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This wasn’t supposed to happen.
Sammy lifts her head, drowsy and worn from the crash that occurred a few seconds ago. She looks around to see what exactly they collided into: a medium sized rock; nothing too serious. Some of her friends are slowly gaining consciousness, wearing the same stirred expression she also has on. And for a second, she’s confused. Why are her friends giving her those looks? Why did they crash in the first place?
But then she glances down to see a phone with a bright pink case- cracked and broken- on display for everyone to see. Everyone .
And then it all comes back.
Getting away from the Indominus, talking with Roxy and Dave.
The phone falling out of her pocket, clattering so loudly on the floor.
Brooklyns cries of accusations, along with her friends' stunned faces.
Yaz’s shocked whisper- and then the crash.
Her memories play in her head like a sick movie, and she wants to turn it off, more than anything . Everyone’s up by now, and they’re all staring at her. There’s silence, so thick and tension-filled you could cut through it with a knife. She can practically feel Brooklyns eyes pouring into her, furious and disapproving. Sammy can’t blame her, not in the slightest, but it still hurts. They were high-fiving just seconds ago, and she thought that she was finally in the clear.
But It was stupid to think she could’ve gotten away with it. She’s a horrible liar, that much was clear by the way she barely stumbled her way through Brooklyns interrogations. Hell, if it hadn't been for Yaz-
Yaz.
Sammy turns to see the girl in question, only to find that she’s faced the opposite way. Her hands are gripping the steering wheel so hard her knuckles are turning white, and she’s shaking. Sammy wants to reach out to Yaz and reassure the track-star that everything will be alright, but she can’t do that anymore.
Not now that her secret is out.
“Is everyone okay?” Darius asks. His eyes show nothing but worry- nothing like the anger of the girl beside him. Ben’s more confused than anything, holding onto Bumpy in an almost motherly way. It reminds Sammy of how she was with Bessie, which in turn reminds her of home .
She doesn’t want to think about home right now, even though it’s intertwined with the situation she’s currently sitting in.
“ Is everyone? !”
Yaz’s words,cold and harsh, ring out like a siren in Sammy’s ears. But before she can say anything, Yaz is already out of the van, slamming the door shut.
Of course, Sammy rushes after her. What else would she do?
In the corner of her eye, she can see the rest of her friends (are they even her friends anymore?) piling out of the vehicle. But that doesn’t matter. She has to reach Yaz, has to make up for all the stupid things she did, and has to make wrong right somehow.
“Yaz, wait!” she gasps. “ Yasmina!”
Sammy doesn’t use Yazs’ full name often, but she does now.
“ We’re not okay!” Yaz cries. We’re in the middle of a jungle with a monster dinosaur out there, and you-”
She whips around to face Sammy.
“ You .”
Sammy can’t hold Yaz’s stare, not when it’s so full of betrayal and hurt. Good thing she doesn’t have to, because Brooklyns butting in with more of her claims. Which are true.
“ -Destroyed our only way home and lied about it!” she chides, turning to face Darius, Kenji, and Ben. “ I told you guys!”
God, if only Sammy hadn’t been in focus of Brooklyns camera. How different things would’ve been, huh? She remembers approaching Brooklyn that fateful night, excited to tell her about the roasting marshmallow party the rest of the campers were holding. Then Sammy saw the pink-haired girl zoom in on her taking the DNA of the Sinoceratops.
Her whole world fell apart at that very moment.
If only she hadn’t taken the phone. Then If Brooklyn came in the next morning, asking her about what exactly she was doing in the video, Sammy could have explained everything. She’d spill all her fears and worries to a bunch of kids she met only three days ago, and then maybe everything might’ve been okay. They could’ve worked something out.
But she took it.
It had seemed reasonable in the moment. Steal the phone, wipe the video clean off, and return it. But of course, ever since that awful Mantah Corp agent shook her hand, nothing seemed to go her way. Sammy had waited for Brooklyn to go to sleep, and then she took the girl's phone off its charger. She locked herself in the bathroom all night, desperately trying to open the damn thing. She hadn’t thought about the possibility of a password, and it ultimately came back to bite her. That should've been the final clue that she needed to stop with whatever ‘plan’ she had come up with.
She hadn’t, obviously.
“ Wait, so you did take Brooklyns phone?” Darius asks. “Why? What were you doing?”
