their kills," Simon says enthusiastically.  "Mr. Grady's given us an incredible opportunity."

"Really?  Because to me it just seems like an incredible migraine," Claire mutters.  Simon smiles sympathetically and offers her more tea. 

But nobody dies.  The raptors seem content to follow Owen around the wild jungle.  Everything reaches a strange sort of equilibrium, and most people forget that the raptors are out of containment at all. 

Claire can't.  She can't stop thinking about them, and about Owen, living in a fucking cave somewhere, hunting when they want, sleeping when they want, stalking through the trees and playfighting. 

It sounds like a step up from having to fight with the Board every other day or fielding angry demands from entitled guests or listening to Lowery hit on a very uninterested Vivian three times a week.  If only the jungle had a Jacuzzi.  Claire would leave and never look back. 

Finally, near the end of September, Claire heads out to the meeting place and finds, to her surprise and immediate panic, a Velociraptor waiting for her. 

Her initial instinct is to turn on her heels and run.  She's wearing five-inch Louis Vuittons, but she ran track in high school, she'd be fine.  She could make it to her car in ten seconds.  But then she hears the familiar crackle and hum of the Fence and realizes that the raptor's on the other side, and forces herself to stay put. 

The raptor snarls, claws extended.  It's taller than Owen and longer than his bike, tail lashing from side to side.  It has claws like small knives and sharp, prominent white teeth.  Claire's seen what those claws and teeth can do.  She's struck again by how fucking stupid creating these things even was in the first place, but she swallows her fear and stands up straight. 

Velociraptors respect authority, right?  She asks herself, locking eyes with this one.  Its scales are a bright, lurid, almost gemlike green.  If she was in the jungle, Claire wouldn't be able to see it.  It would blend right in.  Its yellow eyes have slitted pupils and a kind of calculating look that Claire can only describe as intelligent.  This close to one, she's suddenly aware of that. 

She swallows.  The raptor hisses. 

"I have a dress that matches your scales," Claire tells it, because she doesn't know what else to do.  She knows vaguely that raptors are jumping predators, but there's no way it can jump forty feet up over the Fence.  She's safe.  She's fine.  She's in control of the situation, of her terror. 

The animal growls again, crouching. 

"Tssst," Claire hisses, remembering Grady, and the raptor pauses, confused.  Emboldened, Claire says, "I said, tssst!  Knock it off, you overgrown lizard.  I'm not scared of you."

The raptor stays in its crouch for a moment, watching Claire, then it stands up, shakes it head, and turns, trilling at something in the woods. 

"You've got stones," Owen calls, and pads out from the trees. He's grinning, and there's another Velociraptor at his side.  This one is gray in color with a bolt of blue running from its eyes down to the tips of its tail.  "That's Delta.  This is Blue."

His voice is hoarse and rough from disuse. 

The green raptor, Delta, swings its attention back to Claire and makes a quick clicking noise.  Owen clicks back and saunters over to the Fence. 

He walks like one of them, Claire thinks.  There's a predatory grace in Grady's steps that mirrors that of Blue, who Claire remembers is the oldest, is the beta.  Owen's shaved recently, and cut his hair, but he still looks barely human.

"How long's it been since you've talked to another human being?"  she asks.

Grady shrugs, and the movement looks unnatural.  "A while," he admits.  "It's been a month, right?"

"More or less." 

He nods, and pats Blue's flank.  The raptor chitters and lowers its head, eyeing Claire warily.  Claire gestures to it.  Her heart, for some reason, is still racing.  "This is your beta, right?"

Blue stands up straighter and looks between Claire and Owen.  She recognizes that word, Claire realizes. 

"Yeah."  Grady rubs a knuckle along the underside of Blue's jaw.  Delta hisses at Claire again.  "Delta here's our scout.  I told her to wait for you." 

So this was a test.  "What would you have done if I had run?"

Owen grins, like he's delighted that Claire asked the right question, and says, "Not agreed to your terms."

"Wait," Claire says, "you're going to agree?"

Grady inclines his head.  "We've thought it over," he says, one hand on Blue, one hand on Delta.  "And we decided it was for the best, didn't we, girls?"

Both animals make chittering, cooing sounds in their throats.  Claire can't believe it. 

"You're agreeing to put the raptors on exhibit," she says. 

"Yes."

Claire looks him up and down.  He doesn't look bad.  A little thinner, maybe, and tired, but he doesn't seem to be hurt or bleeding. 

"What happened?"  she asks.  "A month ago, you told me you wouldn't let your raptors anywhere near Masrani Corp."

Grady hesitates.  "Would you buy that I miss watching football?"

"No."

Delta steps away from Owen and gets closer towards the fence.  Its--her--sickle toe taps against the ground.  Claire meets her eyes.  The raptor inches even closer, until only a few thin inches and a wire separate Claire from her teeth.  She can feel Delta's breath. 

The raptor huffs, and chitters. 

"She likes her nose scratched," Owen says, very quietly.  He's watching Delta and Claire can see the tension in his shoulders.  "She shouldn't bite you, not if you go slow."

"That's a positive endorsement," Claire hisses back, heart hammering in her throat.  There is literally no reason to do this.  No pro to outweigh a con, no move to be made to gain an advantage.  The only thing she would win is Owen's regard, and the right to say that she's one of a handful of people who has touched a living Velociraptor. 

Before she can rationalize her way out of it, Claire presses her hand against Delta's nose. 

Delta huffs and stamps one foot, tail swinging. 

Cautiously, aware of how fast Claire could lose her hand, she starts to scratch at the raptor's nose.  Her scales are smoother than Claire thought, cooler to the touch, and Delta groans in pleasure.

"She likes you," Owen says.  He pauses.  "Charlie keeps getting sick," he finally allows.  "I'm worried that it'll get serious, and she'll die.  In an exhibit, she would get better veterinary care than what I can give her.  Barry's been sneaking us medicine when he can, but I don't want him to get caught stealing pills from the vet clinics.  And I really miss real beds."

Claire doesn't look away from the raptor.  I'm petting a Velociraptor, she marvels.  Lowery's going to shit himself.  "I'll tell Simon and we can start construction right away," she says.  "To your specifications, of course."

Owen nods.  "I'm staying out here with them until it’s completed," he warns.  "They won't go back into the paddock, not after they've had all this space the last few months." 

Claire literally doesn't care about anything else right now.  She's petting a Velociraptor and it's purring like a large, scaly cat.  She doesn't even particularly like dinosaurs and this is the most incredible thing she's done in a long time.  "Of course.  Would you meet me tomorrow to start drafting plans?"

"Two days from now," Owen counters.  Blue barks in agreement. 

"Two days from now," Claire says, and pulls her hand away.  Delta regards her for a moment, then turns and trots back to Owen's side.  She could have bitten Claire, and she didn't. 

Claire is amazed. 

Owen says, "You've got a deal."

---

"He agreed," Claire tells Simon, phone pressed up against her ear as she strides through the Control Center, heels clicking.  She can't stop flexing her hand, the sense memory of Delta's cool scales itching in her palm. 

"That is good news!" Simon crows.  She can see him grin in her mind's eye, turning away from whoever he had been talking to to let Claire hear the full force of his delight.  "He will bring the raptors back in?"

"As soon as we build him an enclosure," she says.  "A very large enclosure, from what it sounds like."

"That is wonderful!  Spare no expense.  I will fly in on Sunday to discuss it with you, no?"

"Sunday's fine," Claire says.  She waves to Henry as she passes the labs.  "I'll let you know if anything comes up?"

"Please.  Sound more excited, my friend!  This is good news!"

"It is," Claire allows, stepping into Control.  She lets herself smile, savoring a victory after two minutes of nearly unmitigated stress.  Maybe she will take a vacation this year. 

"Goodbye, Claire," Simon says.

"Goodbye, Simon."  And he's gone. 

"Claire," Viv says, all in a rush, and Claire looks up.  "I tried to call you, but I think you were on the phone, Vic Hoskins is--"

"Back, baby," says Vic Hoskins, turning away from the screen to meet Claire's eyes.  "I hear you've got some good news about my raptors."  And he smiles.   

Chapter Text

v.

This is not the worst situation Barry's been in, not by a long shot.  When he was seventeen, he was thrown into a Dominican jail and held there for five months.  When he was twenty-eight, observing lions in Tanzania, his guide got sick and died, leaving Barry alone in the savannah, hunted by painted dogs. 

This, in comparison, is not so bad.  Stressful, certainly, and destined for tragedy in a way that none of his other misadventures were, but not the calamity Barry worried it would be when he first found Owen's note on his desk.

Shading his eyes against the afternoon sun, Barry squints at the familiar uniform rise of the Fence, buzzing and crackling audible even from a hundred yards away. 

I wonder how much money they've wasted on this damn thing, Barry thinks.  It's not like it stops Owen and the girls from coming through anyway. 

Sure enough, as Barry draws closer, the buzzing hum cuts out and the Fence goes quiet.  Owen will switch it on before he heads back to wherever he's staying--Barry's money is on the coastal caves--and Masrani Corp will be none the wiser. 

"Hello, my lovely ladies," Barry calls.  "How are we doing today, hm?"

Echo is the first one to respond, calling out to her favorite human and darting forward, her hide flashing in the sun.  She dances for him impatiently, calling lowly to urge him faster. 

"And how is my favorite girl?"  Barry stops just short of the Fence out of habit.  Echo coos and stamps her feet impatiently, tail flicking.  Carefully, still not used to being able to touch her without bars and harnesses protecting him, Barry holds his hand out.  Echo gleefully presses her muzzle against his hand, chittering low in her throat.  "How are you healing, Elvis?"

Echo's newest scar makes her permanent sneer even more prominent. It's thick under Barry's fingertips, a knot of tissue that makes her jaw even more crooked and gives her trouble making certain calls.  Her missing and broken teeth are starting to grow back in, though.   Barry scratches her throat. 

"She's still holdin' her left forearm funny," Owen says, sliding out of the trees, Blue at his side.  Delta, spying Barry, hoots and trots over to investigate, followed by a slightly-unsteady Charlie.  Always jealous of Barry's attention, Echo snaps at them to chase them off.  Delta loses interest.  Charlie cries plaintively and looks to her alpha. 

"Don't look at him like that, cherie," Barry scolds.  "I know you get plenty of attention.  Owen has always spoiled you." 

Charlie huffs. 

"She looks better," Barry remarks, looking at Owen.  His friend has shaved recently and cut his messy hair, but it hasn't done anything to make him look less feral.  Owen holds himself like Blue, all coiled strength and barely-retracted claws.  For necessary reasons, of course--if they sense weakness, the girls will turn on him in a heartbeat, Barry's sure of it.

"Whatever she's got comes and goes.  Today's a good day."

"Are you going to take them for a hunt later?" 

Owen nods, a half-smile ticking one corner of his mouth up.  At the word hunt, all four raptors perk up, focused on Barry intently.  Owen hisses, a sharp sound that drags their attention back to him. 

"I'm thinking about goin' after an edmonty tonight," Owen says.

Barry stares at him.  "You eat some bad meat or something?  An Edmontosaurus is way outside their weight class.  Even with you with them." 

Owen shrugs, the motion predatory.  "The challenge'll be good for 'em," he says.  "Right, girls?"

All four raptors bark in unison.  It's unnerving.  Still not the most stressful thing you've seen, du Vallon, Barry tells himself.  "Claire will kill you."

"She might not," Owen says, slyly. 

It's only been within the last few weeks that Barry has meet with Owen face to face.  In the beginning stages of this godawful science experiment, they had only communicated through hastily-written notes.  Barry hadn't wanted the girls too close to the Fence, in case they got through, and Owen hadn't wanted ACU to spot them.  But since Director Dearing found Owen and apparently established contact, he's been a lot more relaxed.  As far as Barry knows, the girls go with him everywhere now. 

"Maybe not," Barry agrees.  "You're really going to risk an Edmontosaurus hunt with Charlie sick, though?  Even I can see that she's not doing well, Owen.  She can barely stand."

Echo hisses at the mention of Charlie's name, shoving her nose into Barry's hand more forcefully.  Barry rubs her jaw.  Echo has always been his favorite, just like Blue and Charlie have been Owen's.  She reminds Barry of a cat he once had, a surly, flea-bitten thing that snapped at other cats and fought stray dogs for no reason other than to strut proudly around his apartment afterwards, blood on her whiskers.

When he learned that she had challenged Owen for dominance, Barry's heart broke.  His girl was going to be the omega now, always pushed around by her sisters.  Owen loved all of the girls, but Echo had bitten him once as a yearling and nearly killed him.  Dr. Wu had spliced parts of Echo's genetic code with Mexican beaded lizard DNA. None of them had known that she was venomous until Owen began to have trouble breathing.  Echo's venom sacs had been removed after that, but Owen's always carried a kind of subconscious dislike of her ever since. 

A PTSD response, Barry privately thinks.  All of that ingrained, gene-deep fear of dangerous things that Barry and Owen had to put aside for their jobs was pinned on Echo.  Not that Owen will ever admit it, or that Barry will ever try and force him to. 

Echo, to be fair, is an asshole, even by Velociraptor standards.  Always a troublemaker, always a bully, always stirring up problems with her handlers and her sisters, but still.  Even an assholish genetically-modified murder bird deserves to be someone's favorite. 

Barry pats her neck. 

"If I leave her behind, she'll try and follow me.  She's strong enough today.  The rest of us will do all of the heavy lifting," Owen says dismissively. 

Delta bumps Echo as she passes, trotting down the Fence, sniffing at it curiously.  Owen lets her.  He's taken to calling Delta his scout. The term makes Barry uneasy in a way he hasn't been in a long time.

"Why do you need to do any heavy lifting at all?  Stick to pachys and Gallimimus.  They're whipping up more for you to hunt, you know.  It's safe.  Why throw more danger into the mix?  You've already been mauled once."

Barry knows better than to touch Echo's bad forelimb.  Most of the raptors despise showing weakness and guard their injuries jealously.  He can see the scar tissue, though, thick and pale, only about three inches long but no doubt deep.

Owen sees what he's looking at and sighs.  "Boredom is bad," he says.  "They're so much smarter than we thought they were, Barry.  If they don't have something to do, they invent ways to get themselves into trouble.  We can take down a Gallimimus.  We can take down a pachy.  It's time to step up again, or otherwise I'm gonna have another rebellion on my hands."

"From Echo?"  Barry keeps scritching her neck.

"Blue'll kill her," Owen says flatly.  "From Delta, if it comes.  She's gonna outgrow Blue soon.  I'm guessing she'll top out at three eighty, four hundred pounds."

"Fucking Wu," Barry mutters.  "I always thought she looked too much like a Utahraptor for it to be a coincidence." 

Owen hums.  "It'll take us a few tries to take down an Edmontosaurus.  Charlie's not one hundred percent and Echo's not either.  Hell, I'm not.  None of us are healing as quickly as we should."

"Sounds like it's time for you to come back inside," Barry says.  Owen's probably tired of hearing that, but Barry's tired of having to say it.  It's not good for them to be out here.  Velociraptors are not tame animals--no matter how sweetly Echo coos when Barry's petting her, she'll gut a man in moments--but they're not wild either, not really. 

These animals were made in a lab.  Owen thinks it doesn't matter, but Barry's been in the field more than Owen has.  He's got more hands-on experience.  And it does make a difference.  The raptors aren't just captive-born, they're captive-engineered, hatched sixty-five million years after even their most distant relatives died out.  Genetically, they're not even the same species as each other.  They're all hybrids. 

Blue is part Black-throated monitor lizard.  She's diurnal, crepuscular on her better days, and hates hunting at night.  Her night vision is poorer than her sisters and while she's still warm-blooded, she's more sensitive to temperature changes than her adopted siblings. 

Delta's DNA is patched with great green macaw and a pinch of fish eagle.  She's the most bird-like out of all of them, and if there's Utahraptor in her code like they think there is, she'll be the largest and most aggressive, too. 

Charlie's code is spliced with green iguana.  Barry thinks that's why she's been getting sick and the others haven't.  There must be a disease that green iguanas are susceptible too, which is why she caught it.  (That or her code is breaking down.   It happened with Blue's nest-mates.  It happens with some of the other dinosaurs all the time.) 

And Echo, Barry's Elvis, with her crooked jaw and foul temper, has the DNA of a venomous lizard. 

They're unpredictable.  Even their pack structure is unnatural.  If Velociraptors are like wolves, natural packs should be made up of parents and their children.  Unrelated individuals are often allowed into packs, but as a rule there's very little in-fighting.  Owen fills the role of parent, but he isn't a raptor and the girls are smart enough to know it. 

Blue's siblings--her genetic siblings--died.  Barry never met them.  He was brought in after to coax Owen and Blue out of their solitude and to join the project because Simon Masrani wasn't sure that Owen could do it on his own.  Echo, Charlie, and Delta aren't her sisters.  They're strangers grafted into a pack. 

So far, the experiment has worked, but Echo and Blue have fought for the better part of the last two years and Delta will undoubtedly challenge Blue.  And, eventually, Owen. 

Maybe it's because he's not a part of the pack hierarchy that Barry can see what Owen and the rest of the park won't.  He's an omega too, an interloper, always relegated to the edge of things.  They planned it this way so that someone would always be close, but not too close so as to get obsessed and blinded, like in the first park. 

Owen's too close, Barry realizes, all at once.  He doesn't see.  He's thinking like he's one of them.  He pulls his hand away from Echo, all the hair on the back of his neck standing up. 

"We will," Owen promises.  "I talked to Claire today and agreed to put the girls on display, so long as InGen can't interfere."

"Good,” Barry says, relieved.  While he's privately got his doubts about that idea, a couple of feet of Plexiglas between the raptors and other people is much, much better than a fence their alpha can turn on and off at will. 

"Yep.  Enclosure should be ready in a month or two, then we'll come back in." 

"A month?  Two?  Owen, are you crazy?"  Barry doesn't want to say it--he doesn’t want to fight with Owen, he wants Owen to come home--but two months of stress and worry that he's going to find his best friend's chewed-up body in the woods forces the words out of his mouth.  "You've already been out here two months!  It's a miracle you haven't died.  It's a miracle the girls haven't died.  It's a miracle they haven't killed someone." 

"They're not gonna kill anyone," Owen growls, eyes flashing.  All four Velociraptors swing their heads around, fixating on Barry with eerie intensity.  "I won't let them."

"You think you can stop them?"

"I've done it this long, haven't I?"

"At tremendous cost to yourself and the animals," Barry snaps.  He stands taller, straighter.  Blue hisses.  "You're hurt.  Charlie got sick and we don't know why.  Echo will never have full use of that limb again.  Someone will get hurt, Owen.  Bring them back in.  We can still put them on exhibit in a few months.  You've proven that they can be trained."

"We're not going back," Owen says flatly.  "Not until the enclosure's built.  You think they'll be happy back in the paddock, Barry?  After they've been out here?  They'll go crazy.  They need this."

"I think you might need this, my friend," Barry says.  "And I am worried that you can't see that."

Owen snarls.  The sound makes Barry want to take a step back, but he knows if he does, he'll never be able to touch Echo again.  He'll always have to be on guard.  The raptors remember those who show weakness. 

"I know it's hard to remember out here," Barry says, calmly.  "I know you are just doing what you feel you have to to protect our girls, and I'll still bring you supplies.  I won't tell anyone where to look for you.  But you're not a Velociraptor, Owen.  You're human.  And they'll kill you.  They will.  It's what they do."

Barry doesn't see Blue jump, but one second she's crouched next to Owen, hissing, and the next she's tangled in the thick cables separating her from Barry, shrieking, claws and tail lashing wildly.  Her feet scramble for purchase on one of the metal beams that stabilize the fence between two posts.  Her claws shriek against the metal.  Her teeth snap and flash inches from his face. 

"Blue!"  Owen roars, and grabs his beta by the tail.  He makes a rough, aborted hissing noise and tugs her backwards.  Blue goes, still spitting, claws extended.  She catches Owen's arm by mistake and bright red blood wells up, spilling to the ground. 

Barry's heartbeat roars in his ears.  His knees shake.  He wants to run away and hide somewhere small and dark and lined with steel.  He takes a deep breath, remembers how he felt hunted by a pack of painted dogs, how he felt in prison, says, "You're gonna get yourself killed, Owen.  I hope to god you don't take anyone else with you," and walks away.   

---

Two hours, fifteen phone calls, and one broken window, courtesy of a minor scuffle with security, Vic Hoskins is on the island to stay and there's nothing Claire can do about it. 

She called Simon, who called Lex Murphy, the CEO of InGen, who shouted at them both for a solid forty-five minutes and then called General Marcus, who spent another forty-five minutes ranting about Claire infringing on his employees' rights and interfering with classified military projects.  She's never been threatened with terrorism charges before.  It's an experience she is not keen to repeat. 

