2 Months Later
The humidity clung to his wings, and steam curled upward from his nostrils as his internal temperature adjusted to the rising heat of midday.
But something was wrong.
It wasn't the temperature, nor the terrain. It was the air. It was still. Unnaturally so. No insects buzzed in the underbrush. No birds called from the canopy. Even the ever-present hum of Isla Nublar's reptilian residents had gone quiet. The silence wasn't fear of him.
Narakul could feel the difference. This wasn't the quiet born from apex dominance, this was a silence rooted in something deeper. Something older.
Narakul froze. His bristle-like sensory hairs quivered, catching faint electrostatic residue clinging to tree trunks. A chemical trace floated in the air.
He turned his head, nostrils flaring, sifting scent molecules through the glandular slits hidden beneath his armored skull. It wasn't prey.
It wasn't a predator either. Not in the traditional sense.
It was artificial, and yet… living.
He moved forward, his vision adjusting between optical layers, from thermal to polarized UV. Something had passed through this part of the forest recently.
Very recently. He reached a tree,an enormous banyan strangled by its own roots, and paused. Four deep gouges raked down the bark, unnaturally clean, as if carved by obsidian blades.
The pattern, the angle, the spread, all wrong for a raptor. Wrong for any known predator on this island. The claw marks started high and ended low.
Whatever made them had been standing on two legs and was tall. at least as tall as Narakul himself, if not more.
Lowering his body, he examined the forest floor. The bristles along his forearms twitched again. Pressure changes. The earth held compressed air pockets where immense weight had pressed down. Tracks.
He traced one with a three-fingered claw, running its perimeter slowly. Bipedal. Deep toe impressions. No heel drag.
No signs of scavenging. But the air carried a lingering dread, a chemical signature his evolving brain could not yet decode.
A manufactured scent, perhaps a pheromone or suppressant, designed to confuse or pacify. It had failed. Whatever left this behind was not confused. It was testing the boundaries of its environment.
He moved on.
Miles away, past the edge of Sector Six, the walls of a high-security paddock stood tall and weather-stained beneath the tropical sun.
Constructed of reinforced alloy and concrete, it had once been considered unbreachable. And yet, today, it stood empty.
Hours earlier, within its towering walls, Simon Masrani had stood behind reinforced glass, watching the lone occupant of the paddock pace back and forth.
The creature was not fully grown, but already 12 meters long and unnervingly intelligent. Its white scales shimmered like moonlight. Its eyes held the cold calculation of a being that did not act on instinct, but on thought.
"Why did it kill its sibling?" Masrani had asked, more to himself than to Claire Dearing, who stood beside him.
"Territorial behavior," Claire had answered.
"Or dominance. Dr. Wu didn't specify."
"Dominance?" Masrani had frowned.
"Then it's already dangerous."
Unbeknownst to them, the creature had long since mapped the enclosure's thermal grid. The inclusion of cuttlefish and frog DNA in her genome had given her the ability to mask her heat signature.
What they saw as an anomaly, her apparent disappearance from the monitors, was a calculated deception.
When Owen Grady arrived to assess the paddock for behavioral vulnerabilities, the trap had already been set.
The claw marks on the wall were a ruse, leading him to believe she had escaped.
But as the gates began to open and the staff entered, she dropped from the wall, hidden in plain sight, and tore through the team.Within minutes, the Indominus rex was loose.
She had breached containment and killed without hesitation.
She tore out her own tracker, flesh still clinging to the implant, and left it as bait for the ACU team. When they arrived, she was waiting. Men died in seconds.
Their weapons, uncalibrated for something of her scale, did nothing to slow her.
She vanished into the jungle, hunting the heat signatures of park guests like moths drawn to flame.
Back in the quiet sector, Narakul had begun to notice the change in the jungle's patterns.
Small creatures were relocating. A herd of Stegosaurus had rerouted their grazing path, moving in odd zigzags. Trees were trampled in violent bursts, not paths of movement, but sites of impact. Something was chasing, cornering, killing.
Not for food. For something else.
Narakul passed through the underbrush into a shallow ravine. Blood stained the leaves. Feathers littered the ground.
A juvenile had been taken here. Not devoured, just killed. Bones cracked and left behind.
He tasted the scent again.
It was her.
He did not know her name, nor did he yet understand the implications of what she was. But instinct told him this creature was different.
Not born. Forged. Crafted, like him, but by different hands. Where his evolution was reactive and adaptive, hers was deliberate, sharpened with cruelty and science.
He lowered his body to the ground and listened.
Far away, in another part of the island, the Indominus let out a roar, not a cry for territory, but a declaration of dominance.
Narakul did not answer.
But he moved in her direction.