"Oh shit," I said. Louder than I meant to. My voice bounced off the skeletal rafters and came back sounding thinner, smaller.
"Oh shit."
I backed away from the wall with the logo, arms limp at my sides, breath trying to crawl its way out through my throat. It wasn't a joke. It wasn't some haunted house exhibit or movie-themed park. I was standing in it—in the dead mouth of something I'd only ever seen behind glass.
InGen.
This was real.
"Oh shit."
I dropped onto a chunk of crumbled concrete and buried my face in my hands. My heart felt like it was trying to pace inside my chest without permission. My skin buzzed like I was electrified.
I'm too young for this.
The thought came stupid and raw and honest.
I'm too young to be stranded on a dinosaur island.
Too young to die far from anything that smells like asphalt or microwave pizza or safe.
Too young to be calculating the odds of surviving the week based on whether or not the Spinosaurus aegypticus is loose.
I squeezed my fists into my temples and tried to breathe.
"Shredder. Calm down," I whispered. "Shredder. Calm down."
I repeated it like a chant, like a joke I didn't want to laugh at anymore. The name felt like a bad nickname from a worse memory. One of those high school things that stuck longer than it should've. But right now, it was all I had.
Shredder. The idiot who stayed in a zoo too long. The idiot who got himself Shreddered by a crocodile. And now the idiot who—somehow—woke up in the middle of Isla bloody Sorna.
I exhaled. Tried to think.
Tried.
Because freaking out wasn't going to help. Not here. Not now. If everything around me was real—and God, every instinct in my bones told me it was—then panic would only get me dead faster.
I needed to figure out where I was.
And—more importantly—when.
Because the dinosaurs were bad enough. But the timeline? The timeline might be worse.
If the Spinosaurus is here…
I felt cold even though the air was thick and hot. My stomach dropped a little further.
If the Spinosaurus is already out roaming, then that means it's after 1999. That's when InGen's last ditch genetic team left the island. After that, everything started unraveling. Raptors stopped being contained. New generations hatched. Breeding accelerated. Predators started moving in packs. The ecosystem went rogue.
If I was post-1999, I was screwed.
No rescue missions. No scientists monitoring from the outside. No one would come. Not for years.
And in those years—everything would be hunting me.
I closed my eyes and tried to breathe slower.
Okay. Let's say the Spinosaurus isn't here yet. Then I've got a window. A small one, sure. But maybe I could make contact. If it's before 1997—before Hammond's second team comes to document the animals—I might be able to find their arrival point. Hell, maybe even reach the old communication towers, get a signal out. There were expeditions back then. There were humans.
But if I guessed wrong—if it was 2001 or later—then I was food.
Because by then, the Spinosaurus wasn't just a predator. It was an apex. Territorial, aggressive, intelligent. The thing would track you like a bloodhound. It wasn't like the others. It didn't just kill to eat. It killed because it could.
And raptors?
God. The raptors were breeding like wildfire by that point.
If I was right about this building—this lab ruin—then I was probably close to one of the eastern valleys. That's where the second raptor strain was concentrated. The smarter ones. The ones that hunted in complex formations, even flanked their prey.
There'd be a pack nearby.
I could feel it. Not even from footprints or sounds or evidence—just in the air. The same way you know when someone's behind you in a dark hallway. The hair on my arms lifted. The ground felt watched.
And if they were nearby, then it wouldn't take long for them to find the lab.
My lab.
My stupid bunker of crumbling walls and old bones.
I rubbed my face hard and stood up.
Options. I needed options. I needed—
A growl.
No. Not a growl. A chuff. Short, clipped, far away. But not far enough.
I froze.
Then I backed into the deepest part of the room, crouching low behind a desk overturned and half-devoured by rot. I didn't move. Didn't breathe loud. Just listened.
The forest was quiet again.
But that didn't mean I was safe.
It just meant something else was listening, too.