Love Like Crazy @soldrawss - Tumblr Blog

the thing about survival (1/2)

rottmnt x jurassic park word count: 12k pairing: leo & OC title borrowed from you're gonna go far by noah kahan part of the archer au

HELLO and welcome to my latest brainworm, which completely derailed the WIP i've been writing with sol since february. this was supposed to be a fun little side project and naturally took on a life of its own. i think the main story will be 2 chapters and then i’ll add to it with extra drabbles as i write them this is a silly au spin-off of the gioverse neutral timeline, in which gio is very much the youngest hamato, and an unholy mash-up of JP movie and book canon. PLEASE don’t take it too seriously, i love the IP but i am not a scientist :’) all my love to @soldrawss, who has helped me with this idea every step of the way, and who so kindly and graciously drew the cover and chapter art !!!!

read on ao3

x

Leonardo’s twin is exactly the kind of insane person who enjoyed math in high school, only he took it a step further and went on to make it his whole career. Donatello earned his doctorate in mathematics the same year Leo finished his emergency medicine residency, and Dad openly blubbered about it every time he happened to so much as glance in the direction of the degrees hanging in place of pride on the living room wall.

So when an insurance lawyer came sniffing around Donatello’s office at NYU, hoping to lure Dr. Hamato PhD out of his comfortable, climate-controlled natural habitat for a consultation at a site somewhere in sunny Central America, that lawyer ended up walking away with the consolation prize of Dr. Hamato MD instead.

“Nardo, please,” Donnie says so gravely that someone passing by the door might have gotten the idea that they’re discussing a close friend’s unsolved murder. “My classes start Monday, I can’t go gallivanting off to Costa Rica on the whims of people with more money than good sense.”

He’s already showing the telltale signs of a man who’s gone too long without decent sleep or solid food more nourishing than the fried potstickers from Peking Garden over on Tiemann and Broadway—a manic gleam in his eyes, a lowered sense of reason, and a flair for the dramatic. More so than usual.

“You think I have time to gallivant, is that it?” Leo argues, mostly just for argument’s sake.

Bickering with Donnie is one of his top five favorite pastimes, to their entire family’s exasperation. When they were just baby college freshman sharing a dorm, they were threatened with new room assignments barely two weeks into the first semester. Probably because the resident advisor didn’t want to be liable when one of them snapped and murdered the other the way it seemed likely they would.

But the RA—and everyone else on their floor—quickly clued in to the fact that roof-raising arguments about literally any subject under the sun was just how they showed their affection to one another. They became the subject of more than one meme on campus.

Truth be told, Leo doesn’t really have a lot going on at the moment. The clinic is still closed for a lengthy remodel, and while the clients and the rest of the staff have been absorbed by their sister location in the interim, Leo’s family unilaterally decided he could use the time away from his demanding workload.

They’re downright militant about enforcing his vacation. Last week April thought he was taking a work call and threw his phone out the kitchen window before he could explain it was his hopelessly lost Instacart shopper.

You have one nervous breakdown and everyone turns on you, he thinks but has the wisdom not to say out loud.

Donnie kindly doesn’t point out the obvious, that Leo is lounging around on his office furniture because he has nothing better to do. And they both know that, lurking right behind the special joy he takes out of giving his brothers a hard time about everything he possibly can, Leo is actually hardwired to please the people he loves. They both know that they’re gonna go back and forth about this for the rest of the afternoon, but ultimately Leo will be the one getting on that plane.

“Kind of inconsiderate, though,” Leo says. “A last-minute five-and-a-half hour flight. And they wouldn’t even give you any details?”

“Exceedingly inconsiderate,” Donnie confirms, the most easy-to-inconvenience person on the planet. “No details. But they paid twenty-five percent upfront.”

He tuns his phone to show Leo the screen, open to his checking account and a newly-deposited $12,500. Leo whistles low, but his mind is racing. That’s a big number.

The whole thing reeks of desperation. The required NDA was ironclad, and Donnie was offered a lump sum that was easily double what his hourly rate would have totaled out to. The law firm must have invested a lot in whatever client of theirs is responsible for this adventure. Something has them scrambling to dot I’s and cross T’s.

Out loud, Leo asks, “Who’s this consultation for again?”

“Lena Grand, CEO and founder of Grand Nexus. You’ve heard of her.”

“Oh, man. She and papa used to date,” Leo says, surprised into a grin that Donnie mirrors instantly. Bringing up Lena Grand is the quickest way to send Yoshi on a tirade about the injustices he suffered at the hands of That Woman and how lucky he was to get away from her with his pride (and credit score) intact.

Back when they were in their very early twenties, with a number of acting awards under each of their belts and promising careers ahead of them, Yoshi and Lena were famously on-again, off-again, up until another one of Yoshi’s casual relationships brought baby Raphael into the picture. Yoshi abandoned the limelight in a heartbeat and never looked back, and Lena, in the kindest thing she could have possibly done for the man she was probably actually quite fond of, moved on and allowed him fade into obscurity.

Decades later, Lena Grand has retired from acting, but is still a big name in the entertainment and hospitality industries. She has her fingers in a lot of pies. She’s always, as Yoshi tells it, up to something.

“GrandNex absorbed a bioengineering company about five years ago and today it’s worth billions,” says Donnie. “They’re building some kind of zoological theme park and it sounds like they need a few people with letters behind their names who are willing to endorse it. Hence the schmoozing.”

“Explains why they agreed to let your plus-one tag along, too,” Leo says.

It probably wasn’t even a hard case for Donnie to make. Michelangelo switched majors a couple of times in college before finding his niche in psychology and going on to get his masters in animal behavior. He works at the Bronx Zoo, developing enrichment programs to keep the critters happy and guiding animal encounter tours. A zoological theme park is right up his alley.

Mikey has already spammed the group chat this morning with texts that were mostly strings of emojis and exclamation points, because he’s always been down to go anywhere and do anything with any one of his siblings at any time, and that will likely never change.

I’m packing your bags!! the latest text read, accompanied by a picture of Leo’s baby-blue suitcase open on Leo’s bed, crammed full of clothes that aren’t folded and snacks from the corner store that likely won’t survive the flight and an entire twelve-pack of Mountain Dew Baja Blast.

I never should have given you a key, Leo had texted back.

Now he leafs through the pages that Donnie was faxed late last night. A lot of the information is redacted, but there are building plans for what looks like a sprawling resort and animal enclosures. The dimensions seem kind of absurd at a glance—multiple square miles for each one, if he’s reading the legend right—but he doesn’t know a ton about zoo-specific architecture. Maybe that’s normal.

It stands to reason that a billion-dollar corporation would have the kind of money to throw around that most people would be willing to change plans and drop commitments for. It only makes Leo less eager to jump through hoops on principle.

If GrandNex thinks they can put a price tag on a Hamato’s good opinion, they’re about to be really disappointed.

And if there’s one thing Leo’s good at, it’s disappointing people.

Donnie is watching him with eyes identical to Leo’s own and seems to think Leo is still mulling over his decision.

“Come on, Lee,” Donnie says, demeanor softening. “You’ll have a good time.”