So Hoskins is staying.  There's nothing Masrani Corp can do about it.  Hoskins never worked for them.  He worked for the military through InGen, and the military insists that he stay. 

"You've let this Velociraptor problem go on far too long, Simon," Lex Murphy had scolded.  (She's only a few years older than Claire and the head of the most prominent genetics company in the world.  She's been CEO since she was twenty-five.  Claire kind of idolizes her.)  "Because of Director Dearing, you have a solution, but if one guest is killed by those animals, I'll make sure the world holds you responsible.  Victor is staying.  I trust him to make sure InGen's interests are well-looked after."

The most Simon could do was confine Hoskins to the Control Center for as long as he stayed on the island.  Claire personally has the rather vicious pleasure of telling Park Security that if they find Hoskins anywhere but the Control Center, he's to be arrested and kicked off Isla Nublar. 

"Safety protocol," she had told both Lex and General Marcus sweetly.  "He upsets the animals.  It's in everyone's best interests that he remain far, far away from them."

"Keep an eye on Hoskins please, Lowery," Claire says, in her car heading north.  She needs to tell Owen that Hoskins is back.  He's not going to take it well--and honestly, having touched Delta and seen how the raptors interacted with him, she gets it, she really does--and it's better than he hears it from her, so he keeps trusting her. 

She really, really needs him to trust her.  She's found a patch of park for the raptor enclosure already.  She'll put them in the Research Corridor, between the wild jungle and the actual research zone.  They can have the volcano in their exhibit.  It wouldn't be hard to extend the monorail out that far, and they're going to have to do it in a year or so anyway so guests can get out to the Indominus. 

Claire's not concerned about that.  She'll give them miles of habitat.  Places to run and hide and hunt.  Hell, she might even put a few herbivores in with them every once and a while to give guests a show. 

What she's concerned about is Hoskins, and InGen.  The fact that she, the Director of Jurassic World, can't have somebody taken off the island is troubling.  She had no idea InGen had that kind of sway, and from Simon's frustration, she doesn't think he knew either. 

But corporate minefields are Claire's bread and butter.  She'll get Hoskins taken off the island.  Either that or she'll let Owen take his raptors on a Hoskins Hunt, which would be just as satisfying.  She has an excellent poker face.  Lex Murphy would never have to know. 

Claire stops off at home to change into more comfortable clothes and grab a Hershey bar.  (She's got a theory she wants to test out.) 

Owen and the raptors aren't at the meeting spot, but Claire's pretty sure they don't live too far.  It would be inefficient of them to live more than a few miles from the place where Owen got all of his supplies.  His animals might be able to run dozens of miles every day, but he certainly couldn’t. 

Claire settles down into the grass with her customer satisfaction reports, Taylor Swift Pandora, and a bottle of water.  She's prepared to wait all day.

--- 

On a scale of 1-5, 1 being extremely unsatisfactory and 5 being extremely satisfactory, how would you rate your experience at Jurassic World? 

---

Claire only has to wait an hour.  She's immersed in the reports--everyone's grammar is atrocious--and halfway through her bottle of water when she feels hot breath ruffling her hair, and stiffens. 

The Fence is still electrified, crackling and buzzing, but there's a Velociraptor on the other side of it, watching Claire with yellow eyes.  She's crouched down to Claire's level, tail sweeping the grass flat.  She chitters. 

"Delta," Claire says, very calmly.  The green raptor chirps in acknowledgement.  "Hello."  Slowly, careful not to startle her, Claire stands up.  Delta does the same, cocking her head to the side.  Her forelimbs are tucked to her chest and her sickle toes tap, almost like she's thinking. 

"Where's Owen?"  Claire asks, feeling a little stupid.  There's no way the raptor understands.  But Delta cocks her head the other way, considering, and lets out two short, sharp barks. 

"Twice in one day," Owen drawls, stepping out of the trees.  One of his arms is wrapped in a fresh bandage.  "I'm startin' to think you're worried about me, Ms. Dearing."

"Oh, we're back to that now?"  Claire brushes grass off her jeans.  Owen raises an eyebrow, impressed. 

"I didn't even know you owned jeans."

"That's because I'm a professional, Owen.  You're a wild animal."

He shrugs.  "Fair."

"Where are your other raptors?"  Claire asks. 

"Sunbathing," he says.  "They're primarily nocturnal.  We've got a big night tonight, so they're resting up.  Except Delta here, who I think is afraid she'll blow up or something if she's not running around all fucking day." 

Claire smiles.  "Another Valley hunt?"

Delta perks up and chitters.  She makes it sound like a question. 

"I'm gonna have to send out a memo," Owen mutters.  "Don't use the h-word, okay?  It builds their expectations up.  And yeah."  He hesitates.  "We're going after an Edmontosaurus tonight."

"Absolutely not," Claire says. 

"Why not?"

"They're five million dollars a pop!  Are you crazy?  And they're thirty-five feet long."

"Six thousand pounds, yeah," Owen says, and grins.

"Are your raptors even going to eat that much?" 

"Well, no," he admits, "but you can feed the extra meat to Rexy or something.  Doesn't she have a birthday coming up?" 

"Yes, she's turning twenty-five," Claire says.  They're throwing a big, park-wide celebration.  Attendance is hopefully going to be in the low twenty thousands.  "Owen, I'm serious, you're not going to able to kill one."

"Then you've got nothing to worry about." Owen grins at her, but he does it too slowly and at the wrong moment.  It looks strange, like he's out of practice.  "There are breeding males in the edmonty herd.  It'll be fine.  We'll pick off a sickly juvenile."

Claire rubs her forehead. 

"C'mon, it's good for my girls.  It gives them a new challenge to figure out.  They've never hunted anything that large before."

Delta definitely picks up on the word hunt this time and dances happily, hopping from foot to foot and barking.  It's actually kind of adorable. 

Murder lizard, Claire tells herself, and her palm itches.  She wants to touch Delta again. 

"One time," Claire warns.  "If you kill more than one, I'll have Sam Dierden introduce you to her Spinosaurus." 

"Scout's honor," Owen says, and this time his grin is genuine. 

"There's no way in hell you were a boy scout," Claire says.

"Sure I was.  Scouts were big back in Montana.  That's how I met Dr. Grant the first time, you know. He didn't recognize me when you brought him in to consult on the raptor project in the beginning, but I recognized him."

"Oh yeah?"

Owen nods, still grinning.  "We went out to a dig to get some obscure badge or something," he says.  "Out in the Badlands.  It was hot and Dr. Grant yelled at me." 

"Really?"  Claire's actually enormously fond of Dr. Grant.  He's rather grouchy in his old age, but he's viciously smart and much easier to tolerate for extended periods of time than Dr. Malcolm.  He reminds Claire of her grandfather, actually, only passionate about dinosaurs instead of small-town football.  "What’d you do, make a pass at his girlfriend?"

"He told me I wasn't respecting the dinosaurs," Owen says, and sobers.  He tugs on Delta's tail gently.  "He told me the same thing a few years ago, actually."

"He's set in his ways," Claire offers.  "I didn't know you'd met him before.  He told us that you were dead, back when you first took the raptors.  How's it feel to replace him as the foremost Velociraptor expert in the world?"

Owen laughs.  "You know, I didn't think of it like that," he says.  "I should introduce him to Charlie.  My youngest," he explains, like a proud parent.  "She's a sweetheart.  For a two hundred and fifty pound murder machine." 

Delta squawks. 

"Sweetheart you are not," Owen tells her.  "Sorry."

Laughing, Claire says, "She might have a sweet tooth, though."

"Hm?" 

"Something Dr. Grant told me once," Claire says, and pulls the Hershey bar out of her pocket.  "Delta?  Want a treat?" 

The raptor is suddenly very interested in Claire again, dancing, nosing as close to the wires and bars as she can.  Claire grins. 

"For some ungodly reason," Dr. Grant had told her, staring intently into his glass of wine, "Velociraptors love chocolate.  I couldn't figure it out.  It was absurd.  The whole island was littered with candy bar wrappers." 

Claire unwraps the chocolate bar and breaks off a piece. 

"Make sure you toss that to her," Owen warns.  "She will take your fingers off.  She's not careful like Blue is." 

Delta opens her mouth, begging. 

"Dumbass," Owen says, affectionately.

Claire tosses her the chocolate and Delta snaps it up eagerly, biting down once and swallowing.  She hoots, dancing around Owen again like an excited puppy. 

Victory, Claire thinks, and proceeds to toss Delta the rest of the chocolate.  The raptor darts after every piece, once even jumping a good fifteen feet straight into the air to catch it.  She overestimates and lands on her face, squawking, legs waving in the air, before she rights herself and snaps the chocolate up.  All the while she makes purring and chattering sounds at Claire, punctuated by excited barks at Owen. 

"Do you know what's she's... trying to say?"  Claire asks, feeling a little stupid again. 

"She's not trying to say anything," Owen says, amused.  He's relaxed somewhat.  His posture is more human and less murderous predator.  His smiles fit on his face again.  "She's telling you that she likes the chocolate very much, and asking me if there's anymore.  No, Delta, Aunt Claire's all out."

Delta squawks and looks back at Claire. 

"Sorry," she says.  "Everything in moderation.  I'm their aunt, now?"

Owen shrugs.  "You're the first person Delta has let touch voluntarily since she was a hatchling.  I think it's because she knows you hate the other H-word." 

Claire reaches out and Delta comes under her hand, arranging herself so that Claire is scratching the junction between her neck and her shoulder.  She groans happily. 

"About that," she says, and Owen stiffens, going unnaturally still and focused again.  "He's back on the island.  I won't let him near you," Claire adds quickly, and Delta looks between Owen and her new friend, confused and suddenly wary.   "Simon and I have confined him to Control.  We just can't get rid of him."

"I told you InGen had more influence than you thought," Owen says, and it comes out like a growl.  "This isn't gonna work, Claire."

"Don't panic," she says sternly.  "It's fine.  Hoskins can't leave, so he can't bother you.  Lex Murphy--InGen's CEO--has agreed to allow the raptor exhibit.  It's going to be fine."

"You say that now, and then InGen brings a fucking military force to your island and hunts my animals down," Owen hisses.  Delta straightens and pulls away from Claire, casting about, clearly looking for a threat. 

"Owen, you have my word that nothing is going to happen to your raptors.  I won't let InGen near them.  And if the enclosure doesn't work--” Claire always thinks about the worst case scenario, for some reason.  She's been that way since she was little.  She always jumps to the calamity first.  If it's too difficult to build an enclosure for the raptors, Claire has a backup plan. 

She won't let InGen put them down. 

"If the enclosure doesn’t work, for whatever reason, you can release them on Isla Sorna.  It's Masrani's island, not InGen's.  They couldn't afford it.  They own the dinosaur's DNA, but after the San Diego fiasco they've been forbidden by the government of Costa Rica from setting foot on the island or disrupting its wildlife.  No humans are allowed to be on it."

Owen looks at her.  "No," he says.  "Not gonna happen." 

Claire spreads her hands, frustrated.  "Then work with me.  How can we make this enclosure the biggest success possible?  I'm trying to help you."   

"If Hoskins is here, it's not gonna--"

"You need to let go of this vendetta you have against Victor Hoskins," Claire snaps, finally fed up.  "Yes, he's an asshole and a moron, but there's nothing we can do about it.  Lex Murphy won't let me kick him off the island.  I did what I could and he won't be able to come near you.  Once we put the raptors on exhibit, they'll make us so much money that InGen won't ever be able to take them away.  That's how this works."

Owen watches Claire, his face gone flat and expressionless.

Claire takes a deep, steadying breath.  "Look," she says.  "You know more about Velociraptors than I do.  You know more about dinosaurs in general than I do. You know how to swagger around out here like you're some kind of Neanderthal throwback, and I don't. 

"But I do know how businesses work, and everybody and their goddamn mother will jump at the chance to see Velociraptors in action, Owen.  They're so infamous people won't be able to stop themselves.  The chance to see Velociraptors in action, Owen.  They're so infamous people won't be able to stop themselves.  We'll make a few million, get InGen off our backs, and everything will be fine.  If you let me do my job, okay?" 

Owen watches her for a moment, his tense posture mirrored by Delta, and then he relaxes a fraction.  "You're actually kind of terrifying," he says.  "Maybe that's why Delta likes you."

"Don't change the subject," says Claire sharply.  "I said, okay?  Are you actually going to let me do my job?"

The raptor handler finally nods.  "Yeah," he says.  "Fine."

Claire raises her chin, satisfied.  "Good."  Her phone buzzes.  It's Karen.  A text message flashes across the screen.  Can I call u?  "I have to take this," she says, and when she looks up, Owen and Delta are gone.

She huffs.  "Seriously?"  She yells out into the trees.  "You better be back here Sunday morning.  We're going to start going over enclosure plans!  Make sure you show up!"

From the jungle she hears Owen laughing.  She huffs again.  Men. 

"Hi, Karen," she says, pressing her phone to her ear and heading back towards the park proper, "what's up?"  

---

Owen plunges down a hill in the Valley, wind and saw grass tearing at his arms.  In the last light of dusk, he can see his girls in the grass all around him, a tail lashing, a tooth gleaming.  Blue bounds silently at his side, her scales turned nearly black by the setting sun. 

Owen can see marks of the raptors' presence on the Valley, too.  Herds stick closer together and spend their nights clustered around trees or on the tops of hills, where they can see the raptors coming.  Abandoned nests and broken eggs litter the lower plains.  The once-friendly hypsys are now wary and mistrustful, skittish and shy.

Everything's different.  The girls are different.  Owen's different. 

He can't stop thinking about Barry.  Blue races beside him, close enough to touch, and she's perfectly fine now, well-behaved and responsible, one eye on Owen to see if he makes any additional commands. 

He can't believe she attacked Barry.  She's been protective of him ever since Echo challenged him, but she's never been outright aggressive.  She won't let Echo anywhere near Owen, but she's fine with Delta and Charlie.  She's never attacked Barry before.  Hissed and snarled and snapped, sure.  She's done that to everyone, including Owen. 

Blue tried to kill Barry today.  And would have, if she'd been able to get through the Fence.  Owen had thought that being out in the wild was mellowing his girls out.  Everybody knows that animals not properly stimulated in captivity get bored, restless, and even violent--zookeepers all over the world spend hours and hours of their time giving their animals things to do so they're occupied with games and not ripping into some schmuck's face. 

Predators in the wild can be violent and aggressive, of course, but they usually don't waste the energy attacking something unless they're provoked or really, really hungry.  Owen's life depends on him making sure the girls aren't hungry, and it's not like Barry threw a punch at Owen or anything. 

Blue shouldn't have attacked Barry, he thinks.  She didn't have a reason to go after him, not unless she picked up on something I didn't see. 

After he'd dragged her back, Blue had snapped at Owen, glaring at him and looking at Barry's retreated back pointedly.  She wanted to run him down.  Owen could feel her intent.  He could read it in his eyes. 

The bloodlust he saw there made him want to cancel tonight's hunt--he's reminded again, very forcefully, of the fresh scars on his belly and shoulder--but he's hoping that the challenge of taking down an Edmontosaurus, a massive, four-ton, and generally pissy herbivore will put a stop to Blue's bad behavior and give her something else to think about. 

(And it’ll hopefully give him something else to think about too.  Barry’d been—Barry’d been almost afraid Owen.  Owen could read it in his eyes. 

It made him wonder how much Barry could see.  If Barry knew that Owen wasn’t sure he believed in cages and containment anymore.)

Charlie hoots softly, nose pointed at the herd of pachys grazing a quarter-mile away on top of another hill. 

Owen hisses back, just as quiet.  Charlie stays on course.  She seems okay now.  A little unsteady, and moving a just a hair slower than her sisters, but alright.  Three days ago she had been curled up in Owen's makeshift nest, shivering and whimpering, refusing to eat and throwing up anything she did manage to get down. 

Hopefully she's out of the woods now, but Owen's been keeping a very close eye on her anyway. Maybe an edmonty will have something different in it that solves whatever problem she's having. 

Owen can smell the edmonty herd now.  They smell like cows, wet and earthy.  He can hear them lowing to each other.  They're maybe a half-mile south, and the wind's blowing the stink of them right to the pack.  Owen grins.  We're upwind. 

He whistles softly.  Echo and Charlie peel off, vanishing into the grass.  Delta picks up speed, hurtling past Owen and Blue.  She'll get out in front of the herd and panic them, driving them back towards the waiting jaws of the pack.

Blue stays right beside him.  

Owen slows to a stop and swings off the bike.  Edmontosaurus have excellent hearing.  Shit night vision, though.  Owen jogs the last quarter mile and gets into position.  The last bit of sun paints everything blue and red.  He spots a tail waving.  Echo, he thinks, getting ready.  Blue crouches down beside him and Owen does the same, drawing his knife. 

Alright, he thinks.  Here we go.  He cups his hand around his mouth and caws three times.  It sounds like a raven or a crow.  Owen taught it to the girls so they could do this, so they could hunt without their prey recognizing the cries of a raptor. 

On the other side of a hill and the herd, Delta hears and caws back.  She's ready.  Owen caws again, and this time, Delta shrieks. 

The sound splits the evening quiet.  The herd scatters.  The ground underneath Owen shakes as the large herbivores panic, stampeding in all directions.  Delta shrieks again and Echo and Charlie answer; they've picked a target.  Owen doesn't dare raise his head above the grass and give away their position, but he knows his girls are herding an edmonty now, probably a young one, away from its herd mates and towards Owen and Blue. 

Even a young Edmontosaurus is twenty feet long and two, three thousand pounds.  And it'll be fighting the raptors every step of the way, lashing out with its tail and trying to head butt them to the ground, where it'll trample them to death. 

Blue hisses in anticipation.   

"Easy," Owen murmurs, and presses low, gathering his legs underneath him.  The ground jumps and shakes.  The edmonty's thunderous footsteps make his ears ache and his teeth rattle in his skull.  He's ready. 

"Now, Blue!" Owen leaps up from the grass as the panicked edmonty--young, maybe only a year or two old, probably twenty-five feet long from tip to tail--goes crashing past, harried by Owen's girls. 

Owen leaps and slashes at the animal's leg, cutting as deeply as he can before bouncing off its hide and landing back in the grass.  He doesn't have the jumping power that the girls do; Blue leaps and lands solidly on the edmonty's back, howling in triumph, and sinks tooth and claw into its neck. 

Echo and Charlie herd it back around so that it’s forced to pass Owen again.  He leaps and slashes, falls, leaps and slashes again.  The edmonty rears and manages to shake Blue loose.  Warm blood splatters across Owen's face.  It bellows, a high, terrified noise, and some other edmontys bellow back. 

Delta shrieks a warning.  Any adult that tries to rescue its young risks falling into the jaws of the pack. 

Blue, snarling, leaps back up onto the edmonty.  It stumbles, dropping back down to all fours, and Owen can see its legs trembling, deep cuts opened on its shoulders and the backs of its legs. 

Owen whistles, calling the girls in for the kill, and surges forward.  He jumps as high as he can, one hand scrabbling for purchase on its neck--he feels momentary stabs of pain, his own blood welling up--and the other bringing the knife in. 

There's a raptor's scream, Blue barking furiously, and a tremendous impact.  Owen goes flying backwards and hits the ground hard enough to bounce.  Stars flash in front of his eyes and his knife slips from his fingers.  Everything goes hazy for a minute. 

"What the fuck," he mumbles, righting himself and staggering to his feet.  Blue hits the dirt beside him, scrambling and spitting.  She shakes her head to clear it. 

An adult Edmontosaurus has come to the rescue.  It stands over the wounded edmonty, forelimbs planted on the ground, and bellows.  Its powerful tail swipes through the grass and tosses Echo ten feet into the air and twenty feet back. 

Delta shrieks at the adult, but even she doesn't want to rush it, wary of its size and strength. 

More adults come charging back for their herd mate, bellowing challenges.  Owen groans.  The hunt's over. 

He whistles the return call, holding his ribs.  He doesn't think anything's broken, but he's not going to risk getting tossed by the adult again.  It's not worth it.  They'll have to try again tomorrow. 

Blue looks at Owen and hisses, frustrated. 

Owen shakes his head.  "Not tonight," he says, backing away from the Edmontosaurus.  It shouldn't pursue them if they leave.  It won't want to leave its injured young.  Owen whistles again.  Charlie and Echo obey, bolting back through the Valley towards his bike.  He whistles again and Delta goes, spitting.  

Blue hisses, but she follows Owen as he turns and limp-jogs back down the hill, swearing softly.  He feels like he got hit by a truck.  His hand hurts, too, and when he looks he sees that the back of his hand's torn and bloody.  How'd that happen?  He wonders, and then realizes that it was Blue up on the edmonty's back, savaging at anything she could reach.  She clawed him and didn't realize it. 

That's twice today, Owen thinks, and his left shoulder aches. 

