Read Chapter 35: The Final Hoist

The rope was hemp, thick as a man’s wrist, and it had fouled itself around a davit arm in a knot that would take five minutes to untie with the right tools. Jack had a blade, a wounded shoulder, and the Atlantic coming up fast beneath his boots. He jammed the knife between the strands and sawed.

“They’re coming back!” Margaret’s voice cracked over the wind. She had braced herself against the rail, the banker’s revolver—Crane’s own weapon, wrestled from his hand in the corridor—shaking in her white-knuckled grip.

Jack didn’t look. He couldn’t. The bow was gone. That was the thought that wouldn't leave him alone. Where the first-class promenade had been, there was only dark water, rising in a smooth, terrible slope. The ship was tilted at an angle that made his inner ear scream, and every groan of the hull felt like a thing alive and dying beneath his feet.

“How many?” he grunted, sawing.

“Three.” Her voice hitched. “Crane’s in front.”

The knot gave a quarter-inch. Jack pulled, felt the tendons in his shoulder shriek, and the rope slipped wet through his fingers. The stern was lifting. Behind him, rows of portholes winked out one by one as the sea swallowed them.

“We need the boat in the water before we go,” he said, more to himself than to her. “We can’t jump. We’ll be sucked under.”

A gunshot rang out. Jack flinched, but the sound wasn’t close—Margaret had fired high, a warning shot that sent Crane’s men scattering behind a stack of deck chairs.

“Give me the confession, O’Leary!” Crane’s voice boomed over the chaos, stripped of its polish. “Your friend is dead. The code is gone. There’s no one left to tell!”

“He’s lying,” Margaret said quietly.

The locket burned in Jack’s pocket, heavy as iron. He didn’t know if the matron was dead. He didn’t know if the confession mattered anymore. The ship was sinking under their feet, and the only thing that mattered was the goddamn rope.

He redoubled his sawing. The blade bit deep, and one strand parted with a pop that felt like a small victory.

“Hold them off,” he said. “Just a little longer.”

Margaret braced the pistol on the rail and fired twice in quick succession. A man cried out in the dark. Crane’s voice roared something about taking them alive, and Jack let himself believe, for the space of a heartbeat, that they had a chance.

The rope gave.

It whipped free of the davit with a sound like a gunshot, and the lifeboat—a twelve-foot cutter, half-swamped with rain—dropped six inches and swung hard against the ship’s side. Jack grabbed it by the gunwale, felt the wood slick and cold, and hauled.

“Get in,” he yelled.

Margaret didn’t argue. She scrambled across the tilting deck, shoved the revolver into her coat, and threw herself over the rail. She landed in the boat with a grunt, spray kicking up around her.

The ship groaned. A deep, rending sound rolled up from somewhere below, like the earth itself cracking open. Jack looked aft and saw the angle of the deck change—subtle at first, then with a sudden, sickening acceleration. The stern was rising. The propellers, monstrous bronze geometry, lifted clear of the water above them.

Crane was thirty feet away, stumbling, his face a mask of fury. His hand came up, dark against the floodlights, and Jack saw the glint of a pistol.

He didn’t think. He grabbed a coil of rope at his feet and threw it, not at Crane, but at the davit arm above him. It caught, looped, and Jack hauled himself over the rail as Crane’s shot went wide, pinging off the steel behind him.

He landed in the boat beside Margaret. She was already pushing off with an oar, using the stern’s rising hull as leverage.

“Release the falls!” he shouted.

She scrambled for the mechanism. Jack found the release on his side, pulled the cotter pin, and the bow of the boat dropped with a jarring lurch that nearly threw them both into the black water. The boat slid free of the davits, and suddenly they were falling—

The water hit them like a wall of ice.

Cold, brutal, complete. It stunned the breath from Jack’s chest, and for a moment he was lost, disoriented, the dark closing in around the edges of his vision. Then his head broke the surface, and he gasped.

The Titanic was above them.

It was still moving. Still sinking. The great black hull rose against the stars like a cathedral of shadow, and the sound—the sound was hell itself. Cries, screams, the snapping of steel, the roar of water flooding a thousand compartments. The stern was nearly vertical now, rising toward the sky with horrible majesty.

“Jack.” Margaret’s hand found his, pulled him toward the boat. “Jack, we have to row. We have to get away.”

He couldn’t look away from the ship. He had spent three days on it, three days pretending to be someone else, and now it was dying. Taking his secrets with it. Taking Vance with it, and Crane’s men, and God knew who else.

“Row,” she said again, and this time her voice broke something in him.

He hauled himself up, found an oar, and dug into the water. Margaret was opposite him, her face a pale oval in the darkness, teeth chattering, but rowing with a strength born of pure terror.

They pulled. The cold ate at them. The boat rose and fell on swells that grew as the dying ship displaced more and more water as it went under.

Two hundred yards. Three hundred.

And then the stern went.

There was no single moment. No gasp. The great ship paused, hung there, a black blade against the stars, and then it slid—slowly, gently, as if tired—beneath the surface.

The sea closed over it with a sigh.

For a moment, there was nothing. Only the dark and the cold and the sound of their ragged breathing.

Then the screams rose.

Thousands of them, carried across the water by the wind, a chorus of the dying. Margaret stopped rowing. Her hands fell to her lap, and she stared at the empty space where the ship had been, her face unreadable in the gloom.

Jack dropped his oar and reached for her. She came to him without a word, and they clung to each other in the bottom of the lifeboat, shivering, silent, alive.

The screams went on for a long, terrible time.

And then they stopped.