Read Chapter 34: Aftermath of the Fall

The water was already at his knees when Jack pulled himself up the last stairs of the grand staircase, gasping, the locket clutched so tight the metal bit into his palm. Behind him, the flooded bowl of the first-class foyer swallowed the chandelier’s final light with a groan of twisting steel. Vance was somewhere down there, tumbling among the benches and potted palms, his lungs filling with the same black Atlantic that would take them all.

Jack didn’t stop to watch him die.

He drove his legs forward, shoulder screaming where Vance’s knife had carved a furrow an inch deep. Blood soaked his jacket, warm and slick against his collarbone, but he couldn’t feel his fingers properly. The locket was the only thing he could feel. He shoved it into his breast pocket, over his heart, and ran.

The boat deck was chaos. Men shouted and fought at the davits. A steward with a broken arm tried to wave passengers toward the rear, where the last boats still swung precariously over a deck tilted so sharply that the stars seemed to have slid sideways. Smoke poured from the forward funnels, and the bow, what Jack could see of it through the crowd, was gone—vanished beneath a sea that had grown hungry and silent.

He needed to find a boat. He needed to get off this thing before it stood on its tail and plunged.

But his feet, traitor that they were, carried him toward the rail. He gripped the teak and leaned over, scanning the dark water for the shape of lifeboat fourteen. There—a hundred yards out, a low black silhouette crawling with huddled forms, oars dipping in uneven rhythm. Somewhere in that boat, Margaret sat with her hands folded, watching the ship she’d climbed aboard as a lie begin its final bow. The matron, Crane’s sister, sat beside her, her confession safe in Jack’s pocket.

They were safe.

He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. Then he saw it. A figure in a white lifebelt, small against the dark, scrambling up the falls of a nearby empty boat, hands slipping on wet rope, coat catching on the blocks.

No.

“Margaret!” His voice cracked on the name.

She didn’t hear him. Or she did, and she didn’t care. She reached the deck, stumbled, caught herself on a coiled line, and turned toward the crowd, scanning.

“Jack!”

She ran to him before he could move, colliding with him hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs. Her arms went around his neck and he winced, hissed, and she pulled back, seeing the blood for the first time.

“You’re hit.”

“It’s nothing.” He grabbed her arms. “Why are you on this ship? I put you on that boat. I put you *on* it.”

“I got off.” Her chin lifted, defiant, eyes bright with a fury that had nothing to do with him. “I watched you run toward Vance. I watched you disappear. Do you think I came all this way—do you think I lied to everyone I’ve ever known, wore dresses that cost more than my year’s salary, just to sit in a boat and watch you die from a distance?”

“Margaret, it’s sinking.”

“I noticed.”

“No, you don’t understand. It’s not going to sink partway and then stop. It’s going to snap in half. And then it will sink so fast you won’t have time to regret being a hero.”

“Then we’d better find a boat.” She took his hand, found it slick with blood from his shoulder, and paled. But she didn’t let go.

They pushed aft, against the tide of people still pressing forward in desperate hope of a miracle. A band played somewhere, a hymn Jack didn’t recognize, the notes thin and broken by the wind. The deck tilted harder, and Margaret stumbled into him, and he caught her, and they kept moving.

They found a stairwell that led down to the second-class lounge, mostly empty now, the furniture already sliding toward the wall. Water lapped at the bottom of the steps, black and oil-slicked, carrying the stink of coal smoke and salt.

“Where are you going?” Margaret asked. “The boats are up.”

“Crane. He’s not going to drown in a ballroom. He’s got money, he’s got men, he’s got a plan. And the only thing he cares about is that locket.” Jack pressed a hand to his pocket. “He’s going to come for it. Better I choose the ground than let him choose it for us.”

A shot cracked the air.

Jack shoved Margaret sideways, behind the steel column of the stairwell housing, as the bullet whined off the treads where they’d stood a second before. He risked a glance around the corner.

Crane stood at the top of the stairs, twenty feet away, his face lit by an emergency lantern swinging overhead. He wore a greatcoat over his evening clothes, and his hair was perfectly combed—even facing the end of the world, the banker looked like he was about to close a merger. In his hand, a small revolver, still smoking.

“Mr. O’Leary.” Crane’s voice carried, calm and unhurried, over the gurgle of rising water. “I’ll have the locket now. And the woman can go.”

