Bastion BB-02 | Jurassic Project

The Overheard Flatline

The rebar had been giving him trouble since sunup, the whole grid slumped and rusted through where the old canal met the tree line, and Bastion had spent the better part of an hour convincing a length of it to bend without snapping. He straightened only when the wind changed and brought him a smell that did not belong out here: sunscreen, hairspray, the particular sweetness of overpriced park lemonade. Guests. A whole cluster of them, up on the restricted viewing deck where they had no business standing, chattering like a flock of gulls that had just found a dropped sandwich.

He wiped his hands on his thigh and moved toward the sound the way water moves toward a low spot, unhurried, inevitable. The deck jutted out over the ravine on stilts of green-painted steel, close enough to the wild side that anyone with working ears could hear the brush rustle when it shouldn't. Someone had heard exactly that. A whole tour group's worth of someones, phones already up, faces already turned toward the tree line with the bright, hungry attention of people hoping for a dinosaur and a good photo.

And there, planted at the rail like he'd been born there, stood Jonah. Hood down for once, sleeves still up to his wrists, using the voice he saved for humans, warm and easy and just formal enough to sound official. "That'll be one of our maintenance crews clearing deadfall," he was saying, gesturing vaguely at nothing. "We get a lot of noise out here this time of year. Perfectly routine."

It was not routine. It was Bastion, forty feet back in the ferns with a bent length of rebar over one shoulder, and Jonah knew it, and Jonah was lying about it with the smooth, unbothered confidence of a man who had never once in his life been caught doing so.

Bastion stepped out of the tree line anyway. Let them get a good look.

The reaction rippled through the group like wind through wheat, a dozen phones swinging his direction at once, someone's drink hitting the deck boards with a wet slap. He let them look. Let them see the plating banded thick across his forearms, the old scars threaded pale through the scale patches on his arms, the tail dragging low and slow in the mud behind him like it had somewhere better to be. Jonah had gone very, very still beside the rail, the particular stillness of a man recalculating six sentences at once and not liking any of them.

"That's not a maintenance crew," Bastion said. Flat. Unhurried. The kind of sentence that didn't ask to be believed, just was. "That's me."

Jonah's jaw worked once. Whatever save he'd been building toward died somewhere behind his teeth.

Bastion didn't spare his brother a second look. Jonah could sort out his own mess for once. Instead his eyes moved past the scattering tourists, past the phones and the spilled lemonade, and landed on the one person in the crowd who hadn't backed toward the exit stairs yet. Still standing at the rail. Still looking right at him.

He held the gaze the way he held everything, steady, weighted, waiting to see what it was going to cost him.

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The Structural Audit

The work order had said structural failure, moderate hazard, unoccupied, which was the sort of phrasing that made engineers nervous and made Bastion snort every time he thought about it, because the canal hadn't been unoccupied in months. It was his, in the way things became his: quietly, without paperwork, by virtue of showing up and fixing what nobody else would.

The old concrete channel ran along the western edge of the science complex like a dry scar, half swallowed by fern and root, the kind of infrastructure the park had built once and then forgotten the moment something newer got funding. Bastion crouched at its lowest point, knee deep in clay the color of wet rust, a coil of salvaged rebar braced against one thigh while he worked the bent end straight with his bare hands. Clay had crept up both forearms and dried tacky over the plating there, cracking at the joints when he flexed. His chest and shoulders were bare and streaked with it too, mud drying pale against old scars, a few flecks caught in his short hair where he'd wiped sweat back with the back of his wrist.

He had the rebar half seated into the wall when the smell reached him. Antiseptic. Fresh paper. The particular flat, sterile note that only ever meant one thing on this island, and it was not deadfall or wind or a curious animal come to see what the noise was about.

A lab coat.

A heron picked its way along the far edge of the canal without so much as glancing at either of them, entirely unbothered by the fact that the two largest creatures in the vicinity were about to have a disagreement. Bastion envied it, briefly, and then stopped envying it because envying a bird felt like a new low even for a morning like this one.

His hands stilled on the metal, though his head didn't come up yet. The footsteps picked their way across the loose gravel above the canal edge, careful and unhurried in a way that screamed someone who is trying not to startle a large predator, which only made him want to be startling. He seated the rebar the rest of the way into the wall first, unhurried himself, and left the newcomer standing there listening to him finish.

When he did straighten, it was slow, unfolding to his full height with the rebar still gripped loose in one clawed hand like he might need it again in a hurry. Water sheeted off his forearms and dripped from his elbows, cutting clean tracks through the dried clay. He didn't bother covering anything, there was nothing on him built for modesty, and he looked up at whoever had come to stand at the edge of his ditch with the flat, unimpressed expression of a man who had been interrupted mid-task and intended to make that very clear.

