FEATHERBRAIN

Traveling with a companion was not something the Indoraptor was used to, and traveling with a completely inept lab-grown creature was not Blue's forte either. Miscommunication and frustration were the third and fourth companions in their blind dive deeper into the forest.

Day and night they traveled, going opposite whenever they saw building lights or heard the rumble of engines. They orbited each other, Blue striding on with determination and the Indoraptor trailing as though pulled by a magnet. The fire had killed the distance between them. Their destination was unknown, but each time they made to settle down, they remembered as one the burst shots of gunfire and the heat of the flames, and grew restless, until they channeled it into more traveling.

Blue was wily to the way humans operated, how they could return over and over to work their devices. Three years had passed in solitude on the island before she saw Owen Grady again. She did not trust the old territory just outside the manor. The Indoraptor had none of these instincts or experiences, but he knew by now that Blue was wiser, and wisdom is what he lacked in keeping himself alive. He followed her without question.

Blue did her best to act aloof and confident with the Indoraptor pacing right beside her, but he was three times her size and oblivious to the act. He stuck his snout in her face constantly, sniffing and staring, watching her like a child given permission to play within a museum exhibit. His mind buzzed with the overstimulation of a creature nearby, but it didn't drive him to want to kill her; rather, he was beset with curiosity, at her birdlike, upright gait and the straight planes of her face. He couldn't follow quietly. He had to pick each interaction apart like he could inspect it with his apish forelimbs. Blue was constantly on the cusp of regretting going back for this overbearing, doggish raptor.

When he probed his nose too close, she, not one to let such an overstep go, punished him with a snap and a squall. And he, not recognizing this as a boundary-setting, unwilling to take such punishment, responded in kind but with more ferocity. Several times a day did they chase each other around thus, until their respective rages cooled.

Multiple times they almost separated, when the tension mounted too high. But it began to get better. Blue hunted most of the time, for she was better at it, and gave up quickly on trying to get him involved when she barked commands her sisters would have leapt at and the Indoraptor just blinked. He was slow, loud, and conspicuous. He didn't stalk, just came screaming out of the bushes after prey. She left him behind and came back later with a kill she'd share.

Then there was sleep. It took some getting used to, sleeping in the open with someone touching the Indoraptor. The first few times, he bolted awake with a scream as his subconscious warned him danger was nearby, badly startling Blue. Visions of human silhouettes behind the bars waking him with jabs and electric shocks swam in the back of his mind.

And then there were other tense times that neither of them could explain. Blue allowed the Indoraptor to stand nearby when it was clear he wouldn't blindly attack anymore, but sometimes he demanded the opposite, with no warning or reason; he would fall into a mood of crouching, shaking, and wide-eyed screaming. He screamed when she approached, not from anger but from fear. It scared Blue as badly as the Indoraptor was scared of her contact. His flayed nerves were so sure that any touch would end in pain, that even the heat coming off her body from feet away was unbearable. His eyes and throat begged for distance, which she had to respect until the strange attack passed.

Every time she hunted alone, Blue missed stalwart, loyal Delta, always at her side and ready to leap at her command. Every time the Indoraptor stuck his nose where it shouldn't belong, Blue missed Charlie, the gentle-natured and admiring, forever seeking out a snuggle from the big sister she looked up to so much. His stalking of her even evoked Echo, who was sullen but ingenious at sneaking behind where the other three were pinning prey to deliver the final blow. The phantoms of her missing pack made her all the more resentful of him.

He was a burden in every sense of the word. When Blue found him to be too annoying, she sought escape in broad meadows. She felt at home in the tall grass with the sun beating down, but the Indoraptor, curiously, viewed such environments as inherent threats. He circled her from the shadows, head twitching, not hunting her, but repelled by the open space surrounding her.

One midday, after a particularly frustrating episode where the Indoraptor had devoured most of the kill Blue brought back without a thought for letting her have the good bits as she deserved for hunting it, she padded to the middle of a clearing and settled down among the flowers for a doze. She was unafraid of predators; she'd encountered both bears and wolves, and they were so frightened of her strange appearance that they gave her no trouble. The therapods from Isla Nublar didn't bother hunting other carnivores, save for the cantankerous Tyrannosaurus rex, and the ones not bought at the auction had dispersed far and wide.

To her left, the Indoraptor paced back and forth under the canopy. He kept a red eye on her at all times, restless at their distance but unwilling to expose himself to the sun. He switched between four legs and two with each turn, sometimes approaching the sunbaked grass, only to retreat again with a twitch of his hands.

Blue cracked an eyelid to watch the curves of his back slink by, then shut it. Her head tilted in little turns as she listened to the wind and enjoyed the sun baking the back of her neck. She was an endotherm, not dependent on the sun but supplemented and cleansed by it nonetheless.

