Various locations
all within five klicks of one another
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AMELIA WOKE up, spitting blood.
Her head rang with a fuzziness that blurred the edges of her vision, and her shoulders shook through joint pain as she coughed up the red that stained the earth in front of her. Amelia squinted, her muted groan only intensifying the stabbing in her skull.
Ground ... Solid ground ... Her eyes shot open as she struggled to her knees, the burst of despairing energy cut short by the cutting of cords into her wrists and ankles. I'm alive! But ... where am I?
The realization came as swiftly as the temporary buzz of energy, and she slumped as a dark pit formed in her stomach. Looking swiftly around, over her sweat-stained and curling hair, she recognized the familiar TimePods and mounds that made up the Tanycolagreus nests.
It felt like a vice was slowly crushing her skull. Everything hurt, and Amelia shut her eyes like a toddler throwing a tantrum, squishing back the desire to cry.
Crying won't get you anywhere. Crying won't help —
"You received direct orders," Ichabod scowled, rubbing his chin as if scratching a patch of skin would shoo the problem away. The problem that he had to deal with because of the incompetence of others.
"Either recruit the other members of the ERAA mission, or eliminate them entirely. Directly quoted from what I said!" Ichabod could feel the volume in his tone increasing in his chest with his temper — he forcibly shoved the anger away and replaced it with a shocking calm.
Having a businessman for a father had many pros and cons, and things that fitted perfectly between. Learning to retain a poker face in high-stake ventures was one of those middle-ground examples.
"A man who can control his emotions can control the emotions of those around him."
And even though Robert 'Bob' Quillan could not have been counted as a good father, he was an excellent businessman.
Of course, that was only outwardly. Inside, Ichabod would've happily disposed of Xeon and his idiotic comrades just like he'd done so with Amelia and that doctor, Royson. Temporarily, he reminded himself. But then he wouldn't have a workforce, and all his hard work and planning would be for nothing.
Yes. My planning. Even if Robert wouldn't admit it, Ichabod'd been the one to plan this special investment.
"Get me into the ERAA mission, daddy dearest, and you'll become a billionaire the second we step into the Jurassic."
"You do understand the stakes of this mission, yeah?" Ichabod adopted a more casual tone, feeling his façade beginning to seep deep inside. That was good. Let him store away the anger — just for a little while — and release it when it was truly needed.
Xeon shuffled, and the eight marines who had gone after him like headless chickens looked just as awkward. It had been easy to win them over; that Jacobs guy less so. Ichabod could respect that, though.
He did like a challenge every once in a while; but not one that would ruin everything that the Institution Of Knowledge had trained him for.
Nothing personal, he reminded the stupefied American faces before him internally. Just politics.
"By the end of this," Ichabod declared, believing in it with every fiber of his being, "all of you will be rich beyond compare. You'll be able to live in places like New England, where life is well as long as you can pay your way."
While Xeon looked reinvigorated, Ichabod moved closer, a few inches shorter but feeling the swell of confidence in his veins. They were almost eye-to-eye.
"But only if you do your job," Ichabod uttered quietly.
"We'll be safe here," Lale declared, his voice sapped of energy. Climbing up to the pan where the waterfall fell from had been draining, and had given him too much time to think.
The what-ifs were infinite, and there were too little solid facts. Lale wanted to cling to what he knew, but their presumed safety was not one of them.
One; Ichabod had betrayed them. After the shock of nearly dying had worn off, he remembered what had previously niggled at him — that all the marines that had started shooting had been a part of Ichabod's lunch meeting before.
Meaning Ichabod had tried to recruit me, before the launch. Lale had realized with a chill across his spine.
The water above the thermal vent was quite cold, but the air was clammy with the surrounding heat. The other recruits were exhausted, even though it was just little more than an hour since they had arrived at the lake in the first place.
Everything can change in an hour.
Two; Bradley had been right. The area they sat in was relatively shielded, and they couldn't be seen by anyone approaching the waterfall's side. There was fresh water and fish, just like his friend had said.
He rubbed his goose-pimpling arms, not sure whether he felt cold on the inside or the outside, thinking about Bradley. Maybe both. "Tina," he called out, as the other men and women settled and began to chat, softly. Probably speculating. He had no time to reassure them, and felt the clench in his chest at the prospect.
Why would he have to be the one to do that? Was Lale the unannounced leader? Did the others really expect that of him?
He sure didn't for himself.
