'I don't know what happened.'

Connor had the gall to at least look a little bit embarrassed by the situation.

Nick was currently standing further up the embankment talking to the police officers, while the rest of us were waiting by the edge of the lake. The novelty of Connor's uninjured condition had long since worn off, boiled down instead to leave me seething, clutching the pathetic attempt at a prosthetic dinosaur head, and trying not to crack any teeth under the intense pressure of my locked jaw.

I scoffed. 'Really? You don't know? You have no idea who's behind this?' Seemed crystal clear to me. And when I got my hands on them they would be dead too. 'You made me a promise!'

'Hey,' he responded, 'I didn't touch the pizza.'

Frustration got the better of me and I instinctively swung at him. The fake head hit him hard in the chest. 'What the fuck were you thinking!?'

'That if it was another Gorgonopsid I'd just run like hell.'

I went for him again but Stephen lunged forward, snatching the prosthetic from my hand before it could hit him and simultaneously shouldering me out of arms reach of my cousin. 'Hey, will you two cut it out?'

'The police found your things. They rang me. I thought...'

Connor's head dropped almost sheepishly with realisation. '...Sorry.'

'Yeah.' His apology didn't change anything. It certainly didn't make me feel any better. 'I don't get it. How could you be so selfish?'

He nodded. 'I wasn't thinking.'

'Clearly.' I shook my head. 'What the hell would I do without you, huh?'

Before he could respond, a set of footsteps alerted us both to an incoming figure and we both looked over just as Nick came to a stop beside me.

'Look I know what you're going to say–' Connor started. 'I'm sorry.'

'The police aren't going to prosecute you for trespassing,' Cutter replied, 'but supposing there had been a predator what were you going to do? Tame it? You knew exactly what was at stake, but you just couldn't keep your mouth shut.'

'It's just so big. I had to tell somebody.' He sighed. 'Sorry... I am. I blew it.'

'Go back to college, get on with your work. I'll find you another supervisor.'

What? 'I'm just as much to blame as he is.'

Nick turned his head and frowned down at me. 'Anna, you didn't do anything.'

I folded my arms. 'I should have known.'

'Right,' he replied, humouring me. 'But you didn't run your mouth off and you've got skills we can use. I'm not letting you out of my sight.'

'I'm just as mad as you are–' probably more so, actually '–but you can't be serious.'

'No. I am.' Then he turned on his heel. And my eyes widened.

The shock made my frustration seem immaterial. 'Cutter...' But he didn't stop and I was forced to go after him. I left Stephen and Connor at the edge of the lake. 'Cutter!'

He just ignored me. 'You can't do that to him!' I returned in outrage. 'You know he's the reason we're here.'

He stopped so suddenly I almost crashed into the back of him, before he turned around and looked down at me. He sighed. 'How am I supposed to keep him safe if he's going to do something like that?'

'What are you talking about?'

'Anna, come on. I'm sorry but how are we supposed to trust that he can keep his mouth shut, or look after himself in the case of a creature incursion after this?'

'So he mentioned something to our best mates, two guys who genuinely believe in Bigfoot. Even if they started talking noone is going to believe them.'

'That isn't the point and you know it.'

'He's made his mistake. And he's learnt his lesson.'

'Has he? Are you sure of that? You just said you can't lose him. This can keep him safe, by keeping him as far away from all of this as he can get.'

I had to physically fight the overwhelming urge to roll my eyes. 'That's bullshit.'

'You don't want to keep him safe?' he replied.

'Don't,' I said simply. I didnt want to argue with him, or make him feel like I was telling him off, because truthfully I didnt really know where I stood with Nick at that moment in time and it felt a little awkward. 'This was his thing. I won't do this without him... ' I couldn't. Nick had a point but it wasn't fair. I wasn't going to do that to him. I sighed. 'I don't expect you to understand. And you know what, I quit.'

I turned away from him and took a couple of steps back down the path, towards my cousin and the lake. I didn't have the chance to get very far before he responded.

'No.'

I stopped, almost disbelieving that I'd heard him right. And I turned back around. 'What?' I asked. 'What do you mean no?'

'I mean no I won't accept that. I don't believe you'll just walk away from something like this when you know you can help.'

'You don't?' I questioned in return. 'Watch me.'

'Don't be stupid.'

'So now I'm stupid?'

'Yes, if you do this.'

I just shook my head. 'Everyone can be replaced Nick. You'll find someone better. Someone smarter.'