The Indoraptor resented its blanketing touch. His scales were caked with years of upbringing in the dark and the damp, and he was loath to leave the predictability of tight spaces. But here was Blue, so confident she was falling asleep. There was some great knowledge she was privy to that he wasn't. At once he was in momentary, muted awe. Blue's confidence was a monolith that rose taller than her physical stature. It was the same assuredness that felled elk with calculated movements, that let her read the land and carried her feet to precise footfalls. Her power was immense.

Not for the first time, the Indoraptor felt foolish. Though his belly was full and it felt good, he felt the sting of some unknown committed wrong when Blue had returned from drinking to find the deer nearly devoured, and chattered angrily of her wasted energy before storming off. It was another gap in his knowledge. He simply had no experience in anything. He only knew the regimented cruelty of man and the senselessness of their experiments, but he was lost in the careless lottery of nature. It made sense only in hindsight that Blue should get the kill she was owed. He'd thought only of his own hunger. And now he thought only of sunlight as a phantom, when really it should chase such monsters away.

The Indoraptor placed a paw into the sunlight. Then another. He crept into the open with his spine curved toward the ground, lowest where light met dark, as though crawling under a barrier. His red eyes fluttered their third eyelids, keeping them clear to see the inevitable jump out at him.

But nothing, inevitably, came. The Indoraptor in all his discomfort crept slowly to Blue's side, tense as a drawn string, and peered down at her folded body. He lowered his belly to the ground and tucked his limbs to his sides, mimicking comfort he didn't feel.

Blue, a little put out, peeked down at him as he settled. He was stiff as a board with his neck stuck out, eyes wide and nostrils puffing. In contrast to his awe of her, Blue only found him confusing. She didn't know what predator he feared; in her experience, meadows had been nothing but pleasant. It was from meadows that she observed the humans on the catwalk above her with her sisters, and it was from meadows that she took to resting once alone, ears always alert for a threat that would have to come bellowing from the forest very far away and seen.

Another thing drew Blue's eye: a fattened tick, drinking hungrily from the Indoraptor's neck, right in the middle of his gold stripe. Without thinking, Blue leaned over and picked it off with her teeth. The Indoraptor, tense as he was, squawked and whipped out of her reach, jaws snapping by her snout. She stared him down, ready to jump if he did, crunching down the swollen bloodsucker.

The Indoraptor peered at her teeth, then calmed quite suddenly when he realized what she'd done. He knew the tick had been there, but had been unable to interrupt its drinking; his claws were too shaky to close on it, and he couldn't curl his neck around to bite at it, and not even rubbing his neck against a surface could dislodge it. So he'd bitterly settled for living with it, reaching up to feel the loose bump with his knuckles every so often and be reminded of his passenger. Even the colonies of ticks that had taken up residence in his armpits and underbelly wouldn't move, for his lipless, gapped teeth were ill-suited for the precision work of picking off insects, and he had to settle for scratching them off, suffering bloody cuts in the process. He was prisoner to the minor discomfort.

Slowly, the Indoraptor sank back down, and allowed Blue to nose around his arm for more ticks. Her thin, close-set teeth and narrow nose were as tweezers to the colony. Soon enough he was stretched out on his side, watching the clouds go by above while Blue enjoyed a little feast from his loose skin. He twitched with every sudden movement, but did not react badly to her proximity to his exposed belly; he had not the instinct to protect it.

She didn't stop there; his scales flaked in plenty of places, soon to be nowhere as Blue tugged free the ill-shed patches that had stuck to his new scales after his previous shed. She removed from him burrs and hooked barbs. She inspected him with the same diligent eye she'd cast over her sisters, and as she worked she daydreamed of when the four of them clustered together in the evening after a feed, flanks to shoulders and heads all risen to each other's, preening and play-biting and soliciting nuzzles.

To the Indoraptor, it felt pretty good. He no longer had to feel the bumps when he brushed his arm against his own body. A great idea popped into his head: reciprocation, so he rolled back onto his belly and nosed around Blue's shoulder. Not only was she tick-less, but his mouth was no more effective in grooming her than it was himself. He sniffed her helplessly. He bumped his nose into the base of her neck and kept it there.

They stayed in silence for a long, still moment. It was a first for the both of them. Blue was torn between pushing him away and tolerating this sudden affection, so she sat there in silence, indecisive and waiting for him to move. The Indoraptor, meanwhile, had momentarily lost himself in his first gentle gesture. He wasn't yet to know the pleasures of nuzzling and head-rubs, but her body heat felt good against his sensitive face, so he kept it there.

After a minute, Blue conceded to reach around and nibble good-naturedly at his jaw. He stilled, thinking she was grooming him more; when she didn't he slid his snout up until he clumsily nuzzled her jaw back. Blue rewarded him with a content croon. The vibration felt good, so he carefully rested his face where it was strongest, on the side of her neck by her throat. He could hear the rush of her heartbeat here.

