Within a second, what seemed like hundreds of men came pouring out. Soldiers, by the looks of them, all dressed in black, carrying guns, and unloading the boxes of equipment from the back of the trucks.

'Professor Cutter?' One of them called. As I stood up, I watched one of the men move towards Cutter, and upon reaching him held out his hand to shake. 'Captain Ryan, Home Office. What the hell is that?' He nodded towards the light.

Nick blinked back at him, slowly took his hand in confusion but didn't respond.

'We saw you were staying in the hotel nearby, and I suspect this is why we're both here.' He pulled out a still of the security camera footage with a blurry outline of a creature on it. 'We have dozens of rogue animal sightings every year, but this one's not like the others. And when we intercepted another tip off from a Mrs Trent about pre-historic flying lizards, we thought we better come down to investigate.'

Nick cleared his throat. 'Right,' he said, 'um...'. He looked to me, and with my lips already parted I sucked in a breath.

I didn't want to get too close to the man, or more specifically the weapon he was carrying, and eyeing him wearily, I then turned as though by way of explanation back to the light.

'We're hoping you might be able to help explain some of this, Professor,' Captain Ryan continued.

'Um...' Nick said again.

Behind him, Stephen was standing protectively over the table of uni equipment, dead eyeing anyone who got too close to either it or Rex, who was bundled up in my scarf on the table, trying to keep warm.

Connor hadn't moved. He was still standing almost directly behind me with his notebook in his hands and this look in his eyes that showed the right amount of confusion for all of us combined, tinged with the aftershock of frustration.

I heard Nick clear his throat again. 'Everything we've seen so far is consistent to vertebrates that last appeared in the fossil record hundreds of millions of years ago.'

The captain frowned. 'You mean they're like creatures from the past.'

'No, I mean they are creatures from the past.'

'How is that possible?'

Cutter looked to me again, and sensing the shift, Captain Ryan turned towards me. 'Are you– do you... understand this?' he asked me.

'On a theoretical level,' I replied softly, 'it's about energy it's... perhaps spontaneity of fracturing within the time-stream, maybe with an added catalyst or transdimensional warping from isotopic decay at a cellular level, it's... complicated.'

I got the feeling he hadn't understood anything I'd said but I didn't blame him because the thoughts were barely functional in my own head, so why would they make sense out loud?

He nodded. 'You two come with me.' He turned on his heel and started back to towards the vehicles.

'Just, hang on,' Nick called after him, 'what are you talking about?'

'We're going back to the Home Office.'

I put my hands in my pockets. 'Why? By the looks of it you've got your own experts.'

'They didn't see what you saw,' the Captain replied, 'and they don't know what you know.'

The ride to the home office took a while, but we sat in relative silence almost the whole way there and only occasionally did somebody speak.

Once we got there, we were led straight to a room, told to sit down, and then left completely on our own.

After a few minutes, someone came back in, placed two thick wedges of paper in front of us, and looking down I read the faded italic inscription official secrets act and quickly turned to Nick as he opened the pages to start flicking through.

'If we don't sign this, what do you think they'll do?' he said, half-sarcastically.

'I think you'd have to make sure you don't stand too close to any windows ever again.' Then, as he caught my eye, I smiled.

'You think it might come to that?' he asked.

I shrugged but couldn't help the short burst of laughter that bubbled up through me. 'Not if they need us. All we have to do is be more useful to them alive than dead. It's pretty easy. We have reasonable doubt on our side too.'

'What a day,' he said.

'What a day,' I agreed. I never thought we'd have to be considering all of this earlier this morning.

'Oh, listen to this,' Nick continued, reading aloud from the pages, 'I do so declare that I will not inform any secondary civilian parties willingly or unbeknownst to myself of that which is enclosed within the bracket, of government party information. Thou shalt keep thy trap shut.'

It wasn't long after we'd signed them that we were taken out to meet the man in charge. I could tell from his suit what sort of man he was.

