Read Chapter 9: Encounter with Marie

The air below decks grew thicker with every step, a stew of coal dust, sweat, and salt that clung to the back of Élodie’s throat. She moved through the steerage corridor with her shawl pulled tight, the locket warm against her palm. Tom followed half a pace behind, his engineer’s cap pulled low, eyes scanning the shadows where pipes cast their crooked bones along the walls.

A child’s cry cut through the murmurs. Thin. Desperate. Muffled behind a door marked with a chalked number that had been scratched out and redrawn twice.

Élodie knocked once. Twice. No answer.

She tried the handle. It gave.

The room was a narrow slice of the ship’s belly, barely wide enough for two bunks and a washstand. A single oil lamp guttered on the floor, its flame throwing long, wavering shapes against the riveted steel. And there, pressed into the corner where the bunk met the wall, was a girl.

Barely twelve. Dark hair plastered to her forehead with sweat. A fresh bruise flowering along her left cheekbone, the skin already swelling into a purple bloom.

“Marie,” Élodie breathed.

The girl flinched at the sound of her own name. Her eyes darted from Élodie to Tom, then past them both, searching the corridor beyond as if expecting someone else to fill the frame.

“You came,” Marie said. Her voice was cracked, raw, as if she had been screaming for hours and had finally gone quiet. “I didn’t think— I wrote the note, but I didn’t think anyone would—”

“We came,” Tom said softly, stepping inside and pulling the door nearly shut behind him. “We came for Louis.”

The name hit Marie like a wave. Her face crumpled, and for a moment she looked younger than Louis himself. She pressed her fist to her mouth, trying to hold something back, but it broke through anyway—a sound halfway between a sob and a laugh, hollow and terrible.

“He’s not your brother, is he?” Élodie said. Not an accusation. A door opening.

Marie shook her head. The motion was small, almost involuntary, like a confession she had been carrying so long that even her body wanted to put it down.

“His mother—the real one—she was good to me,” Marie said. “In Belfast. She took me in when my own mother died of the fever. Fed me. Let me sleep in the corner of their rooms. And when she got sick, she made me promise. She made me swear I would get Louis to his father’s family in America. She gave me her locket.” Marie’s eyes found the chain at Élodie’s throat. “You found it. I thought it was lost forever when— when they took him.”

“Who took him?” Tom asked. His voice was low, careful, the voice of a man who had learned to ask questions without spooking the answer.

Marie’s hands twisted in her lap. The knuckles were scraped raw, the nails broken.

“The woman,” she said. “The one who said she was his sister. That’s what she told the purser. That’s what she told everyone. But she’s not. She’s nobody. She’s a thief who saw us in the queue in Queenstown and saw how I held Louis’s hand, how I guarded the locket. She knew. She knew he was worth something.”

“Worth something how?” Élodie said.

Marie looked up. Her eyes were wet, but there was iron behind them now.

“His father. In Philadelphia. He’s a printer—owns three shops, they say. And he’s been advertising for his missing son for months. The mother’s death was in the papers. The father didn’t know she’d gone to Belfast. Didn’t know about Louis at all until the solicitors wrote. And that woman, she read the same papers I did. She saw the reward.”

Tom’s jaw tightened. “She stole him to collect a reward.”

“She stole him to sell him,” Marie said. “She told me— when she cornered me in the corridor on the second night, she told me if I made a sound, she’d throw Louis overboard and tell the captain I did it. She said the ship was too big and the sea too dark for anyone to sort out the truth before the bottom was fed.”

Élodie’s stomach turned. “How did you get away from her?”

Marie touched the bruise on her cheek. “I didn’t. Not cleanly. She caught me watching her— she’d moved him out of the women’s quarters, said he was her brother and needed to stay with her. But I saw the way she held his arm. Too tight. I saw the way he cried at night and she told him to shut his mouth or she’d leave him in the hold with the rats. So I waited until she slept and I took Louis and I ran. But she woke up. She caught me at the door. She hit me.” Marie’s voice cracked. “She hit me and she took him back and she said if I told anyone, she’d tell the captain I was the thief, that I stole the locket and the boy both. She said I was nothing. A gutter girl from Belfast with no papers and no people. And she was right.”

“She’s not right,” Tom said. His voice was hard now, forged. “She’s not right, and she’s not going to win.”

Marie looked at him, searching for the lie. Finding none.

“Where is she keeping him?” Élodie asked.

Marie swallowed. “Down. In the cargo hold. The one beneath the forward stairwell. She bribed a steward to let her store a trunk there— said it was valuables for her aunt in New York. But it’s not valuables. It’s Louis. She locks him in with the crate. She says if he stays quiet until Philadelphia, she’ll let him out. She says if he doesn’t, she’ll leave him there and tell the father the boy died on the crossing.”

Élodie felt something cold move through her chest.

“Then we go now,” she said. “Before she comes back.”

Marie shook her head, frantic. “You don’t understand. She’s not alone. She has a man. Big, red-faced. I saw them together on the boat deck the first night. He’s the one who hit me. He caught me running and he—”

She stopped. Her eyes went wide.

Behind them, the door to the corridor creaked.

Tom moved before Élodie could breathe. He crossed the tiny room in two strides, put his back to the wall beside the door, and pressed a finger to his lips. Élodie pulled Marie into the shadow of the bunks, her hand over the girl’s mouth, feeling the tremors running through her small frame like a wire pulled taut.

Footsteps. Heavy. Slowing.

A man’s voice, low and rough, filtered through the thin steel. “She’s in there. I saw the light go in. The French woman and that engineer with the red on his collar.”

Another voice. Higher, thin, with an edge of venom. “Then we end this now. The boy goes over the side tonight. No reward if there’s no boy to claim it. We take the girl too. She knows too much.”

Élodie’s blood went cold. She felt Marie stiffen beneath her hand.

Then the footsteps moved on—past the door, down the corridor, fading into the distant rumble of the engines.

Tom waited a long count before he spoke, his voice barely above a whisper. “They’re going to the hold. They’re going to get Louis now.”

Marie pulled Élodie’s hand away from her mouth. “He’s not there,” she whispered. “Not anymore. I lied. I lied to see if you’d believe me. She moved him this morning. She hid him in a lifeboat on the boat deck. She thinks no one will look there until we dock.”

Tom’s eyes went sharp. “A lifeboat?”

“The collapsibles,” Marie said. “The ones still folded up by the aft funnel. She put him inside one of the canvas covers. He has water and a biscuit. She said she’d come for him before we reach New York.”

Élodie looked at Tom. The iceberg. The captain’s speed. The warnings that had been building all evening like a vault of thunder waiting to break.

“We have to get him now,” she said. “Before they do.”

Tom nodded once. “Then we don’t go down to the hold. We go up. All the way up.”