There it is. Leo sighs inwardly, and smiles for his other half, who worries about Leo more than he’d ever admit out loud. He’s pulling strings to get Leo to go on a tropical vacation with his favorite partner-in-crime under the guise of doing Donnie a favor.

“Sure, Dee,” Leo yields, the way they both knew he would. “It’ll be a blast.”

—

Leo and Mikey were picked up from Leo’s apartment by a valet the following afternoon and chauffeured to Teterboro Airport in Jersey, where Grand’s private jet was waiting. They shared the flight with the insurance lawyer Leo had met in Donnie’s office the day before, a middle-aged man named Draxum, and a woman who looked like she was only barely out of college and introduced herself shortly as Kendra.

Draxum was dressed like someone whose best approximation of what constituted outdoor-wear started and stopped at Ralph Lauren, in gray chino shorts and a navy down vest.

He also, five minutes into the polite conversation Leo was carrying alone, since Mikey’s face had been glued to the window since takeoff, says, “You’re much more likable than your counterpart, Dr. Hamato. I can see why he referred me to you.”

It takes every ounce of willpower Leo has to keep a pleasant smile on his face. From the disbelieving huff of laughter Mikey lets out, his little brother can probably tell. Leo swallows the first thing he would like to say—which is that Donnie isn’t paid to be likable, that’s just for free, and he’s the best person Draxum is ever going to meet in his whole miserable, money-grubbing, lawyerly life besides—and then the second thing—which is a catty comment about the man’s decision to wear suede boots to a rain forest, were those on sale or something?—and finally settles for, “Thanks. Tell your friends.”

Mikey nudges Leo with an elbow a couple minutes later and holds out his phone. He used the sluggish in-flight WiFi to look up the ugly vest Draxum was wearing and found it online, priced at two-and-a-half thousand dollars.

They make hysterical eye contact for a split second and then quickly find something else in the cabin to look at, because if Donnie finds out they didn’t even make it off the plane before they got themselves fired, he will never let them live it down.

Draxum scowls at the two of them anyway, as if he can tell they’re making fun of him somehow.

“So,” Mikey says to Kendra, in equal parts a bid to be friendly and also to shake Draxum off his tail, “were you invited to give a review of the park, too?”

The young woman scoffs. She has artfully-messy long hair dyed lavender, and aqua blue eyeliner and lipstick that pop against her brown skin. She looks like she thinks she’s doing the rest of them a favor by breathing the same air.

“No,” she says shortly. “I’m the park’s project supervisor. The whole island runs off my codes.”

“Neat,” Mikey says, “I work at a zoo. One of our silver langurs just had a baby. Do you want to see a picture?”

He doesn’t wait for a yes, since obviously any reasonable person would want to see a picture, and Kendra seems reluctantly charmed by his enthusiasm. The Michelangelo effect in action. No one is immune.

“Dr. Hamato is here as my consultant, recommended to me by someone who has done work for my firm in the past,” Draxum supplies. “If he believes the park poses any sort of danger to the public, he won’t sugar-coat it. We’ll shut the whole thing down.”

“Be my guest,” Kendra snaps.

“Are we expecting an element of danger?” Leo asks conversationally, wondering what in the hell Donnie got them into.

“That remains to be seen,” Draxum says. “Grand claims it’s only the anticipated start-up delays of any new theme park. A lawsuit from the family of the worker that died claims otherwise.”

Leo was given the bare-bones rundown of that whole situation after he’d signed the NDA. Apparently the man had fallen under some machinery on-site and had to be airlifted to a hospital, where he had ultimately passed away. Now the park’s investors are nervous and the park is being audited for safety.

It almost makes sense. Leo smells a rat, but he's always been the suspicious type. He’s keeping the rat to himself for now.

“And this island we’re going to,” Mikey says, “I looked it up and I couldn’t find anything about it, no deed, or development site plans, not even a single ‘coming soon’ announcement. Pretty hush-hush for a family attraction.”

“Oh, yeah,” Kendra says bitterly. “It’s a secret, all right. I didn’t even know what the original program I was designing was for until I was more than a year into my contract. That woman doesn’t tell anybody anything.”

With that, she put a pair of earphones in, and didn’t take them off again for the rest of the flight.

“She sure sounds starstruck,” Leo says mildly. “Which one of us is gonna nab Grand’s autograph for her?”

“Obviously you,” Mikey says, with that patented wide-eyed sincerity that makes him a menace to society. “Make sure she signs it ‘to my biggest fan’.”

He’s always ready to play along. Leo wonders, not for the first time, if Mikey had had other plans for the weekend before being volunteered to go on this trip. If he did, Leo would probably never know about them.

By the time they touch down in San Jose, Draxum looks as though he wishes he had thought to bring earphones, too.

There isn’t a landing strip on the island, so the plane touches down at the San Jose International Airport instead, where a helicopter is waiting to take them the final forty-minute stretch. They pass through wispy, low-hanging clouds, over hills and mountains covered in lush greenery, past crescent-shaped beaches and stretches of bright Pacific blue.

Finally, the pilot announces, “There’s Isla Nublar.”

The island is mountainous, all jagged peaks and forest, and the helipad is on top of a hill that would probably be majestic to look at if it were possible to see anything through the dense fog.

‘Cloud Island,’ Leo thinks, taking off his headset as the rotors slow. Appropriate.

Mikey is showing signs of stir-craziness, and Draxum is showing signs of being tired of everyone he’s currently confined with, and frankly Leo doesn’t trust Kendra not to push somebody out of a moving vehicle for attempting to make conversation with her, so he steers Mikey toward the second of the two Jeeps waiting to take them down the hill and leaves the other two to endure each other’s company.

As they’re helping the driver pile their luggage in the cargo department, Draxum says dangerously, “What do you mean she’s not here?”

A blond man leaning out the front passenger side of the first Jeep says, “Hey, Ms. Grand is a busy CEO, she has things to do. She can’t just cancel all her plans for the weekend at a moment’s notice.”

“The way the rest of us all did?” Leo says to Mikey, who raises his eyebrows back in tacit agreement.

“She can, and she should, if she expects her investors to believe that she’s taking this seriously,” Draxum grits out. He pulls out his phone, either to send an angry text or make an angry phone call, but puts it away again after a few frustrated taps on the screen.

“Oh, yeah, service is really spotty,” the blond man says sympathetically, either unaware of or unconcerned with Draxum’s visibly rising temper. “All the mountains, the canopy, the volcano—you know how it is. Anyway, Ms. Grand is going to video call later this evening to greet everyone, and for the duration of your stay, anything you tell me will go straight to her.” He stretched a hand out, still not bothering to actually exit the vehicle, and said, “Warren Stone, Public Relations manager.”

Draxum looked at his hand as if Stone was offering him a decaying fish to hold.

If Draxum kept this up, Leo was going to start thinking he was hilarious. Unfortunately the older man had already committed the unforgivable act of slighting Donatello, which made him unfunny and unlikable forever, and he needed to stick to the script.

“Can we go already?” Kendra says waspishly. “I have work to do.”

“Man, I’m so sad we’re missing out on the fun conversation they’re probably having,” Mikey says from the front passenger seat, turned around beneath his seat belt to chat with Leo in the back.

