Soyona Santos is a black-market broker and queenpin in the underground de-extinction trade. She rose to international notoriety after the 2018 Lockwood Estate incident brought de-extinct life, and the technology to create and modify that life, into the world outside the corporate sphere. Santos spent years as a wanted criminal in multiple countries, facilitating the illegal movement of animals and animal products through the Amber Clave night market in Malta.
In the spring of 2022, Santos was tracked down by a collaboration between the Central Intelligence Agency (USA) and the General Directorate for External Security (France). A sting operation in Valletta, Malta resulted in her being apprehended by French intelligence operative Barry Sembène, though Santos personally ensured the deaths of at least three CIA operatives during the sting. She is likely being held by either American or French authorities, but as she faces criminal charges in the jurisdictions of numerous countries her eventual sentence has yet to be seen.
Name
Much like the woman herself, the given name Soyona has unknown origins. It is quite a rare name and may have originated in Greece or Mexico, possibly related to the name Sonya. These names occur not just in Western countries but also in the Middle East, South Asia, and Russia. If these names are indeed related to Soyona, it may mean “wisdom.”
The surname Santos is far more common and originates from the Portuguese and Spanish word for “saints.” Its history comes from the Latin word “sanctorum,” also meaning “saints.” This name, obviously, has a Christian background and was commonly given to babies born around All Saints’ Day. It also became very common in Brazil after the fall of the Brazilian Empire and abolition of slavery; recently liberated people living near the Bay of All Saints would adopt this surname if they had no records of their own family names. Soyona Santos’s family history is made no clearer by analysis of her name, as she speaks with an English accent and has a mixed heritage.
Biography
Early life
Little is known about Soyona Santos’s origins. The actress chosen to portray her, Dichen Lachman, was born in 1982; this may give some idea as to Santos’s age. She speaks with a refined Received Pronunciation accent, suggesting that she spent some of her formative years in England. Her surname, however, suggests a possible family origin in the Iberian region, though her ethnicity is at least partly East Asian.
Although her background is still shrouded in mystery, her description of the relationship between Maisie Lockwood and Claire Dearing seems heavily laced with emotion. Dearing had unofficially adopted Maisie, keeping her off the grid and hidden away from society; when Dearing demanded that Santos give up Maisie’s location, Santos countered that Maisie “was never [Dearing’s] to begin with,” her voice showing clear signs of anger. Although nothing about this reaction has been elaborated, some have speculated that Santos was kidnapped as a child herself, and that this may be how she ended up living in the criminal underworld.
Dichen Lachman has stated on social media that she has a backstory for Soyona Santos in mind, but she has yet to reveal it to fans.
Santos’s rise to power
Though her origins remain murky, what is known for certain is that Soyona Santos became a significant figure in the global black market by the early 2020s. Her specialty was animals and animal products: rare and exotic creatures would often fetch a high price if offered to the right buyers, and Santos facilitated these trades. This enabled her to form connections between buyers and sellers, and she was both enriched and empowered by these relationships.
It is unknown how much direct involvement she had with the science of de-extinction, which was first developed in the 1980s by International Genetic Technologies. By 1997 the technology became public knowledge after years of rumors, and in 2005, the company succeeded in opening a theme park and zoo attraction called Jurassic World which exhibited animal and plant life brought back from the dead through genetic engineering. Santos would have been young for much of this time, and possibly not yet in power. By the time Jurassic World closed in 2015, the technology that had brought dinosaurs back to life was now being turned toward darker goals: some, such as InGen’s Head of Security Vic Hoskins, believed that military animals would always remain superior to drone technology and sought to train the more intelligent dinosaurs for such a purpose. In addition, he persuaded InGen’s renowned geneticist Dr. Henry Wu to use genetic engineering to design combat-ready organisms, which he believed would one day be the premier fighting strategy in war-torn regions.
Wu’s first attempt, the Indominus rex, had turned out as fearsome as intended but was mishandled by InGen so badly that it was the direct cause of Jurassic World’s closure. Santos was well aware of the events that transpired at Jurassic World and believed that the animal training would have been sufficient on its own. InGen’s technology remained difficult to access for years after the park’s closure, but in 2018, this all changed. An illegal operation retrieved live specimens and DNA samples from the abandoned park. Eli Mills, a financier to former InGen founder Benjamin Lockwood, organized an auction to sell off the assets to the very sort of people Santos would have worked with. He had also sheltered Henry Wu from the authorities, conscripting him to further his military bioengineering work with a second, supposedly more efficient creature revealed to bidders at the auction as the Indoraptor. It had been trained to attack on command, with a laser sight designating the victim and an acoustic signal issuing the attack command. However, this too ended in disaster, as animal rights activist Claire Dearing intervened to shut the auction down. The hybrid animal died in the subsequent events, and numerous other animals escaped into the wild.
While this was an unprecedented type of crisis for the United States and the world at large, it was opportunity for people like Santos who knew how to take advantage of it. Plenty of the animals, as well as a full case of DNA samples, had found their way onto the black market before the auction was disrupted, and the technology to create more had now gone open-source after decades of being jealously hoarded by a handful of companies. The animals in the wild were essentially up for grabs, with the American government struggling to move its cumbersome bureaucracy fast enough to keep pace with the developing situation. Poachers and illegal breeders took many of the creatures, which would fetch hefty sums on the exotic animal market.
The dinosaurs may have first turned up in the United States, but the auction had seen bidders come in from around the world, and soon the animals started to appear everywhere. Illegal trade bloomed; the animals and their associated technology had applications in the biomedical industry, agriculture, and genetic research as well as the exotic pet trade, trophy hunting, and cockfighting. People would pay huge amounts of money to watch the animals fight to the death. They also found their way into the exotic meat trade, with some species cloned seemingly just to be harvested as food. The animals’ bones were event highly valued, as rumors began to spring up that they could be ground into medicinal powder.