He swings himself back up on the bike and gives the home call, pointing the bike back where they came.  Echo, Charlie, and Delta go without complaint.  They're obviously exhausted, sides heaving, heads hung low.  Echo's limping.  Charlie's snout is flecked with white foam. 

Blue looks back at the Edmontosaurus herd one last time and roars in frustration, the sound floating over the Valley and making Owen's hackles rise instinctively. 

Across the park, far, far away from the Valley, there's an answering roar, and it's not from any dinosaur Owen has ever heard before.

---

Claire's woken up by a call from Sam Dierden.  It's six thirty-nine in the morning.  Claire groans.  "'lo, this is Dearing," she says thickly.

"It's Sam.  Claire, you need to do something, the Valley handlers are pissed, they have a young Edmontosaurus mauled half to death and they're talking about going out to find Owen themselves--"

Claire sits up.  Shit.  "Tell them if they do, they'll die," she says.  "Remind them what Velociraptors can do."

"Oh, they don't need reminding," Sam says, and her voice is grim.  "You need to do something, Claire.  It's bad.  The poor thing's gonna need close to four hundred stitches and months of recovery."

"Leave it."

"What?"  Even Sam, who has a Spinosaurus, a dinosaur bigger and meaner and more territorial than even a rex, sounds horrified.  Claire closes her eyes. 

"Leave it," Claire repeats.  "The raptors will come back.  Leave the injured one."

"Are you crazy?  Montoya's on the fucking warpath, Claire, you're gonna let the raptors back into the Valley?  You have to do something."

"I am doing something," Claire says, and settles back into bed.  She's exhausted.  She's been on the phone with a crying, crushed Karen all night.  She hasn't seen her sister's husband in a few years, but when she does, Claire's going to kick his ass.  "The raptors will be in containment by Thanksgiving, we hope."

"Thanksgiving?" 

"Yes," Claire says.  "Now tell the Valley handlers to leave the injured edmonty, please.  The raptors will go after it instead of mauling another animal.  Circle of life." 

Sam's quiet for a moment.  "Fine," she says.  "But you better come up with something better than Thanksgiving, Claire, otherwise you're gonna have a riot on your hands."

"Of course," Claire says, talking more to her ceiling than to Sam at this point.  Everything is falling apart.  "Because I already don't have enough to deal with, right?"

---

October comes to the island with the usual seasonal influx of visitors.  Claire's life gets crazy very quickly, but she manages to juggle guest complaints, construction on the Indominus paddock, Owen's ridiculous enclosure demands--she's not going to give him his own little herd of herbivores, she's just not, she'll give him a few every once and a while but that's it--Karen's collapsing marriage, and the pissed-off Valley handlers, who lodge a complaint with Simon over the dead juvenile Edmontosaurus. 

Simon, because he's a hero, manages to handle the situation both practically and with more sensitivity than Claire can muster.  "I know it's upsetting," Simon tells them.  "You've raised these marvelous animals from hatchlings.  You love them.  You care about them.  Mr. Grady also cares about his animals.  He is only doing what he feels is best for them.  Director Dearing has secured his agreement.  He will not be hunting Edmontosauruses again." 

After that, life proceeds in Jurassic World like it always does.  Claire meets with Barry du Vallon and recruits him to work on the raptor enclosure full time.  He seems happy to have something to do that isn't cleaning up after the Baryonx and hoping none of the other handlers skin him alive for his association with and continued defense of Owen. 

 "You've got basically an unlimited budget," Claire tells him.  "We want this wrapped up.  It'll make everyone happy." 

Barry agreed and promptly and enthusiastically got to work.  By the beginning of November the enclosure has started to take shape.  It's the biggest exhibit the park has to date.  Marketing's going crazy.  By the second weekend of November, they've sold five hundred special event tickets for the first Raptor Hunt Experience.  When she tells him, Owen just shakes his head. 

He still doesn't like the idea, Claire knows.  As autumn continues, Owen gets leaner, strung out and hollow-cheeked.  He won't come in for a medical check-up, though he does let a vet look his youngest raptor, Charlie, over when she gets sick again.  He tranqs her himself and carries her through the Fence.  The vet does his check-up in the dirt with three other very anxious Velociraptors on the other side. 

Claire meets all of the other raptors, too.  Delta is still her favorite--and she is still Delta's favorite, because she keeps sneaking chocolate to her when Owen's not looking--but she finds that she likes Charlie's sweetness and Echo's playfulness and Blue's calm, composed attitude. 

Owen watches her interact with them with an odd expression on his face, and when she asks, "What now?" impatiently, he doesn't say anything.  Every time Claire sees him, he's got a new bandage wrapped around some part of him.  She keeps bringing him tacky shirts to replace the ones that get shredded. 

"They're just playing," he says, and doesn't say anything else. 

The raptors kill the juvenile Edmontosaurus and don't go after any others.  A precarious balance is struck. 

Claire misses Thanksgiving with Karen because the Indominus freaks the fuck out and panics a bunch of construction workers.  As an apology, she promises to take her sister's sons, Zach and Gray, around the park for a few days over Christmas break.  That way, they won't be home for the majority of the divorce proceedings.  It's the least she can do. 

Hoskins doesn't try and leave Control, nobody gets mauled by a raptor, and Owen stays alive.  He seems to trust Claire, and she trusts him to keep the raptors under control.  In December the raptors get weird and skittish, always turning their heads and chasing after things nobody can see or hear, but Owen's not too concerned. 

"I think they want to migrate," he says.  His voice is still rough and hoarse.  He'd been showing Claire how to make some of the raptors' sounds, their alarm call, their call for help, their call for sneaking through the forest after wild chickens and monkeys. 

"Migrate?"

Owen shrugs.  "They're more bird than lizard," he says, and Claire gets the distinct feeling that he might be omitting some information.  "It wouldn't be surprising." 

"Will they try and leave the island?" 

"Not without me," Owen assures her.  His right bicep is wrapped in a thick bandage.  Spots of red have bled through it.  Blue is currently stalking the length of the Fence, making little grumbling and barking noises in the back of her throat.  "They'll be fine once the season turns." 

"Well, they'll be in their new enclosure before the New Year anyway," Claire says.  "Only a few more days and you can sleep in a real bed."

Owen grins at her.  "Is than an invitation?"  He asks, and Claire smacks his arm. 

But she's smiling, and keeps smiling for the rest of the day. 

---

Zach and Gray arrive the week before Christmas, and they're a lot bigger than Claire remembers.  Gray's excited to see her, though, and rushes to give her a hug.  Claire pats his head and promises to meet them for dinner. 

"You're not gonna come with us?"  Gray says, and he sounds put out.

"I still have to work," Claire says apologetically.  "But, tell you what. Tomorrow I'll take you behind the scenes.  I know a guy who can introduce you to some very special dinosaurs."  That seems to win the younger one over, though Zach eyes Claire like he's not sure what to make of her and slouches off after Zara. 

("You're dumping me with who," Zara had said, flatly. 

"My nephews," Claire said.  "I'd meet them myself, but we've got the Verizon people coming to look at the Indominus today and there's been some kind of electrical issue with Velociraptor Valley that I have to deal with, and--"

"You owe me," Zara sighed, exasperated and fond, and gone off to babysit Claire's nephews.)

Satisfied and excited to have at least two of her major sources of stress wrapped up and taken care of within the week, Claire answers her ever-ringing phone cheerfully.  "Dearing."

"Hi, Claire."  It's Viv again, and she sounds frayed.  "You might want to come back to Control."

"Who's causing a problem now?" 

"Owen Grady's here," Viv says.  "And I think he might punch Hoskins in the face again if you don't get here soon."

"Wait, again?" 

By the time Claire gets back to Control, Owen and Hoskins are being restrained on separate sides of the room by a pair of security guards.  The looks they're giving each other remind Claire of the time she saw Blue and Delta get into a fight over a dead monkey.  They wanted to spill blood. 

"You, behave," she tells Owen.  "You, stay quiet."  Hoskins glares. 

Claire turns her full attention to Owen.  Nobody in Control is looking directly at him, but they keep giving him side-glances and quick looks, awestruck and confused. 

She's forgotten that nobody else has seen Owen in almost five months.  To them he's the crazy asshole who stole a pack of Velociraptors and went feral.  He looks the part, too--scruffy and unkempt, a rip in his shirt, a big knife hanging off his hip.  He's half-crouched like he's thinking about lunging across the room and ripping out Hoskins' throat. 

"Mr. Grady," she says, and that breaks his hateful concentration.  He straightens.

"Claire," he says. 

"Where are the raptors?"  That's the first priority.  If he's here, where are they?  Did he lose them?  Did they turn on him?  Are they alive, dead, or terrorizing Claire's park?

"In the den," he says.  "They'll stay put.  Charlie's not feeling well and they won't want to leave her."

"You--" Hoskins starts. 

"Mr. Hoskins, if you can't be quiet, I will have you removed."  Claire doesn't even look at him.  She's busy watching Owen's face.  "What's wrong?"  She asks. 

Owen drags a hand through his messy hair.  "We need to talk," he says.  "Privately."

"I don't keep secrets from my staff." 

Owen glares.  Claire doesn't care.  He doesn't get to come up here and disrupt her staff, start a fistfight, and then make demands.  That's not how it works.  Finally, he relents. 

"Claire," he says, "I need to know what kind of dinosaur you're keeping in that paddock on the north side of the island."

"Which paddock?"  Claire asks.  There are three.  The Indominus paddock, which she hopes to god he's not asking about, a Pelecanimimus paddock for animals that are sick, and a paddock with a baby male Spinosaurus, who will be joining the adult female in a few years when it's fully grown. 

"Paddock Eleven," Owen says.  "I need to know what kind of animal you're keeping in Paddock Eleven."

"Why?"  Hoskins says.  "That's none of your business, Grady.  You weren't on that project."

Owen looks past Claire to meet Hoskins' eyes.  "Because it sounds like a Velociraptor," he says, "and that might a problem."

Chapter Text

vi.

Owen hates cars.  He grew up riding around on the bed of his mom's truck and the backs of his uncles' motorcycles, and the Navy hadn't done anything to make him like closed vehicles.  They were too claustrophobic for Owen's tastes.  Too sealed off.  You couldn't feel the wind on your face or the road underneath you.  Not even Claire's fifty-thousand dollar, climate-controlled, softly-purring hybrid can copy that feeling.

Granted, he's probably being unfair because he's wedged up against the window while Hoskins leans forward from the back seat, crowding into his space.  Claire keeps glaring at him and tapping her perfect fingernails against her steering wheel, but Hoskins isn't getting the hint.

(Owen's tempted to teach Hoskins a lesson with his fists, and would if he thought the lesson would stick.) 

"What kind of progress have you made?"  Hoskins is asking. 

Owen keeps his mouth shut.

"Obviously a whole lot, since you're here in one piece.  How's their training coming?  What kind of drills can you get them to run?"

A muscle works in Owen's jaw.  Two weeks ago, Delta finally outgrew Blue and challenged her for the beta position.  Blue's Owen's brightest girl, so she managed to put a stop to it, but not before blood had flown.  A week before that, Charlie knocked Owen down the stairs in the den and cracked a rib. 

"You've taken down an Edmontosaurus, so you can obviously coordinate hunts.  What's their responsiveness like?  How to you keep them in line?  You've had to start using physical discipline, I told you they'd respond better to pain than--"

"Mr. Hoskins," Claire finally snaps.  "You are coming along because General Marcus made me bring you.  Mr. Grady is coming along because he has valuable insight into the project.  If you keep upsetting him, I will have you sent back to Control."

"Look, honey--"

"Hoskins," says Owen, lowly.  "Shut up." 

Hoskins finally relents, leaning back in his seat.  "I want a report on those raptors, Grady."

Well, good luck getting one.  Owen doesn't say anything else for the rest of the drive.  He's on edge.  He's been on edge since early November, when whatever's out on this part of the island starting raising a ruckus. 

Whatever it is puts the girls on edge too.  They've been restless lately, irritable, quick to snap at each other and at Owen.  They're constantly looking towards the north side of the island and talking amongst themselves.  Blue especially seems to be uneasy.  She spends all night prowling around the den, calling warning calls at whatever's out there, marking her pack's territory. 

If they didn't respect Owen as much as they do, the raptors would've have gone off to investigate already.  Owen keeps them pretty far away from their new enclosure and the Research Corridor as a general rule--he's not sure he can stop Delta from going after construction workers and lab techs--but they're curious, and concerned. 

He took Delta and Blue yesterday evening.  They swam around the north side of the island--watching Velociraptors swim, incidentally, is fucking hilarious, they look like drunk dogs--to avoid any potential snack food and slunk through the jungle.  Owen found three paddocks.  One had a young male spino, who smelled the raptors and started posturing like a teenage boy, another had a small herd of Pelecanimimus, which Delta had to be bodily hauled away from, and the third had sixty-foot walls and the stink of dead things plastered to the concrete. 

Whatever was inside had heard them, and it had roared.  It sounded like a rex, at first.  That was the roaring and screaming Owen had been hearing for weeks.  But underneath that, it sounded... different.  Strange.  It wasn't until Blue had howled back, nearly shaking with fury, that Owen realized that that whatever was in Paddock Eleven was wrong.

It sounded like a Velociraptor.   

Owen doesn't know of any animal that sounds like a raptor but a raptor.  Maybe Wu had finally stopped pretending and created a full Utahraptor? Or an Achillobator, but Owen isn't sure any dromoaesaurid he knows of could be big enough to make a sound like that. 

He doesn't like it. 

"Usually we fly out here," Claire says, pulling the car to a stop in front of Paddock Eleven.  It doesn't look half so ominous in the daylight, but Owen still doesn't like it.  He can smell rotting carcasses drifting over on the wind.  "So.  What I'm about to show you is top-secret.  Hoskins knows, and my Control staff knows, but Paddock Eleven is Jurassic World's most closely-guarded secret to date."

"You should tell all of these workers to clear out," Owen says, gesturing at the construction staff that's milling around, adding metal struts and more concrete to the wall.  They don't want what's in there getting out. 

"Why?" 

"Blue doesn't like me being out on my own," Owen says.  "She'll probably stay put, but she might not."  And where she goes, Delta goes, and if anyone's going to take a bite out of a construction worker, it's Delta. 

"She'd track you here?"  Hoskins says.  "From how far?  Six, seven miles?" 

Only two and a half, but Owen ignores him.  If he pretends Hoskins doesn't exist, maybe he won't want to rip his throat out. 

Claire deliberates for a moment, but she finally nods and calls to the foreman.  Owen's filled with a rush of affection.  Four months of whispering through fences has made Claire a lot more likely to trust his judgment, and vice versa. 

"Every few years, Jurassic World's profit margin stagnates," Claire explains, leading Owen and Hoskins up a flight of concrete and metal stairs.  "We're not doing too badly, but operating costs are always rising, so every two or three years we open a new attraction to boost attendance.  This time, the Board wanted us to up the wow factor."

"They're dinosaurs," Owen says, thinking of Blue.  "Wow enough."

Claire shrugs.  "Not according to our focus groups.  So the Board talked to Simon and Simon talked to Dr. Wu, and now we have our first genetically-modified hybrid.  We're calling it the Indominus rex."

"Indominus rex," Owen repeats.  The hair on the back of his neck sticks up.  He doesn't like the sound of this at all.  "Are you shittin' me?"

"Sounds better than Piatnitzkysaurus," Claire says.  She opens the door and holds it for him.  She doesn’t look it, but Owen can tell that she’s nervous. 

With a sinking feeling in his gut, Owen steels himself and steps inside after her. 

---

Claire leads Owen and Hoskins into the viewing room with anxiety tying her stomach into knots.  Why does the Indominus sound like a Velociraptor?  Henry never told Claire what's in it--she knows the base genome is from a Tyrannosaurus rex, because when Henry does things he doesn't do them by halves, but the rest of its code is classified. 

She can tell Owen's on edge too, in some kind of wild, barely-restrained way that has his eyes darting to check all the corners and his hands curling into loose fists.  She takes a deep breath. 

"The Indominus rex is the result of ten years of genetic experimentation," Claire explains.  "Its base genome is derived from a T-rex.  This one is about a year and a half old."

"What's the rest of it?"  Owen steps up to the glass, eyes scanning the dark trees.  "How big is it?"

"Right now, forty feet long.  It'll be bigger than a rex once it's done growing.  The rest of its code is classified."

"You mean you have no idea," Owen murmurs, shading his eyes.  "Where is it?" 

"It's shy," Claire says.  She turns to a technician.  "Drop a steer, please."

The tech obliges.  A hook, slab of meat dangling, creaks its way over the enclosure. 

"You feed it with that?"

"Yes.  There was a... problem, early on.  It learned where the food was coming from and started attacking the handlers.  In the interest of safety, we started feeding it with the hook."  That had been a nightmare--her entire Indominus staff had threatened to quit.  The whole project was months behind schedule because of similar incidences. 

And if this thing is part Velociraptor, or something like it, Claire's starting to see why they've had such trouble. 

What were you thinking, Henry? 

"There it is," Hoskins says suddenly, pointing.  He looks positively gleeful.  The Indominus shifts behind the trees, white hide rippling.  It's considering whether or not to eat. 

"She knows we're here," Owen says quietly.  He holds very still.  "Can she see us?"

"They tell me it has a thermal sense, like a snake," Claire says.  The animal's tried to break the glass when people have been standing around before. 

"What the fuck," Owen breathes.  He doesn't take his eyes off the animal, orienting himself so that it can look right at him.  "Is she all by herself?"

"There was a sibling," Claire says.  "She ate it."

"You raised this animal in isolation?"

"We didn't really have another choice.  What, should I have scheduled playdates?"

"Too late now."  Claire can't see Owen's face directly, but she can see his reflection in the glass.  He looks horrified.  "Does anyone feed her?  Interact with her?"

"No," Claire says, impatient now.  "It's a wild animal, Owen.  It's already tried to attack people.  We can't let anyone near it.  It's too dangerous." 

"It's part Velociraptor," Owen says, low and urgent.  "Raptors are social animals.  All of the problems they had with the original packs on Nublar and Sorna were because the animals were basically sociopathic.  Raised in isolation.  They didn't have any social skills or any idea how to behave, so they were hyperaggressive and hyperpedatory.  They ate each other, for god's sake."

"It doesn't look like a raptor," Claire says doubtfully.  The Indominus is coming out in the open now, apparently deciding that food is worth the scrutiny.  It looks like Rexy.  Bone-white, with more spines and crocodile teeth, but like a T-rex.  The only thing that looks remotely like a raptor are its arms and claws. 

"One way to find out," Owen says, and cups his hands around his mouth. 

"Wait," Claire says, reaching out, "don't, Owen, you don't know what it's going to do--"

Owen barks, harsh and scraping, the sound unnaturally loud in the small room.  The Indominus swings its great head around to stare at him.  Owen barks again, then three times in rapid succession, ending with a warbling call that steams in front of the glass. 

The Indominus holds very still for a second, and then it warbles back. 

Holy fucking shit, Claire thinks. 

Owen barks at it again, then turns to Claire.  He's white under his tan.  "Claire," he says, "what the fuck have you done?"

Claire opens her mouth to answer, but her explanation is lost, because the Indominus bellows loudly, louder than a T-rex, louder than the mosa, louder than anything Claire's ever heard, and throws its whole body against the glass. 

The impact tosses Claire off of her feet.  Hoskins swears and collapses back against the far wall.  Owen lurches back but manages to stay upright, dropping into a low crouch.  The glass is still intact, thank god.  It's made from the same material the gyrospheres are made of.  It's meant to withstand a kick from an Edmontosaurus or a collision with a bull trike. 

"What the fuck, Grady," Hoskins snarls, rising to his feet. 

"We gotta go," says Owen.  He doesn't take his eyes off the Indominus.  "We gotta go now.  Claire, back up out the door.  Go real slow.  She's confused."

"What did you do?" Claire says, shakily climbing to her feet too.  "What did--what did it say?"

"I'm not a perfect translator."  

"But?"  

"But," Owen allows, "she ain't happy.  Now get out of here." 

Claire takes a step back, then another, not taking her eyes off Owen or the Indominus.  The animal draws back from the glass, shakes its head, and repeats the warbling call.  Its tail swipes through the air and cracks against a tree. 

"Don't you dare open your mouth, Grady," Hoskins says warningly.  "I don't know what the hell you think you're doing, but--"

The Indominus charges again, slamming its head into the glass.  Claire manages to stay upright this time.  Hoskins topples backwards and Owen drops down to all fours, teeth bared.  "Get out of here," he shouts.  “This animal’s insane!  It’ll kill you!”  The Indominus bellows and slams its head against the glass again, and again, and again.  Spider web cracks have started to appear.  

Hoskins curses and scrambles out the door, followed by the panicking technician.  Claire hits the floor again, thrown back a few feet by the Indominus' impact.  Owen stays where he is, staring down the dinosaur, every muscle rigid and straining. 