“You shot at us,” Jack called back, pressing flat against the wall, forcing calm into his voice. “That’s not how you negotiate.”

“Any of us could be dead in the next ten minutes. I don’t have time to be civil.” Crane took a step down. The water at the bottom of the stairs was higher now, nearly ankle-deep at the base of the lounge. “You have something of mine. It belongs to me. I’m prepared to let you live—that’s the generous part of this offer.”

Jack looked at Margaret. She was crouched against the wall, eyes wide, jaw tight. She shook her head once.

He didn’t have a weapon. He’d lost the blade in Vance’s chest, and the LeMat was long gone, thrown overboard in a moment of desperate idiocy that he regretted with every fiber of his being. He had a locket full of a dead woman’s confession, a shoulder that wouldn’t stop bleeding, and the love of a woman who had stepped off a lifeboat for him, which was more foolish and more generous than he deserved.

And he was cornered by a banker with a gun on a sinking ship.

Margaret moved.

Later, Jack would piece together what she must have done—a sweep of her hand along the wall, finding the fire hose coiled in its brass bracket, the nozzle heavy and cold. She didn’t fire it. That was Jack’s mistake. She grabbed the metal nozzle by its collar and swung it like a club, low and fast, as she rose from her crouch. It caught Crane across the knees, not the head. He staggered, fired again, wild, and the bullet took out a pane of glass above their heads.

But Crane was a Boston banker, and a Boston banker has spent a lifetime learning to absorb a punch. He recovered his stance in half a second, bringing the revolver back up, and that was when Margaret did something even Jack hadn’t taught her.

She reached into the pocket of her borrowed coat—Margaret’s coat, the one she’d worn at dinner, silk and lace. And she pulled out a small silver derringer, twin-barreled, the kind a lady might keep in her reticule on the off chance a gentleman did not behave.

She fired.

The shot was raw, unaimed, a woman who had never held a gun in her life squeezing the trigger as hard as she could. It took Crane in the side, high on the ribs—she’d been aiming for his chest, Jack could tell, and had missed high. Crane grunted, stumbled, clutched his side. Blood welled between his fingers, dark against white silk.

Then he aimed at Margaret, and Jack moved, grabbing her arm and dragging her down the stairs into the flooded lounge, water up to their shins and rising.

“Where did you—” he started.

“I took it off a dead purser,” she said, breathless, sloshing through the icy water, clutching his arm. “I thought it might be useful.”

They crashed through a doorway into a long corridor, half-flooded, doors open on either side, the brass wall sconces casting sickly yellow light across the water. Somewhere overhead, a massive groan shook the ship—a structural sound, like a whale dying, metal giving way under forces beyond imagination. The floor beneath their feet trembled, then tilted.

“He’ll follow,” Margaret said, looking back.

“He’s shot.”

“He’s a banker. You don’t slow a banker down by wounding him. You slow him down by taking his money.” She pushed a door open into what had once been a first-class reading room. Water had flooded the lower shelves; leather-bound books floated in dark clusters, spines swollen, pages bursting. A grand piano sat half-submerged against one wall, its keys making faint, random notes as the water nudged them.

“There.” Jack pointed to the far window. Through the glass, barely visible, a lifeboat sat in its davits—still attached, still loaded with no one, swinging gently as the deck tilted.

“Empty?”

“Not for long.”

He broke the window with his elbow, cutting a long gash in his forearm in the process, and pulled himself through the gap onto the narrow strip of deck outside. The lifeboat hung four feet away, its bow lines already cast off, only the stern fall keeping it from dropping to the sea below.

Margaret scrambled through after him, soaking her coat in the process, blood from his arm mixing with the grime on her fingers.

They got to the boat—canvas over wood, every inch of it cold and wet—and Jack climbed into it, reaching back to pull Margaret up. She landed in a heap beside him, breathing hard.

“The ropes,” she said.

He looked. The stern fall was tangled, knotted around a guide block in a mess of lines that would take five minutes to untie in good light with working hands. He’d never get it free. Not before Crane found them, and not before the ship went under.

“Can you cut it?” Margaret asked.

Jack pulled the locket from his pocket, opened it, and stared at the confession inside—Crane’s sister’s careful handwriting, signed and dated, a better weapon than any blade. He looked at the rope. Then he looked at Margaret, whose eyes were steady, unharmed, alive.

“I’ll figure it out,” he said, and started pulling at the knot.