Santos played a pivotal role in the underground dinosaur trade. Her base of operations was the Amber Clave night market, covertly operated in Malta; the biggest hub was in the Maltese capital of Valletta. From this strategic port city in the middle of the Mediterranean, Santos could ship goods to southern Europe, the Middle East, and northern Africa under the noses of the authorities. The eyes watching her were many, but she evaded capture all this time. The Amber Clave flourished, and Santos found many powerful and wealthy business partners.
Paramount among these was Lewis Dodgson, the CEO of Biosyn Genetics. For years, Biosyn had competed with InGen for dominance in the bioengineering industry, but time and time again InGen had come out on top thanks to Henry Wu and the wealth of the company’s founders. Now that InGen was out of the game, it was Biosyn’s time to shine. They succeeded in winning the support of the United States Congress for sole collection rights of animals captured on American soil; any animals held in sanctuaries by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or found by civilians were shipped to the Biosyn Genetics Sanctuary in the Italian Dolomites, just a few hours’ flight from Valletta. One by one other countries followed suit, sending their animals to Biosyn, but in the beginning this process had not been as easy, and Dodgson had looked into illegal methods to obtain animals. One of these was Kayla Watts, a smuggler who often took work with Santos. It is unknown whether Dodgson met Santos through Watts, or whether Santos introduced Watts to Dodgson.
Biosyn obtained animals off the black market, and Dodgson appears to have hired help through Santos on other occasions too, using poachers to capture high-value creatures from the wild and ship them to the sanctuary through the Amber Clave. The more layers of obfuscation were in place, the less likely Santos or Dodgson would get caught. There is also some evidence that Dodgson sold to the Amber Clave as well as buying from it, trading in some of his own company’s creations in order to fund further projects. By 2022, Biosyn was the world leader in bioengineering, and the Amber Clave was the most notorious black market for de-extinct creatures. Soyona Santos was underground royalty in Malta and a high-priority target for authorities as powerful as the CIA and DGSE.
Kidnapping of Maisie Lockwood
Things began to change on a global scale in the early 2020s, with numerous crises popping up around the world and causing all manner of chaos. This was generally good business for Santos, although there were hints of even bigger problems looming. One of these, the appearance of a new species of gigantic locust in America, made it as far as the Amber Clave; when these giant insects started to appear and devastate cropland, they were sometimes imported to Malta and sold alongside the dinosaur meats, bones, and pelts. It is unknown whether Santos knew about Dodgson’s complicity in this particular disaster, but the Amber Clave is likely how the insects began to invade Mediterranean countries. Dodgson remained her business partner, though he was not always so reliable. On their second-to-last operation together, Dodgson’s payment was late, so Santos planned to demand payment before delivery in subsequent deals.
Santos had only grown in power, and by now had succeeded where InGen and Eli Mills had failed. She had succeeded not only in training animals to follow commands, but in ensuring their complete loyalty. InGen Security’s work at training raptors had been on the right path, and Santos considered their efforts to genetically engineer a perfect killer animal to be foolhardy; their failure had been in assuming the animals’ loyalty could be programmed into them. When she began breeding creatures of her own for security functions, she nurtured their predatory instincts. She had four Atrociraptors, a relative of the famous Velociraptor, bred for the Amber Clave. These raptors—named Ghost, Red, Panthera, and Tiger—were from genetically engineered stock, with their size and speed enhanced, but Santos did not rely on this tampering alone to ensure their effectiveness. She trained them to attack by playing to their natural instincts. Taking cues from Eli Mills’s efforts with the Indoraptor, she used a laser pointer to designate a target, and then used a high-pitched sound to command the animals to attack. She could also summon them on command, bringing them to her defense.
Santos’s Atrociraptors showed a level of complete loyalty that InGen had never accomplished with Velociraptor or its more ill-fated hybrid experiments. Unlike the hybrids, Santos’s animals were not so heavily amalgamated; though they were indeed engineered, all their alterations were well-understood ones. These were not experimental species and therefore not nearly as unpredictable. And unlike InGen’s attempts at raptor training, Santos was not teaching these animals to resist their carnivorous urges. Instead, she was training them to be more efficient at something they already wanted to do—hunt, kill, and eat. She honed and focused this behavior to an extreme degree, and for that, the Atrociraptors showed her absolute, unwavering respect.
By early 2022, Dodgson had contacted Santos with a new objective. He had two new targets he needed to acquire, both of them well-hidden and highly unusual, but related. The first was the theorized offspring of an InGen Velociraptor known as Blue, who had been engineered with the ability to reproduce through parthenogenesis. She had been trained by an InGen animal behaviorist called Owen Grady, who was living off the grid in the northern Sierra Nevada. It was suspected that Blue, and any offspring she might have produced, were probably nearby. The second target was Maisie Lockwood, a fourteen-year-old girl who popular conspiracy theory held was the first-ever successful human clone, a genetic twin of the deceased scientist Charlotte Lockwood. According to Dodgson’s intel, Maisie had been living with her grandfather, Benjamin Lockwood, at his estate in Orick, California but disappeared during the night of the 2018 black-market auction. Her existence had not been known to the public until now, when information about her was leaked to the press (likely to aid in the search for her). Considering her status as an illegal clone, and her disappearance during the 2018 incident where ex-InGen executive and current animal rights activist Claire Dearing was present, it seemed likely that Maisie had been taken in by Dearing.
Santos dispatched two of her underlings to find these targets. To search for the raptor, she chose Rainn Delacourt, an American poacher who held the respect of an outlaw gang. Santos and Delacourt appear to have been familiar with each other; Delacourt was wholly loyal and even admiring of Santos, but unpredictable, and she used derision to keep him in line. To search for the girl, Santos chose Carolyn O’Hara, who she appears to have considered more trustworthy. Both of them departed for northern California; Dearing had once been romantically affiliated with Grady, and so it stood to reason that they were together now.
In the spring, Santos got word that Delacourt had confirmed Blue had a daughter and that, having tracked Owen Grady to his cabin, he had also located Maisie Lockwood living there. Not long after, Delacourt and O’Hara laid and sprung their traps, securing both the juvenile raptor and human. Before long both were en route to Valletta: the young raptor was being flown in by Kayla Watts, and Maisie was on a second plane with O’Hara. To reduce the risk of their plot being exposed, Santos ensured to fly the two separately the whole way to Biosyn’s headquarters, despite Dodgson having requested a single delivery. Concurrent hand-offs would take place at a disused airfield to the north of Valletta.
