Love Like Crazy

———

“Is this some kind of joke?” Sable says by way of greeting the moment the call connects.

“Pleasure to hear from you as always, Shepherd.” Ryu’s voice on the phone sounds the same as ever, calm and dryly amused, as if he’s the only one who knows the punchline. “I take it the kid showed up on time?”

With that remark, Sable no longer lives in a world where this was all some unfortunate misunderstanding. He was clinging to the possibility, as unlikely as it was, that the little boy in the front room had wandered through the wrong door in search of the parent he wandered away from at the grocer or laundromat—that a frantic older turtle would swoop through any second now and snatch him up, scolding him and apologizing to Sable for the inconvenience in the same breath—that Sable would be able to gruffly wave the little family away and go back to bracing himself for the person Ryu was actually sending.

It feels like he’s standing underwater and the pressure is getting to his head, making him say something he ordinarily wouldn’t dare say.

“The kid is the damn problem,” Sable bites back, feeling insane. “He’s practically two feet tall, and walked in here armed with a weapon bigger than he is. Where the hell are his parents?”

“Doesn’t have any, far as I can tell. You know, the orphanage he ran away from didn’t even report him missing?” Ryu chuckles, a rich, oily sound, as if it was funny, as if what he was really saying was could it be any more perfect?

Sable’s heartbeat thunders in his ears, the pressure building, and he realizes he has never in his life been angrier than he is right now. His parents are both long-gone, distant relatives scattered to the winds, and he’s never once considered starting a family of his own, but even someone as unqualified as Sable knows that a child deserves more than this. Someone to worry about where they go, to make sure they come in from the cold and eat well, a soft place to land.

Otherwise kids slip through the cracks and get snatched up by people like Ryu.

“I hope you don’t think that just because you run a restaurant you can tell me how to run my business,” Ryu goes on in a deceptively pleasant tone. “You’re a smarter spirit than that.”

Unfortunately for both his own conscience and the sake of the child in the front room, Sable is a smarter spirit than that.

“Just curious,” he grits out.

“No harm done,” Ryu replies magnanimously. “Be less curious next time.”

Sable would like to slam the handset of the corded landline back into the reciever hard enough to break them both, but lifetime of controlling his strength and marshalling his temper kicks in like clockwork. He doesn’t need to deal with a broken phone on top of everything else. And he doesn’t want to scare the kid.

When he returns to the dining room, the child is standing right where he left him, head down and shoulders up, bright brown eyes alert and watchful. He’s already looking at Sable the second he comes back through the door, likely following the sound of his footsteps.

Sable realizes, abruptly, that he doesn’t know anything about turtle yokai. He’s probably only met one other one before in his life, a wizened old tortoise who had worked at a museum Sable’s middle school had visited on a field trip and was the type of person it was hard to imagine as anything younger than a hundred years old. Sable wouldn’t have guessed their senses were heightened to any particular degree, hearing keen enough to follow the movements of someone in anothe room.

He wonders, with a pit in his stomach, how much of that phone conversation the kid had heard. Judging from the wariness on his little spotted face that hadn’t been there before Sable took the call, he likely heard most of it.

They’re off to a great start.

“Sorry about that,” he says. His voice is gruff, a low rumble that he doesn’t normally make any effort to soften, but he watches the way the lines of the kid’s body go taut with nerves and wants to kick himself for it. “My name’s Sable. You?”

“Clem,” the turtle replies politely, even giving a short bow.

Sable had been half-expecting the kid to try to act like a pint-sized thug, given the crowd that had absorbed him and the fact that he had seemingly been fending for himself on the city streets for gods knew how long. The manners take him by surprise.

“And you’re how old?” he can’t help but pry.

“Thirteen,” Clem replies. Sable doesn’t believe that for a goddamn second, even if the kid does have one hell of a poker face.

Still, thirteen is bad enough. Clem should be in school, where the biggest thing he has to worry about is remembering to do his homework. He should be somebody’s child. Sable should be a better person, a braver one, and tell Ryu to his face that he’s evil for this.

But what good would it do? The cops are crooked, and the Ryu-gumi owns every inch of this town, and Sable is not a better person.

The conversation is stilted and uncomfortable on both ends—because Sable has no clue how to handle children in general but especially tragically self-sufficient ones, and Clem doesn’t trust Sable as far as he can throw him—but Clem doesn’t forget his manners and Sable does his best to gentle his growl and they manage to make it upstairs to the studio apartment in one piece.

Somehow the apartment looks even worse now that Sable knows it’s meant to house the orphan trailing up the stairs obediently behind him. He opens the door and flicks the light switch, and the bulb overhead flickers valiantly a couple times before it manages to stay on and the sparseness of the room is laid bare.

He’s braced for any number of complaints from the kid, or at the very least incredulousness—if you told Sable he had to pay his hard-earned cash for a bare-minimum place like this over top of a rowdy bar, he’d be incredulous, too. There isn’t even a bedframe for the mattress and box springs to sit on.

But Clem takes a few careful steps forward, surveying the room with that gravity that makes him look like he’s thirteen going on fifty. He doesn’t say anything for what feels like an hour, but is probably closer to a minute. Sable can see his hands, down at his sides, clenching in the fabric of his pants as if he needs the reminder to stay still.

To fill the silence, Sable explains about the hot plate and mini fridge, the half-bath with a standing shower in the back, the door with a lock.

“The key will open your apartment, and the restaurant side door, so don’t lose it,” Sable says gruffly, passing it over.

It’s hanging on a braided cord that turns out to be just big enough for a scrawny turtle yokai to slip over his head, which is what Clem does with it immediately. He tucks the key out of sight under his scarf, but he doesn’t let go of it right away, clinging to it with a hand Sable would guess is bunched into a fist.

“Thank you, Mr. Shepherd,” Clem says, as if all of this has been a kindness, and not the bare minimum. Remembering his manners. Grateful to this latest in a line of adults that have all failed him completely.

Sable can’t look him in the eye, opting to turn around and head back down the stairs.

“I got a space heater in storage somewhere,” he says, taking the coward’s way out, hating himself more with every step. “I’ll be back with it in a few.”

It takes five minutes to find the space heater, and an additional fifteen to muster the willpower to face the kid again. When Sable finally hauls the heater up to the second floor, he finds that Clem has bravely ventured far enough to sit on the edge of the bed with his measly bag on the floor at his feet. He’s the give of the old mattress, running gloved hands over the worn-soft quilt that could use a good dusting, his spotted face filled with tentative, barely-daring-to-believe-it hope.

Where did he come from that a room like this could look like a safe haven?

Sable wants to ask, but he hasn’t earned the right. And it wouldn’t make a difference. This is where they are now.

———

Clem turns out to be the best tenant a reluctant landlord could hope for.

By which Sable means he usually doesn’t see or hear any evidence that he even has a tenant unless the kid chooses to be seen or heard. Once or twice, he’s heard the side door open well after Tenten has closed for the evening, when there’s no noise to drown out the solid thunk of the heavy lock turning, and then small footsteps up the creaky stairs.

He tries to leave well enough alone. Ryu wouldn’t be pleased to find out Sable stuck his nose where it didn’t belong. And Clem hasn’t asked for help—which isn’t surprising. He’s all of three apples tall and renting an apartment on his own. If he’d ever asked for help before now, he must have been sorely disappointed. He’s a child who is learning his own lessons about how the world works—just grit your teeth and deal with it because no one is coming to save you.

Sable isn’t coming to save him.

But every so often he lets himself upstairs when the kid is gone and takes measure of things. He quietly stocks the closet-turned-pantry with canned goods and shelf-stable items like noodles and rice, keeps milk and eggs in the fridge, leaves a saucepan and a can-opener on the counter.

Clem never mentions it. As far as he knows, Sable’s quiet oversight is a regular part of room and board.

Sometimes he lingers between the side door and the stairway when he gets home—when he gets back—from whatever shit-show Ryu is likely putting him through, standing there on the fringes of the kitchen. Sable can feel Clem’s eagle eyes watching him as if there is something he would very much like to say. But he never does.

And then exactly one month later, Clem cautiously approaches the counter with squared shoulders, every step as dogged as if there was no other way to get to where he needed to be but to walk through a tiger’s den while the tiger was in it.

He’s holding something in both hands, clutched tight against his plastron, and Sable feels the first stirrings of dread even before Clem opens his mouth and says, “Ryu told me to pay you rent on the first day of the month.”

Sable is glad he isn’t actively holding any dishware. As it is, the cleaning rag doesn’t make a sound when he drops it on the counter.

“What,” he says at length.

Clem’s whole body seems to shrink an inch, shoulders curling up toward his ears, arms pressing tighter to his front, as if the word was a slap. But he’s made of sterner stuff than any adult yokai Sable knows, because he doesn’t back down.