So many questions, too many questions. It’s overwhelming. She doesn’t want to be here.
Brooklyn scoffs. “ Probably trying to erase my video of her taking those samples from the Sinoceratops!”
Sammy watches Brooklyn realize something, and then the girl is slowly walking toward her, slightly pointing the cracked phone at her face.
“ And you knew about the Indomius Rex, didn’t you?”
Anything but that. Those freakish blueprints are still imprinted in Sammys mind, but she had never meant to find out about them. It was another burden to add to her seemingly never ending rabbit hole. She had left the blueprints alone, mind already made up about not giving the information to Mantah Corp. She hadn’t thought anybody else was aware of the Indominous’ existence, besides the scientists who worked on it. So when Brooklyn asked her how she knew about the hybrid up on zipline tower, Sammy could only think:
How do you ?
“ Because you were snooping in Dr. Wus office when I ran into you,” Brooklyn realizes. “ I knew it!”
“ I didn’t mean to destroy the phone!” Sammy pleads, desperate to salvage whatever she can. “ I fell on it when the Zipline came down-”
Ben- who's pretty much been quiet this entire time- pipes up.
“ But you did steal it?” he asks. “ You had it this entire time and didn’t tell us?”
Sammy doesn’t say anything.
“ Hold up.” Darius says. “ What were you doing in Dr. Wu’s office, Brooklyn?”
Brooklyns expression goes from angry to shocked, but she’s quick to defend herself.
“ It doesn’t matter.” She retorts. “ I didn’t break our only way to call for help and lie about it!”
Brooklyns right, and Sammy feels horrible about it. She’s the reason they’re in this mess. Her eyes begin to well up, but she shoos the tears away.
Don’t cry, she thinks. It’ll just make things worse.
But Brooklyn keeps coming at her, and everythings so loud .
“ This is not my fault! This is her fault!”
Sammy covers her ears, hopelessly trying to block out everything that’s happening. Maybe, if she wishes hard enough, it’ll all go away. Or maybe, this is all a dream. A nightmare. An awful, awful nightmare. It’s all too much.
“She-”
“I’m here to spy!”
Shit.
She wasn’t supposed to say that. It was the thing Manta Corp had stressed the most- don’t tell anyone. Her parents didn’t even know what she was doing until she was already on the ferry.
But by then, it was too late.
And right now, she should just keep quiet, but it’s all coming out. The groups’ gone silent, and she bets 50 bucks that they didn’t expect her to say she was a spy . It sounds so ridiculously cliche, so unbelievable- and god, she wishes it was.
“ For a company called Mantah Corp.” she mumbles.
The words come out with so much bitter resentment it’s enough to surprise her. She remembers watching that black car pull up to the ranch, remembers the shady people who talked to her father- and then talked to her .
“ Mantah Corp?” Darius blurts. He turns to face the rest of the group. “ They’re a bioengineering company. Big rivals with Masrani. They tried to make dinosaurs too, but Wu beat them to it.”
“ You doomed us all for some lousy company?” Ben asks.
The way he says it makes Sammy’s heart sting, but it’s not like she didn’t have a motive. What was she supposed to do? Sit quietly and watch everything her parents worked for go up in flames?
“ Our ranch was in trouble.” she sniffs. “So my folks had to borrow a lot of money from some..shady people.”
Everyones waiting for what she’ll say next. There's no going back.
“ We didn’t know they were fronting for Mantah Corp. They said we’d lose everything unless I spied for them.”
She cringes as the memories come back to her. Her family had said no. They were prepared to lose the ranch rather than use her like that. But she had just felt so guilty, knowing that if she agreed, everything would go away. So she contacted Mantah Corp, and accepted their deal. Everything was very blurry from that point. At night, she would pour over emails and files sent to her, memorizing which samples they wanted or what information they needed. During the day, she had to pretend like everything was fine. Her dad would smile at her, or her mother would hug her, and all she could think was how they had no idea.
“ They told me to make the most of the behind-the-scenes access I would get.” she says. “ ‘Use it to gather info from Dr. Wu’s lab, DNA from dinos, and..whatever else they needed.”
The amount of stuff Mantah Corp had wanted her to get was overwhelming. Sure, acquiring samples from herbivores was easy enough, but some of the dinosaurs on the list were not that friendly. How they expected her to get close to a Carnivore, she’ll never know.