2022 arrest
As Santos was chauffeured to the airfield, she was phoned by Dodgson, despite her assurances that she would be the one to call him. He was anxious to learn whether his assets had arrived yet, and upset that Santos had flown them separately; Watts had already landed and was unloading, having been paid €50,000 for her flight. Santos arrived shortly before the second plane, which bore Maisie Lockwood. The girl was understandably hesitant to get in Santos’s vehicle, but alone in an unfamiliar country and surrounded by Santos’s henchmen, she had little choice. Santos ensured that Maisie was treated properly, however, on her drive to the hangar where Biosyn’s jet awaited. The young raptor departed at around this time.
She did not go with Maisie to the hangar, having other business to attend to in the Amber Clave. In an alleyway behind the market, her four prized Atrociraptors had been loaded into crates and placed in a truck, ready to be shipped off to a buyer in Riyadh. Delacourt and his lackey Wyatt Huntley met her in the alley, where she waited flanked by armed guards. Santos expressed mock surprise that Delacourt had succeeded in capturing the juvenile raptor, which she was told had arrived from America in good condition. She offered them a new job and revealed her deadly cargo, and described to the curious but apprehensive Delacourt how the animals had been trained to kill on command—and their relentlessness in carrying out those orders. Although the animals clearly made Delacourt nervous, he accepted Santos’s offer of €50,000 to transport them, double the usual price for such a job.
The second he picked up the bag of cash, however, they found themselves surrounded by armed government agents. They had been set up for a sting by American and French intelligence operatives, Wyatt Huntley revealing himself as a double agent working with the CIA. Santos and Delacourt were ordered to surrender, but Santos was not ready to give up: her bodyguards opened fire, providing cover for her escape. The truck’s driver made for the harbor, racing through the streets to keep ahead of enemy agents.
The truck ran over a spike strip and crashed into a boathouse, the Atrociraptor cages scattered. Operatives were now closing in on the crash site, ready to arrest the driver and capture the animals. Huntley was among them, as was DGSE operative Barry Sembène, the leader of the French division. There were four armed men, and four well-trained raptors: this was simple math. Santos immediately radioed the driver, commanding him to trigger the remote release on the cage doors. The driver questioned her order, but was pressed to obey by the threatening edge to her voice. The animals emerged from the cages agitated by the crash but unharmed, and Santos, from a vantage point overlooking the boathouse interior, used a laser pointer concealed in her bracelet to designate the operatives as targets. The signal was sent, and the raptors had their command. Unlike the driver, they did not question it for a moment.
It took only a second for the raptors to each determine which enemy to kill first. Panthera targeted Huntley; Sembène was targeted by Red. All four raptors launched into combat immediately. Among the targets, Sembène was the only one to evade a fairly quick death by hiding inside a boat rather than fleeing the scene; a foot chase on open ground meant a swift death for the target. As Santos watched the raptors do their work, she realized that she too was being hunted: across the way was Claire Dearing, Maisie Lockwood’s illegitimate adoptive mother.
Santos made her escape into a nearby apartment down the street, looking to make an escape out the window onto the rooftops. She ignored the frightened family living inside; they knew who she was and were wise enough to get well out of the way. Dearing was not far behind, naïvely assuming that Santos would be willing to talk; instead Santos launched into combat, summoning Tiger using the device in her bracelet before hurling a flowerpot at Dearing’s head. While Dearing was dodging this attack, Santos snatched a steak knife from the kitchen counter and advanced with wild slicing attacks. Dearing had unexpectedly armed herself with a taser from one of the cages at the crash site, and she counterattacked. The two women fought fiercely, but ultimately Dearing managed to hit Santos with the taser after being thrown to the floor. If Santos felt threatened she did not let it show: at first she seemed merely annoyed that Dearing had used a taser meant for animals on her, then expressed anger at Dearing’s self-proclaimed motherhood over Maisie. When Dearing would not relent, Santos admitted that Maisie was being flown to Biosyn, and that it was too late for Dearing to reach her in time.
Tiger came to Santos’s defense, and Dearing turned her taser on the Atrociraptor to deflect the attack. Now back on her feet, Santos used her laser to mark Dearing for death. Tiger wasted no time in following this order while Santos fled the apartment. She returned to the crash site to regroup, only to find Sembène alive with Owen Grady by his side; the two men had succeeded in trapping Red in one of the cages. Their prior experience with raptors had allowed them to become the sole survivors of the attack, and Santos was taken by surprise. Sembène turned his gun on her, placing her under arrest. Grady, in radio contact with Dearing, learned what she knew; evidently she was still alive too. Sembène let Grady go, and the raptor trainer commandeered a motorcycle to head off after Dearing. As he drove out of the boathouse, Santos gave him a final parting gift: with her hands behind her head in a show of submission, she activated the laser in her bracelet, marking Grady. Ghost and Panthera, the two raptors left available, gave chase as he disappeared from sight. Grady had been the one to prove raptors could learn to follow orders, and now he would face the reality he had brought into being.
Sembène brought Santos into custody, but she was able to make one phone call, contacting Biosyn’s chief of security Jeffrey to relay to Dodgson what had happened. She had hoped Tiger would finish off Dearing, but she had survived long enough to communicate with Grady about Maisie’s true destination, which meant Santos had betrayed Dodgson to his enemies. She had also learned how Dearing and Grady survived and escaped—Santos herself had been betrayed by her once-loyal smuggler, Kayla Watts, who was now bringing them to Biosyn Valley on board her plane the Midnight Oiler.
Current status
After the 2022 incident in Valletta, Santos was most likely taken into custody by French intelligence, since the arresting officer was from the DGSE. However, it would probably be up to Maltese customs and border control to extradite her to any other country to stand trial. At this time, it is not known where she is being held, or what country will ultimately be the one to hold her prisoner.