Blue tolerated him, with less irritation than previous. Her mood was calm enough to abide his odd mannerisms. By raptor standards he was ugly as sin, his voice warped and head all deformed, but just as she'd done with the Indominus, she could sense her own kind in him. She couldn't know the link between the two hybrids, but sometimes when the light struck him wrong, at the odd turn of his head or the occasional too-quick noise, Blue saw not the Indoraptor but instead the shadow of the great white beast, and it would spook her into maintaining distance between them.

As Blue contemplated this in her own distracted way, the Indoraptor became aware of a minor discomfort of his own. With every inhale of Blue's body heat, it grew stronger. He peeked an eye open, sighted a steely-white throat, and a flash of color and sound burst in his head. It was a memory.

His body was frail, and he was so very small, and everything else was white. White above his head, white beneath his body, and white beside his face, pebbled white, quilled white. A second body pulsed beside his. Eyes. Neck. Twitching thumbs. They leaned against each other, sleeping under the oppressive blanket of early youth, warm and weak and helpless.

Each time he opened his eyes he saw his white brother, and each time he fell asleep he did so leaning on him. But he woke one last time to tangy metal in the air — his first time scenting blood. It was leaking from his brother's mouth. It gleamed red as a cherry against his pale cheek. His brother's head shook. His eyes rolled. He opened his mouth and vomited his insides.

There was noise, and there were gloved hands, which parted the Indoraptors in frantic haste. The Indoraptor dangled, head lolling, and stared down at his white brother, prone, his stark, wet intestines still attached to him at the teeth, his red eye bulging and lightless.

The Indoraptor lifted his head from Blue and rasped in distress, dread convincing him of an enemy. But the enemy was his far-off memory. He'd escaped death in the form of deformity at birth, escaped it when it sought to impale him on bone, and escaped its tongues of hungry fire. A font of toothed memories bit his nerves.

Blue, curious, turned and, with hesitation, bumped her snout against his. Somehow, it shook him back into reality. It would not be the last time.

—

In their travels they came upon a rocky beach, different levels of tide revealed in strips of seaweed across the sand. They both tasted the sea, only to find it unpalatable. Blue preened on a rock while the Indoraptor waded through the shallow waves, dipping his head underwater to sample mussels, crabs, and slow fish. Between feasts the Indoraptor felt a great rousing excitement as each wave broke against his legs, which crested and culminated in a mad dash up and down the surf, body low to the ground and feet frothing against the water. He croaked and warbled, biting at the splashes his feet made. Blue watched him for a while, then joined in, chasing the water as it receded back into the ocean and fleeing from the next wave, back and forth.

When they forayed back into the forest to nap, Blue suddenly coughed a warning and ducked. The Indoraptor obeyed, an impulse newly automatic, sniffing the air for whatever she sensed.

He felt it before he saw it: rhythmic thuds vibrating up into his feet, setting his heart to pounding. Then a massive shape strode out of the darkness before them. The Indoraptor saw rows of banana-shaped teeth under a scarred lip and shuddered, torn between attacking and staying hidden.

The Tyrannosaurus turned to peer at them, her eyes glinting in the shade. They didn't know it, but her name was Roberta. And Roberta peered directly at them with the leery gaze of a queen. All the worst parts of Gila monster, cane toad, and cassowary were combined in her creation to make her one tough customer. The scars marring her scaly hide were proofs of her age and might, and the experiences she'd survived and thrived in had made her confident and merciless. Tyrannosaurs of old could live like Blue did, killing only what they needed to and ignoring other creatures all other times. But not Roberta. She knew deep in her bones that the presence of another was an intolerable offense. She'd made a living hell of the lives of the predators on Isla Nublar, orphaning the juvenile Allosaurus, making game of Carnotaurs, laying indiscriminate waste to herbivores of all kinds. The sole Giganotosaurus, Gertrude, was covered in scars from the battles she and Roberta had wound up in, before the volcano eruption claimed Gertrude's life.

In her days of loneliness following the Indominus battle, Blue had latched onto Roberta for a time, dogging her steps as she explored the newly relinquished island. She left when it was clear Roberta was nothing but a danger who wanted to be alone. From there she stalked Allosaurs, who chased her from their kills, and the family of Carnotaurs, who were generally docile but still suspicious of the small predator. She even in her desperation tormented the Baryonyx Beatrice, swiping kills from her until her skin was flush against her bones, which would later lead to her desperation in pursuing Claire Dearing and Franklin Webb through lava.

Blue, Roberta recognized, and with reason could tolerate. But she did not recognize this black newcomer beside her, and a rumble rose in her saggy throat as she prepared to prove her hierarchy. Blue sensed trouble, and with a quick command she and the Indoraptor were bolting through the trees, their ears ringing with Roberta's bellow. It took them a while to lose her, and they panicked the entire time.

