Chapter 8
Eight
Sloane
No time for hesitation.
The moment the director’s footsteps disappeared, Callan started moving.
Deliberate. Measured. Precise.
Something had changed in him. The uncertainty, the anger I’d seen earlier that day—gone.
Replaced by something colder. Sharper. He moved like a man who’d made a decision that was irrevocable.
He pulled the emergency storm bins from the storage room without a word, dragging them across the floor with a scrape of plastic on tile that set my teeth on edge.
“Feed stations,” he said shortly, already pulling one open.
I gave a curt nod and fell into step beside him, my hands reaching for supplies before my brain fully caught up.
We’d done this before—the methodical preparation for hurricanes, the systematic battening down against storms. Check the seals.
Load the cartridges. Secure the mounts. But those protocols had been built for wind and rain and surge tides.
Not for this. Not for whatever waited beyond our walls now, and the difference sat in my chest the whole time I worked.
Callan handed me sealed feed cartridges. His fingers brushed mine for a fraction of a second; his skin was hot.
“Stock them,” he said.
I moved from tank to tank, opening the automated feeders and loading them carefully.
My hands understood this work even when my mind drifted somewhere else—checking seals, securing mounts, making sure they’d dispense on schedule.
I focused on the small things: the click of a cartridge locking into place.
I turned to see Callan at the control panel, his face lit by the soft glow of indicator lights as the hurricane shutters descended. Each massive panel of reinforced steel crawled downward with a grinding whine, swallowing the viewing windows inch by inch until the outside world vanished completely.
I watched the last sliver of night disappear behind the steel, and dread tightened in my stomach.
With each shutter that came down, the shadows deepened around us.
The vast space contracted, our world shrinking with every mechanical groan.
Each clang of metal meeting concrete reverberated through the empty corridors, final and absolute.
No undoing this. No pulling the shutters back up and changing our minds.
I quickened my pace. Callan and I worked in perfect, practiced silence.
Words would have only slowed us down, and neither of us had any to spare.
Down in the lower levels, he tested each surge door, spinning the heavy metal wheels until the locks engaged with a satisfying thunk.
I trailed behind, my fingers moving across the generator panel—toggle this switch, check that gauge, confirm the fuel reserves that would keep us running if everything else went dark.
I read every number twice, triple-checked every connection, not because I needed to, but because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant letting the fear take over.
We’d checked every lock, sealed every entrance, secured every system.
We’d done everything right. Why did each breath seem like it caught halfway up my throat?
Through the thick walls of the aquarium, I heard it—thin and distant at first, unmistakable: the long, rising howl of emergency sirens cut through the night.
My hands became still.
The sirens multiplied. One became five became twenty, wailing across the city in overlapping waves of warning.
They didn’t sync up. They weren’t supposed to.
The sound became dissonant and overwhelming, bleeding through concrete and steel and every barrier we sealed shut.
My body locked in place, ears straining to make sense of it, to find some pattern, some signal that would tell me what was coming and how fast and how bad.
Beside me, Callan’s hands never faltered. He didn’t look up. He didn’t freeze. He simply kept moving—steady and relentless and sure—as if he’d already accepted whatever those sirens meant and decided it didn’t change what needed to be done.
“Move, Sloane.”
His voice was low, but not harsh, not unkind. It left no room for argument, no space for the panic clawing its way up my chest. It cut straight through the noise in my head and landed somewhere deep, somewhere my body understood before my mind did.
I moved.
By the time we finished the last system check, the aquarium fell silent.
Too silent.
The sirens outside had stopped. I didn’t know which was worse. The tanks glowed faintly in the darkness, casting shifting blue patterns across the walls and floor. Without the overhead lights, the whole building seemed different—still, like the place holding its breath along with us.
Callan stood near the main control panel, his hand resting on the switches.
He didn’t move right away, just stood there, looking at the gauges, the readouts, the little green lights confirming that everything inside these walls would keep running without us.
His jaw appeared tight. I recognized the look. He didn’t want to leave.
Neither did I.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket.
No signal.