Her criminal enterprise suffered a major blow due to the 2022 sting. Multiple vendors, patrons, and providers at the Amber Clave, including Rainn Delacourt, died when Delacourt released multiple animals in his own escape attempt; some of these animals even got out into the street, causing the death of at least one tourist. While the authorities had located the marketplace hidden beneath the city, they had not revealed their hand until the sting; now, with civilian casualties and the deaths of at least three foreign intelligence operatives in Valletta, the authorities have no reason to refrain from bringing the hammer down on the Amber Clave. Some of the animals have probably been secured, their owners arrested and the animals taken by the intergovernmental Department of Prehistoric Wildlife for treatment and rehabilitation. The Amber Clave’s Valletta locale has most likely been shut down, any escaped vendors lying low and waiting for the heat to die down.
Grady and Dearing, with the aid of Watts, succeeded in finding Maisie and the juvenile raptor in Biosyn Valley. Dodgson was undermined by his own employee, a man called Ramsay Cole, and numerous executives in the company were arrested in association with his various crimes. Lewis Dodgson himself did not survive the incident in the valley, having accidentally lit the sanctuary on fire while trying to cover up evidence of his guilt and subsequently allowing animals into the facility where he was trying to make his escape alone.
This is, in all likelihood, not the end for Santos. Whether the bars of any prison can hold her indefinitely remains to be seen, but even so, it is far from unknown for crime lords to maintain their authority even while imprisoned. Santos has a long reach, allies around the world, and an immense amount of power in the black market. She is sure to be a serious test of her captors’ capabilities.
Skills
Criminal enterprising
For years Santos has acted as a broker in the underground dinosaur trade, essentially being a middleman facilitating transactions between sellers and buyers of illegal goods. She was most notorious in Malta, where she was a major player in the Amber Clave night market. Her base of operations appears to have been the port city of Valletta, which allowed her to ship cargoes to three different continents around the Mediterranean with ease. A disused airfield outside the city on the northern coastline serviced her shipments by air, and she almost certainly used similar unofficial landing sites in the other countries where she was active. To maintain power, avoiding the authorities was paramount.
Santos forged many connections in the black market around the world. She most likely entered the underground de-extinction trade in 2018, when the first assets were sold by Eli Mills at the Lockwood Manor auction. Since then, the illegal trade has bloomed, with the animals sold for many purposes: as exotic pets, for unauthorized scientific research, as guard animals, for cockfighting, as sources of exotic meat and pelts, for their bones, and more. Santos’s business partners are as varied as the Amber Clave’s goods: they range from blue-collar poachers with no particular noteworthy background to wealthy CEOs of the world’s leading corporations. She has her ways of dealing with all of these types of people, learning what makes them tick and understanding just how much utility she can squeeze out of them without driving them away. Most of her underlings remain fiercely loyal to her. She can also analyze potential threats with great speed, recognizing just from a person’s demeanor how much danger they could pose to her. This allows her to have the advantage over her enemies more often than not. It is unknown whether she speaks languages other than English, but with a major transnational criminal enterprise to run, it is likely she is multilingual.
Despite being wanted in multiple countries for a range of crimes ranging from animal trafficking to first-degree murder, Santos is only known to have been arrested once, following a prolonged and convoluted tracking operation by a joint taskforce of American and French operatives. During the fight that preceded her arrest in 2022, she showed no fear; when confronted by armed operatives she simply had her guards open fire so that she could exit the scene. She even attempted to keep her animals from the authorities as to conclude their delivery at a later date, and when this effort was foiled, she deliberately had the animals released and sicced them on the operatives, causing three deaths. Finally, after formally being arrested, she sicced the animals on Owen Grady, adding this to her list of charges seemingly just out of spite. When taken down, Santos makes it a problem for everyone in proximity to her.
Violence
When running a criminal operation with global influence, it befits one to be willing to show they mean business, and Santos is far from above maiming and killing when the need arises. Her preferred method of execution is attack animal, and she is quite efficient at this, but when pressed she is also quite capable of using a range of weapons for defense and offense. During the 2022 incident, she was pursued by Claire Dearing and attacked her using household objects such as a flowerpot and a steak knife. When wielding the latter, she preferentially used a series of horizontal slashing cuts, ideal for causing wide lacerations that would lead to an enemy bleeding to death. Her wild, aggressive movements during a fight also serve to intimidate. Santos has not been seen using firearms, though she is almost universally surrounded by bodyguards who are themselves very heavily armed and willing to give their lives for Santos.
Her physical strength is nothing to dismiss either. Despite having a slender frame she is deceptively powerful. During her fight with Dearing in 2022, she was able to bodily throw Dearing into a window with enough force to shatter it and knock Dearing to the floor. Willing and able to use anything at her disposal to subdue an enemy and perfectly capable of becoming completely unhinged during a fight, Santos is a lethal threat to any opponent. Her durability is also astonishing: she was able to take a direct blow from a taser meant for incapacitating small dinosaurs, but appeared more humiliated than hurt. She showed no signs of injury, only irritation.
Skill with animals
One of the deadlier exports of the Amber Clave night market was attack animals, used by crime lords to defend their property from trespassers of all sorts. She oversaw the comings and goings of many illegal goods in the market, but when it came to attack animals, she did not merely supervise, but directly took part. Most famously, she trained a quartet of genetically-engineered Atrociraptors to kill on command with an unprecedented level of success.
She took direction from the failures of others. InGen Security had previously attempted training Velociraptors in a project called the Integrated Behavioral Raptor Intelligence Study, where they had taught the animals various commands and tried to understand their cognitive patterns in order to integrate them into the Jurassic World animal park. InGen’s Head of Security had also authorized research into military bioengineering, starting a series of woeful failed attempts to use genetic manipulation to build the ideal military animal. The first attempt, the Indominus rex, was a proof of concept; the second, the Indoraptor, was a more refined effort, but still fruitless. At least in the latter of these two, there had been some form of training involved. The animal was taught to treat anything targeted by a red laser sight as its next victim, and when commanded by an acoustic signal, it would attack with single-minded determination. Santos was dismissive of the hybrids as a concept, claiming that their creators had expected loyalty to be genetically coded; she utilized methods more in line with InGen Security, nurturing the animals to win their loyalty instead. However, her goals were markedly different from those used by Owen Grady in the I.B.R.I.S. project. Whereas Grady had been training the animals to resist their instincts and perform in shows for a theme park, Santos was training hers to eat people.
