Chapter 14 #2
“We need surveillance. We can’t keep climbing onto the roof every time we want to know what’s happening out there.”
His eyes flicked to mine, then back to the plans.
“Tank cameras,” he said, “we’ll pull one from the smaller reef exhibit—it’s redundant anyway if we’re consolidating. We can mount it on the roof and run the feed down to one of the monitors in the security office.”
“And the lower-level corridors,” he added, tapping the blueprint. “We should block them, whatever’s heavy enough. Create choke points so if anything breaches a door, it doesn’t have a clear path through the building.”
“That’s a smart idea,” I said, marking it on the plan.
For a few minutes, it almost seemed normal. Simply two people standing over a table, solving a logistics problem, as if we were troubleshooting a system failure or planning for a storm surge, instead of the end of everything we’d ever known.
He tapped the main tank area with his pen.
“We need to ration our resources,” he said.
I looked up.
“What do you mean?”
“The fish,” he said. “We transfer everything we can into the main tank.”
My stomach tightened.
“Callan…”
“The smaller exhibits are resource drains,” he continued, his voice steady and practical in a way that told me he’d already thought this through and was just walking me to the conclusion.
“Independent filtration systems. Separate heating elements. Separate feed schedules. Each one pulling power we can’t afford to waste. ”
“Callan, the sharks—”
“They’ll do what sharks do.”
The words hit hard.
My voice sharpened. “They’ll decimate half those populations within days.”
He met my eyes, not defensively, not dismissively, but honest.
“This is survival,” he said quietly.
The word changed the temperature of the room.
“The sharks and Frank are the most valuable animals in this building,” he continued. “The main tank is our most stable ecosystem, with the largest water volume and the best thermal regulation. If power becomes limited… when power becomes limited—that’s the one we preserve.”
Frank.
The hundred-year-old green sea turtle who had been living in that tank since before either of us was born.
Frank, whom Callan checked on every single morning before he spoke to another human being.
Frank, whom he hand-fed on Tuesdays and Fridays, whom he talked to when he thought no one was watching.
Something flickered across his face when he said the name—brief, buried, but I saw it.
“I’m being honest with you, Sloane,” he said, his voice lower now. “I don’t think this is ending anytime soon.”
The cafeteria seemed to shrink.
“And I’m trying to buy them time,” he added, “mainly Frank.”
I leaned back slightly, my fingers curling against the edge of the table.
It was a solid plan. Logically, it was the right call. Consolidate systems. Preserve the most stable environment. Minimize energy consumption across the board and extend the life of the generators as long as possible.
Emotionally, it was like triage.
Like standing in front of a row of tanks and deciding which lives were worth the power it cost to keep them alive.
“It’s going to hurt,” I said quietly, “watching it happen.”
“I know.”
Silence settled between us.
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 captivity had 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.
“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.