CHAPTER 2
AT THE PARK’S main gate, a bored-looking teenager in a SciPark baseball cap charged us a fortune, then issued us with paper maps.
“There’s an app too,” he told us in a monotone speech he’d obviously given a thousand times. “Your Wi-Fi password’s printed on your ticket, and the audio tour’s available in thirteen different languages.”
Thirteen? Couldn’t they have added one more to avoid bad luck? If I’d known what was to come, perhaps I’d have taken that as a sign. But since I’d left my crystal ball at home, I trailed into the park oblivious, hanging back as Bradley bounded on ahead in a silver jumpsuit that probably cost me a thousand bucks.
According to the map, the park was laid out in a series of concentric circles, nine of them, kind of like Dante’s Inferno except the middle was dominated by a giant silver sphere rather than a lake of ice. There were over six hundred exhibits. No way would we get through everything in one day, but I wasn’t about to mention that to Bradley because he’d probably check us into a hotel and then we’d be stuck there forever.
“What do you want to do first, guys?” Dan asked, her question aimed at her three boys. When she adopted ten-year-old Race not so long ago, his two older buddies had come as part of the package. Nobody minded. Before the trio crossed paths with Blackwood, they’d spent most of their time getting into trouble on the streets, the result of parents who just didn’t care. Now Trick, the eldest at fifteen, spent most of his spare time hanging out in Dan’s boyfriend’s recording studio, Vine had recently discovered baseball, and Race—or Caleb if one was to use his actual name, which Dan tended to—liked to come to the office. We’d given him a desk next to Dan’s, and he must have had the best grades in school considering the amount of help he got with his homework. They’d turned out to be good kids, even if their morals could be questionable at times. None of us were in a position to judge them for that. So far today, they’d been taking care of Josh, even though he was seven years old and probably ruined their street cred.
Dan was the only one of us who looked vaguely happy to be at SciPark. Probably because the three older boys could fend for themselves, meaning she was ready to hit the non-alcoholic cocktails at ten in the morning. On any other day, Carmen might have been okay with the trip as well, but her new rifle had been delivered yesterday, and I knew what she’d rather be doing.
“Can we see the dinosaurs?” Josh asked, and everyone else shrugged.
Jurassic Park it wasn’t. Live dinosaurs would have been an interesting spectacle, but these were all made of plastic and the ones that did move just jerked around on the spot while roars sounded through loudspeakers.
“How do they know what dinosaurs sounded like?” Race asked.
Good question, and I had no idea of the answer. It wasn’t something I needed to know in my line of work. Perhaps if I ever had to go undercover as a palaeontologist… Thankfully, Mack and Dr. Google were on the case.
“Okay, so nobody actually does know what dinosaurs sounded like. Scientists just guess based on the shape of their nasal and throat passages.” She scrolled down farther on her tablet. “In fact, they think a T-Rex made a low rumble, and birds honked rather than sang.”
“Then why don’t these pterodactyls honk?”
“Do you know how many guns there are in America?” I asked. “If we had to put up with constant honking, somebody would shoot the things.”
“But the sign at the entrance said no guns are allowed inside the park?”
Ah, such innocence. I glanced at Ana, and she smirked back. Dan obviously hadn’t corrupted her son completely yet.
“Why don’t we move on to the rainforest?”
“Wait, where’s Josh?” Carmen reappeared with a bag of donuts, and boy did I need the carbs.
“Bradley took him to the gift shop.”
“And you let him?”
“I didn’t think it would hurt. Neither of them’ll want to carry stuff around the park all day.”
“You didn’t think it would hurt?” Carmen stared daggers at me. “Have you met Bradley?”
Five minutes later, I found myself lugging two bags of assorted shite towards the rainforest as Josh waddled along beside Carmen in his dinosaur costume. Every so often, Carmen gave me a sideways glare, and worse, Race had told Josh about the honking and he’d decided to try it out. And people wondered why I didn’t want kids? If this carried on, I might be tempted to use the Walther CCP nestled in the small of my back on myself.
“Isn’t this fun?” Bradley asked.
“Do you want an honest answer to that?”
He ignored me completely. “I loooove amusement parks. Next time, we should come for the whole weekend.”
Next time, I’d be joining Black in Barcelona. Or perhaps I could fly home to London and visit a few old friends? Bradley could take his chances with Ana. Even the debacle at the health farm had been more fun than this.
Although I had to admit that the rainforest was cooler than I thought it would be, and do you know why? Fake rainforests in Virginia didn’t have mosquitos. Or poisonous spiders or bullet ants or giant centipedes. The caterpillars were safely locked up in a glass case, as were the titan beetles, and nobody needed to worry about getting dive-bombed by bees. As with the dinosaur collection, the background noises were piped in, albeit a little more realistic this time.
The long, curved glasshouse took up half of the park’s second ring, heated by solar panels that doubled as part of the “Manmade Miracles” exhibit in the next circle. The boys clambered up a wooden staircase to view the “forest” from above while the rest of us meandered along a brick path that wound through the trees below. Having visited the jungle many, many times before, I’d smoothed my hair down with plenty of anti-frizz serum and worn it in a French plait. The other girls had followed suit with sensible styles and plenty of bobby pins. Bradley, on the other hand, looked like the silver-and-turquoise love child of a Q-tip and a cotton candy machine by the time we got to the animal section, and none of us dared to look at each other because we’d have collapsed into giggles.
A girl holding a tame monkey in a lime-green harness seemed to be having a similar reaction. She approached with a smile, but every few seconds, her gaze strayed to Bradley’s hair and the corners of her mouth twitched.
“Would you like to meet Jimbo?” she asked. “He’s a capuchin monkey. Please don’t touch him, though.”
“Should he be out with people like that?” Dan asked. “This isn’t a circus.”
“He only comes out for fifteen minutes twice a day,” the girl explained. “The rest of the time, he lives with his friends in the enclosure over there. In an ideal world, the animals here wouldn’t be in captivity, but they’ve all been rescued from bad situations and none of them are suitable for release. Jimbo belonged to a pop star until the guy got sick of having to change his diaper and dumped him at a pseudo-sanctuary.”
“A pseudo-sanctuary?”
“One that claims to be a rescue operation, but really they’re breeding the animals and selling them. Jimbo’s cage hadn’t been cleaned for months, and he was just sitting in the corner, rocking. He gets lonely.” The girl offered Jimbo a finger, and he held onto it. “See? He seems to identify more with humans than with other monkeys. We tried all sorts of enrichment ideas, but he’d just stand at the bars trying to touch people the whole day. So we’re experimenting with outings, and now he seems to be happier.”