Despite the violent nature of the animals’ training, Santos showed both pride in her raptors and affection toward them. Before they were to be shipped off to Riyadh, presumably to meet their new buyers, she was seen reaching into the cage containing the one called Ghost to give an affectionate scratch. The raptors showed incredible loyalty to her, too, trusting in her authority and executing her orders without hesitation.
Views
On power
Becoming a prominent figure in the criminal underworld of the dinosaur black market has led to Santos developing particular ideas about how to obtain and maintain power. She rules through a combination of fear and admiration, becoming a terror to her enemies and a queen to her allies. Those who show her respect and loyalty are rewarded with frequent job offers at an exceptional rate, especially if the cargo is dangerous or particularly valuable.
A significant amount of holding power involves dealing with other people. Santos understands how fine the line often is between ally and competitor, and demonstrates this philosophy with her various business partners. Lewis Dodgson, the CEO of Biosyn and one of her prominent buyers and suppliers, was useful but not always reliable, so she ensured to be firm when dealing with him. Dodgson held too much economic and political power to be disposed of easily, and Santos still understood him to be a valuable resource anyway, but she did not trust him and made this plain. Nothing she did for him was free, even when it benefitted her too. When she was being pursued during the 2022 incident, she gave up Dodgson’s complicity to Claire Dearing before having a raptor attack her; if Dearing was killed then Santos’s relationship to Dodgson was intact, but if Dearing lived, Dodgson would be brought down along with Santos. She had a similar way of dealing with Kayla Watts, who likewise did not have completely unwavering loyalty. Watts was in it for the money, not for anything else, and her loyalty was first to her family back home; Santos handled Watts by presenting herself as the sole source of reliable income that Watts needed. Finally, her naturally authoritative personality makes it easy for her to command those (human or otherwise) who instinctually defer to strength, such as the Atrociraptors and Rainn Delacourt.
Santos does not show fear, under any circumstances, which is an integral part of maintaining her image. By exuding confidence at all times, she intimidates rivals and foes while inspiring her underlings. She also understands that she can afford variable tactics when facing threats, demonstrating her adaptable strategy during the 2022 incident. Here, she was never concerned about being harmed by the operatives trying to capture her; legal authorities, to some degree, must play by a set of rules, whereas Santos is not beholden to the law by any means. She is able to play dirty while these foes are restricted by procedure. On the other hand, seeing Claire Dearing in pursuit actually alarmed her, and this was where she implemented more drastic measures, putting civilians in the line of fire and directly engaging in combat herself. Dearing, who had been living outside the law for four years and was currently in dogged pursuit of her adopted daughter, was perhaps a greater threat than the armed forces seeking her out.
On de-extinction and genetic engineering
For Santos, de-extinction was an extremely lucrative opportunity. The illegal animal and fossil trades now suddenly intersected and presented Santos with the chance to obtain some of the world’s rarest assets, creatures whose uniqueness meant that wealthy customers would pay top dollar for them. To that degree, Santos can be said to be an avid supporter of de-extinction. In fact, the black market she controlled was often the forefront of new developments in that field of science; it is the first place that Atrociraptor is known to have appeared, created as a designer organism by an unknown party and bred under Santos’s supervision. She owned four Atrociraptors of thoroughbred lineage, each highly trained by her personally. The Amber Clave also saw new species that had been bred for food, such as a species of anicent lamprey. Santos was not particularly concerned about the animals getting out into the wild; if this happened, the animals could potentially breed or be re-captured, increasing the chance that they or their descendants might once again pass through her marketplace.
While Santos is enthused about de-extinction, some aspects of genetic engineering are less appealing to her. She is particularly disparaging about artificial hybridogenesis, the creation of brand-new species through gene splicing, a technique pioneered by Henry Wu. While he had initially begun this research for scientific purposes, it was quickly reapplied for entertainment, and just as rapidly was co-opted by military and paramilitary interests. Santos considers bioengineering for combat to be a completely foolhardy venture, and with the numerous failures in this practice, her criticism is not without merit. She believes that loyalty cannot be derived from genetics alone, and that this mistaken assumption is a critical reason why efforts at military bioengineering failed. Instead, she believes that training the animals in ways that make them feel rewarded and cared for is the only way to gain their alleigance. In her own words, “You can’t engineer loyalty. You have to nurture it.”
On the Maisie Lockwood case
During the 2022 incident involving the kidnapping of Maisie Lockwood, Santos expressed contempt toward Maisie’s adoptive mother Claire Dearing. During their fight, when Dearing demanded to know her daughter’s location, Santos retorted with a resentful “She was never yours to begin with.” Her tone is markedly different from other times she had made angry remarks toward her enemies, bordering on the tone she uses when making threats. The broader implications of her statement here are unknown; it is unlikely that Maisie’s adoption being unofficial and illegal would be something Santos would have a moral objection about, so it seems as though her issue lies elsewhere. It may be because Maisie was kept away from the world for the first fourteen years of her life, deprived of the agency to make her own decisions—something that is of the utmost importance to Santos herself.
Relationships
Buyers and market customers
Santos made her ill-gotten wealth primarily off of her buyers, who went to her to obtain all manner of illicit goods. This ranged from live dinosaurs to powder made from their bones, and her clientele was just as diverse. She sold to common gangsters, and to the upper echelons of the corporate elite. Her goods were shipped out of Malta to countries all around the Mediterranean, and by airplane they could go farther; few places were beyond her reach. She had a particularly close relationship with Lewis Dodgson, the CEO of Biosyn Genetics, who was always on the lookout for new animals to supply his biomedical researchers with. Dodgson was not always a reliable business partner, though, and was notorious for being late on payments; despite this, their working relationship was lucrative enough for Santos to stay in touch. Dodgson was the one who commissioned her to obtain Maisie Lockwood and the raptor Beta, for which he paid handsomely. She still charged him an additional fee to deal with Maisie’s parents when they came chasing after their daughter. Despite her best efforts, Santos was unable to stop them from reaching Biosyn Valley, but Dodgson died due to his own mistakes that very night, so this ended up being a non-issue.
