Dinosaur Island -1994- Apr 2026

Lena pulled the key card from her pocket—Mercer’s own key card, taken from the dead man in the jungle—and tossed it onto the desk. “The radio frequency for the supply boat. The one that comes every three months from Puntarenas.”

And somewhere, in a notebook that never left her pocket, her father’s last words were still legible, written in shaky pencil on the final page:

Lena looked down at her father’s notebook, still clutched in her other hand. She thought of the photograph. The little compy on his shoulder. The way he’d smiled, like a man who had seen a miracle.

The raptor was faster.

She looked up.

“Velociraptor. Hatchery 4, 1988 clutch. He’s had it since it was a hatchling. Trained it, or thinks he has. It’s the only thing on this island that won’t kill him on sight.” Kellerman’s voice dropped to a whisper. “But it will kill you.”

“I’ll take my chances,” she said.

“I don’t care about the cartel.”

He told her.

She came to on her back, seawater flooding her mouth, the roar replaced by the shriek of twisted metal. Something had hold of the ship—not rocks, not a reef—something alive . Through the shattered porthole of her cabin, she saw a shape in the lightning: a column of flesh, brown and ridged, bigger around than a redwood, rising from the sea and wrapping around the stern like a serpent. The Calypso Star bucked once, twice, and then the hull split open like a walnut. Dinosaur Island -1994-

“You look green, Doctor.”

Like a dog. Like a puppy. Its tail wagged once, twice, and then it let out a sound—not a roar, not a snarl, but a whine. High and lonely and afraid.

Lena knew the name. Everyone in paleontology did. John Hammond had been a showman, a billionaire, a laughingstock—the man who’d tried to build a dinosaur theme park in the 1980s, only to have his “living attractions” die in transit or escape into the wild. The project had been shut down by 1988. Lawsuits had buried him. He’d died in ‘92, penniless and disgraced, still insisting that his failures had been “operational, not conceptual.” Lena pulled the key card from her pocket—Mercer’s