'This phenomenon, professor, they tell me you have an explanation,' he said, before any sort of hello or introduction, and he turned on his heel to walk back through the Home Office, assuming we would follow after him.

We did.

'A theory,' I corrected, and mimicked the smile Nick passed me. The man at the front of the group half turned to glance back at me. I straightened my shoulders. 'Anna Havisham,' I said simply, 'I'm a physicist.'

'I know who you are,' he replied. 'Anyone ever explain the term over-achiever to you?'

'There's no such thing,' I replied. 'I've been able to help identify the creatures that have already come through and matched them to different vertebrates from the fossil records.'

'Of course you have.'

'The boys experience proves there is a concrete landscape on the other side of the– what did you call it, Anna?'

'An anomaly,' I told them, 'it's a rupture in space-time. One end in the present and the other...'

'We think it's the earth many millions of years ago,' Cutter elaborated.

The man frowned. 'And this anomaly as you call it is a door between times zones and the worlds history?' he asked incredulously. We both nodded our heads. 'Suppose this...' he paused to find the right word, 'remarkable... theory's correct what are the immediate risks?'

'Famine,' I said, and before I could think of what to say next Cutter added his own insight.

'War,' he suggested, looking to me to continue.

'Pestilence,' I added.

'The end of the world as we know it,' said Nick.

'You know, all the usual armageddony stuff,' I finished. And then we looked again at each other as though aware of the fact we had just finished an entire conversations' worth of each other's sentences and, by complete coincidence, said what the other was thinking.

'I think I could do without the facetiousness,' the man snapped back with an exasperated sigh.

'I think I could do without standing in some anaemic office in white hall talking to some civil service pin pusher when I should be exploring the most significant phenomenon in the history of science,' Cutter replied sharply. I gave a tight-lipped sarcastic smile of agreement.

'Technically I'm not a civil servant more a– err trouble shooter without portfolio in the PMs Office.' he corrected, a small smirk creeping onto his face.

'You mean you're a Government hatchet man!' Nick said.

'Colourful, but surprisingly accurate.'

'There's something else you should know: I intend to find out what happened to my ex-wife whatever the risks so I'm going through the anomaly and if you want to stop me then you're going to have to shoot me.'

'I hope it won't come to that. Now, Miss Havisham, those creatures you were talking about...' As he turned to face the window, I followed his line of vision and found we were looking down into a lab.

The door to the lab opened a moment later, and a scientist in a hazmat suit entered with a large cage. For a second I didn't see him, but then as my eyes came to focus on the inside of the cage, I whipped my head back to stare at the man. 'Rex?'

'What?' Cutter echoed. I pushed myself into Nick's side as I pointed down into the lab. 'What are you doing with him?'

'We just want to run some tests, to confirm your theory. You understand, of course, as scientists yourselves?'

'You really shouldn't handle a lizard like that!'

'Let the experts do their job.'

'They don't know what they're doing. You really shouldn't mess with any sort of angry reptile.'

'I'm terrified.'

I started to shake my head, as the scientist tried to hover the handheld spectrometer above Rex's head. And knowing Rex would confuse it as a circling predator, I watched him chirp, and contract ready to push off into flight. I cocked my head. 'Do they even know he can fly?' I asked.

The man turned to me. 'Fly?' he clarified.

'Did you think the wings were just for decoration?'

At that moment, he took off, circled the scientists three or four times before he swooped towards the doors. And– for some reason– someone came into the room to help try and catch him, but Rex took full advantage of the new escape route and flew straight out.

'Oh look at that!' Nick said.

'Some experts you've got there,' I added.

'He can fly,' the man clarified through gritted teeth.

I had to bite my lip to stave from laughing. 'Oh yeah.'

Nick hummed, and I could hear his own amusement bleeding through his tone, 'hmm, pretty well.'

Rex circled several times, dodging anyone who tried to grab him and instead flew straight up to us. He came through the window so quickly I almost didn't have time to catch him before he had dropped into my arms. I turned to the boss and tried my absolute hardest not to look too smug. 'Oh... those risks I was telling you about–' I began, catching his attention before he could walk away. 'There's one I didn't mention running down your back.'

