All of them at once.
Her screams changed, became higher, broke apart into something wet and choking. Her arm reached up between the bodies pressing down on her, fingers splayed, grasping at nothing. Her legs still kicked, still moved.
Then they didn’t; the arm dropped, and the sounds stopped.
They hunched over her, pressed against her, pulling and tearing at something not clear from this distance.
The wet sounds carried on the wind.
Sloane grabbed my arm, her fingers digging into mehard enough to make me jerk. She was trembling—not dramatically, not visibly unless you were right next to her.
Neither of us spoke.
There was nothing to say. We simply stood there on the roof of the aquarium, the wind pulling at us, the sun trying to break through the smoke and failing, and we watched the world die a little more below us.
* * *
Once we were back inside, the silence between us remained.
The hatch closed behind us with a dull metallic thud that echoed down through the shaft and into the building below. It sealed off the sky. The smoke. The sounds, but it didn’t seal off what we’d seen.
Our footsteps echoed through the upper hallway as we made our way back down toward the director’s office. The aquarium swooshed around us, steady and indifferent.
Everything was still doing exactly what it had been built to do.
Everything except the part that involved people.
I reached the office first and stepped inside, moving straight for the desk phone. I picked up the receiver and pressed it to my ear.
Nothing.
No dial tone. No static. No beep of a connection trying to find somewhere to go.
“Dead,” I said quietly.
I set the receiver back in its cradle. It clicked softly, feeling final in a way I wasn’t ready for.
Behind me, Sloane didn’t respond.
I turned.
She’d walked over to the couch along the far wall and sat down, simply dropped onto it as if her legs had decided they were done and she had had no say in the matter. Her hands rested loosely in her lap, palms up, fingers slightly curled. Her shoulders had fallen forward, and her head hung low.
Her eyes were open, but they weren’t looking at anything.
Not the floor. Not the wall. Not me.
Nothing.
Dazed. Empty. Gone somewhere inside herself that I couldn’t reach from here.
Shock.
I knew that look.
I’d seen it before. A long time ago, in a different life.
I was eighteen when I enlisted. Stupid and restless, I had something to prove in ways I didn’t understand yet, and I thought the Marines would give me something I couldn’t name—purpose, direction, anything to fill the space inside me that never felt settled, no matter what I did.