The driver gives him a few sidelong looks every time the road bumps and bends down the hill. He’s probably wondering why Mikey scrambled urgently into the front seat in the first place if he was just going contort himself uncomfortably to talk to Leo the entire ride. If he asked, Leo would explain that as the youngest of four, technically five, Mikey was hardwired to fight to the death for the front seat on any occasion. But he doesn’t ask.

And because Mikey’s not paying attention to what’s in front of them, Leo sees it first through the thinning fog. He thinks it’s a tree trunk at a glance, tall and slender and curving oddly where it rises above the others. Then it moves, bending as if in a wind, and by the time it twists around to face the car, Leo realizes it’s not a tree at all.

“What,” he says, feeling entirely too small in the open-top Jeep.

Mikey, who went through a dinosaur phase that lasted the entirety of his pre-teen years, points at it and declares, “Sauropod!”

“Animatronic,” Leo says, “right?”

“Right,” Mikey parrots automatically. Then, more slowly, “I mean, it has to be. Right?”

“Right,” Leo agrees, but his heart isn’t in it.

The first Jeep has slowed to an abrupt stop, and theirs slows to a stop behind it. The dinosaur trumpets at them, like the elephants at Mikey’s zoo, and half a dozen other slender necks rise out of the mist at the call to peer in their direction.

Leo’s never seen an animatronic pull leaves off a tree with its teeth and chew them with all the self-importance of a cow at pasture. Its head is some thirty-feet above them, but Leo can see the animal alertness in its eyes from where he’s sitting. It’s living and breathing and eating.

He’s thinking of the NDAs it took to get here, the bioengineering company GrandNex acquired five years ago, the absolute secrecy surrounding this project that seemed a little overkill no matter how transportive the theme park promised to be.

Ever since he was a little kid, Leo’s always had a nose for problems. He could sniff one out like a scent hound tracking down game. He wasn’t always the instigator, but he was always the first one on the scene. He was always the one leading his siblings headlong into what promised to be fun or trouble or, best of all, both.

This, he finds himself thinking, as Mikey clambers out of the Jeep for a closer look, as Draxum shouts something unintelligible from the other car, as the house-sized sauropod cranes its neck away from them and lumbers a troublingly swift step away for another leafy bite, is gonna be trouble.

—

It’s a relief to finally dump his suitcase next to one of the beds in the suite they’d been provided while Mikey bee-lines straight for the clunky air conditioning unit on the wall.

The Safari Lodge is in the same block as the Visitor’s Center and fully unstaffed this far out from the grand opening, but it’s the only one of the three guest resorts on the island that isn’t still currently under construction. A few of the rooms have been fully furnished for the sake of the first handful of unofficial guests and seem comfortable enough.

But Leo can’t help but notice that the window overlooking the lodge pool is very small and barred from the inside. The slant of light falling over the beds draws his eyes to the pyramid skylight, also reinforced with metal bars. Frowning, Leo looks over his shoulder at the suite door. Solid steel, with a number of deadbolts.

“Where the hell are we,” he says out loud.

“I’m saying! The laminated glass in the windows is a little much, right?” Mikey pipes up from where he’s still crouched by the aircon. “By the way are you still scared of spiders?”

“I’m not scared of anything. Wait, why?”

“No reason,” Mikey replies, trapping something under a complimentary mug from the coffee bar. “Let’s go get wined-and-dined.”

The Visitor’s Center has a functioning restaurant where the staff and builders go for meals, and that’s where Leo and Mikey were told to head once they unpacked—and they will. Eventually. But if there’s one thing every Hamato is, it’s too curious for his or her own good. They’re all snoopers at heart. April went so far as to become an investigative journalist and now her snooping wins her awards.

They start by poking around the lodge. The kitchen is a one in name only when they take a peek in, stainless steel counters and cavernous empty spaces where commercial fridges and flattops and fryers will go eventually, and the walk-in fridge is and dry goods pantry are unstocked. It feels like a liminal space in a way, like stepping into a twenty-four hour supermarket in the dead of night and finding yourself wandering the aisles alone.

Most of the rooms are full of pallets of plastic-wrapped furniture and huge unopened boxes of bulk supplies. Every single one has a door that looks like it was built to withstand a surprise visit from the Terminator and windows too small to fit a body through even if you could find a way to remove the bars.

Mikey finds a back door and has to give it the shoulder when it sticks in the frame. He spills out into a lounge area that trails down toward the oddly-shaped in-ground pool. It isn’t fenced-in, which is every EMT’s worst nightmare when it comes to a facility marketed toward families potentially with small children, and the first thing Leo is jotting down in the mental notes he’s taking back to Donatello for their write-up of the place.

Speaking of small children, Mikey says, “Look. We have company.”

There’s a little boy staring at them from the other side of the pool. He’s dressed in a short-sleeve sun shirt, shorts and canvas sneakers that might once have been white that are stained irreparably in the way of all white canvas sneakers. His brown skin is darker than Leo’s, slightly lighter than Mikey’s, and interrupted by pale patches of vitiligo around both eyes and the right corner of his mouth. They might have missed him in all the shrubbery if not for his shock of white hair. His expression is so serious that it borders on a scowl, and reminds Leo immediately of his twin when they were much younger.

He shrinks the second they make eye contact, as if he’s expecting to be scolded for existing.

“Hey, kiddo,” Leo makes sure to say in his least-scolding tone, “you see something cool over there?”

The boy blinks, and looks down at whatever has him crouched sentinel by the closed-up pool. He looks back up and announces gravely, “A bug.”

All the frequent rain has resulted in standing water collecting in the flowerbeds and on top of the tarp covering the pool and along with the persistent humidity it’s probably a busy breeding ground for mosquitoes and roaches. But when they circle around, they see that the boy is actually studying a heroic-looking beetle that’s making its unhurried journey across the bowing leaf of one of the decorative plants.

“Wow, look at that,” Mikey says, crouching opposite the kid. “You know what it’s called?”

The kid is watching the two of them closely with his mouth turned down, waiting for the trap. But he decides to play ball and shakes his head no.

Mikey takes it all in stride, and says, “It’s called a Hercules beetle. It’s a type of rhinoceros beetle. They all have funny horns on their head like this guy.” He points out the lobster-claw shape of its head, falling back into teaching mode. Normally he’s showing off cute fluffy mammals to eager-eyed little kids, but he can be a bug guy in a pinch. “They can carry hundreds of times their body weight. Isn’t we that nuts? They’re like little superheroes.”

“I don’t know about little,” Leo interjects. “That is the biggest bug I’ve ever seen.”

“Not bigger than the spider back in our room,” Mikey says cheerfully. “If we were paying to stay here they’d probably charge us for an additional guest.”

They’re a floor and several doors away from that room and Leo still has to fight the urge to climb onto one of the nearby deck chairs. “Pardon?” he says pleasantly instead.

The back-and-forth has coaxed a smile from the kid. Or what Leo assumes passes for a smile, anyway. His serious little face has relaxed into something more age-appropriate for this tiny person who can’t possibly be more than nine years old. His hands uncurl from where they were gripping the dirtied knees of his shorts, resting there comfortably instead.

“I like spiders,” he offers carefully. “They look scary but they’re good for the environment. My mom said they guarded her garden.”

