by Anna Martin
A real, live, in-the-flesh dissimosaur.
“You can get closer,” Logan said, grinning as the dissimosaur slowly approached them. He sat down on a grassy ridge and held his hand out to the animal, like he might to a dog.
“Logan….”
Kit was so, so unsure of this.
“They won’t hurt you. It’s not just because they know me. They’re like this all the time.”
Kit took a tentative step forward, then another. The dissimosaur closest to Logan startled at the movement, practically pouncing into Logan’s lap for safety. Logan laughed and chucked the animal under its chin.
“Hey, it’s okay. Kit’s a friend.” He smiled at Kit again. “Come on, sit down next to me.”
Kit was out of excuses. He moved slowly, not wanting to disturb the dissimosaur again, and folded his legs underneath himself as he sat down. Tentatively, he held out his hand and gently ran it over the animal’s head.
“They’re so warm,” he murmured, almost to himself.
“Yeah, and too big to play lap dog,” Logan grunted. He shifted the animal so it was in the sand rather than climbing on top of him. “Can you see the others yet?”
Kit had been the one to classify and name the dissimosaur officially, though he based much of his observations on data that had been gathered by Logan. He’d always felt a little guilty for not sharing the praise and recognition that had come with his “discovery.”
It was the first dinosaur to be named based on the appearance of its skin. Dissimosaurus meant “camouflaged lizard,” in reference to the animal’s gorgeous mottled color. That, and its ability to stand incredibly still and blend into the foliage of the island, presumably making it difficult for predators to hunt.
Like they were doing now.
Dissimosaurs looked like squat, fat ostriches with short necks. The juveniles had more fluffy, downy feathers around their necks and onto their torsos, where the adults’ feathers were fewer and lay in sleek lines. Their thick, short legs were incredibly powerful, though Kit wasn’t sure yet whether the animals used them for defense. The tallest animals were only three or four feet tall, meaning they were easily hidden by the long grass on the edge of the beach.
It took a few moments for Kit’s eyes to recognize what he was looking at. Then there were suddenly dozens of eyes staring at him from the undergrowth. It was unnerving.
Logan didn’t seem unnerved—far from it. He was making soft cooing and clucking noises at the first dissimosaur, who was now happily flopped on its side. After a few minutes, there was a soft rustling from the direction of the forest, and the next few dissimosaurs started to appear.
To Kit, they were staggeringly beautiful animals, if not particularly elegant. They moved in a peculiar waddle, tipping their heads from side to side curiously. One approached him, butting its head against his shoulder until, laughing, he reached up to rub his hand over the animal’s neck.
“Wow,” he murmured under his breath.
And they kept coming. He guessed the herd contained maybe thirty animals, including the very young ones that must have been from the most recent breeding season. The numbers didn’t quite add up, and he frowned.
“Why aren’t there more juveniles?” he asked Logan. He counted them again. The numbers were off.
“Not sure,” Logan said. “Probably a variety of reasons. The young ones get picked off by predators, or the eggs get stolen by the oviraptors. I think each breeding pair only produces one, maybe two eggs.”
Kit wracked his brain for a piece of information he’d stored long ago. “I was reading somewhere,” he began, aware that he started so many sentences this way, “that birds and reptiles that produce fewer eggs are usually more attentive parents. They spend more time invested in raising their young. And they’re usually the animals who survive longer, in evolutionary terms.”
“That would make sense,” Logan said.
“Animals that have a low birth-survival rate lay lots of eggs to give them a better chance of a successful breeding season. I guess these guys don’t need to do that.”
Another dissimosaur came over and nudged at Kit. This one had a dark, rust-red frill over its eyes, rising maybe an inch from the surface of its skin.
“That’s a female,” Logan said, answering Kit’s question before he even voiced it. “They’re the ones with the colored markings around their eyes.”
“The males have the frill too, though.”
“But there’s no color in it.”
He nodded, already distracted by his next observation, and the one after that. He wished for his notebook, for a Dictaphone so he could dash all of his thoughts down as they came to him. Next time, he promised himself. There would have to be a next time.
He spotted one of the infants at the edge of the tree line, this one barely ten inches tall and scrawny. Kit’s heart clenched hard as the infant dissimosaur waddled over to them. It was clearly injured, moving awkwardly, and the adults weren’t paying any attention to it.
“Logan,” he said softly.
The animal made a quiet, almost pained noise.
Kit shuffled over to carefully scoop it up into his arms. With the animal held close to his chest, he could feel its racing heartbeat, the short, shallow breaths coming from its chest.
“It happens,” Logan said. He shrugged, but not unkindly.
“What’s going to happen to her?”
“Kit….”
“You can say it.”
He sighed. “She’ll probably get picked off by a predator by the end of the week. I’m sorry, Kit,” he said. “This is what happens out here.”
Kit’s calm, clean laboratory suddenly felt a million miles away. Logan had been right. Despite working on the Archipelago for almost eight years, Kit really didn’t know what life was like on the islands. He was sheltered by the clean and the calm while life and death was roaring on around him.
“Can we help her?”
“Not from here, no.”
“If we take her back?”
