I tried calling Peter.
The screen didn’t even try. No ring. No static. Just two small words:
Call failed.
I tried again, pressed his name, and held the phone to my ear, waiting for anything—a half-second of connection, a fragment of his voice, even the click of a voicemail pickingup.
Nothing.
I stared at the screen. My reflection stared back, barely visible in the dim blue light. The cold knot that had been sitting in my stomach all night tightened, and for the first time since the shutters came down, it became real—the weight of not knowing, not knowing where he might be, not knowing if he was home safe, not knowing if the sirens had reached his part of the city or if he’d heard them at all.
I lowered the phone slowly and slid it back into my pocket, my hands shaking. I pressed them flat against my thigh and held them there until it stopped.
Behind me, Callan grabbed his keys. The jangle of metal broke the silence, sharp and sudden.
“Ready,” he said.
His voice sounded
different—lower, controlled.
I nodded and fell into step beside him.
We walked toward the employee exit together, our footsteps echoing through the empty corridors. The aquarium was never truly quiet, not really. Pumps constantly cycled, visitors spoke, and children pressed their faces against the glass. Even after hours, the building had a pulse to it—the steady mechanical heartbeat of filtration systems and climate controls keeping thousands of living things alive.
Now it just seemed empty, gutted.
Callan unlocked the door. The key scraped in the lock, loud in the silence, and the deadbolt slid back with a click.
For a second, neither of us opened it.
We just stood there, side by side in the dim blue glow of the corridor, close enough that his breathing was audible, sonear that I sensed the strain emanating from him in surges, mirroring my own.
I didn’t want to open that door. I didn’t want to know what had become of the other side. As long as we stood here, in this sealed, quiet, safe space, I could pretend, tell myself the sirens had been a drill, that Peter would be home, safe, probably annoyed, that the world outside was the same one we’d left a few hours ago.
Callan looked at me, just for a moment. His eyes caught the faint light from the tanks behind us, and I saw something there I hadn’t expected—not fear, exactly, but the effort of holding it back.
Then he pulled the door open.
The night air hit us first, off somehow. And beyond the doorway, darkness. Not the soft, familiar darkness of a city at night, with its streetlights and headlights and glowing windows, just darkness.
The parking lot appeared almost completely black.
The lockdown protocol had killed the exterior lights. All we had now was the sickly red glow leaking from the emergency exit sign and some distant orange streetlights down the road.
We couldn’t see shit.
Behind us, the aquarium sat massive and dark against the sky, all concrete and steel and silence.
I stepped out onto the pavement, my eyes straining to adjust. The air was colder than it had been earlier, sharp against my skin after hours in the climate-controlled building. And there was an odor, faint, metallic, almost like blood, but that didn’t seem right, that didn’t make sense. I breathed itin again, slower this time, trying to place it.
Blood.
The shapes of our vehicles waited across the lot—my sedan and his pickup, dim outlines against the deeper darkness. Two ordinary cars in an ordinary parking lot. Everything looked the same as it always did, and none of it felt right.
I took a step toward them.
Callan’s fingers wrapped around my forearm.