This elementary-schooler is schooling Leonardo. It’s adorable. From the look on Mikey’s face, his brother is in agreement, and they probably could have sat there next to the gross pool tarp and weirdly vibrant plants and talked about bugs for the rest of the evening, but a sharp voice from the direction of the lodge snaps, “Giorgio!”

A harried-looking woman in the familiar business-casual attire of khakis and a blazer is standing at the back door. She has a high-visibility vest and a hardhat tucked under her arm, clearly either on her way to or from some sort of work site. There’s a girl of maybe ten or eleven standing with her, clearly her daughter—they have the same delicate features, and the same displeased scowl.

The kid—Giorgio—stands to attention immediately, hands back to their nervous clutching at the hem of his shirt this time.

“I told you not to bother the other guests,” she says shortly. “Get over here, please.”

Giorgio obeys at a quick clip and the woman gives him a stern look as she steers him around by the shoulders to get a good look at him. Her expression is visibly displeased by the state of his muddied clothes, but she doesn’t scold him further, nudging him to stand next to the older girl instead.

To Leo and Mikey, she says, “I’m so sorry about that. My nephew tends to wander. He always ends up someplace he shouldn’t be.”

“We’ve all been there,” Mikey says, who definitely used to be one of those kids who bolted in any direction any chance he got and was the reason that Yoshi finally abandoned his morals and bought a child leash in the shape of a plush monkey backpack.

“And he wasn’t bothering us at all,” Leo can’t help adding. “He’s a really smart kid.”

Giorgio peeks at them through his unkempt hair. Some of the tension in the woman’s shoulders goes slack at that. She sounds surprised when she says, “Oh? That’s good. We have to go, but enjoy your visit.”

As the little family leaves, Leo hears the girl say, “It’s Gio’s fault we’re late, like always. I told you not to let him come.”

“I can’t just leave him home alone because you said so, baby,” the woman says wearily, as if it’s an argument they’ve had a hundred times already, and the door closes behind them.

Leo has seen families in all shapes and sizes pass through the ambulances and emergency rooms he’s worked out of over the years, and he knows better than to judge any parent based on one extremely limited interaction. So he tries not to let it bother him, the way Giorgio clammed right up, the way his aunt and cousin talked about him like he wasn’t even there.

At least he knows that little boy has a mother with a garden who teaches him not to be afraid of spiders. Hopefully he’ll get to go home to her soon and tell her about the beetle he found.

—

The Visitor’s Center is an imposing building made out of solid concrete, with a cone-shaped roof and faux fossils carved in relief around the massive reinforced double doors. It looks like it could double as a bomb shelter in a pinch, and calls Leo’s mind back to the high-voltage perimeter fence they had to pass through to enter the park and the reinforced doors in all the rooms at the lodge.

Overall? Weird look for a family-friendly theme park. Leo quietly adds a tally to the whiteboard in his brain where he’s keeping track of weird things.

Leo and Mikey step into the entrance hall, a cavernous rotunda with high ceilings to accommodate a couple of museum-grade dinosaur fossils suspended by cables. There’s scaffolding and a small crane crowded into room, plastic tarps and sandbags and folded ladders cluttering the fine black marble floor, but a telling lack of a construction crew. The only person inside is a security guard who nods them up the staircase curving around the side of the room.

The investors meant it when they told the contractors to hit pause on production. Leo half-expects to find a mug of coffee still steaming in the break room and the word ‘Croatoan’ carved into a table somewhere.

They meet Draxum on the mezzanine level. He looks ready to breathe fire at the next person who inconveniences him in any way. It probably in part has to do with Warren Stone talking in his ear about press junkets and market research and social media—he has big plans for the official park TikTok account. As the first one to arrive, Draxum is the unlucky captive audience.

As funny as it is to watch, Leo’s gonna be stuck on a flight home with the guy. He’ll probably have to hear all of it secondhand.

Thinking along the same lines, as usual, Mikey comes to his rescue.

“Hey, here we are!” he chirps. “Sorry we’re late! We got turned around.”

Anyone else would have made that sound extremely sarcastic, because you can see the Visitor’s Center from the lodge and it’s barely a two minute walk from one building to the next. But since it’s Mikey it only sounds sheepish and good-natured, and while Draxum clearly isn’t buying it, Warren only chuckles. Somehow he makes even that feel condescending.

“Taking in the sights, huh? I don’t blame you! There’s a lot to see, it’s a shame you only have the weekend here.” He checks his phone, and says, “They should have the informational tour all queued up for us now. Follow me this way, you’ll love this.”

He leads them down the hall, past rooms that are still covered in plastic and primed for paint on the walls, and then waves them through a door labeled Showcase Theater. Inside there’s a cluster of about fifty auditorium seats in front of a large blank screen, and also a short round middle-aged man with an impressive mustache who waves at them enthusiastically.

“Oh,” Warren says, with a measly fraction of the corporate zeal he’s had up until now, “that’s Todd.”

“Hello!” Todd says cheerfully. “I’m glad you’re here! I’ve never liked going to the movies alone. It’s always a better experience as part of a crowd.”

Todd Cape introduces himself as a conservation officer, hired by GrandNex as the park’s game warden. It makes Mikey frown, even as he politely shakes Todd’s hand, the question visibly darting through his brown eyes—game warden?

If Jurassic Park was labeling itself as a wildlife preserve, Todd’s presence there would make sense. But this is very much going to be a theme park, with resorts and restaurants and attractions.

“Had some free time today, thought I might join the tour and give Warren a hand,” Todd explains.

“Quiet down,” Warren says, waving them into the rows of seats, “the show’s about to start.”

The film that starts up is a cartoon, starring a 2D animated character that introduces himself as Mr. DNA. They all turn as a unit to look at Warren, who’s tapping on his phone.

“Yeah, it’s geared toward kids, but gives a decent overview of what our team here has accomplished. I’ll take questions at the end.”

It shows on Draxum’s face how much he visibly and vehemently hates this guy. Leo very carefully doesn’t make eye contact with Mikey. He’s curious despite himself and Warren definitely seems like the type to kick them out of the tour for hurting his feelings.

In his defense, the cartoon isn’t bad. It explains in broad strokes that partial dinosaur DNA strands were recovered from prehistoric parasites that had been preserved in fossilized amber. Since it was impossible to clone from an incomplete gene sequence, GrandNex’s team of geneticists filled in the gaps with the complete DNA from other animals—the video named a frog as an example—until it was whole.

Mikey absorbs the information with his head tilted slightly to one side in a way he’s probably not even aware of, like a service dog who just caught the scent of an impending medical emergency.

There’s a brief disconnect where the video stops and the narration continues through the speakers, and Warren looks up from his phone and says, “Oh, shoot, sorry. All hands and feet inside the ride, please.”

He presses a button behind the presentation podium he’s lounging on and safety bars move down over his audience’s laps, clicking into place. With a gentle lurch, the auditorium seats begin to move sideways along a track a few seconds behind the audio cues.

It takes them past a few double-paned windows, the first one looking into a room that must be the laboratory, with one section lit under cool blue UV lights and guarded behind a security door, another with people in white coats working at microscopes, and a final area that looked like it must be the hatchery. Mechanical arms were automatically rotating large, smooth eggs under a heat lamp.

