“Frank stays. If it comes down to him dying in here or out there, we will release him,” I said softly.
Callan nodded, a small, slow movement, as if he’d known that answer before he asked and just needed to hear someone else say it.
He looked back down at the blueprint, his pen hovered over the main tank outline.
“If we release the sharks,” he said, half to himself, running the numbers the way he always ran numbers—quietly, inside his own head, “it drops our protein demand by roughly sixty percent.”
He glanced up at me.
“It buys us time.”
Time, the only thing that mattered now, seemed to be the only currency either of us had left to trade in.
He studied me for another long second; something moved behind his eyes—not surprise exactly, but close to it—recognition, the look of someone reassessing something they thought they already understood.
“That’s the smarter play,” he said quietly.
He leaned forward and wrote a small, neat notation beside the main tank on the blueprint:
Release protocol.
Two words in his sharp, angular handwriting.
They looked small on the page but enormous in reality.
I stared at them, at the finality of ink on paper, at what it meant—not just for the sharks, but for us, for the decisions we were going to keep making, day after day, in this world that no longer had room for sentiment.
Fifteen
Callan
Once we had a plan for the fish, we turned our attention to food.
Real survival. The practical kind that didn’t care about grief or shock or what we’d seen from the roof. This came down to calories and shelf life and how long two people could sustain themselves on what a mid-sized aquarium cafeteria had in its stockroom.
I grabbed a legal pad from the director’s desk and a pen from the cup beside the monitor and sat down.
The pen scratched against the paper in the quiet room.
FOOD, WATER, POWER, SECURITY
Four words. Four categories. Everything else was detail at this point.
The structure of it helped; lines on a page and fillingthem in made this seem like a problem that could be conquered. A problem with variables and constraints, and a solution somewhere inside it, if we were smart enough and disciplined enough to find it.
Sloane watched me as I wrote. A few feet away, arms crossed, her eyes on my hands as the list grew. She said nothing, but the question was there in the way she stood, the way her weight shifted forward and then back. How are you doing this? How are you sitting here making lists?
The truth was simple and not noble; I wasn’t holding it together because I wasn’t stronger or braver. I was holding it together because if I stopped, she’d have no one. And the part of me that had spent four years in places where falling apart meant people died—that part was still running, still doing what it had been trained to do, which was to keep moving until there was no reason left to move.
That part would break, just not yet.
We moved into the cafeteria kitchen together. The fluorescent lights flickered when I hit the switch—the industrial refrigerators lined the back wall, drawing power from the generators.
“Perishables first,” she said. Her voice was steady, hard with resolve, as if she were forcing herself into the part of her that solves problems instead of drowning in them.
I nodded. “Anything fresh. We eat it now. No waste.”
I opened the nearest refrigerator and stared at the contents. Eggs in trays. Gallons of milk. Produce still crisp. Meat sealed in bulk. Enough to feed hundreds. Seven days of usable life. Ten if we stretched it. Less if power failed.