"Go!" He shouts. 

"I'm not leaving you!"  Claire shouts back.  "Come on, it's going to break the glass.  We have to go!"

Like it can hear and understand her--and maybe it can, if it's part raptor, what was Henry thinking--the Indominus roars again, eyes flashing, and slams its head into the glass.  Its horns punch through at last, and when the animal pulls away, shards of glass fall down into the enclosure below. 

The Indominus snorts, backing up.  It makes the low warbling sound in its throat again, almost sweetly.  One more hit and the glass is done for. 

"Go," Owen says again.  "I'll be fine, Claire.  Get out of here--"

"She's not one of your damn raptors!"

"You think I don't know that?"

"You're not going to be able to reason with it, Owen, come on, it'll eat you!"  Claire climbs to her feet again and steps forward, reaching out for the back of Owen's shirt.  She doesn't give a damn if he's six two and a good fifty or sixty pounds heavier than Claire.  She'll drag him outside and then kick his ass for being so fucking stupid, so self-centered, thinking he's so smart--

The Indominus charges again, throwing its whole body against the glass, and the viewing box pitches under Claire's feet, glass shattering.  The Indominus claws its way past the glass.  Its huge muzzle can barely fit into the box.  The weight of it drags at the floor, sending Claire scrambling backwards against gravity as everything begins to tilt and shift. 

"Claire!"  Owen roars. 

Claire pitches forward, scrabbling for purchase on the sliding, tilting floor, and then she's suddenly in empty air.  The last thing she sees is Owen dodging claws on his way down after her, and the Indominus, screaming and tearing at the walls around her.     

---

Claire wakes up in a world that's all white.  Light bears down on her and pricks the back of her eyes.  Her mouth feels like it's full of rust.  "Where--?"  She mumbles, and then remembers it all in a rush, the Indominus, Owen, Hoskins turning and running.  She remembers--

"Owen," she gasps, sitting upright.  "Where's Owen?" 

"Easy, Claire."  Simon's there, a hand on her shoulder.  His face is kind and concerned.  "Easy, it's alright.  You're alright."

"I'm fine," Claire says, though she feels like she got hit with a sack of bricks.  "Where's Owen?  We--" Fell, she realizes.  They fell into the Indominus' cage. 

"Mr. Grady is also alright," Simon says.  "He is in custody, Claire.  Everything is fine."

"Wait, custody?"  Claire makes to stand but can't quite make her legs work.  She's shaking.  Her skirt is ripped and there are dirt stains ground into her elbows.  How did we not die? "Why the hell is he in custody?  He didn't do anything."

"Mr. Grady tried to free the Indominus rex," Simon says slowly, kindly, like he thinks Claire hit her head on the way down.  She hit everything else, but not her head.  Claire's fine.  Pissed, a little shaken, but fine.  Everything's fine.  She'll get it back under control in a few minutes, turn Owen loose with his animals, and everything will be fine.  "It's under control, by the way.  ACU was able to tranquilize the animal and rescue the both of you from its enclosure.  You're lucky they were so close by."

That doesn't make any sense, but Claire can't figure out why just yet.  "He didn't try to free it," Claire says.  "He thought--he thought it was part raptor, and wanted to test his theory.  It is, Simon.  I don't know what Henry was thinking, but he cooked up a Velociraptor hybrid, and it's insane--"

"It's quite impressive, yes."  Simon grins.  "I hadn't seen her before today, did you know?  She's magnificent.  Terrifying.  Just what we wanted."

"You wanted a raptor hybrid?"  Claire asks, incredulous.  "Owen says that there’s something wrong with it.  It wasn't socialized correctly.  He says it’s insane.  Not insane like cool, insane like insane."

"Mr. Grady invited the animal to attack when he called out to it," Simon says, grin fading.  "Mr. Hoskins was quite clear that the animal did not become aggressive until Mr. Grady started making noise." 

"He wasn't telling it to attack," Claire says.  She's feeling a little stronger now, and stands up.  She wobbles, but stays upright.  Awesome.  Step one, find my shoes.  Step two, find Owen. 

"How do you know?  That's the problem, Claire.  Mr. Grady has learned how to communicate with these animals."

"He doesn't speak Velociraptor," Claire snaps.  "They're animals. They don't have complex language.  Yes, they communicate, but not in a way we can learn to translate.  Owen can make some of their sounds.  Yes, it's partly how he controls them, but it's not exact.  He didn't tell the Indominus to break the glass and attack us."

"How do you know?" Simon spreads his hands helplessly.  "I want to trust Mr. Grady's intentions, Claire.  He seems like a good man.  But something incited the Indominus to attack the glass."

Claire thinks of its eyes.  "I think Owen's right," she says.  "I think it's insane.  It cannibalized its sibling, Simon.  That's not normal."

"Cannibalism happens in reptiles all the time," Simon says dismissively.  "And that was months ago.  If you were concerned, why didn't you bring your concerns to me then?  It's too late now.  The Indominus is nearly fully grown.  She'll go on exhibit next year."

Claire doesn't have the words to explain to Simon how she feels.  When the Indominus ate its sister, Claire didn't know.  She didn't know anything.  The Indominus was just a frustrating project forced onto her by an overambitious Board and an overeager Henry.  It was something to do, something to solve.  A problem.  An exercise in park management.  Claire had measured its development in to-do lists and checked-off boxes.

Is the cage secure?  Check.  Is the asset eating? Check.  Is the asset healthy?  Check.  Are the people working with and around the asset safe?  Check.  Will the public be safe around the asset?  Check.

She didn't think about its behavioral development.  Why would she?  She's not a behavioral scientist.  She doesn't know the markers of proper dinosaur development.  All of the carnivores are violent and aggressive.  They all look for ways to escape.  She thought the Indominus was normal. 

 But now she's seen how the raptors interact with Owen.  They're not safe--she still remembers picking teeth out of Owen's shoulder--but they're not throwing themselves against the bars of the Fence trying to maul Claire's guests either. 

"Simon, you need to let Owen go.  He didn't do anything wrong.  It attacked us.  It's attacked the glass before.  It's dangerous." 

"Claire," Simon says, but she cuts him off. 

"Owen Grady is not at fault," she says firmly.  Things are finally making sense now.  Pieces are falling into place.  "Did you ever stop and ask yourself why ACU was so close by?  I didn’t call for them.  I didn't order them out there.  Who told you that Owen tried to free the Indominus?"

She can see the realization dawning in Simon's eyes.  "Hoskins," he says. 

"I'm glad ACU was close by," Claire says.  "They probably saved our lives.  But I did not put them there."

"Are you saying Hoskins intentionally upset the Indominus?  To, what, prove a point?  Get you to trust him?" 

Shit, I'm starting to sound as paranoid as Owen, Claire thinks.  "I think," she says carefully, "that there's more to this situation than meets the eye.  You need to let Owen go.  I'll talk to him.  He can explain what happened." 

She sounds crazy.  Claire knows she does.  But years of professional and personal trust win out, and Simon nods.  "Very well," he says.  "Mr. Grady should have the opportunity to explain himself, at least. Are you sure you're alright?  You had a nasty fall.  The doctors tell me it's a miracle you didn't break anything."

"I'm fine," Claire mutters.  "I run on aspirin and caffeine anyway, what's a few more pills going to do to me?"

---

They're halfway to Control when Claire gets the call.

"Claire," Lowery says, tremulous, "the thermal imaging scans came back from Paddock Eleven.  The Indominus isn't in there." 

---

"It fooled the cameras," Simon says, torn between wonder and horror.  "How could it do that?  They're state of the art."

"I don't know," Viv says tearfully.  "We scanned the paddock twice and it didn't show up." 

Claire stares at the big monitor, a dim sense of panic cutting through her headache and settling into her bones.  The Indominus hadn't shown up on thermal imaging, so the techs working to repair the damage done to the viewing box had called Control in a panic and gone down to examine the paddock.

They had found claw marks gouged into the concrete wall of its enclosure going all the way up, like the animal had clawed its way over the top.  A couple of techs had gone in to investigate, only to find that the Indominus was still in the enclosure.  It had regulated its temperature to hide from the sensors.  It had devoured one tech and when the other had fled, the Indominus burst through the massive door and out into the park.

Claire keeps thinking, How does it know what thermal sensors are? 

"A concern for a later time," Simon says forcefully.  "Has ACU been dispatched?" 

Viv shakes her head. 

"Send them out," says Simon.  "Nonlethals only. They're trained for this.  This was an eventuality, people.  Let's not panic and forget how well we've prepared for this."

Something in Simon's tone calms Claire down a little.  He's not worried.  It's her job to be worried when he isn't, but he is confident in their ability to reign in this disaster, so Claire will be too.  She's troubled by the Indominus' intelligence--a raptor, it's basically a very large, very bloodthirsty raptor--but when they get it back in containment, they can build it a bigger, better enclosure and prevent it from ever getting out again. 

"Recall everyone north of the resort," Claire says.  "Close the Valley.  The Indominus is four miles from the nearest exhibit.  We've got that window to put it down."  The Control room responds to Claire beautifully, everyone dashing into damage control mode. 

"Everything will be fine," Simon assures her.  "Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to talk to Henry."

"What about Owen?" 

Simon thinks for a moment.  "Let him out," he decides.  "Hoskins will no doubt be preoccupied with this anyway.  We can discuss his actions later.  He's the raptor expert.  He might be able to help us bring the Indominus back in."

Claire nods, relieved.  "Will do," she says, and goes.

---

Jurassic World doesn't have a jail per say.  They don't have a police force.  But theft is a huge problem, as is vandalism and trespassing--honestly, the number of morons who try and get into the Spinosaurus enclosure is astounding--so around five or six years ago Claire built Park Security a nice little complex near the resort and had a floor set aside for criminal containment.

Everyone calls it the Naughty Corner jokingly.  Claire doesn't really get why--seriously, breaking into the Spinosaurus enclosure isn't naughty, it's stupid and illegal--but Park Security isn't really her division so she lets it happen. 

This is where they're keeping Owen. 

"Take me up to Mr. Grady, please," Claire says, signing the check-in sheet. 

"Raptor Guy?"  Saul Gingrich, the park's oldest employee, squints at Claire.  He's eighty-four.  Claire's been trying to coax him into retirement for the better part of her time at Jurassic World, but Saul just laughs and waves her off. 

"Yes," she says.  "There's been a misunderstanding.  Mr. Grady's free to go."

Saul shrugs.  "If you say so.  You better hope that Hoskins fella's not up there, though.  He's been a real prick about keeping Raptor Guy locked up tight.  I told him we're not a real jail, but he wouldn't listen." 

Claire's slightly gratified to hear that someone else thinks that Hoskins is a douche, and smiles.  "Thanks," she says.  "I can let myself up, Saul."

Saul waves at her and returns to his puzzle book.  Nothing seems to rattle Saul.  He goes toe to toe with pissed-off suburban parents and entitled teenagers on a regular basis.  He's got nerves of steel.

Claire takes the stairs two at a time, wincing.  Her whole left side is pretty bruised.  She doesn't remember hitting the ground in Paddock Eleven, but she must have landed on that side.  (She watched the security footage.  It had been strange to watch the Indominus come into the viewing box on camera.  It didn't look real.  She saw herself topple down into the paddock, Owen falling behind her, and they looked like toys.

It had only been ACU coming in over the walls with heavy-duty tranqs that saved Claire and Owen from getting trampled to death.  The Indominus had been distracted and tried to follow ACU around the paddock.  It was as far away from them as it could get when it had finally gone down.)

"Claire," Owen says, as soon as Claire opens the door into his little holding cell.  He stands up and makes like he wants to cross over to her, but stops himself.  "You okay?"

"More or less.  You?"  Claire looks him up and down appraisingly.  He has a cut on his forehead and he has his left arm tucked against his chest, but other than that he looks alright. 

"Be better if I wasn't stuck in here," he says darkly.  "Claire, I swear I didn't tell the Indominus to attack.  Even if I did she's not trained, she wouldn't have known what I was telling her to do, and I wouldn't put anyone in danger like that--"

Claire holds up a hand.  "Relax.  I don't think you set the Indominus on anyone.  You're an idiot, but you're not stupid."  She pauses.  "Hoskins is telling everyone that you were trying to free it." 

She doesn't think that Owen would.  Call her naïve, but she really doesn't think he'd let the Indominus out.  He let the raptors out, but he’s basically their father.  He'd been reasonably sure of his ability to keep them in line. 

He'd been almost scared of the Indominus. 

His expression confirms Claire's suspicions.  "That animal should be put down," he says.  "She's insane.  She's the animal equivalent of a sociopath.  I'd never let her out."

"That's what I thought," Claire says, relieved.  "Why did she attack us?  She's done it before, but she's given up after a few hits.  This time she was--"

"Pissed?"  Owen shrugs and winces.  "I don't know why she attacked.  The call I used is a parent-call.  I use it with the girls all the time and they come running for snacks and scratches, not to bite my fucking head off.  The Indominus has no idea what she is.  What else is she mixed with?"

"I don't know," Claire says truthfully.  "Henry--Dr. Wu--wouldn't tell us.  Simon's with him now trying to get answers, but whenever I asked he always told me it was an InGen secret."

"Seems to be a lot of those," Owen mutters, and Claire can't say she disagrees.  She's worried by how much is coming to light that she didn't know about, and can't control.  Months ago, Owen told her that InGen had more power and influence than she thought.  He's turning out to be right. 

"Why does it matter?"

"What she's made of will influence her behavior.  If she's rex and raptor, she'll be a predator.  If she's sociopathic--and I think she is, no juvenile attacks its parent like that, and properly socialized pack animals don't eat their siblings--she'll be a hyperpredator.  Depending on what else she's mixed with, that can change.  The shape of her jaw looks like a sucho, so she might be piscivorous, but if she’s been raised on steer flanks her whole life, she won’t know to hunt for fish.  She’ll hunt for meat instead." 

"I don't know," Claire says honestly.  "Simon will tell me once he knows, but right now we just don't know.  He sent nonlethals after her, so we'll get the chance to study her behavior, but--"

"Wait," Owen says, very slowly, "what?"

"The Indominus escaped," Claire says.  "She--I don't know.  She tricked the thermal imaging sensors and set a trap.  She set a trap for the techs working on repairing the box and got out.  She's in the Research Corridor now.  ACU's gone after her."

"With nonlethals?"  Owen's face goes white again.  "Claire, you have to tell them to kill it.  It's too dangerous to have in the park.  It will kill people." 

"It's not my call," Claire says.  "Mr. Masrani said--"

"Oh, no one gives a shit what Mr. Masrani says," Owen growls.  "Everyone knows that you run the park, Claire.  They'll listen to you.  Tell them to put it down.  Before it's too late."

"Hey," Claire says, bristling, "Simon Masrani built this park--"

"And he did a very good job.  I'm not saying he's not the boss, or that he's not a good guy or whatever, but you work here.  Every day.  He doesn't.  Half of the staff hasn't even seen him before."  Owen sighs.  "I met him because he heard that my first clutch of raptors died, and he wanted to make sure that I was alright.  The rest of the handlers?  The ACU guys?  He's just a name.  You're the one we see every day."

"While I appreciate the vote of confidence--” Claire starts, but Owen cuts her off.

"You trust me, right?" 

Claire looks at Owen for a long second.  Do I?  Yes, she does.  He hasn't lied to her.  They've been working together for months now.  Owen's blunt and unprofessional and weird, but he's always been honest.  "Yes," she finally says.  "I trust you."

"Then you have to listen to me.  The Indominus rex needs to be put down.  I don’t care how much money InGen's sunk into this thing.  She's part raptor, and she's insane.  She has none of the learned behaviors that my animals have.  She doesn't know what she is.  And she is gonna do exactly what the raptors in Jurassic Park did, which is kill everything.  And she's big enough to do it.  You have to put her down before she kills anyone." 

Owen's face is open and earnest and serious.  He's telling the truth.  He really believes that the Indominus is more dangerous than anything else in the park. 

"Okay," Claire says, deciding to bow to Owen's experience.  "Alright, I'll pass down the order.  I'll deal with the fallout.  Come on, let's get you out of here.  If you tell Simon exactly what you told me, he'll understand.  He's not an idiot."

"I didn't say he was," Owen mutters, but the look on his face tells Claire that he thinks they're all idiots, and he thinks they're all going to die. 

---

They arrive in Control, Claire dirty and sore, Owen white-faced and bloody, in time to see the Indominus wipe out the ACU team sent after her. 

"She dug out her tracker," Claire says, hand pressed over her mouth. 

"She remembered where they put it," Owen says, just as horrified. 

After that, no one argues with Claire when she authorizes the use of lethal weapons.  Hamada's dead.  Lee's dead.  All of ACU's most experienced personnel are dead in the jungle. 

"Where's it going now?"  Claire asks, looking around.  No one seems to want to meet her eyes.  Lowery finally looks up.  He looks like he wants to vomit.  Viv is crying. 

"My guess?"  says Owen.  "The Valley.  If she's thermo-sensitive, she'll go for the apatis." 

"Valley's been closed," Lowery says, and everyone lets out their breath in relief. 

"Make sure the Fences are up and running," Owen barks.  "It's weaker near the Valley, easier to break through."  Claire lets him snap orders and gives herself ten seconds to panic, then takes a deep breath. 

Her phone rings.  Karen's face flashes across the screen.  Claire frowns.    

"Hello?" 

"Claire?  Hi.  Are the boys with you?  I can't get a hold of Zach, I just wanted to make sure they're having a good time, I--"

"Zach and Gray are with my assistant, Zara," Claire cuts in, feeling guilty.  She's forgotten all about her nephews in this mess.  To be fair, she can blame it on falling twenty-five feet into a carnivorous dinosaur enclosure, but they're still her nephews.  "Something came up at work and I had to deal with it, but don't worry, I'm sure they're fine."

Karen starts to cry, which Claire doesn't know how to deal with right now, so she promises her sister that she'll go and find Zach and Gray immediately and they'll start having good, wholesome family fun.  Just as soon as Claire's people kill the murderous dinosaur currently running rampant through her park. 

Owen seems to have the Control room well in hand--military guys, always posturing--so Claire calls Zara, who tells Claire that she misplaced her nephews, and that's when Claire starts to get worried.  They're fine, she tells herself.  We called everyone back an hour ago, they're fine. 

She calls Zach. 

"--nt Claire?" 

"Zach!"  She says, absurdly grateful.  "Thank god.  Are you back at the resort?" 

"--Claire?"

"Zach," Claire says, loudly and clearly, "Zach, listen to me.  Where are you?  You need to get yourself and your brother back to the resort, okay?  Where are you?"

"--lley," Zach says, garbled.  "--Claire?" 

The phone cuts out.  Claire has worked in this park for almost a decade and she's never, ever had a call drop.  Her stomach plummets. 

"Lowery!" She snaps.  "Are all the gyrospheres out of the Valley?"

"Of course they are," says Lowery, immediately switching the screen over.  "What, you think I can't do my job?  All the 'spheres are--oh."  There's one gyrosphere moving on the map, deep into the Valley. 

Zach and Gray.  Claire dives for Viv's headpiece, but Park Security snaps at her that they've got too much to do already getting people back to the resort and out of the park to chase down one gyrosphere, that they'd get to it when they'd get to it, and Claire feels like crying. 

"Need help?"  Owen says, concerned. 

"My nephews," Claire begins.  "They're still in the Valley.  I don't know why they didn't come back, but I have to go get them--"

"I'll come," Owen says instantly, and Claire's temporarily winded by a momentary rush of affection.  "How old are they?"

"No idea, doesn't matter," Claire says.  "Let's go.  Quickly."

Owen looks at her like she's crazy, but he goes. 

Claire quietly adds him to her list of people who will be receiving houses for Christmas, and prays that her nephews are alright. 

---

Gray wants to go home.  He knew they should've gone back when Jimmy Fallon told them too.  If they had, they wouldn't be stumbling through the jungle, wet and shaking.  They wouldn't be searching the trees for that big dinosaur, waiting for it to show up and kill them.

Gray's mom tells him that he shouldn't brag, but he's something of a dinosaur expert.  He's loved dinosaurs since he was three years old.  He's read dozens of books, watched every movie he could get his hands on, and spent hours reading Dr. Grant's and Dr. Harding's work on the Internet. 

He has no idea what kind of dinosaur attacked him and Zach.  Some kind of saurischian theropod, he thinks, maybe a relative of the Tyrannosaurus, though it had horns like a Carnotaurus and weird arms and hands, and it could open its mouth wide like a snake. 

Gray shivers just remembering it.  He's never been so scared in his life.  If he knew what it was he could tell Zach and they could make a plan to avoid it, but he doesn’t know.  He wants to go home.  They shouldn't have even come to Jurassic World.  They're only here because Mom and Dad are getting divorced and they feel really bad about it. 

