Chaz turned to squint where he was pointing. “Yup, those are Pretty Boy’s buddies.”
“You seriously named that thing that almost ate Shawn?” I asked. “Why?”
Chaz shrugged. “We’ve named the big ones. Pretty Boy is a kronosaurus; they are particularly nasty. They can eat you in one bite. But I think I’d actually prefer to be eaten by one of them. It would be better than having an elasmosaurus nibble on you a while.” She didn’t seem to notice the look of absolute gob-smacked astonishment on our faces because she went on as though this were all completely normal. “We have regular old plesiosaurs and pliosaurs too.” She began ticking them off on her fingers. “Let’s see, we have the nothosaurs, simolestes, and mosasaurs here. Oh, and a few dunkleosteus. Those suckers have jaws on them like you wouldn’t believe! Dr Schwartz gets the credit for all of them,” she said proudly. “If he hadn’t tweaked their genes, they couldn’t live in fresh water, or our climate for that matter. Most of them lived in the oceans originally.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, sure I hadn’t heard her right. “Do you mean you are still bringing dinosaurs back to life?”
“Well, yes. Sort of,” Chaz said with a worried look at Schwartz. “It’s a little more complicated than that.” All I could manage was to shake my head at Chaz. Were people really still resurrecting the creatures responsible for almost wiping out the human race? I swallowed the tirade of hot anger that bubbled inside me as I imagined them bringing back the very monster that had almost eaten my best friend just moments before.
“You made all those plesiosaurs? That’s just sick,” Shawn said, my own disgust reflected in his face.
“Swimming dinosaurs,” Todd sniffed. “I don’t care what fancy name you call them.”
“They aren’t technically dinosaurs. They’re swimming marine reptiles,” Chaz corrected.
“To savages, dinosaurs and plesiosaurs are nothing but something to eat. You are wasting your time with explanations, Chaz. So, yes, Todd was it? They are just swimming dinosaurs,” Schwartz sneered. Todd bristled.
“They protect this lab,” Chaz said with an apologetic shrug at Todd behind Schwartz’s back. “No one comes poking around plesiosaur-infested waters.”
We continued our steady descent in silence, and soon the sun no longer penetrated the water far enough for us to see the fish or the plesiosaurs. I shivered as the temperature in the elevator became markedly cooler.
Todd was starting to tremble too, but not from the cold. I noticed that his face was white and sweat was running down it. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have thought he was the one who’d been thrown in the lake with Pretty Boy.
“Are you OK?” I asked, pulled momentarily from my thoughts about this mysterious lab and the monsters they’d created to protect it. “You look horrible.”
“I don’t like small spaces,” he said tersely, clenching and unclenching his fists.
“Wonderful,” Schwartz drawled drily, “a claustrophobic savage.” He’d pulled a small port screen out of the duffel bag at his feet and studiously ignored us as he began typing something into it. I gave Todd’s shoulder an awkward pat with my bound hands. I wasn’t especially fond of the tiny space either. My ears were starting to ache and throb. Noticing my wince of pain, Chaz quickly explained how to clear our ears to relieve the pressure from our descent by holding our noses. A minute and one satisfying pop later and the stabbing pain in my head was gone. I made a mental note not to let that happen again. The elevator passed into the insides of a building, and I looked away from Todd to stare. The first floor we slid past was full of lab equipment.
“Whoa,” Todd said, letting out a low whistle of appreciation, and I nodded in mute agreement. This place was massive. Unlike North Compound’s confining walls of stone and concrete, these walls were made of glass, so you could see through all the rooms from one end to the other, making it hard to tell where one room stopped and another room started.
“Pretty impressive, isn’t it,” Chaz said proudly. “This is just the research floor; wait until you see the rest of it.” The next floor the elevator descended through was covered in wall-to-wall troughs of plants under grow lights, reminding me of the underground chambers in North Compound where we’d grown turnips, potatoes, and other vegetables. Like the floor above, this one too seemed ten times bigger than even the large meeting auditorium back at North.
“Are you seeing this?” I whispered to Shawn.
“I am,” Shawn breathed.
The elevator didn’t give us long to gawk before dropping down into the biggest room I’d ever seen. All comparisons to North Compound disappeared as I pressed my hands to the glass and stared in wonder at hundreds of dinosaurs, all housed in enormous glass cages. Arching above the dinosaur pens was a tangled network of glass walkways, bustling with blue jump-suited people.
“No way.” Todd gasped. Shawn made a disbelieving choking noise, and I pounded him on the back with my bound hands.
“You keep dinosaurs down here?” I gasped.
“Of course,” Schwartz replied. “We run one of the top breeding programs in the world.”
“We run the only breeding program in the world,” Chaz muttered.
Schwartz glared at her before turning his attention back to us. “We have also tamed and trained some of the brighter species. We’ve gathered invaluable data from living in such close proximity. They act as message carriers, test subjects, and pets. You may not kill any of them,” he said, giving us a hard look. “Everyone who lives down here does so because they believe in the beauty and continuation of the dinosaur. Remember that.”
“But why?” I asked, dumbstruck.
“What do you mean why?” Schwartz sniffed.
I shook my head in amazement as I took in the hundreds of cages. “Why would you breed them? After what happened with the pandemic?”
“The ecosystem,” Chaz said. “When people brought the dinosaurs out of extinction one hundred and fifty years ago, no one thought about the impact these guys would have on the ecosystem if they ran wild.” She jerked her head at one of the cages. “They were supposed to just stay in zoos and wildlife preserves, right? Well, obviously, they didn’t. After the pandemic, these guys took over and a lot of other animals went extinct. It threw everything out of whack. Our lab has been trying to correct that with selective breeding and repopulation.”
Her explanation sounded like a more scientific version of Ivan’s table demonstration when we had been back at his house the night before the marines found us again. He’d been trying to explain to Shawn that if you removed all the dinosaurs, the carefully balanced world of predator and prey that we lived in would collapse. And while Chaz wasn’t talking about removing the dinosaurs entirely, she seemed to be making the same general point. Had things changed so much in the last 150 years that we now needed dinosaurs to keep the topside world functional? And if that was true, then what Chaz was saying about balancing out the dinosaur population made a lot of sense. I shook my head as I tried to process this bizarre concept. I had grown up in a compound where everyone talked about the time before the dinosaurs like it was this ideal utopia that could be reclaimed. But what if Ivan and Chaz were right and the dinosaurs were here to stay?
Before I could respond, the elevator continued its steady descent, and I craned my head back to get one last look at the cage of what had to be Parasaurolophus before it disappeared from sight. We passed through a floor that looked like a school, glass desks lined up neatly in glass rooms. The place seemed to go on forever, and I tried to wrap my mind around the fact that it was all underwater. If I hadn’t been standing in the middle of it, I never would have believed it.
“So much glass,” Shawn marveled next to me, and I realised he was right. Glass had been something we’d had to scavenge