As they ran down the hallway, the sharp screeches of the Orkoraptors echoed through the space, reverberating in the stillness —and by virtue of the high ceiling. It was a horrible sound that made Luca's skin crawl, but he didn’t stop. Neither did Nagato. They reached the door in seconds, slipping inside and firmly closing it behind them.

  "I hope those things don’t know how to open this," Nagato muttered, his voice barely a whisper.

  Picturing the image inside his mind, Luca almost snorted. "They’re too big to fit in here anyway."

  He glanced around the room: a short hallway leading to what looked like an office. Papers were scattered across the floor, some still fluttering in the draft from the open doors. A desk was overturned, chairs thrown to the side, and even a potted plant had been knocked over, its small cactus lying sadly on the ground. "Looks like they left in a hurry."

  "Oh, really?" Nagato murmured, his tone grim. "I think they faded away. They’re probably dead.”

  Luca paused, his eyes narrowing slightly. "When did you realize?" He asked but continued looking at his surroundings. The only door in the room had an ‘Authorized Personnel Only’ sign and seemed to have been accidentally blocked by the fallen desk. He barely noticed the pause before Nagato spoke.

  "You too?" Nagato’s voice was sharp. He cleared his throat, his tone shifting to something more cautious. "Half the Visitors disappeared, so I thought something was off. But Liona didn’t believe me—" He cut himself off abruptly.

  Luca turned around, raising an eyebrow. Got you. But he didn’t press further. Instead, he pointed to the desk. "Come on, help me lift this."

  The two of them lifted the desk back into place in silence, the only sound the scraping of wood against the floor. Once it was in position, Nagato broke the silence, his voice low and tinged with frustration. "I saw her after the blackout. It was a mess." He spoke the words with palpable irritation. "The raptors came, and the —ghosts? Whatever they are —hid with us in her truck. But the noises brought them. One of the raptors came in from above." He pressed his lips together. "I came to the museum, and Liona ran off somewhere else with the others."

  Luca nodded, his expression neutral. "It's alright. Cooperating is good, but it isn't an obligation. Surviving is hard enough." He murmured under his breath the last part, before returning to a normal tone. "Now, we should always take the right door. Grab a marker —we’ll mark the direction so we don’t get lost on the way back." With that, he opened the door.

  The room beyond was a messy mix of a break area and workspace. Two doors were on opposite sides of the room, one slightly ajar. They shared a look when the distant sound of footsteps with an odd echo quality came from beyond the ajar door. Luca shook his head and pointed to the door on the right. Without a word, they both headed that way.

  On the other side awaited a narrow, unlit hallway that ended in a second perpendicular hallway. The flashlight illuminated the sign on the only door they found at the end— ‘Proceed with Caution.’

  "Are you sure this is the way?" Nagato asked behind him. For this tone, it seemed like he really, really didn't want it to be.

  Sorry, buddy. Luca nodded at him and gently turned the knob. He grimaced as the door creaked shut, the noise echoing in the small space—and beyond. There was a metal staircase leading downward. As they descended, Nagato pointed his flashlight around, but Luca didn’t need it to see the glass walls and what lay beyond them.

  "What the hell is this...?" Nagato whispered, his voice tense and full of disbelief. He quickly aimed the flashlight at the suspended walkway, revealing the silhouettes of trees, ferns and more plants that Luca had already seen before beyond the mesh.

  "Shh," Luca hissed, gesturing for him to be quiet and then to follow him across the walkway. The floor was made of glass, making it easy to see below. He caught the swaying of vegetation as he moved forward and the glint of a pair of eyes told him it wasn’t just the breeze.

  Both of them hurried to the end, followed by the screech of something in the darkness, and passed through the second metal door—ignoring the warning signs.

  Only once he was sure the door was closed did Luca announce, "They’re not the same as the ones outside. These seem smaller."

  Nagato frowned, his expression a mix of anger and disbelief. "You didn’t say anything about dinosaurs in the basement.” He then mumbled under his breath, “Who has fucking raptors on the basement?"

  Luca shrugged, his tone casual despite the tension in the air. "I didn’t think they’d be here. But it makes sense why they’d have weapons stored down here. Let’s go. We don’t have time to waste."

  The younger man had no choice but to follow, though his expression made it clear he wasn’t happy about it. His grip on the flashlight tightened as they continued down the hallway.

  "...Labs?"

  Luca murmured his agreement as he casually observed through the glass walls without stopping. Many of the rooms they passed seemed to have been abandoned in due time, unlike the offices upstairs. All the doors were on the left side, so they had to go all the way to the end to finally find the one they needed.

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  It was red and had a sign with a fairly easy-to-understand symbol. The skull was quite well-made.

  "Are you sure this is the way?" Nagato asked again, stressing the first word.

