“Again.”
The word hung in the air between us.
Neither of us spoke for a few seconds, then she asked the last question I expected.
“What about the body?”
I blinked.
The practicality of it caught me so off guard that a short, raw laugh escaped before I pushed it down. Not because anything was funny, because honestly, nothing was. But because we were standing in the doorway of a director’s office discussing the disposal of a coworker I’d just put a spear through, and she’d jumped straight to logistics.
“Shit,” I said. “I hadn’t gotten that far.”
I leaned back against the wall and stared at the ceiling, thinking, obviously leaving him on the walkway wasn’t an option. The smell was already unbearable, and in this heat, it would only get worse. And if there was even the smallest chance that whatever this was spread through decomposition—
“We could put him in one of the tanks,” I said slowly.
Her eyes went wide.
“Thesharks?”
“No,” I said immediately. “Absolutely not. We donotneed zombie sharks.”
The thought alone made somethingin my gut twist sideways. Infected great whites circling the central tank. I shoved the image away before it could take root.
Sloane crossed her arms, still pale, still rattled, but I could see her forcing herself to think through it.
“There has to be somewhere we can—”
“The piranha exhibit.”
She stopped.
“Thepiranhas?”
I nodded. “They’ll strip a carcass to bone faster than anything else in this building. And that tank’s self-contained—separate filtration, no cross-contamination with the main system.”
She stared at me for a long moment.
“That is genuinely horrifying, Callan.”
“Yeah,” I admitted.
“But it solves the problem.”
For a second, she just looked at me. Then—despite everything, the fear or the fact we were standing in the wreckage of everything we’d known forty-eight hours ago—a small laugh broke out of her.
“We’re discussing feeding our coworker to piranhas.”
“Welcome to Friday,” I muttered.
The laugh faded as fast as it came. Reality settled back over her face.
“You’re sure he’s dead?” she asked quietly. “Completely?”
I nodded.
“Spear through the skull.”