“I don’t know what your game is,” he told the thing, “but my employer is a very powerful man. He’ll cut a deal with you.” He desperately hoped that was true. “You need to speak to Daniel Rove. You know that name?” Although why the hell would ET’s vivisectionist cousin know Daniel Rove?

He heard another patter of shrill fluting and wondered if his own voice had similarly gone completely under the thing’s auditory radar.

It went away, though not far because there simply wasn’t much away in the room. The upped lighting showed a cramped compartment lined with complex instruments that seemed to be almost entirely without labels or screens, only vastly complex tactile interfaces. The ceiling was close enough that if Lucas had sat up suddenly he’d have brained himself. He wondered numbly if he was on a submarine, or even a spaceship, where room was at a premium.

The creature pulled a cord or wire from one of the machines, and for a moment Lucas thought it was for insertion into humans. Instead it connected the lead to its headgear, and he saw flickering at the edges of its lenses, as if from images being transmitted within.

“Lucas, I understand you’re awake.”

The voice came from several speakers simultaneously. It was Rove’s, and Lucas had never been so glad to hear it.

“Sir, I’m being held prisoner,” he said quickly, in case his captor took steps to shut him up. “I’ve been…I may have been experimented on. They’ve done something to my arm—”

Rove laughed, and Lucas went cold. Perhaps he’d been sold to aliens as a guinea pig or something. Later on, he would examine that thought and ponder on what it said about his relationship with his employer. But then his boss was speaking again, vouchsafing at least some reassurance.

“You’re not a prisoner. You’re actually in a very exclusive hospital, if you can believe it. When we got to you, you were in bad shape. How much do you remember?”

“I…” He hadn’t remembered anything, because the pain and his surroundings had driven it from his mind, but the question conjured the answer. He had been in a cold place, a forest. There had been some big lump in a robe. There had been a…

“Fuck,” he said, because there had been a dinosaur, a great big shaggy dinosaur. Then they’d been chasing the stupid Pryor girl, and he’d ended up in the river, and then…

He remembered Dominic getting attacked. The trees had been alive with fucking things, cackling and cawing like monstrous crows with spears and stone blades. Some of them were wearing hides painted with bright patterns.