“I have it,” Clem says, and holds what turns out to be a squashed wad of cash and coins collected between his gloved hands. “I counted,” he adds, when all Sable does is stand there.

“Ryu told you to pay me rent?” Sable grits out. He can hear the enraged rumble enter his voice and can’t do anything about it.

“He said—you have to pay rent to stay somewhere,” Clem explains. His voice is losing its steely resolve. He looks like he expects the world to crumble out from beneath him at any moment. He wants to keep that little room above the bar, he wants to do whatever it will take to keep it, doesn’t want to be without a safe place to return to at the end of the day. He jumps through every hoop Ryu puts in front of him. What else is he supposed to do?

It occurs to Sable that the kindest thing he could possibly do in this moment is just take the money. But he can’t bring himself to take it.

“Fine, just,” he says, and waves helplessly toward the counter, “put it there.”

Clem perks up and hustles forward to do as he’s told. He has to clamber inelegantly up onto one of the barstools without his hands in play, and kneels there on the seat so he can reach the counter, and carefully piles his tiny, crumpled wealth in front of Sable.

Then he starts sorting bills and counting coins, and the number just keeps going higher. His little spotted face is furrowed with concentration, serious about the task at hand. It reminds Sable of watching kids count out their allowance to buy a treat in the marketplace.

The outcome of gods know how many hours of his little life spent working instead of playing. And it’s going right back to line Ryu’s pockets in the long run anyway.

Finally, he stops. There is laughably little left in the pile for Clem to keep.

Sable feels like he’s aged about a hundred years in the past two minutes. He says, “Look, kid. Whatever Ryu told you—” He stops. Takes a breath in and lets it out. Clem will do whatever Ryu tells him, and so will Sable, and pretending otherwise is a waste of eveyone’s time. He starts again, “Don’t carry your money around like that. And don’t count it out in the open, either. This place is empty now, but what if someone had been skulking around and saw that little fortune of yours up for grabs?”

Turning away from the bar, he steps into the tiny office in the back and rummages until he comes up with a box of envelopes. He sets them on the counter and pushes them over to the turtle, then sweeps his rent payment into the till without bothering to count it, the strangest transaction of his entire life.

Clem picks up the box of envelopes gingerly. His face asks the question his mouth won’t.

“Keep your money safe,” Sable says. “Don’t ever wander around with it like that again. Put your rent payment in an envelope and leave it in my office back there.” He gestures. Clem follows his hand with round eyes. “If I’m not here, then it can wait ‘til I am. Got it?”

Clem blinks once, looks down at the box of envelopes he’s holding, then nods.

“Got it,” he says. He’s thirteen, learning how the world works.

Sable needs a drink.

———

The years roll on. The arrangement, which seemed so precarious and absurd at first, settles into normalcy.

By the time Clem was fourteen, he was brave enough to approach Sable when he got home in the evening. Sometimes he would thank him for the groceries Sable dropped off earlier in the week, sometimes he would mention a sale at the supermarket where the restaurant gets its produce, sometimes he would just wring his hands together and ask if there was anything downstairs he could help with.

The first time, Sable turned him down shortly. He wasn’t not going to add to the work this kid already had on his plate, and he’d been running Tenten solo for years. Only then he saw Clem’s expression, not as hard to read as Sable had once thought it was, turn crestfallen, and he took himself upstairs to a quiet, empty room.

The next time he mustered the courage to ask, Sable pointed him at the sink of dirty dishes, and said if he felt like helping with a few chores, Sable would let him pick something off the menu to eat. And Clem hurried behind the bar like the dishes would grow legs and run away from him if he wasn’t fast enough. And then he swept, and then he sorted tickets, and all the while he asborbed the noise and conversation and Sable’s gruff instructions like he was a sun-starved plant reaching desperately toward a brand-new source of light.

By the time Clem was fifteen, he showed Sable a side of him that he’d never seen before, the one that was nurtured, for better or worse, by the gang he’d been running with for years at that point.

A group of thugs came into the bar with nothing on their minds but causing trouble, each of them on the younger side of their mid-twenties, and clearly new to the area if they didn’t realize that messing with the local mob’s favorite dive bar was a certain death sentence. They were messing around, breaking glasses and picking fights with the other patrons, and Sable was reaching for the jitte he kept under the counter when he heard a mechanical thwack, and one of the troublemakers stumbled back from a table—or, more accurately, from the bolt lodged in the table an inch from where his hand had been.

Clem stood on the stairs with his crossbow raised. He’d grown into it since the first time Sable had seen him with it. He held it like its weight was familiar, and chambered another bolt like he wasn’t shy about using it. He didn’t have to say anything—the threat in his hands was loud enough.

The dining room whistled and cheered for him once the punks had been run out, and Clem, who handled positive reinforcement about as gracefully as a wet cat, disappeared back up the stairs. Sable shook his head, feeling at once fond and disbelieving. It took this long, but it looked like Sable was finally on the receving end of the Ryu-gumi’s protection after all.

By the time Clem was sixteen, he usually had the restaurant ready to open by the time Sable arrived in the morning, prep work done, till counted, chairs moved off of tables. He was still cautious around yokai who were big and loud, and he still wore a guarded, mean expression as if to stave off anyone who might get the idea he was an easy target, but he smiled when he saw Sable. His shoulders weren’t so tense when he worked behind the bar.

He would never be a talkative character, but comparing him to the boy who first walked through the door three years ago was like comparing night and day. He was growing up into a fine young yokai, and his family—the real deal, wherever they were—would have been proud.

By the time Clem was seventeen, a war was brewing.

It wasn’t anything official, and the council of heads hadn’t issued a statement, but word spread like mold. It was all anyone on the street could talk about. The former head of security who had gone rogue more than a decade ago had reappeared with weapons he had built, mutations that he planned to eradicate humankind with. They were fast, the yokai who had seen them spoke of them in whispers, incredibly strong. They could destroy an army in minutes. They wore armor that looked like turtle shells.

The Hidden City had become a more dangerous place almost overnight. Traders willing to move through the human world became scarce. Prices at the grocers’ went up. Tensions were high, and mounting higher every day. The person to blame for it was using weapons shaped like turtles.

Sable noticed it well before Clem did—the way heads would turn to follow him when he entered a room, eyes pinned to his blue-back, white-spotted shell. The long-time patrons, who had watched Clem grow up from their usual tables in the dining room, stopping looking at him with the warmth they used to. Sable felt lower than dirt, giving the kid a jacket and telling him, not in so many words, to cover up his shell, but what else could he do?

He worried every time Clem walked out the door. At some point, it just became second-nature to worry about him—nobody’s child, seventeen going on seventy, strong and stubborn and self-sufficient to a fault, and more often than not the last thing on Sable’s mind before he fell asleep.

And then, on a day like any other, Clem didn’t come home.

———

Ryu’s men come sniffing around for answers, ransacking the restaurant and running out patrons, carving up the smooth polished countertop with a wicked knife clearly meant for more than wood carving.

Sable honestly doesn’t have the first clue where Clem disappeared to, but even if he did, he would have kept his mouth shut. Here in the eleventh hour, when it doesn’t benefit anybody, he managed to find his spine.

He’s proud of Clem for taking the opportunity to run. He approves of the kid for not stopping to tell anyone, even Sable; for the sense he had not to return to this place where he had always been safe, where they would look for him first.

“Just tell us where you think he went,” one of the yokai—the one without the knife—wheedles. “Then we’ll get out of your hair and leave you be.”

“Doesn’t matter where he went and you know it,” Sable finally says with grim satisfaction. “He’s too fast for any of you to catch even without a headstart. By now he’s long gone, and you’re going back to your boss empty-handed. Have a nice life.”

He’s hoping, even as he says it, that it’s true. That Clem is somewhere beyond Ryu’s reach.

That kid who used to count coins on the counter, who learned how to make omelets from watching at Sable’s elbow—that tiny, flinching little thing barely bigger than the bow he taught himself to use, who grew up into the broad-shouldered soldier who could silence rowdy patrons with one stern glance—that kid who still tilted his chin down an inch in deference every time he met Sable’s eyes, who still left his rent money in an envelope on the office desk, who still lingered hopefully before going upstairs for the evening in case there was a job he could do, always starving for company but without half a clue how to ask for it—

Let him make it, Sable prays, without knowing who he’s praying to. Let him make it out.

Ryu lets the destroyed dining room stand as Sable’s punishment. Sable doesn’t know the details of what happened that day Clem decided to run, has been kept uninformed of the goings-on of the Ryu-gumi by design, but from what he’s gleaned, it sounds like it was a very sudden event. It couldn’t have been planned. Sable couldn’t have planned it with Clem. As far as Ryu knows, Sable is a smarter yokai than that.

The bear yokai cleans the wreckage of his life’s work, sweeping up broken glass and righting tables, and thinks that he is probably not a smarter yokai than that.