With this territory clearly taken, Blue and the Indoraptor set off as soon as they caught their breath.

After a few more days of wandering, the Indoraptor and Blue came upon a dilapidated house nestled in the elbow of two mountain ridges. Its front doors were rotted from their hinges, and most furniture was tipped over. Seasons of rain had washed a layer of mud and uprooted vegetation across the living room floor, while a great hole had rotted from the floor of the upstairs bedroom, forming a passageway down to the living room. The Indoraptor paced up and down on four legs, sniffing out every floorboard, while Blue peeked into cabinets and ripped up some of the couch stuffing. In the end, the Indoraptor curled up in a corner by the sofa and closed his eyes. The structure fulfilled his undying need for the comfort of a manmade shelter, and Blue was reminded of her paddock as well. The house was theirs.

—

Side by side with Blue, walking in her footsteps, the Indoraptor could finally live as a wild predator. When she hunted, he learned to take her cues, and when she explored he followed. Through gullies filled with deposited soil and tree trunks, and over the craggy foothills of mountains covered in dense redwoods, the two explored.

Finally, the Indoraptor became useful. He was beginning to understand most of her calls. They developed a system where he would rush loudly upon a herd of deer, forcing them to flee to where Blue hid waiting to deliver the killing blow on whoever was nearest. This system proved almost always effective, and the pair never went hungry for long. Game was plentiful, both furred and scaled. Some dinosaurs had escaped into the deep forest here too, and taking the slowest of the herd down could feed them for weeks.

But most of all, a predator's life appeared to be sleeping. The two returned to the rundown house to pick apart their kills and slumber. They were most active at dawn and dusk, and passed the hot midday and deep cool night by sleeping, flank to flank, Blue settled upright with her chin tucked to her chest, and the Indoraptor stretched out beside her on his side like a dog.

The Indoraptor felt a void where there had been anticipation for the next training, the next hurt. Blue filled it. There was dozing, there was preening, and there was hunting, all of them involving her. And that was it. The Indoraptor could do whatever he wished. He would never have to hurt again if he so wished.

And under this new, salubrious lifestyle, the Indoraptor did something he had never done before. He thrived. Muscle and fat layered his bones, filled the pits in his skeletal face. His limbs thickened. The whistle disappeared from his breath as his pneumonia was finally defeated by the fresh, dry air. Under frequent sun his scales darkened from dull gray to inky black, near-iridescent, and the gold stripe running from his jaw to the tip of his tail not only deepened, but broadened. Splotches of gold sprang up all over his body like bacterial colonies, until his scales were nearly piebald with patches. Some dotted his cheeks and muzzle like human freckles.

The quills adorning his head, rump, and elbows revealed their true identity as pinfeathers. They began with a little white fuzz at their very tips, then sprouted as the wax encasing them fell away over time. More popped up on either side of his hard spine. Before long, the Indoraptor sported twin trails of snowy white feathers on his back, thickest behind his head and atop his rump, and began to molt them regularly. Further, they continued down his tail and ringed the tip with a snowy spade; and further still they spread from his elbows all the way down to his wrists, forming a broad vane of rudimentary wing feathers that draped from his upper arms like loose sleeves.

The first time Blue saw them she picked them, thinking them an addition to her grooming routine. But his pained squeals stopped her. No feathers had been present on herself or her sisters, but some gap in his genetic code happened to be filled where hers had not, despite the numerous other holes in his DNA. Ironically, the hybridized Indoraptor began to look more like a legitimate Deinonychus of old than Blue did.

The Indoraptor moved through social stages like a hatchling in fast forward. He accepted gentleness and playfulness into his movements. He understood her chattering until he could respond to it, though his voice was always one uglier, raspier with hybridization. His chuffs and gurgles could signal all is well and leave me be and play. And play was the best thing of all. It got his heart thumping as though on a hunt, yet had no risk of hurt, at least none that couldn't be assuaged with an apologetic nuzzle. The Indoraptor could sprawl next to Blue for hours, heads raised like the necks of loons, shoving cheeks and pretend-snapping in lazy fun. He growled now only in jest. They chased each other back and forth, dodging and weaving, running in circles from the house living room, up the stairs, down through the hole in the ceiling, and back again. And his favorite, though unraptorish game was sprawling full-body on top of Blue and seeing how long it took for her to escape.

Blue hated that game.

But those were just the games Blue had taught him. The Indoraptor in his isolation had grown inward, developing an odd fixation on his surroundings that Blue lacked. So when the two rested beside a shallow river one evening, it was the Indoraptor who suddenly leapt to his feet and sniffed back and forth along the shore, one eye fixated on the water, then the other.

