Read Chapter 26: The Hull's Breach

The water didn't come as a wave. It came as a wall.

One moment Jack was hauling Margaret up from the catwalk, the boiler room a furnace of steam and screaming metal. The next, the hull groaned like a dying beast and split open forty feet ahead—a jagged black mouth swallowing the dark. Seawater roared through it, not rising but *charging*, a white-capped fury that picked up loose coal, tools, and terrified men and hurled them against the bulkheads.

"Run!" Jack grabbed Margaret's wrist. The matron was already moving, her skirts hitched, her eyes wide and white in the gloom. They sprinted along the service catwalk as the water surged beneath them, climbing the deck plates, eating the distance.

Jack's lungs burned. He'd climbed out of worse in Liverpool alleys, but this was different. This was the whole ocean pouring in with nothing to hold it back.

They hit a ladder and climbed. The water slapped at Jack's boots as he swung himself up onto the next deck. Below, the boiler room vanished into a churning gray-green chaos, punctuated by screams that cut off too quickly.

The matron collapsed against a pipe, gasping. "That's... that's the fourth compartment."

Jack knew what that meant. He'd heard officers talking in the smoking room, drunk on brandy and arrogance. Four compartments flooded meant the ship was going down. No question, no miracle.

"We need to get to the boat deck." He said it with more certainty than he felt.

"Through the bow?" Margaret shook her head, still clutching the ledger case to her chest. "Every forward passage is cut off. We'd be swimming."

"Then we go aft. Up and aft, through the first-class corridors, onto the promenade—"

"You won't make the promenade."

The voice came from behind them, from a service doorway choked with steam. Vance stepped out, one hand pressed to the wound in his side, his face pale and slick with sweat. The burned registry pages were tucked inside his coat like a second ribcage.

Jack tensed. He had nothing—no weapon, no leverage. Just Margaret behind him and a dying ship below.

"You're bleeding," Jack said, buying time.

"I'm alive," Vance corrected. He was holding a pocket revolver, low and casual, as if it were an afterthought. "Which is more than I can say for most of the men down there. And more than I can promise for you if we stand here debating."

Margaret stepped forward. "You have the pages. We have the ledger case. The only way either of us profits from this mess is to get off this ship."

Vance laughed, a wet, rattling sound. "Profit. You still think in terms of profit." He gestured with the revolver toward the aft corridor. "But you're right about one thing. We need off."

" 'We'?" Jack's voice was flat.

"I have a raft." Vance said it the way other men said they had a first-class ticket, ready to be waved at the right moment. "Not a lifeboat. Not one of the collapsibles that some coward officer will launch half-empty. A proper raft, lashed to the starboard side near the baker's store. I paid a Glasgow engineer to rig it weeks ago."

"And you're inviting us along because you're a gentleman?" Margaret's laugh was sharp. "You killed my sister's source. You meant to kill us."

"I'm inviting you because the raft was meant for two. I'm wounded, the sea is cold, and I'll need someone to row." Vance shrugged, wincing. "The list is burned beyond usefulness to anyone but my employer. The pages are incomplete without your ledger case, and your ledger case is worthless without my pages. We are, each of us, useless alone. Together, we have a story to sell."

Jack stared at him. The man had been trying to kill them an hour ago. Now he was offering a seat on his raft? It was a lie. It had to be. Vance's hands were too nimble, his eyes too bright for a man who had genuinely given up the advantage.

"He has a revolver and a wound," Jack said quietly to Margaret. "If we take him together, we strip him clean and row ourselves."

"And if he's telling the truth about the raft?" Margaret's words were barely a whisper. "What do we know about emergency equipment? Do you know how to rig a collapsible from the davits? Can you navigate a raft to the Carpathia's rescue path in the dark?"

Jack didn't answer. He was a pickpocket, not a seaman. Moran's men had known their way around the ship's bones; Jack had only ever known its pockets.

"Time," Vance said, stepping closer. "The water is rising at an inch every minute in the forward compartments. By midnight, she'll break her back. I know the way—the service hatch behind the baker's store leads to the rafts. It'll flood by eleven. So we go now, or we go down."

The matron, who had been silent, finally spoke. "He's a liar. He killed men in the boiler room to make his point. You don't bargain with a viper by offering your hand."

"No," Jack said slowly, his eyes locked on Vance. "You don't." He turned to face the corridor aft, the one that led up and away from the flood. Water was already seeping under the nearby door. "But you also don't die for pride."

He took a step toward Vance. Margaret's hand clenched on his sleeve. Jack shook her off, then nodded at Vance's revolver.

"When this raft is found—if it's found—you'll tell the rescue ship we were allies," Jack said. "And I'll tell them you're the man who tried to sink this ship to cover a banker's crimes."

Vance's mouth twitched, but he holstered the revolver. "Honesty. How refreshing." He turned and led them into the corridor, limping but moving fast.

Behind them, the water found the doorway and began to pour through. The hull of the Titanic had betrayed them all, and the only way out now was a lie.