Blue couldn't stop herself from pressing her face to the glass as the helicopter descended. Despite the stifling and exhilarating nature of foreboding thrumming through her veins, she couldn't help but feel a little excited. She'd always loved dinosaurs, and her little adventure a few years ago had done nothing to dampen it. Now, she was going to once again do something that every paleontologist dreamed of. She was going to walk with dinosaurs.

"Great view, huh?" Tim asked, grinning at her. Blue shot him a look. He kept looking at her as if he knew something that she didn't, and it irked her. Not to mention she still didn't know why the hell he was chosen to tag along. So, yeah, she was a little pissed at him.

Okay, maybe severely pissed at him.

The copter made a soft landing on the concrete helipad – the sight where, just a few years prior, Blue, her brother, and his friends had fought for their lives against a pack of raptors. They wouldn't have made it, if it weren't for an unexpected advantage. Red had succeeded in killing the pack leader, the dominant male or female (Blue still wasn't sure), startling the raptors and earning them the few minutes they needed for the helicopter to reach them.

Remembering her raptor made Blue's stomach flop and clench in sadness and regret. She loved Red. He was more than just a pet – he was intelligent, and understood so much. She missed him every day.

"You okay, Blue?" Billy asked.

Blue nodded. "I'm fine."

Roland turned to look at her, and Blue shifted uncomfortably in her seat. The hunter hadn't said much, but when he looked at Blue like that she felt like he knew everything.

"We've landed!" The pilot shouted.

Everyone disembarked and unloaded the equipment. Billy spoke with the pilot, confirming that the man would be able to pick them up whenever they radioed. Once he got the message, he'd arrive at the helipad within an hour. Their wireless radios would ensure that they could contact the pilot at any time.

"You ready?" Billy asked them as the pilot waved goodbye and the helicopter began to rise into the sky.

"Yup." Tim nodded.

Roland grunted.

"As ready as I'll ever be." Blue said, only half joking.

They began to trek down the road towards the former Jurassic Park hotel. It was the most likely place for the BioSyn group to being their operations, as it was a large building with plenty of room and a good number of dinosaur pens ready to go. As they walked, they all looked around at the jungle closing in on every side. The low-growing plants and shrubbery were beginning to overtake the road, and a few tree roots could be seen poking out of the ground. In about fifty or even as few as twenty years, this manmade path would vanish, consumed by the ever-spreading plants.

"So what's the plan?" Tim asked. "Just stroll in and take pictures?"

Blue glared at him.

"It'll be best if we wait until night." Roland said. "Set up camp nearby, then sneak in and take what we need."

"But the deadliest dinosaurs come out at night, just after sunset." Tim argued.

"We'll have to risk it." Billy decided.

"There will be predators about no matter what time of day it is." Blue said. She remembered being attacked by raptors in both the dead of night and the middle of the day. It made no difference to them what time of day it was. If they were hungry, it was time to hunt.

"What do you think they're planning to do with the dinosaurs once they've got 'em?" Tim asked.

"What do you think?" Billy replied. "Try and succeed where old Hammond and Ludlow failed. At least the old man was sensible enough to turn this into a preserve. I hear from Ian that Ludlow was a nasty piece of goods."

"That 'old man' made some mistakes, but he was a good man." Tim retorted. Blue was surprised to hear genuine anger in his voice. "Peter was cold-blooded, I'll give you that, but John Hammond was a visionary and a philanthropist. He just sometimes dreamed too big, that's all."

"All right, no need to get your panties in a twist." Billy chuckled.

"Were you this flippant when you worked under Grant?" Blue teased.

"I was twice as bad when I worked with Alan." Billy replied. "Just to drive him nuts."

Both Tim and Blue grinned, imagining the scene. Billy must have truly cost Grant some of his sanity; the two were almost complete opposites.

After a minute, Blue asked a question that had been tugging at her mind. "My worry isn't what they're going to do with the dinosaurs – that's rather obvious. My concern is what kind of dinosaurs they're going to go after. Herbivores are all right; they're nice to look at and easy to care for, and the visitors can possibly feed them. But they're not the main attraction. People want excitement, they want thrills; they want a good show. And sometimes, they want blood." She looked at the three men. "And any corporate exec in the entertainment business that's worth his salt will know that."

"They'll want a T-Rex, no doubt about that." Roland said. "Raptors, maybe."

Blue shuddered to think what methods the company might try to employ to catch a raptor.

"Spinosaurus." Billy muttered.

"What?" Blue sputtered. "They have a… they created a…" She swallowed. "Those things are fucking huge."

"Yup." Billy nodded. "They can take down a small plane."

Blue searched his face for any sign of sarcasm or tomfoolery, but Billy's face was uncharacteristically serious. In fact, she would go so far as to say that he looked grim.

"They can't possibly hope to catch one of those." Blue protested feebly. "Even the idea of catching a T-Rex is ludicrous."

"It doesn't matter what the facts are." Roland said. There was no mistaking his face or tone of voice for anything but grim. "What matters is what the executives want. And if they want something, nothing gets in their way." He stared off into the looming wall of trees. "Not even human life." He added quietly.