Of course, while Santos’s high-profile customers made the biggest payments, far more reliable income came from the regular patrons of the Amber Clave night market, many of whom were neither exceptionally rich nor powerful. They were simply connected enough to know about the market and in possession of enough money to try out its exotic wares. Santos herself was not commonly seen on the market floor, instead lurking behind the scenes, but she likely received a cut of the vendors’ profits and cockfighting victors’ winnings. Currently, with Santos arrested by French intelligence and the Amber Clave exposed to the authorities, her income is on hold; she was presumably wise enough to hide her money in offshore accounts where it would be untouchable, but it will take work for her to reestablish her reputation among buyers.
Suppliers and other employees
In order to obtain the animals and products she sold to her buyers, Santos employed a range of suppliers from all kinds of backgrounds. Some of these were tasked with actually obtaining the creatures, others with preparing them for the market, and others were involved chiefly in transport. She rewarded them well for their efforts; tangential to the 2022 incident she made consecutive €50,000 cash payments to smuggler Kayla Watts for the transport of a juvenile Velociraptor to Malta and the duo Rainn Delacourt and Wyatt Huntley for the transport of four Atrociraptors to Saudi Arabia. It is unknown how much she rewarded trafficker Carolyn O’Hara and her unnamed partner for kidnapping Maisie Lockwood, but this presumably fetched a high price too.
Delacourt and Huntley were part of a poacher gang that operated in the United States of America, capturing dinosaurs from the wild and sending them to the market. Some of these creatures arrived alive, but others were butchered for their meat, hide, and bones. Huntley was a newer member of Delacourt’s gang, but she appeared quite familiar with Delacourt himself; the junior novelization describes him as having become an internationally wanted criminal after becoming involved with Santos. He showed her admiration and utter subservience, but she kept him in line by counterbalancing rewards with veiled insults. For example, after his success with capturing Beta the Velociraptor in 2022, Santos expressed mock surprise that he did not fail before immediately offering him a second high-paying job. She regularly entrusted him with operations that were of immense value to her, so she did not actually doubt his abilities, but feigned doubt in order to encourage him to prove himself with each successive job. This kept him at peak performance. She also had to ensure he did not get too hesitant with a particularly dangerous or questionable mission; Delacourt was unscrupulous but he had his limits, whereas Santos was far more ruthless in comparison.
Kayla Watts was another of Santos’s most valued suppliers, but this feeling was not reciprocated. To Watts, Santos was less someone to be admired and more of an employer. Santos was well aware that Watts was primarily in the business for the money: she supported her parents with her income, and this was what had brought her into the black market in the first place. Santos encouraged Watts’s loyalty not with radiating dominance like she did with Delacourt, but with ensuring she would get no better deal for a job anywhere else. Like Delacourt, Watts was directly involved with some of Santos’s most high-value operations, particularly the transportation of animals to Biosyn Valley. She was also the pilot hired to move Beta the Velociraptor from the United States to Malta.
Some of her buyers also played the role of supplier on occasion. There is evidence that her business partner Lewis Dodgson sold Biosyn Genetics assets to the Amber Clave from time to time, with animals believed to be Biosyn-exclusive turning up in the black market. In the game Jurassic World: Evolution 2, the Hammond Foundation lead Cabot Finch also aids in her enterprise while pointedly ignoring the illegal aspects of her activities on Santaegidicus, mostly out of fear.
Most of the black market’s smugglers were familiar with Santos, but not all of them worked for her; her relationship to an Italian smuggler named Wigi is unclear, as he mentioned her by name during the 2022 incident but suggested that Watts was desperate for money in order to still be flying for her. He may have been a business partner, or a small-time rival. Santos may have also had relations with other people who arrived early to the de-extinct animal trade, such as Eli Mills, an American financier who organized the first-ever dinosaur black market auction, Gunnar Eversoll, the auctioneer at that auction, or Anton Orlov, a Russian mobster who organized the first dinosaur cockfighting rings. She did have more transport workers than just Watts, of course; she moved her assets around by land, sea, and air, and is known to have employed a number of people for this purpose, such as a truck driver seen during the 2022 incident behind the wheel of a Volvo N 10 loaded with Atrociraptors. This man was given a device to remotely open the animals’ cages if needed, demonstrating that even the most seemingly inconsequential of Santos’s employees were prepped for danger at any given part of the job.
Other employees of hers were not contracted suppliers, but security. She was often seen surrounded by highly-trained, heavily-armed gunmen who served as her bodyguards during dangerous operations or in places where her enemies might be prying. They were among the most loyal of her employees, and she probably took great care in hand-selecting them. She rewarded them not just with money, but with shows of confidence, the greatest and rarest honor she could bestow. During a shootout between her bodyguards and an international anti-poaching taskforce, she was seen fearlessly walking through the hail of bullets to make her escape, knowing without question that her guards would ensure she made it through unharmed. Their loyalty was indeed true: her guards, not the authorities, were the ones to initiate the shootout, despite being in a fully-exposed position where they could easily be killed. They were entirely willing to lay down their lives for her.
While it is unknown whether any of her bodyguards were indeed killed in the shootout, she did lose two valuable employees for good that day. Watts, having seen Maisie Lockwood being trafficked, was convinced to aid Claire Dearing and Owen Grady in their rescue efforts; she betrayed Santos in doing so, and for this she will likely have to watch her back in certain parts of the world. Santos lost Rainn Delacourt in a far more literal sense: when the shootout started, he fled, leaving his final payment behind. While running through the black market, his actions caused numerous animals to get free, and one of them—a juvenile Baryonyx in the cockfighting pits—killed him after mistaking him for an opponent. Many of her suppliers and other employees were likely arrested during the incident or were tracked down afterward. At this point, she has been taken into custody, which presents her with a significant obstacle to controlling her criminal enterprise.