His eyes rolled. 'Don't pretend you don't know there isn't anybody on the planet better for the job. And Connor's a very smart kid but he can't take care of himself like you can. Come on, Anna, think about it. He stays safe, you don't have to worry about him anymore, and we can work all of this out hopefully before anyone else gets hurt.'

My eyes narrowed. 'He is not some silly little distraction,' I said. 'He's my family and he is just as capable as I am at doing all of this.'

'I know,' he nodded. 'Except... he isn't. Because look at what's happened here.' He held out his arms in explanation. 'Can you honestly tell me you would have done what he did?'

I knew, straight away, that he was right. It wasn't the same. I wouldn't have come down here on my own, I wouldn't have been that foolish. But Connor could be just as impulsive as I was, and just as unable to fight the instinct to get out and find answers. It was a compulsion. I knew why Connor had done this.

And that seemed like another reason that maybe he wasn't ready to deal with it.

I sighed, raising my chin and I looked up to the brightening sky, trying to summon an infinite amount of wisdom and calm from, like, my ancestors or something, before I shut my eyes.

I didn't know what to do.

'Sorry...' Stephen's voice cut in from somewhere nearby and I cracked an eye open and looked at him. He was still holding his phone out explanatorily. 'That was Lester. There's been a presumed attack on a pest controller on the underground. We could have another one...'

I couldn't leave Connor. I couldn't do it without him but I couldn't let people get hurt when I could so obviously help.

I needed space. I needed to think. 'Give me a minute.'

Nick sighed and gestured almost dramatically back to the car. 'Anna!'

'Give me a minute!'

When I glanced across the embankment I saw Connor staring out across the water trying to still the quivering in his lips as tears welled up in his eyes. I walked away. I didn't stop until I was behind him, then I wrapped my arms around his chest and buried my face into his back.

'This kind of thing doesn't normally interest the government,' Doctor Lewis noted as she showed us into the room where the pest controller was currently sprawled out across the hospital bed, convulsing.

A nurse was standing over him trying her best to restrain his trembling limbs.

'They like to keep an eye on violent crime, Dr Lewis,' I replied, 'especially when there's unusual circumstances.'

I glanced at Nick, but still couldn't bear to hold his gaze for much longer than a second.

The drive had been mostly silent and definitely awkward but I much preferred being thrown back in to forced civility with him rather than facing passing opportunities to reconvene the peace.

'Aren't you a little young to be working for the home office?'

'Probably,' I agreed. 'Think they needed someone with a lot of energy, which is handy; we've been on go the since breakfast yesterday. How's the coffee here?'

'Awful,' she admitted.

'Excellent.' I gestured to the files she had open in her hands. 'May I?'

She handed the file to me.

Nick glanced back from the man to the doctor. 'What happened to him?'

'He was found earlier this morning down in the underground,' she explained. We'd had very little information reach us on the drive up from New Forest. All we'd had was an address and the name of the doctor who would be there to meet us. 'He'd been spraying the tunnels for vermin. Judging by the size of the wound he'd been attacked with a knife or an axe but it makes no sense.'

'Why not?' Nick asked.

I scanned the notes on the latest haematology result. 'There's traces of something foreign in his blood,' I explained. I looked for the toxicology report. 'Poison?' I questioned in deduction. 'It's not the wound that's killing him.'

'Are you suggesting someone took an axe to him and then injected poison into the wound?' Nick asked.

'This macromolecular structure... is pretty much identical to Thrombin, there's a high amount of it present in the toxicology report,' I told him. 'It's an enzyme, a serine protease which causes the breakdown peptide bonds in proteins; it stops the natural fibrinolysis and kallikrein-kinin systems which causes animbalance of the haemostatic system. Which means he wasn't poisoned at all,' I corrected in realisation, 'it's venom.'

Nick blinked back at me. 'As in snakes and insects?' he asked.

'If it is, it's not from anything we've ever seen before,' Doctor Lewis explained. Nick walked over to the man in the bed and leant in to get a closer look at the wound. 'We're running every test we can think of, but the truth is that we don't know what we're dealing with.'

'Did he say anything before he lost consciousness?' I asked.

'He was babbling about monsters.'

'It's a single puncture mark but it's not a knife and it's not an axe. It's more like a bite,' Nick observed.

'From what?' Doctor Lewis asked.

'Good question.' Nick and I shared a look, and he raised an eyebrow. 'Do you see why I can't let you quit?' he continued.

I bit the inside of my cheek but said nothing.

'I can't close the underground on a wild hunch!' Lester exclaimed. It warranted an eye roll from me, as I followed Cutter through the door to Lester's office.

'I don't think you understand what's going on here,' I contested in reply.

'Something injected a potentially fatal dose of venom into his blood stream,' Nick added.