Blue watched, waiting for her companion she knew to be often strange to reveal what he saw. The Indoraptor scrutinized the bottom of the riverbank, splashing into the shallows and retreating again, before taking off upstream. He leapt atop a rock above the water and looked down. Beneath him the ground inclined sharply and the water flowed irregularly around a series of rocks, sending its torrent concentrated into a shallow trough adjacent to the river's main artery.

The Indoraptor, in fits and starts, let himself slide off the rock face. He landed on all fours at the mouth of the trough, water splashing up his ribs, and slid down the smooth rock of the river's bottom, a screech in his throat. He picked up speed until he wobbled, sure he'd fall, and the slide unceremoniously dumped him into the river's main flow again.

Water rushing in his ears, the Indoraptor came up for air, doggy-paddling, and scrambled back on shore to race up and slide again. He went down three more times, once flipping onto his back halfway down and finding the helplessness of the position bizarrely more fun, before Blue finally got to her feet and slowly padded up to his launching pad. Shaking water from his head, the Indoraptor thundered to her side, warbling in delight that she would try his game.

She hopped onto the rock and leaned over the edge, nostrils trembling; the Indoraptor, overzealous in taking his turn, and also impatient for her to discover his fun, leapt up behind her too close. So precariously was Blue perched that only the slightest nudge toppled her forward. She landed with a started caw, rump first, in the water and flew down the slide, shrieking the entire time.

The waterslide tumbled her end over end once she met the greater river, and she came up sputtering, kicking her legs like a baby duck. She took only one breath before the Indoraptor slammed into her, having flown in directly behind her. Twice dunked and thoroughly miffed, Blue kicked awkwardly to the shoreline and shook herself off, rasping furiously that her dignity should be so ruffled. She snapped at the Indoraptor when he came up behind her for a nuzzle. She didn't forget that shove.

But Blue's stung feelings didn't last long, because she tried the waterslide again and again, alternating with the Indoraptor until they grew tired. They sprawled in the shade, waiting for the Indoraptor's waterlogged feathers to dry, as he rubbed his cheek against the back of her neck. She purred, half-dozing and enjoying the scratches.

The Indoraptor closed his eyes. He drifted into the casual intimacy of all five senses engaged. He listened to the rush of the water beside them, to the birdsong and rustling wind high above and the warble of Blue's purr under his ear. Sunlight dappled their hides where it poked through the canopy. His steadily pulsing nostrils took in flower pollen and faint game trails. The grass beneath them was a soft, lush bed.

He thought of nothing, and wanted for nothing, and waited for nothing. He was no longer the Raptor, and the world was not All Else; he was not the antagonistic cynosure of his own story. The world existed, and he existed with it, nothing but a drop in the ocean of collective nature. And he reveled in being so blissfully unimportant. His first three years of life felt like a bad dream, and the times he'd woken screaming from one to be comforted by Blue were growing fewer. Some deep, deep part of him rebelled at the memories of his imprisonment, somehow aware that a great injustice had been committed, atypical and wrong. This was what life was supposed to be. And he had found it. The stares, and the lightning, and the cage had never felt so far away.

—

The Indoraptor didn't have a word for love, nor did any creature besides man, and he didn't need to dwell on it. He was an animal; only through action and feeling was the concept expressed. Slowly but all at once, the two raptors had become the epicenters of each other's lives. Solitude at this point was unthinkable.

Unthinkable too was distance. The greedy Indoraptor hadn't panicked at Blue's touch in months, and instead coveted every inch of scale they pressed together. Nothing they did was ever enough. He slept often with his chin across her back. When Blue preened him he couldn't help but curl closer and closer, until he was wrapped neck to tail around her body. A raspy croon was ever in his throat when she was there, rumbling louder when she drew near and subsiding to a low purr as she departed. He craned his neck toward her as she passed as though guided by a magnet, drinking in her indulgent nuzzle or nip with bliss.

But Blue was no less devoted, though she was more casual about it. She refused to budge unless he came along with her. If he dreamed and twitched across the floor in his sleep, she would restlessly wake and waddle to his side again. This ugly, overgrown, brutish raptor was her ugly, overgrown, brutish raptor, her pack-mate, the only barrier between isolation and herself.

When the Indoraptor woke shrieking, with lightning racing through the memories of his veins, swallowing after every breath and dead certain he would soon on the back of his throat taste the blood that came before his voided insides, Blue woke and chittered to him, nuzzling and grooming his face and neck to remind him he was here, and whole, and unhurt.

When Blue's gut roiled with longing for what the Indoraptor had never seen — a paddock, a chorus of raspy voices — and she rose in the dark night to wander, calling without end for what could never come back, the Indoraptor followed faithfully at her side, a warm and steady shadow, ready to guide her home when the episode passed.

