The moment the director’s footsteps disappeared, Callan started moving.
Deliberate. Measured. Precise.
Something had changed in him. The uncertainty, the anger I’d seen earlier that day—gone. Replaced by something colder. Sharper. He moved like a man who’d made a decision that was irrevocable. He pulled the emergency storm bins from the storage room without a word, dragging them across the floor with a scrape of plastic on tile that set my teeth on edge.
“Feed stations,” he said shortly, already pulling one open.
I gave a curt nod and fell into step beside him, my hands reaching for supplies before my brain fully caught up. We’d done this before—the methodical preparation for hurricanes, the systematic battening down against storms. Check theseals. Load the cartridges. Secure the mounts. But those protocols had been built for wind and rain and surge tides. Not for this. Not for whatever waited beyond our walls now, and the difference sat in my chest the whole time I worked.
Callan handed me sealed feed cartridges. His fingers brushed mine for a fraction of a second; his skin was hot.
“Stock them,” he said.
I moved from tank to tank, opening the automated feeders and loading them carefully. My hands understood this work even when my mind drifted somewhere else—checking seals, securing mounts, making sure they’d dispense on schedule. I focused on the small things: the click of a cartridge locking into place.
I turned to see Callan at the control panel, his face lit by the soft glow of indicator lights as the hurricane shutters descended. Each massive panel of reinforced steel crawled downward with a grinding whine, swallowing the viewing windows inch by inch until the outside world vanished completely.
I watched the last sliver of night disappear behind the steel, and dread tightened in my stomach.
With each shutter that came down, the shadows deepened around us. The vast space contracted, our world shrinking with every mechanical groan. Each clang of metal meeting concrete reverberated through the empty corridors, final and absolute. No undoing this. No pulling the shutters back up and changing our minds. I quickened my pace. Callanand I worked in perfect, practiced silence. Words would have only slowed us down, and neither of us had any to spare.
Down in the lower levels, he tested each surge door, spinning the heavy metal wheels until the locks engaged with a satisfying thunk. I trailed behind, my fingers moving across the generator panel—toggle this switch, check that gauge, confirm the fuel reserves that would keep us running if everything else went dark. I read every number twice, triple-checked every connection, not because I needed to, but because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant letting the fear take over.
We’d checked every lock, sealed every entrance, secured every system.
We’d done everything right. Why did each breath seem like it caught halfway up my throat?
Through the thick walls of the aquarium, I heard it—thin and distant at first, unmistakable: the long, rising howl of emergency sirens cut through the night.
My hands became still.
The sirens multiplied. One became five became twenty, wailing across the city in overlapping waves of warning. They didn’t sync up. They weren’t supposed to. The sound became dissonant and overwhelming, bleeding through concrete and steel and every barrier we sealed shut. My body locked in place, ears straining to make sense of it, to find some pattern, some signal that would tell me what was coming and how fast and how bad.
Beside me, Callan’s hands never faltered. He didn’t look up. He didn’t freeze. He simply kept moving—steady and relentless and sure—as if he’d already accepted whatever those sirens meant and decided it didn’t change what needed to be done.
“Move, Sloane.”
His voice was low, but not harsh, not unkind. It left no room for argument, no space for the panic clawingits way up my chest. It cut straight through the noise in my head and landed somewhere deep, somewhere my body understood before my mind did.
I moved.
By the time we finished the last system check, the aquarium fell silent.
Too silent.
The sirens outside had stopped. I didn’t know which was worse. The tanks glowed faintly in the darkness, casting shifting blue patterns across the walls and floor. Without the overhead lights, the whole building seemed different—still, like the place holding its breath along with us.
Callan stood near the main control panel, his hand resting on the switches. He didn’t move right away, just stood there, looking at the gauges, the readouts, the little green lights confirming that everything inside these walls would keep running without us. His jaw appeared tight. I recognized the look. He didn’t want to leave.
Neither did I.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket.
No signal.
I frowned and moved toward the entrance, holding it up higher. Stupid. I knew it even as I did it, but I did it anyway.
Nothing.