Chapter 18
Eighteen
Callan
By the time we made it back to the director’s office, the building had settled into its nighttime rhythm—generators running low, water moving through pipes somewhere behind the walls, and the occasional distant splash from one of the tanks.
I set the marine radio on the desk and rubbed the back of my neck. My shoulders ached. Everything ached, actually. The kind of bone-deep tired that comes from running on fear indefinitely.
“Are you hungry?” Sloane asked.
I let out a breath that almost passed for a laugh.
“Yeah. Actually, I am.”
She nodded toward the hallway. “Tomorrow, when it’s light, we should start cooking through the perishables. Get everything prepped and into the freezers before it goes bad.”
“Agreed.” I paused. “And we need to finish dealing with the rest of the fish situation, too.”
Her face tightened at that. The unspoken list of everything that still needed doing—the tanks, the species we didn’t have the ability to save, the ones we’d have to let go.
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “I know.”
For a moment, neither of us moved. Tomorrow was going to be brutal, and we both knew it.
I clapped my hands lightly against my thighs.
“Alright. Let’s go raid the cafeteria.”
Sloane gave a tired smile with a half-hearted laugh. “Raid. That makes it sound exciting.”
“Everything sounds exciting when the world’s ending.”
We kept the lights off as we moved through the corridor, navigating by the dim red glow of the emergency strips along the baseboards.
The cafeteria seemed enormous in the dark. I grabbed a flashlight but kept the beam angled low, careful not to let it catch the shutter seams.
“What are we thinking?” I asked quietly.
“Snack foods,” she said. “Low commitment.”
“Low commitment food. I can respect that.”
We went through the cabinets and drawers with quiet efficiency: granola bars, bags of chips, trail mix. A couple of plastic-wrapped muffins that were probably stale before the world ended. Sloane grabbed sodas from the vending machine.
Then I found a jar of peanut butter in the back of a cupboard and held it up.
“Oh, hell yes.”
Sloane laughed softly—a real one this time. “That might be the most emotion I’ve ever seen from you.”
“Peanut butter is a cornerstone of survival.”
“That is absolutely not true.”
“It is in my world.”
She rolled her eyes but pulled two spoons from the drawer anyway.
A few minutes later, we were back in the office with our haul spread across the desk. The second couch sat pushed against the wall where I’d dragged it in earlier from the employee lounge, and the two formed a loose L-shape—a strange little living room in the middle of everything.
We settled in; Sloane took the far end of one couch; I dropped onto the other.
For a while, the only sounds were wrappers crinkling and the quiet crunch of chips. The peanut butter jar sat on the cushion between us, traded back and forth without comment.
It was almost normal, almost.
But the awkwardness crept in. We would have to talk about it.
It started small; Sloane suddenly seemed very interested in the nutrition label on her granola bar. I became deeply focused on scraping peanut butter off the inside of the lid.
Neither of us looked at the other until finally she cleared her throat.
“So.”
I exhaled slowly.
“Yeah.”
She glanced up, then quickly back down.
“That was… uh…”
“Yep.”
We both stopped.
A beat passed.
Then Sloane muttered, “This is so weird.”
I laughed—short, rough, almost surprised. “You think?”
“Well, excuse me,” she said, gesturing vaguely with one hand. “Yesterday you were the coworker who absolutely couldn’t stand me, and this morning you were—”
She stopped dead, and color flooded her face.
I raised an eyebrow.
“Finishing that sentence seems dangerous.”
She groaned and dragged both hands down her face. “Oh my God.”
I leaned back against the cushion, fighting the pull at the corner of my mouth.
“For the record,” I said, “I never couldn’t stand you.”
She looked at me sideways. “Bullshit.”
“I was professional.”
“You were an ass.”
“Professional ass. There’s a distinction.”
She pointed a chip at me. “You literally wrote me up for being three minutes late once.”
“You were four minutes late.”
“Three and a half.”
“Four.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
She opened her mouth to argue, but stopped.
Her gaze drifted down to the space between us—the peanut butter jar, to the crumpled wrappers—the strange domesticity of it all, and her ears turned red again.
Finally, without looking at me, she said, “You didn’t have to do that earlier.”
I tilted my head slightly. “Which part?”
She threw a chip at me. “You know exactly which part.”
I caught it and ate it. “Ah. That part.”
She buried her face in her hands. “I cannot believe we’re having this conversation.”