If they could have them, there would be laughs ever in their throats, smiles always across their jaws. Continental life was treating them generously. Perhaps they would be safer in the long run still on one of the isles, but so deep in the redwoods had they wandered that it would take an infeasible amount of equipment and dedication to find them. If they were lucky - and luck had been a close companion to the both of them - no threat could encroach their honeymoon forest.

—

There were things that the Indoraptor did for stress relief that he didn't know the purpose of, only that he'd always done it.

Blue did similar things, just in a different way.

Only when the Indoraptor happened upon a herd of rutting deer did he come up with the genius idea that their two activities could be combined into one shared activity. When he returned to Blue it took a little miming and convincing to try it out, but they got the hang of it eventually.

Neither had any idea what this activity was, or what it would inevitably lead to. They'd never interacted with the same creature of the opposite sex, nor had they ever seen the long-off product of engaging in these acts. Like birds, they just did it because it felt good, and because they could share it.

Henry Wu hadn't intended to make the Indoraptor reproductively viable. The chances of him somehow wreaking havoc with his fertility when locked in a cell were slim to none, so it was simply more effort than it was worth to sterilize him. So five years later, a hundred miles away, he was still intact.

Then Blue became sick.

—

It started with Blue becoming suddenly ravenous; their hunts doubled in frequency, and though the Indoraptor didn't complain, he was starting to get a little fat from the food and their non-nomadic lifestyle. Then Blue suddenly swore off hunting altogether, and displayed weakness to some inner discomfort. She paced irritably from wall to wall in the house and rarely ventured outside, perturbed by something she didn't understand. The Indoraptor, no matter how good-natured his pushing, couldn't convince her to come outside with him.

For three scary days, she lingered in the living room, bloated and panting in one corner. The Indoraptor hunted and brought his kills to her, worryingly pressing chunks of meat to her mouth to get food in her. She ate little, yet bulged much in her midsection.

Suddenly she whined and lurched to her feet, and where she'd been resting there lay an egg. The Indoraptor stared, and Blue, panting, turned to stare. It had come from her body. They were no stranger to eggs — many times had they robbed the nests of ground birds for a snack, or the larger eggs of the errant dinosaur herd roaming the woods for a bigger meal. But never before had an egg come from Blue's body.

The mystery didn't end there. The next day, Blue laid another one. She laid two the day after that. On the fourth day she laid one final egg, in the same place as those that preceded it, and padded away from the site with a pep in her step that hadn't been present for a long time.

Blue and the Indoraptor leaned on each other and stared at the five eggs. They had no idea what to make of them. Eggs were food to them, and nothing more; neither had chanced upon an egg in the process of hatching, and so they never made the connection that they usually contained new life. They felt the urge to eat them, but the fact that they had come from Blue's body deterred them, some primal aversion to the idea warning them away. After the novelty wore off, they just ignored the eggs. They were accepted as an oddity, an incident that soon faded from memory, save for the occasional glance at that corner of the house.

Eggs need care, and the story could have easily ended soon before it began for those five eggs. But it was also the peak of a California summer, preceded by many years of heavy seasonal rainfall. The mud that had washed beneath the house's floorboards carried with it a thick layer of uprooted vegetation that caked against the foundations, and when baked by the sun, enough heat came from above and below that the eggs were accidentally incubated.

The first pip went unnoticed and unseen as the unwitting parents hunted. Tiny lungs filled with their first breath of cool air. She was not the first baby Deinonychus born into the wild at the same time as man, but she was the first on the continent, and the beginning of something new.

In the middle of that night, the Indoraptor sensed Blue missing from his side. He descended the stairs to find her before the egg site, crouched and intent. He joined her and startled. One of the eggs was ruptured, and between its shards was a bent, limp creature. Its head was huge; its spine zigzagged across the floor, its limbs draped haphazardly along and shining with fluid. Its little sides heaved with breath. He could not find eyes, merely bulges in skin where they should have been.

Blue nosed it clumsily, and it did not react to her touch. She opened her mouth, tempted to eat it, but closed it again. The discomfort brought about by warring instincts was too much of a bother to stick around; she straightened up and padded out the door.

The Indoraptor remained, an unknowing sire. He settled on his haunches and reached forward with a dexterous claw. He nudged the strange thing, nostrils flaring, and received no response, though he registered the little body was warm and thrumming. He jerked his neck back when another egg wobbled just a bit. On its surface was another pip, and just behind it in shadow was the pebbled snout of another odd creature.

As equally disconcerted as Blue, the Indoraptor, head wagging, padded away. After nearly a day of dozing and rooting around the soil for bugs by the riverbed, the two raptors returned to the house and sniffed curiously at the corner. The initial creature was sitting up. Its neck was bent harshly forward, its arms were tucked to its sides. The corners of its mouth seemed to split its head in half. And its eyes were open, bright orange and staring blankly at the walls.