Blue frowned but said nothing. The rest of the trek passed in relative silence, nobody wanting to risk either a predatory dinosaur or a sharp-eared BioSyn worker to hear them and come investigate. They reached the part where the road bent to the left, leading up to the big complex. Billy looked over at Roland, who veered left and silently led them off the trail and into the jungle.

Everyone took care to step carefully, keeping their senses peeled for anything out of the ordinary – a strange smell, a flash of movement, or a suspicious sound. When they reached a clump of trees, Roland held up a hand. They all stopped. Blue could just see the windows of the welcome center, the afternoon sunlight reflecting off of them and making her have to squint.

"We'll make camp here." Roland said quietly.

Everybody immediately dropped the equipment they'd been carrying. Each person had their own backpack of supplies. Billy had the camera equipment, Tim carried the sleeping bags, Blue got the survival gear and the food, and Roland had the weapons. Nobody wanted to have to use them, but they'd all taken a crash-course on the various guns and knives, just in case. They also had a blueprint of the building, a detailed map of the island (made by Lex, Ian, Ellie and Alan) and some other equipment.

"Anyone up for lunch? I don't know about you all, but I'm starving." Tim said, diving into the backpack that held the food.

Blue rolled her eyes, but held her hand out for an energy bar. Tim passed one to her, along with a water bottle. The two other men took food as well, and they all ate in silence, glancing over their shoulders every so often.

When they'd finished, they still had a couple of hours left until sunset. They all sat, staring at one another, for a good ten minutes or so, before Tim broke the silence.

"So, Billy – what gives?"

The others stared at him. Tim sighed. "Look, I've known you for five years, man. You never thought to tell me you'd been to Jurassic Park?"

Billy eyeballed him. "There are some things you just don't share, Tim, if you don't have to."

There was a very pregnant pause. Tim looked suitably chastised.

After a minute, Billy sighed. "Might as well." He muttered. "Now that I'm back here." He looked at Blue. "I bet you've been dying to know as well, haven't you?"

Blue shrugged. "I'll tell if you will." She said. It was only fair.

Roland gave them all a look that dared them to suggest he also share. Billy ignored him and started.

"I was Grant's… well, I guess you could say protégé, for about six months when the whole thing started. We had different views on things, but I guess they hadn't really come up, or we hadn't realized just how different, until we were in the thick of things.

"Basically, Grant was asked by a couple claiming to be millionaires, named Amanda and Paul Kirby, to give them an aerial tour of the island. They were into thrills like that, they said. They'd even booked seats on the first commercial flight to the moon. Grant was all hell no, but then they promised to help fund his next expedition, so his hell no changed to why the hell not?

"So he, for some insane reason, decided to bring me along. Probably thought it would be a nice treat for me to see real dinosaurs, even if it was from a fair distance. He told me about his first time on the island, both to warn me of the dangers and, frankly, to stop me from doing anything stupid like jumping out of the plane to investigate closer.

"Long story short, the Kirbys weren't millionaires – they weren't even married. Well, not anymore. They'd divorced about a year ago. Had a son, about eleven or twelve years old. Eric. You've met him, Lex's husband. Anyway, the kid had been parasailing or hang-gliding or something with Amanda's boyfriend just off the coast of the island. Something went wrong and they crashed onto the island. The boyfriend died but Eric… well, nobody knew. So the Kirbys raised up the money to hire a couple of machine-toting idiots and fooled Grant into being their guide, so they could go find Eric. But it's Jurassic Park; nothing goes the way it's supposed to. We got attacked by a fucking Spinosaurus, people died, yada yada yada…"

Billy sighed, passing a hand over his face. "It was awful. You know how you when you're watching a scary film, and a character's walking down a hallway or around a room or something, and the creepy music starts to play, and you begin to get nervous? You know that something's going to happen; you just don't know what. But then the creature jumps out or whatever and you jump, freak out a little, then the movie ends and the lights come on and you go home and unwind. You release all those nerves.

"Here… you don't. You don't ever lose that sense of foreboding; that feeling that something is coming… something is out there… It never, ever lets up. And it's Hell.

"It got to the point where I just wanted it to end. I wanted to get to the part where the boogey man jumps out. And then I did something really stupid. See, we found another lab where they were testing baby raptors and stuff. Pickled dinosaurs – that's not a sight you're going to forget any time soon. It's burned into your retinas. But there were eggs, and I thought, hey, maybe if I took one, we could study it when we got back, and maybe this trip wouldn't be such a fucking nightmare after all. I thought it was a great idea; it would revolutionize our field. And… yeah, yeah, I kind of craved the fame. I'll admit that was a factor. Well, Grant knocked that idiocy out of me pretty quickly. Turns out that my taking the eggs was the reason those fucking raptors were tailing us the entire time. It was awful, knowing that you're the reason everyone's lives are in danger.

"But you know how Grant is – worst curmudgeon since Scrooge. He got his point across, but he also managed to make me feel like crap.

