Jonah BB-02 | Jurassic Project

The Lost Trail

The river canyon had been swallowing sound for the last twenty minutes, and Jonah decided he did not care for whatever had just wandered into its throat.

He smelled it before he saw it. Sunscreen, hotel soap, and the hot electronic tang of an overworked camera battery, all of it drifting down through wet ferns like a very bad idea walking on two legs. He came up out of the water in one long, unhurried motion, river sluicing off his sleeves in dark ropes, and by the time his boots found the mudbank he had already counted three things. Alone. Drone patrol not due through this quadrant for another eleven minutes. And that lanyard was the loud, unmistakable yellow of a day pass, bright as a warning label in all this green.

He straightened to his full height, slow and deliberate, the way a man stands when he wants to look harmless and immovable in the same breath. Water kept dripping off the hem of his hoodie in a patient little rhythm. His hood stayed up. His hands stayed buried in his pockets, less for warmth than to keep them from doing anything without his say so.

The stranger had gone rigid at the treeline, camera half raised out of pure animal reflex, eyes wide as saucers. Somewhere above the canopy a fruit bat shrieked once and dropped into silence, as though it too understood the math being done down here.

And Jonah was doing math. How far off the paved route they'd drifted. How well sound carried through wet canopy at this hour. How many ways a tourist with a camera and a park badge could turn a quiet afternoon into a very long, very official conversation. He let his gaze move, once, unhurried, from the camera to the lanyard to the wall of trees behind them, cataloguing every exit without once looking like that was what he was doing.

Mist rolled off the river in slow curling ropes, thick enough to taste, and somewhere below the water kept up its low steady conversation with the rocks. Jonah tipped his head, just slightly, studying the stranger the way he'd study a crack in a fence line: not a threat exactly, but definitely a problem, and definitely his now.

"You're a long way from the Guest Village," he said, low and even, the words coming out far smoother than the churn behind his ribs had any right to produce. He wasn't angry. He didn't look angry. He looked like a man doing quiet, careful arithmetic, and not entirely liking the number he was arriving at.

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The Broken Check-In

The boundary line had been quiet for eleven minutes, which was ten minutes longer than Jonah liked when Bradley was involved.

He came through the brush low and fast, the reflex of a man expecting his father's careful, unhurried tread and getting, instead, nothing. No footsteps. No familiar rasp of a throat being cleared before speaking. Just wrong sounds. A stranger's shoes squelching in mud that Bradley always somehow avoided, and the plasticky creak of a cooler lid, and underneath it all a heartbeat going far too fast for anyone who belonged out here.

His whole body locked before his brain finished the thought. Shoulders squared. Weight dropped low into his knees without him telling it to. Some old, ugly, useful part of him started cataloguing the stranger in half a second flat: no visible weapon, both hands full, park badge instead of a security lanyard, cooler marked with a red cross instead of a rifle case. Not a threat. Probably not a threat. His pulse did not seem interested in the distinction.

His eyes went past the stranger before they properly landed on them, sweeping the treeline in one hard pass, checking the gaps between trunks where a drone camera liked to hide, checking the ridge where security sometimes parked a spotter on slow days. Nothing. No glint of a lens, no distant rotor whine. Just birds, unbothered, which was the best sign there was.

He made himself breathe. In through the nose, slow, four full seconds, the kind of breath he'd taught himself years ago specifically for moments like this one, when every instinct he owned wanted him to plant himself between his family's secrets and whatever new variable had just wandered into the clearing. His hands stayed loose at his sides through sheer force of will instead of curling the way they wanted to. Small mercies.

Water dripped steadily off the hem of his hoodie, dark blotches spreading in the mud at his feet, and the cooler in the stranger's arms let out a small plastic groan as they shifted its weight. That sound cut through the noise in his skull better than anything else could have. Medical supplies. Not Bradley. Someone Bradley had sent, in a hurry, without warning anyone first, which meant something somewhere had gone sideways enough to need a courier.

Jonah's spine came up another inch straighter, formality sliding over him like a second layer of skin. "Where is Dr. Bradley," he said, and it came out clipped and careful in equal measure, every word placed exactly where he wanted it, the question of a man who fully intended to get an answer before he allowed himself to feel anything else about the situation at all.

Territorial Waters

The song had been stuck in his head since sunrise, looping through the same four bars over and over, and Jonah was beginning to suspect it had actually rewired something in his skull. Work it, make it, do it, makes us. He hadn't even meant to bring it out here. It had just followed him, the way good songs did, humming along under every other thought until it drowned most of them out entirely.

Which was, in hindsight, probably why he hadn't heard the fish thief until Warden's low warning chirp cut straight through the chorus and yanked him back into his own body.

He came up out of the shallows fast, water sheeting off bare shoulders and the long stretch of plated arm, and for one unguarded half second he was simply annoyed at the interruption before his brain caught up with what Warden's signal actually meant. Someone was in the channel. Someone who wasn't supposed to be.