“I wanna see the eggs,” Mikey says urgently, already starting to squirm for freedom.

“Tour’s not over yet, Miguel,” Leo replies. He jiggles the safety bars to make a point, which resoundingly do not move. “And these things were made to keep unruly toddlers much like yourself firmly in their seats, so give it up.”

“Thank you,” Warren says pointedly from the podium. Which makes Leo want to try lifting the bars with Mikey just on principle.

The next window takes them past what must be the control center, a darkened room filled wall to wall with blinking consoles and rows of computer screens, and an impressive digital map of the park spread along the wall, broken into sections and seeming to update in real time. Despite all the computer stations, there were only a handful of people inside. Kendra is sitting at a workstation near the door, telltale lavender hair washed out to white in the glow of her computer and characteristic scowl on her face. Two others are on their feet, facing the map with their backs to the tour window.

One is a young woman with pale orange hair cut in a wavy bob, diamonds glittering at her earlobes and her throat. She’s dressed sharply, in blazer, slacks and heels, and the burly man she’s speaking to seems to defer to whatever she’s telling him with a lot of head nodding.

As Mr. DNA explains how sophisticated the park automation is, everything from the electric cars to phones to door locks monitored and controlled from this one little hub, Mikey says over him, “Who is that?”

“Frida Grand,” Todd says before Warren has a chance to look up from his phone and catch up to the conversation, guessing correctly which of the two piqued Mikey’s curiosity. “There’s no one Ms. Grand trusts more to oversee operations here when she’s away.”

“Her daughter?” Leo asks. He hadn’t heard about Lena having any children, and while he doesn’t exactly keep up with Entertainment Weekly, he did his homework before signing those NDAs—which culminated in a sleepless night of Googling and bothering his dad in the group chat for insider info—and Frida’s name didn’t pop up anywhere.

“Niece,” Todd corrects. “You likely won’t get a chance to meet her before you leave tomorrow, they keep her pretty busy.”

Frida turns her head just before the car continues past the window completely and looks right at them, eyes dark in the low light. For a brief, suspended moment, she looks oddly familiar. Then the ride moves on.

The last leg of the automated tour is a virtual walkthrough of a map of the park, a simplified version of the one in the control room, with information about where gift shops and restrooms were located, and encouragements to visit Les Gigantes for a fine-dining experience headed by celebrity chef Rupert Swaggart.

Warren brings the lights back up, rubbing his hands together and talking quickly, as if to head off the wave of excited questions he thinks is coming.

“And from here, visitors would go straight to the main attraction, obviously the park drive. We’re workshopping the name Safari Tour, but it doesn’t really have the zing we’re looking—”

“EGGS,” Mikey says, finally springing free of the safety bar and climbing over Leo, who didn’t get up in time to avoid becoming a speed bump.

“Ugh,” Warren mutters, deflating. “Yes, fine, this way.”

—

Baxter Stockman is only a few years out of grad school and he looks it, a coltishness to him that puts Leo in mind of a kid playing dress-up, the way he and Raph used to get into their dad’s old clothes and pretend to be movie stars. He squares his shoulders when the tour group enters the lab and puts on a nervous smile and barely lets anyone make an introduction before he’s spilling haphazardly into a well-rehearsed speech about his work.

Three things are obvious right off the bat. One, that Baxter is extremely socially awkward, fidgeting with a broken pen and avoiding eye contact. Two, piggybacking off the first thing, he wants this situation put behind him and these strangers out of his lab as soon as possible, and will jump through whatever hoops he has to as quickly as possible to make that happen. And three, he is undeniably brilliant.

Leo studied genetics in med school, so it doesn’t go completely over his head, but he knows what it sounds like when someone is in their element.

“Oh, look, look,” Mikey says, smacking Draxum’s arm because he’s the body standing close enough to be smacked, “this one’s hatching, look!”

He’s clustered in close to one of the heated tanks, watching avidly as one of the eggs begins to wobble and crack tellingly down the side. A tiny wet snout appears, and then the claw of a foot, and warbling bird-like cries begin to sound as it struggles to make any further progress. Baxter puts on a pair of rubber gloves and leans in to help it get free.

Mikey makes a surprised, alarmed sound in his throat. There’s a myriad of reasons he knows like the back of his hands not to help a baby animal out of its egg, even if it seems to be struggling—you could damage the impossibly delicate blood vessels, you could give it an infection, if it hasn’t absorbed its yolk sac yet you could interrupt that process—but he also knows that it isn’t his place to tell Baxter how to do the thing he has literally invented and seemingly perfected.

So he watches with wide eyes as little bits of the shell come away, holding his breath until its over, and the baby is no worse for wear, blinking big reptile eyes around the room.

“Most dinosaurs have an egg tooth, but baby raptors don’t,” Baxter says, noticing Mikey’s sigh of relief. “They can poke a hole in the egg with their snouts, but at that point the nursery staff has to step in.”

“Uh, that’s,” Mikey starts. Since he can't find a nice way to say ‘bizarre,’ he switches gears. “What do they do in the wild?”

“They don’t breed in the wild,” Baxter says simply. “All the animals in the park are female. We’ve engineered them that way, by denying the developing embryos the extra chromosome that would otherwise create a male.”

“How many different species do you have on the island?” Draxum asks.

“Fifteen, I think,” Baxter says, his confidence wavering more with every second Draxum stares him down.

“Fifteen you think?”

“Well, sometimes the dinosaurs have to go back to the, the drawing board, so to speak. Sometimes we run into problems in the code that need to be corrected. This velociraptor is version 4.3,” he goes on, indicating the baby that Mikey is cooing over, “and we’re thinking about moving to 4.4 soon. They’ve been, um, pretty tricky.”

“If you’re interested in the velociraptors,” Todd says suddenly, too brightly, “you should see the adults. Their pen is a quick walk from the Visitor’s Center, we could be there and back in a jiffy.”

Warren and Baxter both frown at him, and Warren says, “There’s no need for that.”

Todd lifts his hands placatingly. “I was only offering, didn’t mean to step on any toes.”

But Leo thinks Todd wouldn’t have offered in the first place if he didn’t think it was important. There’s been a nervous energy to him this entire time, something bottled up that he’s looking for an opportunity to pour out. Probably the reason he joined the tour in the first place was to offer them this. It must be important if he was willing to put up with Warren for any amount of time he didn’t strictly have to.

So Leo says, “Hey, raptors. I’m down.”

“Let’s do it,” Mikey adds. He never needs to be read in on anything Leo’s up to, he’s just automatically up to it, too.

“Obviously we need to cover as much ground as possible in our inspection,” Draxum says haughtily.

Warren tries arguing for all of two minutes before visibly giving up on them as a group. He says, “Fine, sure, do whatever you want, not like I have an itinerary or anything. Todd, get them back for dinner by five or Ms. Grand will be informed that you’re the reason she was kept waiting. Everyone else,” he says to the lab at large, Baxter and the handful of other technicians who seem to mostly be tidying work stations, “the ship to the mainland has begun loading and departure is at 1600 hours. The last shuttle leaves from here in about fifteen minutes. Be on it. They will not wait for you.”

—

Leo’s hit with the late afternoon humidity like a slap in the face the second they step outside, and it’s probably turning his curly hair into a horror show, but he almost prefers it to spending another minute being led around by Warren Stone.

