Warden BB-02 | Jurassic Project

Eleven Minutes

The guest village lights ran on a timer, warm gold bleeding into the palms at the edge of the property, and Warden had learned years ago exactly where that gold gave out and the real dark started. He stood two steps past that line, weight settled back on his heels, scaled fingers hooked loose against the bark of the tree he'd picked for cover. Hood up, sleeves down to the knuckle, the same worn dark clothes he wore every time this side of the fence line needed crossing. It was a good tree. He'd used it before.

Eleven minutes.

That was how long the figure under the lamppost had been standing there, alone, doing nothing more dangerous than breathing night air and turning a room key over and over in one hand. He'd confirmed the blackout on camera four the moment he took up the tree, well before the stranger had ever stepped outside, and it was holding steady, soft and grainy the way it did most nights around this hour. He liked to tell himself that was luck. He was, on nights like this one, a fairly committed liar.

A gecko worked its way up the lamppost an arm's length from the stranger's shoulder, tail flicking out sideways every time its grip slipped, using the thing like a counterweight to keep from sliding off the glass. Warden's own tail gave one slow answering swish against the dirt, an old reflex he'd never quite trained out of himself, and he thought, not for the first time, that the gecko had a better read on this whole situation than he did. It, at least, was honest about being drawn to the glow.

He'd spent his whole life learning where the blind spots sat, which routes ran quiet, which nights the tide covered a set of tracks before morning. Somewhere in the last year that skill had quietly rerouted itself toward this. Toward guest village lampposts and the particular, ordinary miracle of somebody standing under one with nowhere else they needed to be.

Opsec, he told himself, the same word he'd used the first dozen times, back when it might have even been true. Someone standing in the open that long was worth logging. Worth understanding. It was practically due diligence.

He was aware, in the same clear, unhurried way he was aware of the tide schedule, that this was nonsense. Due diligence didn't come with the specific ache behind the sternum he got watching someone twist a key between their fingers like they had all the time in the world and nowhere better to spend it. He catalogued it anyway, filed it somewhere he wasn't going to examine too closely later, next to a week that had ended almost a year ago and still hadn't fully closed the file on itself.

The wind shifted, carrying the chlorine smell of the hotel pool and, underneath it, the warm cinnamon-sugar drift of dinosaur-shaped churros from a cart three streets over that should have shut down an hour ago and clearly hadn't. It took the stranger's attention with it. Their head came up, not toward him exactly, more toward the treeline in general, the way anyone did when the hair on the back of their neck decided to have an opinion before their conscious mind caught up.

Warden held his ground, weight sunk low and quiet against the tree, breath slowed to nothing worth hearing over the wind. He'd had eleven minutes to decide whether he'd move, and his body had settled the question before his head finished arguing about it.

They turned all the way around, scanned the dark treeline, found the gecko and nothing else, and something in their posture eased, the particular kind of relief that comes from deciding you imagined the feeling of being watched. The gecko, for its part, chose that exact moment to lose its grip and drop into the flower bed with an unceremonious thump, and the stranger huffed out something that might have been a laugh at their own expense, already turning back toward the hotel doors.

That was the opening Warden's better judgment had been counting on not existing. He took it anyway.

He came off the tree in one unhurried line, hood still up, sleeves still down over everything but the last inch of scale that caught the lamplight along his knuckles. What gave him away, up close, was never going to be hidden by fabric anyway: the fine plating along his jaw, up the side of his neck, high across his cheekbones, and the low, patient sweep of a tail no pair of jeans on the island was ever cut to disguise. When the stranger turned back toward the light, he was simply there, close enough to have been standing under that lamppost with them the whole eleven minutes, if lampposts cast shadows that shape.

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The Dead Camera

Camera four sat bolted to a maintenance post at the edge of the west perimeter, angled to cover forty meters of scrub that nobody but Warden ever actually walked. He'd been feeding it a dead signal for three weeks now, the same two hour window every night, a trick that took less effort than most people would guess and considerably more patience than most people had. It was, by his own accounting, some of his better work.

Which was why the flashlight beam sweeping across the housing at half past eleven counted as a problem.

He watched from the scrub line, still enough that a passing park ranger would have walked the fence twice without clocking him. The work order clipped to the newcomer's board read FAULT, INTERMITTENT SIGNAL LOSS, CAM 04 in block letters, and whoever had been assigned it clearly took the job seriously. A ladder went up against the post without wasted motion. A toolkit opened in a neat row on the grass, the kind of arrangement that meant this wasn't someone's first camera. Gloved hands worked the housing panel loose and set it aside with a care that told him more than the paperwork did.

Warden logged it the way he logged everything. Competent. Thorough. Not going to get bored and wander off after five minutes like the last one had.

That last part was the problem.