'There could be perfectly rational explanation,' Lester postulated.

'Oh, now that I'd love to hear,' Nick quipped.

'And how do you suggest I explain this to the mayor? "Excuse me sir, would you mind terribly throwing the whole bloody underground into chaos because we think there might be a fare-dodging creepy crawly on the loose somewhere".'

'We're not talking about shutting down the whole system,' I began as I folded my arms over my chest and blinked slowly with frustration.

'Just the area where the attack took place,' Cutter explained.

'There's a whole network of disused tunnels down there,' I finished with a shrug.

Lester, in return, let out a very long exasperated sigh. 'You know, I find it extremely bloody annoying when you do that. How do you do that?' he questioned in angrily, and for a moment I had no idea what he was talking about until he turned his back to us and cupped his hands around his mouth to shout into the office 'Does anyone else find that creepy? How they just finish each other's bloody sentences?' Then, throwing his arms back to his sides and sighing once more, he bowed his head. 'Yes,' he agreed reluctantly, 'very well.'

I was grateful that Nick wasn't as aggressive a driver as the Captains' men. When we pulled up in a car behind a truck full of soldiers, Captain Ryan was standing nearby, shouting out orders as they unloaded their gear from the back of the cars and immediately started running their equipment to the entrance of the tube station.

Stephen appeared out the back of one of the other black Toyotas just as Nick caught hold of Ryan's shoulder to claim his attention. 'We should go down there with you,' he said as the men started disappearing down the staircase. Ryan just shook his head.

'Special forces go in first,' he explained. 'You didn't think Lester was gonna let you have it all your own way?'

'They don't even know what they're looking for,' I returned, 'they're going to get hurt, or worse. They aren't trained for this sort of mission.'

'But neither are you,' he replied, 'let us check it out first, make sure it's safe for you.'

'There can't be that many different types of venomous predators under the Aldwych,' Stephen argued.

'You should see the last tube home on a Friday night.'

'Just–' I sighed, '–please tell them all to be careful.'

'We will.' After that he nodded to us, silently instructing us to wait until he'd done his job, then he turned and followed his men down into the station.

I didn't even realise that the radio in Stephen's hand had been left on because despite the audible radio chatter crackling through, I hadn't actually realised it was coming from the device. I was leaning against the bonnet of one of the trucks, waiting for the all–clear, and in the meantime found interest in a loose scrap of skin on the side of my thumb and picked at it for a minute.

It wasn't a problem until the screaming started.

It brought my head up, and I was sure my concern was evident in my expression as I looked semi-consciously to Nick but never got a chance to say anything before the sound of one solitary gunshot echoed out of the device.

The mahogany floorboard creaked under foot as I stepped across them. There was no sight of anyone, the whole house seemed eerily quiet and I couldn't shake the impending feeling of dread that had started to bubble up through me.

Something caught my eye, something seeping slowly across the floorboards around the ajar doorway to the dining room.

I reached out and pushed the door open. An arm wrapped around my shoulders. 'Turn it off,' Cutter instructed.

'What?' Stephen returned.

'Turn it off,' he repeated a little louder.

We were suddenly dropped into an expansive and painful silence.

'They were like spiders,' Ryan relayed as soon as he stopped beside us, 'but with pincers not fangs and some were over a meter along. Horrible little–'

I was still leaning against the hood of the car with my fingertips pressed against my eyelids.

'Tell me how you feel,' Cutter asked in interruption.

'Sick,' replied Ryan, 'my ears are ringing.'

'Any blurred vision?' I asked as my expression remained stuck in the mien of a grimace.

'No, but there's something else, the gunshots were really bright.'

'Bright?' Nick repeated.

'Like fireworks?' I suggested.

'Yeah,' Ryan agreed.

I finally pulled my hands away from my face and blinked into the natural brightness of the light. 'That's a classic sign of excess oxygen in the atmosphere,' I explained. 'There must be another anomaly.'

'Richer, more heavily oxygenated air is seeping though,' Cutter said with a nod.

'Which means we're not talking about the Permian era anymore,' I added.

Nick hummed in agreement. 'This is much, much earlier,' he said.

'How much earlier?' asked Ryan.

'Maybe the Carboniferous,' I proposed.

'About 300 million years ago,' Nick finished.

'We really need to see what these creatures look like. I need to see this for myself,' Nick stated.

Ryan's lips pursed in consideration, and I could see his thought process taking place behind his eyes. He looked me over once, then turned his head towards Stephen, who merely mimicked his own expression of contemplation.

'Okay go,' he finally resolved.