And of course, there was that time Brooklyn found her in the hallway of the lab. She had been so startled that she barely made up a decent excuse. They went their separate ways, and she thought that it was the end of that. Then the whole cattle drive fiasco happened, and she got sloppy.
Honestly, it was stupid to take samples when all her friends were around.
“But Brooklyn caught on, and I got scared.” she continues. Her accent is heavy; it always does that when she’s stressed or nervous.
“Then everything went.. wrong .”
She had never meant for the situation to spiral so far out of her reach. The original plan was clear. Attend Camp Cretaceous as a camper, gather as much information as she could, then go home at the end of the camp and discreetly give the info to Mantah Corp. Nobody had anticipated a hybrid dinosaur escaping and wrecking havoc across the island. She hadn’t anticipated growing so close to the other campers.
She walks over to Yaz, who takes a step back. The girl is obviously furious, and Sammy realizes how much she’s hurt her.
“ This is the last thing I wanted to happen.” Sammy chokes.
“Oh.” Yaz laughs. “ To be next to a broken van on killer dinosaur island? Hey, me too! What are the odds.”
The tears are coming back now. How ironic it must be: Sammy, the most outgoing of them all, outed as some sort of double-agent. She didn't spy on her own will though, and she wishes she could just say that. But her thoughts are all jumbled and she’s stuttering over herself.
“ Yaz, I-”
“ Was it all a lie? Wanting to be friends?”
Those words leave Sammy speechless. Of course not, how could Yaz say that? In all honesty, it’s a valid assumption, and she hates that she gave Yaz every right to believe it. But all those moments they had shared together- they’re ones Sammy cherises. And that moment on the rooftop where Yaz opened up to her is the memory she loves the most.
She was never good at making friends, despite her best efforts.
“Pretending you cared about..”
But Sammy wasn’t pretending, isn’t pretending. She does care about Yaz, more than anything. And maybe it was silly, to feel so attached to someone she only met days ago.
“ You just needed someone to hide what you were doing. Tell me I’m wrong.”
All Sammy can do is stand there helplessly.
Everythings happening so fast, yet so slow, almost like the universe is purposely dragging it out.
“ I’m such an idiot.” Yaz scoffs.
Then she begins to storm off, but Sammy follows after her. She needs to explain to Yaz, needs to say something. Her words come out rough and horse, but she doesn’t care about that.
“ You are wrong!” she cries. “ I just didn’t know how to say it, how to explain it to you.”
That was one of the many things that kept her up at night. She spent what seemed like hours, rehearsing what she would say to Yaz in her head. But she didn’t do it. There was almost never a right time, and when there was , she could never build up the courage to say it. How do you say “ oh yeah, by the way, I’m a spy.” casually?
She was scared. Just like she is now.
This day has been nothing but utter chaos, and she wants it to be over. Hell, she saw people get eaten alive . There was no preparation, nothing she could’ve done..
She reaches out her hand to touch Yaz’s shoulder.
“ Just because I spied doesn’t change who I am-”
“ Don’t touch me!”
The track-stars reaction is immediate: she rips away from Sammy, eyes staring like daggers.
“ Go away, Sammy.”
The cowgirl feels her stomach drop. She takes a step back, lip quivering. When she first met Yaz, the girl had a wall built around herself. It took some effort, but that wall came down. They were friends . But now, as Sammys holds herself so tightly her nails dig into her skin, she notices that wall resurfacing.
“ Yaz, please .” she begs. “ I can’t, you don’t -”
She can’t finish her sentence. Her eyes are blurry and her head hurts. She just wants to go home. Yaz’s expression softens for a second, but quickly returns to its previous state.
“ Just go.” she says.
So Sammy does. She backs away, slowly, and catches Yaz’s eye. Then she turns, and leaves. She doesn’t stray too far from the group, but not too close either. Her eyes are definitely red and puffy by now, and she messily wipes at her dried tears to make them go away.
She should’ve distanced herself from the beginning, should’ve focused solely on her spying. That way she wouldn’t have hurt anyone if her secret got out. There’s no one to blame but herself, that she knows.
“ I’m sorry.” She mutters to no one. “ I’m so, so sorry.”
But it’s too late for that now.
What has she done?