'This database contains a list of every known vertebrate that's ever existed on the fossil record– extinct or otherwise.' I was having a hard time focusing. I couldn't concentrate on what Connor was saying; I could barely hear him over the sound of my heartbeat ringing in my ears and I didn't need to look up to know that Nick's gaze was on me.

I tried to tell myself that it didn't matter. That nobody in that hotel knew me or him and no one had been watching and it wasn't a big deal but I could still feel his lips against mine.

Connor stepped back from his open laptop on the bonnet of the truck and incidentally stopped between us, interrupting our line of sight.

'I've been building it every spare second since I was 14,' Connor continued.

'Well,' Stephen replied, 'everyone needs a hobby.'

'A hobby!?' Connor repeated in offense.

I quickly continued 'it's his baby,' in explanation.

'Hey.' Connor reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. 'It's our baby.'

Stephen pulled a face. I started to shake my head. 'I've told you before–'

'You're acting like you didn't contribute to the bare bones of its D.N.A,' Connor complained. 'You know you helped.'

'I did,' I replied. 'And I'm very proud of it.'

'But what exactly are you expecting it to find?' Stephen asked. 'Some kind of lesser-spotted sasquatch?'

'You know we're not talking about a big cat don't you?' Connor replied. 'It's a cover up, there's something else out there.'

'Have you ever met a conspiracy theory you didn't like?' Stephen returned.

Connor guffed, but he said nothing, and in itself the silence was an answer. 'Let's just get on with it, shall we?' And he glanced down the track into the forest. 'Does anyone want to hear a scary story?' The forest was unnerving; a fog had set in lowering visibility so that we couldn't even see the end of the path we were about to walk down.

I linked my arm through Connor's. 'Go on then, as long as it's not the one about the squirrel in your backpack again.' Connor pouted and pulled his arm back from mine. I laughed. 'All I'm saying–Con– is that I think they put the signs up so that drivers don't run them over. I don't think it's the squirrels themselves you need to worry about.'

We ducked and weaved through the tree branches and roots, over fallen trunks, through muddy puddles. In front of us Stephen slowed to a stop, there was a short silence, I batted a low branch out of my face as I waited then after a moment he started walking again in what felt like the complete opposite direction.

'If there were some creature around here, wouldn't the journalists have found it by now?' I asked.

'They wouldn't know what they were looking for,' Nick answered as he fell into step beside me.

'But we do?'

'I've seen Stephen track wounded animals through the rainforest for up to 10 days at a time.'

'Not to mention wrestle an anaconda,' Connor interjected as he stomped past us.

'And save a whale,' I added. Then we both let out a snort of laughter.

'Maybe there is something here, maybe there isn't,' Nick said, 'frankly I doubt it but–'

'Cutter!'

Stephen's outburst claimed our attention, surreptitiously cutting Nick off before he had the chance to finish his statement, and a moment later I found myself running through the trees towards him.

I skidded to a stop and looked up to where Stephen's attention had been drawn, up to something that was resting in the branches of the tree.

'A cow?'

'Okay… now… I'm getting interested.'

'Professor?' Connor called from somewhere behind us as he stumbled off the track into the opening. 'The compass is going haywire.' Nick leant across Stephen to take it from him, and then held it out in front of us. I quickly glanced up to squint through the trees to check for powerlines, but the darkening sky above was clear.

'Anna?' Connor asked, 'what's going on?'

'Magnetic field or something, maybe,' I explained, 'but the source would need to be pretty close.'

Nick pulled a torch from his coat and passed it over to me, 'here, it's gonna get dark pretty fast now, don't get lost, stay close to Stephen.' He pointed up the path, and I nodded, whilst Stephen spun around to get his bearings. He set off again, and we followed him. 'You doing alright?'

'I'm fine. I don't spook easily,' I responded, as I flicked the torch on and angled it down to illuminate the ground, 'I practically grew up on horror movies.'

'… but this is real.'

'Yeah,' I replied, though most of my attention was on the ground to make sure I didn't trip and fall, 'there's just a lot of science we don't understand yet, and when you're open to every possibility, you're prepared for them all. Don't worry about me.' I flicked the torch quickly to Connor, even though it wasn't necessarily dark enough to need it yet, and he yelped in protest as the beam hit his eyes. 'Where's the compass?' I asked.

'I've got it,' Nick replied and he held it up.

'Okay, whatever it is that's doing that, we can find it using this.'

'What?' Nick questioned.

'Oh, if she says we can then we can,' Connor interjected, 'you should have seen her working for her masters, it was bloody brilliant, she finished the whole degree in less than a year and got a first.'

'You don't say...'

I didn't answer. 'I need the map,' I said.

'Why?'

'So I can mark where we are, and that way we'll know if we're going in the right direction because…' I looked to Connor to finish my statement.

'The further we are, the slower it spins,' he concluded. I nodded. 'Brilliant!'

'From there I can work out the boundary of the field and should be able to calculate the location of whatever it is that's causing it.' A noise caught my attention, and I froze, snapping my arm around to shine the torch through the trees on our left.

