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Alan and Ellie had skipped the nineteen-ninety-five conference for the Association of Paleontology, they’d needed a break after everything that had happened the year prior. However, when they heard that the ninety-six conference would be held in Chicago and the annual social held at the Field Museum they couldn’t resist the opportunity to go and reunite with their friends and colleagues.

Of course, Dr. Patricia Valdez was the first to find them as they ambled around the exhibit hall. Alan was in the process of reading a placard about the bones of early hominids in the display in front of them when Trish slung an arm around both their shoulders and inserted herself in between them.

“Well if it isn’t my favorite two bone heads back on the conference scene,” she teased. “ I was so excited when I got your email, El.”

“It’s good to see you too, Trish,” Ellie laughed. “How are things going at Berkley?”

“Oh you know, same old, same old. They’re funding my trip to the Morrison Formation this summer with some of my grads so I can’t complain too much.”

“You didn’t tell me you got the funding!”

“I know, I was waiting to see you in person,” Trish teased. “What about the two of you?”

“The nest guardians we found at our dig have led to quite a bit of research,” Ellie said. “Alan’s thinking of doing a talk about the findings at SVP next year.”

“How exciting! And what about you, Ellie? Have you made any interesting finds?”

“I’m looking into the decline of a species of Cretaceous ferns. I’m hoping I can find something that can point us in the direction of what we can do to preserve threatened species in the modern day.”

“Look at you, out here saving the environment. I always knew you were going to change the world.”

Ellie laughed as a light blush colored her cheeks, Trish always did know what to say. “I certainly try my best.”

“Anyway, I came to grab you two cos there’s another old friend in the main room who’s dying to catch up.”

“Who?” Alan asked. Mentally he went through the catalog of friends they had in the field and which of those they hadn’t seen for a couple years.

Trish punched his shoulder playfully. “If I tell you that it’s not a surprise, is it Alan?”

“No, I suppose not.”

“When did you get so stuffy? The Alan I remember had a great sense of adventure.”

Alan huffed. Of course, he knew the exact moment his sense of adventure left him; the moment he had stared face to snout with a Tyrannosaurus Rex as he tried desperately to pull Tim from the wreckage of the explorer. Trish wouldn’t know that, couldn’t know that, so he would just have to grin and bear it as she ribbed him.

Dutifully, Ellie and Alan followed their friend into the main gallery. The high vaulted ceilings of the Field Museum’s main hall opened up and the floor was littered with circular tables draped in black tablecloths. They were arranged around the main hall’s biggest attraction; the skeleton of the world’s most famous Tyrannosaur Rex, Sue. Her presence in the main hall was partially behind the pair’s reasoning to stick to the less populated halls until the ceremony commenced.

“Well look who Trish dragged in,” a voice with a distinctive Midlands accent called from over by Sue’s display.

“Dr. Williams! What a surprise,” Ellie said with an honest smile. Dr. Iris Williams was a British paleontologist who specialized in marine predators like ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs. She taught at Oxford and had met Ellie and Alan when the pair had come across the pond to do a series of guest lectures at a couple universities. They had not seen her in about seven years and it was quite a surprise that she had come all the way to Chicago for the conference.

“The association always sends me invites to the event and it’s been a minute since I’ve seen some of you from this side of the pond. So I figured I ought to come over and see what all the fuss is about.”

“This is one of the more relaxed gatherings of paleontologists, it’s SVP where the real debates happen,” Trish said. “Anyway, you three catch up. I think I saw Paul Visser walk by and I’ve been meaning to ask him about his latest thesis on prehistoric algae blooms.”

Ellie laughed as she watched Trish dart off in the direction of the hall of taxidermy. “And people say, I’m the spitfire of the paleobotany field.”

“Alan, I heard through the grapevine you’re working on a thesis about dromaeosaur intelligence,” Iris began. “I assume that means you’ve found something rather interesting at your dig?”

“Yes, we have several fossilized skeletons in positions that don’t have a precedent in the fossil record. It’s definitely an exciting time, the students are a big help too; our grad team is really pulling their weight and proving themselves to be quite capable. A fair few of them would make for great digsite managers if they chose to leave our dig.”