He thinks if his kid were to appear at the door, with that usual resting frown on his face and something beseaching in his dark brown eyes, Sable would drop everything for him. Ryu would be surprised to find just how quickly Sable would leave everything else behind.

But it doesn’t matter. Clem never steps foot in Tenten again.

Two months later, a group of five Ryu-gumi are clustered around a table in the corner, and wave Sable over for a round of refills.

As he approaches, one of the yokai, a sleek, pale marten that he’d never seen before, says loudly, “Have you guys noticed this big lug leaves the second floor light on every night? How stupid is it to hold out any hope that that ungrateful brat will ever show his face around here again?”

All the air goes out of the room with a hush as the other patrons stop breathing. Sable stops in his tracks, sake bottle heavy in his hand.

The marten enjoys the atmosphere he’s created, leaning into as he turns around to sneer up at him.

“Problem?”

In answer, Sable straightens his posture, standing at full height. The smugness on the yokai’s face falters, so far out of his weight class it’s almost laughable, a rodent squaring up to a bear.

The only thing protecting him in that moment is Sable’s good sense and they both know it. If Sable chose to lift him out of his chair and break his neck, Ryu would make him pay for it later, but revenge is not protection, and this guy would still be dead.

“Of course he did,” Casey says, some measure of good humor entering his face, the corner of his mouth ticking up the barest amount. “That’s a good sign. He recognized you, he was coherent. We’ll know for sure once he’s awake. But I think he’ll be okay.”

Donnie takes it as his cue, climbing into the bed on the opposite side Raph is sitting on and curling around his little twin, careful of the IV and the broken arm and the cracked plastron. Like he’s thirteen again instead of pushing thirty. Raph can’t remember the last time they turtle-piled. He can’t remember the last time he’s seen Donnie let someone get this close to him without showing his teeth. 

Maybe the night after Mikey self-destructed, Raph thinks. The night he opened portals all across time and space and nearly killed himself doing it, when Raph had to beg him to let go before it was too late for him to let go, and Mikey cried and cried and cried like he’d never stop crying. Donnie had climbed right into their miserable pile and held Mikey like it was exactly what his arms were built for, like he’d never get tired of holding him. 

Mikey, Raph thinks, and it’s like touching a livewire. He sits up straight, and looks around for their youngest—second-youngest, a guilty voice in the back of his mind reminds him. Mikey should be right here next to him. The portal hadn’t seemed to take as much out of him as it had those first two times he tried it, he was on his feet and watching Leo with wide, anxious eyes, his voice the one shouting through the phone for April and Casey to come help please we need you because Mikey has always been the best among all of his siblings at asking for help. 

But he’s not here. 

Raph half-rises from his chair, anxiety thrumming through him with enough force to make him light-headed. Whatever could possibly keep Mikey away from Leo—their Leo!! Alive!!—is something bad. He knows it’s something bad. 

He doesn’t have to look far. On the other side of the infirmary, April and Mikey are hovering over another cot. They’re talking in terse voices, transparently worried, and it sounds like they have someone on speakerphone. Draxum? Raph had thought Mikey wasn’t on speaking terms with the elder yokai. They certainly haven’t been as close as they used to be. 

“Hey,” Casey says, alarm entering his tone as he heads over to join them, “is it Georgie? What happened?”

Georgie? Raph thinks. 

“He and Mikey opened that portal together,” April says grimly. She’s explaining what she’s feeling as best she can. Letting Karai tag along to fight Shredder, however briefly, gave April a secondhand understanding of their family’s mystic power that far surpassed their own. “But Gio—his ninpo is so much bigger than him. It’s like trying to carry the ocean in a bucket. He’s just a baby, it’s too big for him to carry by himself. It’s sloshing over the sides, it’s spilling everywhere.” 

Feeling like the dream has become a nightmare, Raph’s eyes trail past her to the shape in the bed.

Giorgio is tiny for a creature that Raph is entirely intimidated by. He looks even smaller than normal on the cot, chest heaving, breaths raspy and shallow and rabbit-fast. His face is flushed, brow furrowed in pain, and his eyes are fever-bright and confused. His small fist is clutching Mikey’s sleeve, the way someone who was drowning would clutch a life preserver. 

Mikey is glowing, messy shoulder-length hair floating around his face, the black snaking scars on his arms lit up like a flashlight shining through a crack in the door. Raph can’t hear what Draxum is saying, but his tone is steady and exacting, the manner of a teacher walking their student through a trial they know the student is capable of passing. 

Casey gets to work beside Mikey, medicine supplementing the magic as he fits a breathing mask over Gio’s mouth and beak. He has to tighten the straps—the mask isn’t child-sized, it’s almost laughably big, if anything could possibly be laughable now. 

April strokes Gio’s forehead with the pad of her thumb, the same way Raph has a dozen memories of her doing for him when they were children, when he was sick or hurt or having a bad day, the same way she does for all of her little brothers. 

And Mikey doesn’t let up even once. For what feels like hours, his ninpo shines steady and unrelenting and golden, calming the snarling storm inside of Gio with all the patience of a mountain or a star—something that has been here all along and would continue to be here forever, long after everything else is gone—hands that would continue to help and hold until no help was needed, until you could walk on your own. 

And finally, Gio’s breaths start to even out. The pain drains from his face, his eyes slip half-closed. His fist loosens around Mikey’s sleeve but doesn’t let go. 

“It’s okay, baby,” Mikey says, catching Gio’s hand with both of his own, pressing kisses to that tiny palm. “I’m right here, I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here. Do you feel better?”

Gio blinks up at him wearily and manages to shake his head no. No he doesn’t feel better? No nothing hurts? Raph feels restless with wondering, craning his neck to see as much as he can.

But Mikey seems to understand, the frantic edges of him softening with blanket relief, a fire snuffed out under foam. He slumps where he’s standing, an uncomfortable hunch over the bed, cradling the little hand he’s holding against his cheek.

“That’s good,” he says hoarsely, blinking wetly. “Good boy. My brave little turtle. Do you feel sleepy? Can you get some rest for me? I’m gonna be right here with you. As a matter of fact, I’m gonna have the same dream you’re having, so you’ll see me there, okay? We’ll hang out and do something fun.”

His voice is silly and soft and sweet, the way Splinter’s voice had sounded when he was convincing headstrong children that it was bedtime. Raph remembers dad saying the same thing, that he’d meet them wherever they were dreaming. His heart pangs with homesickness and nostalgia and love that grief couldn’t stomp out after all.

“Sharks?” Gio says hopefully, believing every word out of Mikey’s mouth, asking nicely.

“Nice one,” April says, muscling in to kiss every spot on that forehead. “You hear that, Mikey? You better ante up. My baby wants sharks.”

“Sharks it is,” Mikey says solemnly, and a few discs of light peel away from the sunny spots on his arms, taking the shape of sharks that swim in lazy circles above Gio’s head. He watches them avidly, each blink longer than the last, until he falls asleep.

Like a string was cut, Mikey collapses. He sags into the chair beside the bed and buries his face in his hands. He’s shaking, making awful choking sounds, not letting himself sob the way he wants to because he can’t wake their smallest brother. 

Donnie is stiff, reacting to Mikey’s pain like a sleeper agent the way he has since he was two years old, but physically incapable of letting go of the other half he’s been parted from for an impossible, painful decade. 

Raph makes himself stand up and let go instead. He’s not going far, he reasons with himself. He’s not leaving the room. Nothing has the power to take Leo from them now, not with Donnie of all people standing guard. 

But when Raph crosses the room to his little brother—to both his little brothers—Mikey whips his head up and pins Raph with a look that he would be tempted to call hateful. He hadn’t known Mikey could look like that at anybody. It stops him in his tracks. 

“What do you want?” he bites out. His voice is thick and choked, miserable and angry. 

“Angie,” April says softly, “not now, baby.”

Mikey jerks his head away and doesn’t say anything else. Raph, clearly, should leave it alone. He can’t. 

“I just wanted to make sure you were okay,” Raph says, wrong-footed, sounding weak to his own ears. 

“You don’t care,” Mikey snarls. The lowered volume does nothing to temper the venom. “You don’t care! If you did you would have been here. You would have helped me. I killed Leo and you hate me for that. You do!” he adds, because Raph is shaking his head, horrified and stricken, bleeding with every word. “You hate me, and you hate Gio because I love him. You do.” 

Mikey LIED. In his final moments with the little brother that just wanted to be useful and do good, Mikey, who loved gio like a force to be reckoned with, who loved him more than anything else in the entire world, who would have done ANYTHING to keep him, LIED. TO. HIM. He told Gio that Gio was rewriting history, that there wasn't a future to RETURN to, but that was to give Gio a chance at a better life. With brother and a dad who would love him RIGHT, the way his sweet Clementine DESERVED to be loved! He thought he was doing what he thought was best for Gio. Afterall, Mikey was pretty sure he couldn't love right to keep him, and Donnie and Raph and Dad had barely even TRIED.

