The Evolution of Claire (Jurassic World) Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  © 2018 Universal Studios. Jurassic World, Jurassic Park and all related marks and logos are trademarks and copyrights of Universal Studios and Amblin Entertainment, Inc.

  Cover art used under license from Shutterstock.com and iStock.com

  Cover art by Shane Rebenschied

  Cover design by Megan McLaughlin

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780525580720 (hardcover) — ISBN 9780525581383 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780525580737

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For my husband, who put up with an entire winter of me talking about nothing but dinosaurs and gleefully tramping through the forest pretending to be a T. rex.

  Rawwwrrrr (translation: I love you and I like you).

  PROLOGUE

  The thing about running scared? You can’t run forever.

  I thought about trying. After the…incident, as soon as the boys and Karen were safe at home, I went on autopilot. Survival of the fittest and all that.

  If there’s one thing I am good at, it’s surviving.

  I see now that we have that in common, them and me. I’m still standing despite everything, and they returned from extinction. Sheer human hubris mixed with our desire to know, our thirst to see, and our greed to exploit brought them back here—and where does that leave us? What does that make us? God? Predator?

  Or prey?

  Survival is written in their DNA, but I worry it’s being written out of ours. In our spot at the top of the food chain, we’ve grown so complacent. So content. So very destructive.

  I dream about it every night. The screech of the paddock door as it rose; my fingers gripping that flare so tight they cramped. Counting in my head, waiting for her to show herself, I’d never felt that kind of fear. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Miss—

  Sometimes I wake up screaming. My neighbors are going to hate me, and I haven’t even had a chance to meet them yet.

  She made me come back, my sister. Karen doesn’t play the family card often, but her boys almost got eaten by dinosaurs, so she gets whatever she wants. Forever. Because I will never be able to make it up to her or the boys.

  I want you home, Claire. Safe, with us. Far away from all the chaos. I’m begging you.

  It was more running, but this time I was running from the inevitable government investigations and the conspiracy theories online…and the death that’s haunted all the dreams I’ve had since we left the island.

  I took it—the escape hatch my sister offered me. I just didn’t think about how it would feel once I finally stopped running.

  Now I have a half-unpacked apartment and an empty fridge and scars in places my hands can’t reach. But early Monday morning, I’m up and I’m awake and I’m determined.

  I unpack boxes of clothes as my coffee brews. The fuzzy predawn light creeps through the French doors as I hang up shirts and chiffon skirts, pushing the skirts to the side because I won’t be needing them now. I could spend the entire day in sweatpants if I wanted. It should be appealing, shouldn’t it? But there’s something in me that craves clean white lines and feather-light silk and hair swinging straight and neat, because that was the old normal. Now…

  Some new kind of normal needs to be found.

  My fingers brush over a wooden box under another stack of hanging clothes, and my breath catches because I thought I’d lost it long ago. I don’t even remember packing it.

  I lift it out. The box itself was a gift from Simon Masrani to mark my first year working for him. I’d kept all the mementos from my internship in it.

  Eyes burning, I set the box down on my bed. My intern badge is on top of the pile of trinkets inside. I forgot how long my hair was back then. There’s a notebook below the badge, the corners frayed. The spine cracks as I open it. A thistle—a spiky purple flower whose color is almost as vibrant now as it was the day Justin gave it to me—is pressed between the pages, and when I see it, and the handwriting—not mine, his—defining the genus and species, I snap the notebook shut. My heart picks up like I’ve been running, like I’m back there, like I’m nineteen again, because some wounds go so deep there are no marks. Just pain.

  I close my eyes and breathe in deep. Control.

  When I open them, I turn my focus back to the box. There are postcards from Karen at the bottom, and when I lift the stack to leaf through them, I see one last thing inside.

  I smile as I pick it up. The pin was carved out of amber into the shape of a cicada, the bug’s long wings and spiky legs graceful, if you appreciate that sort of thing.

  I do. Or I did, once upon a time.

  I lift the pin to the light filtering in from the window, and it shines through the insect’s golden wings and the arched carvings on its exoskeleton.

  Maybe that’s the way to a new normal: finding that girl I once was again, the one who loved animals fiercely and stubbornly fought for what she believed in. The one who loved organization and color-coding, but who wore bug pins and her hair loose and took flowers from boys with dark eyes and smiles that made me think of hope.