“I have no idea what’s wrong with her,” Logan said. “It could be anything. Something treatable or not.”
The animal nuzzled up under Kit’s chin. The other dissimosaurs were shuffling back toward the forest now, not in any particular formation, but apparently bored of their human companions.
“Can we take her back with us?” he asked.
“You’re the one who said I shouldn’t,” Logan said, clearly annoyed. “You said we shouldn’t even be touching them.”
“We shouldn’t,” Kit echoed. “No.”
The animal made a little noise again. Kit said nothing for a long moment.
“Fuck it,” he said. “I’ll sign off on it. I’ll take the shit and the inevitable ass-kicking. I want to see if we can help her.”
“You sure?” Logan asked.
“Yes.”
Logan stared at him, then leaned over and pressed a hard kiss to Kit’s lips. It wasn’t a sexual kiss or even a particularly romantic kiss.
Kit blinked in shock.
“Come on,” Logan said.
Kit cradled the baby dissimosaur in his arms for the whole journey back to the labs. After a while she fell asleep on his chest. He couldn’t help but look at her every few minutes. This was a dinosaur. A baby dinosaur. And he was holding it.
The ethics board was going to have a field day. And that was a problem, because Kit was head of the ethics board.
He’d been part of the team of people who’d written the guidelines on how they would deal with dinosaur research over the next ten years. He’d shaped those discussions with his colleagues, and now he was the one who had thrown all of that away when faced with an actual, real-life, injured dinosaur. Though he wasn’t going to admit it, Logan was right. There really was a problem with people in Kit’s position making decisions about what the rangers could and couldn’t do. It was part of human nature to try to help.
The whole situation was completely surreal. Kit had sand on his b
oots and mud on his shorts, and his head was reeling from the whole experience and the fact that Logan had kissed him. That was… unexpected. He wasn’t entirely sure what to do next.
Logan was busy piloting the boat. He handled it with the calm efficiency that he showed nearly all the time. He was strong and capable. Logan had kissed him when Kit said he wanted to help the baby.
Kit was utterly fucked.
Logan docked the boat and ran through all of the checks, filling in the log book. Kit had no idea what was going on, if he was honest. He’d never been one for breaking the rules, and suddenly he was very nervous about everything.
“You ready to go?” Logan asked, sticking his head back into the cab.
“You kissed me,” Kit said dumbly, shifting the weight of the baby dinosaur in his arms.
“Yeah. Sorry about that.” Logan had the grace to look sheepish, rubbing his hand over the back of his head. “I should have at least asked first.”
“I don’t mind. I liked it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.”
“Come on. We should get her inside.”
Logan shouldered the backpack, and they walked, close but not touching, toward the labs. Not talking. Kit couldn’t stop smiling.
It wasn’t so late in the day that everyone had gone home. If there was one thing Kit had noticed, it was this place tended to attract workaholics. That, or they all turned into them after being here a while.
No one paid them any attention as Kit followed Logan through the winding corridors to the infirmary clinic at the back of the building. The autopsy on the last dissimosaur had been done here. For some reason, that was freaking Kit out a little. He’d observed that autopsy. He wasn’t squeamish, not exactly, but it had been hard to watch. Now he had a living, breathing dissimosaur to try to take care of.
“Okay, let’s take a look at you,” Logan said as he flicked the lights on and moved around the clinic with practiced ease.
“What are you going to do to her?” Kit asked. He set the baby down on the sanitized table and stepped back.
“I’ve got nothing to go on,” Logan said, snapping on latex gloves, awkwardly adjusting one over the bandage on his wrist. “Funnily enough there isn’t a dictionary of dinosaur veterinary science. Geez, I don’t even know what her pulse should be. What do we feed her?”
“Whatever they eat out there, I suppose,” Kit said. “We have that data. I can pull it up for you.”
“Not right now,” Logan murmured. He pulled an overhead light toward the table, tilting it on its flexible arm. The baby sat back on her haunches, like the adults did, and was regarding him curiously.
“Do you think we should draw some blood?”
“I don’t want to distress her,” Logan said. “But I also don’t know how much to tranq her with to put her under.”
“We can figure that out,” Kit said. He moved to the computer on the desk in the corner of the room and turned it on. It didn’t take long for him to log in and access the internal database. “Can you weigh her?”
Instead of moving the dinosaur, Logan took the scales to her and gently encouraged her to hop on. Kit watched with quiet amusement.
“Four pounds, six ounces exactly.”
“Okay.” He quickly found the file he was looking for and the spreadsheet attached to it. “Give her five milligrams.”
“Sure?”
“Yeah. We’re still working on this, but it’s basically a body mass calculation for different species to figure out how much sedation they need. You’re contributing to it.”
“I am?”
“Yes,” Kit laughed. “You tell us how much sedative you use on each animal and how long it lasts. All that data is fed into the system so we can use it in the future.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t give yourself enough credit,” Kit said, shaking his head. “Not everyone has the kind of knowledge and talent you have to correctly estimate those doses.”
Logan shrugged and prepared the syringe of sedative. He flicked it a few times to get rid of the air bubbles, then carefully held the baby dissimosaur down as he injected it into her neck. She squawked a bit, then stilled. Logan gently laid her down on her side.