So he let Gio go. And it broke him.

Like Tai said, he didn't eat. He didn't sleep. He spent hours just crying to himself in Gios bed the kid barely slept in. He messily chopped his hair off in a crushing wave of grief and anger to be able to control SOMETHING. The kitchen light was off for the first time in forever. (There was no one around to keep it on for anymore. Mikey couldn't be that light in the dark anymore.)

It got to the point where it started SERIOUSLY worrying Donnie and Raph enough to snap to their senses a little, because they didn't realize just how DIRE this situation was, until Gio left. Mikey is just a SHELL of himself. He's barely there at all. They're worried, quietly, to themselves, that if they don't keep a tight hold on him, they might be 3 for 3 in losing little brothers.

Two months later, Mikeys sitting at the kitchen island, with red rimmed and vacant eyes, messy black hair choppy and uneven, staring off into the middle distance and wholey uninterested in the meal Raphs making and forcing him to sit on (hes lost weight, and Donnies keeping an eye on it but Mikeys practically wasting away in front of them and somehow, somewhere deep down, Raph knows how to be a big brother still, at least enough to force a stubborn little brother to eat, even if that's completely simplifying the world ending problem he had a hand in creating), when they get the call.

Another call. Again from Hueso. About, impossibly, another little brother with Yoshi's brown eyes.

And its like someone threw a match on a wood pile doused in gasoline.

Mikey doesn't need to be told twice. He doesn't question it. He races out of the lair almost faster than Raph can keep up, but Raph does his best anyway. Because this sounds too good to be true. Second- THIRD chances don't fall into their laps like this. There's no way they somehow have a ANOTHER lost sibling out there.

There's questions upon questions, dancing doubtful and suspicious in Raphs head, but he keeps them all to himself as he races through the Hidden City streets with Mikey practically vibrating in the passenger seat next to him, who would probably light Raph on fire if he even LOOKED at him with an expression that reeked of any one of his anxious thoughts about the matter. So Raph keeps his eyes on the road. Keeps things to himself. Hes been pretty good at that recently. This shouldn't feel like there's a rope suddenly around his neck.

And it all becomes clear when they race into Run of the Mill anyway. And they see, not some mysterious new sibling, but one they painfully recognize, even if he's whole feet shorter and tinier than they've ever known him.

Giorgio, who looks barely older than 10, kneeling on one of Huesos bar stools because hes too small to sit on it normally and half heartedly warming his hands on a mug of something warm and steaming. His spots laughably big on his little face, pouting with an expression that makes Mikey let put a choked sound beside Raph, from where they still stand at the entrance.

Mikeys expression hurts to look at, but there's more light and warmth and burning determination in his eyes than Raphs seen in a long time. A promise that screams of something Raphs not entirely privey to, but it looks a lot like Mikeys made his mind up about something, and there's a 0% chance that there's anything in the known AND unknown universe, that'll stop him from making it happen.

They pack him off to the bathroom with the change of clothes he fishes from his backpack and then Leo says in a tone just shy of pleading, “Miguel, did you pack the Tylenol with your stuff?”

“Oh!”

Mikey scrambles to find it, digging quickly through his bag in a manner that suggests he’s a little embarrassed at being found out, even if he’s not sorry he did it. He passes the bottle over, but doesn’t manage to do it casually—watching like a hawk as Leo shakes two pills into his palm, only catching himself when Leo hands the bottle back.

They make eye contact for a single excruciating second, a dozen things left unsaid idling right behind the limit line of being spoken out loud, patiently waiting for their inevitable moment in the sun.

Then Mikey opens his mouth, probably to apologize for making it a thing, and Leo calmly and maturely lifts a pillow off the bed to whack him in the face with it before he can get a word out.

“Make me a coffee,” Leo demands over his little brother’s offended sputtering.

“Why should I?” Mikey demands right back, but he’s already on his way over to the coffee bar.

Maybe there would have been a lingering sense of awkwardness in the room if not for Mikey forgetting about the Spider Cup.

He lifts it, a nightmare on eight legs instantly darts over the side of the counter to freedom, and every other thing that happened this morning is swallowed up in the immediate chaos of a loose spider terrorizing the room.

Gio comes out of the bathroom to find Mikey doubled over, laughing so hard it’s just an airless wheezing sound, and Leo standing on the bed, leaning his hip casually against the padded headboard as if he hadn’t just leaped up there in a blind panic.

The boy’s eyebrows scrunch together, confused until Mikey manages to wave the Spider Cup toward the creature currently making its way up the nightstand with single-minded vengeance. Then Gio’s expression clears, and he sets his bookbag on the foot of Leo’s bed as he rounds it, taking the oversized ceramic mug from Mikey and getting on his hands and knees to scoop the spider right into it with his palm.

“My hero,” Leo tells him, only half-joking. “Don’t let that thing bite you.”

“It won’t bite me,” Gio says, peering past his fingers into the cup. “It’s a tarantula. They live here but you can buy them at the pet store, too. Mom said I could get one for my birthday if I was good.”

“Oh, that’s,” Leo starts uncertainly, at the same time Mikey coos, “Cute!”

Gio takes the spider outside and absorbs their praise when he comes back with the empty mug. Leo tousles his hair playfully and Mikey rewards him with a cup of chocolate milk.

While they wait for Mikey to take his turn in the bathroom, Leo coaxes Gio into talking about himself a little more. It’s like pulling teeth, but Leo shared a room with Donatello for the first twenty years of his life—he is more than qualified to get anyone to talk about anything.

He learns that Gio is eight years old, he was born in July, and he doesn’t have any siblings. His favorite color is mint green, like the laces in his canvas sneakers, and he likes spiders and sharks most of all—but an animal ambassador came to his elementary school once and let him hold a ball python, and now he likes them, too.

This kid clearly gravitates toward creatures that other people deem scary or ugly, that no one else in the room would dare to hold. If he was an angsty teenager, Leo would be tempted to call it bravado. Since he’s a tiny baby who barely musters the courage to speak at a regular volume if there isn’t a gross bug in the room to motivate him, Leo think it’s more likely that Gio is just a deeply empathetic little person who doesn’t want anyone to feel left out.

It reminds him of Raph at that age, Leo’s big brother with the biggest heart of anybody he knows, who would purposely pick out the stuffed animal with the crooked stitching or the mismatched eyes because no one else would pick that one. He’d think about it sitting there on the shelf by itself while all the other stuffies went to their new homes and tear right up like clockwork.

Raph’s thirty-one now and he still gets misty-eyed over ugly stuffed animals. He’s not big on bugs, but he’d understand Gio’s stubborn favoritism better than anyone.

Leo wishes fervently, the last time he’ll let himself wish it for the day, that he could call him—he wants to tell Raph all about this kid. It’s a shame they’ll likely never get a chance to meet.

———

The rest of the group is already waiting by the time Leo, Mikey and Gio make it to the Visitor’s Center—and they continue waiting, as Mikey and Leo don’t miss a beat steering their little roommate right past the tour vehicles and up the steps toward that cafeteria on the first floor.

Chocolate milk, as Mikey had announced on their way out the hotel room door in his sweetest ‘argue with the wall’ tone, does not a complete breakfast make.

There’s a different employee running the kitchen this morning but he’s equally as enthusiastic about feeding them as the previous one had been. He and Mikey chat about restaurant work like old friends while he sets the three of them up with takeaway boxes of fried eggs, fresh fruit and sweet corn bread, all piled in around a hearty scoop of gallo pinto.

Gio is visibly put off by the rice and beans dish, or more likely by the onion and bell pepper cooked into it, but doesn’t say a word other than his quiet thank you when he’s handed the food.

Leo, who doesn’t have any strong opinion about it one way or the other, confides in him that gallo pinto is actually his favorite and if Gio would trade him for Leo’s corn bread it would be the best morning ever. Gio perks right up at that, the first hint of a smile lifting the corners of his mouth.

They’re encouraged to pick up some drinks and snacks from a cooler by the door on their way out. Mikey liberates a few bottled waters, and then as an afterthought, with a glance toward the kid, pockets a KitKat for the road.

Gio has his eyes on the prize as he maneuvers down the front steps of the Visitor’s Center, preoccupied with the important task of not dropping his breakfast. Because he’s looking down instead of up, he doesn’t see the expression of dark anger on Draxum’s face. Anger for Gio, rather than at him, but he wouldn’t understand that. It’s for the best that he misses it.

But he doesn’t miss it when Warren says loudly, “Hey, no outside food allowed in the cars.”

The kid jerks his head up, and seems to shrink three sizes when he realizes the grown-ups are all looking at him. His eyes drop right to the ground and stay there.

Leo never had a problem with attention when he was Gio’s age—that came along much later—but his twin had a Don’t Look At Me phase that lasted well into his teens. Leo is painfully familiar with the expression (or lack thereof) on Gio’s face. He seems much less prone to biting people than Donatello had been, but this immediate shut down is exactly the same.