At sound and movement, it suddenly opened its tiny maw, jerked its neck forward, and peeped. Its body bobbed up. It returned to its still seat, then bobbed and peeped again. Like a bird in a cuckoo clock it jerkily bounced, begging for what its parents had no experience providing.

Behind it, all five of the eggs were either ruptured or in the process of being broken, and among the shards were more ugly creatures, prone like the first one was the previous day. Blue, having had enough of the confusing corner, padded upstairs; dust filtered down from the ceiling where her footsteps fell above.

The Indoraptor remained, just as he'd done the first time. Though the small thing couldn't have been a threat, he approached it with slow and tentative footsteps. He craned his neck forward to sniff it. It was smaller than his hand, disproportionate and gangly, but some figure or feature called out for him to recognize it. In the curve of its spine, in the twitch of its limbs, it pulled at his memory.

The creature bobbed and peeped right in his face. Its scales were dry and pale, paler than steely Blue's. An indigo stripe ran down its sides.

The Indoraptor thought of his frail, white brother. And like lightning, cognition rushed through him. It was a little, ugly raptor. Little like his brother used to be, and how the Indoraptor himself was years ago. In coming from this egg, this egg that had come from Blue, and Blue who had shared everything with him since the fire, this creature was of himself. They were of the same flesh, and formerly of the same form. He was full of understanding.

How small and helpless he had been then! He could barely move without the aid of gloved hands. He felt those hands upon him, felt the shake in his limbs and the heaviness of the wide, huge world, and gazed upon the hatchling and knew that those feelings existed in this baby as well. Nobody had answered his peeping cries in the white, sterile tanks where he was left, wired to monitors but never touched unless necessary, until the contact he craved meant only pain and death.

But that did not have to be so for this hatchling. When he realized that, that his past did not need to live longer, that this new thing did not know anything, he felt a great sense of duty. He was big and strong and experienced, enough to share with all five. Little things died fast; what if a big thing nurtured the spark within them? The Indoraptor bent low, his head gliding forward above the ground, until his snout just brushed the hatchling's trembling side. Its peeps doubled in frequency. Its claws shook across his scales. It was so impossibly fragile, full to the brim with warm life. How could it do anything in such a weakened state? How could it hunt?

The Indoraptor had no experience with parenthood, but the faintest paternal instincts awoke in his scrambled genes. He pressed closer to his hatchling and hummed the comfort-noise he and Blue used when settling down to preen and sleep. The hatchling, a female, quieted, sitting there with big eyes and a jumping throat.

The Indoraptor was himself hungry, and in the spirit of his empathy, realized the hatchlings must be hungry too. He rose to his feet and stalled. He felt the urge to sate their fragile hunger, but also the newborn pull to remain near to them, suddenly certain that calamity would befall them if he but looked away. And he couldn't bear that. His protective instincts were fierce in his heritage and fiercer in his experience of cruelty, and the desire to keep cruelty far from them. The oldest daughter's insistent peeping finally drove him out the door.

Maddeningly, all prey seemed to have left the area the second he truly needed something to be nearby. An hour had passed before he returned with a possum; dropping it before his daughter, he faltered at her yawning throat. She made no effort to bite it herself. Impatient, he ripped a chunk of red meat from its innards, smaller than what he perceived was the diameter of her gullet, and pressed it to her mouth. With an ugly croak, she gobbled it down and peeped for more. In careful strips, he fed her until she refused to peck more at his red mouth, her belly distended and eyes lazy with sleep.

The second to hatch, a gray male with an orange stripe, was halfway sitting with his mouth agape. He perked up when the Indoraptor pressed meat to his mouth too, and was fed to contentment. The remaining three were recently hatched and still limp, and wouldn't eat even when offered food. After fretting much, the Indoraptor just swallowed the rest of the carcass.

He sank down beside them all, cutting off their corner from the world, close enough that the first daughter could lean against the soft underside of his neck and sleep. Her throat pulsed with the rapid breath of infancy, with the thrum of her heart. The life inside her was so fragile, and so uniquely precious.

The Indoraptor's heart was pounding. He had no idea why.

—

The Indoraptor was still lying in the corner when Blue wandered downstairs, wondering why he hadn't come up to sleep. By that time the three limp hatchlings had begun to sit up and peep, and were fed to engorgement by their anxious father. The Indoraptor watched Blue approach balefully. She was a big thing in the midst of his small things, a questionable offense no matter how familiar he was with her. She, tense at his tenseness, sniffed the daughter White twitching feebly against his throat with idle, unattached curiosity.

The smallest hatchling, the one who had hatched fifth, began to squirm and rake his limbs across the ground. Of all the babies, he was the darkest, and painted in a light drip down his sides was a yellow stripe. Looking at him made the Indoraptor feel like he was peering into a still pool. He leaned up and stretched his neck toward Black, crooning like a motorcycle, hoping Black would stop moving and stoking his fears.