I frowned and moved toward the entrance, holding it up higher. Stupid. I knew it even as I did it, but I did it anyway.
Nothing.
I tried calling Peter.
The screen didn’t even try. No ring. No static. Just two small words:
Call failed.
I tried again, pressed his name, and held the phone to my ear, waiting for anything—a half-second of connection, a fragment of his voice, even the click of a voicemail picking up.
Nothing.
I stared at the screen. My reflection stared back, barely visible in the dim blue light.
The cold knot that had been sitting in my stomach all night tightened, and for the first time since the shutters came down, it became real—the weight of not knowing, not knowing where he might be, not knowing if he was home safe, not knowing if the sirens had reached his part of the city or if he’d heard them at all.
I lowered the phone slowly and slid it back into my pocket, my hands shaking. I pressed them flat against my thigh and held them there until it stopped.
Behind me, Callan grabbed his keys. The jangle of metal broke the silence, sharp and sudden.
“Ready,” he said.
His voice sounded
different—lower, controlled.
I nodded and fell into step beside him.
We walked toward the employee exit together, our footsteps echoing through the empty corridors.
The aquarium was never truly quiet, not really.
Pumps constantly cycled, visitors spoke, and children pressed their faces against the glass.
Even after hours, the building had a pulse to it—the steady mechanical heartbeat of filtration systems and climate controls keeping thousands of living things alive.
Now it just seemed empty, gutted.
Callan unlocked the door. The key scraped in the lock, loud in the silence, and the deadbolt slid back with a click.
For a second, neither of us opened it.
We just stood there, side by side in the dim blue glow of the corridor, close enough that his breathing was audible, so near that I sensed the strain emanating from him in surges, mirroring my own.
I didn’t want to open that door. I didn’t want to know what had become of the other side.
As long as we stood here, in this sealed, quiet, safe space, I could pretend, tell myself the sirens had been a drill, that Peter would be home, safe, probably annoyed, that the world outside was the same one we’d left a few hours ago.
Callan looked at me, just for a moment. His eyes caught the faint light from the tanks behind us, and I saw something there I hadn’t expected—not fear, exactly, but the effort of holding it back.
Then he pulled the door open.
The night air hit us first, off somehow. And beyond the doorway, darkness. Not the soft, familiar darkness of a city at night, with its streetlights and headlights and glowing windows, just darkness.
The parking lot appeared almost completely black.
The lockdown protocol had killed the exterior lights. All we had now was the sickly red glow leaking from the emergency exit sign and some distant orange streetlights down the road.
We couldn’t see shit.
Behind us, the aquarium sat massive and dark against the sky, all concrete and steel and silence.
I stepped out onto the pavement, my eyes straining to adjust. The air was colder than it had been earlier, sharp against my skin after hours in the climate-controlled building.
And there was an odor, faint, metallic, almost like blood, but that didn’t seem right, that didn’t make sense.
I breathed it in again, slower this time, trying to place it.
Blood.
The shapes of our vehicles waited across the lot—my sedan and his pickup, dim outlines against the deeper darkness. Two ordinary cars in an ordinary parking lot. Everything looked the same as it always did, and none of it felt right.
I took a step toward them.
Callan’s fingers wrapped around my forearm.
I stopped mid-stride. His grip was not exactly rough—he wasn’t hurting me—but he was not letting go either. There was something deliberate in it, controlled, the kind of hold that said, I mean this.
“Let me go first,” he murmured. His voice barely carried past the two of us.
I blinked, tugged against his grip with a forced laugh that sounded empty even to my own ears.
“Seriously?” The word came out sharper than I intended. “I’ve been walking to my car alone since the ripe old age of sixteen, Callan.”
My whole life had become a testament to not needing anyone’s protection, not wanting it either. I’d built that, carefully, deliberately, and I wasn’t about to hand it over in a dark parking lot because the sirens had spooked us both.
His fingers remained in place, neither tightening nor loosening.
“Sloane,” he said.
His voice had changed. The familiar irritation was gone. The cold efficiency of the last two hours, gone. What replaced it made my stomach tighten—something bare and honest that he probably didn’t mean to let through.