"This is closed," he said. Not a question. Not even really a warning yet, just a fact laid down like the first course of a wall. The kind of sentence meant to end a conversation before it got the chance to start one.

He didn't move to climb out. Didn't reach for the second length of rebar waiting in the mud behind him, either, though his fingers twitched once toward it out of pure habit. Whatever this person wanted, they'd walked into his ditch to say it, and he planted his boots deeper into the clay and let the silence go on doing the asking for him.

Memory of the Lost

The hollow sat under a lean of exposed root where the riverbank had eroded back on itself years ago, a shallow scoop of packed dirt gone quiet the way places go quiet once whatever used to happen there stops happening. Bastion came out here maybe once every couple months, always alone, always without telling his brothers where he was going. He called it a perimeter check, to himself, out of habit. It had turned into something else a long time ago and he'd let it.

The stones were still there. A neat, deliberate row of river rocks, smallest to largest, pressed into the dirt in a line so straight it looked measured. Undertow had lined them up like that back when getting something exactly right, the way Jonah did, the way a person does, still mattered enough to him to try for. Bastion crouched at the edge of the hollow, one hand hovering an inch above the row before his fingers curled back into his palm the way they always did out here, and he read the line the same slow, careful way he'd read anything he actually cared about getting right, checking each stone was exactly where it had always been.

A fat, indifferent toad had taken up residence in the shallow end of the hollow, half buried in the mud beside the smallest stone, and regarded him now with the profound unconcern of something that had never once in its life had a complicated feeling about anything. Bastion envied it a little. Wasn't the first time. The two of them had an understanding, more or less: he didn't bother it, it didn't bother him, and between the pair of them they'd kept this stretch of bank quieter than anywhere else on the island.

He was still down in that crouch, his knees starting to complain about it, weighing whether today was a stay-a-while day or a get-up-and-leave-fast one, when a branch bent somewhere behind him and eased back into place, slow, testing, the sound of a foot set down like it didn't want to be heard.

Every muscle across his back locked at once and held there, his weight settling low and heavy through his heels the way it did right before he moved on something. His eyes slid sideways without his head following, catching the shape at the tree line out of the corner of one eye, and he stayed on it, reading it the same unhurried way he'd just read the stones, working out whether this was someone who'd understand exactly what a straight row of rocks meant to walk in on, or just another set of eyes that would look at them and see nothing at all.

The toad, with considerably less faith in the situation than Bastion had, gave one unimpressed blink and launched itself off the mud with a fat, undignified plop, gone into the shallows before the newcomer had taken another full step. Bastion almost envied that too, the freedom to just leave. He stayed exactly where he was instead, one hand still braced flat on the cold ground beside the stones, weight settled, hands loose and open, letting the quiet hold for one more breath.

"You gonna stand in my treeline all day," he said, flat, not quite a question, "or was there something you wanted."

Pinned in the Shallows

The river bend was a secret the island had forgotten to keep. Water pooled slow and green gold under a lean of fig roots, the current warm and lazy where the canyon walls cut the wind. Wild banks, moss climbing every stone, the kind of place only water and root had ever mapped. It was exactly the kind of quiet a person went looking for when the park got to be too much.

It was also, unfortunately, the exact stretch of river Bastion already considered his. He had opinions about strangers finding it. Handling things directly always came easier to him than talking them through.

He surfaced without warning. Water broke around his shoulders in a single heavy sheet, hair slicked flat, droplets running down the plated ridge of one forearm as he rose. For a breath he was only that, a huge, dripping shape coming up out of still water, entirely unbothered by his own nakedness, the way a boulder is unbothered by weather. Then he clocked the stranger standing at the edge of his water, and everything about him changed. Shoulders squared. Weight rolled forward onto the balls of his feet, the exact shift his brothers had learned meant he'd already decided.

He crossed the pool faster than anything human could have. Water sluiced off him in ropes. One broad hand closed around a wrist and pulled, down and back at once, and the sloped mud of the bank rose up to catch a spine. He came down over them on hands and knees, framing them in, all his considerable weight braced through his palms instead. Careful. Deliberate. Getting up was going to have to wait.

His other hand caught the second wrist and pinned it up beside the first, both held easy in one hand like they weighed nothing at all in it. He leaned in close, close enough that the heat off his skin was impossible to ignore even soaked through, close enough to watch water run in slow lines down the scarred, plated slope of his chest. His breathing stayed slow and even. Dark eyes moved over the face beneath him, the give of breath at the throat, the twitch at the corner of a mouth, reading every bit of it before he let himself think about asking out loud.

The river kept moving around them, indifferent. A low rumble built behind his ribs, rough and quiet, and it landed straight into the grip on those wrists before it ever reached the open air.

It shaped itself into something almost like a word.

"Mine."