Read Chapter 24: The Plunge

The wave came without sound.

One moment Élodie was gripping the rail beside Tom, the collapsible boat a dark speck against the stars beyond the fallen funnel. The next, the sea itself rose up and marched across the deck like a wall of black glass.

She had time to see Tom’s eyes widen. Time to see his mouth open her name.

Then the water took him.

The impact ripped her hands from the rail. She tumbled end over end through a freezing, churning blindness, salt burning her throat, her lungs screaming. Something hard clipped her shoulder—a deck chair, a broken spar, she couldn’t tell. She clawed upward, kicking against the weight of her soaked skirts, and broke the surface gasping.

“Tom!” The name tore from her throat raw and desperate. Around her, the sea churned with debris—crates, ropes, shattered wood. Behind her, the Titanic’s stern rose against the stars like a black cathedral, its propeller blades gleaming wet and enormous above the waterline.

“Tom!” She spun in the water, searching. Bodies of the drowned bobbed past her, their faces pale in the faint emergency light. Not him. Please, not him.

A flash of white shirt beneath the surface, five yards to her left.

She dove.

The cold stole her breath before she could take it. Her eyes burned in the salt water, but she saw him—Tom suspended in the dark like a fallen angel, his coat billowing around him, blood trailing from his shoulder in a dark ribbon. His eyes were closed.

She grabbed his collar and kicked for the surface with everything she had.

They broke through together. Élodie gasped, coughed, spat salt water, and hauled Tom’s head above the swell.

“Tom. Tom!” She slapped his cheek with her free hand. “Wake up. Wake up!”

His eyelids fluttered. Water streamed from his hair as he coughed, weak and wet. “Élodie… you jumped in. Again.”

“I could hardly let you go alone.” She laughed—a broken, half-sobbing sound—and wrapped her arm around his chest. He was heavy. Far too heavy. Her legs churned beneath the surface, but her sodden skirts pulled at her like anchors.

“I can’t.” He tried to push her away, but his arm barely moved. The blood from his shoulder seeped into the water around them, spreading like dark ink. “Go. Find the boat. I’ll only slow you.”

“No.” She kicked harder. “I didn’t come this far to watch you drown, Thomas Fletcher. Now move your legs, or I will drag you to the bottom and haunt you there.”

A weak laugh rattled from his chest. But his legs stirred beneath the water, kicking feebly in time with her own strokes.

Something solid bumped her shoulder—wood, blessedly buoyant. She spun, grabbing for it without thought. A door. A wooden door torn loose from a first-class state room, its brass hinges still attached. She hauled herself over its edge and reached back for Tom.

“Take my hand.”

He raised his arm—too slow. A wave caught him and pushed him under before his fingers could find hers. She grabbed for his wrist, missed, lunged further, and caught a fistful of his collar.

“I have you. I have you.” She pulled with a strength she didn’t know she possessed, dragging him across the surface and half over the door. He sprawled across its wet surface, coughing seawater, his face white as the moon above them.

Élodie climbed up beside him, boots kicking for balance on the slick wood. The door tilted beneath their combined weight but held.

She looked up.

The Titanic’s stern had risen impossibly high now, its rows of glowing portholes angling toward the sky like a staircase into heaven. The roar of the sea swallowing her was a sound she would never forget—water pouring into the great ship’s throat.

Tom lifted his head, following her gaze. “She’s going.”

“I know.” Élodie pressed her hand to his chest, feeling his heart hammer beneath her palm. “Don’t look. Keep your eyes on me.”

But she couldn’t look away. None of them could. All around, heads bobbed in the water—survivors who had jumped, had fallen, had been swept. Some cried for help. Some just stared at the dying ship as if she were a loved one taking her last breath.

The stern hung against the stars, impossibly vertical, hanging like a sword about to fall.

“Hold onto something,” Tom said, his voice tight. “She’s going to pull us under when she goes.”

Élodie wrapped her arms over the door’s edge and locked her fingers together. Tom’s good hand found hers, pressing them both flat against the wood.

The ship fell.

It was not like the morning she had watched the bow slip beneath the waves—that had been slow, almost graceful. This was a plunge. The stern dropped with a sound like the world ending, a crack of metal and a thousand screaming voices cut short, and the sea boiled in its wake.

The suction hit them like a hand.

The door yanked downward, wrenching Élodie’s arms nearly from their sockets. Salt water slammed over her head, and the world was nothing but cold and darkness and the terrible weight of the sea pulling her down and down. Her lungs burned. Her fingers stayed locked on the wood, but the wood was diving, and she was diving with it.

Dimly, she felt Tom’s hand tighten around hers.

How strange, she thought, as the sinking ship’s grip pulled at her skirts and the water grew darker still. I came across an ocean to find him. I will not go down with it.

She kicked. Her boot struck something—a rising bubble of trapped air, or the door itself. Her legs drove against the current with a fury she hadn’t known she possessed. She would not drown. She would not let him drown. Not here, not now, not after everything.

The pull weakened.

Élodie opened her eyes to blackness and kicked toward where she thought the surface might be. Her lungs screamed. Spots burst behind her eyes.

Then her head broke through the water and she gasped like a newborn taking a first breath.

The door floated beside her, bobbing gently now. Tom lay limp across it, face down, not moving.

“Tom.” She grabbed his hair and pulled his head from the water. “Tom, breathe. Breathe.”

He coughed. Sea water dribbled from his lips. His eyes opened—dazed, distant, but open.

“Still here,” he whispered. His hand found hers, and his grip was faint, but it was there.

Around them, the sea was quiet. The place where the Titanic had been was empty now, dotted with the wreckage of a thousand lives. The last plaintive cries of the dying faded into the long dark.

Élodie pulled herself onto the door, pressing close to Tom. His body trembled against hers—shock and blood loss and the cold of the North Atlantic sinking into their bones.

“The boat,” she said, searching the horizon. There. Far off, a small dark shape—the collapsible, struggling toward the survivors. She had no torch. No whistle.

She had only her voice.

“Help!” she cried. The word vanished into the wind.

Tom raised his head, and his voice joined hers, weak but resolute. “Here! We’re here!”