  Luca sighed. "I wish it weren’t." Still, he opened it—the sound of metal sliding with a menacing creak—and peeked inside, beyond the lights. A second hallway, narrow and with certain decorations on the walls—if they could even be called that.

  Nagato swallowed hard. "These marks..."

  The streaks looked like scratches —but it was unlikely a cat could have made marks that deep. But the problem was that they were too small to belong to an Orkoraptor and too large to be from the smaller ones they’d seen in the habitat.

  "Let’s hurry," Luca murmured, trying to remember if there had been any mention of this on the website’s pages. But no. He was almost certain there wasn’t.

  Another door was at the end of the hallway, marked like the walls. Luca stretched out his hand and turned the knob after a moment of silence, revealing a glimpse of what looked like a larger room than they’d seen so far. Seeing no danger, he opened the door just enough to enter. The space was indeed twice the size of the laboratories, with counters and machinery distributed against the walls and along the length.

  "How long has it been since anyone’s been here?" Nagato murmured, running a hand over a nearby counter and making a face at the dust. "Decades?"

  Luca didn't believe it but didn't say anything, glancing at the corners.

  "There are no more doors; it has to be here," he said, more to himself than to his coworker. Besides the small fragment of 'always choose the doors at the right,' he was sure the lever was at the end of the ‘path.’

  A sound of abrupt surprise drew Luca’s attention.

  "What the hell?" Nagato hissed, his voice barely a whisper. His eyes were wide, the flashlight trembling in his hand as he swept the room before stopping again on the creature suspended in a large glass tank at the end of the room.

  Luca’s gaze followed the light instinctively, and his body froze at the sight. The creature inside was a grotesque fusion of human and—and dinosaur, floating in a fetal position within the murky liquid. Its long reptilian tail curled around its body, and its clawed hands—sharp and deadly—rested against its chest. Patches of dark scales spread across its body, mixed with human skin.

  He couldn’t stop staring at it, feeling a mix of revulsion and fascination at the same time. It looked like a twisted parody of Mewtwo. Something out of a nightmare—or the dream of a deranged person with a lot, a lot of cash.

  More importantly...

  The claws, Luca swallowed hard, don’t tell me... The thought sent a shiver down his spine.

  "...You didn’t know about this either," Nagato said, not as a question, and he sounded slightly more exhausted than annoyed.

  "No," Luca said, completely serious this time, grimacing. He felt a little offended, to be honest. It was clear from the start that he didn’t know everything about the mystery, just what was necessary. Or what he’d had access to on the pages.

  He hadn’t read anything about this anywhere—which was a bit confusing. Morrigan had come this far. How had she not mentioned anything about the hybrid in the tank? He examined it more closely, noticing a label at the bottom—it read R-sapiens 02. And there were other, more interesting details.

  "...The park —they didn’t make it, then…?" Luca wondered, his voice low.

  There was a symbol engraved on the base of the tank, different from the ones they’d seen in the laboratories that bore the park’s logo but in different colors. His mind began working on conjectures. So they were studying this? Trying to create their own hybrids? The implications were horrifying. Even more so the idea that—what if they’d succeeded?

  (Where was 01?)

  … It seemed the depth of the Mystery was deeper than he’d been given credit for.

  Nagato’s face was pale. "I don’t care which mad scientist made this," he hissed, his voice tense with panic. "I want to get out of here."

  "Let’s split up to search," Luca suggested, and he turned to do just that.

  Nagato didn’t ask questions, taking the other half of the room. For a moment, all that was heard was the echo of their footsteps, the room thick with tension. ‘I want to leave’ seemed to be glowing in neon in the air.

  "Here!" Nagato’s voice rose slightly in excitement, and he immediately covered his mouth, his face paling as he looked around nervously. Nothing happened, but he hurried to pull the lever, causing a mechanical sound that resonated in the room.

  "There really is a mission," Nagato murmured with some surprise.

  Luca turned to him with a raised eyebrow. "Didn't you believe before? No, forget it, did it appear to you...?"

  "Yeah, just after I pulled it." Nagato swallowed. "Now for the other two, right?"

  "To the arsenal," Luca corrected, deciding not to say more on the matter. His eyes turned for a moment to the tank and then to Nagato. "Let’s go." The sooner they got out of there, the sooner he’d be free of the sensation scratching at the edges of his mind. It wasn’t a good sign at all, considering he’d stood in front of a T. Rex and hadn’t felt like this.

  They quickly exited into the hallway, closing the metal door with a click. But they hadn’t gone far when the sound of glass breaking, followed by a heavy thud, echoed from inside. The noise made both of them freeze for a moment before reacting, running down the hallway until they reached the last door.

  The horrible, terrible screech of nails scratching metal reached their ears before they closed the second door.

  Luca swore he could hear his own heartbeat as they stepped into the hallway.

  Fuck.

  What were they supposed to do with this?

  Run for the hills, surely.