Tired and scared, Gray kicks at a clump of dirt.  "How much further?"  He whines.  He hates whining--Zach says it makes him sound like a little baby, and he's not a baby--but this time Zach just ruffles his hair and says, "Not much further, little bro.  We'll find something." 

Gray nods and sticks close to Zach.  He listens hard, but doesn't hear anything.  The theropod that attacked them had been loud.  They would hear it coming, right?  It wouldn't be able to sneak up on them again, not if they were listening for it. 

That'll be my job, Gray decides.  I'll listen for the dinosaur so Zach can find us a way out of this. 

"Look!"  Zach says, and grins.  He points through the dense trees.  Gray squints. 

"I don't see anything," he says. 

"Look closer."

Gray does, squinting, and then he sees it.  There's a building in the middle of the trees, old and crumbling.  It's draped with vines and leaves.  "It's the old visitor center," Gray realizes.  "From the first park."

"Awesome," Zach says, and confidently walks forward, but Gray sees something moving the trees and grabs his brother's arm.  "Dude, what?  We're safe!  We can hide in here for a little while, I'll bet there's like, a radio in there or something--"

"Zach," Gray says softly, "look."

A dinosaur comes prowling out of the jungle, head cocked to the side.  It's maybe six feet tall and at least twice as long.  Its skin is gray and pebbled, like a lizard's, and it has a blue stripe running down its body from its eye sockets to the tip of its powerful balancing tail. 

Saurischian, Gray thinks almost critically, noticing its feet.  The innermost talon on each foot is curved upwards, like a sickle.  Theropoda.  Dromaeosauridae. 

"Stay behind me," Zach says, stepping in front of Gray and holding his arms out. 

"Doesn't matter."  Gray points a shaking finger at the trees.  Another dinosaur comes out, head held close to the ground.  This one is bright green.  Another comes from the other side, its body striped orange and brown, and a fourth comes from behind them, smaller than the others and a duller green. 

The four dromaeosaurids chirp.  They sound like birds.  They all have yellow eyes and three long-clawed fingers on each hand.  The biggest, greenest one hisses. 

"Gray," Zach says, "what kind of dinosaurs are these?  They're not meat-eaters, right?" 

Gray looks at the blue-striped one, and it cocks its head.  Its sickle claw scratches at the ground.  It opens its mouth, revealing dozens of pointy white teeth, and screeches.  The cry is taken up by the other three, rising to a screaming pitch before tapering off, and Gray presses up against his brother, terrified. 

"V-velociraptors," he whispers.  "They're Velociraptors."      

Chapter Text

vii.

Blue is not happy.  There's something wrong in the jungle, and she can't see it or smell it, but she can hear it, and it makes her afraid.  Alpha's been gone from the nest for a long time.  Longer than he's been gone since they left the old den and came here.  She doesn't like it.  Alpha is strong, but the Big One on the other side of the island is wrong.  It smells wrong.  It sounds wrong. 

Blue barks at Delta questioningly.  Her sister is currently perched on top of the den, watching the trees for either Alpha or the Big One.  Delta chirps back.  Nothing. 

Blue paces, grumbling to herself.  Echo doesn’t bother to open her eyes, determinedly soaking up the sun while she can, before dark-hunt-time, but Charlie lifts her head up and hoots.  Blue noses her as she paces past.  Charlie's scent is finally normal again.  She doesn't smell like blood-and-bile anymore, and she's a lot more willing to play games. 

But there will be no games today, not until Alpha gets back.  He will protect them from the Big One.  He will chase it out of their territory.  Blue chitters, telling Charlie to go back to sleep, and keeps patrolling around the den. 

She wants Alpha to return. 

He has been leaving them more and more lately.  Blue doesn't like that either.  If he took one of the pack with him, Blue, Delta, or even Charlie--not Echo, who is no longer allowed near Alpha--Blue wouldn't be worried.  The Alpha protects the pack, but the pack also protects the Alpha.  Their Alpha is strong, but he's strange too.  He doesn't have sharp teeth or claws.  He's fast and smart, but when he's alone he's weaker. 

Blue wants to call to him, but he told them to be quiet before he left.  To sneak and guard the den.  Blue can do that.  She wants to call out to her Alpha and get him to come home, but she doesn't want to disappoint him, so she settles on kicking at the dirt and pacing. 

She can hear the Big One roaring.  It sounds closer now.  Blue hisses. 

Delta, from her perch, barks.  All three of her sisters turn to look up at her. 

Blue chirps.  Danger?

Prey, Delta chirps back.  Trespassers. 

Blue hisses to her pack and they scatter.  Echo and Charlie vanish into the trees.  Delta leaps down and circles around the other side of the den.  Blue conceals herself too, tense, waiting.  She can smell them now.  Prey-things, like Alpha but not.  Young.  Soft.  She can smell their blood underneath their skin. 

Alpha told them to stay hidden, to watch and wait, but these are trespassers.  Those-like-Alpha are noisy and nosy.  They have no respect for the pack's boundaries. 

And anything that is stupid enough--or brave enough--to come into Blue's den is asking to be devoured.  She hisses softly to her sisters.  Wait. 

The two prey-things stumble out of the jungle, reeking like fear.  The little one hides in the bigger one's shadow.  They are unaware of the pack's eyes on them, making loud noises with their mouths and not paying attention to where they're going. 

The bigger one points at the den and makes a loud-happy noise.  Blue growls.  Threat.  Time to end it.  She stalks out of the trees, trusting her sisters to circle around their prey and block off any attempt to escape. 

Both prey-things freeze up, their fear-scents spiking.  They make more noises, and the bigger one steps in front of the smaller one to protect it. 

Delta prowls out of the jungle, head held low.  Echo and Charlie follow her, surrounding the prey-things.  There's not much of them, maybe a few bites each, but they're trespassing and it’s worth the effort to shed blood if it means keeping the den safe. 

Blue opens her jaws and shrieks.  Prey tastes better when it's afraid.  Her sisters take up the cry.  Their tails lash side to side.  They spread their claws.  Blue drops into a crouch and signals to Delta.  The bigger one will be her own kill.  She doesn't care who kills the smaller one, so long as it’s done.  But the bigger one is hers. 

She coils her legs underneath her, judging the distance she needs to spring, and tenses up--

Delta straightens up and barks. Alpha?  Her head's cocked to the side. 

Irritated, Blue turns to listen too, ready to scold Delta for ruining a perfectly good kill-jump, but then she hears it too.  It's distant, over a mile away, but Alpha is calling. 

Alpha is calling for help. 

Blue calls back, high and loud, and swings her head around to all her sisters.  She shrieks at them.  Go go go, Alpha Alpha Alpha, and they all turn as one and run, flashing into the jungle.  The prey-things are small, anyway.  They won't be able to do much damage.  They can be tracked and killed later.

She calls for her Alpha, speeding through the jungle as fast as she can go.  She clears fallen trees in a single leap. She dodges branches.  They bound over a small stream that reeks of the Big One and Blue's calls get louder.  She's concerned. 

They find dead large prey-things, shattered glass, and finally Alpha, standing in the middle of a clearing with another prey-thing at his side.  Blue screeches and runs up to him, nosing him anxiously and sniffing at his hands and his throat. 

He smells alright.  He smells like dirt and old blood and the Big One, but he doesn't smell sick or hurt. 

"Hey, Blue," he coos, hand on her muzzle.  "It's alright, I'm fine."  Most of his noises are nonsense, but then he chitters to her, and she relaxes.  He's alright. 

Satisfied that her Alpha is not going to die, Blue turns her attention to the female prey-thing standing behind him.  Blue recognizes her.  She is white and red, and she smells like the Big One and blood and Alpha.  And fear. 

Blue growls thinly. 

"No," Alpha says, pushing down on Blue's nose.  "You know Claire.  Behave." 

Delta noses the female prey-thing, making hunger-begging noises in her throat.  Echo huffs and proceeds to ignore the prey-thing, nosing around the clearing and sneezing whenever she catches a whiff of the Big One's scent.  Charlie tries to slip past Blue and receive pets; Blue snaps at her warningly and noses Alpha's throat. 

She was worried.  Alpha makes reassuring noises, telling Blue that he's alright, and points at Claire.  He whistles sharply to get their attention, and Blue knows that this is important. 

"Claire," he says, pointing at the female.  "Not prey."  He adds another whistle, the no-hunt call.  "Not prey.  Understand?"

Blue looks between Alpha and the female.  Alpha's scent has changed.  Blue cautiously noses the female, who before has only been near the pack on the other side of the Fence, and therefore not able to hurt Alpha or to be eaten.  She doesn't smell particularly dangerous.  She smells afraid, but not terrified. 

And she smells like Alpha. 

Blue understands. 

"Claire," Alpha says again, firmly. 

Alpha-mate, Blue agrees, and huffs, nosing the female's hand.  Delta hoots delightedly.  Alpha and his mate have not mated yet, but they are courting.  Blue isn't sure this is a good time to mate and bring eggs into the den, not with the Big One refusing to respect territories, but Alpha always does things strangely. 

She sizes up his mate.  She's smaller than Alpha, and frailer.  Blue will watch their courtship.  If she decides that this female is not good enough to join the pack, she'll challenge her, but for now Blue is content to accept her into their pack. 

She barks an order at her sisters.  Alpha-mate is not prey. 

"Good girl," Alpha praises.  He pulls something out of his pocket wrapped in cloth and whistles lowly.  Pay attention.   Hunt-time. 

Blue goes still.  Alpha unfolds the cloth and holds it out to her.  In the middle is a small black device that she's seen other prey-things use around the old den.  They make noises into it and it makes noises back.  Very strange.  She had chewed on Alpha's when she was younger. 

Alpha clicks in the back of his throat.  Obligingly, Blue leans forward and sniffs it, pulling different smells into her mouth and sorting them.  Mud-earth, large-hard-tailed-prey, and--

The bigger prey-thing from the den.  Blue huffs. 

Her sisters all take a sniff, circling Alpha and Alpha-mate impatiently.  This will be an easy hunt. 

Alpha whistles a question.  Ready? 

Blue hoots back.  Ready. 

Go, whistles Alpha, and Blue does.

---

"Are you sure your raptors aren't going to eat my nephews?" Claire says doubtfully, watching the four animals pick their way through the undergrowth, looking over their shoulders every now and then to make sure Claire and Owen were still following. 

"They won't," Owen promises, and grins.  "They'll wait for me to eat first."

Claire smacks his arm.  "That's not funny," she scolds. 

Owen chuckles.  "They're not gonna eat the kids.  I've tried very hard to each them that humans aren't food.  Delta might go for one, but you're here."

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"She likes you," Owen explains.  "So she's gonna show off for a few minutes before she even thinks about killing anything.  She'll want you to tell her how pretty and smart she is."

"That's... weird," Claire finally decides on, but she's smiling.  Delta looks over her shoulder and hoots at Claire.  She doesn't notice that she's walking right at a tree until she smacks into it and stumbles back, squawking. 

The other three raptors make low hissing sounds that Claire suddenly, intuitively understands as laughter.  They're laughing at their sister.

"Delta's more avian that the rest of them," Owen says.  "Great green macaw, actually.  She wants everyone to tell her that she's a pretty, pretty birdy, doesn't she?"

Delta grumbles and swipes moodily at one of her sisters before getting back on track. 

"That's adorable," Claire says, and she doesn't bother hiding the fact that she's grinning openly.  She's exhausted and terrified and sad--she has Apatosaurus blood on her hands, under her nails, and the Indominus is out and it's killing, and her nephews are missing, god, what is she going to do if one of them gets hurt--but this, the trees, Owen, the raptors moving ahead of them, this doesn't seem so bad.  This makes everything else seem almost bearable. 

She's struck by the ridiculously teenage impulse to hold Owen's hand, and ignores it.  Nephews first.  Indominus next. A shower after, and then maybe she'll invite Owen out for coffee, assuming that he doesn't melt back into the jungle like fucking Tarzan. 

Owen grins at her widely and they keep going, sidestepping trees and branches, following four waving tails. 

"Wait a minute," Owen says, "I know where we are."

Blue looks over her shoulder and chirps. 

Out of the jungle, a building unfolds itself.  It takes Claire a minute to place it.  It's covered in dirt and vines, the stones worn down, the familiar structure blunted and warped by twenty-three years of rotting in the jungle. 

"The old Visitor Center?"

"Home sweet home," Owen says.  "Blue?"  He whistles.  The raptor hoots back and disappears into the building with her sisters.  After a minute, she barks.  "Well, shit," says Owen, and leads Claire inside. 

"You've been living here?"  Claire can see signs of habitation now.  There are three nests made up of dirt and leaves and old t-shirts piled around the ground, a few chewed bones scattered here and there.  Up a set of alarmingly rickety stairs is another nest, this one made up of old sweatshirts and t-shirts. 

"Charlie and I sleep up there," Owen says, catching her horrified expression.  "Hey, don't judge.  These are some nice digs.  I spent the first week sleeping in a wet cave.  This is the Ritz compared to that."

"Uh huh," says Claire. 

From farther in, Blue barks again, impatiently. 

"Shit, my nephews," Claire mutters, and jogs through the old place, careful not to trip.  Blue's calls lead them to a garage.  There are ancient Jeeps and golf carts and dusty, dirty merchandise lying strewn everywhere, and her nephews on top of a Jeep, brandishing sticks at four very interested, playful raptors. 

Zach takes a swing at Delta, who hisses and jumps at him. 

"Delta!  On me," Owen snaps, adding a commanding whistle.  The biggest raptor looks at Owen and Claire and then back at the boys.  She grumbles, but hops back down off the Jeep and trots over to Owen's side.  He repeats the whistle and the remaining raptors trot over to him, casting curious glances at Zach and Gray.

"Aunt Claire!"  Gray cries, and he smiles.  He doesn't leave the top of the Jeep, though. 

"You don't have to worry about the raptors," Claire promises.  "They're okay.  They're not going to hurt you."

"You sure?"  Zach shoots back, pulling Gray farther behind him.  "'Cause they look an awful lot like they're thinking about it." 

The raptors mill around Claire and Owen, nosing Owen's throat and Claire's hands.  They're definitely murder machines, but right now Claire thinks they look more like overgrown, scaly kittens.  She's sure she'd feel differently if she'd just been treed by them, but the raptors are really, really low on her list of things to worry about right now. 

"These the right kids?"  Owen asks. 

"These are my nephews," Claire says, and crosses the room to get to them.  Gray practically jumps into her arms, hugging her tightly.  Zach doesn't get down off the Jeep, but he lowers the stick.  "Gray and Zach.  Guys, this is Mr. Owen Grady.  He's a dinosaur handler for the park.  He works with the Velociraptors."

Owen waves.  "Girls, say hello," he says, and grins.  The raptors all hoot and chitter at the boys, then go back to rooting around the garage, sniffing at everything.  They've determined that there's no food in the room to eat. 

"That's so cool!"  Gray doesn't let go of Claire, but he's watching Owen with interest. 

"What are you doing in here?"  Claire asks.  "You should've gone back to the park.  There's a problem."

"A big, hungry problem," Zach mutters, finally climbing down off the hood of the car.  "Yeah, we know.  We met it." 

"Tough kids," Owen says, scratching Blue's nose.  When Owen and Claire had stumbled on the ruined gyrosphere, found Zach's phone, and followed the tracks to the edge of the water, Claire had thought they'd died.  Owen assured her that they were fine, but her panic hadn't abated until Owen put the girls on the trail. 

Zach looks pleased.  "We're trying to fix the Jeep," he says.  "We figured we could get out of here faster in it that on foot.  And we didn't wanna run into those again."

"The raptors?"  Claire asks, confused. 

Zach and Gray both nod.  "They were gonna kill us earlier," Zach says, "but then they ran off."

"They live here," Owen says, but he looks troubled.  "This is their den.  They just wanted you to leave." 

Claire hugs Gray a little tighter.  She wants to hug Zach too, but she's not sure how to go about doing that.  "They're not going to hurt you now.  It's okay.  We're going to get back to the resort, and--"

Delta barks.  She stands straight up, rising over Owen's head, and barks again, shortly. 

"Shit," says Owen, "everybody get down--" and then the Indominus comes through the roof, bellowing.  Claire grabs Zach with one hand, Gray with the other, and throws them all behind the Jeep.  Teeth scrape against the hood of the Jeep and wet, stinking breath fills the garage.  The raptors shriek and scatter. 

"Owen!"  Claire shouts.  She pushes the boys down farther into the floor; the Indominus snaps its jaws uselessly inches above their heads, but can't get down far enough to reach them.  "Owen, are you okay?"

"We're good!"  Owen shouts.  The Indominus draws her head back, shaking it, and bellows again, trying to determine the best way to reach them.  The raptors shriek, furious. 

We're going to die, Claire realizes.  The Indominus backs up, considering the raptors.  All four of them ring around Owen defensively, hissing and snarling up at the larger dinosaur.  A chill worms its way into Claire's heart.  It's part raptor.  Does that mean it can understand them?

Owen must have the same idea, because he looks at Claire with a bad decision written all over his face, shrugs as if to say I'm sorry, and cups his hands around his mouth. 

"Don't you dare--" Claire starts,but it's too late.  Owen makes a scraping call in the back of his throat.  The Indominus hesitates.  All of the raptors swing their heads to look at their Alpha, confused.  Blue repeats the call, higher, almost like a question. 

The Indominus drops her head, claws curling over the edge of the shattered roof, and dives for Owen. 

Owen runs.  The raptors follow him out of the garage and the five of them weave between the Indominus' legs, barking and calling at her.  The Indominus howls, enraged, and pulls her head out of the garage to snap at them. 

"Maybe think about running now!"  Owen shouts, and takes off into the trees.  The Indominus is too big to turn after them fast enough, but gives chase anyway, lumbering off after them.  Claire listens with baited breath; the roaring and shrieking doesn't let up, but she doesn't hear Owen screaming. 

"Okay, we need to go," she says, helping Gray to his feet.  Zach shakes himself off, pale underneath all of the dirt on his face. "We need to go now.  I don't know what his plan is, but he can't outrun the Indominus forever." 

"We're," Gray starts, stammering, "we're, uh.  We're fixing the Jeep."

Claire looks at the ancient thing, smeared with dirt and oil, and back at her nephews.  She raises an eyebrow.  "You can do that?" 

Zach and Gray trade glances.  Gray grins. 

Five minutes later, they're bouncing through the jungle, worry gnawing at Claire's gut.  She hopes Owen's okay.  He has to be.  He's outlived murder lizards for this long.  He's fine, Claire tells herself. 

"What's that?"  Gray points to a dark shape moving through the sky.  The heavy thud of helicopter blades rattles Claire's teeth.

I didn't think we had any pilots on the island, she thinks, watching the chopper swing out over the jungle.  "What are they--?"

Gunfire shatters the air, a muzzle flashing up on the chopper's right side.  The chopper banks sharply.  Something very large howls. 

"They shooting at it!"  Zach crows.  Sure enough, farther down the fringe of jungle, maybe half a mile away, the Indominus bursts out of the tree line, shaking vigorously.  The chopper follows it, machine gun thumping away. 

Please let Owen be okay, Claire thinks. 

She drives the Jeep away from the chopper, following the tree line.  She figures that if they can skirt the wreckage in Gyrosphere Valley--avoiding not only the Indominus but all of its victims, too--they can get onto the main road and be back in the resort in less than half an hour.  Then she can stow her nephews away safely were nothing can ever hurt them again, call for military backup, and put the Indominus down for good. 

"Is that your friend?"  Gray asks, and points again. 

Owen comes out of the trees behind them, settled deep into the seat of his bike, pack running at his side.  Claire grins.  "Yes," she says, "yes it is."  She slows down enough for Owen to catch up.  Delta shoves her nose in the backseat and whuffs, then sneezes all over Zach and pulls out. 

"You okay?"  Claire shouts. 

Owen holds a thumb up and grins.  He's absolutely filthy and the cut on his forehead has opened again, but other than that he looks alright.  "Remind me to buy whoever's piloting that chopper a beer sometime," he yells back.  "Indy's a lot smarter than I wanted her to be.  I wouldn't have lasted much longer." 

"I will," Claire says.  She scans the sky, looking for the helicopter.  She frowns.  "Where'd it go?"

In the distance, black smoke rises against the blue sky, followed by a living cloud of winged, sharp-beaked shapes.

---

Claire watches the cloud of pterosaurssweep down over the resort and feels like crying.  She watches them rise back up into the sky, most of them with empty talons, some with backpacks and hats and other small things, but others with squirming, wriggling, kicking shapes that can only be people.

"Almost there," Owen shouts.  He's still riding right beside the Jeep, raptors swarming around him.  The cut on his forehead has stopped bleeding.

"Aunt Claire, where are we going?" Gray asks.  He's watching the cloud of pterosaurs too, and while she has trouble reading Owen sometimes, she doesn't have a problem with Gray.  He's scared. 

