Elara Voss worked like a storm contained in human form.
Her pen scratched furiously across blueprints spread across my father's study, red ink slashing over my crude sketches, turning fantasy into something that looked alarmingly like reality. Arrows pointed to ventilation shafts, calculations crawled down the margins, numbers stacked into columns that might as well have been spells.
She spoke as she worked, relentless. "Habitat airflow requires intake shafts here and here. Filtration systems here. Otherwise, everything down there suffocates. Aquatic chambers? Forget fish tanks — you're talking pressure ratings in the thousands of PSI. You'd need reinforced steel thicker than a submarine's hull."
I sat cross-legged on the floor, the childhood sketchbook open beside me. Wolves, hawks, jaguars stared up from the pages, their pencil lines worn soft from years of handling. They were my reason.
"Elara," I asked softly, "are you saying it can be done?"
She didn't look up. "I'm saying you won't survive if you cut corners. But if you don't… maybe."
Marcus, arms folded at the door, muttered, "Encouraging."
Elara ignored him.
The study looked like a war room by midnight. Plans carpeted the floor, notebooks stacked against the walls, models rising from scraps of cardboard and string. Coffee cups littered the desk like shell casings.
I watched her work, my pulse racing at every new line she drew. She wasn't dismissing it. She wasn't laughing. She was making it real.
Then, as she shuffled through my stack of sketches, her hand froze.
It wasn't the drawing of the office tower above ground. It wasn't the layered habitats for wolves and birds and reptiles. It was the other sketch. The one I had made late at night, when exhaustion blurred into dreaming.
She held it up, her brow furrowing.
It wasn't one sanctuary. It was many. Layer after layer, each one stranger than the last. Vast subterranean forests labeled Pleistocene Reserve. Caverns with rivers and lakes labeled Jurassic Wetlands. Deeper still, chambers with notes scrawled across the margins: griffins? leviathan? phoenix aviary?
My breath caught.
"You weren't supposed to see that," I said quickly, reaching for the paper.
She pulled it back, eyes narrowing. "What the hell is this?"
I hesitated. My throat tightened. But there was no hiding it now.
"It's… the bigger vision," I admitted. "Not just the ones we still have. Not just the wolves and the hawks. The ones we've lost. And the ones people think never existed at all."
Elara stared at me, silent. The storm outside rumbled, lightning flashing across her glasses.
"You're not just insane," she said finally. Her voice was quiet, not mocking. "You're impossible."
I swallowed hard. "Do you believe the dodo is gone forever? The mammoth? The thylacine? I don't. Not if we look in the right places. Not if we try. And myths…" I faltered, then pushed forward. "Every myth comes from something. Maybe not exactly as we tell it, but from something real. What if they're out there, hiding, waiting for us to find them?"
Her gaze lingered on me for a long time. Longer than was comfortable. Finally, she set the sketch down beside the others.
"You don't want a sanctuary," she said. "You want an ark. For everything. Real or imagined."
"Not imagined," I whispered. "Waiting."
She leaned back, folding her arms, studying me as if I were one of her equations.
"You understand what you're saying, don't you? You're not talking about engineering anymore. You're talking about rewriting the world."
I met her gaze, unflinching. "That's exactly what I'm talking about."
The silence stretched. Then, slowly, impossibly, she smiled. It wasn't amusement. It was something sharper. Something dangerous.
"You're either going to change everything," she said softly, "or you're going to burn with it."
And then she bent back over the blueprints.
By dawn, the house was quiet again. Marcus slept in a chair, hand on his pistol, ever the sentinel. Elara dozed at the table, cheek pressed against a page filled with equations.
I sat alone on the floor, staring at the sketch she had seen.
The extinct. The mythical.
They called to me.
And for the first time, I realized the sanctuary below wasn't just about protecting life.
It was about restoring it.