Mikey opens his mouth, clearly about to hurt someone’s feelings in the brutal and lasting way only the youngest of five ever could, but Leo beats him to the punch.

“Well, looks like there’s six of us, so that’s an easy split,” he says amiably, propelling Mikey and Gio both over to the frontmost car, an SUV wrapped in the Jurassic Park logo with a bubble-like glass roof. It’s sitting over a single-rail track in the road and there’s no driver in sight, so it’s likely going to be guided along automatically by signals it receives through the track. He pops open the rear passenger door for Gio to clamber inside, while Mikey circles around to climb into the back on the other side.

Leo watches through the window for a moment and sees Mikey open his own to-go container with a playful wink, making a show of digging right in. Some of the tension in Gio’s little shoulders goes slack, but he shoots no less than three sidelong looks at Mikey to make sure it’s okay before he dares to take a bite.

Getting this kid to come out of his shell is starting to feel like one step forward and two steps back.

“If the eight-year-old spills some egg on the seats, I’m sure your employer who is worth multiple billions of dollars can pay to have them cleaned,” Leo says to Warren in a significantly less-friendly tone now that Gio is out of earshot. Leo’s going to spill something on purpose at this point just to fuck with this guy in particular. “He didn’t ask to be here and there’s no good reason he should have to go hungry. Please tell Lena she can call my personal phone number if she has a problem with that.”

“Okay, hey, that’s something to consider,” Todd pipes up in a transparent attempt to stop a fight that promises to be ugly before it can start. “Lots of guests are gonna have kids on the tour and kids get snacky. Implementing some kind of concession stand might be a good idea, right, Warren?”

“I had hoped we’d have the chance to further discuss our thoughts during the tour,” Draxum tells Leo pointedly while Warren looks as though he can’t decide whether to continue to be pissed off or reluctantly intrigued at a new avenue of squeezing more money out of park guests. “Since that’s the whole reason we’re here in the first place.”

“Yeah, well, I’m babysitting,” Leo replies. “And if you really thought any of us would get a word in edgewise now that our lovable brand expert has invited himself along, then I have no idea how you managed to pass the bar.”

Draxum closes his eyes and seems to go through all five stages of grief at the reminder that he’s going to be crammed into close quarters with the man who has managed to become his least favorite person on the planet in less than twenty-four hours. Warren’s speechlessness has finally graduated into truncated scoffing sounds, like a self-righteous car engine trying to turn over.

Leo touches his forehead in a sarcastic salute and escapes into the first SUV.

“Lock the doors,” he half-jokes. Mikey takes him seriously and starts pawing for door locks that almost certainly don’t exist in a glorified roller coaster vehicle.

“Are they mad?” Gio asks, a very worried kid who is trying not to sound worried.

It’s hard to remember what it felt like to be as young and small as eight years old—back when the machinations of grown-ups were an absolute mystery, and what seemed obvious to them was not always explained to you. It’s not up to Gio where he goes and what happens to him, it’s up to the group of adults he got landed with, and how pleased they are at his good behavior.

He’s barely made a dent in his breakfast, clearly waiting for Leo to report that they broke a rule and they’re not allowed to eat in the car after all.

“Nah, Warren was just confused, that’s all,” Leo explains easily. “We got it sorted out. Hey, you had some of the rice! How was it?”

Gio doesn’t quite smile, but his face relaxes out of its pinched, nervous expression, and he pokes at the gallo pinto with his spoon. “You said it was your favorite, so I wanted to try it. It’s good.”

“Lee will still give you his corn bread,” Mikey tells him with complete authority, and when Leo scoffs in playful outrage, Gio does finally smile a little bit.

The SUV is a custom-build and has none of the interior components of a regular vehicle; just a huge touch screen display instead of a dashboard, with a bunch of grayed-out options that Leo can’t investigate no matter how much he taps around on it. There’s a headset next to the driver’s seat much like the ones they used in the helicopter that sticks out as analog next to the comparatively sophisticated digital interface.

Mikey does some snooping of his own and discovers an emergency roadside kit in the back, along with a little box of first aid supplies, and about a million park brochures.

“This says there’s supposed to be night-vision goggles under the seats,” he reads aloud. “Shame we’re taking the tour in the daytime, huh, Georgie?”

Gio blinks, seems to realize that nickname could only be meant for him, takes an extra moment to process how he feels about it, then nods shyly.

The frozen display on the screen at the front of the car doesn’t change even when the virtual tour guide chimes to life with a canned welcome message.

It announces that the tour will be starting soon and runs through the rules of the ride in artificially cheerful fashion. Among other things, guests are told to remain inside the vehicle at all times and that attempting to open the doors will activate an emergency alert to park staff. It directs them to the nonfunctional applets on the screen for a walkthrough of components that will likely be more interesting once the system is operational.

Then the SUV lurches gently into motion and begins to glide forward.

Gio loses all interest in what’s left of his breakfast at this point, craning forward eagerly between the two front seats to see out the dashboard. His excitement carries over—Leo isn’t as annoyed about sitting through the ride as he probably would have been otherwise.

He actually finds himself kind of looking forward to it, as the SUVs come to a stop at the first enclosure, and the virtual tour guide narrates sunnily, “If you look to your right, you’ll see a herd of the first dinosaurs on our tour, called Dilophosaurus. One of the earliest carnivores, we now know Dilophosaurus is actually poisonous, spitting venom at its prey, causing blindness and eventually paralysis. This makes Dilophosaurus a beautiful, but deadly, addition to Jurassic Park.”

“Wow,” Mikey half-laughs. “Way to lose half your audience. If Donnie were here, he’d be eating this up—”

“But Raph would cover his ears and make us tell him when it was over,” Leo agrees, grinning.

Gio has his face pressed to the window, eager for a glimpse of his favorite dinosaur he wouldn’t admit was his favorite, but seconds go by and some of the eagerness begins to bleed into disappointment as they sit there and nothing happens. Leo searches the thick foliage from his own window for any hint of movement that isn’t just the gentle stirring of leaves in the wind, but there isn’t a single overgrown crested lizard to be found.

“Leo, get out and shake a bag of treats or something,” Mikey says, thumping the back of his headrest.

“Good call, Ange,” Leo says, playing along and pretending to reach for one of the takeout boxes piled carefully out of the way in the empty driver’s seat, anything to distract Gio from the latest letdown in a long line of them. “Gio, you have any of that cornbread left?”

The kid turns to stare at him, all fast, even reaching up between the two front seats to grab a fistful of Leo’s sleeve.

“Um! It’s against the rules,” Gio tells him urgently. “It—remember? They said we have to stay in the car. And, um, opening the door would be bad. So if you do, you’ll get in trouble.”

And obviously, for a child, “getting in trouble” is the worst possible outcome to any course of action that there could possibly be. He lets go of Leo’s sleeve, but only so he can paw around on his seat for the brochure he was studying earlier and recite the rules on the back out loud. Then he tacks on that the tour loops around, and there will be another chance to see the Dilophosaurus when they come back in this direction at the end, so it’s okay!

Clearly Gio is under the impression that Leo and Mikey are super eager to see the dinosaurs for their own sake, willing to break the rules for a peek, and he’s trying to make them feel better about missing this first opportunity. It’s very cute.

As the tour moves on, past retaining walls covered in thick foliage to give the illusion that they’re out in the wild on an actual safari, the tour guide begins chirping about the various plant life GrandNex has brought back from extinction. That’s easy to tune out in favor of wheedling Gio into talking more.

As they stop at another unexciting length of fence without any dinosaurs to observe, they learn that Gio’s Aunt Ari is an architect on the design team, and right now she’s working on the river ride that will go past the Dilophosaurus enclosure and the raptor paddock. She lets Gio look at the plans sometimes, and he usually comes with her when she visits the park because it’s more convenient than leaving him with a babysitter.

He’s left to his own devices more often than not while the grown-ups are working. He’s done a lot of exploring and knows his way around very well. If Leo or Mikey ever get lost, he tells them earnestly, Gio can show them where to go.

This time his cousin Viola came, too, because her parents split custody of her over the summers and she was staying with her dad until a week ago. She was annoyed that Gio got to see the park first, but she got to see the stegosauruses from the overlook on her first visit and Gio still hasn’t seen a real dinosaur up close. Vi told him all about it until Aunt Ari made her stop bragging.

“She sounds like a real peach,” Mikey says, which is along the same lines as what Leo is thinking, which is, What a spoiled brat.

“She doesn’t like sharing her mom with me,” Gio says unremarkably, eyes glued to his window. “Since she only gets to see Aunt Ari sometimes. It’s okay. I wouldn’t want to share my mom either.”

There’s another no-show at the Tyrannosaurus Rex enclosure, and this time when the cars come to a stop by the fence, a voice that Leo recognizes as belonging to Gus from the control center speaks through the operating system in the car.

