When Grady, Dearing and her nephews left the administration, headwinds had pushed the Sibo's plume further east and thus, the last rays of the setting sun illuminated the steaming ruins of the Promenade's and Richard Owen Avenue's buildings.

In the alleys and streets, wounded were still searched among the bodies while the dead were picked up and loaded in trucks and pickups. The corpses of the killed animals were gathered to be heaped up at the city's outskirts.

The northern half of Burroughs, with the exception of the Grand Nublarian whose still intact vast halls were a refuge for a large number of visitors, had been evacuated and only essential staff remained there. All the visitors and non-essential employees had been gathered in the southern half, mainly in and around the Lost Valley Palace. As for those still in Cartago Valley, trucks had been sent to pick them up along with J-SEC officers and keepers to ensure their safety.

With the city now being associated with death, Dearing didn't want to return there and Grady realized that. Since she had to go back to his bungalow to retrieve her car and her sandals, he offered her to stay for dinner, an offer which she accepted.

When they reached his bungalow, the sun had passed behind the Western Cordillera and everywhere the Sibo hadn't spread its shadow, stars were shining in the sky.
They were not alone in the village since it was illuminated by the lights coming from other bungalows and they saw a jeep moving in the darkness, taking a nearby street.

On the other side of the Long Lake, the Reserve's animals were letting out calls and bellows. Grady listened to them before opening the door of his bungalow.

During the earthquake, a few books had fallen off the shelves and frames had been unhooked from the wall. Fearing more serious damage, he began by making a quick tour of his home, checking for leaks or anything else that could pose a risk.
He then went into the kitchen and inspected the hotplates and the fridge. They were functional.

Once it was done, he came back to his guests:

"If you want to stay alone for a moment, you can go in my room. I will ask the boys to help me prepare dinner," he suggested to Dearing.

"Thank you Owen."

She went to his room and he turned to Zach and Gray.

"You're okay?" He asked them.

"I think…" Zach replied with an uncertain look.

Gray replied with a small nod.

"Ok. While your aunt is resting, let's make dinner. I don't know what you had eaten at noon back in the jungle but you must be starving… If the three of us start now, it will be ready in half an hour. Don't hesitate to take a fruit to calm your hunger," the keeper told them, pointing to the fruit basket on one of the kitchen's worktops.

While Grady was cutting chicken fillets and Zach stirring onion and celery in a wok, Gray had been tasked with preparing the table.

"After setting the table, you can rest a little, Gray," Grady said. "Two are enough for the remaining tasks."

Once he had set the table, Gray wandered a bit in the bungalow but feeling idle and a seeing the books littering the ground at the base of the shelves, he thought he could do a favour to their host by putting them back in the shelves.

As he did that, he had a glance at the titles.
In addition to famous books about dinosaurs or paleontology such as Robert T. Bakker's The Dinosaur Heresies, Alan Grant's The Lost World of the Dinosaurs, or The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs by Gregory S. Paul, there were others about zoology, ethology, Costa Rican gastronomy, Tun-Si history and culture, as well as two books discussing about InGen's scientific discoveries but each expressing a radically different opinion: Henry Wu's The Next Step: an Evolution of God's Concepts, that highlighted the potential of InGen's biotechnology and explored the possibilities of creating brand new species; and Ian Malcolm's God Creates Dinosaurs, a very critical book by the famous Texan mathematician on the consequences of InGen's research and activities.

Once the books were back in the shelves, his gaze turned to a set of frames hanging near the desk, right next to the King Lear's poster.
Photos had been put in said frames, showing the achillobators in their youth, when they were hardly bigger than a chicken or a cat.
On the one in the centre, one could saw Grady walking down a service aisle, followed by the four dinosaurs in a single line with Blue ahead; on the one on the top left, Echo was inspecting a xylophone; and the one of the top right showed Blue lying on Grady's legs, resting her head on his laps and looking towards a turned-on television.
Those scenes were touching and Gray smiled as he looked at them, but his eyes lowered to a rather large document in a file holder below.
Curious, he wanted to know what its content was, but before he took it, he checked that his brother and the keeper were absorbed in their respective tasks.