  That girl…I wanted things beyond me. I ended up sacrificing things I couldn’t even fathom. But as I turn the pin in my fingers, the sun catching the amber, glowing through the wings, I think about it.

  At nineteen, over one summer, I became something new. Someone different. I don’t think it was bad. Or good. I think it was both.

  I think it was survival.

  And like I said, if there’s one th
ing I’m good at, it’s surviving.

  NINETEEN YEARS OLD

  “Did you color-code your boxes?” Regina asks.

  I look up from taping the last one. “Of course. That way I know where everything is.”

  Our dorm room is a study in opposites. My side is completely packed up, the bed stripped, the sheets and blankets tucked away in their labeled yellow boxes. My posters—matted prints of extinct plants and animals—are already wrapped and in their blue box. Everything on my checklist is crossed off—I’m ready to go.

  On her side, Regina’s got half-folded bins and boxes strewn across the floor, Degas prints hanging askew on the wall, and a massive collection of eighteenth-century French literature still stacked underneath the bed.

  My roommate shakes her head, walking over to her half-made bed and throwing herself on it. “Dearing, you’re one of a kind. And to think that the first time we met, I wasn’t so sure about you. Especially when I opened the mini-fridge and saw that box of crickets.”

  “You were so freaked out.” I snicker at the memory.

  “What was I supposed to think? You had bugs in our fridge!”

  “Well, yeah. What else would Sally eat?”

  “And then there was that time you had your lizard on that snail-and-spinach diet…,” Regina continues.

  “Switching up a blue-tongued skink’s protein sources is important. You wouldn’t want to eat the same thing all the time, would you? That’d be boring.”

  Regina gets up and walks over to the aquarium, where Sally is hanging out on her favorite rock. “You’re lucky you’re so cute, Sally Ride.” She grins when my lizard flicks her tongue out. Regina has this thing where she insists on calling Sally by her full name, ever since she figured out I named her after the astronaut. She’s funny like that.

  “Speaking of bugs…” She goes over to her fringed bag, digs around, and pulls out a small box. “I have a present for you. I may have had to put up with crickets and snails this year, but you had to deal with my repeated snooze-button smashing and night-owl tendencies.”

  “Plus that gross-smelling tea you love,” I add.

  “It’s good for you!”

  “It smells like the Grim Reaper opened a perfumery,” I tell her, taking the proffered jewelry box. I open it, and a smile breaks across my face when I see what’s inside: a cicada pin, carved out of amber. “Regina,” I say, pulling it out. “You didn’t!”

  “I remembered you were looking at it when we were at Riverter’s Vintage last time,” she says. “It’s not a cricket, but I thought it was fitting.”

  “You’re so sweet.” I reach over and hug her. “Thank you. I love it. And I’ve loved being your roommate. Not everyone would’ve been so cool with the lizard. I know she’s not the most conventional pet.”

  “You’re not the most conventional person, Claire.”

  “Neither are you,” I say, making her laugh. “I have a present for you, too.” I grab her gift from behind one of my boxes. The edges of the bright red houndstooth wrapping paper are perfectly lined up, the tape smooth and nearly invisible, the edges of the ribbons curled just so.

  “This is so pretty I hate to open it,” Regina says, right before she tears into it like she’s five. Of course. The book inside is an old copy of Rumi’s Masnavi.

  “Is this the Nicholson translation from the 1930s?” she squeals. “The one Professor Gillian was talking about in class?”

  I nod. “She helped me find it from a used bookstore in Oregon,” I say.

  “Thank you. This is awesome! Especially considering your aversion to poetry and all things emotional in verse.”

  I groan. Professor Gillian’s Poetry 101 was harder than molecular biology. “I would’ve failed without your help.”

  “Oh, you would have been fine,” Regina says. “That last paper you did was good.”

  As usual, she’s being nice. Every essay I wrote for that class—every poem I analyzed—I felt completely out of my league. Like I was just scraping along the surface of something that everyone else was diving deep beneath. And no matter what I did, I couldn’t quite slip under with everyone and get it.

  It was hard. I like school. I’m great at it. Struggling with a class—struggling with anything—isn’t what I do. But with Regina’s help, I managed to kind of muddle through.

  “I don’t know how you do all that literature analysis stuff day in and day out,” I confess.