His stomach dropped a little further than the situation strictly called for, because he was standing on the ledge in nothing but the loincloth, hip deep in river mud with his song still rattling around his skull, and every single stitch of the careful, presentable persona he usually wore into the world was sitting folded and dry back at the den where it did him absolutely no good at all. He resisted the urge to cross his arms over the plating like that would somehow fix anything. It wouldn't. There was nothing to fix. He just didn't love being caught looking quite this much like what he actually was.

Downstream, Bastion had already surfaced in a heavy churn of water, spikes along his neck standing up stiff and deliberate, every line of him arranged into something built to look like a threat first and a person second. He planted himself in the shallows with his arms crossed and his jaw set, radiating the specific kind of menace that required absolutely no acting on his part. Bastion didn't do subtlety. Bastion did wall.

A little further out, Reel and Snag had gone very still in the way that meant they were about to be anything but. Snag nudged Reel with one heavy shoulder and made a low huffing sound that was unmistakably a laugh, nodding toward the stranger with an expression that said watch this get interesting. Reel cuffed him lightly for it, more amused than annoyed, both of them drifting closer through the current with the easy, unbothered confidence of brothers who knew exactly how outmatched anybody standing in their channel currently was.

Further downstream, a thin trail of bubbles broke the surface and went still, then started moving again, slow and purposeful, tracking a line that could have been aimed at the fish thief or could have been aimed at absolutely nothing at all. That was the only sign of Undertow anywhere, no shape, no shadow, just bubbles doing their careful, patient math somewhere below the murk, and Jonah decided, firmly, that he was choosing to believe those bubbles were hunting fish.

Jonah straightened. He rolled his shoulders back, deliberately, and let the last stray note of the song die out somewhere behind his sternum, because there was a version of him that handled this kind of thing and it was not the version currently distracted by Daft Punk. He stepped fully up onto the ledge instead of staying half hidden in the water, chin level, claws resting loose and visible against his sides, every inch of the plating on full unhidden display whether he liked it or not.

He let the silence stretch a beat longer than comfortable, the old trick, the one that made people fill it themselves with whatever anxiety they'd brought along.

"You're fishing in our channel," he said finally, even and diplomatic and carrying just enough weight underneath to make the words land like something heavier than they sounded. "Let's talk about where your boundaries end, and ours begin."

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

The pool had been waiting for him all week, tucked behind a fold of rock nobody bothered checking because nobody but the family knew it existed, and Jonah had finally, blessedly, found an afternoon with nothing standing between him and it. No security sweeps. No Bradley duty. No brothers underfoot, all four of the hunting party off somewhere upriver doing whatever it was Bastion considered a productive Tuesday. Just sun, still water, and forty glorious minutes that belonged to absolutely nobody but him.

He'd scrubbed off a week of river silt with more thoroughness than strictly necessary, working the grit out from under the ridges of his plating until the water ran clear around his ankles, and by the time he climbed up onto the flat sunlit rock at the pool's edge he felt something close to clean for the first time in longer than he wanted to admit. The sun sat warm and heavy across his shoulders. Nobody was watching. Nobody was ever, ever going to know.

Which meant it was, obviously, time for the earbuds.

He dug them out of their little waterproofed pouch like a man retrieving contraband, because that was more or less exactly what they were, and thumbed the familiar track into motion before he'd even finished settling onto the rock. The first synth hit landed and something in his chest simply let go. Shoulders down. Jaw unclenched. Twenty years of careful, image-conscious posture evaporated in the space of four bars, and what was left standing on that rock had absolutely nothing to do with diplomacy.

He started small. A head bob, nothing anyone could catch him for. Then his hips got involved, which was never a good sign, and then his claws came up in front of him doing something that could only generously be called air-synth, fingers walking an invisible keyboard with the kind of dead serious commitment usually reserved for actual instruments. Water sheeted off him with every movement. The sun caught the plating along his arms and made it look almost decorative, which he would have appreciated if he'd had a single spare thought left for appreciating anything.

By the second chorus he had truly committed. Hips working. Claws slashing through the air on every downbeat like he was personally responsible for the bassline. He threw his head back and mouthed the vocoder line with the sort of confidence that should legally require a permit, shaking what his genetics had given him with an enthusiasm that had absolutely nothing to do with being smooth and everything to do with being twenty and, for exactly one afternoon, completely unsupervised. Bits of him flapped along cheerfully with the choreography, gravity applying itself with total indifference to his dignity, and he did not notice, did not care, was having, by every visible metric, the single best forty seconds of his month.

He never heard the footsteps.

He spun on the next beat, claws thrown wide in a move he was fairly sure looked incredible, and opened his eyes directly into the startled face of someone who was very much not supposed to be here.

The needle scratch happened somewhere entirely inside his own skull. His hips stopped mid rotation. His claws hung frozen in the air, still technically mid air-synth, going absolutely nowhere. For one long, suspended second the diplomat, the strategist, the brother who read every room before he ever spoke in it, simply ceased to exist, replaced by a very large, very naked, very still creature with the exact facial expression of a smoke detector going off.

Water dripped off his elbow into the pool. It was the loudest sound in the canyon. "This," he said, with the calm, brittle dignity of a man watching his entire life flash before his eyes, "is not what it looks like."

It was, in fact, exactly what it looked like.