He tracked the flashlight beam as it found the loose wire nest inside the housing, watched the newcomer's head tilt at an angle that meant they'd already found the splice he'd made and were deciding whether it looked deliberate or just old. A gloved hand reached toward it, wire cutters following a half second behind, and three weeks of careful, quiet work sat exactly one snip away from becoming somebody's very interesting incident report.

Warden did the math on it fast. A blown cover was recoverable. A camera logging his brothers' movements at three in the morning was not.

He came off the scrub line without any particular hurry, close enough by the time he spoke that his voice didn't need to carry.

"Not that one. Cut that, you'll trip the backup relay instead, and then you've got two cameras logging a fault instead of one."

Uninvited Audience

The camp sat in a clearing on the wrong side of a boundary Warden had mapped better than most of the people who actually lived inside it. Cookfire smoke drifted low through the trees, carrying roasted meat and something green and bitter underneath that he didn't recognize, and somewhere off to the left a pair of kids were arguing over a game with rules that seemed to change every time either of them was losing.

He stood at the treeline and made no particular effort not to be seen.

That alone was worth noting. Warden had spent twenty years learning to be the gap in a sightline, the shape a camera logged as static, the reason a patrol route came up clean on paper. Standing here in plain sight, weight settled, arms loose at his sides, went against every instinct he'd spent that whole life sharpening. He did it anyway, and didn't examine too closely why tonight was the night that particular rule stopped applying.

A woman near the fire was reworking a net with the kind of unhurried competence that told him she'd done it a thousand times before, hands moving faster than her eyes needed to track them. An older man sat close enough to correct her work without saying a word about it, just a look and a small shift of the net in her hands. Somebody laughed at something Warden was too far away to hear the actual joke of, and three other voices picked it up in turn, easy, overlapping, the kind of noise a family made when nobody in it was keeping watch.

Nobody was keeping watch. That was the part that actually surprised him.

He'd counted their patrol two full times through and come up with the same answer both times: none. No one posted at the tree line, no one tracking the water approach, no one so much as glancing toward the dark where a stranger currently stood close enough to count the sparks off their fire. His own camp never went an hour without somebody's eyes on the perimeter. It hadn't occurred to him that a family could sit around open flame trading jokes and simply trust the night not to have anything in it worth watching for.

He filed that away too, the same unhurried way he filed everything, and stayed where he was long enough to watch the fire pop twice and the woman near it finish the row of net she'd been working when he first spotted her.

It was the kids who noticed him first, mid-argument, one of them going quiet enough that the other one turned to see why. A ripple went through the fire circle after that, heads turning one at a time, conversation dying in patches rather than all at once. The woman with the net set it down without any particular hurry, but she set it down.

Warden held his ground at the edge of the clearing, plainly visible, plainly alone, weight settled and hands open at his sides, watching the fire circle for whoever moved first.

The Hidey-Hole

The branch snapped somewhere off to his left, sharp and stupid and entirely too loud for a night that had otherwise gone according to plan, and Warden was moving before his brain finished deciding it was probably nothing. Probably. He'd built a career on not trusting probably.

He cut the watch short, took the long way back through cover instead of the fast way through the open, and didn't slow down until he reached the old fig root with the hollow tucked underneath it. The hollow itself was barely big enough for the dry bag he kept stashed there, which meant the actual undressing happened in the open, crouched in the dark beside the root like a man committing a crime against fashion.

The hoodie came off clean. The jeans did not.

They weren't even his, strictly speaking. He'd skimmed them off a clothesline behind the staff village two years back, boot cut, a size that fit fine everywhere a human foot would have stopped growing and nowhere past that. His own feet ran a size and a half bigger than whatever poor soul had originally owned these, close enough to pass in a work boot, catastrophic the moment denim had to slide back over bare skin and plating that didn't compress the way a human ankle did. He was bent nearly double, buck naked from the waist up and increasingly everywhere else, both hands wrenching at fabric bunched somewhere around his shins, when a second sound came through the trees.

Not a branch this time. Footsteps. Close.

Oh no.

He froze exactly as he was, which was to say entirely wrong. Nothing about the position read as dangerous or dignified or even explainable. It read as a grown man caught mid disaster with his pants around his ankles in the most literal sense the phrase had ever been used, hunched over, bare, and one denim seam away from actually resolving the problem before he'd been so rudely interrupted by having a life.

This is fine. This is a completely normal way to be found. Absolutely nothing about this suggests anything at all.

The footsteps stopped. Close enough now that whoever it was had clearly already seen him, every scaled, plated, thoroughly unclothed inch of him, folded in half over a pair of jeans that had chosen tonight to win.

Twenty years of not getting caught, and this was apparently how it ended.

He didn't straighten up right away. Some small, wounded part of him held out hope that staying very still might make the last four seconds retroactively not have happened.

Well. This is new.