"We have to go back to the resort," Claire says. 

Gray points at the mess in the sky, growing larger with every mile Claire forces the ancient Jeep over.  "Towards that?" 

"Yeah," Claire says.  "Don't worry, okay?  Owen and I will keep you safe.  We won't let anything happen to you, now that you're with us."

From the backseat, Zach snorts.  Claire does not roll her eyes.  They're teenagers, she tells herself.  Teenagers who have been chased by murder machines and cornered by Velociraptors.  It's okay if they have an attitude. 

"You’re a dinosaur handler, right?"  Gray points to Owen, who half-smiles and waves.  The raptors follow his line of sight.  Delta chirps at Claire. 

"Yes," she says.  "He’s the head of the raptor training program.  And those are his girls.  They'll help him protect you."

"They wanted to eat us!"  Zach says. 

"But they didn't," Claire points out.  "Owen?  He's been living with them--by himself, with nobody around to make sure the raptors don't eat him--for almost six months.  They listen to him."

"Is he the alpha?" Gray asks curiously.

"I--yes.  How'd you know that?" 

Gray grins. "That's awesome!  Dr. Grant wrote a book about Velociraptor pack dynamics.  He said that they lived in packs like wolves, with an alpha."  Then he frowns.  "But the alpha in wolf packs is usually the parent."

"Owen raised the raptors," Claire says.  "I don't know how it works exactly, but they think that he is their parent.  And he's spent their whole lives training with them, so they trust him."

"That's awesome!"  Gray looks like he's about ready to climb over the seat and tell Owen so himself, so Claire gently pushes him back down. 

"He's who I wanted you to meet this morning," she says.  "I'm sure he'd be happy to talk to you, once we take care of everything."

Zach snorts again.  Claire closes her eyes and counts backwards from ten. 

They rumble up towards one of the walls that separates the resort from the enclosures.  There are two security guards on top, and they've got their weapons pointed at the raptors, who voice their displeasure. 

Owen scratches Blue's nose and looks to Claire. 

"Hey!  You know who I am?"  She calls. 

One of the guards squints down at her.  "Director Dearing?"  He says. 

"I need you to let me through.  I need to get to Control."

"Ma'am, all due respect, those are Velociraptors." 

Delta and one of the others--Claire thinks it's Echo, who is apparently an unmitigated asshole--hiss up at the guards helpfully. 

"I know what they are," Claire says.  "And they won't be coming in with us. Mr. Grady?"

Owen obligingly whistles.  The raptors look at him, back up at the guards, and chirp before shooting back off across the grass.  "I told them to hide and keep an eye out for the Indominus," he explains.  "If they start screaming, radio me."

The guards nod and, satisfied, open the gate.  Claire feels a weight lift off her chest the second they're through.  She found her nephews and now they're safe.  Well, safer.  The pterosaurs are wreaking bloody havoc.  Claire can hear the screaming as she coaxes the Jeep down the service paths behind the enclosures. 

Beside them, Owen looks grim.  "Leave that here," he says.  "We might need to make a quick getaway." 

They leave the Jeep and Owen's bike stashed in a dusty old pathway that used to lead to the trike enclosure before they were moved into the Valley.  They take the rest of the trip at a quick walk, Owen with his gun in his hands and Zach and Gray behind their aunt. 

The boardwalk is a mess.  Pterosaurs dive bomb the seething, screaming crowd, sharp beaks and teeth sinking into people.  Some of them are big enough to carry a full-grown man off the ground and twenty, thirty, forty feet into the air.  The man drops, and Claire flinches. 

"Where's Control?"  Owen bellows. 

"On the other side of the lagoon!"  Claire bellows back. 

Owen nods.  "Stay close to me!" 

Gray clings to her hand and even Zach crowds a little closer, eyes on the diving, swooping dinosaurs. 

We're never going to open up again, Claire realizes, watching the carnage.  The Indominus is rampaging its way through the north side of the island and the winged dinosaurs are killing her guests.  Everything's out of control. 

Maybe it was never in control in the first place.  Claire thinks that Dr. Malcolm is full of shit--he's the kind of asshole she hated in college--but maybe he does have a point.  Maybe a system like this was never meant to work.

Claire doesn't have time for an existential crisis.  She has two nephews to stash away safely and a park full of people to evacuate.  She keeps her eyes on Owen's back and inches through the crowd. 

"Hey," Zach shouts, "look out!" 

Claire instinctively ducks, but Owen doesn't.  He half-turns, gun rising, and catches a Dimorphodon in the face.  It hits him hard enough to bowl him over and he goes down, shouting in pain.

"Aunt Claire!"  Gray cries. 

Claire casts around for something--anything--that she can use as a weapon.  She grabs somebody's abandoned tranq gun, reverses the grip, and brings the butt of it down on the pterosaur's head.  It shrieks, rising up off of Owen's chest, just enough for him to grab his rifle and shoot it three times. 

The dinosaur squawks, surprised, and topples off of him. 

"Are you alright?"  Claire asks, pulling Owen to his feet.  He's looking at her strangely, something moving behind his eyes. 

"You just--" he says, and then makes a decision.  He closes the space between them, puts a hand on the back of her head, and kisses her. 

His lips are dry and chapped and his mouth tastes like blood, but his hands are warm and his lips are warm and his eyelashes flutter against her cheek.  She can feel his heartbeat under hands.  Claire kisses him back for what feels like minutes but it probably only a few seconds (he's hot, but she still has a crisis to solve) and when they pull apart, Owen grins at her. 

"Nice," says Zach appreciatively.

"Not bad," Claire agrees, and she's thinking about kissing Owen again, dinosaurs be damned, when her phone goes off.

Owen sighs. 

"Dearing," says Claire, and she's never been more annoyed with her phone in her life.  She thinks that she could get very used to kissing Owen. 

"Claire," says Viv, and she sounds garbled and tremulous, like she's been crying.  "Claire, you need to get back here.  Mr. Masrani--Mr. Masrani--"

And Claire thinks of the helicopter that crashed into the Aviary.  She thinks of Simon promising her that he'd do whatever he could to help. 

Her heart breaks.  "Viv," she says, feeling something hot pricking at the back of her eyes.  "Open the service tunnels and get the guests down below.  I'm on the way." 

--- 

For the first time since Claire started working here nearly eight years ago, the Control Room is dark.  All of her staff's gone, replaced by creepily stone-faced military guys in camo jackets and berets.  There are guns everywhere. 

Only Lowery and Viv have stayed, and they both sag with relief when they spot her.  Vic Hoskins, who's lording over the dark room like she knew he would be, turns and grins. 

"Oh, there you are," he says.  He sounds almost cheerful.  Claire's blood boils in her veins.  Doesn't he know what's happening out there? There are now twenty thousand hurt, terrified people stuck on this island, and Hoskins is grinning like a cat that ate the canary. 

(Claire suddenly and ferociously identifies with Delta.) 

"Mr. Hoskins," Claire says, clipped, "what the hell do you think you're doing?"

"We were startin' to think you were dead, Director."  This is the first time Hoskins has ever called her Director, and he does it with a lightly, mockingly.  He's saying, this mess happened on your watch, little girl.  Now stand aside and let me take care of it. 

"Well, I'm not," she growls.  "Now if you'll excuse me--"

Claire feels more than sees Owen come up behind her, stopping just short of her left shoulder.  He's breathing hard. 

"Wow, Aunt Claire, is this where you work?"  Gray rushes into Control after Owen, followed at a more reasonable pace by his brother.  "Cool."

Claire glares at Owen, who shrugs.  "What was I supposed to do, leave them?"

"And it's our favorite dinosaur whisperer too!"  Hoskins claps his hands together, grinning widely.  "You look like you've both been through the wringer.  Raptors finally turn on you?"

"No," Owen says, voice flat.  "A forty-foot genetic freak took exception to our existence.  Seen her?  Big, white, murderous, all InGen's fuckin' fault?"

"Not in front of my nephews, please," Claire says reflexively.  Her mind whirls, trying to figure out a way to solve this.  On her good days, Claire thrives on problems.  She thrives on being the one to come up with a solution and get all of the various parts and pieces of Jurassic World working smoothly, and she's good at it. 

But today has been absolutely fucking terrible, and her head hurts, and she's exhausted and still shaking from their encounter with the pterosaurs.  She's not on top of her game, and she feels like it's forgivable. 

"We can hash out our philosophical disagreements later, Grady.  Stand down.  I'll take it from here."

"You absolutely will not," Claire snaps.  "You stand down.  You've got no authority to be here.  Viv, Lowery, call the rest of the staff back.  We'll evacuate the guests in the morning.  Have you started moving everyone underground?"

"Everyone's in the tunnels, yeah," Lowery says, at the exact moment that Hoskins says, "Hate to break it to you, darlin', but this is now an InGen operation.  I've got boots on the ground and more incoming."

"You can't do that!  This isn't InGen's park." Claire stalks forward, shaking with barely-restrained fury.  "I don't know who you think you are, or what you think you're doing, but Jurassic World is the property of Masrani Global."

"Is it?"  Hoskins seems unfazed.  "The dinosaurs are InGen's.  The research that built this place is InGen's.  Jurassic Park was John Hammond's.  Your boy Simon only got it because the old man went soft in his old age." 

"This isn't Jurassic Park," Claire bites off, and takes a steadying breath.  "And I'm not going to let InGen run it into the ground like they ran the first park into the ground.  You people ruin everything.  The San Diego Incident?  The exterminations on Isla Sorna?  This?  They're going to call it the Indominus Incident, you know.  All because you greedy morons couldn't resist the temptation to play pin the tail on the goddamn cytosine!" 

"Hey now, I seem to remember you bein' real eager to boost your profit margin," Hoskins says, getting angry now.

"I okayed Project Ares because I was told to," Claire says.  "And I continued to allow it, despite repeated problems and warning signs, because you, Dr. Wu, and Simon all assured me that it would work out.

"And," she admits, stealing a quick glance at Owen, "because I thought that I was in control of the situation.  I thought it was something I could fix.  I was wrong, and that's on me.

"But you knew what was in the Indominus, didn't you?" 

Hoskins' face goes still and blank. 

Owen hisses between his teeth.  "He knew," he murmurs.  "Hell, he probably ordered it himself.  The raptor project wasn't giving him the result he wanted, so he decided to go over my head--over your head--and get something else.  Right, Vic?" 

Hoskins doesn't seem bothered by Owen's accusations, or his tone of voice, but Claire shifts farther in front of Owen anyway.  She's genuinely concerned he might fall on Hoskins and rip him to pieces.  Not that that would be a bad thing--it would certainly be satisfying--but Claire's nephews are in the room and they've seen enough bloodshed today. 

"Lowery, why don't you take the boys and get something to eat?"  She says tightly.  "If there's nothing in the break room, I have five pounds of trail mix hidden under my desk."

Lowery, for once, doesn't have anything smart to say.  "Hi, kids," he mutters.  "C'mon, let's let these guys duke it out, yeah?  How old are you, anyway?"

Zach and Gray trail him out of Control, looking over their shoulders at Claire and Owen.  Claire gives Gray a small wave. 

"Do you have any idea how many lives the Indominus could save?"  Hoskins asks quietly.  "Yeah, this one's big, but if we sized 'em down?  Made 'em even smaller than your raptors?  They'd be miracle workers out in the field.  A rex's bloodlust and a raptor's intelligence?  They'd be unstoppable.  A pack of four or five of them could wipe out an entire squadron of the other guys."

"You can't control them!"  Owen spits.  "They're not perfect little killing machines that you can just turn loose whenever you want.  They're thinking animals.  They're self-aware.  They're not tame." 

"I agree with Mr. Grady's assessment," Claire says.  "Project Ares is being terminated, Mr. Hoskins.  All of it.  I'll have Henry erase the data and terminate any embryos."

"You can't do that," says Hoskins.  "I told you.  Project Ares is InGen's property.  You don't work for InGen."

Claire draws herself up to her full height. "I work for Masrani Global," she says.  "And InGen does its work on Masrani Global's property, under Masrani Global's protection, for Masrani Global's interests, and with Masrani Global's financial support.  As of this moment, I am terminating Masrani Global's relationship with InGen.  You may inform Ms. Murphy that I am willing to renegotiate our relationship, but only if Project Ares is terminated."

"And if you're fired," Owen adds helpfully.

That's a win-win any way Claire looks at it, so she nods.  "And if you're fired," she agrees. 

A thundercloud comes over Hoskins' face.  "I don't know what power you think you have, sister," he says, "but you don't have any here.  Simon Masrani's dead. The Board thinks you're dead too.  And all of your employees have been evacuated."

Over Hoskins' shoulder, Claire watches Viv hold up her phone.  A little red record button flashes.  The timer's been running for almost two minutes. 

"So?"  She says.

"So," Hoskins says, like he's talking to a dog, "the only people on this island now are my people.  And more are comin'.  We'll take care of your little problem for you, Director, and then we'll be the heroes who put down the Indominus rex, and you'll be the fuck-ups that let it out."

God damn the pride of men, Claire thinks.  She's keenly aware of the fact that she, Owen, and Viv are alone in a room full of jarheads, all of whom are theoretically loyal to Hoskins and no one else. 

"But hey," says Hoskins, hands spread wide, "I'm not an unreasonable guy. You wanna solve this?  Maybe salvage your precious park?  Win some good press?"  He points to Owen.  "Hunt it down."

Owen stills and Claire's eyes widen.  "Absolutely not," they say together. 

"No," Claire says. 

"Fuck no," Owen growls. 

"Why not?  Scared, Grady?  You've done all kinds of hunts with your girls by now, haven't you?  You afraid Indy's gonna be too much for 'em?  Or," and Hoskins' expression turns sly and knowing, "are you scared they'll turn on you at last?"

Owen closes his mouth with an audible click. 

"See," Hoskins continues, "you and your friend Barry liked to give me the runaround, but I'm not an idiot.  Raptors respect strength, right?  Dominance.  Power."

"That's not even remote--" Owen begins, voice low and dark, but Hoskins ignores him. 

"I know you're a pussy, Grady, but c'mon.  Being scared that a dinosaur's gonna unseat you as top dog?  That's just sad." 

Claire lays a hand on Owen's shoulder.  "Mr. Hoskins, that's quite enough," she says.

"Listen, sweetheart, why don't you just go find your kiddies and wait for your boyfriend here to save the day, okay?  Because I gotta be honest with you, I'm about tired of hearing your--"

There are two steps between Claire and Hoskins, and she's across them so fast he doesn't have time to throw up an arm.   She slaps him so hard the room falls silent.  Every head turns around to stare.  Hoskins brings a hand up to his cheek, more astonished than hurt, but hurt all the same.  Blood wells up from between his fingers.  Claire can feel it under her nails. 

"Well," Hoskins drawls, "will you look at that?  Kitty's got claws, huh, boys?" 

The room remains very, very quiet.

"Tell you what," Hoskins says.  "I won't have you arrested for assaulting a military officer, because I'm a nice guy and yeah, I deserved that.   But if I see you in this room again, I will have you arrested, and left on this shithole of an island while the rest of us go on our merry way, yeah?  And as for you," and he turns back to Owen, "I guess I wasn't clear.

"The United States military is coming out of Fort Lauderdale with warheads, son.  Their orders are to kill anything that's outside the fences.  Their primary targets are the Indominus rex and four very hard to catch Velociraptors.  If they can't find the animals, they're gonna burn the island down."

"Unless," says Owen, bitterly.

Hoskins grins.  "Unless," he says, "I give 'em the all-clear and send 'em home.  If the Indominus is dead and the raptors back in containment, what's there for them to kill?  We already got most of the pterosaurs." 

"Owen," Claire says urgently, "you don't have to do it.  Hoskins is bluffing, I just have to get Masrani Global on the phone--"

"You want her alive or dead?" 

"Don't matter to me," says Hoskins.  "If you don't have the stomach for the killing, we'll do it for you.  We need her contained, at least.  And then your raptors locked away."

"And you won't kill them?"

"Scout's honor," Hoskins says, and raises three fingers. 

Owen's face is blank.  Claire can't read him anymore.  "Owen," she tries, but Owen's already turning on his heel and stalking out of the control room. 

"You've got three hours, Grady!"  Hoskins calls after him, and smiles at Claire.  "Now, are you gonna follow your boyfriend there or am I gonna have the pleasure of having you thrown out?"

"Viv," Claire says, thinking, All men are useless, I swear to fucking god, why does no one listen to me?  "Let's go find Lowery, okay?"

Viv nods, and together they leave Control and Hoskins standing there, smiling. 

---

Owen's not a coward.  He doesn't think he's particularly brave--stupid, sure, but not brave--but he knows that he's not a coward.  He's never been afraid to step up and do what needs doing.  It's one of the reasons why his discharge wasn't dishonorable.  Nobody could find fault with his performance, with his mentality, with his courage. 

(Just with his attitude, but that's a different story.)

He can't help but thinking, though, riding out across the Valley with the sun setting and the girls running beside him, that this is a very, very bad idea.  Every muscle in his body is straining to run the other direction and never look back.  You're gonna die, his instincts are telling him.  You fucking idiot. 

But he doesn't turn around and hisses soothingly at the girls when they cry to him, picking up on his distress.  He orders them to keep following the scent, and they do. 

(He doesn't turn around and run back to Claire, either.  He wants to, but he doesn't.  She's probably going to kill him if the Indominus doesn't.  It'd be a good way to die, though.  Better than this.  Man, he's getting morbid.)

The Valley is empty.  All of the herbivores that survived the Indominus' first rampage are either hiding or loose in the park.  A few lonely pterosaurs pick at carcasses, but they don't bother the hunting pack.  Velociraptors can take down a pterosaur, wings or not.  Velociraptors can take down anything. 

When Owen finds the Indominus, the sun's sunk down below the trees and left behind a thin strip of orange light.  The sky is dark and thick with smoke.  And the Indominus is waiting for them at the top of a hill, her white hide turned red and bloody.  A dead Gallimimus hangs from her mouth.  When she spots them, she bellows. 

The raptors hiss. 

She's still a half-mile away, so Owen whistles tightly.  Sneak-sneak, he says, and cuts the bike. 

Delta, Charlie, and Echo speed off into the grass, disappearing into the dark.  Blue alone stays.  Owen dismounts and presses a hand to her forehead.  He scratches her eye ridges and makes soothing noises in his throat. 

Why does this feel so wrong?  

The Indominus comes towards them at speed, her massive weight making the ground jump and tremble underneath him.  She catches Owen's scent and screams.  She remembers him. 

"Blue," says Owen, and repeats the sneak call.  Blue growls and Owen does it again, and again, until she gets the message and backs off, vanishing into the grass with her sisters.  "Man, this is gonna fucking suck," he mutters. 

Ideally, Owen would like to bring the Indominus into the pack.  Part of him--the part that held Blue in his hands, the part that carried her in his pockets, the part that snuck her bits meat and fruit and gummy bears when she caught a cold--knows that the Indominus has been alone her whole life.  She's been afraid and cut off from a pack, from parents, from anything that could teach her what she is and how she fits into the world.  She's still an adolescent.  She could learn, theoretically.  Everyone said that it was impossible to train Velociraptors and Owen did it.  He can train the Indominus, too. 

But the rest of him, the soldier, the scientist, the rest of him understands that he can't.  She's killed too many people.  She's too dangerous.  After the pterosaurs got out and started mauling guests, Jurassic World's foreclosure was a given, but if the Indominus is still alive when everyone gets off the island, they'll firebomb it to kill her.  They'll kill everything else to make sure that she's dead. 

They’ll kill the raptors. 

When she's fifty feet away, Owen raises his gun and fires.  A twelve-gage shotgun can tear a hole out of a man the size of a grapefruit.  On the Indominus, it rips a dark, shining line down the junction of her shoulder and her throat and doesn't do a damn thing to stop her. 

Owen fires again smoothly, the sound crackling across the Valley, gunpowder burning his hands, the muzzle flash a brief burst of light and smoke.  The second shot catches the Indominus in the snout.  She shrieks in pain and fury and turns aside, swiping at Owen, but he's already ducking back in the grass. 

The larger dinosaur turns around, not nearly as agile as Owen's girls, bleeding and confused, and screams. 

Owen whistles, high and commanding. 

With a shriek that could raise the dead, Blue comes bursting out of the grass, makes a fifteen-foot leap up onto the Indominus' back, and starts savaging at her neck. 

Delta and Echo bounce up to join the fray, clawing and biting, and Charlie rushes to Owen's side.  She yowls at the Indominus challengingly, tail lashing. 

The Indominus shakes herself vigorously and the girls topple off her back landing in heaps and indignant squawks.  The larger carnivore bellows and swipes her tail; Echo goes flying back twenty feet and Blue and Delta vanish, ducking to avoid getting clobbered. 

Owen reloads, takes aim, and fires. 