At the back of the Visitor’s Center is a garage full of company Jeeps and locked storage lockers. The gravel drive joins a side road that doesn’t seem accessible from the main one, winding away into the trees, and eventually opening up into a clearing where a huge metal and concrete cage sits.

It looks like a miniature colosseum, towering walls and catwalks creating a pit in the center, and a fortified guard tower on the far end.

“This is where they live?” Mikey demands, as horrified as anyone would be whose full-time job it was to design happy homes for zoo animals, only to be confronted with what looked like a zoo animal-shaped maximum security prison.

“Only for now,” Todd says, leading the way up the stairs to the viewing deck. “Originally we had them in a paddock like all the others, but they started to attack the fences when handlers arrived to feed them. We moved them into this unit while the main thing is reinforced.”

“That’s generally stress-induced behavior,” Mikey says. He looks troubled, craning for a glimpse of the raptors through the thick foliage in the pen. “The first thing I would take a look at is their environment. Is something missing from it that’s causing boredom or frustration? Is the enclosure itself in need of a redesign? It’s a lot of trial and error, especially in this case. Do you know what changes they’re making to the raptor paddock?”

Todd smiles ruefully at him, shrugging his hands into his pockets. “As far as I know? Bigger fences.”

While they stand there watching, a crane demonstrates the new feeding method, since it can’t be done by hand anymore. A three-hundred pound cow is lowered into the pen, disappearing from view through the thick leaves until all that remains to be seen is the cord. It hangs there like a fishing line for one minute, then two—

And then with a horrific shriek, the cord begins to jerk around, something attached to the bait on the end—Leo can’t see anything, but he can hear the frenzy of snapping and crunching and tearing.

He thinks of that quiet, curious little boy he met a few hours ago, crouched by a closed pool and patiently watching a beetle climb a leaf like it was the most interesting thing in the world, who, according to his aunt, is often wandering into places he shouldn’t be, like every other child who has ever existed.

He imagines, for just a second, that little boy wandering anywhere near this pen and immediately feels his stomach churn with nausea.

Todd never turns his back to the cage. He brought them all out here for a reason, even if he doesn’t seem willing to say it outright.

Leo can’t help but ask, “Was it a raptor that killed him? The man who died?” When everyone looks some degree of surprised at him, he says impatiently, “Sorry, were we still pretending he fell under a machine? Why would an accident that happened during construction call the general public’s safety into so much question that the investors would demand an audit? Drax, I can’t believe you believed that, I thought you were nodding along to be polite.”

“One of the animals killed him?” Draxum asks in a low voice. “How?”

Todd’s tone matches his when he replies, “It happened when we were moving the big one from the paddock into the pen. She rammed the door and caused our gatekeeper to fall. The crate shuddered back from the wall with the impact, and created a gap that couldn’t have been more than a foot wide, but it was enough for her to reach through and—well.”

“Attacks happen,” Mikey says quietly. “A keeper in the wrong place at the wrong time. We can study their behavior, but we can’t predict it a hundred percent of the time. They’re still wild animals.”

“But your guys in the lab talk about them like they’re super-sophisticated LEGO sets,” Leo tells Todd. “They plugged together animal parts until they had something that looked like a dinosaur. And whatever doesn’t work just gets phased out in the next patch. What did Baxter say back there? This is version 4.3.”

The crane that lowered the cow into the pen winds the cord back up with a strained whine. The livestock harness limps back into view inch by inch, torn to shreds.

“It’s a nightmare waiting to happen,” Draxum says grimly.

He sounds as though he’s made a decision his partners at the firm are not going to enjoy hearing. Todd sighs, some of the tension he’s been carrying in his shoulders the entire time they’ve known him finally going slack now he isn’t the only one reading the writing on the wall. Even if it isn’t enough to change everyone’s mind, at least he changed one.

Don’t relax yet, Leo wants to tell him. We still have to survive dinner.

—

The VIP dining lounge is on the uppermost floor of the Visitor’s Center. The chef is already delivering a tray of appetizers to the table when Leo’s group shuffles in.

The dark walls and low ambient lighting create an atmosphere that toes the line between intimate and cave-like. There are digital screens on every wall advertising the park with slow-moving slideshows of planned attractions and future locations, except fo the screen at the head of the table, where the CEO herself has deigned to join them on a video call.

“My, my, there you all are,” Lena Grand says by way of greeting. “I was beginning to think we would need to call a search and rescue.”

Warren gives Todd a pointed look.

“Ah, I’m sorry Ms. Grand,” Todd says as they take their seats, always agreeable, “I got too much into the spirit of things and offered another leg of the grand tour.”

“There’s no such thing as too much spirit,” Lena chides him. “Now, firstly—introductions would be superfluous, wouldn’t they? We all know one another, for all that some of us have never met.”

She’s in her sixties and still the kind of beautiful that stops people in their tracks, a throwaway elegance in the way she sips from a flute and smiles, nothing smudged and not a hair out of place. She wears her wealth subtly, but Leo knows if he were to Google that simple rose gold necklace glinting meekly at her collarbone, he would find it was probably a Van Cleef worth thirty grand.

He can’t afford to forget who she is. He’s glad she wore the necklace, especially as she favors Leo and Mikey’s side of the table with an expression he would be tempted to call affectionate.

“You both look so much like your father,” she says warmly.

Draxum squints at them suspiciously, clearly never having been the type of guy to keep tabs on Entertainment Weekly. Mikey offers, “Dad and Ms. Grand used to date.”

“Ah,” Draxum says after a beat. His expression manages to communicate succinctly that he could have died happily not knowing anything about Lena Grand’s romantic history.

“Lena, please,” she insists, then sighs, as moonstruck as one of the characters she used to play in the movies. “Yoshi was the first great love of my life, you know. The one that got away.”

“That’s exactly how papa tells it, too,” Leo says with a smile. Mikey coughs to hide a surprised laugh. It’s not not how their dad tells it. He just makes it sound like his escape involved at least one hostage negotiation.

“Can we please get back on track,” Draxum grits out, not a question.

“Yes of course, Baron, I know how small talk tends to give you hives. Go on then, tell me about my park.”

Lena leans forward on her folded arms, to all appearances eager to hear it. Mikey glances at Leo, then across the table at Todd and Draxum, who are already looking back. There’s an elephant in the room demanding to be addressed.

“It’s like something out of a sci-fi movie,” Mikey begins. “Like, I can’t stress enough how amazing it was to drive down the hill and see that dinosaur. I mean—a dinosaur!”

On the screen, Lena Grand’s smile widens and softens around the edges—the Michelangelo effect at play. Mikey sits forward in his chair, looking up at her with that earnest resolution that means he’s made up his mind, but he’s going to be very nice about it.

“I understand the vision, I do, but—we don’t know anything about these animals. How could we? They’ve been extinct for sixty-six million years. And I haven’t met a single ecologist on your staff. There isn’t a single person here whose job it is to track and study the way the animals and the environment interact and respond to one another. You’re flying blind.”

Draxum is listening intently and Todd is nodding along on the other side of the table, a downward turn to his mouth and concern that ages his usually-cheerful face by a solid decade. Warren looks as offended as someone who just insulted his mother, spoon suspended halfway to his face. Leo risks a glance at Lena, whose warmth has already evaporated.