'What? What is it?' Connor questioned. I raised a finger to my lip in a pert demand for silence; Connor came towards me and I could hear him humming the X-files theme tune under his breath.

Cutter shushed him, I squinted into the darkness in hope that I would catch sight of whatever it was I thought I'd heard. 'There's something up ahead.'

'What?' Connor called. I immediately reached over and smack him round the head.

'There's someone there.'

Nick was the first to approach the young woman standing beside the creature. She looked around Connors age, maybe, or even a couple of years older. Her head turned at the sound of the twigs snapping beneath our feet as we got closer.

She looked out of place here, just like I expected we did. And there was an expression on her face that suggested she was just as much out of her depth.

'Don't move,' Nick said.

The girl nodded.

I held out an arm to stop Connor from walking any closer to it. He stumbled into the back of me.

'Is it real?'

'Some kind of experiment maybe,' Nick said, 'hybrid, Throwback. Who are you?' he then asked, turning his attention from the creature before us, to the woman.

'Abby Maitland. I'm a keeper at Wellington zoo.'

'Hi,' I replied with a smile, 'okay… Nick, it's a reptile,' I said, as soon as I was sure of it, '5 or 6 tonnes of one, at least, by the looks of it.' Cutter nodded. 'Large supratemporal fossae. Huge osteoderms on its back.'

'Yeah.' Nick agreed, as he stepped towards it to shine the light of the torch against the creature 'It must be some kind of–'

'Anapsid,' we concluded simultaneously.

'A tortoise?' Abby clarified in disbelief.

A short growl of discomfort escaped the creatures mouth, and the others took a half step back. 'Stay in his line of vision,' I called, 'you're making him nervous.'

Again, Nick nodded at me, and carefully retraced his steps back towards us.

'I was right, there was a dinosaur in that warehouse!' Connor exclaimed and danced over to me, expecting a high five. I groaned and tried my best to ignore the hand he was waving around in my face.

'Get off Connor!' I replied.

'Not touching, can't get mad!' he responded as he got even closer to me, 'not touching, can't get mad!'

'Bloody hell. There's two of them.' Stephen interrupted, and I reeled around to where he and Nick had crouched over another animal.

'Where did that come from?' Nick questioned, 'any ideas what that is?'

I crouched down beside him and narrowed my eyes as I exhaled a breathy chuckle, 'nothing that's existed for the last few million millennia.'

'I'll be making a complaint,' Ben's mother snapped, as she attempted to remake her sons bed. She lifted the duvet and debris from the wall now scattered across the carpet and she growled again. 'She's filled his head with all sorts of ideas!'

I watched Abby shrink back to try and blend into the wallpaper behind her as she raised her thumb to her mouth and chewed on a loose tab of skin. For a second, she reminded me of Connor, and I wished I hadn't left him back in the forest with Stephen.

'Just look at his room!' The mum continued.

'It was a dinosaur!' Ben argued back.

'Look, the simple truth is that Miss Maitland got carried away,' Nick attempted to explain to the woman. 'Ben's pet was no more exotic than Draco Volans Southeast Asian flying lizard.'

In response, the mum just sighed and threw her hands onto her hips.

'There was a monster though!' Ben exclaimed. 'It chased us. Tell them, Abby,' he pleaded.

Abby was silent for a moment, her mouth opened and closed a few times but no real sound came out, but I watched panic flitter behind her eyes. I didn't blame her– I would have had the exact same issue trying to explain all this. She looked pointedly at Nick, seemed to think for a moment about what exactly he was getting at, and, reluctantly, went along with it. 'I don't really know what happened. We got frightened, that's all.'

'But I saw the past! Prehistoric times! I was there!'

Nick's head turned to me, as I suddenly grabbed a hold of his arm for some reason in a hysterical excitement I couldn't show on my face. 'You saw the past?' Nick repeated questioningly.

'There was desert and rocks and things...' Ben stammered in explanation. Something in our facial expression must have shown our confusion, and mistakenly, I figured Ben read this as disbelief, and a moment later he grunted loudly and stormed out the room.

'I blame the telly,' his mother said, following him out.

'Okay...' I reached up with my hand to pull a strand of hair from my mouth as we stepped out of Ben's house. 'We have a problem,' I began, starting to piece together the clues in my head. Nick shut the door behind him and followed me and Abby down the drive. 'The creature we found could be many things, but it certainly isn't a ruthless killer that drags its prey up into trees.'

'You can't be sure of that,' Abby said sceptically.

'Actually, she can,' Nick replied.

'A reptile like that, as you know, is an herbivore.'

'Aye, pure veggie.'

'Which obviously means... that there's another one out there.' That thought shouldn't have made me smile, but somehow even that excited me, and when I looked at Nick again he was grinning too.

I was done for.

'What did Ben mean when he talked about seeing the past?' Nick repeated.

'These animals have to be coming from somewhere,' I pointed out in reply.

'Yes,' Nick agreed with a stifled laugh, 'and the answer's gotta be in that forest.'

