She started toward the kitchen, then paused and looked back at me.
“You realize if this works, we’re basically recruiting them into your crazy brother’s island survival plan.”
I smiled slightly.
“Pretty much.”
She shook her head, but a small grin tugged at the corner of her mouth.
“Your family sounds insane.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Then I looked back down at the map one more time. At the tiny speck of land sitting three hundred miles north in the cold Atlantic water. My brother’s paranoid, over-engineered, heavily fortified answer to a question no one else had bothered to ask.
“But right now?” I tapped Finn’s Island with my finger.
“Insane might be the thing that saves our lives.”
Twenty Four
Sloane
Iwatched Callan move through the heavy service door that led out to the interior viewing platform of the holding pool, the same one we’d used days earlier to release the sharks. I followed him partway down the corridor and leaned against the doorframe while he worked the manual valve.
The pump system groaned as he opened the drain.
Water rushed out of the holding pool in a steady, hollow roar, spilling back through the tide channel and into the ocean beyond. The tank emptied slowly, leaving nothing but damp concrete.
He stood there a moment, watching. When he came back in, he wiped his hands on a rag and headed straight for the operations panel mounted along the corridor wall.
“Draining it completely?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He flipped open the metal cover, fingers moving across the switches and gauges with quiet confidence. “With them coming in through the tide gate, I don’t want anything between them and dry ground.”
He pressed one of the buttons. A green indicator light blinked on.
“Good,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Tide gate still responds from the board. System’s operational. I wasn’t sure if the generators would run it, honestly.”
One less thing to worry about.
I exhaled slowly.
“Good.”
Still a lot of things that could go wrong tonight. But one less.
We spent the next hour dragging furniture through the quiet hallways.
Two stiff leather couches from the main entrance lobby scraped loudly across the tile as we maneuvered them toward the offices near the director’s suite. The sound echoed through the empty building in a way that made the silence left seem even deeper.
“Not exactly luxury accommodations,” Callan said as we shoved the second one through the doorway.
“Better than the floor.”