'Okay, here will do. Playback the recordings. See if we can't invite them to come and see us.'

I kept my distance from the both of them, as they sat on the bow at the front of the boat and I remained beside the equipment.

It was rather boring in all fairness; I didn't have a pair of headphones to sit and listen. Instead, I was sitting on the floor of the boat, half hanging over to look into the water in search for the creatures we were trying to lure out.

A distraction. That was all I needed.

I'd be back to normal in no time.

But the water wasn't nearly exciting enough. The waves were chopping from the wind, the water was almost completely opaque and a drab shade of carpet brown. So, I wasn't concentrating too hard on anything in particular when I stared through the water and suddenly became aware of the face staring back up at me.

I jerked to my feet, startled, and bumping accidently into one of the boxes.

The lid snapped shut and I jumped again, turning around to look down at it, just as the same noise grabbed Nick's attention and he glanced back at me. 'Anna?' he asked.

'Um...' I swallowed, spinning back around and taking a step forward so that I could peer down into the water where I thought I'd seen something. But there was nothing there.

The reflections on the water, a perfect mirror image of the clouds and the sky came into focus and I looked up, squinting.

Must have been the clouds.

'Nothing... sorry.'

'This is silly,' Connor complained, 'we should be helping Stephen search the canal Cutter.'

'It's not in the canal.'

I turned my attention back down from the faces I was making in the clouds a moment before I felt it. A presence– something wrapping around my waist and I was pulled off my feet.

I didn't even have time to scream.

The shock made me gasp, but within a second I was under the water and any air in my mouth was quickly rinsed out, and I was aware, even though I'd shut my eyes, that something was quickly pulling me down into the depths.

I held my breath for as long as I could.

When my eyes started to flicker, and I came to, I had no idea where I was. The first thing I saw was bright light in front me, through the criss–cross shadows of an iron sewage cover.

I was floating– I realised. And with it surged disorientation as my sense of direction warped because I thought I'd been upright that whole time. But I wasn't.

I flailed, suddenly panicking and reaching up desperately to grab the sewage cover to hold myself up.

Oh god.

My breathing started to quicken, I titled my head back but the water was already around my neck and it felt like it was rising as the white hotness of terror bubbled up through me.

The water levels rising.

'No,' I stammered, pulling my face up as close to the grate as I could, 'no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,'

My grip tightened, heart beating so quickly it was sending ripples out from my chest.

'Hey!'

I squealed, a cry escaping my lips as suddenly another body appeared beside me, a hand grabbed onto the grate beside mine, and a face came into focus.

'Hey, hey,' he repeated, 'you're okay... it's okay.'

But too terrified of the space closing in on me, I couldn't find the logical part of my brain to listen to him.

'Water,' I cried, lifting myself up like I thought I could get out of the water, 'rising. It's rising.'

The boy shook his head. 'No, no, it's not. It's not, I promise. It's gonna be okay.'

I couldn't steady my breathing. I looked quickly across at him but the walls closed in and I panicked again, legs flailing and splashing both of us, and I tried to give my head more space between the waterline and the top of the grate.

'You're claustrophobic, right?...' the boy deduced quickly. My lips trembled and I nodded. 'Look up. Look up through there.'

I immediately snapped my eyes up through the holes, to the ceiling of the building way up above us.

Exceptionally slowly, I managed to calm myself down.

'Lucien, right?' I asked, voice still shaking.

'Yeah.'

I couldn't move my attention from the ceiling, so I couldn't see his reaction, but I could hear the confusion quite clearly in his voice.

'Might not be a comfort. Been looking for you,' I explained. 'Anna.'

He repeated my name carefully. 'I thought you were dead.'

Somehow it seemed I wasn't. I took another couple of deep breaths. 'Where are we?'

'I don't know,' Lucien replied, 'but they took us down here though, those things.'

I nodded. 'Got you? Pulled you down the drain, right? Isle of the dogs.'

'How'd you know that.'

'Found the thing that did it. Killed it. Found your basketball too.'

'We're going to die right?'

I tried to look him in the eye, find that calmness within myself to say very clearly and peacefully to him that I wasn't going to let that happen, but as soon as my gaze fell back into the drain panic gripped my throat. And I had to shut my eyes, quickly try to level my breathing, before I found the ceiling again.

'No,' I stated confidently, to make up for the fact I couldn't look at him. 'Friends are looking for us,' I explained. 'Be here soon.'

