Quiet. Raw. The admission I never would have made to him before yesterday.
His face changed, a softening I almost missed.
“I know,” he said.
He reached out, his hand moved toward my arm—hesitated, hung there in the space between us. I saw the brief war behind his eyes.
His fingers wrapped around my wrist. Light, with just enough contact to pull me out of my own head and anchorme to something outside of it.
“Look at me,” he said.
I did.
“Right now,” he said, his voice steady and low, “we’ll make a plan, not for the end of the world, but for today, just today.”
His thumb rested against the inside of my wrist, over my pulse. I knew he felt how fast it was going.
“Today we inventory the food supply and anything else of use. We secure every access point again—every door, every hatch, every panel. We conserve power wherever we can, and we move through this, one thing at a time.”
The steadiness in him was infuriating but what I needed.
“You can fall apart later if you have to,” he said quietly. “But not right now. Right now I need you here.”
My breathing slowed; his voice had reached the part of my brain that was spinning out of control and dialed it back.
“Okay,” I whispered.
His fingers lingered on my wrist, half a second longer than it needed to, as his thumb pressed against my pulse one more time—deliberate, I was sure of it now—and he simply let go.
His hand dropped to his side, and the air between us didn’t settle.
I sat at one of the long cafeteria tables with the building blueprints spread out between us, the paper curling at the edges from the humidity that lived inside this building year-round. The overhead lights cast everything in a flat, mutedglow that stripped the color out of the room and made the cafeteria less like a place where families ate overpriced sandwiches and more like a command center.
Callan stood across from me, one hand braced on the table, the other holding a pen he’d been using to mark access points on the floor plan. His sleeves were pushed up to his elbows. His jaw was ridged; he looked like a man working a problem, which, in reality, was what we were doing.
Working a problem.
“Okay,” I said, forcing myself into clinical mode. If I treated this like a project—like a crisis response plan with deliverables and action items—then perhaps I could keep functioning. Maybe I wouldn’t see that woman’s arm reaching up between the bodies every time I closed my eyes.
“We secure all lower-level doors,” I continued, tracing a finger along the blueprint. “Even the submerged service access points on the exterior. Especially those. If one of them gets into the water intake system—”
“It won’t,” he said. “The intake filters are industrial grade. Nothing larger than tiny particulates gets through.”
“Still,” I pressed. “We should double-check.”
He nodded once. “Agreed.”
I shifted to the next section of the layout.
“We need surveillance. We can’t keep climbing onto the roof every time we want to know what’s happening out there.”
His eyes flicked to mine, then back to the plans.
“Tank cameras,” he said, “we’ll pull one from the smaller reef exhibit—it’s redundant anyway if we’re consolidating. We can mount it on the roof and run the feed down to one of the monitors in the security office.”
“And the lower-level corridors,” he added, tapping the blueprint. “We should block them, whatever’s heavy enough. Create choke points so if anything breaches a door, it doesn’t have a clear path through the building.”
“That’s a smart idea,” I said, marking it on the plan.