Cooper let out a small, unintentional sound. Pure animal fear. It was incredibly hard not to jump up screaming, but he didn’t dare. Not without knowing where the crocodile had gone first.

Of course, gone was a wildly inapt word. The room was maybe ten by fifteen feet. It obviously hadn’t gone anywhere. Wherever it might be was still dangerously too close.

Cooper’s eyes darted around the enclosure, moving too quickly to really find anything more subtle than a croc tap-dancing on its hind legs in a top hat. Fear is just your body protecting itself, Dr. Ripodi had said once. Just like pain exists to let you know something is wrong, fear is another message. Sometimes, though, the body gets a little too good at protecting itself, going into overdrive, shouting out the fear message in a way that drowns out everything else.

Cooper forced himself to slow down, really examining each mulch pile, every piece of debris floating in the dark water...

Any other time, it would be interesting how, like a switch being flicked, a broken stick in the pool suddenly transformed into the crocodile’s head. It was like Cooper’s brain had finally caught sight of some detail and hastily switched out the cue cards from innocuous inanimate object to living and immediate danger while chuckling, my bad, my bad.

Cooper would have to have a word with Dr. Ripodi about this “too good at protecting itself” bullshit.

The crocodile was about five feet away and almost entirely submerged in water. Only the tip of its nose and the very top part of its head, where the orbital ridges were, peeked out. But Cooper was under no illusion that it hadn’t noticed him there. One eye was fixed directly on him, unblinking. Cooper had never realized how similar to cats’ eyes they were, with the vertical slit pupil and the yellow tones. This eye was quite a bit darker than Boogie’s, though. Almost the same shade as the crocodile’s...skin? Scales?

The way Cooper saw it, he had two options. He could lie there unmoving—and hopefully unthreatening—and wait for someone to find him. The problem with that was he had no concept of how long he had been lying there unconscious, or how easily he could be seen from outside the exhibit.

There was also a small matter of what was or wasn’t threatening to a crocodile. If some other predator were tossed into his extremely small territory, Cooper wouldn’t ignore it just because it was having a lie-in. In fact, lack of movement would just make him brave enough to get close and investigate, and if that thing got closer, he knew he wouldn’t be able to hold still. He just wouldn’t.

Don’t run and you won’t be chased. That’s what James had said. But James was dead, which definitely took some weight out of his argument.