“From what I’ve heard, that's a tough choice to make these days. Your students love the both of you and it’s a well-earned reputation I think.”

Alan looked away for a moment feeling touched by Iris’ words. “Thank you, Dr. Williams. How about you? I’ve heard you’ve mostly been keeping to professorship lately.”

“Heh, I think your source is a little out of date, Alan,” Iris said with a smirk. “Just this summer I was in Wiltshire working on a dig. We’ve excavated a P. Brachydeirus, and given how few specimens of them we have, this one will surely give us some new insight into these creatures once the boys at the lab get it all cleaned up.”

“How exciting,” Ellie chimed in. “It’s been a busy couple of years for us, but things are finally starting to settle back into a comfortable rhythm.”

“So I heard. Trish mentioned she had to cover your position for a couple semesters. I hope —”

“I just needed a sabbatical to deal with some family issues. Everything was fine in the end, just one of those things, you know,” Ellie had rushed to get ahead of the narrative. She knew Trish hadn’t meant any harm in talking about what had been a strange period for everyone involved but it was not a time Ellie wanted to dwell on during what was supposed to be a time of relaxation and friendship.

Iris nodded and clearly picked up on the hint. “Either way, I do look forward to seeing both of your new findings.”

“And we’re excited to see yours as well,” Alan said. “Come on, why don’t we find a seat? I think the ceremony will be starting soon.”

The ceremony and dinner had been a lovely affair, there were speeches from Dr. Bakker and Dr. Burke that had proposed some interesting ideas and called for an age of unity among disciplines as no matter what area you were specialized in you had something to offer the research team you were a part of.

Of course, Ellie found it a bit rich that both the speakers talking about inclusiveness had been men. There were plenty of women in the field but it seemed that there was still room for growth in that regard.

The pair had intended not to stick around too long into the reception, however, they still hadn’t looked at a specific exhibit in the fossil hall that had been part of the reason they had come out to the conference at all. So slipping past groups of gossiping fellows they made their way back to the Griffin Hall of the evolving planet.

“There she is,” Alan said as they came to a stop next to the Triceratops skeleton in the fossil hall.

“What a beautiful creature.”

“That she is,” Ellie agreed. If there was one thing she could say about the things they had gone through in the last few years, it was that the moments when she and Alan had seen the brachiosaurus and the triceratops up close. The bones really didn’t do the animal justice and she could understand why John had wanted to bring these animals back into the modern era, but humans and dinosaurs weren’t meant to be. It was for the safety of both sides if they never interacted again.

“Dr. Sattler! Dr. Grant! Do you have a minute?”

Ellie turned to see who had interrupted the quiet moment they were having. She didn’t recognize the man who stood behind them, he appeared to be in his mid to late twenties, with short brown hair and piercing blue eyes. The thing that stood out the most was the fact he was wearing a suit that looked like it cost twice what Ellie and Alan made in a year teaching. Whoever this was he definitely wasn’t the typical paleontologist.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve met before,” Ellie said. She looped a hand around Alan’s arm and pulled herself closer.

“You’re right we haven’t,” the stranger confirmed. “My name is Dr. Richard Levine, I’m a graduate student out of Berkeley. My professor, Dr. Valdez told me you both were here and I’ve admired your work for a while. I was hoping I could just ask you a few questions.”

Alan quirked a brow but shrugged, he was never one to discourage students. “Sure, what do you want to know?”

“Well, my first question is, what do you think the upper limit of dromaeosaur intelligence really is? Corvidae levels?”

“Higher than that,” Alan said. “Corvids are very smart but they have a slight handicap that dromaeosaurs did not.”

“Size?”

Alan shook his head. “Dromaeosaurs had hands and sure, there’s documentation of crows and ravens using their beaks and feet to do some pretty amazing things. But having an appendage that allows for precise interactions with objects, well that’s an advantage that can’t be beaten.”

Richard looked thoughtful for a moment as he processed what Alan had told him. He didn’t seem to grasp that he had interrupted what was supposed to be a quiet moment for the two paleontologists.

“I have one more question,” he started and Ellie almost held up a hand to dismiss him but Alan shook his head. They were at an event where paleontology students built their network and it was only fair to hear Levine out.