Tina approached, her tank top smeared with blood. Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying, but focused sharply on his own.
"Are you okay?" Lale asked softly, knowing she was close friends with Amelia. It felt like that was important to him; as if keeping Amelia's friends close would keep her close to him, too. With that thought, he looked around again, not spotting Amelia's other annoying technician buddy. "Where's Luca?"
"I'm fine." Tina swiped at her hair, her words strained. She didn't sound fine, but that wasn't Lale's business. "I think. Just cut my shoulder on a reed," she explained, probably thinking he'd been asking after the wound than her mental health. Again, Lale said nothing. "And Luca didn't come."
Suddenly it looked like her eyes were misting up. "He stayed at camp to have a nap. I'm so worried about him."
Please don't cry please don't cry, Lale silently chanted as he put his hand on Tina's uninjured shoulder, immediately feeling his stomach clench. (At the thought of Tina crying or Luca getting killed, he couldn't differentiate.)
"He'll be fine," Lale said quickly. I hope. "He survived getting the container open, remember? He can survive this, too."
Tina swiped her tears away roughly. Lale took away his hand. "I guess."
"For now," he hurried on, before they could think on the matter much more. "I have a job for us to do. Okay?"
The girl nodded, looking slightly more cheered. Lale recognized the determined glint in her eye as Amelia's own. "Okay."
Lale nodded, relieved he'd managed to calm her down so quickly. "Then let's get —
— up!"
The leaf tent Luca had so meticulously set up came crashing down on top of him in a clatter of sticks and leaves. Sunlight and clammy air — burning hot and immediately causing his pores to swell with sweat — invaded his eyes.
He lifted a hand to shield them as he tried to pat around for his glasses, anger roiling up inside of him. It wasn't normal of him to feel so riled up about a tent, but come on. Where else was he going to sleep?
"Hey! What gives —"
Luca's arms were snatched up before he could finish his sentence, figures silhouetted by the sun's rays smirking at him as he scrambled to find his feet. Then he was really annoyed. Was Lale playing a joke on him or something? He wouldn't put it past the guy. If only he had his glasses to see the idiots who were pounding his bed to pieces. Then he'd set them straight.
"Looking for this?" Sunlight glinted off something else. His glasses! It sounded like that walking behemoth Xeon ... Luca pulled his arm out of another's person grip and made a lunge for them, miserably returning to most of his middle school years spent reaching for those blasted things.
"Nuh uh!" Xeon pulled the glasses away, and Luca watched with clenched fists as he carelessly dropped them into the mud. "Oops! Too bad." Like a real middle school bully, Xeon clapped Luca over the head, and the technician pulled away with a scowl.
It was no use. He was outnumbered three to one, and they quickly took hold of him again. Luca was expecting to get beaten, his eyes half screwed-up, not dragged and thrown down in front of Ichabod, two other Learners beside him and quivering.
One, a woman, was sobbing quietly. The second was a man, who seemed tense with rage.
"You can't do this!" He screamed up in Ichabod's face. Even with blurred vision, Luca could feel the man's cold gaze sink into him.
"I have. And I will," Ichabod murmured softly. He pushed the man back by his chest, and it was as if he sucked all the fight out of the guy Learner.
Luca felt panic clawing up his throat. What was going on? Where was everybody? And why was Ichabod being even shadier than usual?
"Mr Harris," Ichabod said, his unexpectedly cheerful tone making Luca flinch. Kneeled in front of Ichabod, he felt like a commoner to a sovereign, and it didn't feel good. "So nice to see a man of such expertise among us! Tell me, would you like to help me out in a special project?"
Luca glanced at the two people beside him. The man seemed even more rigid, if that was possible, and the woman's head bowed until her hair was touching the marshy earth. They seemed broken.
He swallowed. "Depends ... what the project is."
Like the EEG. Luca's pride and joy — not exactly his brainchild, but he had been the one to place the circuit boards and the wires in the bot's cranium. He was, in all retrospect, the EEG's lifegiver. That had been a fun project.
Ichabod's eyes seemed to narrow, though it was difficult to tell. He put his hand on Luca's shoulder, which didn't feel as tender as he perhaps wanted it to be.
"Believe me ... you'll like —"
It wasn't as bad as it seemed, Tina supposed.
Sure, they'd been shot at ... she'd seen people die and get hurt ... the guy she was attracted to was probably dead or would likely end up dead ...
