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 next forty-five minutes were a blur of screaming winches, roaring diesel outboards, and the relentless, creeping advance of the North Pacific.

Because the evacuation had started two hours before the collision, the catastrophic bottlenecks that had doomed the ship in my past life never formed. There were no stampedes at the stairwells. No jammed fire doors crushing families in the dark.

By 12:40 AM, twenty-two lifeboats had been dropped into the swells, carrying eleven hundred and forty passengers and non-essential crew safely beyond the suction zone of the sinking behemoth.

The Titan of the Pacific was dying on her feet.

Her bow was pitched thirty feet into the air, her massive twin bronze screws dripping sea foam as they rose clear of the water, exposed to the rain like the ribs of an ancient whale. The starboard list was twenty-eight degrees. Walking was impossible; we moved by hauling ourselves along the safety lines and welded pipe railings like mountaineers scaling an iron cliff.

Out on the water, half a mile away, the lights of two Canadian Coast Guard cutters—the Gordon Reid and the Sir Wilfrid Laurier—were cutting through the storm, their searchlights sweeping across the flotilla of orange lifeboats, pulling survivors aboard with industrial cranes.

On the high port rail of the promenade deck, only six people remained.

Captain Arthur Sterling, Third Officer Maya Lin, Leo Vance, his sister Clara, myself... and Julian Drake, who was sitting limp on the deckplates, staring blankly at the rising ocean like a man whose brain had completely disconnected from reality.

Beside us hung Lifeboat Twenty-Four—the final emergency craft, its davits creaking under the extreme list, dangling precariously above the churning foam.

"Get in, Captain," I said, bracing my boots against a bollard to hold the boarding ladder steady.

Sterling shook his head, his hand resting flat against the peeling white paint of the wheelhouse bulkhead. His uniform was torn, his eyes calm, peaceful, and entirely resigned. "A master goes down with his hull, Mercer. That was the law when I took my first command forty years ago. I ignored the signs. I let corporate greed blind me. I belong to the sea."

"Cut the theatrical bullshit, Arthur," I snarled, grabbing him by the front of his lifejacket and hauling him toward the boat’s gunwale with all the strength left in my aching arms. "You don't get the easy way out. You don't get to be a romantic martyr in the history books. You're going to survive this night. You're going to sit in front of the federal maritime board of inquiry. You're going to testify under oath against Drake’s holding company, and you're going to tell the world how cheap corporate shortcuts turn thirty-thousand tons of steel into an iron coffin."

Sterling looked into my eyes, his mouth trembling. He didn't speak. He simply nodded once, swallowed his tears, and allowed Leo to help him scramble over the gunwale into the boat.

"Clara, Leo, Maya—move!" I commanded.

They moved with disciplined speed, dropping into the center seats.

I reached down, grabbed Julian Drake by the collar of his ruined parka, and threw him unceremoniously into the bottom of the boat like a sack of damp laundry. He didn't even fight. He just lay between the floorboards, curling into a ball around his knees.

"Nathan!" Maya screamed from the helm of the lifeboat, her hand on the release pin. "Jump! The stern is going!"

The deck beneath my boots gave a terrifying, final heave.

A sound like an underwater artillery barrage tore through the hull as the main engine mounts snapped, dropping six hundred tons of cast-iron machinery through the forward bulkheads. The ship's bow plunged downward in a violent, sickening lurch.

A massive wall of displaced black water surged up over the promenade rail, slamming into my chest with concussive, bone-crushing force.

The cold was absolute. It was the same cold that had murdered me in the dark three hours ago. It dragged me under, spinning me in a vortex of foam, bubbles, and tearing steel cables.

My hand clawed through the freezing blackness, searching for a purchase, searching for life.

Not this time.

My fingers locked onto something hard, cylindrical, and wrapped in nylon rope.

The trailing painter line of Lifeboat Twenty-Four.

I kicked with everything left in my burning legs, hauling myself up hand-over-hand through the churning foam, my lungs screaming for air, refusing to let the ocean win.

Gasp.

My head broke the surface into the howling rain.

Two hands—calloused, grease-stained, and young—clamped around my wrists.

Leo Vance.

"I've got you, Nathan!" the boy screamed into the gale, his heels dug into the fiberglass seat. "Pull, Clara! Pull!"

Together, the brother and sister hauled me over the gunwale. I crashed onto the floorboards of the lifeboat, coughing up gallons of salt brine, gasping for the freezing air of the North Pacific.

Maya slammed the throttle forward.

The diesel outboard screamed, the propeller biting into the chop, driving our small craft through the whitecaps just as the stern of the Titan of the Pacific pointed straight up into the black sky like a monumental granite spire.

For ten seconds, the great ship hung motionless against the storm clouds.

Then, with a low, mournful sigh of escaping air that sounded like the dying breath of a mythological leviathan, thirty thousand tons of steel slid beneath the waves without a sound, vanishing into forty fathoms of black water.

The ocean closed over her grave.

The surface smoothed into rolling, empty swells.

And all around us, bobbing in the dark like a field of floating stars, twenty-four orange lifeboats flashed their white beacon lights into the morning mist.

Twelve hundred souls.