He felt movement over his neck and looked. Blue was pecking White — with careless brutality! He leapt to his feet and bowled her over onto her back, screaming. Blue kicked and scratched him, scrambling to her feet. The Indoraptor bent low over the five hatchlings and uttered terrible warnings, garbled hisses and screeches, hotter in fury than any moment ever before.

Blue knew resource guarding when she saw it, and her interest in these living bobbleheads tripled. She was yet to understand their origins. Her only experience with baby raptors was her own youth and faint recollections of her sisters, but she was a well-socialized beast and had no use for those years. The Indoraptor, raised in isolation, was more used to plumbing the depths of his memories for comfort.

Blue barked at the Indoraptor to stand down and let her investigate; he obeyed no such command, and only rumbled louder. The hatchlings quivered, the loud noises offensive to their newborn senses.

Their quaking drew Blue's eye first in predatory interest, and then again in discomforting confusion. There was something about them that set her on edge. Only when the littlest of them, Black, happened to turn his wobbly head in her direction, mirroring the angle of his father's head above, did Blue see the resemblance, and then the significance of that resemblance. And as her mind traveled fast along the circuit connecting them all — creatures, egg, Blue, Indoraptor — she grew still and tall, eyes wide and nostrils flaring. The Indoraptor spied her calm and calmed himself, settling out of his crouch but ready to leap nonetheless.

Blue's memories danced with phantoms of her infant siblings, playing in a simulated savannah that stretched to four too-short horizons with rubber and plastic, between the fleshy trunks of man-legs. A new generation of Deinonychus blinked up at her from below the bowed shield of the Indoraptor's body.

Blue made the peace-noise, croons vibrating from her throat and ululating through her teeth. She padded forward and stuck her neck out, sniffing and nuzzling the Indoraptor's snout with her own, all apologies and understandings. He, mollified, moved aside, so Blue could meet their children. Her nostrils flared, taking in the scent and heat roiling off of White. She moved then to Gray, then to the females Yellow and Orange — they with dusty tan scales and a sky-blue stripe, and orange scales and a gold stripe — and finally to Black, feeling like a giant looking down at another Indoraptor.

Black trembled, blinking up at her with his mouth agape and teeth exposed. He peeped quietly, the pink of his tongue flashing. Something in her gut nudged Blue; the hatchlings would be hungry again. Their little limbs could not carry them, could not strike for them. But she, if she were to find and kill and bring the meat, would sustain their growth, give them strength.

Blue straightened up, announcing her hunting call as she padded toward the door. But she did not sound the "come with me" call, and if she had, she most likely would have been ignored. The Indoraptor settled down again, his long neck raised to watch her go, White slouching between his forelegs. Blue glanced back at the door, stopped, then circled back to bump her snout against that of the Indoraptor. Finally understood, he crooned to her, thinking promises of grooming and cuddling, they seven, when she returned.

She raced off to find food for their children, while the Indoraptor kept watch. Against his belly, the five baby raptors peeped, sleepy and at ease.

Hundreds of miles away, a group of people in charge of many more people passed an act. Though these lands were already protected, regulations and enforcement were lacking, and the closure of an ineffective administration in January provided a gentler sect of leaders with the opportunity to fix that.

It was the largest swath of land ever protected in the United States, and the most strictly regulated. No more would poachers or unwanted wanderers sully the forest depths where dinosaurs had escaped, since the creatures had proven themselves awkward but relatively seamless additions to the local ecosystem. Roberta, never a subtle beast, was found, extracted, and contained in a manufactured ecosystem twice and thrice and quadrice secured on the east coast, where not even money could gain access for those who wanted to gawk at her. Admirers were well-supplied with content, though, when her handlers set up a picture-heavy Twitter account.

As for the raptor, no one but Owen Grady and Claire Dearing knew exactly where she was, and they were determined to keep it that way. And not even they knew that the Indoraptor had lived, nor could they possibly know about White, Gray, Yellow, Orange, and Black.

Truth be told, neither Owen nor Claire, nor even Maisy, whom they'd adopted, would be terribly sorry if they never saw another dinosaur in their entire lives. But something about the beasts still drew them, as sure as it had drawn them from the very beginning, and again and again thereafter. So they settled along that California preserve in a large home in the forest near a small town, content to live normal and unassuming lives, but also aware that their proximity may expose them one day to the creatures that had consumed their lives. They didn't particularly mind.

And if that creature, in her wanderings, happened to be Blue, she'd visit with company.

—

everyone who commented with something along the lines of "hurry up and update": shut it. you should know by now that's a rude as hell thing to comment to a writer. don't ever do that dumb shit again

The thrilling conclusion! Originally I had a fourth chapter planned, but my ambition usually exceeds my ability and I am nOT falling for that trap. Hope you enjoyed! Please let me know what you thought!