Read Chapter 10: The Engine Room Clue

The engine room’s heat hit them like a physical wall, thick with the smell of coal dust, oil, and scorched metal. The rhythmic thunder of the reciprocating engines vibrated up through Evelyn’s soles, rattling her teeth. She pressed a handkerchief to her nose as Julian led her past a maze of hissing pipes and gleaming brass gauges, their glow casting long shadows across the iron catwalk.

“Fleet was seen here,” Julian shouted over the din, his voice almost lost. “A stoker swears he saw a steward in the boiler rooms an hour before we arrived. Said he ‘wasn’t right.’ Pale as a ghost.”

Evelyn’s skin prickled. Fleet, the man who did not exist, wandering the bowels of the ship. “Who told you this?”

“A greaser I played cards with in the crew mess. Name’s Whitcomb. He said Fleet dropped something when he ran off.” Julian ducked under a low-hanging valve, and Evelyn followed, her skirt catching on a bolt. She yanked it free with an impatient snap.

They found Whitcomb near the base of the forward funnel casing, a lanky man with soot carved into the creases of his face like riverbeds. He nodded at Julian, then squinted at Evelyn, clearly unused to seeing a lady in silk below the waterline.

“You the one asking about the ghost?” Whitcomb asked.

“The steward,” Julian corrected. “You said he dropped something.”

Whitcomb wiped his brow with a rag that was more dirt than cloth. “Aye. Right there, by the steam pipe junction. I went to pick it up, but the heat near melted my gloves. Left it where it lay. Figured it belonged to the devil anyway.”

Evelyn crouched, ignoring the grime soaking through her gloves. Tucked beneath a cluster of pipes, wedged into a crevice of riveted steel, was a folded sheet of paper. It was singed at the edges, smudged with coal, but unmistakably stationery—cream-colored, with a faint monogram pressed into the corner.

She pulled it free and unfolded it. The ink had bled in places where sweat or steam had touched it, but the engraving at the top was clear: a delicate interlocking pattern of ivy and thistle, surrounding a single letter *M*.

Julian peered over her shoulder. “The same as the fragment?”

“Yes.” Evelyn’s voice was barely a whisper. She ran her finger over the embossed design. “But I’ve seen this before. Not on the letter fragment. Long before.”

She felt his gaze shift to her, sharp and probing.

“Where?” he asked.

Evelyn hesitated. The engine’s roar seemed to swell, filling the empty space between them. “In a photograph. My grandmother’s locket.”

Julian said nothing, but she could feel the weight of his silence. She looked up. His face was unreadable, but his eyes—those dark, searching eyes—held something new. Not suspicion exactly. Wariness.

“Your grandmother,” he repeated slowly. “The one who died in New York twenty years ago.”

“Yes.” The word felt hollow.

“The same woman we’ve been trying to save. Margaret O’Leary.” He stated it as a fact, not a question.

Evelyn’s throat tightened. The paper trembled in her fingers. She had carried this secret like a stone in her chest, and now it was breaking through the surface. “I told you. I recognized her. But I didn’t—I couldn’t tell you everything. I barely understand it myself.”

Julian folded his arms, the coal dust darkening his cuffs. “Then explain it to me now. Because I’m starting to feel like the only man in the dark on this ship.”

Evelyn took a breath. The heat was oppressive, suffocating. She forced the words out. “When I was a child, my mother kept a small photograph in her dressing room. A young woman with dark curls, holding a baby. She told me it was my grandmother, Margaret Ashworth. That she had died of fever in a New York tenement before I was born. But the locket in the photograph—the one around her neck—was the same design as this. I used to ask my mother about it. She said it was a family heirloom, passed down from her mother. That it was lost when Margaret died.”

She paused, staring at the paper. “Except it wasn’t lost. It’s here. On this ship. Around my grandmother’s neck.”

Julian’s jaw tightened. “If Margaret is your grandmother, then she didn’t die twenty years ago. Someone lied.”

“My father,” Evelyn said, the word bitter. “Who else could have orchestrated a false death? Who else had the money, the connections, the motive?”

“But why?” Julian pressed. “Why fake the death of his own mother?”

Evelyn shook her head. “I’ve asked myself that a thousand times since I saw her face. My father is a hard man, Julian. Ruthless. But he’s not cruel without purpose. If he erased Margaret from the family record, he had a reason.”

“And you think that reason is on this ship?”

The question hung in the hot, oil-scented air. Evelyn looked down at the note. The ink was smudged but legible. She read it aloud, her voice steadying.

*“If you find this, I am still alive. They will tell you otherwise. Do not believe them. The locket holds the name. Ask the child what she saw.”*

Evelyn’s breath caught. *The child.*

Julian noticed the change. “What does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” Evelyn admitted. “But she left this for someone. Not for the crew. For someone who would come looking.”

“Fleet,” Julian said. “He found it. He was carrying it to you. To us.”

Evelyn nodded slowly. “But Fleet was never real. He was placed here. By whatever force keeps me looping. So what if this note wasn’t meant for us at all? What if it was meant for someone else, and Fleet intercepted it?”

Julian’s brow furrowed. “Who?”

The answer came to Evelyn like a cold draft through a shuttered room. “The child. The child she mentions. Margaret was in hiding for twenty years. What if she had a reason to hide more than herself?”

She looked at Julian, and the pieces snapped together with a clarity that made her stomach drop. “Margaret wasn’t just my grandmother. What if she brought someone with her when she disappeared? A child no one knew about. A child my father has been hunting for two decades?”

Julian’s hand dropped to his side. His face went pale beneath the soot. “Evelyn… if that’s true, then your father isn’t on this ship to protect her. He’s here to finish what he started.”

Evelyn’s heart hammered. The engine roar seemed to crescendo, drowning out everything but the terror rising in her chest. She folded the note carefully and slipped it into the inner pocket of her jacket.

“We need to find Margaret before he does,” she said. “And we need to find that child.”

From somewhere above them, muffled by layers of steel, came the faint sound of a gong. Seven bells. Evening was falling over the Atlantic, and the Titanic steamed on, oblivious.

Julian caught her arm. “Evelyn. If Margaret is your grandmother, and if there’s another child—a sibling of your father’s—then this loop isn’t a mission. It’s a family secret that’s been waiting twenty years to surface. And the ship is going to sink in less than twelve hours.”

She met his eyes. “Then we have less time than I thought to find out what my father is willing to kill to keep buried.”

They moved toward the ladder, the heat of the engine room fading as they climbed toward the cold, dark deck above.