But overall, Tina was alive. She was alive and open to seeing the beauty of the land around them. As she and Lale collected the Learners' clothes, she appraised the wide open spaces of the marsh. If they could make elevated platforms high enough to escape the jaws of any hungry predator, there was no problem with populating it with houses connected by wooden walkways and porches.
Tina could see it all mapped out in her mind, her architect's brain taking over so that she didn't have to think about Amelia.
About Luca, and all the things she hadn't said to him.
The only problem, she decided, would be the wood. Tina hadn't seen one tree, the so-called 'jungle' being populated by ferns and squat palms. Guaranteed, tall ferns and palms, but wood would be a big issue for any and all construction.
She heard Lale wince as he bent over, and remembered that Royson had said something about him breaking a rib. She'd never broken anything besides a nail in her life, and she was eager to keep it that way.
"I can take this," Tina told him quickly, taking hold of the grey suits in his arms. "It's okay, really."
"Thanks," Lale said begrudgingly. Tina smiled internally despite their situation. It was almost a pity Amelia was into girls; she reckoned Lale and Mel would get along like a house on fire, when he wasn't being a world-class grump.
Then the guy stiffened. Tina followed his gaze to Bradley's prone form, and she felt a pang of sadness.
Lale didn't look to her, but she knew what he was going to ask before he did. "Can you — can you just give me a sec? I need to ..."
Tina didn't hesitate in pressing her hand against his forearm in a tiny act of consolation before going to return to the waterfall, the mulch under her bare feet trodden by the boots of the marines.
And maybe by some —
Dinosaurs aren't the biggest problem, Amelia reassured herself for the millionth time, after another screech in the jungle distracted her from trying to cut her way free from the cords using a particularly jagged piece of metal from a nearby TimePod.
After crawling over in a mess of whimpers every time her wrecked ankle twinged, she'd set to work with sweat burning at her eyes and her mouth pursed in concentration. Methodically, she rubbed the cord around her wrist across the sharp, outward-pointing part of the circuit board. The plastic was giving way, slowly but surely, but red cuts were being sliced deeper and deeper into her arm every time she miscalculated.
After all, the Tanycolagreuses only defended their nest ... they didn't actually try to eat us. That was the only consolation of the situation; unless a particularly hungry dinosaur came across her, Amelia wouldn't end up eaten.
Still, she jumped when an echo streamed through the jungle. Until she finally jumped free of the wrist cord, and pulled away to untie the one around her ankles.
Rolling her joints and hearing her bones pop, Amelia straightened unsteadily, leaning against the TimePod for support. Her vision swam, and the taste of bile was overwhelming on her tongue.
A high-pitched rumbling filled her head, almost like a helicopter was coming to land. Amelia pressed a finger to her temple, wondering silently how badly she'd been messed up on the inside by that electric shock.
The only reason she was still alive, she guessed, was if Ichabod downed the intensity of the wattage. But for what purpose? Why didn't he just kill them flat out? It made no sense — but then again, nothing about what had happened made sense, except for the small pieces that were slowly coming together.
Ichabod was a traitor. He needed the volt-guns to subdue she and Royson and probably the others, too, which explained his jumpiness the day before Bradley and Luca had gone off to search for the container and returned with weapons.
Her eyes trailed to where the hulking metal structure lay, its doors wide open. The droning was louder with her buzzing thoughts, but Amelia settled to see what was left.
And what she could use to fight back.
By the time she'd reached the container, hobbling like a drunk on one-and-a-half legs, sweat was pouring down her face. Wish I'd gone to that five-star bath, Amelia groaned internally, remembering what Bradley had said.
That train of thought led her to Lale ... and Tina and Luca and Zoey. Were they okay? Where were they?
The sound of the high-pitched droning was almost unbearable in her skull, and she knelt over with her palms pressed to ears, trying to crush the sound. It was then, she noticed, in the shadows of the container's doors, the dark cloud on the horizon.
Only it wasn't a cloud.
The droning came from hundreds ... if not thousands of dog-sized dragonfly wings.
Feeling horror fill her chest like a balloon popped in her lungs, all the air was sucked from her mouth. Carnivorous ... Amelia swallowed as she eyed the swarm, steadily approaching like a storm. Griffinflies.
Before they got close enough for her to notice any further details, Amelia bit down on her cheek to center herself, and slowly swung the container doors closed, dread filling her every cell.
Dear God ... Please let them not be hungry.
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