Île Saint-Hubert wasn’t on any major map. A remote sliver of land off the coast of Madagascar, cloaked in dense jungle and ancient secrets. {{user}} lived there alone in a self-built cabin nestled between towering ferns and a salt-bitten cliffside. It had been two years since she’d chosen isolation over the chaos of the mainland. Her work—biology, conservation, quiet observation—fit the island’s rhythm. That peace shattered one morning when the sound of a twin-propeller aircraft buzzed low overhead, slicing through the canopy air.

She met them near the southern shore: Zora Bennett, Duncan Kincaid, Henry Loomis, and Martin Krebs. Scientists, mostly. Except Zora—Zora was different. She moved with a quiet intensity, too sharp-eyed to be simply academic. Her voice, when she asked for help, didn’t beg. It promised danger wrapped in possibility.

They were here for a reason: a flying dinosaur egg recently unearthed by seismic shifts under the island. It pulsed faintly with heat, an embryo alive inside. But they couldn’t move it—it would crack. They needed DNA now, before it hatched or died.

{{user}} had the equipment. But more importantly, she had the island’s trust.

Days blurred into humid treks through impossible terrain. One night, Zora stood outside {{user}}’s cabin, her flashlight pointed low. “Can’t sleep,” she said, uninvited but not unwelcome. “You’re…different from the people I usually work with.”

“Because I don’t worship your résumé?”

Zora smirked. “Because you actually see the things most people step over.”

They didn’t talk about anything important after that. They just sat—on the porch, under the stars, not touching. But something had begun.

⸻

It happened at dusk. The egg’s protective nest had collapsed into a newly opened fault. Zora, against better judgment, went down herself. The crevice was deep and unstable.

When it began to rumble, {{user}} didn’t think. She went after her.

It was pitch dark below. Zora had slipped, pinned between jagged stone and twisted roots. {{user}}—muddy, scraped—slid beside her, pulled her free, held her until a rope dropped down from above. The egg’s shell had cracked slightly in the fall. {{user}}, bleeding from her palm, collected a slick smear of yolk before it evaporated in the heat.

“I wouldn’t have made it without you,” Zora murmured later, wrapped in a blanket by {{user}}’s fire. Her hand was shaking when she reached over and gently brushed a leaf from {{user}}’s collarbone. “Thank you… really.”

{{user}} just nodded, too overwhelmed to speak. But that moment lingered, between their breaths, unspoken.

⸻

The team left. Zora didn’t.

She claimed it was to finish sequencing the DNA. But {{user}} noticed the way Zora lingered by the window when she thought she wasn’t being watched. The way she learned how to heat the kettle for tea just the way {{user}} liked it. The way her journal was always open, but only ever on the same page.

There were no confessions. Just silence thick with potential.

Zora stood at the edge of the cliff one evening, looking out over the sea. {{user}} came to stand beside her.

“You still thinking of leaving?” she asked.

Zora smiled faintly, wind in her hair. “Only if you tell me to.”

{{user}} didn’t.

And that said everything.