“Have either of you considered the possibility of a lost world existing in some remote corner of the world?”

Alan quirked a brow, “A what now?”

“A lost world,” Levine repeated. “It’s a theory that posits that somewhere on the earth is a location so remote that it was untouched by the grasp of the K-Pg extinction event. It’s been floated around as perhaps being in some untouched forest of the Congo, The jungles of South America, or the glaciers of Antarctica.”

Ellie gave Alan a look that suggested she was about to bolt, he held her hand firmly in his; they had to handle this carefully.

“No, and I think you ought to vet the sources you get your information from with a bit more scrutiny, son. The dinosaurs died sixty-five million years ago, and the ones that didn’t were already well on their way to becoming the birds that we know today.”

“Surely Dr. Grant as someone who’s dedicated his life to this line of work there must be some part of you that wants to see a living, breathing dinosaur.”

“I can understand the appeal,” Alan felt Ellie’s nails dig into his arm. “But there’s no point in hoping for something that can’t happen. As paleontologists, we’re blessed with the gift of being able to peel back the sands of time with every animal we uncover.”

He gestured to the triceratops skeleton and the painting on the wall beyond of an artist’s recreation of what Sue the tyrannosaurus might have looked like in life, standing in the shallows of a cretaceous creek bed. “Everything we do is about the truth and there is truth in these bones. If you want to go chasing rumors of ghosts long forgotten, I can’t stop you. I do highly suggest you put this silly idea behind you though, Dr. Levine.”

“What about when you had Dr. Valdez sub for you three years ago? I heard from some of your grad students that you and Dr. Sattler were in Costa Rica— ”

“No, we weren’t,” Ellie said, her voice sharp as a razor. “We took a leave of absence to deal with a family emergency.”

“It is highly unprofessional of you to make assumptions about our private lives, if you were really so curious about it Trish would have told you why she was filling in for us,” Alan made a mental note to question the students at the dig if any of them had talked to Dr. Levine or if it was one of the few grad students of his that had gone on to other sites and museums across the US.

“You have to admit the dates just line up pretty cleanly with the timeline Dr. Ian Malcolm — “

“Dr. Malcolm has a history of manic episodes,” Ellie interrupted again. “There’s a reason he left academia after what happened in nineteen ninety-four.” She didn’t want to talk about this, about him, about everything they’d had and lost in such a short period of time. Levine didn’t know what he was asking for, seeing living dinosaurs wasn’t worth everything else that had come with it. If she could turn back time she would have.

“I didn’t mean any offense,” Levine protested.

“If it’s all the same to you, Richard, I think it’s best Dr. Sattler and I take our leave,” Alan said. He’d already started backing up with Ellie as he said the words and they were halfway out of the exhibit when Levine called his farewell after them.

“I thought we had finally put it all behind us,” Ellie said as they walked down the steps of the Field Museums’ entrance.

“He’s just a headstrong young maverick. You know how fresh paleontologists are, they think they have it all figured out. I’m sure he’ll think about what we told him and realize he was barking up the wrong tree.”

“But what if he doesn’t Alan?” Ellie walked down the way to the retaining wall that looked out over Lake Michigan. “What if he finds someone willing to talk?”

“And risk earning Ingen’s ire.”

“They had locals working for them, Alan. You can’t tell me that if someone like Dr. Levine sticks his nose in the right place with the right amount of money they won’t start talking.”

Alan wrapped a hand around her shoulders. “Well, there’s nothing we can do about that, Ellie. It’s like Dr. Chamberlain says, the important thing is to focus on what we can do.”

She nodded and leaned into him more. It was a nice night, the wind carried a cool breeze from the lake and the stars peeked out from gaps in the clouds. She was glad for the calm, and quiet, and for Alan being her rock through all the tough times they’d weathered lately.

“Do you think we should go back?” She asked as she looked over her shoulder at the museum.

Alan shook his head. “It’s getting late, let’s catch a cab back to the hotel and find a good movie to watch before bed.”

She smiled and stood up on her toes to kiss him on the lips. “Yeah, I think I’d like that.”