“This would be a hell of a lot easier if I could actually move my fingers properly,” Logan grouched. He rotated his injured wrist, like it was agitating him. “Now what?”
“This is your arena, Dr. Beck.”
He huffed. “Okay. Can you take notes?”
Kit grabbed a notepad and pen from the desk and moved closer to watch Logan work.
He moved confidently, checking the baby’s vital signs, her heart rate and blood pressure and breathing. Kit was vaguely aware of Logan’s veterinary qualifications, but it was still impressive to see those big hands delicately treat such a small animal.
Kit found all manner of things attractive, but he wasn’t ashamed to admit he had a huge competency kink. Watching Logan move so confidently, whether that was piloting the boat or taking care of the injured dissimosaur, was incredibly attractive. Kit forced himself not to look too hard. It had been a long time since he’d played assistant, though he could still do the role; his ego wasn’t that big.
Logan worked calmly, placing too-big monitors on the baby’s chest since they didn’t have anything smaller.
“Nothing looks out of the ordinary,” he muttered, rubbing the back of his wrist over his forehead.
“We have ultrasound facilities,” Kit pointed out.
“Couldn’t hurt.”
Kit got up and started poking through the storage closet, eventually finding the tall ultrasound machine toward the back. He grunted, shoving other equipment aside as he pulled it out.
“Sorry,” he said, wheeling it over. “It was right at the back.”
With this, too, Logan moved with the calm assurance of someone who was well practiced in this kind of work. There was no training—yet—to be a dinosaur veterinarian, but he was clearly at ease in the role.
Before Kit had a chance to grab his notebook again, Logan was already moving, plugging in the machine and powering it up.
“Vitals steady,” Kit murmured.
Logan nodded. “Okay.”
He worked steadily over the baby’s body, scanning the muscle and organs for any abnormalities. Pale lines of bone glowed on the screen, not bright enough for any kind of diagnosis. Kit thought the animal might have some kind of congenital defect, but that was going to be difficult to prove.
“All internal organs look normal, no tumors, nothing out of the ordinary,” Logan said. He grunted in frustration and Kit tried, very hard, not to find that hot. “We did the wrong thing, Kit. We should have left her out there.”
“No.” He said it instinctively. “No, she was hurt. It could be something we can’t see here. Take some blood for tests while we can. I’ll run them myself.”
“In the morning,” Logan said with a sigh. “It’s too late now.”
He prepped the vials and took the bare minimum for Kit to work with. Kit was about to ask for more, then realized they had no idea what effect drawing blood from the infant could have. And if they were hanging on to her, he could always get more.
“I’m going to take her home with me,” Logan said decisively as he set the blood aside for labeling.
“Are you sure?”
He winced. “Dissimosaurs are herd animals. Their entire survival depends on each other. I could leave her here overnight, sure, but that’s likely to cause her even more distress when she wakes up alone.”
Kit couldn’t help it. His heart pitched.
“Okay. Do you want me to come with you?”
Logan smiled and shook his head. “I think I’ll be fine.”
There was almost nothing to help Logan out. Not even a freaking cat carrier. They’d managed to sneak the infant in, but it was after hours, and Kit knew how to get around without being noticed. Getting the dinosaur through the residential village
without people seeing her would be more difficult.
In the end, Logan stripped out of his hoodie and wrapped the infant in it. Then he emptied a backpack and carefully laid the dinosaur and the hoodie in the bottom of the pack.
“Leave it unzipped.”
“I know,” Logan shot back. He carefully shifted the backpack onto his good shoulder and fished his keys from his pocket.
“Here,” Kit said, tearing a strip of paper from his notepad and scrawling his number on it. “In case you need anything.”
Logan took the paper, his features softening into a bemused smile. “I think we’ll be okay.”
“Just in case.”
Chapter Nine
That night, Logan didn’t sleep in his own bed. Instead he curled up in the oversized arm chair in his living room and let the baby dissimosaur make her nest in a bundle of blankets on his lap. He set the alarm on his phone to vibrate every ninety minutes, just so he could check on her.
Sleep was for losers.
The next morning there was only one little accident due to their lack of a litter box, and Logan grabbed his laptop and placed an order through the general store’s online ordering system for a few things he might need if the baby survived. Just in case.
When he was done, the baby was squawking again—she sure did make a lot of noise for an animal that was habitually quiet—and he guessed she was hungry. The night before she was still drowsy from the sedative, and he wasn’t sure it was safe to feed her. Now, though, he had to figure it out.
“Come on, then, little one,” Logan said softly and carried her through to the kitchen. He liked cooking and kept a wide range of ingredients in stock. Poking through the fridge, all he could think of was the bag of mixed leaf salad.
It wasn’t exactly indigenous vegetation, but Logan guessed it would probably be fine. He fished a couple of leaves from the bag and set the baby down on his small dining table.
“Here,” he said, holding out a sprig of arugula.
The baby cocked her head to the side.
“It’s food,” he insisted.
After a moment she leaned forward and nipped it from his fingers.
Logan grinned.