Read Chapter 23: The Rising Water

The cold hit him first. Water, black and oily, lapping at his cheek. Then the pain—a dull throb at the back of his skull where Vance’s fist had connected. Jack O’Leary coughed, spat brine, and pushed himself up onto his elbows. His hands found steel grating, slick with seawater. The corridor tilted at a sickening angle, the electric lights flickering overhead, casting the world in stuttering yellow spasms.

He was in the engine-room passage. Somewhere below. The ceiling pipes groaned, and the water—it was rising fast. It swirled around his knees now, and he was sitting. That meant it was already over his ankles standing. He scrambled upright, braced a hand against the riveted wall, and took stock. His coat was heavy, soaked through. The brass key from Adelaide was still in his pocket, a hard lump against his thigh. The cipher key—locked in his skull, thank Christ—was still there too.

But Margaret. Where was Margaret?

The last thing he remembered was the gymnasium. Vance. The bastard had smiled—that wide, easy smile of a man who’d just won—and then the world had gone black. Margaret had been in his grip, her eyes furious, not afraid. And then nothing.

Jack moved. He sloshed down the corridor, his boots finding purchase on the grated floor as the water tugged at his calves. The engine room was no longer the cathedral of steel and steam he’d crept through hours ago. It was a chaos of hissing pipes and dead gauges. A few stokers still worked, frantic, their faces lit by the orange glow of open furnace doors as they fought to keep the pumps running. None of them looked at him. They were beyond noticing a man in a soaked evening coat.

“The gymnasium—where’s the ladder to the boat deck?” Jack grabbed a passing stoker by the arm.

The man shook him off. “Gone. Flooded. You want up, you go through the mail room, then the cargo hold. If you can make it.” He was already moving, plunging toward a companionway that had water spilling down it in a steady cascade.

Jack’s mind raced. The gymnasium was on F-Deck, above this. If Vance had knocked him out there, he could have dragged him down here to dispose of him. But Margaret? Had she stayed? Had Vance taken her? Or had she been left behind in the chaos of the evacuation—

A sound cut through the engine noise. A whistle. Three sharp blasts from above, then a fourth. The lifeboat signal. They were loading the boats now. Jack’s hand went to his pocket, to Adelaide’s pass, the paper already beginning to pulp against his wet fingers. He could push for the upper decks. Show the pass. Get in a boat. Live.

The water rose another inch. It was at his knees now. He could taste the salt in the air, and something else underneath it—phosphorus. Faint, chemical, like a struck match that never caught. Bell’s charge was set for midnight. The explosion would come first, not the sinking. And Vance would be gone by then, off in a lifeboat with the ledger, leaving this whole ship to burn and flood and drag everyone down with it.

Margaret had known that. She’d stood beside him in the gymnasium, her hand on the hidden revolver in her coat. She’d called Vance a coward. She’d spit at him. And Vance had smiled.

Jack moved toward the ladder. Not up. Down.

The water was colder as he descended, more insistent. It sucked at his legs, pushed against his chest as he slogged through a crew corridor lined with cabin doors, some hanging open, some sealed. Debris floated past—a cork lifebelt, a woman’s hat, a child’s shoe. He didn’t look at the shoe.

The gymnasium was three decks up and two hundred feet aft. He wasn’t going there. He was going where the water would take him, because that was where Vance would have put her. A man who kills is a man who disposes. Vance wouldn’t have left a witness on a deck full of passengers. He would have dragged her down, away from the crowds, away from anyone who might see.

The corridor split. Left was the mail room, marked by a brass sign. Right was a narrow stairwell descending into the post office, where the sorted mailbags sat in flooded racks. The water was up to Jack’s waist now, forcing him to swim in short, desperate bursts. His coat was a monstrous weight. He ripped it off, let it sink, and struck out toward the mail room.

He found her in the sorting cage.

Margaret was slumped against the iron bars, the water up to her shoulders. A dark bruise bloomed on her temple. Her hands were tied to the cage with a length of rope, her arms stretched above her head, keeping her face just above the surface. She wasn’t moving. Jack swam to her, his breath ragged, and grabbed her chin.

“Margaret. Margaret!”

Her eyes fluttered. She coughed, spat water. “About bloody time,” she managed, her voice a thin rasp. “I was starting to think you’d taken the pass and left me to grow gills.”

Jack laughed—a short, sharp bark of relief—and went to work on the rope. His fingers were numb, clumsy. The knot was tight, a sailor’s hitch that wouldn’t give. He pulled his pocketknife from his trousers and sawed at the wet cord until it snapped. Margaret’s hands fell. She sagged against him, and for a moment he held her weight, treading water with the ceiling closing in.

“Can you swim?”

“I can do a great deal more than swim, Jack, but I cannot do it tied to a cage.” She took a ragged breath. “Vance didn’t kill me. He wanted me found. Wanted the message sent.”

“What message?”

“He’s not just after the list.” Margaret’s hand found his shoulder, gripping tight. “The ledger case is a decoy. He knew you’d come for it. That’s why he let you take the letter, let you think you were outsmarting him. The real prize—the one he’s carrying now—is a strongbox. Brass. Heavy. It doesn’t hold papers. It holds a banker’s seal and a photograph.”

Jack shook his head. “I don’t—what does it matter what’s in the box? He’s going to blow the bulkhead. The ship’s going to explode. The box is ash either way.”

“No,” Margaret said, her voice hardening. “The box isn’t paper. It’s metal. It will survive the blast. And it will sink to the bottom of the Atlantic with the ship, and Vance will walk away, and he will tell his banker that the evidence went down with the Titanic. No one will ever contradict him. No one will ever know what Anna Jackson found.”

“So we take the box from him.”

“So we take the box from him, and we don’t let him leave the ship.” Margaret pushed off from the cage, struck out for the corridor. “He’s heading for the mail room, port side. He has a motorized launch, a small one—too small for passengers, perfect for a man with a strongbox and a story to tell. If he reaches the boat deck before the charge goes, he’ll be a mile away before the bulkhead breaches.”

Jack swam after her. The water was chest-high now, and the lights flickered once, twice, then held. Above them, the ship groaned—a deep, tectonic sound that was not the sea. That was the hull saying goodbye.

“Then we don’t let him reach the boat deck,” Jack said.

They surfaced in the mail room, and there he was. Vance. His back to them, bent over a canvas duffel, a heavy brass strongbox at his feet. He was working the straps of a life preserver with one hand and a small revolver was tucked into his belt. He hadn’t seen them.

Margaret’s hand found Jack’s arm. Her eyes were fixed on Vance, and for the first time, Jack saw something beyond anger in her face—he saw grief. Raw and old and aching.

“He killed her,” Margaret whispered. “Anna. She wasn’t lost in a carriage accident. She was standing exactly where I’m standing now, and he put a knife in her ribs and pushed her over the side. I watched from the shadows. I did nothing. I was afraid.”

Jack looked at her. “You’re not afraid now.”

Margaret pulled the revolver from her soaked coat. “No,” she said. “Now I’m angry.”

She raised the gun, and the water rose another inch, cold and patient, and the ship tilted forward into the dark.