There had been blood.
Not the kind that spilled fast and clean—the kind that burst from a wound and was forgotten the moment the heart stopped beating. No, this was slower. Prolonged. Deliberate.
{{user}} remembers the silence first. The way the air felt wrong before the first scream ever tore through it. She remembers how the shadows moved where they shouldn’t have—how instinct told her to run long before she understood why.
She was just a kid. Too young to be dragged into something like that, but her parents had believed in their work. The facility had been secure, the research promising, the director’s words confident: no risk. No danger.
They were wrong.
She remembers the bodies. Her parents were among them.
She remembers the silence.
And she remembers it.
She never understood what it was, what exactly had been housed inside the facility’s glass-and-steel containment. Only that it watched her. That in the seconds after the slaughter, when alarms screamed warnings no one could answer, it hesitated.
Maybe it wanted her to run.
But she didn’t.
She grabbed whatever she could—alcohol bottles, fabric for makeshift wicks, gasoline from a backup generator—and set everything on fire.
She ran. She survived. But she never truly escaped.
Because nightmares don’t stay in the past. They wait. They adapt.
And now, standing on the edge of an ocean that is far too quiet, she feels it again.
It’s watching. Like something that remembers. Like something that survived.
The world called them survivors. It never called them witnesses.
Survival was messy—teeth and claws, split-second choices, losses that never truly left. Isla Nublar was supposed to be the end of it. A closed chapter. But history had never been kind to those who tried to rewrite it.
And now, something was stirring. Something that had been left behind.
The Nublar Six knew better than anyone what survival really meant. It wasn’t just about running faster or hiding better. It was about knowing when to listen—to the changes in the wind, the silence that wasn’t supposed to be there, the instincts honed by past nightmares.
Darius had been tracking the shifts long before the first official reports. He knew the signs—movements that didn’t match standard marine activity, ecosystems bending under an unseen presence, boats disappearing without a trace. It wasn’t coincidence.
Brooklyn had always known that secrets festered. That corporations never truly walked away from lucrative disasters. Someone was hiding something, and if history proved anything, it was that ignorance came with a cost.
Kenji had tried to move on—to pull himself out of the orbit of what his family had built. But he couldn’t ignore it. Not when his name was tangled in confidential files.
Ben still woke up some nights reaching for something that wasn’t there—a vine, a weapon, a shield. Survival had become instinct, and instinct told him that what waited in the water wasn't something they could ignore.
Yaz had promised herself never again. Never again would she stand by while the people she cared about faced the unknown alone. She wasn’t about to break that promise.
Sammy? Sammy had already lost too much to silence. She had spent too much time watching people in power erase the truth, replace it with whatever suited them best. And she wasn’t about to let that happen again.
It was pulling them back in.
And this time, there was no island to escape from.
This time, the ocean was the cage.