“You only have one veterinarian,” Mikey goes on. “At my zoo, we have teams of them. We have curators and horticulturists and trainers.”

“Trainers?” Warren cuts in skeptically. “You want us to teach the compys to stand on their hind legs for a little treat?”

Leo, who both used to help Mikey study for all of his finals and is also one of the first people his little brother calls to ramble or vent about work-related things, has enough secondhand information to confidently say, “You’re already training them. Your dinos hear a Jeep or jingling keys by the fence and they know that means a human is coming—it’s basic conditioning. They need cognitive stimulation or they’ll get bored, and then aggressive. That’s probably why the raptors are so… like that.”

“Captivity isn’t natural,” Mikey adds. “Tons of time and effort goes into behavioral husbandry programs. You poured all your efforts into containment, and built electric fences and concrete moats to keep them from escaping. But if their enclosures had everything they needed, the animals probably wouldn’t even want to escape. If they did get out, they wouldn’t want to go very far.”

“I read about a clouded leopard that got out of its enclosure at a zoo and sat in a nearby tree until it was found by staff,” Draxum says.

“That was a happy, curious leopard,” Mikey tells him.

“Roll a log full of hamburger meat into their yard and let the dinos go to town,” Leo says.

“I’ve told you, Ms. Grand,” Todd says, “your biggest concern can’t be what looks nice and how efficient the automation is.”

“You can run this entire park with a team of twenty people,” Warren says, scowling openly now. “That’s a marvel of engineering, and it keeps costs down, which may mean nothing to you, but means a hell of a lot to our investors. This is a business we’re running, you know.”

“A business that we have yet to determine you’ll be running,” Draxum reminds him coolly. “Your investors are waiting for my word on the matter. And I have yet to be impressed.”

It’s a stone-cold thing to say to someone who just spent the afternoon showing him living, breathing dinosaurs brought to life specifically to showcase at this park and no other in the world. If that doesn’t impress a middle-aged lawyer from Jersey, what will?

“I can see tensions have gotten high, and there’s no need for that,” Lena says suddenly, her first contribution to the conversation since it took a turn to the left. She steeples her hands under her chin, every inch a former star of the New Hollywood era, her waves of white hair framing her dimpled smile as effortlessly as it seemed to on the movie posters. “While admittedly these aren’t the glowing reviews I may have been expecting to hear, I did ask for your honest opinions. And we still have the rest of the weekend to convince you, don’t we?”

Leo can’t see what another day or two might do to change their perception of the place, and from the looks on their faces, Mikey and Draxum can’t, either. Todd just looks tired and frustrated, like he’s been going in these same circles for months. He probably has.

“Go on the park drive tomorrow, the real thing,” Lena says, “and you’ll see exactly how well-taken care of these creatures are. Miles of space, food brought to them on a pedestal, the whole nine yards. Warren, you’ll arrange everything, won’t you?”

“Of course, ma’am,” Warren says. He’s been nodding along with her since she started talking, a bob of his head that made his blond quiff bounce in time. “It’ll have to be fairly early in the morning, since that tropical storm is due to hit us tomorrow night, and they’ll need to be on the copter by three at latest to avoid it. But it shouldn’t be a problem, I’ll get our guys in control to start setting up now.”

“Perfect! Oh, just you wait,” Lena says brightly. “You’ll never forget what you see here tomorrow. I’m eager to hear your thoughts! Toodles!”

For someone who’s eager hear their thoughts, she disconnects the call quick. Leo thinks he wasn’t imagining the dark anger she gave away in brief lapses of her remarkable self-control—the whiteness of her knuckles where they were clasped together, the way her tone had cooled and didn’t quite match her charming smile. It’s likely that she’s very rarely said ‘no’ to and she didn’t like the way it sounded.

“Okay, well,” Todd says, “I suppose I’ll see you all bright and early then!”

“What? You don’t need to go on the ride, you work here,” Warren says.

“He’s going,” Draxum says with the finality of a gavel falling on the block. “It’ll give us more of a chance to discuss things. As a matter of fact, I’d like to meet with your ‘guys in control’ while I’m here.”

“Oh, that’s just this way,” Todd says brightly, and leads the way around Warren with Draxum following close behind. Warren blusters and rushes off after them, saying things about security clearance and disrupting the ecosystem of the engineers’ workspace.

Leo glances at Mikey, who glances down at the appetizer tray on the table, tiny tortilla cups of ceviche that are soggy and lukewarm by now and listing wetly where they sit.

“We didn’t get to finish dinner,” he says sadly.

“There’s a kitchen around here somewhere,” Leo replies.

They go downstairs and wander through the rotunda with a nod for the security guard who doesn’t look up from his book to nod back. There’s a restaurant on the main floor that seems to function as an employee canteen for now. A young woman in a server polo waves them into the kitchen with a smile and boxes two of the standard staff meals to go—casados with chicken, rice, beans and mixed picadillo, along with the last piece of a caramel tres leches cake that Mikey looks ready to kill and die for.

“Note to self, eat down here next time,” Mikey says, holding his food like someone might try to take it from him.

“Weren’t impressed by the cold fish soup?” Leo says faux-sympathetically.

He’s teed Mikey up perfectly for an impassioned rant about ceviche that Leo knows the ins and outs of already, simply by virtue of knowing Mikey. He sinks into the familiar sound the way most people would sink into hot bath water after a long day at work.

At around six PM, it’s already getting dark, and automatic lights have flickered on outside. The last thing Leo is expecting to see as they near the lodge is the tiny figure huddled on the front step.

“Giorgio?” he says. In the corner of his eye, he sees Mikey’s head whip around in surprise to look where he’s looking. When the little boy scrambles to his feet, wringing his hands nervously, Leo makes an effort to soften the next question. “Hey, what are you doing out here?”

He doesn’t answer right away, brown eyes darting between Leo and Mikey, who crouches to be on the kid’s eye level with one of those warm smiles that could disarm even the most jaded and guarded of souls.

It’s not like they have anywhere important to be. So Leo sits, too. When they’re not towering over him, it’s a little easier for Giorgio to look them in the eye.

Finally, the kid says, “I’m supposed to get on the boat.”

Immediately, alarm bells go off in Leo’s head, but he tries not to let it show on his face. The boat that almost certainly isn’t at the dock anymore, leaving for the mainland a day early to beat the storm? The one that Warren had explicitly warned the lab technicians not to miss the boarding time for?

Slowly, they eke the story out of him; he and his cousin got into an argument—this Leo absorbs without giving away a hint of the skepticism he’s definitely feeling, at the idea of this recalcitrant, soft-spoken child getting into an argument with anyone, let alone a much bigger kid—and Aunt Ari decided to separate the two of them, keeping cousin Vi with her while she wrapped up work and sending Giorgio back to the lodge to pack his things.

A car was supposed to pick him up, he tells them, along with the family’s luggage, but the suitcases were already gone when he checked the closet, and a car never came. He was sitting in the lobby looking out the window to make sure he saw it, he stresses, as if to head off the assumption that he was just messing around somewhere, and it never came. Then he started to get nervous so he waited outside instead.