Grabbing the document by the spine, he took it out of the file holder and turned it over to read the cover:

GRADY Owen
LORENZ Nikolaas
SEMBÈNE Barry

Integrated Behavior Raptor Intelligence Study

Logbook.

09/31/2017 version.

He opened the document and by browsing it, his eyes were immediately attracted by one of the appendices at the end, consisting of a presentation in the form of individual records, each featuring one or several pictures of the animals involved in the program.
Gray discovered that in addition to the four Achillobator he had seen pictures of, there were six other packs of four individuals each, and of a different species, Neoraptor, previously erroneously called Velociraptor.

The first eight records were of animals that belonged to the subspecies Neoraptor athertonii tigris.
In the latter, the males had an orange body striped with black and a pale white belly while the females were brown with a light grey mottling and stripes and a pale brown underbelly.
He read the names attributed to individuals. For the males there were Priam, Hector, Paris and Aeneas while the females had been called Hecube, Andromache, Briseis and Cassandra. All names of characters from the Iliad.

Gray then moved on to the second subspecies, Neoraptor athertonii iroquoii, named after the males' sagittal crest of dark grey quills.
He thought that they were visually attractive. They had a blue-grey body with a brownish red back, and a light blue lateral stripe on each side than ran from the head to the end of the tail while two small red ridges adorned the top of the snout. The females however had a creamy white body mottled with black.
Due to the straight and elegant posture they had on the pictures and their round pupil, the iroquoii evoked more birds than the tigris.
Here again, the chosen names were from Greek mythology and there were Agamemnon, Ajax, Ulysses and Achilles for the males; Clytemnestra, Hermione, Iphigenia and Electra for the females.

And finally, came the records sheets dedicated to a hybrid subspecies of the two previous ones, named Neoraptor athertonii iroquoii x tigris.
The males, dark grey with a light grey underbelly, had inherited the iroquoii's quills crest and red eyes and the tigris' stripes but compared to the first, the snout's ridges and the lateral stripes were less pronounced. The females, also dark grey but mottled with black, had yellow eyes.
The names given to the males were Heracles, Perseus, Theseus, and Bellerophon, and those to the females were Atalanta, Hippolyta, Medea, and Andromeda.

"Zach? Can you check how's Claire doing?" Grady asked at that moment. "Don't disturb her if she seems to be sleeping. Go by the patio if necessary. I just want to know what she is doing," he added in a low voice.

As he was on Andromeda's record, an information caught Gray's eye: It was written that she had been shot in mid-2013 following an incident.

Gray heard someone walking towards him.

"Gray?" Grady's voice asked on a neutral tone. "Could you replace your brother in the kitchen please?"

He closed the log book, put it down on the desk and turned around to see Grady standing a few steps away from him and looking at him with a half stern, half melancholic expression.

He had noticed that Gray was reading Andromeda's record and the boy realized that it made the keeper feel uncomfortable that he discovered that one of the neoraptors of his research program had died.

"Yes, Mr Grady," Gray nervously replied.

As they returned to the kitchen where rice was starting to cook in the wok, Grady told him:

"You can call me Owen."

Twenty minutes later, dinner was ready and Grady went to told Dearing about that.
She arrived soon after and the four sat down at the table, the boys facing each other, Grady back to the kitchen and Dearing facing him. Her eyes laid upon the food on the table and as she was hunger-stricken, her haggard look lighted up a little.
He and the boys had prepared pieces of spiced chicken and a plate of Arroz Navideño, also known as Christmas rice, garnished with parsley, prunes, crushed almonds, celery and whose curry scents diffused in the whole room. For dessert, they had put some fruit on the counter.

"I know it's not a good old turkey. I had planned to go to the feast that was organized for tonight so I did with what I had," Grady said, talking about the main course.

He became silent for a moment, thinking about what he would say next.

"I'm aware that the adjective is not really appropriate but Merry Christmas," the keeper added after a sigh. "Enjoy your meal."

"Enjoy your meal," they said back, feebly.

They served themselves and dined with an undisguised appetite.

However, none of them desired to speak and the meal proceeded in a complete silence that was only disturbed by the distant sounds of the eruption and the occasional calls of some dinosaur, let out in the darkness of the night.