'And maybe Ben found it,' I replied, '…I think I have an idea.'

'Stephen!' Cutter yelled, as we ran towards them, slightly out of breath by now, shaking our torches and waving our arms. 'Let him go– Let's scare him.'

'Let's see where it thinks it's safe…' I finished.

We followed it through the clearing to a denser area of trees, as it grumbled and roared out its protests to the fright. We emerged– still running– from the thick woodland, and it made for a light in the gap between two trees. The light engulfed it, and the creature passed through the gap and faded out of view right in front of me. I stumbled to a halt, feet slipping through the browning pine needles and sticks on the forest floor.

'Where did it go?' Connor asked from behind me, as I stepped closer to the flickering golden puddle of light that seemed to be suspended between the trees.

'Home,' I explained, even though I didn't understand how it was even possible.

'Okay…' Nick mumbled unsurely, 'what–what– what is that?'

'I think that's my magnetic field,' I explained, and slipping the compass out my pocket I held it out in front of me and watched the needle spin so fast in the centre that I couldn't even focus on it. 'Oh my god. It is. That's it!'

By the time the sun had come up, I'd been sitting in front of the light all night. The quiet was consuming. Behind me, Connor was sitting up against a tree taking a snooze, as Stephen sat at the fold–away table with the equipment they'd brought from the university.

Nick sat beside him, propped up on one elbow as he fiddled with the machinery and flitted back and forth between it and Connors open laptop, which was scrolling through the database of extinct species on a loop.

The notebook in my lap was open, my biro resting in the spine as I'd sketched and resketched and calculated and jotted down anything that came into my mind. To my left, an upturned cup was acting as a table for my compass– I had long since finished the coffee Nick had bought for me in the early hours of the morning.

A noise– the sound of Connor jolting awake– came from behind me, and I glanced back briefly over my shoulder at him. He snorted, lifting his cuff to wipe away the drool from one corner of his mouth before he immediately groaned from the soreness of his limbs and pushed himself up to his feet.

'Morning,' he greeted us all, and the guys at the table groaned back. 'Hmm, morning, Anna, what did I miss?' he stumbled inelegantly through the dirt towards me, pulling his notebook from his coat pocket and flipping it open.

The lights reflecting off the silver caught my eye as it flew from his hands and slurped into the light...

'My pen!' Connor exclaimed.

'Your magnetic field theory…' Nick noted as we shared a look again.

I tapped the glass of my compass with the end of the biro. 'The speed's remained constant,' I explained, and then quickly checked my watch again. 'Yeah,' I continued, 'no noticeable variation or deviation for, um, 7 hours now…' At the thought of how long we'd been sitting here, I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hands, 'what I don't know yet is what could be causing a magnetic field so powerful.' I got up, my spine cracking from the movement, and brushed the dry bits of twigs from my jeans.

'Maybe it's an alien spaceship?' Connor suggested. We exchanged a quick glance, he grinned at me and excitedly crossed his fingers on both hands. I turned my head and looked up, raising a Vulcan salute to the sky.

'Do you have any theories, Anna?' My attention was brought back down to the professor with the sound of his voice.

I nodded. 'So far I have several but I'm only looking at it, I mean, they're technically only observations at this point.'

'Everything we've seen about the animals so far is consistent with vertebrates that last appeared in the fossil records hundreds of millions of years ago.'

I nodded. 'I don't need to run any tests to know that they're creatures from the past,' I said. I turned my head back to the light and stared. 'I just– I don't know how to start explaining the how.'

'Haha! Brilliant!' Connor buzzed, unable to keep still from the excitement of it all, and he let go of something else that then went whizzing through the light. 'That's brilliant…Oh, that was my front door–'

'We should go through it,' I said suddenly, interrupting Connor.

'What?' Stephen questioned.

'The past is right there. On the other side of that thing.'

'It might not be safe,' Stephen continued to argue with me. But something told me he was intrigued too. He leant back in his chair and put his feet up on the table beside the equipment, interlocking his fingers behind his head.

'Who cares about safe,' I responded. 'Ben said he saw the past,' I repeated, 'he looked through it.' My eyes met Nick's, sparkling with the intrigue and excitement of it and I knew he was the one who would take the least convincing. 'Come on…' I said, 'it's so close.'

Stephen looked back at Nick. 'She makes a good point.'

'Thanks Stephen.' I smiled.

'Hmm, can anyone feel that?'

'What?'

'The ground's vibrating,' Connor said.

I frowned as, holding his gaze, we both slowly dropped down to a crouch, and I reached out a hand to feel the ground beneath us. Sure enough, he was right. I could feel it tremoring like the hum of an old engine.

'Another creature?' Connor suggested.

Stephen must have overheard him, because immediately he started to turn and look around for it.

I shook my head. 'It's too inconsistent, gait patterns are more regulated.'

'It's a truck,' Stephen said.

'Yeah,' I agreed.

'No, really, it's a truck.'

I looked up, just as a whole entourage of vehicles drove through the trees towards us and pulled up in the clearing.