"So now I'm feeling guilty and I was still scared as fuck, so when we got to this… well, I guess it was an aviary. It was filled with pterodactyls. And those things are vicious! It was like Hitchcock's The Birds! They were dive-bombing us, and I knew we weren't going to make it out of there. And that pressure was getting to me, the disappointment… God, I hated the idea that I'd disappointed Grant. And I was so stressed. I just wanted it over, however that happened. So I told them to go and I distracted the creatures.

"I thought I was dead. Hell, I should have been dead. But Grant called Ellie – she was married to some guy in the government at the time – and she got the Navy and the National Guard and every other damn guy with a gun to come to the island. They saved me. I was pretty beat up… I've still got nightmares about those animals. But I made it. And at the end of it… Grant forgave me. I didn't deserve it, but he forgave me."

Billy gazed off into the distance, looking so much older than his thirty-odd years. "I learned a lot that day." He said. "Wised up on a bunch of things. But it comes with a price; it always comes with a price. I was on sleeping pills for months, and therapy for a good year. There are still times that I can't sleep at night." He looked down at his hands, holding them up for inspection. "And in case I ever start to forget, I've got these…"

Blue had seen his scars many a time, digging in the dirt with him. She'd been mildly curious, and she knew that other students speculated as to what caused them, but she'd never really given them much thought. Now she knew. Those thin white marks, like stabs of a scissor blade, weren't from any metal tools. They were from razor-sharp beaks.

"Held my arms up over my head to shield myself." Billy explained.

Tim gave a low whistle, but it wasn't disrespectful. It was like a young soldier seeing a veteran's war wounds. Blue felt a surge of respect for her mentor, and gratefulness that she'd gotten out so unscathed. Her scars were painful, yes, but they were emotional. They weren't spelled out on her body for all to see and gape at.

Billy looked up. "Looks like the sun's beginning to set." He observed. "Story time is over. Tim, you come with me; let's see what these bozos are up to."

Tim got up, retrieving a handgun from the bag. Billy grabbed a rifle, and the two started out, quickly vanishing into the jungle.

Roland glanced over at Blue. She could feel his stare, and shifted uncomfortably. He hadn't said a word throughout Billy's entire narrative – in fact, he hadn't appeared to be listening at all. But now he was staring at her, eagle-eyed, and she felt like she was under a microscope.

"You lost someone, last time you were here." Roland observed.

Blue turned to look at him. Her shock was showing on her face, she knew, and so she didn't bother lying. "How did you know?"

A vein in Roland's temple flinched. "Because I lost someone, too."

Blue cocked her head – a habit she'd picked up from Red. "Who was it?"

Roland sighed. "My partner. Ajay was his name. Ajay Sidhu. Met him while on a hunt in India. We were inseparable." He paused. "He was always nervous for me, claiming I'd get too close to a lion or something and lose a leg. In the end, he was the one who got too close."

The hunter glared at nothing in particular, his jaw clenching. "Peter Ludlow was a bastard. I knew that. I knew what this island could do, too. Hammond hired a hunting buddy of mine back when Grant and the others came here; he got his stomach chewed out by a raptor. But it was the greatest hunt of my life – a T-Rex! The king of the prehistoric jungle! So I took the job. And I paid the price."

Roland fell silent, and the two of them sat companionably for a moment. Blue cleared her throat.

"I'm sorry." She said. "It must have been awful."

"Didn't even get to say goodbye. Send him off, you know." Roland replied.

"I'm sorry." Blue said again. She knew how empty her words must sound to the man; she remembered how hollow Nathan's words of comfort were to her, after having to leave Red behind.

"Nothing we can do about it, now." Roland replied. "Best person I knew… could make a good breakfast out of anything…" He paused, snapping himself out of his reverie. "But it's done. Over. You can't bring 'em back."

"It's more the question of what I could have done differently that bothers me." Blue confided.

Roland gave her that piercing look again. "Who did you lose?" He asked. "Your stepbrother made it off, if I recall."

"We all made it off." Blue said. Then she amended her statement. "Well, except for this one friend of Nathan's. But Oliver, Caleb, Robbie, Nathan and I all made it."

"Then who did you lose?" Roland asked, confused.

Blue opened her mouth, but was unsure of where or how to start. Fortunately, she was saved from answering by the return of Billy and Tim.

"So we got a good look around, and we found – Blue! Behind you!" Billy shouted, his rifle swinging up. Tim raised his gun as well.

Blue turned just in time for something huge and heavy to barrel into her, knocking her flat onto her back.

There is a reference to an award-winning documentary series about dinosaurs in there. I don't expect anyone to catch it but if you do, I will throw handfuls of confetti and do a happy dance. C'mon, don't you want to see me do my embarrassing happy dance?

Some of you might be wondering… but in truth I don't know if Roland is gay or not. I couldn't get a full grasp of his (obviously close) relationship with Ajay in the film (for those of you might be unsure, Roland was the hunter hired by Ludlow in Jurassic Park II: The Lost World), and felt they could be anything. They could be best friends, hunting partners, romantic partners, or even have a Robinson Crusoe/Friday relationship. I don't know. So I felt that, as Roland is a bit of an ambiguous character, it would be best if his relationship with Ajay were slightly ambiguous. Now you know; it's whatever you want to make of it.