Chapter Text
Velociraptors have an understanding of time. It's not like humans', with their symbols, however. Raptors counted by the sun and the moon and the beat of their hearts.
Blue raced down the street, trying to digest what had occurred. Delta was gone. Charlie was gone. Echo was gone. Alpha was gone. All that remained was Blue. She had no pack, no family. She was so caught up in thought, her usually graceful legs tangled beneath her. She fell, but did not bother getting up. A disembodied arm lay in front of her. On its wrist was a black thing with green lights. She recognized it from when she was a hatchling. Alpha had one. Blue and her sisters never understood what it was or what it did, other than glow and make the occasional noise. She stared it the lit face, at the glowing lines. Her heartbeat rang through her head, thump, thump, thump. The lights on the face changed. She continued staring at the thing, and she thought of when she was a hatchling. Blue was alone at first, kept in a bright scentless place, filled with people in white. One was different, however. This one’s scent was strong. She only had instinct at the time, to follow whoever was closest. And this creature was what she called parent. The lights on the face changed again. Blue was older now and was with her parent, this large, smelly creature she called parent.
The lights changed again. Blue thought back to when she was older, but could still be tucked into Owen’s collar. They were returning to where Blue had been born, as scentless as ever. Two eggs were in front of them, shaking, cracking. Two pairs of slitted eyes look up to meet them. Blue left the collar and hopped down to meet the things inside the eggs. They smelled familiar, like herself. She knew they wanted to leave the eggs so she helped, using her new teeth and claws to pick off fragment of the shell and licked them clean. The hatchlings, both of them shades of green, were still staring at Blue’s parent. A white creature that had a scent like Owen, but weaker, exchanged words with the parent. “Ah, Mister Grady, I see Blue, as you named her, is getting along with the hatchlings. Do you have names for them, too?”, the white one asked. Owen replied, “ Yes, I do, Dr. Wu. I’m thinking Charlie and Delta.” Blue didn’t understand the noises the two were making, so she turned her attention back to the hatchlings. One of them acted differently, making odd, high-pitched noises. “That one has genes from several species of bird. It should act more avian than her sisters. Will that be an issue for our program, Mister Grady? We could have her replaced, given a few weeks”, the white one said. “No, it shouldn’t. We’re pack. No one gets left behind”, Owen replied. The lights changed again. That was when Blue noticed something. After a set amount of heartbeats, the lights changed. Was there some correlation? She decided not to dwell on that.
She picked herself up and began to hunt. She was starving, given she hadn’t eaten since morning. Her nose picked up many scents on the street. Fire, sweat, fear, humans, and something unfamiliar. Blue decided to investigate and finds the corpse of a strange creature. It was large and thin, with wings of leathery skin. It stank of decay from its time in the sun. There couldn’t have been much meat in this, but the streets were littered with them. Blue took a tentative bite, and found it to be a mediocre meal. It was mostly bone and the wings were tasteless. It would suffice however. The raptor took shelter in an abandoned shop, and slept, the sound of her heartbeat echoed through her head, thump, thump, thump...