Authorities
Few things were more pertinent to Santos’s operation than keeping one step ahead of the authorities. Locations at which the black market operated had to be chosen specifically to avoid detection; a prominent hub was located in the Valletta harbor in a refurbished underground complex, its entrances kept hidden and closely guarded. It is unknown what measures Santos took to hide it from the local Maltese authorities, but since she was well known to the people of Valletta and widely feared, it is possible she may have resorted to both intimidation and bribery. International task forces were also on the lookout for her, including government agencies of the countries where she was wanted: the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, particularly its Dangerous Species Division, and the Directorate-General for External Security of France were known to be monitoring her as of 2022. She was also of interest to the intergovernmental Department of Prehistoric Wildlife, which was investigating the Amber Clave.
Santos only allowed those who had proven their loyalty in her employ, which would have exposed some undercover agents trying to infiltrate her inner circle. To further hide herself, she held all of her business dealings in secluded places with armed guards, ensuring to minimize her chances of being caught in the act. For years the efforts against her mounted, but she got away with it until 2022. That year, one of Rainn Delacourt’s supposed poaching allies, Wyatt Huntley, turned out to be a double agent working undercover for the CIA. He and his fellow operatives were working in collaboration with French intelligence agents led by Barry Sembène to orchestrate a sting operation. By making a job offer to Delacourt and Huntley, she was exposed, leading to a violent confrontation. During the clash, she unleashed four trained animals to attack one detachment of operatives, including Sembène and Huntley. Of the four, Sembène was the only survivor, having previously trained with raptor dinosaurs at InGen Security and thus more experienced than his ill-fated colleagues. It is unknown if other operatives died during the incident. Santos was arrested by Sembène, and has since been taken into custody.
Maisie Lockwood and family
One of the stranger jobs Santos was involved with was the kidnapping of Maisie Lockwood, a girl who until fairly recently was not even known to exist. Santos learned from her contractor Lewis Dodgson that Maisie was the clone of a deceased scientist named Charlotte Lockwood, who herself was the daughter of InGen co-founder Benjamin Lockwood. It is unclear whether Dodgson explained to Santos exactly why he wanted Maisie, other than that she was immensely valuable to Biosyn; however, as the only living human clone, the possibilities were easy to speculate on. Maisie had been hidden away by her grandfather for years and only left her home after the 2018 incident, which had been a significant turning point in Santos’s life too. After the incident Maisie had been taken in by two former InGen employees, Owen Grady and Claire Dearing, and was living off the grid in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Grady and Dearing held significance to Santos as well. Grady had formerly been an animal behaviorist employed at InGen for their I.B.R.I.S. project, which had first demonstrated how to teach commands to raptor dinosaurs by understanding how their minds worked. Santos’s trained Atrociraptors were the natural consequence of the research Grady pioneered. Dearing, on the other hand, had been the Operations Manager at Jurassic World, and later founded the Dinosaur Protection Group and became a leading voice in the extinct animal rights movement. This put her at odds with Santos’s line of business.
Santos orchestrated the kidnapping of Maisie Lockwood with the aid of Carolyn O’Hara, not traveling to the United States herself to oversee it. However, she did briefly meet Maisie when the girl arrived to Malta, having been led to believe she was being safely taken into custody by the government and only now realizing she had been lied to. She was understandably reluctant to comply, but she had little power to refuse. Santos, to her credit, seems to have sympathized with Maisie to some degree, since the girl had been deprived of agency over her own life for so many years and was full of pent-up frustration over it. Santos did not travel with Maisie to the hangar where she would be transported to Biosyn, but did ensure she was brought there safely. It seems unlikely that Dodgson was just going to keep Maisie living at Biosyn headquarters indefinitely after he was done with her, so it may be that Santos had plans in place for this inevitability once the job was done. However, they remain unknown.
Whatever the plan was for after this job, it became irrelevant when Grady and Dearing joined up with the American and French intelligence agents monitoring Santos and participated in a sting operation in Valletta. Maisie had already been sent on her way, but her parents were in hot pursuit. At the site of the conflict, Dearing caught sight of Santos with a look of recognition on her face, and Santos knew that she was about to be pursued. This was not like the government operatives, who were bound by law and procedure when dealing with her. Dearing believed herself to be Maisie’s rightful mother, and while Santos vehemently disagreed that Dearing had any right to Maisie at all, she knew precisely what kind of determination Dearing would bring into battle. She was briefly at an advantage when Dearing wanted to talk things out first, but when Santos launched into combat, Dearing countered fiercely. Eventually Santos was stunned by a dinosaur taser and knocked to the ground. Irked at having been struck with a weapon meant for animals, she admonished Dearing and rebuked her as Maisie’s true parent, but was forced to give up Maisie’s whereabouts. She overcame her temporary disadvantage with the timely arrival of one of her Atrociraptors, which she had summoned while escaping the streets.
When she returned to the scene of the crime, she was met with Grady, who had helped French operative Barry Sembène survive the Atrociraptors and re-cage one of them; the two men had worked together at InGen and were both familiar with raptor behavior enough to have an advantage. Santos was taken by surprise by their survival and was arrested by Sembène, who allowed Grady to go off and join Dearing in pursuit of Maisie. But as Santos put her hands behind her head, she used the tiny laser device hidden in her bracelet to mark Grady as a target for her Atrociraptors. She was already under arrest and complicit in the murder of at least three government operatives; she did herself no favors with this final act of aggression, seemingly acting out of pure spite.
After her arrest, she made a phone call to Biosyn’s security officer to warn Dodgson about Maisie’s parents, having learned that they survived due to Kayla Watts betraying Santos in order to help them. These efforts were in vain, however, as Maisie’s parents continued to find more allies along the way and ultimately rescued their daughter. However, the original reason that she had been brought to Biosyn’s headquarters—to provide research data to Henry Wu, along with a juvenile raptor captured at the same time—did end up accomplished by Maisie’s own volition. Santos, having been apprehended, has not given any remarks about this turn of events, and will probably not encounter Maisie’s family in the future.