The shell buries itself in the Indominus' broad chest.  Doesn't slow her down a fucking inch. 

If I don't die, I'm gonna kick Henry's ass, Owen thinks sourly as he takes aim and fires again.  The beauty of a twelve-gage is that if you're within fifty feet, your target's gonna hurt.  This shot tears into the Indominus' arm and she howls. 

Owen's got a pocket full of shotgun shells and four vicious, pissed-off, screaming raptors on his side.  As long as he can stay out of the Indominus' reach, he should be fine. 

The familiar feelings of hunt and bloodlust well up in Owen's chest, flood up his spine and down to the tips of his fingers.  He finds himself snarling softly, baring his teeth, sinking deeper into a crouch.  The world narrows and sharpens down to the bare essentials; the Indominus' claws, the willingness of the pack, the weight of the gun in his hands. 

Owen reloads and fires again. 

(A secret about Owen Grady that he'll never admit to anyone for as long as he's alive; it wasn't the raptors that made him this way.  Everybody thinks that he's the way he is--wild, unsociable, prone to showing all of his teeth--because he works with predators, but the truth is much, much simpler. 

Masrani chose Owen for the job because Owen was already wild.)

Blue and Delta shriek, snapping at the Indominus, dancing around her, taking advantage of their speed and agility to confuse her.  Every time they dance in and out of her terrible reach, they come back with wet jaws and bloody claws.  Echo and Charlie ring around Owen, screaming insults.  Owen fires and this bullet catches the Indominus in the face; one of her eyes bursts like an overripe watermelon, blood and viscous fluid splattering the grass. 

The Indominus staggers back, screaming so loud that Owen's ears feel stuffed full and the hair on the back of his neck rises.  The girls wail in pain.  The Indominus draws herself up to her full height, clawing at her face, still screaming. 

She's almost twenty feet high at the hip.  When she rises up, tail flattening the grass, throws her head back, and bellows, she stands at least thirty-five feet high.  Her horns and spines flash in the weak sun.  Her claws are almost as long as Owen is. 

Owen feels something shift, and dread begins to churn in his gut. 

The Indominus, one eye gone, blood running down her face, drops down to all fours, looks right at Owen, and barks. 

It's lower than the sounds his girls make.  Deeper, more resonant.  The sound slides right between Owen's ribs and into his chest.  It makes his heart beat faster and his breath catch in his throat.

It is a challenging call. 

Owen's girls fall silent. 

This is what Owen didn't want to happen.  He didn't know if it would--an animal raised without pack dynamics shouldn't know how they work, the first packs were proof of that.  The Indominus shouldn't know about challenges and alphas.  It shouldn't know to demand a place in the pack. 

But all along the Indominus has known things it shouldn’t.  How to trick humans, how to fool thermosensors.  This afternoon when they were trying to distract it, it caught on to their games and strategies almost as fast as Owen could call them out.  This isn't any different. 

Owen has two options.  He can fight and die, or he can run and die.  It's one or the other.  He's not an idiot.  If he runs, the girls will stay with the Indominus.  They remember weakness.  He'll lose them forever.  And if he fights--

He's just one guy.  The Indominus is more than he can handle on his own. 

The Indominus barks again, rising up off her front legs to demonstrate for him, flexing her claws and lashing her tail.  She hisses. 

From the grass, Echo hisses back.   Owen makes a snap decision, shoves two shells into the shotgun, raises it to his shoulder, and fires twice, as fast as he can squeeze them off.  The Indominus, moving faster than Owen even thought it could, ducks until she's pressed almost flat against the ground and surges forward. 

Owen has the common sense to jump, so she doesn't bite his legs off at the knee, and lands gracelessly on her broad muzzle.  He drags himself out of her reach as quickly as he can, but it's not enough.  She wraps one hand--and there's the spino dexterity, he thinks distantly, as he's dragged off her muzzle--around him and tosses him aside. 

He hits the ground twenty feet away and hard enough to crack a rib.  The world spins.  He can't get any air into his lungs. 

Through the dark and his swimming vision, Owen watches the Indominus toss her head back and shriek in triumph.  He watches Echo and Delta go to her side.  He watches Charlie duck her head submissively, backing out of the Indominus' way as she prowls towards Owen. 

Challengers do not leave their rival alive, he remembers Dr. Grant telling him, once and long ago.  The victor will kill the defeated.  

He watches Blue stand between the Indominus and himself, head slung low.  Blue calls up at the bigger animal, a questioning call that ends in a high, begging trill. 

The Indominus roars. 

And Blue, Owen's favorite, his beta, his oldest and smartest and most loyal raptor, steps out of the way. 

With shaking fingers, Owen loads the shotgun one more time.  He staggers to his feet.  He can taste blood in his mouth.  His ears ring.  He aims. 

"Blue," he growls, in as deep and commanding a voice as he can muster, "stand down." 

Blue cocks her head.  Her sickle toe taps against the ground.  The Indominus bellows and goes in for the kill, obscuring Blue from view, and Owen fires. 

The Indominus twists to avoid the blow, just like Owen knew she would, and he turns and runs. 

He doesn't have a chance of outrunning them, but he does have a chance of getting to his bike.  He forgets to breathe.  He forgets to think.  He forgets everything but how to pump his legs and swing up onto his old motorcycle, how to start the ignition with shaking fingers and twist the accelerator and go. 

The pack screams in disapproval.  They give chase, but the Indominus tops out at thirty-five miles an hour and the girls lose steam at fifty.  Blue, because she's the beta, tries hardest.  She runs fastest. 

Her teeth graze Owen's leg, pain sparking up his spine, but he kicks her hard enough that the bike wobbles and she drops back, screaming after him. 

Owen accelerates, going fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour.  The wind tears at his face and blood drips down his chin, fills his boot.  The night air behind him is filled with the Indominus roaring, triumphant, and the sounds of the pack mourning for their father.        

Chapter Text

viii.

Night falls fast and thick over the park, and Owen doesn't come back.  Claire's not some anxious war wife waiting for her husband to come back, and she's not in the habit of standing around wringing her hands when there's work to be done anyway, but she is worried.  There are people to move underground, nephews to reassure, rescue efforts to coordinate.  She keeps busy.  She doesn't think about the fact that Owen doesn't come back, and doesn't come back, and then he's there, leaning against the doorway into the Innovation Center, bloody and with heartbreak written across his face. 

"Aunt Claire?"  Gray says, sounding unsteady. 

"Shit."  Claire rushes to prop Owen up.  He's heavy and Claire can feel his heart hammering through his ribs.  "Owen, what happened?  Are you okay?"

"I'm okay," says Owen, and he's very clearly not.  He's left a bloody trail leading out into the boardwalk and he's leaning heavily on Claire, breath labored. 

"Did the Indominus...?" 

"She won, yeah."  Owen's expression wavers, like he wants to shut down but can't quite manage it.  "The raptors are hers now."

Claire should panic--she's considering it very hard--but if she panics and Owen's like this, they're all going to die, so she swallows it and says, firmly, "Zach, there should be a first aid kit behind the Stegosaurus display.  Could you get it, please?" 

"Uh," says Zach, looking around. 

Gray huffs.  "C'mon," he mutters.  "I'll show you."

Claire lets Owen lean on her, huffing and wheezing, as she guides him towards one of the benches in front of the hatchery.  The lab is dark now, all the eggs pulled back into the depths of the lab.  Hoskins' people have been removing scientists for a few hours now.  Claire hasn't let them take any eggs, but she's sure some have disappeared into coat pockets and briefcases.  A problem for another time. 

Her current problem hisses in pain as he, with Claire's help, eases down onto the bench. 

"You got away," Claire says softly, and presses a hand to Owen's forehead.  "You're alive."  Owen's mouth twists, bitter. 

"Hoskins is gonna kill them," he says thickly.  "They chose her.  He'll kill them."

Claire doesn't know what to say.  She doesn't really understand Owen.  She didn't before and she doesn't now.  All of his months in the wild have made him even more strange and difficult to understand. 

She's also never had kids.  She's never really wanted them or felt the urge to parent. 

The Velociraptors aren't Owen's children, not really.  He raised them, and he loves them, but they're not human children.  They have claws and teeth and bloodlust.  Everyone's been saying for years that they'd turn on him eventually, because that's what predators do.  But Claire's not sure that matters to Owen much. 

"What do you need?"  She asks, because she doesn't know what else to offer.  Gray reappears at her elbow, holding a first aid kit to his chest. 

Owen smiles tiredly.  "Blue got me pretty good.  Pretty sure I've got a couple of cracked ribs, but there's not really anything I can do about that here.  I need a compress bandage and some painkillers, if there are any."

"Got the bandage," Claire says, riffling through the kit.  "No painkillers.  There's some whiskey in the security office downstairs, though." 

Owen debates with himself for a minute.  "Good enough.  We wanna get the kids down there anyway."

"Why?"  Gray asks. 

Owen looks the kid up and down.  "The raptors are coming," he says. 

They get to the security office very, very quickly.  Zach puts himself in front of Gray and looks around every corner.  Claire holds Owen up until he can slap the bandage on a truly nasty-looking wound on his leg. 

"Can they get in here?"  Claire asks.  "All the doors are closed."

"Doors aren't really a problem for raptors," Owen mutters, examining the bandage.  "It's why we use gates.  Some of the doors in here don't have handles or have electronic locks, like here, but not all of them do." 

Aside from Hoskins' crew, Claire, Owen, Zach, and Gray are the only ones in the building.  Owen's still bleeding. 

"They're comin' for me," Owen says, catching Claire's train of thought.  "I can go, the bike's outside, I can lead them away--"

"No."

"Claire," Owen begins, but she's not in the mood to hear it. 

"We stick together," she says.  "If we split up, we're easier to pick off.  Together, we've got a chance."

All three of them look at her, doubt and fear written across their faces.  Claire takes a deep breath. 

"Look," she says.  "Owen, you know more about raptors than anyone alive.  Gray, you're a tiny genius.  I know the park, and Zach's quick on his feet.  We can--"

"Kill them?"  Owen asks, wry. 

"No," says Claire.  "Grant wrote that raptors--any dinosaur--is really hard to kill if you don't have heavy weaponry, and we have a rifle, a cell phone, and some Band-Aids.  But we can trap them, right?" 

Owen blinks. 

"There's tons of stuff lying around we can use," Gray pipes up.  "Raptors are smart, but we're smarter.

"Well," says Owen, "we've got nothing else to try, so why not?  I might have an idea."

---

They set up traps very, very quickly, each of them trying not to think about the sharp-toothed death rapidly approaching.  They're not calling to each other--they don't want to spoil the hunt, Owen told them grimly--but they're coming. 

Within the hour, Claire thinks they're about as ready as they'll ever be.  The building is empty except for them--she doesn't know where Hoskins' people cleared off to and she doesn't really care--and Owen's blood has been dropped and dripped in complicated trails throughout the building. 

"Indy's gonna stay outside," Owen said.  "She can't get in here, the building's too well-built.  The girls will try and flush us out to her."

"So what do we do?"  Claire had asked. 

"Stay in the building," said Owen, and got ready. 

They'd stashed the boys in the security office, locked the door, and gone up into the catwalks to wait. 

Claire's not not afraid--she does want to live, if only to maul Henry Wu--but beside Owen, high up in the service rafters above the main atrium, she's not terrified either.  Owen is warm and solid and just on the right side of feral, perched like a hunting bird, broad shoulders mantled, eyes trained on the darkened floor below. 

Claire has a knife in one hand and a radio in her back pocket. 

After a while, Owen whispers, so quietly it's little more than a ghost of breath against Claire's ear, "They're here." 

Out of the darkness, four Velociraptors emerge.  Claire's blood chills.  She didn't hear them come in.  The door to the outside didn't lock, but it had been closed.  Their eyes gleam yellow. 

The cast around, sniffing at the blood trails, and seem to consult each other.  Claire holds as still as she can.  If the raptors find them, they'll never get them into the traps. 

Finally, Blue whistles and prowls off in one direction, taking the smallest raptor with her.  The other two--Delta and Echo--peel off after an adjacent blood trail. 

Owen waits for half a minute, tense, and then motions to Claire.  They inch back into the service door and follow the web of catwalks through the building.  The service catwalks don't go everywhere, just the areas that guests can see and need state-of-the-art lighting and projection equipment, but it should be enough. 

Should be. 

Owen's first and strongest blood trail will lead Blue on a merry, complicated chase through the building.  She'll follow the freshest scent, Owen had explained, because she was the beta and it was her job to take care of threats. 

"You're a threat now?"  Claire had said, having difficulty reconciling the image of Owen with raptors nuzzling at his hands and his throat will being a threat, something to be hunted and removed. 

Owen had only shrugged. 

Now, Claire follows him to the leftmost edge of the catwalk, which dead-ends out over the hatchery. 

When Simon had built the Innovation Center, he built it with miles of glass.  Transparency, he said, would both impress the guests and keep everyone honest. 

Claire catches a flash of motion across the hall from the hatchery, green scales moving past the open doorway into one of the smaller sub-labs pressed up against the hatchery.

Owen taps a finger against her wrist.  Get ready.

Claire pulls her radio out of her skirt.  Ready, she mouths. 

Owen nods, cups his hands around his mouth, and barks. 

The reaction is immediate.  Delta and Echo swing back around, appearing in the lab doorway.  They cast around, clicking to each other. 

Owen barks again, and waves. 

Delta sees him first.  She shrieks, teeth bared, and charges into the room, Echo on her heels. 

Delta's problem, Owen's told Claire more than once, is that she has maybe too much bird DNA spliced into her code.  This makes her chattery, proud, liable to show off, and, interestingly enough, unable to tell glass apart from empty air. 

She leaps straight into the thick glass separating the room she's in from the hatchery.  The glass shudders and Delta topples backwards, landing gracelessly on top of Echo.  Both raptors get tangled up in each other, Delta's leg pinning down Echo's tail, Echo's claws jammed under Delta's snout, and Claire says, "Now!" into the radio. 

The door, one of the few electronic doors in the whole center, whooshes shut and the power lock engages. 

"Did it work?"  Gray asks, tinny over the walkie-talkie. 

Claire smiles.  Delta and Echo manage to disentangle themselves, snapping at each other, and they both rush towards the door.  Their claws scrabble at it.  The door stays shut.  "Yeah," she says, nudging Owen, "it worked.  Two down." 

Gray cheers.  Echo leaves Delta to fight with the door and prowls over to the glass window.  She locks eyes with Owen, draws herself up to her full height, and barks three short, staccato barks. 

The sound echoes in the quiet.  From the depths of the building, another raptor barks back. 

"Time to move," Owen says.  "That's Blue.  Let's go."

Now for the hard part. 

Blue is Owen's smartest raptor.  His oldest and cleverest girl.  There's a reason she's held her position over her sisters for so long. 

Together, Owen and Claire dart across the catwalk and back into the main atrium. 

"You know what to do?"  Owen asks. 

It's a shitty plan, and Claire doesn't see how it's going to end well, but she knows what to do.  She nods grimly.  Owen gives her a crooked smile, a kiss on the cheek, and turns back around, disappearing into the service door. 

Claire takes up a position by the biggest projector and gets ready. 

After a minute, Blue and Charlie come speeding into the atrium, claws extended, both of them nearly black in the dim lighting. 

Claire takes a deep breath and turns on the projector.

The projectors they have on the ground can create a full-scale hologram of any of Jurassic World's terrestrial species.  The ones they have in the ceiling can, during special showings, create full-scale holograms of Jurassic World's airborne species. 

A full-sized Pteranodon seems to burst from thin air, taking wing and surging down towards the ground. 

Blue shrieks a warning and dives out of the way.  Charlie bolts in the opposite direction, hooting in fear.  During the show, the hologram repeatedly dives at the audience below.  Kids love it. Raptors, apparently, do not.  The Pteranodon makes its second pass, swooping down so low it almost skims the ground, before it rises back up and flickers as the image changes from projector to projector. 

Howling, Blue leaps at it, but she misses and lands, following its progress with her claws spread and her tail lashing. 

She--and Charlie, who's cowering in the corner, always skittish, always nervous--doesn’t see Owen slip silently from a half-concealed service door behind Charlie, holding a length of industrial-strength chain. 

The Pteranodon makes another pass, rushing past Blue, and she turns to follow it. 

Owen makes his move. 

Charlie's not much bigger than he is, he'd explained, and she's been weak and sick for months.  She doesn't stand a chance. 

Owen wraps the chain, one end already fastened into a rough noose, around her neck and pulls.

Charlie squawks and her whole body jerks back.  She stumbles, tries to turn around to slash at Owen, but he's already dancing back out of her reach.  He hooks the other end of the chain around the iron- and steel-welded bones of the Apatosaurus, anchoring Charlie there, and rushes back into the shadows. 

Blue's attention is torn between the hologram, her screaming sister, and Owen.  The Pteranodon makes its final pass and Blue leaps; she falls right through it and lands on all fours, huffing in surprise.  She watches the hologram fly up critically, decides it's not a threat, and focuses all of her attention on Owen. 

Owen comes prowling out of the shadows, head slung low, the rifle across his back and a knife in one hand.  He curls his lip at Blue, showing her all of his teeth.  "Now, Claire," he calls, keeping his eyes fixed on Blue.  Blue hisses. 

Even though he can't see her, Claire nods.  It takes her a second to find the right switch.  Down below, Owen and Blue are circling each other, feinting and posturing.  Blue shrieks and flashes all of her teeth, flexes her claws, and Owen hisses, darting in and out of her reach. 

"Now!"  She shouts, and throws the switch. 

Light floods the Innovation Center.  Claire screws her eyes shut and she hears the raptors shriek in surprise and pain.  There's a crash down below, a raptor scream and a human yell, and Claire opens her eyes, wincing at the light. 

She looks down in time to see Owen charge Blue and tackle her to the ground. 

---

He wasn't ever going to trap Blue.  She knows him too well.   The other girls had weaknesses he could exploit, Delta's bird brain, Charlie's fear, but Blue's too smart to trap this easily, and too pissed off to go down without a fight. 

On the upside, if he can beat her, she'll be his again.  On the downside, she's a three hundred pound Velociraptor, strong and healthy, and he's got a bum ankle and broken ribs. 

Claire, bless her, does her job beautifully.  The lights come on all at once, sharp and piercing, and Blue jerks back instinctively with a noise of pain. 

She's the most diurnal of his girls, and her night vision's the shittiest.  It takes her forever to adjust to changes in light.  She reels back, shaking her head, and Owen makes his move. 

He gathers all of his strength and explodes forward, drops his shoulder, and body-slams into Blue.  She goes down.  She's not fast enough to slide out from underneath him before he gets one arm around her neck and the blade of his knife, sharper than any raptor's teeth, into her shoulder. 

Blue yowls and kicks up instinctively.  Her sickle claw grazes past Owen's belly, shredding his shirt but missing skin.  She turns her head back and forth, snapping at him, and writhes. 

He twists the knife.  She saw Owen beat Echo, and she knows his game.  She knows that if she wants to win, she has to get away from him.  Owen doesn't intend to let her, but then what he intends and Blue does has always been a point of contention between them. 

With a twist that can break the neck of a Gallimimus, Blue tosses Owen over her shoulder.  The knife pops out and Owen just manages to hang onto it.  He lands hard on his back, the breath leaving his body with a whump. 

Blue regains her feet and shrieks. 

Owen climbs back up to his, significantly more unsteady than she is, and shakes himself.  His vision darkens around the edges. 

Blue shrieks again and bobs her head aggressively. 

Owen blinks. 

She's acknowledging him as a challenger.  She thinks he wants to be the beta.  She looks fucking pissed about it too, but at least now she's not going to try and run him outside into the waiting jaws of her new best friend. 

Blue feints and comes in from the left, teeth bared.  Smart girl.  He's right handed, and she knows it.  Owen pulls all of his limbs out of her reach, turns on his heel--fucking ow--and plunges the knife into Blue's right shoulder, throws all of his weight behind it, and drags the knife downwards. 

Warm blood bubbles up over his hands and he growls before he can stop himself, pushing the knife in to the bone.  Blue screams, trying to pull away, but Owen wraps his other hand around the back of her head, braces his good leg against the ground, his bad against her side, and pulls. 

Blue either has to fall with him or risk breaking her neck.

She falls, cut to the bone, and lands heavily.  She lashes out with her sickle claw again and this time it does make contact, opening a six-inch gash down Owen's side, but it's shallow and he's deep in the bloodlust now.  He barely feels it. 

Blue's right arm is useless now, dangling limply underneath her.  She rolls again and Owen lets her go, backing up to give her space.  He's growling, low and continuous.  Bright blood smears across the floor.  This time, it's Blue's turn to get up unsteadily, pain making her slow. 

Owen stomps forward, alpha written into the set of his shoulders.  Submit. 

Blue hisses, drops her head, and charges at him. 