“Hey, guys, just sit tight for a few minutes,” he says. “Rexy can be a bit shy, we’re gonna try to tempt her out. Keep watching the fence.”

“What do you think they mean by that?” Mikey asks, only to have his jaw go slack in muted outrage as a small trapdoor opens inside the paddock, and a platform rises from some part of the facility located beneath the enclosure. There’s a goat on the platform, chained to a stake. It is immediately apparent what Gus meant by tempting the rex.

From the look on Mikey’s face, Leo can tell that there is a forty slide PowerPoint presentation ready to go regarding his thoughts on the ethics, or lack thereof, of live feeding. Mikey wasn’t thrilled about the cow that was lowered into the raptor pen, either, but this is performative.

“Hey, uh, you guys are aware that there’s a small child in the car with us, right?” Leo leans in to ask the grayed-out display.

“Um,” Gus’s voice replies.

“What’s the goat for?” Gio asks, brow furrowed.

Mikey makes panicked eye contact with Leo over Gio’s head.

Outside, the goat lays down without a care in the world.

The tour moves on somewhat abruptly, and Leo manages to change the subject by pointing to the first thing in the brochure that Gio still has open in his hands. A fool-proof way to get the kid talking is by asking him questions he knows the answers to and then he’s a regular chatterbox. He’s transparently pleased to be helpful.

“Hey,” Mikey says suddenly, all but shoving his face against his window. “Do you see that? Look out in the field over there.”

Leo leans over the middle console to peer out the driver side window, and it only takes him a few seconds to see what Mikey spotted. There’s a gas Jeep, far enough away that it looks like a little toy car, and a person standing next to a big bulky shape that seems to be sprawled out on the ground.

“Huh,” he says slowly.

“Oh, that’s our veterinarian, Lamar,” Gus’s voice pipes up. There’s clearly a team monitoring the tour pretty closely from the control room—which makes sense, Leo thinks, given that this is a maiden voyage of sorts. “He’s on site with a sick Triceratops. If you wanna hop out and wander down there, he won’t mind. To, you know, make up for all the no-shows.”

“Is it safe?” Leo asks with the eight-year-old in mind. Mikey, who has already popped his door open while the car is still trundling along the track at a merry twenty miles an hour, pauses guiltily.

“Perfectly safe. There’s nothing else in the area at the moment but a herd of Parasaurolophus about half a mile out, and those are basically giant scaly rabbits.”

Leo turns in his seat to look at Gio, who looks back with wide eyes. “You wanna take a look, Georgie?”

The kid nods rapidly. So the tour stops, car doors popping open. Mikey jumps out and immediately begins booking it down the hill toward those distance shapes in the field. Leo hangs back to help Gio clamber out of the car, catching his arm when he almost loses his footing in the loose gravel. The track is at the top of a steep incline, which makes for a pretty view, but it would be a long way to fall. Gio mumbles thank you, and clutches Leo’s hand as they make their way through the tall grass after Mikey.

Behind them, Warren is complaining at length about this annoying group and their constant detours, and Todd is replying in his best disarming tone that since Warren is trying to sell the visitors on the park, there’s nothing wrong with indulging them a bit, right? They’re arguing from either side of Draxum, who looks ready to feed one or both of them to the first dinosaur they encounter.

Gio sucks in a breath when they finally reach the clearing.

The Triceratops is laying on its side, dazed and lethargic, stirring up dust and dirt each time it exhales enormously. There’s a huge bony frill fanned around the back of its head, and the three prominent horns on its face that it was named for. It’s like something from a picture book come to life.

Mikey is already reaching out to touch one of the longer two horns, a look of wonder on his face.

“These were always my favorite,” he whispers to the vet, Lamar, who smiles at the hushed admission.

“What’s wrong with her,” Gio asks Leo in a quiet voice. His eyes are huge and riveted, but he’s clinging to Leo’s side like he isn’t going to take a step anywhere near the animal by himself. Leo closes the distance with a few small steps, bringing the kid close enough that he could reach out and touch the bony frill or scaly skin if he wanted to.

Lamar caught Gio’s question and patiently explains that the dinosaur is sick, and she’s been tranquilized so he could take some samples to find out what’s wrong and help her feel better. Mikey is not a veterinarian, but he is a very nosy person who likes to adopt other people’s problems to solve, so he starts asking the first of a hundred questions about her symptoms and Lamar seems willing to indulge him indefinitely.

While they talk, Gio musters the courage to drift a little closer to the Triceratops. He looks up at Leo, looking for something, and then back down at his own hand. He puts it out very slowly to touch those weathered scales with just the tips of his fingers, and then yanks back quickly, like he’s amazed at his own daring.

“Look at you,” Leo tells him, nudging his elbow into Gio’s shoulder playfully. “A regular dino-wrangler. Make sure you tell Viola all about it.”

Gio ducks his head but not before Leo sees the smile on his face. He’s brave enough now to drift away from Leo’s side and circle around to the other side of the dinosaur where Mikey is crouching by her face. He seems familiar with the vet, who greets him by name kindly, and between Lamar and Mikey he’s successfully coaxed into very carefully and gently petting one of the prominent horns on the dinosaur’s head.

It doesn’t speak much for the tour itself that the first stand-out moment happened during an unplanned detour, but the dinosaur enthusiasts are enjoying themselves at least.

Draxum comes to stand beside Leo, gratefully shaking off his unwanted entourage. He’s looking at the Triceratops with an unreadable expression.

“Had any life-changing revelations in the last hour and a half?” Leo asks him, somewhat curious but mostly just to be sarcastic. “Has the tour been magical enough to change your opinion of the park?”

“No,” the lawyer says flatly. “And I’ve already drafted my email to the firm. Lena Grand has delusions of grandeur—”

“Nice,” Leo says appreciatively.

“—and it’s going to get more than one person killed at this rate,” Draxum goes on as if the interruption hadn’t happened. “If she were less concerned with pushing for the park to open to the public, I would be inclined to give her the benefit of doubt. But it’s clear to me she is willing to cut corners and ignore warnings to make a profit.”

Overhead, the sky is getting noticeably dark even though it’s well before noon, thick gray clouds crowding in. The wind is picking up, too, rushing noisily through the nearby copse of conifer trees and leafy palms.

Warren says, “Can we finish the tour now? Or is there another sick dinosaur around that you’d like to ooh and ahh over first.”

“Considering the sick dinosaur is the first interesting thing we’ve seen so far on this famous tour, I’d be really embarrassed if I was the guy who’s been talking it up all weekend,” Mikey remarks loudly.

“Unfortunately Stone does have a good point for once,” Draxum says plainly. “The sooner we get back to the Visitor’s Center, the better.”

Warren makes an antagonized sound and begins to march back the way they came. Leo puts his hand out for Gio to hold without really thinking about it, since the kid almost tripped in the tall grass half a dozen times on the way here, and Gio hustles over to take it in both his much smaller ones as if it’s an offer he thinks will expire if he doesn’t move fast enough. Mikey is sitting back on his heels, smiling at the two of them, not making any move to leave.

“I think I’ll stay with her a little bit longer,” he says. “If that’s okay?”

The automatic gut-punch reaction Leo has to that is one of deep reluctance. He doesn’t love the idea of Michelangelo getting into god knows what trouble while Leo isn’t around to get him out of it, but he’s liable to start biting if Leo voices that concern out loud. He’s twenty-nine and has long outgrown big sibling supervision—even if he’ll never really outgrow being the baby of the family—and it looks like he’s already made fast friends with Lamar, who seems to be a steady, reliable sort of guy.

Sure enough, the vet says amiably, “I don’t mind. I’m in a gas Jeep, I can drop you off at the Visitor’s Center on my way back.”

“Radio in when you make it back, Leatherhead,” Todd calls out. “I don’t want anyone getting stranded if the storm rolls in early.”

Lamar nods and pats the walkie clipped to his belt in acknowledgement. Leo catches his brother’s eye, who gives him a big grin and a thumbs up and singsongs enjoy the rest of the tour! likely because he knows it’s going to be little more than a long, slow, boring car ride where nothing of interest happens.

As he’s walking away, Leo hears Mikey ask skeptically, “‘Leatherhead’?”

“Wear a thrifted alligator jacket enough times and you’ll get a weird nickname in college, too,” Lamar replies.

———

The tour vehicles are heading back along the track toward the Visitor’s Center, this time without stopping at any of the enclosures along the route, when the sky finally breaks open the way it’s been threatening to all morning. Rain comes down in heavy gray sheets and Gio is disquieted by it, peering up through the glass roof and wringing the hem of his jacket nervously.

“Not a big fan of storms?” Leo asks without really expecting an answer. Gio’s expression is enough of one anyway. “Hey, that’s okay. Mikey used to be terrified of thunder when he was your age.”