'They don't even know we're alive!'

Of course I'm alive. It's the only way to destroy a survivor. The after is so much worse. 'Find us,' I assured him, 'promise.'

'What do you think they are those things...'

'Honestly, don't know.' I shook my head and tried to pull myself further up to the grate again. 'but... they were going to kill us they would have killed us already. There's a reason we're still alive.'

'You won't tell my mates will you... that I was crying?'

'You're not crying,' I replied calmly. 'Come on. Talk to me. Tell me everything.'

And as he exhaled a shaky breath, and I finally relinquished some of the tension in my arms, so that I could relax and let the water take my weight.

Once he was finished it was my turn.

My ears pricked up, almost literally, as I noticed a different sound layered between the water pouring through the pipe of us, and the monotonous drone of my own voice.

I cut myself off, spinning myself around and bringing my eyes down from the ceiling towards the walls. 'Hear that?' I asked.

Behind me, Lucien strained to listen closer. 'I– I– don't know. What is it?'

I wasn't sure. I tried to do a quick sweep of all the shadowy corners, straining to see if there were any sorts of doorways or entrances somebody could have been coming through. This room had to have had an entrance at some point. Even if it had been bricked up there had to be a way in.

'Knocking?' I guessed. 'Hammering...' I furthered, 'maybe.'

'Your friends?'

'Gonna get us out. See, I told him. I adjusted my grip on the grate, my hand cramping, and I tried to circle on wrist at a time. 'Trust me.'

'We're not gonna drown!' he replied.

'Yeah,' I agreed. 'Okay. O–'

There was no warning this time. I only felt it wrapped tightly around my ankle once I was already back under the water as, with no time to prepare, there was no way to hold my breath and stop the water rushing to my lungs.

Except this time, there was no way I'd been dragged so far. I tried to stay as calm as I could, but I didn't have any breath left in my body, and I kicked desperately with my free leg at the grip around my ankle.

The few first fell in vain, and gritting my teeth, I tried to muster every scrap of energy I had, and stamp as hard as I could. And it worked. Whatever it was uncoiled from my ankle, and wasting no time I circled my arm, pushing myself upwards to the surface.

There was a platform of some sort next to me, and I swam to it, and pushed myself up out the water. I flopped onto my back, shuffling further up the platform on my elbows. The anomaly had reopened, it was right there in front of me, and after a second, from up out the water, so was the creature.

It was like nothing I'd seen before. There was something vaguely humanoid about it's eyes, but beyond that, there was nothing to suggest what it could have descended from. It had tusks just as big as the Smilodon, but webbed feet, and a tail like a tadpole.

It flopped down onto the platform in front of me. I scrambled up onto my feet. It would have been a really good day to have my knife. It was too late to go back for it once I'd realised I'd left it at the A.R.C overnight. Never again. I should have learnt my lesson the one time I forgot it in the cretaceous and almost got swallowed by a Spinosaurus.

Anna. It's like you want to get eaten!

As the creature lunged at me, I kicked out, landed a foot in its jaw and with a whine it fell back and crashed into the water.

'Anna!' I whipped my head round in the direction the voice had come from and found Connor sprinting across the interlocking spurs of platforms towards me. He was close, close enough that when the water started to bubble where the creature had just gone splashing through, I held out my arm to tell him to stop.

And he froze, stumbling clumsily with the momentum but managing to catch himself right as the creature rose up out the water.

This one was different.

This one was much, much bigger.

I trailed my eyes right up its to its face as it towered over me. It flailed one webbed limb in my direction, catching my body in just its hand, before it curled its appendages around me, and I was lifted off my feet.

The coolness of the air dissipated as we passed through the anomaly, melting away to a hot and humid atmosphere.

The rockface on the other side was steep. I was carried across several long ridges of boulders until the creature came to the edge of an incline and started to descend it.

I heard the sound of the rocks crumbling beneath its feet before there was a sudden jolt, the creature slipped, its grip on me was loosened out of reflex and I fell to the ground. It was barely a second before the creature had corrected itself but I pushed myself onto my feet and leapt forward, bursting into a careful calculated sprint like my instincts were taking over my body. Everything came back to me– every second of being marooned out in time came flooding back all at one and I could hear my heart beating in my ears but everything else was silent.

I had outrun so many things. I had run for my life so often I was numb to the impending constricts of death. The only thing I knew was to keep going whether something was chasing me or not.