It's an uncoordinated move, lacking the raptors' usual grace and poise, but it's fucking effective.  Blue slams into Owen like a freight train. The knife spins out of his hand and clatters to the ground a good distance away.  She knows it’s his fangs, his claws; she'll never let him near it. 

Owen twists and manages to land on his better side, but can't do anything to stop Blue from sinking her teeth into the meat of his arm and her claws into his chest.  They're so close she can't use her sickle claws, which is the only reason Owen doesn't die. 

Agony bursts behind his eyelids.  He dimly hears yelling, Charlie shrieking, Blue snarling around the meat of his arm--

And then Blue lets go. 

She jerks back, an angry hiss torn out of her throat, and then Claire is standing over Owen, a short length of iron filament in her hand and fury across her face. 

Blue shakes her head, blood dripping from her jaws, and hisses.  She looks between Owen and Claire. 

"Thanks," Owen manages--words are difficult right now, all he wants to do is snarl--and manages to get back up.  Pain hits him in waves, but he can stand, and Blue's wary now, not sure how to handle Owen and Claire together. 

"Don't mention it," says Claire.  "Where do you need me?"

"Don't let her bite me again," Owen says, and lunges. 

Blue, because she's brave, and beautiful, and dedicated to the last, leaps to meet him.  Owen ducks underneath her, sliding under the arc of her jump, and launches himself onto her back with everything he's got left. 

They land heavily, Blue's powerful hind legs taking most of the impact, and she manages to stay upright, swinging her neck around to bite at him, but Claire's there with her iron and she clocks Blue hard along her jaw.  Blue's head snaps back, and Owen throws his weight forward. 

They overbalance, and go down again. 

Owen jams his good hand under Blue's jaw, holding tight.  He shoves his elbow on top of her throat and angles his body so that he's pinning her shoulders down.  She kicks uselessly, but she can't get the purchase she needs to dislodge him. 

She's pinned. 

She goes still underneath him.  She's beaten, and she knows it. 

Claire presses the knife back into Owen's hands.  He has Blue's throat at his mercy.  He could ram it up underneath the base of her skull.  Shove it under the soft skin of her underjaw and let her bleed out. 

Blue's his firstborn.  His favorite girl.  She watches him with one yellow eye, just as bright and intelligent as it was the day she was born, and he makes a decision.  Carefully, he pulls the knife away from her throat and makes a soft sound in his throat. 

Blue breathes. 

He makes the noise again, some cross between a croon and a warbling coo, a noise he's made a hundred times for her, for the others.  Remember me?  He’s trying to say.  I'm your father.  I'm your alpha. 

And Blue, as Owen backs off, makes a curious, tentative peep. 

Owen gets off of her and stands between her and Claire.  He makes the noise again, and holds out his hand.  His fingers are slick with blood, his and hers, but Blue comes to him anyway.  She looks at him, then out towards the door, towards the boardwalk and the Indominus.  She looks back at Owen, huffs, and presses her nose to his fingertips. 

Owen grins. 

"Uh," Claire says. 

"Good girl," Owen praises, running his hands down the side of Blue's face.  She lets him, tail flicking.  Her arm's a mess.  Owen's sure he's a mess too, but he doesn't really care, because Blue is his again.  She's not going to try and eat him, and she's not going to get killed by Hoskins. 

"What just happened?"  Claire asks.  Behind her Charlie, still tied up, hoots, like she's asking the same thing. 

"Go see your sister," Owen says hoarsely.  Blue noses his hands, snorts at Claire, and does, nuzzling Charlie and twisting her head around to examine her own injuries. 

"What did you do?"

"We challenged her for dominance, and won," Owen says.  He catalogues his injuries.  His ribs hurt like hell, and his arm is swelling up already, but it's nothing fatal.  The gash on his side bleeds sluggishly. 

"We?"

Owen can't help but grin.  Endorphins are kicking in, dulling some of the pain.  "We," he agrees.  "You helped, which means now you're the co-alpha." 

Claire raises an eyebrow.  She's smeared with dirt and sweat and blood.  She looks like she wants nothing more than to sleep for two straight weeks.  Owen thinks that he might adore her, just a little. 

It's not just anybody who's got the guts to stand up to a rampaging Velociraptor, let alone win.

"Welcome to the pack," says Owen.  He prods his bitten arm.  "Ow."

"If you--we--are the alphas, they won't attack us, right?"

"Right," Owen says.  He feels like he's walking on sunshine, or something equally ridiculous.  He's probably lost more blood than he thought.  "They might challenge us one day, but they've had so much upheaval that they're just gonna want to let someone else take charge for a while.  Right, Blue?"

Blue chatters.  She doesn't seem to particularly mind her useless arm, tucking it close to her chest.  She head butts Charlie, who makes a plaintive sound at Owen.

"I got you, pretty girl."  With Claire's help--Owen's arm is also pretty much useless--he unties Charlie and lets her nuzzle against him, anxiously reassuring her alpha of her devotion. 

"Go ahead and get Zach and Gray," Owen says, a raptor on either side.  "I'll go get Charlie and Delta.  With the girls and a fast-ish car, we can get out of here and take the Indominus somewhere else."

Claire, to her credit, doesn't say, "And do what with it?"  She looks Owen up and down.  She looks at Blue and Charlie.  She doesn't ask, "How are we going to kill it?"

She says, "I have an idea." 

---

This is, without a doubt, the stupidest thing Claire's ever done.  This is insane.  This is absolutely, completely, totally batshit insane, and it's the best option that they have. 

She doesn't take her nephews.  She tells them to stay in the security office until she or Owen comes to get them, because the last thing she needs is to get her nephews killed.  She hugs Gray and hugs Zach and tells them that they're very brave, then she grabs a road flare out of the first aid kid and goes to meet Owen. 

All four raptors are out in the atrium now, milling around their alpha.  At Blue's barked demand, they all to go Claire and very delicately nuzzle up against her hands and throat.  She's not really a fan of having them so close to her, but Owen seems to think it's necessary, so she allows it. 

Delta chirps. 

"She'd almost had the glass broken when I showed up," Owen says.  He's taken the opportunity to wrap what's left of his vest around the ugly wound on his arm.  His shirt is ripped and bloodstained, but he's flushed, vibrant, and ready.  "So, what's this idea of yours?"

Claire takes a deep breath and tells Owen. 

They argue about it for a few minutes, but then they hear the Indominus roar somewhere outside and come to an agreement very quickly.  Owen's bike is outside.  Claire's in pretty good shape, and the distance isn't so great that it's insurmountable.  Rexy is old, anyway.  She's going to clock out at about fifteen miles per hour, max, especially in the dark. 

Owen's going to go first. 

He shows her which calls to use, which signals the girls will respond to, and leaves Charlie and Delta with her.  He takes Blue and Echo, because they're the fastest, dashes outside, and shoots the Indominus twice with his rifle. 

For a second, Claire thinks that it's going to take the raptors again. It beat Owen once before, after all.  But Blue and Echo perform perfectly, leaping at the Indominus, biting at its heels, and dashing off with Owen as he swings himself up onto his bike and goes, heading for a blinking red light in the distance. 

Claire, Delta and Charlie at her side, takes a deep breath and walks out into the boardwalk. 

Everything is dark and tattered.  The boardwalk is completely silent.  Claire can hear the Indominus screaming in the distance, the raptors calling, the fading hum of Owen's bike, and then nothing. 

She takes a deep breath, steadying herself, and makes her way out past ruined storefronts and overturned tables.  At her sides, Delta and Charlie keep pace, scanning for threats. 

We can do this, she thinks.  We can do this. 

None of them see the .50 caliber shoulder-mounted gun until it flashes, and then Charlie just isn't there anymore. 

Blood mists over Claire's face and hair and clothes.  Delta shrieks in surprise.  And Charlie twitches once, her legs kicking, and then she goes still.  There is a hole the size of a grapefruit torn out of her chest, and Claire knows that she's dead. 

She spins around, searching wildly for the threat. 

Vic fucking Hoskins emerges from the shadows, a man with a huge gun propped up on his shoulder at his side. 

Delta stiffens. 

"Hoskins," Claire says, fury bubbling in her throat, "what the fuck?" 

"I told Grady that I was gonna put the raptors down if he couldn't make them useful," Hoskins says, lightly.  He's not at all bothered by the fact that Charlie wasn't doing anything or that she was standing two feet from Claire.  Delta hisses, lowly.  "Now stand aside, Ms. Dearing." 

"No," says Claire, stepping in front of Delta.  "Hoskins, we don't have time for this, we need to get to Rexy, and we need to kill the Indominus--"

"The military is on its way," Hoskins says comfortably.  "The Indominus will be dead by morning.  It's a shame we have to scrap the project, but there's always next time, right?"

"Next time?" 

Taking Claire's fury as permission, Delta darts out from behind her faster than she thought was possible.  She lunges, first at the man with the gun, barreling him over and dipping her head down to worry his throat, and then at Hoskins. 

Her muzzle is wed and dark.  The man with the gun doesn't get up again. 

Delta advances on Hoskins, claws outstretched. 

Dimly, Claire remembers Owen telling her that Delta hates Hoskins.  Delta snarls. 

"Whoa, easy, girl."  For the first time since she's known him, Hoskins sounds afraid.  "Easy, easy.  Dearing?  Dearing, you wanna call this thing off?"

But Claire's frozen.  Charlie's dead on the ground behind her.  "Delta," she tries, but it's too late.  "Delta, no--"

Delta surges forward in one smooth, terrible motion, and lays into Hoskins.  Blood flies.  Hoskins screams and screams and then he doesn't, cut abruptly, terribly silent. 

"Delta!"  Claire manages, finally remembering the sharp whistle that Owen said will call a raptor off its kill. 

Delta looks up, a bit of intestine hanging from her mouth, and chirps.  Claire's stomach rolls.  She whistles again, trying to sound as commanding as possible, and Delta comes, stepping off Hoskins' body.

"We've got other things to do," Claire says, and swallows her disgust, her fear, and goes to Paddock Nine. 

She calls Lowery.  "You're still in Control, right?"

"Uh, yeah?  Are you okay?  Claire, it's radio silence, what's--"

"Shut up.  I need you to open Paddock Nine."

"I--what?"

"Open," says Claire, slowly and clearly, "Paddock Nine."

"But that’s--"

"I know what it is," Claire snaps.  "I need it opened.  C'mon, Lowery.  Trust me."

Lowery goes quiet, but the great door that keeps the Tyrannosaurus rex, the oldest dinosaur in Jurassic World, inside starts to creak open. 

Claire lights her flare. 

Later, Zara and Viv will show her news footage of this security tape, Claire standing there in front of the gate with a flare burning in one hand and a raptor at her side.  At the moment, though, all Claire can see is Rexy's eyes, her teeth.  All she can feel is the terrible weight of her shaking the ground.  All she can hear is the roar and the blood pumping in her ears. 

Claire turns, terror pounding in her chest, and runs. 

She cannot run at fifteen miles an hour.  She just can't.  She's in high heels and she's bone-tired, but she has Delta to circle around and confuse Rexy, to slow her down, and all she has to do is keep running. 

Delta shrieks and cries.  The T-rex thunders.  The flare shoots off sparks that burn Claire's hands and her legs and her skirt. 

The first thing Simon Masrani built on Isla Nublar was a cell phone tower.  More have sprung up over the years, but they've been having problems, lately, juggling the growing communications networks and the influx of guests.  About a year ago, Claire greenlit a project to build a new communications tower.  As of now, it's half-done and functioning, and the old tower's been blown apart. Behind the tower is a pit, deep and full of all kinds of broken bits of metal, where they're eventually going to put a Liopleuradon, and it's so deep that not even the Indominus will ever be able to climb out again. 

They just have to get her in it. 

Claire runs.  It's half a mile from the boardwalk to the communications tower.  A five-minute run, tops. 

Claire makes it there in two, and she has time to see, by the light of the flare and the light from the top of the tower, Owen and Blue and Echo fighting with the Indominus, dancing around it, slashing at its feet. 

She lobs the flare with everything she's got and it sails in a neat arc to land at the Indominus' feet.  "Get clear!"  Claire shouts, and dives to the side. 

Owen and the raptors scatter. 

Rexy, following the flare, barrels straight into the Indominus.  The two titans right themselves, roar, and face off.  Rexy's bigger but the Indominus is meaner.  One eye is gone, a mess of black blood, but the other is enraged. 

Blood flies and splatters.  Claire stays where she is, panting.  Adrenaline makes her shake and jerk.  Owen limps quickly to her.  He whistles at the girls, and they join in, leaping from the tower struts and the rex to land on the Indominus and tear at her back and neck.  She roars, outraged, and tosses one of them off of her.   The raptor lands and doesn't get up.  The remaining two keep at her, distracting her so that she can't fend off Rexy. 

"They know what to do," Owen says, watching the fight.  And they do.  They're herding the Indominus to the very edge of the pit where the old tower stood.  She's hanging over empty space. The raptors on her back savage her one more time, then jump free.  

The Indominus tilts her head back to catch one in the air, jaws open impossibly wide, and then Rexy surges forward and catches her by the throat. 

The Indominus screams a gurgling scream, blood dripping down the sides of her mouth.  She scrabbles at Rexy, her claws sharp and shredding, but Rexy has a hold on her now.  There's nothing the Indominus can do to make her let go. 

Rexy presses forward, shoving at the Indominus until there's nowhere for her to go but out.  She slips down the sides of the pit trying to hold on, but gravity works against her. 

She drags against Rexy's teeth in her throat, screams again, and dies. 

Rexy lets her go, pulling away a chuck of white flesh and meat, and the Indominus falls, limp and dead, into the darkness below. 

For a second, everything and everyone is quiet.  Then Rexy tosses her head back, blood streaming and steaming up from her many wounds, and roars. 

Owen flops down in the dirt next to Claire and presses his forehead against her shoulder.  The raptors, who are not fond of Rexy in the slightest, dash over to their fallen companion, nudge her up--it's Echo, Claire notices, and she's moving stiffly and dizzily--to her feet, shriek insults at Rexy, and run off into the trees. 

"Where are they going?"  Claire asks. 

Owen makes a noncommittal noise and doesn't lift his head.  "Home, probably.  That's their territory.  Rexy won't follow them into it." 

Claire tucks her nose into the crown of Owen's head for a minute, letting the warmth and the solidness of him calm her down, and says, "Moment's over, Raptor Whisperer.  Come on.  Let's go find my nephews and get you cleaned up.  Evac's at first light tomorrow." 

Owen groans.  "Don't you ever stop micromanaging?"

She smiles briefly.  "No," she says.  "Now move."  Later, she's going to have to tell him that Charlie's dead.  He might know already--there are only three raptors in the woods now--but she'll have to tell him what happened and how senseless it was and how much it hurts, surprisingly. 

But right now, they won.  The Indominus is dead.  They're alive.  Tomorrow they'll get on a boat to Costa Rica and lose their jobs and spend the next couple of years fielding questions about how everything went wrong, how they tried to stop it, the company's future plans, et cetera.  Tonight, they're alive. 

"Yeah, yeah, whatever." But Owen's smiling too, and together they limp back towards the Innovation Center, leaning on each other all the way. 

---

The hangar on the coast is cramped and hot, but Claire has Zach and Gray tucked up against her and the reassuring sounds of people around her, and she's alive and they're alive and Owen's alive, so she figures she can put up with some discomfort for a while.  Her hands haven't stopped shaking.  She keeps seeing the rex in her mind's eye, feeling her stamp and shake the ground. 

She cannot believe that they all made it out. 

Zara called Claire twenty minutes ago from Puntarenas, sobbing.  She'd been evacuated with the rest of the Control Room staff and hadn't known who all was alive or dead until Claire picked up the phone. 

No one's seen Owen, but that's not surprising.  He'd wandered off sometime after Claire had patched him up and she'd told him about Charlie. She thinks, irrationally, that maybe he's gone off to bury her. 

She hasn't heard from Lowery either, or Viv, or whoever's now in charge of Masrani Global.  Simon's sister Kala, maybe, or his nephew Ari.  She knows that Viv will have uploaded that conversation she and Owen had with Hoskins to the Internet at large, but she hasn't heard any fallout.  Cell service is spotty, though, what with the dinosaur fight that wrecked half the new tower. 

"Aunt Claire," Gray says sleepily, raising his head up off her leg.  "Is that Mom?" 

Across the room, Claire's sister spots her sons and comes running, hand flying to her mouth.  Claire lets them go.  All three of them collide in the middle of the hangar, hugging each other and whispering.  Karen's crying. 

"You're okay," she says, and throws her arms around Claire's neck.  "I was so worried, we heard on the news that people were dying and nobody knew where you were, and--"

Claire hugs Karen tightly and lets her babble.  It's nice to let her older sister fuss over her every once and a while. 

"Where are you going to go?"  Karen finally asks, pulling back.  She touches one of Claire's bruises lightly.  "We heard they're closing down the park.  For now, at least." 

"I have no idea," Claire says honestly.  "I don't know."  She's not concerned about that, either.  She's sure that she's still technically employed by Masrani Corp, but after everything she finds that she doesn't really care.  She wants a shower and a nap and to spend time with her sister and her nephews somewhere that she's not going to die. 

(Or she wants Owen.  She hasn't decided, yet.) 

"Well," Karen says, pulling her sons into a hug, one in each arm, "you're welcome to stay with us until you figure it out." 

"Thank you," Claire says, and means it.  She hates Minnesota, but it might be nice to spend a few days on Karen's couch.  They can make cookies and celebrate a very weird Christmas.  And she can shoot Karen's husband dirty looks over the turkey, which is a plus. 

They stay together, catching up, Zach and Gray talking a mile a minute about the Indominus and how badass Claire had been, coming up with the plan to take it down, running against the T-rex and luring them both to the cell tower, where they were able to finally kill it.  Karen alternates between indulging her sons and shooting Claire increasingly alarmed glances. 

Finally, the ships arrive and FEMA staff usher them all out into the open.  People glance around nervously, but there are so few pterosaurs left now that they don't dare dive down and try to pick a human out of the crowd.  They wheel in the distance, content to watch.  Somewhere on the island, Rexy roars.  Claire, because while she's on Isla Nublar's soil she's still the Director, waits to get on the ship last, shaking hands and murmuring softly to frightened, exhausted guests. 

There are only a few people left when Claire catches a flash of movement at the edge of the trees, and smiles.  

Owen leans against a tree, bad leg propped up against his other knee, arms crossed over his chest.  He smiles when he sees Claire.  A new bandage is taped to his forehead and around his bitten arm.  He's still pale, and he looks exhausted, but he's steady enough when Claire crosses the distance and hugs him.  He's clean, for once in his life.  He hugs Claire back, resting his chin on top of her head for a moment. 

"You leaving?"  He asks. 

"My sister came," Claire says.  "She's going to let me crash on her couch until Masrani Corp sends me somewhere else.   What about you?  Where are you going?"

Owen cocks his head to the side, eyes glittering.  "I'm not goin' anywhere," he says.  "Me and some of the other handlers--Sam, Barry, all of the Valley crew--we're gonna stay.  Found 'em out in the Valley this morning trying to calm the trikes down.  Someone's gotta take care of the animals until you convince InGen not to carpet bomb us all." 

Claire sighs.  She's not surprised, somehow.  "And you think that I'm a workaholic," she mutters.

Owen grins and shrugs.  From the trees, there's a soft chirp. 

"Blue?"  Claire says. 

Blue slinks out of the shadows, coming to stand behind Owen.  She chirps again, softly, and Claire can see the other two remaining raptors moving too, milling around, waiting for their Alpha to turn and join them.

"Yeah, well," says Owen.  "So.  If you ever get tired of your sister's couch.  I have a cave floor?  It's not much, but the view's great.  You wouldn't be bored." 

Claire grins despite herself.  "Yeah?"

Owen nods, shoves his hands in his pockets.  Delta comes out of the trees to circle Claire impatiently, nosing her hands for treats.  Someone on the boat sees the raptor and screams.  "We'll be here," he says. 

Claire smiles.  "I know."  She looks back at the boat.  She can't see her family, but she knows they're there.  "If some of my staff is staying behind," she finds herself saying, not looking at Owen, "I probably shouldn't leave either, don't you think?  It doesn't seem fair."

"No one's gonna complain if you leave," says Owen, but he's fighting a hopeful smile.  Delta noses Claire again.  Blue grumbles in the back of her throat.  "Though if you stay, you might wanna get some better shoes."

Claire grins fiercely.  She looks back at the boat one more time.  She still has her phone.  Karen wouldn't have to worry.  She could come home for Easter.  Karen is reliable above all else; she'll always be there when Claire's ready to go home. 

Besides, she thinks she's earned a vacation. 

"I think I'll manage," she says, scratching Delta's shoulder.  Owen laughs. 

"If you say so.  Ready?" 

"Ready," says Claire waves goodbye to whoever might be watching on the boat, turns on her heel, and runs.