'Let's get some gear.'

'Anna?' I looked up at the sound of a voice calling my name and for a second, I didn't know where I was. I stared up at a terrace house in front of me with white window trims against red bricks, and wondered what the hell I was doing here. It wasn't until a hand came down to gently grab a hold of my arm and I looked around that I saw Nick standing there.

I hadn't moved.

Everyone else had walked away but I was still standing just a few steps away from that same black Toyota. 'Are you okay?'

'Hmm?' Where had I been. I knew I'd been thinking about something since that elapse of time, but now I couldn't remember what. 'Oh. Yeah.' I nodded.

He gave me an incredulous look but continued. 'Have you got a second?'

It wasn't like I was doing anything else except inadvertently staring through a stranger's window.

He must have interpreted my silence as reluctance because he then added 'I know you're annoyed with me–'

'I'm not. I mean– I might be a little,' I corrected as my eyes rolled at my own earlier actions, 'but that's only because you're right. I didn't mean–'

'It's okay.'

'I'm sorry.'

'Anna,' he said, 'it's okay. Are you coming with us?' He gestured back over his shoulder towards the men on the street and tube entrance down to the anomaly. I opened my mouth to answer but nothing came out. His brow furrowed. 'You don't have to. Back there, when that gunshot went off... you just went white.' He trailed off uncertainly and stared at me like he was waiting to see how I reacted. His brow slowly began to furrow. 'Are you sure you're okay?'

I started to nod before his words even computed. 'Yeah,' I finally said as I cleared my throat a little, 'yeah, I'm totally fine, I've got an EpiPen and everything.' I forced myself to start moving. 'Let me just go get ready, I'll be right there. I'll just be a minute. '

I finished doing up my shoelaces and started to pull my hair up into a ponytail when Stephen leant against the pillar of the pavilion beside me.

'You know, I'd feel a lot better if there wasn't a possibility that something could craw up my trouser leg and be stuck in here with me,' he admitted, as he zipped his overalls up to his neck.

'Thankfully it sounds like they might be far too big for that,' I returned as I glanced back at him.

'Thankfully,' he repeated with an expression that showed he thought that was as much an oxymoron as I did.

I mimicked his wince. 'I know right... Ever worry that you might be going slightly crazy?'

'These days? Absolutely,' he answered. 'But I don't think it's us going crazy.'

'Isn't that the first sign?'

He laughed under his breath and there was a slight pause, a momentary silence before he then sighed slightly and continued 'uh, how do you look good in overalls?'

I was taken back.

Securing the bobble around my hair, I finally lowered my arms.

I wasn't sure what to say to that. I looked up and met his eye almost questioningly whilst I tried not to show any hint of emotion on my face. 'Stephen,' I said calmly, 'you're definitely going crazy.'

He laughed again, but any opportunity he had to respond was stolen when Captain Ryan walked up the steps to the pavilion and made straight for Cutter.

He reached into his vest and tried to hand over a pistol to the professor. Nick held it for maybe a second in total before he handed it back.

'No. No we need torches. The most powerful you can find.'

'Take night vision goggles,' Ryan advised.

'Vision isn't the issue,' Stephen explained as he pushed himself off the pillar and took a couple of steps towards the others.

Ryan hummed in reply. 'Are you sure?' he questioned. 'I'm not taking any unnecessary risks. The pest controller died a few minutes ago. They're running tests on my man now.'

'If they really are arachnids like you said,' I called across the bandstand, 'light can disorientate their natural sense of direction.'

The Captain turned his head towards me, then looked me up and down. I saw the look of disbelief flood in his eyes. 'You're not–' he sighed in realisation. 'You've got to be kidding me.'

'Anna's got more of an understanding about what's happening here and more experience with animals than the rest of us put together,' Nick returned.

'Look, I don't care if she's Doctor Doolittle,' Ryan proclaimed.

'No,' Nick replied in amusement, 'she's Doctor Havisham.'

'Oh for gods sake,' I replied, 'I never should have told you about that.'

'You should be proud of it.'

Ryan's sigh cut off our aside. 'I'm sorry. It's too risky. I don't want you getting hurt.'

'A lot more people are going to get hurt if I don't help,' I stated defensively, 'I did a dissertation on the study of insect and arachnid behaviour for my Zoology Bachelors.'

Ryan threw his hands up in surrender, before he turned away and went back to the trucks to help look for the torches.

Nick spared me a glance as he passed, accompanied with a sort of half-wink that I returned with a tight-lipped smile.

I was about to follow after them when Stephen spoke. 'Is that true?' he directed over his shoulder as he tied his shoelaces into double bows.