My focus flitted from Nick's smile to the back of the man's suit, where a huge green sloppy poo had begun to drip from his shoulder all down the back of the jacket.

He stalked away, and I met Nicks eye again. 'That's just... so perfect,' he said joyfully, and he started towards me, 'Rex... I could kiss you...'

He looked extremely annoyed the next time we saw him. Lester– as I'd heard his name was– had retreated to the safety of the chair behind his desk, and was now wearing a new suit jacket and a scowl.

Just to annoy him further, I leant back against the glass wall of his office whilst he spoke.

'The lizards DNA confirms your theory,' he said, 'the creature's a living fossil. Under the circumstances I can allow your exploratory mission into the anomaly.'

'We're taking the lizard back,' Nick started.

'Creatures that don't belong here should be returned to their natural habitat,' I added with a nod.

Lester continued to eye us both for a second, presumably trying to work out if we were insane or crazy, before he lifted his chin. 'The girl can't go,' he said. And I couldn't tell what was worse, the fact that he'd called me that, or the fact he hadn't even bothered to look at me as he'd said it.

'What?' Nick demanded.

Now scowling myself, I pushed off the glass and took a step towards him. 'Why, because I'm a woman?'

He rolled his eyes. 'If you're even half as integral to understanding this phenomenon as everyone thinks you are, you're far too valuable.'

'And how are you going to stop me?' I asked. And my voice was considerably calmer than I thought it was going to be. I sounded genuinely curious, and non-threatening in a falsely secure type of way.

'We have lots of different ways to do that.'

I shook my head. 'No,' I said simply. 'I have to go. I have to move through it and be there on the other side. I have to know exactly how it feels and what effect it has on the human body, and I have to see for myself what's out there.'

'What part of no do you not understand?'

'What part of this do you not understand,' Nick interjected. 'If you want to know what's happening here...'

'If you want us to know how this is possible,' I added.

'–or why this is happening,' Nick continued.

'You have to let us go,' I said.

'Both of us,' Nick finished.

The man bit down hard on the inside of his cheek, presumably deflated with defeat, before he reached into the top draw on his desk and produced a booklet of paper. 'It's a disclaimer,' he explained. 'We don't want any nasty law suits if you don't come back.' And he held out the pen to us.

'I can't believe that worked,' I said, as Nick and I climbed back into a truck we'd been given to return to the anomaly site.

Beside me, Nick whistled, 'yeah.'

'Thanks, by the way, for helping me with that.'

He shrugged. 'It was your idea in the first place, I can't leave you behind.'

'Yeah,' I agreed, nose crinkling, 'plus, you need someone to say I told you so to when we get through and we're in the actual Permian era. Fuck, I can't believe I just said that. What a day.'

'What a day,' he concurred. 'Any chance Connor's worked out what else came through already? It'd be nice to know what to expect when we're on the other side.'

'Um...' I pulled my phone out my pocket to check if he'd text me, but it didn't come on when I flipped it open. 'Oh... my phone's dead,' I said apologetically. 'Trial and error?'

His attention moved momentarily off the exit of the Home Office car park to me, and he smiled. 'What do we know?'

'Carnivore,' I said, 'dragged its prey up into a tree.'

'And were discounting a leopard considering that we're not in Africa. Scylacosaurus?' Nick suggested.

'Too small to make that whole in the fence. They were, what, one meter long?'

'Yeah, um, oh, Aetosaurs were herbivores, weren't they?'

'Hmm,' I agreed, 'but that's the right type of size.' Then something came to mind. 'Inostrancevia.'

'A Gorgonopsid?'

I nodded. 'Seems likely, don't you think? If we are talking Permian, like the Coelurosauravus, and the Scutosaurus, that would make it the prime suspect. Nick, if it's still out there then we've got to find it. Fast.'