I stared at the thick outline of the main tank where Frank drifted in slow, patient circles, where the sharks moved in their endless, ancient patterns, indifferent to everything above the waterline.
Survival.
That was the word now. Not preservation. Not conservation. Not the careful, measured stewardship we’d both built careers around.
Survival.
An idea formed slowly, took shape in the back of my mind before I was fully aware of it.
“What if we release the sharks?” I said.
Callan didn’t respond immediately, but I saw the shift in his posture, the way his body went still—not tense—the way he listened when something caught his attention.
“Into the ocean,” I said.
His head came up. His eyes locked onto mine.
I kept going, my voice steadier than I felt.
“If we take the sharks out of the equation, more fish survive the consolidation. Smaller species reproduce faster. They’re sustainable. We’d be building a food source that replenishes itself instead of one that gets eaten from the top down.”
I gestured at the blueprint, at the network of tanks he’d been marking for consolidation.
“The sharks require the most food of anything in this building,” I said, “by a significant margin. Every pound of fish we feed them is a pound we can’t use ourselves.”
I hesitated, then added quietly, “Or a pound that could keep dozens of smaller fish alive.”
The words hung between us.
He stared at me; his expression was unreadable.
I pushed forward.
“They don’t belong in here anymore, Callan. Not under these conditions, not when they could survive out there without
us—no walls, without feeding schedules, or someone deciding whether they were worth the resources.”
He exhaled slowly, as his gaze drifted away from me toward the glass.
“They’ve never hunted in open water,” he said after a moment. “They’ve been fed on a schedule their entire lives.”
“They’re still sharks, Callan.”
He didn’t argue that.
“They’d adapt,” I said. “The instinct’s there; it’s always been there; the aquarium just suppressed it.”
I could see the war happening inside him, between the man who’d spent his entire career maintaining controlled ecosystems—measuring salinity and temperature and pH levels, keeping everything balanced, keeping everything alive inside walls he understood—and the man who was standing in a building with no help coming, trying to figure out how to keep two people and a hundred-year-old turtle alive for as long as possible.
Letting the sharks go meant giving up control and allowing nature to take them, accepting that what happened to them after that was no longer his responsibility.
For a man like Callan, that was not a small thing.
“And Frank?” he asked.
My throat tightened.
Frank couldn’t survive out there; a century of captivityhad made certain of that. His immune system, his feeding behavior, his ability to navigate open currents—all of it shaped by a life lived inside glass walls.