It does the trick in distracting Gio from the window. He looks at Leo with disbelief in every inch of his little face, and says, “Mikey?” incredulously, like it’s impossible that someone like Mikey could ever have been afraid of the same things that he’s afraid of.

“Yep,” Leo confirms. “It was the thunder he hated. He always said he didn’t like how big it was. Big things can be scary, you know, especially when you’re little.”

Gio, a very small eight-year-old who knows much better than Leo how scary big things can be, nods solemnly.

“What will happen if the bad storm comes early?” he asks.

“Well, then we’ll just have to have another sleepover before we leave,” Leo decides on the spot. “We’ll raid the kitchen for snacks, and Mikey’s got about a dozen more pirated movies on his computer to pick from. But this time we’ll do it right and build a big blanket fort. Have you made one of those before?” Gio nods shyly, becoming a little less tense the longer Leo talks. “See? You’re an expert.”

“And I’ll go with you?” His voice gets very small, as if he’s afraid to ask, but the words bravely inch out anyway. “When it’s time to leave?”

Leo blinks, and turns fully around in his seat to face him. He hadn’t wanted to take Mikey’s place in the back in case it made the kid feel crowded, but now he wishes he had, because Giorgio looks impossibly tiny back there by himself.

“Georgie, no one’s getting on that helicopter without you,” Leo says firmly. “We’re not leaving you behind. You’ve seen how bossy my brother is, what Michelangelo says goes, and he already told me he wants you to sit next to him on the first flight out of here. We’ll get you home, I promise.”

Gio blinks and his eyes are all big and glassy, but he nods. Leo can’t tell if he believes him or not, but he doesn’t get a chance to press, because Gio asks, “What is your home like?”

Leo thinks about his apartment, bleak and barely lived-in. It’s close to work in the city center, but nearly half an hour from his nearest sibling, and no one in his family is secretive about how much they hate that feature. All of them have a spare key, even though the lease is pretty particular about not creating any copies, and it’s more of a surprise when he doesn’t come home to find his kitchen or living room occupied than it is when he does.

He doesn’t begrudge a second of it. It makes them feel better, and god knows Leo’s put them all through hell.

Home isn’t the aparment, anyway.

“I have a really big family,” he tells Gio. “Scooch over—this is gonna be one long TED talk and I’m gonna get a crick in my neck if I try telling it from up here.”

Leo clambers into the back gracelessly, and at thirty it is definitely not as easy as it was when he was a squirrely teenager, but if he’s sore in the morning it’ll be worth it for the way it makes Gio giggle.

He pulls his phone out, swiping through his favorites album for photos to illustrate his stories with. He introduces Gio to his siblings this way one by one, starting with a picture of his eldest brother, Raphael. The picture is one of the dojo that Raph inherited from Yoshi around the time he earned his third dan black belt. Raph is cheesing for the camera, one arm around dad, the other up in an impressive flex. Student retention has never been better.

Gio knows Mikey already, but Leo has to pause on a picture of Mikey’s ferocious scowl, taken on the day he lost an argument he had been determined to win. 

They had all pitched in to put Mikey through school, because the ghosts of student debt have no business haunting their baby brother. He accepted it with the bad grace of someone who was not on board but had been soundly out-voted, and there’s almost certainly going to be another knock-down, drag-out fight to be had about it somewhere down the road when Mikey tries to repay them. 

“What a grump, right?” Leo says, and Gio, who has only known Mikey to be a charming, smiling force of nature, frowns at Leo with as much disapproval as an eight-year-old can muster. No one is immune to Michelangelo being the all-time favorite everywhere he goes and this is just more proof of that.

Next is a picture of April, a screenshot of her very first segment on the air, back when she always wore her hair in two high puffs instead of one. She killed it, the way they all knew she would. No one looking at her could have guessed how nervous she really was. Casey has this exact picture framed in her office, and April pretends to hate it every time she sees it. She’s a Pulitzer-winning journalist now, but they’re proud of that girl who did it scared, too. April, historically, has never let anything stop her—Leo will need to see solid proof before he’ll be willing to believe anything exists that can.

The first picture of Donnie draws Gio up short. He blinks, and looks up at Leo, then back down at the phone. His confusion is palpable, a wrinkle forming in his brow as he tries to puzzle this not-Leo out. It’s adorable, but Leo doesn’t leave him hanging for long, swiping until he finds a selfie of the two of them, taken after finals week their freshman year. Donnie’s wearing his boxiest pair of glasses and is slumped lifelessly against Leo’s shoulder. Leo’s curly hair is in a crooked ponytail and he forgot to take his under eye masks off. Twenty minutes after this picture was sent to the group chat, dad ordered an Uber to pick them up from campus and bring them home for soup and a non-negotiable nine hours of sleep.

“He’s my twin,” Leo explains. “He’s older by ten minutes, and he has lorded those minutes over me every single day of our lives. And he’s a genius, so basically he never listens to anything I say. Donnie was the one who was supposed to come on this trip, you know,” he adds, smiling at the automatic way Gio’s eyes get big and surprised at this piece of information. “But he’s not a big fan of the outdoors, so he made me go instead. His loss—he would have liked you. Math is his favorite subject, too.”

Leo puts the phone in Gio’s hands and lets him swipe clumsily through the rest of the album. When he pauses on something silly or chaotic, Leo fills in the context he’s missing. Thunder grumbles outside, low and close, but Gio is too preoccupied to be frightened by it. Leo pats himself on the back for a job well done.

“I’m glad Donnie made you come,” Gio mumbles without looking up from his study of the photo on the screen. Yoshi standing behind the chair Leo’s sitting in, his arms wrapped around Leo’s shoulders from behind, chin propped on Leo’s head.

They look alike, smiling the same crooked smile. The Leo in that photo is about twenty-two and hasn’t broken his papa’s heart yet.

“Oh yeah?” Leo asks.

“Yeah,” Gio says, squaring his shoulders and lifting his stubborn chin, but still not quite making eye contact. “You’re nice. I’m happy you’re here.”

He says it with the frank, guileless honesty of a child who wouldn’t know the first thing about telling a reliable lie. He wouldn’t have a reason to lie in the first place. Leo’s knee-jerk response is one of relief—good thing this kid doesn’t know me better, he thinks ruefully, or he’d wish Donnie was here instead.

“Well that makes two of us,” Leo says, nudging their shoulders together, hoping to see that serious expression soften into one of its rare sweet smiles. “Wouldn’t have missed this for the world.”

Because Leonardo’s life is a cosmic joke, that’s exactly when the power goes out. The car slows to an abrupt stop on the track in front of an enormous electric fence, and the lights lining the side of the road go dark.

Gio sucks in an alarmed breath, every bit of nervous tension Leo managed to distract him from flooding back into his tiny body. The headlights remain on, beaming through the rain, so they must be drawing from the battery. The air conditioner and the useless flatscreen display have turned off along with the lights outside.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Leo says immediately. “The storm must have knocked the power out. It storms so often out here I’m sure they know exactly how to handle stuff like this. They’ll have everything up and running in no time.”

The rain is drumming against the roof and the sides of the car relentlessly. Leo tests the power windows and it wirrs down a few agreeable inches, letting cool fresh air in. Gio’s grip on Leo’s phone is white-knuckled and his other hand is clenched into a fist in the front of his jacket, but he isn’t panicking yet. He seems willing to follow Leo’s cue, at least for now.

“Didn’t Mikey say something about night vision goggles?” Leo says. “Let’s snoop.”

There’s nothing under Leo’s seat or the front driver’s, but Gio does find a case under the front passenger seat. The goggles inside look like a slim pair of binoculars and power right on as soon as the batteries are inserted.

It’s the perfect distraction for a trying-not-to-be-rattled little kid, who is immediately glued to his window with them and testing all the switches and buttons to see what happens.

In the front of the car, something is blinking. Leo squints through the dark and leans forward, pawing around until his fingers find the shape of that bulky headset he had noticed earlier in the day.

He puts it on, and it’s immediately obvious that the connection is bad. He can hear voices, disjointed and fuzzy, what sounds like Draxum having a blistering conversation with an extremely nervous Warren. They both sound excited about something, talking over each other. Leo twists around in his seat to peer out the back window, narrowing his eyes through the glare of the second car’s headlights, but he can’t make out much more than the shape of the car.

Leo lowers the mic and says, “Hello? Hey, can you hear me?”

After a few attempts, he gives it up for a bad job when he realizes that even if Draxum is replying to him, Leo can’t make out a single word. He slides the headset off again and tosses it into the front passenger seat.

“Leo?” Gio asks suddenly. “What’s that noise?”

It takes a moment of straining his ears, then Leo hears it, too. A low, distant booming sound, one after another, hard to make out over the storm unless you’re listening for it specifically. It stops for a long time—fifteen seconds, then thirty—and starts again.