'Not a word of it,' I admitted.

'So it's not true that you're a doctor?'

'No, actually he was right about that...'

'I thought you just started your PhD.'

'MD. It's a long story.' I waved a hand to try and seem breezy and nonchalant, like I didn't care about it all. 'But, please don't call me 'Doctor'; I don't like it.'

'Well okay,' he nodded in agreement. 'You ready?'

'Yeah.' I nodded and wiped my clammy palms against my thighs. 'Um, I know Ryan said Spiders not bugs, but... do we know how sure he was about that?'

'Pretty sure,' he clarified as he stood up and crossed his arms over his chest, 'why, are you scared?'

'Only of dying.'

'Well, you should be fine.'

'Unless it bites me.' I walked down the steps of the pavilion.

'Actually, they could still technically be scorpions,' he said as he followed and fell into step beside me.

'That doesn't make me feel any better.'

'Honestly, it wasn't supposed to...'

We took the escalator down towards the platform only it wasn't moving, and trying to focus on my footing against the steps so that I didn't trip and tumble all the way to the bottom only made me feel dizzier.

I had always hated static escalators. I hated how eery they felt and I knew it was irrational but I couldn't help it.

Cutter was first to reach the platform and he jumped down onto the track. He quickly turned back, half reaching out to offer me a hand down but I had already dropped down behind him. We followed the line to the adjoining conduit to the maintenance tunnel and I flicked my torch on. Soon after, one beam of light was joined by two others.

'There, on the floor,' Cutter voiced calmly as we made our way through the door to the tunnel network. He directed the light of his torch onto the ground to illuminate a large arthropod, some kind of Arachnida that looked like a spider, and it let out a squeal as the light hit it, and it scarpered away from us. 'You were right,' Cutter said, 'They're sensitive to light.'

'It makes sense,' I explained as we walked further down the corridor towards where we assumed the anomaly was, 'they're probably stuck if the anomaly is emitting a bright enough light to disorient them -' A soft ticking noise beside my head caught my attention and I turned semi-consciously to it and shone my torch arbitrarily up the wall. I wasn't expecting to find anything, it was a shock to see a spider right beside my head and instinctively I leapt back against the opposite wall, hand over my chest to try and slow my heartrate. 'God damnit!'

'Not a fan of spiders?' Stephen asked.

'I'm not a fan of anything that lurks,' I replied, and I thought that was pretty fair.

We reached the room at the end of the corridor.

The corridor opened out into a larger, brighter room that looked like some kind of bunker. There were several rows of periodically spaced bunk beds, crates stacked atop one another, stacks of papers tied with string, rolls of films on shelves standing up against the wall.

The bunker was teeming with spiders. The light from the torches seemed to disturb them and they all started to scurry to the darkest corners of the room.

There was a divide down the middle, some kind of chain link wall that sectioned off a space from the sleeping area except a large section of the wall was missing and from where I was standing I couldn't determine the cause.

I took a step closer. A reflective, glistening light behind the chain link caught my eye and I took another step towards the hole in the fence. The closer I got the more light came into view. I ducked through the hole in the fence and stopped in front of it. 'Nick...'

He followed me, squeezing through the gap behind me until he came to a stop at my side.

We'd found another anomaly.

'What's happening to us?'

I turned my head towards him, his face lit up by the flickering of the anomaly. I watched his lips curl up into a smile.

My grip faltered, the torch suddenly slipping from my hand and sliding through my fingers before I could stop it and I immediately dropped down after it, trying to catch it before it hit the floor but I was a fraction of a second too slow.

It clattered to the ground, I caught it on the rebound and the beam diffused against the back wall now illuminating a part of the room that before was shrouded in the shadows.

Something moved.

It was just a little bit and barely visible behind a tetrised wall of precariously balanced crates, but by the time I had brought the behind into focus the movement had stopped. For a moment I wondered if I'd imagined it but I inched forward. 'Guys...' I said in a whisper –and turning towards me Nick's torch lit up the gap between the boxes– I saw something moving again.

Instinctively I slammed my hand down over Nick's around the neck of the torch to keep it there.

'What is it?' Nick asked.

'I don't know,' replied Stephen as he narrowed his eyes to try see it a little clearer. I shook my head in agreement.

'It's...' I paused, pulling away from Nick to take a curious step closer to the crates, 'not a spider. We should go.'

Nick nodded in agreement, his hand closed around my wrist and I felt him move to pull me with him back towards the hole in the wall but our movement caught its attention and before I could even blink the creature burst through and the crates came crashing towards us.