“Ignoring it seems worse.”
She peeked through her fingers. Something vulnerable sat behind the embarrassment—something she was clearly trying very hard to keep hidden.
“You didn’t ask for anything back,” she said.
“No.”
“Why?”
The question was quiet, as if she were genuinely confused, like she’d been turning it over in her head for hours and still didn’t understand.
I looked at her for a moment: the tiredness around her eyes; the way her hands were still trembling slightly against her face, even now, hours after the worst of it; at the way she kept bracing herself—for disappointment, for cruelty, for the catch.
“You needed it,” I said. “That was enough.”
She stared at me.
I watched the words compute, watched them move through her—confusion first, then something softer, that broke through the careful walls she’d been holding up all day. Her eyes brightened for just a second before she blinked hard and looked away.
She grabbed another granola bar, tore the wrapper with more force than necessary.
“Well,” she muttered, not quite steadily. “This apocalypse is off to a very strange start.”
I let the moment pass.
“Just wait until tomorrow when we start relocating sharks.”
She groaned, letting her head fall back against the couch, but when she turned to look at me again, there was something different in her face, that hadn’t been there yesterday, or any of the days before that.
Almost as if she trusted me.
* * *
We pushed the couches together until the cushions met, forming something that looked like an oversized crib for two grown adults who had absolutely no business sharing a sleeping arrangement.
I stepped back and looked at it.
Ridiculous.
The director’s office had fully transformed now—supplies stacked against the far wall, the marine radio sitting on the desk next to a half-empty jar of peanut butter.
Outside the glass door, the aquarium, life support systems running on autopilot, kept thousands of animals alive in a world that had stopped caring about them.
Sloane stood beside me with her arms crossed, staring down at the couch arrangement like it had personally insulted her.
“It’s almost like I should be issued a juice box before I climb in there,” she muttered.
A laugh slipped out of me before I could catch it. Genuine and unexpected.
“Careful,” I said. “Next step is nap time and finger painting.”
She shot me a glare. “Don’t push it, Callan.”
But the corner of her mouth twitched; for the briefest second, the room seemed lighter.
I grabbed the sleeping bag and opened it and spread it onto the makeshift bed. “Luxury accommodations. Five stars. Ocean view.”
Sloane walked over slowly, still eyeing it like the floor might be the better option.
She wasn’t thrilled.
Neither was I, and not because of the couch.
I rubbed the back of my neck, suddenly very aware of how small this office was, how little space existed between that couch and the other one. How little space would exist between us once we were both lying down?
“Look,” I said, keeping my voice even. “Just for tonight. Until we sort something better out.”
She didn’t respond right away. She sat on the edge carefully, testing whether our engineering would hold, pressing down with both hands like she expected the whole thing to slide apart.
It held.
Her shoulders dropped slightly.
“We’re going to roll off this thing,” she said.
“That’s why they’re pushed together.”
“That doesn’t help.”
I sat on the opposite side, left a deliberate gap between us. Enough space to make it clear—to her, to myself—that this was practical, survival logistics. Nothing else.
The silence settled in fast, and not the comfortable kind.
Not after this morning. Not after the way things had unraveled between us while the world was busy doing the same thing outside.
I stared at the floor, found a scuff mark on the tile, and studied it as if it contained answers.
I didn’t need to be thinking about her right now. Didn’t need to be replaying the way she’d looked in the early light, or the sound she’d made when—
No.
I shut it down hard.
The last thing either of us needed was that kind of complication. Not now. Not on top of everything else.
Sloane shifted beside me.
“You’re being weird,” she said.
I huffed quietly. “Weird?”
“Yes. Weird.” She leaned back against the cushion and turned her head to look at me. “Callan, we literally had sex this morning, and now you’re sitting like I’m radioactive.”
I blinked.
“Well, when you put it like that—”
“I’m serious.”
“I know.” I exhaled slowly. Let my head tip back against the cushion. “That’s the problem.”
Her expression shifted, the sharpness faded, and something more honest took its place—something tired and uncertain.
The day sat between us, all of it. The radio transmission, the smoke-filled skyline.
The growing, suffocating certainty that the world beyond these walls might already be gone—and that the two of us, sitting in this stupid couch fort with peanut butter and chip crumbs, some guy on a boat miles from here, might be all that was left.
“Sloane,” I said quietly. “I just can’t add that to everything else right now; I don’t have room for it.”