I'm standing here again — the night the ship starts taking on water. I remember how this day ends: the warning signs were there the whole time — no one listened. This time, I'm getting everyone out before it happens.

The taste of salt water was still burning the back of my throat when the universe slammed back into focus.

My lungs spasmed, gasping for air that was suddenly warm, dry, and smelling faintly of melted butter, lemon oil, and expensive Cuban tobacco. The deafening roar of thirty-thousand tons of ocean tearing through shattered steel vanished in an instant, replaced by the polite, muffled murmur of four hundred wealthy passengers laughing over champagne in the Grand Salon two decks above.

I stumbled forward, my palms slapping hard against the polished brass railing of the starboard observation deck.

The ship beneath my boots was steady. It was humming with that deep, rhythmic four-cycle thrum of eight turbocharged diesel engines running at full throttle. There was no screech of shearing rivets. No red emergency strobes slashing through knee-deep black water. No screams echoing through the dark, flooded service corridors of Deck B.

My hands were shaking violently. I raised them to my face. My knuckles were unbroken. My uniform jacket was dry, the gold braid of chief safety engineer gleaming beneath the amber sconces of the bulkhead.

I whipped my head toward the bulkhead clock beside the bridge access hatch.

8:14 PM.

A cold shockwave rolled down my spine, freezing every drop of blood in my veins.

I'm standing here again.

I had lived this night. I had died this night. Three hours from now, at precisely 11:22 PM, the Titan of the Pacific would strike an uncharted granite shelf off the jagged shoals of Queen Charlotte Sound. The collision wouldn't tear the bottom out in one cinematic crash. It would be a glancing blow, a dull, shuddering scrape along the lower starboard keel that Captain Arthur Sterling would dismiss as a minor engine misfire or a rogue wave rolling across the bulbous bow.

The warning signs had been there the whole time.

At 8:30 PM, the lower bilge telemetry sensors in Compartment Four would begin throwing intermittent voltage spikes. Chief Engineer Henderson would call it a faulty ground wire and mute the console. At 9:15 PM, the starboard stabilizer fin would lock three degrees off-center due to hydraulic pressure bleed, dragging the ship half a nautical mile off course into the shallow coastal shelf. Captain Sterling would refuse to cut speed because Julian Drake, the ruthless majority shareholder hosting a private investor gala in the penthouse lounge, had promised a two-million-dollar bonus if the ship shaved four hours off the Vancouver-to-Juneau transit record.

Nobody listened. When I brought the automated strain-gauge readings to the bridge at ten o'clock, Drake had laughed in my face, poured me a scotch, and told me to stop embarrassing the company in front of venture capitalists. When the ocean finally breached the double bottom at 11:30 PM, the watertight doors had closed automatically on a four-minute delay—trapping forty-two crew members in the laundry and galley compartments beneath the waterline.

By midnight, the emergency generators had flooded. The lifeboats on the port side had jammed on their davits because the listing angle exceeded twenty-two degrees. And by 1:15 AM, the freezing black waters of the northern Pacific had dragged twelve hundred souls into the abyss.

I remembered the exact weight of that water. I remembered the sensation of the icy current pinning my chest against the steel mesh of the emergency escape trunk, the lights flickering out, the realization that my warnings had meant nothing, that arrogance had murdered us all.

Now, my chest rose and fell in ragged, frantic heaves as the damp sea breeze whipped across the promenade. The ocean stretched out into the moonless dusk, vast, black, and deceptive. The waves were only four feet, rolling gently against the steel hull, but fifty fathoms down, the rocks were waiting.

The universe had dropped me back onto the deck with three hours on the clock.

I wasn't an engineer filing memos this time. I wasn't going to stand politely by a chart table while an arrogant captain and an entitled billionaire gambled twelve hundred lives for a public relations headline.