“Maybe it’s the power trying to come back on,” Leo guesses, wishing Donatello was here to call him an idiot and then correct him.

Something runs past Leo’s window, and he jumps in surprise. He realizes it’s Warren when the man cuts in front of the SUV, illuminated by the beaming headlights for a split second before he’s gone again, taking off at a dead sprint towards a cluster of indistinguishable buildings nearby.

Leo follows the vague shape of the unlikeable man with his eyes, trying to put together a mental map. He remembers seeing restrooms during the first length of the tour, because he remembers remarking to Mikey that it was strange to have a whole rest area in this part of the park that was seemingly only accessible by automated tour vehicles.

Where was it again? he wonders. Which enclosure?

“Leo?” Gio asks again.

“Hm?”

“I can’t find the goat,” he says.

Leo almost asks “what goat?” before half a dozen amorphous things in the back of his mind suddenly snap into place with crystal-clear clarity all at the same time. Instead he says, forcing his voice to sound perfectly calm, “Can I try those?”

Gio agreeably passes the goggles right over and Leo looks through them into the Tyrannosaurus rex paddock where a goat was delivered earlier on the tour to coax the rex out of hiding. The goat is gone, and all that’s left on the platform is a broken chain, swinging back and forth rapidly.

The booming sound is back. It’s louder now than it was before—or closer.

It occurs to Leo that the flashing blue and orange lights along the electric fence have gone out along with all the others.

A dark, hulking shape that Leo mistook for more of the trees moves suddenly, revealing itself. It lifts its jaws up and back and swallows the body of the goat in one laughably easy bite. When it brings its head back down, looking through the darkness and the rain seemingly right at Leo, its eyes in the infrared light glow like a cat’s.

Deliberately, horrifyingly, it touches the fence, curling its claws around one of the thick braided cables. Testing.

Nothing happens. The fence is down. This is why Warren ran. 

Feeling like he’s hovering somewhere outside of his own body, Leonardo lowers the goggles, moves away from the window, and puts his arm around the painfully silent kid who has decided it’s definitely time to be scared if the way he trembles against Leo’s side is any indication. 

“Don’t say that word,” Gio said plainly, as if there was nothing at all remarkable about the knock-down, drag-out fight he’d instigated at the slightest show of teeth. Raph hadn’t known his eldest sibling very long at the time, and hadn’t learned yet what he would learn relatively soon—that Gio would give him absolutely anything he wanted if he was just willing to push and whine and ask nicely—so he very reluctantly let it go.

It didn’t stop him from telling their family all about it the second they got home. Donnie started making noises about hacking the Hidden City traffic cams to see for himself, while Mikey clamored for a play-by-play and Leo whined about missing everything cool that happened while he was stuck in the medbay, and the whole time Gio distributed dinner with a lack of expression on his face.

Up until the moment Splinter took his spotted face in both hands and said, “Well done, my Gray. You make your family proud.” Then tension Raph hadn’t noticed for what it was leaked out of his shoulders and the set of his mouth, and it was a much softer Gio who passed his father a plate.

Later, Splinter would tell Raph how it felt to fight in the Battle Nexus. How it felt to abandon honor, to kick and claw and use his teeth, just to survive another day. It is not something he ever would have wished for his children to understand, he would say, patting one of Raph’s massive hands gently. But if that’s what it took for his boys to come home safely, then he preferred it over the alternative.

“What makes him a Hamato is the same as what makes you one,” Splinter said with a rueful, crooked smile. “And your other brothers and sister, and myself. Loyalty to the ones you love. A sense of fairness in an unfair world. And the stupid, stubborn refusal to stay down as long as you have even one more second of fight left in you. Whatever that looks like.”

But it wasn’t something Raph would get to see very often at all. Gio never came out and said in so many words that he was more comfortable with long-range combat, but the bow he never left the lair without did that much for him.

It made sense for him to provide support from an overwatch position, which he did unerringly, unflinchingly, never missing his targets of shoulders and thighs and once, when he was feeling particularly mean after some botched robber pointed a gun in Mikey’s general direction, a knee.

While it took some getting used to, Raph can hardly remember what it felt like to walk into a battle without feeling his big brother’s eyes on his back.

Tonight, though, he wishes Gio was down here with the rest of them. Raph doesn’t know why the Foot Clan is robbing the Museum of Natural History but it can’t be for anything good. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t really care. He feels prickly and short-tempered and waiting for the fight to start.

Things with the Foot have been a little tense ever since the almost end of the world. However badly they feel about being made into squishy fleshy meat puppets by their alien overlords, it’s not badly enough to make up for the fact that they knowingly and willingly brought the Krang to New York City in the first place.

Leo can play the blame game all he wants, he can try to claim the whole pot the way money-hungry gamblers sweep chips to their side of the poker table after a winning hand, but Raph knows whose fault it really is. He knows who to blame for what he almost lost.

Even now, more than a year later, Raph’s temper rises the second he sees those stupid Foot ninja cowls. His blood starts to race with it, that eager violence left in him like a scar from the Krang parasite. He understands attack dogs.

“Well, well, well,” Leo says performatively. “If it’s not the Foot, climbing out of whatever hole they’ve been hiding in. What have you guys been up to? You gotta get on Insta, we gotta stay in touch.”

Lieutenant and Brute are slow to react, sizing the turtles up warily. The general public has no idea who fought the Krang off, but these guys certainly do. They’ve seen exactly what kind of fight the Hamatos can bring.

They must decide whatever scheme they’re up to is worth it, because Lieutenant lifts a hand to summon an origami ninja and then shrieks in surprise as he twists to dodge a bolt instead. He and Brute turn to look at it, embedded three inches deep in the brick wall behind them, in stunned silence.

“What the hell,” Brute demands, squinting in the direction it was fired from. “Okay, who the hell is that guy?”

“Oh, that’s our big brother,” Mikey says sweetly, spinning one of his chucks idly and watching the Foot like a hawk. “It’s his first fight with you guys, our hereditary enemy. This is a special occasion!”

“Aw,” Lieutenant says, reluctantly moved. Then he finishes his summoning with a flourish, and human ninjas slink out of the shadows alongside the constructs, and Raph doesn’t have to worry about anything except smashing as many of them as he can into the ground.

It doesn’t occur to him that Gio’s slow to answer them on the comms until the third time they check in with him and don’t get an answer back. Raph twists around to look urgently at Leo, who doesn’t need to be asked and opens a portal for him instantly.

On the other side is the rooftop Gio was sitting sentry on, only he’s pinned on his shell by a burly ninja in the black Foot cowl. He’s holding his crossbow sideways across his chest, trying to heave the much larger man off of him, and the angle’s all wrong—he can’t get leverage, he’s stuck until something gives.

Raph plucks the man off his brother the way a cat would a mouse, letting him dangle from Raph’s hand for just long enough for the realization to set in that he had royally screwed up his own night by messing with the wrong turtle. Then he takes great pleasure in connecting his other fist to the man’s skull and dropping him in an ungainly pile of limbs next to another unconscious body; the second half of the ambush that Gio must have dealt with on his own.

Gio is quick to sit up, chest heaving. His hand is clenched around his bow so tightly that it’s probably leaving lines on his palms even through the thick gloves. He darts a quick look around, taking in the roof and the bodies behind Raph, and then Raph himself.

It makes him think of a kid who learned to fight because he had to, because no one else was going to protect him. Who learned quickly that he was at an immediate disadvantage fighting people who were so much bigger and stronger than him. Who picked up a ranged weapon one day to level the playing field and never went anywhere without it and never let anyone get close to him again if he could help it.

This is the same guy who flung himself at a leopard seal yokai for looking at Raph in a way he didn’t like. Who climbed into Leo’s hospital bed every time he started to cry in his sleep during his recovery. Who lets Donnie climb all over him and Mikey hug his arm and April hold his hand and Splinter pat his cheeks.

His personal space is a thing he guards relentlessly, and a thing he surrenders completely, depending on who he’s looking at.

The easily-incited anger Raph carries with him like a scar is smothered all at once. Love unfolds in its place, a patchwork blanket miles long and with room for everyone to crowd under together and Gio’s name stitched right alongside the others as if it had always been there.

“Hey, Georgie,” Raph says, an affectionate rumble entering his voice, “let’s go home.”

Their brothers are clamoring for their attention on the comms, talking about the dinosaur bones the Foot were trying to steal and how cool the bones would look in the lair actually, what do you guys think? Gio settles into his skin more with every noisy second that goes by.

He doesn’t need any help getting to his feet. He’s made of stronger stuff than Raphael will ever fully understand. If no one had shown up to help him, he would have survived somehow. Giorgio’s a Hamato, stupid enough to never give up. He’s someone else’s soldier, taught the hard way that losing isn’t option.

But before anything else, he’s their Gio.

When Raph offers him a hand, he takes it. He would put the whole world in Raph’s hands if he could.

—

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.”