“You’d do that for two strangers?”
Callan looked out over the dark ocean. The wind pressed against us.
“Right now,” he said, “no one is a stranger; it’s just living and dead.”
Another pause; the captain exhaled—a slow, shaking sound that carried more relief than any words could have.
“Alright,” he said.
“We’ll be ready for you.”
“You might’ve just saved our lives,” the captain whispered.
The signal faded, the static rising to swallow his voice.
“Bay City Aquarium,” he added, barely there now, “we’ll see you tomorrow night.”
Then the static took everything.
Callan set the mic down on the ledge beside the radio.
The rooftop stretched around us, wide and empty.
I looked at him.
“So,” I said. “One captain and a sixteen-year-old.”
He nodded.
“Yeah.”
The wind pushed across the roof again, carrying the smell of salt and cold water and the faintest edge of something I couldn’t name. Something that might have been the future arriving, whether or not we were ready.
“Think we can handle that?” I asked.
Callan stared out toward the black horizon where a boat waited somewhere in the dark. A father and his son. Running out of time.
“Yeah,” he mumbled.
“I think we can.”
Twenty Two
Sloane
That night the exhaustion finally caught up to both of us.
The day had been long—moving tanks, releasing the sharks, planning for the captain and his son to arrive tomorrow—my muscles ached in places I didn’t know muscles existed, and my head hung heavy with everything we’d done and everything still coming.
Callan leaned against the hallway wall outside the staff locker room, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand.
“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I smell like fish, freezer burn, and stress.”
I let out a tired laugh.
“That’s disturbingly accurate.”
The locker room showers still worked—the aquarium’s water systems remained one of the few things we didn’t have to worry about yet. Small miracle.