Dinosaur Island -1994- -

She wasn’t alone on the island.

She turned. Jack Harriman stood in the wheelhouse doorway, one hand braced against the frame, the other nursing a chipped mug of coffee. He was forty-seven, two decades older than her, with a face like cracked leather and the easy slouch of a man who had spent half his life on boats that shouldn’t have stayed afloat. Former Royal Navy, now freelance “maritime logistics,” which Lena had learned meant he moved things—and people—that customs wasn’t supposed to see.

She came to on her back, seawater flooding her mouth, the roar replaced by the shriek of twisted metal. Something had hold of the ship—not rocks, not a reef—something alive . Through the shattered porthole of her cabin, she saw a shape in the lightning: a column of flesh, brown and ridged, bigger around than a redwood, rising from the sea and wrapping around the stern like a serpent. The Calypso Star bucked once, twice, and then the hull split open like a walnut. Dinosaur Island -1994-

He told her.

It stood at the edge of the jungle, thirty feet of muscle and scale, its head tilted as if considering her. The tyrannosaur was not the shambling, tail-dragging monster of old museum paintings. It was fast. Low-slung. Its eyes were forward-facing, intelligent, and the color of molten gold. She wasn’t alone on the island

Lena knew the name. Everyone in paleontology did. John Hammond had been a showman, a billionaire, a laughingstock—the man who’d tried to build a dinosaur theme park in the 1980s, only to have his “living attractions” die in transit or escape into the wild. The project had been shut down by 1988. Lawsuits had buried him. He’d died in ‘92, penniless and disgraced, still insisting that his failures had been “operational, not conceptual.”

She smiled. This time, it was a nice smile. He was forty-seven, two decades older than her,

A roar.