Read Chapter 21: The Engine Room Reckoning

The heat hit Jack first—a wet, oil-scented blanket that clung to his lungs. Then the noise: the monstrous pulse of reciprocating engines, steel pistons slamming in endless rhythm, steam hissing through a dozen valves. The air shimmered with it.

He pressed himself against the railing of the upper catwalk, the forged letter and map folded tight against his chest beneath his borrowed waistcoat. Margaret was close behind him, her jaw set, one hand clutching the brass rail as she scanned the chaos below. The engine room was a cathedral of iron and fire, men in grimy singlets moving between enormous columns of polished metal, their shouts lost in the mechanical roar.

“Why here?” Margaret shouted over the din. “We should be moving up, not down.”

“Because down is where Vance isn’t looking.” Jack pointed to the far corner, where a series of locked supply cages ran along the bulkhead. “I need to stash the letter and map somewhere safe. If Moran’s men catch us with them, we’re done. But if we hide them, we control the bargaining.”

Margaret’s eyes narrowed but she didn’t argue. She followed him down the ladder to the main deck, keeping close as they threaded between steam pipes thick as a man’s torso. A crewman with a wrench shouted something Jack couldn’t hear, gesturing at them to clear out. Jack waved apologetically, mouthing “lost” and “passengers,” and kept moving.

They reached the supply cages. Heavy mesh doors, padlocked. Jack examined the nearest lock—a solid brass number, not the cheap iron ones he’d cracked a hundred times in Belfast. He slid the brass key Adelaide had given him from his pocket, not for the lock, but as a probe. No. The key was for Boston. He needed something else.

A tool room. The door was half ajar, and beyond it Jack could see workbenches, wrenches, bins of bolts. He ducked inside, Margaret on his heels. The room smelled of grease and copper. He found a thin pry bar and returned to the cages, working the edge between the lock and the hasp. Three hard pulls. The metal groaned. The lock held.

“They’re serious about their stores,” Margaret muttered.

“Good,” Jack said. “That means whatever’s inside is worth keeping.”

He moved to the next cage and tried again. On the second pull, the hasp gave with a sharp crack, splitting at the weld. The door swung open. Racks of canvas tarpaulins, coils of rope, spare oil cans. Jack shoved the ledger letter between two folded tarps, then tucked the map behind a rusted paint tin. He stepped back, kicked the cage door shut so it looked latched from a distance, and wiped his hands on his trousers.

“If Vance doesn’t know we have them anymore, we’re just two scared passengers hiding from a killer,” Jack said. “And if he does know, he’ll tear the ship apart looking for us while the letters stay put.”

“Clever.” Margaret didn’t sound impressed. “And when we don’t survive, who comes back for them?”

“We survive.” Jack said it firmly, the way you’d tell yourself something until it was true.

A raised voice cut through the engine noise, sharp and authoritative. Jack froze, pressing Margaret against the bulkhead. Two figures emerged from a narrow passageway between the boilers—a squat, red-faced man in the white-and-gold of a senior engineer, and beside him, Vance.

Vance wore an overcoat despite the heat, collar up, his pale face slick with sweat. He carried a leather case, and when he gestured, Jack caught the glint of a revolver in his other hand.

“Keep your voice down,” Vance was saying, his words carrying just enough over a lull in the machinery. “This stays between us.”

The engineer shook his head violently. “You’re asking me to sabotage my own ship. Even for what you’re paying, I’m not a suicide.”

“You’re not blowing up the ship. You’re opening a seam.” Vance’s tone was calm, almost bored. “One charge in the right place, timed correctly. The bulkhead takes strain, the water comes in slow—enough to cause confusion, call everyone to the pumps. Passengers panic, crew gets distracted, and I walk off this ship in the chaos with what I came for.”

“The bulkheads are watertight for a reason. You breach one below the waterline…” The engineer wiped his face with a rag. “That’s not a diversion. That’s a death sentence for a thousand people.”

“Five hundred,” Vance said. “Third class is already locked below. You think they count?”

Jack felt Margaret’s hand clamp on his arm. Her face had gone pale beneath the soot-streaked skin, her eyes fixed on Vance with a hatred so pure it looked like pain.

The engineer shook his head. “No. I won’t do it. Whatever hold you have on me, it’s not worth drowning.”

“You’re a gambling man, Mr. Bell. You lost money at my table. A great deal of money.” Vance stepped closer, his voice dropping to a murmur Jack had to strain to catch. “But I’m not asking you to pay me back. I’m asking you to trust me. The ship won’t sink. The _Titanic_ is unsinkable—the world knows it. Even if you blow a hole in her, she’ll stay afloat long enough for me to be in a lifeboat and you to be in my debt, forgiven.”

“That’s not how the mathematics work,” Bell said, but his voice had lost its edge.

“I’m not interested in your mathematics.” Vance held up the leather case. “This is a ledger of every bank vault your family has ever held a mortgage against. You know what that’s worth? More than your life. More than everyone on this ship.” He pressed the case into Bell’s hands. “Take the charge. Where I marked it. Do it now, and the ledger is yours.”

Jack watched Bell’s resistance crumble second by second, the same way he’d watched men fold at cards—slowly at first, then all at once. Bell opened the case, glanced inside, and closed it again. He nodded once.

“Forward hold. Port side, seam between bulkhead eight and nine,” Bell said. “Twenty minutes. I’ll set it to blow at midnight.”

“You’ve got ten.” Vance turned and walked back the way he came, disappearing into the fog of steam.

Jack held his breath until the engineer was gone too, swallowed by the roar of the engines. Then he sagged against the bulkhead, his heart hammering so hard he could feel it in his throat.

“Midnight,” Margaret said. “We have until midnight before he blows a hole in the ship.”

“He doesn’t care about the list anymore.” Jack shook his head, trying to make sense of it. “He’s got the ledger—the registry of every vault. The letter we took, the map, none of it matters if he can sell what’s in that case.”

“Then we’ve been fighting for the wrong thing.”

Jack looked at her. Her eyes were hard, calculating, and he saw the agent in her again, the woman who’d tracked Anna Jackson across an ocean.

“No,” he said slowly. “We haven’t. He’s going to sell the registry to the Ferrier gang. But we still have the first half of the cipher, and you have the second. He doesn’t have the key.”

Margaret’s mouth twisted. “He’s about to kill a thousand people to escape with a list he can’t even read?”

“That’s what gamblers do when they’re desperate.” Jack pulled the pry bar from his belt, weighed it in his hand. “He’s not trying to win anymore. He’s trying to burn the table.”

Margaret was quiet for a long moment. Then she looked toward the ladder that led upward, toward the first-class decks and the cold night air.

“We need to stop him,” she said. “Not for the list. For the ship.”

Jack nodded. But as he followed her toward the ladder, the engineer’s words echoed in his mind—forward hold, port side, bulkhead eight and nine. And beneath that, the phosphorus crate on Vance’s map, unaddressed, waiting.

The map was hidden in the supply cage behind them.

And Vance’s marked charge was in the same hold as the phosphorus.

One spark, and the _Titanic_ wouldn’t just take on water. She’d go up like a powder keg. Vance wasn’t planning a slow leak.

He was planning a bomb.