She winced, but didn’tlook away.
“Right.”
Silence again, longer this time.
Then she took a breath and squared her shoulders. Something visible in her eyes, not acceptance, exactly.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go deal with it.”
I grabbed the spear and pushed off the wall.
“Stay behind me.”
She gave me a flat look.
“He’s already dead, Callan.”
“Yeah,” I said, pulling the door open and checking the hallway before stepping through.
“I’m just not one hundred percent certain he’s the only one that got in.”
Twenty One
Sloane
By the end of the week, the aquarium had changed; it became quieter.
Not because the city outside had gone silent, but because the life inside the building had changed, too.
Every day followed the same routine—long, exhausting hours of cooking everything that might spoil. The cafeteria, storage rooms, and even the little employee break areas were stripped bare. We cooked until the air inside the building hung thick with oil, salt, and roasted meat.
Everything that could go into the freezers went into the freezers. Rows of labeled containers stacked like bricks of survival.
Strange, doing something so domestic while the world outside died, but food meant life now, and every bit mattered.
The hardest part of the week, though, hadn’t been the cooking but the relocation of the sharks.
We spent two days moving them from the main interior tank to the exterior ocean holding pen. Nets, gates, slow movements, patience. Dangerous work even in normal circumstances, and both of us ended up soaked, bruised, and barely standing by the time we finished.
Now we stood together on the inside platform overlooking the holding tank. We watched as the tide crept in. It was time.
The heavy ocean gate loomed beneath the waterline, separating the tank from the open sea beyond. Once it lifted, nothing would keep them here anymore.
“They’ll be fine,” Callan said beside me.
I nodded.
“I know.”
And I did.
Sharks belonged to the ocean. Aquariums only ever served as temporary addresses for animals built to travel hundreds of miles of open water, but, well—watching them circle below us, something pulled in my chest, almost like saying goodbye to something bigger than fish.
Callan worked the manual lever slowly, and the mechanism groaned as the gate rose.
For a moment, nothing happened until the first shark noticed and turned toward the widening gap, sensing the current pulling through from the open ocean.
No hesitation. It slipped through, gone.