De-extinct animals
When de-extinction went open source after the 2018 black market auction organized by Eli Mills and Gunnar Eversoll, animals that had once been confined to secluded research facilities and high-security theme parks suddenly became available to just about anyone. Those with means, as always, had the lion’s share of access, and Soyona Santos placed herself in a position to control that access by acting as a broker between sellers and buyers. She became a powerful figure in the Amber Clave of Malta, practically owning the market. All kinds of animals, some living and some dead, came in and out of the market daily through secret access points, shipped around the world at Santos’s orders through trade hubs like the Amber Clave.
The purposes of these creatures in the market were multitude. Some were used as cockfighters, including Baryonyx, Allosaurus, Oviraptor, Triceratops, Stygimoloch, Gallimimus, Pyroraptor, Nasutoceratops, Dimetrodon, Carnotaurus, and Lystrosaurus. Some of the smaller animals, including Microceratus and Dimorphodon, were chiefly sold as exotic pets. Nearly all of the animals that entered the market in any capacity were potential sources of exotic meat and pelts, and it is likely that many losers of the cockfights ended up this way. However, some species were almost exclusively sold as food, such as an unidentified species of lamprey and a large type of hybrid locust that plagued North America in the early 2020s. The black market may be how these locusts spread to the Eastern Hemisphere, since live specimens were kept in the Amber Clave before being cooked. Lesser-known market animals include Pachycephalosaurus and Velociraptor, while the junior novelization references Elmisaurus. Some, such as Parasaurolophus, were slaughtered for their bones, which were ground into powder and used as an alleged traditional medicine. Discarded teeth, too, were commonly seen in the market. Of course, this is likely far from a comprehensive list of animal species that have passed through the Amber Clave’s halls, nor the purposes for which they were bought and sold.
Soyona Santos had a particularly notable relationship with four Atrociraptors, each a thoroughbred of a specialized designer breed. Santos obtained them at a young enough age for them to imprint on her and recognize her as a parental authority figure. As they matured, she trained them in a similar way to InGen’s I.B.R.I.S. researchers using techniques later pioneered by Eli Mills, but also bore in mind the failures of both these predecessors: rather than rely on the raptors’ genetic traits, however proud she was of their good breeding, Santos taught them to optimize their predatory instincts to hone in on a target and kill with precision and efficiency. Their sense of smell was superb among theropods, as was their speed and agility. Over time she taught them to kill humans on command, likely using targets such as rival crime lords, underlings who attempted to betray her, or law officers that threatened to expose the Amber Clave or Santos. The four animals, named Ghost, Tiger, Panthera, and Red, showed complete respect and loyalty to Santos and carried out her commands without hesitation. They were given their targets by a laser sight, and commanded to attack with an acoustic signal; Santos could also summon them with this signal. Since they could respond to her electronically-assigned commands from other locations in the city, it is likely they were outfitted with RFID chips similar to those utilized by Masrani Global and Biosyn in order to communicate when visual or auditory contact were impossible. Santos was affectionate toward these raptors and proud of what they could do, though she generally only showed them tenderness when other people were not around.
Eventually, these animals were to be sold to a buyer in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia where they would presumably be employed as guard animals. Santos’s affection for these raptors, however strong, did not preclude the inevitability of selling them. On the same day that they were to be shipped off, she also oversaw the transit of another high-value specimen, a juvenile Velociraptor called Beta, the offspring of an I.B.R.I.S. specimen named Blue. This young raptor had been requested by Lewis Dodgson of Biosyn, along with the young Maisie Lockwood, to be used in research. Capturing both of these targets ended up a disaster for Santos, as it drew the ire of Maisie’s adoptive parents; they joined up with intelligence agents tracking Santos to the site of the Atrociraptor shipment. When the battle caused the truck carrying the animals to crash, Santos ordered the driver to release them, and she assigned four operatives as targets. The raptors carried out her command with glee, killing all but one of the men. Red was re-contained in a crate by the survivors, while Tiger was assigned to chase after Claire Dearing. During the chase, Tiger was injured and left behind on the streets of Valletta. When she was arrested, Santos instructed Ghost and Panthera to pursue and kill Owen Grady, though with the aid of the traitorious Kayla Watts he and Dearing both survived. Panthera was unable to catch up to the fleeing airplane, while Ghost succeeded in boarding but was immediately after knocked overboard and fell headfirst into the Mediterranean from a great height. It is unknown whether Ghost survived impact in the sea, and furthermore unknown what became of all four raptors.
It may be that the Atrociraptors, along with other Amber Clave animals, may have been captured and transferred under the authority of the Department of Prehistoric Wildlife. This organization works to combat the illegal dinosaur trade and rescue exploited animals, moving them to secure sanctuaries. The most prominent of these is the Biosyn Genetics Sanctuary, where Santos had both supplied to and obtained animals from before; her Atrociraptors may have ended up here. The sanctuary is now under jurisdiction of the United Nations following the death of Biosyn’s CEO and the exposure of corruption in the company’s executive ranks. Santos’s Atrociraptors could very well be alive in Biosyn Valley, but if so, it is unlikely she will be granted the right to visit them by her captors.
Portrayal
Soyona Santos is portrayed by Dichen Lachman. She is not based on any particular character from Michael Crichton‘s works, instead being an original character created for Jurassic World Dominion. The casting of Dichen Lachman was partly because of her role as Ayacoatl in the 2008 SyFy Channel film Aztec Rex, widely considered a notoriously bad film. Director Colin Trevorrow enjoyed her performance, and allegedly wanted to see her feature in a dinosaur film with higher production value. While more traditional fans felt Santos was not a conventional enough Jurassic villain, many audiences enjoyed her confident portrayal of the character and enjoyed the unique aspect she brought to the world of the series. Lachman has expressed interest in resuming her role if invited to future projects.
While preparing for the role, Dichen Lachman researched the lives of real-life fossil poachers, using this as a frame of reference for the kinds of experiences that Soyona Santos might have had in her own criminal career.
In earlier scripts, her first name was Sierra. This is a reference to Dichen Lachman’s character from the 2009-2010 science fiction television series Dollhouse.