On paper, Leo tries to think with some degree of fairness, it’s not like Giorgio was walking alone through Disneyland. This theme park is empty save for a handful of people that Ari must know and work with, and all the roads lead back to the same central place. Maybe they weren’t far from the lodge when she sent her nephew in that direction, maybe she thought she’d get a ride with a coworker and Giorgio would make it to the ship long before she did.

Nevermind that in the few minutes Leo had known him, Giorgio had already proven to be the type of kid who was easily distracted by a cool-looking bug, who his aunt had told them liked to wander off. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to see something enticing in the trees and take off after it. He’s a little kid, that’s what they do.

“It sounds like your aunt got the wrong information,” Mikey says, softening the blow. “She must not have realized the car had already come and gone.”

“It’s gone?” Giorgio says, stricken, but not surprised. The worst-case scenarios he’s been making up in his head and sitting with were probably the only company he’s had for hours.

“Hey, don’t worry, we’ll fix it,” Mikey tells him, all fast, and then immediately turns to look at Leo, the resident fixer. Giorgio mirrors him, eyes big and brown and worried.

Can’t have that, Leo thinks.

“Of course we will.” He pushes himself to his feet, and the problems to solve line up in his mind’s eye in order of importance, starting with, “Have you had dinner, big guy?”

The kid blinks, not expecting the question, and after a moment he shakes his head. “Aunt Ari said we’d eat on the boat,” he says.

“How about you eat with us instead?” Leo says, and holds out his boxed meal until Giorgio gets the clue and takes it in both his little hands. He looks from the box he’s holding over to the identical one in Mikey’s hands, and then back up at Leo.

“It’s yours,” Giorgio says slowly, seeing through him.

“Nah, it’s just extra food they didn’t want to go to waste,” Leo lies. “I ate already, couldn’t eat another bite.”

Mikey’s got a glint in his eye that Leo knows means that he’ll be splitting Mikey’s dinner with him or else suffer the consequences, but his little brother doesn’t give the game away to the boy who needs convincing not to go hungry for the night.

“Oh,” Giorgio finally says, then, shyly, “thank you.”

They steer the kid back inside the lodge, Mikey scooping his bag up for him as they go, and get him tucked away in their suite with dinner in his lap and a Ghibli movie playing on Mikey’s laptop to keep him occupied. He slowly forgets to be nervous, asking questions about the film that Mikey’s quick to answer, and Leo steps into the bathroom to make some calls.

Giorgio had dutifully recited his aunt’s number when asked for it, but that call goes straight to voicemail. Understandably, since service is spotty on the island, and Leo’s only got a single bar of 4G at random points throughout the day.

But he still has Draxum’s phone number from back when the guy showed up to hire one of the Drs. Hamato, and he’s probably still up at the Visitor’s Center menacing people. The call goes through.

“What,” Draxum says by way of greeting.

Disregarding that, Leo says, “Hey, Drax, it’s Leo. Uh, are you near someone who would be able to hunt down the phone number of an contractor for me?”

“What,” Draxum says again, with a slightly different inflection this time.

“There’s a woman here, first name Arianna, I think she’s an architect. She brought her daughter and her nephew to visit the park, and I think they missed the boat. I’m not sure where she is, but I’ve got the nephew here with me at the lodge.”

Draxum doesn’t answer for long enough that Leo takes the phone away from his ear to check that he hasn’t dropped the call.

“Someone brought children onto this island?” the older man finally asks dangerously. “Knowing that it was being audited for safety concerns?”

“Well, if she works here, she’d have to know that, right?” Leo replies, trying to find the middle ground between objectivity and tossing that woman under the bus for the worry she’d let Giorgio sit by himself with. “I’m worried she and the other kid are stranded somewhere. I called her and it went straight to voicemail.”

There is some dark muttering on the other end of the line, unintelligible conversation that sounds like a barked demand and a confused volunteer, and then an unfamiliar voice says, “Hello? This is Gus?”

“Hi Gus,” Leo says plainly. “Did you get any of that?”

“Some of it. Uh, I’m double-checking now, but as far as I know, everyone left who was supposed to,” he says, the clacking of a keyboard audible behind him. “Yeah, Arianna DeLuca—she scanned her badge at the dock at 3:37. The ship left on time at 4:00. Should I—do you need me to call her?” Gus asks. “Did she leave something behind?”

For a moment, all Leo can hear is a dull roar in his ears.

He stands there, holding the phone, listening to Mikey’s voice in the next room coax Giorgio into laughter, and comes to terms with it.

Then he gives Gus his number, asks him to pass it along to Giorgio’s aunt if he gets through to her, and then hangs up before Gus can pass him back to Draxum. He stands there and holds his phone and considers calling the aunt back himself, leaving a second voicemail that’s much less polite than the first. He lives inside the daydream of it for several seconds, imagining exactly what he would say, the tone of voice he’d say it in, until the urge passes. Until the blind fury simmers down into a more productive anger.

Then Leo pockets the phone and steps back into the main room of the suite.

He’s smiling, but Giorgio still takes one look at him and asks, “They left without me?”

Mikey sucks in a breath, expression pained. Leo comes over to sit on the edge of the bed.

“I’m sure it was an accident,” Leo says. “I bet she’s storming around that ship screaming at people to turn it around to come back and get your or else!”

Giorgio’s eyes drift back to the half-eaten dinner in his lap, the colorful, chaotic scene playing out in Castle in the Sky creating an incongruous tableau. He doesn’t say it out loud, but his expression is as transparent as one of those neon billboards in Times Square with the scrolling text: No she’s not.

“It’s her loss, you know,” Leo says, coming up with the idea on the spot and rolling with it, nudging his shoulder into Giorgio’s tiny one. “She’s gonna miss the tour.”

After a beat, the kid looks back up. Interest piqued despite himself. He’s accepting the fact that his family left without him far too easily in Leo’s opinion, but the gleam of curiosity in his face is much easier to look at than the overshadowed sadness had been.

“The dinosaur tour?”

“That’s the one!” Mikey jumps in. “You’re gonna get to go on it with us tomorrow, how cool is that?”

Giorgio’s eyes get round and moonlike. “I am? Really? My aunt said it’s okay?”

“Your aunt is gonna call me if there’s any issues,” Leo tells the kid, tugging on one unkept white loc fondly. “She has my number and she knows where to find you. Now, what dinosaur are you looking forward to the most? Do you have a favorite?”

Giorgio—Gio, he insists—claims he doesn’t have a favorite, but he talks an awful lot about the dilophosaurus. He can’t quite finish all of his dinner, but he finds extra room for dessert when Mikey presents him with the treasured piece of tres leches cake, as easily as if he’d always intended to give it away.

When he starts to nod off, they tuck him into Mikey’s bed. They leave the bathroom light on and the door cracked open, a bar of golden light spilling into the room in lieu of a nightlight. He falls asleep hugging one of the extra pillows, only a sliver of his face visible.

Mikey sits next to Leo on the other bed and says softly, “Poor thing. I can’t believe she left him. I’m glad he’s going on the tour with us, he deserves to have some fun.”

“Yeah,” Leo agrees. “Let’s make tomorrow a day he’ll remember.”

Love Like Crazy

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