  “Well, I couldn’t do all the political analysis stuff you’re working on, or go to law school so I can lobby to protect animals, so I guess we’re even,” Regina replies. “You are all about the long game, Claire. I appreciate that. I so don’t have that kind of patience.”

  I smile. She’s right; what I wanted, it’s a long game. I realized a long time ago that in order to create real change for animals—from domestic pets to wildlife to farm animals—you need to have a lot of money, or a lot of power. Laws that could—and should—protect animals more aren’t being championed the way they should be.

  All it takes is one person, determined to rise, to get enough power to give a voice to the voiceless.

  Politics make so much more sense to me than Rumi’s talk of gardens that aren’t actually gardens and love that runs so true you’re shattered when it ends. Politics are about what you want, who you know, how you manipulate, and what you control. The climb to get the kind of power to make laws and pass bills and create real change—that path is clear to me.

  It’s the path I’ve chosen, and nothing will get in my way. I won’t let it.

  There’s a knock on our door, and I go answer it. My big sister’s standing there grinning, her blond hair in an intricate braid down her back.

  “Karen, hi!”

  We hug. She smells like home, like the cinnamon candles our mom lights in the evening and the barest whiff of smoke from the backyard fire pit. When we were little, we roasted marshmallows and hot dogs on long sticks over the big bonfires our dad built. Now Dad does the same thing with my nephew, Zach.

  Karen looks over my shoulder, still holding me. “Did you actually color-code your moving boxes?” she asks. “Claire…honestly!”

  Regina cackles from her bed. “I like your sister, Dearing.” She waves. “I’m Regina.”

  “Karen,” my sister says, finally letting go of me. “It’s nice to meet you. Claire’s been so busy this year we’ve barely seen her, and getting her on the phone has been nearly impossible.”

  It’s a pointed comment. Mom’s obviously been complaining to her. She watches Zach while Karen’s at work, and Karen and her husband live just across town from my parents. So she’s close. And I’m…not anymore.

  I’ve gone home only a few times this year, and it’s not enough for Mom. Dad probably feels the same, but he’s kept it to himself.

  “I needed to get good grades,” I protest.

  “I know,” Karen says, reaching out and squeezing my hand. “And you did great, didn’t you?”

  I nod. My GPA is perfect—partly thanks to Regina saving my butt in that poetry class. But even as Karen turns to ask Regina about her summer plans, I feel guilty at my sister’s reminder of how I’ve neglected my family this year. The last time she sent me a picture of Zach, I was startled at how big he’d grown.

  I want to go back more often, I really do. But money is always so tight, and I don’t have a car, and taking the bus turns the six-hour drive into fourteen. And then Professor Broadhurst offered to be my mentor, and that also meant managing her office hours once a week. I’ve tried to explain what a big deal it is to be chosen as a freshman, but I don’t think my parents quite get it.

  There’s a lot my parents never quite get. They try. They’re wonderful. I love them. But there’s something in me that wants more than a little family in a little house with a quiet little life. And I’ve never figured out a wa
y to say that without sounding mean or scornful.

  I am grateful. For our little house and the lovely childhood I had. For my parents and for Karen and for the chance to be an aunt.

  But I’m different. I want things they don’t. Control. Change. Power. I want a bigger life. One far from here. One that’s never boring. One that’s always a challenge. One where I fix problems and always have the answer.

  I see a climb ahead of me, a long, rough road with hazards and hills…but it’s not defeating and it’s not scary—it’s exciting.

  Driven is what people call girls like me to our faces.

  Bossy is what people call girls like me behind our backs. Like it’s a bad thing.

  Someday, they won’t be able to say it’s like a bad thing.

  Because someday, I’ll be the boss.

  When Regina’s parents show up about fifteen minutes after Karen, they take one look at my roommate’s still-unpacked boxes and shake their heads.

  “I tried!” Regina says, her dark brows rising the way they do when she lies about stealing my last bag of pretzels. “But my French final was intense, and I needed to argue with the know-it-all in my class afterward about the second-to-last question.”

  I snort. The “know-it-all” in her French class was as into her as she was into him, but they were both in total denial. They got coffee six times over the last semester to conjugate verbs or something, and after each encounter, Regina came back to our dorm with this little kick in her step and a rant on her lips about whatever they’d debated that day and how he was so very wrong and why in the world did she let him draw her into these conversations.